Chapter 9 – The Thing

After visiting my mother, the lunchtime I so longed for finally arrived.

But to my surprise, it wasn’t as I wanted.

The cafeteria smelled like burnt coffee and whatever mystery meat the kitchen was calling stew today, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and casting everything in that sickly greenish tint that made even fresh food look radioactive. I grabbed a tray and headed for the sandwich station, already mentally checked out for the next thirty minutes.

Then I felt it.

The air pressure changed like right before a thunderstorm hits, my immunity kicking in automatically with that familiar static crawling across my skin. Someone was using power in the building, and they were using a lot of it.

I scanned the room and locked eyes with Martinez.

He stood at the serving line completely frozen mid-reach for a plate, his pupils blown wide and swallowed up by black that spread to the whites of his eyes. His hand trembled, fingers twitching like he was fighting invisible strings.

“Kai, Kai, Kai.”

The voice came from Martinez’s mouth but it wasn’t his voice, too feminine and too sing-song, layered with something that made normal people’s ears bleed. I knew that voice and I knew exactly who was puppeting my coworker like a meat suit.

“Get out of him, Sarah.”

Martinez’s head tilted at an angle that was wrong, too far to one side, his lips pulling into a smile that didn’t belong on his face.

“But I just got comfortable.”

I set my tray down with more force than necessary, the clatter echoing through the suddenly silent cafeteria as every guard in the room turned to stare at us.

“Out, now, or I’m cutting your cable access for a month.”

The black in Martinez’s eyes flickered and his body went rigid, muscles locked tight enough that I could see them straining against his uniform. Then he gasped, doubling over as the presence vacated his skull like smoke being sucked out of a chimney.

“What the—”

Martinez looked around wildly, confused and terrified.

“Take five, get some water.”

He stumbled away toward the water fountain, hands shaking so bad he could barely grip the button. Poor guy had no idea he’d just been possessed by one of the most dangerous entities in the facility.

I felt the presence shift.

It slithered through the air like oil on water, searching for a new host, and I tracked its movement by the way people shivered when it passed them, unconscious reactions to predator proximity. It settled on Jenkins standing by the coffee machine.

Jenkins’s head snapped toward me, eyes flooding with black.

“You’re being so mean today, Kai.”

“You’re being a pain in my ass today, Sarah.”

“I just want to talk.”

“Then use the intercom like everyone else.”

Jenkins’s body moved toward me with jerky, uncoordinated steps, The Thing never being great at controlling human bodies smoothly since she was too used to her real form with all those wrong angles and impossible geometry.

“The intercom isn’t personal, I miss you Kai, it’s been three whole days since you visited.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Too busy for me?”

I pushed my immunity outward in a wave of pure negation that crashed into her like a wall, the connection between her and Jenkins snapping audibly with a sound like breaking guitar strings. Jenkins collapsed and I barely caught him before his head cracked against the tile floor.

“Three hosts in two minutes, you’re getting sloppy.”

The temperature in the cafeteria dropped ten degrees in an instant, frost creeping across the windows in spiraling patterns that looked almost like screaming faces. The lights flickered and in the spaces between the strobing brightness I could see shapes moving in the corners.

Not real, just illusions, fear given form.

“I’m not sloppy, I’m motivated.”

Her voice came from everywhere now, no longer anchored to a body, whispering from the vents and echoing off the walls and dripping from the ceiling tiles. Around me guards started backing toward the exits, their base human instincts screaming at them to run.

“Everyone out.”

I didn’t have to say it twice, the cafeteria clearing in under thirty seconds and leaving me alone with a room full of shadows and the presence of something that wore human skin like a badly fitted coat.

The shadows coalesced in front of me, taking shape.

She appeared slowly, piece by piece, like reality was loading her in chunks—first the smile that was too wide and full of too many teeth, then the eyes that were bright yellow and slit like a cat’s. The body came last, a tall woman in a vintage dress that shifted colors every time I blinked, covered in patterns that hurt to look at directly.

Sarah, or at least that’s what she called herself, her real name being something humans couldn’t pronounce without their tongues splitting.

“There you are, handsome.”

“You know the rules, no possessing staff during work hours.”

“Rules are so boring Kai, you’re boring when you talk about rules.”

She circled me like a shark, her movements too smooth and too fluid, her dress not moving with her body the way fabric should but flowing independent of physics and responding to winds that didn’t exist.

“Then let me be boring somewhere else, I’ve got twenty-three minutes left of my lunch break.”

“Spend them with me.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Still no.”

Her smile faltered for just a second before coming back twice as wide and sharp enough to cut, the shadows in the room darkening and pressing in closer. I felt the weight of her attention like physical pressure against my skull.

“You used to visit more, what changed?”

“Nothing changed, I visit on schedule.”

“The schedule isn’t enough.”

Classic yandere energy, I’d dealt with this before with Thalia but Sarah took it to a whole different level—Thalia wanted to keep me but Sarah wanted to consume me, remake me into something that existed only for her.

“It’s going to have to be enough.”

The illusions intensified, the walls melting away to reveal an endless void filled with floating eyes and grasping hands, the floor becoming transparent and showing me an abyss that went down forever and was lined with teeth and screaming mouths.

My immunity ate through the illusions like acid through paper and I didn’t even blink.

“That’s not going to work Sarah, it never works.”

“I know.”

She stepped closer, near enough that I could smell the weird ozone-and-copper scent that clung to her, her hand reaching out with fingers elongating into something with too many joints before touching my cheek.

Cold, everything about her was cold.

“But I keep trying anyway, because maybe one day you’ll feel it Kai, the fear, and when you do—when you finally feel that delicious terror—I’ll be right there to catch you.”

“Creepy, super creepy, like restraining order levels of creepy.”

“You can’t restrain something that doesn’t exist in your reality.”

Fair point since Sarah existed in like seven dimensions at once and only pretended to be solid when she felt like it, restraining orders requiring a physical address and all that.

“What do you actually want, Sarah?”

Her whole demeanor shifted, the predatory circling stopping as she just stood there looking weirdly vulnerable for an interdimensional horror, her extra joints retracting and her hand becoming human-shaped again.

“Visit me, today, please.”

“I’ll visit tomorrow during normal rounds.”

“Not good enough.”

“It’s going to have to be.”

The temperature dropped again, so cold my breath came out in white clouds, the shadows writhing and taking forms that were almost recognizable and almost human but wrong in ways that made the lizard part of my brain scream.

“Then I’ll leave.”

I went very still.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll leave Kai, I’ll break out of this boring little prison and go back to the cities, back to the hunting grounds where the fear is thick and sweet and everywhere.”

She wasn’t bluffing, I could hear it in her voice and see it in the way the reality around her started to crack like breaking glass. Sarah could leave whenever she wanted just like my dad, the only thing keeping her here being me.

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Don’t I? It’s been so long since I’ve tasted real fear Kai, the kind that makes humans do terrible things, the kind that spreads like a disease.”

“Sarah—”

“All those people screaming and running and hurting each other in their panic, it would be beautiful.”

The worst part was she meant it, Sarah feeding on fear the way normal people needed food and water. She’d been contained for three years, surviving on the ambient anxiety of the facility and the tiny bits of energy I gave her during visits, but it wasn’t enough—not really, she was starving.

“If I visit you today, you stay put?”

Her smile came back genuine this time, the shadows retreating and the temperature starting to climb back to normal, the illusions fading like they’d never been there at all.

“Promise.”

“For how long?”

“Until your next scheduled visit, I can be good Kai, I can be so good for you.”

I ran a hand through my hair, already regretting this decision, but what choice did I have? Sarah loose in a populated area would be a catastrophe, the kind that made international news and required military intervention.

“Fine, I’ll come by after I finish lunch.”

“Really?”

The hope in her voice was lowkey painful to hear, she sounded like a kid being promised their favorite toy and not an ancient entity that literally ate human terror for breakfast.

“Really, but you owe me.”

“Anything, I’ll owe you anything Kai.”

She rushed forward and hugged me, her arms wrapping around my torso with too much strength, her body feeling wrong against mine—too cold and too solid and somehow not solid enough all at once. I awkwardly patted her back.

“Okay, personal space Sarah.”

“Sorry, I’m just so happy.”

She pulled back but kept her hands on my shoulders, beaming up at me with that too-wide smile, her eyes having shifted from yellow to bright green, the color they turned when she was genuinely pleased about something.

“I’ll make my cell nice for you, I’ll clean up all the bones and put away the torture implements, it’ll be romantic.”

“Please don’t make it romantic.”

“Too late, I’m already planning it.”

She dissolved into shadows, her laughter echoing as she slithered away through the ventilation system, and I watched her go while feeling the familiar exhaustion of dealing with obsessive interdimensional entities settle over me like a wet blanket.

My lunch was definitely cold now.

I better go before she loses control.