Chapter 1: The Breach
There is a specific kind of silence that only exists in places abandoned by God. It isn't the peaceful quiet of a snowy forest or the calm of a desert night. It's a heavy, suffocating silence. The kind that presses against your eardrums until they ring. The kind of silence that feels like it's holding its breath, waiting for you to make a mistake.
That was the silence of St. Jude's Asylum.
I didn't believe in the paranormal. Twelve years as a Tier One operator in the sandbox burns the superstition right out of you. You learn very quickly that the real monsters don't hide under beds; they walk on two legs, carry Kalashnikovs, and bleed red just like the rest of us.
When you've seen what human beings can do to each other in the name of war, the idea of a transparent lady in a white dress rattling chains seems almost laughable.
So, when the city hired my private security firm to clear out the condemned hospital before the demolition crews rolled in, I treated it like a standard sweep and clear. Some local kids had been reporting weird lights, strange sounds. Classic urban legend garbage. I figured I'd find some squatters, maybe a meth lab, and a whole lot of raccoon droppings.
I was wrong. Dead wrong.
The air inside the asylum was thick. It smelled of black mold, decay, and the faint, metallic tang of oxidized copper—like dried blood on a rusty blade. My boots crunched over shattered glass and peeling linoleum, echoing down the cavernous, graffiti-scarred corridors.
I had my Glock 19 drawn, pressed close to my chest in a compressed ready position. The SureFire tactical light mounted beneath the barrel sliced through the gloom, throwing long, distorted shadows against the peeling walls.
"Clear," I muttered into my comms, even though I was working solo. Old habits die hard.
I was on the fourth floor, the old maximum-security ward. The temperature had dropped by at least fifteen degrees the moment I crossed the threshold of the stairwell. I could see my breath pluming in the beam of my flashlight, a milky cloud in the dead air.
Then, I heard it.
Scuff. Scuff. Scuff.
Footsteps. But not the heavy, deliberate tread of a man. It sounded like bare feet dragging across the filthy tiles. Quick. Erratic.
I froze, instantly dropping my center of gravity. My thumb rested on the light switch, ready to strobe and blind whoever was out there.
"Security," I barked, my voice booming down the hallway like a gunshot. "Come out with your hands visible."
Nothing. The silence slammed back into place.
Then, at the far end of the corridor, where the flashlight beam started to diffuse into the heavy darkness, something moved.
It wasn't a shadow. It was the opposite. A pale, indistinct blur. It darted from the doorway of what used to be a hydrotherapy room, sliding across the hall with an unnatural, fluid grace. It didn't walk; it glided.
My heart hammered against my ribs, an old, familiar friend from my days in Fallujah. Adrenaline spiked my blood. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up at attention.
Target acquired, my brain supplied, falling back on years of conditioned response. Ghosts don't trigger tripwires. Phantoms don't leave footprints. It's just a guy in a sheet. A squatter messing with you.
I moved. I didn't run; I advanced with tactical precision. Heel-to-toe, keeping my upper body perfectly steady, weapon trained down the hall.
As I closed the distance, the temperature plummeted further. A wave of bone-chilling cold washed over me, biting through my tactical jacket.
Suddenly, the pale figure lunged across the hall again, completely illuminated for a fraction of a second in my beam.
It looked… wrong. The proportions were off. The limbs were too long, the joints bending at angles that would break human bone. It wore something that looked like rotting hospital gowns, trailing behind it like dirty cobwebs.
Before I could process what I was looking at, it threw itself into a room at the end of the hall.
BANG.
A heavy, rusted steel door slammed shut behind it with a concussive force that shook dust from the ceiling. The echo rolled down the corridor like thunder.
I hit the wall beside the door frame, slicing the pie, clearing my angles. The hallway was pitch-black again, save for the tight circle of my flashlight.
"You're boxed in!" I yelled, my voice tight. "There's no other way out of that room. Come out now!"
Silence. No breathing. No shuffling. Just the sound of my own pulse pounding in my ears.
Alright. Playtime's over.
I stepped back, evaluating the door. Heavy gauge steel, reinforced frame, but the hinges were rusted, brown with decades of neglect. The lock mechanism looked corroded.
As an ex-Special Forces operator, breaching is muscle memory. You don't think; you act.
I planted my left foot, raised my right, and drove my combat boot forward with every ounce of kinetic energy I could summon, striking the door exactly next to the deadbolt.
The metal groaned, the rusted locking mechanism sheared off with a sharp snap, and the door flew open, crashing against the interior wall.
I pivoted into the fatal funnel, weapon up, finger resting lightly on the trigger guard. The flashlight beam swept the room in a rapid, practiced arc. Left corner, clear. Center, clear. Right corner—
I stopped dead.
The breath caught in my throat. My finger instantly moved entirely off the trigger.
There was no pale, unnatural monster. There was no ghost.
Huddled in the deepest, darkest corner of the room, trapped between a collapsed hospital bed and a rotting radiator, was a family.
A mother, maybe thirty years old, looking like she had aged fifty years. Her face was hollow, smeared with dirt and grease. She was wearing a torn, oversized men's coat that hung off her emaciated frame.
Clutched to her chest were two young children, a boy and a girl. They couldn't have been older than six. They were wrapped in filthy, threadbare blankets, trembling so violently it looked like they were vibrating.
They weren't looking at me with the anger of caught trespassers. They were looking at me with the sheer, unadulterated terror of prey that has finally been cornered by a predator.
"Please," the mother choked out. Her voice was raspy, destroyed by the cold and thirst. She threw one hand up, shielding the children's faces from my blinding tactical light. "Please, God, don't. We don't have anything. We just needed to stay warm. We'll leave. Please."
I slowly lowered my weapon, pointing the muzzle toward the floor. I shifted my flashlight beam away from their faces, aiming it at the ceiling to illuminate the room with a softer, ambient bounce.
"Hey," I said, trying to soften my authoritative bark into something resembling a human tone. "Hey, it's okay. I'm security. I'm not going to hurt you."
The mother didn't relax. If anything, she pulled the children tighter. The little boy was crying silently, tears leaving clean streaks down his dirt-caked cheeks.
"I saw someone run in here," I said, my tactical mind trying to catch up with the emotional gut-punch of the situation. "A tall person. Pale. Where did they go?"
I swept my light around the room again. It was a dead end. Concrete walls. Boarded-up windows. No secondary exit. No trap doors.
"There's nobody else here," I said, confusion creeping into my voice. "Where did the person who slammed the door go?"
The mother stopped trembling. Her ragged breathing hitched. She lowered her hand from her children's faces and looked at me.
But she wasn't looking at my eyes.
She was staring over my left shoulder. Staring out the open doorway into the pitch-black hallway I had just walked down.
All the color drained from her already pale face. Her jaw went slack. Her eyes widened until I could see the whites all the way around her irises.
"We didn't slam the door," she whispered, her voice barely carrying over the pounding of my heart.
The temperature in the room plummeted again. My breath plumed into the air.
"It locked us in," she whimpered, her gaze fixed on the darkness behind me. "And now… now you let it in."
I didn't want to turn around. Every survival instinct I had honed over a decade of combat was screaming at me to raise my weapon, to fire blindly, to do something.
But I was frozen.
Because right behind my left ear, close enough that I could smell the stomach-churning stench of rotted meat and stagnant water…
Something exhaled.
Chapter 2: The Hunger in the Hallway
The breath that hit my neck wasn't just cold—it was absolute zero. It didn't feel like air; it felt like a void, a vacuum that sucked the heat right out of my skin, leaving behind a trail of ice and the nauseating stench of a mass grave.
I didn't scream. My training wouldn't allow it.
In one fluid motion, I spun, dropping to a low crouch to shrink my profile while whipping the Glock 19 upward. My thumb slammed the toggle on the SureFire light, sending a blinding 1,000-lumen strobe into the doorway.
In the flickering high-intensity light, I saw it.
It wasn't a man. It wasn't a ghost. It was a nightmare stitched together from pale, translucent skin and elongated bone. It stood nearly seven feet tall, its torso unnaturally thin, like a starved dog's ribcage. Its arms reached down past its knees, ending in fingers that were too long, with too many knuckles.
But it was the face that stopped my heart.
It had no eyes. Just smooth, stretched skin where the sockets should have been. Its mouth was a jagged, vertical slit that ran from the base of its nose down to its throat. And it was vibrating. The thing was shivering with a frantic, predatory energy.
The strobe light hit it, and for a second, it recoiled. It let out a sound that wasn't a scream—it was the sound of grinding metal, a screech that vibrated in my very teeth.
"Get back!" I roared at the family. "Get in the corner and stay down!"
I didn't wait for a response. I didn't wait for the thing to recover. I squeezed the trigger.
Pop-pop-pop.
Three rounds, center mass. I saw the sparks as the 9mm hollow points hit the entity's chest. But there was no blood. No wet thud of lead meeting flesh. It sounded like I was shooting a stack of dry plywood.
The thing didn't even flinch. It just tilted its head, the vertical mouth twitching open to reveal rows of needle-thin, black teeth.
I fired again, aiming for the head this time. The round passed clean through the pale skin, leaving a hole that didn't bleed. The hole simply closed up, the flesh knitting back together like liquid mercury.
"Check your fire," I hissed to myself, the tactical brain taking over despite the rising panic. Ballistics are ineffective. Change the variable.
I reached for the flashbang on my vest—a souvenir from my last contract—but before my hand could even touch the pouch, the thing moved.
It didn't run. It folded.
It collapsed inward on itself and lunged across the floor like a spider on a hot plate. It was so fast the human eye could barely track it. I felt a massive weight slam into my chest, throwing me backward.
My Glock skittered across the concrete floor, the light spinning wildly, illuminating the room in chaotic, nauseating arcs.
I hit the far wall hard. The wind was knocked out of me, and for a second, the world turned gray. I could hear the mother screaming, a high, thin sound of pure animal terror. I could hear the children wailing.
The creature was on top of me.
I could feel its weight—it was heavy, like wet clay. Its long, spindly fingers wrapped around my throat. The skin felt like cold, damp leather. I reached up, grabbing its wrists, trying to use a standard grapple break, but there was no leverage. It felt like trying to hold onto a column of moving ice.
The vertical mouth opened wide, inches from my face. The smell was unbearable now—the smell of every death I'd ever seen, every rotting corpse in every sun-baked ditch across the globe.
"Not today," I growled, reaching into my belt and pulling my combat knife.
I didn't stab. I sliced.
I drove the serrated blade across what should have been its throat. The blade bit deep, and a thick, black ichor—the color of used motor oil—sprayed across my face. It burned like acid.
The creature shrieked again, the sound so loud it shattered the remaining glass in the nearby medical cabinets. It released my throat and skittered backward, climbing up the wall and onto the ceiling with the ease of an insect.
I scrambled to my feet, wiping the stinging black gunk from my eyes. My throat felt like it had been crushed by a vice.
"Out!" I choked out, grabbing the mother by the arm and hauling her to her feet. "We have to move! Now!"
"It won't let us!" she sobbed, clutching her children. "It's been watching us for days! It won't let us leave!"
"I don't give a damn what it wants," I snapped, retrieving my Glock from the floor. I checked the chamber—still hot.
I looked up. The ceiling was empty. The thing was gone.
The hallway outside was a tunnel of absolute shadow. My flashlight beam felt small, pathetic against the weight of the dark.
"Stay behind me," I ordered. "Touch my belt. Don't let go. If you lose me, you're dead. Do you understand?"
The mother, Elena—I'd seen her name scrawled on a discarded social services form in her pocket earlier—nodded numbly. She grabbed the back of my tactical vest. The two kids, Toby and Sarah, clung to her legs, their small hands white-knuckled.
We stepped out into the hallway.
The air was different now. It didn't just feel cold; it felt thick, like we were walking through waist-deep water. Every step was an effort. My flashlight beam seemed to struggle to penetrate more than ten feet.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
The sound was coming from the walls. From inside the vents. From the ceiling.
It was following us.
"Keep moving," I whispered. "Don't look up. Just look at my heels."
We reached the stairwell. The heavy fire door was hanging off its hinges. I kicked it open, weapon ready.
Empty.
The concrete stairs spiraled down into a black pit. We were on the fourth floor. Three flights to the ground. Three flights to the exit.
We started the descent. The silence was back, but it was worse than before. It was a hungry silence.
As we reached the landing for the third floor, I stopped.
My flashlight hit the door to the third floor. It was welded shut. Not rusted—welded. Fresh beads of molten metal were still glowing red in the dark.
"That… that wasn't like that when I came up," I whispered.
I turned back to the stairs leading down.
The stairs were gone.
Where there should have been a flight of concrete steps leading to the second floor, there was only a smooth, vertical drop into a void that my light couldn't reach.
"Oh God," Elena whimpered. "The building… it's changing."
I felt a cold sweat break out over my body. I've been in ambushes. I've been trapped behind enemy lines with no extraction. I know how to handle a physical threat.
But you can't outshoot a building that's rewriting its own architecture.
Click-clack.
The sound was right above us.
I looked up, and my light caught the pale figure perched on the underside of the landing we had just left. It wasn't just one anymore.
Two more of the entities were crawling down the walls of the stairwell, their movements jerky, like a corrupted video file. They were surrounding us.
One of them—the one I had cut—had a jagged black scar across its throat. It leaned over the railing, its sightless face tilted toward us.
It didn't attack. Instead, it did something far worse.
It spoke.
But it didn't use its own voice. It used mine.
"Clear," the thing mimicked, its vertical mouth twitching in a grotesque parody of speech. "Security. Come out with your hands visible."
The voice was a perfect replica. The same gravelly tone. The same Mid-western accent.
Then, the second one opened its mouth.
"Please! Don't let it see us! Don't let it in!"
It was Elena's voice. Perfect. Terrified.
The third one, the smallest of the three, let out a sound that made my blood turn to slush. It was the sound of a child's soft, rhythmic sobbing.
They weren't just predators. They were mimics. They were collectors of fear, harvesting the sounds of their victims to use as bait.
"Back against the door!" I yelled, shoving the family against the welded third-floor exit.
I dropped the Glock's magazine and slammed in a fresh one. Seventeen rounds of 9mm. One in the chamber.
I reached into my vest and pulled out my last resort: a modified thermite flare.
"You want a sound to copy?" I hissed, looking up at the pale, twitching things. "Copy this."
I struck the igniter.
The flare hissed to life, a blinding, magnesium-white glare that turned the stairwell into high-noon. The entities shrieked, their pale skin blistering instantly under the intense heat. They scrambled backward, retreating into the shadows of the upper floors.
But the flare wouldn't last forever. I had maybe ninety seconds of light.
"Look at me," I said, grabbing Elena's shoulders. Her eyes were glazed with shock. "I need you to listen. I'm going to blow this weld. When I do, we run. We don't stop for anything. If you see something that looks like me, but I'm standing right next to you—it isn't me. You run toward the light. Do you hear me? Run toward the light!"
She nodded, tears streaming down her face.
I turned to the welded door. I didn't have C4. I didn't have a torch.
What I had was a high-pressure CO2 canister from my tactical kit and a heavy-duty breaching hammer.
It was a long shot. A "desperation-play" we'd only practiced once in training for extreme extraction.
I held the canister against the glowing weld and cracked the valve. The liquid CO2 sprayed out, freezing the metal instantly. The red glow vanished, replaced by a brittle, white frost. The rapid temperature change from white-hot to sub-zero caused the metal to groan and crack.
I swung the hammer.
CRACK.
The weld shattered like glass.
I kicked the door. It didn't budge. I kicked it again, putting every bit of my 220-pound frame into it.
The door flew open.
But we weren't on the third floor of the asylum.
We were standing on the edge of a forest. A forest of dead, black trees under a sky that had no stars, only a swirling, bruised purple haze. The air smelled like ozone and old copper.
"This isn't the hospital," Toby whispered, his voice trembling.
I looked back. The stairwell was still there, a concrete island in the middle of this nightmare landscape.
And the three pale figures were standing in the doorway, their long shadows stretching out toward us. They didn't cross the threshold. They just stood there, vibrating, watching.
"Welcome to the Ward," the one with my voice whispered.
Then, the door slammed shut.
The stairwell vanished.
We were alone in the dark woods. And from the shadows of the black trees, thousands of tiny, glowing red eyes began to open.
Chapter 3: The Geometric Woods
The transition was so violent it felt like a physical concussion. One second, I was braced against the cold, industrial weight of a rusted hospital door; the next, I was standing in a place that didn't belong on any map I'd ever studied.
The sky above us wasn't black. It was a bruised, pulsating violet, the color of a fresh hematoma. There were no stars, no moon, just a thick, swirling haze that seemed to breathe. Below it, the forest stretched out in every direction—if you could even call it a forest. The trees weren't made of wood. They were obsidian-black, their trunks twisted into tight, agonizing spirals that looked like frozen screams. They didn't have leaves. Instead, they were covered in millions of thin, needle-like protrusions that vibrated with a low-frequency hum.
I didn't lower my weapon. My flashlight beam, which had been a spear of light in the asylum, now felt sucked dry, the beam only extending a few feet before the darkness swallowed it whole.
"Where are we?" Elena's voice was a ghost of a sound. She was still clutching my vest, her knuckles white and shaking.
"I don't know," I said, my voice sounding flat and alien in this dead air. "But we aren't in the hospital anymore. Stay low. Form a diamond. Kids in the middle."
I did a quick mental inventory. I had twelve rounds in the current magazine of my Glock, seventeen in the spare. One combat knife. One tactical flare left. A small medical kit. No radio signal—the comms in my ear were dead, emitting only a rhythmic, wet clicking sound that made my skin crawl.
We were behind the curve. In the military, if you don't know the terrain and you don't know the enemy, you're already dead. You just haven't stopped moving yet.
"Look," Toby whispered, pointing a small, trembling finger toward the treeline.
At first, I thought it was fireflies. Tiny, pinprick lights dancing in the dark. But as my eyes adjusted, the "lights" began to blink. They weren't fireflies. They were eyes. Hundreds of them, glowing a dull, predatory red, situated about two feet off the ground.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
The sound was coming from the red eyes. It was the same sound the mimics had made, but smaller. Faster.
"Don't move," I commanded. I reached into my pouch and pulled out a ChemLight. I snapped it, and a harsh, neon-green glow filled our immediate perimeter.
The green light revealed the things in the bushes. They looked like hairless, malformed coyotes, but their skin was the same translucent, pale gray as the mimics. Their limbs were too long, their joints double-hinged, and they moved with a jerky, stop-motion gait. They didn't have noses or ears—just those glowing red eyes and a row of black, needle-like teeth that they chattered together to create that clicking sound.
They were scavengers. The bottom of the food chain in this hellscape. And they smelled our fear.
"They're coming closer," Elena whimpered.
"I see them."
I aimed the Glock at the lead creature. It was crouching on a fallen "tree," its red eyes fixed on Toby's throat. It was salivating—a thick, black sludge dripping from its jaw.
"Back away slowly," I said. "Keep your eyes on the treeline. Do not turn your back."
We began to shuffle backward. Every time we moved, the clicking intensified. The pack was closing the circle. They were testing us, looking for a weak point. They saw the mother's shaking hands. They saw the children's tears.
One of the creatures—a mangy, scarred thing with a missing front limb—lunged. It didn't growl. It just launched itself with a sickening, wet sound.
I didn't think. I reacted.
I didn't use the gun. Ammo was too precious. As the thing's weight hit me, I stepped into the lunge, caught its throat with my left hand, and drove my combat knife upward through the base of its jaw.
The creature's body was surprisingly light, like it was made of hollow bone and paper. It let out a high-pitched, electronic-sounding shriek and dissolved. It didn't bleed; it simply turned into a cloud of fine, black ash that smelled like burnt hair and old electronics.
The rest of the pack paused. The clicking stopped instantly.
"They're afraid of the blade?" Elena asked, a glimmer of hope in her eyes.
"They're afraid of someone who fights back," I corrected. "But they're hungry. The fear will wear off. We need to find cover."
I looked around. To our left, the "trees" seemed to thin out, leading toward a massive, monolithic shape rising out of the violet fog. It looked like a building, but the geometry was all wrong. The walls slanted at impossible angles, and the windows were glowing with a faint, sickly yellow light.
It looked like a distorted reflection of St. Jude's Asylum.
"There," I said, pointing toward the monolith. "We head for the structure."
"But that's where the things came from!" Elena protested.
"No," I said, looking back at the dark woods where the red eyes were starting to blink again. "The things come from the dark. Structures have corners. Corners can be defended."
As we ran, the forest began to react to our presence. The black trees started to lean in toward us, the needle-like protrusions scraping against my tactical gear with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. The ground felt soft, like we were stepping on layers of wet cardboard.
We reached the base of the monolith. It was a gargantuan wall of gray stone that felt warm to the touch—unnaturally warm, like skin. There was a single door, a massive slab of black iron with no handle.
"How do we get in?" Toby cried as the clicking sound behind us grew into a deafening roar. The pack was charging.
I looked at the iron door. There were no locks, no hinges. But in the center of the door, there was a circular indentation, about the size of a human palm.
I looked at my hand. Then I looked at the black ash still coating my knife.
I smeared the ash into my palm and pressed it against the indentation.
The iron didn't swing open. It melted. The metal turned into a viscous liquid that flowed downward, revealing a hallway that looked exactly like the one I had just left in the real world—except it was made entirely of bone-white marble.
"Inside! Now!"
I shoved the family through the opening just as the first wave of red-eyed scavengers reached us. I turned, firing two rounds into the mass of pale flesh to buy myself a second of time.
The bullets hit, and the creatures exploded into ash. I dived through the opening.
The iron door solidified behind me instantly.
The silence that followed was heavy. The marble hallway was lit by floating orbs of yellow light that bobbed gently near the ceiling. It was clean. It was quiet. It was the most terrifying thing I'd seen yet.
"We're safe," Elena gasped, collapsing to the floor and pulling her children into her lap.
"We're not safe," I said, checking the hallway. "We're just in a different room."
At the end of the marble hall, a figure was standing.
It wasn't a monster. It was a man. He was wearing a pristine, white doctor's coat. He was holding a clipboard. He looked perfectly normal, except for one thing.
He had no face. Just smooth, featureless skin from his hairline to his chin.
"Patient 402," a voice echoed through the hallway. It didn't come from the man; it came from the walls themselves. "You are late for your evaluation."
The "doctor" began to walk toward us. He didn't have feet. He just drifted across the marble floor, his movements perfectly smooth.
I raised my Glock. "Stop right there."
The doctor didn't stop. He didn't even slow down.
"The trauma of the transition is common," the walls whispered. "Please, step into the examination room. We need to harvest the memory of the light before it fades."
Behind us, the iron door began to ripple. Something on the other side—something much bigger than the scavengers—was hitting it.
BOOM.
The iron dented inward.
BOOM.
"Elena, get up," I whispered, my eyes darting between the faceless doctor and the buckling door. "The 'Ward' isn't just a place. It's an organism. And we're the virus it's trying to digest."
The doctor reached into his coat and pulled out a long, silver needle. It wasn't a medical tool. It was a jagged shard of glass that hummed with the same violet energy as the sky outside.
"This won't hurt," the walls lied. "It will only take everything."
Chapter 4: The Surgical Theatre of Shadows
The faceless doctor didn't walk; he glided, his white coat fluttering as if caught in a breeze that didn't exist in that stagnant, marble hallway. The silver needle in his hand—that jagged shard of violet glass—pulsed in sync with the humming of the walls. It wasn't just a tool. It was a beacon.
"Memory of the light," the walls whispered again, the sound echoing not in my ears, but directly inside my skull. "The harvest is overdue. Patient 402, submit to the procedure."
"I'm nobody's patient," I growled.
I didn't aim for his head. He didn't have one in any traditional sense. I aimed for his center of mass, the place where a human heart would be.
Pop. Pop.
Two rounds of 9mm hollow points buried themselves in the pristine white fabric of the doctor's coat. There was no impact. No stagger. The bullets didn't pass through him—they were absorbed. I watched, horrified, as the fabric rippled like water, the lead slugs sinking into his chest and vanishing without a trace.
"Physical resistance is a symptom of the sickness," the doctor "said," though his smooth, skin-covered face remained motionless.
Behind me, the iron door screamed. A massive dent, the size of a man's torso, bubbled outward. Whatever was on the other side was no longer just hitting the door. It was trying to wear it.
"Elena, Toby, Sarah—get behind that pillar!" I pointed to a massive marble column carved with the likeness of weeping eyes.
"We can't!" Elena screamed, her voice cracking. "The floor! Look at the floor!"
I looked down. The white marble was no longer solid. It was turning translucent, becoming a deep, bottomless well of liquid shadow. Thousands of tiny, pale hands were reaching up from the "stone," their fingers brushing against Elena's ankles, trying to find a grip on her worn-out sneakers.
"Movement!" I barked. "Keep your feet moving! Don't let them settle!"
I turned back to the doctor. He was ten feet away now. The air around him felt like a localized gravity well, pulling me toward that violet needle. My limbs felt heavy, my thoughts sluggish. It was a psychic anesthetic.
I reached for my second-to-last tactical tool: a high-decibel sonic emitter. It's designed to disorient human targets in close quarters. In this place, where everything seemed to communicate through vibration and hums, I hoped it would be a flashbang for the soul.
I clicked the "on" switch and threw the small black box at the doctor's feet.
A high-frequency scream, well above the range of human hearing but devastating to the nervous system, tore through the hallway. The floating yellow orbs shattered instantly. The marble walls groaned, cracks spider-webbing across the polished surface.
The doctor stopped. His faceless head tilted sharply to the left, then the right. The violet needle flickered and dimmed. He raised his hands to where his ears should have been, his body vibrating with a violent, jagged motion.
"Now! Run!"
I grabbed Sarah, tucking her under my arm like a football, and hauled Elena and Toby toward a side corridor that looked like it led deeper into the monolith. We sprinted across the "liquid" marble, our boots splashing through the shadows as the hands beneath the surface shrieked in frustration.
We didn't look back until we burst through a pair of swinging double doors at the end of the hall.
We weren't in a hallway anymore. We were in a theatre.
It was a massive, circular room, built like a Roman coliseum but scaled for giants. Thousands of empty stone seats rose up into the darkness above. In the center of the room, bathed in a harsh, vertical shaft of violet light, was a single surgical table made of obsidian.
But it wasn't the table that caught my eye. It was what was hanging above it.
Dozens of "frames" were suspended from the ceiling by rusted chains. They weren't picture frames. They were window-like portals, each one showing a different view of the real world.
In one, I saw a rainy street in Seattle. In another, a quiet bedroom where a toddler was sleeping. In a third, I saw the very hallway of St. Jude's Asylum where I had first encountered the family.
"They're watching us," Toby whispered, staring up at the portals. "They're watching everyone."
"These aren't just windows," I said, walking toward the center of the room, my boots echoing like gunshots. "These are entry points. This is how they get in."
I looked at the obsidian table. There were leather straps attached to it—straps designed for small limbs. For children.
I felt a cold, sharp realization pierce through my tactical focus. This place, this "Ward," wasn't just some accidental dimension. It was a processing plant. It took the "light"—the memories, the souls, the essence of the living—and refined it into whatever fueled this nightmare.
"Elena," I said, my voice low and dangerous. "Why were you in that hospital? Really?"
Elena froze. She stopped clutching Toby and Sarah. She looked at the obsidian table, and then she looked at me. Her eyes weren't filled with terror anymore. They were filled with a deep, hollow exhaustion.
"We weren't squatting," she whispered. "We were invited."
"Invited by who?"
"The man in the suit," she said, her voice trembling. "He told us if we went to the fourth floor, if we stayed in that room, the 'doctors' would fix them. He said Toby and Sarah were special. That they had too much 'light' for the world outside. That it was making them sick."
"The man in the suit," I repeated. "Was he faceless?"
"No," she said. "He looked like you. He spoke like you. He told me he was a veteran. That he was looking out for his own."
A mimic. They had used my face—or a face like mine—to lure them here. The entity I had encountered in the hallway wasn't just a random predator. It was a recruiter.
"The children aren't the patients," I realized, looking at the violet light. "They're the fuel."
CRASH.
The double doors we had just come through were blown off their hinges.
It wasn't the faceless doctor who stepped through. It was the thing from the iron door.
It stood eight feet tall, a mountain of grey, necrotic muscle and bone. Its head was a cluster of rusted surgical instruments—scalpels, saws, and forceps—all fused together into a jagged, metallic crown. Instead of hands, it had massive, hydraulic-like pincers.
It was the "Breacher." The Ward's heavy enforcement.
It let out a sound like a steam engine venting pressure, a hot, wet hiss that sprayed the room with the scent of old blood.
"Protect the harvest," the walls screamed.
The Breacher lunged. It moved with a terrifying, mechanical speed. It ignored me entirely, its pincers snapping toward Toby.
I didn't have time to aim. I tackled Toby, rolling him across the stone floor just as the Breacher's pincer slammed into the obsidian table, shattering a corner of the stone with the force of a wrecking ball.
I scrambled up, pulling my last flare.
"Elena! Take the kids! Under the seats! Hide!"
I struck the flare. The magnesium flare hissed, but in this room, the violet light fought back. The flare didn't illuminate the room; it only created a small, flickering bubble of white light that was being compressed by the shadows.
The Breacher turned toward me. The surgical tools in its head began to spin and whir, a cacophony of grinding metal.
"You're not a doctor," I hissed, drawing my knife. "And I'm not on the insurance plan."
I didn't wait for it to move. I ran straight at it.
I slid between its legs, the heat from the flare singeing its grey flesh. As I passed under its massive torso, I drove my knife upward, aiming for the gap between its muscular thighs.
The blade sank in up to the hilt. The Breacher let out a mechanical roar, and instead of black ichor, a spray of white, hot sparks erupted from the wound.
It's a machine, I thought. Or a cyborg. A construct of the Ward.
The Breacher spun, its pincer catching me in the ribs. I felt three of them snap instantly. The world tilted as I was flung across the room, hitting the stone seats with a sickening crunch.
My Glock fell from my holster, sliding into the darkness under the portals. My flare was dying.
I lay there, gasping for air, the taste of blood copper-sharp in my mouth. I could see the Breacher looming over me, its metallic head spinning, the blades dripping with sparks and shadow.
"Sarah! Toby!" Elena's scream echoed from the shadows.
I looked up. The faceless doctor had entered the room. He wasn't interested in me. He was drifting toward the children, his glass needle glowing with a predatory hunger.
The Breacher raised its pincer for the killing blow.
"Finish the harvest," the walls commanded.
I reached into my pocket. My fingers brushed against something I'd forgotten I had. A small, silver St. Jude's medal I'd picked up off the floor of the asylum when I first entered.
It was just a piece of cheap tin. It shouldn't have meant anything.
But as my blood-slicked fingers touched it, the medal began to glow. Not with the sickly violet of the Ward, or the harsh magnesium of the flare.
It was a soft, warm, golden light. The light of a sun that hadn't been seen in this place for centuries.
The Breacher froze. The blades in its head stopped spinning. The faceless doctor recoiled, his glass needle cracking in his hand.
"The… the Faith," the walls whispered, the voice now filled with a genuine, shivering fear. "The Light of the Lost."
I looked at the medal in my hand. It was vibrating. I didn't know if it was God, or just the concentrated hope of every poor soul who had ever died in that asylum, but it was working.
"Get away from them," I rasped, forcing myself to stand, my broken ribs screaming.
The golden light expanded, pushing back the violet haze. The portals in the ceiling began to flicker, the images of the real world becoming clearer, more solid.
"We're going home," I said, my voice gaining strength.
But as the golden light hit the Breacher, its grey skin began to melt away, revealing what was underneath.
It wasn't a machine. It wasn't a monster.
Inside the suit of necrotic muscle, wired into the surgical tools and the hydraulic pincers, was a man. He was wearing the tattered remains of a US Army uniform. His eyes were wide, white, and filled with a thousand years of agony.
He looked at me, and his lips moved.
"Kill… me…" he wheezed. "Please… kill… us… all."
Behind him, hundreds of other shapes began to emerge from the seats of the theatre. More constructs. More veterans. More "patients." An army of the lost, all turning their sightless eyes toward the golden light in my hand.
And they didn't look like they wanted to be saved.
They looked like they wanted to feed.
Chapter 5: The Legion of the Lost
The golden light from the St. Jude's medal didn't just illuminate the room; it burned. It was a holy cauterization. Where the light touched the obsidian floor, the "liquid" shadows hissed and retreated like boiling oil. But the light also revealed the full scale of the nightmare we were trapped in.
The thousands of stone seats weren't empty. They were occupied by things that had once been people. They were "The Patients"—men and women fused into the architecture of the Ward. Some had their limbs elongated and woven into the stone; others had their eyes replaced with the same glowing violet shards I'd seen in the doctor's hand.
They began to stand in a rhythmic, clicking unison.
The man inside the Breacher—the soldier—looked at me through the cage of surgical steel that had replaced his jaw. His eyes were milky with cataracts, but a spark of the human remained. He was weeping, the tears leaving streaks through the grime on his face.
"Kill… me…" he repeated, his voice a mechanical rasp. "Before… the Master… wakes."
"I've got you, brother," I whispered, my voice thick with a rage I hadn't felt since the day I left the service.
This wasn't just paranormal. This was a desecration. They were using soldiers—men who had already given everything—as the muscle for this hell-dimension. They were recycling our trauma to build their enforcers.
I didn't use the gun. I didn't use the knife. I held the medal high, the golden light pulsing like a heartbeat.
"Elena! The portals!" I shouted. "Look for the one showing the fourth-floor hallway! That's our extraction point!"
The faceless doctor screamed—a sound like a thousand violins snapping at once. He lunged, his glass needle aiming for the medal. He knew what it was. It wasn't just a symbol; it was a frequency. A dissonant chord in the perfect, silent symphony of the Ward.
I stepped into the doctor's path, swinging the medal like a flail. The light caught him across the chest, and the white lab coat disintegrated. Underneath, he wasn't flesh and bone. He was a lattice of black, geometric lines, a living blueprint of agony. He collapsed, his form flickering like a dying television set.
But the army in the seats was moving now. They didn't run; they flowed down the aisles like a grey tide.
"I found it!" Toby yelled, pointing to a portal hanging thirty feet above the ground.
It showed the rusted door of the asylum, the one I had kicked in. It was flickering, the image distorted by static.
"It's too high!" Elena cried. "We can't reach it!"
I looked at the Breacher. The soldier-machine was shaking, fighting the programming that commanded it to kill us.
"You," I said, stepping toward the monster. "You're still in there. I know the oath. Never leave a fallen comrade."
The Breacher's hydraulic pincers twitched. The blades in its head began to spin again, but slower this time.
"Help them," I commanded, my voice echoing with the authority of a commanding officer. "Give them a lift. That's an order, Specialist."
The man inside the machine let out a harrowing sob. He stepped forward, his massive, heavy footsteps cracking the stone. He reached down—not with the pincers, but with his arms, which were still partially human under the layers of necrotic muscle.
He cupped his hands, forming a step.
"Go!" I shoved Elena toward him.
She hesitated for a split second, looking at the horrifying cluster of scalpels for a face, then she climbed up. The Breacher hoisted her with a mechanical groan, lifting her toward the suspended portal.
One by one, he threw them. Elena first, then Sarah. As Toby reached the edge of the portal, he looked back at me, his face pale in the golden light.
"Come on!" he screamed.
"Go, kid! I'm right behind you!"
Toby disappeared into the portal, his body vanishing as he crossed the threshold back into our reality.
I turned back to the room. The tide of patients was only ten feet away. Their clicking was deafening now, a wall of sound that threatened to shatter my skull. Behind them, more faceless doctors were emerging from the shadows, their glass needles ready.
The soldier inside the Breacher looked at me one last time. The golden light was fading. The medal was getting hot, the tin melting in my hand. It couldn't sustain the bridge much longer.
"Thank… you…" the soldier whispered.
He didn't wait for me to climb. He turned around and charged into the oncoming tide of patients. He used his massive pincers to tear through the grey flesh, creating a barricade of bodies to buy me those final few seconds.
He was going to stay. He was the rearguard.
I jumped.
I grabbed the edge of the portal frame. The metal was freezing, biting into my palms. I hauled myself up, my broken ribs screaming in protest.
As I pulled my legs through, I looked back into the theatre.
The golden light was gone. The violet haze had returned, thicker than ever. I saw the Breacher being overwhelmed by the hundreds of patients, disappearing under a mound of pale, reaching hands.
And then, I saw him.
At the very top of the coliseum, in the highest seat of the shadows, a figure sat. It wasn't faceless. It didn't have surgical tools. It was a man in a perfectly tailored, charcoal-grey suit. He was holding a pocket watch.
He looked directly at me and smiled.
"See you in the morning, Captain," he said.
I fell.
The sensation of the portal was like being pulled through a straw. My vision went white, then black, then a violent, crashing gray.
I hit the floor of St. Jude's Asylum. Hard.
The air was different. It was cold, yes, but it was real. It smelled of dust and old rain. I looked up. The rusted steel door was hanging off its hinges.
Elena was there, clutching her children on the floor. They were crying, but they were whole.
I scrambled to my feet, my gun drawn, sweeping the hallway. Empty. The silence was just… silence.
"Is it over?" Elena whispered, her voice trembling.
I looked at my hand. The St. Jude's medal was a lump of melted, unrecognizable tin. My tactical watch, which had stopped in the Ward, began to tick again.
"We need to get out of here," I said, my voice rasping. "Now."
We didn't take the stairs. I led them to the fire escape I'd scouted earlier. We climbed down into the cool night air of the city. The streetlights felt like the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.
I walked them three blocks to a 24-hour diner. I gave the waitress a hundred-dollar bill and told her to feed them everything they wanted.
"Wait," Elena said, grabbing my hand as I turned to leave. "Where are you going?"
"I have to finish the sweep," I said.
"No," she pleaded. "Don't go back in there. Please."
"I'm not going back for the ghosts, Elena," I said, looking toward the dark silhouette of the asylum on the hill. "I'm going back for the records. I need to know who that man in the suit was. And I need to know how many more soldiers they've got in there."
I walked back toward the hospital. But as I reached the perimeter fence, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was a text from an unknown number.
The evaluation isn't over, Patient 402. You left your light behind.
I looked at my reflection in the glass of a darkened storefront.
My eyes weren't blue anymore.
Deep in the center of my pupils, a tiny, jagged shard of violet glass was beginning to grow.
Chapter 6: The Administrator's Ledger
The coffee in the diner was burnt, acidic, and tasted like heaven. I sat in a corner booth, my back to the wall, watching the family eat. They were shoveling down pancakes as if they were trying to fill a hole in their souls that had been empty for a lifetime. Elena's eyes kept darting to the window, watching the sunrise bleed across the horizon. For them, the sun was a miracle. For me, it was a spotlight.
Every time I blinked, the violet shard in my eye scraped against my eyelid. It wasn't just a physical sensation. It was a filter. When I looked at the waitress, I didn't just see a tired woman in a stained apron; I saw the faint, shimmering blueprint of her nervous system. I saw the "light" in her—a flickering amber glow centered in her chest.
I was seeing the world through the Ward's eyes.
I stood up, my ribs screaming a protest that I ignored with practiced ease. I touched Elena's shoulder. She flinched, then looked at me. Her expression softened, but then she saw my eye. She gasped, pulling the children closer.
"Go to the address I wrote on that napkin," I said, my voice sounding like it was being filtered through a radio. "It's a safe house. Mention my name to the man at the gate. He'll take care of the rest."
"You aren't coming?" she whispered.
"I have a debriefing," I lied.
I walked out of the diner and back toward the shadow of St. Jude's. The morning sun didn't feel warm anymore. It felt cold, distant—a dying bulb in a room I no longer belonged to.
I didn't go back through the front door. I went to the basement—the maintenance tunnels that the city maps had conveniently "forgotten." I needed the records. Not the medical files, but the St. Jude's Initiative documents. If the Ward was recycling soldiers, there was a paper trail. There was always a paper trail.
The air in the basement was thick with the scent of ozone and wet ash. My flashlight was unnecessary now. The violet shard in my eye illuminated the dark, turning the concrete walls into translucent membranes. I could see the "veins" of the building—black, pulsating pipes that carried that dark ichor I'd seen earlier.
I reached the archives. The room was a labyrinth of rusted filing cabinets and water-damaged boxes. I didn't have to search. The "light" guided me. One cabinet in the very back was glowing with a faint, sickly purple hue.
I ripped the drawer open.
Inside was a single leather-bound ledger. No hospital logo. No government seal. Just a symbol embossed on the cover: an eye with a vertical slit for a pupil.
I opened it. The pages weren't filled with names. They were filled with coordinates. Dates. Ranks.
Subject 114: Fallujah, 2004. High Trauma Yield. Processed.
Subject 209: Kandahar, 2011. Survivor's Guilt Peak. Processed.
Subject 402: Ramadi, 2006. Moral Injury. Pending.
That was me.
"The records are quite dry, aren't they, Captain?"
I didn't reach for my gun. I knew it wouldn't matter. I turned around.
The Man in the Suit was leaning against a concrete pillar. Up close, he looked even more like me—the same jawline, the same scar over the left eyebrow from a shrapnel fragment in '06. But his eyes… his eyes were two bottomless pits of violet fire.
"You're not a ghost," I said, my hand tightening on the ledger. "You're an Administrator."
"I am the Architect of Necessity," he said, his voice smooth and terrifyingly calm. "Humanity produces an incredible amount of waste, Captain. Not plastic or carbon, but agony. Trauma. Fear. It's a raw energy that the universe has no place for. So, we built a refinery. The Ward."
"You're harvesting people," I spat. "You're turning soldiers into machines."
"We are giving them a purpose!" he countered, his face flickering for a second, revealing a glimpse of the black, geometric lattice underneath. "In your world, they are broken. They are discarded. Here, they are the foundation. They are the enforcers of the Great Silence. And you… you were our finest candidate."
"I'm not a candidate. I'm a problem."
The Administrator laughed. It was a sound like glass breaking in a velvet bag. "You think that shard in your eye is a wound? It's an invitation. You didn't escape, Captain. You were upgraded. You can see the blueprints now. You can see the architecture of the soul. Why fight for a world that wants to forget you exist?"
He stepped closer, the shadows in the room beginning to spiral around him. "The family you saved? They'll forget you in a week. The city will tear this building down and build a shopping mall. But the Ward… the Ward is eternal. Join us. Become the Chief of Security. Protect the refinery."
I looked at the ledger. I looked at the names of my brothers—men I'd bled with, men whose funerals I'd attended. They weren't dead. They were being milked for their pain in a basement in another dimension.
"I took an oath," I said, my voice low and steady. "To protect the innocent and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the melted lump of the St. Jude's medal. It was cold, dead tin now. But I didn't need the medal's light.
I had the violet shard.
"You said this was a refinery," I said, looking the Administrator in his dead eyes. "And every refinery has a pressure valve. Every system has a fail-safe."
I focused. I didn't look at the Administrator with my human eye; I looked with the violet one. I saw the blueprint of his "body." I saw the central node—the point where all the dark energy of the building converged. It was right behind his sternum.
I didn't use a knife. I used my hand.
I drove my fist into his chest, not with physical strength, but with the intent to corrupt the data. I let the violet energy in my eye flow down my arm, a feedback loop of my own trauma—every loss, every death, every night I'd spent staring at the ceiling wishing I hadn't come home.
I didn't give him my light. I gave him my darkness.
The Administrator's eyes widened. For the first time, I saw fear in them. The violet fire in his sockets turned a jagged, screaming white.
"What are you doing?" he shrieked.
"I'm initiating a system crash," I rasped.
The building began to groan—not the sound of wood and stone, but a sound of reality tearing. The black pipes in the walls began to burst, spraying that thick, black ichor everywhere. The "patients" in the higher floors began to scream, their voices merging into a single, world-shaking roar.
"You'll die with us!" the Administrator roared, his form beginning to dissolve into ash.
"I died in 2006," I said. "This is just the paperwork catching up."
I felt a massive surge of energy, a white-hot explosion that started in my eye and radiated through my entire body. The basement vanished. The ledger vanished. The Administrator vanished.
I woke up on the sidewalk across the street from St. Jude's.
The sun was high in the sky. People were walking by, coffee cups in hand, eyes glued to their phones. Nobody looked at the hospital.
I looked up. The building was still there. But it looked… different. The windows weren't glowing. The air around it didn't feel heavy. It was just a shell. A hollow, rotting carcass of brick and mortar.
I reached up and touched my eye. It felt normal. No shard. No scraping.
I walked to the glass door of a nearby shop and looked at my reflection. My eyes were blue. Tired, bloodshot, and old—but blue.
I felt a weight in my pocket. I reached in and pulled out a small, charred piece of leather. It was a fragment of the ledger. Only one name was legible on the blackened page.
Subject 402: Status – Discharged.
I turned and walked away, blending into the crowd of people. My ribs still hurt. I was still broke. I was still a man with too many ghosts and not enough sleep.
But as I walked, I noticed something.
The people I passed—the businessmen, the students, the joggers—every now and then, I'd see a faint, violet spark in the corner of someone's eye. A tiny, jagged shard of something dark, waiting for the right moment to grow.
I stopped at a crosswalk. A man in a charcoal-grey suit was standing on the opposite corner. He looked like any other executive. He was checking his pocket watch.
He looked up, saw me, and gave a small, polite nod. Then, he stepped into the crowd and was gone.
The Ward didn't close. It just moved. It's in the subways now. It's in the office buildings. It's in the silence between your heartbeats when you're alone in the dark.
And I'm still a Tier One operator. I still have my Glock. And I still know how to find the blueprints.
The war isn't over. It's just gone private.