Everything is silent. No birds. No wind through grass. Just the rhythm of footfalls on rubble.

Step. Drag. Step. Drag.

Your shadow stretches thin behind you, a long gray specter tethered to cracked heels and battered soles. The fifth settlement. The sixth. The seventh. They all blur together in memory — gunfire in the night, bodies rotting at the perimeter, a note pinned to a door with a kitchen knife.

Settlements full or dead. Food stores picked clean. No room. Move on.

But there— on the edge of a low ridge, where the land finally flattens out.

A shape. Dark against the smog-choked sky.

Walls.

They rise from the wasteland like a promise, a misplaced testament that someone, somewhere, decided to stop running and start building. Steel and concrete and scrap, all of it rammed together into a rampart maybe twelve feet high. It’s not pretty. But it’s standing.

A watchtower, cobbled together from shipping containers stacked three high. A faint curl of smoke rises from somewhere behind the wall.

It’s movement. It’s life.

Eight’s the try. Maybe it is.

A voice calls out from above, sharp with fatigue. From the watchtower, a figure leans over the railing — you can just make out the silhouette of a rifle and a mess of dark hair.