I hate our crumby little town. It's so grey and derelict. You'd think we lived in the ninteen-sixties by all the concrete housing, and all the drug addicts in the worse alleys during the small hours of the morning. Not to mention the vandalism around here, and complete lack of charisma. At least it matched the mood for the season- Halloween was upon us once again.

As I sauntered down the street with my nattering best friend, trailing my fingertips along the rough knapped flint wall, I couldn't help but notice a pair of goths across the road from us, staring at us as we passed. Sometimes I think it's Halloween all year round. They looked like marooned punk rockers.

"Yunho?" I admit I hadn't really been paying attention to what he was saying as we traipsed our way to his house. The breeze was chilling even though I was wearing a long sleeved shirt and a warm leather jacket. Not one of those shiny black ones, though. I don't like to be mistaken for being in some sort of biker gang around here. It's matte, and rather stylish if I do say so myself. "Yunho! Stop daydreaming!"

I looked up from my wistful gaze at the grimey pavement, eyebrows slightly raised. "Huh?"

"Pay attention, you butthead!" Jaejoong was walking backwards in front of me, flailing his arms. He was about to smack into a metal lamp post, but at the last second he side-stepped it without so much as a glance behind him. I've known him for longer than I remember, but I'm still not quite used to his uncanny awareness of his environment.

"Sorry, Jae," I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets and pouted at him. That always gets him- a smile bloomed upon his lips, and after a pause he glided around in front of me with his arms aloof like a ballerina. His checkered pale-blue-on-white shirt fluttered against his slim figure, and his near-white hair went every which way. He had the mind of a scientist, but the heart of a kid.

"You know what time of year it is, don't you?" He enthusiastically spoke as he twirled, not caring to look at me when he spoke. "Time another local myth crops up that we just have to disprove!" Joy of joys, my favourite past time. I'm glad he was too busy making himself dizzy to notice me roll my eyes.

"Just so long as you remember what you promised last year- no more graveyard stakeouts, trying to calculate how much energy is required to reanimate for longer than five minutes, and weird all-nighters at the cliff edge." He stopped his antics just as he was facing me, and puffed out his cheeks. I know that look. "Oh no you don't, Jae, you can't-" His eyes were suddenly the size of dish-plates and shined with water. He clasped his hands together under his chin and tilted his head slightly. When he does that, all his surroundings seem to blur around him and he draws you in. My God, it was sickening. "That's not gonna work this time! Think of something which won't interrupt my sleep pattern, please."

Jae's smile turned into a wicked grin. I felt myself gulp in anticipation. I have a funny feeling this year is going to be just as eventful as the last.

-----

Of all the tales he could have picked, it had to be this one. The one the neighbors put most gusto into when re-telling. The one everyone fears the most, up to the point where nobody dares step foot in the described location.

I trust Jae, I really do, but this time I tried to talk him out of it. Of course, that didn't work- there was no arguing with science, apparently. That was always his excuse. He always thought he was right. I hated that arrogant part of him, but I think that's only because it was true.

Even though I put my foot down about it, he knows my weaknesses, and stormed off. I knew exactly where he was going, equipped with a warm coat and a camcorder by now, and after anxiously pacing his living room where we last fought (if you really can call it that), I whined and caved in. Time to rescue his sorry arse from loneliness, and possibly something far more sinister if he makes it there alone. Not that I believed in ghost stories. But… There isn’t smoke without a fire.

Although I'd never been there before, everyone knew where the lab entrance was. Part of the elaborate story told every year was detailing the path there. Not many bothered to find out if it was all a load of bollocks, but as far as I was concerned, there was as little to disprove it as prove it.

Bed of red, bed of blue. Steeple grey, man out of view. Down the hatch.

To the stranger, these simple sentences are vague and absolutely unhelpful. However, to a local boy like me, I knew this meant to go through what traditionally were the poppy fields, red over the late spring, then follow the river down through the hills. Around there should be a break in the boulders and turf for the entrance which is apparently a hatch. After all, one of the main attractions to this decrepit town was the caving experiences to be had, if you were adventurous (or stupid) enough. Anyway, to everyone, the rhyme’s ridiculous. But that didn’t stop them believing it.

Unfortunately I didn’t believe my mother about the turning weather during the afternoon. Jaejoong seemed to have made a considerable head start (maybe I had held back a moment to grab a bite to eat) so I didn’t want to turn back for a warmer jacket. I ploughed miserably through the wind, which flattened and parted my hair unflatteringly. Stuffing my hands harder in my pockets, as if I would suddenly find a secret compartment deeper in for optimum warmth, I squinted down my path and took a deep sigh. The wind was biting and cold, stinging my nose and numbing my cheeks. I wondered if Jaejoong had remembered something that would at least prevent him from getting hypothermia. He rarely remembered ‘trivial’ things like surviving the weather.

I prepared myself for a long walk.

-----

Neither my mood nor the weather went under much improvement. I had recently stopped shivering, seeing as my body was too numb to realise it needed warming up anymore. Jaejoong would just tell me I’d climatised at this point, and I would tell him so had my mood. It was weird not going there together. At least we’d end up in the same place. He’s a(n evil) genius, but I am fair game when it comes to figuring out urban riddles. It’s not even complicated. Whoever thought of it was either stupid or lazy. The hardest part was actually moving my feet one in front of the other when my legs were seizing up.

The poppy fields were hardly a dazzling sight in the makings of winter. Twiggy stalks and shrivelled leaves were the only evidence the colourless soil could bear life at all, remainders of weeds and whatever the farmer had recently harvested over the autumn left strewn and sallow to bog down over a wet winter. The clouds above were making a tremendous movement, gathering, murmuring, conspiring against me as they turned blacker and blacker in their growing restlessness. The swirling shades of grey irked me, threatening rain any moment, ready to spit down with the wind. Well, if it spits at me, I spit to the wind; if nature was a rebel, well, I was a goddamn anarchist.

Drawn into a monochrome sketch, nothing was going to shift my spirits now. The only reason I endured the soul- weather and practically athletic hike to the abandoned labs was Jaejoong. Okay, so we both knew some aspects of the legend were ridiculous; like the idea Captain America wasn’t just the figment of a cartoonist’s imagination, and that poltergeists were the real reason the lab had that huge accident and was left to gather dust ever since. But then, we all know all kinds of crazy experimentation went on in the wars. After all, we have Nazi Germany to thank for much of our knowledge on dreams and the importance of REM sleep (Jaejoong told me, and he cited it. Nerd). I don’t even want to know what happened in some prisoner of war camps in any of the countries involved. Whatever did, usually had human rights thrown out the window. Just like with what they were doing here on our very soil.

Captain America was a serum of strength. Well, I was following Jaejoong into the laboratory of personal hell; the experimentation here was to do with fear. What created it, where it comes from, pain reception. Whether fear affects you physically and how it can be repelled, whether it is transient and manifests or is built into our very nerves. After all, nervous comes from the same word stem (did Jaejoong bug my ear? I can practically hear him right now).

These scientists raised animals to be fearful of something which they could trigger in order to explore the nature of fear in the psyche, what part of the brain it stemmed from, and what chemicals are released in the brain. Experiments led to people with extreme phobias being neuro-traced as they are tormented, eventually scared to death and the post-mortem used to understand the moments before their unfortunate demise.

Apparently, the scientists developed a gas which not only was toxic but solvent to the moist orifices, or in non-Jaejoong terms the mouth, eyes, wounds… with a strong chemical which could cause hysteria and trigger physical reactions such as palpitations and hypertension, essentially inducing a person’s worst nightmare in their imagination. Apparently this was supposed to work as in the person affected would do anything, including pay the ultimate price, to make it stop, or succumb to the extreme symptoms of fear- seizing and dying.

I could feel my own nerves as my heart pounded, unsure by now whether it was just the trip or the anticipation. The ground was soft with the damp beneath my heavy boots, saturating the soles as I trudged. The meadows were warm and beautiful in the spring; coming out now there was an eerie chill and ugliness in the trees, gnarled and withered under the season’s deathly beckoning.

One great oak had closed its eyes after such sweet temptations to sleep, succumbing to the calls of the reaper only to be taken away on the cloud of its slumber, forsaken body becoming heavy with grief and slumping across the rifts of the tractor’s tyre tracks in the mud.

I clambered gingerly over the corpse, wondering if the body would be moved to a more dignified place or left to rot, exposed to the elements.

It is said that the spirits of those mistreated and tricked into being guinea pigs were restless and unable to move on- seeking revenge on the engineers who meticulously constructed their deaths for a ‘better understanding of the brain’ which was merely a mask for the aim of de-sensitised soldiers and the mother of all tear gasses. They returned and wrecked the lab, setting angry and frightened animals loose and throwing shelves of the newly developed chemical weapon to the ground- the smashing jars causing the liquid inside to evaporate into a noxious gas, suffocating the scientists in their own creation.

In the end, the legend is that anyone who enters will die by their worst fear, the ghosts haunting the place they died in and making sure no-one who enters, leaves.

I could hear Jaejoong’s “ridiculous, ay?” ring in my ears. “There just has to be another reason they shut down the -may I remind you, classified- operation besides grossly improbable war crimes. We don’t even really know what they were doing there. Not the truth, that is. The whole truth.” And that’s partly what worried me. The absolute uncertainty. He might break in and find it’s not shut down at all, and the story’s to scare the locals into keeping away. I shook my head, lips pursed. He was gonna make a national security issue, I knew it. Either that, or become the next urban legend.

-----

It didn’t take too long to get to the riverside, bank laden with straw-like grass, river swelling with the rain it’s had over the month. I had to be careful around here, as the land became more slopes than anything else in the hills and honeycomb caves below piles of rubble. The dirt track I was following already had slips and slides dug into the otherwise smooth mud. Well, he wasn’t subtle about leaving tracks. This would make my life at least a little easier when it came to finding the supposed lab hatch.

The gale in the small valleys and high grounds seemed to create rushing tunnels, sometimes trying to push me back, others to guide me forward. I’m not usually one for nature, especially the dull tones of grey around here, but there was something mysterious and transient about this place, that took me away on its journey and yet spurred me on in my own. When the gusts blew against me, it the hair from out of my eyes, and when it blew with me, it pressed a firm guiding hand on my back. I ignored the warning in the tumultuous sky and heeded the whisper of the wind in my ear.

I hadn’t been this adventurous in a long time; clambering over damp rocks, climbing slides of boulders which seemed to teeter on a whim, using vines to guide myself across ledges rather than take the long way up through the hills. I finally got my hands dirty after slipping on a particularly mossy stretch of stone, grazed and gritted palms burning. But it felt good. It was exhilarating. Exhilarating to feel something for once. And honestly, I was beginning to wonder if I could feel anything at all.

My hard work, ending with soaked jeans ankles and a grubby jacket, paid off. I was stood at the peak of a rock, weather dangerous, distraught and starting to spit with anger, wind raging around me dragging debris, looking down at a circle of metal winking invitingly from below the overhanging slates. With all the noise of nature around me, a crowd chattering, my audience; (were they telling me not to do it?) it all drowned out for the beckoning of the tunnel beyond.

I clambered down from my high spot, leaves and twigs smacking me in the intense whorl of weather. It was pressing with all its might at my shoulders, begging me to turn back, go with it back into the plains and escape once again. But I couldn’t listen. My curiosity had me by both hands, leading me unconsciously on into the alcove.

It was stunning how, once in the shade of the overhanging slates and foliage, everything stopped. The pressure on my body suddenly no longer pressing, I almost fell over.  It was as if I’d stumbled into a bubble. Orientating myself, I finally turned to look at the thing which I’d been in search of all this time.

The metal fit into the rock snugly and effortlessly. If not for the fact it was wide open, I knew by the huge weight behind the thick door, this thing was air tight. I wondered if the mechanism that helped shift the weight still worked, or if Jaejoong had to conjure some kind of resourceful plan in order to shift it himself. I was surprised I hadn’t found him still outside, wired up to the front display, still working on the coded lock. But of course, he’d cracked it, despite being world war two and top of the range tech at the time.

Somehow, lifting a leg to climb in through the hatch felt very deliberate and slow, as if a weight was slipped into my shoe. There was a dark shadow cast across the inner corridor, dust carpeting the floor aside from a singular track of cautious prints. The air was thick and I wondered how many spores must have been flying around, because the musk was a special kind of ancient, an indescribably bad smell that made me want to choke. My eyes watered the further I got in.

Lifting up my shirt to cover my nose and mouth, I found breathing a little easier. Curiosity got the better of me, and through the twinge I glanced around, absorbing my surroundings. I had soon reached the end of the passage, a singular inexplicably functioning light casting a dull flame at the door frame. The large glass bulb of the light was encased with barred metal and obscured by a thin layer of grime. Jaejoong must have triggered it. But why only that one?

I took my time. Although I knew I wasn’t alone- Jaejoong must be around here somewhere, right?- he was nowhere in sight, even after I poked my head around into a large room, having to pluck at my courage every step further I took. My heart’s pace hadn’t stopped increasing beat by beat since I stepped through the hatch.

The room had a teal hue in the darkness, my shadow dragging in on the amber glow behind me. There were two long tables down the main scape of the room. The light flickered behind me, messing with my limited vision. I took a few more paces in, following Jaejoong’s footsteps. Everything was grey under the dust. My heart jumped once more as my eyes adjusted, slowly revealing the room to me.

The shelves at the walls of the room had all been pulled down. I could see the shadow of where they used to be on the grimey, peeling paint. Shards dulled by time, crusted with crystalline stains where substances had slowly dried away, left a garden of thorns around the fallen frames.

"October thirty-first, twenty twelve.”  Jaejoong’s voice drifted through the smog that clouded the room, startling me. Every hair on my body prickled. He was recording his investigation for data collection. My body sighed with relief, but the stutter of my chest and unease in my heart prevented me from really rejoicing.

“Jaejoong? Where are you, man? I’m sorry I’m late…” I sounded muffled and feeble through the fabric of my makeshift mask.

“Investigation of the local legend surrounding the abandoned, partially destroyed laboratory dating back to the early nineteen twenties. Most information surrounding the nature of this research faculty is largely classified..." His lofty voice continued to describe everything he'd gathered on the place prior to coming here. Looking around while I was listening, I made sure to disturb as little as I could- avoiding smashed vials on the floor and following Jaejoong's footsteps in the thick layer of grey dust. He clearly didn’t hear me. It was okay. I’d make it to him.

"Log one. The lock was complex, but rudimentary compared to modern security. The entrance reveals a perfectly undisturbed dust level- I am the first to revisit this place. However, after all this time, not all particles in the air have settled. The air is polluted…” I couldn’t pin where his voice was coming from. It seemed to bounce around the room. A second light blinked bleak further ahead, revealing half constructed experiments with each flash.

I began to suspect Jaejoong of trying to spook me. As if this place wasn’t creepy enough. “C’mon Jae… Give me a clue here…” I tried to shout louder through my makeshift mask, but all I managed to do was inhale more of the disgusting air. I squinted as my irritated eyes began to really sting. I became aware once again of my hammering heart. It was working. I was scared.

"Log two. I can smell the chemical fumes in the air from the nineteen-forties, incarcerated here since it was last used. Even though it was so long ago, I should probably be using a gas mask..." Damn right, we both should.

The face of a clock gleamed in my peripheral vision as I took another timid step forwards. It read eleven six.

The blinking light suddenly sparked bright, and a vision flashed past my eyes that made me shriek with all my lungs. There were bodies everywhere. Some were bloodied, others battered, some simply slumped in their place, the occasional not human at all; all partially decayed, withered into themselves, and yet still a shadow of their former selves shaped in the darkness of their flesh and bone and held by the faded fabric of their clothes. The image was burned into my eyes, but blinking around the reality of the room was that no such thing was there. I trembled at the thought of walking further, but I had to find Jaejoong. I couldn’t stay here a moment longer alone.

“Log three. The first lab room was indeed struck by disaster, as legend suggests; however, the cause is as of yet unknown for the skeletons. Usual government policy was appropriate burial, whether the bodies were identifiable or not.” Skeletons… I don’t see any skeletons… And yet, sure enough, in my next few paces my heart sank as I felt and heard a sickening snap. My neck was stiff as a board as I slowly gathered my courage to look down to see I had broken a gaping skeleton’s shin.

I screamed for Jaejoong. Why wasn’t he rushing to my side? Why was he just logging away, as if I weren’t here at all?

I spotted another clock. Eleven-six.

The grey-teal around me seemed to eat away at the only light as I shakily urged my legs to carry my further, to try and find my only hope for sanity, my friend. A quiet yet sharp clicking sent a crawling shiver across my skin like a thousand insects. The distant sound of signal interference crackled as the only sound in the room, disjointed pieces of Chamberlain's announcement of war drifting through, harmonized with an offset geiger counter.

Jaejoong's voice returned with my next step in his, but something was wrong. It wasn't a log. "What was that?" I froze. He yelped. My heart crashed through the floor, chest swelling with worry. He screamed. The blood-curdling screach staggered me, almost sending me to the floor.

"This can't be! You aren't real! You didn't happen! You aren't here!" The rest dissolved into senseless raving.

Gathering any strength left in my wheezing body, I spurted to the end of the room, ignoring the shrieks and cackles of strange voices mixed with Jaejoong's cries, colliding with the door of the only exit. I thought escaping would release me from my hallucinations, however I never collided at all, as the door I saw closed in fact had always been open and I tumbled straight through and onto the concrete ground.

I was in a room with no windows, no light sources, yet it was not pitch black. By now- screw logic. All I knew was, as I stared down in horror, that this was where Jaejoong had ended up too, lying face down and sprawled out with his recorder lying broken beside him. 

"Jaejoong?" I croaked as reality hit me, my eyes welling as if trying to shield me from what I was seeing. Jaejoong... He wasn't moving. Urgent, I grasped his shoulders and shook, but nothing. "Jaejoong! Jaejoong!" This can't be happening. This was worse than any nightmare. "JAEJOONG!" His body was cold as the floor he lay on, eyes wide and glazed over, hair sleek with sweat. I rolled him onto his back, shaking him some more, tears streaming and streaming, dripping onto his porcelain cheeks. He was pale as a sheet, an awful expression ghosting his face, mouth slightly agape. I was breaking down. Soon I was shaking too hard to even lift his shoulders from the floor. I collapsed onto his chest in quivering sobs, not wanting to accept what he could be- but I had to know... So I... Leaned in close... And felt no breath against my ear, saw not even the shallowest rise of his chest. I scrunched my eyes closed as the greatest pain of my life clenched at my throat, strangling me. My fists clenched in his jacket, not knowing what to do with themselves. My world was burning down around me. He was dead. My best friend was dead.

"What are you most afraid of, Yunnie?" Sweet, soft tones met my ears. Breath caught in my throat, I slowly raised my gaze to see Jaejoong's absent eyes staring into mine. My body without command swayed away in numb terror, heart stopping as Jaejoong's stiff body sat up to fix into my very core...

What are you most afraid of Yunnie?

The waking dead.