They were vomited from the tunnel like bile from a choking throat, crashing onto the ground in a tangle of limbs and panic. Star’s hands hit something soft, wet—slick with rot. His stomach turned.

Then he looked up.

The world slowed.

Rows of medical beds stretched out in a cavernous, makeshift room, thrown together with collapsing partitions and IV poles bent into grotesque angles. Emergency lights flickered overhead, dull red and pale green strobes casting long shadows across the devastation.

But it wasn’t the beds that made Star’s breath catch.

It was what was on them.

Corpses—six at least—lay supine on stained mattresses, if one could still call them corpses. Their flesh had sunk into the cushions, merged with the metal frames as if they’d been left too long, as if gravity had melted them into the furniture.

Bone jutted from their limbs—long and twisted, fingers like spider legs stretching to the floor and past it. Their skeletons had overgrown themselves, tangled and tangled again, reaching like roots into the very meat of the room. That’s when Star realized:

They were standing on them.

The floor wasn’t floor.

It was skin,  tendons, and fused bone. It pulsed beneath their feet.

Andrea screamed, stumbling away from one of the beds. The sound echoed against the blood-slick walls, bouncing back in a warped, watery mockery.

Glenn, pale and soaked with sweat, reached out to steady her, only to recoil when his boot squelched deeper into the floor—into something soft and yielding that gave a wet crack beneath his weight.

“Astaghfirullah!,” Yasir whispered, voice trembling. “What the fuck is this place?”

No one answered. Star couldn’t. His eyes were fixed on the beds—those things—all of them bent into grotesque poses, limbs stretched impossibly long like trees forced to grow in a box. Their faces, where visible, had been split open or bloomed into rot-colored flora. One of them had a fungal stalk growing from its eye socket, speckled with weeping pustules that pulsed like a heartbeat.

The room breathed.

A thick, corpse-sweet heat filled the air, mixed with the tang of antiseptic and blood. Flies drifted lazily around one bed where a jaw had fused with an IV pole, the metal piercing up through the throat like a stalk driven into loam.

Then Star saw the wall.

At the far end of the room, half-shrouded by draped wires and hanging plastic sheeting, a massive hand-painted mural loomed. Someone—many someones—had pressed blackened, bruised hands to the wall to paint it. The smudges created the image of a goat.

Not just a goat. A towering black creature with a dozen eyes staring out from its bloated body, its horns curling up like branches. Around it gathered robed figures—red and green shapes that might once have resembled humans, now twisted and hunched.

And suckling at the goat’s teats were malformed things—half-human, half-kid. Infants with too many eyes, faces stretched into muzzles, hooves where fingers should be. Some still bore hospital bracelets. One wore a bonnet.

The mural dripped. Fresh.

“They were worshipping it,” Glenn muttered. “This—this was a… nursery.”

“No.” Star’s voice cracked. “This was a temple.”

And suddenly the mural felt alive, watching them. Not with painted eyes—but with the gaping mouths in the walls, the thin whispering sounds that began to slither across the room.

They had walked into a womb.

A sacred, rotten place.

Andrea shivered and turned in a circle, trying to find something, anything, untouched. “This isn’t right. This isn’t even biology. This is—this is something else.”

Star took a step back.

The floor twitched.

He looked down—and the bed next to him sighed.

Its ribs, half-submerged in tissue, flexed as if breathing.

“Miriam,” Star whispered again.

Behind him, the tunnel groaned.

Andrea’s breath came sharp as she spun toward Glenn. “Help me move the bed! We can block the tunnel entrance. That thing—whatever it is—can’t fit through if we jam one of these against the opening.”

She was already gripping the rusting side rail, putting her weight behind it.

“No, no, no,” Yasir stammered, backing up, nearly tripping on a slick mound of flesh. “We can’t touch them. We shouldn’t desecrate these bodies any more than—than they already have been.”

Star stepped forward, voice tight. “He’s right, we need to block that entrance, but not like this—these things were people once.”

Andrea snapped her head toward them, eyes burning. “If we don’t barricade this place we’ll end up as part of the floor! You want to be the next one to melt into a mattress? Be my guest.”

The argument spiraled, voices rising—Yasir waving his arms, Star trying to mediate, Andrea spitting fury—but it didn’t matter.

Glenn had already started.

Silent, methodical, like a man who’d done this before, Glenn gripped the rubbery shoulder of the nearest corpse and pulled.

The flesh clung to the bedding like congealed wax.

There was a sickening slrrrkkk as part of the arm tore free. The skin came off in a peeling sheet, revealing raw tendon and a glistening network of pulsing vessels underneath. The sound was wet. Intimate. Bones cracked under his grip like sticks buried in muck.

Star turned away, bile rising in his throat.

That’s when he heard it.

A sound—soft and subtle, just beneath the range of the others’ voices. At first he thought it was his own heartbeat.

Then it came again.

A bleat. Weak. Fragile. Like a newborn goat struggling to cry. Then again—louder.

Star froze. His eyes swept the room, but there was no animal here. Nothing living.

Except the mural.

It loomed larger now. Or maybe it was just closer. Its painted eyes seemed wet. Hungry. Watching.

The bleating continued, rising in volume. Higher. Clearer. Then it doubled, echoed, multiplied—layers of tiny voices weeping in the dark.

“Do you hear that?” Star’s voice cracked. “Glenn. Stop.”

But Glenn kept working, tugging another joint loose, tearing muscle from fused metal, breathing through his nose like this was just another task on a list.

That’s when the singing began.

It slithered in under the bleating. A broken, childish voice, drifting on air that didn’t move, syllables warped by distance and rot.

“We shed the skin… we bloom in pain—
And walk reborn… through blackened rain…”

Each word fell like ash, soft but deliberate, muffled like it came through a thick wall—or a womb. The voice was neither male nor female, old nor young. It was becoming.

The others stopped.

Andrea turned her head slowly, mouth slightly open.

“What… the hell?” Yasir whispered.

Glenn froze mid-peel, the half-torn limb still gripped in his hands, threads of gristle snapping between it and the bed.

The room seemed to hold its breath.

Then the mural shifted.

Only Star saw it—at first. The black goat’s painted eyes blinked. A fly crawled from one nostril. The infants suckling at its teats twitched. A handprint slid, wet and fresh, across the wall.

The voice came again, almost sweet: