23/02
Well, I’d meant to write the next part a little sooner than this, but every project I’ve ever done is a bit like this: *sporadic*.
So, last time, I said that I’d talk about the Letters (yeah, I know that I’ve capitalised that word, but the Letters are important. To me, and to the story). Here we go.
Not that long after I met Buddy, I decided to clear out the roof space in the house gifted to me by my grandparents. I reckoned that if I got rid of all of the garbage up there, then I could shift all of the stuff from one of the spare rooms to make a play area for Buddy. He’s a pretty big dog after all.
So, slowly going through everything, selling off the stuff that even those guys on *American Pickers* or *Pawn Stars* would turn their noses up at (and paying an exorbitant percentage of my sales to that criminal old creature Mrs. Simmons two blocks closer to town, who always seems to be having a “yard sale”, by the way), I finally came across the Letters.
They were in a box, one of the cardboard ones with handles like the ones you use to store unused files in. The Letters were just thrown in there though, like a pile of disorganised papers that had been stuffed in in a rush. As I’d already come across several boxes full of photographs and old love letters written by my grandma and gramps (which I most definitely do *not* want to share here) I at first assumed that they were just a part of the old folks’ collection that they had never gotten around to memorialising for themselves. Before I could consign them to the darkest corners of the attic where nobody would ever see them before my death however, a single word caught my eye: Deitrich.
Now, I’ll go more into Deitrich in my next entry, but suffice it to say that Fort Deitrich was once the largest employer (and greatest source of revenue) for my little town of Burkettsville before it quietly shut down, and much of the cash injected into our local economy dried up. Luckily for Burkettsville, the long-serving Mayor Sutter seems to have his finger on the pulse, with our marina, hotels, and glorious beaches picking up much of the slack, and while the city isn’t quite as prosperous as it once was, we’re not a dying community by any means.
Seeing that word made me want to read the rest of the letter and (braced as I was for more of my grandparents attempts to “physically reconnect with each other” in their older years) I read on. What I discovered was to change my life forever.
I’m not going to repeat the Letters verbatim (they are all locked away securely in another State with a handsomely-paid lawyer whom I trust to send to the right people once I’m dead), but here’s the gist of the first few:
**People were being abducted from the streets of Burkettsville by Fort Deitrich employees with the full knowledge and consent of the upper echelons of Fort Deitrich staff.**
I looked it up online. Back then, we had the second highest rate of “Missing Persons” reports in the entire United States. I know, I know, this doesn’t sound too scary to all of you conspiracy nuts out there. But to me, a 32 year old man with virtually no life experience, it scared the *hell* out of me. But the worst was yet to come.
Fort Deitrich closed down nearly fifteen years ago. I checked online for “Missing Persons” reports in Burkettsville. Guess what I found? We now have the highest instance in the United States.
That certainly gave my sense of personal safety something of a kick in the backside.
So, what could I do to keep myself safe? Well, first off the bat, I bought myself a gun. And then I bought a few more in a variety of types and calibers, just to be safe. They’re all down in their cabinets now, gathering dust. Then, I joined a gun club to learn how to shoot (a fairly successful venture, I’m now pretty decent with shotguns and handguns, less capable with rifles at long range) and signed myself up to several self-defence and personal combat courses (not so successful, turns out I can’t fight for toffee; one of my instructors actually laughed me out of the course after three lessons).
Thus trained and equipped as best I could be, I tried to resume my regular life, but those damn Letters kept nagging at me. More than once I found myself up in the attic at 3am in the morning looking them over, and their disturbing contents preyed on me during the day too. Slowly, ever so slowly, an idea started to form in my head. At first it wasn’t much of anything, just a vague idea that I should be doing something about all of those missing people but, over time, this developed into something more. A thought that maybe I had been dealt such a great hand in life, and now I owed it to others less fortunate to help out in whatever way I could.
The way I’ve described this makes it sound like the formative process of a vigilante superhero. It was nothing like that at all, it was just a pervasive feeling that maybe I could actually help in a small way, and not just coast along without a care in the world. Anyway, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what you think, the end result is that I decided to take myself to what was left of Fort Deitrich and see if I could poke up some dirt. This decision was to be one that changed my life forever.
I guess I never got round to saying everything that I wanted to in this entry. This introduction to my life looks like it’s going to be longer than I thought it would be. Next time, I’ll tell you about Fort Deitrich, I promise.