Page 10 of Silent Shadows

But I know when I need to.

“Welp,” I say, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice and failing just a little. “Honestly, if I were eight feet tall and covered in hair, I'd avoid us too. Let’s call it.”

“This reminds me of that one case, searching that lake in Georgia for the ‘Big Blue,’” Taylor goes on. “I had a good feeling then. And I have a good feeling now.”

“Me too.” Maya chimes in. “Bigfoot’s been avoiding people longer than we've been looking, so maybe tomorrow’s our day.”

The Mystery Machine comes into view through the trees, a familiar silhouette against the night sky.

She’s not pretty. Not in a traditional sense, at least.

Big, retrofitted tour bus body, matte dark paint to cut glare, reinforced panels, a roof rigged with antenna arrays, and Jax’s drone setup. Solar panels line the top like armor. The side is marked with our logo in a font Maya fought me over for three days before finally agreeing to one that didn’t look like a conspiracy blog from 2004.

But to me?

She’s everything.

She’s a home, a lab, and an archive. She’s proof that this isn’t just some half-baked obsession and that I built something real from it.

“Home sweet, slightly haunted home,” Jax mutters from behind me.

“It’s not haunted, man,” I laugh, stopping in my tracks as I run through the tests we’ve done after many unexplained events. “We’ve never had any confirmed paranormal⁠—”

“Relax, man, I’m kidding.”

“I knew that,” I say, forcing a laugh as Jax brushes past me and up the stairs. He doesn’t know that despite those tests, I’m still 95% sure it is haunted after I had an encounter with an orb in the kitchenette last fall.

Taylor laughs as she follows him in. “You totally thought he was serious.”

I ignore her as I climb the steps behind them, stepping into the low hum of systems running.

Inside, it’s organized chaos.

The front cab is Taylor’s domain, stripped down and modified, navigation systems upgraded. Maps—real paper ones—are tucked into side compartments alongside tablets running GPS overlays. A CB radio is mounted next to a digital comms panel, because redundancy matters.

Behind that, the main workspace.

My space.

A long counter runs along one side, covered with equipment: thermal scanners, audio recorders, parabolic mics, sample kits. Everything is labeled and has a home, which matters in the moments when you’re running on adrenaline and awe.

Opposite that is a bank of monitors mounted into the wall and wired into our camera feeds, drone footage, and whatever else we’re currently analyzing. Right now, they flicker with recorded darkness and empty forest.

There's a small kitchenette in the back that only ever sees any action from me. Sleeping quarters are in the middle. The space is tight but functional. We have everything we need: bunks, storage, and just enough privacy to keep from losing our minds completely.

I drop my pack onto the bench, running a hand through my hair.

“Alright,” I say, heading straight to the monitors. “Let’s pull footage, cross-check the audio, and see if anything slipped.”

Jax is already there, plugging in his camera. “Way ahead of you.”

Maya slips in last, tablet in hand, already pulling up our route logs. “I flagged a few timestamps where environmental noise dropped more than expected. Could be something.”

“Or nothing,” Taylor says, stretching her arms over her head while sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Or data,” I counter, already scrubbing through a thermal clip.

We fall into this part easily—the breakdown and analysis where we all try to turn a night of nothing into something we can use.