Redacted Realities
A Rot at the Core
It is the year 2028, and something is wrong. Not wrong like a paperwork mix-up or a late payment, but systemically wrong. The kind of wrong that doesn’t scream — it festers. You don’t see it on the headlines; you see it in the bureaucracy. In missing documents, quiet defaults, municipal IT outages, courthouses that shut at 2pm due to “staffing shortages.” You hear it in empty call center queues and the sudden disappearance of real humans from customer service.
The numbers are still there, flickering on screens — GDP, growth indices, Dow Jones. But the ground-level story is something else. Mail isn’t being delivered in whole zip codes. DMV lines stretch around buildings that haven’t been cleaned in weeks. Libraries have “paused operations until further notice.” Potholes don’t get filled. Streetlights stay dark. You see your neighbors disappear, slowly and quietly. And nobody says the word — collapse. But everyone knows it’s there. Beneath the polite fictions and ceremonial optimism of the official press briefings, something essential has stopped working.
The rot isn’t in Washington — not primarily. It’s in the counties. In the towns. In the second-rung suburbs that used to be middle class, safe, respectable. The places where mortgages were leveraged to the eyeballs by dual-income households who now both work DoorDash and manage four debts apiece. It’s in school districts where half the teachers are gone and the other half are part-timers. It’s in hospitals where the ER has one doctor per twenty-five patients, and you’re triaged with a clipboard asking, “Can you afford this visit today?”
By 2026, the defection had started. Not through violence or protest — but through silence. Young people left, not with slogans, but with a shrug. College grads didn’t take jobs in Kansas City or Cleveland. Nurses stopped renewing licenses. Engineers ghosted LinkedIn. They just left. Out of the system, out of the datasets. Nobody knew where they went, and nobody could stop them. The term “Southern Exit Strategy” was whispered online — derided by Fox News, ignored by CNN. But the footprints in the data were undeniable.
Social Security numbers with no active billing history. Voter rolls with missing registrants. Cell phones permanently shut off. Utility disconnections not followed by reconnections. Mortgages in legal limbo, the foreclosure process stalling under sheer administrative exhaustion. Banks hired third-party contractors to physically investigate homes. These weren’t urban squats. These were nice houses. Cookie-cutter subdivisions. HOA communities. Empty.
And those who remained started noticing. There were fewer people in the Starbucks. The traffic eased up on Tuesday mornings. The gym was weirdly quiet. Dentists closed with handwritten signs: “Moved out of state.” Pharmacies shortened hours. “Due to staff shortages.” It felt like everyone was leaving — or waiting to. Even the MAGA diehards started to go silent online, posting less, showing less flag-draped rage. There were rumors some had been denied visas — the “traitor clause” — and now they were just… stuck.
Corporate America kept going for a while. Amazon still delivered. Fast food still hired. Logistics ran on tired Hondas with Uber Eats decals. But cracks widened. Local governments defaulted on municipal bonds. Pension obligations were missed. City workers were furloughed. Water systems began issuing boil notices weekly. And nobody could afford to fix anything.
The people who used to “run things” weren’t there anymore. Mid-level administrators. Utility engineers. Technicians. Legal clerks. Gone. The systems they had maintained — power grids, property assessments, court dockets, permit offices — didn’t collapse in a blaze. They just slowed. And slowed. And slowed. Until nothing moved.
In its place emerged a kind of improvisational survivalism. Mutual aid networks. Gray-market electricians. Nurse co-ops. But for every success story, there were ten quiet failures. Elderly left unvisited. Paperwork backlogged into oblivion. Kids pulled from schools because “it wasn’t safe anymore.”
The federal government, meanwhile, did its dance. Press conferences, new executive orders, ritual attacks on scapegoats. It was all noise. None of it touched the rot. Congress passed a “Prosperity and Dignity in Work Act.” Nobody read it. Treasury insisted America remained “the most resilient economy in the world.” But bond yields were climbing. Foreign capital was quietly leaving.
In Arkansas, where Jeremy Dalton lived, the signals were late in arriving. The state had always lagged national indicators. But now the problems hit all at once. The Little Rock power grid experienced cascading failures during a July heatwave. Two of the four trauma centers shut down in August. Teachers’ unions voted to walk off indefinitely. The National Guard was deployed to “protect critical infrastructure,” which translated to putting three Humvees near an AT&T hub and calling it a day.
Debt collectors like Jeremy were caught in the middle. On paper, they had power. Court orders, repossession rights, private security support. In reality, none of it mattered. The courts stopped issuing warrants. The cops refused backup. Judges quietly told agents to “hold off for now.” Nobody wanted to be the guy that kicked in a door on a family who’d lost their health insurance, their jobs, and their hope. And so it all hung there — unresolved.
But the companies still sent the orders. House 39. 14B Wisteria Lane. Parcel 412-S, Cypress Heights. Agents still went out. They still filed the paperwork. They ticked the boxes: “No contact. Abandoned. Suspected flight.” They photographed empty fridges and half-full closets. They mailed reports to banks where junior analysts tried to make sense of portfolios that now consisted of ruins. Nobody wanted to mark the paper as zero. Nobody wanted to admit this wasn’t just a default — it was defection.
By late 2027, a few cities tried to reassert control. They hired task forces. Passed nuisance property ordinances. Sent fines. Threatened arrests. But nothing worked. People didn’t fear legal consequences anymore. If you had nothing, if you were trapped by debt, if your options were poverty or exile, what did a $2,000 fine mean? Nothing. They left anyway. Sometimes in the night. Sometimes openly, with a barbecue, as neighbors watched and wondered if they were next.
Jeremy Dalton had seen the signs early. He tracked missing persons reports. Watched Reddit boards. Noticed patterns in social media shutdowns. And yet even he was unprepared for the scope. Entire blocks went dark. The electrical grid showed usage drop-offs of 70%. School attendance in districts cratered. The school board tried to fake numbers for federal funding — until the feds themselves stopped caring.
The rot had reached the bottom of the data stack.
Jeremy’s job was simple: verify, document, submit. But nothing felt simple anymore. Every house felt like a message. People weren’t running from hardship. They were rejecting the premise. The deal. The supposed covenant of citizenship. Work hard, follow the rules, earn your place. That contract was broken. Nobody was paid. Nobody was safe. So they walked.
And somewhere, in a growing number of European towns, families with American names unpacked boxes into old villas and concrete apartment blocks. They were learning Greek. Enrolling their kids. Starting over. Their debts didn’t follow. Their records didn’t follow. The United States — god bless it — kept the lights on in Washington, but out in the counties, the game was already over.
By 2028, Jeremy knew it too. That’s when House 39 came up again. Nine months stale. No contact. A house in a middle-class Arkansas suburb. Assigned to him. No backup. No escort. Just a half-dead printer at the office and a checklist that meant nothing anymore.
And that’s where the story begins.
The Street With No Name
It’s a two-hour drive out from Little Rock to the edge of Conway County, down roads that used to be paved and aren’t anymore. Jeremy’s Silverado rattles past empty gas stations, hollow strip malls, and billboards that haven’t been updated since the start of the decade. The GPS tries to route him through a neighborhood that no longer exists — bought up in a 2025 fire sale, then bulldozed by an insurance company trying to dodge responsibility after a chemical spill.
By the time he hits the subdivision where House 39 is located, it’s already 11:30 AM. The sun is brutal, hard white on cracked pavement. This street used to sell at $400k for a two-story, pre-fab, wood-frame home with vinyl siding and faux brick facades. In 2024, it was still listed in mortgage ads as an “emerging enclave.” Now it’s a warzone with garbage piling in medians, lawns overgrown with kudzu and ragweed, and utility boxes pried open like tin cans by copper thieves.
Street names are faded. One intersection sign is gone entirely. The local municipality stopped replacing them a year ago — no funding, no incentive. Nobody needs directions here anymore.
Kids loiter in the distance. One has a tire iron slung across his back like a weapon. They don’t say anything when Jeremy parks. They just watch.
He steps out. Combat boots. Kevlar vest. A laminated badge hanging off a lanyard that no one respects. The air smells like rotting meat and mildew. There’s a hum — not electrical. Insects. Flies. Too many of them.
House 39 is still standing. Just barely. There are boards across the windows, but one has been torn down. The mailbox is sealed shut with what looks like Gorilla Glue and concrete. A duct-taped notice on the front door says “INFESTED — DO NOT ENTER,” spray-painted in red below it: “CDC ZONE — HANTAVIRUS, LCMV, RODENTS.”
Jeremy’s seen this before. Not exactly this, but close. He saw it in Dallas, in Tucson, in the outskirts of Jacksonville. A generation walked away. Left the house, locked the doors, vanished. The paperwork left behind like an obituary.
This one? They did more than leave. The garage door is buckled in from the inside. The crawlspace panel is off. Something rustles. Flies circle the vents. He glances through the broken slats of a boarded window. He’s not stupid enough to enter — but he doesn’t need to. The place has been completely stripped. Sheetrock peeled back. Wiring gone. Plumbing amputated at the walls. Even the insulation has been raked out.
Inside, he sees what looks like animal waste — human waste too. The carpets are gone. The floorboards are slick and dark. The copper’s long gone, so are the breakers. The HVAC system has been ripped apart, possibly with a saw. There’s spray paint down the hall in angry strokes: “NOT YOURS,” “VOID,” “YOU DON’T OWN ME.”
He checks his phone. Signal’s patchy. He logs into the agency app and tries to update the record. It crashes.
Back in the cab of the truck, he slams the door, flips on the AC. Tries again. This time it loads. He pulls up the standard checklist for Category C abandonment: mail shutoff, power terminated, visual inspection. But this isn’t Category C. This is something else.
He adds his own notes.
— Signs of structural compromise. — Possibly biohazardous. — Presence of vermin. — Alleged CDC warnings (unconfirmed). — House gutted, unlivable.
He pauses, then adds two extra tags:
— Karma Inc? (graffiti on inner garage door) — Warning: possible booby traps.
He uploads the file. It’ll flag the house for secondary hazmat inspection — not that anyone will show up. No budget, no jurisdiction. Banks hold the paper but no longer want the liability. The asset is now toxic.
He turns the key. The truck hums to life. There’s movement in the rear-view mirror — a figure ducking back into another boarded house. A shape. Might be a squatter. Might be another repo man. Or just a ghost.
Driving away, Jeremy starts the call to regional HQ. The line buzzes for 30 seconds. Someone answers: Miguel. New guy.
“Hey. House 39. Total write-off. Same pattern. Even worse than 22 and 31.”
“Goddamn,” Miguel says. “That whole zip is non-performing now. We got 113 flagged mortgages there. Fifty-three in foreclosure. The rest? Vanished.”
Jeremy listens. He doesn’t talk. Miguel goes on:
“Bank rep is gonna lose it. That’s his portfolio. We already had two regional asset managers get canned last month over exposure like this. They’re dumping portfolios at 20 cents on the dollar now. Some are saying even lower. Zero upside.”
“They still think these people’ll come back?” Jeremy asks.
“They’re still running models from 2019.”
Silence.
Miguel sighs. “Hey, uh. There’s a rumor going around. Saw something on the internal threads. EU banks are dumping Treasuries. Tranches getting re-rated. Unconfirmed.”
Jeremy grunts.
“I heard,” he says. “Also heard two entire blocks in Oklahoma were stripped and tagged last week. Rotting meat, fake CDC signs, dog feces. The works.”
“And hornets,” Miguel mutters.
“Hornets?”
“Yeah. Rumor is — some people dropped Asian hornet queens into crawlspaces before leaving. Sugar packets, wet insulation, everything. Started nests. One guy got swarmed. Still in the hospital.”
Jeremy kills the call.
Outside, thunder rolls in from the west. Clouds gather but no rain. A dry heat storm. He wipes his forehead, stares at the road ahead. On the radio, a country station plays ads for canned food bulk orders and bunkers. The signal fades. Then it’s static.
Institutional Breakdown
Jeremy leaned back in the cab, engine humming, and stared through the windshield at the silent house. He tapped the call icon for his ex-wife for the third time that day. Straight to voicemail. Again. He threw the phone on the dash with a curse. Something about it — maybe it was the silence — sent his temper spinning out past its bearings.
“Is she dressing the boy in a goddamn dress again?” he muttered. Not even sure which kid anymore. He hadn’t seen them in over a year. Visitation kept falling through. Plane tickets, schedule conflicts, accusations. But he saw the photos. Facebook, TikTok, group chats. The eldest — Tyler — in eyeliner. Nail polish. A whole mess he couldn’t wrap his head around. Something had been taken from him and twisted.
He rubbed his temples. “That boy had a .22 at ten,” he said to no one. “Built a goddamn drone from scrap. And now…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he toggled over to his work app. The Home Office in Little Rock was already pinging — two missed calls, three flagged messages. The last one all caps: URGENT PORTFOLIO STATUS – CASE ESCALATION.
The banks were waking up — or rather, the actuarial departments were. Debt portfolios weren’t recovering. 32 cases this week, all confirmed evac. Ghosted properties. Asset flight. Digital trails ending cold in Mexico City, Quebec, or worse — Thessaloniki. Budapest. Valencia. Paperwork filed through quiet EU offices — names changed, identities repapered. The quiet purge. And this wasn’t theory anymore.
Corporate was still running on 2023 assumptions: everyone comes back. Debts are gravity. The US dollar is gospel. These people just needed to be leaned on hard enough and they’d fall back into line.
But Jeremy had seen the trendlines. It was happening again and again: young families, defaulting quietly, vanishing overnight. The mailboxes glued shut. Utility meters fried. The occasional dogshit in the HVAC or sardine paste under the carpet just to make the place unsellable. Retaliation disguised as entropy.
He put in the final codes on House 39. Risk category: Level 4. Final disposition: unsalvageable. His finger hovered over the submit button. He hesitated — not because of the paperwork, but because he knew the number crunchers weren’t watching the right metrics. They still believed in credit scores and FICO charts and late fees. They weren’t looking at social media vanishing patterns. Voiceprint deletions. Rapid language training downloads.
Then his partner, Wade, called from the field. Different county. Same story.
“Hey man, just so you know, got another one. House had those EU relocation pamphlets under the floorboards. Custom-printed. Professionally done. And…”
He paused.
“…the whole crawlspace smells like piss and pesticides. Wasps everywhere. Found a cutout of Woody from Toy Story flipping the bird taped to the breaker box.”
Jeremy laughed, but it came out bitter. “Yeah,” he said, hitting SEND on his case report. “They’re not coming back.”
House 39
The air had thickened to something viscous by the time Jeremy reached House 39. Heat hung off the hood of the Silverado like radiation off a spent reactor core, and the cicadas — relentless — screamed like a static feed left open to a dead channel.
It was a cul-de-sac once pitched as executive housing. Modular modernist designs. Neutral greys. Automated sprinklers, long dry. The brochure from 2024 called it Ridgepoint Estates. Now the street signage was bleached, the paint peeling in oily strips from the curb numbers. Garbage was piled in a neat wall at the end of the street. Not collected — organized. As if whoever left had been civil to the last.
House 39 was just visible through a stand of overgrown juniper. He parked at the end of the block, out of some leftover instinct — don’t corner yourself. Not in these zones. He slid the shotgun behind the passenger seat, just in reach, and stepped out. Kevlar vest under a polo shirt two sizes too small. Boots scuffed to hell. Holster worn smooth at the edges. He scanned the porch from 30 feet out.
Flies, lots of them. Not hovering — swarming, agitated, flickering against the cracked screen like static. The mailbox had been glued shut and sealed over with grey concrete compound. The flag had been snapped off. Spray paint in red across the side wall: NO ACCESS – CDC ZONE. HANTAVIRUS.
His eyes narrowed. The CDC hadn’t used that stencil since the last outbreak scare in 2025, and even then only in very specific rail hubs. It wasn’t real. He’d seen it before. It was plausible. That was the game now — make it plausible enough that no one checks. Like fake police tape printed from Amazon. A legal fiction so believable no agency wants to test it.
He knocked once. Useless formality. Of course it echoed into nothing.
The porch had no give. Whoever left had bolted the door and braced the inside with reinforced bars — he could tell from the hinge tension. Windows were blacked out. One pane on the second floor had a crack pattern suggestive of impact trauma — not from the inside. Someone had tested entry. Probably a looter. Probably didn’t get far.
He made his way around to the side and peered through a warped gap between two of the wooden boards. Movement. Something darted across the floor, fast, dark, low. Rat? No. He held his breath and looked again. Thin winged shadows moved across the hallway ceiling, clustered near the open attic hatch. Wasps.
He exhaled sharply. “Fuckin’ hell.”
He stepped back and scanned the perimeter — overgrown grass nearly to his knees, the dry remains of a child’s bicycle halfway absorbed by weeds. A rusted swing set groaned faintly in the hot wind. But no neighbors — no eyes. These homes had all gone dark.
Back at the truck, he took out the ruggedized tablet and launched the property inspection app. There was a checklist for this. He’d memorized it by now. “Asset Non-Recoverable – Suspected Sabotage.” Click.
Dropdown: “Environmental hazard?” — Yes.
“Signage or public warning present?” — Yes.
“Obvious indicators of infestation?” — Multiple.
He added manual notes: Wasps in ceiling cavity. Unstable structure. CDC fraud signage. Possible rat den under crawlspace. HVAC panel removed. Garbage rot odor confirms biological decay.
He paused and added a comment:
“Interior appears to have been stripped. Suggest copper scavenging. Wall cavities exposed — saw traces. Possibly chainsawed. Security glass remains intact. No signs of occupant return. Strong likelihood this property has been deliberately rendered unrecoverable.”
Then the final tag. A new one, added by Jeremy himself, not in the official documentation: Karma Flagged.
Karma Inc. — Mexican logistics. Everyone had heard of them. Untraceable biological sabotage services for the newly uprooted. Rats in the vents. Red ants seeded under the floorboards. Botfly larvae mixed into HVAC returns. Word was you could pay in crypto and schedule a “Goodbye Package” with next-day deployment. Jeremy didn’t know if that was true. But it felt true.
He looked once more at the sealed mailbox. Then turned, stepped over the child’s tricycle, and climbed into his truck.
The AC roared to life, stale air rushing out. He sat for a moment, helmet off, sweat soaking his collar, hands clenched on the steering wheel.
He didn’t call it in right away. He just sat there. The buzzing in his ears wasn’t the cicadas anymore. It was something deeper — a static in his gut, a suspicion that he was now the only man on this street still pretending anything was salvageable.
And somewhere, deep in his bones, he knew: there’d be another one just like this tomorrow.
Maybe worse.
Communication Blackout
The Silverado crawled up the on-ramp of I-40 East like a dying animal. Jeremy Dalton rolled the window halfway down and lit a cigarette with the one hand not gripping the wheel. The radio buzzed static between AM conservative rage and local preachers promising redemption for a price. He turned it off. All noise lately was either fear or prophecy.
He tried his ex-wife again. Straight to voicemail. No ring, no delay. Disconnected. He stared at the phone. She always picked up eventually. Or at least texted back with a thumbs-up or a curt “not now.” But this was the third day. Her Facebook was gone too. Not deactivated — deleted. No forwarding number. No trace. Just gone.
He checked his son’s page. Noah. Eighteen. Had a few online friends from somewhere in Europe. Thessaloniki. Lyon. Lisbon. That had always annoyed him, made Jeremy grind his teeth. European trash, those soy-faced types who played violin and wore scarves in summer. His son’s last post was from four months ago: a blurry picture of an airport, captioned “new life, new name.” That was it. And now his profile was gone too.
He tried calling. Same result. A polite female voice told him the number was no longer in service. No warning. No explanation.
He hurled the phone into the passenger seat. The casing cracked. His hand trembled.
It wasn’t just the silence that stung. It was the knowing. That she had planned it. That she had waited — waited for him to be stuck on the road, on a repo run, buried in paperwork and asset tags and gas receipts, and then had taken the kids and vanished.
He remembered the arguments. She’d said something once about Greece. Jeremy had laughed in her face. “We can’t even get to Dallas without the truck breaking down, and you want to fly the kids to Europe?”
She had smiled, that smug, unbothered way she had when she knew she held the better hand.
“Not we,” she had said. “Just me.”
The part that burned most was the memory of his oldest — Noah — looking down when Jeremy yelled. The softness in his eyes that used to ask for permission now just looked… embarrassed. Like he was ashamed of something Jeremy didn’t understand.
He’d asked, once, furious and slamming doors, if she was “dressing the boy in a fucking dress.” He didn’t get a straight answer. Just silence, again.
He couldn’t prove anything. Couldn’t find them. Couldn’t even track which airport they flew from. It was as if they’d been… cleaned out. Like digital bleach had been poured over every trace of them.
Institutional Breakdown
Structural Rot
The Silverado crawled up the on-ramp of I-40 East like a dying animal. Jeremy Dalton rolled the window halfway down and lit a cigarette with the one hand not gripping the wheel. The radio buzzed static between AM conservative rage and local preachers promising redemption for a price. He turned it off. All noise lately was either fear or prophecy.
He tried his ex-wife again. Straight to voicemail. No ring, no delay. Disconnected. He stared at the phone. She always picked up eventually. Or at least texted back with a thumbs-up or a curt “not now.” But this was the third day. Her Facebook was gone too. Not deactivated — deleted. No forwarding number. No trace. Just gone.
He checked his son’s page. Noah. Eighteen. Had a few online friends from somewhere in Europe. Thessaloniki. Lyon. Lisbon. That had always annoyed him, made Jeremy grind his teeth. European trash, those soy-faced types who played violin and wore scarves in summer. His son’s last post was from four months ago: a blurry picture of an airport, captioned “new life, new name.” That was it. And now his profile was gone too.
He tried calling. Same result. A polite female voice told him the number was no longer in service. No warning. No explanation.
He hurled the phone into the passenger seat. The casing cracked. His hand trembled.
The Things Not Said
It wasn’t just the silence that stung. It was the knowing. That she had planned it. That she had waited — waited for him to be stuck on the road, on a repo run, buried in paperwork and asset tags and gas receipts, and then had taken the kids and vanished.
He remembered the arguments. She’d said something once about Greece. Jeremy had laughed in her face. “We can’t even get to Dallas without the truck breaking down, and you want to fly the kids to Europe?”
She had smiled, that smug, unbothered way she had when she knew she held the better hand.
“Not we,” she had said. “Just me.”
The part that burned most was the memory of his oldest — Noah — looking down when Jeremy yelled. The softness in his eyes that used to ask for permission now just looked… embarrassed. Like he was ashamed of something Jeremy didn’t understand.
He’d asked, once, furious and slamming doors, if she was “dressing the boy in a fucking dress.” He didn’t get a straight answer. Just silence, again.
He couldn’t prove anything. Couldn’t find them. Couldn’t even track which airport they flew from. It was as if they’d been… cleaned out. Like digital bleach had been poured over every trace of them.
The Rage Engine
He pounded the steering wheel until his palm throbbed. The inside of the Silverado smelled of sweat, nicotine, and something metallic he couldn’t place. Maybe it was just the taste of his own teeth grinding. Rage, thick and physical, pooled behind his eyes.
There was no one to blame. And that made it worse.
Washington? The banks? Those smug-ass fuckers in Brussels with their suits and loopholes? The job? It all blurred together. Every repo job now came with a hint of betrayal. Every boarded-up house was a middle finger. A joke he wasn’t in on.
“Cowards,” he muttered. “Parasites.”
But he was talking about his own family. Even if he wouldn’t admit it aloud.
He thought about turning around. Driving west. Leaving the badge, the vest, the tablet in the dust. But there was nothing there either. The system might be rigged, but it still kept score. He still owed child support, even if the kids were ghosts now.
So he drove. Mouth tight. Knuckles white. Somewhere down I-40, a house waited that would look just like all the others. Another ghost address. Another financial corpse. Another checkmark on a screen.
And another reminder that the world had moved on without him.
Rage Inward, Rage Outward
Jeremy paced the office, the knee brace creaking slightly with each movement. He opened the break room fridge. A half-eaten burrito sat rotting in a stained plastic container. The microwave door was duct-taped shut.
He tried the phone again. Not to his ex-wife — he knew that was pointless. He called the last known number for the family lawyer. No answer. Then he called Lenny. Voicemail. Then he tried corporate collections liaison. Voicemail again.
He slumped into the cracked vinyl chair, opened the incident report software, and began the checklist for “High-Risk Asset Retrieval.”
Boarded windows? Check. Mail returns undelivered? Check. No visual activity in >6 months? Check. Physical hazard indicators? Check. Presence of vermin, insects, or other biological contaminants? Check.
He hesitated for a second, then added two fields of his own:
— Site flagged as ‘Psy-Ops deterrent’
— Likely boobytrapped or symbolically defaced
He saved the form. The cursor blinked for five seconds. Then the screen froze.
The Stages Of Grief
Later, sitting in the Silverado in the office lot, Jeremy watched the sun sink low behind a Walmart distribution hub. His phone buzzed. A bank rep — someone new, voice barely out of college.
“Dalton, we got your file. Uh… why is the biohazard box ticked?”
“Because it smells like something died in there,” he growled.
“You sure it’s not just neglect? That can’t be verified without EPA-level inspection, you know.”
Jeremy exhaled hard through his nose. “It’s not just neglect. There’s rot. There’s signs of infestation. Could be rats. Hornets. You want to go in and verify, be my guest.”
“Can we… maybe soften the language for corporate reporting? ‘Unstable site conditions’? ‘Unknown biological presence’?”
Jeremy blinked. “You want me to reword the truth?”
There was a pause on the line.
“We’re trying to prevent market contagion.”
He hung up without answering.
He understood now. The rot wasn’t the house. It wasn’t just the neighborhood. It wasn’t even the debt portfolios, the fake valuations, or the unreachable tenants. It was the whole machine — a system engineered to deny its own death, even as it drowned in its own lies.
And Jeremy was a fucking janitor, cleaning up the aftermath.
Only nobody wanted him to clean — they just wanted him to say it was fine. That the stink was normal. That rot was a “cosmetic issue.”
Tomorrow he’d be sent to House 41. It wouldn’t be any different. But he’d still go. Because what else was there?
Denial Loops
The drive back from House 39 was slow, looping, and directionless. Jeremy Dalton didn’t rush. The Silverado’s A/C wheezed against the Arkansas heat, barely functional but good enough to mask the stench of his own sweat and cheap coffee. His left hand gripped the wheel while his right thumb jabbed repeatedly at the dashboard console, trying to get a signal. No luck. Signal died two exits back. Another tower offline? Copper thieves? Budget cutbacks?
None of it mattered.
He wasn’t really going anywhere. The GPS on the dash still plotted a route to the Little Rock office, but Jeremy knew he’d be pulling into an empty lot. Half the building had been vacated last year. The upstairs offices were gutted for copper and conduit by an ex-employee with a bolt cutter and a truck full of justifications. Nobody even pressed charges.
What bothered Jeremy wasn’t House 39. It wasn’t even the biohazard warnings or the boarded-up mailbox filled with cement. It was what came after: the boxes.
Thirty-nine houses this quarter.
Zero commissions.
Every address ended in the same way. Deserted. Stripped. Paper trail dead. Every file looped back into the same vortex of 503 server errors, invalid chain-of-ownership flags, and offshore call centers that had long since stopped picking up. Jeremy had driven to Tulsa last month to tag a four-bedroom that had been sold to a Ghanaian educational pension fund. The documents were real. The debt was real. But nobody wanted the house. And nobody knew who actually owned it.
He tapped open the messaging app. Still no word from his ex-wife. Two missed calls, no response. Kids’ profiles scrubbed from Facebook. Phone disconnected. Not even a forwarding address in the school’s emergency contact list. He’d tried tracing their social accounts. Nothing. His daughter’s old TikTok had been inactive for six months. His son’s email bounced back from every address. Either they had gone dark, or…
Or they had gone south.
The phrase made his stomach twist. They had been talking about it online for over a year now — the “Southern Exit.” Reddit threads. Whispered Telegram groups. Off-grid YouTube influencers discussing resettlement services in Greece, Portugal, Spain. Code names. Tips for surrendering identity documents. Even debt nullification procedures.
His eldest had been angry, then quiet, then vague. Something about studying marine biology in “the Aegean.” Jeremy had brushed it off. Now he wasn’t so sure.
He clenched his jaw, swerved off the ramp, and pulled into a rest stop. The engine hummed while his mind ticked through numbers — commissions missed, cases unresolved, leads evaporated. It was more than burnout. It was obsolescence.
The Wall
He called Lenny from the rest stop. “I’ve got nothing,” Jeremy said, voice flat.
“You tagged it?”
“Yeah. House 39’s gone. Cemented mailbox. Place is uninhabitable. Might be booby-trapped.”
A long pause.
“You mark fire ants?”
Jeremy grunted. “Yeah. And wasps. And fish rot. Spray-painted biohazard warnings too. I put that shit all in the report.”
Lenny sighed into the phone. “That’s the third today.”
“Third?”
“Third abandoned. Third with active hazards. Fourth if you count the squatter that got stung into a coma in Conway. He broke into an empty duplex. Place had black mold and three hornet nests. EMTs wouldn’t even enter.”
Jeremy rubbed his eyes. “You hear from compliance yet?”
“They don’t care anymore. Long as we check boxes. You upload the RZ-113?”
“Yeah.”
Another pause. “Listen,” Lenny said. “Off the record — you need to check this out. Ever heard of Karma Inc?”
Jeremy squinted. “What?”
“Google it. Mexican logistics outfit. Cargo handling, biological pest control, some kind of… exotic relocation services. I don’t know. I had a guy in Memphis say the abandoned house next to his was cleared out in twenty-four hours by a ‘cleanup crew’ out of Monterrey. No paper trail. No police involvement. Just a QR code and a signed waiver.”
Jeremy ended the call, opened a search, and typed it in.
The site was clean. Minimalist. No indexed contact information. But the offerings were clear: organic material disposal, chemical neutralization, pest control, wildlife redirection. Discreet. Rapid. Unquestioned.
He leaned back in the truck seat.
People weren’t just leaving. They were erasing themselves.
The Old Dream
The freeway rolled by, low gray and endless. Jeremy didn’t drive fast. Every few exits, he’d catch sight of another house stripped bare. Mailboxes boarded up. Lawns long dead. Neighborhoods with peeling HOA notices flapping in the wind. Some bore red spray paint: CANCELED, others, a crude skull and crossbones.
He’d known this was coming. He just didn’t know it would feel like this.
America wasn’t dying fast. It was eroding — eaten from within, like termites in a support beam. The system pretended it was intact. The news was still full of election chatter, new stock highs, recovery indexes. But on the ground, people were vanishing. Not in ones and twos — in thousands. And always the same kind of person: young, skilled, debt-crushed. Gone without a trace. Not even a Facebook memory.
Jeremy’s hands tightened on the wheel.
The management still believed in the old paradigm: America as a permanent gravity well. Nobody just leaves. Nobody defaults. Debt follows you like a shadow. Paperwork never dies.
But the paperwork wasn’t working anymore.
House 39 had no utility hooks. No occupant history. No legal contacts. It had been flipped five times through funds, derivatives, synthetic tranches sold out of Dubai and Ontario. Nobody owned it. Everyone owned it. No one wanted it.
He passed a billboard: “STAY AND BUILD — AMERICA NEEDS YOU.”
He snorted. The billboard was cracked down the center. Half the lightbulbs were shot out. Some kids had tagged the lower half: “or leave and live.”
As he pulled off the highway, he saw the tent clusters again. They were creeping outward — first under bridges, then parking lots, now along the berms near city parks. Whole families. Solar panels. Satellite dishes. Food trucks. It was turning into a shantytown with Wi-Fi.
This wasn’t the country he fought for. But that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that this was the country — and it had always been this way.
The illusion was just finally breaking.
And no one upstairs seemed ready to admit it.
Not yet.
Not ever.
The Public Reckoning
By the fall of 2028, even the networks couldn’t hide it anymore. For years, the story had been smothered beneath layers of denial, euphemism, and market-speak. Terms like “regional restructuring,” “transitory dislocation,” and “post-pandemic demographic drift” were tossed around with a straight face. But behind the gloss, something had rotted out. And finally, in September, it broke through the membrane.
The lead segment aired at 7:00 PM Eastern. No graphics. No dramatic music. Just a grim-faced anchor in a navy suit, eyes sunken, jaw locked. The chyron beneath him was stark: TENT CITIES IN FORT WORTH, COLUMBUS, AND ATLANTA DOUBLE IN SIZE – 4.4 MILLION AMERICANS UNACCOUNTED FOR.
“We have received verified information from multiple financial institutions, state auditors, and housing authorities that a wave of residential defaults in middle-income neighborhoods has not been due to foreclosure or unemployment, but outright abandonment,” the anchor began. “Entire families appear to have exited the system. Not evicted. Not foreclosed. Not processed. Just… gone.”
Jeremy watched from his couch in silence, a cold beer sweating in his hand, untouched. The feed cut to drone footage. Subdivisions outside Austin, Jacksonville, Sacramento: houses stripped, streets silent, power lines sagging, every other car left in driveways with the doors hanging open. Shot after shot of defaced buildings. Windows boarded. Biohazard signs sprayed in red. Mailboxes welded shut or stuffed with rebar.
Then came the second segment. The numbers. Not estimates — hard counts. IRS data showing sudden collapses in regional tax compliance. Student loan servicers reporting default spikes in zones that now showed zero social media activity. Telecom carriers unable to trace device pings from entire ZIP codes.
“This is not a localized event,” the second anchor said. “We are witnessing the largest voluntary disappearance of citizens in recorded U.S. history.”
Jeremy set the beer down. He picked up his phone. His ex-wife’s number still returned “disconnected.” Her Facebook profile had gone dark six months earlier. No new photos of the kids. No comments. Nothing. Her sister in Denver hadn’t responded to texts. The eldest boy had posted something in Greek in April. Jeremy didn’t speak Greek.
Next, a White House press conference. The administration looked cornered. The Treasury Secretary flanked by Homeland Security and the Chair of the Federal Reserve. Behind them, a massive screen with a map shaded in red and orange: counties with confirmed mass disappearance metrics.
“We are experiencing a coordinated economic subversion of the American system,” the Secretary said, voice taut. “These disappearances are being facilitated by a network of foreign actors targeting vulnerable citizens with fraudulent promises of asylum, debt relief, and illegal expatriation.”
Jeremy snorted. It wasn’t fraud. It was freedom.
The DHS official stepped up. She tried to project strength. Announced new measures: asset seizure authorizations, enhanced border controls, investigations into online platforms promoting the so-called “Southern Exit Strategy.”
But the room smelled like failure. Every question from reporters struck blood. Who exactly had authorized these synthetic debt portfolios tied to foreign pension funds? Why had the Department of Education allowed securitization of student loans through Caribbean tax shelters? How could Homeland Security track lone wolves in Michigan, but not whole families flying out of Mexico City under false names?
A final question lingered too long.
“Madam Secretary,” a BBC reporter asked, “Do you believe the American Dream is now something people escape from?”
Jeremy turned the TV off. The silence in the room was thicker than before. He stared out the window into the late summer dusk. Sirens, faint and intermittent. Somewhere, a lawn sprinkler sputtered to life.
He knew the answer. He’d known for years.
They weren’t coming back.
Chapter 1: Redacted Realities
Section 1: A Rot at the Core
It is the year 2028, and something is wrong. Not wrong like a paperwork mix-up or a late payment, but systemically wrong. The kind of wrong that doesn’t scream — it festers. You don’t see it on the headlines; you see it in the bureaucracy. In missing documents, quiet defaults, municipal IT outages, courthouses that shut at 2pm due to “staffing shortages.” You hear it in empty call center queues and the sudden disappearance of real humans from customer service.
The numbers are still there, flickering on screens — GDP, growth indices, Dow Jones. But the ground-level story is something else. Mail isn’t being delivered in whole zip codes. DMV lines stretch around buildings that haven’t been cleaned in weeks. Libraries have “paused operations until further notice.” Potholes don’t get filled. Streetlights stay dark. You see your neighbors disappear, slowly and quietly. And nobody says the word — collapse. But everyone knows it’s there. Beneath the polite fictions and ceremonial optimism of the official press briefings, something essential has stopped working.
The rot isn’t in Washington — not primarily. It’s in the counties. In the towns. In the second-rung suburbs that used to be middle class, safe, respectable. The places where mortgages were leveraged to the eyeballs by dual-income households who now both work DoorDash and manage four debts apiece. It’s in school districts where half the teachers are gone and the other half are part-timers. It’s in hospitals where the ER has one doctor per twenty-five patients, and you’re triaged with a clipboard asking, “Can you afford this visit today?”
By 2026, the defection had started. Not through violence or protest — but through silence. Young people left, not with slogans, but with a shrug. College grads didn’t take jobs in Kansas City or Cleveland. Nurses stopped renewing licenses. Engineers ghosted LinkedIn. They just left. Out of the system, out of the datasets. Nobody knew where they went, and nobody could stop them. The term “Southern Exit Strategy” was whispered online — derided by Fox News, ignored by CNN. But the footprints in the data were undeniable.
Social Security numbers with no active billing history. Voter rolls with missing registrants. Cell phones permanently shut off. Utility disconnections not followed by reconnections. Mortgages in legal limbo, the foreclosure process stalling under sheer administrative exhaustion. Banks hired third-party contractors to physically investigate homes. These weren’t urban squats. These were nice houses. Cookie-cutter subdivisions. HOA communities. Empty.
And those who remained started noticing. There were fewer people in the Starbucks. The traffic eased up on Tuesday mornings. The gym was weirdly quiet. Dentists closed with handwritten signs: “Moved out of state.” Pharmacies shortened hours. “Due to staff shortages.” It felt like everyone was leaving — or waiting to. Even the MAGA diehards started to go silent online, posting less, showing less flag-draped rage. There were rumors some had been denied visas — the “traitor clause” — and now they were just… stuck.
Corporate America kept going for a while. Amazon still delivered. Fast food still hired. Logistics ran on tired Hondas with Uber Eats decals. But cracks widened. Local governments defaulted on municipal bonds. Pension obligations were missed. City workers were furloughed. Water systems began issuing boil notices weekly. And nobody could afford to fix anything.
The people who used to “run things” weren’t there anymore. Mid-level administrators. Utility engineers. Technicians. Legal clerks. Gone. The systems they had maintained — power grids, property assessments, court dockets, permit offices — didn’t collapse in a blaze. They just slowed. And slowed. And slowed. Until nothing moved.
In its place emerged a kind of improvisational survivalism. Mutual aid networks. Gray-market electricians. Nurse co-ops. But for every success story, there were ten quiet failures. Elderly left unvisited. Paperwork backlogged into oblivion. Kids pulled from schools because “it wasn’t safe anymore.”
The federal government, meanwhile, did its dance. Press conferences, new executive orders, ritual attacks on scapegoats. It was all noise. None of it touched the rot. Congress passed a “Prosperity and Dignity in Work Act.” Nobody read it. Treasury insisted America remained “the most resilient economy in the world.” But bond yields were climbing. Foreign capital was quietly leaving.
In Arkansas, where Jeremy Dalton lived, the signals were late in arriving. The state had always lagged national indicators. But now the problems hit all at once. The Little Rock power grid experienced cascading failures during a July heatwave. Two of the four trauma centers shut down in August. Teachers’ unions voted to walk off indefinitely. The National Guard was deployed to “protect critical infrastructure,” which translated to putting three Humvees near an AT&T hub and calling it a day.
Debt collectors like Jeremy were caught in the middle. On paper, they had power. Court orders, repossession rights, private security support. In reality, none of it mattered. The courts stopped issuing warrants. The cops refused backup. Judges quietly told agents to “hold off for now.” Nobody wanted to be the guy that kicked in a door on a family who’d lost their health insurance, their jobs, and their hope. And so it all hung there — unresolved.
But the companies still sent the orders. House 39. 14B Wisteria Lane. Parcel 412-S, Cypress Heights. Agents still went out. They still filed the paperwork. They ticked the boxes: “No contact. Abandoned. Suspected flight.” They photographed empty fridges and half-full closets. They mailed reports to banks where junior analysts tried to make sense of portfolios that now consisted of ruins. Nobody wanted to mark the paper as zero. Nobody wanted to admit this wasn’t just a default — it was defection.
By late 2027, a few cities tried to reassert control. They hired task forces. Passed nuisance property ordinances. Sent fines. Threatened arrests. But nothing worked. People didn’t fear legal consequences anymore. If you had nothing, if you were trapped by debt, if your options were poverty or exile, what did a $2,000 fine mean? Nothing. They left anyway. Sometimes in the night. Sometimes openly, with a barbecue, as neighbors watched and wondered if they were next.
Jeremy Dalton had seen the signs early. He tracked missing persons reports. Watched Reddit boards. Noticed patterns in social media shutdowns. And yet even he was unprepared for the scope. Entire blocks went dark. The electrical grid showed usage drop-offs of 70%. School attendance in districts cratered. The school board tried to fake numbers for federal funding — until the feds themselves stopped caring.
The rot had reached the bottom of the data stack.
Jeremy’s job was simple: verify, document, submit. But nothing felt simple anymore. Every house felt like a message. People weren’t running from hardship. They were rejecting the premise. The deal. The supposed covenant of citizenship. Work hard, follow the rules, earn your place. That contract was broken. Nobody was paid. Nobody was safe. So they walked.
And somewhere, in a growing number of European towns, families with American names unpacked boxes into old villas and concrete apartment blocks. They were learning Greek. Enrolling their kids. Starting over. Their debts didn’t follow. Their records didn’t follow. The United States — god bless it — kept the lights on in Washington, but out in the counties, the game was already over.
By 2028, Jeremy knew it too. That’s when House 39 came up again. Nine months stale. No contact. A house in a middle-class Arkansas suburb. Assigned to him. No backup. No escort. Just a half-dead printer at the office and a checklist that meant nothing anymore.
And that’s where the story begins.
Section 2: The Street With No Name
It’s a two-hour drive out from Little Rock to the edge of Conway County, down roads that used to be paved and aren’t anymore. Jeremy’s Silverado rattles past empty gas stations, hollow strip malls, and billboards that haven’t been updated since the start of the decade. The GPS tries to route him through a neighborhood that no longer exists — bought up in a 2025 fire sale, then bulldozed by an insurance company trying to dodge responsibility after a chemical spill.
By the time he hits the subdivision where House 39 is located, it’s already 11:30 AM. The sun is brutal, hard white on cracked pavement. This street used to sell at $400k for a two-story, pre-fab, wood-frame home with vinyl siding and faux brick facades. In 2024, it was still listed in mortgage ads as an “emerging enclave.” Now it’s a warzone with garbage piling in medians, lawns overgrown with kudzu and ragweed, and utility boxes pried open like tin cans by copper thieves.
Street names are faded. One intersection sign is gone entirely. The local municipality stopped replacing them a year ago — no funding, no incentive. Nobody needs directions here anymore.
Kids loiter in the distance. One has a tire iron slung across his back like a weapon. They don’t say anything when Jeremy parks. They just watch.
He steps out. Combat boots. Kevlar vest. A laminated badge hanging off a lanyard that no one respects. The air smells like rotting meat and mildew. There’s a hum — not electrical. Insects. Flies. Too many of them.
House 39 is still standing. Just barely. There are boards across the windows, but one has been torn down. The mailbox is sealed shut with what looks like Gorilla Glue and concrete. A duct-taped notice on the front door says “INFESTED — DO NOT ENTER,” spray-painted in red below it: “CDC ZONE — HANTAVIRUS, LCMV, RODENTS.”
Jeremy’s seen this before. Not exactly this, but close. He saw it in Dallas, in Tucson, in the outskirts of Jacksonville. A generation walked away. Left the house, locked the doors, vanished. The paperwork left behind like an obituary.
This one? They did more than leave. The garage door is buckled in from the inside. The crawlspace panel is off. Something rustles. Flies circle the vents. He glances through the broken slats of a boarded window. He’s not stupid enough to enter — but he doesn’t need to. The place has been completely stripped. Sheetrock peeled back. Wiring gone. Plumbing amputated at the walls. Even the insulation has been raked out.
Inside, he sees what looks like animal waste — human waste too. The carpets are gone. The floorboards are slick and dark. The copper’s long gone, so are the breakers. The HVAC system has been ripped apart, possibly with a saw. There’s spray paint down the hall in angry strokes: “NOT YOURS,” “VOID,” “YOU DON’T OWN ME.”
He checks his phone. Signal’s patchy. He logs into the agency app and tries to update the record. It crashes.
Back in the cab of the truck, he slams the door, flips on the AC. Tries again. This time it loads. He pulls up the standard checklist for Category C abandonment: mail shutoff, power terminated, visual inspection. But this isn’t Category C. This is something else.
He adds his own notes.
— Signs of structural compromise. — Possibly biohazardous. — Presence of vermin. — Alleged CDC warnings (unconfirmed). — House gutted, unlivable.
He pauses, then adds two extra tags:
— Karma Inc? (graffiti on inner garage door) — Warning: possible booby traps.
He uploads the file. It’ll flag the house for secondary hazmat inspection — not that anyone will show up. No budget, no jurisdiction. Banks hold the paper but no longer want the liability. The asset is now toxic.
He turns the key. The truck hums to life. There’s movement in the rear-view mirror — a figure ducking back into another boarded house. A shape. Might be a squatter. Might be another repo man. Or just a ghost.
Driving away, Jeremy starts the call to regional HQ. The line buzzes for 30 seconds. Someone answers: Miguel. New guy.
“Hey. House 39. Total write-off. Same pattern. Even worse than 22 and 31.”
“Goddamn,” Miguel says. “That whole zip is non-performing now. We got 113 flagged mortgages there. Fifty-three in foreclosure. The rest? Vanished.”
Jeremy listens. He doesn’t talk. Miguel goes on:
“Bank rep is gonna lose it. That’s his portfolio. We already had two regional asset managers get canned last month over exposure like this. They’re dumping portfolios at 20 cents on the dollar now. Some are saying even lower. Zero upside.”
“They still think these people’ll come back?” Jeremy asks.
“They’re still running models from 2019.”
Silence.
Miguel sighs. “Hey, uh. There’s a rumor going around. Saw something on the internal threads. EU banks are dumping Treasuries. Tranches getting re-rated. Unconfirmed.”
Jeremy grunts.
“I heard,” he says. “Also heard two entire blocks in Oklahoma were stripped and tagged last week. Rotting meat, fake CDC signs, dog feces. The works.”
“And hornets,” Miguel mutters.
“Hornets?”
“Yeah. Rumor is — some people dropped Asian hornet queens into crawlspaces before leaving. Sugar packets, wet insulation, everything. Started nests. One guy got swarmed. Still in the hospital.”
Jeremy kills the call.
Outside, thunder rolls in from the west. Clouds gather but no rain. A dry heat storm. He wipes his forehead, stares at the road ahead. On the radio, a country station plays ads for canned food bulk orders and bunkers. The signal fades. Then it’s static.
Section 3: Institutional Breakdown
Jeremy leaned back in the cab, engine humming, and stared through the windshield at the silent house. He tapped the call icon for his ex-wife for the third time that day. Straight to voicemail. Again. He threw the phone on the dash with a curse. Something about it — maybe it was the silence — sent his temper spinning out past its bearings.
“Is she dressing the boy in a goddamn dress again?” he muttered. Not even sure which kid anymore. He hadn’t seen them in over a year. Visitation kept falling through. Plane tickets, schedule conflicts, accusations. But he saw the photos. Facebook, TikTok, group chats. The eldest — Tyler — in eyeliner. Nail polish. A whole mess he couldn’t wrap his head around. Something had been taken from him and twisted.
He rubbed his temples. “That boy had a .22 at ten,” he said to no one. “Built a goddamn drone from scrap. And now…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he toggled over to his work app. The Home Office in Little Rock was already pinging — two missed calls, three flagged messages. The last one all caps: URGENT PORTFOLIO STATUS – CASE ESCALATION.
The banks were waking up — or rather, the actuarial departments were. Debt portfolios weren’t recovering. 32 cases this week, all confirmed evac. Ghosted properties. Asset flight. Digital trails ending cold in Mexico City, Quebec, or worse — Thessaloniki. Budapest. Valencia. Paperwork filed through quiet EU offices — names changed, identities repapered. The quiet purge. And this wasn’t theory anymore.
Corporate was still running on 2023 assumptions: everyone comes back. Debts are gravity. The US dollar is gospel. These people just needed to be leaned on hard enough and they’d fall back into line.
But Jeremy had seen the trendlines. It was happening again and again: young families, defaulting quietly, vanishing overnight. The mailboxes glued shut. Utility meters fried. The occasional dogshit in the HVAC or sardine paste under the carpet just to make the place unsellable. Retaliation disguised as entropy.
He put in the final codes on House 39. Risk category: Level 4. Final disposition: unsalvageable. His finger hovered over the submit button. He hesitated — not because of the paperwork, but because he knew the number crunchers weren’t watching the right metrics. They still believed in credit scores and FICO charts and late fees. They weren’t looking at social media vanishing patterns. Voiceprint deletions. Rapid language training downloads.
Then his partner, Wade, called from the field. Different county. Same story.
“Hey man, just so you know, got another one. House had those EU relocation pamphlets under the floorboards. Custom-printed. Professionally done. And…”
He paused.
“…the whole crawlspace smells like piss and pesticides. Wasps everywhere. Found a cutout of Woody from Toy Story flipping the bird taped to the breaker box.”
Jeremy laughed, but it came out bitter. “Yeah,” he said, hitting SEND on his case report. “They’re not coming back.”
Section 4: House 39
The air had thickened to something viscous by the time Jeremy reached House 39. Heat hung off the hood of the Silverado like radiation off a spent reactor core, and the cicadas — relentless — screamed like a static feed left open to a dead channel.
It was a cul-de-sac once pitched as executive housing. Modular modernist designs. Neutral greys. Automated sprinklers, long dry. The brochure from 2024 called it Ridgepoint Estates. Now the street signage was bleached, the paint peeling in oily strips from the curb numbers. Garbage was piled in a neat wall at the end of the street. Not collected — organized. As if whoever left had been civil to the last.
House 39 was just visible through a stand of overgrown juniper. He parked at the end of the block, out of some leftover instinct — don’t corner yourself. Not in these zones. He slid the shotgun behind the passenger seat, just in reach, and stepped out. Kevlar vest under a polo shirt two sizes too small. Boots scuffed to hell. Holster worn smooth at the edges. He scanned the porch from 30 feet out.
Flies, lots of them. Not hovering — swarming, agitated, flickering against the cracked screen like static. The mailbox had been glued shut and sealed over with grey concrete compound. The flag had been snapped off. Spray paint in red across the side wall: NO ACCESS – CDC ZONE. HANTAVIRUS.
His eyes narrowed. The CDC hadn’t used that stencil since the last outbreak scare in 2025, and even then only in very specific rail hubs. It wasn’t real. He’d seen it before. It was plausible. That was the game now — make it plausible enough that no one checks. Like fake police tape printed from Amazon. A legal fiction so believable no agency wants to test it.
He knocked once. Useless formality. Of course it echoed into nothing.
The porch had no give. Whoever left had bolted the door and braced the inside with reinforced bars — he could tell from the hinge tension. Windows were blacked out. One pane on the second floor had a crack pattern suggestive of impact trauma — not from the inside. Someone had tested entry. Probably a looter. Probably didn’t get far.
He made his way around to the side and peered through a warped gap between two of the wooden boards. Movement. Something darted across the floor, fast, dark, low. Rat? No. He held his breath and looked again. Thin winged shadows moved across the hallway ceiling, clustered near the open attic hatch. Wasps.
He exhaled sharply. “Fuckin’ hell.”
He stepped back and scanned the perimeter — overgrown grass nearly to his knees, the dry remains of a child’s bicycle halfway absorbed by weeds. A rusted swing set groaned faintly in the hot wind. But no neighbors — no eyes. These homes had all gone dark.
Back at the truck, he took out the ruggedized tablet and launched the property inspection app. There was a checklist for this. He’d memorized it by now. “Asset Non-Recoverable – Suspected Sabotage.” Click.
Dropdown: “Environmental hazard?” — Yes.
“Signage or public warning present?” — Yes.
“Obvious indicators of infestation?” — Multiple.
He added manual notes: Wasps in ceiling cavity. Unstable structure. CDC fraud signage. Possible rat den under crawlspace. HVAC panel removed. Garbage rot odor confirms biological decay.
He paused and added a comment:
“Interior appears to have been stripped. Suggest copper scavenging. Wall cavities exposed — saw traces. Possibly chainsawed. Security glass remains intact. No signs of occupant return. Strong likelihood this property has been deliberately rendered unrecoverable.”
Then the final tag. A new one, added by Jeremy himself, not in the official documentation: Karma Flagged.
Karma Inc. — Mexican logistics. Everyone had heard of them. Untraceable biological sabotage services for the newly uprooted. Rats in the vents. Red ants seeded under the floorboards. Botfly larvae mixed into HVAC returns. Word was you could pay in crypto and schedule a “Goodbye Package” with next-day deployment. Jeremy didn’t know if that was true. But it felt true.
He looked once more at the sealed mailbox. Then turned, stepped over the child’s tricycle, and climbed into his truck.
The AC roared to life, stale air rushing out. He sat for a moment, helmet off, sweat soaking his collar, hands clenched on the steering wheel.
He didn’t call it in right away. He just sat there. The buzzing in his ears wasn’t the cicadas anymore. It was something deeper — a static in his gut, a suspicion that he was now the only man on this street still pretending anything was salvageable.
And somewhere, deep in his bones, he knew: there’d be another one just like this tomorrow.
Maybe worse.
Chapter 2: Communication Blackout
Section 1: Silence
The Silverado crawled up the on-ramp of I-40 East like a dying animal. Jeremy Dalton rolled the window halfway down and lit a cigarette with the one hand not gripping the wheel. The radio buzzed static between AM conservative rage and local preachers promising redemption for a price. He turned it off. All noise lately was either fear or prophecy.
He tried his ex-wife again. Straight to voicemail. No ring, no delay. Disconnected. He stared at the phone. She always picked up eventually. Or at least texted back with a thumbs-up or a curt “not now.” But this was the third day. Her Facebook was gone too. Not deactivated — deleted. No forwarding number. No trace. Just gone.
He checked his son’s page. Noah. Eighteen. Had a few online friends from somewhere in Europe. Thessaloniki. Lyon. Lisbon. That had always annoyed him, made Jeremy grind his teeth. European trash, those soy-faced types who played violin and wore scarves in summer. His son’s last post was from four months ago: a blurry picture of an airport, captioned “new life, new name.” That was it. And now his profile was gone too.
He tried calling. Same result. A polite female voice told him the number was no longer in service. No warning. No explanation.
He hurled the phone into the passenger seat. The casing cracked. His hand trembled.
Section 2: The Things Not Said
It wasn’t just the silence that stung. It was the knowing. That she had planned it. That she had waited — waited for him to be stuck on the road, on a repo run, buried in paperwork and asset tags and gas receipts, and then had taken the kids and vanished.
He remembered the arguments. She’d said something once about Greece. Jeremy had laughed in her face. “We can’t even get to Dallas without the truck breaking down, and you want to fly the kids to Europe?”
She had smiled, that smug, unbothered way she had when she knew she held the better hand.
“Not we,” she had said. “Just me.”
The part that burned most was the memory of his oldest — Noah — looking down when Jeremy yelled. The softness in his eyes that used to ask for permission now just looked… embarrassed. Like he was ashamed of something Jeremy didn’t understand.
He’d asked, once, furious and slamming doors, if she was “dressing the boy in a fucking dress.” He didn’t get a straight answer. Just silence, again.
He couldn’t prove anything. Couldn’t find them. Couldn’t even track which airport they flew from. It was as if they’d been… cleaned out. Like digital bleach had been poured over every trace of them.
Chapter 3: Institutional Breakdown
1. Structural Rot
The Silverado crawled up the on-ramp of I-40 East like a dying animal. Jeremy Dalton rolled the window halfway down and lit a cigarette with the one hand not gripping the wheel. The radio buzzed static between AM conservative rage and local preachers promising redemption for a price. He turned it off. All noise lately was either fear or prophecy.
He tried his ex-wife again. Straight to voicemail. No ring, no delay. Disconnected. He stared at the phone. She always picked up eventually. Or at least texted back with a thumbs-up or a curt “not now.” But this was the third day. Her Facebook was gone too. Not deactivated — deleted. No forwarding number. No trace. Just gone.
He checked his son’s page. Noah. Eighteen. Had a few online friends from somewhere in Europe. Thessaloniki. Lyon. Lisbon. That had always annoyed him, made Jeremy grind his teeth. European trash, those soy-faced types who played violin and wore scarves in summer. His son’s last post was from four months ago: a blurry picture of an airport, captioned “new life, new name.” That was it. And now his profile was gone too.
He tried calling. Same result. A polite female voice told him the number was no longer in service. No warning. No explanation.
He hurled the phone into the passenger seat. The casing cracked. His hand trembled.
Section 2: The Things Not Said
It wasn’t just the silence that stung. It was the knowing. That she had planned it. That she had waited — waited for him to be stuck on the road, on a repo run, buried in paperwork and asset tags and gas receipts, and then had taken the kids and vanished.
He remembered the arguments. She’d said something once about Greece. Jeremy had laughed in her face. “We can’t even get to Dallas without the truck breaking down, and you want to fly the kids to Europe?”
She had smiled, that smug, unbothered way she had when she knew she held the better hand.
“Not we,” she had said. “Just me.”
The part that burned most was the memory of his oldest — Noah — looking down when Jeremy yelled. The softness in his eyes that used to ask for permission now just looked… embarrassed. Like he was ashamed of something Jeremy didn’t understand.
He’d asked, once, furious and slamming doors, if she was “dressing the boy in a fucking dress.” He didn’t get a straight answer. Just silence, again.
He couldn’t prove anything. Couldn’t find them. Couldn’t even track which airport they flew from. It was as if they’d been… cleaned out. Like digital bleach had been poured over every trace of them.
Section 3: The Rage Engine
He pounded the steering wheel until his palm throbbed. The inside of the Silverado smelled of sweat, nicotine, and something metallic he couldn’t place. Maybe it was just the taste of his own teeth grinding. Rage, thick and physical, pooled behind his eyes.
There was no one to blame. And that made it worse.
Washington? The banks? Those smug-ass fuckers in Brussels with their suits and loopholes? The job? It all blurred together. Every repo job now came with a hint of betrayal. Every boarded-up house was a middle finger. A joke he wasn’t in on.
“Cowards,” he muttered. “Parasites.”
But he was talking about his own family. Even if he wouldn’t admit it aloud.
He thought about turning around. Driving west. Leaving the badge, the vest, the tablet in the dust. But there was nothing there either. The system might be rigged, but it still kept score. He still owed child support, even if the kids were ghosts now.
So he drove. Mouth tight. Knuckles white. Somewhere down I-40, a house waited that would look just like all the others. Another ghost address. Another financial corpse. Another checkmark on a screen.
And another reminder that the world had moved on without him.
2. Rage Inward, Rage Outward
Jeremy paced the office, the knee brace creaking slightly with each movement. He opened the break room fridge. A half-eaten burrito sat rotting in a stained plastic container. The microwave door was duct-taped shut.
He tried the phone again. Not to his ex-wife — he knew that was pointless. He called the last known number for the family lawyer. No answer. Then he called Lenny. Voicemail. Then he tried corporate collections liaison. Voicemail again.
He slumped into the cracked vinyl chair, opened the incident report software, and began the checklist for “High-Risk Asset Retrieval.”
Boarded windows? Check. Mail returns undelivered? Check. No visual activity in >6 months? Check. Physical hazard indicators? Check. Presence of vermin, insects, or other biological contaminants? Check.
He hesitated for a second, then added two fields of his own:
— Site flagged as ‘Psy-Ops deterrent’
— Likely boobytrapped or symbolically defaced
He saved the form. The cursor blinked for five seconds. Then the screen froze.
3. The Denial Engine
Later, sitting in the Silverado in the office lot, Jeremy watched the sun sink low behind a Walmart distribution hub. His phone buzzed. A bank rep — someone new, voice barely out of college.
“Dalton, we got your file. Uh… why is the biohazard box ticked?”
“Because it smells like something died in there,” he growled.
“You sure it’s not just neglect? That can’t be verified without EPA-level inspection, you know.”
Jeremy exhaled hard through his nose. “It’s not just neglect. There’s rot. There’s signs of infestation. Could be rats. Hornets. You want to go in and verify, be my guest.”
“Can we… maybe soften the language for corporate reporting? ‘Unstable site conditions’? ‘Unknown biological presence’?”
Jeremy blinked. “You want me to reword the truth?”
There was a pause on the line.
“We’re trying to prevent market contagion.”
He hung up without answering.
He understood now. The rot wasn’t the house. It wasn’t just the neighborhood. It wasn’t even the debt portfolios, the fake valuations, or the unreachable tenants. It was the whole machine — a system engineered to deny its own death, even as it drowned in its own lies.
And Jeremy was a fucking janitor, cleaning up the aftermath.
Only nobody wanted him to clean — they just wanted him to say it was fine. That the stink was normal. That rot was a “cosmetic issue.”
Tomorrow he’d be sent to House 41. It wouldn’t be any different. But he’d still go. Because what else was there?
Chapter 4: Return Drive
Section 1: Denial Loops
The drive back from House 39 was slow, looping, and directionless. Jeremy Dalton didn’t rush. The Silverado’s A/C wheezed against the Arkansas heat, barely functional but good enough to mask the stench of his own sweat and cheap coffee. His left hand gripped the wheel while his right thumb jabbed repeatedly at the dashboard console, trying to get a signal. No luck. Signal died two exits back. Another tower offline? Copper thieves? Budget cutbacks?
None of it mattered.
He wasn’t really going anywhere. The GPS on the dash still plotted a route to the Little Rock office, but Jeremy knew he’d be pulling into an empty lot. Half the building had been vacated last year. The upstairs offices were gutted for copper and conduit by an ex-employee with a bolt cutter and a truck full of justifications. Nobody even pressed charges.
What bothered Jeremy wasn’t House 39. It wasn’t even the biohazard warnings or the boarded-up mailbox filled with cement. It was what came after: the boxes.
Thirty-nine houses this quarter.
Zero commissions.
Every address ended in the same way. Deserted. Stripped. Paper trail dead. Every file looped back into the same vortex of 503 server errors, invalid chain-of-ownership flags, and offshore call centers that had long since stopped picking up. Jeremy had driven to Tulsa last month to tag a four-bedroom that had been sold to a Ghanaian educational pension fund. The documents were real. The debt was real. But nobody wanted the house. And nobody knew who actually owned it.
He tapped open the messaging app. Still no word from his ex-wife. Two missed calls, no response. Kids’ profiles scrubbed from Facebook. Phone disconnected. Not even a forwarding address in the school’s emergency contact list. He’d tried tracing their social accounts. Nothing. His daughter’s old TikTok had been inactive for six months. His son’s email bounced back from every address. Either they had gone dark, or…
Or they had gone south.
The phrase made his stomach twist. They had been talking about it online for over a year now — the “Southern Exit.” Reddit threads. Whispered Telegram groups. Off-grid YouTube influencers discussing resettlement services in Greece, Portugal, Spain. Code names. Tips for surrendering identity documents. Even debt nullification procedures.
His eldest had been angry, then quiet, then vague. Something about studying marine biology in “the Aegean.” Jeremy had brushed it off. Now he wasn’t so sure.
He clenched his jaw, swerved off the ramp, and pulled into a rest stop. The engine hummed while his mind ticked through numbers — commissions missed, cases unresolved, leads evaporated. It was more than burnout. It was obsolescence.
Section 2: The Wall
He called Lenny from the rest stop. “I’ve got nothing,” Jeremy said, voice flat.
“You tagged it?”
“Yeah. House 39’s gone. Cemented mailbox. Place is uninhabitable. Might be booby-trapped.”
A long pause.
“You mark fire ants?”
Jeremy grunted. “Yeah. And wasps. And fish rot. Spray-painted biohazard warnings too. I put that shit all in the report.”
Lenny sighed into the phone. “That’s the third today.”
“Third?”
“Third abandoned. Third with active hazards. Fourth if you count the squatter that got stung into a coma in Conway. He broke into an empty duplex. Place had black mold and three hornet nests. EMTs wouldn’t even enter.”
Jeremy rubbed his eyes. “You hear from compliance yet?”
“They don’t care anymore. Long as we check boxes. You upload the RZ-113?”
“Yeah.”
Another pause. “Listen,” Lenny said. “Off the record — you need to check this out. Ever heard of Karma Inc?”
Jeremy squinted. “What?”
“Google it. Mexican logistics outfit. Cargo handling, biological pest control, some kind of… exotic relocation services. I don’t know. I had a guy in Memphis say the abandoned house next to his was cleared out in twenty-four hours by a ‘cleanup crew’ out of Monterrey. No paper trail. No police involvement. Just a QR code and a signed waiver.”
Jeremy ended the call, opened a search, and typed it in.
The site was clean. Minimalist. No indexed contact information. But the offerings were clear: organic material disposal, chemical neutralization, pest control, wildlife redirection. Discreet. Rapid. Unquestioned.
He leaned back in the truck seat.
People weren’t just leaving. They were erasing themselves.
Section 3: The Old Dream
The freeway rolled by, low gray and endless. Jeremy didn’t drive fast. Every few exits, he’d catch sight of another house stripped bare. Mailboxes boarded up. Lawns long dead. Neighborhoods with peeling HOA notices flapping in the wind. Some bore red spray paint: CANCELED, others, a crude skull and crossbones.
He’d known this was coming. He just didn’t know it would feel like this.
America wasn’t dying fast. It was eroding — eaten from within, like termites in a support beam. The system pretended it was intact. The news was still full of election chatter, new stock highs, recovery indexes. But on the ground, people were vanishing. Not in ones and twos — in thousands. And always the same kind of person: young, skilled, debt-crushed. Gone without a trace. Not even a Facebook memory.
Jeremy’s hands tightened on the wheel.
The management still believed in the old paradigm: America as a permanent gravity well. Nobody just leaves. Nobody defaults. Debt follows you like a shadow. Paperwork never dies.
But the paperwork wasn’t working anymore.
House 39 had no utility hooks. No occupant history. No legal contacts. It had been flipped five times through funds, derivatives, synthetic tranches sold out of Dubai and Ontario. Nobody owned it. Everyone owned it. No one wanted it.
He passed a billboard: “STAY AND BUILD — AMERICA NEEDS YOU.”
He snorted. The billboard was cracked down the center. Half the lightbulbs were shot out. Some kids had tagged the lower half: “or leave and live.”
As he pulled off the highway, he saw the tent clusters again. They were creeping outward — first under bridges, then parking lots, now along the berms near city parks. Whole families. Solar panels. Satellite dishes. Food trucks. It was turning into a shantytown with Wi-Fi.
This wasn’t the country he fought for. But that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that this was the country — and it had always been this way.
The illusion was just finally breaking.
And no one upstairs seemed ready to admit it.
Not yet.
Not ever.
Chapter 5: The Public Reckoning
By the fall of 2028, even the networks couldn’t hide it anymore. For years, the story had been smothered beneath layers of denial, euphemism, and market-speak. Terms like “regional restructuring,” “transitory dislocation,” and “post-pandemic demographic drift” were tossed around with a straight face. But behind the gloss, something had rotted out. And finally, in September, it broke through the membrane.
The lead segment aired at 7:00 PM Eastern. No graphics. No dramatic music. Just a grim-faced anchor in a navy suit, eyes sunken, jaw locked. The chyron beneath him was stark: TENT CITIES IN FORT WORTH, COLUMBUS, AND ATLANTA DOUBLE IN SIZE – 4.4 MILLION AMERICANS UNACCOUNTED FOR.
“We have received verified information from multiple financial institutions, state auditors, and housing authorities that a wave of residential defaults in middle-income neighborhoods has not been due to foreclosure or unemployment, but outright abandonment,” the anchor began. “Entire families appear to have exited the system. Not evicted. Not foreclosed. Not processed. Just… gone.”
Jeremy watched from his couch in silence, a cold beer sweating in his hand, untouched. The feed cut to drone footage. Subdivisions outside Austin, Jacksonville, Sacramento: houses stripped, streets silent, power lines sagging, every other car left in driveways with the doors hanging open. Shot after shot of defaced buildings. Windows boarded. Biohazard signs sprayed in red. Mailboxes welded shut or stuffed with rebar.
Then came the second segment. The numbers. Not estimates — hard counts. IRS data showing sudden collapses in regional tax compliance. Student loan servicers reporting default spikes in zones that now showed zero social media activity. Telecom carriers unable to trace device pings from entire ZIP codes.
“This is not a localized event,” the second anchor said. “We are witnessing the largest voluntary disappearance of citizens in recorded U.S. history.”
Jeremy set the beer down. He picked up his phone. His ex-wife’s number still returned “disconnected.” Her Facebook profile had gone dark six months earlier. No new photos of the kids. No comments. Nothing. Her sister in Denver hadn’t responded to texts. The eldest boy had posted something in Greek in April. Jeremy didn’t speak Greek.
Next, a White House press conference. The administration looked cornered. The Treasury Secretary flanked by Homeland Security and the Chair of the Federal Reserve. Behind them, a massive screen with a map shaded in red and orange: counties with confirmed mass disappearance metrics.
“We are experiencing a coordinated economic subversion of the American system,” the Secretary said, voice taut. “These disappearances are being facilitated by a network of foreign actors targeting vulnerable citizens with fraudulent promises of asylum, debt relief, and illegal expatriation.”
Jeremy snorted. It wasn’t fraud. It was freedom.
The DHS official stepped up. She tried to project strength. Announced new measures: asset seizure authorizations, enhanced border controls, investigations into online platforms promoting the so-called “Southern Exit Strategy.”
But the room smelled like failure. Every question from reporters struck blood. Who exactly had authorized these synthetic debt portfolios tied to foreign pension funds? Why had the Department of Education allowed securitization of student loans through Caribbean tax shelters? How could Homeland Security track lone wolves in Michigan, but not whole families flying out of Mexico City under false names?
A final question lingered too long.
“Madam Secretary,” a BBC reporter asked, “Do you believe the American Dream is now something people escape from?”
Jeremy turned the TV off. The silence in the room was thicker than before. He stared out the window into the late summer dusk. Sirens, faint and intermittent. Somewhere, a lawn sprinkler sputtered to life.
He knew the answer. He’d known for years.
They weren’t coming back.