A particular quiet existed underground—a silence not of peace, but of weight. Dirt pressed in from all sides. The cold concrete walls of Logan Walker's shelter didn't echo. They swallowed sound. The flicker of a single solar-powered lantern cast soft shadows on walls covered in inventory lists, blueprints, and taped-up news clippings from the world that used to be.
Logan sat cross-legged in a corner, flipping through a small, dog-eared notebook. His handwriting was meticulous, bordering on obsessive: "Estimated rations remaining: 341 days (solo). Water purifier efficiency is holding at 92%. Thermal readings are stable. No exterior movement detected for 36 hours."
He paused.
A drop of condensation trickled down a steel beam above him, falling onto his wrist. It was cold. Not freezing. But enough to remind him it was October in Ohio. Above him, the world continued—perhaps in ruins, possibly unchanged. He didn't know anymore.
He hadn't seen another person in 71 days.
Logan wasn't a doomsday prophet. He didn't wear camo or fly flags off his roof. He was just a freshman at Columbus University, majoring in mechanical engineering, and obsessed with the end of the world.
Most people played shooters or scrolled TikTok. Logan hoarded PDFs about civil defense, watched documentaries on Chernobyl and Syria, and read obscure blog posts about bunkers built by retired Soviet engineers. He spent summers with his uncle, a Vietnam vet who taught him how to shoot, skin rabbits, and distill water from swamp runoff.
So when the first reports came in—birds attacking livestock, people convulsing on the streets, the CDC issuing vague warnings about a new prion-like agent—Logan didn't panic.
He packed his bag.
And he left.
His shelter wasn't deep. Only twenty feet beneath an abandoned barn about an hour outside the city. But it was layered—three feet of reinforced concrete, scavenged air filters, water tanks that fed off the roof's runoff, even a bicycle rigged to charge batteries manually. It smelled like dust and old metal.
He kept it clean. Sterile.
Everything had its place.
Two rifles hung on a makeshift rack beside the entrance tunnel, each with loaded magazines and a safety on. They were cleaned every Sunday—Logan still observed Sunday cleaning. Food cans were organized alphabetically. First aid kits, like fire extinguishers, were placed at each corner of the room. He even had a section dedicated to printed-out survival forums, all categorized by human, biological, and infrastructure threat type.
The bunker had only one rule: everything must have a purpose.
Including him.
Today marked 100 days since Logan had cut ties with the surface. The radio still worked. He had rewired, re-tuned, bent copper, and made Frankenstein antennae from old bicycle spokes and broken solar lamps.
There were no broadcasts anymore.
Just static.
Sometimes, through the static, a voice would break through—garbled, cracked, like it was being pulled underwater.
"South—base—failed—non-human—"
Logan would scribble it down. Time-stamp it. Plot the direction.
Then he would add it to the wall.
The wall was covered in strings and pins, like something out of a movie. Each pin was color-coded: red for infected sightings, green for clean zones (though most of those were now crossed out), black for unknowns. There were fewer greens every week.
He didn't feel fear. Not exactly.
It was more like observation, like a man might study the cracks in his ceiling before it collapses.
He had been sleeping when it happened. A barely perceptible vibration moved through the floor like a shiver. Logan sat upright, eyes wide, breath held.
He moved silently. He pulled the emergency switch. The bunker dimmed—red LEDs activated instead of the brighter whites. It was night mode. There was less energy, less attention.
He crawled toward the sound.
The vibration again. This time louder. A dull, rhythmic thudding. Distant, but heavy. Not footsteps. Not weather.
Something else.
He pulled out the scope. It wasn't attached to a rifle—just a salvaged scope he used like a periscope. A small hatch near the ceiling let him see a tiny sliver of the surface.
Fog. Movement. Birds scattering.
Then he saw it.
Something massive. Quadrupedal. Covered in pale flesh and twitching muscle. It was sniffing and not walking. Not hunting. Just… sniffing. Its head was bulbous, no eyes, just ridged bone and a snout that dragged across the ground like a bloodhound with a broken nose.
Logan didn't breathe.
It lingered for five minutes.
Then it screamed.
A guttural, wet sound—like rusted metal being torn in half underwater. Logan clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached.
The thing moved on. Slowly. Dragging one leg and bleeding from its back.
He didn't open the hatch again that night.
The next morning, Logan broke protocol.
He opened the surface hatch.
The world smelled wrong. Not just rot, but stale. Like something had sucked all the oxygen out of the trees, the leaves were limp. The grass was gray. Even the sky looked like it was recovering from trauma.
He stepped out, rifle slung across his chest. Eyes sharp. Every movement is calculated. He made it ten feet before finding the first carcass.
It had once been a deer.
Now? Its spine was visible through its back. Legs had mutated—bent backward, ending in clawed hooves. The eyes were gone. Burned out or eaten. Its mouth had too many teeth, like its skull had tried to evolve and failed halfway through.
Logan knelt beside it. Pulled a scalpel from his pouch. He needed samples. He needed answers.
There was something in the blood. Something that steamed even in the cold.
The cells were still alive.
He bagged a chunk of muscle, placed it in a sealed tube, and marked it.
"Sample #34: Mutated Cervine."
He would test it later.
By evening, Logan was back underground.
The meat locker was nearly complete. It was preserved by salt and vacuum sealing. If he rationed correctly, he could last another year.
But that wasn't the point anymore.
Something was changing. The infected weren't mindless. The animals weren't just dying. They were adapting.
Becoming something else.
He needed to adapt, too.
He needed to build.
He needed to ensure that when the surface belonged to monsters, there would be one place left they couldn't take.
Not just a bunker.
A fortress.
...
Outside, the wind howled.
But it didn't carry the sounds of leaves or birds anymore.
Just the low, distant rumble of something breathing wrong.
Something alive.
Something is getting closer.
Logan sat alone at the folding metal table in the center of his bunker, surrounded by maps, field notes, and dissected samples. He adjusted his glasses, the left lens slightly cracked from a fall weeks ago. His eyes flicked between microscope readings and hand-written notes across multiple pages.
The deer's muscle tissue reacted to light.
Not heat—light.
He waved an LED over the slide again. The fibers contracted.
That wasn't normal. That was behavior.
And behavior implied something worse: structure.
He turned to the back corner of the bunker, where a dozen sealed boxes waited. Inside were books, textbooks, pages torn from biology manuals, and evolutionary charts.
He pulled a laminated placard from one of the crates: Prehistoric Mammalian Ancestors.
His mind ran through the implications.
Adaptation didn't mean chaos. It meant design. The longer these creatures lived, the more they seemed to remember what they once were. Not as mutations, but as returns. Reversions.
What if this wasn't evolution at all?
What if it were memory encoded in the blood?
Logan wrote down a single word in his logbook: "Regression."
He stared at it long before adding: "Survival through the ancestral line."
He didn't sleep that night. He worked.
Day 102.
Something broke perimeter protocol.
Logan heard the tripwire snap like a guitar string under tension.
He didn't jump. He stood, pulled the rifle from the wall, and flicked on the periscope camera feed. Static, then a flicker.
Then—movement.
A dog.
No, not a dog anymore. Not with that size. Not with that stance.
Its body was twisted but lean, with elongated limbs. Its fur had fallen off in patches, revealing cracked skin underneath, like baked leather. But what caught Logan's attention was how it moved: not with panic or hunger, but strategy.
It was circling.
He watched it trot between bushes, testing the air, its ears twitching. It was not looking for food, but for a response.
Logan activated the perimeter speakers.
A sudden white noise blared from the solar speakers hidden in the tree line.
The creature reeled, howled—a high-pitched, awful sound—and bolted back into the trees.
He turned off the feed and noted the behavior.
"Subject #19. Canine lineage. Displays coordinated probing tactics. Reacts violently to frequency shock."
He flipped to another page in the notebook and added a new column.
Under it, one word: "Pack?"
If it was probing, it wasn't alone.
The next day, he set traps.
He spent six hours above ground, masked and silent, laying steel jaws, tension lines, and spike pits camouflaged with bark and leaf rot. Every step outside felt heavier now. The sky was always gray, and the birds were always silent. There was no wind, only pressure.
He paused midway through digging.
He was being watched.
Logan turned slowly. Nothing was there.
Still, he felt it. Like static on the skin. Like the world was holding its breath.
He finished laying the trap. Covered it. Stepped back. Wrote down the location in a grease-stained field journal.
By nightfall, he was inside again.
Back in the crawlspace beneath the world.
And still—it felt too quiet.
He loaded his rifle.
Lit only half the lanterns.
And waited.