Chapter 48 One Shot

Ma En's attention was thorough, but his pace didn't slow. Partway up the staircase, a faint give underfoot — a soft yielding beneath his shoe, accompanied by a low, wet sound, like something had burst. He looked down. The footfall point was flat; nothing suggested any foreign object. He pressed his foot down several times and confirmed it: what should have been solid red wood had gone genuinely soft here, and something was oozing from it, a liquid whose color was close enough to the runner's deep red to almost hide it.

He brought the umbrella blade down into it.

The blade went in without resistance, smooth and easy — the way it would feel sinking into meat.

The rust-heavy air began to carry something else now, something that shared rust's character without being rust.

Blood? Is that blood seeping through?

He didn't crouch to investigate. He stepped back a few paces. In that same moment, movement — above him. In this silent hall, it was impossible to miss. Footsteps, running, coming toward the staircase from the upper floor; then a collision with something, and a new sound — the drag and scrape of something heavy and metal being hauled.

Ma En raised his eyes. On the walkway balcony just above the staircase landing, a small figure flashed into view and was gone — ducking through a side passage. It disappeared before he could get a read on it. Small — head barely clearing the railing — and moving fast, the kind of fast that would make even an adult look slow. The figure was in a white hooded sweatshirt.

He didn't know what this person was running toward or away from. He felt no urgency about it. He'd already judged, with high confidence, that whoever it was wouldn't be leaving this building — not soon. Whether they crossed paths now or missed each other, he'd have another chance.

The red runner showed no further sign of softness the rest of the way up. Whatever he'd stabbed into on the way, whatever had oozed through, remained unexplained.

The second floor: a long corridor, rooms lined up on both sides. Every door was wood, looked heavy, the name plaques either fallen off or faded to illegibility. Some doors had paper — rough-draft paper, from the look of it — wedged in the card slot beside them, covered in handwriting that had been crossed out; the scrawl was near-illegible, and what Ma En could make out wasn't in any Asian script.

Other doors had been drawn on directly — red and black, with a simplicity that recalled a three- or four-year-old's drawings, but what they depicted was bleak and frightening. Monsters chasing people, told in a few strokes. It created an atmosphere, despite its crudeness.

Blood marked the walls, too: handprints, footprints, outlines that might have been body parts, shapes that might have been animal limbs. Some of it was old and dried to brown; some of it was minutes fresh. He'd smelled nothing walking into the corridor — nothing — and the moment he was inside, his face tightened involuntarily. The stench of blood was overwhelming.

If the small figure in the white hoodie really was a child, the thought that someone like that had run to this place was difficult to hold in his mind. Strange was one thing, but there wasn't a single aspect of this dream that wasn't strange.

He moved through the corridor without trying to be quiet, though also without the crouch and skulk of someone hiding — just walking straight, spine upright. Each time he passed a door, he tested it with the umbrella tip. Some swung open easily; some were locked solid. The open ones revealed no monsters, only interiors that had seen better days: long tables, billiard tables, fitness machines and gym equipment, all overturned or smashed. Wood, plastic, metal — whatever their composition, whatever their structural complexity, the destruction had simply twisted them past the point of use. Shapes that had been rigid and functional were now crumpled and useless. Some rooms had blood on the floor, not much, and no bodies.

Some walls had been punched through entirely, connecting directly into the adjacent room — it took very little imagination to picture something forcing its way in.

These scenes read as both old and recent. The air carried both fresh and long-fermented smells, the latter nearly burying the former; if Ma En had less experience with this sort of thing, he'd have struggled to separate them.

He'd opened every door that would open. The end of the corridor was a dead end: a corner with a planter, bare now, soil still in the pot but the plants long gone, just the container and the dirt. Thinking of the creature outside — thinking of everything in this building — he couldn't stop himself wondering whether the plants had been pulled out by someone, or had left on their own.

Perhaps every visible plant in this hall was a creature.

He'd found nothing particular at the dead end. Nothing suggesting any of the people and things that had apparently torn through here had recently been present. So where had the small figure in the white hoodie gone? If the corridor ended here, the figure had to be in one of the locked rooms.

The best option was to get the locked doors open. Before that, Ma En put his hands together and clapped — once, sharp, letting it ring clearly through the quiet corridor.

Then he listened.

No answering rustle in the corridor, nothing moving within reach outside it. He'd put real force into the clap; if there was truly something here that heard it and still lay completely still, that would be concerning. Like an unseen assassin who might emerge without warning the moment they chose to.

He stopped masking his footsteps. He walked back through the corridor, striking the locked doors hard with the umbrella as he went — strike, listen, move on, try the next one, kick it open. On the second attempt, a locked room betrayed movement from inside. No concealment, no subtlety — the sounds crossed from one room to another through what must be a connecting route, quick footsteps and the clang of metal. Something being pushed toward a door.

Ma En adjusted the hat brim and followed those sounds at a deliberate, unhurried pace until they came to rest in a room at the end. The door to this room was locked; but the room next to it was not only open but had a sizable hole in the shared wall, big enough to pass through. Ma En didn't take the easy route through the neighboring room. He kicked the locked door directly.

A dull thud. The door shifted back slightly without giving — heavy resistance from the other side, something pushed up against it.

He paused. Listened carefully. No sound of the person inside trying to retreat through the wall hole; they seemed to be staying still, holding their position against the door.

He said nothing. He drove more force into the door, two or three times in succession. The resistance slid backward; the lock mechanism failed, and the door pried open a gap just wide enough to enter sideways. After that, Ma En went completely still and simply waited — for a full minute, by feel.

At first, silence. Then — breathing reached him through the gap. And a shallow shadow slid under the door: something in the room, approaching.

He heard it clearly. In his mind, the sounds resolved into a picture: the person on the other side, after a long silence without anything happening from outside, was cautiously, quietly trying to confirm the situation — creeping toward the door, trying to peer through the gap.

But Ma En was standing right there, and on pure instinct sent his gaze down through the crack.

Two pairs of eyes met.

He saw half a face, hood pulled up — the hood concealed everything except the eyes. Small and slight; the top of this person's head came only to his chest. If this was genuinely a child, they were underfed and underbuilt. But this same slight, small body had, judging by the resistance at the door, been capable of pushing something surprisingly heavy up against it, and had moved through the building at speed that would leave most adults behind.

The instant their eyes met through the crack, the person startled — and seemed to collapse in on themselves, as though dropping straight down, like they'd sat down hard on the floor.

Ma En couldn't understand why, at a moment like this, in a place like this, running into another human being would produce that kind of reaction. Generally speaking, in a place full of monsters and danger, seeing your own kind shouldn't be cause for that level of alarm.

Unless — in this place, it wasn't only monsters that hurt people.

In which case, this one might be more experienced than they appeared.

The sounds from behind the door immediately shifted: scrambling, retreating, clumsy and urgent. Ma En estimated the distance, then kicked again.

This time the door couldn't hold. It came loose from its frame entirely, tilting backward and slamming down against the barricading objects. Ma En picked out the gap and slipped through it like a cat — light, without a sound — his senses wrapping around the exact spot where the other person was; they seemed unable to stand yet, still finding their feet.

In a handful of heartbeats, they were face to face inside the room.

The small figure in the white hoodie seemed to startle again — and froze.

But when Ma En looked at the eyes beneath the hood, he found no fear. None at all. After all that running, all that barricading, all the clumsy scrambling backward — the eyes looking back at him contained nothing. No emotion of any kind.

Which made no sense. The behavior and the expression were completely contradictory.

"Good evening." Ma En removed his hat and inclined his head.

The white hoodie said nothing. Only raised its face slowly, and rose from the floor.

He could see now what the figure had been dragging: a double-barreled hunting rifle, the kind that broke open at the breach. Old. Poorly maintained — the barrel was oxidized to a spotted rust, the stock scarred with scratches and smeared with blood. Clearly difficult for this person to actually carry; most of the time the stock was simply dragging along the floor.

As they stood, they made a labored effort to raise the barrel and aim it at him, bracing with both arms — the stance of someone on the defensive. But they didn't retreat a single step.

Ma En put his hat back on. He'd been observing carefully. This person was in a completely clean white hoodie despite having run through this filthy environment and moved at that speed. In contrast, his dress clothes were well and truly ruined. Mud, blood smears, pus stains — he looked exactly as wrecked as his evening had been.

In another sense, that clean white hoodie told him everything he needed to know about who he was dealing with.

He tugged his jacket hem straight, adjusted his necktie, unhurried.

"I'm Ma En. I just arrived here. Could you tell me — what is this place?"

He chose not to lead with her identity. First contact — he always preferred to establish his own intentions before pressing on anyone else's.

But she ignored this entirely. She only reached up with one hand and lowered her hood.

A girl.

Clean-featured, sharp-boned, with a ponytail. Asian-looking face, but her hair was gold.

If she were well-trained with a firearm, this situation would be complicated. But standing in front of a gun didn't frighten Ma En — he had both the eyesight and the neural response time to act in the instant between the trigger pulling and the round leaving the barrel.

"Are you alone?" Facing her silence, he only softened his voice, doing his best to show that he meant no harm.

The answer came as a gunshot.

He didn't see her pull the trigger. Only a crawling wrongness rising from somewhere in his spine. He'd already shifted his weight sideways, already snapping the black umbrella open in front of him — but through the holes the creature's pus had eaten into the umbrella's surface, he saw the two rounds coming.

One struck the umbrella's intact material and was caught there, entangled.

One came straight through a corroded hole.

Time slowed — and his body refused to move. He'd seen the round. He couldn't avoid it.

Too close.

Too fast.

The next instant, the sensation of half his body simply ceasing to exist arrived before the pain could — the remaining half was already flying backward through the air.

He saw the wreckage that had been his body in the air beside him, watched the loops of viscera unfurl, watched the blood mist spray outward in a fine cloud.

One shot, and she just —

He never finished the thought. His rotating field of vision went black.

An antique-looking hunting rifle. And a single shot had blown apart half his body.

TOBECONTINUE…