Inside the Stillness

Brady lived by himself in a hovel carved into the side of a low hill, a few miles south of Beowawe. Once, the place had been a miner’s claim, the kind of hopeful scar left behind by men who’d chased silver and sunlight across the desert.

Now it was his, half cave, half cabin, cool in summer, warm enough in winter, and far enough from anything resembling a town to make the world feel properly quiet. He liked it that way.

His neighbors, those few who bothered to ride this far out, thought him a bit touched for preferring the company of wind and sand to that of people, but Brady didn’t mind. There was a peace in the desolation, in knowing that the nearest soul was a good half-day’s walk away. Even the wild horses kept their distance, though he could often see them at dusk, tracing thin silhouettes along the ridgelines.

That evening, he sat on his newly built porch, a rough thing of pine planks and sweat, nursing a cup of coffee and a cigarette he’d rolled himself. The desert, restless with the murmur of insects and the shifting of wind through sagebrush, seemed to hold its breath. The quiet struck him first as pleasant, then as peculiar.

No horses.
No pronghorn.
Not even the usual whisper of air through the gullies.

The stillness was not empty, as it pressed on him, as if sound itself had been buried alive beneath the sand.

Brady leaned forward, frowning. A flicker of movement caught his eye beyond the sage line, something tall gliding between two low hillocks.

The shape was wrong for a man, incorrect for anything he’d ever seen. It was too fluid, too deliberate, as if it moved through a slightly thicker world than his own.

It stepped into the dying light.

The figure was dressed in black, though the cloth seemed to absorb the sunset. Its skin was the color of ash, its eyes two caverns sunk deep beneath a brow too heavy for any human skull.

In each hand, it carried a curved blade that glinted as though catching light from somewhere beyond the sun. The thing advanced, gait jerky and marionette-like, as if pulled forward by invisible strings.

Brady rose, his instincts older than reason. He’d hunted enough to know what came next.

Where there was one predator, there were always more. He stepped inside his hovel, unhurried but efficient.

The Winchester leaned against the far wall, oiled and ready. He grabbed it, along with every box of ammunition he owned, and took position in the doorway.

By the time the first shot rang out, the figure was close enough for Brady to see that its mouth never closed, gaped open in a soundless scream, a pit lined with teeth like shards of glass. The rifle cracked, the creature folded in half, and yet its body hit the ground with a delay, like it had to remember how to fall.

Then came the others. They poured from the horizon in silence, dozens of them, each identical, each moving as if bound to the same unseen rhythm.

The sound that should have come with such a mass never arrived; even his own gunfire seemed muffled, absorbed by the night as if the desert refused to echo it back. For eighteen hours, Brady fought.

He lost track of time except for the rhythm of reloading, firing, counting, and breathing. His arms ached, his shoulder bruised deep purple, but he never stopped.

The air stank of gunpowder and blood, if that’s what it was. The fluid that seeped from the bodies shimmered like oil and evaporated in the sandy loam.

When dawn finally broke, the sun rose into a sky too pale, as though it too had grown weary of color. Brady stepped out and surveyed the battlefield.

Two hundred corpses lay sprawled across the slope, their faces already crumbling into gray dust. Brady burned them anyway.

For three days, he kept the pyres lit, watching as the smoke curled upward in thin, unnatural spirals that refused to disperse. The wind did not return. The horses did not return. The world seemed to hold itself back, waiting for something.

On the third night, as he sat beside the last smoldering heap, he heard the faintest whisper, a voice so low it felt like it was forming inside his skull rather than around him.

“We were the first breath,” it said. “And you have exhaled us.”

Brady stood, rifle in hand, though there was nothing to aim at. The horizon quivered.

The stars above Beowawe seemed to shift, not twinkling, but turning, like they were eyes adjusting their focus toward him. He did not run.

He watched as the night sky pulsed once, twice, then settled. The desert released, the wind returned, carrying with it the familiar rasp of sage and sand.

By morning, the world looked unchanged, with empty hills, bright sky, and the faint glimmer of heat rising from the rocks. But sometimes, when Brady steps outside with his coffee and his smoke, the stillness creeps back, thick and patient.

And though he never speaks of that long night south of Beowawe, he keeps his rifle close. Because every so often, the silence comes again, hungry, remembering.