16 Jul Tornado Warning

Let me start by saying I know how this sounds.

Three college guys, at the end of the semester, a rural VRBO, and a storm warning? Feels like the setup to every backwoods horror cliché imaginable. Believe me, I get it. We were exactly the kind of idiots who would ignore red flags if it meant cheaper booze and no neighbors for twenty miles.

And that’s what we got—a bargain.

The listing called it a “reinforced storm shelter home,” tucked away in west Texas scrubland, far enough from Lubbock to lose signal, but close enough for a beer run if needed. No reviews. Not one. But the photos were glossy and professionally staged—sunset over a wraparound porch, a slick minimalist kitchen, even a hot tub on the deck.

The best part? Two nights for $129. Total.

I booked it. Split three ways, it was cheaper than a bar tab. Trevon thought it was hilarious—he said it looked like a murder barn from the outside. Jared called it “off-grid aesthetic” and brought four bottles of Fireball to celebrate the end of finals. None of us were particularly concerned about the lack of Internet or a cellphone signal. Trevon joked, “No girls, no WiFi—guess we’re really roughing it this weekend, boys!”

I remember the message from the owner more clearly now. It didn’t seem strange at the time. He thanked us for booking, noted that the low rate was due to it being “storm season,” and added:

“No worries, gentlemen. The structure’s reinforced—steel-bolted framing, thermal shielding, industrial roofing. She’s held through worse. Just don’t ignore the alerts. And don’t turn off the intercom, whatever you do. It exists for your safety.”

There was a smiley face at the end of the message. I remember that, too.

We arrived just before sunset. The GPS cut out five miles from the property, and we had to finish the drive using screenshots of the directions. When we turned off the main road, the gravel drive narrowed into a patchy, rutted mess that wound past empty fields and a rusted-out grain silo.

Then the house came into view.

It didn’t quite match the listing photos.

It was the same house, yes, but it looked more… armored. The porch columns were metal, not wood, as in the listing. The windows were covered by heavy-duty retractable shutters, currently open. The walls were paneled with some sort of galvanized sheet siding, bolted down tight. Even the foundation had thick steel plates set around the base, like a protective coating.

“Damn,” Jared muttered. “Looks like they’re prepping for war, not weather.”

“Bet it was a meth house before they cleaned it up,” Trevon said, already pulling out his phone for pictures.

Inside, it smelled faintly of bleach and rust. The layout matched the listing—open floor plan, updated kitchen, two bedrooms, plus a finished attic with a few bunk beds. But there were… details that didn’t sit right. Little things. Like the scratch marks in the hallway drywall. They weren’t from claws—they were more like shallow gouges, curved like bites. We noticed similar indentations on the door frames, both inside and out. A few looked as if they’d been painted over, poorly. Then there was the black crust in the corners. Not mold exactly—too dry and granular. It was concentrated in the crevices where the floor met the walls, or in the seams around the window frames.

“Maybe mice,” I offered.

Trevon knelt beside one patch. “Mice with fangs and black tar for blood?”

We laughed it off. We were twenty-one and drunk within the hour.

The intercom was built into the wall beside the fridge—a square speaker grill with a green light blinking softly. An old-looking label had been taped next to it.

“STORM ALERT SYSTEM – DO NOT DISABLE.”
“WEATHER WARNINGS WILL BE BROADCAST THROUGHOUT THE PROPERTY.”
“ALERTS ARE NOT OPTIONAL.”

Underneath, someone had scribbled in pen: “DON’T TURN ME OFF. Not even for a second.”

Jared saluted it with his shot glass. “I, for one, welcome our new weather robot overlord.”

The intercom buzzed briefly an hour later. Just static, followed by a single low tone. We stood there, frozen, looking at each other, but nothing else happened.

Trevon smirked. “Guess Siri’s checking in.”

By midnight, we’d half-forgotten it. The drinks kept coming, and someone dug out a Bluetooth speaker. We were playing beer pong on the island counter when the tone returned.

BZZZZZZZT.

Then a crisp, monotone female voice came through.

“Tornado Warning. Carnivorous system detected. Take shelter. Do not exit structure. Do not open doors.”

It didn’t sound like a storm center broadcast. It didn’t sound like a person, either, more like something trained to imitate one.

Jared snorted. “Did it just say carnivorous?”

Trevon doubled over laughing. “Damn, that’s metal! Cannibal cyclone!”

I didn’t laugh. The atmosphere had changed dramatically. It was hard to explain. Still, I figured it was a weird local thing. Maybe someone had hacked the system as a prank.

Ten minutes later, we heard the first howl. It sounded like something huge and wounded, bellowing through miles of empty land. The windows shuddered in their frames. The metal siding groaned. The power stayed on, but the porch light flickered once.

Trevon went for the front door. “I need to see this. If it’s an honest-to-god flesh tornado, y’all know I’m getting that on camera!”

I stopped him. “Dude, it could just be a normal tornado, with a creepy alert system.”

He laughed. “Then I want proof for TikTok.”

The wind howled again. It was closer this time. I shuddered involuntarily.

We argued for a minute before Trevon stepped out onto the porch, phone up, recording. I hovered behind him, just outside the threshold.

The clouds above us churned like liquid slate, and from them, something descended.

It wasn’t an ordinary funnel cloud. It was pinkish-gray, fibrous, and wet. It didn’t twist or rotate so much as ripple—like muscle under skin. If I didn’t know better, I would have said it looked like it was made out of actual flesh. Lightning flashed inside it, but instead of thunder, we heard something that made my stomach twist.

Screaming.

Dozens of voices. Hundreds.

Trevon’s phone dropped from his hand.

All around us, the air filled with a new sound—a dry, sharp rattle, like sand hitting metal—only it wasn’t sand. It was teeth. Thousands of them, spinning like shrapnel, glinting in the porch light as they peppered the siding, ground, and railing. One yellow, human-sized specimen buried itself in the wood next to my hand.

Trevon screamed, spinning around—his face was cut open, cheek split to the bone. More teeth jutted out from his shoulder and leg, with one lodged just above his eye socket. He staggered, slipped, and fell against the doorframe.

I grabbed him and dragged him back inside. Teeth clinked off the walls as we slammed the door shut.

Blood dripped in fat splats onto the laminate floor. One of the embedded teeth twitched, then burrowed deeper into Trevon’s thigh. He screamed again, slapping at it.

Jared ran in with towels, white-faced and shaking. “Wh-wh-what’s happening?!”

The intercom buzzed once more, followed by the same calm voice. “Severe wind event in progress. Do not exit structure. High likelihood of casualties. Shelter advised.”

I looked back at the Post-it note: “DON’T TURN ME OFF. Not even for a second.”

And for the first time, I intended to follow the instructions.

* * * * * *

Trevon spent the next ten minutes convulsing on the floor while we tried to dig the teeth out of his leg with a butter knife and barbecue tongs.

It wasn’t just blood. The wounds wept something thicker, almost like tar. And the teeth… they weren’t just stuck in him. They were working, writhing, as if chewing. Every time we gripped one, it squirmed beneath the skin, burrowing deeper into the flesh, as if it knew.

I’ll never forget the one in his face. It had lodged above his eye, in the soft meat under the brow. At first, Trevon was shouting, screaming. Then his voice pitched high and thin, and he just clawed at it. His fingernails broke as he frantically tried to dig it out.

I pinned his arms. Jared hesitated—his face ghost-pale and glistening with sweat—before jerking the tooth out with the tongs.

Trevon’s eyeball came with it, with a burst of fluid. I remember thinking it resembled egg whites.

Trevon fainted, and Jared dropped the tooth. It fell to the floor and twitched like a cockroach, then split in half and began to crumble.

I wrapped Trevon’s head in a kitchen towel and laid him out on the couch, while Jared dry-heaved into the sink.

Outside, the storm didn’t fade. It circled and intensified. The lights flickered again. Wind hammered the walls with what sounded like sledgehammers made of flesh. And beneath it all, we could still hear the howling, the rising and falling, harmonizing with itself in a sick, unnatural chorus.

I peeked through the kitchen window, just a slit through the shutters. What I saw didn’t make sense. The tornado had split, not just into multiple funnels, but into limb-like appendages—thick, muscular arms trailing fingers that dragged along the ground. They punched into the earth, reemerged, and twisted like they were tasting the soil.

One limb slammed into a grain silo half a mile away, causing it to explode in a bloom of rust and metal.

“Is that thing alive?” Jared asked behind me.

I didn’t answer. I was staring at the intercom.

It buzzed again, with that same low tone. Then the light on the panel turned red:

“ALERT: System Integrity Compromised. Shelter may not remain viable. Seek lowest point. Prepare for secondary events.”

“What the hell is a secondary event?” Jared asked.

I didn’t know, but I could feel it building, like a weight pressing through the ceiling. The wind wasn’t lessening. If anything, it seemed to be seeking us out—and it knew we were inside.

We barricaded the doors with whatever we could find—a couch, chairs, the mattress from upstairs. The intercom light blinked red the entire time. Trevon came to briefly, muttering something about “the walls breathing.” He passed out again seconds later.

At one point, Jared asked, “Did we even book this place through a verified host?”

It was a throwaway comment, but it stuck in my brain.

After we got Trevon stable again, I pulled out my phone to see for myself if we still had no signal. To my dismay, we didn’t, but the VRBO app still had an offline cache of our last correspondence.

The listing was gone.

It wasn’t marked “inactive” or “canceled.” It had just… vanished. Gone were the photos and our reservation record. It was as if we’d never even booked it.

The only thing left was the owner’s message thread. I clicked it. It said: “User Not Found. This account has been terminated.” A little farther down, it continued: “This property was removed due to false identity documentation and unverifiable ownership.”

My stomach turned. “He wasn’t even the owner.”

Jared looked up. “W-what?”

“Whoever listed this place, VRBO says he faked the ID.”

“Then who the hell was he?”

Before I could answer, the intercom buzzed again. This time, it wasn’t a warning. It was a forecast:

“Precipitation incoming. Anomalous hail detected. External temperatures dropping. Seek reinforced shelter. Estimated impact: six minutes.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

“Anomalous hail?!” I cried.

“What does that even mean?” Jared asked.

Trevon groaned from the couch, dried streaks of blood solidified on his cheek.

We didn’t wait. We grabbed him, still barely conscious, and carried him toward the crawlspace hatch in the hall closet. It was bolted shut with a steel bar and a crank lock, and took us a minute to get it open. The air that wafted out was musty, cold, and damp. Below was a small, unfinished space, with low ceilings, packed dirt, and old insulation falling in clumps from between the joists.

We dropped down just as the first impact struck the roof with a thunderous crash. Another, and another quickly followed it, each of them loud enough to shake dust from the beams.

Then came the smell—sharp, chemical, and wrong.

I angled my phone light up through the crack in the floorboards. Some sort of black fluid was melting through, bubbling on contact. Each drop left a small, fuming hole where it landed, eating through the wood and metal like acid.

I backed away fast. “It’s burning through!”

Jared pointed toward the corner. “There’s a sump pit or something under the house—might be lower ground.”

We dragged Trevon that way, huddled behind an old tool cabinet, listening as the hail kept falling—spiked balls of some frozen, unidentifiable compound, each one sizzling as it chewed its way through the roof.

From above came a sound like a stovetop igniting—whoompf—and something heavy collapsed.

I stared at the intercom speaker in the floor joist. One had seemingly been built into every room.

“Containment failing. Shelter breached. Next phase imminent.”

“What the hell does that mean?!” Jared screamed, no longer concealing his panic. I shushed him, expecting further instructions, but there were none, just the constant, maddening sound of dripping, banging, and screaming coming from outside.

Jared curled into himself. “Why is this happening to us? What is this?”

I had no answers. All I had was Trevon’s blood, still tacky, on my hands.

I shook my head, defeated.

* * * * * *

We stayed huddled in the crawlspace for hours. Time didn’t seem to move right down there, either too fast or not at all. At some point, I realized I hadn’t heard hail in a while—just a low hiss above us, like corrosive steam working its way through layers of timber and hardware.

Trevon stirred once, muttering my name. His eye socket had stopped bleeding, but the skin around it had gone pale and waxy. Jared sat slumped beside him, arms tucked to his chest, rocking like he was trying to retreat into himself.

I pulled my phone again. I still had no signal or notifications, and the saved listing was still absent. All that was left was the lingering VRBO error: “This account has been terminated.”

This time, when I clicked the host’s profile, the app crashed completely.

I sighed and held my breath, then lifted my head toward the joists. The intercom hadn’t made a sound in hours, which almost made things worse. But just as I shifted to check on Trevon again, the speaker crackled back to life:

“Flash Flood Warning. Black flood approaching. Avoid contact. Exposure risk: substantial. Substance is nonaqueous. Expect sudden emergence.”

Jared blinked. “Flood? From where? It hasn’t rained.”

And then, as if it had been waiting for us to doubt it, we heard the first gurgle, coming from beneath us, from the earth itself.

In the back corner of the crawlspace, where the sump pit dipped deepest, a thick, sluggish bubble emerged, as if the dirt was melting. Something black and syrupy pressed upward through the soil, splitting the clay, oozing in our direction.

I shouted for Jared, already grabbing Trevon under the arms. We hauled him backward across the floor as the pit filled. The stuff was thick and oily, and it was moving fast. It clung to the ground, then started creeping, stretching out in slow tendrils.

Jared kicked one of the plastic crates into its path to slow its momentum. It hissed on contact and melted to slag in seconds.

“Look out, you guys! It’s not water!” I said, as the substance rapidly approached my friends. “It’s not wa—”

The goo touched Trevon’s ankle.

He spasmed as the fluid crawled up his leg like ivy in defiance of gravity, wrapping his calf and thigh and holding on tightly. We screamed and pulled him away from the ooze with all our might, but made little progress, the viscous fluid stretching in long ropes as we attempted to free him.

Behind us, more of it seeped through the wall. The flood wasn’t rising from one place—it was everywhere. Sprouting from cracks in the dirt, swelling up from seams in the stone. It surrounded us with unnatural speed.

We reached a half-rotted bench press frame left by a previous guest and climbed atop it, keeping Trevon between us. Jared whimpered as the goo lapped at his shoes.

And then the tendrils grew longer, some thinning into filaments that reached for us like antennae. One brushed Jared’s arm—and he froze, as if he’d just grabbed hold of a live wire.

“Jared—”

His body went rigid, and his eyes widened. Foam bubbled at the edge of his lips. The goo slithered up his neck and over his jaw.

He didn’t scream or resist. Instead, involuntarily, he breathed it in. A slow, wet gulp as the black fluid crawled into his nose, mouth, and ears. He fell backward, convulsing, arms flailing. The bench frame rattled. I tried to pull him back, but it was like trying to rescue someone drowning in tar.

The goo opened over his face, like a gaping maw, and sealed. His features distorted beneath it, bubbling and twitching. Something deep inside him let out a sound I’ll never forget, like a laugh submerged in boiling oil.

Then he went still. His chest stopped rising.

Even then, the substance wouldn’t leave him be. It continued sinking into him, filling every orifice.

Trevon moaned beside me. His one good eye focused on Jared’s body. “Is he—?” he asked, unexpectedly coherent.

I couldn’t answer, not really, but I nodded anyway.

Just then, the intercom buzzed again.

“Casualty registered. Flood level: 67%. Realm breach imminent. Perimeter unstable.”

“What the hell is a realm breach?” I whispered.

The crawlspace shuddered.

Trevon clutched his stomach, groaning again. “Something’s wrong.”

I looked down. The black goo had touched the base of the frame. It was climbing again.

I scanned the crawlspace. We had nowhere else to go. The walls were leaking now, everything sweating the stuff. It wasn’t so much as pouring in as being birthed.

We needed a way out.

“Trevon, help me!” I whispered. “We’ve got to get higher!”

Trevon didn’t move.

“Come on!” I shouted, shaking him. “We’ve got to go! We don’t have much time!”

He just sat there, staring at Jared’s corpse. The black sludge had contorted his mouth into an O-shape. His eyes were still open beneath the muck.

“I-I-I don’t want to d-die like… like th-that,” Trevon whispered.

“You’re not going to!” I shouted. “But we have to move! Now!”

We hoisted ourselves onto a rusted shelf bolted to the far wall, standing on bags of gravel and old drywall. It wasn’t safer, but it was higher, a few extra inches of not-dying.

From below, the black flood surged.

We pressed flat against the joists above and waited.

The intercom’s light turned red again.

“Next event imminent. Breach point forming. Biological threat inbound. Threat level: apex. Duration: indefinite.”

Then came the cracking noise, like glass under pressure, followed by the sound of something shattering. A thin ribbon of light cut through the gloom, shimmering just above the flood line. Then another, like slashes in reality.

Trevon stared. “Are… are those… windows?”

“No,” I said definitively.

They were tears, rips in the crawlspace, and through them came movement. First, a claw—no, not a claw. A leg, chitinous and segmented, then another. Then a face, with a long, canine snout, but too thin and flexible, and black, bulbous eyes. The whole head was crowned with pincers.

The thing pulled itself through one of the rips like it was climbing out of its own reflection. Behind it came another, and another. Their bodies made no sound, but the flood responded, parting for them and lifting them up. They moved like sharks in deep water, and they were hunting.

I grabbed Trevon’s arm. He was silent now, locked up again.

One of the creatures sniffed the air, clicking its mandibles. Then, like a puppet, its head snapped toward us with incredible speed, and it began swimming up the side of the crawlspace.

Trevon whimpered. I reached for the closet thing to a weapon I could find, a rusted wrench left on a nearby beam. When the thing reached us, I swung, striking it in the face. The beast recoiled, chittering, retreating down into the flood.

A moment later, another latched onto Trevon’s leg, clutching him tightly—and bit.

He screamed. I’ll never forget the way it sounded, so much worse than the screaming flesh cyclones beyond the rental’s walls.

I swung again, smashing the thing’s shell, but it didn’t flinch. Unperturbed, it clamped its jaws down and dragged Trevon halfway off the ledge.

“No! No, no, no!” I screamed, lunging for Trevon in a last-ditch effort to save him.

That’s when the wall exploded.

A fresh funnel cloud blasted through the breach, this one thicker and faster, packed with spinning detritus. But the debris wasn’t made up of bits of trees or shingles—they were teeth, millions of them, a literal wall of enamel and calcified roots—and they struck us like a wave.

Trevon’s body was lifted from the shelf and shredded, cutting off his shrieks of agony mid-air, as he was mercilessly torn limb from limb, blood misting across the beams.

I screamed, covering my face.

When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

A moment later, the intercom said, emotionlessly:

“All Clear. Storm event terminated. Thank you for your business.”

And I passed out.

* * * * * *

When I came to, the crawlspace was bone dry, as if nothing had ever been there. There was no sign of the black sludge or gore—no scent, residue, or stains. Even the formerly warped floor joists had snapped back like memory foam. It was enough to make me feel as if I had somehow imagined the entire thing, but I knew I hadn’t. My hands were sticky with someone’s blood. Probably Trevon’s. This had been no hallucination.

I stumbled out of the sump pit, through the kitchen, and outside through what was left of the front door, half torn off and swinging on one hinge. The porch was gone. Most of the roof had collapsed inward, and what remained of the metal siding looked like it had been melted with a blowtorch.

Everything else in the house, including the furniture, walls, and hot tub, had been either mangled or buried under debris.

There were no tire tracks in the gravel, aside from our own, and no sign of emergency response. Not so much as a hint of ash or smoke. Everything was still.

Or so I thought, until I noticed the tree. About thirty yards out, an old oak stood leaning sideways in the wind.

Something hung from it, tangled in the upper branches.

I already knew what it was, but I walked there anyway.

Trevon’s skeleton was suspended in a loose net of fibers—maybe fishing line, perhaps something else. His bones had been picked clean. His jaw hung open. One of his arms was missing. What remains of his skull had a gouged-out, fractured orbit where his eye used to be. All across the ribs, hips, and arms were hundreds of tiny, bite-shaped divots.

I couldn’t scream. I no longer had it in me. Instead, I just dropped to my knees and stared.

I stayed like that until dusk.

No one came.

No one ever came.

Eventually, I mustered the energy to climb back into our truck and head back down the road until I got a bar or two of service. Then I called 911 and told them… something. Not the truth, obviously. Just that a freak tornado had hit us, and that my friends were either missing or dead.

Search and Rescue found the ruins later that day. Trevon’s body was never recovered. By the time responders arrived, the bones in the tree were gone, vanished as mysteriously as the storm that had arrived and taken his life.

Jared’s remains were never located.

I reported the black sludge, the teeth, and the intercom warnings to the authorities. They nodded and took notes. Asked if I’d been drinking, which, of course, we had. A detective pulled me aside and insultingly asked how many tabs I’d dropped. When I insisted that an intercom-based weather reporting system had spoken to us directly, he asked if I’d ingested psilocybin. They never ordered toxicology reports.

They didn’t bother to catalog evidence or dig through the remains of the building. Never took samples of the walls, or the floor, or the single, twisted scrap of bone I’d found behind what remained of the water heater. One officer asked if I was sure it wasn’t a bone from an animal. Later, they found a single tooth buried at the base of the trunk, and said it looked like a cow’s.

Eventually, they ruled it an “act of God,” attributing the structural collapse to storm damage, and listed both of my friends’ official causes of death as undetermined after several days of futile, halfhearted searches turned up nothing. The only evidence I had that either of my friends had even been there was the blood on my hands, but even that wasn’t enough to convince anyone that something awful and far more bizarre than a tornado had happened.

Unofficially, I was marked as a trauma case. A few people whispered about shock and hallucinations.

The listing? Still wiped. VRBO claimed the host’s account was “removed for cause,” and offered me a $50 gift card and a tone-deaf message about “customer safety being a top priority.”

I didn’t sleep for weeks. Something more profound gnawed at me: If what we experienced wasn’t natural—if that house was more lure than shelter—then it couldn’t have been the first time. And more importantly, would it be the last?

I had my doubts.

As such, my obsession with finding answers grew, and I began digging through old listings, deleted forums, and Reddit threads that had been flagged and removed. I found nothing directly. But I remembered the layout, the architecture—even the damn porch swing.

I broadened my search, looking for VRBO listings that bore similarities. It took weeks, but I found it: a newly listed property in rural Arizona with no reviews. The photos showed a modern cabin. It appeared clean and inviting, with the desert sun spilling across the porch. It had the same wide metal shutters and polished kitchen. Two bedrooms. An attic bunk. Even the storm intercom was visible in the background of one shot, with the same speaker grille beside the fridge.

I zoomed in. A yellow Post-it was stuck just above it: “DON’T TURN ME OFF. Not even for a second.”

The host’s username, predictably, was just a string of numbers. There was no photo or bio, and the account was listed as having been “recently verified.”

The property description welcomed travelers to “enjoy the silence of the desert, far from civilization and perfect for storm season.” And it was available that weekend.

I sat there for a long time, motionless and unblinking, staring at the screen. If you looked at the shadows in the corners of those photos, where the walls met the floor, you could see the black crust—the remnants of yet another black flood.

And the house? It wasn’t rebuilt. It was the same one, I was sure of it. It had somehow been disassembled and relocated—and was ready for someone new.

* * * * * *

I never went back to school after that.

My football scholarship was quietly canceled within weeks of the news breaking. They said it was a paperwork issue, but nobody fought it, not even me. The team coach sent a condolence text and then never followed up.

No trace of Jared was ever found, not so much as a scrap of fabric or a puddle of blood. His parents posted flyers and opened a GoFundMe, but after six months they stopped talking about it altogether. I don’t blame them.

Trevon had a closed-casket funeral. They buried his old jerseys and letterman jacket, along with photos of him. I gave a eulogy I don’t remember writing and stared at the ceiling of the church the whole time, half-expecting it to shudder and split open.

I still have nightmares to this day.

Locally, the story goes that we were caught in a freak tornado, and the structure we had been renting collapsed. A newspaper ran a one-paragraph blurb under the heading: “College Students Caught in Weekend Storm, Two Dead, Including Star Running Back”

No one interviewed me. No one asked what really happened. And even if they had, I doubt they would have believed me.  In small-town Texas, the law doesn’t work like it does in other places. If a death fits a box, they seal it and move on. And when it doesn’t, they make it fit. Case closed.

A few more months passed. I tried to move on, but something continued keeping me up.

Every night, in the stillness, I’d hear that voice again: “Black flood approaching. Avoid contact. Exposure risk: substantial.”

I tried to track down the Arizona VRBO listing again. That was gone now, too, another dead end, though something told me that if I dug deeply enough, I’d eventually find listings from a town there, where several people had recently gone missing, with it blamed on a freak storm.

But I didn’t want to find out what happened in Arizona. I wanted to anticipate where it would happen next, and so I kept looking. I imagined that if I found where it went, or where it had come from, I could prove it hadn’t all been madness. That Trevon and Jared didn’t die because we partied too hard or ignored a storm alert, but because someone—or something—laid a trap for us in that house.

And eventually, I’m proud to say, I found what I was looking for.  Another new listing, in yet another state. New Mexico, this time, situated in remote desert flatland. Like the others, it had no reviews, and the property owner had no bio, and a badge saying they were “recently verified.”

The structure was the same. It had an identical porch and sloping roofline, as well as the same front-facing windows and reinforced siding. They’d moved the entire house, again. Or built another one exactly like it. I had no idea how they managed such a thing; long ago, I had suspected the paranormal, but that didn’t matter. Not anymore.

I was certain this was it—my opportunity to make everything right again.

In one of the photos, behind the kitchen counter, you can barely see the weather warning intercom, but it’s there. And just below it, there’s the all-too-familiar yellow Post-it note, with the telltale message: “DON’T TURN ME OFF. Not even for a second.”

I stared at the listing for hours.

Then I booked it.

Next weekend. For three nights.

This time, I’m going alone, to find out what it truly is, and to make sure no one else ever walks through that door again.

I’m going so that Trevon and Jared’s deaths aren’t in vain, and I’m burning it to the ground, once and for all.

It should have killed me when it had the chance.

If I don’t come back, just know: the storm’s not over.

And if it continues, it’ll be over my dead body.