Axton crouched near a mangled corpse, noting the clawed gouges and punctured bone. “What did they make here?” one of his men muttered, voice shaking.

The abandoned research facility was a graveyard. Axton, a seasoned special forces operative, led his team through halls lined with bodies. Each corpse bore the same haunting marks—deep bites, shredded flesh. The mission brief had hinted at experimentation, but this... this was a slaughterhouse.

Something inhuman had done this, but the culprit was long gone—or so they thought.

As night fell, they set up a perimeter outside. Axton volunteered for the first watch, restless from the horror inside. The surrounding forest loomed dark and silent, save for the occasional rustle of wind through the trees. But then he heard it—a faint, wet tearing sound, accompanied by the crunch of bone.

He gripped his rifle and moved toward the noise, his flashlight slicing through the darkness. The beam landed first on the fresh deer carcass, then the figure, a girl, hunched over it. Feasting. Axton stopped cold.

She was barely human. Her gaunt frame trembled as she ripped into the flesh, blood dripping from her cracked lips. Her tangled hair fell in wild knots, and her body was a tapestry of scars, raw wounds, and exposed sinew. One cheek was nearly skinned, her side oozing blood from a jagged tear, and her calf was stripped to the muscle.

Her feral eyes never rose to meet the light. She was consumed by hunger, tearing into the deer with a desperation that sent a chill down Axton's spine.

He didn’t move, didn’t breathe, his finger twitched on the trigger, but he didn’t fire.

The girl—no, the creature—was feral, a shadow of humanity. The scars on her body matched the torment etched into the walls of the facility. This wasn’t just a survivor. She was something else entirely. Something left behind, a remnant of whatever twisted experiments had occurred here.