Lu Wen ran the math in his head, his thoughts spinning like a weathercock in a high wind. The old casino once breathed through a dozen exits, but most were dead letters now, welded shut with heavy steel plates since the scammers turned the building into a rat warren. Only two lines of escape remained: the front entrance facing the river and the side door leading to the open lot. The front was a non-starter; the bird-thing was out there in the dark, and they'd already dropped the heavy industrial shutters—a metallic chunk that sealed the world out. It was an exit that didn't exit.
That left only the side door. To open those three inches of hardened steel, you needed a key from Big Brother Zhang or one of the guards. Lu Wen remembered that door—it lived in a dark valley of his head. In the early days, when he was still a green grunt, he'd tried to jimmy it. The guards had found him and beaten him raw, a world of pain that left him in a soupy semi-consciousness for days. While they were dragging him away from the threshold, Shan Lang Biao—the ex-ranger who handled a rifle like a second limb—had hissed a bit of local wisdom into his ear.
'You dumbass! You think you can pry this open? Bullets won't even scratch this three-inch plate, and a grenade would only leave a smudge of soot. Without a key, you're just a rat in a box.'
He was right. Every window was a sorry patchwork of burglar bars, designed to keep the human machinery from jumping ship. The Green Building wasn't a casino anymore; it was a giant cage, a sarcophagus-like monolith of doom. Unless the watchers invited you out, you were staying in.
Lu Wen felt a cold lead of worry settle in his gut, but beneath it was a thin skin of certainty: as long as he stayed inside, the horned scavenger bird that used to be a man couldn't get to his meat. Then a thought flickered like a bad heart. He wasn't entirely without an ace in his hole. Ge Ming was right here. He was a man who swung weight in this machine. If Lu Wen played it right, the cook might lead him and Darin out of this graveyard. But the thought of striking a deal with a cannibal—a psycho genius in stained whites who liked the taste of human flesh—made his stomach perform fantastic rubber acrobatics. It was a thought that tasted like death."
There was no more time for 'What-if' sessions; the only math that mattered now was survival. Lu Wen hoisted Darin up, her body feeling like a bundle of loose sticks in his arms, and reached out to nudge the bald stork's arm. He didn't dress it up in fancy words—he told the cook straight that the gears of this place were stripping, and if they didn't find an escape hatch soon, the machine was going to eat them all.
Ge Ming, that human butcher sent by Boss Deng, might have been a monster in his own right, but even cannibals know when a reality has gone sideways.When a nightmare becomes physical, self-preservation is the only gospel worth preaching. The stork-like man offered a sharp, liquid snort and agreed to lead them down into the guts of the building.
Out on the concrete, the black nightmare bent over the man they called Scarface.He Feng lay there, a paralyzed heap of meat, his breath coming in a dry, shivering rattle. The beast tilted its head, its jaundice-yellow eyes flashing with a predatory intensity, and sniffed at him, bobbing its head like a scavenger bird finding a ripe carcass. Suddenly, it jerked its face toward the moon and let out that high, thin wail that froze the marrow in Lu Wen's bones: 'Waaa... Waaa... Haccch!'
Then it lunged. The heavy, gray beak hammered into He Feng's belly, punching through denim and skin like a hot nail through lard.He Feng shrieked—a high, despairing sound that belonged in a slaughterhouse—as blood geysered from the wound like a broken dam. His eyes bulged, twin balls of glassy terror, as he watched the demon hook its beak into his cavity, dragging out the steaming coils of his own intestines and swallowing them down fresh. It was a vision from a charnel pit. Even Big Brother Zhang, a man who handled fear like a trade, felt his stomach perform fantastic rubber acrobatics; he stumbled back, turning his face away from the sight of his own right-hand man being unmade while he was still wide enough awake to see the teeth in his own belly."
Lu Wen watched Big Brother Zhang and understood the crack in the man's iron mask. He Feng wasn't just another scrawny tech grunt caught in the gears; he was a home-town boy from the gritty side of Henan. He'd been a wood-shaper once, a carpenter with a temper that ran hot and fast like a brushfire. One day, the fire had boiled over, and he'd used an axe to unhinge his boss's head from his shoulders. Zhang had played the good Samaritan, helping him dodge the pigs and hauling him across the border. Since then, Scarface had been Zhang's shadow, the machinery of the man's will. Seeing his right-hand man being unmade, his guts dragged out and swallowed fresh by a feathered nightmare, had finally stripped the boss's gears.
But the demon out on the killing floor was a non-starter for the engines of war they carried; it didn't bleed, and it wouldn't die.Everyone was caught in a purgatory of helplessness, and the math for survival was looking like a long string of zeros.
"What's the play, Big Brother?" Yi Kan blurted, his eyes twin balls of glassy terror as he watched his partner's fate through the safety glass and the burglar bars.
"Let the bastard eat until he's glutted! He might just slink back to whatever hole he crawled out of!" Zhang snarled, gritting his teeth to kill the shivering rattle in his voice.
He waited until he found a thin skin of certainty, then bellowed his orders like a town crier.
"Don't just stand there! Snatch up your phones! Call every hard-eyed bastard you can think of! I don't care if it's the local pigs, the military, that Colonel Ok Sok-krit (លោកសុខគ្រឹថ)—hell, call the other gangs! If they've got war-gear and a pulse, I want them here! We'll find out if this world has anyone who can put this demon down!" Zhang barked, his own fingers jabbing a frantic rhythm into his phone as he called the god of their little hell-on-earth, Big Boss Deng.
Big Brother Zhang stomped out from the back, his face a hard scrawl of fury. He took his phone and detonated it against the gray concrete floor; it shattered into a million plastic teeth, sending a jolt of surprise through the room.
"Easy now, Boss Zhang," Ge Ming urged, his stork-like face calm but wary.
Being a man who swung weight in the machine's gears, the scrawny tech genius wasn't afraid of Zhang's knuckles.
"Easy with a goddamn ghost?" Zhang Wei bellowed, his voice cracking.
"The Big Boss listened and just laughed. He said I was high on skag, then he just killed the connection. The line's dead—just a flat, mocking hum! Bastard!"
Dian Yan Ming's eyes were moving like trapped rabbits in their sockets.
He lunged toward the massive ceramic statue of Guan Yu, his hands as cold as pond ice as he stabbed a thick bundle of incense into the burner. He was begging the god for a shield against the dark when the world simply gave up the ghost—the lights went out in a single, final snap.
The emergency lights coughed into life, casting a sickly, sallow glow across the hall.
From the floors above, screams drifted down—high-voltage sounds of pure agony that made the heart perform fantastic rubber acrobatics.
Then, the wall speakers, which usually bled out nothing but soft elevator music, hissed into life with a static that sounded like a nest of snakes.Through the electronic curse came a voice as dry and shivering as a winter wind:
—Deserve… To… Reap… What… You… Sowed…—
Then the static just died, leaving a profound, choking emptiness.
"Spooks!" Dian Yan Ming shrieked—a sound that belonged in an insane asylum.He bolted through the room, waving his piece in a blind, rat-like scramble.
Ka-blam!
A single report cracked the air like the clapping of giant hands.Dian Yan Ming hit the floor, settling into a cold, still heap as his life began to drain away into the gray floorboards in slow, oily gouts.
It was Shan Lang Biao, the ex-ranger who handled fear like a trade, who let the hammer fall. He put a single slug into his own partner. Big Brother Zhang's eyes rolled like trapped rabbits in their sockets, staring at the man as to ask why? Biao, his face as tight as a drum, simply offered a sharp, liquid snort. If he hadn't pulled the trigger and made that meat still, Dian would have started hosing the whole room with lead in a blind, rat-like scramble.
Before the shock of the gunshot could even drain away, Ge Ming, that human stork, let out a shriek that belonged in an insane asylum.
"The front door!" he bellowed, his voice a hard scrawl of panic as he scrambled backward. He was right. At the main entrance, the bird-thing—that feathered engine of nightmare—was staring in through the burglar bars with jaundice-yellow eyes that burned like furnace doors to hell. Its massive talons, with wet, webbed membranes between them, clamped onto the steel frame, searching for a way into the nest.
"Call someone! Anyone!" Zhang barked, his voice a dry, shivering rattle. But the answer was a chorus of silent head-shakes. Every piece of tech was a dead letter. No signal, no bars—just a profound, electronic curse of static that sounded like a nest of snakes, a sound that wasn't human in the slightest.
The bird-demon at the door unhinged its jaw and let out a shriek so high and sharp it was a sliver of ice cutting straight into the meat of the soul. It felt as if the sound itself were trying to yank their spirits right out through their skin.
Suddenly—PLUH-CHUNK!—the massive ceramic statue of Guan Yu on the altar shattered, exploding into a million jagged teeth that rained down onto the floor like a dropped plate of porcelain.
Panic erupted then, a riot of focused, urgent haste that no one could steer. Reality had gone sideways into something fundamentally wrong with the world, a nightmare that defied every instructional manual of logic. But the broken god on the floor wasn't the worst of it. Not by a long shot. The true horror was what they saw illuminated by the sallow, sickly glow of the emergency lights out on the riverfront.
Lu Wen watched as a shape wrapped in a rotted straw mat emerged from the river's darkness... but it wasn't alone. There were six of them, six identical walking skeletons marching in a nightmare line. Suddenly, they all unhinged their jaws and let out a shriek that sounded like a baby being processed in a slaughterhouse—'Waaa... Waaa... Haccch!'—a high-voltage sound of pure agony that didn't just rattle the ears; it was a sliver of ice cutting straight into the meat of the soul. Then, the metamorphosis took hold as they twisted and stretched into feathered engines of nightmare, bird-like demons with eyes of amber fire.
Lu Wen felt a cold lead of certainty in his gut as his legs turned to water. He stumbled backward, his body locked in a slow-motion panic, until he slammed into the long stainless-steel table in front of the dining hall. Trays of evening slop flipped and crashed, food scattering across the floor in a chaotic, greasy mess. He stared at the ruined meal on the tiles, then looked back at the main entrance where the feathered monstrosities were swaggering closer, their talons clicking on the concrete with a focused, urgent haste. A single word pulsed in the programmer's brain like a neon sign in a blackout:
"DINNER!"
..............