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Ch. 23 The Tunnel and Thorium Cars
Last Updated:
2025-05-01 10:27:26
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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
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Field 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
Last Updated : 2025-05-02Field 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
Last Updated : 2025-05-03Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 1 Meeting Mr. X
I don’t know when you’ll be able to read these memoirs, whoever you are. By the time you read them, I could even be dead. That’s one of the reasons I’m writing them, because someone has to know these things. A second reason is that Samuel Moore needs to know what kind of man his father was and the real reason he won’t be seeing his father anymore. A third reason is that writing it will keep me from going crazy while I recover here in this facility, whatever it is and wherever it is. My mind desperately needs something to do while my body heals, which the doctors here tell me will take time, a lot of time.Fortunately, Rachelle taught me how to encrypt files on my laptop so that they look innocuous if Control sees them and how to foil keystroke recorders. Rachelle is a computer genius. I’d call her a savant. She’ll come into the story soon enough. Do I think Control could be spying on my computer activity here, in a hospital bed, on my own laptop? I know they are. However, when Control
Last Updated : 2025-04-18Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 2 Meeting Rachelle the Computer Whiz
Physical therapy sucks! It hurts. I’m back in bed now, with my spasms under control enough to keep writing to you, dear reader. One day soon, I’ll probably give you the details of my injuries, but I really don’t want to think about them right now any more than I have to. Writing to you will help keep my mind off the pain. Yes, they give me painkillers in this place, but they don’t block all of it. I’m also writing this time to keep myself awake until dinner gets here. I don’t want to miss dinner because I passed out from pain and exhaustion. Been there, done that. At least the food is good in this place, something to look forward to. Last time, I told you about my encounter with Mr. X that fateful day and the card he left with me. It wasn’t long, maybe a couple of days later, during the weekend, when I called the number. I wanted to ask more questions. To my surprise, Mr. X answered himself immediately after the first ring. I had expected to get some voicemail or an operator, but n
Last Updated : 2025-04-18Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 3 What's Going on in Dust Bowl, Arizona?
I knew it would happen eventually. Today, the main doctor who sees me informed me that I am deemed well enough to be debriefed about what happened in Dust Bowl. I have an appointment tomorrow morning after breakfast to talk about my experiences there. I won’t be walking to the appointment myself, of course. I’ll be wheelchaired in.I’m actually surprised this hasn’t happened a lot sooner. I’ve been conscious and well enough to answer questions for weeks. I mentioned that to the doctor when he was here in the room. He said that they also wanted me to be in a good state of mental and emotional recovery, too, for the debriefing. I can appreciate that.In the meantime, I’ll be debriefing you some more dear reader, before I slip off to sleep tonight. Last time, I was in the Ford Expedition with Rachelle and was just opening the Dust Bowl, Arizona mission briefing video.The video started with a map of Arizona zooming in on a region northwest of Phoenix, and well off any interstate or highw
Last Updated : 2025-04-18Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 4 Getting Food To-Go
I have a confession to make. I skipped making an entry here yesterday. You're probably reading this in its completed form, so you'd never know I skipped a day, but I'm telling you because I want you, whoever you are, to know how much I appreciate you reading this. Writing this record is really helping me process what's happened to my life since I became an Agent of Control (if I even still have that status. It's not exactly clear at this point what's to become of me once I'm all healed up as much as I'm going to get healed up, especially after yesterday.)I have faith that Rachelle’s pet AI will get this file in front of a lot of eyeballs, but I have no idea whether you're taking me seriously or just thinking that you're reading a piece of fiction. Either way, it helps me a lot to know that you're reading this. It's a much nicer way to work things out than what happened yesterday after breakfast.My first debriefing session since I came to be here at the facility was intense. Although
Last Updated : 2025-04-18Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders Ch. 5 Black-Eyed Kids
Today, I had a different debriefing interviewer, a much more normal seeming person. Although he wasn’t a Mr. Rodgers level of friendliness, he was calm, professional, and not rude, a huge improvement over yesterday’s guy. But, I'm sure you're more interested in reading about the road trip to Arizona than about me right now as a guy recovering in a hospital room, so here goes.When Rachelle returned from the restroom, she acted like nothing weird had happened, as if a physics-defyingly long electrical cord had not emerged from and then disappeared back into her cargo pants, as if we had always planned to get our meals to go. She smiled a lot, cracked jokes, and seemed in good humor like before, but didn't offer any kind of explanation for the odd occurrence or even acknowledge it.I took my cue from her and conversed back with her normally. Once at the vehicle, I got into the driver's seat and she got in the back for her nap as she had planned. I set my food container on the front pass
Last Updated : 2025-04-18
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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
