CHAPTER ONE: The Awakening.
The Stillness Beneath Jackson
Jackson, Michigan wasn’t what it used to be. Once a proud, working-class town with grit in its bones and coney sauce in its blood, it had faded into a ghost of itself. The factories had long since closed. The last union hall burned in a mysterious fire, and the Coney Islands—every last one of them—had sold out, changed the recipe, and lost the soul of the only thing that made the town remember who it was.
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In 2028, America was broke. Not the kind of broke you fix with a tax credit or a stimulus check, but a deep, bone-rotted poverty that settled into the land itself. Forests gone. Lakes poisoned. Rivers black with sludge. The sky hung low, permanently bruised. Jackson hadn’t escaped. If anything, it had become a test tube, a forgotten Petri dish where something terrible had begun to grow.
It started with the silence. Deer stopped coming near. Birds vanished from the skies. The frogs, however, returned. In droves.
They said it was a miracle. They said it was science.
But no one asked where the frogs were coming from.
Her name was Sloan. She didn’t remember her parents. Didn’t remember much before the foster system spit her out into a rusted trailer near Ganson Street. Twenty-five, sharp-tongued, covered in scars she didn’t talk about, Sloan didn’t care about the world. Not really. But she did notice the glowing trucks that came in the night. The new glass building with no signs. The security that wore no patches. And the hum that filled the air, just beneath the frequency of hearing.
She was working night shift at the last independent gas station in town—Big Al’s Fuel & Bait. It hadn’t seen bait in five years, but the name stuck. Sloan chain-smoked behind the counter and read dog-eared copies of old sci-fi novels that seemed more like prophecy than fiction now.
That night, a man came in.
He wore a tattered trench coat and didn’t make eye contact. His face was pale, but his eyes glowed yellow when they caught the flicker of the fluorescent lights.
“You seen them yet?” he asked, voice like dry leaves.
Sloan blinked. “Seen who?”
“The cold ones. The sleepers.”
“You’re gonna have to be way more specific than that, chief.”
He dropped something on the counter. A mason jar filled with cloudy water. Inside was a frog—at least, it looked like a frog. But it had human eyes. Blue. Familiar.
She stepped back. “What the hell is this?”
“They’re changing us. CRISPR. Synthetic resurrection. Using the amphibian code to rewrite what it means to be human. Hibernation for space, they say. Survival in deep freeze. But it doesn’t stop there. It never stops there.”
He turned and left before she could move.
The jar pulsed.
The facility was called EdenBiotek. It had sprung up almost overnight on the edge of town, where the old paper mill used to be. No one had seen any construction. It was just there, like it had grown out of the ground. Like mold.
They said it was bringing jobs, but no one knew anyone who worked there. Only that trucks came and left at midnight, and that strange sounds echoed through the empty woods.
Children were having dreams. Drawings of people with frog legs and gills. Of shadows watching them from vents.
Old people vanished from nursing homes. Homeless shelters quietly emptied.
And every now and then, someone would go missing for a few days—and come back different. Stronger. Less patient. Violent. Like something inside them had woken up and didn’t quite know how to wear the skin it was in.
Sloan brought the jar to the only person she trusted: Doc Hewitt, a retired biologist who once taught at Michigan State before something made him snap. He lived alone, surrounded by papers and feral cats.
He looked at the jar and went pale.
“Where did you get this?”
“Guy dropped it off. Looked half-dead. Told me EdenBiotek’s doing something with frog DNA.”
“They’re not using frogs,” he whispered. “They’re using us.”
He pulled a dusty book from his shelf. Anura: The Genetic Legacy of Amphibians. Inside were diagrams of hibernation cycles, regenerative properties, and a theory he’d been laughed out of academia for suggesting:
The ancient DNA embedded in frogs’ ability to endure the unendurable could be used to unlock a human’s dormant, divine sequence. Not evolution—ascension.
“We were never meant to be gods,” Doc said, trembling.
The jar cracked.
The frog screamed.
The next morning, the town woke to a power outage. Cell service down. Roads closed.
And at the center of town, where Big Al’s used to stand, was a crater.
Sloan was gone.
All that remained was a smear of something green and wet, and a single line burned into the pavement:
AWAKENING SEQUENCE INITIATED.
Thank you for reading Chapter One. I hope you enjoyed the beginning of this dark journey—because there is much more to come. Stay curious, stay aware, and prepare for what awakens next.
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