The Call Center

Chapter 1: The Weight of Routine

My phone alarm went off at 10:15 AM, same as always. Two months into this job, and I still hadn’t gotten used to waking up when most people were already halfway through their morning. The RV was cold—November in Arkansas had a bite to it, and the ancient heater in this tin can only worked when it felt like it. I rolled out of the narrow bed, my feet hitting the linoleum floor with a shock of cold that woke me up better than any coffee could.

The face in the tiny bathroom mirror looked like shit. Dark circles under my eyes had become permanent fixtures, and I’d lost weight I couldn’t afford to lose. The Hernandez crew had taken everything from me—my friend, my safety, my ability to sleep without checking the locks three times. But hey, at least I had a job now. A weird fucking job that started at eleven in the morning and called itself the night shift, but still. Money was money.

I pulled on my least wrinkled polo shirt—Sykes didn’t have an official uniform, but Marla had made it clear that “business casual” was expected. Whatever that meant when you’re answering phones in a converted mall at hours that shouldn’t exist. The shirt hung loose on me now. Stress diet, I guess. Better than the meth diet half the RV park was on.

The drive to Sykes took twelve minutes if I hit the lights right. I’d timed it obsessively those first weeks, back when I was sure every car behind me was carrying someone with a bullet with my name on it. Now I just drove, checking my mirrors out of habit more than fear. The building loomed up on the eastern edge of town like always—a dead mall pretending to be something else, fooling nobody.

The parking lot was that weird in-between state it got around shift change. Day shift people heading to their cars, moving fast like they couldn’t wait to get away. Night shift people dragging their feet toward the entrance, knowing what waited inside. I recognized most of the faces now, even if I didn’t know names. We didn’t talk much. Night shift had that effect on people.

I badged in at 10:52, giving myself time to get situated before the official start. The fluorescent lights hummed that sick tune they always did, the one that made your teeth ache if you paid too much attention to it. The building still smelled like a mall—that combination of industrial cleaning products and something else, something sweet and rotten that had seeped into the bones of the place over decades.

Des was already at his desk in the center of the floor, like always. The man never seemed to arrive or leave—he just existed there, a constant presence in his cheap suit that fit him like it was made for someone else entirely. He nodded when he saw me, that slow acknowledgment that meant I was still doing okay, still following the rules, still surviving.

“Morning, Paul,” he said, though we both knew morning was a lie we told ourselves to make this make sense.

“Hey, Des.”

Two months ago, he’d found me behind the truck stop, sleeping in my car with a knife in my hand and paranoia in my bones. I’d been running for three days straight, convinced every set of headlights was them coming to finish what they’d started in that parking garage. Des had knocked on my window at 3 AM, and I’d nearly put the knife through his throat before I realized he wasn’t trying to kill me.

“You look like you need work,” he’d said, calm as anything, like finding desperate people sleeping in cars was just part of his routine. Maybe it was.

He’d set me up with the RV—knew a lady who’d take cash and not ask questions. Then he’d brought me here, to this place that used to sell jeans and pretzels and now sold something else entirely, though I still wasn’t sure what.

“You’re not the first person running from something to end up here,” he’d told me during that first night shift orientation. “Won’t be the last. Sykes doesn’t care about your past as long as you can follow the rules and show up on time.”

The rules. Jesus, the rules.

I made my way to cubicle seventeen, my designated spot in this maze of temporary walls and old dreams. Theresa was already in sixteen, setting up for her shift. She looked up when I passed, flashing me that smile that made the whole place seem less like a nightmare for about three seconds.

“Hey, you,” she said, voice low enough that only I could hear.

“Hey yourself.”

Theresa was nineteen, too young to be here, too smart to be anywhere else. She’d started a week after me, and we’d bonded over the shared what-the-fuck of this place. She noticed things—really noticed them, in a way that made me think she’d been seeing weird shit long before Sykes. The way she’d watch shadows move, tracking them with her eyes like they were separate from whatever cast them. The way she’d know which phone was about to ring before it did.

“Good night?” she asked, which was our way of asking if anything had tried to kill us in our sleep.

“Good enough. You?”

“Counted three cars following me from home. Only two were real.”

I wanted to ask how she knew the difference, but Frank’s cubicle was right there, and Frank was... well, Frank was Frank.

The fifth cubicle on the right had been occupied since before anyone could remember. Frank sat there, all six-foot-something of him folded into an office chair that should’ve broken under the weight of whatever he really was. Skinny didn’t describe it right—he was stretched, like someone had grabbed him by the head and feet and pulled. His fingers were too long, with too many knuckles, and they moved across his keyboard in ways that hurt to track.

I pulled the coffee and bagel from my bag. Same order every day from the gas station—medium dark roast, black, and a plain bagel, untoasted. The coffee was still warm enough to steam, the bagel fresh enough to fool yourself it was food.

“Morning, Frank,” I said, setting them on the exact spot he liked—left side of his desk, three inches from the edge.

Frank didn’t look up. He never did. But his too-long fingers paused their typing for exactly three seconds—his version of “thank you” or maybe “accepted” or possibly “your offering prevents me from eating your soul today.” With Frank, you never really knew.

The coffee and bagel would disappear during the shift, but I’d never seen him eat or drink. They just... weren’t there anymore at some point. Like a lot of things in this place.

I settled into my cubicle, booting up my computer. The screen flickered through colors that shouldn’t exist before settling on the standard Windows desktop. Normal companies had IT departments. Sykes had equipment that fixed itself, usually in ways that left you with a headache if you thought about it too much.

11:00 AM hit, and the building changed.

It wasn’t anything you could point to exactly. The lights stayed on, the computers kept humming, the air conditioning continued its death rattle. But something shifted, like the world had been adjusted one degree to the left. The day shift people were gone now—not just clocked out, but gone in a way that meant they couldn’t come back even if they wanted to. The building wouldn’t let them. Not until 6 AM.

This was the night shift, even though the sun was still up outside. Time didn’t work right here. Des had tried to explain it once, something about the building remembering when it was a mall, when 11 AM to 4 AM made sense for holiday shopping or whatever. But I think it was simpler than that. This place operated on its own schedule, and we were just along for the ride.

My phone rang at 11:03. The display showed a number with too many digits.

“Sykes Enterprises, this is Paul. How may I direct your call?”

The voice on the other end was like gravel in a blender full of honey. “Naples. Florida. Storage. Auction.”

I fought the urge to hang up. Two months in, and the Naples calls still made my skin crawl. But I pulled up the desktop list, the one that only appeared for these specific calls. Eleven slots filled with names that looked like someone had beaten a keyboard with a ham and called it language.

“I’m showing eleven confirmed reservations, sir. The next available slot would be—”

“No.” The voice got worse, like multiple people were talking through the same throat. “There must be space. I have items to store. Special items. They’re still warm.”

My stomach turned. I’d learned not to think too hard about what got stored at the Naples facility. But sometimes the callers gave you details anyway, like they enjoyed knowing you had to sit there and listen.

“I’m sorry, sir, but all current slots are filled. You’re welcome to—”

“I’ll give you seven years.”

I stopped typing. “Excuse me?”

“Seven years of uninterrupted sleep. No dreams. No nightmares. Just darkness and rest. For one slot.”

The offer hung in the air between us, and for a second, I actually considered it. Seven years of real sleep, not the paranoid half-dozing I’d been doing since Marcus died. Seven years of not waking up in a cold sweat, sure I could hear footsteps outside the RV. Seven years of—

“Sir, I have to inform you that this conversation is being recorded. Any threats against my person will result in forfeiture of your next reservation opportunity.”

There was silence on the other end, but not empty silence. It was full of breathing that didn’t match any lung configuration I wanted to imagine.

“Threats,” the voice finally said, amused. “Young man, I don’t make threats. I make offers. But very well. I will wait my turn. The meat will keep. It always does.”

The line went dead, leaving me with that particular flavor of nausea that came with Naples calls. Through my headset, I could still hear echoes of wherever that call had come from—dripping sounds, something heavy being dragged across stone, and underneath it all, a rhythmic chanting that sounded like it was coming from too many mouths.

“You okay?” Theresa’s voice drifted over the cubicle wall.

“Yeah. Just Naples being Naples.”

“I hate those calls. The way they talk about the storage units...” She trailed off, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. Those weren’t storage units. Not really. They were something else, something that rich monsters paid to access, something that existed in a place that wasn’t quite here and wasn’t quite there.

The next two hours passed in a blur of regular calls. Credit card customer service, insurance claims, subscription cancellations—normal stuff that helped you forget the other calls, the ones that reminded you this wasn’t a normal call center. I’d gotten good at the mental switch, the way you had to compartmentalize to survive here. Naples call? File it away. Normal call? Focus on that. Don’t let them bleed together, or you’d end up like Janet from day shift, who’d started asking regular customers if they wanted to bid on human memories and got fired. Or “fired.” Nobody ever saw her leave.

My thirty-minute break came at 1:30. I headed to what used to be the food court, now converted into our break room. The old signs were still up—Sbarro, Orange Julius, some Chinese place with a name nobody could pronounce. But the counters were empty, the kitchens dark. We had vending machines instead, humming against the far wall like they were planning something.

I bought a coffee from the machine, checking the cup carefully before taking it. Normal white paper, normal black lid. Not red. Never red. I’d made that mistake exactly once, three weeks into the job. Held a red cup for maybe ninety seconds before Des had slapped it out of my hand. The skin where I’d been holding it had turned colors that didn’t have names, and I’d spent the next hour in the bathroom, throwing up something that looked like liquid television static.

“Always check,” Des had said. “The red ones aren’t for us.”

I found a table in the corner where I could watch both entrances—old habit from the running days, though it served me well here too. The coffee was hot and bitter, exactly what I needed. I had maybe ten minutes before I needed to head back, and I was planning to spend them in blessed silence when my phone buzzed.

Text from Mom: “Haven’t heard from you in a week. You okay?”

I stared at the message, trying to figure out how to respond. What was I supposed to say? “Hey Mom, I’m great, working at a call center that exists outside normal time, taking calls from creatures that want to store their nightmares in Florida. Also, I’m pretty sure my supervisor is only partially human, but the pay is decent so I’m sticking it out.”

I typed back: “I’m good. Work’s been busy. I’ll call soon.”

Another lie to add to the pile. I wouldn’t call. Couldn’t risk it. The Hernandez crew might be monitoring her phone, waiting for me to get stupid and homesick. Besides, what would we talk about? She’d ask about my life, and I’d have to lie more, and she’d know I was lying because moms always know, and then we’d both feel like shit.

I pocketed my phone and took another sip of coffee, then froze.

How long had the cup been sitting there?

I checked my watch—8 minutes. No, wait. The break room clock said 12 minutes. My phone said 6 minutes.

Shit.

The first sign was always the shadows. They started moving wrong, sliding across the floor independent of their sources. The fluorescent lights were still humming their sick tune, but the shadows were dancing to something else, something with more teeth.

Then came the whispers. Not words exactly, but the sound words would make if they were melting. They came from everywhere and nowhere, filling my head with almost-meanings that hurt to almost-understand.

I tried to stand, but the room was already shifting. The walls breathed in and out, and suddenly I wasn’t in the break room anymore. I was in the food court, the real food court, from 1987. The place was packed with shoppers, their faces blurring when I tried to focus on them. They moved through me like I was the ghost, carrying shopping bags from stores that had been closed for decades.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered, gripping the table hard enough that my knuckles went white. The metal was real. Had to be real. Had to be—

“Paul?”

Theresa’s hand on my shoulder snapped me back halfway. The food court was still there, overlapping with the break room like two photos taken in the same spot decades apart. But Theresa was solid, real, an anchor in the storm of temporal displacement.

“How long?” she asked, already guiding me toward the detention room.

“Coffee was... I don’t know. The clocks are all wrong.”

“They always are during an episode. Come on, twenty minutes in detention and you’ll be fine.”

She led me to the small room off the break area, what used to be a mall security office. Now it was just four walls, no windows, one door, and a timer that actually kept accurate time. The company called it the “wellness room,” but everyone knew what it really was—a place to wait out the hallucinations that came from drinking contaminated beverages.

Theresa sat with me, which she didn’t have to do. Her break was probably over, but she stayed anyway, her presence keeping me grounded while reality sorted itself back into the right order.

“I saw the mall,” I said after a few minutes. “Like it used to be.”

“Yeah, that’s a common one. I usually see the Christmas shopping rush of ’92. Sometimes Easter of ’88.” She said it so casually, like seeing temporal echoes was just part of the job. Which I guess it was.

“How do you stand it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Been seeing weird shit my whole life. At least here, there are rules for it. Guidelines. Out there?” She gestured vaguely at the world beyond Sykes. “Out there, the weird shit just happens and nobody tells you why.”

The twenty minutes passed slowly, but by the end, the walls had stopped breathing and the shadows were behaving themselves again. We walked back to our cubicles together, and I tried not to think about how normal this felt, how quickly I’d adapted to a world where hallucinating the past was just an occupational hazard.

The rest of the shift was quiet until 3:47, when my computer screen flashed that particular shade of green that meant Portland Interstate was calling. I grabbed my noise-canceling headphones, the special ones that were supposed to protect us from whatever those calls contained, and answered.

“Sykes Enterprises, forwarding to Portland Interstate Deliveries.”

“Acknowledged.” The dispatcher’s voice was wrong in ways I couldn’t define, like it was coming from inside my skull rather than through the headphones. “Establishing connection to Driver Seven-Seven-Nine.”

I hit the connection protocol, watching my screen fill with code that moved and shifted like it was alive. The headphones were supposed to block out the actual conversation, but they weren’t working right. Never did, really. Fragments leaked through.

“—picked up the Centralia specimens. Three imps, contained but active. They’ve already eaten through two of the iron cages—”

I tried to adjust the headphones, but more leaked through.

“—skinwalker pack from Nevada, seven total. Sedated but showing signs of—”

“—coordinates for the Alaska pickup. The lich wants them fresh, so minimal processing—”

My nose started bleeding. That was usually the sign to stop listening, but I couldn’t help myself. The calls were like picking at a scab—you knew it would hurt, knew it would make things worse, but you did it anyway.

“—remember, the things in Truck Twelve aren’t dead, just sleeping. If they wake up before you reach the—”

A hand on my shoulder made me jump. Des stood behind me, his face unreadable as always. He reached over and adjusted something on my headphones, and suddenly the voices cut out, replaced by white noise that felt like cotton in my ears.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, handing me a tissue.

“Headphones malfunctioned.”

“They always do for some people. Curious types. The ones who want to know.” He studied me with eyes that didn’t quite reflect light the way they should. “Curiosity’s dangerous here, Paul. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”

But I didn’t stop listening. Even as I dabbed at my nosebleed, even as Des walked away, I was filing away what I’d heard. Centralia—I’d heard of that. Ghost town in Pennsylvania with an underground fire that had been burning for decades. But imps? Skinwalkers? A lich in Alaska?

Every answer led to more questions, and every question led deeper into whatever Sykes really was.

Ten minutes before shift end, Roy Gladstone appeared at my cubicle like a heart attack in uniform. The old security guard had a way of moving that was too quiet for a man his size, appearing in places without anyone seeing him arrive. His notebook was out, the one where he recorded everything, cross-referencing reality with whatever system made sense in his head.

“Need to talk to you,” he said, his voice gravelly from decades of cigarettes and suspicious observations.

“I’m still on the clock.”

“After, then. Parking lot. It’s important.”

The way he said “important” made my paranoia sit up and take notice. Roy didn’t do social calls. If he wanted to talk, something was wrong. My mind immediately went to the Hernandez crew. Had they found me? Was this about to become a very different kind of problem?

4:00 AM came like a relief and a death sentence combined. The building did its shift again, that subtle adjustment that meant the night shift was over and we were allowed to leave. The day shift wouldn’t arrive for two hours, leaving the building in a weird limbo state where only the real skeleton crew remained—Frank in his eternal cubicle, the security guards, and whatever else lived in the spaces between the walls.

I logged out, shut down my computer, and tried not to run for the exit. Theresa was already gone, having left right at 4:00 like she always did. Smart girl. The longer you stayed after shift, the more likely you were to see something you couldn’t unsee.

Roy was waiting by my car, smoking a cigarette despite the no-smoking signs posted every ten feet. In the pre-dawn darkness, the cherry of his cigarette was the brightest thing in the parking lot.

“You know about my past,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“I know you’re running from something. Most people here are. But that’s not what this is about.” He took a long drag, then stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe. “It’s about what you’re running toward.”

“I’m not running toward anything. I’m just trying to survive.”

Roy laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Son, nobody just survives at Sykes. This place changes you. Has been changing you since your first day. You think it’s coincidence that Des found you? That you ended up here, of all places?”

“What are you talking about?”

He pulled out his phone, swiped through some videos, then showed me the screen. It was security footage from inside the building, but from cameras I’d never seen. The angles were wrong, showing perspectives that shouldn’t exist—views from inside the walls, from above the ceiling tiles, from beneath the floor.

“This is you, first day,” he said.

I watched myself on the screen, walking through the building. But there was something else there too, something following me. It wasn’t quite visible, more like a distortion in the air, a person-shaped absence of light.

“This is you last week.”

The same footage, but now the distortion was clearer. It had features, almost. A face that might have been mine if you looked at it sideways. It moved when I moved, stopped when I stopped, but sometimes it would turn its head to look at things I hadn’t noticed.

“And this is you yesterday.”

The thing following me was almost solid now. It looked like me, but wrong. Too tall, too thin, fingers too long. Like I was evolving into something that could shake Frank’s hand without flinching.

“The building’s marking you,” Roy said, pocketing his phone. “Has been since day one. You’re changing, Paul. Becoming something that can survive here long-term. Question is, do you want to know what you’re becoming?”

I stared at him, my mouth dry. “Do I have a choice?”

“There’s always a choice. You can quit, leave town, try to outrun it. Some people do. Most of them turn up dead within a year—not from what they were running from, but from what they were becoming. The transformation doesn’t stop just because you leave. It just happens without guidance, without rules.” He lit another cigarette. “Or you can stay, learn the real rules, understand what this place actually is.”

“And what is it?”

“A processing center. A place where things that shouldn’t exist can do business with things that shouldn’t know they exist. Every call you take, every rule you follow, you’re maintaining barriers between worlds. And the building, it needs people like us. People who are already broken enough to bend without shattering completely.”

“That’s insane.”

“Is it? You’ve taken calls from creatures bidding on storage units in a place that exists outside normal space. You’ve seen Frank push his head through a computer screen to eat something that was pretending to be human. You’ve drunk coffee that made you see through time. How is what I’m telling you any crazier than what you’ve already experienced?”

He had a point. God help me, he had a point.

“The violence you’re running from,” Roy continued, “it’s attracted something’s attention. Violence always does. It feeds certain entities, and you’re practically marinating in it. Every night you go to sleep afraid, every time you check your mirrors for threats that might not even be there anymore, you’re sending out a signal. And things are starting to answer.”

“What kind of things?”

“The kind that make the Hernandez crew look like choir boys. The kind that Portland Interstate transports. The kind that bid at the Naples auctions.” He dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his heel. “You’re in the food chain now, son. Question is, are you predator or prey?”

Before I could answer, my phone rang. I looked at the screen—4:17 AM. We were well past shift end, which meant this call shouldn’t be happening. The number on the display was mine. My own phone number was calling me.

“Don’t answer that,” Roy said sharply.

But I was already reaching for it, my finger hovering over the accept button. The phone rang again, the sound seeming to echo from somewhere that wasn’t quite here.

“Paul, I’m serious. Do not answer that call.”

The third ring sounded like Marcus’s voice saying my name.

I looked at Roy, then at the phone, then at the building behind us where impossible things happened every night. Somewhere in there, Frank was still typing with his too-long fingers. Somewhere in there, the vending machines were restocking themselves with products that shouldn’t exist. Somewhere in there, the boundaries between realities were tissue-thin and constantly under negotiation.

The phone rang a fourth time.

“If I answer this, what happens?” I asked Roy.

“I don’t know. Nobody’s ever answered their own call before. At least, nobody who could tell us about it afterward.”

The fifth ring began, and I knew if I let it go to voicemail, I’d never know what message I was trying to leave myself. Or what message something pretending to be me was trying to leave.

But Des’s words echoed in my head: Curiosity’s dangerous here.

I let the phone ring out.

The silence afterward was deafening. Roy nodded approval, but I could see something else in his eyes. Disappointment, maybe? Or respect? With Roy, it was hard to tell.

“Smart choice,” he said. “But it’ll call again. They always do once they have your number. And eventually, you’ll be curious enough or desperate enough to answer.”

“When that happens?”

“When that happens, you better hope you’ve learned enough to survive the conversation.”

He walked away, leaving me alone in the parking lot with the echo of my own phone number in my recent calls list. I sat in my car for a long time, watching the building as the sky gradually lightened toward dawn. Somewhere in Arkansas, normal people were waking up to normal jobs with normal problems. But I was here, in a parking lot outside a dead mall that processed impossible things, slowly turning into something that could survive in a world where my own phone number could call me with messages I was too afraid to hear.

I drove back to the RV park as the sun came up, checking my mirrors out of habit and paranoia combined. Every car could be the Hernandez crew or something worse—something that had noticed the signal I was unconsciously broadcasting, something that fed on violence and fear and found me absolutely delicious.

But the drive was quiet, normal even. I parked outside my rented tin can, went inside, and locked the door. Then locked it again. Then checked it a third time, because that’s who I was now—a man who worked impossible hours at an impossible job, slowly becoming impossible himself.

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about what Roy had shown me. The thing following me in the security footage. My reflection becoming something else. Was that what happened to everyone who stayed too long? Did we all eventually become something like Frank, sitting in our designated spaces, performing our functions, no longer quite human but not quite other either?

My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: “You made the right choice not answering. But choices are just delays. Everything converges eventually. Be ready.”

I deleted the text and closed my eyes, trying not to think about convergence, about transformation, about the thing I was becoming. But sleep wouldn’t come. It never did anymore, not real sleep. Just a kind of suspended animation where I waited for my next shift, my next exposure to the impossible, my next step toward whatever I was evolving into.

Tomorrow—today, technically—I’d go back. I’d bring Frank his coffee and bagel. I’d answer calls from creatures seeking storage for their horrors. I’d listen to Portland Interstate drivers discussing cargo that shouldn’t exist. I’d follow the rules and pretend this was just a job, just a paycheck, just a temporary stop on my way to somewhere else.

But Roy was right. There was no somewhere else. Once you were in the food chain, you stayed there. The only question was where you’d end up—consumer or consumed, processor or processed.

I finally dozed off as the morning sun heated the RV’s thin walls, my dreams full of shadows that moved wrong and phone calls from numbers that didn’t exist. In the dreams, I answered every call, and each one told me something true and terrible about what I was becoming.

In the dreams, I wasn’t afraid anymore.

That scared me more than anything.

Chapter 2: Connections in the Dark

Three days after Roy showed me those videos, I was sitting in my cubicle when Theresa appeared at the entrance, car keys jingling in her hand.

“Break time. Come with me.”

“I’ve got ten more minutes before—”

“Now, Paul. This is important.”

Something in her voice made me look up from my screen. Her face was calm, but her eyes had that intensity I’d learned to recognize—the look she got when she’d noticed something the rest of us had missed. I logged out and followed her through the maze of cubicles, past Frank’s eternal typing, out through the employee entrance.

The parking lot was empty except for our cars and the few vehicles that belonged to the skeleton crew. Theresa’s beat-up Honda Civic sat under one of the lights that actually worked, and she led me to it without speaking. Once we were inside with the doors closed, she finally relaxed a fraction.

“I need to show you something,” she said, reaching into the back seat for a notebook. Not just any notebook—this thing was thick, pages warped from water damage and use, held together with rubber bands and determination. “I’ve been documenting everything since I started. Every weird call, every rule violation, every time something impossible happened.”

“That’s...” I wanted to say dangerous, but we both knew everything here was dangerous. “Why?”

“Because nobody else is. Think about it—we all just accept this insanity. Follow the rules, don’t ask questions, collect your paycheck. But what if the rules aren’t just arbitrary? What if there’s a pattern?”

She opened the notebook, showing me pages covered in her cramped handwriting. Dates, times, incidents, all cross-referenced with an organizational system that must have made sense to her.

“Look at this,” she said, pointing to a section titled ‘Entity Identification.’ “Every Naples caller I’ve documented has called from the same area code, except it’s not a real area code. 513 doesn’t have a 9 as the second digit—that’s impossible in the North American Numbering Plan. But it appears consistently.”

“Okay, so they’re calling from somewhere that doesn’t officially exist. We knew that.”

“But that’s just the start.” She flipped pages. “Portland Interstate’s trucks. I’ve been tracking the driver numbers they mention. Seven-Seven-Nine, like the one you heard. Four-Four-Five. Nine-Nine-One. Always three repeated digits. And here’s the thing—I cross-referenced with accident reports from the Department of Transportation.”

She pulled out her phone, showing me a website.

“Every one of those number combinations corresponds to a fatal trucking accident somewhere in the US. Driver Seven-Seven-Nine? Mark Hoffman, died in 1987 when his rig went off a cliff in Colorado. Four-Four-Five? Jennifer Martinez, 1993, head-on collision in Texas. They’re using dead drivers’ ID numbers.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Or maybe not Christ. Wrong mythology.” She turned more pages. “But here’s what really got me. Sykes Enterprises doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean? We’re sitting in their parking lot.”

“The building exists. We exist. Our paychecks clear—I checked, the money’s real. But the company itself?” She showed me printouts from various business databases. “No incorporation records. No tax ID number. No business license. According to every official record, Sykes Enterprises isn’t real.”

I stared at the papers, trying to process this. “Then who’s paying us?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. The checks come from a bank in Delaware, but the account holder is listed as ‘Sykes Enterprises LLC,’ which, again, doesn’t legally exist. It’s like we’re being paid by a ghost company to work in a ghost mall to serve ghost customers.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, though part of me already knew.

“Because you’re the only other person who seems to actually see what’s happening here. Everyone else just... accepts it. Like they’re sleepwalking through their shifts. But you watch things. You notice. And...” She hesitated, then reached over and took my hand. “And because I like you, and I think we’re both in danger of becoming something we won’t be able to come back from.”

Her hand was warm in mine, solid and real in a way that nothing else at Sykes seemed to be. I’d been so focused on survival, on just making it through each shift, that I’d almost forgotten what human connection felt like.

“I like you too,” I said, because what else was there to say? We were two people slowly drowning in impossibility, and maybe holding onto each other was the only way to keep from going under completely.

She leaned across the center console and kissed me. It was quick, almost hesitant, but it tasted like coffee and possibility and something worth fighting for. When she pulled back, her cheeks were flushed.

“Sorry, I just—”

“Don’t apologize,” I said, and kissed her back, properly this time.

For a few minutes, we were just two people in a car, not employees of an impossible company, not processors of interdimensional commerce. Just Paul and Theresa, making out in a parking lot like normal people did.

Then my phone rang, and reality crashed back in.

The number on the screen was the emergency dispatch line—the one that only rang for Portland Interstate calls. I was off the clock, technically on break, but these calls didn’t care about technically.

“I have to take this,” I said.

“I know,” Theresa replied, but she didn’t let go of my hand.

I answered on speaker. “Sykes Enterprises, emergency routing.”

“We need a clean connection immediately.” The dispatcher’s voice was wrong as always, like multiple recordings played simultaneously. “Driver Three-Three-Eight has a situation requiring immediate consultation.”

“I’m not at my desk—”

“Any connection point will do. You have the protocols.”

The line went dead. I looked at Theresa, who was already pulling out a tablet from her bag.

“I’ve been working on something,” she said, fingers flying across the screen. “If Portland Interstate can connect through any device, that means the protection isn’t in our equipment—it’s in us. We’re the filter.”

She pulled up an app that looked like nothing I’d ever seen—lines of code that moved and shifted like living things.

“What is that?”

“Something I’ve been developing. A way to listen to their calls without the mental degradation. Watch.”

She connected my phone to the tablet, and suddenly the screen filled with visual representations of sound waves. But these weren’t normal patterns—they moved in dimensions that shouldn’t exist on a flat screen, folding in on themselves and expanding simultaneously.

“Connection established,” a new voice said, and I recognized it as Driver Three-Three-Eight. But through Theresa’s program, I could hear what the voice really was—not one person but dozens, all speaking in perfect synchronization.

“Report,” the dispatcher commanded.

“Cargo breach in Unit Seven. The Centralia specimens have adapted to the iron containment. They’re currently discussing terms.”

“Discussing?” The dispatcher sounded genuinely surprised, which was terrifying in its own right. “They don’t discuss. They consume.”

“These ones are different. They claim to have a message for Management. They say the fire is spreading underground, that the barriers are thinning. They want to negotiate passage for something larger.”

“Absolutely not. Protocol Seven-Seven. Immediate termination.”

“Understood, but—” Driver Three-Three-Eight paused. “They know about the Alaska shipment. They say if we don’t listen, the lich won’t get what it needs, and the northern barrier will collapse entirely.”

Through Theresa’s visualization, I could see secondary patterns in the conversation—hidden frequencies that carried additional information. Images formed in the static: a town on fire underground, creatures made of smoke and heat, and something massive stirring beneath Pennsylvania soil.

“How do they know about Alaska?” the dispatcher asked.

“They say the fire told them. They say the fire tells them everything now. It’s not just burning coal anymore—it’s burning through into other places. Other realities. And something on the other side wants to talk.”

“Patch them through,” the dispatcher said after a long pause. “But maintain all containment protocols. If they try anything—”

The connection shifted, and suddenly the car filled with the smell of sulfur and burning earth. The temperature spiked ten degrees in seconds. When the new voice spoke, it came from everywhere at once—the speakers, the air vents, the vibration of the windows.

“We know what you are,” it said, and I realized with sick certainty that it was talking to me, not the dispatcher. “We know what you’re becoming. The fire sees all things that transform. You carry violence in your bones, Paul Loston. You reek of it. Blood and gunpowder and guilt. Delicious.”

“Who are you?” I managed to ask.

“We are what burns beneath. What has always burned beneath. Your kind calls us imps, demons, devils. We are older than your names and younger than your fears. And we have a proposition.”

Theresa squeezed my hand harder. Her tablet was going crazy, patterns multiplying and fragmenting as it tried to process what we were hearing.

“We’re listening,” the dispatcher said, though it sounded reluctant.

“The one you call the lich, in Alaska. It harvests without permission. Takes what belongs to the fire. We want payment. One driver. One human who carries enough guilt to feed us for a decade. In exchange, we return to Centralia and seal the breach from our side.”

“Unacceptable,” the dispatcher said immediately.

“Then the breach widens. More of us cross over. Your precious barriers collapse. The thing sleeping under Centralia wakes fully and crawls up through every coal seam on the East Coast. Your choice.”

The connection started breaking up, static eating the words. But just before it cut out entirely, the voice spoke again, directly to me.

“We’ll be waiting for you, Paul. The fire is patient. The fire remembers everything that burns.”

The tablet sparked and died. The car’s electrical system flickered. Then everything went quiet except for our breathing and the distant hum of the building’s ventilation system.

“What the fuck,” Theresa whispered, “was that?”

“I think,” I said slowly, “that was a job offer.”

We sat in silence for a minute, processing what had just happened. Then Theresa laughed—not a happy sound, but the kind of laugh that comes when you’re so far beyond normal that absurdity becomes the baseline.

“A job offer from fire demons. Because that’s our life now.”

“Could be worse,” I said. “Could be the lich.”

“Don’t even joke about that.” She pulled her hand away to examine her tablet. It was completely fried, the screen cracked in patterns that looked almost organic. “Six months of work, gone.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be. I recorded everything to cloud storage. The real question is, what are you going to do about their offer?”

“Nothing. I’m not volunteering to be demon food.”

“But they know who you are. They know about your past.”

I thought about Marcus, about the parking garage, about the blood on concrete and the promise written on my windshield. The Hernandez crew seemed like such a small problem now compared to entities that burned beneath reality itself.

“Everything knows about my past apparently,” I said. “It’s like I’m broadcasting it on some frequency only monsters can hear.”

“Maybe you are.” Theresa pulled out her regular notebook, flipping to a section labeled ‘Employee Changes.’ “I’ve been tracking what happens to people who work here more than three months. Physical changes, behavioral changes, new abilities. You’re not the only one who’s transforming.”

She showed me entries for various coworkers. Tom Chen, who now spoke only in questions. Janet from day shift, who could see ten seconds into the future but only for trivial things. Mike Rodriguez, who drank contaminated coffee and now navigated impossible routes through the building.

“We’re all becoming something,” she said. “The question is whether we have any control over what.”

Before I could respond, there was a knock on the car window. We both jumped, but it was just Des, standing there in his ill-fitting suit, patient as death.

I rolled down the window.

“Your break ended seven minutes ago,” he said, but there was no reproach in it. Just statement of fact. “Also, you might want to come inside. Something’s happening with Frank.”

We got out of the car and followed Des back into the building. The moment we crossed the threshold, I could feel it—a wrongness in the air, like the pressure before a storm but inverted, pulling instead of pushing.

Frank’s cubicle was surrounded by people, all maintaining a careful distance. The man himself was still in his chair, but something was different. His head was tilted back at an angle that would have snapped a normal person’s neck, and his mouth was open wider than anatomy should allow.

“Double call came through five minutes ago,” Des explained. “Someone claiming to be from Corporate, wanting to discuss policy changes. Frank identified them as a doppelganger immediately, but when he went to... feed... something went wrong.”

Frank’s head was partially through his computer screen, but instead of the usual smooth transition, he seemed stuck. The screen flickered around him, showing glimpses of somewhere else—a place that looked like an office but wrong, with too many corners and walls that didn’t connect properly.

“The doppelganger fought back,” Des continued. “It’s trying to pull him through instead of the other way around.”

“Can we help him?” Theresa asked.

“We’re not supposed to interfere with Frank’s feeding. But this has never happened before.”

I stepped closer, ignoring the instinct to run. Through the screen, I could see more of that impossible office. And there, sitting at a desk that hurt to look at, was something wearing a human shape like a bad suit. It had Frank’s head in its hands—not metaphorically, but literally holding the part of Frank that had pushed through the screen.

The doppelganger looked up, and for a second, we made eye contact through layers of reality. It smiled with too many teeth and spoke in a voice I recognized.

It was my voice. The thing was wearing my face.

“Hello, Paul,” it said. “I’ve been waiting to meet you. The original is always so much more interesting than the copy.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “I’m right here.”

“You’re here now. But time isn’t linear in the spaces between. I’m you from a different angle. A you that said yes to certain offers, made different choices. And now I’m here to collect what’s mine.”

It yanked on Frank’s head, and Frank’s body convulsed in his chair. The computer screen cracked, spiderweb fractures spreading from the point where Frank’s neck met digital glass.

“Let him go,” I said, not sure why I was trying to negotiate with my own twisted reflection.

“Make me,” it replied, and pulled harder.

I didn’t think. I just acted. I grabbed Frank’s shoulders and pulled back, trying to anchor him to our reality. Theresa grabbed his other shoulder, and Des joined us, all three of us trying to keep Frank from being pulled into whatever space existed behind the screen.

The doppelganger laughed—my laugh, but wrong. “You can’t save him. You can’t even save yourself. Do you know what you become, Paul? Do you want to see your future?”

“No,” I said, pulling harder.

“Too bad. Here it comes anyway.”

The screen exploded outward, but instead of glass, it was like reality itself shattered. For a moment, I could see everything—infinite versions of myself in infinite timelines. In one, I was driving for Portland Interstate, something inhuman in my eyes. In another, I was bidding at the Naples auctions with hands that had too many fingers. In a third, I was burning underground with the Centralia imps, feeding on guilt and fear.

And in one timeline, I was sitting in Frank’s chair, typing with fingers that had grown long and wrong, never leaving, never stopping, just processing calls for eternity.

Then Frank’s head snapped back through the screen, and in his mouth was something that looked like a massive pink worm, but with my face on one end. He bit down, chewing with mechanical precision, and the doppelganger’s screams came from everywhere at once.

When he swallowed the last piece, Frank’s head returned to its normal position—or at least, normal for Frank. He looked at me with eyes that might have been grateful or might have been hungry.

“Thank you,” he said, and it was the first time I’d heard him speak. His voice was like tuning forks made of bone. “But you should not have seen that. The branches of possibility. Now you know what you could become.”

“I don’t want to become any of those things.”

“Want is irrelevant. You will become what you need to become to survive. Or you will not survive.” He turned back to his computer, which had somehow repaired itself, and resumed typing. “Your shift resumes in three minutes.”

The crowd dispersed, everyone returning to their cubicles like nothing had happened. Just another day at Sykes, where people got pulled into computer screens and doppelgangers wore your face and fire demons made job offers.

Theresa and I walked back to our cubicles together.

“You okay?” she asked.

“No. You?”

“Not even close.” She paused at her cubicle entrance. “But hey, at least we’re not okay together, right?”

“Right,” I said, and wanted to kiss her again, but Frank was there, and the cameras were watching, and who knew what else was observing us through angles we couldn’t perceive.

The rest of the shift passed in a blur. Regular calls that I handled on autopilot, my mind still processing what I’d seen through Frank’s computer screen. All those versions of myself, all those possibilities. Was that what Roy meant about becoming? Were we all just choosing which nightmare version of ourselves to evolve into?

At 2 AM, another medical emergency call came through. I switched to the medical software, watching the screen populate with information that shouldn’t exist yet—injuries that hadn’t happened, emergencies that were still potential rather than actual.

“Medical emergency dispatch,” I said, following the script. “Please identify yourself and your medical unit.”

“Fairbanks General, Alaska,” the voice said, and something in my gut clenched. Alaska meant the lich. Alaska meant whatever Portland Interstate was transporting there. “We have an incoming situation. Multiple casualties from a shipping accident.”

“Can you provide details?”

“Portland Interstate vehicle overturned approximately forty miles outside city limits. Cargo breach. We need... special protocols.”

I checked the approved names list. Fairbanks General was there, but highlighted in yellow, which meant verified but suspicious. No red flags though.

“Routing you to specialized response team,” I said, about to transfer the call.

“Wait,” the voice said. “Check your desktop camera first.”

That wasn’t protocol. I hesitated, then pulled up the camera feed. There was an ambulance in front of the building, but it looked wrong. Too many doors. Windows in places that didn’t make sense. And the logo on the side...

Shambles.

“Shit,” I whispered, then hit the alarm.

The building’s lights went red. Security protocols activated, doors locking automatically. Roy and two other guards appeared from nowhere, carrying equipment I’d never seen before—something that looked like a cross between a shotgun and a tuning fork.

“Everyone stay in your cubicles,” Roy commanded through the PA system. “Do not look at the windows. Do not answer any doors. Do not acknowledge anything you might hear.”

Through my desktop camera, I watched the ambulance doors open. What came out shouldn’t have been able to move the way it did. Too many joints, all bending wrong, but somehow achieving forward motion. They wore paramedic uniforms, but the uniforms were stitched together from multiple sources, just like the bodies wearing them.

“They’re early,” Des said, appearing at my cubicle. “Shambles usually doesn’t hunt this far south until winter.”

“Hunt?”

“Harvest, technically. They’re collectors for the Alaska operation. The lich needs... materials. Fresh ones. Shambles provides.”

“Materials. You mean people.”

“Parts of people. The parts that still work. The parts that can be reassembled into something useful.” He watched my screen with clinical detachment. “They usually stick to hospitals, morgues, places where the recently dead accumulate. But sometimes they get ambitious.”

The Shambles creatures were at the door now. One raised a hand—or what might have been several hands stitched together—and knocked. Three times, perfectly synchronized.

“Nobody answer that,” Roy’s voice came through the PA again.

But I heard footsteps. Someone was walking toward the door. Through the maze of cubicles, I saw Tom Chen moving with jerky, unnatural steps, like a marionette being pulled by invisible strings.

“Tom, no!” I shouted, but he didn’t respond.

He reached the door, his hand moving toward the handle.

“Goddammit,” Roy muttered, then did something with his weapon. A sound came from it—not quite a gunshot, not quite a musical note, but something that existed between the two. Tom collapsed like his strings had been cut, inches from the door.

The Shambles creatures tilted their heads—all of them, simultaneously, at the exact same angle. Then one spoke, its voice coming through the door despite it being closed.

“We have permits,” it said. “Legitimate salvage rights. Check your records.”

Des was already at his computer, fingers flying across keys. “They’re not lying. They have a permit for one harvest. But it’s dated for next week.”

“Time is flexible,” the Shambles thing said. “What’s a week between business partners?”

“The permit is date-specific,” Roy said loudly. “Come back when it’s valid.”

There was silence for a moment. Then all the Shambles creatures laughed—a sound like medical equipment being fed through a wood chipper.

“Very well. We will return. But we’ve marked this place now. Such interesting materials here. So many people becoming things that aren’t quite people anymore. Perfect for our purposes.”

They retreated to their ambulance—backwards, never turning around, their joints bending in ways that made my eyes water. The vehicle started with a sound like screaming, then drove away, leaving tire tracks that glowed faintly green in the darkness.

“Everyone remain in position for five more minutes,” Roy announced. “Tom Chen needs medical attention. Real medical attention, not whatever that was.”

I watched them carry Tom to the break room, his body limp but breathing. When the all-clear finally came, the building felt different. Marked, like the Shambles had said. Like we were all on a list now, waiting to be harvested when our expiration dates came up.

“They’ll be back,” Des said. “They always come back once they’ve identified a source of materials.”

“And we just... what? Keep working? Pretend that didn’t happen?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Because the alternative is leaving, and now that they’ve marked you, leaving won’t help. They can find you anywhere. At least here, we have protocols. Rules. Some measure of protection.”

He walked away, leaving me staring at my computer screen, where the medical emergency software was still running. The call from Fairbanks had disconnected, but there was a message in the log: “See you next week. Save the interesting ones for us.”

I deleted the message, but I knew it didn’t matter. We were all marked now. All waiting to be harvested by things that wore human shapes like ill-fitting clothes, that stitched together bodies from spare parts, that served a lich in Alaska whose hunger was so vast it required a constant supply of materials.

Just another night at Sykes Enterprises, where the employee turnover was literal and the only retirement plan was hoping you’d become something useful before something worse collected you.

My phone buzzed. Text from Theresa: “You okay?”

I texted back: “No. But still here.”

“That’s all we can ask for. See you tomorrow?”

Tomorrow. Another shift. Another eight hours of impossible calls and evolving into something not quite human. But also another eight hours with Theresa, finding moments of connection in the darkness.

“Yeah,” I texted back. “See you tomorrow.”

If we made it that long.

Chapter 3: Deepening Horror

Carrie found us in the parking lot three nights later, just as our shift was ending. Theresa and I had taken to sitting in her car for a few minutes after work, decompressing from whatever fresh nightmare the night had brought. It was becoming our routine—a small island of normalcy in an ocean of weird.

“We need to talk,” Carrie said, appearing at the driver’s side window like a ghost. “Both of you. Now.”

There was something off about her—more off than usual, I mean. Everyone who worked at Sykes longer than six months developed quirks, but Carrie seemed different tonight. Her movements were too fluid, like she was flowing rather than walking.

“Can it wait?” Theresa asked. “We’re both exhausted—”

“No. It can’t.” Carrie held up a manila folder stuffed with papers. “I’ve figured it out. What Sykes really is. What we’re really doing here. And if I’m right, we’re all in much more danger than we thought.”

That got our attention. We followed her to her car, a sensible sedan that looked too normal for someone who’d been documenting interdimensional commerce for over a year. She spread the papers across the hood, using her phone’s flashlight to illuminate them.

“Look at this,” she said, pointing to a map of the United States covered in red dots. “Every Sykes call center location. There are seventeen of them, all in former shopping malls, all built between 1979 and 1987.”

“There are other centers?” I asked.

“Oh, Paul.” Her laugh had a bitter edge. “You thought we were unique? We’re just one node in a network. But here’s the interesting part—look at the pattern.”

She traced lines between the dots, and I saw it. They formed a shape—not quite a pentagram, not quite a circle, but something that hurt to look at directly.

“It’s a containment grid,” she explained. “Each center is positioned at a weak point between realities. We’re not just processing calls—we’re maintaining barriers. Every rule we follow, every protocol we maintain, it’s all part of keeping things from bleeding through.”

“Bleeding through from where?” Theresa asked.

“Everywhere. Nowhere. Places that don’t have names because naming them would make them more real.” Carrie pulled out another paper, this one covered in equations that seemed to squirm on the page. “I’ve been tracking the call patterns. They’re not random. They follow tidal patterns, but not water tides—reality tides. Times when the barriers are thinner.”

She was talking faster now, her words tumbling over each other in her excitement to share what she’d learned.

“The Naples auctions happen during the lowest tides, when things can cross over easiest. Portland Interstate runs during the transitions, carrying cargo between high and low points. And the medical emergencies—they spike right before a surge, when the pressure builds up and things start to crack.”

“This is insane,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew it made sense. It explained everything—the time distortions, the impossible geometry of the building, why a call center needed security guards armed with weapons that didn’t officially exist.

“It’s not insane. It’s brilliant,” Carrie continued. “Whoever designed this system understood that you can’t stop these things from existing. You can’t prevent the barriers from weakening. But you can manage it. Control the flow. Turn chaos into commerce.”

“Who’s ‘whoever’?” Theresa asked. “Who’s running this?”

“That’s the trillion-dollar question. I’ve traced the money as far as I can, but it just disappears into shell companies that own shell companies that own concepts rather than assets. The closest I’ve gotten is something called the Board of Directors, but they’re not people. They’re... positions. Roles that someone fills, but the role itself is what matters, not who’s filling it.”

She pulled out a photo—grainy, obviously taken in secret. It showed a boardroom that couldn’t exist in three-dimensional space, with chairs arranged around a table that had too many sides. The figures sitting in the chairs were blurred, but their shadows were crystal clear. The shadows had too many arms.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“Second floor. There’s a conference room that only exists on Thursdays between 2:17 and 2:34 AM. I snuck in last week.” She touched a scar on her neck that I hadn’t noticed before. “Cost me three days of memory and what I’m pretty sure was my ability to see the color blue correctly, but it was worth it.”

“Carrie,” Theresa said slowly, “you’re talking about this like it’s a good thing. Like the system works.”

“It does work. That’s the beautiful horror of it. We’re antibodies in a cosmic immune system, processing infections before they can spread. Every impossible call we handle, every rule we follow, we’re preventing a total collapse of local reality.”

“And what happens to us?” I asked. “The antibodies?”

Her smile was too wide. “We adapt. We evolve. We become something that can survive in the spaces between. Look at Frank—he’s been here since the beginning. He’s not human anymore, but he’s not not-human either. He’s found a perfect balance point.”

“Perfect? He eats doppelgangers through computer screens!”

“And by doing so, prevents them from infiltrating our reality. He’s performing a vital service.” She leaned closer, and I could smell something wrong on her breath—ozone and copper and something else, something that reminded me of the Naples calls. “We could all be like that. Vital. Necessary. Eternal.”

Theresa grabbed my hand, squeezing hard. A warning.

“Thanks for the information, Carrie,” she said carefully. “We should probably get home. Think about everything you’ve shown us.”

“Think fast,” Carrie said, gathering her papers. “The next reality tide is in four days. Low tide. The barriers will be tissue-thin. That’s when they’ll make their move.”

“They?”

“The ones who want to break the system. The ones who think chaos is better than managed commerce. The ones who—” She stopped mid-sentence, her head tilting at an odd angle. “Do you hear that?”

I didn’t hear anything except the normal sounds of pre-dawn Arkansas. But Carrie was listening to something else, her eyes unfocused.

“They know I told you,” she whispered. “They’re coming.”

Before we could ask who “they” were, Carrie sprinted to her car and peeled out of the parking lot, leaving us standing there with the taste of ozone in the air.

“We need to go,” Theresa said urgently. “Now.”

We got in her car, and she drove us not toward home but deeper into town, taking turns seemingly at random.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure we’re not followed. Carrie was right about one thing—we’re being watched. But I don’t think it’s by whoever she thinks.” She checked her mirrors again. “Pull out my notebook. The blue one, not the research one.”

I found it in her bag—smaller than her main notebook, bound in blue leather that felt weirdly warm to the touch.

“Page forty-seven,” she said.

I flipped to it and found a detailed entry about Carrie. Not just observations, but inconsistencies. Times when Carrie had been in two places at once. Conversations that Carrie had referenced that never happened. Small things that added up to one big thing.

“You think she’s a doppelganger,” I said.

“I think she’s been one for at least two weeks. Maybe longer. The real Carrie would never talk about the system like it’s beautiful. She was terrified of it. She wanted to expose it, not become part of it.”

“Then where’s the real Carrie?”

“Same place all the replaced people go, I assume. Somewhere we can’t reach. Or dead.” She pulled into an all-night diner’s parking lot. “We need to tell someone.”

“Who? Des? Roy? They might already know.”

“Frank,” she said. “Frank would know. He always knows.”

The thought of voluntarily talking to Frank made my skin crawl, but she was right. If anyone could identify a doppelganger that had been operating for weeks, it would be him.

We drove back to Sykes as the sun was rising, the building looking almost normal in the morning light. Almost. If you didn’t look at the shadows that fell in directions that didn’t match the sun’s position.

The day shift was arriving, normal people heading to what they thought were normal jobs. They couldn’t see the second floor that only existed sometimes. They couldn’t hear the echoes of calls that hadn’t been made yet. They worked their eight hours processing regular customer service calls and went home, never knowing they were the camouflage that let the real work happen in the dark.

We badged in using the emergency override codes Des had given us for “special circumstances.” The building felt different during the day—muted, suppressed, like it was holding its breath. Frank was still in his cubicle, of course. He never left.

“Frank,” I said, approaching carefully. “We need to talk to you about Carrie.”

His fingers never stopped typing. “She tasted wrong,” he said in that tuning-fork voice. “Too much copper. Not enough fear.”

“You knew she was a doppelganger?”

“For seventeen days. But she was performing her function. Processing calls. Following rules. No violation, no feeding.”

“But she’s spreading lies,” Theresa said. “Trying to recruit us for something.”

“Not lies. Different truths. She shows you one path. Others will show you other paths. You choose which truth becomes real.” His head turned slightly, not quite looking at us but acknowledging our presence. “The real Carrie made her choice. She opened doors that should stay closed. Looked for answers in places that charge a price for looking. The doppelganger is what remains. Still Carrie, but from a different angle.”

“Where is she now?” I asked. “The doppelganger?”

“Gone. Fleeing. Failed her recruitment mission. Others will come to collect her.” He paused in his typing for exactly three seconds—the longest I’d ever seen him stop. “You were wise not to agree. That path leads to the Board, and the Board is always hungry for new perspectives to consume.”

“The Board of Directors?”

“Directors of nothing. Directed by everything. They sit in chairs that exist in all times simultaneously, making decisions that have already been made and will be made and are being made now. To join them is to cease linear existence.” He resumed typing. “Your shift begins in four hours. Rest. You will need it.”

It was a dismissal, and we took it. But as we were leaving, Frank spoke again.

“The one you knew as Carrie left something for you. Cubicle forty-two. Use it wisely.”

Cubicle forty-two was in the abandoned section, where the ceiling tiles had fallen and mold grew in patterns that looked almost like writing. We found a box on the desk, wrapped in paper that felt like skin but looked like metal.

Inside was a hand-drawn map of the building—but not the building as it existed now. This showed all the iterations, all the times, all the angles. Rooms that only existed on certain days. Corridors that led to other Sykes locations. A basement that definitely didn’t exist but also definitely did.

And at the center, marked with a red X, was something labeled “The Heart.”

“What do you think it means?” Theresa asked.

“I think it means the real Carrie was trying to find the source. The thing that makes Sykes what it is.”

“And look where that got her.”

But I was already memorizing the map, tracing the routes with my finger. Because Carrie—the real Carrie—had been right about one thing. We couldn’t keep working here without understanding what we were really part of. And this map might be the key to that understanding.

Or it might be what finally transformed us into something that couldn’t leave.

Either way, I knew we were going to use it. Curiosity might be dangerous at Sykes, but ignorance was deadly. And I was tired of being ignorant.

The drive home was quiet, both of us lost in our own thoughts. I dropped Theresa at her apartment—she lived in an actual building, not a tin can like me—and we kissed goodbye with the desperate intensity of people who weren’t sure they’d see each other again.

“Four hours,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

“You too.”

But we both knew we wouldn’t. We’d lie in our respective beds, staring at our respective ceilings, thinking about maps that showed impossible rooms and doppelgangers that recruited for positions that existed outside of time.

Just another day in the life of Sykes employees, slowly evolving into something that could survive the truth.

I got back to the RV park just as the morning workers were heading out—contractors and day laborers who didn’t ask questions about why I was coming home when they were leaving. Tommy, the Vietnam vet who never talked, was working in his garden. He looked up as I passed, and for a second I thought I saw recognition in his eyes. Not just of me, but of what I was becoming. He’d seen people change before, maybe in the war, maybe after. He nodded once, then went back to his tomatoes.

My RV was exactly as I’d left it, but it felt smaller somehow. Like I was outliving it, outgrowing it. Or maybe I was just seeing it clearly for the first time—a tin can where a desperate kid was hiding from violence that seemed quaint compared to what I faced every night.

I sat on the narrow bed and pulled out my phone, scrolling through the contacts I never called anymore. Marcus’s number was still there. I’d never deleted it, even though I’d watched him bleed out in that parking garage. Even though I knew he was dead.

Or was he?

That call from Portland Interstate, the one where I’d heard his voice... What if the drivers were right? What if death wasn’t as final as we thought, especially for people who died violently? What if Marcus was out there somewhere, being transported like cargo, feeding something with the guilt I carried?

I must have dozed off thinking about it, because the next thing I knew, my alarm was going off. 10:15 PM. Another night shift in eleven minutes.

But when I looked at my phone, there was a voicemail. From my own number.

My finger hovered over the play button. Roy had warned me about this. Des had said curiosity was dangerous. But I was already changing, already becoming something else. What was one more step into the impossible?

I played the message.

“Paulo.” It was Marcus’s voice, but wrong. Layered. Like he was speaking from multiple distances simultaneously. “I know you’re listening. You always were too curious for your own good, hermano. But listen good—I’m not dead. Not alive either. I’m cargo now, like I told you. Portland Interstate has me in Truck Seven-Seven-Nine, driving routes that don’t exist on maps. The driver, she’s interesting. Used to work someplace like yours. A storage facility in Florida. Small world, huh? Or maybe the world’s just smaller for people like us, people caught between normal and nightmare.”

There was a pause, filled with sounds I couldn’t identify. Engine noise, maybe, but from an engine that ran on something other than gasoline.

“They feed on guilt, Paulo. Every time you think about that night, every time you blame yourself, I feel it. It keeps me... functional. Not alive, but operational. Like I’m a battery running on your regret. But here’s the thing—I can see where you’re headed. The paths are all converging. You’re going to get an offer soon. A real one, not like those fire demons playing games. And when you do... when you do, hermano, remember that sometimes the worst choice is not choosing at all.”

The message ended. I played it again, then again, trying to understand. But each time I listened, the words seemed to change slightly, like the message itself was unstable, existing in multiple versions simultaneously.

I drove to work in a daze, the world outside my windshield feeling less real than the voice on my phone. The familiar route seemed different—buildings I’d never noticed before, intersections that had too many corners, streetlights that cast shadows upward instead of down.

The Sykes parking lot was fuller than usual. Day shift should have been long gone, but there were at least a dozen extra cars. I recognized some of them—people from night shift who weren’t supposed to be here yet.

Inside, I found out why. Des had called an all-hands meeting. Everyone from night shift was crowded into the main floor, forming a rough circle around something I couldn’t see yet.

“Ah, Paul,” Des said when he saw me. “Right on time. We were just about to begin.”

The crowd parted, and I saw what was at the center. A man I’d never seen before, wearing a suit that actually fit, sitting in a chair that looked too expensive for Sykes. He was maybe forty, with silver streaks in his dark hair and eyes that reflected light like a cat’s.

“Everyone, this is Mr. Kellerman,” Des announced. “He’s from Corporate.”

A ripple went through the crowd. Nobody had ever seen anyone from Corporate. We weren’t even sure Corporate existed in any meaningful sense.

“Thank you, Desmond,” Kellerman said, and his voice was perfectly normal. Too normal. Aggressively normal in a way that made my teeth ache. “I’m here tonight to discuss some changes to our operational structure. As some of you have noticed, activity has increased significantly over the past month. More Naples calls, more Portland deliveries, more... interventions from interested parties.”

He stood, and I noticed his shadow didn’t quite match his movements. It was always a half-second behind, like it had to think about where to fall.

“This is because we’re approaching a convergence point. Every seventeen years, the barriers thin to near-transparency. During these periods, our work becomes both more critical and more dangerous. Some of you will be asked to take on additional responsibilities. Others will be offered... advancement opportunities.”

His eyes found mine in the crowd, and for a moment, I saw something else looking out through them. Something vast and patient and hungry.

“Mr. Loston,” he said. “Please stay after the meeting. We have matters to discuss.”

The rest of the meeting was corporate speak that meant nothing and everything. Productivity metrics that measured things that couldn’t be measured. Safety protocols for dangers that couldn’t be described. Benefits packages that included things like “temporal insurance” and “consciousness continuation plans.”

When it ended, everyone filed out to their cubicles except me, Des, and Kellerman. Theresa caught my eye as she left, her expression worried. I tried to look reassuring, but we both knew reassurance was just another lie we told ourselves.

“Paul,” Kellerman said once we were alone. “I’ve been reviewing your file. Impressive adaptation rate. Most employees take six months to achieve the level of integration you’ve shown in two.”

“Integration?”

“Into our operational framework. You’re handling impossible calls, surviving encounters with entities, even showing signs of temporal perception. And that incident with Frank’s doppelganger—remarkable initiative.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Yes, and that’s what makes you valuable. You still care. Most employees, by this point, have developed what we call ‘protective dissociation.’ They stop seeing the horror because their minds can’t process it anymore. But you... you see it all and keep functioning.”

He pulled out a folder from nowhere—I literally didn’t see where it came from—and handed it to me. Inside were photos of me, but taken from angles that didn’t make sense. One showed me from above, but there was no ceiling in that part of the building. Another showed me from inside my computer screen, looking out.

“We’d like to offer you a promotion,” he said.

“To what?”

“Driver. Portland Interstate needs people who understand the nature of their cargo. People who can navigate routes that exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously. People who can transport items that are alive, dead, and neither.”

I thought about Marcus’s voicemail, about him being cargo in Truck Seven-Seven-Nine.

“What happened to the previous drivers?”

“They were promoted as well. To positions that required their particular talents. It’s a ladder, Paul, but not one that goes up or down. It goes in directions you don’t have words for yet.”

“And if I say no?”

Kellerman smiled, and I saw too many teeth. Not more than normal, just too many of the normal amount.

“Then you continue in your current position until you either break or become something like Frank. Useful, but limited. Trapped in one function forever.” He leaned forward. “But I don’t think you’re the type to accept limitations. The violence you’re running from—it’s not just the Hernandez crew, is it? It’s the violence in yourself. The capability for it. That’s what you’re really afraid of.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you could have run further. Could have gone to Canada, Mexico, anywhere. But you stopped here, in a nothing town with a job that pays just enough to survive. Because deep down, you wanted to be found. Not by them, but by something. Something that would make sense of the chaos.”

He stood, the folder disappearing back to wherever it had come from.

“Think about it. The next Portland Interstate shipment is in three days. If you’re interested, just answer your phone when it rings at 11:47 PM. If not...” He shrugged. “We’ll find someone else. We always do.”

He walked away, but not toward any exit I knew. He just walked between two cubicles and wasn’t there anymore.

Des remained, studying me with those eyes that didn’t quite reflect right.

“You want to know my story,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Roy said you tried to leave once.”

“Everyone tries to leave once.” He touched the burn scars on his neck. “Mine was three years ago. I’d been here eight months, thought I understood the rules. Thought I could outsmart them. So when my shift ended, I didn’t wait for the lights to stabilize. Just walked out.”

He sat in the chair Kellerman had vacated, and for the first time since I’d met him, he looked tired.

“I existed in seventeen different timelines simultaneously for thirty seconds. In one, I died in a car accident on the way home. In another, I never left at all. In a third, I became something that fed on temporal friction. And in all of them, I was still me, still conscious, still experiencing everything at once.”

“How did you survive?”

“Frank pulled me back. Reached through his screen and grabbed the version of me that belonged here. But the others... they’re still out there. I can feel them sometimes. The dead me, the trapped me, the monster me. All existing, all real, all connected by the thread of consciousness that got split seventeen ways.”

“Jesus.”

“Jesus has no jurisdiction here,” Des said flatly. “This place operates on older rules. Contracts written before humans invented writing. Agreements made in concepts rather than words.”

“Then why stay? Why not run as far as you can?”

“Because running doesn’t change what you are. And what I am now... I’m useful here. I understand the temporal currents. I can see when someone’s about to fracture across timelines. I can sometimes prevent it.” He stood. “That’s why I recruited you, Paul. I could see your fracture lines the moment I found you in that parking lot. You were already breaking across possibilities. The only question was whether you’d shatter completely or find a way to hold together.”

“And have I? Held together?”

“So far. But Kellerman’s offer... that’s a different kind of fracture. Drivers don’t exist in just one timeline. They drive routes through all of them simultaneously. It’s why they can transport impossible cargo. They’re impossible themselves.”

My phone buzzed. Text from Theresa: “You okay? Kellerman looked hungry when he talked to you.”

I texted back: “Yeah. Talk later.”

But I wasn’t okay. I was standing at a crossroads that existed in more dimensions than I could perceive, being offered a choice that wasn’t really a choice at all. Become a driver and fracture across realities, or stay and slowly transform into something like Frank.

“Your shift’s starting,” Des said. “Try to focus on the present. The future will collapse into a single possibility soon enough.”

I went to my cubicle, brought Frank his coffee and bagel, settled in for another night of impossible calls. But everything felt different now. Temporary. Like I was already half-gone, already driving roads that didn’t exist.

Theresa reached over the cubicle wall and squeezed my shoulder.

“Whatever he offered you, we can figure it out together,” she said.

“Can we? Can we really figure out how to navigate between realities together?”

“We can try. That’s all anyone can do here. Try to stay human a little longer.”

But looking at Frank, typing eternally with his too-long fingers, I wondered if staying human was even an option anymore. Maybe the best we could hope for was choosing what kind of monster we became.

The night wore on. Naples calls, Portland dispatches, the usual symphony of impossibility. But underneath it all, I could hear something else. The sound of roads that existed in parallel dimensions. The hum of trucks carrying cargo that was alive and dead simultaneously. The whisper of my own future, fracturing into a thousand possibilities.

At 11:47 PM, my phone would ring. And I would have to choose.

But that was still days away. For now, I had Theresa’s hand reaching over the cubicle wall, holding mine. For now, I had the familiar rhythm of impossible calls and mundane protocols. For now, I was still mostly Paul Loston, twenty-one years old, running from violence and toward something worse.

For now.

Chapter 4: Crisis and Revelation

Three days passed in a blur of contaminated coffee and temporal distortions. Theresa and I had started meeting before our shifts at the Chinese place that never closed—China King, though I’m pretty sure the owner was Korean. Didn’t matter. The food was cheap, hot, and real, which was more than you could say for most things in our lives.

“You’re going to take it,” she said, not a question. We were sharing lo mein and avoiding the conversation we needed to have.

“I don’t know.”

“Paul.” She put down her chopsticks. “I can see it on you. You’re already halfway gone. You check your phone every five minutes like you’re waiting for it to ring.”

She was right. The anticipation was eating me alive. Every call that wasn’t the call felt like a disappointment and a reprieve at the same time.

“What would you do?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t have anyone calling me from the dead. I don’t have Corporate offering me promotions to impossible positions.” She reached across the table, took my hand. “But I know you can’t keep existing in this in-between state. It’s killing you.”

“Everything here is killing us.”

“No. Everything here is changing us. There’s a difference.”

Before I could respond, my phone buzzed. Unknown number, but I recognized the area code—513 with a 9 in the wrong place. Naples.

“Don’t answer it,” Theresa said.

But I was already sliding my thumb across the screen.

“Hello, Paul.” The voice was like honey poured over broken glass. “We’ve been watching you. Such interesting guilt you carry. Such delicious violence in your past.”

“What do you want?”

“To make you an offer. Not like those crude fire demons or that corporate puppet Kellerman. A real offer. We have someone here you might want to see.”

“I don’t—”

“Marcus says hello.”

The world stopped. Theresa’s hand tightened on mine hard enough to hurt.

“That’s not possible.”

“Anything’s possible in Naples, Paul. For the right price. Your friend is here, in our special collection. Still talking, still thinking, still feeling everything. Would you like to hear him?”

There was a shuffling sound, then: “Paulo?” It was Marcus’s voice, but hollow, echoing like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “Paulo, don’t listen to them. I’m not—I’m not really here. I’m nowhere. I’m cargo, remember? Don’t let them—”

The line cut back to the honey-glass voice. “He’s so animated. So full of unresolved energy. We could resolve it, Paul. Give him peace. Give you peace. All you have to do is take our call when it comes. Not Kellerman’s. Ours.”

“When?”

“Oh, you’ll know. It will be the call you want to answer most and least. The call that breaks you or makes you. Choose wisely.”

The line went dead.

Theresa was already pulling me up, throwing money on the table. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“But—”

“Now, Paul.”

She dragged me out to the parking lot, looking around like she expected something to jump out at us. Maybe she was right to worry. The shadows were moving wrong, falling in directions that didn’t match any light source.

“Get in,” she said, unlocking her car.

We drove in silence for a few minutes, taking random turns, doubling back, making sure nothing was following us. Finally, she pulled into an abandoned gas station and killed the engine.

“They have Marcus,” I said.

“They have something that sounds like Marcus. That doesn’t mean—”

“You didn’t hear him. It was him.”

“Paul.” She turned to face me fully. “Even if it is him, even if somehow he’s alive or whatever you call existing in Naples, you can’t trust them. They’re not offering to free him. They’re offering to use him as bait.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because you look like you’re ready to drive to Florida right now and storm their storage facility.”

“It doesn’t work like that. Naples isn’t really in Florida. It’s...” I tried to find words for what I’d learned from the calls. “It’s adjacent to Florida. Same space, different angle.”

“Which is exactly why you can’t—”

She stopped mid-sentence, staring at something behind me. I turned to look and saw Roy’s truck pulling into the gas station. But Roy wasn’t alone. There were three other vehicles with him, all Sykes security.

“Shit,” Theresa whispered.

Roy got out of his truck, hand resting on that weird weapon he carried. The other security guards spread out, surrounding us but keeping their distance.

“Paul,” Roy called. “We need to talk.”

“About what?”

“About the fact that you’re a fucking beacon for every nasty thing in a hundred-mile radius.” He walked closer, and I could see his face was haggard, like he hadn’t slept in days. “Ever since you showed up, activity has tripled. Naples calls are up 400%. Portland’s running extra shifts. And now we’ve got reports of something big coming up from the south. Something that followed your guilt here like a bloodhound.”

“That’s not my fault—”

“Isn’t it?” He pulled out his notebook, flipping through pages. “Marcus Rivera, deceased, parking garage in Lincoln, Nebraska. Three members of the Hernandez crew, also deceased, same location. You were the only survivor. The only witness. And you ran here, carrying all that violence with you like a disease.”

“I didn’t kill anyone!”

“No, but you were there. You were part of it. And for things like what we deal with, that’s enough. Violence leaves a residue, Paul. It clings to you, calls to things that feed on it.”

One of the other guards—a woman I’d seen but never talked to—spoke up. “Roy, we don’t have time for this. It’s almost here.”

“What’s almost here?” Theresa asked.

Roy looked at her with something like pity. “The thing that’s been tracking Paul since Nebraska. We thought it was the Hernandez crew at first, but it’s not. It’s something that feeds on unresolved violence. Something that grows stronger every time Paul feels guilty about surviving.”

“That’s insane—”

The temperature dropped twenty degrees in two seconds. Our breath became visible, fogging in the suddenly arctic air. The streetlights flickered, dimmed, then went out entirely.

“Everyone in the vehicles,” Roy commanded. “Now!”

But it was too late. Something rose from the cracked asphalt of the gas station—not solid, not gas, but something between. It had a shape that suggested human but wrong, like someone had tried to draw a person from memory and gotten the proportions off. It moved toward us with jerky, stop-motion animation movements.

“Paul Loston,” it said, and its voice was every violent death I’d ever imagined for myself. “You carry such beautiful guilt. Such perfect survivor’s shame. I’ve been feeding on it since Lincoln, growing stronger with every nightmare, every flashback, every moment you wished you’d died instead.”

“What are you?”

“I’m what happens to violence that doesn’t get resolved. I’m the echo of every gunshot, the shadow of every death, the weight of every could-have-been.” It moved closer, and I could see through it to the abandoned gas station beyond, but distorted, wrong, like looking through water. “Your friend Marcus created me when he died. You fed me when you ran. And now I’m here to complete the cycle.”

Roy and his team had their weapons out—those strange tuning fork guns that seemed to hurt reality itself. But the thing just laughed, a sound like breaking bones.

“Those won’t work on me. I’m not from outside. I’m from within. From Paul’s own mind, given form by his guilt.”

“Then how do we stop you?” Theresa demanded.

“You don’t. He does.” It pointed at me with something that might have been a finger. “Face what happened. Stop running. Accept that Marcus is dead, that you couldn’t save him, that you survived because of blind, stupid luck. Or keep running and feed me until I’m strong enough to manifest permanently.”

“I...” My throat was full of sand. “I watched him die. I couldn’t do anything.”

“Yes,” it hissed, growing more solid. “More. Tell me how his blood looked on the concrete. Tell me how he called your name with his last breath. Tell me how you ran while his body was still warm.”

“Stop it.”

“Tell me how you’ve imagined it differently a thousand times. How you’ve dreamed of saving him, of taking the bullets instead, of being the hero instead of the coward who ran.”

“I said stop!”

“Tell me how you hate yourself for living when he died. How you think about ending it yourself just to make the guilt stop. Tell me—”

“He forgave me!”

The words came out in a roar, surprising everyone including me. The thing paused, wavering.

“What?”

“His last words. While he was dying. He said ‘Run, Paulo. Don’t die for my mistakes. Run and live.’ He forgave me before I even needed forgiveness. He knew I’d blame myself, and he tried to stop it.”

The thing started to dissolve, its edges becoming less distinct.

“But the guilt—”

“Is mine to carry, not yours to feed on.” I stepped forward, and for once, I wasn’t afraid. “Marcus is dead. Maybe he’s also cargo for Portland Interstate. Maybe he’s in Naples. Maybe he’s nothing but memories and voicemails from other dimensions. But he’s not here, and you’re not him, and I’m done feeding you.”

The thing let out a sound like screaming wind, then collapsed into itself and was gone. The temperature returned to normal. The streetlights flickered back on.

Roy lowered his weapon, looking at me with something like respect.

“Well,” he said. “That was unexpected.”

“Is it gone?” Theresa asked.

“For now. Maybe forever. Guilt entities are tricky—they can come back if you let them.” He turned to his team. “Stand down. Crisis averted.”

As the other vehicles pulled away, Roy lingered.

“You did good, Paul. But this isn’t over. That thing was just one problem. You’ve still got Naples wanting you, Portland offering you a job, and God knows what else sniffing around.” He got in his truck, then paused. “And Paul? That call you’re waiting for? The one at 11:47? Don’t answer it alone. Whatever you decide, have backup.”

He drove off, leaving Theresa and me standing in the abandoned gas station, still shaking from adrenaline and impossible confrontations.

“Your place or mine?” Theresa asked.

“Yours. I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

We drove to her apartment in silence, both processing what had just happened. I’d faced down my guilt made manifest and survived. But Roy was right—that was just one problem solved. The bigger issues were still waiting.

Theresa’s apartment was small but real—furniture that matched, pictures on the walls, a life outside of Sykes. We sat on her couch, not talking, just existing in the same space. Eventually, exhaustion won and we lay down together, fully clothed, holding each other like the world might end if we let go.

“Paul?” she said in the darkness.

“Yeah?”

“Whatever you decide about the driver position, I’ll support you. But promise me something.”

“What?”

“Promise you won’t disappear without saying goodbye. I’ve seen too many people at Sykes just vanish. One day they’re there, the next they’re gone, and nobody remembers them quite right. Promise you won’t be one of those.”

“I promise.”

But even as I said it, I wondered if it was a promise I could keep. In a place where time wasn’t linear and existence was negotiable, how could anyone promise anything?

We fell asleep like that, tangled together on her couch, while outside the normal world went on, oblivious to the things that moved just outside its perception.

I woke up to my phone ringing. The display showed 3:33 AM. The number was impossible—just symbols that hurt to look at.

“Don’t,” Theresa mumbled, still half-asleep.

But I was already answering.

“Paul.” It was Frank’s voice, but different. Multiple Franks speaking in harmony. “Come to Sykes. Now. Bring the girl. The doppelganger has made its move.”

“What doppelganger?”

“The one wearing Carrie’s face. It’s here, and it’s trying to kill the real one. But the real one is fighting back. The building is... destabilizing. We need you.”

“Why us?”

“Because you’re the only ones who know both versions. You can tell them apart. Hurry.”

The line went dead.

Theresa was already up, pulling on her shoes. “We have to go.”

“It could be a trap.”

“Everything could be a trap. But if the real Carrie is alive and fighting back, we have to help.”

We drove through the empty streets, the town looking abandoned at this hour. Even the 24-hour gas stations seemed closed, their lights on but nobody inside. It was like the whole world was holding its breath.

The Sykes parking lot was chaos. Cars parked at random angles, doors left open, people standing around looking dazed. The building itself was flickering—not the lights, but the actual structure, shifting between different versions of itself. Sometimes it was the mall, sometimes the call center, sometimes something older that hurt to perceive.

Des met us at the entrance, his usually calm demeanor cracked.

“They’re on the second floor,” he said. “The floor that doesn’t always exist. Right now it’s... very much existing. Too much. It’s bleeding into other floors, other times.”

“How do we stop it?”

“Kill one of them. The real Carrie or the doppelganger—doesn’t matter which. Once there’s only one, reality will stabilize around that version.”

“We’re not killing the real Carrie,” Theresa said firmly.

“Then you better be sure which is which.”

We entered the building, and immediately I could feel the wrongness. Gravity was optional, pulling in different directions depending on where you stood. The walls breathed, and sometimes I could see through them to other times—the mall in its heyday, the empty building before Sykes, and something else, something ancient that predated human construction.

The stairs to the second floor were visible tonight, which was wrong in itself. They usually only appeared on Thursdays between specific times. We climbed them, each step taking us through a different moment. I saw myself from last week, from yesterday, from tomorrow, all climbing these same stairs.

The second floor was chaos. Office spaces that shouldn’t exist overlapped with store fronts that used to be. And in the center of it all were two Carries, circling each other like predators.

They were identical. Same face, same clothes, same expression of determination mixed with fear. The only difference was their shadows—one fell normally, the other fell in multiple directions at once.

“Paul!” they both said simultaneously, both relieved to see us.

“How do we tell them apart?” I whispered to Theresa.

“I don’t know. They both look real to me.”

One of the Carries stepped forward. “Paul, it’s me. The real me. I’ve been trapped in a storage room for weeks while this thing wore my face. Ask me something only I would know.”

The other Carrie laughed bitterly. “That won’t work. It has all my memories. It knows everything I know.”

“Then how—”

“There is a way,” Frank’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere. He was here but not here, existing in the walls themselves. “The real Carrie has been changed by her imprisonment. She’s seen things, learned things. She knows what Sykes really is now. The doppelganger only knows what Carrie knew before.”

“That’s not helpful if they both claim to know,” Theresa pointed out.

“Then ask them to show you,” Frank said. “Actions reveal truth better than words.”

I looked at both Carries. “Show us what you’ve learned. Show us what Sykes really is.”

The first Carrie pulled out a notebook—the same one she’d shown us in the parking lot. “It’s a containment grid, a processing center for interdimensional commerce—”

“Old information,” the second Carrie interrupted. “That’s what I thought before. But I’ve seen the truth now.” She walked to a wall and placed her hand on it. The wall became transparent, revealing something underneath. Not pipes or wiring, but veins. Living tissue. “Sykes isn’t a building. It’s an organism. We’re not employees—we’re antibodies in its system, processing infections, maintaining its health.”

“That’s insane,” the first Carrie said.

“Is it?” The second Carrie turned to us. “Think about it. The building maintains itself, repairs itself, grows new rooms when needed. It feeds on our presence, our work, our transformation. We’re not maintaining barriers between realities—we ARE the barriers. Living, breathing, evolving barriers.”

“She’s lying,” the first Carrie insisted. “She’s trying to confuse you with half-truths and nightmare logic.”

But I was thinking about everything I’d experienced. The building that seemed alive, the way it changed people, the way it existed in multiple times simultaneously.

“If Sykes is alive,” I said slowly, “then what does it want?”

The second Carrie smiled sadly. “To survive. To grow. To reproduce. There are seventeen Sykes locations now. There used to be three. Every few years, when enough employees have transformed sufficiently, it buds. Creates a new location. We’re not just antibodies—we’re reproductive cells.”

“Enough,” the first Carrie snarled, and her face shifted for just a second, showing too many teeth. “This is all lies and madness.”

But she’d revealed herself. The real Carrie wouldn’t have that many teeth.

“Theresa,” I said quietly. “Left one. It’s the doppelganger.”

Theresa didn’t hesitate. She pulled something from her pocket—a shard of mirror from the bathroom, the same kind I’d used to kill the other doppelganger. She threw it with perfect accuracy, and it embedded itself in the false Carrie’s chest.

The doppelganger screamed—not with one voice but dozens, all the people it had pretended to be. It collapsed in on itself, becoming smaller and smaller until it was just a point of impossible darkness. Then that too vanished.

The building shuddered and stabilized. The second floor solidified into a single version of itself—an office space that looked normal except for the walls that you could see through if you knew how to look.

The real Carrie collapsed, and we rushed to catch her. She was thin, too thin, and her eyes had seen too much.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I’ve been fighting it for so long, keeping it from fully taking my place. But I’m so tired...”

“We need to get her medical attention,” Theresa said.

“No hospitals,” Carrie managed. “They’d never understand what’s wrong with me. I don’t exist in just three dimensions anymore. I need...” She coughed, and something that looked like liquid light came up. “I need to stay here. In the building. It’s the only thing keeping me coherent now.”

We helped her to the break room, laid her on one of the couches that I was pretty sure hadn’t been there before. The building was taking care of her, providing what she needed.

“Paul,” she said, gripping my hand with surprising strength. “The driver position. If you take it, you won’t just be working for Portland Interstate. You’ll be working for the building itself, helping it spread, helping it grow. Every impossible delivery you make strengthens the connections between locations.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know anymore. Maybe the building is protecting reality by processing these anomalies. Or maybe it’s a parasite, feeding on the intersection between worlds. Maybe both.” She closed her eyes. “But Frank was right about one thing. You’ll become what you need to become to survive. The question is whether you’ll still be you afterward.”

Her hand went limp in mine, but she was still breathing. The building would take care of her, in its way.

Theresa and I left her there, walking back through the stabilized building. Employees were returning to their cubicles, resuming their shifts like nothing had happened. Just another crisis handled, another night at Sykes.

As we reached our cubicles, Frank spoke, his voice coming from his cubicle even though he never stopped typing.

“The call will come tomorrow night. 11:47 PM. The convergence is accelerating. You must decide, Paul Loston. Driver or drone. Predator or prey. Human or other.” His fingers paused for exactly three seconds. “Choose wisely. Your choice affects more than just you.”

I looked at Theresa, saw my own fear reflected in her eyes. Tomorrow night, everything would change. The question was whether I’d be the one directing the change or just another casualty of it.

“Together,” Theresa said, reading my mind. “Whatever you choose, we face it together.”

I nodded, not trusting my voice. Together. Even if together meant fracturing across realities, even if it meant becoming something monstrous, at least we wouldn’t be alone.

The rest of the shift passed in a blur. Normal calls that felt surreal after everything we’d been through. At 4 AM, we clocked out and went back to Theresa’s apartment. Neither of us wanted to be alone with what was coming.

We had less than twenty hours before the call that would change everything.

Chapter 5: Transformation and Departure

I spent the next day investigating. If I was going to make a choice that would alter my existence fundamentally, I wanted to know exactly what I was choosing. Theresa helped, her talent for noticing things others missed proving invaluable.

We started with the security footage Roy had access to, the cameras that didn’t officially exist. He wasn’t supposed to show us, but after the guilt entity incident, he seemed to think we’d earned some truth.

“This is from three months ago,” he said, pulling up a file. “Former employee named Janet Wu. Answered her final call.”

The footage showed Janet at her cubicle, phone to her ear. As she listened, her expression changed from confusion to horror to something else—acceptance, maybe. Or resignation. When she hung up, she stood and walked toward the exit. But with each step, she became less solid, more translucent. By the time she reached the door, she was barely visible. When she opened it and stepped through, she didn’t step into the parking lot. She stepped into somewhere else, a place the camera couldn’t quite capture.

“Where did she go?” Theresa asked.

“Portland Interstate hired her as a driver. But not a normal driver. She drives routes that only exist when observed. Quantum highways, I guess you’d call them. The act of driving them makes them real.”

“Is she still human?”

Roy shrugged. “Define human. She still has consciousness, memories, personality. But she exists in a state of superposition until she chooses a route. Then she collapses into that reality for the duration of the drive.”

“And that’s what they’re offering me,” I said.

“Maybe. Each driver position is different. Depends on what cargo you’re suited for.” He pulled up another file. “This was Tom Martinez, two years ago. Answered his final call.”

This footage was different. Tom didn’t fade. Instead, he multiplied. One became two, two became four, four became eight. Each copy walked to a different exit—doors I hadn’t even known existed. And each one got into a different Portland Interstate truck.

“He drives all routes simultaneously now,” Roy explained. “Every possible delivery happens at once, and he experiences all of them. Says it’s like being a chord instead of a note—harmonious but complex.”

“Do any of them regret it?” I asked.

“How would we know? They can’t come back to tell us. Once you’re transformed, you operate on different rules. You can interact with us during specific windows, but you can’t just drop by for coffee and complaints.”

I thought about Marcus, about his message saying he was cargo. “What about the people who don’t choose? Who just get taken?”

Roy’s expression darkened. “That’s different. They become resources, not employees. Materials for things we don’t want to think about.” He closed the files. “Look, Paul, I can’t tell you what to choose. But I can tell you this—the ones who choose, who walk into it with open eyes, they maintain more of themselves. The ones who get taken, who resist until the end, they lose everything.”

We left Roy’s office with more questions than answers. But there was still one person who might have real insight—Des.

We found him in his usual spot, that desk in the center of everything where he could see all timelines simultaneously.

“You want to know what happens after,” he said before we could ask. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then I’ll show you. But you might not like what you see.”

He stood and led us to a part of the building I’d never been to—a corridor that seemed to stretch longer than the building’s dimensions should allow. At the end was a door marked “Archives.”

“This is where we keep the records of transformed employees,” Des explained. “Not files—echoes. Impressions left behind when someone chooses to become something else.”

He opened the door, and we stepped into a room that couldn’t exist. It was vast, cathedral-like, filled with what looked like glass sculptures. But as we got closer, I realized they weren’t sculptures. They were moments, frozen in crystal.

“This is Janet,” Des said, touching one. It shimmered, and I could see her—not as she was, but as she is. Driving an impossible truck down a highway made of probability, delivering packages that contained concepts rather than objects. She looked happy, or at least content. Focused.

“And Tom.” Another crystal, another glimpse. Tom, split into a dozen versions, each one different but connected. Some were older, some younger, some barely human at all. But they all shared the same smile, the same sense of purpose.

“They’re still themselves,” Theresa said, wonder in her voice.

“Yes and no,” Des replied. “They’re what they chose to become. The core remains, but the expression changes.”

I found myself drawn to a crystal at the back, one that seemed older than the others. When I touched it, I saw something that made my brain hurt. A figure that might have once been human, sitting in an office that existed in all times simultaneously, making decisions that had already been made and would be made and were being made now.

“Who is that?”

“Mr. Kellerman. Or what Mr. Kellerman became. He was employee number seven at the first Sykes location. He chose to become management. Now he exists as a role rather than a person—the eternal middle manager, forever promoting others to positions they don’t fully understand.”

“That’s horrible,” Theresa said.

“Is it? He chose it. Wanted to be important, to have power, to make decisions. Now he does, forever, in all timelines simultaneously.” Des moved to another crystal. “This is the real question—not whether you’ll transform, but what you’ll transform into. The call at 11:47 won’t just offer you a position. It will offer you a shape, a function, a purpose. You can accept, reject, or negotiate. But once you choose, that choice echoes across all possibilities.”

“What did you choose?” I asked him.

“To remain. To be the anchor, the one who stays stable while others transform. It’s my own kind of transformation—becoming unchangeable in a place where everything changes.” He touched his scars. “These aren’t from temporal friction. They’re from resisting transformation. Every day, the building tries to change me, and every day, I choose to stay myself. It’s exhausting, but it’s my choice.”

We left the archives in silence, each lost in our own thoughts. The day was wearing on, and the call was getting closer.

At 6 PM, we went back to Theresa’s apartment to wait. Neither of us could eat. We just sat on her couch, holding hands, watching the clock tick toward 11:47.

“Whatever happens,” she said, “I want you to know something.”

“What?”

“I love you. I know it’s only been two months, and we’re both probably too damaged to know what love really means, but I love you. The you that brings Frank coffee every day. The you that helped save him from the doppelganger. The you that faced down your guilt entity. All the yous I’ve seen, I love them all.”

“I love you too,” I said, and meant it more than I’d ever meant anything.

At 11:30, we drove to Sykes. If I was going to answer this call, I wanted to be in my cubicle, in the place where I’d first started transforming. It felt right, somehow.

The building was quiet. Night shift hadn’t started yet—wouldn’t start for another eleven minutes, if normal time meant anything anymore. We sat in my cubicle, Theresa in a chair she’d pulled from somewhere, both of us staring at my phone.

11:45.

11:46.

At 11:47 exactly, it rang.

The number on the screen was impossible—not numbers or symbols, but something that existed between the two. My hand shook as I reached for it.

“Speaker,” Theresa said. “I want to hear too.”

I nodded and answered on speaker.

“Paul Loston.” The voice was mine, but older, more tired, speaking from somewhere that wasn’t quite here and wasn’t quite there. “I’m you, calling from a future that might happen. Or a past that didn’t. Or a present that exists sideways from yours. Time isn’t linear once you take the position.”

“What position?”

“Driver, but not just any driver. Special cargo. The things that are too dangerous for regular Portland Interstate routes. The ones that require someone who understands guilt, violence, transformation. Someone who’s already been cargo himself, in a way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. The van is outside. Holley Danton is driving—she’s been doing this longer than anyone. She’ll teach you the routes that exist between heartbeats, the highways that only appear when you’re not looking for them. You’ll transport imps from Centralia, skinwalkers from Nevada, and yes, sometimes, people like Marcus. The ones caught between life and death, existence and void.”

“Is he really alive?”

“Define alive. He exists. He experiences. He remembers. But he’s also cargo, being transported to feed things that shouldn’t exist but do. If you take this position, you might be able to change his route. Maybe even find a way to deliver him somewhere better. Or maybe you’ll just become another driver, moving impossible things from one nightmare to another.”

“And if I don’t take it?”

“Then you stay. You become like Frank eventually—useful but limited. Or you break, like the day shift people who can’t see the second floor even when they’re standing on it. Or something else comes to collect you—Naples, Shambles, something worse. The violence you carry marked you, Paul. You’re in the food chain now. The only question is where.”

I looked at Theresa. She nodded, squeezing my hand.

“What about Theresa? What happens to her?”

“That’s her choice. She has her own call coming, her own transformation waiting. But that’s not your story to tell.”

“If I go, can I come back?”

“Not as you are. You can visit, like a wave visiting a shore—touching but never staying. You’ll see her, she’ll see you, but you’ll be operating on different frequencies. Unless...”

“Unless what?”

“Unless she chooses something compatible. Dispatchers and drivers work together. One plots the course through probability, the other drives it into reality. But that’s her choice, not yours.”

I felt time crystallizing around us, all possibilities narrowing to this moment.

“The van’s waiting,” my future self said. “Holley’s patient, but the cargo isn’t. There’s a pickup in Alaska—something the lich doesn’t want transported. Something that could change the balance if delivered to the right place. Your first run, if you choose to take it.”

“What kind of something?”

“The kind that makes Shambles look like puppies. The kind that requires a driver who understands that sometimes the real cargo isn’t what’s in the back of the van—it’s the guilt, the memory, the transformation itself.”

I stood up, phone still in my hand. Through the window, I could see a van in the parking lot. Just a normal-looking Portland Interstate vehicle, except for how shadows bent around it, how it seemed to exist in multiple places simultaneously.

“Paul,” Theresa said. “Whatever you choose, I support you. But choose for yourself, not for me, not for Marcus, not for anyone else.”

I thought about everything that had led me here. The shootout in Lincoln. The flight to Arkansas. Des finding me in that parking lot. Two months of impossible calls and slow transformation. All of it converging on this moment.

“I’ll do it,” I said into the phone.

“Good,” my future self replied. “Walk to the van. Don’t look back. Don’t run. Just walk like you’re going to any other job. Because that’s what this is—a job. Just one that exists in more dimensions than most.”

The call ended.

I looked at Theresa one last time. “I love you.”

“I love you too. Now go, before you lose your nerve.”

I walked through the building, past Frank’s cubicle. He looked up for the first time I’d ever seen, his too-long fingers pausing in their eternal typing.

“Good choice,” he said in his tuning-fork voice. “You’ll make an interesting driver. Remember—the cargo isn’t always what it seems. Sometimes you’re transporting the thing. Sometimes you’re transporting what the thing represents. Learn the difference.”

Des was at the exit, holding the door open.

“You sure about this?” he asked.

“No. But I’m doing it anyway.”

“That’s the only way to do anything here.” He handed me something—a key that felt warm in my hand. “For the van. Holley has the master, but this one’s yours. Your connection to the routes.”

I took the key and walked outside. The van was there, engine running with a sound that existed in frequencies I’d never heard before. The back door was open, revealing cargo space that extended further than should be possible.

In the driver’s seat, a woman turned to look at me. Holley Danton, though she looked different from the employee photos I’d seen. Older but also younger, existing in multiple ages simultaneously.

“Paul Loston,” she said, her voice carrying the weight of impossible miles. “Ready for your first pickup?”

I climbed into the passenger seat, the key heavy in my hand. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“That’s all anyone can be.” She put the van in gear, but instead of driving forward, we moved in a direction that didn’t have a name. The parking lot folded away, replaced by a highway that existed between seconds.

“First rule of driving impossible routes,” Holley said as reality blurred past the windows. “Don’t try to understand it all at once. Let it come naturally. You’re already partially transformed from working at Sykes. This is just the next step.”

“What exactly are we picking up in Alaska?”

“Something the lich has been harvesting without permits. Something that needs to be relocated before it destabilizes the entire northern grid.” She glanced at me. “Also, there’s a message for you in the glove compartment. From an old friend.”

I opened it and found an envelope with my name on it in Marcus’s handwriting. Inside was a note:

“Paulo—If you’re reading this, you took the job. Good. I’m cargo on Truck Seven-Seven-Nine, but cargo can be rerouted. Holley knows the ways between the ways. Find me if you can. Or let me go if you can’t. Either way, stop carrying the guilt. It’s feeding things neither of us wants fed. —M”

I folded the note and put it in my pocket.

“Can we really find him?” I asked Holley.

“Maybe. The routes are infinite, but they all connect eventually. Every delivery touches every other delivery at some point. It’s just a matter of navigation.” She smiled, and I saw she had too many teeth—not in a threatening way, but in a way that suggested she’d been driving these routes long enough to adapt to their requirements. “But first, Alaska. First, we learn what you’re capable of. First, we see what kind of driver you’ll become.”

The van accelerated through dimensions I didn’t have words for, carrying us toward a pickup that would be my first real test as something more than human but not quite other.

Behind us, Sykes grew smaller but never disappeared, always there in the rearview mirror no matter how far we drove. I could see Theresa in the window of my cubicle, watching us go. She waved once, and I knew she’d be okay. She had her own transformation coming, her own choices to make.

But for now, I was Paul Loston, driver in training, transporting impossible cargo through improbable routes. It wasn’t the life I’d planned, but then again, nothing had been since that night in Lincoln.

At least now I was choosing my own nightmare instead of running from someone else’s.

The highway stretched out before us, existing in all times simultaneously, and Holley began to hum something that might have been a song or might have been an incantation. Either way, it felt like coming home to a place I’d never been before.

“Welcome to Portland Interstate,” Holley said as we passed a sign that existed in seven dimensions. “We deliver everything, everywhere, everywhen. Terms and conditions apply. Reality not included.”

I laughed—actually laughed—for the first time in months.

Maybe this would be okay. Maybe being a monster wasn’t about what you became, but about choosing to become it on your own terms.

The van drove on through impossible spaces, carrying us toward Alaska and whatever waited there. Behind us, Sykes continued its work, processing calls from entities that shouldn’t exist, maintaining barriers that couldn’t hold forever.

But that was someone else’s problem now. I had my own cargo to deliver, my own routes to learn, my own transformation to complete.

And somewhere out there, in the spaces between spaces, Marcus was waiting. Maybe I’d find him. Maybe I’d free him. Maybe I’d just learn to let him go.

Either way, I was done running.

Now, I was driving.