Curtain of unconsciousness drawn away, I knew something wasn’t right when the sky was filled with moonlight, but the pale satellite was nowhere in sight.

  It’s like when you follow the trail of the ethereal glow tracked against the night’s void, then you’d expect a big, pale orb winking back, but in the center of the radiance there was a perfect sphere of nothingness. I don’t mean to say that there was a cloud blocking the moon, or it was a new moon, I mean to say that there was nothing there. A cluster of stars shined from where the moon should have been, like the object generating the light had been deleted from existence, but whoever did it had forgotten to switch off the illumination too.

  Strange, but circumstances swiftly ripped my attention to other things, namely, where was I?

  Judging from the foliage, I definitely didn’t wake up in Los Angeles, that mega city probably hasn’t had a proper grove of trees since the 30s, but there was something familiar about these red giants reaching their leafy hands to the heavens. Gears tumbled in my brain like acrobats exchanging levers at the circus and it clicked for me that I had seen pictures of these kinds of trees as a child, Redwoods. That narrowed my location down to somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

  Not much, but it was something to work with.

  I still had my feet under me, no nausea or dizziness seized my senses like they would if someone had used tranqs to knock me out. Still had my clothes too, but the buggers had made off with my wallet and gun. It was a small piece, a .22 I was licensed to conceal carry, but the lack of its familiar heft under my arm made my skin crawl with anticipation that anything could come leaping out of the trees. In the LA warrens any number of creeps, slinks, and beeps try jacking you on the daily, so my senses were heightened to react to the slightest provocation.

  Nothing came, but that was the eerie thing, because I noticed it then, nothing was making noise. No birds, bugs, or thrum of distant traffic, just the sound of my feet crunching the ground underneath. Silence ruled the air and its oppressive howling was worse than any twig snapping or animals snuffling in the dark. Panic settled on my shoulders and drifted to my belly until it knotted into a pit in the gut. I had to break the silence, even if it might garner unwanted attention.

  “Hello! Is anyone there? Hello?” No one replied.

  Alright, I had to collect myself, recall the last thing I remembered. I was working a case, kidnapping, some child from the Heights. No wait, they found her in several different locations... A high-profile adultery investigation? No, not that either, that was a clone. As much as I racked my brain, trying to remember the last thing I was doing before coming here, my mind drew blanks as much as the moon was missing from the sky. It was ridiculous, but my mind couldn’t even remember what year it was.

  Every effort to reach back was meeting a wall, so that meant that I had only one place to go.

  Forward.

  I must have been in that forest for only five minutes when something broke the interminable shade between the trees. Lights, on my level and not just in the sky, blinked between the trunks of the forest’s sentinels. That meant one thing, baby. Other people! A quick sprint brought me to the treeline’s edge, eager to put that forest behind me, and I was not disappointed with what I saw.

  A small field separated the forest from a cul-de-sac of suburban one stories, and beyond this slice of life, there was a sprawling town in the distance. My heart leapt in my chest, burning to start running headlong into civilization, but my feet kept their place, glued by an instinctual paranoia that had saved my bacon on more than one occasion. It was nighttime, but there were no street lights on in either the neighborhood or town. The source of light I had seen was coming from just one house, but otherwise the rest of the buildings might as well have been trees for all the light and comfort they provided.

  Something was up, call it what you want, but I had a gut feeling.

  Yet I was stuck between the unknown and the disquieting, a forest of silence or a town without light. You’d think the decision would be easy, who’d want to get lost in the wild, but part of me wanted to just run back into the trees and hide from the little town. Something wicked was out there and the hushed silence was a predator holding its breath, waiting for prey to step into its trap.

  One, two, three, my feet made up their mind for me with a prowl toward the only lit up house. My pace quickened the further out into the open I got, exposed to whatever may be watching, and by the time my back hit the dwelling’s wall, I was almost sprinting. There were no shouts of alarm or shots from a gun blowing me away in the short trip, but my heart hammered in my chest just the same. When the thrumming of drums calmed down in my ears, I perked up from the noise of whispers lilting on the wind.

  It was coming from inside the house.

  Of course the curtains were drawn on every window, so I could not just peek inside with minimal risk. If I wanted to see who else was here with me, I had to go inside. Fortunately for me, the back patio door was cracked open. Unfortunately, there was a trail of black fluid leading up to the house, terminating in a handprint on the white exterior wall.

  Again, the impulse to run seized me, but my inertia betrayed me as one who had gone too far to turn back. As I reached the door’s threshold, the whispers from inside grew louder and their mumbled gibberish took shape.

  “Shh, shh, it’s alright baby, its alright. Momma’s here, momma’s here.” A woman’s voice, but there was something off in the way she spoke. It was not just that she kept repeating the same thing, over and over, but a slight warble altered her tone to a little lower than normal. A droid perhaps? Curiosity got the better of me, but caution stopped my hands from knocking or announcing myself. I crossed the threshold and stalked toward the woman’s voice, taking note of the house’s interior appearance.

  It was trashed.

  Something dried and dark was smeared on the walls and there was a sickly sweet smell with a tinge of rot permeating the air. By my own experience investigating slums, I knew it wasn’t blood or other bodily fluids, but I had to resist a gagging reflex. Accompanying the rotten décor were smashed pieces of furniture, trash everywhere, and torn wallpaper that should have been enough of a ‘get out’ sign for anyone with common sense to turn back. Unfortunately, men like myself, men who make a career out of being private investigators, often lack enough common sense to heed such things. The urge to keep pushing the envelope drives us on, seeking the truth that’s out there.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  In the living room, I found her, and she wasn’t a droid. By the pale gooseflesh of her back, pimply and streaked with scratches, she looked human enough, though cyborgs looked real too with the more expensive glamour models. I couldn’t see her face to tell if she had the tell tale eyes that would give away if she were human or machine, she was facing away and hunched over a bassinet.

  “Shh, shh, it’s alright. Don’t cry, stop crying, stop crying!”

  There was no baby crying to be heard, at least not one that I could hear. My hand instinctively reached out and grabbed a decorative plate from a table next to me. Between her and me, there was a good ten feet distance, but I wished it was a thousand. I should have turned back.

  I spoke instead.

  “Hey, chickie, you alright?”

  The woman stopped her jabbering and the silence I thought I had escaped from the forest came back again with a vengeance. My intuition screamed at me to leave, but she spoke and I listened.

  “You thought you could just come back after leaving us?” The woman flowed up from the ground with an animal’s grace and spun around to face me. She wasn’t a droid, but I don’t think she was a human either. In place of her eyes were two hollow pits with burned flesh around the sockets and when she next opened her mouth, a shrill snarl preceded her attack. The space between us was crossed in an instant and even as I smashed the decorative plate against her head, the thin woman had enough strength and momentum to manhandle me to the ground and start pummeling my face.

  I wish I could say that my years of ground fighting practice had saved me, but all those lessons were forgotten as I tried blocking a flurry of blows trying to simultaneously rip my face off and cave in my head. I would have also forgotten the shard of broken plate, still gripped in my right hand, if not for the pain its edges now caused by cutting into my palm. That small sliver of ceramic would be my salvation.

  In a desperate attempt, I used my left arm to swat the insane woman’s arms aside for just a brief moment, but a moment was all I needed to drive the plate shard into my attacker’s neck. No blood spurted like I hit an artery, but as I dragged my makeshift dagger across her neck, a black, viscous fluid flowed from the injury. The woman stopped throwing hands at my face and clutched her ruined throat, giving me the space to make some room and toss her off of me. I jumped up, prepared to ram a right hook into her face if she tried jumping me again, but the woman flopped on the floor, gagging and unable to breathe.

  I would have felt pity had I thought she was human, instead I slammed my size 13 boot on its neck until the creature stopped spasming.

  When I was sure that whatever the thing that had attacked me was dead. I stepped away and took a moment to compose myself. I’d blasted creeps with stunners when I used to be a security guard in the factory district, but I’d never taken a life before, if that’s what this woman had to begin with. The black liquid pooling under her head was not like any blood I had seen, nor did it have the pungent smell or shining rainbow hue of an android’s fluid. It was something else.

  The ramifications of what I had done aside, I looked at the plate shard still clutched in my right hand. It was covered in the same black gore, but a fragment of writing was on it.

  [Welcome to H-]

  “What a welcome.” No one replied, but I was not expecting an answer.

  Part of me wanted to leave the house then and there, but there was the matter of the baby bassinet in the center of the living room. Approaching it was more apprehensive than even walking into this madhouse, but to my relief the woman had not been whispering to a baby in the bassinet, instead the basket was filled with a rotting chicken breast and some miscellaneous trash.

  The lone, tiny sock next to the poultry caught my imagination with unpleasant ruminations, but a ringing sound broke those thoughts. It was coming from my pocket. I’m sure that there was not anything there before, but now that I checked I discovered an antique smart phone, one of the kind that old zoomers loved so much. The caller ID did not reveal much information, as it just said “unknown”.

  “Hello?” I held the device to my head like I’ve seen them do in the old movies.

  A woman’s voice replied on the other end. “Congratulations, you’ve leveled up!”

  “What does that mean? Who are you?”

  The other end of the phone clicked and silence ruled again. I would have thrown the stupid phone at the wall if I did not think that it might hold more information. My guess was right, on the cellphone there was a call and text function as well as two apps. One app was a book symbol called “Codex” and the other was just heart with the word “Stats” underneath. Red notification alerts were by both of the app symbols, so I clicked the codex first and found mostly a whole lot of nothing. There were pages for entries, “Bestiary” and “Locations”, but most of them were just unclickable question marks. The only entry I was able to read was in the bestiary and labeled “Hollow”. Clicking on it immediately showed me an image of the woman I had just slain and information under it.

  I exited out of the bestiary, not really understanding what all that mumbo jumbo meant and clicked on the “stat app” next. It was just as useful as the previous one, which was to say, not much.

  It looked like some sort of game, but I hadn’t touched a dive system since that big accident three years ago that ended up with ten thousand MMO players’ brains ending up outside their heads and dribbling out of their ears. Whatever it was, it was gibberish to me. Finally, I tried using the phone to call some sort of authority, but every attempt to dial a number ended in the phone immediately disconnecting.

  I had a phone, but I was alone.

  I did not want to stick around inside the house with the dead body of the “hollow”, if that’s what that woman really was, so I quick-stepped outside for some fresh air. As I hit the sidewalk, a light turned on over my head. I thought for a moment that it was some sort of helicopter searchlight and that rescue had finally come, but it was just the street light. Down the line, out the cul-de-sac and to the town beyond, lights were turning on in buildings and homes in succession from closest to out of sight. A cold wind blew from the heart of the waking beast and I heard the ring of the phone going off in my pocket again. I checked, but it was not a call, a different unknown number had sent me a text and a chill ran down my spine that was not caused by the wind.

  “Welcome to Hopeville.”