Page 41 of Shadow

King’s voice pulled my focus to him. “We used neodymium super magnets charged with electricity to keep them immobilized. They can’t move more than a few inches. What’s interesting is that they seem to understand this. Once they realized escape was impossible, they entered a kind of coma-like state.”

I took a deep breath and forced myself to reexamine the source of my nightmares.

Their flesh was a mottled, dark gray, stretched over twisted muscles that bent in unnatural directions. Their arms and legs were malformed, their movements jerky and alien. A line of spikes ran up their spines, ending in needle-like points. Patches of short, dark hair covered most of their bodies, though not enough to mask the raw sinew beneath. At the end of each limb, long, deadly claws extended.

I frowned at the absence of visible genitalia. Either they were female, neutered, or they were never equipped with such features in the first place. The thought sent another shiver down my spine.

These creatures weren’t just nightmares. They were living, breathing horrors.

Why was he showing me this? It felt wrong. These creatures shouldn’t have been here. They should have been destroyed.

It would be at the top of my report to the Federation when I got back home.

If I got back.

King had somehow managed to capture these things and study them. Even though every fiber of my being wanted to reject what I was seeing, I had to pull myself together. If I was going to survive this terrifying adventure, I would learn everything I could about them.

Taking a shaky breath, I stepped closer, almost hypnotized. Strangely, the raw terror gripping me began to subside.

We called them “hounds” because they ran on all fours, but that was where the resemblance to anything canine ended. Their jaws were massive, their teeth designed for ripping and shredding. The jaws were powerful enough to pulverize bone, wood, and even concrete.

The only thing that had kept us safe was the steel-reinforced walls and floors of our compounds. With enough of them, though, they could break through even that. It usually gave us a small window to escape. If we were lucky.

The attack that killed my co-workers was different. To this day, we had no idea how the hellhound breached the compound.

I inched closer to the nearest one, my curiosity outweighing my fear. One black, glossy eye swiveled in its socket to follow my movement.

Yeah, that wasn’t unsettling at all.

My chills developed into goosebumps. It was studying me.

“Not too close,” King said quietly, his tone sharp enough to stop me mid-step. “Bring him upright,” he commanded one of the Shadow Warriors.

A motor hummed to life, and the hellhound in front of me shifted. The magnetic restraints crackled as the creature was slowly moved from its four-legged position to an upright, two-legged stance.

It was bizarre. The change in posture altered its entire body structure.

My gaze flickered over its frame. Its neck was shorter than that of a dog, its thick torso blending into shoulders that seemed misplaced. The arms jutted out at awkward angles, not tucking beneath or in front like a canine’s would.

My brain struggled to process what I was seeing.

And then King spoke, bringing my fragile grip on reality crashing down.

“It’s human,” King said, his voice low. “Not a hound at all.”

The words hit me like a thunderclap, jolting my brain into action. My eyes traced the creature’s grotesque form again, noticing details I had been too shocked to process before. The short neck, the arms that extended outward instead of tucking beneath, the straight, elongated legs. The way its neck met the spine and flowed downward in a sickeningly fluid line. The pelvis rotated unnaturally.

My gaze drifted back to its head. The skull wasn’t human. It was elongated, stretched to accommodate the impossibly large teeth crammed into its mouth.

A twisted thought wormed its way into my mind, and before I could stop myself, I said it aloud. “An alien, like Shadow Warriors, or a dog crossed with a human.”

The words tasted vile on my tongue, and even thinking it felt like too much. Voicing it was almost unbearable.

“No,” King replied, his tone grim. “But we had the same thoughts. This is a man-made genetic monster.”

“Man-made?” I echoed, disbelief coloring my voice as my eyes remained fixed on the thing in front of me.

“We don't necessarily believe it happened intentionally,” he explained. “The highest chemical concentration we’ve found in their bodies is formaldehyde.”

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