I got lost alone in a national forest with half a bottle of water and followed a strange white figure to a camouflaged door hidden in the brush.

I got lost alone in a national forest with half a bottle of water and followed a strange white figure to a camouflaged door hidden in the brush. The staircase behind it led underground, where a voice warned me to leave before the lights suddenly went out. I woke three days later strapped to an operating table, and after a woman questioned whether anyone would notice me missing, she asked one thing I never expected: “Are you looking for a job?”…

I had been lost for two days when I saw the white figure.

By then, I was hungry enough to think seriously about eating things I normally wouldn’t touch, dehydrated enough to question what was real, and embarrassed enough to admit the whole mess was my fault.

I had gone off the marked trail alone.

No hiking partner. No one tracking my location. No clever backup plan.

Just me, a mostly empty backpack, half a bottle of water, and miles of forest in every direction.

A blackberry bush scraped my ankle as I pushed through the undergrowth. I looked down hopefully, but every berry had already been picked clean.

Then something pale moved at the edge of my vision.

A person.

At least, I thought it was a person.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Wait! I need help!”

The figure slipped between the trees.

I followed.

Every time I thought I was about to catch up, it appeared farther ahead, never fully in front of me, always just off to one side.

I ran harder than I should have in my condition.

Branches slapped my face.

Briars tore at my clothes.

But I was convinced whoever I was following might know the way out.

Eventually, I burst into a clearing.

The figure was gone.

Instead, I found a door.

An ordinary brown door stood at the far edge of the clearing, tangled in vines and bushes as if someone had built a wall underground and forgotten to hide the entrance properly.

The forest around me suddenly erupted.

Birds screamed from the trees.

Animals barked and cried from somewhere I couldn’t see.

Every instinct told me the woods were warning me.

But hunger makes you practical.

I could wander away from the only man-made thing I had seen in days and probably die, or I could open the door and hope somebody inside had water.

Up close, I noticed faded camouflage paint.

Whoever installed it had wanted it hidden.

I reached for the handle.

Then all the animal noise stopped at once.

That should have been enough.

I opened it anyway.

A concrete staircase descended deep underground.

The moment I stepped inside, a motion light clicked on overhead.

Cool air hit my face.

For the first time in two days, I felt relief.

Then a man’s voice crackled through a hidden speaker.

“Hey. You. How’d you get in here?”

I froze.

“Hello?”

No answer.

“If you can hear me, I’m lost. I need food and water.”

The man sighed.

“Go back out the way you came. You need to leave now.”

I actually laughed.

“I’ll die if I go back out there.”

There was rustling near his microphone.

Then I heard a woman arguing with him in the background.

I couldn’t make out the words.

The man came back on.

“I gave you a chance. You should have listened.”

The lights went out.

Complete darkness.

Then I heard boots coming up the stairs.

I turned and ran.

I made it only a few steps before somebody grabbed me from behind.

A rag covered my mouth and nose.

A woman’s voice spoke close to my ear.

“You should have listened while you had the chance.”

Then everything disappeared.

When I woke up, fluorescent lights were burning into my eyes.

I was strapped to an operating table.

Metal instruments sat nearby. Curtains hung along one wall. A sink stood in the corner.

A man in glasses and a lab coat smiled at me from the foot of the table.

“Hello, Nicholas.”

My stomach dropped.

“How do you know my name?”

He seemed delighted by the question.

He knew my full name.

Nicholas Garber.

He knew my height.

My weight.

My eye color.

Then he held up my wallet.

I swore at him.

He laughed and introduced himself as Eric.

I demanded to know why I was tied down.

His expression finally became serious.

“You found a secret operation. People aren’t supposed to know this place exists.”

A woman entered.

I recognized her voice immediately.

She was the one who had knocked me out.

Her name, I eventually learned, was Emily Kane.

She told me they were part of a branch of the United States Cryptid Department.

They studied things most people would call monsters.

Sometimes they observed them.

Sometimes they hunted them.

I told her it sounded like children playing secret agents.

That earned me a slap.

After that, Emily had Eric remove the restraints.

Then she started asking questions.

Why had I been in the woods?

Was I with anyone?

Had I told anybody where I was going?

Was someone expecting me to return?

The truth suddenly sounded much worse when I said it aloud.

I had gone hiking alone.

My father had died when I was young.

My mother still used a flip phone.

I barely used social media.

No one had my location.

Nobody was waiting for a check-in message.

As I answered, something changed in Emily’s face.

She relaxed.

That should have frightened me more than it did.

“Is that it?” I asked. “Did I pass?”

“For now.”

She crossed her arms.

“One more question.”

I waited.

“Are you looking for a job?”

I stared at her.

“No.”

Emily slowly drew one finger across her throat.

I reconsidered.

“I mean… I could be persuaded.”

“Good.”

She smiled.

“You start immediately.”

And that was how, after getting lost in the woods, following something I still couldn’t explain, being drugged, kidnapped, and waking up strapped to a table, I somehow became the newest employee of a government department I hadn’t known existed.

I just didn’t know yet that my first shift might kill me.

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Emily shook my hand.

“Welcome aboard, newbie.”

“My name is Nick.”

“I know, newbie.”

That became our relationship almost immediately.

She led me through long underground hallways beneath flickering lights. Doors carried labels I didn’t particularly enjoy reading: entomology, gigantism, radioactive subjects, humanoid testing.

I kept asking when I could leave.

Emily finally stopped walking.

“You can leave anytime you want.”

I looked back toward the staircase.

She smiled without warmth.

“Feel free to wander back into the forest you spent two days getting lost in.”

I stayed.

Eventually, she pushed open a door to what looked like an armory built for a small war.

Rifles.

Shotguns.

Blades.

Launchers.

Gear I couldn’t identify.

At the far end stood one of the largest men I had ever seen.

His name was Sven.

Emily introduced me as his new apprentice, then left before either of us could object.

Sven told me I had apparently been unconscious for three days.

Three days.

That explained why I no longer felt as though my stomach was eating itself, but it also meant somebody had been keeping me alive while deciding what to do with me.

Sven didn’t seem interested in my existential crisis.

He was going hunting.

And apparently, so was I.

“There is a wrong answer,” he told me when I hesitated.

So I agreed.

He gave me a tranquilizer gun, a vest, and several gadgets whose purposes he refused to explain unless they became “mission essential.”

Then he made me climb what he called the Staircase of Doom.

I nearly collapsed at the top.

Sven hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You passed.”

Then he casually informed me there was an elevator.

I started to understand why everyone in that facility annoyed me.

Outside, the heat and forest sounds brought every miserable hour of being lost rushing back.

Sven led me to what looked like a solid rock wall.

He lifted a disguised panel, entered a code, and an entire section opened like a garage door.

Inside were rows of four-wheelers.

I was still trying to process the government’s secret underground cryptid department apparently having a better recreational vehicle collection than most dealerships when Sven told me to choose one.

We rode about fifteen minutes into the woods.

Then he stopped.

His joking disappeared.

“Ready the tranq gun.”

The forest had gone silent.

Sven found a large piece of exoskeleton on the ground.

Too large to belong to any insect I wanted to meet.

Then leaves moved above us.

I looked up.

Something dropped from the tree.

It hit Sven before either of us could react.

The creature looked vaguely humanoid, but that was where anything familiar ended.

Purple exoskeleton.

Extra limbs.

Eight blue eyes.

A massive scorpion-like tail.

It pinned Sven and drove the stinger into his arm.

Sven looked straight at me.

“Take the shot.”

I couldn’t.

I wish I could make that part sound heroic.

I wish I could say my training took over.

I had no training.

My body simply froze.

The tranquilizer gun might as well have been welded to my hands.

The creature lifted Sven onto its shoulder and disappeared into the woods.

The silence afterward was worse than the attack.

When I finally moved again, shame hit me all at once.

I grabbed my radio.

“Sven has been abducted. He was stung. Send backup.”

Someone answered that they were coming.

I could have waited.

I probably should have.

Then I saw the white figure again.

The same pale outline I had followed before finding the underground door.

It stood at the edge of my vision and moved down the same route the creature had taken.

I followed.

By the time I realized what I was doing, the figure had vanished.

In its place was a cave.

Large tracks led inside.

I stood there arguing with myself.

Wait for professionals.

Or go after Sven.

Then I remembered him looking at me as he said, “Take the shot.”

I went in.

The cave walls were stained dark red.

Skulls had been mounted along the passage like warnings.

At first I saw dead animals.

Then larger things I couldn’t identify.

Farther inside, I heard wet tearing.

The creature sat with its back toward me.

Behind it, I could see part of a human arm.

My stomach turned.

I thought Sven was dead.

I stepped forward.

A bone snapped beneath my boot.

Eight blue eyes turned toward me.

I raised the tranquilizer gun.

The creature roared and charged.

I fired.

The dart bounced off its exoskeleton.

One shot left.

I aimed again.

This time, the dart struck one of its eyes.

The creature stumbled.

The sedative took effect slowly, then all at once.

It collapsed only a few feet from me.

I waited until I was sure it wasn’t getting back up.

Then I walked toward the body behind it.

It wasn’t Sven.

Whoever—or whatever—it had been, the remains were too badly torn apart for me to understand much beyond that.

I vomited.

Then I heard breathing.

I came around a rock formation with my empty gun raised.

Sven was lying on the ground.

Alive.

Barely.

Black veins spread from the sting wound in his arm.

I don’t know how I carried him.

Adrenaline does strange things.

I got him over my shoulders and staggered toward daylight.

By the time I reached the cave entrance, a recovery team was arriving.

Two men brought a gurney.

Another carried a syringe filled with cloudy pink liquid.

When he pulled his mask down, I recognized Eric.

“What stung him?”

“Some kind of scorpion-human nightmare.”

Eric’s face tightened.

“Scorpioid.”

He injected Sven immediately.

The others went into the cave.

Back at the facility, Emily debriefed me.

The capture team had successfully caged the creature alive.

Apparently that was good news for research.

Sven’s condition was less encouraging.

The venom had badly damaged his arm.

Eric wasn’t sure whether he would survive.

Even if he did, he might lose the limb.

I blamed myself.

Emily told me not to.

“Sven knew better than to take a completely untrained recruit out there without proper backup.”

“I still froze.”

“It was your first cryptid encounter.”

I almost corrected her before I realized something.

“I don’t think it was.”

Emily looked at me.

I told her about the white figure.

How it led me toward the hidden door.

How it appeared again after Sven was taken and led me toward the cave.

For the first time since meeting her, Emily looked genuinely unsettled.

She asked me to describe it carefully.

Tall.

White.

Almost glowing.

Always at the edge of my vision.

Always ahead of me.

She told me it might have been a yokai—a spirit more commonly associated with Southeast Asian folklore, though their department had recorded sightings elsewhere.

According to Emily, such beings were unpredictable.

Some harmed people.

Some guided them.

Some did both depending on circumstances no one fully understood.

“So it’s like a guardian angel?”

“In a very loose sense.”

That helped more than I expected.

Later that evening, we received word that Sven was going to live.

Five days passed before visitors were allowed.

When I walked into his room, he looked terrible.

Pale.

Weak.

Nothing like the oversized man who had nearly crushed my hand when we first met.

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“For what?”

“If I’d taken the shot when you told me—”

“First rule of cryptid hunting,” Sven interrupted. “No what-ifs.”

Then he smiled.

“I wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t come after me.”

He pulled back the blanket.

His injured arm was gone.

In its place was a mechanical one.

Metal fingers flexed.

“Pretty good upgrade, huh?”

I stared.

Then I laughed.

Sven raised the new hand.

“If you thought my old handshake was bad—”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Absolutely not.”

For the first time since finding that hidden door, I felt something close to normal.

Sven reminded me of our deal.

I had survived the hunt.

Now I could ask whatever I wanted about the department.

For days, I had accumulated hundreds of questions.

Who built the facility?

How many creatures were out there?

How long had this department existed?

Why had the white figure chosen me?

Instead, I asked only one.

“When do we hunt the next one?”

Sven grinned.

And that was when I realized something that probably should have terrified me.

A week earlier, I had been desperately trying to escape that forest.

Now I wanted to know what else was hiding inside it.

THE END.
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