The county road thinned into a cracked spur, weeds creeping through tar seams like veins reclaiming a corpse. They left the depot behind with the jerrycans clanking soft against thighs, every drop inside them a promise of distance and fire. The morning had finally chosen sides: pale light bled through the pines, sharpening edges, pulling shadows long and brittle.
The spur led them to a set of stone pillars at the mouth of a cul-de-sac. On each pillar hung a sun-bleached banner, corners flapping weakly: WELCOME TO ASPEN RIDGE — HOMES STARTING IN THE 300s. The font smiled too wide, as if it hadn't been told the buyers never came. Behind the pillars, asphalt looped around lots where foundations had been poured but no frames raised. Concrete pads lay naked, chalk lines still visible, rebar bent like fingers half-buried in weeds.
"They sold dreams here," Madison muttered. "Not houses."
"And the dreams foreclosed," Margo said.
The first pad bore spray paint: KEEP OUT in frantic red. Another farther on read: HELP. The word had been crossed through in black, so deep the strokes cut into the concrete.
"Do we keep moving?" Riley asked, her voice thin with fatigue. The brick bag dug into her shoulder; she adjusted the strap and grimaced.
"We keep moving until the road stops pretending to be a road," Margo said.
They threaded between pads, grass brushing knees, rebar snagging sleeves. At the end of the loop, where the builders had left a drainage pond half-dug, someone had raised walls. Not homes, not official, but barricades built of pallets, drywall sheets, a line of SUVs parked nose-to-nose. Beyond, the skeleton of a two-story house stood. Framed but never finished, its beams exposed to weather, plywood walls sagging, Tyvek wrap flapping like ghost-skin.
Madison squinted. "Camp?"
"Once," Margo said. She pointed to the roofline. A banner sagged between rafters, daubed in tar: WE LISTEN TOO.
Riley sucked air. "Them?"
"Not ours," Margo said. "Maybe cousins. Maybe idiots." She crouched and studied the ground. Shoe prints, dried hard. Some small, some bare. No drag marks. No wheel tracks. "They moved. Or they were moved."
Gavin scanned the barricade. Something hung on the SUV grill—shapes tied in a row. Shirts. Children's shirts, bright colors bleached pale. A yellow T-shirt with a dinosaur. A pink hoodie. A soccer jersey with numbers peeling.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Madison muttered.
"Warning," Margo said. "Or liturgy. Maybe both."
They slipped along the barricade's shadow, every eye checking rafters for a glint of scope. None showed. The subdivision was a graveyard that had never earned bodies. Just plans, aborted mid-sentence.
Then Gavin froze. "Listen."
The air ahead wasn't empty. It carried rhythm. Not footsteps. Not words. Knocks. Faint, deliberate, out of sight.
Riley went pale. "They're here."
"Not them," Margo said, her voice harder than steel. "Humans. Or what's left that still thinks it is."
The knocks continued. Three quick, one pause, then two. A pattern.
From inside the skeleton house, a voice answered: "We listen."
Margo stiffened. The voice was human, hoarse, a woman's. But the timing—too sharp, too precise.
She motioned low: stay down. They crouched behind the SUV wall, hearts pounding against ribs.
Another voice followed, male, cracked but firm. "We don't repeat. We don't teach."
Riley whispered, "That's their creed."
Madison wiped sweat from his beard. "Or a trap."
Silence. Then wood creaked. Steps, slow, deliberate, overhead in the unfinished skeleton. Gavin lifted his revolver, checked instinctively—empty. He gritted his teeth. The cleaver would have to speak for him.
Margo gestured: wait. She slipped forward alone, melting into shadows, climbing a gap between pallets like a rumor nobody chased. Gavin clenched fists but didn't move. Riley mouthed prayers without sound. Madison counted knuckles against his thigh.
From inside the house, a sound rose: a whistle. Two notes, uncertain, wavering. Then again, steadier. It drifted through plywood walls, bounced between beams.
Riley's face twisted. "That's not human."
The whistle repeated, exactly, no error this time. Then came the word, low and strangled but clear: Please.
Madison hissed. "It's them."
Before Margo could return, the whistle answered itself from deeper in the subdivision. Then another. Then another. Echoes. No—rehearsals.
Shapes emerged from between the pads. Five, then eight. Tall, thin, moving with the confidence of people who'd learned what walking was by watching films. Each carried something in their hands—pieces of wood, pipes, even a broken 2x4. They didn't swing them. They held them the way humans carried tools.
Riley's whisper shivered: "They're practicing us."
Gavin's knuckles whitened on the cleaver. "Then we leave."
Margo appeared again, breathless, face taut. "Back. Now. They own this ground."
They retreated, steps careful, even, not rushed. The shapes did not follow. They only watched, and the whistles braided together into a single tune, ugly and determined, like a choir that had learned the words but not the meaning.
When they reached the county road, Margo didn't stop until the banners and pads and shirts were far behind. Only then did she speak, voice low and final.
"That subdivision never lived," she said. "But something else did. And it remembers."