Gray did a quick walk-through of three more houses, ones where the damage wasn't severe enough to merit caution. In each, he found the same soul-crushing uniformity of contents that had disturbed him so with the Winslow residence: bland earth tone colors, white shirts and khaki pants or skirts, no sign of any modern convenience or technology: television, telephone, VCR, anything at all. His internal balance, already askew from the bizarre impressions the first house had given him, was further disquieted with each house's interior. His cell phone buzzed on his belt as he exited the fourth house, and his quick retrieval of it was prompted more by the discomfort the tone caused him than any desire for more information. Who knew what his subconscious would make of some new (and likely terrible) discovery?

"Go," he ordered, knowing it was one of five people, three of whom were on-site, the others unlikely to make a call right then.

It was Morris, who immediately asked "Do we know if this factory used to be a mortuary or something?"

"No idea. Why do you ask?"

"Because one of delivery rooms has what looks like a damned Mortician's prep table in it. Its…weird."

"You ain't kidding," Gray muttered. "Anything else 'weird' there?"

"In the room? Well, apart from chemical drums there's some compressed gas cylinders, oxygen masks and someone's laundry…"

"I meant the factory equipment," Gray put it in quickly. Morris had a bad tendency to methodically list things before him, which while excellent for an engineer, was bloody annoying for everyone wasn't one.

"Uh, mechanically, no. The equipment is all standard for fertilizer production. Looks like it was mixing a lot of organic waste with cleansers, then with natural steroids and antibiotics."

"Any idea on the sources?"

"Err, that's also a little weird. The chemicals are all from known vendors, though BP seems to lead the pack. The organic stuff, well, unless I'm reading their records wrong, it looks like most of it comes from the septic tanks of that development."

Gray paused his steps, looking about the houses again. "How are you getting that?"

"The factory's computers were still running, and they seem linked to the server that hosts the HOA. At least according to Benji."

"Hmm," was Gray's grunted response. "Nice, self-contained system. Very green," he muttered aloud.

"Well, almost," Morris put in. "The septic waste notwithstanding, they were getting irregular shipments of something labeled 'C-N packs'. That's Charlie, dash, November, packs, with no other description beyond the weights listed in kilograms." Pause. "Pretty damned irregular ones…"

"Meaning?"

"Well, heh, they'd go months and months without getting any of them, then they'd get a few over the course of a week, then…nothing again for months on end." Pause. "Maybe it was some kind of additive or something."

"Send me a screenshot of one of these delivery schedules," Gray ordered. The phone gave a faint 'ding' chime as the image came over. It was faint, but Gray could make out the essentials. Between July 8th and 21st two years previously, the plant had received four such deliveries. What caught his eye was how the deliveries varied in weight: the first was listed at 50 kg, the second at 30 kg, the third was oddly 72 kg, and the last listed at 98 kg. Damned odd totals all around, especially the first two.

The delivery dates were likewise bizarre. The first delivery was July 8th, the next a week later on the 16th, and the last two were within a day of each other, the 20th and 21st. Something about this combination of weights and dates felt significant, though precisely why escaped him. He asked, "You find any stockpiles of these 'packs', quote unquote in there?"

"No. I mean, if they've been taking in shipments between three and four hundred pounds, it's gotta be somewhere in here, right?"

"Maybe they use it as soon as it arrives?"

"Possible, but if it's a regular part of their production process, why the erratic delivery schedule? Why not get it in bulk?" Pause. "Listen, I've ordered the Guardsmen to cart out the filing cabinets and deliver them to the main site. They've gotten orders to pull out as well. Does that track?"

"You're alone there?"

"Yeah. I don't mind saying this place is giving me the creeps."

"Head back here," Gray ordered. "There's a good chance we'll have to evac soon."

"That front up by Manitoba?"

"Yes."

"I'm on my way." The connection was cut, and Gray continued towards the Homeowners Association building, which was appropriately at the center of the development. Wilson appeared at his shoulder as he walked, his white coveralls now lightly stained.

"You heard? About the storm front?" Gray nodded, making sure to keep a few paces distance between them. "We'll be packed away within the hour."

"Good. Any immediate findings?"

Wilson shook his head. "Toxicology is nearly finished. I'll have a base breakdown in half an hour."

"Soil samples?"

"Same issue, I'm afraid." There was the sound of something tumbling over within the staging tent, which caused Wilson to hustle away without further comment. Just as well as they were just a few paces from the HOA. It was a two-story affair whose sharp, business-like design clashed sharply with the suburbanite scene surrounding it, its very size putting Gray's teeth on edge, hinting there was more to it than simply being an administrative node for the development.

Entering, he took note of the vandalism that defaced the walls, looking as if several somebodies had decided to go berserk with axes and hammers. There was no graffiti in evidence, the odd splatter or streak of blood notwithstanding, merely large gashes in the walls and doors having been kicked in. Broken glass was everywhere, and if the few rooms he glanced inside were any indication, the attacker's rampage must have been something to behold.

He paused at a particularly large room, one which looked like it had functioned as a classroom of some sort. The chalkboard at the front had been cracked and half-hung off the wall, and the two-dozen student's desks were to a one upturned or damaged in some way. What caught Gray's eye however were the few posters that still clung to the walls. They were clearly the efforts of the students, done in crayon and paint, showing clusters of children in white shirts and tan pants and skirts. One poster had them standing in green field with houses in the background, the other with adults crowded behind them. The banner on the former read "Together We Are Perfect", while the latter read "Only Together Are We Strong".

The other posters had been torn down and ripped to shreds, but from what little he could make out, they'd been more professional in execution, with scenes of banners, flags and what looked suspiciously like paramilitary uniforms on them.

Gray felt his blood start to chill at the implications. The schoolbooks on Jenny Winslow's shelf had been anecdotal, the authors familiar to him as ones who believed in 'traditional' values and education methods, but that coupled with these images painted a much more comprehensive picture in his mind. It wasn't a pleasant one, and still incomplete, which didn't settle his nerves in the slightest.

Exiting the destroyed classroom, he called out "Benji? You here?"

"Back here," came the response, far further down the main hall. Gray carefully maneuvered himself over the bits of glass and debris, which seemed never-ending and left him wondering exactly how many of the residents had been involved here. Ultimately, he came upon what looked like a central office, the door having been nearly kicked off its hinges. There were papers and binders scattered all about, chairs upended and general damage to the room. At the small desk along the wall was another chalk outline, this time encompassing a desktop monitor that appeared to have been smashed with a sledgehammer, though given what he'd seen at the Winslow's, Gray doubted it was anything that simple.

Benji was seated at the conference table, a USB cable connecting his laptops to the computer he could hear humming under the main desk. His eyes were fixed on the screens before him, his fingers dancing on the keys like a concert pianist. "You're looking very disturbed," the smaller man said without looking up.

"This is a disturbing place," Gray stated, taking in the wreckage of the room.

"You're right there," was Benji's reply, pausing his work for a second to point to the main desk. "Look at that doorstop there."

Gray looked where he indicated, noticing a sizable bound mass of pages. "What is this?" he asked picking it up.

"An application for admission into this place. Open to any page and tell me what you think." It was rare for Benji to ask, never mind direct action on his part, so Gray did as bade figuring the matter important enough to humor him.

The page he opened to was a series of multiple-choice questions, and immediately saw the significance. He read aloud "Which best describes your children's relationship with their maternal grandparents? A, Hostile. B, Indifferent. C, Nonexistent. D, Other." He frowned and turned to another page.

"Which describes your spouse's relationship with their immediate family? A, Hostile. B, Indifferent. C, Nonexistent. D. Other."

Another page. "Which describes your own relationship with your high school peers? A, Hostile. B, Indifferent. C, Nonexistent. D. Other."

He paged through other sections in silence, seeing the same options offered for variations on the same question. "Talk about rigid criteria," he murmured. "And definitely looking for a particular type of person." Gray looked up and asked, "What have you found so far?"

"Devilish thick encryption on this system," was Benji's clear answer. "They're using Corbonite algorithms, if you can believe it."

"Which, if memory serves, you wrote."

"True," the smaller man acknowledged. "And while these clever fellows swapped out the encryption key, they missed my back-door."

"So you have the system open?"

"Alas, no." Benji frowned. "The same clever fellows apparently have seeded the system with a number of little traps that, if tripped, would wipe the server. Nothing I can't deal with, but I have to proceed carefully."

"So, again, what have you found so far?"

"So far, I've got the listing of applicants and residents unlocked. Not much beyond that, I'm afraid."

Gray snorted. "Doubt that will tell us much."

"You'd be surprised. Come look," Benji waved to him. Gray came as bade and squinted at the laptop screen, seeing merely three rows of names, virtually all of them colored a dark red. There were a lot of names there, and Benji heard the unspoken question. "8,145 applicants total, of which only 35 have been accepted since this development was created five years ago." He tapped several keys and the red-colored names melted away, leaving just the 35.

"There are only 31 houses here…"

"33 to be exact," Benji corrected, and Gray nodded again, remembering Wilson's initial brief upon their arrival. "When Evergreen first opened there were 28, with a total 75 planned. But what's interesting is who they accepted here."

Gray started reading the names, his frown deepening. "Is that…Ed Winslow? 'The Psalms Investor'?" Edward Winslow had been a small-time money manager who, a couple years earlier, had gotten lucky with some of his stock picks. He'd apparently based most of them on select passages from the Book of Psalms and marketed the process to clients, who ate it up. His luck dried up not long after that and the Winslow family had collectively dropped from sight just ahead of arrest warrants getting sworn out.

"It appears to be."

"I thought he was hiding up in Canada."

"Perhaps the Mounties chased him back south."

Gray kept reading. "Carmen Pilsudsky…Aaron Jupeman…Ronald Agar…Calvin Randall…that can't be the same Bernard Coopes who…"

"Who drained three charities with the excuse they weren't 'virtuous enough' because they served disadvantaged youth? Yes, it is, and this whole list is a veritable who's who of well-off reactionaries and throwbacks," the computer man nodded. "Each and every one of them having successfully vanished from public view. Now we know where they landed."

"Still, this seems more accepted than can be accommodated."

"I thought the same, but not all of these happened at once." A few more keystrokes and a set of dates appeared beside each name. "28 accepted on the day of opening, the remaining seven coming in over the next five years. The most recent being Mr. 'Psalms' Winslow and family just a couple months ago.

"And before you say it, yes, that's still more than the number of available units. But…I noticed a sub-file in here that that was segregated from the main line. That's what alerted me there are tripwires in the system. Fortunately, they're not very imaginative and I cut them without jeopardizing data integrity. What that file shows, however, raises some…interesting questions."

"How so?" Benji declined to answer, instead bringing up the second list. There were between 35 to 40 names listed there, each of which had both a name in common with the various accepted families and a common notation next to their given name – SndtAFC – followed by a seven- or eight-digit number string.

Gray pointed to one and asked "A cipher key?"

Benji shook his head. "I thought of that, but the numeric sequence doesn't look right."

"A code word of some sort?"

"Much more likely, though I can't think what it might be for."

Gray let his eyes roam the list again, noting how the names sometimes clustered together, as if encompassing an entire family, while others were singular. He was mildly embarrassed when he realized how the number chains were, in fact, dates expressed as digits and without separators. Benji apparently came to the same conclusion, as he muttered "Oops," and reorganized the names so they were shown sequentially. This didn't exactly clarify things, nor did either man expect it to.

Gray took a mental step back and viewed the information in isolation, which painted a strange picture all on its own. This notation SndtAFC was applied to the names at seemingly random dates, save in four cases where they came within days of each other. In the latter case, it was applied to the same family name. Something about this made his guts turn to cold stone.

A terrible suspicion took hold when he saw four dates near the middle of the list. Dates from the month of July, two years prior. "You said that fertilizer factory shared this place's main server?"

"Yes."

"Remind me: what that's place's name? Arcade or something?"

"Arcadia Fertilizer Company. And it appears to service this development alone; no paperwork or invoicing showing wider distribution."

"AFC," Gray muttered as he pulled out his phone and brought up the screenshot Morris had provided. He had to force himself to compare the dates in question, going still at seeing them a perfect match. The names in question likewise rang a distant bell, which almost immediately become a clear chime of memory. "Alfonse DeCarlo, the self-declared Cardinal of the California Reform Church."

"Eh?" Benji squinted at the section in question. "I thought he and his brood were wiped out in a police raid or something."

"Apparently not," Gray allowed, retrieving his cell phone and bringing up the screenshot that had so puzzled him earlier. "These dates…" he muttered, eyes bouncing between the two screens while he tried to recall the essentials of the DeCarlo matter. The man himself had appeared out of nowhere over a decade ago and claimed to be a Catholic priest, Dominican by training – something that, strangely, the Church itself never definitively denied, even after he'd publicly wed a woman claiming to be a nun and fathered two sons from her – who declared himself emancipated from the Vatican and 'founded' a new order in San Diego (using funds he himself furnished from sources unspecified). He was certainly earnest in his ministry, gaining a sizable number of parishioners, but made so much noise the Holy See had felt the need to shut him down.

The DeCarlo's had dropped from sight six or seven years ago just as serious investigations of him started up, and apparently the four of them had been among the first to move into the development five years ago. Yet, all four had this strange notation next to their names, and in a sequence that left Gray disquieted to his very soul.

Ernest DeCarlo, the eldest child if memory served, received said notation on March 8th, two years ago, the very same day the fertilizer factory received this mystery shipment weighing roughly 50 kg, or 100 pounds. He would have been about 10 years old at that time, so the weights matched as well.

The younger child, Julien, received the same eight days later, and the factory received a package with a recorded weight of 30 kg; roughly what one would expect a healthy sized eight-year-old to clock in at.

Their mother, Marianne, was notated on March 20th, and the factory again received something reported at 72 kg. Try as he might, Gray couldn't recall seeing even a picture of the woman, but suspected it was close enough to match her body weight.

And then Alfonse himself received the strange note to his name the day following his wife, and this time Gray clearly recalled the man's image. He'd been lean and fit, the very picture of health and energy, so putting him at 97 kg, over 190 pounds, wasn't that much of a stretch.

"Hello, lye pit," he muttered, wondering in what condition these 'C-N packs' were upon delivery to their ultimate fates.

"What was that?" Benji asked, frowning again.

Gray put the application package down and rubbed his chin, a sense of clarity settling on him as disparate bits of data formed like an old-time jigsaw puzzle. "Look at where we are," he said aloud, not really addressing Benji – who carried on without pause – as much as to himself. "Physically, not geographically.

"A small community," he said, as if reciting a list. "Geographically isolated but set up to be self-sufficient and self-contained. They grow their own food, drink from the same well, recycle their wastes into something useful. All very tidy.

"But if we look into these houses and what do we see? Uniformity of layout, furniture, books, even clothes. Hell, I'll wager if we look in the kitchens – the one that didn't start fires – we'd see the same meal schedule in each one. I didn't see any televisions, any radios or computers in any of them. Hell, we've had to use our satellite uplinks to send data out; this region is a wi-fi dead zone, so no cell phones, not internet, nothing coming in from the outside.

"Everything about this place is communal. This building, the one we're in? It's not just an HOA office. There's what looks like a classroom down the hall, where children made posters about 'together' being perfect and strong. And the textbooks they're using? Cranks and idiots who think that the 1950s were a golden era of normality, that the Soviet Union still exists, and who can't even spell 'Kwanzaa'.

"But who lives here? Who thinks this is a place to raise a family?" He tapped the application book. "They're looking for people of means but with no real ties to family, peers, anything that would connect them to the outside world. People whose ideas are…out of step with the modern world. People who are, for all intents and purposes, as ideologically and emotionally isolated as this place is from the highway.

"This isn't a gated community. It's a damned cult compound.

"But what's missing from it? We've seen enough of these that when it gets this complex, turns into its own little world, there's always…"

"A lye pit," was Benji's observation, and Gray nodded.

"No matter how careful the selection, you're always going to have people who don't actually want to live on an isolated commune and have to swallow truckloads of nostalgia that tastes like crap, no matter what they say during the intake interviews. Or, worse, they get buyer's remorse once they've arrived.

"What would a place like this do with someone like that when they start making noise about having different thoughts from the rest, hmm? Can't have them leaving, if only because this place is all monolithic unity and letting anyone leave would blow up the foundation of all that. Before you know it, everyone decides to leave. Or drops a dime to the authorities who decide to do a replay of Waco.

"No, anyone making trouble has to be removed another way, and it has to be a way that deters everyone watching from trying something themselves. And as we don't see any guillotines or pillory on the lawn, it has to be something pretty fucking awful."

"Worse than the industrial furnace that Japanese cult used twenty years ago?" Benji snickered, then growled at the screen before him.

"The four dates next to the DeCarlos match deliveries to the fertilizer factory of something labeled 'C-N packs'. It just occurred to me that the 'C' could be carbon, and the 'N' is for nitrogen, two of the most abundant elements in the human body and prime nutrients for plant growth." Gray let it hang there, not mentioning the corresponding weights for each such pack and all that implied; it was nonetheless sufficient to cause Benji to uncharacteristically pause his work for a beat, which for him was tantamount to a scream of absolute horror.

"I'll further wager," Gray continued. "That if we compared the whole list against delivery schedules, we'll see the same thing for each name." He audibly swallowed and stated, "You followed the Winslow case, right?"

"Damned right I did. I lost five-figures to that idiot."

"Didn't he have two daughters?"

"I…believe he did." Benji frowned in thought. "In fact, I think it was his oldest who tipped off the SEC about him. Poor girl ended up getting it from both ends, her sister and her parents, and on television no less."

"C-Span?"

"TMZ, actually. Nothing like a little sister screaming at her elder how she ruined everything for them to make the crowd cheer, is there?"

Gray paused in thought, then asked, "Any 'Winslow' named on that list?"

"Hang about." A few keys were tapped. "Ho-oh, here it is. Yes, there's a 'Jenna Winslow' at the very end. Hmm, date is just over two months ago. Before you ask, yes, that was the one who dropped the dime."

"You were going to ruin everything again." Phantom words that suddenly took on a whole new context.

"The Winslow house had only one furnished bedroom outside of the parents," he stated flatly. "I'd say this place, these people, have been recycling a lot more than just the piss and shit they've been flushing down the toilet."

Benji paused again and started saying "Talk about all-natural…"

"Don't," Gray cut him off. "Just, please…don't."