Chapter 5 Kimberly
KIMBERLY
Darkness presses in on me from all sides like it’s trying to make a point.
Not soft darkness. Not the kind that feels like sleep or privacy or mercy.
This is industrial darkness, thick with the faint chemical sting of antiseptic and something older and colder underneath it, like damp concrete that never quite dries out.
The air tastes metallic when I breathe in, and every inhale scrapes my throat like I’ve been smoking unfiltered cigarettes for a week straight.
Pain finds me before memory does.
It pulses through my left arm in slow, molten waves, each heartbeat dragging a ribbon of fire behind it that curls up into my shoulder and down my ribs, setting off sympathetic aches in places I don’t remember injuring.
It hurts in a deep, structural way, like my body is filing a formal complaint about how I’ve been using it lately.
For half a second I’m absolutely certain I’m dead.
Then I try to move.
Every nerve in my body lights up at once and I make a small, humiliating sound that leaks out of my throat before I can stop it, something halfway between a gasp and a whimper, and the pain gets so bright it washes my vision white.
Okay.
Not dead.
Just aggressively alive.
I lie there, breathing shallow and fast through my nose, staring into nothing, waiting for the pain to dial itself back down from apocalyptic to merely catastrophic. My heart is thudding too hard and too fast, like it’s trying to punch its way out of my rib cage and file a missing persons report.
“Fuck,” I whisper hoarsely, because it feels like the correct response to literally all of this.
The surface under me is narrow and too firm, a thin mattress on top of something solid, and when I shift my weight a fraction of an inch I feel the unmistakable pressure of concrete beneath it.
The air is cool against my skin, raising goosebumps along my legs and the good arm I still have full feeling in.
Antiseptic.
Concrete.
Cold.
My brain starts booting up in jerky, out-of-order fragments.
Fire.
Smoke.
Sirens.
The sound of something big hitting the wall.
Bone.
My stomach flips.
I open my eyes.
The ceiling above me is low and unfinished, a grid of exposed piping and bundled cables running along it like industrial veins, all lit by a single dim utility strip bolted to the wall a few feet to my right.
The light buzzes faintly, an electrical insect hum that drills straight into the back of my skull.
The room is small. Windowless. Bare.
No art. No furniture except the narrow cot I’m lying on and a battered metal chair shoved into the corner.
The walls are poured concrete, stained in places with old water marks and rust shadows, and the air has that stale, underground quality that tells me this place hasn’t seen real sunlight in a very long time.
Where the hell am I.
My left arm is immobilized against my body in a rigid sling that wraps around my shoulder and torso, thick padding pressing into my ribs, and when I try to lift my head to look at it more closely, pain explodes behind my eyes hard enough to make me hiss and drop my chin back onto the pillow.
“Okay,” I mutter to the ceiling. “Cool. Love this for me.”
I test my fingers.
They move.
Slowly. Clumsily. But they move.
That’s… something.
My throat feels like sandpaper soaked in battery acid, so I swallow and immediately regret it.
“Water,” I croak into the empty room, fully aware of how pathetic that sounds and deciding I do not care.
Nothing happens.
Of course nothing happens.
I close my eyes for a second and try to line my thoughts up into something resembling a coherent timeline instead of a highlight reel from a nightmare.
Restaurant.
Glimner.
Explosion.
Fire.
Men with guns.
The gas line.
Then—
My chest tightens.
Something huge and wrong tearing into the kitchen.
Bone-white spurs.
Impossible speed.
Being lifted off the floor.
Arms like a furnace around my body.
Eyes that glowed.
A voice saying no like it was being ripped out of a very large, very distressed man.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
My pulse spikes hard enough to make my arm throb in protest.
That wasn’t a hallucination.
I know it wasn’t, in the same way you know when you’ve been in a car accident versus when you’ve had a bad dream about one. My body remembers the heat of him, the solidity of his chest, the way the floor dropped away when he picked me up like I weighed nothing at all.
The pressure in my chest flares faintly at the memory, low and strange and deeply unwelcome.
“Nope,” I tell my own rib cage. “Absolutely not. We are not doing mystical soul bullshit right now.”
I draw in a careful breath and open my eyes again.
And then I see him.
He stands near the door on the far side of the room, tall enough that his head nearly brushes the exposed piping overhead, his broad shoulders making the already narrow space feel even smaller.
He is perfectly still, hands loose at his sides, posture alert without being aggressive, like a very large, very dangerous statue someone forgot to finish animating.
He does not move when I gasp.
He does not raise his hands.
He does not step back or forward or make any sudden noises meant to reassure me.
He just watches me.
The utility light catches in his eyes and throws back a faint, metallic gleam that makes my stomach drop through the floor.
Not bright.
Not glowing.
Just… wrong.
Like reflections that don’t belong there.
My heart slams so hard against my ribs it actually hurts.
“Oh,” I whisper.
His jaw tightens.
Just a fraction.
It is somehow the most human thing about him.
Up close like this, without smoke and strobe lights and fire trying to kill both of us, he is even more unreal.
He is enormous, first of all, in the way that makes your brain stutter for a second while it recalibrates what it thinks a human male body is supposed to look like.
He’s easily a foot taller than me, probably more, with a chest and shoulders built like someone took a normal man and then kept scaling him up until physics started filing objections.
His skin is dark, not in a human way, but in a metallic, almost burnished way that catches the dim light and throws it back in subtle bronze and gunmetal highlights.
Faint ridges run along his forearms and up the sides of his neck, and even at rest I can see the outlines of bone spurs beneath his skin, tracing pale, unnatural arcs that look like the skeleton of some prehistoric predator trying to grow its way out of him.
He’s wearing a black shirt that’s torn and scorched in several places, the fabric stiff with dried blood.
My blood.
The sight of it makes my stomach lurch.
He notices where my eyes go.
“I cleaned you up,” he says quietly, his voice low and rough and very, very human. “As much as I could without hurting you more. You lost a lot of blood.”
Okay.
So he talks.
Good.
That’s… good.
My mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
I try again.
“Hi,” I manage hoarsely, because my brain has apparently decided that this is a normal, socially appropriate response to waking up in a concrete bunker with a bone-spurred murder cryptid standing guard over my bed.
His lips twitch.
Just barely.
It might be my imagination.
“Hi,” he says back.
The word sounds like it hasn’t gotten much use lately.
Silence stretches between us, thick and humming with unspoken things and the faint electrical buzz of the utility strip overhead.
My survival instincts finally finish booting up.
Every single one of them lights up at once.
Not screaming yet.
Just… fully armed.
Every hair on my body stands on end.
My pulse roars in my ears.
My right hand curls into the mattress, searching blindly for something, anything, I could use as a weapon even though I am acutely aware that if he decided to hurt me, the concept of self-defense would be a charming, optimistic joke.
“Okay,” I say carefully, keeping my voice as steady as I can manage while my nervous system throws a rave. “I’m going to ask a couple of extremely basic questions now, and I would really appreciate it if you answered them in the non-murdery way.”
His shoulders shift slightly, as if he’s bracing himself for impact.
“Fair.”
“First,” I say, licking my dry lips. “Am I currently being held hostage by a large, extremely hot, extremely illegal-looking man who tore through a building like the Hulk on bath salts.”
“No.”
The answer is immediate.
Flat.
Almost offended.
“Good,” I say faintly. “Strong start.”
“Second,” I continue, because apparently we are doing this. “Are you planning to eat me, experiment on me, ransom me, or otherwise turn me into a subplot in your personal horror narrative.”
“No.”
There’s a pause.
“…No,” he repeats, slower this time, like he’s choosing the word very carefully. “I am not going to hurt you.”
My laugh comes out thin and hysterical.
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to forgive me if I do not find that immediately reassuring, given that you look like something that crawled out of a very expensive, very cursed gene lab.”
That almost-smile twitches again.
He shifts his weight, just a little, and I tense so hard my ribs ache.
He notices.
Of course he notices.
He still doesn’t move any closer.
“I know what I look like,” he says quietly. “And I know what I did back there. But I didn’t come for you. I came because they were going to kill you.”
The words land somewhere in my chest and just… sit there.
Uncomfortable.
Heavy.
“Oh,” I say again, because I am having a truly banner day for eloquence.
My gaze drifts, traitorous, to the bone spurs tracing faint ridges beneath the skin of his forearms.
They are not extended.
They look… dormant.
Like claws tucked away.
“What,” I ask slowly, “are you.”
He exhales.
It sounds like it hurts.
“I don’t have a good answer to that,” he says.
Of course he doesn’t.