Part 2:
First he heard it.
The clicking and grunting that sounded like he was trapped with hundreds of wild animals. He could feel the rays of sunshine hitting his face. He was laying on something firm, yet soft. He thought it could be mud. He dared not open his eyes, for fear of what he may see on the other side. His eyelids were like protective shields, a millimeter thick. They could protect him from any horror, as long as they were shut. He smelled smoke and something putrid at the same time, feces he thought. I must be in a campsite and likely near the latrines, but whose campsite? He still did not dare open his eyes. His head throbbed. It felt like he sprinted at full speed with his head down and smashed into a tree. Who am I? He asked himself– he still did not dare open his eyes. “You are Special Agent Richard Clarke” a voice said to him. “You were sent here by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, your mission was to investigate a murder. Your partner was Special Agent Josh Sullivan, now he bears no name. Remember this Agent Clarke, soon you will face an ultimatum: it is imperative that you do not forget who you are.” Agent Clarke still did not dare to open his eyes. I shouldn’t concern myself with these nonsense matters he thought. “Oh but you should,” the voice said, “for your partner did not remember, now he is forgotten.” Who are you? thought Clarke. “I am the dream man,” said the voice, “Tell me agent Clarke, do you believe in dreams?” I do, thought Clarke. “Then wake up,” calmly said the voice.
Clarke’s eyes flashed open and in a jolt, he sat up. His right arm was tied to a long wooden spike in the ground. He looked around trying to assess his situation. First to his right where he saw what only could have been a giant pile of human waste. I am next to a latrine, he thought, yet this is barely even a latrine. How uncivilized are these people? Then the agent made the mistake looking to his left.
There must have been a hundred of them. All of them clicking and grunting to communicate. All of them are crawling. They had no clothes and mostly pale skin. There were men, women, and children all of them human, or were human at one point in time. Clarke’s eyes narrowed scanning the mob for familiar faces. His heart dropped. He spotted Sullivan– he was part of the mob. He was ravaging a rabbit: it was raw and when he bit down blood spilled out everywhere. He was covered in blood, unbothered by the stench or mess.
“Sullivan!” Clarke called out. The clicking stopped like a record scratch. All one-hundred eyes flashed up, piercing Clarke. Staring at him with an intensity unmatched by anything he had encountered before.
As the Durango pulled into the sheriff’s station Murphy knew he was in for it. It was 8:03 and he was exhausted, he had been up for 24 hours. At the Sheriff’s station there was all sorts of commotion. Both feds and regular cops littered the building. Standing outside smoking a cigarette was Officer Ashbrook. He was a middle aged man, balding, with a brown beard. His gaze shifted to Murphy in the Durango.
“What are you, a special agent?” he laughed.
Sheriff Desmonde walked outside, his face dumbfounded; he was accompanied by a federal agent in a black suit.
“What the hell are you doing driving a federal vehicle, boy?” The Sheriff always called Murphy boy. Nobody really knew why. Apparently he looked a little bit like the Sheriff’s son.
Murphy swallowed, “I have orders from Special Agent Richard Clarke to escort this sample to a Special Agent August Smith”. Murphy shouted.
“Pretty good boy did you rehearse that?” The Sheriff sneered.
The Agent stepped forward, “Agent Smith is inside” he said to Murphy. “Take the samples to him, then we have to talk.”
I am going to die here, aren’t I? Thought Clarke as he stared at the swarm of feral people. They were still staring at him, waiting like a pack of hungry wolves biding their time. It must have been an hour. Clarke checked his watch, only two minutes had gone by. He checked his pockets, his holster. Everything was still there except his gps, with his left hand he pulled out his gun, it was loaded but he only had thirteen bullets. Really twelve. He saw what those creatures did to those people in the cabin, there was no way Clarke was going to be ripped apart like that, so he saved one for himself, just in case. There’s got to be at least a hundred of them, he thought. There was really no way he could fight his way out of this and survive. There has to be another way out, he thought. He looked around in desperation, his heart racing. His right arm was still bound, he had to get the rope off first. So he had to use one of his precious bullets. He shot the rope off, as the gun went off a loud boom echoed in the forest. The mob shrieked and howled like a wolf pack. In the commotion Clarke recognized another face: it was the missing girl. She too had become feral, pounding the dirt and screaming like a madman.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!” Clarke screamed, waving his gun around in the air.
“ALL OF YOU MUST KNOW ENGLISH TELL ME, WHAT IS GOING ON?!” His voice echoed and the animals became aggressive. They roared at him, they howled at him, they clicked at him. They began to encircle him, like a hive mind, they moved in synchronization. It seemed all one hundred of these bodies had but one mind.They got closer and Clarke felt helpless. Just when he was about to give up something emerged from the woods.
“You must be Officer Carlito Murphy!” said a middle aged black man with a greying beard. He reminded Murphy of the NBA player James Harden. He was hunched over a table. His brow furroughed, and it seemed as though he was trying to read something in fine print.
“I am Special Agent August Smith,” he said. He wore a beaming smile on his face but to Murphy it seemed to be fake, an act. He sensed that Agent Smith didn’t really want to be here. Murphy couldn’t blame him. Wirt County West Virginia has become a place where FBI agents disappear on the regular.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Murphy looking around. Agent Smith had turned what was formerly the conference room into what appeared to be a makeshift lab. Plastic littered the room, the samples were all on display. There was a microscope on the table next to Agent Smith. To his left was a laptop with a case so thick it looked like a briefcase. It was open to some sort of forensic database. This was not Murphy’s expertise.
“We have to talk. You were the last person to see both Agent Clarke and Agent Sullivan. If we want to crack this case and have any hope of finding them we need to know everything you know,” Smith said.
Behind him the agent from earlier walked in.
“Behind you is Special Agent Chef Isak,” Agent Smith said.
Agent Isak nodded.
“He’s not much of a talker,” said Agent Smith.
Agent Isak smiled, “I’m afraid you do enough talking for the both of us Auggie,” he said.
“So Murphy, tell us every little detail of your life from the moment you met Agent Clarke and Agent Sullivan until right now,” demanded Agent Smith.
“We want every little detail,” Agent Isak said, “The specifics, the breakfast you ate, the type of shoes you wore, the texts you sent to who and why, every little detail is imperative. It’s usually the smallest details that solve the biggest cases.”
And so Officer Murphy began, “It was an ordinary afternoon.”
The figure from the woods issued one loud click and the feral mob became silent. He was pale, very pale. He had a few strands of long black hair covering his head and face. It was all that remained of a once luscious head of hair. The figure was skinny;it moved on all fours like an ape. He reminded Agent Clarke of Golem from Lord of the Rings. The creature was carrying a spear, and a rabbit was impaled on it. It drew closer to Clarke in the center circle. The hive mind moved aside for it. The forest was so silent. Clarke could hear the birds in the trees. He felt the tension in the air. Clarke suddenly remembered the night before, what happened before he was knocked out. He remembered the creature that spoke to him. This must have been what is slowly approaching him now. After what seemed like a century, the creature made it to the middle. He dropped the spear. Clarke pointed his gun at him. After another moment of silence, the creature finally spoke.
“You won’t be needing that,” the creature bellowed. His voice was old and raspy. It seemed as though he hadn’t really used it in a long time. Clarke was still silent.
“I’m guessing there’s only twelve bullets in that pistol,” the creature continued, “and you’re probably saving one for yourself, as a precaution. That means you have eleven bullets to use on us.” The creature laughed, a cryptic, horrid, archaic, laugh. “I’ve never heard of eleven bullets taking out a colony of one hundred and thirty seven!” he exclaimed.
“What is this?” Clarke finally and quietly asked.
“This?” the creature questioned, “this is freedom.”
“Freedom?” was Clarke’s response.
The creature smiled showing almost all gums, except for a few decaying teeth.
“Freedom,” it said.
“They don’t look free to me,” Clarke responded.
“They are,” said the creature. “They’re here by choice and they’re free.”
“There is no chance Josh Sullivan is here by choice,” Clarke fumed.
“He was like you at first, hesitant but he would change his mind”
Clarke looked at Sullivan. He was in the circle and he seemed to not recognize his old friend.
“JOSH!” shouted Clarke.
“It’s no use” said the creature, “he has no name now, he remains nameless and free.”
Clarke turned to the creature. “Yesterday he would have remembered!” he said.
He pointed the gun right between the creature’s eyes, “What did you do to my friend!?” he demanded.
“I gave him the choice: he could return to a boring life,working, risking his life every day in the field of duty,” the creature began. “A slave to the machine. Just for some slips of little green paper, to buy the next best thing to keep up with the neighbors. If you don’t you’re shunned, rejected. A shallow society, an unempathetic society. Hell, if you don’t acquire this paper you’ll die, and the world moves on. They’ll step on your corpse on their way to work. Eventually, they’ll all face the same fate. Do you want to live in a society where you need little green slips of paper to live, agent?” the creature explained.
His monologue is interesting, Clarke thought. But Sullivan would never fall for it.
“I suppose it is an interesting way to look at my way of living,” Clarke responded. “But I don’t think it is that shallow or simple. There are good men and there are bad men, everywhere you go. For every selfish man there is a good man. That is the natural balance of how the world works. We are a money-driven society, but that doesn’t mean we’re a selfish society.”
The creature listened to Clarke intently.
“Let me go and let me bring my friend with me,” Clarke pleaded. “I promise the bureau will leave you alone. They won’t even know you exist.”.
The creature sighed, “I can’t do that” he said. “He is one of us now– he made his decision and it can’t be reversed.”
“How!?” Clarke exclaimed.
“He won’t remember; he is a completely different person now. He is no longer an individual. He is we, and we are him,” the creature gave a cryptic response.
“Twenty-four hours ago that man was Special Agent Josh Sullivan, an FBI agent, a husband, and a father,” Clarke began. “You’re telling me that he gave up on his old life, his wife, his son, his duty as federal agent, to play in the woods? And on top of that he doesn’t remember a thing!?” Clarke was livid.
“He lost his memory because of the ceremony,” the creature responded.
“What ceremony?” Clarke inquired.
“When he forgoed his old life and chose his new life we held the ceremony. His old memories are gone, he chose to forget, he chose to be free!” the creature horridly explained.
“He chose to be feral,” Clarke said.
“He chose a peaceful life, just like his ancestors intended– a wild one sure, but a relatively peaceful one.”
“PEACEFUL!?” Clarke yelled, “You slaughtered a group of people like cattle in their cabin. Ripped them to shreds, and took this girl as your prisoner,” he pointed at the missing girl who was next to Sullivan in the circle. “You must have brainwashed her too!” he added.
“We try to be peaceful, but those people attacked us in the middle of the night,” the creature said.
“THEY WERE SCARED!” Clarke boomed.”They encountered a group of nasty … feral people on their property. I would have shot you too,” he said.
“They killed a few of our own in that cabin,” the creature responded. “Those boys had a shotgun; we had to take them out.”
That’s why there was so much blood, Clarke thought. A few of these feral people died too. Their bodies must have been removed from the cabin, but they couldn’t remove all that blood.
“You have a choice,” said the creature. “Your old friend is gone. Stay and you can live out your days happy and carefree, living a simple life, like your ancestors did, or you can leave and die cold and alone.”
“Why would you trust me to leave?” asked Clarke.
“Because I know you’ll be quiet,” said the creature.
“I don’t trust that you’ll really let me leave,” said Clarke, “and besides how could you know that I’ll be quiet?” he continued.
The creature started, “I sense that you can understand our way of life … besides by the time all you slow ‘civilized’ folk get here we will be gone, nobody will believe you. You’ll be some kind of madman,” he said.
“I am a federal agent,” said Clarke, “they’ll believe me”.
“Oh but they won’t. They’ll have no evidence of us here, they’ll think you hallucinated it all, they’ll say you’re unfit, they’ll give you a suspension, then they’ll let you go!” The once seemingly emotionless creature began to lose its composure. Clarke could see through him, the creature began to look more human now.
“How would you know anything for certain?” Clarke inquired.
“You and I have a lot more in common than you think,” the creature sneered.
It seems as though half the bureau is here, thought Murphy. According to the official FBI report, Agent Clarke has been missing for exactly 19 hours and twenty-seven minutes. Agent Sullivan even longer. The Bureau began to mobilize. John Smith, the Indian Shaman was brought in for questioning. He showed the feds where the forest of the north well was.
“Even if you find Agent Smith, he’ll never be the same,” is what the Shaman said as he left the station. Wirt County sheriff’s station was packed. This is one of the biggest cases in West Virginian history. The media formed a mob of people surrounding the outside of the station. The news of the two missing agents spread like wildfire and Murphy had to tell his story to almost all of them. As the last man to see both the missing agents, he had cameras in his face constantly. He felt like quite the celebrity. In the middle of his interview with CNN he caught out of the corner of his eye four, all black Chevy Suburbans rolling out of the Sheriff’s station. The FBI had begun its search.
“I was once an agent like you,” the creature began. “It feels like a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago, in a sense. I was a whole different person then. If only I could remember my name. I was investigating a case when I came across a cover up. I tried to expose it, I told my superiors about it, but they were part of it. I became obsessed with trying to solve it, to see who else was involved. I wanted to leak it to the media. Do my job as a civil servant, the people deserved to know what really happened. I got too deep into my work; I was shunned by my peers. Eventually I was suspended with pay. When I gathered enough evidence to leak it to the media I was rejected, they told me I was crazy. That’s why I decided to come out here. I did not want to live in a society that was so blind.I rejected it and began living life, happy and free. Eventually more people followed and now we are the only people on this planet that are truly free,” explained the creature.
“What was the secret!?” Clarke demanded.
“I’ll tell you, but no one will believe you if you tell them,” the creature said.
It was late when they found him.
He was stumbling around the forest, disheveled and dirty, his suit was tattered and his hair was matted. Alas, he was still alive. They brought him back to the station. They sat him in a chair and wrapped a blanket around him.
“It’s nice to see you again, old friend,” Agent Smith smiled.
Agent Isak nodded in agreement.
“You were right about these people,” Agent Smith said, “The West-Virginians really are good, honest, hard-working, blue collar folk. I’ve been met with nothing but kindness since I’ve been here with all of the people, except for the sheriff,” he laughed.
Agent Isak got back on target, “So what happened Rick?” he inquired, “Tell us everything.”
“I got lost,” Agent Clarke said.
“Really?” Agent Smith said, “I find that hard to believe, you didn’t see anything unusual? You were in the deep woods for nearly a day!”
“I SAID I GOT LOST!!” Clarke yelled.
Agent Smith and Agent Isak were taken aback. Clarke never got this mad, ever. It seemed as though he changed.
“Perhaps now’s not a good time,” Agent Smith whispered.
“I agree,” Agent Isak responded.
As the men began to leave the room Clarke spoke up.
“Wait!” he called, “Get me on the phone with Director Cohle, I want to be reassigned. I refuse to be assigned to this case anymore!”
The Shaman was right, Clarke was never the same. He became a paranoid mess. He didn’t last long in the bureau and moved to San Francisco, far away from Appalachia. When he closed his eyes at night he could still often hear that horrible clicking sound, and for the rest of his life he harbors a terrible secret that constantly weighs on him.
By the time the bureau got to the campsite, the feral people were gone. Agent Sullivan, along with the rest of them were never seen again.
Officer Murphy finally got his raise.
