Chantaburi Province, Thailand, July 2035
I find Frederik Eriksen exactly where he said he would be. The 35-year-old Swedish veteran sought refuge in the Thai jungle after the war, embracing the life of a full-time monk. His days are devoted to meditation, prayer, and study, rarely disturbed by the outside world.
He has just returned from a grueling one-month Tudong—a silent pilgrimage that took him through forests and mountains in complete solitude. For three months, he lived with nothing but his alms bowl, sleeping under the open sky or in cemeteries, practicing extreme renunciation.
Why, then, did he ask to be interviewed? As we speak, I begin to understand. This conversation is not for attention or validation—it is simply what he needs to turn the page.
"We had everything in my squad—Moroccan teenagers from Stockholm who thought a good time meant hanging out in parks and playing FIFA, and Swedes from Jönköping who preferred cruising around on mopeds with their girlfriends. Most of them were barely 20, fresh out of training, and suddenly drafted, sent across the Øresund to reinforce Denmark. Barely two months of training and most of them couldn’t even grow a beard. I remember that one patrol well. The forest we pushed through had been hit with nerve agents two days before. Not persistent enough to linger, but we still prayed our CBRN suits and gas masks would hold.
It wasn’t exactly the taiga—small trees packed so tightly that every step meant forcing your way through branches. Gear snagged constantly, as if unseen hands were pulling us back. Two days earlier, crabs had been spotted here. We were sent to confirm the nerve agents had done their job. So we marched in a line, more focused on when we’d be rotated off the front or finally allowed to take off our masks for a smoke.
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I had a MAG in hand—a beast of a weapon, one and a half times your arm, eleven kilos unloaded. 7.62mm belt-fed. Good luck dragging that and a full CBRN pack through the brush. Still, I managed. Three years in the army had built me for this, even if I’d never seen combat before the war. The teens in my squad weren’t so lucky.
My sergeant walked beside me, trying to make sense of his map, eventually resorting to the GPS on his phone. The forest was so thick you couldn’t see two meters ahead. We stopped at the edge of a clearing—500 meters more, and we’d be through. To our left, another squad had found thirty or so crab bodies. Morale wasn’t bad. The end was in sight.
Frederik pauses, his gaze drifting to a flower.
“Was that when it attacked?” I ask.
“At the tree line.” He exhales. “The guys mistook it for a fallen log. It had bark—greyish-white, with black lines—blended right in with the birches. Maybe 20 meters long. Nobody noticed the heat radiating off it until it moved.”
It struck fast, grabbing my sergeant’s leg on one end and another guy’s on the other. They screamed as it bit down—not enough to sever, just enough to hold. Then it thrashed. Sidewinding, rolling, slamming them against trees. Like a wind-up toy gone berserk.
We opened fire. Its bulk sent men flying, bodies hitting the dirt as it flailed. The sergeant and the other guy were torn apart. I won’t describe it—for my peace of mind and yours. Then it grabbed someone else, just a few meters from me. Timo.
Its mouth—no eyes, no face, just rows of jagged teeth—latched onto his head. It rolled, and just like that, Timo’s head was gone.
Someone next to me took a stray bullet in the chaos. Squad tactics collapsed; there was no way to control it. The thing slowed, its movements growing sluggish. I was down to my last ten rounds when it finally stopped, gasping like a dying fish. White liquid poured from its wounds.
I reloaded and kept shooting until I was sure it would never move again.
Barely had time to grab the wounded and what was left of the dead before the artillery we called in on the last part of the forest landed.” He finishes.
“Had no one seen those worms earlier?” I ask.
“No. That July, reports of them appeared left and right. Never in a group, never with crabs. Like wildlife you could find them where the crabs had just died. They speculate they were deep inside the meteors and took their sweet time before coming out.”
“Do you really believe they’re gone now?” I ask.
“Don’t go digging too deep.” He answers as he stands up. He leans for his cane before disappearing back into the canopy.