Dean Johnson never planned to stay in Blackwater.
It was the kind of town where the gas station still had a rotary pump out front, where the local diner's sign buzzed at night like a dying firefly, and where everyone called each other by their first name whether you liked it or not. A quiet place. A safe place.
That's why his wife loved it.
She was born here. Grew up in a little white house at the end of Pineview Street. When Dean married her, she'd told him laughing, bright-eyed, full of warmth he didn't deserve "You'll retire there one day, you'll see. That town is good for the soul."
He didn't argue. He never did when it came to her.
Now, she was buried in an unmarked grave in a place he wasn't allowed to see, and the town she loved was rotting from the inside out.
Dean stood on the back porch of their home, staring out at the still trees. It was just past dawn, but the sky was gray strangely so, like something had gone out behind the clouds. The birds weren't singing. Even the bugs were quiet.
His coffee sat untouched in his hand, black and bitter.
The wind carried the smell of something burnt.
Inside the house, her pictures still hung on the walls. Her scarf still lay on the coat rack. It had been two years, but Dean had never taken any of it down. Couldn't. Wouldn't.
He'd moved here after she died. Left the CIA. Just walked out. No explanations, no forwarding address. The agency let him go without a fight. Maybe they felt guilty. Maybe they knew what really happened.
Dean never stopped asking questions.
But he stopped getting answers the day he found the last letter she'd written one that hadn't been sent. It was sealed. Marked:
FOR DEAN – IF I CHANGE.
He never opened it.
He stepped down onto the overgrown grass and made his way to Main Street, passing shuttered storefronts and quiet porches. He knew every person who lived here now. Had coffee with them. Helped rebuild their fence. Shared tears at funerals.
Now they barely opened their curtains.
Blackwater had changed.
It started with the river. The same river kids used to swim in during the summer. A year after the supposed "chemical spill," people got sick. Not all at once just headaches, tremors, memory problems. But then came the disappearances. Then the… incidents.
Last month, a man bit through his neighbor's neck during Sunday Mass. Another tried to dig a tunnel beneath the hardware store, muttering about "the roots crawling in."
Dean had seen worse in his years with the agency. He'd seen warlords gas villages and sleeper agents burn entire safehouses to ash. But this? This was quiet. Insidious. Like rot in the walls.
And worst of all he had a sinking feeling the government was watching. Not stopping it. Just… waiting.
As he turned onto Holloway Avenue, he noticed something strange.
The clinic's front door was open. Wide open. Lights off.
That clinic his wife's clinic had been padlocked for months. No one went near it anymore. But the door was swinging in the wind, creaking like it had been waiting for someone.
Dean reached for the pistol at his side.
He stepped inside.
The air hit him like a wave sour, metallic, wrong. Something had died here recently. The floors were slick with muddy footprints, some too long, some not shaped like feet at all.
The receptionist's desk had been overturned. Papers scattered like snow. And at the end of the hallway, beneath the flickering overhead light…
Something was crawling.
Not walking.
Crawling.
It moved like it didn't remember how to be human.
Dean raised his weapon.
"Stop right there!"
The thing lifted its head.
And for one sickening moment he thought he recognized the face. Half-gone, jaw split wide, eyes full of red veins but the shape of it… it was the mailman. Kevin. Used to bring his dog treats.
Kevin hissed.
Dean fired once, center mass. Kevin didn't even flinch.
He kept crawling, faster now, bones cracking as if forced into motion.
Dean fired again this time in the head.
Kevin dropped.
Dean stood there, breathing hard, heart pounding in his throat. The gun in his hand felt heavier than it ever had before. Blood pooled beneath the body, dark and slow.
He turned away and staggered outside.
The sky had gotten darker.
Across the street, an old woman stood in her window, staring at him. Her eyes were sunken. Her hands bled against the glass.
Dean looked around the empty street and felt the world tilt.
Blackwater was gone.
Whatever was left now…
Wasn't human.