I inspect remote powerlines with a commercial drone. Yesterday, I counted a tower that shouldn’t be there, and now I’m hiding in the woods.
If you don't know what a maintenance corridor looks like deep in the backcountry, you need to understand the scale of it before any of this will make sense.
Imagine a perfectly straight scar cut through the middle of an ancient, untouched national forest. The clearing is about two hundred feet wide, a flat avenue of rough grass and crushed gravel, bordered on both sides by impenetrable walls of towering evergreens. This avenue does not curve. It does not follow the natural topography of the land. It simply cuts a brutal, mathematical line through valleys and over mountains, stretching into infinity in both directions.
Running down the exact center of this liminal scar is a line of high-tension transmission towers. These are the massive, skeletal steel giants, standing over a hundred and fifty feet tall, carrying the thick bundles of cable that transport hundreds of thousands of volts from remote generating stations to cities hundreds of miles away.
When you stand in the corridor, you feel profoundly small. You are completely isolated from human civilization, yet you are walking under the very veins of it. The isolation is heavy, pressing down on you from the silent forest walls, but the clearing itself is never quiet.
Because the lines hum.
It is a constant, aggressive, electric sizzle. A deep, vibrating drone that you don't just hear; you feel it in the roots of your teeth. It makes the air smell sharply of ozone, like the moments right before a violent thunderstorm breaks. When you spend enough time out here, that hum gets inside your head, and eventually becomes your heartbeat.
My job is to drive an off-road utility truck down this corridor, alone, for weeks at a time. I am contracted by the energy conglomerate to inspect the infrastructure. The terrain is far too rugged for bucket trucks, and walking it would take months, so they use drone operators. I drive to a tower, park, launch a heavy-duty commercial inspection drone, and fly it up the steel lattice. I record high-definition video of the ceramic insulators, check the structural bolts, look for rust, log the GPS coordinates, and then drive to the next one.
It is tedious, lonely work. You sleep in the back of the truck, cook on a small camping stove, and rely on a satellite phone for emergency contact. The truck is essentially a rolling power station itself, equipped with a heavy-duty alternator, auxiliary battery banks, and solar panels to keep the drone batteries charging on rotation.
The current route started four days ago. The first forty towers were entirely unremarkable. The routine settled over me like a heavy blanket. Drive a mile, park. Calibrate the drone. Launch. Fly the pattern: up the left leg, across the lower crossarm, check the bundled conductors, up to the top peak, check the static wire, down the right leg. Land. Swap batteries. Drive another mile.
The days blur together out here. The scenery never changes. The green wall of trees on the left, the green wall of trees on the right, the grey gravel road ahead, and the steel giants marching off toward the horizon until they fade into the atmospheric haze.
Yesterday evening, the sun began to dip behind the western treeline, casting long, warped shadows across the corridor. The temperature dropped rapidly, the damp chill of the forest creeping out into the open space. I parked the truck midway between Tower 42 and Tower 43, leaving the diesel engine idling to run the heater and charge the equipment bank.
I climbed into the back cab, poured a cup of lukewarm coffee from my thermos, and opened my laptop to begin the daily data transfer and review.
The protocol requires me to review the wide-angle approach footage for each sector before submitting the close-up structural logs. It’s a redundancy to ensure no macro-environmental hazards, like leaning trees or unauthorized construction, are threatening the right-of-way.
I opened the video file for the sector covering Towers 40 through 45. The footage played on my screen, a smooth, high-altitude tracking shot moving forward down the corridor. The camera panned slightly, taking in the endless stretch of grass, the flanking forests, and the repeating steel structures.
I took a sip of coffee, my eyes scanning the screen out of pure habit.
Tower 40 passed below. Then 41.
The drone continued its forward flight in the video. The space between the towers is standardized. They are engineered to be spaced at exact intervals depending on the tension and the terrain, usually about a quarter of a mile apart. The rhythm of them passing the camera is predictable.
Tower 42 passed on the screen.
The camera glided forward. The gap of empty grass and gravel rolled by. And then the next steel structure entered the frame.
I reached out and hit the spacebar, pausing the video.
I frowned, leaning closer to the glowing monitor. I rubbed my eyes, feeling the gritty fatigue of staring at screens all day, and looked again.
I looked at the timeline timestamp. Then I looked at my physical logbook sitting on the passenger seat.
Tower 42 was recorded at mile marker 10.5. Tower 43 was recorded at mile marker 10.8.
The structure paused on my screen was situated barely two hundred yards past Tower 42. It was entirely in the wrong place.
I hit play. The drone flew past the structure. A few seconds later, the actual Tower 43 entered the frame, properly aligned, holding the massive cables aloft.
I hit pause again and scrubbed the video backward, freezing the frame on the anomaly.
There was an extra tower.
Right between 42 and 43, sitting slightly off-center from the main alignment, closer to the right-hand treeline.
I stared at the paused image. Something was deeply wrong with the visual composition. The primary towers are constructed of galvanized steel. They have a sharp, reflective quality, a hard geometric perfection. They reflect the sunlight in bright, blinding flashes.
The extra structure in the video was dull. It absorbed the light rather than reflecting it. Its color was a mottled, flat grey, almost like the color of wet concrete or dried mud.
Furthermore, it wasn't holding up any wires. The thick transmission lines passed directly over its top peak, hanging with their natural sag, entirely disconnected from the structure beneath them, so I made the drone comeback until I think of what to do about it.
My immediate thought was a bureaucratic error. An old, decommissioned tower that the demolition crews had failed to dismantle. Or a temporary structural support left behind from a previous repair. But it didn't make sense. The spacing was wrong, the alignment was wrong, and the company was meticulous about keeping the corridor clear of debris.
I looked out the window of the truck. The actual corridor was bathed in the dimming, purple light of twilight. The hum of the lines buzzed aggressively in the cold air.
I looked forward through the windshield. I could see the silhouette of Tower 43 in the distance. And there, rising from the shadows between my truck and the next marker, was the dark shape of the extra structure.
I could not leave an unlogged anomaly in the sector. The contract was strict. Any undocumented structures, even old ones, required immediate close-up photographic logging.
I looked at the battery readout on the drone controller. Sixty percent. More than enough for a quick two-minute flight down the corridor and back.
I stepped out of the warm cab into the biting evening air. The sudden chill made me shiver, but the sound of the electric sizzle from the wires overhead was what really made the hair on my arms stand up. It felt louder than usual. More erratic.
I placed the heavy octocopter on the flat lid of a storage box mounted to the truck bed. I powered on the rotors. The high-pitched whine of the electric motors joined the low hum of the powerlines. I grabbed the control tablet, stepped back, and pushed the throttle up.
The drone lifted into the twilight, its green and red navigation lights blinking rhythmically. I oriented the camera forward and pushed the right stick, sending the machine gliding rapidly down the corridor toward the dull, grey shape rising in the gloom.
I kept my eyes glued to the tablet screen, preferring the high-definition camera feed to my own limited vision in the fading light.
The distance closed quickly. The feed showed the crushed gravel rushing past underneath, the tall grass blurring. The shape of the extra tower began to define itself against the darkening sky.
I slowed the drone's forward momentum, bringing it into a steady hover about fifty feet away from the structure, aligning the camera with what would be the middle cross-section of a normal tower.
I tapped the screen to engage the zoom lens.
The image jumped forward, filling the tablet with the details of the grey lattice.
My breath caught in my throat.
The struts and cross-beams were not made of steel.
There were no bolts. There were no rivets. There were no sharp, milled edges. The structure was composed of thick, cylindrical lengths of material that looked organic. The surface was heavily textured, flaking and pitted, resembling the thick, grey hide of an elephant, or the dried, calcified bark of a dead tree.
I adjusted the exposure on the camera, trying to pull more light into the lens.
The structure was asymmetrical. The angles were slightly wrong. A steel tower relies on perfect triangular geometry to distribute weight. This thing looked like a crude, haphazard imitation of that geometry. The "beams" were slightly warped, bowing under their own weight.
And then, through the high-definition feed, I saw the rust.
Except it wasn't rust. Where the cylindrical beams intersected, forming the joints of the lattice, there were patches of deep, reddish-brown coloring. But it wasn't oxidized metal. It looked wet, like thick, congealed fluid seeping from the seams.
My thumb hovered over the control stick, paralyzed. A deep, primal alarm bell was ringing in the back of my brain, a survival instinct screaming at me that I was looking at something that should not exist.
I stared at the tablet.
The horizontal beam dominating the center of the screen—a beam that should have been rigid, unyielding steel—was shifting.
It was a minute movement, barely perceptible. I thought it was wind buffeting the drone, causing the camera to sway. But the telemetry data on the screen showed the drone was holding a perfectly stable hover.
Then I realized, the camera wasn't moving. The structure was.
The thick, grey horizontal strut bowed outward slightly, the rough surface stretching. Then, slowly, it contracted, pulling back inward.
Outward. Inward.
A slow, rhythmic expansion and contraction.
It was breathing.
The entire towering structure, standing a hundred feet tall in the middle of the empty corridor, was taking slow, agonizing breaths.
I watched in frozen horror as the texture of the grey "hide" began to ripple. The coloring of the structure was slowly shifting, the dull grey breaking apart into darker, vertical striations, mimicking the shadows and colors of the dense pine trees standing just fifty yards behind it. It was trying to break up its own silhouette, or camouflaging itself against the treeline.
I jammed the control stick backward, desperately trying to pull the drone away in a rapid retreat.
The motors screamed as the drone pitched backward.
On the screen, the camouflage instantly ceased. The illusion of the rigid structure shattered.
From the upper section of the entity, a massive, thick cable detached itself from the main body, and what for a moment appeared to be a wire, was in fact a long, muscular tendril, whipping through the air with a speed that defied the creature's immense size.
The tendril snapped forward, blurring across the camera feed.
There was a deafening crack of impact transmitted through the audio feed, followed instantly by the tablet screen shattering into a chaotic mosaic of static and error codes.
SIGNAL LOST.
I dropped the tablet. It clattered against the gravel.
I looked up down the corridor.
About two hundred yards away, the red and green navigation lights of my drone were gone. The sky was empty.
But the grey structure was not.
In the dim, purple light, the silhouette of the tower was unfolding.
The rigid, triangular peak of the structure was bending downward. The thick, vertical support legs were shifting, pulling out of the earth with wet, heavy tearing sounds that carried across the open space.
It was uprooting itself.
Panic, absolute and blinding, flooded my nervous system. I didn't think. I didn't try to gather my equipment. I threw myself into the driver's seat of the idling truck and slammed the heavy door shut, locking it with a frantic smack of my palm.
I threw the transmission into drive, stomped the accelerator to the floorboard, and gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white.
The heavy diesel engine roared, the large off-road tires biting into the crushed gravel and spinning for a fraction of a second before finding purchase. The truck launched forward, throwing me back into the seat.
I thought to turn around, but I realized I don’t have the time so I drove straight down the corridor, heading east, away from the setting sun, away from Sector 42, aiming the headlights into the encroaching darkness.
The truck bounced violently over the uneven terrain. The suspension screamed as I hit ruts and dips at sixty miles an hour, a speed the vehicle was never designed to handle off-road. The tools and storage boxes in the back crashed and banged against the metal bed.
I kept my eyes fixed on the illuminated patch of gravel ahead, dodging the concrete footings of the actual transmission towers as I rocketed past them.
Tower 43 flew by in a blur of steel. Then 44.
The electric hum of the wires overhead seemed to match the frantic, elevated RPM of my engine.
My breathing was shallow and fast, scraping against the back of my dry throat. The logic center of my brain was desperately trying to rationalize what I had just seen. A hallucination. A stress-induced psychotic break from the isolation. A shadow cast by the setting sun playing tricks on the camera lens.
But I had heard the wet tearing of the earth. I had seen the tendril shatter the drone.
I reached up with a trembling hand and adjusted the rearview mirror, angling it to look back down the corridor behind me.
The sky behind the truck was a deep, bruised orange, bleeding into black. Against that dying light, the true scale of the horror was silhouetted.
It was following me.
The entity was walking.
The gait was slow, agonizing, and profoundly unnatural. It moved on multiple, stilted limbs, long and spindly, lifting them high into the air and planting them with deliberate, heavy impacts that I could feel vibrating through the chassis of the fleeing truck.
It looked like a colossal, deformed harvestman spider, but its body was a chaotic tangle of thick, grey cables and shifting organic mass. It was easily a hundred feet tall, its upper bulk scraping against the lower sag of the actual high-tension wires.
I watched in the mirror as it approached Tower 44.
And before my own eyes through the mirrors, It stepped over it.
One massive, grey limb lifted high into the twilight, clearing the lower crossarms of the steel tower, and planted itself on the other side. The entity straddled the infrastructure, its dark mass passing through the electromagnetic field of the powerlines.
As it moved through the electric field, the thick tendrils hanging from its central mass began to writhe and spasm, reacting to the massive voltage pulsing just feet away from its body. It seemed to draw energy from the proximity, its movements becoming slightly less stilted, slightly more fluid.
It was tracking me.
Despite the distance, despite the speed of the truck, the silhouette in the mirror was maintaining the gap. The long, terrifying strides covered incredible distances with each step.
I looked at the dashboard. The speedometer read seventy miles an hour. The engine temperature gauge was climbing rapidly toward the red zone. The truck was screaming.
I looked back to the mirror.
The entity was turning its massive, tangled head. It was angling its upper mass toward the thick bundle of wires running overhead.
Then the idea sparked in my brain, It was hunting the electrical signature.
The truck is a rolling power plant. The heavy-duty alternator was spinning at maximum capacity, generating a massive electromagnetic field to charge the auxiliary banks. The entity, had locked onto the loud, erratic electrical pulse of my vehicle fleeing down the corridor.
I realized with a cold, sinking dread that as long as the engine was running, I was a beacon in the dark.
I looked at the fuel gauge. Half a tank. I could drive for hours. But the engine wouldn't last that long at this RPM. The radiator would blow, or an axle would snap in a rut, and I would be stranded in the open clearing, sitting inside a metal box humming with the electricity it craved.
I had to abandon the vehicle.
I needed to kill the power and disappear into the environment.
I scanned the edges of the corridor illuminated by the headlights. The wall of pine trees on either side was dense, a chaotic tangle of trunks, low branches, and thick underbrush. There was no trail. There was no easy way in.
I checked the mirror again. The towering silhouette was passing Tower 45. The ground beneath the truck shuddered slightly with the distant impact of its steps.
I made the decision.
I eased off the accelerator, the engine braking throwing my weight forward against the seatbelt. I steered the heavy truck sharply to the right, aiming directly for the edge of the treeline.
The tires left the crushed gravel and hit the soft, muddy grass of the shoulder. The truck slid, the rear end kicking out, before plowing nose-first into a thick thicket of thorny bushes at the very edge of the forest.
The impact violently jarred my spine. The headlights illuminated a solid wall of bark and green needles directly in front of the windshield.
I threw the transmission into park. I reached forward and twisted the key, killing the ignition.
The deafening roar of the diesel engine died instantly.
The sudden silence in the cab was absolute, immediately replaced by the oppressive, hissing hum of the powerlines overhead.
I reached down and slapped the battery disconnect switch installed under the dash, severing the connection to the auxiliary banks. I killed the headlights, and dash lights, then plunged the truck into total darkness.
I unbuckled my seatbelt, my hands shaking so violently I fumbled with the release button three times before it clicked. I grabbed my satellite phone from the center console, shoved it deep into my jacket pocket, and grabbed the heavy Maglite flashlight from the door panel but I did not turn it on.
I opened the driver's side door, wincing at the small creak of the hinges, and slipped out into the freezing night air.
The ground was soft and wet. I immediately scrambled around the front of the truck and pushed my way into the dense forest.
The branches tore at my jacket and scratched my face, but I didn't stop. I pushed through the initial wall of vegetation, moving entirely by touch, crawling over rotting logs and slipping on wet pine needles. I forced myself to keep going until the ambient light from the stars above the corridor was completely blocked out by the canopy, and I was encased in absolute, suffocating darkness.
I found a massive, ancient pine tree with exposed roots forming a small hollow at its base. I backed into the hollow, curling my knees to my chest, making myself as small as possible.
I sat there in the pitch black, my lungs burning, listening.
For a long time, there was only the sound of my own ragged breathing and the distant, electric sizzle from the clearing.
Then, the ground vibrated.
It was a soft tremor at first, felt more in my teeth than in the dirt. But it grew stronger. A rhythmic, heavy thudding.
Thud. A pause.
Thud. It was slowing down.
I pulled the satellite phone from my pocket. The screen cast a faint, harsh glow in the dark hollow. I dialed the emergency dispatch number for the energy company.
The line hissed with static, connecting through the satellites in orbit.
"Dispatch,"
a bored, tinny voice answered.
"Identify."
I cupped my hand over my mouth, pressing the phone tight to my ear, terrified that the sound of my whisper would carry through the trees.
"Operator ID four-seven,"
I breathed.
"I need emergency extraction. Sector... past marker forty-five. The truck is disabled. I am off the corridor, in the treeline. Send a crew."
There was a pause. The tapping of a keyboard echoed through the earpiece.
"Copy that, four-seven,"
the dispatcher said, his tone entirely unconcerned. "Telemetry shows your vehicle is offline. Engine failure?"
"Yes,"
I lied.
"Catastrophic failure. I had to abandon it. Just send the extraction team. Please hurry."
I couldn't tell him the truth. If I told him a hundred-foot-tall mimicking entity was hunting the electrical grid, he would flag me for a psychiatric hold, log it as a prank, and delay the response, and I needed a rescue.
"Extraction team is alerted,"
the dispatcher droned.
"Nearest depot is three hours out. They will track your truck's last GPS ping. Stay with the vehicle, four-seven."
"I am not staying with the vehicle,"
I whispered frantically.
"Tell them to approach with caution. Tell them to look for..."
I stopped. What could I tell them to look for?
"Tell them to bring heavy lights. And do not approach the truck immediately. Just tell them that."
"Noted,"
the dispatcher said, clearly ignoring the panic in my voice.
"Stay safe, four-seven. Dispatch out."
The line went dead.
I shoved the phone back into my pocket, plunging the hollow back into darkness.
Three hours. I had to sit in the freezing mud for three hours.
The vibrations in the ground grew intense. The heavy footfalls were right outside the treeline.
I slowly, agonizingly, turned my head and peered through the dense thicket of branches toward the clearing.
The starlight provided just enough illumination to see the break in the trees, and the dark shape of my abandoned truck sitting at the edge of the grass.
A shadow fell over the clearing, blocking out the stars.
The entity moved into my field of view.
It was massive. Standing mere yards away, the sheer scale of the creature was paralyzing. It did not have a discernible face or head. The central mass was a shifting, fibrous knot of grey tissue and thick, cable-like appendages.
It stood directly over my truck, its long, stilted legs bracketing the vehicle like the pillars of a bridge.
It stopped moving.
It stood in absolute silence for several long minutes, as if listening. It was trying to sense the hum of the alternator, the pulse of the battery. But the truck was dead. I had severed the connection.
The entity lowered its central mass.
The movement was slow and fluid, completely at odds with the stilted, awkward way it walked. The thick tangle of grey cables that formed its upper section descended, draping over the hood and cab of the truck like a heavy, suffocating net.
I watched, holding my breath until my vision blurred, as the ends of the tendrils began to writhe. They were seeking access points. The thick fibers slid over the metal, probing the seams of the hood, feeling the gaps in the grill.
There was a sharp, metallic screech. The heavy steel hood of the truck was peeled back, tearing off its hinges with effortless, terrifying strength. The entity tossed the crumpled metal aside, exposing the engine bay.
The tendrils plunged into the cavity.
I couldn't see exactly what it was doing, but I could hear it. A wet, slurping sound, mixed with the sharp snap of electrical arcing. The creature was interfacing with the heavy-duty battery banks.
A faint, sickly blue light began to pulse from the core of the entity, illuminating the grey, textured hide. It was feeding, draining the residual chemical energy stored in the deep-cycle batteries, sucking the lead-acid cells dry.
The feeding lasted for twenty minutes. The blue light flared, then slowly faded back into the dull, mottled grey.
The tendrils retracted, pulling out of the ruined engine bay, dripping with battery acid and engine oil.
The entity slowly raised its central mass back into the air.
I thought it would leave. I thought it would turn and continue its slow march down the corridor, seeking the next substation or the next vehicle.
It didn't.
Instead, the creature stepped back from the ruined truck, moving to the exact center of the clearing, directly beneath the high-tension wires.
It stopped.
Slowly, the long, stilted legs began to lock into place. The joints stiffened. The thick, grey cables of its upper mass began to shift and reconfigure, rising upward, spreading out into rigid, horizontal cross-beams.
The texture of its hide rippled, the organic surface mimicking the hard, geometric angles of a steel lattice. The deep grey coloring shifted, developing patches of false rust at the joints.
Within minutes, the horrifying, chaotic mass of the creature was gone.
In its place stood a dull, grey transmission tower.
It was perfectly aligned with the corridor. The high-tension wires passed directly over its peak. It stood there, silent and motionless, blending perfectly into the brutal, mathematical repetition of the infrastructure.
It wasn't leaving, and I am sitting in the dark, watching the false tower stand over my broken truck.
It is waiting.
My phone says it has been two hours and forty-five minutes.
The extraction crew is coming. They are driving down the corridor right now, expecting to find a mechanic failure. They are driving toward the coordinates of my truck.
I can't call dispatch back. My battery is at two percent, and the cold is killing the remaining charge. Even if I could, they wouldn't believe me. They wouldn't stop the crew.
I can't run out there to wave them down. If I leave the treeline, if I step into the open clearing, the tower will see me. It will feel the electromagnetic pulse of the flashlight in my hand, or the heat of my body.
All I can do is sit here, pressed against the damp bark of the pine tree, and wait for the headlights of the rescue truck to pierce the darkness.
I am going to have to watch what happens when they drive up to the abandoned truck, park directly beneath the dull, grey tower, and step out into the humming night.
I am going to have to watch the steel lattice begin to breathe.
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