The fight for the gun was a blur of sweat and straining muscle, then the concrete floor of the holding cell simply vanished beneath him.
Nathan Carver was not falling so much as being swallowed by a lurching wrongness. The impact slammed the air from his lungs. He hit tile, a shock of cold so clean it felt alien against his skin. His momentum carried him backward, his head cracking against a metal shelf. His grip went slack. The service pistol flew from his hand.
Aw fuck!. He saw it skitter across the polished floor, stopping inches from the other man's shoe.
"Don't," Nathan rasped, scrambling on the slick surface.
Too late. The suspect, Ethan, moved with a terrifying economy. He did not scramble for the gun; he flowed to it, rising to one knee with the weapon already an extension of his arm. His eyes were calm, his aim steady. "Stay put."
Nathan froze, his hands rising instinctively. A stupid, placating gesture. "Look, you're making a mistake," he said, the words spilling out, desperate. "Don't make this worse. Just give me the gun."
Ethan did not reply. His gaze swept past Nathan, scanning, calculating. It was only then, staring down the barrel of his own gun, that the background resolved itself. The cinderblock walls of the station were gone. They were in some kind of store, surrounded by long, mostly empty aisles. Crushed boxes and torn wrappers littered the floor like confetti after a dead party. He looked up. The ceiling soared into darkness, impossibly high. Warehouse? No. The storefronts, the tiled expanse… a mall. An abandoned one.
He turned back to Ethan, the absurdity of it hitting him. "What the hell just happened?"
"You came through," the man said, his voice exhausted, but amused.
Nathan stared. "Came through what?"
Ethan just looked at him, a dismissiveness that made Nathan feel like he had asked a child's question. He stood, his movements tight and practiced, the kind of efficiency drilled in by hard experience. He kept the pistol ready, angled toward the darkness down the aisle. Then he went rigid.
Nathan heard it too. A faint dragging sound from the next aisle over. A soft, rhythmic scrape on the tile.
A shape shuffled into the dim light at the end of the row. A woman, maybe, her long hair matted with filth. Her clothes were soaked in streaks of brown and a darker stain that made Nathan's stomach clench. Each step was a loose, unsteady shuffle, as if her joints were coming apart. She bumped into a shelf, bounced off without seeming to notice, and kept coming.
"Jesus Christ," Nathan breathed.
The smell hit him then. Not rot, not decay, but something worse. The wet, sickly-sweet stench of a deep infection. Ethan's hand flashed up, a sharp, silent command. Nathan's mouth clicked shut. His heart hammered against his ribs. The woman stumbled on, her jaw working without a sound, her eyes fixed on nothing. She dropped to one knee, her hands brushing over the floor as if searching for a lost coin, before disappearing behind a rack of shelves.
Nathan's mind raced, grasping for any rational explanation. "What is this? A dream? Some kind of VR, did they drug us?"
Ethan shook his head slowly. The shift in his posture, the chilling lack of confusion, was more terrifying than the woman. This was not a shock to him. This was a homecoming. "It's real," he said. "Just not our…real."
He reached over and grabbed a metal candy rack, laying it down carefully into the aisle, obviously trying to minimize any noise in the cavernous space. A flimsy barricade. He turned back to Nathan. The look on his face was weary, but not without some sort of joy. Nathan boggled at this. The man was actually excited. "Get up. Stay behind me. And don't talk."
Nathan's jaw tightened. Take orders from him? From a perp? Every instinct, every year on the force, screamed no. Then the scraping sound came again, closer this time, followed by another, and the instinct to survive screamed louder.
He got up.
They moved through the dead store, Ethan in front. His movements were deliberate, a man not exploring but patrolling familiar, hostile territory. He kept the pistol tight to his chest, his eyes methodically scanning the intersecting aisles for signs only he could read.
Nathan followed, his own hand aching with the useless urge to act. To grab the gun, to call for a backup that did not exist. But every time a half-formed plan flickered in his mind, Ethan's head would pivot just enough to acknowledge him. A silent checkmate. He was being watched.
Stepping over the shattered glass of the front doors brought them into the main concourse. The air here was colder, with a dead stillness that felt fundamentally wrong. Before them, the mall opened into a wide, three-story canyon of decay. Grime-caked skylights shed a weak, gray light on the scene below.
Ethan moved to the railing at the edge of the second floor. He stopped, leaned over, and a soft gasp escaped him. It was a tiny sound, barely there, but it was thick with a dreadful sort of recognition.
Drawn by the change, Nathan stepped to the railing and looked down.
His breath caught. At first, he saw one figure shuffling across the cracked tile of the main floor. Then his eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he saw another, and another. They were not a group. They were a tide. Dozens of them, all moving with the same slow, broken purpose between dead fountains and empty kiosks.
The sight triggered a frantic checklist in his cop's brain. Riot victims? No, too quiet. A new designer drug? Possible, but the coordinated lack of coordination felt wrong. A mass psychotic event? He tried to lock onto the idea, but it would not hold. The way they moved, the way they simply were, fit no category he had ever known. Each one was layered in filth, their clothes stained with patches of brown, black, and red. He saw a man with half his shirt ripped away, his chest a canvas of dark, crusted rot. But it felt. . . .familiar?
Then the smell rose to meet him, not as a scent but as a physical wave. It was a thick, saturated poison of spoiled meat and chemical decay that climbed up his throat and made his eyes burn. Nathan gagged, turning his head away, fighting the bile that rose with it.
Ethan had not moved. He just watched the floor below. "What the hell are they?" Nathan whispered.
Ethan answered without looking at him. "I guess that depends on where we are."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one that matters." Ethan finally turned to him, and for a second, Nathan saw a flicker of something anticipatory in his eyes.
They stood in silence, the only sound the distant, collective scuff of feet on tile.
"You said I came through," Nathan said, his voice tight with the need for a single, solid fact. "Through what?"
Ethan's gaze returned to the horde below. "A door, I think. A passage between our world and… this."
"That's insane."
"Look around you," Ethan said, his voice low. "Is it? We're here, aren't we?"
Nathan swallowed against the taste in his mouth and looked down again. One of the figures had stopped. It stood motionless for a moment before its head tilted, unnaturally, upward. Its face was slack, but its nose twitched like a dog catching a scent on the wind.
An involuntary shudder went through Nathan. He took a step back from the railing. "Can they see us?"
"I don't know," Ethan said. "The rules are never the same. They change depending on the story."
Nathan stared at him. "The story? What story—"
A loud thump from deep within the mall cut him off, followed by a hollow, metallic rattle.
Instantly, every head below snapped in the direction of the sound. The movement was jerky, a field of puppets pulled by a single string. They all faced the same point in the darkness. Listening.
Then, as one, they began to walk. Not toward Ethan and Nathan. Toward whatever had made that noise.
Ethan was already stepping back from the railing, his focus absolute. He ejected the pistol's magazine, checked it with a glance, and slid it back home with a clean, practiced click.
Nathan fell into step beside him, his boots scraping softly on the tile. The sound seemed loud in the relative quiet, a counterpoint to the persistent, dragging murmur of the horde somewhere behind them. They passed the hollowed-out shell of a boutique, its mannequins scattered in poses of plastic agony. Everything of value had been stripped long ago.
"This place," Nathan said, his voice a low rasp. "It's been like this for a while."
"Probably," Ethan replied.
At a junction, they found a shattered mall directory. The plastic housing was cracked, the map itself mostly a singed ruin. Ethan leaned in close, his finger tracing a path he could barely see through the damage. "Here," he muttered, pointing to a just visible icon for a service corridor. "Back halls. Less open ground."
He looked toward a heavy, unmarked door nearby. Nathan glanced from the door back to the concourse, a fresh wave of dread washing over him. "Will they follow us in there?"
The unspoken answer hung in the stale air: If they hear us.
Ethan shouldered the fire door open, revealing a gulf of concrete darkness. The air that breathed out was cold and smelled of dust and damp. The sound of shuffling feet faded, replaced by the door groaning shut behind them. Its latch caught with a heavy, final thump that echoed down the hall.
They were plunged into near-total silence.
"You're not scared," Nathan stated, though it felt like a question.
Ethan gave a short, sharp huff of air that was not quite a laugh. "Don't be stupid. I've been wanting to shit myself for a while now." He adjusted his grip on the pistol, a small, tense movement in the gloom. "But compared to the day I just had? This is kind of a relief."
He turned to face Nathan, and though he was mostly a silhouette, Nathan could feel the weight of his gaze. "That stuff out there." he said, his voice dropping to a low, grim whisper, "That's easy."
He turned and pushed deeper into the corridor, his footsteps a steady, rhythmic beat in the oppressive dark. Left with no other choice, Nathan followed him.