I had a dream probably 12 years ago that I’ve never forgotten, during one of the darkest times in my life when I was scared I’d fail in life
The dream began in a volcanic Ashland where I was traveling with a ragtag band of refugees trying to escape some horrible volcanic event or maybe even super volcanic event, so we were all journeying through this grey valley flanked by ashen mountains with a few distant volcanoes, I was the leader of this group and they were depending on me to hopefully guide them to survival.
We came to a huge obsidian temple structure and it was built onto the valley wall so we had to climb it to ascend out of the valley, so we entered. But the building had an ominous energy like something dark was sleeping inside of it.
Part of the way up, a young boy in my group was running ahead even though I told him to wait and tried to run after him, but as happens in dreams my legs were like lead and I couldn’t keep up. I had this growing sense of dread.
Then the boy slipped off the edge over an overhang and as I looked down after him he plunged into a lava pool, burning to death. My sense of dread didn’t go away it only increased. Somehow I knew (maybe because it was a dream made by my own mind) that that wasn’t the only horror that awaited us in here, this place wanted all of us not just the boy.
That dread manifested as the boy came clawing his way out from the lava pit and let out a horrifying cry like a nazgul or a ghoulish undead, with his flesh bubbling and dripping off of his bones in places he began sprinting with inhuman speed back towards the entrance of the obsidian temple he had fallen from, right back into the entrance.
My band of refugees began panicking, torn between the anguish of watching the boy die and the horror dawning on them of what he had become- a monster- and why he would come sprinting back into the temple some floors below us.
We all heard the inhuman commotion as his undead body slammed into corners, so great was his speed, and we all realized rather abruptly that he was closing in on our group.
I urged the group to begin climbing the stairwells that wrapped around the precipices of this obsidian temple, up towards the valley wall. We had only one possible escape: somehow reaching the top and whatever salvation waited for us up there from the desolate volcanic wasteland and the undead monster that had once been a little boy. So we all begun to sprint, but we were slow.
some of the refugees had bags, some were elderly men and women, it began to dawn on me that we had no hope to escape as i heard the monster closing in from below. I turned to confront him, readying to fight with no weapons.
When he emerged he looked at me with his ghastly skull shining through his melted off face and he spoke and said "You did this to me so I will punish you by making you live while your people die." And he ran past me with superhuman speed and tore into my group, beginning to butcher these weak powerless refugees even as I tried to fight him, plead with him, even as I tried to urge them to keep running, he eventually killed every last one of them with his long ghoul clawed skeletal hands.
"Im sorry." i said to him. "Im sorry i let you become a monster." and he just smiled back at me and stepped off the ledge, plunging again into the lava, this time to rest eternal, but the carnage of my mangled people now lay all around me, and still the black obsidian stairway beckoned, leading up into the tallest passes of the ashen mountains where smoke and fog obscured the path, I had nobody left and nowhere to go but up.
So i went up. Up, up, up through winding valley corridors of sheer black jagged rockfaces, ascending thousands of steps until the atmosphere seemed thin and the night stars shone from above, the distant red glow of the lava flows fading to a dull reminder of the carnage i was leaving behind me.
eventually the climb slowed but the path continued and the stairs began to turn downwards, the rock walls opened up into a dusty grey plain of old ash that had blown here from distant eruptions in the ashlands below, but it was cold up here and dark, and the fog parted and i saw in the distance a structure, not ominous and unnatural like the obsidian temple but a human structure, a distant farmhouse, but I had a feeling when i looked down the winding stairs at this house like i was looking into the blackness of a night that has a rapidly approaching tornado, totally invisible, the sight of this farmhouse gave me a sense of existential dread greater than even the obsidian temple had inspired. But i knew i had to keep going forward anyways. So, with despair in every step, i put one foot infront of the next and kept walking.
As i approached the house I realized its scale, it was not some small farmhouse, more of a manse, and the stairs on this path led straight to its roof where the stairs that had once led down from its top were gone. There was only a gaping black hole in the roof, my only way forward was into this abandoned structure, so with a heart full of fear i lowered myself down into pitch blackness.
I found myself in an ash flooded attic full of furniture like old spinning wheels and some misshapen objects with soot stained sheets over them, the room was so very cluttered with dillapidated old stuff that i could hardly navigate it. I kept bumping stuff then I froze, because on thr far side of the room i saw a sillouhette standing motionless. A feminine sillouhette that seemed like it moved slightly as I brushed against an old desk, causing a noise.
As she reacted, she turned towards me and I saw her face, and her mouth hung open, her jaw split in two, one half dangling and the other holding a malicious grimace.
She moved like a squid striking out from inky blackness at its prey, lifting up off her feet and drifting rapidly to me, her mangled jaw soon centering around my field of view as her face filled my vision and she grabbed the sides of my head, talking to me
"You have to pay for what he did to us, you have to see it all"
And she entered me, i just remember at this point in my dream my vision was full of motion, like she had possessed me and was flying me through the pages of her own history book, in a misty ashen blur of colors and shapes i found myself chopping wood in a dark forest with green leaves around, when a rage filled every fiber of my being and i turned towards a tent, gripping my axe as i swung it through the fabric, turning it on my first wife (in my dream i understood this to be the vision of the woman's husband when he murdered her with his axe) and splitting her jaw and head open rather than any log
I was crying abd begging to be left alone and allowed to leave when we swirled back into the attic, and the ghost was standing right there with inhuman stillness, i couldnt look away from her mangled face as she said "now you know what he did to me…" and she slowly disappeared into a small mist
I was deeply disturbed and crying and disoriented as i looked around the attic and saw a small wooden panel with some grey filtered light showing through it and i went that way, but as i did another ghost of a different women, her neck angled violently screamed at me and grabbed me and possessed me, now I was her husband, the same man with his second wife wringing her neck as she turbed blue
In this manner a series of murdered women ghosts possessed me, forcing me to witness their deaths from the poijt of view of their killer, all killed by the same horrible man in different violent ways, in total 7 stories of 7 murders of 7 dead wives, and each one whisming me to another part of this forsaken farmhouse where they had lurked waiting for whichever man was unlucky enough to enter this cursed homestead
My experience dreaming this was mostly an unsettling amount of vertigo during the dream and images of violence and these ghastly faces of ghosts filling my vision before flying me to another room where another ghost would stand motionless waiting to possess me, the entire time i felt like i was crying and falling from a very extreme height
Eventually though the last ghost released me from her possession and i stood in the kitchen room where she stood with me, her face blue from drowning in a bath tub, and she smiled at mr and spoke more gently than thr others had, she reached to take my hand but when i flinched and screamed she dropped her arm back down to her side and just smiled sadly at me
"Thank you"
And she and all other ghosts were gone and it was just me alone in this forsaken manse's kitchen, and i heard a sound i never expected, trickling water. So i walked towards it and found a back door on the ground level which opened easily, and i stepped outside and saw some white, ash-filtered sunlight and a sight that took my breath away, about 300 yards away was a running river with lush green trees and plants and a thundering waterfall, and i knew that my trials had passed as i walked out towards the end of the ashlands with my boots squishing in fertile muddy soil, and i woke up completely drenched in a puddle of my own sweat

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

“Can you get the laundry?” Mom asked me as I sat in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. The buzzer had just gone off in the dryer in the basement, ringing in its harsh, dissonant way. Sighing, I got up. I had just gotten home from school a few minutes earlier.
I headed across the beige carpets and white walls of our living room to the basement stairs. They followed the same decorative scheme of white walls and beige carpet, but the basement door waiting at the bottom was an old, rickety thing with many cracks eaten into its surface.
I went down to the basement on the same ten steps I had traveled many times before. I pushed the door open. It groaned like a terrified old man, its rusted hinges looking ready to fall apart at any moment. Behind the door lay a curtain of shadows, an impenetrable black abyss. I reached over to the light switch and tried flicking it up and down a few times, but nothing happened.
“Dammit,” I sighed, walking into the basement. I assumed the bulb had burned out. The door closed behind me with a final groan. I pulled out my cell phone and shone it around, heading towards the dryer in the back corner. But the dryer wasn’t there.
The light of my phone barely seemed to penetrate the thick darkness. The shadows suffocated the light, so that I could only see a couple feet in front of me. Stumbling forward with the phone held out in front of me like a holy cross, I looked for anything familiar.
Beneath my feet, I saw smooth concrete, just like we had in our basement. But the room seemed like it went on forever and had nothing in it. Our basement was only about twenty feet wide, and much of that was filled with the washer, dryer, water-pump and other machinery necessary for a house.
I looked up, but the light only went up into a blanket of shadows, not revealing any ceiling. The ceiling, too, had risen, as if all the surfaces of the structure had pulled far away from me.
Terror filled my heart. For a brief moment, I had wondered if this was some sort of prank. But I knew that was no longer possible. This had to be real. I fled back towards the door, my light held out in front of me.
I wanted to scream for help, but something instinctual in the back of my mind told me that was a very bad idea. As my shoes slapped the concrete, I realized I heard another sound as well, almost like chewing and dripping. Soft, skittering footsteps accompanied it, drawing closer to me.
Something cold slithered its way through my heart as I heard those sounds. I knew I was not alone down here, in this place where everything had changed.
***
As I silently flung the door open, I glanced back. The light from the stairway formed a long rectangle that faded off far in the distance. In that light, I saw something the size of a man but resembling a burnt cadaver. It crawled across the massive concrete floor only ten feet behind me, its body thin and sunken. Its eyes were no more than dark and empty sockets in its pointed head. Wisps of thin smoke continuously rose from the black sockets. It had skin the color of burnt charcoal with jutting edges and deep grooves. Its hands and feet splayed out like massive talons. As it moved, its body cracked and snapped like burning wood. Its jerky movements to the left and right reminded me of the skittering of a centipede.
Its lipless mouth continuously chewed on something. To my horror, I realized it was a dismembered human hand. The skin was roasted to a dark brown from the heat of the creature’s mouth. Sizzling drops of blood rolled down its snake-like face and spattered the floor. I slammed the door behind me, looking up the stairs.
I still saw the whitewashed walls and the beige carpet, but now the stairs seemed to go on forever. I looked up, seeing hundreds of stairs disappearing into the distance. I sprinted up them as fast as I could, taking them two at a time. As I ran, I heard a soft voice, so distant it almost didn’t even sound real. And yet, I would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of my mother, calling down to me.
“Jake?” the voice whispered, fading off into nothingness almost instantly. “Come here, Jake…”
“Mom?” I cried, panicked. “Mom?!” Something slammed hard against the rickety door at the bottom of the stairs. It shuddered in its frame, the cracks spiderwebbing and widening across its mottled surface.
I had run up a couple hundred steps when the door below me finally exploded in a shower of coarse splinters. Skittering forwards like a salamander, the eyeless creature with the body of charred ashes crawled after me, moving much faster than any human could. It still held the dismembered hand in its mouth, which was little more than bones with strips of gore by this point. It chewed constantly, and the wet crunching of it rose through the stairs like a whisper.
I saw the ending to the stairs up ahead of me now, only fifty or sixty steps away. There was a bright-red door at the end, the color of freshly-spilled blood. I could hear the creature’s soft, echoing breathing close behind me, like the bellows of a forge. With every bit of energy I could muster, I pushed myself forward, sprinting towards that door as if it were the gate to Heaven itself.
I pushed it open. The door slammed against the wall with a crack. On the other side, I saw a hallway with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made incessant pinging noises, strobing on and off in chaotic patterns. Everything was cast in a sickly yellow glow, reflecting like jaundice off the walls and carpet.
I turned and slammed the door shut, pressing my body weight against it. This door looked much newer and sturdier than the one at the bottom. We hadn’t had a door at the top of the stairs in my house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To my surprise, I saw a deadbolt built into this door. I reached down and flung it into place just as a heavy weight smashed against the other side of it. The door shuddered in its frame, but it held. More blows rained down on the other side. A frantic, insane shriek emanated from the burnt creature, fading down the endless hallway in dying reverberations. The screams had an alien, metallic ring to them. Far off in the distance, I heard echoing replies.
“Jake…” I heard my mother’s voice far down the hallway, so faint that it barely registered above the alien screaming of the burnt creature. A surge of hope rose in my heart. Perhaps there was a doorway leading back to my house, I thought. Perhaps Mom really is calling me.
“Mom? Where are you?” I yelled as loud as I could. At that moment, the shuddering of the door stopped abruptly. The sudden silence seemed deafening. I didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Where are you…” the voice whispered, as faint as rustling leaves in an autumn wind. “Jake…” I gave one mistrustful glance back at the blood-red door and started off down the hallway. I was exhausted and covered in sweat from my frantic trek away up the dozens of stories of steps.
There was an endless beige carpet here covering the floor of the hallway that squished under my feet. It gave off a subtle, rotten smell as I walked, almost like the faint smell of stink bugs and vomit mixed together. I wondered what kind of fetid liquid had seeped into it.
The walls might have once been white, but they had yellowed and peeled with age. The entire place had a run-down, abandoned feeling to it. The hallway itself appeared to have no end. As I kept walking forward, the end of it continuously disappeared into a point far off in the distance, like some sort of optical illusion.
Rooms surrounded both sides of it with the same wet, beige carpet and flickering lights. I saw mattresses stained with enormous pools of blood next to smashed chairs and desks. Broken computers and monitors littered the filthy floors. In a few rooms, I even saw skeletons with pieces of putrefying flesh still clinging to their pale bones. It reminded me of an office building from Hell.
“Jake…” my mother’s voice came, as faint as the wind but nearer. It seemed to be coming from a room just up the hallway. Around the area where I thought the voice might have come from, I saw an open door. Harsh, white light spilled out onto the filthy beige carpet. I sprinted toward it with a new sense of hope.
“Where are you, Jake?” the voice came again as I turned and looked into the room. It looked like a bright spotlight was shining in my direction. It blinded me for a long moment. I blinked fast, taking a few uncertain steps inside, but I couldn’t see anything past that blinding light.
“Mom?” I cried, moving out of the beam that shone through the door with such radiant intensity. Inside, I found dozens of faceless, naked mannequins, their plastic bodies twisted into odd positions. Some of them were posed as if they were crab-walking, while others had their heads twisted around backward. The hardwood floor looked wet and sticky, covered in a thin film of ancient, clotted blood.
I took a step forward, and my shoe gave a tacky, sucking sound as it lifted off the disgusting floor. I looked around, confused, until I saw speakers built into the walls. They were small, metal panels with circular vents. At that moment, they started again.
“Jake… where are you?” my mother’s voice cried through the speakers. Confused, I backpedaled out of the room, sensing a trap. The glare of the spotlights blinded me as I stumbled into the hallway.
I heard something faint, a rustling sound followed by a repetitive chewing. My heart dropped. I looked back, seeing three of the burnt creatures loping down the hallway toward me on all fours. They were only fifty feet behind me now that I had wasted time in the spotlight room. I swore under my breath as my heart raced and a rising anxiety and terror took over. They must have broken through the door somehow.
Their smoking, black sockets of eyes seemed to stare right through me. I tore my gaze away and ran down the hallway, past dozens of rooms that seemed to get stranger and stranger with every one. I glimpsed an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one, but it looked like it was filled with blood. The smell from that room was an overwhelming one of copper and iron.
The next room looked like it was taken from an elementary school, with crude drawings of stick people next to charts of the alphabet and an ancient, dust-covered blackboard. Across the board, I saw someone had scrawled, “HELP ME, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” I saw the skeleton of a child laying under a blanket in the corner, as if the kid had taken a nap in this evil place and never woken up. Deep bite marks were engraved into the child’s neck and skull.
Up ahead, the hallway finally ended. There was a wall with what looked like the beginning of an enormous slide poking out of it. The slide gleamed a cyanotic blue under the fluorescent lights, the same blue as a corpse’s fingernails. Dozens of arrows surrounded it on all sides, seemingly drawn by permanent marker on the grimy walls. They all pointed insistently at the slide.
The metallic shriek of the burnt creatures came from close behind me. I felt something sharp swipe at the back of my shirt. I was nearly dragged back, but the fabric ripped. I went stumbling forward. I was only a few feet from the slide. I didn’t know if it would turn out to be my salvation or my damnation.
Without hesitation, I jumped headfirst into it.
***
The slide immediately went straight down. My stomach rose into my throat as butterflies filled my chest. Going down headfirst was far worse and more terrifying than I could have imagined, and I thought I would fall right off the slide and plunge to my death.
The area around the slide looked like an eternal abyss. Where the walls of the hallway ended, I saw a sudden drop into thousands of feet of blackness. It looked like the drop just went on forever. I saw that, far below me, the slide turned and curved back into the same wall I had just come from. It was bizarre, seeing that bright plastic architecture suspended in the void. As I gained speed and the slide grew steeper, a scream ripped its way out of my mouth.
After a steep first drop, the slide leveled off slightly. I bashed into it with a jarring, bone-rattling bounce. All the air was knocked out of my lungs. My vision went black for a long moment. I was carried away downwards on the slide at a tremendous speed, destination unknown.
I don’t know how long I descended, terrified and shrieking. Far below me, I saw the slide go up into a loop and then level off. I felt a rising sense of horror as I approached the loop, certain that I would simply fall out at the top and break every bone in my body.
I approached the loop at a tremendous speed, feeling the cold air that smelled of the wet carpets blowing across my face as I went up it. For a terrifying moment at the top, I felt myself losing momentum, slowing down. I felt sure I would fall. But I was just carried over through the other side of the loop. Sweating and breathing heavily, still positioned headfirst on this nightmarish slide, I saw it level out ahead of me. The slide curved back around 180 degrees and entered a glowing, white hatchway built into the wall.
Still moving at a considerable speed, still going headfirst, I crashed through the hatchway. The slide suddenly ended. I shrieked as I fell through open air. I saw bright lights all around me and heard the whirring of gears. Someone was screaming nearby, but it sounded more like an excited scream than one of pain or terror.
I saw a pool of water rippling underneath me, coming up fast. A moment later, I sunk through the surface like a stone. I kicked my legs, aiming myself back up. Finally, I broke through and inhaled a large gulp of sweet air. My heart was beating so fast that I thought it might explode. I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I thought I would die on that slide, and the panic still hadn’t fully left me.
I looked around, confused. I was in front of some sort of indoor amusement park. I treaded water in a rectangular swimming pool near the front gate. The amusement park itself was contained in a massive room thousands of feet wide and thousands of feet high. The sickly beige carpet still covered every inch of the floors, even on the ramps leading up to the rides and the stairs leading up to the water slides.
The fluorescent lights hung down on cables hundreds of feet long from a ceiling that loomed high above us. They flickered and strobed by the hundreds, sending ghastly shadows searching across the park. Rollercoaster tracks and waterslides curved and rose off in the distance. “The Badlands Playground” was engraved in iron above the entrance.
And there were people on some of the rides- mostly men, all wearing black military gear and carrying automatic rifles and pistols. Rollercoaster cars continuously ascended to high points then dropped as the soldiers on them laughed and cheered. One soldier smoking a cigarette next to the front gate looked up abruptly as I dragged myself out of the pool. He had an automatic rifle slung around his shoulder. Around his waist, he had what looked like grenades and flashbangs. He pointed the rifle at me for a long moment. I paused in mid-step, frozen with fear, my clothes soaked and my shoes squishing with chlorine water.
“Hey kid, what the fuck are you doing here?” the soldier said as cigarette smoke oozed from his nose and mouth in a gray cloud. His eyes looked as cold and flat as frozen steel. I saw a nametag pinned on his kevlar vest that said “Sergeant Overholser”.
“I have no goddamned idea,” I whispered hoarsely as I approached him. “I think I went in the wrong basement. I don’t know how that’s possible, but somehow I did. I was in my house, I went downstairs, and suddenly, I’m being chased by weird charcoal monsters! Why are you guys here? And where is ‘here’, anyway?”
“We are professionals investigating an anomaly,” Sergeant Overholser said coldly. “This place is that anomaly. We call it the Badlands.” I looked at all those clad in full military gear, riding the many rides of the Badlands Playground. Some of them had even stripped down to their boxers and were riding the brightly-colored blue, red and green water slides with whooping cheers. The slides spiraled and curved all around the park, going under coasters and over swings and merry-go-rounds.
“It looks like you guys are just playing on the rides,” I observed.
“That’s part of the anomaly!” he said defensively. “We have to ride them for, um, research purposes. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jake,” I said. “Jake Booth. Is there a way out of here?” Sergeant Overholser motioned with his head towards strips of red tape with arrows leading underneath the entryway to Badlands Playground.
“We always leave a trail heading back,” he said. “But this place is weird. Sometimes it changes on us. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own.” As if the Badlands itself had heard his words, something like a tornado siren started shrieking overhead. The fluorescent lights all cut out simultaneously, plunging us into total darkness for a few long moments. I couldn’t hear anything over the cacophony of the siren. I listened to the rise and fall of its eerie wailing. The excited shrieks of the passengers on the rides cut off instantly.
Red emergency lights flicked on all around us, spilling their bloody light all over the amusement park and the pale faces looking down from the rides. People started screaming, but it wasn’t the excited cheers I heard before. Now they were shrieks of terror.
“Fuck!” Sergeant Overholser cried, “it’s changing! Get off the rides, get off the rides!”
The nearby swing carousel had a few men chained in their seats. It continuously sped up in the crimson glow until they zoomed around in a blur, their pale faces frozen into silent screams. I watched, horrified, as they raised their arms out to us, pleading for help. They started to spin so fast that they seemed to be losing consciousness, and then there was a sound like a gunshot as the metal chains holding the chairs snapped. The soldiers went flying, still locked into the chairs. They smashed into the whitewashed walls with a shattering of bones and a clanging of metal. They gave a muffled grunt as they fell. I saw, with horror, that their skulls had been crushed and their necks broken from the impact.
I heard crashing and wails of agony from all around us. A roller coaster car flew through the air and smashed into the wall only twenty feet away from me and Sergeant Overholser, killing the man and woman riding it instantly. They were thrown forward and their bodies almost seemed to explode as they crashed into the wall.
It looked like the water in the water slides had all transformed to thick, clotted blood that dribbled slowly down the plastic surfaces. Writhing black worms as thin and long as tapeworms swam in those rivers of blood, slithering like water snakes through the currents. As I watched, I saw them twist their long bodies around anyone unlucky enough to be on the slide, suffocating their victims as they sucked their blood with lamprey-like suckers..
“Shit! I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the rides,” Sergeant Overholser yelled excitedly, grabbing my shoulder and roughly shoving me towards the entrance. “I was against it from the start. I told those idiots I wouldn’t ride those things for all the opium in China. But the engineers said they were all fine, all structurally sound, no danger, all that bullshit. But they weren’t counting on this place changing to a hellscape in the blink of an eye. Dammit!”
As we left the Badlands Playground, the screams of the dying followed us out, rapidly growing fainter and weaker before finally fading into nothing.
***
The bloody glow of the emergency lights continued as the Badlands Playground turned into a hallway with a thin piece of red tape fixed firmly down the middle. Doors opened up on both sides of us. I saw suburban neighborhoods in some of them, but they were contained inside of massive rooms with whitewashed walls and beige carpets lining the roads and sidewalks. Everywhere we looked, the fluorescent lights were dark. Only the emergency lights stayed lit, giving off their dim, eerie radiance.
“Keep a sharp lookout, kid,” Sergeant Overholser whispered grimly as our feet pounded the carpet with dull thuds. “Whenever the emergency lights turn on, weird shit starts crawling out of the woodwork. And this place is filled with weird shit. Even in normal times.” As if on cue, something hunched slithered out of a threshold only a few feet in front of us.
Its skin was a sickly gray color, like the skin of a corpse. Its freakishly long arms tapped the ground in time with its heavy footsteps as it skittered across the ground. At the end of its stick-like arms and legs, it had vicious curving talons. The creature was a naked, twisted thing, about five feet tall, and its entire body was covered in thousands of ears. It turned towards us, its eyeless face rising to its full height. A deep sore of a mouth opened up, revealing sharp, twisted fangs that intertwined like the roots of a tree. I felt like this creature must hear every beat of my thudding heart. All those ears seemed to twitch with every panicked breath I took.
The monster lunged at us, pushing off the ground with its emaciated limbs and soaring through the air in a blur. Sergeant Overholser raised his rifle to fire, but the beast smacked into him like a freight train. They went flying off together, their bodies spiraling through the air. The monster’s sharp sticks of legs and arms wrapped around Sergeant Overholser’s body, embracing him like a lover. I saw the talon-like fingers and toes of the creature biting deeply into Sergeant Overholser’s legs and arms, drawing rivers of blood that flowed in thickening currents. The monster drew the fighting, sweating man closer to its fangs that grew like tumors in its slash of a mouth.
Sergeant Overholser was able to bring the rifle down and shoot the creature in the chest. It gave an ear-splitting wail that seemed to contain many harsh, gurgling voices in one. Blood as sickly green as swamp water oozed from the bullet hole in the creature’s body, dribbling down its many ears in thick, clotted clumps.
I ran over to help him. While the creature was distracted, I gained as much speed as I could and tackled it to the side. Its skin felt loose under my grasp, like the skin of a corpse, but it burned with a feverish intensity. The gurgling scream of the monster rose higher as its sharp arms came up. The black talons sliced through the air and towards my skin.
I felt a deep burning pain across my chest as it gouged a deep slash from my left shoulder down to my right leg. Blood immediately poured out of the wound, warm and wet. I backpedaled away in terror and pain as it continued thrashing its sharp limbs in all directions like an enraged hornet.
Bleeding and wild-eyed, Sergeant Overholser started to stumble to his feet. I ran over to help him up. I locked my arms around his back and tried to pull him. I felt his warm blood soak into my clothes from his many deep stab wounds.
The monster lunged across the room at us. I screamed and dropped Sergeant Overholser, falling on my back in an attempt to escape. The monster landed hard on him, its sharp fingers stabbing into his right shoulder, pinning his arm to the ground. The rifle went sliding across the hallway, far out of his reach.
In desperation, he looked up at me one last time as he pulled a grenade from his pocket.
“Run,” he whispered, his eyes flat and dead. I didn’t need to be told twice. As he yanked the pin, I sprinted away from that place of horrors. I followed the red tape forward, but to where, I didn’t yet know.
A few heartbeats later, the hallway exploded in an inferno of soaring flames and black smoke.
***
The red tape with the arrows continuously pointed forward as the hallway turned left and right, veering off in random directions at intersections and over bridges of beige carpet laid over a seemingly endless drop into blackness. From the rooms all around me, I heard strange screaming, chewing and breathing. I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, never looking back, afraid of what I might see if I did.
Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, the red tape ended at a shadowy threshold. Cautiously, I walked forward, taking out my cell phone and shining the light around. I found myself in a cave. It was eerie, looking back and seeing a random doorway built into the granite wall.
There were signs that the cave had been used by some agency or another. Crates of weapons, ammo and supplies were stacked haphazardly around the entrance to the Badlands. But I saw no one here.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed eerily in the stone cavern, but no one responded.
Sighing and holding my phone out in front of me for light, I staggered through the tunnels of the cave, looking for a way out. After about twenty minutes of winding passageways, I found it.
Somehow, I ended up coming out in Death Valley National Park, over a hundred miles from where I had started. Exhausted and thirsty, I started trekking across the desert towards a nearby road, ready to hitchhike back home and forget this entire nightmare ever happened.
***
I walked in the front door, my clothes ripped and blood covering my body. I had been quite a scene, and it had been difficult to get anyone to pick me up. Getting back home had taken me twelve hours. And, of course, Death Valley had no cell phone service.
“You’ve been missing for two days!” Mom said, her face pale and shocked. “The police are looking for you! Whose blood is that all over you? Are you hurt?” I just shook my head.
“Most of it’s not mine,” I said, exhausted.
“But where have you been?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you,” I said wearily, trying to forget the horrors of the Badlands.

It was hard to stay asleep today. I didn't dream much because I was so dehydrated. I could see the dream imagery forming. The last dream was almost non-existent. I completely forgot all of it when I woke up. Which never happens to me, usually. I'm surprised I got the dreams that I did.
In the first dream, I was sleeping. I could see myself laying where I sleep. Spirits were around me, watching me. I felt uncomfortable. The energy felt somewhat dark. I ended up waking up, looking up to see what time it was. 4:44 AM.
I fell back asleep, having another dream where I was being looked at. My partner was there, staring intently at me. I was next to a stranger, talking to some girl. I vaguely remember grabbing his arms, comforting him. Earlier, I had a nightmare. Right before this dream. A TV was playing, showing a compilation of all the 'coming soon to theatres' bumpers. I surprisingly wasn't scared of it. I pretended to be fearful of it, calling out for him to save me. He must've been making up for it, because he didn't appear then.
Later, I was with my brother. He and his friend were eating. I saw a miniature sized pie crust of what was once sugar cream pie. I know there was mini custard pies/tarts before this dream. I had the urge to steal, once I left the cafeteria; seeing a helados bar, the guava one. Purple and teal tiles blurred in the corner of my eye. My lucidity seemed to be affecting the surroundings. I saw a few napkins dispensers; I grabbed a subtle blue one, wrapping it around the bar. I intended on putting it in my messenger bag (my book bag). In school, I used those instead of regular backpacks. My sister and niece showed up, directing me towards a escalator. It was broken. Were were now in a mall. I saw one of my local supermarket chains behind a entire wall of paneled glass. As we were going up the stairway. We used all our force to get it to work. We also passed a dvd store. I got nervous, thinking the young xennials/old millennials working there owned the other shop I stole the helados bar from. It was on the floor when I stole it. I woke up again not long after this, having that last dream that I do not remember. My friend from facebook was in it. I can recall a fridge, and lobby. There was a hallway I was looking down into. A woman was either standing there, or being projected from some film reel. There were two movies I saw/watched, which I'm surprised I can remember thinking about. When I woke up, nothing substantial came back to me, other than those vague details. My mind didn't memorize anything.
Also, when I woke up after the first dream, descent by fear factory was playing through my head. The end lyrics. It had been stuck in my head before awoken.

Fritz Gerhard lit a cigarette and inhaled. Beside him, Aldrich Grubber said, “Sometimes I wonder why I go on.”
They were talking about politics, mainly, their shared anticommunism. They had been partners for nearly ten years now, and only in the past few months had they felt comfortable enough with each other to speak freely. It was 1972 A.D, and East Germany was still a communist nation. When Fritz was a child, Radio Free Europe predicted that communism in East Germany would collapse by 1960, and that the German Democratic Peoples’ Republic would have no choice but to combine with the west. Though Fritz loathed the government, he had to admit: It showed no signs of collapsing.
“Because that’s human nature,” Fritz said. “We cling to the last little bit of hope until our soul leaves us.”
Aldrich grunted. Ahead of them, the road continued through hilly pastureland, Cattle and sheep grazed behind meager fencing. It would be dark soon.
“Life isn’t so terrible,” Fritz said. And it wasn’t. They had both been officers in the Volkspolizi (People’s Police) for over ten years; both made good money; both were decorated and trusted by the state. “We have things.”
“But we can’t be free.”
Fritz shrugged. “We’re free enough.”
Aldrich grunted again.
“I say...”
A loud, flat bang filled the day, rattling the car windows. Aldrich instinctively hit the brakes, and the Lada fishtailed. Fritz cried out and held on. Aldrich fought for control of the wheel, but it locked up, and they flipped, the world going head-over-heels in a quick and sickening fashion. Fritz screamed. Something smacked him in the head, and darkness stole over him.
The last thing he knew, a fence post crashed through the windshield and Aldrich, sweet, kind, poor Aldrich, was killed.
***
Consciousness came slowly and painfully back. His head hurt. His arm hurt. He moaned and tried to move, but a hot flare of agony snaked up his side.
For a moment, he was totally disoriented. He opened his bleary eyes, and saw only cracked glass before him. He remembered the crash. Jesus Christ. He was still buckled in, hanging upside down.
He looked over at Aldrich. The stake had gone through his stomach; his eyes were glazed and his mouth was crusted with blood.
Fritz closed his eyes, something like grief washing over him. Aldrich wasn’t just his partner; he was also his friend.
Sighing, Fritz fumbled for the safety latch, found it, and clicked it; the belt released him, and he fell out of his seat. Pain consumed him, and for a moment he was sure he was going to pass out again.
When he was certain he wouldn’t lose consciousness, Fritz summoned the energy, and reached for the door handle.
Aldrich moved.
Caught unaware, Fritz started. He turned, and Aldrich’s eyes were open. He let out a thin groan and lifted his arms.
“Aldrich!” Fritz gasped. Aldrich saw him, and began reaching for him. “Hang on. I’ll...”
...What? The man was impaled on a massive wooden stake, tacked to his seat. He couldn’t get him free by himself.
The radio!
In his crash-addled haze, Fritz had forgotten the radio. He reached for it, grabbed the handset, and pulled it close to his mouth.
Aldrich reached for it.
“Aldrich, stop.”
Fritz depressed the TALK button.
“This...”
Aldrich caught hold of the cord and ripped it out.
“Aldrich!” Aldrich didn’t seem to notice. He was suddenly alive with energy, and his sole purpose was grabbing hold of Fritz. He was delirious. If Fritz didn’t get help soon, he’d die.
“I’ll be back,” Fritz said.
Luckily, the passenger side window had been busted out in the crash. Fritz elbowed the rest of the glass shard away and wiggled out onto the grass. When he got to his feet, a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him, and he nearly sank to his knees; he caught himself on the car’s under side, and spent several long minutes steadying himself.
Somewhat under control, Fritz let go and went around the front of the Lada; during the crash, they went off the highway and now rested at the bottom of a slope falling from the highway. Fritz wasn’t sure he could climb the rise, but he did, pausing for breath three times.
When he reached the highway, the first thing Fritz noticed was the fire. A quarter of a kilometer distant, thick trees crowed the road. Beyond them, the village of Karl Marx straddled the Polish border.
“Jesus.”
The orange glow of fire ebbed beyond the trees. Columns of thick smoke poured into the heavens. A gunshot rang distantly out, and someone screamed.
The memory of the bang came suddenly back. Something must have happened. An attack of some sort.
When the initial shock passed, Fritz noticed something else: A thin white mist clinging to the ground; the pastures stretching east and west of the highway were lost beneath it.
He had to get help. Strussltdort was ten kilometers back; he’d never be able to walk it. Karl Marx was closer, but it looked like it needed help itself.
He had no choice.
Fritz began to walk.
For the first few steps, hot pain shot up his left leg, but the farther he went, the more the pain lessened. His foot, however, panged every time it met concrete. It wasn’t broken, just sprained. When he was in the National Peoples’ Army (NVA) during the early sixties, he broke his other foot, and the pain was exquisite; he couldn’t walk for a month, and even after that, only slowly and for short periods of time. That was during the construction of the Anti-Fascist Rampart in Berlin (the Berlin Wall, Radio Free Europe called it). He was trying to cross into the west but stepped in a post hole. As far as anyone else ever knew, he was doing a routine inspection.
Presently, Fritz stopped to rest a moment. Ahead, the road continued before disappearing into the trees. Closer now, he could smell the thick tang of smoke. More gunshots rang out. He nearly lost his nerve and turned around, but Aldrich was counting on him, so he pressed himself forward. The trees closed in around him, and he was standing on the outskirts of Karl Marx. The road continued ahead before rising up a steep hill. Houses and shops lined the way. The mist was thicker here.
At the first house Fritz came to, he knocked but revcieved no answer, even when he stated he was Volkspolizi. He staggered to the next one and tried again, same thing. Only this time, he saw a curtain flutter, and knew someone was in there.
They were cowering in their homes. He couldn’t blame them.
Defeated, Fritz followed the highway up the hill. At its summit, he stopped, horror rising within him. Below, the main part of Karl Marx, wedged between the hill and the river, was aflame. Screams and gunshots rose into the night. His eyes darted from one building to another, one neighborhood to another. The police station was in the city’s eastern quadrant, which was thankfully devoid of fire.
Fritz withdrew his service revolver and started toward the police station. He met no one on the way.
The Karl Marx police station sat on a once fashionable corner not far from the river. As he drew closer, gunfire startled him, and he threw himself against a wall. Slowly, ever so slowly, he inched his way to the corner, and hazarded a glance.
Nothing. The street stood empty save for an abandoned car parked at a weird angle before the station steps. The gunfire came again, echoing. Judging by the sound, it was coming from several streets over.
Summoning up all the courage he could, Fritz craned his neck around the corner and peered down the street. Cars, like the one just ahead of him, littered the roadway, many of them left diagonally across the street. Doors stood open on many of them, as though their occupants fled in a hurry. A fire burned at the end of the street; from here Fritz couldn’t see what was afire, though he suspected it was a building. In the flicking orange glow of the flames, Fritz thought he saw people, staggering left and right like shell-shocked refuges. Again, he was too far away to tell exactly who they were; they very well could have been invading soldiers or even aliens.
Risking exposure, Fritz darted across the street, sidestepping a metal trashcan lying on its side like a wounded animal. It wasn’t until he was halfway up the steps that he noticed a man was on the sidewalk, curled up in the fetal position. Fritz stopped, considered going to him, but decided against it: The pool of blood around his head marked him as a corpse. No one could lose so much of the stuff and live.
Shaking his head, Fritz went through the doors and stopped. Before him, a wide, general office area opened up, the middle of which was crammed with desks and filing cabinets. The floor was tile, black and white, and the walls were smooth wood-paneling. A bust of Karl Marx glared down at him from one of the cabinets.
“Hello?” Frtiz called, letting the doors fall shut behind him. His voice bounced off the walls and came back to him.
He was alone.
Looking quizzically about himself like a tourist, he crossed the office and came to a frosted glass door that, he assumed, led back to the cells. Just as he was about to turn the knob, a dark form slammed against the glass, startling him and leaving what Fritz instantly knew was a smear of blood. The shadow, screaming and moaning like a madman, threw itself against the door again, and it shook in its frame. It wouldn’t take long before the door gave way.
For the first time that night, Fritz drew his gun.
The shadow continued its assault.
If there were answers to be found, it wasn’t here.
Fritz went back to the main doors. Behind him, the frosted glass began to crack.
Outside again, the smell of smoke pinched Fritz’s nostrils. In the short several minutes that he had been in the police station, another fire had erupted, this one in the building against which he had hidden only minutes before: Whirling funnels of fire rose from the second story windows. The place must have been burning this whole time.
Remembering the people he thought he saw before entering the police station, Fritz turned to look down the street, and what he saw horrified him:
Dozens, if not hundreds, of dirt and blood-caked survivors lurched toward him, some of them with previous injuries. They shambled along the street, the sidewalks, their heads hung and their arms raised as if for supplication.
“What’s happening?” Fritz called.
One-by-one, their heads rose. Their eyes, each and every one, were dead and white, their faces burned, blasted, and ripped to shreds. Flesh hung in long, wet tatters, and, in some grizzly cases, teeth and bone were exposed. When they saw him, they came for him, their arms raising and their hollow moans becoming more animated, more excited.
Something slammed against the door behind him, and he let out a thin, womanish scream.
What was going on?
No time to question. The lumbering mass of death was closing in. Thinking fast, Fritz hopped over the stairway railings, landed on his feet, and ran in the opposite direction. Around a corner, the glow of the fire was stronger, bathing storefronts in its warm light. The street continued for a bit one before T-boning a cross route. The cross route, running east-to-west, was lined with tall buildings. Beyond, an impenetrable sheet of fire danced madly with the night. Screams, shouts, and gunshots under laid the mammoth crackling.
For a moment, Fritz was paralyzed. Then, as the first of the...monsters came around the corner, he ran. He’d circle back, he decided, circle back and get out of the city.
At the cross street, Fritz turned west, and came face-to-face with a man. Screaming, Fritz raised his gun, but the man fell back a step, his hands going defensively up. “Don’t shoot!” he cried.
Fritz cocked the gun. “What’s going on?” he demanded, his voice cracking. “What’s happening?”
The man, his hands still up, shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a chemical. It’s making people crazy. We have to get out of here!”
“Chemical?”
The man looked back over his shoulder. Fritz craned his neck, and gasped: The streets were filled with them, all slowly, deliberately moving forward.
“This way!” Fritz said. He led the man east along the cross street.
“Where are we going?” the man asked, panting.
“Circle back,” Fritz said.
At an alley, Fritz paused. The things were far behind them. To the left, a side street led into the roaring blaze.
“Come on,” Fritz said, ducking into the alley. On the other side, the street was empty. Another street led up the hillside.
“We’ll get out of here,” Fritz said, smiling.
“Thank God.”
They started across the street, but before they could fully cross, an army of them appeared on top the rise. Fritz came to a screeching halt, his heart jumping into his throat. Oh no.
Behind the marauders, a spotlight winked on, blinding Fritz. He turned, threw his hands up, and stumbled back.
“Those are our men!” the man yelled, elated. “NVA!”
Then the shooting started.
“What the hell?”
Bullets whizzed left and right of them; some went wild into the air and others hit the ground, kicking up dust. “They’re trying to kill us!”
“Come on!” Fritz yelled, grabbing the man by his shirt.
At the other end of the alley, the people were so close they were nearly able to grab Fritz.
“Come on!” Fritz screamed.
They followed the street east. At another corner, they turned south, toward the oncoming army, and stopped. A police car, its lights flashing, blocked the street. Several officers stood behind it. When the officers saw them, they raised their rifles, but Fritz threw his hands up. “Don’t shoot!”
The officers looked at each other, as if unsure of what to do. When the first of the monsters came around the corner, one of the officers shouted something and waved them on.
“Are you bitten?” the cop asked as Fritz squeezed past the back fender of the car.
“Bitten?” Fritz asked. “No!”
“What about you?”
The man looked nervously to the oncoming mass.
“Were you bitten?”
The man shook his head.
The cop nodded. He looked at Fritz again, examining his uniform. “Do you have a weapon, comrade?”
Fritz held up his handgun.
“That’ll do. FIRE!”
The officers opened fire on the advancing hoard. Bodies spun and jerked and fell. Some of them, however, impossibly, got back to their feet and came back again.
Fritz aimed his gun into the mass and squeezed off three shots, one of which struck one of them in the head, sending him to the ground.
“Hey!”
Fritz looked behind him. The NVA was advancing. The cop next to him sighed, relieved. “It’s about time they...”
The NVA opened fire. The cop flew back against the car and went down. One of the windows shattered. On the other side, the monsters pressed against the roadblock, their wavering arms outstretched and seeking.
Fritz went down to his knees. They were trapped. Either way they could go, there was death.
“Hey!” the man who’d followed him said. Fritz looked up. He was on the sidewalk, next to an open manhole. The heavy metal cover was next to it. “Come on! Let’s go!”
Fritz sprang to life. The man went down first and he followed. The creatures were just behind them.
Something exploded. A rocket, a mortar, Fritz didn’t know, but the ground shook and he fell the rest of the way down, landing on a concrete ledge flanking a rushing river.
“We’re safe,” the man said. “Safe.”
***
“Where are we going?”
Fritz was following while the man (Johan Gertz) led. The ledge along the water was narrow, barely wide enough to support them. The shadows were held at bay by the bare bulbs lining the ceiling.
“Out of town.”
At one point, they had to wade across the water to another opening leading away from the city. As the journey continued, Johan began to grow tired.
“I need to sit,” he said.
He and Fritz sat side-by-side on the ledge.
“What happened back there?” Frtiz asked, suddenly remembering what Johan had said on the surface. “A chemical?”
Johan nodded. “It was a plane crash,” he said. “God knows what they were carrying.”
“A plane crash?”
Johan nodded again. “Big plane. It looked military. It was passing over, then it just...dropped. When it blew up, gas went everywhere. Like fog.”
Fritz remembered the loud crash he and Aldrich had heard.
Aldrich!
In the chaos he’d forgotten all about him.
“We have to get going,” Fritz said, getting to his feet.
Johan shook his head. “Give me a minute.”
For the first time Fritz noticed his countenance: He was pale and drawn, and sweat sheened on his narrow face. His chest rose and fell, rapidly, as though he were having trouble breathing.
“Are you alright?”
Johan shook his head. “I...”
Before the words had even left his lips, Johan pitched forward, splashing into the water. Screaming, Fritz jumped in after him.
“Johan? Johan!”
Fritz checked his pulse.
He was dead.
But why were his eyes opening? Why was he grabbing him? Why was...?
Fritz screamed in agony as the dead man’s teeth sank into his neck. Possessed of the strength of desperation, he heaved Johan off of him. His face was covered in blood.
The rushing, ceaseless tide caught the dead man and pushed him away. As he passed, he reached out for Fritz’s pants, his fingertips just brushing his leg.
And then he was gone.
Shaking, Fritz fumbled his way back to the ledge, tried to climb back up, but splashed back into the water. The tide carried him downstream a few feet before he gathered the strength to stand. This time, he succeeded in climbing back onto the ledge; he slumped against the wall and felt his wound.
It wasn’t deep, thank God, but it was bleeding profusely. He had to get out of here and find a doctor, fast.
Fritz forced himself back up.
***
Fritz could scarcely move the manhole cover. He was weak, feverish, and slathered in sweat.
When the lid moved gratingly across the pavement, Fritz let out a small victory cry and hoisted himself up.
For a long moment, he lay on the asphalt. He heard no noise, no gunshots and no screaming. He figured he’d made it to one of the suburbs outside the city. The star-splattered sky was lightening to orange, giving testament to the passage of time.
When Fritz finally struggled to his feet, he saw the city of Karl Marx below, but from a different angle than he had when he came in. The whole thing was on fire now. Squinting, he thought he saw the streets crammed with...with those monsters.
Overhead, a jet plane roared from the south. Fritz looked up, saw its streaking underbelly in the first light of the morning sun, and watched something fall of it and plummet to the ground. Just before the bomb exploded, vaporizing him, Fritz thought: I wonder what people taste like.

First...Previous...Next
Colonist Memory Log: Captain Alan J. Emerson
UNS Evandra
Steam valves hissed out in mechanical chorus with our footsteps as me and my friends followed our mysterious new ally through the labyrinthine corridors of this massive underground complex. Whoever this lobster person was, they seemed to know quite well where we were going; never for a second giving pause no matter how many available paths split from our own.
At first, this strange creature had attempted to speak with us. Unfortunately, the meaning behind his strange chitterings was lost along the language barrier. After a short while spent laboring without avail to speak with us, the alien instead began clicking quietly to themself.
“Where do you think he’s taking us?” Alice asked, her words giving form to the question on all of our minds. Naturally, none of us truly knew the intentions of this mysterious guide. So far, their interactions with us seemed more underpinned with curiosity and gratitude than hostility of any kind. Honestly, I heavily doubted they could harm us even if they wanted to. Sure their four-pincered claws didn’t exactly look pleasant to be on the receiving end of, but standing at only about five feet tall, it seemed unlikely to be any stronger than a Human.
Replying to his wife’s question with a shrug, Alex cast his gaze to either side of us in silent admiration of the impressive clockwork arrangement along these walls. “My GRIM says we’re going in the general direction of that settlement, so I’m gonna have to assume there.”
Walking along behind this apparently sapient ‘arthropod’, my thoughts again returned to what had happened outside. Any civilization advanced enough to build this underground complex surely wouldn’t still be using such primitive weaponry. “Speaking of that settlement…” I interjected, hoping to get the other Als’ perspective on our situation. “Was it just me or did that place look like something straight out of the Iron Age?”
“It wasn’t just you,” affirmed Alice with a nod, the light from her torch casting twisted shadows along the mysteriously-mechanized wall. “Then again: for a society like that to build something like this is—”
“Downright impossible!” I finished for her, my mind racing with seemingly endless possibilities. Being the sole career engineer in our little clique, I was our current authority on all things mechanical. The mechanisms laid out within this complex reminded me distinctly of a Victorian clock tower, only scaled up to an absolutely obscene degree.
Beside me, Alex damn-near jumped out of his skin as without warning the gears began to turn. Off in the distance, larger mechanisms could be heard churning against each other in pursuit of some enigmatic end. Whatever this machine did was clearly far more advanced than simply telling time.
Seeing the mechanisms of this machine turning before his eyes, the lobster man offered up into its echoing halls a rather pleased-sounding chitter before beginning to ‘murmur’ beneath his breath. Confused as I may have been regarding this behavior, I most certainly wasn’t about to stop him. These strange mumblings, after all, gave my Cogitolink more data to work with synthesizing our new friend’s language.
Whatever it was the lobster man was saying, the GRIM seemed relatively sure that it was some sort of prayer—not exactly comforting given the Human habit of doing that spontaneously only whilst the reaper looms near.
Preliminary Language Synthesis Complete! Activating…
Glancing back at the faces of my friends, I could tell by their mild discomfort that they too had just received that very same message. It wasn’t so much that we heard these words physically, but rather that they seemed to penetrate our very thoughts—a sensation that would take some getting used to.
Thankfully, that strange feeling didn’t last long, soon being replaced within me by awe as the lobster’s clicking sounds suddenly made sense as words. “We are close, my uncarapasced friends!” He began excitedly, casting a glance back to us as we eyed him with newfound comprehension. “The Great Omnus will want to speak with you.”
“And who might that be?” I asked him, my tongue clicking to imitate his language. Though I had thought the words in English, the GRIM expertly directed my mouth to speak in their vernacular.
“So you do understand me!” Replied the lobster man, the antennae on his face twitching slightly in a gesture my translator interpreted as amusement.
“O-only since a few seconds ago,” Alex began, his mouth moving many miles a minute with pure, childlike excitement. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Alien. My name is Alex, this one here is Alan, and that’s my wife Alice.”
“Pleasant to meet you, Alex. I am Kritivek; Warrior Priest of the Great Omnus. Pardon my ignorance, friend, but might I ask what precisely you are?”
I groaned in frustration, understanding now that it would be awhile before my own inquiry would be answered. I could hardly blame Alex for wanting to converse with alien life, but I really would’ve appreciated him waiting half a fucking second before doing so.
“We’re Humans!” Replied the xenobiologist cheerfully, watching with amazement as the alien before us sounded out the word. “We, uh, came here from another world. Care to answer that same question for us? You know: what you are.”
Again, Kritivek opted to ignore my own question in favor of answering Alex’s “Our species is the Chitaan, if that is what you wished to discover…”
“What was that thing that attacked us back there?” Alice interjected, jabbing her thumb over her shoulder to gesture behind us. I'll admit, that was actually a pretty smart thing to ask. If Humanity was going to have to contend with those creatures, then it would be a good idea to ensure we knew how best to do so.
Now, I was by no means a master of Chitaan body language, but it was pretty clear her question had baffled Kritivek. “Surely you are tugging my antenna!” He exclaimed, the expression remarkably similar to a Human phrase of apparently similar meaning. “Mad Ones are the natural endpoint to a Chitaan’s lifecycle.”
Alice’s brow furrowed in confusion upon this matter-of-fact reply. “Elaborate, please.”
“It is just what happens as a we age!” Kritivek explained, his lower two arms making a gesture I presumed was analogous to a shrug. “With each molting and subsequent growth, our personhood slips away from us little by little until eventually we are naught but mindless, cannibalistic beasts. Is that not how it works for Humans?"
“Fascinating!” Replied Alex, his bright blue eyes sparkling with curiosity regarding this strange lifecycle. “So how long does your species live for?” He asked, once again derailing more important matters in his relentless pursuit of knowledge.
“As long as we still have enough food to molt and grow. Speaking of molting, your friend looks rather on the verge of it. His fleshy exterior seems like it’s practically falling off already!”
Under normal circumstances, I might've viewed this less as an insight and more as an insult; here, however, with the understanding of how their biological cycle differed from ours, I was able to take it on the chin. "We stop growing after a certain age," I explained calmly, casting my gaze down to the wrinkled palms of my hands. "After that, our bodies start slowly breaking down. I am near the end of a Human lifecycle."
"And yet you retain yourself..." The Chitaan clicked ponderously, his lower claws linking together like the hands of a monk. "Most of we Chitaan retain our sense of self until we are [thirty years old] or so. How old might you be, Human?"
"Eighty seven years," I sighed, the words somehow making me feel even more decrepit as they left the tip of my tongue.
For what it was worth, Kritivek seemed downright awestruck by this admission. "Amazing! You are far elder than any sane Chitaan in history. The Great Omnus will want to hear of this! Perhaps your species will be of great use to him."
At last seeing an opportunity to organically repeat my prior inquiry, I took the chance without hesitation. "You've spoken repeatedly of this 'Omnus' figure. Would you care to tell us more about him? I presume he's one of your gods, but correct me if I'm wrong."
"He is our only god!" proclaimed the Chitaan proudly. "Only Omnus has shown himself true. He is the god of this world and has no peer!"
"And where is Omnus?" I asked, deciding it best to entertain Kritivek's divine delusions for now. The last thing Humanity needed right now was a crusade targeted at converting us to some primitive deity.
"At the moment, he is all around us. He hears our words here, but only at the ancient shrines can the Great Omnus truly share his wisdom."
"Before we go any further..." Alice sighed, casting mildly concerned glances toward myself and her husband as she bit her lip anxiously. "You're not planning on like... Sacrificing us or anything, right? You have to tell us if you are!"
Visibly recoiling from us upon this notion, Kritivek snapped his left claw rapidly in a gesture my translator pinned as an emphatic negative. "Oh stars, no!" He replied, maintaining eye contact with us as he continued forth through the darkness. "Our god explicitly forbids sacrifices; especially that of living things. He has no use for food nor treasure, and asks that to honor him we give those things to the ones among us who need it."
"Sounds like a standup guy..." I murmured, not trusting this for a second. Unlike his larger playmate, this Chitaan's outer shell looked far less bulletproof: a weakness I was prepared to exploit if his promises of peace were to prove hollow.
"What is it that has brought you to our world, friends?" Asked Kritivek, his antennae straightening out with curiosity.
None of us really knew how to answer that. How were we supposed to tell an alien native that we'd come to make our home on his planet; to colonize it for the good of mankind. "Our home is gone…” I confessed, the words awakening bitter old memories and sending them on a violent charge to the forefront of my psyche. “We came to this world seeking a new place for our kind.”
“My condolences for your lands…” The Chitaan chittered softly, casting between the three of us a look of pity. “I am sure the Great Omnus will do everything in his immense power to assist you. We need only speak with him.”
Somehow, I got the feeling that ‘Omnus’ would not be the one to help us here on account of his, uh… Existential ambiguity. His Warrior Priest, on the other hand, was very much real. “So what exactly is it you do, Kritivek?" I asked, curious was to why such a supposedly peaceable god would require fighters as a part of their clergy.
"The Great Omnus instructs me to defeat Mad Ones before they can grow large enough to pose a serious threat to our homes. The one you saw is known as Dekaal. He is believed to be over [one hundred years old] and is a direct result of my predecessors' failure.”
"And how large do these 'Mad Ones' usually get?" Asked Alex, anxiously rifling though his pockets in a fruitless search for something with which to take notes.
Pausing for a moment as though mulling over the question, Kritivek soon enough offered up his reply. "Most go mad before they are [nine feet tall]. Those I slay are seldom greatly larger than that. As for how large they can get, there are legends of some growing to be over twice the size of Dekaal.”
Such titanic proportions were difficult to properly picture within this enclosed facility, but nevertheless intimidating. Assuming these 'legends' had some basis in truth, I could definitely see why the Chitaan priesthood of warriors was necessary.
Sluggishly making our way up a massive stairway, soon enough we returned once again to the outside world, stepping out onto a steep mountainside pathway overlooking the settlement below. Pinpricks of light from the stars above us symmetrically opposed the distant light of bonfires below. On three sides, this sizable town was surrounded by a large, stone wall. On the fourth border, however, it was guarded by the relatively small ridge upon which we walked.
Few Chitaan could be seen outside of their homes at this late hour, with just a few dozen huddled around the bonfires, drinking and chittering amongst themselves. Across the way from where we stood was a crudely carved staircase leading up the ridge and into another mechanized cave. There, at least a hundred Chitaan could be seen standing in line to enter.
"Whatever could be in there?" Alex wondered aloud, following Kritivek as he guided us closer to the line. Seeing how many Chitaan there were—how vastly they outnumbered the three of us—my hand reflexively slid down to the gun holstered at my side. Hopefully, a few well-placed shots would be enough to persuade the primitives into more amicable behavior should they choose violence.
Hearing my best friend's question, Kritivek chipperly chittered out a reply. "Just through that entryway is one of the ancient shrines. There, Omnus will receive an audience with you Humans." To have so many lined up for the chance to commune with their god even in the dead of night, clearly Chitaan were a very spiritual people.
Despite how in-demand their god’s guidance apparently was, none of the aliens waiting in line raised any objections to Kritivek cutting past them with us in tow. Catching sight of the Humans newly in their midst, most of the Chitaan regarded us with wide-eyed wonder. Amongst the crowd, names were tagged onto us; with most concluding me and my compatriots to be 'spirits' of some description.
Arriving at the shrine’s front entrance, the four of us were intercepted by an especially large Chitan wearing a rust red shawl. “Brother Kritivek…” He began calmly, paying surprisingly little mind to we Humans as he spoke. “Where are the others? I trust your hunt went well?”
“Unfortunately, your trust would be misplaced there, brother.” Clicked our guide, gesturing down to us with his upper claws as he continued. “We were attacked unexpectedly by Dekaal. He killed Gheyk and Fivik: it is only by the assistance of these beings from another world that I survived!”
“Another world?” Kritivek’s presumed superior repeated, casting his gaze down upon us in disbelief. “Tell me, strange ones: where truly are you from?"
Clearing her throat in order to obtain the larger Chitaan's attention, it was Alice who spoke out in reply. "We are from amongst the stars," she began, pointing skyward to the twinkling void above as her words began to sink in with the priest. "We've come here to your planet in search of a new home, and Kritivek told us your god Omnus may be able to help."
"That he can..." The priest in red replied without hesitation, stepping aside from the shrine entrance and gesturing for Kiritivek to guide us further inwards.
"I must be forgetting things in my old age: why again are we going along with this?" I asked the other Al's in English as entered into the cave where supposedly these people communed with their god.
Offering up in response a shrug of uncertainty, Alice seemed to contemplate my question for a moment before at last offering up a less-than-confident response. "If nothing else, it might ingratiate us with the natives if we play along..."
Cautiously stepping forth into this supposed 'shrine' alongside Kritivek, I was initially taken aback by how closely it resembled some kind of control room. Sprawled in strange patterns across a large dashboard of sorts were a multitude of archaic-looking buttons and levers, alongside a variety of meters measuring enigmatic data. Mounted just above this control panel was what appeared to be the head of a gramophone, and this entire setup looked to be connected with the clockwork walls.
"Great Omnus!” Kritivek began, approaching the console and bowing before it as he spoke. "I bring to you these visitors from beyond the stars. Friends: introduce yourselves to this world's god!"
My best friend wasted no time in complying to this request, similarly stepping forth toward the dashboard kneeling down in deference to the imaginary god it represented. "Great Omnus; I am the one they call Alex and these other two are my companions: Alice and Alan. We are of the Human race, and have come here in search of a new home following the devastation of our world."
Alice was next to speak, introducing herself to this ancient machine apparently worshipped by the natives and offering up further context as to Earth's presumed fate. "Our home was destroyed by the greed of a few, and now it is we of the many who have been tasked with seeking out a place for mankind to reside."
"This is ridiculous..." I grumbled to myself, refusing to unnecessarily bend my legs in deference to an unthinking machine. Regardless of how fervently the natives worshipped this pile of ancient scrap, I could hardly bring myself to take my own words seriously as I spoke. "We were promised that you could assist us O Great One... I imagine that for a god who definitely exists, that shouldn't be a problem, right?"
Disapproving glares shot forth from Alex and Alice upon my clearly sarcastic words of praise. Fortunately, the mocking cadence of my words held no special significance to Kritivek, who regarded them as entirely genuine. Silence fell over the shrine room as despite ourselves we all waited for something to happen. "Apologies..." Kritivek chittered quietly, reassuming his standing posture as he looked to the gears around us. "Omnus takes time to respond. We need only wait a few moments."
"Sure..." I chuckled, rolling my eyes at this clear copout. Obviously, this 'god' was not going to answer us. The Chitaan, it seemed, had found a large machine from some past civilization and decided it to be divine in nature. This was a waste of our time.
That's what I thought, at least, until the gears around us started to move...

[System Agnostic]
​
I occasionally get this message while foundry is open. Once every 2 or 3 times I launch foundry. It tells me that foundry has tried to access a website (or a website has tried to access foundry) and that it has blocked it.
​
Here is the log in full
​
Malwarebytes
www.malwarebytes.com
​
-Log Details-
Protection Event Date: 3/31/24
Protection Event Time: 3:36 AM
Log File: 7ee1ce4e-ef07-11ee-855a-50ebf62189bf.json
​
-Software Information-
Version: 4.6.10.316
Components Version: 1.0.2286
Update Package Version: 1.0.82822
License: Premium
​
-System Information-
OS: Windows 11 (Build 22631.3296)
CPU: x64
File System: NTFS
User: System
​
-Blocked Website Details-
Malicious Website: 1
, D:\Foundry\Foundry Virtual Tabletop\Foundry Virtual Tabletop.exe, Blocked, -1, -1, 0.0.0, ,
​
-Website Data-
Category: Compromised
Domain:
IP Address: [Deleted]
Port: 30000
Type: Inbound
File: D:\Foundry\Foundry Virtual Tabletop\Foundry Virtual Tabletop.exe
​
​
​
(end)
​
Any idea what or why this is?
​
Oh and here is a list of all of my active modules (I am on the PF1e system, though I don't know if that is relevant) just in case it is module related.
​
Active Modules:
----------
About Time v;
Advanced Macros v;
Advanced Templates Pf1 v;
Ambient Doors v;
Better Roll Tables v;
Better Roofs v;
Chat Portrait v;
Combat Enhancements v;
Combat Utility Belt v;
DFreds Chat Pins v;
DFreds Droppables v;
DFreds Effects Panel v;
DFreds Pocket Change v;
Dice So Nice! v;
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Old Boney. Collector of bones. Trapper of souls. Shaper of reality. Were the legends true? I would soon find out.
Harmon Canyon - Harmon Peak
Everything started simple. It was going to be a quick day-hike up Harmon Canyon loop on the 18th. It was Jake, Seth, and me. The trail was uphill for the first stretch, but not too difficult. The path was made of dirt and small rocks, surrounded by hills of dry grass and the occasional patch of green.
We came across a sign made of rusty metal, attached to a pipe. It read out "Harmon Canyon," in a style that looked like it was made in the 1920s. At the time we thought of it as an interesting landmark and snapped some photos, but what we were actually witnessing was our first temporal anomaly.
"How long do you think it's been here?" Seth asked.
"Probably since the dawn of time," I joked, not knowing the truth hidden in my statement.
We kept along the path for a few more miles until we hit an obstacle, a locked gate. The gate was comprised of two chain link fence panels, topped by sharpened metal ends, and connected by a chain lock.
From each side of the gate extended three strands of barbed wire, which attached to a steep drop-off on the left side and up the side of a cliff on the right side. There was no way around it.
"This is where Harmon actually starts," Seth referred to the gate, "do you want to keep going?" We thought about it for a minute and decided to press on.
"What's the easiest way to get past…" I pondered, "…we could go over it, or we could try to squeeze between the barbed wire, but it's too low to go under… yeah the barbed wire would probably be easiest."
"There's no way a person can fit through that barbed wire," Jake said, "you're gonna get shredded to ribbons."
"Yeah the only way is over the top," Seth agreed.
"No I'm pretty sure I could make it," I contested.
Jake threw his water bottle over the gate, "well, now we have to go over," he said as he began climbing the gate.
He made it over, and Seth started following after.
Watching them struggle over, and remembering my historical bad luck hopping fences, (I had some ripped clothes growing up), I decided to try my luck with the barbed wire. I remembered anecdotes of soldiers in WWI who used heavy mats or coats to cover barbed wire before climbing over it. I was wearing a heavy coat myself so I decided to try the same tactic.
I placed the coat shell-side-down on the bottom-most wire, and then slid over it, pushing down as I went, to create the widest possible clearance from the top wire. Going slowly from one foot to the other, I waited for the feeling of a barb digging into my back, but it never came. I made it unscathed.
As we started walking on the next stretch, Jake started feeling his arm. "Ah, I got cut going over that fence," he noted.
"Yeah me too, I got cut on my finger," Seth added.
I checked my arms and hands and found nothing. "Wow, I made it through perfectly fine and I was the one that everyone said would get cut to ribbons."
"Well why didn't you tell me that you could just go through the barbed wire?" Seth complained.
"I did, but you went over the top anyway," I replied.
"Well how was I supposed to know?"
"Because I told you which way would be easiest before you went over."
"Well I never said that you couldn't make it," Jake redacted, "I meant that I couldn't make it."
The setting sun painted the sides of the hills a dark indigo. A breezy chill set in, which made me appreciate my large jacket. Near the bottom of a slope we came across an odd frog. It moved in a zombie-like fashion, deliberately picking up each limb before taking a step, as if trudging through an invisible quicksand.
"What's the frog doing?" Seth asked.
"It's trying to find its little hidey-hole," Jake replied.
It was as if the frog was being called or commanded by an unseen force in the wilderness.
At the bottom of a ravine, there was riverbed that crossed the trail. Slick mud was patched over by the occasional fortunate spattering of rocks. The trail branched into three different paths. After a brief discussion, we decided to take the path to Harmon Peak this time, and explore the other paths on different days.
The trail wound around a mountain, climbing higher and higher. The temperature dropped as night fell, and the misty air kissed our skin like the first bellow of a just-opened freezer.
"Don't worry, the peak is right up this bend," Seth assured us, time and time again. Mile after mile, we appeared to make little progress toward the peak. "Let me see the map," Seth said. On my phone, the marked trail appeared to go off into the wilderness and abruptly stop nowhere near a road.
"If we go to the peak it will take about one more hour, and then we'll go back the way we came, it doesn't look like it loops around." Based on the rate that the temperature was falling, we made the decision to turn back before it got too dark, and return to the peak on a morning hike.
Scary Dairy
The next night we were joined by Renee, and the four of us went on a late-night exploration of Scary Dairy. Seth and I had been there during the day, but not yet at night, and it would the first time for Jake and Renee all together.
My dad drove us over to the entrance, and then took the car to a discrete location to wait, so that there would be no evidence of us being there. We arrived just before midnight.
The four of us went around the bar blocking the entrance, and started along the wide path to the structure proper. Gravel crunched beneath our feet with every step. Shadows darted in and out of sight in the dense scrubland on either side.
Far across the flat brush we saw tall lights and wondered what they might be. Every so often there was a long concrete trough of unknown use on the side of the trail.
About halfway to the first site, the barn, we were startled into alertness by beams of light suddenly flooding the hillside next to us from down the trail, and shifting around the bend towards us. Without saying a word we all darted to the opposite side of the trail, where a large bush made a nice spot of cover to hide behind.
However, getting behind the bush meant going down a slope covered by thickets. The ground dropped at a 45 degree angle, but the top of the thickets remained flat, meaning that each step was more vines, twigs, and thorns between the person standing and solid ground below.
I was leading our four-stack into the brush, and only a few steps in made me take pause, as the shrubbery swallowed me up to my knees.
"Why'd you stop? Keep going!" Seth urged.
"Ok, you go in the lead and get swallowed by the vines," I responded.
Seth moved around the others and towards me at the front, before stopping at the same distance that I went.
"Aaaah I think this is far enough," he agreed.
The four of us crouched as low to the ground as we could and watched as the beams of light curved until they were fully parallel to the trail next to us. We were expecting a car to come creeping through, but it never came. Eventually the lights faded out and we all just stood there bewildered.
We continued down the dirt road until we reached the first structure, the dilapidated barn. The ground was mostly empty, save for some sparse shrubs here and there. Seth and I had been here before, but at night the barn gave off a different aura. Only a few metal panels remained on the rusty frame of the structure.
I herded the others to the center for some group photos. As they stood there posing, we could have been surrounded by thousands of unknown eyes or been the only beings left on the planet.
After we had finished there, we made our way to the main structure. When we arrived, Jake rushed to the front of the group and through the first few doorways, saying something about stepping on homeless junkies.
The rest of us split up and searched various rooms of the sprawling concrete maze to cover more ground.
As I entered my room to search, torn spray paint can husks and shattered glass crunched beneath my steps. A large portion of the concrete wall was broken, revealing the adjacent room. Jutting out from the the broken wall was pipes of various sizes, with one snaking towards the center of the room like the tooth of a human-sized Venus flytrap.
I studied the mishmash of graffiti caked on the walls, and somehow, the garbled letters and words began to make sense. I leaned closer to the wall and slowly a face resembling my own formed in the cracked, gray surface. The face opened its maw and whispered to me, "he… waits… in…"
"AH FUCK! You just stepped on me!" My concentration was broken by a gruff voice in one of the other far-off rooms. When I again looked at the wall, the face was gone, the graffiti was back to random indecipherable scribbling.
Seth and Renee meandered into the room, and started looking around.
"I wonder what this room was, this looks like a shower…" Renee explored a corner of the room with a raised barrier which made a square on the floor.
In the background I heard more unknown, gruff voices echoing from far-off rooms, "Oww! Someone just stepped on my hand!" … "Motherfucker quit steppin' on me!" … "Ah shit! Who just stepped on me!?"
"Woah guys! Look at this spider!" Seth exclaimed, pointing out a large spider which made a home in the tangled pipes jutting from the wall.
I peered out the slim windows placed high on the wall and saw a group of scraggly old men walking away carrying bindles.
After a while, Jake came through the doorway, "all clear guys, there were no homeless junkies," he said, scraping matted hair and blood off of the sole of his boots on the coarse ground debris.
When we were done exploring the rooms of the interior of the structure, we made our way out on to the main courtyard area. I had the others stand on the edge of a raised trough so I could get a photo of them against the mountains.
Right when I was about to take the photo, a glowing light erupted from behind the mountains, and flooded the entire skyline with a spectral gleam. It was as if a pale, sickly sun was rising from behind the mountains, creating a parody of daylight. Knowing that no one would believe us, I hurriedly snapped a few photos of the others silhouetted against the otherworldly radiance.
In a few moments, it sunk back behind the mountains and the night returned to darkness. We each took a few seconds to process what had just happened, before confirming what we witnessed with each other. Was it something signaling to us? Calling to us? We were calling to it? Did it change us? Did we change it?
We ended the exploration there and headed back. We agreed to take it easy over the next few days to recuperate.
Shooter's Paradise
On the 20th we had a shooting day at Shooter's Paradise. We had my AK and Glock, and Jake's 1911. When Jake was trying out my AK, one of the employees approached him and started complimenting the rifle, "that's a nice AK man… it's really nice… it's really nice… would you shoot me with that AK?"
Jake did not know how to respond to him.
Later when we were finishing up, I was the last one on the lane packing up, and the same employee approached me. "Hey you looking forward to Thanksgiving? Yeah, not me, I'm going to my stepdad's side of the family's Thanksgiving this year; my stepdad always has something ignorant to say."
I didn't know what to tell him so I just said "yeah man, that's just how it goes at gatherings sometimes."
Santa Barbara
The 21st was a wharf day in Santa Barbara. We started with a trip to the Sea Center, then we went to State St to find somewhere to eat. After going up and down the street a few times unable to reach a consensus, we decided to play it safe and grab some pizza at Cali-Forno Pizzeria.
We got a table, and while we were waiting for the food to be prepared, we went to the restroom one by one. There was a random child playing on a tablet on the floor of the back hallway, and once we saw that, we knew that the food was going to be amazing. (Our assessment was absolutely correct.)
Harmon Canyon - West Canyon Loop
On the 22nd we did another round of Harmon Canyon, this time with the addition of Renee. We started as it was getting dark, and to our fortune, the second gate into the canyon proper was unlocked, allowing us to stroll right in.
When we came to the main crossroads, we chose to take the west canyon loop this time. It started with a strenuous incline up a mountain, followed by a loop around the top.
"Which way would you guys rather go," Seth asked the group, "the steep side going up and the gradual side going down, or the gradual side going up and the steep side going down?"
We were already starting to feel some aches in our calves. "Let's do the gradual side going up," I offered.
"Nonono, that way's not as good, let's do the other way," Seth countered.
"Well then why'd you even ask?" Renee said exasperated.
Ascending the peak loop was a trial. The damp dirt provided less than optimal purchase. I had to partially zigzag the way up to make it more manageable. City lights faded in the distance behind us like the last embers of a dying fire.
The way down the peak was treacherous. My phone light gave me some clarity, but holding it meant that I had one fewer hand to stop a fall. I took cautious steps on shaky legs. Each potentially false foothold was equally likely to send a handful of rocks or myself tumbling down.
Off of the peak it began to level out, and we were moving at a brisk pace. Since there were fewer natural snares to worry about, we turned our lights off and let natural night vision guide us.
I was near the back of the pack. As I surveyed the dark, flat path, I noticed a chunk that was blacker than the rest.
"Wait a minute…" I stopped to investigate.
I turned my phone flashlight on and beamed it at the void. It was a large hole in the ground, big enough that a person could easily crawl in.
"Hey guys, come look at this!" I got a better angle. The hole was mostly cylindrical but irregular enough that it didn't suggest being man made. It made a diagonal path through the ground, flat enough that a person could slowly descend without sliding, but steep enough to pose a challenge going the other way.
"What the? Get a picture of me in the hole!" Seth climbed in eagerly.
"Haha okay!" I switched my phone into camera mode.
Once Seth was in the hole his expression turned, as if something caught a hold of him. His face changed in stages through excitement, pondering, and realization within the span of a few seconds.
"Guys… I think we're supposed to be in this hole, I think it was placed here for us…"
"What are you talking about?" I assumed he was joking.
"Yeah… there's something on the other side of this hole we're meant to find, come on!" He turned around and faced into the waiting emptiness below.
"Like a bear? Get real! Quit messin' around before you get bit by a snake or something."
"We find it! I know we find it!" Seth exclaimed, crawling full speed into the hole.
Like a blur, his body had almost fully disappeared before I managed to get a grip on one foot. The others grabbed his legs and it took the combined strength of all three of us to drag him backward out of the hole. He was clawing at the dirt the entire time, fighting to get deeper in.
We managed to convince him to leave the hole behind, but on the way out of Harmon Canyon, I realized that I felt it too. From the short time I was in proximity to the hole, something invisible had grabbed me, and it hadn't yet let go.
Ventura Beach
The next few days were relatively calm and normal. The 24th was a beach day, the sun and waves helped temporarily wash away the feeling of being drawn to something out there in the woods. Christmas went without a hitch, and on the 28th I baked up some pistachio cookies.
Santa Paula Punchbowls
However, even as we were celebrating I could see the longing growing in the other's eyes. We came up with a plan to hike the Punchbowls on the 29th. This was a hike that I personally had more experience with than the others. As we were going over the plan and details, I warned the others that the Punchbowls was one of the longest hikes I'd ever done, and it can take three hours each way.
"No, you guys were probably going slow when you went, it shouldn't take more than a half hour there and a half hour back," Seth calculated, "that means if we want to spend an hour there, we have to budget two hours total."
"Well we weren't racing by any means, but we certainly weren't going slow either," I cautioned, "plus, even if we are faster now than my group was back then, the recent rainstorms will create more obstacles to slow us down."
"Okay so add in 15 minutes to account for the mud, that brings us to two hours fifteen minutes, that will be easy."
"I'd say that's still too optimistic by a long shot… we should at least hit the hay early tonight and get an early start. It's past midnight now so if we want to get a full night's sleep and drive down there first thing in the morning, we can probably get there around nine or ten."
Renee seemingly agreed, "exactly, we should only watch like… two or three more seasons of Umbrella Academy before bed."
"Yeah we- wait what?" I turned to look at her.
"Perfect, we'll only watch about four or five more seasons and go to bed early," Seth added.
"Huh!?" I turned to him.
"Oh what the hell, if you all are watching it I might as well watch it with you," Jake sauntered into the living room.
That night turned into an Umbrella Academy marathon that lasted until the sun was high the next day. By the time we got up and out, the sun was past its peak. We drove over to the starting point at the catholic school, and made our way in.
The trail was mostly dirt and mud puddles. It snaked around pieces of fenced-off private lands, where we occasionally utilized the fence to keep our balance on the slippery, narrow path.
As the way opened up to wider wilderness, we were greeted by a rough landscape of large rocks, stout shrubs, and a blanket of white mist. It was a collage of dark greens and grays, with the occasional spat of winter orange.
The casual first stretch was no indication of things to come. Before long, the cliffs and the forest rose to meet us, and then exceed us. The jagged edges of the cliffs revealed a history of geologic change. The overcast sky broke into a full rain and did not cease for the entire night.
More than once we lost our way and had to double back. The river, emboldened by the recent and continuing rains, often swallowed our shoes as we crossed it back and forth. The wet, mossy tops of rocks made vague bridges of dubious purchase.
Every so often there were arrows painted on rocks and trees, but their inconsistency lead to us second guessing ourselves.
"Are you sure we're going the right way? We havn't seen an arrow in a while."
"Cross back over the river and check if there's one on that side."
"Was the last one we saw pointing the way to the Punchbowls or the way back?"
By the time we finally made it to the Punchbowls, the sky was black. A shallow rock-hang offered a slight shelter in the unceasing rain. Some of the others took the opportunity to go for a full swim, but I didn't bother; losing the last bit of body heat that I had was an undesirable outcome.
I laid my shemagh folded on a rock to use as a makeshift seat, and dug through my pack, offering some snacks to the others and enjoying some myself. Everything outside the immediate beam of a flashlight was blanketed in darkness.
Communicating was difficult, we had to shout to compete with the combined roar of the heavy rain and waterfall. Thunder echoed periodically through the forest from unknown origins, warning us that the worst was yet to come.
After soaking up in sufficient rain at the Punchbowls, we headed back. The return trip was only slightly easier than the trip there, with the way fresh in our memory. The heavy rainfall had only increased the size and ferocity of the river, but as the night went on, stepping in the river began to matter less with how drenched we already were from the rain.
A few hours into the return journey, my phone suddenly started to buzz erratically. I looked at the screen and saw a flurry of messages coming in. There were texts, missed calls, and voicemails, they all came at once when we were in range of a cell tower.
First was a text from my dad, saying to give my parents a call because my mom was about to send the police to come look for us, assuming we had gotten lost in the wilderness.
Next I started listening to the voice mails. The first couple ones were from my mom, saying to call her back when I got the message, and then the next few were from an unknown number. The unknown number was one Deputy Jimenez, saying that they were starting up a search party.
I was about to call that number back, when I happened to get an incoming call from it. I picked up and quickly let Jimenez know that we were not lost, we were just still out here because we had an (Umbrella Academy marathon-induced) late start. He said that they would wait for us at the starting area to make sure we made it out okay.
As we started getting close to the end, the familiar fenced-off oil rigs returned. We saw some red and blue flashing lights behind a fence, but when we got within view, they drove off.
We got to a stretch of path that was wide, flat, and straight, with tall, thick forest towering over either side. For fun, we decided to turn off all our flashlights and phone lights to really experience the night. The rain had softened to a gentle sprinkle.
We were still far enough from civilization that no artificial light nor sound penetrated the dense treeline. I could hear the other's breathing, the small blips of raindrops hitting shallow puddles, and the soft tap of each footstep on the damp ground.
The sky married the horizon, where the trees were marked by the voids they created in the patchwork of stars. In those moments we were no longer intruders, strangers, explorers, or anything separate from the environment and the rest of the universe. We were the darkness, and the rain.
When we were almost back at the catholic school, I caught something gray out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look and saw a pale, humanoid figure covered in some type of cloth, huddled against the berm staring at me. My heart stopped beating while I fumbled with my phone trying to shine a light at it.
In the light it was revealed to be an oddly shaped pair of rocks, resembling a body and a head. I could not recall seeing the uncanny formation when we had passed the area the first time.
Jimenez was waiting for us at the entrance of the parking lot. Jake stepped up and put his conversational skills to work, smoothing things over for us. We thanked Jimenez and sent him on his way.
We were more than eager to hop in the car, get our wet socks off, and crank up the heat. The rocks scraped the bottom of the car, a final farewell as the car climbed up on to the road.
Point Mugu
The time was here, the main event: Point Mugu. It was going to be a simple camping trip along the beach. We were packing the supplies on the morning of the 30th.
"Alright," Seth said, "checklist."
"Food," I sounded off.
"In the cooler."
"Water."
"In the trunk."
"Sleeping bags."
"In the car."
"Wood chopping axe."
"Check."
"Tent number one."
"Packed."
"Tent number two."
"What?"
"Tent number two?" I repeated.
"Why would we take a second tent? There's only going to be four to six of us."
"I'm not falling for that again, we only had one tent in Los Padres and I got crunched."
"Yeah we only had one tent and we all fit."
"'Fit' as in crunched, yes we did, but now we don't have to be crunched."
"We had plenty of room and there's going to be fewer of us this time."
"Well then, how about this, I'll take the second tent just for me, and since you'd have plenty of room with me in your tent, you should have even more room without me in that one, right?"
"Ok deal, you can have the second tent, but I bet you're going to be cold in there without everyone, you're going to want to come back to the first tent."
"Sure, we'll see when we get there. So it's final, tent number two is all for me, no take-backs?"
"Yup that tent is all for you."
We drove along the Pacific Coast highway on the way to the campsite. The beach wasn't a particularly enticing destination for crowds because of the predecessing weather, so we had an easy trip.
I took my parent's car, and Jake drove his truck. We gave Gavin and Nick a call but they confirmed that they were backing out; it was going to be Renee, Seth, Jake, and me.
The sky was overcast but not terrible. Off and on there were light drizzles that lasted a few minutes before passing on. The campsite had a wide clearing of dirt, a fire pit, and a table. We placed all the supplies on the table and put a canopy over that to keep everything dry. Jake brought an electronic lantern, which we hung in the center of the canopy.
The two tents were built right up against the edge of the canopy with the entrances facing the table.
"Okay so which tent is your guyses?" I asked.
"This one," Seth pointed out.
"Okay so this one will be all mine then."
"Oooh no! You're not pulling that!" Renee jumped in, "you're not getting a whole tent while the rest of us are crunched in a small tent!"
"What? I thought everyone could fit in one tent easy, even easier if I was in the other tent, right?"
"I never said that, who said that?" Renee asked.
"Seth did, in fact he guaranteed it."
"Well Seth doesn't know what he's talking about, he likes crunching people, plus I wasn't there so he doesn't speak for me."
"Well alright then, I guess we'll do two and two, I knew it!"
We snapped some glow sticks to wear so as not to get lost on the night's adventures. I made a green necklace, and Seth made some purple bracelets. We decided to start things out with a solid nature hike.
On the edge of the campsite there was a long unpaved road that shot off into multiple hiking trails every few miles. At the start of this road was a sign that listed the names of the available trails and the distance to the start of each one.
The group stopped at the sign and we each looked over the names of the hikes to decide which one sounded the best. I started at the top and read each row going down. "Scenic Trail… Overlook Trail… Fireline Trail…" my eyes scanned each name, but only one made me pause.
"Old… Boney…" I whispered to myself. It was the first time I had heard the name in my life, but saying it was somehow familiar, like saying the name of a friend I had forgotten about. It was the very last name on the sign, and it looked slightly different than the rest, like it had just been painted on recently.
"Ah! Found it, that's what we came for!" Seth exclaimed, putting his finger on the Old Boney line.
"What we came for?" I asked.
"Yes, don't you remember?" Renee asked, "we've been searching for Old Boney all week."
"All week?" I started to remember.
"All year," Jake added.
"…All our lives…" I concurred.
Our destination clear, we started down the road as the sun began to set. The unpaved road was mostly empty, with a dense, wall-like treeline on either side. It was mostly straightaways mixed in with the occasional gentle turn. The width was sufficient for two cars to comfortably pass.
Every now and then we encountered various animals always heading down the road the same direction we were, as if sure of their destination. Renee took the opportunity to poke a spotted frog.
A few bends in the road ahead of us, we saw some distant car headlights. As the headlights grew nearer, I somehow felt intention behind them, like they would try to prevent us from reaching Old Boney.
"We have to hide… we can't let them see us!" someone said in an urgent whisper.
"Quick! Into the treeline!" came a response.
The four of us rushed to the trees in unison, peering out from between leaves and branches. The headlights turned out to be a pair of bicyclists riding side-by-side, their beams scanning the ground in front of them like searchlights.
We were too close now to risk letting something stop us. We had to stay out of the light no matter what. We waited until they were far gone before moving an inch. When we could no longer see the glint of their beams, we continued.
At the start of Old Boney's trail, I felt the pull grow strong. Everything was urging me forward, the trees, the grass, the rocks, the wind.
The dusk had turned to night, and not even the moonlight penetrated the treetops. In contrast to the entry road, the actual trail was wide enough only for a person, so the four of us walked in single file.
Small hills led to frequent changes of pace, and obstacles were plentiful. Wry tree branches dove from their perches into the middle of the path, obscuring the way ahead despite the use of Jake's powerful camping lantern.
About every 25 meters, a large log had been placed in the middle of the path to prevent our advance, or at least slow us down. We joked that the barrier logs must have been for preventing mountain bikers from using the trail, but inside we knew that they were placed by our predecessors to stop us from crossing the point of no return.
We found a small area off the side of the trail to rest a bit. There were a few large rocks encircling a patch of lush grass. The tops of the rocks were somewhat flat and made for convenient benches. Jake's lantern perfectly illuminated the small oasis. We sat down and took stock of our situation.
Nearby crickets, distant frogs, and the adjacent stream created a harmonious white noise. In this spot, it felt like Old Boney couldn't reach us. We sat in silence for a moment.
"…It can't hear us here…" I started, "you know, we could turn back… forget about it all… Old Boney, everything…"
The others looked at me for a few seconds, and then at the forest. I know what they knew. The choice was already made. We would end up meeting Old Boney, one way or another.
As soon as we caught our breath we were back at it. With every step I felt an aura of decay and sorrow growing stronger. I often felt gaunt fingers scratching at my ankles, and each time I checked, there was some tangled root in the vague shape of a hand somehow wrapped around my foot, as if it was dragging me under the dirt.
The forest gradually subsided and became a semi-arid chaparral. The way took us around the sides of mountains, where rough stairways cut into the compacted dirt guided us towards oblivion. What flora there was changed from muted green to dry browns and grays, then eventually to dead black.
I knew we were close when pieces of animal carcasses became frequent. Some torn fur here, a mangled paw there, some unidentifiable innards hanging on a branch. One final curved staircase led us to the base of a mountain where a large chunk of the side was missing.
The group spread four across and stared wordlessly into that alcove. At first I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. I blinked multiple times, and finally had to look away and take it in one piece at a time.
There was a gigantic, primitive, throne shape cut into the rusty red rock of the mountain, about five meters high and two meters across. Upon the seat was a droopy, tangled mass of coal black bones, convulsing and squirming against each other like a colony of leeches. There were bones from things on Earth, things that are no longer on Earth, things that would one day be on Earth, and things that would never be on Earth. The movement of the bones made a cacophony of clacking that drowned out all thoughts of sanity.
The mass of bones pulsated and changed shape, forming four tendrils somewhat resembling elongated human hands, and reached out slowly towards each of us simultaneously. Renee approached first, I watched her reach back at the tendril. As she did, the skin on the tips of her fingers broke and peeled backward revealing the bones of her hand.
Seth was second, walking straight into a tendril and being pulled into the bony mass. As he disappeared I saw the purple glimmer of his glowstick bracelets quickly move in two opposite directions.
"Oh what the hell, if you all are becoming one with Old Boney, I might as well do it with you," Jake sauntered into the unspeakable horror.
I looked to my left, Renee was gone too. I looked back forward, the last tendril was about to reach me. I tried to step back but the bones in my legs wouldn't move. I could only watch the swirling tendril of bones reaching shakily towards me. When it was mere inches away, I felt a pressure in my chest.
My ribs began to shift and snap, piercing through my skin. They formed a hand-like appendage and extended towards the bone tendril like an old friend going in for a handshake. As Old Boney and I finally connected, I realized that I never really possessed any bones. What I had previously thought was my own skeleton was really parts of Old Boney this whole time, and those parts were now returning home.
After we were done there, we hiked back to camp for dinner. On the way there we came across an owl. It was surveilling us from the top branch of a tree. Every time I tried to take a picture of it and the flash went off, it swiveled its head right at me. I realized I was probably unintentionally flash-banging it.
Back at camp we got a roaring fire going and warmed up. After learning harsh lessons the previous month in Los Padres, we over-packed food. We had plenty of weenies and burgers with all the dressings, and s'mores for dessert.
Jake handed out some heat packs, I kept one in my pocket and it stayed warm all night. We were starting to set out the sleeping bags in the tents, when Renee noticed that the tent that Seth brought was partially flooded due to a hole where rain had seeped in.
"I don't know about you all, but whatever happens, I'm in that tent!" she pointed to the one I brought.
Jake and Seth agreed.
I thought for a minute, "well if you all want to jump in the tent I brought, I can solo the tent you brought after all, there's enough space on the non-flooded side for me to fit."
Everyone agreed, and I put a few large rocks inside the perimeter of the fire pit to heat up for later.
"This is a little trick I learned, it's going to keep me warm when we go to bed," I said, looking at the rocks atop the now-smoldering fire.
"That's going to be waay too hot, you're going to burn yourself," Seth objected.
"Oh trust me, I know what I'm doing."
Before bed time, we trekked out towards the beach, sprinting across the highway when there was a lull. We slid down a steep sand dune and met the ocean. Jake's lantern could only scratch the very edge of the dark waves as they came in, introducing the start of a black infinity.
Staring across that void I imagined countless places to visit, sights to see, and bones to gather.
When we got back from the beach, I tapped the rocks that I had placed in the fire earlier to see how hot they were. They were too hot to grab with bare hands so I used my shemagh as a makeshift often mitt. I placed one hot rock in the puddle in my tent, and the water immediately hissed. The other hot rock I wrapped in my shemagh and placed near my feet to keep them warm.
That night felt like sleeping in a five-star hotel compared to what I experienced in Los Padres. The extra preparation really did pay off. The next morning I had a breakfast sandwich with spam, eggs, potatoes, cheese, and salsa.
I can't tell for sure if all or even some of me ever really made it back home. Old Boney's trail still exists out in those mountains behind Point Mugu. When you feel him calling in your bones, you know where to find him.

I had a dream a few nights ago where I played the intro of Metroid Prime 4 and wanted to share what I saw. As is often the case with dreams, my perspective often shifted from playing the game on a tv, being within the game as a third person observer and being Samus herself. This is my attempt at creating a summary for the intro of Metroid Prime 4 based on what I experienced within the dream while describing it as if it were an actual level someone could play. If it were real I believe this intro would serve the same purpose as the Frigate Orpheon at the start of Metroid Prime 1. It is a linear sequence before the game opens up and serves as a hook for some of the mysteries within the game. While we do not know where Prime 4 will take place within the Metroid timeline, due to my dream showing Samus’s purple gunship from Fusion and Dread this must take place after those games.
METROID PRIME 4: APEX
The game opens with a view of space as the camera pans down to show a planet completely covered by desert. After a few moments Samus’s gunship comes into view from the right side, flying toward the planet. The ship enters the atmosphere and hovers above a large valley between several colossal dunes. Within the valley are the ruins of an ancient fortress of metal and stone. While it can be determined that this once belonged to a very advanced alien species, years, perhaps centuries of apparent abandonment and exposure to the elements have withered what was once an impressive building. Mysteriously outside of the fortress are dozens of spaceships in relatively pristine condition, though some have begun to be swallowed by accumulating sands brought forth by wind. While still in her vessel Samus has the spaceships scanned for any lifesigns or internal failures, the ships turn out to be in working condition but there are no lifesigns in the immediate area. However As her ship approaches the fortress it is grabbed by some invisible force and is dragged toward the ground. ADAM warns that their ship has been caught in a tractor beam and they will be unable to leave until Samus disables its source. He traces its energy signature to deep under the fortress, noting that this combined with the abandoned spacecraft, which the player learns belong to missing bounty hunters, can only mean that whatever is down there is a trap. After exiting her gunship Samus investigates the abandoned bounty hunter ships while making her way toward the fortress. When scanned the player can learn which bounty hunter said ship belonged to. There are also some large sea shells protruding from the sand, seemingly from ancient aquatic creatures. If scanned they reveal that this planet was once a vibrant ocean world with no landmasses, but somehow all the water vanished, leaving behind a lifeless desert of what was once the ocean floor. The fortress is colossal, the size of its interior doors imply that its inhabitants were massive, and since it was once underwater the architecture has no stairways or elevators, clearly designed for beings that could move in 3 dimensions underwater.
My dream unfortunately ended here. If this game was real, the following is what I would have liked to happen afterward.
Samus descends further into the fortress, going deeper underground the farther she goes. Eventually she comes across some robotic opponents, but since this is the start of the game these guys are easy to dispatch. If scanned the player learns that these robots were not originally from the fortress, given that their designs imply something that traverses land instead of water. Going even deeper the technology within the fortress seems different but more recently placed. There are also powerful reactors supplying energy to the fortress, but they seem to be overkill for a tractor beam. Eventually Samus comes across a room where the control panel for the tractor beam is located. She shuts it down and exits the room. However once she goes through the reactor room on her journey back to the surface, all the machinery surrounding her, save for the reactors, shut down. This leaves Samus in an eerie darkness before a wormhole appears in front of her, blocking her way out. After a few seconds a large alien tentacle covered in pincers emerges from it, the base of the appendage still connected to the wormhole implying a much larger creature lies behind it. The creature, simply called “Interloper,” attempts to grab Samus but is unsuccessful as she dodges out of the way, initiating a boss battle.
The Interloper is able to summon blue orbs of plasma and have them hone in on Samus, though she is able to destroy them using her arm cannon. The more Samus damages the Interloper the larger the wormhole it is peering through gets, allowing more of its body to come through and making the fight more difficult. The reactors surrounding the fight however are becoming more and more unstable and if scanned during the fight reveal that they are exerting too much power and will cause a meltdown if they continue running. The fight ends with the reactors shutting down, which in turn causes the wormhole to start closing around the Interloper. In a last ditch attempt to capture Samus the Interloper attempts to grab her, this time successfully. But as Samus is about to be swallowed by the wormhole her metroid abilities activate and she begins draining the creature's energy. A horrid ghostly scream is heard as this is done and the wormhole closes before Samus reaches it, severing the end of the tentacle holding her. Samus takes a moment to examine the now lifeless appendage, but before she can get a good look it bursts into rays of light and vanishes. This “death” is similar to what happens to Chozo ghosts when they are defeated in Metroid Prime 1. The reactors however are in a meltdown state and will explode within 3 minutes. Thus a timer starts and the escape sequence begins as Samus must hastily make her way back up to the surface.
During this escape sequence the player can have Samus risk exploring a previously inaccessible room within the fortress, though they need to be quick as the timer is still counting down. The room has a mural of 4 parts, revealing the original inhabitants of the planet, who are none other than the species that Phantoon belonged to. For convenience I will refer to them as “the Cephalo” due to Phantoons’ cephalopod-like appearance. The first mural displays the Cephalo in their primitive early years, establishing civilization on their home planet. The second shows the Cephalo traveling through the sky and constructing giant floating domes filled with water high above the ocean. The third shows massive water filled spacecraft exploring their solar system and beyond, encountering other friendly alien species such as the Chozo and the Alimbic as the Cephalo back on their home planet look up from deep below the ocean and celebrate their achievement and newfound friends. The final mural however is broken and illegible, its pieces scattered amongst the floor leaving only a solid stone wall.
Samus exits the fortress and dashes to her spaceship as the sand beneath her starts to sink. Using her visor she remotely controls her now freed ship to hover above the ground and fly toward her. She makes it to the underside hatch just as the ground beneath her collapses, leaving her suspended above a giant hole. From her ship's cockpit she sees all the bounty hunter ships get dragged into the hollowed underground of the fortress, along with thousands of tons of sand.
Upon entering her ship, ADAM states he is glad to see her safe but unfortunately the Federation will not be happy to learn so much evidence was destroyed in her escape. However he then mentions he has some good news. Because Samus was able to survive for so long against the Interloper, the AI was able to triangulate the point of origin of the wormhole. Its coordinates originate from an uninhabited planet outside Federation space called RL-732.
And that is the end of the intro, though I would like to describe another scene I thought up. This scene would not be something that happens in the game but would only be a pre release teaser, or an unlockable cutscene within the extra contents section of the games menu. The reason for this is twofold as 1. It would break the pacing of the game as I think players would immediately want to go to RL-732 and not be roped into another cutscene that does not add much. Reason number 2 is that I would like this game to have the same feeling of Isolation as Prime 1 (though I admit it might be difficult due to the inclusion of ADAM). From a chronological perspective, this is what happens next in the story before Samus heads to Planet RL-732.
The scene starts with a view of a futuristic city's skyline with the tallest building belonging to the Galactic federations military command. The scene then switches to an elegant office within the skyscraper, the view from the window reveals that this office is near the top of the edifice. Admiral Castor Dane drops a stack of papers on his desk as Samus calmly sits in a chair in front of him, wearing casual clothing instead of her usual Chozo armor. The admiral has an uncharacteristically angry tone with Samus, saying that the GF’s patience with her is wearing thin. He brings up the annihilation of the BSL station, the destruction of the EMMI robots, and now the fact that a bunch of evidence was ruined due to her interference. He reminds her she was meant only to investigate the disappearance of several GF aligned bounty hunters but her actions on the planet will cost the Federation millions to recover and thoroughly inspect what is left of their ships. He warns that next time she might be the one with a bounty on her head.
Admiral Dane then angrily dismisses her from his office but before she leaves the room his demeanor changes to be more in line with his character in Metroid Prime 3. After calling her name he gets up from his desk and approaches her at his doorway. He mentions that with the Space Pirates defeated and GF space now being safer than ever, he is beginning to fear that the Federation is looking for new enemies and scapegoats, he warns Samus to watch her back. Without a word she then leaves the office with the Admiral returning to his desk. His computer shows a live recording of his office, but it is a few seconds behind, showing footage of the Admiral angrily dismissing Samus and her leaving immediately with himself never getting up from his desk.
If you have gotten this far thank you for reading this, I really enjoyed writing this and would like to know your thoughts, both on my ideas and your own for what the intro to Metroid Prime 4 will be. On a final note I would like this game to explore a fact of the Metroid universe that doesn’t seem to be brought up often: why are there so many ghosts? This game would also reveal why there are so few Chozo by the time Samus is adopted by them, and what the endgame for advanced civilizations is within the Metroid universe. As you probably guessed, Phantoon is the main antagonist of the game and the being that was attacking Samus under the fortress. Metroid is no stranger to cosmic horror and lovecraftian entities, but this game would go all in on the aesthetic as Phantoon fits right in. With Planet RL-723 I imagine it having a surface entirely of ice, but below it are tropical alien jungles, volcanic caverns, a deep underwater system that ranges from vibrant coral to a dark murky abyss, and otherworldly ruins that invoke images of R'lyeh from call of cthulhu, with strange spatial anomalies throughout the planet.

"Sometimes The End Of One Adventure Is Just The Beginning Of Another."

Respect the King of Games! Yugi Muto!

Yugi Muto is the main protagonist of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga series created by Kazuki Takahashi. Yugi is introduced as a teenager who is solving an ancient Egyptian puzzle known as the Millennium Puzzle, hoping it will grant him his wish of forming bonds. After solving the Puzzle, Yugi revives an ancient spirit initially known as Yami Yugi: his true identity is later revealed to be a pharaoh of Ancient Egypt named Atem, who takes over his body during times of stress or when there's games of chance to be played.
Manga Yugi appears in several different series so to help differentiate which series a particular feat is from they will be marked by hovering over the feat. I've also provided the rules for each arc, or at least the ones that had dedicated pages explaining them.

• Original Series Duel Rules
  
• Duelist Kingdom Duel Rules - They really just play fast and loose with the rules in this arc. You can do basically whatever you want.
  
• Battle City Duel Rules
  
• Yu-Gi-Oh R Duel Rules
  
• Millennium World Duel Rules
  

The Shadow Games and the Millennium Puzzle

In the original series, Yugi didn't play as much Duel Monsters as he did later. He instead preferred Shadow Games, which mostly came in the form of childrens punishment games where the "player's true natures are revealed". The winner got to keep living, but the loser would be banished to the Shadow Realm.

• In a Shadow Game against his bully, Ushio, Yugi manages to stab a stack of bills without hitting his hand that was placed underneath. When Ushio cheats and attempts to stab Yugi, he is punished with the Illusion of Avarice which forces him to see common trash and leaves as a pile of riches.
  
• After challenging a skeezy TV Director to a Shadow Game involving rolling the lowest number on a die and rolling a six, Yugi takes advantage of the man's anger by splitting the die in half to force him to roll a seven. For his loss he is punished by the "Mosaic Illusion" which blurs the man's eyes like a censored television.
  
• Defeats a karaoke-singing bully in a Silence Game by taking advantage of the fact he always holds a microphone and makes him play the "Beat Festival" penalty game that amplifies his heartbeat to unbearable levels.
  
• While not part of a Shadow Game, Yugi punishes an evil teacher with a penalty game that removes the makeup from her face like pieces from a puzzle
  
• Forces a shyster shoe salesman into a game that involves picking coins out of a shoe without being stung by a scorpion. Despite attempting to cheat, the man ends up stung when his knife does not hit the scorpion and his hand is pinned in the shoe.
  
• Defeats Kaiba in a game of Duel Monsters and teleports him inside a card to "The World of Duel Monsters"
  
• The Millennium Puzzle shows Yugi where Jonouchi is being held hostage. He does this during Duelist Kingdom as well
  
• Tricks several goons into standing in a puddle so a stun gun will zap them all
  
• Has two "rooms" in his soul to represent the two spirits within him
  
• Invites Shadi into his Room of Soul which transforms into a trap-laden maze
  
• Yami Yugi can force his soul to be the dominant one in certain situations. Normal Yugi can do the same thing and take over as well
  
• Compete against Shadi in a game to see whose heart shows weakness that involves solving Shadi's riddle, solving the Concentration or Death puzzle by divining parts of a monster he cannot see, and defeating an illusion of Jonouchi by showing trust in his friend
  
• Beats Mokuba at his own game and seals him in a giant capsule
  
• The Millennium Puzzle gives Yugi an idea on how to save Jonouchi from a murderer
  
• Inflicts Kaiba with the penalty game "Mind Crush" which "destroys the evil part of his soul" and leaves him in a coma.
  
• Uses the penalty game "Mind on Air" in order to make a crooked game show host reveal his secrets.
  
• Can raise or lower the level of a Shadow Game. This is never mentioned again.
  
• The Millennium Puzzle will prevent players from cheating during a Shadow Game
  
• Can withstand attacks that destroy the soul as the other soul inside of him can take over
  
• Removes Imori's soul and "feeds it to 25 hungry dragons" after defeating him in a game
  
• Shadi explains the Millennium Items will test the wearer and instantly kill them if they are unworthy
  
• The Millennium Puzzle seemingly lets Jonouchi draw the Time Wizard at a crucial time
  
• Punishes the Ventriloquist of the Dead with his own puppet
  
• Can speak with himself inside his soul
  
• Forces the Player Killer to walk up a set of gallows and 'fall into darkness'
  
• During a Shadow Game with Marik, manages to withstand the residual damage from a blast of The Winged Dragon of Ra
  

Duel Monsters

Quick Thinking

• Defeats Kaiba in a duel due to Kaiba's Blue Eyes refusing to attack. Yugi explains that Blue Eyes refused to attack due to Kaiba's "soul wasn't in the card". He then plays a Monster Reborn to summon his own Blue Eyes and win the duel.
  
• Plays Shift in order to protect Curse of Dragon and summon Dark Magician.
  
• Mind Controls Mai's Harpie's Dragon and launches it through her Mirror Wall with Catapult Turtle
  
• Defeats Pegasus' mind reading by switching between souls
  
• Provokes Pegasus in order to activate a pair of face-downs to destroy Toon World and his monsters at the same time
  
• Prevents Jigen Bakudan from exploding by sacrificing it as part of the Black Magic Ritual
  
• Defeats Thousand-Eyes Restrict's ability by blocking all of its eyes with Kuriboh
  
• Determines what kind of deck the Rare Hunter is using based on how he's playing
  
• Uses Pandora's Dark Magic Curtain spell to summon Dark Magician Girl to destroy Pandora's Dark Magician
  
• Plays Lightforce Sword to reduce Slifer's attack but Marik manages to play around it because Marik is lame.
  
• Activates Magical Hats to keep Dark Magician Girl safe from Slifer
  
• Uses Magnetic Arm Shield to prevent himself from being defeated by Rocket Warrior
  
• When Jonouchi plays both Graceful Dice and Skull Dice, he De-Spells Graceful Dice and makes a bet that Gilfer won't lose enough ATK to be destroyed, which he wins
  
• Gets rid of Dark Necrofears possessing spirit by baiting it into Kuriboh and then destroying it with Chain Destruction
  
• Prevents Kaiba from sacrificing the monsters he had summoned by playing Lightforce Sword to remove Obelisk from Kaiba's hand
  
• Reacts to Kaiba playing Voice of the Heavens to steal his Slifer the Sky Dragon by playing Exchange, a card that forces players to swap one card each
  
• Baits Kaiba into destroying Big Shield Garnda so he can activate Soul Rope, a trap card that allows him to summon King's Knight from his deck. This allows him to summon Jack's Knight as well and eventually sacrifice them all for Slifer the Sky Dragon
  
• Destroys both Obelisk and Slifer by activating Pot of Greed which allows Yugi to draw two cards, thus increasing Slifer's ATK to 5000. Kaiba activates a Trap that lowers it to 4000, but both monsters are still destroyed in a massive explosion
  
• Activates Magic Cylinder and targets Lord of D. to get rid of his abilities that boosted Kaiba's Blue Eyes White Dragon
  
• Plays Monster Reborn and summons Slifer the Sky Dragon to protect Obelisk
  
• Uses Soul Taker to steal Marik's monsters and prevent him from sacrificing them to boost Ra
  
• Plays Dimension Magic in order to sacrifice Obelisk. This allows him to dodge Ra's attack and summon the Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl who use their combined magical power to destroy Ra
  
• Hides his monsters and spells inside the Toy Box in order to avoid a field effect.
  
• Saves himself by playing Swords of Revealing Light to stop a direct attack from Yako
  
• Overwhelms Seto's Duos by summoning a multitude of Kuriboh to cover his blade. Seto's Ka was strong enough to defeat three of the other Guardians easily.
  
• Summons Slifer to attack Diabound
  
• Avoids 3000 LP of damage by using Turn Jump to skip the turn count ahead by three
  
• After relearning his name and having his Ba returned, is able to summon The Creator God of Light, Horakhty to destroy Zorc
  
• Keeps himself from being defeated by activating "Magician's Defense"
  
• Uses "Final Guess" to prevent Kaiba from re-summoning a Monster and to summon his own Dark Magician
  

Strategy

• Reflects Insector Haga's attack with Mirror Force. Haga was a champion duelist and played at an incredibly high level.
  
• Uses Magical Hats to outplay the Ventriloquist of the Dead
  
• Defends Mystical Elf with Mirror Force
  
• Can expertly shit talk to get under an opponent's skin
  
• Tricks Reaper of the Cards into attacking a bait face-down card
  
• Baits the Player Killer into attacking his own card
  
• Combos with Jonouchi to destroy the Wall Shadow .
  
• In the Labyrinth Duel, uses Magical Boxes to switch his Dark Magician with Jirai Gumo to destroy the Labyrinth Tank.
  
• Blocks Sanga of the Thunder's attack with Mirror Force and reflects it onto Monster Tamer
  
• Destroys the water covered Suijin with Summoned Skull
  
• Fuses Summoned Skull and Red-Eyes Black Dragon to make Black Skull Dragon
  
• Uses Monster Reborn to resummon Suijin and block an attack
  
• Plays Shift to move the Black Skull Dragon, who was too large for the dungeon, to the end to attack Gate Guardian.
  
• Uses Eye of Truth to see Kaiba's hand.
  
• Plays Mystic Box of Death to get around Kaiba's defensive card and destroy his monster.
  
• Bluffs Mai with a face-down card
  
• Summons Black Luster Soldier to destroy Mai's pet dragon
  
• Pins down a piece of Exodia to prevent the Rare Hunter from getting an instant win. He then uses Chain Destruction to burn away all the copies of Exodia's right arm in the Rare Hunter's deck, rendering it useless. Winning this duel was extraordinary given that the Rare Hunter was cheating
  
• Forces Pandora to discard his Dark Magician with Card Destruction
  
• Demoralizes Pandora by Brain Controlling his monster and using it to summon Dark Magician on the first turn
  
• Goes spell for spell with Pandora, weathering his Dark Magician being destroyed and immediately bringing it back from the graveyard. Having the correct cards to counter Pandora was extra relevant since Pandora was cheating using his stage magic.
  
• Resummons Buster Blade in ATK mode in order to bait Marik into attacking then activates Brain Control to steal Marik's Revival Jam. Slifer's attack destroys Revival Jam who is immediately revived, forcing Marik to draw 3 cards due to his "Card of Safe Return". The revival of Revival Jam forces Slifer to continue to attack it and Marik to continue to draw cards until he eventually decks himself and loses.
  
• Plays Multiply to block for Kaiba during a tag-team duel
  
• Sets Kaiba up to easily summon Blue Eyes White Dragon
  
• Goads Kaiba into attacking a monster with equal ATK to Blue Eyes only to reveal he'd lowered the enemy's ATK power
  
• Swaps a trap card's target with the trap Mystical Rift Panel which protects Kaiba's Blue Eyes White Dragon.
  
• Predicts Marik summoning a Fusion Monster and uses De-Fusion to split it apart once it attacks
  
• Goes Trap for Trap with Kaiba and Marik resulting in Marik taking a direct attack
  
• Destroys Blue Eyes White Dragon by baiting it into an attack and activating the Trap Card Spellbinding Circle, which reduces its attack by 700 points and makes it weaker than his Red Eyes Black Dragon
  
• Fuses Dark Magician and Buster Blader to form the Dark Paladin. He uses this monster along with the magic card De-Fusion to defeat Kaiba's Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon and win the duel
  
• Uses Multiply on his Metal Devil to summon two more, which he then uses to summon Obelisk
  
• Anticipates Dark Magician being taken by his opponent and uses his face-down card, Owner's Seal, to return him to his side of the field
  
• Steals Tilla Mook's Evil Eyes of Coercion by playing Bounce, which leaves her open for Buster Blader to attack
  
• Plays Spellbinding Illusion to negate the effect of a monster that was enabling three other monsters to fuse together. He then uses Diffuse Wave Motion to destroy all of them.
  
• Anticipates Mrs. Maico Kato's De-Spell and plays one of his own
  
• Uses the Soul Barter to allow one of his monsters to dodge an attack and negate it
  
• Anticipates a pair of trap cards that would prevent him from summoning an Egyptian God card and defeats it by playing a Fusion Monster instead
  
• Uses a combination of Spellbinding Illusion, Weapon Regeneration, and Lightning Blade to destroy The Wicked Dreadroot which was a part of the trio of evil God cards
  
• Activates the Trap Card Sand Fortress in order to make up for his lack of monsters.
  
• Uses the Turn Jump card to level up Silent Swordsman Lv. 1, a monster that grows the longer they are on the field.
  
• Uses a combination of Fit of Rage and Strike Back in order to power up his Toy Magician and defeat Depres Scott.
  
• Baits Yako into attacking
  
• Uses the Cross Counter Trap to play Stairway to the Underworld and summon Gorz and Kaien.
  
• Negates Barbaros Ur's attack with Negate Attack
  
• Destroys Barbaros Ur with a combination attack from Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl and then defeats Yako with a direct attack from Dark Magician Girl.
  
• Has a strong enough Ka to summon The God of the Obelisk with no issues
  
• Stalls Bakura with Marshmallon, a monster that cannot be destroyed by battle. He continually uses Marshmallon to outfox Bakura
  
• Uses a combination of a spell card and Gandora to destroy Bakura's field while protecting his own monster
  
• Blocks a direct attack with the trap card Monster Stronghold
  
• Defeats The God of the Obelisk with a combination of trap cards.
  
• Uses Card of Sanctity and Silent Magician to defeat Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl
  
• Uses Gold Sarcophagus to steal away Yami's Monster Reborn, preventing him from summoning Slifer the Sky Dragon
  
• Summons Gandora to destroy Kaiba's Deep Eyes Dragon
  
• Activates Spiritual Swords of Revealing Light to keep himself and Kaiba alive during a Shadow Game
  

Bullshit

• Defeats Kaiba in a duel due to Kaiba's Blue Eyes refusing to attack. Yugi explains that Blue Eyes refused to attack due to Kaiba's "soul wasn't in the card". He then plays a Monster Reborn to summon his own Blue Eyes and win the duel.
  
• Rather than attacking The Cocoon of Evolution itself, commands Curse of Dragon to attack the forest around it, burning it away and stealing the ATK bonus it provided
  
• Covers The Great Moth in mist in order to boost Summoned Skull's ATK and destroy it
  
• Plays Giant Soldier of Stone on the last bit of available land on the field in order to attack the Moon floating above the field and force the tides to recede, exposing Mako's hidden monsters
  
• Has his Mystical Elf chant a spell that adds her ATK to a recently reborn Blue Eyes
  
• After trapping the Player Killer's monsters inside the Swords of Revealing Light, uses Catapult Turtle to break the ring around the Castle of Dark Illusion, causing it to crash down onto PK's monsters and destroy them
  
• Forcibly fuses Mammoth Graveyard with Kaiba's Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon in order to force it to age and get weaker
  
• Avoids the Harpy Lady Sister's pheromones by playing Mystical Elf as their abilities only work on male cards
  
• Hides a pair of trap cards inside one of the Magical Hats
  
• Nukes a duelist, outside of a duel, with Slifer the Sky Dragon. It is never explained how he did this.
  
• Traps Deva in a loop that defeats him
  
• Destroys Kaiba's dragon with a combo of Magician Girls
  

Top Decking

• Draws Swords of Revealing Light in order to stop Kaiba's Blue Eyes from destroying him
  
• Pulls the last piece of Exodia and defeats Kaiba
  
• Draws Polymerization on the turn when Curse of Dragon and Gaia the Fierce Knight would be destroyed
  
• Draws Swords of Revealing Light at a crucial time in order to stall Mai
  
• Topdecks Slifer and its awesome. Slifer is immune to Dark Necrofear's possession ability which had been a huge pain in the ass up until then.
  
• Draws and plays a face-down card without looking during his duel with Marik. The card was one given to him by Kaiba, Devil Sanctuary that was said to be able to defeat Marik due to its damage-reflecting ability.
  
• Pulls a Monster Reborn he uses to summon the God of the Obelisk from his graveyard which he uses to defeat the Wicked Avatar's copy ability and cause a massive explosion. The Wicked Avatar was a evil God card on the same level as The Winged Dragon of Ra
  
• Defeats Deva and it's awesome
  

Mahad

One of the Six Sacred Guardians that serve Atem and the original owner of the Millennium Ring. In an attempt to defeat Thief King Bakura, he sacrificed his life and fused his Ba and his Ka together to create the "Dark Magician". As the Dark Magician, he would continue to serve Atem long after he was gone.

• Destroys several of Bakura's spirits
  
• Redirects Diabound's blast back onto him using his "Afterworld Warp" spell
  
• Punches holes in a tomb using magical blasts
  
• Flies into Diabound's face before it can fire a blast
  
• Downed and rendered immobile by Diabound. He is saved by his student, Mana and her spirit who would later be known as Dark Magician Girl
  
• Fuses with Curse of Dragon and Duos to form Drake Knight Duos Dragon
  
• Can focus his energy to double his attack power
  
• Blows away Diabound with a Black Magic Attack
  
• Warps away Zorc's lightning
  

Durability

"Real" Durability

• Gets up despite getting wailed on by someone several times larger than him.
  
• Beat on by a goon
  
• Sent to the infirmary after being bowled over by several upperclassmen
  
• Slapped with a briefcase by Kaiba
  
• Thrown by a sucker punch
  
• Gets beat up by a sore-loser
  
• Sucker punched by a cheating gamer
  
• During a Shadow Game where their avatars take the same damage they do, ends up getting punched in the chest hard enough to leave 2 sizeable dents.
  
• Withstands having his soul attacked because he was touching the Millennium Puzzle which allowed Yami Yugi to take over.
  
• Survives being hung by the neck
  
• Punched by Bandit Keith
  
• Takes a heavy mental toll from the Shadow Game with Pegasus He is eventually overwhelmed and passes out
  
• Blocks a Blast from the Winged Dragon of Ra during a Shadow Game
  
• Takes damage from a monster attack during a Shadow Game with Marik
  
• Shot in the chest with a crossbow bolt during the Shadow Game with Marik
  
• Blasted by Deva during a Shadow Game. Yes, the villain looks stupid.
  

VR Durability

• Blasted by Pandora's "Ectoplasmer" spell
  
• Hit by a Hinotama spell. This happens several times during this duel
  
• Gets hit by a meteor
  
• Has his own Dark Magician's attack turned back on him and takes 1500 LP
  
• Shot with a Monster Cannon that takes 2600 LP
  
• Slashed across the chest by Vampire's Curse, taking 2500 LP
  
• Bashed by Green Baboon King taking 2600 LP.
  
• Blasted by Greed Quasar's Prominence Napalm, leaving him with only 400 LP.
  
• Punched by War God Gaap and reduced to 300 LP
  

Ba Durability

• When a body loses all of their Ba energy, they die
  
• Obelisk tanks a blast from Diabound's Spiral Wave
  
• Uses Slifer to block Diabound's blasts that were aimed at innocent villagers. Diabound's blasts were strong enough to destroy stone buildings
  
• Takes a Spiral Wave that nearly destroys Slifer and another that actually does destroy it
  
• Despite being heavily damaged, manages to ride up a ridge to meet Bakura only to fall into a pit which he manages to survive
  
• Has his Ba attacked by several of Bakura's spirits until he is saved by Mahad.
  
• Blasted by Zorc's electricity
  

Intelligence

• Can read heiroglyphics
  
• Finishes the Millenium Puzzle after working on it for seven years.
  
• Tricks a gun-toting bully into a trap that will set him on fire if he moves in the slightest
  
• Notices Mokuba is cheating in a roulette game involving poisoned food and destroys the switch he is using by tying the Millennium Puzzle to the spinning wheel in front of them.
  
• Solves a guillotine puzzle and saves everyone's arms
  
• Practices his 'sixth sense' for gaming by playing a concentration game with his socks
  
• Defeats a game of Clock Solitaire and determines where a bomber is hiding.
  
• Tricks Bakura into removing his soul and putting it in a piece on the game board in order for Yami to take over the game
  
• Solves a puzzle by rolling dice
  
• Notices subliminal messages in the tape of Pegasus that challenges him to a duel.
  
• Determines why Duelist Kingdom is being held on an island
  
• Assist Jonouchi with a question
  
• Reasons his way through the Paradox Brother's maze puzzle
  
• Defeats Duke in a shell game
  
• Was the only person who could solve the Millennium Puzzle in 3000 years. He solves it again while in a burning building
  
• Solves the Puzzle inside Yami Yugi's room
  
• Has Slifer shoot the ground to fling itself into the air
  
• Realizes the entire Millennium World is a tabletop RPG being played by Yami and Bakura
  
• Uses "Table Talk" in order to delay Bakura's attack
  

Speed

Movement

• Dives and catches a falling Anzu
  
• Sprints around a gang with a can of spray paint to draw a flammable maze
  
• Saves Pandora from a blade
  
• Keeps up with a thief on foot
  

Reaction

• Dodges a stabbing strike by leaping high into the air
  
• Blocks a thrown die with the Millennium Puzzle
  
• Transforms and moves out of the way of a set of falling bookshelves
  
• Dodges a falling block
  
• Catches Mokuba before he runs off with his star chips
  
• Snatches a thrown card out of the air
  

Skill

Physical

• Wins a game that involves snatching papers out from under a bottle of chloroform
  
• Wins a game of explosive ice hockey played on a hot griddle
  
• Dodges a sucker punch while focusing on a fighting game
  
• Uses a yo-yo to destroy a metal roof
  
• Can spin dice when rolling them to alter what they will land on
  
• Can sense other duelists
  
• Catches up with Bakura on horseback