Page 111 of Death Valley

The passage opens suddenly into a chamber, not as vast as the settlement area but large enough that my light gets swallowed. The air feels different here—slightly warmer, carrying a scent I can’t immediately identify. Something earthy and familiar, almost like…

Home.

The realization stops me in my tracks. This place smells like our childhood home—like the lavender sachets my mother used to make and place in every drawer, every closet. The scent transports me instantly through decades, a visceral memory so powerful it makes my breath catch.

What the fuck?

“Hello?” I call out against my better judgment, my voice immediately swallowed by the darkness. “Is anyone here?”

Only silence answers, but the feeling of being watched intensifies, raising goosebumps along my arms. I turn slowly, sweeping my flashlight across the chamber, the beam catching on natural stone formations that cast strange, anthropomorphic shadows against the walls.

That’s when I hear it—so faint at first I think I’ve imagined it. A soft humming, melodic and hauntingly familiar. A tune without words, rising and falling in gentle cadence.

My mother’s lullaby.

That’s what it is.

The one she hummed to Lainey and me when we were small, before her illness took her too far away to remember such things. I know it now, clear as day.

“Who’s there?” I call, my voice stronger now, driven by a mixture of fear and impossible hope. “Show yourself!”

The humming continues, growing slightly louder, though I can’t pinpoint its source. The cave’s acoustics distort the sound, making it seem to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

I move deeper into the chamber, following the melody, my flashlight beam darting frantically from shadow to shadow. The humming leads me toward a small alcove in the far wall, a natural recess in the stone barely visible until I’m almost upon it.

As my light falls across the alcove, a figure shifts in the darkness—someone sitting hunched against the wall, knees drawn up to chest, face obscured by a curtain of matted blonde hair.

My heart stops, then lurches painfully forward.

“Lainey?” The name escapes me in a broken whisper, half question, half prayer.

The humming stops.

Slowly, achingly slowly, the figure raises its head.

And there she is.

Elaine Wells.

My sister.

Her face is gaunt, cheekbones too sharp beneath skin that’s unnaturally pale, almost translucent in the harsh beam of my flashlight. Dark veins map the surface like rivers seen from above, pulsing visibly with each heartbeat. Her eyes reflect the light with that same unnatural blue I’ve seen in the hungry ones, but they’re still recognizably hers—the same shape, the same intelligence behind them.

She’s changed, transformed—but not completely. Not like Hank or Red. Something of Lainey still remains, trapped inside this halfway state between human and other.

“Aubrey,” she says, her voice raspy with disuse but undeniably hers. “You came.”

A sob tears from my throat, loud in the silence of the cave. Three years of searching, of hoping against hope, of nightmares and guilt—all culminating in this moment of impossible reunion.

“Lainey,” I manage, my voice breaking around her name. “Oh, Lainey. I found you. I finally found you.”

She stands in a way that’s both familiar and wrong—too fast, too graceful for the sister I remember. In the fuller light, I can see more changes: her fingernails lengthened into something like claws, her teeth slightly too sharp when she parts her lips, her posture subtly altered as if her spine has been reconfigured.

But it’s her.

It’s still fuckingher.

“You shouldn’t have come now,” she says, though there’s no anger in her tone, only a profound sadness. “These mountains are dangerous. I left the journal so you’d understand, so you wouldn’t keep looking.”

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