Infernal Engine (Sci-Fi Horror / Thriller)
The tower of poker chips collapsed as soldiers’ march shook the floor. Rows of troops rushed past the window. Jason watched as the perfect storm brewed. Ice clinked in glasses of warm bourbon. Glass beakers and cylinders clattered on the shelves, echoing the militant rhythm.
“Do you need me to brighten the light so you can see?” asked Logan.
“No, this is fine,” said Jason.
Logan stacked his feeble pile of chips. Jason’s jaw tightened.
“I’m not here to stop you, you know,” Logan said.
“You sure?” Jason gathered his spilled chips into a pile. “Certainly sounds like it.”
“So, you’re really going through with it.”
“What other choice do I have?”
Logan sipped his bourbon. “More enemies are landing on the surface every day. This is the worst time for this.”
Jason kept his eyes on the soldiers, tracking them like a countdown.
Logan tossed his cards onto the table. “You could just keep playing poker, getting paid, letting your son live his life.”
Jason walked to the window and peered out like a kid in detention.
“He will,” he said. “And a long one — once I kill that thing down there.”
They caged a being as old as time itself. Not for observation — for energy. They had countless names for it, but no clear idea of what it was. No one cared for its name, only what it provided.
Logan followed, swirling his drink, and rested a hand on Jason’s shoulder. “You think killing our power source will end this war? Damon wouldn’t want you trying to save the world.”
“He looks just like me when he’s upset. That’s what scares me.”
The soldiers passed out of view. Jason looked back at the room — a lab-turned-poker-lounge. After the cage was built, the engineers were left with the mundane task of monitoring The Beam’s stability. To pass time, they converted an unused lab into a poker den: a mountain of chips, aged liquor no one could pronounce properly, and a green felt table imported from Australia. Luxuries suited for the finest of engineers.
The sweet smell of lukewarm bourbon and fresh cards danced around the room. Outside the stained poker table — scattered chips and soaked green felt — the lab remained orderly: beakers shelved to regulation, whiteboards half-erased but tucked away, flammables locked up tight.
“Jason, you have to understand—”
“I understand everything,” he snapped. “We caged that beast. Then these nonstop invasions began. This war took my light, my wife —- trying to save lives... and now my son?”
“Maya died doing what she loved,” Logan said gently. “She saved so many. I hate that she was in the greenhouse when the breakout hit, but—”
“I still hear her singing, Logan.” Jason’s stare didn’t budge. “What will you say when Damon’s shot down? He died in the line of duty?”
Logan sighed, jangling his ice. “Since the invasion, everything’s locked down. Even head engineers can’t access The Beam. Just keep doing your riddles with him... it grounds you.”
“I have to fix this,” Jason's voice trembled. “If I shut it down then the invaders will have nothing to fight for, and my son won’t have to anymore.”
“You sure about that?”
“I have the timing down to the second, Logan. Entry routes, access points — every step mapped. The more skilled soldiers are fighting the war above, the ones down here are no more than civilians with guns.”
Logan set his glass down. “Does that make it worth it? Damon’s already lost his mother. You want him to lose his father too?”
Jason kept his eyes on the street outside. For all the chaos in the world without a sign of order in sight, there was a strange hush. He pulled a frayed thread on his sleeve about five or six times at that point. His heartbeat pounded in sync with the shifting gears below — the ugly grind of that foul, rotten energy converted into “clean” power for the nation.
“There are still bodies missing since we built The Beam,” Logan muttered. “Gerald vanished in the lower levels. And now you want to go into the heart of it?”
He handed Jason the last sip of his bourbon — the watered-down end most savor.
“At least take the edge off,” he said. “But I know once you’ve got a blueprint in your head, there’s no stopping you.”
As Jason sprinted down the hall, he glanced at his watch and smirked. A riddle came to mind — one he’d heard from a soldier last week. The guy used to tell jokes. Lately, he switched to riddles.
I’ll get him with this one, Jason thought.
He typed: I have cities but no houses. I have mountains but no trees. I have water but no fish. What am I?
He smiled and pushed forward. The building buzzed with soldiers, blind to reality — minions of the machine. Just before the exit, a voice called out.
“Mr. Stewart — where are you going?”
Jason turned. Tyler. Damon’s old friend from training.
“I need to get to The Beam. Urgent maintenance. Pressure levels are unstable with everything happening.”
Tyler stepped closer, concern in his voice. “Sir, the lockdown overrides all maintenance. They're shooting trespassers at The Beam. On sight.”
Before Jason could answer, the city quaked. More soldiers poured into the hall, sweeping Tyler into the chaos.
Outside, in the parking lot, Jason jumped onto his motorized bike, which everyone had, and sped off toward The Beam.
The steel city stretched around him — a maze of skyscrapers like massive pylons opening the Earth’s jaws. The most advanced city on the planet, built just miles above the core — and yet its people moved like commuters in Manhattan.
Behind thick metal doors, residents peered out at the commotion — curious, but passive. Protected by steel and the hand the TMRW corp held over them shielded them from the cruel reality —- everlasting war and chaos miles above. The war, for them, became background noise.
Some rushed with suitcases clutched tight, others ignored the alarms and kept on. Life inside the fortress was untouched by reality.
Jason’s watch buzzed.
He looked down and grinned — Damon replied: ‘A map.’
Jason chuckled, then typed his next one as the towers of The Beam came into view:
The more you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?
Tall gates loomed over The Beam — so massive they might’ve been buildings themselves. The Beam itself was a 3 story column that was visible while the rest drilled a depth long forgotten between the hyperboles and rumors. Two guards stood out front, weapons in hand, and eyes fixated on the parade of soldiers.
Jason closed in. His hands trembled as the towers grew near. He couldn’t confront them directly. Not like this. Everyone was on edge — jumpy, overstimulated. Trigger-happy. He could use that.
One soldier spotted him and motioned for him to slow. “Mr. J?” he called. “You gotta slow down, sir!”
Jason, however, did not slow down.
He accelerated. The soldiers fumbled for aim. Shots cracked the air, missing narrowly as he tore past them, charging down the long concrete pathway that stretched like a driveway to some godless estate. Lasers seared the air near his ears — close enough to make him jump. The wind reeked of scorched steel and singed cotton.
One laser cut through his shoulder like a knife through butter. He lost control and the bike flipped—it narrowly missed crushing his head. Everything blurred as he struggled to his feet. Blood streamed down his arm, soaking his sleeves. One arm stayed in his pocket.
A soldier approached, gun drawn. “Mr. J?! What the hell is going on? We’re going to have to detain you.”
Another chimed in, rattled. “What’s your problem, man!?”
Jason flinched, his side seared with pain. “I—I can’t stand...”
One of them moved to help him. He rolled a silver orb beneath their feet and bolted.
The guards had just enough time to look down before the orb detonated with a shockwave of electricity. Both collapsed, twitching violently.
Jason gripped his arm and darted for the entry. He overrode the controls and slammed the door behind him.
Inside The Beam: silence. A cold, sealed steel hallway — no windows, no seams, no sound. He stood in the medical ward lobby, surrounded by two stories of clinical glass-walled rooms. Some patients rested silently in beds. Others lay in plain view for medical interns — observed like decaying exhibits.
All were infected with The Affliction — the disease linked to prolonged exposure to the engine. Its cause wasn’t proven, only feared. Victims rotted from the inside out. Their bodies barely held any water. Their skin aged decades in weeks. Immune systems collapsed. Bone protruded like jagged peaks beneath paper-thin flesh.
Jason snagged a lab coat from the locker room to cover his arm, then scurried down the corridor, he scanned each room for her. Hands sweaty. Vision wavered. Where was she?
They’d spoken the night before. Everything had been timed. Was she bailing? Had she turned him in?
He glanced over his shoulder — expecting alarms, soldiers, betrayal.
But the medical staff moved with eerie calm, consumed by their routines. No one looked at him twice.
He stopped outside a room and paced.
He peeked into the room.
A figure drooped on the hospital bed, surrounded by ivory-coated interns, all of them frenzied around in spectacle. As the crowd parted to review their notes, Jason caught sight of the patient at the center.
An Afflicted.
Its skin sloughed off the bones like overcooked meat. Hanging in ribbons. Gripped at the joints. It breathed raggedly, barely.
He leaned in for a closer look, but someone yanked him around the corner; Elise. Elise dragged him into a private room and shut the door. With her labcoat, high clearance ID, and stethoscope no one questioned her moves.
“Didn’t I tell you to meet me at my unit’s entrance?” she hissed.
“Where were you!?” Jason demanded.
“I tried to cancel but — what happened to your arm?!”
Jason looked back into the hall. Elise grabbed supplies and made him remove the soaked labcoat. She prepped and started stitching his shoulder.
Jason winced as looked past her toward the muffled screams of the Afflicted. “I haven’t seen one up close since Maya passed.”
Elise stiffened. “What did you need to talk about?” She cascaded the needle through his skin.
“Elise, I need your help.”
“With what?”
“I need access to the um…greenhouse .”
His skin pinched together with a sharp pain. Her expression curdled into a cocktail of fear and anger. “Jason… that’s a death sentence.”
“Elise, listen—”
“No one’s been down there in years. A few months after Maya died, we shut it down.”
Jason looked at the tiled floor. “Her voice still dances through these halls.”
Elise sighed, as his pain subsided. “She was the best nurse I ever worked with. We closed the greenhouse because it became something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“The plants became infected with something…awful. We couldn’t stop it. We salvaged what medicine we could from what remained before the contamination took everything. No one’s been down there since.”
“So what? Withered plants? I can handle that.”
The alcohol forced him to clinch his body as she cleansed the area. “First — only a few of us have access. Second — there are Afflicted down there. Dangerous ones.”
“People like the head of cardiology?” he said, lifting his eyebrows.
The next needle felt deeper. “If this is about Maya… she saved everyone she could. We still use her protocols. Stop doing this to yourself.”
Jason stared at a dark stain on the wall, as if it might reveal an answer. “I need to save Damon.”
Her hands trembled as she threaded the last area. “How?”
“By killing that cancer,” Jason said. “We captured it — and it infected everything. It won’t end until we kill it.”
“Leaps in technology always come with consequences, Jason, and attract enemies, but—”
“Consequences? Don’t.” His breath skipped as he forced himself to calm. “Don’t lecture me about consequences.”
“This isn’t you.” She twisted the stethoscope. “You take this away and we’re all back to the dark ages. Our nation has never done this well — endless energy, cheaper way of living, limitless healthcare, the list goes on.”
“All pointless if we aren’t alive to enjoy it.”
Elsie looked away.
“Elise… my son is up there fighting for us. I can’t lose him. Please.” His voice cracked.
Elise clinched the stethoscope tighter, as if restraining herself. “Jason… this is wrong. I can’t help you.”
His body trembled. Sweat beaded on his palms and neck and spine.
“You mean you won’t,” he said quietly. “But I have to help Damon. I have to.”
“Normally I’d help you, Jason. You know that. But this…” Elise loosened her grip. “This is too far. Let your son fight his own war. He chose this path — remember that.”
His eyes welled as she stood. His jaw clenched tight as she waved goodbye.
His only way in. The only path left. He couldn’t let her walk away.
“Go home, Jason,” she said softly as she walked. “You don’t look well.”
He stood. Without thinking, he grabbed the stethoscope, yanked it behind her neck — and pulled her to the ground.
He dipped his knee in her side and before she could gasp for air, he yanked her ID from her coat. He bolted for the greenhouse. He glanced back, she was frozen. She stared at him — not screaming, not calling for security— she stared.
He would never forget that look.
Down the corridor, soldiers shouted behind him. Lasers cracked past his ears. He dove behind a corner, chest heaving. Sweat poured down his hands as he steadied his grip.
He peeked out and fired. He clipped one soldier in the leg, sending him to the ground..
He sprinted for the stairwell. At the greenhouse gate, he scanned Elise’s badge. The doors groaned open — slow, too slow. A yawning steel mouth.
Bootsteps thundered behind him.
He squeezed through the gap just as the soldier closed in. A laser grazed Jason’s shoulder.
Jason hit the control panel, trying to close the door — but the soldier was already halfway down the stairs. The yawning mouth closed a bit quicker. Jason aimed and fired. Click. Empty.
Each step closer thudded like a drumbeat in Jason’s throat.
Right as the mouth shut — Jason grabbed the soldier, and kept him in place at the narrowing gap. The door caught him — and crushed him.
Jason felt the soldiers' anguished voice through his bones.
Then the door crushed him.
Jason paused before he grabbed the gun, wiped blood from his sleeves, and took a deep exhale. This man was dead, because of him. His skin felt cold and his chest tightened. He listened to his breaths to make sure he was present. That it was real. It had to be done. It had to be done.
His watch lit up. Thank goodness. A message.
Maps.
He smirked faintly. Damon.
Jason typed his next riddle with shaking fingers:
I’m always hungry. I must always be fed. The finger I touch will soon turn red. What am I?
He hit send and pushed forward — deeper into the dark.
In the greenhouse, a rusted balcony overlooked a leviathan tree that stretched into the abyss below. The lights flickered — barely alive. The air was thick with the stench of rotting vegetation.
Jason descended. The deeper he went, the thicker the smell — until it forced him to gag.
Vines strangled the railings and stairs, pulsing faintly with an unseen rhythm. Up close, he saw flowers with petals like bruised skin, each sprouting malformed fingers that flexed and twitched from their centers.
He crept forward.
He felt watched.
The stench of decay — mildew, something sick — hung in the air like a curse. The greenhouse no longer smelled of life; It smelled like its memory.
A voice slithered through the dark.
“This is your fault. Look at yourself.”
“Leave me alone!” Jason shouted, staggering back.
“You can’t save your son.” Another voice.
He stumbled away, trying to outpace the whispers.
He wandered until he entered a vast, dim room. Roots thicker than chimneys pierced from the darkness above and into the floor, twisting like muscles. It was the center of the greenhouse.
He walked through the chamber, eyes wide at the warped vegetation. Leaves pulsed with veins. Flesh-colored petals beat with the rhythm of a heart. Flowers blinked — and filled with teeth yellowed and broken.
“This is evil,” he whispered.
One blossomed with clusters of bulging eyes. One twitched as he stepped close — reaching.
He raised a hand toward it.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”
Jason snapped around.
A figure stood under the tree’s shadow, watering the plants.
“Not unless you want to become Afflicted,” the man said, holding the watering pot still as a statue.
Jason blinked. “Why do the plants look like this?”
“Many of us think it’s life… returning life. Evolving,” the man replied.
“‘Us’?” Jason asked. “There are others?”
“I think the planet’s reacting to us — like an immune system. You get an infection, your body attacks it. This is inflammation"
“Then I’m here to kill the virus.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It is. What else is there?”
The man’s voice grew quieter. “Do you remember when we first found him? His appearance, his presence… didn’t align with anything we knew. So we tried to kill it. When that failed, we caged it. Studied it. And eventually... turned it into a battery.”
“It was evil from the start,” Jason said. “We should’ve destroyed it then.”
The man sighed. “We threw the universe off balance, Jason.”
Jason froze. “How do you know my name?”
The man stepped into the light.
Jason’s breath caught in his chest. This was no ordinary Afflicted.
“Gerald?”
He nearly dropped to his knees.
“Gerald — we thought you were dead.”
Gerald looked at him with eerie calm. “If capturing it caused all this... what do you think killing it will do?”
What if he was onto something?
“What are you doing down here?” Jason asked.
Gerald sighed. “After I got sick, I saw myself for what I was. I knew my life wouldn't be the same. Up there, they’d treat me like some pitiful three‑legged rescue dog. My family was better off without me — my benefits alone made me worth more dead.”
He touched a rotted leaf with surprising gentleness.
“So I took advantage of a near-zero metabolism. Decided to stay. Be their caretaker. Maybe it’d buy me some redemption.” He paused. “Part of me thinks that’s why I’m still alive. Another part thinks this disease wasn’t meant to kill us… just make us suffer. Show us the seeds we planted take root.”
“It can’t be healthy being here alone,” Jason said.
Gerald chuckled. “Who said I was alone? The others just aren’t as polite.”
“The others?”
“Everything needs balance. I wasn’t a good man. You all saw my professional face. Once the Affliction hit, I figured it was karma.” He watered a seizing flower. “So I started tending to the plants. Seeing what good they still had in them.”
“Where are the others?” Jason asked.
“They smelled all that blood on you the moment you walked in.”
Jason’s stomach twisted. “Where’s the path to him?”
A chorus of claws scraped across the greenhouse floor. Gnarls — abandoned, angry — echoed through the dark.
Gerald nodded toward a hallway. “Sounds like they’ve found you. Staircase isn’t far. Take it down — you’ll know the entrance when you reach it.”
“Thank you, Gerald,” Jason said. “Please… take care.”
Gerald smiled faintly. “I always do.”
Halfway down the staircase, the voices returned.
“You couldn’t save your wife.”
“You won’t save your son.”
“He’s probably already dead.”
Jason collapsed to his knees. Maya slipped through his hands. Damon marching into war. He remembered every failure.
He wasn’t strong enough to turn back — even if he wanted to. He was worn, fraying, breaking.
“Enough!” he shouted.
The voices cut off.
Silence. Heavy. Wrong.
Three hunched Afflicted erupted from the darkness.
Jason staggered backward and fired — one dropped instantly.
The other two sprinted down the stairs.
He kept retreating, keeping his shaking aim steady. One lunged. He pulled the trigger — a clean headshot. It crumpled.
He bolted down the remaining stairs. When he risked a glance back, the third Afflicted stopped at the threshold and cowered back like a frightened puppy.
Ahead, a massive gate loomed — huge enough to funnel elephants through. Thick black steel. Bolts the size of street cones.
“So that’s what Gerald meant,” Jason whispered.
His device buzzed.
He looked down — his wrist trembled.
The replies weren’t from Damon.
“Hell!”
“Karma.”
His mouth felt like sandpaper.
Then another message appeared — Damon’s name lighting the screen.
“Fire?”
Then Damon sent another message:
“My turn — What can fill a room but takes up no space?”
Jason stared at it for a breath longer than he meant to — then approached the scanner. He lifted Elise’s ID and pressed it to the reader.
Steam hissed from the cracks as the door unlocked and folded inward.
Beyond it, a narrow bridge stretched across a bottomless pit. At its center sat the black steel throne he had engineered years ago. Cords rooted into the figure slumped within it — countless tendrils disappearing upward into the ceiling like tubes feeding a sleeping titan.
Jason stepped onto the bridge, gun raised.
The creature looked worse than the Afflicted — skeletal, with limbs bolted into the chair. The cords didn’t pierce its body so much as grow through it, as if it had fused to the machine over centuries.
It let out a dry, smoky chuckle. “Look what you’ve become.”
Jason’s grip tightened. “Fight fire with fire.”
“Then we all burn alive, child.”
“I’m fine with burning,” Jason said. “Long as you burn with me.”
The creature tilted its head slightly, as though amused.
“First you wanted me dead. When you were too weak to kill me, you used your technology to cage me. Now you want me dead again?”
“I didn’t know the cage would cause this chaos — this war.”
“Jason,” it said softly, “you humans build cages to feel safe. Yet it is always you who suffer most from them.”
Jason’s heart hammered. “How do you know my name?”
“You’re quite popular these days.”
He swallowed. “I’m here to end this. This chaos you caused.”
“Me?” It laughed again. “I was here before life knew what it was. The universe demands balance. When you disturb that balance… it overcorrects.”
“And I’m here to restore it,” Jason said, raising the gun. “By ending you.”
“You believe killing me will yield paradise?”
“It’ll restore what we had.”
“What you had — and always will have — is me. Light and shadow, Jason. Without me, your grandchildren won’t know the word peace.”
Jason’s voice shook. “Then what choice do I have?”
The creature shifted, cords tightening and loosening with a whisper of steam. “I am your prisoner, if you believe I deserve death… then my life is yours to take.”
A long, loud silence.
“What’s your name?” Asked Jason.
“Lennohx.”
Jason steadied the gun with both hands. “So, Lennohx… why not just destroy everything? Isn’t that what demons do?”
“Demon,” Lennohx repeated, almost kindly. “You cage what you do not understand. Demon, devil, alien, monster — I have worn every title across humanity’s existence. But that’s what you all need.”
Jason’s jaw tightened. “How can I believe that?”
Lennohx studied him. “You look like a man that lost his light.”
Jason dropped his aim. The air in his lungs felt thick and unmoving.
Was he right? What did he become?
Maybe Lennohx wasn’t a monster. Maybe it was the shadow the light needed. And maybe the world didn’t need saving.
But a restart.
Jason stepped to the console. His fingers hovered over the panel. Lennox didn’t power the grid, he was the grid — his thoughts, his mind, his presence spread through the ecosystem like circuitry. He powered the darkness, society manipulated it.
He had a choice; not of peace, war, or of anything so obvious. But of control, surrender — the light needs a shadow.
He let go of the pain, the guilt, the light he hoped for. Damon didn’t need a paradise, just a space to heal. A space they all could.
He hesitated as he glanced back at the grotesque creature. He saw himself in its eyes, his own darkness — but Maya always saw the light in the shadow. It was his turn.
Jason overrode the system and released the levers.
Bolts clicked. Cords hissed loose. The room exhaled — a long, hot breath held for decades.
Lennohx gripped the arms of the throne and rose.
Steam drifted from the holes in his body as they closed, one by one. His skin thickened. Muscles swelled. Wings tore from his back and unfurled, vast enough to blot out the room.
“It astounds me…” he said.
Jason couldn’t speak.
Lennohx looked down at him. “You were intelligent enough to extract infinite energy from me — enough to light your world forever. Yet this land chose to keep all others in the shadows.”
Then he leapt.
Straight up, through the vaulted prison, bursting through every steel beam and cable like they were paper. Screams echoed from above. Gunfire. Chaos. Metal crashed down as Jason sprinted for the exit.
The stairs trembled beneath his feet. He paused as a thunderous boom rippled through the facility.
Then… silence.
Too sudden. Too complete.
He climbed the final steps, light spilling through the door at the top.
“W–what was that…?” he panicked. “Don’t let me down, Lennohx. Let Damon live. Let us keep our light.”
Then it hit him.
He raised his watch, opened the message thread — and finally replied to Damon’s riddle.
“Light?”
He waited for an answer.
Hoping the war had ended.
Hoping his light hadn’t left.
Jason stepped toward the door, light cracked through its frame.
His watch beeped.
The End