The Badger sped through another two blocks of eerie suburban silence before Maria slowed the vehicle. The psychic static was gone, replaced by the familiar, tense quiet of a monster-infested world. Up ahead, they could see their objective.
It was an old, pre-System military checkpoint, a hasty relic from the first few days of the collapse. Concrete barriers and sand-filled barricades blocked the road, forcing all traffic through a single, narrow channel. The Vulture team had clearly used it as a defensible staging area. A canvas tent was still set up, and their transport—a smaller, faster vehicle than the Badger—was parked beside it, its doors wide open.
There were no bodies. No blood. No signs of a fight. But something was deeply wrong.
Everything was covered in a thick, crystalline, web-like substance.
The webs, identical to the kind Leo had seen the Stalk-Weaver and Night-Stalker use, coated the concrete barriers, the abandoned truck, the tent. They weren't glowing with a malicious purple light or shimmering with lures. They were a flat, dull gray, almost perfectly camouflaged against the concrete, and seemed strangely inert.
"What do you make of that, boss?" Maria asked, her voice low. The whole team was pressed against the viewports, studying the silent, web-draped scene.
Leo's [Sense Contamination] skill was giving him a strange reading. It wasn't the active, hungry malice of the Night-Stalker's traps. This felt… old. Dormant. Like a spiderweb covered in dust.
"It's a Stalker-class monster's work, but it feels abandoned," Leo reported. "The energy is faint. Whatever did this isn't here anymore."
"So where's the Vulture team?" Rick asked nervously.
"Inside," a voice rumbled. It was Grunt. He pointed a thick thumb at the largest structure: a small, concrete bunker that served as the checkpoint's guardhouse. "The webbing is concentrated around the door. They must have locked themselves in when the creature showed up. The monster tried to get in, failed, and moved on."
It was a logical deduction. And a hopeful one.
"Ben, scan the bunker," Leo ordered. "Any life signs?"
Ben, having recovered from his psychic ordeal, manned a different console. "I'm not getting anything, Leo. No heat signatures, no bio-signs... nothing. The walls are thick, maybe lead-lined. It's blocking my sensors."
"So we're going in blind," Maria sighed.
Dr. Thorne, finally looking up from his precious data, interjected. "If the creature used a paralytic or soporific agent similar to the one encountered at the hospital, life signs might be too suppressed for standard sensors to detect. Physical entry is the only way to be certain."
They disembarked from the Badger, the air feeling clean and crisp after the oppressive atmosphere of the Mnemonic Zone. They approached the checkpoint cautiously. The gray webbing crumbled to dust when touched, confirming Leo's suspicion that it was old and inert.
The bunker door was heavy steel, sealed with a large, rusted wheel-lock from the inside. There were deep scratches in the steel, but the door had held.
"They're alive," Sarah said, a note of hope in her voice. "They must have hunkered down and waited it out."
"Only one way to find out," Grunt said. He looked at the door, then at his sledgehammer.
"No," Leo said immediately. "We don't know the situation inside. Let's try knocking first." He balled his fist and pounded on the heavy steel door. "Hello? This is a recovery team from The Foundry! Is anyone in there?"
Silence.
He tried again. "We're here to help! The creature is gone!"
Still nothing. A deep, unsettling feeling began to grow in the pit of Leo's stomach.
"Alright, enough games," Grunt snarled. He stepped forward. "Stand back."
He raised his sledgehammer. But this time, instead of swinging wildly, he planted his feet, aimed carefully, and brought the massive hammer down directly on the exterior locking mechanism with a single, precise, and utterly devastating blow.
CRACK!
The sound of shearing metal echoed down the street. The lock shattered. Grunt pulled the heavy door open, revealing the dark, windowless interior of the bunker.
The air that wafted out was cool and stale. It didn't smell of death or decay. It was perfectly neutral.
They switched on their mag-lights, the beams cutting through the darkness. The scene inside was frozen in time. Four Vultures, clad in light scouting gear, were there. One sat at a radio, his hand still on the dial. Two were playing cards at a small table, a winning hand still fanned out. The last one was asleep on a cot.
Their eyes were open. They weren't breathing. But their bodies were perfectly preserved. No wounds, no decay. They looked like wax figures.
"What in the world...?" Sarah whispered, stepping forward to check the pulse on the nearest man. Her face went pale. "He's cold. But there's no rigor mortis. No lividity. Medically, this is impossible."
Leo swept his light around the small room. He saw it instantly. A detail everyone else had missed. On the floor, beneath the ventilation grate, was a small pile of fine, pink dust. The same dust the Night-Stalker had used to trap the door in the hospital sub-basement.
The creature had gotten in. Not by force, but through the vents. It hadn't needed to break the door down. It had put them to sleep, and then... done something else.
"It didn't want to kill them," Leo realized aloud. "It was using them."
His light found a series of strange, crystalline pods attached to the wall behind the radio equipment, hidden in the shadows. They looked like oversized, translucent cocoons, and they were pulsing with a very faint purple light. Inside each one, a shadowy, fetal form was slowly developing.
"It was using their life-force," Thorne breathed, his eyes wide with horrified understanding. "Their dormant biological energy... it was using them as living batteries. Incubators. It wasn't nesting here. It was breeding."
The missing Vultures. The activated Husks at the library. The Night-Stalker wasn't just a predator. It was a shepherd. It was building an army. And they had just stumbled into its nursery.