There was no end ahead. Just as there was no beginning behind. The floorboards creaked under his boots, sounding as though he were stepping on the ribs of something still alive. The wallpaper was a sickly, faded yellow, peeling away from the corners like rotting skin. Although the corridor felt endless, it disturbingly resembled an ordinary house hallway—and that suffocating familiarity made it even more terrifying.
Sparse, yellow bulbs hung from the ceiling at long intervals, casting a weak, anemic light. Right behind every patch of illumination, absolute, breathing darkness waited in ambush.
His footsteps echoed. His eyes drifted to the picture frames lining the walls.
Dozens of family photographs hung in the gloom: a father, a mother, a small child, and a baby in the mother’s arms. A perfect family of four. But where their faces should have been… there was nothing. The flesh had been violently smeared sideways, as if erased by a brutal, invisible brushstroke. Eyes and mouths melted into each other, forming silent, agonized vortices. They were screaming without sound.
A cold cramp twisted in Rust’s stomach. He quickened his pace.
The deeper he went, the narrower the corridor became. The smell of dampness was replaced by the sharp, throat-burning stench of raw rust. He started jogging. With every step, reality itself warped violently. The photographs on the walls melted downward like wax, the wooden frames splintering.
Then, a deafening sound exploded.
CRASH!
The violent impact of a car accident. The tortured shriek of bending steel and the shattering of glass slammed against the walls of his mind.
Rust’s vision went black.
When it returned, he was no longer running. He stood motionless. The endless corridor was gone. He was facing a solid, dead-end wall. Swallowing hard, he turned around.
They were there. The three doors.
They were no longer as he had first seen them; this time they had emerged from the shadows, standing before him in their full, horrifying reality.
The left door was cast from cold, heavy metal, riddled with bullet holes, deep dents, and shrapnel scars. The heavy stench of gunpowder and dried blood seeped from its surface.
The middle door was like a mirage. Perfect white wood, adorned with elegant golden engravings that gleamed even in the dim light. Not a speck of dust, not a single scratch marred its surface. It stood there with an untouchable, immaculate grace.
And the right door… black, rotting wood. Thick, tar-like blood oozed from its cracks and beneath its frame, dripping onto the floor with a sickening plip… plip… rhythm. The edges of the wood were partially devoured by a wet, pulsing black tissue—tissue that looked exactly like the skin of the monsters he had strangled in the dark.
This time, Rust didn’t hesitate. His instincts violently pushed him toward that perfection, that cleanliness. He lunged for the white door in the middle. He grabbed the golden brass handle. It was ice-cold, like the hand of a frozen corpse. He pushed down hard.
Locked.
“Open,” he growled. He kicked the door. The wood rattled but didn’t budge. He took a step back and slammed his shoulder into it with all his superhuman strength.
Nothing. Not even a scratch. Instead, the pristine white surface trembled, instantly rejecting his dirty touch.
Just as he pulled back to strike again, a whisper echoed—not from outside, but directly from between his own teeth:
“Not yet…”
The moment the voice spoke, the bullet-riddled metal door and the pristine white door melted away like ink drops in water, dissolving into the darkness.
Only one choice remained. The black wooden door.
It was slightly ajar. Thick black blood seeped from the gap, dripping onto the floor with that disgusting, inviting rhythm.
Rust wanted to take a step toward it, but his body suddenly grew incredibly heavy. It felt as though an invisible demon, weighing tons, had sat on his chest, mercilessly crushing the air out of his lungs. His body went numb. The part of his mind that still wanted to stay clean screamed, trying to pull him back, to stop him from crossing that threshold.
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But that sickening pull, the call of the pulsing tissue, dragged him inward. Forcing every ounce of his willpower, Rust reached out with a violently trembling hand and pushed the dark door open.
And he fell into the void.
He was falling through absolute nowhere. As the seconds passed in the pitch-black descent, whispers began to surround him. First a few, then dozens, then thousands. None of the words were decipherable—it was the wet, disgusting frequency of a colossal, diseased hive.
The louder the voices grew, the more violently Rust’s brain throbbed against his skull. Red masses of flesh. Stretching black veins. Interlocking teeth… Everything suddenly turned blood-red.
Rust opened his eyes, but this was no longer the void. It wasn’t even his own body.
He was crawling on the ground. His vision was covered by a thin, wet, pulsing red membrane. A savage, wet growl that didn’t belong to him escaped his throat. His gaze involuntarily lifted. On the horizon, the first rays of sunlight seeped through the ruined buildings. The head of the body he occupied slowly turned to the right.
Standing before him was a massive hypermarket.
The body, despite all of Rust’s mental resistance, began crawling toward the dark entrance. Inside… it was alive. A colossal mass of flesh had swallowed the walls and shelves, transforming the ceiling into a pulsing, rotten incubator. The air was thick, suffocating, yet disturbingly warm. From the depths of that grotesque biomass came thousands of wet, baby-like whimpers.
The moment he approached the mass, a saw-like, ear-splitting scream erupted from within.
Everything turned black again.
Rust was falling once more. The whispers had become a deafening roar. And then, the end came.
SPLAAT!
He crashed into a thick, tar-like black pool at the bottom of the darkness. He couldn’t move. The heavy, sticky black liquid poured into his mouth and nose. His lungs burned. He was sinking, unable to struggle, drowning inside his own darkness, inside the cursed thing flowing through his own veins. His vision went completely black…
“HAAAAH!”
Rust gasped violently, like a drowning man breaking the surface, and his eyes flew open.
He sat up with a jolt. His hands instinctively flew to his throat. His chest heaved like a bellows. His mind screamed that he was drenched in sweat, but when his hands touched his face, his skin was terrifyingly dry and cold. He wasn’t crawling. He wasn’t in the tar pool.
He was in the open air, on the roof of the half-finished skyscraper. The safe spot where he had camped last night after killing the Alpha.
Staggering, he stood up. His legs still trembled from the aftershock of the dream. He leaned his shoulder against a thick, unfinished concrete pillar. The morning sun was slowly rising between the crumbling skyscrapers, casting its pale orange light onto the gray ash.
Rust took a deep, shuddering breath. As his heartbeat gradually returned to its machine-like, steady rhythm, his mind still echoed with the horror of that red vision, the market, and the suffocating tar.
To clear his mind, he took his canteen from his bag and splashed water on his face. The cold shock helped a little. His eyes drifted to his shoulder beneath the torn vest. The deep, deadly claw marks left by the Alpha had completely closed, leaving only smooth, pale skin. The bandages he had wrapped around the wound last night had loosened and fallen off on their own, the wound having shrunk and healed within hours. The black, tar-like blood had dried, disappearing among the dust and heavy shadows.
Rust took a deep, emotionless breath. “Yeah,” he thought. “How much longer can I deny that I’m not normal?”
To distract himself, he knelt and unzipped his massive backpack, emptying its contents onto the concrete. Spare black tactical shirts, extra magazines, military canned food, an elegant metal canteen filled with aged wine, first-aid supplies, and a few technological devices whose purpose he couldn’t quite figure out.
But the most unsettling thing was this: every single item—from the metal surface of the cans to the buckles of his tactical vest—bore the exact same cold, perfect logo.
P.A.R.A.D.O.X.
As Rust stared at the items, his mind flooded with questions. What was that dream? Was that grotesque place real? And most importantly… with this bag, these powers, these rapidly healing wounds—what exactly was he?
At that moment, he felt a strange, deep emptiness in his stomach. It wasn’t ordinary hunger. It felt as though a bottomless pit had opened where his stomach should be, demanding to be filled immediately. While rummaging through the gear, a small, silver, vacuum-sealed package caught his eye.
He tore it open. Inside was a dark, hard bar that looked like chocolate. There was no writing on it. Without thinking whether it was poisoned or not, Rust took a bite.
It was crunchy. Strangely, the taste was much better than he expected—a light metallic but intense aroma. The moment he swallowed the piece and it slid down his throat… incredible happened.
The massive void in his stomach closed instantly and completely. An artificial but perfect feeling of fullness spread through his body. A tiny bar had satisfied three days’ worth of human energy needs in seconds.
Rust tossed the rest of the package into his bag. He took off his torn vest and shirt, pulled on a fresh black tactical shirt, sheathed his knife, holstered his gun, and slung the heavy backpack over his shoulders.
He began descending the skeleton of the construction site toward the silent city below.
The streets were soulless and dead. The wind blowing between the buildings created a lonely, suffocating hum as it hit rusted metal and broken glass. There was no sign of life anywhere—only the fine gray ash floating in the air.
He walked through that dead silence for about an hour.
And then, his steps suddenly stopped.
At the end of the wide avenue stood a colossal building. It was the exact same hypermarket he had crawled into in his dream, behind that pulsating red vision.
Rust slowly moved his hand to the gun at his waist. His eyes locked onto the broken panoramic glass doors of the market. Wide, fresh blood trails dragged from the ground, disappearing into the darkness inside.
Without losing his composure, he took a step forward. His heavy military boots crushed the broken glass on the ground with a sharp crunch.
CRUNCH.
And silently, he took his first step into the darkness of that massive market.
Author's Note: What did you think about the dream sequence and the true nature of his blood? Let me know in the comments!
[Spoiler: Artistic Inspirations for Chapter 4]
The Faceless Corridor: Inspired by René Magritte's "The Lovers" and Francis Bacon's terrifying "Screaming Popes".
The Sleep Paralysis: A direct nod to Henry Fuseli’s masterpiece, "The Nightmare".
The Biomass & The Black Door: A tribute to Zdzis?aw Beksiński’s dystopian nightmares and H.R. Giger’s biomechanical body horror.
P.S. Tomorrow (Sunday), Chapter 5 drops and we are stepping completely inside that hypermarket. Be ready, because the real hunt is about to begin.
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