Apocalypse Days: I Rule with Foresight and a Powerful Son
Chapter 186

Chapter 186: 186

Winter reacted instantly.

He yanked his rifle back up, sweeping his torchlight across the corridor. The beam trembled in the heat haze, catching the fractured outline of something behind Mireille. It loomed tall, barely humanoid, shifting like oil on water. His finger pulled the trigger.

Bullets tore into the shadow, but passed straight through.

The figure didn’t flinch.

Winter didn’t wait. He dove behind the nearest support pipe, just as the thing lunged. The metal shrieked as claws carved into the wall where he’d stood seconds ago. A valve burst from the impact. Scalding steam flooded the corridor, curling white against the low red emergency lights. Winter coughed, eyes burning, heat crawling under his armour like ants.

The growl came again. Lower this time. Closer.

It vibrated the air, deep enough to press into his chest cavity. Pipes groaned. Floor plates buckled under unseen weight. Somewhere—inside the walls—Winter heard it crawling. Metal scraping against metal. Not blindly. Not randomly.

Stalking.

Dr. Mireille’s projection glitched—her image crackled with static as the projection warped. Then, with a pop and a hiss, she vanished. The shadow lunged through the space she’d stood in, claws swiping uselessly through empty air. But Winter saw it—just for a second.

Long limbs. Emaciated body, pale flesh stretched tight over joints like angular hinges. The skin shimmered like translucent insect wings. And those eyes—

Dead, but aware.

Not Subject 17. No. Something worse. It looked similar to one of those things that had attacked him and Zara during the initial raid that forced them into Sector 2. A cold realisation trickled down his spine. One of the experiments, maybe something discarded or forgotten. Its powers, could he call it that? They were different from those they had encountered then as well. It had mimicked Zara’s face. And Leo’s. Winter’s stomach turned at the memory. It had learned.

Why couldnt things just go in his fucking favour for once?

He didn’t waste time.

Winter bolted down the left tunnel, sticking to shadows, low and fast. His boots slapped softly on the metal floor. His torch flickered. He hit the side of it with the palm of his hand. The beam steadied, barely.

His comms were dead. Emergency power was failing.

Only backup red strips lit the corridor now, painting the world in hellish crimson. Everything seemed slower in that light. Thicker. More wrong.

He sprinted past broken equipment, slashed wires, and a half-melted locker door. His eyes caught a dark stain smeared across the floor—blood, definitely. Dried, then re-wet. Like someone had crawled through it.

Then—a helmet.

Winter slowed.

It was crushed, visor shattered, one side caved in like a soda can. The tag was burned out, but he could see part of the emblem. A guard. Someone who had tried to escape—and failed.

The walls nearby were scorched. Plasma burns. Arc damage. Signs of a fight. But also... blast marks. Someone had set off explosives.

"Shit..." Winter muttered, stepping over the helmet and pressing on.

He ducked under a sparking pipe, then turned a corner—and froze.

The hallway branched.

To the left, silence. To the right—voices.

Faint. Human. Arguing.

He crept to the edge, rifle up. Male voices—two of them. One was panting. The other sounded frantic.

"...We go now! It’s not safe—!"

"You think I don’t know that?! We will get fucked if we get into contact with either boss or those things!"

Winter’s mind raced. Who were they? Guards? Lab rats trying to escape this maze of death?

Then—drip. Behind him.

A thick drop of something hit the floor. It hissed on contact, eating into the metal with a sizzle.

His neck prickled. It’s here.

He turned, slowly.

Nothing yet. But the tunnel was too quiet now. Even the pipes had gone still. And the air smelled wrong. Not like heat or rust, but decay. Damp, heavy. Like rotting flowers and old blood.

He had seconds. If he ran toward the voices, he’d lead the thing right to them. And they’d never survive it.

Think.

Winter pulled a small flash-charge from his belt and primed it. He leaned toward the hallway where the voices came from—and threw the charge.

It clattered against the wall and rolled into the corridor. Behind him, the growl deepened.

He bolted in the opposite direction.

Behind him, the flash went off with a concussive bang, filling the branching hall with blinding light and sound. Screams followed. Gunfire. Something scraped against the walls, fast.

He didn’t look back.

He ran.

The corridor tilted, not just in his vision but in reality. The walls groaned again—something was shifting beneath them. Winter stumbled, caught his balance on the railing, and sprinted harder. Every breath scraped the inside of his throat raw. Then—another noise. Not the thing from before.

A scuttling. Fast. All around him.

He slowed. A mistake.

From a service grate near the ceiling, something dropped with a metallic clang. It landed between him and the stairwell—a spindly creature, no taller than a child, but built wrong. Bent backwards at the knees, its arms dragging along the ground.

No face, only a blank, skin-stretched skull with a vibrating slit where a mouth should be. Its flesh twitched like it was breathing through that slit, the sound a rattling gasp, wet and insectile. Every movement sent a ripple across its skin like a bag full of writhing cords. It shrieked.

Winter raised his rifle and fired.

The first shot blew one leg off. The thing didn’t even scream—it twitched and bounded toward him, hopping like a spider with a broken leg. Winter dodged. The claws grazed his shoulder, scraping armour and slicing the fabric underneath. Warm blood spilt.

"Son of a—"

He kicked it, hard. The creature slammed into the wall and cracked its skull, black ichor spraying from the wound. It screeched again—high-pitched, reverberating in his bones. Then more sounds—skittering. In the walls. Above.

Not alone.

Winter grabbed the corpse by its twisted arm and hurled it into the next vent opening, slamming the grate shut behind it. He bolted. No time to wait for the others to drop in.

The corridor veered left. He rounded the corner, and another beast lunged at him from the side.

This one had arms like wet ropes and bone hooks where hands should be. It snagged his leg, yanked hard. Winter hit the floor with a grunt, rifle clattering ahead.

The thing hauled him backwards, rasping something wet and slurred that might’ve been mimicry or madness.

"No!"

He twisted. Pulled the sidearm from his hip. Aimed under his arm and fired.

The thing’s head popped like a blister, spraying him with fluid that burned on contact. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed his rifle, and kept moving.

He rounded another corner—his leg dragging slightly now, and heard a pipe burst somewhere behind. Steam screamed into the air.

Whatever those things were, they weren’t just mindless. They were coming in patterns, cutting him off.

That wasn’t random.

Someone had turned the whole damn facility into a labyrinth of predators.

His lungs burned. His body moved on instinct—left, left again, down the rusted ladder. He slid the last few rungs and stumbled onto a platform—and found the stairwell.

Or what was left of it.

The whole thing had collapsed halfway down. Mangled rebar and crumpled stairs formed a jagged mess. No safe descent. No way up.

"Perfect," he muttered.

But the piping...

He scanned the walls. Thick water conduits. Steam vent lines. Reinforced steel bolted into place. He holstered the rifle on his back, grabbed the closest one, and began to climb.

His gloves slipped. He adjusted. Kept going. His shoulder screamed from the earlier hit, muscles trembling with each pull. The pipe vibrated faintly; something else was moving in the walls again, matching his descent. He gritted his teeth and didn’t look back. One foot after the other, gripping metal slick with condensation. The pipe groaned but held.

Halfway down, something screeched far above. Echoing. Metallic.

Winter climbed faster.

He reached a lower landing. Only half-lit, cracked concrete instead of metal now. Pipes still ran along the walls, but the air felt denser, older. He couldn’t tell how far underground he was now. Level five? Six?

"Zara..." he whispered, breath heavy. "Leo..."

He had to find them before the thing did.

He passed a smashed security panel, wires sparking weakly. The corridor here was long. Narrow. Doors lined one side—storage, maybe containment. The other side was smooth concrete, interrupted only by rusted emergency hatches.

Then—a door.

Steel. Slightly ajar.

Winter raised his rifle again.

He approached slowly, every step measured. The air hummed faintly. His finger rested on the trigger. If it were a person, he could get information. If it was one of them—

He’d blow it to hell.

It could also be Zara. Maybe Leo. Maybe just a supply closet with nothing but dust and ghosts. He couldn’t afford to hope—but he also couldn’t not.

The door loomed. Scratched. Dented. Dark inside.

He exhaled quietly.

Three... two... one.

He kicked the door open with a grunt—rifle raised.