The road into Shelby Springs doesn’t feel like any road you’ve driven before. The night presses down heavy, humid, almost viscous. The swamp hums with its usual chorus—cicadas, frogs, the slow groan of unseen water—but threaded beneath it is something else. Low. Steady. A drumbeat, faint as a pulse pressed against your ear.

You shift in your seat. Terry drives the way he always did in hostile zones—shoulders loose but ready, posture calm enough to fool anyone else, though you know him too well to miss the tension. He’s coiled. Listening. Reading the dark like it’s a map.

“Feels like a patrol all over again,” you murmur.

His jaw flexes. “Difference is, at least over there we knew what we were fighting.”

You mean to laugh, but it dies in your throat when the headlights catch something ahead. Not a deer. Not a man. Something stretched wrong, its arms dragging, back arched like it’s waiting to pounce. The light snags its face for a fraction of a second—blank skin where features should be—before it slips back into the ditch, vanishing into the trees as if it had never been there.

Your hand is on the pistol before you even register moving. Terry doesn’t tell you to stand down. He just exhales, slow, controlled—the same breath he used to take before breaching doors overseas.

The silence after feels worse than the sight of it.

Then the radio snaps alive. Static floods the cab, rattling the speakers. You reach for the dial, but the station finds itself. A voice emerges from the distortion—wet, ragged, whispering.

Not Terry’s name. Yours.

Every muscle locks tight. The voice doesn’t just sound like it knows you. It is someone you knew. Someone buried three continents away.

Terry’s eyes never leave the road. For a long, terrible beat, neither of you speak. Then, steady as ever, he says, “Safety off.”

You flick the switch without hesitation.

The drumbeat grows louder. You feel it in your chest now, syncing with your heart. The trees crowd closer to the road, branches like fingers clawing at the truck. A shadow keeps pace just beyond the headlights, long and gliding, too fast to be a person.

The gospel station cuts through the static. A woman’s voice rises, raw and trembling: Wade in the water… God’s gonna trouble the water… Only the words don’t sound sung—they sound pleaded, as if dragged from someone’s throat against their will.

Your skin prickles. The air in the cab turns cold, damp, like a cellar. A shape flickers in the passenger mirror—your reflection, but it doesn’t move when you do. It just stares back at you, eyes wide, mouth open like it’s screaming.

“Terry—”

“I see it,” he says, calm but clipped. His hand shifts from the wheel to the knife strapped to his thigh, the motion practiced, silent.

The song warps, dragging lower, voices layering on top of one another until the sound is a chorus of drowned throats. The reflection in the mirror mouths the same words you hear in your head: You shouldn’t have come back.

The truck jerks—Terry slams the brakes. Out ahead, the road is gone. Where the pavement should stretch, there’s nothing but a yawning expanse of water, black as oil, swallowing the headlights. Mist curls above it, thick and crawling, and in it you see silhouettes standing in rows, waiting.

Dozens of them.

Some too tall. Some too small. Some bent backwards in ways that make your stomach turn.

One of them tilts its head. You recognize the posture instantly. A habit from the Corps. A man you watched bleed out in a desert years ago.

Your breath stutters.

Beside you, Terry’s grip tightens on the wheel. For the first time tonight, his voice dips into something you rarely hear—something close to shaken.

“That’s not possible.”

But the figure just raises a hand, beckoning you both closer to the water.