The Sleestak
You ever wonder why some parts of America still don’t have cell service?
I mean, it’s 2025. You can FaceTime a barista in Paris while on a toilet in Tampa, but somehow, there are whole chunks of this country that are just… blank. Dead zones. Not even a bar of service. And the locals? They don’t complain. They don’t want it. In fact, they’ll look you in the eye and say, “We like it quiet out here.”
Yeah. Sure you do.
This is a story about one of those places.
And the quiet things that live there.
And the scientists who woke them up.
THE HOLLOW LAB
It starts, like most real-life horror stories, with money and hubris.
DARPA funding. Black ops biotech. Underground facilities. All the greatest hits. A company called Anatech set up a research center outside Hico, West Virginia. No one knew what they did there, just that every few months trucks would roll in with nitrogen tanks, sealed cages, and crews that looked more like private military contractors than lab rats.
Officially, they were studying neural adaptation and epigenetic memory in primitive organisms.
Unofficially?
They were messing with something that didn’t belong in our century.
That’s where Dr. Monica Velez comes in. Evolutionary biologist. Harvard pedigree. The kind of mind that could map ancient genomes like some people do Sudoku.
She was hired to study reptilian neural fossils pulled from a cave system a thousand feet below the facility. Except they weren’t fossils.
They were samples.
And they were preserved.
Still moist. Still humming with dormant DNA.
No one asked why the cave was sealed in thick black glass like it had been vitrified. Or why the Anatech team who discovered it… didn’t make it out.
They just sent more people down.
And brought something back up.
THE SLEESTAK PROTOCOL
First thing Monica noticed: The tissue didn’t degrade. Not even when exposed to oxygen. That was a red flag. The second? It responded to light. Flinched under UV. Reacted to warmth.
By the time she saw the fully grown specimen in the isolation chamber, she knew what they were looking at.
Not a dinosaur.
Not a lizard.
Not a relic.
A sentient predator. Cold-blooded, bipedal, eyes like empty wells—and the unmistakable intelligence of something that evolved not just to hunt, but to remember.
The lab called them Subject 9A through 9F.
But the internal chatter had another name.
Sleestak.
Someone on the team was a nostalgic bastard who grew up watching “Land of the Lost.” Only this wasn’t a guy in a rubber suit lurching through a foam cave. These things were silent. Swift. Social.
And they weren’t asleep anymore.
They were adapting.
THE ESCAPE
Security footage from June 4th, 3:32 a.m.
A breach in the cold storage vault. Not an explosion. Not a break-in. Just… power failure. Flicker, flicker, out.
Then infrared picks up motion. Six distinct forms, one by one, slithering out of the cold room.
No panic.
No sound.
Like they’d been waiting.
What happened next was so fast the logs barely captured it. The containment squad was shredded in under four minutes. Every camera beyond the third sublevel goes black. A blackout that extended 50 miles in every direction.
Then the storm came.
A freak Appalachian thunderstorm that lasted twelve hours, cutting off all contact.
And by the time the feds arrived?
The place was abandoned.
No bodies.
No tracks.
No Sleestak.
Just blood. And claw marks. And a series of tunnels that shouldn’t have been there.
THE RETURN
Fast forward six months.
People start disappearing.
Not in big cities. Not even in suburbs. We’re talking logging towns. Little off-the-grid communities that already don’t like outsiders, where a missing person can just be written off as a runaway or a drunk lost in the woods.
But it’s not just one or two. It’s dozens.
And the survivors—what few there are—don’t make sense.
One old man was found wandering naked on a highway with deep symmetrical slashes in his back and a catatonic stare. Another was recovered in a ranger station 70 miles from home, muttering about “glass caves” and “snake-men with no mouths.”
That’s when Monica shows up again. Only this time, she’s not working with Anatech.
She’s trying to shut it down.
THE NEST
Turns out, the cave system that Anatech drilled into was more than just geology.
It was a vault. A prison, built by an extinct species older than humans. The glass? Not natural. Artificial vitrification. A seal.
Something had tried to bury the Sleestak.
Because they don’t die.
They hibernate. For millennia. Waiting for heat, light, and blood.
The cave wasn’t a discovery. It was a mistake.
And now that the Sleestak are out, they’re doing what they were made to do.
They’re nesting.
Learning.
Sending out scouts.
Infiltrating towns under cover of night and pulling people into the old tunnels. No tech works in the area anymore. GPS dies. Batteries drain. The air gets thicker the deeper you go. And those who hear the low, hissing chorus—those who follow it—don’t come back.
THE CONVERSION
One thing Monica hadn’t realized: These weren’t just creatures. They were bioengineered. A hybrid between reptilian DNA and something else.
Something not from Earth.
Think about it—why would a predator evolve to fear light in an open-air planet like ours? Why the reflexive recoiling from sound? Why would a creature need memory resonance—the ability to transfer learned behavior from one generation to another in seconds?
Unless it wasn’t from here.
Unless it was a weapon.
A seeded species, sent out to colonize planets the slow way.
Via blood. And breath. And silence.
She finds the proof in a hidden chamber—a hollowed-out space filled with hibernation pods and alien inscriptions. And a crude human drawing scrawled in blood on the wall:
“We were wrong.”
The pods are open.
The lights are dimming.
And from the black, that same whisper:
“You found us. Now we remember you.”
EPILOGUE
The government has quarantined the Appalachian region. They claim it’s an ecological collapse. A fungus. A fire. A toxic gas leak.
Locals aren’t buying it.
They’ve started wearing mirrors around their necks. Burning fires every night. Leaving livestock at the edge of the woods like sacrifices.
They remember.
But the rest of the country?
Too busy doom-scrolling and streaming to care.
Until the cell towers start going down. One by one.
Until the towns go dark.
And the eyes return.
FINAL NOTE FROM MONICA VELEZ (Unpublished, Recovered Email Draft):
"We called them Sleestak because we needed a name. Something old and goofy to take the edge off. But there’s nothing funny about them. Nothing fake.
They remember everything. Every face, every scream, every betrayal.
They were here before us.
And they will be here after."