On the day of the SATs, my parents suddenly burst into the testing center. Ignoring the proctor’s attempts to stop them, they dragged me out by force. “Chloe, we’d never hurt you!” “If you want to live, come with us right now!” Even though I had no idea what was going on, I blindly followed my parents onto a train heading deep into the Colorado Rockies. That afternoon, a news alert popped up on my phone, and my blood ran cold: Right after the SAT Reading section ended this morning, all 1,020 students in my testing center—except for me—dropped dead. With a pale face, I turned to ask my parents what the hell was going on. But they just pointed at the train window behind me, faces twisted in absolute terror: “Don’t look back! We have to get off this train right now!” 1 Just half an hour before that, they had been smiling, telling me to do my best on the big test. But then, they appeared in the testing hall, looking utterly unhinged. “Chloe, you need to come with us right now!” I looked at the grime and dirt on their clothes, then at the school security guard who was knocked out cold near the doorway. My mind just completely blanked. “What happened? Why did you knock out the guard?” They grabbed my arms from both sides in a death grip. “We would never hurt you! Even if we have to knock you out too, we are taking you out of here today!” The proctor, seeing the commotion, rushed over to intervene. “Look here, today is the SATs! This determines your daughter’s entire future!” “Whatever your emergency is, it can wait until the exam is over!” My mom completely ignored her, shoving the proctor hard. “Is the SAT more important than staying alive?!” Before I could even process what was happening, I was dragged out of the testing center. We didn’t go home. Covered in dirt, they hurriedly dragged me onto a cross-country train. It wasn’t until the train finally started moving that the color slowly returned to their faces, though their eyes kept darting around the cabin like hunted animals. What were they hiding from? I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Mom, Dad, what exactly is going on? What are you so afraid of?” “And where are we going?” My mom pressed a finger to her lips, her voice chillingly cold. “Don’t speak. Don’t ask questions.” Their fugitive-like behavior quickly caught the attention of the conductor, who cornered them and interrogated them for a long time. I asked the passenger in front of us and found out this train was heading straight for the remote Colorado Rockies. My parents didn’t know anyone in the Rockies! Why were we going there? They were still trying to talk their way out of the conductor’s questions. Even if I asked them, I knew they probably wouldn’t tell me a thing. Bored and anxious, I pulled out my phone, thinking I’d look up if anyone posted about the Reading section I’d just missed. But a massive breaking news headline immediately dominated my screen. Mass Fatality at Local SAT Testing Center: 1,020 Students and Proctors Dead from Sudden Cardiac Arrest… I tapped the article, and the blood roaring in my ears drowned out all other sound. The testing center was the exact one my parents had just dragged me out of! They were telling the truth! Other than me, everyone in that room was dead! If they hadn’t pulled me out, I would be just another corpse under a white sheet right now! But could this news really be true? I was just debating whether to call my homeroom teacher when my best friend, Haley, called me. “Chloe! Are you okay?! Mr. Davis is dead! The Class President is dead too!” “Everyone in your testing center—all the students and teachers—are dead!” Her voice was trembling uncontrollably. She was terrified. “Haley! I’m fine. Do you know what happened?” Before I could get another word out, my dad violently snatched the phone from my hand. “Don’t trust anyone!” I was completely lost, desperate for answers. “Dad, you must know something, otherwise you wouldn’t have pulled me out! Tell me! What is going on?!” “Why did everyone in that room die?!” 2 My mom sighed, her voice softening as she tried to comfort me. “Chloe, knowing too much won’t do you any good.” “Just know that we would never do anything to harm—” Her voice cut off abruptly. I looked at her, only to see all the color drain from her face once again. “Mom! What’s wrong?” Hearing my voice, my dad turned to look at my mom. The moment he turned his head toward us, his expression froze. Their eyes were wide with sheer terror, entirely locked onto something right behind me. Through the reflection in their shrinking pupils, I could see a blurry, dark shadow looming at my back. But behind me was just the glass window of the train. Was there something outside the window scaring them? Instinctively, I started to turn my head to look. But my dad slammed his hand onto the back of my head, holding me in place. His lips trembled, producing a tone of voice I had never heard from him in my life: “Don’t look back. Hurry!” I could feel my dad’s hand physically shaking. He was terrified to his core. At the exact same time, a freezing breath of air blew against the back of my neck. The very next second, my dad yanked me out of my seat. He dragged my mom and me, sprinting through several train cars like our lives depended on it. He didn’t slow down until the train pulled into the next station. Without a word, they practically shoved me off the train. “Mom, Dad, what did you see back there?” My only answer was dead silence. They refused to speak, but I hadn’t forgotten the absolute horror on their faces. It felt like if we had been even one second slower, we would have met the same gruesome end as everyone in that testing center. What were they running from? Was it that blurry shadow? Seeing that the sun was starting to set, I suggested we stay at a hotel in the city for the night. But my parents, their faces ashen, immediately flagged down a taxi. “No time! Take us to the airport!” I was shoved into the backseat of the cab. On the way, my phone rang again. It was Haley. I went to answer it. Sitting in the passenger seat, my dad whipped around and warned me: “Do not answer that!” My mom looked at me with intense paranoia. “Chloe, listen to your dad! Right now, we cannot trust anyone!” The driver gave us a deeply weird look through the rearview mirror, but I ultimately let the call ring out. I did, however, shoot Haley a quick text on iMessage to let her know I was safe. She never texted back. Half an hour later, urged on by my dad’s frantic shouting, the driver finally pulled up to the airport. The driver looked highly annoyed, but the moment he caught sight of the dried blood on my dad’s clothes, he peeled away from the curb in sheer panic. The earliest flights out were completely booked. I told my parents we should just fly out tomorrow, but my dad didn’t say a word. He was staring blankly at the airport news monitors. The local news was playing. With just one glance, the blood in my veins turned to ice. Just ten minutes ago… The Amtrak train we had just gotten off derailed and plunged straight into the river. All 1,000 passengers on board died on impact. There were no survivors. The conductor who had been interrogating my parents earlier was shown on the broadcast, a pale, lifeless body floating in the debris. Two brushes with mass-death in a single day. My nerves were finally completely shattered. My parents were right! There really was something out there hunting us, trying to wipe us out. Despite the shock, my dad was the first to snap back to reality. He made a phone call. He seemed to deeply trust whoever was on the other end, either nodding along or repeatedly saying, “Okay, okay.” When he hung up, it was like a switch flipped in him. “Come on. We’re flying to Miami!” Wait, Miami? Weren’t we going to the Rockies? Why the sudden change? I was terrified. “Dad, maybe we should just go to the police!” 3 My dad’s face was deadpan. “The police can’t do anything! We’ll die anyway!” I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to score three tickets for a flight boarding in ten minutes. I sneaked a peek at his boarding pass. The destination was Denver, Colorado. Didn’t he just say Miami? Why did he lie? I was getting completely lost. I had no idea where my dad was taking us, or what he was planning to do. Right before we boarded, he turned off his phone and tossed it straight into a garbage can. Without a second of hesitation, my mom did the exact same thing. They both turned to look at me. “Chloe, our phones will track our location.” Faced with a life-or-death situation, I didn’t care about anything else. I copied them and threw my phone into the trash. Only after the plane was successfully in the air did my mom whisper to me: “Baby, I know you have so many questions, but I promise you…” “Once we reach our destination, I will tell you everything.” “Right now, the only thing that matters is keeping you alive!” I was about to respond when my dad clamped his hand over my mouth. “From this moment on, if you don’t have to speak, keep your mouth shut!” “No matter who talks to you, do not answer, and whatever you do, do not say your name!” I didn’t know why, but I nodded as hard as I could. Half an hour into the flight, the quiet hum of the cabin was shattered by a cheerful ringtone. Everyone on the plane turned to look at me. It hit me—I still had an old backup phone sitting at the bottom of my backpack! My parents’ faces drained of all color. A flight attendant approached me. “Miss, please turn off your electronic device immediately.” Awkwardly, I dug the backup phone out of my bag. The caller ID flashing on the screen was Haley’s name. “Wait, how is she getting a cell signal at 30,000 feet?” The passenger sitting in the aisle seat suddenly asked out loud. I froze, my face turning deathly pale. Because I suddenly remembered something crucial about this backup phone—I never put a SIM card in it. Even if there was cell service up here, it was physically impossible for Haley’s call to come through! While I sat there frozen in horror, my dad snatched the phone from my hand and smashed it onto the floor. “Dad, I—” I tried to explain, but he glared at me with absolute fury. “Shut up!” “Hey man, calm down, your daughter didn’t mean to!” The passenger next to us tried to calm my dad down, but I knew my dad was just enforcing the rule: Do not speak. The phone screen was cracked, and the audio was broken, but the impact somehow unlocked it and automatically opened the iMessage app. It landed right on my text thread with Haley. Our chat history had ended with that text I sent her after getting off the train. But three seconds later, a deeply terrifying message populated on the cracked screen: [Chloe, I’m so glad your mom sees you’re still alive. Too bad our Haley wasn’t so lucky. She and Mr. Davis both died in the testing center today.] 4 Haley is dead?! How is that possible? She wasn’t even taking the SATs in the same room as me! And if she died this morning, who had been calling me all day? Was it a ghost?! I looked at my parents in pure horror. They looked just as shocked. My mom’s face twisted in pure despair as she muttered: “It didn’t fall for the trick! It still found us…” So my dad loudly announcing we were going to Miami was a trick to throw it off. But Mom said it was here! Where was it? I frantically looked around the cabin but saw nothing suspicious. Who—or what—was it? No one could give me an answer. My dad shot my mom a desperate look. Taking a deep breath, my mom looked at me with heartbreaking sorrow. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pill, and dry-swallowed it. “Mom—!” What did you just take? Before I could get the rest of the sentence out, my dad slapped his hand over my mouth again. “If you don’t want to get everyone on this plane killed, shut up!” Watching my mom begin to violently foam at the mouth, I had to bite my tongue to hold back my sobs. My dad let go of me and caught my mom just as she slumped over. “Susan! Susan! What’s wrong with you?!” “Somebody help!” he roared, perfectly playing the part of a devastated husband. “My wife is having a medical emergency! We need to land this plane immediately!” Seeing this play out, I finally understood what she had taken. This was their contingency plan. The only way to force the plane to land was to stage a severe medical crisis. To avoid a fatality onboard, the pilot made an emergency dive toward the nearest available airport. The second we touched down, we followed the paramedics into an ambulance. My dad looked at my tear-streaked face and wiped a tear from his own eye. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. If we hadn’t forced a landing, that plane would have crashed. We, and the hundred other innocent people on board, would all be dead right now.” I forced my crying down, grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote: [Dad, is the Grim Reaper hunting us?] It was the only logical thing I could think of. But my dad just shook his head. “Wait until we reach the Rockies…” After an hour in the ER, my mom was stabilized, though she remained in a deep coma. At the same time, the local news reported something horrifying. The hundred-plus passengers from our flight hadn’t died, but every single one of them had collapsed into an unexplainable, sudden coma—exactly like my mom. My dad wanted to leave immediately. He said we had to make it to the mountains before dawn. But I refused to budge. If we left, what would happen to Mom? Maybe my dad couldn’t bear to leave her either, or maybe he was just too exhausted to fight me. He didn’t push the issue. Instead, he deadbolted the hospital room door and gave me one final, severe warning: “Tonight, no matter who knocks on that door, do not open it! And do not say a single word!” After he said that, he fell into a deep sleep on the visitor’s couch. Actually, it didn’t look like sleep. It looked exactly like the unnatural coma the passengers on the plane were in. At midnight, a knock echoed against the hospital room door. “Room 301, rounds. Please open the door.” It was a nurse’s voice. I was about to stand up, but then I remembered my dad’s warning. Whether it was really a nurse or not, I wasn’t going to touch that handle. The knocking continued for a few moments before fading away, and the shadow under the door crack vanished. Ten minutes later, Haley’s voice drifted through the door. “Chloe, it’s me, Haley. I heard your mom was in the hospital, is she okay? Can I come in and see her?” My heart leaped! It really was Haley’s voice! Did that mean she wasn’t dead after all? But just as I took a step toward the door, a second voice chimed in: “Yeah, Chloe, I came too…” My hand started violently shaking. It was Caleb, the Class President. But I had clearly seen his body zipped in a body bag on the morning news. He was dead! He couldn’t physically be here! I stumbled backward, entirely paralyzed by fear, keeping my mouth shut. But the voices outside were multiplying. “Chloe, it’s your lab partner Tyler…” “Chloe, open up, it’s Mr. Davis…” … “Chloe, open the door.” It sounded like everyone was out there. The mass of shadows blocking the light from under the door grew thicker and thicker… What the hell was going on? I backed up until I tripped and fell onto the hospital bed, my flailing hands accidentally hitting the TV remote on the nightstand. The TV flickered on. I looked up at the midnight broadcast covering the SAT tragedy, and suddenly, every piece of the puzzle clicked into place. 5 The news anchor reported that the 1,020 bodies of the students who died during the SATs this morning had inexplicably vanished from the county morgue. Staring at the dense, black mass of shadows shifting beneath the hospital door, all the hairs on my body stood on end. Did they come back from the dead just to hunt me down? My dad was right. As long as I didn’t make a sound or acknowledge them, they couldn’t breach the room. I clamped both hands over my mouth, terrified to even breathe too loudly. I waited in agonizing silence for what felt like hours. Slowly, I watched the shadows under the door dissipate, one by one. Just as I finally let out a sigh of relief, a hand shot out from behind me. My comatose mom had suddenly bolted upright and wrapped her fingers around my throat, choking me. Pure instinct took over, and I let out a muffled scream. In that exact fraction of a second, the shadows that had just left the hallway swarmed back to the door in a frenzy. “Chloe!” “Chloe!” The voices morphed from friendly and gentle to agonizingly shrill, and then violently aggressive… They started slamming themselves against the heavy hospital door. My limbs were completely frozen in terror. Just as the door hinges began to groan under the pressure, my dad snapped awake. “Don’t just stand there! Put your weight against the door! We can’t let them in!” He yanked me off the bed, and we threw our entire body weight against the wood. We held the line against the brutal pounding for roughly ten minutes, until the faint sound of a rooster crowing echoed from the window… Instantly, the violent crashing stopped. I looked through the peephole. The shadows in the hallway were completely gone. My dad collapsed onto the floor, utterly drained. “It’s okay. They’re gone.” My heart finally began to slow down. “Dad, did they get infected by some kind of virus? Are they zombies?” It was the only logical explanation I could grasp! But my dad shook his head. “It’s not a virus! And it’s not a curse. Stop guessing.” “Then what is it?!” I was losing my mind. This kind of relentless, suffocating dread was something I thought only existed in horror movies. My dad stood up, checked on my mom—who was fully unconscious again—and his eyes hardened. “We need to leave. Now. Or we’re going to get everyone in this hospital killed.” “But Mom?” “Your mom will be fine. Once this is all over, she’ll wake up. Everyone will.” Before I could even process what that meant, my dad was pulling me out the door. I don’t know where he got it, but he had another burner phone. He dialed that same person again. “We survived the night. Those things don’t dare come out in the daylight.” “We will make it to the Rockies today.” He hung up, snapped the phone in half, and tossed it into a trash can. I didn’t dare speak. It wasn’t until my dad rented a car and we were driving the desolate highways toward Colorado that he finally sighed. “Chloe, do you know what kind of space we live in?” I blinked. “Three-dimensional.” He didn’t acknowledge my answer, but instead started talking about his past. “Your mom and I spent our college years researching the fourth dimension. And, through certain unconventional methods, we proved it actually existed.” “Though calling it the fourth dimension is a bit inaccurate. ‘Alternate dimension’ fits better.” “Humans can’t access an alternate dimension because there is a barrier between our worlds. That barrier is upheld by a specific set of rules.” “If a rule is broken, the barrier shatters, and things from the other side can cross into our world.” The concepts he was throwing at me were way over my head. “Dad, are you saying… the things trying to kill us are entities from an alternate dimension?”
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