GRENUN: When The Air Killed Us

Chapter 5: Dark Sun

I look up, and the sky isn't a sky anymore.

It looks like someone took a massive, rusted iron lid and slammed it down over the whole damn world. There are no clouds, no blue patches, no soft morning light filtering through the storm. Just a flat, suffocating ceiling of dull, bruised ash suspended three hundred feet above the flooded rooftops of Greifswald. The sun is gone—replaced by a faint, sickly white disc that bleeds no warmth, casting zero shadows across the churning, oil-slick water below.

The air hitting the clear visor of my Dräger respirator doesn't move like wind. It feels heavy, stagnant, carrying a damp, sulfurous heat that makes the rubber skirt bite into the raw skin of my jaw.

SKRRR-HHHH. SKRRR-HHHH.

The sound of my own lungs echoing inside the plastic facepiece is the only proof I’m still breathing clean air. Every drag through the dual charcoal canisters tastes like powdered chalk and old copper. It’s dry, tearing at the back of my throat, but outside the mask, the world smells like a fresh grave after a chemical spill.

I sit back on my heels on the wet gravel roof, my boots soaked through, my knees trembling so hard they knock against the concrete lip of the raised elevator housing. Water—black, sludge-heavy Baltic floodwater—laps rhythmically against the fourth-floor windows of the brick apartment building across the street. The sea swallowed the lower three floors in less than ten minutes.

My left arm is numb. I’ve been clamping the yellow emergency box against my ribs for so long that my bicep is locked in a tight, burning knot. I don't set it down. I don't let the wet handle slip past my fingers.

Elena’s words hit me like a slap: "If the sky goes dark and the pumps fail, that box is the only thing keeping you from turning into one of them."

I look down at my soaked lab coat, reaching into the torn pockets with my right hand to take stock of what I have left to survive the next hour.

Three plastic bottles. One is unsealed, half-full of tap water from Sub-Level 3, the cap cracked from when I slammed into the filing cabinet. Two are sealed half-liter mineral bottles—clear, pristine, holding clean water that looks like liquid gold against the grey gravel. One spare charcoal filter canister, the aluminum housing dented on the side. And the yellow box.

Three bottles. One mask. One box I was ordered to burn. That’s my whole life. That’s everything standing between me and the fog.

"Silas..."

A hand grabs my right forearm.

I flinch so violently my back slams hard against the brick wall behind me, my boot skidding in the gravel. A strangled scream gets swallowed by the rubber mouthpiece of my mask—phut-clack—the valve rattling as I drag in a panic-spiked breath.

"Silas... please... look at me..."

It’s an old woman. She’s kneeling on the slick roof three feet away, wearing a torn floral kitchen apron over a dark blue wool sweater. Her silver hair is plastered across her forehead in clumped, wet strands, dripping black rainwater into her eyebrows. Her hands are raw, red, and shaking so hard she can barely keep her balance against the freezing coastal draft.

She isn't wearing a mask.

Her mouth is wide open, her chest heaving in rapid, shallow gasps as she pulls the heavy, sulfurous air deep into her lungs.

"Don't touch me!" I yell into the mask, my voice muffled, sounding like I’m shouting from the bottom of a dry well. I yank my arm back, but her fingers are surprisingly strong, locking around my coat sleeve with the hooked grip of a drowning person. "Get back! You're breathing the open air! Get back!"

"Silas..." she whimpers, her voice thin, wet, and raspy. "My... my chest feels so heavy... I can't... I can't find my glasses..."

My stomach drops straight through the roof into the dark water below.

I know her. She lives on the second floor of my building on Fischerstrasse. Frau Lindemann. She used to leave a small plastic bowl of fresh strawberries on the windowsill near the mailboxes every July. She’s seventy-two years old.

"Frau Lindemann, put something over your face!" I scramble backward, dragging my boots through the gravel, trying to break her grip without hitting her. "Cover your mouth! Use your apron! Use your sweater!"

"It burns, Silas," she whispers.

She stops coughing. Her shoulders drop.

Right in front of my eyes, her chest stops heaving. She takes one long, quiet inhalation—dragging the yellow-tinged mist hanging over the rooftop straight into her lungs.

I watch the change happen.

I count the seconds inside my head because the lab manuals were printed in bold red ink on page twelve: 60 SECONDS TO SYSTEMIC FAILURE.

One. Two.

The pink color in her withered lips vanishes, replaced by a dull, slate-grey hue that spreads outward toward her jawline.

Three. Four.

The fine red capillaries on her cheeks don't bleed—they darken. Thick, black, twine-like veins bulge outward beneath her skin, spider-webbing across her neck, up her jawline, and into her temples. They pulse once. Twice. A rhythmic, heavy thrum that pushes through her grey flesh like worms under silk.

Five.

Her brown eyes—the eyes that used to crinkle at the corners when she smiled at the mailman—turn milky white. The pupils don't dilate; they dissolve, spreading a cloudy, marble-like film across her irises until she looks like she’s staring through two drops of curdled milk.

She doesn't scream. She doesn't fall over. She doesn't claw at her throat.

She just sits up straight on her knees, her hands falling away from my sleeve, resting loosely on her apron.

And then she whispers my full name.

"Silas Brandt."

Her voice isn't raspy anymore. It isn't weak. It’s smooth, clear, and perfectly steady—a voice that carries no pain, no fear, and no oxygen struggle.

She shouldn't know my middle name. I never told her. We talked about her cat and the weather near the front steps.

"How..." My voice cracks inside my respirator. My heart beats against my ribs so violently I can feel the pulse vibrating in my front teeth. "How do you know my name?"

Frau Lindemann slowly turns her head. Her milky eyes don't track me—they just face my general direction, completely unblinking in the grey drizzle.

She parts her dark grey lips, and a thick, pale plume of yellowish-green vapor curls out from between her teeth, rising softly into the air between us.

She’s one of them now.

 

I scramble backward until my shoulders slam into the metal door of the roof hatch. My hands are shaking so violently I drop my unsealed water bottle. It rolls across the gravel, the cracked plastic cap popping off, spilling half my clean water into the dirty black rain.

I don't reach for it. I don't care.

Frau Lindemann pushes herself up to her feet. She doesn't rush. She doesn't pounce. She walks with a slow, deliberate cadence, her soft house slippers clicking against the wet gravel.

She isn't running.She doesn't need to run.She has all the time in the world.

"Silas," she says softly, her voice carrying over the sound of the distant tsunami siren. "It doesn't hurt. You don't have to keep wearing that heavy rubber on your face."

"Stay away from me!" I kick out with my right boot, slamming the heel of my leather shoe against her shin.

It hits her with a hard thud. A normal seventy-two-year-old woman would have collapsed, clutching her bone in agony. Frau Lindemann doesn't even stagger. She absorbs the blow, her grey skin barely indenting, and takes another step forward, her hands hanging loosely at her sides.

She exhales again. A fresh cloud of pale green mist rolls across the space between us, clinging to the wet rubber of my mask, fogging the lower corner of my lens.

Sixty seconds.

If a single tear in this rubber seal opens, if the intake valve slips for three seconds while I’m standing in her cloud, I will be kneeling on this gravel next to her, whispering names into the fog.

I grab the brass handle of the roof hatch, yank the rusted iron lever upward, and throw myself backward down the dark stairwell into the flooded building below.