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The first thing you need to know is that they're lying to you about everything all the time. You might think that you're informed and aware, but there are plenty of threats out there that you won't hear about on the news or even on the internet. It's not that the media doesn't want to tell you about these dangers, it's that we're not allowed to. If you rise high enough in the ranks of any media outlet,
Pretty soon you start hearing whispers about reporters whose names you're forbidden from speaking. The ones who got erased. You'll never hear anything more than whispers though. Because when I say erased, I mean erased. I mean every synonym of the word destroyed. All online presence deleted. Anybody who's close to them gets disappeared too. Just in case. The only thing those poor idiots leave behind is a black hole.
Pretty soon, I think I'm going to be one of them. I've nailed my feet to the floor of the RV to buy myself some time. But that last shot hurt so bad that I dropped the nail gun. And inside my blood-soaked boots, the squirming has already started. Haley is yelling something outside and hammering on the door. It won't hold for her long. But I've got to try to tell my story. This is the only chance I'll ever get. My name is Terry Blankenship.
Until recently, I was a reporter for a mid-sized regional newspaper. I had heard the whispers too, but I was content just to ignore them. I wanted to keep my head down and do my job. When the higher-ups axed a story or called off a field investigation for no good reason, I let it slide. I was happy just to have a job I loved, especially with all the recent layoffs. Things might have gone on that way forever if it hadn't been for Haley.
When I first met Haley Chow, she was still an intern in her 20s. She had a sharper eye for detail than most that had been at the paper for years. She turned a lot of heads and made a lot of enemies. I'm not sure whether she was assigned to me as a joke, a test, or some sort of punishment, but either way,
she changed my life. Haley reminded me of who I had been when I'd started out as a reporter, or maybe of just who I'd wanted to be. She noticed each time I let a promising story die, or avoided following up on a good lead. And when she asked for an explanation, all I had were lame excuses. It began so simply, with a single email.
Haley and I were staying late in the office. Me because I didn't have anyone to go home to. And her because she still viewed this whole reporting thing as some sort of crusade. Somebody had left behind three fourths of a pizza and Haley was leaning on her desk with a string of cheese hanging out of her mouth. She was hitting the refresh button on her inbox when the message came in. It was from a naive 18 year old Bible college student named Gabe Sheldon. Gabe was from a town I'd never heard of.
a town called Harkers Point. And he was concerned because he hadn't heard from anyone back home in weeks. Not even the shops on Main Street were picking up. When Gabe called the nearest police station, they informed him that everything was fine, but a friend who was a teacher in the next town over told Gabe that mail delivery and school bus pickup to Harkers Point had been canceled, and that the Harkers Point students had disappeared from her attendance roster.
Gabe lived on campus and didn't have a car, so he wanted us to investigate what was happening in Harker's Point. Haley had been working on a project about communication breakdowns in rural America, and she thought that the Harker's Point story would make a perfect centerpiece for her first article. She wanted to check it out now, and she wasn't taking no for an answer. "Any other day, I probably would have dumped cold water on the whole idea.
It reeked of exactly the sort of story that needed to be cleared by the higher-ups first. But something about that night made me say, "Screw it. Let's go." Maybe it was the fact that Haley was going by herself one way or another, and with nobody else in my life to care about, I felt responsible for her. Maybe her zeal made me feel ashamed of all the similar stories I had passed over in the past.
Hell, maybe it was just the pizza and the fact that neither of us had anything better to do on a Friday night. We were both excited as we packed up our gear and headed downstairs. It felt like nothing could go wrong. Parker's Point was a two-hour drive from our downtown office. We took Lucy, the RV that I used whenever I had an overnight field assignment. The gas mileage was crap and it looked like the 1970s threw up in the interior.
But she was reliable, and reliable was what we needed, because the roads heading out to Harker's Point were bad. After 20 miles of bumps and potholes, I understood why Haley wanted to write about rural America's abandoned infrastructure. But the site ahead of us pushed all concern about the RV's tires out of my mind. The road was blocked by two black, militarized vehicles. Red and blue lights flashed from both hoods, but I couldn't see any police license plates.
In fact, I couldn't see any identification at all. Four figures in menacing full-body armor stood guard on the road, two facing inward, two facing outward. In situations like this, I usually rolled down the window with a smile, presented my press badge, and asked for an official explanation of what was going on. But not this time. Something about those faceless, black-clad figures made my skin crawl.
and a quick glance at the passenger seat confirmed that Haley had the same feeling. No, the best thing to do here was to make a U-turn on the gravel shoulder and head back the way we came, just like we were never here. If only it had been that easy. The moment the men saw Lucy, the RV's headlights, they began speaking into their chest-mounted comm devices. By the time I got my behemoth RV turned around, a pair of them had already climbed into one of the Humvees.
My knuckles were white as I drove along the two-lane country road, hoping, praying that I wouldn't see a set of glaring hunter's headlights approaching from behind. If I did, I had an awful feeling that neither I nor Haley would ever be seen from again. "'Here, turn here!' Haley suddenly shouted. "'Here!' turned out to be a dirt forest road that plunged downward so steeply, it might as well have been a cliff, but under the circumstances, I was willing to try anything.'
Potholes jarred Lucy's suspension and bushes scraped against the undercarriage. But 30 seconds later, we were safely out of sight from the road. I switched off the lights, just in time to see one of the hulking black vehicles round the corner behind us. Neither of us dared to speak. We hardly dared to breathe. I finally worked up the nerve to ask Haley how she had known where to turn. Motioning me into the back of the RV, she revealed a packet of bootleg topography maps that she had printed back at the office.
If I had caught her, I would have called it a waste of good printer ink. But out there, in the dashboard lit darkness of the RV, I was pretty sure that she had just saved both our lives. According to Haley's maps, we could continue on these old logging roads until we came out on the other side of the highway, thereby dodging Harker's Point and its creepy blockade completely. I had my doubts about the overgrown dirt track, but I also couldn't think of a better solution.
For all we knew, that black Humvee was waiting for us back up on the road. Gritting my teeth, I shifted Lucy into gear and quietly begged her to hold together for me, just this one last time.
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This podcast brought to you by Ring. With Ring cameras, you can check on your pets to catch them in the act. Izzy, drop that. Or just keep them company. Aw, I'll be home soon. Make sure they're okay while you're away. With Ring, learn more at ring.com slash pets. It was slow going. Some of the dirt tracks Haley sent me down hadn't been used in years, or maybe longer. This had to work, because there was no way that Lucy would make it back up those steep, rocky slopes.
We were about halfway through when disaster struck. An enormous old growth tree had fallen across the road ahead. There was no way the tiny saw in my toolkit could cut through such a thick trunk, and there was no moving it either. I watched Haley's face grow pale in the glow of the dashboard light as she traced her finger along the only route that was still left open to us. It led directly through Harker's Point. We could still come out the other side, she insisted, as long as...
Haley didn't finish her idea, but she didn't need to. I was thinking the same thing. As long as whatever had gotten to Harker's point doesn't get to us first. Maybe it was that lingering fear of the unknown that made me turn off Lucy's headlights once we saw the lights of the town flickering between the branches. Out here in the country, the almost full moon and stars were bright enough for me to follow the dirt road once my eyes adjusted to the light.
Lucy's rumbling was so loud it set my teeth on edge. But at least we wouldn't be seen. We drove down the zigzagging road in silence. Hayley looked out the window with her knees pulled up to her chest. I took nervous swigs of lukewarm coffee. We both knew that in just a few moments, we would be face to face with whatever had happened in Harker's Point. We were so distracted by the possibilities that neither of us noticed the woman in the road. "Look out!" Hayley screamed.
But it was too late. I threw on the brakes, the tires skidded on loose gravel, and a sickening thump reverberated through the RV's interior. I froze, heart racing. I had just hit another person with a vehicle for the first time in my life. Considering how slow we had been going, it wasn't likely that they were seriously injured. But still, the right thing to do was to get out and check. Haley and I looked at each other. Neither wanted to be the first to open the RV door.
The person outside snapped back up to their feet. It was a middle-aged woman in a white nightgown. Her lanky brown hair was tangled with leaves and muck, and her feet were bare. Careless of the fact that she'd just been knocked over by an RV in the middle of the woods, she began to swing her hips from side to side. She kicked her feet, waved her arms. It took Haley and I a moment to realize that we were witnessing a dance.
The sort of dance a toddler might force a doll to do, spinning it recklessly and making it bend in unnatural directions. I sat with my foot on the brake, transfixed by what I was seeing. Those movements had to hurt, but the look on the woman's face was one of pure exhilaration. Tears streaked her filthy cheeks, but her mouth was contorted into a smile. She should have been rolling on the ground in agony, but instead...
She leapt onto Lucy's hood and continued her gruesome performance. Haley opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment, the woman reared back her head and slammed it into the windshield. A bloody spiderweb fracture appeared in the glass. The woman waved her arms, spun, and did it again. Her bright white smile pierced through the blood streaming down from the cuts on her face. "I let Lucy roll downhill, then hit the brakes." The woman tumbled from the hood.
I angled the wheels so that she would pass harmlessly between them, but still shut my eyes tight, expecting to hear the splintering of bone beneath the RV's overwhelming weight. In the red glow of the taillights, I watched the woman climb to all fours like some sort of long-limbed hairless dog, her head still bobbing to some awful beat that I couldn't hear. I stepped on the gas. We clattered down the dirt track at speeds far too fast for Lucy to handle, but in the heat of the moment, I didn't care.
I just wanted to put as much distance between us and her as possible. Before long, the conditions of the road improved, but I had already begun to notice an odd pull to the left from the steering wheel. It was soon followed by the telltale thwap of a flat tire. We were just about 10 minutes away from Harker's Point, and God knows how far from anyplace else. As Lucy screeched to a halt, Hailey and I exchanged another glance.
in books and movies. It's moments like this when people turn on each other. Sure, I could have raged at Haley for dragging me to Harker's Point in the first place, and she could have shot back, saying it was my panicky driving that had gotten us trapped out here, but we both knew better. If we wanted a chance to laugh about this around the water cooler one day, we'd have to work together. I wasn't surprised that there was no cell phone service.
But what really worried me was that the ham radio I'd set up in the back of the RV was also dead. All communications into and out of Harker's Point were being shut down. But why, how, and by whom, I had no idea. None of the other services appeared to have been cut off. The lights of Main Street were still shining brightly through the trees, but somehow their brightness felt dangerous. Light could serve as a lure to draw nightmarish things out of the darkness.
Things like the woman from the woods. Were there more like her? Was that what this was about? Some kind of cult or chemical in the air that was making people lose their minds? With a shiver, I remembered that the black armored guards had all been wearing some kind of breathing mask. The only thing I had in the RV were a few old surgical face masks. But Haley and I threw them on just in case. We hadn't brought much more than water and snacks.
But we scoured Lucy for anything that might be useful. Pocket knives, rope, flashlights, and moth-eaten wool blankets. By the time we strapped our overloaded day packs onto our backs, we looked like a pair of apocalypse survivors. Which I guess, in a sense, we were. We just didn't know it yet. Haley was out of the door before I could stop her. She was holding my tire iron like she wanted to whack somebody's head off with it. But the forest outside was quiet.
There were no deer, no small animals wrestling in the undergrowth, not even the whirring of insects in the humid summer night. The stillness was plenty eerie, but it was nothing compared to what we experienced after we walked out of the woods and into Harker's Point. Like a lot of old Southern towns, the place had a beaten down but homely look to it, like a worn out pair of your favorite shoes.
The houses were sagging with age, but were well cared for. Plastic toys and garden gnomes were scattered across each lawn. Through warmly lit windows, we could see kitchen tables set for family dinners and movies playing on big screen televisions. It was an ordinary suburban scene, except that all of the people were missing. A few screen doors were hanging wide open,
as if the inhabitants of those houses had walked outside but had expected to return in just a few minutes. The deserted streets had us both on edge. We were starting to notice signs that something bad had happened here. We could see a fire hydrant spraying water into the air. There was also a chain with a broken dog collar attached to it. I wanted to retreat back to the cover of the trees and avoid the town entirely, even if it meant adding hours to our already day-long walk.
But for Haley, the memory of the dancing woman was too fresh in her mind. She didn't want to run into any more of those out there in the woods. And besides, she had her work as a journalist to consider. Terrified as we both were, she was still snapping photos with the old film camera that hung around her neck. Its click felt far too loud in the silence. Before I could tell her to knock it off, I heard the sound I'd feared, or maybe anticipated.
fast moving footsteps. A lot of them. Haley and I vaulted over a fence into somebody's backyard. Through a gap in the peeling wooden planks, we watched a bizarre scene unfold on the nighttime suburban streets. There were dozens of them, dressed and naked, whole and broken, adults and children. Their arms were linked. They kicked their feet and threw back their heads as they whirled, forming a chaotic spiral that was nearly as long as a neighborhood block.
As injured and exhausted as some of them clearly were, a wide smile was spread across every face. A minute later, they were gone, twirling around the corner like a bad dream. If it hadn't been for the shell-shocked reaction on Haley's face, I would have sworn I'd hallucinated the whole thing. She was already moving, her camera at the ready. When I grabbed the strap of her day pack to pull her back, she spun like she was going to hit me.
I whispered that those people might be dangerous and that we needed to keep moving. And when none of that worked, I finally admitted the truth. I was scared. I'll never forget her reply. - And what? You think I'm not? But I've still got a job to do. - I didn't wanna have this argument. Not now. Not with that insane ring of dancers still out there. I should have been paying more attention to the house behind us. The house that we ignored while we hid. The sound of breaking glass made us both turn.
A young couple waltzed out from the lightless living room, careless of the shattered patio door beneath their bleeding feet. Their out-of-focus eyes locked on Haley and I. Right away, I knew what they were coming for. They wanted us to join their dance. We heaved ourselves back over into the street and ran, our argument forgotten. Behind us, the duo slammed themselves into the flimsy fence until it collapsed. They never once paused their hideous waltz. They had to be exhausted. It had to be killing them.
But they just wouldn't stop. I didn't look back, not even when other doors slammed open, and more pursuers joined the hunt. They all moved in sync, every footstep hitting the pavement to the tune of that same awful rhythm. I was running so hard I was seeing stars. Fat drops of sweat dripped from my face like a countdown. I was paying the price for all those gas station breakfasts and late night beers. I was starting to fall behind.
We had almost reached Main Street when Haley suddenly veered right. Someone had left the rear door of a small liquor store propped open with a brick. We could slip inside and let the door close behind just like we were never there. And even if the trick didn't work, at least we would have put something solid between us and those psychopaths outside. I promised my ailing body a plate full of veggies if only it would give me one last burst of energy. And seconds later, we had carried out Haley's plan.
We squatted there in the back of the liquor store, breathing deep the smell of damp, dusty concrete. Only then did it occur to me that more of them might be lurking in this lightless storage room. But the place was quiet. They didn't seem the type to set up an ambush. And after 10 minutes passed with no sign of our pursuers, we decided to get moving ourselves. Just like the small town suburbs we had passed earlier, the sales floor of the liquor store was disturbingly ordinary.
The lights were on, music was playing, and a half-drunk Cherry Slushy sat beside the cash register. We crouched behind the shelves until we were sure that the coast was clear. Then we crossed the parking lot toward Main Street. The ring of dancers had twirled off, but they might loop back around at any time. I was an overweight, middle-aged editor and Haley a stick-thin kid just out of college. But we moved through Harker's Point like a pair of soldiers avoiding sniper fire.
We hid behind boxes and in the shadows of store entrances. But no matter where we went, there was no sign of anybody else. Parker's Point wasn't big enough to have its own town hall or school. Its "downtown" couldn't have been more than three blocks of greasy spoon diners, mom-and-pop shops, and boarded-up offices. We were almost through, I thought. I could see the woods on the other side. But Haley was no longer with me. She was shuffling like a sleepwalker toward a small park to her left.
By the time I returned to her, she had frozen completely, transfixed by the sight before her. She had just discovered what had happened to the population of Harker's Point. Almost everyone in town was there, hundreds of them. They danced through the soccer field in an enormous spiral, trampling the fallen and the dead beneath their feet as though they weren't even there.
The exhausted, battered ones did their best to drag themselves along with the rest. That same twisted expression of joy was stitched on their faces. How long had they been keeping this up? Hours? Days? Haley was actually trying to get closer. She snuck from tree to tree, her camera at the ready, looking for the perfect shot. If I shouted a warning and the dancers heard it, we were both dead.
All I could do was wave helplessly, even though I was sure she wasn't going to turn around. She was completely focused on her mission, on documenting this insanity so that others would know what had happened in Harker's Point. I was so worried about Haley that I didn't notice the man beside me until it was too late. The wet grass of the park had muffled his dancing steps, and the next thing I knew, a cold, clammy hand was resting on the back of my neck.
When I turned, his grinning face was so close to mine that I could see the drool dribbling down from his cheek-to-cheek grin. Terror. That was my first reaction. Pure, unadulterated, pants-wetting terror. I shoved him off of me with a shriek, but the smile never once left his face. Not even when he slipped in the dewy grass. He snapped his ankle and stood again, still dancing on his purplish, bent, backwards foot.
I was already running, running as blindly as a hunted animal. Knowing all along that I was too late, my scream had alerted the dancing hundreds to our presence. That writhing mass of humanity was already spiraling toward us, and this time, there were too many of them to outrun or hide. I was almost back to the liquor store by the time I realized that hardly any of them were following me. Those who did swayed along unhurriedly in pairs of two or three, like they were just waiting for me to start dancing myself.
The spot on my neck where the man had grabbed me was warm to the touch and itchy, like thousands of microscopic insects were squirming beneath the surface of my skin. For all I knew, maybe they were. This was why Harker's Point had been sealed off from the world. This was what they, whoever they were, had been trying to contain by gagging the media. Whatever was making those people dance themselves to death was contagious. And whether by a simple touch or even just by proximity, I had been infected.
The dancers weren't chasing me, because I was already becoming one of them. My hand had flinched on its own. Just a small involuntary motion, like when a doctor taps your kneecap with a rubber hammer to check your reflexes. And yet, it had been totally outside my control. My feet were starting to stumble, but not from tiredness. They were kicking themselves outwards. They were moving to a sort of rhythm.
I didn't have much time. I still had some tools stored in the RV from all those home improvement projects that I had never got around to finishing. Tools like duct tape, ratchet straps, and a nail gun. Which brings us back around to the present moment. Before long, the swaying of my arms is going to be forceful enough to tear off the duct tape holding them to the chair. And with every bounce of my nailed down feet, the ratchet straps around my legs are getting looser.
Haley's still out there, pounding on the door. She's yelling something. It sounds like... But it doesn't matter. She'll be dancing with us soon enough.