Buried In The Sky Novels & Stories

Even my deceased family members couldn't be left in peace! I clenched my jaw so hard that my mouth filled with the taste of blood, yet it still couldn't suppress the fury raging inside me. Pulling out my phone, I was just about to call 911 when Melissa snatched my phone and threw it to the ground. She stomped on it with her heel, shattering it immediately. "Calling the police, huh? I'll give you a little hint—it's pointless. Ms. Fuller rules over Joverton City." She pointed to a deep pit nearby, which had been dug out to build an artificial lake for the horse ranch. It was filled with rubble, shards of glass, and rusty steel bars.

My chest burned as I drowned in the silence. The scene shifted again. The water was gone, but the weight remained. It was heavy and dry now. Dirt filled my mouth and nose. I was buried deep, the earth pressing against my ribs until I couldn't expand my chest. I clawed at the soil with my fingertips, but there was nowhere to go. There was no air. There was never any air. Finally, my eyes snapped open. I was lying on my back. Above me, the sky was a brilliant, piercing blue. Soft white clouds drifted lazily across the horizon. The sun was warm on my skin. It was a perfect, beautiful day.

My name was in the system. Tomorrow I'd walk back into the one place I'd promised myself I'd never go again, carrying the greatest secret Ethan Graves had ever given me without knowing it. He thought he'd buried me. He had no idea what I'd grown into instead.

It was a terrifying, absolute myth. "He is a dead man walking," Lucian growled, his pitch black eyes snapping toward the shattered stained glass window. "The Blacksite is an underground fortress buried beneath a mile of permafrost. It was built during the Cold War to survive a nuclear holocaust. There is no extraction from that ice."

Outside the window a cloud moved across the pale November sky and the grounds went darker for a moment and then lighter again. She thought about the specific way that terrible things sometimes produced the conditions for something that could not have existed otherwise. She thought about her mother understanding that and working with it for eleven years. She thought about Harlan maintaining a file and a sourdough starter in equal measure. She thought about two people performing in a house full of cameras and slowly, accidentally, stopping. None of it was worth what it had cost. All of it had produced this. She put her hand over his. He turned his hand and held hers.

CHAPTER FOURTY-SEVEN ALL THAT WE BURIED “The deeper you dig into the past, the more it starts digging back.” The mountains rose like broken teeth from the Austrian horizon, white-capped and indifferent. They held no memory of blood, no record of names. Snow covered every ruin eventually. But buried beneath the southern slope of what the locals called Todesspitze—Death Peak—was a structure that predated the Cold War, the Reich, the Empire before it. No markers. No flags. Just the hum beneath the ground, faint and rhythmic, like a second heartbeat waiting to be acknowledged.

Ryan I'm not gone. That's the thing nobody tells you about being buried alive inside your own skin... I'm not gone, I'm just far down, pressed under something vast and cold and patient, and every so often I get close enough to the surface to feel what my body's doing without any say in whether it stops.

The light exposed everything bodies, debris, blood smeared on glass, graffiti that hadn't been there before the words written in black ash, "THE SKY LIED." "THEY'RE INSIDE US." "DON'T TRUST THE ANGELS." I didn't want to think about what any of it meant so I just kept walking. My boots crunched glass and bone and every time I passed a car, I checked the windows, hoping maybe stupidly, that someone might still be inside, alive. But they were all the same. Empty. Dead. Gone. I am selfishly hoping I am not the only one that was kept alive.

Something loyal. Something patient. Something waiting. The sky hadn’t just fallen. It had been pulled down deliberately. And we were standing at the center of its collapse.

The evening sky was covered with thick gray clouds, as if the sky itself were holding its breath. A heavy silence hung in the air, occasionally broken by the rustling of the wind through the old trees on the hillside cemetery. Before me, the mound of earth was still damp, the soil soft and clinging to the fingers of the gravediggers who had just stepped back a few paces. A black stone tombstone stood there, simple, without excessive ornamentation—only a name carved with a code that only we could decipher.