Taking The Next Step

      Christmas is a hard time for those of us who know what happened to those children. We all sat together this year, and remembered what had happened. thinking of those thousand-or-so children who all opened their gifts, only to be poisoned by them months later. It kills me. Silas, for as tough as he always seems, is probably the most affected by it. He's soft on the inside. We all are.

      April 29th, 2011 was the day we met up with Silas in that junky little cafe. It's been over a year since we discovered the truth about the poison. It's been just over a year since Allen died, christmas eve, 2011. It's really hard to believe it's been a year without him. Honestly, I only knew him for a year, less than that, really, I met him in january of the year he died, but I feel his loss every day. Every day we get closer to solving this thing, every time we misstep, and find ourselves lost again, I can feel Allen guiding me toward the next step. It's been a hard year without him, but I'm going to make sure this all comes crumbling down, and everyone knows who is responsible for it.

      As we sat in that diner, at the end of april, two years ago, we ordered more cups of coffee, and silas went out for maps. we covered the table with America, sprawled out under cups of coffee, salt shakers, and packets of sugar, circling locations and connecting the dots. We were re-tracing the steps that had led everyone here. Compiling the story that Allen would later re-tell here. I think we all hoped for a pattern to emerge, but it couldn't. We were missing important pieces of information. We needed to know how the toy company had gotten the material, where that terrible poison had come from. We had a lot we needed to learn. It all started with the toy company. We spent the next two days researching the company, and researching their games. we never realized how many of Gregory's clues were twofold, until we looked at a list of all the games the company had made. He had even turned his own body into a life-sized operation, hoping that the similarity of the clues would tie things together for whoever was trying to stop this mess. It was morbid, but Silas had a little laugh to himself when he noticed. I can never really tell how he felt about Greg.

     After two days of research, we finally got on the road to try to get closer to the headquarters of the toy company.

Conversations with Silas

     We found another number in the papers, and since we were out of change, Allen called it from his cellphone. It was Silas' phone, and Allen lept up when he heard his friend's voice, heaving a sigh of relief. He told Silas that it was Allen, and I heard silas roar something through the phone. I couldn't tell if it was relief or anger. About a minute later, I knew it was both. According to what Allen told me, after Allen lost his fight on the train, the man, Wilson, took his gun, wallet, knife and, most dangerously, his cellphone. Three days after I found Allen by the tracks, the bank was raided. In fact, Everyone Allen had visited received another visit, every call he made was tracked, every gps coordinate he had visited was re-checked. The entire network of people working to uncover this mystery had been plowed through by Wilson Ingram and the police.
     Now, it was Allen and I,  Silas, Liza, Mike, the hacker who had been traveling with Silas,and one other person from the bank who escaped with Liza. There were only six of us now. Silas had decided to meet with Allen and I, and we climbed back into our car and headed west again. Allen was a mess. He wouldn't let me drive, even though there were tears pouring from his face. Finding out that everything had collapsed because he had lost a fistfight may have broken him. I really don't think he was the same after that. I think that the overwhelming weight of it all may have finally made a crack in his resolve, and it wasn't long before that crack would widen.
     We met Silas in a junky diner, a day away from chicago. He and Liza had been travelling together, trying to find out more about what had happened. Mike and the other two hacker fellows were hidden away in a safe-house, living somewhere in the woods. Silas was a really gruff sort of guy, not ever rude, per se, but not the sort of guy who wasted words on niceties. His first impression was of a guy who had been through a lot, and didn't want to waste time. Liza seemed like a charming enough woman, if a bit of a flirt.
     They told us about the things that had happened after Allen went missing, how the police had used his phone to track everyone. Silas was on his way into chicago when it happened, and Liza had barely escaped across the roof with the other guy. There was a small access hatch on the roof, and they made it across the alley to safety. She had gotten ahold of Silas, and he had met them a couple miles from the bank. They had been travelling together since. Mike had gotten delayed at the train station, and was a day away when it happened, but he was nearly nabbed at a different station that week. He finally made it to Silas a week later. The whole thing had been a mess. They were pretty sure nobody else had escaped. Fortunately, Mike had kept ahold of the backpacks with all of the clues in them, and the cops hadn't gotten ahold of all of that.
     We told Silas and Liza everything we had learned, and they sat there, dumbfounded. They had no idea about the toys, and were disgusted. It took Silas a minute to decide what to say. It took Liza much longer. she just dropped her head to the table, and disappeared into her head for a bit. We spent the rest of the day in that diner, talking about what we knew, and what we needed to do next. Honetly, I don't think anyone was sure what to do.

The Return To The Bank

     We got to the bank late at night, and entered in through the back entrance. Allen tapped the Fibonacci sequence on the button, and we waited for a long time. A really long time. But nothing else happened. He shouted for someone to let him in, and when he got no response, he headed for the front door. When we got there, we realized that the chain had been cut. We pushed the door open, and were shocked by what was there before us. The entire place was empty. Cables had been torn from walls, papers were scattered across the floor. Everything was a mess. There was blood spattered on one wall, with a dent in the drywall next to it. The entire place had been raided. The vault had been blasted open, and the inside of it was empty except for a cheap metal bookshelf, laying on its side.
     Allen was Devastated. I was, too, of course, but I didn't know these people. Allen had friends here, friends who were at best all arrested, and at worst, friends who nobody would ever see again. He wandered through the ruins of the bank, and wiped dust off of a table. This had happened a long time ago, but it didn't matter to him. What mattered is that it happened at all. We gathered at much of the paper as we could, in the hopes that we could find something useful,  and then we left, before someone showed up for us. We found a small hotel, and Allen brought me some food. He didn't eat, he just drank a small bottle of vodka and put himself to sleep. He shook all night.
     The next morning, we dug through the papers, looking for something that might tell us where everyone had been taken, or even how to contact someone. All Allen wanted to do was find Silas, who he was sure hadn't been at the bank. He thought that Mike might have been there, in Chicago, when the raid happened. Allen kept pausing and staring at nothing while we looked though the papers  It was like he was trying to remember something that he never knew to begin with. We found a phone number, and Allen called it from a phone outside the hotel. It went to voicemail. Allen came back to the room slumped over. It was amazing the toll that this had taken on him, but it was more amazing that he was still standing. A lot of people think he may have been falling apart mentally, like he was going insane, but I think he was stronger than that. I think that he was exhausted, and he was overburdened with worry. The more he found out about this whole thing, the more he knew he had to protect people. He had a lot of protective instincts, but having to protect so many people was too much. He'd never admit it, though, he'd just press on.

Things In Perspective.

     We finally had a next step, and we knew what this whole cover-up was about. It was very exciting, but it was very threatening. These people had killed thousands of children by accident, and then to cover it up, they had been going across the country killing parents, and anyone who spoke out. Allen had been doing a lot of digging, So I was certain at this point he was on their new, revised list, probably with a big fat underline. It made me very anxious. But he was so excited to know something new, he was almost frantic, which was terrifying in a way, and also a bit of a relief. Allen had been so down since yesterday that to see his head spinning like that was a refreshing change. He seemed like he might be ready to see his friends again, so I mentioned it to him.
     He didn't like the sound of that at all. He felt he'd be putting them into more danger, and while I agreed with him, It seemed like they were in enough danger already. We spent the day discussing our next step, and reading through documents. Greg had done his research, and when we had the context of the article, we were able to really draw a lot more information from the paperwork. I finally convinced Allen that we should see his friends at the bank, and let them know what they had been fighting for.
     We drove for three days, and arrived in chicago, like a blur. I had never been to chicago before, so it was pretty exciting, but of course, we didn't get to do any sight-seeing. Instead, we charged straight for the bank.

(I'm sorry this post is so short, I'll make sure to give you a longer one soon, but I'm on the road right now, and haven't really had time to write more. It's really important to me to do Allen justice, so I don't want to write junk and send it out there. Thank you so much for reading so far! -Jess)

Learning Between The Walls

     After I had pried enough boards off of the wall to get inside, I began to pull things out of the walls. There were two filing boxes filled with paperwork, and most importantly, a map of the united states, covered in marks and post-it notes. I drug them out through the hole I had torn out, and we started to sift through the papers, as morning light rose into noon, and barely fell though the windows.
     The map was the simplest thing to understand. The locations on it were places that Gregory had hidden clues for Allen. Most of them, it turns out, he had already recovered. There were a couple in the midwest that were unaccounted for, but we weren't sure we needed them. The boxes, meanwhile were loaded with new information. We pored over it, lists of names, mostly, a lot of them, Allen pointed out, were probably the same names of people who had been on the list he found on the servers in the desert. We sifted through the names for most of the day, and didn't feel like we had gotten anything new.
     I decided to climb back into the wall, and give it a second look, just in case. The first thing I found in the wall was the latch that would have opened the wall up. There was a cable from a bike's brakes running along the wall, connected on one end to a latch, and disappearing into the wall. I flipped the latch, and realized that the wall over the bathtub was the door I should have been looking for. The other end of the brake cable was hooked to the toilet paper roll. When you pulled on the handle, the door would unlatch. Oops.
     But, looking from the outside of the tub, I saw what I really wanted to find. Right across from the hole, on the opposite wall, was a little shelf between two studs, and on top of that, was a newspaper. I brought it out, and I started looking through all of the articles. The newspaper was printed funny, and the word draft was all over it, which I guess meant that this wasn't a published issue. I looked though it, until I found a smallish article near the middle "Children Poisoned By Popular Toys". I read the article and took it to Allen. The children had been poisoned by an additive to the plastic used to extend the plastic, making higher volumes of plastic at lower cost. In theory, the additive was a real game-changer, because it would cost a lot less to produce plastic, and would also mean that recycling plastic would be able to produce more plastic. Unfortunately, the plastic made with the extender, when left in sunlight for extended periods of time became incredibly toxic, and a lot of children had died from it. It was on my second reading that I noticed the name of the author. It stuck in my head, because it sounded familiar, and then I realized why: the author was on the lists I had been reading earlier. I looked back through the paperwork, and found him, listed as deceased.

Exploring the old house of an old man.

     Gregory's house was a very old house. It must have been put in in the fifties, at least, and hadn't been taken care of very well. The wooden floors creaked, and had cracks between the planks. The paint in his kitchen was peeling, two different layers, yellow, then an old sage green, finally revealing the old fashioned plaster underneath. It was amazing to me to think that anyone had been living here at all. But the signs were there that Gregory had been living here not more than a few years ago. The furniture was still arranged, and though it was covered in a thick cake of dust, the couches in his living room were fairly new, with only the faintest imprint of a sitter in them. The fireplace was made of old red bricks, with cracks in the mortar, and lichen growing on the mantle. The back door had been broken in long before we arrived, and the screen had been torn in, down at raccoon height. There were leaves scattered around the floor, and it felt like we had broken into a ghost's home. All through the house were small reminders of the man who had lived there. His copper pots, tarnished now, but hung by order of size, the photographs he had taken himself, of beautiful lakes, and his beautiful wife. Even she was left behind, resting in an urn on the mantle. That place broke my heart. It was a beautiful old house, where two people had really loved one another, and something had torn that apart. We just weren't sure yet what had done it.
     Allen searched the house carefully, wandering through each room, shining his flashlight into cupboards, sifting through closets, lifting up furniture. He didn't seem to find what he was looking for, but he was determined to find it. He and Otis sniffed through the whole house while I went to get something to eat. When I returned to the house with food from a shop nearby, he and Otis were sitting in an upstairs bedroom. Resting against the wall, caught in a green blur of sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree branch that had pushed itself through the window, he looked defeated. I offered him food, and he ate it, begrudgingly. I guess he thought that Gregory would have another clue for him, another breadcrumb to lead him to answers. The fact that the house was empty sent him back under his raincloud, and he was sulking again. We spent the night in that dusty house, and sat in that room all night.
     The next morning, I woke up first, and grabbed breakfast. When I got back, Allen was still asleep, and Otis was curled up against him. I waved a breakfast burrito around their head,s but neither of them even wiggled, so I ate my own, and killed some time. I decided that I would try to find something that Allen might have missed. I definitely didn't expect what I found. I walked to the bathroom, to snoop around, and then I walked around the corner to the kitchen, and realized that something felt a bit off. I walked back and forth, and realized that the walls didn't match up. Somehow, the rooms were smaller than they should have been, and then I realized that they were spaced apart to far, and that in the wall between them, there must have been some sort of space. I started in the kitchen, running my hands all over the walls, looking for something that might get me between the walls. I came up empty handed, and headed to the bathroom next. I searched every inch of the wood-paneled walls, and didn't feel any latches, so I started searching other things around the room. There didn't sem to be any levers, or switches, or anything in the room that would open it. then, I got a bit desperate, and flung myself into the wall. I bashed it with my shoulder twice, and as I braced for my third charge, Allen came running down the stairs. Then, with a wild strength I borrowed from someone else, I charged the wall again, and cracked one of the slats.
     Allen came over to the wall, looking through the slat I had cracked open, and his eyes lit up. Allen ran up to his pack and brought back his crowbar, pointing out that I could have just grabbed it myself, and began to pry boards off. I took it from him, and told him to go eat his burrito. This was my discovery, and he wasn't getting the glory for it. He laughed at me, kissed my cheek, and ran back upstairs to share his breakfast with otis.

Leaving My Little Life

     After two more days of preparation, Allen, Otis and I left home. It was really sad, but I knew it was what I wanted to do. We packed up my little car, closed up my little house, and left my little life. I let Allen drive. He wanted to feel like he had some control over the situation, which was fine. Since I wasn't giving him a choice about company, I was giving him as many other choices as I could. I asked him where we were going, and he said he had been thinking about it for awhile. He told me about all of the clues he had gone through previously, and listed them off to me to see if I could think of anything. The heart, the key, the knife with the message "Dead End Drive, Whitney Texas" on it, The flash drive with the Omega symbol, the list from the servers, the voice recorder, and the formula. We mulled it over for awhile while Allen drove aimlessly east.
     I bunched my knees up against the dashboard, and my jeans rubbed my calves unpleasantly. I'm really more of a skirt and shorts kind of girl, but I needed Allen to see me as an adventure partner, so I was in pants. I suggested that we try another family on the list, and he pointed out that he didin't have the list anymore. He didn't want to back to the bank and ask. He was ashamed of having disappeared, and didn't want to re-join the others until he had something solid to show he was worth his mettle.
     Allen turned off the freeway suddenly, and headed the other way. I asked him where we were going, and he assured me he had a plan. Two days later we were in Riverside, California. Allen had taken me to his old home, and showed it to me. It was really a nice house, but we didn't stay long. We stayed there for one night, and in the morning, Allen went to get coffee. He took my laptop with him, and was gone for about an hour. I almost thought he wasn't going to return, but when he did, he was very excited.
     We piled back into the car and drove for about a half an hour to an old house tucked out of the way. Nobody seemed to live there, and I was more than a little nervous about sneaking into a stranger's home. Allen grabbed Otis' leash, checked that his new pistol was loaded, and asked me if I was coming. We snuck through a hole in the old chain-link fence, and headed through a very tree-filled, overgrown yard. Otis' tail barely showed over the high weeds, and I was suddenly glad to be wearing jeans. We snuck around the back door, and entered the home of Gregory Faulkner.