I walk tight loops through my kitchen, every squeak in the linoleum keeping time with the static blizzard in my skull. The clock whirs somewhere above the fridge—3:08 AM, the city of Whispering Pine holding its breath in that dead zone where nothing should move. The tap drips in quarter notes. Light from the living room flickers against the cracked Formica table, making each edge look like crime-scene tape. I open the fridge and close it twice, just for the slap of the gasket and a reason to keep my hands busy.
I replay the night's events until the details lose their skin and turn to bone. Goat corpse splayed in a perfect O of dirt, Marjorie's yard in slow collapse, the way Sloane said "Jesus" like he'd spotted the Reaper behind my shoulder. I remember the sample bag with that black, metallic hair, tucked neatly in the cruiser like a relic. I think about the other things that don't fit—the scuffed plastic lunchbox in Earl Kitteridge's trailer, edges melted by something not altogether friendly; the bloody drag marks on the mothball carpet, stopping just under the window before the body gives up. I think about the window, too, and the way the glass was sheared in a curve, not jagged, as if cauterized mid-break.
A damp wind shakes the siding of my place and I clench my jaw, force myself to breathe like I'm not counting each inhale, like something might listen through the vent if I exhaled too fast. I go to the back door, check the lock again, then press my forehead to the glass. On the porch, an empty beer can tips and rolls east when it should have stayed still.
I should sleep. But the couch is sweating, the darkness puckered at the corners, and every time I close my eyes I see the gouges on Earl's chest, the way he tried to crawl toward the bathtub instead of the hallway, as if he'd known what was coming and understood the pointlessness of doors. I run my tongue over my molars and taste old metal. Some of the blood at the trailer was already dry. Some was still wet and sweet-smelling, so fresh it made my nostrils ache.
I pull out my phone and scroll to the contacts. I skip Mom and Dad, both back in Eagle and drunk on grief or just good whiskey, depending on the day. I pause on "Anna," my thumb hovering, but the ache that trickles down my sternum says don't. She wouldn't answer, not after the last time, and not at three in the morning, even if she did still have my number saved as "Kamen, dumbass."
Instead I punch in the number for Dr. Farley at the Anchorage lab and hang up before it can ring. I won't get anything this late, and the answering machine will be full by sunrise. I type: "Found more hair. Need ID on sample ASAP. Not wolf, not bear. Call me when you get in." I don't add: before another body hits the floor.
Back in the living room, I collapse onto the stiff plaid couch, count the lines in the wood paneling, and try to convince myself that the thing in the woods could just be a rogue dog, or a starving lynx, or the insomniac's hallucination I earned with six years of graveyard shifts and too many shots of bad coffee. But when I blink, I see that flash of black in the alder thicket, the curve of something more clever, more deliberate, watching with eyes that outlasted the rain.
I'll check the perimeter in the morning, call in the wildlife boys, spin the right story so Marjorie and Sloane and whoever else doesn't lose sleep. But tonight, I'm not the sheriff, not even a man with a badge. I'm just a set of teeth and a soft animal's panic, pacing my own kitchen, watching the horizon for a shadow that's already somewhere inside the house.
The phone vibrates on my thigh. I flinch and answer, voice hoarse.
"Kamen," says Ainsley, the intern, her tone sharp like she's half-scared, half-excited. "Dispatch just got a call. Something tore through the dumpster behind the high school. Janitor says it was big. Bigger than a dog."
Her silence is baited, waiting for grownup reassurance I don't have.
"I'll check it out," I rasp. "Keep the line open."
I grab the keys, ignore the loaded .38 in the desk drawer—like that'd matter—and head for the door, flinching at the cold as it unzips my skin.
In the street, every porch light is dead. The full dark has volume. As I climb into the cruiser, I think about what I'll find behind the school, and whether it's already done with the bins and looking for something that bleeds.
The parking lot behind Whispering Pine High is all puddles and sodium vapor glare, the kind of light that makes everything look jaundiced and not quite real. I kill the cruiser's engine and listen for anything—the mechanical drip of condensation, the wind flattening the flag on the field, the kind of silence that edits itself so you'll fill in the blanks. Then: a clang, somewhere behind the cafeteria dumpsters. I thumb the radio and let Ainsley know I'm on scene, which is procedure, not comfort. The last time I felt comfort was 1998, watching Rugrats with Anna on a pastel beanbag, before the universe got clever.
I slip out, leave the door ajar, and use the flashlight like a scalpel to cut through the fog. The dumpsters squat against the wall—ugly green tumors, dented and leaking sour newsprint—but one of them's got a new modification. Dead center in the side panel, a hole big enough to toss a raccoon through lengthwise. The edges aren't just bent—they're peeled, like pastry, with a black slick around the rim that glistens under the beam.
"Well, fuck me," I mutter, too loud. "Whatever did that is probably as big as the shit I took earlier."
A shuffle by the fence—Sloane, who must've gotten the same call, or just followed the smell of bad ideas. He's in full uniform, eyes wide, as if he was hoping to find nothing and is disappointed to be right. His hand twitches to holster, like he might draw on a trash can if it made the first move.
I pivot to show him the hole. "You ever see a bear do that?"
Sloane shakes his head. "Bear's got more sense. Besides, last one we had was two summers ago, and you shot it with tranquilizer yourself."
"Yeah," I cough, suddenly remembering that this is supposed to be professionalism, not an audition for who can be the biggest fuckup. "Sorry. This is just… weird."
He comes closer, squats, fingertips grazing the greasy edge. He sniffs, wrinkles his nose. "Smells… wrong. Not garbage. You smell that?"
I do. There's a burnt chemical note, almost like singed hair or the way the morgue used to reek in spring. I shine my light along the asphalt, see the glisten of something tar-black soaking into the cracks, then more of that same coarse hair, a snarl of it stuck in the dumpster hinge.
Sloane leans in, says, "Looks like it scraped itself. Maybe you'll get your DNA."
"That would require this thing being in the database," I say, but I'm already bagging the evidence, already picturing how pointless it'll be to mail another hockey-puck-sized baggie to Anchorage for an answer that won't come.
Something clangs above us—a metal vent, Maybe HVAC, maybe not. For a second my scalp prickles; every childhood story about wendigos and skinwalkers bubbles to the surface, all the monsters Dad said could peel you open and walk around in your skin if you weren't careful. I suppress the urge to look up, because I know how that story ends: the thing's already looking down.
We circle the dumpsters for tracks but there's nothing. No prints, not even a scuff, like it floated in, did its damage, and floated out. Sloane jokes it was the lunch lady's revenge for budget cuts, but his voice shakes at the edges.
We finish the sweep, triple-check the doors and windows. I radio back to Ainsley—no sign of an animal, we'll check with wildlife at sunrise—and agree to meet Sloane here again at first bell, because neither of us is sleeping tonight.
Back in the cruiser, I tap the steering wheel and try to isolate what's been simmering at the edge of panic: whatever did this is testing us. Not just hungry—curious, maybe, the way a person picks apart a clock to see what ticks. Maybe that's why Earl tried to reach the tub. Not for sanctuary, but because the thing wanted him to.
I drive home, hair samples tucked in the passenger seat like a silent passenger. The sun is threatening the horizon, too early, too gray. I run through the motions—double lock the door, wedge a chair under the handle, line up the steel Maglite and the baseball bat and the .38 on the table, just in case. Then I pour a half-cup of whiskey and watch the windows.
Sleep doesn't come. Only the ticking of the wall clock, and the sound of that beer can on the porch, rolling back and forth in a wind that's suddenly stopped.
In the morning, Ainsley texts: "Lab called. They want you to bring the sample in yourself. New protocols."
I text back: "On my way." My hands shake, just a little, but I tell myself it's the caffeine.
Outside, the street is perfect, untouched, almost sweet—no signs of violence, no evidence of the night, just a crust of fresh frost on the fender and the hollow quiet of small town amnesia.
But as I drive to the lab, I keep my eye on every rearview, every tree, every patch of shadow that isn't supposed to move. There's a new kind of silence in Whispering Pine. The kind that listens back.
Anchorage is two hours on a good day, three on black ice, and it's both when I hit the highway. There's a frost haze on the mountains and a line of trucks ahead, each one coughing diesel and throwing up plumes that stick to the horizon like the smell of old cigarettes. My eyes burn. I chew at my thumbnail, flick on the radio, and get nothing but static until some guy named Cowboy Jim starts giving updates on roadkill and lost dogs, the way only Alaskans do. Every five minutes, the idiot says, "Remember, all the wild things come out after dark, folks."
I park behind the state crime lab at sunrise, the lot half-iced and stinking of car exhaust and cafeteria bacon. The building itself looks like a failed root canal—mustard yellow, with security glass warped by the last earthquake. I shoulder my bag, check the sample in the cupholder again, and walk fast so I don't have to think about how it's still warm in my palm, like a living thing.
Inside, the lights are too bright, the tile too clean, and the receptionist eyes me over her glasses like she's scanning for weaponized incompetence. I sign the sheet and wait, wiping my hands on my jeans, until a woman in a white coat calls my name. Dr. Emma Thompson, the geneticist they always wheel out for serious weirdness. She looks like she'd rather still be asleep.
She takes the baggie from me and holds it up to the light. "Black fur, huh?" Her voice is tired, but not bored. "Isn't that what you sent last time?"
I shrug. "This is… fresher. And the last one turned up nothing."
She pinches the edge of the bag and squints. Her eyes go sharp and pale, like a wolf's. "We'll run PCR and get you something in two hours, maybe three. Want some coffee while you wait?"
The break room is a cube of vending machines and floor wax fumes, the windows painted over so night shift can delude itself about the hour. I sit at a sticky table and nurse a cup that tastes like carbon and rainwater. My phone hums and it's Sloane, sending me a meme of a Chupacabra labeled "Wildlife Officer of the Month." I reply with a middle finger and a blurry shot of the fur sample from the parking lot.
Time goes viscous. I scroll the news, read about a sinkhole in Florida, a recall of romaine lettuce, and a senator's affair with a campaign intern. Nothing about Whispering Pine. The world doesn't care about the things that carve holes in the night up here. Only we get that privilege.
At 11:03, Dr. Thompson tracks me down. Her hair's pulled tighter, like she's bracing for wind. "We got results," she says. "Walk with me." Her shoes slap the linoleum too loud, echoing down the corridor lined with glass-walled labs. I follow, trying to keep my hands from balled fists.
She pushes open a door, beckons me inside, and shuts it with a soft click. "Kamen, you remember the DNA scan from your last sample?" I nod. The nutso thing about it was that it matched nothing in the database. Not wolf, not dog, not bear. Not even a hybrid.
She slides a printout across the table. This time, the readout is split into two columns. One side is labeled "Standard Reference." The other: "Unknown Organism." The letters crawl across the page, swollen with jargon and acronyms, but the highlighted rows are all I need.
"Short version—it's a canid, but with a bunch of mutations. Not like anything we've seen. Some viral integration, some weird gene edits. Looks… engineered, honestly. CRISPR lines, patched in with retrovirus. See these markers?"
She taps her pen on the highlighted segments. "Wolf genes, sure, but also something else. Cat? Some marine mammal? I can't even tell until we get the full map. But it's not a wild breed. This thing was made."
I stare at the chart until my eyes hurt. "Made by who?" My voice cracks on the last word.
She shrugs, lips pulled tight. "Best guess, a lab that doesn't want to be found." She narrows her eyes and lowers her voice. "We got a call last winter—Fish and Game, way up by Nome. Something was killing sled dogs on the outskirts, emptying the insides but leaving the skin mostly intact. Samples never made it to us. Local warden said the evidence vanished overnight, black van and all. This pattern here?" She jabs the paper again. "Matches what he described."
For a second, I see the trailer, the husk of Earl, the window cut smooth as a coin edge. I think about the hair that shimmered like oil in the sun, and what the world looks like through those eyes.
Dr. Thompson leans back and sighs. "You brought me something special, Kamen. If you want, I can send it up the chain. But you know what that means."
She looks at me, and the room gets colder.
It means the suits come running. It means the story gets buried before anyone in Whispering Pine knows what's living in the trees. I'm not sure if that's mercy, or just the way secrets work.
I pocket the report and thank her, trying to keep the dread folded neat. The parking lot is full sun now, glittering ice and windshield glare. I call Sloane, tell him to meet me at the station. I don't mention what's in the report, not yet.
As I drive north, I grip the wheel hard. The road shrinks behind me, the sky getting heavier the closer I get to home. Every mile, I can feel the thing out there, not just hiding but waiting—hungry, clever, alive in a way the rest of us aren't.
The last stretch of highway yawns out, the edges of the forest darkening like a bruise. I drive faster, counting out the minutes, running the math on how many people a creature that smart could hollow out before the news even catches a rumor.
I park behind the sheriff's office, engine ticking and the air still as dried bones. Above me, the crows wheel in a slow, deliberate circle.
I gather the files, the vials, the broken chain of evidence—then go inside and start making calls.
Because if the world isn't going to save us, it has to be someone. And if it has to be someone, it might as well be the dumbass who always loses his way after dark.