I always believed I hated Vladimir Makarov. His arrogant grin, his booming voice in the halls—everything about him grated on me. We were opposites, two poles of the same school that repelled each other.

During P.E., he was playing basketball, a storm of noise and motion. I was just watching, bored. Then he jumped for a shot, stumbled, and crashed into me with his full weight. The impact knocked the air from my lungs, and darkness swallowed me.

I woke up to an aching head and his face hovering nearby. The schoolyard was silent. Eerily, profoundly empty. No classmates, no teacher. Just the two of us in the vast, quiet space.

"They must be pranking us," he muttered, avoiding my eyes. We parted without another word to change.

The school corridors echoed ominously. When I stepped outside, he was already there, staring down the completely deserted street. Not a single moving car, not one other person. A perfect ghost town.

"My parents aren't home," I said, the words sounding small. "Same," he replied. "We should check my place."

His house was locked. Without a word, he scaled the fence, then turned and offered me his hand. A strong, calloused grip. He pulled me over. Inside was just as empty.

We started living there. We took what we needed from silent supermarkets. Evenings, we huddled by a fire pit in his backyard, the flames our only warmth and light against the deepening chill and silence. In that flickering glow, his usually sharp features seemed softer, thoughtful.

One night, I broke the quiet. "We have to look for others. There has to be a way out of this." He kept his eyes on the fire. "Why? It's not so bad here. It's... simple." "I can't live like this, trapped in an empty world with someone I... someone I barely tolerate," I said, the lie tasting bitter even as I said it. He finally looked at me, and the flash of hurt in his eyes was so raw it stole my breath. I instantly regretted my words. They weren't true anymore.

Then the Shadows came. Dark, shifting forms at the edges of our vision. We ran, stealing the first car we found. Vladimir hotwired it with grim efficiency and slammed the accelerator. As we fled through the lifeless city, I saw it—a single, yellow light burning in a third-floor window of the dark hospital.

I spent the next day convincing him to investigate. He called it a suicide mission, a trap. But he finally agreed.

We reached the hospital as dusk fell. Inside, the Shadows were no longer just glimpses. They were a palpable, whispering cold that chased us up the stairwell. My foot crashed through a rotten step. I screamed, plummeting into the dark shaft between floors. His hand shot out, seizing my wrist in a vise-like grip. He hauled me back up, his face a mask of sheer strain.

We found the room—314. Inside, under the glow of a dying emergency light, were two hospital beds. And on them, connected to silent monitors, were us. Our own bodies, pale and sleeping.

Instinct screamed at me to touch, to wake us up. This was the way back. I stepped forward, but his hands clamped on my shoulders, pulling me back. "No," he said, his voice rough with fear. "Are you insane? That's us! We can go home!" "To what?" he demanded, turning me to face him. His eyes were desperate. "To you hating me again? To us being nothing? Here... here we have something real. You are real to me here. What if we go back and forget all of this? Forget this?" He was offering me a life here, in this empty world, with him. But back there was my family, my old life, everything I knew. And yet, back there was also the wall between us that had crumbled to dust in this quiet apocalypse.

His hands were still on my shoulders. My heart was pounding. Do I reach for my old life, or for his hand?