I watch the office clock nose-dive from 2:59 to 3:00, then back again, like it's caught in its own temporal panic attack. My shoes click slow laps on the tile, my mind chewing through everything the way Sloane eats through glazed bear claws: desperate, manic, oblivious to the future consequences. There's a coffee ring on the incident log, shaped like a rot halo. Every eighth step, I want to wipe it, but if I stop pacing the fears might actually crowd in close enough to touch.
The phone keeps not ringing. I picture Dr. Thompson up in Anchorage, huddled like a rat in a maze of dead-man's switches and plausibly deniable secrets, holding onto my sample like it's a curse she can mail to someone else. I picture Sloane in his car, white-knuckling a steering wheel, pretending not to be terrified; Ainsley, tiptoeing the fine line between wanting to know everything and hoping every weird thing in this town is just a side effect of bad water. I picture Anna and her perfect everything, untouched by what the woods are growing, probably dating some smug, coastal environmentalist who thinks wolves and wolves alone are the apex badasses of nature.
The phone still doesn't ring.
Sometimes, when the silence is bad enough, I can hallucinate the hybrid's breathing from the health center, see the way its body seemed to twitch between stages, frantic, undecided, desperate to become something that survives. It's the same thing we all do, if I'm honest about it. Change or die, even if you break your own bones in the process.
I almost leave—almost go out to my cruiser and drive aimless circles around the edge of Whispering Pine, just to prove I can—but then the phone vibrates so hard it spits off the desk and slaps onto the floor. I snatch it before the voice mail can catch it.
"Yeah," I say. My voice is already hoarse.
The silence is an ambient horror, like a dead air at the end of a call to a suicide hotline. Then a click, and the gritted-jaw voice on the other end: "Sheriff Mitchell?"
"That's me," I say, though I want to hang up and crawl out of my own skin.
"This is Special Agent Lindstrom. You left a message at the Bureau outpost," the voice is dead of inflection, sexless bureaucrat, like every vowel is under audit.
I forgot I even called the FBI.
"Yeah. My tip line about, uh, monsters in the woods. Or would you prefer 'bioengineered housepets'?"
"Sir," says Lindstrom, and it's the 'sir' they use when your story will end up a footnote in a report, "we received your sample. Seattle's Center confirmed cross-species CRISPR edits, but there's no evidence—"
"There's tons of fucking evidence," I snap. "You want a list?" My hands are shaking again. "Three dead bodies. One in a trailer. Two found just this morning at the edge of town, eyes eaten, skin peeled off the hands. We have DNA, Lindstrom. It's not from anything on the continent."
Another pause. I hear paper shuffling, the muted click of a computer mouse. I clench my jaw, wait for the punchline.
"Please remain at your post," says Lindstrom. "Do not engage with the specimen. Collect further evidence if encountered. We have a team en route."
I almost bite through my tongue. "You're sending people? When?"
A click. "Within seventy-two hours. There are… containment protocols. Until then, Sheriff, do not contact the press. Do not approach the subject. Do not leave town."
I snort so hard it tastes like bile. "Did you miss the part where it's already in town? Do you understand—" the rage finally boils up, "—that if I sit on my hands for another three days, you'll have a body count instead of a specimen?"
Lindstrom's exhale is a perfect parody of patience. "Do not approach the subject," he repeats, "or you will trigger escalation. We'll be in touch."
The line clicks dead, so abrupt I hear the echo of my own heartbeat in the receiver.
I slam the handset down, catch my breath, then do it again for emphasis, a child's tantrum in a dying town. "Fucking monsters," I hiss, so loud it shakes the plaster flakes off the ceiling. "Fucking monsters, and everyone's still reading the fucking manual!"
My hands curl into claws. I want to snap every pen in the cup, punch holes through the case files, pour coffee straight into the server and let the caffeine fry every secret in the state's antiquated database. But all I do is stand there, chest heaving, counting every pulse in my sinuses until I can taste blood.
The phone rings again. I eye it like a snake. I want to let it rot. Then I answer.
"Yeah," I bark.
It's Ainsley. Her voice is tremulous but sharp, the way it gets when she's about to ask for something she knows isn't hers to ask. "Sheriff. There's… someone here for you. At the front desk."
I thumb the intercom. "Who is it?"
She hesitates, but the feed is live and I can hear the strange cadence of another voice behind her, deeper and older than the usual parade of petty criminals and local meth heads. The voice says, very clearly, "Tell him it's Miss Belcourt."
My stomach drops. Marjorie. The goat lady. I thought she'd spend the rest of winter barricaded behind triple deadbolts, not walking into the station.
"I'll be right out," I say, and the anger washes off in a rush, replaced by something heavier, meaner, a sense of dread I can't outpace by pacing.
I square my shoulders and walk through the glass door. Marjorie sits in the reception chair like a queen forced into exile: wool shawl wrapped tight, lips pursed, hands folded white-knuckle around a closed umbrella. Her eyes are the kind that don't just look at you, but through, as if she's memorizing your bad decisions in advance.
"Morning, Sheriff," she says, only it isn't a question.
"Ms. Belcourt," I nod. "Everything alright?"
She shakes her head, just once.
"I found something," she says. "On my porch this morning. Thought you should see."
She produces it from her bag: a plastic shopping sack, inside which something black and shiny glints in the light. I open the bag, bracing for hair or bone, but what's inside is worse. It's a human hand, fingers curled, palm scarred with deep crescent cuts. The skin is veined in blue-black, but it's the nails—five perfect claws, sharpened and glistening with some kind of gelatinous secretion—that make me want to throw up behind my badge.
"It knocked at my door," she whispers. "It left that on the mat."
The world slides a little under my feet, like the entire town is set on ice and starting to slip toward the river. I wrap the evidence in another bag, double-layered, and paste the calmest expression I can find over the panic stampeding in my brain.
I look up, meet her eyes. "You saw it?"
She nods. "Not all of it. Just the hand."
Sloane appears in the hallway, his face drawn tighter than a drumhead. He sees the hand, blanches, then turns away. I can't blame him.
I thank Marjorie for bringing it in, try to offer a drop of comfort, but she's already halfway out the door, umbrella clenched like a baton, her whole body fighting the urge to run.
I carry the sample to the evidence locker. I take the stairs instead of the elevator, because I can't stand to be confined, not now, not with the thing that grows closer every second, gnawing off its own limbs to reach us.
Halfway up, I stop, stare out the window at the colorless skyline. The woods press right up to the edge of the city, a ragged green wall with secrets stacked a hundred feet deep. I see a flicker in the trees, a ripple of motion, and for a second I imagine the hybrids gathered just out of sight, learning, adapting, waiting to see if the next move is mine.
I go back to the office and sit in my chair, squeeze my temples until the world tunnels into a single, manageable point of pain.
I dial the Bureau again, because I don't know what else to do. This time, I leave a message.
"I've got a body part," I say, trying to keep the sob out of my voice. "It's not fully animal, and it's not human either. Your people need to get here. There's no time. Please."
I hang up, let my hands drop into my lap, and finally give myself three seconds to close my eyes.
When I open them, the sun's gone, and the lights in the station are flickering in tandem, the way old fluorescents do when the ballast is about to die. I think, in the darkness, about the phone call at midnight. Go to the old health center, end of the line. They're waiting for you.
I'm starting to understand what they meant.
I snap upright, chair screaming against linoleum, and bellow "Fuck it!" It's more statement than curse—a pressure-blast meant to jolt the marrow of anyone listening. Sloane bolts in from the kitchenette, shirt peppered with powdered sugar, and I don't even look at him before I start barking orders.
"Gear up. Full kit. We're going back to the genetics lab—" I hit the siren tone in my own voice, so every syllable slaps off the cinderblock walls, "—and you're bringing every pound of ammo they let you check out. This is our town, Sloane. Ours." I say it twice, just to make sure the echoes hear me.
The deputies crash out of whatever hidey holes they'd crawled into during the lull, each one blinking and pale, knuckles already white from clutching radios and day-old reports. I tell five of them—Jenkins, Fa'amasino, Tran, Ogle, and Rodriguez—to stay and hold the station. "If I call, you answer. If I don't call, get the hell out and torch the place." The rest, I pull in a close huddle and spell it plain: We're clearing the lab, and we're sealing it top to bottom. No survivors, no prisoners. No more phone calls from dead girls or letters from the fucking Bureau.
We roll out in three cruisers, lights dark, guns heavier than sense. I drive lead, the engine a boil in my hands, every turn bone-familiar. The sky is a rag of purple, the shapes of the trees flicking past like a zoetrope of bad dreams. Nobody speaks, not even Sloane, not even when the first round of gunshots let off in the distance—just the hollow wind and the grit of teeth grinding through the storm.
We approach the old loading dock just as the last pigment drains from the sky, pull around back where the floodlight is busted and the air tangs of bleach and rotten ozone. The memory of last time—hybrids in the shadows, the howl of metal on bone—flips my stomach, but I keep my hand steady on the wheel and count to five before stepping out.
I signal the breach, and the deputies fan out, moving as one machine for the first time since I took the badge. I hear the locker-room clank of armor, the hiss of breath through masks, the safety clicks that mean no one's betting on capture tonight.
Inside, it's the same crypt as before: a corridor of fluorescent disease, the walls smeared with decades of failure and interruption. We sweep the entry, two-by-two. Past the reception desk, now cratered by some melee, and the plaque that reads "Whispering Pine Genetics" but is mostly scratched out to say "Whispering Pine Get Fucked." The rest is pure darkness, punctuated by the green glow of the elevator at the end of the hallway.
We move in, clearing bathrooms and cloak rooms, until we hit the wide-open atrium—once the break room, now a kill box. Three shapes are standing over a trash can fire, but these aren't the feral scavengers I remember. They stand too tall, backs iron-straight, faces a bad copy of human—like someone printed a person from memory and ran out of ink at the eyes.
"Fire at will!" I yell, and the deputies open up. The concussive crack of shotgun and .45 tears the first two apart, the third pivoting and sprinting up the back stairs at an angle that shouldn't be possible. I drop it with two shots to the spine, and the way it folds makes me wonder if it ever had a skeleton to begin with.
We clear the rest of the floor: biology labs, data rooms, the old server farm where they must have run their first experiments. The only thing left alive is the hissing biofreezer, still whispering its secrets to an empty room. I check the logbook—last entry is from two weeks ago, signed by a Dr. T. Gregson. In the margin, a scrawled note: "Don't go below 28. If you have to, burn everything." I pocket the page and keep moving.
Sloane and two others cover the stairs. I'm about to order us down when something slams the security door above, rattling the hinges like a jackhammer. For a second, I think the Bureau goons are here early, but then I see the smear of black fur and the clawed hand splayed across the glass, nails sharp as rebar. It's the hybrid. Not the original, maybe, but a version of the same bastardized genome—taller this time, more teeth, a face that's closer to mine than the wolves I grew up hunting.
It sees us. It smiles.
"Move!" I shriek, pointing Sloane's squad to the stairwell. We don't run so much as plummet—a stampede of bodies crashing into the bowels of the building. Down one flight, then another. The air gets colder, more bitter, the lights switching over to red as we hit the sub-basement. This is where the building gets weird: the concrete walls start to sweat, the angles bend. Fifty feet in, the hallway kinks left, then left again, then down a ramp too steep to be code for any legal construction.
We keep going. Gunfire barks behind us, but the hybrids don't scream; they just keep moving, faster than before, learning the geometry of the chase. I slam the maintenance door at the bottom and weld it shut with a stolen acetylene rig from a research closet, praying the lock will hold them for another five minutes.
The first sub-level is research suites—glass-walled cages, each one filled with equipment in a state of explosive disassembly. One room is littered with vials of fluorescent green fluid, another with bones, another with what look like taxidermied squirrels but are wired up with electrodes and metal plates. A crucible for every madman's hobby. The second level, deeper, is colder, quieter. The lights don't work here, so we sweep with maglites and the spinning blue from the SWAT helmets.
There's movement up ahead, and for a split second my brain interprets it as a person, until I clock the reverse joints in the legs and the way the head cocks almost upside down before it ducks away. It's another hybrid, but the skin is translucent, muscled and vascular, the veins glowing with blue light. I signal "two o'clock" to the deputies, and we fan left, hugging the wall.
We clear room after room, the adrenaline stringing my nerves tight as a garrote. The third time we see one, it doesn't run; it just sits there, hands folded, watching through the glass. It blinks, and I swear it's trying to mimic a smile. I want to put a bullet through it, but I don't. Not yet.
I let the thing in the glass wall stare at us a few seconds longer. Nobody else wants to break the silence. Then, just to prove the world isn't all theatre, I raise my sidearm, fire a single round into the safety glass above its head, and watch the thing barely flinch. It just cocks its head again, eyes like the inside of a snapped pearl. Sloane breathes out a wordless curse, his whole body arched away from the glass as if even a sheet's thickness can't keep this place from getting inside you.
The second floor is supposed to be offices, server banks, maybe an old lunch room. Instead, all the doorways open onto raw abattoir. The place smells like the inside of a vending machine lined with dead hampsters. There are hunks of carpet peeled up in ragged strips, as if something used its teeth for demolition. I signal the team to clear left and right. We pass rooms swollen with broken computers, all their screens flashing a diagnostic in red. Sloane mouths the words as he reads one. "Noncompliant Host." He looks at me, face pale. "It's not talking about us, is it?"
I want to lie, but the truth comes out first. "I think everything in this building is a host. We're just not on the preferred menu."
Fa'amasino calls out from a side room. "Sheriff, you better see this."
I cut right, gun up, and find Fa'amasino braced in the door to what must have been a conference room. Inside, four figures are stuck together at the hands, wrists fused by translucent tissue, heads lolled in semicircle like a makeshift jury. Someone shaved their hair, maybe to make the scalp easier to peel, maybe just for science. Their faces are more animal than human—one with snout, one with elongated jaw, another gnarled into a beak shape. One of them is still breathing through a punctured windpipe. The wet noise is, for a second, the loudest thing I have ever heard. I clamp my teeth until my jaw screams and signal to move on.
We sweep the rest of the wing: wet labs turned into flex cages, server closets recabled with hair instead of wire, a single bathroom stall occupied by a mound of black gelatin that might have been a person, or maybe it was something the research team used for spares.
We regroup at the elevator bank, everyone tight and sweating but none of us ready to admit this is the easy part.
I tap Sloane on the shoulder, almost gentle for once. "You holding together?"
He doesn't turn. "You ever think maybe the reason we never see the future coming is because we're halfway inside it, already getting pressed into whatever shape it wants?"
I could say "no," but that would be a lie. I just nod and motion the team to stack for the elevator.
The lights go fully black between floors, generator power flickering from red to ultraviolet and back again. Somewhere below, I hear doors opening and closing, distant but methodical. It makes me want to scream, even though the rational part of me knows it's just the air handling system running out of pure habit, cycling the rot from sublevel to sublevel.
We clear the second floor ladderwell in teams of two, each pair dropping fast and silent. The stair treads are tacky, dragging at our boots. I move last, eyes on the gaping throat of the stairwell as it swallows us down to the next level.
The sub-basement is a new kind of dark. You feel it before you see it; the air is cold and damp, thick with a musk that has just a touch of ammonia. My flashlight cuts a cone through the fog, spotlighting circles of disgust: a dead rat's tail, a pair of gnawed gloves, a strip of what looks like human tongue shrink-wrapped to a mop handle. Somewhere further in, what sounds like an intercom sputters alive, coughing out white noise and snatches of human speech. For a beat, I think it's my own voice, distorted and stretched to a parody, echoing the last things I said upstairs.
At the mouth of the main corridor, a sign reads "Containment A." The letters glow faint blue, the kind of paint that charges in daylight to warn you when the fluorescents fail. Just beneath it, in letters doubled over by shaking, a warning: "DON'T OPEN. DON'T LET THEM FOLLOW."
We open anyway.
The leftmost door grinds back, hinges screaming, and the smell rolls out like a physical force, all copper and cellar and something older, the arcane scent of first-time blood. Tran shoves in ahead of me, gun braced, and freezes. There, sunk into the wall, is a full nest: bodies windmilled together, fused into a lattice. Some are old, collapsed down to tooth and clotted thread. Some are fresher, the limbs still twitching, stitched together by black gunk that pulses if you stare too long. In the middle, a single hybrid, head stretched to twice normal length, tongue protruding as if it's lapping at invisible water. It doesn't notice us at first. Then its nostrils flare. It lifts its head, stares with those unfixed pearl eyes, and starts to whimper. One, then more, then the whimper becomes a chorus: the whole nest is making a low, hopeless wail, like a choir composed entirely of orphans.
Rodriguez starts to lose it, backing out and muttering "no, no, no" until her radio clicks into static and she shatters protocol, running for the stairwell. I let her go; I would rather have a half-mad corporal above ground than a corpse in this carnivorous crawlspace. The rest of us move on, guns up, but now aiming more at the shadows in our heads than any real threat.
We hit the second containment. The door is locked, but Ogle's a genius with a pry bar, and after a minute of swearing we wedge it open just enough to see inside.
At first I think it's empty, then I see the writing on the walls: not words, but diagrams, chemical maps, rows and rows of DNA sequences painted in something that is probably blood. There's a cot, barely more than a frame, and on it, a body. Human, this time. Wearing a lab coat, the tag reading "T. Gregson." The face is intact except for the eyes, which are gone, sockets black and glossy and not even a hint of leakage. He's posed, too—hands folded, wedding band still shining on the left finger. There is a phone in one hand, the screen cracked but still glowing with a single-word message:
HUNGRY
Sloane shudders. "Fuck me," he says. "That's what this is about. They're starved, all of them. They're not even trying to get out." He turns, suddenly wild-eyed. "We're the only food left."
Jenkins cracks a joke, but it's so thin I almost miss it. "Maybe we shoulda brought donuts."
There's no mirth, just the thin sound of boots dragging off down the hall.
Sloane and I push ahead, following the corridor as it narrows and then splits, one fork to an electrical maintenance room, the other down a chute tight enough to make my shoulders itch. Everything here was built with an eye toward keeping things out—but from the inside, every defense only looks like a trap.
At the bottom of the chute, we find the nest. Or maybe the birth canal. It's a cistern of sorts, the walls slicked in a paste that positively wails for a Petri dish. On the floor, three hybrids huddle together, shaking, as if the last round of gene-edits stripped out their ability to control their own nerves. One is almost catlike—a slender, beautiful thing, ruined at the jawline by jaws that split all the way to the ears. One is a horror of hands, each arm splitting at the elbow into three bisected forearms, the fingers tapering into knitting needles of bone. The third is still in transit, half-wrapped in a kind of cocoon, skinless and bloody as a newborn calf. They are all dead quiet until we step inside, and then it's the blue-eyed one that stands, straightens, and regards us.
It says, very softly, "Mitchell." My name, pronounced like a riddle. Then, "End of the line."
I want to shoot, but can't. Instead, I raise my badge in the thin hope that this counts as some kind of social contract. It blinks, and repeats, "End of the line. End of the line. End of the line," until the echo paints the space with something that feels like church. Then it drops to all fours, scuttles past me, and vanishes up the maintenance shaft, which should have been impossible. But nothing about this night cares about "should."
The rest of us sweep for evidence. Tran's hands shake so bad I have to take the photos myself. Every room we clear tells the same story: the researchers tried to build a predator with enough discipline to starve itself, to wait for the order to kill. They learned, eventually, that you can't breed the hunger out of something that used to be wild. Maybe they thought they could, just for a year or two, long enough to check off the contract and cash the next grant.
We clear the rest of three in military cadence, room by room, nothing but the slap of boots and the spastic click of gun safeties being checked and checked and checked. Ogle and Tran take the east wing, Fa'amasino and Jenkins do the south. Sloane and I keep eyes on the west, which smells like fermented bleach and dry urine and—underneath—something curdled, incapable of decay. The hallways here look like they were abandoned mid-disaster: coffee still in mugs, a rolling chair knocked onto its back, one computer left on, screen saver bouncing the NASA logo in infinite, pointless orbit.
We find two more bodies on the perimeter. One is just a suit, all the soft bits slurped out. The shoes are polished to a captain's shine. Sloane lifts the coat with the barrel of his shotgun and makes a noise I can't parse. The rest of the skeleton collapses like it's allergic to being seen. The second corpse is upright in a supply closet, jammed so tight between the shelves you'd think they'd grown together. The hands are still typing an imaginary keyboard, even though everything from the elbows down is just darkened gelatin. I let the others bag it, knowing there'll be no chain of evidence for what's waiting at the end of this.
Halfway down the corridor, Tran radios in: "Clear, but movement in lab nine. Might be one live." I doubt it, but we're paid to check.
We rally at nine and use the battering ram on the door. It gives instantly, splintering inward, and instantaneously, something's on Ogle. She makes a single sound—a high, rising note—and then the thing is inside the line, coiled around her ribs and yanking. For a split second it's like she's wearing a fur vest made of tarantula legs, then the legs piston and Ogle comes apart at midsection, bone and bright yellow fat ejecting in a fan pattern. The thing drags the top half back, legs kicking in protest, and disappears behind the conference table. Fa'amasino opens up with the pump-action, and a haze of buckshot shreds the room.
I don't blink. Just keep firing. Sloane drops two grenades in after, which works as advertised, and the resulting firestorm cooks everything to a black pudding. The hallway fills with the stench of roadkill in July.
Jenkins is hyperventilating. Fa'amasino is on his knees, whispering a prayer in a language that sounds older than him, older than any of us. Sloane reloads in total silence, every motion exact, surgical. I call out for Ogle, out of habit, but the only answer is the slow drip of something wet onto the tile.
I tell them to hold. We post up at the junction, double-guard every entrance, then quick-march to the next room. The first rule is never stop. The second rule is never double back.
We find two more of them in the next twenty minutes—hybrids now stripped of any attempt at charm, eyes just voids sunk into the skull. They're learning to mimic the sounds that scare us: footsteps, cop radio chatter, even the weird singsong of Fa'amasino's prayer. One drags at the edge of my vision for a full minute before Tran finally blows its spine out with a three-round burst.
After that, nobody speaks above a whisper.
We finish the third floor with a final sweep. I send Sloane and Jenkins to check the executive office; Fa'amasino covers me while I bind the wounds on Tran's forearm. The bite is deep, but the flesh isn't sloughing yet. I tape it tight, inject two ccs of adrenaline from the first aid kit, and hope that's enough for the next hour.
We regroup at the elevator bank, all of us running on muscle and fear. The team is lighter by one, but the resolve is a live wire. Sloane's face is a blueprint for what mine must look like: jaw locked, teeth bared, eyes stuck wide.
"How much ammo," I ask, voice flat.
"Maybe two mags each," Sloane says, not looking up.
"We'll need it," I say, and pry open the elevator doors. The shaft is pitch-black, but movement on the cables says we're not the only ones thinking about escape routes. I toss in a flashbang, and the scream it triggers is so loud my fillings hum for ten seconds.
We take the stairs, not dignified but fast. On the landing between floors, a sticky trail leads down. At the next landing, it's joined by two more. I order silence, not because it's smart, but because it's the only way to keep the fear from going airborne.
The next sub-basement is colder, as if the building's own climate had decided to give up. The fog on the floor is thick enough to knife, and the lights are gone, replaced by a sick-green glow from the emergency panels. The walls here pulse with condensation; the air tastes like the skin off a lithium battery.
Two of the hybrids are waiting for us when we hit the main hallway. They've grown since the last time, or maybe just shed the old skin. The fur is gone, now it's blue-black flesh, slick with oil, eyes like marbles set into raw hamburger. They move together, flanking us with a precision that is almost military.