The phone rings before I've even had the chance to defrost my coffee. One ring—sharp enough to cut air—then silence. Then again, rattling the handset against the cheap plastic like a wasp in a jar. I fumble, knock over a stack of last month's death threats (fan mail, Whispering Pine style), and snatch the phone before it can ring a third time.
"Yeah." It's not a question.
The silence tastes like aquarium water. Eventually, a voice leaks through, strained and wrong, like someone's throat is lined with steel wool.
"Kamen," it says. My name, drawn out, vowels stretched like tendon.
A pause. I listen for the human undercurrent, but the static is doing most of the talking. Even so, I can make out the sound of something—wheezing?—or the slow pant of air dragged in and out through failing lungs.
I clear my throat and try again, softer. "This is Sheriff Mitchell. You need medical, or—"
"Go to the old health center," the voice interrupts. "End of the line. They're waiting for you."
The line dies with a squeal. I put the phone down, peer at it, half-expecting it to start smoldering right there on the desk.
Sloane's herding a donut into his face on the other side of the glass door. I wave him in, see him hesitate, then shuffle like a kid told to apologize for broken glass.
"You ever get a call from a corpse?" I ask.
He frowns. "Like, a prank? Or—shit, you mean…"
I tilt my head. He gets the drift. I tell him what the call said. He goes a shade lighter and stares at the floor, then wipes his hands on his duty belt like maybe gun oil will make the willies go away.
"We should check it out, right?" His voice is small. "Or…"
"Or what?" I say. "Let the health center ghosts leave a Yelp review?"
He doesn't answer, and I don't blame him. The old Whispering Pine Health Center is the kind of building you drive by fast, even on bright days. A squat, L-shaped tomb with a roof caved in and windows boarded since the state cut rural funding in '09. Rumor says it's home to every meth-head, firebug, and feral thing within ten miles. Also, sometimes, a cult. Sometimes, depending who you ask, feral children with their own primitive language. Sloane once claimed he saw a bear walk upright through the atrium, pause to admire the fire extinguisher, then vanish into the boiler room. The outside is tagged with so many layers of graffiti it looks like someone tried to laminate neon hieroglyphs onto cinderblock.
I grab my coat and radio, slide my sidearm out of the drawer, make sure the cylinder doesn't stick. Sloane does the same, suddenly all business, but his eyes keep flicking to the phone like it might ring again with a more sensible errand.
Ainsley, the intern, pokes her head in a second later to say that the lab in Anchorage flagged my latest sample as "pending administrative review." Which, in bureaucrat, means they found something but don't want to be the first one to say it out loud. She asks if I want her to tag along, "for note taking."
I tell her no, and she looks almost disappointed. Or maybe she just doesn't want to go back to her cubicle and finish typing up my statement about the time Sloane thought he'd found human remains, but it was just a bag of moldy rutabagas.
We drive in silence. The sky is the off-white of fridge mold. At the edge of town, the wreck of the health center crouches behind a shelf of birches, its parking lot a graveyard of busted glass and candy wrappers. I kill the headlights two blocks out and coast in, the cruiser rolling slow as a hearse.
"Sheriff's office," I announce to nobody, the words absurd in the empty echo.
We fan out. The main doors are old hospital-grade aluminum, half wrenched off the hinges, fluttering in the wind. I cover left, Sloane takes the right. Inside, every step is a new acoustic horror. Linoleum pops and squishes underfoot, the mold and rot making the walls buckle outward in places. It smells like bandages, old bleach, and the underlying note of urine that defines all abandoned government property.
The front desk is untouched, though the computer monitor has a neat hole through it about the size of a fist. Someone's painted a smiley face in drying blood on the wall behind reception.
"Who the fuck would wait here for us?" Sloane whispers, pointedly ignoring the blood. "You think it's local, or—"
"Sshh," I cut him off.
There's a sound, down the corridor to Pediatrics. A soft mewl, the kind a coyote makes when it's caught in a snare. Or the kind a child makes when they know crying is pointless.
I drop my hand to my sidearm, motion Sloane to go wide. We inch forward, past labs with doors hanging open and file folders spilled across the floor. The mewling sound comes again: rhythmic. Strangled.
We round the corner and see it.
At the end of the hall, on the cracked waiting room tile, is a figure. Even hunched over and half curled, it's bigger than a grown man. It pulls itself forward in short, shuddering spasms, like its body is too heavy for its bones. In one hand it clutches the payphone receiver, the cord trailing after it. The other hand—if that word even applies—is a tangle of jointed digits, claws where fingers should be, the skin black and raw.
I recognize it, even before the radio sample, the phone call, or the nightmares add up. It's the thing the lab report tried to warn me about: the prototype animal, made from a scavenger's spare parts.
Its mouth splits open, and the noise that comes out is not human, but carries the shape of language, like a fever dream of speech.
"Help… Help… Not… Supposed…"
I step closer. The air is thick with ammonia and old blood, but I move anyway. I want to ask what it means, why it called for me, why it bothered to speak at all. But the thing is dying. Dying, I think, in the way only something that was never really alive could die.
I kneel. Sloane stands behind, his sidearm slack at his side, not even pretending this is a fight worth staging.
The creature—person—thing—blinks eyes that shimmer between black and blue and something like mercury.
"They… made us," it rasps. "Now they… watch. From trees. From sky. Always. Watch."
It lifts its head, nostrils flaring, the cartilage pulsing under the skin.
"Don't tell," it says. "Don't tell—"
It convulses. For a second, its entire skeleton seems to vibrate with some infrasound I feel in my teeth. Then it slumps. The receiver swings and thuds on the tile.
It's dead. Or at least, it's not moving.
I look at Sloane, who is not blinking, not breathing, pale as a ghost but rooted on his feet like he might sprout moss.
I mean to say something, maybe a prayer or a plea, but the air shudders and then splits around us—an unholy sound, like every air raid siren in the world going off at once, funneled down to a single, skull-boring frequency. Sloane drops sideways, hands clapped over his ears. My knees buckle—no dignity, not even a second of warning. My bones rattle with the noise, fillings in my teeth singing like tuning forks, spine spasming so hard I taste battery acid.
It cuts off, fast as it came. The silence after is sick, a pressure vacuum. I roll onto my belly, blink tears from my eyes and try to orient, but all the lines of the room are bent, fishtailing across my retinas.
"The fuck was that?" Sloane's voice is a paper cut, shaky, not quite real. He's on his knees, blood webbing from one nostril. He looks old, for the first time I can remember.
There's no time to argue about it. Outside, something slams against the building with boulder force, and dust rains from the ceiling tiles. The corpse in the hall is still—a wet sack of ambition and bad science—but I can feel the air growing thick again, the way you know the next aftershock before the ground even moves.
I haul Sloane up by his collar. He's heavy, loose-limbed, and for a flicker I wonder if his skull is fracture-shattered, if I'll have to drag a body out of here. But he stumbles after me, and we book it down the hall, past the cartoon smiley face in flaking blood, through the haze of disinfectant ghosts and old piss. The double doors at the entrance swing on their splintered hinges. I shoulder them open, only to find the vestibule beyond is sealed, cinderblocks mortared up on what used to be daylight.
I try the emergency exit. Same: a blank wall, fresher concrete, painted to blend with the original. That's when I panic, not in a movie way but in a small, pathetic, animal way. I hammer at the glass with the butt of my gun, knowing it's useless. Sloane slides down the wall and moans behind me, his breath coming in hiccupy gasps.
The roar starts up again, only this time it's further away, muted by the layers of stone and rebar. It's shifting, broadcast from somewhere below us. And I have the sudden, inarguable sense that this place doesn't want us dead. It wants us inside.
I collect myself, count breaths. "We need to move," I say. It comes out brittle, a bad impression of someone in control. Sloane wipes the blood from his face and crawls upright. We don't talk; there's no pivot to a better plan. We just keep moving, deeper into the guts of the health center, past radiology, past the shattered remains of an MRI machine, past the echo of our own shoes in the tunnels of reverb.
In the dark, you lose sense of time, of scale. The only landmarks are doors, every one tagged with decades of graffiti, some of it in English, some in Russian, some in slant symbols that look like teeth. We pass a bathroom with a dozen handprints nailed to the wall in human shit. We pass a waiting room where all the dolls in the toy chest have had their eyes gouged out, every one staring up at the fissured ceiling like they're waiting for the next noise to start.
At the crossroads to the surgical suites, I see a battered map under glass, the kind that's supposed to reassure visitors of their place in the maze. I spit on my palm, wipe away a coat of grime, and stare. The "YOU ARE HERE" dot is faded to nothing, but the map is—wrong. It's got layers, overprints, dozens of floors I don't remember from the blueprints I read as a rookie. Not just two stories, not three. Sixty-five. All descending. All labeled with increasingly surreal names: RESEARCH, HABITATION, ISOLATION, GROUND ZERO, then floors whose names are crossed out, rewritten in marker, then re-crossed, as if the building itself kept changing its mind about what to call the things it contained.
"We're on one," I say, and point. "We need to find stairs. We go up, or…" I let the alternative hang there.
Sloane is staring at a sticker pasted over the elevator shaft diagram. It's a cartoon dog, tongue lolling, paw raised in a wave. But someone's drawn rows of extra teeth in the mouth, and written I CAN SEE YOU in bubble letters underneath.
I laugh, louder than I want, because dying in a basement is always a punchline. Then I spot the glow—across the hall, beyond a half-collapsed door, the low blue flicker of a monitor.
I don't trust light, but I trust darkness less. So I push into the room, Sloane behind me, feet dragging on the tile. The monitor is old, CRT with a warped fishbowl screen, but it's powered. There's a tower humming under the desk, fans clogged with dust. Someone left it logged in: a file tree of video clips, each labeled "LOG" then a string of numbers.
The top one is tagged YESTERDAY. I double-click, because curiosity is the only thing I've got left. The file stutters to life.
A man in a lab coat appears, his face a spasm of bad lighting and worse fear. He talks fast, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. He names the project—I don't catch it. The words come out in a scattershot of bureaucratic euphemism, but the subtext is loud: They made something. Something that learned. It hunted the other prototypes, killed them all, and then started climbing the floors, to see what else it could be.
He says—"If you're watching, don't come in. Lock the doors; bury the building. It knows you're there. It remembers the way out through people." His mouth freezes in a rictus, then the feed explodes in static, a black hand arcing across the frame.
I back out of the video, open the next file, and the next. The people change, but the story's the same: project started as a wildlife adaptation trial; accelerated after the first wolf specimen grew opposable thumbs; all oversight collapsed when the hybrids started breeding, not just with each other but with anything alive they could get teeth into.
Sloane watches over my shoulder, lip trembling. "End of the line," he says, repeating the phrase from the phone. "We are the end of the line."
The floor vibrates: another impact, far below. The power grid here is old, but I can feel air moving through the vent grates. Some system is still running, and all of it is trying to flush us down the throat of this building.
I slingshot my brain to the schematic I saw. There's an access stairwell off the maintenance wing, if we can find it. I don't say it out loud, because it sounds too hopeful, and hope is not currency in this place. Instead, I lead Sloane past the monitor room, down a corridor scored with deep claw marks, and into a maintenance closet that's been refurbed as a panic room.
There's no food, just racks of cleaning acid. The wall is lined with Polaroids, decades of janitors and custodial staff, but all the faces have been burned out—tiny specks of char where eyes or cheeks once were. A mummified hand dangles from the ceiling vent, fingers bone-white and pointing at the hatch above.
I palm the hatch open. Sloane pushes me up, and I haul him through after. The crawlspace is just wide enough for us both, though it stinks like dead insulation and wet dog.
Careful, I inch forward, pushing away the dust and rat droppings, and the tunnel pulses with the memory of that roar. Once, for a second, I see another set of eyes ahead—orangey, vertical slit, fixed on me—but when I blink they're gone, as if the building itself has pupils that dilate on intruders.
We move. I keep left at every fork, the way you're supposed to survive a labyrinth. At last, the tunnel drops out above what used to be the pediatric observation ward. I kick out the grille and land on a linoleum counter, hard enough to bruise my knees. Sloane follows, both of us spitting dust and adrenaline.
Below, arrayed on the floor, are the shapes of other people—five, maybe six, all sprawled and unmoving, as if they'd been dropped here as study specimens and then left to rot. Each is shriveled, drained, not a mark on them except for the slackness of their faces, as if something sucked all the memory out and left an empty sleeve.
Sloane makes a noise—half yelp, half retch—and pivots away. I hop down, scanning the exits. The only way out is through.
"We go," I hiss, and tug him after me. We step over the bodies. I don't look at their faces; I focus on the next door, the next breath, the next footfall.
We're almost out—almost to the Maintenance corridor I mapped in my head—when someone raps three times on the glass of the supply closet. Tap, tap, tap. Precise. Purposeful.
I want to run, I want to scream, but I force myself to look.
Inside the closet is a girl. Maybe sixteen, maybe thirty, hard to say under the layers of piss-stained parka and trauma. She's curled up, hands braced against the glass, eyes wide and feral, but she's alive, more alive than anything we've seen in the past hour.
I shoulder the door, snap the lock off, and she flings herself past me, hissing like a stoat. She signs fast—American Sign Language, or something like. Sloane catches three words: "Downstairs. It waits."
The girl points at the floor, then yanks at my jacket, dragging us toward a corridor I'd written off as sealed by the last quake. But she knows something—I don't know what, but it's better than my plan.
Even as we move, the air goes strange: cold and wet, thick with ozone, like the moment before a lightning strike. The lights flicker overhead, and every bulb pops, one by one, plunging the building into a jittery blue-darkness.
We run, all three of us now, down the basement corridor that pulls tighter and tighter around us until it feels like running through the throat of a dying animal. The map in my head is gone now, replaced with raw instinct: keep moving, chase the air, keep ahead of the thing that's already learned our names, our cell structure, our worst prayers.
This is what the world looks like, stripped of the fake order of science: just three mammals bolting through a maze, praying the next turn is the way out and not the end.
Somewhere above us, the roar echoes again, but now it's less than a roar—almost a laugh, low and knowing, patient enough to wait for us to run down into its arms.
I find the stairs, half-collapsed, but passable if you go sideways. The girl squeezes through first, then Sloane, then me. I don't look back, because there's no script in which I survive seeing what's coming up behind.
We hit the bottom landing hard—twisted metal and glass underfoot, puddles of electric blue from the snapped bulbs pooling around our boots. A door gaped to our left, stenciled LOADING BAY in a font that reeked 1973. The girl led, Sloane and I limping after, every muscle tuned for the next shock.
The bay was a slab of concrete ringed by rusted shelving. A single streetlight bled in through a warped plastic window, projecting the three of us in puppet silhouettes onto the far wall. The air reeked of dead birds and hot transformer oil. The bay doors themselves were jammed halfway up, warped by freeze-thaw cycles and the kind of vandalism that needs hydraulic equipment.
We made for the opening. I could see, through the slit, a patch of lot glittering with frost, the sky above it purest black and sharp as a guillotine. Out. We could go out. Two hundred feet to the treeline, then a straight shot down the service road and we'd cross the perimeter fence by the moss patch where Sloane made out with his prom date back in '09. I could see it all, so close my body moved ahead of my brain.
The girl skidded to a stop just before the doors, doubled over and hacking up something dark onto the cement. Sloane tried to help her up, but she swatted him off, wiped her mouth, and pointed to the far end of the bay, where stacks of sheetrock cast blocky shadows. She signed: WATCH. I tried to remember, but it was too fast, fingers gnashing air.
Then the shadow moved.
It was so fast the girl didn't even scream—she just buckled, knees gone, as a shape quadruple the size of any wolf I've seen vaulted from behind the shelving. It hit her like a car, jaws closing right above the collarbone. I heard a wet crunch. A sound like a tennis ball popping. The shadow—no, not a shadow, a thing—wrenched her up, dangling, and her head just… wasn't there anymore.
The jaws worked twice, then spat the skull against the wall with a sound I'll hear forever in places I'm not supposed to remember sound. I stumbled back, lost my grip on Sloane. The thing turned to us with eyes that weren't eyes—just two furrows in a slick, black pelt, like someone had stretched oilcloth over a deer skeleton and told it to practice smiling. Its mouth unzipped, tongue blue and ropy, jaw stretching until it split at the chin and kept going.
Sloane fired. Once, twice. The first shot missed; the second caught the thing in its side and the noise it made wasn't pain but irritation, like we'd interrupted its dinner with a burst pipe or a faulty light switch. It let go of the girl and bounded toward us, claws making sparks on the concrete.
We ran for the cinderblock stairs. I could hear Sloane sobbing, a wild, high animal noise that had nothing to do with words. My chest hurt; every exhale was blood and old cigarette tar. I risked a look back and saw that the thing was joined by two more, smaller but faster, crawling along the wall at angles that didn't respect the existence of gravity. They were not alone. Nothing down here was ever supposed to be alone.
We cleared the stairwell by vertical leap and raw panic. Sloane landed wrong and rolled, took a chunk of banister with him, but I didn't stop. Couldn't. The shrieks from the loading bay weren't even in English. It was like someone had sampled every species' fear sound and played them back at 1.25x.
On the second floor, the hallway yawned wide and empty, all the emergency lights fried out except a single green EXIT sign at the far end. Sloane caught up, bleeding from his left hand, and neither of us said a word. We just sprinted. Behind us, claws hammered the stairs, tearing up the cheap terrazzo and sending chunks pinging ahead of them like tracer rounds.
We burst through the EXIT door and found ourselves in a hospital cafeteria frozen in time—trays stacked with decade-old fries, a plastic Santa dangling from the soda machine. There, huddled by the vending machine like a prayer circle, was a group of people. Four? Five? All gaunt, too hollow to be rescue, but too alive to be ghosts.
They looked at us. I saw hope in one face for exactly one heartbeat.
Then the lead thing punched through the door behind us, splintering the cheap core like matzah. The hybrids poured in—three, four, then a fifth, twitching and grinning with teeth that receded into the jaw and then slid forward again, shark-style. The survivors bolted; so did we, but in different directions. It was chaos, humans pinballing off chairs and counters, but the hybrids zipped right through, ignoring anyone who didn't run. No, not ignoring—herding. Steering.
One latched onto a woman's ankle and jerked her off her feet. She went down hard, head on tile, and the way her leg bent at the knee wasn't natural. But the thing didn't eat her. It pinned her, then kept its paw on her back, flexing claws in and out like it was thinking about how best to take her apart for study.
Sloane and I made the mistake of hitting the kitchen—dead end, except a cut-through to the loading dock. We ducked under the heat lamp, past a wall of blunted knives, and out through the swinging door. The lead hybrid followed, its gait as smooth as poured tar. It was toying with us. That made my stomach twist in a way that was almost worse than the anticipation of being torn to shreds.
We doubled back, down a set of maintenance stairs. At the landing, I fished out my radio, thumbed it, and prayed for a signal. Static. Then, slotted between bursts, a single voice: "End of the Line." Not the girl's, not Sloane's, not mine.
I didn't stop to answer.
We ducked into a janitor's closet, slammed the door. I fumbled for the light, half-hoping it wouldn't work, but it flickered on after a stutter. Sloane slumped against the mop sink, blood stringing from his nails, breathing in wet huffs.
Outside, silence. The kind that means something's listening for you to noise back. I counted sixty. Ninety. One-twenty. My heart slowed just enough for my brain to restart.
"What the fuck are we supposed to do?" Sloane whispered. He didn't look at me. His face had collapsed into a new, smaller mask.
"We wait," I said, "and then we leave. Through the crawlspace, if we have to."
But the thing about predators—real ones—is they never lose your trail.
An hour, maybe less. The hybrids never left the floor. They kept pace, even as we crawled through the vent shafts, even as we doubled back through the dead lab. The girl's headless body was gone from the loading bay—the blood cleaned up, even. If you squinted, it looked like nothing had happened at all.
We got out by luck: a storm knocked power out citywide, so the locks on the second-floor fire escape disengaged. We slipped into the blizzard, chins down, and ran until the hospital was two hundred yards of white fog behind us.
It wasn't until I got home, bandaged and shivering, that I realized the thing in the woods, the thing in the health center, and the thing in my own head were all following the same simple rule.
Never let the prey forget it's being hunted.