As they neared the Command Center's outer monitoring station, the usual military discipline had fractured into a frantic, high-pitched scramble. Technicians were shouting over one another, their fingers flying across consoles that were spitting sparks.
"It's not a surge! It's a draw!" one technician yelled, his face pale in the strobe-like light. "Something is siphoning the main line from the surface junction!"
Mira and corporal Halloway watched from outside as the command center rose into tension
"Get the feed from Junction 4!" Alex barked.
The screen in front of them sputtered to life, grainy and washed in the green hue of night vision. At first, no one could make sense of the image. It looked like thick, wet cables wrapped around the external power transformer—until the cables moved.
A limb, segmented and covered in a fine, glistening fuzz, tightened around the high-voltage housing. The creature was massive, its body a nightmare of translucent plating and pulsing internal organs that glowed with a sickly bioluminescence every time it drained power.
"My God," Halloway whispered, her professional mask finally cracking. "It's hugeeee."
"Switch to the wide-angle," Alex commanded, his voice hard and rigid. "Show me the perimeter. Now!"
The technician hit a sequence of keys, and the display shifted. The screen split into a dozen different views of the bunker's exterior—the reinforced concrete dome, the ventilation shafts, and the thick steel blast doors.
Mira felt the air leave her lungs. The "numbness" she had felt earlier was replaced by a cold, paralyzing terror.
The facility wasn't just under attack; it was infested.
Hundreds of them were draped over the bunker like a living, breathing carpet of shadow. They clung to the vertical walls with multi-jointed legs, their bodies overlapping in a grotesque, writhing mass. Some were small, the size of hounds, skittering through the radar dishes; others were gargantuan, like the one at the junction, anchored to the roof. In the moonlight of the world above, their translucent skin made them look like phantoms, shifting in and out of visibility as they pulsed in sync with the bunker's failing power.
The bunker, the last fortress of humanity, looked like a piece of fruit being swarmed by insects.
Seeing the infested bunker, Alex's calm facade finally breaks, his brows creases as he sweeps his hair backwards in utter disbelief, this wasn't a minor situation, it was massive and more deadly than anything he had ever seen in a movie
Mira looked at the monitors, then back toward the inner doors where Alex was. The realization hit her with the force of a physical blow. If this was what the "safe" zone looked like, there was no "out there" left to go back to. The creatures weren't just an army; they were a new ecosystem, a shroud that had fallen over the Earth to stifle it.
The atmosphere in the Command Center was already brittle, but Alex's next move felt like sealing a coffin.
"Deann!" Alex barked, facing his brother, a young corporal. "Get to Sector A. The emergency baffles are going to drop, and the light grid is failing there . Tell them that if the power dies, they stay silent. No crying, no praying, no whispering. If they breathe, they breathe through their teeth. Go!"
Dean disappeared into the gloom of the corridor, his boots echoing against the metal. Alex turned back to the monitors, his face a mask of jagged shadows under the red emergency strobes.
"The creatures are sound-sensitive," he muttered to himself as though it were new information. "They track the vibration of the siphoned power, but they hunt the frequency of heat and noise."
On the monitor for Sector A, Mira saw the crowded hallway of civilians—families huddled on thin cots, children clutching tattered blankets.
Dean entered the frame, his arms raised in a gesture for calm, his mouth moving in a silent command for stillness.
Then, the primary breaker for the North Wing gave way and the lights went out.
The screen displaying Sector A didn't just go dark; it vanished into a void. For a heartbeat, there was a heavy, suffocating silence that transmitted even through the audio feed.
Then, it happened. A sharp, piercing wail—a child's voice, raw with the kind of primal terror that no parent could muffle in time.
"No," Mira whispered, her hand flying to her mouth.
The scream was like a dinner bell for the abyss.
" Damn it damn it " Alex cursed as he clenched his fists in utter frustration and fear for the next action that was to proceed
On the exterior thermal scans, the "carpet of shadow" shifted. The thousands of creatures draped over the bunker's dome didn't just move; they surged. It was a synchronized, fluid rush, a dark tide flowing toward the coordinates of Sector A.
The sound began over the Command Center's speakers: a low, rhythmic scratching that quickly escalated into a frenzied, metallic shrieking. Above Sector A, the sound was deafening—the screech of serrated claws dragging across reinforced steel, the heavy thud-crack of gargantuan bodies throwing themselves against the concrete shell.
Skreeeeee-tchk-tchk-tchk!
The ceiling panels in the Command Center began to thud violently. The shrieks of the creatures were unlike anything Mira had ever heard—high-pitched, melodic, and hungry, sounding like a thousand violins being snapped in half.
Although Alex knew no matter how much scratching those creatures scratched on the bunker, they won't be able to get in because of the hard rigid metals that were used for the building but then, their cover had been somewhat blown and that scratching wasn't going to stop anytime soon which could make the people go tense and into panic, off which he didn't want
Mira collapsed back against a console, her knees hitting the floor. She slammed her palms against her ears, squeezing her eyes shut as the tears carved tracks through the dust on her face. But she couldn't block it out. The sound of the metal groaning above, the frantic scratching of a thousand multi-jointed limbs, and the mental image of those families trapped in the dark below the scratching... it was too much