By the Smoog Hitch
Caela was pretty excited about tonight. She’d been out with the guys to Fort Deitrich a bunch of times before, and every time it had been a real thrill. She knew that the other guys were great believers in the paranormal, but she honestly wasn’t. What got her juices going was the exploration of what had been left behind. The thought of people’s lives, *real people’s lives*, just waiting to be explored, had something in Caela desperate to go along with them, even if they were a bunch of deadbeats. Fun deadbeats, but deadbeats nonetheless.
Caela had always been fascinated by other people, and how their lives differed from hers. In another world, one in which her parents had chosen to invest in a certain technological startup instead of pouring their savings into a company whose sole purpose was to renovate the barracks of Fort Deitrich, she might have been a psychologist, or social worker at the very least. But here, in this reality, she was just plain old Michaela Veronica Pagett, waitress at a small-time, all-night diner.
Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Caela had always held onto that deep-seated interest in other people: the strange and different ways that their minds worked held a pull like gravity for her, and she couldn’t help but let herself be drawn into (what she imagined) were their psyches. As a waitress, Caela got to see people at their best and their worst, especially when working the graveyard shift. The stories she liked to tell at parties about her experience in that place got her more drinks bought for her than the tips she earned would have paid for.
Caela’s best friend Isobel liked to tease her about working in a diner, but Izzie’s parents were rich. Her mother was a lawyer, her father a consultant of some kind (Caela didn’t know for what), and so she never wanted for money. Despite this, Izzie’s ribbing was for the most part gentle and without any malice. The two were friends and even in the face of parental disapproval, Izzie stayed by Caela’s side, and they had been inseparable since third grade.
Maybe it was a result of her upbringing, but Izzie’s interests, unlike Caela’s, were somewhat esoteric. Anything out of the ordinary attracted her immediate attention, whether it be an unsolved murder, a missing person, or even the appearance of a UFO. If someone looked at her internet history, they’d see – interspersed with all of the usual stuff – searches for topics such as Missing 411, Flat Earth Theory and the Michigan Dogman. This interest led Izzie to make acquaintances, and eventually proper friends, with people which her parents would strongly disapprove of, like the losers from the California Research Association for Paranormal Sightings (they said that the acronym was intentional, to throw off government search engines).
And so it had happened just two years ago, that Izzie had talked Caela into coming along on one of CRAPS’s excursions to that abandoned monument to governmental indifference, Fort Deitrich. Caela had a definite idea of how that day would go, but as it turned out, she found two things to revel in. Things she never would have expected.
On the journey there, while the rest of the group were talking about all of the unusual things that they might find there, Caela found herself drawn in to their conversations. She didn’t for one second believe any of the stuff they were talking about – especially Chud’s talk about time travel machines – but the camaraderie displayed by this small group (on that first day, all seven of them were there- it never happened again) caught her attention and never let her go.
Once on the base, Caela discovered a new way to see people: through the things that they’d left behind. She explored the village with abandon, getting new insight into the workings of the human mind from the things that they’d not cared enough to take with them- and also from what they *had*. She sometimes dragged her friends off-course from their investigations into ghostly apparitions, but more often than not simply sat in on their sessions, just to see what happened.
Those couple of years were pretty good for Caela; she enjoyed the infrequent night-time trips, especially as her work schedule usually put her on nights anyway, and she soaked in the sights and sounds of the abandoned fort. That was, until the night they came across something altogether *different*.
Since then, Caela’s interest in Fort Deitrich had become almost obsessional. She pushed CRAPS, who after that first incident were naturally unwilling to go back, into continuing their investigations into the old place. Caela wanted to find out *why* the people who ran Deitrich did what they did and, if possible, stop it from ever happening again.