The flickering bathroom light buzzed above their heads. Water dripped steadily from a cracked pipe, echoing like a heartbeat. Ephraein, Herbert, Bleu, and Pierro all pressed against the bathroom wall, breath shallow, frozen in silence. Outside, the heavy thuds of Dr. Finn's mutated arms could still be heard dragging across the bunker floor. He was somewhere in the dark, searching, smelling, maybe even remembering.
But it wasn't the only sound anymore.
Something else was creeping closer.
A second rhythm. Wet footsteps.
Lukas.
"Shh—" Herbert mouthed, but it was too late.
The door creaked. A sharp slam echoed through the hall outside. The bathroom lights dimmed, turning everything a sick shade of yellow.
Then Lukas appeared.
He didn't walk—he tilted into view. His body moved like a puppet half-controlled, his limbs disjointed, his head twitching in sharp bursts. His face was warped—skin stretched too tightly over bones, teeth too many for a human mouth, black liquid soaking through his shirt like tar from the inside.
Ephraein whimpered. Bleu clutched her mouth to keep from screaming.
"Please," Pierro whispered. "Not again..."
Lukas hissed—a dry, rattling sound like glass scraping bone—and lunged.
The door burst open, slamming against the tiles. Lukas swiped with his nails, razor-sharp and inhumanly long. He tore through the wall, slicing through it as if it were paper. Herbert reacted first—he kicked the sink loose from the wall and hurled it at Lukas. The metal struck him across the face with a metallic clang, but Lukas didn't even flinch.
Bleu threw a bottle of cleaning acid. It splashed across Lukas's chest—his skin sizzled, smoke rising, but still, he came.
"RUN!" Ephraein screamed.
They burst out of the bathroom, sprinting blindly through the dark, ruined hallways of the bunker. Pipes hissed steam. Lights sparked and died. Behind them, Lukas screeched in a tone far too high for a boy. A monster's voice now.
No one knew where they were going—but they knew they had to escape.
The wind had grown stronger. Gallagher Street was always eerily quiet, but tonight it breathed. Sasha, Venice, Toff, and Sheriff Jasper had circled the restricted complex twice. The bunker was sealed tight. No keypad, no passcode, not even a sound from beneath anymore.
But they knew people were still down there. They had heard the screams.
Then Jasper paused.
"Over here," he said, pointing. "That manhole cover…"
It sat at the edge of the lot, buried partially in overgrown weeds and gravel. The metal was stained dark, like something had tried to claw its way out once.
Venice crouched beside it. "If there's an access ladder, it might lead to the control room. These older bunkers always had escape hatches built into maintenance shafts."
"Or it could lead to hell," Toff muttered, cocking his gun.
Sasha nodded. "We're going in."
Together, they pried open the rusted cover. The smell hit them first—iron, oil, decay. Jasper dropped down first, flashlight in hand. Sasha followed. Venice next. Toff landed last, gun drawn, every nerve alive.
They emerged in a narrow crawlspace filled with low-hanging wires and ancient pipes. The sound of electricity was absent. Everything was dead.
After a ten-minute crawl, they found it:
The control room.
The air was thick. Bloody smears decorated the walls. A cracked monitor blinked weakly, repeating the same phrase on screen in red:
"PRIMARY ACCESS: LOCKDOWN ENGAGED. EXTERNAL OVERRIDE: DESTROYED."
Venice gagged. The floor was sticky. There was a chair in the corner, and what looked like Bryan's body, headless, slumped against the wall. His hands were twisted backwards, as if he had tried to fight something with the last of his strength.
Jasper knelt beside him. "No pulse. Cold. He's been gone for hours."
Sasha stepped forward. "What did he see?"
"Whatever it was," Venice said softly, "it tried to silence him violently."
There were drag marks on the floor, heading deeper into the lab.
"Let's move," Sasha said, cocking her flashlight. "The others might still be alive."
Herbert, Ephraein, Bleu, and Pierro burst into the old medical ward. Beds were overturned, cabinets empty. The emergency lighting buzzed faintly red now. Lukas's screech echoed somewhere distant—but growing closer.
They slammed the double doors shut and barricaded it with a metal tray.
"What do we do?" Bleu hissed. "He's not human anymore!"
"We fight smart," Herbert muttered, tying a length of cord around a scalpel and broken broom handle. "We hold him off until someone finds us."
Pierro stayed near the wall, shaking. "You don't understand. I saw it in the server logs. This isn't Lukas. It's… what's left of him. He died. But Michael didn't let him stay dead."
"You caused this," Ephraein growled. "You sabotaged the safety systems—"
"I didn't know!" Pierro yelled. "I didn't know it would become—that!"
Then—
CRASH.
Lukas burst through the wall—not the door—the wall. Plaster and brick exploded. His eyes were empty black voids. Blood leaked from his chest in strange geometric shapes, like a ritual had been carved into him. His fingernails cracked the tile beneath him as he approached on all fours.
He was smiling now. An awful, crooked smile.
Herbert struck him with the makeshift weapon. Lukas caught it mid-air.
Snapped it.
Grabbed Herbert by the arm. SNAP. Herbert screamed as his arm broke in three places.
Bleu tackled Lukas with a rolling cart, sending him tumbling. Ephraein grabbed a needle filled with expired sedative and jabbed it into Lukas's throat. He flailed, screeching, buying them seconds.
"Go!" Ephraein yelled, dragging Herbert. "Run—run!"
Deep in the central hallway, Sasha, Venice, Jasper, and Toff moved cautiously. Then—
A door burst open.
Ephraein emerged, dragging Herbert.
"HEY!" Sasha shouted. "Over here!"
They all rushed into a storage room, slamming the door shut.
They were all breathing hard. The scientists stared at Sasha in disbelief.
"Sasha! You're b-back!" Ephraein gasped.
"Awhh," Sasha said. "Who's still alive?"
"Lukas is in here. Pierro's still out there. And Finn… Dr. Finn, he's... he's not human anymore."
They all turned to the sound of thumping again.
Heavy, wet dragging sounds.
"Oh God," Bleu whispered, "he's coming back."
Suddenly, from deeper within the complex, an alarm—one no one had heard before—blared across the walls.
"SECONDARY HOST DETECTED.""NEXUS CORE COMPROMISED.""ALL LIFE FORMS MUST EVACUATE."
Toff blinked. "What the hell is that?"
Venice stared at the screen that had activated above them. There was something moving on it.