Chapter 1281: Story 1281: The Hollow Fields
The Vault’s doors hissed open.
Behind them: wind.
Wild, howling, real wind—not the stale, recycled air of cities or shelters. It carried the scent of ash, decay… and sothing older. Beyond the threshold, the world stretched into gray plains covered in brittle stalks and hollow husks—the Hollow Fields.
Juno stepped out first.
The landscape groaned like it rembered pain. Fields of abandoned crops, now long petrified, stretched to the misty horizon. Trees stood like skeletons, each bark-scarred with claw marks and blistered by exposure. There were no signs of cities, no map coordinates—just a place carved out of forgotten war.
Shade followed, shielding his eyes from the rising dust. “So this is the Deadlands.”
H-13 confird it with a click of his internal scanner. “Coordinates match lost grid Z-0X. Last known use: viral drop testing. No extraction logs. No survivors on record.”
And yet, far in the distance, sothing moved.
Not walkers. Not Wraiths. Sothing else.
The Vault had opened into a boundary zone—where infection t evolution.
Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet cracked.
Juno stumbled back as a section collapsed, revealing trenches of old cables and underground wiring—the remnants of an ancient research web, buried and abandoned.
She peered into it and saw bones. Hundreds.
Not just human. Animal. Twisted. So still wore gear.
A faint digital hum rose from below.
H-13 scanned again. “There’s still power… coming from beneath the soil. Sothing’s awake down there.”
As they moved deeper into the fields, scarecrows began to appear—dozens of them.
They weren’t straw and sticks.
They were stitched bodies.
Half-rotted, posed to look like workers, children, farrs. Their mouths sewn shut. Tags still hanging around their necks: “Trial 117,” “Field Test 43-A,” “Nutrient Host 5.”
Shade looked away. “Who the hell made this?”
H-13 replied: “VIREX called it Field Conditioning. An experint in long-term exposure zones. They tried to ta infection by seeding false communities.”
Juno muttered, “They built a town of the dead… just to watch it fall.”
The trio reached a stone archway marking the entrance to what used to be a village. A crooked sign still hung from rusted chains:
“Welco to New Grinloch.”
Sothing scuttled past their feet—too fast to catch.
Then ca the voices.
Not from throats. From the fields themselves.
Whispers. Echoes. Recordings. Every stalk of hollow wheat vibrated with sound, like living speakers.
The air said her na.
“Juno…”
She froze.
Shade raised his rifle. “They know we’re here.”
“No,” she whispered. “They’ve been waiting.”
From the fog erged figures—not zombies. Not Wraiths.
People.
Alive.
Wearing crude armor, gas masks, bones for decoration.
And one of them, a tall figure with a scorched VIREX insignia lted into his chestplate, stepped forward and removed his mask.
It was Axen.
Alive.
Or sothing like it.
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