An unnatural silence jolted him awake. He opened his eyes to air that was sharp and cold, smelling of dampness and the stale morning hush of the neighborhood. He gently moved her hand aside and sat on the edge of the bed. Below his balcony, the city of Pula still slept, wrapped in the heavy, misty shroud of the first winter. The streets were deserted; despite it being a working Monday, the locals were stealing a few final minutes of warmth beneath their blankets.

On the horizon, the sun looked like a sickly, stingy eye, barely squinting through the gray.

The aroma of roasting coffee wafting from a neighbor's kitchen was suddenly shattered by the screech of a seagull. It was flapping its wings manically, as if trying to outrun a terror only it could sense.

That’s when he saw it. A white trail in the southern sky. This wasn’t the slow, lingering line of a jet; it was a scar tearing through the heavens with impossible speed, spreading toward the city like a surge of pure rage.

In a state of shock, he dropped his coffee mug onto the newly varnished parquet floor. He moved to open the balcony door, stepping over shards of ceramic he didn't even feel, mesmerized by disbelief—straining for a better look.

He was washed over by the chirping of thousands of birds taking flight. The trembling of the treetops and the wailing of car alarms accompanied his horrified gaze toward the sky. It was a look of pure, unadulterated fear; one could count every capillary now swollen with the blood of a heart gone wild.

He managed only a single word: "IMPOSSIBLE!"

Like an automaton, driven by pure instinct, he ran back into the room. This time, the ceramic shards sliced into his feet. He grabbed his wife and the baby from the crib.

The frantic confusion of those violently awakened and the sheer horror in her eyes followed his every manic step toward the elevator. At the exit, he snatched his bug-out bag—years of working as a survival instructor had left a professional imprint. He was always prepared for the worst-case scenario, but for this?

The elevator plummeted through the floors. Ten seconds felt like an hour in hell. In the cabin mirror, he saw their faces—in her eyes, there wasn't just fear of what was coming, but fear of him, of those wild eyes filled with shock and disbelief. He kissed her forehead, cutting off his thoughts just as the ground floor doors slid open. Outside, the air was vibrating. Now, everything was clear to her.

The sound wasn’t just in their ears; it was in their bones—a low, crushing rumble from the sky, as if a hundred jet engines in a low-altitude flyover were stripping the roofs off the surrounding buildings. Darkness was swallowing the morning.

A nuclear fallout shelter, transformed into a grocery store, sat directly beneath their building. Built during the Yugoslav era, it had waited for an external enemy that never arrived—judged instead by the internal one. A thirty-meter stretch of sidewalk separated the building exit from the entrance to salvation.

The scream from the sky grew louder. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a glowing orb on the gray horizon, devouring the clouds at an insane speed.

Those thirty meters felt like an eternity, like a slow-motion film with no end. The crying of the child in his panicked grip escalated into a painful wail. Her repetition of the word "IMPOSSIBLE" and the screams of the people nearby—doomed souls staring at the sky in a trance—merged with the panicked whistle of the last escaping bird, counting down the milliseconds to impact.

At the very entrance to the shop—the bunker—stood two elderly clerks with terrified faces, frantically tearing at their hair as they watched the sky. He grabbed them and threw them into the hallway. He knew exactly what had to be done. He began smashing through the drywall that hid the armored doors of the old shelter. It took him only a few seconds; never in his life had he been more grateful for someone else's "shoddy workmanship." Shards of white plaster lay beneath his feet, stained red by the blood of his mangled fingers. The doors were well-greased. Those several thousand kilograms of steel, now marked with red smears, slid shut with ease.

"GET DOWN!!!" was the last thing he gasped, drenched in sweat, as the slam of the concrete doors into the steel frame echoed through the space, followed by the million-times-louder crack of death and destruction from the world outside.

To be continued...