Story 1281: The Hollow Fields

The Vault’s doors hissed open.

Behind them: wind.

Wild, howling, real wind—not the stale, recycled air of cities or shelters. It carried the scent of ash, decay… and something older. Beyond the threshold, the world stretched into gray plains covered in brittle stalks and hollow husks—the Hollow Fields.

Juno stepped out first.

The landscape groaned like it remembered pain. Fields of abandoned crops, now long petrified, stretched to the misty horizon. Trees stood like skeletons, each bark-scarred with claw marks and blistered by exposure. There were no signs of cities, no map coordinates—just a place carved out of forgotten war.

Shade followed, shielding his eyes from the rising dust. “So this is the Deadlands.”

H-13 confirmed it with a click of his internal scanner. “Coordinates match lost grid Z-0X. Last known use: viral drop testing. No extraction logs. No survivors on record.”

And yet, far in the distance, something moved.

Not walkers. Not Wraiths. Something else.