Page 15 of Shadow (Marinah and the Apocalypse #1)

Marinah

K ing said he had hellhounds, and as much as I wanted to doubt him, there was no reason to. The very idea sent a shiver through me. Hellhounds were relentless, killing with single-minded precision, and they were almost impossible to destroy. They would break off parts of their bodies without hesitation and slip through barriers like fences, gates, even prison cells, where they massacred those inside by the tens of thousands.

The Federation never succeeded in capturing one alive, let alone keeping it contained. Every attempt ended in bloodshed. Whenever humans tried, humans died.

Six months before the war’s end, though I should probably have called it the first war since the hounds were returning, one of them breached the underground compound where I worked. It killed twenty-three people. Half of them were heavily armed.

Three of my co-workers and I managed to squeeze into a reinforced steel closet and slam the door shut just as the hellhound was about to tear us apart. Inches separated us from certain death. It battered the door until our rescuers came. I’ve had nightmares about that moment ever since.

And now King said he could take me to see a hellhound.

Before the war, my life was normal. Busy. I went to school, hung out with friends, and dreamed about my future. Thinking about my friends tightened my chest. Hailey, Brittney, Corey, and Kaitlin didn’t make it.

I never saw what happened to them, but I knew they were gone. For years, I clung to hope. Maybe they’d made it to one of the safety zones, maybe I’d see them again. But they never came. Eventually, reality crushed that fragile hope into silence.

I estimated that fewer than a million humans survived after five years. I wished I was wrong, but the analysts I worked with agreed with me. Having my father as long as I did was a miracle. The people who survived lost everyone they loved.

Brian, a co-worker, told me once that the only way to stay sane was to stop thinking about the people who died. He said it with a hollow, empty look in his eyes.

He died the day the hellhound broke into the compound. I still heard his screams at night when I closed my eyes.

And now, King wanted me to face one of those creatures again.

No, I didn’t want to see something that killed so many people I cared about. Just knowing there was a hellhound here was enough to terrify me, and this time, the shivers running across my skin had nothing to do with King.

“Follow me,” he said, rising from his seat with that commanding tone I resented way too much.

The fresh food might have bolstered me physically, but seeing hellhounds wasn’t going to do anything for my mental stability. If the Federation had told me in advance that this was part of the plan, I probably would have ended things.

Suicide had become a grim reality for many of us. Nobody wanted to face death at the claws of those creatures, least of all me. They haunted every nightmare I’d had since the war began.

King reached the door and paused, glancing back when he realized I hadn’t moved. “Come,” he snapped, his patience clearly wearing thin.

I sucked in a shaky breath and forced my feet to move, following him like a lamb to the slaughter. I was in a compound full of Shadow Warriors, I reminded myself as I shuffled forward, trying not to trip over my feet. The last thing I needed was for the Neanderthal in front of me to pick me up like a sack of flour.

I increased my pace, skipping a step or two to catch up. The only bright side was I didn’t stumble. Maybe that cursed half-ball really was working miracles.

King strode through a maze of hallways, taking left and right turns in quick succession. Everything looked the same, white walls, wooden doors, and Spanish-tiled floors stretching endlessly. Within minutes, I was hopelessly lost.

He didn’t bother looking back, probably because he could hear every hurried step I took. My father once told me, during one of his rare talks about Shadow Warriors, that their eyesight and hearing were ten times sharper than a human’s.

King knew I was following. I had no doubt about that.

I never fully understood my father’s admiration for the Shadow Warriors. He saw beyond their ability to help us kill hellhounds and seemed to have a deeper connection to them, one I could never quite grasp. He was adamant that I never repeat anything he told me about them. He understood the fragile trust between humans and the Warriors and believed it would only deteriorate once the war was over.

My father respected the Shadow Warriors, even their animal forms. I asked him questions, but he rarely answered. Yet sometimes, it felt like he wanted to. There were moments when he seemed unsettled, and I tried to coax the truth out of him. Each time, he told me the same thing: for my safety, he couldn’t share more.

King led me downstairs, and I recognized the pool area as we passed it. We kept going deeper into the compound. At the end of another long hallway, two guards were stationed in front of a door unlike anything else I’d seen over the past week. It was made of heavy metal, with a thick bar secured across the front.

Without acknowledging the guards, King pressed a button beside the door. A crackling sound came from the small intercom.

“Coming in,” he said curtly, lifting the large bar and handing it to one of the guards.

I glanced at the guard, then back at King, who opened the door and stepped through without hesitation.

“Will you lock us inside once we enter?” I asked the unsmiling Warrior holding the metal bar.

He didn’t even glance at me.

Before I could press further, King grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. I stumbled, barely catching myself before I fell.

The heavy door slammed behind us, and the resounding thud of the bar being replaced sent a jolt of fear through me. My terror was bone deep. My first instinct was to run, but there was nowhere to go. Instead, I closed my eyes, trying to steady myself against the rising tide of panic.

King’s voice was unexpectedly reassuring. “They can’t hurt you. We have security measures in place,” he said.

I forced my eyes open, glancing at him. His piercing blue eyes were locked on me. He appeared calm. Even though fear was crawling through my veins, I remembered his warning about eye contact and quickly let my gaze drift around the room instead.

If my guess about the metal was correct, the walls were reinforced steel. The floor appeared to be the same. The room was built for containment.

A sharp, angry zap of electricity snapped through the air, and my head whipped around toward the source. It took me a moment to process what I was seeing: two hellhounds suspended from the ceiling by wire cables attached to their bodies.

One of them shifted slightly, and the zapping sound filled the room again before silence fell.

The creature I stared at was hideous. Its grotesque form reminded me why these monsters haunted my nightmares. They didn’t just kill my co-workers. They also killed my mother. And my father.

King strode forward, nodding to one of the guards stationed inside. The guard immediately lowered his gaze, but not before shooting me a sharp, unhappy glance.

King’s voice pulled my focus to him. “We used neodymium super magnets charged with electricity to keep them immobilized. They can’t move more than a few inches. What’s interesting is that they seem to understand this. Once they realized escape was impossible, they entered a kind of coma-like state.”

I took a deep breath and forced myself to reexamine the source of my nightmares.

Their flesh was a mottled, dark gray, stretched over twisted muscles that bent in unnatural directions. Their arms and legs were malformed, their movements jerky and alien. A line of spikes ran up their spines, ending in needle-like points. Patches of short, dark hair covered most of their bodies, though not enough to mask the raw sinew beneath. At the end of each limb, long, deadly claws extended.

I frowned at the absence of visible genitalia. Either they were female, neutered, or they were never equipped with such features in the first place. The thought sent another shiver down my spine.

These creatures weren’t just nightmares. They were living, breathing horrors.

Why was he showing me this? It felt wrong. These creatures shouldn’t have been here. They should have been destroyed.

It would be at the top of my report to the Federation when I got back home.

If I got back.

King had somehow managed to capture these things and study them. Even though every fiber of my being wanted to reject what I was seeing, I had to pull myself together. If I was going to survive this terrifying adventure, I would learn everything I could about them.

Taking a shaky breath, I stepped closer, almost hypnotized. Strangely, the raw terror gripping me began to subside.

We called them “hounds” because they ran on all fours, but that was where the resemblance to anything canine ended. Their jaws were massive, their teeth designed for ripping and shredding. The jaws were powerful enough to pulverize bone, wood, and even concrete.

The only thing that had kept us safe was the steel-reinforced walls and floors of our compounds. With enough of them, though, they could break through even that. It usually gave us a small window to escape. If we were lucky.

The attack that killed my co-workers was different. To this day, we had no idea how the hellhound breached the compound.

I inched closer to the nearest one, my curiosity outweighing my fear. One black, glossy eye swiveled in its socket to follow my movement.

Yeah, that wasn’t unsettling at all.

My chills developed into goosebumps. It was studying me.

“Not too close,” King said quietly, his tone sharp enough to stop me mid-step. “Bring him upright,” he commanded one of the Shadow Warriors.

A motor hummed to life, and the hellhound in front of me shifted. The magnetic restraints crackled as the creature was slowly moved from its four-legged position to an upright, two-legged stance.

It was bizarre. The change in posture altered its entire body structure.

My gaze flickered over its frame. Its neck was shorter than that of a dog, its thick torso blending into shoulders that seemed misplaced. The arms jutted out at awkward angles, not tucking beneath or in front like a canine’s would.

My brain struggled to process what I was seeing.

And then King spoke, bringing my fragile grip on reality crashing down.

“It’s human,” King said, his voice low. “Not a hound at all.”

The words hit me like a thunderclap, jolting my brain into action. My eyes traced the creature’s grotesque form again, noticing details I had been too shocked to process before. The short neck, the arms that extended outward instead of tucking beneath, the straight, elongated legs. The way its neck met the spine and flowed downward in a sickeningly fluid line. The pelvis rotated unnaturally.

My gaze drifted back to its head. The skull wasn’t human. It was elongated, stretched to accommodate the impossibly large teeth crammed into its mouth.

A twisted thought wormed its way into my mind, and before I could stop myself, I said it aloud. “An alien, like Shadow Warriors, or a dog crossed with a human.”

The words tasted vile on my tongue, and even thinking it felt like too much. Voicing it was almost unbearable.

“No,” King replied, his tone grim. “But we had the same thoughts. This is a man-made genetic monster.”

“Man-made?” I echoed, disbelief coloring my voice as my eyes remained fixed on the thing in front of me.

“We don't necessarily believe it happened intentionally,” he explained. “The highest chemical concentration we’ve found in their bodies is formaldehyde.”

“That makes no sense.” I took a cautious step closer, staring into the creature’s cold, unblinking eyes.

“Genetically modified formaldehyde,” King said from behind me.

I blinked, trying to connect the dots. “Your point?”

“A company within the U.S. combined genetically modified proteins with formaldehyde and got it approved by the FDA,” he said. “Paraformaldehyde, used in embalming fluid, was cheap to produce, about $10 for 500ml, and sold for $50. But genetic modification turned 500ml into 50 times that volume.”

I turned slowly to face him, my mind spinning. His gaze locked onto mine, burning with intensity, and this time, I didn't look away.

“You’re saying this,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder at the monstrosity, “is a man-made creation.”

“It’s not just man-made,” he said, his voice quieter now but no less chilling. “It started as human .”

My stomach churned. My mind refused to grasp the full weight of his words.

No. It couldn’t be true.

This was impossible.

Or at least, it should have been.

“What we were facing isn’t a hound at all, though we still called them that,” King continued. “It’s a reanimated human quadruped with dead flesh mutated into a killing machine with four-inch razor claws, jaws ten times stronger than a Rottweiler’s, and a toxic secretion from its teeth and claws that kills everything it connects with.”

King’s words hit me like a brick wall, jumbling in my brain as I tried to process the enormity of what he was saying. But one thought rose above the chaos and wouldn’t let go.

“Did my father know?”

“He died before we confirmed what they were,” King said, his gaze shifting to the monstrosity behind me. “But there were things he told Greystone that made us believe he might have been aware of what had happened.”

My heart sank. My father couldn’t have known. Despite his military background, he was a peaceful man. He would have blasted the truth from the tallest building.

Then another thought slammed into me. “If there’s any chance my father knew, that means the Federation knows too?”

King’s sharp blue eyes snapped back to mine. “We believe they’ve known since the first wave.”

The air left my lungs in a painful rush. I tried to breathe, but my chest refused to expand. The walls felt like they were closing in, and the thing behind me felt closer than ever.

No. It couldn’t be true. There was no way my government could have been responsible for something like this.

Except… my dizziness increased.

This made perfect sense.

Pharmaceutical companies and food manufacturers had always tried finding cheaper ways to poison us. The government was complicit. Farmers were accused of being in on it too. I remembered the protests at UC Berkeley. And then there was President Barnes. He wasn’t just a politician; he was a synthetic biologist and agricultural scientist.

The monstrous pieces of the puzzle began sliding into place, and the picture they formed was horrifying.

“Did your people, the farmers, know what was happening?” I asked King, forcing the words out while desperately trying to hide my growing panic.

“I don’t believe so,” King replied. “Commercial farming wasn’t our thing. Most of our people shifted to organic farms when GMOs, pesticides, and chemicals became the norm.”

He stepped closer, resting a firm hand on my upper arm. “Are you okay?”

Spots danced in front of my eyes, and the room began to spin faster. I swayed, my knees buckling, and King caught me before I hit the floor.

“I need to get out of here,” I managed to choke out, my voice strangled as I fought for air.

Without hesitation, King swept me into his arms. My eyes went wide as one of his men moved quickly to press the intercom. A metallic clank sounded as the door was unbarred.

I tilted my head just enough to glance back at the hellhounds.

One of them was watching me.

Its unblinking, inky-black eyes followed every movement, and for a fleeting moment, a chilling thought crossed my mind.

It understood.

Somehow, it understood.

There was intelligence lurking in those dark, monstrous eyes. An intelligence that shouldn’t have been there.