Micah

Dumb jokes.

Too many beers.

That kind of laughter that only comes up when you're a little buzzed and far away from responsibility.

Caleb kept blasting music on a Bluetooth speaker until Mikey threatened to throw it into the stream.

That settled it.

We stayed up too late and crashed sometime around 2 in the morning.

The second night, that's when things started to shift.

At first, it was just a feeling.

The air had a different edge to it, cooler and heavier somehow.

We sat around the fire again, but it wasn't the same.

Less talking, more staring into the flames.

It was Caleb, I think, who asked Mikey about his uncle.

The one who used to hunt up in the northern ridges.

Mikey shrugged and said, yeah, he used to tell me some weird stuff about this place.

That got our attention.

He hesitated, like he wasn't sure he wanted to say it out loud.

Then he started in.

His tone was casual at first, but it carried that undercurrent.

The one you hear when someone tries to play it cool, but you can tell the story stuck with them.

He said his uncle used to talk about something called the walker, not a ghost, not an animal, something else, something in between.