It was the night of April 26th, 1986. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant loomed against the darkness like a steel beast, waiting to be fed.
Inside the control room of Reactor Four, four weary souls clung to routine while the world outside seemed to warp.
Dr Grigor Venchev hunched over his small desktop machine, his thick glasses fogged as he tapped furiously. The man was no genius, but he had a taste for tea and a cat named Tatya he longed to get back to. Yet here, nothing behaved as it should. Every time they tried to bring the reactor online, there was a surge - and then emptiness. Fuel vanished as if swallowed by the dark.
Nina Pretovich, the frail cleaner with tubercular lungs, clutched her pinny like armour. She had little place among scientists and party men, but her heart was protective, and her hands were clumsy.
Oleg Makarov, the Party official, white-haired and draped in his uniform, paced the control room. He hated the science that surrounded him, but he was bound to the cause. He demanded answers, demanded order.
And Yuri Chenkov, tall engineer with a heavy moustache and heavier secrets, fiddled with his tools. He was here as a watchful hand of the KGB, but his thermos - filled with something far stronger than tea - was his real lifeline.
Then came the call.
"…HELP!…Containment…"
The intercom choked on static, but the distress was unmistakable.
The lights failed. A brown-out plunged them into shadows until backup power hissed to life. The Geiger counter crackled in the corner, the sound of invisible death. Through the fireproof glass they saw the outbuilding’s guards - mangled, ripped apart, corpses sprawled in pools of blood. Then the floodlights outside went dark, leaving only memory of the horror they’d glimpsed.
Something was loose.
Something that should not be.
The group split. Oleg, dragging Nina with him, marched into the cold corridors to find Dr Venchev’s supervisor, Dr Vasilichev Daschgaloshskiv Aldosvermillichev. The plant should have been bustling with workers - instead it was empty. A chill seeped into their bones. Above them, a squelch echoed through the vents.
At a frozen door, Oleg hurled himself at the ice until his foot gave out. They forced their way into the switchboard room, where panicked voicemails from Dr Vasilichev spilled from the machine: "Something is wrong in Kyiv."
When they moved on, the walls themselves seemed to mock them. The word BLIND was scrawled in handwriting they recognised as their own - but no recollection of writing. In the hall, a severed arm lay waiting. Oleg picked it up. Perhaps its owner could still be saved.
Back in the control room, Grigor and Yuri faced their own horrors. In the corridors, a hiss seeped from the pipes. The Geiger counter ticked louder. Grigor tore at his skin in the bathroom, scrubbing invisible filth from his hands. Yuri offered him the thermos, and the fumes lit Grigor’s veins with false clarity. He raved that Nina had tampered with the reactor, while Yuri quietly slipped a hidden film roll from his screwdriver - evidence for Moscow.
The gas leak hissed louder. Yuri patched it, and they pressed deeper into the dead corridors.
In the medical ward, Oleg glimpsed a pale face vanish into shadow. Nina searched desperately for supplies. In the morgue, they found corpses with gaping wounds, as if torn open by claws.
"Bears", Oleg whispered. "Were-bears", Nina countered, recounting childhood tales.
But the truth was far, far worse.
An attack from the dark revealed Dr Sylvette Roschenko, the senior medical officer, wielding a lead pipe. They almost fought her - until she hissed that she thought they were the monsters. Still, the bodies vanished from the gurneys while their backs were turned.
Something walked the halls with them.
Meanwhile, Grigor donned a radiation suit and stepped into the core of Reactor Four. Where there should have been fuel, there was nothing.
No radiation. Only silence.
And turquoise goo, pulsing against the rods.
He scraped it free, and flung it into Yuri’s toolbox. But the goo writhed, alive.
Reunited, the five of them descended into chaos. Accusations, alarms, fire in the pipes, and Dr. Roschenko’s sudden disappearance. Still, they pushed on.
Returning to the Control Room provided no answers.
Grigor pleaded to leave, there was no hope here. Oleg, fueled by the mother country, demanded they fix the issue at hand to save thousands of lives. A compromise is had; outbuilding, then home.
Yuri tried the intercom one last time, surprisingly to be met by a voice. Dmitry, an engineer from the other reactor. His excuse was pathetic - that he had hidden away on the toilet, convinced the empty plant was some prank. Yuri pleaded for them to meet up, for safety.
The alarms wailed as the survivors staggered through the plant’s shadowed halls, their nerves shredded. Nina’s lamp caught a pocket of leaking gas and flared - fire washed across her face, searing her brow, collapsing pipes, and sealing Reactor Three off from Reactor Four with a cascade of falling steel.
In the staff locker room, Nina discovered a small polaroid taped to her locker: her daughter, grinning in front of her favourite animal at the zoo - a giraffe. The picture blurred as tears filled her eyes. She clutched it to her chest, her body wracked with coughing, but for one still moment the group stood in solidarity with her, bound by something more than fear.
They had no choice but to continue.
Through the courtyard they went, stumbling past mangled soldiers and the eerie silence of the dead plant. Ahead, the outbuilding glowed faintly blue, as if lit from within by some unnatural star.
As they drew closer, a sudden flash seared their eyes. For a heartbeat they saw it - a towering silhouette, eight feet tall, arms dragging long as whips, and a head swollen and round like the moon itself. Then it was gone, and only the glow remained.
Oleg snatched a pistol from a dead guard and pressed on.
Inside, Yuri’s toolbox began to whine and twitch in his hands. The turquoise goo slithered free, slick tendrils racing up his arm. Where it touched him, his skin whitened, leached of life. Grigor fumbled for his sanitizer, splashing alcohol over Yuri’s flesh. The goo hissed, flinging itself free - only to reform, writhing.
Oleg emptied his pistol into it, but bullets punched through harmlessly. Each droplet that sprayed against the wall wriggled on its own, searching for new life to infest.
Then she came.
Dr Sylvette Roschenko, beautiful beyond reason, every movement pulling the breath from their lungs. Her eyes smouldered; her voice dripped honey. The group followed without question, as if shackled by her allure, down stair after stair, into the bowels of the outbuilding.
At the bottom lay a chamber of nightmares. Machines pulsed with foreign light. Cages rattled in the dark, their contents shifting, moaning. On the central table, a man with only one arm was clamped in place, eyes wide with silent agony.
Roschenko smiled. "One of you must give him an arm. A woman’s arm."
The demand tore them apart. Grigor muttered calculations, Yuri spat denials, Oleg insisted it must be Nina. The cleaner stood silent until the weight of their cowardice broke her patience. Her hand lashed out, striking each man across the face in a single sweep.
The illusion shattered.
Roschenko’s beauty peeled away, skin paling, lips curling to reveal the predator beneath. Her body moved with terrifying precision, muscles honed like steel wires. Yuri charged with a wrench, but she caught it mid-swing and flung both him and the tool aside with a single effortless motion.
Then the lights surged.
The cages filled with light, and inside they saw them: horrors clawing at the bars. Shapes stolen from their own reflections. One bore the exact features of Dr Grigor Venchev, its glasses askew as it slammed itself against the cage, screaming for release.
Grigor bolted for the door. It was frozen shut with a layer of ooze, hard as ice. His panic clawed at him as Roschenko advanced, unstoppable. Nina swung her pipe, her coughing fit weakening the blow. She collapsed, wheezing. Oleg raised his gun, but the chamber was empty - all his bullets wasted on the slime above. Desperate, he hurled the pistol at her.
Grigor tore at the door until the lock gave way, and they spilled out of the chamber into the stairwell. Behind them Roschenko’s voice slithered after them:
"The children will not be pleased."
And, faintly, Nina swore she heard her daughter’s voice crying from one of the cages.
The outbuilding betrayed them again. Upstairs, Dmitry - the engineer they had thought an ally - barred their path. His voice shook: "They made me do it." - a coward till the end.
Grigor’s fury boiled over. He kicked through the door, splintering the lock in one strike. But obsession overtook him, and he kept kicking, over and over.
Yuri turned back, desperate. His hidden transceiver, proof for Moscow, had fallen down the stairs. He plunged back into the dark to retrieve it, knowing it might be his only victory. The message sent, a fleeting hope for the Motherland bloomed in his chest.
Then the stairwell shook. A mass of goo filled the doorway, stretching, towering, blocking escape. Yuri brewed a desperate weapon - sanitizer and solvent, mixed to a frothing "molisolvent" - and flung it. But his feet slid out beneath him, and the concoction splattered harmlessly across the floor. He cracked his head against the stone and fell still.
Oleg dragged him, limp, into a maintenance tunnel.
The tunnels spat them out into the plant’s car park, but the lot was empty. Not a single car remained. Overhead, the moon glared bright and lonely - not a star shone in the black sky.
They stumbled into a remote building at the forest’s edge. Desperate, Oleg doused Yuri in fuel and struck him awake with the stench. Together they stole a car, wheels squealing into the night.
Behind them, Reactor Four erupted. A column of fire licked the heavens. For an instant the amusement park ahead glowed as if it were daylight, rides silhouetted against the inferno.
Then darkness again.
The car swerved as a tyre burst, metal shrieking as it slammed into a lamppost. Injured and bleeding, they spilled into the street - just as a shadow tore through the windshield.
It followed them into the park.
Oleg drove them forward on foot, the haunted Ferris wheel looming like a crown of rust. Behind them came the figure - immense, purple-scaled skin stretched over an obscene frame, bulbous head glistening in the moonlight, claws long and curved.
Yuri fired blindly, bullets sparking against the night. The creature’s claw sliced him open from crown to crotch in a single sweeping stroke. He fell in two.
Grigor fled into the woods. Ahead of him stood… himself. Another Grigor, waiting. He ran deeper, but the clone appeared again, and again, as though the trees birthed them.
He could run no more - "When the devil comes for me, I’ll go down fighting."
He swung at one, teeth bared. The clone’s face peeled away, revealing Tatya, his beloved cat, her jaws monstrous. She leapt, biting through his spine, and Grigor crumpled lifeless to the dirt.
Nina stumbled through the forest, coughing blood. Roschenko walked beside her now, calm as if on a Sunday stroll. "I only needed a scapegoat," the doctor whispered.
Nina clawed at her eyes, but Roschenko caught her hands and hurled her to the ground. The last thing Nina saw was Roschenko’s boot crushing down, silence following the crack of her skull.
Oleg wandered deeper, lost, alone. The woods swallowed him whole.
And then - the snarl. A bear’s roar, impossibly close.
The dark consumed him.