I’m A Park Ranger At Tower 9. My Partner Just Looked At Me With A Hollow Smile And Said, “it’s Beautiful Beneath The Ground.” I Don’t Think She’s Human Anymore.

I looked at Denise again, really looked at her, and noticed something I’d missed before. There was dirt under her fingernails. It was fresh dirt, dark and moist, the same color as the dead ground in that circle. She’d been there.

She’d seen the crack, maybe even looked into it, and something had hollowed her out from the inside. I heard engines approaching. Big engines. Multiple vehicles.

I went to the window and saw a convoy of black SUVs with no official markings pulling up to the base of my tower. Men and women in dark suits with equipment I didn’t recognize were piling out, moving with military precision. One of them, a woman with silver hair and a face that looked like it had seen too much, looked up at my tower and spoke into a radio.

*”Target structure acquired. One ranger appears uncompromised. One showing Class 3 symptoms. Preparing quarantine protocol.”*

*”Wait, quarantine? I’m fine! I didn’t touch anything!”*

I yelled out the window, but they ignored me. Two of them started climbing the tower stairs while the others set up some kind of perimeter equipment. The woman with silver hair grabbed a megaphone.

*”Ranger Callahan, you’ve been exposed to a Class 4 anomaly. We need to run decontamination screening. Please cooperate fully. Any resistance will be interpreted as evidence of compromise.”*

Compromise. What does that mean? But I knew what it meant. It meant they thought I might end up like Denise, sitting in a chair somewhere with empty eyes and a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all.

The two agents reached my observation deck. Both wore full hazmat suits, which seemed excessive until I realized they weren’t protecting themselves from chemicals. They were protecting themselves from whatever had gotten into Denise’s head.

*”Ranger Callahan, step away from the compromised individual and exit the structure.”*

The agent’s voice was muffled through the suit.

*”Please, what happened to her? How do we fix this?”*

*”There is no fixing Class 3 contamination. The cognitive structures that make someone a person are gone.”*

He paused, looking at Denise with something almost like pity.

*”What’s left is something else wearing a human shape.”*

The Aperture Response Initiative

They escorted me down the tower stairs while four more agents went up. Through the window, I could see them approaching Denise with some kind of scanning device. She finally moved then, her head turning to face them.

That smile widened just a fraction. Then she spoke, and her voice was wrong. It had an echo to it, like multiple people talking slightly out of sync.

*”The aperture requires nourishment. We are helping it grow. You should help it grow too. It’s beautiful beneath the ground. Come see, come see, come see.”*

The agents backed away quickly. One of them spoke into his radio.

*”Confirmed Class 3 with active recruitment behavior. Recommend immediate restraint and transport to Facility 7.”*

They wrapped Denise in what looked like heavy canvas straps, binding her arms and legs. She didn’t resist, just kept smiling and repeating “Come see,” over and over in that horrible chorus voice.

The woman with silver hair approached me as they loaded Denise into a reinforced transport vehicle.

*”You’re lucky, Ranger Callahan. Most people who get that close to an aperture don’t walk away with their minds intact.”*

*”What is an aperture? What the hell came out of that crack in the ground?”*

She studied me for a long moment as if deciding how much truth I could handle.

*”There are places where reality is thin, where something else presses against our world trying to get through. Most of the time, the barriers hold. Sometimes they don’t. When they crack open, things come through. Not creatures or beings in any way you’d understand, more like concepts, ideas that infect human consciousness like a virus. Code Black is what we call it when one of these breaches occurs in a populated area.”*

*”And the stripped trees? The dead ground?”*

*”The aperture’s area of effect. Reality breaks down near the breach point. Physical laws stop working right, biology stops working right, and if you’re in there too long, your mind stops working right too.”*

She gestured to where Denise was being loaded into the vehicle.

*”She probably stared into it for 30 seconds, maybe less. That’s all it takes.”*

I felt my legs go weak. I’d been in that clearing for at least 10 minutes. Why didn’t it happen to me?

*”That’s what we’re going to find out. Some people have natural resistance. Others just get lucky. Either way, you’re coming with us for evaluation.”*

They put me in a separate vehicle, not restrained like Denise, but definitely not free to leave. The drive took about an hour, winding deeper into the forest on roads I’d never seen before until we arrived at what looked like an old ranger station that had been converted into something else entirely.

There were armed guards, chain-link fences, and equipment that belonged in a laboratory, not a forest. Inside, they ran every test imaginable: cognitive assessments, brain scans, blood work, and psychological evaluations.

Hours of questions followed about what I’d seen, what I’d felt, and whether I’d heard any singing or voices. I told them about the family at the campsite and the woman’s expression darkened.