They couldn't find any files.
Not a single document worth reading—no folders, no reports, no labeled binders. It was as if someone had cleaned the place out completely. If not for the mess everywhere—drawers yanked open, cabinets overturned, footprints in dust—you might have believed the staff had only stepped out and planned to return.
But the deeper the group searched, the less the base felt abandoned by accident.
It felt abandoned in a hurry.
That was when they found the door.
It wasn't like the others. Thicker. Heavier. Built for containment.
No warning signs. No bright red paint. No skull-and-crossbones. Just a steel surface and a wheel valve that looked like something off a submarine hatch.
The boys exchanged a glance.
If there was no warning, it probably wasn't lethal.
They stepped closer and gripped the wheel.
It turned easily.
The facility hadn't been abandoned long enough for rust to seize it. As the wheel rotated, bolts slid free—one after another—until the final lock withdrew with a dull clunk.
Then the door opened with a shriek of metal.
Inside was a large, bright room dominated by white.
White walls. White ceiling. White floor. No corners, no shadows—nothing a camera couldn't see. A steel sink and a polished metal toilet gleamed under the lights like surgical instruments.
And in the center of the room—
A person lay sprawled on the floor.
"Why is there someone here?"
"Is he dead?"
"Is this some kind of trap?"
Questions spilled out too quickly, overlapping, desperate. No one had answers. The fear of finding a living stranger in a place like this made their mouths run, as if noise could keep panic away.
Finally, the boldest of them stepped forward.
The body was long—too long—but frighteningly thin, all bone and angles. Starved. The skin was pale to the point of looking waxy. The hair, cropped almost to nothing, was dark. The eyes were rolled back so far only the whites showed.
No chest movement.
No smell.
He crouched and checked for breath. Then two fingers to the neck.
Nothing.
He stood and shook his head.
The room went quiet.
"So what now?" someone muttered. "Leave him here?"
That idea earned immediate disgust.
"I wanted to use this place as a secret hideout," another snapped. "You want a corpse in it?"
The leader—still the boldest—made the call.
"Help me carry him out. We bury him. We're done with this place."
They didn't have a "rest in peace" tradition the way others did. This wasn't mercy. It was practicality. Burning a body took fuel. A coffin cost money. Leaving it exposed meant rot, animals, disease.
A hole in the ground solved everything.
Two grabbed the arms. Two grabbed the legs. Two supported the torso.
And then they realized something.
The corpse was heavier than it looked.
Six grown young men strained, breathing hard, dragging the dead weight through corridors and out of the underground facility. None of them noticed the first change.
Not until they reached sunlight.
_________________________________________________________________________
Summer sunlight in Siberia was precious. Warm. Rare. Worth walking straight through instead of around.
So they didn't avoid it.
They carried the body out into the open, cutting across the base's surface buildings toward the trees. The place aboveground had been disguised as a simple settlement—something that would look ordinary to satellites and passing aircraft. Even the vehicles once used here had likely been civilian, never military.
A settlement meant certain things by default.
A small church.
A small graveyard.
They planned to bury the stranger there. Quick. Quiet. Clean.
Even if government men returned someday, no one would count graves.
But they didn't know what sunlight meant.
Under the harsh, yellow glare of the sun, something hidden inside the "corpse" reacted.
A strand of DNA—something human science couldn't read, couldn't label, couldn't understand—began to work.
Yellow sunlight was taken in, converted, and pushed through a body that had already been worn down to the edge of death.
It was not gentle.
It was not healing the way people imagined healing should be.
It was like pouring cold water into boiling oil.
The reaction was violent.
Energy flooded tissue, nerves, bone—every system at once. Strength didn't "increase." The body rebuilt itself from the bottom up. Sense by sense. Cell by cell.
A breeze brushed the skin—
And it felt like a hammer blow.
Not metaphorically.
Like impact.
The fragile body trembled, organs rattling, bones cracking under sensory overload. But damage repaired itself instantly, and the repaired parts returned stronger than before.
Wind became punishment.
Sound became pressure.
Light became weight.
Frequencies outside human hearing scraped across newly awakened nerves. Smells turned sharp and detailed, too detailed. Vision sharpened until the world became painfully precise. Touch stopped being touch and became information—heat, texture, vibration, density—too much, too fast.
To handle it, the brain adapted.
Not slowly.
Not safely.
Neural pathways expanded, reinforced, reorganized. The mind could process the flood… but the thinking behind it couldn't keep up.
It was like strapping a supercomputer to an ancient operating system and forcing it to run a modern program without drivers. The hardware might survive, but the software would tear itself apart trying.
Signals crossed. Regions fought. Vision and hearing bled into each other. Smell tangled with memory. Emotion flared as a stabilizer—anger, confusion, irritation—anything that could form a thread the mind could grab and use to reorganize itself.
The worst part was that the body refused to die.
Instinct took over.
It didn't know why it hurt.
It didn't know what it was.
It only knew one thing:
The sun.
The sun felt like survival.
So the body pursued it.
The boys didn't notice any of that.
Not until they reached the graveyard.
They dumped the "corpse" onto the ground with rough hands, already arguing about how deep to dig.
That drop—harmless to a normal person—hit the half-dead, rapidly mutating body like an explosion.
And that was enough.
The dead man sat up.
He sucked in air like it was the first breath of his life and screamed—raw, animal, violent.
Six boys froze.
Every horror story they'd ever heard flooded back at once: vampires, mutants, monsters, walking dead. In a world full of rumors, the only thing scarier than a living enemy was a dead one that refused to stay dead.
No one moved.
No one even blinked.
And then the "corpse" moved first.
He ran.
Not in a human way—not with thought or direction. It was pure instinct, pure reflex, a body chasing the only thing that made the pain feel like purpose.
Sunlight.
He sprinted through open ground at a speed that didn't make sense, avoiding anything that cast shadow without even realizing why.
His thin hospital gown shredded almost immediately, ripped away by wind pressure until he was bare skin under the sky.
He didn't stop at land's edge.
He reached a cliff, launched himself, and hit the ocean like it was solid ground—skipping across the surface in a spray of white. Shockwaves rolled behind him, shoving water aside like a boat's wake, only heavier, louder, wrong.
But even that pace couldn't last.
The body was still adapting.
Still starving.
Still rebuilding.
Eventually, the run slowed. The figure staggered ashore, collapsed onto wet sand, and lay there as waves crawled over him.
_________________________________________________________________________
Waking up from hunger felt like being crushed from the inside.
Like a vice clamped around the stomach and twisted until the world blurred.
He didn't wake thinking, I'm lucky to be alive.
He woke thinking, I need food.
He blinked at a ceiling that wasn't white.
A room that wasn't sterile.
A bed that felt real.
Then a voice, hoarse and dry, spoke from somewhere nearby.
"You're awake, stranger."
He turned his head, and pain flared behind his eyes—sharp, sudden, like a knife behind the skull. An old man sat near an unlit fireplace, thin as wire, white hair messy, mustache strangely well-kept compared to the rest of him. In one hand was a glass filled with cheap amber whiskey.
The man had spoken English.
That alone should have surprised him more than it did.
His thoughts staggered back online, and with them came another spike of pain. But the chaos from before was gone. The mind felt… organized. Divided into pieces that made sense. Not calm, exactly—just functional.
The old man watched him carefully.
Too carefully.
Like a man deciding whether the stranger in his house was sick… or dangerous.
A hand drifted subtly down beside the chair, toward something hidden.
The awake man didn't notice.
Not yet.
Because his eyes had locked onto the food.
A plate sat near the bed—round bread and cold fries, simple, stale-looking, but to him it was salvation. He grabbed it with both hands and ate like he hadn't eaten in years.
Maybe he hadn't.
His body took it.
Not just digested it—used it. Every bite sent sensation through him like a flood. Taste exploded into information. Texture turned into detail. Heat and salt and oil and starch became a thousand separate signals screaming through nerves.
For a moment, his mind wavered.
But it didn't collapse.
It endured.
Across the room, the old man watched the stranger devour food like an animal and decided not to move.
Not yet.
The stranger swallowed, breathing hard, and finally looked up.
His eyes—still too sharp, too awake—focused on the old man.
And for the first time since he woke, the hunger wasn't the only thing he felt.
He felt confusion.
He felt irritation.
He felt something else beneath it, something colder.
Instinct.
Because somewhere deep inside him, a part of his body already knew what the old man was reaching for.
And he didn't like it.