The Den

The sun rose like an anemic flame, bleeding thin light across a world shattered by entropy. Heat shimmered across broken asphalt, bending the horizon into a fever dream of fractured silhouettes. Buildings slumped in skeletal frames, brick and glass collapsed like decomposed organs. Rusted vehicles lay heaped along the curb, metal carcasses stripped bare, their interiors calcified with mold.

Ethan moved through it, a single figure limping against a sky bruised with smoke. The air stung bitter with the taste of iron and mildew, thick with the rot of things that once lived. His boots crunched over shards of glass, wrappers, bones. Somewhere beyond the city, an animal howled—a song too long, too guttural to be human.

Ethan’s breath caught for an instant in his throat.

No hoot answered.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as the sound faded.

This was the last day of his journey. He knew it. Felt it in his joints, in the dry rasp of his throat. His body was a ledger of exhaustion: muscles corded like steel wire, tendons screamed under the weight of his pack. A pack which carried a tenth of the weight from when he started off the journey. Just as he now walked alone, when he started with eighteen others. Each step became labor. Each breath, effort. The skin along his hips rubbed raw where his belt rubbed against his bones. Hunger burned in his gut like acid.

He walked for months. Always moving. Evading the infected, avoiding the things that came later. The hunters. Scavenging whatever he could pry from abandoned houses, gas stations, the corpses of civilization itself. No comfort. Nor warmth. Just movement and survival.

Back when there were thirteen of them, they saw an encampment. A settlement. But that seemed too easy. Too prime a target for infected. Movement equaled survival.

Now only Ethan survived.

In the beginning, the cities had been deathtraps. Infected filled them like vermin, drawn to the density of human life. People thought they could hold out, barricaded in, armed patrols, desperate alliances. But hunger won. Disease won. Disease always won. Ethan watched cities burn, watched bodies stack like cordwood, black smoke roll across suburban grids.

Late, when the infected dispersed, when food ran out, when they ran out… the cities became empty. And that was worse. Worse for people like him.

The graveyards of skyscrapers were silent now, except for the wind, and the occasional sound of movement in the dark. Movement that wasn’t human.

Rumors circulated back. Savage enclaves. Raiders. Villages rebuilt from bones of neighborhoods. Stories told in barter camps, whispered over fires as they cracked and died out. Some claimed things were hunting in the old cities. Not infected. Not people. Someone claimed they were people, adapted people, who gave up humanity to survive among the infected.

But the infected weren’t in the cities.

Ethan walked. Ethan walked because he knew nothing else. His community, his last connection to humanity, was gone. Wiped out in a single night. He didn’t remember running. Just fire and screams, the pounding of gunshots and the pounding of his own heartbeat like a war drum in his ears.

Now there was only hope. Thin, fragile hope that someone, somewhere, rebuilt something worth finding.

Midday, he found the church.

It rose from the wreckage like a relic, a squat stone building haloed by shattered stained glass. The double doors sagged inward, their brass handles green with corrosion. A carved cross leaned at a precarious angle above the lintel.

Ethan hesitated at the threshold. The air inside cool, but heavy. Thick with the smell of old dust and something else. Something rancid. His chest tightened. Every instinct screamed no. Not here. Noth this place.

Then the sound came.

A hunting call. High-pitched, ululating, echoing through the streets like a razor drawn over steel. A pack. A pack close by. Too close.

Ethan slipped inside, closed the door as silently as he could. Darkness folded around him, pierced by slanted beams of light filtering through stained glass in fractured hues. Emerald, crimson, violent. The pews stretched in rows like dead soldiers, coated in a year’s worth of dust.

He moved down the aisle, boots whispered against the stone. The central podium loomed in the shadows. He slid behind it, back pressed to the cold wall. His breath came shallow. The sounds outside continued. Yips, hoots, a chorus of predation.

He stayed still. Waited. Counted heartbeats.

The yips continued. Hoots grew distant.

Then a sound.

Faint. Wrong.

Outside, the sounds suddenly grew far more distant. Running away.

Inside, the sound continued.

A thin wail, muffled and broken, followed by a choking sob.

Ethan froze. Every muscle locked.

No. No child could survive this long.

Impossible.

The infected, if they heard the sound, would converge. Tear the church apart.

But the sound came again. Softer this time. A mewing, almost animal. Then a groan. A woman’s voice, low and strained.

He unshouldered his pack, drew the revolver from the side pocket. The metal felt slick in his hand, grip worn smooth by sweat and fear. Six rounds. That was all he had.

The sound led him to a side door, half torn from its hinges. Beyond it, a hallway stretched into darkness. Walls buckled inward where something massive had slammed through. Paper littered the floor in sodden drifts. The stench him. Feral, musky, layered with decay. Like a wet animal den.

He didn’t want to use the flashlight. The beam was a beacon. But he had no choice.

The LED flickered on, cutting a narrow tunnel through dust motes. The air thick, particulates swirled like spores.

The cries grew louder. Wet, choking sobs. A rustle of movement. Something dragged.

Ethan’s heart slammed against his ribs.

He edged forward.

The office at the end of the hall was a ruin. Desk overturned, drywall shredded into curls. A door lay twisted across the floor like a broken limb.

Something moved.

A shape. Small, gray. It darted across the beam. Crawled. Limbs jointed wrong, jerking with insect speed.

Ethan jerked the light toward it, just in time to see it vanish behind a mound of debris.

Another sound. Wet. Rhythmic. Breathing.

He rounded the corner, light cut across the room.

He froze.

The creature crouched in the wreckage, pale as old ash. Its body, childlike. Thin, hairless. But the whole creature looked stretched. Warped. Arms too long, fingers tipped with keratin hooks. The jaw hung wrong, split at the chin into two pulsing mandibles.

It hissed as the light struck it.

Teeth slick with saliva.

And behind it.

Oh God.

The woman sat slumped against the wall. What was a woman. Might have been a woman. Skin patterned with splotches. Her eyes gleamed like molten coins. No visible lips until the silicone like mat peeled back to reveal rows of razor teeth.

The hunters.

In her arms, another thing writhed. Smaller. Wetter. A newborn.

For an instant, the scene burned into Ethan’s brain: mother and brood.

Brood.

Breeding.

These weren’t rumors.

His finger closed on the trigger. The run roared. The first shot tore into her shoulder. She screamed. A sound never heard before. Not human. Not earthly. Something older. From the cosmic beyond. A summoning.

The room exploded into motion. The child-thing launched from the floor, claws raking the air. Ethan fired again. And again. Flashes seared the dark.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Click.

Six shots. Empty.

Something hit him. Hard. He went down, tangled in splintered wood. His flashlight spun away, its beam wheeling across the ceiling like a frantic eye.

Ethan scrambled backwards. Boots slipping in something wet. A shape lunged past, talon skittering on tile.

He didn’t look back.

He ran.

Out the hall, into the nave, the stained glass a blur of color as he tore between the pews. His breath came in ragged gasps, lungs burning, muscles screaming.

Behind him, the calls. High-pitched. Tribal.

A shriek.

A call worse than the infected.

Outside, sunlight detonated across his vision. The street tilted beneath his feet as he ran. He ran, acid pumped in his veins. Somewhere behind him, the hoots changed pitch. A pack. A new kind of pack. They were coming.

They’re coming.

They’re breeding.

The thought looped in his skull. A broken signal repeating over and over again.

They’re coming.

They’re breeding.

They’re coming.

They’re breeding.

Then a human thought broke through.

What are they?

He ran on the only instinct left: run.

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