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John wasn’t entirely sure where to look for Mike. His mind was too exhausted to formulate a coherent search plan, and he ended up wandering aimlessly for some time.
As he walked down the dark street, he glanced at the windows of the buildings, where tired occupants were one by one blowing out the candles that dimly lit their mostly glassless windows. Because of the darkness, John resigned that he could not check these buildings tonight, and walked on until he eventually came to the corner of Fifth Street.
Too tired to think of much of anything, he absentmindedly turned left up the once-major road which was now, like most of the streets in Sidewood, overgrown and crumbling.
As he walked along Fifth Street’s crumbling sidewalk, he passed the myriad abandoned brick and wooden buildings that stared at him from across the parking lots that lined the street. As he began his journey, he found that most of the buildings had been abandoned for long enough that their once-purpose was no longer identifiable, but as he progressed farther from the center of the town, he found more recently abandoned buildings, where rings of glue still stuck to the bricks, giving away the letters that had hung from the blackened brick walls in their former lives.
He stopped at each building, hoping to see in its murky shadows the outline of a human, but each building was securely boarded and each lot fenced with razor wire, so that even the most daring human wouldn’t have considered stopping here.
As he passed a small house-like building that, according to the glue stains, had once contained the “Meadowland Animal Clinic,” the road began to curve gently to the left. He glanced at the houses to his left and right as he walked up the street and, even in the night, it eventually came to him that he was now walking up Pacific Circle.
At this realization he glanced about nervously, afraid that The Others might see and identify him. But he couldn’t see any people around and he was certain that, in the darkness, nobody would be able to recognize him anyway, and he continued to walk forward into the neighborhood where he and The Few had once lived.
He continued to meander up the street until he was at the corner of Exemplary Drive, where he heard a rustling sound. He looked up the street and saw the figure of a person at the dead end, peering at him intently from the porch of an old house.
John turned and walked about halfway down Exemplary Drive and looked more closely at the person staring at him, hoping that the figure on the porch was his lost son. When the figure stepped down from the porch onto the overgrown front lawn, however, John saw that it was definitely too large to be that of a twelve-year-old.
A pang of panic went through his stomach as he realized that it might be one of The Others, and he turned his face away, hoping that the figure on the porch wouldn’t recognize him.
“John?” an old, heavily accented voice called softly from the void.
“Yeah.” John said. He spoke in a voice not quite his own, just to make sure that nobody around could recognize him by his voice.
“Come in.”
John just stood there, not wanting to give himself up just yet.
“Edward.” the voice confirmed, just to let John know he wasn’t someone to be afraid of.
Slowly, John walked the rest of the way to the dead end and up to the porch of the house, stopping for a moment when
Edward was clearly in his range of vision, just to make sure he wasn’t being ambushed.
“Most of ‘em are still down at the courthouse,” Edward mentioned as he walked up and stood beside John at the porch.
John let the night’s silence speak for his indifference, and the two men stood tensely for some time.
“I’m looking for my son, John finally explained.
“Which one?”
“Mike,” John said. “If he’s still alive,” he added after a moment. He sat down on a wooden crate, breathing heavily, as he realized that he had just admitted that his son could be dead.
Edward chuckled. “I think he’ll be okay. The people here may have some things wrong, but they ain’t monsters. They’ve been through this kinda thing before an’ they’re okay.”
John’s eyebrows bent up at Edward’s statement. “All those people we…” he stopped and corrected himself. “All those people they killed, though. I was there. Nobody but monsters could…” His voice trailed off.
“Revenge, John.” The tone of his voice let on the grin that was masked by the night. “They all want the revenge. But that’s not all that’s in ‘em. There’s more to it, I think.”
John suddenly got bitter. “It’s all I want to see.” He got up from the crate and stormed off back toward downtown.
When he got back to Fifth Street, with the very beginning of dawn creeping up on the town, John began to look more closely at the fenced-off, boarded buildings, seeing acutely every small opening and bent wire. If anybody could get into those buildings, Mike could.
He stopped and stared at the building he was standing in front of. The fading remnants of the sign were illegible, but he could tell from the construction that it had once been a warehouse of some kind. He studied the wire that surrounded the building, looking for any sign that his son might have snuck inside. The wire fence was only continuous along the street, and if he had managed to get through somewhere along the perimeter, he would have been able to get into any of the fenced-off buildings fairly easily.
The purplish light revealed broken or bent wires in a few places, where a person who didn’t mind a few scratches could have snuck in, although they were more likely the paths of small animals than of people.
Desperate to find his son alive by any means necessary, John didn’t care about likelihoods. He lay on the ground and managed to squeeze under the fence while getting cut only a couple of times. He brushed the mud out of his wounds and hurried across the crumbling asphalt parking lot to the building.
The rectangular building was about 30 feet tall and made of corroded steel and rusted aluminum. The bottom of each outside wall was covered in brick from the ground to about six feet high. The hollow metal doors that had once secured the old warehouse now blew open and shut at the whim of the light morning breeze.
He walked timorously into the warehouse. It was completely dark except for the dim light of dawn shining through the several sets of doors on all four walls. The building was completely empty, with bare walls, high ceilings, and a bare concrete floor, and even his lightest steps echoed through the building with a disconcerting volume.
The doors were each opening and closing in the wind, and the building cycled between reasonably well-lit and pitch-black with no particular rhythm. With each darkening, John’s steps slowed, and he walked more carefully, afraid of running into something he hadn’t seen in the dim light of the moment before, and slowly, he moved across the damp concrete floor.
He finally made his way across the warehouse, to the doors that faced away from the street. These doors faced the rising sun in the east, and the morning sunlight shone around him into the building, allowing him to look over the entire space.
He stood for a while, surveying the warehouse for any place where a young boy might hide. He could see every wall and corner in the giant rectangular building, and he finally decided that the giant building really was empty, and moved on to look for his son elsewhere.
As he moved out of the building into sunlight, he found himself in an industrial establishment of some kind. The area was littered with rusted metal-faced buildings, pipelines, and intimidating steel structures that John couldn’t identify. Throughout the area ran cracked concrete roadways, just wide enough for a delivery truck, and years of rain washing over the rusted metal that surrounded them had left the once-white concrete stained with reddish-brown streaks.
To John’s left were the industrial buildings, attached to various pieces of derelict steel equipment, and to his right were the offices – two and three story brick-faced buildings much like those on Main Street, with large now-unglassed windows which overlooked the industrial area, so that the managers and executives could overlook the operation.
He moved to one of the larger buildings. It looked very much like the other buildings. It had several small smokestacks emerging from the roof, and several of the pipelines that ran around the premises ran through the walls, although it was impossible to tell which ones ran into the building and which ran out.
This building was one of the few which still had intact doors on the front which, of course, were locked. John pulled at the handles, and even kicked at the doors a couple of times before he gave up on this building and followed the corroded, tar-stained pipes to the next one.
The building he came to was a small one, more sturdy and probably newer than the others around. While it too was marred by the same rust that covered everything else, it, unlike the others, had only patches of light-brown near the ground, where the runoff from the roof had collected against the walls.
The doors to this building were open and badly damaged, as though someone had at some point forced their way inside. As he pulled one of them open, it scraped against the ground, letting out a grinding noise loud enough that it seemed to echo back from the edges of the earth.
He stepped inside the building, which still contained quite a bit of the old machinery. The pipes ran across the building from east to west, splitting in the middle to make room for several pieces of equipment along each one. There were several “stations” along the pipes, each with innumerable valves and levers that had once been operated by the plant’s employees.
Each station bore a placard, now covered over with dirt and corrosion, but which had once shown the name of the person who worked each station. John walked over to one of the stations, and tried to imagine the people of Sidewood, whose work at this very plant had once sustained the entire town.
His mind wandered on to the state of the town today, with the blue-collar workers from stations like this and the white-collar managers from the buildings across the road killing each other daily as The Others and The Few, respectively.
He wiped the back of his hand against one of the placards, revealing letters that could just barely be made out:
“Eastern Oil Company; Edward J. Pleasant”
John frowned. Edward was one of The Others, he thought suddenly. He briskly walked over to the next station and rubbed the dirt from the placard. “Samuel M. Tartell.”
John’s curiosity took hold of him, and for quite some time he walked from station to station and building to building, finding the names of The Few, and even forgetting for a while that he was looking for Mike.
When he came back to the realization that he still hadn’t found Mike, John abandoned his curiosity and started looking for a way out of the plant. He really didn’t want to go through the warehouse again, even in the brighter light of midmorning. He followed the cracked concrete road away from the warehouse, past several other buildings, finally crossing an orphaned piece of railroad track and coming back to a road, where a sign still bore remnants of paint that had once said “Eastern Oil Co.”
Disoriented from the winding paths inside of the gates, John wasn’t quite sure which street this was or which way he should turn. He looked up and down the street, but didn’t see anything he recognized. Finally, for lack of any better option, he turned to his left and began walking, hoping that he was going in a direction that would take him to his lost son.
After quite some distance, the rusted fence surrounding the plant ended. As the road continued, it became lined more and more densely with buildings on either side, and it eventually ended at an intersection with Main Street.
The street signs that had once marked this intersection were missing, so John looked up and down the street to orient himself. He could tell he was near the east end of town, and to his right the buildings were already fading into the wilderness that separated the town from the others around it.
To his left, some distance down the road, there was a group of people milling around in the street. He approached it slowly, not sure if the people there were friendly or hostile. He stayed in the shadows of the buildings as he slowly and quietly approached.
When he got close enough, he saw the face of the middle-aged man he had shaken hands with in the courthouse the day before. Recognizing him as one of The Others, John started to turn away and look elsewhere, but the sound of laughter caught his ear.
He turned around and his eyes scanned the crowd frantically.
He was certain recognized his son’s laughter.
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