"Welcome to Nowhere"

The van rattled along a dark mountain road, its headlights cutting weak paths through fog that seemed to swallow everything. Three YouTubers inside, joking about UFOs and rednecks, completely unaware they were driving toward something that would tear their reality apart. The GPS had failed miles back. Cell service was long gone. They were entering the National Radio Quiet Zone, where technology went to die.

The engine quit without warning. No sputter, no cough. Just silence. The three of them climbed out to investigate, and that's when the sky opened up.

A light appeared overhead, spinning, pulsing with colors that didn't belong in any natural spectrum. One of them, the girl named Esme, barely had time to look up before the beam found her. She shot into the air like a puppet yanked by invisible strings and vanished into the craft above.

The boys ran. Lucas made it maybe twenty feet before the beam caught him too. His friend Kai grabbed his ankles, pulling with everything he had, screaming for help that would never come. The beam won. Lucas came apart at the waist, and Kai fell backward clutching the lower half of someone who'd been alive three seconds ago.

The craft disappeared. Something else descended. Wings like leather stretched across impossible angles. Eyes that glowed with borrowed moonlight. The Mothman snatched Kai and carried him off into the trees, leaving only blood and the distant sound of screaming.

The camera held on the welcome sign: "Welcome to Nowhere. Pop 247."

Morning brought Abigail Fleming down that same road, though she didn't know what had happened there hours before. Her vintage compass spun uselessly on the dashboard, but she didn't care. For the first time in years, the electromagnetic noise that had made her life unbearable was fading. The constant static in her skull, the burning sensation near anything electronic, the headaches that never quite went away. All of it dissolving into blessed silence.

Nowhere looked like a town that time had forgotten on purpose. Main Street could have been lifted from a 1950s postcard, all brick storefronts and hand-painted signs. No cell towers. No WiFi signals bleeding from every window. Just stillness.

Her new employer, Thaddeus Beaumont, received her in a decaying mansion that smelled of old money and older secrets. The man was ancient, wheelchair-bound, with eyes that seemed to see more than they should. His caretaker, a woman named Clara Sterling, watched the introduction with an expression Abigail couldn't read. Interest? Suspicion? Something else entirely?

Thaddeus explained her job. Tech enforcement officer. She would ensure the town's residents only used electronic devices on approved days, protecting the radio telescope's sensitivity. Simple enough. But the way he looked at her suggested he knew something about her condition that she hadn't told him.

The Nakamura Family Restaurant was where Abigail met the town. Benji Margolis introduced himself with the enthusiasm of someone who'd been waiting years for a kindred spirit. He was the local conspiracy theorist, the keeper of strange stories, the guy everyone tolerated because he meant well even when he was talking about interdimensional portals and government cover-ups.

Their conversation was interrupted when Kai stumbled out of the woods.

The YouTuber was barely coherent, covered in scratches and dried blood, raving about glowing eyes and moth wings and shapes that shouldn't exist. Something had carried him through the forest and dropped him at the edge of town, and he had no idea why he was still alive.

Abigail noticed something no one else could see. Faint waves of electromagnetic energy pulsing on Kai's clothes, concentrated where something had touched him. The aura faded within minutes, but she'd never experienced anything like it. Her sensitivity had always been a curse, a medical condition that made modern life impossible. This felt different. This felt like her body was trying to tell her something.

The investigation that followed wasn't her job, but she couldn't stay away. The local doctors, Ian and Jenn Bailey, analyzed physical evidence from the attack site. Strange glowing residue. Feathers that matched no known species. Kai's descriptions suggested something impossible: a creature that combined elements of Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster, two separate legends merged into one nightmare.

Benji took her to his father's video store, then down to the basement where the real collection lived. David Margolis had spent years researching Nowhere's paranormal history before he disappeared. His notes documented creature sightings going back decades, patterns of activity that clustered around the Big Ear telescope, connections between the town's founding and something much older.

Abigail touched an artifact from one of the documented sightings, a chunk of metal recovered from a Mothman encounter in the 1970s. The vision hit her like a physical blow. She was seeing through the creature's eyes, soaring over the forest, watching the town from above. She felt its hunger. Its confusion. Its fear of something lurking beneath the surface of Nowhere, something that made even monsters nervous.

The search party that night included Asher Drake and Sasha Black, the town's glamorous newcomers who treated the whole thing like an ironic adventure. Their smuggled phones and tablets interfered with Abigail's sensitivity, sending spikes of pain through her skull. But she pushed through, using fragments from her vision to guide them toward an abandoned military bunker hidden in the hills.

Inside, they found Esme. Alive, somehow, but her eyes glowed with an eerie green light and she didn't respond to anything. Catatonic. Changed.

The Mothman-Flatwoods hybrid found them there. It blocked the exit, wings spread wide, eyes burning. Abigail was overwhelmed by another wave of visions, and in that chaos, she understood something unexpected. The creature hadn't been hunting the YouTubers. It had been trying to protect them from something worse. Something that lived in Nowhere. Something ancient.

Satoshi Nakamura, terrified and trigger-happy, fired his rifle at the hybrid. The creature fled into the darkness, and with it went any chance of learning what it knew.

Back in her new room that night, Abigail examined her arms in the mirror. Strange patterns had appeared on her skin, moth-like designs forming where her EMF sensitivity usually manifested as rashes. They faded as she watched, but they'd been real. Something was changing inside her. Nowhere was changing her.

Across town, Clara put Thaddeus to bed and then descended to a hidden room full of antique radio equipment. She sent an encrypted signal into the night, her face unreadable in the green glow of vacuum tubes.

Asher intercepted part of the transmission from his own hidden surveillance setup. He didn't understand what it meant, but he recorded it anyway. He was here for reasons he hadn't shared with anyone, and every piece of information might prove useful.

Neither of them saw what happened next. Miles away, at the edge of the Quiet Zone, the surviving YouTubers were ambushed by a black SUV bearing the Beaumont Industries logo. Men in tactical gear dragged them into the vehicle and disappeared into the night.

Nowhere had claimed its first new residents. Whether they wanted to stay or not.