Night Patrol and the Hollowed Ruger 1022 chassis

They called themselves patrols now Ruger 1022 chassis . Dawn brought a revelation: not every afflicted person had been “fixed” by the visitors.

Some had been changed irreparably. There were “hollowed” who wandered with a shape of humanity but a warped aim, their minds tethered to something distant and calculating. The Northwatch, the community center group, and ragged bands of volunteers organized nightly watches.

A new problem emerged: looters. Darkness emboldened certain folks to reclaim supplies and goods by force. Survivalists who had hoarded fuel and food now found themselves targeted. The Northwatch established a perimeter with signal flares and motion posts, hugging the roadways where the aurora’s light still made the sky bleed colors. Their gear range included ARs, shotguns, and perhaps most useful in close work, handily accurate Ruger 1022 chassis rigs loaded with small, controlled rounds—less lethal at range, but precise enough to take out an errant threat that could not be reasoned with.

That night Mara led a four-man sweep to the east side of town, following a trail of overturned bins. Her Ruger 1022 chassis had a short barrel and a reflex sight—fast on target when needed. She moved through the alleys where the aurora painted murals and followed faint boot prints to a collapsed storefront. It was there they found a pocket of the hollowed huddled around a radio emitting a looped pattern: the same structured pulses that had first broken the airwaves. They had weapons: kitchen knives and rusted pistols that clicked uselessly with empty chambers. The hollowed watched the aliens’ light on the horizon like worshippers.

Eli’s hand was steady on his own Ruger 10/22 tactical chassis. He had reconfigured it with an upgraded forend and a bipod for those rare moments of deliberate, aimed fire. He and three others moved to the rear alley. Mara signaled softly, then swept the door. Inside, the hollowed rose with a chorus of throaty groans that sounded almost human. They lunged. The first few shots were muffled—aimed to disable. The KP-9 magazine of the hollowed’s altered weapons mattered not here; what mattered was the steady, surgical pressure of the survivors’ fire.

After the skirmish, amid overturned shelves of canned goods and broken glass reflecting the aurora, Mara paused to examine one of the hollowed’s faces. It was a young man who had been part of her gym’s cross-fit group. He stared at her with a blank look that was not empty—a mapped, routed stare like a waypoint on some foreign chart. She felt guilt and relief in equal measure.

Back at the center, the community set up a makeshift lab with an old ambulance freezer and a microwave. They had a retired EMT who swore by cold compresses and simple antiseptics. The aliens’ light in the north continued to pulsing, and sometimes the infected nearby would suddenly lift their faces to it and calm as if soothed. The survivors were split on whether to assist or run.

Inside the group, practical mechanics arose. People compared chassis and platforms as if discussing tools in a shop. “The best chassis for Ruger 1022,” one muttered, thumbs tracing scars on a barrel, “is whatever you’ve practiced with. The best Ruger 1022 chassis in a hurry isn’t an aftermarket catalog—it’s what’s reliable when you need it.” That sentiment kept everyone honest; they couldn’t bargain with perfection in a catalog. They could only train and use what they had: Ruger 10/22 chassis rigged for different roles, and reliable magazines stacked like promises.

As night closed, the aurora pulsed brighter, and a faint hum shifted into what sounded like layered voices. The visitors were broadcasting now in a pattern that included human phonemes—old lullabies, snippets of speech, and memories folded into sound. Some of the hollowed would approach the craft and stand until the tendrils of light brushed them. Afterwards, some would become lucid again, as if knocked back into place, while others would become more distant, leaving behind a shell of a person.

It was Eli who suggested a daring plan: communicate. Not through weapons, not through barricades, but through a shared symbol. Josephine had an old church bell in the town square—a rusted thing that had only recently been used to call volunteers in an emergency. She proposed the bell’s tone might be translated: a steady human frequency in the sea of alien pulses. The survivors would ring that bell in sequence and see if the creatures responded. It sounded risky, naive, and possibly foolish—but if the light communicated through pattern and tone, perhaps something human could talk back.

That night, under a vault of brilliant aurora, the bell rang. Notes rolled out over the fields like a human tide. The aliens’ surface pulsed, and for a heartbeat, every hollowed that had been swaying like grass in a breeze straightened. Their eyes cleared. A child stopped crying. The craft’s tendrils retracted like a cat’s claws, and the survivors felt a small, seismic relief. The bell did not solve everything, but it proved something they had suspected: the visitors responded to human patterning.

When the arc of the sky finally thinned, many of the hollowed that had been approached by the craft showed better cognitive signs. The townspeople cheered cautiously, but with a fatigue that tasted like actual hope. The aurora was still there—still beautiful, still strange—but in the clearing above the saucer, a soft white light separated the visitors from the world beneath. The survivors set night watches again, but the tone had shifted. They were less fearful and more determined to learn.

Eli set his Ruger 10/22 chassis on the bench and took off his gloves. He thought about the delicate balance: the rifle that could take a life also kept it safe; the magazines they had relied on were part of the toolbox that allowed them to reach toward answers rather than abandon the world to panic. He sat with Mara and Josephine and mapped the next steps: listen, ring, and learn—then help where they could.