Came to me in a dream…
Set in small town Oklahoma, modern day (2024). Let’s call the town Mercy.
Our protagonist is a 30-something woman from Australia, Annie. Things have unravelled for her (work, relationship, studies – she’s an academic) recently and she is soul searching. She has visited Mercy because a whole branch of her family have lived there since colonial times and she figures that is as good a place as any to find new meaning in her life.
The library is her natural go to place, as well as a diner and a dive bar (well, she is an Aussie). The town is very church, but she’s anti-religion. The only other thing that stands out about Mercy is that there are noticeably more people who are open carry (guns) than you would expect.
Annie learns that when the town was founded there was a major gun battle, with 28 lives lost. It was the era of the Boomers and Sooners, the Land Rush of 1889 – where there was a lot of settlers wanting their plots of land, and not necessarily legally. Where Mercy grew from, newly arrived settlers fought to the death over some land, although one newspaper article suggests that bad moonshine and hallucinations were the instigators.
Annie gets to work tracing her relatives who arrived shortly after 1889. It takes a lot of study, and there are several people in the town she is beginning to like, and she has found out (social media) that her ex is already engaged to someone else… so she takes out a monthly rental and decides to stay a while.
A romance blossoms. A friendship (diner or library) blossoms. And she finds some distant relatives, one of whom is elderly. She basically gets more involved with town life.
Annie traces the historical references to all of her past relatives (property records etc) and finds that many of them suddenly ceased to exist (in Mercy) in 1957. When she looks deeper, it turns out that in 1957 there were 5 children born and 3 deaths, yet the town population dropped by 33. When she asks people, the reason is clearly a secret.
After prying and prying, Annie learns that many people became demonically possessed in 1957 and the problem was put to right. She links that to the hallucinations of 1889. And starts noticing the guns, the preparedness of the town, more and more. A friend (now that she is part of the town) starts training her in gun use, because it is just what locals do.
Given that there is 68 years between 1889 and 1957, and 68 years beyond that is next year, Annie stays longer.
On a rural property, at night, a small device burrows out of the ground, and hatch opens, and a wraith flies out. It has the vague shape of a living creature, but not human or any animal we know. More amorphic than anything, but moves like it is alive. It scoots off across the fields, and then the device returns, up the same burrow, and releases another wraith.
The elderly relative relents and tells Annie the truth. Annie’s friends (and lover) are also gathered around. The details are sketchy but we (the audience) get to see what really happened in 1889 and 1957. Both times were the same. We see a lot of panic, and a lot of shooting, and a lot of people being shot dead.
Meanwhile numerous wraiths have flown (just above ground) into Mercy, into homes, and entered the bodies of people who are asleep. The transformation takes all night, with plenty of groaning and twitching. Some of them sleep in quite a bit…
Each body-snatched person, when they awake, are clearly not themselves. They can’t communicate and they move strangely. Haltingly, like someone driving a car for the first time. So, a bit like zombies, but more stop/start. Learning how to operate the human, and learning quite quickly.
You know the rest. It’s basically people with guns vs zombies. These zombies aren’t the eating-people kind. They are grabbing weapons and killing humans.
People cornered. People fleeing. People we have grown to like dying. Heroics. When a “zombie” is shot dead, the wraith leaves the body as dozens of little wraiths, they have lost coherence, and quickly each shatters into a puff of smoke.
In the aftermath, the government arrives and has meetings with church leaders. The news tells of mass psychosis due to a terrorist poisoning the water supply. One of the people we liked, who died, was “foreign”.
The government finds the burrow and excavates. They find a small spaceship, with pods of algae and a power source. We don’t know what they did with the ship after the discovery.
But wait! In all the chaos some of the wraiths body snatched a farmer and his family, and when they got to the edge of town, and saw the chaos, they wen back to the farm and found a door in the ground.
One year later, in a survival bunker, the wraith-people start to utter words for the first time. It is much harder to notice that they are not real people. And they have a TV.