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The Mojave Desert was a different kind of silence. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of the library or the tense hush before a storm. This was a vast, ancient silence that pressed in on all sides, a void that swallowed sound and light and hope. The Sand-Skimmer moved like a ghost across the hard-packed earth, its electric motor a bare whisper against the immensity of the landscape.
Jack drove, his senses stretched to their limit. Out here, the scents were simple and overwhelming: creosote bush after a rare rain, the dry, dusty smell of sandstone, the faint, cool aroma of a night-blooming cactus. It was a clean slate, which made the contamination all the more obvious.
He slowed the vehicle to a crawl, his nose twitching. "We're close."
Elsa checked the GPS. "The coordinates are still five miles out. You're sure?"
"It's not a location yet. It's a... stain." He brought the Skimmer to a full stop and got out, kneeling and pressing his fingers into the dirt. Elsa and Morbius joined him.
To a human, the ground was just ground. To Jack, it was a page in a book, and something had written on it in invisible ink. The scent was faint but unmistakable: that same alkaline, alien odor of the Ambrosia, but soured. Twisted. It didn't smell like a refined fuel anymore; it smelled like a wound, an infection seeping up from deep below.
"It's in the soil," Jack murmured, his voice low. "They've been dumping waste. Or something's leaking."
Morbius closed his eyes, his pale face tilted to the wind. "The land is sick. The natural order here has been poisoned. I can feel it... pulling. A vortex of pain."
A sudden, sharp cry cut through the silence, high-pitched and frantic. It came from a cluster of rocks a hundred yards away. It was the sound of an animal in pure, mindless terror.
Jack was moving before the others could react, his form a blur as he closed the distance. He found the source huddled in a shallow crevice: a young coyote, its fur matted and its eyes wide with a fear that had nothing to do with the nearby humans. It was panting, foaming at the mouth, and its body was trembling uncontrollably. And its eyes... they glowed with a faint, sickly green light.
As Jack watched, the creature's form began to shimmer. A second, phantom-like head, misshapen and snarling, momentarily phased into existence over its real one before fading away. It let out another choked yelp and tried to bite at the air where the apparition had been.
It wasn't rabid. It was unstable. Its very essence was being rewritten by the poisoned land.
Jack felt a cold fury settle in his gut. This was the Aegis Consortium's "live testing." This was the fallout from their "successful prototypes." They weren't just building weapons in The Silo. They were turning the very environment into a laboratory, and the local wildlife were their unwilling, suffering test subjects.
The howl that built in his chest this time wasn't one of challenge, but of mourning for the bleeding land and the innocent life caught in the crossfire of a war they could never understand.
The coyote's suffering was a tiny, concentrated echo of the agony Jack had felt from the Dimensional Drifter. It was a violation, a shredding of a natural essence forced to hold a shape it was never meant to. He couldn't leave it like this.
"Hold it still," Jack said, his voice a low, commanding rumble.
Elsa didn't question him. She moved with a hunter's efficiency, using the stock of her rifle to gently but firmly pin the coyote's shoulders to the ground, avoiding its snapping, phasing jaws. The creature thrashed, a pathetic, terrified strength in its limbs.
Jack knelt, ignoring the danger. He didn't reach for it physically. Instead, he placed his hands palm-down on the soil on either side of the trembling animal. He closed his eyes, reaching for the part of his curse that was primal, ancient, and deeply connected to the natural world—the part that understood the pure, unadulterated language of the wild.
He pushed his consciousness out, not as a human thought, but as a wave of pure, grounding instinct. He projected a single, powerful concept: Be. Still. Be whole.
It was the opposite of the Drifter's chaotic frequency. This was a song of stability, of the earth, of the moon's constant, predictable pull. He poured his own will to remain in control into the animal, a shield against the chaotic energy corrupting it.
The effect was not instantaneous. The coyote shuddered violently, the phantom head flickering in and out of existence. But slowly, the violent tremors subsided into shivers. The frantic, glowing light in its eyes dimmed, fading back to a dark, animal brown. The phasing stopped. It lay panting on the ground, exhausted but present. Whole.
Jack pulled back, breathing heavily. The effort had been immense, a different kind of strain than any physical fight.
The coyote struggled to its feet, gave Jack a single, unreadable look, and then scrambled away into the darkness, its tail tucked between its legs but its form holding solid.
Elsa watched it go, then looked at Jack. "You can... heal it?"
"No," Jack said, standing up and wiping the dust from his hands. His face was grim. "I can't heal the land. I just gave it enough of my own stability to fight off the infection. For now." He looked toward the horizon, where the source of the poison lay. "It'll just get sick again if we don't stop it at the source."
Morbius pointed a long, pale finger toward a low, dark mesa in the distance. A mesa that, now that Jack focused, had a faint, almost imperceptible shimmer at its base—the telltale distortion of a powerful holographic or light-bending cloak.
"The wound is not the land," Morbius intoned. "The land is the symptom. The Silo is the wound."
They had found it. Not just a hidden base, but the source of a sickness spreading across the desert. The stakes were no longer just about stopping an army.
It was about curing a plague.
They left the Sand-Skimmer hidden in a deep, dry wash two miles from the mesa. The final approach would be on foot, using the terrain as their only cover. The air grew thicker, the alien scent of corrupted Ambrosia a constant, acrid presence in their nostrils.
As they drew closer, the true nature of The Silo's defense became clear. It wasn't just a cloak. The entire base of the mesa was ringed by a series of tall, thin pylons, nearly invisible against the rock. A low, sub-audible hum emanated from them, a frequency that set Jack's teeth on edge and made the beast within him stir with restless agitation.
"Sonic fence," Elsa whispered, lowering her multi-spectrum binoculars. "It's not lethal. It broadcasts a frequency that induces disorientation, migraines, and auditory hallucinations in anything with a complex nervous system that tries to cross. It would turn us into stumbling, helpless targets long before we reached the entrance."
Jack focused on the hum, analyzing it. It was a blunt, brutal instrument compared to the suppressor—a shotgun blast to the brain instead of a surgical scalpel. But its very lack of finesse was a problem. Their planned "energy smokescreen" was designed to confuse sensors looking for specific supernatural signatures. This thing would just hammer their minds indiscriminately.
"We can't mask this," he said. "We have to break it."
"A physical assault on the pylons would trigger an immediate alert," Morbius countered.
"Not a physical assault," Jack said, a new idea forming. He looked at the Cry of the Void box strapped to Elsa's pack. "A sonic one."
He explained his plan quickly. The sonic fence was a single, powerful, monotonous frequency. It was a bully. But every frequency has a resonant opposite—a counter-wave that can cancel it out.
"The crystal," Jack said. "It's a battery of pure, structured lunar energy. We can use it as a power source. But we need a speaker. Something to broadcast the counter-frequency."
Elsa's eyes lit up with understanding. She unstrapped one of the acoustic dispersal grenades Hector had given them. "These aren't just noisemakers. They're programmable acoustic projectors. I can recalibrate one... use the crystal's energy to power it, and program it to generate a phased counter-wave to the fence's frequency."
It was a desperate, jury-rigged solution. They were combining stolen alien tech, black-market gadgets, and the power of a cursed artifact to fight a billion-dollar defense system.
While Elsa worked with frantic, precise movements, Jack and Morbius stood watch. The desert night felt alive with unseen threats. Jack could feel the land's sickness as a dull ache in his own bones. Every rustle of a lizard, every scuttle of a scorpion, felt like a plea.
After what felt like an eternity, Elsa held up the modified grenade. Wires snaked from its base to the Cry of the Void box, which now pulsed with a soft, rhythmic light. "It's ready. But the power draw will be immense. It'll only work for maybe sixty seconds before the crystal's energy is drained and goes inert. We have one minute to get through the fence and find cover inside."
Sixty seconds. One minute to cross a killing zone and breach the most secure facility they had ever faced.
Jack took the device, feeling the hum of the crystal's power vibrating through the metal casing. He looked at the shimmering mesa, then back at his companions.
"Sixty seconds," he said. "From the moment I throw this, it's a sprint. No hesitation."
He drew his arm back, took aim at the center of the sonic field, and threw the grenade in a high, arcing lob.
It landed silently in the sand. For a heart-stopping second, nothing happened.
Then, a pure, clear tone erupted from it—a single, perfect note that cut through the oppressive hum of the fence like a knife. Where the two frequencies met, the air itself seemed to warp, creating a visible, shimmering tunnel of silence through the sonic field.
The path was open.
"Go!" Jack roared.
And the three of them ran into the heart of the wound.
The silence inside the counter-frequency tunnel was absolute and unnerving. The only sound was the frantic crunch of their boots on the gravel and the pounding of blood in their ears. The shimmering walls of the tunnel pulsed with the strain of containing the clashing energies. Jack could feel the crystal's power depleting with every step, a bright star dying a rapid death.
Forty-five seconds.
Ahead, the base of the mesa resolved from a shimmer into a solid, imposing structure. A massive, circular blast door, seamless and grey, was set into the rock. There was no keypad, no visible mechanism.
"Magnetically sealed," Morbius observed, his voice tight. "It will not yield to force."
"Then we don't use force!" Elsa yelled, skidding to a halt before the door. She slapped a small, disc-shaped device from her pack onto the metal. It glowed blue, and a complex series of magnetic locks could be heard disengaging deep within the rock with heavy, resonant clunks. "We use a bigger magnet! Now, help me!"
Thirty seconds.
Jack and Morbius threw their weight against the colossal door. Metal groaned in protest. It was like pushing against a mountain. Jack felt the muscles in his back and shoulders scream, the beast within lending its raw power to the man's desperate need. Morbius strained, his vampiric strength focused into a single, monumental effort.
With a final, shuddering shriek of tortured metal, the door gave way, sliding open just wide enough for them to slip through.
Twenty seconds.
They tumbled into a dark, cool corridor as the door immediately began to grind shut behind them. The moment they crossed the threshold, the pure tone from the grenade outside stuttered and died. The Cry of the Void box on Elsa's pack went dark and inert, its captured moonlight extinguished. The sonic fence's oppressive hum returned, now muted by the thick rock walls.
They were in.
The corridor was dimly lit by emergency floor lighting, stretching into a profound darkness. The air was cold, sterile, and carried the same soured-Ambrosia scent, now mixed with the coppery tang of blood and the ozone of high-energy machinery. But underneath it all was a new smell, one that made the fur on Jack's arms stand up even in his human form.
It was the smell of a kennel. Of wet fur, of confinement, of fear, and of a deep, simmering, collective rage.
From the darkness ahead, a sound echoed down the corridor. It wasn't the whir of a machine or the hum of a reactor.
It was the sound of heavy, synchronized breathing. And the slow, dragging scrape of claws on metal.
The sound from the darkness froze them in their tracks. It was a sound Jack knew in his bones, a sound from his own worst nights—the sound of a caged predator. But this was different. It was multiplied. A chorus.
Elsa slowly, silently, raised her rifle, its scope piercing the gloom. She let out a sharp, quiet hiss of breath. "Jack... you need to see this."
He moved to her side, his eyes adjusting to the low light. The corridor opened into a vast, cavernous space. It was a holding pen, but unlike any he could have imagined. Dozens of individual cells lined the walls, each fronted with reinforced transparent alloy. And inside each cell... was a werewolf.
But they were wrong.
Some were massive, their forms bloated with grotesque muscle, their fur patchy and their eyes glowing with the same sickly green as the corrupted coyote. Others were emaciated, twitching, their bodies flickering with unstable energy. One had crystalline growths erupting from its spine. Another had two sets of jaws, the smaller one inside the larger clicking mindlessly.
These weren't natural lycanthropes. They were the Consortium's "successful prototypes." Twisted, unstable hybrids created by forcing the Ambrosia and who knew what other genetic material into unwilling hosts. The air was thick with their pain and their rage, a psychic miasma that threatened to drown him.
At the far end of the chamber, a heavy security door stood shut. That was their way deeper in.
"We can't leave them like this," Jack said, his voice a low growl of shared agony.
"We cannot free them," Morbius countered, his tone grimly practical. "They are weapons, not allies. Unleashed, they would tear us apart and then each other. Their suffering is a tragedy, but our mission is to end its source."
Jack knew he was right. It was a brutal calculus of war. But as he looked at the tortured creatures, seeing a dark reflection of his own curse in every cell, a cold, clear resolution settled over him.
He wouldn't free them into a mindless rampage. But he wouldn't leave them as experiments either.
He focused, pushing his consciousness into the chamber, not with a calming wave as he had with the coyote, but with a single, sharp, commanding impulse—a predator's directive that bypassed their broken minds and spoke directly to their base instincts.
It was not a request. It was an order from an Alpha to his broken pack.
One by one, the chaotic movements in the cells stilled. The snarling ceased. The twitching forms slumped to the floor. A heavy, unnatural silence fell over the chamber. He had forced a temporary, merciful peace upon them.
He turned away from the cells, his face a mask of cold fury, and pointed to the security door.
"Now," he said, his voice deathly quiet. "We find the ones who did this. And we put them to sleep. Permanently."
To Be Continue...