Chapter 2: The Earthquake and the Lost Team

Three months ago, a localized earthquake hit the Black Pine Range, sending a landslide crashing down the western slope and ripping the land wide open. That quake rattled the windows of every bait shop and VFW hall from Grand Marais to Ely, knocking over trophies and snow globes. The next morning, folks at the diner were already betting on what the government would find. Satellite photos showed something new—a gaping bronze tunnel, raw and out of place on the mountainside. Word spread fast in certain circles, even if the feds tried to keep it quiet.

Professor Howard McAllister from our institute got the call to lead the team. Howard was old-school—still wrote everything in pencil, drove a battered Ford Ranger with more bumper stickers than paint. He and his ragtag crew worked under floodlights, generators humming through the night, cataloging every scrap and sending up samples by chopper. Locals saw glimpses, and the rumors started: government treasure hunters, old Indian burial grounds, something big. The truth was stranger than any of them guessed.

When we followed the tunnel into the underground, things got weird. This place didn’t fit anything we knew—no burial pits, no skeletons, no sacrifices. Just empty, echoing halls, and those twelve monstrous bronze pillars, each one thirty feet wide and rising over two hundred and fifty feet tall. They stood like petrified trees, swallowing our lights, making us feel like ants.

The air tasted of old pennies and wet stone. Every step echoed, the sound swallowed by the dark. There were no carvings, no graffiti, no animal bones—not even a mouse. Only those pillars, ancient and silent, looming out of the shadows.

Tests dated the pillars back eight thousand years. The engravings—delicate, hypnotic—finally gave up their secret: a prophecy, eight thousand years old, predicting the end of humanity in 2012.

Howard’s hands shook as he pointed to the translation. Nobody said a word for a long time, the silence broken only by the faint beep of a data logger. Even the grad students, always ready to argue, were stunned into silence. It felt like we’d stepped into an apocalypse movie, only the terror was real.

Prophecies about 2012 had been everywhere—Mayan calendars, Nostradamus, all the end-of-the-world talk. But it was 2025 now, and we were all still here.

The world didn’t end—just another brutal Minnesota winter, then spring. Still, back in 2012, folks in town panicked. Churches filled up, survivalists went off-grid, and doomsday preppers hoarded beans and shotgun shells. Now, it was just a strange, half-remembered scare.

But for the people with clearance, the prophecy was more than a myth. In windowless rooms near D.C., people whispered about what happened in the Range.

The government had sent a scientific expedition into the Black Pine Range. Three days in, all contact vanished. Seven people gone, without a trace. All that was left at camp was a radio, stuck on a loop:

Humans are no longer human; they are right beside us.

Humans are no longer human; they are right beside us.

Humans are no longer human; they are right beside us.

…

Even the toughest operators flinched hearing that on repeat, the static twisting the words into something barely human. It sounded like a warning, or maybe a confession.

If humans aren’t human anymore, then what are we? False ones.

We sat there in the cold, the radio hissing, the phrase burrowing into our bones. It was hypnotic, the forest outside pressing in.

With the two incidents so closely linked, my boss told me and McAllister’s team to help the military investigate. I thought I knew fear, but nothing prepared me for what we’d find in those woods.