Between 1:59 to 3:00

Sunday, March 8, 2026 12:06 PM.

73 degrees outside with a soft breeze drifting through the cracked window.

I sat in my car on duty, the quiet afternoon stretching longer than usual. The parking lot had that strange kind of quiet that only happens late at night. Not completely silent, but distant. A car passing somewhere blocks away. A door slamming in an apartment building. The low hum of streetlights buzzing overhead.

Most nights on duty were like this.

Long.

Slow.

The kind of shift where time moves so slowly you start checking the clock every five minutes just to make sure it’s still working.

I leaned back in the driver’s seat and adjusted my headphones. Music helped pass the time, even if it was low enough that I could still hear what was going on around me.

At least… that was the plan.

Both headphones were on, music low enough to still hear the world outside or so I thought.

A faint noise broke through the rhythm.

Then another.

Car alarms beeped somewhere in the distance. Tires rolled across pavement blocks away. Normal sounds… but something felt off.

I paused the music.

That’s when I heard it.

Voices.

Soft. Distant. Almost like someone whispering nearby.

Or maybe… just inside my head.

And suddenly, wearing both headphones didn’t feel like the best choice anymore.

I slid one headphone off my ear and listened.

That’s when I realized the whisper wasn’t coming from outside the car.

It sounded… almost like it was coming from the radio.

I rubbed my eyes and glanced at the windshield. In the reflection, for just a second, it looked like a handprint pressed against the glass.

My chest tightened.

Then I remembered.

I’d leaned against the car earlier while I was on the phone.

Probably just my own handprint.

Somewhere nearby, I heard the crunch of tires rolling over gravel.

But when I looked up, there wasn’t a car in sight.

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard.

That’s when something else hit me.

The union trucks weren’t there. They were usually parked across the street like clockwork every night.

Slowly, I turned my head away from the clock and looked outside.

The streetlight pole across the road was blinking.

Not flickering.

Blinking.

Rapid. Uneven. Like someone was flipping the switch on and off.

Feeling overstimulated, I reached for the radio and switched it on, hoping a late-night voice would make the quiet feel normal again.

I turned the radio dial slowly. With every station that slid past, the same voice whispered through the static.

I slowed the dial even more, careful not to skip past the sound.

The static shifted and warped with every tiny movement of the knob.

Different stations flickered in and out.

Fragments of music.

A weather report.

Half of a commercial.

But beneath all of it, buried deep in the static, that same voice stayed there.

Whispering.

I pulled the headphones off completely now and set them in the passenger seat.

The inside of the car suddenly felt smaller.

Quieter.

The whisper came again, thin and distorted like it was traveling through miles of broken signal.

“Lose… hour.”

I froze.

The voice didn’t sound like a normal radio broadcast.

It sounded like someone trying to speak through interference.

Or worse.

Like it was speaking directly to me.

I leaned closer to the radio, slowly moving the dial back and forth, trying to catch the voice between the static. Then it came through clearly.

“Lose hour.”

“Lose hour?” What does that even mean?

I leaned back in the seat, repeating the words over and over in my head.

Lose hour… lose hour…

Before I could even start to make sense of it, I heard a low muffled sound in the distance. It slowly grew louder… and closer. Louder.

I finally realized what it was.

Just a couple of cats going at it.

“Whew.” I let out a slow breath of relief. For the first time in a while, something felt normal again.

The street was quiet again. The cats had scattered somewhere into the dark.

Then something crossed my mind.

I glanced down at the dashboard clock.

My stomach tightened.

I couldn’t remember the last hour.

I tried to think back.

Had I been on my phone?

Scrolling through something?

Maybe I had dozed off for a few minutes.

But that didn’t explain it.

Even if I had fallen asleep, I should remember waking up.

Instead there was just… nothing.

A blank space.

Like someone had erased a piece of the night and stitched the rest back together.

I looked around the parking lot again.

The streetlight was still blinking.

The wind was stronger now, pushing loose trash across the pavement.

Everything looked normal.

But it didn’t feel normal.

That whisper from the radio echoed again in my head.

Lose hour.

I glanced at the dashboard clock.

1:07.

For a second I tried to remember when I’d last checked it… but the thought slipped away like a dream you forget the moment you wake up.

As I tried to process it, a stray shopping cart rolled across the parking lot in the wind, passing my car and almost grazing the bumper.

Suddenly the interior of the car glowed red.

My heart jumped into my throat.

Then I remembered the charger port. If the cord wasn’t pushed in all the way, it flickered like that sometimes.

The breeze outside picked up, brushing against the side of the car and rustling through the trees. For a moment it sounded almost like footsteps circling the vehicle.

My face pressed against the glass so tightly I thought I heard the window crack. I squinted into the darkness, trying to see if someone was really there.

I gripped the steering wheel without realizing it.

But there was no one.

Just the empty street and the quiet hum of the night.

I leaned back slowly, my breath fogging the window.

My mind… my eyes… my ears… they were all starting to play tricks on me.

At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

The dashboard clock glowed softly in the dark.

1:59.

I stared at it for a moment, trying to remember the last time I had checked it.

Then the radio crackled again.

Static filled the car.

And through it, the whisper returned.

Soft.

Clear.

“Lose… hour.”

Before I could even react, the clock changed.

1:59

…to…

3:00.

I blinked.

Daylight saving.

I let out a small laugh and shook my head. “All that over a clock change,” I muttered.

Then my phone buzzed in my lap.

I glanced down at the screen.

4:00 AM.

My smile faded.

The glow from my phone lit up the inside of the car as I stared at the screen.

4:00 AM.

I slowly looked back at the dashboard clock.

3:00.

My chest tightened.

One of them was wrong.

Or maybe… both of them were.

The radio sat silent between the seats, but the static hadn’t fully disappeared. It whispered quietly beneath the silence, like something waiting just on the other side of the signal.

Then the speaker popped softly.

The radio crackled one last time.

Through the static, the voice whispered again.

“Already did.”