Chapter Text
Island of Patch, 0237 local time
The ground should have leveled out twenty meters back.
Logan Ward knew the terrain. He had checked it in daylight, memorized the slope, counted his steps on the way down. The ridge was supposed to break into scrub and rock, nothing more. Instead, the incline kept going, rising under his Salomon trail runners like it had something to prove.
He stopped.
Listened.
Wind from the west. Thin. Cold. No airliners. No distant rotors. No animals either, which was wrong for this latitude and time of year. Even the Mojave made noise if you waited long enough.
He didn’t wait.
Ward checked the compass on his watch strap. The needle wavered, then settled somewhere it had no business pointing. He tapped the casing once, hard enough to make the point. It didn’t change.
That was also wrong.
He took a knee, adjusted his plate carrier and looked up at the sky. The stars were sharp and bright, too many of them, arranged in patterns he couldn’t place. Having spent most of his life outdoors, he knew constellations the way some men knew roads. These weren’t them.
Fatigue explained a lot. It didn’t explain this. It certainly didn’t explain why he didn’t seem to have any memory of the last hour. TBI? Unless detailed visual hallucinations had been added to the list of symptoms, it couldn’t have been that.
Ward stood and took three careful steps forward. The ground felt solid, familiar. Dirt and stone under rubber soles. No vertigo. No sense of falling. Just a ridge that shouldn’t have been there, under a sky that he’d never seen before.
He turned slowly, scanning the way he’d come.
The valley behind him was gone.
Not hidden. Not obscured. Gone. Where there should have been a shallow basin and a dry wash was now a dark forest, tall and dense, trees rising like walls. The air smelled different too—green, wet, alive in a way that had no place in his last known grid square.
Ward exhaled once, long and controlled. Panic wasted calories.
He checked his watch. The face glowed steady and familiar. Time was still moving the right way. That counted for something. He checked his carbine next, running his hand along the receiver, the sling, the magazine seated tight. Everything where it should be. Everything real.
The world was the variable.
He thought about maps. About drift. About how far a man could walk in the wrong direction before the error became permanent. He thought about the Long Walk—about instructors who didn’t yell, didn’t explain, just watched to see who kept moving when the answers stopped coming.
Ward adjusted his bearing again. Picked a direction that felt less wrong than the others.
“Okay,” he said quietly, to no one.
The word vanished into the trees.
He started walking.
The ridge crested at last, opening onto a landscape that made no effort to explain itself. Mountains in the distance, sharp and pale. Then, flipping up his NODs, he stole a look at the moon as it emerged from behind a cloud, and froze in his tracks.
Instead of the waning crescent one would have expected at this time of year, there was a half-shattered ruin in an already unfamiliar sky.
Ward stopped only long enough to mark the moment in his head. Not where he was. Not how he’d gotten there.
Just when he understood that whatever this place was, it wasn’t going to help him.
He flipped his NODs down and continued forward, towards a smattering of artificial light on the horizon, amplified into blazing orbs by the panoramic night vision goggles affixed to his helmet.
The walk wasn’t over yet.
Foxgrove, 0514 local time
The argument ended the way most of them did.
Not with resolution, but with exhaustion. A door slammed. Footsteps retreated. Voices fell away, leaving a pocket of silence that felt heavier than the noise had been.
Ward watched the village settle again through his glass.
Foxgrove, if the sign was to be believed, lay below him, a loose scatter of buildings pressed between treeline and shore. No walls. No towers. No visible security. Just darkened homes and the faint glow of a few streetlamps flickering near what passed for a main road.
He’d been in his hide site since just after 0300. Two hours of stillness. Enough time to know the rhythms. Enough time to notice what didn’t belong.
They came from a treeline some 200 meters distant. He picked them up on his thermal monocular, moving low and deliberate. Stalking. As they got closer, he could resolve details in the pale, pre-dawn light.
Glowing red eyes. Not like a normal predator’s tapetum, these blazed like candles. Under his night vision, it looked as if someone were walking toward him with a pair of lit cigars. By shape they vaguely resembled overgrown coyotes.
Aliens? That would have been his first guess, if it weren’t for the all too human-looking individual he’d seen wandering around for the last two hours. The man was scraggly and thin, armed with an overbuilt-looking lever action of some sort.
Guess we’ll see how competent he is with it, Ward thought as he began counting the creatures. Eleven in all, he sized them up, just as they seemed to be doing with the village. He glanced down at the suppressed 11.5-inch carbine laying beside him, and weighed his options.
Option one: stay hidden.
Let the unknowns hit the village. Observe. Gather information. Learn what these things were capable of and how the locals responded. No compromise of position. No introduction under fire. Cold logic favored it.
Option two: intervene.
Engage from standoff distance. Thin the herd before it reached the first house. Accept that he’d probably be seen. Accept questions. Accept consequences he couldn’t predict.
He looked back at the creatures. They were less than 100 meters from the first of the houses now, and that was when he noticed a shift in their behavior.
The lead creature paused at the edge of the clearing, head tilting as if it could taste the air. Another followed, then another. They weren’t charging. They were choosing.
Ward could feel something settle in his chest. This was no random ambush. This was a hunt. He made his choice.
Grabbing his rifle, he pulled his head and left arm through the loop of the two-point sling. If these things could see infrared light, he was about to find out. He looked to his right. The night watchman lit a cigarette, the match burning like a lightbulb in the blue-gray world of the thermal-fused white phosphor night vision. He looked back at the creatures, the leader creeping towards the front door of the first house.
Ward’s left thumb depressed the “fire” button on the IR aiming laser mounted to his rifle. The ambient humidity in the air made it so the entire beam was visible, terminating just below the creature’s right eye. As quietly as he could, he flicked the safety selector to “single,” and took out the slack of the polished two-stage trigger.
He exhaled slowly to his natural respiratory pause, and at the precise moment he reached it, pressed the trigger. His first shot came as a surprise to him, exactly the way it was supposed to.
The flow-through suppressor spat once, the aiming dot of his laser barely moved. The creature jerked once, then dropped to the ground, not moving. At less than 100 meters, the shot had been an easy one.
Taking advantage of the pregnant pause, he decided to forego a security round to his first target, and engaged a second.
Foxgrove, 0521 local time
Elias Turner wasn’t one to volunteer for nightwatch. Rather, he had been volunteered. It wasn’t the first time they’d drawn straws, it wasn’t even the first time he’d drawn the short one. But something about the last few hours had him on edge.
Myrna and Caleb had been at it again, arguing for the whole village to hear. Sure, there sounded like there was a bit more venom in her voice this time, but he hadn’t thought anything of it. No, what had him on edge was a feeling, deep in the back of his head. Not even a feeling really, more of an inclination. An inclination that he was being watched.
He thought he’d seen movement in the trees to the south, but it was probably nothing. A few deer getting spooked.
For him, it started not a second after he’d lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. A muffled pop and a booming crack, then another. Then, howling.
Beowolves.
Scrambling, he swung his rifle off his shoulder and into his hands. To his credit, he did exactly what he’d been taught to do. He ran for the alarm siren. Get help. Taiyang will come, he always does.
As he ran the short distance to the siren controls, he could hear more faint pops and cracks to his right. Were those gunshots? Who else was up?
Foxgrove, 0522 local time
Ward had managed to down two of the creatures and wound a third by the time they wised up. As they scattered and scrambled, he panned back to his right. The guard was gone.
He noticed something else. The first creature he’d shot seemed to be almost disintegrating. Guess that one’s not getting back up.
He filed the information away for later, and focused on processing the immediate threat. He wanted to stay inside the treeline for as long as he could, letting the trees further suppress his rifle’s report and concealing his position. But he knew he couldn’t for much longer.
The creatures began to flow into the village, scratching at doors, prowling for anyone foolish enough to be out. They found one such individual. Unarmed, helpless. The man who’d stormed out of his home earlier.
He seemed frozen in place, staring down a creature that Ward couldn’t see, obstructed by one of the buildings. Shit, need to move. As he tore down the embankment, he remembered the guard. What if he starts sending rounds your way?
Ward figured that now was as good a time as any for standard rules of engagement: only fire if fired upon. He took off at a dead sprint towards the village.
Rounding the corner to what looked like a blacksmith’s shop of all things, Ward sent four rounds into one of the creatures that was clawing at the door, oblivious to his presence. He moved on at a brisk pace, scanning for targets.
He found the man who’d been cornered earlier, having climbed up a ladder onto a nearby roof. Ward snapped his laser onto the creature snarling up at him, sending two rounds through the back of its head.
Without a word, the man began to climb down from the roof.
“Stay up there!” Ward barked.
“My wife,” he stammered, “I have to-”
An eerie, two-toned screech filled the air before he could finish. So that’s where the other guy went.
Outskirts of Foxgrove, 0527 local time
Taiyang jolted awake when he heard the siren. A siren that only meant one thing: Grimm. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and stepped into his sandals. He crossed the hallway, and rapped on each of the girls’ doors.
Telling them to stay put and guard the house came with the usual protests and insistence that they could help. Still, he knew they would do as they were told.
Hopping on his bicycle, he tore down the half-kilometer dirt trail to the main village. He prayed he would get there in time, chastised himself for living as far as he did. He slowed as he neared the village, taking in the sounds of the ongoing attack, getting an auditory sense of what he was about to face.
Amidst the howls and snarls and the occasional panicked gunshot, he heard something else. In controlled pairs and measured strings, he could just barely make out the sound of suppressed rifle fire. A muffled thump, and a louder crack as the rounds broke the sound barrier.
Damned funny. He couldn’t recall seeing anyone on the whole island toting around any kind of suppressed weapon. They weren’t even common in military use as far as he knew. And Patch didn’t even have a formal militia. This was a sound that didn’t belong.
As he ran towards the village center, he saw the source. Two men were crouched on a rooftop. One Taiyang recognized, Caleb, apprenticed to the village weaponsmith. He was sitting in the fetal position, hands over his ears.
The other was the anomaly. In the pre-dawn light, he could just make out the details of the other figure. A large man, clad in mottled green and brown camouflage, was bracing himself on the roof behind Caleb, rifle in hand, scanning over the nearby rooftops. He wore some sort of body armor, and a helmet with a strange array of four tubes that covered his eyes.
“Hey!” Taiyang had to shout over the siren.
The stranger snapped his head towards Taiyang, the tubes over his eyes now locked onto him like the eyes of a jumping spider.
“Do you see any more? I don’t hear any.”
The stranger first knelt, then stood upright. He grabbed a ladder that was resting on the rooftop and lowered it to the ground. Climbing down, he approached Taiyang.
“Eleven total, one ran west into the treeline. You see any on your approach?”
“No.”
“Then I guess that’s the last of them. Mind turning off that siren?” the man flipped the tubes up onto his helmet, now looking not dissimilar to a set of antlers.
Taiyang studied his face. Clean shaven, about his age. He wore an easy half-smile, the satisfied look of a confident professional who’d gotten the job done. “Yeah, follow me. I’m guessing you’ll want to be out of here before people start asking questions?”
“You could say that.”