#Foundation Inspection Near Me
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Expert Foundation Inspection Services | Structural Engineers
Trust the proficiency of our skilled team for thorough foundation inspection services. Enhance your property's stability with our foundation inspection service.
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chphomeinspections · 4 months ago
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3dcinspppectiions77 · 6 months ago
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Home inspections services in Broadview IL
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3DC Inspections is your go-to home inspections services in Broadview IL. We provide thorough property assessments to safeguard your investments, offering detailed insights into a building's condition. Trust us for professional, reliable inspections tailored to your needs.
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foundationrepairtulsaus · 6 months ago
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Foundation Repair Tulsa brings professional structural restoration expertise to Oklahoma property owners, offering comprehensive services including foundation piering, crawl space repairs, and drainage solutions. Our certified technicians provide transparent, commission-free consultations.
Website: https://foundationrepairtulsa.co/
Address: 1432 N Main St, Tulsa, OK 74186, USA.
Phone: 15395491407.
Business Email: [email protected]
Operating Hours: 8am - 6pm.
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5staarfoundation · 6 months ago
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Signs Your Home Needs Foundation Repair Work
Is your home showing signs of foundation issues? Cracks in walls, uneven floors, sticking doors, or gaps around windows are common indicators that foundation repair might be necessary. Ignoring these signs can lead to costly damage and safety hazards. Protect your investment and maintain the structural integrity of your property today!
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nirvanabuilders · 8 months ago
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How to Identify Foundation Issues in Basements and Crawl Spaces
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Basements and crawl spaces are often the first areas where foundation problems become noticeable. Detecting these issues early can save homeowners from costly foundation repair and protect the integrity of the entire home. Understanding the signs of trouble in these spaces allows for timely action. Here’s how you can recognize potential foundation problems in your basement or crawl space.
1. Cracks in Basement Walls and Floors
Cracks in the walls or floors of your basement are common signs of foundation damage. While small, hairline cracks may result from natural settling, larger horizontal cracks often indicate pressure against the foundation walls. These larger cracks may signal serious structural issues that require professional foundation repair services. Be mindful of widening cracks or those that allow water to seep into the basement, as they often point to more severe problems.
2. Bowing or Bulging Walls in Crawl Spaces
In crawl spaces, walls that bow or bulge are a clear indicator of foundation stress. This often happens when soil pressure builds up against the exterior of the foundation, causing the walls to push inward. If left unaddressed, this issue can worsen, leading to the need for more extensive foundation repair. It’s crucial to consult a professional to assess the extent of the problem and find an effective solution.
3. Moisture and Water Damage
Excess moisture or standing water in basements and crawl spaces is a common sign of foundation issues. Water can enter through cracks or poorly sealed areas, leading to mold, mildew, and wood rot. These conditions not only weaken the foundation but can also affect indoor air quality. Before seeking foundation repair services, it’s important to address moisture problems with proper drainage and sealing to prevent recurring damage.
4. Uneven or Sagging Floors Above the Crawl Space
Uneven or sagging floors above a crawl space can indicate foundation issues. This problem typically occurs when the supports in the crawl space shift or settle unevenly, causing the floor above to become unstable. A professional assessment might reveal the need for slab foundation repair or reinforcement of support beams to correct the issue.
5. Musty Odors or Mold Growth
A musty smell or visible mold in your basement or crawl space is often a sign of excess moisture due to foundation problems. When water enters through cracks or poorly sealed areas, it creates an environment where mold can thrive. Addressing this issue with timely foundation repair can prevent further damage and improve the overall air quality in your home.
The Importance of Timely Foundation Repair
Addressing foundation problems in basements and crawl spaces early is crucial for maintaining your home’s stability and value. Delaying repairs can lead to more extensive damage, such as structural instability and higher repair costs. Consulting a foundation repair company at the first sign of trouble ensures that the issues are resolved before they escalate, keeping your home safe and secure.
Conclusion:
If you notice any of these warning signs in your basement or crawl space, it’s important to schedule a professional inspection. A trusted foundation repair company can identify the root cause of the issues and recommend the best solutions to keep your home stable and protected. Taking action early can prevent small problems from turning into major concerns, ensuring peace of mind for you and your family.
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foundationsolution1 · 10 months ago
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Concrete Caisson Foundations: A Comprehensive Guide by Foundation Solutions
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When it comes to constructing sturdy and reliable structures, the foundation plays a pivotal role in ensuring long-term stability and safety. One of the most effective methods for supporting heavy loads and navigating challenging soil conditions is the use of concrete caissons. At Foundation Solutions, we specialize in providing top-quality concrete caisson foundation services, tailored to meet the specific needs of each project. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the basics of concrete caissons, their applications, benefits, and why Foundation Solutions is your go-to provider for exceptional foundation services.
What Are Concrete Caissons?
Concrete caissons, also known as drilled shafts, are deep foundation elements constructed by drilling a cylindrical hole into the ground and filling it with reinforced concrete. These structures are designed to transfer heavy loads from a building or structure to deeper, more stable soil or rock layers. Concrete caissons are commonly used in various construction projects, including bridges, high-rise buildings, towers, and other heavy structures.
The Construction Process of Concrete Caissons
The construction of concrete caissons involves several key steps:
Site Assessment and Planning: Before construction begins, a thorough site assessment is conducted to evaluate soil conditions, load requirements, and any potential challenges. This information is crucial for determining the size, depth, and number of caissons needed.
Drilling the Shaft: A specialized drilling rig is used to create a cylindrical hole in the ground. The diameter and depth of the shaft depend on the load-bearing requirements and soil conditions.
Installing Reinforcement: Once the shaft is drilled, a steel reinforcement cage is lowered into the hole. This cage provides additional strength and stability to the caisson.
Pouring Concrete: Concrete is poured into the shaft, encasing the reinforcement cage. The concrete is typically poured continuously to prevent the formation of cold joints, ensuring a uniform and strong foundation element.
Curing and Inspection: After pouring, the concrete is allowed to cure and harden. The caisson is then inspected for any defects or irregularities.
Load Testing: In some cases, load testing may be performed to verify the caisson’s load-bearing capacity and ensure it meets design specifications.
Applications of Concrete Caissons
Concrete caissons are versatile foundation elements suitable for a wide range of applications, including:
Bridges: Caissons provide the necessary support for bridge piers, transferring loads to deeper, more stable soil layers.
High-Rise Buildings: For skyscrapers and other tall structures, caissons offer a reliable foundation solution capable of handling heavy vertical and lateral loads.
Towers and Masts: Communication towers, transmission masts, and similar structures benefit from the stability and strength of concrete caisson foundations.
Marine Structures: In coastal and offshore construction, caissons are used to support docks, piers, and other marine structures.
Retaining Walls: Caissons can be used in the construction of retaining walls, providing stability and preventing soil erosion.
Benefits of Concrete Caisson Foundations
Concrete caisson foundations offer numerous benefits, making them an ideal choice for various construction projects:
High Load-Bearing Capacity: Caissons can support extremely heavy loads, making them suitable for large and complex structures.
Versatility: They can be used in a wide range of soil conditions, including soft soils, loose sands, and even underwater environments.
Reduced Settlement: By transferring loads to deeper, more stable soil layers, caissons minimize settlement and ensure the long-term stability of the structure.
Resistance to Lateral Forces: Caissons provide excellent resistance to lateral forces, such as wind and seismic activity, enhancing the overall safety of the structure.
Durability: When constructed with high-quality materials and proper techniques, concrete caissons are highly durable and require minimal maintenance.
Cost-Effectiveness: Despite the initial investment, caissons can be cost-effective in the long run due to their durability and minimal maintenance requirements.
Why Choose Foundation Solutions for Concrete Caisson Services?
At Foundation Solutions, we pride ourselves on delivering top-notch foundation services, including concrete caisson construction. Here’s why we stand out from the competition:
Experienced Team: Our team of professionals has extensive experience in designing and constructing concrete caisson foundations for a wide range of projects.
Advanced Technology: We use the latest equipment and techniques to ensure precision and efficiency in every project.
Customized Solutions: We understand that every project is unique, which is why we offer customized foundation solutions tailored to meet your specific needs.
Quality Materials: We use only the highest quality materials, ensuring the durability and longevity of our foundation solutions.
Customer Satisfaction: Our commitment to customer satisfaction is unmatched. We work closely with our clients to ensure their needs are met and expectations exceeded.
Case Study: Successful Concrete Caisson Project
One of our recent projects involved the construction of a high-rise office building in an area with challenging soil conditions. Our team conducted a thorough site assessment and determined that concrete caissons were the best solution for supporting the structure’s significant load requirements. We successfully drilled and installed multiple caissons, providing a stable and reliable foundation for the building. The project was completed on time and within budget, with the client highly satisfied with the results.
Contact Foundation Solutions Today
If you’re planning a construction project that requires a reliable and durable foundation, contact Foundation Solutions today. Our team of experts is ready to provide you with top-quality concrete caisson services tailored to your project’s needs. With our experience, advanced technology, and commitment to excellence, we guarantee a foundation that will stand the test of time.
At Foundation Solutions, we are dedicated to providing superior foundation solutions for all your construction needs. Trust us to deliver the expertise and quality you deserve, ensuring the stability and safety of your structures for years to come.
Tagged Foundation Repair, Foundation Repair Santa Clara, Foundation Solutions
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foundationsolution · 11 months ago
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National Property Inspections of Rochester NY | Home Inspector | Commercial Property Inspector in Rochester NY
National Property Inspections of Rochester offers trusted and comprehensive services as a Home Inspector in Rochester NY. We specialize in detailed evaluations of residential properties, ensuring buyers and sellers receive accurate and actionable insights about their investments. Our skilled team focuses on delivering clear, concise, and timely inspection reports to help you make informed decisions. For businesses, our role as a Commercial Property Inspector in Rochester NY, is critical in assessing the condition and safety of commercial facilities. Whether it's retail spaces or office buildings, we provide thorough inspections to ensure all aspects of the property meet the required standards. Contact us now for a consultation.
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persiandevelopmentinc · 1 year ago
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xuchiya · 5 months ago
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the beauty of us || jung wooyoung || one-shot
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|genre: boyfriend! wooyoung. girlfriend! reader. just pure fluff and wooyoung being a real man out here |mentions: nothing really.
summary: As you test shades and colors, he offers himself—literally—as the canvas for your art. In the middle of the bustling mall, his playful curiosity and quiet devotion create a masterpiece of their own.
word count: 1.1k
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As I descended the stairs of my apartment, the faint jingle of my car and apartment keys filled the otherwise quiet air. The cool morning breeze slipped through the slightly open window in the stairwell, carrying with it a sense of unhurried peace. I approached the shoe rack near the door, carefully slipping into my sandals, the soft scrape of their straps fitting into place.
Behind me, the sound of socked feet padding softly on the wooden floor made me pause.
“Oh? Are you going somewhere?” came a familiar voice, light and inquisitive.
I turned my head to find Wooyoung standing there, leaning casually against the wall with a curious tilt to his head. His dark hair was slightly tousled, as if he’d just woken up, and his eyes sparkled with interest.
“Yeah,” I replied with a small nod, holding up my keys. “I’m heading to the mall to pick up some make-up. I’ve run out of a few things.”
For a split second, his expression lit up, a glimmer of excitement crossing his face. Before I could say another word, he suddenly bounced on his toes, his energy spilling over.
“Oh~ I’ll pay!” he announced, his tone playful but sincere, his hand already reaching into his pocket for his wallet.
I blinked, caught off guard by his enthusiasm. “You don’t have to do that,” I said, though a smile tugged at my lips.
“But I want to!” he insisted, his grin widening. “Think of it as my way of making sure you get only the best.” He winked, and for a moment, I couldn’t tell if he was serious or just being his usual cheeky self.
“Well, if you’re coming, don’t complain about how long I’ll take,” I warned, narrowing my eyes at him playfully.
“Long?” he repeated, pretending to be offended. “With me around, shopping will be fun and efficient. You’ll see.”
I rolled my eyes, slipping my phone into my bag. “Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Deal!” he chirped, already slipping on his sneakers.
As I watched him tie his laces with unbridled excitement, I couldn’t help but feel a warmth in my chest. Wooyoung always had a way of turning the simplest things into something memorable, and I had a feeling today would be no exception.
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“You know, you can still back out right,” I told Wooyoung for the third time as we stepped into the mall. “It’s just make-up shopping. It could take ages.”
“I’ve got time,” he said with a grin, hands shoved into his pockets. “Besides, I want to see what this whole make-up business is about.”
I gave him a skeptical look, but he just winked at me, completely unbothered. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves in the brightly lit cosmetics section of a department store. A sales associate handed me a small shopping basket, and I immediately began scanning the shelves, looking for the essentials I needed.
Wooyoung, true to his word, wasn’t just there to follow silently behind me. Instead, he picked up random products, holding them up like they were foreign artifacts. “What’s this for?” he asked, squinting at a bottle of primer.
“It’s primer. It creates a smooth base for make-up.”
“And this?” He held up a brow gel.
“Keeps your eyebrows in place.”
His curiosity was endless, and honestly, it was kind of adorable. He’d inspect each product, occasionally putting it back or pretending to test it on himself just to make me laugh. But then, his questions turned into quiet observation.
As I moved down the aisles, I swatched foundation shades on the back of my hand, testing each one under the harsh store lights to see which matched my skin tone. Wooyoung watched intently, his head tilting slightly as if trying to figure out my process.
“You’re really thorough about this,” he remarked after a while.
“I have to be. My skin’s super sensitive,” I explained, showing him my hand now streaked with various shades of foundation. “If I pick the wrong one, I’ll break out, or worse, get a rash.”
He nodded thoughtfully but didn’t say much. Moments later, I noticed him picking up a palette of blushes and trying to mimic what I was doing—pressing a small amount on his wrist and holding it up to the light.
“What do you think of this one?” he asked, holding out his arm.
I stifled a laugh, impressed by his effort. “Not bad. You’re getting the hang of it.”
By the time we made it to the eyeshadow section, my arm was a rainbow of shades, from blushes to highlighters and eyeshadows. It was getting harder to find space to test new colors. Wooyoung noticed and, without a word, rolled up his sleeve and extended his arm toward me.
“Here, use mine,” he said casually, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
I blinked at him, surprised by the gesture. “Are you sure?”
“Of course. Why not?”
He held his arm steady as I gently swiped on a few shades, blending them with my fingers to see how they’d look. His skin tone was slightly different from mine, but it worked well enough for testing. The onlookers around us couldn’t help but giggle and whisper. A couple of them even squealed quietly, clearly charmed by the scene.
Wooyoung, unfazed by the attention, just smiled at me. “Told you it will be fun and efficient,” he admitted, glancing at the colors now adorning his forearm.
“Yeah yeah whatever” I teased, dabbing a shimmering gold eyeshadow onto his wrist.
“But mostly, I like seeing how happy it makes you.” His tone was light, but the sincerity in his eyes made my cheeks warm, a soft smile was on my lips as I placed back the palette on the shelf. By the end of our trip, we both had arms covered in a patchwork of colors, but my basket was filled with carefully chosen products. As we headed to the checkout, I couldn’t help but glance at Wooyoung, who was grinning like he’d just discovered a new hobby.
“Thanks for tagging along,” I said softly. He shrugged, pulling out his wallet and handing over his card, “Thanks for letting me be your test subject. Anytime you need another arm, I’m your guy.”
The sales associate at the counter smiled knowingly as she handed me my bag. “You’re lucky to have him,” she said with a wink.
I couldn’t help but smile back. “Yeah, I am.”
As we walked out of the store, Wooyoung leaned in and said, “Next time, you’ll have to teach me how to actually use this stuff.”
“Deal,” I replied with a laugh, grabbing his hand, intertwining them as I lead us to the food court.
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maitanii · 1 year ago
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IT WASN'T LOVE. He wasn't in love. Ran Haitani, definitely, wasn't in love.
However, as his finger scrolled through the phone screen each night, attempting to delete some blurry photos where only the outline of a smile was discernible, laziness conveniently took hold, allowing those files to continue occupying space on the phone.
On closer inspection, you're not that pretty. He wouldn't even say you're pretty, just an ordinary girl. Those five freckles scattered across your cheeks aren't that beautiful, even though they reminded him of the constellations Rindou always points out when they travel to the countryside. The poorly painted nails, slightly bitten at the corners, are just another sign that you're a mess, although he always brings a nail file for you to use. And the small chip in your front teeth? Nothing out of the ordinary, but he was with you when the fall happened (and watched you cry yourself to sleep while holding you on the couch).
"Are you listening to me?"
"Loud and clear."
"Right." Returning to spear the fork into the salad, you made sure not to pick any tomatoes. Those were left for Ran. "When is the fight?"
"Tomorrow." Reaching for his cutlery, he began to stab at his food. "Are you worried?" he commented before starting to chew.
"Don't talk with food in your mouth, pig." Placing your face in your hands, you turned your head to look out the window.
"Okay."
The red lights from the opposite building reflected on your forehead. In just a minute, Ran had noticed you had gotten new highlights in your hair. He also spotted the small pimple that had popped up near your chin and the poorly applied concealer on it. The tension in your shoulders. And that you didn't want to look him in the eyes.
"What time is the fight tomorrow?" you asked as Ran's slender fingers played with the engraving on the fork.
Ask me not to go.
"At seven. But South always asks us to arrive earlier. Should we order dessert?"
Ask me not to go.
"Okay."
Come on, ask me not to go.
Taking his gaze away from some point on your face, he lowered his head. The ambient music in the restaurant slipped into the silence of the conversation. How could he fall in love with someone who worried about him getting hurt in a fight? Trust was the foundation of any relationship, right? Damn it.
The Mont Blanc and the cheesecake didn't last long on the table. In a fork battle, the desserts soon disappeared. Rindou had always suffered the consequences of stealing bites from his food, so why had he fought with you to accept eating the last piece of Mont Blanc?
"I have exams soon, and I'd like to get up early. Can you take me home?"
"Sure." Smiling, Ran thanked the waiter who cleared their plates (the first time he didn't thank him, you reproached him for it). "But you have to let me pay."
"No."
"Then I guess you'll have to walk home alone."
"No problem."
He sighed. Fighting was pointless. In all the years since your friendship began, you had never let him pay an entire bill. Not even when your ex-boyfriend left you and gave you several jars of ice cream could you avoid leaving some coins on a piece of furniture at his house. Or when he gave you that bouquet of flowers on Valentine's Day, and you left two boxes of chocolates on the backseat of the car.
The way back home was quiet. To no one's surprise, you chose the music, and he chose the topic of conversation. The guys from your economics class. The new mascara that didn't leave many clumps. The scholarship you had applied for months ago. He was so engrossed that he got distracted and ended up driving through several streets, prolonging the journey. Well, what a silly mistake.
"Thanks for bringing me home. And thanks for today." Raising your thumbs, you drew a slight smile on your face. "I needed to get out for a while."
"I know, you took too long to respond to my messages."
"I always do that."
"Not to an invitation to have dinner at your favorite restaurant."
"You know me so well." Pinching his cheeks between your fingers, you watched as he squinted his eyes.
Closing the car door, Ran watched as you began to search for the keys to the gate in your bag. Taking out his phone, he checked the messages he had received during dinner. Two taps on the door prevented him from replying to the meme Rindou had sent him. Your perfume once again invaded the interior of the car.
"Ran." The concern in your voice made him immediately turn his head. "I know it's a lot to ask, but please try not to go to the fight tomorrow. You can come up with any excuse and come to my house. But please, don't go."
A smile began to slowly form on his face.
He wasn't in love. But when he got home and wrote a message to South saying he had a fever, he had done it with immense joy in his heart. And when he went to bed and looked at the photos he never deleted from his gallery, he would write again in his notes the places he wanted to take you. But he wasn't in love because what he felt was beyond any of that."
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lady-ace · 8 months ago
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Scp x Captain Marvel
(Why? Because i am going feral for this idea. I am crawling up the walls. Foaming at the mouth. If i could write fics, THIS would be the one, but since i can't, i'll just write this long idea)
Billy (in cap form) is sent into a portal when fighting an magical villain who was attacking Fawcett. The portal leads him to another dimension, where he lands on a populated area. Phones are drawn, videos are taken.
Billy gets nervous. Where was he? Why are people recording him? This for sure isn't Fawcett or anywhere near, judging by their amazed and scared faces.
Billy flies down to the crowd to try and reassure them that everything's fine, but as he lands, the crowd scatters away. Billy didn't think it would be nice to follow them, so he left it at that and flew off, exploring this small city he ended up in.
After a good while of just flying around, he decides enough's enough and goes down to a place he deemed "safe" and de-transforms back to his human form.
What Billy didn't see was a camera on the other side of the road, that saw what looked like an flying man land on an alley, and proceeding to be struck by lighting after yelling 'SHAZAM!' (that surged out of nowhere in broad daylight and in a clear sky), after which a small child comes out of said alley, no sign if the man was ever present.
The SCP foudation executives catch wind of this "Flying man" and quickly get up to capture him, seeing the videos circulating around Social media (and deleting them, not to cause more panic) to locate where exactly it is.
They narrow it down to a small city and dispatch a MTF squad to find the child, now nicknamed SCP-6514-1, contain it, and bring it back to the foundation for further inspection.
As nightfall came, Billy was searching a place where he could sleep safely. This new world didn't seem to have heroes (or, as far as he'd seen) but crime might still be big.
When he left yet another building he thought was safe (an abandoned parking lot didn't seem that welcoming if it rained), he heard footsteps. Multiple footsteps, loud against the pavement.
Billy heart started beating faster, but before he could even think of looking back, an dart shot out from behind him, hitting his arm. Billy instantly felt different- sleepy, drowzy, just, not good, as various masked and armed people came out of his surroundings and picked him up, leading to some sort of car or van (Billy couldn't really tell, he was too busy trying to keep awake.)
When he woke up, he was muzzled. It was not tight enough to hurt, but tight enough he couldn't let a single word out.
He scratched at it to try to get it off to no avail, and just as he was about to give up, the door to the room he was trapped in opened, with the same men who captured him escorting him back to another room- this one being fully white, and being separated by some kind of reinforced glass. He was brought to to one side of the room, and another person awaited on the other side. A nametag on his lab coat reads “Dr. Peter S.”
Dr. Peter: “Hello, SCP-6514-1.”
The man said, getting a note book and a pencil and giving it to Billy,
Dr. Peter: “We would like if you'd answer some of our questions. We assure you, you won't be harmed in any way unless you attack us first and we see the need of self-defense.”
Billy: “...”
Dr. Peter: “I'll take that as an 'yes'. Now, what are your powers?”
Billy, writing down in his note book: “Why would i tell you? You just kidnapped me!”
Dr. Peter: “Well, you see, you are an anomaly. You came out of nowhere, causing mass panic, demonstrating supernatural powers above any normal human's. Could you see how that's a cause for concern, 6514?”
Billy, a bit annoyed at the nickname: “I can see how that would be weird, but not weird enough to kidnap me over! And what's with the numbers?”
Dr. Peter: “The numbers are simply for identitication's sake. And for any intends and purposes, you could pose a threat to humanity, so i find it's enough to capture you over.”
Billy: “Threat to humanity? But i'm just a normal boy!”
Dr. Peter: “How come?”
Billy: “i'm the Whiz kid! I work for the radio!”
Dr. Peter, writing this all down: “Uh huh. I see how you can be an 'normal child', but what about 6514-2, your flying-thunder summoning counterpart?”
Billy, frozen at the mention of marvel: “..I don't know what you're talking about.”
Dr. Peter: “6514, we saw it. It's why we captured you. There's no need to try and say you don't know.”
Billy, with a defeated look: “That's Captain Marvel. A superhero.”
Dr. Peter, with an eyebrow raised, obviously doubting it, yet still writing it down: “Uh huh..? And what exactly does he do?”
Billy: “i save people. I defeat villains. It's what heroes do, isn't it?”
Dr. Peter: “Yeah, i'd think so. But tell me, what is a child like you doing as an superhero? Shouldn't you be at school?”
Billy, writing something and scribbling over it trying to find the right words: “I can't go to school.”
Dr. Peter: “Okay. Well, where did you live, then?”
Billy: “I lived in Fawcett city. You know, the magic one?”
Dr. Peter, writing down stuff: “i never heard of it, and i'm pretty sure there aren't magic cities.”
Billy, a bit upset: “Look, i was just fighting a villain and a portal i accidentaly fell into put me here! I just wanna go home!”
Dr. Peter: “And home is Fawcett?”
Billy: “No, no! Away from here, anywhere but here! I don't want to be here, everyone should be so worried! And i'll not be there for the people i swore to protect!”
Dr. Peter, with a small worried look, collects all his stuff and gets up, looking at the MTF guards on stand by: “I think we've done enough today. Bring 6514-1 back, he's too emotionally charged right now. Besides, we've already got a lot of information.”
As he heads out to leave, Billy knocks on the glass and puts up the notebook.
Billy: “Could i keep the notebook?”
Dr. Peter, thinking it over, since it is a small decision but if anything goes haywire he would be to blame: “hmm.. okay.”
/////
Billy curls up in the first cell he was brought back to, thinking about ways to escape and if the justice league will be able to find him.
“Stupid portal.. making me go to some weird place i don't know..”
Billy thinks, as he draws in the small note book and glares at the camera and it's blinking red dot.
Suddenly, the lights go out in his room. Was it night?
Oh well.
He hopes tomorrow the league will already be here. He misses Mary and Freddy.
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spacetimewithstuartgary · 2 months ago
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Webb's autopsy of planet swallowed by star yields surprise
Observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb's observations show the planet's orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.
"Because this is such a novel event, we didn't quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction," said Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tucson, Arizona. "With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own."
Two instruments aboard Webb conducted the post-mortem of the scene—Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). The researchers were able to come to their conclusion using a two-pronged investigative approach.
Constraining the how
The star at the center of this scene is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years away from Earth.
The brightening event, formally called ZTF SLRN-2020, was originally spotted as a flash of optical light using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. Data from NASA's NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) showed the star actually brightened in the infrared a year before the optical light flash, hinting at the presence of dust.
This initial 2023 investigation led researchers to believe that the star was more sun-like, and had been in the process of aging into a red giant over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.
However, Webb's MIRI told a different story. With powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, Webb was able to precisely measure the hidden emission from the star and its immediate surroundings, which lie in a very crowded region of space. The researchers found the star was not as bright as it should have been if it had evolved into a red giant, indicating there was no swelling to engulf the planet as once thought.
Reconstructing the scene
Researchers suggest that, at one point, the planet was about Jupiter-sized, but orbited quite close to the star, even closer than Mercury's orbit around our sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer and closer to the star, leading to the catastrophic consequence.
"The planet eventually started to graze the star's atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment," said team member Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The planet, as it's falling in, started to sort of smear around the star."
In its final splashdown, the planet would have blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star. As it expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year.
Inspecting the leftovers
While the researchers did expect an expanding cloud of cooler dust around the star, a look with the powerful NIRSpec revealed a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer in. Furthermore, Webb's high spectral resolution was able to detect certain molecules in this accretion disk, including carbon monoxide.
"With such a transformative telescope like Webb, it was hard for me to have any expectations of what we'd find in the immediate surroundings of the star," said Colette Salyk of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, an exoplanet researcher and co-author on the new paper.
"I will say, I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment."
The ability to characterize this gas opens more questions for researchers about what actually happened once the planet was fully swallowed by the star.
"This is truly the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we've observed in action, and this is the best detection of the aftermath after things have settled back down," Lau said. "We hope this is just the start of our sample."
These observations, taken under Guaranteed Time Observation program 1240, which was specifically designed to investigate a family of mysterious, sudden, infrared brightening events, were among the first Target of Opportunity programs performed by Webb.
These types of study are reserved for events, like supernova explosions, that are expected to occur, but researchers don't exactly know when or where. NASA's space telescopes are part of a growing, international network that stands ready to witness these fleeting changes, to help us understand how the universe works.
Researchers expect to add to their sample and identify future events like this using the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will survey large areas of the sky repeatedly to look for changes over time.
TOP IMAGE: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI)
LOWER IMAGE: Schematic illustration of the preengulfment and postengulfment interpretation of ZTF SLRN-2020. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal (2025). DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/adb429
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gretavanmoon · 10 months ago
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an omnipresent force• ch 1
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Chapter 1- DARK PHENOMENON
Jake x reader (we'll get there... I promise)
Words: 10.5k
A/N: Semi-AU// Set six years in the future, the world has decided to cast humankind aside, starting with the poisonous entities that are destroying her the most.
Warnings: Dystopian Horror Cursing, Smoking, Mention of Alcohol, Feelings of Fear and Uncertainty, An Apocalyptic World, Hunting, Violence (mention of firearms), Looting, Kidnapping, Wounds and Pain, Blood, Death & Dying, Burials, Lying, Deceit, Sadness
enjoy my dabbling in the sci-fi world
Cheatham County, Tennessee 2030
Y/N
It feels like only yesterday that I noticed that the hillside beside my garden seemed as if it had taken on a different shape, the sycamore tree perched at the foot of it tilted and stretching way lower than it normally did. I squinted in question at the sight, wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me. The day was chilly and windy but the sun still shone, casting late-evening shadows across the garden ground. ‘Strange,’ I’d thought to myself as I realized. ‘A sinkhole?’ 
I stood from my knelt position, wiping my hands against one another as I cleared the dirt from them.
I wasn’t wrong, the ground was sunken and almost rutted, almost as if it had quietly shrunken itself down five or six feet sometime throughout the day. When my toes poked up to the edge of it, I backed away quickly, realizing that the ground could potentially give way again at any second, and take me right along with it. The wind had picked up as I skipped backward, putting as much distance as I could between it and me. A strange type of fear had taken over my body, one that I’d never felt before. ‘Sinkholes don’t happen here, do they? Don’t they normally occur in sea-level land, or near river beds where the bedrock is weakest?’
Hell, I didn’t know for sure. I’d never seen a sinkhole in real life before, nor had I ever really done much research on them. I made my way back inside as a light drizzle began to coat my face, letting the door slam behind me with the vacuum pull of the wind mixed with my open windows. I sat down at my kitchen table, pulling my phone from the charger as I searched up my grandfather’s contact. 
I pulled the phone to my ear and listened to the tone ring out, and his gruff voice greet me on the other end. 
“Evening, youngin’! What are you wastin’ time with today?” he joked. 
A smile cracked across my face. “Nothing, Papaw… was just cleaning up the dead weeds from the garden. Hey, I noticed something out in the yard, I think I have a sinkhole…”
I heard him inhale his cigarette smoke. “A sinkhole? How in god’s name…? You sure, youngin’?”
“I’m positive. Look, I’ll send you a picture.” I turned my phone and snapped a quick few photos out the kitchen window, showing the land he knew just as well as I did, and how it now sat very, very differently. “There. Should be coming through, now.”
I listened as he puffed his cigarette again and clicked around on the screen of his phone, still very uncomfortable with the thing, and why it was really necessary in his life. “Hell’s fire, you’re right. When’d you notice it?” he asked. 
I sat back down in my kitchen chair, crossing one leg over the other as I peered up at the ceiling. “Just… Now…” My voice trailed off as I inspected the ceiling and wall in front of me, seeing that a giant crack had formed right along the load-bearing wall in the center of my small home. “Damn, Paps, there’s a crack in my wall, too…”
Suddenly, I felt panicked, standing up to run my hand along the fracture. It was big, almost a centimeter thick, all the way from the floor to the ceiling. 
“You’re kiddin’ me. Go downstairs, go to the basement, see if there is a crack there…” he ordered, so I did. I kicked the old paint cans to the side as I rounded off the bottom step of my basement, trying to make sense of where the floor would line up with the walls above me. Sure enough, there it was, the old stone foundation that was holding up the footers of my little home had begun to collapse, sinking down into the ground right in the center of it all. 
“Shit, it’s here, too. It’s bad, Paps, what do I do?!” I panicked, looking around for something as if I could prop it all back up. 
“Get everything that you can, all your valuables, sis. Pack it all up and come here. Come stay with me and your Gran. Don’t be afraid, just be aware. I’ll call your Daddy and tell him what’s happened. Me and him and your brother will come out and assess it once’t this rain passes.”
I felt as though my chest was starting to heave, the sudden mind-bending fear that my whole home was going to cave in on itself and crush me now scaring me more than anything I’d felt in a long, long time. “Okay, okay I’ll be there soon. Thanks, Paps,” I said as I hung up the phone, making sure to snap another few quick photos before I dashed back up the stairs in search of my suitcase. 
Little did I know that that would be the last time I would ever set foot in my tiny little cottage, the first home I ever had after I moved from my parents’ in Nashville after college. I’d bounced from apartment to apartment before I finally moved back out to the country to be near my grandparents. The cottage was tiny, and it wasn’t much, but it was mine. I’d stayed single for the majority of my life, never settling on any one man, finding flaws in damn near all of them that I brought home with me. I was 32 at the time, and settling down into a relationship or marriage was the absolute furthest thing from my mind. I’d cherished that home, filling it with antiques and spice racks and multicolored lace curtains… transforming it into the home I had always wanted while maintaining my steady work-from-home career. 
I remember my head spinning like a top as I packed up my valuables… my laptop and my important paperwork, my toiletries that would last me a few days, along with a few practical outfits that would keep me warm with the changing season. Surely I didn’t need to pack for more than a few days, long enough for my dad and brother to come and see if they could fix the footer under my house and allow me to grab a few more things.
But I was so, so sadly mistaken.
I never got to set foot in my little cottage again. That home eventually got eaten up in what turned out to be the first sinkhole in Tennessee. Well, not the very first, obviously. But the first one that would spawn a series of many more across the state of Tennessee, and Kentucky, and all the way down into Alabama and into Mississippi. 
That was so long ago, now, and the way of life I knew and loved changed forever that day, as the world as we knew it tilted itself on its axis, never to be the same again. 
That day, that very day, the Earth had decided that she was going to rid herself of these heartless beings that someone had decided would inhabit her, stretching and breaking and destroying everything in her power to extinguish all of mankind and all that mankind had created in spite of her. The Earth didn’t need us anymore, and though we were all completely reliant on her, we had also created an invisible force of a blend of scientific knowledge and powerful mechanics that, inevitably, had drained her completely dry of her natural resources. 
No one believed it was the end of days, there was no giant announcement that came across our radio waves and on our phone alert systems. There was no dark, biblical occurrence or seven plagues like those who believed in such things had predicted… it just… happened. 
One day I was weeding my garden, and the next, I was coming to terms with the fact that I had no choice but to thrust myself into full on survival mode. Living with nothing more than what I had at that very moment, and watching as everything in my life dwindled down more quickly than anyone could even fathom. 
Earthquakes shook the planet. The rivers all over the world had begun to overflow, the trees began to uproot themselves and fall like timber. Animals would be dead on the side of the roads, even animals that seemingly had absolutely nothing wrong with them. Birds, bears, wolves… lying and littering the hillsides as if they had just laid down to go to sleep.
Even the sun wasn’t the same. It just felt different. The normal heat that fell onto your skin seemed to sear it now instead of warm it. The wind, when it did blow, made a hissing noise as it’d pass by. The sinkholes continued, even some as big as lakes, swallowing up unsuspecting neighborhoods and taking everything with them in their wake. 
In the weeks following that day, my father had forced my grandparents and I to come back to Nashville, given that there hadn’t been any disturbances in the land there, yet. So the three of us packed up what we needed, saying goodbye to the home that my grandparents had lived in since marriage, and loading everything into their old pickup truck. We made the short drive back home to my parents’ where they had prepared the guestroom and my old bedroom for our arrival. 
My younger brother James still lived at home with them, still young but never having the want to move out and be on his own. He was eight years my junior, twenty-four years old and working on his master’s degree in engineering and technology. Truly, he was too smart for his own good. My parents had allowed him to live at home as he was a very quiet creature, devoting most of his life to his studies instead of being any type of social butterfly. He was strong, though, and never hesitated to be the one to come and pick me up after I’d had one too many drinks at the bar. 
“Hey, sis. Sorry your house got swallowed up,” he’d said as he took me in his bear-hug embrace, patting the back of my head with his giant hand. 
Though my body was reeling with fear of the unknown, James was the one to bring me back down to earth with his overwhelmingly warm embrace and matter-of-fact way of speaking. My only sibling, though much younger, always knew exactly what I needed, right when I needed it. “Thanks, pipsqueak. Kinda fuckin’ sucks, actually,” I’d replied with a defeated lilt. “Didn’t think I’d be living back at Mom and Dad’s during the apocalypse,” I joked. 
I still remembered how his face had contorted hearing that word, still a shock to the system to hear it said out loud. It shocked me too, even as I said it. The two of us retreated to the living room as my parents assisted my grandparents in getting their room unpacked, which at the time seemed like nothing more than a menial task to mask the reality of what was happening around us. Menial actions to make the situation feel less threatening and more like something we could ignore. 
“Is this shit really happening, Y/N? Like are we really going to have to–”
“Yes, James. You saw my house, you’ve heard the talks on the News… it’s happening. And it’s happening fast. Everywhere.” I was always a very straightforward person, getting right to the point of things instead of beating around the bush. I always thought it was a waste of time, ignoring the reality of things. 
“Fuck,” he’d mumbled under his breath, his leg bouncing up and down as he hugged one of Mom’s old decorative pillows on his lap. My little James, always wearing his heart on his sleeve and possessing the inability to hide his emotions. Though his stature was monstrous, his personality never mirrored it. 
My eyebrows furrowed as I pondered him, feeling that strange aura that only siblings share bouncing right off of him. “What is it, James? What’s wrong?” I’d asked, now really getting worried as I watched his eyes scan the room aimlessly. 
He sniffed hard through his nose, scooting closer in the chair. He held his giant hands out to me, palms down, his knee still bouncing furiously. “What?!” I asked. “I’m confused… What is it?”
He swallowed and finally flipped his hands over, revealing to me something that I had never seen on him before. His palms and fingers were covered with some type of bruise-like rash, marks that resembled heavy birthmarks but a very deep purple as opposed to a light pink. “What happened? Did you burn yourself?” I’d asked, taking his wrists in my hands to observe him.
He shook his head. “No, they just… it just appeared a few days ago. It started out like weird bumps, then it’s turned to this. And it’s spreading, sis. I don’t–” his voice trailed off as my eyes met his, full of worry. 
“Does it hurt?” I asked, not prepared to hear the truth. 
“Yeah. It doesn’t feel good… I’ve been hiding it from Mom and Dad, I don’t want them to worry any more than they already are, ya know?” 
I shook my head in agreement as I let my fingertips brush over the strange marks. “Anywhere else on your body?” I asked. 
“No. Not yet, at least…”
“Care if I take a photo, just so we can try and look it up? I’d make you an appointment, I just don’t think…” I trailed off again as the same thought process flew through both of our heads. There won’t be any more going to the doctor.
“Yeah, sure, go ahead,” he muttered as he exhaled and I snapped the photo, my recent album now no longer full of my lavish boardwalk lunches and blurry nights out with friends, but instead screenshots of international news articles and how to tie paracord.
We’d holed up there with my parents for a month or so before our next greatest fear came crashing down over us. Suddenly, like a blackout in a storm, every piece of technology as we knew it ceased to do its job.
The big stuff went first– internet telecommunications and hubs… then went the cell phone towers and television broadcasts, little by little it all began to fail, thus cutting off communication between us and the rest of the world completely. There was no such thing as using your cell phone anymore, and those who still had landlines only were able to get them to work some of the time. Wind turbines, hydroelectrics, newer vehicles… all of it simply just stopped performing. Though the most intelligent scientists and blue-collar employees on earth tried as they might, nothing worked. Nothing held up. It was like all technology had forgotten its only purpose, the only reason it was created in the first place.
We knew things were bad when we caught word that the major hospitals had closed down and had already begun resorting to old medicine. A new sadness fell upon us as we realized that my grandma would no longer be able to just run out to the pharmacy for her medications, and the realization of that was almost harder to swallow than knowing that James’ hands were being eaten alive by something inside him.
But I would find them. I would venture out and get them for her, no matter what it would take. None of us had really bothered to leave the confines of our home, knowing that anything past our neighborhood was probably a warzone of greed and looting. Or worse, full of more sinkholes. We truly had no way of knowing, except for the quiet and quick conversations held with our trusted neighbors over the fence line. Everyone was simply terrified.
We’d already started to notice a strange amount of people walking the streets by my parents’ house; the normally calm and quiet neighborhood full of retired musicians and elementary school teachers was now teeming with sketchy foot traffic. My dad and grandfather wasted no time in resorting to armed protection, pulling out my dad’s arsenal of weaponry he kept locked away in the basement since my childhood. Never did he think he would actually think about using it.
The days were long, and the nights were even longer. Each day brought a new fear to us, a new way of questioning how we were going to survive, if we were going to survive. It was almost like we were sitting around waiting for someone to tell us what to do next. And when we expected to hear something from our government, all we got was silence. It was like they had left us all for dead, never once giving us even a sliver of advice.
There were days when my mother would have a complete mental breakdown, her fearful tears turning into full-on panic attacks that would leave her exhausted and still, my sweet father and grandfather by her side whether she needed them or not. 
Next came the fall of electricity as a whole. The whole world, shrouded in darkness as panic fell upon everyone surrounding us. No longer did we have the simple luxury of being able to turn the lights on and off. Hot water had to be heated manually, and we learned to cook over a small campfire in the back yard. 
One night, as the weather began to cool, the six of us gathered in our living room, cooking over a propane stove Papaw had thought about packing last minute. The wind was blowing a lot colder, now, but we managed to keep warm as the season began to change over into winter. Luckily, the almanac had said this was to be a mild winter, and we still had enough supplies to last us through, but my grandfather and I had noticed that it would be necessary to venture out for food, soon. 
He and I were always on that same wavelength, speaking to and through one another and making decisions far ahead of time. We were both doers, and pretty smart ones, at that. 
“We’ve got to go back,” I whispered to him after supper that evening as we did our best to clean the dishes. “You know that, right?”
His crows feet became more prominent as he winced at me. “I know we do. But the question is when? And how will we convince them that we need to retreat back to Cheatham?” It’d become obvious to me in the past week or so that it was time to go back out into the country to my grandparents’ home, away from the middle of the city where the dangers were creeping in around us at a quicker pace.
“There will be an argument, I’m sure. I know your mother won’t want to leave her home, and she will say that the city can give us more supplies than my farm could,” he whispered. What my grandfather and I both understood was that while that much was true, the supplies would only last so long before they’d be all gone, forcing us all to retreat anyway. Not to mention the stores have probably all been looted clean, by now. 
“Dad and James and I will go into the city for last minute supplies. Gran’s medications and anything else we can get our hands on,” I decided as he dropped his dish, grabbing my wrist firmly in his, holding it steady. 
“You’ll do no such thing, youngin’. I’ll go. You stay here, with your mother and grandmother.” His voice was stern, and though I was a full-grown adult, I knew better than to argue with my elders. 
“But Paps, you’re… no spring chicken,” I said with a hint of warmth in my voice. One last attempt to make him stay, and let me go. He may have been old, but he was still stronger than any man I had encountered in the past few years. 
“No matter. You’re stayin’ with them,” he said, picking up his dropped dish and rubbing the cloth over it again. Deep down, I knew it was because if it really was as dangerous as they said it was out there in the new public, he’d selflessly choose to put himself in the middle of it if it meant saving my life. 
I sighed. “First we’ve got to convince them to leave.” And that was going to be the hardest part.
+++
The next morning, I awoke to the sound of my grandmother shrieking in pain. It woke all of us, actually. My family and I met in the hallway of the freezing cold home, all of us rushing to my grandparents’ bedroom to see what was happening. 
We pushed the door open to find them both in the floor, my grandfather hunched over my grandmother’s body in the fetal position, her hands gripping at her chest. 
“Dad, Dad what’s wrong with her?!” my father yelled as we all fell to the floor with them in a panic. “Is it another heart attack?!”
“No,” my sweet and timid grandmother was able to choke out. “My skin, it’s– it’s burning so–” just as her words stopped, her body lurched backward, her muscles tightening so rigidly that my grandfather had no choice but to catch her. Her hands still gripped at her chest, her fingers now scratching  and ripping her pajama top off, the buttons flying all across the room. “It burns!” she cried.
My father and I crept closer, my brother helping my grandfather to hold her body. I ordered my mother to grab a flashlight, and when she returned, we shone the light on the area that my grandmother was grasping so tightly. And there on her chest, right below her breastbone, right where her heart was, was the exact same bruised rash that had overtaken the skin of my brother’s hands. 
My eyes shot to him, both of us falling into pure panic as we simultaneously realized what we were seeing. 
“Is it a heart attack, Jane, are you–”
“NO!” she cried. “My skin is on fire, right there, right here–” she pointed, and another look to my brother told me that the fire sensation was the exact same that he had been experiencing on his hands. Suddenly he shot up, rushing into the living room while the rest of us tried to console my grandmother in the pale darkness of the morning. He returned quickly with a cloth in his hands, soaking wet and sopped with water. 
“Here, Gran. Let me… this will help,” he begged, kneeling beside her as he flattened the cloth over her rash. She yelped in pain again, her hands and legs growing stiff at the reaction as he forced the cloth to her. But after only just a few seconds, she relaxed, her once screwed-shut eyes finally opening to look at us.
A tiny cry of relief left her thinning lips as her muscles fell limp, obviously feeling somewhat free of the pain. 
“James, how did you– How did you know that would help her?” my grandfather asked as we all stayed sat in the bedroom floor. 
I watched as James swallowed, finally sitting up enough to bring his hands into the barely-there glow of the rising sun through the window. He slowly turned his giant palms upright, showing my family the wounds that he had been secretly hiding from them for some time, now. Except since he showed them to me last, they’d doubled in size. Exact same color, exact same shapes as the bruises on my grandmother’s chest. 
“James, what on earth is that?” my mother cried, rushing to his side to hold his hands and inspect them more. “Why didn’t you tell us?!”
“Couldn’t worry you more, Mom, I just couldn’t add to the…” James shook his head, unable to finish. 
“Do they hurt, son? Like Jane’s…?” my grandfather asked him. 
James nodded, swallowing harshly. “Yeah, and they’re only getting worse.”
+++
A bit later that same morning, James found me in the hallway, bringing his face close to mine as he spoke quietly. “It was her pacemaker,” he mumbled.
His eyes avoided mine as they shot around, his words catching me off guard. “What?”
“Her pacemaker. In her heart,” he said. James had always been a man of few words, but right then was a time when I needed him to explain to me his thoughts in grave detail. 
“Yes, James, but what do you mean? How do you know that?” I pressed, trying not to upset him.
“Think about it,” he said, grabbing my arm and twisting me away from earshot of the family. “My hands… All I’ve done my entire adult life is touch technology. Hold it, work with it… hell, I build computers, sis. I held my phone day in and day out. My laptop… My entire life was spent on them. And Gran, her pacemaker, right at the skin above her heart…” 
His words didn’t make sense to me at first, and they honestly confused me even more for a few seconds, until he turned his hands over to me again. The rashes had begun to centralize over his fingertips, the places on his hands that made direct contact with the technology he worked with. 
“James, you don’t think…?” I breathed, my heart suddenly falling. He maneuvered his hands to mimic holding a cell phone and how his fingers would hit the screen, the rashes sitting exactly where the phone would have touched his hands most. Then again, he moved them as if he was typing on a keyboard.
“Radioactivity?” I asked, still shocked and confused. 
He shrugged. “I dunno, maybe. But, does it not kind of make sense?” he asked, leaving me unable to answer. “If I had to bet, I would say that Mom and Dad will be next.”
My heart had gone from swimming in my stomach to sitting in my throat, making my breathing chopped and anxious. My father had climbed cell phone towers and repaired them, and my mother was an x-ray technician. 
“Fuck, James,” I said, crossing my arms. “It can’t be, what about me? Why haven’t I gotten any rashes, I’m around technology, too,” I argued.
He shrugged again. “Not really, though. Not as much as we are. Hell, Y/N, you spend more time in your garden and with a book in your hands than you do anything else. You lose your phone fifty times a day, you never even watch TV for Christ’s sake,” he blubbered, his voice also becoming pained. 
I was left stunned, unable to disagree with him. But still, shouldn’t my parents and I be showing signs of the rash, if James’ suspicion was true? He pushed past me, grabbing his winter jacket from the hook on the wall as he carefully slipped his arms through the sleeves. 
“We’re going into town. Stay here with Mom and Gran. We’ll be back tonight. Don’t come looking for us if we don’t make it back by dark,” James said. 
“James, no! I will go! It’s too dangerous! Paps needs to stay here, plus your hands–”
“Fuck my hands, sis,” he growled, his face close to mine again as his jaw clenched. I could tell he was in pain. He rounded the corner and plucked his shotgun from its place against the wall. “We’ll be fine. Take care of them.”
JAKE
I’d never seen my twin look at me that way, before. We’d shared everything… every first, every win, loss, every new experience and every happy moment, we shared them all, together. Feeling the exact same emotions at the exact same time because our shared DNA told us that we had to. In our 33 years, I’d never seen his eyes so full of fear, so full of uncertainty that I was sure if I didn’t act, my chest was going to collapse. 
And he’d only glanced at me for a second, maybe two.
We’d been preparing to wrap up the tour of our fifth album when the world shut down. Yeah, we’d all been through the whole Covid thing, but that was no match for this. A drop in the bucket compared to the entire earth as we know it ceasing to work alongside us anymore. It’d begun giving up on us, pushing us out as if it didn’t even know we inhabited it. Mother nature was fucking us, and there was nothing we could do about it.
Just those short ten-odd years ago, the four of us had gathered in that cabin out in the mountains to write what would come to be The Battle at Garden's Gate… running away from the infected world and hiding away from the virus to drown ourselves in our instruments and sound. The uncertainty was wild then, but now, fuck. This… this is something more wicked than any of us could have ever anticipated. 
Josh’s eyes bored into mine, speaking a thousand words before he downcast them, then looked back onto the hands and arms of our sound engineer. Completely covered in purple bruises and blisters, his fingers swollen to the point that they looked like they may explode. He was the first one we saw with the rash. 
We’d canceled the last half of our tour as shit went south, not like we’d have been able to do anything anyway, as all the technology falling to shit would have held us to strictly little acoustic sets. But we were stupid to even think about doing that. We were naive to think we could even go on. That anyone would even show up for the shows. There wasn’t even any point.
We’d heard the rumors about the rash, but we hadn’t seen one first-hand yet, until that day. It was the same day that our mother called and said our aunt and uncle’s home had been swallowed by one of the sinkholes. We were all terrified, no one even had any clue what to do. Where do we go? Back home? Do we stay together? Do we run?
I knew why Josh’s eyes were so cripplingly fearful that day. Not because of what was happening around us, not because of the bewilderment of being faced with a thousand situations at once, but because he was scared I would be next. I knew that, because after his eyes left mine, they shot directly to my hands. 
Our sound engineer had only gotten on board with us less than a year ago, but he’d been in the business longer than any of us had been alive. Our hearts broke for him, as he explained his pain to us and how he wished he could stay along with us, helping to play around with our sound as we distracted ourselves from the world falling apart. 
But we knew it was all for nothing. Things were only getting worse.
+++
“Tell me you don’t have any rashes. Tell me right the fuck now that none of you have anything on your hands…” Josh barked at Sam, Danny and I as we shut the van doors behind us, enclosing the four of us. We’d decided on doing the same thing we’d done a decade ago- retreating to the wilderness to write. Or, whatever the fuck. There was hardly any electricity… how I thought I could finalize anything without an electric guitar was beyond me. Shit was so fucked.
Sam and I glanced at one another from the two backseats, shaking our heads quickly as we both understood we’d be the ones most likely to show signs first, our instruments being ones with the most electricity pulsing through them. “No,” we both muttered, holding our hands up. “Nothing.”
“Good. Daniel?”
Danny mirrored our actions, holding his hands up after buckling his seatbelt. “No, I’m clean so far,” he said quietly from the passenger seat. 
Josh put the old van in reverse, taking a deep breath as he backed from the space of the parking lot. Our decision to retreat like this was a quick one, none of us really knowing what the best route of action was. Everyone around us had dissipated, gone back to their homes and families, and apparently the outside world had truly begun to crumble. We’d been a little hidden away from it all, having just returned from a leg of touring in Greece where things hadn't hit too hard, yet. Things in the US were apparently much, much worse. And when we returned home, we found it to be absolutely true.
Luckily, our families had all decided to meet us there, and hunker down together as a unit. We were all we had left, at this point.
“The first sign of any of it, we tell each other. Got it? I don’t care if you think it’s nothing. If you see it, share it,” he commanded of us. We all nodded and agreed, knowing that if the rumors were true, the three of us would most likely be the ones to see it first thanks to our constant use of our instruments.
It was quiet in the van as we drove through the looted and abandoned city we once loved, people roaming the streets aimlessly as the pure confusion began to set in. There were no stop lights, no heavy traffic, hell, there weren't even any storefronts open. Luckily we’d filled up fuel tanks at one of the last remaining gas stations before the electricity had shut down, and hit the road running North, back home to Michigan to gather our families and go to Yankee Springs. Anything was better than nothing, and where better to be than away from the looting and rioting and hide in a secluded few cabins, able to fend for ourselves and worry about nothing more than taking care of one another. 
+++
Naive, naive. 
Little did we know that our rations would run out quickly. Little did we know that we’d quite literally have to live off the land. Fish for food. Mom had to re-teach herself to can. Dad and Sam caught fish and killed squirrels with his old BB gun. 
There was no time to write. Fuck, there was no time to even play. We spent our time surviving. We’d had almost no contact with the outside world in almost a month. It was then that a few other families had gotten the same idea as us and joined us there, breaking into cabins and preparing winter camps.
We warmed ourselves with the fireplace, and we boiled our water to drink. We collected tools and stashed them away, and we hid every bit of food we brought deep in the basement of the cabin. Many nights were spent gathered around the fire talking and telling stories, trying our best to keep some type of normalcy about ourselves. But most nights we were all too exhausted to even care, crashing into our beds that we considered ourselves fortunate to still have.
I was scared. Of course I was scared. Things had happened so fast that three months felt like the blink of an eye. I hardly even kept up with what day it was. We'd gone from traveling the world and playing shows for thousands to hiding away in unmarked cabins in the woods, praying that we'd survive into the next day. I remember my mind being in a constant state of buzzing awareness, while at the same time feeling so numb and unable to grasp the fact that the world was ending that I could hardly see straight. 
Ending? No, maybe not. I’d read enough books and was educated enough to know that the Earth goes through her changes. She doesn’t care for the fact that we’re here. She’s going to go through it whether we are here, or not. Her job isn’t to protect us. Her job is to stabilize herself through her ages, making sure she doesn’t implode from the inside out and return to stardust to join the other millions of stars of our universe as she’s simply unable to keep the life that lives on her, alive.
The Ice Age, the Pleistocene, Quarternary… all of it happened, and is happening. We’re just here to witness this one it as it does, and record it in history books. 
“Holy fucking shit, man,” Danny exclaimed as we all had reclined on a hillside that night, passing around a bottle of Irish whisky. The wind was absolutely freezing, but luckily, we’d all become acclimated to it again. “Wait, are you saying… wait.” Danny sat up, his curls a mess as he’d long forgotten about his hair routine. “Josh, did you write…?”
I’d been drunkenly sharing my wise words and hypotheses about this supposed ‘end of the world’ with them all evening, accentuating my tales with my grandiose words to make them seem more intriguing. Just like I always did. Just to fit the bit.
“Did I write Age of Machine to go along with the literal historical changes that the earth makes? Yes, I did,” Josh replied matter-of-factly. “Though I wrote it to be inflicted by humans and not the Earth itself, but…”
“...Did you not know that, Daniel? Really?” Sam butted in with a slur.
Danny leaned back on his elbows. “I mean, yeah, I guess I kinda remember you explaining it as you wrote it, but god, that was ten years ago. And if I remember correctly, Sam and Jake were the ones that put in the work for that one because I had smoked a bit too much that night. But yeah, I guess I never really put two and two together…”
I smiled at Danny’s realization, and the fact that it took him nearly a decade to understand what Josh’s lyrics to that song had meant. And how eerily terrifying and ominous they were even still. I would have explained my hypotheses more in-depth had I known that Danny hadn’t ever put everything together.
A silence had fallen over us again as we watched the only constant in our lives these days– the moon gliding and rolling on her backdrop of stars. Without the filter of light pollution, every single one was visible, now. 
“How did you know, Josh?” Danny finally whispered.
“How did I know what?” Josh replied, and I could tell there was a lump in his throat. He didn’t want to talk about this. 
“That song… everything literally fucking happened, is happening… how did you…?”
“I didn’t, Daniel. Of course I didn’t fucking know this was going to happen,” Josh argued with venom in his voice. “Not in our lifetimes, at least.”
I heard Sam swallow hard. Finally, it was out on the table. The one thing we’d all been thinking, all too scared to bring it into the light. Except Danny, I guess. That damned haunting song we wrote ten years ago, somehow predicting the near future almost to a tee.
“Wait,” Danny rolled to his stomach to look at us. “This is insane… man, we… we wrote a song about this, about this exact shit happening… how in the fuck did we do that?”
Just then, a bright white and purple light lit up the dark night sky, a giant ball of exploding flashes so close it made us all jump to our feet in fear. It made no sound, of course, but the streaks of light burned bright as the sun for just a few seconds before fading away, the light burning down into blackness again.
“What the fuck was that?!” I yelled, looking to my brothers for confirmation. 
“Satellite,” Sam said. “It exploded…”
We all stood for a few seconds and watched to see if anything else was going to happen, and I remember my heart was beating so hard that I swore everyone could hear it. There’s no time to fall into fear, Jake. Embers of burning metal fell into the atmosphere, floating in space to maybe one day hit the earth. A contraption created by man and thrust out into the universe to give us knowledge of things we couldn’t see, exploded and died right in front of our eyes.
Just then I watched as Danny lowered his head, turning toward Josh to shove the bottle into his hand. “God machine… really malfunctioned and blew, hm?”
Y/N
My mother’s rashes came next. Deep purple bruises and red blisters began covering her entire body, centralizing over her hands mostly, too. They ate away at her, sending her into an almost comatose state as her body shook and vibrated in pain. We tried to keep her in a cold bath, and it brought some relief, but the rashes spread so quickly that we were nearly unable to keep up with them. We found that basic Ibuprofen did help with their pain control, but as the rashes worsened, the drug was little help. 
My father and grandfather and I were beginning to reach a point of helplessness as we were caring for my mother round the clock, my Gran and James doing whatever they could to help us, while still suffering with their own pain, too. 
We talked to the neighbors, and they all had begun to experience the same thing. Some had even made contact with health care professionals in their families, all reporting the exact same things, with no care plan in sight. The government apparently was still silent about it all, causing riots in the streets and parades onto our public law buildings. People looking for answers, guidance. Anything to help us. There was no such thing as seeing police patrolling the streets anymore. No ambulance wails heard in the distance. Nothing. We were helpless. Confused, lost, and utterly at our wit’s end. 
The day my mother finally succumbed to her rash was quite literally the worst day of my life. We all sat gathered in the bathroom, letting her body try and be soothed by the freezing cold water we’d submerged her in. We held her hands as gently as we could as she cried out in pain, my father nearly inconsolable as he crouched in the floor beside her. 
“I’m so sorry, my love. I’m so sorry… If I could take this pain away from you, I would. I’d take it in a heartbeat,” he’d cried as his head fell onto the side of the tub. 
I’d gone numb. I was unable to maintain and regulate my emotions as life had begun happening so fast. I cried into my pillow the day she finally passed, trying not to let my screams be heard by the rest of the family. I could do nothing. My father, my grandfather… none of us. The house sat silent for hours.
James had sat on the back porch steps as he was unable to grip a shovel handle, watching as Paps and I dug a hole in the frost-dusted ground of the back yard. None of us spoke. Hell, none of us really even breathed. Dad carried out the body of his beloved, his face straight and emotionless as he dropped her lifeless body into the cold ground. I tried not to think too much about the action I was performing, knowing if I did I would surely lose what little food I'd eaten the past few days. 
The loss of my mother sat heavily on us as a few neighbors brought over what rations that they had barely been able to prepare, themselves. We allowed ourselves a few days to mourn her as the weather grew colder, and James’ rash spread to his arms. 
It was a week later that James had become unable to care for himself any more, and a week after that that a rash appeared on my father’s chest and hands. Both of them, being eaten alive by the ravishing blisters, leaving my grandparents and I in a mental state so disconnected from reality that we were hardly surviving. No longer did we care for ourselves. No longer did we enjoy the simplicities that came with life. Round the clock care, constantly. Ice baths, unending doses of pain killers, preparing scrap meals, and trying to get them to eat and drink while they all were being blinded with pain. 
Most of our neighbors had left. The street was nearly empty. Packs of wild dogs rummaged through homes that had been deserted, and what few people had stayed behind hid away in their homes in fear. Our plan of retreating back to the country had been put on the backburner when my Mother passed. And by some act of god, or maybe of sheer luck, my grandfather and I showed no signs of the rash, at all. My grandmother’s was spreading, of course, but at a much slower pace as everyone else’s, and her pain wasn’t nearly as horrific. James and I knew it was because she wasn’t exposed to technology, as much. His prediction had come true. 
First we buried James, and then we buried my father. Right there in the backyard, next to the garden that was now a pile of old, dead weeds that we hadn’t bothered to clear from the soil as Autumn turned to Winter. 
My grandfather cared for my grandmother as best he could, and I in turn cared for them both. Somehow, some way, I was able to compartmentalize it all, my brain going into overdrive as a trauma response, I guessed. I was the protector, now. The young and able one, stepping into the role of caretaker of my elderly grandparents. Truly, I had no other choice. 
I packed up my hiking bag with everything that I could, and convinced my grandparents to do the same. Paps agreed, it was time to retreat. There wasn’t anything here for us, anymore. 
There, we’d at least have a wood stove and firewood. Gran’s cellar full of canned vegetables, and a fenced-in yard with a barn where we could capture chickens and goats that were most likely still roaming the countryside of neighboring farms. Why we had ever agreed to come to the city in the first place was beyond me. Thought it would be easier, I guessed. Bigger house, close to the city and resources. Never did we think that things would get this bad. Never did we think that my grandparents’ homestead would have been the better option. But then again, never did we think we would lose three of our family in a matter of a month.
But now, as a cold and blistering wind blew across the shutters and creaked the house on its foundation, I made the executive decision to move my grandparents back to Cheatham County. Back to their farm, back to what they knew, in the house that they’d built. 
At dawn that next morning, the three of us stashed as much as we could into my Paps’ old pickup truck, and filled the tank to the brim with the diesel fuel my dad had stowed away in the garage. We prayed that their house wasn’t eaten by a sinkhole, and we prayed that everything would be just as we had left it. The three of us bundled up and clambered into the bench seat of the truck, and I mentally prepared myself to see the city I once knew and loved in a state that was going to be no less than jarring. 
I stuck the key into the ignition, hearing the old gears roaring to life. The sound was truly like music to my ears, a noise that none of us had heard in what felt like years. I pressed my foot to the gas pedal, revving the cold engine to come to life even more. We can do this… We can run away…
The sound of the engine ignited something deep in my chest, giving me an urge that I hadn’t felt in so long. It was the feeling of freeing myself, running away from all of the horrific scenes that my parent’s house had just been witness to. It was time to run. 
“You ready for this?” I asked my Gran as my fingers sat on the gear shift, ready to thrust it into drive.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she replied, her gaze downcast on the street ahead of us. 
“Paps?” I asked. 
“Hit the gas, sweetheart.”
He rolled the crank window down and let a cold gust of air fill the cab as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, lighting one up as I pulled out onto the street, completely unknowing of what we were about to encounter. The smell of his smoke lit a new fire inside me, filling me with a newfound encouragement. And for the first time in months, I saw a glimmer of hope in my grandfather’s eyes. 
JAKE
Josh hadn’t spoken to us in days. Only the necessary words needed to get us through the motions of preparing meals, cutting firewood, and the like. Danny had questioned him about it again, the same conversation that had happened a few nights ago, when we watched the satellite explode. Danny didn’t intend to piss him off or whatever, but he had just had time to sit and think back on it, and dig a little deeper into the caves of Josh’s mind while we wrote that damn record. 
“This is the fucking New Age Crisis, isn’t it?! The one you wrote about?” Danny had said as mom cleaned up the dinner table one night. “You wrote about the fucking age of machine way back when we were writing Black Smoke, man!”
“Why in the fuck are you just putting all of this together, Daniel? Huh? Those words have been written for over a fucking decade, and you’re just now figuring all this out?!” Josh had retaliated, leaning his body across the table.
“No, I fucking knew it all, Josh! But don’t you think the fact that it’s kind of all coming true isn’t a little fucking weird?!” Danny replied, raising his voice. In the days since that first conversation, Danny had done nothing but appear to be in a constant state of thought. Deep thought. “It’s like you told the fucking future! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!”
“God damnit Daniel,” Josh said as he shoved his chair under the table. “I’m not going on about this anymore, you don’t see anybody else caring about it.”
Danny looked my way. “Do you not think this is fucking weird, Jake? Seriously.”
I opened my mouth to speak, not wanting to further their argument. “I–I don’t think it’s that serious, I mean, there are similarities but…” I said calmly, running my nervous hand through my hair that hadn’t seen a wash in days. “Josh isn’t like, psychic or some shit…”
Danny slammed a fist onto the table, startling us all. “Why the fuck did you tell the video directors to make the whole Age of Machine video spin, hm? Did you want it to look like the viewer was being hypnotized? Just like you wrote about in Brave New World fucking years before? We fucking did what the literal lyrics said the other night, Josh. Outside, looking at the dark night sky and watching a satellite or a power of lies fucking die, just like you said. Kill fear. It all happened!”
“Daniel! Calm it the fuck down,” Sam said. “You’ve known this, we’ve all known this… he intertwines all his lyrics, he always has… why is this such news to you?”
Danny lurched himself to Sam’s face. “Because it’s coming fucking true Sam!” he spat, yelling in his best friend’s face. I raised my hand up between them, hoping to calm them before anything got out of hand. This was way out of character for Danny. 
Danny stood quickly from his chair, shoving it backward as the rest of our families came storming into the dark, candle-lit room to see what all the fuss was about. “I’m not fucking stupid, Josh. I know you know what the hell is going on. And I want nothing to fucking do with it,” Danny grit his teeth as he spoke, pointing his finger into Josh’s face before turning and retreating up the stairs of the cabin. 
“What in the hell is going on here?!” my mom asked, coming to Josh’s side.
“I’ll go talk to him,” Danny’s mom followed him up the stairs. 
“I don’t think there’s any getting through to him,” I stopped her. I hadn’t said anything, but I wholeheartedly had picked up on Danny’s strange, obsessive behavior lately. “I think he’s…” I swallowed. 
“He’s what, Jake?” she asked.
I slowly brought my finger to my temple, poking at it. “Getting in his head, a little,” I said gently. She gave me a sideways glare before her lips turned into a half-smile, and she finished rushing up the stairs. 
Yeah, Josh hadn’t talked to any of us since then. And neither had Danny, really. He spent his days locked away in his room, practically freezing himself to death and ignoring all our knocks as he sat at his desk with a notepad and pen. It was so strange of him. Completely out of character and it honestly started to worry us. 
One morning I woke and walked out onto the porch that faced the lake, looking out as a few random folks checked their fish nets and began their treks toward the woods to hunt. It had gotten significantly colder, and I could see my breath in the air. As I gazed out, something on the lake caught my eye. 
It was Josh, out on the John boat, paddling further out around the bend of the water. 
“Josh!” I yelled, signaling for him to turn around and come and pick me up. I needed to talk to him; Sam and I were going crazy without the two of them speaking to us. I bounded down the porch steps, rickety and soft from their old weathered age. “Josh!” I yelled again. Finally, I caught his ear. “Come here! Come get me!”
His shoulders dropped but he listened, paddling slowly back to the shore until the side of his boat tapped the grass. “What?” he asked. 
“I wanna go too,” I said, kicking my leg around to step into the boat. The misty fog was just settling over the calm water as Josh huffed a breath. 
“Why?” he asked as I made myself comfortable. 
“Because, you won’t talk to me, and I don’t like it. Figured I gotta resort to forcing you,” I replied with a smirk. I could feel the tip of my nose getting cold. 
Josh stayed silent but began paddling again, pushing us back out into the open water. We faced one another in the boat, my fingers interlaced as I watched him go stroke for stroke. Once we got to the middle of the water, he finally stopped, resting the paddle across his knees. I would wait for him to speak. No one could hear us out here. Just him and me. 
“It was all based on a dream, you know,” he said solemnly, his eyes cast out across the water. 
“What was?” I asked, already knowing the answer but wanting him to tell me more. 
“All of that shit, all the stupid fucking lyrics. I had a dream when I was like, what, 15? A nightmare, actually. A bunch of them. It was like I had… built this world in my sleep-state, like once a month I would have another one that built on top of the last. I wrote them all down, as soon as I woke up. I’d go to these other worlds that felt real in my head, as I dreamed them. I created so much while I was asleep. And the fucking weed and booze didn’t help the matter,” he went on, using his hands to talk, now. 
I was having trouble understanding. “...But, we all kinda helped write that stuff, Josh. Like, a lot of it…”
“Yeah but how do you think I was able to expand on that weird fucking world we built? You guys putting your two cents in, making me think so hard about it all, then going to sleep that night and having the most realistic dreams about it. Then waking up, and turning it into music,” he explained, biting his cheeks in as he gave me a devious smile. “Danny’s fucking right. All of it is happening. Maybe not really in the same context, or the same order, but. It’s happening. We’re watching it. I dreamed about the video we made for that fucking song. The setting, the context, all the weird props and shit…” 
“The drugging?” I asked, remembering jumping from my skin as we filmed those scenes of saline being dropped into our eyes.
“Yeah. The fucking drugging. The big white building. The cots, us being held hostage there by someone… it’s exactly how it all happened in my dream. I made sure of it. And I’m fucking scared, Jake…” he said, leaning across the boat and pulling on the collar of my coat. 
I looked into his eyes and swallowed. I knew why he was scared. If things kept going the way they were, the only thing that would come next would be an entity coming in and taking us… using us for some experimental bullshit like we’d had them do in the video. 
“Starcatcher was a little bit of a break from the norm of my nightmare worlds… I tied it all in, but I really based it off of one of those side-story ideas that you and Sam got that one night. Cults and blind faith and all that shit,” he whispered, rocking the boat a little. “But this last album…”
This last album. 
The one we didn’t even get to finish touring. We’d managed to fit one in right after Starcatcher had wrapped, continuing on with the world we’d built all those years ago. The world that I guess, now, came straight from Josh’s dreams. That one concentrated a little more heavily on love and romance and the freeing of oneself through intimacy, but this latest one, it was some of our darkest work, yet.
“Danny wasn’t kidding when he said that was only the tip of the iceberg. Shit got a little fucking dark with this last one, didn’t it?” he muttered, reminding me of all the lyrics we’d stayed up late writing just a couple of years ago. 
Lies, deception, control, death… we really did get a little heavy with it. We wound lyrics into symbolism with governmental control and all that. We really tapped back in to lyrically beating around the bush. And unfortunately, things seemed to be moving right on par with life as we fucking knew it, right then. 
“Yeah, it really did,” I agreed. “But listen, you don’t need to put that on yourself. Danny’s just… going through something I think. Getting in his mind too much. We’re isolated out here, Josh. Our lives just fucking stopped, now we’re out hunting to feed ourselves?! I think we all deserve to give ourselves a little grace right now, don’t you think?” I tried to reason with him as I felt my toes freezing in my boots. 
He sat almost emotionless, staring at the water beside us as he tapped the oar in his hands. “I wish you could see into my mind,” he breathed, almost soundless. “My nightmares… Danny’s right." He sighed heavily. "It's only going to get worse."
"How the fuck do you know that, huh? How do you know that shit won't go back to completely normal tomorrow?" I pressed, trying to fight an unending battle.
Josh's face turned green. "Did you not hear me just now? I said I wished you could see into my mind...see those dreams that I had." His voice was raising, chopping up with enraged tears. "It's like I'm fucking watching it all come to life. Every bit of it."
He leaned in closer to me on the bench of the boat. "Remember those damned symbols we put on Garden's Gate? I'd stayed up late one night reading through old symbology books and finding runes and shit just because I thought they looked cool... I picked out the ones I thought might go along with what we had for the album. Hell, I didn't think it would ever end up like this..."
"Like what?!" I squealed, raising my hands into the air.
"I don't know, Jake. I swear, it feels like I knew this was going to happen before it ever even did. And that sounds crazy, but I swear on everything, I thought I was just writing about my nightmares. Using them as fuel for lyricism. Never did I think I'd watch it all play out in real time..."
My heart hurt for him. I could tell he was truly internally struggling. He looked like he hadn't slept or eaten in weeks. But this notion that he had seen all of this happen before? No. It made absolutely no sense.
"You can't feel responsible for this..." I muttered.
"No. I don't. But I do feel like I had a hand in perpetuating it. Like I could have stopped it or--"
"Stopped the fucking apocalypse? Yeah..."
He dropped his head into his hands. "Shit, this is all so fucked up."
I watched his shoulders rise and fall as he shuddered through deep breaths, trying to calm himself, trying to make sense of what was happening in his mind.
"So you know more?"
He lifted his head, his eyes swollen and dripping with tears that weren't there for sadness. He was terrified.
"Yeah. I know more."
+++
It was three nights later that all hell broke loose. I was awoken in the middle of the night to the sound of the front door crashing open, and loud, heavy footsteps barging across the hardwood floor. In my half-asleep state, I thought it was maybe Sam trudging back inside after a late-night smoke, knocking the snow off of his boots, but when my gut felt that feeling of uneasiness, I shot up from my bed. I threw my sweatpants and a sweatshirt on, shoving my door open to rush down the stairs of the cabin. 
I was met with Josh already at my side as he had heard the commotion, too, and then we were met with the sound of my dad’s voice yelling and echoing off the wood walls. 
My dad’s voice had always carried, and he tended to be a very lighthearted man, but we all knew the way his voice sounded when he was serious. Scared. 
It was pitch black, but luckily I knew that cabin like the back of my hand, and Josh and I undoubtedly could navigate it even with our eyes closed. My shoulder was touching his as we finally hit the landing, my stomach churning with nerves to see what the hell was going on. 
I was met with a scene that I was sure I had seen in a movie before– silhouettes of tall men in dark clothing, black masks covering their faces as the weapons they held illuminated the space with tiny red laser lights. One had his boot across my father’s chest as he lied on his back on the floor. My mom was shrieking, pushing against one of the men as they held her back from getting to my dad.
“What in the fuck is going on?! Who are you? Get the hell out of here!” I yelled as I pushed my way through in the darkness, tripping over chairs and rugs and Josh’s feet as I moved to shove myself into the man holding my father down. All I remember was chaos. Fists, yelling, darkness… my mind wanting to protect my family and Danny’s family but also wanting to protect myself. It felt as if there were six other people in the cabin with us. And looking back, I think my count was about right, though I could hardly see a thing. 
I heard the sound of breaking glass, or maybe a plate or something as I caught a shadowed visual of Danny breaking a heavy ashtray across one of the men’s heads, but Danny was promptly thrown onto the floor, himself.
I felt the butt of a gun smack across the back of my head, knocking me forward to land in what I learned to be Sam’s arms, stumbling back as he caught my weight. It hurt, and I instantly felt a rush of blood to my skull and a metallic taste in my mouth. The red laser lights flitted around the room, only illuminating objects and people here and there. My vision was blurred and I felt like I could vomit; I saw quick flashes of Danny and my mom… Josh and Danny’s dad… But I couldn’t tell you a damn thing that happened from then on. The rush of confusion was blinding, my body on auto-pilot.
Some time thereafter, I woke up in the back of what felt like a truck, the walls high and metal around me. My arms were bound at my back, and my mouth was taped shut. I could hardly breathe, my head was pounding, and I could feel dried blood resting at the crook of my neck. The vehicle roared beneath me and I could hear the tires screeching around every turn. 
Yes, definitely in a vehicle.
When I had finally gotten my wits about me again, I tried my best to look around and get my bearings, and all I saw were the painted black walls of the truck, and the rugged rusty metal of the bed of it below me. I was enclosed. I screamed from behind my taped lips, unable to make hardly a sound as my chest and lungs felt deprived of air. I looked, I searched- nothing. No one. I was by myself. My mind raced back to what had happened at the cabin, and my memory only gave me that same blurred chaos. Six men. Weapons. No words, violence. 
And then, for the next hour, I was alone.
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