The hallway ahead opened like a wound, slick with wire-veins and walls that pulsed faintly to the rhythm of something breathing below. Missy took the lead, followed closely by Dina, Kevin, and Natasha. Behind them, the four remaining officers moved in a staggered line—guns out, flashlights twitching like nervous eyes.
One officer, Thompson, the youngest of the group, lingered just a second too long near a side corridor.
He thought he saw something. A light. Flickering red.
"Hey—wait," he called out. "There's something—"
The others turned in time to see him step through the side passage. Just one step. The wall immediately closed behind him.
"Thompson!" Officer Jiro banged against the wall, but it was solid now—just old drywall, quiet, still.
Inside the corridor, Thompson was alone. His flashlight flickered and then died. He smacked it—once, twice—until it sputtered back to life.
The hallway ahead twisted like a spine, with wires dangling like tendons from the ceiling.
He heard the hum again.
And then a voice. A child's voice.
"Thompson... do you want to see the drawings?"
He turned.
There was a figure standing at the far end of the hall. Small. Head tilted. Arms moving strangely, as if sketching in the air.
The figure was made of ash, melted wax, and memory. It wept black from its eye sockets, Scribble.
The child took a step forward, and the walls reacted. They bent inward. Squeezed.
Thompson screamed once before the entire corridor crushed in on itself. A terrible crunch. Then silence. The others felt it. A jolt. The building had fed again.
Missy looked at Dina. "We're running out of time."
Meanwhile, Dina found the next passage—beneath the floorboards of what used to be a guest room, now warped with veins of copper and exposed bone-like beams. They pried open a hatch that should not have been there, revealing a dark shaft with a makeshift ladder bolted into the wall.
It led deeper. Far deeper than the house should physically allow.
They climbed. As they descended, the air grew thicker, humid with blood-warm moisture. The walls began to show carvings—etched in something that looked like fingernails and chalk. Names. Dates. Words like belonging, new body, and Lukas v.3.
Missy whispered, "He's not just rebuilding Lukas…"
Dina finished the thought: "He's trying to become him."
At the bottom, they reached a chamber of terrible stillness. This was the core. Dozens of tubes ran in and out of a pulsating red sphere in the center, like a heart surrounded by scaffolding. Metal ribs curved overhead like the inside of a monstrous chest cavity. Monitors hung from wires, flashing static, and childhood home videos of Lukas's voice warped through white noise.
Michael's voice came again, all around them.
"I let you in. Because I want you to see it. The new version of what family is. What a memory is. What I am.."
Lights snapped on overhead, revealing the walls of the room lined with half-formed bodies—entities suspended in tanks. Faces twisted mid-scream. Arms reaching for someone who wasn't there.
Natasha choked back a sob. Kevin stepped forward, fists clenched. Missy and Dina exchanged a look. They knew what had to be done. But above them… something shifted. The walls moaned. And a familiar, monstrous presence reawakened, Wrath.
He was awake again. And he was hungry.
The chamber pulsed with artificial breath, the cables twitching like tendrils of a god's nervous system. Missy stared up at the throbbing red sphere—the heart of the thing Michael had become.
It wasn't just wires and blood. It was memory made flesh.
"This is it," Dina said, eyes scanning the rows of twitching entities in their tanks—failed experiments. "This is where he's anchored. If we destroy this—"
"We destroy him," Missy finished.
Kevin pulled out a canister of gasoline they'd brought from the car. "We light this up."
"I'll cover the monitors," Dina said, already moving toward the control panel, fingers typing in a panic, bypassing ancient systems Michael once used for his early experiments. Natasha moved to the side, watching the tanks, her hands trembling as she saw one of the malformed bodies… slowly turn toward her. It had Lukas's eyes.
A distorted voice crackled through the room.
"Not Lukas…"
Her scream was muffled by the sudden collapse of the ceiling.
BOOM.
A twisted shape crashed into the core room, fire trailing from its back, claws blackened and cracked—Wrath.
Smoke poured around him. His skin was half melted, raw. His jaws cracked open with a metallic laugh.
"DID YOU THINK I DIED IN THAT FIRE?" he roared, voice dragging like claws on steel.
Missy dropped the gas can. Kevin raised a wrench. Wrath charged. Chaos.
He slammed into one of the tanks, glass and fluid spraying across the room as the entity inside screeched. Dina ducked under falling cables, trying to finish overriding the security locks.
"MISSY! LIGHT IT!" she yelled.
Missy flicked the lighter, but Wrath was already too close. He struck, knocking it from her hand.
Kevin tackled him from behind, but Wrath twisted his burnt claw, piercing Kevin's shoulder and lifting him like a rag doll.
Kevin screamed.
"YOU TOOK HIM FROM ME," Wrath growled, voice bubbling with hate. "NOW I TAKE YOU ALL."
But something in him glitched. Sparks flew from his arm. One of the wires running from the heart snapped, and he staggered for just a second—his monstrous eye flickering.
Dina shouted, "HE'S LINKED TO THE CORE! IF WE DESTROY IT—HE GOES WITH IT!"
Missy dove for the lighter. Flames roared across the gasoline line. Fire danced toward the tanks.
Wrath let out a shriek that was both rage and fear.
"No—NO—NOT YET—"
The fire caught the edge of the sphere. It began to scream.
The monitors glitched wildly—footage of Lukas playing, laughing, burning. The voices of Michael, Marque, even Wrath, tangled into a cacophony of grief and madness. The tanks exploded one by one.
Missy and Dina grabbed Kevin and Natasha, dragging them toward the passage they came from as the chamber collapsed. Flames roared behind them. The house above screamed—every pipe and floorboard twisting, writhing.
Wrath reached toward them through the fire.
"I AM THE NEW LIFE—"
But then the sphere burst in a white-hot explosion of memory and hate.
And Wrath vanished in the flames.
Later, smoke curled up from the broken remains of the house on Gallagher Street. Firefighters arrived too late. All that remained were collapsed walls, a melted shopfront, and a pulsing silence.
Inside the ruins, the heart still beat—faintly. Michael Harrington was not entirely gone. But something fundamental had been broken.