Sound of the Nest

Miller didn’t move his rifle. The barrel remained leveled at Garrison’s throat. "Don’t get smart, Vance. My men are tired, we are hungry, and we aren’t playing by the old book. Walk."

"You are making a mistake, Miller," Garrison said, his voice dropping into a deadly whisper. He didn’t drop his hands, but his weight shifted slightly to his back leg. "Look at the walls. Look at the timber supports."

Miller laughed, a harsh, grating sound that bounced off the stone. "The timbers are fine. Move."

"I am not talking about the wood," Garrison said. "I am talking about the vibration."

A soft, rhythmic clicking started from the ceiling above us. It wasn’t one creature this time. It sounded like hundreds of tiny, wet stones rattling together inside a tin cup. The blind miners hadn’t just abandoned the main shaft—they had nested in the upper ventilation recesses directly above our heads.

"Sir," one of Miller’s men whispered, his flashlight beam shaking as he pointed it toward the dark ceiling. "The rock is moving."

"Shut up!" Miller snapped, though his own eyes flicked upward. "It’s just water."

"It isn’t water," I said, my hand tightening on the strap of my backpack. "The megaphone, Miller. You just blew the dinner bell for the entire colony."

A pale, eyeless face dropped from a hole in the ceiling, landing directly on the back of the soldier holding the flashlight. The man shrieked as the creature’s split jaw clamped down on his shoulder. The flashlight hit the concrete floor, spinning in wild circles and casting long, chaotic shadows down the shaft.

"Fire!" Miller yelled, panicking.

The narrow tunnel exploded into bright flashes of muzzle fire. The sound was deafening, a continuous roar that completely destroyed any chance of hearing where the next creature was coming from. The blind monsters didn’t care about the bullets—the noise was drawing them from every side shaft like a flood.

Garrison didn’t fire his sidearm. The moment the first soldier shrieked, his large hand grabbed my jacket collar and hauled me backward into a dark, unlit utility recess.

"Stay low!" he shouted over the gunfire.

He threw his body over mine, pinning me against the cold stone floor as a massive silhouette blurred past the entrance of our alcove. Outside in the main shaft, Miller’s men were being torn to pieces, their screams echoing horribly between the rapid bursts of automatic weapons.

"Miller is down!" a soldier screamed, followed by the wet, crunching sound of bone snapping.

"We need to move now," Garrison whispered against my ear, his breath hot against my skin. He pulled me up by my arms, his grip steady and unyielding despite the absolute chaos three feet away. "The noise is going to bring the summit pack down the main elevator line. We take the secondary rail skiff."

We scrambled out of the alcove, stepping over the discarded rifles and the dark fluid pooling on the concrete floor. Garrison grabbed a flashlight from a dead soldier’s belt, clicking it onto the lowest green setting.

"Where is the skiff?" I panted, my lungs burning from the sulfur and gunsmoke filling the air.

"Through the drainage screen at the end of this junction," he said, breaking into a sprint. "Keep your head down, Valerie. Don’t look back."

The secondary rail depot was smaller than the transit station, a concrete vault dripping with mineral water and lined with old maintenance equipment. In the center of the rusted tracks sat a small, open-platform electric utility skiff used for moving mining tools.

Garrison slammed his hand against the skiff’s manual ignition box. The small electric motor hummed to life, a low, steady vibration that felt like a blessing after the roar of the gunfire.

"Get on," he said, reaching down to pull me onto the metal platform.

He engaged the drive lever, and the skiff jolted forward, accelerating quickly down the straight, narrow tunnel toward Depot One. The air became warmer as we moved deeper, the temperature rising as the tracks approached the geothermal grid of the mountain core.

"We have thirty hours left before the automated dispersal," I said, pulling Thorne’s digital map from my backpack. The red overlay lines were pulsing faster now. "Garrison, if Thorne was telling the truth, the core control room is fully automated. How do we override a hard-locked sequence without the master codes?"

Garrison kept his hand on the skiff’s control lever, his gray eyes staring into the dark tunnel ahead. "We don’t override it, Valerie."

I looked up from the screen. "What do you mean?"

"The automated valves run on a hydraulic pressure system powered by the main geothermal cell," he said, his voice flat and calm. "The software is locked, but the hardware is mechanical. If I can get into the main coolant chamber beneath the pressure lines, I can manually close the backup release valves."

"But Thorne said the system will purge any manual interference," I countered, a sudden, cold dread settling into my stomach.