I work for the department of parks and wildlife in my state. Something is very wrong here
I managed to land this job a few months back. I was excited; it would be my first full time job, and half of the job is being out in nature. Who wouldn’t love getting to take daily hikes on the government’s dollar?
When I started working here, we began getting shipments of dozens of signs and instructions from HQ to put them up around the local fishing ponds. They read “Catch and release only. Do not eat the fish.” This struck me as odd. I have lived in this area for my entire life, and signs like these have never been posted. These ponds have always been available for catch and consume, considering the fisherman has a license. I asked my supervisor about them, and she shrugged it off. The Air Force and Army bases dump their waste or leftover chemicals in the water sometimes by accident. She guessed that this time they had dumped a bit more, and it had to be cleaned up by Waste Management or Park Ops. That takes time though.
So we went on posting the signs.
A couple days later, we got a call about a man down by the ponds. He was screaming, waving a small gutting knife, and just really freaking people out. It’s normal, sad to say. Drug usage in this area is quite high, so we get calls like this every once in awhile. Usually some junkie strung out, half way to overdosing. I was sent down with two bigger guys from Park Ops to assess and handle the situation.
When I got there, it was the smell that hit me first. It stunk like death. Like the kind of death where dozens of flies swarm to get a piece of the rotting body that’s been left out for weeks. The type of death where the mangled flesh is almost unidentifiable from decay. It smelled like old blood and rust. We walked around the pond to see families quickly escorting their children away, seeking refuge in their cars. That’s when we saw the guy. He was older, had a mangey beard and one of those trucker hats that’s continuously stained, and he had no shoes. I looked to his feet only to see a matted pile of flesh covered in a mixture of thick layers of dried mud and blood. A fish hook was imbedded into the left one. He had a gutted fish in one of his hands. By gutted, I mean the guts were currently hanging out of the fish, and it seemed like they had bite marks. There was a small ring of red around his mouth. It was an awful sight, but that’s how it is with junkies here. They’re always in bad shape. We couldn’t see the knife described in the call.
We began walking over, and he must have heard us. His head snapped a good 90° towards us, and he stayed motionless, his wide, almost lifeless eyes peering into us, studying us as if we were his prey. His eyes went down from mine onto my chest, and he gave a grim smile, each of his jagged, red teeth sticking out like daggers. I followed his eyes down. He was looking at the park insignia embroidered onto our work shirts. He looked back up, and starting walking towards us. He stopped when he was mere feet away and was thrown into what seemed to be histerically laughing, beating himself with his hand and the corpse of the fish, almost clawing at his torso, like he was trying to get something out of him. We ran. All three of us ran the whole five miles back to the info center. The cops found the guy later after we called. He killed himself. They said gutted himself like a fish.
The next few weeks, incidents like this continued. Same stories. People, seemingly sober, going crazy and cutting themselves, whether they were successful in killing themselves or not. The military took on security in shifts at the pond. Everyone found it weird. They usually don’t involve themselves so heavily in the community. None of us were sent there to handle incidents again. They closed the ponds to the public. Something was in the water, in the fish too. Something the military wasn’t telling us.
The fish began to wash up on the banks of the pond. You could see, and frankly smell, that much from outside the newly instated perimeter. They came up in droves and lay on the shores for a day until they were loaded into big, tan trucks marked with Army insignias. Then came the birds. They began falling straight out of the air like some plague. All over the trails. We were ordered to set up small perimeters, containment areas really, around the bodies until government workers could come to dispose of them. My coworker Alex didn’t. He said he was going to take care of it himself. It was stupid to close the whole trail because of one little dead bird. We saw the trucks pull up shortly after he left to handle it. He hasn’t showed up for his shift in the last three days. My supervisor said that his position was terminated. My other coworkers and I tried calling, texting, and showing up at his house, but it’s all radio silence. His newspapers are piled up on the door. His front porch light has been on since he disappeared according to the neighbors. Everything about him was wiped from Kronos (the employee website the parks use). His account usually would have shown up as inactive if he had been fired. It’s like they scrubbed him out from time itself.
They put something in the water. I know it. Today, I’m going to the pond. I’m going to find out what’s in there. I’m going to find Alex. I’m going to find out what the hell is happening here. I need to know what they put in the water.