The jungle air was heavy, wet with the smell of rotting leaves and distant rain. Bravo squad moved like ghosts through the dense underbrush—boots sinking in mud, rifles scanning every shadow, ears tuned to the slightest crackle of movement. Shade led, eyes sharp, muscles coiled. Behind him, Rook, Pip, Marta, and Jules mirrored every step, silent and precise.
"This place… it's too quiet," Marta muttered, voice low, like speaking would shatter the fragile calm.
"Quiet is what they want you to hear," Rook answered, tone flat, practiced. He didn't look around; his eyes were always forward, always calculating.
A low growl vibrated through the leaves. The squad froze, rifles raised. From the shadows erupted a hybrid bear-tiger, fur patchy, blackened, muscles rippling like it had been carved from stone. Its eyes glowed faintly yellow, nostrils flaring. Without warning, it slammed into Jules, tossing him like a rag doll into a tree trunk. His scream cracked the night.
Marta opened fire, bullets tearing through its hide. Shade added his own rounds, precise and fast. Rook's rifle barked in rhythm. Slowly, the beast collapsed, twitching, bleeding, and then lay still. Jules coughed, groaning, clutching broken ribs. They dragged him behind cover, hearts hammering.
A scream shattered the tension. "Help! Please!"
The squad froze. Pip spotted the source: a man in torn clothing, blood streaked across his chest, waving frantically. They moved toward him, cautious but determined.
Then it leapt. From the treeline came a skin-walker—thin, leathery, mouth splitting grotesquely across its chest. With a speed that seemed unnatural, it tackled the screaming man, hurling him against a tree. Flesh tore, bones cracked, and the squad could only watch as it fed, wet slurps filling the clearing.
They opened fire, bullets shredding the creature, but by the time it hit the ground, the man was gone. Only a smear of blood and half a skull remained.
"Command," Shade stammered into the earpiece. "We found a local… he's dead. No survivors. End report."
Silence. Then—a scent. Sweet. Floral. Clinging. Marta sniffed. "Do you smell that?"
Before anyone could answer, Pip screamed, raising his rifle toward the sky. "It's up there! Shoot it!"
He fired blindly. Then another. Then another. Every man began screaming, firing at invisible shapes that danced just beyond comprehension.
Shade's throat went dry. He lifted his head—and froze. A huge spider, carapace gleaming in moonlight, hung from the canopy, each movement deliberate. He fired, but the bullets had no effect.
Then came the hallucinations. Zombies, crawling from the ground and mist, their faces twisted with the familiarity of dead friends. The team fired, but every shot tore nothing. The sweet smell dissipated. Shade blinked. The undead were gone, leaving only the red-stained leaves, the corpses, and the fog of madness.
Rook's voice—soft, familiar—slipped from the shadows. "I'm here… we're here…"
Shade dropped to his knees. "I didn't know… please, someone… breathe… move…" He clawed at the dirt, praying for life to answer. Silence.
Then the wind shifted. From above, a shadow descended—a man-bat hybrid, wings cracked and leathery, eyes glowing red. It shrieked, slicing through the night. Shade barely had time to look before its claws cut him in half at the waist. Pain exploded, then darkness.
The clearing fell silent. The jungle swallowed the cries.
Only the soft, wet hum of larvae moving under the leaves remained. The air smelled of iron and sugar. The faintest whispers drifted through the trees:
> "You cannot escape… the sweet rot…"
The clearing was silent now. No birds. No wind. Only the smell—sweet and rotten—rolling through the trees like mist.
Pieces of Bravo team lay scattered: helmets cracked, limbs twisted at impossible angles, eyes wide in frozen terror.
The forest held its breath.
Then, slowly, the camera pulled back.
Beyond the treeline, half hidden in the mist, stood an old, rotting farmhouse. The moonlight spilled across the walls, showing streaks of dried blood and vines clutching the wood like veins.
Inside the house, something moved.
A wet, bubbling sound echoed through the dark interior—like a heart too large for its body. The floorboards pulsed.
From the center of the room, a massive blob of flesh quivered—pale and glistening, stitched together from meat, bone, and unknown tissue. Dozens of tentacles slithered from it, wrapping around support beams and furniture, spreading across the walls like roots.
Each tentacle ended in a small, pulsing sack that hissed softly, releasing faint plumes of greenish gas that drifted out the cracked windows. The vapor crawled into the jungle, winding its way toward the fallen soldiers' corpses.
The gas shimmered faintly as it touched their bodies. A finger twitched. A chest moved.
The camera lingered on the house, on that impossible, writhing creature, as the whispers returned, faint and wet and wrong—
> "Breathe… again…"
Then—
Cut to black.
The drone buzzed high above the canopy, its camera lens flickering through static and smoke. Through the feed, the jungle looked wrong — shapes moving where wind shouldn't blow, leaves trembling though nothing touched them. The operator zoomed in.
Bodies. Torn apart. The identifier tags of Team Bravo glinted in the moonlight, scattered across the clearing. And there — just past the treeline — the drone caught the farmhouse. Its walls were breathing.
"Jesus Christ," muttered Lieutenant Vega, the squad leader of Team Delta. "Are we seeing this right?"
The tech beside him swallowed hard. "It's real, sir. Heat signatures everywhere… but none of them human."
The drone camera jerked — a tendril of flesh shot from the house and snagged the drone midair. Static filled the screen. Then a faint image flickered before total blackness — a single eye, red and wet, staring directly into the lens.
The screen went dead.
> "Command, this is Delta. Bravo and Alpha are gone. I repeat — both squads KIA. We've got biological contamination—unknown origin. Advise immediate evac and quarantine."
Static. No response. Then — a low hum came through the radio. Not static this time. It sounded like breathing.
> "Delta… don't… run…"
The team froze. Sergeant Kline ripped off his headset. "That wasn't Command."
Vega frowned. "Pack up. We're pulling back to Outpost Theta. If Bravo's gone, that thing's moving."
They started moving through the jungle, fast but quiet. Rain began to fall — soft, warm, sticky. When Vega looked at his gloves, the droplets weren't clear. They were pink.
> "Sir," the medic whispered. "The rain—"
> "Keep moving."
The jungle around them pulsed, faintly glowing under each flash of lightning. The vines looked almost alive, twitching with each thunder roll. And behind them, far in the mist, a distant sound — like hundreds of lungs exhaling together.
The radio crackled one last time.
> "Containment breach confirmed. Sector C collapsing. Source unknown. Nearest asset — Subject: Jack."
Vega stopped walking.
> "Who the hell is Jack?"