Deer tattoos for mensxeer tattos

The title says it all really. We were together for 2 years (mostly lived together as well), she broke up with me over phone (she said she fell out of love or never was in love) and blocked me everywhere. Last time I saw her in person we were still together. Anyway I drew a picture on her Ipad while we were still together and now, after one year of no contact she got it tattoed (she only has around 5 tattoos and they are all big and they mostly have at least a little meaning.) Am I overreacting or is this okay? (She has BPD (diagnosed) and probably NPD traits (undiagnosed ofc), also I’m 100% sure she would never ever call me or want to see me again. I’m extremely confused and angry to be tied to her again after spending so much time and energy trying to heal after this horrible way of being discarded. ) Can someone explain what happened? I can’t wrap my mind around it.

I hope this is the right subreddit for this question, I feel like it could possibly be emotional abuse or something similar.
The title says it all really. We were together for 2 years (mostly lived together as well), she broke up with me over phone (she said she fell out of love or never was in love) and blocked me everywhere. Last time I saw her in person we were still together. Anyway I drew a picture on her Ipad while we were still together and now, after one year of no contact she got it tattoed (she only has around 5 tattoos and they are all big and they mostly have at least a little meaning.) Am I overreacting or is this okay? (She has BPD (diagnosed) and probably NPD traits (undiagnosed ofc), also I’m 100% sure she would never ever call me or want to see me again. I’m extremely confused and angry to be tied to her again after spending so much time and energy trying to heal after this horrible way of being discarded. )

Considering getting a floral tattoo for my next one. Anyone have any suggestions for tatto artists that specialize in floral tattoos and have clean line work in SF or the East Bay?

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The area where we were heading in Eastern Europe was known for its radioactivity. We had received reports of strange animals, things that looked like they were hatched from a mad scientist’s laboratory. I didn’t know how much of it I believed, because some of the descriptions the survivors gave sounded more like wendigo and dogmen than any real animal. I figured that, in the heat of the moment and under attack, their minds had likely twisted the true form of the animals, horrifying as they were, into something truly nightmarish.
There were three of us heading into the dark Eastern European forests: my friend Dmitri, who was originally from the country and knew the language, his girlfriend Anna and myself. Everything seemed mundane enough as we flew into the country and handed over our passports. There was no sign of the horrors waiting ahead.
The first towns we encountered looked idyllic enough as we drove through them in a rental car. Isolated farmhouses with cows and chickens dotted the landscape. Plentiful fields of wheat, potatoes and corn stretched out on all sides of us. The black earth here was fertile, I knew. As we headed deeper into the radiation zone, however, the houses and farms all started to look abandoned and dilapidated, the fields barren and dead.
“Christ on a cracker,” I muttered, more to myself than to my friends, “this place looks like it suffered through the Apocalypse.”
“It did,” Dmitri said grimly. “A nuclear apocalypse. I feel like the Biblical one is far more optimistic than the true apocalypse will be. In reality, there will be no Rapture, no victory of light over darkness. If there is ever a World War 3, every major city will be consumed by nuclear fire. It will throw buses and cars thousands of feet into the air, spilling out bodies onto the burning skies. Entire streets will collapse, trapping countless millions under the rubble.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Anna commented, her dark blue eyes staring out the window. I saw the reflection of white eyes skittering through the brush outside, small animals that disappeared in front of the approaching roar of the engine.
“How far is it?” I asked, feeling carsick and anxious. The winding roads here curved through countless hills. It reminded me of driving through parts of Northern California before, when I had retched out the window. Anna and Dmitri seemed unaffected, though. I cursed my stomach, which was always turning traitorous towards me.
“It’s a while, man,” Dmitri said. “This country is huge. Probably another three or four hour drive. And then we have to start walking.”
“Good thing we left before dawn,” Anna said, stifling a yawn. She had a can of some cheap Russian Red Bull knock-off, some fluorescent green crap that smelled like chemicals. But she drank it as if it were the finest French wine. I gazed out at the dark forests that passed us on both sides, wondering what kind of sights lay ahead in this land of the damned.
***
The Sun rose early over the gently rolling hills and black earth of Ukraine, sending its rusty streaks of blood across the sky. The going had been easy so far, except for the constant car sickness I felt. I took a few pills of meclizine, wishing that I could have smuggled some weed gummies through customs. But here, cannabis was illegal, and I was not eager to see the inside of an Eastern European prison, where lunatics like the Three Guys One Hammer maniacs and the Chessboard Killer lived in hellish conditions.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” Dmitri said with awe and wonder oozing from his voice as the car braked abruptly. I looked up quickly, my stomach doing flips. But what I saw laying across the road instantly brought me back to the moment. Dmitri pointed a tattooed hand at the sight.
“Is that real?” Anna asked. I could only shake my head as we all stared at the dead bear that was laying across the cracked road, its dead eyes staring straight through us.
I noticed immediately that the bear had extra paws on its arms. Blood-stained claws jutted sharply out of its four paws, each seeming to have seven fingers. Its feet looked stunted and twisted, like the roots of a tree. An extra arm stuck out of the front of its chest, a pale, white fleshy growth emerging from its sternum. The mutated limb looked malformed and boneless, causing a sense of revulsion to rise up as I gazed on it. It flopped gently in the heavy wind that swirled down the surrounding hills.
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Dmitri said slowly, his eyes as wide and excited as a child. “Can you imagine what other kinds of things must be lurking in these forests? This is going to make a really awesome documentary.” Anna nodded, playing with a small, hand-held digital camera she took everywhere with her. She wanted to make a video that would finally go viral on the internet and help her gain some recognition for her work.
“I’m going to record everything, including this,” she said excitedly, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she opened the door of the car. Dawn had risen overhead, radiating the first warm rays of a bright summer day. After a long moment, I followed her out. Dmitri stood at her side, his dark eyes wide. He ran a trembling hand over his shaved head as he looked down at the enormous bear.
Anna zoomed in with the camera, kneeling down before the still beast. Her finely-formed fingers shook with excitement as she drew within inches of the corpse. I wondered how the bear had died, as I didn’t see any signs of injuries on the creature’s body. The next moment, I saw it blink.
I backpedaled away, giving a hoarse, guttural shout of warning. Anna was busy staring at the screen of the digital camera, scanning it across the bear’s extra fingers and limbs. But the panic that swept over Dmitri’s face showed me that he, too, had seen it. He grabbed Anna’s arm, dragging her back with sudden fury. She stumbled, her legs crossing under her. She crashed into him and they fell back together. A moment later, the bear came to life, its bones cracking as it twisted its head to look at the three of us.
It swiped a mutated paw at the place where Anna’s face had been only a moment before. I heard the sharp claws slice through the air like switchblades. The bear’s head ratcheted over to glare at us. It gnashed its teeth as silver streams of saliva flew from its shaking head. With a primal roar, it leapt off the ground. I turned to run back to the safety of the car, but I nearly tripped when a pale figure streaked out of the forest right in front of me.
It looked like something conjured up in a nightmare. It was naked and bloated, its skin white with bulging, pink cheeks. It looked to have a combination of human and pig features, and yet it ran upright like a person. Its irises were blood-red, its pupils huge and excited. Its beady eyes flicked over to Anna and a low, satisfied growl erupted from its wide throat. I watched the muscles work furiously in its porcine body as it sprinted towards her.
Before either Dmitri or I could react, the pig-thing grabbed Anna around the neck, its sharp, black fingers digging deeply into her skin. She squealed like a strangled rabbit as it dragged her away into the dark Ukrainian forests. Its pink lips pulled back in an excited grimace, revealing the sharp fangs underneath. I heard its guttural growls fade away rapidly. It sprinted much faster than a person, its hooves slamming the ground over and over at a superhuman speed.
“Hey!” Dmitri called excitedly, taking a step forward. “What do you…” A giant bear paw with too many gleaming claws smacked his leg out from under him, sending him flying. I only stood there, shell-shocked and amazed, as Anna disappeared into the trees.
A single moment later, the bear rose to its full height, roaring at us. Streams of spit flew from its mouth as its rancid breath washed over us, breath that emanated a smell like roadkill and infection. I put my hands up, flinching, expecting a blow that never came. When I looked up, the bear had gone back on all fours. It ran in the path the pig-creature had gone, its white, boneless extra limb hanging limply from its chest.
“What the fuck!” Dmitri cried on the ground, rocking back and forth. I came back to life, running over to his side. I saw deep gouge marks sliced through his blue jeans. Bright streams of blood lazily dripped from the claw marks on his left leg.
“We need to get help,” I cried, shaking him. His eyes looked faraway and confused, as if he didn’t fully realize what was happening. “We need to go back and get the police.”
“The police?” he asked, laughing. “The police here won’t do anything. You think they’re going to travel out into the radioactivity zone just for a missing person?” He shook his head grimly before reaching out a hand to me. “Help me up. There’s a first aid kit in the car. We need to bandage this up. Then we’re going after Anna.”
***
We had no way to call for help. The phones this far out in Chernobyl didn’t work, and there were never any cell phone towers built in the silent land. After Dmitri had disinfected and bandaged his legs, he rummaged through the trunk, looking for weapons.
“God damn, there’s nothing good here,” he said despondently. “Some bear mace, some knives… what good is any of that going to do against these mutated monsters? We need an AK-47.” I nodded in agreement.
“Too bad we’re not in the US,” I said. “The only guns you’re going to get around here are the ones you take off the bodies of Russian soldiers.”
“Yeah, if only,” he muttered sadly, handing me a large folding knife. “We have one canister of bear mace, three knives and a tire iron. Not exactly an arsenal.” I really didn’t want to go into those dark woods, but thinking of Anna being tortured or murdered made me feel sick and weak. I shook my head, mentally torn.
“Here, take the bear mace, too. I’ll take the tire iron and a knife,” he continued, forcing the black canister into my numb fingers. “You ready for this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I think we should try to find help. If we both go out there and get slaughtered, no one will ever find Anna.”
“The nearest town is two hours west of here,” he responded icily. “By the time we get help, her trail will have gone cold. It will take at least five or six hours to get any rescue out here. No, we need to do this, and we need to do it now. If you don’t want to come…”
“I’ll come,” I said grimly, my heart pounding. “Fuck it.”
***
Dmitri had a sad history. As a child living in Ukraine, he had been kidnapped by an insane neighbor and kept in a dirt pit outside for weeks, wallowing in his own piss and shit, slowly starving. He said the man would throw down a stale crust of bread or a rice cake into the mud and human waste every few days. Dmitri would pull the food out, wipe off the feces and eat it. I shuddered, remembering the horror stories he had told me. I knew he had a personal reason for making sure Anna was not subjected to the same endless suffering, even if it meant his own death.
The bear and the pig-creature had left a clear trail of broken brush and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Side by side, we moved cautiously ahead, constantly checking our backs. But we saw no signs of movement and heard nothing. Up ahead, the trees abruptly opened up, letting golden sunlight stream down. Blinking quickly, we left the forest behind.
We walked out into a field in the middle of a valley surrounded by tall, dark hills. Grass and weeds rippled in waves as the wind swept past us.
Formed in a semi-circle in front of us, human skeletons lay endlessly dreaming. They stared up into the vast blue sky with grinning skulls and empty sockets. Some still had putrefying strips of flesh and ligaments clinging to the bones. Animals had scattered some of the bodies, but others lay complete, like corpses in a tomb. Human skulls, leg bones and arm bones lay scattered haphazardly across the field, their surfaces yellowed and cracked with age. It looked like a bone orchard.
“What are we looking at right now?” I whispered, furtively glancing around at the field of bones. An insane part of my mind wondered if they might rise from the dead and come after us. Compared to what we had already seen in this place of nightmares, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Dead bodies,” Dmitri said grimly.
“Victims of the nuclear accident?” I asked. He shook his head, pointing at some of the fresher corpses nearby. Their throats looked like they had been ripped out, the bones of their necks showing deep bite marks. The one nearest us had its skeletal fingers wrapped around a glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled inside and a cork inserted into the top.
I knelt down, prying the fingers back with soft, cracking noises. I uncorked it and took out the paper. It felt thick in my hands, like some kind of hand-crafted paper from the old days. The cursive flowing across the sheet looked like it had been written in a quill pen with actual ink. In confusion, I read the letter aloud:
“Rules to survive in the Helskin Nature Preserve:
“1. The cult known as the Golden Butchers has been kidnapping women to breed them with the pig-creatures. They worship the offspring that result from these unions as gods. If a member of your group gets taken, you will find them in the living farm at the end of the forest.
“2. If you encounter Mr. Welcome, the enormous pig god with the eyes on his forehead, you must not let him touch you.
“3. The red snakes can only see while you’re moving. If you encounter them, stay still. Don’t even breathe.”
“Breeding women with pig-creatures?!” Dmitri cried, horror washing over his face. “We need to find her! But where do we even start?” I looked through the field, trying to see any sign of tracks, but it looked like hundreds of animals had gone through this field recently. Paths of tall, crushed grass crisscrossed the enormous length of it, some of them worn down to black dirt and stones. I just shook my head, having no idea.
A distant scream rolled its way down the surrounding hills. It came from our left and sounded very much like Anna. Dmitri’s eyes turned cold. Without looking back at me, he started frantically running towards the sound. It faded away within seconds.
“Wait up!” I cried, sprinting as fast as I could. His freshly-shaved head gleamed as he disappeared into the trees. Gripping the open buck knife in my hand, my knuckles white with tension and fear, I followed after him.
***
We wandered for hours through the woods, never hearing a second scream to guide our path. We both hoped that we were going in the right direction. A small deer trail winding through the brush opened up, heading up rocky hills and clear streams of water.
Sweating and nervous, we traveled for miles and miles, rarely talking. A few times, I tried to get Dmitri to slow down.
“How do you know you’re going in the right direction?” I asked. “We’ve been walking this trail for five hours and haven’t seen a thing.”
“This was the direction the scream came from,” he said weakly. “Where else would they go? They would want to travel quickly with a hostage. They would take a trail.” I didn’t point out that there may be other trails, that we had absolutely no idea where we were going.
As we reached the peak of a mountain, I pulled a small, portable Geiger counter we had taken along for the trip. The radioactivity here was high, much higher than normal background radiation. I didn’t know how far we were from the nuclear power plant at the center of all this, but at a certain point, it would become too dangerous to keep moving forward.
Dmitri was next to me, chugging a bottle of water when a shriek rang out below us. It sounded almost animalistic but had a strange, electronic distortion. Amplified to an ear-splitting cacophony, it echoed through the trees. Much quieter roars answered from the forests all around us in response, the cries of bears and other predators. These sounded much closer, however.
“Pssst,” a pile of thick ferns said to my left, shaking suddenly. In Ukrainian, the ferns continued by whispering, “Hey, you!” I jumped, swinging the knife in the direction of the brush, watching the blade shake wildly in my hand as fresh waves of adrenaline surged through my body. Dmitri was by my side, his eyes wide and wild. He glanced over at me, nodding. He had the tire iron raised like a tennis racket, ready to strike. A moment later, a little boy crawled out.
He was scarecrow thin, his face smudged with dirt and filth, his dark eyes sunken and lifeless deep inside his small head. He had black hair and a nose like a little twisted lump in the center of his face. It seemed like it had been repeatedly broken. He didn’t look older than ten, but he looked so emaciated that it was impossible to say. The rags and tatters he wore barely covered his body, and the boy was almost in his Genesis suit.
“Come out,” I said grimly. Dmitri’s eyes bulged from his head.
“Don’t kill me, please,” the boy whispered in a cracked, choked voice, his accent giving all his words a guttural tone. “Take me out of here. My Mom and Dad brought me here, they were part of the Golden Butchers, but a couple months ago, they got sick and died from all the poison in the water and food.”
“Who are you, kid?” Dmitri said, reaching down and pulling him up to his feet. I watched the boy closely, the bear mace in one hand and the knife in the other, looking for any sign of sudden violence or betrayal.
“My name is Pilip. I come from the farm,” he said, pointing vaguely towards the tallest peak in the area. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there.” Dmitri kneeled down until he was eye-to-eye with Pilip.
“Can you take us there?” he said. Pilip’s eyes teared up, but he slowly nodded.
“If you will take me with you when you leave, I’ll show you,” he said, crying now, “but it is a horrible place. It is the place of Mr. Welcome.”
***
Pilip guided us to the living farm, saving us a great deal of time. He navigated the forest like an experienced hiker, seeming to know the entire area from the smallest clues: a split, fallen tree, or a tree with a whorl like an eye, or a sudden curve in a babbling brook. It saved us a great deal of time wandering through the woods, where everything looked exactly the same to me.
“There,” he said, pointing through a break in the trees to the farm. The entire top of the hill was cleared of trees and brush. In its place stood a nightmare.
The farm was the closest place to Hell I have ever seen. The top of the living building peeked over the tall trees surrounding it. It had something like a bell tower on the top of it, almost like a church might have. But instead of a bell, it had an enormous, blood-shot eye.
The eye had an iris as red as a dismembered heart. Its pupil was dilated and insane. From here, the eye looked to be about the size of a church bell and had no eyelids. Strange white filaments like those of a slime mold surrounded it, trailing down into the building. I wondered if this was the optic nerve for the great, staring eye.
The rest of the building was as black as eternity, windowless and imposing. It had a brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and steep slopes. I watched the building and the eye closely. To my horror, I realized that the entire thing was alive somehow. The eye constantly spun in its place, staring out over the surrounding hills like the Eye of Sauron. The building constantly breathed.
“Welcome!” a hushed, distorted voice cried. The words seemed to come from the breathing and living walls of the farm itself. “Welcome! Wellllll-come…”
“What the fuck is this, kid?” Dmitri whispered hoarsely. “Where’s Anna?” Pilip shook his head sadly.
“She’s inside with the other breeders,” he said, the fear and terror evident on his face. “They keep them chained in cages or bound in the basement until the time for the ritual comes.”
“And when is that?” I asked. He looked up at the sky and the fading light. We had somehow wasted nearly an entire day already. Night was coming, and we hadn’t even seen Anna yet.
“At sunset,” he responded. Dmitri nearly jumped up at that.
“Sunset?! That’s almost here! We need to go now!” he cried. I almost wanted to laugh.
“What are you going to do, stab that enormous building with your knife?” I whispered. “We need a plan. Maybe we can burn it down or…” But my words were cut off by the roaring of the building. Its scream echoed over the hills. It was immediately answered by countless others, including one that came only a few dozen feet behind us. I grabbed Dmitri’s shoulder, my panicked eyes flicking in that direction.
“There’s something…” I started to say when the brush cracked under a heavy weight. Looking up, I saw something horrible stalking us from behind.
It looked like a pig, walking on all fours with a fat, bloated body, but it was the size of an SUV. Its eyes were like the eye in the building, blood-red and dilated. All over its body, hundreds of sharp teeth grew out of its skin, covering the pink flesh like tumors. The creature almost looked like a porcupine with all the sharp points of fangs projecting from its body.
For a moment, its eyes widened as we stared at each other. They instantly narrowed as the pig roared again and gave chase. It gnashed its teeth, opening and closing its mouth in a frenzy of bloodlust. In its mouth, too, the teeth grew wild. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth of different sizes grew from its gums, tongue and lips.
“Run!” I cried, grabbing Pilip’s arm and hauling him off the ground. The boy had a natural survivor’s instincts and immediately started running by my side, away from the approaching creature.
We broke out into the massive clearing where the living farm stood. I saw that the building had only a single door in and out, a black barn door that stood wide open. I heard Dmitri’s feet pounding the ground behind me. The heavy thuds of the approaching creature drew louder by the second.
“In the barn!” I cried, not having time to think. It was the only possible place of safety here. I sprinted faster than I ever had before towards those doors as if they were entrance to paradise itself. Without slowing, I ran into the building, trying to slam one of the doors shut behind me. Dmitri grabbed the other. With the creature only seconds away, they started swinging shut. Pilip’s small body pressed against my leg as he came forward, using his meager strength to help me.
The door was extremely heavy and hard to move. The building itself looked like it was six or seven stories tall, and the doors to the barn nearly a-third of that height. With a tortured creak, they slammed shut. A single breath later, something heavy thudded against the other size, as if it had been hit by a battering ram. But the door held. Quickly, Dmitri and I grabbed a large board leaning against the wall and stuffed it into the brackets on both sides of the door, locking it from the inside.
I noticed how cool and dark it was in here, as if I had walked into a cave. I turned, taking in the interior of the living farm for the first time. At that moment, I had to repress a scream welling up in my throat.
***
Hundreds of imprisoned women both lined both sides of the barn. They were stacked one on top of another like prison cells. Wearing filthy, blood-stained rags, most of them looked silently down on us with dead, haunted eyes. I noticed the majority were in their twenties or thirties, but their eyes looked centuries old.
Along the back wall, an enormous pig lined the wall, positioned like Jesus on the cross. It stood as tall as the barn itself. Extra eyes covered its face, a dozen of them positioned all over its cheeks and forehead. From the top of its head, I saw white filaments rising up into the bell tower. Its many blood-red eyes focused on us, as still as death.
“Welcome,” it hissed. “Welcome!” Its limbs were chained to the wall. Enormous rusted links intertwined around its body, preventing Mr. Welcome from moving.
“Anna?!” Dmitri cried, looking around frantically. There was no one else here that I could see except for Mr. Welcome and all the hostages. “Anna, where are you?!”
“Don’t scream,” Pilip said in a tiny, fear-choked voice. “Please, don’t scream…”
But it was too late. As Dmitri’s last words faded, trapdoors built into the black floor of the barn sprung open. Dozens of mutated bears and pig-creatures crept out, their predatory eyes scanning us with hunger and anger.
***
“Fuck!” Dmitri cried, running back to the door at my side. Frantically, the three of us pulled the board up and dropped it to the fleshy floor with a clatter. As hisses and growls erupted all around us and the predators creeped forwards towards us in a semi-circle, the barn door flew open.
It was night now, the darkness creeping in like a descending curtain. No pig creatures awaited us on the other side, but something worse seemed to be creeping out of the forest.
I saw snakes the color of clotted blood slithering ahead. Each one was the size of a tractor-trailer, yet they made very little noise. An occasional hiss would rip its way through the air, but they hunted silently.
As I stood in the field in front of the barn, a no-man’s land of hellish proportions, the certainty of death fell over my heart like grasping skeletal hands. I looked down at the little boy sadly. He gave me a faint smile, even though his eyes were terrified.
“I think we’re fucked,” Dmitri whispered by my side. I only nodded.
***
But at that moment, I remembered the rules, and an idea came to me.
“Just stay still,” I said. “Don’t even breathe.” Pilip and Dmitri looked at me strangely, then recognition came over their eyes. Dmitri only nodded, and then we all played statue.
The predators from the barn were only thirty feet behind us by now, crouched down and hunting us like a cat with a mouse. Yet the snakes also closed in, their black, slitted eyes gleaming with a reptilian coldness. As the mutated bears and pig creatures leaned down to pounce, I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
I felt a sudden rush of air all around me. The snakes flitted forward in a blur, their massive jaws unhinging. Two fangs swiveled out like switchblades, fangs big enough to impale a police car. Drops of clear venom fell lazily from the ends.
Keeping my eyes closed, afraid to even breathe or blink, I listened as the sounds of tearing flesh and screaming animals resonated all around me. After about thirty seconds of this, everything went deathly silent.
***
I don’t know how long we stood there like statues, but eventually, someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes, unbelieving. Dmitri stared at me intently.
“They’re all gone,” he whispered. “All except Mr. Welcome. It’s now or never.” I nodded, and together, we moved into the farm.
The trapdoors still lay open. I could hear very faint sobbing coming from under the building. Dmitri was afraid to make a sound. Together, the three of us went down to investigate.
We found a dark basement covered in hay. Torture tools covered the walls: iron maidens, brazen bulls, crosses and an entire universe of whips, saws, grinders, pliers, razor-wire and other blood-stained tools of the trade. In the corner, we saw Anna, her hands tied to the wall. More rope bound her feet and legs. We ran forward. When Anna saw Dmitri, she collapsed into a nervous wreck.
“Oh my God, you came! Please, get me out of here, right now,” she whispered. “They’re coming. The ritual will start soon.” Without a word, we started cutting the ropes, freeing her quickly.
“We need to be as quiet as possible,” I told Anna. “We can all get out of here. Let’s go.”
***
As we ascended from the basement back to the main floor of the living farm, the repetitive, metallic voice of Mr. Welcome kept repeating the same insane mantra.
“Welcome,” it said. “Welcome!” Once the four of us were all together, however, it changed.
“Welcome, thieves,” it hissed, its voice deepening and turning into a demonic gurgle. “That is my breeder. You will have to find out what happens to thieves.” I could only imagine all those blood-stained tools in the basement, and I shuddered.
Mr. Welcome inhaled deeply, his massive, fleshy body ballooning. With a predatory roar, he ripped the chains out of the wall of the living building. Orange pus and dark, clotted blood dripped from the holes. The barn breathed faster and deeper, the broken walls vibrating and shimmering as new life and pain flowed into them.
Mr. Welcome started moving towards us like a grinding juggernaut, walking on two legs like some sort of pig god. His many lidless eyes never looked away from us. The frayed optic nerves leading to the bell tower broke with a sound like snapping rubber bands. Dmitri looked at me with great sadness in his eyes.
“Get away,” he whispered. “I’ll distract it. Just get Anna home, no matter what.” Before I could respond, he ran forwards towards the abomination, the small, useless knife raised in one hand.
Mr. Welcome saw him coming. He tried to swipe at Dmitri with a sharp, black hoove, but Dmitri ducked, running around the back of him. He gave a battle-cry and started stabbing the monster in the back of the leg, which probably hurt it about as much as a toothpick.
But it provided a distraction. This time, Mr. Welcome spun his whole body, falling back to all four legs to deal with this nuisance. He used his massive snout to smack Dmitri hard, sending him flying across the barn. He hit the wall with a bone-shattering thud.
Dmitri’s skin immediately started to blacken, as if he were being burned alive. His eyes melted out of his face as he screamed, clawing at the dying patches of necrotic tissue spreading across his body. Within a few seconds, his screams faded to agonized groans. He tried to crawl back towards us as he died.
“Run!” I screamed, grabbing Anna’s hand and forcing her to sprint by my side. Pilip was already one step ahead of us, frantically trying to reach the shelter of the forest. I heard the ground shake behind me as Mr. Welcome drew near, moving much faster than we could ever hope to go. I knew we would never make it.
“Keep going, no matter what!” I yelled at Pilip and Anna. They kept running, the animal instinct to survive now foremost in their minds. I had to suppress mine. I turned to face the creature, the evil pig god known as Mr. Welcome.
***
In hindsight, I don’t know if God or some divine power had interceded, but the bear mace was probably one of the few items that could have saved us at that moment. Mr. Welcome had many eyes, and now that he was running on all four paws, his face was within reach. As my heart palpitated wildly, I raised the bear mace and sprayed at his dozen eyes. He didn’t slow, and I had to jump to the side to keep from being trampled. The air whooshed past me as if a subway car had gone by.
But a moment later, Mr. Welcome gave a roar- and not one of anger and hunger. This was a roar of pain and uncertainty. Blinded, Mr. Welcome frantically started running in circles, knocking down huge swathes of trees. The ear-splitting racket as he pulled the forest apart crashed over the surrounding landscape. Without a moment of hesitation, I turned to follow Pilip and Anna back to the car.
We told the police about the barn and all the hostages, but they claimed they couldn’t find it, and we never heard anything more about it.
***
Looking back on the experience, I now know why Chernobyl is a restricted zone, and it isn’t just because of the radioactivity. There are some things that hide under the surface, after all- things that grow in the dark, rotted places where no eyes roam.

The Pazyryk culture is known from well-preserved burials (some frozen). It was certainly Sakan (close relatives of Scythians, maybe also of the Khotanese), and there are chimeral beasts represented in many ways, some like Scythian beasts (grifins). Pearson, “the man in Pazyryk Barrow Two was tattooed with numerous real and fantastic beasts, including beaked and antlered horses with lions’ tails”. Some of this resembles Scythians golden art of griffins attacking horses https://www.reddit.com/mythology/comments/q2ssp8/scythian_golden_pectoral/ , which seems to represent legends of the Arimaspoí fighting gold-guarding griffins. The Arimaspoí were a one-eyed people in the north, according to ancient Scythians https://www.reddit.com/IndoEuropean/comments/142t347/scythian_greek_arimaspo%C3%AD_oneeyed/ .
​
Though Pearson said that some tattoos were of mythical beasts, they might have been based on real animals made to look like ones from myths (as decoration or in ritual). An odd feature is that the horses buried there also were decorated, often in horned masks. Pearson :
>
One of these horses, a venerable old gelding, was buried in Pazyryk Barrow One with a massive, antlered headdress. [Its] mane was covered, and its tail was wrapped to create a smooth, sleek appearance, and the wrapping terminates in a tuft of red horsehair, giving it a distinct resemblance to a lion’s tail.
>
Other horses from Pazyryk wear equally ornate headdresses. A second horse from Barrow One wears a horned, winged lion. A horse from Barrow Two wears a ram’s head with a bird perched, wings outstretched, between its horns; a horse from Barrow Five is crowned with a wooden deer’s head with attached leather antlers. At the site of Berel, four horses (out of a total of thirteen found in Kurgan 11) were buried wearing massive wooden ibex horns. All had mane coverings and either tail wrappings or tightly braided tails. These horses, as well as the many others buried without headdresses both at Pazyryk and Berel, also wore various pieces of tack, including bridles, saddles, girths, martingales, and cruppers. These pieces were decorated with images of other animals or scenes of animal predation.
>
​
These might have been used to mimic rituals of men wearing horns (and other masks, etc.) to imitate the gods. This is known from around the world, including IE, as shown by the use of ceremonial horned helmets in Norse rituals (compare maks of gods used in rites, or the Hand of Sabazius). Semenko sees this as a sign of IE origin :
>
Indo-European cults of the horned ‘horse’ i.e. the horse transformed ritually into another horned animal (either a bull or a goat or a deer) using a special mask with horns were practiced by the Asian Indo-Europeans of Iran, India and Middle and Central Asia (Pamir, Kazakhstan and Russian and Mongolian Altai regions) in 4200–200 BCE and by the European Indo-Europeans of the Atlantic, Northern and Central Europe (the Celts and the (Northern) Germans) in 300 BCE – 650 AD. Around 4200 BCE the practice of the early Indo-Europeans of the Pamir region of yoking different non-equid horned animals such as bovines and goats into the first invented chariots became one of the sources of the horned ‘horse’ cult development. The second source of the development of Indo-European cult of the Horned ‘Horse’ was the Middle–Central –South Asian practice of riding horned animals other than Equidae before using the true horses as riding animals.
>
​
Using mismatched animals to pull a chariot seems like a short-term solution. I feel it shows either ritual (imitating gods whose chariots were pulled by non-standard animals, birds, goats, etc.), though it might have been used when needed due to scarcity. All this shows IE usage, but Pearson takes the opposite path :
>
The custom of horse sacrifice in Kurgan burials may have arrived in the Altai as a result of Indo-European expansion, but the particulars of the Pazyryk horse burials cannot be explained as purely Indo-European in inspiration.
>
In order to understand the meaning of these horse costumes, we must first understand the meaning of their key attributes, that is, the salient characteristics of deer and mountain sheep/ibex. Esther Jacobson-Tepfer has explored the significance of these animals in Altaic religion from the Neolithic onwards, convincingly connecting them to the concept of a World Tree or World Mountain, both of which are reflexes of the World Axis belief common to most if not all Siberian and circumpolar religions. The antlers of the deer can be related to the branches of the World Tree: petroglyphs of deer dating from the Neolithic onwards represent some deer with strikingly tree-like antlers. The mountain sheep/ibex may be said to stand on the top of the World Mountain. Its horns, resembling wood, can probably be connected to the World Tree in the same way that the deer’s antlers are.
>
​
Since IE people definitely had a World Tree, this doesn’t seem like proof of non-IE origin. Horned men and horses seen in IE art in Europe seems to show this goes back to PIE. The importance of horses is certainly known in many IE cultures. As to the cause, when men of importance wore elaborate head-covering, and horses were important, it only makes sense that similar decorations would come to be used for both. This is true even in cases where horned horses did not represent a figure from myth, but imitation of deer from myth also seems like it could be one cause.
​
This also seems like art from the Indus Civilization, which includes “unicorns” of uncertain origin, 3-headed animals, etc., as well as horned men. The men have been compared to Indic Paśupati ‘Lord of the Beasts’ and one greatly resembles the sitting horned man on the Gundestrup Cauldron. Some animals are hard to identify (either not real or obscured by artistic flair), so look for yourselves to see if they match known IE horned horses, etc., described above :
​
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script#/media/File:Longest_Indus_script_inscription_(colour).jpg.jpg)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script#/media/File:Shiva_Pashupati.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script#/media/File:Stamp_seal_and_modern_impression- _unicorn_and_incense_burner_(?)_MET_DP23101_(cropped).jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script#/media/File:Indus_script.jpg
​
These images also relate to whether the Indus Script was used for an IE language. I have used values based on the Sanskrit names for the objects represented, with good results. I feel that the converging features being related to IE counterparts on several sides supports the reality of IE origin.
​
​
Pearson, Kristen R. (2017) Chasing the Shaman's Steed: The Horse in Myth from Central Asia to Scandinavia
https://www.academia.edu/35913475
​
Semenko, Aleksandr Andreyevich (2021) The horned (non-)horses of Indo-Europeans and the problem of Celts’ and Germans’ origin
https://www.academia.edu/45158983
​
Whalen, Sean (2024) Partial Decipherment of the Indus Script: Compilation (Draft)
https://www.academia.edu/115789583
​
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazyryk_culture

Hello, I'm visiting Berlin and would like to get a small simple tatto (don't know what yet but the point is to make one in Berlin) Do you have any recommendation for tattoo shops that are walk-in friendly (and not so pricey) ?

Hello, I'm visiting Berlin and would like to get a small simple tatto (don't know what yet but the point is to make one in Berlin) Do you have any recommendation for tattoo shops that are walk-in friendly (and not so pricey) ?

As you can see from the pictures I have most of my upper arm (not the inside though), and a bit of my lower arm tattoed. But unfortunately I don't really like my tattooes anymore. I keep my arm covered at all times, even now during the summer. I no longer feel feminine or pretty in dresses or short sleeves, I just feel ashamed. I would love for the tattooes to be compleyely gone, but I don't know if that is possible. And I'm prepared for the process to take time, cost a lot of money and be painful, I just want them to be gone.
The flowers are originally between 9 and 6 years old, but in november last year I went back and got the mouse tattooes and my tattoo artist also lined up my old tattooes again. I regret this so much!
I have started to check out my local laser clinics to see what they can offer, but since all of this is new to me I'm having trouble deciding which one to choose. Not all of the clinics have before-and-after-pictures on their websites that I can look at.
Looking at the pictures of my tattooes, which laser do you guys think would work best? All of the clinics say that the laser they use is the best, the most effective and the most gentle laser on the market, so I just get unsure and confused. These are the lasers I can choose from:

• Cutera Enlighten lll
• PicoSure
• PicoWay
• Revlite Q- switched laser
• ND Yag
• DYE

And this might be a long shot, but does anyone here have experience with tattoo removal in Norway?

I am looking for some nice Tattoo ideas which are Evangelion based. I am not looking for full Body or face tattos. I am a big fan of imagary. The only idea i have since now would be the seele logo /the face of lilith. What are your Takes?