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.