Chapter 1
“AHHHH!! WHAT THE FUCKING HELLLL!!!!”
Huff... huff... huff... his breath tore ragged from his chest, energy bleeding out of him as quickly as the fear was pouring in.
“Captain... Captain...” his voice, once so full of soldierly conviction, now thinned to a pathetic whimper, calling out into the suffocating dark.
“CHARLIE RUUUNNNN!!! RUN AWAY!!!”
The captain’s voice cracked and split the darkness, desperate, hoarse, “CHARLIE, IT’S RIGHT BEHIND YOU—!!”
But his warning trailed off into nothing, swallowed whole by the black, just as Charlie himself was.
A scream. Then silence. Then a wet, tearing sound that no man should ever have to hear, as the terrible maw residing in that lightless cavern closed around him, and Charlie’s voice—along with whatever remained of Charlie—disappeared.
‘...what is this?! Just... just what IS this?!’
The captain’s mind reeled, thoughts fragmenting apart like shattered glass as he stumbled backward, his flashlight darting rapidly, wildly across the rock, illuminating nothing, illuminating everything, catching only glimpses of something that moved where nothing should move.
‘It was supposed to be a rescue mission... so why... WHY?!’
Rage and terror boiled together inside him, indistinguishable from one another.
‘WHY IS THERE A FUCKING ALIEN KILLING MY MEN?! What did we do... what did we DO to deserve this?!’
The screams of his dying men echoed through the cavern, layering atop one another, a chorus of agony that seemed to seep into the very stone.
“CAP-TAIN... WAIT?!”
One last voice called after him, desperate, pleading, but the soldier dressed in black didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. He ran—ran as though the wind itself had become death, chasing him, breathing down the back of his neck, hungry for him too.
---
The darkness dissolved.
Fluorescent lights flickered to life overhead, buzzing with an electric hum, illuminating rows upon rows of gleaming steel tables cluttered with bubbling beakers, their contents glowing an unnatural, sickly green. Wires snaked across the floor like metallic serpents, connecting to a massive tesla coil that crackled and spat blue lightning into the recycled air.
And there, standing before it all, draped in a stark white labcoat far too large for his small frame, stood Marcus.
“YES... YES!!! IT’S ALIVE!!! IT’S ALIIIIVE!!!”
His wild cackling echoed off the laboratory walls, deranged and delighted, as he gazed upon his greatest creation—a grotesque abomination of stitched flesh and writhing tentacles, chained atop a cold steel slab, its many eyes blinking open one by one, awakening to serve its master.
“Soon... SOON the world shall tremble before my genius! They called me mad, they called me a FOOL, but who’s laughing now?! WHO’S LAUGHING NOWWW?!”
His crazed laughter bounced amongst the beakers and coils, his small hands raised triumphantly towards the heavens, towards the flickering fluorescent gods of his own making—
“MARCUS!!”
A voice, sharp as a blade, sliced clean through the laboratory, through the coils, through the abomination and its many blinking eyes, through everything.
“Fufufu... who dares interrupt the great Doctor Marcus in his moment of triumph?!” he cackled, unfazed, his mad scientist persona bristling with indignant, theatrical rage.
Footsteps thundered down the staircase, heavy and furious.
“Marcus, I am NOT playing with you right now—turn that music down and clean up this mess, do you hear me?!”
“The great Doctor Marcus answers to no one! Not gods, not kings, and certainly not—” he paused dramatically, savoring the words, “—NAGGING SISTERS!!”
His sister’s face contorted, flushing red with an anger that only siblings could properly conjure from one another.
“MARCUS, I SWEAR TO GOD—”
“Bwahaha! Foolish girl, you cannot comprehend the scope of my genius! Soon my creation shall—”
“MOTHER!!” She threw her hands up, whipping around towards the stairs, her patience thoroughly, spectacularly exhausted. “MOTHER!! MARCUS IS NOT LISTENING TO ME?!”
And just like that—
The laboratory shattered.
The tesla coil’s lightning fizzled into nothing. The bubbling beakers evaporated like morning mist. The many-eyed abomination, chained and writhing a moment ago, dissolved back into what it always was—a pile of old stuffed animals and blankets heaped atop a broken folding table.
Marcus blinked. The fluorescent gods above him flickered back into a single, dim, dust-caked basement bulb.
His bravado, once so grand, so towering, shrunk down along with the rest of his imagined world, curling inward like a spider struck by fire.
Heavy, measured footsteps descended the stairs. Unlike his sister’s furious stomping, these carried a weight all their own—unhurried, absolute, the kind of footsteps that didn’t need to rush because they already knew they’d be obeyed.
She emerged from the stairwell shadows—tall, obsidian hair cascading like a dark waterfall down her shoulders, her fair countenance set into an expression of well-worn, weary annoyance.
Marcus swallowed thickly.
The great Doctor Marcus, terror of gods and kings, suddenly found himself very, very small indeed.
---
Her mother’s boots hit the final step with a soft, deliberate thud, and the basement seemed to shrink around her presence.
“Marcus.” Just his name. Nothing more. But it carried more weight than any threat his sister could have conjured.
The great Doctor Marcus, still clutching the tattered remains of his labcoat—which upon closer inspection was simply one of his father’s old dress shirts, buttoned backwards—opened his mouth to protest, to declare once more the scope of his unmatched genius, but the words died somewhere in his throat.
“I—I was just—” he started, his voice losing all traces of its former theatrical grandeur, shrinking down to something small and childlike, “—I was just playing, Mom, I swear, I wasn’t being loud on purpose, I just—”
“You’ve been down here for two hours,” she said, arms folding across her chest, “screaming about gods and kings and *abominations*, while your sister called for you to come up for dinner *four times*.”
His sister, arms still crossed, shot him a look of pure, unrepentant satisfaction.
“But Mom, I was *this* close to finishing my experiment—”
“Marcus.”
That was all it took. One word, one name, spoken in that same flat, unmovable tone, and his shoulders sagged, the last vestiges of his mad-scientist bravado draining out of him like air from a punctured balloon.
His mother’s gaze swept across the basement—the “laboratory” now reduced, in the harsh light of reality and her unimpressed stare, to what it truly was: stuffed animals strewn across the floor, blankets tangled in heaps, an old desk lamp flickering weakly atop a folding table, and crayon-drawn “blueprints” taped haphazardly to the wall.
“Clean this up,” she said, “and since you clearly have so much energy to spare screaming down here—” she nodded towards the stairs, towards the kitchen beyond, “—you can take the trash out. All of it. Front and back.”
“But Mom, the Great Doctor Marcus doesn’t—”
“Marcus.”
“...Yes, Mom,” he mumbled, all traces of the deranged genius gone now, replaced by the deflated posture of a boy who had just lost an argument he never actually had a chance of winning.
His sister, smug and thoroughly vindicated, followed their mother back up the stairs, throwing one last triumphant glance over her shoulder as Marcus trudged towards the overflowing trash bags waiting by the laundry room, muttering under his breath about ungrateful sisters and unrecognized genius, the great and terrible Doctor Marcus reduced, once more, to just a boy taking out the garbage.
