Chapter 2: The Silent Woods

Jack's routine had always been predictable—coffee at dawn, check the radio for overnight incidents, drive the route. For twenty-nine years, this rhythm had sustained him through Virginia's changing seasons, through budget cuts and personnel changes, through the slow erosion of a job that nobody noticed until something went wrong.

But after mile marker 112, the rhythm felt different. Hollow.

Three weeks passed without incident. Jack told himself the deer thing had been a fluke, some combination of circumstances that his practical mind simply couldn't piece together. Someone had taken the carcass for meat—Tracy's explanation made sense, even if it felt wrong in his gut. People did stranger things for free protein.

Then came the possum.

The call crackled through his radio at 7:15 AM on a gray October morning, the kind of day where fog clung to the hollows and made everything look uncertain.

"Got another mess for you, Jack," Tracy's voice carried that familiar note of weary resignation. "Mile marker 108. Possum this time. Lady called it in around six, said it was pretty bad."

Jack's coffee had gone cold in his hand. Mile marker 108. Four miles south of where the deer had vanished. Still on his route, still in that stretch where the woods pressed closest to the asphalt.

"Copy that," he'd said, setting down his mug with fingers that weren't quite steady. "On my way."

The drive to 108 felt longer than usual, each familiar curve and dip seeming to stretch out before him. Jack found himself checking his mirrors more often, though for what, he couldn't say. The woods looked different in the morning mist—deeper, somehow. More secretive.

He found the stain easily enough. Same size as before, maybe a little smaller. Same dark, uniform circle that looked like someone had dumped a bucket of something thick and organic onto the blacktop. Same wrong smell drifting up from the wet asphalt.

No possum.

Jack stood beside his truck for five full minutes, studying the scene. The fog was lifting, revealing the familiar landscape of his route—guardrails he'd repaired, potholes he'd patched, mile markers he could navigate blindfolded. Everything normal except for the impossible absence at his feet.

This time, he searched more thoroughly. He walked both sides of the road for a hundred yards in each direction, checked the culverts, even pushed into the underbrush despite the thorns that caught at his coveralls. A possum was smaller than a deer, easier to carry off, but still—thirty pounds of dead weight didn't just disappear without a trace.

His radio crackled. "Jack, you there?"

"Yeah, Tracy. I'm here."

"How's it looking? Need the hose truck?"

Jack stared at the stain, watching the last wisps of fog curl around his boots. "Tracy, there's no possum."

A pause. "Come again?"

"Same as the deer three weeks ago. There's a mess, but no animal."

He heard Tracy sigh, the sound crackling through static. "Jesus, Jack. Somebody's beating you to the cleanup. Got to be. Maybe old Henderson from down the road—you know how he is about free meat."

Henderson. Jack knew him—a grizzled man in his seventies who lived in a trailer surrounded by auto parts and raccoon traps. The kind of person who might indeed brave a foggy highway for roadkill.

"Maybe," Jack said, but the word felt like lying.

Two weeks later, it was a raccoon at mile marker 115. Same story—mess without a source, stain without a cause. Jack didn't bother searching this time. He just hosed down the asphalt and filed his report, noting "debris removed" without specifying what debris or where it had gone.

Tracy started asking questions.

"Jack, you sure you're not missing something out there? Three incidents, three no-shows. That's either the strangest coincidence I've seen in fifteen years, or you're losing your touch."

They were sitting in the county maintenance building, a cinder block structure that smelled of motor oil and stale coffee. Tracy's office was barely bigger than a closet, its walls covered with duty rosters and safety regulations that nobody read. Jack sat across from her desk, feeling like a student called to the principal's office.

"I'm not missing anything," he said. "Whatever happened to those animals, it happened before I got there."

"Then why are people calling in fresh kills? You think they're lying?"

Jack shifted in the uncomfortable plastic chair. "Maybe they're seeing shadows. Dark shapes on the road, assuming the worst. You know how it is on these country highways—people's imaginations run wild."

Tracy leaned back, studying him with eyes that had seen thirty years of municipal bureaucracy. "Your incident reports are getting thin, Jack. County's already talking budget cuts. They see a maintenance tech who's not maintaining much, they start asking questions I can't answer."

The threat hung between them like smoke. Jack had seen other techs let go over the years—men with families, mortgages, obligations he'd never taken on. His own needs were simple, but unemployment at sixty-one wasn't a prospect he relished.

"I'll find more work," he said.

"You better. Dead animals don't clean themselves up, and if they're disappearing before you get there, maybe you need to get there faster."

Jack drove his route that afternoon with new urgency, looking for anything that needed fixing. A loose guardrail bracket. Broken reflector posts. Minor pothole repairs that could wait until spring but would look good on a report. Busy work to justify his existence.

But as he drove, he found himself slowing at each mile marker between 108 and 115. Studying the woods that pressed against the roadway like a living wall. The trees were mostly bare now, October having stripped away their leaves, revealing the gray architecture of branches beneath. In the failing light, the forest looked different—not empty, exactly, but watchful.

He stopped at mile marker 112, scene of the first disappearance. Got out of his truck and stood where the deer stain had been, now scrubbed clean by weeks of rain and traffic. The woods stretched away on both sides, deeper than they had any right to be. Jack had grown up in these hills, knew every logging road and hunting trail for miles around. But standing here in the growing dusk, the forest felt infinite.

That's when he noticed the silence.

Not the comfortable quiet of evening settling over the countryside, but something deeper. More complete. No rustle of small animals in the underbrush. No birds calling from the canopy. No insects buzzing in the tall grass. Even the wind seemed to have died, leaving the air perfectly still.

Jack stood motionless, listening to nothing. The silence pressed against his eardrums like water, so absolute it made him dizzy. He'd never experienced anything like it—not in three decades of working these roads, not in a lifetime of Virginia forests.

Then, from somewhere in the trees, came the soft crack of a branch breaking under weight.

Jack's head snapped toward the sound. The woods looked the same—gray trunks disappearing into shadow, bare branches creating a lattice of darkness. But something was moving in there. Something careful and deliberate, picking its way through the underbrush with practiced stealth.

Another branch cracked, closer this time. Then another, the sounds forming a rough line parallel to the highway. Whatever it was, it was keeping pace with him.

Jack got back in his truck faster than dignity allowed, his hands shaking as he turned the key. The engine turned over with a reassuring rumble, breaking the unnatural quiet. He pulled back onto the highway and drove toward town, checking his mirrors every few seconds.

The woods fell behind him, but the feeling of being watched lingered like a bad taste. By the time he reached the maintenance building, full darkness had settled over the county. Jack sat in his truck for a long moment, staring at the building's fluorescent lights and trying to convince himself that what he'd experienced was normal. Rural highways were full of wildlife. Deer, certainly. Bears, possibly. Even the occasional mountain lion, though they were rare in Virginia.

But as he finally climbed out of his truck and locked the door, Jack couldn't shake the certainty that what had been watching him from the woods was something else entirely. Something that understood the value of silence, and patience, and the perfect timing required to make things disappear without a trace.

The next morning brought another call—a fox at mile marker 110—and Jack drove toward it with the slow, reluctant pace of a man approaching his own execution.

The pattern was becoming clear, even if the reason behind it remained hidden in the shadows between the trees.