This can’t be happening to me. This isn’t real.

I looked at Robert, who was explaining how his group had ended up in this city, but my gaze kept drifting to the small embroidered head of a Gorgon on his T-shirt.

You might not have cared about politics, the military, or listened to the news and read the newspaper summaries, but you couldn’t not know about The Gorgon.

"The Gorgon." A symbol group. A ghostly, almost mythically legendary group, whose predecessor three hundred and six years ago helped the First Three rise to power. A small, elite organization, directly subordinate to the Three and only the Commander-in-Chief. The names of the participants were always kept in the background; they didn’t exist as individuals – there was only "The Gorgon" and the Gorgons. They devoted their lives to military service, to this group, giving up their past and future. The most difficult operations, the hottest battle zones – the name "Gorgon" was always there. And no one knew whether there was more truth or rumor surrounding these fighters, whose professionalism and faith in their ideology were spoken of almost with reverence.

“…this plague started spreading rapidly in the northern part of the region a couple of weeks ago. The authorities tried to convince everyone that everything was under control. Maybe it was at first, but you can't seal off entire cities and borders, “Robert paused for a moment.” I was working with my team in the "Cold Calm" area; now fighting has flared up again there.”

“Fighting? In the southwest?” I asked, incredulous. “But they said all military operations there had ended. After all the peaceful and pacifist demonstrations?”

“People never get enough blood,” Sam scoffed suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down at the floor. I shot him a warning glance, which, of course, he didn't see. Robert, however, reacted with extreme calm to Dort's barb.

“I’m not the one who ends the fighting, and neither are my people. Just as we’re not the ones who start it.”

“How did you get here?” I asked immediately, not allowing Sam to start a debate.

“This Tuesday, we were urgently called back. We were supposed to land five hundred kilometers north of here, but the landing site was declared lost. And not just that. The red zone,” the man coughed. “In the end, we were dropped off at the central area airport and transferred into our own vehicles, with the expectation that we would leave the cordoned-off zone by land. But… The final directive from "command" brought us here. The Monarchs had to admit that attempting to reclaim lost territories was unfeasible. We were ordered to ensure that everything here remained under control; the town is small, but it’s one of the main junctions for the roads. Like every town in the Isthmus Region, really…” Robert scoffed, looking down at the floor with some disappointment. “But the Three miscalculated. Nothing here was under control anymore.”

“How bad?” the question slipped out before I could think. But it seemed like Sbort was waiting for the question.

“We arrived when the police were already cordoning off the eastern residential neighborhoods. They were trying to evacuate as many healthy people as possible. Rumors spread through the city that the infected couldn’t be killed; the law enforcement refused to respond to calls or enter other people's homes. The Reapers were hastily abandoning their service quarters,” Robert paused briefly. He spoke with calm and focus, as if recounting a boring lecture, as though nothing extraordinary had happened; as if just minutes ago, one of his team members hadn’t died. I almost lost myself in it. The man's composure and calm were so intoxicating and contagious that, for a moment, all the nightmares of the past few hours flew out of my mind. “I’ll skip the details of the bureaucratic nightmare and the insanity of some untouchable officials, who issue reckless decrees and give orders devoid of any reason,” he smiled grimly with the corner of his mouth. "The Gorgon was sent to the home of the local mayor, whose daughter had contracted the plague. They confined her to the second floor, hoping to cover up the whole situation: they didn’t want to send their daughter to the hospital and tarnish the family’s white name. And when they realized they’d made a foolish mistake, it was too late. We were ordered to take the mayor and his wife out of the house and transport them to a safe location. Honestly, I didn’t expect things to be so bad and dangerously serious. I left some of the Gorgon team to assist the police, and took the others to carry out the order,” another brief pause. “When we arrived, we found the house in such a bloody state it looked like a slaughterhouse had been set up there. Out of the seven residents, four were torn apart and their bodies literally chewed up. And two were…” the soldier hesitated, tilting his head to the side, “I’d say alive, but that contradicts what we saw. The injuries weren’t fatal: one had a minor bite on the neck, the other had chewed hands. But alive, those… creatures were definitely not. First of all, you can tell a living person from a dead one; the basic smell is unmistakable. Secondly, when you empty an entire magazine into someone…” the man sighed heavily, not finishing the sentence.