When people think of Liberin city, they often think of one of the zones they’ve been to. Each one of them left a different impression. The Golden Zone is the rich part of the city, with astonishing architecture, great planning of the street layout, and well-maintained. The people lived without any fear as they felt protected. The Red Zone was smaller, with people cramped in that small space, no guards to keep the peace, and people doing anything they could to survive and see the next day. Robbery and murder happen on a daily basis. The streets and buildings look like they could crumble at any moment. Everyone is on edge as they fear everything in The Red Zone.
When people die in the Golden Zone, their bodies are cremated. If they are from rich or influential families, they have graves or even statues where they are admired by the whole city. In the Red Zone, no one gets a grave. Their bodies are left on the street or dumped into the morgue. The smell of the Red Zone is sickeningly sweet because of the rotting corpses and the smoky smell from the bodies burned in the great furnace.
Traveling people often mistake it for some kind of tower since it rises high above the buildings of the Red Zone. They didn’t know that it was a chimney of the morgue, of the great furnace. They didn’t know that the smoke coming out of it was made from burning corpses.
The Red Zone hid many horrifying things from the outside world. Some were hidden, secret. While the others were known but not spoken of as no one wanted to acknowledge their existence. Some things are better not knowing.
There was a loud buzzing sound all around, and slowly, more and more of these sounds were heard. A fly was standing on an eye, buried under many corpses of men and women alike. Some of them didn’t have any visible injuries, while some had many wounds and bruises. As the eye blinked, the fly quickly moved away. It was wide open, and its gaze moved all around, registering the place and the situation. The pupil slowly adjusted and the blur went away, the sound once muffled became clear, and the smell came to the nostrils like a knife piercing the skin and sticking itself in the flesh.
The corpses were moved by hand; this action was followed by heavy, anxious breaths. Once the bodies were swept away, Navia lifted her torso, dead bodies on her legs. Her breath became faster and shallower. The sight of piles of thousands of corpses almost gave her a heart attack, and made her join them in the afterlife.
Trying to stand up in a panic, she felt pain in her shoulder and wrist, at the same time, the discomfort of putting a hand in the mouth of a dead person. The ground was hidden by many corpses, and the only thing she could stand on was the dead bodies.
Her hands went to her head to grab it and wrap herself in her own embrace to calm down, but as she touched her head, a pain echoed from one side of her head to the other. Bringing her hands in front of her face, she saw both of them covered in dark blood. Looking down, her hair fell, and she could see that most of them were colored with her blood. The wound she received from falling from such a height didn’t fully heal. All of that felt like a nightmare she couldn’t wake up from.
Between the buzzes of the flies, she heard another noise. Turning toward it, she saw a corpse being slowly eaten by flames. Looking up, she could barely see it, but there was a person standing near the edge. He was the one who dropped the torch. Naiva screamed, “Hey! I am not dead! Hey!” Her voice weakened and tired. She didn’t know if the man didn’t hear her or ignored her, but he went away from her sight.
There were cases where they threw the body, and the person turned out to be still alive, but if they were in such a state, the morgue put the dead label on them, there was no good reason to save them as death could welcome them at any moment.
Screaming was of no use. Watching the fire slowly spread from corpse to corpse, Navia began to crawl away since standing up was impossible. As she moved forward, she tried not to look down at the rotting bodies, their dead eyes watching her. Besides trying not to look at them, she tried her best not to vomit, but even if she did, there was nothing in her stomach.
Every time she touched the rotting body, it made her gag, and with every movement, she felt her heart beating faster. She could already feel the warmth of the fire, and the smell was getting stronger. Before she could even reach the wall, the smoke got to her, obscuring her vision. She didn’t know how much longer she had to crawl to reach the wall. Suddenly, the body under her slipped, and she did along with the corpse. She was standing on one of many piles of bodies and didn’t notice the slope.
Falling down, she heard many bones snapping. She fell faster than the corpse of a woman, and as she reached the bottom, she felt something sharp touching her side. The falling body picked up speed and pressed hard against her. The sharp thing turned out to be a broken bone, now sticking out through Navia’s stomach.
Her earlier plea for help was barely a whisper compared to the anguished scream, the sound bounced off the walls until it reached the top of the chimney. The scream was heard all over the Red Zone and the border of the Golden Zone. The sound that people heard wasn’t a scream of a woman in pain. It was as if a sea monster emerged from the water, letting the citizens know that it was coming for their blood. The ones who were in the streets quickly looked for shelter, not even waiting for the alert from the city. The shopkeepers hid their merchandise and blocked the doors to their shops.
It wasn’t unusual for a few monsters to somehow slip past the walls protecting the city. It was rare, but people didn’t ignore the signs of upcoming monsters. Red Zones barons quickly responded by assigning more guards to the walls of their residences. A few of them even sent their guards to the streets where their shops stand to protect them. The streets became empty, with the only noise made by the patrolling guards. No one had seen the monster, but it wasn’t enough for their fear to be washed away.
Pushing the corpse away, she glanced at the wound, panting heavily. Navia grabbed the bone as she grunted in pain, quickly thinking about what to do about it. Breaking it wouldn’t help her since the rest of it was below her. She clenched her teeth and looked for solid ground under her. Once she found it, she tried to lift herself, trying to resist another scream. The tip was already gone from her sight and close to getting it out of her body. With that much pressure, one body she was standing on suddenly moved, her whole posture collapsing to one side. The bone was damaging her insides as it slipped back, piercing a bit more of her skin to the side, away from the stomach.
The second scream wasn’t ignored by the Golden Zone’s border guards. They were quick to sound alarms, the first bell echoed through the streets. When it reached the other tower, it repeated the signals. The ringing of bells made the people anxious, so the guards helped them organize a route back to the shelters or homes. In dark blue uniforms made of light plated armor, the guards of Golden Zone moved in groups of three. The captain of the group was the one who controlled the crowd, while the other two helped where they could, or if needed, they assisted the captain.
Many guards with muskets headed to the walls of the Golden Zone, keeping watch on any monsters that dared to stand on the land of Liberin City. The citizens of the Red Zone tried their best to stay away from the walls of the other zone, but this time it was different. Many people gathered near the walls to be protected by the gunners on top.
“Those fuckers are using us…” A guard on the wall whispered in anger as he watched the poor and scared gather under the walls. “What if I don’t shoot when the monster comes? Might eat some of them before trying to get past the wall…” The guard turned to the man beside him, letting his displeasure be heard and visible to others.
“Can’t do. Some monsters get stronger after eating. We can’t risk it.” The other guard was calm and obedient to the orders and rules set by the governors. His gaze was focused on the streets away, on the lookout for the monster.
The furious guard only let out an annoyed grunt, already marking the man beside him as someone he didn’t want to know. Even though the orders were logical, he didn’t want to waste his time on the Red Zone he despised. Many people from above despised them. They were stain to the prestige of the city, of its wealth and safety.
Navia’s scream slowly changed into a cry, It was hard for her to endure so much pain. The wounds hadn’t healed yet, and more of them appeared. She wanted and needed time to rest, but there was no time for that. Between her tears, she could see the dark cloud slowly moving closer to her. The fire was spreading, and the smell of burnt flesh was everywhere.
The piles of corpses slowly fell as the burnt bones became fragile, being broken by the pure pressure of the bodies on top of them. Navia lifted her arms to protect herself from the falling parts of the corpses. The pain was too much, but she didn’t have an option. She had to endure if she wanted to survive.
“Do I want to live?” A question rose in her mind. “Is this pain worth it? I lost my beloved… I have… A daughter… But I haven’t seen her in a long time. She must be thinking I am already dead… The order will help her… I am sure… She doesn’t need me anymore… I can just die and join my husband…” Navia ignored the pain, slowly accepting her situation. “It’ll be my last feel of pain… And then peace.”
When she closed her eyes, she tried to imagine heaven with her husband… A man… A person? She couldn’t see him well, no exact shape to remember. The heaven wasn’t calm as she smelled rotten flesh and smoke, heard the fire that she could only connect to hell. Opening her eyes, she realized that the place she was imagining right now wasn’t much different from the hell she saw as she opened her eyes.
“I… D… want to die…”