The recorder clicked on with a dry static hiss."Day 274," Dr. Mirek Keln said, his voice paper-thin. "Subject Five did not survive the marrow transfer. Again. The nerves liquefied before I even connected the final syringe."
A pause. Breathing. Scratching of pen on cloth.
"Something's changing in them. Not just decay. Not mutation. It's… reorganization. Like whatever's in their blood is building toward something. Something smarter."
He coughed, then snapped the recorder off.
The lab stank of ammonia and wet rust. Not a sterile cleanroom anymore, but a place of wrongness. Metal counters were flaked with brown corrosion. The emergency lights pulsed red, always red now—like a heartbeat. The generator whined above, failing.
And below, behind the reinforced glass of Containment Room B, Subject Five was moving again.
Mirek hadn't fed it in four days.
It should not be moving.
Its face—what was left—pressed against the window. The skull had split down the center like a deseeded fruit, revealing something that blinked and twitched beneath. It no longer had teeth. It had spines. And they clicked when it breathed.
He turned away from the window, stomach twisting. The walls here were whispering again—he'd written it off as pipe stress, but no, the voices had started calling him by name.
They knew.
Mirek staggered toward the autopsy table. The body there was fresh—still steaming. A former assistant. Her ID tag, melted into her clavicle, still read "Jen." Her mouth hung open in a rictus of horror, but there were no vocal cords left to scream with. They had been unspooled, as if something had reached down her throat and unraveled her like yarn.
He hadn't done it.
He didn't think he had done it.
Still, his gloves were sticky with blood, and a loop of intestine had somehow wound itself around his ankle like it was holding him back.
A whisper again. Closer this time.
Mirek.
He turned.
Nothing.
No—something. The vents.
He stepped closer to the grated duct overhead, breath fogging in the stale cold air. Black fluid began to drip from the slats. Not water. Something thicker. Oily. With flecks of tissue in it.
A drop landed on his cheek. It was warm. It smelled like meat and chemicals and something old—older than language. He reached up, wiped it away.
His skin peeled off with it.
He stumbled back, screaming. Beneath the layer of skin, there was no blood, no sinew. Only small, twitching mouths—hundreds of them, gumming softly, suckling like blind larvae. They opened in silent hunger.
"Mirek," said a voice from inside his chest.
No—not from inside his chest. From inside the recorder. It was still running.
He hadn't turned it off.
He hadn't hit record.
He stepped closer.
The voice on the recorder wasn't his.
It was Jen's.
"They're in the marrow," she whispered. "We were never meant to see it. We weren't supposed to open the bones. You thought the blood was the secret, Mirek—but it's deeper. It's always been deeper."
Something skittered behind him. Fast. Wet.
He turned just in time to see Subject Five pressed against the containment glass. But the glass was gone now. Not shattered. Melted. Warped like plastic under a blowtorch.
Five stepped through.
Not walked—stepped. Like a man. Like it remembered. Its limbs were longer now. No longer experimental. Evolved.
"Jen," Mirek whimpered.
The voice from the recorder answered."I'm not Jen."
The lights went out.
And the feeding began.