36 pgs.
In The Devil’s Detour, data-witch and logistics engineer L.A. Cruz uncovers a terrifying secret buried within the infrastructure of American commerce. When her algorithms begin generating impossible freight routes—phantom trucks traveling roads that don’t exist – she discovers a hidden “shadow network” converging around industrial ruins and sites of disaster. Her superiors dismiss her findings as hallucinations, but the system she helped build begins to turn against her. Phones, screens, and machines whisper warnings. Something beneath the grid is alive – and it has noticed her.
Fleeing corporate surveillance, L.A. follows a set of coordinates sent by a corrupted divination app and ends up at a desolate truck stop in Scranton, where she meets Jo “Mama” Ashcroft and Darla Rae, two long-haul witches of the open road. They’re part of an ancient, secret order known as the Haulin’ Coven, bound to the sentient force of the highway itself – “the Road” – which provides protection in exchange for loyalty and vigilance against infernal interference.
When a storm swallows them into an impossible off-ramp, the trio faces a demonic entity from the Infernal Logistics Authority (ILA)—a bureaucratic horror that enforces contracts and audits souls lost to the machinery of commerce. In a chaotic battle of salt, sigils, and cyber-rituals, L.A. merges digital sorcery with old-road magic, hacking the demon’s code and forcing a system reboot that saves them – temporarily.
They emerge back onto the real highway, shaken but alive, only to find a blood-marked business card from the ILA warning of a “Refinery Audit” in three months. As dawn breaks, Jo anoints L.A. as a new sister of the Haulin’ Coven. Bound now to the haunted roads of the Rust Belt, L.A. embraces her hybrid power-part coder, part conjurer—and joins the fight to keep the last free miles of the world’s highways out of Hell’s corporate control.
Themes:
Digital witchcraft • Rust Belt occultism • Haunted infrastructure • The commodification of labor and soul • Feminist camaraderie in the face of systemic evil
Tone:
Neo-pulp horror with noir and cyber-occult overtones; The Devil’s Detour blends Maximum Overdrive grit with Hellraiser bureaucracy and Neuromancer-era techno-mysticism.
First page excerpt:
“The corporate hotel room in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a
perfect cube of beige nothingness. It smelled of
industrial-grade air freshener designed to mask the ghosts of a
thousand lonely travelers, a scent that was both aggressively
clean and deeply soulless. L.A. Cruz sat on the edge of a bed
engineered for optimal spinal alignment, the starched white
sheets crisp and cold against her skin. For six years, this had
been her world: a series of identical, climate-controlled boxes,
each one a testament to a life lived in the sterile embrace of
corporate efficiency. Now, it felt like a tomb.
In her hand, her phone, a sleek black monolith of glass and
polished aluminum, felt alien. It had once been an extension of
her mind, a tool of almost supernatural precision that allowed
her to command the intricate ballet of global logistics. She was
a data-witch, a digital sorceress, and her magic was the
invisible hand that guided the flow of commerce.
But a week ago, her magic had turned on her. Her algorithms,
the beautiful, intricate spells she had woven from the raw data
of the world, had begun to show her things that shouldn’t exist.
Phantom shipments moving along roads that weren’t on any
map. Drivers vanishing from the grid, their last known locations
forming patterns that looked like summoning circles. The
system was haunted, its clean, logical pathways infested with
a signal bleed from some other, darker reality. It was a reality
desync, a corruption of the data that was so profound, so
fundamental, that it threatened to unravel her entire
understanding of the world.
It had started, as it often did, as a favor. Her friend, a
small-batch coffee roaster in Oregon, was about to lose a
major contract because his prize-winning Geisha beans were…”