Chapter 4: A Rational Lie

For three weeks after the fog incident, Jack lived like a man waiting for execution. Every shadow seemed to move with purpose, every sound in the night carried the promise of something watching. He'd started sleeping with his bedroom door locked, though what good a flimsy interior lock would do against something that could make a fox vanish into thin air, he couldn't say.

The rational part of his mind—the part that had served him well through thirty years of practical work—kept insisting there had to be an explanation. Fog played tricks on the eyes. Adrenaline distorted perception. What he'd seen could have been a large dog, maybe a coyote, moving with the quick efficiency of a natural scavenger. The weightless way it had lifted the fox could have been an optical illusion, shadows and mist combining to create something that looked impossible but wasn't.

Jack clung to these explanations like a drowning man clutching driftwood, even as part of him knew he was lying to himself.

The calls had stopped coming. No more roadkill reports, no more mysterious stains at mile markers between 108 and 115. Tracy seemed pleased with the development.

"Maybe whatever was causing your phantom cleanup crew moved on," she said during their weekly check-in. "Animals follow patterns, you know. Migration routes, feeding schedules. Could be you just got caught in the middle of something seasonal."

Jack nodded and made agreeable sounds, but the absence of calls felt more ominous than their presence had. Whatever he'd disturbed in the fog, it had learned to be more careful. More secretive. The thought that it might be out there still, adapting its methods to avoid his notice, made his skin crawl.

But as November stretched into December with no incidents, Jack began to relax despite himself. The rational explanations started to seem more plausible. Rural Virginia was full of wildlife he didn't understand—predators and scavengers with behaviors that might seem strange to human eyes but made perfect sense in the context of survival. He'd been letting his imagination run wild, turning natural phenomena into something supernatural.

The realization came on a cold Thursday night in mid-December, as Jack drove home from a late shift repairing storm damage on the northern section of his route. He was tired, looking forward to a hot meal and maybe a beer, when his headlights caught movement on the roadside ahead.

An animal, maybe fifty yards away, hunched over something in the grass beside mile marker 113. Right in the heart of his problem zone.

Jack's blood went cold, but he forced himself to slow the truck rather than speed past. This was his chance. In full darkness, with high-beam headlights and a clear view, he could finally see what had been haunting his route.

He pulled to a stop twenty feet away and hit his emergency flashers, bathing the scene in alternating red and blue light. The animal looked up at him with eyes that reflected like mirrors in the headlight beam.

It was a mountain lion.

Jack's breath left him in a rush of relief so intense it made him dizzy. A mountain lion. A perfectly natural, perfectly explainable predator that could account for everything he'd witnessed. They were rare in Virginia but not unheard of, especially in the deeper forests where his route cut through undeveloped wilderness. And this one was obviously sick—painfully thin, its ribs visible beneath matted fur, moving with the careful deliberation of an animal on the edge of starvation.

The big cat stared at him for a long moment, caught between the truck's headlights like a deer. What it had been feeding on looked like a rabbit, probably road-killed earlier and missed by other scavengers. The lion's muzzle was dark with blood, but its eyes held the dull exhaustion of an animal pushed beyond its limits.

Jack reached for his radio to call it in, then stopped. A starving mountain lion this close to populated areas would bring out state wildlife officers with tranquilizer guns and relocation protocols. But looking at the emaciated creature, he doubted it would survive capture and transport. It was probably dying already, driven to feed on roadkill by desperation and the final stages of whatever illness had reduced it to skin and bones.

The humane thing would be to let nature take its course.

The mountain lion watched him for another few seconds, then picked up its meager meal and slipped back into the woods with liquid grace. Jack sat in his idling truck and felt the last three weeks of tension drain out of his shoulders like water.

There was his monster. There was his impossible creature that could make animals vanish without a trace. A sick, starving predator cleaning up roadkill before he could respond to the calls. The speed he'd attributed to supernatural forces was just the efficiency of a natural hunter. The silence was the practiced stealth of an apex predator. Even the way it had seemed to lift the fox without effort could be explained by adrenaline and the distorting effects of fog.

Jack pulled back onto the highway and drove home with something approaching peace for the first time in months. He'd let fear and isolation turn a perfectly normal wildlife encounter into something sinister. Rural highway maintenance brought you into contact with all kinds of animals—deer, bears, foxes, and yes, occasionally mountain lions. He'd been doing this job long enough to know better than to let his imagination run wild.

That night, he slept without leaving the lights on. For the first time since the fog incident, his dreams weren't full of hunched figures and impossible movements.

But in the morning, as he sat with his coffee and planned his route for the day, a small voice in the back of his mind whispered uncomfortable truths. The mountain lion had been emaciated, barely able to support its own weight. How could something that weak have been efficiently clearing thirty-pound deer carcasses? And the creature he'd seen in the fog had moved with predatory health, all coiled muscle and terrible purpose.

Jack pushed the thoughts away. He'd found his explanation, and it was a good one. Simple. Natural. The kind of solution that let him sleep at night and do his job without jumping at shadows.

The fact that it didn't quite fit all the evidence was something he chose not to think about.

Over the following days, Jack threw himself into his work with renewed energy. Winter brought its own challenges—ice damage to guardrails, salt corrosion on metal fixtures, potholes that would need attention come spring. Normal problems with normal solutions, the kind of work that had defined his career.

He drove past mile markers 108 through 115 with barely a glance. Just another stretch of highway now, no more threatening than any other section of his route. If he occasionally caught himself scanning the tree line or listening too carefully to the sounds from the woods, he attributed it to habit. The remnant of three weeks spent jumping at shadows.

The mountain lion explained everything. Sick animals behaved unpredictably, and predators followed food sources until they were exhausted. What he'd witnessed was nature being efficient, cleaning up its own messes before human intervention became necessary.

It was a rational explanation, and Jack Riley was a rational man.

But late at night, when the house was quiet and his guard was down, he sometimes found himself remembering the way the creature in the fog had looked directly at him. The intelligence in that gaze. The sense of being evaluated by something that understood far more than a starving mountain lion ever could.

Those moments, he told himself, were just the echo of old fears. The mind's reluctance to abandon a good mystery in favor of a mundane truth. He'd seen what he'd seen—an emaciated predator doing what predators do. Everything else was imagination, the product of too many years working alone on empty highways where the only company was whatever lived in the woods.

And if sometimes he woke in the small hours with the absolute certainty that he was lying to himself, well, some lies were necessary for survival. Some truths were too large and terrible to carry.

Jack had found his mountain lion, and he was going to hold onto it like a lifeline, no matter what his instincts whispered in the darkness.

The alternative—that something intelligent and organized was hunting on his highway, something that had seen him watching and marked him as a threat—was simply too dangerous to believe.

Even when it was true.