The sun was barely more than a ghost behind a curtain of gray clouds, its light filtered through the haze like a dying ember. Ivy stood motionless atop the ridge overlooking the collapsed city center of Easton—a tangle of shattered skyscrapers, mangled roads, and craters so deep they seemed to claw into the Earth's bones. The world below her looked like a battlefield where nature had finally declared victory over man.
She adjusted the straps of her pack, the weight of salvaged supplies digging into her shoulders. Mason, a few paces behind, scanned the horizon through a pair of cracked binoculars he'd picked up from a fallen soldier's remains.
"No movement," he murmured. "At least, not on the surface."
"Not sure if that's comforting or terrifying," Ivy replied. She could hear her own heartbeat echoing in her ears. There was something wrong with the silence today—it wasn't the usual kind that came with dead cities. It was heavier. Expectant.
They descended the ridge, their boots crunching over broken glass and gravel. Ivy led the way through the skeletal remains of what had once been Easton's civic district. Billboards flapped in the wind, their slogans half-obscured by soot and claw marks.
"Secure your future today."
"Vote for progress."
The irony wasn't lost on her.
Their destination was a sublevel military archive rumored to lie beneath the Central Command Tower—a building now tilted like a drunk giant frozen mid-fall. Word among survivors was that the government had stored blueprints of the pre-Fall shelters there. Real shelters. Not the makeshift hideouts patched together from junk and hope like the ones most survivors clung to.
"If it's still intact," Mason said, voicing her unspoken thought, "we might finally find somewhere safe to last the winter."
"I won't hold my breath."
Still, they pushed forward, weaving through cars rusted into husks, past streets where bloodstains had long dried into rust-colored memories. Occasionally, Ivy would pause, eyes narrowing as she spotted strange trails in the dust. Not footprints—something wider. Something dragged.
They reached the Command Tower by midday. The front entrance was choked with debris and melted metal, warped as though scorched by plasma fire. Ivy found a breach along the side—jagged, narrow, but passable. She turned on her flashlight and ducked through, Mason close behind.
The inside was worse.
Walls collapsed into each other, stairwells twisted beyond use. The air was thick with the scent of mold, dust, and something faintly chemical—burnt electronics, maybe. Her light caught the skeletal remains of a soldier, still in uniform, slumped against the wall with a sidearm clutched in bony fingers.
Ivy crouched beside him. A faded ID tag hung from his neck.
"Captain Elijah Roan," she read aloud. "Security clearance... Level Four."
She gently tugged the ID tag free and pocketed it. Mason gave her a look.
"In case we need it for the doors," she said. "You never know."
They found the freight elevator shaft near the back of the building. Predictably, the lift itself was long gone—its cables snapped, the platform at the bottom a twisted mess. A rusty ladder ran down one side of the shaft.
Mason peered down. "How deep?"
"Five stories. Maybe six."
He gave a low whistle. "You sure about this?"
"No," Ivy said, and swung herself onto the ladder.
The descent was slow, nerve-wracking. Each rung groaned under their weight, but held. When they finally reached the sub-basement, they found themselves in a wide corridor sealed by a reinforced steel door with a biometric scanner. Its panel flickered dimly.
"Looks dead," Mason said.
"Maybe not," Ivy replied. She reached into her coat and pulled out Captain Roan's ID tag. Carefully, she held it to the scanner.
Nothing happened.
Then a click. A groan of grinding gears. The door hissed open an inch.
"Guess he still had some clearance left," she muttered, shouldering the door open the rest of the way.
Inside was a world preserved in stillness—file cabinets, locked drawers, a main console coated in dust but otherwise pristine. The air felt colder here. Older.
"Jackpot," Mason breathed.
Ivy didn't respond. Her gaze was fixed on the far wall, where a map of the United States had been mounted, marked with dozens of red pins. Most were faded, but a few still glowed faintly.
"Shelter coordinates," she whispered.
Mason joined her, eyes wide. "There's one only fifty miles from here. Near the forest ridge."
"Could be underground. That terrain's perfect for hiding."
They moved toward the console. Ivy tapped the power button. To her surprise, the system flickered to life, running on some kind of emergency reserve. A soft blue interface blinked onto the screen.
>> Welcome, CAPT. ROAN
>> Accessing Shelter Records...
Then—
>> ALERT: Motion detected in sublevel B3.
They froze.
Mason looked at Ivy. "We're on B3."
Ivy spun around. The hallway beyond the archive was still dark, still silent. But something was wrong. The air had changed—gone sour.
And then they heard it.
A soft, wet scraping sound. Like something dragging itself across tile.
"Lights off," Ivy hissed, killing her flashlight. The room was plunged into darkness, save for the screen's soft blue glow.
The sound grew louder. Closer.
Mason drew his blade—steel sharpened from the wreck of a guardrail. Ivy held her breath, heart hammering.
The thing emerged at the edge of the hallway.
A silhouette at first. Then more.
It was tall—too tall. Its body elongated, arms trailing to the floor. Its head twitched unnaturally, as if pulled by invisible strings. One of its eyes glowed faintly green. The other was a hollow socket.
A Strain.
But this one was... different. Mutated beyond the others they'd seen. Its skin shimmered slightly in the dark, almost chameleon-like. And behind it... came another.
And another.
"Mason—" Ivy whispered.
"I see them."
Three... no, four of them now. Crawling silently into the archive like wolves circling a wounded deer.
She scanned the room quickly. No exit.
Unless—
"There," she pointed to a maintenance hatch near the rear corner of the room.
They darted for it, just as the lead creature let out a gurgled, electronic hiss—a grotesque mimicry of a human voice. The archive exploded into chaos. The creatures moved with shocking speed.
Ivy yanked open the hatch and shoved Mason through first. She scrambled after him just as claws swiped at the back of her jacket. She felt fabric tear.
The tunnel was narrow, forcing them to crawl. Behind them, the sounds of pursuit—thumping, screeching, the whine of metal under pressure.
"We need to collapse this tunnel behind us!" Mason shouted.
"Pipe above!" Ivy pointed.
He didn't hesitate—unslinging his pack and pulling out a small incendiary charge. He slapped it to the pipe, activated the timer, and they bolted.
The explosion roared behind them, sending a shockwave down the tunnel. Dust and debris rained down. The ceiling groaned.
They didn't stop until they burst out into the maintenance corridor of an adjacent building—an old subway station converted into a scavenger market long since abandoned.
Both of them collapsed, coughing, eyes stinging.
When they finally caught their breath, Ivy pulled the map fragment from her pack—the coordinates she'd saved.
"This is it," she said. "We're done running blind. If that shelter's real, we're going."
Mason nodded slowly. "And if it's not?"
She met his gaze. "Then we make it real."
The world might be broken.
But Ivy wasn't done yet.