The Herding

A Story of Folk Horror and Ecological Infection

In a small town suffocating under the oppressive heat of late summer, a single tick bite is the start of a terrifying change. When seventeen-year-old Leo develops a strange "summer flu," his mother assumes it's a passing illness . But as the fever smolders and the antibiotics fail, Leo’s energy bleeds away, replaced by a profound, unnatural stillness . He begins to watch the woods behind their house with a silent, patient focus, as if waiting for a curtain to rise.

Soon, the whispers begin. A farmer sees a man missing for a year standing silently among a herd of deer at dusk . Teenagers on a remote road are frozen in their headlights by the sight of a pale, gaunt figure moving with the animals, its eyes reflecting the light with a dead, soulless glare . The town’s missing are not gone. They have been assimilated.

As the disappearances accelerate and the very air becomes a vector for the plague, the few who remain are trapped between a world that is being erased and a wilderness that is actively recruiting . A mother’s desperate love, a sheriff’s crumbling order, and a hunter’s grim knowledge of the natural world are all that stand against a silent, creeping tide that doesn't want to kill them—it wants to change them.

Pretty good

One of the better robot voices, though obviously human would be better

I'm not sure if the author is real or AI, but I enjoyed the story either way