The Shape You Make: Sentry-One
When thinking of story concepts and brainstorming, often scenes from that world will play like a movie in my head. This one wanted out, onto the page. Check the teasers and yesterday’s story from this haunted world, linked at the bottom of this post.
The world through the thermal scope was a simple place. The living were ghosts of heat, flickering white-hot against the black canvas of the city. The dead were just cold concrete. Private Harris, Sentry-One, preferred it this way. It reduced the job to a clean, binary choice: target or non-target. White-hot: life. Black-cold: everything else. And somewhere in the middle, the Voids.
He scanned the empty plaza, the rubber eyepiece cool against his skin. His breath plumed in the chill night air of the rooftop nest. Three hours into a six-hour shift. The silence was starting to get loud.
Don’t zone out, you useless piece of shit, a voice in his head growled, his father’s, long since blended with his Drill Sergeant’s into one constant, internal critic. Stop fidgeting with the stock, boy. You’ve got your mother’s hands. Too delicate. A real soldier has stone for hands.
“You got anything, Two?” Harris murmured into his throat mic, needing to hear a voice that wasn’t the one in his own memory.
“Negative,” Corporal Davies’ voice crackled back, calm and bored. “Just a few rats. The four-legged kind.”
Harris grunted, his thumb stroking the cold steel of the rifle stock. The Stalker-7 Thermal. Top of the line. His father would have laughed at it. We had to use our eyes, kid. Had to learn the difference between a shadow and a threat. Made men of us. Harris had enlisted to get away from him, and had somehow ended up in a job where he heard his voice more clearly than ever.
He swept the scope back across the plaza. A flicker of movement. He zoomed in, the optics whining faintly. There. A single figure, stumbling near the dead fountain. A woman. A smear of white-hot panic against the black. Her movements were jerky, erratic. And tethered to her side, gliding in perfect, unnatural lockstep, was the reason for his posting.
The Void.
It was a human-shaped hole in the world. A patch of absolute, heat-sucking cold that registered on the scope as a perfect, featureless black. The temperature reading in the corner of his display dropped into the negatives. This one was close to its host. Dangerously close. It was practically on her shoulder, its head tilted as if whispering advice.
“Sentry-Two, I’ve got a tango,” Harris said, his voice suddenly dry. The boredom of the last three hours vanished in a cold, chemical shock that flooded his veins. “Plaza center. Void’s proximal.”
“Copy that, Sentry-One,” Davies’ voice was all business now. “Looks like a Stage Four. She’s hunting.”
Harris knew the protocol. A Stage Four was designated a critical threat. The proximity of the Void meant the host’s psychological defenses were gone. They were desperate, and would be actively seeking eye contact, looking for anyone to pass their nightmare onto, just to buy themselves a few hours of sleep. The protocol was simple: eliminate on sight.
He centered the crosshairs on the woman’s chest. The white heat of her heart flared in the scope. An easy shot. A necessary one. He let out a slow breath, his finger moving to the trigger.
Well? What are you waiting for? An invitation? his father’s voice sneered. See? Those hands. Hesitating. Always hesitating. Do your damn job, boy.
But his finger hesitated. Through the high-tech lens, she was a person. A woman in a thin coat, her shoulders hunched. She looked lost. Terrified. He saw her drop a plastic bag, its contents scattering as cold, dark shapes across the pavement.
And then he saw it. Something that wasn’t in the manual.
The Void, the black shape beside her, moved. It raised an arm, a limb made of absolute zero. It was pointing. Not at the woman. Not at the street.
It was pointing up. Directly at him.
A deep, internal cold locked his joints. It was impossible. They were just echoes, perceptual ghosts. They couldn’t see. They shouldn’t act.
Before his mind could process the impossibility, the woman reacted to the gesture. Her head, a white-hot coin in the darkness, snapped up. She scanned the rooftops, her movements frantic, desperate. And then she stopped. Her gaze locked onto the tiny, invisible glint of his lens.
Through a thousand yards of night and magnified glass, her gaze locked onto his. He saw the Void she carried, and it saw him. The curse was a payload, and she fired it down the barrel of his own weapon.
The world in his scope shattered. Not into static, but into a hostile data packet that bypassed thought and slammed directly into his brainstem. A high-frequency digital shriek, the sound of a billion corrupted files opening at once, screamed behind his right eye. He didn’t just see the Void; he received it. For a fraction of a second, he felt the damp chill of the plaza on his own skin, tasted the coppery tang of sleepless fear in his mouth—her fear. A torrent of cryogenic data, raw and weaponised, burned a path down his optic nerve.
He yelled, ripping his head back from the eyepiece, the rifle clattering to the concrete floor of the nest. He staggered backwards, clawing at his helmet, trying to scrub the image from his eye. The world swam back into focus. The dim lights of the rooftop, the dark shape of his rifle, the sprawl of the city beyond. The rooftop was empty. And yet he was not alone.
The accelerated, magnified transfer had bypassed all the early stages. His Shape was born fully formed. It stood six feet away, between him and the ledge, radiating a sepulchral cold.
It had his father’s broad shoulders, his ramrod-straight posture of casual disapproval. Its face was a shifting vortex of static, but Harris knew the sneer that was etched into it. He could smell the phantom scent of stale bourbon and Hoppe’s No. 9 gun oil on the air.
The soldier in him vanished. The training, the protocols, the jargon—it all sloughed away, exposing the terrified boy he had always been.
“No,” he whispered, his voice cracking. He pushed himself further away, his back hitting the sandbags. “Dad, no. I’m sorry. I was going to…I was going to do it. I’m not a coward!”
His Shape took a slow, deliberate step towards him. Its boot striking the concrete produced no audible sound, only a wave of cold that washed over Harris, making his teeth ache. It raised a hand in that old, familiar gesture of slow, deliberate disappointment.
And in that moment, Harris broke.
The terror and the training fused into one, single, desperate command. Threat. Compromised. Final Protocol. He understood at once: the threat was not the figure before him. The threat soon be inside him. He couldn’t shoot it. He couldn’t run from it.
His hand, moving with a speed and certainty that would have made his father proud, went to the sidearm holstered on his hip. He drew the pistol. It felt cold and solid in his trembling grasp. A solution. An order he could finally follow without hesitation.
The Shape of his father watched, its static face unreadable but its slowly shaking head screaming contempt.
Harris brought the barrel up under his own chin. His jaw shook, though his eyes were dry. He was just…done.
His earpiece crackled. “Sentry-One, what’s your status? You made no sense. Harris, talk to me.”
The last thing Private Harris heard was the crisp, mechanical click of the safety coming off his pistol.
“Sentry-One?” Davies’ voice said, a note of confusion creeping in. “I heard a pop. Sentry-One, report. Harris… do you copy?”
Silence answered.
Wow! It felt almost post apocalyptic in the beginning but the way you narrow the scope down to Harris’s internalizations and fears was so subtle and it really pulled me right into his shoes. Really well done.
For a split second, I was scared this would be another eye situation. But it was a scary, borderline tear-jerker of a story. The void is fascinating!