When the play button was finally pressed, the image was grainy, flooded with the sickly orange glow of a highway rest stop in Nebraska. The camera was shaky, held by someone jogging toward a silver sedan idling near a bank of vending machines.
"Put it away, Elias," a second voice commanded, low and urgent. "If the signal catches the upload, we’re done."
The file sat at the bottom of a corrupted SD card, a lone survivor of a hardware crash. VID_20230217_004750_417.mp4. The timestamp was cold: well past midnight.
The camera dropped, pointed at the asphalt. The last thing the video captured before cutting to black was a pair of boots stepping into the frame—and the shadow of something with far too many limbs stretching across the pavement under the flickering fluorescent lights.