The Final Stage

Before the final collapse, before the cities burned and the sky turned the color of old wounds, the forces that hunted survivors had moved like shadows—silent, organized, and merciless. They had not appeared overnight. They had been built brick by brick, law by law, justification by justification, until the machinery of suppression was so vast and entrenched that no one could pinpoint when freedom had actually died.

They were not soldiers—not in the old sense. They were an amalgamation of outsourced power:
corporate enforcers, private mercenary outfits, cartel-funded militias, and state-controlled security drones. Each faction served the same unspoken master—control at any cost.

Before the Collapse, the Hunt Was Systematic

The Drones Came First

Silent tri-rotor units drifted through the streets like metallic vultures, their sensors tuned to detect gatherings of more than three people. They scanned faces, logged heat signatures, listened for forbidden words. A single anomaly triggered a cascade of escalation.
First a warning blared from the drone’s speaker.
Then a flash of light.
Then someone vanished, carried away in a stun-web, the drone lifting them like prey.

People learned not to look up. Not to speak loudly. Not to hope.

Then Came the Black Vans

No markings, no plates.
They prowled the neighborhoods at night, taking those who asked too many questions, those who refused to comply, those who still believed in the naïve notion of rights.

Residents heard the same sequence in their nightmares:
Tires on wet asphalt.
Doors sliding open.
Boots hitting concrete.
A muffled cry.
Then silence.

The vans drove off into the darkness, leaving behind homes full of trembling families who pretended not to have seen a thing.

Cartel Militias Filled the Void

When the government traded its integrity for alliances with drug syndicates, the militias became enforcers.
Heavily armed.
Unrestrained.
Deadly.

Entire blocks were sealed off as “stability zones,” where residents were forced to submit to inspections, interrogations, loyalty tests. Those who refused were marked—sprayed with invisible ink read only by drone scanners. Once marked, escape was impossible. Every corner, every checkpoint became a trap.

Propaganda Finished What Force Alone Couldn’t

Legacy media—the same institutions that once claimed to guard the truth—became the mouthpieces of the regime.
Every broadcast insisted that dissenters were:

• extremists

• threats to national safety

• enemies of democracy

Neighbors turned on neighbors. Families reported their own.
Fear did the hunting even when the hunters slept.

The Final Stage: Purges Before the Fall

As the nation finally buckled, the forces escalated.
Curfews tightened.
Entire districts vanished behind barricades.
Search teams swept through burned-out suburbs with heat sensors and sonic disrupters, flushing out the last pockets of resistance like animals.

Anyone who survived had done so through sheer luck—or because they had already descended into the underground network forming beneath collapsing cities: the seed of a future resistance.

And Even Now, Long After the Collapse

Those forces, or twisted remnants of them, still roam the wasteland.
Some as broken machines, following protocols no human remembers.
Some as rogue militias, surviving off the bones of the fallen world.
And some—still organized—because the hunger to silence hope never truly died.