Chapter 8: The Rules of the Brood

Chapter 8: The Rules of the Brood

The hours after sunrise were a slow-motion ordeal. Alex moved through his apartment like a trespasser, the simple act of pouring a bowl of cereal feeling like a profound violation. He was a ghost animating a corpse, and the ghost was exhausted. He kept replaying the conversation with Mrs. Gable, the ease with which he’d accessed the dead man’s memories, the flawless performance. The success was more terrifying than any failure would have been.

He was staring out the window, watching the mundane ballet of morning traffic, when a sharp knock came at his door. Not a tentative rap, but two solid, confident thuds. He knew, with a certainty that settled like a stone in his gut, who it was.

He opened the door to find Wallace and Dan standing in the hallway. They looked unnervingly normal, like they were just stopping by before heading to work. Wallace was in a clean, pressed shirt, his expression calm and analytical. Dan was holding a greasy cardboard box that smelled of pepperoni and cheap cheese.

"Figured you might not have eaten," Dan said, offering the pizza box like a peace treaty. The gesture was so bizarrely reminiscent of their poker night, of the life before the unravelling, that Alex felt a fresh wave of vertigo.

He stepped back wordlessly, letting them in. They entered his apartment not as guests, but as if they had a right to be there. Wallace’s eyes scanned the room, taking in the dusty bookshelf, the half-eaten bowl of cereal, the general air of quiet despair. He seemed to approve of the seamless continuity.

"You look terrible," Dan observed, setting the pizza on the coffee table. "But you're in one piece. That's good."

"How was your morning?" Wallace asked. The question wasn’t small talk; it was an assessment.

Alex’s throat was dry. "I saw Mrs. Gable."

Wallace raised an eyebrow. "And?"

"We talked about her dog. And my… my mother's hip." The words tasted like poison.

A flicker of something—relief, perhaps—crossed Wallace's face. "And she didn't suspect a thing." It wasn’t a question. "Good. That's the most important part. The performance must be flawless."

Alex finally found his voice, a raw, ragged thing. "Why are you here?"

"Debriefing," Wallace said, taking a seat on the couch as if he owned it. "What happened last night was… an emergency intervention. Now comes the lesson. You need to understand the rules if you're going to survive this."

"Rules?" Alex laughed, a short, bitter bark of a sound. "You have rules? Does one of them cover corpse disposal? Because you seem to be a little rusty on that one."

The jab was meant to hurt, but Wallace was unfazed. "The body under the sink was a mistake from a long time ago. A… messy transfer from when I was new. Inexperienced. It serves as a reminder that mistakes have consequences. Tedious ones."

He leaned forward, his calm demeanor becoming a cloak for an absolute, chilling authority. "That brings us to the first and only unbreakable rule: Secrecy. Humans can never know what we are. Not ever. They would not understand the dream of a man escaping the void. They would see monsters. And they hunt monsters."

Dan, chewing on a slice of pizza, added, "They'd cut us up, stick us in jars. No thanks. This life is way too good to end up as some scientist's pet project."

"The performance you gave for Mrs. Gable," Wallace continued, his gaze intense, "that is not a lie, Alex. It is our shield. It is our camouflage. Our greatest strength is that we are perfect mimics. We inherit the memories, the mannerisms, the emotions. We can love the families we inherit, we can excel at the jobs we are given. The danger, the thing that happened to you, is when the mimicry is so perfect you forget you are the one behind the mask. You 'blanked.' You got lost in the role."

Alex sank into a chair, his head in his hands. He was a faulty copy. A defective unit. "So what now? I just… live this lie? Pretend to be him until the day this body gives out?"

"You don't pretend," Wallace corrected him sternly. "You become. You live. You enjoy the sensations you were starved of for eons. You drink the coffee, you listen to the music, you feel the sun on your skin. You honor the gift you've been given. But you never, ever forget what you paid for it."

He let the words hang in the air, a stark reminder of the empty vessel in the sunflower container. Then his expression shifted, the immediate lesson ending, and a darker, more complex one beginning.

"But the truth is, the humans are the easy part," Wallace said, his voice dropping lower. "The real danger… is us."

Alex looked up, confused. "Us? You and Dan?"

A thin, cold smile touched Wallace's lips. "No. Not our brood. We three are a family unit. We protect our own. But we are not the only ones who escaped the dark."

The floor seemed to tilt beneath Alex’s feet. The profound, crushing loneliness he’d felt all morning was suddenly replaced by a new, more complicated dread.

"There are others," Dan said, his jokey demeanor gone, replaced by a grim seriousness. "Lots of them. All over. We call ourselves Hollows."

"Some form broods, like us," Wallace explained, taking over. "Small groups, for stability and protection. But many are solos. Drifters. And not all of them are as careful as we are. Not all of them see this life as a gift to be cherished."

He paused, letting the implication sink in. "Imagine being given the keys to a life, any life. A world of sensation at your fingertips. Some of us are content to simply live. But others… others get bored. They see humans as toys. They see these lives as joyrides. They take risks, they get sloppy, they break their vessels and just… take new ones. They leave behind chaos, and chaos draws attention."

Wallace’s eyes were like chips of ice. "A few years back, a solo in Denver got a taste for the original man's gambling addiction. He pushed it, got in deep with the wrong people. When they came to collect, he didn't run. He panicked and made another Hollow out of one of the enforcers. A violent, unstable man. The transfer was a mess. The new Hollow was… flawed. It went on a rampage. A local brood had to intervene. They had to perform… housekeeping. On a massive scale."

Housekeeping. The word sent a chill down Alex’s spine. It wasn't just for forgotten corpses. It was for their own kind. They policed themselves, erasing the mistakes with a terrifying ruthlessness. He was part of a secret, predatory ecosystem, hidden in the cracks of the human world, and there were rules enforced by unseen judges.

"We are telling you this because your blanking is over," Wallace said, his voice a final, sharp command. "Your senses are coming back online. Not the human ones. Ours. You need to learn to see the world as it really is. To spot the other actors. To feel the seams in their performances, just like you felt the one in your own."

He stood up, walking to the door. Dan followed, leaving the half-eaten pizza on the table like a strange offering.

Wallace turned in the doorway, his gaze pinning Alex to his chair. "You have to learn to recognize your own kind, Alex. Because the odds are, in a city this size, you've already met one. The odds are you see them every single day."