Series By: deathfox919
It’s been a hot minute since I posted, but good God do I have something to tell you guys.
After I posted my update last Saturday at around noon, I went down to the grocery store where low and behold, I saw Bob with my own two eyes. Victoria and Lily were also there, and James was supposedly coming down to.
“Bob, what the fuck are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Well, I think I should wait until James gets here so I can explain it to him as well,” Bob told me.
“And what about Katie and Oz?” Victoria asked.
“I ran into Katie last night and told her already, and Oz got lost in one of those Snake Forts again,” Bob explained, “I only know that because I saw him outside of it and...well, you guys remember what happened last time.”
I’ll explain the Snake Forts later.
We barely had a moment to think about what Bob told us before James came into the store and was shocked just like I was to see our supposedly dead boss standing before us, looking more lively than he had in the past few months.
“Well, I guess there’s no point in waiting for the agents to get here. They already know,” Bob said, avoiding eye contact with any of us.
“So the guys who were here yesterday are involved?” Victoria asked, “Why the Hell doesn’t that surprise me?”
What none of us knew is that they wouldn’t be here for a long time.
Krasinski and one of the men who took James to the store (by force) on Friday stayed in a house on Mulberry Lane on Friday night, and forgot to follow the code of conduct everyone in this town knows pretty goddamn well. For someone who is supposedly analyzing the anomalies of this town, they weren’t doing a very good job at it. I guess that’s why Davis and Moore were late coming to the store on Saturday afternoon.
“A few months ago, I started feeling really under the weather. I told everyone here that I had pneumonia, but that was not the case.” He bowed his head for a moment. “I remember driving along the old dirt road by Chester’s Garage and having a coughing fit. I pulled over and tried to give myself a moment to breathe, and then I don’t remember anything until Thursday night.” He scratched his temple. “I was standing in the middle of the field that was right next to that dirt road. I looked at the condominiums across the street and they all looked dead. Then I wandered back towards town and came across Davis, and now I’m here.”
I paused. Things were starting to make a bit of sense now. “So...is that why we were all huddled up in that bunker last night?”
“Davis said something about an artificial being roaming the woods around the quarry, so I don’t think so,” James informed me.
“When did you talk to him?” I asked.
“Like three hours ago, when he came through to make sure the grocery store was still shut down. He said, ‘We can’t take any chances.’”
I paused again. Victoria kept asking Bob questions, but I was more focused on the fact that all of my rational thoughts had just imploded and now I was stuck in this twisted mystery. Nothing here really added up.
We waited for another two hours before Davis showed up. He was alone as Langdon, Moore, and the other men were still cleaning up the mess made by Mulberry Lane. The house they stayed in would be torn down a day later, due to something awful in the basement. I have no idea what they found, but it can’t be good.
We all grilled him about being late and what the fuck was happening with Bob, naturally, and he didn’t have a much better explanation than Bob.
“From what I can tell, it seems he contracted one of the viruses we keep in the basement of the E-Z Mart. My best guess would be Homestrux, an ancient virus we found on a dig in New Mexico. It causes a coma that lasts for anywhere from two to eight months and has flu like symptoms leading up to the coma.” He paused. I could see sweat beads breaking out on his forehead. “The problem is this; we don’t know how it got out. This also still doesn’t explain how the fake Bob was here for so long and why we found his remains in the baseball diamond.”
That’s really all we got from Davis.
As of right now, Bob is still legally dead. We have no idea what to expect about the other eight people who were found to be dead in the baseball diamond.
Naturally, when it comes to this town, the story doesn’t end there.
Sunday went by without incident. All I really did was lounge in my apartment and begin looking for other jobs as I knew the grocery store wouldn’t be open for a long time and I’d end up being evicted soon enough.
However, this town had a sick April Fool’s joke waiting for all of us.
I woke up yesterday morning to about ten different texts and two voicemails. I have the tendency to sleep like the dead once I actually manage to get comfortable, which is something everyone hates. I even tried to make my ringtone a Slipknot song so that I would actually wake up, but evidently that doesn’t work either.
To sum it all up, the house that the agents tore down on Mulberry Street had a tunnel running underneath the ground. Smoke was coming out of it and when Moore entered he could see a faint orange glow far ahead. Lily called me not even five minutes after I had woke up and demanded that I get my ass down there.
Of course, I obliged.
When I arrived at the scene, I saw that Langdon and one of the other agents that I had seen with James on Friday were inside one of the black vans fiddling with equipment. Langdon looked up for a brief moment and made eye contact with me. I could’ve sworn that there was fear swirling around in his eyes.
He jumped out of the van and ran over to me. “Mark! I need you to go over to the house for a second. Stand over by Victoria and Lily.”
Again, I obliged. I walked across the lawn and over towards the hole in the ground that had formed when the house was demolished.
He went back into the van and closed the door this time. It was maybe ten minutes later that he and the other man came out, looking absolutely petrified. In the meantime, Moore was setting up a large canopy tent and Davis was setting up two tables with a multitude of laptops and other pieces of advanced technology.
“What do you think is going on?” Victoria asked me.
“I have no idea, but if these guys know about everything that goes on in this town, and they’re scared, then I think we’re going to be shitting our pants at whatever they find,” I told her.
Langdon came over to us. “You’re all free to go back to your homes, I think we got what we need.”
I couldn’t understand what the fuck was going on. I went back home and watched more Netflix, as I had all the time in the world apparently. But I never really watched it. I kept thinking about how weird the events of the past day had been.
What had they found under the house?
I knew it couldn’t be the Snake Fort Oz wandered into. Snake Forts look like large piles of sticks that the hyper-intelligent snakes that live in our woods build in order to have their offspring. They usually look similar to piles of hay, but they have been known to create tunnels as well. Oz got stuck in one of those tunnels before, and the snakes were fairly infuriated.
Something else was rubbing me the wrong way. I knew that the bobbing head hadn’t gotten into my apartment, as I had locked everything tight and you would be able to sense the stench of death before you even entered the building. Either way, I spent the rest of my day in a haze thinking about it.
Well, when I woke up this morning it finally dawned on me what was wrong, and why the town felt so empty.
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