Part 2: The Breath Within the Dark
The two crematorium workers froze, their hands hovering over the heavy iron lever that would have tipped Clara’s casket into the white-hot inferno. The roar of the furnace suddenly felt deafening, a hungry beast denied its meal.
“Daniel, this is psychological delusion,” Dr. Crane stammered, stepping forward. His fingers were trembling so violently he had to shove them into the pockets of his white lab coat. “Post-mortem spasms. It is a documented medical phenomenon. The buildup of gases in a pregnant corpse can cause… muscular contractions. It’s a trick of the light and biology. Nothing more.”
“A trick?” I whispered, my eyes never leaving Clara’s stomach.
Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the chapel, the fabric of her white maternity dress rippled again. This wasn’t a random spasm. It was rhythmic. Deliberate.
Like a hand pushing from the inside, trying to find a way out.
“Shut the coffin!” Helena Vale roared, dropping her facade of the grieving, dignified matriarch. Her voice hit a pitch that made the glass light fixtures vibrate. “Daniel, you are desecrating my daughter’s body! Marcus, remove him from this room immediately!”
Marcus moved with the predatory grace of a man who had never been told no in his entire life. He grabbed my shoulder, his grip like a steel vice, digging into my cheap, rented suit. “You heard my mother, grease monkey. The show is over. You’re going to walk out of here, or I’m going to ensure you spend the rest of your life in a psychiatric ward. We own the judges in this county. Don’t tempt me.”
I didn’t flinch. I didn’t look at him. I simply reached into my jacket pocket one more time. I didn’t pull out another piece of paper.
I pulled out a heavy, black tactical flashlight—a tool from my garage. And before Marcus could drag me away, I slammed the heavy metallic base of the flashlight directly onto his kneecap.
Crack.
Marcus screamed, collapsing to the tiled floor, clutching his leg as curses poured from his mouth. Helena gasped, backing away into the shadows of the chapel, her face twisted in absolute fury.
“Security!” she shrieked. “Call the police!”
“Call them,” I said, my voice dead and cold. “Let’s have the police, the media, and the state coroner look at this ‘post-mortem spasm’ together.”
I stepped back to the edge of the open casket. I ignored the agonizing groans of my brother-in-law on the floor. I ignored Dr. Crane, who looked ready to faint. I leaned over Clara.
Her skin was ice-cold to the touch, painted with the grotesque, thick makeup the funeral home used to hide the pallor of death. But when I pressed my ear directly against her chest, I didn’t hear a heartbeat. Dr. Crane wasn’t entirely lying about that. Her heart was silent.
But then, I felt it. A faint, hot puff of air against my cheek.
She wasn’t breathing through her nose. Her lips were parted just a fraction of a millimeter. And from deep within her throat came a sound so low, so desperate, it broke my heart into a million pieces.
“…D-Dan…”
It was a sigh. A ghost of a whisper.
“She’s alive,” I breathed, tears finally stinging my eyes. “She’s alive! Get an ambulance! Now!”
“No one is calling an ambulance,” a voice said from the doorway.
I whipped my head around. Two men in dark, unmarked security uniforms had entered, locking the heavy oak doors of the crematorium behind them. They didn’t look like standard guards. They carried tactical holsters under their jackets. They were the Vale family’s private security—hired muscle loyal only to Helena’s payroll.
Helena stood beside them, her dry eyes suddenly burning with a calculating, venomous intelligence. The weeping mother was completely gone. In her place stood the billionaire CEO of Vale Pharmaceuticals.
“You should have taken the money I offered you when you married her, Daniel,” Helena said, her voice dropping to a chillingly calm register. “I offered you five million dollars to walk away and leave her alone. You insisted on ‘true love.’ And look where your romance has brought you. To a furnace.”
“What did you do to her?” I demanded, stepping in front of the casket, shielding Clara with my own body. “She’s your daughter! This is your grandchild!”
Helena looked at Clara’s shifting stomach, and for a split second, a flash of genuine horror—not grief, but fear—crossed her aristocratic features.
“You don’t understand what she carries, Daniel,” Helena whispered. “Dr. Crane, prepare the sedative for the boy. We are finishing this today. The ashes must be scattered before the sun sets, or none of us survive what is coming.”
The Secret in the Blood
My mind raced. I was outnumbered, outgunned, and trapped in a soundproofed crematorium room. Marcus was still hobbling on one foot, cursing, while the two guards began drawing their batons, moving toward me with synchronized, lethal intent.
But they didn’t know who I really was. They thought I was just a mechanic. They thought I spent my days changing oil and fixing brakes.
They didn’t know that before I opened my garage, I had spent four years in the Marine Corps as a combat engineer, trained to look at structures, systems, and environments, and figure out exactly how to break them.
I looked at the cremation control panel on the wall to my left. A heavy digital interface with emergency shut-off valves for the natural gas lines feeding the furnace.
“Dr. Crane,” I said, keeping my eyes on the approaching guards. “The Vale family is powerful, but they can’t protect you from a mass murder charge. If they burn her, and you signed the certificate, you go down for premeditated murder.”
Dr. Crane’s eyes darted wildly. “I… I had no choice, Daniel! The bloodwork… her bloodwork wasn’t human anymore! We had to stop it!”
“Shut up, you fool!” Helena barked.
Her bloodwork wasn’t human?
Before I could process the terrifying weight of those words, the first guard lunged at me, swinging his heavy steel baton toward my temple. I ducked beneath the swing, using the momentum to drive my shoulder into his midsection. We crashed into the metal tray of the cremation chamber.
I grabbed his wrist, slamming it against the iron edge until he dropped the baton. I scooped it up and spun around just in time to block a strike from the second guard. The metallic clang echoed like a gunshot in the confined space.
I kicked the second guard squarely in the groin, sending him to his knees, but the first guard grabbed me from behind, locking his arms around my throat in a chokehold. The air left my lungs. The room began to spin.
Through the blurring vision, I looked at the coffin.
Clara’s hand—her pale, beautiful hand—suddenly reached out from beneath the white dress. Her fingernails were completely black, stained with a dark, oily residue. She clawed at the velvet lining of the casket, tearing the fabric with a strength that didn’t belong to a dying woman.
“Daniel…” her voice was clearer now, but it sounded distorted, layered, as if two people were speaking in unison.
With a surge of adrenaline, I threw my weight backward, slamming the guard holding me against the hot exterior wall of the cremation furnace. He screamed as the heat scorched through his uniform, loosening his grip. I broke free, spun around, and delivered a brutal elbow to his jaw, knocking him unconscious.
I turned to the control panel, raised the steel baton, and smashed the glass casing over the emergency manual override. I grabbed the heavy red lever and pulled it down with all my might.
A high-pitched shriek pierced the room as the natural gas lines bled out. The roaring flames behind the iron doors instantly hissed and died, plunging the rear of the chamber into a dark, smoldering silence.
“You’ve ruined everything,” Helena whispered, her face completely pale. She wasn’t angry anymore. She looked paralyzed with terror. She looked at the door, then at the window. The sky outside was turning a deep, bloody orange. The sun was touching the horizon.
“Marcus,” she said, her voice shaking. “Get the car. We have to leave. Now.”
“What about Clara?” Marcus groaned, pulling himself up using a chair.
“She’s not Clara anymore,” Helena said, her voice hollow. “The incubation is complete. Look at her.”
The Awakening
I rushed back to the coffin, dropping the baton.
Clara was sitting up.
The movement was jerky, unnatural, like a marionette being pulled by invisible, clumsy strings. Her head tilted to the side at an impossible angle, a sickening pop echoing from her neck. Her eyes, which had always been a warm, vibrant green, were gone.
In their place were pupils so dilated that her eyes appeared entirely black, reflecting the dim chapel lights like pools of obsidian.
“Clara?” I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. I reached out a trembling hand, touching her shoulder.
She turned her black eyes toward me. The expression on her face wasn’t one of pain, or fear, or love. It was a look of profound, ancient hunger.
Her jaw opened—wider than any human jaw should be able to open—and a thick, black fluid began to spill from the corners of her mouth, dripping onto the pristine white baby-shower dress.
“Daniel…” she said, but the voice didn’t come from her vocal cords. It seemed to resonate from deep within her swollen abdomen.
The stomach didn’t just shift now. It was thrashing. The shape of a tiny, malformed hand pressed against the skin of her belly from the inside, stretching the flesh so thin I could see the blue and black veins pulsing violently beneath.
Dr. Crane let out a terrified yelp, turned on his heel, and sprinted out the side exit of the crematorium, abandoning Helena and Marcus.
Helena didn’t try to stop him. She backed away toward the main doors, her eyes locked on Clara’s stomach. “The Vale lineage was supposed to contain it,” she muttered to herself, her mind seemingly fracturing under the pressure. “We suppressed the gene for three generations. How did she trigger it? What did you give her, Daniel?”
“I didn’t give her anything!” I yelled, tears of horror streaming down my face as I looked at the monstrous transformation of the woman I loved. “We just wanted a family!”
“A family?” Helena laughed, a hysterical, sharp sound. “You brought a god into a mechanic’s garage, boy. And now, it wants to be born.”
Suddenly, Clara’s body convulsed. She let out a sound that was half-scream, half-shriek—a sound so primal it tore at the eardrums. She gripped the edges of the wooden coffin, and with a terrifying display of strength, shattered the thick oak panels with her bare hands. Wood splinters flew across the room.
She fell out of the casket, landing on her hands and knees on the cold tile floor.
The black fluid was pouring out of her now, pooling around her knees. And within that pool of black liquid, something else was moving. Tiny, pale, translucent tendrils began to emerge from the hem of her dress, brushing against the floor like the legs of a centipede.
Marcus, despite his broken kneecap, managed to drag himself to the exit. He and Helena threw open the heavy oak doors, rushing out into the corridor, slamming the doors shut behind them.
I heard the heavy electronic lock click into place from the outside.
They had locked me in with her.
Trapped with the Truth
The room was completely silent now, save for the heavy, wet breathing of the creature that wore my wife’s flesh. The sun had finally dipped below the horizon, and through the high stained-glass windows, the chapel was plunged into a deep, twilight shadow.
Clara—or whatever was inside her—slowly rose to her feet.
Her spine bent backward in a horrific arch, her joints cracking in rapid succession. The white dress was completely ruined, soaked in black fluid and stained with crimson blood where her abdomen was beginning to tear open.
She took a step toward me. Then another.
I backed up until my spine hit the cold, metallic frame of the dead cremation furnace. There was nowhere left to run.
“Daniel,” the voice echoed, sweeter this time, mimicking the exact tone Clara used when we sat on our porch on quiet summer nights. “Don’t be afraid. It’s just us. Your family is finally ready to meet you.”
She raised her hands, reaching out for my face. Her fingers were freezing, the black fluid smearing against my cheek. I looked down at her stomach.
The skin of her abdomen parted.
But there was no baby inside.
Through the tear in her flesh, illuminated by the dim red emergency light of the dead furnace, I saw a pulsating, iridescent mass of flesh, eyes, and teeth. And in the center of that horrific mass, resting safely within the nightmare, was a small, golden vial attached to a mechanical pump—a device bearing the unmistakable, embossed logo of Vale Pharmaceuticals.
The device was injecting something directly into the entity’s core. A glowing, blue serum. And on the digital display of the pump, a timer was counting down.
00:03… 00:02… 00:01…
The device beeped once, a clear, electronic chime that shattered the silence of the room.
Clara’s black eyes suddenly snapped wide, her head jerking violently as the blue serum fully integrated into her system. A collective, deafening roar vibrated from her chest, and the windows of the chapel shattered into a million pieces.
May you like
From the darkness of her open abdomen, a pair of long, pale hands—much larger than a baby’s—reached out, grabbed the edges of her torn flesh, and began to pull the rest of its body out into the room.
And as the creature looked at me, it smiled with Clara’s teeth.
