Abandoned Barn, Arcadia Bay Oregon, October 10th, 2013, 3:40 PM
The trio pulled up to the front of the barn, looking at its decaying facade, the wood was splintered and rotted, several planks were missing allowing for of the inside to be viewed. They all walked up to the door, with James leading the charge. They all stopped in their tracks when they came to face the old door, James knelt down to the ground and looked at his feet
"Fresh Tire marks, someone's been here recently..." he said aloud to the group who were now all looking at the disturbed stretch of earth the perfect length for a vehicle. James looked up at the door, he noticed that the handle had a large padlock on it that required a key they didn't have, but the lock on the door itself was old and rusty,
James grabbed the padlock and tried to yank on it as hard as he could hoping to be able to simply rip the lock from its confines and open the door. But it was of no use, James sighed and took a second to catch his breath "No luck here. Max, see if you can't find another way in" He instructed "And use that 'power' of yours should the need arise" by this point James had just come to terms with her abilities, though James couldn't see what she was doing or explain how she did, all he knew was that she used them and gave fair warning if a situation got potentially dangerous.
Max walked off to the left side of the old building, about a couple seconds later she called out "Guys! I found the front door, come on!" James walked around the side of the barn with Price behind him, there he found how Caulfield had found their way in, a loose piece of corrugated steel was poorly patching a hole in the side just large enough for a person to fit through, James ducked his head to avoid colliding it with the wall of the barn and stepped inside.
Once inside James took a look at his new surroundings, It was relatively dark inside, with only a little sunlight shining through the walls of the barn where wooden planks had fallen off over time, the floor was completely covered in old hay, there was an old tractor sitting dusty and abandoned in the middle of the barn, and James could see that there were platforms above yet no way he could see to climb up there.
"God, this is way too Blair Witch... I have goosebumps all over" Max commented
"This place is...unsettling to say the least" James nodded in response
"Hey! check out this old chest!" Price said turning her attention over to a large wooden container pushed up against the wall, she pulled the lid up and peered into it to overlook the contents inside,
"Yes please open it a little louder Chloe, let everyone who might be here know We've come to plunder their shit..." James said rhetorically only to have Price flip him off with looking behind her
"Jackpot. Old shit..." Price said defeated she didn't find some great treasure inside
"No, look closer" Caulfield instructed. Price shifted some old binders and books around
"Harry Aron Prescott and family donate new library to Arcadia Bay" Price read aloud from a newspaper headline that talked about the opening of the library that most people in town had taken to simply call 'The Prescott Library' "Prescott Industries celebrate grand opening" Price kept reading headline after headline "The Prescott's bring bomb shelter to town." whether James liked it or not. The Prescotts certainly left their mark on his town.
"Nice scrapbook" Price commented "I'll check here for more clues, you guys go scope out the area" James did as he was told and turned around the investigate the inside of the barn.
James looked around, there wasn't much. Say for the old tractor, a picture of the Barn in days past when it was well maintained, an old photograph of Harry Aron Prescott, the owner of the barn, a pitchfork with cobwebs and dust coating its surface, James looked at the door they had tried entering earlier when he noticed something. along the inside of the wood was a message, carved into the wood probably ages ago, James squinted his eyes and moved in closer to try and get a better look. In scrawled messy writing that comes common when crudely carving a message onto a hard James could barely make out "TOM M, AND WILL P. SEPT, 1989" James looked away and turned around upon reading the message, James walked away from the message not wanting to stir up any unpleasant memories and back over towards Caulfield
It looked like she had noticed something in the Hay and was moving it away from a certain location on the floor, James joined in on the effort by helping move hay away with his foot. Once they were done they both realized the had uncovered some sort of hatch that led god only knows where "Well what do we have here?" James asked flatly, the hatch was held in place by yet another padlock, similar to the one outside.
"It looks brand new..Why?" Max asked puzzled by her discovery, James shrugged
"Well, let's see if there's a way to bust that lock" he said looking around as if he would find the answer in his surroundings "Its gotta be something... heavy"
Max grabbed a hook that was connected to the barns pulley system that would help haul blocks of hay around the place back when the place was still in full operational order and hooked it through a loop in the handle on the hatch, then she walked over to a platform that was just about as tall as James probably was "Chloe, could you give me a hand?" she asked. Price walked over helping her up to reach the platform
"Sidekick at your service" Chloe joked as she hoisted Max up high enough to climb up on her own. James walked over to the platform observing Caulfield's movements trying to wonder what sort of plan she had concocted inside her head. James' eyes followed her as she made her way across the platform towards a piece of old farm equipment, stored along one of the top platforms. Caulfield grabbed onto the things pull cord and pulled down with all her strength, the piece of machinery tilted forwards and fell due to gravity in front of her, what was more surprising to James was the fact that the thing didn't collapse the platform bringing Max back down the ground level. James observed as she then used to machine as a stepping stool to hoist herself up to the walkway it had previously blocked, James watched as she looked around trying to find a solution to something just before she raising up her right hand.
James was surprised when he looked up and saw Max had somehow managed to get up to the third level in the barn despite the fact she wouldn't have been able to since there was a large piece of old farming equipment blocking her path "How did she..." James asked confused, Price nudged him in the arm
"Dude, I'm willing to bet you one hundred dollars it was her rewind ability" she remarked, then it had made sense to James remembering what he had said earlier outside. He watched as Max tired the other end of the rope from the pulley she rigged the hatch door to the other end of the machine
"Is she's doing what I think she's doing.." James said to himself continuing to watch, she pulled the junk a little further in on the platform before kicking over, the force of the fall caused the pulley to rip the handle clean off of the hatch door, the machine falling to the ground next to it with a loud metallic thud. Before long Max had jumped her way back down to the ground and the trio approached the now unlocked hatch, Caulfield tried to lift open the door but found it rather difficult to do so.
James walked over and offered a helping hand lifting the hatch with a little less difficulty "Damn, guess you got muscle on you after all string bean" Price commented, referring to James' thin lankly figure
"Guess all those days of helping my mother in her garden paid off" James said cracking his knuckles. Now that the door was open the trio could see inside. Before them laid a concrete staircase that led underground to somewhere
"What..is this?" Price asked
"Likely an old cold war fallout shelter. But I guess we'll have to find out ourselves" James explained before walking down the steps, the heels of his shoes making a loud audible step that echoed the deeper in he got.
"Do I even need to say how weird this is?" Max asked almost rhetorically
"You just did. Who builds this kind of place?" Price responded and raised a query of her own
"Paranoid lunatics fearing the end of the world, or people who wanted to hide something they really don't want anyone to find" James offered an answer but the truth is, he was almost just as confused about this place as his partners were. After reaching the end of the short staircase James looked around, the entire sub-level was built out of concrete. but the lights were on and shinned a fluorescent blue color. Not at all like the type of lighting one could expect in an old bomb shelter built underneath an abandoned barn, someone had been here recently.
The deeper into this place James got the more questions were raised, his most pressing question being why was there a locked door with a state of the art security lock on it? This only added to his theory that someone, whoever they were, they definitely were keeping this bunker well kept. "No use trying to bust in that door, I'll need a code..." James thought to himself. he investigated the keypad on the security lock, the most worn down buttons were the 2,4, and 5 keys. James tried to enter the code as 452 but was met with a red light on the keypad indicating he had put in the wrong code, he thought back to where he may have seen a 3-digit code that would have been at a place like this. Then it hit him.
The scrap of paper with all of the numbers on it James had placed with all of the other evidence against Nathan back at Price's house had a very similar code, without hesitation James punched in the numbers 542 into the keypad, the thing beeped and the light was now a green color
"Yes! I thought that only worked in the movies" Max cheered in excitement, James walked over to the large security door that the security pad had locked and rotated the valve handle on it. Once the door was open he stepped inside, the two girls following behind him.
The trio looked around the new room they found themselves in, there were metal shelves stockpiled with food cans and other rations, adding more evidence to James' theory that this was an old fallout shelter of some kind, many of the lights inside were off casting the room in dark immense shadows, but the weirdest thing about it all was that the room was completely sterilized and clean almost similar to the hospital he had visited merely hours ago but had now felt like a lifetime. "Stocked and ready for the apocalypse. This must have cost a fortune" Price commented, walking in and off to the left into another room that was similarly lit.
James following behind, wanting to investigate this place thoroughly. Upon walking through James saw something bizarre, in front of him was a leather couch wrapped in what appeared to be protective plastic, and front of that was a chair and a white backdrop that almost looked like a photography studio, given that James knew who the original owner of the barn above this bunker was, and that Nathan was a photography enthusiast much like Max was, it wasn't hard for him to make the immediate connection James walked forwards past the couch, choosing to ignore the framed drawing of girl with bits of gore and body parts spilling out of her opened throat, and towards the metal cart that contained what appeared to be medical grade needle syringes and a couple bottles of drugs, each new discovery James found made his stomach turn in knots he didn't know were possible, every hair on his body was standing at attention and his brain was firing off signals at rapid-fire pace.
Walking around James checked the cabinets, upon opening one closest to the back of the room did he discover something truly horrible, inside were red binders all labeled with the names of several people, many of them being students at Blackwell thats James was antiquated with, his eyes went wide at the sheer number of these binders, they filled the entire bookshelf "My god... something tells me I don't want to open these and see what is inside" James said aloud referring back to all of the evidence he had gathered in this one room alone. James swallowed the knot forming in his throat and pulled out three of the binders that really caught his attention
one labeled "Victoria"
one labeled "Kate"
and lastly one labeled "Rachel"
Setting them down on the table front of him he opened the first one from the bunch he pulled out, by that point by Price and Caulfield had joined him at the table to look over his find, much to his relief Victoria's binder was empty. Then he opened the one labeled as 'Kate'. What James saw made his heart sink.
Max gasped in shocked horror at the contents, the binder was full of black and white photos of Kate Marsh in bizarre, compromising positions, her face was blank and she looked like she wasn't even aware what may have been happening "When I get my hands on that motherfucker..." James said with a cold, dull, furious tone in his voice
"Kate wasn't the first..." Max noted "All of those binders are filled with other victims" then her eyes went wide with the frightful realization
"Victoria's binder was empty..." James said with a slight quiver in his voice "That son of a bitch is gonna dope her up and do the same thing, and I'm willing to bet he plans on doing it tonight at the party tonight... Just like he did last week"
Then Chloe let out a gasp at her own discovery "Rachel..." she said under her breath, James looked over at Price, she had opened the Binder labeled 'Rachel' and found Rachel Amber in much the same situation as Kate was. His worst fear had come true, as much he really wanted to,
James Makintosh had just uncovered the biggest conspiracy the likes of which Arcadia bay has never seen before.
"This can't be real... These are all-These are all posed shots right?" Chloe pleaded hoping that what she was seeing wasn't true
"I'm sorry Price but. They're real alright, all of them" James shook his head
"Maybe- maybe Nathan paid her a shitload of cash to do this. She probably would have" Price had begun to panic, James had never seen her like this before, but he could understand why, he had gone through a similar dilemma when he realized what had actually happened to Marsh, but the reality for him quickly set in
"This is some kind of bad nightmare, and we can't wake the fuck up" he said under his breath. "Where is that?" James pointed to the picture of Nathan and Rachel, she looked completely out cold and Nathan looked to be lowering her into the ground
"The junkyard! We have to find that spot, now! then we can see what he did..." Price said quickly "There's no way she's dead, no way!" Price kept denying as she ran through the bunker and up the stairs. James and Max following quickly behind her
American Rust, Arcadia Bay Oregon, October 10th, 2013, 4:25 PM
The truck sped through the entrance to the Junkyard faster than James had expected, hitting his head along the roof of the ceiling, the car moved so fast a lot of the time it was at risk of crashing alongside or into the piles of trashed cars.
Once they had reached their spot all three of the people jumped out at lightning speed, James rushed over to the back of the truck and pulled out a shovel that he had grabbed along they're way when they passed by James' house. He carried the tool in both of his hands and walked at a quick pace in order to keep up with the two girls. Only halting when they had stopped in their tracks "Look, this is it!" Chloe frantically said pointing at the ground, James moved to the front of the group and immediately stabbed the shovel head into the dirt, removing the earth steadily. While James made a decent chunk into the digging, both Price and Caulfield began to aid by clawing out dirt with both of their bare hands.
"Stop Stop!" James halted the group who complied
With a shaking hand James pointed down into the hole they had made, they had found had to have been a canvas or plastic bag still submerged inside the earth. "Please no..." Price tearfully pleaded, James used his hands to try and rip open the back, once he was successful all three looked inside the bags contents and their hearts broke collectively.
"Oh... oh, Chloe I'm... I'm so sorry..." James broke the silence offering his sympathies "Oh no Rachel, Please not her!" Price finally broke down into tears, while Max had backed away due to the horrid smell that now filled the air around the bag, James just looked inside of the hole he created with his hand over his mouth, words escaping him. Caulfield walked over to her wailing friend and embraced her
"Chloe I'm so sorry" she said just as tearfully as Price was
"Who does this?!" Chloe screamed out
"Someone who needs to pay..." James said in a cold, dull, but also furious tone, never taking his gaze away from the thing that he had unearthed