I'm not using my real name for obvious reasons, and I'm leaving out the exact park and team.

If you're in the southwest, you can probably guess it's that big one where the stone glows red before the sun actually rises, where ravines are so tight your radio starts sounding like it's underwater.

Desert on the flats, Twisted juniper and Pinion on the benches, and then deep cold slots where a headlamp beam looks like a cigarette in fog.

This was my first real search and rescue call out as more than a training shadow.

I'd done litter carries on easy rescues, directed tourists back to the trailhead, helped an old guy with heat cramps hike out at

2:00 in the morning.

I'd taken the courses Map and Compass, low angle rigging, desert medicine.

I was fit, enthusiastic and a little too excited.

To prove I wasn't just another weekend warrior.

I had a new pack, borrowed A-Team radio, checked my Garmin 4 times and told my girlfriend I'd text on the in Reach if it went long.

You know the type.

That was me.

The call came over.

Group me at 5:27 on a Saturday.

Overdue party of four.

Last contact yesterday, 1830 influencer type loop trail 8 miles rated moderate temps overnight 32 to 36, no storm cell.

The coordinator asked for a hasty team to go to the PLS point last seen, then leapfrog along spurs and side canyons.

They needed bodies to search.

Audible first, then visual.

I replied.

Available before I'd finished reading.

5 minutes later I was driving, the sky just starting to smear from black to iron Gray coffee steaming in a travel mug that tasted like dish soap.

At incident command.

It all felt legit grown up.

The white board with the grid trackers pinning last phone pings, the burnt smelling propane heater, the morning knots of quiet conversation.

The coordinator, Gray, was in a fleece with the team patch worn almost white.

He looked like a retired woodshop teacher.

Calm, methodical eyes.

He paired me with two veterans, Tino, compact and careful, the kind of guy who talks with his hands but keeps his palms low.

And Maureen, tall, 50, plus hair in two braids, like she'd never cared what was fashionable.

They both logged more hours in those canyons than I'd spent sleeping in my apartment.

First rule, Maureen said as she handed me a strip of reflective tape for my pack strap.

It was already getting light enough we didn't need headlamps, but she stuck the tape on anyway.

Never whistle after dark, OK?

I said, half laughing.

I don't really whistle.

Don't say their names out loud, Tino added.

He held my gaze long enough for the joke to die in my throat.

You got the map?

Good.

Stow your in reach in the top brain, you'll want it later.

And hey, he tapped the carabiner on my right shoulder strap.

Clip us when we stop groups of three.

I thought it was a hazing thing.

Teams all have folklore, little rituals they use to shape the rookies on the way out of the parking.

Pull out.

Maureen touched a fingertip to the bumper of the UTV and then to her lips.

Tino stepped over the cattle guard with his left foot.

First, I wanted to ask, but I also wanted to act like I'd seen this in the briefing packet.

The influencers were a group of four in their early 20s who ran a channel that made the Park Rangers roll their eyes.

Drone shots, Chirpy epic edits.

Hiking boots with the tag still on.

The last live post, logged by a volunteer at 2:40 the previous afternoon, showed them at the overlook with the caption crushing Miles in the Red Maze.

Sunset selfie with headlamps around their necks like jewelry.

Nobody at their Airbnb saw them again.

You can judge all you want until you're the one following faint sneaker prints.

Wear good boots.

Should be.

We moved in a fast, hasty line, Maureen on point, me in the middle to learn her pace.

Tino trailing with the radio in the little notebook he kept in his chest pocket.

The trail was clean, a ribbon of red brown wind smooth sand broken by flat plates of rock.

Ravens hopped ahead of us like it was their job to lead by Hour 2 the day warm to the winter version of Pleasant, that 38 to 50 swing where you keep unzipping and rezipping layers.

I kept thinking, I'm doing it, I'm out here, I'm useful.

The first odd thing was nothing dramatic.

It was how we talked.

We said subjects, not victims or kids.

We never said their names because we didn't have them yet, just a channel handle and four smiling faces on the radio.

We used call signs and time stamps.

Never.

Hey, I think I found always Hasty 2 at Grid F9 reference GZ923 resection to feature standby for coordinates.

It felt like a play where I'd learn my lines but not the meaning.

Side Canyon after side Canyon, we broke off the loop to comb benches and ledges.

We found the usual trash tourists leave behind when they're not thinking.

Foil from an energy bar, a gel shot, a Gray wool fiber that could have been anything.

We found one footprint so fresh it's still slumped at the edge, edges crisp in the cool shade.

We stepped back and marked it, photographed, measured stride to match against the others.

Later Sr.

work is less heroics, more homework.

At midday we reached the Influencers campsite.

Let me say what I mean by campsite.

There was no tent, no firing, nothing formal.

Just a flat space tucked under a slanted slab.

A nice shelter if you were 22 and everything felt like an adventure.

From a distance it looked like the ground had been tidied up close.

That tidiness was wrong.

I had been trained to look for the asymmetry of people Criss crossing tracks in soft dirt.

A place where someone sat and scuffed their heels, places where a backpack had been dropped in the sand mounded, a kitchen shelf with smudge marks.

This site had regularity, 4 sitting places evenly spaced, 4 depressions where you might lay a pad, edges squared off like the ground itself was a careful person, 4 little stacks of rocks next to each bed, and each stack had the same number of stones.

7A dead juniper branch leaned against the slab, not as a brace, but like a ladder placed for show.

That's not theirs.

Maureen said quietly, more to herself than to me.

No chance.

Copy Tino said he turned away from the site and wrote in his notebook, not looking at it as he wrote.

He drew something else instead.

Three dots in a triangle, then 2 lines, then a dot outside.

He didn't show me.

We fanned.

We did what we always do.

Circled to pick up tracks, scanned for micro trash, sighted along the faint contour of scuff marks to see if they hinted at direction.

I was about to call out a strand of fishing line caught in a sage stem when I heard it.

Help.

It was clean and high and sharp and close.

I don't mean carrying the Canyon close.

I mean another person in the next room.

close.

It had that startled bird echo up in the roof of your mouth, like when you almost drop a glass.

I turned without thinking.

Because we train you to respond to that word.

It's muscle memory.

The problem was, it came from everywhere at once.

Help.

Same voice, near, like maybe 20 yards.

Then the same help, but thinner, as if far down a hall.

Then a raspier help, lower to my right.

I spun, felt the rush of adrenaline make my fingers tingle, and took one step toward the nearest wash.

Maureen's hand hit my shoulder harness so hard I almost fell.

No, she said.

Eyes here.

I did that thing where you pretend you intended to turn to your teammate.

All along.

The rational part of my brain started offering possibilities.

A person moving fast, calling repeatedly.

Acoustics, 2 people in distress.

We all want the world to make sense to the maps we carry.

Copy audible, Tino told the radio.

He did not say we heard help.

He said it like he was logging Thunder.

Hasty too, has audible multiple directions repeating.

Another voice called.

It wasn't help this time.

It was a rock thrown into a quiet pool that makes a plunk.

And then later you remember it as speech.

Then Maureen.

It was her name.

My hair rose.

Not a metaphor.

The little hairs on my arms, on the back of my neck, lifted.

Whoever said it got the vowel right.

The reen part with a faint upward lilt that only people who know her use.

It slid around us like a kite string.

We couldn't grab.

Maureen didn't move.

We don't answer names, she said to me.

We don't speak them.

Not here.

Then the part that tipped the scale, the sound of a person stepping lightly on dry leaves, that skitter crush sound.

Only it came from silt and bare rock.

It came from places where there were no leaves, no twigs, nothing for a shoe to talk to.

It made the sound anyway.

Wait, I said, because I wanted to apply the things I knew.

We can triangulate, call out, have them call back bearings.

I raised my hand to point and realized my finger was shaking.

Yeah, Tino said softly.

That's what it wants.

He clipped his carabiner to the loop on my right shoulder strap.

Maureen clipped in on my left.

We had practiced team clips in bad weather and at night to make sure no one steps blindly into space on slick rock.

I had never been clipped at noon on a clear day 100 yards from a well marked trail.

Keep your eyes on toes and knees.

Maureen's voice dropped into the monotone.

She used to talk people down from ledges, factual and kind at the same time.

The face will be tempting.

Ignore it.

What face you'll know, she said.

We move together, the three of us, into the shallow draw behind the camp.

Our goal wasn't to go towards the voice, It was to get enough lateral separation to see what cast what.

I kept my head down to watch the ground, little vortices of sand where wind eddied dark pebbles.

A beetle stuck belly up.

My tripod knee ached where I banged it the week before Maureen's boot brushed mine, and the contact felt like permission to breathe again.

Hey, someone said.

Too close, guys.

The awkward half swallowed S sounded exactly like the kid in the drone clip, the one with the neon beanie.

I looked up.

There, half veiled by the brush, was one of them Gray hoodie jawline that would photograph well.

Confusion on his face, like finding my team attached to me, was the weirdest part of his day.

He took a step toward us and caught his shoe on the edge of a rock, exactly the way he had in the video, where his friends had laughed and he'd grinned at the camera and said I'm good, I'm good and held his hands up.

Only he didn't blink.

People blink every 5 to 10 seconds.

You don't normally count it until it stops.

He looked at us the way deer look across a road at night, motionless but not rigid, too poised.

The sun hit his cheek and made no shine.

Skin absorbs light.

This skin pushed it away.

Say your names, he said, and there was no breath at the edge of the consonants, no dampness.

Dry mouth over dry teeth.

Say you're here.

I don't know how else to explain it except like this.

My whole body leaned toward wanting to be polite.

It was wired deep, the urge to respond when someone asks your name in the most normal voice you've ever heard.

If you've ever worked a hotline

at 3:00 in the morning and had to match someone's cadence to keep them from hanging up, you know that.

Pull, answer, meet their energy.

Be human back.

Maureen squeezed my arm once, hard enough to bruise.

No Tino lifted the radio.

Audible visual, one subject or similar.

He chose his words with care.

Do not approach.

Subject is stationary.

Help, the thing said, as if trying a new word on its tongue.

I'm here.

Say my name.

Say your names.

Let me know you're here.

We stepped sideways together to change our angle.

From 2 feet over, the hoodie's seam shifted wrong.

Instead of a single folded curve, the fabric had a second ghost seam, where an image had been laid over a shape that wasn't quite the same, like those cheap T-shirts where the printed sleeve doesn't match the cut.

The jawline had a little bevel, like it had been stapled to the face underneath.

No smell, that's the other thing humans smell like salt and oil and cloth warmed by sun.

This was cool the way granite is cool, even when everything else bakes.

It would have worked for anyone who didn't know him, but we had never said his name.

Copy came command over the radio.

Gray's voice stayed level.

Hasty 2 maintained group of three protocol.

No whistle, no names.

If approach continues, escalate to rule three.

Other teams hold position.

I didn't know there was a rule 3.

The thing took two steps forward without the shoe scuff sound.

This time it didn't blink.

Its mouth opened like it was going to smile and then stopped half open.

Someone learning where to put muscles.

I wanted to be brave.

I wanted to be useful.

I also wanted to run until my lungs tore.

Hey, it's set again, the voice pitching up like a friend signaling a friend from across a bar.

Hey, it's me, I need water.

No, Maureen said, but to me, not to it.

Rule 3.

She unzipped the top brain of my pack and took out the orange contractor bag we all carry for body heat emergencies and shelter.

She shook it open with a stiff snap.

I had practiced crawling into that bag in the snow to trap the warm air, to keep a subject shivering from going lethal.

I had never practiced what happened next.

She put the bag on the ground, open like a mouth, and stepped behind me, her hand on my head, the other hand on my right shoulder to turn ME3 clicks to the left.

Tino lobbed a rock.

It was not a big rock, fist sized.

He threw it not to hit but to distract the way you toss a stick, not to a dog, but away from a dog.

The thing's head turned to follow the ark, but not like a human tracks motion.

It slid.

No saccade, no hitch, just a glide.

Help, it said mildly, like it was noting the weather.

I think I sprained my ankle.

Get ready, Maureen told me.

Oh, now, now, she said, and we moved.

If you've never done a bag and bolt drill, here's how you use the bag as visual interruption.

Humans key on faces and hands.

You remove both from view.

You step like you're in a three legged race, your clips keeping you aligned so you don't kick each other's ankles and you don't look back because humans also key on eye contact like CGI Riggs track points.

We moved together.

We had practiced the movement pattern in dumb scenarios with jokes.

It did not feel dumb.

Now, behind us, the voice called hey, hey, hey, hey and then perfectly as if he'd been practicing Maureen.

This time it added a little cough.

At the end.

I kept my eyes on Marine's left sleeve and the ground 2 feet ahead.

We reached the crease where the draw pinched into a slot.

We had a pre planned rally, a wedge juniper trunk where 3 runners of webbing were already in place from some old training scenario or some other day.

They looked sun faded and useless but they told you human here, human before human again.

We fell into the shadow and clipped short.

Maureen turned and in one practice motion lifted the orange bag like a bullfighter's Cape and dropped it across the slot opening.

The bag hung and flapped and caught on a thorn, and for a second it looked foolish.

Then the thing stepped into the shade.

It didn't like it.

There was no hiss or recoil, no vampire burn.

It just slowed.

Maybe light means something different to the shape of its nerves.

Maybe it needs the scattered, gentle illumination of overcast and can't parse hard edge.

It peered in the way a person peering into a dark garage dims themselves, makes their face slack to hear better.

Only the slack didn't fit.

The face didn't know how to go limp.

The half smile stayed and the eyes did not adjust.

Tino took out a little film canister, the old black kind.

He popped the lid.

Inside was Gray ash.

He touched his index finger lightly into it and flicked it like salt at a grill.

What are you?

I began.

He flicked again.

The ash made tiny arcs and then drifted like it couldn't find a place to land.

The third flick hit the threshold of shadow and did not cross.

The dust hung.

I would have called it a trick of light if I were alone.

I was not alone.

Rule 3, Tino said without taking his eyes off the gap.

Make ash.

Make barrier.

Think of it like flour on an oil leak.

What ash?

Anything burned by us.

Marine spoke softly but clearly, like reading to a child during a storm.

Old cotton shirt, hair, sage.

You keep it in every kit.

You didn't pack yours yet because you're new?

I swallowed.

The word ran through my head anyway.

Skinwalker.

I had grown up hearing it in whispers and in Halloween dares and on forums where people argued about cultural theft.

I had told myself not to use that word to explain the unknown.

Then it reached up from the dark, living and wrong, and used my teammate's name and her teammate's voice and wanted mine in return, and my mind grabbed the closest label.

Like a handrail on stairs, something outside shifted.

Not steps.

The pause before steps.

Guys, the voice said Dewey with concern.

It's getting weird out here.

OK, please, I'm cold.

Copy.

Tino said to the empty air.

He kept his tone professional.

We hear you.

He did not say more.

He did not ask questions.

He did not give it anything.

We waited.

Maureen breathed slow enough that I matched her without meaning to.

The orange bag rattled faintly, making fake fire sound outside.

Once a Raven made the frog croak they use when they don't want to waste a caw.

I wanted to peek around the bag just like a child wants to look under the bed.

Because not looking makes a shape, looking makes it be a pile of shoes.

I didn't look.

After a time that was either 3 minutes or 20, the voice tried on a new tone.

Fine, it said.

Petulant, pitch perfect 22 year old who had not got his way.

Fine, then, lower testing.

You'll get lost.

Then the exact voice of our coordinator radio.

Still, all teams return to base.

Repeat all teams.

It clipped off, leaving the echo of authority in my gut.

Not bad, Tino murmured.

It's been listening.

How long?

I asked without moving my mouth.

Much longer than we have, he said.

We waited again.

I watched the little fluff of ash that hung in the air like a stain on glass.

It began to drift down, slow as snow inside a paperweight when the last Moat kissed the ground and did not blow.

Maureen nodded once.

We backed away together, then unhooked, then moved again in that three legged pattern until the slot widened to a place where sunlight cut a hard knife as the day leaned.

We didn't run.

That's the other rule.

Nobody prints in the brochures.

Do not feed it with theater.

You want to run.

You will want it like a mouth wants water.

Don't move like professionals or move slow like prey.

Those are your choices.

By late afternoon we had rejoined the loop trail where the footprints of 100 visitors smudged any hope of clean sign.

We did not hear the voice.

We did not hear Ravens either, which was almost worse.

At a trail junction we stopped to drink water and eat half smashed bars while a family in bright new fleece came down from the overlook laughing.

The dad said hey, are you guys search and rescue?

And I wanted to grab their wrists and make bracelets of ash.

We walked them out politely.

At incident command the board had been updated.

Other teams had searched 2 spurs.

AK 9 had worked the dry wash by the highway.

A drone had flown where it could.

No subject found, no clear direction.

Gray listened, nodded, wrote a time next to each report.

He didn't ask me to speak, he asked Tino.

He asked Maureen.

Then he said we'll go again one hour before dawn, not at night.

I asked, because my legs felt like string and also because the desert at night in winter can be kind, cold and loud with stars, and part of me wanted to prove I wasn't scared.

We don't whistle after dark, Gray said, and his eyes were tired in a way a nap doesn't fix.

We don't call their names after dark.

We do not feed the mouth that calls.

I did not sleep well that night.

Every time I closed my eyes, the face with the wrong slack tried to set like gelatin.

At 2:19, I dreamed a phone buzzed with a text.

It's me, no capital at 4I sat on the edge of my bed and packed ash into an old film canister like a superstitious climber packs a lucky rock.

We hiked in under a sky the color of cold tin.

The Canyon felt different, wound tighter.

Our headlamps were off because dawn was close enough to be a rumor and because Maureen said light draws lines, sound draws circles.

I pinned that in my mind without knowing why.

We didn't go back to the camp.

We went up Canyon, where the walls drew together until we had to turn sideways.

There is an uglier word for narrow canyons that all the tourists use.

We try not to.

If a place has power, you don't make it a joke.

The wash bottom was ribbed with old flood runs hard as ceramic under foot, and even the Ravens didn't dare the slot.

The air smelled like stone.

We moved in the habit we had worked the day before.

3 clipped, stop, breathe, listen.

We heard nothing for a long time then, guys, right over our shoulders.

Soft is the idea of a hand.

We didn't turn water, it added, slightly bored with itself.

Then it tried.

I fell, which almost worked.

My knee twinged in sympathy at a constriction no wider than a door.

Maureen stopped.

She pointed.

The rock had been polished not by water but by work, 4 little smooth places where many times a shape had pressed and tested and pressed.

Above them a nest of twigs jammed too far up for any wind to have carried them.

Some of the twigs were not twigs, they were the stiff plastic stems from those fake plants you buy at craft stores.

Rule 4, she said.

And I didn't know there was a Rule 4.

We set our own call.

How?

Not a whistle.

Tino smiled without humor.

Not names.

He took from his pocket a tiny speaker the size of a matchbox and a little battery pack.

He connected them with a snapped magnet and set them on the ledge.

We speak something that belongs to us.

That it can't wear.

What?

Maureen hummed.

I expected a song.

I got a note.

A single low old note that felt like a steel string, just plucked.

Like the sound a wind makes in a bottle.

If the bottle used to belong to your grandmother.

Tino harmonized 1/3 above in a voice that would have embarrassed him around a campfire.

The two notes beat together.

Not pretty, not a performance, More like a coordinate you could mark on your map again, Maureen said, and I added mine a fourth below, shaky at 1st and then solid when theirs held me up.

It hurt my chest, like maybe I wasn't built to make that noise.

We did not sing long, We didn't need to.

The slot held it and folded it and set it gently on the ledge, like bread set to rise.

Something answered.

It didn't do words.

It tried and made a soft scraping curious, like a new climber learning knots by feel.

It added a note too high to hear, which is a stupid sentence until you feel your molars ache and your eyes water.

We stopped.

It stopped.

Then the little speaker on the ledge played our three notes back exactly right.

It had recorded without being told.

We listen to ourselves.

It's hard to explain what that did to me.

The Canyon had our breath now to it.

It belonged to the slot and the rock and the cold and the three of us clipped together.

We stepped forward, past the door with choke.

The slot opened into a pocket where Flood had dumped everything it had chewed loose over a decade.

Yard sale scraps, chunks of pallet wood, a wheel off a cheap suitcase, a cracked phone case with glitter nest.

That was the word my mind grabbed, but not like feathers and song.

More like a magpie with a credit card.

At the center of it lay a shape the exact size of a person sleeping on their side.

Subject, Tino said gently.

Visual.

He did not say boy.

He did not say a name.

No audible.

Stand by.

Copy command said the radio's sound, flattened by rock, made Gray sound like he was under a blanket.

We moved slowly.

Ash canister open, bag ready, clips taut.

The shape did not turn.

If you've ever been the first to reach someone in deep sleep, you know how it feels to hang on the edge of their breath, afraid to tip them one way or the other.

I took two more steps and saw the hoodie seam where a head rested on an elbow.

The seam was right.

The light made the cheek shine.

The skin absorbed it.

The eyelid flickered.

People in deep sleep flicker their eyes.

He was human.

We did the things you do.

We said human words in human cadence.

I'm here, I'm a rescuer.

You're safe.

I'm going to touch your shoulder now without saying a name.

We touched with the backs of our fingers first to startle the least.

He sucked a breath and came up on his elbow so fast I almost hit the orange bag out of reflex.

He was 22 or 20 or that age when you can't tell the difference, lips cracked, white scrapes on his palm crusted with the red dust you never wash out of your socks.

His eyes watered with the shock of wake.

Hey, he whispered.

He looked at the ledge with the little speaker like he knew it.

He looked at me and then passed me, pupils trying to jump.

Don't, he said, and then don't say.

He swallowed.

It made me it.

He gagged and made a noise like a dog choking on too big a mouthful of dry kibble.

Then he leaned sideways and vomited Clearwater and nothing else.

It kept giving me water, he whispered.

Not food, water.

OK, Maureen said in that soothing voice that holds back panic's tide.

We're going to get you out.

Where are the others?

I asked before I could calculate the cruelty of that question.

I wanted him to say right there behind you with a shaky smile.

He flinched and his mouth made the shape of a name that did not come out.

They it put us in places, he said, places that were like places we knew.

It kept trying the wrong voices until it got close.

It learned the cough.

He laughed once, a dry bark.

I didn't cough until it made me.

We'll talk later, Tino said.

Not here.

We bagged him, not because he was hypothermic, though his hands were cold, but because the orange became our new flag, our new box to move the world inside.

If something wants your lines in circles, you draw new ones and put them on your shoulders.

I clipped to Tino and to the kid.

Maureen took point, Ash open in her left hand, radio in her right low.

We moved.

It did not try to stop us.

That's the part I don't understand, and I am OK not understanding.

Maybe it had never had anyone refused to speak when spoken to.

Maybe it liked the game more than the catch.

Maybe the nest was bait and we took the wrong piece.

All I know is that as we move back down the slot, in the place where the day's first sun had just cleared the rim, there was a smear of something on the wall, like when a kid drags chalk under a hose.

Stream lines gone watery and sad.

At the trail, it tried again, casual as a bird.

Peep Maureen.

The kid flinched hard and started to turn.

Maureen touched the back of his hand with two fingers.

That's not for us, she said.

That's for the place where we are.

We walked.

I watched the ground.

The world stayed the world.

Back at incident Command, there were blankets and tea and a paramedic who said the kids vitals were better than you'd think.

He drank slowly.

He asked for his friends again, in a voice that made Gray, who has seen more than anyone needs to look away.

We told him the truth.

We hadn't found them.

We were going back out.

What is it?

He asked finally.

Not as a child, not even as a scared adult.

Not the way you ask what an animal is, or what a sound is.

The way you ask what rule you broke so you can stop breaking it.

What is it?

The word I didn't want to use sat on my tongue like a tack.

I did not say it.

I said something old.

He nodded with a fierce, private, miserable understanding.

It doesn't like ash, he said.

It doesn't like dark.

It likes words.

It likes your name in your mouth.

Yes, Maureen said.

He looked at me as if weighing me, a stranger with orange on my shoulders.

Don't say mine, he whispered.

Please, I didn't.

We found one more of them before nightfall, and the second we found alive was worse for wear, dehydrated, with lips split and a blank stare that made me think of church, Not the kneeling, the afterward, when you're not sure what to do with your hands.

He had a jagged cut on his calf he couldn't explain except to say it wanted the shape of it.

We did not find the other two that day or the next.

In the days after We found their phones, their hats, their prints that always stopped at the same kind of place, the edge of shadow, a pinch point, a ledge polished smooth by something trying on feet, like shoes.

The official report, which you can request but won't like, says subjects located, 2 rescued, 2 presumed deceased.

And then it says all the things the park has to say.

Stay on trail, carry a map, don't split the group, travel prepared for conditions.

It does not say never whistle after dark because there is no administrative code for that.

It does not say don't speak the names because imagine that laminated on a kiosk.

It does not say we are not just looking, sometimes we are being looked at because how do you write that and keep the parking lot full of families on Saturday?

Here is what I will say because I am not on a sign and you don't know my name.

If you go, go with three clip, even if it makes you feel silly.

Leave a strip of reflective tape on your strap because someone might need to find you in spin drift or dusting snow or a wash of shade.

Carry something you can burn to ash.

I know this is the desert.

We don't burn.

You don't light it there.

You burn it here, where you can control it, where it's your fire on your terms and you carry the ash in an old film canister, like someone's grandfather taught you a trick in a garage at dusk when the red walls stare back the color of a bruise and your breath comes out bigger than it went in.

Don't whistle.

Your mouth is not the only instrument out there at night.

When you hear your friend's voice say your name from the wrong section of dark, do not answer.

That mouth can learn, and it will, and it will practice until it fits like fingers trying on a glove.

And if you do the thing we did, the three notes, the little speaker, the way you set your own tone in a place that wants to wear your words, don't do it like a dare.

Do it like a way home.

The rock will hold your breath the way a hand holds a child's hand firm.

And not forever.

I left the team after that season, not because of horror, though there was that, but because the way I saw the place had changed and I wanted it to be a certain way again.

SAR needs people who can do the job and then sleep.

I can do the job.

I can't do the last part.

I still hike.

I still step over cattle guards with my left foot first and touch my fingers to my lips at a trailhead without thinking about why, and when a Raven croaks at me like a smoker laughing, I croak back, low and stupid sounding, and the bird looks at me like I've been told a joke I won't get until I'm older.

My girlfriend asks me sometimes, when we're parked at the overlook in evening and the tourists are doing their last light shots and the stone is pretending to be fire.

What was it?

She doesn't mean the missing boys.

She knows those answers.

She means the mouth.

She means the dry sound of my name in someone else's voice from just behind the brush.

I tell her the truth.

I can stand.

It was old, it had rules.

We learned some.

We'll learn more.

I don't say the other word because I am not the one to tell that story.

She nods, and we sit there with a thermos of coffee that tastes like dish soap because I will never get it right, and the Ravens hop like little Undertaker's, and the rock glows and then stops the way something alive glows and goes quiet after.

If you go, remember we're not just looking.

Sometimes we're the bright bit of string in the brush.

Sometimes we're the call and not the caller.

And if something learns the cough at the end of your name and asks for water in the voice of someone you love, tie in, draw your circle with ash, hum your note low and true, and walk away with your eyes on the ground and your friend's hands on your shoulders.

Don't look back.

That's for it.

That's not for you.

I'll start with this.

I'm a dad with a mortgage in a back that hurts when I carry too many grocery bags.

I'm posting this because my hands still shake when I hear our back door creak even though we replaced the latch and added a bolt.

If you live at the edge of the woods and your kid brings home a stray, just read this through.

It won't make you feel better, but it might make you see things the way I finally did.

We moved into the new development in late spring.

The builder called it Sage View.

It's a row of identical beige boxes with young trees zip tied to stakes, sprinklers hissing at 6:00 AM and an HOA e-mail once a week about trash cans.

The lots back up to a county nature preserve.

No lights back there, no paths, just a posted fence and signage about sensitive habitat.

The realtor sold that as a feature.

Quiet, she said, waving her hand at all that dark deer at dusk.

My wife, Claire, loved the kitchen.

Our daughter, Grace, 6 and Fearless, loved the grassy Swale behind the fence that held puddles Tadpoles liked.

I love that the commute put me home by 5, and the cul-de-sac meant she could ride her scooter with the other neighborhood kids.

First weeks were normal.

Boxes, pizza, arguments about where to hang the TV, that kind of thing.

If you squinted, if you ignored the wall of dark beyond the fence at night, the place felt like a reset button.

Grace found the dog on a Saturday in June.

I was in the garage flattening moving boxes when she yelled Daddy Dog.

Her voice was too excited for the tired mud I pictured.

I stepped into the backyard and saw her on her knees at the fence line, hand threaded through a gap in the slats, palm up.

The thing in the scrub took a step toward her like it understood the gesture.

I'm not an expert in dogs, I grew up with cats, but even I could tell this wasn't OK.

It was emaciated to the outline of bones.

The rib cage was a rack, the hips like twin knobs pressing through dull, uneven fur.

1 front paw was mangled, 2 toes fused, the whole foot twisted so that when it put weight on it, there was a wrong little rotation, like the joint bent where no joint should.

It didn't bark.

It didn't pant, it stood in the shade and watched my daughter with an expression that wasn't friendly or fearful, just focused back.

Gracie.

I said and reached for her shoulder.

Claire came out, wiping hands on a dish towel.

Oh.

She said, voice soft.

Poor baby, she made the mistake people make.

She widened her eyes and tilted her head and turned into syrup about a creature that needed a clinic, a shelter, a tranquilizer gun, something.

We went back and forth right there, me saying we don't know what it is, it could bite, it could have something, Claire saying we could feed it while we called around.

It was cruel to let it suffer.

Grace looked between us with that top lip tremble.

I know means she's bracing to cry, my friend.

She said.

You win some and you lose some that.

Afternoon I bought a.

Big bag of kibble and the cheap metal bowls from the grocery store.

We set them on the slab by the back door and left the slider cracked.

The animal stood 10 feet away in the shade and watched us set out dinner like a guest at a table who doesn't understand the ceremony.

When we went inside, it came forward, sniffed once and pushed its whole face into the kibble.

It didn't chew.

It just swallowed, like it had learned to skip the part of eating where you taste.

Buddy Grace said in that way, kids name things for the first word that feels right.

Buddy's hungry.

I said we'd call animal control on Monday.

It was a weekend.

Our phones were full of photos of boxes.

We hadn't filed the new vet info yet.

The county shelter was the kind of place where you leave a message and they call back.

On Wednesday, we'd keep it outside.

I told Claire we'd do this like sensible people.

That first night, every time I passed the slider, I saw it standing just outside the porch light, at the edge of where light turns to backyard black.

It stood there the way a person stands square, evenly weighted, head level.

It didn't wag, didn't sit, just watch the lock.

That was oddness number one.

It was fascinated with locks.

Not doors, not people locks.

We had a neighbor Cam, who treated the HOA Facebook page like his job.

Three houses down, big guy with a smoker in the driveway and a shirt that said BBQ.

It is my love language.

When he saw the bulls by our back door the next day, he yelled over the fence that coyotes were thick this year and we shouldn't encourage anything.

That ain't a coyote, he said when we described it.

Probably some poor feral.

Just be careful people losing cats lately.

Check next door.

Next door was full of missing posts.

Tabby seen last Tuesday.

Little brown dog slipped under fence.

Parakeet.

I don't know either.

Two houses away, the Callahans had plastered the cul-de-sac with Please help us Find Copper, a golden retriever with a white chin and helpless eyes.

The comments were the usual coyotes, owls, someone said Mountain Lion, but that felt dramatic.

We kept Buddy outside it, slept, or at least lay down under the BBQ, tucked in where the concrete stayed warm.

The mangled paw stuck out at a bad angle, the toes on that foot long and splayed like someone had stretched them and stopped halfway.

At night I heard it shift and scratch, and once on that first Sunday, I heard a sound like the back door unlocking, the click pop of the deadbolt.

I froze where I was in the hallway.

Claire was asleep.

The house was quiet except for the fridge.

The slider was shut when I went to check, the bolt was where I'd left it.

Buddy was standing at the glass, 10 inches away, head cocked, listening to my steps.

It made that sound again.

Not with its mouth, with its throat, the little click and then a pop that only makes sense when metal slides into a strike plate.

It was practicing on Monday.

I called animal control.

A woman with a tired voice took the address, said they were backed up, asked me to keep the animal contained if possible.

Don't try to touch it, she said.

Don't feed it if you can avoid it, I said we'd been feeding it.

It looked half starved.

She sighed in a way that told me she has this conversation a lot.

We'll try to get someone out by the end of the week.

It's.

Funny to me now how?

Fast we'll do the right thing, turns into we'll wait until it's someone else's problem.

By Tuesday night, Buddy wasn't a stray we were helping.

It was a routine.

Grace would tap the glass and say dinner and it would step out of the shadow and pretend to be what she wanted.

Oddness #2 was the way it looked at my daughter.

With me or Claire.

It blinked slow, calculating with grace.

It went still in a way I can't explain.

Not stiff, not threatened.

Like a child at story time, looking at the pictures, absorbing everything.

Voice, cadence, hands.

If she chattered, it watched her mouth.

If she sang, she tends to sing to everything.

It turned its head like a radio catching a signal.

That week, two more pet posts went up on next door.

One had a Ring camera clip of something loping across a driveway at 2:00 AM.

It wasn't great quality, but you could see back legs, a long spine, a head that turned toward the camera as if it knew what a camera was.

In the comments, someone wrote wolf and someone wrote no wolves here.

And someone wrote, Coyotes will take cats right off the patio.

And someone wrote, Why do people let cats outside?

So it became a fight, the way those threads always do.

By Thursday, when Claire left the slider crack to air out the house, Buddy nosed it open with that mangled paw and set 1 foot on the kitchen tile like it was testing temperature.

Claire yelled no in that high voice you use on pets and toddlers.

And it withdrew, head low, as if chastened.

It spent the rest of the afternoon pressed to the glass, watching the handle.

Our cat Pixel, a fat Gray creature who slept where the light pooled, had been irritated from day one.

He did that sideways Halloween walk past the slider, tail puffed, ears flat.

He would hiss and then do nothing more.

Friday morning he ate half a can of tuna and curled in the laundry basket.

Friday evening, he didn't come when Grace called him in that sing song voice she uses that sounds like a different child.

We shook treats, we checked his usual spots behind the dryer, under the guest bed, the warm patch by the vent in the hallway.

Nothing.

Maybe he's in the garage, Claire said, and I agreed because it was easier than what I was thinking.

Grace cried quietly into a towel.

Pixel doesn't like buddy, she said like it was a confession.

That night at 1:30, I woke up to Mom.

You know your kids voice, even half asleep with a train of a dream still dragging past your window, your body wakes for that word, like being pulled to the surface for air.

I touched Claire's arm and she was already moving.

Baby.

She said into the dark.

Mom.

The voice said again, the exact same way.

Same breath between syllables, same faint scrape at the end from the mild summer cold Grace had.

The sound came from the kitchen.

The slider glowed, rectangle, pale with porch light.

Claire flipped on the hall light.

That's when I saw the weirdness.

The light made the sound falter, not stop, falter, like turning on a light broke a rhythm.

We got to Grace's room and found her face down, boneless in sleep, hair across her cheek, mouth open, snuffling.

The monitor on her dresser showed a pink line that jittered with regular breath.

Her door had been shut.

The voice came again from the kitchen.

Mom, same tone, same break.

I don't know what made me do it.

Curiosity, dread.

I can't say.

But I closed my eyes and listened past the word.

You know how when you close your eyes you hear more details?

I heard the faintest wrong click right after the word, A tiny throat noise that wasn't quite human.

The sound you get when you imitate the lilt of a sound but can't help your own voices shape.

I walked to the kitchen.

Claire was behind me.

Buddy stood beyond the glass with its nose fogging a small Oval, not panting, not panting at all, the jaw holding the shape of M.

The jaw went slack, then stiff, slack, then stiff, as if it were trying to fit a tool into the groove of something.

Its eyes didn't look at me.

They looked past me, at the hall where the bedrooms were.

Get back in bed, I said to the empty hallway.

Too loud, as if pretending would make it more harmless.

Now It turned its head at my voice.

Then it made a new sound.

The deadbolt click, perfect, followed by the hollow thunk of the latch.

Perfect.

It wasn't touching the door.

We added a secondary lock the next day.

Cam helped.

You hear that around 2?

He asked, driving a screw, not looking up.

Heard something in my yard, like someone whispering, and then my back gate latch.

Checked the cameras, nothing but a moth.

That afternoon I found pixels collar under the deck.

It had been dragged into the fine cold dust beneath the steps and laid there perfectly, the buckle pointing up, the bell tarnished and still no fur around it.

No mess.

Claire told me not to tell Grace.

Over the next week, the neighborhood pets went from missing to we think we saw a Husky down the block.

Came home bloodied from something that did not sound like a fence.

A Guinea pig habitat on a patio was found open in the morning, the wire lid neatly unlatched and set aside.

Someone posted that their parrot started saying the wrong name at night.

You don't need to believe me.

You can tell yourself.

We all primed each other, that we wanted something to blame for the sadness of lost pets.

But I know how my own house sounded.

I know how my own house changed.

But he began to repeat our kitchen.

The beep of the microwave in the wrong room, the whisper of the fridge ice maker behind the couch, the repeated little click of the back door over and over during dinner like a metronome.

And then the voices came.

Honey from the hallway in Claire's voice while she stood right next to me.

Daddy from outside while Grace was in the bath singing to her shampoo.

I stopped using Claire's name at night.

I said hey.

Instead I started checking on Grace.

3 * a night and then four.

What do you think it is?

Claire whispered, as if the thing could hear whispering and regular speech differently.

I think I said and stopped because I didn't have a name that would land right.

Wolf didn't fit, Coyote didn't fit, dog didn't fit.

And the word you're probably thinking, I won't put it here, I'll say this.

Wherever the preserve had that thing tucked away, moving the houses up to the edge pulled it to us like a magnet.

Animal control came on a Tuesday, a guy named Matthew with a catch pole and a bureaucracy's worth of warnings.

He put a crate with a pressure latch near the fence line and smeared it with canned food.

But he waited under the barbecue and watched him.

It did not come near the crate.

It did not sniff.

It watched his hands on the latch the way it watched my hands on the lock.

Matthew took photos.

He said he'd swing by tomorrow.

He told me not to leave the slider open that night.

The air felt like a storm without a storm.

We were the only house on our row with the backlight on.

From the hallway, the kitchen looked like a lit stage and the yard a black audience.

Grace's door was cracked open.

I was sitting on the floor in the dark outside her room, like some old world guard.

Around 2:15 I heard it.

The sound of the back gate chain sliding through the eyelet.

Not fast, carefully, like a person who had watched somebody do it once and was excited to try.

I went to the window.

The gate hung stupidly open, the crate sat where Matthew had said it, the top lay beside it as neatly as a book.

The catch position.

My blood ran weird when I saw it was the same as before.

Something with patience had put it back the way it found it.

The canned food was gone, the crates floor was clean.

No hair, no footprints on the dry dirt around it.

The next morning I told Claire we were done.

We would stop feeding, we would keep the doors locked, we would call Matthew in the county and whoever else until they removed the thing.

Claire nodded, pale.

She had stopped sleeping too.

Grace, of course, cried Buddy.

Will be hungry.

She said, as if hunger was a weather we were responsible for.

She stood by the slider that afternoon and tapped the glass the way she did when she meant it.

Dinner buddy appeared the way it always did, slow, smooth, like it had always been there, and merely decided to move.

It stood close to the glass, closer than a normal animal would.

There was a new thing around its neck, something red, ragged, with a snap that glinted.

Collar.

Grace said, delighted.

But he has a collar.

She turned to grab her crayons, like she needed to record the good news.

Don't look, I told Claire.

She looked anyway.

We both knew that snap The red ribbon copper printed on the cheap bent metal, The address scuffed.

It had looped the retriever's tag around itself, like a kid trying on a parent's watch.

Like rehearsal.

I called 911 and then felt stupid for calling 911 on an animal.

While the dispatcher asked if anyone was in immediate danger, Buddy lifted the mangled paw and set it delicately against the glass, right where Grace's palm had been just minutes earlier.

The long toes splayed and flexed.

The print on the glass looked like a hand let me skip a day because writing it makes me sweat the way I did.

Then we didn't sleep.

Animal control came again.

The guy looked tired.

He said there'd been calls all up and down our street.

He moved the crate back behind a Bush, as if a Bush would fool something that understood door latches.

He showed me a video on his phone from a property a mile up the preserve border.

Something tall crossing behind a trash can.

The flash of the eye shine.

The wrong long arm, we think.

Mange, he said, because it was the word his job offered him.

That evening I went into the garage to look for the feeder crickets Grace had once begged for and we'd briefly adopted for a science thing.

You know how in a new house, you still have boxes weirdly labeled by whoever helped you move?

I was hunting in a box marked Decor and found instead a zip lock bag full of hair.

Not a handful, Not the tumbleweeds we scoop off the bathroom floor.

A bag someone had filled, as if saving it, soft Gray pixels Gray tucked beside it.

A row of tags and bells and beads laid in a line.

The way Grace lined up her plastic ponies, copper, some with phone numbers worn down by rubbing.

One with a little fish shape, one that said Princess, and for whatever reason that one made me put the whole box down and walk away.

I didn't tell anyone about that box.

I tied it off and put it in the trash and took the trash out immediately.

I didn't want the smell in the house.

And to be clear, it didn't smell like rot.

It smelled like laundry that never made it from the hamper to the machine.

Warm human close.

You can roll your eyes now and say I was primed, that I saw what I feared.

But the thing about fear is, once your brain associates a sound with danger, you hear it everywhere.

The back door click became like a smoke alarm beep.

Even when you try to ignore it, your body registers it.

On Friday, the neighborhood group chat that I had muted by default lit up.

Anyone else hearing a kid outside at my fence?

Sounds like my son but he's sleeping.

Not funny if this is a prank.

Someone posted a clip from their Ring camera of the side yard.

You couldn't see much, but you could hear a small perfect dad in a girl's voice.

The comments were instant and ugly.

Then an hour later someone else posted we're missing our cat.

Please check your sheds.

I made a decision I should have made the first night.

I drove to the hardware store and bought a heavy slide bolt, the kind that sits halfway up the door, out of the reach of kids and animals.

I bought a second bolt for the inside garage door and one of those rubber wedges you kick under a door in a hotel.

I bought a baby monitor even though we already had one.

I bought a cheap camera that texts you when it sees motion.

I felt like a fool, a nervous homeowner, but I installed them all metal into wood.

Little shiver of the door in the frame.

Grace went to bed at 7:30 because school was out and her body clock shifts earlier in summer.

We read two books.

She asked why Buddy wasn't coming in.

I said Buddy needed to stay where he was used to staying.

She fell asleep with her mouth open.

That tired kids sleep.

That isn't pretty.

I tucked the blanket up under her chin for no reason other than it made me feel like a person who could control something.

At 1:40 AM, the camera notified me.

Motion detected kitchen.

The photo was grainy and caught at a bad angle, but it showed the slider, the porch light glow, and the outline of something standing very, very close to the glass.

Not pressed, not fogging, just standing.

The audio clicked on.

Half a second later, there was the sound of the deadbolt.

Not the actual bolt, mine was slid, but the sound of it, the tiny echo list.

Click, my brain now mapped to the same place.

And then my daughter's voice from outside our house.

Mom, I'm stuck.

Exactly the right wine in the vowel, exactly the right little breath after.

The only thing wrong was timing.

The words were too regular.

No kid calls for help with metronome cadence.

Real fear has breakage in it.

This was clean, Claire whispered baby and stood up.

Because she is a mom and that word moves her like gravity.

I grabbed her wrist hard enough to make her gasp and shook my head.

I put a finger to my lips.

I didn't trust my voice.

We stood a full minute in the dark, hearing Mom, I'm stuck.

Every six or seven seconds I counted it was 6, then seven, then six.

When I finally spoke, I pitched it low toward Grace's room.

Grace, answer me.

Silence, then the sound of Claire's voice from outside saying answer your father.

My wife put her other hand over her mouth.

That was the moment she stopped believing me.

Animals, me, locks me will handle this and understood that something past naming had crossed our lawn and learned our house.

I opened Grace's door and pointed the light at her face.

She groaned and rolled, annoyed I'd woken her after confirming that, after staring at the little chapped lips and the smear of crust at the corner of her eye that proves humanity.

We walked to the kitchen.

But he stood exactly where the motion photo had caught it.

But now I could see detail.

The mangled paws, toes not just long but cracked at the ends, like nails that have been scraped blunt by concrete.

The fur close up, revealing bruised, thin skin, not and never healthy.

The eyes, dull and set a little too far apart, was wrong for a domestic thing, and under the red ribbon tag on its neck, a scrap of cloth looped like a scarf, blue with rockets, Grace's pajama bottoms from earlier in the week that I could have sworn I'd washed.

Buddy.

I said the name sour in my mouth.

Buddy, go away.

It opened its jaw, shaped its mouth very carefully, and said Buddy in my voice.

It said it wrong.

It butchered the consonants, and there was a little click right after the, uh, like a mechanical error.

But it said the word.

It said the word the way I had said it three nights ago when I told Claire we were done feeding him.

Then it did the door again.

Click, thunk, pause, click, thunk.

It held the shape of the sound in its throat, as if tasting it.

You know when you have a thought that slides in and leaves a residue that nothing washes?

Mine was simple.

It's not mimicking to get food, it's mimicking to learn the lock and to call the person it wants to come to the lock.

It was a plan with too many steps for a hungry animal.

I turned on every light.

The kitchen became bright enough to show dust in the air.

The backyard stayed a flat black.

The brightness made the thing blink.

Not flinch, blink.

Like its eyes didn't adjust fast enough.

It backed 1/2 step into the shadow and held their thinking.

I told Claire to take Grace and go to the car.

I told her to call 911 and Cam and anyone else with a truck and a weapon and to stay on the line with someone the whole time.

She didn't argue.

She scooped our sleeping daughter in that armful moms all seem to have arm, hip, cheek and went to the garage.

I slid the bolt and kicked the wedge and stood in the square of kitchen light facing something that was 2 inches from the glass and didn't make a fog with its breath.

It tried once more.

Dad, it said.

And if it had said my name, I think I would have opened the door just to do something stupid and old and brave.

But it said the wrong word.

And the fact that it said Dad cemented that it didn't know us in the way you know a person.

It knew the shape of us, the rolls.

It knew Mom because that's what my daughter calls out.

It knew Dad because that's what Claire says when she wants me and doesn't want to wake Grace.

It was learning the parts of us that fit the skin sizes.

It was considering headlights swept the fence, cams truck.

He's the kind of guy who hears a text like mine and comes in boots with a mag light and nothing under the weapon category that the HOA would approve.

He slammed the truck door and the outside voice said bright and cheery.

Hey neighbor.

In a spot on imitation of his tone that made my stomach pitch because there's no way it had practiced that.

Cam lifted the mag light and Buddy slid back very fast into the dark, beyond the swing of the kitchen light, like water leaving a hole.

We walk the yard with our lights.

The crate was untouched again.

The gate hung open.

The fence line looked like all fence lines do at night.

Plank, plank, plank, shadow.

Nothing.

But when my light passed over the edge of our deck, the beam caught the glint of something small and metallic.

I crouched and reached into the dirt.

My fingers found the rough line of a zipper.

It was Grace's small hoodie.

It had been pulled under the deck and laid flat the way you lay a shirt to iron it.

It was still warm from the dryer.

We called 911 again because now it was a person or an animal with hands.

The dispatcher asked if anyone had attempted entry.

I didn't know how to answer that.

Cops came, two cars, polite and bored until I showed them the kitchen camera clips.

The younger one stopped smiling.

The older one said his cousin's chickens had been disappearing.

They walked the fence and told me what people tell you when there's nothing to be done.

Keep the doors locked, lights on, don't leave food out, report anything else.

He told me they'd log an extra patrol.

I didn't sleep that night.

Claire and Grace slept in our bed with the door locked.

I sat in the kitchen at the table, just to show myself that I could occupy my own house at

4:00 AM, when it's the worst version of night and best of morning.

The motion camera pinged again.

This time it caught a different angle.

The shadow of something tall and slender moving past the porch post.

The edge of a face with too much length under the eye.

The flash of the red tag.

It made a new sound.

2 syllables spoken like a question skin, the first syllable too bright, the second dragged.

I didn't breathe for too long listening to that, and I don't know if I did the right thing.

Next, I went to the garage.

Here's where the story will sound stupid or brave, depending on what you are.

I wish I could say I planned something intricate.

What I did was simple.

I opened the garage, got in the SUV and backed it down the driveway until my bumper was past the porch.

I left the engine idling.

I took our kitchen trash bag with the box of tags and hair and cloth I'd told myself I'd thrown away and dragged it out into the middle of the driveway.

I tore it open with my hands.

The tags made small tinny noises on the concrete.

The hare made a soft sound that made me gag.

I set the bag down and walked backward toward the open garage.

Got in the car, foot on brake.

My hands shook.

I flashed the headlights once.

It did what curious things do.

It came to sea.

You'll say I couldn't see it.

You're right.

I watched the red tag swing into the beam, and then I watched the rest of it arrive, assembled from parts I've been seeing in pieces for two weeks.

The 2 long arms, the twisted paw that still found purchase, the fur that looked like a suit borrowed and not altered.

The way it moved like the idea of a dog someone described to someone who had never seen one.

It stepped into the light and stopped with its head cocked over the trash bag like it was reading a note.

Then it bent to the bag.

It lifted the hoodie out by the hood and did something with it.

I still dream about it Shook it as if to fix its shape, then lined it with both hands across its own chest, as if measuring, like a person grabbing a shirt at a department store and holding it up to see if the shoulders will fit.

It looked toward the garage like it expected to be watched.

I took my foot off the brake.

The bumper hit it before it moved.

That's the true part.

When you hit a deer or a dog, there's chaos.

This was a dull, clean sound, like a bag of wet sand struck by a board.

The body didn't tumble.

It folded under the bumper.

The car hopped.

That wasn't me.

That was the axle hitting something it didn't like.

I kept going until the hood met cardboard boxes and the sensors screamed.

Then I reversed a foot and went forward again, because if I stopped once, I knew I wouldn't do it twice.

I didn't look at the camera, I used mirrors and instinct and the simple physics of big machine over small body.

I didn't turn off the engine, I didn't get out.

I sat there with my foot on the brake and the engine ticked and the smell of hot oil filled the space.

Claire opened the house door and said my name like prayer.

Cam stood in the driveway with the flashlight pointed at the floor.

The way you do when you can't look up.

Is it?

Claire started.

I handed her my phone and told her to call Matthew at animal control, to call the cops, to call anyone whose job it was to name what I'd just run over.

I told her not to let Grace out here.

The fact that I remember saying that, and not the first thing I did when I got out of the car, tells me what matters to my brain.

When I finally looked, I didn't feel brave.

I felt tired.

You want me to describe it?

I won't.

I'll say this, The fur wasn't fur all the way through.

It had places where skin had different thicknesses, like it belonged to something else first.

The mangled paw broke open in a way that showed more joint than an animal normally shows.

The red tag lay flipped to show the back where a phone number had been worn illegible by rubbing against the false throat that had worn it.

The head lay at an angle nobody's head should.

The eyes looked like any eyes when there's no more brain behind them.

Glassy surprised the voice didn't come.

No clicks, no borrowed mom.

It made a sound that was finally animal air leaving a shape, and then it made no sound.

The cops came and turned our driveway into one of those tape tied scenes people slow down to stare at.

They didn't put up tape, but they did the visual equivalent.

Light spinning bodies and uniforms moving with purpose.

Matthew came and stood with his hands on his hips and all the energy drained out of his face like a balloon.

You let go, you ran over a coyote, he said later, when he had to write something on a form, severe mange, neurological something, he used words that had the advantage of being on the sheet in front of him.

I signed where he told me.

He asked if he could take the body.

I said yes, please take it, take the whole night.

Cam said he'd bleach the driveway before Grace woke up.

He did, and the smell of bleach made the kitchen smell like a hotel pool until we opened all the windows.

People on Next Door posted about the commotion.

Someone wrote Finally and someone wrote Poor Thing and someone wrote My kid slept through it, and someone wrote a long thing about human encroachment and habitat loss that I agreed with in theory and could not engage with in practice because I was up two nights listening for a sound I swore I'd never hear again.

The Callahan's took down their copper posters.

They held his leash and talked to each other and went back inside.

Grace asked where Buddy went.

We said Buddy needed to go back to where he came from.

She accepted that because she is 6 and accepting is what her brain can do when we give it some scaffolding.

She asked for a different story.

At bedtime.

We read Not the one about the dog.

We had the HOA fence company extend our slats all the way to the ground.

No gaps.

We added motion lights.

I put a second bolt on the interior garage door.

For two weeks I slept on the couch.

For two months I learned the house's new noises until they turned back into a hum I could live with.

Here is the only satisfying part any of you will get.

The sound stopped.

No more clicks in the kitchen that weren't the bolt.

No more mom from the yard while the real mom stood in the hall.

No more interest in locks.

The preserve is still the preserve.

At night, it is still a black wall.

But the pressure at the glass went away.

The feeling of being watched by a thing that understood latches left.

That is the ending you can live with.

In the fall, when the builder planted more young trees and we all put out pumpkins, the HOA sent a note reminding us to keep pets indoors for coyote safety.

I nodded.

Because whatever word you wish to use is irrelevant to what it does.

Predators follow the edges of our lives where our lights end.

That's the truth.

City people forget until they move somewhere like Sage View the last thing I'll put here and then I'm done.

Three days after the driveway, a man in a Plain County truck came by to ask a couple follow-ups.

Not a cop, not Matthew.

A man with a clipboard.

He asked if we'd noticed anyone unusual in the neighborhood.

I said beyond the obvious, no.

He asked if we'd seen anyone carrying tools, a trap, a cooler.

I said no.

He asked very neutrally if we had kept anything from the scene.

I said we had not.

He clicked his pen and asked if anyone had been injured.

I said no.

He thanked me and left a card that just had a general county department phone on it.

No name.

That night when I took the trash out, I saw something near the spot the crate had been, a small neat row in the dirt of things set shoulder to shoulder.

Not tags this time.

Buttons from a child shirt, blue with tiny rockets, laid carefully where the crate had sat, like a lesson left on a chalkboard.

I didn't call anyone.

I swept them into the dustpan and threw them away.

We sold the house in December, with honesty about a coyote incident disclosed to the buyers.

We moved to a street with more houses and fewer fences.

I still like the quiet.

I still like the edge.

I think that's human.

But I check my locks the way someone checks weather, not because I think they'll fail, but because I know something watches the way we open and close our doors and keeps a little library of those sounds for itself.

It doesn't need to be supernatural to be wrong.

It only needs to be patient and hungry and unnervingly good at practicing until the shapes of us fit.

If your kid taps on glass and says dinner and something in the dark answers with the exact click of your deadbolt, lock your door twice.

If you hear your own voice from outside at 1:30, wake your kid 1st.

And if you find a red tag around a neck that never had the right throat, for one, don't tell yourself a story about wolves.

Tell yourself the truth.

It learned you because that's what it came to do.

It was looking for your size.

We're OK.

That's the part I promised myself.

I'd say at the end we're OK.

But when I picture that moment in the driveway, I don't see headlights.

I see the way it measured the hoodie against its chest with those long, careful hands, like a clerk in a store.

That's the part that puts me on the couch sometimes, in a house full of light, listening for a sound that doesn't come.

I don't know how to start this.

I'm not a writer.

I'm a trucker.

My handle is grit and I've been driving for 22 years.

I've seen it all.

Ice Rd.

jackknives in Wyoming, 120° tire blowouts in Death

Valley, lot lizards at 3:00 AM who look more dead than alive.

I've seen things that would make you sell your car and take the bus, but I've never seen this.

I'm sitting in a motel room in Vernon, CA.

I should have been asleep three hours ago.

I delivered my rig, but I can't close my eyes.

Every time I do, I see them.

The eyes.

I need to write this down.

I need someone to know what happened on the long haul.

My run was high priority, a sealed manifest I picked up in Salt Lake City bound for a nondescript government depot in LA.

The kind of run you don't ask questions about.

It was just me, my rig, the old lady, and 40,000 lbs of something that had to be there

by 6:00 AM.

No stops, no delays.

The run was going smooth until about 2:30 this morning.

I was on US 93, that long, dark, empty stretch of nothing in Nevada, South of Alamo.

It's called the Extraterrestrial Hwy.

for a reason.

There's nothing out there but darkness, stars and the mountains, which look like sleeping giants.

I had my high beams on, cutting a cone of white into the black.

I was sipping stale coffee, listening to a late night talk radio host drone on about conspiracy theories.

That's when it happened.

Thump, scrape.

It was heavy.

Not a Jack rabbit, not a damn tumbleweed.

This was a thud.

I felt it in my seat, right through the chassis.

Damn it.

I yelled, snatching a look at my mirrors.

Nothing.

Just the endless 2 lane Rd.

vanishing behind me.

But I knew I'd hit something.

The front end felt off, like it was pulling slightly to the right.

My manifest said no stops, but if I had a cracked radiator or a busted airline I'd be stranded in 100 miles anyway.

Against my better judgement, I geared down, hit the Jake brake and pulled the old lady onto the gravel shoulder.

I left the engine running, it's diesel heartbeat covering the silence.

I grabbed my 4 cell mag light from the door pocket and jumped out.

The silence of the desert at night is something else.

It's not quiet.

You hear your own blood.

You hear the weight of the sky all right, you son of a bitch, Where are you?

I muttered, Expecting to find a mangled coyote or a small deer.

I walked to the front of the rig.

My high beams.

Were still on, painting the desert scrub in ghostly white.

There was no animal, no blood splatter on the asphalt, nothing.

What the hell?

I shined my mag light on the grill and I froze.

There was a dent right over the radiator, but that's not what got me.

Pressed into the Chrome and steel was a handprint.

I'm not talking about some smudge.

I'm talking about a perfect five fingered handprint pressed so hard it had left a shallow indentation in the metal and it was dripping the blood.

It wasn't red in the beam of my flashlight.

It looked thick, black and oily.

It sizzled on the hot Chrome, letting off a smell like burnt ozone and rotten meat.

I got closer the hand.

It wasn't right.

The palm was too wide and the fingers were too long, way too long, like a spider's legs splayed out.

They were jointed in ways a human hand just isn't.

I felt the coffee turn to acid in my stomach.

I reached out a shaky finger and the black blood was hot.

It wasn't just warm, it was burning hot.

I pulled my hand back with a hiss.

I should have called the cops.

I should have.

I don't know what, but I had the manifest.

I had the deadline.

I ran back to my cab, slammed the door, and hit the locks.

Thumpka chunk.

I sat there for a full minute, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest.

It's just the desert.

You're tired.

It was a weird animal.

I grabbed A rag, intending to wipe it off, but as I looked at the grill again from my driver's seat, the black blood was melting.

It wasn't dripping off, it was sinking into the metal like acid.

After a few seconds, the handprint was gone.

Only the dent remained.

I threw the truck in gear and peeled out, spitting gravel all over the highway.

For the next hour, I was high on adrenaline.

I turned off the radio.

I just listened to the road, scanning every shadow.

The CB was dead quiet, not even static.

I needed to clear my head.

I was running low on coffee and high on panic.

I saw a sign.

Gas, 2 miles.

It was a 24 hour truck stop near the I-15 Jct.

one of those lonely flickering places.

I pulled in.

The lot was empty save for a rusted out 80s sedan parked near the door.

I idled the truck by the pumps, but I didn't kill the engine.

I went inside.

A little bell jingled.

The place was sterile, too bright.

A young kid, maybe 20, was behind the counter, leaning on his elbows, reading a comic book.

Just a large coffee, Black.

I said.

My voice sounded like gravel.

Rough night?

The kid asked.

He didn't look up.

You have no idea, son.

I went to the machine, filled my thermos.

My hands were shaking.

I could still smell that burnt ozone smell.

You hit something back there, didn't you?

The kid said.

I stopped.

I turned around.

He was looking right at me, and his eyes, oh God, his eyes.

They were pale, not blue or Gray, I mean white, like polished moonstones, but they weren't dull.

They were bright, unnervingly bright.

They looked wet, like they were lit from behind by a little sickly white light.

What did you say?

I asked.

He smiled, and the smile didn't match his face.

It was too wide, all teeth.

It hates a messy entrance.

He said, conversational, like he was talking about the weather.

You should have checked your tires before you left, it tore one of them up pretty bad.

I stared at him.

I hadn't checked my tires.

That'll be $2.50.

He said, his eyes never leaving mine.

I fumble for the cash, threw A5 on the counter.

Keep it.

I backed out of the store, never turning my back on him.

I got to the door.

Hey, Grit, He called out.

I froze.

My handle, my CB handle.

It's not on my license, It's not on my truck.

You're leaking, he said, that awful wide smile splitting his face.

It's already inside the cab.

I ran.

I didn't even look for traffic.

I jumped into the rig, slammed the lock, and checked my mirrors.

The kid was standing in the doorway of the lit up store.

He wasn't moving, just watching, smiling.

I tore out of the station, horn blaring, and got onto the I-15.

SI was hyperventilating.

It's inside the cab.

I turned on the Dome light, scanning everywhere, The sleeper, the passenger footwell, the dash.

Nothing.

Just my own junk, a cold, greasy fast food bag, my logbook.

But the smell was there, faint burnt ozone and rotten meat, and I looked at the floor mat on the passenger side.

There was a small, dark, oily puddle on the rubber.

It was sizzling ever so faintly.

I screamed.

I grabbed the rag I'd meant to use earlier and swiped at it, and the rag disintegrated.

It just fell apart like it was rotten.

The puddle was gone, soaked into the floor.

I was done.

No more stops.

I was driving straight to Lai didn't care if a tire blew.

I didn't care if the engine seized.

I was not stopping.

I drove for two more hours.

Straight through the Mojave.

I was in California, passing Baker.

The sun was still hours from coming up.

I was a wreck, mainlining my coffee, my eyes burning.

Then I saw flashing lights up ahead on the shoulder, a car, a new looking Lexus, was pulled over.

A woman in a nice business suit was standing next to it, waving her arms.

Flat tire.

In 22 years, I've always stopped.

You stop for a stranded motorist in the desert.

That's the code.

My trucker instincts screamed stop.

My new instincts screamed Dr.

I slowed down.

I couldn't just leave her.

I eased off the accelerator, ready to pull over.

I was 50 feet away, my headlights painting her.

She stopped waving.

She turned her head and looked right at me, the same eyes bright, pale, wet and shining in my headlights.

She smiled the same damn smile as the kid.

It was wrong on her face, it stretched her skin too tight.

She wasn't waving for help, she was beckoning.

A single long fingered hand crooked at me.

Come here.

I slammed my foot on the accelerator.

The rig screamed, black smoke pouring from the stacks.

I swerved into the left lane and as I passed her, she didn't move.

She just watched me, that impossible smile plastered on her face.

I looked in my passenger side mirror.

She was still standing there, unmoving as my tail lights vanished.

It's not people.

It's one thing, it's wearing them.

How is it ahead of me?

I'm in an 18 Wheeler doing 80.

How is it always ahead of me?

The realization hit me like a physical blow.

It wasn't following me, it was waiting for me.

It knew my route.

The rest of the drive through Barstow and down the Cajon Pass was a blur of terror.

Every pair of headlights in my mirror was it.

Every car I passed.

I was terrified to look at the driver.

The CB wasn't static anymore, it was crackling.

And underneath the static I could hear laughter.

A high cold wet sound like bubbles popping in oil.

I was on the edge of a full blown psychotic brake.

Then came the worst part.

Just outside of San Bernardino, getting close to the I-10 interchange.

Whoop, whoop.

Red and blue lights filled my cab.

ACHP cruiser, A state trooper.

No, no, I whispered.

I had to stop.

You don't run from the cops, not with a critical, high priority sealed manifest government load.

You stop.

I pulled onto the shoulder.

My heart was a stone.

This was it.

This was the end.

I watched in the mirror as the trooper got out.

Big guy, campaign hat, clipboard.

He walked slow, deliberate.

He shined his flashlight into my cab.

He tapped on my window with a gloved knuckle.

I powered the window down an inch.

The smell of ozone and rotten meat hit me like a wall.

License and registration driver.

His voice was a deep, professional monotone.

I fumble for my wallet, my logbook.

My hands were slick with sweat.

I passed them through the gap.

He clicked off his flashlight.

His face was lit just by my dash lights.

I couldn't see his eyes under the brim of his hat.

You're in a hell of a hurry, driver, he said.

Yes, Officer.

I I have a critical deadline in Los Angeles.

Was I speeding?

He was silent.

He just stood there looking at my paperwork.

You hit something, he said, Not a question.

It was a coyote, Sir.

Back on the 93.

I checked the truck.

No damage.

My voice was a squeak.

He leaned in.

He leaned right in so his face was close to the window gap.

It wasn't a coyote.

Grit.

My blood turned to ice.

Grit.

He called me grit.

He looked up.

In the shadow from his hat brim fell away.

I saw them, the bright, Milky shining eyes.

They were weeping, that black oily fluid which ran down his cheeks like tears.

He smiled, his mouth unhinged, stretching wider than any human mouth could, revealing rows of small needle like teeth.

It doesn't like to be kept waiting.

He gurgled, the voice wet and wrong.

It's so hungry.

He didn't reach for the door handle.

He reached for me, his long wrong fingers spidering through the one inch gap in the window.

I didn't think I reacted.

I stomped the accelerator.

The old lady jumped.

The whole cab shrieked as the troopers arm wedged in the window was ripped backward.

I heard a sound, a wet pop and a crunch of bone.

I didn't look back.

I didn't care.

I drove.

I ran every red light on the surface streets.

I got to the depot at six O 5:00 AM.

The sun was just starting to burn.

The smoggy haze over Lai crashed through the depot gates, not even waiting for them to open fully, and slammed to a stop in the yard.

A man in a cheap suit with a clipboard was waiting, looking annoyed.

You're late, driver, and you just busted our.

I fell out of the cab.

I literally fell onto the asphalt, shaking, crying, borderline hysterical.

Take it.

Just take the truck.

The keys are in it.

It's in there, it's in the cab.

The depot manager's face went from annoyed to concerned.

Whoa, whoa, easy there buddy.

Rough run.

I scrambled away from the truck, crab walking backward.

I looked at the manager.

He was normal, just a tired middle-aged guy.

Tired, normal brown eyes.

You, you look like you've seen a ghost.

He said something like that.

I sobbed.

He sighed, walked over to the cab and opened the door.

He looked inside.

He looked at me.

There's nothing in here, man, just smells like you spilled a burrito.

He signed my manifest, tore off my copy.

Go get some sleep, you're done.

I ran.

I grabbed my duffel from the side box.

No way was I getting back in that cab and I ran out of the depot.

I've been walking for an hour.

I found this motel, paid in cash.

I'm in the room.

I locked the deadbolt, the chain, and jammed the chair under the knob.

It's over.

The sun is up.

I'm alive, I'm safe.

I just, I just needed to wash my face.

I've been sitting here for an hour, but I just now got the courage to go into the bathroom.

The mirror is old, spotted with rust.

I looked like hell, Haggard, a 50 year old trucker aged 20 years in one night.

I turned on the tap, splashed the cold gritty water on my face.

It felt so good.

I looked up and my reflection smiled at me.

It was the same smile, the one from the kid, the woman, the trooper, the one that stretches too wide.

I'm standing here, staring at the mirror.

I can't move.

I'm leaning in, my heart gone, just a cold, dead hole in my chest.

For just one second, just one single terrible second, my own eyes in the mirror glowed with that same wet and possibly bright pale light.

It wasn't chasing me to catch me.

It wasn't toying with me.

It was chasing me to get in.

I'm still here.

I'm looking at my hands.

They look normal, but I'm so, so thirsty and I can smell it.

The ozone, the meat, it's coming from me.