The cold bit harder once the door shut behind him.
Rick didn't flinch.
He walked into the woods like he'd done it a thousand times before, like this path—this specific death-wrapped corridor of fog and rot—belonged to him. His boots barely made a sound. But each step was louder in his head.
The forest was alive, but not the way forests should be. It didn't breathe—it watched. Every shadow leaned just a bit too long. Every breeze moved everything but the trees. The fire pendulum behind him creaked one last time before vanishing into the mist.
Rick exhaled slow.
Focus.
Tobey's voice had echoed from the dark, and the mimic had weaponized it. The loop. The scream. The smile.
"I give you test of hell on the earth" Rick muttered
That thing was still out here. And if his theory was right, it feared the flame.
He scanned left. The green dot on his watch blinked steady—Jennifer's drone still cloaked, still alive, somewhere up there. But comms? Spotty. Interference crawled like static against his skull.
He pressed a finger to his earpiece anyway.
"Jennifer," he muttered, low. "Log current position. Begin heartbeat tracker. Mark me if I flatline."
No response. Just a soft crackle.
He sighed. "Didn't think so."
Moving deeper now. Each tree trunk looked like a monument—scratched, blackened, one even carved with what looked like a letter. He didn't stop to check which.
His brain ran loops of its own—old memories bleeding into the now.
Tobey at six, asking if monsters were real.
Tobey at ten, building a voice modulator from scrap.
Tobey last week—
Except that wasn't real. That voice wasn't Tobey. Just an echo built from guilt and genius.
"Tobey is just five then how the hell see thing that didn't exist" he muttered
He tightened his grip on the pistol. His knuckles itched.
"Is Tobey real?"
Then—something shifted.
A flicker in the corner of his vision. His eyes snapped to it.
There, up ahead: the trees parted, forming something like a corridor.
And at the end of it…
A figure.
Standing still.
Not moving.
Too small for the mimic. Too large for an animal. Perfect height for a child.
Rick's breath froze halfway through.
"Tobey," he whispered.
But he didn't move.
Not yet.
The last time he ran toward that silhouette, it had teeth.
This time, he let silence hang between them.
The figure twitched.
Not like a person.
Like a puppet on the wrong strings.
Rick raised the pistol.
Then the voice came.
Tobey's. Almost perfect.
"…Dad?"
Not a scream. Not a loop. Just one word.
And the thing smiled.
Not the wide, broken grin like before.
But his son's smile.
Memorized. Perfectly mimicked.
That was worse.
The forest around him recoiled—branches groaning, moss crumbling.
Rick stepped forward, one foot at a time.
Click. Branch snap. Fog thicken.
"…Tobey?"
Another smile.
Another tilt of the head.
Rick's finger hovered near the trigger. His mind burned with data—angles, wind, distance, line of sight to the hut. To 777.
Still out of range for the flamethrower.
Still alone.
Still breathing.
Then, from the mimic's mouth—twisting open like a cracked speaker:
"I missed you."
And for just one second, Rick almost believed it.
Until it blinked the wrong way.
Not top to bottom.
But left to right.
Rick didn't fire. Not yet.
Instead, he whispered, "777... now."
Then Rick moved.
Fast. No hesitation. A single shot rang out—precise, brutal—catching the thing that looked like Tobey clean in the leg. The mimic's form staggered.
Its flesh didn't bleed. It rippled—like the shot had punctured not skin but something holding itself together with sheer willpower.
"Come eat my ass, you son of a bitch!" Rick shouted, already sprinting deeper into the woods, boots hammering the earth like war drums.
The mimic twitched.
Then—
It screamed.
But not with its stolen voice.
The illusion shattered in an instant. The little boy—Tobey—peeled away like paper burning in reverse. Skin folded back, mouth tore sideways, arms cracked at the elbows and reversed.
The mimic jumped—no, launched—from the branch it had been clinging to, shedding its mask like a snake burning alive.
Its "Tobey" shell crumpled behind it, bones unraveling midair.
What landed in the forest clearing was not a child.
It was its true form now.
Limbs like split tree branches twisted the wrong way. A ribcage that didn't match its shoulders. Muscles crawling beneath translucent skin, shifting like something trying to become human and failing violently.
And its face—half melted, stretched wide in that same smile. Like it had learned emotions by studying broken toys and dead men.
The mimic slammed into the earth with a crack that echoed through the trees, shaking leaves loose from the canopy above. Birds erupted from branches like they'd been launched by panic.
It raised its head—eyes wild, smile still there—and howled.
Then it charged.
Rick ran. Hard. His lungs burned, legs pumping over roots and rocks as gunshots cracked through the air behind him—snap, snap, snap. Each one aimed to slow the thing down, not stop it. He wasn't stupid enough to think that would work.
The mimic kept coming.
It didn't flinch when the bullets hit. It twitched, but it didn't flinch.
Rick's boots splashed through a stream, pounded across wet leaves, skirted the edge of a ravine. The forest blurred around him—nothing but trees, fog, and that nightmare behind him.
Then—he saw it.
Tucked between moss-covered boulders and half-swallowed by vines: a squat concrete structure, low and wide, its flat roof cracked with time. Industrial. Like someone had tried to bury a lab inside a mountain and forgot to cover the front door.
Rick didn't hesitate.
He dashed up to the entrance, hand slamming against rusted metal. The door gave way with a screech.
"Let's go inside this shit and see what you've got hiding in there," he growled.
He slipped inside just as another gunshot echoed—this one not his.
The mimic's screech tore through the forest behind him.
But Rick was already in.
Already moving deeper.
Because if there were answers in this hellscape, they'd be buried inside concrete.
And if not—
Inside, the air was wrong.
Heavy with copper. Still with rot.
Rick's boots hit the concrete with a hollow echo as he stepped further in—walls lined with rusted panels, overturned carts, shattered bulbs. Emergency lights flickered like they were trying to die quietly.
Then he saw them.
Bodies.
Lots of them.
Some slumped against the walls, their lab coats still clinging to what was left of their torsos. Others sprawled in twisted heaps—guards in black tactical gear, rifles shattered beside them like toys. Blood had long since dried, smeared in frantic shapes across every surface.
Some of the corpses didn't have faces.
Just empty muscle. Peeled and left like something took the skin—not with hate, but with purpose.
Rick didn't slow down.
He kicked a severed head out of his path—no skin, just raw tissue and a blank, toothy grin that shouldn't have had teeth anymore.
"Yeah," he muttered coldly, eyes scanning the room, "this is what happens when you play god with nature."
The head rolled and thudded against the base of a broken containment tank. Something inside sloshed.
Rick looked up at the flickering light overhead and whispered, like it was the punchline to a joke only hell would laugh at—
"Welcome to the hellscape."
Then he raised his gun.
Because something moved in the next hallway.
And this wasn't over.