The Path Beneath the Pines

The forest still smelled of smoke even though the fire had passed nearly a year ago. Mara tugged her bandana higher over her mouth as she stepped carefully between the blackened trunks. Every footfall sent up a soft puff of ash that clung to her boots and found its way into her lungs no matter how tightly she pulled the cloth across her face. The sky above was too bright, a hard blue that made the charred land seem even harsher, and the silence pressed in until her ears rang. She told herself she was imagining it, that the wildlife would return in time, but there was something uncanny about how the forest had gone utterly still.

“Still nothing,” Paul called out behind her. He was crouched by one of the soil samples they’d driven into the ground. He tugged the tube free, scowled at the meager scraping at the bottom, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Paul had been with the research group longer than anyone else, an easygoing man, mid-forties, with a streak of humor that carried the team through the long hours of fieldwork. Today his expression was tight, his shoulders heavy.

Janelle stood a little farther upslope, eyes narrowed against the glare. Their supervisor was a compact, no-nonsense woman in her early fifties, the kind of leader who could bark orders one moment and share trail mix the next. She had spent most of her career studying wildlife recovery across the Front Range and carried herself with the quiet certainty of someone who knew the land intimately. Mara had admired her from day one, but she never quite shook the feeling she was still proving herself. Six weeks on the team wasn’t enough to feel rooted.

“We’ll move down into the drainage,” Janelle said, adjusting her pack straps. “Might find better soil there. Let’s keep at it.”

They trudged downhill, boots crunching over brittle branches. Mara let herself drift behind, listening for some scrap of birdsong, some rustle of small life, but found only the whisper of wind against scorched bark. She wondered, not for the first time, if the fire had burned away more than trees.

The fallen ponderosa sprawled across the drainage like a toppled giant, roots ripped from the earth and twisted skyward. Mara might have walked past it if the light hadn’t caught on something pale beneath a snarl of dirt. At first she thought it was just stone, but when she knelt and brushed away soot she felt an unnatural smoothness under her glove. She tapped it with her knuckles. A hollow clang rang back, sharp and metallic.

“Hey,” she called, louder than intended. Her voice startled her in the dead air.

Paul and Janelle doubled back. Together they scraped more soil away, revealing the square outline of a slab set into the ground. A rusted metal ring jutted from its center.

“Looks like a hatch,” Janelle said, her tone flat but her eyes alert.

“Out here?” Mara asked. “In the middle of the forest?”

Paul gave a low whistle. Not just any forest. Cold War country. They buried all kinds of things out here…silos, bunkers, you name it.”

Janelle crouched and tugged at the ring, finding resistance at first before it creaked open with a reluctant groan. A gust of air exhaled upward, metallic and stale, carrying with it the sour tang of coins left too long in water. Paul gagged. Mara pressed her sleeve against her face and forced her breath steady.

“We’ll just document it,” Janelle said. Her voice was steady, though Mara thought she saw something else flicker across her face, like a kind of recognition.

The ladder was old steel, flaking with rust, but held firm under Paul’s weight as he went first. Janelle followed. Mara lingered a moment, staring down at the black mouth yawning beneath the roots, before gripping the rung and beginning the long descent.

The air thickened as she dropped: cooler, heavier, carrying a faint bite she couldn’t quite place. When her boots hit the concrete floor, her flashlight beam swung across the narrow walls beaded with damp. Block letters, half-flaked, were stenciled across the opposite wall: SHELTER 12B.

Her chest tightened. Not just a shelter. It was a bunker.

They moved cautiously, lights darting over debris. Old ration tins littered the corners, a collapsed sleeping bag moldered against the wall. In the beam of her flashlight, Mara caught the pale outline of a child’s shoe curled in the dust. Her stomach pinched. She forced herself to look away.

“This place hasn’t been touched in decades,” Paul muttered.

“Don’t assume,” Janelle replied.

They passed through a narrow corridor into a mess hall where tables lay overturned and chairs collapsed in heaps. The air tasted of rust and mildew. On the far wall, deep scratches gouged into plaster formed words that sent a shiver down Mara’s spine.

DON’T OPEN THE LOWER DOOR.

“See that?” Mara whispered.

Paul snorted, trying for bravado. “Could be some bored kid carving warnings.”

“Into concrete?” she shot back.

Neither of them answered. They just kept moving, the beam of Janelle’s flashlight steady while Mara’s quivered in her grip.

The deeper they went, the more oppressive the silence became. They found an office with rusted filing cabinets, a communications room with switchboards collapsed into tangles of copper, a generator hall that smelled of mold and faint gasoline. Each room spoke of abandonment, as if people had fled mid-task.

Then they reached the corridor that sloped down. At its end sat a massive hatch, wider than the others, painted with faded hazard stripes. A wheel lock sealed it closed. Above the frame peeling letters read: Lower Storage. Restricted.

The warning on the wall pulsed in Mara’s mind. Don’t open the lower door.

She found herself whispering, “We shouldn’t.”

Paul planted his hand on the wheel. “Seized up.” He strained, muscles bulging until the metal shrieked.

“Wait,” Janelle said. She raised a hand. Her voice dropped. “Do you hear that?”

They froze. In the stillness, faint as breath, came the sound of dripping. Slow, irregular. Not water. Something thicker.

It took all three of them to wrench the hatch free. A gush of colder air rolled over them, dense and sour, coating Mara’s tongue with bitterness. Her light pierced the dark chamber and she staggered back.

Rows of glass cylinders lined the walls, some shattered, others clouded with viscous yellow liquid. Inside floated shapes, distorted and gray. Some looked vaguely human…limbs too long, faces slack and eyeless. Others were unrecognizable, knotted into wrong forms.

Mara’s stomach heaved. “Oh God.”

Papers lay strewn across the floor, pages warped and darkened. Scrawls ran down the margins: trial batches unstable…containment breach probable…evacuation ordered…

Paul’s voice cracked. “What the hell were they doing?”

“Biological experiments,” Janelle said grimly. Her face was drawn tight, but her voice carried a strange steadiness. “Military. Pathogens. Vectors. They must have abandoned the site.”

A cylinder near the far wall cracked with a sound like a gunshot. Mara flinched, her beam jerking just in time to catch the glass splinter, the yellowish liquid spilling out across the floor in a sluggish sheet. Inside the broken tank, something pale writhed once, then collapsed into the spreading pool. The smell hit them a second later, sour and wrong, as if rot and bleach had fused into one.

Mara’s scream stuck in her throat.

“We’re leaving,” Janelle snapped, her voice iron.

But as they turned toward the corridor, a sound rolled through the bunker, a deep groan of concrete straining followed by a muffled thump. Dust sifted from the ceiling, stinging their eyes. The hatch they’d forced open gave a metallic shudder, bowing inward before easing back. It was as though something on the other side had pushed against it, testing its strength.

Paul’s face drained of color. “That wasn’t the building settling.”

Janelle didn’t answer. She grabbed Mara’s arm. “Move.”

They ran, flashlights swinging wildly, throwing fractured light across the walls. Shadows leapt like figures rushing alongside them. Mara’s breath rasped in her ears, too loud, too ragged, and she felt like she could hear behind them the drag of something wet across concrete. Not footsteps. A smear. A crawl.

They stumbled back through the mess hall, past the gouged warning on the plaster. In the corner, where she swore there had only been dust, Mara caught the impression of streaks leading upward as though fingers had clawed toward the ceiling.

“Faster!” Paul barked.

The air grew thicker as they climbed toward the first hatch. It carried a smell like copper pennies and damp soil. Mara’s calves screamed as her light flickered across the communications room doorway and for an instant she thought she saw a figure slumped in one of the chairs. She blinked, and it was gone.

They hit the ladder well. Janelle shoved Paul upward first, practically hauling him onto the rungs. Mara’s hands shook as she waited her turn, the darkness pooling behind her, heavy and listening. She thought she heard a breath, low and guttural, close enough that her skin began to crawl.

Then she was climbing, boots slipping against steel. Her flashlight banged against the wall, beam scattering. Halfway up, a slam echoed below, and the ladder jolted as if something had seized it from beneath. Mara screamed and scrambled faster, hand burning on the rusted rungs.

Paul’s hands closed around her wrist, hauling her the last few feet. They spilled onto the forest floor in a tangle of ash and sweat, gasping like fish on land. The hatch yawned below them, still open. From its black throat came a single, hollow knock. Once. Twice. Slow and deliberate.

“Seal it,” Paul wheezed, terror stripping his voice raw. “We seal it now. No one can ever know.”

Mara staggered to her knees, her chest heaving. The forest around them remained utterly still. No wind. No birds. Just the faint tremor of ash drifting across scorched ground.

“We can’t,” she rasped. Her voice shook, but conviction cut through. “If something’s alive down there, if it spreads…”

“Someone already knew,” Janelle said. She wasn’t looking at them. She was staring into the hatch as though it had her in its grip. “They buried it. They buried it under fire and earth. And the forest grew over it like a scar. There’s a reason this place is silent.”

For a heartbeat, no one moved. Mara felt the weight of the forest pressing down, every tree leaning inward, every charred root pointing toward the open mouth in the ground. She thought of the shoe, the scratch of warnings on the plaster, the streaks clawing toward the ceiling. The silence here wasn’t empty…it was waiting.

Her hand rose before she knew it, trembling toward the rusted ring. The hatch gave a faint vibration under her palm, as though something beneath was breathing. She tightened her grip and knocked once, the metal ringing with the impact.

And from the darkness below, something knocked back.