The sound was soft but unmistakable—like a sack of wet grain dropped from a truck bed. Thud. It shook the loose panes of the farmhouse’s front window and made the porch wind chimes jangle once before settling back into silence.
“Did you hear that?” Willow asked, sitting up in bed, her long gray braid falling over one shoulder.
“Course I did,” muttered Birch, pushing off the patchwork quilt. He scratched his beard, half white now, and reached for the flashlight kept next to his tattered copy of Be Here Now. “Ain’t no possum makes a noise like that.”
Willow was already slipping her bare feet into worn moccasins. “Maybe one of the goats got out again.”
“Then why’s my back tingling?” Birch muttered, more to himself than to her. It was true. Something felt off. The air was heavy in a way that reminded him of acid trips that went just a hair too sideways—when the trees leaned in too far, when the wind stopped just long enough to make you wonder if you were alone.
They lived on ten acres of scrubland southeast of Wendell, Kentucky, nestled in a sagging farmhouse they’d bought cheap back in ’78, trading city life for a dream of quiet rebellion. No TV. No Wi-Fi. No real contact with the outside world beyond the occasional truck into town for flour and dried beans. They had each other, a wood stove, and a stubborn garden. And they were happy. Mostly.
Until now.
Birch led the way down the stairs, flashlight sweeping across shelves stacked with dusty jars of home-canned vegetables and dog-eared paperbacks. The dogs hadn’t barked. That was what really struck him. The mutts barked at everything. Tonight? Dead silence.
He opened the front door slowly, the screen creaking on rusted hinges. The porch light hadn’t worked since Clinton was in office, but the moon cast enough of a glow to see what lay just a few feet away in the tall grass.
A woman. Naked. Curled in on herself, as if dropped from the sky—but no crater, no trail. Just there, her body tangled in what looked like gauze or cobwebs, the strands clinging like wet plastic. Her skin was pallid and bruised, her hair matted with dust. She twitched at the sound of the door, letting out a guttural sound—something between a gasp and a sob.
Willow gasped, hand over her mouth. “Oh, goddess…”
Birch descended the steps, slow but steady, the flashlight casting weird shadows across the woman’s form. He crouched, careful not to touch her right away. That... substance was strange. It shimmered faintly, though the moon wasn’t bright enough to make it glint.
“Hey now,” Birch said gently, “you’re safe. You’re okay.”
As if responding to his voice, the woman spasmed once and then stilled. The webbing flaked away like old paper—easily, almost too easily—leaving nothing but her shivering form. Willow rushed forward with the old poncho she used for drumming circles, wrapping it around the woman’s shoulders.
Her lips were moving. No words, just syllables. Hisses. Clicks.
Then, finally: “They’ll come back. They always do.”
“Who, hon?” Willow whispered. “Who’s coming back?”
The woman’s eyes were wild. Glassy. She stared straight through them, as if watching something over Birch’s shoulder. “Big... wheels. No doors. No face. The lights bend wrong when they move. You think it’s behind you but it’s already ahead.” She shivered violently. “It folded the ground. It didn’t even touch me. Just... opened.”
Birch’s mouth had gone dry. He’d heard stories. They both had. Not about aliens, but about those things. The XMVs. Land vehicles too big to be real, too fast to be logical, appearing where no road existed, built like nothing else on earth. Silent. Ominous. Like earthbound gods made of steel and shadow. Some said they were military prototypes. Others said worse.
The Tollivers—the folks down by Black Creek—claimed they saw one pass through their orchard without snapping a single branch. Last year, there was talk of a bus-sized machine in the next county, something with treads like submarine hatches and wheels taller than a man, just... rolling through the woods.
But this was the first time Birch had seen the aftermath.
Willow held the woman close. “We gotta call Candler,” she said, breathless.
Willow hadn't expected to feel fear again. Not real fear. Not the cold, immediate kind that spidered down your spine and made the world tilt sideways. She’d thought she’d burned all that out of her a long time ago—in San Francisco, in ‘69, during those weeks when the whole city felt like it might turn inside out under the weight of Nixon, acid, and the war machine.
But when she saw the woman lying in the grass—naked, half-coiled like a broken marionette tangled in some unnatural silk—fear came roaring back, clear and electric.
She didn’t scream. She’d never been a screamer. She watched. Her brain kicked into strange, surgical gear—something she hadn’t felt in decades.
Because once—long before Birch, before the goat milk and kombucha and rainwater catchments—Willow had been someone else entirely.
Her name had been Marion Cole then. Dr. Marion Cole. MIT-trained systems analyst, on contract with Raytheon in 1963. She’d worked out of a windowless facility in Maryland, parsing schematics that didn’t make sense. Propulsion systems with no heat signature. Camera footage of vehicles too large to register on military weight scales. Tracks that appeared in the Nevada desert with no source, no lead-in, no exit.
They called the files Unresolved Terrestrial Mechanics.
She’d only seen one image—just one—before she walked away from it all. It had been grainy, black-and-white, taken from a B-52’s rear camera. A massive vehicle, low and slow, trundling across an open dry lakebed with no visible wheels. It was moving, but it shouldn’t have been. Its dimensions didn’t track. The desert warped slightly around its edges, like a mirage with mass. Like the laws of physics were humoring it rather than obeying it.
They never said what it was. But the memo was marked “XMV Sighting – 5th Confirmed.”
Extraterrestrial? No. That word had never come up. Willow remembered that detail. She remembered it because that’s what wasn’t said. The conversations always centered on Earth. On here. On us. Someone had built these things. Someone who knew how to manipulate space, weight, silence.
She walked out of that life on a rainy night in March, twenty-six years old, after hearing a supervisor whisper to a colonel, “If we see another one west of the Mississippi, we activate Tier Black.”
She never found out what Tier Black meant. She didn’t want to.
She changed her name to Willow, moved west, and found Birch at a peace march outside Tucson. They lived like ghosts on the fringe ever since.
But tonight, standing over the broken, web-wrapped woman in the grass, those memories came rushing back. Not as images, but as recognition. Her eyes saw patterns the way they used to—how the woman’s arrival hadn’t broken the earth beneath her, how there were no signs of a crash or impact, how the grass was bent but not torn.
An XMV had brought her. Had deposited her. Like freight. Like cargo.
Willow hadn’t touched a computer in forty years, but her mind was still wired for systems, for data, for truth hidden in plain sight. And this woman’s body—whatever had happened to her—was data. Proof.
She knelt down, not out of maternal instinct, but out of something older. Older even than fear. Witnessing.
Her fingers brushed the strange web-like substance. It gave easily, like baked sugar glass. No scent. No stickiness. No resistance.
Then the woman had whispered it.
“They’ll come back.”
And just for a second—just one blink—Willow thought she heard them, too. Not a sound. Not a machine. But a pressure in the air. Something that pushed inward, like a breath held by the earth itself. A sense of being watched. Assessed.
No. Not watched.
Measured.
Birch had gone to get towels. She was alone with the woman now, and her old name stirred faintly in her chest. Marion. Dr. Cole. She wasn’t a hippie in that moment. She was a scientist again. A witness.
She leaned close, her voice low. “How far did they take you?”
The woman didn’t answer.
But her eyes—glassy, silver-flecked, rolling slightly—were trying to find something just over Willow’s shoulder.
Something that wasn’t there anymore.
Or worse—something that was.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcYCmBE22Sr
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The sun had barely crested the ridge when the gravel crunch of tires announced Sheriff Candler’s arrival. His county cruiser, a faded white Crown Victoria with a dented fender and a rusting spotlight, rolled to a stop in front of Willow and Birch’s weathered farmhouse. The sheriff stepped out, adjusting his belt and surveying the scene with a skeptical eye.
“Morning,” he drawled, tipping his hat. “Got a call about a... situation?”
Willow nodded, her face etched with concern. “Found her just before dawn. Covered in some kind of webbing, no clothes, no ID. She’s inside, resting.”
Candler raised an eyebrow. “Webbing, huh? You sure it wasn’t just a bad trip? You two still dabbling in... herbal remedies?”
Birch bristled. “That was decades ago, Sheriff. This is serious.”
The sheriff sighed, pulling out a notepad. “Alright, let’s take a look.”
Inside, the woman lay on the couch, wrapped in a quilt. Her breathing was shallow, and her eyes fluttered beneath closed lids. The remnants of the strange web-like substance clung to her hair and shoulders, shimmering faintly in the morning light.
Candler leaned in, inspecting the material. He touched it gingerly, then rubbed his fingers together. “No stickiness. Almost like... spun glass.”
Willow nodded. “It disintegrated easily when we tried to remove it. Never seen anything like it.”
The sheriff straightened, jotting notes. “Alright. I’ll call in the EMU to transport her to the hospital in Hazard. In the meantime, I’ll have my deputies search the area.”
By 7:00 AM, two deputies arrived, their patrol cars kicking up dust as they navigated the narrow dirt road leading to the farmhouse. Deputy Harris, a lanky man with a perpetual squint, and Deputy Morales, stocky with a no-nonsense demeanor, joined Candler in the search.
They fanned out, combing the surrounding fields and woods. The grass where the woman had been found was flattened, but there were no tire tracks, no footprints, no signs of any vehicle having approached or departed. The dew on the grass remained undisturbed beyond the immediate area.
“It’s like she just... appeared,” Morales muttered, scanning the tree line.
Harris knelt, examining the ground. “No drag marks, no broken branches. If someone dropped her off, they did it without leaving a trace.”
Candler frowned, looking around. “No vehicle could get through here without leaving some sign. And there’s no way she walked in this condition.”
Willow approached, her expression serious. “Sheriff, I think you should see this.”
She led him to a patch of ground near the edge of the woods. The grass here was singed, the soil slightly charred. A faint, metallic odor hung in the air.
“What do you make of that?” she asked.
Candler crouched, touching the scorched earth. “Could be lightning, but there was no storm last night. And the pattern... it’s too uniform.”
He stood, dusting off his hands. “Alright, let’s get the EMU here. Maybe they can make sense of this.”
By 8:30 AM, the Emergency Medical Unit arrived, their ambulance navigating the rutted path with practiced ease. Paramedics moved swiftly, assessing the woman’s condition and preparing her for transport.
As they loaded her onto a stretcher, she stirred, murmuring incoherently. Her eyes opened briefly, revealing a haunted, distant gaze.
“They’re coming back,” she whispered, her voice barely audible.
Willow leaned in, grasping her hand. “Who’s coming back?”
But the woman had already slipped back into unconsciousness.
The paramedics exchanged uneasy glances but said nothing as they secured her in the ambulance.
Candler watched as the vehicle disappeared down the road, the morning sun casting long shadows across the fields. He turned to Willow and Birch, his expression a mix of skepticism and concern.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” he admitted. “But I’ll file the report and see if anything comes up.”
Willow nodded. “Thank you, Sheriff.”
As he climbed into his cruiser, Candler paused, looking back at the couple. “You two take care. And if anything else... unusual happens, give me a call.”
With that, he drove off, leaving Willow and Birch standing in the quiet morning, the mystery of the woman’s arrival lingering like the morning mist.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡu6j03ws6qJ
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Hazard General was a hospital in name, more like a glorified triage shack with barely functioning equipment and fluorescent lights that flickered with the irregularity of a dying star. Nestled in the forgotten green folds of Appalachian Kentucky, it had handled its share of ATV crashes, methamphetamine overdoses, and black lung complications. But the woman who was wheeled through its emergency doors just after 5:00 a.m. on a fog-wrapped Tuesday morning wasn’t part of that world.
She was from somewhere else.
The triage nurse, a retired combat medic named Lou, took one look at her and muttered, “Christ almighty,” before rushing for the trauma cart.
She was filthy, covered in a crust of dirt, dried plant matter, and a strange translucent material that clung to her limbs like organic gauze—fine as spider silk but with a ghostly sheen, almost iridescent under the buzzing fluorescent lamps. The material was brittle, crackling when disturbed, and fell apart under pressure as if it had fulfilled its purpose and was now decaying into nothing. Her eyes, wide and storm-gray, flitted back and forth like she was watching something only she could see.
Dr. Evelyn Harper took over instantly. Formerly a battlefield surgeon with Médecins Sans Frontières, Harper had patched up child soldiers, machete victims, and dying mothers. But even she flinched when the woman opened her mouth and whispered, in a dry, cracked voice:
“They’re... still... watching.”
It wasn’t just the content. It was how she said it. No hysteria. No pleading. Just cold, heavy certainty—like a warning from someone who’d already seen too much.
“Vitals are low, but stable,” Lou reported. “No visible trauma. Just... exhaustion.”
“And hypothermic,” Harper muttered. “Let’s get her on warming blankets, a central line, and I want every damn test we can run—trauma panel, CBC, tox, MRI, full neurological workup. I want answers now.”
They logged her in as Jane Doe #421-A, and the machines went to work.
Everything changed when the scans arrived just before sunrise.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjZAnwBoyRx
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Dr. Alan Kim, the hospital’s consulting neurosurgeon, met Harper in the imaging suite. He was fresh from sleep, his hair still damp from a quick shower, but he sobered the moment he saw the scans.
“There,” he said, his voice dropping to a hush as he leaned toward the glowing monitor. He pointed to a cross-section of the brain’s medial temporal lobe. “Look. See that shadow?”
Harper narrowed her eyes. “That’s not... Wait. Zoom in.”
A tear-shaped sliver glinted back at them. Metallic. Unmistakably artificial. Nestled in the hippocampus like a pearl tucked into an oyster.
Kim whistled. “No surgical entry point. No cranial damage. No scar tissue. No inflammation. It’s inside the brain, and the brain doesn’t seem to mind.”
“Jesus,” Harper whispered. “Is it a microchip?”
Kim shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Whatever this is, it was either inserted with a level of precision that borders on science fiction… or it wasn’t inserted at all. It grew into her.”
“Are you saying her brain accepted it?” Harper asked.
“No.” Kim stared at the image as if it might come to life. “I’m saying her brain was built around it.”21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqYVk5Ouw4n
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Back in the ICU, Jane Doe began to stir.
A nurse named Chelsea screamed when the woman’s back arched violently, her limbs spasming. The monitor chirped as her heart rate spiked. Her eyelids fluttered. She spoke in a tongue no one understood—words that didn’t belong to any known language. Ancient? Synthetic? Coded?
She wept, then laughed, then screamed. But it was the silence that followed that chilled the room: a deep, shuddering inhale... and then:
“They took me,” she rasped. “Tore me open. They made me wrong.”
The EEG readings were worse...spiking into brainwave territories associated with states of extreme trauma or deep psychedelic immersion. Gamma oscillations fluctuated like someone flipping through frequencies on a radio. Her brain wasn’t just dreaming. It was remembering—or fighting not to remember.
Harper stared at the EEG readouts, her knuckles white around a paper cup of coffee she’d stopped drinking an hour ago.
“If this is some kind of psychosis,” she said softly, “it’s the most advanced case I’ve ever seen. If it’s not…”
Kim didn’t answer. He was staring at the implant’s profile on the digital screen, highlighting the subtle patterns carved into its surface. The grooves formed concentric circles—almost like fingerprints, but deeper. Engineered. Purposeful.
“She’s not crazy,” he said eventually. “Something was done to her.”
“And we still don’t know who she is,” Harper said.
“No,” he said. “But whoever she is, she wasn’t meant to come back.”
Just then, the monitors in the ICU pulsed again—and Jane Doe sat bolt upright in bed. The restraints snapped taut. Her eyes glowed wet and silver in the low light.
“They’re on the move,” she whispered. “You can hear them... if you listen to the road.”
Dr. Kim didn’t respond at first. He was frozen beside the monitors, his eyes locked on the rhythmic pulses of her vitals. Something had just clicked for him—something that made no sense.
“Evelyn,” he said quietly.
Harper turned from the bed, still unsettled by what the woman had just said. “What?”
He motioned her over and pointed to the numbers running down the side of the monitor—heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation. “Look at her vitals. And not just the heart rate—it’s elevated, sure—but see how stable it is? Her body’s running hot, like she’s mid-sprint, but she’s lying completely still. High adrenal load, steady glucose burn, elevated core temperature. And her cellular regeneration rate—when we drew her labs? Off the charts.” Dr. Kim added thoughtfully, “There’s another layer to this—her lungs show signs of tar buildup and irritation, classic markers of chronic smoking. I’ve seen this before in actors—long hours, stress, late nights on set. It’s common enough in the entertainment industry, but it’s striking against the backdrop of her otherwise extraordinary physiology.”
Harper squinted at the readouts. “Okay, yeah, she’s got the vitals of someone in extreme physical duress, but she’s not convulsing, not panicking. Why?”
“Because she’s not reacting to it. Her body lives like this.”
“What does that mean?”
Kim exhaled, eyes still on the monitor. “Before med school, I spent five years with the Samsung Racing Team. Grand Prix circuit. I wasn’t in the pit—I was a driver. Finished fourth in Jeonju, '03. Spent enough time behind the wheel to know exactly what this looks like.”
Harper blinked, trying to reconcile the calm, bespectacled neurosurgeon with the idea of him tearing down asphalt tracks at 200 mph.
“This woman’s vitals?” Kim continued. “They’re nearly identical to what we used to see in seasoned NASCAR drivers in mid-race telemetry. Cardiovascular precision under extreme pressure. Neural firing patterns tuned for rapid decision-making. Metabolism burning clean at high speeds. It’s like she’s been conditioned—built—to function in constant, high-speed motion.”
“But she’s not a driver,” Harper said slowly. “She was found naked, confused, covered in some sort of biological webbing, and—unless we’re missing something—she’s never even seen a track.”
Kim looked back at the woman, who now lay motionless but alert, her eyes staring somewhere just beyond the ceiling tiles.
“That’s what I can’t figure out,” he murmured. “Because if she isn’t a driver... then why the hell does her body think she is?”
And down the hall, a delivery cart’s rubber wheels squeaked faintly as they turned a corner—mimicking, just for a moment, the deep, distant rumble of a giant vehicle pulling up just outside the realm of understanding.
The room chilled.
No one said a word.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsjFXFk61IR
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The third night fell heavily over the eastern Kentucky hills. The hospital's fluorescent corridors, usually stale and predictable, now felt like an overexposed film reel—flat and surreal, humming with energy that no one could explain.
Dr. Evelyn Harper stood in the observation room adjacent to Isolation 3, arms crossed tightly over her chest. The woman inside the room hadn’t moved in hours. She sat upright in the hospital bed, perfectly still, her eyes wide open and staring—unblinking—at the wall.
Harper didn’t realize how tightly she was gripping her tablet until Dr. Kim entered behind her.
“You’re still here,” he said softly, closing the door behind him.
“So are you.”
Kim joined her at the glass. “She hasn’t eaten.”
“She won’t. Every time the nurse brings food, she just touches it. Like she’s trying to remember what it’s for.”
Kim didn’t reply right away. He studied the woman’s profile, the elegant angles of her cheekbones, the subtle twitch of her index finger as it hovered above the plastic tray.
“You talked to the board,” Harper said, more as a statement than a question.
“I did. They want to escalate. Call in the CDC, maybe the FBI.”
Harper turned, sharp. “The CDC? Why?”
“Because no one knows what this is. They’re scared.”
“She’s not contagious.”
“We think she’s not," Kim said gently. But what if she’s been... altered? That webbing wasn’t natural. Remember the implant we found in her hippocampus? That’s not in any medical registry. I’ve spent three nights trying to trace a single possible match in the NIH anomaly database. Nothing. Nothing even close.”
Harper leaned her head against the glass. “If we call them in... we lose her.”
Kim hesitated. “Yes. They’ll take her out of our hands. Military, probably. Lock her down somewhere we’ll never hear from her again.”
“Just like that.”
He looked down, running a hand over his face. “Evelyn, we’re doctors. Not spies. Not investigators. She needs more than we can give her here.”
Harper clenched her jaw. “She talks in her sleep. Did I tell you that?”
Kim looked up.
“She says things. ‘Turned inside out.’ ‘The black road that never ends.’ ‘It’s bigger on the inside.’ And one that keeps repeating: ‘They folded the miles.’”
Kim took a breath. “That sounds like trauma.”
Harper nodded slowly. “Or code.”
They stood in silence. From the other side of the glass, the woman turned her head suddenly and looked right at them. Not toward the glass. At them—like she could see through the tint and the sterile light, like she’d been listening to them the whole time.
“She knows we’re talking about her,” Harper whispered.
Kim didn’t move. “Maybe she wants us to.”
“Do we have a choice?” she asked, voice barely audible.
Kim hesitated only a moment. “We need to report it. We’re beyond our depth.”
Harper swallowed. “Then do it. But I want to be in the room when they come. And I want her name to follow her. Even if she doesn’t know it yet.”
Kim nodded solemnly, eyes still locked with the woman's eyes across the glass.
“I’ll make the call.”
As he turned to leave, Harper whispered more to herself than to him:21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6CKYWgPAQO
“She was running from something no one’s ever caught on film. And we’re about to hand her back to it.”21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAt84GqcGLM
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The black Suburban came rolling in just after dawn, its tires crunching gravel like slow applause. It passed unnoticed by most of the early-rising staff at the county hospital—nurses dragging carts, janitors mopping corridors—but not by Dr. Harper, who stood at the far end of the third-floor hallway with a coffee gone cold in his hands. It bore no markings. No license plate. Just a dull, government-issue sheen and windows that refused to give up what lay inside. It came to a stop beneath the covered emergency entrance, and for a moment, the hospital felt unnaturally still. The birds outside hushed. Even the machines in the ICU seemed to pause, as though caught listening.
The first to step out was a woman—tall, clean-lined, in a grey tactical coat with a flat expression that somehow conveyed everything and nothing all at once. Her dark hair was pulled back tight, her boots immaculate. A laminated ID badge, clipped to her chest but carefully shielded from view, reflected briefly in the morning light. She moved like a soldier, but slower—more deliberate. Behind her came a man in a plain blazer, scuffed boots, and a button-down shirt with the collar still half-popped. He scanned the parking lot as if expecting a sniper on the roof. One hand stayed hooked near his hip, even though no weapon was visible. Last came a younger woman with glasses and a nervous sort of grace, her tablet already in hand. She was dressed like a grad student, but there was something in her gaze—piercing, clinical—that put Harper instantly on edge.
The nurse at the reception desk gave a confused half-wave as they strode past without a word. Greaves led, Holt flanked, and Anwar closed the triangle as they disappeared into the elevator with a metallic ding.
Room 318 was dim, its single occupant still asleep—or something like it. The woman they’d found covered in web-like strands three days ago now lay beneath two layers of hospital blankets, her skin still unnaturally pale, her breath too steady. Machines beeped. Electrodes blinked.
Dr. Harper turned as the elevator doors opened.
“You Harper?” the lead woman asked. Her voice was smooth but flat, as if every syllable were being measured against some internal metric.
“I am.”
“Elena Greaves,” she said, stepping forward. “This is Agent Holt. Dr. Anwar. We’re with a military intelligence branch. You won’t find our agency on your call logs.”
Harper frowned. “I never made any calls.”
Greaves smiled with zero warmth. “We know.”
Behind her, Holt scanned the room, eyeing the machines with disdain. “This her?”
“Yes,” Harper said.
Greaves turned her head slightly, just enough to signal Anwar, who stepped closer to the woman in the bed, her tablet flickering to life in her hands.
“Vitals?” Anwar asked without looking up.
Dr. Kim appeared in the doorway just in time to answer. “Still elevated. Metabolism is through the roof. At rest, her heart rate rivals that of an active NASCAR driver. I’ve only ever seen cell regeneration like this under extreme stress—crash-level adrenaline. But she’s unconscious. Or appears to be.”
“Where did you say she was found again?” Holt asked suddenly, glancing at Harper.
“She was found naked in a farmhouse wrapped in some kind of... silk,” Harper said quietly.
Anwar didn’t move right away. “Have you found out who she is yet?” she asked, his voice steady, but urgent. “That has to be the main thing, right?”
“Still no ID, still no prints," Kim sadly admitted. "Even she doesn’t seem to know who she is."
Holt stepped forward slightly, his voice even but direct. “That’s not a problem for us. We’ve got the resources to figure out who she is. Our people can crack IDs that don’t technically exist.” He glanced at Anwar, then back at Kim. “But I’ve got two more questions for you, Doctor. First—what can you tell me about that implant? The one lodged in her brain. And second—has she said anything else? Anything at all?”
Dr. Harper cleared her throat, exchanging a quick look with Kim before answering. “The implant... well, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen. It’s embedded deep in her brain, beyond the reach of conventional surgery, but here’s the good news—it doesn’t seem to be causing her any harm. No inflammation, no malignancy, no obvious interference with normal brain function. What it does or why it’s there, we have no clue. It’s completely benign so far.” She hesitated, then stepped back. “She started talking last night,” he said, voice low. “Said something strange.”
Greaves turned. “Said what?”
“She said... ‘They’re on the move. You can hear them... if you listen to the road.’”
A silence settled over the room. In the hallway outside, a delivery cart’s wheels squeaked faintly as it turned a corner—mimicking, just for a moment, the deep, distant rumble of something massive rolling up just outside the edges of perception.
The room chilled.
Greaves stared at the woman, her expression unreadable.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCdKTkkBW0Y
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Los Angeles — Two Weeks Later
The knock came just after sunset. Not the casual rap of a delivery or a neighbor, but three slow, deliberate thuds that sent a strange chill down Stella Hudgens’ spine. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel, frowning as she crossed the small apartment toward the door.
Through the peephole, she saw two men. Plain clothes, but their posture screamed official. One tall and broad with dark skin and a calm intensity in his eyes; the other slightly shorter, red-haired, with the look of someone who had once worn a uniform so long it still shaped how he moved. Their presence didn’t say "salesman" or "detective." It said something else. Something deeper.
Stella opened the door slowly. “Yes?”
The tall man spoke first. “Ms. Hudgens? Stella Hudgens?”
She nodded warily.
“I’m Major Ben Sisko. This is Captain Miles O’Brien. We’re with Army Intelligence.”
Her heart climbed into her throat. Army?
“We’re here about your sister. Vanessa.”
The name hit her like a slap.
“I—I don’t understand,” she stammered. “Vanessa’s been gone for almost three years. The LAPD gave up. Everyone gave up. Are you saying—?”
“She’s alive,” O’Brien said, his voice quiet, but firm.
Stella stared at them. “What did you say?”
“She’s alive,” Sisko repeated. “She was found in rural Kentucky. Rough condition, but alive. She’s currently under care at a secure medical facility. We only recently confirmed her identity.”
Stella’s knees nearly gave out. She grabbed the doorframe for support. “I—I don’t understand. Where’s she been? What happened to her?”
Sisko and O’Brien exchanged a glance—one of those tight, silent conversations that conveyed a thousand classified facts they wouldn’t be sharing tonight. “We don’t have all the answers,” Sisko said carefully. “But what we do know is that she didn’t vanish voluntarily. Her disappearance may have been tied to an incident involving something we’re investigating—something called an XMV.”
“XMV?” Stella blinked. “What the hell is that?”
"All in good time, ma'am," O’Brien said gently. "Right now, we need you to prepare yourself, Ms. Hudgens. Your sister... she’s not quite the same.”
Stella stepped back, overwhelmed. Her eyes were wide, shining. “I thought she was dead. I mourned her. I—I planned a memorial. What do you mean she’s not the same?”
“She’s been through something extraordinary,” Sisko said. “Something we’re only beginning to understand. But the important part is—she’s alive. And she asked for you.”
Stella’s breath caught. Her hand flew to her mouth. It was only 3 years ago that Vanessa had vanished from the Pacific Coast Highway in broad daylight. No wreck, no witnesses, no trace. Just her red Ferrari left idling by the roadside with the driver’s door open and the engine dead—like it had simply stopped being a machine. And now it's owner, a movie star presumed lost in an unspeakable void, had turned up in Kentucky. Speaking in fragments. Changed in ways no one could explain.
Stella sat down numbly on the couch, cradling a lukewarm cup of tea she’d forgotten she made. Her apartment, modest and cluttered with art supplies and unopened mail, suddenly felt too small—like the walls were inching inward with every word spoken.
Across from her, Sisko and O’Brien had settled into the armchairs flanking her coffee table, both men with the posture of experience: weary, alert, and unmistakably dangerous if provoked. A plain black folder now lay open between them, its contents precise, classified, and utterly surreal.
O’Brien leaned forward and tapped a photo with his finger. “What you’re looking at is what we call an XMV. eXtraordinary Motorized Vehicle. Land-based. Not a craft. Not a UFO. And definitely not of this world.”
Stella blinked at the image. It looked like a car—but only if a car had been dreamed up by something that didn’t understand how humans traveled. Bulbous armor-plated ridges, tire tracks that branched like veins, grills shaped like snarling mouths. The vehicle in the picture shimmered faintly, even though the shot had clearly been taken at night. It looked alive.
“They... drive?” she asked, unsure if she sounded naïve or just insane.
“They move,” Sisko replied. “Drive implies wheels, steering, control. These things aren’t driven. They move the way animals stalk. The way predators circle. And they don’t make sense—not physically. Their exhaust can smell like ozone, or burning sugar, or sometimes... nothing at all. Some reports say their engines don’t even make sound. Just a pressure. Like gravity shifting.”
“They shouldn’t exist,” O’Brien added. “But they do. And we believe your sister encountered one.”
Stella’s hands tightened around her cup. “Jesus.”
“We didn’t have the clearance to act when her car was found—she wasn’t high-profile enough for our division to be involved. But we knew. We saw the tire impressions. Hexagonal. Offset pattern. Standard rubber doesn’t leave that kind of burn mark.”
Stella leaned forward. “You’re telling me my sister was taken by some kind of... monster car?”
“She was intercepted,” O’Brien corrected softly. “Taken, yes. But by something intelligent. Coordinated. These vehicles don’t just appear. They are deployed. And they don’t always come alone.”
He reached into the folder and slid out a second sheet—sketches. Renderings. A series of crude, hand-drawn impressions pulled from dozens of eyewitness accounts. One showed a sleek, bat-like cruiser with deep channels carved into its hood. Another looked like a Victorian hearse built from rusted chrome and glass. One had no windshield. One was a glistening black orb on wheels.
O’Brien tapped one of the sketches—a sinister, winged shape with jagged fins and low, predatory headlights. “That one,” he said, voice grim, “has been seen in three continents over the last two decades. But the worst report came out of Reading, Pennsylvania. 1995. A ten-year-old boy was struck and killed in a hit-and-run, and witnesses swore it wasn’t a normal car. They called it ‘The Batmobile’—but not like the comic. This thing was wrong. Too fast. No license plate. The tracks it left were scorched into the asphalt. Cops never found it. No wreckage, no trace. Just vanished. And that,” he said, eyes locking with Stella’s, “is the kind of thing we’re dealing with.”
Stella stared, speechless, then finally whispered, “What do these things want?”
“We don’t know what they want,” Sisko said, voice low. “Sometimes they chase. Sometimes they stalk. Sometimes they just... watch. But in every case where one appears, there’s fallout.”
“Fallout?” Stella echoed.
O’Brien gave her a long look. “Has anything... odd happened to you since Vanessa disappeared?”
She shook her head instinctively but then hesitated. “Define odd.”
Sisko shifted. “Unmarked visitors. People in dark suits. Black cars parked across the street for days at a time. Animals going silent when you walk by. Strange phone calls. A sensation of being followed. Or dreams. You ever dream of engines revving in the distance, but you wake up and there’s no sound?”
Stella leaned forward, eyes narrowing as she recounted the moment that had haunted her ever since. “It was on the set of Glass District, about six months after Vanessa vanished,” she said. “We were shooting late, everyone was tired, and I went to my trailer to grab my phone. That’s when I saw him—this man just standing outside, like he’d been waiting. He wore a pale grey suit that didn’t quite fit, and his face was... off. Like it had been molded too smooth. His eyes were too still, too shiny. He didn’t blink. He smiled—just barely—and said, ‘Do you love your sister?’ I thought he was a fan or some method actor, so I laughed it off. But then he asked, ‘Do you miss her? Would you know her if you saw her again?’” Her voice dropped, chilled by the memory. “I asked who he was, and he just said, ‘You’ll understand when the wheels come.’ Then he walked off. I tried to follow, but he was gone.”
Sisko nodded grimly. “You’re lucky, Stella. What you saw has a name—S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Sub-Terrestrial Autonomous Liaison Kinetic Evaluation Replicant. We don’t know how many there are, or even if they’re truly human, but they show up to check up on whoever's been touched. They watch. They evaluate. They look like people, but they’re not—and that’s what makes them dangerous. They’re not armed in the conventional sense, but some of them have been known to induce neurological effects—seizures, hallucinations, paranoia—just by being in close proximity. You’re lucky yours only asked questions and walked away. Others haven’t been so fortunate.”
“And Vanessa—she’s been touched,” O’Brien said. “Deeply. She survived something no one else has. But she brought it back with her. That’s why we need your help.”
Stella’s voice shook. “What do you mean, brought it back?”
“Whatever took her—whatever machinery was used—left a mark,” said Sisko. “In her body. In her brain. And maybe in her memories. But also, in the world around her. Wherever she goes now... they might follow.”
Stella felt her pulse pounding in her ears. “You think they’re coming for her again?”
O’Brien didn’t answer right away. He looked her dead in the eye. “I think they never stopped.”
Stella rubbed her hands together for warmth, though the room wasn’t cold. The silence that followed O’Brien’s words wasn’t just silence—it felt weighted. As if the air between them had thickened, settling in her lungs, crowding her ribs.
Sisko leaned back slightly, watching her with that soldier’s stillness. He wasn’t just reading her; he was gauging her limits.
“You’re not just Vanessa’s sister now,” he said. “You’re a proximity point. That makes you part of this whether you like it or not.”
“I didn’t ask for that,” she said.
“No one does,” O’Brien said quietly.
Stella looked down at the strange sketches still spread across her coffee table. Some were almost beautiful in their brutality—shapes that reminded her of insect carapaces and melted steel, headlights like eyes sunk too deep. Others were grotesque. All of them made her skin crawl.
“They aren’t... driven,” she said, repeating the phrase with a trace of disbelief. “You mean these things... just move? On their own?”
Sisko nodded. “They’re not vehicles in the human sense. They're vessels. Or maybe weapons. And they’re not from here. Every time one is spotted, the electromagnetic spectrum in the area warps. Wildlife patterns change. Gravity misbehaves. It’s like they bring a different set of rules with them.”
“But they aren’t invincible,” O’Brien added, shifting forward and lowering his voice. “They’re not ghosts. They leave marks. Patterns. We track those. We’ve been building a profile for nearly a decade—using field agents, remote sensors, anything we can sneak past DARPA. But every time we get close... they vanish. They’re always ahead of us. Like they’re listening.”
“They are listening,” said Sisko, almost under his breath.
Stella stiffened.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a theory,” he said, meeting her eyes. “That whatever controls these things—it can hear when people start to notice. When someone starts asking questions, digging around, obsessing. That’s when they show up. Like they’re... summoned. Not by ritual. By attention.”
“And once that attention is locked,” O’Brien added, “they mark you.”
Stella sat back slowly, trying to process that, trying to deny the way her stomach had just knotted.
“You said I’m a proximity point,” she murmured. “So--- what does that mean? What now?”
O’Brien exchanged a glance with Sisko. “It means you come with us,” he said. “Not permanently. Not yet. But we’re taking you to the secure site in Kentucky. You need to see your sister—but more importantly, she needs to see you. If there’s anything left in her that’s her... your voice might be the only one that reaches it.”
Stella’s jaw clenched. “She was missing for nearly three years. No ransom. No sightings. Just... gone. And now you’re saying she came back broken, and haunted by something not from here?”
“Yes,” Sisko said. “And that may be the least terrifying part.”
He reached into his coat and pulled out a thin, black folder—marked only with a red triangular symbol Stella didn’t recognize. He slid it toward her.
“What is this?” she asked, not touching it.
“Your clearance,” O’Brien said. “Read it. Burn it. Pack what you need for the week. We leave in the morning. And Stella—” he paused, leveling his gaze on her— “from this point on, assume everything you know about roads, vehicles, and what moves through this world… might be a lie.”21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvRIQqdiYVy
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21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCvBdpwW6E7
Stella stared at the folder long after the two men had gone. The red triangle on the cover seemed to pulse in the low light of her apartment like a quiet threat—or a warning. She hadn’t opened it. Not yet. She wasn’t sure she was ready.
The sky outside her kitchen window had gone the color of tarnished silver, the clouds thick with the weight of another storm. Beneath it, Los Angeles glinted indifferently—steel and glass and humming traffic, the world still spinning as if none of it had changed.
But everything had.
Vanessa was alive. Alive and broken and tucked away in some military-guarded medical ward in rural Kentucky. And if what those agents had said was even half true, Stella wasn’t just losing her grip on reality—she was being drafted into something far stranger.
She opened her phone.
Her agent, Barry Klein, picked up after one ring, his voice all velvet and caffeine, oblivious to the tectonic shift unfolding behind her eyes. “Stella, baby, you better be calling with good news. They’re ready to lock the contract. It’s you and Juniper Hart, and the check has more zeroes than a math textbook.”
Stella closed her eyes and steadied her voice. “Barry... I can’t do it.”
The pause on the other end was immediate. Sharp.
“You can’t do it? Stella. This is the role. You disappear now, you don’t just drop a ball, you drop your career. What the hell’s going on?”
“I can’t say,” she said, voice low. “I wish I could, but I can’t. Just tell them... family emergency. Medical leave. Whatever they’ll believe.”
Another long silence. Then Barry’s voice returned, softer this time. “Is it your sister?”
Stella’s throat tightened. “In a way,” she said. “I have to go. Please cover for me.”
“Jesus, Stel. You’re scaring me.”
“I’m scared too.”
She hung up.
The apartment seemed suddenly too large, the echo of that last sentence reverberating off the walls like a secret that had waited too long to be told.
She packed lightly. Jeans, thermals, a weatherproof jacket. No red carpet gowns. No press-ready cosmetics. Just what she’d need for the road ahead, which, if the agents were to be believed, would not be ordinary at all.
Before she zipped the last bag, she opened the black folder. Inside: a military-issued ID, a one-way ticket to Louisville, and a photo of Vanessa in the hospital bed—eyes closed, wires sprouting from her skin like roots from pale, disturbed soil.
Stella pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.
Whatever had taken her sister had let her come back. But it hadn’t let go.
And now, it was Stella’s turn to follow the road into darkness.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSUcZQCHVPY
and then Add to home screen.