Chapter Two: The Descending Flesh
Sublevel B-3, The Genetics Wing
The stairwell was narrow, sealed in steel long corroded into something brittle and alive. Every step Mara took echoed into the dark like footsteps in a cavernous throat. The walls were sweating — condensation, she told herself. But it glistened red, thick, like plasma.
She kept the flare burning in her left hand, its sizzle the only steady sound. Her right — the one she'd crushed earlier — still pulsed beneath the glove. The pain was gone. That scared her more than anything.
At the bottom, the door had no handle. Just tissue — veined and pulsating — stretching across it like a membrane.
Mara hesitated.
Then she pressed the scalpel against the flesh and cut.
It moaned.
---
The door peeled apart like a slow wound opening, revealing the inner lab. Her old domain.
The air smelled like antiseptic and meat.
Flickering fluorescent lights revealed the corridor. Time had barely touched it — except where the Chimera strain had bloomed. Glass walls sagged, deformed. Patches of skin grew across tiles like creeping moss. A computer console had fused into the floor, its monitor still alive, looping one broken message:
> "GRAFT FAILURE 216-B. SUBJECT UNRESPONSIVE. PURGE ABORTED."
Mara stepped forward, past the blinking consoles, past the rusted wheelchairs wrapped in spinal cords, toward the Containment Wing.
---
Inside, tanks lined the wall — human-sized cylinders, once used to grow tissue and organs.
One tank was shattered.
Another was fogged with condensation — something pressed against the glass from inside.
She approached, breath shallow.
A face.
Pressed so hard against the glass, the features were stretched grotesquely — nose flattened, eyes wide and bloodshot. Lips peeled back to reveal teeth, yellow and broken.
It moved.
The body rammed the tank. A crack formed.
Mara stumbled back, arm raised, the flare hissing.
Too late. The tank burst, fluid flooding out with the sound of a body being birthed. The thing inside spilled across the floor — pale, bloated, twitching. It had no legs. Instead, its lower half was a cluster of nerve cords, like a jellyfish dragging guts.
It looked up.
And smiled.
---
"Jules?" she croaked.
It cocked its head.
Then it screamed.
Not sound — frequency. A shrill, bone-vibrating tone that made her drop to her knees, blood dripping from her nose.
The thing charged, tendrils slapping the floor wetly.
She grabbed the nearest object — a heavy lab tray — and swung.
Metal met flesh. The thing squealed. Green-black fluid burst from its skull. Its body twitched violently, its nerve cluster coiling in seizure.
She swung again. And again.
Until it stopped.
Until it was a heap of muscle and leaking cartilage.
Until her arms trembled and her flare guttered.
---
Silence returned.
She backed against a console, chest heaving. Something buzzed to life behind her.
A monitor.
The screen flickered, showing a grainy, static-filled image: a hallway. Live feed.
In the middle of the hallway stood a figure.
Tall. Hairless. Wrapped in surgical tubing like veins extruding from its spine.
It turned. Looked straight into the camera.
And waved.
---
> Voice log detected. Playing last entry.
Mara turned sharply. The speaker crackled.
Julian Rourke's voice came through, distorted, desperate.
> "They said it would regenerate tissue. Repair the dying. Instead, it remembered every cut. Every wound. It healed wrong — it kept the pain."
> "The orchard grew. It fed on memory. And we fed it."
> "Mara, if you're hearing this… You brought it back. Or maybe you never left."
The recording ended.
---
She stood frozen.
Her reflection in the tank glass stared back at her.
But it wasn't her face.
It was smoother. Younger. Wrong.
She reached up. Her cheek squelched under her touch — too soft, like fruit on the edge of rot.
And under her skin… something shifted.