(South Stairs - Bad - Memory-Dream Lily Showing the Past)
The kitchen doors are the old Western kind, double and swinging, each pushes a small announcement. I press my back against the wall beside them and listen, letting my breathing slow.
The radio's static fades behind me, muffled by the walls. The neon hum sags into the background. All that's left is the drip of something in the dark and the occasional metallic tick of cooling appliances. And beneath it, once every few seconds—
That thin, breaking cry.
It's coming from below. I can feel it in the way the sound travels upward, more vibration than voice.
Below means stairs. The South stairs are rotten. Don't repeat.
My thumb brushes the trigger guard.
"You're not responsible," I whisper to myself. "You owe them nothing. You don't even know if it's human."
But the memory of Lily's carved warning burns under my skin.
She left those words for someone. Maybe for herself.
Maybe for a stranger who barely made it inside alive.
I could honor that warning by turning around and leaving.
Instead, I push the door open with the muzzle of the gun.
It swings inward with a long, wounded squeal.
Inside, the kitchen is a study in abandonment. Pots hang from a rack over the island, bottoms mottled with rust. Metal counters are streaked with old spills and dust. The industrial stoves along the back wall gape open like metal mouths.
I know this isn't my body. Not my hands. Not my breath.
This is Lily. Her memory. Her moment.
And she's letting me stand inside it.
Her voice comes like a warm breath against my ear—inside the memory, not outside it.
"Shhh… just watch."
"Lily?" I ask desperately.
But she's already gone. The guide slips away, leaving her body—her memory—beneath my feet. I'm inside her skin whether I like it or not.
The lights are dead.
Lily lifts the flashlight, and I feel her pulse jump under my ribs as she sweeps it in a frantic arc. Harsh white fractures across metal, shadows jumping, her breath hitching—
Then she kills the beam before it can settle.
Her mantra rises in my head, sharp and instructive:
Don't make yourself a lighthouse.
Learn.
I force myself forward—in her body, with her fear—one agonizing step at a time. The air grows colder, like a draft from a walk-in fridge, the kind where bodies are kept. A sick thought. A truer one.
The smell hits next: rot tangled with chlorine, sharp enough to sting.
"Help…"
The voice is a thread of sound rising from the floor drain near the prep sink.
Human.
Hurting.
Lily—I—crouch beside the drain. Rust rings the grate. Something black and gelatinous clots between the slats. My—her—nose burns.
"Hey," I say softly, mouth angled toward the metal. "Talk to me. Where are you?"
A cough rattles up from below, wet and thin.
"Down… here…"
The words drag like they're scraping across broken glass.
I close my eyes—Lily's eyes—once, quickly.
There it is. The line.
There's a version of Lily who stands up, walks out, and survives because she finally accepted what the world had become.
I could be that girl.
But that cough drops into the same drawer where Lily lives inside me now—her debts, her half-finished good deeds stacked like old files. It lands with a soft, accusing thud.
"You're not her," I whisper. "You don't have to do this."
Another cry rises through the drain. "Please. It hurts."
Eli, I'll someday learn.
Eli, who will argue and whisper and cling to my jacket like it's the last thread tying him to this world.
Right now, he's just a voice.
Just a stranger.
I lean closer to the drain.
"I need you to tell me what's down there. Stairs? A basement?"
"Freezer…" His voice shakes. "Walk-in… there were stairs but…"
A breath.
"They fell."
The south stairs are rotten. Don't repeat.
Again, that same warning.
The freezer. Of course.
Every diner like this has one. Thick insulated doors. No windows. No escape.
"How many are you?" I ask.
A long pause.
"Me," he whispers. "Just me now."
The last two words are so small they nearly dissolve.
"Okay." My voice steadies. "Listen carefully. I'm going to find the door. You stay silent. If you hear anything that isn't my voice, you don't make a sound. Understand?"
A beat.
"Yes."
There are a dozen ways this ends with a body—maybe his, maybe mine.
The infected have been changing.
Slower. Smarter.
Less charge, more wait.
They remember passageways now.
They remember doors.
This could be a Lantern trap. A recorded voice. A pull-you-down-and-close-the-lid trick.
But the infection in me—the one born the moment I woke up wearing Lily's face—has its own agenda.
It whispers:
If this were Lily, someone would have gone down those stairs.
And if you're wearing her skin, you don't get to walk away.
I stand inside her memory and scan the kitchen.
There—half-hidden behind a stack of empty crates—is the freezer door. Metal, reinforced, with a heavy lever handle. Scratch marks spider out from the latch as if someone clawed their way in or out.
I step closer. Pistol raised. Lily's pulse is thundering in my ears.
A sound shifts behind the door.
A dragging.
A wet scrape.
Not the kid.
Something heavier.
I stop several feet away, every muscle pulled tight, every nerve screaming.
Of course, the infected are here.
Of course, they chose the meat locker.
My grip tightens around the gun.
I'm tired. Hungry. One mistake away from never waking up again.
This is not the night to be a hero.
But I feel Lily—her fear, her resolve—rising through the memory around me.
And I take one step closer anyway.