Joseph

Get Right with God

Agent Nicholas Grayson. The dogs are barking. Down the street someone screams. High and broken like glass in the wind. It pulls you from the dark where you’d been dreaming. Some place black and wet. You lay there breathing. Your pants stick to you. Your cock slick with the last heat of it. The spillage cooling on your thighs. You do not move. You feel a fly crawling across your cheek, and you let it.

Then the smell comes. Old meat. Sweet and foul. You know it at once though you’d tried to forget. The bunkers. The silence beneath the earth. The heat and the bodies. What you found there. What you kept. You close your eyes but the dark only brings it closer.

You remember what came before. Before the war and the sand and the silence that followed. The day the recruiter came. The house The fan humming overhead and stirring the heat but not cooling it. The smell of coffee and dish soap. Early summer. Dust on the sill. Light slanting through the yellowed curtains.

The house is plain. Suburban. Brick with streaked siding and a porch that creaks in the heat. The lawn is cut to regulation height, edged sharp as a blade. You mow it not out of pride but discipline. A need for order. A ritual to keep the chaos at bay.

High school’s behind you. You’re still lean, all elbows and wire, but the body’s changing. You’ve taken to lifting. Running. Waking before the sun to train. Muscle and motion and meat. Steak, chicken, eggs. You eat like it’s war.

You’ve played ball—football, basketball—so you’ve got a base. But this is different. This is hunger turned inward. This is the grind. And it suits you.

He sits across from you in dress blues. Palms flat on the table. Like a man laying down cards. Staff Sergeant Clay Devlin. His eyes calm. Measuring. The kind of man who’d seen fire and never flinched from it. He speaks softly. Like a thing rehearsed. But not dishonest. Not quite.

“Ma’am, I know this ain’t easy. I get mothers in tears. Fathers who slam the door. That’s part of the job.” he says.

Your mother sits stiff-backed in her chair, hands in her lap, eyes never leaving the sergeant’s face. “Then maybe the job’s wrong.”

“Your son’s got something, ma’am. Discipline. Grit. I seen it the second he walked into my office. Most boys come in looking for glory or a way out. Nick—he just wanted purpose.”

“My son’s got purpose right here. This land. This family. Nicholas, why don’t you tell me what you told the officer here why you want to join the Marines?”

“I want a chance to serve my country and the Lord, fighting against the world’s evil.” You say. “I want to do something with my life. I want to be useful.”

“Nicholas, you’re such a smart boy. You don’t have to do this. There are so many other ways you can express your God-given talents. But your daddy was changed when he came back from the war. That’s when he started drinking, and that’s why he left us.”

She turns toward you, face flickering with pain.

“The uniform don’t know you. The flag ain’t gonna send you a letter when your body comes back zipped in a bag.”

“I have to do this,” you say. “I have to do something. You’ve told me my whole life, how much evil there is in the world. And we pray, we pray to the American flag, we pray to protect the president and the troops. And I’ve always known that that was something that called to me, and now I know it is what I’m supposed to do. I feel a calling, Mother.”

“Ma’am,” says Devlin with a gentle, practiced calm, “I’d be lying if I said it was safe. But I will tell you this: he’s got leadership potential. He’s smart. Observant. Steady under pressure. I don’t just want him in my Corps—I need men like him. Men who don’t flinch. He’ll be part of something that matters.”

“I already lost my husband to the bottle, Sergeant,” she says. ”My boy’s the last steady thing in this house.”

She stands. Walks to the sink. Her back to you. Her shoulder shake.

“Nicholas, you’re a grown man. Old enough to make your own decisions. I can’t stop you.”

She turns around and look you in the eye, and you see the pain etched on her face.

“Make sure whatever’s left of you comes back through that door one day.”

“I’ll come back to you, Mom.” You tell her.

“Ma’am, the Corps takes care of its own." Says Devlin.

Staff Sgt. Devlin turns to you. “Pickup’s Thursday. 0600 sharp.”

He nods to your mother again, respectfully.

Then he’s gone. Only the clink of the tap and the steady breathing of your mother trying not to cry.

“I’m gonna make you proud, Mom,” you say, “I’m gonna make you proud.”

You’re full of it. Hope. The real kind. The kind that hums in your bones and makes the world seem like it might open its arms instead of its teeth. For the first time you can remember, the path ahead doesn’t feel like a trap. There was a time you thought the only way to keep from falling into darkness was to put on the collar, become a priest, seal yourself off from the rot of the world.

But not now.

You suck in your gut and puff your chest. Try to look like a man. For her. To give your mother something to believe in. To ease that worry behind her eyes. It hurts to see her afraid. But you feel it in your bones—this moment. You’re strong. Invincible. She’s wrong. It’s not dangerous. Not for you.

You think of your dad.

He left when you and Marley were still small. Started fresh somewhere else. Remarried. Took in her kids. Younger than you by a stretch.

After he left, you and Marley did what you could, but it was your mother who carried the weight. Day in, day out. And though she never said it, the leaving broke something in her. Left it unfixed.

You were bitter for a time. Shut down. Quiet. But as the years passed you stepped up. Took on more. And this past year, you made your choice.

You enlisted. Marines. Not for escape, but for purpose.

Something clean. Something true.

Boot Camp, MCRD San Diego

Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. Summer 1990. Day 12 of training. 0430 hours.

The lights come on with the wrath of heaven. White and sudden and unkind. A trashcan lid clangs against the concrete like a bell calling the damned to reckon. You woke hard, breath shallow, heart kicking. Above you Whitaker mutters a curse thick with sleep.

“Rise and shine, you goddamn abortions! This ain’t your fucking mama’s sewing circle! This is the United States Marine Corps!” Barks the DI.

The squad bay erupts like a nest of stirred hornets. Cots groan. Flesh slaps tile. Your body moves before thought arrives—folding sheets, lacing boots, tucking your shirt. You did not speak. You did not look. You simply obey.

The floor stinks of mildew and old socks and the thousand-foot stink of boys not yet men. The ceiling fans turn above you like the rotors of ancient machines, carving time out of the dawnless dark. Outside the sun had not yet breached the wire, but sweat already silvers your brows like a baptism in a bloodless church of war.

You worry you won’t measure up. Not the worst in the platoon, but nowhere near the top. And you reckon you won’t rest easy till you are. You don’t know the others yet. There’s laughter, sure, but it’s the kind with teeth. The kind men use to test each other. All chest and shoulders and eyes that don’t blink. It wears on you.

Their language comes hard and constant. Profanity like breath. Like ritual. You’d heard cussing in high school, but not like this. Not like the flood of filth that fills the air here. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Faggot. Cruelty braided together in jest. Shirts are called blouses. Toilet paper’s shit paper. Words twisted. Made crude. Familiar things made strange.

You were raised Seventh-day Adventist. Raised to mind your tongue. In high school, they left you alone for it. Gave you space. Not here. Here it’s everywhere. And now you try your hand at it. Swearing. Just to belong. The words come out awkward. Clumsy The others laugh. Elbows in ribs. Grins like blades. No harm yet. But you feel the edge.

They see you pray. Morning and night. Quiet and steady. A cross beneath your shirt, warmed by your skin. Some of them pray too. But not like you. Not with fire. Not with fear.

They’ve given you names—Preacher, Padre, Choir Boy. Words meant to belittle, but not to wound. Not yet.

You miss home. Miss your mother. There are moments you regret coming here. Real fear, cold and deep. But your body changes. Hardens. The boy you were begins to vanish. And what’s left, you don’t recognize. Not yet. But it’s coming.

They tell you to embrace The Suck–the Marine Corps and its daily misery. So you embrace it.

Obstacle Course – 0900 Hours

The course cuts through the base like a scar. Ropes, walls, sandpits, barbed wire—challenges carved from pain and repetition.

You pull yourself up a cargo net, arms burning. Beside you, Whittaker grunts and swears and laughs like the whole thing’s a joke.

“I swear, Nick,” he says, “if I survive this I’m gonna marry the first woman who brings me fried chicken and don’t ask no goddamn questions.”

“You’ll marry the first girl that kisses you.” You say.

You and Whittaker reach the top. From the far side of the course, Silas Mercer clears an obstacle without breaking stride. Efficient. Joyless. His face unreadable beneath the dust and sun.

Kelso lags behind. Cuts corners. Breathes through clenched teeth.

You and Whittaker are cut from different cloth. He’s loud. Loose. Laughs like a man who’s never known the weight of silence. You keep to yourself. Tight as wire. More at home with a page than with a punchline. And yet, somehow, you’re becoming friends. It could be the bunk assignments. It could be just circumstance. You’re different enough that you don’t have to pretend. There’s peace in that.

You like his lightness. The way he floats above things. It’s foreign to you, but you admire it. It makes you feel, in some quiet way, proud. Like you’ve reached across some divide. You think he’s trying to break you open, loosen you up. And maybe he’s right to try.

Mercer is something else. You’ve only known him a short while, but he carries the air of a man who’s seen too much or not enough. At first, you think there’s kinship. Same background, maybe. But the longer you’re near him, the less certain you become.

There’s something wrong beneath his skin. He’s distant, yes, but more than that—superiority. Like he’s above it all. Above you. You don’t think he came here for duty. You think he came here to kill. And not for cause. But for pleasure.

The others may be crude, loud, simple—but you can feel their hearts beating in their chests. Their souls, scuffed but intact. With Mercer, there’s only silence. Something cold. Like a man-shaped absence. Like whatever was meant to be human in him has packed up and left. Or died in place.

Chow Hall – 1230 Hours

The food is grey and flavorless. Eggs that bounce. Coffee that tastes like burnt rubber and battery acid.

You eat in silence. Mercer sits alone, always. Kelso goes to sit next to him, and Mercer just looks up at him with hose dead eyes of his, as if daring Kelso to sit. Kelso shrugs his shoulder and walks over to your table and sits across form you.

“Mercer watches people sleep. Did you know that?” asks Kelso.

“Well, we all can’t sleep.” You say. “It’s probably nothing.”

“I don’t know. Man, the way he looks at us, it’s like a fucking spider looking at its prey.” Says Kelso.

“I had that same thought at one point.” You say. “He does have way of looking at you, like he’s planning something, like he wants to eat your face.”

Across the room, Mercer smiles. Just slightly. Like he heard every word.

Whittaker talks as he shovels food into his mouth. “I hear there’s a circus in town. Marle Brothers Big Top. I shoulda joined the circus instead of the Corp. Food’s probably better.”

Whittaker is the yin to your yang. In the mess hall he pushes at the edges. Just enough to make you smile. When the sergeant’s back is turned he shapes faces in his food. Sometimes worse. Mashed potatoes molded into mockery. Peas for eyes. A crude cock and balls drawn with gravy like ink on a page. It’s stupid. And it’s perfect. In a place meant to grind you down, it feels like defiance. You feel it too. Like sin without the stain.

He leans over while you eat. “You gonna eat that?”

You open your mouth to answer but he’s already helped himself. Fork scraping your tray. You don’t stop him. Don’t even flinch. You let him take it. Long as he doesn’t touch the meatloaf.

Rifle Qualification – Day 24

You lay prone. Breath held. Sight steady.

The rifle is a language now. You speak it fluently. Your grouping is tight. Your posture perfect. The instructor nods once.

Next lane over, Mercer doesn’t miss. Not once. His score is perfect, but he shoots like he’s removing something from the world. Not practicing. Purging.

After qualification, Mercer approaches you for the first time. “You shoot clean.”

“Oh, well, you know, I’m just getting the hang of it.”you tell him. “You’re not a bad shot yourself there, Mercer.”

He doesn’t acknowledge the compliment. “You need to shoot fast.” He says. “You’ll need both.”

He walks off, and for a second you watch his back and think: that’s not a man—they just gave something shaped like one a uniform.

A thought’s been creeping in lately, one you don’t want to name. But the way Mercer moves, the way he looks at people—it’s like something else is in him. Something old. Something wrong. You used to think all that talk about the devil was just metaphor, or maybe you believed it but never expected to see it. Now you’re not so sure. He feels possessed

Barracks – Night

The squad bay is quiet. Except Mercer, laughing in his sleep. Soft, muffled. Like a child dreaming of pulling wings from flies.

Whittaker whispers from above. “That motherfucker’s gonna shoot somebody who ain’t wearin’ a uniform one day.”

Outside, the wind rattles the flagpole. You stare at the ceiling and do not sleep.

The Desert

Forward Observation Post, near Al Khafji, Northern Saudi Arabia. Three days before the ground assault begins. The air is still. The world waits to crack.

The desert in February is cold before dawn and hot by midday, and cruel no matter the hour. The sand stings the eyes and clogs the throat, whispering over the dunes like a voice without language. Everything is the color of bone. Dull. Scoured. Forgotten.

You lay flat in a shallow fighting hole cut into a ridge of shale and sand. Your rifle cradled to your chest like an infant. The lens of your scope fogs slightly with each breath. You adjust without thinking. Movements slow. Smooth. You’ve been in-country long enough now that your hands know what to do before you do.

Beside you, twenty feet away, Boyd Whitaker hunkers down behind a berm, chewing sunflower seeds and scanning the horizon through binoculars.

“Ain’t nothin’ out here but God and the people he forgot.” Says Whittaker.

“I don’t know if God forgets anyone,” you say, “but they sure have joined the ranks of the unguided, lost misfit souls.”

Whittaker grins. “That’d be us, huh?”

“We do what we can.” You say.

You both fall quiet again.

Behind you, far to the west, the artillery boys are drinking warm water and telling lies to stay warm. Up front, it’s just them. Silence, sand, and radio static. A horizon so flat it feels like the edge of the world.

In the Sandbox, they gave you a rifle and made you a sniper. Whitaker beside you as your spotter, laughing even when there was nothing to laugh about. Mercer had the same assignment, and Kelso his reluctant spotter.

As a boy you’d held rifles in your hands, your father beside you in the scrub fields behind the house. But they never sat right in your palms. Cold and alien.

The M40 is different. It speaks to you. There is a cleanness to it. A discipline. You strip it down, part by part, and learn its language. Steel and spring and breath. A thing that holds death like a secret and gives it shape.

When you shoot, you pray. Not loud. Not for show.

“Lord Jesus, God, bless this bullet.” You say.

Or, “Still my breath. Steady my hand. Let this be Your will.”

Each trigger squeeze a prayer. Each round a rosary bead. And in the scope, justice comes in small and distant shapes. And you are its vessel.

You carry your phrasebook like scripture, dog-eared and damp with sweat. As-salaamu alaikum. You say it under your breath, again and again. Peace be upon you. The words settle in your mouth like dry bread. You whisper them before you shoot. A prayer of precision. Peace by way of fire.

The Quran you keep hidden. An English translation tucked in the jacket of your Arabic manual. You study it in secret. You’re drawn to the washings, the prayers, the aching beauty of the mosques and the voices rising from minarets. There’s order in it. Cleanliness. Discipline. You admire it the way you might admire a distant star. Bright, unreachable.

But the words don’t speak to you. Not the way your own do. The text is dry. Hard. Full of rules. The tone cold. And yet the names of God comfort you. The reverence. You like how they speak the Prophet’s name with care. Peace be upon him. Always.

You haven’t bathed in a week. You drink water like a man dying but never feel clean. Your body is covered in dust and sweat and grease. The stink clings to you. You no longer notice it on yourself, only in the others. You watch the locals and envy their purity. Their white garments. Their rituals of water.

Your body has never been stronger. Thirty hours of training a week. Your muscles burn, your lungs bite, and you welcome it. The pain strips something from you. Ego. Doubt. You believe each blister, each ache, brings you closer to God’s work. To the man you’re meant to become.

In Okinawa, you studied what you could. Shinto. Zen. Watched monks in gardens of sand. They moved with silence and purpose. You tried to sit like them. Empty your mind. But prayer did not live there. No Christ. No cross. Just the breath and the void. It felt wrong. But still, you respected it.

The others went out at night. Whoring and laughing. Whittaker always asking if you’d come. Kelso too. You wanted to. Some part of you did. But you knew the shame would hollow you out. So you lied. Said there was a girl back home. There wasn’t. But your mother always said a white lie was better than a black sin.

They call you Choir Boy. Say it with a smile. Say it with a sneer. Doesn’t matter.

0830 Hours

Over comms, a soft click. Then the voice.

Mercer, over radio, says “Movement. Single truck. Road westbound. Two occupants.”

“Copy that.” You say.

Kelso mutters “Four-eighty meters. Civilian pattern. Possible scout vehicle.”

There’s a long pause. Then Mercer again, voice calm. “Want me to pop their teeth out or just erase the heads?”

Whittaker shoots you a look.

You mute your mic and mouth to Whittaker, “What the fuck?”

“Jesus, Silas…” says Kelso.

The Whittaker. “Rules of engagement. Confirm identification.”

Another pause. Then static.

“Roger that.” Says Mercer, like it’s nothing.

The truck disappears over a dune. Nothing happens. No shots. No confirmations. No reprimands.

You shift slightly. Your knees ache from lying still. Your right shoulder burns from holding the rifle steady for hours. Sweat cools against your lower back, then dries again. The flies come anyway. Always.

The other Marines grow restless in the lull. No shots fired. No blood drawn. They joke of blue balls and wasted rage, of needing to kill just to feel like men. But you are a sniper. And what you feel is not hunger. It is dread.

You follow orders. You understand the mission, at least in the way it’s been explained to you. The enemy is the enemy. That’s what you’re told. And most days you nod and swallow it. But some part of you holds back. You don’t see the threat with your own eyes. You are told who to hate, and you try. But there’s a stone in your gut that won’t move.

You fear the moment your finger tightens on the trigger. You fear the recoil of your soul. You fear falling apart. But more than that, you fear the absence of feeling. That you’ll kill and feel nothing. That something in you will die, quiet and final.

They say it’s a rite of passage. Mercer believes that. Believes in it like gospel. Maybe he’s right. You know you’re good with the rifle. Gifted. And a part of you—small and still—wants to know what that means. Wants to move from theory to act. Not for glory. Not for hate. Just to know.

But you want it to be clean. You want it to be holy. You want the shot to ring with purpose, like a bell in a quiet church. You want to feel God’s hand on your own. You want peace to bloom from the barrel.

The others don’t talk that way. For them it’s blood and duty and keeping the man next to you alive. Politics don’t matter. But for you they do. Or they did. You were told Saddam was a tyrant. That his people were godless or bowed to the wrong god. You believed that. Mostly.

But in the stillness, the questions come. Why would God scatter the faithful so wide? Why divide truth like that? Why make it so hard to know who’s right?

till, you press on. You cling to the thought that you serve something greater. That through the rifle and the oath, you bring order to a broken world. That the men above you—Bush, the brass, the banner—stand in the place of shepherds. That your aim is just. And that heaven watches.

100 Hours

You watch a lizard emerge from the sand. Stops. Stares. Runs back into its hole like it remembered something.

“Think we’ll be in Kuwait by March?” Asks Whittaker.

“March, maybe” you say. “I mean, we’re not moving that fast, but a lot can happen in a few weeks.”

As the words leave your mouth you hear and feel a low rumble to the south. Thunder, but not sky-born. The ground itself muttering. A column of tanks appears on the horizon, black silhouettes swimming in heat distortion.

“First wave?” Says Whittaker.

“Let’s just keep our eyes open,” you tell him.

You watch as M1 Abrams roll past like prehistoric beasts—dust trailing them in long braids. No one waves. No one smiles. The men inside are faceless behind glass and steel. You feel something sink inside you. The future rolling by, too heavy to stop.

Nightfall

The temperature plummets with the sun. Whittaker lights a cigarette. Passes the pack to you and you light your own. The glow paints your face in brief flickers, then fades. Beside Whittaker, Kelso digs into an MRE with mechanical effort. Chicken something.

“Quietly, Whittaker asks, “You’ve always been tightly wound. You always been this way?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m tightly wound.” You tell him.

Whittaker laughs, “Oh, you’re tightly wound, alright!”

“Well, nobody can be as as loose around the edges as you.”

“You got that fucking right!” He says.

“But I remember, when I was a boy, I used to joke around a lot more.”

“Oh,” he says, “what happened?”

“I don’t know. I think I just grew up, huh?”

“Well,” he says, “you sure as fuck ain’t like that boy, Mercer.”

“Well, that guy’s a psycho. I think we can all agree at this point.”

You settle in. You watch. You wait. Somewhere out there, Silas Mercer breathes like a man asleep in the middle of a fire. Somewhere else, death is on the move, quiet and barefoot.

You stare through your scope at the blank nothing of the night.

You never notice when the lizard comes back.

The Burning Towers

The edge of the Kuwaiti oil fields. February 1991. Days into the air campaign. Nightfall bleeding into dawn.

You march toward it like men drawn to a funeral pyre. The sky is dark as ink and thick with the breath of burning oil. It churns above you in thunderous silence, the color of old bruises, the wind carrying heat and grit and the smell of something dead and buried clawing its way back up.

You walk point. Rifle slung, boots sinking into ash-laced sand. Your flak jacket coated with soot. Your skin beneath your sleeves damp and blistered. Whitaker follows, silent now, eyes narrowed against the smoke.

The towers burn. Dozens of them. Oil derricks lit up like candles in a black cathedral. Great tongues of fire arced into the heavens and did not go out. The flames are alive. They roar without wind. They feed without mercy.

Whittaker says quietly, almost reverently “Looks like hell forgot to close the door.”

You watch one of the towers collapse in the distance, steel bones snapping under its own inferno. The earth trembles. The heat comes in pulses.

It begins to rain oil.

It feels like something hellborn is moving before your eyes, undoing the work of God in plain sight. Spoiling His creation. Tainting the grace and the bounty you were handed without asking. A ruin come to walk among the living.

You pull your goggles down to protect your eyes and take shelter behind a rusted-out personnel carrier, long since abandoned. The desert is littered with the bones of machines, some still smoldering, others twisted into sculptures of war. The bodies had mostly been cleared. Mostly.

This is more death than you’ve ever known. The ground littered with bodies. Twisted shapes in the dust. Enemy uniforms soaked dark. At first you’re gutted. Hollowed out. You start to question yourself. Your purpose. Your place in this.

But time wears things down. Even the sacred. You stop seeing faces. Stop seeing men. The dead become matter. Shapes. Chaff. Roadkill on the highway of war. You tell yourself it’s not cruelty. It’s survival. You’re not denying their humanity. You’re setting it aside. That’s the story you sell yourself, anyway.

Then there’s Mercer.

He moves among the corpses. Slow. Intent. And he begins to jab them with his bayonet. Not to check. Not from fear. Just to do it. Like he’s practicing. Like it means nothing.

Your gut turns. You’ve worked hard to find the line, to hold it steady. Mercer steps over it like it isn’t there. He treats the dead with scorn. With play.

You remember these were men. The enemy, sure. But still men. You wouldn’t want it done to Whittaker. Or to your own body. Or to your mother.

Kelso sees it. Has seen it before. Says nothing. Just looks away.

But Whitaker doesn’t.

He turns, voice sharp and loud. “Mercer, knock it the fuck off.”

You drink from your canteen. The water is hot. Tastes like metal.

And then you see it.

Movement, in the fire. Not the flicker of heatwaves or the slow roll of smoke, but a shape. Immense. Moving through the inferno as if born to it. No sound. No howl. Just the thunder of its footsteps somewhere beneath the world.

A silhouette. Towering. Vaguely human. Arms too long. Head too low. Like a man half-forgotten by the laws of nature. It walked between the flames like a dream stained in blood. It did not burn.

Whittaker smacks you on the back of your helmet and peers into the flames. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

“I thought, I thought I saw something.” You say.

You lift your goggles and rub your eyes. The shape was gone.

The derricks stand like black crucifixes in a wasteland of light and heat.

You move on. Silent. The stench follows them—crude oil and charred flesh and something else. Something older. The wind carries whispers you couldn’t place. Metal groaned like breath. Flames danced in patterns too precise to be random.

And far behind you, something walks.

You tell yourself it’s nothing. A trick of smoke. The mind reaching for shape where there is none. Like faces in the fire. That’s all. But this feels different. And it leaves a chill behind despite the heat.

You whisper a prayer. Not for courage. For mercy.

At the time you don’t name it trauma. Don’t think to. Just a vision. A sign. But later, maybe, you begin to wonder. If something in you cracked open. And if the thing that stepped through wasn’t just in the fire.

The Bunkers

Iraqi defensive line, southern border. February 1991. Day five after the ceasefire. An operation to secure and clear enemy positions. “Sanitation duty.”

They call them bunkers, but they weren’t built to protect men. They were graves waiting to be filled.

You step down into the earth, rifle low, breath held. The sun above has already burned the world to bleached ruin, but the air below was worse. Still. Stale. Thicker than oil, heavier than blood.

The flashlight on your vest cuts a pale ribbon through the dark. Cement walls slick with condensation. A map still tacked to the far wall, untouched by fire, curled at the corners like a dying leaf. Radios knocked from their cradles. Shell casings littering the floor.

And the bodies.

Six of them. Maybe more. Hard to count in the stink and the shadows. Twisted where they’d fallen. One slumped against a desk. Another face-down beside a machine gun that never fired. One sat upright, arms folded in his lap, like he was waiting for something that never came.

Their skin had turned the color of boiled leather. Eyes sunken. Lips split like old paper. And the flies—the flies never left. They moved like thoughts, crawling in and out of mouths and sockets, indifferent and eternal.

Whittaker gags behind you, retching into a sandbag.

“Ain’t natural.” He gasps. “They ain’t even been dead that long.”

Bunker clearing puts the fear of God in you. The thought of being inside one—waiting for the breach, for the fire, laying traps in the dark like some wounded animal—it chills you. And being the one sent in isn’t any better. The tunnels are tight. The air sour. Each corner feels like it could be the last. You move slow, heart thudding like a drum in a funeral march.

And yet you keep coming out. Alive. Each time the terror fades a little, worn down like old stone. You learn the rhythm of it. The terrible cadence of survival.

At the rigs it was different. The bodies there were distant. Easier to strip of meaning. To reduce to shape and mass. You learned to look without seeing. But the bunkers don’t allow that. The stink of rot is thick. Clings to your clothes. Gets in your teeth. There’s no wind down there. No smoke to blur the edges.

And these dead—they aren’t just the enemy. They’re the men you’ve been picturing for days. Studying their minds. Their habits. Their fears. When you find them broken in the dark, you can’t pretend they were never real.

You tell yourself to stay cold. To stay sharp. See them as remnants. As aftermath. But it doesn’t hold. Not for long. The weight piles up slow and quiet.

You start drinking more. Not to toast the living. But to calm the nerves. To steady the shaking hands. To drown out the dead, who wait for you in every shadow.

Against all order and code, Mercer draws a small camera from his kit. He leans into the dead man slumped at the table, throws up a peace sign like some grinning tourist, and snaps the photo. His smile is wide. Pleased. Kelso sees it and just shakes his head. No words.

But Whittaker speaks. “Mercer, what the fuck?”

He smacks the side of Mercer’s helmet. Not hard. Not soft either.

Mercer freezes. Turns slow. Cold as stone. He steps into Whittaker, chest to chest. No shouting. Just stillness. Tension like a wire drawn tight. One breath more and they’d be on each other. And you know in your gut that Mercer wouldn’t stop. Not till something broke or someone died.

That’s when it happens. Something breaks in you.

You move without thinking. Grab him by the front of his armor, fists already swinging. You aim for his face, for the soft skin behind the helmet’s edge. One blow lands. He absorbs it, shifts, returns it with force. A hard jab to your temple. You stagger. Regain. Swing again. He ducks. You hit his vest, shove him back.

Then his fist comes like a hammer. Connects clean.

And everything fades.

Dark.

You wake to Whitaker over you, slapping your face, voice sharp and distant. Kelso and a pair of grunts are holding Mercer back, his face a mask of cold judgment. No rage. Just a quiet certainty that you’ve become something beneath him. An offense. A mistake. A thing to be erased.

You lie on the bunker floor, the world ringing, your pulse pounding in your skull. Whitakker’s shouting something. You blink.

And in that moment—bleeding, broken—you see it. A small object. Black. Irregular. Obsidian, maybe. You snatch and almost swear that you felt it pulse in your glove.

Later, you burn the bunker. Didn’t say it was policy, but no one objected. Diesel pours in, lit with a match. The flames caught fast, greedy and bright. No ceremony. No prayers. Just a few seconds of silence while the wind shifted and ash rose like snow.

Whitaker sits on a ration crate, staring at nothing. Lights a cigarette and behind the smoke, he says “Don’t reckon I’ll ever forget that smell. You faced off against Mercer. I get it, but he’s gonna hold a grudge.”

“I don’t know what came over me. You say. “I lost myself there for a second. That was not like me. It’s these bunkers, just it gets to me.”

“Same.” He says. “Watch your six.”

Far behind you, the fire rages. Inside your pocket, the amulet sits like a wound that will never clot.

You don’t know why you took it. It was instinctual. The moment it touched your palm, it felt like it belonged there. Like it’d always been.

Midnight

Forward encampment. The war is over, but the fires still burn in the distance. The oil fields paint the sky in slow ruin. Most of the men sleep fitfully. Grayson does not sleep at all.

You sit alone by the burn barrel. The amulet weighs in your pocket. You haven’t taken it out since the bunker.

Footsteps crunch the gravel behind you—too slow to be an officer, too steady to be Whittaker.

He looks at you as if you are a frog splayed to a plinth.

“Don’t ever lay hands on me again, or I will kill you.”

He extends his hand and without thinking you reach for it. Muscle before mind. The old reflex. And the moment your skin meets his you’re filled with a sickness. Shame rising up like bile. The act small and simple and yet it brands you.

“You’ve been carrying it.” He says.

“Carrying what? What are you talking about?”

“I watch everything.” He says.

The wind sighs. Far off, a generator hums its broken song.

“I saw one like it. Not here. Valley in Afghanistan, before anyone said we were there. Same stone. Same shape.”

Mercer crouches by the barrel, his eyes reflecting the coals. Pale and twitchless.

“I dunno, man. Maybe it’s a key. Or a piece of something too big to carry whole. You ever feel like the sand’s whispering when no one’s around?”

You say nothing, hoping he’ll leave.

“I don’t think it talks. No. I’m saying it listens.” He says. “Men dig deep enough, they start finding things that were never buried. You brought that piece back from a place meant to be forgotten. You should bury it again. Or keep it. I don’t care. Just don’t ask it for answers.”

He walks off, boots crunching like bones in the dirt. The wind picks up again. You stay there, staring into the burn barrel as the embers pulse red and die.

You take out the amulet. Black as pitch and cut in angles that catch the firelight like blades. Obsidian maybe. Or something older. Hard to say in the glow of the dying barrel, where the coals pulse like heartbeats. The facets shift as you turn it. Or seem to. Could be a trick of the light. Could be the thing itself. Watching. Changing. Remembering its shape. You put the thing back in your pocket.

You don’t sleep that night. You don’t take the amulet out.

But you do dream.

You stand in the bunker again.

But the walls are made of meat. Pulsing. Veined. Breathing. The lights are gone, but everything glows with a dull, red rhythm like a heart too old to die. The floor sloughs underfoot. Wet. Soft. Screaming without sound.

You walk forward. Rifle in hand though you don’t remember picking it up. Ahead of you, the corpses sit upright now. Watching. Their mouths open, filled with flies. Their teeth black. The smell. That same smell.

Burned oil. Dead milk. Something older.

You try to turn but the room turns with you. The ceiling stretches into dark ribs, long and curving like a ship’s hull. Or a womb.

In the far corner, something moves.

It crawls out of the wall like it was born there. No face. No eyes. Just shape. Human in form, but wrong in proportion. Too long. Too slow. It does not walk. It arrives.

And then it speaks.

But not with sound.

The words unfurl inside his mind, syllables wet with rot:

“We. Remember. What You. Took.”

You stumble back. The amulet is in your hand now, though you never reached for it. It burns like dry ice. You open your mouth to scream.

No breath.

The shape reaches for you.

”We. Remember. The Burning.”

Suddenly, you’re outside. The oil fields again. But there are no stars. The towers are gone. Only the flames remain—suspended in the sky, unmoving. Like they’ve been nailed to the air.

And walking between them: that same silhouette. Towering. Human-but-not.

This time it turns to you.

This time you see its face.

It’s yours.

Or what you would become. Skin stretched too tight. Eyes like burnt holes in the world.

It smiles.

And you wake.

You bolt upright in your cot, soaked in sweat. The other Marines are still asleep. Whitaker turns slightly in his bunk above, mutters something about his mother, then stills.

You clutch the amulet in your fist. Blood on your palm from where it bit into him.

You look down.

The stone is warm.

Still pulsing.

You know in your gut the thing doesn’t belong to you. Never did. The amulet. Black and and wrong. You should not have taken it. You feel the pull to be rid of it like a fever rising. You think of burying it. Deep where no one will find it. Let the earth keep its secret.

But you don’t.

Something stays your hand. Not fear. Not quite. A thought like a splinter. Maybe there’s a purpose to it. Maybe someone knows what it is. What it means. Maybe it’s a key. And you need answers more than you need peace.

The dream still clings to you like wet ash. You’d call it stress, once. Chalk it up to the weight of war and the blood you carry. But Mercer’s words are still crawling through your mind, and that thing in your pocket burns like a coal.

You feel watched. Not by men. Not by God.

By something older.

You feel the edges of the world curling inward. Thin. Hellish. And you are not alone.

You wonder now if you carried something out with you.

Or if you woke it. And it followed.

The Envelope

Makeshift observation post, outskirts of Basra. Three days after the ceasefire. The wind has changed direction. Everything smells like the end of something.

You sit beneath a ripped canvas tarp stretched over steel poles driven into the sand. The wind tugs at it like fingers, but the knots hold. You stare at the horizon.

Nothing moves.

Not the tanks, not the trucks, not the birds. Not anymore.

He reach into your thigh pocket of your trousers and pull out the envelope.

It is heavy. Not thick, just… heavy. Cream-colored. Government stock. No seal but a faint watermark. Your name typed clean across the front.

Grayson, Nicholas – USMC, 1st MarDiv

You turn it over once. Then again. Then tear it open.

Inside: one sheet. Folded three times with bureaucratic precision.

UNITED STATES FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION LIAISON OFFICE – JOINT OPERATIONS GULF THEATER

To: Lance Corporal Nicholas Alexander Grayson

Your name has been forwarded for recommendation to the Bureau’s Special Activities Review Committee under direct advisement of General Matthias Virek, USMC Command.

Based on combat record, psychological evaluations, and command assessments, you are invited to submit yourself for screening related to field operations within the Federal Bureau.

If interested, report to provisional debrief center – U.S. Embassy, Kuwait City – no later than March 14, 0900 hours. Further instructions will follow upon interview.

This is not an offer. This is a window.

Special Agent Alton W. Rusk Bureau Liaison – CENTCOM Coordination Unit Semper Fidelis.

You read it twice. Then a third time.

Until now, your future felt unclear. You thought about another tour, maybe something else, but nothing took shape. It all felt murky. Then suddenly, it clicked into place—sharp, certain, like a lens snapping into focus. It felt obvious, inevitable, like a calling, a gift from God.

You’ve heard of General Virek but are too far down the chain to have met him. Still, somehow, he knows who you are. He recommended you for this new position.

It takes a moment to sink in.

The realization hits like you’ve been walking around naked without knowing it. Now you feel exposed. Watched. You start replaying your actions from the start of the war, wondering who’s been observing you, and what they’ve seen.

The wind tugs the paper slightly in your grip.

Behind you, Whitaker’s boots crunch in the dirt. He sits down beside you with a grunt and pulls off his helmet, setting it on his knee.

“That the one from Virek?” He asks.

“How’d you know?”

“Oh, there’s been some talk amongst the boys. I don’t rank, apparently, but the general sees something special in you. You gonna take it?”

“I can’t figure out what it is,” you say, “But yeah, I think I will take it.”

Whittaker shrugs. “Whatever they want, it’s probably the same thing we all want. Somebody who can see without blinkin’.”

Whittaker looks at you sideways. “You saw something out there, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You say. “I mean, we all see things out here, that’s part of the madness of this place.”

Whittaker shrugs, knows you’re holding something back.

Later that night, long after the sun buries itself behind the dunes and the fire barrels have gone cold, you fold the letter again. Put it back in the envelope. Then place the envelope beneath the amulet in your footlocker.

But you don’t lock it.

Because you know whatever came next wasn’t coming through the front door.

It was already inside.

Recruitment

U.S. Embassy, Kuwait City. March 14, 1991. Room B3 – sub-level security chamber. 0902 hours.

The room is small and ugly in the way all government rooms are. Pale green walls. Fluorescents overhead humming like insects. A metal desk bolted to the floor. No windows. One camera in the corner, blinking a red dot like it’s bored with its job.

You sits with your back straight, forearms resting on your knees. Not at ease. Not at attention. Somewhere in between.

You haven’t slept. You haven’t shaved. Your blouse still smells of sand and engine oil. You left the war six days ago and it hasn’t noticed that you’re gone.

Across from you sits Special Agent Alton W. Rusk. Civilian dress, dark blue suit, desert boots instead of Oxfords. He reads from a slim file. Turns a page. Breathes through his nose.

“You don’t talk much.” He says.

“Well, sir,” you tell him, “this Marine reserve his words for important moments and for when he has something to say.”

Rusk nods. “That’s fine. We’ve got too many talkers. Not enough listeners.”

He finally looks up.

“Lance Corporal Nicholas Alexander Grayson. Iowa. One sister. Mother, father living. High school diploma, no priors, no citations. Rifle expert, top three percent in your unit. Commendation for action during the Battle of Khafji. Citation for bravery in a chemical weapons facility near Basra, which, officially, does not exist.”

He tilts his head, studying you.

“There’s something unusual about you. You make decisions quickly. You don’t break under pressure. You take orders—but you also think two layers above what you’re told. That’s rare. What’s rarer is that you know how to bury what needs burying.”

“This interview is about options. You can go back to Iowa. Get yourself a dog. Learn to sleep again, maybe. Open a tire shop. Marry a woman who lies about how much she drinks. Or—”

He slides a manila folder across the desk. It’s heavier than it looks. Sealed. No markings.

“You open this, you’re agreeing to think differently. Act differently. Operate outside the lines you’ve been taught.”

“Sir,” you say, “you do paint an appealing alternative picture of this Marine’s future, but he is curious about what’s going on.

“Only one way to find out.” He says. “If you say no? Then you walk. We never had this meeting.”

“Do you think this Marine will regret opening this envelope? Sir?”

“If you say yes? Then the next war you fight won’t have a front line. It won’t have medals or funerals. And when you lose, you don’t die—you vanish. We don’t need heroes. We need ghosts. We need someone like you.”

Something in his voice hooks into you. Like he’s not just speaking but summoning. As if the world holds shadows deeper than men and you are meant to walk among them. To see what others can’t. To move where only ghosts go. You open the envelope.

The Dinner Table

The Grayson family kitchen. Supper just after sundown. Ceiling fan spins above them like a slow metronome.

The plates are chipped. The roast is dry. The potatoes are soft but lumpy. No one says anything about it. Your family just passes dishes, scoops servings, nods thanks without words.

The clink of silverware is the only sound for a long time. Through the open window, the cicadas buzz like static.

You sit at the head of the table, not because you asked to, but because your father wasn’t there and someone had to.

Marley sits to your right, arms tanned from the sun, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid. She still wears the silver chain he gave her when she turned sixteen, before Kuwait, before Basra, before the bunkers.

Since you’ve been back you take to long drives. Daylight to dusk. Just to see the green again. Trees bending in the wind. The slow breath of fields alive and whole. The air smells of dirt and growth and old rain. It steadies you. You’ve no wish to see the old crowd. High school ghosts. You lift weights. You run. You stay sharp.

You buy a rifle. Practice in the back fields. Bottles and cans lined like sinners waiting judgment. Sometimes your sister comes along. You teach her to shoot. You talk less and less, but the silence between you feels full. You spend time with your mother. You all go to church.

You try speaking with the pastor. Your words falter. They live somewhere behind your teeth but won’t come forward. Still, sitting near him feels like placing your hand on a steady rock in a flood. You don’t speak your questions. Maybe because you don’t yet know them.

Most of the platoon drifts off. You don’t keep track. But Whittaker writes. Calls once in a while. Says he’s moved to Los Angeles. Says he’s joining the police force. Says he’s marrying his high school girl.

He sounds content. Whole.

You don’t know what to make of that. But it lingers. Like a note struck too low to hear but felt all the same.

Marley studies you in the soft light.

“Nick… what was it like? The war, I mean. What was it really like?”

Your mom doesn’t interrupt. Just pours herself a bit more tea, eyes lowered. The question had been coming for days. Someone had to ask it.

“What was it really like? Honestly, it just didn’t feel fair. Didn’t feel like a fair fight. Felt like a lot of decisions had been made, and we were just there to clean up a mess somebody else had made. I know it was the right thing to do, but it was messy. It was just messy. You don’t want to hear about that stuff anyway.”

Something strikes you. As a boy you’d asked your father about the war. He’d looked at you a long time and said a few words that meant nothing—answered without really answering.

Now you hear it in your own voice. The same dodge. But it also brings a flicker of understanding. For the first time, you feel a kind of kinship with him.

After dinner, you stand on the porch alone.

The stars are out, but they look wrong. Too clean. Too ordered.

Behind you, through the window, he see Marley washing dishes. See your mother drying them, back to him.

Inside was peace.

Out here—you pull the amulet from your pocket, feel the weight of it.

Out here, something is waiting.

Now

Enlisted young. The Corps. The desert. The badge. All of it drawn by some hand you’d never see till it was too late. And now. America laid open like a wound. Smoke and silence where the towers once stood. And you laid out on this cot in a safe house they said was clean. The girl you saved, on the other side of the blue tarp that separates the two of you, is still working on her laptop.

The stink hits you again. Meat long gone. Sour. Once it turned your gut. Now it’s just a part of the world. Like dust. Like rust. Like grief.

The dogs still barking. Something feral in it. But the screaming has gone out like a fire in wet wood. And from outside, Rocío’s voice: “What the fuck was that?”

You tell yourself: Get up, Marine. Check the wire.

You rise. Slow. The blanket clings and the skin pulls and your pants hang heavy and wet. You don’t look down. You know. You remember the dream. The corn. The thing that rose up from between the rows and kissed you with a mouth full of ruin. A tongue like a snake, slick and choking.

There something’s seriously wrong with me, you think. Something’s desperately wrong with my soul. I made a mistake. At some point I went wrong. I need to get right with God.

You steady yourself. The safe house is dark and humming with static. And there it is. A few feet off. Small. Still.

Takes you a moment to understand what you are seeing.

Then it doesn’t.

The body of an infant. Dead. Flesh rotting. Dissolving into the concrete floor like wax under fire. Skin bubbling. Eyes gone. No mouth to cry with.

And in your chest, something breaks. Quietly.

---

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes
• Chapter Five: Shadow Work
• Chapter Six: The Suck

Optics

Senator Wexley. The door shuts with the weight of finality. The city is muffled behind tinted glass. You sink into the leather like a man descending into water. Dust streaks your slacks. Sweat dries in the hollows of your collar. Your hands lay open on your knees, black with soot and stone, your nails rimed with blood. No theatrics now. You had earned the grime.

Across the avenue the wound of the South Tower lay open to the sky, raw and vast, as if the hand of God had pulled it up like a rotten tooth. Men in helmets move among the ruin like shades condemned to labor. The air still chokes.

The engine stirs beneath you. You do not move. You lean your head back. Your eyes shut against the light. Your breath shallow. The dust in your nose, in your mouth, in the lining of your coat.

Buzz.

The phone stutters in your breast like a second heart. You open your eyes. The name on the screen burns like scripture. Whitman.

“Bryce. Bryce, listen to me.” He says. “I just watched it. Every network. You’re standing there at Ground Zero with your sleeves rolled, dirt on your face, hand on a first responder’s shoulder—you looked like the real goddamn deal. Not some legacy suit hiding behind a podium. You looked like command. Like authority. Like destiny.”

“Yes, just like we planned. I’m tired of this. Now, what’s next?” You ask.

“Bush is finished. He’s yesterday’s man. He’s Yale Skull and Bones, he’s oil cartels and country-club cowardice. That whole crowd’s fading like the Marlboro Man. You? You’re the new architecture, Bryce. You’re the forward-facing myth. The post-liberal axis made flesh. You just stepped into the breach. And people saw it. They felt it. You ready to be a president, Senator Wexley?”

“You’re goddamn right.” You snarl.

“Let me tell you what this is. We’re in the early stages of an epochal realignment. The whole post–Cold War liberal order? That soft technocratic slime they called governance? It’s burning. The rubble behind you—that’s not just the Towers, it’s the entire myth of American exceptionalism collapsing under its own weight. And out of that chaos, out of that ash? Comes a figure. Stoic. Strong. Pre-ideological. That’s you.”

Whitman loves the sound of his own voice. You’d stop him, cut him off clean. But he’s speaking on you now. And that you don’t mind.

“We’re done pretending this is about left and right. This is about order and decay. This is about building something sacred in the bones of empire. The next rulers of the world will be men forged in catastrophe. Not hedge fund clowns. Warriors of the eschaton. You’re not running against Bush, Bryce. You’re running against the 20th century. And you’re gonna win. Because people don’t want consultants in khakis. They want the man who walks through fire and comes out anointed by it. You looked Presidential today? No, no. You looked inevitable.”

You know Whitman well enough to hear the slack in his drawl. The words come slower. The fire gone out of them. He’s winding down. You’ve seen it before.

“Get your head right, Bryce. Hydrate. Sleep if you can. Because tomorrow? Tomorrow’s a deployment. We hit the ground running. Media wall to wall. Sunrise to sunset. Every outlet, every camera. You’re not doing interviews—you’re building narrative. This is the blitz phase. No letup. No dead air. You’re the tip of the spear now. And we drive it all the way through. Bryce, ol’ boy, you done good.”

You hang up.

You feel it. The rising heat. The blood beat in your ears like war drums. You are the thing that comes when the hour grows late. And the people—they will get what’s owed.

You forced your way into Alpine like a thief at a banquet. At first, you played the part. Looked away. Signed the papers. Let the bodies vanish and took your coin. But that was never enough. You wanted more than the taste. You sent kid girl sniffing, that pale girl with the code name: Swift Knees Eighty-Five. What was her name? Belle something. Belle Flower. That was it. You used her to pry open the door, and when the moment broke, you were already inside. Part of it. Of them. Whitman loathed it. Loathed you. But he could do nothing. Could not lift a hand.

You thought Whitman soft. Thought him weak. A coward dressed in cleverness. But now he’s seen you true. Hitched his wagon to yours. He’s hardened. Become capable. Become something else.

So have you.

Once the Senate was enough. The mask of duty. The illusion of service. But the presidency—too vast, too fraught—once seemed beneath your appetite. No longer. Whitman was right. It was never ambition. It was fate.

The city moves around your armored black car like a dream. Sirens wail distantly, muted behind bulletproof glass. Ash falls on the windows like snow, streaks of neon bending like nerves under pressure. Inside: leather, silence, the glow of a phone. It’s Lorraine Henshaw, your secretary.

Lorraine Henshaw is forty-two. Boston born. More handsome than fair. A face carved stern and plain, near matronly. Not the sort you’d have picked for a post such as this. You’d have taken a girl with softer edges, something easy on the eyes. But Henshaw came in like weather. A front you could not stop. And before you’d made sense of it she was in the seat across from you, already working.

Your wife raised an eyebrow. Then smiled. Said she was glad you’d finally chosen someone who led with their mind and not their figure.

In the time since, Henshaw has become a fixture. A spine to your operation. You hate the truth of it, but you lean on her. Heavily. There are mornings she knows your schedule before you’ve risen. She is brisk. Exacting. In her manner, you catch something of your mother. That hard-won competence. That quiet command. And though you’d never say it aloud, you are grateful for her. More than you like to admit.

You pick up the phone.

“Senator! I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time. I just got off with Mister Whitman—he and I are finessing tomorrow’s media schedule. He’s brilliant, by the way. Brilliant. The way he talks about optics—I swear it’s like he invented the word.”

“Yes, Lorraine,” you tell her. “I’ve been working with Whitman and training him to utilize his inner talent, which was previously neglected.”

“You’ve brought up the best in him.” She says. “And your appearance on Tough Talk this morning? Sir. You owned the moment. And Ground Zero? My God, you looked so virile. So presidential. The cameras weren’t even supposed to be there, but of course they were. You in your suit, lifting debris like you belonged to the earth itself. You didn’t just look like a leader. You looked like America. I—I think you’re going to win this thing, sir. I truly do. Bush won’t know what hit him.”

“It’s good to hear you’ve come around to my destiny, Lorraine. Usually you’re much more critical of my appearances.”

The man you were might’ve measured him fair. Seen Bush as a rival worth the weight. But that man is gone. Now you see Bush for what he is. A sorry thing. Meek and stumbling. And you mean to break him. Grind him down to dust beneath your heel.

“Senator… can I say something personal?”

“Speak freely, Lorraine”

“I think I gave you bad advice. About Alpine. About not… looking too closely.” She says. “It wasn’t my place. I know that. And more than that—I was wrong. Dead wrong. You’ve changed, sir. Since then. There’s a… power in you now. A stillness. You’re clearer. More certain. And if I may be bold—there’s something… sexy about it. About you.”

She laughs lightly, nervous, aware she’s crossed a line.

“Anyway. Just wanted to say that. I’ll email the talking points for tomorrow by ten. God bless, Senator.”

She disconnects.

There’s a sliver of unease. Thin as a knife’s edge. You don’t rightly know what she’s talking about. Alpine, yes. In the broad strokes. The shape of it. But the finer cuts are lost to you. Blurred. Like a dream on waking. Still, you don’t let it trouble you. You’ve no time for doubt.

And yet you find her praise agreeable. The gleam in her voice when she speaks of your stature. Your bearing. Henshaw, who’s spent her years henpecking like your mother before her. Now turned apostle. She sees you now. As Whitman sees you. As you are. And that, more than the truth of her words, is enough.

The limousine moves through the city like a shark. Each turn of its wheels carving space between you and the smoking crater where the world had come undone. The towers gone to ash and bone.

You sit in the hush of the cabin, not asleep but unanchored. The weariness upon you earned and absolute. And yet some joy unbidden stirs beneath the exhaustion. A brightness. The glow of something born at last into light.

The phone in your pocket stirs again, interrupting your reverie. You stare at it a long moment. A text message from Caruso asking you to call him at the number he provides. A payphone, no doubt.

Why Caruso dogs you now in the hour of your ascendancy is beyond you. But he would not press without cause. You signal the driver. “A pay phone,” you say. “Now.”

The limo glides to a stop, and you step out. The air is thick with grit and smoke, death clinging like a second skin. The stink of it coats your throat. People drift through the streets, eyes rimmed red, mouths slack. You raise your collar. Shield your face. No need to be seen.

You find the phone, feed it coins, and dial the number he gave you with hands that don’t quite feel like your own.

“Senator. Good news. That situation we talked about? It’s handled.” Caruso’s voice is low, but there is an edge to it. “You were right—guy was a goddamn head case. Wouldn’t shut up. But I put one in the back of his skull, nice and quiet. Clean work. Yanked the teeth, ground ’em down like dust. Took what was left out to a farm I know. Fed the whole mess to a pen full’a pigs. By this time tomorrow, they’ll be shittin’ out his remains.”

“Good. I don’t want to hear any more about it.” You tell him.

“One more thing.” Caruso’s voice tightens. “Before he went quiet, the guy kept runnin’ his mouth about Alpine. Over and over. That ring any bells?”

“Alpine? Place has a population of less than 1200. Why would he be talking about a small town? Strange. I’ll look into it.” You say.

“Anyway. You take care of yourself, Senator. We’ll talk soon.”

The line goes dead.

Alpine. Again.

It gnaws at you. The blank of it. Like a name half-formed on the tongue. You know it mattered. Know it lay at the root of all that shadow work. The vanished. The hacker girl. And Whitman. That’s where you found him or he found you. The line blurs.

You remember it all. Until you don’t. The base itself—beyond the checkpoint, past the gate. After that, it’s noise. Fragments. Smells. Shapes. Then nothing. And that nothing unsettles you more than you’d care to admit. Because it was recent. Close. You can still feel it on your skin. The clearance was top-tier. Eyes-only. Buried so deep you’d need a map and a spade. And yet a ragged man, some sidewalk prophet, had whispers of it in his mouth.

Mercer was meant to handle the Belle girl. He failed. Now he rots in custody. The vagrant? Taken care of. Permanently.

You pull out your phone. Type slow.

To Voss: There might be some moles around Alpine. Did you leak?

You stare at it. Thumb hovering. Then send.

Minutes pass. The screen buzzes once.

From Voss: Negative. Will investigate.

It has been a banner day.

Your suit is spoiled, sweat-stained and caked with the grit of a nation’s graveyard. Your limbs ache with the labor of honest work long forgotten. Last time you felt this raw and drenched with sweat was when you hired that damn golf coach. Had you swinging over and over under a sun that peeled the skin. No shade. No mercy. Just the weight of that club and his voice counting off the strokes like a sentence. You held your tongue as long as you could. Then you didn’t. Sent him packing. Never picked up the club again.

The stench of the people clings to you still — the broad and broken many. But none of it matters. Not now.

You have laid your cornerstone. Set your hand to the foundation of something vast. The crowd saw it. The cameras. The nation. And Whitman — at last — Whitman bends the knee in his own fashion. Calls your name like a priest calls fire. You are no longer his gamble. You are his altar.

And Caruso — God bless him — he has done what you feared you could not. The last ghost swept from the stage. The one man who knew too much now known no longer. Gone to the earth, or what devours it.

You feel something rising in you. Barely held. A pressure behind the teeth. You want to laugh. You want to howl.

But still —

There was something in Caruso’s voice. Not the usual gravel and threat. No. Something else. A hitch. A tremor. As if the man had seen a shape behind the world and it had looked back.

Caruso. Afraid.

You chuckle in the back of the limousine. The sound dry and low.

No.

He’s carved from bedrock. You’ve seen him break men with his silence alone. Whatever you heard, it was a trick of the line. A phantom in the wires.

The rest of the day stretches before you like a red carpet unrolled through the heart of empire.

You arrive at the tower as dusk lays its last hand on the city. It stands there in its vanity, black glass and gold. The brass doors spin without end. Men enter and men leave. A nearby flag hangs at half-mast. Still as judgment. No wind to stir it. The SUVs idle at the curb. A low growl in the throat of power. The doorman tips his cap without looking.

Inside, the concierge greets you. A man who knows well the hungers of those who rule. He leans in with the hush of a priest.

“Any medicinal needs, sir? A companion, perhaps?”

The words fall harmless. Once, they might have found purchase. You’d have taken the drugs, the body, the forgetfulness. But not now. That man is gone. You nod and pass.

Your suite is high above the city. You peel off the day. Step beneath the scalding hiss of the shower and let it burn what it must. When you emerge, you dress in something clean and cut sharp. The old suit—filthy, frayed at the soul—is thrown out.

You ring Henshaw. Wake her if you must. Tell her to find a photographer. First thing. You want headshots. Statesmanlike. Something for history to get right. You say nothing more and she says nothing less than “Yes, sir.”

Later, the room gone still, your hand moves of its own volition. Finds the case. Cold steel with a lock you don’t recall setting. You open it.

Inside, the knife.

Long and black. Twin-edged. At its center, a gem the color of old blood, pulsing faintly. You lift it. Turn it.

Time slips.

The blade hums some low frequency in your bones. You do not know where it came from. Alpine, perhaps. Or before.

You sit with it. The red stone fixed like an eye. And you understand.

The knife is you.

Not the man you were. But the thing you’ve become, of what comes next. Not promise. Not threat. Only certainty.

Next Level

Bryce Wexley. Vince sets the blade to the tape and draws it slow. His hands shake. The edge is notched and fouled. He works the strip free. Then another. The tape comes away with a sound like breath through teeth. The chair groans beneath you as you stir, wrists welted and raw, the skin gone the color of bruised fruit.

“I’m sorry, Senator.” He says. “Jesus. I didn’t know. Thought you were just another nutcase with delusions of grandeur. You kept going on about Alpine and the twins and—I didn’t believe a word of it. But after what I just saw…"

“It’s all right, Vince, I know it’s a lot to take in. You got to, you’ve got to call the impostor and tell him that you took me out.”

“That’s, that’s a great idea, Senator.” He says. “Give me a moment. Lemme collect myself.”

Vince finishes cutting the last strip. Lets it fall. His breath catches. He wipes his face with the sleeve of his shirt, smearing tears across his cheeks. Unknowingly streaks of something pink and grey now nest in his hair.

He turns. Looks back and forth. Tommy slumped against the wall. Bue on the floor, drooling. The other one next to Bue like a man halfway to judgment.

Vince squares his shoulders.

He goes to Tommy first.

The boy’s face is still stretched in awe. Eyes wide. Mouth open. Like he’d seen the face of God and it wasn’t beautiful.

“Oh, kid…” he says, lowering himself to his knees. Gently folds Tommy’s arms over his chest. Closes his eyes with the pads of his thumbs. Palms lingering there, shaking. Vince leans in. Mouth near the boy’s ear. “Tommy,” he says “you were a good boy. I’m sorry I brought you here.”

He sobs once, short and hard. Then he’s quiet. Hands on his thighs, head bowed.

He stands. Wipes his face again. The tears smear what’s left of Tommy further up into his hairline. He doesn’t notice.

Vince crosses to the bodyguards. First Bue. Then the other. Both slack-jawed. Gone inside.

He crouches, snaps his fingers in Bue’s face. “Hey. You in there?” He asks.

Nothing.

He slaps him. Hard. Bue’s lip splits open.

Still nothing.

Vince exhales through his nose. Rises. Pulls his phone from his back pocket.

“Yeah. Spilled some wine in the guest house of La Jolla. Needs to be cleaned up. Hell of a thing. Pick up a bag of laundry while you’re at it.” He says, and then looks at Bue and his other solider. “Two guests drank too much.” He says. “Passed out. Make sure they’re okay.”

He ends the call. Slides the phone into his jacket. Thinks. Then looks to you. He sees your hand. The blood slipping from the raw bed where the nail once was. Says nothing. Just turns and walks out.

When he returns he brings gauze and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He pours it over the wound and the fire of it rips a sound from your throat you didn’t know you had. He binds your hand in silence.

The gauze soaks through slow. Like a flower opening in red.

“Okay, Senator.” He says. “I think I know how to play this. Let’s go. I got another place we can go where no one will think to look for us. We can make plans there.”

“I’m not leaving here without a gun.” You tell him, and grab Bue’s pistol from the giant’s holster.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Senator, point that thing down to the ground. I’ll get you up to speed on how to shoot it later.” And then Vince presses painkillers into your palm. “This will help take care of the pain.” He says, you down them dry,

Vince removes Bue’s bullet proof vest and straps you in it, adjusting it to your slighter frame.

Vince shrugs off his bloodstained jacket. Uses it to mop the mess from his face. Wipes it across his cheeks, his mouth, the creases under his eyes. Then tosses it over a chair and walks to the main house.

He returns a few minutes later wearing a track suit, the jacket taut across his gut.

You both walk to the main house.

The girl is still there. Perched on the edge of the couch. Legs crossed. T-shirt, panties, long brown cigarette coiled in her fingers. Next to her, the man with the bloodshot eyes who first opened the door.

Vince walks straight past them. Doesn’t slow.

“You two.” He tells them. “Out. Don’t come back.”

“I need to get dressed—” says the girl, and the man slaps her across the face. A sharp crack. Her head jerks sideways.

“We leave. Now.” He tells her.

He grabs her by the hands and drags her stumbling toward the front door. She doesn’t resist. She doesn’t look back.

Vince moves to the kitchen. Grabs one of the laptops off the marble counter. Closes it. Tucks it under his arm.

Turns to you. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The town car waits at the curb. Engine low. Windows dark.

You climb in. Vince follows. The doors shut.

And just like that, the house falls away behind you. The hedges. The guest house. The place where something came through and changed the rules.

The road unwinds.

The pills take hold. Slow and certain. Your limbs turn to lead. Your thoughts unwind, slack and senseless. There is comfort in it. The weight of the vest across your chest, the cold press of the pistol at your ribs. You don’t know how to use it, not really. But you’ve seen the films. You know how men look when they kill.

The comfort doesn’t last.

As the last of the adrenaline bleeds out, the sickness crawls in. Your nose leaks blood. Your ears too. The itching begins. The rash. It always comes first, before the visions. You try to raise your hand, to claw at yourself. Nothing moves. You lie like a corpse. Mouth open. No sound. Just the wet line of drool on your chin.

Your eyes remain open.

The world folds in on itself. Faces bloom like wounds atop the living. Grotesque. Watching. Vince sits beside you. But his face cracks. Hardens. Plates of bone sliding from beneath his skin. He is molting. Becoming. You’ve seen crabs do this on the shore. You’ve never seen it in a man.

The city beyond the window slides past like a dream. Every passerby blind and mute, lips sewn, eyes sealed. A parade of meat. The sun opens like a lidless socket. One great eye rimmed in fire. Around it, a halo of smaller eyes, blinking and staring, always staring.

Vince looks at you. He’s afraid. He doesn’t understand. But he sees the ruin in your face. The color gone. The sweat. The dead weight of you beside him.

He lights a cigarette. Offers one to you. You do not speak. Cannot.

Your eyes find his. In them you see motion. The slow churn of claws beneath the skin. He draws back. Silent. Leaves the cigarette on the dash.

And drives on through the dark.

The highway spills off the 15 and into a lonely cut of blacktop, a gas station sunk into the earth like a blister. The lights above it buzz in their housings and cast their pale light across the pavement. The air is thick with the smell of old fuel and sunburned rubber. The town car idles beneath the canopy, its motor ticking. Overhead the sky hangs low and dirty, the color of sheep’s wool dragged through ash, smeared at the edges by the city’s ruinous glow.

Inside the car the you sit with your hand swaddled in gauze, the fabric browned through with blood. The ache is dull now, flattened beneath the pills Caruso had pressed into your palm. But the memory remains. The smell of Bue’s breath. The snap of the nail tearing loose. The explosion of pain.

The painkillers and the visions have subsided. You are wrung out like a rag. Hollowed. Spent. Not just in body but in mind and spirit. As if some great tide has passed through you and taken all but the shell.

Vince slides the car into park and opens the door. His shoes hit gravel and glass and the door shuts behind him with a thump.

He walks across the lot beneath a halo of failing light. Finds a payphone. Vince pulls a worn black flip book from his coat and opens it to a page. Presses numbers into the keypad. He lets it ring. Then hangs up.

He stands there with his back to the car and the wind teasing the hem of his jacket. Waiting.

The pay phone rings.

He answers. Talks. Nods. Hangs up.

He dials again.

This time he speaks at length. Hangs up again.

He returns to the car and does not speak. Slides into the seat and pulls the door closed behind him.

The engine purrs as you pull away for the gas station.

“Senator,” he says, “it’s done. Your… twin. The other you. That situation’s handled. Permanently.”

You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding. Long and low. “Good,” you say.

“We’re heading north. Gonna see someone. Name’s Trenody. She was mixed up with that Heaven’s Gate mess back in the day. Only one that walked away. Used to think she was cracked. Talking about signals and watchers and doors made of teeth. But after what I saw today… She might be the sanest person I know.”

Vince glances at you.

“Look. I gotta know, Senator. What happened in Alpine? Why are there two of you? What the hell did you people do out there? I need to know whats going on so I know what I’m getting into and how to help you. Talk to me, Bryce. Start from the beginning.”

You take a deep breath. Gather your thoughts. And tell him.

“I knew something big was happening in Alpine. My secretary Lorraine kept pushing me, telling me I had to get on top of it or I’d miss my shot. So I hired a hacker to dig into it. With the intel she gave me, I went to General Voss and invited myself to a base out there. It’s just outside a small desert town. Real quiet. But out in the hills, they’ve built something secret. They took me in. What I found was stranger than I imagined. There’s talk of a cult. Aliens. Experiments. They say I’m the key. They grew another version of me. A copy. A twin. They say it’s part of the process. Somehow, I escaped. I don’t know how. It’s like what happened in the guest house. Something follows me now. I feel it in the back of my skull. Always just behind. Watching. I have to kill the other me. That’s the only way. He’s taken over my life. It’s the only way to reclaim what’s mine.”

As you speak, Vince watches. You’ve known him long. Done things for each other that don’t bear telling. But now there’s fear in his eyes. Real fear. And it unsettles you in a place you thought long calloused. He listens without a word. Weighing each one like a man sifting for lies.

Some part of him thinks you’ve slipped. Lost the thread. But the rest remembers what he saw. The thing in the room. The way the air turned wrong.

And that part believes. Or wants to.

“All right, Senator, this is way beyond my pay grade, but I’ll help you. I just don’t know what to do. What’s the plan?”

“For now? I need to sleep.” You tell him.

“All right. We got about a half hour drive ahead of us. You just kick back, rest up. I’ll let you know when we get there.”

Vince drives north with the sea falling away to your left, cliffs bleeding down into the surf. The sun low behind you. The shadows lengthening. He pilots the town car with one hand on the wheel, the other resting like a dead thing in his lap.

You pass Torrey Pines, where the trees leaned toward the wind, their roots gripping the sandstone like the fists of the dead. Then on through Del Mar Heights, where the houses sit quiet and sunburned, their windows catching the dying light.

As you climb into Rancho Santa Fe, the road narrows and the world softens. The scrub goes lush. Oleander and eucalyptus. Wide lanes shaded by olive trees brought over a century ago and still refusing to die. The air smells of loam and cut grass. There is a moneyed stillness, bought and bred.

Gated estates rise like fortresses, hedges grown tall and sculpted into walls. Horses move behind wrought iron. Stucco walls blooms with bougainvillea, and the mailboxes are shaped like old-world lanterns. There are no sidewalks. No strangers. Just wealth gone to seed.

Caruso turns onto Paseo Victoria. Slows the car. Nods toward a stone-wrapped estate set back from the road behind a curtain of pepper trees.

“This street used to be called Colina Norte. Before it all went sideways.” He says, pointing through the windshield. “That’s the place. Heaven’s Gate. All thirty-nine of ‘em. Lined up like dolls. They tore the house down. Demolished it. Built that mansion in its bones. New owners now. Rich types. Wine cellars and prayer rooms.”

He drums his fingers on the wheel.

“This neighborhood’s got memory. But folks like to forget. Keep it quiet out here. Best not to trespass. Outta respect. You understand.”

Vince taps the brakes. The car rolls forward a little farther. He points again.

“That one. Down there. That’s where Trenody stays.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then speaks as if confessing.

“Back in the mid-nineties I was expanding—moving money through properties that didn’t like paperwork. Retreat centers out in Joshua Tree. A sweat lodge in Temecula. That Heaven’s Gate house—cleanest books I ever saw. Didn’t know what they were doing. Didn’t care. They paid in cash. Bundles. Crisp. Never asked for anything. And the tax shelter? Airtight.”

Vince sighs.

“First time I saw Trenody she was playing some tinny keyboard, humming like she’d seen heaven and it hadn’t impressed her. I was there to twist arms. Get a greenhouse permit signed. She didn’t even look at me. Just kept playing. Then they went and drank the Kool-Aid. Or whatever it was. Bodies all laid out like a choir. The deed was tied to one of my paper shells. If the Feds dug too deep, they’d find blood and fingerprints all over the wrong ledgers. So I did what I had to. Burned the trail. Sent in a cleaner. Cleaner didn’t come back.”

Vince glances at you.

Two nights later, she shows up. Trenody. In my driveway. No shoes. Wearing that black Heaven’s Gate sweatshirt. Holding a VHS tape labeled EXIT. She was crying and laughing. Both. Hands wrapped in gauze. Burned through.”

Vince pulls the car to a slow stop before the estate. Stone wall. Iron gate. No intercom. No guards.

“She told me, she couldn’t go with them. I let her stay. Pool house. Fed her. Let her talk. Then I watched that tape. Started like you’d expect. Bunk beds. Uniforms. All lined up neat. Looked like one of those news clips they ran on the networks, except the camera was moving. Someone walking around with it. Breathing real loud. Tall as sin. Dressed in wire and shadow. Face like a snowstorm on a dead channel.”

Vince shudders, then continues his tale.

“And those fingers, Bryce. Christ. Long like tines. Like something that pulls you apart slow. They were on the screens. Still. But not right. Eyes moving when they shouldn’t. Jaws working like they were trying to chew through silence. Then it cuts. Just static. Buzzing. But under it, I could still hear them. Talking backwards. One guy kept saying,  ‘I am not my name. I am not my name.’ Then comes the ritual. You’ve seen the photos. Black clothes. Nike Decades. All that. Only in this version, their mouths don’t stop moving when they go still. They keep whispering. Like they’re still in the room.”

Vince stares out the windshield, seeing something only he can see.

“Couldn’t tell what they were saying. Sounded like locusts learning to pray. And up on the ceiling… something was spinning. Not fast. Not slow. Just… wrong. Like it didn’t care what gravity meant. Like it was above laws. Above God. Trenody says it wasn’t a ship. Said it was a door. And she was right. Because the last thing on that tape—was me.”

Vince turns. Holds your gaze with his eyes.

“Standing in my own driveway. Two nights after the suicides. Wearing my robe. Smoking a cigarette. Looking straight into the camera. But I wasn’t being filmed. Not by anything on this planet. I smashed the tape. Burned it in my sink. Swore to forget. But I still see it, Bryce. That thing. That room. That mirror. And that version of me? The one in the frame? He wasn’t blinking. And he wasn’t smoking. That’s what I saw on that video tape.”

Vince exhales. Unbuckles his belt. Looks over at you.

“She’s not right, Senator. But maybe none of us are, after what we’ve seen. She keeps the place up. Lives quiet. Doesn’t talk much unless you ask the right kind of questions."

He opens the door. The air smells of eucalyptus and lavender and something faintly electric

“Come on, Senator. Let’s go see Trenody. She’s expecting us."

She owes you all right, you think.

Vince walks to main door, which opens just before he rings the bell. The woman who greets him has hair that is long, unbrushed, the color of rusted copper. It falls around her face like a veil, matted in places, threaded with dried lavender stalks. Her face is gaunt, though not starved. Her eyes wide and glinting, the irises a pale green that seems nearly colorless in the dim. She does not blink often. There is a stillness to her.

Her hands are scarred, pink latticework across her palms and fingers, the skin too smooth in places, too new. Old burns, long healed but never forgotten. She clasps them behind her back as she watches you approach.

She wears a denim skirt that hangs asymmetrically and a pair of hospital socks, the kind with rubber grip on the soles. One is missing.

She and Vince look at each other a moment, and then she gives him a quick, clumsy embrace.

When she looks at you, she tilts her head like a crow noticing a new kind of shine.

“You’re the one who came back wrong.” She says.

“What do you mean?” You ask her.

“You’ve seen something like I did.”

“Yeah,” Vince says’ “she’s still like this. Trenody, this is the friend I told you about.”

“Pleased to meet a fellow traveller. How are you called?”

“Bryce.” You tell her.

“You look familiar. Have we met?”

“Can’t say we have. You might have seen me on TV.”

“Are you an actor?” She asks. “A newscaster? How would I know you?”

“I’m a goddamn senator of the United States of America.” You tell her.

She looks at you again and something shifts behind her eyes. Your face settles into its shape within her memory. She knows you now.

“Oh, yes,” she says, “you did come back wrong. Please come in.”

She leads you through the house, slow and silent, her steps echoing off marble and stone. The place is vast. Built for ghosts or gods.

Vince leans in close, his voice low. “Senator, you helped pay for all this. Consider this place yours.”

She takes you to a patio in back that overlooks a large pool. She offers you both chairs and iced tea, and then she sits.

Three weeks past you lived soft, born into wealth, the world laid smooth before you. Then the fall. Down into the gutter, into the stink of dumpsters and the hard cold of pavement nights. This morning you found yourself in a modest house in La Jolla. Not rich. Not poor. But now you stand in an estate vast and quiet, an place that feels more like home—more like the world you come from.

It unsettles you. You don’t show it. The shift in scale. The return. You’ve changed in the fall. You don’t take the taste of cold tea for granted now. You drink it slow. Like it means something.

The sleep did you good. Your bones ache less. The sun is kind. The hush of the house stretches out like a hand. For the first time in a long time, you feel the edge of peace. A whisper of hope.

Vince lights a cigarette. The smoke drifts. Trenody looks at you. And she sees something.

“They called me Trenody, back then.” She says. “Trenody of the Next Level. Funny how that name still fits, even after all the others fell away. It means a song for the dead, you know. In the Classroom, we learned that our bodies were not really us—they were vehicles. Just a kind of container. You learned to speak of them that way. ‘My vehicle is experiencing discomfort.’ ‘This vehicle needs rest.’ You stopped saying ‘I.’ The ‘I’ was your mind, your true self—the part that came from the stars, from the Evolutionary Level Above Human—we called it TELAH. That was our heaven. Not pearly gates. Not clouds. Just pure function, pure unity, no ego.”

It sounds hopeful, almost childlike in its reach. You’ve never given much thought to the line between mind and body, but now it settles in you with the weight of something half-remembered. A shape in the dark that makes sense only once it’s passed.

Heaven, though. That part rings false. A story for the weak. Trenody speaks of it like a place she’s seen with her own eyes, but you know better. She’s not right. Not in her body. Not in her mind.

Still, there’s something in her. Something tied to the things you’ve seen. The wrongness. The signals. Vince is right—she knows more than she should. And she believes herself to be a piece of this thing.

You believe it too.

But not all of it.

Some of what she says is broken. Bent. Maybe she’s lying to herself, maybe she’s been lied to. But not everything she tells you holds weight. And yet still, you listen. Because some part of her knows you. And knows what’s coming.

Trenody continues.

“Ti and Do were our shepherds. Ti was the feminine aspect—Bonnie—and she left her vehicle earlier, cancer. We called it her Exit. That is what death was: an exit ramp off this freeway of lies. Do carried the rest of us after she left. He grieved, I think. In a quiet way. Like a computer with a corrupted drive, still trying to run the program. We were the Crew. Just passengers waiting for the signal. We wore uniforms—black shirts, black pants, those Nikes everyone talks about now. But that was just the outside. Inside, we were mind, shedding our humanness. We practiced slippage checks—any hint of desire, vanity, memory—and our check partners would call it out. No love. No jealousy. No families. Some of the men even underwent castration—Do did. Said it helped quiet the noise.”

“Oh, boy. You say under your breath.

Vince’s face is stone. You figure he’s castrated people before, and with blunter tools.

Trenody looks down.

“The signal was the comet—Hale-Bopp. Do said it was the marker. Behind it rode The Craft. Not a ship like in Star Trek. It was metaphor and machine, both. And it was coming for us. I did not take my Exit. I—my vehicle—failed. I stayed behind. Sometimes I dream that they are still in orbit, waiting for me to be ready. They called it madness. A cult. But we called it preparation. The Earth, they said, was about to be recycled. Only those who had purified their minds could be evacuated. We believed it. I believed it. Now? Now I live in this place. I do not use contractions when I speak. I still say ‘vehicle’ without thinking. And every time I hear the word ‘crew,’ I see them again. Sitting in rows. Eyes bright. Waiting for the Craft.”

Tears stream from her face.

When Trenody speaks of the Earth being recycled, something clicks. A thread winding tight through your own theories. Maybe that’s the bargain. Maybe that’s always been the bargain. The Earth scrubbed clean. Burned down to the roots. And a few chosen taken. Preserved like insects in amber.

You see it now. The government don’t run the show. They serve it. Provide specimens. In return they get seats on the lifeboats. Escape pods for the elect. When the blade drops. And it’s dropping soon.

The thought coils in your gut like wire.

You’re too tired to mask the shift in your face. Vince sees it. Sees the fire catch behind your eyes. Watches you. Watches Trenody. Back and forth. His gaze like a pendulum. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t need to. The silence holds the weight.

“TELAH is The Next Level.” she tells you. “The transcendental, non-human realm we aspired to ascend to — a higher evolutionary level above human existence. The Space Aliens are beings posing as higher powers but actually working against the Next Level.”

“Is there a lower level? What’s at the lower level?” You ask her, your gut churning.

“There is a lower level. There is TELAH, and then there is the Luciferians. They are our fellow humans who are trying to stop our glorious plan. And then there are the space aliens, who are posing as higher powers but actually working against the next level.” Her yes lock on yours. “Please, I need to know,” she pleads, “the things you saw, were they TELAH or space aliens?”

“They were definitely space aliens. There was no sense of purity or goodness about them.” You think of Wong. Maybe he is an outlier. “They are terrifying and awful.” You tell her.

Trenody looks away. Smiles. A brittle thing that barely holds.

“That is what they all said.” She says. “That is what we said, back then. Ships and beings from the Next Level. Galactic shepherds here to ferry the worthy. That lie was soft. Easy. It made suicide feel like a promotion.”

She sets her iced tea down. Walks to the window. Stares out into the dark.

“But ships do not haunt your dreams. Ships do not bleed time. Whatever came through… it was not made of stars. It was made of memory. And it remembers us.

“My dreams are mainly haunted by horrible crab people and people with their eyes and mouth sewn shut.” You say.

“It is not a stranger. It is not visiting.” She continues. “It is not an outsider peering in through the window of reality. It is something older than humanity, older than language, older than light. And it has been here before. Maybe not in this form, maybe not in flesh or in craft—but in myth, in ritual, in dreams, in the architecture of the mind. It has encountered us before—not as explorers or abductees, but as material. As tools. As fuel. It knows our patterns—the rhythms of human thought, the edges of fear, the seams where identity frays. It knows our story better than we do, because it may have written parts of it.”

As Trenody speaks, a cold settles in you. What once sounded like the ramblings of a fractured mind now strikes true. Her words fall in line with what you felt. What you saw. The thing that touched you and left you marked. The Entity. Its voice still echoing in your skull.

Your face betrays you. Something in it shifts. Trenody sees it. She nods slow.

“This Entity—whether it is called TELAH, a god, a signal, or an alien — is not discovering humanity. It is returning to it. It remembers us because we belong to it in some deep, pre-linguistic way. Because we are, at least in part, its expression. And when you called it an alien, you placed it outside the self. It remembers us means: It knows the doors in your head. Because it built them. It is not learning you. It is waiting for you to remember it back.”

She then says nothing. The room seems to hold its breath. There are no words spoken between you and Vince. Then at length, as if some verdict has passed unseen, she rises.

“I have something to show you.” She says.

Trenody takes your hand and leads you out. Vince watches. Meets your eye and gives a slow shake of his head. He doesn’t rise. Just sits there in the quiet, smoking his cigarette down to the filter, the ember burning low and mean.

She leads you down a narrow hall behind a woven curtain. The air is cooler back here. Denser. Like something was sealed long ago and still breathes in the dark. The walls are lined with banker’s boxes and obsolete tech—reel-to-reel players, Betamax decks, a dusty Sony camcorder that looks like it witnessed a war.

She unlocks a low cabinet with a brass key shaped like an ankh, though the top is broken—more hook than symbol now.

Inside: is a single burnt film frame, encased in glass. The edges are melted, warped inward like the heat came from behind the image.

She holds it up to the lamp.

The image is nearly black. But there’s just enough left.

She hands the frame to you, and what you see is figure in a dark hallway. A mirror at the end of it. The figure is walking away. But in the mirror, he’s walking toward the camera.

Closer.

And closer.

And smiling.

The grin is wrong. The eyes are too calm. The teeth are too many.

---

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes
• Chapter Five: Shadow Work
• Chapter Six: The Suck

Cattle Waiting for the Sky to Fall

Senator Wexley. The phone rings. Whitman again.

“You’re on every goddamn screen in the country, Bryce! Standing in the ash like a statue. That’s what they needed. That’s what they missed. Now here’s what comes next. You get your hands dirty. Roll up those sleeves. You dig with the firemen; you pray with the chaplains, you bleed a little if you have to. And you don’t speak until someone asks. You show them what a man looks like.” Whitman is on a roll. “This is what it’s about, Bryce. We are out of step with this decaying world not because we’re lost—but because we belong to another age. An age of order. Of sacrifice. Of hierarchy. And now that age is clawing its way back through fire and steel, and you—you—are its herald. You’re not out of place, Senator. You’re right on time!”

“Yes,” you say. “The sniveling weaklings need a strong leader to show them the way.”

“Bryce, listen close.”Whitman says in a conspiratorial tone, “Our man was supposed to tie off the threads in San Diego. The Flower girl. She slipped. Asset failed. Sloppy work. Unacceptable. Now, don’t panic. I’ve already got a new team en route—Delta boys, off the books. And I’m not just sending them to mop up. I’m sending them to cleanse. Burn the rot. You understand me?”

“Oh yes,” you tell him. “I get your drift. Wipe them out completely, leave no sign they ever existed.”

“Exactly. This is the age of men who do what must be done, Bryce. The rest are just cattle waiting for the sky to fall. Images are the biggest con ever invented. They don’t represent reality—they replace it. A fake becomes the reference point. You lose the original. Go give them the image, Senator!”

“Will do.” you say, and the line goes dead.

You sit with your hand on the door latch. Beyond it the sky rains ash and cinders and the towers burn like funeral pyres. You brace yourself to step out when the phone rings. You glance down. Vince Caruso. Breaking his own protocol. Breaking the one rule he swore to keep: Never call the mobile.

You hold the phone a moment longer than you should. Then you answer.

“You been busy.” Caruso says. “When I saw you on Tough Talk this morning, you had the fire in your gut, Senator. But that ain’t what got me. What got me was two hours later—your face, your whole damn self. Standing in front of the wreckage, covered in ash, you looked real presidential out there.”

“Thank you, Vince. Good to hear from a loyal supporter such as yourself.”

There is a moment of silence. Then Caruso speaks again. “Tell me something. You got a twin brother I don’t know about?”

“No, I’m an only child.”

“Reason I ask, I gotta guy holed up who claims he’s you. Tommy says he looked like a drifter, but once he cleaned up, he looks like you. I mean—exactly like you. Same height. Same nose. Same eyes. Scared out of his mind, raving about being replaced. Claims you’re the fake. Says he’s Bryce Wexley. Says you walked out of Alpine and took his life.”

“What the hell, that’s some lunatic. There must be a coincidence that he looks like me.”

“I want to know what the hell I’m looking at.” Asks Caruso. “And more importantly—what do I do with him?”

“I don’t give a damn.” You say. “Throw him out on the street. I don’t know who the fuck he could be.”

Caruso sighs. “All right. But Senator—this shit’s above my pay grade.”

“Don’t bother me with nonsense like this again.” You tell him and end the call.

You check the mirror before you move. Tilt your chin. Square the line of your jaw. The handsome devil looks back at you. You signal the driver with a flick of your fingers, and he steps out into the smoke to open your door.

The air hits you like a wall. Foul and wet and heavy. Your throat starts to close against it.

You crouch by the curb. Dip your fingers into the grey runoff pooling there. Then into a clump of ash. You smear it across your brow just above the right eye. Just so. A mark. A small touch of ruin.

You stand. Shoulders back. Eyes sharp. Scanning the broken street for cameras. For reporters. For witnesses.

You are ready now.

Ready to play the part.

The skyline burns. Smoke rises in spires of ash and ruin, the color of bruised ochre and old bone. The sun hangs behind it like a tarnished coin. Ash sifts from the heavens like slow snow. The wind bears the stink of jet fuel and blood and the black iron tang of burnt wire.

The sirens wail. From near and far. The sky stitched with the roar of rotors. A bell clangs. The radios whisper code, sorrow, and static. Somewhere in the bones of the ruin a girder gives way with a groan like a beast dying slow.

You stand there. Sleeves rolled. Tie gone to soot. Your hands blistered and blackened. Your nails cracked and rimmed with the dry red of other people’s blood. You hold one end of a rebar rod, the firefighter the other, and you pull like men at the plow. No speech between you. Just breathe and sweat and labor beneath the pall of a broken sun.

You shove at a slab of wreckage, heaving it up with both hands as if you expect to find something living underneath. There is nothing—only dust and ruin.

You look to the photographer standing hollow-eyed nearby. “Hurry up and get this shot!” you say. “I’m hungry.”

The woman lifts her camera without a word. The click of the shutter is sharp as a whipcrack in the smoking silence. She does not understand, or she understands your callousness too well. Either way, she obeys.

A body bag passes. Zipper closed. You stop. Close your eyes. The stench rises like incense. Meat and plastic. Circuitry charred to bone. You breathe it deep.

You are near the end of your patience with crawling in the dirt among these worms. You reckon you’ve earned a drink and a wash besides. The filth clings like a second skin, and the temper in you stirs mean and restless.

By the triage line, a girl coughs dark into a rag, spotted already with her life. You kneel. Lay your palm on her back. “The ones who did this will pay. We will hurt them. We will hurt them badly.” You tell her.

Nearby, a priest prays. Garbed in black. Words low, soft as dust. You bow your head. You mumble, make some vague gestures, and turn to the cameras and say, “The righteous wrath of the Lord is with us. We will make these heathens suffer for challenging the country blessed by God.”

You hear the voice of the world as it unravels. Radios. Weeping. The wind.

You join the line. Hands on buckets. Hands on bricks. Hands on memory. A ring in a palmful of dust. Gold catching sunlight in the ruin. You look at it and think it an ugly thing. Low karat gold, dull and false beside the ring you wear on your own hand. You look and did not take. Turn and keep digging.

A man retches in the gutter. Another falls like timber. You do not turn. Your eyes raw. Your teeth clench against some deeper tremor.

A woman comes with a mic in hand.

“I’m only here to lend a hand, my dear, standing with the weary and the wounded in their hour of need.” You say, feigning anguish. “But soon I must depart to join the finest minds our nation can summon, so that together we may see justice done and hold accountable those who brought this abomination upon us.”

She covers the mic with one hand and leans in “Senator, if you run for president, you’ve got my vote.”

You place a hand on her shoulder, look into her eyes, “Thank you. Every vote counts.”

A bottle comes. You open it. Do not drink. Pour it down your scalp. Steam rises. The sweat and the ash sluicing down the ridges of your cheek. You breathe. Straighten. Say nothing.

In the distance, the wreckage smolders like the altars of a fallen faith. The flag stands among it, limp and then lifting—red, white, and blue beneath a sky that had forgotten such colors.

You stand beside it. Silent. Your shadow stretches long across the dead. The dust rises round your shoes. And you breathe the breath of the old world gone. And the new one not yet born.

You steady yourself, a smile flickering beneath your practiced solemnity. You think of the great responsibility soon to be placed in your hands—of the trust, the authority, the mandate born from fear. And you welcome it. All of it. For their sake, of course.

The Veil Shall Thin

Bryce Wexley. The light through the blinds cuts the room in slats, and you sit still in the chair they’d found for you. Tommy had rigged a dropcloth from a plastic sheet he took out of the limousine. The girl—you still don’t know her name—smokes long brown cigarettes by the kitchen window, her gaze wanders.

Then comes the knock. Three soft taps. Tommy answers, low words exchanged, and the stylist enters.

Young man. Slender. Hair in a bun. A satchel of tools that jingle. You tell him to cut it high and tight. To make you look like a man built for war. He nods once at you and sets to work.

No words for a long while. Only the sound of the scissors, the faint hush of hair falling to tile. You watch the strands drift down, brown and silvered and coarse with age.

You ride high still. You have turned the tables on your enemies. You will take back what was stolen. You will stand safe behind your hired men and bring the false Bryce to ruin. Make him kneel in the dust and kiss your boots for the sin of wearing your face.

The stylist trims along the jawline, the nape. He moves with care, his fingers sure. Then pauses. His reflection in the mirror catches your eye.

“Do you want to keep the beard?” He asks. “It looks good on you. Regal.

“Regal, you say? Like a king? Well, I suppose so.”

He works the shears with the slow patience of a man working on something delicate. Fifteen minutes of snip and silence. When he steps back, you lift your eyes. The man in the mirror is clean now. Clean. Well-groomed. Your dyed hair gone, leaving only the grey. A trimmed beard, pointy at the chin. The best you’ve looked in weeks. But not the same. The bones show sharper beneath the skin. The eyes hold something hollow. The face has been carved by fear, worn thin by hunger and long hours in the dark. Not a man reborn. A man returned. From somewhere worse.

“You like?” He asks, holding a mirror so you can see your reflection of your back.

At first you don’t like what you see. Shrunken. Worn down. You tell yourself it is the look of a soldier. A man ready for war. Fighting fit and hard as coffin nails.

The stylist sweeps up, gathers the tools of his trade, and leaves.

An hour later, the tailor arrives. Drives up in a dented Lexus with dealer plates, carrying two garment bags and a case the color of gunmetal. Tommy opens the door and lets him in without a word.

The tailor is small, dark-skinned, late fifties maybe. Wire-rimmed glasses. Calloused hands. He looks you over like you are a problem that could be solved with the right math.

You stand in the center of the room stripped down to undershirt and boxer briefs, the girl gone somewhere deeper in the house. Tommy sits on the arm of the couch, scrolling through his phone like none of it concerns him.

“Shirt first,” the tailor says. You slip into it. White. Crisp. The fabric whispering as you pull it down over your shoulders.

“Pants.” The tailor hands them over. Wool. Expensive. You button them slow, felt the weight settle across his hips.

“Jacket now.”

You slide your arms in. The tailor steps behind you, pulls at the shoulders, tugs the hem. Then come the pins. Fast, efficient. Cuffs. Lapels. Waist.

The man circles you like a sculptor sizing up the stone. Adjusts his tape. Measures you again.

Then he crouches, one knee to the floor. Looks up at you. Clears his throat.

“Do you hang to the left or the right, sir?”

“Left.” You tell him.

The tailor nods. “Very good.” Then he marks the adjustment, not even blinking.

“Very good. Take them off, please. I’ll have them ready for you within the hour.”

“Hey, Tommy,” you ask. “how many, how many boys you got ready to ride with me?”

“Hey, look, that ain’t my call, alright? That’s Mr. Caruso’s business. He’s on his way right now, you can take it up with him. Anything else I can do for you, Senator?”

“You got those, those guns, and the bulletproof vest I asked for?”

“Nah, I don’t. Far as I know, Mr. Caruso’s got that handled. You want a drink? A smoke? You want the girl too? Don’t get shy on me now. Just say the word, Senator. I’ll make it happen.”

“Any cigars?” You ask.

“I do indeed.” He takes one from the humidor, trims it, and lights it for you as you puff away as you think about your impending victory.

You smoke the cigar slow and easy while the tailor works his trade and leaves. The suit fits like a second skin. You marvel at how the flesh has fallen from your bones. You have not worn a frame so lean since the days when you still believed in such things as future and fortune. You look damn near magnificent.

There comes a knock at the door. Three times. A pause. Two more. Another pause. Then four raps sharp as bones on wood.

Tommy goes to answer it and when the door swings wide a man fills the frame. Broad as a barn beam and dressed in a suit that strains at the seams. The bulge beneath his coat plain enough to know without seeing. A gun.

Behind him comes Vince, smiling with all the warmth of a winter sun. And behind Vince another man larger still, big as a linebacker, carrying a duffel bag slung over one shoulder like a sack of feed.

Vince Caruso stands with the bulk of a man gone soft with comfort but not yet fallen to ruin. His hair slicked back, black and gleaming like tar in the sun. His suit loud in cut and color, more flash than form. He carries the air of a California businessman who remembers violence but speaks now with the easy grace of money. Late forties. A fighter gone to seed but still dangerous in his way.

Vince spread his hands wide like a man offering benediction.

“We need to have a conversation. Not here. Guest house out back’ll do. Tommy, you come too.”

The big man steps through first and opens the door to the backyard, motioning for you to follow. Vince and the giant in his wake. Tommy hesitates, then trailing behind like a condemned man.

The guest house is nice enough, although the air stale. Vince takes a seat in a chair by the window, crosses his legs easy.

“I’ll never forget this day, Senator. World Trade Center. Pentagon. Lord knows where that last bird was bound. White House? Capitol? The world ain’t ever going back to what it was.”

As Vince talks, Tommy busies himself at the kitchenette, grinding beans, rattling cups. The two suited men go to work in the living room, pushing the furniture against the walls without a word. From the duffel, the giant pulls a sheet of clear plastic like the kind painters use. They unfold it, heavy and slow, and tape it down to the floor.

“Yeah, the planes, it’s crazy.” You say. “I think the imposter must be behind it. It’s all connected. We’re going, we’re going to connect the dots. It’s all, it’s all ties together. I know it.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that.”

Your gut curdles.

“I don’t know what you’re doing with this plastic. Hey, I already got my hair cut. We don’t, we don’t need the plastic.”

“Oh, no, Senator, this isn’t a haircut.”

From the bag came sealed packets. They tear them open and shake out white hazmat suits. Don them like men dressing for war. Tape their boots, their wrists, their throats.

The giant sets a single chair in the center of the room and covers it with another sheet of plastic.

Vince nodded toward it. “Have a seat, Senator.”

You break into a sweat. You do as he says. You walk to the chair, slow and reluctant, like a man stepping into his own grave. You keep your gaze locked on Vince’s eye.

“What’s this all about? Vince, you trying to double-cross me? Are you in league with the imposter?”

Vince steeples his fingers and speaks low.

“Don’t know who you are, the man said. But you ain’t Senator Wexley. Know how I know? Cause I just spoke to him myself. And you know what he told me?”

He leans in close, his voice calm as prayer.

“He told me to get rid of you, but first, we’re gonna have a conversation.”

“You believe him? Ask me anything! I know everything about you! We go way back, Vince!”

“Oh, I’m gonna ask you lots of things.” Vince growls.

“Vince! You remember the first time we crossed paths? Wasn’t on a golf course. Wasn’t at a fundraiser. It was in that little bar down in City Heights, smelled like piss and bleach. You were still running numbers for the old man. You remember? I was nobody back then. Fresh off my first election win. City Council. Eighteenth District. Nobody paid me any mind… except you. You slid that manila envelope across the table. You didn’t say a word. Didn’t have to. Five grand in untraceables. No letterhead. No promises. Just a note: Remember your friends. And I did, Vince. I did! When the rezoning deal went through? You got first crack at those lots. When the city contracts came up for grabs? Your cousins got the bids. When the neighborhood association needed a new board? You picked the chairman. I never forgot who carried me when the big boys wouldn’t.”

As you speak a red light blooms from Vince’s belly like a wound torn in the fabric of the world. It pulses slow and terrible. No man turns to see it. Only you. As if it were meant for your eyes alone.

“I never forgot how you vouched for me when nobody else would touch a clean-skin kid with a trust fund and a crooked smile. You remember that thing down by the docks? The warehouse? The one we don’t talk about? I remember it too, Vince. Every second of it. Every shovel full of dirt we packed over that mistake. You and me. So don’t you sit there looking at me like I’m some stranger. I know you! And you know me! Question is, who do you want standing with you? The Senator with the cameras and the lapel pin? Or the man who never forgot who gave him his first goddamn shovel? Vince. We’ve been through so much. How could you, how could you doubt me? I’m right here in front of you!”

The more you talk the more light spills from Vince’s belly getting brighter and brighter.

He steeples his fingers and he says, “I don’t know who you are, but you know an awful lot about me, and we’re gonna get to the bottom of this. Now, the Senator, he told me to get rid of you, didn’t exactly say how, but we’re gonna find out a little bit more about you.”

“Wait, Vince, wait! How do you know the Senator is real? I’m telling you, he’s an imposter! He doesn’t have this information I just gave you”

“I’ll give you this. You do look like the Senator, but you’re thinner than the Senator. And I just saw my TV, not once, but twice. Saw him Tough Talk, and I saw him at ground zero. Whoever you are, we’re gonna find out. And Bue here,” Vince nods to the giant, “he’ll make sure you don’t clever with the details.”

The big man, Bue, goes to the duffel bag. Sets out the tools deliberately. A hammer. A set of pliers. A propane torch still scuffed from old work. Lays them in a row like relics before an altar.

He looks up. Smiles without mirth.

The quarterback pins you to the chair with strips of duct tape, binding your wrists and ankles.

Bue hefts the pliers, turns them once in his hand like a man testing the heft of a blade. Then he crouches. Takes your hand in his. Chooses a finger. Sets the teeth of the pliers against the nail, ruining your recent manicure from earlier.

“Who are you?” Asks Vince.

“Did the aliens get to you? Did they get to you? Vince, are you in league with the Greys?”

Vince frowns. “Wrong answer.”

Bue jerks his arm back in a short, brutal snap, and pain floods you so fierce it blots the world to a single white star.

The studio lights are searing. You sit across from Phil Doherty beneath the glow of national attention. You are dressed in a midnight blue suit. Power tie, discreet flag pin. The perfect American.

Doherty leans in. His voice is smooth, practiced. “Senator Wexley, your new reality show premieres this Friday. Cameras follow you into the halls of power—and maybe behind the curtain too?”

“What? What? Who, who? What do you mean?” You say.

You hear applause. Canned and clean.

Camera two zooms in.

The red light blinks. But it’s not a camera light anymore. Not entirely. It’s the red emergency beacon above the blast doors in Alpine, blinking as the first scream cuts through the feed room.

A technician mutters something in Russian. You sign off on the stack of files beside you. You don’t ask what the names mean. They’re already in the system.

“Some say the Senator is a man with vision. Others say you’re chasing ghosts. What do you say to the critics?” Asks Doherty.

“The ghosts are real! They’re aliens! They’re out there!”

The applause fades. It becomes the hum of fluorescent lights. Flickering. Failing.

The klieg lights that shine on you during your crucifixion. Blood in the grout. 3,333 human subjects arranged in rows of cots. Some drugged. Some still whispering prayers. All gone before the door was sealed.

You remember their names. You remember nothing.

A figure approaches. He is pale. Clad in surgical white. No eyes—just skin pulled taut across sockets. He hands you the last form. “The final seal must be affixed by one who has been seen.”

“I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” You scream.

Something brushes against your mind. A fouling. A trespass. It is like two pounds of sand poured into a one-pound sack. You feel it spill into you. Heavy and wrong. You are full to bursting. You cannot hold it, and yet you do.

Phil Doherty is saying something about leadership. About unity. But you can’t hear him. You are watching the monitor behind him. It’s playing footage from Alpine. The screen is not supposed to be playing that. But there it is. Out in the fields stand strange shapes. Sculptures that cast no shadow and lean against the sky. The earth is scoured clean in great rings. The bodies lie there too. Flayed and splayed. Pinned like insects by some hand unseen.

The chanting gathers in intensity.

A wide shot of you standing between two glass pods. Each holds a version of you. One gestating. One fully formed.

You flinch. The camera holds.

“Everything okay, Senator?”

You scream.

The pods hiss. One opens.

The version of you that remains inside is not awake. He is dreaming. That dream pours into you like cold black water. The pod opens and you fall to the floor, a thing discarded. A thing aborted.

The other pod cracks open. The doppelgänger steps out. Perfect hair. Perfect skin. Smile unbroken. He does not look at you. He does not need to. He has already replaced you.

“You are the door,” say the twins in unison. Their mouths do not move. Their voices come from within your skull.

You lunge at the doppelgänger, hands groping for his throat, wild to close on it, to crush the life from him.

Phil Doherty leans forward. “Senator?”

Your scream goes on without end as you clutch at the throat of your own likeness, bent on throttling the life from it.

“And what does the future hold, Senator Wexley?”

You turn to the camera.

The feed distorts. The audience screams. You are no longer in the studio.

You are beneath it, in a room that does not exist, a dark space humming with ritual geometry, with blood in the seams of the tile. The applause echoes like ritual chanting. You look down. Your hands are red. Not metaphor. Not symbol. Just blood. Still warm.

From the edge of the dark, your better self steps forward, suit immaculate, hair perfect.

He speaks in your voice, but the words are not yours.

“Thank you for joining us. Now the veil shall thin.”

Phil smiles at you, grinning ear to ear and then some. “We’ll be back after you return from the Alpine.”

He smiles. The lights go out.

The Bue and the other man lay curled on the floor like something folded in on themselves. Their breaths shallow. Their gaze fixed not on any thing in this world. Catatonia. Or else some deeper fugue. A silence without end.

Caruso kneels in the wreck of himself. The front of his slacks dark with urine. His face lifted as if in prayer, though there was no god to meet it. He sobs without shame.

Tommy slides down the wall. The stink of voided bowels is sharp in the air. He shakes like a struck animal, eyes wide, lips working. “No. No. No. No. Too much. Too much. Don’t. Want. It. In. My. Head.”

He draws the pistol from his holster with the slow resolve of the condemned. Sets the barrel in his mouth. Pulls the trigger.

The blast cracks the room like thunder made flesh. A bloom of blood and bone cast like seed against the drywall. You feel the spray of it on your face and newly coiffed hair. Warm.

Caruso blinks. Looks at the body, then at you, then at the sleeves of his coat, slick with what remains of Tommy’s brain.

He bares his teeth.

“What the fuck was that? What just happened?”

You try to lunge at him but are still bound to the chair.

Caruso stands in the blood-warm hush of the room, taking in what he’s seen. His face turns slack, his jaw goes heavy. Behind his eyes, the slow grind of thought like stones moving beneath old earth.

He looks at you then. Looks through you. The kind of gaze a man gives the moment the veil lifts and the truth of things comes screaming in.

“Bryce, I didn’t believe you. Can you blame me? It sounded like lunacy. But after what I just saw… Fuck. It’s true. Every goddamn word you said.”

His voice breaks. Then something else passes across his face. A flicker. A spark behind the eyes. Realization.

“Bryce. Oh God. Bryce.”

He steps back from you as if the air around you had turned to flame.

“I told the other one. The Senator. I told him about you. He knows you’re here. In San Diego. We gotta move. We gotta get you out of here. Right now!"

Cyberphr33kz

Belle Flower. Your mother leads you into a mirrored tent where every reflection is wrong. Not backwards—wrong. The glass shows versions of you spliced with beasts: a second head curled like a fetal twin; feathers sprouting from your scalp; your torso shaped like a spider’s abdomen; goat hooves stitched where your hands should be; he body of a horse grafted to your spine; a toucan’s beak nailed over your nose and mouth. The seams are rough and weep blood and pus in slow and endless measure. Each reflection speaks in your mother’s voice.

“You were born opened,” they say.

“The mother of monsters takes her own.”

This has to be a dream—a nightmare. You have not seen your mother in so long, and yet here she stands. You don’t know how you came to be with her, and you don’t know why. You thought you had escaped, thought you were free. But you are back—back in this place—and you cannot say how.

In one of the mirrors, you see the words stitched in silk, the letters running backwards: La Belle et la Bête. Your mother towers over you, her hand heavy on your shoulder, whispering things you cannot bear to hear. “Perfection is a curse. We’re saving you from it.”

She nods to your reflections in the mirror.

You want none of it.

You feel yourself cleaved from your own being, slipping away, and you would give anything to be made whole again.

Your mother tuts and turns you this way and that before the glass. In the mirrored depths, you see yourself adorned with new monstrosities: a rhinoceros horn fastened to your brow, the hide of a zebra sewn raw along your back.

“These are your inheritance. The Mother doesn’t want pretty things. She wants truth.”

You turn to run, but the mirrors fold in, closing like a flower. You see your father, kneeling, weeping, clutching something in a cloth. You lift the edge.

It’s your own face, calm, doll-like, stitched at the lips, eyes wide open.

Your body begins to unravel. Scars split open, revealing not organs but symbols carved into bone—sigils you doesn’t recognize but feel burning in your skull like migraine. You collapse into the dirt, and the bones of your spine stretch up like a serpent, rising from your back.

Even in the dream, you try to scream, but your mouth is sewn shut with silver thread.

You wake with tears running down your face. Maybe you whimper. Your throat is raw, and every muscle in your body screams. You are cold to the bone.

As the world steadies, you feel the bandages wrapped around your elbows and skull. Your right wrist swollen and dark with bruising.

You are in a car. The sky is bright and blue, and the trees slip past in a blur. A highway sign swings into view: Chula Vista. Five miles.

The man driving wears a shirt loud with flowers and a bucket hat. He leans to the dash, and the fog on the glass clears. And that is when you see it. On the back window, a shape reveals itself in the glass: a spiral. You didn’t draw it. But it’s there. A perfect coil.

You feign sleep. Breathing slow. Eyes half-lidded. Biding your time.

The car slows. Gravel cracks under the wheels. Above you, a sun-faded sign leans against the wind: Rico’s Autos.

The man nudges your shoulder. “Hey, you awake? How you doing? You up yet? Hey, hey kid.”

You stir like something half-dead, come back from the dark.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

He looks at you, and there is something like sympathy in it, though not quite.

“You’ve been through a lot. I’m Detective Grayson, FBI. I was investigating you—routine background—planned to meet, ask a few questions about matters you’re already familiar with. But things escalated. You were attacked. No question, the man intended to kill you. We stopped him. He’s in custody. Right now, we’re at a secure safe house. Intelligence suggests you’re being followed by individuals with hostile intent. Our priority is your safety. That said—you are in legal trouble, young lady. We’ll address that when the immediate threat is neutralized. For now, you’re secure. I intend to keep it that way. Are you hungry? Need anything?”

“I think I know what you mean,” you say. “But I don’t think I’m who you think I am. I’ve been trying to get back to my apartment. That’s what matters. There’s someone I was supposed to meet. I need to go.”

“All right,” Grayson says. “Some of your belongings were taken by whoever this guy was working for. The rest are in the custody of the San Diego Police Department, pending evidence processing. We’ll do what we can to recover them, but right now it’s tied up in red tape. Is there anything you need urgently—medications, anything critical?”

“If I could get my cell phone?”

“Is there anyone you need to contact right now?” Grayson asks.

“Yeah. There’s someone I need to talk to.”

Grayson studies you.

“I want you to understand the situation.” He says. “We’re aware of your involvement with certain online message boards, and we believe you had prior knowledge of the events that unfolded today on the East Coast. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“No, and I don’t have my phone or laptop or anything to prove anything or, you know, have any evidence. Do you have a warrant? Or, like, are you detaining me?”

You’ve spent your life evading eyes like his. Hackers don’t talk to agents. That’s the rule. But you’ve seen things. You know that much. You just don’t know what it all means.

Grayson exhales.

“All right, listen,” He says. “I don’t have a warrant. And I know your type—suspicious of law enforcement. Frankly, we could have a long, philosophical debate about whether that suspicion’s justified. But right now, here’s the truth: you shouldn’t trust me. Look at me. I’m not even dressed properly. It’s ridiculous. All of it was to keep you alive. A little gratitude would go a long way toward making this process easier—for both of us. But I understand where you’re coming from. You don’t have to say a word right now. All I need you to do is step out of the car. We’re at an FBI-sanctioned safe house. We’ll take this one step at a time."

“How do I know you won’t just tie me up?”

“You don’t know that for sure.” He says. “Your options are simple: you can stay in the car while I figure this out—I’m not going to drag you out—or you can get up and come with me. I don’t advise running. It’ll only make things worse. I’m going to look you straight in the eye and say this: You’re safe. And you can trust me—at least as far as knowing I am who I say I am.”

You study his face—the small flickers of truth behind it.

“What happened to my friend in the trailer?”

“He took a round to the stomach. He was in bad shape, but he was still alive when the paramedics took him. We can call the hospital and check on his status if you want. You’re welcome to use my phone if you need to call someone. Do you know the number by heart? Because you’re not getting your own phone back anytime soon.”

“There’s someone I do need to call. Someone I’m supposed to meet.” You tell him.

“I’m advising you to be careful. You’re not in deep shit—not yet—but you are a person of interest. If you’re thinking about calling a drug dealer or anyone like that, I strongly suggest you don’t. Now, who exactly were you supposed to be meeting?"

“Buck Flanagan. He’s family, in a way. I haven’t seen him in a long time, and we were supposed to see each other.”

“Would you like to make that call here, or would you like to make that call inside?” He asks.

“I’ll take the call outside.”

You step out into the light.

The garage squats in the dust like some gutted thing. A pale blue ruin under the morning sun.

Chain-link fence rattling in the wind. Beyond it, the sound of traffic, dogs, a siren. Two rust-bitten cars out front, still as corpses, their windshields cataracted with grime. The windows boarded or blacked out. A patch of wild grass clawing through the cracked asphalt, obscene in its greenness. Oil-stained concrete and cigarette butts. No name on the door. No mailbox. Only the faint scent of rust and rot.

Grayson hands you his Blackberry. You fumble with the keypad, pretending to recall Buck’s number. But you’re digging.

Grayson’s recent calls:

A number from San Diego.

A Boyd Whittaker in Los Angeles.

Marley Ginger.

Dolores, last name a heart emoji. Cute.

Calls to a General Virek.

Multiple to Langley, Virginia.

Text from Alicia Hightower: I’m here to talk if you need me.

Grayson’s reply: Thanks.

You dial Buck.

His voice jumps through static. “Belle, are you okay?”

In the background you hear: elephants trumpet and heavy machinery beeping.

“Yeah, I’m, I’m okay." You tell him. “I don’t know how I will be able to meet you. Some guy, some Fed, picked me up. The guy who was been following me, that guy I told you about earlier, he found me again when I was at Red’s house in the trailer park. He tried to get in, and he shot at me, and I’m okay. Just grazed my temple. I got knocked out. Right now, I’m in Chula Vista, but I’m gonna be able to meet up with you. Where are you?”

“I’m still in Arizona. I got about an hour to go, and I’m gonna head out of here. I’ll get you the phone and clothes you asked for. I can’t believe what’s happened to you! I’m glad you’re okay. Red hasn’t a picked up his phone, though.”

“I think he’s in the hospital.” You say. “There’s more, but I can’t talk about it now. I’m on someone else’s phone. But I need a way to reach you.”

“I’ll call this number when I’m an hour out. Tonight.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

You hand the phone back to Grayson.

The wind moves around you.

Grayson opens the trunk of the car. Inside lay a flak vest, a pump shotgun with the stock taped up crude, and a med kit with dried blood rusted at the latch.

And your laptop.

Compaq Armada. Old but built like a tank. Loved by hackers for being cheap and stubborn and born for Linux. Security men and pentesters prized them, too. The black plastic casing plastered with stickers. One, the sad ghost face of an old Macintosh screen. Another of some local band: Drive Like Jehu. Your hard drives velcroed to the sides like cargo meant for rough roads.

And there, too, was your phone.

“Look,” Grayson says, voice steady. “I’m going to need some assurances from you—that you’ll cooperate. If I hand this over, you’re free to make your own decisions. But I’m coming clean with you. I want to work with you as an informant on an issue of national—and international—security. There’s more I can tell you, but right now I need a commitment. I’m just asking you: don’t run. Cooperate with me a little while longer.”

You look at him. “I have no choice,” you say. “I have nowhere else to go. I’ll stay. I’ll cooperate. But I need to know more before I give you anything. You owe me that.”

He doesn’t answer because the door groans open behind him, a Winston smoldering at the edge of his mouth. His hair buzzed tight, gray at the temples. His eyes lock on you, then your shirt. “I’m a Steve Earle man myself.” He says. Then to Grayson. “Afternoon, Agent. What division you say you’re from?”

“It’s Lookout division, but you wouldn’t have heard of it.” Grayson shows the man his badge.

His jaw works behind the smoke. “We just moved our C.I. on your say-so. You know how hard it is to move someone when they’re halfway through an investigation? Come on in. I’m Leland Carrick. Everyone calls me ‘Lee.’”

You step through the door, and a fly drifts in before Grayson. Its green thorax catches what little light there is. It moves without urgency, as if summoned, as if it belongs.

Inside, the air smells of rust and ghosted gasoline. A ceiling fan spins slow overhead, creaking in protest. Pigeons rustle in the roof beams. Lanterns threw long shadows against hanging tarps that formed makeshift walls inside the converted garage bay.

A work lamp buzzes, its filament pulsing like the heartbeat of something dying.

Wires snake along the walls, half-hidden behind torn insulation and peeling paint.

In the garage bay, the roll-up doors braced shut with welded iron bars.

A foldout table held a scatter of maps, a pair of radios, a pistol laid out on a towel like an offering. A coffee can full of cigarette ash. A Gideon bible wrapped in duct tape.

The cameras run silently, their feeds flickering green in the half-dark like frog eyes in a swamp. Someone had written a phone number on the wall in grease pencil. A knife stuck into the drywall below it. And beneath it all, the quiet hum of power drawn from a rigged generator.

Carrick turns to Grayson. “You were at Waco. You think it was about guns? Or did somebody not like the idea of a messiah in Texas who wasn’t federal-issued?”

“That’s a can of worms,” Grayson says. “My friend, I would be happy to break it down over a few beers someday. But right now, there’s a lot in motion.” Grayson’s face clouds. Were you there?”

“Nah, I got some buddies with the A.T.F. who were there. But yeah, I’ll take you up on that beer. Let me introduce you to the crew.”

A man in his early twenties sits cross-legged on a milk crate near a surveillance wall, sipping Mountain Dew from a can that looks older than the kid himself. He wears a faded Bauhaus tee. C.R.T. monitors glow green behind him.

“Yo, uh, is this the package?” he asks, blinking furiously. “Didn’t know we were running intake again so soon. Was about to heat up some Cup Noodles.”

Carrick nods in the direction of the kid. “That’s Evan Park, our surveillance tech. Evan, this is Agent Grayson.”

“Call me ‘Blinky.’” the kids says. “Wait a minute. You’re the Agent Grayson? So, uh… real talk, Grayson—what if Kaczynski wasn’t wrong, y’know? What if we’ve already crossed the threshold? Like, the control systems are too good, and now we’re all just… sleepwalking into a technological apocalypse?”

“Honestly, I think he was more right than he realized.” Grayson tells him. “I don’t know what kind of evidence he had, but you folks are asking questions that are way above my pay grade right now. Like I said, get a few beers in me sometime, and we’ll talk it through—at least what I’m cleared to discuss. Some things I know, I’m not authorized to share.”

“Roger that.” Blinky says.

A woman steps in from the side bay, braids tight. She glances at Grayson, then you, then Carrick. “Who the hell’s this?”

“That’s Miss Belle Flower.” says Carrick. “New intake. Temporary. Agent Grayson, this is Deputy Marshal Rocío Velasquez.”

“You can call her ‘Ro.’” says Blinky.

Rocío Velasquez steps up and extends her hand to Grayson. You can tell she has a strong grip. “Good to know you, Agent. You better not be bringing ghosts into this place. We just cleared one out on the say so of your friend, Guthrie. We can stay on board for a day or two to help out.”

“That would be great.” Says Grayson. He leans in. Whispers something meant for no other ears.

Carrick leads you toward a back room. Former office. Two cots. One chair. A place for the displaced. “You can sleep here.” He says.

Ro crosses her arms. “Not taking the panic room?”

She nods to the pit in the floor covered by a mat and some tires. Steel ladder leading down to the dark.

“Bathroom’s still dead. Use the bucket system. Fresh water’s in the jug. Don’t flush if you can help it.” Says Carrick. “Generator’s on its last legs. How long you need this place?”

“Honestly, I don’t expect we’ll need this location for long. We’re likely going to stay mobile.”

Velasquez asks: “And what’s the girl running from?”

“She’s been through a lot, so let’s keep this professional. She’s rattled—needs time to get her footing. What I can tell you is she’s witnessed violence, and she’s been targeted. At the same time, she’s a person of interest. So stay sharp. And let’s make sure she doesn’t disappear on us.”

Velasquez looks at your feet. “Well, I don’t think she’s going to go too far. Let me get you some sandals, kid.”

Velasquez pulls out a pair of flip-flops from a bag.

“Where is the bathroom?” You ask. “Because I need to take a shower and wash my feet.”

You wash. It helps only in the way it always helps. A little. Not enough.

Later, Grayson comes to you. The overhead lights threw long shadows.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. You don’t have to trust me—I get that.
But I’m asking you to stay put.” He says. “Right now, this is the safest place for you. We’re going to work with you to figure out a long-term plan. Going back to your old life isn’t an option—it’s not safe anymore. I know it’s a lot to take in. I’m sorry for that. But you could be a critical asset in something bigger than either of us. If you need anything, let me know. These folks here will make sure you’re taken care of."

“Okay. Thank you.”

Grayson nods and leaves.

Blinky hands you your computer. At long last, you’ve got your laptop. It feels like it’s been an age since you last had it. You plug in Blinky’s ethernet cable, adjust your settings and you are back online. You can tell that your laptop is being monitored. You open a terminal window, type rapidly, and you are free of scrutiny. Across the room, Blink does a spit-take with his Mountain Dew. Tries to play it cool.

You check your PayPal account. You’re flush.

Alerts pinged. eBay. Cyberphreaks message board.

You ignore the eBay alert, focus on the message NullCatastrophe, fellow denizen of Cyberphreaks. It was sent in the dead hours before the towers fell.

“Need help,” they said. “Something’s following me through the sites. It’s coded in corrupted JavaScript.”

NullCatastrophe spoke of a digital presence. A thing without form but not without will. Drifting between domains like smoke through a keyhole. It left marks in comment threads. Whispers in backend code. A glimmer in the static. You follow the trail, but each time you do, your browser begins to act strange: the URLs redirect to nowhere. Your webcam flickers on for a moment, then off. And the speakers—your own speakers—say your name. Not the name the world knew. The old name. The one sewn into a silk banner above the freak tent: Belle et la Bête.

And you ask yourself: “Did I hear it? Or did it hear me first?”

You hunch deeper into the chair. Lose yourself in the code. Barely notice when Blinky drops food and soda at your elbow. Didn’t see night fall until he turned on the lamp.

Later, Grayson comes back. Wearing the Federally-issued suit of his kind. Asks how you are. You muttered you’re fine.

He nods. Lay. on a cot. Out cold in minutes.

Hours pass.

The air grows cold. Your breath steams like smoke from your mouth.

From the other room comes a sound. Low. Wounded. It’s Grayson. A whimper. Wrong from a man like him.

You freeze.

And from the edge of your vision, a shadow moves.

A shape large and bent and black.

The rot hits you next. Thick and wet in your throat. Your stomach turns.

A thud. Wet meat on concrete.

And the thin, thin wail of an infant.

Each time it cries, your body answers.

Your breasts swell.

Your nipples throb.

Yellow milk leaks and soaks your shirt.

You can not move.

You can only listen.

And you could only pray it had not yet seen you.

The Box

Agent Nicholas Grayson. You drive the Impala away from the safe house. Carrick called it South Glass.

When you left the Kearny Mobile Home Park you called Guthrie and told him you needed a place. He said you wouldn’t like it. He was right. Still. He delivered.

The crew were solid. Carrick and Park asked too many questions but you could live with that. Velasquez kept her questions to herself. That counted for something.

You told her to make sure Park kept an eye on Flower’s internet use.

“We want her motivated to dig.” You said. “Get her whatever she needs. But monitor her internet activity—covertly. And bug the phone. I want a full record of who she’s talking to.”

You watch the lights of the city drag past the windshield.

You hope Flower will be all right. Surprise yourself with the paternal instinct kicking in.

Still. She is stronger than she looks. You can see it plain. The way a tree grows twisted in a hard wind. The scars told the story whether she wants them to or not.

General Virek calls. Sounds like he’s walking through a hallway.

“Agent Grayson, I only have a minute. Today’s been hell since the attacks. Your digital footprint’s been compromised. Someone’s been sniffing around your secure files, but the IP trail’s been rerouted through a series of proxy servers—maybe even a chain of zombie nodes. It’s clean work. Could be Russian, could be Chinese, could be private-sector. The signal’s been bounced too many times to trace directly, but the access pattern suggests they’re combing through Alpine-related intel. Whoever they are, son, they know what to look for.”

He hangs up.

Your Blueberry vibrates.

Guthrie.

“I just left the trauma unit at UCSD Medical.”

“How is he?” You ask.

“Mathers is alive. Took a round to the lower spine. Paramedics got to him in time, stabilized his vitals. But it’s bad.”

“Jesus.” You say under your breath.

“He’ll live, but he’s not walking again. Bullet severed the spinal cord. Complete paralysis from L2 down. The surgeons installed a colostomy system. He’s looking at permanent care. No more rodeos. Not ever.”

“Guthrie, keep me up to date on his status.”

“Yeah. He’s unconscious for now. Heavy sedation. But when he wakes up, he’s going to need answers. One more thing—hospital’s tight-lipped, but the media’s sniffing around. Local PD put out a boilerplate report: home invasion, one suspect in custody. That won’t hold long.”

“Do your best.” You tell him. “I’m heading to the police department.”

The line goes silent. And then you arrive.

You sit in the stale chill of the homicide bureau with the sun just now lifting over the windows slatted with dust. The two detectives across from you wear shirts wrinkled and ties askew. A clock on the wall ticks time that will not be returned. One of them scratches at a legal pad. The other stares as if watching something far off through a fogged pane.

“This isn’t how I saw the day unfolding.” You tell them. “Obviously, none of us could have predicted—or prepared for—an attack of this scale. I expected a simple pickup. Bring the girl in, start the work. But there are other forces in play here. We need to find out who—or what—is involved in the attack on her. And who’s pulling the strings.”

One of the detectives hands you a coffee.

“Agent Guthrie speaks highly of you. Questions your methods, but says you get results. We got Mercer in the box. You want to interrogate him?”

“Affirmative.” You say.

“Oh, and Guthrie said you’d want this.” The detective hands you a plastic bag containing your suit.

“Thanks. I’m going to change.”

When you come back you hand them the bag. The sandals and the shorts and the shirt and the hat you took from the civilian at the Kearny Mobile Home Park. Borrowed, if that’s what you want to call it. You gave them back just the same.

“Can you return these?” You include a twenty in the bag as a way of thanks.

You follow the man down a corridor lit white and unkind. The walls close in like the sides of a long forgotten tomb and the stink of old sweat and sour coffee is thick on the air. He opens the door and you step inside.

The box. Four walls and a single light hissing overhead. The floor is scuffed and dulled by the scrape of shoes and struggle. The air is still. Still as death.

And there he is.

Silas Mercer.

Chained at the wrists to a bolted steel ring like some dog they never could break. His head shorn close to the scalp, the flesh of his face dark with bruises, split, bandaged. Left eye swelled shut beneath a web of gauze and blood. They say he may lose it. That the glass got in deep when you drove him into that mirror.

But he sits there unmoved. Back straight. Breathing slow. A calm about him that is not peace but something more feral, more profane. The stillness of a man who has seen what lies beneath the world and made his peace with it. He looks at you with the one eye left to him and smiles.

Like he’s waiting on the next act. Like he already knows the lines.

“I was just talking to our old buddy, Boyd Whitaker.” You ask. “Hard to believe how long it’s been. When’s the last time you were in touch with anyone from our Gulf outfit?”

“Whitaker? I haven’t talked to the motherfucker in years.”

“Yeah, well, you never really got along with most of the platoon. It’s been a long time. What have you been up to?”

“Been busy. You got me in a chokehold, huh? Been takin’ jiujitsu classes on the side? Hell, you’d never have put me down like this back in the Sandbox.”

“No, I guess my skills have come a long way since then. Although, to be honest, there were plenty of times I wished I’d put you in a choke hold.”

“Back then we were young.” Mercer says. “Saddam, he was a bastard, no doubt. But he was our bastard. Iraq’s got no sea. Couldn’t play ball with Iran when the mullahs dropped their oil to bleed the markets. Saddam warned ‘em. Said if nobody stepped in, he’d take Kuwait with both hands. Hell, he told the U.S. government. Told the western press. Nobody listened. So he did what he said he’d do. And we used it as our excuse. That’s why we were there, Grayson. That’s what we fought for. Not justice. Not peace. Just the story folks back home could stomach.”

He stares at you with his one good eye.

“You been busy since. Waco. McVeigh. The goddamn Unabomber. All them ghosts clingin’ to your coat like soot. And still you punch that Bureau clock? Still think you’re clean in all this? Didn’t learn a thing, did you? Thought you were one of them Seventh-Day boys. Thought y’all believed in judgment. Investigative kind. So tell me, when’s yours comin’?”

“The way I see it, Mercer, judgment’s happening all the time. It’s not for you or me to figure out how it works. Our job is to follow the law—God’s law, in this case. And we just have to hope we see a little justice now… and the rest in due time.”

Mercer spits on the table.

“When all is seen, ain’t nothin’ understood. You drown in the light and come up empty. Mais, you ever sit and think on them men? Kaczynski. Koresh. McVeigh. I do. I done thought on ‘em plenty. They like dominoes. One knockin’ the next, and the next, till the whole line gone down. Koresh, now, he thought he was the Lamb of God. But lemme tell you, Grayson—God been dead a long time. We done kilt Him. Still, the man weren’t wrong ‘bout everythin’. We are livin’ in Babylon. Babylon with its shiny badges and black boots and big ol’ buildings, and despite all Koresh’s guns and sermons, Babylon came knockin’. Came with fire. Took him and a whole house of folk with him. Why? So the ATF could flex a little muscle ‘fore budget season? So ol’ Janet Reno could make an example, say this what happen when you push back?"

“It’s a lot messier than the public was ever told—and that’s for their own good. You’re not wrong to think something bigger is at work here. But it’s better to stand with the light than with the devil. The only real question is, Mercer: whose side are you on?”

“My own side. I’ll tell you something, that fire lit somethin’ in McVeigh. He was out there at Waco, sellin’ bumper stickers, flyin’ the flag. Watchin’ that compound burn down with women and babies inside. He saw that and it twisted somethin’. Thought he could strike back. Thought he was defendin’ the Constitution, blowin’ up that buildin’. Thought the men and women who torched Waco worked there. But all he did was hand the government the excuse it needed to tighten the leash. Dominoes, cher. Just fallin’."

“You can argue about whether it was the right role to play, or whether the dominoes should have fallen at all.” You say. “But we can both agree—they’re falling. And it’s about time you made a choice. Word is, you’re losing that edge. Your days as a gun for hire are numbered. Not many people are going to hire a shooter who can’t see straight down a barrel.”

“Nah, I’m not worried about that.” He says.

“What are you worried about, then?”

“I know what my future is.” He says. “Your future is Kaczynski. Now that one, he saw the whole game laid out. Knew we weren’t made for this world of concrete and cameras. Said we’re creatures meant to hunt and bleed and run free in the wild. Not be penned up in apartments and cubicles and told how to live, how to think, what to want. He said we in a zoo, boy. Bein’ domesticated. Obedience is the endgame. Smile for the zookeeper.”

Mercer looks up to the ceiling, then back at you.

“And now? These attacks today? Maybe it’s foreign. Maybe it’s homegrown. Don’t make a lick of difference. It’s just the next domino, Grayson. Watch close now. They gonna come with more laws, more eyes, more fences. And we? We’ll ask ‘em for it. Beg ‘em to keep us safe. Hand ‘em the leash with a thank you. But today? Just today, the veil slip a little. And folks see Babylon for what it is. But it won’t last. They goin’ back to sleep. Ain’t nobody drivin’ this engine no more, bébé. This thing done wound itself up, and now it’s runnin’ where it wants. So I ask you, mon ami—where’s that next domino fall?”

“Let’s get straight to it, Mercer. I need to know who you’re working for and why you were hunting the girl. You can make this easy on yourself —or you can make it hard. Your call.”

“Look, Grayson, I am a consummate professional. You’re not getting anything from me.”

You lean forward, both hands on the table, and look him in the eye. “You want to make it hard on us? Fine. We can handle that. You? You’re going away for a long time.”

“You listen close now.” He snarls. “First fella look at me crosswise in that yard? I ain’t gon’ hesitate. I take him out right there, clean an’ mean. Make a scene they won’t forget. Let ‘em all know—I done arrived. After that? Oh yeah, they gon’ come knockin’. I’ll have to pick a crew. Might be the Aryan Brotherhood, the kind with the lightning bolts an’ bad tattoos. Maybe the local flavor, y’know? Don’t matter. Give me three years. I’ll run that gang like a Sunday sermon. And then? I run that whole damn prison. And you, on the outside, you’re in prison, too. You got some hard choices to make.”

You tell the guard you’re done and leave. Outside in the garage the sun has risen higher. Your ribs throb. Your knuckles split. You lean against the cold steel of the car like a man held together by old injuries and newer regrets.

The FBI building was new. Fluorescent lights hum overhead. You pass through checkpoints and doors, nodding to clerks and analysts who don’t know him and didn’t want to. You step into Conference Room C.

Miller sit there with a file like a priest with a sin list. She flips the pages as if they might rearrange themselves. She does not look up.

“You want to explain yourself?”

She reads from the page. Unauthorized operation. Transport of a civilian witness. Violation of protocol.

“Look, you can hand over the forms or not.” You say. “Either way, I’m doing my job—and how I do it isn’t your call.”

She stares at you for a long time and says nothing. There was a kind of mercy in that.

You sign forms until your hand cramp. Use-of-force reports. Custody logs. Transfer records. Signatures that would be filed and boxed and never read again. Your name, over and over, as though it might eventually become someone else’s.

By dusk you sit in the Crown Vic they assigned you parked beneath a sky smeared with red like a wound across the horizon. You had not eaten. You had not slept. The bruises beneath your shirt blooms like some terrible flower. Your bones ache. Your mind replays the scene like a reel jammed in a projector. The girl’s blood on his hands. Mercer’s eyes in the mirror before it shattered.

You grip the wheel.

There was no peace to be had.

There would be no sleep.

Only the long night and the forms he hadn’t signed yet.

And finally, the drive back to the safe house.

You check in with the team. No trouble while you were gone. You ask who’s taking watch through the night and offer to take a shift yourself. Velasquez shakes her head. “You look beat to hell, she says. Get some sleep.”

She’ll take first watch. Then Carrick. Then Blinky.

You nod. A smile half-formed and broken on your face. “Yeah,” you say. “I’m just gonna lay down.”

You pass by Flower. The pale glow of the laptop screen on her face. She barely looks up.

You shrug.

Find your cot.

Sleep takes you before you can think twice about it, and in your dreams, you are once more a child. In the old farmhouse in Indiana where your mother was raised. The walls hung with sun-faded posters of the shows your grandparents let you watch. The Superfriends. Deputy Dawg. Yogi Bear. Your mother did not approve.

It is that night—the night it happened.

You rise from the bed and step out into the darkened hall. Past the kitchen. Past the living room. The television spilling the national anthem into the stale air. Your father slumped dead asleep in the Barcalounger, the floor about him littered with empty cans of Old Milwaukee. His mouth open. Your mother has already gone to bed. Worn out from the fighting and the futility of it. She tries to get him to seek help but it comes to nothing. They argue and argue. Like beasts in a pen with no gate.

Somewhere, the man you are now, dreaming this dream, begs you not to take another step, not to leave the farmhouse. But your pleading goes unheeded. You open the door and step out into the summer night.

The grass is wet with dew and cold against your feet and you move out into the corn. In the rows ahead something hangs in the air. A woman maybe. A thing. Its face pale and skull-like. The black robe it wears is fouled and torn and it flaps in the faint stirring of the night.

“Lo, my child,” It hisses. “To fashion thee into the instrument of mine own purpose, I must needs take the scales from thine eyes, yea, even thy innocence must I strip away. For I am the whetstone, and thou art the blade; and by mine hand shalt thou be sharpened.”

It drifts down out of the dark and presses its mouth to yours.

It’s tongue. In your mouth. The taste of it. Cold. Wet. You gag on the length of it, and still it comes. Unending.

In the distance, you hear yourself mewling, trying desperately to wake from your nightmare.

What the Cat Dragged In

Belle Flower. As Red leaves Magnolia Village in the dust of the rearview, you lift your head slow from behind the dash. The road unwinds ahead. Sunlight on the hood. Wind in your hair. You breathe like it hurts. Like coming back costs something.

Red turns to look at you, his eyes hard, jaw set beneath the moustache gone to frost.

“Kiddo, you brought a lot of heat upon yourself. I’ll help if I can. But if you got something to say, now’s the time to spill it.”

You shift in your seat, the truth clutches in your mouth like a dry stone.

“I got folks after me, Red. Bad folks. But I haven’t done anything wrong. That’s all I know. That’s all I can say.”

He nods. Like a man marking a grave.

“Just so it don’t reach my doorstep, that’s all.”

“I’m grateful. For the ride. For this.” You tell him.

He gives a soft grunt.

“Buck vouches for you. That’s good enough for now. Him and I, we go back. Big Top days. Place never did sit right with me. Felt wrong. I got out. You wanted out, too. Why I drove you to San Diego.”

You looked down, ashamed of what you weren’t saying.

“Thanks, Red. When I know more, I’ll tell you. I swear. You’re not caught up in something you’ll regret. Not knowingly. I just need time.”

Red stares straight ahead. Then glances sideways. A long, unreadable look. He knows you’re lying. But he let’s it ride. For now.

Red’s phone rings. He flips it open and holds it to his ear. Says nothing at first. Just listens. The road kept on.

“Buck,” he says, “she’s with me. She’s safe. Ain’t pretty, but she’s standin’.”

He tilts his head, listening, and then turns to you, handing you the phone.

“He wants a word, kiddo.”

You take the phone. Buck’s voice.

“Belle, honey! You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. I’m pretty banged up, but I’m trying to figure out my next steps. But, yeah, I’m okay.”

“Thank goodness!” He says. “We just rolled into Phoenix. Gonna pitch tent, get the crew settled. Soon as thats done, I’ll put wheels to pavement, head west. If I push it, I can make San Diego by nightfall. You need anything, Belle? Somethin’ I can lay hands on’ fore I get there?”

“Yeah. Could you get your hands on a phone that I could use? I don’t think there’s any way that I’m gonna be able to get back my own phone. And by now someone’s probably tracking it. I need a phone. Can you get me some clothes? I’m a small, petite. Some clothes and some shoes, please. Once I have my phone, I can take care of everything else.”

“All right, sweetheart, “I’ll see you tonight.” he says and hangs up.

Red doesn’t say a word for the rest of the ride. The tires hum low over the blacktop. You look up at the rearview mirror and scan the horizon behind you. No one’s pursuing you. Just traffic. Then, the sign: Kearny Mobile Home Park. You’ve driven past it a hundred times, a thousand maybe. Never knew he was here. Just down the road all these years.

There’s a wrongness to it.

A man like Red doesn’t live quiet unless he’s hiding from something or waiting on it. And all this time, all these years, you thought him gone to rust or rambling long-haul routes through the desert. Not parked up ten miles from you, tucked in behind chainlink and oleander. If he was that close, why didn’t he ever reach out? Why didn’t Buck say?

You stare at the sign and your stomach turns, not from fear exactly, but from the wrongness of it.

Something’s off.

Either Red’s been watching you this whole time… Or he’s not the only one who knew where you’d end up.

Red guides the Bronco slowly through the entrance and weaves between trailers and driveways. He pulls into his slot easy. He reaches across you steady and sure and opens the glovebox. His hand finds a pistol resting there and takes it up without a word. He leaned forward and slipped the thing into the waistband at the small of his back. Metal against spine. His face gave nothing. Like a man readying himself for a past he’d hoped was done with him.

You step out. Across the way, a woman with a hose in her hand watches you like she’s measuring you for a box. Her face cut from something sour. She shakes her head once, low and mean.

“My, my, my. Look what the cat dragged in.”

Red doesn’t so much as glance her way. Just lifts his hand, middle finger in salute.

Under his breath, he mutters, “We had a dalliance a while back, her and me. Since then, she don’t cotton to women I bring home. Rookie mistake. Don’t shit where you eat, kiddo.”

He fishes a key from his pocket, the metal catching what light there is, and unlocks the door.

Swings it wide.

“Welcome to Casa Mathers,” he says. And you step inside.

Red’s trailer is neat in the way a man keeps a space when he’s the only one who’s got to live in it. Sparse. Ordered. The couch is old but well-kept, a throw blanket folded square across the back. There’s a stack of car magazines on the coffee table, an empty ashtray, a battered paperback of Lonesome Dove dog-eared and spine-cracked. No photographs. No clutter. No trace of anyone but Red.

The kitchen’s small, but every dish is washed and put away. The garbage bin’s empty, save for a flattened cigarette pack. The floor swept clean.

But the table in the living room—that’s where it cracks.

There, in the center, sits Red’s kit. A spoon blackened on the underside. A small, glassine bag folded neat like a love letter. Cotton pulled apart and stained faint brown. A capped syringe lying crossways over a strip of rubber tubing. The needle sharp and gleaming. The heroin measured out, waiting to burn. You can almost see him there, rolling the sleeve, tying off, eyes already slipping half-shut in anticipation before Buck’s voice pulled him back.

The rest of the trailer is clean.

But the table tells the truth.

Red looks at the table, then at you. “It’s a free country.” He says. “Bathroom’s in the back. I’ll lay out some clothes. Oughta fit. Close enough.”

You’re no stranger to folks chasing ghosts in bottles, needles, or smoke. You seen it plenty under canvas, behind the sawdust ring, men and women alike unmaking themselves in slow, cruel ways. It doesn’t scare you, but it doesn’t sit right either. You’ve not had luck with the kind who use. Been four years since you laid eyes on Red, and now he looks hollowed out, like something carved from meat and left in the sun. It doesn’t make you feel good being near him. Like you could catch the unraveling.

But you’re slick with sweat and dried blood and city grime. The stink of panic on your skin. You need the water.

You study him and ask, quiet: “Red, are we safe here? How well do you know your neighbors?”

You think of the woman outside—her stare.

“We’re cool. I been here a long while. Too long, maybe. Know some too well. The rest just enough. I wave when I got to. Keep to myself otherwise. What I do in here ain’t no one’s business.”

“So if someone doesn’t belong, you’d know?”

You look to the closed door of the bathroom. “I can’t watch the place while I’m in the shower. Keep an eye out. Just holler if anything doesn’t feel right. I’ll be quick.”

He nods. Then sits himself down like a man settling into old pain. Draws the pistol from his back, lays it on the table, and lights a cigarette. Smoke curls up to the ceiling.

You make your way back and find the bathroom. It is as unadorned as the rest of Red’s home. A man’s place. Functional. No frills.

You strip out of your clothes, the sweat-stiffed fabric peeling from your skin. The stink of the street, the stink of fear and flight, rises off you like steam. You step beneath the spray, the water hot, sluicing dirt and filth from you. The water runs. And you let it. Because there is no washing it clean. But you stand there anyway.

You think on Red. On what he was and what he’s become and what of him you might’ve invented in your head to feel less alone in this world. You wonder what you’ll do if he’s not the man you want beside you now. You don’t know what he’s capable of anymore. You don’t know what he isn’t.

You move quiet through the bathroom, the fan like breath behind the wall. In the medicine cabinet: razors, disposable. Deodorant. A bottle of aspirin with the label peeled halfway. Nothing strange. Nothing out of place. Still. You don’t meet your own eyes in the mirror. Not ready for that.

You think about exits. Bathroom window is small and tight as a coffin lid. You could squeeze through if you had to. Might leave skin behind, but you’d get clear.

You are not helpless. You remind yourself of that. You’ve lived through worse. If it comes to running, you’ll run. If it comes to bleeding, you’ll bleed.

The bathroom’s your excuse. The window’s your plan. The fear is yours and yours alone. And it hums in your bones like a thing with teeth.

The steam curls about the room like smoke and you stand there in the quiet of it. You dry yourself. A ritual. The mirror stares back. You catch your reflection and flinch as if struck.

You don’t look long. Don’t linger. Mirrors aren’t safe. Never have been. They call back the old voices, the ones that spoke in praise and pain both. Your mother’s tall shadow, your father’s surgeon’s hands. The freak tent. The blood. The whispers. You don’t understand now, but you will. And maybe you did. And maybe that’s why you can’t look too long without seeing the ruin they left behind.

You check the damage. Bruises like old fruit. A cut on your elbow. A scrape on your thigh. All of it fresh, soon to be counted among the older scars. A map no one else reads. You press your palm to your ribs and breathe deep.

Out there, the world basks. California sun gilding the flesh of bronzed gods and half-naked saints. They move through the light like it owes them something. The cult of body. You are not among them. You walk a different road. Covered in dark fabric, head down, eyes sharp. You don’t wear your pain on the outside. You hide it like a weapon.

You live online. In the hum of servers and glow of screens. Where no one sees. Where no one touches. Outside, the heat presses close, but you wear long sleeves, thick pants. You don’t care to be seen. Not really. Not anymore. You tried that once. All it did was invite the knives.

Outside the bathroom door, folded with care, you find a black tee and pink sweatpants laid neat atop a footstool. Beside them, a pair of pink, bedazzled flip-flops.

You pull the shirt over your head. It clings to your damp skin. Across the chest, the mirror throws it back at you in reverse—“David Allan Coe.” A skull grinning mean beneath a Confederate slouch hat, DAC above the brim. Crossbones beneath, not bone but a Winchester shotgun and a guitar bearing the rebel flag. Behind the skull, a burst of stars and war feathers.

You slide into the sweatpants. Pink as bubblegum and stitched across the ass in faded block letters—“Juicy.” Must belong to one of Red’s lady friends, you figure. You run your hand through the pockets and come up with a pair of folded twenties, faded and sueded. Money that’s been through the wash.

From somewhere in the trailer, a radio plays the low, mournful twang of steel guitar and sorrow.

Then, a knock at the door. Three sharp raps. Measured. Unhurried.

The feeling of ice spills down your spine. You ease the door ajar. Just a slit. The hallway beyond washed in the pale gold of morning. Red is moving. Slow. Deliberate. Toward the front door.

You hiss his name. “Red,” you whisper. “Don’t let anyone in.”

But he does’t turn. Doesn’t answer. Just keeps walking. And the silence that follows is thick enough to drown in.

“Police. Detective Malcolm. Mind if I come in?” says the voice. You recognize the New Orleans accent.

Red’s voice, steady. “Sorry, officer. Not without a warrant.”

“I’ve got one. I’m holding it up. You can see for yourself.”

Red steps to the door, gun in one hand. Presses his eye to the peephole. Then, there is a sound that is not loud but final. Red falls to the floor.

There is a hole in him. Blood comes out.

“Oh, God!” The words don’t rise to your lips but rattle in your chest like dry leaves in a gutter. You dive for Red’s pistol. Your fingers close round the grip like you were born to it. You run. Bare feet on linoleum. The hallway narrows like a throat. Red’s groan follows you like the cry of something already dying.

You slam the bathroom door shut, twist the lock. It clatters beneath your hand like it might come apart. Footsteps. The man’s. Then the door flies inward just as your body clears the sill. Half out the window when the world erupts behind you—gunfire like a cannon from the front of the trailer.

Arms snatch your waist and drag you back inside. Your elbows rake the window frame and split like fruit skin. You hit the floor hard. Bone and tile. The taste of metal in your mouth.

The barrel of his gun presses to your head. Cold. Oily.

“I told you,” he says. “You run, I follow. And here I am.”

His voice is a stone dropped in a still pond.

“We got seconds. You know what I’m here for. What’s not on the laptop? Not on the drives? Don’t lie to me. I’ll know.”

The pistol. Red’s. There, just out of reach. You stretch. Hope flickers. His boot comes down on your wrist like an anvil.

Pain floods you, white and blinding. You twist. Flail. A knee connects, maybe. He grunts. His gun barks. And then the world folds in on itself.

Darkness takes you. Swift. Without mercy.

Chokehold

Agent Nicholas Grayson. The second you slam the Crown Vic door, Guthrie’s already got his foot in it, tires chirping. He’s got one hand on the wheel, the other snatching up the radio. “Control, this is Charlie-1. Requesting a plate check on California, 3-Yankee-Delta-3-2-1. Light Green Bronco.”

The radio spits back static and the voice of Dispatch: “Copy, Charlie-1. Stand by for return.”

Guthrie doesn’t blink. Eyes locked on that Bronco. Deadpan he says, “So what’s the deal, partner? That guy owe you child support? What’d I miss?”

“Spotted the Bronco earlier—stood out. At the time, it had a single occupant. Now it’s got two. That’s a discrepancy.”

The radio comes to life. “Charlie-1, plate comes back to a William Mathers, resident of the Kearny Mobile Home Park.” says the dispatch, providing an address on Convoy Court. “No wants, valid registration.”

“Pull over or pursuit?”

“Let’s just tail on for a while.”

As the words leave your mouth, a black Chevy Impala slides smooth into your lane behind the Bronco, ghostlike, efficient, the way a man moves when they don’t want to be seen moving.

“Interesting,” says Guthrie. “Your rodeo, Agent. What do you advise?”

“Keep tailing. Be discreet.” Maybe another agent from the Bureau, you wonder.

Guthrie leans forward and snatches the mic from the dash.

“Control, this is Charlie-1. Run this plate quietly; no alerts: California, 3-Tango-Delta-4-7-3. Black Impala.”

The reply scratches back across the radio. “Copy, Charlie-1. Stand by.”

“Charlie-1,” Dispatch returns after a spell. “Plate comes back to a David Patel, out of San Diego. No wants, valid registration.”

The black Impala keeps its distance, gliding behind the Bronco like a shadow. You track them both as they roll up Convoy Court, into the sprawl of the Kearny Mobile Home Park.

The Bronco pulls into the driveway of a trailer that could belong to any man. Plain. Faded aluminum siding. The jade paint of the Bronco still catching the light of the sun, gleaming. Bill Mathers, who you think of as the cowboy, reaches across the girl. Pops the glovebox. Something in his hand. Leans forward and slides it down the back of his jeans like it belongs there. Pistol, you think.

Out steps the cowboy. Belle climbs out after, her hair looks like hell. She wears the morning’s ruin on her skin—sweat-stained shirt, feet raw and red.

Across the way a woman with a hose in hand watches them come. She wets her begonias, eyes Belle and scowls at the cowboy and says something to him. The cowboy doesn’t look her way. Just raises his middle finger. Then he and Belle disappear inside the trailer.

The Impala rolls to a stop half a block down. And waits.

You tell Guthrie to hold back, park where the dust won’t kick up, where the sun doesn’t glance off the windshield and give you away. He nods.

You flip open your laptop. Type in the digits. David Patel. Rancho Bernardo. Dentist. That’d make a cool nickname. Clean record, clean car. Clean as a whistle. His photo stares back at you. Wire rims, neat smile. A man who flosses.

You murmur to Guthrie without looking. “Stay here.”

You step out. The heat’s already pressing in. The world smells like rust, dry weeds, and old oil.

You need a disguise.

You move through the trailers. Knock on one—the door opens slowly. A man stands there. Sagging flesh and mottled skin, like someone who’s outlived their own use.

“Can I help you?”

You show the badge. Flash of federal steel. “Sir, I’m sure you’ve heard what’s happening in our nation today. I need your help. Something’s going down. I need a change of clothes. Hat’d help too.”

The man frowns, draws breath like it costs him something. “I pay taxes,” he says. “That means you work for me, son. I’m on a fixed income, and if this was any other day I’d tell you to go to hell!” He shuffles back, opens the door wider. “Take what you need.”

He bitches all the way to the bedroom. The place smells of mildew and time.

You grab what you need. A floral shirt loud as birdsong. Shorts. Sandals. A bucket hat to throw shadow across your eyes. You holster your sidearm and look to the man.

“If I don’t come back,” you say, “you can keep the suit. Worth a couple thousand if you know where to sell it.”

That shuts him up.

You press the mic. “Guthrie. I’m heading in. I’ll be the guy in the hat.”

“Copy that,” he says.

You step into the sun again. Slide around back. The Impala waits. The man who steps from it isn’t Patel. You know it the second he moves. Bald head. Goatee. Gray suit. He pulls gloves on like a man settling into old habits. His walk’s casual. The kind of casual that’s practiced. Something about the set of his shoulders and his stride tugs at your memory, but you can’t place it.

He looks around. Moves behind Red’s trailer. Reappears.

You look through the Impala’s window. Empty.

The man raises a hand. Three knocks on Red’s door. Each one deliberate.

Then he holds up a paper to the peephole. The moment stretches.

“Guthrie,” you say. “We’ve got something. Call it in.”

Of a sudden there comes the sound of muted gunfire—a silencer. Then the door gives way with a crack of splintered wood and the man in the gray suit steps into the gloom like he’s always belonged there.

You run after. Feet finding slick blood on linoleum. The cowboy sprawled on the threshold, gutshot and gasping like a landed fish. His hands clutch at his belly. You leap past.

Down the hall. The man is there. Moving. You fire—the report deafening in the narrow corridor. You miss.

“Guthrie,” you bark into the comm. “Get around the back. He’s going to kill Flower!”

The hallway tightens. The world becomes the width of your shoulders. You push forward—the sound of struggle. A woman crying out.

The bathroom door hangs on busted hinges. And there she is. Belle. Blood in her hair like a crown. The gunman looming over her like judgment itself.

And then you see the shape of him. Something behind the eyes. It’s Mercer.

You crash into him. Get him in a chokehold.

The world becomes motion. Flesh and drywall. The mirror explodes. Shards of it rake Mercer’s face. He doesn’t cry out. He drives backward like a bull. You hit the wall hard enough to rattle teeth.

He tries to throw you. Your grip holds. His strength’s fading. His body goes slack. Collapses under your weight.

You roll him over, wrench his arms back, cuff him with hands still trembling.

Then to Belle. She’s breathing. You press a towel to her wound. It blooms red but slow. A graze. Just a graze.

“Guthrie,” you rasp. “Take him. Flower’s been hit. I’m handling it.”

You gather her up in your arms and push past Guthrie’s bulk as he moves into the trailer.

The street outside is alive now. Sirens. Voices. The stink of heat and cordite.

You find the first-aid kit in the Crown Vic, patch her as best you can.

A crowd gathers. The buzz of it rising.

When the ambulance and cruisers arrive, you grab Guthrie’s shoulder. Look him in the eye.

“You handle this. I’m taking Miss Flower someplace safe.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it again.

And then you’re gone. Her in the backseat. The engine turns over beneath you like a prayer.

Flesh. Hair. Bone.

Senator Wexley. Your limousine rolls south down the FDR like a hearse, black and sealed against the sound of the city. Inside, you sit alone. The tinted glass offers no shelter from what looms beyond it. Smoke pours from the island’s heart. Not a pillar, not a plume—a wound. Thick and rising and without end.

Sirens wail. A procession of red and blue. Streets are choked with fleeing bodies and men walking toward death with the stunned gait of sleepwalkers. You watch them pass.

You see his reflection in the window—hollow-eyed and soiled—and behind it, you. Polished. Whole. The one that stayed behind in Alpine. The one that smiled for the cameras.

The driver says nothing. Eyes fixed forward. The phone buzzes once—Whitman’s number, your political advisor.

“Bryce. You still in the city?”

“Yes. Just left Doherty’s studio.”

“Everyone’s watching it. Everyone will remember it. Which is why you’re going to get out of that damn car and go downtown!” He snarls. “Chaos is the mother of opportunity. You need to be seen. On the ground. Covered in soot. Looking presidential. A man of the people. Not hiding behind tinted glass in Midtown. Now’s your chance to be the one who stood there when the rest ran. Trust me, this photo will outlive you. This is legacy!”

“Well, you do know best. It sounds annoying, but I suppose I must.”

The line clicks dead. You lower the phone. The sirens outside scream like distant birds.

The door opens. You step out, blinking against the smoke and soot. Your shoes splash into the gray water snaking along the curb. A crowd has gathered behind the barricade, dazed and murmuring. Firefighters stagger past. A man collapses near a lamppost.

You will not forget the smell in the air. Not in this life nor in any life to follow. The concrete burnt, the steel ran molten in the girders. But that was not the worst of it. There was plastic and rubber and paper, the foul offal of industry turned to ash. Wiring charred and walls crumbled. Carpets gone to cinders. Thousands of screens gone dark. But more. Flesh. Hair. Bone. The meat of man unmade. The stink of jet fuel and death. A reek that had no place in this world. And yet it came. And it lingered.

You walk forward, slowly, deliberately. A flashbulb pops.

A young photographer lowers her camera. “Senator Wexley? Can I take a few?”

“Of course,” you say “try to catch my good side.”

She raises the camera. The shutter clicks. Soon there’s a gaggle of other photographers taking photos for the newspapers and magazines. Tomorrow they’ll run your likeness above the fold. Sleeves rolled. Jaw set. The hard angle of your chin catching the light. Eyes like flint. The face of vengeance clad in a man’s skin. A leader born not of ballots but of fire.

A crew arrives. A boom mic floats overhead.

“Senator Wexley, any comment?” asks one of the reporters.

You square your shoulders before the ruin, and your voice cuts through the ash-laced air.

“They have woken a sleeping giant,” you say. “And they shall be afraid. For it is we who are strong!”

The wind turns. Carries the cinders like snow, and the sky weeps gray.

Flip the Tables

Bryce Wexley. You glance at Wong. You squint. And again it comes. The light. Not bright, but warm. A halo like late wheat swaying under heaven’s hush. His face calm. His presence a balm. You feel it in your bones, in the quiet place that knows before knowing. He is not of this place. He is one of the good ones. Of the ones who watch. Who wait.

You step slow. Reverent.

“Wong, I know that you’re one of the good ones, one of the ones from… from… from outside. I know about the secret deal.”

He turns from the screen where the towers bleed black into a bright morning sky. His eyes distant.

“I’m sorry. What you say?”

“I know,” you tell him. “I know that things aren’t what they seem, that the, you know, those in power are pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone! I need you to help me! They’re chasing me, Wong! They, they want me for something. They said, I’m, I’m the door.”

He looks at you with a kind of gentle alarm. Like you’d just told him you saw God in a drainpipe. Then he smiles. A soft sad thing.

“All right, I’ll help you. However I can. What you need?”

“They’ve… they’ve replaced me with… with someone that looks like, like me, but he’s better than me, and I can’t get any money from my accounts! I could use, I could really use some money so that I could, I could help. You know, I could, I could figure out what’s going on.

He sighs. Pulls a worn twenty from his apron and presses it into your palm.

You stare at the bill. Rage climbing you like fire up dry wood.

“A twenty isn’t what I need! I need more than that. I can’t, I can’t… What am I supposed to do with a twenty?”

He only shrugs. “Sorry. Best I can do.”

“Don’t you have a spaceship or something, or some, some technology that can protect me?”

He steps back. His face closed now.

“Settle down. Settle down. I think it time you leave.”

“Keep your secrets, then!” you shout.

You straighten your coat. What’s left of it. Shuffle out under the blue sky. He watches you go. Then turns back to serve his patrons, glancing up now and then to watch the horror unfolding on the television.

“This man is an alien!” you yell. Some heads turn. None stay.

Once again, you’re outside. Exposed. Where they can find you. The twenty crumples in your fist. But it’s a start. You can find Caruso.

You walk the streets. North Park. Too early for the kind of help you need. Still, you find a kid—Kangol hat, white tank, pants dragging. You know the look.

You approach him. “Do you happen to know where I could score some drugs?”

He wrinkles his nose. You reek. But then he softens.

“Look, man, you can have this for free.” He pulls out a joint from behind his ear and hands it to you.

“Oh, thank you. Thank you! You know, I’m a veteran.” You lie, “I fought in the war, so the joint, yeah, it’s good for me.”

“All right, man, you have a good day.” He nods and walks off.

You follow him until he enters an apartment building and closes the door behind him.

You realize your plan is flawed. This is taking too long.

Then a number comes to you. Vince. He made you memorize it. “Payphone only,” he’d said.

You see another kid, leaning on a wall, skateboard at his feet.

“Hey, kid,” you say. “Want to buy a joint?”

His eyes widen. “On a day like today? Fuck, yeah!”

You trade smoke for ten bucks. You walk to a nearby laundromat, exchange the money for quarters, and spot a pay phone.

You feed the coins into the slot. The receiver’s slick with old sweat and breath, and you wedge it to your ear with your shoulder, eyes on the nothing stretched out in front of you. Whoever comes after can clean it if they care. The line rings. And rings. Then he answers. Voice flat. Tired or suspicious or both. “Who’s speaking?”

“Vince, it’s Wexley. I need your help. Some, some. I need your help.”

“Hey Senator — caught your little appearance on Tough Talk this morning. Damn shame it got clipped early, real shame. Word is Abu Dhabi TV got a ring from those clowns in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They’re saying they’re the ones behind the whole goddamn mess.”

“Oh, that wasn’t me. That’s another me, but they’re after me. They’re after me! Vince, who?”

“What are you talking about?” He sounds confused.

“The, the bad ones, the ones the government has to deal with!”

“Whoa, whoa, man, slow down. What are you talking about? Bad ones?”

“These guys are real bad that make us look like clowns. They’re after me. Vince, you owe me. I need your help!”

“All right, Senator, you and I go way back. How can I help you?”

“I need a new identity. You, you have safe houses, right? You’ve got stuff like that, yeah?”

“Uh, yeah, I can certainly do that for you, Senator. When do you need it?

“Right away.”

“All right, I have connections in New York City, but it’s going to take me a while to get you a safe house there.”

“What can you do for me in the meantime?

“What do you need, Senator?”

“Some money, a weapon.”

“Alright. I can arrange that. Where are you in the City right now? I’ll make some calls and make it happen. See who I can send over.

“I’m not in New York.” you tell him. “I’m in San Diego.”

“No, man, I just saw you on TV. I know you’re in the City.”

“I told you, that’s not me!

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—“

You interrupt him. “Vince, they made a fake me! They made one in a lab.”

“Oh. Ah, sure. Senator, break it down for me ’cause I’m lost. What do you need?”

“I need a safe house. A new passport and at least $5,000. And, uh, a bulletproof vest, and a gun and some ammo.”

You hear him whistle. “That’s some serious shit there, Senator; I can have one of my boys pick you up, and take you to a safe house; where are you at?”

You look at the cross streets you are near and tell Vince.

“All right, Senator. I don’t know what’s going on, but you know, we’ve been scratching each other’s backs for a while now. If that’s what you say, if that’s what you want, I’ll have a man sent to your location in thirty minutes.”

“Thank you, Vince! You’re a good one. I knew, I know I could trust you.”

The line goes dead.

While you wait for Vince’s man, you buy six bacon-wrapped hot dogs from a street vendor, sit on the curb, and eat them. They burn your gut but settle your nerves.

A limo pulls up. Man in slick clothes looks around, confused.

“Hey, hey, hey!” You yell as you approach him, bits of bread and onions spray from your mouth.

The man steps back, putting his hands up, “Man, I don’t got no time for you. Got no money for you. Fuck off.”

“Vincent sent you for me. You’re Vince’s boy, right?”

He looks at you. “What the fuck?”

“I’m Bryce Wexley. I’m Bryce Wexley!”

“All right. All right.” He goes to his trunk, pulls out an expensive blanket, and covers the back seat. “All right, man, if you say so.” Under his breath, you hear him mutter, “What the fuck?” as he opens the door for you.

You collapse into the back seat. “You would smell bad, too, if you had seen what I’d seen.”

“Right, right. Whatever you say, Man, whatever you say.”

As you drive away, he picks up his phone. “Yo, Mister Caruso, Tommy here. I picked up the… Senator. He’s in rough shape.” He turns to you and offers you his phone. “Hey, Senator, he wants to talk to you.”

You hold the phone to your ear. “Senator?”

“Hey, Vince, your man here is not too polite.”

“I’ll take care of that. Tommy’s a good boy. He’s going to take you to a place in La Jolla. You can hole up until we can talk face to face.”

“Vince, thank you, Vince! You’re a saint. The good ones, you know, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll think about you.”

Tommy takes a phone, wipes it on his pant leg, holds it to his ear, listens, and nods.

“All right, all right. Yeah, I’ll get him cleaned up.”

You drive to the outskirts of La Jolla. Tommy pulls up into the driveway of a decent house. He gets out and opens the door for you, treating you with the respect that is your due. You step out and he won’t meet your eye though you see the question there, flickering. The not-knowing. The what-the-hell-happened-to-you.

Tommy knocks on the door of the house, which is answered by a man in his twenties, eyes bloodshot.

You follow the man and Tommy past a kitchen. On the floor is a stained mattress circled by video cameras on tripods. On the kitchen table are several laptops. A girl wearing nothing but a tight T-shirt and panties walks by, bow-legged. She doesn’t look at you so much as through you. She drinks water from a plastic bottle like it’s the only real thing left.

Tommy says, “Senator, anything you need, I’m at your disposal. If you want to clean up, there’s a bathroom down the hall.”

You grab the towel from his hand. You shower. Hot water. Mercy.

Afterward, you clothe yourself in what’s been left. Gym shorts thin at the knees and a t-shirt bearing the faded logo of San Diego State University. You pull it over your head and it smells of detergent and old sweat and something fainter still. You stand before the mirror. The glass is smeared and tired. You wet your fingers and try to set your hair to how it once was or how it ought to be. Like the man on the screen on Tough Talk. The clean one. The one who speaks and the world listens. You rake your hands through the mess of it but it will not hold. It’s hopeless.

“Tommy!” You yell.

“Yo?”

“I need a stylist. I need a shave. I need a suit.”

“You got it. Anything else?”

“And the cash. And the gun. And the bulletproof vest.”

“You got it, Senator.”

The future is looking good. You don’t have a plan yet. You’re still trying to figure out what’s going on with the aliens. But you’re Bryce Wexley, old boy, and you will flip the tables on them.

---

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes

Wexcess

Bryce Wexley. You drag the back of your hand across your mouth, the bile sour on your tongue, and through the fog of sweat and heat and shame you see him—Wong. Framed in the glass door of his diner. His eyes dart up from you to the television behind him where the towers burn. Then back to you.

Wong comes upon you slow and sure, like a man approaching something wounded. His face, it creases not in pity but in the quiet knowledge of pain. He holds out his hand. “Let’s get you inside.”

You raise your eyes and for one moment, his head is engulfed in a dandelion of golden radiance. A crown of fire, wild and tender. You blink. It is gone.

He guides you to a table. “I get you something to eat. Something to settle your stomach.”

You hear your name like it’s been dragged out of a well. Takes a second to realize it’s coming from the TV. You look up, and there you are. Sitting next to Phil Doherty on Tough Talk. That grin of his plastered on like always. Only this isn’t a rerun. It’s live. Now.

And the man sitting beside him—it’s you. But it isn’t.

The man on screen sat straight-backed and sure. He was what you strive to be. What the press hinted you might become. You watch him, that other you, and you feel like you are peeling away. Like he’s shedding you, leaving the husk behind.

Your first thought is that the man on the screen is not a man at all. That he’s a skinwalker, a lizard wrapped in meat, some reptile thing done up in your own hide like a suit bought cheap and ill-fitting. It’s wearing you. Wearing your smile, your gestures, the way you hold your hands just so, like they taught you in the greenrooms.

But it doesn’t make sense. If the skin’s enough, why would they need yours? And yet you watch and you feel it all the same—the shame, deep and black. Your hair stuck flat to your skull with sweat and bile, your clothes a patchwork of filth, your feet raw. And there he is, sharp as a blade, suit pressed, hair combed, the world leaning toward him like flowers to the sun.

Your voice rises from your throat like something choking. “That isn’t me! They replaced me!”

A patron two stools down lifts a finger slow to their lips, eyes sharp over it. “Shhh!”

“Good morning, folks.” Says the television host, “I’m Phil Doherty, and this is Tough Talk. Now listen, I wish we were kicking things off with something a little lighter today, maybe even a little fun. We’ve got Senator Bryce Wexley here with us—yes, that Wexley. His family’s been called the Kennedys of the West Coast. A real political dynasty. And Senator, we appreciate you being here.”

“Thanks, Phil.” The other Bryce says, “It’s a pleasure to be here, as always. And I’ve got to say, nice suit.”

Phil laughs, then turns to look directly into the camera.

“But let’s be honest—we’ve got more pressing business this morning. America is under attack. So we’re going to put your reality show segment, Wexcess, on hold and focus where we need to: the safety of our nation and the facts as we know them. This is no time for fluff.”

Behind the host and the man wearing your face the screens play clips from Wexcess. They’ve stacked the deck for spectacle. The old producers knew their craft. Knew how to gild the rot.

There you are, barreling down some desert highway in that gaudy Humvee like a king of nothing, the sun burnished on chrome and steel. Cut to you again, poolside, flanked by supermodels whose names you never learned, their laughter canned and hollow.

The reel rolls on. Red carpet, flashbulbs, the dumb applause of a thousand strangers. You grinning like a man with no past. No blood on his hands.

Then your boy, Graham. His face lit and sharp. Telling the camera during a talking head segment how you “suck,” and there’s you right after, telling the world Graham’s “very, very sorry for what he said.”

All of it stitched together like some gospel for fools. You watch and you know it’s a lie. But you can’t look away.

Doherty turns to the camera. “Stay with us. Tough Talk returns after these messages.”

And then a commercial plays, some inane morality play of capitalism. A family at breakfast, their smiles carved and hollow, praising a thing they did not make and do not need.

Wong comes back bearing the plain grace of hot food. A chipped plate. Scrambled eggs. Toast browned and crisp at the edge. Steam rising from the coffee. He sets it down.

“You want jelly?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. Just smiles that quiet smile of his and lays a packet by your plate. Then he turns and goes.

He doesn’t know you from Adam. doesn’t know the office you hold or the fortune you command. To him you’re just another vagabond off the street.

And still he brought you breakfast. He treats you with dignity and kindness.

You tear the packet open with trembling fingers, the foil splitting like skin, and squeeze the jelly straight to your tongue. It coats your throat sweet and cheap and chemical. You drag the eggs into your mouth like a man starved, which you are, and the toast follows in great wet mouthfuls. The food hits you like morphine. Your hands shake. Your heart beats fast and light.

You look up, eyes flicking sharp like a hunted thing. What’s his angle, this Wong? Man feeds strays, but why? You’ve seen enough to know nothing comes without a hook. You saw his head glow. Maybe he’s one of them. One of the good ones, maybe. The kind who wears a man’s shape to pass in the daylight.

You think about that radio show, late nights in the dark, Art Bell talking about The Greys, the Reptilians, the ones who made the deals. Maybe the things you saw in Alpine—maybe they were real. And maybe Wong’s not like them. Maybe he’s something else.

You glance sideways. Real careful. Check your hands. Your mouth. You listening to yourself now, the words running under your breath without your leave. You wonder if anyone’s watching.

And the worst thing is you know they are.

After the meal Wong comes and takes your plate without a word and wipes the table clean with a rag drawn from the pocket of his apron. He looks at you once.

“Come with me.”

You follow him cautious as a coyote, ready to bolt should the air shift wrong. Your eyes fix on the back of his skull, the smooth dome of it shining faint under the fluorescent light, and you watch for some tell, some hidden seam in the meat of him where the zipper might run, where the mask might peel away and show the thing beneath.

At the front door a mop waits, its head limp and soaked in gray suds. Beside it a bucket, the water inside warm and soapy.

“You clean up,” he says.

You kneel at the bucket like a penitent and dip your hands into the murk, the water warm and citrusy with soap. You bring it to your face and scrub, the suds running down your neck, the sting of it in your eyes, the scent sharp in your nose. You wash as if you might scour something from yourself that the years have left behind. Something that clings. Something that will not come clean.

“No, no.” he says, “You clean up.” He points to your puddle of vomit. The scent of it rises and stings your eyes.

You let out a long breath. You roll your shoulders like a man shouldering a yoke and set to the work. The mop clumsy in your hands, foreign. You drag it across the floor in fits and starts. You move without rhythm, without grace. You reckon you’ve never done a day’s mopping in your life. But you do it anyway. Because there’s nothing else to be done.

And then you see him.

Not straight on. Just a flicker in the corner of your eye. He leans against a wall leading to an alleyway, smoking a cigarette. Watching. He draws on the cigarette slow and easy and flicks it into the street. Its cherry arcs through the air like a meteor before it hits the Earth, and the man turns and walks away.

Down the alley.

You follow his path with your eyes. You see where he goes. You know this street. You know every corner of it. You’ve walked it a hundred times and never once has there been an alley there. Not till now.

The mouth of the alley darkens behind the man’s retreat, swallowing light like a thing alive. Not shadow but absence. A void. As if God himself had turned his gaze from that place and would not look again. You come to the threshold where morning ends. The edge of light. You lift your foot. The air beyond is cold. Frigid.

You place your foot within.

And you know. In your bones. In the red meat of you. One more step, and there is no turning back.

You are not a fool. You turn from the alley and make your way back to the diner, to your mop. You mutter low beneath your breath of dissection tables and cold steel and how wise a man is who knows when to run.

Slyly, you look back at the alley through the tangle of your hair. The alley gone now like it never was. Like the world itself rolled over and smoothed the crease. But there on the pavement, you see it. The cigarette butt still smoldering. Smoke curling thin into the morning air.

Heat

Belle Flower. You’ve been standing in front of the Mira Mesa Public Library so long the shape of you is near worn into the concrete. The sun climbs higher. The shade crawls back. You keep expecting the man in the grey suit to round the corner, to step out from behind the world like he was always part of it. Instead you see the old ones walking. Old Chinese couples bent like river reeds, moving slow through the morning. Filipina mothers pushing strollers heavy with sleeping children. Indian women in their saris speaking low and fast, talking about the towers. The fire. The day the sky came down.

Red pulls up in his Ford Bronco, paint the color of faded jade, light catching on the metal like water in a dry place. It looked new. Lovingly restored. But the man behind the wheel was not new. Not untouched.

Red had lines now, deep and mean. His eyes sunk further in, not cruel, but tired. You remember them clear—sharp once, reckless. A man with miles ahead. Now he wears them all on his face. The years rode him hard. Drove deep. Didn’t let up.

Back then, he was all grin and boot leather. Hair long, engine louder than his conscience. He’d smoked through half a pack before you cleared county lines. Said little. Drove fast. Didn’t ask questions. The kind of kindness you don’t know you need until long after it’s gone.

He leans there against the Bronco, one arm slung careless over the doorframe. He pulls off his aviators slow and squints at you, his eyes pale and run through with age. He takes in the mess of you—hair wild, shirt twisted, sweatpants stained through, bare feet cut and streaked with road-grime and blood.

“Aw, hell. Get in.”

You tell Red about the man in the grey suit. How he killed your doorman and broke into your apartment like he owned the place, and how you escaped, dove through the window, and landed on the hedge like an animal in flight. You tell him you need to go back. Circle the block a few times, make sure the wolf is gone. Maybe get your hands on what’s left—your gear, your papers, a change of clothes. Whatever scraps of your life he didn’t take.

He lights a cigarette, draws on it. Smoke curls from his mouth, drifts past the scar in his lip. He doesn’t look at you, not at first. Just stares out over the parking lot.

“Buck did say you’re in some kind of trouble. Trouble seems to find you, don’t it?”

“I guess so,” you say.

He taps ash to the pavement. Takes another drag, and then you drive away.

Red turns on the radio, twists the dial and the voice comes raw through the static. Another plane has gone down. United Airlines. Flight 93. Crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

He listens a moment. Just a moment. Then he kills the radio with a flick of his fingers and silence folds in.

“Christ. Can you believe this shit? Whole goddamn world’s goin’ to hell. I swear, every time you think we’ve seen the worst of it, somethin’ new comes crawlin’ outta the pit.”

You let the breath leave you slow like something wounded. Say nothing. Your eyes fix on the window and the world beyond it, the sun climbing indifferent over rooftops and powerlines. You will not meet Red’s gaze. You try not to think about the news burning through the radio. There’s too much stirring in you. Too much weight. Like you been sleepwalking and the dream’s caught up to you. And worse than the dream is the knowing you helped bring it to life.

He glances at you and whatever he saw on your face made the words die in his mouth. Like a man realizing too late he’s been talking to a corpse.

“Thunderation, ain’t my place to talk about the end of the world when you look like you’ve been livin’ in it.”

He drums his fingers once on the steering wheel, then scratches at the back of his neck.

“Truth is, I shoulda kept closer, Belle. I shoulda checked in. Stayed on top of you, made sure you weren’t driftin’ too far out. But I didn’t. Life’s got a way of slippin’ past when you ain’t lookin’. Next thing you know, it’s been years.

“So tell me, kiddo. What’s it been like? What you been up to, besides runnin’ from shadows?”

“I’ve just been making it work.” You tell him. “I haven’t had a proper job. I haven’t been able to land any. Things outside of the circus. I mean, I’m not trained to do any of the stuff that normal people do, so I done what I could. It’s not very easy, but I do what I can. Nothing worth telling. Just enough to make it work.”

“You know, you ain’t grown an inch since I last laid eyes on you. But hell, I can see plain as day you’ve grown in ways that matter. You ain’t that scared little doe I hauled across state lines in the dead of night. Back then you looked like a thing that’d bolt if I so much as breathed too loud. Like the world itself was hunting you."

He flicks his cigarette out the window, watches the spark vanish behind him.

“I never asked what you were runnin’ from. Didn’t need to. I saw enough in your eyes to know it was bad. Knew it had your folks’ stink all over it. But you’re different now. There’s steel in you. Might not see it when you look in the mirror, but I see it clear as day. You been carryin’ yourself like someone who’s seen what’s on the other side of fear and decided she wasn’t gonna bow to it.”

He clears his throat, thumb tapping the wheel.

“And look, I ain’t your preacher and I sure as hell ain’t your daddy. But on a day like this—might be worth pickin’ up the phone. Callin’ your mom and dad. Even if it’s just to say you’re still breathin’. World’s comin’ apart at the seams, Belle. Ain’t no shame in lettin’ people know you’re still standin’ in it.”

He grabs his flip phone from the pocket of the shirt and tosses it on your lap.

“Your call. Ha, see what I did there?”

“Yeah,” you say, absolutely not. I have no plans to talk to them. I definitely don’t need them knowing where I am right now, so I hear what you’re saying, but it’s not something I’m comfortable with doing now.”

He sighs. “It’s a free country.”

As the Bronco rounds the corner you see police cruisers stacked four deep, strobes painting the stucco in blood and bruise. Radios crackle. Men in uniforms bustle about.

Red slows the truck. The engine idles rough beneath his calloused hand.

“That’s a lot of heat,” he says.

He turns to you then, eyes narrowed.

“Anything you need to tell me, kiddo?”

“I didn’t do anything wrong! I gotta go inside. And if the police are here, that means that most likely no one else is gonna try to hurt me. So maybe this is a good thing?”

You set your hand on the latch and you pause. Old lessons stitched into your bones like scars. Don’t talk to the law. Don’t let them know your name. You glance down at yourself—barefoot, bleeding, sweatpants fouled. You can’t be seen like this. Not here. Not now. Not with a man dead on the pavement. You let the door click shut and sit there in the heat. Waiting. Watching.

“Park down the block. I need to think this through.”

Red eases the Bronco down to a crawl and without a word he reaches across and shoves you low, one hard hand on the crown of your head, pressing you beneath the dash like he’s hiding contraband. His eyes never leave the road. His mouth set in a line you’ve seen before, a man weighing the cost of something already spent.

“Stay down!” he hisses

“What do you see?”

“Black sedan. I don’t know if they’re cops or not, but they’re definitely law. Guy in the passenger seat looks smart. I think he’s lookin’ for someone. Maybe you, Belle.”

“Gosh, Red, I don’t know what these people want from me! We gotta get out of here then, because this is not good. We gotta go somewhere else.”

“I can take you to my trailer back in Convoy. I got some clean sweat pants and some flip-flops you can wear.”

“All right. Let’s just go to your trailer. Let me sit down. Let me think for a little bit, because this situation’s not safe!”

Bronco

Nicholas Grayson. The plane touches down heavy as a stone on the tarmac, tires screaming beneath the weight of steel. The sky above San Diego blue and unbothered, indifferent to the smoke twisting halfway across the country. You’d been aloft when the first tower fell. Somewhere over Arizona when the second burned.

By the time the word of the Pentagon hit the cabin, it was no longer accident, no longer madness or malfunction. It was war. And every passenger knew it.

The plane docks. There is the slow, somber shuffle of feet, as if you were all walking from one funeral to another.

The badge you carry got you off quicker than most.

The terminal was chaos made flesh. Faces upturned to televisions, mouths slack and eyes burning, herded like cattle by staff who knew nothing and could say even less. You could feel the static charge of grief and terror in the air, a nation realizing it was not untouchable, that something had reached across the oceans and slit its throat.

Then you see him. A man in a suit, holding a placard: GRAYSON in block letters. His shoulders are slumped, his face pale and pinched and hollow-eyed, like someone who’d rather be anywhere but here. A man wanting nothing more than to be home, wherever home was, with the people he loves.

You walk up. Show him your badge. Tell him your name.

He tucks the placard beneath his arm and offers his hand, the shake firm but not unkind.

“Guthrie. Andrew Guthrie. Wish we’d met on a better day. This way.”

He nods toward the parking structure, and you fall in step beside him, the tide of bodies pressing in close all around. People moving like cattle through a chute.

“Can I take your bag?”

“That’s okay. I’ll hold on to it. Thanks, though, Mr. Guthrie”

Something gnaws at you. You slow your pace, your eyes lifting toward the open sky. Empty. Silent. No engines droning in descent.

Guthrie follows your gaze and answers without being asked.

“U.S. airspace shut down soon as the second plane hit. Grounded everything.”

You reach his car. A government sedan, black and anonymous. You slide into the passenger seat.

Guthrie starts the engine, glancing at you sidelong.

“Most agents, they want a minute. Get their bearings. Maybe sleep off the flight. But I read your file. Hell, you’re that Agent Grayson, aren’t you? Reckon you’ll want to get to it. Where to?” Guthrie’s eyes are fixed forward, hands on the wheel at ten and two.

“Miramar. Magnolia Village. Apartment building. I need to have a chat with a Miss Belle Flower.”

You give Guthrie the address and watch him nod once, slow and sure. Then you fish the Blackberry from your pocket, the plastic slick beneath your thumb. You dial your sister’s number without thinking. She picks up on the first ring. You hear her television in the background. News about the World Trade Center. The Pentagon.

“Nick? Oh, thank God. I can’t believe what’s happening! They’re saying it’s terrorists! Do you know anything about it?”

“Not a thing. I just wanted to make sure everybody was okay. I needed to hear your voice. How’s Pete?”

You reckon her husband’s decent as men go though you’ve long thought him touched in the head. A fool maybe but not the kind that means harm. Just a man who don’t know near as much as he thinks he does.

“Oh, you know, Pete. His lawn care business is taking off, but he can’t get his head in the game today. He’s coming home, which is for the best”

“That’s good. Okay, I’ve got to go. Stay safe”

“All right. Well, thanks for calling. You take care of yourself. Love you.”

“Love you, too, Marley.”

Just as you hang up, your BlackBerry pulses and you thumb the screen, and it’s a message from Alicia Hightower, the shrink the bureau paid for. It reads “I’m here to talk if you need me.”

You text back, “Thanks.”

You’re about to slip the thing back in your pocket when it comes to life buzzing in your hand. You look and the number is one you know. Boyd Whitaker. Fellow jarhead. You pulled each other out of the sand more than once in the war. You owe him more than you ever said aloud.

“Boyd, how you doing?”

“Hey there, good buddy. Heard you got yourself transferred. New division, huh? Only good news I heard all damn day. Hell of a day for good news, though, ain’t it? Where you hanging your hat?”

“Well, actually, right now I’m down in San Diego. How’s the life up in Los Angeles?”

“Oh, you know, walking and talking. Working the beat. San Diego? Huh? That don’t beat all. Do you remember Silas?”

“Silas?”

You close your eyes. Of course you remember. Silas Mercer. The man with the dead eyes. The one who liked the work too much. How he slipped through the cracks, past the shrinks and the tests and the red flags—that’s a question you stopped asking long ago.

“Always had a weird feeling about that guy, but then I also had the same feeling about Tim McVeigh. We all know what happened there. Seems like I should listen to those feelings.”

“Word around the campfire is, he’s been seen in San Diego. Few days back. Don’t know if that’s why you’re out there. God, I hope not. He’s a bad hombre, brother. Bad all the way down.”

“Yeah, he was a cold motherfucker.”

“Hey, something just hit my desk. I gotta run. Hang ten, brother. I’ll make my way down to San Diego. And if I can’t, come up to L.A., as long as you’re in town.”

“All right, buddy, good to hear your voice. Give a hug to the wife.”

He laughs. “Copy that.”

You arrive at Belle Flower’s apartment building. The flash of blue and red lights turning the stucco walls into a crime scene mural. Four squad cars. Officers milling at the entrance. One of them bent low beside a shape slumped against the pavement, a black tarp folded neat over what had once been a man. A forensic photographer crouched, camera raised.

You knew the shape of it. The stink of death in the air like something bitter under the tongue. You’d seen it before.

“Agent Guthrie, can you circle the block once? I want to get the lay of the land. Maybe see if Miss Flower is out and about. Keep your eyes open.”

You make your circuit slow and watchful, eyes scanning the crowd for a sign of Flower but she isn’t there. What you do see is a man behind the wheel of a light jade Bronco, the paint near luminous in the sun like something freshly minted. He’s got a cowboy hat stained from years of weather and sweat, aviators low on his nose, a cigarette burning down to the filter in his fingers. He looks like Sam Elliott if Sam Elliott had seen the bottom of a needle more times than a whiskey glass.

You pull into the driveway of Flower’s apartment building. And then you see it. Small and green and mean as sin. A fly crawling the length of the dashboard like it owns the world. Its legs tapping out some measure older than speech. It pauses a moment, its wings shivering in the stillness, and when you crack the door it slips past you into the wide and waiting air. Gone like it was never there at all.

You cross the lot and the officers watch you come like men waiting on bad news. One of them steps forward. Lean and hard-eyed. He looks you over, your suit, your shoes. The weight you carry.

“You murder police?”

“No, sir. Nicholas Grayson. I’m with the Bureau. FBI. Lookout division. I’m not here to cause a scene. Just trying to locate a particular individual listed at this address.” You lift the badge from your coat and hold it where the officer can see. It catches the light. “I’m looking for a young woman. Name’s Belle Flower. Early twenties. Possible connection to an ongoing investigation.”

He looks at you a long moment. Then he turns to the officer beside him, something passing between them that needed no words.

“All right, let me bring you up to speed. Victim’s Harold Nguyen, works the door here—lived on-site.”

He looks to the body shrouded in the black tarp at your feet.

“C.O.D.’s a single G.S.W. to the head, close range. Time of death logged at approximately 0602 hours. We’ve got that timestamp off a voicemail he left for one Belle Flower—tenant in Unit 2B. Nguyen was on the line with her when the shot went off. Suspect made forced entry into Flower’s unit shortly after. Timeline puts him inside within minutes. Flower either bailed out or was forced out of a second-story window."

The officer points to an open window, and then to smashed shrubbery below.

“Witness reports the perp circled back to the apartment after the fact, cleaned house. Took hardware—laptop, portable drives, could be intel, could be leverage. Description’s solid: Male, mid-30s, shaved head, facial hair—goatee. Dressed like a pro, grey business suit, well-built frame. Neighbor clocks him moving with purpose. No hesitation. Tires on Flower’s vehicle were punctured. Whoever this guy is, he came prepared. Knew the layout. Knew the timeline. Wasn’t here for the doorman. He was after Flower. Question is—why?”

The officer’s mouth is still moving when your eyes cut past him, drawn to the jade glint of the Bronco tearing off down the street like a beast loosed from its pen. You don’t hear the rest of what he says. You already know.

“All right,” you mutter, voice flat as the asphalt. “Thank you, officer.”

You slide a card from your coat, hand it to him without looking. “Keep me looped in. Any contact with the young woman, I want to know.”

Then you’re moving, the pavement underfoot, the blood in your ears. You throw yourself back into the sedan.

“Guthrie,” you bark, slamming the door. “we’ve got movement. Follow that Bronco!”

---

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes

Operation Watchtower

Agent Nicholas Grayson. The drone of the airliner moves through you, slow and rhythmic, a narcotic hum. You drift, thoughts unmoored, slipping backward through time. A stairwell. Cold cinderblock walls. Your steps in tandem with another. The sound of your heels ringing in the emptiness.

General Virek swipes his card. His voice low, measured. “This is important. Don’t scuff the circle.”

You nod. Swipe your own. The MP at the door marks your passing with the briefest of acknowledgments.

Beyond, a vast darkness. A cavernous expanse without measure. The space is unknowable, its borders lost to shadow. A single desk glows dim beneath the feeble light of a lamp. The man seated there is gaunt, his frame stark against the gloom. He lifts his hand, crooks a finger. The movement stretches his shadow long across the floor, reaching for you, the illusion of its touch against your cheek.

A voice not in the air but in your mind. Come.

Your body moves forward of its own accord.

As you near, the chalk line becomes visible. A circle, drawn with intent. You do not question its meaning; you only know that it must not be disturbed. At the last instant, you lift your feet, cross the threshold unmarked.

Sit.

The chair is a cheap, foldable thing. You sit.

On the desk, three manila folders. Names that carry weight. Waco Siege. Unabomber. Oklahoma City Bombing.

His gaze lingers on you, unreadable. Your work has not gone unnoticed, Agent Grayson. That is why you are here.

A sickness coils in your gut. You swallow it down. You wish yourself elsewhere. You are not elsewhere.

Tell me, Agent. What did you see in these operations that others did not? Things only you could see.

“Sir, I’m reporting with the understanding that what I say will remain within the confines of this room and your discretion. What I’m about to tell you is not speculation. It is analysis—drawn from direct field experience, intelligence correlations, and post-incident investigation. I’ll be blunt.

“The official narrative on Oklahoma City and Waco is incomplete—willfully so. McVeigh may have lit the fuse, but he wasn’t the architect. The evidence at the Alfred P. Murrah building suggests multiple explosive sources. Blast-wave patterns contradict a single-device detonation. Residue samples retrieved from interior columns showed chemical compounds that were not consistent with ANFO. We’re talking military-grade accelerants—black budget-level assets. Either McVeigh had help, or we did it ourselves. I lean toward the latter.

“At Waco, similar irregularities persist. Koresh wasn’t just leading a cult—he was running a rite. Ritualistic diagrams were found in the compound, traced in ash and blood. Burn patterns in the main hall showed circular containment glyphs—non-Christian, non-Western, but deliberate. Interviews with survivors indicate coordinated chanting. Sympathetic resonance, possibly. In plain terms, he was summoning something. And he nearly brought it through.

“I pulled twelve kids out before the fire collapsed the west wall. We lost seventy. I carry every one of those names—the kids from Oklahoma, too—daycare center, ground floor. I know the reports. I signed half of them. My shrink says that’s trauma. Fine. But trauma didn’t explain what I saw in that building. Evil did.

“In both cases—Waco and Oklahoma—we’re looking at overlapping anomalies: coded symbols, environmental irregularities, electromagnetic interference pre-detonation. There are threads here, sir. Threads that don’t trace back to standard operational enemies. This isn’t al-Qaeda. It’s not rogue militias. It’s something older. Smarter.

“You know that already.

“I’ve chased conspiracy theories before—most are noise. But some aren’t. I’ve seen enough to believe they’re real. And I’m not afraid to call it what it is: occult influence on domestic soil, cloaked behind anti-government sentiment, weaponized by people who know exactly what they’re doing.

“I’m not asking permission to dig deeper. I’m reporting that I already have. And that I intend to continue.”

His mouth smiles, a smile that is not a smile. His hands move over the folders, sliding them from view. He replaces them with a single file.

Operation Watchtower.

His voice does not change. The weight of the words presses just the same. Events of great portent are unfolding.

You will go to San Diego. You will go alone. There are matters beyond our organization’s conventional understanding. You will find them, and you will put an end to them. What is required is not understanding but resolve. There are movements in the dark. The Order of the Black Star. The Aryan Solar Circle. Their paths converge. What comes of it is unknown. You will see that it does not come to anything at all.

The Order of the Black Star, led by Erik Dunlop. He believes we stand at the edge of the Fourth Aeon, that the world as we know it must be razed to bring about divine order. Their bookstore, The Veil, is their gateway. A meeting place for mystics, drifters, the lost. It is where they are found. It is where they are made.

Clipped to the dossier is a photograph. Erik Dunlop at a lectern in some dim and cavernous hall. The gathered sit in rapt attention, their faces drawn with something like reverence, something like hunger. Their suits tailored, their jewelry discreet, the quiet wealth of those who do not need to announce themselves.

Dunlop stands among them yet apart. The cut of his Armani suit immaculate, the silk sheen catching the light like oil on water. Around his neck a pendant of obsidian, dark as the space between stars. His smile does not reach his eyes. His hands rest upon the wood like those of a man delivering a verdict, not a sermon.

The Aryan Solar Circle. A Nazi faction under Kurt Maurer. They see the West as weak, dying. They seek empire in its place. Their stronghold is a bar in Ocean Beach. Dugin’s.

Clipped to this dossier is another photograph. Kurt Maurer stepping from a black limousine, the door held open by a man whose face is turned from the camera. Maurer is powerfully built, the kind of strength that does not come from vanity but from war. His red hair shorn high and tight, his goatee salted with silver. The sleeves of his expensive shirt rolled back to reveal the ink coiled along his arms, symbols of old allegiances, old gods, the sigil of the Aryan Solar Circle harsh against his skin—a sunwheel encircled by runic inscriptions, jagged script whispering of ascendance through destruction, of blood and fire and the breaking of weak men. A symbol carved from old hate, its lines grim and unbroken.

Behind him the glow of neon, the low slouch of a biker bar, its sign half burned-out. Dugin’s. A den for those who trade in shadows and violence, where men speak of war not as history but as prophecy. Maurer stands as though an empire has already been conquered. A man who does not wait. A man who does not ask. A man who takes.

You listen. You do not interrupt.

Our division is small, Agent Grayson. You will have no backup. You will need allies among the locals. Begin with Miss Belle Flower. A hacker. We have watched her. We have found nothing beyond the petty crimes of her kind. But she has reach. Connections. She will be useful.

He opens the folder. The paper whispers against itself, the weight of what is written there bending the air around it. He lifts a sheaf of pages, crisp, orderly, squared at the edges. Stapled clean. Paper clipped to the top is a photograph of a girl not yet full grown, eighteen maybe. She stands outside a stuccoed building scorched by the western sun, San Diego heat rising off the pavement like breath. Overhead, the iron bellies of jets split the sky and leave nothing behind. She does not smile. She does not frown. Her face is a blank page, unwritten. The wind lifts her hair and lets it fall. She does not move.

You thumb through the dossier. The pages are thin.

She was born into the sawdust and smoke of a traveling circus, her parents fixtures in the freak tent. Giants and grotesques. She was neither. Had no claws, no second head, no forked tongue. Just flesh. And so they made use of her the way a butcher makes use of a carcass. She was theirs. No state had claim to her. No birth recorded. No name but the one they gave.

Her mother was a tower of a woman, her arms thick as fence posts. Her voice could still a crowd or send them howling. Her father was small and clever and with many fingers, nimble as rats, a surgeon by instinct and desire. They took her body like a canvas. Sewed into her the limbs of beasts. Goat tail. Rabbit ears. Small things at first. Later… stranger. She could not animate them. They rotted on her.

The scars remain. Lines drawn in tissue. A map of what was done.

The circus knew. Of course, they knew. It was not hidden. It was spectacle. This is the cost, they said. This is life under the big top. And she—just a contortionist. Folded but not rare. So they let it happen. Every one of them. Not one lifted a hand.

She fled. One night, under a low moon. Buck Flanagan drove the rig. Weathered man. Hair the color of old bone. He saw what they did to her. Maybe not all of it. But enough. He drove her to the edge of the county. Passed her off to a man named Red. No last name needed. That’s how it ends, most stories in the dark. Red took her West.

Next page. A new paragraph. The words are sharper here.

She had eyes on a forum. Lurker’s eyes. Thread after thread. A cell. Plans. Smoke and fire. Her hands on the wire before it burned. But she said nothing. Maybe fear. Maybe she couldn’t believe. But the silence was hers.

Flip again.

A new contact. Anonymous. Knows the circus. Knows what was done. Says they want to help. But she does not trust it. How could she? The past does not reach out a hand unless it means to pull you under. And yet, someone out there knows her. Knows her name, her shape, her history. Knows she ran.

Wants her back.

A silence settles between you.

Then he stands.

And his shadow rises behind him.

You expect the silhouette of a man. What you see is not a man. It is something else.

It is something alien and terrifying. The room does not contain it. Cannot contain it. It does not obey the space it occupies.

The shadow writhed. It breathed and buckled like wind in the grain. Out from it came arms not arms, spindled and black, stretching into the air and gone again like smoke in reverse. It pulsed. Grew. Diminished. You thought you saw teeth in the turning of its head. Long and thin and sharp as awls. But they, too, dissolved, unshaped, and what remained was only the silhouette. A thing unbeheld yet seen. A thing that bore watching. And watched.

You hear a whimper. Thin, dry. You recognize it belatedly as your own.

He extends his hand. You cannot refuse it. The fingers close around yours.

Godspeed, Agent Grayson.

Your memory is a broken thing after that. A series of flashes. The long walk back. The circle unmarred. The door closing behind you. The cool night air and General Virek’s voice, distant, making some empty sound of comfort.

Your apartment. The go-bag waiting by the door, as always. The airport. The ascent into the sky.

Now.

Something stirs against your hand.

You look. A fly. Small. Metallic green, its thorax gleaming like something wet, something unnatural.

The tickle of the fly on your hand is the first thing to call you back. You’ve been gone. Drifted somewhere beneath thought, beneath memory. A hollowness where a man ought to be. You had slipped into the old places, fear-worn paths carved through the meat of you, left there to keep you safe once and long ago. You do not remember where you were. Not truly.

The Agency sent a woman. Alicia Hightower. A therapist, they called her. Said she’d help you root out the rot. Teach you to listen again. To feel. Said it was new science. Revolutionary. But there is nothing new under heaven. The engine hums through the floor. The air is cold. You breathe. In. Out.

You raise your hand and swipe at the insect but it is gone before you move. Drifts to the window. Impacts the glass. Again. Again.

A soft chime sounds through the cabin.

Then again.

And again.

Something shifts. A ripple in the air. You see a steward emerge from the cockpit. His face is pale, unfocused. The other attendants glance at one another. At their hands. At the lights overhead.

You do not know what is wrong.

Only that something is.

Terribly, terribly wrong.

Swift Knees 85

Belle Flower. Your phone rattles against the wood of your nightstand, insistent. Dragging you up from the depths of sleep. A rare sleep untouched by nightmares, and you resent it for that. You turn your head, eyes heavy, the red glow of the clock staring back at you. 6:01 AM. You lie still, listening to the hum of it. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. In another moment, it will tumble to the floor, a thing desperate to cast itself down, to be done with its purpose, to end.

From the next apartment, you hear the faint sound of a television broadcast and your neighbor sobbing.

Your landline rings.

You know what this is. You’ve always known. You sit in the dark with the knowing of it heavy in your chest. As if you’d swallowed iron. You’ve seen it. Not just once. Night after night. The thing circling in your thoughts, a wheel that never stops turning. You did nothing. And now it’s come. You do not answer. You only listen. And wait.

The cell phone stops buzzing. The landline rings on, stubborn in its purpose, until at last it yields to the tape.

“Miss Flower?” It’s Harold Nguyen, your doorman. “Your father is here. Shall I send him up?”

Then a sound. A dull percussive thud, like the popping of a paper bag. A sharp intake of breath. A wet and shuddering gurgle.

Silence.

The line goes dead.

You are in shock. Your father. The thought of him. Why is he here? What could he want? How did he find you? Your breath shallow in your chest. Your heart a drumbeat of old fear. The first thought is to flee and fast. You know he could be just beyond the door. You do not want to see him. You do not want to hear his voice. Of all the men in this wide and wounded world, he is the last you want to meet.

There’s a knock at the door. Three sharp raps. Measured. Unhurried.

“Sorry to bother you, Miss Flower. It’s Jones, your super. There’s a gas leak reported coming from your apartment. Needs to be looked at, pronto.” A southern accent. New Orleans?

The voice flat, even. No urgency in it. No real concern. Just the words, the way they ought to be said.

You take the knife from the kitchen drawer where it waits. You slide it down into the waistband of your sweatpants, where it rests against your hip. Then you go to the door.

“Now’s not a good time. Please leave.”

“I must insist, Miss Flower,” he says. “It’s very dangerous, this gas leak.”

“I don’t smell anything in here. Please go away.”

He knocks on the door again.

“I’m warning you,” you say. “Please leave me alone. It’s not a good time for me.”

The door explodes open, the force of it throwing you to the floor. Above you stands a man in a grey suit, well-fitted. His skull smooth and bare, the shine of it catching the hallway light. Maybe shaved by choice. Maybe not. Maybe a concession to male pattern baldness.

His goatee is trimmed neat, salt and pepper, the kind a man keeps when he cares about control.

He does not fidget. Does not shift his weight. He stands still as stone, his face blank, unreadable. Not waiting. Not impatient. His gun aimed at your face.

The knife slips from your waistband, but you catch it, the blade cold in your palm. Your first thought is flight. The circus had made you fast and limber and hard to hold, and you move before thought betrays you. Down the hall. Into your bedroom. The window waiting. Below, neatly trimmed hedges. You leap. The branches catch you, scrape you. And then you roll to lessen the impact.

Above, the man leans from the window and laughs. “You run, I follow. That’s the way it is.”

Then he ducks back inside.

From your apartment, you hear your parrot squawking the name you use on the dark web: “Swift knees. Eighty-five. Swift knees. Eighty-five.” Over and over. A name that should not be known.

You run. Behind you the footfalls of the man and the silence of his intent. You chance a look and there he is, close now, look of grim determination on his face. His hand finds your shoulder but you twist from it, slip the grip. You feint left and vanish right and you are gone.

And then you feel the dew on your soles like the breath of the earth come up through you, cold and quickening. You tear through a stranger’s yard, leap the fence. Your breath is ragged in your throat, and the sweat rolls off you like oil.

You are compromised. Everything you carried—thumb drives, disks, the laptop—is gone to him now.

You need out. You need to be online. There’s a library in Mira Mesa, public and quiet. You run toward it, cutting through streets and backlots like a hunted thing. An hour later you arrive, chest heaving, sides burning, and there it is. Closed. Still dark behind the glass. The hour too early.

So you stand there with nothing.

Except a name.

You cross to the pay phone. You punch the number you haven’t used in years, feel the metal buttons press into your fingertips. The line rings.

An operator’s voice. A pause.

Then Buck.

“Yeah. I’ll accept.”

Street sounds behind him, the hum of the world still turning. He’s driving. Going somewhere.

“Belle, I tried calling you earlier! Phone just rang and rang! Have you turned on the TV? Do you know what’s going on?”

“Going on?”

“Two jets. They just crashed into the World Trade Center. We’re under attack. Belle, America’s under attack!”

There’s a sickness low in your gut. A knowing. You are complicit. That much is clear. The blood isn’t on your hands but it’s near enough. Close enough to taste.

This is the reckoning, you think. This is the shadow come knocking. That man at your door, he was no accident. You knew. When the phone rang. When the sobs bled through the wall. You knew. And you did nothing. You turned from it. You looked away. A coward’s silence. A coward’s sin.

“Buck, someone just broke into my apartment. I barely escaped. He claimed he was my father. Oh, God, I think he killed my doorman!”

“Calm down, Belle. Your mom and dad are in the trailer behind me.”

“Oh, God. Okay, so this has nothing to do with my father. Where are you?”

“We’re in Arizona. We’re gonna be in San Diego in two weeks. But if someone’s after you, I’ll ditch this caravan and come scoop you up.”

“If my parents are with you, I don’t want them to know where I am right now, and I still want to avoid them.”

“Belle, they’re the last people I would ever tell. How can I help you?”

You stand there in the morning hush, breath ragged, heart a hammer in the dry well of your chest. You need your laptop. You need money. You’d ask Buck to wire you some, but you realize your ID is back at your apartment. You think furiously.

“Buck, is there anyone in San Diego you know that can help me?” You’ve met unsavory folks during your life in the circus. You hope that Buck knows someone big. Someone aggressive. Someone who’s intimidating who can check on your apartment and see what’s there, and see if they can grab your things so that you can get out of there.

“Belle, remember when I got you out of the circus? Remember Red, the guy who drove you to San Diego? He’s in Convoy. He’s close by. He could be there in like 15 or 30 minutes. I’m gonna give him a call. You stay put.”

3,333 Faces

Bryce Wexley. You are weary. The sun has carved its mark upon you, and the wind has taken its share. Your skin is dry, cracked at the knuckles, the lips. Your clothes stiff with sweat, and with dust. You smell of old concrete and city heat, of grease from borrowed meals and the salt of your own body. The grime has settled in the lines of your hands, beneath your nails, in the creases of your face where sleep has been a fleeting thing.

Three weeks since Alpine. Since the Black Labs. Since you crawled free of that place like something aborted and unwanted. The city has given you nothing but its empty corners, its cold steel benches, its unblinking neon. You’ve kept moving, though the weight in your limbs grows heavier, though the nights stretch long and restless. You’ve seen the way men look at you. The way they look through you. You’ve learned where to hide when the wrong ones are near.

The morning is warm, the air thick with the quiet hum of a city waking. The sun presses against your eyelids, a dull and insistent light. You’d like to sleep. To drift a while longer in the half-world between dreaming and waking. But the sun will not be denied.

You push yourself up, bones stiff, the ache of pavement, and restless nights settling into your skin. It is time.

You think of Wong. A light touch. His diner not unfriendly to men like you, men who slip in and out of places without leaving much of a mark. He looks the other way when you take scraps from emptied plates, pretends not to see when you ghost through his diner after closing. Sometimes, if you put a broom to his sidewalk, he’ll press a lunch into your hands, a quiet offering. Then there’s The Big Kitchen. Judy the Beauty and her staff generous with their portions. A kindness that means a long walk, more than a mile, past storefronts, past men who look as if they, too, have woken unwilling. And then, of course, there is Marge Calloway with her soup kitchen, but that’s even further away. You weigh the choice, the day stretching out before you, empty and waiting. Wong’s it is, then.

You have been nowhere and everywhere. Moving, always moving, because if you stop, they will find you. If you stop, you will think too much. San Diego is too hot, too bright, too full of people who don’t see you. Mission Beach at night, when the ocean air makes it almost bearable. The alleys behind the Gaslamp, where the stink clings to you and no one asks questions. A shelter on Market Street, but you don’t like sleeping there. Too many eyes, too many whispers. The nightmares come fast when you try to rest.

You have seen things. Too much, really. A man bleeding out behind a bar while the world kept moving. Symbols scratched into brick that made your head throb. A man in a perfect suit staring at you from a diner window. Just watching. You left before he could stand up. Once, you saw a cat slinking through the shadows, tail flicking like it had no worries in the world. You almost called out before you realized it wasn’t him. Mister Whiskerford. He probably thinks you abandoned him. He probably hates you. No, scratch that; he probably doesn’t think about you at all.

They are still out there. The ones from Alpine. The Black Labs. You know because you helped them. You thought you were doing your job. You signed the papers, greased the wheels, let them make people disappear without a trace. Then you saw things you weren’t supposed to see. Security footage that moved wrong, shadows twisting behind locked doors, things speaking in voices that didn’t belong to them. The U.S. government has a deal with something not from here. Aliens. Extraterrestrials.

Something happened to you in Alpine. You should have died, but you didn’t. You don’t know why. You remember a voice that wasn’t a voice, something pressing against your skull like it was peeling you open. You can feel things now. Know when someone isn’t what they seem. Know when a place doesn’t belong. It’s like your brain got rewired, but you don’t know what the hell to do with it. It hasn’t saved you from anything, just kept you running.

They haven’t stopped looking. General Conrad Voss is leading them. He was always the one with the orders, the real power behind it all. Maybe he’s the one who made the deal. Lorraine Henshaw, your secretary, must have known something. She was different before it all went down. Colder, watching you like you were already dead. Was she always in on it? Did she try to warn you? No, she would have done more if she cared.

You need help. Vince Caruso is your best shot. You did favors for him when you were in office, greased the right wheels, made his life easier. He owes you. He knows it. If anyone can make you disappear the right way, it’s him. Unless he’s already decided you’re not worth the trouble.

For now, you survive.

The other day, you saw a cat waiting by the back door, watching you. Just for a second, you thought it was Mister Whiskerford. Your chest was tight. You wanted to believe he found you, like he had been looking for you this whole time. But that’s stupid. He’s fine. He moved on. He has probably forgotten you completely. You would if you were him.

You need a plan. A way out. Something. Because you can feel it now, more than ever. They’re getting closer.

Without warning, your head explodes in agony. Like an iron spike driven clean through the crown of your skull. You lurch, knees striking pavement, pedestrians parting round you like water round a stone. The sky blackens. The world peels away. Overhead, stars wheel in unfamiliar patterns. Moons hang low and bright, pale-bellied things that do not belong. Comets trail fire through the heavens, their paths slow and deliberate, as though watching. The constellations shimmer like glass spun thin across the firmament, casting long, strange shadows that move independent of the light.

San Diego still murmurs, its sounds muffled as if heard through water.

You see them then—two black towers, tall and still as grave markers. Between them and beyond, a citadel rises. Immense. Impossible. It recedes even as it sharpens to clarity. You feel it before you see it.

A weight behind your eyes. A pressure in your chest.

Something there is watching. Not with sight but with a mind vast and cold. For a moment, it touches yours. Brief. Wordless. You reel. You are known. And then it is gone. Or worse—it remains.

You blink, and the city is back. But not as it was.

A woman staggers, sits hard on the curb, her hands trembling, staring at her Walkman in disbelief. Cars roll to a halt, their drivers faces a look of stunned confusion. Crows provide a choir with their caws.

No, no, oh, God, that wasn’t real, you think. That wasn’t real. It saw me. It knew me, not like a person knows another person, like a fire knows dry wood, like an ocean knows a drowning man.

You see after images of towers burning.

I shouldn’t have seen that. I wasn’t supposed to. Aliens. It has to be aliens!

The people around you look upon you with disgust. Or they look past you, through you, their gaze skimming the world as if you were never there. And some do not see you at all.

Your flesh begins to tingle. Begins to itch. Rivulets of sweat trickle down your spine. You know you’re about to have another terrible vision. And then it hits you like a sledgehammer burying itself into your skull.

The world disappears.

You are in a hallway that should not exist.

It is endless—narrow, featureless, white, the kind of white that hurts the eyes, the kind that makes everything inside it feel surgical and forgotten. The floor is wet. Not with water. With something else. Something that smells like copper and old grief.

Along either side, at exact intervals, are doors. 3,333 of them.

Each is numbered.

Each bears a single name—and you know them all.

Names you never learned in waking life, but you recognize every one.

Behind each door is a person you helped vanish. Not directly. But by signing something. Ignoring something. Making a call. Just doing your job.

The doors begin to open. Slowly. One by one.

First, soft whispers. Then voices. Then screams.

A child with no mouth sobbing through his eyes.

A woman whose bones are on the outside of her body, still walking.

A man shaped wrong, limbs moving like water.

They emerge, silent at first, then speaking in perfect unison:

“We remember you, Bryce.”

You try to run, but the hallway stretches. The lights flicker.

You stumble. The wetness on the floor is now ankle-deep, now knee-deep, now rising.

You turn back—and the doors have vanished.

Only faces remain, embedded in the walls.

All 3,333 of them.

Their eyes open.

Their mouths open.

And they begin to sing.

A terrible, perfect, hymn of remembrance.

The sound drills into your skull, vibrating through your teeth, through the marrow of you.

Then, there is a last voice, quiet and close. It breathes into your ear:

“You are the last door.”

The vision fades, and the pressure crushing your brain lifts. You find yourself sprawled on the ground. You lay there for a minute, and the sun beats down on you, and you feel piss drying on your leg. You realize that your clothes are in disarray. You were a senator, dammit! Are a senator, and you straighten what, underneath all the filth, is an outrageously expensive blazer.

You stagger towards Wong’s and hear people around you talking about the towers. How could they know about the towers that you just saw in your vision? Just as you’re about to open the door to Wong’s, you see a television above the counters broadcasting the World Trade Center. Smoke billowing into the New York City skyline. As you’re about to push open the door, goose bumps rise on your flesh, and the urge to scratch at your skin returns. You scream because you know what will happen next. And it does.

The sky is dark.

The Alpine wind like razors across your skin, slicing without blood. You are bound to the wood. Arms stretched wide. Ankles strapped tight. The grain of the crucifix rough against your back, splinters finding their way home. Your skin shivers in the cold, and your body, unbidden, betrays you. Your member stands erect, throbbing.

Below you, the crowd moves. Robed and hooded. Faces hidden. They chant in an alien tongue. The sound is wet and clotted and old.

Beyond them, soldiers. Rifles cradled like infants. Eyes forward. Breath held. Waiting.

And behind the soldiers, the scientists. Cold-eyed. Watching monitors that glow with terrible colors. Their fingers dance over keys as if in prayer. Not a one looks up. Not a one looks away.

Then, the twins. Thin as bone, white as salt. Sexless and yet obscene in their symmetry. Their faces smooth and expressionless, their movements like glass through still water.

They approach.

One raises a hand.

The other places long fingers on your belly.

There is no blade. No cutting.

Still, you open.

A door. Hinged in the meat.

And from within you issues a torrent. A flood of shapes and smoke and screaming mouths.

Winged things. Crawling things. Things that burn and things that whisper.

They pour from you, shoving past one another, hungry for air, for space, for violence.

The chanting rises.

And through it all, you hear one of the twins whisper—not aloud, but into your marrow:

“You were never one man. You were the lock.”

You find yourself on hands and knees, vomiting the meager contents of your last meal on the sidewalk. It splatters on your knuckles. Your tongue burns from the bile.

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• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes