I'm not saying the money made it worth it, but it did keep me fed. The kind of job I had, hell, the kind of place we worked, was the sort of thing you didn't exactly talk about at family gatherings. I never brought it up with my brother when he called, didn't post about it, didn't take photos.
I wasn't even allowed to keep a journal. Not a real one, anyway. only the pocket logs they issued, the kind where every page was marked confidential in bright red.
And even then, we weren't supposed to write anything more detailed than shift notes and tool sign outs. But if you're the type who's ever stared down the barrel of a second eviction notice or wondered if that noise in the ceiling meant you couldn't afford the exterminator again, you will understand why I took the job. I got the call through someone who knew someone, a guy I'd done contract rigging work with out in Arizona.
He didn't tell me what the job was, just that it paid triple and they needed people who could keep their heads down. The phone call was short. I didn't even give a formal yes, just silence long enough for him to say, "All right, I'll pass that on.
" 2 days later, I got a message on my old work email that was still connected to my phone. I hadn't used it in years. There was no subject line, no sender list, just a set of coordinates, a time and instructions to bring ID and steel toe boots.
It felt off, every part of it. But I was behind on rent and the other job I'd lined up fell through. I told myself it was probably some private sector contract gig, maybe security or survey work.
Nothing legal, just quiet. I drove 5 hours to a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. An unmarked van already waiting.
The driver didn't say a word, just pointed to the back like he'd done it a hundred times before. and I climbed in because desperate people do strange things when the numbers finally stop working in their favor. We drove for what felt like hours.
The windows were blacked out and my phone was taken and sealed in a leadlined pouch, the kind you could only release with a strong magnet. Nobody spoke. And when the van finally stopped, we were at a small private airfield, bare concrete, a single flood light, and a plane waiting on the tarmac.
Too small to be commercial. The plane wasn't marked, just a featureless charter jet. Inside were half a dozen other guys spaced out like strangers at a funeral.
The windows were frosted over. The only thing they served was water and sealed bags like IV fluid. When we landed, it was dark again, and I was left disoriented.
Everything felt wrong in a way I couldn't quite name. My body knew I'd crossed too many time zones or altitudes or both, but no one ever told us where we were. The air outside was thin and sharp.
And the men who met us wore plain gray jackets and carried clipboards. They handed us gear bags at the staging facility and told us strip out everything we came in with. Clothes, wallets, and anything from the outside with the exception of our boots.
Our IDs were stuck facing the outside so they could easily identify the owners. and they stuffed it all into a heavy plastic bin that was wheeled away without a word. They handed us jumpsuits and blank ID badges.
All I know was that it was up high somewhere. It was not quite mountain range level, but definitely past the treeine. The air was thin and cold enough that your nostrils cracked and burned.
You couldn't see anything outside the fence but gray sky, rock, and snow smooth hills that never changed no matter how long you stared. I don't think it was on any map. I say that because I've looked.
God knows I've looked. The site itself looked like a prison complex. Everything built from prefab concrete and modular steel.
bright orange flood lights on timers that ran like clockwork. A mesh hall, four dorm buildings, a machine shop, and the shaft tower itself. A series of structures built into the slope like a scar that hadn't healed right.
I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a small chance this was a trick, and I was never getting that money they promised. They called it the dig despite it being a mine. Our job was to keep it operational.
Crews rotated in and out every lunar cycle for exactly 28 days. We didn't work by month. Instead, we worked by the moon.
What we were digging for wasn't exactly clear. Not to me. Officially, we cleared debris, stabilized support columns, and tested gas levels.
The actual excavation was handled by remote systems deeper down. All we ever saw were containers being brought up and loaded into sealed trucks. The guys unloading them wore radiation gear.
We weren't given any, told we didn't need it. The only rule that mattered, they told us during induction. was this.
No one goes below level seven. They made this clear. There was no reason to go past there, not even to retrieve a lost tool or follow a cable run.
Even if people called for help, we were told to ignore it. If you detect unauthorized comms from restricted levels, log and escalate. Do not engage, the safety officer told us during the briefing.
That was the only time the room went quiet. At first, it all felt strangely normal. Sure, the job wasn't typical, but for me, it was easy work.
The only thing that bothered me was that my sleep didn't feel restful, like my brain didn't have time to relax. Our schedule was simple. Wake up at 6:00 a.
m. , eat, do safety checks, grab tools, and work. We spent 8 hours down in the dark with only the hum of lights and the grumble of machines for company.
Most of the dig was reinforced with old concrete and steel. Everything beyond level three had that pressure-cooked look with walls bowed in places and support beams rusted but still technically intact. There was dust in the air that never settled so we wore respirators but the air still tasted like blood and chalk.
By level five the stone changed. You could feel it under your boots. Everything sounded different, too.
Your steps didn't echo the same way. It was like the walls swallowed sound. People talked less the deeper we went, probably from the thinner oxygen.
Level six had the worst of it. The air got warmer, tighter in the chest. Even the light struggled down there.
The bulbs glowed dimmer, always flickering. Some of the guys swore they saw things in the far corners of the shaft. Just shadows probably tricks on their tired eyes.
But occasionally someone would shine a light into the dark and claim it bounced off something reflective like cat eyes. And you could always hear something beneath your feet. It didn't sound mechanical.
He was slower, heavier, something more like a breath or a pulse. Sorenson didn't say much his first week, but one day when we were cleaning an old spill by the lockers on six, he paused mid-scrape, just staring at the floor for a while. Then he said almost to himself, "I think my dreams know more about this place than I do.
They show me tunnel systems I haven't been in, but when I get there, I recognize them. What? I asked, but he went back to scraping the floor like he hadn't heard me.
There was something off about him that day more than usual. He had been getting stranger all week. I heard other workers whisper things when they thought no one was listening.
Stuff that didn't make sense. Like the mine wasn't built here. It was reopened.
One guy, Thompson, swore he saw markings in the stone that didn't match any of our tools. I couldn't help but find the whole thing ridiculous. Being stuck in artificial light for 8 hours a day clearly impacted these guys.
And I wasn't about to let that happen to me. And through it all, level seven just waited. The first time I saw the door up close was during my rotation on safety checks.
Level six was on my route, and one of the daily tasks was to confirm the seal integrity on the level seven door. Every shift, someone had to take the elevator down, scan the weld lines with the handheld thermal unit, and log the readings manually. The door to level seven was solid steel, welded in three places, painted yellow and black like a wasp's nest.
No keypad, no lock, just a placard. Restricted. Do not open.
I marked it off on my checklist and realized I was holding my breath the entire time as if something on the other side might hear me. And I swear I heard someone whisper from the other side. But I never told anyone out of fear of admitting I was catching whatever mental bug the other guy seemed to have.
Sorenson disappeared on day 19, but we didn't realize straight away. We got used the guys crashing early or skipping mess to sleep off a migraine. Nobody kept track of anyone unless they were your tool buddy for the shift.
But when we lined up for check-in the next morning, he didn't show. Someone joked that he'd finally quit and maybe he'd hiked out in the night. We all knew he'd been unraveling.
Little things at first. He standed too close to the wall as if listening for something. He started skipping mess and keeping food in his bunk as if he didn't trust the kitchen.
Once I found him standing in the equipment hallway, just staring at the rust stains on the floor. I remember he said they reminded him of a pattern, but he couldn't remember from where, maybe his dreams. Once again, he'd never expand on what he was saying.
He started keeping a journal in his pocket log. I caught glimpses of sketches of spiral-like shapes and some teeth as well. One page had a date circled three times with the words do not follow underlined hard enough to tear the paper.
He'd been stationed near the freight elevator on six and said he kept hearing voices over the intercom even though no one was broadcasting. Said the signal was from 7. They said they pulled security footage to check but they never shared it with us.
However, word got around. One night, he bypassed the maintenance override and forced the service lift down. He taken a breathing tank, a work light, and one of the old crowbars.
That was it. He went down alone when everyone was sleeping. When we woke up and got to work, I noticed the lights across the lower levels started flickering in rhythm in a slow timed pulse.
4 seconds on, four off, over and over. The morning after that, Sorenson's name was gone from the manifest. The site supervisor wouldn't let anyone descend below 5 for the next 2 days.
Safety concerns, they said structural review. There was no mention of him in the bunk records. His gear locker was empty.
Even his plate and cup from the mess were missing, like he'd never been there at all. That's when it really started to go wrong. On day 22, Wyatt took the emergency ladder between 4 and 5 after the main lift locked up again.
It was the second time that week. He was furious, muttering about how the maintenance crew should be fired and decided not to wait. He slipped 30 ft and cracked two ribs on the landing.
Said the rungs were slick with something, but when we checked, they were spotless, like they'd been scrubbed. On day 23, Briggs had a seizure in the mess hall. Full tonic.
He bit through his tongue, blood everywhere, and he took six guys to hold him down. He didn't remember it afterward, but he kept asking where the lights had gone. The lights were still on.
Not long after that, a soft rattling started in the ventilation system. Constant like metal beads rolling around inside the ducted work. Kept some of us up at night.
We asked maintenance to check it out. They sent a guy. He climbed into the crawl space, came back down an hour later, and said there was nothing there.
Wouldn't meet our eyes when he said it. By day 24, our radio stopped working reliably. We'd hear our own voices looping back on a delay.
Sometimes they came back distorted. Sometimes they said things we hadn't said. Someone asked to leave early and was denied.
They said there wasn't transport scheduled until the next cycle and breaking protocol would void his payment. He backed anyway and disappeared during the night. Nobody saw him again.
The rest of us stopped asking questions. I started seeing shadows move where they shouldn't. First in the elevator reflection, then the corners of the dorm showers.
They always disappeared when I turned to look. And then there was the door to level seven. Every morning during safety check on six, someone would swear the welds looked thinner just a little, like heat stress had started to pull them apart from the inside.
But none of us wanted to be the one to measure. We didn't want to get close enough to prove it. It happened on day 26, midshipift.
We were down on level 5, clearing out some half collapse support corridors when the tremors started. It didn't seem unusual at first. The place groaned all the time, but then a chunk of ceiling came down and took out our primary lift and emergency ladder.
One second we were tagging a busted pipe, the next second alarms were blaring and the whole tunnel was filled with dust and blinding us. We had five of us down there. Emergency protocol radioed to use the service access shaft by the old pump station.
It went around the main shaft, but was deeper and looped down through old maintenance corridors before connecting back up above. the only working one left, which meant to go up. We had to go down first.
That meant passing near seven. I remember standing at the base of the ladder and thinking how bad it had been for them to route us through that level despite the warnings. But the supervisors had radioed it, so we climbed.
We hit level six, out of breath and wired. Deak was coughing so hard I thought he'd pass out. Elsen kept looking down at the shaft like he was paranoid.
I couldn't help but think about my three remaining days. That after all of this, it would be worth it. Then we reached seven.
The change was instant. The temperature spiked like we'd stepped into a sealed room with no ventilation. It clung to us hot and humid like a sauna.
But instead of wood, the air tasted of rot. It hit the back of the throat and stayed there. And breathing felt like inhaling through a soaked rag.
Pressure built in our ears and sweat started pooling inside the masks. Jeez, it's like breathing soup. I muttered.
"Why is it so hot down here? " Deak said, yanking at the strap of his mask. "It's supposed to get colder the deeper we go.
" "It's not just the heat," Elson said. "Something's off. The air is thick.
" Then the lights behind us went individually, like someone was following and flipping a switch as they came. De's lamp started to cut out, flickering to the rhythm of his footsteps. Nelson stopped climbing altogether and just froze.
"Do you hear that? " he asked. "I didn't want to, but yeah.
" There were voices in the walls murmuring somewhere deep in the rock. Gomez dropped his bag, trying to reach for his emergency beacon. It tumbled down the shaft, clanging off steel until the sound just stopped.
We kept going. At the next landing, we left the shaft and headed down the corridor that led deeper into seven. Inside was a chamber that felt almost alive.
The walls weren't stone so much as tissue, dense and wetl looking with a surface that glistened in the lamp light. They flexed in slow waves like muscles of a throat mid swallow. Every step squatchched faintly, and the smell was worse than before.
Then we saw him curled near the wall was what was left of Sorenson. He was dead, no question. His body was slumped like it had been dropped, but the chamber hadn't let him go.
Something had fused him into the floor. His back was half sunk into the wet surface, skin stretched thin where it met the tissue as if the walls were slowly pulling him in. The film across his body pulsed faintly.
One eye was still open, dried and glazed over like a dead fish, while his jaw hung slack in a way no living person could hold. You could see where the veins had darkened, branching into the floor like roots. The stench of raw meat left out in the sun invaded through our respirators.
Gomez whispered. That's why they redid the welds. Jeez, Dee muttered, voice tight and higher than usual.
He had one arm half shielding his face like that would help. What the hell is this? This is sick.
Gomez gagged behind his respirator. His voice was hollow. It feels like we're inside something's body.
Nobody corrected him. Elson was shaking. I remember how his helmet light jittered across the walls like he couldn't keep his head still.
"We shouldn't be here," he kept whispering. "We're not supposed to see this. " I didn't say a word.
I was trying not to breathe to get through it. No way. I was cracking with just a few days left.
The ground beneath us throbbed. Gomez said something about a light ahead. I didn't see anything at first, just shadows stacked on shadows.
But then something shifted and I caught the shape of another shaft lined in rusted brackets and half buried conduit. It looked like another access tunnel smaller than ours, stretching straight up. Is that the old vertical?
Deak asked, squinting, his voice cracked. It goes all the way up right top side. I nodded.
We all knew the layout from the emergency map. This one was a backup escape route sealed decades ago, supposedly useless. But there it was.
Then the light shifted again. Whatever comfort that shaft offered disappeared when I realized it wasn't just exposed. It was open, unsealed, like it had been used recently.
That's when the skin of my arms crawled. The heat pulsed again, thicker than before, and the walls began to breathe slower, heavier. I felt sick, like I was fighting a childhood fever.
There was something in the center of the chamber, massive and still, carved with ridges like the roof of a mouth, only wider than anything should be. It didn't move, but I swear it felt like it was waiting. I stepped closer to get a look, and the thing in the center didn't move.
Behind me, someone whispered my name. I turned, but no one else had moved. The light post again, not a flash, more like a deep rhythmic contraction.
Everything flexed. The floor dropped half an inch beneath my boots, and the film rippled like it was breathing harder now. Deak shouted something, but his voice didn't carry right.
It came out bent and muffled as if we were underwater. Elson started backing toward the exit, stumbling over his own boots. That was when the tunnel behind us began to close in a slow tightening.
I don't know what made me move first. Maybe instinct, but I ran, leaving the others behind, pushing through the thick air. And I didn't dare look back.
I threw myself into the old vertical, dragging with my elbows. Behind me, the corridor dimmed, swallowed by that pulsing heat. I remember the way the metal of the vent burned against my palms.
The way the air changed. Less heat, more cold, thinner again. I kept crawling.
Didn't think, just crawled. When the tremors started again, I thought the whole shaft would give, but it didn't. I kept climbing hand over hand, forcing myself up through the shaft.
It wasn't built for this kind of escape. Too narrow and extremely old. But I didn't care.
I just needed to get above level 7. Eventually, the tunnel curved and connected to a collapsed service hall at the back end of level six. I had to crawl over the rubble that had caved in earlier.
My legs scraped against rebar and broken stone. Every movement felt harsh in my body. That's when everything tilted.
I felt something shift in my head. When I woke up, I was in the infirmary on level one. The lights were too bright and everything smelled like bleach.
My throat was dry and someone had shaved part of my scalp for electrodes. The medic didn't say much, just clipped a monitor to my finger and asked if I felt nauseous. His tone was practiced flat like I was a routine checkup as if nothing unusual had happened.
I asked what happened to the others. He said I must be confused. The service shaft.
I said we took the one near the pump station as the supervisor said that was the way out. The medic didn't even look up, just said. There weren't no orders given over the radio.
That channel's been dead for days. I didn't say anything after that. Just let him finish what he was doing.
But I couldn't stop thinking about it. The calm in the voice that told us which way to go, the exact timing of the tremors, and the fact that the radio hadn't crackled or cut out like the others. How stupid we were to just follow the commands without question.
They said I'd been unconscious for 5 days, long enough that they'd already processed my dismissal. I went home like nothing had happened. I followed their itinerary, boarded the plane, and tried not to think about what I'd seen.
I didn't remember going through the terminal. I barely remember the flight. Everything between the infirmary and my front door felt dull, like I was moving through underwater.
The next day, the deposit hit and I received double hazard pay. as if that squared the books. I haven't slept through the night since.
The dreams are always the same. That soft flexing pressure of walls that breathe, the taste of metal and sick in the back of my throat. Sometimes I'm watching from above.
Other times I'm crawling. Since I returned, I've been waking up to find dirt under my fingernails, and I didn't know how it got there. Then mud on my slippers, and eventually there were calluses on my palms.
Turns out I'm digging backyard mostly. Then it was the patch of dirt in the alley behind my apartment. And at one point, I woke up in a drainage ditch.
places I shouldn't have been. I don't remember walking out there, but I always wake up near a pit with raw and blooded hands and dirt packed tight under my nails. It was never the same hole.
I called the guy who got me the job to ask him what the hell kind of thing he dragged me into and whether he was digging too. But his voice on the other end was flat. confused.
He didn't sound tired or haunted like I was. "Oh, I never gave him your name," he said. "I meant to.
I had your info pulled up and everything, but I got distracted and forgot. The job I was going to recommend was in Nevada. Warehouse gig, graveyard shift, but good pay.
I swear I never passed it on.
