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.
*”How many?”*
*”Five. Parents and three kids.”*
She made a note.
*”We’ll send a team. They’re probably too far gone by now, but we have to try.”*
*”Try what? What do you do with people who are compromised?”*
*”Depends on the class level. Class 1 and 2 can sometimes be rehabilitated with cognitive restructuring therapy. Class 3, like your friend…”*
She hesitated.
*”We keep them comfortable. That’s all we can do. They’re not suffering. The parts of them that could suffer don’t exist anymore.”*
I thought about Denise. I thought about all the times we joked together and complained about the older rangers who thought their war stories were fascinating. We shared coffee during joint training sessions, and all of that was gone now. She was just a shell that looked like Denise but contained something else, something that wanted to spread.
After 12 hours of testing, they finally told me I was clean. Whatever resistance I had—genetic, psychological, or just blind luck—had kept me from being infected by whatever lived beneath that crack in the ground.
The woman with silver hair escorted me to a small office where a man in his 60s sat behind a desk covered in maps.
*”Ranger Callahan, I’m Director Mills. I oversee Code Black response for the Western District. You’re the first ranger to report an aperture breach and walk away uncompromised in 8 years. That makes you valuable.”*
*”I don’t want to be valuable. I want to go back to my tower and pretend this never happened.”*
*”That’s not an option anymore. You’ve seen behind the curtain. You know these things exist. We need people like you, people who can get close to apertures without immediately succumbing. Will you help us?”*
I thought about Denise’s empty smile. I thought about that family at the campsite and about all the other rangers who’d probably encountered these things over the years and ended up restrained in facilities like this one, repeating “Come see,” until their bodies gave out.
*”What would I be doing?”*
*”Same job as before, mostly. Watch the forest. Monitor for unusual activity. But when we detect aperture formation, you’d be part of the response team. Help us seal breaches before more people get compromised.”*
*”And if I say no?”*
*”Then we wipe your memory of the last 24 hours and put you back at Tower 9 with a cover story about a gas leak. You’d live a normal life. Probably never encounter another aperture.”*
*”Probably.”*
That “probably” did a lot of heavy lifting. If these things were forming randomly in national forests and I was naturally resistant, how long before I stumbled into another one by accident? At least if I was working with these people, I’d know what I was walking into.
*”I’m in. But I want answers. Real answers about what these things are and where they come from.”*
Director Mills smiled, but it wasn’t a happy expression.
*”Fair enough. Welcome to the real job, Ranger Callahan. Your first briefing is tomorrow at 0600. Get some rest. You’re going to need it.”*
They set me up in a small room with a bed and a door that locked from the inside. I tried to sleep but kept seeing that crack in the ground from the photo, pulsing with light that seemed to call to something deep in my brain.
Around 2:00 a.m., I heard singing. It was faint, like it was coming from very far away. It was beautiful and terrible at the same time.
I got up and looked out the window but saw nothing except dark trees and moonlight. The singing continued. I grabbed my pillow and pressed it over my ears, but somehow I could still hear it.
After about 5 minutes, it stopped. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of Denise. She was standing at the edge of that glowing crack, looking back at me with her hollow eyes.
*”Come see,”*
She said.
*”It’s beautiful beneath the ground. Don’t you want to help it grow?”*
I woke up at 5:30 a.m. drenched in sweat with seven missed calls from an unknown number and a single voicemail. Against every instinct screaming at me not to, I played the message.
It was my own voice, but wrong. It was like hearing a recording of yourself played backwards and then forwards again.
*”We’ve been waiting for you, Callahan. You’re going to help us open so many more doors.”*
The briefing room at 0600 was smaller than I expected. Director Mills stood at the front with a projection screen behind him showing what looked like a topographical map of our region with dozens of red dots scattered across it.
Three other people sat in folding chairs: two men and one woman. All of them looked like they’d been through exactly what I had: haunted eyes, nervous movements, and the kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.
*”Welcome to the Aperture Response Initiative,”*
Mills began without preamble.
*”Everything you learn in this room is classified at the highest level. Disclosure to unauthorized personnel results in immediate memory wipe and permanent removal from the program. Are we clear?”*
We all nodded. Mills clicked a button and the map zoomed in on the northwest sector where I’d found the stripped trees.
*”This is Aperture Site Alpha 19, discovered approximately 0400 hours yesterday. It’s the 19th documented breach in this forest system since 1987. Each red dot you see represents a previous incident.”*
I counted quickly. 19 breaches in 38 years. That was one every 2 years on average.
*”How many people know about this?”*
The woman to my left asked. Her name tag said Lawrence.
*”Fewer than you’d think,”*
Mills replied.
*”The Forest Service employs roughly 15,000 rangers nationwide. Of those, maybe 50 are read into the Aperture Response Initiative. The rest go their entire careers never encountering a breach. Or if they do, we intervene before they understand what they’re seeing.”*
*”What about the compromised individuals?”*
One of the men asked.
*”How many of those are out there?”*
Mills’s expression darkened.
*”Globally, we estimate between 8,000 and 12,000 Class 3 contaminated individuals in secure facilities. Class 1 and 2 cases number in the hundreds of thousands. Most of them living normal lives with what they think is PTSD or schizophrenia or any number of mental health conditions that mask the symptoms.”*
The number hit me like a physical blow. Hundreds of thousands of people were walking around with fragments of whatever lived in those apertures infecting their minds.
*”The good news,”*
Mills continued.
*”Is that Class 1 and 2 contamination is manageable. Cognitive therapy, medication, behavioral modification—these can help people live relatively normal lives. Class 3 is terminal. Once someone reaches that level of infection, the person they were is gone. What remains is a vector for further contamination.”*
