The fire that night was low, a bed of pulsating coals that painted their faces in shifting shades of red and black. The easy camaraderie of the previous evening was gone, replaced by the silent, shared understanding of the hunt to come in Vietnam. The Behemoth's endless, rhythmic strides were the only sound.
Into this quiet, Wolfen spoke.
"Remember," he said, his voice a low rumble that seemed to sync with the creature's vibrations, "I said I'd tell you guys a story. Before we hit that lab."
A hush fell. Leo, who had been cleaning a piece of gear, stilled his hands. Maya's eyes, reflected in the fire, grew wide and fixed. Jordan's analytical gaze sharpened, ready to process data. Derek leaned forward, and Eva felt a cold knot form in her stomach.
"Yeah," Derek said softly. "We remember."
"I'll tell you," Wolfen continued, staring into the coals as if seeing another fire entirely. "But at your own risk. Don't blame me if you have trouble sleeping."
"Oh, come on," Leo said, but the bravado was thin. "We're not kids. We've seen things."
Wolfen's lips twitched, but it wasn't a smile. It was the grimace of a man about to open a long-sealed tomb. "Well, okay then."
He took a slow breath, and when he spoke again, his voice changed. It lost its ancient, bored timbre. It became younger, flatter, haunted. The voice of the boy he'd been.
"I was seventeen when all this started. Fast forward two years. I'm traveling alone. Looking for my sister."
He used a name, then. A real one. It was a soft, human sound that seemed alien coming from him. It hung in the air, a ghost they'd never known.
"I saw three camps. Completely destroyed. Not burned. Not overrun in a fight. Just… unmade. Tents ripped apart, supplies scattered, but no bodies. No blood, even. It was… clean. Wrong."
He poked the fire, sending up a shower of sparks that died quickly in the mist.
"I was moving on, wanting to be anywhere else, when I heard screaming. It sounded like a little girl. High, piercing, pure terror. Normally… I avoided those kinds of things. Sounds are bait. But that day… I don't know why. I went."
He fell silent for a long moment, the memory playing out behind his eyes. No one dared to breathe.
"I came to a clearing. The screaming had stopped. It was dead quiet. I looked around. Saw no one. Then… I saw by a big pine tree."
His gaze lifted from the fire, looking at a point in the dark beyond their shelter, as if he could still see it.
"A seven-foot-tall dog. Standing on its hind legs. Like a man. Its fur was matted and dark. In its hands… it was holding a little girl. Couldn't have been more than seven. She was dead. And her head… was empty."
A soft, choked sound came from Maya. Derek had gone perfectly still.
"The dog-thing… it had eaten it. Her head was just… gone. And then… it turned and looked at me."
Wolfen's voice dropped to a whisper, forcing them to lean in. The fire seemed to dim.
"And it smiled. With a mouth that wasn't built for it. Its lips pulled back over too many teeth, and it… it talked. Its voice was wet, gurgling, like it was trying to copy a sound it didn't understand. It said, 'Help me. Help me. Help me.'"
Around the fire, faces were now masks of dawning horror. Leo's jaw was clenched so tight a muscle twitched in his cheek. Jordan's eyes were wide, his logic failing to process the perversion of the image.
"I felt… uneasy," Wolfen said, the understatement hanging in the air, colder than the void. "Then, I heard a rustle behind me. I started to turn…"
He mimed a slow turn of his head.
"THWACK."
The sound he made was sharp, final. Everyone flinched.
"Something hit me on the head. Hard. Not enough to kill. Just enough to drop me. I was out."
He looked back at the fire, his youthful tone dissolving back into his ancient, weary one. "I woke up in a pile of dead bodies. Not human bodies. Deer, raccoons, a bear… a compost heap of forest things. And those dog-things were there. A lot of them. Just… standing in a circle around the pile, watching me. Smiling. And in the middle of them… smaller ones. Cubs. But their faces… their faces looked like sad, confused human children."
Eva felt her own blood run cold. She saw Derek's hand creep unconsciously to his own temple.
"I saw my machete. Lying in the dirt, a few feet away. They'd just… left it there. Like it was part of the game." His voice became utterly devoid of emotion, a recitation of grim fact. "I grabbed it. And I massacred them all. The big ones. The smiling ones. They didn't fight much. They just kept trying to say 'help' as I cut them down. And then… I saw the cubs. The ones with the human eyes. They were whimpering. Huddling together."
He looked up, meeting each of their gazes in turn, his golden eyes reflecting the hellfire of his memory.
"I killed them too. Even the cubs. Because whatever they were… they weren't right. They were a wrong thing that needed to be unmade."
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the crackle of a single ember. The story wasn't just scary; it was a violation of nature, a peek into a layer of the apocalypse that was purely, simply evil.
"I left," he finished, his voice a dry whisper. "Covered in blood that wasn't mine. And I never heard a crying child in the woods again without hearing that smile first."
He leaned back, the story told. The firelight danced on faces that were pale, sick, and forever changed. He had warned them. They had insisted. And now they all sat in the heavy, suffocating dark, the image of smiling dogs and headless girls seared into their minds, a new kind of nightmare to fuel their journey. Wolfen had given them a story, all right. A weapon of memory, sharper than any Umbralite blade.