APOCALYPSE: WHEN THE PAST RETURNS

Chapter 4

Adrian couldn't sleep.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the creature crashing through the forest. Its enormous body. Its dark scales. Those pale, glowing eyes.

He remembered the moment it had turned its head toward him. For a few terrifying seconds, he had been certain it would attack. Yet, it had continued deeper into the forest, leaving him with questions he couldn't answer. What was that creature doing in Evergreen City? How had it returned after being extinct for thousands of years? And why had it appeared so close to the place where they tested the robot?

Adrian tossed aside his blanket and sat up, rubbing his tired face.

His father's warning echoed through his mind: If this species ever returns, it will not return alone.

He glanced at his phone on the bedside table. The anonymous messages were still glowing against the dark screen:

Stop searching for your father's missing research.

Some discoveries must remain buried.

His jaw tightened. Whoever had sent the messages knew about his conversation with Henry. That couldn't be a coincidence. Someone had either been listening through the walls or had found another way to track his every move.

He picked up his phone and examined the number again. "Who are you?" he muttered.

He wasn't going to spend the entire night wondering. Adrian opened a reverse-number lookup service and entered the digits. He waited impatiently, tapping his fingers against the mattress as the search processed.

For several seconds, nothing happened. Then, a single result appeared on the screen:

Elena Morgan.

Adrian frowned. The name meant nothing to him.

He searched again, hoping to find something that could connect the woman to Henry or the National Scientific Archives. The results offered little more than a name and a possible contact listing. No photograph he recognized. No obvious connection to his father's research. Nothing that explained why she wanted him to stop investigating.

"Elena Morgan," he repeated quietly.

He considered calling the number, but stopped himself. If she had gone to the trouble of sending an anonymous warning, confronting her now might only alert her that he was onto something. Besides, he had a more urgent problem: the creature, the strange plant, and his father's missing research.

Adrian put his phone aside, reached for the research bag on the chair beside his desk, and pulled out the heavy brown manuscript. He placed it on his bed and opened its cracked leather cover. If he couldn't sleep, he might as well find answers.

For hours, he studied the yellowed pages beneath the dim light of his bedside lamp. His father's handwriting filled the margins, accompanied by sketches of ancient animals, unfamiliar spores, and strange environmental cycles. Adrian read each entry carefully, searching for anything that might explain the reptilian beast he had encountered in the forest.

Nothing explained its strange behaviour.

He rubbed his tired eyes and turned another page. Then another. Frustration tightened his chest. His father had spent years studying these things, yet the manuscript seemed to raise more questions than it answered.

Adrian was about to close the book when something caught his attention at the very back, the final page.

A line of writing had been pressed firmly into the margin, almost hidden near the fold. He had overlooked it earlier. He leaned closer, lifting the manuscript toward the lamp.

The handwriting was unmistakably his father's sharp, hurried, and uneven, as though the words had been written in a moment of panic. Adrian read the first line. His eyes widened. He read it again, his pulse quickening.

Written in large, jagged letters were the words:

THE PLANTS AND ANIMALS WILL BECOME AGGRESSIVE AND BEGIN ATTACKING ONCE THERE IS A FULL MOON.

Adrian went completely still. "A full moon?"

He stared at the warning, waiting for his mind to make sense of it. Outside his bedroom window, thin clouds drifted across the night sky. The moon hung above the distant forest, its silver light partly hidden behind the overcast haze. A chill crept down Adrian's spine.

He remembered the purple-veined plants spreading across the forest floor. He remembered the enormous creature charging through the trees, shaking the ground beneath its feet. Perhaps his father had known more about these species than the manuscript revealed. Perhaps their return followed a pattern he had discovered but never managed to explain completely.

Adrian's fingers tightened around the book. His father hadn't merely studied extinct species. He had known something about their behaviour, something that suggested their return came with a dangerous biological trigger.

But how had his father discovered it? And if he had known these creatures would become aggressive, why hadn't he left clearer instructions about stopping them?

Adrian swallowed hard. "This can't be happening."

He wanted to believe there was another explanation. A scientific reason that didn't involve an ancient warning coming true before his eyes. But the plant was real. The creature was real. And someone had already warned him to stop investigating.

He looked at the manuscript again. One question now mattered more than anything else: When was the next full moon?

Adrian slapped the book shut and hurried to the corner of his bedroom, where his father's old desktop computer sat beneath a layer of dust. He pressed the power button and waited impatiently as the cooling fan whirred into life. The monitor flickered, filling his face with a harsh blue glow.

He opened an astronomical tracking database and searched for the current lunar cycle in Evergreen City. The results are loaded. Adrian leaned toward the screen, scanning the information until he found the next full moon.

Then he froze.

Two days.

He stared at the words, hoping he had misunderstood them. Two days.

He checked the lunar data again, then looked at the manuscript lying open on his bed. His father's warning seemed to stare back at him from the page.

Two days to prepare.

Two days to understand what was happening.

Two days before the creatures in the forest might stop wandering through the trees and begin hunting anything in their path.

Adrian stood abruptly and paced across the room, his thoughts colliding. He needed to warn someone. Henry had refused to believe him. The local authorities would probably dismiss him as another frightened scientist obsessed with his father's reputation. And the four teenagers who had helped him with the robot experiment had no idea how much danger they might be in.

He stopped pacing.

The robot.

The thought struck him so suddenly that he turned toward his desk. They had been testing it when it activated unexpectedly and turned toward the forest. Shortly afterward, they had discovered the strange plant. Could their experiment have triggered something? Or had something already been happening beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to emerge?

Adrian didn't have enough evidence to answer either question. But he knew he couldn't afford to ignore the possibility.

He grabbed his phone and opened his messages, his thumb hovering over Leah's name. He needed to warn the teenagers to stay away from the forest until he understood what they were dealing with.

Then his eyes shifted to the unknown number again: Elena Morgan.

Whoever she was, she knew about his conversation with Henry. She had warned him about the missing research, but she hadn't explained why. Was she trying to stop him from discovering the truth, or was she warning him because she knew how dangerous the truth actually was?

Adrian had no answers.

He turned back to the computer screen. The countdown remained unchanged: Two days.

His father's words were no longer an old theory written in the margins of a forgotten manuscript. They were a ticking clock. And the countdown had already begun