Hollow Ground

Cities breathe differently when no one's left to fill them.

The wind flows through empty intersections like it's hunting for voices. Paper flutters across the cracked pavement. Doors swing open for no one. And the silence isn't peaceful. It waits.

Tacoma felt like a big grave, sunk too deep to dig out.

And I was a corpse still walking.

It took me three days to find the church.

It sat on the city's southern edge, half-buried in a slope of ash and overgrowth. One of those older buildings—stonework arches, tall wooden doors, a busted steeple leaning like it was bowing to the trees.

I'd passed it a dozen times when it meant nothing to me. A landmark. A blur. Another relic from a time when I was most worried about whether I'd bomb a class presentation.

Now, it looked like home.

The place was quiet.

No bodies outside.

No blood on the stone.

The front doors were still chained shut by a rusted bike lock. I found a hacksaw in a maintenance truck and cut it off, easing the doors open.

Dark inside.

Damp.

But intact.

First step: clear the dead air.

I made a slow circuit of the chapel. Checked every pew, every shadow. The altar was cracked. Some stained glass had burst inward like something had tried to claw its way through.

But there were no bodies.

That was a win.

The basement was even better—thick stone walls, concrete floor, old iron piping overhead. It looked like it had been used for storage: old folding chairs, stacked hymnals, a piano missing three keys. I could work with that.

I sealed the front doors again. Barricaded the side exits. Set up motion wires across the main hallway. Just noise traps—metal cans filled with screws strung to bent coat hangers. Anything bigger than a cat, and I'd hear it coming.

I spent the next day reinforcing everything.

Hammered planks across vulnerable windows. Drained an old vending machine for parts. Built a makeshift cot from scavenged cushions and army blankets.

I made the basement mine.

The hunger stayed quiet that day.

Not gone. Never gone. Just dormant.

It let me work.

Let me think.

I started journaling again, this time on real pages instead of the backs of receipts and food wrappers.

Day 7. This place could last for a while.

I reinforced the hallway with a crushed vending unit. Moved supplies inside. Got a rain barrel up top. Working on a filtration rig next.

There is no sign of mutants nearby—no scent trails. No rot.

It's quiet. It's almost too quiet.

But maybe that's what peace feels like now.

I didn't write about Harper.

I didn't want to remember her eyes. How she looked at me like I was the monster.

That night, I lit a candle in the chapel.

Not for prayer.

For light.

I sat in the center aisle, staring at the shattered glass overhead.

Reds and purples bled together where the light filtered through.

Saints with no faces.

Hands reaching toward nothing.

I didn't know what any of it meant.

But I sat there anyway, just breathing.

Just being.

There was no one to talk to, no one to remind me what my voice sounded like, so I began saying things out loud just to keep from forgetting their shape.

"My name is Lucas Reed. I'm twenty-two. I was born in Spokane. I like horror fiction. I know how to gut and field-dress a deer. I built a treehouse once when I was ten. I broke my wrist the same week."

None of it mattered.

But I said it anyway.

By Day 9, I had a perimeter.

I used tripwire, glass shards, and an old motion sensor ripped from a garage.

The hunger returned that night, so I went hunting.

Not far.

Just enough.

I tracked a stalker beast through the alley behind a shuttered grocery store. Thin thing. It's like a greyhound with too many ribs. Fast, twitchy. It moved like a glitch in a game.

I waited behind a dumpster until it passed, then struck with the axe. It tried to scream, but I crushed its throat before it could.

It bled black, oily fluid.

I didn't care.

I dragged it into the shadows and fed.

This one was… different.

I saw flashes of the sky from a rooftop.

A sense of speed. Freedom.

Then, the cold panic of starvation.

It had been running from something.

Not me.

Something worse.

I returned to the church just before dawn.

The city was still. The wind didn't blow.

Inside, I stripped the beast for tissue samples. I'd started storing parts in a sealed bin, testing decay rates. The scientist in me—what little was left—wanted to know more.

What made the mutations stick?

Why could I eat them but not normal food?

Were there others like me?

I didn't have answers.

Only instincts.

By Day 10, the chapel was a real shelter.

I had stored food. Clean water. Reinforced doors. Crude sleeping quarters. And a kill count that was climbing higher than I liked admitting.

But I'd survived.

That mattered.

I lit another candle that night.

Same place. Same silence.

But this time, I carved something into the stone altar.

Just four letters.

HOME.

Not because it was.

But because I wanted it to be.