Seattle Tunnels

Seattle launches Urban Legend Day, a citywide challenge offering $100,000 to anyone who can prove that one of the region's legendary creatures or unexplained stories is real. Downtown becomes a carnival of believers, skeptics, news crews and college students. Bigfoot dominates the interviews, but one lesser-known legend keeps surfacing: stories of enormous batlike creatures living somewhere beneath Seattle.

A group of University of Washington students decides that finding the truth could make them famous — and possibly $100,000 richer. Despite warnings from professors and police to stay out of Seattle's abandoned underground passages, eight students organized into four two-person teams secretly enter the tunnels after dark, while four friends remain in a surveillance van above ground monitoring their cameras, headsets and radios.

At first, the expedition is almost fun. The students laugh, tease one another and explore forgotten corridors with consumer cameras and headlamps. Then they begin finding things that shouldn't be there: enormous scratches across concrete walls, strange vibrations beneath their feet, burned and mutilated remains, and a huge curved metallic surface buried deep beneath the city.

Something is moving in the darkness.

One team discovers a gigantic folded shape hanging overhead. Another hears wings beating through passages too narrow for anything large enough to make the sound. Cameras begin malfunctioning. Radio transmissions overlap with voices that shouldn't be there. When one student disappears, his frightened partner hears his voice over the radio saying: “I'm okay.” But the surveillance team can see enough of the remaining camera feed to know that it isn't him talking.

The expedition collapses into chaos.

The four teams become separated as enormous batlike organisms begin hunting them through the tunnels. Students crawl through air shafts barely wide enough for their bodies, hide in abandoned chambers and run through pitch-black corridors while the surveillance van desperately tries to guide them toward an exit. Video feeds disappear one by one. Communications break apart into screams, static and voices apparently being imitated by something underground.

But the creatures aren't the real secret.

Deep below Seattle, the surviving students discover that the strange curved metal isn't part of the tunnel system at all. It belongs to an ancient buried spacecraft, concealed beneath the city for an unknown length of time. The terrifying batlike organisms aren't simply monsters living underground. They're protecting it.

Something inside the buried craft is awakening.

The students' cameras capture fragments of something far more disturbing than the creatures: impossible lights beneath the earth, enormous structures disappearing into darkness, strange footprints and evidence that other people reached this place before them — and never returned.

Above ground, the surveillance team realizes they are no longer documenting an urban legend. They may be recording proof of something humanity was never supposed to discover.

As the remaining students desperately search for a way back to the surface, communications suddenly return. One missing student's voice comes clearly through the speakers: “We found the way out.” Everyone in the van celebrates.

Then another monitor flickers back to life. The camera is lying motionless underground. Beside it is the student whose voice they just heard. He's dead.

The radio crackles again. The same voice calmly says: “Come down.”

Behind the surveillance van, somewhere in the darkness of Seattle — wings begin to flap.