It happened in the blink of an eye, but for a brief moment I could have sworn that I saw a black tendril tear itself out of the fabric of existence and push the kid in front of a passing metro bus. The tendril and the ripple in space-time was gone in an instant. It couldn’t have been there for more than a hundred milliseconds but I saw it.
It’s easy to sit in my office and look down on the people I am tasked with protecting. I quite literally look down at the security monitors for eight hours a day. It is this perspective that allows me to find these things disturbing. It allows me to see the synergy and synchronicity. In short, the workers operate less as independent units and more like a hive.
Frank Lamb was an intellectually disabled man from New Concord, Kentucky. At 52 years old, he’d never seen the inside of classroom. He couldn’t read or write, but had above-average communication skills. He had been placed in the care of the state when a welfare check at his parent’s farm revealed that the elder Lambs had been dead for some time. Frank’s parents had seemingly been mauled by an animal and left on the front porch.
I was in high school back then all of this started, I guess I was about 16 years old. Karen was 12. My dad ended up getting a second phone line so she could talk to her friends and the rest of us could use the phone. It wasn’t uncommon for Karen to be up at night talking to her friends on the phone, so I don’t know when these things started happening, but I’ll tell you when I first noticed something was wrong.
“The Rathen are known to infect our loved ones and turn them against us. They tell us that we imagined things as we remember them. Once someone has been lost to them, there is no hope. Cut all contact. After the infection has taken root, it is only a matter of time until the host his taken over and they are ready to strike.”
“I’ll never be as loved as I was when I was pregnant, but I don’t want to bear the thought of losing another life from inside me. I’m done.”
That night, I had a nightmare I can’t forget to this day.
The headline read, “The River Wolf Strikes Again.” As with the other victims, a body was found in the Ohio River. The throat had been torn out and the arms and hands showed lacerations consistent with defensive wounds.
I had been riding with no particular destination for about a week when I rolled into a town called Rozet, Wyoming: Population 25.
“Just where do you think you’re going Devil!?!”