We’re on the road now as I write this second file. I saw the sign saying we had just entered Iowa a few miles back, but I don’t know how far we have to go, or what will happen to me when we get there. My thoughts dwell on things like becoming a science experiment, or even getting dissected. You don’t have me convinced that we’re friends. I think we’re barely allies.
Sorry, I forgot. You don’t want me to refer directly to you, Mutt. Keep it simple and objective for the clarity of my “report,” or whatever these are. I’ll stop, but we need to have a serious talk about what happened in Kennel. Can you promise I’ll survive whatever’s next on the schedule? When I’m sad or scared, I write. It keeps my mind on something else and makes it feel like I’m accomplishing more than I would be while cowering under a blanket.
I can see why the guy who goes by Beagle has the name. He’s been the nicest so far, and makes sure I’m fed. Then again, he is the only one on the team who doesn’t carry a gun around. As the tech, he seems to spend his work hours monitoring or studying things at his workstation. He’s tried to put me at ease a little by talking computers with me on his downtime. I think it’s helped, but I get frustrated each time even he refuses to say anything about what’s going on.
Then there’s Doberman. The “old man” of the group. An ornery and by-the-books fellow whose official title is Captain. Keeps everyone in line. All of that was evident enough the first time I saw him from the trailer window, barking orders at the rest of you or stomping into or out of the tent that’s set up where cars once parked in front of an outdoor movie screen. I think I have the rest of the names, but I don’t know much about jobs or positions. Retriever, Bernard, Dalmatian, Spaniel, Dachshund, Terrier, Husky, and Foxhound. Did I miss anyone? Most of you kind of blend together.
Like I’ve said, I notice things, so it’s obvious to me that Mutt is a bit of an outsider. Maybe something of the newbie, too. He seems to have a handler in Lab, the only woman on the squad and, I think, more of a hard-ass than the captain. It always looks like she has an eye on him to keep him from running, even though he showed up first to “scout ahead” prior to the main invasion.
Did the sheriff cooperate with you guys? And what did you eventually tell my parents? Don’t you think it’s cruel to keep me out of the loop and take me away from my family and everything I know? How can you do this sort of thing to people? This laptop, and this journal, are the only companions I have. I’ll write another report for you, and I’ll tell you what I saw, but I also have to get my thoughts out while I have the chance. Give me a few minutes to decompress.
Okay. Deep breaths…
I was given a copy of the transcript from my recorded conversation with Mutt yesterday morning, and told that if I “didn’t have anything better to do,” I could copy and paste it here and clean it up. “It might even make you feel part of the team,” he said. I think he’s just passing on busywork, but I’m still trying to wake up and process everything that went down last night, so… maybe it’s not the worst idea.
Your computer’s auto-translation software did an okay job, but there are definitely some words it got wrong. If I’m doing this, though, I’m going to format it so it looks like an actual conversation. None of that movie script looking stuff.
We open on Mutt walking in from the corner of the screen. He sits across the interrogation table in the trailer, which doubles as the place where I eat my meals. He’s calm and restrained, but since the camera doesn’t show his eyes, I’ll describe them as distant and world-weary. He also has a problem with eye contact, which isn’t a good trait in an interrogator. That, and a whole lot of other things about the way he talks to me, tells me that he usually isn’t picked for this job. Maybe the others would be too harsh on a green kid like me, so they chose the soft approach.
“Hello again, Pom,” he says in a voice I have trouble hearing sometimes. “How’d you sleep? I’ve never tried the bed in this thing.”
“Okay, I guess. Can I see my parents now? Can I call them?”
“Sorry. I wish that was up to me. But it’d be difficult to arrange just now, anyway, since we have the town locked down. Our backup convoy barricaded off the roads in and out, and everyone’s been ordered to stay indoors. You have train tracks nearby, so we’re using the good old chemical spill excuse. Your parents think you’re safe in the church with others for now. I’m sure they’re worried about you, but we just can’t…”
“How long will this last? What do you want from me?”
“It’s complicated. I think we should ease into this. Pom, last time we met, I asked if you had projected before, and you told me… never prior to Friday night. But you didn’t ask how I knew you could do it.”
I shrug and take a breath as I realize I could be sitting on that cold metal chair for a while, then reply, “I was scared, and too tired to have a real chat. I’m not used to being pushed around by some government goons… No offense.”
“That’s okay; it’s sort of what we are. Why did you go to Moira’s cabin?”
“She… Um… W-well…”
“It’s okay. Take your time.”
“It’s not that I’m nervous. I’m trying to figure out how to best put it.”
“You can skip past what you and your classmates thought of her. I did finish reading your summary of events this morning. And I’m sorry for your loss.”
“T-thank you. I, uh… I mean, if you read it, then you’d know that Charlie… what I think is Charlie… He told me to go there, to find answers.”
“Right. I think there might be some in Moira’s personal writing.”
“Can I read it?”
“Sorry. Also not my call. It’s a mess, anyway. Mostly insane ramblings, like in that book you found. Once we get it all scanned, I’ll tell you what anything relevant to you says. That’s a promise, okay? I’d like to help each other here.”
“Help…? I… I don’t even know what I am. How can I leave my body like that? I read about it, but why me? And how can Charlie do it, if he’s…”
Mutt takes out a vape pen and puffs a long one like a habitual user, but is courteous enough to turn away from me when he breathes back out.
“I was watching last night. From a safe place, in hiding. I saw you, and our target—the ‘monster,’ but not a second projected person above your house.”
“You were watching? How?”
“We have the same gift. Only, I knew I could do it when I was much younger than you. I was so young, in fact, that I used to think it was just a normal thing everyone did. I’m not sure why it took so long to manifest in you. Even with the pills.”
“Then I’m really not alone… But I swear, I saw Charlie. We talked.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t. Only that I didn’t see him.”
“Wait. You’ve been here long enough to… Couldn’t you save Jessica?”
“I was conducting an investigation, Pom. On my own, as the others waited for me to call it in. We’d been chasing Moira and the thing she carried for a long time. There was no way I could have saved anyone by myself. I’m sorry.”
“But, you… You’ve been doing this all your life, haven’t you? Can’t you, like… I don’t know, fight that monster? Fire psychic blasts or something?”
Mutt lets out the most subtle of chuckles, and shakes his head. “It’s not like that. What we have is very rare, but it’d make for a lame superpower. We can look around, fly, and run from beasts that are invisible to the ‘normies.’ That’s about it. Good for spying, but not much else.”
“That… thing, the Girük, is invisible?”
“It’s not that it’s invisible, but more that our physical minds can’t really perceive it. We have with us a few special cameras that can show us its shadow in digital form, but they’re bulky; they use all of this special hardware in ways I don’t understand. A simple pair of goggles that can pick up our monster haven’t been invented yet. The only other way to observe it is by leaving our bodies. Even then, we’re only getting a fragment of its existence, and it’s dulled. Think of it as… seeing the creature through several pairs of sunglasses.”
“But why’s it like that?”
“It’s all long, uncertain science, and they don’t tell us everything. What I can say, is that it’s been around, at least in our world, for nearly a hundred years. And it actually split in half just after it arrived. It seems to be unstable in our world while whole. Or, at least it was.”
“Is it a demon? Some… interdimensional being?”
“Heh. You’re a smart kid, Pom.”
“It’s more that I’m a sci-fi nerd…”
“I gathered that from what you wrote. Which was a big help, by the way. We appreciate it. Easier for you than talking, right?”
“But can you tell me where it came from?”
Mutt takes another hit from his vape pen. He’s naturally twitchy, nervous, and on guard. He needs something to take the edge off.
“We aren’t sure,” he says. “One half of it stayed in an old hotel lobby, bound to certain objects. It was dismantled and remade… elsewhere, piece by piece, and contained there and studied for decades. Until it got out.”
“Where was it kept?”
Mutt hesitates, and deflects. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But I…” he pats at his chest, “was the dumbass that went exploring and freed it, while projecting. It attached itself to me, and… This thing we call a Girük, it feeds at night on people as they sleep. Absorbs something we can’t detect or measure, killing its victims. And it took away my ability to project. Well, mostly. I can still do it if I take a drug cocktail that the division I work for developed, but it has some nasty side effects.”
“If people started dying after she… Was the other half attached to her?”
“That was always the belief. She went into hiding following an incident at a radio station that happened while it was on air. The team before ours started the hunt for her, but she always slipped away before they could bring her in. She eventually ended up here—who knows why for certain. I wish our paths could’ve intersected; that she’d be sitting where you are now. I would’ve liked to speak with her, even if she wasn’t right in the head anymore.”
“Why… did she die the way she did? It was horrible.”
“Yeah. I know. It’s… bad that you had to see that. If it makes any difference, she probably valued the parasite she’d been carrying around since the 1970s more than her own life and accepted her fate. When she saw you at the store, she must’ve realized what you can do, and wanted to pass her curse, or blessing—however she saw it—to you. Think about her words.”
“It needed someone younger with this gift…”
“It hijacks that part of you to give itself more freedom. Based on your description, it must have fed for many years and engorged itself like a bear about to hibernate. I tried to stay away from populated areas, but I doubt Moira cared who it killed, or how many. We don’t want to find out what its objective is. That’s what we’re trying to do here. Contain it.”
“Why do you work for these people? You seem like a regular guy.”
His vaping arm drops down to his side, and I remember him looking a little bit… remorseful, maybe?
“It wasn’t by choice,” he confides. “I broke into a place run by some very powerful people. There was no way I could hide forever, even though they didn’t actually have a recording of my break-in to go off of. So… it was either help them find the other half, or become a prisoner in an underground science lab for the rest of what would be a short life.”
Mutt hears something in his earpiece, and I stay quiet as he listens in.
He presses it with a finger and replies, “No, I’m not trying to scare her. You don’t even need to monitor us. I’m making progress.”
“… Is that your handler?” I ask, at the risk of sounding sardonic.
“Lab,” Mutt sighs. “She and Doberman go way back. The veterans. They survived both incidents when the Girük escaped its containment, long before I showed up, when many others didn’t.”
“You just said you weren’t trying to scare me. I don’t need to hear about some SCP type crap!” I blurt, despite usually not being one to act out, especially around people I barely know.
“SCP… Oh. Yeah, I think I’ve heard of that… The real work is even less glamorous, I swear.”
“… They let you use the internet down in wherever they keep you?”
“Of course. We’re still people. When we’re off duty, we even have movies and video games. We just happen to serve a department no one’s heard of. And that keeps me on a… Well, I hate this term, but it’s definitely fitting to call it a short leash. They finally started trusting me just enough to send me out here to do some field work for the first time.”
“You sure are trying to get familiar with me…” I grumble. “I’ve watched interrogations before. You’re just building rapport because you want something.”
“Fair enough. But I know we can help each other.”
“Why should I trust someone… dressed like Neil Patrick Harris at the end of Starship Troopers?”
This time, one of my comments seems to break through Mutt’s icy, suppressed exterior, and he lets out a genuine laugh.
“I respect you for liking the classics, but you’re too young to be watching stuff like that. Besides, Foxhound got it closer when he told me I look like Chris Redfield from the last Resident Evil game.” Mutt is a little disappointed when I just sit there looking stupid before I shake my head. “Not as familiar, huh…”
“Hold on—is it even dangerous if we’re awake? Can’t it only… hurt people while they’re sleeping?”
“We’re told that it can defend itself with its claws. It makes the edges physical, and even though it’s just a thin sliver, it’s enough to cut through you.”
I’m seen recoiling a little from the thought. This creature really is monstrous, some ghostly horror that never belonged in our world.
“Then how do you even fight it? You can’t just shoot it, right?” I wonder.
“With powerful microwaves. They don’t ‘burn’ it, but they do seem to destabilize and immobilize the thing, giving us a chance to trap it. They don’t show me the more confidential files, but from what I have read, it’ll enter a low-energy state when it knows it can’t go anywhere. You said it was a cloud the first time you saw it, right?”
“Um. Y-yeah… I guess so.”
“That’s how it appears when it’s not putting much effort in. God… it must have fed on so many people over the years. I’m sorry Moira brought it here. But you have a chance to do something good, kid. It wants you. We can use that.”
“Does your team… want to use me as bait?”
“You really are quick.”
“I mean, it’s pretty obvious,” I say and cover my face with my hands. “If I do this… and you’re probably not giving me a choice… Can I go home after?”
“I’ll do everything I can to make sure that happens.”
“Can you keep me safe?”
“It’s our priority. We don’t want it to touch you. If it does, it latches on. That’s what happened to me. I can teach you how to move around faster, and more easily. It might not be able to move quickly at all anymore, based on your descriptions. You should easily outrun it. You lure it into the cage, and get out before we lock it. Do you think you’re up for it? For the sake of your town?”
“… What do you need me to do?” I ask reluctantly.
The recording continues for an hour, and I won’t bother putting the rest here. He explains the plan on repeat, including fallbacks and fail safes. It sounds simple enough, but the problem even I’m smart enough to notice, is that they’re treating this like they’re trapping a wild animal. I ask a few times how intelligent they think the being is. Mutt sidesteps the question. Maybe he doesn’t want to worry me that we might not be able to outwit it.
But at one point, he does reveal that his half did speak to him, with real words, when they first “met.” That seems like enough of an answer to me.
After our long conversation and planning session, I’m finally allowed to leave the trailer under supervision and get to see the operating base that’s been set up at a drive-in theater which closed before I was born. The team is scrappier than I expected, not quite the roughnecks I imagined. A few of them are ex-military, but nothing elite from the sound of it. They may now serve in a unit just about no one knows about, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best in the world or anything. It’s more that they were trained to deal with, study, and contain a very specific threat which provides some kind of scientific knowledge. When I told Beagle, the closest person they have to a scientist in the group, that maybe your bosses should just dispose of something this dangerous… he just laughed and said, “Believe me, we’ve tried.”
It can only be locked away; they don’t know how to destroy it. But, while it existed, it might as well be studied and measured. Like Mutt, he didn’t tell me much about it, either, even when I basically said, “hit me, I’m a sci-fi writer.” Most information was confidential and above his pay grade, but there were wild theories that had dripped down into their division over the years. Beagle had the impression that the higher-ups were “scared of something,” and the team was meant to be more of a sacrificial tool.
“We train for this, but no one expected to live long when we got deployed to hunt down the other half.”
“You’ve been at this for years, haven’t you?” I countered.
“Yeah, but we’ve never gotten this close to it before. Now it’s out there, with no host. We don’t know for sure what it’ll do.”
“Mutt did say I shouldn’t talk to you,” I murmured back. “He called you a confidence-killer.”
“Just a realist,” he said. “He’s right, though. We’re ‘first responders;’ not the experts. But we do need to protect you. Just follow orders, and be smart.”
I left the tech van full of computers and monitoring equipment, and examined the strange metal pillars that the team’s stronger members were setting up around the site. They were tall and had wire supports that needed to be driven into the ground, and all along their sides were emitters of some kind, powered by thick cables that ran to a truck with a large diesel generator. I could tell they were the corners of a kind of energy cage. Real high-tech equipment.
Captain Doberman watched over everything, his shoulder unit buzzing non-stop as the secondary team worked to keep Kennel locked down and its people indoors. My parents must’ve been worried sick about me. I had to hope that the team was sympathetic about them already losing one child.
“Mutt,” I spoke up on our fifth or sixth time going around the site. “If half of the Girük lives in you, does that mean it also comes out to hunt?”
He told me, “It wants to, but can’t. I sleep in something like a hyperbaric chamber, that’s bolted down in the RV. As long as it’s sealed, it won’t run wild.”
I then wondered, “Is this everything you’ve brought? Is it enough?”
“There are special rifles in the armored truck, which can fire bursts of microwave energy. Beyond that, we have a portable ADS unit. It’s coming in on a slow-ass vehicle and should be here in a few hours.”
He didn’t explain an “active denial system” and seemed to be waiting for me to reply, so I think he was just testing my tech knowledge at this point.
“A big version of your rifles, basically,” I said. “Is that it, though? Are there really no other weapons that work?”
“None found so far, but the lab guys say it should bring our monster to its knees. Well, when it takes a form that has them. At close range, it should…” He heard his handler calling for him, and like a good dog, obeyed her latest command and darts off without giving me the details.
In my old life—which either ended only yesterday or when Charlie left us, I’m not sure—I’d never do something this brave or reckless. I guess it helps when you don’t have a choice. Even so, this was my home I’d be defending. And maybe it was selfish, but I didn’t really care if they actually captured the Girük or not. If it ran off and left our town, that would be good enough.
Days are short up here in the winter, and by around five, while I was filling up on an early carb-filled dinner tailored to help me crash, our ultimate weapon arrived and was set up. The vehicle seemed small in comparison to the large radar dish-shaped array attached to it, which was “powerful enough to nuke a burrito from a hundred feet away,” Beagle claimed. I wasn’t big on the whole military-industrial complex thing, but I can respect cutting-edge hardware. It wasn’t long ago that we didn’t have something like this as a tool.
It was designed for deterrence and riot control, sure… but there could be a chance that it was first developed to combat cosmic horrors. Maybe…?
Mutt, being far more seasoned in the art of projection, didn’t need to sleep. He’d be helping me as a second pair of eyes in the shadows, and all he’d need to do was enter a meditative state. In contrast, I’d be taking a sedative created to put me into a deep sleep while actually enhancing my ability.
The rest of the town would also be taking in a substance, but they wouldn’t know it. Making the shutdown excuse a little closer to the truth, most everyone inhaled an odorless and colorless chemical that was rained down by military aircraft. I didn’t like any part of it, but there was a sensible reason for the precaution. Keeping me calm through his explanation, Mutt told me that it was a type of stimulant that would wear off by around midnight, and that anyone who normally stayed up that late wouldn’t even notice the effects.
“If the dosage is right, no one in town will be able to fall asleep,” he said. “Worst case, Kennel has a plague of fussy toddlers and cranky seniors tonight. It’s likely that no one will even get with others and put the pieces together.”
That, and anxiety was running high already. It wouldn’t do anything about the monster’s claws, but we were removing its food source.
The planes sprayed just past nautical twilight, when the Girük was known to leave its method of slumber and begin to hunt. Mutt and I were given gas masks for around a half-hour as the stimulant settled, and the rest of the team breathed in deeply themselves to ensure they’d be wired through the evening.
Dogs, as in the actual animals, began to bark across town as the chemical took hold. Squirrels left their torpor and could be heard through the surrounding woods, scurrying up trees in crazed movements. Birds normally only heard in the mornings woke up and filled the icy air with their mewling. The strange sounds and atmosphere only added to the tension and fear I was already feeling.
By the time I took off my gas mask, the rest of the team was geared up with their high-tech rifles, and everyone had a first-aid kit. They were dressed warmly, but not defensively. It seemed like they should’ve been protected as if they were going to war, but when I remarked on their lack of body armor…
“It wouldn’t do any good anyway,” Mutt said. “Those claws cut through all known material. Better to have full range of movement.”
I think that was when it really hit me, and I recognized how far out of my depth I’d gone in such a short time. Doubts crept in. We were a ragtag band of insects trying to capture something godly, and I hadn’t even gotten proper training or anything. I barely knew these people, and had no assurances that I wouldn’t be sacrificed, or on the flip side, that they’d all survive.
“Relax,” Mutt added when he saw me worrying. “All we need to do is put it in a box. We have your back, Pom. Follow the plan.”
The sedative was strong, and I was out within minutes. I fell asleep on the bed in the trailer, with one of those heavy-duty Girük-sensing cameras on me just in case. Even if it was after my ethereal self, and not its physical shell.
Every camp light shut off at once. Only the windowless tech van where Beagle monitored things and ran comms kept running. It was a cloudy, starless sky, which made it darker but was actually better for us, as it’d make it easier for me and Mutt to see one another against the gray above.
The team took up positions around the cage and hid, becoming so quiet and still that it was like they weren’t even there. They even kept ice cubes in their mouths to avoid breathing out condensation.
The pill I took did weird things, and I began the night with some sharp and focused lucid dreaming, where I knew I was asleep and in control since the start. I quickly left my body and the trailer, and floated over to the middle of the cage, feeling more agile and less “dreamy” than I was the first time I’d done this back home. I felt so real and grounded, that I might as well have been my regular self, only equipped with tech that let me fly around and go through walls.
And actually, there were some sources of light left in camp. The only way for the team to communicate with me was with light, and it came in the form of electronic signs like the kind you see alongside highways; only the text was in a red color instead of orange. There were three posted around the site, and they just had room for simple instructions.
“GO UP HIGHER,” was the first order I got, as I looked around to try and find Mutt, and a network of those special cameras tracked me and kept an eye on all directions in the darkness. I rose effortlessly until I was a good fifty feet in the air, where I felt like a dangling fish attracting a shark. “GOOD. WAIT THERE,” Beagle typed out next. “WE SEE YOU. WE SEE ALL.”
I could make out the silhouettes of treetops on the horizon, while the night sounds of the hyperactive animals came in muffled, like I was underwater. I gave every direction a glance, but tried to watch the signs most of all. It was hard to keep in mind that Beagle had many more eyes on the area than I did. If I was alone, I likely wouldn’t see the monster until it was too late. But I was still prey; little more than a terrified rabbit, stuck up in the air, watching for a hawk.
“REMEMBER,” another message flashed, “DON’T LOOK AT IT TOO LONG.”
Oh, God, I thought. Oh, God, it’s going to kill me, possess me, devour me.
I tried to calm down. I knew I couldn’t wake up in my state, but I felt so exposed, and I wondered if a panic attack was possible. That, or I’d just freeze up like a deer in headlights when it mattered most.
Was Charlie out there tonight? Could he see me? It wouldn’t go after him, would it? Part of me felt terrible about it, but worrying about someone else did at least help steady me a little. That was short-lived, though.
“PICKING UP SOMETHING,” Beagle communicated. “DRAWING NEAR.”
I think I did feel like I was being watched. There was a faint buzzing in the air that came in clearly. I sensed a presence, just like I had when I first encountered it. It was getting closer.
“DROP BACK DOWN,” appeared on the signs. “LET IT COME TO YOU.”
I descended into the cage, under the tops of the pillars. I felt no safer there. Maybe it was even worse, in fact, because my mind wandered to the possibility of getting trapped inside with the beast.
“GET READY,” the words I was dreading popped up. “IT’S CLOSE.”
I stopped looking around completely and stayed focused on the sign in front of me, ready to move on a hair-trigger the instant the order came through.
I’m not sure how much time passed. Maybe a minute, maybe five. All the while, I was certain it was out there, lurking. Drawing near. About to pounce.
“IT’S NOT MOVING,” suddenly flashed. “LOOK TO YOUR LEFT.”
I did so—and there it was in the dark, just over my non-existent shoulder. How long had the damned thing been hovering there? Beagle must’ve pulled his own trigger when he told me, having decided that enough time had lapsed with it just… floating there, that it became better to warn me of its presence than wait any longer for it to make a move. Now what was I supposed to do?
Its shadowy, writhing bulk blended in with the space just past the invisible cage wall that wasn’t yet active. Like before, it was too dark to see its head, and its claws glowed a dim amber. It was frozen in the air, facing my direction. I couldn’t tell if it was studying the pillars, or had already done so… or if it simply had some intuition that this was a trap. It refused to go any further.
One of the signs was positioned just beyond the creature and in the corner of my vision, and I was able to read, “SLOWLY MOVE AWAY FROM IT.”
I kept my backpedaling very slow, drifting like a balloon in a light breeze. It still didn’t move, and I couldn’t be sure how fast it was now. I wasn’t going to assume anything despite its slow, bulky approach from before.
“STOP THERE,” Beagle said as my back neared the opposite edge of the cage. A few seconds later of non-movement, he then changed it to an unhelpful, “DAMN IT.” Followed by an equally useless, “HOLD ON. TALKING TO TEAM.”
That was the moment the Girük had been waiting for. The freaking thing was cleverer than they had given it credit for. They weren’t even certain if it could read our words, but it knew just when to act: right when the team had let down their guard to confer with each other; the moment Beagle had only started a conversation over the radio and taken his full focus off of the cameras. Even worse, the monster didn’t simply come straight at me as expected.
No, it took advantage of the brief lag in response time by plummeting into the ground like it was melting into the earth. Its barely tangible body dropped beneath the packed dirt of the drive-in, and all of a sudden it could’ve been anywhere. I didn’t know what to do, since I was still stuck in an “awaiting orders” mindset. I didn’t move, and it very nearly cost me.
“UP! NOW!” the sign spat, using exclamation points for the first time.
I propelled upward and looked down in time to see the pair of glowing claws come out of the ground like ant lion mandibles, long enough to pinch the space where I’d just been. I moved so fast that I got out of the cage in time for Beagle to activate it, and after a high-pitch whine of capacitors, the pillars created the floor of the invisible box, only an inch or so off the ground. But the Girük retreated downward, so all it did was cut off a tiny segment of the claws, which disappeared in a wisp of smoke and would surely regrow.
The trap had failed. It would never stumble inside of it now. Knowing this, Beagle didn’t hesitate in bringing the flood lamps in the area to life. The rest of the team came out of hiding, keeping on the move to better their chances. Their rifles were raised to combat an enemy they couldn’t see, forcing them to rely on the tech guy to first pinpoint it. It was a nightmarish situation.
But it showed no interest in them. With everything on, I could see it clearly just ahead, its body still pitch-black as it hovered in front of one of the elevated blinding flood lamps, absorbing its light. It was facing my direction.
“RUN,” Beagle ordered. “RUN. HIDE.”
Before I rocketed myself backwards, the squad opened fire at the creature’s position in front of the light, and I could see the faint trails of energy their weapons left behind, looking like heat haze. The shots that did manage to land noticeably blasted away small chunks of its infinitely-complex shape, and even though the damage was superficial, seeing that it could be harmed gave me the boost in confidence I needed to get moving.
Unseen by my neighbors and the other people in town, I tore through the air as fast as my projected mind allowed. Sometimes facing ahead, but mostly backwards or looking over my shoulder so I could keep an eye on my pursuer. It felt like I got a head start, but as bulky as the Girük had grown, my fears were renewed when I noticed it was getting bigger—because it was gradually gaining on me.
We must’ve been traveling at seventy, maybe eighty miles an hour, as faint ghostly things that weren’t affected by physics like air resistance. We soared over roads and passed through entire houses in the blink of an eye, only getting glimpses at the families that had been forced to stay awake and would never know it, or understand that we had phased into and out of their walls. My new worst fear was that those claws could’ve been slicing people in half and I wouldn’t find out until the morning, if I made it that far.
But I won’t keep my pretend readers in suspense; thankfully, they were all unharmed, as we found out by the next morning. So, I don’t have a massacre on my conscience. The Girük is a horror, but not a rabid animal.
My life was still at risk, though, and it continued to close distance. By the time we had made it to the town square, its claws could almost reach me. I wasn’t able to go faster no matter what I tried, and while I could see in the light of street lamps and open businesses, half the time we were traversing dark alleyways or abandoned buildings, shrouding the monster in shadow. It could grab me while we were in the dark and I wouldn’t know.
Mutt, however, had anticipated that it could catch up with me. Astral projection is a strange science, and being a human able to zip around as a ghost bird feels like a ridiculous idea even after you try it. But, like any skill, with more experience comes better talent, and my backup had a faster top speed and could maneuver like a fighter jet. I saw his translucent shadow against the clouds above that reflected some of the town’s light. He’d been following me the whole time, waiting to be tagged in and take my place at the right moment. Even if the Girük wasn’t fooled, the hope was that we could at least confuse it long enough to give me a chance at retaking some distance. Mutt gave me the signal, and pointed out the bank just ahead.
As soon as I entered its darkened old 1950s-style lobby, I broke away and he came down from the ceiling for the swap. I then went upward, and saw Mutt being chased towards the high school, where an ethereal fog signaled how far I could go until I was out of range of my body and risked losing my connection to it. He could keep pace with the Girük, and for a moment I considered going back and letting him deal with it alone. Problem was, he’d never been in my school and didn’t know its layout past a floor plan. Any wrong turn could cost him and possibly result in both halves reuniting, which was assumed to be very, very bad.
I had to keep helping, scary as it was. He trusted I’d be ready to do so.
Following behind at what seemed like a safe distance, I went into the school maybe ten seconds after they did. There was a dense fog inside the building, just like outside. What a pain that the drive-in had to be so far away. I wasn’t as sharp all the way out here; things had become dreamy, and the fog only made it easier for the Girük to sneak up. Hopefully Mutt didn’t need me.
Having lost track of them, I “kept my head on a swivel,” as people like those on the team loved to say, and cautiously went down the school hallway—which I don’t think we’re ever meant to see at night—and entered the gymnasium to see if our backup cage had been triggered already.
That had been our contingency plan all along. Should the main trap fail, we still had one at the school gym, set up by the secondary team in a building guaranteed to be empty at night while the town was sheltering in place. The idea was to enter the room while being chased, tripping sensors that would then spring the trap once the pursuing monster flew past next. That was why my last order on the electronic signs was just to run and hide, instead of giving away the existence of a second cage to our predator.
But it was empty; they hadn’t been in here yet. Had Mutt lost our target? Did it realize he was someone else too soon? It could now be hunting us. We had to find each other and get it to chase after us at full speed again. If it came sniffing around in the gym, it would see the pillars and all of the planning and hard work would be ruined.
I traversed the familiar places of my school, keeping my movements unpredictable and not parallel to the walls, like how I’d naturally walk while being a physical person. “Go through walls at angles,” Mutt had told me. “It’ll give you some cover if you lose sight of it in there and it starts searching.”
It was so weird to see my school like this. It had shown up in dreams, sure, but even in those, typically I’d be moving about as I would in the real world. But this was like no-clipping through a video game level. Thing was, the fog kept getting worse. I’d lose range as the night dragged on and I exhausted my mental energy. If this lasted much longer, we’d miss our chance to catch the bastard for at least one night, and our failure might cost someone else their life.
Just after I went through a faculty break room, I finally spotted the other opaque shadow with glowing eyes. Mutt was taller than Charlie, so they weren’t easy to confuse, but I did briefly think he could’ve been my brother. I kind of wonder how the night would’ve gone if he had helped, too.
Mutt was in the open doorway of a science classroom with lab tables in the middle of the main hall, giving him a view of both ends and a few seconds to get moving if he saw our target. He didn’t know sign language, but he had taught me some basic hand signals. Upon noticing me, he waved me over, and then requested a refresher on which way we were supposed to go. I pointed in the direction of the gym, and he asked me to hold position and cover his back while he scouted ahead.
But… that wasn’t what happened. Moments after we’d been reunited and he had communicated the next step, the Girük—which might’ve been hiding and waiting for us to be close so it could take us both out at once—dropped from the ceiling tiles above Mutt. There was no sound that would’ve warned him, no way to prepare. Taken completely off guard, he didn’t have a chance.
It crushed his projection under its legs as it crashed down, destroying Mutt’s remote self. I froze up upon seeing this, and couldn’t get myself to do anything other than float backwards slowly in the dark classroom opposite the science lab. I had no way of knowing what just happened to my partner. Had he simply snapped out of his trance? Was he having a seizure? Or had he actually just died? I was certainly on my own now; that much was obvious.
The Girük stood there, just past the doorway, and it was tall enough that its head I had yet to get a good look at was above the doorframe. Thin, smoky wisps of what was left of Mutt’s projection rose as they dissipated, and I saw our pursuer swish its claws around in the tenuous vapor, as if to sample an aroma. Could it… “smell” or otherwise read a person’s essence through its claws? Whatever Mutt’s spirit tasted like, it didn’t seem to appeal to the beast in the fog, and it swatted away the rest of the vapor like it wasn’t interested. That, or… it could detect some trace of its other half already within it.
Something else I should mention. When it hit the floor, there was an impact. It was real and measurable, powerful enough to rattle the nearby locker doors and the hanging clock in the classroom, yet not too heavy, considering its size. It might’ve been equivalent to a fifty-pound weight, like the kind the “gym bros” in PE drop to the floor after working out in an attempt to impress others.
But how the hell does something that barely exists in our world, and flies through walls like a spirit have any mass at all? Unless it’s eaten so much that…
I’m getting sidetracked. The Girük was approaching, its large body passing through the doorframe, and there I was, still paralyzed by fear after realizing I was on my own. There was only one thing that might’ve saved me, and it was that it seems to have some emotions—or feels anger, at the very least. When it raised its claws as it drew near, I sensed frustration. As if we’d pissed it off by making it chase us.
And seeing that little moment of weakness on its part, masked as a threat display, was the next tiny push I needed to move again. I knew it would catch up, and that my time was running out regardless. I had one chance to get things right, and, not to sound like I’m boasting, but I made the risky choice to not go straight to the gym, even though I knew exactly how to get there.
I assume because of its size, the Girük needs time to get to full speed. I didn’t want to give that demonic creature a chance to process what was in each room it flew through. That’s why I had it chase me outside first, and while looking over my shoulder pretty much the whole time as I navigated the psychic fog around the school, I turned my trajectory into a wide arc until I had looped back to the main entrance; figuring the intelligent hunter might be suspicious if I suddenly aimed at the boxy building that was large enough to hold a cage.
As it gained on me, I soared down the hall, blew through the library and principal’s office, got past the cafeteria and bathrooms, and finally, cleaved the corner of the gymnasium without ever showing the creature its doors. I was only in there for a half-second at my velocity, but it was enough to trip the pillar detectors. When I emerged onto the track and field, I flipped around, slowed my speed, and eventually stopped when I realized I was no longer being chased. With the blues of the fog closing in, I hesitantly floated back inside to see if I had somehow succeeded.
Upon seeing the Girük just feet away and right in front of me as soon as I phased through the wall, I was started backward. Then I recalled that the cage reached nearly to the edge of the room, leaving little clearance outside of it.
It was furious, and bashed itself against the barrier of energy that, in a spectral form, I could just barely see as a thin bubble-like sheen of color. It then bounced around at high speed, I think checking for a way out or a weakness. A few moments later, it seemed to simply accept that it was trapped, and without a farewell gesture, folded in on itself and compacted into the bizarre cloud that had appeared in my bedroom. A probable “low-energy state,” like Mutt had mentioned. I knew it was just biding its time, waiting.
But it wouldn’t kill anyone else in Kennel.
Mutt was alive, and his projected self found the gym about ten minutes after I sprang the trap. Beating him there by a few minutes was the secondary team, that worked on shrinking the cage until the small, seemingly innocuous cloud was able to fit in a large metal containment tank.
Mutt’s specter gave me a thumbs-up, and I returned to my body without waking. Mentally drained, I didn’t stir until noon the next day.
“I had never been forcibly ejected like that,” Mutt said when he brought me lunch, after he congratulated my brave effort properly. “Felt as if I snapped back like a rubber band. Gave me a bitch of a headache and made it hard to meditate again. But, your home’s safe, Pom. The Girük will go somewhere far away, where it shouldn’t be able to break out.”
“Does this mean I’m a member of the team?” I asked tiredly.
He could tell I was joking, thankfully. Then he told me that the camera was off, and we didn’t have to be careful with what we said at the moment. I asked if he could tell me what was in Moira’s journal, but that if it wasn’t about Charlie, I didn’t really care. Our talk went something like this…
“The older dogs believe that Moira’s been leading a long-distance, semi-nomadic cult for decades,” he mentioned, even though I just said I had little interest in her. “I’m telling you this because I think it’s relevant. That book you found is the third copy we’ve collected. None of her followers have been brought in, and it’s hard to say how many there are. I hear they tend to… take their lives without hesitation when cornered.”
“Do they worship her, or the monster?” I asked.
“The monster. She was only the messenger. Impossible to say now if it was just a grift to keep money rolling in, or if she was a true believer. The truth might be in between. We’ll probably also never know if she was actively feeding the Girük, or even making sacrifices to it… or was just indifferent about how many people it killed. She was unstable at best, and definitely sporadic.”
Of course, now there was a cult. I wasn’t surprised.
“She used to be what you might call normal,” Mutt continued. “You got a glimpse of her earlier books she wrote way back. But in 1978, the Girük was transferred to her, live on air. Our predecessors scrubbed as many copies of it as they could find, but somebody recently leaked a ‘bootleg’ of the radio show onto the internet, and suddenly we had thousands of people on the lookout for her. It was just a matter of time before she learned about it and slipped away again. But her time was running out regardless. No doubt that one of the reasons she kept on the move so much was to find a successor.”
“Charlie…” I whispered.
I won’t write down everything Mutt told me next word for word, even if I could remember it all or had it recorded. It’s a sensitive, personal subject. And while Mutt could appear unfeeling or cold on the outside, and like someone who was haunted by past mistakes, he treated the findings from Moira’s journal and other documents delicately and gave me time to process everything.
To summarize it… Well, it kind of all leads back to that grocery store. I don’t hate the place or blame its existence for what happened, and it wasn’t his fault that he did most of his own shopping there—maybe because he knew all about the quality of the food at the Walmart where he worked. One day, early on during Moira’s time in our town, they crossed paths and she must’ve seen what she saw in me. Whatever Charlie was buying, it led to an encounter that changed the lives of everyone in my family. He never told any of us about what he was going through. Partly due to the financial hardship we were struggling to get past at the time, maybe. I’m not sure. He was also always the kind of person that believed asking for help meant becoming a burden. One of his few flaws.
In the following weeks after she discovered he could project, she kept trying to “open his eyes,” to get him to see all the glories of her false god that she carried around, which was looking for a new body to inhabit. He didn’t take to her grooming attempts, and didn’t want to be taught about the Girük or how to unlock the full potential of his gift. Towards the end of his life, she wrote rage-filled entries about “that stupid boy” who wouldn’t so much as give “the great text” a glance. She was never going to let it go.
She spoke of being connected with her half of the Girük in a way where she could “ride along” with it on its nightly hunts. In other words, she wasn’t in control, but could see through its eyes, which Mutt hadn’t realized was possible. The implications are sickening. It meant she had watched as it took the lives of countless sleeping teenagers or “less delectable” adults over the years, all across the country as she moved about, and was fine with it. It was symbolic of how corrupt and twisted she’d become, and I think it points to her being a true believer in the demon that took residence in her demented mind.
One night, Moira and the Girük found Charlie’s apartment. He wasn’t in his body at the time; he was probably out wandering like he must’ve done since he first realized he could do things he never told us about. I mean, I get it. We wouldn’t have understood. I could see Mom wanting to have him evaluated if he claimed he could project and fly around. Still, I wish he had told me, if just to see my reaction and then brush it off as a weird joke after I looked at him like he was crazy. He kept so much a secret.
But Moira and her pet, or master, persisted. As in my case and Mutt’s, the monster can’t integrate with us while we merely sleep. It has to wait until we’re projecting, and then pierce that part of us with its claws. And Charlie was fast. He outran those assholes every night when they showed up. He randomized his sleep schedule to make it harder for them to get a jump on him. But you can’t keep something like that up night after night. It wasn’t long before he looked into moving to a different town and apartment, even after only being in his first for a few months. He never got the chance, and ran out of time.
Moira was never sure what happened exactly. During a chase, Charlie eluded them once again after bringing them out further than before. Maybe he was trying to get them lost in the fog, to separate her from her body, but it happened to him instead. Or… he might have just found his way to end the nightly hunts for good. I doubt that it’s the latter. He wasn’t a quitter.
Charlie never returned to his body, or ran out of time. At some point, his connection to it had been weakened too much or severed completely, and it “withered,” as Mutt put it. Those that found him told us he’d been gone for three days. Moira raged, filling several pages with nothing but angry black scribbles. Charlie hadn’t been in that apartment long enough to fully unpack, and there were no family pictures on display. His procrastination may have saved my life, as it kept her unaware of my existence until only recently. I’m not even sure if she ever did have time to realize I was his sister. She was dead the very night after we met. Mutt and I think the Girük was so desperate for a new host that it couldn’t wait anymore. Moira must’ve known or felt it coming, and made something of a ritual out of it.
Mutt apologized for Charlie’s suffering, even though it was no one’s fault but hers. But I was just glad that he hadn’t been discovered while still living at home, as that also would’ve put me on the witch’s radar. And though he had never heard of anyone who can project without a living body (his department studies the field and its use cases for the military, even though the gift is very rare), there was nothing saying that it was impossible, and my brother may have been exceptionally strong with his talent.
I’ve chosen to believe that he’s still in this town, as a thinking, conscious being. Or, if nothing better, some fragment of his existence. And that’s much more than I had in the days following his funeral. Mutt said I should hold onto that if it gives me some solace, and that it might even be true.
I think the two of us had bonded a little in the brief time we’d known each other, so far as it was “okay” to, given our age difference. He was also probably simply thankful to meet someone like himself. I imagine the gifts we possess can make us lonely people, eager to connect with those like us.
So, he confided a couple more things with me. The first was an assurance that the half he freed by accident and now dwelled within him wasn’t driving him insane, and it stopped talking years ago. It only comes out at night, but can’t leave Mutt’s sleeping pod. Granted, it might be starving and weak, yet it’s free of any rage, as far as Mutt can feel. Is it calmly biding time and saving energy? Maybe. But it also only knew a hotel lobby for most of its time here, and its current existence must be better than the endless experiments its captors subjected it to across decades. It wasn’t purposefully fed and turned into even more of an atrocity by whatever Moira’s friends did to its other half.
Mutt then gave me a ‘one last thing’ anecdote. “There’s evidence that the cult actually goes further back than Moira. That book she and her followers carry around isn’t written like her previous works. And it’s full of so many references to obscure old-world mysticism and folk lore, that it’s more likely her predecessor was the original author, and she only co-opted what he had scribed to continue or restart a hidden group he led first, which went undiscovered.”
“She just slapped her name on the Girük ‘Bible?’” I asked, feeling clever.
“Something like that. It would mean it was written by a Stanislaw Kozak. He might’ve been planning to pass on his knowledge and have Moira take his place, as he didn’t expect he’d be killed when his half left his body. But she could have found his book or been guided to it in other ways. The part of the Girük we just locked away may be nothing like the half it split from. God knows what they did to it over almost a century.”
“Whatever happens… glad to be of help,” I told him with a genuine smile.
He gave me the slightest smile back, and it felt like all was right in the world and I had avenged Charlie in a way. The feeling only lasted a moment.
Before I had a chance to ask again if I could go home, Mutt had an order come through his earpiece. As he listened in and the team packed it up outside, his smile dropped into a frown, and I… already knew what was coming.
“Ma’am, is that really necessary?” he responded. “I’m not questioning, I’m just… I told her I’d… I know it’s not my place to make promises, but…”
When all was said and done, he looked at me with the same despondent, distant stare he had when we first met and broke the news.
“They want to take you back to home base.”
I couldn’t say I was terribly surprised, but this was still devastating.
“Why…?” was all I managed to whisper out.
“To, um… To run some tests. To make sure the Girük didn’t leave any trace of itself on you.”
“Do you really think I’m dumb enough to believe that?” I asked, feeling betrayed and even a little heartbroken.
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to keep lying to me, and he couldn’t bear to tell me the truth.
“Can you tell me where we’re going?” I meekly requested.
“… Nevada,” he said, equally listless. “We’ll have to keep pace with the ADS truck this time. Places the ETA at around… thirty-six hours.”
That long a drive, across such distance, taking me away from everything I knew… I couldn’t believe it. My world felt like it was shattering all over again.
It wasn’t quite as difficult as it used to be to say what was on my mind, and I told him something he might’ve already known.
“What do you think they’re going to do with you when the Girük is locked in a cell? Will they have any more use for you? Or will they try to rip away your half of it next? That might kill you. Are you ready to die for them?”
“My whole team is. We always have been,” he gave his stilted response.
Done talking, I crossed my arms and murmured, “Then go be a good lapdog.”
Whatever morsel of training Mutt had been given took hold, and he returned to being an emotionless soldier. Then he got up and left me alone.
Without ever getting a chance to call my parents, we moved out.
I’ve burned all my daylight writing this follow-up entry. The sun is setting outside over the plains of Nebraska as our convoy prepares to stop for food and refueling. Attempting to escape seems pointless, and I know Charlie isn’t out there, following me thousands of miles from home.
My only hope is in Mutt, and failing that, the mercy of his superiors. Whatever their plans are, I’m more scared of them than I was the monster I helped capture in my school. If the worst happens, my last request would be that this somehow reaches my mom and dad, so that they know the truth about both of their children. Regardless if they choose to believe our story or not.
I don’t hate you, Mutt. I was just hoping you’d try to get your name back.