The Hound of Hollow Pines

The Hound of Hollow Pines

The fire crackled low in the underground bunker, spitting sparks that briefly lit the jagged ceiling. Children sat cross-legged around the flames, wrapped in wool blankets and too-thin jackets, their faces upturned and waiting. Some leaned forward with their chins on their fists. Others, older, feigned disinterest, but even their eyes never left the man crouched beside the fire. They were sent to the odd man whose body was twisted and pained, not for a fireside ghost story, but because they needed to know what they were up against.

Most of them had only been in the bunker a few days, nine in all, from three families that had fled south after the last regime sweep. They hadn’t seen a drone up close, but they’d seen what was left behind. Burned fields. Blackened roads. Empty farmhouses where voices once lived. And the body. So many bodies.

The Hound crouched near the fire, one hand flat against the stone floor for balance. The fire painted him in flickering lines, shadow dancing on the wall behind him like something alive. His eyes, hard and far away, swept the children like a commander surveying his troops. He wasn’t always like this. Once, long ago, he'd lectured in halls lined with bookshelves and dryerase boards, not bunker walls and ration crates. But that world was gone.

"You're all too young to remember what it was like before," he said. "Before the sky turned against us. Before the cities became scanners and the streets listened. Back when you could walk upright through the trees and not be hunted by your own reflection."

One of the older girls shifted, uneasy. Another stared into the fire.

"Now," he continued, voice gravel dragging across dry air, "there's a reason I only run missions at night. During the day, it's the optical lenses that’ll get you – high-res, facial recog, movement patterning, gait analysis. A man, even crouched, shows his shape. Shows intention. You can't mimic a animal under sunlight. The daylight sees through everything."

He paused, letting the words settle like ash.

"But at night? That's when you can become something else. Surveillance drones rely on thermal at night. They don’t see you – they see heat. So, if you walk like a person, if your body lights up on their screens all even and bright, you're tagged. You're dead."

A murmur rolled through the kids like dry leaves. One boy, maybe eight or nine, raised a tentative hand.

"So how do you move then?"

The Hound tilted his head. "You don't move like a person. You move like something else. Something they don't care about."

He paused long enough to make them lean in, then tapped the side of his leg. "You go low, on all fours. Spine flat. Hands curled. You breathe through your mouth, so your nose doesn’t burn hot. And– " he arched an eyebrow, "you lift your leg to pee like a dog."

A ripple of laughter broke through the firelight. One boy barked out a fake howl. Another mimed the motion and nearly fell over.

The Hound didn’t laugh. "It ain’t for show. It’s survival. You act like a dog or a wolf down to the last twitch. A canine don’t carry messages in its mouth. But I do."

Silence returned. Even the restless ones were still now.

An older girl, arms crossed, asked, "Have you ever almost been caught?"

He looked at her for a long moment. His hands rubbed together absently, as if kindling something inside. "Three nights ago," he said quietly. "Closest I’ve ever come to dying. Want to hear about it?"

Nods all around. A few leaned so far forward their elbows scraped stone.

The fire crackled. The Hound leaned closer to it, one hand extended toward the warmth, eyes lost in the flickering orange.

"It started just like any other run," he said, the tone of a man recalling someone else’s memory. "Clear skies. Drones sweeping east to west in thirty-minute waves. I’d memorized the terrain and their flight patterns. Had my scent markers, knew the trees I could trust to hide my from the thermal imaging overhead. The message was strapped under the fur I wore, sealed in wax, wrapped in oilcloth. Analog. Paper and pen. The message was a call to arms – an order for coordination across three nodes before a major strike. No ordinary runner left to be trusted with it. We’ve lost too many in the last month. Too many eyes in the sky. I am the only one left who hasn’t been caught."

He took a breath. The kids watched without blinking.

"I crossed the western ridge just as the moon dropped behind the bluff. The air was wet. Not rain-wet, but heavy like fog that hasn’t made up its mind yet. The trees were slick with condensation. Ground soft. Too quiet. Even the crickets had gone still. The perfect conditions for what I had to do."

His voice lowered, steady now. The children leaned closer as the firelight snapped between them.

"That’s when I dropped to all fours. And I became something else."

He dropped to all fours just past the ridge, paws sinking into a bed of pine needles damp with fog. The woods welcomed him like an old ritual – cold, quiet, unblinking. Every inch of him knew how to move: back straight, elbows tucked, head down, mouth open. The gear fit like a second skin – padded gloves molded into curled joints, feet encased in soft-soled wraps that deadened his weight. Tucked inside the chest lining was a single-use gel pack, sealed tight in waxed fabric. Emergency only. It could drop his surface temperature just enough to mimic a dying animal in thermal view. He’d carried it for over a year and never used it. A last resort. A lifeline for when everything else failed. He prayed it never would.

He crept through a corridor of firs and black pines, their limbs clawing at the moonlight overhead. The bark was slick – sweating cold, layered in dew, rot clinging in its cracks. And now the temperature had dropped even more, and everything dripped. Rotting leaves, old rain, fungus. He moved through it all like he belonged there.

A barred owl called once in the distance, and then again, farther off. He stopped beside a young birch, pulled a pouch from his vest, and squeezed a thin stream of canine urine onto the bark. It hissed faintly. It smelled wrong to him, but right enough to fool a drone’s chemical sniffer. Survival wasn’t about elegance. It was about detail.

The first sweep came exactly as expected. A soft mechanical whine passed overhead, low and methodical. The Hound dropped flat beside a rotted log, tucked one arm beneath his chest, and curled like a sleeping dog. His tail, a bundle of cloth and thermal shielding, lay limp behind him.

It hovered, quiet but close. The scanner passed over him. Broad, invisible, humming like static in the bones. He didn’t move. Not even to blink.

The drone paused. Hovered.

Then moved on.

The terrain changed after the creek. The trees thinned, giving way to a slope cluttered with timber and rot. A logfall, remnants of some long-abandoned logging operation, rose like a collapsed altar before him. Trunks lay crisscrossed and waterlogged, swollen with moss and black fungi. Some still had rusted chain links embedded in them. Old saw cuts showed in their splintered flesh like ancient scars.

Fog had settled into the lower reaches, coiling through the tangle like breath between ribs. The climb would be slow. Worse, it would be awkward. There was no way to move across the obstacle like a four-legged animal – not with the angles, the spacing, the height. But going around would take too long.

He counted as he crouched at the base. Always thirty minutes between sweeps. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The moon was where it should be. The rhythm hadn’t failed him before.

Twenty-nine-fifteen.

He started up, claws scraping bark, muscles already burning. The climb was worse than it looked, slippery, uneven, full of hidden gaps. He pressed forward anyway, eyes fixed on the ridge.

Twenty-nine-forty. Almost there.

Then his back foot slipped. Just enough to throw his weight off. His hand shot out instinctively, gripping the edge of a moss-slick log. Human fingers, not paws. The kind of motion that caught an algorithm’s eye.

Thirty-oh-three.

The hum changed. Slight, but sharp. Not distant – retracting. One of the drones’ pitch lowered as it pivoted back.

They’d seen something.

The second drone descended like a vulture – slower, deliberate. It hovered in place, a silent judge.

The Hound froze halfway up the slope, one knee braced against a moss-slick log. The air around him vibrated with the faint hum of propellers, the frequency too low to be heard clearly, but enough to make his nerves itch.

A soft click echoed through the timber: manual override. He knew the sound. The drone was no longer governed by algorithm. A human was flying it now. Someone was staring at a screen, watching his posture, comparing his outline to known movement patterns.

Sunlight would’ve sealed his fate instantly, revealing every unnatural shift of muscle and line. But even here, in this shadowed slope, the operator’s camera was picking up details: limb symmetry, angle of gait, body mechanics. A human silhouette beneath fur and posture.

He adjusted slightly, letting his spine sag and jaw go slack, but the damage was done. The last move was too clean, too upright. His arms had extended at the elbow – wrong angle. His footfall too precise. Real dogs didn’t grip bark with fingers.

A red light pulsed from the drone’s underside, slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat. The drone circled once. Stopped in front of him.

They were watching him. Not a blur in the trees. Not a shape on thermal. Him.

He lowered his head and waited. Every instinct screamed to run. But instincts got people killed.

He didn't wait for a second pass. His fingers reached beneath the fur lining at his chest and found the small capsule strapped tight with twine. A twist and crush, that's all it took. The gel pack ruptured, and cold spread across his chest like a sudden flood.

The air thickened. Sounds faded. His breath hitched.

His body temperature began to plummet. His muscles seized as if gripped by frost. He staggered once, foot slipping on damp bark. The cold clawed into his spine, and he let himself fall sideways off the log, limbs loose, mouth open.

The forest held its breath. Even the insects seem to pause. Nothing moved.

He dropped.

He landed hard, but didn't tense. His cheek pressed against the mud. A small trail of ants marched across his jaw. He let them. His breath came in shallow puffs, barely disturbing the leaves near his mouth.

One back leg twitched, enough to simulate nervous system decay. His tail draped limply. His eyes remained closed, save for the smallest slit under one lid, watching the trees for shifting shadows.

Above him, the drone hovered.

He lay motionless, counting seconds in his head. The gel was working. He could feel the cold crawling across his skin, his limbs growing dull and uneven. That was the key. A dying heat signature. Patchy. Fading.

Overhead, the drone hovered. He couldn’t see its scan, but he knew the rhythm. Five seconds. Long enough to decide.

He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Let the machine make its choice.

Then it turned.

He lay still. Thirteen minutes. Each one stretched thin as wire.

The cold was no longer a sensation. It was a fact. It became the ground, the bark beneath his cheek, the mud against his ribs. It moved through him in slow pulses, claiming fingers first, then wrists, elbows, knees. His jaw locked tight to suppress shivering, but a faint tremor danced at the corners of his mouth.

A slug crawled across his glove, indifferent to the war above. Somewhere nearby, an animal broke a twig underfoot. It sounded like a crack of gunfire. Every noise in the silence rang too loud, too sharp.

His breaths were shallow, timed between gusts of wind that moved like invisible predators through the canopy. One breath. Then a pause. Then two. Anything more would bloom hot in the thermal scan.

At last, the hum drifted off. The red glow disappeared behind tree cover.

He didn’t move.

Five more minutes passed. Then ten. Finally. He heard the next wave of drones pass over and disappear over the tree line.

Inch by inch, he shifted his limbs, rolling toward a tangle of roots choked with ivy. He crawled inside, dragging himself by elbows, each pull a bolt of pain through frozen tendons.

Shadow swallowed him. And for a moment, he didn’t feel like a man at all.

Just a shape. Just a ghost in the trees.

He’d become a beast to survive. Dropped language, dropped posture, dropped everything that once made him a man, but, he wasn’t the monster. The system was.

It had always been the Beast.

He stayed longer than he needed, even after the chill ebbed. Part of him had to remind himself that he could still stand. When he finally moved, it was slow, hesitant, like walking upright needed to be relearned.

Back at the campfire, the Hound sat in silence for a long breath. The fire had burned lower. No one spoke. Even the usual coughs, rustles, and nervous whispers had stilled. The children stared at him.

The smallest one, barely more than eight, leaned forward until his blanket slipped from his shoulders. His voice was quiet but pierced the silence like a blade.

"Did you die?"

The tension broke. Laughter exploded from the older kids, some falling over, others wiping their eyes. The little boy’s ears turned red as he glanced around once he realized his blunder.

The Hound smiled, barely, and reached out to muss the boy’s hair.

"Not that night," he said. "But it’s a fair question. Felt like I might."

He leaned back, voice lower now. “Every time I go out there, I become less human. That’s what it takes to survive the Beast.”

He looked up at the firelight reflecting in the children’s wide eyes.

“And I don’t mean me.”

The fire cracked again. And this time, they all leaned back into the warmth, content just to listen to it burn.

By dawn, he reached Outpost Yarrow. The sky was the color of ash, and frost still clung to the grass. He approached the barn slowly, limbs stiff, jaw aching. A rusted weathervane turned once overhead. He slid open the hidden cellar door and descended into the dark.

Inside, a lantern flickered against cement walls lined with crates and canvas. A woman in a threadbare coat looked up as he entered. She didn’t speak, just held out her hand.

The Hound unwrapped the wax-sealed message from beneath his chest layer, the paper stiff with cold. He handed it over.

"Burn it after you read it,” he said, voice rasped, lips pale. He didn’t wait for a reply. He would rest here, hidden until the next nightfall gave him cover again.

Back at the campfire, after the children had wandered back to their families, the Hound stared into the campfire, still thawing his joint. His back still ached from the years of missions, locked in a permanent curve that made upright movement a conscious effort.

“Mr. Hound?” One of the boys from before, the Hound guessed him at 15, maybe younger, stepped up quietly and crouched beside him. "Could you teach me?" the boy asked. "To move like that? To run a mission."

The Hound didn’t answer right away. He watched the kid’s face. Too young, but already too changed.

He reached down, picked up one of the gloves drying beside the grate, and turned it slowly in his hand.

"It’s not something you learn," he said at last. "It’s something you become."

The boy nodded, "The best way to hide is to become what they ignore."

The Hound stared at him, caught off guard. Not by the words, they were true, but by the fact that they came from a boy barely old enough to tie his boots. For a moment, he didn’t speak.

For a heartbeat, the bunker’s shadows seemed to deepen around them. The firelight caught the sharp angles of his face, the scarred knuckles frozen mid-motion over the grate. His eyes, flat and assessing like a wolf hearing an unexpected echo of its own howl, locked onto the kid.

The boy didn’t flinch. Just stared back, dirt smudged across his nose, fingers curled tight around the edge of his blanket.

A slow breath hissed through the Hound’s teeth. Not quite approval. Not quite disbelief. Something rougher, older. Maybe the recognition of a truth he’d carved into his bones, now spoken aloud in a child’s voice.

"Yeah," he said at last, voice gravel-dry. "That’s it exactly."

The next morning, just minutes before the end of his shift, a man known only as a Night-Watcher, one of the few operators trusted to fly manual overwatch, requested one last recon pass.

The drone he piloted coasted low over the logfall ridge, sunlight slanting through the trees in pale beams. Its camera lens had switched from thermal to optical, collecting every nuance of light, shadow, and movement in the wrecked timber.

He remembered the reading from the night before. Wounded animal, no threat. But something had felt off. Too methodical. Too clean. It hadn’t settled with him.

He circled the drone slowly over the spot he saw the animal die. Bark torn, yes. A streak in the mud. But no body. No scavenger disruption. No blood. No evidence of disturbance.

He leaned forward in his chair and zoomed in. The drag mark ended beneath a cedar root system choked in ivy and…vanished.

He sat back, exhaling through his nose.

"You clever bastard," he muttered.