I climbed up the stairs of the warehouse. I wasn’t being subtle or stealthy in the slightest. The metal longsword, held low at my side, clanked loudly against every step. Bunny wouldn’t say anything to me at all, so now I have no idea what I’m up against. Maybe there’s nothing at all; she could have been burned by lightning in a freak accident. But... I don’t think so.

On the second floor, I was trying to draw out whatever might be listening. I kicked over a box of nails onto the concrete floor. Even though I braced for it, the thousands of tiny metal impacts still made my ears ring. Nothing showed up. Onto the next room.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Bunny’s expression. It seared itself onto my soul, proving to me that my current reality is worse than I had hoped. Is that the face people make when they’re going to die? When they fear that they’re going to be ejected from their lifeloop? A box of lightbulbs, each one now smashed into tiny glass fragments on the floor. The sound was dulled by the roaring thunder outside. If that’s the face of someone about to die, I wonder if the man Bunny stabbed made it too. Maybe that’s who she learned it from. The next box was full of screws. It was too heavy to knock over, so I ripped down the side of the cardboard with my blade. The tiny metal spirals spewed onto the ground like entrails after the rupture of skin; and just like entrails, they seemed to squirm on the ground for a moment while the wound was still fresh.

Unlike entrails, they didn’t stop squirming. I held my head lower to get a better look; maybe the adrenaline had finally gotten to me. They really looked alive. The screws were like worms writhing in clusters, their spiraling ridges pulsing in waves like the fins of a manta ray. I poked one with the tip of my weapon. It was still just as hard as steel, but it responded to the stimuli with fear—It curled up into a tight coil like a dead centipede. I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I picked one up with my bare hand. It was trembling like it was afraid of me. It was cold and heavy, but felt like it had a pulse. I investigated the psychedelic motion of the ridges, swaying and coiling around the body as if it was a circulatory system.

When I was a child, I would pick up screws in my dad’s workshop and run my finger around the edge, trying to find where the spiral begins and ends. Invariably, after spinning it around in my fingers, I could find where both sides tapered off into nothing. But these screws were different. No matter how closely I looked, I couldn’t figure out where the spiral began or ended. It was as if it was now a discrete circulation unto its own; a loop.

My experimenting was distracted by a thin shadow that slithered down the concrete wall like a snake. It wasn’t really a shadow, but that’s what it looked the most similar to. It was also like a projection, fuzzy and unstable. I felt like if I put my hand in front of its light source I’d block it out from existence; like holding your hand in front of a projector. Looking around me, I realized that there were several of these snakes. The walls surrounding me had dozens, each one slowly inching closer to the floor. Looking up, they were all coming from a common source: a mysterious hole in the ceiling. I was standing directly underneath it. Each floor above me had a similarly-shaped hole in exactly the same spot, letting me see through them, all the way to the ceiling of the top floor. Up there, something was waiting for me.

I didn’t have time to draw my weapon before the snakes leapt off the walls, wrapping around my limbs. My sword dropped to the floor and crushed the screw-worms while I tried to break free from the snakes’ grip. They were wrapped around my arms and legs, tight as tourniquets. “Pins and needles” was an understatement. As the tingling pain tightened, I jerked my right arm as hard as I could in the opposite direction of the wall the snake was in. Using every ounce of force in my body, I pulled as hard as I could. It doubled down on its grip, but I could feel something in it start to give. After just a moment more, the snake split right in half, releasing its grip from my right arm. (You probably shouldn’t try to play tug-of-war if you’re the rope.) Its midsection ruptured in a splash of orange-brown blood onto the cold floor. The unmistakable scent of pennies filled the air as I tried to rip off the remaining snakes.

The other shadowy snakes must have witnessed it all happen because their strategy quickly changed. They rushed back up the walls, towards the ceiling. The tips of my feet lifted off the ground with them. All three of them were distributing my weight evenly between them, suspending me in the air. I reached my now-free right hand towards the ground, grasping for the longsword. I wasn’t confident it would do anything in this situation, but I needed to do something.

As more projected snakes coiled around my purple limbs, the burst of adrenaline I had been on started to recede. Helpless in the air, I was finally given a moment to think about the situation I was in. The tiny pricks of panic sweat jabbed at my pores. The fuzzy pulses from the snakes ran through my body, making it feel like radio static. Soon, my entire body had gone entirely numb. I was already half-way up the room when the snakes began to pull harder. They were trying to lift me through the holes in the ceiling. Looking up through them all, I could see where they were coming from, and what they were pulling me towards.

Attached to the ceiling of the top floor, there was a mouth. A huge, open mouth. Its layers of teeth were made of sharp, jagged triangular metal sheets. A greasy brown oil dripped off them like saliva onto my helpless face. In the very center of the mouth was a single eye, glowing silver. The snakes that held me were coming from deep inside the mouth. Then, I gasped at the revelation that these weren’t snakes. These were its tongues.

I was soon lifted up onto the third floor. The metal screw-worms writhed out of their cardboard boxes onto the floor, this time of their own accord. It wasn’t just screws, either; gears were spinning and grinding against one other. Metal valves were attaching themselves haphazardly around the walls in bizarre patterns. Thin sheets of metal were folded up like origami cranes, fluttering around the room with their razor-sharp wings. I could understand it now: this was the brood, and that silver mouth was the broodmother. As I grew closer, it salivated onto me more and more. It was hungry, and its children were hungry. Eating me wasn’t an act of malice or hatred. It was just survival.

Of course, this didn’t make me feel much better. I don’t think there was anything I could have thought to make me feel better. The only thing that seemed to help at all was doing what came naturally: screaming my fucking head off. I don’t know how I kept it together for so long, but I let loose everything I was holding in. Pathetic yelps, strings of profanities, thrashing, kicking, crying for help; it was the only thing I did. It was the only thing I could do.