Only Survivors Give XP

Chapter 1 - The Wreckage

Chapter 1 · 1,276 words

Consciousness came back in pieces.

First: pressure. Something heavy across his chest, something else pinning his left leg. The weight was real and it hurt. His ribs complained with every shallow breath.

Second: smell. Copper and fuel. The sharp chemical bite of ruptured hydraulic lines mixing with something darker, something that coated the back of his throat. Blood. His blood, probably.

Third: the taste of dust. Concrete powder and pulverized drywall, gritty between his teeth.

Nolan opened his eyes.

Darkness. Faint light leaked through gaps in the debris above him, gray and diffuse. He was inside something. The overturned shell of the ambulance, crushed nearly flat by whatever had fallen on top of it. The cab was an accordion of bent metal. He could see the remains of the dashboard through the partition, the steering column bent double.

He tried to move his left leg. Pain shot up from mid-thigh, sharp and hot. Probably not broken. Compressed. Something heavy was resting on it.

"Hey," he said. The word came out rough, barely audible. "Hey. Marco? Jess?"

Silence. The silence of an empty space.

He didn't want to think about what that silence meant. Marco and Jess had been in the cab when the—when whatever happened happened. The cab was the accordion part.

Nolan closed his eyes for two seconds. Then he opened them and started working.

Paramedic training. Assess your own condition before you assess anything else. He ran through the checklist. Conscious, oriented. Pain in left thigh, probably compression, motor function intact—he could flex his foot. Ribs, at least two, likely cracked. Breathing labored but adequate. No major bleeding that he could feel.

He was alive. That was the starting point.

Then he noticed the light.

A different light. Something else. A faint glow at the edge of his vision, like a heads-up display projected directly onto his retinas. He blinked. It stayed.

Text. Floating in the air.

**[Class: Last Paramedic]** **[Level: 0]** **[Threat Detection Radius: ~30m]**

He stared at it. The words didn't waver. They moved when he moved his eyes, fixed in his peripheral vision like a smudge on a pair of glasses that no amount of blinking would clear.

"What the—"

A second element appeared. Upper right corner of his vision. Numbers.

**[School District Elimination Cycle: 71:42:18]**

The numbers were falling. As he watched, the seconds ticked down. 71:42:16. 71:42:15.

He didn't know what it meant. Not yet. But the word "elimination" tightened his chest. The numbers were falling, steadily, relentlessly, and the pressure had nothing to do with his cracked ribs.

Something had happened. Something big. He'd been in the ambulance, responding to a call—what call? He couldn't remember the dispatch. He remembered the street, the rain, Jess driving. Then nothing.

And now there were words floating in his vision and a clock counting down to something he didn't understand.

The threat-detection radius. He focused on that. Thirty meters. A circle around him, invisible but apparently measurable by whatever had put these words in his head. The edge of the circle pulsed, faintly, once, and he felt something. A tingling at the boundary of his awareness. A sensation like being watched, translated into a spatial warning.

Something was out there. Within thirty meters. He couldn't see it through the wreckage, but it was close.

The tingling faded. Whatever it was hadn't come closer.

Nolan's mouth was dry. His head throbbed. The numbers in the corner of his vision kept falling.

71:39:02.

He needed to get out of here.

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The ambulance's storage compartment was behind the patient bench, accessible through a panel that also served as a structural brace. He knew this because he'd loaded and unloaded this vehicle four hundred times. The panel had two release points, one at the top, one at the bottom. The top one was crushed. The bottom one might still work.

He shifted his weight, gritted his teeth against the pain in his ribs, and reached down. His fingers found the release latch. It was bent but not seized. He pulled.

A gap opened. Maybe six inches. Enough. Cool air rushed in, carrying the smell of wet concrete and something else. Something organic and wrong, like meat left in the sun.

He pushed. The gap widened. Debris shifted above him, gravel cascading down his neck. He froze, waiting for the whole mass to come down on him. It didn't. The wreckage had settled into a stable configuration. Barely.

He worked his body through the gap. His left leg screamed. He ignored it. His shoulders scraped against bent metal. He kept moving. And then he was through, rolling out onto broken pavement, gasping.

The sky was visible. Overcast, gray, the sun somewhere behind a thick layer of cloud. He was in what used to be a street. The ambulance behind him was unrecognizable, a flattened shell buried under concrete slabs and twisted rebar. Other buildings around him ranged from damaged to destroyed. A hospital wing to his left had partially collapsed, its upper floors pancaked down into the lower ones. A pharmacy across the street had its front wall missing, shelves visible through the dust.

No people. No sounds of traffic, of sirens, of anything normal. Just the wind and the occasional groan of settling debris.

And the numbers.

71:36:44.

Nolan pushed himself to a sitting position. His left thigh was bruised and stiff but he could put weight on it. His ribs hurt when he breathed deep but he could breathe. He was functional. Damaged, but functional.

He crawled back to the gap in the ambulance's storage compartment and reached in. His first-aid kit, standard issue, mounted on the interior wall. He found it by feel, pulled it out. The bag was torn. He opened it.

Scattered. Most of the supplies had spilled out when the ambulance rolled. He found two trauma dressings, a partial roll of gauze, three alcohol swabs, one IV start kit (no bag), a tourniquet, and a pair of trauma shears. Half a kit, maybe less.

He clipped it to his belt.

His phone. He patted his pockets. Left cargo pocket. He pulled it out.

The screen was cracked, a spiderweb fracture across the lower half. But it lit up when he pressed the button. The battery indicator showed 11 percent. No signal bars. Zero. The network was down.

He opened the messaging app. It loaded slowly, the cracked screen making half the text hard to read. There was one unread message. From Lio.

The timestamp was three days old.

*"Nolan. Something is growing inside the school. Like roots or something. The teachers don't know what to do. Some of the kids are scared. I'm okay. Please come."*

Nolan read it twice. Then a third time.

His brother was seventeen. He was at the high school on the east side when—when whatever this was happened. The school district. The countdown was for the school district.

71:34:11.

The wound opened. The old wound. The one from his first year on the job. The child patient. The triage call. The decision to leave one person because another needed him more, and the first person dying because of it.

He hadn't been there for Lio. Again.

Nolan stood up. His leg protested. His ribs protested. Everything protested.

He looked east, toward the school district. He couldn't see it from here. Buildings blocked the view. But he could feel the countdown ticking in the corner of his eye, and he could read his brother's message on the cracked screen of a dying phone.

He started walking.

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