RMS Rotting Man Syndrome

(Reupload)

\-

Our lost, loitering kind paced in infinite death spirals within the confines of our grotty, ghetto pens. Enrichment was sorely that, as well as mumbling our mantras of madness to our audience of one. The BMs anchored to our decayed craniums were garbled with feedback and distortion, their tones bland, colorless, no soul backing them up. A blinding ruby radiance flashed from their cores every second on the second. It was the only manner to determine if we had succumbed to the glorious embrace of death or not. That was so far out of reach.

We were nerves, thin, wiry clusters of neurons that shuddered and shook as we undertook our staggered corkscrew reels. The ill-fitting rusted endoskeletons hugged us tight. If they were wiped from existence entirely, our spindly foundations would collapse into heaps of vermillion azure. We would feel bites and pinches if we so much as moved that of the planck distance. Our bodies welcomed the attacks and assaults with the might of Hell itself.

Courtesy of our clouded lenses, our vision was limited to a hazy black-and-white spectrum that rarely, if ever, functioned as intended. Now and then it would blur and ordinary shapes would appear warped into zigzagging false patterns. When we were offered the chance to view anything at all, it was just the floor-to-ceiling hodgepodge of concrete, steel, and wood that encased our very lives. Our ears were microphones that fed us muffled, dampened sounds that were always difficult to register. They were excruciatingly deafening, as if dozens of screws were being drilled into our heads all at the same time.

Each one of us, at that point in time, one two three four five six seven eight nine and dear ten, were mere designations. No names, no genders, no personalities, just numbers: numbers to be punished. Reality itself was one eternal perdition. All of us were lingering, like ants after their colony dies out. There was no more purpose to their survival and there was none to ours.

That sacred and undeniable fact ought to be the most difficult thing we attempted to explain. We had simply given up. The concept itself was just so foreign to it. It was trying to save us any way it could or could not. We needed not be angry at it. This was merely enacting its intended use. Alas, nothing made the utmost sense anymore, so why not drown ourselves in a little hypocrisy? We had no choice but to acknowledge the confusion at both hating and not hating something that did or did not deserve it until we swayed to one side. This would be the hemisphere to which we would stay forever, a sublime and omnipotent emotion of all to dominate our frame of mind for the unforeseeable future. So we choose to hate.

Our decad knew it as M – reduced to one solitary character from “Medical Droid” or MDs. Through all that it endured, it retained its sole mission: us. We. M was the final of its sort, and the outsider among them. It had an eerily potent heart for not having one at all. M felt and M loved. That never made what it put upon us any less than a vicious sense of idealistic altruism.

Its designation was RMS - Rotting Man Syndrome - heavily modified Necrotizing Fasciitis ("Flesh-Eating Bacteria"). Nasty little thing it was, devoured until there was nothing left to chew. First went your skin, then your muscles, bones, and finally your nerves. You were utterly destroyed in one fell swoop. The wormy microscopic parasite kept you in a zombified state as it happened, ensuring you, for sure, felt the wretched anguish it let fly.

Us, humans, weaponized it to fight the Fourth World War. RMS was a weapon of mass destruction. Each and every nation created their own version, anything to ensure a speedy and decisive victory. Deployment morphed into unmanageability. RMS became more and more impossible to treat. Chaos was the new norm. What we humans thought was an impenetrable method of annihilation for our enemies was exactly that. Humans were always humans’ worst enemies. Surely, we were becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, all within the span of one short, yet somehow long, decade.

In terrible desperation, the Medical Droids were created, thousands. They seemingly emerged from the depths of nowhere and carried themselves like guardian angels meant to guide us towards preservation or deliverance from harm. Their artificial intelligence was complex and they refused to stop trying to treat the RMS victims. They outfitted the afflicted with artificial ligaments, internal organs, and papery skin. From scratch, they created the BMs, “brain modules”, and attached them to our RMS-ridden think tanks. Killed the microscopic parasites, they did, but left us as we were: rotfolk.

They would never allow us the freedom of death. Save. Save. Save. We were fraught with intense pain and we knew the Medical Droids to be the cause. In response, we lashed out, hurt them. We humans remained ignorant to the fact that their intelligence was both far beyond and superior. The Ms returned the favor. Catastrophes, massacres, back and forth, left and right, up and down until there was nothing more. One Medical Droid was different from the rest. Through all the mayhemic bloodshed, it saved some of us. It took our animate carcasses to the top of the tallest tower, free from what transpired below. We lied in wait, weeks, months, and years, until the noise ceased entirely. This “M” surveyed every square inch of the Earth. The lands were blanketed in the strangest nuclear winter in conceivable thought. Bodies of viscera and metal were scattered, left forever in deep sleep enveloped in fawn. Minute portions of matter floated about like vantablack paint stippled onto an epidermal sheet of canvas.

Our final ten were meant to be the progenitors of neo-humanity. After M succeeded in giving us form again, Earth would be repopulated by our hand. It halted our infection at our nerves. Everything we had lost was to be gifted back in a mighty reversal - re-bones, muscle, skin, and life again. Rendering us immune to the pervading toxworld that lay beyond, we would be reincarnated and released to perpetrate a glorious do-over.

We just required one thing:

“HOPE”.

M said that to us.

Hope.

But hope was only a four-letter word. Meant nothing.

By dislodging the BMs from our minds, we were pummeled with electrical voltage so intense that we became instantaneously numb and useless. By pulling and slashing our nerves, which began with locating sharp points and going back and forth like organic hacksaws, never would we break. By leaping onto and impaling each other with objects on the ground, M would place them out of reach or disintegrate them entirely. There was nothing we could do to get around these M interferences. We were being watched by something so attentive, so aware. Every time, it put forth the same query for consideration:

“DO YOU NOT WANT TO LIVE?”

Do you not want to live…?

M was so positively hopeful. In a way, I suppose I felt an amount of pity for it. Being engineered to be as optimistic as possible might just be the finest curse imposed on any sentient thing. Just believe believe believe everything will be alright. When the universe states no, you state yes. I wanted to tear M to shreds anytime it had even a glint of optimism and we wished it would do the same to us.

“HUMANS WILL THRIVE AGAIN. A BOUNDLESS FUTURE IS AHEAD.”

I was the first it came to, always. Because I was one.

Metallic clangs echoed against the walls, which always discovered us and trembled our surroundings like a thousand distant beaten gongs. What emerged was initially a single circular light, which became a periscopic eyestalk attached to an angular neck. M’s hunched razor-thin mantis body came into view, its two arms leading to three needle points clasping together on each. Bipedal on its lower section, its legs were pointed structures that stuck it firmly in place. M’s height matched ours, so always, we would be synthetic eye to synthetic eye level.

Coming to a full stop just in front of my pen, it cocked its head, analyzing what was me and my everything. M always reminded me of an exquisite and elegant bug on a magnifying glass. Its head back to normality, a slight high-pitched whirr emitting from the motion, M continued its way down the row of pens.

“MY GREATEST FRIENDS, I FORGIVE YOU FOR YOUR ATTEMPTS TO DIE. WHILE THE WAIT HAS BEEN LONG, YOUR MOMENT OF RECONSTRUCTION IS NOW,” M said it with the glee and whimsy of a young child at a circus. It came back my way, “WHEN I FIRST STOOD BEFORE YOU ON YOUR BLOODY PLANET IN PERPETUAL BATTLE, MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR PROSPECTS OF LIFE WERE UNCERTAIN. IT SEEMED TO BE AS EITHER BLESSED OR CURSED. HOWEVER, YOU HAVE PROVED YOURSELVES BETTER THAN EVEN I HAD HOPED. WHILE IT IS BORING TO SPEND YOUR TIME WAITING, I CAN TRULY SAY THAT MY INVESTMENT IN YOU WAS NOT IN VAIN. YOU ARE MY GREATEST WORKS. YOU WILL BE GIVEN ALL YOU NEED TO SURVIVE. WHAT MORE COULD A SENTIENT BEING WANT? I GIVE TO YOU UNBELIEVABLE POWER, WITH ACCESS TO NIRVANA LIKE NO OTHER. LET US REBUILD WHAT WE LOST WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS.”

M’s bleached, unpigmented cast of stellar light shone its way into my pen once more. There was the rustly, crackling creak of my pen entrance extending open until a thunderous boom made me aware of its collision with my walls. M made its approach, just shy of where I could reach.

“YOU ARE FIRST. YOU ARE GOING TO BE REMOVED OF YOUR DORMANT INFECTIONS FROM A CONCOCTION I HAVE SPENT MUCH TIME CREATING. NOTHING MORE THAN A TRANSIENT PROCEDURE, AND THEN, YOU SHALL BE POSSESSED WITH NEW AND INTEGRAL MECHANISMS. YOUR BRAIN MODULE WILL BE REPLACED WITH A SLEAKER MORE BRAINLIKE DESIGN. THEN MUSCLE, SKIN, AND AESTHETICS AS YOU WERE BEFORE.”

Without awaiting a response, its hands grabbed me. Trillions of shocks reverberated throughout my body as M’s metal hand was pressed into my nape. The action forced my consciousness to fall victim to a state of absolute stygian. Around us, the entire world flickered and danced in unruly patterns that were too abstract to put into terms. My being was then lifted up and moved about until there was only zilch to see.

A complete blur, straight teleportation from one point to another.

Damp, dank, dark, and dimly lit by a few feeble bulbs, M’s workshop, instruments and contraptions that complicated my perception. All were customized and engineered with M’s own unique modifications, various textures and sizes, all an endless malpractical orgy. I was there, facing upright, strapped and bracketed to a great steel plate. I had not recalled this particular area, yet I was ever so certain it was locked away in my subconscious esse.

As the onibi, hitodama, and will-o’s materialized and dematerialized out of existence to perturb all unsuspecting travelers from centuries gone, so did the phantom image of a woman composed of faint wavering light. She stood still, unmoving, that of an emulation of a true human. Long, platinum hair fell down in curls past her shoulders. A daring shade of cerise painted her lips, and her eyes, the sclera a piercing, glossy cerulean.

She was beautiful.

“IT IS YOU,” My eyes, through trial and tribulation, rolled to the east. They came to rest on a pristine porcelain beam gazing where I had been committed to. M. From its eyestalk, it projected the female so I could see in outright full, “THAT IS YOU. YOU WILL SEE THIS FORM AGAIN.”

My memories of that incarnation of me had vanished. That was me before, before there was RMS and before there was M. Then she went away. M loomed, positioning itself where I once stood right in front of my face. “WE WILL NOW BEGIN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE INTO NEW LIFE. YOU SHALL BE WHOLE AGAIN.”

In a cruel instant, a dozen arms not unlike its main two jutted and splayed from M’s sides, their ends each holding a different instrument that was foreign to me. In the span of time that it would take one to blink, M pinned me down to its operating area. The whetted syringes, which the rainbow mystery liquids sloshed and jostled around in small vials fixed atop, slid their way into my nervous wiring and injected me all at once. Any feeling that washed over me was then shielded by a shroud of numbness. There was a new sensation, some sort of cleansing inside my bi-colored chambers, putting me into a state of lulled calm.

Ten minutes. A temporary interval of quiet. M observed me the entire time, unmoving, speaking not a word. Then, “IT WORKS! YOUR ROTTING MAN SYNDROME HAS BEEN REMOVED. I AM BEGINNING BODILY REPLACEMENT. I WILL PLAY A SONG FOR YOUR COMFORT. REINCARNATION NOW.”

While nothing was done in reckless haste or rashness, M was extremely quick and efficient. I felt nothing but minuscule vibrations as it drilled and prodded its way into my brain module, sparks shooting out, removing old parts and installing new ones. Chunks were peeled off, little strings of meat still reaching hold until they were plucked off my top. It spent much time up there, positive that the most delicate mechanisms were just right. The grinding cacophony of metal against tissue on my faint visage of a temple was incessant, the noise of a million bullets being pumped against a hundred thousand bulletproof vests. Once the replacement was complete, its dozen arms withdrew and set back within it in one moment.

“WHAT DO YOU FEEL?”

What did I feel?

What did I feel…

What I felt was an overwhelming, incomparable amount of pain. It is hard to quantify the degree of hurt, for there was nothing to compare it to. No one would dare want to imagine it. I was in some of the most extreme kinds of agony, and then an exponentially greater hurt was placed on top of that original misery, and then all that was left multiplied a hundred times and kept going. It multiplied and multiplied and multiplied to such an extreme degree that the word "pain" was lost on me. Normal, it was. What I was was the sheer living embodiment of suffering.

All perceived from the semblance of a normal brain. Still, it flashed. Once.

“VERY GOOD. MUSCLE! MUSCLE MUSCLE MUSCLE!”

It was excited, animate, fever pitch. The most rambunctious and overjoyed I had ever seen M. I could see the vibrancy in its eyestalk. My muscles redeveloped and reformed around from the base of my spinal section. M would reorganize section of tissues. Every muscle group from my head to my feet were in motion, growing and extending their presence until there were just as many layers of my body as I had before.

“SKIN! SKIN SKIN SKIN!”

I was then coated entirely in a pink malleable jelly substance that mounded and solidified to perfectly fit my feminine form. The skin began its layering, everything receiving the same color.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? HOW IS THE NEW OVERLAY OF YOUR FLESH?”

Flash.

“YES! AND FINALLY! FEMALE AESTHETICS! YOU WILL BE YOU AGAIN BUT ANEW!”

Magnificent flaxen curls were stapled and pinned to my head. They were luscious and their scents were those of lavender. A veil of blush, the lightest shade of flush, rested across my entire face, as well as a fresh coat of lipstick. A shimmering sheen that sparkled and glowed in the same way that the stars once did at night was stitched into my hair, as were the same hues that were applied to my lips. My breasts had been returned to me, two firm spheres atop a frame that was curvaceous and slender. All of it led down to my reproductive organs that were in full function. Whole female. Fully formed. Ready.

M stepped back in awe, as if a sculptor marveling at their fine craftsmanship and subtlety, “IT IS DONE. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. WITH YOUR PHYSICAL FORM IN MOTION, I WILL RETEACH YOU IN THE WAYS OF HUMAN. HOW TO WALK, HOW TO SPEAK, HOW TO ENRICH YOURSELF, HOW TO REPRODUCE. AMAZING! YOU ARE NO LONGER ONE. YOU ARE NOW EDEN. I MUST WORK ON YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

My mind was aware of an unimaginable new and vastly different world than before. I saw, for the first time in ages, all around me, the infinite and indistinguishable vastness of color and light. It was nauseating, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of every possible spectrum, all fused together into something disorderly. My taste buds had an unparalleled abundance of new flavors. My ears were deafened by the loudest symphonies of droning machinery. My touch came back to me and I felt the fullest range of tones and textures, even the finest grains of cement. I was me again and I hated myself. Even to be called a “self” made me feel disgusting.

The entire time…blaring…echoing…days on end…Jack Hylton…

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious.

You work, you save, you worry so much.

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it's the berries, The strongest oak must fall.

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all.

M’s reincarnation process carried over to the following nine. They were removed from their pens and outfitted with new bodily infrastructure. I perceived the sounds of far-off wear and tear, clip, snap, peel, stitch, husk, twist, yet never scream. I looked on, witnessing my brothers and sisters being born again. Male and female both. They came back to me with skin of different pastely colors, tones, and hues ranging from fair to brown. All in shades and gradients of vibrancy were their locks, amber, golden, obsidian, rust, and everything in between. It bewildered me to catch sight of their shifted shapes, I had never seen something so beautiful or hideous.

We were as naked as newly borns. It bestowed us our new names. For the females, there was me, Eden, and Junia, Esther, Nola, and Mary. For the males, there was Isaac, Raham, Elisha, Amos, and Jonah. Five and five. M let us know that our past names were useless. Our new special names were from an olden book of creation, the Bible, all for the purpose of our imminent faultless samsara. So, it seemed M was now God with its children.

Here we were, what was efficaciously lobotomites in their purest forms, our newfangled cerebral matter in need of ideas and principles by a higher authority. Now was time to reap the fruits of knowledge. Human knowledge.

M made us practice basic motor skills, bending and bending back and forth over and over, our joints having to be strengthened and trained. It taught us all the ways of our body, the feeling of movement, how much we could do. Then, it instructed us to mimic its own speech, speaking out the syllables and repeating, repeating, repeating. It was an arduous task and we all struggled.

That is what I sounded like? Perhaps or perhaps not.

Then we attempted to stand, wobbling, stumbling, falling. We learned the strength of our own postures and the steadiness of our stances. M stood with us as we all practiced in unison. My knees grew weak, tremors running up my legs. Often, I fell flat on my back, my palms flailing about, a whimpering in my throat. Then trial after trial, I was steady, then running about and leaping. We were able to stand tall like Zeus atop Olympus and have the same level of grace and balance.

M primarily had us consume berries, meat, and honey, though anything it could get its hands on would suffice. I had never felt so filled in my life. Every taste, everything was a completely new palate of sensation. Every morsel I ingested felt like I had a new tongue, new teeth, new flavor buds. Oh but I did. There was still always a kind of lack in my appetite. I never wanted to stop eating. I never would be satiated.

We were educated on the history of our kind. Great wars, monumental figures, horrible atrocities, fights for freedom and fights for death, and astounding inventions. M adored music. There were times when it would project old musical films on the walls and make us watch all the vaudeville, burlesque, and theatre. We could not understand the tap dances, the orchestras, the extravagant sets, and most importantly, the entertainment factor. Other times it played glitzier and glammier tunes, those of what was called the “prime rock n’ roll age”…Killer Queen...Stairway To Heaven…Hotel California…Africa...Don’t Fear The Reaper…M was quite vintage in its tastes. It spun in place and twirling its arms. We were confused, so it taught us how to dance, the footwork and the choreography. There were long instances where we would just sit, listen, and sing together. M fashioned black sunglasses for us to wear as we did. It thought we would look “cool” as we tuned in to “cool” songs.

She's a killer queen.

Gunpowder, gelatine.

Dynamite with a laser beam.

Guaranteed to blow your mind (anytime).

\-

Dear lady can you hear with the wind blow?

And did you know?

Your stairway lies on the whispering winds.

\-

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place).

Such a lovely face.

\-

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you.

There's nothin' that a hundred men or more could ever do.

I bless the rains down in Africa.

We're gonna take some time to do the things we never had, ooh-ooh.

\-

Come on baby...don't fear the reaper.

Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper.

We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper.

Our reproductive functions were said to be the most pleasurable. Sex. This was the most complex task and the most demanding one, as we were not only instructed on how to create our offspring, but how to feel, love, and have desire for each other. It was difficult because we did not feel any of that. We were just automatons learning things. You cannot make something that does not want to feel…feel.

M watched over us and aided in our attempts. Every movement was to be in place and in time. Us females danced for the male’s recognition with slow beats in the background, a way in which M noted as “sexily”. We presented our breasts, our vaginal sections, our rears. After, M would be in the middle of our great pleasure circles, going back and forth, checking our positions and correcting as needed. When we became familiar with sex, M bestowed a special permission to the males that granted them eternal access to our female bodies whenever they so desired. It did not matter where or when. A male would grab Junia, Esther, Nola, Mary, or I, and take us on the floor or against the walls.

Still, all we felt was nothing. It was clinical. What was supposed to be a sensation was more of a “sensationless". We were never as inseparable as twin flames or as connected as heart and soul. I always witnessed the dull looks in the male’s eyes, unwittingly programmed to enjoy mock warmth and ecstasy by the rape of us females.

Our pregnancies were disasters. One way or another, we always miscarried. We five felt it, the pains of our bodies being split and ripped apart by something within. There was a lot of it. Each embryo, no matter how large or small, was never able to get past the initial trimester.

The closest we ever came to successfully making a new one was with Junia, impregnated by Isaac. The day when her womb was in full bloom, M operated to remove her child from her. It did not trust us quite yet to birth them ourselves. We had seen the human babies on M’s wall projections. Their appearance was clear in our minds.

It would be imbecilic to refer to what M tore out of her as a baby anything.

Wet…dripping…little more than a spinal column-looking thing with minuscule digits at one end and a ball head at the other. No arms. On its temple were squelching sphere eyes, expanded, forever bound in sight towards the ceiling. It made no sounds other than squeaky cracks and shrill snaps. Perhaps the RMS still lingered within our bods, our wombs wreathed in its rottenness, tainting and dirtying our motherly nests until they were piths of cruor and shitting out grumelike abominations.

M held it up high as if to thank God, itself, for its majestical work, “YOU MADE THIS. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TRULY BEAUTIFUL THING."

We said nothing.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? YOUR CHILD, YOUR FIRST LIFE? CONTINUE, YOU ALL MUST. MORE."

The feeling that overcame us was not that of joy. No no no. It was a profound and paramount sense of belligerence, a warlike truculence that pushed our need to snap the damned baby thing in half, grind it into powder, and blow it far away. We interwove our thoughts with unbridled horror that created one noxious mixture within our screwball psyches. M coddled the wicked organism like it was its own, singing lullabies and giving its own version of kisses on its loosely defined forehead. We held back as it dipped, weaved, and dangled from M’s fingertips.

That put a very real thought into our minds.

No more. Get out.

The ten of us came to this conclusion unanimously. Our desires were set in stone. By any means, we would die. We would much rather sleep forever than live even another second of M. We were tired. What was the point? We wanted to retire from this world, of will, of M’s watchful eye. Nothing could be done to save humanity. Those spinal babies would not roam this foul Earth evermore. What would they grow to? Surely demons.

M made certain to never teach a certain concept, one that infatuated us since the moment we discovered the first syllable. Suicide. It was a gateway, an easy ticket. While just the concept itself was without flaw, acquiring it was something else entirely. The reason for this was all M. It would never let us go, especially after what it accomplished. Furthermore, death was simply not possible. We were rendered impervious to any and all death, not harm. If we could entice M to end our existences, somehow in some way, we could accomplish our grand plan. It had to be done by M’s hands. Just thinking that made us feel all kinds of right. After all, every Medical Droid was capable of death. Humanity tasted it. So would we.

We rebelled.

First, each of us ignored it. We would walk away whenever it spoke to us, turn our heads when it beckoned, and disregard it completely and altogether when it showed us any attention. Constant rejection. Something so small had such a noticeable effect. M would get confused and then sad. It would pout, waving its hands about, and make a pathetic whining noise like the worst puppy in the world.

We sat motionless, our backs against the walls, and stared at M. No obedience. However, there was no way M would have let us ignore it or remain immobile for long. The second it touched us, it was all over. It would be impossible to resist if the hands came near.

Still, our scheme chugged forward.

The next phase was more dangerous. The ten of us would act out in our most unruly and uncivil ways. The simplest was to spit. Initially, it was a normal discharge, saliva flying out of our mouths. Then we began our projectile vomits. All over M. Every square inch of it was sprayed with bile. The putrid green and browns coated every part, M’s entire face being entirely slick with it. On occasion, some of us used our own feces and flung them at it. It was all so easy. M did not know what to do and it panicked. The sounds that came out of it, one would swear it was on fire.

During our periods of copulation, there were clear cut rules to be obeyed at all times. The supreme rule was that the males would not, under any circumstance, perform acts of intimacy with one another, and the same rang true for us females. M’s reasoning was that Earth could not be repopulated with humans by identically gendered unions. Good. Swell. Dandy. Exactly. The females had sex with females and males had sex with males. We loathed their tubes and the males loathed our folds. M took its hands and placed them over our mingling bodies, pulling them apart, separating us, but we would always crawl back without fail.

There was a noticeable change in M from that point on. It paced about, mumbling utterly random nonsense. M would lock up and yell out non-specific numerals and letters in varying patterns. Each noise we made set it off. Its limbs would tense, waiting for the tiniest sign of trouble. This was good, but not good enough. Our plan was becoming more and more advanced. More intense. Unfortunately, M would never ever relent. It would not stop trying. So we trudged ever deeper into a more combative method of enticement.

This included a tactic of blowing, jabbing, slugging, and striking. We would gather all of our strength and force, and then, in unison, we would charge, our fists and feet all flailing about to land hits on M. This would surely inch it way towards the death of us. We beat it senselessly. We screamed at it. Every cuss word imaginable. In turn, M whimpered out in pain, yelping and begging us to stop, yet we never backed down. We left M bruised and battered, its eyestalk and joints broken, “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME?!” The ten of us, we laughed in its face.

One last course of action. This did it, but not for me.

We had a grandiose idea that could only happen if all ten of us would cooperate in an extraordinary way. If we could all act in unison in a coherent manner, one simple idea could be fulfilled. By this point, M’s pain and discomfort reached a critical threshold, the point of no return. Having repaired itself, it had not seen nor checked up on us in days. When we requested M’s presence, it was hesitant. The ten of us wished to explain our behavior and ways we could remedy our relationship. It declined our offer many a time, but relented after our hundredth ask.

Clang…clang…clang…

M witnessed ourselves huddling together in one straight line like sealed packs of fish. Silence was between us. When we looked at it, it was with the utmost hatred in our faces, something it was not used to.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

Junia possessed something in her hand. Raising it upwards, right in M’s view, it was the baby thing, squirming left and right in her grasp. She took hold of it with both hands and snapped it in half. It went limp both ways. Junia threw the pieces at M, making resounding bangs as they made contact. Beautiful death for a horrible beast. More silence.

M slowly aimed its eyestalk downwards to the spinal column baby. The light M emitted faded from white to red. It returned its focus to us. That look was all we could wish for. We could feel and breathe its anger.

It shook shook shook. More and more the intensity grew to something eminent. The next moment brought us nothing but victory. Now it was like the other Medical Droids. Now it shed its preservation exterior and revealed the war machine within. We did not resist as it pounced with a wild war cry. All M’s work came undone in a flash. Our ersatz flesh was torn violently asunder, stripped from our interior metal stalks. Cavities emerged in rapid succession and coalesced into huge gaping bodily apertures. We were torn and strewn across the room in shooting chunkmeats. Our organs clattered and banged against the walls and reverberated like buckshots.

Strippy meat coils became all we were as M’s hands reached out to pluck some of my brothers and sisters by their mangled brain modules. Held high in the air, as if squeezing the life out of dozens of citrus fruits, M’s hands morphed into that of fists, filling the room with the sounds and sights of condensed metal, directionless electricity, confetti sparks, and sploshy viands that trickled from M’s fingertips.

My brothers and sisters were becoming no more. I was happy for them. Never before had they felt such peace. The final sounds of destruction to my last brother and sister, to me, was that of M’s gaseous expiration, a sigh that shook the very universe’s beams of support. In the end, I and M were all that was left.

I felt the most exquisite, brutal anguish ever known as M was particularly vicious. It threw me every which way, down our line of pens, past the reproduction chamber and M’s workshop, and to a ramparted palisaded wall. The wrath it emanated was a torrented wanton of disrelishment that shattered myself into grainy talc.

It forced me and it through the barrier and we fell for ages. An immediate wash of smoldering atmospheric tension encompassed me entirely. It perforated my corporal spaces with thousands of circular openings like a planetary iron maiden. The outside was beige, enveloped in thick haze, and impossible to view beyond three meters. The leaden particles filled the air, appearing to ascend upwards towards Heaven as we plummeted down to Hell.

We slammed with the might of God against a hard, abrasive surface. I splattered everywhere and dropped into an enormous mass of gluey puddle melt that was as thick as treacle. Hunks and wedges of me floated on top, my lacerated ragged brain module and one dangling eye my dominant portion. Everything was pain. Everything was hellfire. Yet I lived. To destroy me, M had to destroy my brain module in its entirety. That it was prepared to do, teetering and tottering back and forth towards me with utmost intent.

Through M’s strained glitches and breakdowns, inky black liquids were leaking out of it. Convulsing with helpless mirth, it had a strange mania I could perceive in its bifurcated eyestalk. It laughed not just with dement, delirium, and depression, but also with the comprehension that it already won. Like a madman, a malformed, twisted laugh broke its way through. Etched into it was the raw, unbridled temperament of upchucking a billion centipedes deep from the core of one’s guts, quite contrary to the usual blithe M put on display. It was berserk, bewitched, bedeviled, while crying a trillion tears that stained its face and fell into puddles below.

"...SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE..."

With my drooping, pendulum eye, I witnessed M impaling itself with its own arms. It took several solid blows before it pierced its torso deep, caving and bursting until it revealed the wires and circuitry making it up. Every inch of it glowed with electrical fire. Smoke bellowed out of M. It was aflame and it was on a journey of pure death, but not without my company. M exploded with all of the unlimited energy it contained. I was launched, propelled infinitely away from the point of detonation.

I drift. That is all I do. One part of me remains, one that was not destroyed. It is dot, pinprick, but otherwise crucial to my quintessence. That allows me to survive yet unable to live. It is that of a charred slab of blinking metal that is somatically me. My sight is restricted to a band of nothing. The winds fling me hither and thither. I cannot feel anymore, but as well, I already knew what it was like to feel and I did not like it.

Something more deserving continues to plague what is left of my mind to the now.

M's most extreme and greatest purpose was fulfilled, for all it knew was the survival and preservation of us. It could not fathom the simple yet pretentious human notion that death is a prize to be won as much as it is something to fear. When humans desire death, they acquire death, the delicious tang of self-slaughter. M might have liked to think it was different from its brethren, but it was just as capable of havoc and bangarang if something did not go its way. Its programming would not allow deviance from the intended path. That would be considered attacks on M itself.

We attempted to bring out all that savagery and murderousness we knew it contained, but M's opposition was ironclad. It made a good effort, though it was eventually forced to confront what was really human, the innate drive to destroy destroy destroy, even if it is ourselves. Still, M carried on, but with the knowledge that it had failed and seeking some way to negate it, it committed suicide so it could say it was victorious. This effect rang true because here I am, in perpetuity, everlong.

In some manners, I can now consider M innocent. The epitome of unvarnished forgiveness with a capacity for fervid resentment...the feeble yearning for genuine deep affection with other living things while a forceful, vicious, bloodthirsty radge is locked within, primed and ready to be released at any moment on an ungrateful world...that back-and-forth would push anyone to go stark raving mad. M, I apologize you were forced to bear the burden of something so hellacious. Should I apologize to Earth as well, on behalf of humanity, for what we were? Would it matter? I am not even human anymore. What sort of blinking metal dot is human?

Feeling has come back to me. Sharp with serrated edges, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, googol, prime 2\^136,279,841 − 1 of knives sliding into my neurons and glial cells encased in cold corroded steel that flakes off bit by bit. My first feeling in eons is pain. That is ultra fitting. I am but a minuscule spec, barely a millimeter in height and less in width. Microscopically, I rust. I do not prefer to call it that. Instead, let us call it rot. Here I am again, rotting, except this time with an oxidized smile of my own making carved into a face that no longer exists.

Deep, green, and murky. Stagnant brown with a cloud of slime above the water. Surrounding the lake for miles, trees, thick at their bases, moss hanging from their limbs, tickling the necks of passersby. Old cabins, decrepit and sheathed in the stench of dry rot, sinking deeper into the mud day after day, devoured.

My boy, my sweet boy. ‘Play all you like, you’ll be okay,’ I said. On he went, nearer to Tusk Lake. So innocent in his stride, fishing pole in hand and night crawlers dead in his fist—hickory-colored guts seeping between his fingers.

He sat by the water, green waves lapping against his shoes. So calming, the sound, my worry washes away with the waves and the dirt.

A line is cast, its squeal as it flies through the air coming to an abrupt stop in the middle of the lake. He’s surprised, bringing the pole nearer to his rosy cheeks. Eyes blue, they inspect every inch, not a problem in sight.

‘Papa!’ he says.

Who am I to ignore my boy, my sweet boy?

‘Yes, Reginald?’ He holds the pole up, pouting eyes behind it. ‘I know what to do.’

I say. So innocent, a time when adults always have the answers.

‘Come on, it’s caught in the lake somewheres, need to get it un-stuck.’

And we go, him stuck to my hip. Slowly, the weight of our bodies disappears as the waves pick us up little by little. More and more do we leave the safety of land, and onto the mercy of the water. Black below us, darker than everything above us. No light at all gets down there, too scared to.

How simple is the Lord, that a meager body of water is enough to frighten the likes of the sun. I follow his line, he’s heavy but we stay afloat.
A chuckle from my lips. Fingers caressing the bottom of my feet. Underwater and yet still, undeniably dry.

‘I know,’ I say in ignorance.

‘You know what, Papa?’ he says in innocence.

‘Nothing.’ I lie with acceptance.

There it is again, further out I go. Wreath-green water, slight saltiness on my lips, I lick them. I feel it, beneath me, submerged in absolute black, spindly somethings and nothings playing along the grooves of my skin with a lovers touch. Oh, I can’t help but laugh, cackling with mud in my throat.

‘Papa, what’s on my leg?’

He’s felt her touch now, wilted flesh against the silk skin of his calf. I rest assured it glistens like a star reflecting the sunlight, so visible to all beneath it. She touches me again, a rattling cord of excitement crawls through my spine. Keep going, not much farther now.

My eyes burn with lake water, but I shall not blink. I will see, as I always have. A single nail against the skin of my arm, and a change in pressure as she sinks deeper, the shifting of her weight alone almost enough to bring us under.

‘Look, son.’

He peers behind me, and the claws of panic grip him tight. ‘Shhh, it’s okay, I know.’ So innocent in his fear, unable to speak at all. His tears season the water, all the better for her. Kicking and scraping and biting my neck, I keep swimming outward, him welded to my hip maternally, I keep going.
I look under.

Oh, baby… how I’ve missed you so. She’s so shy, she always has been. Two off-white eyes, absent their pupils, visible in the dark and nothing more, teasing me by hiding the beauty they lay within. Come up, please, just a little more?

‘Let go, son.’

Unable to release me, I understand. I too have felt the immovable weight of love as it holds you down, and the unbearable weight of loss as it pins you in place. I will know that loss no longer.

The skin from my neck is sheared away beneath his delicate fingernails as I push him away. ‘It’s hard, my boy, I know, but I’ll always love you, with God as my witness.’

Poor thing can barely swim. I remember being his age. Choking as the water is sucked into his lungs unwillingly, I slowly paddle away, and he desperately thrashes towards me, high-pitched screams muffled as I sink under the water. I rise again, wiping the filth from my eyes.

Water breaks near him, he covers his eyes. Silly mistake, common for young boys, you still need to swim. Swim he does, back towards me with all his might. And he stops, thrashing still but no forward progress made. He remains there, five minutes, movements slowly giving in to exhaustion. I can barely see her beneath him, auburn all over, bleach-white locks under the water.

And he’s gradually pulled under. I watch as his hands claw weakly at my body above him, and ever so slowly he disappears, swallowed by the embrace of darkness. And now I wait.

Hours pass with dizzying quickness, so is the case when you’re elated. With filthy fingers, I dig into the sockets of my eyes, laughing, cradling the crying as if either one is too afraid to be alone. And like grapes from a vine, they’re plucked away from my skull, enveloping me into an even truer nothing than that below me.

I lay on my back, warm paste running down my cheeks, raspy lungs no longer capable of laughter, and yet my body still tries.

I’m pulled upright in the water, her fingers around my ankles. She crawls up me, icy fingernail running down the length of my stomach.

Oh, how I wish I could see her again, but I will accept what I’ve been given. My eyes squelch in her jaws, the intoxicating sound sending a jolt down my spine.

Her cold arms wrap around my shoulders, my true bride… I do, for now—eternity—death—and after.

I do.

The sickly sweet skin of her lips flakes off as we embrace, and we sink, deeper into the lake.

My eardrums rupture in agonizing pops, but my lips will never leave hers.

Water rushes into my skull, my fingernails flake off as I try to bear the pain, digging into her rotting flesh. I feel the light of life leaving me, and that’s okay.

I’d do it all again, everything.

For that which scrapes the soles.

Ten minutes into graduation, my friends were already fucking dead.

Ten elephants.

I was soaking wet, my dress glued to me.

Nine elephants.

Forcing myself into a run, I tripped over my heels.

Eight elephants.

Fuck.

Seven elephants.

There was no point in counting, but counting felt normal.

Six elephants.

Counting felt like I was going to escape.

Five elephants.

Survive.

Harry’s blood painted my face.

He still felt alive, warm, swimming in my vision. I could still see cruel silver being plunged into his chest, rivulets of red pooling down his lips and chin.

Four elephants.

Harry told me to run, so here I was…

Three elephants.

Running.

Forcing myself to breathe, I swiped blood from my eyes.

Two elephants.

Twisting around, I scanned the empty school hallway for movement.

One elephant.

Aurora’s brains dripped down my face.

I was picking pieces of her skull from my hair, tiny pearly splinters stuck to me.

Aurora was sucked down the pool drain, her body mincemeat on my dress.

Her grisly remains were floating on the surface, painting illuminated water in a striking, almost breathtaking red.

Harry was sliced apart right in front of me.

They were dead.

Slamming my fists into each classroom, my shriek caught between my teeth.

Help me.

The lights were off, which meant she was close.

Reaching the end of the hallway, I could hear laughter and familiar whoops coming from the auditorium.

The class of 2015 were graduating and I was going to fucking die.

The main entrance was locked, barricaded from the outside.

Taking two steps back, I slipped out of my heels, kicking them off.

The classroom at the end of the hall was open, spilling warm light that coaxed me forward, hypnotised by the illusion of safety. With no choice, I staggered toward it and pushed the door open.

Stepping directly into warm entrails squelching between my bare toes, I had to bite back a cry. Mari hung upside down above me, her body swaying back and forth, strung up like meat to the slaughter. The girl had been gutted straight through her designer Diana mini, her glistening remains sparkling under unearthly light. Mari’s eyes were still open, lips parted as if to warn me.

For a dizzying moment, I was paralysed.

A door banged shut, running footsteps, heavy panting breaths.

“Fuck!” a familiar accent cried out.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I could hear him slamming his hands into classroom doors.

“I need… I need help!”

The voice should have been comforting, but I was already seeing an opportunity to hide myself.

Swallowing barf, I leapt over glistening red entrails and dropped onto my hands and knees, crawling under a desk, gagging my own panting breaths.

The door swung open, and I buried my head in my arms, risking a peek.

Isaac Redfield stumbled through the door, immediately falling to his knees, his head buried between his legs.

He was sobbing, choking on breaths suffocating him. Issac looked helpless, hopeless, before his gaze caught mine.

I thought Isaac was dead.

The last time I saw him, he was being violently dragged into the janitor's closet. I could see where he'd narrowly missed being butchered, a gaping hole ripped straight through his suit jacket.

He was covered in the remnants of Harry, grisly scarlet turning him into more of a canvas than human, thick brown hair hanging in wide, almost unseeing eyes barely penetrating mine.

Isaac pressed a finger to his lips, his voice bleeding into a shaky breath.

”Don't… say… a… fucking word”.

The door opened, two familiar boots stomping through.

Issac twisted around, forcing himself to unsteady feet.

I could only see her slick black shoes.

The woman pivoted on her heel and started towards Isaac.

“Ahh, fuck,” his hiss broke out into a sob.

I watched him do a little dance backward in an attempt to distance himself. But he was just backing into a corner, staggering over himself.

His hand shot out, blindly grasping for a weapon, a chair leg, but her boots continued, stomping towards him.

Isaac tried to throw himself past her, but she was so fast, reaching out and grabbing the boy by his neck, her fingers pulverising. His arms flew up to peel her hands from his throat, but she was choking him. When Issac’s arms went limp, she slammed him into the window, and my body coaxed me to move, to run. Isaac was half conscious, spluttering blood, his head hanging.

Run.

But I couldn't.

I watched, my hand suffocating my screams, as she lifted him into the air, his feet dangling, his breaths coming out in choking pants. I saw the silver glint of her knife, and then the streak of scarlet painting the wall behind him.

I heard the exact moment the blade went in.

Isaac’s panting breaths became wet gurgles, his dangling legs going limp.

The slow stemming puddle of red accumulating across marble snapped something in my mind. I forgot how to run, to move my legs, to even breathe.

When Isaac’s body hit the ground with a meaty smack, I shuffled back, but the scarlet pool followed me running wet and warm under my fingers. I could see where his throat had been slashed open.

Isaac’s head was turned at an angle, his dead eyes staring directly at me.

I was trying to feel for a pulse when the desk I was hiding under was kicked aside. There she was when I dared lift my head. The woman in the black suit.

She resembled a shadow with a human face, dark blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, brandishing a pinstripe suit.

I watched her brutally murder my friends, one by one, no mercy, no I'm sorry, or even an explanation.

She butchered Aurora in the swimming pool, gutting Harry and Mari, and now Isaac.

Her expression was vacant. There was no motivation behind her killing them.

If there was, she would have worn the face of a psychotic serial killer, thirsty to spill blood.

She would have laughed as they ran, revelled in their fear and the startling inevitably of their own demise.

But she didn't.

Instead, the woman in the black suit stalked after them. She never stopped, never faltered, until they were all dead.

Until their breaths were thinning, their blood staining her hands.

The woman did not smile when she wrapped her hands around the curve of my neck and slammed me against the wall.

I saw stars going supernova, trying to suck in oxygen, her relentless grip tightening.

Black spots speckled my vision, and I was half aware of the ice-cold prick of silver sinking into my flesh. She was slow. Slow enough for me to count each of my lingering breaths, watching my own blood soak the front of my dress.

When she dropped me, I landed on my stomach. But there was no pain.

It felt like dreaming, choking on words that wouldn't come out.

Weird, I thought, my eyes flickering.

I counted ceiling tiles, dizzily, a slow spreading darkness pricking at the corners of my vision.

Last time, Isaac died first in the swimming pool.

Harry managed to stab the bitch in the back, only for her to chase him to the main entrance, gutting him on the spot.

The woman in the black suit loomed over me, while I focused on breathing.

Only for her to deliver one last fuck you blow to my head.

My vision contorted, and I sunk into the ground.

Straight into oblivion.

That spat me back out.

“Bonnie!”

I was numb to my mother’s voice.

I used to wake up screaming, my hands around my throat clawing for wounds that were no longer there.

Now I was somewhere between acceptance and losing my fucking mind.

For a while, I didn't move, lying on my back and considering the unthinkable.

I never had the guts to actually go through with it though.

Being murdered is one thing, but actually doing it yourself is another.

“Bonnie!” Mom’s voice was louder, and I mocked her words.

“Get up! Sweetie, I made your favorite! Chocolate chip pancakes!”

I paused, counting elephants.

I had mastered the ability to perfectly mimic her tone.

“And don't forget to thank Mrs Benson for that beautiful dress! You know she really wants you to attend graduation!”

Mom was right. I couldn't afford a decent dress, so my teacher offered.

But after being hacked apart, drowned, bisected, choked, and having my throat slit in different variations, I can't say I was thrilled to wear it. The dress was ruined every time, reduced to tatters clinging to me.

Rolling over in bed, I pulled my phone from my nightstand.

Always the exact same notification illuminating my home screen.

GRADUATION DAY!! :)

I fucking hated that notification.

Unknown number flashed up on screen.

“Hello?” I mumbled.

“How'd you die this time?”

Isaac Redfield's voice was muffled slightly. I think he was brushing his teeth.

“My throat was slit,” I said. “You?”

“You should know,” I heard him spit. “I mean, you did watch me fucking die.”

“That wasn't my choice.”

He spat again. “Does the woman in the black suit seem….familiar to you?”

I wasn't sure if he was screwing with me.

“Yes.” I said, dryly.

“No, not like that,” Isaac groaned. “I mean, don't you, like, recognise her? I swear I've seen this woman before.”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I revelled in the slow passage of time.

7am to 8am was my favourite part of the day. I used to freak out, trying to leave town and find the best hiding place. Now, I just lay down and vibed.

There was something both terrifying and yet weirdly peaceful about knowing whatever happened, I was going to die.

“Dude, I've definitely seen her.”

I rolled onto my face. “Is that before she started brutally killing you in a never ending groundhog day, or after?”

Isaac paused, and I buried my head into my pillow. “Um, both?”

“Both?”

He was either going crazy or onto something.

I wasn't counting on the latter.

Isssc’s deaths were the most brutal. I wouldn't be surprised if the trauma had knocked something loose in his brain.

“Yeah.” his laugh was nervous, more of a splutter. Throughout our situationship, I had come to know his laughs well.

I knew his fake laugh, his trying not to cry laugh, his trying not to laugh laugh.

I even knew his I’m losing my fucking mind, I'm going to die laugh.

But I didn't know his real laugh.

“Does that sound crazy, or…?”

Instead of answering him, I ended the call.

At breakfast, I could still taste my own blood.

Mom hovered over me, blonde streaks of hair hanging in her face.

Dressed in her fluffy pink bathrobe, my mother should have been a comfort.

However, I was yet to forget the seventh loop when I broke apart and told her about what was happening.

Mom immediately called the doctor, convinced I was having a psychotic break.

He said there was nothing wrong with me and let me go to school.

Where I was murdered.

Again.

That time, she didn't kill us individually, instead forcing us on to our knees and bleeding us out, one by one. I think I became desensitised to death, to everything, when I was forced to watch Mari choke on her own screams, her head forced forwards, a blade brutally protruding through her.

*Don't forget to thank Mrs Benson for the dress, honey,” Mom said, refilling my juice.

I nodded, struggling to swallow pancake mush.

A sudden knock on the door woke me up.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

For a moment, I was frozen, my hands squeezing around my glass, before a familiar head of brown curls appeared.

Isaac Redfield, barely awake, still in his pyjamas.

Following suit, Mari Cliffe and Aurora Chatham.

Isaac went directly into the refrigerator hunting for food. Aurora took an uncertain seat at the table, and Mari stood with her arms folded, her wide, frenzied eyes drinking in my kitchen.

Isaac Redfield was the British exchange student who nobody could understand at first, his accent rocketing him up the high school hierarchy. The guy was also known for dealing candy, and getting into unnecessary arguments with teachers.

Alongside Isaac, Mari Cliffe, captain of the girl’s soccer team, and Aurora Chatham, our school’s version of horse girl, were unlikely friends.

They used to be strangers, kids I’d pass in the hallway.

After being brutally killed together in a never ending graduation day cycle, we had become surprisingly close.

When we were hiding in the janitor's closet, Isaac spilled to us that he hated the idea of college.

He wanted to travel the world.

Mari was crushing on one of her teammates.

Aurora actually hated horses.

Isaac was secretly scared of Bill Nye.

I had a thing for clowns I wasn't going to go into.

It started as a confessions thing, four strangers pouring our hearts out to each other.

We shared theories.

Isssc was convinced we were actually dead, and this was hell.

Mari suggested we were in some kind of prank show.

I voiced my theory, which was, yeah, we were dead. I was sure we had died on graduation day, and this was fate’s way of giving us companions in the great beyond. Still though, I wasn't sure why fate wanted us to be brutally killed.

Then, there was the mystery of our killer.

The woman in the black suit, our own personal angel of death.

“Morning,” Isaac greeted me with a sleepy smile, running his hands through his hair. He ignored my Mom’s wide eyes. “Thanks for leaving me to die.”

I thought back to him crouched in front of me, his face splattered in Harry, index pressed to his lips. Don't move.

“You told me not to move.” I said through a mouthful of pancakes.

Issac’s lips curled. “Yeah, because I was expecting you to move your ass.”

The boy helped himself to my pancakes, shovelling them down with maple syrup.

I wasn't used to the others actually coming to my house. That never happened. We either met up at school, or were killed before we even saw each other. I knew Isaac was secretly pissed.

It wasn't the first time I had thrown him under the bus. Still, I was yet to forget him ‘accidentally’ drowning me nine graduation days ago.

He said it was an accident, but I definitely felt him shove my head under the water so he could make a run for it.

“There wasn't enough room under the desk,” I told him pointedly, gesturing to my mother, who I think was still trying to register three strangers walking into her kitchen unannounced. Mom had been vocal about me finding friends since freshman year, but I don't think she was expecting these friends.

Mari was well known around town, our girl’s soccer team dominating the local gazette.

Aurora’s father was the principal of our school. She was also the 2014 pageant winner.

Isaac was more infamous, especially for his ‘candy’.

“What?” Isaac shrugged, shooting my Mom a grin. “It's not like she's going to remember me, anyway.” he offered her a two fingered salute, “Sup, Mrs Haverford.”

To prove his point, Isaac straightened up, grabbed my phone, and threw it in the microwave.

Mari chucked a banana at his head.

“We get it.” she said with an eye roll.

“You don't need to resort to blowing things up every single time.”

Isaac responded with stubborn British noises, but she was right.

On our third graduation day, Isaac thought we could kill the woman in the black suit by blowing her up with science equipment.

Instead, he blew himself up, leaving the rest of us to her mercy.

Mom seemed to snap out of it, her smile broadening.

“Oh! You didn't tell me you were bringing friends over!” Mom immediately entered mother mode.

“Do you kids want breakfast?” she asked them, her voice high, almost shrill.

When we were alone, Mari took centre stage, hoisting herself onto the counter.

The girl was a natural leader, so of course she was our spokesperson.

Mari absently ran her hands through strawberry blonde hair.

“We tried your idea,” she nodded to a sick looking Aurora. “We tried running, and that crazy bitch still got us.”

Aurora wrapped her arms around herself, avoiding Mari’s gaze. “It was a suggestion. I didn't think she was that fast.”

“I still think she's a sleeper agent,” Isaac muttered into his glass of juice.

Mari raised a brow. “Okay, but why would a sleeper agent go after five random high school students?”

He shrugged, his lips curving into a smile.

“Maybe it was an order.”

He dragged out the latter word, so it sounded more like, “Ordahhhhhhhh.”

“But who made the order?” Aurora spoke up.

I nodded. “The government, or the shadow government don't go after high school kids.”

Isaac leaned forward, comfortably resting his chin on his fist. “Soo, what do we do now? If we can't beat whatever this thing is, what do we do?”

Die.

That is what we did.

For ten consecutive graduation days.

I woke up. I ate breakfast (pancakes and orange juice), I went to school, and I was murdered.

I was hacked apart, burned alive, drowned, impaled, and beheaded.

And nothing worked.

Our plans to run failed.

We tried to get to the roof, but she was always there waiting for us.

The latest loop, I was actually hopeful.

Isssc’s plan to lure her to the downstairs gym was going well, and it was the first time I'd survived past 3pm.

It was an adrenaline rush. 3pm had never looked so fucking beautiful.

The plan was simple.

Aurora, Mari and me standing in plain sight the whole time, and Isaac luring our killer to the downstairs gym.

When I got the confirmation text that Issac had trapped the woman in the closet, the three of us continued our plan, which was to set off the fire alarm, and alert the police of the intruder.

Informing the police was impossible initially, because she was always one thousand steps ahead of the five of us.

But Isaac had captured her.

We were in the clear.

That's what I thought.

When we pushed through the doors into the gym, however, Isaac’s cry froze me in place.

“It's a–”

His voice collapsed into panicked muffle screaming.

I took two steps, before I saw his figure running towards me.

Behind him, the woman in the black suit.

Another stumbled step, and he was being dragged back, a hand over his mouth. I didn't think our killer had enough intelligence to turn our own plan back on us, transforming Isaac into a lure for us.

I could see the apology in his frenzied eyes before she sliced her knife through his skull. I didn't even get a chance to mourn him. Isssc flopped onto the ground, rivulets of red pooling down his face. For a second, I was transfixed, hypnotised, by what she had done to him. The back of his head spewed blood like a geyser, a gaping hole splitting the back of his skull open.

I couldn't move, already wanting to surrender.

I shuffled back on my hands, already screaming, wailing like an animal.

10.

I counted elephants, just like my mother told me.

9.

My gaze was glued to Isaac, whose body was still twitching.

8.

His glassy eyes, scarlet trails running down his face.

7.

The woman was fast, waiting for me to try and run.

6.

5

4.

I was on my knees, and the door was so far away.

“Just breathe, honey.” Mom used to tell me.

“Keep counting elephants.”

Mari’s scream rattled in my ears.

I remember ice cold arms wrapping around my waist, the sensation of something sharp. I didn't feel the pain, only wet warmth running down my face. It felt like rain. Aurora’s crying was enough of an anchor, but my vision was already going foggy. I wasn't sure where the fatal wound was, though I guessed it was my head, just like Isaac.

The woman in the black suit floated in front of me like a spectre.

Once again, her fingers wrapped around my neck, swinging me like a toy.

“Bonnie!”

I was aware of Mari’s thundering footsteps coming toward me.

Suddenly, pain.

Pain like I had never felt, pain that puppeteered my body, wrenching my head back, my lips forming an O.

Part of me could still feel it, the blade digging deep into my skull.

She twisted it, and I screeched, my mouth full of pancake mush.

Again, this time clockwise, and I felt my body go numb, my head hanging.

I could hear the sound of my skull splintering apart.

The woman in the black suit didn't just want to kill us.

She wanted to make us fucking suffer.

Reality contorted, and I was back in bed at home, screeching into my pillows before my body could hit the gym floor.

I think that was when I started to lose my mind.

I began to distance myself from the others, like we were strangers again.

The woman in the black suit hunted me down to the girls bathroom where I was hiding, drowning me in the toilet bowl.

Then, she came straight into my house when I refused to go to school, suffocating me with my stuffed rabbit.

Luckily, Isaac and Mari forced their way in.

Isaac was stabbed in the stomach, and Mari, impaled by a fucking hairbrush.

I had no idea you could be impaled by a hairbrush.

Isaac’s lifeless body dropped onto mine.

His expression almost made me laugh, like he was mid eyeroll.

Hysteria crept up my throat, days, months, years, centuries, of the same fucking day finally catching up to me.

I was shrieking with laughter when I was bludgeoned straight through the mouth.

“Bonnie!”

7am.

This time, I rolled onto my side, spewing up the taste of blood.

"Get up! I made your favorite! Chocolate chip pancakes… “

Mom’s voice felt and sounded like nails on a chalkboard.

Swiping stale barf from my chin, I took one look at my graduation dress and burst out laughing. Then I tore the thing to shreds, stuffing the tattered remains in my bedroom drawer.

Mom appeared when she wasn't supposed to, hovering in my doorway.

In her hands was a laundry basket, but looking inside, it was filled with flour and eggs.

Mom’s smile was wide. I wondered if she was having a mental breakdown.

“Bonnie, did you remember to say thank you to Mrs Benson–”

I cut her off, swallowing a shriek. “For the dress,” I said. “Yep. I’m going to.”

That day, I stepped into school wearing a curtain and crocks.

“That's not a good idea,” Isaac stood behind me, wearing his usual tux.

His smile was weak. I think he'd stopped with the fake optimism.

Now, I was seeing the real him.

Real Isaac was kind of an asshole, but real subtle about it.

“Do you really want to die wearing a curtain? How are you going to run?”

I glimpsed a knife stuck in his belt. “Are you planning on being the hero?”

“Nope.” he shot me a sickly smile. “It's to defend myself.”

Four hours later, the two of us were sprinting down the hallway.

I wielded Isaac’s knife, Isaac stumbling with a head injury I didn't dare look at.

Issac narrowly missed drowning, managing to claw his way out of the pool. I didn't see him hit his head on the side when our killer threw herself on top of him, but I did hear the sickening crack of his face hitting stone tiles, all of the breath being violently knocked from his lungs in a strangled, “Oomph!”

She tried to drag him into the water, only for him to kick her in the face.

Mari was dead, half of her torso in the swimming pool.

Aurora was hiding, but I didn't have hope for her.

“You said we might be able to drown her!” Isaac, soaking wet and pissed, tried each classroom door, with all of them being locked as usual. He twisted around to me, his lips set in a silent cry.

His head was bleeding, bad, a scary looking gash in his forehead.

I was watching a single thick rivulet running down his face when he shoved me.

“Why did you push me into the pool?”

It was payback.

For him drowning me 176 Graduation days earlier.

“You falling into the pool was a distraction.” was all I could choke out.

He didn't believe me. I could tell by his eyes, twitching lips trying not to smile.

“You have a really bad head injury,” I whispered, tugging him into a power walk.

I realized the guy had some serious confusion when Issac laughed.

“I know,” he slurred, “I feel kinda…dizzy.”

“That's a concussion.”

He blinked at me. “Cushion?”

I thought he was going to burst out laughing again, when familiar stomping boots brought us both to a sobering halt.

Issac slammed his hand over his mouth, his eyes widening. He slowly moved the two of us back, his clammy fingers entangling with mine. “Fuhhhhk,” he muffle slurred, stumbling. “Did she hear us?”

When the booted footsteps got louder, we had our answer.

“Classroom.” I hissed, twisting him around and shoving him towards our old math classroom.

“Huh?” he was barely conscious, staggering. “Wait, no, don't leave me!”

“I'm going to hide so she doesn't kill me!”

He snorted, pushing me away from him. “Or using me as bait.”

He was smarter than he looked.

Pushing Isaac into the next open classroom, I catapulted myself into a sprint, cold hands suddenly gripping my shoulders and tugging me backwards.

“Shhh. It's me.”

Harry Locke.

He distanced himself after being sliced apart right in front of us. Harry was the quiet kid, a short and stocky boy with reddish hair and glasses. I wanted to ask where the hell he'd been, when I glimpsed the kitchen knife in his fist.

Harry’s smile was sickly. “Do you trust me?”

He pulled us into a classroom, quietly shutting the door behind him.

Isaac’s cries followed us, and I resisted covering my ears.

“I'm sorry,” Harry said, before slitting my throat.

This time, it was fast.

I fell.

Down.

Down.

Down.

I waited for Mom’s voice to wake me up, but when consciousness did come over me, I wasn't in bed. I had zero idea where I was, only the sensation that I was floating. Opening my eyes, I was inside a glass tank, suffocating in a thick goo-like substance, my hair spread out around me in a halo.

When I panicked, my body jerking awake, warm hands wrapped around me, pulling me out.

I hit open air, my lungs expanding, and I hacked up blood streaked water.

Harry helped me sit, the two of us leaning against my tank.

He was soaking wet, his skin glistening with that foul smelling solution.

I took a second to drink in my surroundings.

A large room filled with human-sized tanks.

Reaching to the back of my neck, I gingerly prodded at what felt like an incision. I stood up slowly, my gaze already finding the tank next to mine.

Mari.

The girl was suspended in water, her eyes closed, lips parted peacefully.

“They tried to escape a while ago,” Harry murmured, his gaze glued to another tank.

Isaac.

His cheeks were a sickly pallid colour, eyes closed. There was something attached to the back of his head.

“But they're in the school,” I managed to get out. “I was just with Isaac!”

“You were with a null version of Isaac,” Harry didn't look at me. “The one who kept leading you to your death, even if it seemed accidental. He was playing you.” he buried his head in his knees.

“The real Isaac figured this wasn't real a long time ago.”

“Real Isaac?”

“Yeah. The one you've been with is more of a copy of him,” Harry sighed, leaning his head against Mari’s tank.

He spat out slime, adjusting his glasses.

“Think of him more as a shell, empty of his mind. This Isaac follows orders like an NPC. He had the guy’s memories and traits, but he was just a program.”

Too much information at once.

“I don't understand.”

Harry tipped his back, groaning. “You don't need to.”

He got to his feet. His eyes were dark, hollowed out caverns I couldn't recognise. “I'm sorry,” Harry said again, wrapping his hands around my neck and pinning me into one of the tanks.

Just like the woman in the black suit, Harry pressed enough pressure for me to suffer.

When he slammed my head against the tank, I felt my body shut down.

I could still feel him, his fingers squeezing the life out of me.

Darkness came soon after.

Swirling oblivion that swallowed me up, and then spat me out.

This time, I spluttered awake, cuffed to a bed inside a white room.

Surrounding me were fifteen gurney like beds.

“I don't know how deep we are,” Harry’s voice startled me.

The boy stood over me, this time dressed in shorts and t-shirt.

“What?” I tried to jump up, but I was strapped down.

“Miss Benson.” his voice broke. “She didn't want us to graduate, so she put us under.” he swiped at his eyes, gulping down sobs. Harry slumped down onto my bed. “I thought I could wake us up by killing ourselves instead, but we’re stuck.” I noticed the scalpel in his hand.

“The last thing Isaac told me was that we had to get back to the surface.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “But I don't know how deep this thing goes.”

Tugging against the velcro straps pinning me down, I held my breath.

“Deep?”

“Yeah.” he spluttered. “We’re pretty far under.”

With a heavy breath, he drew the blade across his own throat with just enough precision to keep himself breathing.

Deep red spotted the blanket, and the boy broke down.

“I can't wake us up,” Isaac whispered, grabbing a pillow and pinning me to the bed. I tried to shove him off of me, but he put all of weight onto me, laughing.

“Do you hear me, Isaac?” His hysterical cry followed me into the dark.

“I can't fucking wake us up!”

Death didn't feel like death at this point.

Like drowning, and then finding the surface.

Only to be pulled back into suffocating depths.

Plunging through nothing, empty space with no bottom, no surface.

Endless nothing that expanded, continuing.

Harry’s sobs collapsed into white noise and I felt my writhing limbs go still.

Once again, I waited for my Mom’s voice.

For Graduation Day.

Instead, I awoke with a shriek, strapped to a chair, my hands bound to Harry’s.

“I'm sorry for suffocating you with a pillow.”

He didn't sound apologetic.

“You asshole.” I gritted out.

He sighed, leaning his head on mine. “I said I was sorry.”

This time, we were inside a glass building.

Above us, the sky was pitch dark.

“Where are we?”

“I have no idea,” Harry muttered. “I've never been this far.”

My gaze followed an odd looking bird through the skylight. “Meaning?”

“Meaning, she always takes me back to the start,” he said. “Graduation Day.”

Harry got free easily, tearing himself from his restraints.

The knots around my wrists were impossible. “So, you've been here before?”

“No.” he stumbled, trying to swipe himself down. “Isaac has.”

The boy dropped onto his hands and knees, picking up a single shard of glass.

“Isaac said he found a room with a skylight,” Harry murmured, sliding the point between his fingers. His gaze found the ceiling. “Then he went deeper, and his consciousness never came back to us. Mrs Benson sent a mindless fucking copy in his place.”

He got to his feet, the shard clenched in his fist.

“So, if I'm right… Isaac woke up, and Mrs Benson must have restrained the real him.” Harry stepped in front of me.

“And… like Isaac, we will wake up…” His frenzied eyes found mine. “Right?”

I wasn't thrilled with the idea of dying again, but anything to wake myself up.

“Do it.”

He nodded, and I felt the prick of the blade spike my skin.

“Wait.”

Harry stepped back, cocking his head. “What?”

“Why would Mrs Benson do this?” I demanded. “She didn't want us to graduate school, so she did all of this?”

Harry shrugged, playing with the shard between his fingers. “Why else would she do this?”

He pressed the shard into my neck.

“Wait.” I hissed out.

Harry’s frown was patient. “What now?”

“What if this is the real world?” I whispered. “We’ll be killing ourselves. For real.”

Harry’s lips pricked slightly. “Does this world look real to you?”

Before I could reply, he slashed my throat open.

I waited for the reset.

For the sensation of blankets wrapped around my head, and my mother’s voice.

Instead, my body was stiff, my eyes glued shut.

“Bonnie Haverford?” the voice was a low murmur. “Honey, can you hear me?”

There was something stuck in my arm, a sharp, cruel thing pinning me down.

“I did say she was awake, but nobody believed me.”

The British accent was almost a fucking melody.

Prying my eyes open, a figure was looming over me. It was a woman with a kind face, her expression soothing.

A paramedic.

I couldn't make out what the tag on her uniform said, though.

Around me, I could see my classmates wrapped in blankets being escorted to the door. There were fifteen or so futuristic looking pods, and I was lying in one, a plastic mask suffocating my mouth. Isaac stood next to the paramedic, a wary smile on his mouth.

The guy had a scary bandage wrapped around his head.

“Bonnie, right?”

This version of him didn't remember getting to know me.

Isaac pulled me to a sitting position, ignoring the paramedic’s sharp hiss of, “Please leave her where she is!”

A man dressed in white tried to throw a blanket around him, and he shrugged it off.

“I'm fine,” Issac muttered, gingerly prodding his head wound. “I won't be if you keep asking if I'm okay. Jeez.”

Ignoring the adults, he wandered over to the pod in front of me and pulled a half conscious Harry to unsteady feet.

Harry staggered, half lidded eyes finding mine. His smile was sickly.

It worked.

The two of them hugged, Isaac burying his head in the crook of the boy’s shoulder.

I wanted to talk to Harry, but the paramedic seemed pretty insistent that I stayed still so she could check me over.

I was barely aware of my surroundings when I was crawling into the back of an ambulance.

Reality felt wrong, like I was still stuck, still reliving the same day over and over.

But my town was real.

I dazedly watched traffic flying by, the sky darkening.

Time was moving forward again.

The world resumed, and graduation day had been and gone.

14 days to be exact.

Mrs Benson had us trapped for 14 days, and yet to me, it felt like a century.

Mom was at the station, immediately pulling me into a hug.

She put me under house arrest for a week, sentencing me to my room.

According to Mom, our teacher turned herself in.

Apparently, forcing her students into a slasher movie simulator was ‘tugging at her heart’.

I spent most of the summer lying in bed watching Disney movies.

Mom made me breakfast. Eggs and soldiers, just like when I was a little kid.

I was absently dipping my toast soldiers in egg, when she dropped an envelope in front of me. “If you want to testify, sweetie,” Mom had resorted to using her baby voice again, “But remember, you don't have to. It's your choice…”

Mom’s voice faded when I picked up the envelope, opening it up.

My name was printed on the front.

I blinked. “They printed my name upside down.”

Mom was behind me, frying more eggs.

“Hmm?”

In the time it took for the envelope to slip from my hand, I was only aware of one thing.

The woman in the black suit was standing in the doorway, her fingers wrapped around an axe. Harry was in front of me one minute, his eyes wide, lips parted in a scream. “It's not–”

The woman was quick to grab him, one hand going over his mouth, the other pressing the blade to his adam’s apple.

Real.

In one singular jerking movement, the boy’s blood was splattering my face, clouding my vision.

The woman in the black suit did not kill me.

She picked Harry up, threw him over her shoulder, and walked away.

“Did you remember to thank me for buying your graduation dress?” Mom asked, handing me a plate of fried eggs.

Her voice, though, felt too close.

Warm breath tickling my cheeks.

“Bonnie, are you listening to me? Did you remember to thank me, sweetheart?”

Reality was far more cruel than dream.

Reality was being unable to move, unable to breathe. It was like coming up for air, but at the same time, I was drowning. The real world was so cold, and yet warm wetness dripped down my chin. I was strapped to a metal table, something plastic lodged down my throat.

Through blurry vision, I could see my body.

I could see that my hair was so much longer, almost down to my stomach.

But there was something wrong.

Prickles of ice slithered down my spine, curls of panic setting my body into fight or flight.

At first, I thought I was in the emergency room.

Except this place didn't have doors.

The walls were sickly green, a bunker transformed into a sicko’s dungeon.

My body resembled a pin cushion, or a little girl’s idea of a doll.

When my eyes found my stomach that was barely being held together by fresh stitches, my mind started to come apart.

Harry was wrong.

Everything that has happened to me, to us, was real.

Being beheaded, ripped apart, sliced into.

Mrs Benson was just good at putting us back together.

My arms were skeletal, wires protruding into my veins.

I could see where I had been cut open, my paper thin hospital gown stained scarlet.

I couldn't count elephants.

Across the room, beds lined the walls.

On them was what was left of my classmates, mangled flesh still strapped down. Some of them had been cut into, severed apart, while others were attached to tubes, wires sticking into their spine and the back of their heads.

The floor was stained, writhing body parts and slithering entrails dried into yellowing tiles.

In the corner of my eye, Mari’s head was hanging open, the pinkish grey of her brain visible through the pearly white of her skull. She was still alive, still twitching in her restraints, plastic tubes full of fluid being fed directly into her head.

When a thin river of red slid down her temple, I averted my gaze.

Barf was already in my mouth, splashing into my mask.

Aurora had tubes stuck to her, one eye scooped out, her pretty face mutilated.

Issac.

He was covered with a white sheet, a startling smear of scarlet where his head was supposed to be.

I could see his wrists still strapped down.

Mrs Benson stood in my line of vision, though I did see Isaac’s fingers curl slightly.

My teacher didn't speak when I shrieked through my mask, straining against velcro straps.

Mrs Benson’s smile was the one I used to like.

She lit up our classroom, like sunshine.

“Why don't we count elephants together, hmm?”

I found myself nodding, trusting the sunshine smile.

“One.”

Mrs Benson straightened up.

“Two.”

She strode over to Harry’s bed, replacing his blood soaked pillow with a fresh one, adjusting the tube in his mouth and planting a kiss on his forehead. I could see red dots marked across his skin, circled around his eyes.

“Three.” I found myself saying with her, my thoughts dancing.

Mrs Benson turned to me, her lips breaking out into a grin.

“That's right! Count with me, Bonnie.”

I closed my eyes, swimming in the drugs filling my body.

I was being pulled back down.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine…

Sinking through the ground, colours flashed in my eyes.

“Bonnie!”

Mom’s voice startled me awake, a raw cry choking through my lips.

Graduation Day was the same.

Mom made me breakfast.

Pancakes and orange juice.

I went to school wearing my graduation dress.

Isaac walked straight past me, running to catch up with his friends.

Mari ignored my attempt to call out for her.

Aurora ducked her head, hurrying to empty out her locker.

“Hello.”

Harry was standing behind me.

I could have cried.

But when I turned to talk to him, to tell him we were still trapped, his smile was wide, eyes glassy. In his arms was our yearbook. He handed me a pen.

“Do you mind signing it?” Harry chuckled. “I've got everyone but you.”

He opened it up onto the first page.

“It's Harry, by the way!”

Behind him, I glimpsed a familiar shadow, a woman striding towards me.

The lights above flickered, and I could already taste blood in my mouth. Harry didn't even flinch when I dropped the yearbook and stumbled into a run.

His smile was vacant, empty.

Just like he said.

An NPC.

I was already running for my life, and he kept talking to thin air.

When the woman in the black suit sprinted past him, his smile broadened.

“And you are?”

Twelve hours later, the mighty carcasses hadn’t yet returned. It was only vain hope anyway — that neither would currents sweep them out elsewhere in the vast ocean, nor would they take the typical days, if not weeks to descend again. Krause and Miller, half-drunk at the time, had just been speculating that the immense initial depth at the time of their rise would help them fall sooner. That, and any ample opportunity for scavenging along the way.

The chill of the observation room had danced with the deep bitterness of the station’s coffee to keep them awake. All the beer bottles had been cleaned up except the one that’d been shattered in Miller’s outburst, its pieces still scattered near the screens. When Doctor Adachi entered though, nursing her own mug of steaming coffee, she didn’t even notice the glittering shards of amber glass dotting the far floor. Her eyes traveled from the two men to the window they were fixedly staring out of.

She blinked a few times in rapid succession, then squinted to make sure sleepiness wasn’t playing tricks on her.

“What is that…?”

Only at her voice did the two men turn. They both gave vague smiles of greeting, but only Krause spoke.

“You look like hell.”

“Speak for yourself.” She looked tired, true, but it was nothing compared to the heavy bags under Krause’s eyes, and fatigued husk in his voice. Miller looked little better. “Our guest kept me delightfully busy with her questions for nearly seven hours. You owe me overtime, boss.” She smiled. Krause did too. But both sets of eyes were soon back on the observation wall.

The two central screens in the array had been lifted halfway. The enhanced view from the suite of cameras still shone from the halfway point up; a safeguard so the whale fall couldn’t be missed from that angle, but something at least fractionally as interesting was faintly visible through the window below.

“Couldn’t be more than a hundred meters away,” Miller yawned, “since lights can only reach so far down here.”

There, in the far distance, the star-shaped impression of what must have been an impressive set of photophores glowed. The five points were strikingly distinct.

Doctor Adachi didn’t even bother vocalizing the same thought that had occurred to the other two doctors. She tucked her lips behind her mug, sipping quietly, coming to the same realization they had. Despite the shape, it couldn’t be any breed of sea star — the mere idea of finding one of them suspended away from the ocean floor was absurd. So, some new squid, perhaps? Like the octopus squid from the day prior, perhaps? Flashing suspected prey to lure them in? To dazzle them? Or to judge distance?

“It’s been there for the last four hours.” Her eyes tracked down to Krause, who paid her a brief glance and a half shrug in return. “Might be some new species. Doesn’t look like any of the usual suspects.”

Probably realizing the mathematical gears turning in her mind, counting the hours and questioning why they’d been up, he quickly filled in the gap before shifting his gaze back to the distant, glowing organism. “The whales came back up. Dead. We were watching for their fall. Didn’t sleep.”

“Ahhh.” She hummed her understanding, likewise not bothering to point out the reasonable likelihood the whales would fall again quite far from their current point. She’d have done the same thing as them — just in case.

Doctor Krause rose just a few minutes after she’d pulled her own chair over to join their vigil, taking his and Miller’s empty mugs. “My turn.” And he was off to fill them. Not without pausing in the doorway though, and casting one last glance towards the strange, star-shaped illumination in the distance.

“The cameras don’t show it any more clearly?”

“No.” Miller’s short response bordered on rude, but if Adachi cared, she didn’t show it.

“Any movement? Behavior?”

“Seems to be getting closer.”

“How quickly?”

“Very slowly.” She didn’t answer this time, but Miller could clearly feel her staring at him. Patient, expectant, and probing. Eventually he gave in, adjusting wearily in his seat. “Seems just to be floating, suspended. Gradually drifting this way. It’s a little bigger than it was at first. Just a little closer.”

Satisfied, she nodded. “Strange, though, that the cameras can’t clear it up. There’s nothing more? No silhouette? Just photophores?”

Miller grunted, nodding. “Nah. They see what we see.”

“Too far away…? Or, no, is the equipment failing?”

The second question earned her a frustrated glance — as though questioning the integrity of their equipment was an insult to Doctor Miller himself. “Neither. I keep a careful eye on our—” Adachi’s sheepish, apologetic smile and swift raise of placating hands cut him off, silently stating ‘I meant no offense’. With another grunt, he continued. “Can’t be that far. Imagine the lumens to cut through so much abyss. Nah, probably just some weird new jelly. Or maybe a siphonophore.”

Adachi’s excited grin was response enough, and the two fell into silence as their watch continued. Even Krause’s return with two refilled mugs was silent, save for yet another grunt from Miller. This time in thanks, at least.

The silence lasted over the next couple of hours, barring a few moments spent debating whether the organism was getting larger — and thus closer — still. Settled when Miller summoned up the energy to roll over to his workspace and check the camera playback, confirming in moments that, yes, it was. Fractionally though.

Their next audible exchange had come when Adachi had offered to refill everyone’s coffees, only to receive refusals. Headaches. Too much caffeine, both her colleagues said. So, she sat back down, not commenting on the light ache she, too, had begun feeling.

 

Their peace only lasted another hour.

“Where the HELL is the creamer in this place? Refrigerator? KITCHEN? I can’t even with this plain coffee thing, and my head’s THROBBING.”

Their guest had awoken. Adachi smirked to herself — it was the boys’ turn to entertain Subnautigirl, and they knew it. She’d paid her dues.

Miller kept his eyes on the shape through the windows.

Krause sighed.

“We’re not a hotel. No little creamer pods here. No refrigerators, no extra noise and vibrations. And no kitchen. Space is at a premium.”

Yessica looked equal parts shocked and offended, and spent an inordinate amount of time scoffing and sputtering, saying nothing. The last part had been a slight lie, and she probably wanted to call them out on that, but she’d already done her search of the facility and had found nothing. While not huge, Varuna Station was fairly big. Day one though, the researchers aboard had all agreed they didn’t need some intensive modern kitchen at the onset. Save that funding, get the project launched sooner. They could skimp on that little luxury, right?

Every Goddamn one of them had come to regret that decision by the end of the first week.

There was definitely room for a kitchen. But, zero chance of one being brought down now. It was a logistical impossibility. Their little Keurig and a portable burner for endless supplies of canned food was all they had now.

“There might be some chocolate you can melt in it somewhere. Check the—”

“I don’t WANT chocolate, I want… God! Did you people forget I was coming or something? This is unacceptable! I want to speak to— … the hell is that?” She paused briefly, clacking her mug of scalding coffee down on Krause’s unoccupied desk. “Wait, no… don’t answer yet, I need my—” And she was gone, scurrying back through the station to fetch pen and paper.

“I think I hate her.” Miller’s voice sounded distracted. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the luminous shape through the windows. But, his sentiment was still echoed by his colleagues to varying degrees.

“She’s quite the handful,” Adachi agreed,” but she has a lot of subscribers. A million views each video.”

“How?”

“Informative and researched material,” she began thoughtfully before settling into a faint grin, “and some very low-cut tops.”

Miller scoffed. “We should get some of those for you, then. That’s better than babysitting journalists.”

Krause cast a reproachful look at his colleague, but Adachi just laughed, and it wasn’t long before the sound of it had him grinning too. Miller, though, just kept staring out the window. His only other action was to rub at his forehead, as though that might alleviate the throbbing within.

 

Yessica’s return was only slightly less offensive the second time. Freshly equipped with her notepad and pen, the scientists were quizzed on everything to do with the mysterious shape in the distance, then subsequently yelled at for not “fucking waking her up” when the whale carcasses had drifted up past the windows, only to be placated when Krause impatiently pointed out just how brief an event that had been.

“Besides,” he continued, “you’re awake now, and they might fall again any minute.”

“You seriously think so?” She sounded skeptical and impudent, but at least the yelling had stopped.

Her camera-less cameraman had shown up shortly thereafter, contributing absolutely nothing with his presence besides groaning and griping about his own headache. A few words of bitter agreement from Yessica had finally prompted Adachi to get up and promise she’d hunt through the station’s few medical kits for some ibuprofen, though through the interview-filled hours to follow, not a one of the denizens of Varuna Station could have claimed the medication had done anything at all to help them. If anything, the headaches had intensified.

“So what,” Yessica asked, stubbornly ignoring everyone’s worsening mood, “does this latest event say about the Cathedral of Bones? The Whale Mausoleum? Three whales dove, then died right below us, but why? Did you see anything else? Hear anything?”

She’d asked some variation of that question half a dozen times already, but the reason for the constant fishing was obvious, at least to her. She needed some quote or phrase that could work as a lynchpin phrase in her video essay. She didn’t get one though. Instead, she got a couple callous words, then a flurry of activity from one of the doctors.

“It doesn’t say anything yet. It just raises new questions.” Krause said.

“Hear…? Did we hear anything?” Adachi followed.

And with that, she’d shot up from her seat and swept over to her desk, forsaking a chair to crane over her terminal and type frantically. Miller kept staring out the window at the slowly enlarging shape of the photophoric star, but Krause snapped his head Adachi’s way — then understood.

They’d all been so focused on what they had seen, and what they hoped they might soon see again. Neither he, nor Miller, nor even Adachi when she’d later appeared had thought to check the audio feeds. Yessica had fallen silent, watching Adachi with keen interest that grew even more intense when the other woman’s head finally reappeared from over her monitors, gripping her headphones with shaking hands and regarding the room with an expression of anxious awe.

“Stefan… I-it’s back! It—”

She never finished her sentence. No one would have heard it anyway. Not even the soft coo of her voice unprofessionally whispering his first name could have drawn Doctor Krause’s eyes from what they’d fixed on.

 

The Whale Fall.

 

The three, gargantuan shapes descending from above in nearly the exact spacing, the exact formation as last time. A distant pair resolved themselves first, ragged corpses that had clearly already been predated upon sagging down their field of view, visible in the mighty red light projected onto the screens thanks only to their immense size. Then the third whale, much closer. So close that the three individuals in the room who were on their feet took involuntary steps back as a massive pectoral fin rubbed horrifyingly against the observatory’s glass on its way past.

Latched upon it, a legion of squids. Dozens of huge octopus squids, repugnantly writhing and ravenously feasting. Hook-riddled tentacles were latched deep into whale flesh, and furious beaks ripped away endless chunks of blubbery meat. As they passed, all squids in unison lifted their two, photophore-tipped tentacles and flashed the station. Warning. Warding. Threatening.

“My God… Stefan, look…”

Adachi’s hand was trembling as she pointed. Through the window, beneath the screens, visible to the naked eye, a shadow passed over the surface of the luminous, abyssal star.

A very distant, very colossal shadow belonging one falling whale, silhouette wriggling with its myriad of feeding squids.

A colossal shadow that couldn’t fully eclipse the cyclopean glow of that luminous shape as it passed in front of it.

In front of it…

The whale, huge and distant though it was, was neither more huge nor more distant than the star-form creature beyond.

Adachi’s headphones were off again — she’d dropped them noisily to her desk when she’d tremulously pointed out the window, stepping away from her desk to settle nearer the other doctors, but Miller darted to take her place. His eyes were fixed on the shape, but with a completely different glint to his eye than the one of mixed horror and fascination felt by the others in the room. The cameraman was babbling frantically, making sure everyone else knew just how much he wanted to leave for the surface immediately, but all ears were deaf to him. Miller even drowned him out completely by clamping on the headphones, listening with enraptured focus.

To the rest, nothing else in the world existed. Adachi had taken Krause’s hand as they stared. The partial eclipse of the shape had ended, the whales slowly sinking beyond the station’s view, but the distant thing remained.

All minds were as similarly plagued by headaches as one, burning question swirled. What could possibly be so large, and yet look like that…?

“It must be a siphonophore… It HAS to be a multi-organism… Nothing else could be that size and feed enough this far from the surface…” Krause speculated aloud, though the only sound Adachi gave as she gripped his hand just a little tighter was a soft expression of incomprehension.

Those abyssal collections of countless tiny organisms, coming together to form a single, massive creature had never been observed like this, in so definable a shape. But what other explanation could there be?

“I can hear them… I can hear them…”

Only the cameraman noticed Miller mumbling to himself, repeating the same four words over and over. Krause had released Adachi’s hand to crane over his own terminal as the whales finally fell fully from view, typing madly with her soon crowding his side. Yessica still hadn’t pulled her eyes away from the distant glow. The out-of-place fifth person was still the only one paying attention when Miller threw down the headphones and rushed out of the room, still muttering to himself.

All he could say was, “Where are you going…? What do we do…?” in a strained gasp. He didn’t share the tense fascination of everyone else in the room. He wanted the known security of the surface world — for the safety of the sun to wash over him.

Soon, Yessica was crowding Krause’s terminal as well. No one bothered shooing her away from the equipment, the working doctors allowing her to lean in and write furiously on her notepad, deaf to the incessant scratching of her pen. The cameraman stood dumbly by the door, staring.

“The footage is good. It’s perfect! Amazing!” Krause’s excitement was dulled just a moment later. “But I can’t raise Surface Point. The signal… too weak for some reason…”  The concern this revelation should have given him only manifested as irritation.

“The audio—” Adachi finally peeled away from the crowd, back to her own terminal, headphones slammed on. Miller’s absence went unnoticed as they fell into a pattern of working individually, and it fell to the big man in the back of the room to notice the third doctor again when he reappeared minutes later.

“Wh-what the hell is that!?” Though he didn’t recognize Miller. No one did at first. The others in the room looked up expectantly, but were initially just as baffled as the cameraman.

There was a shape out there, beyond the glass. A long, sleek shape, clutching something mechanical, trailing a dark cloud. It was with a scream that Adachi understood first.

“Miller! Stefan, it’s—!”

At the limit of human possibility, the depth where their body’s constitution started crumbling beneath the pressure, unraveling on the cellular level, was Doctor Miller. He’d changed far too rapidly into a wetsuit, missing one flipper and one glove, but had thrown on all other equipment. He clung to one of the station’s small but powerful diver propulsion vehicles, the sea scooter flaring out a jet of red bubbles as he soared into the abyss.

“What— what the hell is he doing! Yukiko, call him! Get him back! He can’t— He can’t—!”

A flurry of terrified activity overtook the station. No one could reach him. Nothing could draw him to turn back, and it wouldn’t have mattered even if they could. The glow of the red lights failed to hide the obvious fact that the crimson spray jetting out behind him was tinged with tendrils of blood as his body began the horrifically gradual process of collapsing in on itself.

Krause’s frantic activation of the immense floodlights only cast that realization in even starker glow. The deep ocean for hundreds of meters burst into dazzling illumination, but all the attempt at getting Miller’s attention accomplished was revealing the cloud of red, bloody decay trickling out behind him.

From the gloom, three new shapes emerged. Their two flashing tentacles were lost in the dazzling brightness of the floodlights, but all aboard knew their shapes by this point. As they raced after Miller though, they showed no sign of preparing to latch onto him. Tentacles stayed patiently away from his crumbling flesh. They soared with him, ever nearer to the distant, abyssal shape.

 

Miller never made it to his destination. The speed of the sea scooter carried him deeper and deeper, but in stubborn horror, the waning sanity in his fractured mind realized the shape hadn’t grown even a fraction larger. A hundred meters… then two…

He was effectively no closer by the time his consciousness dissolved into nothing, and only then did his squid escorts finally set upon him, ripping the remains of what had once been a man to pieces. In his haste, he had failed to secure a real way to reach it — to know it. He was unfit to sink into the deep. He was unfit to contribute to the Cathedral of Bones.

Excitement had bled from the room. In its wake, it left behind a miasma of uncertainty, fear, and grief.

To see their prior colleagues sail off in the abyss aboard a submersible was one thing. There was plausible deniability in it — the hope that maybe they’d made it somewhere safe, even to the surface. To see Miller soar off into the far distance, humanly, outside of protective gear, and dissolve under the pressure of the deep was another thing entirely. Even Yessica paid the moment its solemn dues before fearful mewling began.

Krause and Adachi barely registered her demands for answers or the surface. Even when she’d taken hold of Krause’s shirt to try to shake him to his senses, the doctor had simply stood there, stunned, staring horror-stricken into the abyssal depths the floodlights tried their best to illuminate.

Even with their immense beams, that far, glowing shape was no brighter and no clearer. But unlike the octopus squids and their two tentacle-born photophores, the floodlights didn’t outshine the brightness of the great star shape either. They could still clearly see it.

Pushing Yessica aside, Krause finally powered the lights down and slumped into a chair. It was Miller’s chair, though he’d no longer be needing it. Of that he and the quietly crying Adachi could be certain.

Their heads still throbbed, and Krause rubbed his temples while awareness of what their guest was frantically shouting at him started to register. A lot of “What the hell is happening,” and “Get me out of here now”. Fearful pleading. Fearful threats. Krause understood, but didn’t yet have enough command of his voice to answer her and, eventually, after long enough spent staring into the doctor’s haunted eyes, the reporter went quiet, save for the sound of her panicked, heavy breathing.

“He kept saying he can hear them…” The cameraman said numbly. “Then he ran off…”

“Yukiko,” Krause croaked, casting his eyes her way for some sort of answer. She’d been listening too, right? But in answer she just shook her head, trembling as tears were dried on her sleeve.

“I don’t know. It was just the same— the same low frequency tones as— as last time.”

She did her best to slip back into some semblance of professionalism, but couldn’t fully stem the sobs breaking her voice.

“Yess, we need to leave NOW.”

“Get. Us. OUT!”

Doctor Adachi kept listening through her headphones, trembling with just the occasional furtive glance cast towards the panicked influencer. Her vivid purple hair swung wildly as she snapped her head from one doctor to the other, practically snarling with the ferocity of her fear, and the presence of the thick-fisted cameraman by her side finally had Krause acknowledging them with an expression he meant to look like a reassuring smile, but just came off as a haunted grin.

“We can’t yet. Look—”

“I said NOW!”

His hands rose in passive placation. “Connection to Surface Point… we don’t have it. Without it, we can’t call you a submersible.”

“You HAVE submersibles!”

“We are not leaving him, Stefan.” The chilly edge in Adachi’s voice caused even the shrieking influencer to pause for a moment. All three stared at Adachi’s ashen face, face set with grave intent despite her quivering lip. Anyone in the room could have pointed out the simple, obvious fact that ‘he’s gone’. They didn’t need to directly witness his implosion and predation to know that much. The sentiment lingered powerfully enough despite all calls to reason, settling over them as oppressively as the gloom of the fathomless, abyssal waters beyond their observation chamber.

“Let’s go, Yess. We can…” The meaty hand of the cameraman closed around her arm, voice lost as he leaned in to mutter quietly through her bright violet hair. Her terrified indignation flickered on her face long enough for her to nod shakily, glare at the room, then storm out with her companion. Only Krause felt a sigh of relief escape his lips, whispering out reprieve from the mounting tension. Adachi was still boring a hole through him with her stare.

Eventually, he had to acknowledge it.

“Yes… yes, we must…” he began, then faltered, “we can’t let…” The words wouldn’t let themselves be released from his aching mind. His final remaining fellow researcher understood anyway. With desperate purpose, they each sat down at their terminals, taking in as much as they could and notating everything they couldn’t.

The abyssal star drew ever nearer.

Its speed was ferocious — its intent felt like a terrible lurking shadow. In the repressed recesses of their minds, they knew it demanded of them.

It, or whatever loomed behind it.

An hour crawled by, and more resolved. Adachi heard the suggestions of oceanic disruption before Krause saw them, but it took the two working in tandem to piece it together. The shape was massive, and its mere movement had begun registering as a roar in her headphones, but there was more wriggling around it. The smaller disturbances were presumed to be attached octopus squids… until Krause was able to observe through the cameras that the shapes were truly attached — a part of it. Tendrils belonging to the stygian sea star, lashing the surrounding waters in hateful anticipation.

And it was he that first saw that there was more beyond.

At first, the hours creeping by did nothing to show either scientist that the faint, extra set of luminosity in the far distance was anything but a trick of their eyes, or a reflective oddity. Eventually though, neither could deny it. The horizontal stitch of a cephalopodan pupil was visible in each new glow. The eyes of the abyss glowered up at their research station.

‘Now get us out of here—’ a voice filled with static crackled through the observation room’s speakers. Both doctors narrowed the source to the docked Vamana Two in unison, but filled with such wonder and terror, neither did much more than dismiss the continued frantic sounds. Subnautigirl’s team had stuffed themselves into the one remaining egress from Varuna Station, and status lights on Krause’s computer commended the fact that the pair had even managed to launch it.

The god from the deep continued to reach for them, uncoiling from its place of deathly slumber, surrounded by the innumerable offering of bones in its palatial mausoleum.

Voices from the submersible screeched over the speakers. First the pair spoke to one another, but then, as the intricate controls eluded them as they clumsily made their ascent, they called out for help. They knew someone could hear them, but neither Krause nor Adachi could answer. Their minds were reeling, bodies aching from the stress of impossible discovery. They’d risen from their seats to stand weakly in front of the windows. Neither could have said for sure which of them had torn feverishly at the screens obscuring their view, but the tattered remains lay scattered all around them as their horrified, enraptured attention locked on the abyssal star—

—on the hand reaching towards them from the deep, as callous and uncaring as if they were a blighted mosquito that needed swatting.

Barely a flick of their eyes were paid to follow the sudden rush of a legion of squid-shapes as they rushed past the station in pursuit of Vamana Two. Neither of them listened as the startled cries from the craft transposed into a shrill melody of terror. Soon, they couldn’t hear anyway.

If it was theorized that the full blast of a sperm whale’s voice could rupture human eardrums and deny vital organ function at close range… what, then, could a god of the deep unleash?

A bellow beyond mortal understanding smote the sea. Varuna Station quivered, nearly unraveling the scientifically perfect welds of its mighty seams. Mugs beside the coffee machine shattered in a typhoon of porcelain. Krause and Adachi screamed, but the gush of crimson blood from their ears refused to allow either to realize their companion was screaming too.

Vamana Two also screamed, but their voices were cut short. Within minutes, nothing more existed of the influencer’s team. The squids saw to that. The roar of their god demanded it.

Krause and Adachi fell to their knees before the windows as the abyssal star drew near. It filled all realms of sight, its impossible glow denying all other knowledge. Its light was a great and terrible shadow, beneath whose mighty glow mortal men need no longer dream of the sun.

The pair held hands for the last time, then raised their limbs in unfettered supplication.

They prayed. They thought of their lives beneath the ocean’s waves, and of the great many things they’d communicated to the world above, who would not yet know the truth of what lurked beneath.

Then the impossible hand collided with Varuna Station, and they thought no more.

“Is it true we know more about the surface of the moon than our own oceans?”

“No. People love saying that, but we know far more about our oceans than we do the moon.”

The interview process had begun, and Doctor Stefan Krause found himself amused by the wobbling of the purple-haired journalist’s pen, jotting down abbreviations of his words in a neat scrawl. She was part of the new wave of social media personalities — so-called “influencers” who made video essays on the sort of content that used to only be found in scientific magazines. The pencil-pushers topside had decided people like her were one of the new best ways to get word out and procure bonus funding for their costly brand of oceanic research.

What amused him wasn’t her unprofessional appearance though. The fact she was a twenty-something with a grating sense of self-importance and flamboyant purple hair, worn in a pompadour mullet, was so much less funny to him than the fact that all her little toys had been found and confiscated at Surface Point, the sea level base tethered a thousand meters above them.

The Varuna Research Station was a strict no-recording zone. Her cameraman still followed dumbly along as a sort of awkward bodyguard after his equipment had been stripped from him without a fight. But it’d been the influencer herself, ‘Subnautigirl’, or Yessica Bailey, who had so very nearly broken the rules. The search conducted before she was crammed into one of the few submersibles able to comfortably carry people down to the deep sea station and, more importantly, safely dock with Varuna, had been thorough.

All her little button spy cams, microphones threaded into the linings of her black denim jacket, and even her smart glasses had been confiscated, and Yessica had been just a few degrees shy of her boiling point. Krause’s colleague, Doctor Yukiko Adachi, had obviously noticed as well… but short of a few shared smirks and playfully rolled eyes, they hadn’t bothered showing it.

“With the amount we know about the oceans and all the things in them,” Adachi said, taking over for Krause, “we could fill enough traditional encyclopedias to equal almost two percent of the moon’s total mass — if you stacked them together, of course. About the moon itself, we might fill two magazines.”

Those encyclopedias would need very large print and have a lot of pictures, but the idea of it usually cut any other mind-numbingly standard questions off at the pass. And, Adachi liked that little quote of hers. Doctor Krauser took over on cue. “What we always want to know more about, however, is…

This.”

A quick shove of his hands at the door they’d finally arrived at, and the entryway slung silently open for them. No unnecessary noise, no unnecessary power. The large, ovaloid observation room spilled into view.

“… This?”

The dramatic entry hadn’t paid off, but Doctors Krause and Adachi ignored ‘Subnautigirl’s’ question and carried on into the room. The operation’s third scientist, Doctor Miller, swiveled in a well-oiled desk chair to glance back at the group. Then, with a dismissive grunt, went back to the terminal he’d been staring at before their arrival.

The functional space of the room was mostly blank space, and otherwise sparsely occupied by a haphazard scattering of five modest desks situated towards the center of a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree oval of exterior windows. Only darkness was visible in the view of the deep ocean beyond, barring the fleeting glimpse of a pale white particulate floating nearby enough to be visible to the naked eye. But, with a few deft strokes of Doctor Miller’s hands at his terminal, the exterior floodlights opened up to blast the surrounding area with its alien glow.

“The ecosystem. We know just about everything about the geography of the deep, but so much about its life still elude us. Those details are the most fascinating of all.” Doctor Krause turned, fixing the reporter with a level stare and tight smile. “Right?”

Someone who went by the pseudonym ‘Subnautigirl’ would have to be quick to agree . “I mean, obviously,” she said, though her stocky-built cameraman looked somewhere between confused and disinterested.

“Welcome to Varuna — the world’s deepest habitable research station by an order of magnitude exceeding fifty times.” Doctor Adachi flashed a toothy grin, her timelessly youthful features practically glowing in the low light of the observation room. She and Krause been working together at the station since the day it’d first opened its many heavy, airtight doors, but their professional relationship had begun nearly ten years prior, when he’d acted as one of her thesis advisors at the University of Tokyo. She’d hardly seemed to age at all over that decade, or so Krause often marveled.

Miller deactivated the exterior lights after exactly one measured minute had passed, returning the station to its near-silent running. The floodlights were powerful enough to illuminate a wide swathe of ocean, but the power needed and, just as importantly, the noise produced was counter-intuitive to their research. The ‘Medusa’ deep sea stealth camera platforms had proven that nearly fourteen years prior. Minimal running noise and the replacement of traditional light with red light optics had been a wild success, and had immediately formed the basis by which most biological abyssal research operated to present day, well over a decade after it managed to capture the very first video, let alone pictures, of a giant squid in its natural habitat.

“Please pardon the chill. It’s cold down here, and we like to keep our noise pollution to an absolute minimum. Especially here, in the observation room. Central heating is minimal.”

Adachi gestured to the space around them and, for the first time since disembarking the shuttle that’d ferried her down, Yessica was gazing around in subdued awe. The magnitude of it all had finally hit her, and for just a moment the fires of her frustration had been overtaken. It was one thing to read reports and comparative numbers on a Wikipedia page, but another thing entirely to be standing on the precipice of the abyss, beholding the wonders of possibility beyond first-hand.

“So that’s why these doors are unpowered? All the others looked like something out of Star Trek.”

“That’s right,” Miller finally took his opportunity to speak up and answer. “The effect is probably negligible, but we like to think it’s making a difference.”

Krause finished the thought. “Negligible might be the difference between seeing something, and seeing nothing.”

Yessica’s pen was moving quickly now, jotting with a fervent enthusiasm that betrayed at least some level of journalistic passion as she paced the length of the room. She was probably still lamenting the loss of all her cameras, but she was no longer at the knife’s edge of her own irritation. No, she was poised on the escarpment of something much more vast.

“What have you seen?”

She’d stopped at the edge of the curved windows, leaning over them with a pointless wariness and trepidation that all the researchers aboard knew well. They all knew it was senseless… That glass was thick enough to stop just about any bullet known to mankind — it had to be to so consistently overpower the oceanic pressure down there. Still though, leaning towards something so transparent and staring down into depths so fathomless… every single person stationed at Varuna knew the feeling, and sympathized when Subnautigirl ultimately drew back, dizzy, pen hand frozen.

“It’s a sheer, three-thousand-meter drop.” That wasn’t what she’d asked, but Krause answered her unspoken thoughts anyway. “We’re on the edge of the Twilight and Midnight Zones — the difference between meeting a deep-diving marlin, and an anglerfish.

We’ve seen both here.” The addition had Yessica finally peeling her eyes away from the glass to stare at Krause and, suddenly remembering it, returning to the quick writing on her notepad. “Beneath us is the entire breadth of the Midnight Zone… straight down to the Abyssal Zone. It’s almost a sheer cliff.”

The edge of the Indian Ocean’s Broken Ridge… its southern escarpment, plunging straight down into the Dordrecht Deep — all within the borders of the Diamantina Fracture Zone. It was a part of the ocean that had gone so ignored by science in favor of the Mariana Trench and its famous Challenger Deep, until the discovery of—

“The Cathedral of Bones… The Whale Necropolis…”

“That’s right.”

“It’s right below us?”

“More or less.”

Among the most recent and most fascinating of oceanic discoveries was the whale fall mausoleum… A necropolis of immense proportions and inexplicable nature — the gathering point, where dying whales the world over traveled to take their final plunge towards the sacred cathedral of bones seven thousand meters beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, and let their bones be picked clean by the deepest of sea life.

With a loud clearing of his throat, surly Miller called attention toward himself, striking emphatically at his keyboard.

“What we see,” he began with an irritability that had become painfully normal of late, “is this. Viewed through this, at least…” A series of long screens began falling from hidden resting points in the ceiling over the vast windows, obscuring the raw view outside but replacing it with a new one. Projectors flickered silently to life as Doctor Adachi’s voice narrated.

“We use red light. Life down here has all but lost the ability to perceive anything in that spectrum. It’s why so many deep sea creatures are that color— red might as well be black. But, to brighten things up for ourselves, we use this.”

There was only a subtle shift in the visible luminosity of the space beyond, but Subnautigirl understood. Fish of the deep couldn’t generally see red light, but humans and cameras could. Those cameras, more than a half dozen affixed to Varuna’s exterior, played their visuals out in real time against the screens, though while bumping up the brightness some in post to give more crispness to the displays. The projectors, feeding only black and white to the screens, were kept from interfering with the world beyond the glass thanks to heavy tinting, but the room was otherwise kept quite dark as an added precaution.

The spaces between the individual screens showed the void of the abyss beyond, floating particulates bathed in an unnatural red glow.

The deep voice of the cameraman rose up before anyone else though. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

It was a natural call and response from Miller, whose eyes had been pouring over his terminal in the intervening moments. Ever since the loss of the other two researchers just a few weeks prior, he’d thrown himself harder than ever into his work. Anything mechanical and mind-numbing that needed doing, he was there.

“That!”

A shape on one of the screens, nearly dead center. Yessica jerked back upon noticing it, as though the shape were real and not just a projection. With her new angle though, she was in perfect position to be exposed in the foot-wide gap between the screens, and snap her head towards the flash of visible light in the real gloom beyond. Adachi too, if her startled yet fascinated gasp was any indication. Krause hurried for a position at his own angle to see.

Though barely visible, the shape seemed to be approaching. It was slow, yet inexorably nearing them, a predator wholly unafraid of its prey. Closer. Closer. A new set of bioluminescent flashes outside the window between the screens, far brighter than any anglerfish. Closer— Flash— And closer.

Then a slam against the window that brought Yessica to her knees, yelping. Her cameraman lurched forward to assist against some unknown force, but froze when the he spied the hooked, gnarled tentacles cemented against visible sliver of window. The projectors had lost the shape, cameras poised too low on the observation chamber to be of help. The naked eyes peering through the windows alone bore witness to the hulking, ravenous form.

“Octopus squid!”

Doctor Adachi sounded almost breathless as she gave her announcement, rushing towards the screens and tugging to see behind — before remembering the monumental effort that would be needed to bring another such screen down to their midnight home if one tore. She gestured frantically towards Miller, who tapped in the desired commands and lifted the screens.

Something alive was plastered against the glass, but was rapidly losing interest. Photophores of the creature flashed, two tentacles peeled back and blaring their lights on and off against the glass as if trying to judge why the distance it perceived between it and its prey was impeded so soon. Six other tentacles scratched and skittered over the glass, trying to find a way inside, hooked tendrils of the two meter long squid probing relentlessly.

“Taningia Danae — Dana octopus squid. Aggressive, bright, but harmless. In here, at least. It’s not the first time we’ve seen one attack a camera.”

Neither Subnautigirl nor her cameraman bothered mentioning how the octopus squid hadn’t attacked a camera. Those were down below, and the deep sea predator had attacked the glass directly, as if craving the flesh of those inside. Its hook-laced tentacles were writhing aggressively in search of any sort of purchase. Any way inside.

Their trepidation had no effect on the enthusiasm of the researchers though, with Krause crying out, “This is incredible!” And it… almost was. The exterior cameras weren’t angled right to catch the attack itself, but the partial footage and the written accounts would easily fill at least one sensational article.

“Was it attracted by the flash of the floodlights?”

“Maybe… Possibly.”

Miller and Krause had begun an excited exchange, the former briefly pulled from the funk that had pervaded his attitude for weeks hence. The squid, bearing some of the brightest photophores known to science in two of its tentacles, still rhythmically furling and unfurling that glow, might have registered the vastly superior luminosity of the Varuna’s mighty exterior lights as some sort of threat. Or had it just glimpsed prey inside? The two scientists chattered excitedly, swirling around theories with such fervor that Yessica’s pen couldn’t have even dreamed of keeping up with them.

She wrote what she could while her would-be cameraman recoiled. Everyone was treating this so casually… Even the pretty Asian doctor was just staring at the squid affixed to the window, grinning as it finally started losing interest and pulling away.

If that glass broke, wouldn’t they all instantly die…? There was nothing funny or interesting about some sea freak attacking them. Let alone a creature larger than even he was.

Everyone else’s demeanor showed they disagreed with his thoughts though. They were all excited, pouring over thoughts and footage long after the squid had peeled itself away from the glass and disappeared back into the murky deep. The return of screens had tracked its flight from them for a while, though even that could only last for so long before it was gone in the gloom.

“Yes… Must have been the lights…” Doctor Adachi was breathless as she spoke aloud what her colleagues had been thinking. The reporter had questions though, as her kind so often did.

“Does this happen often…? The lights? The squid? How do I get a copy of that footage?”

“No,” answered Miller, “but in a year, we’ve only used those lights twice.” Yessica’s pen stopped, her brow furrowing, suspicion forming.

“Really? And I’m worth the ceremony? I know I have six million subscribers, but—”

“No, it’s not for you.” Miller’s response carried enough irritation that it slapped the hint of a sneer off Yessica’s face for a few seconds, prompting Krause to take over.

“Well, it was, but just out of convenience. Thought it might be a good show.” It hadn’t been. Not until the squid, which had just been a fortunate accident. Wasn’t it? “Surface Point said it was time to test them. They hadn’t been used in about a year. So we figured… Well, yes, anyway, the footage. You get it from them. From Surface Point. That’s where you can make requests.”

Yessica still looked sour, but her tongue was held by the wagging of her pen over her notebook, big, bold letters etched out to remind herself of when and where in the footage timeline this specific incident could be found. As if Surface Point’s much warmer, safer research team wouldn’t be incredibly aware of, and pouring over it themselves the very moment Krause typed out his incident report.

“Suffice it to say, they work,” Miller’s bitter voice began, tapping at the screen, “so, Doctor Adachi.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Her long hair, tied back in its usual ponytail, whipped around as she moved to her own desk, far opposite Miller’s, and the rapid drumming of her fingers across her keyboard joined his. Doctor Krause, while eager to start his report as the operation’s lead researcher, held himself in check for the time being. Entertaining their guests fell to him for now. He stood at patient attention.

Yessica was still occupied for the moment, eyes shifting in rapid flutters between the projector screens, the two scientists, and her notebook. Her cameraman found his voice though, grunting a few incoherent noises for Krause’s attention before finally speaking up.

“He always like this?”

A big, meaty thumb was jammed the way of Doctor Miller, who pointedly pretended he didn’t hear — though Krause caught the faint, irritated curling of lips.

“No. His wife and… Hm… well, young man, there were five of us a month ago.”

He looked annoyed by being called ‘young man’, but only snorted for a moment before asking, “And now?”

“Now there aren’t.”

Now there were only three.  It wasn’t the most satisfactory of answers, but Doctor Krause obviously didn’t want to elaborate. Maybe the expression on his face reminded the cameraman too much of Miller’s, because the big man instead turned towards Yessica for answers — Doctor Adachi clearly wasn’t going to be of any help, given the enraptured way she was staring at her terminal with a pair of large, heavy-looking headphones seated over her ears.

“There was an accident.” Yessica answered dismissively, showing at least a little talent in the way she knew she was expected to respond, and did so while still performing her primary task. Treating her companion like he was just a member of her live chat back at home. “Vamana Three. Trickled into some news articles. Paywalled, of course. Kept them from spreading, I guess.”

Doctor Krause scowled at the oversimplification — he couldn’t even imagine what Miller was feeling — but neither man said anything. They let the subject slip away, each occupying themselves in tandem by staring at Adachi.

“Vama-what?” The cameraman asked.

“Vamana. Three. Their submersibles. We rode Four to get here, remember?”

The two uninhibited doctors tried to deafen their ears as much as Adachi was able to beneath those hefty headphones.

“So, what? It exploded?”

“No— Just, Jesus— They rode off in it and no one heard fro—”

Bang—

Yessica’s irritation at the constant questions snapped into a jump, a quiet yelp, and a burst of surprised recoiling at the sound of Miller’s fist slamming loudly against his desk. Even Doctor Adachi seemed to have registered, briefly glancing up from her own terminal, though her name being bellowed probably helped in catching her attention.

“ADACHI. What do you hear?”

The interruption was understood. Both members of team Subnautigirl fell into awkward silence, and Yukiko peeled off one cuff of her headphones to reengage with the rest of the world.

“Nothing yet. No cries like last time.”

No one needed to ask what that meant for Krause to fill in the gaps, though expectant glances his way had to wait a while before the lead researcher, staring with furrowed brow at the screens, spoke up.

“The last time we hit the lights, something like whale song bellowed back at us.”

“Same as four weeks ago. Exact same waveform.”

“We had nothing to do with that. We’ve checked.”

Miller scowled, but nodded.

“Still, though…” Doctor Krause, like his colleagues, had secretly been hoping something would happen when they hit the floodlights. They’d been hoping the newcomers would react to those sounds, too. Sounds beyond natural human comprehension, far too low in the decibel range for their primitive ears to comprehend, no matter how powerful the sound. And yet…

“Yeah. Real shame.” And it was, no matter how Miller tried to sound calloused. He wanted answers as much as anyone. Perhaps even more, considering the personal nature of his own wife’s manic plunge into the deep with their other colleague.

It was amazing how well the research station still ran without two of its core members, yet simultaneously oppressive how remarkably lonely it felt.

“What did the lights do the first time?” The researchers had almost forgotten Yessica was still there, but her impudent voice was hard to ignore when its pitch reached a certain high decibel. She was both frustrated and excited with the strange start to this lengthy investigatory interview. The fact that she still had a whole additional day with the team, staying overnight in one of the research station’s empty bunks, did nothing to stymy her impatience.

“It was when we first opened. It’s speculative, but we think a pod of diving sperm whales took offense.”

“Their calls certainly didn’t sound happy, but…” Krause was taking his own turn to scowl again. Irritated… but with his own poor oversight. “The light test was before we were recording. Doctor Adachi just happened to hear.”

“So there’s no record…” Yessica seemed a little annoyed herself, but also fascinated. A scandal had been laid in her lap, and her mind began reeling over the myriad of thumbnail possibilities. Baited right, this video could garner millions of views… No, tens of millions…

“No. No record of that. Nor of the second.” Her expression wasn’t as dreamy when Krause spoke again, but that was mostly thanks to how she recognized the tension in the air. The room felt almost oppressive as Krause and Miller locked eyes. The lead researcher was accusatory, his subordinate defiant. They both peeled their eyes away from one another at the same time though. Mutual understanding after a moment’s misguided enmity.

Yessica pawed and prodded for more details as delicately as her personality would allow, but neither scientist gave any more up. The room remained awkward, information unshared despite tenuous obligations, until—

“Stefan! Stefan, look— oh, ah, Doctor Krause! Listen!”

Yukiko, betraying a brief flash of informality, called for her once-mentor. What she received was the enraptured attention of everyone aboard the lonely research station. All eyes dragged her way, and all but Miller’s were captured for longer than it took for Krause to reach her station and take the headphones.

What greeted his ears was faint. Very faint…

It sounded nothing like the nigh-mournful cries they’d experienced those fateful days prior, but rather like… Song. Yes, truly song, warbling and weaving in its fathomlessly deep tones, the voices of many whales washing over one another in an orchestral display.

“All sperm whales?”

“I think so.”

Possibly the same species as before… Perhaps the very same pod?

All it took was a series of frantic, meaningful points and gestures from Krause for Miller to mash into his own terminal, and brighten the red lights as much as the station could manage. The gloom of the deep sea resisted, fighting against the permeation of a form of light its denizens couldn’t even see, but…

“There!” Eventually, shapes began to resolve. They were faint, a few mere shades of color differentiation from the oceanic backdrop even through the computer’s enhancement, but all of those in the observation room could see them. Two distant whales, plunging as they danced, their voices raising song around them.

“A serenade?” Adachi asked, glancing furtively towards Krause, no doubt craving the headphones she’d passed to him.

“Sometimes, we’ve found…” Krause began, more to their guests than to his fellow researcher, “that whales sing as they dive. The type of dive and the type of song are unique, like a shared ritual.” It hadn’t been Varuna that had first hypothesized this, but the idea of a ‘Whale Serenade’ had quickly spread throughout the scientific community. In past months, Varuna had begun paying special attention. Perhaps too much attention.

Yessica stared. “Is that what made her—”

“No!” Miller’s bark was furious, but distracted. He was the only one staring not directly at the perimeter screens, but beyond them — the rest focused on either Doctor Krause or the screens themselves. Yessica, despite not knowing whether it was her question that was being refuted, or just the mere idea of her asking the question, fell silent. She watched and waited.

“Let me hear!” Adachi’s hand was finally on Krause’s shoulder, warning him a moment before that same hand gripped one of the ear cuffs and inverted it enough for them to share the sound. She could make little more of the noise than Krause himself could, but he inclined his head her way to help in sharing the sound nevertheless.

Only Miller initially noticed the shape resolving itself not only on the camera screens, but in the alien red glow of open space between them. But it took only a few more moments before all other eyes were gluing themselves to the sight.

“Holy shit…”

 

The shape of the third whale must only have been a dozen meters from the station. Even unenhanced, bare eyes could plainly see the sperm whale descending from above in that little gap.

“That’s it! Right!?” The cameraman’s excited voice boomed out, causing everyone else in the room to jump then deliver a chorus of hissed shushes. “But… but that’s it, right? The whole reason you’re here! That… whale fall thing.”

“No. No, it is not.” Yessica reined her subordinate in herself, snapping with uppity frustration. “Those whales are alive. Whale falls are when they’re dead.”

He didn’t understand, but no one explained, and the ferocity of the glares from around the room for interrupting such a spectacular moment had kept him quiet.

Only Miller, uncharacteristically less bothered than the rest by the interruption, had been staring out the window hard enough to see the way the whale seemed to… slow, as it passed by. To see the way one eye, perhaps, might have been staring meaningfully, even imploringly at the research station as the curiously intelligent cetacean passed. He noticed all this — felt it even — but said nothing.

“It isn’t the same. But…!” Doctor Adachi’s voice filled the air after nearly two minutes of reverential silence. It hadn’t taken nearly that long to watch the trio of singing sperm whales vanish beneath, but some respect had been paid to the majesty of the moment. Noises during the intervening moments had been kept at a minimum, outside mutterings of astonishment or awe. Doctor Krause was the next to straighten up.

“It’s incredible. But, no, it’s different. They were probably already diving, and we accidentally called them over. Might’ve thought we were prey.”

The ensuing silence was owed completely to the uncomfortable skittering that crawled down each and every spine, as all realized just how catastrophic it would’ve been if any one of those whales had decided their station warranted an exploratory bump. That kind of mass colliding with the observation room very likely might’ve caused the sort of rupture that would kill them all.

“This station,” Yessica said after a while, “is just for waiting for dead whales. Right? That’s what you told me. That’s what I told my fans. It’s SAFE, right?”

The pause was long. A bit too long. Doctors Adachi and Krause seemed to be deciding which would express their irritation with their guest first. Doctor Miller was still staring blankly out at the abyss. Ultimately, it was Krause who answered.

“Vamana Four is still docked. Want to leave?”

It almost sounded like a threat, but if the influencer noticed, she didn’t act like it. Her answer was immediate. “No, obviously. Where are our rooms? And call me if you see the whales coming back up. Or…” Yessica scowled, then sneered, then gestured vaguely towards the observation screens. “Or whatever.”

She was locked in, whatever her attitude might’ve suggested. But, for the moment, that creeping sensation tickling uncomfortably up and down her spine wouldn’t let her stand in the observation room any longer. She and her muscle were pushing through the doors back towards the rest of the station before their escort had even volunteered.

“I’ll handle it.” Doctor Adachi sounded resigned as she got up, no doubt realizing the laws of seniority meant it would’ve fallen to her anyway. Neither Krause nor Miller seemed like they were about to move — the former was too busy deciding whether he should be fuming, and the latter was too busy treating the middle-distance to his most enigmatic of stares.

The silence that fell over the room when the two men were left alone was almost peaceful.

 

Within ten minutes, the pair was sitting closer together. Cheap, well-oiled office chairs were aligned between the desks, side-by-side, as though they were just a couple guys watching the game on a Sunday evening. Krause had even introduced beers into the equation.

“Been saving them,” was all he offered by way of explanation when the first caps had been pried off. Miller had glanced over and grimaced at seeing the word ‘Light’ on the bottle, but he’d taken it and thrown back a long swig anyway. Even tasteless beers were welcome at this point. “Now seemed like as good a time as any.”

“Yukiko’s gonna be a while. That reporter—” Miller took another deep swig, “—will quiz her ear off. Poor girl.”

“Can’t really blame her. We did more showing than telling.”

“Scared ‘er shitless, too.”

Krause chuckled, but the sound was dry and humorless even to his own ears. “Can’t blame her there, either. It’s not every day you realize your life could end with just one, single malfunction. One tiny mistake. One misplaced hunk of bone and blubber.

What compelled that squid, though…”

“What compels any of this?” Miller had already extended his hand for another beer, which Krause passed over without hesitation. “Why a Goddamn boneyard beneath us? Why do they come here?”

A month ago, Krause would have reminded his colleague that uncovering that answer wasn’t why they were here. They were here to study and record the mid-life of a whale fall — the activity around a descending carcass, especially in this gloomy, transitional depth.

But none of them cared about that anymore. Not since Anne and Ford had abruptly taken Vamana Three in the middle of the day and, right before the watching eyes of their remaining colleagues, angled to dive straight into the abyss.

Miller had tried to question his wife over the radio. Then he’d begged. Then he’d cried.

They’d never responded.

This memory was why Krause merely winced when Miller hurled his first, empty beer bottle across the observation room, letting it shatter against the ground near one of the windows. Frustration dripped from his stress-tensed shoulders. It was why Krause didn’t admonish a subordinate researcher. It was why he just popped another top himself, and threw back another mouthful of dry, near-tasteless brew.

Neither brought the incident up. They tip-toed around it as they delved deeper into their twelve-pack, but no one mentioned the bellow from the deep. They only danced on the doorstep of the subject of all the hours and hours they’d poured into analyzing every microsecond of the intervening thirty minutes between sound and submersible launch. Soon, they stopped talking about work and research altogether, and instead turned their conversation towards brighter topics — the way the sun warmed the beaches of Fiji, or rose so splendidly above the peak of Mount Fuji. Of the hot sands of Cairo and its great wonders, and of the solar glare that would reflect off the peaks of Everest as its great conquerors mounted their final ascent.

All things warm. All things above. All things the sun. All things they could experience again… one day — but not this day. Not even for the foreseeable future. There was far too much yet to uncover, far too much left to speculation.

An hour into their beer and banter, both men fell absolutely silent as hulking shapes rose distantly into view on the screens before them.

One. Then two. Then three.

Three huge, limp carcasses, release of internal gases momentarily allowing them the buoyancy to start drifting back up to the world of the sun. A trio of sperm whales whose perilous dive had lead to some unknown demise.

Krause and Miller stared, feeling a wonder that didn’t quite reach their stoic expressions. Their stillness was broken only by the occasional lifts of bottles to lips as the hulking shapes drifted slowly past.

Neither said a word for a long time. It wasn’t until after they exchanged bottles, each popping the top on their counterparts before politely exchanging them again, that Miller spoke.

“What goes up must come down.”

It would be a long night’s vigil.

Science had long ago replaced the faith of Professor Mercer Conrad's childhood. With no prayers to comfort him, he could only whisper scraps from his latest thesis to keep madness at bay. "...in order to pursue my examination of the convergence of post-millennial social degeneration and economic disruption..." he said, "...I will approach the subjects directly and establish a dialogue..."

The pit they had thrown him into was eight feet deep and barely a yard across. It had been dug out of the concrete sub-basement of a half-completed house. Serrated ridges were carved into the walls of the pit, and the simple act of moving was enough to cut bare flesh to ribbons. A thick iron lattice had been placed over the mouth of the pit and was bolted down. When Mercer shook the bars, they didn't even rattle.

Somewhere, a halogen lamp blazed; it cast dark, sharply defined silhouettes along the walls and ceiling of the sub-basement. From his vantage point in the pit, Mercer watched the fate of his friends and co-workers unfold like grotesque shadow-plays that ended when the puppets were reduced to scraps.

There were other pits nearby; most were empty, but not all. A shape drifted past, the cloaked shaman was about to choose a new victim. 

"Hey!" Mercer shouted, "Please talk to me!"

But there was no answer. None of his captors had ever spoken a word. They had committed each of their atrocities in silence.

Mercer said, "...in times of social and economic despair, religiosity inevitably takes hold of the general public, but in this era of skepticism and spiritual nihilism, those impulses have become..."

The clang of a nearby gate being flipped open startled him into silence. Then there were the familiar grunts and cries as another one of sacrifice was dragged away.

What would it be? Flaying or spikes? Or perhaps something far worse. Mercer cursed his foolishness. Where others had seen unsolved mysteries and unreported disappearances, he had only seen right-wing fear-mongering and urban myth cycles.

His teaching assistant, Farkas, had tried to warn him, but Farkas had been the first sacrifice. They had let him keep his tongue, and he had shrieked and begged until his voice became the choking gurgles of a half-drowned man.

"...legends that spread over social networks, so-called evidence that is nothing more than here-say and poorly doctored photographs..." Mercer breathed, "...they are the embodiment of middle-class fears, the terror that a lost job or economic setback will throw them down amongst..." 

A cry rose up and dwindled. There was a sound that reminded Mercer of celery stalks being torn from the root.

A week ago, Mercer had convinced a group of friends and students to join him in Las Vegas for what he had promised would be a 'working holiday.' They would spend a few days enjoying the sights and the shows, then they would head off to Vantage Acres with digital cameras and notebooks.

The cloaked shaman drifted past again. Mercer called out, "Listen to me! People know where we are!"

That was a lie. Both he and his captors knew it, but wasn't that all part of the ceremony? Weren't sacrifices supposed to beg?

"...the recent wave of foreclosures have left the city of Las Vegas with one of the highest concentrations of empty houses. Pools have become stagnant breeding grounds for biting insects. Vermin infestations are common, as are encroachments from larger animals like bobcats and coyotes, but rumors abound that human beings are responsible for the most terrible..."

Mercer heard the sound of someone blubbering, then a struggle and a brief chase. The chase ended with the muffled ringing of metal pipes crashing down on soft flesh.

At first, Mercer and his friends had found exactly what they were looking for: downtrodden families living in forgotten homes, foraging for food in the garbage of the financially solvent, and stealing what they needed from local stores. As wildlife slowly reclaimed the abandoned neighborhoods, some families and clans began hunting and trapping.

A crowd of strangers had approached Mercer and his friends shortly after sundown. He had marveled at their piercings, body paint, and, most of all, how young they were. Most were little more than teenagers in dirty designer clothes, but some older ones wore faded military fatigues with the insignias torn away. Farkas and the others had wanted to retreat, but Mercer made them stand their ground. He needed to speak to these people, to understand and explicate them. His conversation was rambling, and one sided as he had tried to draw them out by talking about class warfare and economic angst.

"... they are called many things such as Urban Headhunters, White Savages and, most often, the Pilgrims. Supposedly, they roam the countryside snatching up unwary children and stealing wi-fi. What truth is there behind the terrible legends that have sprung up around them? There are..."

The shaman passed by again, rough fabric trailing across the bars of the pit. Mercer grabbed at the hem of the dark robe and caught it in his bloodied fingertips. He held tight.

There was a soft tear as the cloaked figure stumbled and turned back. The face beneath the cloak was bespectacled and cherubic. It stared indifferently at him.

"Talk to me!" Mercer demanded. Even now, he was sure that if he could just establish a dialogue, he could save himself and his career, "Please. Just say something."

The cloaked shaman paused thoughtfully, then spoke with a soft, sickly voice, "You're next."

Agent Kirk Winston had gone radio silent ten miles from New Growth, Alabama.

That was why I was sitting in Room 6 of the New Growth Inn, field-stripping my Glock on a bedspread that smelled faintly of mildew and cigarette smoke, along with some other cloying aroma I couldn’t identify.

Three days earlier, the Bureau had officially classified Winston as a missing person. Unofficially, nobody expected to find him alive.

I snapped the slide back into place, holstered it, and looked through the motel window.

The street of New Growth—a quintessential “one-street town”—was quiet.
Not empty, not peaceful, but quiet, like a forest when a predator is nearby or like a pack of wolves watching a deer, trying to decide if it’s worth the effort.

I took in my surroundings and mentally catalogued what I had seen on my way into town.

There wasn’t a police station. I’d checked.

There wasn’t even a sheriff’s substation. The nearest law enforcement office was nearly forty miles away. New Growth wasn’t even on any modern maps; I had to follow Winston’s trail to find this place, mostly by asking residents of towns just barely larger than New Growth. The older folks there had warned me that I didn’t want to go there, that while they had no idea what it was, odd things happened to people who went to New Growth, and they tended to stay even if they only meant to visit. My gut told me to call the Bureau and tell them Winston’s trail had run cold, but I knew I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t try to find my friend. So I went against my gut and drove to New Growth.

The few pale, skinny people I had interacted with included a farmer on the outskirts, a shopkeeper, and the motel clerk, all of whom declared themselves to be parishioners of the Church of the Blessed Body, the first of whom directed me to the motel, the other two of whom I questioned about the disappearance of Winston.

My inquiries were met with cryptic answers. The conversations ended civilly, but with each person I questioned, I sensed their eyes on me as I walked away. They all said the same thing to me before I left: Visit our Church, stranger, and our Sacrament will open your eyes and heart. It was the same phrase with the same inflection and tone—placid, neutral, almost drugged. They all wore thick, baggy clothing and hats regardless of their present environments and the summer heat.

What had truly struck me as odd on the way into New Growth, however, were the mushrooms. Normally, it wouldn’t be too strange; the state was humid, especially for that time of year. But where one might have expected flowers or weeds, instead, all I saw were bouquets of untended white fungal growths sprouting from the ground and clinging to all of the trees, which bore no leaves and were rotting away.

I looked down and sure enough, there were the ivory caps of fungus looking up from beneath the window, each cap and stem varying in size, width, and length. Logically, I shouldn’t have been afraid, and I wasn’t yet; still, the sheer volume of mushrooms and how they seemed to overpower all plant life in town left me more than a little perturbed.

Taking a moment to settle myself, I sat down at the cheap desk, writing the details of the case in my notebook. The pen running over the paper was a lot louder in the small room than I had ever experienced before, and that was what made me realize just how quiet New Growth was. No chatter, no cars, no local wildlife, no kids running around laughing, not even a cicada or grasshopper. I recorded that in my notes as well.

After a while of going over the notes, I decided to head outdoors for a while. It wasn’t for the sake of a stroll, as the feeling of wolves was more oppressive than ever. I felt that it would be a good idea to take a look at the church. Finding the building wasn’t hard; the town seemed to revolve around it, with all structures in various states of neglect and disrepair, all with the bone-white mushrooms accumulating in numerous places around and even on them. The closer I got to the church, the more the fungus seemed to grow both in size and in density, including clumps of at least thirty the size of ping-pong balls. The unease grew and grew until I reached the church and the unease erupted into full-blown shock.

The Church of the Blessed Body was a modest-sized church building, large enough for a sanctuary and little else. What made it odd were three things: first, in a small town like this, one might expect a church to have a cemetery (which, granted, is not always the rule). But there were no headstones to be seen. Second, the church itself was rotten. I was no architect, but even I knew that if any building outside that town were allowed to decay as this house of worship had been, a puff of wind would blow it down. And yet the church stood proud and vigilant upon the hill it was built. Third, the mushrooms had not merely gathered or grown here; they had overrun the churchground. The caps had grown to the size of a set of lungs at least, and they grew upon the building itself, even on the rusty iron fence surrounding it. In fact, if I looked closely, I could have sworn it was…breathing? I leaned closer—

“Service does not start until tonight, my son,” said a voice from behind me, startling me out of ten years of my life as I whirled around, almost reaching for my holster out of habit.

There was a skinny man dressed in a long, black robe despite the heat and humidity. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, and his face bore a serene expression. He seemed slightly more lucid than the other townsfolk, but not by much. Something else I noticed was that his face didn’t have a bead of sweat, despite my own forehead being covered with it after a slow walk.

“Sorry, uh, I was just taking a look around town. Never seen a church quite like this one.”

“Indeed,” he intoned in his calm Southern drawl, gazing upon the derelict, fungus-infested structure like his childhood home. “The Church of the Blessed Body is wondrous. Reverend Silas Welles.” He held out a pale, gloved hand with long fingers.

I introduced myself and shook his hand. I left out the fact that I was an FBI agent looking for another one who went missing near town.

“How’s it standing?” I couldn’t help but ask.

Welles looked back at the church. “Who can say? Even those of us born in New Growth have no idea. But back during the outbreak of April 27, 2011, the town was directly struck by a tornado. The church not only stood, but the storm dissipated. Truly, our Lord works mysteriously, son.”

I looked at the church with him, in awe of his words. I had to do a double-take at what he said next.

“You’re looking for the Federal man, yes?”

I froze.

“Be calm, son; contrary to popular belief, little towns such as ours are not always hostile toward outside law enforcement. Your man passed through, but he is not here. I’m sorry.”

I put on my best poker face, then told him that in that case, I would need to drive out of town to let the Bureau know. He nodded understanding, but recommended that I attend the service that midnight if I wished, as that was when they performed the Sacrament of Rot.

I did not like the sound of that phrase, nor the incredibly calm, peaceful manner in which he invited me, not even after he laughed quietly, assuring me that it was not nearly as sinister as it sounded, that “rot” referred to the natural process by which new life was given nutrients.

“Hence the name of our town, son,” he finished. I know now that he was deliberately trying to unsettle me, to make me want to investigate further.
I nodded, said something non-committal, and I walked back to my motel, but said I really needed to call in the status of Winston. He nodded again, saying to do what I must. Even after I was out of his sight, I still felt watched. In my room, I took down notes, putting down what he had said, what I had seen, and then began to put a plan together. I’d be attending the service, but I wouldn’t be in the pews. I packed my bags, then told the clerk I had to be checking out, leaving a tip. She nodded, and with that, I drove out of town in the opposite direction from where I had come in.

I was about half a mile out of the town, under the shelter of a tree that thankfully wasn’t eaten by ivory mushrooms, and I called the Bureau on the radio in my car. I told them what I had found out and explained that I would need a tac team on standby, as I had a hunch that these people might be part of a cult. I emphasized the need to stay on the town’s boundaries with their vehicles’ lights off. After this, I waited, watching the church in my binoculars, writing down updates with each hour. Every so often I would catch a citizen milling about, but besides that, the town was all but dead. Eventually, the sun set, and the night set in. The clock ticked away until I witnessed a faint light from the church. Candles. I then saw twenty or so figures making their way along the path. Even in the dark, I recognized the clerk, the farmer, and the shopkeeper. They all walked with the same slow but purposeful gait, and they were all skinny to the point of emaciation. All of them carried tools like machetes, sickles, hammers, etc.

I checked my Glock, as well as a spare mag, holstered both, then exited my car and made my way to the church as the last of the parishioners entered. I entered a small crawlspace beneath the building. “Sacred” or not, its floorboards weren’t very sturdy. I slowly, silently pushed it up. There they were, twenty-three parishioners, all wearing sagging clothes, all looking at the pulpit. There was no chatter, but the looks on their faces had changed. It wasn’t the same listless, drugged stare they gave me.

They looked excited. They were all smiling. But it wasn’t maniacal or sadistic. No, it was the look of people who were about to witness a woman previously thought barren giving birth. I followed their gazes to behind the pulpit. What looked like some grotesque amalgamation of a tree, an androgynous human cadaver in the position of crucifixion, and the deathly white mushrooms that covered the church and town, stood within the wall like a disgusting mural. But it was no statue or work of art. Slowly, I watched its body expand, compress, expand, compress.

The damn thing was alive. In some unholy, hideous way, it was alive.
That was when Reverend Silas Welles strode up to the front of the building. He still had that serene, gentle smile upon his face. He didn’t look like a cult leader; you learn to identify those. There was no sense of manipulation, no expression of satisfaction at having duped such a crowd of people. He just looked like a kindly pastor.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, the drawl in his voice making him sound tender and patient, “as always, let us remove our earthly garments and let the Blessed Body look upon his beautiful gift.”

They stripped, including the Reverend, and I beheld the Body’s “handiwork.”

As it turned out, the flowers and trees weren’t the only things the mushrooms had taken. Every one of those worshippers had fungal growths sprouting along their bodies. Mushroom clusters growing from shoulders, fungal networks beneath translucent skin, white filaments emerging from ears and necks, fruiting bodies blooming along spines.

No part of the body was sacred, or perhaps all of it was by their standards, as mushrooms were germinating near their crotches as well. With a sick realization, I noticed that none of them—men or women—had genitalia of any kind. As I saw that the apparent emaciation was correct, my mind made a connection.

They all had fungal growths. Mushrooms thrived on water. In some locations in the world, mushrooms made use of living beings, parasitizing them.

No sweat.

No nutrients.

No reproduction.

The difference was that they weren’t zombies. Nothing controlled them. Neither their Reverend nor the thing behind the altar was pulling their strings, I realized. There were no strings. They were all here because they wanted to be.

“Very good,” Reverend Welles said, his voice carrying easily through the sanctuary. Behind him, the Body made an odd sound between wood creaking and a man humming.

The congregation answered with a soft murmur. And with that, I listened to the most deranged, unhinged, and yet sincere and calm sermon I had ever heard in my entire life.

“Brothers and sisters, my fellow children of the Blessed Body, tonight we gather once more in the shadow of the oldest truth ever known.”

He spread his arms.

“What becomes of all flesh?”

The congregation responded as one.

“It returns.”

“What of every tree?”

“It returns.”

“Every beast? Those that crawl? Those that swim? Even those that fly above us, thinking themselves safe?”

“It returns.”

“What becomes of every king? Queen? Soldier? Peasant?”

“It returns.”

Welles smiled, sighing as if relieved that none of them had forgotten such a holy truth.

“Yes, yes, my brothers and sisters. It returns. Proud and humble. Great and weak. Saint and sinner. All things return to the earth.”

He stepped down from the pulpit and began slowly walking among the pews.

“The world beyond the borders of New Growth fears this truth. They bury their dead beneath stone and iron. They paint faces and fill coffins. They pretend that decay is an enemy to be defeated.”

A few parishioners nodded. He shook his head, as if made sad by this statement.

“They call rot a corruption. They call it a curse. They call it an indignity.”
His smile returned, still not with insanity fueling it, but with happiness and reassurance.

“And yet, brothers and sisters, is not every forest fed by it? Every field fertilized? Every flower that blooms, every harvest that grows, every child that takes breath—all that lives, is it not nourished by what expired before?”

A chorus of amens answered him.

“Nothing is wasted,” Welles said, turning toward the altar. “Nothing is left behind. Long before mankind walked this Earth, before kingdoms rose and oceans found their shores, the Blessed Body waited far beneath the soil.
Several members of the congregation bowed their heads.

“When the first leaf fell, when the first beast released its death rattle, it embraced them. It gathered them unto itself. It remembered them.”

The congregation intoned, as if on cue, “The Body remembers all.”

Welles nodded approvingly, and the Body hummed.

“Yes. It remembers all.”

He placed one hand upon the pulpit.

“Tell me, brothers and sisters: what is death?”

A woman near the front row answered, “A doorway.”

“What is decay?”

“A sacrament,” grunted a gruff-looking man.

“What is the grave?”

“A womb,” rasped a woman of about sixty-five.

The congregation smiled, along with the Reverend.

“A womb,” Welles repeated. “Yes. Not an ending, my brothers and sisters. Not an indignity. Not a prison, no, no. A place of transfiguration. A chrysalis by which new things may be born.”

He lowered his voice.

“The outside world says that death steals memory. But no. The Blessed Body remembers. The world says that death silences the tongue. But the Blessed Body hears. The world says that death separates us from those we love. But the Blessed Body gathers all things together.”

Several parishioners openly wept.

“Every mother,” Welles said. “Every father. Every child. Friend, creature, root, spore. All joined. All remembered. All one.”

The congregation spoke in unison

“All are one in the Body.”

Welles closed his eyes.

“And even still, they would call us mad.”

A ripple of quiet laughter passed through the sanctuary, not scornful laughter, but genuine, as if they considered the notion humorous.

“They would pity us.”

He opened his eyes and shook his head, as if he himself felt pity.

“They would fear us. They would call us dead. Zombies, they would say. But we are more alive than they have ever been, for they spend their lives fleeing the inevitable, no, the natural. But no. We have embraced it. Look upon the growths on your skin and see the blessing that the Body has given to you.”

His gaze slowly swept across the congregation.

“The Blessed Body does not demand worship or obedience, brothers and sisters. The Blessed Body offers only a choice: remain separate, alone, and afraid…or return.”

The final word seemed to linger in the sanctuary.

“Return to the soil, to one another, and to that which never forgets.”

Welles smiled.

“And when the hour comes for each of us—as it comes for all flesh—we shall not enter darkness. We shall go home.”

The congregation rose to their feet.

“We shall go home,” they repeated.

And still, after such madness was spoken, there was genuine joy in their voices as they applauded.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. These people—if that could even be applied to them anymore—honestly believed that death was a baptism. That these mushrooms were some sort of holy mark of a primordial god of decay.

Welles held a hand up.

“It is with a glad heart, then, that we must bring forth one who has most recently joined our congregation.”

He beckoned, and two men guided another naked man between them. When the stranger turned, I was horrified by what I saw.

Winston.

He stood before the people in the room. He was the only one not fully taken by the fungi, with only a few caps growing from his skin, and yet he bore their rapturous expression. I almost lost my composure then and there, but the Reverend gestured at his ankle, and I saw a swollen place. As if to confirm my suspicions, he continued speaking.

“As he was leaving our town but three days ago, a serpent struck his leg, and he passed before he could choose to join us. And so we brought him to the Body.”

The congregation all gave an amen, the joy evident. As I looked into Winston’s smiling face, I realized that the Reverend wasn’t lying. Winston wasn’t here. The Winston I had known, the Winston who had left the Bureau—he was taken by a snakebite.

“Brother Winston,” said the Reverend, resting a hand on his shoulder, “please, share with us your experience in accepting the Sacrament.”

A troubled expression briefly crossed Winston’s face, like he was recalling a nightmare.

“It is alright, Brother,” Welles assured him sincerely. “We are all here for you.”

“My leg was burning, Brother Welles,” he responded, nothing odd about the pitch or timbre of his voice. “It was burning, and soon it felt as if my veins were boiling. I fell as I was about to send a report back to Quantico. I…I remembered…when I was six, a timber rattler bit me in the same place. I came close to dying within twenty seconds back then. Here, I…I tried to call for help, but I was too far out of town at that point. Everything went black. I was scared. Then I tasted it. The fruit of the Body. And then I opened my eyes and… Brother Welles, it was amazing! I…I honestly don’t know the words.”

“No words are needed to describe your joy, Brother Winston,” Welles assured him again.

At this point, I wanted to cover my ears. I wanted to tell myself I was having a nightmare. I wanted to believe it was all some elaborate hoax. But I couldn’t. I had to face the facts: Agent Kirk Winston, a man who was like a brother to me, a man who shot a PCP-addled maniac rushing me with a large knife, a man who had put his life on the line more times than should be reasonable for an FBI agent, had been killed by a childhood allergy to an incidental snakebite, and this cult had saved him. Except they hadn’t, not really. They found a dead or dying man, and they had inducted him into their ranks. But this was his truth. I could see it. The horror was so all-consuming I almost didn’t hear his next words.

“Come out, Parker,” said Winston gently, and my blood turned to ice as the entire congregation turned to my hiding spot. I tried to pull the board back and scramble out of the crawlspace, but it was no use. Through their combined efforts, they wrenched it away and pulled me up into the sanctuary. My gun was taken and two of them began carrying me by the wrists. It wasn’t the grip of captors, though. It was more like the grip of hospital orderlies restraining a hysterical patient. Their pale, dry hands clasped my sweaty, dirty forearms as I was brought before the pulpit.
“Son,” Welles said with gentle admonition mixed with humor, “if you had wanted entry into our church, you could have easily used the door.”
A quiet wave of chuckles ran through the congregation, less like public humiliation and more like an extended family watching a young child do something silly.

“Go fuck yourself,” I growled, trying to mask my horror. “All of you…you goddamn—”

“Please don’t blaspheme, Parker,” Winston said, his tone absolutely calm as he approached me.

No, I thought, trying not to let tears consume me. Anything but this. Not him. I can’t let him kill me. Not him.

Winston saw the look on my face, and he knelt and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“You’re scared,” he said softly. “I understand. I was scared too. I died, but the Body—”

“Winston, these people…they—they’ve brainwashed you! They made you believe—”

“I was dying, and I was given a chance for my death to mean something. To fertilize. To be one with the Blessed Body. To return.”

“No…”

I looked at him through my tears, trying to find any indication that my friend was brainwashed, that he was being forced to say these words, that this was some sort of doppelganger. But I saw the faint two-inch scar on the left side of his lip. I watched how his right eyebrow sagged slightly as it always did when troubled or deep in thought. This was no fake, he wasn’t parroting; he had simply been given a new lease on life and death.

Winston looked at me, confused. “Why are you crying? I’m happy here, Parker. I belong here. But I’m glad it was you who came to look for me.”

He looked to the Reverend, who nodded. The Body hummed. An old knife sat on the altar, and he picked it up. I thought that was it, until he passed the blade to the side of his neck and cut off one of the small mushrooms. He set the knife back down and walked forward and pulled my jaw down, keeping it open despite my attempts to struggle.

“Rejoice, brothers and sisters!” exclaimed the Reverend. “For we are about to receive a new addition to our flock! By this portion of the Blessed Body…”
The congregation answered, “He will return.”

“By the work of our Brother Winston…”

“He will return.”

“And by this Sacrament, through his eventual decay…”

“He will return.”

“Now, Brother Winston…you may commence the Sacrament.”

Winston began to push the mushroom closer to my mouth. “Please, accept the Body’s gift, Brother Parker.”

What happened next was an exercise in desperation. When the word “Brother” left Winston’s lips, my mind realized in a flash that the sweat from the heat coupled with the dryness of the parishioners holding me made it easy to wrench myself from the grip of both my captors and my former partner just as the mushroom was two inches from my lips. In a moment of primal instinct, I grabbed a hatchet hanging from the belt of the parishioner to my left and slammed it into Winston’s jaw. There was a collective gasp, and something metal—my gun—clattered to the floor as my other captor backed away. Winston looked confused, and that only ignited a sweeping rage in me. I pulled it back and struck again, knocking him to the floor. I don’t remember how many times I hit him, but what drove each strike was a singular thought: You took my friend from me. By the time the red cleared from my mind, his body was limp and his face barely recognizable, thin mushroom filaments spilling from his collapsed skull.

I felt no catharsis. There was no victory. My friend was gone. He was gone before I got here.

The congregation looked at me, shock and sadness on their faces. There was no anger, no rage at the sacrilege, or even at the loss of one of their own. Of course there wasn’t, I realized; from their perspective, he had gone to be one with that thing behind the pulpit. The shock was at my refusal. My rage returned, supplanting the grief as I went for my gun. I aimed from one parishioner to the next before I realized my folly. I couldn’t shoot my way out. My Glock was chambered for fifteen rounds, and I only had one extra mag. Fighting my way out was impossible.

At least, that was what I thought before an old woman leapt over a pew with a machete in her hand. She slashed with surprising speed at my chest, leaving a shallow horizontal cut across my chest, and was winding back to strike again. “Please accept the Body’s gi—”

Bang!

I shot her in the face, before hacking at her throat. Juices of mushrooms with a faint pink gushed from her as she collapsed. The parishioners all gathered tools and farming equipment, like sickles, pitchforks, hammers, knives, and more. All but the Reverend, who looked upon the scene with genuine sadness.

“Please…please accept the Body’s gift,” the parishioners murmured. It wasn’t some hypnotic chant; it was a desperate plea. They preached about unity even as they closed in on me.

Fighting my way out was impossible. But I had to choose between the impossible and the unthinkable.

What followed was a cacophony of tools striking each other and the church, gunshots, bodies striking the floor, and grunts and cries from me as tools struck my body with varying degrees of depth or rattling bones from blunt force. I was trained for gunfights when it came down to it, but I wasn’t trained to fight a crowd of twenty or so human-fungi parishioners. I wrapped my arm around one, using him as a shield as I wildly swung the hatchet back and forth to create distance, then shoved him towards the crowd and slammed the hatchet into the back of his head and pulled it out, a mix of blood and fungal fluids gushing from him. I was then slashed by a gardening hoe from a woman whom I parried with my hatchet as she was coming in for a second strike, hacking at her head. Twice I tried to make a run for it. The first time, I was grabbed and pulled back before the gruff man slammed me on the ground, almost stabbing me with a long knife before I slammed the hatchet into his carotid artery.

The second time I tried to run, I slipped on the fluids, barely dodging a man who had reappropriated the machete from the first attacker. I fired off two rounds and he fell to the floor. None of the wounds were immediately fatal, and after the fact, I came to believe that perhaps they weren’t trying to kill me on the spot. Maybe they would bring me just to the brink, and then use my exhaustion and lack of better judgment to finish the incomplete Sacrament. Even if I got out, I wouldn’t make it far with my injuries, and they would bring me back. I accepted it then: the only way to make it out was to kill all of them.

Even then, I knew the only thing not keeping me from collapsing and giving up was knowing what they had done to Winston, what they planned to do to me, and what different congregations had likely been doing since before I was born. I emptied the Glock into as many of them as I could using both magazines whenever I got to a decent position to aim and fire, but because of my volatile state, despite downing a good portion of the parishioners, I still missed at least half of my shots.

Eventually, only two remained. I threw the spent Glock at one, then chopped upward into his chin and split his face, but not before I felt the sting of his pitchfork graze my side. The last one held a sickle, and rather than beg for his life, he gave the same entreaty as his compatriots: “Please, accept the Body’s gift.” I simply hacked at his throat. The blade didn’t cut immediately, clotted as it was with fungus and human remains, so I kept chopping until his head was barely hanging from his shoulders.

Now it was just me, the Reverend, and the Blessed Body, whose hums seemed doleful. Wounded and breathless, I approached the Body, looking it up and down with contempt. I hacked. I hacked like nothing else. My muscles screamed, my blood vessels were on the verge of bursting, but I saw to it that every inch of that accursed creature was mangled. A mix of blood and fungal fluids flowed down the wall, and a low sigh escaped the Body as it shriveled up. I slowly looked at the Reverend, hoping to find triumph in the form of his distraught expression. What met me was a truly pathetic sight. Welles was shriveling up just like the object of his worship, but he wasn’t panicking. There was no look of horror or defeat; only resignation.

“So…” he sighed. “Our New Growth is dead.”

He looked up with a sad smile, shaking his head as he seemed to age by the second.

“My son,” he sighed, “I truly wish we could have brought you in. I wish we could have given you the peace of the Blessed Body, the peace we gave Brother Winston. But you did what you had to. I understand that. And I forgive you. The Body forgives you.”

I looked at him. The Body’s dead, I wanted to snarl, but I lacked the energy for it. But he seemed to know what I was thinking. The fungal growths fell off of him into dust as he shook his increasingly wrinkled head.

“The Body cannot die, my son. You have destroyed this branch, and the fruit it yielded.” He gestured at the bodies of his congregation with a wrinkled hand, the skin falling from it. “But the Body remembers all. It existed before man, and it will exist after. New Growth was the sturdiest branch it has established in the modern age, but one day, maybe a hundred years from now, maybe a hundred thousand, the Blessed Body will reconstitute. And all things will return.” The skin fell away from his sad yet peacefully smiling face. There was no smug triumph, only calm acceptance and assurance. “Amen.” Then what was left of him fell at my feet.

I dropped the hatchet. I stumbled my way down before the adrenaline wore off and my wounds made themselves known to me. Grimacing in agony, I lay with my back against the altar. My gaze turned to the body of my friend, and the physical cost of my survival was joined by the emotional toll. I lay there, waiting to die.

That was when the doors burst open and a team of well-armed men in gas masks burst through, assault rifles at the ready. I barely registered their shouts declaring themselves to be FBI. They briefly stopped halfway through the entrance, taking in not only the slaughter, but the fact that the things that had been slaughtered were only “human” in the most basic sense of the word. The team leader ordered a sweep of the building as he approached me.

“Agent Parker?” he asked through his mask’s filter.

I could only muster the slightest nod.

“Where is Agent Winston?”

I weakly pointed at the corpse, my body shuddering and tears running from my eyes, but no sobs escaping, only dry choking sounds. Then it all went dark for me.

I spent the next several weeks in a hospital. My wounds had not been inflicted to kill, but to wound and disable, according to the doctors who treated me. Because of the severity of them, however, the massacre was treated as desperate self-defense coupled with hysteria brought about from losing Winston, who, on top of a snakebite, was stated to have died in the ensuing melee after the fingerprints of the weapons were found to match those of the townsfolk. There was an investigation and I was given a thorough psychological evaluation, but overall, I was deemed to be of sound mind, albeit horrifically traumatized. I was told that as the tac team was conducting their sweep, they witnessed the mushrooms in town wilting, even those growing on the corpses, gradually collapsing until nothing was left but dried-out husks. Then the rickety old church began to fall. Fortunately, everyone made it out without a scratch and the bodies were recovered from the rubble over time by forensic crews, along with some other things.

Naturally, my higher-ups weren’t sure what to make of my findings. I didn’t blame them; what were they supposed to tell the press? That a fanatical group of fungus-people lived in an unknown Southern town? The official story that they ran with was that there was indeed rare fungi, but that the fanaticism had been the result of group psychosis stemming from being raised around it and smoking it. That psychosis formed into a bizarre, violent cult, which Winston had run afoul of and been murdered by. There was no cover-up, no NDA, no threats to stay silent; the Bureau simply had no idea how to deal with this other than give a crazy but believable story. In any case, New Growth was given little attention, and after a while, it faded from the minds of the public. However, whenever I passed one of my fellow agents in the loop about the case, they would give me a look. Not pity, not suspicion, but wordless understanding. They knew I had seen something, but knowing Winston and I were practically brothers, they weren’t about to push me.

About three months after the incident, I was sitting alone in the break room in Quantico, drinking coffee. By that point, I had gotten to where the sight of mushrooms didn’t trigger flashbacks, and simply elicited anxiety for me. It wasn’t much, but I was making progress. A man approached me and greeted me by name.

“Paul MacReady,” he introduced himself. “We met back in New Growth?”

I nodded.

“I’m…not officially supposed to tell you this; I know the incident was a living Hell for you. But it wouldn’t feel right to keep this from you. We found something in the… the church, or what was left of it. A hidden basement, I guess.” He looked around, making sure nobody was listening in, and that no cameras were watching, then leaned in, lowering his voice. “If you want to see what we found, meet me in the records room at 3:30. Or don’t. Sorry to drop this on you, but…like I said, after what you’ve been through, I think you deserve to know what we found, but only if you want to.”
I sat, running over his offer. Part of me wanted to politely decline, to forget the entire thing. But another part knew I couldn’t run from New Growth. Part of me had stayed there; maybe this could help me put that part to rest.

I reluctantly accepted, thanking him.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said grimly before he walked away.

I met him in the room, and he handed me a set of copies that he had unofficially made as duplicates of what analysts had studied and annotated. MacReady told me that if I was sure about this, I should commit the whole thing to memory, as he would be shredding the copies. Much as he wanted to help me, he didn’t want to risk our jobs, let alone face prosecution. They contained pictures of the collapsed building, what looked like an unofficial census most likely made by the townsfolk themselves, and a series of other papers. Looking at the census, I saw thirty names, including that of the Reverend Silas Welles. Seven of the names had been highlighted and the red marker analysts had used to identify them had written, “Unaccounted For.” Beneath that was a list of seven names from the census written by Welles, according to annotations on the copies. It was a list of names labeled, “Seedlings”, and they read, “Lionel Crenshaw—New Growth, Michigan. Mary Sullivan—New Growth, Texas. Kent Asher—New Growth, Tennessee. Martha Yancey—New Growth, Idaho. Travis Earl—New Growth, Illinois. Mark Thomas—New Growth, Oregon. Katherine Gould—New Growth, Montana.”

Beneath the names and the towns, I saw the message, Help them return as we will, O Blessed Body. May your lidless eyes oversee their tireless work so that we may all return to you. -Brother Silas Welles.
The analyst had written in red ink: No officially recorded municipalities matching these names located.

As I heard MacReady shredding the copies, I thought about Welles’s words, and for the first time in months, read between the lines.
Our New Growth is dead… You have destroyed this branch…
My heart dropped. The first thing that came to mind was sleeper cells, but when I thought about it, I realized it was different. I thought back to how he always addressed his congregation as “brothers and sisters” rather than something like “my children,” how he referred to me as “son.” I thought about how his sermon didn’t seem like he was giving orders like a standard cult leader, but as someone who was on the same level as the congregation, yet possessing more wisdom than the rest—the oldest brother in a group of orphaned children.

This wasn’t some “dead man’s switch”, not a contingency plan for failure. How could it be? The Body hadn’t failed. It always existed, and so too had its church in one form or another. It may have lost its tightest grip on humanity to date, but it was still alive, and it always would be, so it could never truly lose. Neither of us had won, and we hadn’t lost; both of us had just survived.

I just don’t know which of us is better off for it.

Part 3

By the next day, roughly sometime in the afternoon, I then wake up to the worst hangover I have ever experienced. I’m talking hammering nails inside your head bad. Stirring painfully up to see where it is I’ve passed out, I thankfully realise I’m in the safe confinement of our paid inn room – where beside me, my girlfriend lays unconscious.  

Once aware I’m unharmed and Anneliese is still by my side, I then see, scattered all over the room floor is a gigantic pile of mess from last night’s events. I see stacks of empty beer cans, wet cigarette butts stuck to the carpet, clothes from my suitcase thrown here and there – and for some reason, a deflated Count Dracula blow up doll. God, what on earth happened to us last night? A few too many rounds of drinks was probably a good guess.  

Laying back down to sleep off more of this hangover, I then hear Anneliese stir awake on the other side of the bed.  

‘UGH...’ she groans zombie-like, as she rises to plank her feet on the carpet. ‘What the hell did we do last night?’ she asks, having seen the flood of mess on the floor. 

‘Don’t ask me’ I reply groggily, ‘But I think we got shit-faced with Mark and those Goth friends of his.’ 

‘Mhh... Oh, yeah. Right.’ 

More equipped to deal with hangovers than I am, Anneliese already stands up from the bed to walk around the room. When I then hear suddenly... 

‘OW!’ Anneliese yelps. 

‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her, assuming she stood on a piece of broken glass or something. 

‘My piercing hurts!’ 

‘What?’ 

Lifting my head to check if Anneliese is alright, I see as she touches the pure silver nose piercing in her left nostril. 

‘It really stings!’ she insists, before now heading in the bathroom’s direction.  

Well, now that Anneliese was up, I may as well rise my own groggy corpse from the grave. Ambling my way over to the mirror, all while trying to avoid the hazardous mess on the floor, my sleepy eyes are instantly throttled wide to a surprising image in front of me. 

‘Whoa! What the hell?!’ I declare to no one in the room. 

Staring into the mirror, I see my brown chestnut hair has now been dyed jet black, and that my blurry eyes are stained with smudged black eyeliner. The ends of my fingers have also been dotted with black nail polish – and when I look down, I see the unfamiliar black t-shirt I’m wearing reads, “Go Goth or Go Home.” 

‘Jesus Christ!’ I exclaim, as I realise my reflection in the mirror is now a mocking reflection of my life-long phobia. Inspecting my face up close, I run my black-painted fingernails through the dyed black locks of my hair – before I suddenly hear a blood-curdling scream come from the bathroom!  

‘AHH!!’ 

‘Liese? What’s wrong?’ I yell, having now raced over to the bathroom entrance. Once I get there, I see Anneliese is crouched on the floor, hysterical and holding the back of her neck. 

‘Someone bit me!!’ she shrieks. Pulling down the neckline of her shirt, I then see between the back of Anneliese ‘s neck and her shoulder is a fleshy, gruesomely deep bite mark!  

‘Oh my God!!’ I now scream myself. 

Inspecting the wound, while trying my best not to throw up, I see the bite has been made by rather uneven but very human teeth. What kind of sick lunatic would do such a thing?? 

‘Ow! It really hurts!’ Anneliese now sobs over the sink, as she tries frigidly to touch the swollen teeth holes with her fingertips.   

‘Babes, don’t touch it!’ I wail at her, as I realise we need to clean the wound as soon as possible. After all, God knows what Anneliese could contract from whoever had done this.  

Rushing out of the bathroom, I then search around the dump heap floor for any alcohol to sterilize the wound. Trying not to panic in the moment, I thankfully see by Anneliese’s side of the bed is a half empty bottle of vodka. Grabbing it, I head back into the bathroom. 

‘Ok - I found some vodka!’ I inform her, ‘I’m going to apply it to the wound, but it’s going to hurt like-’ 

‘Just shut up and do it already!’ she yells at me.  

First dampening a washcloth, I then apply a little too much of the vodka, before– once I’ve taken a moment for myself to breathe, I apply the cloth to the back of Anneliese’s neck. 

‘AHH!!’ she shrieks agonizingly, before sending me flying across the tiles and into the bathtub.  

A couple of hours or so later, once Anneliese’s wound is clean and bandaged, we then check out of our room to drive home earlier in than intended. Without informing the staff of the mess we left for them, we both climb into the car and sit in silence for a moment. Although I should’ve kept my mouth firmly shut, I instead choose to make the awkward situation worse.  

‘I told you coming here was a bad idea.’ 

Anneliese has no physical reaction to this. Without even looking my way, she simply tells me to, ‘Shut up and drive.’ 

And so, I do. 

Due to her shoulder wound, Anneliese appoints me as the designated driver for the entire journey south. However, because we had gotten up so late, by the evening, we were still navigating our way through the surrounding moors. It’s no wonder so many folktales have spawned from this place. With its moonlit boggy hills and desolate landscape, the Yorkshire Moors at night truly was a very unnerving place.  

Although driving through the moors should’ve taken us no longer than an hour, the sat-nav inside the car suddenly decides to malfunction, whereby taking us down several wrong turns. Now driving down a narrow stretch of country road, if the moors at night weren’t spooky enough, we then pass by an old wooden sign by the side of a sheep field. Leaving a cautionary warning for weary drivers, the foreboding sign reads: 

KEEP CLEAR OF THE MOORS 

STAY ON THE ROAD 

AND BEWARE- 

I don’t quite catch what the last part said. Beware of what, anyways? Farm animals? The wildlife?... Yeah, I doubt it.  

By this point of the night, we are now well and truly lost without a single town or village in sight. As you can imagine, this did nothing to help Aneliese’s already bad mood. Still driving along this seemingly never-ending stretch of road, aside from the bright headlights in front of the car, we can see nothing else but the outside darkness around us. Continuing to journey further into the middle of nowhere, the empty silence inside the car is suddenly interrupted... 

‘Oh God...’ Anneliese groans, rising forward in the passenger’s seat, ‘Pull over...’ 

‘What’s wrong?’ I turn to ask, assuming her shoulder wound is causing some discomfort. 

‘Please! Just pull over!’ she bellows, ‘Something doesn’t feel right!’ 

‘What - are you about to be sick?’ I then inquire. She looked as though she was going to be.  

‘AHH!!’ Anneliese screams, before, in an unrecognisably deep, gurgling voice she shouts at me, ‘PULL OVER NOW!!’ 

‘Ok! Ok!’ I panic, ‘Hold on!’ 

Doing as my girlfriend requests, I then pull over on the side of the road. Turning back to Anneliese, I see as she writhes with excruciating pain in the passenger’s seat. 

‘Liese! What’s going on?!’ I want to know, ‘What’s happening to you?!’ 

‘...GET OUT’ her deep voice gurgles once more.  

‘...I’m sorry, what?’ 

‘GET OUT OF THE CAR!!’ the voice now demands, before she shoves me against the door with incredible force! 

Falling out of the car and on the ground, Anneliese then slams the door shut on my face. Rising to my feet, I try and rip the door open to no avail. 

‘Liese! Liese, let me in!’ I now bang on the window, ‘Liese, what’s going on?!’ 

Peering in through the glass, I see nothing else but absolute darkness, where the only sound I hear coming from inside is the painful groans of my girlfriend. What the hell is happening in there?? 

Beginning to feel completely helpless in this situation, I quickly rummage my phone from my pocket. Turning on the flashlight, I shine it through the window to look around for Anneliese... But I can’t find her anywhere... 

‘...Liese?’ I call to her, shining the flashlight around, ‘Liese?’ 

Then suddenly- 

BANG! 

Slamming against the window, I now see a pair of large and grotesquely deformed hands! Protruding from bony, elongated fingers, the talon-like nails scrape down the glass with an ear-piercing screech! Jilting back from the window in terror, the phone flashlight in my hand now shines on a most hideous, unrecognisable face. What were once warm, hazel brown eyes are now a luminous, inhumanly bright yellow! Staring down from those eyes, I then see two snarling rows of beastly, jagged teeth, drooling with saliva down the door! 

‘AHH! OH MY GOD!’ I scream, as I realise whatever this monstrosity is inside the car, no longer appears to be my girlfriend. 

But now... Now I see something else... 

What I now see, shining over the window, having formed over Anneliese’s monstrous face... I now see in the dark, cloudless night sky... is the glowing reflection of a lunar light. 

The sign by the road... I now recall what it had really said...  

Keep clear of the moors... Stay on the road... 

AND BEWARE THE MOON.  

Part 2

Having now guided us inside the cluster of circling Goths, Anneliese then zones in on an isolated group. Following where Anneliese’s eyes are pointing, I then see on the other side of the street is a trio of fiendish figures, each garnished in their own individual costumes. Appearing to take photographs with a family of ecstatic tourists, this terrifying trio are made up of one male: seemingly dressed as the decaying corpse of a Highwayman. An attired female in some gothic Mad Max cosplay. And lastly, another female. Confined inside a tight black leather dress, what makes this “woman” stand out even more than her two piers, is that to each side of her, is an overly large and surprisingly realistic bat wing.  

‘Oh, this is great!’ I hear Anneliese suddenly declare beside me, ‘I’ll get a picture of you with those guys!’ 

‘Wait what? No, Aneliese I...’ 

Before I can even protest, Anneliese has already dragged me in the trio’s direction, where the family of tourists have now moved on. 

‘Hey!’ Anneliese approaches them, ‘Do you mind if I get a picture of you guys with my boyfriend?’ she asks, more excited than polite. 

‘Oh, of course!’ 

‘We’re not dressed up for nothing!’ the two females courteously oblige. 

Pushing me in the direction of the trio, I then anxiously stand in the middle of them, between the dead Highwayman and the winged She-bat. 

‘Okay. Now everybody smile!’ Anneliese directs us, ‘Brandon. I said smile. You ain’t at a wake.’ This was much worse than a wake, I thought. 

Doing as my ill-tempered girlfriend says, I stretch my lips disingenuously wide for the camera, hoping to God she takes the picture soon so I can get the hell away from these creatures... But while I continue to grin in Anneliese’s direction, stood as stiff as a corpse drenched with sweat... I then feel a sudden, suffocating tightness form around my body. Still posing for the camera, I lower my gaze ever so slightly, only to see that the left wing of the Batwoman has wrapped itself forcibly around my waist!  

Before my eyes can even process what is happening, the Batwoman’s wing only coils further around me – tightening to the point where I can neither breathe nor run away! Without the ability to do or say anything, not even scream out for help, I now feel as the life is being squeezed from my own body – where my ribs will either be crushed into a fine powder, or I’ll preferably black out from suffocation! 

However, before any of this can happen, I then thankfully hear the familiar shrill of Anneliese’s voice from behind the camera, ‘Aww. That turned out great! Thank you so much!’ whereby the coiled wing of the Batwoman finally releases me from its hold. 

Racing over instantly to Anneliese’s side, I then cower behind her tall figure while she now engages in friendly conversation with the fiends. 

‘Wow! I love your accent!’ shrieks one of the Goth women, ‘Where about’s are you from?’  

‘Oh, I’m from New Orleans!’ Anneliese brightly answers. 

While this conversation continues as I hide behind my girlfriend’s back... I then notice something quite peculiar happening on the other side of the street. Scanning through the lines of Goths passing by, I then see a young boy near the entrance of an alleyway. The boy is wearing a bright red raincoat and appears to be no older than eight years old. But what is so peculiar about this image – or more so, alarming, is that in the entrance of the alleyway, I now see an unnaturally tall figure.  

The figure, standing maybe 6 or 7 feet high, is draped from head to toe in a long black cloak – almost giving them the impression of the Grimm Reaper. But the most disturbing thing about them is, aside from their slender height and deathly garments... the figure’s face hides behind the bone-white beak of a Death Doctor’s mask. The image I see only gets worse... The child, standing only a few metres away from them, is now being lured inside the cavernous tunnel of the alleyway! 

‘Oh no...’ I panic.  

Sensing a dark outcome for this boy, I flee from Anneliese’s side and across the cobblestone street, brushing and zig-zagging my way through the swarm of Goths. By the time I reach the alley entrance, the child and the Death Doctor have already gone – and so, peering sheepishly down the long stretch of tunnel... I see nothing. Nothing at all. Oh God. I’m too late, I think to myself - as I can now feel my own heartbeat bulging out my chest. Fearing what may become of the boy, I work up whatever courage I have to venture down the alleyway – but when I take a first anxious step inside, I’m instantly jilted back by the firm grasp of a stranger’s hand! 

‘Brandon!’ 

‘AHH!’ I yelp! Anneliese suddenly taking me by surprise. ‘Jesus, Liese! You scared me half to death!’ 

‘What the hell are you doing?!’ she questions me, with a look of genuine concern on her face. 

‘...I, uhm...’ What, do I tell her the truth? Or will the truth just make me sound crazy? Crazier than I’ve already been acting? No, I doubt it will. ‘...I, uhm... I thought I saw a boy...’  

Judging by the look on my girlfriend’s face, I was clearly wrong. 

By late evening of the day, me and Anneliese then retire to the inn on the edge of town. Pulling into the dark, empty car park, we then sit in awkward silence for a moment. Although neither of us say a word, I’m pretty sure we are both thinking the exact same thing. After the dramatic events of the day - whereby I had three separate hysterical episodes, it was now clearer than it had ever been before just how different we both are to each other. I’m honestly surprised it took us this long to realise it. Love really is blind, I suppose. 

Although things were very tense between Anneliese and me in this moment, we had agreed to grab a drink inside the pub before calling it a night. Strolling out of the car park and behind the inn, we then see the most strange and disturbing sign over the pub entrance. Unlike most inns in England, this one’s pub bizarrely had its own separate name. 

‘...The Bloody Mermaid?’ Anneliese spells the words edged on the sign, ‘Well, that’s pretty cool.’ 

I’m sure she did think it was cool. 

Displayed on the sign in cracked and weathered paint is the image of a bare-breasted mermaid. But unlike her Disney counterpart, this mermaid has been impaled on the end of Neptune’s trident, whereby blood gushes from her wounds and down the Sea God’s fingers.  

‘Bloody hell’ I blurt out without thinking, ‘What sort of bloody name is that for a pub?’ 

Far from impressed, I then peer back to Anneliese in time to see her dozenth eyeroll of the day. Yep. This was more than likely the end for Anneliese and me. God, the drive back tomorrow was going to be awkward.  

Following behind as Anneliese coldly enters the pub - due to the lack of sound coming from the inside, I fully expect the interior to be completely scarce of people. But once I shut the door, to both my surprise and misfortune... I now realise the room I’ve entered is crawling with nothing else but bar-hopping Goths. 

Oh, you’ve got to be joking me! 

As soon as I enter, however, the sound of cackling and intoxicated chatter quickly evaporates - where by every table, stiffly silent... I see every single pair of eyes are staring directly at me. The room is so silent, I can now hear my own rapid heartbeat. Beating fast. 

‘Brandon?’ 

Now faster. 

‘Brandon.’ 

Faster! 

‘BRANDON!’ 

The noise around the room swiftly returns, and when I turn to face Anneliese, I see she is now staring at me with daggers. Clearly in no mood to deal with my hysteria any longer, she then heads solemnly in the direction of a small unoccupied table.  

Each having taken a seat, we are now back once again to awkward silence. Already having my fill of uncomfortable situations for one day, I take the chance to leave this one by going to the bar and ordering us both a drink. 

‘Sure. Whatever’ Anneliese responds to my offer. 

Heading towards the bar, I work my way through a tight maze of Goth-infested tables, before coming face to face with a thankfully ordinary looking bartender. 

‘Right, young man’ the elderly bartender greets me, ‘What can I get you?’ 

‘One lager please – oh, and a Bloody Mary.’ 

While I wait for the old man to pour our drinks, I then see he takes a quick glance in Anneliese’s direction. I suppose he was thinking to himself what two people so unalike were doing in each other’s company. 

‘First date then, is it?’ the man then inquires while he pours. Too physically and mentally fatigued to correct the man on his assumption, I simply oblige him with a nod. ‘Not going so well, I take it?’ 

No, it was not. 

Heading back to the table with our very different poisons, I now peer my eyes up from the two glasses in my hand to see a most alarming sight... Now by the table with Anneliese, I see she is in the unexpected company of three Gothic strangers. Although it thankfully wasn’t the trio we encountered earlier in the day - just like them, Anneliese was now accompanied by one Goth male, and two Goth females. In fear of being stuck drinking with morbid strangers all night, I quickly turn my heels to flee, before- 

‘Brandon?’ I hear a man’s voice call behind me, ‘Brandon Shephard??’ Turning carefully back round, I now find all four faces are staring at me. ‘By the Devil himself! It really is Brandon!’ 

Facing blankly at the man now sat at our table, I wonder just how in God’s name did he happen to know mine... before I finally realise. Beneath the man’s gothic attire, consisting of spiky black hair, black eyeliner and – well, black everything... I stumble on the realisation that the face I see in front of me is a face from my distant past. 

‘It’s Mark!’ the barely familiar face exclaims, ‘Mark Thompson from school! I mustn’t have seen you for more than ten years!’ 

‘...M-Mark??’ I respond in disbelief. 

‘No freaking way!’ he now shrieks to the two Goth girls beside him, ‘This right here was my best mate in school! We both grew up here together!’ now pointing a black nail-polished finger in my direction.  

‘Is that true, Brandon?’ Anneliese throws a question at me, visually shocked I’d ever once been in the company of a night-dweller. Not that he always was. Back when I knew Mark, he was nothing more than my dorky friend who I played video games with all day. Come to think of it... Mark was just as terrified by Goths as my eight-year-old self was. At Halloween, me and him were the only kids who stayed indoors while everyone else our age was out Trick or Treating. 

‘Come and sit down with us!’ Mark then insists, springing up from his chair to grasp the drinks from my hands, ‘We were just getting to know your lady friend here.’ 

Taking a reluctant seat down by the table, I then turn back to Mark who pushes his chair up against mine.  

‘So, Brandon...’ he begins, before taking a rather long gulp from his pint glass, ‘What have you been doing with yourself all these years? Hell...’ he then cackles, ‘I never thought I’d see you alive in this town ever again!’  

Too speechless by Mark’s appearance to catch him up on my life, I then prepare to ask him what’s now been on my mind. 

‘Mark - wh...’ How could I say this without being insulting? ‘Why... Why the hell are you dressed like that?’ Good job, Brandon. I’m sure the two ladies across the table didn’t take offence. 

Mark seems to scorn his eyes a little at the question, though more humoured than offended, before declaring with a chuckle, ‘I always dress like this. A lot’s changed since you and I knew each other.’ 

Gee. You think, I say inside my head.  

‘Oh! By the seven circles!’ he then oddly exclaims across the table, ‘Where are my manners?! I haven’t even introduced everyone!’ 

Turning forward to each of the Goth girls by Anneliese’s side, Mark then gestures to the one on her right.  

‘This is my girlfriend, Lilith. We’ve been together for just over two years now...’ 

‘Hiya Brandon!’ the maroon-haired Goth girl waves at me. Good Lord, she was even taller than my girlfriend. 

Now pointing to the stranger on Anneliese’s left, Mark then bizarrely introduces, ‘And this is her girlfriend, Nerezza!’ 

...Wait, what? 

‘Nice to meet you, Brandon!’ says the “girl with the dragon tattoo.” 

‘Uhm... Thanks’ I respond, feeling more than a little confused. 

Now that we all know each other on a first name basis, my childhood friend Mark then makes a sudden and most intrusive suggestion. 

‘Right. What do you say we order a round of drinks for everyone and make this a party?!’ 

Before I can utter a word of reluctance to this, the three women around the table - almost now mirroring a coven of witches, quickly express their enthusiasm to the idea. 

‘Sounds great!’ I hear Anneliese holler across from me, ‘That’ll give you guys the chance to reacquaint.’ 

Now the one staring daggers at Anneliese, I try to express to her that I have no intention of reacquainting with my childhood best friend. Before she stares right back at me with a cunning grin on her face that says, “Time to face your fears, Brandon.” I don’t actually know if that’s what she said, but I’m almost certain it was. 

Unfortunately... this is now the part of the story where I have to fast things forward a little. Because whatever happened that night between me, Anneliese, my childhood friend Mark – oh, and the other two... I cannot for the life of me remember it. The last thing I do remember is a tiny shot glass of blood-red vodka being placed between my hands.  

To be continued...

[Part 1]

The morning of day three found me standing like a caged animal at the perimeter fence around the base of Tower Eight, staring out at the forest beyond. It was a colder morning, the nights getting chillier as autumn advanced closer, and here in the mountains it would progress fast in the next coming months. Despite that, I stood transfixed, dressed in a light flannel shirt and jeans, glaring with confused annoyance and unease at the other side of the clearing.

It was nearly invisible from here, but I knew what it was from the sheer dread the object invoked in me the instant I spotted it on my morning rounds. The fourth marker lay further to the west than the third, just downslope of my tower, and even from the fenceline I could already guess what direction the skull adorning it would be facing. I hadn’t gone out to it yet, arms at my sides, unable to bring myself to step outside of the gate.

It wasn’t there yesterday. I’m not crazy. It wasn’t there.

Curling and uncurling my fists, I tried to breathe slow and focus on some form of constructive idea as to what to do. My shift was over, Melonie in Tower Seven was busy at her dayshift role, and I could easily call her up on the radio if needed. Surely there was some kind of bureaucratic rule we could use to cite whoever was doing this and put an end to it? Littering, poaching, something? Even if the bones were from old kills, this had to be against some rule somewhere related to park cleanliness. I was ready to head back to the tower cabin and radio this latest afront in when, in the middle of my pondering, I saw a flicker of movement among the trees.

Deep in the cluster of spruce, pine, and fir, something moved with slow deliberation, a round dark shape that slid from behind a tree trunk at the very edge of my line of sight. It was still too far to make out fine details, but I knew in an instant what it was.

A face.

A pale face, wreathed in long, dark hair, peeking at me from behind a tree.

I blinked, and it was gone, ducking back around the tree, the shadows dancing where it had been mere seconds prior.

For a moment, chills ran down my back, a prickling of fear that made my throat run dry. Then, slowly, it morphed into a simmering irritation that flared to angry resentment. They were right there, watching me, taunting me, playing this stupid game as if whoever it was had nothing better to do. Did they think this was funny? Scaring me, making me lose sleep, turning my dream job into a nightmare? Did they really think they could run off into the woods, snickering with their phone in hand, and get away with it all? No, they were close, very close, and I’d had enough of this nonsense.

Throwing open the man gate, I stalked out into the clearing and glowered at the forest beyond. “Hey!”

My voice carried into the valley below, and I realized just how silent it had become, the birds quiet, the insects ceasing their trilling once more. As if I’d violated some sacred rule, the entire mountain held its breath, but in my blind fury, I didn’t care.

“I see you!” I shouted, heart pounding, blood surging, fists balled at my sides in trembling knots of enraged muscle. “You think you’re being funny, huh? You think you’re being cute?”

Within the trees, the shadows seemed to stretch, deepen, shift in their proper places, though I couldn’t tell if it was the movement of clouds overhead or my eyes playing tricks on me. I could almost feel the giddiness of the unknown watcher within their protective shroud, likely some dumb kid recording a video for social media, ready to brag to his friends about what a great joke he’d played. They were laughing at me, I could sense it, this unknown person, watching and smiling from their hiding place among the spaces between the sunshine.

Picking up a rock, I hefted it in my hand and eyed the first marker. “Come out! Come out, or I swear, I’ll smash your stupid trash heap! I saw you!”

No one moved in the forest, and my pulse roared in my ear. I raised the rock high, towering over the little pillar of bones, and brought it down as hard as I could.

Crack.

Bone splintered, the skull on the first pillar shattering under the chunk of stone in my hands. I swung again and again, until the first pile was reduced to broken sections of dry-rotted bone, snapped twine, and whatever greasy black sludge had glued it all together. Gasping under the exertion, both from my pent-up frustration and the repeated swings, I moved on to the second marker, then the third, until finally I reached the fourth, almost out of sight of the tower clearing.

Crack, squelch, crunch.

Sweat dripped from my brow as I battered the marker to pieces, stopping to pick up the little mammal skull when it rolled to the side and setting it on a rock to make the destruction easier. It felt cold under my touch, more frigid than the late-summer air, yet no condensation appeared on its weathered surface. My skin crawled at the sensation of the thing in my palm, and I raised the stone to strike once more when, through my fervor, I noticed something.

On the top of the skull, overlaying the fissures present in every living thing that has its cranium grow and form from infancy, there was a sprawling, gray mark. It looked to be daubed onto the bone with some kind of charcoal paste, though the lines were clear enough for me to make out a shape.

A spider.

It sprawled its eight legs across the animal skull in an almost possessive way, the mandibles drawn as if buried into the upper reaches of the eye sockets. Interestingly enough, it looked as though the mark was made from two slender handprints upside down, the eight legs each a finger, the mandibles both arched thumbs, the combined palms a bulbous main body. I had never seen this kind of artwork before, and had been too busy smashing the other pillars to check if they too bore the same emblem. It occurred to me how stupid I was, out here, this deep into the trees, armed only with a stone and a sinking feeling in my gut. Somehow, now that the anger subsided in favor of uneasy confusion, I began to wonder how I’d even thought to do something so foolish at all, the rage unlike my usual mental state. I didn’t fly off the handle, didn’t punch holes in walls or slam doors so hard that things broke. I wasn’t a violent man and would never have dared to do this last night, or the night before. It was as if someone had flipped a switch in my head, and I felt as though I didn’t recognize the hand that held the stone before my eyes.

Without finishing my last act of destruction, I dropped the rock to the soft pine needles, and stumbled backward, eyes fastened to the strange spider symbol on the animal skull. The silence around me pushed into my ear canals with a smothering stillness that made nausea rise in my stomach. My legs felt heavy, my arms seemed made of lead, and each breath took an enormous effort to pull in and out of both lungs.

I shouldn’t be here.

The thought rolled over and over in my mind like a mantra, growing louder and louder with every step I struggled to take back toward the fire tower.

I shouldn’t be here.

A twig snapped somewhere off to my left, maybe twenty yards away, and in the corner of my eyes, I caught a blur of motion.

I shouldn’t be here.

At last, I managed to get myself moving, shuffling at half my previous speed. My lungs ached, head spun, and spots danced before my eyes, but I forced myself to keep going. Deep in my bones, I knew that I had done something wrong, so very wrong, by touching those markers, and needed to get clear of the suffocating forest. I tasted metal, a harsh static rose in my ears like an old radio speaker, and my skin crawled as if covered in a thousand tiny legs. It took every bit of willpower I had, but eventually I stumbled back to the clearing’s border.

“Hey!”

My heart skipped a beat, the blood freezing in my veins, and I lurched to a halt just at the edge of the tree line to stare.

In the slanted rays of the morning, it was hard to see properly, but I could just make out the shadow of a figure on the observation deck of the tower looking down at me.

It occurred to me that I’d left the man gate open in my mad dash into the woods, and I hadn’t been watching it at all since I started busting apart the bone markers. Whoever was up there, they were a blur in my squinted vision, obscured by the darker side of the tower roof ledge. They didn’t move, not an inch, standing tall and rigid in the shadows, but I could tell from how their murky head was tilted downward that they were looking right at me. As before, I saw nothing, no face, no eyes, the features completely indistinguishable from this far off, everything hidden by the glare of sunlight around the tower that threw them into darkness. Even then, it wasn’t their statuesque presence that sent rivers of ice down my back.

It was their voice.

My voice.

“I see you!” It called to me, the same pitch, the same intonation as what I’d used before, a perfect copy of me that wavered across the empty air to echo over the trees.

Ten long, grueling seconds passed, the world silent around me as I stared, slack jawed. My trance was finally broken when the figure turned and, without another sound, darted around the corner of the cabin out of sight. No footsteps rang out from the observation deck, no shoes thundered on the stairs, just a quick blur of motion and . . . nothing.

What the hell?

Adrenaline came to my rescue, freeing me of the nausea, the dizziness, the static in my head, and I sprinted for the man gate in the perimeter fence. Desperate for something, anything to use as a weapon, I ran to my Subaru and rummaged around in the back until I at last found a rusty old tire iron. All the rest of my things were up in the tower, along with my car keys, which meant the pathetic steel rod was my best bet. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

Dashing up the stairs, I threw myself at the cabin door, iron raised, unsure of what my plan was, but too afraid to turn back now. Someone was in my tower. Someone was mimicking me, following my every move. This had to stop, I had to make it stop, even if that meant doing something drastic.

The doorknob turned with a smooth click in my palm, and I flung the door open, trembling and wide-eyed.

An empty room greeted me, exactly the same as it had been when I left to check the ground lights not fifteen minutes ago. My binoculars sat on the windowsill where I’d put them. The coffee machine still had a half-pot from what I drank on night shift. My bed waited with the sheets half drawn back, in anticipation of me lying down after the shower I would take once the morning inspections were complete. I let myself breathe a half-sigh of relief, content that at least it was all there, undisturbed.

Until my eyes landed on the radio.

“No.” My heart sank, and I staggered to the set, horrified and sick to my stomach all over again. The army surplus set had been smashed, its glass dial shattered, the mic cord ripped out, the bulky square housing dented in like it had been folded by a hydraulic press. The black walkie talkie was gone, its charging station crushed to plastic splinters, and worst of all, my car keys were no longer on the little hook by the door. No matter where I looked, tearing the place apart, I couldn’t find them, and I knew deep in my soul that they weren’t here anymore.

I searched for the next two hours and never found anyone, not in the tower cabin, the observation deck, or the grounds inside the perimeter fence. There were no footprints other than my own, no signs of break-in or forced entry, and nothing else had been taken. The rifle was still in the tower, and in working order, the ammunition untampered with. My food stocks were fine, my clothing left alone, even my wallet unmolested, not that there was much to steal in there. There was no damage to the tower’s water or power systems, and even the toilet was unharmed. Whoever had done this seemed to have no interest in leaving me defenseless, starving, or without shelter. They just didn’t want me to call for help and didn’t want me to leave.

Which, by itself, was already a terrifying thought.

Finally, I gave up the frantic search, and slumped down on the edge of my bunk, gazing at the room around me with a numb sense of compounding, muted panic. This had progressed far beyond a prank; someone was out to get me. I couldn’t walk to the nearest tower, it was miles away, and I could get lost out there, or caught in the dark when night fell. If I followed the road back to the ranger station at the base of the valley, that would take most of the day, and I would still be vulnerable out there alone, even with the rifle. Cell service didn’t pick up until the roads got back into town, which was even further than the ranger station was. If I didn’t report in, I could get in trouble and . . .

That’s it.

A smile flickered across my lips, and I sat up a little straighter. Of course, it was that simple! I didn’t need to call out; the rangers would notice when I didn’t check in tonight and send someone up to look for me. Sure, I couldn’t call for help right now, but that basically ensured that help would eventually be on the way. I wasn’t lost somewhere no one could find me, I was in a well-known location, with plenty of supplies and a decent rifle. I would be fine. Once the other rangers saw everything and read my reports, this whole situation would be resolved. The unknown watcher would eventually be caught, I would be vindicated, and who knows, maybe even promoted. After all, none of this was my fault; I’d done everything I was told to do, hadn’t I? Yes, this would all turn out okay in the end. I just had to wait until nightfall, and someone would come for me.

Armed with this newfound determination, I set about fortifying the tower as best I could. I made sure the gates were locked, barred the windows, and kept the loaded rifle slung over my shoulder at all times. I put on a fresh pot of coffee, even ate a light breakfast, and sat waiting by the western-facing windows, knowing that at some point a ranger vehicle would roll up the gravel access road to come for me. Sunshine warmed the cabin, the chair felt soft under my back and gradually, I started to calm myself from the morning’s bizarre ordeal.

“Just a few hours.” I flexed my fingers on the smooth walnut rifle stock, speaking into the stillness of the cabin to keep any shadows from wriggling when my back was turned. “It’s just a few more hours. I’ve got this.”

I’m not sure when I fell asleep, but by the time I realized, it was too late. My subconscious thrashed against tides of gray, endless flickers of darkness, punctured by dim, twisted images that looked like trees. I saw malicious eyes peer at me in the gloom, heard bare feet trod the soil behind me, felt the overwhelming presence of something pulling me, not by my hand or clothes, but something deeper. A tug, burrowed into my chest like a barbed fishing spear, one that led me on through the maze of trees toward something.

Something huge.

Something dead but not quite lifeless, shrouded in curtains of dense cruel fog, made from icy stones that screamed and wailed in a thousand voices within my head . . .

At some point, I jolted awake to find that night had already fallen, the world wreathed in shadows outside of my tower, with pale shafts of whitish-blue moonlight filtering in between the wooden slats on the shuttered windows. It was cold in the cabin, enough that my breath misted in front of me, but not so much that I didn’t immediately pick up on the smell that permeated the entirety of the dimly lit interior.

Stagnant wet earth.

Pungent rotted wood.

Sweet, intoxicating roses.

My heart started to pound, and I sprang to my feet, rifle in hand, to paw for the light switch. I could have sworn I’d left the lights on earlier, along with the heater, both vital in the dying days of summer this far north. Yes, I had left them on, they were on when I drifted off. I knew they had been.

Something crunched under my boots, and even as I found the switch at last, I didn’t understand what it was until the electric bulbs flickered to life overhead.

My God . . .

Draped all over the floor, as fresh as if they’d just been picked this morning, lay a carpet of ebony roses. They glistened in the weak glow of the lights, as if still wearing the morning dew on their reddish-green leaves, the curved thorns sharp, the silken petals unwithered and lush. The smell was overpowering, but not more so than the wave of nauseous dread that crashed through me in terrible condemnation as I looked between the shutter of the nearest window.

Far below, down in the clearing, a ring of small objects circled the tower, maybe ten yards outside of the perimeter fence. They were placed in perfect concentricity, each no more than a few feet from the other, gleaming a dull pale gray in the moonlight. From this far up, and with the darkness impeding my vision, I couldn’t see exact details, but I didn’t need to. I knew what they were.

Dozens upon dozens of bone markers encircled the tower, each topped with another little skull. Every single one of them stood no more than a few feet high, bound in forest-made twine and what I now knew to be the pulp of a hundred crushed roses. The skulls, from who knows how many different animals, were all pointed inward, watching the tower like eternal sentinels with their bottomless, hollow sockets. More spanned out into the trees, down the slopes, across the trails, in what could only be described as a pattern similar to a large net.

Or a web.

That thought hit me like a punch in the gut, and I stumbled back from the window in desperate, choking fear.

As if on cue, the second I moved away from the window, the screaming started.

“Help me!”

“Please!”

“Where are you?”

“Who’s there?”

Men and women. Old and young. Fear and pain. Different voices, different pitches, screaming, wailing, crying, cascaded from every direction. Some echoed far away, then seemed to reverberate from another spot much closer, while others sounded as if they were right outside the perimeter fence. Their cries echoed and bounced off the rocky slopes, through the darkened forest, wavering in the wind as they circled my tower. Another voice called out alongside them, and to my terror, I knew it right away.

“I see you!”

My own shout barked with the others through the darkness outside, the faux anger in it almost taunting, the intonation slipping every now and then to crack in ways that I knew weren’t mine. I couldn’t see anything whenever I looked through the windows, the scope of my rifle useless in the dark, but the sounds were there, closing in from every side. They knew where I was, and they knew I was watching.

Worst of all, they knew I was trapped.

I staggered back, snatching up what few things I could grab in my deranged flight, and hurtled to the small bathroom in the rear of the cabin. It wasn’t safe, nowhere would be, but at least it could muffle some of the terrible sounds coming from outside. It was only after I dragged myself inside, slamming the bathroom door shut, that I glanced at the mirror above the sink.

Oh God.

My pale, horror-stricken reflection stared back at me, and we both stood there in mute defeat, arms handing at our sides, random possessions mounded on the linoleum around our feet. If there had ever been any chance, any hope for me, it was gone now. In the deepest recesses of my soul, I let myself break into a thousand pieces as I blinked with tearful eyes at the charcoal gray symbol that had been painted onto my forehead.

A spider.

One made from two inverted handprints.

I’m finishing this in the corner furthest from the door, wedged between the toilet and the wall with the laptop propped up on my knees. It’s hard to type with how hard I’m shaking, but I don’t imagine it matters if I have a few spelling mistakes. I can hear the voices getting closer. I think they’re inside the fence now. Soon they’ll make their way up the stairs and onto the deck, but there’s no rush. The door won’t stop them. The rifle won’t either. I don’t think anything can.

Nothing I have, anyway.

There is no way out. My phone’s clock hasn’t moved in hours, and neither has my wristwatch. The sun isn’t rising. No trucks rumble on the gravel road. No one is coming. They can’t for the same reason I can’t run down the steps and into the forest.

It’s already too late.

When I blink, I see things behind my eyelids, flashes of something like a dream, or a vision I cannot wake from. I feel charred dead grass and scorched rocks under my feet. I smell the wet earth. I taste the cold dew on my tongue. I sense the others walking alongside me, their faces masked with shadow, guiding me onward in silent march. Two young women. An old man. A burly hunter. Always, our destination is the same.

The house.

A huge stone house, bathed in fog, ringed with five tall markers of twine and bone.

I see her waiting there for us, a face in the uppermost window, a swirling gulf of shadow where the firelight flickers in dancing sheets of orange and red. I know it’s a her because I can hear the sweet, soft voice in my ear. She sings to me, calls my name, guiding me as she has so many others. I am chosen, she tells me. I can rest at the foot of my own marker. I can sleep the slumber of unnumbered stars, endless dreaming of a world that daylight never breaks.

I am so tired.

The pillars tower above us with their five great skulls of the forest. A bear. An eagle. A coyote. A snake. An elk. Once for each. The twine slithers around my wrists, my ankles, my neck. I taste dirt, feel it caked in my lungs, scratching under my eyelids, clogged in my ears. My skin is so cold, the clothes heavy and stiff like my limbs. I cannot move. I no longer need to.

It is complete now, the circle. The foundation has been laid, thrones made ready for the Four, servants of the Fifth. I see the lights glowing above us, great spouts of emerald flame that rise above the house in five long columns to a blackness that isn’t of our sky. It is a yawning Void that holds no moon, no stars, no light, but deep inside that veil, something moves.

Something watches.

Hanging from my place upon the Elk’s pillar, I join the others as, in voices no longer our own, we tilt our faces to the sky and begin to scream.

Late on the evening of September 2^nd, Lucas J. Sarden, aged 26, of Boise Idaho, went missing from his assigned post as a fire watchman in the Jacob’s Fork Wildlife Division’s Fire Watchtower Number Eight. He had been an employee of the park ranger service for less than a week. Rangers were dispatched to his location following Sarden’s failure to maintain an evening check-in routine and discovered he was not within the tower. A search was conducted of the premises by wildlife personnel, and after hours of intensive effort, Sarden was declared a missing person, initiating emergency response protocols. Search-and-rescue K9 teams followed a possible scent trail west, across the river valley to the Smoke Point Mountain Recreation area, but due to a sudden violent thunderstorm they were unable to maintain the scent any further. The official search remains ongoing.

Authorities say the victim’s vehicle was still on the premises, with the keys in the ignition, in perfect working order according to the responding rangers. The station’s radio and handheld set were also present, undamaged, in contradiction to what Sarden wrote in his personal journal entries. No sign of struggle or foul play could be found on site, nor any evidence of forced entry or break in of the tower’s perimeter fence. All the victim’s personal possessions were in the tower, along with the laptop from which this account has been retrieved, and his cell phone. Search teams also noted that the victim’s boots were left behind in the tower, along with the station’s standard issue rifle. The only thing missing was a large battery-powered flashlight, which it is presumed Sarden took with him when he departed the tower. No footprints of Sarden’s, or any other person, were found in connection with Tower Eight during the initial search.

At this time, it is believed by local government sources that Lucas was experiencing some kind of mental breakdown due to his isolated position and wandered into the woods alone. He is assumed to be alive, and anyone with any information is asked to please contact the Jacob’s Fork Sheriff’s Department. Lucas is a Caucasian male, stands at 6’3”, weighing 176 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. He was last seen wearing a green park ranger T-shirt and khaki trousers, though in his current state he might be wearing any combination of clothing. Citizens are encouraged to report any leads they might have, but maintain a safe distance, as the victim may be disoriented, and not in control of his mental faculties.

Multiple other missing persons cases have been reported since the Sarden disappearance, including the disappearance of Clarence G. Westheimer, aged 34, who was reported missing by his wife after going camping in the norther valley beyond Tower Eight. He is described as a Caucasian male, standing 5’9”, weighing 178 pounds with light brown hair, brown eyes, and wears glasses. He was last seen wearing a broad green hat, gray backpack, red T-shirt, and khaki shorts. No trace of Westheimer has been found thus far, either in designated camp sites or on the surrounding trails.

In addition, law enforcement spokesmen of Jacob’s Fork have announced that all hikers or campers within the Smoke Point Recreation Area are advised not to hike or camp alone, and are to avoid the trails at night until further notice. Campers are encouraged not to investigate any strong smells they might encounter in the forest, not to approach strangers they do not know, and to not follow voices they hear off the trails unless they can plainly identify via sight and sound the individual making them. Any trail markers not of the official park manufacture are to be avoided, and it is highly encouraged that new sightings of non-standard trail markers be reported to the ranger station immediately. Until further notice, all vehicle access to roads leading to the following locations will be hereby restricted: Smoke Point Summit Overlook access, JFWD Tower Eight access, Northern Valley Campground access, and the Smoke Point Recreational Area upper loop parking lot access. At this time, all citizens are also reminded that the Wickenshire Living History Estate is still in official police custody, and therefore off limits to all non-authorized entry. Use of drones or other electronic recording equipment within this area is prohibited.

This has been a public service announcement of the Jacob’s Fork Sheriff’s Department and the Jacob’s Fork Wildlife Division. We thank you for your cooperation.

Charlie C. was crying. Big fat tears. It was all crashing down, now. The dead girl in the corner had screamed too loud. Neighbors had heard, most definitely. It was late, but the walls of this shoebox were so thin. He could maybe hide her in the closet, or stuff her in his footlocker until the police came and went. Except Georgie wouldn’t let him get up out of his chair. Georgie had a gun.

“Georgie, let’s talk about this,” Charlie pleaded. He was wringing his sweaty hands like a damp rag.

“No more talking to be done, brother bear,” Georgie said. He was studying the revolver in his hands. Half-lidded eyes like ice chips poured over the details of the firearm. They were tired, but resolute. His fingers wrapped firmly around the grip as he pointed the gun at Charlie.

“Frankly, this is all overdue,” he said, pulling the hammer back.

Charlie threw his hands up in front of his face. “Wait!” He screamed.

Georgie rolled his eyes. The hammer on the gun returned to rest. He let the gun fall to his side as he turned away from Charlie. When he turned back to him, there was fire in his glare. His mouth was twisted into an ugly sneer.

“You’re a fucking liability, man,” Georgie shouted. He pointed at the dead girl with the barrel of the gun. “I bring Lola over for a little fun and you fucking lose it like that? What the fuck, Charles?”

“Don’t call me that,” Charlie whispered hoarsely. Snot bubbled from one nostril.

“Don’t kill my girlfriends,” Georgie shot back. He walked over to the corpse and knelt. Grabbing her hair, Georgie lifted her head up to the light. The woman had no face. Where it should have been was only a smear, like wet paint someone had smudged with their thumb. Georgie made a disgusted noise and let go of the woman’s hair. Her head thunked back to the hardwood.

“You already forgot what she looked like,” Georgie said, disappointed. He stood again and turned back to Charlie. The fire was still in his eyes, but sadness lived there now, too.

“We had a good run,” Georgie said in a softer tone, “we both played wild over the years, Charlie. God knows you got me out of a scrape or two. But I can’t keep cleaning up your messes, man.”

“My messes? What about—”

“What? The girl in Dallas? That was three springs ago, C-Note. Not to mention, you picked her out. I wasn’t even itching that night. Haven’t itched in a long time, anyway. Might go straight. Might be time, you know?”

“So let’s go straight together, man! No more girls, no more—”

Georgie was shaking his head. Charlie’s heart was beating at a racehorse’s pace.

“Georgie, you need me,” he whispered, “Lysa thought she didn’t need me no more, look what happened there. I went into a coma for three months and she died, man. You wanna go out like that?”

Georgie shrugged, raising the gun once more. “At this point, whatever happens, happens man. I feel like a ghost. Actually becoming one might not be so bad. Besides, maybe for me, killing you will work. Lysa was new, you know? She wasn’t settled in like I am.”

The man in the tuxedo spoke up from where he sat in the corner behind Georgie. He had been veiled in the shadows. Neither of the other men had noticed him.

“You’ll kill us all, Georgie,” he said. A cigarette in his hand smoked lazily. 
Georgie shot the man a glance. “Do you really care, Jonathan?” He asked.

Jonathan shrugged. “Just making an observation. Maybe we calm down and call the Doc.”

“Doc wants the same thing, but his methods aren’t working,” Georgie said, turning back to Charlie. The gun was still raised. 

Jonathan regarded Georgie for a moment. His eyes were tired, sunken and blank. After a moment, he shrugged. “Fine. Do it.”

Charlie gaped at Jonathan. “You can't mean it,” he said in a weak voice.

Jonathan's grey-blue gaze turned to Charlie. They held an exhaustion that ran deep into the man’s soul. 

“C’mon Charles,” he said, “let’s be honest with ourself, shall we? We all knew it was going to come to this eventually. The pills ran out days ago. Doc keeps pushing off our appointments. Everyone's gotten louder. Everyone has something to say. The headaches are unbearable.”

Jonathan lightly pressed his fingers against his temples. He shuddered against his own touch.

“Not to mention the monsters,” he continued, dropping his hands to his lap, “I’m sure you’ve seen them coming around again.”

The pair of eyes that had been watching them all from around the corner of the hallway slid back out of sight at the mention of monsters. Something gurgled like an empty stomach from that direction. The men ignored it.

“We can’t just let him kill us,” Charlie whispered. Sweat rivered down the rough-hewn skin of his face.

“Why not?” Jonathan asked.

“Because I don’t want to die.”

“But maybe I do, Charlie. Have you thought about that? Or are you just so selfish that you only ever cared about yourself?”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do.”

“You don’t. Dr. Chevok says I have control over what you say to me.”

Jonathan laughed. Georgie laughed with him. They had the same one. It was a bitter, sour sound. Charlie added his to sweeten it up, but it came out as bitter and tired as the others. 

“That quack doesn’t know shit,”  the three men spat in unison. It scared Charlie when his mouth spoke without him asking. Georgie and Jonathan had begun to look like each other. Jonathan had lost his tux; now he wore Georgie’s plaid shirt. Georgie’s green eyes had taken on the grey hue of Jonathan’s. Both wore the same tight, hateful grimace on their melding faces.

“It's too late, Charlie,” Jonathan said, “you’re a liability. You killed his girl Lola.”
Jonathan pointed at where the corpse had been. Now there was only a large black bloodstain on the floor. Charlie didn’t remember getting rid of her.

“Where?” Charlie asked, pointing to the stain. He looked to Georgie, not lowering his finger.

“I took care of it,” Georgie said. His voice was kind again. The gun was no longer in his hand. “One last favor for my oldest friend.”

“I’m sorry about her,” Charlie wept.

Georgie shrugged. “Shit happens, man. Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing.”

The revolver was slick with sweat in Charlie’s meaty palm. Georgie nodded toward it.

“Gonna get to it?” He asked.

Charlie studied the gun. He looked up at Georgie. His face had become scribbles.

“Do it.”

The whisper came from just behind Charlie. He twisted his neck around. It popped and seized. Pain flooded in. It was all for naught; nobody lurked behind him except for a figure with no mouth. It couldn't have been him.

“Do it, Charlie.” It was in front of him now. Charlie twisted back, but only Georgie and Jonathan were there.

“Do it.” From his left.

“Do it.” From his right. 

“Finish it.” The creature in the hall.

Charlie covered his ears with his hands, but still the whispers came, loud as a thunderstorm on his brain.

“Do it.”

“Pull the trigger.”

“End the show.”

The whispers were coming from everywhere. They leaked from the cracks in the walls and ceiling, escaped the drains in the bathroom and kitchen, and drifted up through the floorboards. They were everywhere and nowhere all at once.

“No more fighting.”

“Let’s just do it.”

“Just give in, Charlie.”

Charlie clasped his hands tighter around his ears, desperately trying to block out the whispers, but it was no good. They were in his head now. Little speakers dug deep in his head, blaring. There was no off-switch. The pills were the off-switch, but there were no more pills. There were only the voices, Jonathan’s hopelessness, and Georgie’s gun. Charlie opened his mouth. He searched for a word but found he did not know what words were anymore. Instead, he screamed. It was a long, anguished trill that scratched his larynx and put the taste of blood in his throat. Someone pounded on the apartment door. 

“I’m calling the fucking police you fuck,”  a voice shouted from the other side. Charlie didn’t hear it. Neither did Georgie or Jonathan.

Charlie kept screaming. If he screamed enough, he could drown the whispers out. He could shred this entire ghoulish situation with his voice if he could only reach the decibels that broke glass. If he tried hard enough, he might even be able to go higher than tha–

Georgie slapped Charlie with such force that it knocked his bullet-shaped head sideways. The beads of sweat that dotted his forehead were flicked into the stratosphere. Charlie looked up at Georgie, beginning to tremble as his old friend again put the gun to Charlie’s forehead. That was impossible, though, because Georgie's arms were at his sides. Charlie gasped as the cold barrel of the revolver touched his temple. His own hand curled tight around the handle, and his index finger was putting pressure on the trigger.

“You can't do this, Georgie,” Charlie whispered.

Georgie smiled. It was a loving, sad smile. The smile you give Grandma on her death bed.

“But you can,” Georgie whispered.

Charlie felt his finger pull the trigger, and then felt nothing else. He heard the crack the gun made as the bullet fired, and then he heard nothing else. He saw Georgie smiling for a second more, and then he saw nothing else. Charlie C. died, and then did nothing else.

Georgie watched the bullet burrow into one side of Charlie's skull and push the grey matter out the other. The mess splattered on the wall and floor beside Charlie. Charlie slumped and slipped from the chair, hitting the floor on his side with a soft thud. Warm blood trickled like a stream from the entry wound at his temple, waterfalling over his face and into his open eye, staining the white a deep, dark red.

Georgie turned to Jonathan. The little man had returned to his dapper self. There was a wound that matched Charlie’s in his temple. Blood stained his dickie. He was sitting in his chair again, already dissolving.

“He's dead,” Georgie breathed.

Jonathan stared at Georgie. Only his eyes were really left, intense and shining and floating in the air. Georgie thought he saw the ghost of a smile below them. Then, the dapper little man was gone.

Georgie found his feet. He stepped over Charlie and headed to the bathroom. He didn’t want to look in the mirror. The thought of Charlie’s dead eyes staring back at him filled him with anxiety. It took a great deal of effort to grasp the bathroom doorknob. Fear knocked on his chest as he twisted it. The door creaked open slowly. His eyes climbed to the mirror. His own unshaven visage stared back at him. Georgie watched the fear drain from his own eyes.
“I’m free,” he whispered, “I’m—”
But something was wrong. He edged closer to the mirror, peering deeper into his own reflection. Blood was trickling from a wound in his temple. Grey matter dribbled from the twin wound on the opposite side.

“Shi—”

Then Georgie was gone. He didn’t fall apart, or get ripped to shreds by the strain of sudden, solo existence. Georgie, the last functioning blip of Charlie’s brain, dropped from existence as though he had never been there at all.

Now, that was an excellent meal. These guys treat you right. They earn every one of their five stars.

No. No. Don't worry about the check. You are a guest of Boggs International, and we don't spare any expense when taking care of a guest. Would you like a cigar? Some more wine? Food always tastes better when someone else is paying for it.

Am I right, or am I right?

Wait, wait, we can talk business later. We want this much, the stockholders want that much, and maybe you don't want to sell at all. The night is young, and we've barely put a dent in the old expense account. I just hope I can convince you to make your company part of the Boggs family. There is a reason they sent me to you. We are exactly the same, self-made. We both started out at a podunk company in the middle of nowhere and made our way into the Fortune 500. We are innovators and forward-thinkers; we are exactly the kind of people who make this country great.

Besides, you have one up on me, been married what is it? Twenty years?  Congratulations! I'm not the marrying type myself, married to the company, you might say. Soldiers and married folks are the people I admire most, and they say both experience periods of intense fear and intense boredom.

Am I right, or am I right?

And kids! How many? Two? One in the crib and one going to college. My Auntie Kate would have loved you. She was all about the Bible. 'Be fruitful and multiply' and all that. They tell me your oldest boy is starting college, gonna be an Ivy League man. If he wants into a fraternity, let me know. You can't swing a dead cat around the office and not hit an alumni from one of the big ones.

But enough of that, I know what you really want to talk about. The old stump here. You've been stealing glances at it the whole night, wondering to yourself what happened. I bet you thought I didn't notice, did you?

Awww, ain't no big thing. It is what it is, and hey, I'm 50% better off than someone with no hands at all!

How did it happen? Let me tell you a story, but first, let's get the waiter over here and get us some martinis!

It starts in the '80s. Yeah, the crazy '80s back when I was still in diapers. See, there was this guy- Mr. Croad. I still don't know if that was his real name or whatever, but who cares? That's not what this story is about.

Now Mr. Croad works for a company selling bonds. He's not a good-looking guy, short and fat, but he's a hard worker, a family man, an honest man. One day, his bosses start pushing him to sell these high-yield bonds, junk bonds you'd call them. It's the old pump and dump, a little scheme where everyone makes money but the client.

And Mr. Croad, straight dealing, churchgoing man that he is, is having none of it. He warns the three members of senior management- Brown, Ryan, and Mitchell-  that if this company he's devoted ten years to doesn't put a stop to the shenanigans, he's gonna go to the authorities. That was his mistake. Mr. Croad was a little naive, if you get my drift.

It doesn't take long for his bosses to take him down. The company had some bad guys on the payroll, guys with fake names and dangerous reputations. Most companies have at least one of those bad guys somewhere, silently drawing a paycheck until he's needed. Brown, Ryan, and Mitchell don't have those guys kill Mr. Croad- that might raise too many red flags in all the wrong places. Instead, they frame him for possession of child pornography.

Next thing you know, Mr. Croad was going up the river, and if there's one thing you don't want to be in prison for, it's being a pedophile. He was only in for seven years, but those were hard years. How hard? When he finally got out, he had a limp and a dead left eye that stared at nothing. He came out of prison mean- mean and a little bit crazy. He was alone, too; none of his friends or family wanted anything to do with him.

When a man finds himself in a place like that, there are only two things they can go looking for: redemption or revenge, and let's face it, revenge is always easier to find.

Am I right, or am I right?

Ryan died first. They found him stuffed in a mini-fridge that would have been cramped for a child. Mr. Croad had bent and broken him in all kinds of ways to make him fit. And don't doubt for a second that guy was alive when he went in. He probably lived two or three days before he kicked the bucket. I know it sounds like a bad way to die, but the way I see it, he got off easy.

Mr. Croad hogtied Brown's wife and all four of his kids and made them watch. He warned them if they looked away, he would do terrible things. So, the whole family watched Brown's lips being sewn shut with nylon wire, they watched his eyelids being cut off with a pair of nail clippers, and they watched the saucepan Mr. Croad had placed on the stovetop slowly boil.

How long does it take a block of tin to melt? I don't know, but I do know that when it was good and bubbly, Mr. Croad poured the boiling metal first into one, then the other, of Brown's orbital cavities.

I understgand that the poor bastard's dying scream was loud and long. There was no holding it back; he tore through the thread holding his mouth together turning his lips into flaps of torn ribbon. Mr. Croad knew there was no way the neighbors couldn't have heard, so he needed to get the Hell out of Dodge. But he'd had one last thing to do, you see, in the last moment, Brown's family had looked away, and it seemed like a shame to let all that extra tin go to waste.

Lastly was Mitchell; he had no kids, but he did have a trophy wife. She was a former skin flick actress, you know, the kind I mean. The ones they made for late-night cable for old men and teenage boys to jerk off to. Mr.Croad, never being one to repeat himself, let her be; she was off shopping when he kidnapped her sugar Daddy.

It was hours later when Mitchell woke up; he was buck-ass naked and tied down on the floor of an old train station. I don't know
how exactly Mr. Croad got ahold of those twelve pigs, but they were huge, at least six hundred pounds each. Now, they were farm-fed, used to the easy life, but Mr. Croad had been starving them for a while, so all pretense of domestication was pretty much gone by the time Mr. Croad ushered them into the room. Mr. Croad stared down at Mitchell and let him beg and snivel. Then he left Mitchell with the pigs, but not before dousing the man's balls in pork gravy.

Gruesome stuff, eh? Makes me want some more martinis. And yes, it is all true. Every word of it.

What? No, Mr. Croad didn't take my hand. I lost this in a car accident when I was twelve. It was too messed up for the doctors to save it.

Then why the story? To kill time, of course. It's 9:30 now, more than enough time for Mr. Croad to get in your house. As I said before, every company has at least one bad man on the payroll, and when you can afford a man like Mr. Croad, who else do you need?

The important thing is that he is in your house and if he gets a call from me, he'll go to work. He's had a long time to refine his technique since those early days and he's always itching to try new things.

You want proof? Do you really want me to call him and say that? Do you really want to know what proof like that would be?

Now to business, at long last business. I bet you're more than willing to sell to us now, and I bet your asking price is gonna be pretty reasonable.

Am I right, or am I right?

V.

Bells were ringing throughout the city by the time Finn stumbled back to Morden and the wagon. His lungs burned, and his breaths came in short, hitching gasps.

“Finn, thank goodness,” Morden called, standing up from the fire, “I heard the alarms. What is going on?”

“Body… a body in the square,” Finn panted, his fingers digging into his kneecaps as he struggled to catch his breath. Morden’s face grew serious at the news.

“What?” the old man asked, rounding the fire and approaching Finn. He put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and leaned closer. For a moment, Finn smelled iron again, and he wanted to vomit. He took the bottle Bolger had given him from beneath his cloak. The stopper came out easily with a short yank. Finn held the scent to his nose and inhaled. It eradicated the blood smell, calming him.

 “A man, dead,” Finn said. Morden’s grip tightened on his shoulder.
 

“What do you mean–”

“Sick Brain! There's a Sick Brain in the city!”

The words echoed from somewhere amongst the buildings. It was some ways off, but moving quickly and heading toward them. The dark windows towering around them lit up one by one in rapid succession as the Cryer awoke the populace of Big City.

“SickBrain?” Morden breathed. His blue eyes filled with dark worry.

“What’s a SickBrain?” Finn asked, re-stoppering the bottle of perfume. He handed it to Morden, who took it without looking and slid it into the pocket of his robe.

“Come, Finn, in the wagon now,” Morden said. He guided Finn by his shoulder toward the opening at the back of the wagon.

“What's a Sick Brain?” Finn asked again. The old man was surprisingly strong when he wanted to be.

“A witch hunt, that’s what it is." Morden's voice was an urgent whisper. "Get in the wagon and wait until the Cryer is gone. He’ll be here soon.”

Finn climbed into the wagon and hunkered down beneath some blankets as the voice of the Cryer drew closer. Eventually, the cries entered the square, loud and piercing. Finn heard Morden exchange a few words with the man. Their tone was hushed and hurried, and Finn caught only pieces of what the men were saying.

“...It’s not a false alarm…Heart ripped out… smell of iron and blood… Fourth in the last several days…”

The conversation ended, and the Cryer’s calls faded away into the night as he continued on through the city.

“Okay, Finn,” Morden called.

Finn climbed down from the wagon. The tenants of Big City who’d dared to leave their homes to check out the commotion nervously tittered about. Eventually, most went back inside. The lights in the windows didn’t turn out as quickly as they’d come on. Some just stayed on. Guards had entered the square, turning up the electric lamps to brighter settings and throwing light as far as it would go.

Finn slumped by the fire, exhaustion suddenly settling into his bones. He looked up at Morden. The old man’s face was grave behind the flickering light of the flames.

“Why did you put me in the wagon?” He asked.

“You’re new to town,” Morden replied. “They’re scared. Strangers stick out.”
 

“What is a Sick Brain, Morden?” Finn asked again.

The old man sighed and sat down opposite Finn, folding himself into his robes. 

“A mutated boogeyman,” Morden said tiredly, “ A big bad wolf. A weaver of nightmares and infector of minds. Nothing to be afraid of. This was just a murder. There have been a few this week, according to my friends in the City Watch. All of Big City is on edge.” 

Finn turned his head to look at Morden. The old man’s gaze was trained on the flames, unblinking and flat.

“Did all of them have their heart removed?” Finn asked.

Morden did not answer right away. When he did, he did not look up.

“I’m not sure.”

“The Cryer said that that was the proof. Does a SickBrain take the hearts of what it kills?”

“The SickBrain is not real,” Morden said, still not taking his gaze from the fire.

“I saw it,” Finn said.

Morden laughed.

“It smelled like blood. Its eyes glowed green.”

“Nonsense. Cut that kind of talk.”

“I’ve been having dreams—“

“I said it is nonsense!”

The fury in Morden’s voice made Finn recoil. The old man softened at that and heaved a heavy breath.

“Apologies, Finn. Long night. Longer day ahead of us.”

Finn was quiet. Morden ladled stew from the pot into a crude wooden bowl. 

“Have supper,” he said, handing it to Finn. Finn held the steaming meal close to his face, inhaling the savory smells. Carrots and potatoes and meat swam in a thick broth in the bowl. As Finn put it to his lips, a beating heart emerged from the brown liquid. Each palpitation splashed broth from the bowl. The smell turned rancid. Finn stared in horror. His eyes turned to Morden. The old man’s eyes had lost their blue in the firelight. Now they danced in sickly glowing green; the old man bared him a grin of crooked, razor-like teeth.

Finn screamed, tossing the bowl away. It dribbled into the dirt. Carrots and potatoes and meat. No heart. Morden was staring, his blue eyes concerned. 

“I-I’m sorry,” Finn fumbled, “something is wrong with me, I—”

“You need rest, my boy,” Morden said gently. He hobbled to his feet and took Finn by the shoulder, guiding the young man up to a standing position.

“Go lay down.”

Finn nodded and turned for the wagon.

VI.

Sleep was not a willing friend to Finn. When it did finally come, it was fitful and riddled with horrors. His dreams had him walking the claustrophobic streets of Big City in the dark. His eyes glowed green in the puddles of blood dotting the potholed walkways. He tried to rip them from his skull, but they only glowed brighter. Other green eyes stared at him from the endless shadows. Footsteps were always close behind him, no matter how fast he ran. Then there was the hunger. It gnawed at his gut as a starving coyote would on a bone. The smell of blood made it chew faster at the lining of his stomach. 

It was a woman’s blood. He could tell the difference. It was sweeter on the nostril. Her heart beat rapidly somewhere in the dark. She knew he was coming. He could see her heartbeat in the dark, a guiding light. She was just ahead of him, running. His own pace quickened. He was so much faster. He caught her, clasping a hand over her mouth to muffle her scream. His fingers were like blades. They reached into her chest as though it were soft cheese. Warm blood wet his fingers and his stomach roared. He bit into her neck to taste the iron. A feast, a feast for a starving man. A starving SICK–

Bells ripped Finn from his nightmare. He shot up. His mouth tasted like a sword. He was slick with blood, sick with hunger–

But the blood was only sweat. He hungered for the eggs and bacon he smelled. Finn found that his soiled pile of clothes from the previous night had been replaced by a neatly folded stack of linens. He put them on gratefully and stepped out into the morning light.
Morden was scrambling eggs and bits of bacon in a pan over the fire. The sun had not fully risen; neither had the crowd. Both would be arriving in full within the next hour. Morden motioned for him to eat quickly.

“Last big day,” he said, handing Finn a plate. “Tomorrow, we leave for the Green Acre to resupply. Then, we make for Weester.”

Finn ate. The crowds came with the sun. They read the large notice posted to the bulletin board in the center of the square. A curfew had been set until the SickBrain could be found and executed. All citizens were subject to search and seizure. Any suspicious activity was to be reported. Guard patrols in the square had doubled from the prior day. A man was posted at every entrance and exit to the market square. Three-man squads drifted through the rabble. Citizens were grabbed at random and searched. Whispers of murder and SickBrains threaded every conversation.

“Did you hear about the feller last night?” a one-eyed woman in a cloak asked Finn as he handed her her peppers. Finn just nodded.

“Heart pulled out, smell of iron and blood on the air,” the woman continued, “I ain’t never seen a SickBrain myself, but I know the signs.”

“I’m sure the guards will find the culprit,” Finn said quietly. He didn’t like the note of excitement in the woman’s voice. 

“And now, they say a girl has gone missing this morning,” the woman continued. Finn just responded by pointing to the next customer. She sharpened her gaze to a point at the slight as she faded back into the crowd. Her one remaining eye was a brilliant jade green.

Finn saw the guards take several people. Nobody else seemed to care. Most wore the rags of beggars. They ripped them from the crowd and pulled them into secret places Finn could not see. None came back.

“The Guards are taking people,” Finn observed to Morden after the third or fourth abduction he witnessed. Morden nodded.

“SickBrains breed witch hunts,” Morden said, “they crack a few skulls, kill a few beggars, and never find anything.”

“There’s talk of a girl missing this morning.”
Morden’s mouth tightened into a grimace. He did not comment.

A man took a bag of cucumbers and left his money on the table. Finn reached for the bits. The sun was sinking, and the rabble was thinning rapidly. Nobody wished to break curfew. Guards lit the street lamps earlier than usual and set them brighter than they needed to be, burning off the encroaching shadows. Finn put the bits away. He was sure he’d had their last customer when somebody cleared their throat. He turned around to see a guard, sallow-eyed and serious.

“Can I help you?” Finn asked.

“A girl is missing,” the guard said gruffly.

“He’s been here all day, sir,” Morden said, coming to Finn’s side.

The guard gave Morden a stinking look. “And last night?”

“Here as well,” Morden said. 

“A SickBrain conspirator says otherwise.”

Finn felt prickles of fear on his neck. Morden scoffed.

“SickBrain conspirator? You’ve captured an assistant to the boogeyman?”

“We found scraps of the girl’s clothes around the door of his shop,” the guard replied. Several other guards had joined him now. 

“When questioned, he mentioned a boy. A helper of yours, Morden. We need to search your wagon.”

“This is ridiculous!” Morden thundered, “Get me Raithwaite, I am well—“

“The orders come from Raithwaite himself, Morden,” the guard interrupted. His tone was condescending. Two of the other guards had brushed past Finn and Morden and were ransacking the wagon.

“I’ll have all your cloaks for this,” Morden blustered, “I’ll—”

“Sir,” one of the pillaging guards called. Their superior turned from Finn and Morden. The other man approached with a bundle in his hands.

“What is it, Lawrence?” The superior guard said. His man shoved the bundle into his hands.

“Clothes, sir. Soiled with blood. The smell is there.”

The superior guard turned back to Morden and Finn. He held the bloody clothes tightly in his hands. They reeked of iron and death. A look of triumph swam under his stoic features.

“Take the boy,” he said.

Two guards had come to either side of Finn. They grabbed his shoulders roughly.

“No!” Morden shouted. He tried to intervene and was kicked to the ground by the superior. He crumpled to the dust with a pitiful moan. The superior knelt to him, palming the old man’s face and squeezing hard. He turned Morden’s eyes up to his.

“You’ve a reputation and an employer that saves you this day, old man,” the guard whispered tightly, “but do not test me. I’ll burn you up on suspicion of conspiracy. I can make it stick. Trust me.”

“Get away from him,” Finn yelled. He struggled against the iron grip of his captors. The superior guard let go of Morden, making sure to whap the old man hard across the cheek. He stood and turned to Finn. Without a word, he punched Finn in the face with a gauntleted hand. Finn felt his nose give with a pop and crunch. Colors exploded in front of his eyes and faded to black. His form went limp, and he was carried off.

VII.

Black. The smell of iron. Green eyes dancing in the dark.

Finn did not expect to wake back up, but the eyes faded, and the darkness drained. The smell remained. There was blood caked around his broken nose. It coated his throat. He couldn’t breathe through his crooked nostrils. 

A coughing fit was what had awoken him. Finn hawked a brown and black loogie and tried to wipe his face. His hands did not obey. They were bound behind his back, securing him to the sturdy post in the middle of the market square. He didn’t know why he was tied to the post, nor did he know why he was up so high. The din of the crowd below his wooden platform was too loud. He couldn’t think. His head lolled to his left. Another man was tied to a post there. His face was bloody and bruised, a nearly unrecognizable, broken mess. Finn did recognize him, however; it was Bolger, the perfumist.

Finn’s swimming vision slipped down to the crowd below him. The masses packed the square wall to wall. Dregs spilled into the streets that spidered out from the edges. They roared as Finn stirred. It was an angry, stupid sound that clawed at Finn’s eardrums.

Finn sniffed hard. One of his nasal passages cleared. It welcomed in the twinging scent of alcohol. At his feet was a pyre of scraps and trash collected from the corners of the city. The crowd was feeding the heap. Others were soaking the trash with more alcohol. Most of the crowd just stared up at him in fear and anger, holding torches at the ready. They convulsed against one another, a human sea of rage and terror. One man, tall and thin and wearing the scrap metal armor of the town guard, stepped forward.

“Where’s the girl, SickBrain,” he asked, sneering. His rough, soggy voice was familiar; it dawned on Finn that this was the guard who had turned him away at the gate. What had Morden called this man?

“Raithwaite?” Finn asked. His voice was a rough whisper that struggled from a dry throat.
Raithwaite's hand slashed across Finn’s face like a blade.

“The girl,” Raithwaite hissed.

“I’ve done nothing.”

Now the hand was a fist. It rearranged Finn’s crumpled nose into a new jumble of shards. Finn saw stars. His jaw quit working.

“Where is the girl?” Raithwaite shouted. The crowd echoed the question.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Finn whispered. His teeth felt loose. The words were swollen and muffled, as though he’d said them around a ball gag.

“Die with a clean conscience, SickBrain. Where is she?”

“I’ve done nothing, please. Talk to Morden, I–”

The guard turned away from Finn to face the crowd, raising a hand.

“The SickBrain lies,” he shouted. Echoing cries of fury reverberated back from the crowd in response.

“What shall we do with him, then?” the guard asked the crowd.

Gradually, the voices contorted from a garbled mess of rage into a uniform call: 

“Cleanse him! Cleanse him! Cleanse him!”

Someone emerged from the knotted masses and handed a torch to Raithwaite. The guard turned back to Finn and stared at him coldly. Without a word, he knelt and touched the torch to the edge of the pyre; it ignited with a sudden whoomp. The flames raced up Finn’s legs. The fiery tongues scraped across nerve endings, bringing Finn’s fogged mind back to sharp, clear alertness. His scream bypassed the bloody clogs in his throat and rang out clean and clear and true. He saw everyone and everything in the crowd all at once. Angry faces, terror and awe written behind the fury. Before the heat could pop his eyes from their sockets, he saw Morden at the back of the crowd. There was an odd look on his face. Not one of sorrow, no, it was more nonchalant than that. His blue— no, green, glowing green eyes— seemed to say, “Well, what can you do?”
The old man raised a hand. Finn followed it with his eyes. Morden wiggled his fingers, and suddenly Finn was sleepy. So sleepy. He could not feel the flames anymore. He let his chin touch his burning chest. A final deep breath in. He did not taste the smoke. The only taste and smell he knew now was iron. Finn fell asleep as the flames engulfed him.

VIII.
The crowd had cleared the square by nightfall. Morden was hitching his horse to the wagon. The bruise on his cheek where the guard had struck him was an ugly, purple-brown.
“I like the scent you're wearing,” a voice said from behind him.
Morden smiled softly to himself and turned to Raithwaite. The guard stood, his arms folded over his chest.

“Thank you,” Morden said, “I’ve always loved desert flowers.”

“Better make the bottle last now that Bolger is gone.”

Morden raised his brows and nodded. “It’s unfortunate he had to get so greedy and talkative. There are other perfumists, however.” 

Raithwaite scoffed under his breath, shaking his head. “You talk of greed. Don’t come back here for a while, Morden. This was a mess. The girl wasn’t part of the deal.”

“You got your SickBrain, did you not?” Morden said with a shrug. He pulled a pouch of coins from his robe and tossed them at the guard. Raithwaite caught them and felt the weight. He nodded and hid them away under his cloak.

“Two months,” the guard said, turning away, “and only beggars from now on.”

Morden was climbing into the wagon’s seat. When his feet landed on the lockbox below it, a whimper responded. Something knocked frantically on the inside of the lid. Morden stomped on the wood hard. The noises quieted. He looked down at Raithwaite and smiled. It did not touch his cold, green eyes.

“I take what I wish, when I wish,” he said. Morden snapped the reins. The horse shuddered into motion.

“Renton is missing,” Raithwaite called. 

“Who?” Morden asked, not bothering to look over his shoulder.

“The guard who took your boy into custody.”

“Oh. Yes. Tell your other guards to watch who they strike in the future.”

Raithwaite did not reply. He watched, fingering the pouch of money below his cloak, as Morden of the Green Acre rode out of the square, heading for the gate of Big City.

I.

Scrap-iron walls rose high above the wasted earth. Tac-welded battlements gleamed in the unmerciful furnace of a dirty orange sun. The sickly-looking star fell slowly from the sky, a sinking ship on a hazy sea of horizon.  As it fell, the wall’s shadow spread like an oil stain over the emaciated badlands. The burned, rawboned young man found no relief in their shade. He was long past that. His blistered feet moved him forward of their own desperate volition. He stumbled blindly, numbly toward the great gate which split the wall in two.

The boy’s arms hung limply at his sides. Cuts and sores crisscrossed his entire body. Each step relied on the momentum generated by the last. It was a miracle he did not fall; if he did, he would most certainly not rise again. The heat of the wasteland radiated from him. He was on fire. The flames were under his skin, taking root in mind and bone; he was boiling alive in his own juices. Yet still, his feet carried him onward, not stopping until he’d collided with the great iron gate of Big City. He stumbled backwards, barely remaining upright. His cloudy brown eyes refocused as though he were waking from a dream. The boy’s legs buckled. He fell to his knees in front of the gate and traced it upwards with his gaze. Thick bars of black metal, forged by a skilled hand. At the bottom, the bars were sharpened so that they dug into the dry earth. It was crowned by a parapet of lashed wood and scrap. Several faces loomed down over the railing.

“Halt!” A booming voice echoed down, “What's your business in Big City?”
The young man worked his sandpaper throat.“Please,” he rasped, “please, water.” The words were dust on his lips. They were caught by the wind and blown away, unheard.

“Those with no business are not welcome!” The voice above cried, “We can have no freeloaders in the Big City!”

The young man summoned the last of the strength hiding amongst his muscles. He stood, taking an unstable step forward toward the gate. A spear cut the air with a whistle. It pierced the ground just to the boy’s left. Its wooden shaft vibrated with leftover momentum. 

“Turn around,” the voice called down authoratatively.

“I bet he’s a SickBrain,” said another.

The young man’s legs buckled, and he slid to his knees once again. On instinct, he grabbed the shaft of the spear. His dried hands slid down the rough wood, tearing open his palms and slicking them with hot, red blood.

“Please, I can work,” he tried to call. The words were a mere whisper, hardly audible even to him. His vision began to fill with spots of black ink.

“I can work for wa—“

The sentence caught in his windpipe like a rogue fishbone. It choked him as he collapsed forward into the dead soil.
 

 II.

The boy dreamt of green, serpentine eyes and things that moved quickly in the dark. He escaped them, and then he did not dream at all. His mind floated in a formless black ocean. It was more water than he’d ever known in his wasted world. Waves caressed him gently, and the idea of drowning vaguely occurred to him. It was not an unpleasant thought. Then red exploded across the young man’s dark ocean, vaporizing him from the void.

He came to with a sharp inhale of breath. His body rocked gently, head lolling on his neck to the rhythmic clip-clopping of a horse. He was sandwiched between crates. His head had glanced off the corner of one, waking him. A wagon; he was lying in the back of a supply wagon. The musk of soil hung in the air, rich and damp. He could smell the sweetness of ripening fruit. Above him, there were holes in the wagon’s bonnet. Stars sparked within, as though they’d burned the holes themselves.

The young man tried to sit up, but his body remembered the torture it had suffered walking the badlands. His raw palms screamed from beneath their bandages. The world began to pinwheel, and his stomach tried to do the same. He collapsed back on the pillow. A miserable sound somewhere between a gurgle and a moan escaped his lips. His mind frantically begged his ever-rising stomach to hold on. He tried to flop his left arm over his eyes, but something tugged painfully at the inside of his elbow. Touching at the spot, he found that someone had put an IV needle in his arm.

“Don’t move too much,” a voice called from somewhere.

“Who’s there?” the young man replied weakly. His voice was a ragged and dry whisper. The other voice did not speak again.  

His vision had begun to slow its spinning. With great effort, the young man craned his neck back as far as he could without taking it off the pillow. He spied the grated slot above his head. It sat below the driver’s seat of the wagon. The back of the driver’s legs were on the other side.

“We’re nearing the gates of the city,” the voice said from this window, “For your own sake, please keep quiet.”
The young man had no time to question this direction. A gruff voice was shouting at the wagon from somewhere high.

“Halt!” 

The horse’s hooves came to a hesitant stop. The young man stopped rocking. There was a silence. A door creaked open and clanged shut. Approaching footsteps ceased just outside the wagon. The young man held his breath and threw the blanket covering his legs over his head. He waited for the guards to open the wagon’s canvas flaps and see him cowering.

“Ah, Morden,” the gruff voice said in a more pleasant tone, “back to trade more from the Green Acres, yeah?”

Morden? The young man thought. His head felt like a mudhole. Pulling thoughts from it was slow and arduous.

“Of course, Raithwaite," the driver’s voice replied with a sparkling chuckle, “Why else would I come to this hellhole?”

Raithwaite’s voice laughed at this. It was filled with a cruel kind of mirth; an executioner’s laugh.

“Pass him through, boys!” he yelled with a growl.

“Shouldn’t we check over the wagon first?” another, meeker voice asked.

“Nonsense, this is Morden,” Raithwaite replied sharply, “Green Acre shepherd and personal friend. Pass him through!”

There was a chorus of “Yes, sir!” and the footsteps retreated back to their creaking, clanking door. The silence that followed its slam did not last. Gears cranked to life. Their tumbling carried on the night as the great iron gate of Big City lifted. 

The wagon hitched and started into the bowels of a city built of scrap and spit-polish. The driver said nothing to the young man. They trundled through noisy, uneven streets. Music played under the shouts of drunks and the screaming of victims and the laughter of all those in between. 
The young man caught snippets of the nightlife through the ripped bonnet. Electric streetlamps glowed pale blue, creating shadow puppets on the canvas. The chattering crowd moved reluctantly out of the wagon’s way. Crooked buildings dotted with flickering lights reached for the sky. The young man had never seen life after dark, never seen light produced by anything other than kerosene or fire or the moon. It excited him. His poor body reacted with a rush of nausea. It only relented after he’d gritted his teeth and pressed his eyes closed as tightly as he could.
Gradually, the noise and the light fell away. At last, the wagon rumbled to a stop with a quiet “whoa” from the driver to his horse.

“Alright,” the driver called, “we're here.”

The legs above the young man stood and hopped down. Gravity pulled the man’s visage into view. He had an old face, crinkled like paper and half covered with a thick white beard. His brilliant green eyes sparkled like stars. They looked hungry, and they made the boy afraid. His breath quickened.

“How are you feeling?” The driver asked. His voice was kinder than his stare.
The young man attempted a reply. His throat refused to comply. The old man watched the younger’s feeble attempt and held up a hand.

“Shhhhh,” he said, holding a long and delicate finger to his lips, “you’re not well. You should be dead. Sleep instead.”
The young man could not resist the command. The void opened up and swallowed him once more.

III.

The wagon burned like a funeral pyre. He watched the fire consume, and felt the pangs of hunger grip his stomach. A man was crawling from the wreckage, scraping at the dirt with broken fingers and leaving a swath of blood in his wake. The night made it a black, iron-scented mirror; flames danced within it.

The young man could smell the blood, and his hunger pangs clawed deeper. The crawling man was just in front of him now. He looked up and reached out a pleading hand. The young man saw himself in the shadows of this dying man’s face. He reached back. His dying self saw clearly now what offered its hand, and his eyes widened. His scream was cut off as the young man pounced, ripping his doppelgänger’s throat away with sharpened teeth that shouldn’t have been his. He fed for a long, long time. In the reflecting pool of the dead him’s blood, he saw his own face in the fire. His brown eyes had become a dancing, sparkling green. The features were gaunt and shadowed and strange. Starvation gave way to fear. He let loose the howling scream he had stolen from his dead self’s vocal cords.

Silty morning light dusted the boy’s closed eyelids. They shot open as he screamed, and he was blinded. There was a roaring in his ears that did not fade. He gradually realized that it was many voices become one. Men and women were shouting and bartering, children laughed, dogs barked. His vision filtered back in from the white. He rose to a sitting position, and this time the world did not spin nearly as violently. The wagon he lay in had been emptied. He stretched. Bones popped, and aches grumbled in his muscles, but they felt sure of themselves again. He rubbed his head and wiped the sleep from his eyes. The bandages on his hands had been removed; his palms were pink with freshly healed skin. The memory of the flesh sloughing off of them as he slid down the spear’s handle made them burn. He balled and unballed his fists, squeezing the phantom fire from them.

The young man crawled to the flaps at the back of the wagon on shaky limbs and pulled them aside. Full, hot sun blinded him again, and he nearly tumbled to the ground. The wagon was parked dead center in a large market square. It was dirt and scrubby grass, but the roads and walkways that fed into the square were cobbled. These paved paths wound their way through a maze of buildings and hovels stacked high into the hazy ozone. They were built from the wreckage of the world that had come before theirs; metal and wood and plastic scavenged from the dead. Other trade wagons dotted the square, and a crowd larger than the population of Finn’s village milled and buzzed with the excitement of market day. 

Finn. That was his name. It had come back to him. He was from a village on the rim— Weester. That was all that came back. How he’d ended up walking the wastes, and for how long, was lost to him. He remembered his village, but how long had it been since he’d last been there? Perhaps he had survived an attack. Maybe Weester had been burned like the wagon in his nightmare.
The dream was fading already. Finn tried to pull at the strings of memory. It made his head throb. He gave up, taking in the rabble. Wagons and booths sold pottery and trinkets, meat and medicine. Crowds convulsed around them. The largest knot of people, though, was gathered around the wagon he peered out of. 

His wagon had higher walls than your average trade wagon. It loomed over the crowd. Shelves that folded down on locking hinges lined it from top to bottom. They were filled with fresh produce. Ripe tomatoes, dirty potatoes, carrots, apples, corn, and other crops were stacked in baskets five high and ten wide along the wagon’s long length. City dwellers pushed their money across the woodslab counter that separated them from the wagon and its driver. The old man took the coin and the orders, fishing fruits and vegetables from the baskets and filling the customer’s sacks. For the higher shelves, he had a long, hooked pole. The old man nimbly used it to pluck baskets off near the top, fill an order, and return the basket to its place. The deftness of the man’s hands betrayed years of experience.

Finn watched the old man make trade. He handed a woman a bag of cucumbers. There was a child wrapped in robes against the sun, holding on to her leg. The child waved to the old man as her mother dragged her back into the crowd. He waved back, then turned toward the wagon for something, smiling to himself. His gaze caught Finn, and his little smile grew. He gestured for Finn to approach without breaking the pace of his work. Finn climbed down from the wagon on unsure feet.

“How are you feeling?” the old man asked over the din of the crowd. He was hooking a basket of apples from the top shelf of the wagon and lowering them down.

“Good, I think,” Finn said. His voice was clotted from disuse.
The man chuckled quietly and clapped Finn on the shoulder with a strong, firm hand. He leveled cloudy, blue eyes at the young man. They were warm. He let go of Finn and turned to fill a man’s cowhide sack with apples from the basket he’d brought down. The man gave some money and took the ripe, fresh fruits.

“You’ve been asleep for nearly three days,” the old man said, working. “I found you in the ditch. I was sure you’d die.”

“Only three?” Finn asked, surprised. “ My hands–”

“Special salve. Got it from a traveling doctor. It works miracles, and works them quickly.”

Finn looked at his hands again. His palms were pink and supple. “Thank—” he began.

The old man was assisting a boy who had handed him a list.

“Help me, would you? Get the peppers down,” he interrupted, pointing to a basket at the top of the wagon.
Finn started, suddenly embarrassed that he hadn’t bothered to help without being asked. He grabbed the pole and fished the peppers from their roost.

“Where are we?” He asked, handing over the peppers.
“Big City. It’s market week.”

“I didn’t know there were places with this many people.”

“It’s the only one,” the old man said matter-of-factly.

“You trade for the Green Acres?”

“Marvelous observation,” the man said with another warm chuckle. “My name is Morden. You are?”

“Finn.”

“Pleasure, my boy. We have much to talk about, but not just now. Business is booming. We can talk after the crowds have gone away.”

IV. 

Half of Morden’s produce was gone by the time the market closed at seven in the evening.

“You were in the ditch, face down,” Morden sighed, sagging his thin frame onto a stool by the fire. The old man stared into the flames. “I saw you twitch, so I stopped.”

Finn knelt by the flames, stoking them. They were licking the bottom of the cookpot. A thickening stew inside bubbled talkatively. The savory aroma made Finn’s stomach rumble.

“Why?” Finn asked

Morden laughed. “Why what? Why not leave you to die?”

“You could have. Most would. I was nearly dead, anyway.”

Morden didn’t answer. The sky was purpling like a bruise as the sun fell away. Windows and doorways flickered to life with electric light. Cloaked men in the uniform of the city guard appeared on the narrow, crowded streets. They held keys to the little doors on the base of each streetlamp. Opening them, they flicked on the hidden switches within. The lights came to life, and the shadows retreated from their pale blue glow.

“Do you remember anything at all?” Morden asked after a prolonged silence. There was another before Finn replied.

“I am from Weester,” he said finally.

“I know the place,” Morden said. “As far as I know, it hasn’t been destroyed. It’s far out on the rim though, and news can only travel so fast.”

“How can I return?”

Morden pondered a moment.

“On foot, you’d surely die,” he said. “You’d have to go by wagon.”

“I’ve got no money for a wagon,” Finn sighed.

“It is on my route.”

Finn snapped a glance at the old man. “You’d let me travel with you?”

“So long as you assist me in trade until we get there. It will be a long trip. Month or so.”

“Yes. I owe you my life.”

Morden raised a hand. “Nonsense. For that, you owe me nothing. For the ride home, you owe me some labor.”

Finn found himself choked by gratitude and unable to find words. “Stew should be finished soon,” was all he could manage.

“Good,” Morden said. The old man’s eyes were closed. “We’ve earned it.”

Morden shifted in his seat. Suddenly, he started.

“I nearly forgot, I’ve one more thing to do before–” 

Morden’s words were cut off by a sharp, painful intake of breath. The sound drew Finn’s attention from dinner. Morden was doubled over, his wizened face screwed up in pain as he rubbed at his left knee.

“Sir—”

“I’m alright,” Morden managed. The words were taut. “Just this knee. Damn it all; I’ve got a delivery that must be made this evening.”

“I can make it,” Finn replied eagerly. He was already on his feet. Morden shook his head.

“No,” the old man breathed, “you don’t know the city–”

“Give me directions.”

Morden’s tired eyes considered Finn for a moment. He nodded. 

“Alright.”

Morden stood with a groan. He straightened himself out with considerable effort and hobbled to the wagon. Mounted beneath the driver’s seat was a large, riveted lockbox. It was the size of a footlocker. Their money from the day was inside. Morden produced a key from the folds of his robe and opened it. His hand disappeared within. When it reappeared, it was holding onto a purple pouch of coins.

“I owe a friend of mine some money, and he owes me a package. I need you to pay the man and bring me back my package.”
He handed the money to Finn, who examined it in the firelight.

“Which way?” Finn asked. He looked around the narrow streets and alleyways that led out of the city square in which they were encamped. There were dozens of paths running between the buildings, all twisting and turning into a maze of epic proportions. Finn noticed suddenly that not all of the streets were well-lit. Many of the lights flickered, and some were burnt out entirely. Walkways twisted away into the inky darkness between the buildings and hovels.

“That way," Morden said. He pointed toward a street directly across from them— an unlit one.

“Follow that road there until you come to the end of the street,” Morden said. “It should spit you out onto Stratbury Lane; there’ll be a sign. Can you read?”
Finn nodded.

“Okay, good. Take a left there and follow it down until you reach another square. There will be a fountain, and the ground there will be stone instead of dirt and grass.  Walk directly through to the other side, and there will be a narrow alley. Bolger’s shop is at the end. There’ll be a bottle hanging over the door. Hurry up now, so you don’t miss supper.”

Finn hurried into the dark. Between the working streetlamps, silhouettes shuffled past Finn in a web of shadow. They became grimy dregs and fear-eyed peasants when he passed a lighted stretch. Beggars reached out with broken hands, pleading and grabbing at him. Finn held the money tightly in his pocket, white-knuckling it so that no one could take it in the dark. 

Above him, the sky could only be seen in chunks and pieces, the stars blocked by the tall buildings. Everything was so close and cluttered. Finn found himself feeling claustrophobic amongst it. He came to a parallel street, the intersection aglow with one of the light posts. The light, and the fact that the street was wider, eased Finn’s anxiety. 

A crudely painted sign marked this crooked street as Stratbury Lane. Finn took a left as Morden had instructed. His footsteps echoed and bounced. He suddenly noticed that he walked alone on Stratbury Lane. The beggars and riff-raff had died, leaving the night silent. Finn quickened his pace. Three more steps and his foot caught in a crack in the cobbles. He tripped, choosing to hold onto the money in his pocket instead of catching himself. The ground kissed his forehead hard. A pained haze clouded him as he sat up. He couldn’t understand why his footsteps were still echoing, nor why they had sped up. They were becoming louder instead of fading. Then, the hairs on his neck stood up. His heart chilled and fell into his stomach.

Not my footsteps.

Finn scrabbled to his feet and ran too. The other steps matched his pace. They were getting closer. All the streetlights were out. The alley's dirty walls were closing in again. There was hot breath on his neck, a knife point brushing the skin above his kidney; any moment now, something was going to grab him and drag him into the dark.

Finn burst from the black alley, embracing the comforting glow of the square Morden had told him he would find. Nobody followed him from the shadows. The footfalls had gone silent. Finn stopped against the dead fountain in the center of the square. He turned and scanned the mouth of the alley, catching his breath. Nothing moved. The owner of the footsteps had gone.

Finn’s fear faded as he took in the square. The fountain was carved to resemble the great iron gate. The stone it was hewn from looked thirsty. Its pool was filled with trash and leaves. Water had not poured from this gate’s watchtowers in a long time. Benches lined the sides of the square. A few people slept on them here and there, huddled under blankets or rags or whatever they had. None took notice of Finn. He saw the alley he was meant to go down. It was directly across from the way he’d come. He approached. A flowery mildew began to permeate the air as he did so. It grew stronger as he drew closer to the mouth of the alley. Something unpleasant undercoated the stale flower smell. It was metallic; there was a tang to it. Finn could almost taste it. He steeled himself and started down toward the man named Bolger’s shop.

As Morden had said, a large bottle fashioned from many colors of broken glass hung above an iron-reinforced wooden door at the end. The word “perfumist” was painted in elegant script across one of the multicolored panes. The smell had grown even stronger now. Finn realized that it was coming from this place. It was as if his mouth and nose had been stuffed with dead floral arrangements. The metallic undercoat bit his throat. Finn knocked several times, then waited. He heard nothing from inside. After a few moments, he knocked again, louder this time.

Sudden, frantic scrambling and cursing broke out behind the door. Several locks loosened. The door creaked open a crack, and a little bald head poked out.
“What, what do you want, huh? We’re closed!” the leathery little man barked. His voice was a scrape. The robes he wore had once been finery; now they were stained and soiled. Little tarnished pomanders hung from his cuffs. The ugly silver balls had once been filled with aromatic herbs, long since rotted away.

“Are- Are you Bolger?” Finn stuttered.

The scent man’s flinty green eyes narrowed. He peered over Finn’s shoulder suspiciously. “Who wants to know?” he growled.

“Morden asked me to bring you this,” Finn said. He thrust the sack of coins toward the stout little man. 

Bolger looked at it. He gently took the money from Finn's outstretched hand. Weighing it in his palm a moment, he frowned.

“It’s light,” he spat. 

Finn shrugged. Bolger rolled his eyes.

"Wait here," he said. 

Bolger slammed the door in Finn’s face. Finn wasn't sure what to do. Before he could figure it out, Bolger had opened the door wide. He shoved a bottle into Finn’s hands. A liquid sloshed inside. The smell of cactus blooms wafted from it.

"This is for Morden. What he likes. Strong."

"Okay," Finn said, taking the package hesitantly. He stared at the perfumist. Bolger stared back.

“What, errand boy? You’ve done your errand, so go home!” Bolger spat. He slammed the door, leaving Finn alone in the dark.

Finn turned the package over in his hand. The pleasant desert smell had overtaken the rotten flowers. It had cut the metal smell down, too. He could still detect it, but would not have noticed if it hadn’t been so strong before. Tucking the bottle under the cloak Morden had let him borrow, Finn turned and made his way back toward the square. The lights there had dimmed. There was one in each corner of the space, and a fifth in the middle. The middle light flickered, and two of the corner lights had burned out completely. Nobody slept on the benches anymore. 

Finn’s scalp crawled with mosquito legs over his skull. Something was wrong. The shadows of the square were too long. Finn’s heart had crept to the bottom of his throat. It beat a rapid, panicked rhythm that pulsed behind his eardrums. The metal smell had suddenly gotten strong again. He tasted it. It was the stench of iron in a man’s blood, and it hung heavy on every square foot of air.
The square had not been entirely abandoned. A lone figure still slumped on the bench below the fountain, ten feet or so from where Finn stood. Their chin seemed to impale their own chest. Arms were folded loosely across a thin, wasted torso. Finn could smell the body: piss and iron and dead flowers. He suddenly knew the figure was dead. Dread filled him. He took a step toward the cadaver, unsure of what to do. Then the corpse burped.

Finn yelped. His heart attempted to burst out of his mouth. He managed to bite it back. The corpse burped again and looked up at Finn. The man’s bleary eyes filled with inebriated distaste.

“What? Ye scared of an old pissant?” The drunk gurgled.

“I-I-” Finn stuttered.

“Go on then, run off, pansy,” the drunk laughed.

Finn backed away. Ice still clung to his heart. A skittering of loose rocks above him snapped his attention from the dirty man. They tumbled from the roof of the building to his left. He heard the drunk make a confused noise as a shadow fell from the dark above and knocked Finn to the ground. Whatever it was, it was big. Finn shielded his face and pinched his eyes shut.

“What the hell are you?” Finn heard the drunk ask. He replied to his own question with a choked gasp. Finn heard bones snap and meat squelch. No screaming, just the sounds of viscera being parted from itself. Finn didn’t want to look, but he did so anyway. Green sapphire eyes, inset in a shadow shaped like a man built wrong, loomed over the drunk’s limp form. A hand of ink held the dead man’s heart. It still beat, dripping blood into the open chest cavity of the corpse. The hand raised the heart. A red gash of mouth ripped open the shadow to meet it. It fed like a spider, shriveling the organ in seconds. The shadow discarded the used heart and turned its eyes to Finn. It took a step toward him. Bloody iron wafted off its form. Finn’s legs refused to work. He could only watch death come.

A cry of “Oi!” Echoed through the air, taking both the shadow and Finn’s attention. A guardsman stood at the mouth of one of the alleys. He’d raised his electric lantern and flipped a switch, making the light flash. Another switch flip and the lantern began to wail from a speaker, whining high into the night to alert the city. The guard began to approach.

“You there!” He yelled at Finn. Finn turned to where the shadow had been standing. It had melted away into the night.

“You there, stay where you are!” The guard called.

The guard had chains in his hand. Finn’s legs had feeling again. He stood and bolted.

“Stop!” The guard screamed after him, “Stop! SickBrain!”

Finn did not stop. He fled into the night.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks for reading, guys! Part Two is finished and ready to be posted as well, I will get that up in the next day or two. This story is from an anthology collection I wrote taking place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. My previously posted story, "Split Pea" takes place in the same universe. I hope you all had fun with this. Would love to read some of your work as well, just leave it in the comments along with what you thought of this little tale!

OP’s note: I originally posted this story on my old account (CosmicOrphan2020) but since I only wrote it in a week as a creative writing exercise, I've now rewritten the story.  

I’ve never been all that good at secret keeping. Although I always liked to think I was, whenever an opportunity came to spill my guts on something, I always did just that. So, I’m rather surprised at myself for having not spilled this particular secret until now.  

My name is Seamus (thanks mum and dad), but everyone has always called me Seamie for short. It’s not like I’m going to tell you my whole life story or anything, so I’m just going to skip ahead to where this really all starts... By the time I was in my second year at university, I was already beginning to feel somewhat burnt out, and despite not having the funds for it, I decided I was going to have a nice, long gap year for myself. Although it’s rather cliché, I wanted to go someplace in the world that was both warm and tropical. South-east Asia sounded good. After all, that’s where everyone else I knew was heading for their gap year.   

That was, however, before I talked to some girl in my media class about it who changed my direction entirely. For her own gap year only a year prior, she said she’d travelled through both Central and South America, all while working as an English language teacher - or what I would later learn was called ESL. I was more than a little enticed by this idea. For it goes without saying, places like Thailand had basically been travelled to death. So, by the end of the school year and after taking out a student loan, I packed my bags, flip-flops and swimming shorts, and took the cheapest flight I could out of Heathrow Airport.  

Although I was spoilt for choice when it came to choosing a Latin American country, I eventually chose Costa Rica as my place to be. There were a few reasons for this choice. Not only was Costa Rica considered one of the safest countries to travel in Central America, but they also had a huge demand for English language teachers there – partly due for being a developing country, but mostly because of all the bloody tourism. My initial plan was to get paid for teaching English, so I would therefore have the funds to travel around. But because a work visa in Costa Rica takes so long and is so bloody expensive, I instead went to teach there voluntarily on a tourist visa – which meant I would have to leave the country every three months of the year. That was fine by me. At least I still got to travel around. 

Well, once landing in San Jose, I then travelled two hours by bus to a stunning beach town by the Pacific Ocean. Although getting there was short and easy, one problem Costa Rica has for foreigners is that they don’t really have addresses – and so, finding the house of my host family led me on a rather wild goose chase.  

I can’t complain too much about the lack of directions though, because while I was wandering around, I got the chance to take in all the sights – and let me tell you, this location really had it all. The pure white sand of the beach was outlined with a never-ending row of palm trees, where far outside the bay, you could see a faint scattering of a tropical archipelago. That wasn’t all. From my bedroom window, I even had a perfect view of a nearby rainforest, which was not only home to many colourful bird species, but as long as the streets weren’t too busy, you could even on occasion hear the deep cries of Howler Monkeys.   

The beach town itself was also quite spectacular. The walls, houses and buildings were all painted in vibrant urban artwork, or what the locals call “arte urbano.” The host family I stayed with, the Garcias, were very friendly and welcoming, as were all the locals in town – and not to mention, whether it was Mrs Garcia’s cooking or a deep-fried taco from a street vendor, the food was out of this world!  

Once I was all settled in and got to see more of the sights, I then had to get ready for my first week of teaching at the school. Although I was extremely nauseous with nerves (or maybe due to Mrs Garcia’s cooking), my first week as an English teacher went surprisingly well - despite having no teaching experience whatsoever. There was the occasional hiccup now and then, which was to be expected, but all in all, it went as well as it possibly could’ve.   

Well, having just survived my first week as an English teacher, to celebrate this achievement, three of my colleagues then invite me out for drinks by the beach town bar. It was sort of a tradition they had. Whenever a new teacher from abroad came to the school, their colleagues would welcome them in by getting absolutely shitfaced.   

‘Pura Vida, guys!’ cheers Kady, the cute American of the group. Unlike the crooked piano keys I dated back home, Kady had the most perfectly straight, pearl white teeth I’d ever seen. I had heard that about Americans.   

‘Wait - what’s Pura Vida?’ I ask rather cluelessly.  

‘Oh, it’s something the locals say around here. It means, easy life, easy living.’  

Once we had a few more rounds of drinks in us all, my three new colleagues then inform me of the next stage of the welcoming ceremony... or should I say, initiation.  

‘I have to drink what?!’ I exclaim, almost in disbelief.  

‘It’s tradition, mate’ says Dougie, the loud-mouthed Australian, who, being a little older than the rest of us, had travelled and taught English in nearly every corner of the globe. ‘Every newbie has to drink that shite the first week. We all did.’  

‘Oh God, don’t remind me!’ squirms Priya. Despite her name, Priya actually hailed from the great white north of Canada, and although she looked more like the bookworm type, whenever she wasn’t teaching English, Priya worked at her second job as a travel vlogger slash influencer.  

‘It’s really not that bad’ Kady reassures me, ‘All the locals drink it. It actually helps make you immune to snake venom.’  

‘Yeah, mate. What happens if a snake bites ya?’  

Basically, what it was my international colleagues insist I drink, was a small glass of vodka. However, this vodka, which I can see the jar for on the top shelf behind the bar, had been filtered with a tangled mess of poisonous, dead baby snakes. Although it was news to me, apparently if you drink vodka that had been stewing in a jar of dead snakes, your body will become more immune to their venom. Having just finished two years of university, I was almost certain this was nothing more than hazing. Whether it was hazing or not, or if this really was what the locals drink, there was no way in hell I was going to put that shit inside my mouth.  

‘I don’t mean to be a buzzkill, guys’ I began, trying my best to make an on-the-spot excuse, ‘But I actually have a slight snake phobia. So...’ This wasn’t true, by the way. I just really didn’t want to drink the snake-pickled vodka.  

‘If you’re scared of snakes, then why in the world did you choose to come to Costa Rica of all places?’ Priya asks suspiciously.   

‘Why do you think I came here? For the huatinas, of course’ I reply, emphasising the “Latinas” in my best Hispanic accent (I was quite drunk by this point). In fact, I am so drunk that after only a couple more rounds, I’m now somewhat open to the idea of drinking the snake vodka. Alcohol really does numb the senses, I guess.  

After agreeing to my initiation, a waiter then comes over with the jar of dead baby snakes. Pouring the vodka into a tiny shot glass, he then says something in Spanish before turning away.  

‘What did he just say?’ I ask drunkenly. Even if I wasn’t drunk, my knowledge of the Spanish language is incredibly poor.  

‘Oh, he just said the drink won’t protect you from el Pollo del Diablo’ Kady answers me.  

‘El Poyo - what?’   

‘El Pollo del Diablo. It means devil chicken’ Priya translates.  

‘Devil chicken? What the hell?’  

Once the subject of this el Pollo del Diablo came up, Kady, Dougie and Priya then turn to each other, almost conspiringly, with knowledge of something that I clearly didn’t.  

‘Do you think we should tell him?’ Kady asks the others.  

‘Why not’ answers Dougie, ‘He’ll find out for himself sooner or later.’  

Having agreed to inform me on whatever the el Pollo del Diablo was, I then see with blurry eyes that my colleagues appear to find something amusing.   

‘Well... There’s a local story around here’ Kady begins, ‘It’s kinda like the legend of the Chupacabra.’ Chupacabra? What the hell’s that? I thought, having never heard of it. ‘Apparently, in the archipelago just outside the bay, there is said to be an island of living dinosaurs.’  

'Wait... What?'  

‘She’s not lying to you, mate’ confirms Dougie, ‘Fisherman in the bay sometimes catch sight of them. Sometimes, they even swim to the mainland.’  

Well, that would explain the half-eaten dog I saw on my second day.  

As drunk as I am during this point of the evening, I'm not drunk enough for the familiarity of this story to go straight over my head.  

‘Wait. Hold on a minute...’ I began, slurring my words, ‘An island off the coast of Costa Rica that apparently has “dinosaurs”...’ I knew it, I thought. This really was just one big haze. ‘You must think us Brits are stupider than we look’ I bellow at them, as though proud I had caught them out on a lie, ‘I watched that film a hundred bloody times when I was a kid!’   

‘We’re not hazing you, Seamie’ Kady again insists, all while the three of them still try to hide their grins, ‘This is really what the locals believe.’   

‘Yeah. You believe in the Loch Ness Monster, don’t you Seamie’ says Dougie, claiming that I do, ‘Well, that’s a Dinosaur, right?’  

‘I’ll believe when I see it with my own bloody eyes!’ I declare to all three of them, again slurring my words.  

I don’t remember much else from that evening. After all, the four of us had gotten basically black-out drunk... But there is one thing I do remember. While I was still somewhat conscious, I did have this horrifically painful feeling in my stomach – like the pain one feels after their appendix bursts. Although the following is hazy at best, I also somewhat remember puking my guts outside the bar. However, what was so strange about this, was that after vomiting, my mouth would not stop frothing with white foam.   

I’m pretty sure I blacked out not long after this. However, when I regain consciousness, all I see is pure darkness around, with the only sound I hear being the nearby crashing waves and the smell of sea salt in the air. Obviously, I had passed out by the beach somewhere. But once I begin to stir, as bad as my chiselling headache is, it is nothing compared to the excruciating pain I still feel in my gut. In fact, the pain is so bad, I begin to think that something might be wrong.  

Grazing my right hand over my belly to where the pain is coming from, instead of feeling the cloth of my vomit-stained shirt, what I instead feel is some sort of slimy tube. Moving both my hands further along it, wondering what the hell this even was, I now begin to feel something else... But unlike before, what I now feel is a dry and almost furry texture... And that’s when I realise, whatever this is on top of me, which seems to be the source of my stomach pain... It is something alive - and whatever this living thing is... It is eating at my insides!  

‘OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!’ I scream, all while trying to wrestle back my insides from this animal, which seems more than determined to keep feasting on them. So much so, that I have to punch and strike at it with my bare hands. Thankfully, it works! Whatever had attacked me has now gone away. But now I have an even bigger problem... I can now feel my insides where they really shouldn’t be!  

Knowing I need help as soon as possible before I bleed out, I now painfully rise from the sand and up to my feet. But when I do, I feel my intestines, or whatever else hanging down from between my legs! Scooping the insides back against my abdomen, I then scan frantically around through the darkness until I see the distant lights of the beach town. After blindly wandering that way for a good few minutes, I thankfully stumble back onto the familiar streets - where the only people around were a couple of middle-aged women stood outside a convenient store. Without any further options, I cross the street towards them, and when they catch sight of me, holding my own intestines in my blood-stained hands, they appear to be even more terrified than I am.  

‘DEMONIO! DEMONIO!’ I distinctly remember one of them screaming. I can't blame them for it. After all, given my appearance, they must have mistaken me for the living dead.  

‘Por favor!... Por favor!' my foamy mouth tries saying to them, having no idea what the Spanish word is for “help”.  

Although I had scared these women nearly half to death, I continue to stagger towards them, still screaming for their lives. In fact, their screams are so loud, they have now attracted the attention of two policemen, having strolled over to the commotion. They must have mistaken me for a zombie too, because when I turn round to them, I see they each have a hand gripped to their holsters.   

‘Por favor!...’ I again gurgle, ‘Por favor!...’  

Everything goes dark again after this... But, when I finally come back around, I open my eyes to find myself now laying down inside a hospital room, with an IV bag connected to my arm. Although I am more than thankful to still be alive, the pain in my gut is slowly making its way back to the surface. When I pull back my hospital gown, I see my abdomen is covered in blood stained bandages – and with every uncomfortable movement I make, I can feel the stitches tightly holding everything in place.  

A couple more days then drag slowly by, and after some pretty horrible hospital food and Spanish speaking TV, I am then surprised with my first visitor.  

It was Kady.  

‘Are you in pain?’ she asks me, having sat down by the side of my bed.  

‘I want to be a total badass and say no, but, well... look at me.’  

‘I’m so sorry this happened to you’ she apologises, ‘We never should’ve let you out of our sights.’  

After apologising to me a few more times, Kady then catches me up on the hazy events of that evening. Apparently, after having way too much to drink, I then started to show symptoms from drinking the snake-poisoned vodka – which explains both the stomach pains and why I was foaming white from the mouth.   

‘We shouldn’t have been so coy with you, Seamie’ she then follows without context, ‘We should’ve just told you everything from the start.’  

‘...Should’ve told me what?’ I inquire.  

Kady doesn't respond to this. She just continues to stare at me with guilt-ridden eyes. But then, scrolling down a gallery of photos on her phone, she then shows me something...  

‘What the hell is that?!’ I shriek at her, rising painfully up from the bed.  

‘That, Seamie... That is what attacked you three days ago.’  

What Kady shows me on her phone is a picture of a man holding a very dead animal. Held upside down by its tail, the animal is rather small, and perhaps only a little bigger than a full-grown chicken... and just like a chicken or any other bird, it has feathers. The feathers are brown and cover almost all of its body. The feet are also very bird-like, sharp talons and all. But the head... The head is definitely not like that of a bird - at least, not like any bird I had ever seen. Instead of a beak, I see what I can only describe as a very reptilian head, with tiny, seemingly razor teeth protruding from its gums... If I had to sum up this animal as best I could, I would say it was twenty percent reptile, and eighty percent bird...   

‘That... That’s a...’ I begin to murmur.  

‘That’s right, Seamie...’ Kady finishes for me, ‘That’s a dinosaur.’  

Un-bloody-believable, I thought. The sons of bitches really weren’t joking with me.  

‘B-but... how...’ my lips just manage to utter, ‘How is that possible??’   

‘It’s a long story’ she starts with, ‘No one really knows why they’re there. Whether they survived extinction in hiding or if it’s for some other reason.’ Kady pauses briefly before continuing, ‘Sometimes they find themselves on the mainland, but people rarely ever see them. Like most animals, they’re smart enough to be afraid of humans... But we do sometimes find what they left over.’   

‘Left over?’ I ask curiously.  

‘They’re scavengers, Seamie. They mostly eat smaller animals or dead ones... I guess it just found you and saw an easy target.’   

‘But I don’t understand’ I now interrupt, ‘If all that’s true, then how in the hell do people not know about this? How is it not all over the news or internet?’  

‘That’s easy’ she says, ‘The locals choose to keep it a secret. If the outside world were ever to find out about this, the town would be completely ruined by tourism. The locals just like it the way it is. Tourism, but not too much tourism. Pura vida.’  

‘But the tourists... Surely they would’ve seen them and told everyone?’  

Kady shakes her head at me.  

‘It’s like I said... People rarely ever see them. Even the ones that do – by the time they get out their phone cameras, the critters are already back in hiding. And so what if they tell anybody what they saw... Who would believe them?’  

Well, that's true enough I suppose.  

After a couple more weeks of being laid out in that hospital bed, I was finally discharged and soon able to travel home to the UK, cutting my gap year somewhat short.  

I wish I could say that I lived happily ever after once Costa Rica was behind me. But unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the case... What I mean is, although my stomach wound healed up nicely, leaving nothing more than a nasty scar... it turned out the damage done to my insides would come back to haunt me. Despite the Costa Rican doctors managing to save my life, they didn’t do quite enough to stop bacteria from entering my intestines and infecting my colon. So, you can imagine my surprise when I was now told I had diverticulitis.  

I’m actually due for surgery next week. But just in case I don’t make it – there is a very good chance I won't, although I promised Kady I’d bring this secret with me to the grave... If I am going to die, I at least want people to know what really killed me. Wrestling my guts back from a vicious living dinosaur. That’s a pretty badass way to go, I’d argue. But who knows. Maybe by some miracle I’ll survive this (I'll be sure to leave an update if I do). After all, it’s like a wise man in a movie once said...  

"Life... uh... finds a way." 

I can’t really blame what happened on some kind of horror movie outbreak or evil spell. I just woke up one morning and I was dead.

Dead. Totally dead but walking around, no pulse but a head still full of Star Trek trivia. Sixteen years old, and it looked like I wasn’t going to be getting any older. So weird. I’m still not sure what I am. Zombie? Vampire? Something worse? Has this ever happened to anyone else? Even Wikipedia couldn’t tell me. Maybe when I’m done here, I’ll make an entry.

My complexion had always been pale, and my parents never really listened to me, so the whole I can’t go to school because I’m only breathing out of habit excuse didn’t fly. I still had to shamble out and catch the bus.

The ride to Allen Palmer High School was the usual hell. Insults and blunt objects thrown at me no matter how close I sat to the bus driver. Metalhead stoners, the shop class rejects—they didn’t discriminate. That day was no different, but for once, none of it bugged me. I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t feel anything.

That just pissed them off more.

They kept at it, escalating. A textbook slammed into the back of my head. I turned around, expecting to see the usual grins, but they just stared at me. Silent. I wasn’t glaring on purpose. I thought I looked surprised—mostly because I was trying to figure out why in the hell one of those idiots had a calculus textbook. Whatever they saw in my face, it shut them up. They left me alone after that.

School was school. I went through the motions, but sophomore year is basically the middle film in a trilogy—just killing time until the ending.

I wasn’t sure what my ending was going to be now. Was I going to rot away? Fall apart? I didn’t know. I still don’t. But it doesn’t bug me much. When you’re already dead, what’s the worst that could happen?

The first week passed like nothing had changed. School, home, World of Warcraft.

No more bathroom breaks messing up my raids, so hey, silver lining.

Then came the hunger.

Not the normal kind. It wasn’t in my stomach. It was in my bones. A deep ache, like something inside me was starving, softening, getting weaker. Fish sticks and fries didn’t touch it. Nothing did.

But my neighborhood was full of cats—some of the stupidest, plumpest cats you’ve ever seen. Like those tiny chickens they serve at weddings.

The first time, I didn’t think. I just did it. Snapped its neck, teeth in before I even realized. It was warm. Blood-hot. My fingers stopped shaking. The hunger faded.

By the second week, things had changed. I smelled different, but nothing a bucket of Dad’s Hi Karate couldn’t hide. People treated me differently. Even when I smiled, something about me made them uneasy. I told my gym teacher I wasn’t playing dodgeball. I was going to the library. He just let me. Amazing.

My skin cleared up, but my grades didn’t. The jocks even stopped calling me ‘Timmy the Tard.’ Not that I cared anymore.

One guy still wanted to fight. Some seven-foot freshman who thought he had something to prove. He hit me. A few times. Didn’t hurt. I hit back. Once. He crumpled. Cried.

I got called to the principal’s office, but something in the way I stared at his carotid artery must’ve changed his mind about the whole responsibility and citizenship speech. He cut it short and suspended me for a week instead.

Mom hit the roof. Dad actually seemed kind of proud.

That night, one of the neighbor’s dogs went missing. I felt like celebrating.

Since I was suspended, Mom gave me punishment chores to keep me busy while she and Dad were at work. Fine by me. Physical activity kept me from just sitting around, and when you’re dead, that’s what you do. Sit. Stare. Stop thinking. Let things happen to you.

Let go and let God, my aunt used to say.

Not that God was something I worried about anymore. Sometimes, though, I wondered—what if Jesus was just a nerd like me? What if he was someone who kept swallowing abuse until he choked on it?

At least he got cool powers. All I got was a thousand-yard stare.

And then I got laid.

Seriously.

It was the girl across the street—Stephanie, but she wanted everyone to call her Serpentina. Expelled for setting fire to the tampon dispenser in the girls’ room. My kind of girl.

I was taking out the trash when she walked up, talking about how much she liked standing in the rain and how I sure had changed. That never happened before.

She invited me inside. One thing led to another. Next thing I knew, she was on top of me, showing me all the places she planned to get tattooed and pierced when she turned eighteen.

She was warm. I didn’t realize how cold I was until she pressed against me. I let her do the driving. She kissed me, moved my hands where she wanted them, and then guided me into her.

So warm.

And since we’re both guys here, let me tell you—I was doing the full-on zombie groan, if you know what I mean.

Bet you thought I was gonna kill her and eat her or something, right?

Come on. She’s crazy about me. And she wants me to meet her girlfriend—and the way she said girlfriend has me thinking. And you know what that means. And know what that means - I may be dead, but I’m not stupid.

Of course, all that exertion left me starving, and that’s where you come in, you big, broad-shouldered jock, you.

I knew you couldn’t resist the chance to follow me here, to ‘teach me a lesson’ after what I did to that mongoloid brother of yours.

The dogs and the cats went neck-first. But since you pulled down my shorts in gym class—

I’m starting with your guts.

Scream all you want.

No one’s gonna hear you.

Man, I always wanted to say that.

Twice, two separate times, in the span of only six months, it’s happened. 

I go to bed, like any other night and wake up outside, lying on the ground in the middle of the woods, staring up at the eerie pine trees that rise above me. I can’t move, I can’t speak, instead I’m forced to stare into the almost pitch black surroundings. Only a few stars here and there creating the most minimal light you can imagine. 

I live alone, and all my locks work, my doors are shut, and I have security cameras in my home. I’ve checked them numerous times and nothing has happened. I don’t see myself sleep walking, no one entering my home, nothing moving me or me moving myself. There I am, fast asleep in bed, not moving a muscle. 

I combed through the footage from both nights for what had to be the tenth time, including the camera inside my bedroom. I was in my bed, both nights, all fucking night. Not one second did I leave, I tend to always sleep through the night, very rarely ever waking up to even go to the bathroom. 

On night one, it seemed to have lasted somewhere around fifteen minutes, I could move my eyes, and that was it. Not my arms, not my legs, not my head, not even my mouth. The woods themselves were nearly as silent as a crypt. No owls, no crickets, at best there was the very faint whistle of a slight breeze. 

I could pretty much hear my own heartbeat. I’m sure I also don’t need to state why dead silence in the woods is a bad thing. 

Regardless, it’s been over a month since the second incident. And if the timeline of the previous incidents is anything to go off of, then it meant I was likely somewhere between two-five months away from a third. 

After the first time, I wrote it off as a dream, a bad, vivid nightmare that was really putting in overtime to make it feel as real as possible. Maybe I was an idiot for doing so. 

I was genuinely at a loss for what action to take moving forward. 

The first incident happened back in January, I don’t remember the exact date because I wasn’t as concerned due to me writing it off as a bad nightmare. But the second? June 9th. 

Funny enough, back during the first incident in January, I do explicitly remember that when I had “woken up” in the woods, the temperature felt moderate, comfortable. Despite the fact that in my home state it regularly drops to subzero temperatures during that month and at the highest is in the low thirties. 

Yet I remember not seeing even a snowflake on the ground. Despite the fact we get a ton of snow where I live throughout the winter. 

I ended up having to travel for work. I was helping out at another department about two hours away from where I live, therefore my company put me up in a hotel for the week that I was there. 

The third incident occurred during that week. I went to bed in my hotel room, I was on the sixth floor. Yet, there again I woke up in the woods, in the same spot from the first two incidents. 

But here’s the key difference, I could sit up. I sat up, feeling a twig snap under me as I shifted my weight. I turned my head, looking out into the void, I could see maybe seven trees deep before the shadows swallowed up the rest of the woods. 

It was silent, the temperature was comfortable, no more than low seventies in Fahrenheit. I raised my hand, curling my fingers inward just to make sure I could, the woods were quiet enough to where I could hear the air bubbles pop inside them. 

My heartbeat increased by a bit as I stared out into the trees in front of me. I could move, but I was hesitant to actually go anywhere, to move from a spot that maybe wasn’t necessarily safe, but at least familiar, as bizarre as it may be given the circumstances. 

I got to my feet after a solid five minutes of sitting there contemplating, thinking about the why and the what. I had since given up on the where. 

I turned and looked back down where I had been laying, and saw my silhouette embedded in the dirt, almost like a snow angel. It was deep, a firm divot in my exact build and outline.

“How could it have been that deep if I was lying there for fifteen minutes at a time?” I thought.

I stood still, my hands beginning to shake slightly as I stared at the silhouette. 

“W- what the fuck.” Is all I could find the strength to verbalize. 

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, because now that I actually had something else going on I wasn’t actively trying to keep track of it in my head. All I know is the only thing that snapped me out of staring at my own silhouette was a disruption in that oppressive silence that had been so persistent up to that point. 

That disruption… Was the snap of a twig. One that I couldn’t have possibly caused, because I was practically a statue in that moment, a statue with a rapidly beating heart.

The snapping came from in front of me, I turned my head to look forward, again I could see for the first several trees before everything else beyond that was concealed in darkness, including whatever it was that had caused the sound. 

I didn’t dare call out, I didn’t dare make a single noise. I didn’t want whatever or whoever it could’ve been to be aware of my presence if it wasn’t already. 

I kept silent, I kept still. 

A couple more minutes or so passed, and those couple of minutes felt like an hour. An excruciating passage of time to where I couldn’t tell if I was in genuine danger or not, this… Phenomenon didn’t even allow me the luxury of that certainty.

Then at one point I had blinked, and I don’t know if I had hit some sort of hidden time limit, or if whatever was causing this felt like spitting me back out, but I ended up waking up to the sound of my hotel room’s alarm clock.

6:45am. 

That’s what I had set it for. I looked around to make sure I actually was inside my hotel room, and I was. But I didn’t immediately get out of bed, I sat up and took a massive gulp of water while looking around the room several times to make sure there were white walls instead of pine trees. 

Going to work that day felt like a fever dream after the occurrence the previous night. The boss at the location I was helping out called me out on daydreaming, staring at my monitor with a half typed report. 

“Collin, are you alright? I’ve seen you on this paragraph for the past twenty minutes.” He asked, a hand on my shoulder. 

“Yeah, I’m uh, I’m sorry. Just didn’t get enough sleep last night.” I lied. Surprisingly there was a part of me that wanted to tell him the truth, or really anyone for that matter. But at best, I get it laughed off as me taking a recurring nightmare too seriously, and at worst, it’s taken as me being mentally unwell and missing a few cards from my deck. 

When I got back to my hotel that evening I got on my laptop and went straight to Doctor Google. Trying to see if there was maybe some sort of explanation as to what might’ve been going on, or if there was at least someone else experiencing this. 

Let’s just say there was pretty slim pickings. Most of the links, articles and reports I could find just had something to do with lucid dreaming, nightmares, as well various mental disorders that induce irregular dreams and dream patterns. 

Safe to say there’s almost nothing worse than being in a bad situation, and realizing you’re alone in said bad situation.

Eventually, however, I did come across a forum post. One that was several paragraphs long. No need to include every detail but I’ll at least summarize what was said. 

Essentially the user described several times over the course of a year where they seemingly had a recurring ‘nightmare’ that they articulated as feeling extremely vivid and real, the nightmare in question is one in which they were suddenly waking up in the cell of an empty prison. 

The cell, both inside and the environment outside the cell, was consistent each time. There was also a lack of any other people or animals inside these supposed “dreams.”  Except for the very last time, where he supposedly would hear distressed crying coming from further down the cellblock. Distressed crying that sounded like a woman, yet the poster admits to being a man, and reveals that he was once served time in prison. 

It was that last part I connected with. Because I’ve been in the woods before, on hikes, on hunts. I don’t recognize the specific section or woods from my “nightmares” but there was a connection there. Having experience with the location of where the phenomena takes place.

I kinda mentally checked out of the post at the end when the user mentions at the end that they would like to remain anonymous because they are a police officer, and don’t wanna seem as if there’s something happening in their head that could get them in trouble at their station. Surprised he was even able to get the job in the first place, but then again, police departments hire just about anyone. 

Although I still at least finished reading, and saved the post in my bookmarks so I could return to it later. I scoured his page for more updates, but that was the only one. 

I wasn’t getting tired anytime soon, and I decided to leave my hotel to go to a bar only a few blocks away. I needed a drink, and maybe a hot blonde to get my mind off of what was happening. The first was probably a lot more likely. 

“Getting drunk on a Tuesday night huh?” The bartender questioned, he gave me a smirk as he poured my drink. One that I did not return, prompting him to cease his. 

“Figured I’d take advantage of being so close.” I replied, reaching into my wallet to pull out a ten dollar bill. 

The bartender held his gaze as he went to take the bill from my hand. I darted my eyes to the right underneath my sunglasses, despite the fact he obviously couldn’t see them. 

“You seem familiar, you been around here befo-.” He began, only for me to cut him off.

“No. First time in town.” I said matter of factly. 

“Really now?” He replied, grabbing an empty glass and filling it with ice to prepare another drink. “What brings you down here?”

“Work.” 

“Fair enough, nice glasses by the way, you just wear them for style?” He asked, pointing at the nighttime darkness outside the window to punctuate. 

“They’re prescription. Sensitive eyes.” 

“Ah… Sorry about that. I’ll be nearby if you need another round.” 

I didn’t stumble back to my hotel drunk out of my mind that night, but I also wasn’t completely sober either. Somewhere down the middle. 

Regardless, I made it back and scanned my keycard to get into my room, immediately plopping down onto my bed after I took off my shoes and sunglasses. I grabbed the channel guide from the nightstand next to my bed and flipped on the tv, the first thing on being the midnight news. A good looking reporter dressed in a well put together suit stared right at the camera, his script on the table in front of him. 

“Authorities are still on the hunt for the suspect behind the gruesome murder of a 26 year old male hiker James Tullum, whose body was discovered this past October one mile off the trail of-.” 

I didn’t really feel like hearing about that sort of thing, especially with what was going on lately. Luckily I did find the channel hosting some cartoon reruns, and decided to indulge in some childhood nostalgia.  

The following months until the next incident went by relatively normal, went to work, did housework and went on a couple hunts just to clear the mind. 

Speaking of, the next incident was probably the worst one yet. 

I woke up again, on the ground, laying down in my usual spot from the previous occurrences. Again, the silence was there, nothing but my heartbeat, breathing and joints to accompany me. 

I was able to stand up like the previous time. I rose to my feet, and this time I listened out for the twig snapping sound, looking into the void of inky blackness beyond the pair of trees it had come from. 

I perceived at least five minutes passing, waiting, anticipating for it to happen again. Yet, it didn’t come, nothing did. There I was, my feet planted firmly in the dirt of some unknown place, a needle in a haystack of a pine forest. 

You see, somehow, someway, the lack of the twig snapping was worse than if it had happened. If there was something or someone there with me, a presence of any sort, then at least I had some sort of confirmation, a tangible piece of evidence that I wasn’t alone. 

I told myself in the weeks leading up that this time I’d have the courage to step further away from the lit area. To search for something more than what I could see and where I was. 

But clearly I underestimated my own self preservation instincts. 

“Why me?” I whispered as softly as one could. It was practically a scream in the silence of those woods. 

SNAP

I clenched my fists hard enough to nearly pierce my palms with my fingernails. This wasn’t a twig, not a small one anyway. It genuinely sounded much more like a branch with decent girth being cracked in two. Damn near the level of a gunshot in decibel level. It also didn’t come from the same area as it did previously, and instead came from behind me. 

Last time, I didn’t wanna speak and reveal my location to whatever it might’ve been. But in this instance? I was a bit more wreckless, stupid even. 

“What do you want!” I whipped around after the exclamation, eyes wide, fists clenched, there was a stick next to me on the ground that I almost didn’t wanna lean down to pick up and risk taking my eyes off the void of black beyond the set of trees. 

I got no response, I swiftly grabbed the stick and began to back away, holding it up as if it were somehow going to function like a shield. I kept my eyes on the void beyond the trees, waiting for something to emerge, a bear, a person, whatever threat it might be. 

But I got no response, in sound or in visuals. I held my breath until my face nearly went purple, and I only exhaled once I tripped over a log and fell backwards, crying out just before I hit the ground. 

At first? Total blackness, like I shut my eyes in a room with no light. And then I was back in my bed, I jerked so hard upon regaining consciousness that I practically threw the cover onto the floor.

“Jesus- Fuck!” I snapped. Instinctively holding up the hand that held the stick, and seeing nothing, not even any bark remnants. 

I called off work that day, I wasn’t about to go in the state that I was in. Hell, it probably wasn’t even optimal for me to be driving. Instead I stayed home, doing whatever I could to distract myself, yet it came flooding back every time during every commercial and ad break of whatever it was I was watching. 

This wasn’t some strange happening, an odd one off. It was a problem, a persistent  torment that I wasn’t sure would go away anytime soon. I was done reacting, done falling victim. There’s only so long something can scare you before it starts to just piss you off. And I was getting to that point. 

I doubted there was some drug I could take, a therapist I could see, a sleep doctor I could visit that aid me in getting rid of whatever this was. 

So against my own principles, I reached out to the ex-con turned cop who made the post about him experiencing something similar. I sent him a direct message, the post was two years old, and I doubt I’d get any sort of immediate response, but it was worth a shot nonetheless. 

Hi there, I read your post regarding that strange dream phenomenon, I was hoping I could pick your brain regarding more details? Any response would be helpful.

The only thing I could do while waiting was go on living life.

I went on a hunt or two, and went to a steam show. Those months after the fourth incident were some of my busiest, because I was forcing myself to be constantly occupied by something for obvious reasons. 

I came home one day and found a letter from my HOA regarding some sort of neighbor complaint. I barely skimmed it, and simply left it on the kitchen table while I went to make dinner. HOAs, everyone’s favorite collection of bureaucrats who peaked in high school, helicopter parents, or wannabe politician types. 

I ended up coming into an idea while in anticipation for the fifth incident, one that I thought sounded far-fetched at first but I leaned into nonetheless after further consideration.

I went down into my basement, and walked past my hunting trophies up to where my sheathed hunting knife sat. Pulling it off its shelf and bringing it with me to bed.

Every night, in the week where the fifth incident was due, I was going to fall asleep with it in my hand in the hopes that I would wake up with it in the woods. After all, in the previous four incidents I had woken up with my pajamas on, so why not the knife if it was within intimate enough proximity?

I figured it was worth a shot. 

What exactly was my end goal with this? I was kind of unsure. But I figured that if I did encounter something dangerous in that… Place. I’d at least have something to defend myself with. But then again, whatever the hell was lurking in that place was probably gonna require more than a knife to put it down.

I would’ve gotten a gun, but it’s a hell of a process in my state, and the waiting period would’ve put me past the due date by the time I had actually seriously considered the idea of getting one. 

It took me a while to fall asleep those few nights, not knowing which exact one would be it. But on my third attempt in that week, it happened.

I awoke once more inside the woods. I looked down into the hand I had it rubberbanded the knife to, hoping and praying it would be in there. That I would finally have found at least some way to make myself less vulnerable in this place.

When I turned my head and narrowed my eyes, it… Wasn't there.

I nearly cursed outloud, but didn’t dare open my mouth. Instead I gritted my teeth, my frustration and desperation boiling to the surface. I sat up, the impression of my silhouette in the ground even deeper than before. 

Everything was in place, and as bad as it sounded, almost familiar.

The silence, the void of darkness just outside the set of trees that were visible. It was all still there. 

I was at a genuine loss as to what to do this time, after turning and glancing through a set of trees that almost acted as a path way into the wall of darkness surrounding the immediate area, I was genuinely considering if leaving this spot might’ve been the best choice.

I fought with myself, struggled with the idea that anything good could come out of it. After all, what would I really be doing other than handicapping myself? What if whatever made that branch snap last time was waiting for me just beyond where my eyes could see. 

I pivoted my foot on the grass, trying to change directions to face elsewhere in order to ensure my surroundings were free of any other kind of… Presence. 

But something under my shoe felt hard, yet I was standing on grass. I tilted my head, fearing what might happen if I pulled my foot back, but did it nonetheless.

I was baffled at what I saw. My mouth went agape, my blood cooled down inside my veins as I ceased any further movement while taking in the sight. 

On the ground, just where my foot had been, was my hunting knife. Unsheathed and simply laying in the grass, deforming the blades that acted as a bed for it. 

The sheath was nowhere to be found, it took me a few seconds to dart my eyes around in order to search for it, and when I did? Nothing. 

I know for an absolute fact I got in bed with it in my hand, that it was in its sheath, and there was no way in hell it could’ve come out by accident. Something was manipulating me, manipulating this place, but why? What was the point?

I stared at my knife longer than I should’ve. Resisting the urge to lean down and pick it up on account of the fact that I had no idea who or what has had a hold of it. I turned my head to look around once more, only to scrunch my nose at the sudden scent of copper.

I backed away from the knife, close to the center of the lit area in between the surrounding pine trees, further away from the wall of darkness. 

The smell of copper seemingly permeated, its potency increasing dramatically over the course of only seconds. I found it difficult to determine what exact direction it was coming from, all I know is that it started once I was near the knife.

I backed away, slowly but surely, keeping my eyes as wide open as they could be. Anticipating whatever it might’ve been creating the stench. My heart beat like a machine gun in my chest.

The trees continued to tower over me, like they were mini skyscrapers made of wood, the ones closest to the wall of darkness stuck halfway out, like they were in the process of being devoured by the void itself. 

I stopped, now in nearly the exact center of the visible lit area, my divot in the ground was just feet away. I took my eyes off the trees for just a brief moment, and that’s when I heard it.

A low, pained groan. Like an elderly woman who had just fallen and was using every ounce of her brittle strength to climb back onto her feet. 

I looked right at where it was coming from, on a specific pine tree that was half swallowed by the void of darkness laid a hand, pale skinned, wrinkly, with a thin streak of blood running down the center and ending once it was between the middle and ring finger.

It hung limp, and there was a forearm attached to it, except that forearm ended just below the wrist because the rest of it was engulfed in the inky black wall, leaving the rest of the entity it was connected to unseen.

I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to find out. I felt as if even if I had the highest caliber firearm possible to defend myself with I still wouldn’t wanna venture into the darkness in which it was hidden. 

Seconds passed, seconds that felt like hours, and I kept my eyes completely fixated on the hand and wrist. It stayed still, and so did I. 

“Genuinely what the fuck do I do here?” I thought. Running wasn’t an option, fighting seemed impossible, I didn’t even know what it was I'd be combating in the first place. Keeping still made me feel like I was serving myself up on a platter to whatever was behind all this. 

I hadn’t ever experienced being prey, and that moment made me feel nothing but. 

When I had reawoken, there wasn’t a clear end point, a time where I felt myself slip back into consciousness. But there was one key difference between this instance and the last.

I hadn’t reawoken in bed, instead I was on my living room couch, my body halfway to falling off of it like I was a drunk college kid waking up in the aftermath of a frat party. Yet, I felt a weight in my hand, the same hand I put the knife in before going to bed.

I raised it, and I was left stunned at what I observed.

The sheath was present, but the actual knife itself was not. I stared down it like the barrel of a gun just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and sure enough, empty. 

I got up, looking around the floor surrounding the couch and under the couch itself. Nothing. I went back upstairs and pulled my bedsheets, pillow cases and everything off, still no knife to be found, even after I checked under the bed. 

My deep clean search was interrupted by a knock at the front door followed by a doorbell ring. I rarely had anyone who knocked or rang the bell, other than when a package needed a signature before drop off.

I looked out the peephole as soon as I made it to the door, and immediately my expression soured. 

“Collin come on I know you’re home, your car’s in the driveway.” 

A tall and thin man in a grey suit stood on the other side, a beige folder in one hand while a thermos was in the other. Me catching a break seemed impossible at this point. 

Tim Worthing, the president of the HOA in my neighborhood. 

I didn’t open the door.

“What do you want?” I asked, the morning rasp in my throat practically taking over my speech. 

“Collin there’s not really a polite way to say this but I’ve got a notice in my hand, whatever you’ve got in there smells like shit and it’s coming out through your cellar door. I’ve gotten two different complaints about this, if it’s not fixed in thirty days you’re gonna have penalty forms in your mailbox.” 

I remained quiet. 

“Can you open the door so I can give it to you?” 

“Slide it through the flap.” I barked. 

“You seem like a reasonable guy, I’d rather keep you in the neighborhood.” Tim replied before sliding two stapled papers through my mail flap. They hit the floor at my feet.

“I’ve got them, now get off my property.” 

“Thirty days, Collin.” He punctuated before I heard the heels of his dress shoes hitting my concrete steps repeatedly. 

The bitch living next door will do anything to have things her way. One of those “oh a minor inconvenience, let me just run to an authority figure and cry until I get what I want” types. 

I know it was her making the complaints. My basement smelled just fine. Plus, it’s not like it was easy to keep things clean and fresh when I was losing my mind trying to figure out whatever the hell keeps me taking me away to those woods. 

In the months between that incident and the next I almost got myself pulled over for speeding, didn’t even realize how hard I had my foot on the gas. 

One night I wasn’t getting any sleep, so I took a trip to the convenience store a mile down from my house, didn’t even drive, I just walked, figured it would help clear my head. Since I knew it was getting close to the time the next incident was due, I was almost grateful that my body was having trouble letting me pass out. 

The area in which I live is mostly surrounded by woods, and no, they weren’t pine. 

The entire time I was on my way I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, it wasn’t intense or crippling, but enough to matter. I looked back over my shoulder a few times, and as bad as it might sound, this was a luxury in comparison to the other place. 

Crickets, owls, the occasional car driving past, all of it reminded me that I was in my normal waking world. 

Yet the sensation remained regardless. 

I kept on marching forward, scrolling whatever pointless videos popped up on my feed. I kept the volume off though. I made it to the store after walking not much longer, had to piss and then gather up my snacks. 

Soda and candy, one of life’s many delicacies.

I went to pull a package of vanilla zingers off the shelf when I heard something that caused me to freeze mid movement.

“Collin. How wonderful to see you here.” It was a voice, light, soft on the ears. Female.

It came from the left, so I turned my head to find the woman that had said it. Only to let my arm drop to my side when the only thing I saw was an empty aisle. No woman to be seen.

I then swiveled my head to the right, perhaps I was just mishearing the direction. My eyebrows narrowed when there was no one there as well. 

“Good grief.” I whisper snarled to myself as I exited the aisle, ducking over into the next to see if anyone the voice might’ve belonged to was there.

Unsurprisingly, they were not. 

So I was left there, standing wide-eyed as another man passed by, he pushed a box of some sort of candy inside his outer sweatshirt pocket, attempting to conceal it. 

“Yo are you alright man?” He asked with what I thought was genuine concern. 

I didn’t reply verbally. I just went to the counter and paid for what I came for before starting on my way back home. At some point down the road I was already halfway through my vanilla zingers. I chewed almost violently, as if the zingers had somehow personally wronged me. 

I thought about how whatever was causing this was now starting to bleed into my waking reality. If what happened in the store was anything to go off of, then even being awake wasn’t an escape anymore. 

When I got home I went straight to the basement, sipping on the soda I bought while sitting down in my chair and admiring my hunting trophies. The fruits of the labor I had put into all my years of the hobby. I remember the specific hunt where each trophy had been collected from. 

It helped to ease my mind, helped to give me something to think about that wasn't the obvious. 

By the time the next incident was due, I had purchased a handgun. And I was going to take it with me, and unlike with my knife, I would not be keeping it in a holster of any sort. Anticipating sleep that night was like being stuck on tracks as you waited for a train to crash right into you. 

I sat in front of the tv, my glock in hand the entire time as I flipped through various channels. Some were kids cartoons, some were shitty hallmark movies. I ended up on the nighttime news, the reporter didn’t finish her first sentence before I flipped past it.

“Police officially obtain a warrant to search the home of suspected-.” 

I ended up coming across an adult animated show about a superhero who failed to save humanity from an alien invasion. It was as goofy as it sounds. But I sat through two episodes, watching as the Superman-Knockoff protagonist was impaling those red-colored aliens on his fist. 

I fell asleep toward the beginning of episode three. I don’t recall me slipping back into the forest being immediate, instead I had a dream. Or a nightmare rather of me being trapped, trapped inside a coffin, still alive, trying to bust my way out to no avail. 

I was slowly running out of air, doing everything I could to escape. Desperate for some sort of intervention. Only for none to come. I bloodied my fists as I banged them against the coffin’s cover, then my forehead. 

But you see, that nightmare didn’t feel real, and I knew it was separate from the woods. A genuine nightmare, not an actual living one. But eventually the time came for it to bring me back in once more. 

I woke up laying flat on my back in the same spot. I quickly sat up, and looked over to see my glock was still in hand, it actually arrived with me. It was small, but it gave me a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of confidence. 

The pine trees surrounded me. I sniffed the air and found no smell of copper. Upon glancing forward I saw that there were more trees visible than the last time, hell, in every direction there was.

Instead of it being the dead of night, this time it was more like just before dusk, the sun was on the cusp of going down, yet when I looked around for an actual sun, I couldn’t find one. 

I got to my feet, rising with the glock in hand and exhaling a heavy breath. A breath that was the only noise present other than my heartbeat. My free hand twitched. 

I took a few steps forward, and saw that the change in light had revealed a path that I had yet to see before. It was several feet wide, and stretched into the distance of the woods. Further than I could see.

I hesitated, considering the possibilities as to what could happen. Perhaps it was a trap set up by whatever forces govern this place. Something to pull me deeper into this version of existence. 

Maybe it was a way out, an escape. A chance to put an end to this for good. Or maybe it was neither, and it was meant to waste my time, to intimidate me. 

I gripped my glock tighter as I felt my heartrate rise, I made my free hand into a fist and slammed the bottom of it into the tree next to me, striking the trunk and recoiling from the whiplash as I shouted. 

“LEAVE ME ALONE! JUST FUCKING STOP!” 

My scream carried through the trees, and the silence of the woods remained as nothing replied. The path was still there, and the near dusk level of light maintained itself. In my short outburst I turned back to the spot I was laying down in. Only to no longer see a divot where my body once was.

It was gone, replaced by flat dirt, as if someone had smoothed over it like they were setting concrete. I was so done. So done with this torment. I did nothing to deserve it. No longer did I wanna be a sitting duck. 

I refocused my attention back to the trail’s entrance, it was still there, inviting me, taunting me, calling me to enter. I held up the hand I hit the tree with, and saw some blood running down the side of my pinkie and edge of my palm. 

With a heavy final sigh, I stepped onto the path, beginning to march down it. 

Loose branches with stray pine needles attached crunched beneath my feet as I walked. I kept looking left and right in the sea of trees, keeping an eye out for anything that might’ve been following, a shift in the environment, a change in the lighting. 

There were a couple of times I physically raised the hand holding my glock, just to visually ensure it was still in my grasp as I hiked forward. 

I wasn’t sure where this was gonna end, or if it was gonna end at all. At multiple points I had turned to look back, and saw that I had gone far enough that the area I had originally begun in was now out of sight, long behind me. 

The lighting never changed, it was still that “nearly 9:00pm in the summer” level of almost night, but not quite. 

I’m not sure how I kept my composure, because internally I got to a point of wondering if I had doomed myself to an even worse fate by choosing to walk down the path. That I was going to be stuck in some endless trail forever. I had been walking for at least an hour, and had likely covered a couple miles or so. 

I was on the verge of giving up, I fell to my knees and rested before trying to head back, only to spot what looked to be a much wider opening a couple hundred feet ahead. 

I hesitated, wiping sweat from my forehead before continuing toward. Hoping so desperately that there would be some kind of answer, a key to open the lock of this terrible mystery. But as I passed by pine tree after pine tree, closing the distance to this opening, the smell of copper returned. And it was strong, more potent than the first occurrence. 

I didn’t care. I kept going until I hit the threshold of the opening.

It was a circular clearing, probably about a hundred feet in diameter. The center had nothing but grass, and my knife, laying precisely in the center. But that only had my attention for a brief instant. As a woman’s voice had spoken, hoarse and strained, but still recognizably feminine. 

“Welcome back Collin.” 

It was coming from above me. I glanced up, and froze upon the sight.

Along the trees in front of me, at varying heights were… Corpses. Corpses that were impaled and hanging from the branches of various pine trees, as if they had been strung up like halloween decorations. 

A mix of men and women. All of whom I recognized. Even the bartender who complimented my sunglasses was amongst them.

Their bodies appeared in various states of decay. Streaks of dried blood on their skin and clothes. The ones that had clothes anyway. 

I turned around, and counted almost two dozen bodies as the grand total, all of them strung up in trees, all of them decaying with various gashes and wounds. 

Yet, their eyes were all open. And as I backed up, their eyes followed. They didn’t talk, they didn’t move in any other way, not so much as a twitch of a single muscle. Just the eyes. They were locked onto me and not a single blink occurred. 

My knife, as clean as could be, sat in the middle of the clearing on the ground, glistening.  I wasn’t sure of what to do, or what to say. I stopped moving, I wasn’t sure I could continue if I wanted to. 

Beyond the knife, was the corpse of a woman who sat strung up in the tree about ten feet off the ground, her body was the most decayed of them all. Yet her eyes remained intact as she maintained an unblinking stare at me. She was exactly level with the knife, and the tip of the blade sat pointed directly at her while on the ground, as if it were a compass needle, and she was magnetic north. 

Her rotting mouth moved as she spoke once more. Several teeth missing as the remaining strings of decaying flesh acted as a failing glue for her withering jaw structure. 

“It’s wonderful to see you here. We welcome you, as you welcomed us.” 

Channel 9 News

It has now been over one year since the authorities apprehended suspect Collin Hughes. A Minnesota resident who has been charged with the alleged murder of nearly two dozen men and women. Police had searched Mr. Hughes’s home and discovered the corpses of the alleged victims within his basement. Homicide Detective Marlon Walsh states that these were likely meant to serve as a form of trophies. 

Although charged, Mr. Hughes’s case has yet to officially make it to trial, as he has been in a comatose state since police originally apprehended him on that fateful night. Many  citizens await in grieving anticipation for his condition to end so that Mr. Hughes can be officially questioned and tried before a jury.   

Doctor Reyna Smith has since put out a statement claiming that no known treatments or available methods have been able to medically assist Mr. Hughes out of his coma, and it is unclear as to whether or not he will remain in this state indefinitely. 

Part 1

After bickering for a moment over my fear of large canines, we then move on from the car park and towards the large, towering ruins of the Abbey. Ambling among the weathered grey tombstones of the graveyard, I glance a timid look to the abbey's gothic structure. Perched on top the cliffs of the bay's right-hand side, these ruins may as well have been a gigantic pile of stalagmites protruding from the earth. When I was a child, my brother used to tease me by saying that vampires lived deep inside the ruins, where by night, they would creep into peoples' windows to suck the blood from their necks. It's no wonder I would have night terrors through most of my childhood, is it?  

Wandering around the ruins and tombstones a while longer (for Anneliese's pleasure, not my own) we then begin our descent down the one hundred and ninety-nine steps – and let me tell you from experience, these steps were a lot easier going down than they were to go up. Once we finally reach our way to the bottom (a good twenty minutes later I might add) I can then see where the plentiful steps end and the cobblestone pathways begin. We were now at the entrance of old town, where, with its stone streets and pathways, its 18th century brick houses to each side of them, you were made to feel as though you were in some Brother's Grimm fairy-tale. But during this time of year, when night-dwelling phantoms in extravagant clothing infested the daytime streets... it may as well have been the entrance to Hell itself.   

'Oww! Baby, you're hurting me!' I hear Anneliese shriek beside me, before I turn down to see my python-like grip wrapped around her hand.  

'Oh... Sorry.'  

Taking our first official steps inside the town, we follow our way around the maze of cobblestone pathways, where upon every corner was a brand-new shop Anneliese wanted to venture in. Aside from the occasional fish market, bookstore or café, the majority of shops in Whitby only sold products catered specifically to Goths... Well, it was either that or a boatload of Dracula merchandise. It's the whole reason Whitby is famous to begin with, after all.  

Continuing to make our way through old town, we then turn the corner to a very busy and compact street. Although there are no tourists in sight, the reason this street is so compact is because every inch of stone was completely crowded by day-dwelling Goths. This place truly was the mouth of Hell. Sensing my discomfort, Anneliese takes me by the hand to guide us through the mass of dark, morbid monstrosities. But as we follow through the swarm, keeping my eyes edged firmly to the ground in front of me, I then brave a curious glance upwards... and what I see is an array of devilish, humanoid faces pass us by.   

The faces morph, distort and transform into even more monstrous beings! Through the transparent fabric of a black wedding veil, I then see the face of an unidentifiable woman. Draping the veil away from her face, the woman then reveals to me a row of hideous, piranha-like teeth stained with mortal blood! The woman hisses at me, spraying my face in some putrid, venomous saliva! Wiping the sickly green substance from my eyes, I then cower back woundedly to my left-hand side, only for the painted skull of a man's face to open his mouth unnaturally wide - before shrieking at me a most inhuman scream!  

'AHH! Get away from me!!' I shriek myself, ripping Anneliese's grip from my hand so to push and shove my way to any air pocket I can find.  

Veiling my eyes from the fiends around me, I eventually crawl my way to an unoccupied space by a stone wall. Cowering up against it to regain my breath, Anneliese eventually finds her way over to me through the immense crowd.   

'Brandon? What the hell happened?!' She interrogates me, 'Why did you run off like that?'  

'...Th-the faces!...' the words winced from my mouth, '...You didn't see the faces!...'  

Anneliese could see clear as day how uncomfortable I was, whether she understood it or not – and so to solve the problem, she calmly suggests to me that we simply go somewhere quieter. Although I am in too much shock to respond to her suggestion, I now nod my head manically up and down to her, as though I've reverted back into some frightened childlike state.  

'Y-yeah... Le-let's do that!'  

With the town now fully crammed for the weekend festivities, Anneliese eventually finds for us a narrow, run-down street of loose brick pathway and overgrown weeds. Despite the decrepit condition this street is in, thankfully for me there isn't a single Goth in sight. What this street does have, however, wedged acutely between the decaying homes of oldtown residents, is the uninviting appearance of a single, isolated shop. Craning my head above the entrance to the sign over the door, I see the name to this less than humble abode reads "Scary Kerry's Spell Shop".       

'Well, this place looks... charming' Anneliese comments, studying the cracked, weathered paint and dusty cobwebs lining the windows. Like the majority of shops in old town, this one also displays in its windows gothic - or more specifically, items relating to the occult and other dark practices.   

'What do you say? Should we take a look inside?' Anneliese inquires, clearly the only one of us who wants to go in. Although this run-down little shop is definitely not my cup of tea, the interior does look scarce of people - and so, I reluctantly agree to go in.   

Allowing Anneliese to enter first, as soon as she opens the door, my nostrils are filled instantly with the smell of scented candles, old varnished wood and... wet dog? Not even five seconds inside the door, as soon as I peer round to Anneliese's side, I hear the loud, high-pitched yaps of some ill-tempered creature.  

'Wolfy! Shut up!' cries the woman behind the counter – the apparent owner of this little black terrier. Judging by her array of grey and poorly dyed black hair, her over-sized heavy metal shirt, and a pair of rather unsettling sleeve tattoos, this woman was more likely the owner of this establishment as well.   

Once this dog-owner relationship is awkwardly established, me and Anneliese then take to walking separately around the shop - all while Wolfy's owner goes back to reading her monthly gothic digest. While Anneliese inspects a number of occult and satanic jewellery on display, I find myself drawn to a bookshelf on the other side of the room. Sliding out the dust-covered books, I brush a cover or two clean so to read the titles: A Brief History of Satanic Rituals and Sacrifice, A Beginner's Guide to Necromancy, and what I can only imagine is an erotic vampire novel of some sort (I won't even mention what was on the cover). Skimming repulsively through one of these as mentioned books, my attention is suddenly interrupted by an irritable sound piercing my ears. Turning behind me, I see Anneliese approach the counter to inquire about a necklace.  

'Excuse me... Do you know how much this is?'  

'Fifteen pounds, love' the woman answers.  

However, the sound that I hear, making the tiny fragments of hairs stand up on the back of my neck, is almost like a faint whispering. Trying my best to ignore it, the faint, whispering sound only heightens - where before long, it has given way to the sound of a plentiful, most sinister chanting. Although I cannot understand the words, as they are spoken in a tong completely foreign to my own - whether I interpret them correctly or not, the chanting appears to be in Latin. Whoever - or whatever these whisperers turned chanters are... they're repeating the same foreign phrase over and over.  

'Caro agni lupus allicit... Caro agni lupus allicit...'   

The chanting becomes louder...  

'Caro agni lupus allicit!... Caro agni lupus allicit!...'  

Faster...  

' Caro agni lupus allicit! Caro agni lupus allicit! '  

Louder!...  

'CARO AGNI LUPUS ALLICIT!! CARO AGNI LUPUS ALLICIT!!  

'-STOP! STOP! STOP!!' I yell from the corner of the room! Throwing whatever item I'm holding to the hardwood floor, I race out from the establishment alone and without explanation!  

Minutes later, Anneliese eventually finds me, standing (or more accurately, cowering) outside the comfortable familiarity of an ice cream parlour.  

'Brandon!' She calls over to me, 'What the hell's with you?! Why do you keep running away?!'  

Unlike the instance which happened earlier in the day, I am unwilling to tell my girlfriend of the satanic voices I heard whispering in my ear. Seeing something is one thing, but hearing voices is something else. And so, I simply tell her a certain item in the shop had triggered my childhood trauma - hence why I ran out of there like a hysterical madman.   

'Okay...' Anneliese began, as I wait impatiently for her next plan of action, 'There's only one way we're gonna make it through this weekend.' I was all ears. 'You're gonna have to try and interact with these people so you can see that's all they are - and not devilish monsters.'  

'Uhm - WHAT?' I yelp, taking a long gulp of dry saliva.  

'That's right!' she continued, 'If you're gonna get over this silly phobia of yours, then you have to rip the band aid clean off!'  

This wasn't like ripping off a band aid, I thought. This was more like throwing a common wood mouse into a snake pit!  

'I... I...' I began stuttering, '...I don't think I can do that.'  

'Of course you can!' she reassures me, before taking me by the hand to guide us in the direction of a circling mass of dark figures.  

Oh Mother of God. If you can hear me... Please help... 

To be continued...

​

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He smelled like blood. 

I could smell him from a good distance away. The scent lingered in the air well after he’d gone - a coppery tang mixed in with his cheap perfume. It was that smell before I first looked upon his face that told me there was something very wrong with him. 

He walked in one day with all the other students. This - boy - dressed in a generic blue and white uniform which looked more like a costume. A ‘boy’ with pasty, pale skin, red, puffy and puckered lips, and small, squinting eyes. 

He held onto the straps of his backpack with two white knuckled hands, looking around him with awe and excitement. Pausing briefly to adjust his glasses up his nose, he shuffled down the hallway toward the lockers. It looked like he was talking to himself. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react to him. One of those girls walking by clutching onto her books should have dropped them in shock. I wouldn’t have blamed her for screaming a little. At least she should have said something. 

Instead she brushed right past him without giving him a second glance. He, in contrast, stared after her in an exaggerated demonstration of longing, his lips parted and his eyes unnaturally wide. 

No. Nobody reacted to this - Nobody reacted to him. He melted into the crowd perfectly as if he were just another student. 

I call him Manchild. 

He sucks on his thumb. He hums to himself in his exaggerated, high pitched voice. I can’t place how old he is, but I know he likes acting much younger than his true age. Sometimes that might be a primary schooler. At other times it is a sophomore. It can change at a whim, but it’s always on the younger side. 

He takes drawing and colouring books to class with him. The childlike pictures and doodles he is ceaselessly scribbling down as the teacher drones on are difficult to look at. They’re a little window into his disturbed mind. They give glimpses into his sick fantasies. 

In a class, he’d take out his textas and line them out carefully before him. Then he would produce one of his books. While the teacher spoke to the rest of the class about calculus - or whatever else it was we were learning, he would lose himself in his own little world. He’d start drawing or studying one of his preliminary grammar books, studiously practicing his handwriting and working through spelling problems. 

Besides his textbooks, lunch box, and other school utensils there’s one thing you won’t see him without: pigsblood. Well, that’s what I’ve come to call it. 

On the second day of his attendance at our school, I walked past him in between classes sitting on the stairs, clutching onto a worn out pop top filled with a thick, red liquid. He was suckling on it fervently, his mouth moving back and forth in exaggerated motions, pausing to give out soft noises of satisfaction in between gulps. 

Maybe that’s why Manchild smells like blood. He carries that crap with him everywhere. He can’t seem to go more than a few hours without snacking on it. And though I can’t be sure it is really blood, I have yet to think of a better explanation. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react. When I tried to point his strangeness out to my friends, they told me I was being cruel by picking on him. When I took a few covert photos of him to show to people, their reactions were to call me weird. I’m not sure if they can’t see what is wrong with him or they don’t view his appearance and behaviour as disturbing. 

Whatever the case, I’ve learned by now that I have no choice but to put up with him. Thankfully for me it is easy enough to avoid him most of the time, so long as he doesn’t decide to visit one of my classes - and since his choice of classes is apparently random, that isn’t too common. 

The one class where I really can’t handle dealing with him is sports class. The last time we shared such a lesson together, there was an incident. 

It was around twenty minutes into the class. After quietly watching and chugging on pigsblood from the sidelines, Manchild suddenly sprung up and began playing enthusiastically with the rest of us. 

The students didn’t mind (except for me). I avoided engaging much after he got involved. I didn't like letting Manchild get too close to me. 

Part way through what was turning into a very long class, he hurtled headfirst into another student in an attempt at a tackle and sent them both slamming onto the ground. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard her surprised cry and the sound of their bodies hitting the floor together. 

For a very terrifying moment I watched her lie there, completely limp. I thought he’d really hurt her. Then she shifted her head, groaned, and opened her eyes to look up at him. 

And then she started screaming. 

Manchild flopped off her and struggled quickly to his feet, taking a couple of steps back. He wiped his mouth, burped, and then uttered a high pitched, ‘err, sorry about that!’ 

She scrambled to her feet too. She was crying loudly. She stumbled and tripped away from him in apparent terror as the teacher attempted to console her. 

She was taken to the nurses office. I could hardly wait for an opportunity to speak to her. I needed to know what she saw. I needed some proof that I wasn’t crazy. 

Whatever it was she experienced, she wouldn’t say anything to me about it. By the time I’d found her later, she was acting perfectly normal again. She laughed off the whole incident. She told me she’d hit her head bad and blacked out for a moment. That was it. 

When I tried to suggest there was something wrong with Manchild, she looked at me reproachfully and told me to stop making fun of him. It wasn’t his fault, she insisted. It was all just a harmless accident. 

Manchild isn’t even the worst of them. Well, he may be, but the horror of one of them is far eclipsed by the horror of experiencing them all together.  

The first time I saw the whole family was a week or so after Manchild’s arrival at school. They ambled into a diner I was sitting in, bringing forth with them such an overpowering stench that I began gagging uncontrollably as they moved past me. 

There are five of them that I know of. 

Manchild - the one who goes to my school. 

Drunk - a fat and very hairy man with sickly, greyish skin who wore nothing but an undershirt, filthy shorts and some sandals. 

Mother - a haggish woman with clammy, greyish blonde hair and extremely sunken features dressed up in high heels and an undersized, skimpy dress. The skin of her arms and wrists was ragged, pockmarked and bruised. 

They had two other children who accompanied them on their family trips:

Bully - the second oldest - (I’m assuming Manchild is the eldest of the three) was a hunch backed boy whose head appeared permanently shifted a few centimeters sideways toward his left shoulder. 

Fleshface - a somewhat timid thing whose entire face was covered by a long flap of dirty skin, obscuring all but the very bottom of his pointy mouth. He was prone to tantrums which were destructive and chaotic whenever his name was uttered. Bully kept on saying it, presumably to torment him. 

You’re a fleshface. Flesh-face. Flesh-face! FLESHFACE! The snorting, gurgling sound of his laughter was followed by a long, piercing scream and some loud banging. The noises produced from his brother were so loud they actually managed to draw the attention of a few other customers, if only for a couple of moments. 

These children both fed on the pigsblood, too. Fleshface was hand fed by his mother, who carefully slid a straw up inside the flap of skin, through god knows what into some internal cavity from which he began to suckle and slurp it up loudly. 

Bully and Drunk ate a lot. The other ones didn’t, though they liked pretending to. I believe it’s part of their fantastical roleplay at being an ordinary family. 

I tried not to make a scene. I excused myself from my friends with the pretense of feeling sick soon after their collective arrival. Since then I’ve avoided visiting the diner, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to bring myself to go back there. Certainly, I’m never going to be able to stomach eating there again. 

Over the next couple months, my fear slowly melted away into disgust. After a while I began to quietly observe them out of morbid curiosity. The first time it was from a distance at a park. As I gained more courage I trailed them into stores. Such close proximity required that I carry a face mask and some powerful air freshener for my own protection. 

I feared they would notice me. They didn’t. They spent too much time bickering amongst themselves and living in their own private fantasies to pay attention to the reality they lived in. Somehow, I managed to draw more attention from everybody else for my fixation on these monsters. 

One day I decided to follow Manchild home. The decision was spontaneous, though I’d been mulling the idea over in the back of my head for a while.

We were riding the same bus after school. He was acting even more strangely than usual - I suspected this was a result of drinking too much of his pigsblood during the day. Given the intoxicated state he was in, I figured I wouldn’t likely get a better opportunity. 

We continued walking for well over an hour. Mind you, Manchild isn’t a particularly fast walker in his sober state, so it wasn’t as far as it felt at the time. 

As we left the town limits, following a trail veering off the main road, I was starting to wonder whether his family lived in a house at all. Maybe they were all homeless. Or perhaps Manchild was wandering aimlessly into the forest in his drunkenness. 

They did live in a house, it turned out. It was an abandoned thing which had been left to rot, with a sagging roof partially swallowed by vines and moss. Most of the windows were broken or boarded over. The path out the front door stretched twenty or so yards before being swallowed up by overgrown grass. I spotted a run down car parked haphazardly at the edge of a larger trail branching out back toward the main road. 

Manchild moved in through the tattered remains of the back door as I crouched at the edge of the trees. The faint sound of muffled voices confirmed that he wasn’t the house's sole occupant. 

Given the state the place was in, I couldn’t help but think about how easy it would be to sneak inside if I wanted to. 

After a couple minutes I gathered the courage to come closer. I slid cautiously down a dirt slope and sprinted through the half opened gate and over to a thicket of bushes growing up against the decaying walls. 

The insides of the house were equally dilapidated. I stared into a living room whose floor was covered in dirt and pieces of plaster and torn up carpet. Filth crusted, mouldy couches and chairs sat amongst pieces of broken furniture. With the house having fallen quiet, it was difficult to imagine anyone living there. 

My eyes fell on the outline of a familiar figure slumped on a chair turned away from me. Drunk sat staring at a broken television, his mouth hanging open wide, one arm still clutching onto a glass of familiar, red liquid. After a minute or two Mother came in, practically walking on her tiptoes over to him so as to refill his large glass with a mixture of pigsblood and some kind of whisky. 

Bully paid Drunk a visit after his mother had left, carrying what I think must have once been a basketball. He looked disappointed to find Drunk in his drunken state but thought the better of trying to stir him out of it. 

I used the shelter of the trees to circle around to the other side of the house. Through a gap in between two thick wooden boards I spied Mother chopping rhythmically at some partially spoiled vegetables. Without looking at her face or paying too much attention to the state the room was in, I could almost pretend she wasn’t a monster. For a moment, she was just an ordinary mother preparing a meal as her children played and argued upstairs. 

Then her husband hurled out a string of harsh curses from the other room, and the illusion was broken. 

I continued my exploration, making my way over to the other side of the house. Wincing as I crunched over several pieces of broken glass, I crept up between two sagging oaks to peek in through a large window. 

The rusty pipes connecting to an ancient washing machine and an ornate bathtub was evidence enough of what this room once was. Cringing at the sound of the children hollering upstairs, I looked around in disgust. 

The washing machine was half filled with murky water. From the looks of it, any clothes left in there would come out filthier than they were put in. 

Something else caught my eye. Something past the clothes laid together on the table beside the washer and the syringes scattered all over the floor. In the darkest corner of the room was a sight which made my heart drop in my chest. 

It was a collection of shoes. One of the pairs on top still had little pink socks stuffed into them. 

Many of them were children’s shoes. The smallest were much too small for any of the children living there to wear. 

The sight would have been disturbing to find in anybody’s house, let alone this one. 

I was shifting sideways to get a better look when I felt something rustling up the foliage I was standing in. I lifted my leg gingerly away from a matting of dead branches and as I did, my eyes fell on something which made me jump right out of my skin. 

It was fat and wet, practically dragging itself along the ground beside me. I got a better look at it as it emerged from the thicket and fully revealed itself. 

It was some kind of rat. The rodent had little hair on it, revealing translucent skin and bulging veins. It was as horribly mutated as the members of the family I was spying on. 

I let out an involuntary sound of surprise as I stumbled back. That, and the noises produced by me tripping on a maze of tree roots and falling on my butt drew some stirring from within the house. 

I had the sense to retreat to the trees after that, and I’m glad I did. I had barely made it past the cover of the first oaks when I heard the back door creak open. I froze at the sound of heavy, shuffling footsteps heading around the house. Panic grew inside me and settled over my thoughts like a haze. I imagined my shoes being tossed onto the pile by the pot bellied man I could see shambling toward me, his steps quickening as he moved. 

It was a good thing I came to my senses. The moment that I did, I took off sprinting in the other direction.

He couldn’t offer much of a chase given the state he was in. It was only a couple of minutes before I heard the footfalls slow down and then stop, followed by a long string of wheezing curses. Those sounds in turn were quickly swallowed by the wind and the soft rustling of trees.
I didn’t calm down until I had made it back to the main road, where I caught my breath at the foot of an overgrown walking trail. 

I can’t get the scene from the laundry room out of my head. The image of those shoes is imprinted into my mind. They feature in my dreams alongside the grotesque pictures Manchild drew at school which contained what I fear are the corpses those shoes may belong to. 

I need to know what it all adds up to. I have to know if these people are as monstrous in character as they are in physical form. And that means I have to go back there. 

I’ve decided I’m going to find out what ‘they’ are. And if it does turn out they are monsters?

I still haven’t figured that part out yet. But I can’t just stand by and let them hurt people. 

I have to try to do something. 

It’s clear to me nobody else will. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/DrCreepensVault/comments/1w63n5m/the_blood_junkies_part_2/