Part 1
The Walmart Parking Lot Encounter began on a night that felt so ordinary it almost disappeared while it was happening, the kind of night you don’t expect to remember because nothing about it seems important enough to stay with you. My name is Daniel Mercer, I’m forty-eight years old, and at exactly 2:07 in the morning, I pulled into a Walmart parking lot on the edge of town because my dog, Atlas, refuses to eat anything except a specific brand of food that I can never seem to find anywhere except under harsh fluorescent lights at inconvenient hours.
The world at that time of night felt hollowed out, like everything unnecessary had been stripped away, leaving only the essentials behind. A few cars were scattered across the lot, parked under flickering orange lights that cast long shadows across the asphalt. The air was still, carrying that faint hum of electricity from the lamps above and the distant sound of a highway somewhere beyond the edge of the property. It was quiet in a way that made even small sounds feel too loud.
