CHAPTER 45: THE HOSPITAL OF ASH

Necessity births invention... a wise man once said.

Desperate times call for desperate measures... another wise man said.

Necessity and desperation, these became the catalyst that pushed Ethan to devise a daring strategy of using a monster to fight against humans.

Somehow, it worked, and for the first time since the world came crashing down and they were chased, they got a moment of reprieve.

Major Pike and his men fell behind.

After hours of sprinting alleys, bleeding tunnels, and echoing corridors, the sudden absence of pursuit felt unnatural.

There were no rifle cracks, no barked orders, no boots pounding in rhythm, just the hiss of wind through broken glass and their own ragged breaths.

And then, they found a hospital.

It loomed at the end of a half-collapsed boulevard. Its facade was cracked, letters of its name long fallen, but the symbol of a faded red cross still clung stubbornly above the shattered doors.

Ivy clawed its way over the walls, choking windows with green that shouldn’t have survived.

"Here," Holt said, voice low but certain.

His rifle swept the entrance before his eyes even finished checking the ground. "This will do."

"No place in this city does," Kara muttered, dragging Reid’s staggering frame toward the doors. "But fine, let’s make it work."

Inside smelled of mold, disinfectant, and old blood.

The lobby’s floor tiles were cracked, the reception desk overturned, gurneys abandoned mid-flight. A wheelchair sat at an angle in the corridor, as though someone had fled in it until the Rift had stopped them mid-roll.

Jonas collapsed onto a bench with a grunt, one arm wrapped around his ribs. Travis slid down beside him, his hands shaking. Mira leaned against the wall, breathing in slow, measured pulls, her eyes still darting toward every shadow.

Ethan moved deeper, checking corners with the gauntlet half-summoned.

Holt ghosted beside him, sweeping halls. Between them, they found a ward with intact doors and beds that hadn’t yet been claimed by fungus or glass.

It was as safe as they’d get.

For the first time since the ambush, they stopped.

Kara laid Reid onto a bed. His face was gray, sweat plastering hair to his temples. His rifle lay across his lap, useless in his trembling hands. "I’m still breathing," he rasped. "Don’t waste time staring."

Jonas peeled back his shirt.

His chest was a map of bruises and half-healed bullet wounds. Without Travis’s Awakening, he would’ve been a corpse in the street. "Hurts like hell," he admitted. "But I’ll live."

Travis sat hunched, his face pale, eyes ringed with exhaustion. "Don’t ask me to pull more out of the tank tonight. I’m... I’m dry". He coughed.

His hands trembled as he fumbled for gauze scavenged from a supply closet, dropping it twice before Jonas grabbed it for him.

Mira patched superficial cuts with cloth torn from curtains.

Kara disinfected Reid’s arm with stale antiseptic, ignoring his hiss of pain. On another side, Holt methodically reloaded his rifle, checking each bullet as though it were worth its weight in gold.

And Ethan? He stood near the window, watching the ruined skyline through cracks in the glass. Pike was out there, still hunting, never giving up.

"It feels wrong," Jonas muttered, breaking the quiet. "Sitting here, resting. I feel like the second I blink, he’ll be on us again."

"He will," Holt said flatly. "But not tonight. The Maw slowed them. Pike won’t rush blind again, not after losing men to illusions".

Reid shifted on his cot, eyes narrowed. "He’s not like the others we’ve faced. Monsters kill because they’re monsters, but Pike, he kills because it’s doctrine. Discipline like his doesn’t stop just because the trail goes cold."

"Which means," Mira said softly, "he’ll be waiting ahead."

Ethan turned from the window. His jaw was tight, his eyes burning with exhaustion and focus. He said nothing.

Major Pike... they learned his name from the system, and it was a name that they won’t forget in a hurry, not even in death.

They gathered in the dim light of the ward, spreading scraps of paper scavenged from the nurse’s station onto the floor. Holt used a broken pencil stub to sketch the city’s skeleton as he saw it.

"We’ve run half the grid already," Holt said. "Enough to know the lay."

He drew jagged lines across rail yards, main streets, and choke points. "Pike’s base is the precinct here. His net stretches four blocks out. Anything inside is his hunting ground."

Reid coughed but leaned forward, his soldier’s eye sharpening despite the fever burning in him. "He prioritizes open terrain, squares, boulevards, rooftops with good sightlines. Every time he tried to herd us, it was toward flat ground where his men could crossfire."

"Which means," Ethan finished, "we go where his doctrine hates. Places that break formation. Tight, twisting corridors. Underground passages, places where they’ll be too many corners for his rifles to dominate."

Holt nodded. "Northwest sector, the industrial blocks. There are warehouses and machine yards there. Easy to hide, harder to pursue."

"Once we get to the Bridge of Cinders here," he pointed to a spot in his sketch. "If we cross it safely, then we would have survived".

"But the path there is crawling with monsters," Mira warned. "I saw movement when we were being driven that way, shapes too big for Rank F."

"Better monsters than men with doctrine," Ethan said.

Jonas barked a short laugh, then winced at the pain in his ribs. "Never thought I’d hear that sentence in my life."

Reid tapped the map, his hand shaking. "We cut northwest through the industrial blocks. Holt leads with navigation, while Mira shields us from air pursuit with her wind".

"Kara and Ethan will take point on ambushes. Jonas, Travis, and I, we’ll try to stay alive in the middle."

Kara frowned. "That’s not much of a plan."

"It’s the only one we have," Ethan said. "We can’t kill Pike here. Not now, not like this, not with half of us injured. All we can do is survive the city long enough to slip past his net."

"And then?" Mira asked.

Ethan’s jaw tightened.

He thought of the quarantine zone to the west, the government broadcast flickering on that lone supermarket TV, the promise of safety that sounded more like another cage. "And then we see if there’s anything left worth reaching".

The ward fell quiet again, the weight of their decision hanging over them.

Jonas lay back on the bed, one hand pressed to his chest. He hesitated slightly, then he grinned. "In case I don’t wake up, tell Pike to go to hell for me."

"Tell him yourself," Travis muttered weakly, his eyes closing.

Reid leaned against the headboard, his rifle across his knees. "We move at dawn, Pike won’t wait long."

Ethan stared down at the map, then at the faces around him, all bloodied, broken, but unbowed.

They had been hunted through the city, driven into monsters’ maws, shot, beaten, dragged to the edge of death. But they were still here.

When dawn came, they would run again.

But this time, it would be on their terms.