Hollow Creek
The road that goes in doesn’t always come out.
Forest || Isolation || Danger
Hollow Creek Road was not on any map she could find online. It appeared, however, in a 1973 county survey that the librarian — a small, watchful woman named Mrs. Okafor — produced from a locked cabinet with the air of someone handing over a weapon. The road ran northeast from the edge of town, through twelve miles of second-growth pine forest, and terminated at a location marked only with an X and the notation: RF tower — decommissioned 1991. Access restricted.
Elena drove out the following morning before dawn, her recording equipment on the passenger seat and her phone fully charged. The road existed, barely: two tire tracks separated by a spine of weeds, swallowed on both sides by tree trunks that thickened as she drove deeper. The signal grew stronger on her portable receiver. Clearer. The voice, when it came this time, lasted nearly four seconds: “They buried the transmitter in the foundation. The foundation is still active. If you’re hearing this it means the loop hasn’t broken yet — which means I haven’t—” Static. The heartbeat resumed.
She stopped the car when she saw the gate. Eight feet of chain-link topped with razor wire, padlocked with a combination lock that looked new. A sign read: PRIVATE PROPERTY — SILO MERIDIAN INC — NO TRESPASSING — SURVEILLANCE IN OPERATION. She photographed it. Then she sat in her car, engine idling, and looked at the trees beyond the gate. Something hung from a branch twenty feet in — a small orange flag, the kind surveyors used. And beside it, barely visible: a second flag. And beyond that, she thought, a third. Someone was marking a path. Someone who expected someone else to follow it.
She turned the car around and drove back to town. But she was already making plans.