Chapter 13:
The Broken Signal
The fall lasted forever.
One moment, my boots were planted on what I'd thought was solid ground—cold concrete beneath me, the hum of dying machinery vibrating through my bones—and the next, the world dropped out from under us with a groan that sounded too much like a living thing in pain. My stomach lurched into my throat as we plunged into darkness, the world above dissolving into chaos. Human screams blending with the shriek of tearing metal, the wet, organic crunch of something deep within the facility's bowels rupturing. The air rushed past us, thick with the stench of ozone and something far worse, something cloying and metallic that coated the back of my throat like spoiled meat.
The breath was ripped from my lungs in a single, agonized gasp as my body hit the ground hard enough to rattle my teeth. I rolled, my shoulder slamming into something unyielding. A broken console, maybe, pain spiderwebbing down my arm in jagged bursts. Around me, debris rained down like shrapnel—chunks of concrete the size of my head, twisted rebar spearing the ground like javelins, shattered glass that glittered like falling stars in the dim, flickering emergency lighting. Dust choked the air, filling my nose, my mouth, coating my tongue with the taste of rust and decay.
I coughed, tasting blood.
Not good. Not good at all.
"Catara."
Sarin's voice was rough, strained, but steady. I turned my head, blinking through the haze of dust and pain, and saw him dragging himself upright, his face streaked with grime and a fresh, jagged cut along his temple that oozed dark blood. His rifle was gone, lost somewhere in the wreckage, but his dark eyes were sharp despite the pain, scanning the room with the precision of a soldier assessing a battlefield.
"You alive?"
I tried to answer, but my throat was raw, my lungs burning as if I'd inhaled fire. Instead, I nodded, pushing myself onto my elbows with a grunt. Every muscle in my body screamed in protest. The room, if it could even be called that, was vast, cavernous, the ceiling lost in shadow high above us. The walls were lined with banks of dead monitors, their screens shattered or dark, wires spilling from their guts like intestines.
And Nia.
She lay a few feet away, motionless.
My pulse spiked, a cold dread pooling in my gut.
I scrambled toward her, my hands shaking, my breath coming too fast. The black veins that had spread across her skin like creeping vines were receding, fading back beneath the surface like ink dissolving in water. But her left arm was still wrong.
Smooth. Chitinous. The claws had retracted, but the limb was unmistakably not human anymore.
I reached for her, then froze.
Her eyes were open, staring at nothing.
"Nia?" My voice cracked, barely louder than a whisper.
She didn't blink. Didn't move. Just stared, unseeing, her lips parted slightly. Then, so quiet I almost missed it.
"She's listening."
A chill crawled down my spine, slow and deliberate, like fingers tracing my vertebrae. "What?"
Nia's head turned toward me, slow and mechanical, like a rusted machine grinding back to life. Her pupils were blown wide, the irises nearly swallowed by black.
"Signal," she whispered. The word was hollow, distant, as if spoken from somewhere far away. "We have to find Signal."
Sarin limped over, his jaw tight, his knuckles white where they gripped the edge of a broken console for support.
"The Whisper Net contact?"
Nia didn't answer. She just kept staring past us, into the dark, as if something waited there—something only she could see.
***
We found the hatch by accident.
A rusted metal door, half-buried under debris, set into the wall like a wound. The symbol above it was familiar—a jagged lightning bolt inside a circle, the mark of the Whisper Net.
Signal's mark.
Sarin pried it open with a grunt, the hinges screaming in protest. The smell that rolled out was thick and cloying. Burnt plastic, scorched metal, and something else, something meaty, like overcooked pork left to rot.
I gagged, covering my mouth with my sleeve.
Inside, the bunker was a charred ruin.
Monitors smashed, their screens reduced to jagged teeth. Servers melted into grotesque sculptures, their wires spilling out like entrails. Papers—maps, schematics, notes—reduced to ash, still clinging to the walls in fragile black flakes.
And in the center of it all, a single message scrawled across the far wall in what looked like charcoal.
SHE SEES YOU
Nia made a sound, low in her throat. A whimper.
Sarin stepped forward, his boot crunching on broken glass. "Someone got here first."
I moved to follow, but Nia's hand shot out, clamping around my wrist. Her grip was fever-hot, her fingers trembling.
"Don't," she breathed. "It's still here."
I froze. "What is?"
Her eyes darted to the shadows. "The whisper."
And then I heard it.
Faint. Distant. Like a voice calling through static.
No.
Not a voice.
Voices.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. Layered over each other, whispering, murmuring, chanting in a language that wasn't language, a sound that slithered into my ears and coiled around my brain like a parasite.
Nia's grip tightened. "You hear them now too."
I did.
And worse, they were getting louder.
***
Signal had been our last hope.
The faceless voice behind the Whisper Net, the one who had fed us intel, who had warned us about HelixMed's "safe zones" before they turned into slaughterhouses. The one who had promised us answers.
Now he was gone.
And whatever was left in his bunker wasn't human.
The whispers grew as we picked through the wreckage, shifting, changing, sometimes almost forming words before dissolving back into noise. Nia reacted to them like physical blows, flinching, her hands pressed to her temples like she was trying to hold her skull together.
Sarin found the terminal. Or what was left of it.
The screen was cracked, the keyboard a melted ruin, but the hard drive. It was intact.
He pried it free, holding it up to the dim light.
"If there's anything left, it's in here."
Nia shuddered. "Don't."
But it was too late.
The second the hard drive moved, the whispers surged.
A tidal wave of sound, of pressure, slamming into us with enough force to knock me to my knees. My vision swam, black spots dancing at the edges, and for a second, I saw her.
A woman. Or something shaped like one. Tall. Thin. Her skin too pale, her hair a spill of black that moved like liquid. And her eyes...
God, her eyes.
Endless. Hungry.
Seeing me.
Then the vision shattered, and I was back in the bunker, gasping, Nia's screams ringing in my ears.
Sarin dropped the hard drive like it had burned him.
The whispers stopped.
Silence.
Then a single, clear voice, cutting through the quiet like a knife.
"Run."
Nia's head snapped up.
The walls breathed.
And from the shadows, something stirred.
It wasn't one thing.
It was many.
Shapes unfolding from the dark, their movements jerky, unnatural, like puppets on tangled strings. They had been human once. Maybe. Now they were just husks, their skin stretched too tight over bones that bent in ways bones shouldn't bend.
And their faces were blank.
Smooth.
Except for the mouths.
Too wide. Too many teeth.
Nia was on her feet, her mutated arm snapping back into its weaponized form with a wet, tearing sound. "Go!"
We ran.
But the things followed. Not chasing.
Herding.
Every turn we took, every corridor we fled down, they were there, waiting, their mouths stretched in identical, ghastly grins.
And the whispers came with them.
Louder now.
Clearer.
"She sees you."
"She's always seen you."
"You were never supposed to wake up."
Then Nia skidded to a stop, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
"Wait."
She tilted her head, like she was listening to something only she could hear.
"The signal's not broken."
Sarin grabbed her arm. "What?"
Nia turned to us, her eyes wide, terrified.
"It's her."
And then the wall exploded.
The thing that stepped through the dust and debris wasn't human.
It wasn't like the others either.
Tall. Thin. Wrapped in what might have been a lab coat once, now just tattered strips of fabric clinging to a frame that was too long, too wrong. Its face was a smooth, featureless oval, save for a single, vertical slit where a mouth should be.
And when it spoke, the voice wasn't a voice at all.
It was the whisper.
The signal.
"CAT-7," it hissed, the sound slithering from that lipless mouth. "You were lost. Now you are found."
Nia stepped between us, her claws raised.
"You're not Signal."
The thing's head tilted. "Signal is dead. We are the Whisper now. We are Her voice."
Sarin lunged for a piece of rebar, hefting it like a club. "Who the hell is Her?"
The thing smiled. Or at least, its mouth split, stretching far too wide.
"The First. The Last. The Mother of the Plague."
Then it moved.
Fast.
Too fast.
Nia intercepted it, her claws slashing, black blood spraying. The thing didn't scream. It laughed, the sound echoing from a dozen other mouths in the dark.
Sarin dragged me back. "We have to go. Now."
I turned to run, and froze.
The corridor behind us was gone.
In its place, a wall of writhing, pulsing flesh, studded with eyes that blinked in unison.
The whispers became a roar.
"She sees you."
"She's always seen you."
"You were never supposed to wake up."
Nia screamed.
And then the world split open.