EPI 01 – The signal
Rain crashed endlessly against the quarantine walls surrounding Death City.
Not normal rain.
This rain felt violent.
Heavy drops slammed against rusted metal fences and flooded empty roads while thunder rolled across the night sky like distant explosions. Lightning flashed above the massive containment barrier stretching endlessly into darkness.
The wall stood over a hundred feet high.
Concrete.
Steel.
Armed watchtowers.
Every inch of it screamed one message:
KEEP OUT.
Old warning signs hung crooked against the barricades.
BIOHAZARD RISK
FEDERAL QUARANTINE ZONE
TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED
Most people avoided even driving near the outer districts surrounding Death City. Rumors alone were enough to terrify them.
People said strange sounds escaped the walls at night.
Some claimed they saw lights moving through abandoned skyscrapers.
Others swore radio stations occasionally picked up voices begging for help from inside the dead city.
Officially, all of it was nonsense.
Officially, the city had been empty for ten years.
Officially, nobody survived the Death City Incident.
But tonight, five people stood directly before the quarantine gate anyway.
Money had brought them here.
Curiosity kept them standing.
Fear kept them silent.
A woman wearing a dark hood adjusted the camera hanging from her shoulder while rainwater dripped from her sleeves.
“You sure this livestream is recording?” asked a tall man in tactical gear.
The camerawoman checked the blinking red light.
“Yeah.”
The youngest member of the group shifted nervously beside them. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-two.
“This still feels like a terrible idea.”
Nobody disagreed.
The tactical leader stepped toward the giant sealed gate and placed a small electronic device against the control panel.
Tiny sparks burst immediately.
The machine buzzed violently.
Static crackled through nearby speakers.
Then—
CLANK.
Everyone froze.
The enormous gate unlocked.
Slowly, painfully, the steel doors separated just enough for darkness to breathe through.
Cold air escaped from inside the city.
Not fresh air.
Not polluted air.
Dead air.
The kind trapped underground for years.
The youngest explorer immediately stepped backward.
“Jesus…”
Beyond the opening stood the silhouette of Death City.
Massive skyscrapers disappeared into fog and rain while faint orange lights flickered deep within the streets like dying embers.
The city looked asleep.
But not dead.
Never dead.
Thunder cracked overhead.
The camerawoman slowly zoomed her lens toward the skyline.
“This place is bigger than I thought.”
Nobody answered her.
Because all of them were staring at the train.
Far away between the buildings, headlights moved silently through the fog.
A subway train.
Still operating.
Ten years after the quarantine.
The youngest explorer’s voice trembled. “That’s impossible.”
Then the radios exploded with static.
KRRRRRRRRR—
The group flinched instantly.
A distorted voice pushed through the interference.
“…don’t… enter…”
The tactical leader grabbed his radio immediately.
“Who is this?”
Static swallowed the signal.
Then another voice emerged.
A woman this time.
Crying.
Weak.
“…Protocol… failed…”
The transmission cut abruptly.
Silence returned.
Rain hammered the streets harder.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
Then greed defeated common sense.
The tactical leader looked toward the opening.
“We go in. Twenty minutes only.”
The youngest explorer stared at him like he was insane.
“You heard the radio!”
“And someone’s paying us fifty grand for footage inside the walls.”
That ended the argument.
Fear mattered less than money to desperate people.
One by one, they stepped through the gate.
The moment the last person crossed into the city—
BOOOOM.
The massive steel doors slammed shut behind them.
Everyone jumped.
The sound echoed endlessly through the empty streets.
The youngest explorer turned pale immediately.
“I really hate this.”
No one laughed.
Inside Death City, silence ruled everything.
No traffic.
No insects.
No wind.
Only the sound of rainwater splashing beneath their boots as they moved carefully through abandoned streets.
Their flashlight beams cut through darkness, revealing old cars left stranded in the middle of intersections. Storefront windows remained shattered. Rusted buses leaned sideways against sidewalks.
A child’s bicycle rested beneath a streetlamp.
Still untouched after ten years.
It felt wrong.
Like time itself had stopped breathing.
The camerawoman slowly turned in circles while recording everything.
“Where are the bodies?”
Again—
nobody answered.
Because she was right.
No skeletons.
No bloodstains.
Nothing.
The city looked abandoned overnight.
Like millions of people had simply vanished.
The tactical leader checked his map device.
“The signal source should be three blocks north.”
Thunder rumbled overhead again.
The youngest explorer suddenly stopped walking.
“Wait.”
Everyone turned.
A small figure stood at the far end of the street.
Motionless beneath the rain.
A child wearing a red raincoat.
Its face remained hidden beneath the hood.
The tactical leader immediately raised his weapon.
“Hey!”
No response.
The child stood perfectly still.
Rain poured around it endlessly.
The camerawoman zoomed in carefully.
The child’s skin looked pale.
Too pale.
Grey, almost.
The youngest explorer swallowed hard.
“Kid?”
The child slowly raised one arm.
Pointing upward.
Everyone instinctively looked toward the skyscrapers above them.
At first they saw nothing.
Then lightning flashed across the sky.
And the entire group froze.
Glowing orange cracks stretched across the buildings.
Thousands of them.
Like veins beneath human skin.
The fractures pulsed faintly beneath the concrete.
THOOM.
A deep vibration rolled beneath their feet.
THOOM.
THOOM.
Like a heartbeat.
The youngest explorer stumbled backward.
“What the hell is that?”
The tactical leader looked shaken for the first time. “Everybody stay calm.”
Then the camerawoman gasped softly.
“The kid…”
Gone.
The child had disappeared completely.
No footsteps.
No movement.
Nothing.
Only empty rain-soaked pavement remained.
The youngest explorer panicked immediately.
“Nope. No. We leave right now.”
Before anyone could respond—
a whisper breathed directly beside the camera microphone.
“It’s awake.”
The camerawoman screamed and spun around violently.
Nobody stood there.
But her camera screen glitched suddenly with violent static.
KRRRRRRT—
The image distorted.
For half a second, something appeared on-screen beneath the city streets.
Something enormous.
A massive pulsing shape buried underground.
Alive.
Then the image vanished.
Streetlights exploded on across the district simultaneously.
Orange light flooded the empty roads.
The ground shook violently.
Far away in the darkness—
something screamed.
The sound didn’t belong to any animal.
It sounded ancient.
Hungry.
Wrong.
Every survival instinct inside the group activated instantly.
“RUN!” the tactical leader shouted.
The explorers sprinted through flooded streets as the glowing fractures spread faster across nearby buildings.
THOOM.
THOOM.
THOOM.
The city heartbeat grew louder.
The youngest explorer glanced upward while running—
and nearly collapsed.
Figures stood inside every nearby window.
Watching them.
Hundreds of silhouettes.
Perfectly still.
Human-shaped.
But not human.
The radios burst alive again.
Clearer this time.
“Protocol Seven… initiated…”
The tactical leader cursed under his breath.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Nobody answered.
Because suddenly—
one of the explorers disappeared screaming into an alleyway.
Something dragged him backward so fast his flashlight flew spinning across the pavement.
His scream cut off instantly.
The camerawoman panicked.
“KEEP MOVING!”
The remaining group ran harder now.
Rain blurred their vision while orange light pulsed beneath the streets like lava beneath cracked stone.
Then came another scream.
One of the mercenaries slammed violently upward into the air.
Invisible force crushed him against a building hard enough to paint blood across concrete.
The youngest explorer nearly vomited.
“Oh God—”
A nearby window shattered outward.
Dark hands burst from inside the building.
Not real hands.
Shadow.
Moving shadow.
They wrapped around the camerawoman’s body instantly.
She shrieked while her camera fell spinning into floodwater.
“HELP ME—!”
The shadows dragged her backward through broken glass.
Her scream echoed through the street long after she vanished.
The youngest explorer sobbed openly now while sprinting beside the tactical leader.
“We’re gonna die!”
“SHUT UP AND RUN!”
The city itself seemed alive around them now.
Streetlights flickered violently.
Building fractures pulsed brighter.
The underground heartbeat shook the roads harder with every second.
THOOM.
THOOM.
THOOM.
Then came the whispers.
Everywhere.
Soft voices drifting through rain and darkness.
“Stay…”
“Don’t leave…”
“We’re lonely…”
The youngest explorer clamped his hands over his ears.
“No no no no—”
Something moved across a rooftop overhead.
Fast.
Too fast to identify.
The tactical leader raised his weapon desperately toward the shadows.
“SHOW YOURSELF!”
Lightning flashed again.
For one horrifying second, they saw it.
A towering black figure standing atop the building.
Its body looked stretched unnaturally thin while glowing orange fractures spread across its skin like burning cracks.
No face.
Only darkness.
Then it vanished.
The tactical leader fired blindly into the rooftop anyway.
The bullets disappeared into rain.
The youngest explorer pointed ahead suddenly.
“The gate!”
The quarantine entrance stood barely two blocks away now.
Hope exploded inside them.
They sprinted harder.
But the city heartbeat suddenly stopped.
Everything became silent.
Dead silent.
Even the rain seemed quieter.
The tactical leader slowed carefully.
“That’s not good.”
Then the ground beneath them cracked open.
Orange light burst upward through the street.
The youngest explorer screamed as glowing fractures spread rapidly beneath his feet.
Something moved beneath the pavement.
Something massive.
The tactical leader grabbed him violently.
“MOVE!”
They barely escaped before giant black tendrils erupted from the road behind them.
The things twisted unnaturally through the air searching for them blindly.
The tactical leader fired again.
Useless.
The shadows ignored bullets completely.
The gate stood only yards away now.
The youngest explorer sobbed with relief.
“We made it—”
A hand suddenly grabbed his ankle.
He crashed face-first into floodwater.
The tactical leader spun immediately.
A woman stood behind them.
Pale skin.
Dark hollow eyes.
Silver fractures glowing beneath her neck.
The youngest explorer screamed while she dragged him backward with impossible strength.
“PLEASE!”
The tactical leader tried pulling him free.
Then he saw the woman’s face clearly.
And froze.
Because she was smiling.
Not normal smiling.
Hungry smiling.
The woman whispered softly:
“The city remembers.”
The shadows beneath her feet exploded upward instantly.
They swallowed both men whole.
Their screams echoed briefly—
then disappeared.
Silence returned once more.
Only the broken camera remained lying in the rain.
Its cracked lens faced sideways toward the glowing city skyline.
Static flickered across the damaged screen.
Then—
a final image appeared briefly through the distortion.
A woman standing motionless deep within the fog.
Watching.
Wearing a silver necklace.
The transmission ended.
Three hundred miles away, inside Saint Gabriel Medical Hospital—
Kai Arden stared silently at the frozen video footage replaying across his computer screen.
The dark office remained quiet except for distant thunder outside the windows.
His heartbeat slowed painfully.
Because he recognized the necklace immediately.
His hands trembled slightly.
“No…”
The image blurred with static again.
But he already knew.
The woman standing inside Death City looked exactly like his sister.
The sister who disappeared ten years ago during the Death City Incident.
The sister the government declared dead.
Kai leaned closer toward the screen.
And for the first time in years—
he began to wonder if the city had never let her leave.
