Chapter 3:
Shadows and Horns
The city had become a graveyard of neon and smoke, a corpse of its former self, still twitching with the occasional pulse of life but rotting from the inside out. The air tasted like copper and burning plastic, thick with the kind of tension that made your teeth ache. Every shadow felt like it was watching me. Every flicker of movement in the corner of my eye sent my pulse skittering like a rabbit in a snare.
I ran until my lungs burned, until the muscles in my legs screamed with every step, until the soles of my boots slapped against cracked pavement in a rhythm that sounded too much like run run run or maybe die die die.
The backpack thumped against my spine, each bounce a reminder of how little I'd managed to grab before fleeing. Of how woefully unprepared I was for whatever the hell was happening.
A half-empty water bottle, a pocket knife, a crumpled protein bar, and the last photo of my brother and me before he vanished into the system. That was it. That was all I had left.
The streets were too quiet. No cars, no voices, just the distant echo of sirens and the occasional scream that cut through the night like a knife. Even the stray dogs had gone to ground, their usual skulking presence replaced by an eerie, unnatural stillness. The kind of quiet that comes right before a storm breaks.
I didn't stop until I reached the old subway tunnels beneath 6th and Wexler, a place I'd only ever heard about in hushed whispers from the kids who used to dare each other to go down there. The entrance was boarded up, but the wood was rotten, easy enough to pry apart with shaking fingers. The darkness inside swallowed me whole, thick and suffocating, like being buried alive.
I crouched in the shadows, listening.
No footsteps. No voices.
Just my own ragged breathing, too loud in the silence.
I fumbled for my phone, the cracked screen casting a sickly glow across my face. The message still burned in my inbox, seared into my brain like a brand:
They're coming.
No signature. No explanation. Just those two words and a set of coordinates that led to the ass-end of the industrial district. A trap? A warning? I didn't know.
But I knew I couldn't stay here.
***
The first light of dawn was bleeding through the sky when I finally crept back toward my apartment, my body aching from hours of hiding in the damp, cold tunnels. The red streaks had faded to a dull rust, like old bloodstains on linen, and the city looked washed out beneath it, like someone had drained all the color from the world. The streets were empty, but the air hummed with something electric, something wrong, like the buzz of a live wire just before it snaps.
I took the fire escape up, my boots silent on the rusted metal. The window was still shattered, glass teeth grinning at me from the frame. I hesitated, listening.
Silence.
I climbed inside.
The apartment had been torn apart.
Couch cushions slashed open, their stuffing spilling out like guts. Drawers yanked free, their contents scattered across the floor—pens, loose change, a half-empty bottle of painkillers, all of it tossed aside like trash. My laptop was gone. The hard drive I kept hidden under the floorboards was gone.
And on the bathroom mirror, written in something dark and sticky—blood? ink?—were the words:
CURE MUSTN'T ESCAPE
The letters dripped, the edges smeared as if the writer had been in a hurry. Or excited.
My stomach lurched.
I stumbled back into the main room, my pulse roaring in my ears. They'd been here. They'd touched my things, rifled through my life like it was nothing. Like I was nothing.
I needed to move.
I grabbed what little was left. A spare jacket, a water bottle, the photo of my brother and me from better days, and shoved them into my already overstuffed pack. My hands shook as I zipped it closed, the sound too loud in the wreckage of my home.
Then I heard it.
A click from the hallway.
The door handle turned.
***
I was out the window before the first black boot crossed the threshold.
The fire escape groaned under my weight as I hurled myself down the steps two at a time, the metal shuddering beneath me. Above me, a voice barked something sharp, followed by the sound of heavy footsteps giving chase.
I hit the alley running, my breath coming in ragged gasps. The streets were waking up now, the first desperate souls venturing out despite the curfew. A few blocks down, a newsstand's flickering screen played a loop of government-approved reassurance:
"Remain calm. The atmospheric event is temporary. Emergency personnel are—"
The feed cut to static.
I ducked into a convenience store, the bell above the door jingling like a cruel joke. The clerk barely glanced up from his phone, his eyes hollow, his skin sallow. The shelves were half-empty, picked clean by panicked shoppers.
I grabbed a protein bar and a bottle of water, my hands shaking as I shoved a crumpled bill onto the counter. The clerk didn't even count it.
Outside, a group of kids clustered around a cracked phone screen, their voices hushed.
"—saw one last night. Down by the docks. It wasn't human—"
"Bullshit. The Antlers aren't real."
"Then what the fuck took my cousin, huh? He didn't just poof into thin air—"
I froze.
The Antlers.
Urban legends. Ghost stories. The kind of thing you whispered about at sleepovers to scare your friends. Tall figures in bone-white masks, their faces hidden behind smooth, expressionless visages crowned with twisting horns. They moved like shadows, they took people in the night, and no one who saw them ever talked about it. Because they never came back.
But I'd seen them.
I'd heard them.
And they were very, very real.
***
Milo's apartment was in the old textile district, a crumbling brick building sandwiched between a laundromat and a boarded-up pawn shop. I took the stairs two at a time, my breath coming in sharp gasps.
I pounded on the door.
No answer.
I pounded again, harder.
"Milo! Open up, it's me!"
A pause. Then the sound of locks disengaging.
The door cracked open, revealing one bloodshot eye and the glint of a kitchen knife.
"Cat?"
Milo looked like shit. His dark hair was greasy, pushed back from his face like he'd been running his hands through it for hours. His t-shirt was wrinkled, his sweatpants stained with what looked like coffee.
But he was alive.
He yanked me inside, slamming the door shut behind me and throwing the locks.
"What the hell are you doing here?" he hissed, dragging me further into the apartment. The curtains were drawn, the only light coming from a single lamp wrapped in red cloth. It cast the room in a bloody glow.
I opened my mouth to answer, but the words died in my throat.
Because spread across Milo's kitchen table were newspaper clippings, printouts, and grainy photos. All of them circled and annotated in his messy scrawl.
And every single one featured the same thing:
Men in bone-white masks.
The Antlers.
***
Milo shoved a mug of something hot into my hands. It smelled like cheap tea and whiskey.
"Start talking," he said, dropping into the chair across from me.
So I did.
I told him about the red sky. About Rina. About the files with my name on them. About the words on my mirror.
And about the things that had chased me.
Milo listened in silence, his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle twitching. When I finished, he exhaled sharply through his nose and dragged a hand down his face.
"You're not crazy," he said finally.
I blinked. "...What?"
He reached across the table, flipping one of the photos toward me. It showed a blurry security still. A figure in a black uniform, its face obscured by a smooth, antlered mask.
"They've been around for years," Milo said, his voice low. "Spotted near every major 'outbreak' in the last decade. But no one talks about it. No one remembers."
I stared at the photo, my skin crawling. "Why?"
Milo's smile was grim. "Because they erase people, Cat. Like your friend Rina. Like half the folks who've gone 'missing' since the sky turned red."
He tapped another photo. A newspaper clipping from two years ago. The headline read:
LOCAL MAN DISAPPEARS AFTER CLAIMING GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENTS.
"They're cleaning house," Milo said. "And if your blood is really some kind of cure…"
He didn't need to finish.
The Antlers wouldn't stop until they had me.
And if they couldn't take me alive?
They'd make sure no one else could use me either.