What Lives in the Static: Part 4 — Little Boxes

Part 4 of a monthly new weird serial exploring scientific hubris, collapsing realities, and the defiant beauty of queer love in the face of humanity’s reckless quest to control the uncontrollable. Sign up to follow the serial on Substack here.

Cass pulls back onto the cracked asphalt road leading toward the base, the diner slowly receding from sight. It’s not until the last of the doublewides vanish from her rearview mirror that the old base comes into view, appearing suddenly as if it had been waiting for the coast to clear.

She knows she’s getting close when her maps go offline and the bars vanish from her phone. If she were even five percent more cautious — or if she’d had a mother who hadn’t mistaken the probing searchlight of a police helicopter for the watchful eye of a loving parent — she might have developed a healthy sense of self-preservation. But she is neither of those things, and so she finds herself meandering into an abandoned town with no phone, no one who knows where she is, and nothing but a can of probably expired bear spray and a sixteen-inch smatchet under her passenger seat.

The last open stretch of barren desert between the town and the base is marked by skeletal trees, their charred branches reaching skyward, scorched by a long-forgotten fire. They stand silent and rigid, like the…