What Remains

The tire blew out on the loneliest stretch of Route 6. One minute, the van was crawling toward the medical transfer point, and the next, it skidded sideways, steel rims screaming like a wounded animal. 

Elias was out the moment the second guard’s boot hit gravel to help the first guard. He was leaner now than when they first caught him. Desperate, too. Not just for freedom - but for something else that he couldn’t put his finger on. 

A voice shouted behind him, demanding compliance. A flashlight swung wide through the trees, but Elias didn’t stop to look behind. His jumpsuit grew soaked as he pushed past the treeline. The forest swallowed him, and the night, thick with pine and rot, offered cover. He didn’t know how long he ran. He didn’t care. Only when the sound of pursuit fell away did he slow, chest heaving, pain lancing through the cuts he made while escaping. Elias leaned against a tree until the stars stopped spinning. 

Then he saw it. 

Half-concealed by brambles and the bones of a collapsing fence, stood a rusted iron sign: Whispering Pines Recovery Center. Gold paint across the letters were flaking off. Behind the fence stood a six-story building, ruined from decades of neglect. Elias rushed closer, slipping through a side door, which shrieked open and slammed shut behind him like it had a mind of its own. He turned, heart jackhammering. The door swung ajar again as he pushed it, calming his nerves that he might be trapped again. 

“You’re just tired,” he muttered. “That’s all.”
Inside, the smell was heavy: mold, old wood, something else that he was afraid to name. He wandered through the narrow halls, peeking into rooms and wondering who must have lived there when the building was bustling with life. The walls were peppered with graffiti, childish in some places, cryptic in others. One phrase caught his eye: 

YOU LEAVE PIECES OF YOURSELF BEHIND. 

He stumbled upon a janitor’s closet that hadn’t been emptied. Inside was a rusted bolt cutter. He positioned the chain of his handcuffs between the jaws and pressed down until the tension snapped, releasing him from the confinement of operating as if he only had one arm. In a nearby patient room, he found a set of plain, blue scrubs, still folded in a dusty drawer. He peeled off his orange jumpsuit, wincing as the fabric dragged across the fresh cuts along his body. The scrubs were baggy, but they fit well enough. 

Elias continued to wander the abandoned clinic, noting how the rooms were like time capsules. Plastic chairs circled in fake therapy sessions from 1998. Motivational posters curled inward from age. “TODAY IS A NEW DAY”, said one above a cracked whiteboard. Beneath it, someone had scrawled: New Day, Same Hell. 

He kept going. Down the long hall. Down crumbling stairs. Into darkness below. The basement walls were concrete and damp, as if the walls were coated with past patient’s grief. There were more chairs down here, stacked like a barricade in front of one of the doors. Unlike the rest of the facility, this door was clean. Too clean. Elias stared at it for a long moment before moving the chairs. The door opened easier than expected, void of the same old creaking the upstairs doors had. Inside was something that did not belong in a rehab clinic. 

A lab. 

Tables with scorched surfaces. Broken test tubes. Rusted surgical equipment. One wall had a corkboard plastered with yellowing photos, but someone had torn the eyes out of each face. Elias noticed a notebook open on one table, pages warped by time, but still legible.

“Subject Zero remains suspended. Exposure sessions continue. It responds not to sound or movement, but emotional frequency - especially fear and regret. It feeds on it. Draws it out.”

“Therapy model failed. Containment…failing..”

Elias blinked. The page shimmered. Behind his ribs, something began to hum. In the corner of the lab sat a locked glass case. The lock had long since rusted away. Inside, nestled on a velvet cloth, was a large piece of amber, roughly palm-sized. It was unnaturally clear, as if someone had spent time shining it. 

At its center was something dark - tiny and curled in a fetal position. Humanoid, almost. But the arms were too long, the head too wide. Its mouth, half-formed, stretched in an expression that could have been anguish…or joy. When Elias lifted the amber, it twitched. He dropped it and cursed, but it didn’t shatter. It pulsed, faintly - like a heartbeat. 

Elias realized he should have run then. But he didn’t. 
Instead he knelt down, next to the amber stone and read more of the journal. The words grew more frantic with each entry.

“Not fossilized. Alive. Recovered from beneath the site - a sap deposit estimated at 12 million years. Impossible. But it’s here.”

“It feeds. It learns. It mimics.”

“We thought it could heal trauma by drawing it out. But it only grows stronger. Patients changed. Some walked out and never came back. Others attacked staff - screaming gibberish.”

“We sealed the room shut. The fire didn’t work. It still remains.”

Outside the lab, something shifted, knocking over a chair. Elias turned - but the hall was empty. Despite being alone, the hairs on his neck stood at attention. The air thickened. His breath grew shallow. Flashes of the past raced across his mind; a boy, no older than sixteen, hurling a chair through a window, a woman sobbing into her knees, a man bleeding from the eyes, screaming in agony. Each vision vanished in seconds, but left an unnerving impact. He looked into a broken mirror on the wall. At first, he saw himself. When he blinked, his reflection didn’t.
 
The amber stone pulsed again. 

Elias stood to leave, only to see that the door to the lab had shut. It wouldn’t open, no matter how many times he threw his weight into it. He looked back at the amber stone on the floor. It rolled back and forth, in place, cracks beginning to form on it. Elias’s thoughts became a jumbled mess. A girl's voice rang out.
 
“You didn’t mean to…”
He dropped to his knees. The memory hitting like a bat to the back.
The house. The accelerant. The thrill. Then the scream. 
He thought the house was empty. It was abandoned. 
But it wasn’t. 
She was inside. Just a curious and rebellious kid. 
Elias had buried the memory. He had to. 
But now it was all he could think of. 
He read the final entry in the journal, smudged with what looked like blood. 

“It doesn’t want to stay hidden anymore. It wants to be free.”

“It needs human pain to root itself here. It needs you.”

“It needs you…”

Just then, the amber split down the center. The darkness inside it stepped out.
 
Elias stared at a copy of himself. It looked like him. No - this thing was Elias. Same eyes. Same scar across the chin. But when it smiled, the room tilted.
 
“You did your best,” it whispered. “It wasn’t your fault.” Its voice slid into his ears like silk and knives. “I can take it away. All of it. The guilt. The fear. Just let me in.”

Elias stepped back, forgetting there was no way out. 
“No…you’re not real…”
The copy blinked. It’s eyes turning black. 
“I’m what remains.”

The world rippled. The walls peeled like wet bark. Roots curled out of the cracks in the floor. The facility groaned as if waking from hibernation. Elias turned and ripped open the door, the sense of freedom convincing him to run away. But the hall stretched impossibly long, never leading him closer to the emergency exit.
 
The amber, now empty, sat on one of the lab tables. Waiting. Elias looked around the room and saw the charred corner. Old burn marks. And he understood. The fire never stopped it - only slowed it down. He searched for a lighter and found a half-empty can of solvent. He moved quickly. Mechanically.
 
The creature watched from a distance, saying nothing. 
“Maybe this time,” Elias muttered, dousing the floor, “it ends.”

He struck the flame and the room went up like dry pine. The last thing Elias saw before smoke took him, was the creature - laughing and crying all at once.
 
By the time fire trucks arrived, the building was a ruin of ash. No body was ever found. But in the center of the wreckage, among the smoldering debris, they found a single piece of amber.
 
Smooth.
Cold. 
Empty.