PRAGMATIC ISSUES

Chapter 9

 

The Archive That Didn’t Exist

 

 

Jonah Reed had learned years ago that the government never truly erased anything.

People disappeared.

Records disappeared.

Photographs disappeared.

But information had a habit of surviving inside forgotten filing cabinets, abandoned hard drives, and the minds of people who drank too much near closing time.

It was why he was still alive.

The storage unit sat behind a shuttered printing company outside Knoxville.

No sign.

No cameras.

Only a rusted chain-link fence and rows of metal doors baking beneath the Tennessee sun.

Unit 114.

The lock was exactly where the anonymous text had promised.

Combination: 4-1-1.

Jonah smiled despite himself.

Someone had a sense of humour.

Inside were dozens of banker boxes.

Every one carefully labelled.

Yellowstone.

Olympic National Park.

Yosemite.

Great Smoky Mountains.

Rocky Mountain National Park.

His pulse quickened.

Someone had spent decades collecting Missing 411 cases.

Far more than he’d ever published.

Far more than the public had ever heard.

He opened the first box.

Missing person flyers.

Autopsy reports.

Handwritten ranger notes.

Photographs.

Most had never appeared online.

Some victims had officially never existed.

A folded map fell from one folder.

Across the United States, red pins marked hundreds of wilderness disappearances.

Most matched known Missing 411 clusters.

But another colour caught his eye.

Blue.

There were far fewer blue pins.

Perhaps thirty.

Each had a handwritten date beside it.

Next to every blue pin was one word.

Retrieved.

Jonah froze.

Not rescued.

Retrieved.

He pulled another folder.

Inside was a military transport manifest.

No agency.

No letterhead.

Just coordinates.

Dates.

Cargo weights.

Every destination matched a Missing 411 disappearance that had ended without a body.

The cargo description chilled him.

Biological Recovery Unit.

Someone had been collecting people.

His phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

He ignored it.

It rang again.

Ignored.

Third time.

A text appeared.

Leave.

Another.

They’re coming.

Jonah looked toward the storage facility entrance.

A black SUV rolled slowly between the rows.

No plates.

Two men wearing plain baseball caps.

Not police.

Not FBI.

They moved like soldiers.

Calm.

Deliberate.

They weren’t looking for a storage unit.

They already knew which one.

Jonah quietly slipped behind stacked boxes.

The men stopped outside.

One spoke into a radio.

“Unit one-one-four confirmed.”

A pause.

“Target likely inside.”

Target.

Not witness.

Target.

Jonah eased open the rear emergency exit.

Whoever rented the unit had planned for this.

He stepped into waist-high weeds behind the building.

Never run in a straight line.

Never use your own vehicle.

Never assume you’re smarter than people with satellites.

Rules learned the hard way.

He crossed an abandoned drainage ditch and disappeared into the tree line.

Seconds later voices erupted behind him.

“He went out the back!”

Too late.

Twenty minutes later Jonah sat inside a crowded truck stop diner five miles away.

He had changed shirts in the restroom.

Baseball cap reversed.

Glasses on.

Disposable burner phone activated.

He looked like every exhausted traveller passing through eastern Tennessee.

The waitress poured coffee without asking.

“You look like hell.”

“I’ve had worse Tuesdays.”

She laughed.

He didn’t.

His attention remained on the folder lying beneath the table inside his backpack.

One page refused to leave his mind.

It contained no names.

Only photographs.

Black-and-white.

Grainy.

Military quality.

Rows of hospital beds.

Each occupied by someone impossibly thin.

Wrists restrained.

Eyes closed.

An IV line disappeared beneath every blanket.

The date stamped across the corner read:

1978.

Another photograph.

Same room.

Same beds.

Only now several were empty.

One patient sat upright.

Its neck bent at an impossible angle.

Its mouth hung open far wider than human anatomy allowed.

Doctors surrounded it behind ballistic shields.

Someone had written beneath the image in faded ink.

Stage Three successful. Cognitive deterioration complete.

Jonah stared until the waitress returned.

“You okay?”

He quickly closed the folder.

“Fine.”

She wasn’t convinced.

Back in his motel room he scanned every document into three encrypted drives.

One upload went overseas.

Another to an investigative journalist who owed him a favour.

The third disappeared into a cloud server that required three separate keys to access.

If they killed him tonight…

…the story would survive.

Only then did he continue reading.

A weathered manila envelope sat at the bottom of the final box.

Across the front, handwritten.

PROJECT RETRIEVED

Inside were only six pages.

The cover sheet carried a warning.

LEVEL OMEGA

Most of the report had been blacked out.

Entire paragraphs vanished beneath thick ink.

Yet several lines remained readable.

Subjects recovered after prolonged disappearance exhibit severe biological alteration.

Conventional reintegration impossible.

Public discovery would create catastrophic societal consequences.

Jonah turned the page.

Every muscle in his body tightened.

There were photographs.

Not corpses.

Not patients.

Field photographs.

Creatures.

Once human.

Their skin stretched too tightly across elongated limbs.

Eyes reflecting like wolves beneath infrared cameras.

One image showed a creature crouched beside a campsite.

Another stood waist-deep in a river.

Watching.

Waiting.

The final photograph had been taken from inside a helicopter.

Several armed soldiers surrounded one of the creatures with tranquiliser rifles.

Across the bottom someone had scrawled in red marker.

DO NOT TERMINATE. RECOVER ALIVE.

Jonah leaned back.

The government wasn’t covering up murders.

They were harvesting survivors.

Or whatever survivors became.

His phone vibrated one final time.

Unknown number.

One sentence.

You have the wrong enemy.

Before he could reply…

…the motel lights went out.

Every room.

Every building.

He sat for a long time. Not hearing anything he just sat, in the hallway he heard people talking about the power being out all over due to a storm.

Glancing out the window he saw that darkness had swallowed the parking lot.

Out of sheer exhaustion Jonah had dozed off whilst waiting for the power to come back on. His dreams were fevered and fill feared. He dreamt of a monster coming out of the darkness and ripping off the skin from his face, keeping him alive long enough to feel it’s long claws ripe open his stomach and slowly, painfully slowly, remove his entails.

With a jolt pulling him from his dream, he heard something, it scratched slowly across his door.

Not knocking.

Scratching.

Like fingernails searching for a way inside.

Jonah reached silently for the pistol beneath the mattress.

Then he heard breathing.

Not in the hallway.

It was inside the room.

 

———————————-

Chapter 10 – The One Person They Missed

Jonah froze.

The motel room was silent.

The bathroom door he’d left cracked open now stood wide. His notebook lay exactly where he’d left it, but the disposable camera Mara had mailed him had been moved. Only a few inches, but enough.

Someone had been inside or rather someone was inside.

His hand slipped beneath his mattress and wrapped around the grip of the pistol he kept hidden. He got up and walked the room, shaking his head maybe he did leave the camera on the chair.

The door was ajar so he eased the motel door shut without making a sound and listened.

Nothing.

No footsteps.

No breathing.

No movement.

He crossed the room slowly, every muscle tense.

Then…

“You’ve gotten slower.”

The voice came from the darkness beside the window.

Jonah spun, pistol raised.

The lamp clicked on.

A woman stood with her hands folded across her chest, completely unimpressed.

“You still point that thing at everyone you care about?”

Jonah lowered the pistol, the tension draining from his face.

“…Claire.”

She smiled, though it never reached her eyes.

“You weren’t answering your phone.”

“You broke into my room.”

“I borrowed a key.”

“You bribed the clerk.”

“He remembered me.”

Jonah laughed for the first time in days.

“That’s not better.”

“No,” she admitted. “But it worked.”

She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him.

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

The silence said enough.

“You sounded scared last time we spoke.” She said

“I don’t get scared” Jonah replied, half joking, half knowing deep down that this time, things were different and he was most certainly terrified for his life.

Claire had known Jonah for nearly eight years.

Long before his articles about the Missing 411 had gained a following.

Long before people accused him of chasing conspiracy theories.

She’d watched him skip birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, always because another family had called claiming someone had vanished without explanation.

She’d never tried to stop him.

Only to keep him alive.

“You look terrible,” she finally said.

“I’ve been busy.”

“I can see that.”

She looked around the motel room.

Maps covered every wall.

Photographs were pinned beside newspaper clippings.

Missing hikers.

Forest maps.

Military reservations.

Pages filled with Jonah’s handwriting.

The room looked less like a motel and more like someone trying to solve a war.

Jonah loved Claire with every fibre in his being. She was the one thing that kept him sane, she always supported him and she was always ready to stand by his side. When they first met, he believed deep down that it was love at first sight for them both.

She was beautiful to him, a plain Jayne to others, but to Jonah she was the most breathtaking creature he had ever seen.

Early on they were inseparable, as time went on, he tried as much as he could to keep her a secret from the Government. If anything every happened to Claire, Jonah would die.

“I wasn’t the only one being followed,” Claire said quietly.

Jonah looked up.

“What?”

“I noticed two different vehicles on my way here.”

His expression hardened.

“Describe them.”

“Black SUV yesterday.”

“Today?”

“A white pickup.”

“Plates?”

“Government.”

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“They weren’t hiding it this time Jonah.”

Jonah’s stomach tightened.

“So they know about you.”

“I think they’ve always known about me.”

Claire reached into her backpack and pulled out three thick binders.

“I’ve been working while you disappeared.”

Jonah frowned.

“Working on what?”

“The names.”

“What names?”

“The people who always seem to arrive first.”

She opened the first binder.

Every page contained a Missing 411 case.

Some he’d investigated.

Some he’d never seen before.

Each had names highlighted in yellow.

Search coordinators.

Federal investigators.

Medical examiners.

Military observers.

Forest Service officials.

Most meant nothing individually.

Together…

Patterns emerged.

Jonah leaned closer.

“No way…”

Claire nodded.

“I thought I was seeing things.”

She flipped another page.

Another.

Another.

The same names appeared over and over.

Not every time.

Just often enough.

Different states.

Different decades.

Same people.

Or people transferred from one federal agency to another.

One man appeared first as an Army captain.

Years later he surfaced as a civilian consultant.

Then with Homeland Security.

Always close to impossible disappearances.

Always disappearing from the paperwork afterward.

“I stopped looking at the missing people,” Claire said.

“I started looking at everyone around them.”

Jonah stared at the pages.

He’d spent years chasing victims.

He’d never considered chasing investigators.

“How many?”

“Forty-three.”

“What?”

“I’ve identified forty-three people who repeatedly appear around Missing 411 investigations.”

Jonah slowly sat down.

“That’s impossible.”

“So is everything else we’ve found.”

Claire unfolded a map across the bed.

Red circles covered the western United States.

Military bases.

National laboratories.

Remote airfields.

Classified facilities.

Every location sat within driving distance of clusters of unexplained disappearances.

“It gets worse,” she said.

She handed him another folder.

Inside were budget documents.

Most had been heavily redacted.

One phrase remained visible.

Biological Retrieval Program

Another.

Subject Recovery Team

Another.

Containment Operations

Jonah felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

“They’re not investigating these disappearances.”

Claire slowly shook her head.

“Wait, what?” He asked with a look of shock on his face.

“Jonah, they are studying them.”

For hours they worked without speaking.

Case after case.

Map after map.

The evidence slowly assembled itself.

A child vanished in the Smoky Mountains.

Months later a classified convoy entered the same forest.

A hunter disappeared in Montana.

Military helicopters arrived before local search teams.

Two hikers vanished in Colorado.

Federal officials ordered county deputies away from the scene before any evidence had been collected.

Every trail led somewhere.

And every road eventually ended at the government.

Near midnight, Jonah opened Mara’s final notebook.

Something he’d overlooked caught his eye.

Tiny numbers written in the margin.

Not page numbers.

Evidence numbers.

He compared them against Claire’s binder.

The first matched a disappearance in Washington.

The second pointed to an Army accident in Arizona.

The third linked to a hiker in Tennessee.

Every reference connected one Missing 411 case to another.

Like stepping stones.

Mara hadn’t been documenting isolated disappearances.

She’d been following a chain.

Each victim led to another.

Each investigation uncovered another layer.

Each answer created two new questions.

She’d been building a path.

Not toward the missing.

Toward whoever was taking them.

Jonah slowly closed the notebook.

“They’re all connected.”

Claire met his eyes.

“Yes, they are.”

Shaking his head in disbelief “But why, how…?”

But before he could finish Claire raised her hand stopping him “What do you think the words Containment, Recovery, Retrieval mean Jonah?”

Looking at her, speechless Jonah did not know just how to respond.

Picking up a file and handing it to Jonah, he looked at and read page after page, shaking his head. Feeling dizzy as if the floor beneath him was made of water, Jonah sat down on the edge of the bed.

Finally looking up at Claire, “This can’t be, why would they experiment on our own citizens? This can’t…”

“It’s true Jonah, every single part of it is true, all we need to do is prove it. The Government is experimenting with human beings, they are responsible for the missing 411 Jonah.”

Jonah’s head was spinning, he could not believe it, no matter how much the evidence pointed in that direction.

Outside the motel window, headlights drifted silently into the parking lot.

Neither of them noticed.

Jonah knew that they needed to keep moving. In the middle of the night the two became ghosts and vanished, unbeknownst to those that had been keeping a close eye on them.