Chapter 25 – The Substitute’s Nightmare

【Martinez PoV】

The duty roster felt like reading my own obituary.

I stood in the guard locker room staring at the paper tacked to the bulletin board. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting sickly yellow light across the names and assignments. The facility smelled like disinfectant and old coffee, familiar scents that usually grounded me.

Not today.

Block Twelve. My name. Seven consecutive days.

Administrative Leave – Evans, K. Duration: One Week.

My hand started shaking. I shoved it in my pocket before anyone noticed.

“Tough break, Martinez.”

I turned. Jenkins stood behind me, already in full tactical gear. He looked at me the way people look at terminal patients. Pity mixed with relief it wasn’t him.

“Someone’s gotta do it.”

“Yeah. Someone.”

He patted my shoulder once, awkward and final, then walked away. The other guards gave me space like fear was contagious. Maybe it was. They’d all heard what happened last month when Sarah decided to wear me like a meat suit.

I touched my neck reflexively. The skin there still felt wrong sometimes, like it belonged to someone else.

The memory hit me without warning. Cold spreading through my veins. My body moving while I screamed inside my own skull. Watching through my eyes as my hands opened doors I hadn’t chosen to open. Sarah’s presence inside my mind, vast and ancient and hungry, treating my consciousness like an inconvenient houseguest.

I’d spent three days in medical after Kai finally got her out. The doctors said I was fine. Clean bill of health. No lasting damage.

They were wrong.

I still woke up sometimes feeling that cold, checking my reflection to make sure my eyes were still my own.

“You good, Martinez?”

I blinked. Cooper stood in front of me holding two cups of coffee. He offered one.

“Yeah. Just tired.”

“You look dead already, man. No offense.”

“None taken.”

I took the coffee. It was lukewarm and tasted like burnt rubber. I drank it anyway.

Cooper lowered his voice, glancing around the locker room.

“Look, if you want, I could—”

“No.”

“I’m just saying, I could talk to the supervisor. Say you’re sick or something.”

“And then what? Someone else gets assigned? We all drew straws, Coop. I lost. That’s how it works.”

“That’s how people die.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Cooper left. I stood alone in the locker room staring at my reflection in the metal lockers. Hollow eyes, pale skin. I looked like I’d already been possessed, drained, discarded.

The contrast made me bitter. Kai walked into Block Twelve with his hands in his pockets. Chatted with The Thing like she was a neighbor borrowing sugar. Gave her gifts. Made her laugh. Treated her like a person.

I knew better.

Without Kai, she wasn’t Sarah. She was a predator. And I was prey.

Day Two.

Block Twelve was freezing.

My breath clouded in front of my face the moment I stepped through the first security door. The temperature had dropped at least thirty degrees from the main corridor. Frost crawled up the reinforced glass of the observation window in delicate crystalline patterns.

This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t the environmental controls malfunctioning.

This was her.

I approached the cell slowly, each step deliberate. My boots echoed too loud in the silence. The facility had sound dampeners in every block, but here the quiet felt oppressive, heavy, like something physical pressing against my eardrums.

“H-Hello?”

My voice cracked. I cleared my throat, tried again.

“This is Guard Martinez. Daily welfare check.”

Nothing.

I looked through the observation window. The cell was dark. Not lights-off dark. Absolute darkness, the kind that swallowed light instead of just lacking it. I couldn’t see anything inside, no shapes, no shadows, nothing.

“Sarah?”

Silence.

Then, from somewhere deep in the ventilation system, a voice drifted down.

“Where is he?”

Three words. Soft, questioning, childlike. They made every hair on my body stand straight.

“Kai is… he’s on leave. Administrative leave. He’ll be back in—”

“Where. Is. He.”

The air pressure dropped. My ears popped. The temperature plummeted further. I could see frost forming on my jacket sleeves in real time.

“He’s coming back. I promise. He just—”

“You’re not him.”

The disappointment in those words hit like a physical weight. The darkness in the cell rippled, moved, pressed against the reinforced glass from inside. I took an involuntary step back.

“I know. I’m just here to—”

“Go away.”

The lights in the corridor flickered once. Twice. Went out completely for five full seconds before slamming back on.

I left Block Twelve walking backward, refusing to turn around until I hit the security door. My hands shook so bad it took three tries to scan my ID badge.

Day Four.

The gifts were destroyed.

I noticed immediately when I entered. The beautiful glass paperweight Sarah had made for Kai—shattered. Scattered across the floor in a million glittering pieces. The shadow-metal pen—bent, twisted, crushed like someone had taken a hammer to it.

The cell was still pitch black. Still freezing. But now there was debris everywhere, evidence of rage, of frustration, of something breaking down.

“Sarah, it’s Martinez. Just checking in.”

No response.

I tried to remember how Kai did this. Casual, friendly, treating the situation like it was normal. I could do that. I could fake normal.

“So, uh, Kai wanted me to make sure you’re doing okay. He’s gonna be back soon and—”

Laughter.

It started low, distant, then built into something that sounded like grinding stones, like metal scraping concrete. It didn’t come from one direction. It came from everywhere at once.

“You smell wrong.”

The voice was right behind me.

I spun. Nothing there. Just empty corridor.

“You smell like fear. Not like him. He smells like starlight and void and home.”

“I’m just trying to help—”

“You smell like meat. Screaming meat.”

Shadows reached across the floor toward my boots. I jerked back, slamming against the wall.

“I promised him I’d be good. I promised I wouldn’t eat. But you… you’re not him. You don’t count.”

The shadows retreated slowly, reluctantly, like predators called off by an invisible leash.

“Get. Out.”

I ran. Dead sprinted down the corridor until I hit the security checkpoint. The guard on duty took one look at my face and didn’t ask questions.

Day Six.

I couldn’t sleep anymore.

Every time I closed my eyes I felt that cold creeping back. Heard her voice promising terrible things. Saw those shadows reaching for me.

Dark circles carved deep under my eyes. My hands trembled constantly. I’d lost five pounds from not eating. The other guards stopped making eye contact entirely.

I looked like a dead man walking.

The final night shift started at 2200 hours. I stood outside Block Twelve for ten full minutes before forcing myself to scan in.

The cold hit immediately. Worse than before. My breath came out in thick clouds. Ice covered every surface, the walls, the floor, the observation window.

The lights were dead.

Not flickering. Not dim. Completely dead. Emergency lighting should’ve kicked in automatically. It hadn’t.

I pulled out my flashlight, clicked it on. The beam cut through darkness that seemed to eat the light, reducing it to a weak cone barely three feet ahead.

“Sarah?”

My voice sounded small, swallowed by the oppressive silence.

“I know you’re there. I’m just… Kai wanted me to check on you. He’s coming back tomorrow. Just one more day.”

Movement.

Not footsteps. Something else. The sound of wet shifting flesh, of too many limbs unfolding in the darkness. My flashlight beam caught something—a glimpse of pale skin that glistened like exposed muscle, of joints bending wrong, of eyes.

Yellow eyes. Slit pupils. Too many of them.

They blinked.

Not all at once. One by one, lazy and predatory.

“He’s not here.”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Layered, distorted, multiple voices speaking in unison.

“I’ve been good. So good. Starving myself because he asked. Because I love him. Because I want him to be proud of me.”

The temperature dropped further. My fingers were going numb.

“But he left me.”

“He didn’t leave you. He’s coming back—”

“HE LEFT ME.”

The scream was physical. It threw me backward against the reinforced door. Glass cracked in the observation window, spider-webbing from a central impact point.

Something massive moved in the darkness. Shadows peeled off the walls and took shape, formed limbs, formed mass, formed a body that was wrong in every fundamental way.

She emerged from the black.

Not the small scared girl Kai visited. This was the truth. The thing underneath. Too tall, joints reversed, skin that shifted between solid and smoke. Hair that moved independent of wind, each strand alive and seeking. Fingers too long, too many knuckles, ending in points that weren’t quite claws but weren’t quite human either.

And those eyes. Dozens of them now, opening across her form like pustules, each one focused on me with predatory intelligence.

“I promised him I wouldn’t cause trouble.”

She moved closer. Not walking. Gliding. The shadows beneath her feet carried her forward.

“But I didn’t promise not to have a snack.”

I tried to back up. Nowhere to go. The door was sealed behind me. Security protocols. Couldn’t open from inside without proper clearance.

She kept coming.

I could smell her now. Ozone and copper and something else, something old and wrong that made my hindbrain scream to run.

“Sarah, please—”

“Sarah is a name he gave me. A gift. A precious thing.”

She leaned down, her face inches from mine. Her breath came out in visible waves of cold. Frost formed on my eyebrows, my eyelashes.

“You don’t get to use it.”

One hand pressed against the wall beside my head. The metal froze solid, then began to crack. Another hand—or something approximating a hand—traced down my chest, stopping over my heart.

“I can feel it. Racing. Thundering. So much beautiful fear.”

She inhaled deeply, her chest expanding far more than human lungs should allow.

“I only behave for him. You?”

Her smile split too wide, revealed too many teeth.

“You are just meat that screams.”

The pressure of her presence crushed down on me. My legs gave out. I slid down the wall, landing hard on the frozen floor. Tears streamed down my face, freezing halfway down my cheeks.

She loomed over me, her shadow engulfing everything. The yellow eyes blinked slowly, lazily, like a cat playing with prey it had already caught.

“Tomorrow he comes back. Tomorrow I will be Sarah again. Sweet. Small. Harmless.”

She leaned closer. Her lips nearly touched my ear.

“But if he is late. If he is even one minute late.”

A tongue that was too long, too cold, licked the side of my face from jaw to temple.

“You will not survive.”

She pulled back. The darkness swallowed her. The temperature rose slightly. The yellow eyes blinked out one by one until only the oppressive black remained.

I sat there for what felt like hours. Could’ve been minutes. Time didn’t work right in Block Twelve.

Eventually I found the strength to stand. Made it to the door. Somehow entered the override code with shaking fingers.

The security checkpoint guard took one look at me and called medical.

I didn’t argue.

I sat in the sterile white medical bay staring at nothing, wrapped in a thermal blanket, while the doctor checked for hypothermia and someone from administration asked what happened.

I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t find words. Could only think one thing over and over.

Kai better not be late.

Kai better not be late.

Because if he was, Sarah wouldn’t just kill me.

She’d make it last.