Three Worlds

The War That Never Finished

Before anyone here ever said the word outbreak, South Zagoria had spent years at war with itself. The fighting never properly ended, it just ran out of fuel. It left a province with roadblocks on farm tracks, ammunition under kitchen floors, and people who had long stopped asking strangers friendly questions.

When the first cases came out of the north, those old habits looked like they might save the country. Checkpoints went back up within a day. Food was rationed before the radio had finished explaining what was wrong. Chernarus held out for months while bigger countries went down in weeks. Then it went down too, in about a week, with every wall still manned. The sickness never came up the roads anyone was watching. It was already inside.

Landfall

Everyone starts on the coast. Some wash up on the shingle with salt in their clothes and no clear memory of the water. Others walk down out of the hills carrying a story they would rather keep. Nobody meets you either way. The pier is empty, and the harbor lights burn all night over water nothing moves on.

You piece the country together from what it left lying around, and none of it was arranged for your benefit. An evacuation notice stapled to a church door, in a language you may not read. A duty roster with the last three names crossed out by the same pen. Ration stamps for a month that never came, still in the drawer of a post office nobody has bothered to close.

The Lights Still Come On

At dusk the street lamps warm up, though not the way they used to. Whole stretches of the country stay dark now, and what still comes on comes on in patches: one village lit, the next one not, a single row of lamps along a road nobody has a reason to take. Stand on high ground on your first night and you can count the lit towns sitting out in the dark. Most people find the sight comforting for about a minute. Then they start wondering who is keeping the power on.

Nobody has an answer. No crew has ever been found working on a line, and no plant has been found burning fuel. The grid should have gone out completely in the first winter, and it still has not. Most people end up using the lamps anyway, because walking a lit road beats walking a ditch. The ones who stay off them have their reasons: light works in both directions, and it shows you to whoever else is out there.

The Wall

Somewhere inland the fields stop at a wide strip of cleared ground, and on the far side of it stands the Wall: ten meters of poured concrete, thick to match, drawn clear across the country. The government started it when the first infected turned up in the north, and drew the line far enough south of them to leave time to pour it. Everything south of the concrete was what the state still meant to save. Everything north of it was whoever ran out of road.

You would expect lights on a thing like this. There are none: no floodlights, no lamps over the gates, nothing on it built to be watched at night. What it has instead is paint, and the warnings face north, because warnings are written for people, not for the infected. Nothing it was built to stop ever came through it. It was simply finished too late: the sickness was already on the southern side. The concrete still decides how this country moves, just never in the way it was poured for.

There are two ways across. By land through one of the seven gates, and a gate is something somebody opens or closes, which is why every argument in this country sooner or later arrives at one. The other way is around the end of the concrete by sea: long, cold, and owned by nobody.

The newest paint on the Wall faces the other way. Somebody went gate to gate with a brush and hung a board on the southern face of each one, seven boards, same words, same hand, telling anyone walking north that a few hundred meters past this point nobody is going to say anything to them first. No authority ordered those. They went up because too many people came back with the same account, and because the ones who did not come back had all walked out of the same seven openings.

South of the concrete a word still counts, and the reason is not decency. Everybody down here draws from the same wells, drives the same four roads and sells to the same buyer, and a man who shoots on sight burns through all of that inside a week. Past the gates none of it holds. There is nothing up there anybody has to come back to, and nobody up there you need again tomorrow.

Locked on the Way Out

The country was locked before it was left. Cash registers sit shut on shop counters with the day's take still inside. Heavy chests wait in back rooms no delivery van ever had a reason to visit. Up in the hills there are steel doors with vines grown across them, built to outlast the end of the world. They did.

Every one of those locks was turned by somebody who meant to come back. By spring, they must have thought, or after the harvest, or once things calmed down. The keys are still out there, in coat pockets and glove boxes and the mud of shallow graves. Some carry a tag that says roughly where they belong. The ones that carry a person's name are worth following: whoever owned one tended to leave a note close to the lock, for whoever came after.

The Smoke

People here call them the Smoke, because the smell reaches you before anything else does. Woodsmoke on a clear road, tar, something scorched, and nothing anywhere that should be burning. By the time you see a glow moving between the trees, you are closer than you want to be.

What survivors have worked out fits in a few sentences. In some of the infected the sickness kept working long after it took them. The change is a mutation, bred into what they are now, and it shows in the skin: they sweat an oil that behaves like the old floorboard oil every farmhouse here kept a can of. Leave a rag soaked in that stuff bundled up overnight and by morning it has heated itself until it catches. On a body that never rests, the same thing happens. Sooner or later they go up in flames, and the fire changes nothing about what they want.

They are more dangerous than the ordinary infected, and it is not close. The heat reaches you before their hands do, so they can hurt you without ever touching you, and they keep coming while they burn. Nobody agrees on whether the mutation happened on its own or was helped along. The oldest locals will only say that the war years put things in these hills that never stood in any inventory, and they say it once, and then they talk about something else.

The Lamplighter

No crew has ever been found on a line. What the south has instead is a story, and the story is about one man. Ask in any village below the concrete why its lamps came back on, and somebody will tell you about the Lamplighter. Nobody agrees on his name or his face. The accounts that hold together are short: a headlamp at the top of a pole some time after midnight, a man up there working with both hands and paying the street no mind, and by morning a row of lamps burning that had been dark the night before.

The bakers believe in him the way farmers believe in weather. On Thursdays two loaves go out on the back windowsill, and nobody in the house stays up to watch. By morning the bread is gone. Villages that keep the custom say their lamps have never failed for long, and the bakery in Elektrozavodsk keeps it more faithfully than any of them. New arrivals get one piece of advice about it: leave the loaves where they are. A hungry night is cheaper than a dark one.

Two things keep it from being only a story. The first is paint. The seven boards on the southern face of the gates were lettered by one hand, and people who have found the work order left behind in the cold power plant at Elektrozavodsk say it is the same hand, signed with two initials and a district number. He was never careful with his paper. Every note of his that turns up names the next place he went, and the people who have followed them say the trail goes a long way.

The second is the radio. After dark, on 87.8 MHz, a man's voice reads a short run of numbers and a few words, and then the channel goes back to static. Most of what comes over 87.8 is survivors talking to each other, so it is easy to take this for more of the same. It is not. The voice never answers anyone, it keeps coming back at the same hours, and people who own a map say the numbers are a place on it: the first counts across from the left edge, the second down from the top, both in hundreds of meters.

Every survivor comes ashore with a radio and no battery to put in it. Most trade the thing away inside a week. The ones who keep it, find it a battery and leave it on after dark tend to stop laughing at the bakers.

Lately the story has grown a third thing, and this one makes noise. Fishermen on the south coast talk about a rotor after midnight, low over the water, heading out to sea and back again before first light. The few who have seen it up close describe something small and patched together: a helicopter with two seats, one behind the other, built from parts that never belonged to the same machine and wired the way the lamps are wired. Nobody in the south remembers a helicopter coming through the collapse in one piece. The Lamplighter, they say, did not find his. He built it.

Where he keeps it is what people argue about. The usual answer is somewhere out on the water where nobody else goes, standing with its tank dry, so that anyone who wants it has to bring fuel of their own, and anyone who wants to keep it flying ends up searching workshops and army sheds for the same kind of parts he used. Some have gone looking. The ones who came back all ask the same question about the seat behind the pilot's: who it is for. And if the machine is ever lost, the old men at the bakeries say, give it time. He has built one before.

The Province Everyone Left

Nasdara has always been a place people passed through on the way to somewhere else. Caravans crossed the Dasht-e Sarman and watered at Qalat-e Lut. Kings built a palace at Shah Yailaq and the walls of Bala Hissar above the western valleys. Every army that came afterwards added a fort of its own and left it standing when it moved on: hilltop forts on Didban Tapa and Ak Hisar, a Soviet design bureau whose number still turns up in the names of half the sites around it, a missile base under the border mountains, and last of all the coalition, with its barriers and container towers at FOB Atlas and in the hills along the north road.

When the sickness came, it came the way everything always had, along the roads. Ardistan closed the crossing at Dar-e Ardis from its own side, and the M12 filled up with people who had nowhere left to drive. The freight yard at Terminal Nas became a camp almost overnight, rows of shipping containers with families inside them, waiting for an airlift out of Dashtabad. The coalition flew out what it could. Then it flew itself out, and the camp went on waiting.

Somewhere in those last weeks the Mehran tunnel on the M12 filled with something that has never cleared. Some say a tanker burned inside, some say it was let loose on purpose to stop the traffic. Either way it still hangs in the air under the hill, and nobody goes in without a gas mask. The forts are all still standing. The people who built them are not.

The North Road

Everybody starts in the north, on the road that runs east from Darvazeh-e Gharb past Gandomabad and Kamar Zir towards Dashtabad and Jakhzar. There is no sea out here to wash up from. Some people come down off the Kotal-e Khushk with no clear memory of the climb. Others were on a truck that stopped here and left without them. Nobody meets you either way. The road is empty in both directions, and the only thing moving on it is the dust.

Whoever dressed you dressed you for market day: a kameez, shalwar trousers and sandals, with a chemlight, one soda, a handful of figs and a bandage in your pockets. That is the whole of it. The capital is a long, dry walk to the south. The first thing the province teaches you is that the soda runs out long before the figs do. The second is that nobody out here has ever regretted carrying a bucket.

The Long Spring

It is spring in Nasdara, and it has been spring for as long as anybody has kept count. The orchards are in blossom, the valleys are still green along the riverbeds, and the nights are short and cold enough to earn a second layer. People who keep diaries say the dates stopped adding up a long time ago: the end of April, then May, and then somehow the end of April again. Nobody here has seen the summer arrive. Nobody is in a hurry for it either, because spring in this province is hard enough.

The sun is not weather here. It is something that happens to you, in a fixed order. First you sweat your water away. Then the road starts to swim and your legs go soft. Then you lose whatever you last drank and ate, and after that you are lying in the road. The old rule is a cloth over your head, light clothes on your back and shade from noon until the heat breaks.

Then there is the wind. It comes up without much warning and turns the whole world brown, and anybody caught in it without goggles and a wrap over the mouth soon has sand in the eyes and in the lungs. In a long storm people faint where they stand. On a still day the dust is a problem of a different kind: it tells on you. Every engine drags a flag of it behind, and every boot on a dry upstairs floor sends a little of it down through the ceiling onto whoever is waiting below.

Where the Water Went

People call Nasdara the province of dry wells, and it is only half true. When the dam at Sadd-e Marek failed in the north-west, the reservoir drained, the turbines at Marek Barq went quiet and the rivers sank to a trickle between their stones. The shallow wells down the valleys followed them. But most of the wells in this province are not dry at all. They are broken: a ring of loose brick around a hole, with water somewhere at the bottom that nobody can reach.

Mud brick forgives almost anything. With bricks, mortar and a trowel a broken well can be built back up, a fallen house can get its walls back, and the old irrigation tunnels that carried water down from the hills can be shored up and closed off again. People who had never laid a brick in their lives learn it here within a week, because a door that shuts and a well that works are worth more than anything you can carry.

A rebuilt well gives water to anybody with a bucket, and that is the trouble with it. Whoever puts one back together has done something for everybody, and has also told everybody where they will be tomorrow. Somebody wrote a line in charcoal on the bricks of a well near Bam-e Sabz that most people out here would sign: This one works. Leave the bucket.

Dots and Dashes

When the province emptied, civil defence did one last useful thing. It set its transmitters to read out where the city shelters were and the codes that opened their doors, so that families who had lost each other on the roads could find a door that would still let them in. The families never came. The transmitters never stopped.

From a quarter to six in the evening until six in the morning the air is full of Morse code. Three doors are on the air at any one time, each with four digits that open it, and the list never stays the same for long. Anybody with a working radio can listen. Fewer people can read it, and the ones who can are in no hurry to teach. It was meant as a kindness. Whether it still is one depends on who gets to the door first.

What the Armies Left

The armies that passed through Nasdara left in a hurry, and none of them took the dogs. Dobermans and shepherds still hold the wire at the bases, around the airfield outside Dashtabad and at the outposts along the roads, and they go for anybody who walks in. Nobody has ever made friends with one. People have tried with food. The dogs do not care what is in your pockets, only that you are inside their fence.

What nobody can explain is the wrecks. The coalition's last flights left from Dashtabad and not all of them got far, so a burnt-out Chinook in the sand is no surprise. But the wrecks keep coming. A stretch of desert near Qalat-e Lut that was empty last week has a fresh one on it this morning, still burning, its cargo strewn across the sand, and sick men in uniform standing around it as if they were waiting for orders. Nobody has ever seen one of those helicopters in the air.

Some say the coalition never really stopped flying. Some say the desert is giving back what it swallowed, one wreck at a time. Most people stop asking once they have seen what a fresh one carries, and go out to get it before somebody else does.

A Reason for Every Shot

Nobody in Nasdara owes you a warning. No line was ever drawn across this province to mark where talking is expected and where it stops, and there is nobody left who could draw one now. Most people who raise a rifle out here will not say a word first.

That is not the same as shooting for nothing. In a province this dry a shot has an owner and a reason, and the reasons are old ones: a well somebody thinks is theirs, a bike that went missing, a brother who never came back from Terminal Nas, plain fear on open sand. People remember who fired and why. The ones who shoot because they are bored do not last long. The province forgets most things quickly, but not that.

Which is why a calm voice still gets further here than a rifle does. A stranger who calls out to you across a courtyard may well be lying. A lie is still a conversation, though, and out here a conversation is how most people live long enough to get thirsty again.

The Quiet Years

Deer Isle was never supposed to matter. Fishing villages, lobster docks and timber roads along a forgotten stretch of the Maine coast. In the late 1960s, that anonymity became its most valuable asset.

The first parcels were bought through a paper company called Northern Atlantic Holdings. The real client was the NSF, a defense agency whose mandate quietly extended into "civil-adjacent biomedical research." By the early 1970s, a granite shelf inside Mt. Katahdin had been hollowed into the Katahdin Military Underground Complex (K-MUC). The island was rebuilt to feed it: a deep-water pier, a central airstrip, and a hardened transfer station above Barringer Crater, dressed for the public as a meteorological observatory.

Older locals tell a different story. Long before any of it, fishermen swore that something beneath the northern ice cracked when the tide pulled out. The earliest NSF surveys took those reports seriously enough to mark the spot as Site Zero. Nobody outside the program ever saw those maps again.

S.T.A.G. and Sample X65

The research arm inside the K-MUC operated under its own banner: S.T.A.G., Strategic Tactical Applied Genomics. Where the NSF wore uniforms and submitted budgets, S.T.A.G. wore lab coats and submitted nothing. Their assignment was a single, deniable deliverable: a battlefield-grade neuroactive agent that could destabilize a population without leaving a signature. Internally, they called it POX.

By the fourth generation, POX no longer behaved like a pathogen. It rewrote the host. The most stable strain was sealed in a single glass ampoule, logged as S.T.A.G. Research Project Sample X65, and locked inside the observation tower above Barringer Crater under permanent atmospheric quarantine. The air around that tower is not weather any more. To breathe it without the right skin is to lose your lungs in under a minute, a fact written into more than one cassette in Tamarova's hand.

Three Cards, Three Graves

The K-MUC was redesigned around containment. A purple-grade access card opened the outer ring; the inner vault required hardware that, on paper, never existed. To keep the few cards safe, S.T.A.G. did something almost absurdly old-fashioned: they buried them.

One was logged into the inventory of the corrections facility on Alcatraz, a concrete island used as a clearance prison for failed test subjects. The card never left a desk in the main block; the warden never lived long enough to file his next report. A second was sunk inside the Temple in the swamp, in the flooded chamber where the dry world ends, a place you can only reach if you can carry your own air. A third, grade-green, was reserved for the few who would still be allowed off the island. That card never made the boat. It is still aboard the carrier, behind a door that does not open from the deck.

The Collapse

The outbreak did not begin in the laboratory. It began in the kitchen of an Alcatraz guard who carried home an item he should not have touched. Within seventy-two hours the prison island was a screaming cage. NSF response teams reached the dock, took one look, and welded the gates shut from the outside. The cable read: "Environmental contamination. Site forfeit. No survivors expected."

The infection crossed the bridges. The local CDF garrison, abandoned by their chain of command, retreated to Prison Island with their families. They lasted nineteen days. The last entry in the duty log is a single line: "Ammo gone. Door holds. God forgive us for what we have to do tonight."

Inside the K-MUC, the surviving research staff made their own decision. They armed the perimeter, triggered a five-minute lockdown, and sealed themselves into the lower vault, taking the Skull Staff with them. Whatever brought it down there is still down there, on the floor of the central pit, beside the helicopter that never lifted off. Offshore, the aircraft carrier USS Atherton refused boarding to anyone without a green-grade clearance card. The ship is still there today, lights on, drifting on its anchor chain.

The Older Faith

What S.T.A.G. never managed to classify is what hurts the most. The Temple in the southern swamp predates every modern map of the island. The villagers who built around it spoke of it only under their breath; the survey teams who tried to photograph it lost a roll of film and an engineer in the same week.

The stonework will not move for daylight. It answers, instead, between the last hour and the first, and only for those who arrive bleeding. A few of Tamarova's tapes describe the trade more bluntly than the official files ever did: the swamp does not gate the Temple. The Temple gates the swamp. What is offered on the altar is repaid in distance, the kind of distance the body cannot walk.

The Hammer in Pieces

Two relics rest inside the Temple, on either side of its broken architecture. The first is set high, a head of weathered iron the masons would have called Mjölnir's crown, lodged where only somebody willing to climb the walls of the inner hall will ever reach it. The second is buried below, behind a wall that does not exist on any plan ever drawn of the building.

That second wall is the lock S.T.A.G. could never break. It will open to one combination only: the Skull Staff in one hand, the X65 ampoule in the other, and the nerve to use them together. The smoke that follows is not weather. It is a door. It bites at anything passing through without the staff's permission, and it closes the moment the staff leaves it. What it leads to is the floor of a chamber no living NSF surveyor ever walked. On its table waits the part that will reforge the hammer.

The Statue and the Hourglass

The Crypt does not give its secret away cleanly. The room before it holds statues circling a flame older than the staff itself. The staff drinks fire willingly (it will carry a flame back south the way a candle carries one out of a church), and that fire will only be answered by a single brazier the Temple kept dark for a thousand years.

The brazier hangs beneath a statue holding an hourglass, and the offer must be made twice: once on the altar of the swamp, in blood, at the right hour; and again at the basket itself, with the staff still burning, when the sky is finally dark enough to listen. What opens then opens downward, and only downward, and only to those who came back for it.

The Floor That Lies

Beneath that door is a place no NSF map dared sketch. The traps in its first corridors are old in a way machinery is not. The floor lies. So do the walls: one of them, in places, is the only path. There are bridges the eye does not see, and bridges the eye sees that hold nothing.

What waits at the end of the corridor is geometry the survivors recognize. The K-MUC's outer doors. The K-MUC's inner doors. The same locks, in the same order: a purple key, a S.T.A.G. punch card, a staff burning at the threshold. S.T.A.G. did not design the bunker beneath Mt. Katahdin from new. They built it from a memory.

What Waits in the Cold

The last room is a bowl. Set it alight with the burning staff and the room itself begins. What S.T.A.G. spent forty years trying to weaponize arrives in waves; the cold that comes down with it belongs to no season anyone here can name. The crossbow lying on the floor is the only thing in the chamber that was meant to be there. The bolts come from what falls.

There are no debriefs from this room. The cassette tapes do not reach it. The last clean line in Tamarova's recovered notes, the one she never finished, reads: the gun is wrong. The fire is wrong. Whatever they were trying to bury, the island was hiding it long before any of us arrived.

The quarantine line is a lie. The island never stopped being a laboratory. You are just the next experiment.