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Ch. 13 The People in Dust Bowl
Terakhir Diperbarui:
2025-04-18 01:33:46
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Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 14 Preacher, Go Home!
Liz directed a comment to the man who was trying to be chatty. “Pardon me, sir, but you don’t seem local. Are you a tourist like us?”He smiled at her. “Well, I’m not local yet but I’m working on it. I’m a pastor who’s come to see about reviving the old church in this town.”You could have heard a pin drop when he said that. There wasn’t even the sound of someone’s silverware scraping a plate or scooping up a bit of omelet.“My friends and I noticed the burned one when we got to town, but we didn’t see any others.”“There aren’t any, but God called me here to change that.”The waitress came by to refill the pastor’s coffee. She added her two cents to the conversation. “It’s not that there aren’t any Christians around here, Pastor, but no one’s had the heart to have an organized church since the old one burned down. Most of us just follow Jesus in our own way without a church. Maybe your ministry is needed in another town.”“I’ve been praying a lot about it,” he replied “I’ll keep seek
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-18Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 15 A Visit to the Library
Around noon that Thursday, before the Dirt rolled in, I found myself headed to Parker, the county seat of La Paz county, in the Ford Expedition with Mont, Rachelle, and Spitfire. Our mission was to visit library archives of newspapers and other sources of records for La Paz county. Until the 1970s, Dust Bowl had had its own newspaper. As a precaution, we weren’t all leaving Dust Bowl in case it might become more difficult to return for some reason, such as if the roads back into Dust Bowl became closed, for example. Liz had wanted Jonie and Mitch to stay there since their particular talents made them more useful onsite there in Dust Bowl, such as when Mitch had seen the peculiar aura emanating from the statue of Lt. Sees-Like-A-Hawk. So, it was left to us “muggles” as Rachelle described us, who weren’t mages and who didn’t have the Sight, to slog through old records.Once we got into Parker, we grabbed some burritos from a Taco Bell drive-thru and headed for the county library. We fin
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-18Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 16 A Close Encounter
Behind our hotel was a tall wooden fence, about ten feet high. This would have kept folks from casually strolling into the field back there. Upon investigation, we discovered a few loose wooden planks in the fence that were not actually nailed in place. They were propped in place to look from a distance like they were attached normally, but they were not. Someone had obviously moved them on occasion to access the field behind the hotel.Wearing our hiking boots so that our feet would not encounter anything sharp on the field after dark, we entered the field ourselves and began looking for a good spot to observe a potential UFO light show. When I call the area a field, we have to remember that we’re talking about the Arizona desert. A field here isn’t like some farmer’s field in Iowa. It was an open field, sure, but no farmer would have wanted to plant crops there. It had definite boundaries like a field, though. Behind us was the hotel. To our left, quite a ways off, was a road. Ahead
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-18Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 17 Alice Introduces Wonderland
“What do–”, Liz began but Alice cut her off. “Please,” the Dust Bowl native said, “not here. We'll be safer at my place. Voices carry.” So, we walked in silence across the field where something otherworldly had hovered over us before we met this mysterious Alice lady. Mont brought up the rear. I could tell from the way he walked that his hand was ready to pull his gun from its hidden holster if that turned out to be something necessary. Mitch and Jonie walked in front of Mont. Mitch’s eyes were wide open scanning both the sky and the horizon, no doubt looking to see if his Sight showed him something. In contrast, as I saw her face in the moonlight, Jonie’s eyes were nearly closed as she walked. A true mage, she was reaching out with other arcane senses than Mitch possessed. Liz and Rachelle walked behind Alice, Rachelle looking down at her feet, probably concerned, as I was, about stepping into an ankle-twisting hole in the dark. Liz’s face looked as if she were workin
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-27Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 18 Behind the Fridge
I saw there, on the faces of my field team members, one by one, a revelation of what Liz had meant that their particular “personal dirts” would include monsters. Mont, Mitch, and Rachelle each looked somber, but Jonie looked as if she was about to lose her cool. “This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me.” She sounded as if she were a child, scared of the dark, trying to calm herself by simply affirming over and over “I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark.” And, like such a child, she repeated the affirmation a few times until Rachelle came over to the couch, knelt down in front of her, and took her hand comfortingly. “This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me. This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me.” “I don’t know,” Rachelle cooed soothingly, “but whatever happens, we’ll face it together. I promise.” Before Jonie could respond, there was a booming knock on the upstairs front door, so resounding that we c
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-27Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 19 A Night in the Basement
Alice didn’t return, at all. Eventually, after thirty very tense minutes according to my watch, Liz’s voice in the dark said, “They must have arrested her. Let’s get out of here. Mont, push the fridge out.” Cautiously, we emerged from our hiding place. The basement light bulbs, dangling from the ceiling, had been left on. The basement looked as we had left it. “I’ll scout upstairs,” Mont said. He pulled his gun. “We’re dealing with a duly authorized sheriff’s office,” Liz reminded him. “Put that away. Don’t go waving a gun around law enforcement if you don’t want to get shot.” Mont nodded with a slightly sheepish expression as he put his firearm back in its holster and covered it up. Liz was right. Whatever they were involved in, they were the sheriff’s office, a normal part of law enforcement and society. We were Control. And what was Control? Was it a secret part of the government? Was it a private entity? Was it even American? Was it international in scope? I wondered why I’d n
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-28Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 20 My Extraction
Well, dear reader, it’s been awhile since I added to these files, but something came up that interrupted the flow of this writing, my extraction from the hospital. I’m writing to you now from a different location which I shall not divulge. However, I’m keeping my commitment to you to complete the story of what happened in Dust Bowl as long as I’m around to keep writing it for you. I left off my last entry with our team in Alice’s basement. Alice had been taken by the La Paz County Sheriff’s Office. We were spending the night in her basement with the house surrounded by law enforcement with canines. Liz had used tech equipment from Spitfire’s pocket dimension to contact Control and request extraction. The extraction was denied. I’ll get back to that, picking up from there, soon. First, however, I’d like to explain why I’ve taken so long to write again and what happened with my extraction from the hospital. Not too many days after Spitfire had warned me on the phone given to me by Mr.
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-29Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 21 Getting Out of the Hospital
Mr. X was pleasantly surprised that I was so healed up and mobile. I got myself onto the gurney without assistance. “Wonderful, Dr. Leighton! I had no idea you were so well-along on your recovery. That will help us immensely as we escape.” Mr. X held up one of the gurney’s patient immobilization straps thoughtfully, then looked at me. “I completely understand your reluctance to use these, even for appearances sake. I am inclined to agree. Should we need to move quickly, abandoning our ruse that I am taking you somewhere as a patient, there won’t be time to unstrap you. I have another idea to make our appearance in the hallway look suitably deceptive.” Instead of strapping me to the gurney, Mr. X, whom I had always thought of as a Man in Black, though in his hospital orderly disguise he certainly wasn’t wearing black, draped a sheet over me, head to toe. “Now, Dr. Leighton, you will appear dead. Dead bodies on gurneys are covered in sheets like this and there’s no need to strap in t
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2025-04-29
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Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 26 Alice is Back but Liz is Gone
A few hours later, as Friday’s sunrise was approaching, Liz had another, more detailed call with Control. She relayed to us that Control wanted us, if possible, to hunker down there at Alice’s until backup arrived. If circumstances forced us to move from Alice’s, we were to inform Control of our new whereabouts as soon as possible after we relocated. We risked a few forays upstairs Friday morning for more than just restroom use, but we made our camp in the basement to avoid being seen through upstairs windows. We brought a microwave from the kitchen downstairs along with food from the cabinets and upstairs fridge. Mont and Mitch even found a home game system hooked up to a small TV in a guest bedroom. We guys passed the time Friday gaming and eating. I got to have normal male bonding time with Mitch and Mont as if we were colleagues from a regular, normal, mundane job with normal lives. We laughed and smiled a lot. I realized they were the kind of guys I’d be friends with anyway if
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 25 DUMBs
“Carl, do you know where you are?” X greeted me from the foot of a hospital bed. I blinked my eyes in a panic, wanting them to focus faster, to bring an end to the blurriness of my surroundings. I wanted to rub my eyes, but I realized that my arms, though not strapped down to the hospital bed, were attached to IVs. My right arm had two of them. My left arm had just one. I kept blinking my eyes hard, focusing them without assistance from my hands. As X and his surroundings came into view, I was relieved to see that I was not in the same hospital room as before.It’s not that I couldn’t still be in the same hospital because my extraction experience had been a dream, or returned to the same hospital after recapture, merely moved to a different room, but I could tell the room was very different from before. This room was clearly a single bed room. My other room had been a two-person room in which they just never gave me a roommate. The curtains weren’t plain white. They had a nice desig
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 24 The Train Ride
After what I thought might have been about thirty minutes, a door appeared in the tunnel to our right, metal, obviously reinforced, with a small, lit up keypad right next to it. X steered us to it. He propped me up against the wall for support while he handled the keypad. By that time, I had become so weak that right before we saw the door, I had been about to say that I didn’t know how much further I could go. I noticed that my breath was coming in slight gasps as I leaned on the wall, watching X punch code after code into the keypad.Finally, something worked and the door opened with a loud mechanical hiss. I realized it had been hydraulically sealed. A gush of pressurized air came from the other side. X gently collected me and we walked through.On the other side was a train station. We were obviously still underground, but this station looked far larger, grander, and more fancy than any city’s subway station in the mundane world. Stairways went everywhere, both up and down. Dozens
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 23 The Tunnel and Thorium Cars
I couldn’t see anything for what seemed like several long seconds. I’m not sure I was breathing, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable like I couldn’t breathe or like I was holding my breath either. I couldn’t hear anything. I had just started to wonder whether I was dead when we, Mr. X and I, complete with the car, whole, intact, not smashed or crashed, emerged from the other side of the wall. We had come out in what looked like an underground tunnel for car and truck traffic. A normal-looking road ran through the tunnel, complete with a dashed yellow painted line down the center and white solid painted lines on the edges of either side. The tunnel was lit with lights along the walls and hanging from the ceiling above, interspersed at about the intervals that street lights would have been on the surface. There was just one problem. We had not emerged aligned with the tunnel. We emerged from a side wall of the tunnel at the same speed we were going when we were in the parking garage. We
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 22 Meeting Mr. Y
Mr. Y looked a lot more like the stereotype of a Man in Black than Mr. X ever had because he dressed more the part. He wore the suit and hat of a 1950’s G-man, as opposed to Mr. X, who, when he wasn’t disguised as a hospital orderly, had always worn Victorian era clothing. Mr. Y was even wearing dark sunglasses in the underground parking garage where they clearly weren’t needed. His skin was the same crayola white as Mr. X’s. He never smiled, though, not at all, whereas Mr. X smiled at every possible conversational opportunity. The two of them seemed very, very opposite from one another.Mr. Y was accompanied by five men in some kind of military uniform, though not from any of the armed services that the general public knew about. They all had large automatic rifles aimed at Mr. X and me. Little, scary red dots veritably crawled over us, more of them on Mr. X than on me, but there were definitely some on me. I realized that meant that, whatever side Mr. Y was on, they didn’t really ca
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 21 Getting Out of the Hospital
Mr. X was pleasantly surprised that I was so healed up and mobile. I got myself onto the gurney without assistance. “Wonderful, Dr. Leighton! I had no idea you were so well-along on your recovery. That will help us immensely as we escape.” Mr. X held up one of the gurney’s patient immobilization straps thoughtfully, then looked at me. “I completely understand your reluctance to use these, even for appearances sake. I am inclined to agree. Should we need to move quickly, abandoning our ruse that I am taking you somewhere as a patient, there won’t be time to unstrap you. I have another idea to make our appearance in the hallway look suitably deceptive.” Instead of strapping me to the gurney, Mr. X, whom I had always thought of as a Man in Black, though in his hospital orderly disguise he certainly wasn’t wearing black, draped a sheet over me, head to toe. “Now, Dr. Leighton, you will appear dead. Dead bodies on gurneys are covered in sheets like this and there’s no need to strap in t
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 20 My Extraction
Well, dear reader, it’s been awhile since I added to these files, but something came up that interrupted the flow of this writing, my extraction from the hospital. I’m writing to you now from a different location which I shall not divulge. However, I’m keeping my commitment to you to complete the story of what happened in Dust Bowl as long as I’m around to keep writing it for you. I left off my last entry with our team in Alice’s basement. Alice had been taken by the La Paz County Sheriff’s Office. We were spending the night in her basement with the house surrounded by law enforcement with canines. Liz had used tech equipment from Spitfire’s pocket dimension to contact Control and request extraction. The extraction was denied. I’ll get back to that, picking up from there, soon. First, however, I’d like to explain why I’ve taken so long to write again and what happened with my extraction from the hospital. Not too many days after Spitfire had warned me on the phone given to me by Mr.
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 19 A Night in the Basement
Alice didn’t return, at all. Eventually, after thirty very tense minutes according to my watch, Liz’s voice in the dark said, “They must have arrested her. Let’s get out of here. Mont, push the fridge out.” Cautiously, we emerged from our hiding place. The basement light bulbs, dangling from the ceiling, had been left on. The basement looked as we had left it. “I’ll scout upstairs,” Mont said. He pulled his gun. “We’re dealing with a duly authorized sheriff’s office,” Liz reminded him. “Put that away. Don’t go waving a gun around law enforcement if you don’t want to get shot.” Mont nodded with a slightly sheepish expression as he put his firearm back in its holster and covered it up. Liz was right. Whatever they were involved in, they were the sheriff’s office, a normal part of law enforcement and society. We were Control. And what was Control? Was it a secret part of the government? Was it a private entity? Was it even American? Was it international in scope? I wondered why I’d n
Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 18 Behind the Fridge
I saw there, on the faces of my field team members, one by one, a revelation of what Liz had meant that their particular “personal dirts” would include monsters. Mont, Mitch, and Rachelle each looked somber, but Jonie looked as if she was about to lose her cool. “This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me.” She sounded as if she were a child, scared of the dark, trying to calm herself by simply affirming over and over “I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark.” And, like such a child, she repeated the affirmation a few times until Rachelle came over to the couch, knelt down in front of her, and took her hand comfortingly. “This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me. This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me.” “I don’t know,” Rachelle cooed soothingly, “but whatever happens, we’ll face it together. I promise.” Before Jonie could respond, there was a booming knock on the upstairs front door, so resounding that we c
