The ambulance made its solitary passage down a narrow, winding mountain road. Tires gripped wet asphalt as a dense, flowing mist enveloped terrain. The engine hummed low and steady, merging with the soft, rhythmic pounding of gloved fists on the steering wheel. Lars Nordgren's face glared in the rearview mirror, etched into grim resolve. His eyes seldom left the road, where the black shapes of pines merged with the rolling fog.
Inside the cramped cabin, Dr. Ilsa Zajac didn't move. Her gaze stayed locked on the clipboard resting across her lap, a lifeline of antiseptic precision. Her uniform fit tightly against her frame, the fabric abnormally stiff in the cold night air. Every sound in the small space, every mechanical susurrus and distant echo, created an atmosphere heavy with unspoken fear.
In the center of the car, tied down with tight straps, a man on the brink of life and death. His skin was a pale sheen, slick with sweat that commingled with cold. There were small punctures and old track marks on his arms, each one was a testament to thousands of injections in sterile hallways long abandoned. His body jerked in shallow, desperate spasms, each growing weaker as the life within him ebbed away.
Ilsa's hand reached out with deliberate reserve to a small, cold syringe, which rested in her case. Her gloved fingers closed over it, and the fluid inside, marked with one black "X," glowed with perverse detachment in the poor light of the interior. With meticulous caution, she pressed the plunger. A tiny bead of fluid formed at the end of the needle, final witness to the rite they had been assigned.
A low, almost inaudible order emerged from Lars' lips. "Make it clean." His voice unnerving, his words speaking of habit and need and not of sympathy. Ilsa tilted the syringe down, and the needle passed through the man's skin with cold efficiency. A short, sharp catch of breath trembled across his chest. His body jerked spasmodically, muscles tightening under the unyielding grip of the restraints. His throat contracted in jagged convulsions, and his eyes, which had filled with a flicker of hope, puffed and uncomprehending, gradually darkened into an endless void.
A low, despairing sigh escaped the man's lips, its sighing quality filling the tiny room as if to mark the conclusion of a requiem. Lars glanced at Ilsa in the rearview mirror. His eyelids crinkled at the corners in a fleeting, recognizing smile. "Well?" he breathed, his voice low and detached as if expecting the worst.
Ilsa made a neat tick on the white sheet. "Time of death: 02:46." The syllables sounded with an ominous finality, each step inching them towards the procedure's end. Lars's grin crept up gradually, and he adjusted his hold on the wheel as the ambulance took the twisty road in a silky glide. Headlamps cut through the mist, revealing fleeting silhouettes that extended along the edges of ancient trees, silhouettes that seemed to hold secrets beyond human comprehension.
The car braked as an enormous steel wall of doors opened out of the rocky mountainside. Hidden far beneath layers of rock and deception, the secret facility towered like an unwritten vow. The ambulance rolled to a stop as headlamps expired in a brief flash, abandoning the interior to all blackness.
Ilsa emerged into the cold air. The cold nibbled at her flesh, and every breath picked up a sharp, wet scent of wet soil and weathered stone. Lars followed, moving deliberately, unwinding his arms and rolling his shoulders in a silent display of resolve. Two security men in black fatigues kept guard, their rifles glinting dull in the subdued light. Their features are still hidden behind the shadow of their helmets; their person a silent reminder of the burden they carried.
A metallic hiss penetrated the oppressive silence, magnificent entrance doors gradually opened. Ilsa shoved forward, grinding stubbornly against the heavy barrier corridor closed in around her. Overhead lights blazed with an almost mechanical intensity, their harsh light casting long, jagged shadows on a spotless floor. Each step sounded with a hollow resonance that merged with the quiet, precise hum of facility.
Far down the hall, at the other end lay the morgue, a chilly, antiseptic chamber behind heavy, reinforced glass separating it from the hall. Behind the glass sat a solitary technician in a filthy lab coat, hunched over a workbench. His pen moved erratically across a clipboard, scanning the readings with professional detachment. There were no hellos, no questions, interrupting the stillness, there was only the quiet scratch of his pen and the dim whine of the facility's equipment.
Lars inched forward slowly. With ease born of experience, he pushed back the restraints on the gurney and picked up the corpse in his arms and set it on a metal table. Ilsa did the same, her gloved hands draping the white sheet over the face of the man with the matter-of-factness of one who had done it too many times before. The sheet draped over his face so that his final gaze was unnervingly serene, a mask of unreturnable finality.
The technician's eyes flickered instantly to what stretched out before him. "Log complete," he stated abruptly, his fingers resting lightly on the keys. Silent questions hung in the air, one which neither room nor tension that filled it could dissipate. "Was he awake?" Ilsa's stomach knotted as the question trembled on the edge of the technician's words, for her mind flashed instantly back to that final, failed flicker of awareness in his eyes.
A small head shake gave her answer, and the technician returned to work, his attention momentarily diverted by the slow whine of the machinery.
With a low, mechanical hum, the slab beneath the body retracted, enveloping the man in the depths of the cold storage room. For a moment, the technician's monitor flickered, a single, wild flash, before returning to its dark, unresponsive state. Ilsa paused, staring across at the glass divider separating the morgue from the hall. Her own shocked, heavily-charged eyes returned her stare, staring from mirrored white with haunted brightness. In the reflection stood something awry in the glass, a very slight movement, a fraction second flutter of white shroud lying across the face of death. Her heart pounded like an urgent drummer beat upon the panic flooding back into it, in sensing the faint displacement that said the covered figure had moved.
A chill of terror ran through her as the fabric trembled, showing a movement that defied all laws of nature. The clinical quietness of the morgue seemed to drag on for an eternity, punctuated by the soft whir of the facility's equipment. Shadows darkened in the corners, spreading like ink in the unattended crevices of the room. The technician's hand trembled as he reached for the emergency button, his move halted under the overwhelming weight of the moment.
The fortified door to the room where the storage space was created weekly, a sound so otherworldly, so alien, that life and death blended into one harrowing continuum. In suspended time, seconds seemed to shatter. The texture that should have remained unchanging gave way to a slow, deliberate movement. A stiff, white hand pressed against the inside of the sheet. A curled hand, still purposeful, as if forcing those who stood there to see the impossible.
The sheet pulled back with agonized slowness, and a face contorted into a mute scream, a face which defied nature, its features stretched and vacant, its eyes staring into an abyss of despair.
A low murmur escaped the technician's lips as he stepped back, his chair scraping harshly across the floor. Lars cursed deep in his throat, stepping away towards the door. The tension broke as the lights flickered and went out at last, plunging the room into a heavy blackness. In that darkness, the night's secrets began their unrelenting march, a dreadful, soundless promise that life would never resume its place.
Everything was different from the way it had been when the lights went back on. The image in the glass now had an oppressive emptiness, the final, inescapable silence announcing the end of the ritual. Shadows whispered their forgotten, ancient tongue as the chill, indifferent mountain night again maintained its relentless vigilance over the secret realities of the facility.
And so the horror cycle began, a descent into terror that would echo through all the black corners of Ossendrecht, all the trembling beats of those who dared to seek the truth. The night, chilled with icy terror, saw the birth of an unimaginable horror, a creature that would alter forever the delicate line between life and death.