#creature-feature

The radio crackled with static before falling silent. Sergeant Martinez pressed the transmit button again, her knuckles white against the black plastic. "Base, this is Echo Team. Do you copy?" Nothing. She lowered the radio and scanned the treeline through her night vision goggles. The Australian bush stretched endlessly in every direction, a maze of eucalyptus and scrub that seemed to swallow sound itself. Three hours since they'd lost contact with Alpha Team. Two hours since the screaming stopped. "Sarge?" Private Chen's voice barely rose above a whisper. "Movement at two o'clock." Martinez followed his gaze. Something pale flickered between the trees—there, then gone. The hair on her arms stood up despite the humid night air. In her twelve years of military service, she'd never felt anything like the wrongness that permeated this place. The briefing had been classified, sanitized. "Hostile wildlife," they'd called it. "Territorial predators." But the photos they'd shown—blurred, grainy things that might have been human once—told a different story. A branch snapped somewhere in the darkness. Then another. The sounds came from multiple directions now, a careful orchestration of approach. Martinez felt her pulse quicken as she realized they were being surrounded. "Chen, Rodriguez—defensive positions. Now." They moved with practiced efficiency, but Martinez could smell their fear. It mixed with the eucalyptus oil and something else—something rotten and wild that made her stomach turn. The first howl came from directly ahead, a sound that belonged to no animal she knew. It started low, almost human, then climbed to a shriek that seemed to tear the night in half. Before the echo faded, another answered from the left. Then the right. "Jesus Christ," Rodriguez breathed. Through her night vision, Martinez saw them emerge from the bush. Tall, impossibly thin figures that moved with predatory grace. Their limbs were too long, joints bending at wrong angles. Where faces should have been, she glimpsed only shadow beneath matted hair. The creatures circled them with patient hunger. Martinez counted at least six, maybe more. They made no sound now except for the whisper of bare feet on dry leaves. "On my mark," she whispered into her throat mic. But when she squeezed the trigger, nothing happened. The rifle was dead weight in her hands. She tried the safety, checked the chamber—everything looked normal, but the weapon refused to fire. Chen's panicked voice cut through her confusion: "My gun's jammed! Sarge, it won't—" The attack came without warning. The creatures moved like liquid shadow, faster than anything human had a right to move. Martinez felt claws rake across her vest, heard Rodriguez scream as something dragged him into the darkness. She ran. Branches tore at her face as she crashed through the undergrowth. Behind her, the howling resumed—triumphant now, celebrating. She could hear them following, their footsteps keeping perfect pace with hers no matter how fast she ran. The radio on her belt crackled to life: "Echo Team, this is Base. Report your status." Martinez fumbled for the device, nearly dropping it in her desperation. "Base! We're under attack! Alpha Team is down, Rodriguez is—" "Echo Team, you are ordered to maintain radio silence. Return to base immediately." The voice was wrong. Too calm. Too knowing. She looked at the radio's display. No signal bars. No connection indicator. The device was completely dead, yet somehow still transmitting. The howling stopped. In the sudden silence, Martinez realized she could no longer hear her own footsteps. She looked down and saw nothing—no legs, no body, just empty air where she should have been. The radio crackled one final time: "Welcome home, Echo Team." As consciousness faded, Martinez understood with perfect clarity that she had never left the base at all. None of them had. The mission, the creatures, the chase—all of it had happened in the space between one heartbeat and the next, in the moment the gas had filled their barracks. The last thing she heard was laughter, human and familiar, coming from somewhere very close by.