The first thing Jack noticed was the cold. It pressed against his skin like wet cloth, seeping through his T-shirt and settling into his bones. He opened his eyes to a canopy of gray-green leaves swaying overhead, their branches tangled so tightly that only thin needles of light reached the forest floor.
He was lying on his back in the dirt.
Jack sat up fast, his pulse spiking. Pine needles clung to his arms. The ground beneath him was soft, dark, and damp, and the air smelled wrong — thick with something rotten underneath the usual scent of bark and earth. He pressed his palms into the soil and pushed himself to his feet, sneakers sliding on a patch of moss.
"How did I —"
He turned in a slow circle. Trees in every direction. Thick trunks wrapped in shadow, their roots bulging out of the ground like the knuckles of buried fists. No trail. No markers. No sound except the faint creak of branches overhead and his own breathing.
He didn't remember coming here. He didn't remember anything before waking up on the ground. The last clear thought he could grab was sitting at the kitchen table at home, his mother's voice calling something from the other room, Lily's music thumping through the ceiling from upstairs. Then nothing. Then this.
Jack swallowed and wiped his hands on his jeans. His phone wasn't in his pocket. His wallet was gone. He had nothing except the clothes on his back and a growing pressure behind his ribs that felt like the beginning of panic.
"Think. Just think."
He picked a direction — downhill, because downhill usually led to water, and water usually led to roads — and started walking. The forest floor crunched softly under each step. He moved carefully at first, stepping over roots and ducking under low branches, but the farther he went, the more the silence pressed in around him. It wasn't the peaceful kind of silence. It was the kind that meant everything else had stopped talking.
No birds. No insects. Nothing rustling through the underbrush.
Jack quickened his pace.
The trees thinned slightly as he moved downhill, letting in more of that pale, washed-out light. The sky above the canopy was the color of old paper, and he couldn't tell if it was morning or afternoon or something in between. The air stayed cold. The smell stayed wrong.
Then he heard it.
A low, dragging sound from somewhere behind him and to the left. Like something heavy being pulled across the ground. It stopped. Started again. Stopped.
Jack froze.
He held his breath and listened. For three seconds, there was nothing. Then, a growl rolled through the trees — deep and wet, vibrating at a frequency that Jack felt in his teeth. It didn't sound like any animal he could name. It was too thick, too wrong, like a voice trying to form words through a throat full of mud.
Every muscle in his body locked tight. His eyes swept the shadows between the trunks, but he couldn't see anything moving. The growl came again, closer, and this time it was answered by a second sound from a different direction — a crackling snap, like a branch breaking under sudden weight.
Jack ran.
He didn't choose the direction. His legs chose for him, carrying him downhill at a sprint, sneakers slapping against root and rock. Branches whipped at his arms and face. He ducked, stumbled, caught himself on a trunk, and kept going. Behind him, the sounds multiplied — dragging, cracking, that awful guttural moan — and he couldn't tell if they were getting closer or if his own crashing through the undergrowth was drowning them out.
His lungs burned. His side ached. He was not built for this — not built for running flat-out through uneven terrain with no warm-up and no warning. But fear was a fuel that didn't care about fitness, and it drove him forward until the trees suddenly broke apart and he stumbled out onto open ground.
He nearly fell into a ditch. His foot caught the edge and he windmilled his arms, catching his balance just before he tumbled into the shallow trench of mud and gravel that ran alongside a strip of cracked asphalt.
A road.
Jack bent double, hands on his knees, gasping. His heartbeat hammered so hard he could feel it in his fingertips. He looked back at the tree line. The shadows between the trunks were still and silent. Whatever had been moving in there hadn't followed him out.
Or it had stopped where he couldn't see it.
He straightened up and turned to the road. It was narrow — two lanes, no center line, the asphalt split and crumbling at the edges. Weeds pushed through the cracks. But he knew this road. He had ridden his bike along it a hundred times when he was younger, following the long curve that connected the rural stretch east of town to the highway interchange near the city limits.
This was Harrow Road. Which meant he was about four miles from home.
Relief hit him like a wave, and he almost laughed. Whatever had happened — sleepwalking, some kind of blackout, whatever — he was close. He could get home. He could figure it out from there.
But then he looked up, past the road, past the low rise of the hill on the other side, and the relief turned to something else entirely.
Smoke.
Thick columns of black smoke rose from the horizon in the direction of the city, smudging the pale sky like ink dropped in water. Not one column — several, spread across a wide area, twisting and merging as they climbed. The kind of smoke that didn't come from a backyard fire or a controlled burn. The kind that came from buildings.
Jack stared. His mouth went dry.
"Mom. Lily."
He started walking fast, then jogging, following Harrow Road west toward home. The road curved through open farmland, the fields on either side overgrown and oddly still. No tractors. No cars. No sound of traffic from the highway he should have been able to hear from this distance.
He rounded a bend and stopped.
A car sat halfway in the ditch on the right side of the road. A dark blue sedan, its front end crumpled against a wooden fence post. The windshield was shattered into a web of white cracks, and the driver's door hung open at a bad angle, the hinge bent. Glass glittered on the asphalt around it like scattered teeth.
Jack approached slowly. His sneakers crunched on the glass. He leaned down to look inside the car.
Empty. Both front seats, the back seat — no one. The keys were still in the ignition. A coffee travel mug sat in the cup holder, its lid popped off, brown liquid dried in a stain across the center console. On the passenger seat, a cell phone lay face-down.
He reached in and grabbed the phone. The screen was cracked but it powered on when he pressed the button. No signal. The time read 3:47 PM, but the date made him pause. It was today's date. Or what should have been today's date — the same day he remembered sitting at the kitchen table.
Jack set the phone down and stepped back from the car. The smell hit him again, stronger out here in the open — that same rotting sweetness from the forest, carried on a faint breeze from the direction of the city. He looked at the smoke columns still rising against the sky.
Something dark was smeared on the edge of the open car door. He didn't look closely. He didn't want to know.
He started running again, this time with purpose, his sneakers pounding the broken road. The houses would start soon — the first scattered homes on the outskirts, then his street, then the small blue house with the chipped porch railing where his mother kept a clay pot of herbs that never quite survived the winter.
Four miles. He could do four miles.
He had to.
The wind shifted and the smell thickened, and somewhere far behind him, back toward the tree line he had fled, that low wet growl rolled across the empty fields like distant thunder.
Jack ran faster.