Hollow Roads
When a forgotten civilization is uncovered beneath the western Antarctic ice, the world celebrates the greatest archaeological discovery in history—until the research team reveals something no one understands: an ancient geometric contagion embedded in the ruins, a force that doesn’t infect bodies but infects reality itself.
Within days, the “Hollow Virus” tears across the globe. Faults—zones where physics collapses—spread north from Antarctica like a second atmosphere. Buildings drift into the air. Streets fold into impossible shapes. People caught inside distort: some twist into violent, puppet-like aggressors, while others remain fully conscious but trapped in frozen, geometric paralysis. Hospitals overflow with victims who are not medically ill—but cosmically undone.
Humanity does what humans always do in apocalypse:
they run home.
The military deserts. Governments vanish. Emergency systems collapse. The world falls apart in a single night.
And in the middle of it stands Specialist Cole Larson—a lazy, hungover Montana National Guard soldier with no ambition and even less discipline. But when the activation order comes and he witnesses the chain of command disintegrate firsthand, he becomes one of the few still wearing a uniform.
Abandoned by leadership and “voluntold” to stay behind, Cole realizes he has no reason to remain in Montana at all. He doesn’t have a wife, kids, or anything close to a real future—just a mother somewhere in Los Angeles. Whether she’s alive doesn’t matter. Finding her gives him a direction to walk.
So he straps on his gear, pulls on his tan balaclava and shades, and becomes something the broken Northwest whispers about in fear:
Stillface—
the soldier with no reaction, no hesitation, and nothing left to lose.
Armed with a .22 MP5, a battered Polish AK, and the stubborn will to keep moving, Cole travels the hollowed highways of America. From Idaho to Washington to Oregon and down into the ruined skeleton of California, he crosses a wasteland where Faults tear the world open and Aberrants stalk the night.
The further he goes, the stranger he becomes—
less man, more myth.
On the cracked highways of a world unraveling, Cole Larson walks alone.
Not to save the world.
Not to save anyone.
Just to reach the end of the road, no matter what it holds.
