Buried In The Backwater Novels & Stories

He looked like he’d seen a ghost. “Hae? What’s wrong?” I asked, pulling him inside. He didn’t sit down. He just stood in the middle of my living room, shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have done it. Anna, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have looked.” The cold feeling in my stomach returned, colder than ever. “What did you find?” “It was so hard to find anything,” he said, his words shaky as his feet. “They buried it deep. Really deep. I had to use backchannels, old newspaper archives that weren’t fully digitized… I almost got caught twice.”

The scent of heavy rain and burning circuit boards followed Damien Blackwood into the dim, subterranean records office beneath the municipal courthouse. It was a godforsaken graveyard of old city bureaucracy, filled with rusted iron cabinets and the low, oppressive hum of an outdated ventilation system that failed to clear the stifling midsummer humidity.

The old maintenance bunker sat half-buried in the side of a low ridge, its concrete face screened by decades of vine and fallen timber. We almost walked past it in the pre-dawn dark. Only the residual spatial sense caught the hollow geometry beneath the overgrowth and pulled me to a stop.

"Oh, my goodness! This woman died a horrible death!" "She was a pureblood werewolf attacked by a rogue. Her body was pumped full of liquid silver!" "How did her family not realize what was happening? Couldn't anyone sense she was dead?" The TV kept replaying the news of my death while the comments section blew up with arguments about how I'd died. People reacted with shock, grief, and even outrage. But not a single one of them knew who I really was. My body was found in an old storm drain at the boundary of our family land. The site had once served as a military water reserve, storing liquid silver bombs during the civil war, but it had long been abandoned.

When the trees broke, I was standing on the edge. The quarry stretched below like the mouth of something too old to name. Water dark and still. It’d been flooded decades ago, after they dug too deep and hit a spring. Now it just sat there... no fish, no bottom, just cold and quiet. People said it was cursed. I figured it was honest. There were broken beer bottles lining the ledge, crushed soda cans, and graffiti caked in dust: TINA SUX DICK, JESUS WATCHES U FUCK, A + R 4EVER.

I had no use for love that arrived too late. Three months later. My team was celebrating a successful project completion when the call came in— from the funeral home. They wanted to know if I was available to collect Sarah's ashes. Gazing at the tranquil blue lake through the window, I chuckled softly and replied, "Flush them down the drain." I hung up. Just like that, the last shadow from my past was gone. And I felt light and free.

His gaze landed on the urn in my arms, and he knew—I was taking my mom to be laid to rest. He scrambled toward me, clutching at my pant leg. "Jess, please—let me come with you. I just want to see Mom one last time." I pried his fingers off and walked out the door without looking back. The burial site was just as the agent had promised—rolling green hills, fresh mountain air, a quiet peace that stretched for miles. My mom had always said the city was too loud, too busy. She used to tell me that when she was gone, she wanted to rest in the mountains, surrounded by beauty.

Not even Elias, alive and hiding and full of reasons to hate them. Just how natural it was getting. How much of himself he couldn't find anymore underneath it.

How pathetic. I remembered the day they laughed at me. The day they ridiculed me. Called me a liar, a gold-digger, a nobody pretending to be someone. The memory was still sharp, still raw. But now? Now I had walked into this room beside a giant. Not just anyone—but Robert Adebayo, CEO of Adebayo Pharmaceuticals. A name that rang loud in global boardrooms. A company with over twenty branches worldwide, operating in more than three continents. We weren’t just big—we were dominating.

I nodded while fidgeting with my fingers. Alexander walked out of the car and the driver drove out of sight. Soon, the car stopped in the mansion and I walked into the house absentmindedly. Drey Lauren. Why won't I forget that name? Anna Lauren. Who is she? I sighed deeply wanting to head upstairs when my face turned to the television. The burial of Anna Lauren was being displayed. People in black stood there with umbrellas above their heads and that's when I realized it had started raining. A thunder rumble came from the sky and a sharp pain hit my head, making me fall to the ground.