Homecoming

     The server that hosted the website was pinging from inside my own house, back in Riverside. It didn't make any damn sense, but mike and i agreed, we were going to my old house, and we would find out what was going on. The gps told us it'd be about a day and a half of constant driving, so we paced ourselves and made it there in about four days. Nothing exciting about the trip, really, so let's skip ahead to my house.
     The newspapers were piling up on the front porch, and the lawn had died while I was gone. The leaves from my tree in the front had all fallen off, but I think it was still alive. We approached the house nervously, it was surreal, honestly, to be in my own home, and have it be abandoned. Like visiting your old school, familiar, and completely foreign all at once. The house was empty, the power had been shut off months ago. so how was there internet? It didn't make any sense. Nothing seemed out of place,. which considering the rush I had left in seemed like an impossibility. Somebody had clearly tidied the house up a little bit while I was gone.
     I looked through the whole house, but I couldn't seem to find the computer. I wandered into the back yard, and nothing seemed out of place at first. Then I noticed a light mounted over my back door. One of those solar-charged motion-detector types. It didn't belong to me, and even more strangely, it didn't light when I moved in front of it. I hopped up on a chair and lifted it off of its screws, bringing it into the house. Mike popped it open and found inside that it was a small computer. They apparently make them about the size of a vhs now. I didn't know, but Mike recognized it immediately., and shoved the whole thing into his bag.
     he said he couldn't do anything with it here, without power, so we'd have to take it with us. I grabbed some more things from my house, and we left for the day.

Mike Works Magic

I took a screenshot of the site.

     We shook off our hangovers, and mike powered into the website.
There was nothing interesting about it. Nothing. It was a simple webpage, with a .jpg stuck into the middle of it. He tracked the i.p. through two proxies, and bumped into a firewall, somewhere in the caiman islands. So, mike started his bigger computer on the firewall, and left it to grind away. Meanwhile, he moved to his smaller computer to focus on the site again.he started sifting through in detail, and opened up the source code of the site. Then he opened up the .jpg in some program i didn't understand and started scrolling through the code. He knew that Gregory had built that site for a specific reason, but the surface of it didn't mean anything. I watched him scroll through all the code, and while I didn't understand any of it, Mike seemed to read through it with ease. He flew through it a mile-a minute, then suddenly he stopped scrolling, and I saw his eyebrow pop up, before he opened his web browser. He opened the site again, and put a backslash in, with a short string of text. I won't say what the website was, but after the slash he wrote "spite_and_malice".
     Immediately we watched a new webpage load with a log in screen. We were so frustrated with this stuff. Every attempt we made to make sense of it all just raised more questions. Mike Got to work on that log in page, and I left to get breakfast. I grabbed some breakfast sandwiches and coffees, and headed back to the hotel. I was gone maybe twenty minutes, and when I returned, mike was in the shower, but his little laptop was open on my bed. He had a user name plugged in, and the computer was repeatedly punching in passwords.
It was October 23rd. I had been chasing this stuff down for four months. I didn't really know anything that I didn't know on that day in June when a heart appeared on my doorstep. Well, I had learned to shoot, I had learned to stitch myself up, but I hadn't come to understand what was happening around me.
     I sat on the bed and lifted my pistol off of the nightstand. I spun the chamber in my hand staring at it for a long while. I took the safety off, just as mike left the bathroom. He saw what I was doing, and I became immediately embarrassed. He didn't say anything, but it was in his eyes. I put the safety back on, and put the gun back down. Mike walked to his computer, looked at it for a second, and then moved back to the other bed. He grabbed a sandwich and turned on the TV.
A half an hour later, his big computer beeped a note, and he got up, and dashed to it. He had made it past the firewall in the caimans, and was ready to keep tracking the i.p. Forty minutes after that, he had found the last address in the chain.
It was in my hometown.
In fact, it was in my house.

Finding Faulkner

     Hiding out in another hotel, smashing my head against the wall. I had him, right there in my hands. RIGHT THERE, and I had to let him go. If I hadn't there would have been an investigation about the murders, and Mike hadn't been wearing gloves. I was trying to think of something anything that could help me make sense of all of this. The list, the detective, the secret data center, the puzzles, the man in the lake, and his beating heart, none of it made any sense to me. It was infuriating, knowing nothing, and feeling like I was being shoved around by forces I couldn't control. Forces I couldn't even talk to.
     At that moment, something occurred to me that I should have realized on day one. Gregory Faulkner could not have stapled his chest shut. Gregory Faulkner couldn't have wired up his own heart to tell me a clue. Gregory Faulkner was the source of my problems, and I needed to understand him.
      I sat down and talked to Mike, told him everything that had happened. He hadn't heard anything before the data center, and was surprised to find out that I had taken on this job without knowing Gregory at all. I guess it put things in perspective for him, he left the hotel and came back with food and a bottle of plastic bottle vodka and orange juice.
     It was terrible stuff, but it did the trick. We sat in our hotel room, and did a lot of internet research about Faulkner. As you know, Gregory Faulkner is an alias that I gave him, since I've changed all the names here, but the name we searched turned out to also be an alias. There was a long series of webpages about this man, most of them had 404'd, or were taken down, but we found two websites that mattered. Each page held a message, the first one read:

     "Those of you who knew Gregory Faulkner remember him as a brave man who fought for what he believed in. We all loved him very much, but do not make his mistakes, he was wrong."

The second site we found sitting on the computer screen when we woke up. We had apparently gotten drunker than we thought. But when we woke up, we found a simple white webpage with a faint grey omega symbol on it.

Interrogation.

I had Wilson firmly by the throat, but I didn't take any chances. Mike climbed up the stairs, and took my gun, and held it on Ingram While I patted him down. I kept the knife from his ankle, and the derringer from under his coat, and sat him up in a chair in one of the rooms upstairs. I tied him in a shredded sheet, and began to talk.

"How's your arm?" I had no idea how to interrogate someone, but I saw the blood leaking from where the bone was sticking out of his forearm, so I asked.

"Really? That's where you start? It's great, Allen. I'm sure it will heal up nice, and we'll be playing tennis again anytime now." What an asshole.

"Fine. How's this? Why are you killing these people, and how are they connected?" I shouted more than I meant to.

"No Allen, you know I won't tell you any of that. Try again." He was calm, and incredibly irritating. I did something a bit rough, and nudged the bone. He screamed, and I asked again.
He started laughing. Laughing at the top of his lungs. I shoved the gun into his face, pressing it between his eyes. His brow furrowed, and the laughter stopped.

"Interesting... are you going to shoot me, Allen? If you shoot me, I can't tell you anything. That's what you want, isn't it? Information?" He started laughing again, and after about ten seconds of laughter, violent, full-body laughs, a small spurt of blood shot out of his arm, and he blacked out. He was still breathing, still had a pulse, but he had lost so much blood that he collapsed. Mike and I put his gun back in his hand, repositioned him in the room with the father and the son, and left, calling 911 from a payphone in the area and reporting gunfire from the neighborhood. Then we threw away the bloody sheets and hid.

An Old Friend

Mike was a faster driver than me. Lots of zipping in and out of lanes, lots of speeding. We dashed to the house of the first man as fast as we could. The door was left open, swinging, and we sprinted in through it. We heard a thud upstairs, and I rushed up, leaving mike at the door to stand guard. I couldn't believe what I saw when I hit the landing. The first man was curled up in the corner of the nursery, covering his child as well as he could, and standing over him was the last person I expected: Wilson Ingram, the cop who first attacked me. I immediately had my pistol trained on him, and he looked up as I entered the room. He smiled an acid smile at me, and fired two shots, one for father, one for son, and greeted me like an old friend.
"Allen, what a pleasant surprise."
He trained his gun on me next, and I ducked into the hallway to avoid his shot, which shattered a door at the end of the hall. The laughter was unsettling, he just broke out and laughed. "Good to see you've gotten quicker, Alan! Let's have some fun!"
Ingram walked slowly down the hall, toward the door I was hiding behind, leading with his pistol. I heard him fire another shot, followed by a shout from downstairs. Mike. He was unarmed, and I had left him alone. I jumped out from behind the door, and found Ingram pointing his gun downward. I lept at him, and caught his arm, knocking him to the ground. He pulled the trigger as his arm hit the floor and broke under my shoulder. He wailed on me with his free hand, and I pinned his throat under my elbow, and used my left hand to take his gun from the now limp arm. I held it to his head and told him to hold still. I called for mike, who responded that he was fine, and then began my interrogation of Wilson Ingram.

Asking For Help

     That night, we didn't make it to sleep. We were too stressed, to anxious. We lay in bed, turning the encounter over in our heads again and again. I understood why he'd be scared, but we were offering him help, we were on his side. How were we supposed to help if nobody wanted it?  We got out of bed that morning and headed toward our next house. It was about half an hour from the hotel, and we left at eight, to make sure everyone would be awake.
    Twenty minutes after we left from the hotel, we received a call. The man from the first house wanted to speak with us in private. We agreed t meet with him after visiting the next household. Finally, we felt like we were getting somewhere, we had a family to meet with now, and a man who actually wanted help. Apparently, he was afraid we'd scare his wife. When "The incident" happened, his wife closed off, wouldn't eat, or speak for months. It took a long time for her to finally open back up, and he was afraid of losing her to that again. We asked what "the incident" was, but he wouldn't say over the phone. Mike agreed, thinking that his phone might be bugged. So, we finished our conversation and headed to the closer house. We should have left sooner.
     When we got there, we realized we had been beaten. The fire department made that clear enough. According to them, there had been a gas leak in the house, and when it reached the pilot light of their water heater, the whole place went up. The family had been upstairs, asleep. A husband and wife, both in bed, both burned alive. We asked when the fire had started, and one of the firemen told us it happened at about six fifteen. Mike pointed out the obvious. If this family had gone up at six fifteen, the man from yesterday could be next. We headed to the car, and mike immediately began to call the man. There was no answer.

Indiana, Family One

    In Indiana, we met our first living family. We knocked on the door, and were greeted by a skittish-looking woman. She had that air about her, like a sparrow, ready to dart off at any second. We introduced ourselves, and verified her name, and asked if we could take a moment to talk to her. She seemed hesitant to leave the front door, and i guess I can't really blame her. She called for her husband, who came forward, carrying a young child, no more than 18 months, I think. We introduced ourselves to him, and he invited us in to the living room. We sat down, and he asked what it was we were visiting about. Mike started, admitting that we didn't really know why we were talking to him. He tried to explain the list, , and as soon as he did, I felt the room change. The man got tense, and pulled his child closer to him, and very quickly he told us he had had enough and that we needed to leave.
 I butted in: "sir, I don't want to scare you, but the people on this list are dying, and we're trying to help."
He lost his temper "I have lost enough to this mess, and it is all behind me now! Get out of my house!"
     The baby started to cry, and we gave him a business card before leaving, heading for the next house on our list. We stopped for dinner on the road, and tried to see if he had given us any clues. As far as we could tell, he hadn't. We pulled into a hotel for the night and lay awake for hours trying to understand what had happened to that family. Nothing came to mind.