𝐘𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐲 - 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝟏𝟏𝟔𝟔

Chapter 10: The Aftermath

Smoke filled the air, drifting through the broken halls of the once-pristine factory. Quinn stepped over the mangled corpses of the workers, his senses flooded by the aftermath of the chaos. The alarms had stopped, replaced by an eerie quiet, punctuated only by the faint crackling of small fires scattered throughout the factory.

The other experiments had scattered, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Huggy Wuggy's massive footprints were visible, smeared with streaks of red against the tiled floor. Mommy Long Legs' sticky webs hung in torn strands along the walls, and deep claw marks from CatNap scored the doors and desks. Signs of the storm they'd unleashed lingered everywhere.

Quinn moved slowly, his body heavy with the weight of what he'd witnessed. He didn't know what to feel. The rush he'd felt in the moment had faded, leaving a strange, hollow ache in its place. Part of him knew they'd had every reason to unleash their rage—to take back some of the control they'd lost when they'd become experiments in this underground prison. But as he looked around, a knot of unease grew in his chest.

A faint noise broke the silence, and he turned to see a figure standing in a corner—a little girl, her face pale and eyes wide with terror as she looked up at Quinn. 

"Please..." She trembled, "Don't hurt me."

Quinn's jaw tightened. He didn't want to be like this, to be the monster they'd made him into. And yet, a part of him wanted to snarl, to bare his teeth and finish what had started in the chaos of the Hour of Joy. His face began to split involuntarily, the monstrous maw slowly opening, revealing rows of jagged teeth within.

The girl whimpered, her gaze locked on Quinn's bisected face. But just as quickly as the hunger rose, Quinn forced it down, closing the split and taking a step back. He wasn't like them. He wasn't just a creature of rage.

He turned away from the girl, letting her run away. His eyes caught sight of a small, broken mirror amid the debris. For the first time since the outbreak, he looked at his reflection—not as a boy trapped in a monster's body, but as something entirely different, neither human nor beast. His large, cartoon-like eyes stared back, his yarn-covered form coated in blood.

"Who am I now?" he wondered, feeling the question settle heavily within him. He could no longer recognize himself, inside or out.

The quiet creak of footsteps echoed down the hall. He looked up to see Huggy Wuggy in the distance, eating away at one of the bodies with a satisfied smile. The others were moving on, taking as much as they could with them.