Estimated reading time — 36 minutes

Ding dong!

Erin Tucker (“Erry” to anyone besides her mother) looked up from her tablet to see which of the locals had come to bug her before she finally got off work for the weekend. She heard the man, and his distinct not being a local, from the other end of the store that had long ago been a gas station. And now it was hers. Well, it was only hers on weekends, but her family had owned the location for decades. Well, not owned per se, but they were the only stabilized store in a hundred-and-fifty mile radius. It was thanks to her and her tolerance for vagrants and passers-by that their station got the “Best Local Fuelling Station” award from higher ups that she’d never seen (and would never see) in her life.

“A bell by the door, that’s awesome!”

The man that walked up to her counter was beaming, and if his all-black clothing and very cheap (but modern) looking sunglasses didn’t give it away, his clean haircut and trimmed nails did. He seemed like a cut-and-paste Company drone, except she’d never heard of Company workers wearing dress shorts and a polo shirt rather than suits.

“You’re from the company?” Erry asked, not able to hide some skepticism from her voice or the look she gave the man.

“The company!” The man said, smiling and nodding. “Yeah that’s right, I’m from the company. You guys still call it that?”

“Yeah?” Erry said. What else was there to call it?

“Sorry for barging in and yelling, I’ve only read about using a bell-and-string system for doors back in the paper books my Grandma used to keep.”

“Oh that’s… neat.” Already this guy was striking her as more of a tourist and less of a man-in-black that her uncles would tell stories about around the fire. “What can I get for you?”

“Is there a place to stay in the next town over? I’m due in… Well, the place doesn’t have a name, just a set of coordinates, and I’d rather not break out the Foundation Nature Pack and sleep in the middle of the woods.”

He smiled like she should have gotten the joke.

“Sir, I don’t mean to be crass,” she said, “but are you fucking with me?”

The man’s smile fell, but he didn’t look angry or caught off guard.

“No, I’m sorry if I seemed like I was. I’ve just never been out to the country before, or even out of the city.”

“Okay…” Erry sighed and looked at the clock. Only ten more minutes left before she was free. “Sorry, what can I do for you?”

“That’s the thing,” the man said, “I actually just came in to look around. I’m serious, the company doesn’t let us do field work beyond the city limits very often. I mean any civilian with clearance can go inside and out the city as much as they god damn want, but it’s been a decade since I was away from my usual office, and that was for a work convention in Denver!”

“So this store is… Special? Unique?”

If a concrete box of a gas station in the middle of nowhere, with only two vehicle charging stations, a broken down stocking bot, and an outdated sort-and-stocker in the back, was unique to this man, then she would never again doubt what she’d heard about the big cities.

“I’m not gonna pretend it is or should be for everyone, but…” The man got a far off look in his eyes, Erry could tell even behind the sunglasses. “Yeah, we really don’t get out too often. Ever since the Foundation got a lock on things, why would we need to?”

“I guess… So… If you need the bathroom, here’s the key.” She put the key and the toilet plunger it was attached to on the counter.

“Might as well,” the man said, taking the plunger without batting an eye and heading for the back. “I’m gonna assume the bathrooms are back this way?”

“Yeah!” Erry called, “In the doors marked ‘Bathroom!’” She wasn’t as annoyed with him as she’d been with other strangers who needed hand holding to find the bathroom. In fact she’d taken a liking to him, lord knew why. Anyone with the company wasn’t going to be out beyond one of the major city’s Reality Grounders for long, but maybe she could get a story or two out of him.

The man came back up with a few bags of trail mix, bottles of water, and bundles of toilet paper stuffed in one arm and scrolling his phone with the other. It pleased her to see that, unlike most of her clientele, the man’s hands were clean and still a little moist after his bathroom visit.

“Where are you going?” Erry said, making to scan each of his items as slow as she could.

“I was meaning to ask you, actually, if you could help me find it. Does this area look familiar to you?”

He flipped over his phone where a satellite imaging app showed a green dot a few dozen miles North and well into the forest, a long ways away from Erry’s station.

The Hunting Grounds.

“Have you been there before?” The man asked, noticing Erry’s sudden interest.

“No, but I’ve always wanted to. There’s old cabins out that way. My grandpa kept tabs on it for as long as he lived.”

“What was your grandpa’s name?”

“Ern-”

Erry stopped, the name on the tip of her tongue and her eyes on the Foundation logo on the man’s spotless black polo. Ernest Tucker, more than anyone, had told her stories of both the Company-men and the house in the woods. Both had given her nightmares at one point.

“I’m not here to do anything but look,” he said. “I’m here to check out an old lead and make sure it’s not active. If it is, I’m out, it goes in the system, and we notify everyone not to go there. If it’s not, I get to enjoy a night off and hopefully in the nearest motel.”

“So you’re not going to slip me anything?” Erry asked, “Make me forget we ever talked? Not gonna evacuate anyone in town or seal us off to rot?”

The man shook his head. His expression softened and seemed a bit… Sad? “If there were something that big it would’ve been taken care of already. Even if it was a sudden thing, the Reality Grounder in the city would pick it up long before it would happen. There’s some light activity the satellites picked up fifty miles north of the site, but that’s another city’s jurisdiction.”

“My mom says that’s all made up, that they’re regular cell phone towers.”

Another head shake.

“You can look for yourself if you want. The equipment’s all there in the city, the only thing you can’t see for yourself are underground containment facilities.”

“Woah, really!?”

“Yes, you… You really haven’t ever been to the city, have you?”

Erry didn’t even hear the man’s question. This was it!

“That’s it, you have to take me with you north!!”

“No.” The man’s jovial nervousness was gone in an instant, the sternness in his voice a hammer on Erry’s ballooning interest and mood.

“Why not?” She asked. “Look, don’t tell anyone this, but I’ve been there before. It’s not dangerous.”

“I could talk to you all day about the reasons why you aren’t coming.” The man held his phone to the ancient cash register until the just-as-ancient reader beeped green. “Keep the change.”

No. No! Something interesting had finally walked through her fucking door, she couldn’t let him waltz out and leave her to yet another damn weekend of the usual. Just the thought of laying around her townhouse and staring at screens and wondering…

What was out in the woods? She’d heard stories, but…

“You won’t be able to get in without my help!”

The man froze halfway out the front door. The ding dong he’d been so excited to see on the way in sounded twice as he went out to his car, put his supplies in the back, and walked back into the store. In his hands was a metal clipboard with a pen and paper attached.

He took off his sunglasses, under which were blue eyes that stared into her soul, and tapped the clipboard.

“If what you say is true, then you can come only in the capacity to help me reach my destination. Once there you will do nothing but sit in my car and wait for me to take my measurements. If you’re coming with, that means we’re gonna be getting back here” he motioned around the gas station, “near three in the morning. I’ll have to sleep in my car and you in your office if you have one. Still want to come?”

“Yes.”

The hardboiled expression cracked. It hadn’t taken much, and Erry could guess it was because this guy didn’t do this sort of thing often.

“I’m not gonna bullshit you,” he said. He went a few steps down the counter, propped his elbows up, and buried his face in his hands. “If you’re not bullshitting me, at least. Is there a trick to getting into the area, and do I need your help to let me do it?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t seem to like that answer, but whether that was from him needing her help or her taking this too far, that was the real question.

“So, again, because I’m not bullshitting you anymore, at all, there is a scenario where I let you come with me to do my work.”

“Yes?” Erry said, smiling.

“If there is no other way to get there, and if it isn’t dangerous, you can come along and stay in the god damn car at all times. Shit probably won’t be hitting any fans, but if it does, you’re gonna have to drive my car back here and call the cavalry.

“Still want to come?”

“Yes!”

“Say something besides ‘yes’ for god’s sake!”

“Abso-Lutely! Just give me ten minutes for my replacement to come in. Don’t worry mister, even if the hunting grounds are a waste of time, our drive up definitely won’t be.”

“Fine… What’s your name?”

“Erry Tucker, what’s yours?”

“Putter.” He put his hand out across the counter. “Jack Putter.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said, appreciating that he didn’t slack his grip on her just because she was a country girl.

“Erry,” he said, that real sternness back in his face and voice. “Like I said, I’m not gonna bullshit you any more. I want you to swear that you won’t bullshit me from here on out. Can you really help me get to the site?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding, but her eyes shifting down to the counter gave her away before she said it herself. “I mean, we have the key here at the station, but you could’ve busted the lock open with a sneeze if you’d wanted to.”

“Thank you,” Putter said, giving her hand one final shake before letting go. “And that works perfectly fine. The Foundation has deep pockets but they wouldn’t hesitate to pin a ‘destroyed property’ case on my paycheck.”

The girl and her help proved to be invaluable only minutes after they hit the road.

Thanks to Erry, roads that the GPS flagged as “impassable” were passed quite easily. It wasn’t that she knew the area like the back of her hand, it was like she had tattooed the area into her brain. Even if the ride was much bumpier than Jack had envisioned, they were going to hit what she called the “hunting grounds” before sunset at the rate they were going.

The only price, at least the only one either were aware of yet, was a game of Twenty Questions.

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen from the company?” Erry asked after guiding them back onto paved road from a winding side-path. The sky was but they could hardly tell. The trees that made up the forest were almost as tall and winding as the buildings back in the city. One of Jack’s coworkers had told him the woods were a sort of anomaly, but when they had tried to check the database, like most things, they didn’t have the clearance. Hard to doubt what he was seeing, though, the car’s headlights were already putting in work to make sure the car didn’t fold into the nearest tree like a noodle around a fork tine.

Have to get a few pictures for Nancy, Jack thought. She’s always wanted to hike through a forest.

Every few seconds the trees would blend together, making the woods surrounding them feel more like a solid wall. It creeped Jack out, but he tried not to show it. He was in control, and nothing was happening.

Still… If anything did happen, he would whip the car around and drive back to the station.

“Agent Putter? Detective Erry to Agent Putter?”

Damn if the woods weren’t giving him a weird form of road hypnosis.

“What’s up?”

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen from the company!”

“The weirdest thing…” He turned his playlist down and tried to think of something.

“Why’d you turn that down, can’t think and listen at the same time?

“Actually, no you can’t, at least not as well as when things are quiet. Your attention splits up the more things you try to keep a bead on and the brain can only focus so much before things start to fade in and out.”

“Interesting,” Erry said, as if it was anything but, “now quick, and no making something up!”

“You’d be surprised how normal things are working in the city, even for the foundation. The craziest part of the job is trying to…”

The rest of the sentence was try to keep me and Nancy’s revivifying bounces at the “Reject’s Bin” on the down-low, but said instead:

“… Clocking in and clocking out.”

“Awh that’s no fun,” Erry said, seeming genuinely displeased. “Also take this next turn there on the left and head straight, we’ll be there in an hour.”

You want a story? Jack thought, and not without a bit of excitement. There was something he could tell, even if it wasn’t his own experience.

“My buddy at the Reject’s Bin, where I work, was at one of the black sites when it came under attack from one of the things in the underground cells. We call them ‘anomalies.’ Dude was typing at his desk when all-of-a-sudden his fingers are tapping against a different desk in a different cubicle. When he turns his chair around to check what the hell was going on, he’s staring across the aisle of cubicles at himself.”

“What?”

Jack nodded. “Everyone on the ground floor of the building had swapped heads. If the underground security hadn’t taken care of whatever was causing the problem, it could’ve kept on playing with their minds like putty. It took a week for the effects to wear off and for said buddy to wake back up in his proper body.’

“That’s crazy! You’re not leaving anything out are you?”

Damn, she was good.

“Yes,” he said, “but only things that will get me and my buddy fired if it gets back to the Foundation that we repeated it.”

Which wasn’t the entire truth. The entire truth was that half of said staff that felt the anomaly’s effects shut down and never returned. Only “shut down” was too nice a way to put it: They were on the ground with seizures violent enough to tear internal organs and break bones. The storyteller and the man he’d swapped minds with were two of only a dozen that made it through the episode unscathed.

“Your turn,” Jack said, rolling down his window a bit and lighting a cigarette. Regardless of how spooked his temporary partner was, he’d sure as shit spooked himself, and none of the car’s equipment designed to keep them safe was gonna change that. Nicotine might help, though.

“What?”

“Tell me about the- what’d you call it? The ‘Hunting Grounds?’”

“Oh, there’s not much. I’ve only ever seen it from a distance and heard about it from my grandpa’s stories.”

“So tell me a few of those, we still have an hour to kill for the trip.”

“I don’t know how to tell a story like you!”

Like you… It was flattering to hear her say that, even if the story hadn’t been his own.

“Start with the beginning. Then tell the next part. Just like that.”

“Fine,” she said, “a deal’s a deal.”

“Did we make a deal?”

“Don’t know, don’t care, anyway, my grandpa tells everyone in the family stories about these woods all the time. My mom and my uncles have all heard it countless times since they were kids. Grandpa never told it to me around a campfire like them, by the time I was born he couldn’t walk much anymore. But he made good with the small lantern around his kitchen table. A real gas lantern from back in the old days!”

Jack almost asked for more details on the grandpa, but decided against it between inhales of tobacco smoke. The girl was looping into the very thing she’d said she couldn’t do: Tell a story, and tell it well. There was no doubt in Jack’s mind that grandpa passed down his storytelling techniques as much as his stories.

“It had been a farmhouse for a loooong time until it was abandoned and used for hunting trips. When grandpa was a kid himself it was long abandoned, except for the fall and spring months where it became useful as a place to stay overnight during hunts.

“I guess caribou weren’t as rare as they are now, because there used to be so many of them that you could shoot almost as many as you wanted in the last week of November. So that’s what my family did.

“Every year all of the men and a few of the ladies covered themselves in camo gear and caribou piss-”

“What!?”

“Yep, caribou piss up the wazzoo. Deodorant, body wash, shampoo and conditioner, you name it. If they could put it on their bodies, it smelled like piss. Actually, not as bad as you’d expect human piss to smell, but still pretty gross. And they didn’t care at all, hell they weren’t even sure if it really worked. They did it anyway, for the entire week that they were out stealth camping in the woods waiting for a male caribou to come through, which was what they were doing when they saw… it.”

A bit melodramatic, Jack thought, but I’m interested.

“Grandpa and some of his cousins had split up around this area we’re driving through now, to go camp at the farmhouse. That’s not what they’d told the adults, because even then the area was a blanket off-limits zone for anyone in the area, including signs and fences with wire to keep it off. But my grandpa had the key, this same key right here in my pocket.

“He said they never got a good look at it. What they did get was an earful seconds after they let themselves past the gates.

“‘Sounded like some poor soul was screeching off in the wood,’ Grandpa said. ‘Me and my pals thought it was just that, some city boys that got past the fences and were taking a spot in one of our clearings to get ripped off of booze and spacers before a day of hunting.’”

“And your grandpa didn’t care?” asked Jack.

Erry shook her head.

“Not at all. I never heard it from the horse’s mouth but I guess my grandpa was a party animal back in the day. He and his cousins just shook their heads and spent the night in the farmhouse. It had been a long day of hiking and a party wasn’t on the menu until the next night.

“In the morning they tried finding the guys they’d heard but only found a bunch of bottles.”

“Drink and ditch?” Said Jack, shaking his head. There was less and less green out there every day, how could someone born out in the country want to make it worse?

“That’s the thing, my older cousins thought the same thing, until Grandpa saw unopened bottles or ones that were half full. That and there weren’t any obvious boot tracks in the mud, and a few paw prints from pack animals. It had been drizzling for a few days straight at that point, so the tracks were already fading away. They ignored it at the time and got to hunting.”

“They bag any big game?”

“No, and that was what really started to spook my grandpa. After a full weekend of tracking and waiting for something to creep into their sights, nothing showed up. Not even any rabbits or squirrels.”

“Birds?”

“No birds. Something in the forest had spooked everything into hiding. On the last day before the big hunting weekend was over my Grandpa and the cousins all marched into the thicker end of the forests north of the farmhouse, stealth be damned. They’d wanted to see something, or at least peg down what had everything so spooked.

“Around that time someone mentioned the missing party-goers, and everyone but my grandpa got spooked enough into heading back to the farmhouse after a day of seeing nothing but trees and mist-covered hills. My grandpa kept going though, once you light a fire under his ass nobody but him is gonna put it out.”

“That’s a funny way of putting it,” Jack said, doing his best to act upbeat even if the story had really started to creep him out. The trees around the car started to blend even further in the dusklight. The branches above them may as well have been a concrete tunnel for all he could see. It was too easy to imagine something out there looking back at them, curious (or maybe hungry) as it watched something come down a road that had been long abandoned.

“It’s true, that man can’t settle down. You’d think his walker was radioactive the way he refuses to use it, even on his hikes.”

“So did he see it? We gotta assume something peculiar, or a pack of them, had the woods haunted.”

“No. To this day he claims he only saw the fresh kill of what must have been a pretty badass predator, probably a wolf or maybe even a bear. It doesn’t explain what he saw, but it’s as close of an answer as we ever got.”

“What he saw?”

“Yeah, now that’s where things get creepy. The fresh kill was a caribou. A big motherfucker in his own right, big enough that if my grandpa hadn’t hightailed it out of there it would’ve made for an impressive mantlepiece. He never got the chance though, because as soon as he approached the carcass to examine it, he noticed two things:

“Everything in the forest had gone quiet around him. Even the drizzle-rain that was hitting the leaves was gone, he said ‘If I’d close my eyes I would’ve believed I was in outer space.’”

“The caribou didn’t have any wounds other than a broken jaw and just a few more bumps and scratches than you’d usually find on a wild game animal. And it was big, but flat at the same time. My grandpa said that it looked empty of everything but the bones. Like it had been skinned and cleaned for its pelt from the inside out.

“Grandpa ran back to the farmhouse. Whenever he tells the story, especially to locals, he spruces it up with some supernatural spice, but I think the core story is plenty scary. Nobody goes into the woods anymore, the trees are just about the only thing living anymore. Maybe some bugs and birds, but they’ve been migrating North. My mom says it’s from the city’s radiation, but I think it’s because it still snows every few years up in the Rockies. Animals like snow for some reason.

“But yep, that’s the story. From then on we all said that even beyond the woods being dangerous, they were haunted. The Company would take you away if you set foot in there.”

“Well, depending on what I see at the farmhouse, that last part might really happen.”

“Really!?” Erry looked equally scared and surprised at that, which Jack couldn’t blame her for. If rural folks knew one thing about the Foundation, it was that local life changed permanently when they got involved, and usually for the worse. Never mind amnestics or anomalous hazards, picking up an entire community and moving it somewhere root-and-stem isn’t an easy task.

“Yes,” he said, “it might, but don’t worry. If something as big or badass as the hunter as your Grandpa talked about was still here, the satellite scanners would have picked it up by now and the area would have been flagged. What’s there now, if it’s still there, will most likely be pinned as “non-anomylous fauna” brought about either by natural or anomalous radiation. It won’t be an anomaly in and of itself. Either way I don’t have to go farther than the farmhouse you talked about.”

“What if it is? A big deal, I mean.”

“It won’t be.”

“Hey, no bullshitting remember? What if it is?”

Jack was starting to regret making that promise, if only because when it came to the Foundation, there was no “worst case scenario.” There were only “worse case scenarios,” as everyone that even had basic clearance with the Foundation joked, “because it can always, always get worse in their line of work.

But he’d promised. No more bullshit.

“If it’s something more than just an animal, like a temporally affected object or space or even an animal with special abilities, then the Foundation will have it either under lock-and-key or heavy surveillance within twenty four hours. Anyone within twenty five miles will also be under close watch at best, or told to move somewhere else at worst.”

Erry blew air out of her mouth and relaxed against the passenger seat.

“Oh thank god,” she said.

“What do you mean!?”

She looked at him as if he’d asked her to clarify why two plus two came out to four.

“The gas station’s like, thirty miles away. And all the towns and whatnot are out west, not in this direction.”

“Ah,” he said, trying not to look too dejected at his own lapse in memory as he lit another cigarette. At least the farmhouse was only a few minutes away. He had a good feeling that whatever was here either wasn’t active anymore or had moved on somewhere or somehow.

A quick walk to the site and back, no fuss, no muss.

What Erry had called a gate, and it had been in her memory, was more like a cage for the farmhouse and hunting grounds beyond it. It wasn’t even a farmhouse at all, rather a two story log cabin that connected to some grazing pastures closer to an actual farm a dozen miles south. Despite the building not having legs it was being kept shut in by chain link fences reinforced with thick metal bars. The fences were pretty close to the farmhouse at first, but they spread out the farther away they got into the forest. By old grandpa’s accounts, the fence had reached farther than he’d been able to walk.

“Here,” said Erry, handing him the key. It was a thick plastic rectangle on a keychain. The gate’s card reader was built to outlast anything else in the forest and was solar powered on top of that. If it didn’t work, nothing would. “Do I need to-”

“You,” Jack said very pointedly as he turned and reached to the back seat of the car. “Are going to do absolutely nothing but watch my camera footage.”

“What camera?”

“Right here,” Jack said, pointing to a button around the chest area of his polo. “There’s some extra wiring and machinery in the shirt, so it’s not exactly as small as it looks, but still pretty neat.”

From the backseat he pulled a big, metallic briefcase that he put on his lap and opened. Erry undid her seatbelt and got closer, craning her neck to see-

“If you see anything in this briefcase, I’m going to have to kill you.”

Jack shot her a side look that said he was quite serious. At the same time he reached into his pocket and brought out…

His cigarettes.

Jack smiled and opened the briefcase for her to see. “I hope that doesn’t count as bullshitting.”

“It counts as fuckery,” Erry punched his shoulder but remained up and peering into the briefcase. Inside were cardboard boxes of various sizes, one large and taking up half the box, the rest smaller and packed neatly on the other side. They were all labeled with numbers and letters that Erry found familiar to the ID tags she got on most products at her store.

“Now, no bullshitting or fuckery here, I need you to promise me something.”

Jack’s face wasn’t betraying any hint of the descriptives, so Erry answered just as seriously.

“Hit me.”

“You do not, under any circumstances, leave this car. You do not roll down the windows, you do not stick your head out of the sunroof, and you do not drive it closer to the farmhouse. Is that understood?”

Erry nodded, her body tensing as Jack laid down the ground rules. She thought of grandpa teaching her how to shoot a gun for the first time when she’d turned ten. The .22 rifle had felt like a ten-ton killing machine that could wipe out the entire forest at that age, and Grandpa had made sure she treated it like it was.

The first key to safety is respect, he’d said. And if you don’t, or can’t, respect a firearm and the people around it, then you have no business being around one at all.

Jack was carrying some of that weight in his voice now. It wasn’t as deep or even commanding as Grandpa’s, but he was one hundred percent serious. If she didn’t follow the rules, she was immediately going home and he would have to come back out tomorrow.

I won’t fuck this up, she thought as she had with her grandpa. For some reason, above all else, it seemed a matter of pride, to prove that she could rise to the situation.

“I’m gonna need a hard ‘yes,’” Jack said.

“Yes.”

“Perfect. Right here-”

Jack pressed a button to the right of the car’s main gadget panel. Out popped a grey box with what looked like a little speaker connected by a thick wire.

“-is a radio. Push to talk, and we can’t talk at the same time. Copy?”

They stared at each other in dumb silence.

“Oh, yeah, “copy” means that you understand what was just said and hear it loud and clear, especially over the radio.”

“Oh. Copy.”

“And the only other major thing to know about is this.”

Jack pulled out the cardboard box that took up half of the briefcase’s real estate. Inside the box was a styrofoam cube that came out with a screech that bit at Erry’s ears. Inside that was…

Another box. This one black and with only a single button on one of its sides.

“This is a portable reality grounder. Make’s sure everything stays normal around the car. Even with anomalys that don’t make it past a brief note in a filing cabinet somewhere, you always gotta be careful of something fucking with space and time. Don’t ask me how it works, if the rumors are true, the Foundation barely knows themselves.”

Jack gave the cube a few turns around in his hand before slowly pressing the lone switch.

Nothing happened.

“Hope it’s working!” Jack said, tossing it switch-side-up onto the backseat. “And one last thing.”

He put his hand on the door and pushed it open. He hid it well, but Erry saw him flinch as the warm but humid air from outside reached in to touch them both. The smell of wet, decayed wood was overpowering.

“If anything remotely dangerous happens, you drive out of here. You know how to drive right?”

“Copy. I mean yes.”

“Okay, if anything happens to me, or if you think something is happening and can’t get a response from me over the radio, you drive as far away as you can and call the Foundation. Again, not gonna happen, but just in case. And honestly…”

He finished pulling himself out of the car and looked toward the simple, but quite unbreakable, electronic gate in the middle of the fence. Only a short walk away but still a little hidden by the fence, was the log cabin known as “the farmhouse.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said quietly. “I feel a lot better with someone watching my back. You good?”

“Yes,” Erry said, hoping he couldn’t hear her foot tapping nervously against the car’s floor.

“Okay,” he said, “Let’s get this over with.”

A clown suit might have been more practical than his dress shorts, polo, and loose suit jacket, but oh well, it was humid out here and he’d rather be comfortable if (or when) something went down.

When he waved the little rectangular key in front of the gate’s reader, there was a heavy thunk as the bolt holding the door closed crashed backwards into the lock.

Jack jumped, his bladder clenching. When he looked back to the car, no doubt sheepish and red from embarrassment, Erry was giving him a grin and a thumbs up from the passenger seat with the radio’s microphone in hand. Her grin said enough: That scared the shit out of me too.

Jack really was happy that he brought her along. That made him feel guilty; no matter what he’d said or what he was sure of, this could turn into a shitshow in the time it took him to snap his fingers. She might have acted buddy-buddy, and he might have encouraged it, but the young woman was his responsibility.

Clutching his briefcase, he pushed the heavy door into the farmhouse’s prison open. The hinges screeched. A few steps more, and he was beyond the threshold. It was becoming harder and harder to believe that everything was going to be A-Okay about this, but…

Well, but nothing. He had a job to do. And the odds were on his side, weren’t they?

Approaching the log cabin, which was big but seemed rather simple and compact, he might as well have been a thousand miles away from the car. Its headlights were cutting in through the fence well enough, but that only made the surrounding forest and cabin more starkly contrasted and difficult to parse.

And it was so quiet.

Even back at the gas station he could hear birds calling and tree branches shaking hands with anything they could touch while riding the breeze. A breeze might have sounded a little scary coming from a forest as dark as this one, but it would’ve been something.

A very light buzzing came from inside his jacket. He’d forgotten to unwind the earphone attached to his lapel, which along with the camera that would already be broadcasting back to the car, connected to the radio as well.

“Can you hear me?” Erry said into his ear as he slipped the earphone in. He pressed a button in the middle of the earphone’s wire to open the mic and spoke as if he was talking (whispering) to someone in front of him.

“I copy, can you hear me?”

“Copy. I mean yes, I can hear you.”

“And you can see the video on the dash?”

“Yeah, it’s even night vision. Pretty damn good night vision too.”

“Click that off, you’ll see it on the top right of the screen. I’m about to pull out my flashlight.”

“So?”

Jack pulled a flashlight from his packet and switched it on. There was a sharp gasp from the other end of the line.

“Fuck that’s bright, god damn!”

“Told you. Now don’t laugh but I’m going to do some narrating in case the camera and its footage gets damaged somehow.”

“Won’t laugh. It’ll just add to the creepy documentary feel I’m already getting.”

That makes two of us. Except it was a lot creepier imagining his end of the footage being streamed out as horror footage recovered after the fact.

Foundation agent gets trapped in a purgatory, only thing recovered was what you’re seeing now…

Jack wiped his sweating hands against his shorts and brought out what Erry would say looked like a compass. Which it was, in part, it was also three other things: A chronometer and a temporalmeter. The first and second were the Foundation’s best equipment, at least for those on Jack’s paygrade, to read any changes in space or time. It linked to the grounder in the car and was the most reliable piece of tech on his person.

With one eye on the beam of his flashlight and the other on his meters, he trailed slowly around the forest.

“Starting initial field inspection,” he whispered, feeling silly for doing so but unable to help himself. “Don’t have the names of any of the fauna around me, but the farmhouse is surrounded by tall trees with branches and leaves that come down from the top in increasingly large cone shapes. The trees are spaced about six-to-ten feet apart and- oop.”

Something cold had hit Jack’s left hand. Then another, small and cold, hit his right. A few more patterings on his hair confirmed it.

“It’s raining,” he said, out loud and indignant. “Fuck me and my luck, it’s raining. God damnit.

“Anyway, the cabin is two stories with a pretty big looking attic area sitting on top. The wood is grey and slim, like the trunks on the trees surrounding it. Getting one last look out into the woods, I can’t see anything that stands out. I don’t know if that’s alarming or not, but… Something about this seems weird already.”

It’s my first time seeing a wooden building, he thought. I wonder what it’s like inside.

“Each side of the cabin has four windows. Two for the first story and the second on each side. The front door is the only one, and there’s no patio or an overhang for someone to get out of the rain, but there is laminated paper on the front door for.”

“It’s like you’re the main character of a horror movie,” Erry said into his ear. She was still whispering, which creeped him out.

“I know,” Jack said while he read the sheets of laminated paper hung to the door by a screw. “How old would you say your grandpa is?”

“Seventy-eight, why?”

“This is a sign-in list for people staying at the cabin. The last entry was in the late twenties.”

“Really?!”

“Really,” Jack murmured. The cabin had been used quite often by a lot of people until…

“You’re grandpa wrote his name in here. His group was the last, and they were the only ones to be here in a decade. Something-”

Something screamed.

Faraway, deep into the forest, a high shriek echoed through the trees and rain. It sounded human. It got louder, closer.

Jack dropped the papers.

Did he dare go inside? Or run to the car?

The thing, or person, continued to shriek, the pitch climbing until it was like a siren powered by human screams right next to the cabin-

It stopped.

Jack grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door inward, tripping over himself and falling into a stuffy darkness that smelled of old wood and carpet.

If Jack hadn’t rolled forward into the cabin, his death would have been much slower and more excruciating. He was aware of it too, because whatever whistled above his back was travelling fast and hard enough to gut him. A sharp survival instinct Jack had never before been aware of told him to jump even farther into the cabin, no matter how dark it was, because whatever was outside was about to kill him.

He pushed off the ground and scrambled further into the cabin, fingers and heels digging into the carpet. Something crashed into the ground behind him, pain shooting up his leg. He was dragged across the ground, a chunk of his calf tearing away. He didn’t scream, things were moving too fast and he was too scared, but he did turn around on the ground, pulling himself with his arms and uninjured leg, trying to get his flashlight pointed at whatever was attacking him.

The car’s headlights were hitting him right in the eyes, but for a fraction of a second he could see the shadow of a huge claw reaching through the door. It smashed against the hard wood floor, almost breaking through it, trying to get the rest of him.

The thing was screaming in that not-quite-human cadence while its claw dug into the separated meat of his calf and scraped it out. It brought the meat back towards its body. Jack heard something huge moving outside of the cabin but could only see the harsh silhouette of the claw pulling his meat towards its body.

It disappeared.

There was another terrible screeching from the outside, this one metallic and shrill as the car’s headlights were crushed. Jack thought he’d gone blind until he saw sparks flying from his car. Four compact and lightless explosions sounded in sequence from the car, sparks out of the tirewells as the thing clawed at each one.

“Erry…” Jack whispered, then shouted. “Erry, can you hear me?!”

Whether or not she could, she screamed. It and the white noise of the rain were all Jack could comprehend until fiery pain spread through his leg, and then he was screaming too. If he hadn’t grabbed the Foundation briefcase (and he almost hadn’t, why would he need it, this was a simple check-in check-out assignment) he would have bled to death there in the cabin. But his flashlight was still on, pointed towards the floor but barely illuminating the hard metal shell of the briefcase.

Jack shifted towards the suitcase and flashlight just enough to slide his exposed calf muscle into wooden splinters on the floor. Almost as bad as the pain was the distinct feeling of each splinter of wood digging into his wound.

Jack clamped his teeth together, almost biting his tongue off, and grabbed for both the flashlight and the briefcase, pushing through the agony as he opened the briefcase and brought out three boxes. The first was a syringe gun with several rounds of painkillers already loaded into the gun like a revolver. It would’ve been a miracle except that each of the rounds (which were really plastic barrels full of god-knew-what) had “Warning: One per patient at risk of death” printed along the barrels.

“Jack? Jack? Are you there!?”

He didn’t answer. If he answered, he’d start screaming again, and if he screamed, there would be enough time to doubt what he was doing. Of which, he had no idea. The foundation had paid for a pretty nice first aid class when he’d first signed on but that was all a distant memory.

Best guess it was. If he got it wrong, oh well, it wouldn’t be his problem anymore.

But it would be hers. Remember that.

The gun went into the meat of his thigh, popping as the needle shot the liquid in one of the barrels deep into his skin, injecting the fluid.

Nothing in Jack’s life had ever felt so sweet than the numbness that spread through him. Whether it was something in the drugs or his own euphoria, he felt like everything could, would, be okay.

Until he pointed his flashlight to his leg, and then the panic set back in right as the evening’s water and granola bars he and Erry had snacked ejected from his mouth and onto the carpet next to him. His calf was a beaten, bruised, and bloody piece of meat held together with tendons and some muscle.

“Ah… Fuck…” He groaned, then went back to making his best guess with what he had.

“Jack!? Jack!!?” Erry whispered into his ear.

“I can hear you,” he said as he took a few more of the cardboard boxes out of the briefcase. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“I am.” In one of the boxes was an antiseptic spray, the other a roll of sterilized bandages. Hoping it wasn’t killing him to do it, he sprayed the antiseptic all over his leg. Even with the pain meds, he felt a burn as the spray foamed over his leg. That burn spread into a horrible ache throughout his body as he wrapped the gauze around the wound.

Last was the tourniquet.

“Jack. Please. Help.”

“I’m almost done,” he said. The tourniquet was automatically tied with an electric motor, thank god, but while he was fastening it around the same area he’d injected the painkillers, he was becoming more and more aware that at any second the thing that had injured him could come back to finish him off.

“Please Jack, come help.”

“I’m hurrying as fast as I can- hrgh!”

The tourniquet clinched his leg together, doing its job of cutting off blood flow to his leg but spreading more of that horrible ache through his body that no amount of painkiller or dope would help him through. While it tightened, painfully but surely, he pointed his flashlight towards the car. No doubt he wouldn’t get a good look with the rain and gate in the way, but he needed something to work with.

“Help! Please!”

Erry screamed from the car.

At the same time:

“Please Jack. Come help me,” she whispered into his ear.

He froze, not even noticing the pain of the increasing pressure on his thigh.

“Who is this?” Jack whispered. He felt along the earbud’s wire, missing it a few times in the dark. When he looked at it with his flashlight, it was clear why he couldn’t feel it: it was severed. Probably had been since he’d dove into the cabin.

“Jack.” Erry whispered into his ear. “Please. Help. HELP!”

He ripped the earphone out of his ear and crushed it against the carpet. Sucking wind into his lungs, he tried to focus.

All that existed was him, the beam of the flashlight pointed at the wreck of the car, and the pattering of the rain that was all too easy to focus on and get lost in while his brain was in overdrive. Turning his head slightly to see what he had left in the briefcase only made things worse.

There were three cardboard boxes left. One had a flare gun, the other an emergency transponder that sent out an S.O.S signal, and tubes of liquid amnestics that fit into the syringe gun he’d used for his pain meds. The transponder might have been good news if it wouldn’t take half a day for the Foundation to get to him. Like the grounder, it was a simple black box with a switch marked “Press Only For Emergency” which he pressed. But he and Erry could be dead by then if the thing-

Something outside exploded. A wall of pressure and rain droplets hit Jack’s face. He didn’t see the huge claw that had tried to grab him before, but he felt the pressure of it scraping at his back. A horrible stench of rotten meat made him gag, but he didn’t move until the claw was gone.

There was a thud from above him, probably the roof of the cabin. The thing was probably perched on the cabin and waiting for either him or Erry to make a move.

Jack hobbled to the nearest piece of solid wood that wouldn’t poke a hole in him. The closest he could see by the meager light he allowed himself was what looked like a windowsill. Crawling to it, he slammed his forehead against something solid and had to bite his lips to keep from cursing.

He crawled under the thing, hoping it was something solid enough to keep him just a bit safe, and looked out the window.

The car beyond the iron fence was right there, yet a thousand miles away, and Jack was certain that if he put an inch of his body out into the rain, he was dead. Even attempting to signal to Erry, either with his flashlight or wildly shouting, was far too dangerous.

Whatever was hunting them was smart.

Hunting…

Jack shivered, and almost continued to if he wasn’t certain he’d shake himself into convulsions and die of an aneurysm.

The rain whispered a flowing static outside, but other than that it was silent. No noises from the roof, nor from the car.

Jack wanted to sit in that corner until a Federation team bulldozed through the woods and rescued them. It would have been a lot easier to do, maybe he could even hope to pass out and get some of the wait out of the way.

Cupping his hands around the flashlight so that it didn’t shine out of the window and give him away, he pointed it around the room.

The first floor of the cabin was, by itself, a pretty cozy looking living room type space. Besides the giant hole that had been the front door was a modest kitchen. On the other side, where Jack was sitting and trying to ignore the pain in his leg, was a group of big soft chairs and a table no doubt meant for card and party games. The rear half of the cabin belonged to a few chairs and a couch parked around a sizable fireplace.

Now that was something you didn’t see in the city. Of the few social districts, even a faux gas-powered fireplace was kitsch. What was the point? Everybody knew boilers did the heating.

There was the slightest movement from the fireplace. Near the top where it funneled into a chimney, something was wriggling. It reflected off of the dimmed flashlight. It looked like a rope or thick cord. Jack risked loosening his covering of the flashlight to get a better look.

It kept being a thick black cord until a bigger shape descended from above, moving through it and coming out the end, unraveling like a fleshy sleeve.

A red eye. The iris of the eye widened, then folded back into the mass of the black tentacle when Jack pointed the beam into it, then shot back through the fireplace.

The rainfall stopped. Jack dove for the center of the cabin. He hadn’t made the conscious connection until his body hit the carpet and the corner of the cabin he was hiding against crumpled under the weight of the same claw that had cleaved a piece of his leg off. It didn’t rip the whole thing away, but rather burrowed a hole next to the window to better get an angle on its prey.

Even through the pain meds, Jack could feel more splinters going into his raw flesh. But he didn’t scream. He couldn’t.

The claw searched for him, prodding around the counter he’d hidden under. When it was clear the hunt wasn’t in the same corner the eye had spotted, the thing shrieked. It was a horrible scream that sounded like the guttural cry of any kind of animal, human included. Something about it burrowed into Jack’s head, spreading a horrible certainty that if he didn’t get out of the cabin that instant, the claw was going to shoot straight through the cabin and rip his head off.

He didn’t move, but he finally did scream, pounding his fist into the carpet and cursing everything he could. But he did not move. If he hadn’t been one hundred percent sure of the thing’s goal, he would have ran (hobbled, rather) like hell through the cold rain just for a shot at getting out of there. Away from this awful thing and its screaming.

It’s trying to get you out in the open.

Whatever this thing was, wherever it had come from, it was an apex predator in every sense.

But he wasn’t dead yet, god damnit.

He wasn’t dead yet!

Quietly, stifling a pained groan with every step, Jack hobbled to the stair on the opposite side of the room. Fortune wasn’t shining on him enough to find any old propane canisters in the kitchen’s cabinets, but he called it even when the thing didn’t hear him and stop the screaming to kill him itself.

By the time he was climbing the stairs he almost gave himself away to get the pain to stop. From his leg and his head both. The screaming hadn’t been too hard to overcome at first, but the way it drilled into his head didn’t let up one bit.

Go. Run. Get out.

Not so much words, rather core impulses that his entire being wanted to follow. Where he was going was pain and death in every sense of the words.

Yet what got him to the top of the stairs, and through the rest of his short life, was an urge he had never and would never be able to fully appreciate. It was a simple urge, yet one that is baked into every human.

To win. Even if he wasn’t the one to do it, he and Erry were going to take this thing down before the Foundation could hope to catalogue it. It’s not like it was guaranteed that he’d patched himself up for good, the chunk out of his leg could render him unconscious any second and dead soon after.

Fuck that. He was going to fight.

Poking his head and his flashlight between the stair bannisters, some of that luck he wished for came to him not as propane, but fuel almost as potent. Regardless, he held his single-use flare gun and hoped the flare would prove useful.

The second floor was a big empty room probably meant for any amount of people in a hunting party to sleep and lay their gear out. It wasn’t empty anymore, probably hadn’t been for a long time.

It was packed with bones, fur, and dust. Jack didn’t have enough time to even get a rough estimate, the thing screaming made sure of that, but there seemed to be decades worth of hunting leftovers. There was a massive pile of rotting meat in a corner, completely devoid of flies and maggots you’d see on any corpse out in the woods. The creature was in the middle of feeding when it and Jack noticed each other.

The closest Jack would have described it was a bird. The claws that had tried to kill him were talons connected to a bulbous body covered in a sleek black fur. Instead of arms or wings it had tentacles that hovered all about it. Some of the tentacles were digging through the pile of meat, some looked right at whatever had trespassed on its nest with bright red eyes. Whether the eyes were really glowing or were only shining from Jack’s flashlight, he would never know.

Without aiming, he fired the flare gun towards the thing. The shot went wild, but straight into a pile of bones and fur that erupted into bright green flames.

The thing’s shrieking (it was coming out of mouths at the end of some tentacles) changed pitch. It jumped away from the flames, the tentacles absorbing the various things at their ends and gathering on either side of the creature’s body.

To form its wings, Jack thought. But that’s impossible, a thing like that couldn’t fly!

And it didn’t, not in the way of any bird on Earth that he knew of. When the tentacles had all gathered and spread into wings, the thing jumping and screeching in fear and pain, two of the eyes sprouting from the top of its body. It flapped both wings just once. The wings glowed, radiated, a deep red color as they were brought down.

Then it was gone. It didn’t go quietly either; the roof of the cabin exploded skyward, whipping the flames that had already been spreading quickly into an inferno. In his brief glimpse of what could only have been the thing’s nest, he saw that the attic area of the cabin was exposed. The thing had ripped apart the second floor’s roof to make room for its food storage.

There were huge holes on either side of the attic as well, big enough for the thing to crawl through, no doubt.

Holy shit, Jack thought in a daze as he hobbled down the stairs. The heat was already at his back, warming his hands and feet. Whatever this is made the cabin its own birdhouse.

At the bottom of the stairs, his leg suddenly gave out. There was no resisting or pushing further, it simply gave way and wouldn’t work again. Crumpling to the floor, he chanced a look back up the stairs.

The second floor was on fire, and it was spreading down the stairs fast. So he kept going, crawling until the heat was singing his hands and neck. Then he hobbled again, but didn’t scream. His throat was raw from it and the cabin was quickly filling up with smoke.

It was a straight, if excruciating line to the front door, he could-

FWOOOSH!

A smoldering pile of bones blasted through the ceiling and landed close to his side and scorched him so badly that he could see, at least in his mind’s eye, the skin boiling through his polo sleeves.

Don’t stop… You stop, you’re dead, and it won’t be quick…

Jack made it to the hole that had been the front door and fell through it. At the same time a portion of the second floor fell through behind him. In the rubble he saw a study-enough looking piece of wood that wasn’t on fire and made a grab for it.

It wasn’t much, but it was something that let him hobble better, and he had a feeling deep down that things were coming to a head. Either the thing was going to kill him, or…

He couldn’t think of an “or” as he dragged his mangled leg across muddy grass water. More likely than not, he was gonna die.

The thought wasn’t as scary as it had been before. Probably because he was so exhausted and racked with pain that death really wasn’t all so bad an idea. Besides, he’d had a good run, and how many other guys in their late twenties would say the same in his day and age?

The rain stopped falling. The flames stopped burning. Or rather, they kept burning, but floated upwards along with the raindrops. Branches of trees reached for the stars. Even the light shining from the fire seemed to warp and turn upwards towards-

The creature. It hovered above what had been its nest. A handful of its red eyes glared, Jack was certain, with a hatred as bright as the fire. It flapped its wings and turned sharply in mid air, pointing towards the car. Towards Erry, watching with horror.

Its nest was going up in flames and the bigger piece of meat was burning and spoiled, so why not call it even and take the other one that was still trapped?

Jack wasn’t sure why he was sure, but he thought the thing was going to do exactly that. With one hand he reached into his pocket, with the other he chucked the wood he’d been carrying at the thing that was about to eat his friend.

It missed, and it was nowhere near a graceful throw, but it did the job and got the creature’s attention.

Jack scooped a handful of mud into his hands and threw it. This one was a bullseye, hitting one of the eyes on top of the thing’s body that slithered and pulsed like it was also congealed tentacles morphing into what the creature needed.

Please get pissed, he thought. Please get pissed and go for me instead.

The thing screamed and flapped its wings once. Jack dove, then became weightless. His body drifted above the ground towards the cabin.

There was a thunderous clap. The creature was directly behind him, swiping with one of the claws that were the only rigid and solid parts of its body. Jack didn’t see his right arm come off, but felt it in an oddly detached way. That was good, he was left handed, and his last gambit was in his left pocket.

His last move was to jump for the cabin. It wasn’t much of a jump with only one leg to work with, but he tried. It did little more than aim his body in a particular direction to drop, and there was another clap as the thing flapped its wings and flew at Jack in what must have been close to light speed, even though Jack was close enough to bite.

Maybe, probably, he’d pissed it off that much.

Which was good, because that’s exactly what he’d wanted.

Everything went dark, yet extremely hot. The thing had enveloped him in the tentacles that were its body. Most likely to make sure he didn’t get away.

That was fine with him too. He didn’t need to see the needle gun in his pocket, only feel for it and jab into the tentacles squeezing the life out of him.

Very slowly, the tentacles that cocooned him relaxed. There was enough room to rotate the cylinder of the needle gun against his chest and stick the needle in the closest tentacle. There was a pop, and the amnestics were injected into the creature.

The amnestics he’d loaded in before climbing to the second floor of the cabin worked very quickly. The first injection was supposed to erase a civilian’s short term memory. If more injections were given to the same patient, the effect spread to the long-term memory. Any more than that would leave the patient devoid of any memory, including how to move and breathe, for an entire day. Jack put each of the amnestics into the creature just to be sure, then rolled the anesthesia packs in as quickly as he could.

The fire was all around him. Even seconds after being let go by the tentacles he could see the skin boiling on his good arm and leg.

Through the front of the cabin he could see Erry, screaming and waving at him. He couldn’t hear her, only the flames roaring and wood snapping back at him. He shot anesthesia into his neck and felt numb bliss flow throughout his body.

Before his eyes melted, he looked at Erry and put his thumb and forefinger in a circle.

It’s okay, he meant to say, though he would never know if she saw the gesture.

Jack put another anesthesia injection into his neck and fell away into darkness.

Credit: Chance Kimber

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