Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 157. Hamster Cage

"There is no way none of them had been possessed." I said to Henry as we left the underground attic through the hole in the wall that I had seen the people entering through. It led us into another room, longer and made of stone, which did not match the attic at all.

"I think so too. Either they had thought the possessed ones had already died, or they just didn’t care; we’ll find at least one in here." Henry also glanced around.

Everywhere was garbage on the ground, broken furniture, and once again, a mix of disgusting leftovers.

Henry looked through another hole in the stone wall.

"What is all this?"

I followed him and scanned the insides of the large human-sized gap, hit by an even stronger smell of rot, seeing an upside-down bathroom with a hole in the floor. I was unsure if we should go through that or if they used it as a toilet.

"Feels like the mansion now."

Moving closer and looking down, I found there was a one-meter-deep tunnel. At least this tunnel wasn’t dirtier than the rest had been.

I jumped inside and crawled until I found another hole to my right. Looking through it, I saw a big living room. Broken furniture and wood were stacked beneath the hole that led to the tunnel I was currently in, which was located at the upper part of the wall. Using the furniture as a ladder, as it was apparently intended, I climbed down.

A dirty carpet, blood, waste, but this time, there was rotting flesh as well. I heard Henry following me and crouched down by a small pile of flesh. This...

"Are two months enough to go cannibalistic?" I asked Henry behind me.

"Even less should be enough." He came to my side and crouched down to pull a smaller bone from the pile; it still had tooth marks on it.

"Well, Ethan had said it wouldn’t be pretty." We looked around and found another gap in a wall.

Like a big hamster cage with colorful tunnels, one room led to another, mismatching so much that I questioned how Ethan had identified a specific number of houses in absolute darkness. I would say not one room in here had much to do with the next.

After crossing into the next room, we spotted a wall full of earth on our side.

"A balcony." Henry noted, sliding his hand over the railing that pressed against the black soil.

Another hole in the floor, this time giving us access to a second makeshift ladder made of stacked wooden boxes.

"It’s already a wonder that they had made it this far up." The more we descended, the more unbelievable this feat seemed. The smell, however, grew stronger, and when we entered an askew room, where the ground could serve as a slide, we found that the lower part of that slide was packed with dead bodies—many of them, about thirty or more. As if they had rolled down and been left like this.

After I put the collar of my sweater over my nose, I slid down and looked through the corpses. I searched for someone with a pulse or dazed eyes among the pile of bodies, and while I rummaged through them, my hand touched something warm.

It was a scalp with long blond hair. After pulling a girl out, I discovered that she was gripping a hand with all her strength. Henry had searched beside me and helped me pull her out further, along with the body that belonged to the hand she held.

Finally, we uncovered two identical-looking girls around their twenties, clutching each other’s hands. One had chunks of flesh missing around their thigh, which we discovered while we dug them out.

"What the hell?" I looked at Henry in bewilderment while he opened one of the girls’ eyes.

"Dazed. Alive." He said.

I did the same with the other girl.

"Also possessed. We have two now."

We placed the girls in a ’standing’ position as they lay on the askew floor with their feet against the other bodies, ensuring they were at least not submerged by the corpses.

"Fuck, what the hell had happened here?" I lifted the girl’s dirty dress, which should have been white or yellow at some point, slightly, to take a closer look at her thigh. The wounds were full of pus and dried blood, but she was still holding on to life.

"Do you really want to know?" Henry looked over my shoulder, and I could only shake my head at his question.

"Did someone really try to eat them while they were alive?" I asked hesitantly.

"Do you really want to know?" Henry repeated, his voice turning peculiar, and I again could only shake my head.

"Let’s continue to look." I put her dress back in place, and we continued to search through the pile of corpses, not finding anyone alive.

"Going back or continuing?" Henry asked, looking at the twins, and I sighed, immediately regretting opening my mouth.

"I don’t want to ever come back here. Continue." The shadows needed the girls alive, so they were probably safe as long as they were possessed and two weeks hadn’t passed.

From the askew room, we came into a little library that had a normal horizontal floor, though it was covered with books. There were empty shelves on each side where the books should have been. We looked under the pile of books and found someone else. It was an elderly man, fully buried under them.

Dazed. Alive. Possessed. At least he had no flesh missing. After placing him on the books, we continued with our rapid descent; every second room was now leading further down. We found more rooms that were entirely vertical, one that should have been a bakery, without even one crumb of bread.

"Let’s hope these shelves had been full of food when they woke up here."

Inside a restaurant dining room with a big pizza oven, we found another possessed one, stuffed inside the mentioned oven. There was, however, no matching kitchen where the four hundred could have found more food.

A male teenager, as old as I was; besides, he looked somehow familiar.

"A classmate." Henry mumbled.

"Really? I’m not sure I remember him..." Thinking a bit, he was drinking with the guys and me once, but I don’t recall more.

"Without counting the four that will attack us, we have now found half of the other shadows. If all the remaining shadows had possessed someone, there should be four more of them here." Henry counted.

"Let’s continue." We placed the classmate on the floor and found a hole leading to another tunnel. I crawled inside first, Henry waiting for my order to follow; it was wide and high enough for me to move while crouching down.

There were a few corpses, and I checked each. When I tugged at one with long hair that had her back turned to me to inspect her, I noticed she was holding something. It was small and had hair as well—it was a child, about four years old. I pressed my lips together and made sure that the woman was dead before I wanted to continue, yet my hand grazed the head of the dead child.

It was warm.

No, please, God, no.