UNKNOWN LOCATION, VALE – 27 JULY 2021: GUARD J. KOENIGS

Jens Koenigs needed a smoke. Martin’s voice — shrill, relentless, self-important — bored into his skull like a drill. If the professor kept screaming like that, Jens was convinced his eardrums would split.

He patted the back pocket of his jeans out of habit, but there was no pack of cigarettes. No jeans, either. None of them had any personal belongings. Their clothes had vanished along with their phones, watches, wallets — everything that tethered a person to the world outside these walls.

Maybe it was some autistic quirk, but the absence gnawed at Jens. He craved the small rituals that steadied him: the flick of a lighter, the weight of a cigarette between his fingers, the precise tick of a watch on his wrist. Without them he felt unmoored, stripped bare. Whoever had taken their possessions hadn’t just inconvenienced them; they had erased the last traces of who they were. Identity reduced to hospital pyjamas and an unmarked drip bag. More than an inconvenience — it was dangerous.

Jens was the last man alive who should complain about violations of human rights. He had lost count of how many he had trampled himself, always in the name of duty. But what exactly had that duty been?

At first, he had believed the people they removed from vaccination centres were genuine lost causes — terminal cases of some hyper-aggressive strain that could kill anyone nearby. Containment made sense. Yet after a handful of those operations, the pattern emerged: no guard ever fell ill, no matter how close they stood to the infected. The disease — if it was a disease — wasn’t contagious. It ravaged from within, slow and merciless. Jens had watched them during his shifts, chained to beds, or restrained in chairs, begging for relief that never came. He had seen the agony stretch for days, sometimes weeks. A bullet would have been kinder.

He was never in a position to question the supervisors. Still, doubt had taken root. Then the secrecy sealed it. No reports, no mentions, no paper trail. The missions simply never happened. Each one left him feeling filthier, more complicit. Restlessness grew into something sharper; thoughts of desertion circled like vultures. If he had run then, perhaps he could have salvaged what remained of his conscience.

Instead, he was assigned to disposal duty — mass graves under cover of night. After that, there was no going back. No redemption. Only the knowledge that his soul was already forfeit.

And now, here he was, locked in with the man he held responsible for the whole rotten chain. Martin Von Rotten. The architect. The face on every screen and directive. Too perfect, too convenient. Something was deeply wrong with the picture.

Like the others, Jens remembered nothing of his arrival. Confusion pressed against suspicion. He did not know Sandra or Zaur — had no idea whether he himself had dragged them here, whether this derelict clinic was one of the sites he had once patrolled. He was certain of only one thing: Martin’s identity. He knew the professor’s face, his voice, his smug certainty. Jens had hated him for years — hated him enough to send anonymous death threats from burner accounts, each one typed in the small hours when guilt refused to let him sleep.

Martin’s presence here could not be coincidence. The man knew more than he pretended. Jens was convinced he was still playing supervisor, still pulling strings even in pyjamas. Whatever game this was, Martin was part of it. Jens could not afford to let anyone suspect how much he knew — or what he had planned.

He remembered fragments of the hours before Brushtown. The vaccination centre. The tall, bald figure he had become in the waiting area. The black sports bag at his feet. He had no idea how many days had passed since, or where the bag was now. But it had to be here, hidden somewhere. The organisers would not leave their only armed guard defenceless. He was still a guard, wasn’t he? Still useful.

They must have noticed the missing weapons from the armoury by now. Soon they would trace them back to him. But by the time they pieced it together, he intended to be gone — across a border, vanished.

In the end, they had only themselves to blame.

He had left his laptop open one careless afternoon. His superior had found the drafts — the threats to Von Rotten. A reprimand followed, then demotion to armourer. They should never have given him keys to the weapons store.

They really shouldn’t have.