Scorching winds raged through the desert valley, distorting the horizon into a wavering blur beneath a sun that danced like waves on an ocean he could almost remember.
The ocean. The thought was inviting — a memory of cool depths and salt-kissed breezes — and brought a flicker of comfort to the mind of a young man locked in battle with a thirst that clawed at his throat.
Each step through the yellow sea of sand was a fight. His lips were cracked. His vision tunneled. But just as despair threatened to settle in, he spotted it — a small cluster of cacti in the distance.
With stumbling legs and half-dead hope, he fell toward the only sign of life he'd seen in hours. Greed overtook caution. He tore into the flesh of the nearest cactus, desperate to drink, only to recoil at the taste — bitter, sour, wrong.
Back home, he'd grown up in a desert town. He knew better. Knew that bitterness meant poison. Most cacti were like that — full of alkaloids that punished the body rather than nourished it. Even the safer ones still carried a bite. But he was out of options. His body didn't care what was safe.
So he chewed. He sucked the moisture from the plant's slimy insides, hoping the small relief wouldn't cost more than it gave.
Now, it was a race.
A race against the sun.
A race against his own body — which might soon reject what little he'd managed to take in, purging the poison and whatever water came with it.
His hands trembled as he rose, sticky with the cactus's milky sap. The sun showed no mercy, and his shadow was already shrinking beneath him — high noon. He scanned the landscape, eyes darting over dunes and cracked earth, searching for anything that might hold shade or salvation. Then he saw it: a low ridge of stone in the distance, barely visible through the heatwaves, but real enough. If he was lucky, the rocks might cast a shadow… or trap moisture beneath their surface.
Driven by instinct more than strength, he forced his legs forward, each step sinking into the hot sand. The bitter taste still lingered on his tongue. His stomach rolled. He knew the nausea was coming. He just needed to make it to that ridge before it hit — before his body gave up entirely.
By the time he reached the rocks, his vision had narrowed to a pinhole. His hands found the cool surface first, and he collapsed beside it, cheek pressed to stone that felt like ice compared to the air. He dragged himself into the narrow shadow it cast, just wide enough to cover half his body. There, in that sliver of mercy, he allowed himself a breath. Then another.
His fingers brushed across the base of the stone, and he felt it — not water, not yet — but dampness. The sand was cool and held the faintest resistance, a subtle pressure that whispered of something more below. With shaking hands, he began to dig. Not deep. Not desperate. Just focused. Controlled. Measured.
And then—wet grit. Moisture.
Not enough to drink, but enough to build hope.
As he dug, the smell of damp earth mixed with sweat and blood. His fingers bled — scraped raw by stone and grit — but he didn't stop. He couldn't afford to. Not here. Not after everything he'd escaped.
The wind shifted. A dry gust carried with it the phantom scent of ash — faint but sharp. It made his stomach tighten. Not again. He clenched his jaw, pressing his forehead to the stone. There was no roar. No howl. Nothing stalking the dunes yet. Still, he knew what that smell meant.
He had come to the desert to avoid them. The heat, the emptiness — it drove most of them away. But even here, in the quietest of places, they could bleed through.
He leaned back, letting the stone support his weight as his body trembled from exertion. The moisture he'd unearthed was just enough to darken the sand beneath his hands. He cupped it instinctively, bringing it to cracked lips and pressing it to his tongue. Barely damp. Barely anything. But still… something.
His heart slowed, just a little. Not from comfort — there was none to be had — but from focus. He wasn't dead yet.
He scanned the horizon again. Nothing but dunes and the faint shimmer of distant heat. No shapes moving. No warped silhouettes against the sky. No sign of the horrors that had driven him here. Just the sun, the sand, and the silence.
For now.
He couldn't stay. The desert offered concealment, but no mercy. Sooner or later, he'd need more than damp soil. He'd need shelter. Food. Answers. Maybe even people.
His eyes fell to the edge of the ridge — a jagged line of rock sloping downward, half-buried by shifting sand. A path. Or a trap.
Did it matter?
He stood, slowly. Muscles stiff. Breath shallow. And he started walking, keeping the wind at his back and the heat in his bones — trying not to think about what he might find in the distance.
The ridge sloped gently at first, then grew steeper, dipping into a narrow canyon flanked by wind-worn rock. The air shifted here. Still dry, still hot — but heavier somehow, muffled. Like the heat was listening.
He moved slowly, wary of ambush, though the silence was near-absolute. No insects. No birds. Just the scrape of his boots and the soft grind of sand shifting underfoot.
Then, a shape. Faint. Curved. Half-buried against the canyon wall.
He approached, pulse quickening.
It wasn't natural. A chunk of metal — burnt, twisted, and half-melted into the stone as if dropped from the sky. The edges bore the familiar gray-white of modern alloys, the kind used in aircraft or armored vehicles. Whatever it was, it didn't belong in this place.
His hand hovered over it, then settled against the surface. Cold, even in the heat. He traced the letters stamped into the blackened hull.
"UNIT 3 - MIDWEST CORRIDOR - RESEARCH DIVISION"
His breath caught. This wasn't just debris — this was a message. Proof that others had come through. Maybe they'd even survived. Maybe they'd left something behind.
He crouched, brushing away the sand and stone around the object. More metal. A casing. A broken hatch. Just wide enough to—
He froze.
A footprint.
Fresh.
Not his.
And not human.
The footprint was wide and sunken, toes spread like claws. Three forward, one behind. Deep enough to bend stone.
He didn't move. Didn't breathe.
Whatever left that print hadn't been light. Or far.
He scanned the ridge above — nothing. No movement. No sound. Still, the air felt… disturbed. Like the wake of something powerful passing just moments before.
He stood, slower this time, more deliberate, letting his eyes adjust to the shadowed crevice just ahead. The narrow canyon widened, and in its heart, nestled between jagged stone and sand-scoured walls, stood something he didn't expect:
A building.
Or what was left of one. Not of this world — but of his. Reinforced steel plating. Half-collapsed solar panels. The skeleton of a forward research outpost, half-swallowed by rock. An emergency shelter, maybe. Or a staging point that never got used. Or worse — one that did.
He approached, wary. His hand hovered over the half-open door, hinges rusted and warped from heat and time. The symbol stamped above it was barely legible, but unmistakable: a stylized spiral — the emblem of the Rift Containment Initiative.
He pushed the door. It creaked open with a metallic groan.
Inside: darkness, and the smell of old air.
If there was water, supplies, or answers, they'd be in there.
But so might something else.
He stepped inside anyway.
The air inside was cooler, but still thick — like breathing through fabric soaked in dust and time. He let the door fall shut behind him, the sound echoing through metal halls barely wide enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder.
The corridor was tilted, as if the building had crashed into the canyon wall at an angle. Loose wiring hung like vines, swaying slightly in the stale breeze. Faint red lights blinked on the ceiling, powered by a backup battery that should've died years ago.
He passed what used to be a workstation. The screens were shattered. One chair lay overturned. Another was burned straight through. Something explosive — or impossibly hot — had passed through here.
And yet… there was no blood. No signs of panic. No scattered belongings.
Everything was broken, but strangely orderly. Like whoever had been here had left before the chaos — or never got a chance to react at all.
A small storage panel stood ajar. He pried it open.
Inside: a sealed ration pack, slightly crushed but intact. A miracle.
He ripped it open and took a bite without checking the label. It was dry, gritty, dense — but his body didn't care. He chewed. Swallowed. Chewed again.
Then a sound.
A soft scrape.
Metal on metal.
Somewhere deeper in the compound.
Not loud. Not fast.
Just… deliberate.
He stood still for a long moment, listening.
Nothing followed the scrape. No footsteps. No breathing. No echo. Just the hum of old circuits and the silence of something waiting.
He tightened his grip on a broken metal rod he'd scavenged from a bent support beam, then moved deeper into the hall. Each step felt heavier now, not from exhaustion — but from knowing he wasn't alone.
A door halfway down the corridor blinked with a faint yellow light above it. Still powered.
He pressed the console beside it. No response. So he wedged his fingers into the narrow gap and pried it open with a groan of steel and grit.
Inside was a communications room — or what remained of one. Terminals lined the walls, most cracked and lifeless, but one still flickered. A single screen.
He stepped closer. The display was filled with text logs, looping on a delay. He squinted at the faded words:
DATE: UNKNOWN
STATUS: RIFT STABILIZATION ATTEMPT #12
OUTCOME: FAILURE — SUBJECT CORRUPTION
NOTES: "DO NOT OPEN THE LOWER CHAMBER. IF ANYONE'S LEFT… STAY OUT. DON'T WAKE IT."
He stared at the screen, heart pounding harder now.
Then the scrape came again — louder this time.
Not from the hall.
From beneath him.
He backed away from the terminal, eyes dropping to the grated floor. A faint draft pushed upward through the slits. Cold, unlike the rest of the building. Like something sealed was still breathing.
He stared at the grated floor, the warning still echoing in his head.
Don't wake it.
His fingers tightened around the metal rod. He didn't want to go down there. Every instinct screamed against it. But whatever was below had survived — somehow. That meant water. Shelter. Supplies. Maybe even answers.
So he pried open the floor panel.
Beneath, a narrow maintenance shaft led downward, lit by flickering emergency lights. It wasn't deep — maybe a story or two — but the air that drifted up carried a weight to it. Old. Cold. Touched by something that didn't belong.
He lowered himself in carefully, boots clanging against the steel rungs. Each step echoed.
One floor down, the ladder ended at a reinforced hatch. It had no power — just a manual crank, worn smooth from use.
He paused, listening.
Nothing.
He turned it.
The hatch gave with a hiss of stale air and ancient pressure. He stepped inside.
It was a cryochamber.
Rows of glass pods stretched into the shadows. Some were shattered. Others were empty. A few still glowed faintly — and within one, a figure lay motionless, suspended in mist and light.
Not a soldier.
Not a scientist.
Something else.
Its limbs were wrong. Too long. Its chest barely rose with breath. Its skin was a dark, oil-slicked gray, stretched tight over muscle that didn't look human.
And worst of all — its pod was cracking.
One fracture.
Then two.
A hiss of vapor escaped from the seams.
He took one step back.
Then the creature opened its eyes.
The creature's eyes didn't blink.
Just open. Wide. Unmoving. Pale, colorless orbs that shimmered faintly in the dark, like glass reflecting firelight.
It didn't lunge.
Didn't hiss.
Didn't move.
It simply stared at him.
He stared back, frozen. His breath shallow. The metal rod in his hand felt like a twig now — a meaningless defense against whatever this thing was.
Then its chest rose.
Once.
And its head tilted, ever so slightly. As if studying him.
A faint noise escaped the pod — a pulse, low and rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. But not the creature's. The chamber itself was reacting. Responding.
Lights flickered to life across the room. Consoles came online. Data streams scrolled across forgotten monitors. One of them displayed a warning:
BIOMETRIC SIGNATURE MATCH FOUND
CLASS: UNKNOWN
STATUS: QUARANTINED
ENGAGING EMERGENCY OVERRIDE…
The pod hissed louder.
A seam in the floor retracted nearby, revealing a stairwell curling deeper underground. Red lights lit the path like blood vessels.
He didn't know what was down there.
But he knew staying meant facing the thing in the pod. And it was waking up faster now.
Cracks spiderwebbed across the glass. Thin lines. But spreading.
Then, without a sound, the creature smiled.
He didn't think.
He ran.
Boots hit steel. The stairwell groaned under his weight as he bounded downward, hand skimming the railing for balance. The red lights pulsed with every step like a countdown — steady, relentless.
Above him, the hiss of the pod grew sharper. A crack of glass, then the thud of something heavy hitting metal.
He didn't look back.
The stairwell emptied into a narrow corridor — older than the rest. The walls were unpainted, the wiring exposed, bundled like veins. Whatever this part of the facility was, it hadn't been meant for long-term use. A sub-basement. Or a vault.
He reached a reinforced door — newer than the others, clearly installed after the rest of the place had already begun to rot. It had no handle. Just a biometric panel and a worn keypad.
He stared at it, heart pounding. Then glanced down.
A handprint was smeared across the keypad in dried blood. Five fingers. Human.
Below it, scratched into the wall with something sharp, were the words:
"WE BROUGHT IT HERE."
"WE SHOULDN'T HAVE."
Behind him, the stairwell creaked.
A shadow shifted at the top.
He had seconds. Maybe less.
The keypad blinked once — then displayed a prompt:
"ENTER IDENTIFIER."
He hesitated. Then typed the only thing that made sense — the last thing he'd read upstairs.
"MIDWEST CORRIDOR - UNIT 3"
The screen paused. Processing.
Then the door slid open with a heavy click and a cold blast of air.
Inside: darkness. But not empty.
Rows of tanks, filled with a liquid that shimmered faintly with threads of blue and violet — veins of light suspended in fluid. At the center of the room: a single circular platform, cables snaking outward like spider legs.
He stepped inside.
The door shut behind him.
The air in the chamber was unnaturally cold. Not desert cold. Engineered cold. Preserved.
The tanks lined the walls in precise intervals, tall as coffins, each filled with that same eerie liquid — neither water nor oil. It pulsed faintly, as if lit from within, and shifted colors when he moved. He stepped closer to the nearest one.
Inside floated a shape. Humanoid, but not human.
It had no eyes. Just smooth, unbroken skin where a face should be. Its limbs were too long, its chest segmented by lines that pulsed faintly in time with the light. Not alive. But not dead, either.
He moved to the next tank. Then the next.
Each one held a different variant. Some smaller, some monstrous. All wrong.
Some were missing limbs — others had extra. One tank was completely shattered from the inside, now dry and empty.
He paused at that one longer than the others.
That wasn't the pod upstairs.
This one had been broken a long time ago.
In the center of the room, the circular platform flickered to life — not from his presence, but as if triggered by the room itself. A low hum filled the air.
Above it, a holographic recording shimmered into existence. Static at first, then sharpening into a figure: a man in a tattered lab coat. His face was pale, eyes hollow, voice trembling.
"If this is playing, then containment has failed."
"We weren't the first to cross. But we were the first to bring something back. We thought we could control it. Study it. Replicate the traits. Enhance our own."
"But it wasn't just biology. It wasn't just… evolution."
"It changed the rules. Bent them. Broke them."
The image glitched — the man's face distorted, jaw stretching too wide before snapping back into place.
"If you found this room, leave it. Burn it. Collapse it. Don't go deeper."
"Don't let it connect."
The hologram ended. The lights dimmed again.
Behind him, the door let out a soft hiss — not of opening.
Of pressure equalizing.
Something had triggered the internal locks.
Something else was now in the lower levels.
The silence after the recording ended was louder than the hologram itself.
He stood on the platform, eyes scanning the tanks again — not with curiosity now, but with a quiet dread. Whatever the facility had done, it hadn't just failed. It had unraveled something. Something buried deeper than the creature upstairs.
The walls began to hum. A subtle vibration through the floor — steady at first, then erratic. The red emergency lights flickered.
He stepped off the platform.
Then something strange happened.
The sound in the room shifted — not like an alarm or machinery. Like reality itself was cracking. A low, layered tone, like two frequencies fighting each other. A pressure in his skull. His vision doubled for a moment, as if time had tripped over itself.
Then it passed.
The tanks were still there. The room unchanged.
But now… there were footsteps behind him.
He turned fast, swinging the rod.
Nothing.
No one.
The door was sealed. The room was sealed. But the sound had been real.
He backed toward the wall, eyes darting, breath catching — and that's when he noticed the tank to his left.
It was full just seconds ago.
Now it was empty.
The fluid still floated in the air like mist, swirling unnaturally. And something had stepped out without making a sound.
He didn't see it.
But its reflection shimmered across the broken glass on the floor.
Tall. Thin. Still.
Watching.
It was here.
And it didn't need doors.
He didn't breathe.
The reflection hovered for another second in the broken glass — tall, thin, the wrong kind of still.
Then it vanished.
No movement. Just… gone.
He turned. Scanned. Nothing.
The tank beside him still pulsed faintly, but the mist inside was dissipating. The liquid floated unnaturally slow, resisting gravity, curling back in on itself like smoke in reverse.
He stepped back toward the central platform, heart hammering, every instinct screaming to run — but there was nowhere left to go. The door was still sealed. The stairwell, likely blocked. And the creature…
He didn't know if it had ever truly left the tank. Or if it had been waiting for him the moment he stepped inside.
Then something shifted in his vision — not the room, but the space around him.
The walls bent slightly inward. The ceiling stretched higher than it had seconds before. The corners of the room softened, like water blurring lines on a painting.
And there — in the reflection of the platform's curved metal surface — the creature stood just behind him.
He spun around again. Nothing.
The air was thick now. Heavy with pressure.
Then, from the ceiling, a single drop of glowing fluid fell — silent, slow — and landed on his shoulder.
It burned cold.
Where it touched, the fabric of his shirt began to warp — shifting through colors like oil over water. The texture shimmered, then… stabilized. Whatever it was, it was changing his clothes on a molecular level.
He tore the fabric away and tossed it aside. The drop hissed against the floor and evaporated.
The creature wasn't chasing him. It wasn't killing him.
It was testing him.
Experimenting.
He backed toward the platform, every nerve in his body firing at once. The shimmering fluid had burned through fabric like acid, but without heat — warping matter itself like it was nothing more than code.
And now, he realized, the lights weren't flickering from power loss.
They were flickering in rhythm.
With the creature's breathing.
He turned and slammed his fist into the control panel beside the sealed door. Nothing. The biometric scanner blinked red.
Then, behind him, the tanks began to hum.
One after another, they vibrated — deep, resonant tones like a choir of tuning forks. Each pulse shifted the air, bending the walls a little more. The gravity in the room twisted — light itself seeming to bend around corners that shouldn't exist.
He dropped to one knee, dizzy. His thoughts were swimming. Memories folded in on themselves. He couldn't tell if seconds were passing or hours.
Then, something broke.
A crack — not in glass, but in space.
Behind the tanks, along the far wall, a thin vertical seam opened — jagged and glowing faintly blue, like the inside of lightning. It pulsed once.
He didn't wait to question it.
He ran.
The crack widened just enough as he passed. Light swallowed him. No sound, no pain — just cold.
And then, silence.
…
He awoke beneath the open sky.
Dunes stretched endlessly around him. The ridge was gone. The building was gone. Even the canyon had vanished.
He was back in the desert — but not where he entered.
The sun hung low in the sky now, casting long shadows over the sand. Hours had passed, at least. Maybe more.
But the strangest part wasn't where he was.
It was what he was wearing.
His torn shirt was gone. Replaced by a sleeveless, seamless wrap of black cloth — stitched together by no thread, covered in faint geometric patterns that shifted when he moved.
And burned into his right palm was a faint mark, like circuitry. Or a key.
He didn't know what had happened in that place.
But it had let him go.
And it had left something behind.