The Fall of Villedor

The sirens start just after sunrise. At first, Hakon thinks it is another military exercise, the kind he used to run when he was still enlisted. He had been up since five, drinking the kind of coffee that could peel paint and staring at the dent in his cab’s dashboard. His shift starts early, and Villedor’s traffic never sleeps. The radio crackles with static, then the announcer’s voice breaks through, trembling but trying to sound calm. Something about “isolated infections” near the eastern perimeter. People are told to stay home.

He snorts. “Sure they will,” he mutters, starting the engine. The old taxi rattles like an asthmatic smoker, but it’s his. The streets are already jammed with people trying not to panic. The markets are overflowing, people grabbing anything that will fit in their bags.

By noon, the air smells like fear. Helicopters thunder overhead, black smoke rising from the hospital district. He sees soldiers sealing off intersections with concrete barriers. The same kind of barricades he helped set up years ago in foreign sand. Only this time, it’s his own city behind the wire.

He picks up one last fare, a woman clutching a little boy with red cheeks and a plastic dinosaur in his hand. “To the west bridge,” she says, her voice cracking. Hakon drives fast, but not fast enough. The checkpoints are clogged. Soldiers are shouting at civilians. Someone fires a gun. The sound turns the whole street feral. The crowd surges, people climbing on cars, smashing windows, screaming.

Hakon shoves the car door open and pulls the woman and her son out. “Go,” he yells, pointing toward the side streets. “Stay off the main roads.” He turns back just in time to see one of the infected tear through a line of soldiers. It moves wrong, like a puppet with its strings cut. Bullets don’t stop it. They only make it scream louder.

He runs. Not out of cowardice, but because the soldier in him knows the math. No backup. No cure. No hope. You survive by moving.

By nightfall, Villedor burns. The radio stops talking. The power cuts out. Fires turn the sky orange. He finds shelter in an old parking garage, his taxi still parked nearby. He uses a crowbar to pry open the vending machines, eats stale chips, and listens to the distant chorus of screams and gunfire.

Days blur together. The army abandons the city. Quarantine walls rise. The last choppers leave, their rotors whipping up ashes. Hakon watches them vanish beyond the smoke, clutching the gun he took from a dead soldier.

He buries the woman’s boy two days later near the river. The mother had turned before dawn. He can’t remember her name. He doesn’t let himself.

After that, the soldier takes over. He scavenges, fights, learns. The streets become hunting grounds, and he learns to move between shadows like the monsters do. He stops thinking about rescue.

When the Peacekeepers come years later, Hakon is already a ghost among the ruins, driving no one but himself through a dead city. He still keeps the taxi keys in his pocket, though the cab burned long ago.

A reminder of what the city took. And what he became when it fell.