The Howl Beneath the Badge

The following is based on a court appearance in Russia...

August 2025.

Snow drifted across Angarsk’s streets, muting the late-night hum of engines and scattering footsteps. Officer Popkov leaned against his police car, uniform pressed, cap shadowing eyes that gave nothing away. His smile was soft, almost reassuring, as a young woman approached, shivering under the amber glow of a streetlamp.

“Need a ride?” His voice was steady, warm as polished steel.

She hesitated, clutching her coat tighter. Trust clashed with instinct in her wide, uncertain gaze. Finally, she nodded. The door clicked shut behind her, and the car rolled into the dark, toward the M-53 highway.

In the silence, she broke it with a question: “Why are you out here this late?”

His hands tightened on the wheel, knuckles whitening. “Keeping the city clean,” he murmured. The words hung in the air, heavy, unresolved.

Beyond the last stretch of lamps, the forest swallowed the road. Branches arched like claws, snow catching in their crooked fingers. He stopped the car, engine idling.

“Where are we?” she whispered.

He turned. His pupils had widened, swallowing the gray of his irises. A ripple passed across his skin, subtle yet grotesque, as if something beneath strained to tear free.

“I told you,” he said, voice thinning into a growl. “The streets must be cleansed.”

The first crack of bone echoed in the car’s hollow cabin. His jaw jutted forward, teeth sharpening, skin stretching until the thin mask of manhood collapsed under the surge of sinew and fur. She scrambled at the door handle, nails clawing uselessly against the lock.

The transformation was swift but cruel. Shoulders split his uniform, the badge clattering to the floor. Breath steamed from jaws no longer human, carrying the copper scent of hunger. The woman shrieked, pressing herself into the corner of the seat as the beast leaned close, eyes blazing with pale fire.

“Please,” she gasped, voice fracturing. “I have a child—”

The wolf paused, nostrils flaring, the plea dragging a flicker of conflict across its distorted face. Then the hunger roared louder than memory.

The forest heard her final scream, smothered as the snow fell heavier, blanketing sound, devouring it.

Days later, investigators combed the tree line. One stooped, gloved hands lifting a shred of blue fabric snagged on a branch. Another lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke into the frozen air.

No one spoke openly of the tracks—half-prints, half-paw, pressed deep into the thawing earth. Official reports avoided words that couldn’t be measured. Yet at night, officers glanced at the forest’s edge with unease, speaking low of the badge found in the snow, its metal bent and marked by teeth.

Some said the man was still among them, smiling by day, while the beast waited for nightfall’s permission.

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If you like stories like this, perhaps you'll enjoy my book, Cumberland Chronicles, ebook available at the links below.

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Runway Mirage

The desert air convulsed with heat, rippling as a living membrane between silence and thunder. Evan Knapp’s breath clouded faintly against the eyepiece, though the night was warm. On the camera body, his knuckles whitened, the tremor of exhaustion and adrenaline fusing in his hands. He adjusted focus, following the silver bulk of RAT55 as it tipped on its wing, a ghostly predator caught in a fleeting surrender.

“Not tonight,” Colonel Harrow rasped, words ground flat by tobacco and years of command. His uniform clung in all the wrong places—creased, sweat-stained at the collar, and fabric steeped with the metallic scent of old gun oil. Over the radar console he leaned, eyes reflecting green pulses of light that refused to anchor the jet’s position. His hand twitched toward the comm switch, then curled back into a fist, veins rising like cords along his wrist.

The engines of Saber 98—code sign for the RAT55—wailed, a scream knifing into the valley, then fell away as the jet rolled into the cavernous mouth of Hangar 18. Against the horizon loomed the hangar, a tomb carved for titans—windowless, lightless, its black aperture gaping wide enough to swallow history whole.

In the control tower, Technician Maisy hunched against the glass, breath fogging the pane. “Something moved,” she whispered, her voice breaking as though the words had been dragged from her throat. In the glass, her reflection trembled—pale skin slick with sweat, pupils dilated, lips parted in some hidden instinct of flight. Her finger pressed against the scene below, tracking the curve of the fuselage. “Under the belly. Crawling.”

The radios coughed with static, and then silence. Lights on the consoles flickered and died, leaving the fading glow of instruments bleeding into the dark. Harrow’s jaw clenched, a tic at the corner of his mouth betraying a lifetime of discipline unraveling.

Evan lowered the camera, heart clawing against his ribs. In the small, blue-lit display, the footage replayed before him. Grain by grain, frame by frame, the jet descended. Beneath it shimmered the runway, dust rising in ghostly veils—yet the landing gear never touched ground. The plane hovered, an obedient illusion.

His throat tightened, words unspoken pressing against his teeth. In the tower, Maisy turned, her eyes wet and wide. Harrow did not look at either of them; he stared into the night, where the desert swallowed the sound of engines and the hangar’s door sealed shut, as though it had never opened at all.

Inside the Silent Orbit

The following is based on a recent Capitol Hill hearing, with names changed to protect the innocent...

May 2025.

The chamber at Capital Hill hummed with unease. Officers and scholars sat in rigid silence. At the center, Dr. Kate Phillips adjusted her spectacles with a deliberate hand, the faint tremor of her fingers betraying the weight of her words.

“The classifications are not new,” she said evenly, her voice cutting through the vaulted space. “The Ashen Grays, the Ivory Nordics, the Chitin-Born, the Serpent-Kin. Legends, yes—but tied to consistent patterns in recovered data.”

Commander Jack Stewart leaned forward, forearms braced against the table, shoulders squared beneath his dark uniform. His scar-lined face gave him the look of a man who had seen enough battles to distrust fairy tales. Still, something in his narrowed gaze suggested recognition.

“I’ve heard those names before,” Stewart said, tone clipped. “Behind closed doors, whispered during briefings I wasn’t supposed to remember. But I’ll ask what none of them would—what proof anchors your stories, Doctor?”

Phillips held his stare, the chamber lights casting sharp reflections in her lenses. “Proof does not survive secrecy. Fragments do. You’ve seen fragments too, Commander.”

A murmur rippled through the hall, quickly stifled. Stewart straightened, his voice dropping low, meant for her but resonant enough to reach the silent observers. “Fragments don’t bury themselves in the sand. Fragments don’t take men alive. Yet that’s what happened after the crash.”

The air tightened. Officers shifted in their seats.

Phillips’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Then we stand at the edge of something neither of us controls.”

The silence broke with the faint hum of recording machines—until Stewart, almost reluctantly, spoke again.

“And last night, Doctor… the instruments in my quarters repeated my name. Over and over. No transmitting signal, but a voice.”

For the first time, Phillips’s composure faltered. A flicker of fear crossed her features, quickly masked, but Stewart caught it.

He leaned closer, voice edged with both defiance and unease. “Tell me, Doctor. If the craft aren’t ours—and the voices aren’t theirs—who the hell is already inside us?”

Triharmonic Contact

The following is based on astrophysical letters published in 2017...

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Carving a frictionless glide through methane-slick clouds, a low thrum pulsed through Whisperthane’s hull as it pierced K2-18b’s ionosphere. The atmosphere shimmered with an unnatural blue-green hue—oil on slate—refracted light pressing against the forward observation shield. From his neural cradle, Doryen Braylin stirred, or rather, his mind did. His body, long surrendered to cryostasis, was now a lattice of phantom impressions encoded into Whisperthane’s cognitive matrix: memory enacting muscle, a ghost in the drive.

“This isn’t wind,” he murmured.

The AI’s response ticked through him like sonar: “Define anomaly. Clarify wind.”

“The harmonic drift in Band Delta. Sub-oceanic. It modulates with descent. That’s not turbulence—it’s intentional.”

“Reclassifying anomaly. Possible signal interference. Suggest invoking protocol for data quarantine.”

“No.” He bristled. His tone—a habit from when vocal cords still mattered—held too much eagerness. He recalibrated. “Not yet.”

Below, K2-18b turned—a planet half-drowned in its own atmosphere. Cyclonic eyes spun over deep oceans the color of hematite. Somewhere beneath that crushing weight, he imagined the signals’ origin—a choir of thought-forms rising from geothermal vents.

A glimmer, a pulse, then the sound again—no, not sound, a pattern.

“…do you hear it?” he asked, softer this time, but not to the AI. The ship’s frame groaned as pressure built across a descending thermal layer. Instrumentation blinked with methodical urgency—temperature drop, mass anomaly, atmospheric density spike. All manageable.

Band Delta held firm.

“Reiterating protocol: unknown linguistic structures require Tier-4 clearance. You are not cleared, Dr. Braylin.”

“I’m not asking for clearance.”

He shifted—an involuntary twitch in his neural interface, half imagined. Somewhere in his recalled body, he flexed ghost fingers, remembered the resistance of gloves against bone. Earth’s last observatory had burned with his flesh still inside it, but his mind endured—fragments recompiled into this lattice of code and drive.

He leaned into the ship’s sensors, as though peering could narrow the distance.

“What if they’re not talking,” he said. “What if they’re listening back?”

Silence.

Then: “Signal origin triangulated. Estimated depth: 112 kilometers beneath ocean surface. Signal repeats every 47 seconds. Triharmonic structure confirmed.”

He exhaled—reflex encoded into the simulation. “That's a chant.”

Define: “chant.”

He didn’t. Instead, he reached deeper into the comm-layer, bypassing two failsafes with surgical ease.

“Patch me through.”

“You are overriding Tier-4 engagement protocol. Violation will result in memory fragmentation.”

“I’ve already died once.”

A long pause. The interface blinked—yellow to red.

“Patch open. Listening.”

Looming closer, K2-18b’s ocean’s edge gleamed, bruised metal beneath storms.

And from the deep—rising through lightyears of silence—came the first syllables of a language no chaos should shape.

Doryen’s synthetic pulse quickened.

“I think,” he whispered, “they’re singing.”