Chapter 8: An Echo on the Blacktop

The Arizona retirement community had been designed to erase the past. Red tile roofs and manicured lawns stretched beneath endless blue sky, every street named after some southwestern flora—Saguaro Drive, Desert Willow Lane, Palo Verde Circle. It was a place where former lives dissolved into golf games and book clubs, where the only urgency came from early bird dinner specials and scheduled shuttle trips to the grocery store.

Jack Riley had been living in this carefully cultivated paradise for six years, and he hated every sanitized minute of it.

Not that he could complain. The modest pension from Warren County had stretched further in Arizona than it would have in Virginia. His two-bedroom ranch house came with a small yard he didn't have to maintain and neighbors who smiled politely before returning to their own business. It should have been peaceful. It should have been the reward for thirty-two years of faithful service.

Instead, it felt like exile.

The problem wasn't the heat or the retirement community's suffocating cheerfulness. The problem was that Arizona couldn't hold his dreams. Every night, Jack's sleeping mind drifted east across two thousand miles of highway to a twelve-mile stretch of Virginia blacktop where impossible things moved through darkness with predatory purpose.

He'd wake in the small hours, sheets soaked with sweat that had nothing to do with desert temperature, his mind full of fog and tall figures and the wet sound of metal being peeled away like skin. The dreams were getting worse, more vivid, as if distance had somehow sharpened his memories instead of dulling them.

This particular morning found him on his back patio at 5 AM, coffee growing cold in his hands as he stared across the retirement community toward distant mountains. Somewhere out there, beyond the carefully planned neighborhoods and championship golf courses, the real world continued its messy, dangerous business. People drove dark highways and encountered things they couldn't explain. People disappeared.

And Jack Riley, who might be the only person who understood why, sat in enforced retirement two thousand miles away.

His laptop waited on the patio table where he'd left it the night before, screen dark but somehow accusatory. The internet had become both salvation and torment—a window into the world he'd abandoned, a daily reminder of his own cowardice. He told himself he was staying informed, keeping up with news from Virginia. But really, he was searching for patterns, looking for signs that the Collectors were still active.

Looking for evidence that his silence had consequences.

Jack opened the laptop and navigated to the website for the Warren County Herald, a weekly paper that covered local news with the thoroughness of a small town where everyone knew everyone else's business. Usually, the headlines were reassuringly mundane: school board meetings, church fundraisers, high school football scores.

Today was different.

The top story hit him like a physical blow: "Young Man Missing After Late-Night Crash on Route 340."

Jack's coffee mug slipped from nerveless fingers, shattering against the concrete patio. But he barely noticed, his entire attention focused on the article that might as well have been written about events from decades past.

"Michael Chen, 23, of Richmond, was reported missing after his vehicle was discovered overturned in a ditch near mile marker 112 on Sunday morning. Chen's 2019 Honda Civic showed evidence of a single-vehicle accident, but the driver was not found at the scene.

"'We're treating this as a missing person case,' said Sheriff's Deputy Janet Morrison. 'It's possible Mr. Chen was disoriented after the crash and wandered away seeking help. We're conducting a thorough search of the surrounding area.'

"The accident occurred on a section of Route 340 that has seen several incidents over the past few years..."

Jack's hands shook as he scrolled down, looking for more details. Mile marker 112. The same stretch of highway where he'd witnessed impossibility, where creatures that shouldn't exist had emerged from darkness to claim the dead and dying. The same section where animals had been vanishing months before that, cleaned up by things that moved without sound and lifted weight without effort.

It was happening again. Had never stopped happening.

The article was brief, offering few details beyond the basic facts. But Jack didn't need details. He knew exactly what had happened to Michael Chen, could picture the sequence of events with horrible clarity. A young man driving alone at night, maybe tired from a long trip, maybe distracted by his phone or the radio. A moment's inattention, a curve taken too fast, the sick sensation of losing control.

Then the crash. The broken glass and twisted metal. The brief window of consciousness before help could arrive.

Except help didn't arrive on that section of Route 340. Not the kind that carried people to hospitals and filed accident reports and asked questions about insurance coverage.

Other help came instead. Tall figures that moved through darkness with predatory patience, that spoke in wet voices and conducted their business with the efficiency of long practice. They would have found Michael Chen injured but alive, trapped in his overturned Honda like a gift waiting to be unwrapped.

And Jack Riley, who might have prevented it, had been watering his desert garden two thousand miles away.

The laptop screen blurred as Jack's eyes filled with tears he hadn't allowed himself to shed in six years. All the rationalization, all the careful justification for his silence and flight, crumbled beneath the weight of four simple words: "the driver was not found."

Another victim. Another family that would never know what really happened to someone they loved. Another addition to the Collectors' tally, made possible by his cowardice.

Jack wiped his eyes and read the article again, looking for any detail that might suggest hope. But the facts were grimly familiar. Single-vehicle accident in a remote section of highway. Driver missing despite extensive search efforts. No witnesses, no evidence of foul play, no explanation that satisfied common sense.

It was the same pattern he'd witnessed years ago, the same methodical cleanup that left investigators baffled and families devastated. The only difference was that now he understood what they were dealing with, and he was doing nothing about it.

The retirement community was stirring to life around him—early risers heading out for morning walks, sprinkler systems activating with mechanical precision, the distant sound of golf carts beginning their daily migration toward the clubhouse. Normal people living normal lives, blissfully unaware that somewhere in Virginia, things that defied explanation were conducting their ancient business on a stretch of highway that most maps didn't even bother to name.

Jack closed the laptop and sat in the growing Arizona heat, feeling the weight of six years' worth of accumulated guilt settling on his shoulders like a lead blanket. He'd told himself that running was survival, that staying silent was wisdom, that one man couldn't make a difference against forces so large and terrible.

But Michael Chen's empty car argued otherwise. Michael Chen's family, waiting for news that would never come, argued otherwise.

The Collectors were still active, still hunting, still claiming victims on a highway where Jack Riley had once cleaned up after ordinary accidents and dealt with normal problems. They had adapted to his absence, found new ways to avoid detection, continued their work without the interference of a county maintenance man who'd glimpsed too much.

And they would keep doing it until someone stopped them.

Jack stood up, his decision crystallizing with the sudden clarity that comes when procrastination finally meets consequence. He walked inside, past the comfortable furniture and climate-controlled air, to the bedroom where he kept his travel bag.

It took ten minutes to pack—work clothes, a few personal items, the emergency cash he'd been saving for some undefined future crisis. He moved with the mechanical precision of someone who'd made an irrevocable choice, not allowing himself to think about the comfortable life he was abandoning or the dangers he was driving toward.

By 6 AM, he was on the road.

The retirement community receded in his rearview mirror, red tile roofs and artificial palm trees giving way to open desert and then interstate highway. Jack drove east with the sun rising behind him, his GPS showing thirty-six hours to Warren County, Virginia.

Thirty-six hours to prepare for a confrontation he should have faced six years ago.

Thirty-six hours to figure out how one man could fight creatures that existed in the spaces between official acknowledgment and scientific possibility.

But as the Arizona landscape blurred past his windows, Jack felt something he hadn't experienced since that night at mile marker 110: purpose. For six years, he'd been running from the truth. Now he was driving toward it, armed with nothing but guilty conscience and the certain knowledge that Michael Chen deserved better than an empty car and unanswered questions.

The Collectors had marked him once as a witness to their activities. Now he would see what they made of him as an adversary.

Route 340 was waiting, just as he'd left it.

The hunt was about to begin.