Chapter 4: Flight and Fracture

Chapter 4: Flight and Fracture

The voice inside his head—You… will… join… the… grove—was not a sound, but a chilling certainty. It was the promise of being dismantled, of being remade into something twisted and wooden. As the driver's side window finally gave way with a percussive explosion of tempered glass, showering the cab in glittering shards, Jack didn't hesitate. He didn't fight. He fled.

With a desperate roar, he swung the heavy tire iron not at the creature now reaching a twig-like arm into his space, but at his own passenger-side window. The glass starred on the first impact, a web of fractures spreading from the point of contact. He swung again, harder, putting his entire body weight behind it. The window shattered, collapsing outward onto the rain-slicked road.

He didn't have time to be careful. He lunged through the empty frame, heedless of the jagged teeth of glass still lining the edge. One of them sliced a deep, hot gash along his forearm, but the pain was distant, an abstract signal from a body he was already abandoning. He hit the asphalt hard, rolling with the impact, the rough, wet surface scraping his cheek raw.

He scrambled to his feet, a frantic, four-limbed motion, and risked a single glance back. The creatures were swarming his rig. The root-limbed one was on the hood, its monstrous form silhouetted against the stormy sky as it tore at the windshield wipers. The birch-bark creature was halfway inside the cab, its eyeless face turning toward the empty driver's seat. A third was methodically ripping the tires to shreds with pointed, wooden claws.

Behind him, the sounds began. Not the clean tearing of metal, but a grotesque symphony of destruction. A deep, resonant CRACK as if a giant tree was being snapped in two. A wet, grinding noise of splintering wood and shredding steel. They weren't just wrecking his truck; they were consuming it, pulling it apart with a methodical, unnatural strength. His cab, his kingdom, his one safe place in the world, was being unmade.

That sound broke the last tether of his courage. He turned and ran, plunging off the road and into the pitch-black maw of the Superior National Forest.

The world dissolved into a nightmare of unseen obstacles and frantic motion. Thorny branches whipped at his face, tearing at his clothes. His boots sank into slick, cold mud, threatening to pull him down with every step. The rain, a steady downpour on the highway, was a torrent here under the canopy, channeling down trunks and leaves in cold, heavy streams. He ran blind, fueled by pure terror, the horrifying sounds of his rig's destruction fading behind him, replaced by the snapping of twigs under his own feet—a sound terrifyingly similar to the creatures' movements.

He didn't know how long he ran. Time lost all meaning, stretching and compressing in a blur of fear. Every shadow was a monster, every rustle of leaves a pursuer. The whispers returned, no longer just in his head but seemingly carried on the wind, slithering between the ancient pines. They promised him rest, a place in the soil, a long, quiet sleep beneath the roots. He pressed his hands over his ears and kept running, stumbling, falling, and hauling himself back up, his body a canvas of cuts and bruises.

Eventually, his legs gave out. He collapsed into a bed of wet pine needles, his lungs burning, his mind a hollowed-out cavern of shock. He lay there, listening to the rain and his own ragged breathing, until consciousness finally frayed and snapped.

He awoke to a different kind of silence. The sterile, humming silence of fluorescent lights. The air smelled of antiseptic and floor wax. A thin, coarse blanket was pulled up to his chin. He was in a bed, his arm wrapped in a tight, clean bandage.

A woman in blue scrubs, her face kind but weary, was checking a monitor beside him. "Well, look who's back with us," she said softly. "You gave us quite a scare. A state trooper found you wandering along the highway just before dawn. You're in Ely-Winton Memorial. Do you remember what happened, Mr. Renner?"

Jack tried to speak, but his throat was raw. He remembered everything. The pale hand. The cracking glass. The voice in his skull. "My truck," he finally rasped, the words feeling clumsy and foreign in his mouth. "The... things..."

Before the nurse could reply, a man in a sheriff's department uniform entered the room. He was broad-shouldered with a weathered face and a mustache that seemed to weigh down the corners of his mouth. "Jack Renner?" he asked, his voice a low, unimpressed rumble. "Sheriff Brody. We need to talk about your accident."

"It wasn't an accident," Jack said, pushing himself up on his elbows, the sudden movement sending a jolt of pain through his body. "They attacked me. They came out of the wood... the lumber..."

Sheriff Brody exchanged a look with the nurse, a flicker of professional pity. "Son, your rig jackknifed and hit a patch of black ice. Went right into the trees. It’s a miracle you walked away at all. You were suffering from exposure and a pretty serious concussion when we found you. It's common to have hallucinations after that kind of trauma."

"No," Jack insisted, his voice rising with a desperate edge. "It was real. The cargo..."

"The cargo was scattered all over the road," Brody said, cutting him off with a patient but firm tone. "Just lumber. We had a crew clear it up this morning. Listen, you get some rest. The doctor says you'll be fine. We'll take your full statement when you're thinking a little more clearly."

The sheriff placed a gentle but unyielding hand on Jack's shoulder, pushing him back down onto the pillow. The dismissal was absolute. He was just another exhausted trucker who fell asleep at the wheel, his mind inventing monsters to explain the chaos. He was alone, his terror invalidated, his truth erased and paved over with a simple, logical lie. Defeated, he let his eyes slip closed, the crushing weight of disbelief pressing him down into the mattress.

He drifted in a shallow, drug-hazed sleep, the real world bleeding into nightmares of splintered wood and whispering leaves. Sometime later, he surfaced to the sound of low voices in the hallway just outside his slightly ajar door.

"Is he stable?" a voice asked. A state trooper, by the sound of it.

"Yeah, doctor says he'll be fine," Sheriff Brody's familiar rumble replied. "Just shook up. Thinks he saw boogeymen in the woods."

There was a pause. The trooper's voice dropped, becoming hushed, serious. "Did the cleanup crew get everything? We need to know that site is sterile."

"Sterile as a church on Monday," Brody said. "My boys and the DOT crew were thorough. You'd never know anything was there. But listen, this is the second Blackwood shipment to go off the road in six months. The official story is 'freak accident,' I get it. But my people are getting spooked."

"The story is the story," the trooper said, his voice hard as iron. "That's the directive. The situation is contained. Our job is to make sure it stays that way. Just keep the driver sedated and here until we get the go-ahead."

Jack’s eyes snapped open in the dim light of the hospital room. The fog of shock and medication evaporated in an instant, burned away by the cold, sharp clarity of those words.

Blackwood shipment.

Sanitize the site.

The situation is contained.

He wasn't crazy. He hadn't imagined it. The claw marks, the hand, the creatures—they were real. The sheriff wasn't a fool; he was a liar. This wasn't a cover-up of an accident; it was the containment of an event. He hadn't just been hauling lumber. He'd been a pawn in something much bigger, a disposable cog in a machine that transported monsters through the night. And when the cargo got loose, they didn't send a rescue party.

They sent a cleanup crew.