ID 47751479 © Jeff Gabbard | Dreamstime.com
“Hey Jeb, coming in, don’t shoot me.” I shoved the slightly stuck door of the trailer open further with my back, my arms filled, wobbling on what could only generously be called steps to get into Jeb’s fifty-year old mobile home he inherited from his grandfather.
He shouted back. “No promises, unless you brought beer.”
Safe, relatively, with his acknowledgment of my existence, I stepped inside, the mildew scent of inadequate insulation and air conditioning had retreated from overwhelming to only nauseating with the change of the season. Now, the cat piss from the two ferals living under the building beat out the mildew. I would shower once I got home.
“I owe you two six packs, and,” I said as I passed by his work station to head for the kitchen, adding the beer to the piles of shit. Returning from that toxic dump, I continued, “I got one for hanging out.” I stuck an arm out to the faded, splintered plywood masquerading as his porch to pick up the third before heading to the bank of monitors and the half-broken chair he kept for visitors. I moved the library book on North American birds to the ancient fax machine he kept for emergencies. The front door remained cracked, and I promise myself for the hundredth time to measure it and bring him a non-warped door that would swing shut. During the summer, the promise is to keep out the bugs and during the winter to keep out the chill; fall and spring are okay, but even as far off the beaten trail as we are, someone could come by and hear us talking.
And not all business is suitable for just anyone to hear.
I cracked one green can and pass it to him, then popped a second out of the plastic rings for me. Looking over the ten monitors, most had four to a dozen street views., I asked, “What’cha doing?” The two monitors where I sat showed woods.
He knocked back half the can before answering, his eyes not leaving the screen tower before him. “Sauron business.”
“Like that evil dude in Lord of the Rings?”
“Yeah, kind-of, not really.” Jeb’s black eyes flicked my way as he typed a message on one of his keyboards. “But also, none-of-your-business. But speaking of business, if you brought beer, the info panned out.”
“Like a well-oiled iron skillet.” I pulled out an envelope from my jacket. “Here is your part of the haul. Three gift cards, two HEB and one Walmart, fifty each, and the receipt for your property tax being paid for the year.”
“Girls safe?”
“They are out-of-state at least, can’t do much more than that.”
He grunted.
I let the silence stretch between us. Jeb lived alone, very alone, and he only had so many words in him at any time, outside of talking computer, which I don’t speak well. He downed the can, and I finished mine. I cracked him another before getting up.
The hunt for the two boxes of trash bags I left in the kitchen for when I visit didn’t take long; it’s more a matter of excavation than figuring where he might have moved them. Into a clear bag, I dropped as much of the recycling as can fit, tie it off, and toss it out the door in a clatter. Then in a dark bag, I picked up as much of the soiled paper plates, napkins, leftover molded food, and trash-trash as I could lift, cursing under my breath once again about being dumped into a female body and the bum left arm gifted to me by other males who took exception to me dressing like my real sex and beat me within an inch of my life when I was fifteen. Maybe, someday, I’ll pour money into some hormone treatments to help with muscle definition, but I rather spend it other ways for now. Being small had a lot of advantages in my work.
The black trash bag also went out the door. I don’t bother looking into the refrigerator; I had learned that lesson. But I do a quick count of the paper plates and plastic utensils to see if anything needs replacement, and made sure Jeb was eating enough to stay alive. Satisfied he had enough until my Thanksgiving kidnapping, where I drag him out for his seasonal shave, bath, and full meal, I passed through the main room where he worked and slept. The single-wide’s bedroom had his miniature server farm fed by the solar panel array he kept closer to the road. Four of the ten monitors were now dark.
Outside, I move the recycling to the back of my compact and, after repositioning the gun box to the side, put the trash bag into the trunk to take of later. I touch the grip of the Glock in my ankle carry, the Beretta at my back, the dagger set up for a left draw, and the two thin knives built into my jacket. Everything in place and everything in its place.
Returning inside with the lunch I bought on the way, I sat and waited, pouring out half my fried okra and placing the second roast beef sandwich on the folded fast food bag. The first roast beef, with garlic sauce, went into me.
“No, apple pie?” Jeb popped two okra into his mouth as he turned off another monitor.
“They were out; only had peach.”
He grunted and returned to whatever task he had on the final screen. Two always remained up; one monitoring stock markets around the world and the other showing four or so group chats scrolling by. My text window with him is on the bottom with a couple other high school friends he helps out locally, and one old flame he kept hoping will reach out after disappearing during COVID.
He specifically asked me not to look. Same with Harvey. We did anyway. We agreed he didn’t need to know until he was ready.
The two monitors at the station I sat at were for special long-term projects which wouldn’t be turned off until he was done with them. I’ve seen all kinds of things here from architectural designs of buildings around the world to chem trail studies. I looked over the woodland visuals for birds, since he had a book about them. Here and there red outlines popped up from movement, turning to green around plants and blue around animals. Sometimes names appeared, identifying the flora and fauna with Latin designations. I squinted some as the twilight cast long shadows, seeing if I could identify the stuff before the computer.
Something furry went by the trail camera. Taller than the shrub trees. On two feet. Visible for only a second. Emblazed with red.
“Hold on.” I leaned in. “Anyway to back this up?”
“You see something?”
“Yeah, the fucking Big Foot, maybe.” My voice raised and cracked. I hated when I squeaked. “Is this real time? Is it near here?”
“Nah, it’s a PA cam, part of the Sauron program. Just background checks for discrepancies the computer couldn’t identify. The guys wanted some eyeballs to sort out the flags.” He crumpled up the sandwich paper. “Figures you would see Sasquatch.”
“Don’t start.” I warned. All my life I have seen weird shit that nobody believed. Maybe it is from being a man in a woman’s body. Maybe it was the double flat-lines I pulled on the way to the hospital when I was fifteen. But I had encountered ghosts, two I am absolutely positive of – one new-dead and one from the revolutionary war, Texas version. One of my clients swore up and down a demon was stalking her; I took the money because it was green, but by the end, I agreed with her before returning the motherfucker back to hell where he belonged. And, no, there isn’t a body anywhere for blue boys to find. A feral pig hunting trip with friends ended with me hyperfocusing on Big Foot until deer season rolled around.
Jeb shrugged at my words and returned to whatever he was doing.
Jeb had been among the friends when I went four months of bat-shit crazy looking for the furry bastard to show up again. He never believed. Not Big Foot, not the ghosts, and not the demon. Not even after gluing me up after fighting the thing that left claw marks needing his non-tender mercies and sizzled when holy water had been poured over them to cleanse them. At least he accepted me as me, which is more than most of the people I grew up were willing to do, including half my family.
“Alright, let’s back this up.” He closed his last screen, rolled over, and started to hit the keyboard at my station.
“So what is this all about?” I asked as he worked.
“The Sauron project?” Jeb smiled half-way. “Officially the ASE project, or All-Seeing Eye. A group of…” click, click “that should do it. Watch the screen. Of us gray hats got together and decided to see how many publicly available cameras we could put together.”
“Like the dark web?” I glanced at him, before returning my eyes to the screen.
“Nah. We wanted it to be totally legit, a real challenge.” He leaned back, the wheeled chair creaking. “One of the Florida guys from Reddit NotTheseDroids had started the work, and a tech bro from the valley wanted to test out non-AI pattern recognition. We’ve been stitching it together since 2020 and it covers most of the US now. I used it to help you with that car chase in Dallas.
“But the big jump happened when BirdWatcher929 found out about it and joined us. He is trying to find all the birds and helped us link in trail cams. He paid for five servers across the nation to process data so it would never go down in any local disaster, a big investment to link up since this isn’t on the world wide web net. Anyway, several bros are using all the visual data to test out various programs. One guy is doing visual compression and can keep up to a week of data stored.”
“From every public camera?”
“That we can legally access. That’s important, we want this totally legit. A couple college lawyer wanna-bes pop in and are getting us access to public cameras in buildings and oth—What the fuck?” Jeb froze the screen.
It wasn’t a clear shot by any means, but it was large, on two feet, and furry.
Also snouted like a wolf, not a human face.
“Let’s back up.” The keyboard started clicking. A screenshot expanded out, timestamp with location, and he typed Verified good red flag. Anomaly. Investigating species.
“The trailcam group has helped BirdWatcher find thirty species for his lifetime list, which he has driven out to see in person, and the Audubon Society has loved all the dumps we have made for location spottings. In addition, the All-Seeing have been working with other scientists on gathering migratory habits and endangered species information. But this sucker…” The second screen flipped to four packing lots, all with timeframe before the anomaly. Jeb dropped in a search engine, “Come on JeffWishedHeWasThisGood, let’s see how good we have tweaked your crawler.”
“Why are we looking at parking lots?” I snorted a laugh. “Sasquatch doesn’t drive.”
“Eliminate the reasonable before you look into the unreasonable.”
“Fair.” It’s something I always have to do with my investigations. I watched as each of the parking lots, one just inside a State Park entrance, another gravel with a retail store, a paved one looked like next to a fire station with a small airplane strip, and the last was mostly cracked and overgrown, its lines faded with age. People pulled into and out of the first three, faces matching going in and out. Jeb answered questions popping up with “yes store, no search”.
As the shadows lengthened, heading toward the twilight and the countdown to the time stamp of the not-man-maybe-costume-guy siting on the original screen in the screenshot, a nice top-of-the-line SUV pulled into the cracked parking lot. I finally picked out the date, four days ago, about the time I was helping get my client’s daughter and her best friend across state lines under a bright full moon and away from their attackers. The computer grabbed the front license plate, but since Pennsylvania only requires back plates, it was just a vanity plate saying “Run Faster.”
A tall man got out, dark hair curling around his ears, beard shadow but no moustache or sideburns, key in hand. He walked around to the back, leaving the driver’s door open. From the bending over, I bet he was putting the key into a magnetic box under the fender. Returning to the front, he pulled off his shirt and tossed it in. Not much could be seen by the camera because of the door in the way and the glare of the setting sun on the glass, but the man obviously worked out.
I pushed down the jealousy of muscles I wanted and didn’t have.
The rocking motion indicated taking off his shoes and bending over for socks and likely pants. The door closed to show his buck-naked back. No tattoos.
Then no skin, only fur.
“You saw that, right?” I asked.
“Nope. I absolutely did not see that.” Jed’s hand froze over his keyboard. The question hovered on the screen, with a little square of the man’s face…the werewolf’s face. “Store? Y/N; Search? Y/N”
“It’s okay,” I said quietly. “Just say No, No. Lose this, lose the screenshot. Say it was a bear or something.”
“But Kenny,…”
Still talking barely above a breath, afraid to break Jeb. “It’s Pennsylvania. Far from here.”
“I-I…” He stopped with a grunt. Jeb’s eyes darted from the screen to the keyboard and back again.
I pulled his hand away and hit the “N” key twice. “You say everything is on a week back-up.”
“Yeah,” my friend’s voice was flat, “it helped us find two lost hikers last month. Being able to pull things up.”
“Is it seven days at a time, or…?”
He shook his head. “Twelve-hour compressions.”
“Okay, so in three, maybe four, more days this will go away.”
Jeb started shaking.
“Four days you will be safe. Don’t save anything. Don’t flag anything. Mark the anomaly a bear to train the computer not to flag it for others.” I kept talking to him softly, trying to get through his shock. “It is a camera. No one knows it is on the public sites. The download was everything and no one knows anyone would pick out this one thing out of everything. You are good. You are safe.”
“It’s real.”
“Not to you.” I moved my body between him and the screen. “Turn everything off and come home with me tonight. We will do Thanksgiving early. Clean all of this off of us. You will be fine.”
“What if…”
“No, just turn off the computer. Wipe what you need to. Come on now. You don’t want the FBI finding this.”
His eyes lit at the FBI. He understood the FBI. He nodded.
Not as focused as normal, but I watched him close things out, changing the red flag marker. He did a quick search and found two other markers from the same night and area and deleted those as well. A click here and a click there. Eventually all the screens went dark, even the ones which were never dark.
Outside we walked by the woodpile and climbed into my car. We drove past the solar panels keeping the server farm running and dodged his goats, which kept the grass down around them, letting the strong Texas sun provide maximum benefit. He relaxed the further away from the impossible we got.
I wiggled in my seat, double-checking the gun I keep in the back holster. The one with blessed silver bullets if I ever cross paths with a demon again. Dying twice changed my definition of impossible a long time ago.
(Words 2,695; first published 12/22/2025)