Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

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 plumes of ash and rust.

Juno stepped back from the monument, her mother's voice still echoing in her skull.

"Cycle. Return. Deep Vault…"

Axen shouted, "We triggered something. 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, metal groaning from pressure and age.

And rising from that dark… came 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 meters. 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 experiments. Places VIREX locked even itself out of. Designed to store unstable prototypes."

"Like viral consciousness?"

"Or memories. 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. Something 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 melded with data cables. Faces distorted in eternal panic. Some still had ID tags:

"Dr. K. Laron"

"Mira Zhang"

"Subject: Echo-3"

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

Or trying to.

"Cognitive duplicates," H-13 whispered. "Emulated minds. Memories extracted pre-infection. They've been running loops for decades…"

Shade aimed 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.

"Welcome to VIREX Vault Zero. Memory containment 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 memories 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."