[LOG BEGINS]

  [REDACTED FILE CONTINUED // CLASSIFIED ACCESS OVERRIDE GRANTED]

  MC remembered thinking; if I were in that circle, I’d survive.

  Easy.

  I’d lock myself behind steel doors—real ones. Reinforced. The kind you can’t just break through, no matter how many undead arms are clawing at the frame. Zombies can open doors, sure, but they can’t outthink metal and engineering.

  If I had the money like that rich kid from the trailer, I’d have turned my mansion into a fortress. Cameras. Sensors. AI-controlled defenses. Hell, a bunker.

  The trick was staying alive long enough. That’s it. You don’t win.

  You just… survive.

  At least, that’s what they told themself.

  See, I was working on set. Just a normal staff member, equipment, cables, the usual stuff that keeps a film running but doesn’t earn you a name on the posters.

  We were filming the final scenes. Tensions were high, but the energy was electric. Everyone wanted to finish strong. The author, Keonie Bowein, was there too, watching from the shadows like she was studying something.

  It was the cabin scene, the one with the monster girl and Brad Pitt.

  We all knew it was the climax.

  The big twist.

  She’d been bitten, turned half-creature, half-human. Most wanted her dead. But two women arrived with her and swore she was harmless. Said she killed the zombie that bit her before it could finish the job. Said she still had her mind, and a plan.

  A plan to draw out the entity and end the loop once and for all.

  Brad’s character was skeptical, naturally. So was everyone else. Then someone asked how they’d even found this place. One of the women explained: they’d heard a message, broadcast through the static on an old radio. Coordinates. A call to survivors.

  That’s when the receptionist from earlier stepped forward. Quietly. Like she’d been waiting. She admitted she was the one who sent the message. She hadn’t known if it would work, but it did. It brought them all together.

  It was a beautiful, eerie scene.

  The infected girl, still conscious, said she didn’t have much time left. They were using medication to slow the transformation; AIDS medication, weirdly enough but it was temporary. Her only wish was to destroy the entity before it finished her.

  After that, she wanted to die on a beach. Said she was supposed to get married there once, before her fiancé walked out.

  Filming wrapped early that day.

  The director called it before sunset, citing a bad feeling he couldn’t shake. No one argued. There was something heavy in the air, something that had settled over the set like fog.

  Even the lead actress looked unwell; pale, distracted, barely holding herself together. She was the first to leave after the director dismissed us, heading straight to her room without a word.

  We weren’t staying in hotels. For reasons no one questioned, we were living on set until production was finished. Temporary rooms, trailers, repurposed buildings. Mine was across from the main set, only five or six feet away. Close enough to hear generators humming through the walls.

  I went to sleep almost immediately.

  Chaos started the following morning.

  They found the lead actress dead in her room.

  At first, it was labeled an overdose. That explanation didn’t sit right with anyone. She wasn’t taking medication. She didn’t use drugs. There were no signs of anything out of place, no struggle, no mess. Just her, lifeless, as if someone had flipped a switch.

  After that, things changed.

  A new receptionist appeared shortly afterward. No one remembered hiring her.

  She was… off.

  She would stare out into empty space, eyes fixed on nothing, like she was watching something no one else could see. When she wasn’t actively interacting with someone, she would freeze completely, standing motionless, expression blank, until someone spoke to her or physically guided her away.

  It was unsettling.

  And it didn’t feel like coincidence.

  After that incident, the deaths didn’t stop.

  People from the cast began turning up dead, one after another. What made it worse was the pattern. Sometimes, not always, but often enough to be impossible to ignore, they died in the same order as their characters had in the movie.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Word spread quickly through the set.

  Whispers turned into panic.

  That was when Brad Pitt dropped out.

  No announcement. No statement. One day he was there, the next he was gone. With him leaving, and half the cast either dead or too terrified to continue, production collapsed.

  Crew members started packing up without being told. Equipment sat untouched. The illusion that this was still a movie dissolved completely.

  The director officially canceled the film.

  He told the assistant director to stay behind with a few remaining crew members to clean up the set. Everyone else was dismissed, told to go home and wait for further instructions, if there ever were any.

  The director never made it home.

  He died in a freak accident while driving, before he could even leave the area.

  By then, police were already involved. Investigations were opened, not just for this set, but for others.

  Similar incidents were being reported elsewhere, different productions, different countries, same impossible pattern. Reporters swarmed the area. Headlines spread. Speculation exploded.

  This wasn’t an isolated event anymore.

  Whatever had started with the film was spreading.

  *****************************************

  Only six of us were left on the set.

  The assistant director.

  Three remaining crew members.

  The receptionist, who stayed because she said she wanted to help.

  And me.

  When the director left that day, we thought the worst had already passed. Then the call came. The news confirmed it before anyone could speak it out loud.

  He was dead.

  Everything collapsed after that.

  The assistant director sank into a chair like his bones had vanished. One of the crew members started pacing, hands shaking, muttering that this wasn’t real. Another broke down completely, crying openly. The receptionist stood still for a long moment before joining us, her face pale, eyes unfocused.

  They started talking all at once.

  They told me that after the movie trailer aired, strange things began happening to them. They started seeing a face, everywhere. On set. On billboards. Reflected in glass. Printed where it shouldn’t have been.

  Sometimes it appeared in the campers of the actors and actresses. Sometimes it stared at them from places that didn’t make sense.

  And every time it appeared, it asked the same question.

  Would you give up your life…

  or take someone else’s?

  It had to be a human life.

  Every one of them made the same choice.

  They chose themselves.

  Taking a life, they said, wasn’t something they could do. Even when faced with death, even when terrified, they couldn’t bring themselves to answer yes.

  Then the face asked them another question.

  How would you like to die?

  None of them answered that either.

  They didn’t know what to say. They were too afraid to choose. Too afraid that answering at all would seal something irreversible.

  They thought staying silent might save them.

  It didn’t.

  Then it explained the rules.

  It said we would play a game.

  All of us would be placed into a circle. One by one. Turn by turn. Whoever took a human life would win. If someone died while inside the circle, another player would immediately take their place.

  The circle could never be empty.

  At the time, none of this had happened to MC as yet.

  MC hadn’t seen anything.

  They hadn’t heard any voices.

  They weren’t asked any questions.

  Then they thought, just briefly, that maybe, just maybe they were spared.

  But then after the director had died and with his death, the circle was incomplete…..

  A space opened.

  Someone needed to fill it.

  That was when I saw them.

  I was standing near the edge of the set, looking toward one of the actress’s camper buses that hadn’t been cleared yet. The door was shut. The lights inside were off. And yet, two figures stood there, perfectly still, watching me.

  The first was a man with black hair. His eyes were wide, too wide, and unblinking. His face held an expression that wasn’t anger or fear, but something heavier. Something knowing.

  Beside him stood another figure.

  Its head was too small for its body. Its eyes were enormous, glossy, and wrong. And it was smiling. A stretched, fixed smile that never moved, never faltered.

  They stared at me.

  Not for a moment.

  For a full minute.

  I couldn’t move.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  My body locked in place as if something had pressed pause on me.

  Then without warning they were gone.

  The air shifted. The pressure lifted. My knees nearly buckled as control rushed back into my limbs.

  I told the others what I saw.

  No one looked surprised.

  They told me those were them.

  The ones they had been seeing.

  The ones who asked the questions.

  The ones who ran the game.

  And just like that, I understood.

  I was no longer watching from the outside.

  I had taken the director’s place.

  I was part of the circle now.

  Over the next few days, it didn’t stop.

  Whenever I looked outside, I would see only one of them.

  The Entity with the bob hairstyle.

  It never moved.

  Never blinked.

  It would just stand there, across the lot, beside a trailer, at the edge of the set, watching.

  Always watching.

  The other one was gone, but its absence felt temporary, like a held breath.

  On the third day, I fell asleep.

  And it was on set.

  Everything looked the same. Too clean. Too quiet. The lights hummed faintly above me. I could feel that something was wrong before I saw it.

  This time, both of them were there.

  They stood together, just as before, staring. Then, without warning, they vanished.

  That was when two cats appeared.

  They came out of nowhere, padding softly across the concrete. I remember smiling. I remember feeling relieved. I crouched down, cooing at them without thinking, and picked them up.

  They were warm.

  Real.

  Comforting.

  I carried them back to my room and set them gently on the bed.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” I said out loud.

  “Where did you come from?”

  The moment the words left my mouth, they changed.

  Their bodies twisted and stretched, fur pulling back like wet fabric. Their eyes widened, grew too large. Their shapes folded inward and outward until they were no longer cats at all.

  They were them.

  They looked at me and asked the question.

  “Would I take someone else’s life?”

  “Or give up my own?”

  They asked simultaneously in a gargley voice.

  I told them the truth.

  I told them I was human, and that taking a life wasn’t easy.

  They asked me another question.

  How would I like to die?

  I asked if I could choose any way I wanted.

  They didn’t answer.

  So I spoke again.

  “I just want to sleep,” I said.

  “And never wake up.”

  A broad creepy smile crawled on their faces.

  And then they were gone.

  I woke up.

  After I told the others about the dream, we left the set.

  We didn’t finish cleaning. No one wanted to stay another minute longer than necessary.

  Over the next few days, people started dying.

  Some on their way home.

  Some after they got there.

  Accidents. Sudden illnesses. Things that didn’t make sense.

  One by one.

  Until it was my turn.

  I fell asleep.

  And I didn’t wake up.

  The cycle continued.

  [LOG ENDS]