Speaker 1: I've been homeless for a while now, long enough to
know which places are safe and which ones aren't, and
which ones will get you stabbed in your sleep. I
move around a lot, keep to myself, and never stay
anywhere too long. That's how you survive. The city is
full of tense cities, makeshift little neighborhoods of the forgotten
and unlucky. Some are worse than others. You don't stay
in the ones run by the guise with glassy eyes
and twitchy fingers. You don't set foot in the ones
that stink of chemicals, urine and death. But every now
and then, YE hear whispers about a place that's different.
There's one under the overpass and the outskirts of town.
I heard about it a few weeks back. No fights,
no cops, no trouble. Nobody knows why. But people who
stay there don't leave. They don't come back into the
city looking for change. They just settle into that little
tent city and that's it. Supposedly they were all happy there.
I wasn't planning on going. I don't like places I
can't walk away from, But that night I didn't have
a choice. The rain came fast, thick and freezing, soaking
me to the bone. Within minutes. I've been hanging around downtown,
near one of the busiest streets, keeping my head down
and hoping for scraps. When they came out of the bar,
a group of them, loud, drunk, laughing. Those kinds of
people don't take kindly to people like me. They started
with insworts, Hey, get a job, asshole, that kind of thing.
I kept my head down and kept walking. Don't engage,
don't make eye contact. It's a rule. But when you're
the weakest thing on the street, there's always someone looking
to prove something. One of them shoved me from behind hard.
I hit the pavement, gravel dug into my hands. I
could have stayed down, maybe they'd have laughed and walked away,
but I made the mistake of trying to get up.
The first kick caught my ribs, the second my shoulder,
The third I don't even remember. Everything blurred together, a boot,
the taste of blood, the sound of rain hammering the street,
drowning out my own ragged breath. Then a voice, enough man,
let's go, And just like that, it was over. They
were gone, back to their warm bar and soft beds
their lives, and I was left in the street, bleeding
into the gutter, shivering like a dying dog. I pulled
myself up, one arm wrapped around my ribs. I needed
to find shelter. The usual spots were taken under the
bridge near Maine, the alcove behind the abandoned gas station,
the empty warehouse there still had half a roof left.
Even the beat up places, the ones with the rat
bitunia sleep were full. That's when I remembered the tense city.
I hesitated, rain pouring down on my face. Something about
it felt wrong, but I was out of options. My
ribs ached with every step, and by the time I
made it, I was light headed from the cold and
the steadied loss of blood. The first thing I noticed
was how neat it was. Tense cities aren't usually this organized,
the messy, thrown together from whatever scraps people can find, tarps,
tied defenses, cardboards stacked into walls. This place wasn't like that.
The tents were perfectly spaced, set up in even rows,
all facing the same direction, like soldiers standing at attention,
no signs of fight or scrawled out warnings on the ground.
I stood at the edge of the camp. Unsure whether
to step forward, I felt eyes on me, not unfriendly,
just watching. Then a woman, thin, middle aged, bundled in
a ragged coat, stepped toward me, pulling something from a sleeve.
She pressed the dirty dry cloth into my hand for
the bleeding, she muttered, then walked away. Before I could
thank her. A man followed, silent as a shadow. He
handed me a bottle of water, gave me a single
slow nod, then turned and disappeared into his tent. No
one asked me who I was. No one asked what
happened to me. They just helped. I sat down near
the entrance of an unclaimed tent, pressing the cloth against
my split lip. The pain was dull, now, a steady
throb beneath my bruised ribs. I tipped the water bottle
against my mouth and drank half of it in one go,
my body grateful for some than clean rough night. I
turned my head. A man in his mid forties was
sitting on the ground a few feet away, watching me.
He had a half smoked cigarette in one hand, rolling
it between his fingers. I hesitated before answering. I wasn't
used to people talking to me. You could say that,
I muttered. He nodded, took a drag, exhaled slow. Yeah,
same here read That was his name. I learned it
a few minutes later, after he scooted a little closer
and offered me half of the protein bar he'd scavenged earlier.
I took it. We sat there chewing in silence for
a bit, just listening to the rain pattering against the tents.
We were both new here, both sizing up the place.
Where are you from? He asked. Eventually I swallowed a bite.
Why to my mouth know where that matters? Reed, gave
a dry chuckle. Yeer, that sounds about right. I didn't
push him for details, but he told me anyway. Medical debt.
That's what did him in. He had a wife, a daughter.
Then his wife got sick. The bills piled up. He
took out loans, maxed out credit cards, tried everything. She
still died, and the debt didn't die with her. His
daughter was better off without him, he said, staying with family.
He hadn't seen her in years. I told him a
little about myself, but not much, just that I ran
from a bad situation, no family, no real ties, just
surviving neither of us felt sorry for the other. That's
not how it works out here. We just got it.
Relapsed into silence, watching the people around us move between
the tents. The people here are weird. Huh, Reid muttered
and nodded, Yeah, real weird. The rain finally let up
some time after midnight, leaving the camp eerily quiet. The
only sounds were the occasional shovel of feet and the
distant hum of the city. Read and I sat near
our tents, watching the camp move in its strange, silent rhythm.
It wasn't just their behavior that unsettled me. It was
the way they navigated around the center of camp, avoiding
it without looking like they were avoiding it. I looked
at the center of the camp. At first glance, it
looked like any other patch of ground, dark packed earth,
damp from the rain. But the longer I stared, the
more I realized something was off. The soil was loose, uneven,
in a way that suggested it had been recently disturbed.
No weeds, no scattered trash, nothing settled into it. I
nuddered with my elbow and nodded toward it. You notice
that he squinted at the dirt, brow furring like I
don't know, like something that was put there or taken out.
A quiet rustling made me glance up. An older woman
stood a few feet away, just watching us. Well, I
thought she was watching us, but it turns out she
was looking at Reed. She didn't say anything, then, as
if deciding we weren't worth the effort, she turned and
walked away. Neither of us spoke for a long time,
but I knew Reed felt it too. Her behavior was
the clear sign of an unspoken warning. I woke to
the sound of movement. The camp was in full motion.
Shapes emerged from tents, figures stepping into the cold. Heads bowed.
They moved with purpose, but without urgency. Reed stirred beside me,
sitting up and rubbing his face. His breath was visible
in the cold air. The hearl is this? He muttered.
I didn't have an answer. People were gathered around the
fire pit in the center of camp, the same spot
we'd been staring at earlier. The flames flickered weakly, barely alive,
but no one made a move to stoke them. They
simply knelt, their bodies angled toward the smoldering embers, hands
resting in their laps. Reed gave me a look. What
do we do? He whispered, But if we left now,
they'd notice we were the only ones still sitting near
the tents. If this was some kind of tradition, we
should at least try to fit in. I dun'no, man,
I whispered back, But I'm not about to be the
only one sitting this out. Reed exhaled through his nose,
clear frustrated, but after a moment he followed my lead.
We shoveled closer and knelt with the rest of them,
lowering our heads, doing our best to blend in. Then
the muttering started. At first I thought it was the wind,
a low vibration rolling through the air, But as it grew,
I realized it wasn't coming from above. It was coming
from the people. A low, rhythmic humming pulsed from their throats,
just a single deep note, stretched out for long, breathless
moments before shifting into another. I didn't understand it, but
I could feel it. The sound buzzed in my chest,
unsettling in a way I couldn't explain. Read and I
exchanged glances. Neither of us spoke, but I could see
the question in his eyes. I did the only thing
that made sense to me at the time. I opened
my mouth and mimicked the sound. The firepit shuddered. I
thought it was my eyes plain tricks on me, the
glow of the dying embers warping the ground. But then
the dirt moved. It sank. A deep, wet grown rolled
from beneath the soil, like the earth itself was exhaling.
The pit caved inward, not suddenly, but slowly, collapsing in
on itself like something deep below was pulling it down.
Read stiffened beside me, his breath going shallow. I didn't
dare move. Then something broke the surface bloated, wet and shuddering,
the thing pushed itself free from the sinking dirt. Its
surface was slick and glistening, with patches of dark, wiry
hair or fur clung to it in irregular clusters, sprouting
like weeds from raw, ruptured skin. Beneath it, veins bulged
and throbbed, pulsing in a low, sick way. As it
expanded and pulsed, the smell radiating from it made its
way to us. It was overwhelming, a putrid wave that
clawed its way up my throat. I gagged. Reed's body
jergged beside me. He covered his mouth, his eyes wide
and horrified. The thing quivered, then split, like meat being
pulled apart by invisible hands, and inside something moved. The
shape within was rising, twisting against the tight, fleshy walls,
trying to push free. A slick tendril slithered out, glistening
in the firelight, dripping with some thick amber colored fluid,
Then another, then another. My breath caught in my throat.
My body locked up, every muscle screaming at me to move,
to run, to tear my way out of this nightmare.
The thing in the pit continued to unfold itself, slick
tendrils sliding out, curling in the air like they were
testing it. The stench was unbearable, heavy and rotten. My
vision blurred as nausea hit, bile rising in my throat.
I stumbled back, hands digging into the dirt. My legs
felt like lead, but I pushed myself up, heart hammering.
A hand climbed around my fist. I turned and there
she was, the old woman, the one who had been
watching read earlier. Her eyes were cloudy, but there was
no blindness in them. Stay, she murmured, Her fingers tightened
round my wrist. It only takes one. A shiver shot
through me, my stomach twisting into knots. Every one was
looking at Reed. I lost my breath. I turned my
head just enough to see him, still kneeling. He saw
it too, all those eyes locked onto him. His lips
parted slightly. Wait, confusion flickered across his face. Then fear
Reid scrambled back on his hands. His eyes darted between
the people kneeling around their pit, their faces unreadable, not participating.
The thing in the ground pulsed again, its mass shifting
and stretching. Wait, wait, what the hell is this? I
just got here, read stammered voice, cracking under the weight
of sheer panic. His hands were raised, shaking as if
to show them he wasn't a threat, as if that mattered.
His gaze locked onto mine, desperation in his wide, bloodshot eyes,
silently begging me to do something, say something, stop this.
I couldn't. The moment stretched silent except for the soft,
wet noises coming from the pit. Then, with terrifying speed,
the tendrils lashed forward. Two large burly men stood up
and made their presence known. Reid tried running, but they
caught him. I watched as they dragged him toward the
creature and pinned him down right next to it. The
tendril punched through his shoulder, sinking deep with a sound
that was both a rip and a squelch, like wet
fabric being torn apart. Reid screamed, body jerking violently as
the muscle around the wound convulsed, trying to force the
thing out, but it was already borrowing deeper. His legs
kicked against the dirt, twisting his free hand clawing at
the tendril embedded in him, trying to pry it loose.
The second one wrapped around his throat the moment it tightened,
his scream cut off, replaced by a grotesque, bubbling wheeze.
His hands clawed at the slick, pulsing coil strangling him,
his nails dragging across its surface, but finding no grip,
nothing to hold on to. The thing lifted him slightly
off the ground, his feet scraping against the dirt, his
body shuddering like his brain was firing off every last
desperate command to escape, but the tendrils just kept pulling.
He dragged him forward into itself, his clothes stuck to
its wet, pulsing mass the second he made contact, as
if something beneath the surface had latched onto him. He
tried to kick off, tried to push away, but the
creature's flesh was sticky, sucking him in, pressing against him
with a crushing force that made his ribs groan under
the pressure. His lips peeled back, baring his teeth in
an agonized grimace as he felt it starting to take him.
He was being absorbed. His skin started to pull, to stretch,
to sink into the folds of the thing's body. It
didn't eat him, didn't consume him the way an animal
would devour prey. Instead, the flesh of the thing in
the fire pit parted and pulled around him, pressing in
on all sides, smothering him in a thick, pulsing mass.
His body began to fold the way a person collapses,
But like those animations people made of what it would
look like being pulled into a black hole, his back
arching unnaturally, his ribs cracking apart, his joints popping one
after the other as his limbs twisted at horrific angles.
His eyes were still moving, his mouth was still open.
His body was breaking apart, but he was still there.
The smell changed, The acred stench of rock grew thicker,
but there was something else underneath it, now something worse.
It was the unmistakable, gut wrenching stench of meat cooking
from the inside out. Something inside the thing was heating him,
poiling him alive. Beneath its bloated surface, Reid started making
a noise, a bubbling sound, thick and wet, rising from
deep inside his chest, like his lungs were filling with liquid.
His head jerked forward as if he was trying to cough,
but instead of air, a thick stream of amber colored
fluid dribbled past his lips. His lips moved, but no
words came out, just more of that wet, bubbling sound,
and then, with a final sickening crack, his head tilted
all the way back. His face disappeared beneath the thing's
pulsing flesh, and read was gone. The thing retreated back
into the ground, and people started making their way back
to their tents. The woman from earlier approached me. This
time she showed proper emotion. She apologized, but said that
now I had no choice and I could never leave again,
but the camp would take care of me. The next morning,
the camp was unchanged. The sun rose over the overpass,
washing everything in dull gray light. People moved about their routines,
stretching stiff limbs, adjusting their tents, heating scraps of food
over makeshift stoves. A few murmured quietly, but their voices
were flat, absent of emotion. No one spoke of Reed.
His tent was gone, his belongings were missing. His spot
by the fire pit where we had talked was just
bare ground. There was no sign he had ever existed.
The vire Bit itself sat cold and undisturbed. The ashes
from the night before were still there, untouched. The earth
with a monster had surfaced. Where Reed had been pulled in, crushed,
folded into something unrecognizable, It was now smooth, packed tight.
I sat by my tent, staring at it. I barely slept,
maybe an hour, maybe less. Every time I closed my
eyes I saw it Reed's body twisting, his mouth open,
bubbling sounds rising from deep inside his chest, The way
his bones had cracked, how his body had been swallowed whole.
I pressed my knuckles to my mouth, swallowing back nausea.
The stench of burned flesh and wet decay still clung
to my senses. I could smell it, taste it, like
it had embedded itself inside me. That night, I lay awake,
staring at the fire pit. Memories looked over and over
in my mind. Reid's face, his voice, his screams. My
hands clenched, nails dug into my palms. I needed to
do something, but if I tried now, they'd stop me.
I stayed, not because I believed in it, but I
needed to stay long enough to figure out how to
escape this place, long enough to understand what I was
up against, to learn their patterns, to see if they
were vulnerable. So I watched, I listened. I learned their rituals,
the quiet way of moving, their unspoken rules. When they
knelted the fire pit, I knelt too. When they hummed
their strange rhythmic tones, I mimicked them, forcing my voice
into the same lifeless melody. At first, my presence was tolerated,
a stray dog, lingering where it didn't belong. But the
longer I stayed, the more. They accepted me, and soon
I found myself inside the inner circle. They gave me tasks,
starting small. I was assigned to collect supplies rational water,
mend the fragile structure of the camp. They watched how
I followed orders without question. I never hesitated when something
was asked of me. I let them believe I was
sinking into it, that I was dissolving into the same
mindless devotion they all carried, so to them, I was
no longer a risk. The older ones began to notice.
I caught them watching, murmuring in approval when I followed
orders without question. A few of them even started speaking
to me, not much, but enough. I started speaking with
the elders, the ones who had been here the longest.
They spoke of time, as though it had no meaning,
as if this place had always been here. One of
them told me that the city above was young, that
the steel and concrete were just a thin layer of
something much older. The land beneath had existed long before
men had carved roads into it, long before they built
towers of glass and metal and pretended they were in control.
The thing beneath the dirt was older than all of it.
They didn't call it a guard. They didn't even have
a name for it. The part we saw in the
pit was only a fragment, a piece of something buried deep,
something stretched out beneath the land. Its body sprawled like
a great root system. What we fed it was enough
to keep it satisfied here, But there were other places
like this across the world, doing the same things we did.
I was given roles in the ceremonies, first as an observer,
standing at the edge of the fire pit as they
conducted their nightly rituals. Then I was made an assistant.
I played my role well. I helped choose the sacrifices,
walking the camp in the days before a ritual, feeling
the weight of their silent gazes as I picked the
ones who would not wake up in their beds the
next morning. Sometimes they knew. Sometimes I could see it
in the way they carried themselves, the way their hands
trembled when they reached for their food, the way their
shoulders hunched inward like they were trying to disappear. It
didn't matter, no one ran. They all went to the
pit the same way. I tried my best not to
be the one that would drag the victims out to
the pit, but sometimes that duty was handed to me.
I gathered what I needed in pieces spread out over months.
A sturdy can, old and thick, something that would shatter,
and sharp pieces scraps of metal jagged and sharp meant
to tear through flesh. Scavenged chemicals, and makeshift grenade. Crude
but functional. It wasn't perfect, but it would do the job.
That night, a woman had been chosen. I'd seen it
in her before they even told me. The small shift
in her breathing, the way her hands barely touched her food,
the vacant focus in her eyes. She knew she was
lucky that way she reminded me of Reed. Not in
the way she looked. Reed had been hard edged, years
of suffering chiseled into his face, while she was younger, softer,
like she had once belonged somewhere else. But it was
in her eyes, the way she stared through me, past me.
She didn't fight. No one ever fought. When I volunteered
to be the one to take her to the pit.
No one questioned it. I'd been here too long for
them to doubt me. Now I had done my part,
played my role, led enough people into the pit without hesitation.
I stood beside them in the dark, humming their song,
feeding the thing beneath us. They trusted me completely. She breathed,
shallow and steady as I took her arm in my hand.
Her skin was warm, pulse light, and steady beneath my fingers.
She didn't pull away. She walked where I led her,
quiet and obedient, just like the others before her. The
camp gathered around us. We walked through them, through the
ones I'd knelt beside, the ones who had stood with
me as the fire burned low, the ones who had
whispered the old stories into my ears. My breath felt
thick in my chest. The way to the grenade in
my pocket was heavy, burning against my skins. My heartbeat
thudded in my skull. This was it. There was no
backing out now, my fingers wrapped around the fuse. Up close,
the thing in the pit was worse than I'd ever
let myself see. There were mouths, or things that almost
resembled them, gaping slashed open gorges lined with pulsing ridges
of flesh, but no teeth, just folds of wet, sucking
muscle layed over one another, like the gills of rotting fish.
They twitched, flaring open, and its eyes, if they were eyes,
were scattered unevenly across its surface, shifting slightly as they swayed,
never focusing, but always aware. With one violent shove, I
threw the woman aside. Gasps pulled through the crowd, a
sharpened hail that cut through the heavy quiet of the night.
She hit the ground hard, rolling to the side. Her
face twisted in confusion. But I was already reaching into
my pocket, yanking out the grenade, my fingers tightening around
my lighter. The pit reacted instantly. The ground pulled apart,
like splitting skin. A thick, wet noise rolled from the
darkness beneath as the creature reared up, sensing something was wrong.
The thing in the pit wasn't mindless. The tensils last
forward fast. There's striking vipers. I lit the fuse, my
breath ragged sweat rolling down my back. I was too slow.
I knew it in the same moment I saw them
come in for me. There was only one way to
make sure this worked. I lunged forward and thrust my arm,
my entire arm, into the largest of its gaping mouths,
grenades still clenched my fist. The second I made contact,
it latched onto me. The flesh around the mouth sucked
inward as suffocating, muscle bound vice wrapping around my arm,
locking it in place. It burned, not like fire, but
like something alive was crawling into my skin, burrowing, spreading.
I felt it move inside me. Veins surged outward from
where it held me, black tendrils creeping beneath my skin,
forcing the way up my forearm, boring into the spaces
between muscle and bone. I screamed as it pulled harder,
yanking me toward its body, trying to make me whole.
My fingers locked around the grenade. My bones started to bend,
joints popped, My elbow snapped backward. My wrist buckled under
the impossible pressure. The pain was all consuming, a raw,
electric agony that tore through every nerve. I lost the
part of my vision. My body convulsed, My legs nearly
gave out. Beneath me. It was trying to crush me
into something small enough to fit inside. Then the grenade exploded.
A shock wave ripped through my body, sending blinding heat
up my arm or what was left of it, tearing
through flesh and muscle, shattering bone. In an instant, the
force tore me away, sent me hurtling backward, crashing into
the dirt, my body skidding across the ground. The creature shrieked,
not in sound, not in anything I could hear with
my ears, but inside my skull, a raw whil that
shattered my thoughts, a wordless, agonized scream that was neither human,
nor animal, nor anything that should have existed in this world.
I couldn't breathe, but I felt it dying. The pit convulsed,
buckling inward, flesh rupturing, splitting open, sprang thick black fluid
in every direction. The mouths gaped wide, sucking, had the
air trying to cling to life, trying to pull something, anything,
into itself, to stop what was happening. It was collapsing.
The earth cracked beneath it, the pit caving in, the
body deteriorating, turning to something wet and broken and undone.
I tried to move, but I couldn't. Everything went black.
The world came back in pieces, a steady rhythmic beep,
the distant murmur of voices, white light pressing against the
backs of my eyelids. The sterile weight of blankets tucked
around my body, pinning me down, holding me in place.
The unmistakable smell of antiseptic. I was alive. I tried
to move, but my body refused. My limbs felt heavy,
A deep, dull ache pulsed through my side, my chest,
my skull radiating outward. My throat was raw, my ribs
tight like they had been wrapped in iron. I turned
my head, and that's when I felt it, or rather didn't.
My right arm was gone. I couldn't see it, couldn't
feel it, but the pain was still there. A deep,
phantom weight like something was still holding on to it,
still digging into my bones, still trying to pull me
back down. The sensation crawled at my shoulder, a hollow, twisting, emptiness,
nerves firing into nothing, reaching for a limb that no
longer existed. My left eye wasn't there either. I lifted
my remaining hand, fingers trembling, and felt the rough edges
of a thick bandage covering half my face. Underneath. My
skin pulsed, tender, stitched, swollen. The socket was empty. The
room was silent except for the beeping of machines, the
sound of fabric rustling. As I tried to shift my weight.
I could hear footsteps outside the door, voices too low
to make out. Somewhere in the distance, someone laughed, normal life,
the world continuing. I should have felt relieved, I should
have felt something. Instead, I just felt tired. I let
my head sink back into the pillow. Nurses passed by
the door, their voices drifting through the half open gap.
I forced myself to listen, let the words seep in.
They said it was an accident, a fire, some kind
of explosion out by the overpass. Yeah, no one found anybodies,
no traces of anyone living there. Just a a pause,
just a whole. My finger curled into the sheets. The
ten city was gone, The people, the elders, the silent, faithful,
vanished without a trace. A slow exhale left my lungs
long and steady. I let my eye drift shut, exhaustion
pressing me deeper into the mattress, pulling me under. For now,
it was over in our part of the world. But
if it wasn't someone else, we'll have to stop it.