Chapter 7: The Weight of a Lie

The transfer paperwork sat on Tracy's desk like an accusation. Jack watched her read through the medical forms, the request for route reassignment, the carefully worded explanation citing head trauma and ongoing neurological concerns. Each page turned felt like another step away from Route 340 and the impossible things that haunted its mile markers.

"This is sudden," Tracy said, not looking up from the documents. "Last week you were worried about keeping your job. Now you want to transfer to the northern district?"

Jack shifted in the uncomfortable plastic chair, the same one where he'd sat through months of meetings about budget cuts and productivity reports. "Doctor says I need to avoid stress. Familiar locations can trigger... episodes. Memory flashbacks from the accident."

It wasn't entirely a lie. The emergency room physician had mentioned that trauma victims sometimes experienced anxiety when returning to accident sites. Jack was simply extrapolating that medical advice into a career decision.

Tracy finally looked up, studying him with the shrewd eyes of someone who'd spent three decades navigating county bureaucracy. "Jack, you've been working Route 340 since before I became supervisor. You know every pothole, every guardrail, every troublesome intersection. Starting over on unfamiliar roads seems like it would be more stressful, not less."

"I need a change," Jack said, surprised by the firmness in his own voice. "What happened out there... it's affected me more than I initially realized."

Tracy leaned back in her chair, fingers drumming against the desk. Through her office window, Jack could see the maintenance yard where county trucks sat in neat rows, waiting for their daily assignments. Normal vehicles for normal work, cleaning up ordinary messes that made sense.

"The thing is, Jack, I've got a problem. County commissioners approved the budget cuts we talked about. I managed to keep your position, but it came with conditions."

Jack's stomach dropped. "What kind of conditions?"

"Your route stays your route. They don't want to pay for the learning curve that comes with reassigning experienced personnel. You know 340 better than anyone else in the department. From their perspective, moving you anywhere else is inefficient."

The words hit him like physical blows. He'd spent weeks crafting his escape plan, researching transfer procedures, preparing medical justifications. The idea that bureaucratic efficiency might trap him on the very highway he was desperately trying to avoid had never occurred to him.

"There has to be flexibility," Jack said. "Medical accommodation, worker's compensation—"

"Sure, if you want to file a formal claim and go through months of paperwork and evaluations. County lawyers, insurance investigators, psychological assessments." Tracy's expression was sympathetic but unyielding. "Is that really what you want? Because once you start down that path, there's no guarantee you'll have a job at the end of it."

Jack stared at the transfer paperwork, now seeming as fragile as tissue paper. At sixty-one, with limited savings and no other skills, unemployment wasn't just frightening—it was potentially catastrophic. He'd spent his entire adult life in county service, building toward a modest pension and basic health benefits. Walking away now would mean starting over with nothing.

"How long do I have to decide?"

"The reassignments take effect Monday. That's four days." Tracy gathered the papers and slid them back across the desk. "Jack, I don't know what's really going on with you, but I've seen good people make bad decisions when they're scared. Whatever happened at that accident scene, don't let it destroy thirty years of solid work."

Jack took the paperwork and walked out to his truck in a daze. Four days to choose between financial ruin and returning to a highway where impossible things moved through darkness with predatory purpose. Four days to decide whether he was brave enough to risk everything on the slim chance that someone, somewhere, might believe his story.

By the time he reached home, the decision felt inevitable. He couldn't afford to quit, couldn't risk the bureaucratic maze of worker's compensation claims, couldn't start over at sixty-one with nothing but memories of creatures that shouldn't exist.

He was trapped.

That evening, Jack sat at his kitchen table with a beer and Deputy Morrison's business card, turning the rectangle of cardboard over in his fingers like a talisman. The deputy had seemed competent, professional. But even competent professionals had limits, and what Jack had witnessed stretched far beyond the boundaries of normal law enforcement.

He imagined the conversation: "Deputy, I need to amend my statement about the accident. I didn't lose consciousness from flying debris. I was struck by something that looked human but wasn't, something that emerged from the woods with five others of its kind to collect the bodies from the wreckage."

The response was predictable. More medical evaluations. Questions about his mental fitness. Possibly involuntary psychiatric hold if he pressed the issue too hard.

Jack finished his beer and put the business card in a kitchen drawer, beneath old utility bills and forgotten warranties. Some truths were too dangerous to tell, especially to people whose job required documentation and evidence and chains of custody that would never accommodate creatures that vanished into darkness like smoke.

The next four days passed in a haze of routine maintenance and mounting dread. Jack worked his usual schedule, checking equipment and updating paperwork, but his mind kept returning to Monday morning when he would have to drive Route 340 again. Past mile marker 110, where twisted metal and spilled blood had drawn things from the woods. Past the section where animals had been disappearing for months, where fog had concealed predators that moved without sound.

Sunday night brought no sleep. Jack lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to ordinary house sounds and trying to convince himself that what he'd witnessed had been hallucination or false memory. But every time he closed his eyes, he saw the tall figures moving through darkness with businesslike efficiency, heard the wet sound of metal being peeled away like skin.

Monday morning arrived gray and cold, winter settling over Virginia with the promise of months ahead. Jack dressed in his work clothes and drove to the maintenance building, nodding to coworkers who had no idea that their mundane world contained things that defied explanation.

Tracy was waiting in her office with coffee and what looked like genuine concern.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Fine," Jack lied. "Ready to get back to work."

She handed him his route assignment—the same stretch of highway he'd been covering for decades, now feeling like a prison sentence. "Take it slow today. If you need to come in early, don't hesitate to call."

Jack folded the assignment sheet and put it in his shirt pocket. "I'll be fine."

But as he drove toward Route 340, past familiar landmarks and through small towns where people lived normal lives unburdened by knowledge of predators in the woods, Jack knew he wouldn't be fine. He was returning to a hunting ground disguised as a highway, armed with nothing but a pickup truck and the certain knowledge that some things were better left undisturbed.

The Collectors—he still thought of them that way—had operated in secret for months, possibly years. They'd developed methods for cleaning up their activities, for avoiding detection, for making victims disappear without leaving evidence that would satisfy official investigation.

And now Jack Riley, the only witness to their true nature, was being forced back into their territory by economic necessity and bureaucratic inflexibility.

He reached mile marker 115 and began the slow patrol of his route, checking for overnight damage or debris that needed clearing. Normal work that felt anything but normal now that he knew what else used these twelve miles of asphalt for their own purposes.

The woods looked different in daylight—just trees and underbrush, ordinary Virginia forest that could conceal deer and rabbits and maybe the occasional black bear. But Jack had seen what emerged from those trees in darkness, and no amount of winter sunshine could erase that knowledge.

He was trapped between impossible truth and necessary silence, between duty and survival, between the job that defined him and the creatures that had marked him as a witness to their activities.

For the first time in thirty years, Jack Riley drove his route afraid.

And in that fear lay the seed of something larger—a guilt that would grow over the coming months and years, fed by every news report of missing persons and unexplained accidents, every driver who traveled Route 340 unaware of what watched them from the tree line.

Jack had chosen silence to protect his job, his pension, his modest future. But in making that choice, he'd also chosen to abandon everyone else who might encounter the Collectors to their fate.

It was a weight he would carry for the rest of his life, growing heavier with each passing day until it finally drove him back to the very highway he'd been too afraid to leave.

Some choices, Jack was learning, followed you forever.