The names of some individuals and places mentioned have been changed to protect the identities of the families of those involved and anyone who may attempt to find the location described in my recounting.
I’ll start by saying my Uncle Jethro passed away quite a few years ago. Now, Jethro was a bit of a character according to my parents. He worked as a foreman at a large salt mine located in the southeastern United States and would often disappear for days—even weeks—at a time, according to my aunt. I remember that whenever my parents and I would visit, he had this look in his eyes. They were always wide. Blank. As if he’d just witnessed something unspeakable to the point that his essence and personality eroded more and more every time I saw him. It was chocked up to long hours and sleep deprivation by my aunt, which made sense at the time.
This led to his aforementioned reputation as a bit of a character. In order to cope with whatever he had experienced down there, he (you guessed it) turned to alcohol, which led to chew and cigarettes, which led to heroin, which ultimately led to him being lowered six feet into the ground at the ripe age of 49.
My Aunt Nellie passed shortly thereafter. Suicide. Even though Jethro wasn’t exactly the perfect husband, he was all she had in that small, isolated village of a town. Their deaths were so close together, in fact, that Jethro’s final will and testament hadn’t even been read yet—which is where I come in.
The day I turned eighteen, my mother handed me an envelope when I got home from school. It was addressed to me.
“Found this in the mail,” my mom said, quizzically.
On the envelope was a single word: David.
That’s me. There was no return address. Enclosed in the envelope was the deed to several hundred acres of land both in and around what we’ll call Oldsburg. Yes, this was the same town where Jethro lived, worked, got fucked up in, and died. I had effectively become a majority landholder in a town before I could even grow a beard. I was stunned. I just kept staring at the paper. My parents were shocked when I looked up from the paper and told them.
I immediately called my buddy Darren and my on-again off-again girlfriend, at the time, Katie. I told them I was planning a road trip to close out high school and start our new college lives. I didn’t tell them exactly what we’d be doing—I was saving that for when they came over—but that it was going to be awesome. They immediately accepted and the trip planning began.
Two weeks later, we’d loaded a week’s worth of stuff into the back of my mom’s old aquamarine Sable wagon that was now mine and hit I-85. This was back when sat-nav was pretty much limited to rental cars and the flip phone had just debuted, so we were using a paper map. When Darren leaned up from the back seat and pushed down the foldable armrests between Katie and I—the car had a front bench seat—he said he couldn’t find Oldsburg on the map. Apparently, where I’d told him it was supposed to be was the middle of scenic nowhere. I’d never actually looked the town up before online, since we didn’t have a home computer, but from the long car drives we’d taken when I was a kid, I knew it was quite a ways away from the interstate. I did know it was somewhere between two towns, though, which is why when we pulled off at a rest area, I looked at the map. In between those two towns… was nothing. Just a state road. Now, the map we were using was five years old, so maybe Rand McNally just missed it that year. While Katie and Darren waited outside the car and stretched, I went inside the rest stop to use the bathroom and stopped by the kiosk on the way out. An older gentleman, probably in his 70s, was manning the desk in the center of the entrance area. The bathrooms were on the left and the room with all the tourist trap flyers was on the right. I perused the flyers looking for a map or anything mentioning “Visit Scenic Oldsburg” or something of the like. After finding nothing, I headed up to the desk where the old man sat in his swivel chair, slowly twisting in a leisurely fashion.
“How can I help you, young man?”, he said.
I told him I was looking for a map, preferably a newer one. I told him the map my friends and I had was several years old and was missing our destination.
The old man leaned under the desk and grabbed a crisp, new looking map and mentioned something about a town called Smith-something being reincorporated within the past few years. I told him I had no clue about that town and thanked him for the map. He asked me where we were headed and when I told him “Oldsburg,” his chipper old-person demeanor quickly morphed into a deadly serious stare.
“Son, you best not make jokes like that,” he said sternly.
“I’m not sure what you mean. I haven’t visited since I was a kid, and…” I said, confused, and was abruptly cut off by the old man.
His expression had softened slightly, but still remained serious. “I’m assuming you didn’t hear about the accident,” he said.
I was taken aback. The old man proceeded to tell me about a massive chemical fire that had taken place around the same time my Uncle Jethro and Aunt Nellie died. Apparently, there was some sort of facility on the other side of the town, near the mine. He said the Environmental Protection Agency had turned the whole town into a Superfund site, closing it off from the rest of the world. They even rerouted the state road that connected Oldsburg to the two towns it was nestled between.
I walked out, feeling defeated. Katie and Darren were standing outside the car with their arms crossed. I guess I’d been in there for a while.
“Did ya fall in or something?”, teased Katie.
I laughed and proceeded to fill them in on our situation. Looked like we’d be heading home. They could tell I was bummed, but said we could go explore the place, even if it was just for one day. Even if we saw nothing, we’d have one last big adventure together.
We all agreed and the mood lightened a bit as we hopped back on the interstate. It was mid-afternoon when we pulled into the AmeriHost Inn parking lot in that first town off the highway. When we got inside, the clerk said we could get a room, but couldn’t check in until four, so we decided to grab some late lunch and hit the public library to see what we could find on Oldsburg.
After chowing down on some fried chicken, we walked across the street to the library. Much like the town, the library was small. I’m pretty sure it was actually a house at one point before being converted. Katie approached the librarian’s desk and asked if he had any records on Oldsburg. An older man with large black spectacles with a nametag reading “Dan” asked her a couple questions, and after she told him she was a geography student at a relatively large university in the state we were in, he obliged and led us back to the records room.
Dan let us be and we started searching. Most of the files related to Oldsburg were snippets of obituaries and business ads. It wasn’t until I saw the Sears coupon that I became intrigued. I wondered why that was there, so I flipped it over and saw a tiny, one paragraph blurb from what I believed to be a local newspaper.
“Assistance Available: Following last week’s incident in Oldsburg, assistance funds have been made available.”
That was it. Nothing about what actually happened, just a vague reference to an “incident.” Darren found a clipping of a groundbreaking ceremony for a chemical plant—presumably the one that caught fire. None of what we found really helped us figure out what happened, but did provide at least some context. Dan the librarian let us hold on to the clippings we found. He told us that nobody had really taken an interest in Oldsburg in quite some time and that he’d be happy to give them to us for our research project. Part of me felt bad that we had deceived him, but ultimately, we got what we’d come here for—information—even if it wasn’t much to go on.
We checked into the hotel and planned our now-15-mile-or-so drive to Oldsburg. I thought about sharing the land deed with the librarian the following morning, but decided against it since I thought it would raise more questions than I wanted to answer. Plus, I didn’t want the guy to think we were actually going there.
We looked at the map again to see where the state road curved and figured the second windy curve was where the new road was constructed. The whole road was curvy, but that’s where it seemed to start to take a detour through the forest in a wide C shape, as if it was constructed to go around something. Darren took the bed by the loud wall AC unit and Katie and I shared the bed closest to the door. We hit the road the next morning.
The drive was about what you’d expect. Full of absolutely nothing but asphalt and trees. There wasn’t a single side road or driveway after we got out of the town. After 15 minutes or so, we reached the big curve. There was a noticeable change in the pavement. It looked newer, darker where it began to curve. Since we hadn’t seen a single car since leaving the last town, we just stopped in the middle of the road and got out. It was strange, just being able to walk on an active roadway. Darren had already begun inspecting the asphalt when Katie and I heard a car in the distance. I yelled at Darren to get back to the Sable. Katie hopped back in the passenger seat and I moved the car off to the side of the road and put the hazard lights on. Right as Darren walked over to the passenger side and gave me a puzzled look, a white Crown Victoria with a Sheriff’s Office emblem came around the curve in front of us. It slowed to a crawl and the driver’s window rolled down to reveal a youngish-looking deputy.
“You folks lost?”, he asked, as I rolled down my window.
Before I could answer, Katie leaned over me to project her voice and said, “Yeah, we’re looking for…” and said the name of a pretty big city about 50 miles south.
“Young lady, you’re definitely not headed the right way,” he said in a concerned voice. He mentioned the name of the next town over. “It’s about ten miles away, and once you get there, you can take the highway the rest of the way,” he said.
She thanked him, and after he went on his way and was out of sight, we got back out of the car to continue investigating. It was at this point that I noticed an area in the woods that didn’t really match up with all the others. There weren’t as many trees in one specific area. Sure enough, after walking a few dozen feet off the road, I saw old chipping pavement peeking out from the weeds, grass, and soil.
“Hey guys!”, I yelled. “I think we’ve got something!”
“Well no shit,” said Darren enthusiastically as he bent over to inspect the cracking asphalt. In the distance, straight ahead, we could make out an overgrown fence. Katie said she’d pull the car back off the road and we could grab our gear. Darren and I watched Katie pull the car around and exchanged excited looks with each other. She opened the hatch and grabbed her pack. Darren and I grabbed our stuff, too, and we headed into the unknown.
Katie took out her bolt cutters and removed the lock. As the gate creaked open, we were greeted with more abandoned road, though it was more intact. It looked like they tried to grind up the road before the fence to hide it but this stretch in front of us hadn’t been messed with. It was just overgrown.
After an hour or so, the town fully came into view. It consisted of about a half dozen red brick buildings, with two side streets that held the majority of the town’s homes. The town center—if you could call it that—had abandoned businesses you‘d expect to see in old-town America. A hardware store, a diner, the civic center. There were about a dozen parking spaces between all the buildings, and filling every one of them was a car.
I peeked inside several of the abandoned cars, the stench of rotting seat material permeating from one with its window slightly rolled down. They were all locked. Some looked like they’d been there for a while, while others were seemingly new, including a couple late model 4x4s. I gave it no thought at the time. We stopped at an old picnic table in between two of the buildings that was surprisingly not fully overgrown, and ate the lunches we’d packed.
We finished our meals and kept walking until we came across Decker Street, the street where Uncle Jethro and Aunt Nellie’s old house was. I paused, looking down Decker, eyes glued to the dead end sign enveloped in kudzu, long since covered up. But I still remembered that sign, it was when I knew we’d arrived looking out the car window as a kid. I silently approached their house, which was about halfway down the small road. I knew Darren and Katie would probably follow me, so I didn’t say anything as I walked onto the porch. Although I didn’t tell them where exactly my Uncle Jethro lived, I’m sure they’d caught on by now.
Surprisingly, it was unlocked. As I entered, I was struck with a disgustingly sweet stench. I knew something in here was dead. As I covered my mouth with one arm, I used the other to shine my flashlight and went room to room. I found the source of the stench in the bathroom—a rotting possum that looked like it was melting into the tub. I vomited in my mouth a little bit, walked out, and closed the bathroom door. I entered the kitchen and noticed a deep stain on the otherwise light wood floor. Looking up, I saw a small hole in the ceiling along with some dried spatter. I knew that Aunt Nellie used Jethro’s Winchester to do the deed, but I never knew where. I guess it was right there. God, it hurt to see that.
I exited the house and exhaled, having found nothing of note except my possum friend and the gory reminder of my aunt, and walked back onto the porch. I saw Katie and Darren looking into an old Pinto in the driveway of a home across the street. I saw something white waving in the breeze attached to one of the posts holding up Jethro and Nellie’s porch roof. I looked closely as I stepped down off the porch and saw that it was crime scene tape, long since faded, the yellow decaying over the years just like the person it was put there for.
I walked over to Katie and Darren.
“Guys, look,” said Katie.
The car’s windows had clouded from years of disuse, but we could make out the silhouette of a rifle in the trunk of the hatchback alongside what looked like some form of identification. Katie had already tried the driver’s side handle and I tried the passenger side. Locked. After grabbing a paver from the home’s garden and chucking it through the rear window, he reached inside, carefully avoiding scraping his arm on the glass still dangling from the hatch, retrieving the ID and also grabbing the rifle.
“Dude,” I exclaimed. “What the hell?”
“Oh don’t be a prude, Daniel.” This comment came, surprisingly, from Katie. “It’s not like this thing’s gonna drive again, let alone move at all.”
Darren looked just as surprised as me by that comment. I knew nobody was coming back for it, but disturbing it just felt… wrong. A few seconds passed, and I opted not to respond just as Darren haphazardly dropped the magazine out of the rifle. He set the gun down and I picked it up. I wanted to see something. I pointed the rifle down and pulled back the charging handle, and sure enough, a round popped out. Whoever this belonged to was ready for something.
Katie read the full legal name of a woman off the identification card, which also said she was employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of Inspector General.
“So why the fuck was the army here?”, said Darren.
“It’s not the army, Darren,” said Katie. “It’s cops. Like military cops.”
“Okay, but my point still stands,” said Darren.
I interjected: “Guys, I think we should leave.”
“We just got here, dude,” said Darren. “Besides, don’t you want to find out what happened here?”, finished Katie.
“I did until a minute ago when we found the loaded gun,” I thought. It looked like I was outnumbered, but I had the keys. I didn’t know what went down here, and I didn’t really want to find out. I honestly thought we’d just see an abandoned town, check out the mine, take a few Polaroids, and leave. Besides, the elderly man at the interstate rest stop said the place was a Superfund site, and the EPA and FEMA being referenced in that newspaper clipping made it seem like it probably wasn’t safe to be here. Plus some government agent’s ID and weapon in an old car? It felt off.
“I’m going back. Something is really off here. I… I don’t know what it is but it feels like we’re not supposed to be here,” I said.
They weren’t budging—and they were pretty vocal about it. I won’t get into the details but some words were exchanged and I found myself walking back to the Sable. Alone. I wasn’t going to ditch them or anything, I said I’d be waiting for them in the car. As I crossed back through the fence, I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders, and I walked up to the car just as the sun began to set. I put my stuff in the front passenger seat, hopped behind the wheel, and leaned the seat back. I downed a YooHoo and some animal crackers and dozed off.
I woke up to the sound of tapping on my window and was startled by the sight of a bright flashlight and the deputy we’d met earlier in the day, this time without his sunglasses. His blue eyes stared at me and he looked dead serious. I rolled the window down and he said one word: “Gate.”
“What? What do you mean?”, I said.
“The gate. Is the goddamn fucking gate shut?”, he screamed.
“No, I…”, and as soon as the word no left my mouth, he sprinted back to his car and hopped on the radio and grabbed something. He then sprinted past me towards the gate. I had never seen someone run so fast in my entire life.
Ten minutes later, the deputy, now winded, walked back slowly. I immediately got out of the car and walked towards him, wanting an explanation. He responded by drawing his weapon and shooting me.
When I came to, I was staring up at buzzing yellow lights. As I tried to stand up, my body wouldn’t budge.
“It’s a sedative,” I heard a voice say very matter-of-factly. “You’re not going anywhere.”
A glasses-clad face came into view and looked down at me smugly. That’s when my blood became ice and it seemed like time itself slowed down. I felt like I was falling. It was the librarian.
“In 1966, the United States Army injected biological agents into Chicago and New York’s subway ventilation systems,” Dan monologued nonchalantly, “to test how people would… react,” he finished, as he flicked a syringe in his hand, a small drop of some dark liquid flying off the tip. “What we’ve done here is not so dissimilar, but we haven’t had any new subjects in quite some time.”
He paused, then continued. “Oh, don’t worry. Your friends are safe,” he said.
I began to writhe, but was almost immediately jabbed with the needle, and blacked out again.
I woke up face down on a concrete floor. It took me more than an hour to find the ability to stand. When I stood up, I was in a basement. Likely residential. Small. A speaker out of my range of vision crackled to life.
“You have been injected with an experimental cocktail containing Yersinia pestis. Previous tests have produced… less than desirable results. We believe this formulation will be effective,” said the voice. “This particular cocktail contains trace amounts of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and an agent developed to inhibit the limbic system of your brain. The potential capabilities of this cocktail are invaluable.”
Being an eighteen year old, I didn’t understand the disease names or what they did, but based on the other terminology being used, I knew it couldn’t be good. Almost as if he sensed my ignorance, the speaker crackled to life once more.
“Yersinia pestis,” the voice continued, “responsible for the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, is the Latin name for what you would call the bubonic plague. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or mad cow disease, causes, among other things, memory problems, coordination issues, and… changes in behavior. By inhibiting your limbic system from functioning properly, those behavioral changes can be enhanced. We will be monitoring you throughout testing. You will find a flashlight and one bottle of water next to the speaker to your right,” the voice ended, leaving me with nothing to hear but silence and the slow dripping of water through a hole in the floor above me.
I grabbed the bottle and flashlight and climbed the stairs slowly, stumbling several times before reaching the landing. I walked out of the house I had been dumped in and headed out onto the street. It seemed like it was still evening, but the sun’s position told me it was earlier than it had been when I was shot. I had no bullet wound or any stitches to indicate I’d been shot with an actual bullet, so I assumed I’d been tranquilized. After figuring out that I’d been out for nearly a day at least by this point, I wandered aimlessly down the unfamiliar street, which turned out to be Baker Street, directly parallel to Decker, until I found Katie.
She was laying in the middle of an alley connecting the two roads face down, bloodied, unmoving. I stumbled towards her while yelling her name. When I saw her, I nearly fell to my knees. She had been beaten savagely.
“KATIE, KATIE, KATIE!”, I screamed as I leaned over and began to shake her.
I flipped her on her side and sat on the ground next to her and saw a chunk of her head was just… gone. Then I noticed all the blood. I hadn’t really paid attention to the pool of blood around her when I saw her.
A hand grabbed me by the neck, pulling me and flinging me backwards ten feet. My back struck a fire hydrant and I yelled in pain.
Darren stood in front of me and approached me with intent.
“What are you doing?!”, I screamed.
The homicidal glare he gave me disappeared and he backed away, dropping the brick in his hand that was slowly dripping red and pink.
I screamed and ran as fast as I could. I ran for about a minute until I reached what I thought was the end of Baker Street, a place completely unfamiliar to me. I turned around and Darren was nowhere to be seen. And then I saw it. A large black and silver goliath of a structure. I knew instantly that this was the chemical plant. The photo in the newspaper clipping had the same road in the foreground.
I had begun to stumble as I trekked towards the small gravel path that twisted behind the plant. I naively hoped it would lead me out of there. I kept walking until I reached the end of it. In front of me was a small hill with an open tunnel jutting out. The mine. A bland concrete facade adorned the opening.
I walked into the tunnel, adorned with bright oval lights every ten feet on both sides for as far as the eye could see. The gray concrete walls gleamed, as though they were polished. I continued walking down the tunnel, water bottle and flashlight hanging out of my pant pockets. The flashlight kept clipping my inner thigh and I angrily swatted at it every time it rubbed against it. I remember yelling in frustration, grabbing it, and smashing it on the ground. In addition to the sudden violent outburst, I had begun having cold chills, too, and I could feel that the lymph nodes in my neck had swollen severely.
I heard a low patter behind me, and then it got louder. And louder. I turned around and I could make out a humanoid silhouette sprinting towards me from the entrance of the tunnel. I let out an uncontrolled primal scream and darted further down the corridor before reaching a set of large, white metal doors. I tripped several times as I scrambled towards what I hoped was salvation. I was covered in scrapes from sliding my knees across the jagged concrete floor but I didn’t care.
I could hear multiple locks clicking open on the other side of the door. A clean-shaven man in a lab coat with a disgusting grin plastered on his face opened the door. He stepped out of the way and another man who was hidden behind him jabbed me with a syringe.
“David?”, I heard a man say in a gruff voice.
My ears were ringing and my vision slowly returned. I was looking up at a ghost. Once my eyes adjusted to the humming lights, I noticed it was a man, covered in bandages. When I looked at his face, the only part of his body not covered by the bandages, I saw the eyes of my Uncle Jethro. He looked down at me before pointing across the room. I looked up and saw we were in a cell. While still laying down, I lifted my head and peered towards where Jethro’s finger was aimed. I peered into a cell across the hallway and faced two similarly bandaged people.
Jethro helped me up and I faced those in the cell across from me as people began to speak and I heard other voices from down the corridor. In total, there were seven bandaged people, including Jethro. A woman, who sounded like she was in the cell right next to ours, spoke. I couldn’t see her, but my heart skipped a beat.
“It’s okay, my name is Addie.”
“Addison Thompson,” I said.
I heard a gasp. She seemed shocked. She asked me how I knew her last name, and I told her that my friends and I had found her identification and weapon.
“Why… I… don’t get it,” I said, turning to Jethro. “This is impossible.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Jethro. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Jethro and Addie both explained to me that they were federal agents. Jethro was actually an undercover FBI agent, not a foreman, tasked with investigating the disappearances of undocumented people in the area, while Addie was tasked with investigating expense discrepancies related to a facility. This facility. As it turns out, the entire town’s population of around 100 people had consisted solely of federal employees and their families. The “salt mine” was just a front.
They were captured after a group of about a dozen scientists and protective officers loyal to Dan—whose real name I learned was Dr. Alistair Sletch, a fittingly assholey-sounding name—went rogue after being confronted by Addie, Jethro, and another agent assigned to the case who were posing as research assistants to maintain their cover. By this time, the only residents left in the town were Sletch’s loyalists, investigators on their case, and essential staff. The rest had already been transferred out due to the government’s view of the facility as a liability by that point. A brief firefight took place at the chemical plant, which was actually a storage facility for experimental biological weapons Sletch and his staff had produced, and one of the tanks was damaged. Fortunately nothing was in it.
Sletch then threatened to use the weapons he had created against the U.S. Government now that the jig was up. They knew he was experimenting with weapons, but on paper, the facility was only (only being relative, of course) being used to store and experiment with VX.
The government, threatened with retaliation by Sletch that could’ve wiped out the entire state, reached a deal with him. As part of the deal, the existence of the facility would be scrubbed from the public record, which was easy to do since you had to have a reason to go there in the first place, and anyone on the ground in Oldsburg who knew about what was truly taking place and wasn’t on Sletch’s payroll would be handed over to him for experimentation. Oldsburg was sealed off from the outside world, yet remained accessible, with Sletch being granted immunity from prosecution and receiving shipments of food, water, supplies, and… people. Sletch gladly accepted. In turn, the government requested that he hand over the majority of the weapons he had made and that he create new weapons, to which he gladly obliged. Those who were left behind were turned into human guinea pigs. A total of six federal employees and their families were affected, including Jethro and Addie.
I learned later, that the government spun various lies about their disappearances, and their families were fed bullshit stories on how they either died or quit and disappeared, all of them hauntingly believable. It was a car accident for Addie and, as I already knew, an overdose for Jethro. Both closed casket, since, of course, they weren’t actually dead. Something tells me that Aunt Nellie may not have killed herself at all.
Possibly the most horrifying aspect was that the government continued providing subjects to Sletch, typically undocumented people, up until a few years prior to my friends and I’s little road trip. I don’t know how many people entered that facility and never left, but Jethro estimated hundreds, in addition to the cases of dozens of missing people he was investigating.
The effects of the cocktail had been gradually wearing off as I laid on the floor of the cell and I felt more like myself again. About an hour later, we heard multiple loud bangs from somewhere in the facility. A couple minutes later, two burly men entered the hallway from a door to my left. One of the men drew a sidearm from a holster and shot the people in the cell across from us. The cell containing Jethro and I opened and the second man entered. He reached into his waistband and then fell to the ground, his head flailing from the force of the bullet that entered it. The second man had already murdered the people in the next cell over and he too fell over after being shot in the chest.
Darren walked past our open cell, eyes ahead, his jacket torn and face bloodied, red streaks visible in his short blonde hair. He fired one more shot into each of the guards’ heads. It was Addie’s M16, now with a new-looking magazine inserted into it. Addie, Jethro, a man whose name I never learned, but whose face would later appear on NamUs, and I slowly exited our cells. Looking closely, Darren was twitching, finger still on the trigger. Addie walked forward towards Darren, presumably to tell him that it was okay now, when he stepped back and shot her in the throat. Jethro moved in front of me as Darren turned the rifle towards us as Addie fell to the floor, her body making a wet, choking sound. Jethro charged him and I ran. I ran through the open door that Darren had come through and past empty offices and dead men and women in red-stained lab coats. I heard three more shots as I kept running. I ran until I approached a ladder at the end of the hall with an exit sign illuminated above it and began climbing. I emerged into a white office with a desk in the corner. Seated in a dark purple chair was Sletch. He seemed pleased, with a slight, content smile on his face.
“Looks like the cocktail was successful. Not on you. Your friend. Darren.”
I slowly approached him as he withdrew a revolver from a drawer in his desk and pointed it at me. I froze.
“You stand. I speak,” he said.
“I was disturbed by the manner of your arrival but I’m pleased that you and your friends have done a wonderful service to the U.S. Government. The cocktail we’ve produced will be very effective in eliminating threats to our nation. You may go now,” he said.
He gestured to a door to my left. I approached it, keeping my eyes on him the whole time, backing into the door and opening it slowly.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “The injection you received when you entered the facility below us was an antidote. You will not die of the plague or mad cow disease. We’re glad you stopped by, I hope you appreciated our invitation, though we weren’t expecting any… additional visitors. Hope you had fun catching up with your uncle.”
I stared at him blankly, continuing backwards out the door. Once it had fully closed, I turned around and tripped into a shelf. It was dark outside and I stumbled out the front door, a rusty bell announcing my exit. I eventually made it back to the road, the real road, guided by moonlight. The Sable was there and the keys were on the hood. The sheriff’s deputy who shot me walked out from behind a tree, shining his flashlight at me and I stopped. He dramatically gestured his hands towards the keys, beckoning me to take them.
“Get out of here, kid,” he yelled.
I cautiously approach, grabbed the keys, and got the fuck out of there, leaving the deputy in the rearview mirror.
I drove for over an hour, hands white from gripping the steering wheel, tears clouding my vision. My friends were probably dead. Katie definitely was. My uncle, who I thought was dead, is now probably dead. Everybody was dead. After a few more miles, I saw a line of police cars blocking the interstate. I slowed down and stopped behind a tractor trailer and several other cars. A state trooper drove his vehicle behind mine. Then, everything happened in an instant. I was blinded by dozens of flashlights, and a group of police officers, the lead one holding a shield in one hand and a pistol in the other, approached me as a PA system told me to put the car in park and put my hands up. I was pulled out the driver’s side window of the car after they smashed it in, and I was placed in cuffs.
Everything that happened next was a blur. Long story short, I was accused of luring my friends to a remote area and killing them. The local sheriff’s office had provided a BOLO to the state police and other area law enforcement agencies on me and my vehicle. I’m sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that the deputy we’d met had been the one to call it in.
The bodies of Darren and Katie were found in a wooded area 50 miles away from Oldsburg, burned. The equipment I had brought with me and that had been taken from me when I was tranquilized was found near their bodies, covered in my fingerprints. My parents died in a mysterious house fire that same day, too. With no one to testify in my defense, the trial was short, but I maintained my innocence until my release. A lot has changed since I was imprisoned, and while I’ve spent the last few years trying to bring true justice to my friends, I’ve hit a dead end.
So, this is my Hail Mary. I’ve kept this to myself for so long but I will not live in fear any more. I want people to know the truth. I think it’s still happening. That area still has one of the highest concentrations of Jane and John Does in the United States.
This morning as I was making breakfast, I saw two cars park at the end of my driveway. I live at the end of a dirt road and my house is the only one on it. It’s dark out now and they’re still there. On the news tonight, I saw a small piece about medicine being sent overseas to countries that the United States is not necessarily on friendly terms with. The color of the liquid inside is the exact same as what was injected into me all those years ago.
I saw flashlights in the woods behind my house a couple minutes ago, and as a convicted felon, I’m not able to possess a firearm, not that I would’ve stood much of a chance alone anyways. I fear that I am not long for this world, but even moreso, I fear they will bring me back to that place. To hell with anonymity, if you do not hear from me again, know this: I, Daniel Oliver Simmons did not murder my friends, and if you ever receive a strange piece of mail directing you to a town that you can’t confirm the existence of, burn it.