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- [00:01]
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Mochi Health Representative
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- [02:00]
Agent Conroy
Beware the Redwood Bureau. A secret organization which captures and researches creatures and objects that defy explanation. Their reckless procedures have led to countless innocent lives lost. I am Agent Conroy. I worked for the Redwood Bureau, but I have escaped them to leak their reports to the unsuspecting public. You have the right to know.
- [02:26]
Shopify Representative
Was.
- [02:44]
Sam
Okay, so this. This is Sam first official log. That's what Conroy wants to call it anyway. A personal operations log. Sounds fancy, right? Makes it seem like I know what the hell I'm doing. Like I'm not a guy with an eyeball in his chest and one backpack's worth of possessions. He said it's important that documenting my experience could help someone down the line. Maybe even save lives. Personally, I think it'll be more useful as a how not to handle an interdimensional possession tutorial. But hey, this is me recording my day talking into a mic like a goddamn vlogger. Except instead of traveling tips and and dating advice, I've Got trauma and monsters and a sentient growth sharing my bloodstream. And a secret organization that wants to lock me up and cut me open but let me back up. For the three people who might actually hear this and don't know the story already. Hi. I'm Sam. I used to be normal. Had a job, a girlfriend, friends, rent. I thought a bad day was spilling coffee on myself. Or suddenly having car troubles I hadn't saved up for. Then I started having dreams. Except they weren't dreams. I was connected to a world that chewed up physics and spit out insanity. The sky bled. There was this building. Not quite a structure, but more like an entity. It's hard to describe. An impossible form that was folding in on itself. And it saw me. I woke up sweating, believing it was a nightmare. You know, stress, bad takeout, repressed childhood trauma. Whatever causes nightmares. But I kept having the dreams, and they were getting worse. Then I started itching and I couldn't stop. Fast forward through a week of me slowly losing my grip on reality and boom. A goddamn eyeball burst out of my chest. Yeah. A literal, blinking, twitching eye, dead center, right below the collarbone. I could see through it, and it started speaking to me. That's when the fun really started. I called the police. I didn't know what else to do. But that led them right to me. The Eye guided me. Directed me to run and leave everything as crazy as it seemed it was. Right. They've been searching for me ever since. I've been running, hiding. But mostly I just got lucky that Conroy found me before they did. He told me things I wish I didn't have to know. About the Redwood Bureau, about Project Visionary. About the others who didn't get away. He's not with us now. Conroy. He's off dealing with something else. Something worse. Which is saying a lot, all things considered. But he asked me to keep these logs. Document what's happening, what I'm seeing, what I'm becoming. And what the Bureau is trying to do to me. I'm not the same, not since the Eye. And I don't think things can go back to normal. It's not just that I've got a hitchhiker sharing headspace with me. No, it's more than that. I react faster sometimes. I know things. Things that it tells me will happen before they do. And I hate that. I'm getting used to it. I've been lying low for months. Different cities, different states. I've spent more nights in places that weren't for living than I want to Admit I now sleep with a gun under my pillow and one eye open. No pun intended. Some of Conroy's team trained me. Sort of. They're working on it at least, but not like the Bureau does with their agents. We don't have labs or VR war rooms. No trauma suppression cocktail. Just a crash course in not dying. They taught me how to shoot without flinching. How to spot Bureau patterns and activity. How to tell the difference between something supernatural and something that just smells bad. Which brings us to this log. To me, sitting here in a safe house that smells like bleach and battery acid. Recording the words that might outlive me. Tomorrow I go out. My first solo assignment. The easiest one that is currently on our radar. One hostile, low level local phone calls to a small town sheriff about weird happenings that went ignored. To that sheriff's office, nothing. Which, if you've been paying attention, means it's definitely something. So, yeah, that's me, Sam. The guy with the eye. Not a soldier, not a hero. Just a guy who found himself in a fucked up situation. If you'd told me a year ago, I'd be sparring in a moldy basement of an abandoned business with a Viking woman named Vic who teaches knife fighting like she's auditioning new recruits in a prison gang. Don't tell her I said that. I would have laughed in your face and gone back to microwaving my hungry man, but here we are. Turns out once you've got a parasitic extra dimensional eye embedded in your chest and the Bureau tries to bag you like a stray cat, your career options become limited. The past few months have been a blur of new cities. Burner phones and safe houses that feel more like condemned buildings with a padlock and a ticking clock. We move constantly, always ahead of the next sweep. Conroy says we have pattern intercept software that predicts Bureau field deployment windows. I think we've just been lucky. It didn't seem to work when we were intercepting some signal from a moon base. Yeah, not even joking. This is my life now. But no pattern intercept warned us about the team of Bureau agents descending on our comfortable and well furnished safe house. The Eye told me and I told everyone else. Conroy took it more seriously than I was expecting. We grabbed what we could and within 10 minutes, that very nice place was up in flames. Since then, there hasn't been any very nice places. Every few days we relocate. Different town, different busted couch to call a bed, if I'm lucky. During the day, we train. And by we, I mostly mean me. The others already know what they're doing. I'm the project. The dead weight. The nobody with an alien eyeball. The first time they put a handgun in my grip, I shot the damn target stand. Not the target, not the silhouette. The wood frame holding the whole thing up. Reese just stared at me like I gave him a bowl of shit flakes for breakfast. Well, technically that's gotta be harder to hit than the target though, right? I asked him. He wasn't impressed. And he didn't laugh. He never laughs. That was day one. By day 10, I could hit a center mass grouping at 15 yards. Mostly if I remembered to breathe. And the eye didn't twitch at the last second, which it does a lot. It acts like it tries to help, adjusting my aim ever so slightly. Like a drunk GPS trying to reroute you into a lake. I'm probably worse at hand to hand. They paired me with Vic. 6 foot 2, built like a refrigerator full of concrete. Ex vero. Probably on the receiving end of some experimental super soldier program. Her idea of encouragement was throwing me on the mat. Until I learned to fall better. I have not, in fact, learned to fall better. The first time she handed me a blade, it slipped out of my hands. I've always been the avoid conflict type. My worst fight before all this was a college bar argument over whether alien is better than aliens. And now I'm being taught to puncture someone's windpipe before they can kill me with their knife. Winning as much as the training is painful and grueling. Trying to sleep is worse. Occasionally, I even manage a few hours before the dreams bore into my mind. Visions of that other place. The broken sky. The thing that lives between the angles. It's never far from my thoughts. I've been working on meditation for pretty much this whole time. Conroy says it helps. Said keeping your mind clear is crucial to resisting the eye's influence. Problem is, my mind is no longer a private space. Inhale. Hold. 1, 2, 3. Exhale. What are you doing? I'm trying to meditate. You are wasting time. We need to be training. This is training. When the Red Tree men break down the doors to haul us off. How will sitting on the ground with your eyes closed help us? It's redwood. And it's not training for them. It's training for you. To make you quiet. The color of the men or their wood is of no importance. And I am completely silent. You are the only one that can hear me. Yeah, that's exactly the problem. I do not see the problem. Other than your frivolous usage of extremely limited time. How about I put a knife into you and then you won't see anything you could not even if you wanted to. Empty threats are but another example of how you are wasting our precious time. It's not our time. It's my time. It appears as though you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how time works within this strange dimension. Damn it, can you shut the fuck up? And on like this it goes. Interdimensional organs. 1010. Highly recommended. So yeah, no enlightenment or control for me. I just lay there in the dark, feeling its pupil roll around in my rib cage, its thoughts rattling around in my head, trying not to think about the fact that I can't even be alone when I'm by myself. I feel it learning, always absorbing, creating its own compendium. Constantly. It watches me fumble through all this, taking notes, getting better at intervening. Recently, during a knife drill, I stepped wrong about to take a hit and my body moved before I could think. Just a twitch, a shift of weight, but enough to avoid a broken nose. Vic noticed. With her experience, how could she not? I'd pulled off an impossible dodge. She didn't say anything, but she gave me this look, like for the first time she saw something interesting in me. I hate that it helps me. I hate that I'm starting to rely on it. But there are moments, fleeting, fragile moments, where I feel capable, not skilled or confident, but like maybe I won't die the next time something or someone comes to collect our skin. After a while, I just couldn't take the sitting around anymore. I stormed into the briefing room, which is a fancy term for the half finished basement under our latest safe house, and said, give me something to do before I stab the eye and blow my fucking brains out. The request wasn't graceful. In fact, it was less of a request and more of a mental breakdown disguised as bravado. Reese looked up at me from his terminal like I'd proposed going commando and knocking down the bureau's front gates. Vic didn't even turn around. She just kept cleaning her gear like I wasn't even there. You're not ready, rhys said flatly. I've been ready. You've been here, he corrected. You've been training, sleeping in safe houses. That's not the same thing. That's pretty much what he sounds like, by the way. I laughed, sharp and thin. What do you want me to do, sit here forever? Practice shooting paper while something's in my chest slowly overtaking my thoughts? No response. Look, I'm not any good to anyone here. If I can't even do anything, I'm not going to evolve. Sitting on a cot eating protein bars and arguing with myself. Still nothing. Let me prove I can do this. And if I die, that's one less problem for you guys. They exchanged glances, the kind that non verbally communicated. Just give him something so he fucks off. Vic finally grunted. Fine. We've got something. Low priority off grid. Should have gone to a field agent some time ago, but we just don't have the manpower to take every job. I folded my arms. Perfect. That's all I'm asking for. She handed me the file. Manila folder. Actual paper, which was how I knew it was low importance. The serious stuff gets encrypted tablets and digital maps. This looked like someone printed it out of a 90s arcade office. Subsurface Hostile Class 1 anomaly Unconfirmed Grove Hill, Tennessee signs burrowing activity near abandoned property. Missing pets. One local report of man shaped thing crawling out of hole in ground to local sheriff. No human casualties reported. No photos. A sticky note was slapped on the front. Probably a ghoul. Three hours later I was on a bus with a duffel bag full of borrowed gear and a realization that if anyone searched my bag, I was definitely going to jail. I sat in the back, hoodie up, pretending to sleep. The eye was quiet, but I could feel its tension, watching what I was watching, judging my confidence through the twitch of my fingers. Do you really think this is a good idea? It asked. I didn't answer. I just clenched my jaw and stared out the window. Grove Hill wasn't even a town. It was more like a collection of buildings that hadn't figured out how to die properly. One gas station, one bar, a handful of houses. A place the world simply passes over until a computer program picks up keywords in a phone call not even the sheriff taking the call cared about. I spent the rest of the day doing recon, walked the perimeter of the reported site. It was worse than I expected. The house was half collapsed, its porch sagging and rotten. The windows were either boarded up or broken. Vines had swallowed most of the siding. There were claw marks on the concrete foundation. There were bones scattered around the side yard, small ones. Cat skulls. Maybe raccoons? Hell if I know. But something had been eating something that didn't clean up after itself by sundown. I checked into the only motel in walking distance, a place called the Pine Rest, which I think was a cruel joke since the mattress felt like it was filled with pine needles and and I wouldn't be getting any rest. Room 6 ground floor always choose ground floor and know your exits. The air conditioner was held together with duct tape and prayers. The TV had two channels, static and reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger. I laid out my gear on the bed like I'd seen the pros do in movies. Combat knife, flashlight, pistol, spare magazines, reinforced tactical vest, rechargeable headlamp, one charge of Bureau issue explosives I definitely was not supposed to take that. Is your plan to get us killed? The Eye asked. Just covering my bases. Do you think this will go how you've imagined? No, I said after a lengthy pause. But I'm going anyway. Silence. Why? I hesitated. I didn't really know. Because I was tired of hiding. Because I wanted to matter. Because sitting still made me feel like I was losing myself from the inside out. Because. Because I just have to do something, I whispered. I stared at the ceiling as I lay back on the lumpy mattress, listening to the motel settle like bones shifting in a grave. The room felt too quiet. The hum of the old AC had a stutter to it, like a nervous breath. Outside, a stray dog barked once and stopped. Somewhere beyond that, wind moved through the trees like something big was passing through unseen. I turned off the light, set my alarm for just before sunrise. I hoped I'd get a few hours of sleep. I did not. I stared at the ceiling until it faded into darkness, the weight of the next day pressing down on me like that abandoned house was already trying to bury my bones.
- [24:21]
Agent Conroy
Warning Signal interruption detected.
- [24:27]
Shopify Representative
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- [27:17]
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- [27:51]
Sam
The sun had just began to climb over the horizon when I stepped off the road and into the trees. The forest was thick with mist and dew, accompanied by a silence that felt all consuming. The kind of silence that waits and watches that dares you to make the first noise. Each step I took felt like it echoed despite the mud beneath my boots absorbing most of the sound. The air smelled like mildew and wet bark, and somewhere beneath that, just faintly, something sour, something dead. Ahead of me stood the house, if you could still call it that. What remained of it sagged like a carcass left out in the rain, the frame twisted, half digested by rot and nature. Shingles lay scattered around the front steps, and a portion of the roof had collapsed inward, exposing the splintered bones of the attic. The front door was gone, just a yawning, crooked hole in the wall that looked like it might swallow anyone dumb enough to walk through it. Which apparently, was only me. I stood at the edge of the property longer than I meant to, gripping the pistol at my side like it was a lifeline. This wasn't a drill. There would be no instructor yelling at me to adjust my form, no one stepping in if I froze. If I failed. Here, this could be it. You're afraid, the eye whispered inside me, calm and without judgment. Yeah, no shit, I muttered under my breath. Good. Fear sharpens the instinct. I didn't respond. My mouth felt dry, like my nerves had sucked the moisture out of everything a file had said. This was likely a ghoul type subsurface entity, a low intelligence predator, hyper aggressive, with a preference for decaying environments and a tendency to burrow. Generally nocturnal. Poor vision, if any. They typically navigated by scent, sound, and vibrations. The report emphasized the importance of encountering it during daylight hours, preferably while it was dormant. But the report didn't mention the way the ground felt around this place, soft and unstable, like something had chewed through the foundations and replaced them with nothing. It didn't mention the way the trees leaned away from the house like they were trying to escape. And it definitely didn't mention the smell, a rancid cocktail of copper, rotting meat, damp earth, and old wet fur. It hit me like a physical force as I stepped onto the sagging front porch, and I had to fight the urge to gag. Inside, the house was barely holding together, floorboards bowed and buckled, warped by moisture and years of exposure. Wallpaper peeled the walls and long curling strips like dead skin. The air was heavy and every breath tasted like mold. Insects scattered across the floor as I passed, their nests tucked into the corners of the collapsed furniture. I kept my light low, checking doorways and shadows, trying to stay as silent as I could. The sound of my heartbeat was louder than my footsteps. I found the kitchen, or what used to be the kitchen near the back. Cabinets hung off their hinges and something black had crusted along the baseboards. The tile floor was shattered in a wide circle and that's where I saw it. A tunnel, freshly used, about three feet across. The dirt around the rim had been clawed, as if something pulled itself free from the earth one handful at a time. I crouched beside it, careful not to get too close. The hole radiated cold. It felt like winter lived down there, like the very concept of warmth had been stripped away. I could see no bottom, just darkness, dense and complete. It's close, the eye murmured. How close? Closer than you were ready for. I didn't like that answer, but I couldn't argue with it. My plan, if you could call it that, was overly simple. The thing was supposed to be dormant during the daylight. Maybe I could catch it off guard, neutralize it before it knew I was here. Quick and clean. That was the fantasy. A fantasy that would be crushed pretty much instantly as a sound broke the quiet. Not from the hole but behind me. A dragging noise, wet and uneven, followed by a sharp, frantic scratching. I turned. Something slammed into me too fast to register. We crashed through the dark tunnel, plunging into the crawlspace beneath the house. Dirt exploded around us. My back hit something hard, and the air was expelled from my lungs in a single burst. The thing was on me. It shrieked. Not like an animal, not like anything human, either. The sound felt like teeth scraping against my skull. Its limbs were long, gaunt, unnaturally flexible, its fingers ending in splintered nails, caked with black and brown. Its skin was gray and translucent in places, stretched taut over a frame that looked more bone than muscle. No eyes, just deep empty sockets and a mouth so full of teeth it barely seemed to close. It clawed at my vest, teeth snapping inches from my throat. I shoved it off, scrambled for my pistol, but it vanished into the dark with a speed that should have been impossible for something so skeletal. I was on my feet, chest heaving, dirt and blood filling my mouth. My flashlight flickered, maybe damaged in the fall. The darkness was near total left. The eye snapped. I spun left just in time to duck as it lunged again. Claws whooshed over my head. I fell backwards and scrambled away. Before I could get to my feet, it landed on me, pressing down, pulling itself towards me as I tried to push it away, but its strength was insane. I couldn't breathe, couldn't move. Then everything inside me lit up. The eye flared white hot, burning against my sternum like an ember pressed to my skin. My body reacted without me. I moved fast, efficient, precise. I grabbed the knife from my belt and drove it up into soft tissue. The ghoul shrieked, trying to push away, but now I was holding it in place. I stabbed again and again as foul, dark, rotten liquid poured down onto me with a final stab into the side of the neck, followed by a violent pull downwards. The thing collapsed on top of me, twitching, pouring the cold, rancid blood. It didn't move again. I shoved it off, crawled backwards until my spine hit the wall. My breath came in ragged gasps. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. It was dead. Somehow, against all odds, I had killed it. I didn't feel triumphant. I didn't feel powerful. I felt like I'd walked into a wood chipper, got spit out, and the fucking Eye came to pick up the pieces. The air was still. The house creaked above me. We're alive, the Eye whispered, sounding almost surprised. Barely. Barely is still alive. I sat there for a long time, waiting for my heart to slow down, my hands to steady. It wasn't by choice that I scrambled back to my feet. It was an involuntary reaction when I heard it faint from somewhere down the tunnel. Another scream. I froze in fear. My whole body was still vibrating from the fight I'd just survived. Every muscle ached. My lungs burned. The knife in my hand, slick with blood, felt like a hundred pounds. My brain was still trying to process what just happened. I hadn't even begun to consider what came next. Run. Run, the Eye said. Where? I choked out. I turned toward the way I came, the shattered slats of the rotten kitchen floor above me. The dim gray light of morning was still bleeding through, filtered and pale. I stumbled forward, one hand reaching for the tunnel's edge edge, the other bracing the side of the opening, boots slipping in a slurry of mud and the blood covering me. I managed to leap upward and catch the rim of the tunnel. My fingers dug into loose soil, trying to haul myself up. I'd managed to get one of my elbows onto the kitchen floor, so close to freedom I could taste the fresh air. Something slammed into me, knocking the wind out of me as I flew back into the putrid tunnels. I hit the ground hard, ribs flaring with pain as I landed flat on my back. A fog of dust and debris rolled around me as I scrambled to regain my bearings. Get up. The Eye snapped, voice sharp and unfamiliar. I twisted just in time to see it. Another ghoul lunging from the dark. Its mouth was open wide, its arms outstretched like it wanted to climb inside me. My shaking hand gripped the pistol in its holster, pulling as quickly as I could and managing to fire once blindly. The shot went wide, ricocheting off something hard. It didn't even flinch. It collided with me, a split Second later, the impact slammed me against the tunnel wall, the side of my head connecting with the solid earth hard enough to knock the world sideways. My ears rang. My vision was briefly lit up by a white flash, which quickly gave way to a growing darkness. The creature was all limbs and teeth and speed. No hesitation, no wasted motion. Its only goal was to kill me somehow. I twisted beneath it and rammed my elbow upward. It staggered just enough for me to scramble out from under it, pushing toward the narrow side tunnel. The eye now pointed out. Crawling, I dragged myself down the tight corridor, every inch of motion scraping fresh pain across my battered body. The tunnel closed in around me, pressing into my stomach and back. Every breath pulled in dirt and rot. The walls pressed so close, it felt like every inhale was going to overinflate me and trap me. Behind me, the ghoul followed. Faster, faster. The eye ordered. I'm going as fast as I can. I spat through gritted teeth. My arms shook. My hands were going numb. My pistol clanked against the dirt. Every time I shifted to the left, I heard the creatures, breathing wet and eager, closing in. I tried to focus on the noise my pistol made. There's another, the eye said. Up ahead, to your right, in the wall. What the? 3 in total. Another further in, heading this way. You gotta be fucking kidding me. There wasn't much I could do. I pulled myself from the tunnel into a bigger space, knowing what awaited me. Turning immediately to the right, I saw it. A face peeking out from the soil. Those same eyeless holes. Lips peeled back. If the eye hadn't warned me, I probably wouldn't have noticed. It launched at me with a shriek that caused me to flinch. I barely reacted fast enough to raise my arm. It bit down on my forearm, its teeth puncturing through the reinforced jacket like paper. I screamed. The sound I made frightened me even more, and I slammed my elbow and its head into the wall, over and over, trying to shake it loose. It didn't let go. I stabbed the knife sideways into its cheek, twisting and pressing as hard as I could. It yelped, loosening its grip. I shoved it backward and rolled into a crouch. It was already coming again. I raised my pistol and fired, this time, landing a shot straight into its chest. It staggered, let out a grotesque sound, fell forward and kept crawling towards me. It leapt and dove at me as I lunged forward, closing the distance before it could strike. I fired several more shots, unable to tell if they connected or not, before I buried the knife under its jaw, driving it up until I felt the hilt scrape against cartilage it convulsed once, then fell limp, twitching on the ground. I collapsed back into the tunnel wall, panting, the foul blood coating my hands. Once again, the sleeve of my jacket hung in tatters. My leg was bleeding from somewhere. I didn't know where. Everything hurt. That's too, I said aloud, though I didn't feel even the slightest sense of confidence. I got back to my feet, unsteady, shaking. The pistol felt heavier than ever, my arms like rubber. Keep moving, the eye whispered, its tone low and unreadable, but something about the way it spoke felt off. For the first time since this whole thing started, the eye spoke with almost zero authority. It sounded like it was just as afraid as I was. That didn't make anything better. I pushed forward, dragging one foot behind the other, the sounds behind me moving closer and closer. I didn't even know how to get out at this point. These tunnels are an entire network, and I had wandered in like bait with a flashlight and a Free Meals T shirt. Might as well have seasoned myself.
- [45:34]
Agent Conroy
Warning Signal interruption detected.
- [45:41]
WhatsApp Representative
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- [46:10]
Venmo Representative
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- [46:39]
Agent Conroy
If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats, or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive.
- [46:53]
Sam
At participating McDonald's.
- [46:56]
Agent Conroy
Signal connection restored.
- [47:00]
Sam
I tried to double back after the second kill, adrenaline still burning hot through the cuts on my arms and the torn flesh in my thigh. But the moment I retraced Even a few feet. I heard the movement closing in behind me and the other one circling through the side tunnels to cut me off. The eye said nothing. It didn't need to. We both knew I was running on borrowed time. My leg was stiff, bleeding sluggishly into my boot. My shoulder throbbed with every step, arm half useless, fingers tingling from nerve damage or blood loss, maybe both. The only thing keeping me upright was the certainty that if I stopped, I'd be torn apart by literal monsters. I stumbled into a slightly wider chamber, a junction of burrowed out shafts. The walls here were ribbed with claw marks and packed earth moist and black like mold. I backed up slowly. My flashlight flickered. The beam caught motion to my left. Then it stepped into view. Bigger than the others, taller, more muscular. Better fed. Probably the Alpha. If ghouls have alphas. Its bones jutted at unnatural angles, skin a pale gray with streaks of black filth clinging to its chest and shoulders. Jaws hung loose, twitching. Claws long and blackened, clicking together like knives in a butcher's hand. I turned to run, but before I could, the second one dropped from above, landing hard in front of me with a thud and a cracking of bones. I raised my pistol, but its claws shot out quicker than I'd anticipated, causing me to bring my arms to my chest and take a step backwards. It lunged before I could recover, driving a shoulder into my gut and slamming me into the wall with bone jarring force. The air left my lungs in a single wheeze. I collapsed to one knee, vision doubling. Claws dragged across my chest, slicing through the vest, carving heat into my ribs. One of them shoved my head back against a wall, pinning me in place, while the other pressed closer, mouth opening like it wanted to smile, speak, but didn't remember how. Their claws moved. Slowly now, deliberately. One ran a finger along my cheek, down to my collarbone. Almost tender. They were enjoying this, showing me all the pain that was to come. The eye was silent, but I could feel its panic right alongside mine. I was slipping. My arms refused to lift. My legs stopped responding. There was only pain. Please, I choked out, not sure who I was talking to. No, I knew who I was talking to. The eye. Difficult. Something, I thought. We're going to die down here. A sound cut through the growing fog. A scream. It took me a moment to realize it wasn't mine. The Eye. The scream was coming from within me, Growing, spreading. It was everything I felt. Raw, wounded, panicked. A full body expression of primal terror. It didn't want to die. It refused to die. And it wouldn't let me Die either. The change was nothing I could have prepared. For one moment I was pinned, breathless, bleeding. The next, I was splitting open. It started between my shoulder blades. A pressure, sharp and foreign, like someone was threading wire through my spine and pulling everything attached to it outward. My vision went white. I couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't even think. The pain wasn't pain anymore. It was sensation without name, like I was being reshaped from the inside out by rules that didn't belong to this world. My flesh moved, reorganized. Tendons unzipped. Muscles unfolded. And then they emerged. Two limbs, impossibly long and wrong, humanoid only in the vaguest anatomical sense. Their forms shimmered, partially translucent, partially solid, coated in glistening strands of something like mucus and stardust. Each arm was double the length of my own. Triple jointed, they sprouted from the back of my shoulders like the wings of a fallen angel. I felt them like an extra set of limbs I hadn't realized I'd been missing. I could feel the tunnel walls under their fingers. I could feel the cold radiating off the creatures in front of me. The ghouls stopped just staring with mild puzzlement. That pause was all I needed. The right phantom arm launched outward, burying its fingers into the mud packed wall behind the nearest ghoul, pulling me forward with explosive force. My legs dragged uselessly as I closed the distance. In the blink of an eye, the left limb shot out in front of me and caught the creature by the neck, lifting it off the ground mid motion. The momentum didn't stop. We slammed into the wall together, hard enough to crack something deep in the creature's chest. Before it could scream, the other phantom arm wrapped around its right shoulder. The left released its neck and grabbed the other arm. Both began to pull. I didn't plan it. I didn't try to interfere. I gave in to the desire, the bloodlust. The ghoul's arms stretched outward first resisting, then tearing, the skin separating with a wet, fibrous sound like pulling apart roast chicken. It shrieked an awful bubbling sound, and I silenced it with the knife, driving it into its neck and face over and over until there was no fight left. In slumped and the phantom limbs let go of the creature's two arms that thumped onto the ground in a wet, useless pile. I stood, coated in gore as the alpha creature made its move. It lunged, but I didn't even turn my head. I knew where it was, how fast it was moving, even had a pretty good idea of what it weighed. I could feel it. My right Phantom limb struck sideways like a backhand from hell, catching the creature mid charge and sending it flying into the tunnel wall. With the ground shaking force, it staggered. Dazed, I spun, pivoting on one foot in a motion that felt like flipping inside out for a fraction of a second. The movement wasn't natural, but it was right, like bending the laws of the universe and knowing the world can't correct you. By the time I completed the turn, I was already drawing my sidearm. I raised it one handed, blood dripping from my elbow. The creature tried to get up, but I didn't give it the chance. I emptied the magazine into its head. The first shot slumped it, but I didn't stop following its falling body until the slide locked back. The grouping was so tight it almost looked as if there was only one hole right between the eyes. Silence fell in a blanket of death. My breath came in heavy, broken gasps. I stood in the narrow tunnel, the rotten blood soaking into my clothes, into the dirt coating the phantom limbs that still trailed behind me, and slowly they retracted. The shimmering arms folded back into my flesh, the sound somewhere between reverse breathing and a zipper closing in slow motion. The sensation was unbearable and intimate and electric. I collapsed to my knees, body shaking from exertion and pain and something else. I should have felt like a monster, but for the first time in my life, I felt powerful. Or alive. I whispered, barely. The eye finally responded after a lengthy silence. Barely is still alive. I knelt in the dirt, body trembling, pistol loose in one hand, the other pressed to the side of my torn vest where the warmth hadn't stopped leaking. I waited for another sound, but thankfully nothing came. The eye was still like it too, was trying to make sense of what had just happened. I don't know how long I sat there. Five minutes, maybe 15. It didn't matter. Time had stretched, thinned, and bled like everything else in that place. Eventually I forced myself to move. Not because I had energy left, I didn't, but because I knew what would happen if we stuck around here too long. For all I knew, the Bureau had gotten a reading from whatever had just happened to us, but I wasn't going to leave anything behind. I retrieved the explosive charge from my pack and staggered back through the tunnels, one hand trailing along the walls for balance, the other holding a flickering light. The eye told me the best place to drop the explosive. As we made our way out, I looked at the corpses, at the wreckage I'd left behind. It was hard to believe that I had done all this. No, not I. We. Climbing out wasn't easy. I slipped twice trying to reach the surface, my leg screaming every time I used it for leverage. My right arm had long since gone numb. My jacket was stiff with half dried blood. Everything I wore felt like it weighed 50 pounds and smelled like a moldy sewer. But eventually I made it. I crawled out of that house on my stomach, gasping into the daylight, clawing at the porch like a man escaping his own grave. I limped out to the road and triggered the detonator. The explosion was deeper than I expected, a slow earth swallowing concussion that didn't echo so much as ripple, sending a low growl across the land. The porch collapsed, the walls folded inward. The ground caved in around the den, and just like that, the whole place sank into itself, coughing up a cloud of smoke and dust that hung in the air. I stood there, watching the ruin. That was two days ago. Now I'm here, sitting in another nameless room in another safe house on the edge of nowhere. My cuts are bandaged. My tears are stitched. My body hurts fucking everywhere. But I'm alive. We're alive. The Eye hasn't said much since we got back. It doesn't want to answer my questions just yet. Maybe it's processing. Maybe it's exhausted. Or maybe it's just giving me space. I don't really know how to feel about that. But I do know this. Something shifted down there in me. Those limbs. The Eye didn't just push them out to save itself. It gave them to us. To me. And now that they've been here, I can still feel the echoes. Like I've grown phantom nerves for things that aren't here in this reality. But I think I get it now. This isn't going to stop. Not the Bureau. Not the creatures that crawl out of the dark. Not the things waiting in the walls and in the soil beneath our feet. The freakshows and nightmares, the impossible and the unexplained. They're not rare. They're just ignored and unseen until they aren't. And I don't get to walk away from it. There's no next chapter waiting for me in some quiet town, no peaceful life after this. I've been marked, forged into something else. Whether it's the eye or the fight or both. I've crossed a line I can't uncross. I've seen too much, felt too much. I carry something now that won't let me go back to the way things were. If this is what I am now, then I need to stop pretending I'm not. So I'll get better, smarter, stronger. I'll learn how to fight the people and the things that scare me. Learn to move before they move. Bleed less, hesitate less. I'll find ways to hurt the things that want to hurt me. I'll kill the things that don't die easy. Because I know they're still out there. And because I know the Bureau is still watching. If they don't already know what happened then, they do now. They'll mark me as dangerous in one of their little files. A liability. Something to own and contain. I'm not just a target now. I'm a problem. Something they can't predict, and that makes me valuable. But more than that, it makes me a threat. Conroy warned me. Said the more I learn to survive, the more I grow into what I am now, the more dangerous I become to. To the Bureau, to their goals, to their illusion of control. And he was right. But he said something else. Something I couldn't ignore even when I tried. He said that people have a right to know. They deserve the truth. About the things that claw up from the forgotten corners of the world. About what's waiting in the woods or the basements or the cracks between worlds that open up when you aren't looking. About the monsters hiding in government reports. The ones with sharp teeth and the ones wearing clean suits and Agency badges because the Bureau doesn't protect anyone. They contain. They lie. They preserve their own power, their own secrets, and leave the rest of us to die in agony. But we're not staying silent anymore. Not me, not Conroy, not the others who are still out there, still fighting, still leaking information and resisting. Most of us aren't special. We're not soldiers. We're just people who survived long enough to realize that someone has to push me back. And that's what we're going to do. One case, one monster, one classified file at a time. Even if it kills us. Because the Bureau isn't the cure. They're the disease. So if they're listening, and I know you are, hear this. I'm still breathing. And one day, we're going to fuck you up.
- [65:40]
Austin James
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- [66:01]
Sam
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- [66:04]
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