At my daughter’s wedding, I wore my Army dress blues for the first time in 19 years. Mid-ceremony, a man I’d never met approached me, shook my hand, and whispered, “I know what you did in Fallujah.” My chest tightened—those records were sealed. He slipped me a card, and when I flipped it over, I nearly DROPPED it

The card bore the insignia of a government agency I thought had long buried my name. Not the Army. Not the VA. This was deeper—darker. Just three letters etched in jet-black ink across a field of white: “OSA.” Office of Strategic Anomalies.

I stare at it like it might burn through my palm. My daughter’s vows echo in the background, but my heartbeat drowns them out. Who is this man? What does he know about Fallujah that even my therapist wasn’t cleared to discuss? I fold the card and tuck it into my inner jacket pocket, trying to maintain composure. The last thing I want is to ruin my daughter’s perfect day with ghosts from a war she barely remembers.

After the ceremony, we move to the reception. There’s laughter, dancing, clinking of glasses—but I can’t seem to focus on any of it. I keep scanning the room for the man in the charcoal suit, but he’s vanished. No trace. No sign he was ever there.

When the cake is cut and the last toast is made, I quietly slip away to the parking lot. I sit in my car, the glow of the streetlamp flickering overhead, and finally take out the card again. There’s a number scribbled on the back beneath the OSA emblem. Just that. No name. No title. Nothing else. My fingers hover over my phone screen. I shouldn’t call. But then again, I’ve never been good at letting sleeping dogs lie.

I dial.

It rings once.

Then silence.

A click.

“Colonel Michael Reyes,” a voice says. Calm. Measured. No introduction. “You kept the coin. That means you’re ready.”

I grip the steering wheel with my free hand. “Who is this?”

“You know who we are. And we know what you saw in Fallujah wasn’t a hallucination.”

My blood runs cold.

“No one was supposed to survive that night,” the voice continues. “And yet, here you are. Breathing. Remembering. Still asking questions. It’s time to get answers.”

The line goes dead.

That night, I barely sleep. Memories from 2004 claw their way out from the vault I’d locked tight. The mission. The screams. The thing we found beneath that mosque. My squad had orders to extract a high-value target, but what we stumbled on… it wasn’t human. Or maybe it was once. I remember its eyes. That’s what haunts me most. Those black, glistening eyes like twin pits of tar.

Three days later, a package arrives at my doorstep. No return address. Inside, a burner phone and a set of coordinates. Alongside them, a note in block letters: NO UNIFORMS. NO QUESTIONS. 72 HOURS.

I tell my wife I’ve been asked to attend a last-minute veterans’ retreat. She raises an eyebrow but doesn’t press. She stopped asking questions years ago, when she realized the nightmares weren’t going away.

I drive twelve hours north, across state lines, through winding roads that lose cell service somewhere past mile marker 212. The coordinates lead me to an abandoned airstrip hidden behind a rusted-out chain-link fence. A single hangar remains, and from it, a low hum pulses through the air like a heartbeat.

As I approach, the hangar door slides open with a mechanical groan. Inside, fluorescent lights flicker to life, revealing a long metal table and five people already seated. They don’t look at me. Not yet. Each of them wears civilian clothes, but there’s no mistaking the military posture. These are operators. Warriors. Survivors. Like me.

A woman in her late forties nods once as I enter. “Colonel Reyes. We’ve been expecting you.”

“How many of us are there?” I ask.

“Seven total. You’re the sixth. The seventh… didn’t make it.”

“What is this?” I demand. “Some kind of reunion?”

The woman stands. “We call it Project Lantern. And you’re here because the thing in Fallujah wasn’t isolated. There have been sightings. Events. All linked to you and the other members of Echo Squad.”

My pulse quickens. “They told us it was a biological weapon. That we were hallucinating.”

“They lied,” she says. “It wasn’t a weapon. It was a warning. And it wasn’t hallucination—it was contact.”

She taps a remote, and the lights dim. A projector whirs to life, illuminating the far wall with grainy black-and-white footage. My stomach churns as I recognize the silhouette in the center of the frame. Tall. Slouched. Its limbs too long for a human body. Eyes glowing. It moves with jerks and stutters, like a puppet missing half its strings.

“This was filmed three weeks ago. Northern Montana. Same energy signature we found in Fallujah. Same sonic frequency. Same residual radiation. It’s hunting again.”

I look around the room. No one speaks. We all understand the unspoken truth: whatever we encountered, it isn’t finished with us.

The woman turns back to me. “We brought you here because you’re the only one who made physical contact and lived.”

“I didn’t live,” I whisper. “I just didn’t die.”

Her gaze hardens. “We need you to help us stop it before it spreads. Before more people vanish.”

I take a deep breath. I’m not a soldier anymore. I left that part of me behind two decades ago. But something stirs inside me now—something primal. A duty that never really left. I nod.

“I’m in.”

That night, we sleep in separate quarters inside the hangar. The air smells like oil and secrets. At 3 a.m., I wake drenched in sweat. There’s movement outside my door. I reach for the sidearm they issued us—standard Glock, modified barrel—and creep into the hallway.

A shadow darts past the exit.

I follow.

Outside, the sky glows orange with static lightning. A storm brews unnaturally fast. At the tree line, I spot him—the man from the wedding. His silhouette cuts a sharp figure against the swirling clouds.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he says without turning.

“You gave me the card.”

“I was testing you.”

“Testing me for what?”

He finally turns. His face is different now—his eyes pitch black. No whites. No pupils. Just like the thing in Fallujah.

And then I understand.

He’s not the messenger.

He is the message.

I raise the Glock. “Who are you?”

“I am what waits at the edge of your world,” he replies. “You called me when you remembered. Every time you dream, you bring me closer. Every survivor is a doorway. And you? You’re wide open.”

He lunges. I fire.

The bullet stops inches from his face, suspended mid-air. Then it dissolves into dust.

I back away slowly, heart pounding. He doesn’t follow. Just watches.

“You can’t kill what isn’t alive,” he says, and vanishes into the dark.

The next morning, I tell the team everything. No one laughs. No one doubts. They’ve all seen it in some form. The woman—her name’s Jordan—explains that OSA was created not to investigate anomalies, but to contain them. The problem is, containment isn’t working anymore.

“The Fallujah Entity—code name Gateskin—feeds on memory,” she says. “And now that you’re all remembering, it’s getting stronger.”

“So how do we stop it?” someone asks.

There’s a long silence.

And then Jordan says the one thing I don’t want to hear: “You go back.”

“Back to Iraq?” I ask, incredulous.

“No. Back to Fallujah. Not the city. The place. The moment. We built something called a temporal echo chamber. It can take you there—put you inside your memory. Let you confront it where it first touched you.”

I stare at her, my throat dry. “You want me to relive it?”

“No. We want you to trap it.”

The mission is set for midnight.

They strap me into a chair that looks like it belongs in a dentist’s nightmare. Electrodes. A visor. Tubes and wires that pulse with pale blue light. I clench my fists as the machine powers up, and suddenly—

—I’m back.

Dust. Heat. Gunfire.

Fallujah.

My boots crunch over broken tile. The mosque looms ahead. My squad moves with me, alive again, faces I haven’t seen in nineteen years. We breach the doors.

And there it is.

The pit beneath the altar. The whispering. The cold, unnatural wind.

Only this time, I don’t hesitate.

I leap in.

Darkness surrounds me, alive and thick. The Entity waits, eyes glowing in the void.

“You returned,” it hisses.

“I never left,” I reply.

I activate the beacon hidden in my glove. The walls ripple. The light expands, pure and searing.

The thing screams.

And the chamber begins to collapse.

I don’t know if I’ll make it out.

But I know I’ll take it with me.

When I wake, I’m in the hangar.

The others stand over me.

Jordan’s voice is shaking. “We lost the signal. Thought you were gone.”

“Did it work?” I ask.

She nods slowly.

“For now.”

I sit up. The weight in my chest is lighter. The nightmares… silent.

But I know this isn’t the end.

Because somewhere out there, in the corners of forgotten wars and buried missions, other doors still creak open.

And one day, they’ll call me again.

When they do—I’ll be ready.