Calvin Rourke has worked Montana's backcountry for twenty-three years. He knows what abandoned vehicles look like, what missing hikers look like, and what the mountains can throw at a man. When a truck turns up on Service Road 12 with the keys still in the ignition and the owner nowhere to be found, he follows the trail into the pines — and finds something the mountains were never supposed to show him. A pit in the earth. A ring of scorched ground. Footprints that stop without explanation. And a federal response that arrives before anyone could have called it. Calvin Rourke will spend the rest of his life carrying what he saw that day. This is how it started.
Brian Bullock is a retired Boeing quality inspector turned science fiction author. His debut series, The Sentinel Trilogy, follows one man's disappearance from a Montana trailhead into a universe thousands of years in the making — ancient alien species, AI companions, and ordinary people carrying extraordinary weight. When he's not writing, he's producing the Everyone Knows podcast and building the Sentinel Universe one story at a time. He lives in Tennessee and works under Starborne Studios.View all by Brian Bullock
