Rescue in the Dead of Night

"...Help... somebody... help me..."

Curled up in a dark corner, the frail figure trembled as she let out an indistinct moan.

She had no idea how many days had passed since she left the shelter. There was not a shred of strength left in her body; she felt as if she were already dead... Or rather, she was probably about to die anyway. She had drunk all the water she carried. Her throat and tongue hurt, and every breath she took felt like fire scorching her mouth. Though she still had emergency rations, she could not swallow them at all.

Her body could no longer move. Sometimes, she could not even tell whether she was awake or dreaming. Only the voices of those terrifying "monsters" echoed beside her ears. She had once considered fleeing this place, but on the way to the stationmaster's office, she had accidentally sprained her ankle while escaping those monsters. Honestly, simply making it here alive had already been lucky.

But now, it seemed that perhaps it would have been better if those monsters had caught and killed her back then. The feeling of being curled up in a corner, waiting alive for death, was simply too terrifying.

Bang!!

Suddenly, a violent impact came from the door, and the figure jolted hard.

They were here!

She had hoped they might arrive later, but those things had noses even sharper than she had imagined... So this was it. She would die here too, just like everyone else, torn apart and bitten to pieces by those monsters until she became an unrecognizable mass of flesh...

No rescue was coming.

No matter how long she endured, no matter how long she waited, no rescue came.

Perhaps she understood that there could not possibly be any rescue. Maybe she was