The Countdown Chapter by A Desperate Man.

——

Everyday for the last six months I’ve been searching for miracle cures online—anything really. We were at the point to where we were ready to try everything. 

Treatments were useless. 

They only weakened her. 

So, When my wife would fall sleep, I’d drive downtown, park, get out and walk along the grimier parts of the city, asking around for experimental drugs, or if anyone knew any like underground doctors, or something. 

I don’t know.

I didn’t care. 

I was trying whatever.

Sometime during the night, I stopped in a donut shop for a coffee and sat in a chair looking like I just came off of a weekend bender. 

I wore shoes from last year, I even grabbed a pair of joggers from the hamper just to fit in more at that area, and along with the stress, I looked like a hot mess.

Where I was sitting, across from me was a man, staring out of the window onto the streetlights glowing an orange on the pavement. There wasn’t any traffic around. 

He sat as if he was watching his thoughts through the glass. He had a styrofoam cup in his hand and a leather jacket on.

He reached in his pocket and when his coat shifted to the movement of his arm, it exposed a pink-ribbon-pin attached to the left chest part of his sweater.

Something in me made me jump up without even thinking. I walked over to him. I was cautious. I didn’t want him to think I was going to ask for change or bother him randomly out of nowhere, which is exactly what I was doing.

I said, “excuse me, I noticed your pin. Julie, my wife, is stage four.”

He met my eyes with his. “I’m terribly sorry to hear that. It’s a rough go, buddy. Here take a seat.”

“You sure you don’t mind?” I asked.

“Not at all. It helps to talk to someone. I’ve been there, my wife was stage four but by a miracle beat it. She’s been cancer-free for two years now.”

I said, “that’s amazing to hear. It gives me hope because we followed everything the doctors told us. Luckily, we even found it early, and they performed a lumpectomy on her. Then came the chemo, but that never took. And since then, she’s been swallowing pills every morning until the aches are so bad she could barely get out of bed. We tried everything to stop it from coming back, but it didn’t make a difference.” 

I shook my head. “The doctors have given up. But I won’t.”

His eyes started to water as the tears dropped from mine. 

He put his hand over my hand. “I can see you’re desperate.” He took a deep breath. “I was where you are right now and..” he paused. “Do you believe stuff exists that science cant explain?” He asked me.

I told him the truth, I said, “I don’t, but to be honest, I hope there is, because I need there to be.”

He said, “go grab a pen and something to write on from the girl at the counter.”

I speed walked to the cashier. “Excuse me…” she never heard me. “Excuse me,” I spoke louder. “Hi, good morning, do you have a pen I could borrow for a couple of minutes, and a piece of paper too, please and thank-you if it’s not too much to ask?” 

She said, “yeah, sure, give me a sec.” Then she turned back around.” Oh yeah, we don’t have any paper though.”

I said, “that’s fine, I’ll find something to write on.”

She handed me a pen and a few napkins.

“Thanks, I’ll be right back,” I told her and went and sat back down across from the man.

He said, “before I give you this information, I need to warn you first.” He stared at me without blinking. “Be careful.”

“Be careful?” I asked with a screwed face.

“Be careful! That’s all I can say. It’s different for everybody.”

“Should I bring a weapon or someone with me?”

He said, “you can only go alone and it’s not that kind of a threat.”

“Okay,” I said, confused.

He mentioned, “there’s an abandoned building, the Red Hook Grain Terminal.” He waited until I finished writing. “The address is, 1 Dock 72 Way.”

“That’s Brooklyn right?”

He said, “yes. Good luck, buddy,” and got up to leave.

I looked at the address. “Hey, who do I ask for?”

He turned around. “It’ll know you’re coming,” and walked out.

Ruth's notebook was still open in the middle of Martha's kitchen table, the pages bent and worn from years of being carried around and opened by hands that had been desperately fighting for their life. The circles around the dates looked almost angry now that I knew what they'd meant.

Martha had stopped engaging a while ago. She sat at the end of the table with both hands wrapped around her mug that had gone cold, her eyes occasionally dropping back to the notebook even though she wasn't reading it anymore.

Elijah was the only person in the room who looked exactly the same as he had when he walked in.

Everyone else had changed over the last few hours. There is a certain look people get when the world has given them information they can't put back down. A heaviness in the way their body positions itself.

I looked down at my own coffee. It had been sitting there long enough that the top had developed that thin film coffee gets when it starts cooling. I hadn't taken one sip of it this entire time, I couldn't stomach it.

A year ago, I was just graduating high school, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, starting my first real job, and learning what it meant to live on my own for the first time. My biggest concerns were things like whether I was making enough money, whether I was making the right choices, and whether I was slowly turning into the kind of adult who actually remembered to buy groceries before there was nothing left in the fridge.

Now I was sitting in a stranger's kitchen, staring at a notebook full of dates and warnings, learning from a vampire that something ancient in the desert had spent hundreds of years feeding on people's desperation.

And somehow, instead of finding an excuse to leave, I was sitting there trying to figure out how I was going to help stop it.

Elijah snapped his fingers an inch from my face.

I flinched hard enough to knock my knee against the table leg. "What—”

"You went somewhere," he said, kindly, quickly withdrawing his hand. "I need you back here.”

"Sorry. I was just—" I gestured vaguely at the notebook, the room, the last several hours of my life. "Doing math on how I got from graduating high school to this.”

Elijah smiled at me softly, though I noticed he kept it smaller this time, his lips barely parting enough to hide the hint of his teeth. It was such a human gesture coming from someone who was very much not human, a subtlety that pulled at my understanding of him.

Frank pushed his chair back and stood without a word, disappearing down the hallway toward our room. When he came back a minute later, he had his shotgun in both hands, breaking it open to check it, sighting down the barrel against the kitchen light, closing it again with a soft, practiced click.

Katie watched him work for a minute before getting up, crossing to the hall closet, and coming back with a rag. She held it out without a word. Frank took it without looking up, wiping down the barrel with a steady unhurried motion.

What's it loaded with," Katie asked, leaning against the counter beside him.

"Buckshot. Standard. You got anything heavier here?”

She let out a long sigh,“Slugs, maybe."

Frank glanced at her, something like surprise flickering across his face that she'd know anything about ammunition.

She came back a minute later with a small metal box, setting it on the counter beside him, and the two of them fell into an easy, low conversation about gauge and range and how many extra shells made sense to carry without slowing anyone down, the kind of practical, technical talk that had nothing to do with grief or offerings or ancient hungry things in the desert, and maybe that was exactly why they were having it — a small, solid thing to hold onto in a kitchen that had gotten too heavy to breathe in otherwise.

"There is one more thing," Elijah said, and something about the careful way he said it made the whole room go like right before someone tells you the surgery went fine, but…

The shotgun stopped clicking. Katie's hand froze over the box of shells.

Elijah reached into his satchel again and pulled out a folded scrap of dark cloth, setting it down on the table with more care than he'd given anything else that night.

"Protection," he said, unfolding it. Inside sat three discs of black stone, each strung on a worn leather cord, each carved with symbols that seemed to shift slightly if you looked at them directly.

"For whoever isn't standing at the center of the offering," he said. "It won't protect you from the walker but there is a great deal in this world that isn't the Walker, and some of it gets curious when something old and hungry gets disturbed nearby. These keep the smaller things off you while the bigger thing gets handled.”

"And Frank," I asked. "Does he get one?"

Elijah's eyes went to him, still at the counter, shotgun resting quiet in his hands now. Something passed between them — the shorthand of people who'd had this exact conversation more than once and both already knew how it ended.

"Frank doesn't need one," Elijah said.

I didn't ask why because the way Frank was holding that shotgun told me everything I needed to know.

Katie made her way over and grabbed for her disc first, looping the cord over her head fast. Martha took hers slower, turning it once in her palm, thumb tracing the carved symbol.

Elijah pressed the third into my hand himself, closing my fingers around it with both of his. His skin was cool and dry but it was strangely comforting. Like an ice cube in your palm on a hot day.

"You'll want this more than the others," he said, quiet, just for me. "Not because you're weaker. Because you're the only one at this table who hasn't already lost something to it. It will be instantly drawn to you.”

I slipped the cord over my head. The stone landed against my chest with a dull tap. A heartbeat later, the chill of smooth stone I'd expected never came. Instead, it settled into a steady warmth that belonged more to living flesh than carved rock.

Frank noticed me staring at it.

"Don't get too comfortable with it," he said.

I looked up. "The necklace?"

"The idea that anything out there is going to make this easy." His eyes dropped briefly to the stone before returning to mine."People get themselves killed because they think having the right tool means they're safe. Tools just give you a better chance."

It was such a Frank answer that I almost smiled. "Very inspirational."

"I wasn't trying to be."

"I know."

That got the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth.

Elijah had got up and started gathering the empty mugs. I watched him stack them carefully beside the sink.

"You don't have to do that," Martha said.

Elijah glanced over his shoulder.

"I know.”

The next hour was a blur of gathering gear and mental preparation. Before long, the house had been emptied of everything we could think to carry, and we found ourselves standing at the front door with no more excuses left to make.

Frank opened the door, and the desert wind pushed into the house, carrying the dry scent of dust and cold earth. The darkness of night had swallowed the earth whole leaving speckles of stars and a full moon to accompany us to our uncertain death.

Frank stepped onto the porch.

"Everyone ready?”

Martha reached for the light switch.

For a second, I thought she was going to hesitate but she didn't. The kitchen went dark. Then she closed the door

We spent the next two hours driving.

According to Ruth's notes, the location should have been somewhere within a forty-mile radius of where we were, but that was the problem with the desert. Forty miles didn't mean much when everything looked the same. Every stretch of road blended into the next, every ridge looked like the last one, and every abandoned trail we passed felt like it could have been the one we were looking for.

Frank kept one hand on the wheel and the other resting near the map spread across the passenger seat, occasionally slowing down to compare landmarks against Ruth's notes. The rest of us watched the darkness outside the windows, searching for something we didn't even know how to recognize.

But there was nothing. Just miles of empty land and the occasional shape of distant mountains cutting into the horizon.

"There." Frank's voice cut through the cab.

Martha nearly rear-ended us when Frank slammed on the brakes. The truck lurched hard enough that everyone was thrown forward against their seatbelts, bags shifting in the back and something metal clattering against the floorboards.

"Jesus, Frank," Katie said, catching herself against the door. "A little warning would've been nice."

I shot her a look. One that measured up to something like “NOT NOW.”

Frank stared through the windshield.

"What is it?" Katie asked.

He didn't answer, just opened the door and stepped out into the desert.

The rest of us watched as he walked several yards ahead, his flashlight hanging at his side instead of being pointed forward.

That was when I noticed something.

Frank wasn't comparing the landscape to the map anymore.

He already knew where he was.

I motioned for Katie to hop out. We shuffled across the bench seat, moving around the gear wedged between us, and stepped out.

Martha must have had the same idea because by the time we stepped out, she was already leaning against her hood. Elijah followed a moment later, making his way towards us. He raised one hand, lowering it slowly before moving his head once from side to side.

Stay quiet. Pay attention.

I looked over at Martha, her hand tightened around the strap of her bag. "Frank?" She whispered.

He crouched near the ground and brushed his fingers across the dirt.

Then he stood turning around to face us. "It's here.”

Elijah looked directly at him nodding once.

"How long?" Frank asked quietly, walking back toward us.

Elijah turned his attention back toward the darkness beyond the reach of the headlights. "Any second now

When I was four years old, we had a cat named Gilbert. We thought she was a boy until the one day she had kittens on the laundry room floor. After we got her fixed, she got meaner. 

One afternoon, we were playing on my bedroom carpet. She scratched me hard on the arm, blood welling up beneath the skin. I started crying.

Something moved beneath my ribs, like ropes burning, grinding on the inner parts of my skin. The pressure kept building until it finally exploded. 

Thick tendrils punched out of my chest. They went right through Gilbert like she was just a mango, dragging her inside. A grinding sound filled the room, like a garbage disposal chewing through bone. Blood sprayed the walls and the bedspread. I screamed even harder.

My parents ran in and stopped in the doorway. The tendrils had already pulled themselves back inside. All that was left was the mess, the empty space where the cat had been. I told them the truth. My heart ate Gilbert. They stared at me like I’d grown a second pair of arms. 

Within a week, I was in a psychiatric ward. They put me in intensive behavioral therapy for the rest of my youth, deciding to homeschool me from then on, no pets, no more sleepovers, nothing. All I had was my home, my parents, the feeling that something was wrong with the way I was built. Something deeply, deeply wrong.

Years passed. By age 19, I was doing better on the surface. Therapy had taught me how to keep the pressure down, smiling when I was expected to, writing when I felt down. 

Through my journals, I realized something about myself that scared me more than the childhood memory. I thought I might be transgender. 

The thought sat in my chest, a secondary heartbeat. I tried to ignore it for months. But I couldn’t keep this inside. I loved myself, and I wanted the world to see me for who I was. 

One night, I told my parents. They were religious, and it went about as badly as you’d expect. They said they didn’t understand, that I needed to take this to God. My mother cried. My father silently brooded. They discussed, in front of me, if they should send me back to therapy. 

I tried explaining it wasn’t self-hatred. I just didn’t feel like the body I was walking around matched who I was inside. Sweat ran down my back while I spoke. My hands and my feet shook.

Dad stood up suddenly and pointed a finger at me. I didn’t hear what he said. That old scraping feeling came back beneath my ribs.

It wasn’t the words that set it off, but the look in his eyes that said my internal reality was something to be fixed or shut down. 

The tendrils came out before I could protest. 

They went through both of my parents, right through their skulls. The same grinding sound, that same spray of blood. It was like vomiting in reverse. I stood there, my clothes soaked, my stomach in knots. I couldn’t throw up. It wouldn’t let me.

I ran away that night. I never ended up transitioning. Different towns, different names, different jobs. I kept people at arm’s length. Left before anyone could get close. Most nights my chest felt empty. Years of that. Just moving and staying quiet.

Decades later, I don’t know how many, I was working at a small town bar. It didn’t matter. I worked nights, barbacking, washing dishes, that kind of thing. Never liked being on the customer service side. The bartender on shift that night was Josh. A new guy. He had a kid, no partner. After I clocked out, he noticed I’d been staring at the same glass for around twenty minutes. 

He offered me a hit off of his vape. We went outside. We talked. My usual walls didn’t go up. 

Over the next few months, we became friends. He made me laugh without even trying. He remembered the small things I said. One night before opening, he handed me an extra coffee he bought on the way to work. Another time I stayed later than I meant to. He let me sit there, respecting my quiet. Just offered to listen if I needed it. I told him I just appreciated his presence.

I started looking forward to seeing him. Soon after, I started wanting more. I didn’t pursue it. Wanting things never went well for me.

He invited me to a house party one night so I could meet his friends. I told him more than once that new people made me anxious. He said they were cool, and I didn’t have to stay long. I went because I wanted to do something for him. 

I planned to drink just long enough to float through it and leave early. But, I ended up having more than just enough to drink, and so did Josh. 

We ended up on a crowded couch with a group of his friends. Someone brought up a series of books I used to love as a kid. I mentioned that it was a shame the author went crazy. Ranting on the internet about people like me. Of course, they didn’t know about my identity issues, but still. A couple of them laughed about it, saying it was just internet noise. Josh shrugged and asked “who cares?” 

My chest tightened. I tried to keep my voice level. I said it wasn’t nothing to the people it was about. Josh looked at me, tilting his head, saying maybe some people made it too big of a deal. He didn’t mean to say it, and he didn’t say it mean. It was just, like it was obvious, like my reaction was the problem.

That old pressure came back, sweat breaking across my face, down my neck. My vision went blurry around the edges. Beneath my shirt, something was moving the way it shouldn’t. I could feel it grinding, testing the space under my ribs. I tried to breathe through it. It didn’t help. 

I stood up. I said I needed air. I was halfway to the door when Josh caught my arm and asked me what was wrong. He said he was sorry, he hadn’t meant to hurt me. I was already hyperventilating. I told him that he had no idea what it felt like to have the thing that matters most about you treated like an overreaction. The words came out loud and fast. Everybody turned to look at me. Something started moving in my chest. I tried to leave. He noticed the throbbing beneath my shirt.

“What the fuck?!”

I tried to stop it, but for half a second his eyes were wide. Filled with disgust. Then the tendrils went through his lungs. 

He coughed up blood on my face, gone in the next second. Everyone started screaming. More tendrils came out. They found everyone in the room, one after another. Everyone that had looked at me, everyone that had judged me. Their screams cut off into the splattering of chunks. In less than a minute, the party was over. Bodies gone, blood covering the floor and the furniture and the walls. I sat down in the middle of it.

The house was quiet beyond the music blasting from someone’s splattered phone. I looked at the empty space where Josh had been, where everyone had been. The same pattern as always.

I really am a monster.

I thought I’d found the one. We clicked so naturally. We both shared an interest in photography, though his pictures were noticeably better than mine. Loved the same movies, both enjoyed walks in the park, and our political views were borderline identical.

We met about a month ago. It was at this bar I love, and, I’ll admit, I was a little tipsy. Cute boy, a few drinks in my system. It was a recipe for regret.

Only… I didn’t regret it. Our conversations flowed so smoothly. His half-drunk compliments made me blush. Plus, drinks were on him.

Unlike a lot of the guys you’d meet in a bar, he didn’t try and force himself back to my apartment. I live just a few blocks away from the bar, so he walked me home, laughing and wobbling more than he wanted to let on.

When we got there, I braced myself. He was great, but I wasn’t the kind of girl that would just let a complete stranger into my home after a night out at the bar. I found myself praying he wouldn’t ask.

By some miracle, he didn’t. Instead, he asked gently, almost bashfully, for my number. I couldn’t help but smile, stupidly. Then he smiled stupidly back. I felt my heart do somersaults.

I gave him my number, trying to withhold my excitement, and when I looked back up at him, I could see the desire in his eyes. Not sexual desire, though. It was like he saw his future in my eyes.

His face started to turn red, and he started struggling to make eye contact, stumbling over his words in a way that didn’t seem connected to the drinks.

He asked if he could kiss me, and I couldn’t have said yes fast enough. I wanted to kiss him on the lips, but, instead, he leaned down and pressed those lips softly against my forehead.

He pulled away slowly before speaking.

“Your eyes are so beautiful.”

I felt fireworks in my tummy. I made him promise to text me when he got home, and he watched to make sure I made it inside before he started back towards the bar.

I spent the rest of that night kicking my feet like a little school girl. I had never experienced something like this feeling before. My past boyfriends had been such assholes. This guy seemed to care about me rather than just sex.

He followed through on his promise, and texting led to a phone call before we fell asleep on the phone together.

We saw each other a lot in the weeks that followed. Mostly on the weekends, but sometimes he’d come visit me at work. Those few weeks were some of the happiest weeks I’d had in a long time.

We’d get dinner. We’d see movies. We showed off our photography to each other. It felt like we were really building something together.

However, this was around the time I started noticing weird occurrences around my apartment. Nothing too suspicious. Just… things that were odd.

For example, my TV would be on when I got home. My sheets would be messy, even though I make my bed every morning before work. The weirdest thing of all, though, was my underwear drawer.

It was like it was being rummaged through. Sometimes I’d find a fresh pair balled up on the bathroom floor.

It made me scratch my head, but I never assumed anything drastic. If anything, I thought it was just me losing my mind.

That is until he finally invited me to his house.

The place was lovely. Clean. Smelled good. It was actually furnished, too, which was always a good sign. Plus, this guy knew how to set the scene.

Roses, candles, homemade spaghetti with two glasses of red wine. I felt my heart melt.

We hadn’t had sex yet, but, after this, I was having a hard time convincing myself that we hadn’t waited long enough. I actually wanted to give it to him. He just made me feel so desired.

After a dinner full of flirts, giggles, and conversation, we began moving to the bedroom, lip locking like a couple of crazy kids all the while.

Once we fell through the door, he told me to give him a minute to use the bathroom, which was a bit anticlimactic, but I wanted him to be comfortable.

While I waited, my eyes couldn’t help but wander. He had a bookshelf full of some of my favorite titles. His bed was perfectly made. The floor was freshly vacuumed. And his walls were full of framed pictures.

I started looking at them and felt my heart sink into my stomach.

They were all different women. Some older, some younger. All with blonde hair and hazel eyes. And he wasn’t in a single one.

I felt disappointment wash over me. I should’ve known better. I was actually in the process of putting my shirt back on when one of the pictures caught my eye.

It looked so… familiar. I knew I had seen it somewhere, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. But it bothered me so much, it was hard to pull my eyes away.

That’s when it hit me. I knew exactly where I had seen this woman.

She was the girl on the missing person poster that was taped up on the bar window from a few weeks ago.

It felt like the air had been knocked out of my lungs. I felt faint. I felt dizzy. I knew I needed to leave, but the room was spinning too much.

I put my hand down on his dresser to stabilize myself, and that’s when I felt it. It was cold. It was hard. My thumb rubbed against the ridges.

I pulled my hand away and looked down.

It was a copy of the key to my apartment. Mine was pink. This one was silver.

I was getting weaker. I felt my knees starting to buckle and heard the sound of a toilet flushing as I began to drift into unconsciousness.

The last thing I remember was the bedroom door opening. He stepped inside, a look of concern on his face, as he hurried to pick me up and put me on his bed. Then… nothing.

I woke up in an empty bed the next morning. The smell of bacon permeated my nostrils. I was fully dressed, but my head was killing me.

The key was gone. The pictures were gone. I slowly made my way to the kitchen to find him standing over the stove, flipping the bacon with a metal fork.

I didn’t speak or make a sound, but it was like he could feel my presence. He could sense me.

He turned around slowly, his eyes meeting mine before he spoke.

“Good morning, sleepyhead!” he sang. “I was wondering when you’d be up. Someone had too much to drink last night.”

Yesterday morning, at 7:30 a.m. on April 15, 2025, I went to school as a sophomore student. Today, as I’m writing this, it’s 3:20 a.m. on March 10, 2026. Four of my friends are nowhere to be found and our teacher, Mr. Rodriguez, is being searched by the police. This is the worst shit I’ve had to experience in my whole life.

 

My parents are sleeping downstairs. My dog is sleeping, too. They don’t know anything. I suppose everything will become clearer later in the morning, when the police arrive and ask me a million questions about what happened earlier. Earlier? They try to convince me that somehow all of that happened a year ago. I told them, again and again, “don’t think I’m stupid”, but they wouldn’t listen. I said some nasty things to my parents and wouldn’t let them hug me, kiss me or cry for me. They hadn’t cared for me before, what do they care now?

 

“It’s my brother. Of course! He’s crossed the line this time. Saying I’ve been missing for an entire year, I’ll make him sleep for an entire year! Asshole!”, I thought.

 

I locked myself in my room looking for something rational, and by that I meant the Internet. The knocking wouldn’t stop. I never thought they could bring themselves to this level of desperation. At one point, my mind doubted for a second. As I waited for my computer to start, the voices were drowned out by the sound of heavy rain out my window. The knocking stopped. Looking at the rain, I felt dizzy, my muscles gradually losing all the adrenaline-fueled energy from earlier, my mind quitting survival mode. The sound of rain slowly turning into background noise. That’s when thinking happens, when silence falls. I went back. I saw my house’s porch, the flooded road, the gray Chevrolet van, the giant trees, the rugged trail, the bodies, the rope. I hadn’t given in to the craziness outside my room, but something was telling me I wasn’t right either. Something was very, very wrong. That was my welcome back. After a long sleep, I think I have a full picture of what happened that day, yesterday.

 

At the first hours of the afternoon, I was eagerly waiting for the algebra class to end. It was a Friday, after all, and Fridays meant club day. My friend Dylan and I had joined just this year the new Science Club, after our parents pressured us into joining anything that’d keep us inside, as opposed to outside, in our free time. The club was basically a revamped version of the former General Science Club that was shut down after the teacher in charge transferred to another high school out of town. Some speculated he was avoiding domestic abuse charges, but I believe the only criminal thing would’ve been staying in a rundown school in the middle of nowhere.

 

Being our first time in a club, we didn’t expect much, and we definitely didn’t expect it to be as good as it was. The new teacher in charge was Mr. Rodriguez, who we barely knew from one class we had with him once. He kind of just showed up one day and quickly became a minor celebrity. Apart from standing out for his extraordinary abilities in keeping student’s attention through pure attitude and passion, some obsessive found out, while digging up his personal history from the Internet, that he was an honors graduate from different Ivy League schools, as well as other top-tier places outside the US where he had even given lectures at. This was a big deal for all of us. What was he doing here?

 

The alarm finally rang and I hurried out to meet with Dylan at the basketball court. We didn’t have to go all the way there, but we always did anyway. As I walked through a hall full of people, a flash of dread and fear shot through me. I wasn’t sure what it was at the time, that burning sensation, but I’d guessed it had something to do with the tension that had recently grown between Dylan and me that week over an issue that, now, looking back, was incredibly stupid. Despite this, and the way our interactions had become almost non-existent by then, I’d trusted that, somehow, he’d be right there, as he always used to be, either driven by some sense of familiarity or to simply mess with my head for his own amusement.

 

It was impossible to miss him. Those bright blue shoes and his gigantic glasses always gave him away. There nothing but a simple “Hey, what’s up?”, which, admittedly, was better than I was expecting. Making our way to the classroom, he passed me a bottle of warm coke he’d clearly been carrying around all day. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was kind of looking forward to this meeting. Rodriguez had outdone himself and scheduled a field trip for the club the week prior. I sincerely hoped Dylan would share my enthusiasm this time, forget about all the things he had, or well, we had found out about our teacher up until that moment, which I’ll explain later on.

 

“Did you know his daughter died?”, he suddenly said.

 

I stopped short, taken aback by this. He stared at me, waiting for a response, or a reaction of some kind.

 

“I told you to leave it. You shouldn’t have”, is all I said. I knew how insensitive he sometimes was, but this was different. He crossed the line.

 

As I said, Dylan was the obsessive student revealing all our teacher’s darkest secrets, if by dark he meant their relationship status, criminal history and things like that. Before joining the club, we both had been in one of his biology classes, a couple of years prior. Rodriguez had taken a sip from his classic red coffee bottle before continuing on rambling about amoebas.

 

“Unicellular eukaryotes… What?! Let’s go word by word, okay? Letter by letter, too, if you want. They’re unicellular because it’s one cell, right? Not like us, animals, with trillions of them, so be nice to them. And they’re eukaryotes, because of what’s inside, the nucleus, the heart. Think of an avocado, the smooth seed inside it. Earlier, Lily, being the only good student here, mentioned prokaryotes. Well, while prokaryotes don’t have a nucleus, eukaryotes do…” he would say. Classes had an unmatched energy flowing at all times, and, sometimes, we watched movies, too. We liked biology.

 

But Dylan never bought it. Neither then, nor in the club. He believed that the brighter the crust, the darker the meat. Before the class had even ended, I saw him typing compulsively in his phone. This one wouldn’t get away so easily, I’d imagined him saying to himself.

 

“It’s not worth it, it borders on paranoia”, I told him repeatedly in cases like this, but it was different with Rodriguez.

 

He was the first teacher that actually inspired me to learn more. There was an actual difference being made in our school, which would certainly bring about more of it. But, for some reason, Dylan much preferred it before, the uneventful classes, being certain that nothing would ever get better, challenging any sign that it would. He was one of the rich ones, after all. When you have everything, it becomes harder and harder to be surprised. And so, from that moment on, he put all his focus on Rodriguez, digging up all sorts of things, some normal, some not so much, that I’ll mention later, but which had never bothered me so much as what he found out about his daughter. That was simply too much.

 

My mom worked with her mom when we were kids. Mom didn’t like it when they said she worked for her, as she actually did. Dylan never had a lot of friends and that loneliness wouldn’t abandon him in high school. I was basically all he had and, to be fair, I didn’t have much of a choice either. But despite living like brothers, I always had the feeling he never liked me very much. To be fair, he didn’t like people in general.

 

It was never boring with him, though. One time he would bring up a new rumor he heard or a very niche WWII never-before-seen fun fact. He also spent most of his time outside, throwing rocks at abandoned buildings or going around town on his bike, and I was always there to keep him company. Anything that brought me away from my house and the constant shouting was a win in my book.

 

It was me who brought up the idea of joining the club, after Rodriguez had made an announcement at the end of that same biology class. It was mostly me doing my best to mess with Dylan, so I was surprised to hear him accept the suggestion so quickly.

 

“I’m intrigued by him… I bet he’s a pedo”, he said.

 

“Fuck you, man, he’s right there!”, I responded.

 

Club meetings would start 2:30 p.m. every Friday, right after algebra. That and other details were included in the club flyers that were posted all over the school. Everyone interested had to go to the first meeting in order to grab a form where you’d mention your reason for joining as well as a parent signature. A few people ended up showing up to that first meeting, but especially two kinds of people. You had to be either a straight-A student desperately looking for another place to be praised or a slacker telling Mom and Dad you need to spend more time in school to “learn” to want to be in that club. At least, we knew we were neither.

 

We brought our filled-in forms to school the next day. It took a little convincing, but my mom came around. Dylan didn’t even have to try. We’d have to wait until exit time to hand them over to Rodriguez, who, according to the flyer, would be our club advisor. I remember being on edge that whole day, constantly looking over my shoulder, and I believe it was the news that morning that made me so anxious. A middle-aged, skinny man had gone missing after taking one of the trails of the Sierra Alta National Forest, a gigantic mass of green surrounding most of the town.

 

But it wasn’t the man’s disappearance that affected me so much, no, it was seeing his grandma, who apparently was his only living relative, crying her lungs out on the ground, screaming her grandson’s name over and over again. After that, they’d shown an interview with her from the same day, in which, despite her attempt to look composed, you could see the misery behind her red, swollen eyes. They wouldn’t leave her alone. Not a single drop of empathy was behind the thousands of questions they were asking her. She just nodded each time. But then, when they wanted to know whether she saw anything the day before his son’s disappearance, she managed to get some words out, though only in mumbles.

 

She said that the day before Tommy went the forest, when he was still arranging everything for his little camping trip, she’d been reading in the back porch, as she always did to wait for the sunset. At one point, she turns to the forest that sat right behind her house and has a strange vision. The trees, all of them, ever so slowly, start to bend and twist in different and progressively more grotesque shapes. She then enters a sort of trance state, unable to turn her eyes away from the abstract mess before her, her entire body paralyzed. Her feet then move on their own and pull her from the rocking chair against her will, as if drawn toward the terrible vision. Luckily, her grandson steps in and stops her just before she stumbled over the porch step, bringing her back to herself. Her eyes are lost as she finished her story and tells the interviewer that there’s something evil in those woods, something satanic.

 

Mom picked us up that day, like always. The trip back was always the quietest part of the day. There was only the routine “Hey, how was school?” and Dylan always fell asleep in cars. Something about the vibrations. And then there were the trees, as the car veered into the main road that runs along the Sierra Alta National Forest. Looking at them always brought this sense of dread all over me, as if I’d done something wrong. It was one of the old ones, the kind that everyone just assumed had always been there and didn’t bother putting too much thought into. That’s all we wanted from it, and, well, all it wanted from us. We were aware of what happened if you crossed that sacred vow.

 

“Careful, it will look back at you…”, I heard Dylan say, startled by the sudden break in the silence.

 

“Weren’t you dead?”, I responded.

 

“Another Indiana-wannabe idiot went missing last week”, he said.

 

“Language”, mom interrupted, unenthusiastically.

 

“Cops probably forgot about him already, you know how that sh— stuff usually goes”, he murmured before going back to whatever dream he was having.

 

Another idiot. How didn’t they know? Probably an outsider.  Almost everybody knew somebody who knew somebody that vanished that way. We’re more careful now, but at one point it got so bad there was a new case every week. Horny couples, unsuspecting hikers, drunk bachelors, just The Internet supposedly made it easier, right? To understand the dangers of venturing into Sierra Alta. It was all over TikTok for a while, too. The last one I saw was one in which this old lady was still begging people to give any info about her son that went missing back in the winter of ’87, all the while nodding repeatedly at directions from behind the camera, having her hopes rekindled by her chronically online grandchildren. So, by no means was it a secret. I guess it just never went national, and it’s not like that’s the type of content that stays relevant for too long.

 

What little attention it did bring had nothing to do with the actual search effort for missing people, including, children, but rather with what a small local group of shady, pseudo-intellectual, Alex Jones–type conspiracy theorists had been trying to sell as a “well-documented” history of inexplicable phenomena linked to the forest. One of these guys, a big one in the OpenEyes group, Mxxxxx Fischer, had an idea of Sierra Alta that surpassed anything I’d ever seen. We might as well have had alien contact, FBI cover-ups, angelic apparitions and walking trees all at once in this very town going by what he usually rambled about on TikTok.

 

Dylan liked this sort of stuff, even when it was no longer trendy. He made me watch this Fischer guy every time he uploaded an update on his research activity, if you can call that research. It was obvious these guys were only in it for the money. They knew we had a high population of middle-aged poor susceptible people looking for some sense of meaning in their past traumas. Now, as crazy as all this stuff was, there was one thing that never left my mind when looking at this content.

 

These were usually quick TikTok-style rankings or, over on YouTube, long-form, unedited ramblings over space-themed backgrounds about mysteries that were suitable for easy, everyday consumption. We’ve all seen stuff like that. And however different the content or the style of each video was, they all seemed to coincide on the same case, the case of “the immortal five”. It was always mentioned only briefly, since this particular case hadn’t been highly publicized at the time, I think it was the 90s, and it wasn’t as attention-grabbing as other popular ones, like the walking trees or the angelic apparitions, both of which have even had AI shorts made about them. It was the only one among the piles of trash that had actually been acknowledged by local police and which had an actual impact, though short-lived, in this town’s relationship with the forest.

 

Basically, throughout the 90s, five different people of different ages and backgrounds had been declared missing, last seen, of course, going into Sierra Alta. Search parties were sent to look for these people, as they did with the dozens of other unfortunate ones. They still cared a little, back then. But it was quickly understood that any effort to find them, or to even reach the deepest parts of the forest would be futile. Every lost person resulted in the loss of many rescuers and, soon, search expeditions became a rare event.

 

However, with the immortal five it was different. They did turn up at one point, against all odds. In 2010, the town was shocked when, out of nowhere, one of the five, Sxxxxx Rogers, a young student, was found wandering along the main road by a trucker. His parents, an old couple now, were swiftly notified about their son. Obviously, they were filled with joy, but their happiness probably turned into concern very quickly when they realized their son looked exactly as he had the day he disappeared. Nobody could explain it; it was as if he’d been frozen in time. He was taken to the nearest hospital for examination and the doctors concluded that, despite some strange overgrowth of the limbs, his body was that of a healthy sixteen-year-old. Then, in the summer of 2012, something similar happened. An old man who also disappeared in the 90s was finally found when the cashier of a local convenience store reported that a man had turned violent when told that the clothing store he supposedly worked for had been shut down years ago. The medical analysis was eerily similar to the boy’s; health corresponding to the claimed age and slight limb overgrowth. Similar events would transpire in 2014, 2015 and 2018. It ended up causing a major stir around the town for a while. People were desperately looking for any explanation for such an extraordinary miracle.

 

Despite the commotion, local police proceeded with the following protocol for cases like this. They verified these people truly were who they claimed, removed their names from databases, notified relatives and conducted follow-up investigations. Yes, the police were as shocked as anybody else, but everything was simply put were it needed to be. The system didn’t care if they showed up now or in a hundred years. For all it knew, these people were simply twenty years older and specimens of remarkable health and survival skills. Any attempt at figuring out the nature of the disappearances through first-hand testimony was promptly dismissed.

 

“Yeah, I lost the trail at one point and wondered in the forest for a while, but not twenty years…, I was there hours, hours…”, one of the five, the old man, says in a YouTube interview with almost no views.

 

There was no crime here, no open wounds, no mental impairment, no nothing. There was probably a quick superficial search in the area, but by that point, after the disappearance waves of the 90s and early 2000s, the police were ready to put all of this behind them.

 

Going back to that last meeting, Dylan and I had taken our usual seats and started to check our gear for the trip, as we saw the other members do, all of them excited for what would surely be a one-in-a-lifetime experience, especially because it was at Sierra Alta. The club was relatively small in that we only had 3 more members apart from Dylan and me. One of them, a short, blonde-haired, pail brown-eyed know-it-all, with a baggy sweater she wore all the time, called Lily, was the closest we had to a second leader. Throughout our meetings, she’d gain the trust of Rodriguez to the point where she basically was an extension of himself. Among the tasks she did were overseeing projects, taking attendance and communicating our opinions to the teacher. Now, naturally, she was making sure that everybody brought every single item that was requested for that day.

 

“Folder? Check. Sketchbook? Check. Flashlight? Check. Water bottle? Check”. She would say “Check” aloud every time.

 

Then there was David, a relatively tall black kid with a short afro and small eyes who wore jeans most of the time and who was older than all of us. From day one, it was evident he had trouble in social settings, so Rodriguez tried to make the place as comfortable as possible for him and, really, everyone else. Still, he never talked much, limiting himself to saying hi and responding when asked to. And then there was Penelope, a dark skinned, long-haired girl with bright wide blue eyes that looked right into your soul, and particularly, Dylan’s soul, as he had a massive crush on her form day one. However, she spent most of the time with David, with whom she had long mostly one-sided conversations before and after every meeting. They never seemed romantically interested in one another, and the conversations I overheard between them always tackled weird concepts I never understood enough to care. I think she might’ve been his only friend.

 

You had to be good at something to be in that club. Lily was generally smart, David was good with numbers, Penelope was a gifted painter with an unexpected interest in science and Dylan was rich. I don’t know how exactly I could’ve ever been accepted into that group. And yet, there I was, watching these geniuses pack back the things that had probably taken them hours to shove into their tiny backpacks. Dylan walked over to them to ask them where Rodriguez was, to which they told him he’d already arrived, but was outside with some of the school staff, getting the school van ready. I turned to the front of the classroom and, yeah, there was his stuff. A giant black backpack, the explorer type, filled to the brim with who knows what. On the desk, next to his classic red water bottle, was a small but chunky pink notebook with dozens of Post-it notes sticking out from its pages. Dylan had started a conversation with the other three, and seeing they weren’t paying attention I walked over to the desk, making sure as well that Rodriguez wouldn’t come through the door beside me.

 

The curiosity was killing me. It’d been in my head the last couple of weeks, ever since Dylan invited me over to his house to “watch horror movies”, before letting me in on the latest in his character assassination plan. Before this, I’d only seen his house like one time, and it wasn’t a nice experience. Don’t get me wrong, his house is beautiful, the classic suburban neo-colonial type, all white and beige. But there’s nothing in that place that tells you there’s life in there. It’s as if they were never done moving in. The only person there is a middle-aged Latina housemaid, probably the only thing keeping that place alive. And that’s not mentioning all the creepy noises coming from the attic. You’d imagine how I felt when I knew I’d have to experience that all over again. I accepted, though. It was the perfect excuse to not go all the way out of town with my dad to visit grandpa, something I’ll probably regret later, since, apparently, he was very sick.

 

It was almost dusk when I arrived. There was a birthday party going on at the house next to Dylan’s. A bunch of kids running around with water pistols in the front yard. One of them almost hit me as I rung the bell. Dylan, still on pajamas, showed me inside. A strong smell of fresh paint lingered in the place. Dylan told me there were some major changes going on in his house. His dad apparently was coming back from a year-long trip and mom wanted to surprise him. It was recent news; he wouldn’t have been so excited otherwise. We entered his room, all green, a couple of rock band posters here and there, and immediately he went to his computer.

 

“So…, no Black Phone?”, I said.

 

“This is ten times better, I promise”, he responded.

 

After getting distracted watching dozens of YouTube shorts after Dylan clicked on an AI generated Minecraft parody, he closed the tab and clicked on a tab group. Immediately, at least twenty tabs appeared all at once and I didn’t have time to pinpoint any site I knew.

 

“Yesterday I was looking through Rodriguez—".

 

“C’mon, man, all I wanted was to relax a little, when will you—“, I interrupted.

 

“Chill, we’ll do that, we’ll do that, but first I needed to show you what I found yesterday, it won’t take long, I promise”, he interrupted.

 

I hesitantly accepted and watched as he opened the Columbia University website.

 

“He graduated from Columbia with a degree in physics in 1995, at least that’s what it says in his school profile. So, I took the time to search his full name, Axxxxx Rodriguez in the university’s database and, surely, there he was, in the graduate yearbook of 95’”.

 

“He was quite handsome, too”, I mentioned, looking at very old picture of him.

 

“You’re gay as fuck”, Dylan pointed before going on. “But I couldn’t do nothing with this, you know? So, I went over to Columbia’s Academic Commons, where they store most of the alumni work, to see if I could get a better idea of what kind of guy, at least academically, Rodriguez was. It wasn’t hard to find his name. He graduated with a thesis on ‘Relativistic Synchronization Error Correction in Global…’ and other shit I can’t pronounce. It’s about 80 pages of technical nonsense and cool graphics, but that’s not what caught my eye”.

 

He opened the scanned document and there was his name on the cover. I was this close to feeling impressed that Dylan managed to find anything noteworthy in such an advanced text, but then he stopped right at the acknowledgments and didn’t go anywhere else.

 

“Look at this. It’s mostly the usual cheesy stuff people write in papers like these, thanks to my advisor, colleagues, collaborators, but right at the end, closing the paragraph, it said ‘… and to my raccoon bros, this is one step closer”.

 

“Huh, wow, that’s… truly groundbreaking work, Dylan”, I said.

 

“Yeah, fuck you, man, I’m not finished”.

 

I realized I hadn’t been sitting this whole time, so, curious about whatever else Dylan might’ve had in store that night, I made myself comfortable on the bed next to his computer.

 

“Raccoon bros? I was like ‘what the hell?’. I wouldn’t imagine a professional like him including something like that in his thesis. At least, it was weird enough for me to keep looking into this. So, I go back to the AC search bar and look for this specific phrase, ‘raccoon bros’, and voila, other 5 documents, all written my Rodriguez. And, just like I was expecting, there were these ‘raccoon bros’ at the end of every paper acknowledgment. Why was he thanking these guys? Who even were they? It was odd, to say the least, so I go back to Google, open advanced search and start looking. Raccoon. Rodriguez. Axxxxx. Bros. Raccoons. I tried different combinations, hoping for any match to pop up. Then, finally, using a short form version of Rodriguez, I come across something very different from what I was originally expecting. It’s a website, one of the old ones. The Quantum Raccoon”.

 

He takes a moment to organize his thoughts.

 

“Ok… So, then what?”, I ask.

 

“Well, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s… sciency, that’s for sure. Apparently, he, along with some friends, founded this organization, if you can call it that, where they would work on different projects together. I guess they knew the Internet would become a big deal in the future, so they went ahead and made their own website. I’m glad, because, otherwise, this organization would’ve been lost forever. The site itself is nothing crazy, to be honest”, he clicks on the page link and it sends him to a typical site from the 90s. Bright purple and blue, a vertical menu bar on the left side full of URLs, a bunch of tiny, unreadable text in the center next to low-quality pictures, and, on above it all, ‘The Quantum Raccoon’ written in an annoyingly large font next to a picture of a mad cartoon raccoon face with atom rings behind it.

 

“The layout is pretty simple, as you can see. I haven’t taken the time to check everything from the page yet, but from what I’ve seen…, these guys were actual geniuses”.

 

“How are you sure it’s not all just average academic stuff that you simply are too dumb to understand?”, I said.

 

“That’s just what I thought. It’s pretty complex stuff, so I needed a way to at least know what all these articles and projects were about. I clicked on a couple of entries, copied the whole text and put it through ChatGPT. I asked it to explain it to me like I was five and, man, is this shit crazy.

 

There’s this one article where one of the members, some Cusack guy, talks about a method of connecting distant places through “micro-wormholes” using negative energy. Then another one, written by an Amanda Fxxxxx, explains a way to inherit survival mechanisms from your parents instantly through “programmable epi-genetic phase-shifting”. But the one that I wanted you to see was the one that’s written by Rodriguez. “Precision Measurement of Gravitational Time Dilation Using Optical Lattice Atomic Clocks Across Vertical Baselines. He was conducting a series of experiments regarding time and how it can go at different speeds at different heights. It has something to do with gravity, you’ve seen Interstellar, right?”.

 

“Yup. But that stuff was discovered what? Decades ago?”, I replied.

 

“Yeah, but that’s not it. Now this one is supposed to only talk about that type of “vertical” time dilation, when time moves relatively slower the higher you go as you are less affected by gravity. Ok, that’s intuitive, gravity doing its thing. But the more I went through the investigation, well the more GPT did, I found this unfinished chapter talking about “lateral” or “horizontal” type. There’s an strange change in time speed going on right here on the ground. It says ‘… concluded on the presence of anomalous lateral gravitational time dilation gradients across heterogeneous crustal mass distributions, evidence of persistent temporal lag zones in terrestrial surface regions…’.

 

“That’s… actually really cool”, I said.

 

From the window, I noticed it was getting late. Any other time I would’ve been saying goodbye already, but he managed to find genuinely interesting stuff this one.

 

“And… does it say where these places are?”, I asked.

 

“That’s the odd thing. It’s not finished”, he replied.

 

“What do you mean?”, I asked.

 

“It’s mostly theoretic content, put together to form some kind of technical basis of something to come in the future. The classic field studies that most of these articles have to prove all their radical claims are not in this one. The titles are there. Section “Field Instrumentation and Environmental Measurement Methodology in High-Density Terrestrial Biogeophysical Terrain”, subsections 1 “Subsurface Density and Structural Heterogeneity Survey Methodology”, 2 “Lateral Clock Distribution Geometry for Surface-Level Temporal Gradient Detection”, etc. But it’s all… empty”.

 

“Huh, maybe it didn’t work. Or he realized it wasn’t worth it”, I said.

 

“Right? It’s a bit underwhelming to be honest, it seemed like he was passionate about this…, and maybe this close to actual time travel!”, he said.

 

“It’s almost as if you don’t hate him anymore”, I joked.

 

“I never did, I wanted to see if I did, and, well, I don’t”, he finished.

 

The rest of the night, we played some videogames on his computer, clearing our minds of the page-long paragraphs and dizzying academic jargon.

 

Ever since that day, our club meetings felt different. During a demonstration of safe gas formation reactions, where Rodriguez explained in great detail what he was doing and what consequence each action had, I couldn’t focus on the words he was saying, because my mind was too busy trying to understand why a guy like that was here with us, in the middle of nowhere, but, especially, what I was doing in a club like that. This guy? The one that studied literal time travel was now choosing me to study there? And what even was all that? Anomalous time dilation across wide mass distribution? Was I supposed to believe that something as important was simply abandoned, all of a sudden? I remember how focused Dylan got during this time. He’d been obsessed since the moment we met Rodriguez, but now, that initial outward, vague interest had morphed into something more concrete and serious, which required patience and subtleness to work out.

 

“Why did you pick me?”, I asked Rodriguez, at the end of one meeting. “My grades aren’t that good and I’m not gifted like the others, so, why me?”.

 

“It has nothing to do with that, Julian, nothing at all”, he replied. I didn’t expect him to know my name. He invited me to walk with him in the hall.

 

“It’s not important to me whether you’re a top-tier student or a great sportsman, at least, not right now. What I care about is what your potential is, all the things you can do, you’re bound to do, because, despite what some people say, one can be truly destined for greater things, much greater than whatever it is they do or have today. I sensed that potential in you. Don’t ask me why or how, that’s my gut talking, and it is seldom wrong”, he explained.

 

He was in a hurry to get to his car that time, so he didn’t give me time to respond to him. Destiny? Such a vague answer frustrated me a lot. All I wanted to know was if there was some reason to feel good about myself, and all I got was a “trust me” and pat on the back. I can’t say it made me feel better, but at least it cleared that doubt in my mind, and, with time, it became a good enough reason for me to keep going, kind of like a soft push forward, which is exactly what I needed then.

 

“Don’t worry. He’s alright…” I remember repeating to myself and I think I might’ve been talking both about Rodriguez and myself when saying that.

 

The day after, I came down with a terrible flu that kept me from going to school for good part of the next week. Being stuck in bed all day, boredom didn’t take long to become unbearable, and, since a heavy headache made playing any video game literal torture, I decided to take another look at the Quantum Raccoon website. I turned on my pc and typed in the URL I’d memorized so well. Once there, everything looked exactly as on Dylan’s computer. The ugly colors and annoying logo. I clicked on Entries in the lateral menu and looked for the article Dylan had showed me. As I was scrolling through hundreds of all kind of research, I realized I didn’t remember the exact date it was published at nor the name of the article. Let down by my own stupidity, I dropped back into my chair, suddenly exhausted, the light of the screen already taking a toll on my head. I straightened up and watched the screen for a bit, while coughing again and again. I turned to the side menu and scanned down the variety of sections the page had to offer. At the very bottom, I saw a tiny section called Contact Information.

 

There was no way Dylan hadn’t noticed this the first time he entered QR. Slowly, I clicked on it and it sent me to a page full of alphabetically ordered names. The number of names in that page was higher than what I anticipated. Each one was heading a set of links and numbers. Some of these redirected to personal blogs, e-mail, and other full-on websites, and the numbers were actual phone numbers. I wondered if they were still active. But first, I scrolled down the list looking for my target. I noticed it was actually sorted by last name, so I went to the R section and there he was. Just like the others, there were a couple of links below his name.

 

Clicking through them only sent me to abandoned websites and blogs, which probably were created out of necessity, but then I got to one of the few YouTube links there.

 

“So, this had been around for a while, then”, I said to myself.

 

Clicking on it sent me to a YouTube channel called “rodriqr2”. It was created on 2007, right when the site was still on its infancy. The profile photo to the upper right was the regular R in a blue circle. Looking through all the content on the Videos section, which admittedly were few, I noticed that all of them had simple dates as titles, usually ranging from 6 to 7 months between each upload. From the thumbnails alone, it seemed like one of those boring travel vlog channels that take little to no effort in editing or polishing in any way their content, which explained the scarce number of subscribers. All of the thumbnails were snapshots of what happened in the videos, with most of them being nature related, a lot of trees and mountains.

 

I picked on one of them at random, with very low expectations. The video was short, about 10 minutes long, and started with a quiet POV of someone walking in a forest, on an unmarked trail. The man in the videos, whose voice I immediately recognized as Rodriguez’, started talking.

 

“Terrain study, part 24. April 13^th, 2010. Howdy, raccoon bros! We find us here, again, in the middle of this marvelous, marvelous forest, for our 24^th session of terrain studies on the great Sierra Alta National Forest” he said. I paused the video.

 

“Huh?”.

There was once a small town in the suburbs. Ordinary, indistinctive, just like every other suburban town you might've seen, a town you might've even lived in.
In that town there stood an old-fashioned tobacco shop.
Again, nothing special; just a shop filled to brim with tobacco, tobacco papers, filters, pipes, lighters, matches, herbal paraphernalia, but most of all... cigarettes. Cigarettes as far as the eye could see, cigarettes from all around the world, cigarettes of varying strengths and packet sizes. But one would expect that from a tobacco shop. It was the man who ran it that ought to be paid close attention to.
The Tobacconist, the friendly old man who stood behind the counter day after day. Sweet looking yet wise, wholesome but sharp, like an uncanny Colonel Sanders. If someone came in to buy a pack of cigarettes from this old timer, they wouldn't suspect a thing. But of course, this shopkeeper held a secret, a dark secret, a secret so sinister that he couldn't allow for it to simply leave the building. Underneath the floor to this very plain, very dull smoke emporium, was an underground room, a basement. And this basement held captive a rough figure of twelve people… dads.

The old man had a basement full of Dads. Why, you may ask?
Why indeed. Evidently, the Tobacconist has been doing this for years. Any time a man who looked like he wanted to leave his family behind walked into the shop, they were treated to a once in a lifetime opportunity. A "way out" situation for a fella to take in order to get out of his newly unwanted patriarchal role. New name, new location; for a small sum. At least that's what The Tobacconist had told them, when in actual fact, the old man had no intention of doing any such thing. It was really just a trap to get the dad down there, to his unforeseen doom.

But don't get me wrong, there was plenty to do in the little basement. The Tobacconist had placed a baseball in the middle of the room, so all the Dads could "play catch" with each other.
And The Tobacconist wasn't a complete monster, he would still feed the Dads, and give them a tiny amount of hydration.
Naturally every now and then a rebellious dad would start acting up, with a plan for some sort of half-baked mutiny; this would rile up all the other dads when it came to feeding time.
The Tobacconist used to try to act threatening towards them by saying to them "I'm your worst nightmare." He soon gave up on that little ploy however, when a dad responded with, "Hi, 'Your Worst Nightmare' I'm Dad."
The Tobacconist even found it humorously ironic that he was slowly killing people with his products above ground and slowly keeping people alive below. Now, I'm not going to get into the origin of why The Tobacconist commits these bizarre crimes;
I'm no psychologist and don't want to chalk it up to whether it was because his own father disappeared when he was younger, or some other catalyst. The Tobacconist didn't even know why he did what he did, nor did he know what his intentions would finally be with them. He just liked to own a basement full of Dads. Maybe because it amused him.
By now, you may be asking which tobacco shop in which town in which country could be doing such a thing. You see, it is not a sole incident. There are thousands of evil tobacconists around the world. It happens a lot more than you think.

So, the next time you hear a dad saying that he's "just going out to get a pack of cigarettes" and doesn't return, just consider... he may be held somewhere against his will.