You run at a loss of breath, the swarming, black pack on your heels. A scarlet sun plummets the molten tarmac of an anonymous road and your soles sink into it like softened butter.

Each stride is an ordeal. The energy it takes to extract yourself from this molten tar, twisting around your ankles in long rubbery threads, exhausts you, inexorably. The sickening wave, chaotic chitin mass, gains ground. Sometimes, you overtake poor aeons, also stuck in the pitch and which, in spite of desperate efforts, find themselves entangled, condemned to an immobility synonymous with death.

Their vain gesticulations do not change anything and the terrible fate that awaits them forces you to speed up.

Yet they are familiar faces, people you know. They implore your help, their eyes reddened and their complexion livid. Their mouths twist with terror and they shout

"Please Gabriel, please!".

But you answer nothing and do not stop. Something pushes you to cling to life at the expense of an ounce of elementary empathy. Again and again, no matter what. An instinct that was dormant in you during all these years of torpor and that refuses, today, obstinately, the surrender. The pleas turn into screams when thousands of hungry mouths, chelicerae and mandibles tear the skin, perforate the flesh to gorge themselves in an obscene, frenetic orgy. In a flash, a bloodbath gives way to skeletons displaying bleached bones, prostrate in horror as the magma of insects spills out rustling through protruding eye sockets and hollowed-out ribs.

You redouble your efforts, your determination. Cramps tetanize your thighs. A little further, a woman with auburn hair gathered in a bun, is sunk up to her waist in the ribbon of asphalt and struggles limply.

Claire! Your wife. You look away, but you can't contain the tears rolling down your crimson cheeks. You could end this useless and ridiculous escape. Maybe it would be better to let it go. To take your wife in your arms, to feel her perfume in the hollow of her pale nape, to intoxicate yourself with her beauty and to plunge one last time your glance in hers before gaining her lips. Waiting for the deliverance, kissing the loved one while the soldiers of a vengeful world devour you.

Yet again, you are urged to continue on your way. It is not your fault. It is this sick, barbaric instinct, which orders you to continue, flogging your conscience. It frantically stimulates your muscles with a new will, it turns you into a helpless spectator of the carnage of all those you cherish. The price of survival is weighed down with the price of guilt that remorse does not alleviate.

You want to scream, but no sound deigns to come out of your mouth. As in the hands of a sadistic puppeteer, you see yourself going around her, lengthening your stride, without you being able to act otherwise.

"Gabriel! Gabriel!" she shouts, realizing that you will not turn around.

You draw then in your ultimate resources to force this primal impulse to obey your condition of moral man and, clenching your teeth, you deviate your trajectory and run toward Claire. But when you brush her, a hand with sharp nails grips the bottom of your jeans, well decided not to let you go. You stumble and sprawl as the pack approaches with loud screeches. You look up and realize what a big mistake you've just made. It is no longer the angelic face of your wife who looks at you smiling.