The Arrow

The next place that we had any GPS coordinate on was this graffiti covered bar called the arrow, in new york. This place kinda rules. I actually had a stupid hard time looking it up just now. It's listed on google as "The Rook" which makes a lot more sense than the arrow, when you think about it. I see why Greg chose it. Allen didn't waste any time. He started tearing the place apart. We showed up during the afternoon, so there wasn't anybody in there, just a bartender, and us. Allen walked up to him and started asking all sorts of questions, I don't remember half of it, I mean this was a year ago. It's hard for me to remember a lot of this stuff, honestly. But I do remember what he did next. He pulled his gun on the bartender. He was nuts, I swear. The bartender was, of course, freaked, and lead Allen downstairs. In the basement there was a painting on the wall and behind that was a safe. It was full of cash. The guy thought we were robbing him. Allen just started laughing. dude was dark. Finally we convey to the guy what we're looking for. He sighs, like he's relieved and takes us to one of the booths. Says something that tells me we're not the first ones to come looking for this crap, and asks to see the knife. I don't know what Knife, but allen pulls this big old thing off of his calf, the bartender smiled. Then he takes the mirror off the wall this time, upstairs in the bar. He hands us a sheet of steel about the size of a sheet of paper. He basically says that the first people to come asking were cops, but his instructions were not to give it to anyone with any badges. Only to the person with the knife. he asked what the knife said and allen replied "Dead End Drive" that chilled me, the way he said it. I think it spooked the bartender, too because he suddenly remembered the gun, and tried to get us the hell out. We obliged, but not before Keith shoved a twenty into the tip jar.
We got a hotel, which wasn't cheap in new york, and we sat down to study the plate. it was hard to make out what was on it. It was clearly punched through all over, riddled with tiny holes, and if you held them up to a light, you could see shapes, but they were so small that we couldn't make them out. Allen decided we had caught the middle of a trail again, until Keith made a connection. Well, it was half of it, anyway. He pulled the shade off of one of the bedside lamps in the hotel room and stuck the metal next to it. Suddenly, the room was darker, and across one wall was a scatter of specks of light, connected by weird lines. It still didn't make sense, but it was clearing up. The metal was a formula.

Battleship Cove

     Battleship cove is a pretty badass little tourist place, full of old decommissioned ships. But, the GPS data on the picture we had was pretty pretty precise, so we new which ship we were going to, the USS Massachusetts. This thing was a big hulking beast of a boat, bristling with guns. We bought visitor passes and spent hours wandering through the whole boat. we knew it was somewhere in the front-ish middle of the ship, but none of us could really tell what the picture was, or what deck it was taken on. There's a lot to get lost in inside a battleship. But, finally we found what we were looking for, a gun loader. I guess underneath those big damn guns, they have machines designed to load the guns. I always imagined it was a dude down there shoving the shells in, like you see in old ww2 footage. but we had found the place. we scoured that little room, looking for anything. we found some numbers engraved on the wall, but that didn't mean anything to us, and for all we knew they were part of the ship. But we wrote them down anyway. There was d6, 193, and B19. they were all in different places, and all written down in different ways. Finally, Allen decided to do what we were all afraid we might have to. He climbed into the pipe where the bullets go. We saw his feet disappear and didn't hear anything from him. after a moment or two, we did hear something, but it wasn't Allen. A tourgroup was coming through. We didn't know what to do, so we feigned interest in the display, and tried to act cool. Then we got a text from Allen inside the tube. All he said was to sneak out and meet up at the car, so we joined the tourgroup, and casually strolled out. When Allen met us out at the car, he was kindof greasy, but he was smiling. He had a small black and red box in his hand. he opened it up, and we saw nine buttons along an lcd screen, with a speaker to one side.

     So, we took the box to a hotel and set it up on a table. it was small, and the plastic felt old. We opened the top and looked at the buttons: On/Reset, yes, no, Repeat/clear, and the bottom row counter from 1 to 4, and then an enter button. So, we turned it on, it played a weird phrase, and then waited for us to do something. So, we started putting in the numbers from the gun room. Nothing. So, Allen started trying to remember the other numbers from everything he had encountered up to that point, but that didn't do anything either. It was real bullshit, let me tell you. Finally, Allen decided that we had come to the wrong place first. so we headed for the next place with GPS coordinates. I don't really know what drove him, honestly, but that man never stopped. It scared me a little, how determined he was.

Mike's Second Email

So, okay, the three of us, Me, Allen and the old guy, Kieth, were driving away from the house, as fast and casually as we could, when we saw three cop cars zip past us in the other direction. it was pretty spooky how close we had come. We drove to a hotel and sat Kieth down. Allen wasn't done asking him stuff. He told me I needed to leave. He was pissed and it scared the hell outta me, so i didn't argue. I went for a walk, and about an hour later, Allen texted me that it was alright for me to come back. When i did, he and the old dude were all buddy-buddy. I don't know what they talked about, or what happened, but something Kieth had said had soothed Allen's nerves. It weirded me out, and nobody ever explained it to me, but suddenly I was the third wheel in their bromance.

Regardless, Allen had decided to pick up with the computer. He asked me to look at the pictures on the computer and see if I could figure out where any of them were. No problem, of course, at least two of them had GPS coordinates on their exif data. Sometimes I'm surprised by the amount of data people let their iPhone pin on their pictures. Whatever. The picture we decided to go to was in Massachusetts. It wasn't the closest picture, but it's date was the soonest, so it seemed like a good starting place. We spent about a week on  the road, Me, Allen and the old dude, and after a blowout in Nebraska, we ended up at Battleship Cove, in Fall River Massachusetts. 

The first of Mike's Emails.

Mike finally sent me that Emil, so we can keep the story going. It's not as well-written as Allen, but the story is what matters.

Okay, we had just gotten the computer from his backyard, and we took it back to our motel. I hooked it up and started sifting through it. It was running Ubuntu, a nice little custom setup. We found what we needed pretty quick. The computer had been put there by a man named Kieth Meadows. He lived in the area, and we decided to go check it out. There was also a folder of photographs on the computer. Allen Recognized a lot of the pictures as places that he had found clues before. I didn't recognize any of them, and he said there were some that he didn't know either. 

We left for Kieth's house, and found him sitting out on his porch. He was an old dude, sixty, seventy, maybe. We didn't ask. He brought us into his house, and told us that he was the person who had delivered the heart, and who had been in charge of cutting it out of Greg. He kept looking around his house like he was nervous, and that just didn't sit right with Allen. Something about his movements, I guess. Eventually, Allen figured it out. The old bastard had been bugged. We saw the camera and Allen jumped up and grabbed it down, pulling the cords out. It was a stupid thing to do, of course, but I think he just panicked. Then he turned to the old guy and asked him what was going on. Kieth explained that he had been roughed up by some cops. The computer was legit, and that there were more pieces of the puzzle still out there. He swore up and down that he was on our side, but Allen didn't trust him anymore. He grabbed the old guy, and we drug him to the car. The place would be swarming with creeps any second, so we had to get out of there, but he wanted to get more info out of Kieth, so we brought him along, and ran as fast as we could.

I hope that's enough for now, we've got a whole lot of work to do tonight, so I'll wright you more soon. Send me an email in a couple days to remind me.

I'll try to keep hounding people to keep this going. I feel like I should tell you that I don't really know what Allen was doing here. He's got a lot of stuff in this blog that I just don't get. I have no idea why he chose that name, or what it means. Sometimes when a person dies, they leave a lot of questions behind. I'm going to do my best to answer them for you.

In Memoriam

I don't know if anyone reads this, or if you are aware, Judging on the comments, and the last post, I think nobody is. I'm being cryptic. "Allen" is dead. I recovered his body three days ago in Arizona. Apparently, he has been referring to me on this blog as "Silas" That'll have to do. I'm going to try to finish what he started. I think this story is important, and "Allen" would have wanted it finished. It's going to be a bit tricky for me to fill in some of the blanks, but there are other people who knew him, and who helped him. I've contacted "Mike" and he's going to email me soon with that.

I just wanted to tell you all that this man has died. 

He was a brave man, and we all lost something with him.

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.