Page 20 of The Bleeding Woods

Jade meanders, against Clara’s pleas but in line with our compromise.

She bargained for ten more minutes of devoted digging and enlisted the help of all our hands.

Joey whimpers by the exit, careful not to touch anything visibly moist. Clara stays nearby, but she’s a bit more eager than I expected her to be.

She’s getting her hands vehemently dirty with ash and encrusted blood.

I make myself useful with a rove over the connective corridors just beyond the emergency exit.

There’s a lot more to this laboratory than meets the eye.

It seems to span endlessly beneath the earth’s crust, erupted from the ground miles away from here.

In my mind’s eye, I see the barbed wire and the skeletal buildings it barred off.

That must have been the entrance disguised as something else, something far more harmless. A cloak in plain sight, a cover.

A succession of narrow twists leads me to a room filled with shattered screens.

The scent of electrical embers lingers strongly in here.

It smells like a lit cigar. If not for all the death and decades between when researchers had roamed here, I’d suspect to find one in the ashtray on the desk.

However, there are only six ancient cigarettes to be found there, beside a crushed water bottle labeled with the initials N.W. and a heat-warped protein-bar wrapper.

My stomach inverts on itself.

This tomb has gone untouched since the massacre that left it like this. No one has been able to access it. No one has dared.

A single monitor remains intact, its glass a sheath of darkness.

My flashlight serves as a weak but worthy guide through the gloom, but in a moment of refraction against the screen, it blinds me.

In the sudden blast of white light, I could have sworn a blade of luminescent red sliced through my vision.

A chill skitters up my spine so tangibly, I’m afraid to glance over my shoulder.

The undamaged monitor crackles. It sounds like rustling leaves and inexplicable laughter married via an electronic hum.

Static floods the blackness, first bloodred, then grayscale.

The pixels clamber over one another, playfully violent in their jumble of chaos.

When they arrange into reluctant order, they present a grainy re-creation of what this sector’s security cameras last collected.

“She just gave the order. Kill them all,” says a scientist with hair as white as his haggard complexion.

His voice is a pathetic rasp amid a sea of shatters and screams. His gaze, full of bursting veins and silver tears, is directed at a wall of embryos, each inanimate within cylinders of glowing green fluid.

His hands are wrapped around his rib cage in a terrible, futile embrace. Rivers of blood pour through them.

“. . . all of them?” One of his assistants, struggling to hold her dislocated arm in place, scuttles forward with a scowl. “We . . . we can’t. If we terminate them all, this was for nothing. Nothing.”

He exhales slowly. “I know.”

Every researcher in the room lets their jaws hang.

Then they gather the last of their strength and hoist flamethrowers into the air.

A fanfare of fire leaves every artificial womb boiling, every underdeveloped embryo liquefied inside.

When the pressure is strong enough, the cylinders burst, sending fireworks of glass into the subterranean sky.

The researchers stare, now sealed inside a smoldering tomb.

“Do you think it heard?” another assistant asks, quivering.

“Oh, my dear . . . it hears everything.”

Footsteps beyond the flames punctuate his point. A low growl follows, then grows. It grows into a thunderous boom of laughter. Cruel, wicked, screeching laughter. Merriment and agony laced into the same sound bite. Pure, hysterical hedonism. Pain. Monstrous pain.

Every rock-solid resolve goes molten. Those still conscious enough to cry allow their tears to roll.

Those with their throats intact whisper prayers to a god out of earshot.

Those with any semblance of sense run to the opposite end of the room, clutching desperately to their final moments, dumb to the futility of it all.

The laughter crescendos. Louder, louder, and louder still.

At last, it is the only audible noise, triumphing over every whimper, plea, and sob.

Over the amber glow of the fire, a deviant sunset, arises a monster.

A tortured and twisted being with a smile like a thousand razors, a mouth of bone alchemized into ebony wood serrated into a mass of gnashing splinters dripping red.

It does not permit any of those present a swift death.

Each one perishes slowly, edging on the threshold between awareness and shock.

There is no escape, no drifting into neural purgatory.

The monster makes certain, absolutely certain, that every ounce of pain is felt.

The white-haired man is the last to be released from his mortal coil.

Gazing into the eyes of the beast, he utters an apology. “I’m sorry, JS-7R. We shouldn’t have—”

JS-7R digs its dagger nails into the crown of the researcher’s skull.

It rips at the corpus callosum, parting left brain from right, and proceeds to the collarbone, leaving his throat a spiderweb of flesh, veins, and arteries.

His body is dropped beside the rest with an inconsequential thud aligned perfectly with a quartet of footsteps beyond the lab’s borders.

Rubber soles on metal stairs, distant, ascending.

JS-7R is too enraptured by its gory masterpiece to pay them mind. This blood would fertilize a garden all on its own. It would take time and patience, but it would grow, as all things do when they are fed.

The screen glitches, then implodes with a surge of uncanny crimson. At the very end of the tape, breathing, ragged from laughter, colors the soundscape. Now that same breathing skims the nape of my neck.