Series By: deathfox919
Well, I am back. It’s only been two days since I last posted, but a lot of shit has changed. Now my town is on the brink of not existing at all.
I woke up Tuesday morning and realized that what had been bugging me was the seeming lack of other people in my town. Hell, when I came back to my apartment building the day before it didn’t seem like anyone else was there.
Well, that’s because the town population had dropped from 2,407 down to 407.
I remember driving down main street and passing the small diner, the cafe, the town hall, the library, the grocery store, and every other building you can imagine a small east coast town having. There was no sign of life anywhere. In all that time, I saw the old couple that owned the cafe on their deck and Freddy Nixon smoking marijuana in his beaten Chevrolet Chevelle.
On my way back to my house, I passed a horribly mutilated body sitting on the side of Garland Way towards the turn off to Mulberry Lane. Two crows were picking away at the man’s intestines through the grotesque wound in his stomach. I didn’t recognize the man.
Once I got back to my apartment, I heard Miss Johnston’s beagle whimpering from behind her apartment door. I figured that if I still heard him whimpering in a couple hours, I would take in the poor pup. For some reason, it was a lot colder than the past couple days. On Monday it had been almost sixty degrees, but Tuesday felt like it was maybe forty-five degrees at most.
Not five minutes after I came back home, Davis and Langdon had come by and informed me of the situation. I knew most of the town was gone, but they told me only four hundred and seven people were left. Two thousand people managed to vanish into thin air over the past twenty four hours. A couple of their agents had vanished too, one of them being Moore.
After looking through the confirmed missing in the town, we found out that Victoria, James, and Katie had all disappeared. We couldn’t tell with Oz just yet, he could still be in the Snake Fort. Last time, he was lost in there for almost five days, but he’d managed to make friends with most of the snakes.
Now we were crossing into dangerous territory. Something of this extent had never happened in the strange history of this town. This had never happened...well ever.
I talked with Davis over some scotch that afternoon about this, about how odd and disastrous this really was.
“I’ve been with this company for eleven years now and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he began. He took a massive swig of his scotch and polished off the entire glass before pouring himself some more. “Hell, I bet none of this agency has. We’ve been around since 1805, yet I guarantee that none of them would’ve seen the day where two thousand people just fell off the face of the Earth.”
“You really think that this is the weirdest thing that’s happened in your agency’s history?” I asked him as I fiddled with my glass, mindlessly.
“Oh I know it,” he said timidly, “We’ve seen a lot of shit over the years. Hell, I knew a guy who once saw a twenty foot tall werewolf-ish monster climb Mount Rushmore before a chopper shot it down on top of Jefferson’s head. I guarantee you he’d be shitting himself if we put him in this situation.”
“There is no way that this happened,” I told him, scoffing at his tale of a giant werewolf climbing Mount Rushmore like something out of the movie Rampage.
“Remember back in 2008 when the news reported that some of the heads on Mount Rushmore needed extensive maintenance?” he asked me, “They were repairing the claw marks.”
I didn’t know what to say. Luckily for me, Davis continued talking.
“We’ve known how to fix every situation to date, except for this one. I am completely stuck on how this situation is going to be resolved,” he informed me as he threw back even more whiskey.
I looked over at Langdon, who was reading a novel entitled Penpal. “Whatcha reading?” I asked him.
“A novel about a kid who keeps receiving letters from a creepy stranger,” he told me, “It’s pretty decent, and very well thought out.”
“How do you feel about this shitshow?” I asked him.
“I think that we’re stuck in a situation we can’t fix,” he sighed, “I think that if we try, we will only make things worse. I think your town is in a great matter of trouble and that the four hundred people left alive should be cautious over the next few weeks.”
“So...you think this shit can’t be fixed?” I asked him. I finally took a gulp of the smooth scotch that Davis had brought over. It was incredible, but it wasn’t a thought that stayed on my mind for very long.
“I think that we’re approaching an impasse,” Langdon told me. He put down his book and stood up now. “Yesterday, when we had you and your co-workers stand in front of the hole, we realized that none of you could be seen on any of the monitors. We don’t know what exactly is happening at the site, but we know it’s very dangerous and that this level of a threat has never been seen in this agency’s history.”
“So basically, because this hole showed up underneath one of the houses on Mulberry Street, about eighty or ninety percent of this town disappears into fucking thin air?” I asked in complete disbelief.
“I know that this must be hard to hear Mark, but I assure you that we’re trying to figure out what is going on as fast as possible,” he assuaged.
“No you’re not!” I barked. Even I didn’t expect that, but nonetheless, it happened. “Davis is sitting at my kitchen counter getting plastered off of the best goddamn scotch I’ve ever had and you’re reading a fucking book!”
“Look, every other agent besides Watson is at the site right now trying to figure out if anything else is due to come our way,” Langdon assured me.
“Who is the shit is Watson!?” I asked, “And why in the everloving fuck isn’t he helping out to?”
“He is talking to Lily right now, because you and her are the only ones left in this town that work at that goddamn grocery store,” he said, clearly more irritated now, “All of the others are missing, even fucking Bob who popped up just a few days ago!”
Davis poured himself yet another glass of scotch in the midst of my argument with Langdon. I’m positive he wasn’t even phased by what was going on.
“Well, then why are you here?” I asked, “Why are you in my apartment? And why the fuck is Watson with Lily?”
“We were checking in on you two, but clearly you have it covered on your own!” Langdon turned to Davis and said, “Let’s go try and save this town before we all end up descending straight down to Hell.”
Davis rose to his feet and told me the scotch was mine. I’d end up finishing the entire bottle within the night.
As Langdon walked out, he turned back to me and said, “You know, you’re lucky you don’t share the town’s name in your Reddit posts or the town’s population would drop by one more person. Believe me, we don’t need that.”
The two of them left and I just stood there alone in my apartment. I didn’t move or speak and I barely breathed the whole damn time. Eventually, I heard the faint whimpering of Miss Johnston’s beagle and remembered that six hours had passed since I promised myself I’d go check on the poor thing. I went down to the landlord’s place and eventually found the key to her apartment. The dog raced out to greet me and I gladly gave it a belly rub before I took it back to my apartment and gave it a little bit of sliced turkey from my fridge and some water in a small tupperware container.
Later that day I went back to Miss Johnston’s apartment and grabbed the beagle’s dog bed, food and water bowl, and his collar to reveal his name was Eddy. He didn’t even bother with the dog bed, he snuggled with me to sleep that night.
Yesterday wasn’t much of anything, just me sitting around in a haze of depression mixed with disbelief over the fact that most of the people I knew were probably dead and that I was stuck in a situation where there was nothing I could do except wait for the agents to come up with a plan.
My mother and father are still alive and my sister moved to Annapolis about two weeks before the vans even showed up, so at least that’s a plus.
Now, we’re here.
And now that I’ve typed out just how helpless I’ve felt, I’m going to go try and fix this situation. Fuck waiting around for the agents to solve the puzzle, I’ve lived in this town longer than most of them have known it’s existed.
I hope to update you again soon. If I don’t update within a week, then I guess I should’ve stayed home with Eddy.
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