Jack Mercer had been on the road since dusk, running a long-haul job that took him across a stretch of desert most truckers avoided when they could. The route wasn’t unsafe so much as unnerving. It had no towns for miles, no reliable radio signals, no lights except the ones you carried with you. Some nights the sky felt heavy with the kind of darkness that didn’t just obscure things—it swallowed them.
He sat forward in his seat as the minutes dragged past two in the morning, rolling his stiff shoulders and wiping a thumb along the cracked dashboard. His coffee had gone lukewarm ages ago, but he kept it in his hand anyway. Anything to stave off the creeping sense that something was edging closer the deeper he went into the empty miles.
The desert wasn’t even beautiful at night. It was colourless, stretching into nothing on both sides of the road, its scrub and sand blending into one long sheet of grey. His headlights cast a blunt cone of light ahead, showing only the broken line of the tarmac and the occasional warped highway marker that had been battered by years of weather.
Then, without warning, the air in the cab shifted. Jack felt it more than he heard it. A subtle pressure, as though the space around him had tightened. The engine produced a harsh metallic groan, the kind that suggested something in the guts of the machine knew something was wrong even if he didn’t. The CB radio hissed, then fell silent, then hissed again with a crackle that resembled breathing.
Jack frowned and tapped the face of the radio. “Don’t start with this now,” he muttered, aware of how thin his voice sounded in the quiet.
The headlights dimmed for half a second. Not enough for total darkness—just enough to make his eyes strain to adjust. Ahead, the reflective strip of the mile marker glinted. 19.
He slowed for a better look.
There, standing dead centre in the road, was a figure. It wasn’t hunched or animal-shaped. It was upright—far too upright. Jack tried to convince himself it was a hitchhiker. Someone stranded. But even from a distance, he could tell something was off. Its posture was too fixed, too perfectly straight, as though it had been planted there rather than walking into place.
Jack eased his foot onto the brake. The truck rumbled gently as it decelerated, and that gave him a moment to notice the way the figure’s outline rippled, just a little. A shimmer, as though it drifted out of sync with the rest of the world.
He gave a short blast of the horn. The shape didn’t move from the middle of the road.
Then the figure lifted its head.
Jack felt the air leave him. Its face was wrong. Blurred, distorted, lacking any proper features. He couldn’t pick out eyes or a mouth, but he felt watched all the same. A tension crept across his scalp. He didn’t believe in ghosts, didn’t believe in anything except worn tyres, scheduled stops and the comfort of routine, but something about that face, if it could be called a face, cut through every certainty he’d ever held.
He told himself to drive straight through. Whatever it was, it could move. It could step aside if it wanted to. He pressed the accelerator.
The figure unfolded. That was the only word Jack could think of afterwards. It didn’t step or sidestep; it lengthened. Arms extending far beyond what limbs should allow, body stretching in one smooth, hideous movement. Just as he reached it, it slipped out of the path of the truck with a grace that felt unnatural, brushing along the side of the trailer with a sound like fabric catching on nails.
The cab lights surged to full brightness, flooding the interior with a fierce glare. The radio emitted a shrill burst, making Jack flinch and slam on the brakes.
He checked the mirrors.
The figure now stood behind the truck, framed in the glow of the brake lights. It hadn’t turned around. It just appeared there, facing him, its featureless face lifted slightly, as if matching his gaze.
Then it started to move after him.
Jack’s heart jolted. He accelerated until the tyres whined, but the figure didn’t fall behind. It glided across the tarmac so smoothly that it barely seemed to touch it. The faster he drove, the closer it drew, its elongated silhouette gaining definition with each passing second, as though approaching it sharpened its shape.
A burst of static tore through the CB, and a voice whispered from the speaker; not quite human, not quite distant. One word: “Returned.”
The sound crawled along Jack’s skin. He twisted the volume dial to zero, but the whisper seemed to echo in the cab regardless.
He pushed the truck harder than he should have. The road dropped abruptly just after the next marker, a sudden dip followed by a long bend. Jack took the decline too fast, the truck rattling violently. For a moment, the trailer’s weight threatened to tip the whole rig sideways. But the skid gave him something unexpected: distance. The figure lagged behind, its form flickering before reappearing further back on the crest of the road.
Jack spotted a faint cluster of lights ahead, the outline of a highway maintenance depot. A scrap of civilisation after miles of nothing.
He aimed the shuddering truck towards it. Gravel sprayed beneath the wheels as he pulled into the forecourt, the engine coughing like an animal on its last breath before it cut out completely.
Silence swallowed everything.
Jack sat there, gripping the wheel, waiting for the shape to emerge from the dark. The road remained empty. He couldn’t decide whether the sight calmed or terrified him more.
Climbing down from the cab with unsteady legs, he approached the depot’s door. It was locked, of course. He knocked anyway, not because he expected someone to answer, but because doing something, anything, felt better than standing still.
A knock came back from the other side. Slow. Measured. Too heavy to be human knuckles.
Jack stepped away from the door, throat tightening. The air shifted again, the same pressure he’d felt before the figure appeared in the road.
The door creaked. Only a fraction, but enough for a thin strip of absolute darkness to show through, deeper than the night around him.
The smell of heated metal drifted across the forecourt.
A whisper followed, close enough that it felt like it rose from the ground beneath his feet. “Returned.”
Jack ran, not towards the truck, not towards the road, but into the vast dark desert beyond the forecourt. His instincts didn’t care where he went, only that he fled.
Behind him, the depot door opened wider. Something stepped out, and the lights flickered as if the power grid itself recoiled from it.
The desert was vast and empty, offering no real safety. Jack knew that. He ran anyway, breath tearing at his lungs, the ground shifting beneath his boots.
He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. He could hear it following. And the night had never felt so endless.
Jack didn’t realise how long he’d been running until the ground beneath his boots changed texture. The gravel from the depot’s forecourt gave way to the packed, cracked earth of the open desert. His legs burned with every step, breath slicing in and out of his lungs in ragged bursts. The night wrapped around him like a second skin; vast, cold, and indifferent.
He risked a look back.
The depot stood harmlessly in the glow of its exterior floodlights, but something about the brightness seemed wrong. The light didn’t stretch as far as it should. It clung to the building but refused to spill properly across the ground, as though the darkness surrounding it had thickened.
Jack couldn’t see what had come through the door. Nothing moved. But the absence of movement was worse than if something had been advancing openly. It meant the desert was keeping a secret from him.
He slowed only when his lungs demanded it. The desert floor sloped gently downwards, and he found himself standing in a shallow basin where the moonlight pooled weakly. Sagebrush and brittle clumps of grass dotted the landscape in awkward clusters. The isolation pressed hard on him. He listened for any sound: wind, shifting sand, the groan of metal from the depot, but the desert held its breath.
Jack bent forward, hands on his knees, and tried to steady himself. Sweat chilled on his skin despite the dry air.
“What the hell was that thing…” He spoke aloud because silence felt like an invitation for something else to answer.
He straightened slowly, scanning the horizon. He needed a plan. Running aimlessly into the desert was hardly a strategy. His truck was back at the depot, but going back now felt suicidal. There had to be a highway patrol outpost somewhere up the route. He’d passed a sign earlier, faded, unreadable in the dark, but he remembered the shape of it. If he followed the road north, he might reach help.
He walked with purpose now, forcing his feet into a steady rhythm. The desert’s coolness seeped through his boots, grounding him slightly. He kept one eye on the ribbon of highway that ran parallel to his path. The road felt safer than the open terrain; at least it offered direction. He made his way towards the shoulder, climbing the slight incline until he reached the cracked asphalt.
Nothing about the road had changed, yet everything felt altered. The white line looked sharper than before, almost too crisp, as though it had been painted again while he wasn’t looking. The silence pressed against his ears so firmly that he found himself whispering a test sound, just to make sure he hadn’t gone deaf.
He walked. The darkness ahead thickened with every step, almost as if his progress stirred it. The moon sank behind a thin veil of clouds, leaving the desert dimmer and more watchful.
After ten minutes, he saw it: a truck, pulled over on the right-hand side, hazard lights blinking faintly. Relief rushed through him so intensely that his knees nearly buckled. Another driver. Someone sane. Someone real.
He jogged the last stretch, lifting his arm in greeting. As he drew close, the truck’s details sharpened—the shape of the cab, the mud-splattered bumper, the pattern of rust across the steps.
Jack stopped dead.
It was his truck.
It sat neatly at the roadside as though he’d parked it himself, perfectly aligned with the white line. No dents. No cracks. No sign of the violent sprint he’d made into the desert.
The engine wasn’t running, but the hazard lights pulsed softly, steadily, like a heartbeat.
Jack backed away, eyes wide. He looked behind him, half-expecting to see the depot in the distance, but there was only the highway stretching endlessly in both directions. No buildings. No lights. Nothing but the desert.
The truck door clicked.
He froze.
The door didn’t swing open fully. It eased out just a fraction, enough to show a sliver of the dark interior. From inside came a soft tapping—a faint, rhythmic sound, as though someone were drumming their fingers against the dashboard.
Jack shook his head, panic rising in a painful wave. He stepped back until his heel snagged on uneven asphalt. He almost fell.
The tapping stopped.
A different sound followed, low and steady, like slow breathing through a narrow space.
Something shifted inside the cab. Not much. Just enough for the shadows to rearrange themselves.
Jack stood rooted in place. The truck no longer felt like a machine. It felt inhabited. Occupied by something that understood he couldn’t run forever.
He forced himself away from it, turning sharply and heading north along the road, never letting the truck out of his peripheral vision until distance swallowed it. His pulse thundered in his ears. Every few steps, he checked the horizon. The desert looked unchanged, but the air around him had grown heavy again.
The sense of being followed clung to him like heat.
He didn’t see the next building until he was practically on top of it. A low structure appeared at the edge of his vision—isolated, windowless, half-buried in sand drifts. A former weigh station, maybe. The government had abandoned most of them years back.
Jack approached cautiously, circling until he found the old service door. The sign was so faded that it had become pale lines on metal. He tried the handle. It resisted, then gave with a reluctant groan.
Inside, the darkness swallowed the beam of his torch almost immediately. The air smelled stale, touched with the faint sourness of long-dried coolant and rusting machinery. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him, leaning his weight against it, heart pounding.
He swept the torch across the room. The beam revealed a counter, a row of cabinets, a bank of silent monitors coated in dust, and a scattering of ancient paperwork stuck together by humidity. Nothing threatening. Nothing alive.
He let out a slow breath, lowering himself behind the counter. The floor was gritty beneath his palms, but at least it was solid. He listened for footsteps, sliding movement, anything that might suggest the thing had followed him here.
Nothing.
For several minutes, he stayed completely still, letting the quiet settle around him. His breathing steadied. The pressure in his chest eased.
When a sound finally came, it was so soft he almost believed he’d imagined it.
A scrape.
From outside the door.
He lifted his head, listening harder. Another scrape followed, deliberate and close, as though fingers were testing the edges of the metal.
Jack clenched his jaw, suppressing a groan of frustration and fear. He scanned the room quickly for anything he could use as a weapon—a pipe, a rusted crowbar, even a screwdriver—but the weigh station had been stripped of almost everything useful.
The scrape came again, followed by a slow, unmistakable push.
The door’s hinges creaked.
Jack rose to his feet. His pulse hammered beneath his skin. The torchlight trembled as he raised it towards the entrance.
The door opened a few inches.
No face appeared. No arm reached through.
Instead, a voice seeped into the room. Not booming. Not whispering. A steady, emotionless tone that sounded as though it came from everywhere at once.
“Returned.”
Jack backed away, understanding, finally, clearly, that running was no longer an escape. The desert, the truck, the depot, the weigh station, they were shifting around him, closing in like the tightening walls of a maze.
The thing didn’t just follow him.
It moved the world to keep him close.
Gareth Ellis - Author 