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.