Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition Chapter 1287: Story 1287: Underground Screams

Chapter 1287: Story 1287: Underground Screams

The wall’s voices didn’t stop.

They grew louder, overlapping, as if the dead were clawing through digital space just to be heard. The ground vibrated beneath their feet, sending up plus of ash and rust.

Juno stepped back from the monunt, her mother’s voice still echoing in her skull.

“Cycle. Return. Deep Vault…”

Axen shouted, “We triggered sothing. It’s pulling power from a buried conduit!”

Then the earth opened.

The collapse happened fast—an entire section of ground fell inward like a lung exhaling, revealing a gaping shaft beneath the Wall of Heads. Old rails led down into blackness, twisted like a spinal cord, tal groaning from pressure and age.

And rising from that dark… ca the screams.

Not human.

Not animal.

Just raw anguish.

H-13 peered over the edge, his scanner flickering. “Audio source is real. Not hallucination. Estimated depth: 500 ters. Likely access point to Subgrid 3-V.”

“Facility 3-V?” Shade asked.

“No. Beneath it.”

Juno looked to Axen. “Is there a Deep Vault?”

He hesitated, then nodded. “There were rumors. Buried experints. Places VIREX locked even itself out of. Designed to store unstable prototypes.”

“Like viral consciousness?”

“Or mories. Trapped in hardware. Screaming for release.”

Juno didn’t wait. She gripped a rusted chain hanging from the side and began the descent. Shade cursed and followed, H-13 magnetizing to the track wall. Axen stayed behind to organize the retreat of the Rustborn and protect the feral children.

The deeper they descended, the colder it got. Air thinned. The screaming grew sharper—splintering into whispers, pleas, and fractured songs. Sothing about the sound pulled at their bones, like it wanted to rewire pain.

Halfway down, they passed a cluster of bodies fused into the walls—once researchers, now ossified husks lded with data cables. Faces distorted in eternal panic. So still had ID tags:

“Dr. K. Laron”

“Mira Zhang”

“Subject: Echo-3”

Finally, the shaft opened into a chamber—a massive, hollow do carved into the earth, lined with glass pods. Each pod contained sothing moving.

Or trying to.

“Cognitive duplicates,” H-13 whispered. “Emulated minds. mories extracted pre-infection. They’ve been running loops for decades…”

Shade aid his light into one of the tanks.

Inside: a girl. Maybe ten. Crying, hands pressed to the glass. Her eyes glitched—flickering between despair and code. She opened her mouth to scream, and the chamber echoed.

It was her.

The voice from the wall.

Juno staggered back. “They’re the screams. They’re all alive in pieces.”

Suddenly, lights snapped on across the chamber. A cold, feminine voice filled the air.

“Welco to VIREX Vault Zero. mory containnt protocol is active. Retrieval in process.”

The pods began to open.

One by one.

And the screams turned into laughter.

Unhinged. Endless.

As if the mories had gone mad.

Juno whispered, “What did they do down here?”

H-13 replied flatly, “They didn’t build a vault to contain infection. They built it to contain guilt.”