THE TEENAGE HUNTERS FOLLOWED the cottontail down into the holler, jumping a makeshift fence with KEEP OUT signs posted. It was the only animal they’d seen the entire afternoon, which was why they pursued it so doggedly. The two brothers, Asher and Hudson Mullins, went one way, while Liam Turner darted in the opposite direction toward a craggy rock formation farther down in the valley.

Liam entered the generous opening of a cavern carved into the limestone gorge. He paused, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and blinked several times at the strange thing on the ground in front of him. It was egg-shaped, about the size of a throw rug, and deep purple. He thought it might be oil seeping from the ground. When he stepped closer, he knew it was blood. It had that unmistakable odor, even to a hunter as young as him. It appeared fresh, but it had started to congeal. He looked around for a carcass, but whatever animal had been killed there was long gone. Absent were signs that it had either walked off under its own power or had been carted off by hunters. It was as if it had disappeared.

Liam lowered his Explorer XP405 crossbow and bent down to study the puddle, his eyes narrowing and his brow furrowing with curiosity. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but he reached down and extended his right index finger, bringing it closer to the pool of liquid. As the digit came in contact with the surface, breaking the thin scab, a jet of warm blood pulsed out like a punctured living artery. The blood hit him in the face. It got into his mouth and eyes. He drew back, dodging the spray.

Instantly, he felt the effects. It was a slight discomfort at first, a tightening of the skin all over his body, like a mild sunburn. It intensified into a scorching pain. It felt like his skin was on fire as it made soft sizzling sounds, steam exuding from his eyes. He had no breath to scream. The air in his lungs evaporated due to the extreme heat. As he began to take his clothes off to cool down, his skin split apart, tearing across the back of his head and down behind both ears. The rush of air into his open wounds triggered a pain response. His agonized howls of pain could be heard by his two friends who were looking for him in a distant part of the holler.

Liam’s skin peeled open like a ripe banana down the sides of his torso and legs. Skinned alive, his musculature exposed, the indignity to his body was not yet complete. The entire network of his circulatory system, every artery, arteriole, vein, venule, and capillary, as well as the heart itself, separated from flesh and fascia to hang freely outside his body against a backdrop of human pulp. Liam was inside out, yet even in this inhuman and monstrous form, he remained alive, a golem of tortured flesh, and a servant of Mother Earth.

They heard Liam’s screams echo through the holler before going silent.

There was no sign of their friend.

“We need to get out of here and report this,” Hudson said.

“We have to find Liam first,” Asher told his brother. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“Maybe he got away and is home now.”

Asher looked at his brother like he had two heads. “You heard that, right?”

Hudson grimaced, “We’re not even supposed to be here, this is the area where they closed that coal mine. We shouldn’t have come out here.”

“Well, we’re here now, and we have to find Liam.”

“What if this has something to do with those missing coal miners?”

Asher knew his brother had a point. Something had happened at one of the mines last month, resulting in its shutdown. Afterward, there had been a number of disappearances in the small town of Lynch. Most supposed that the coal miners and their families had left for job opportunities in Pennsylvania or elsewhere, but others believed it was something more sinister. Some thought that the victims were kidnapped or lured into the woods and ritualistically murdered.

“We haven’t looked near that far ridge. There are some caves down there. Liam might be trapped inside. If we left without him, by the time we come back with help, it could be too late.” Asher started in the direction of the ridge. “Come on.”

“I still say we get out of here,” Hudson mumbled, stepping in line behind his brother.

Asher wasn’t eager to go any further in the holler himself. If nothing else, had he been the one in trouble, he’d want his friends to look for him.

The sun had dropped behind Black Mountain in the west, casting ominous shadows all around them. As mysterious and foreboding as the Kentucky woods could be during the day, it was far worse at night.

Asher was carrying a rimfire Taurus Judge loaded with .45 Long Colt cartridges. Hudson was toting a 10-gauge tight against his chest. Approaching a large opening in the stone wall, Hudson slowed.

“After a quick look around, if we don’t see him, we leave, right?” Hudson asked.

He waited for Asher to answer him. When Asher went into the cavern without saying anything, he sighed and followed.

They walked several paces, calling Liam’s name, when their boots pressed into something soft and squishy. Their heels made wet, squelching sounds when they raised them. The scent of blood stopped them in their tracks.

It was pitch-black. Asher took his phone out of his pocket and switched on the LED light to illuminate the cavern.

“What the fuck!” Hudson said. It wasAsher’s exact thought as he looked down in disbelief at the ground, which was cobwebbed with a system of worm-like, muscular tubes and smaller, darker membranes crisscrossing each other. This elaborate vascular system pumped fresh blood to a puddle on the cavern floor. A heart contracted rhythmically inside a dense clot of tissue, like a grotesque spider in the center of its web.

The vessels they stepped on when they entered were ruptured and hemorrhaging on the ground around their feet. Behind a narrow crevice in the wall to their left, Asher noticed something lurking in the shadows. He shined the light from his phone on it and flinched. It was roughly Liam’s height with a similar frame.

“Liam, are you all right?” Asher asked.

But it was clear to see that he was not all right. His skin was bone-white and stained with dried blood. There were obvious wounds to Liam’s body, but it was not apparent at first just how bad they were until a flap of skin from the top of his head all the way to his left hip opened sideways, revealing his skeleton beneath, like he was wearing an overcoat of flesh.

“What is that?” Hudson screeched. “That’s not Liam. Run.” He turned and raced out of the cavern. Asher was right behind his brother, sloshing through the gore from broken tendrils.

A coiled artery acted like a rope, causing Asher to trip and fall headlong to the ground near the mouth of the cavern. He didn’t make a sound, and Hudson continued bolting at breakneck speed too fast to look back. Reaching the exclusion fence, he realized that his brother was not behind him. Breathing heavily, he called Asher’s name as he scanned the darkness of the holler.

“Asher, don’t do this.”

He made sure the safety switch was clicked off on his shotgun and headed back in the direction of the cavern.

Before reaching the entrance, he heard a shuffling from behind a cluster of trees to his right. His heart pounding, he stopped and looked around, raising the shotgun. Something was moving out there, and all he could think about was the thing in the cavern that Liam had become.

“Help me.”

It sounded like Asher, but Hudson wasn’t certain. His brother’s voice was different, muffled.

“Asher? Is that you?”

“Hudson, help me.”

As the figure emerged from behind the trees, it remained cloaked in darkness. It was a moonless night, and the vastness of the universe and its galaxies of stars were blotted out by heavy cloud cover. Still, Hudson knew immediately that something wasn’t right as the figure continued to move toward him with an arduous, shambling gait.

Hudson didn’t want to take his hands off the gun to get his phone out and shine light on whoever, or whatever, was approaching him. He waited with his finger on the trigger, prepared to stand his ground and shoot or run for his life the moment he got a good enough glimpse. When the shape got within ten feet of him and he saw it, he could do neither. The only thing that came to mind was the frog that he dissected in class a year earlier, its little body flayed open, its insides exposed and dripping. Only this specimen was much larger. And moving. It was a tangle of blood vessels, arteries and veins, dangling down like the pendulous branches of a weeping willow and spitting blood from small tears and punctures, a dense muscular heart beating on the outside.

“It hurts. Make it stop,” the thing moaned.

Hudson recognized it as Asher. The sobbing came from a hidden mouth somewhere inside the inverted body of his brother.

“Shoot me, Hudson, please.”

Hudson shook his head slowly. His eyes were wide. His hands trembled as he lowered the shotgun.

The monstrosity let out a tormented wail and drew closer.

Terror held Hudson in a death grip, and when the pulmonary vein in the center of the thing erupted and sprayed bright, red blood across Hudson’s chest and face, he didn’t flinch. The pain was immediate, the agony intensifying to an unbearable level. When he had completely changed into an alien form, he felt nothing.

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