"They haven"t touched this part of the city yet..."The surroundings were very different from what he had seen in other parts of Boston. No cars abandoned in the middle of the road, no smell of dried blood coming to attack his nostrils.
Lazar was walking on a street devoid of any trace of the pa.s.sage of any monster, but to say that the Apocalypse hadn"t left its imprint in this place would be a mistake.
Many people had fled, as suggested by the absence of cars in garages that no one had bothered to close before leaving.
Other houses were barricaded from the outside, which meant that fools had decided to stay.
"Monsters aren"t stupid, barricades are more likely to attract them than anything else."
The sign he had just pa.s.sed indicated "Fenno Street".
It was a residential area for people with high incomes.
When Lana got a big promotion a few years ago, he and she had moved from her apartment to get closer to her place of work and to escape the anxiety that living in the city center entailed.
With the 5-figure salary she had just earned, they could largely afford to live in a beautiful house in a quiet area of Boston.
The Apocalypse had taken Lana from him and prevented him from leaving the United States. But when he went up to his neighborhood and began to observe more closely the surrounding houses, he couldn"t help but think that there were good sides to it.
Take his neighbors for example. They never failed to display their wealth condescendingly when the smallest opportunity arose, believing that it made them superior to others.
Now they were reduced to spying on Lazar through the boards of their barricades while he was walking up the street.
"We can see their window curtains wiggling from here, a bunch of r.e.t.a.r.ded... If I was a monster, I would already be scratching at their door."
With an event such as the Apocalypse, one shouldn"t even ask himself the question of whether the world economic system had collapsed. Obviously, it was the case.
Now that money is worthless, neither do they.
"Nothing has changed in substance. The world will always be dominated by those who have the most power, what has changed is the way it"s obtained. The only ones who will really count in the future will be those who get their hands dirty. Obviously these people will not be among them."
When he arrived in front of a two-story house with a cubic appearance, he stopped.
The shutters and the roof were light green in color and the facade completely beige. An unforgivable lack of taste, but Lana insisted on the pretext that she wanted her house to look like her favorite duo of ice cream, vanilla, and pistachio.
He climbed a dozen steps that separated him from the door and opened it.
"I hadn"t missed that."
As soon as he walked out the door, his eyes were attacked by the very kitsch decoration of the house, once again. Lana was an eccentric and this was very evident in her decoration.
The best thing she had found to make the interior of the house more pleasant was to display a dozen stuffed animals everywhere and photos of shirtless male actors on whom she fantasized.
Feeling constantly watched by dead animals and not fully dressed guys who bite their lips... for Lazar it"s anything but pleasant.
He went to the door to the garage because he wanted to check the condition of the electrical panel there.
The switches were all in the OFF position which meant that the power had tripped. Putting them back in the ON position was useless, he saw that the electricity didn"t turn on when he tried to turn on one of the lights.
The freezer 5 yards from him was surrounded by a puddle of water and when he went to open it he noticed that there was no ice inside at all.
He had no way of knowing when the power was cut, but it must have been shortly after the announcement of the Apocalypse.
"Maybe even from the start. Seeing the street it"s obvious that my neighbors were warned, but how? Probably one of them who saw what happened elsewhere in town and who warned them."
A logical but false deduction...
It was 5:00 p.m and because of the power outage, the sun was the only source of light available.
However, one would have to be stupid to leave the inside of his house visible from the outside given the circ.u.mstances. He went to close the window shutters… all except those in his room, he needed daylight for something.
There is always one or more elements that make each teenager"s room have a special atmosphere.
This wasn"t the case in Lazar"s room. No particular smell, no particular mess, no posters of his favorite music group. Even his wallpaper couldn"t be described as anything other than neutral.
The only thing that attracts attention in his room is the crammed shelf of several hundred books next to his desk and the subjects of the books there were so varied that we couldn"t learn anything about his preferences with them.
"It must be in the drawer."
The reason he needed light was to see the map of Boston he had just pulled out of one of the drawers in his desk.
No one goes to war without a plan.
"I know that you wouldn"t have approved what I am going to do because you are afraid that I will be killed. I also know that you would like them all to die even more than me, so we will do it like that. I promise to kill them all and not to die. It will pay off the debt that I owe you..."
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8 years earlier
6:30 a.m, Boston
A young brunette in her mid-twenties dressed in a crumpled two-piece suit was snoring on her desk.
For the past 10 months, Lana Walker, an agent in the local FBI office of Boston, was working on an important case.
The investigation had been at a standstill for 1 month now and being of a particularly fierce nature, she just had her third sleepless night of the week.
The beautiful woman she used to be had a very neglected appearance these days.
Her bun could no longer be described as a hairstyle, the dark circles under her eyes made her look like a zombie and a trace of drool that had pa.s.sed down her cheek on one of her doc.u.ments finished making her lose all her charm.
She had dozed off just 1 hour ago and there was no more coffee in the only machine on her floor. There was indeed another one, two floors higher, but she didn"t feel brave enough to go there.
"Huuuuuuuuuh... My head! I can"t go on like this. Maybe..."
She looked right, then left to see if one of the desks around her was occupied.
Fortunately, none of her colleagues had been early, there was no one to judge her if she went back to sleep.
"Just 30 little minutes. I beg you."
15 minutes later.
"Lana! You will never guess what happened!"
A thin and balding fifty-year-old guy arrived with a file in hand, he knew she would be there in advance but he hadn"t suspected that she would have spent the night here.
"f.u.c.k! Spencer, you could have avoided shouting."
He was a good partner, he knew exactly what the problem was when he saw Lana"s face and he also knew how to solve it.
"I"ll get you a coffee, we"ll talk about it when you wake up."
She still looked p.i.s.sed off but he knew she would become sweet like a lamb after she had her morning dose of caffeine.
"Yes, do that and leave the file before you go."
She said to him as she saw him go with it.
She knew he wouldn"t be in such a state if it wasn"t for good reason, so she quickly opened the file to find out what was going on.
At first glance, nothing unusual, just a report on the illegal arrival of an individual on American soil.
"What makes this doc.u.ment so special?"
After flipping through several pages, she understood why this doc.u.ment was so important.
"His name is... d.a.m.n!"
At the top of the page, there was a photo of a child looking somewhat angry by the flash of the photo that had just been taken of him.
"If we forget his jaded look, I could almost find him cute. Lazar Sogorov... We"re going to have a little chat you and me."