Two hours before dusk, I climbed the ridge behind the church.
It wasn't high—just a mound of earth and rootweb, scattered with dead leaves and shards of broken headstones. The remains of an old graveyard stretched across the slope, mostly reclaimed by time and silence. Names on the stones were worn to shadows. Crosses lay split under trees, vines threading through their fractures like veins.
There was no breeze. Just heat rising off damp stone and the faint click of beetles underfoot.
The journal had said, beneath the hill with the sunken church.
My church sat at the base of this incline.
Which meant something was underneath.
I searched methodically, checking for cellar doors, manhole covers, grates. Anything that could lead underground.
It took time.
The first thirty minutes turned up nothing but buried iron fence posts and collapsed mausoleums, their caskets shattered and empty.
Then I found it—half-hidden under ivy and loose soil.
A hatch.
Circular. Reinforced steel. Hinged.
The kind of thing you'd expect on a military bunker, not under a chapel in suburban Washington.
I cleared the debris, pried it open with a crowbar, and shined my light into the hole.
A ladder descended into darkness.
The air that rose from the shaft was cool. Damp. Carried the scent of mildew and rusted wire. But there was something else underneath it.
A pressure.
Like the silence had weight.
I descended slowly.
One rung at a time.
Metal creaked under my boots. Dust floated in the beam of my flashlight. The walls were tight—corrugated steel, old insulation, spiderwebs turned to fiber clusters.
At the bottom, the passage opened into a tunnel.
Wide enough to walk without crouching.
Concrete walls. Exposed piping along the ceiling. Cable bundles hanging like veins.
The floor was lined with rubber matting, most of it torn and warped.
The further I walked, the more the smell changed—less mold, more chemical. Like antiseptic and ozone and the copper edge of blood.
And beneath it all, that same pressure.
Growing heavier.
After twenty meters, I reached a fork.
Left: more tunnel. Right: a half-open security door with flickering LEDs around the frame.
I listened.
No movement. No hum. Just the sound of old air trying to escape a sealed space.
I took the right path.
The room beyond was a control center.
Or had been.
Rows of desks, half-melted monitors, overturned chairs. Charts pinned to the walls—mutation diagrams, anatomical sketches, dates crossed out in red.
A single phrase repeated across the top of every whiteboard:
Containment is behavioral, not biological.
The implication was clear: they weren't trying to stop the mutation. They were trying to manage it.
Worse, it suggested they'd failed.
At the center of the room was a display case—cracked open, glass jagged like broken teeth.
Inside, on a stand: a metal plate, charred and warped, with a single word etched into its surface.
PRIDE.
No other text. No context. Just the name and the aftermath.
A burned outline marked where something larger had once sat beneath the plaque—maybe a containment pod. Maybe a body.
Now gone.
Something moved in the hallway behind me.
Fast. No sound. Just motion at the edge of my vision.
I backed into the far corner, light raised, axe gripped tight.
The room remained empty.
The hallway, dark.
No pursuit.
Just that pressure again—closer now.
Like I was being watched by something that wasn't breathing.
I stayed in the shadows for nearly an hour, listening for anything alive.
Nothing came.
Nothing followed.
When I finally left the bunker, the sun had dropped behind the trees. Shadows stretched long across the hillside. The hatch sealed behind me with a dull metal click.
The world above felt no safer than the one below.
But at least up here, I could see the stars.
That night, I didn't write.
I just sat in the loft of the chapel and stared at the compass.
Its needle twitched toward the east—toward the direction of the burned relay tower.
But part of me knew that whatever lay below that hatch… wasn't done with me yet.
Not even close.