"Noren...! Noren...!"
The voice cut through thick fog, sounding far away as if it was underwater. Noren woke slowly, caught between fear and confusion. He could feel the ground beneath him, but everything else was strange and unclear.
"Am I dead?"
The crash came back to him metal twisting and screaming, mud splashing cold on his skin, the car flipping through the air. Then, nothing but black.
But something bothered him even more.
"Why am I seeing my past?"
Things began to appear in the fog walls, windows, classrooms. A bell rang somewhere far off.
His eyes widened.
"This is... my high school."
A place he'd never gone to, not since he was alive.
But now it was here, as if time had stopped.
Footsteps echoed down the hall.
He saw himself as a child, barefoot, drawing math problems in the dirt with a stick.
The broken calculator, still scratched from when he dropped it in the rain.
The old fan in the orphanage dining room, creaking every fifth spin.
The sharp smell of chalk.
The pain of running laps before breakfast, urged on by some forgotten face.
That one time someone said, "You did good, kid."
Pieces of memory, coming and going.
Noren touched the locker beside him. It felt real. Cold. Solid.
But none of this should be here. Not anymore. Then, with a gasp, he did.
Noren opened his eyes. The fog was real now, clinging to the earth like a shroud. He was lying on the ground, his body aching, his mind still half in the dream. He took a deep breath and forced him to sit up and walk ahead His feet crunched on dry corn stalks. The sky looked strange heat and dust, and a silence that pressed in.
He looked around, hoping to see anyone.
Just one person.
But there was nobody.
He reached for his phone. It was scratched but still worked, with a little power left. He turned on the camera and looked through the lens.
A black shape stood out against the sky too sharp to be a barn, too new to be old.
Click.
He took a picture and zoomed in.
There was a short building at the edge of the field shiny metal, with a round tower at the back. Thin metal poles stuck up into the sky, some with small red lights.
"...Looks like a weather station," Noren said quietly.
But something wasn't right. The building looked too new, too alone. No roads led to it. No fences. No signs.
He looked closer.
He checked the distance in the photo, then looked at the real building again.
If it was about as tall as a normal building, and judging by its size from here... it was about 1.2 kilometers away. Maybe closer.
He drew a line on his phone screen to check.
"1.17 kilometers," he said softly. "Give or take a bit."
He started figuring things out in his head how high the ground was, which way the wind blew, where the sun was, even how wet the ground felt.
This was how he stayed alive.
Not by being strong. Not by being fast.
By thinking things through.
"Aliens? Or army?" he whispered. "Or something else?"
Nobody being here, and that weird building just sitting there, made him feel even more worried.
But he wouldn't find answers just standing around.
He put his phone in his back pocket, adjusted his arm sling, and started walking slow and careful, watching the strange building grow larger.
He didn't know what he'd find.
He took a short walk, his car wrecked and undriveable. Walking while scanning his surroundings, even in the middle of the crown field, there wasn't a single bird.
"That light took birds and animals too?" Noren's brain started to tickle.
"Even at the apartment, I don't see any vehicles. If it was aliens, they wouldn't need any spare parts from humans... unless it was an energy core or something more useful. Wait? Energy core?"
His expression changed as if he'd figured something out. His face showed a hint of realization.
He took less than sixteen minutes to reach his destination a 1.17 kilometer walk for a 65 kg person at about 4 to 5 km/h. It felt a bit long, but he pressed on.
Noren stepped closer to the weather station, its metal walls gleaming under the harsh sun. The air buzzed with a low hum, as if the building itself was alive. But the doors hung open, wires snaking out like cut veins. No one had been here for days maybe longer.
He crouched by a toppled sensor array, its screen cracked but still flickering.
"No real-time data... but maybe raw logs?"
He pried open a panel, brushing dust off circuit boards. Numbers flashed temperature, wind speed, solar radiation all frozen at the moment the world went silent.
He glanced at the station's solar array, dusting off the tilted panels. He checked the sun's position and compared it to the panel's angle. "Not perfect, but close enough," he muttered.
He tapped the station's display, scrolling through the energy logs. "No spikes. No drops. Just the usual ups and downs." The panels were tilted southeast, not ideal for midday, but nothing strange. The energy output matched what you'd expect for the time of day and the panel's angle.
Noren double-checked the calculations in his head.
"If I adjust the tilt, it'll get a little more sun, but nothing dramatic."
He shrugged.
"Nothing unusual here."
He moved on, scanning the rest of the station. No hidden tech. No unexplained energy drains. Just a regular weather station, doing its job. He sighed, frustration mixing with relief. Sometimes, things really were just ordinary.
Noren feld this disappointing.
"If there's nothing here," he muttered, "why did the lights take everyone? Why not me?"
Puzzled, he stepped outside, scanning the sky and the empty fields. He crouched, touched the earth, ran his fingers through the dry corn stalks. No changes. The world felt as dead and ordinary as ever. His hands trembled harder now something wasn't right. He felt it in his bones.
Then,
BOOM!
A deafening explosion ripped through the silence. Noren's heart lurched. He spun toward the sound as a plume of smoke and dust erupted from the horizon.
"Something was happening."
He sprinted to the edge of the field, where the corn gave way to open land.
The explosion had come from the direction of the city or what was left of it.
The sky was darkening, not with clouds, but with a strange, shimmering haze.
Noren's breath caught.
He had expected to find answers. Instead, he was staring at a nightmare he couldn't explain.
His hands, still shaking, clenched into fists as he tried to make sense of it all but the world refused to give him answers.