I doubt that you feel sorry for me. If our roles were reversed, I would certainly not feel sorry for you. Everything that had occurred I brought on myself. I should have seen things more clearly, as what was happening was obvious. All of the signs were there, apparent to anyone with half a brain. I should have just rolled on Kevin when I had the chance. How was I going to save Sara when I could barely save myself?

But how does any of this result in me chasing someone, something, into a cemetery in New Orleans? Why do I end up sitting on a chair in a pool of light surrounded by infinite darkness with a voice whispering in my head?

It really boils down to two little words. Methamphetamine psychosis. That shit is real, my friend. Back when I was using, I caught a fair dose.

Now, I am not telling you I was hallucinating. I know now that I wasn’t. But it was meth psychosis that put my foot in the door, that made me take my first fateful steps towards that chair, that pool of light, that voice.

If you have never been around anyone experiencing methamphetamine psychosis, then you are lucky. People in its throes are not pleasant to be around. Its symptoms are fairly indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia. Anxiety, irritability, paranoia, hallucinations and feelings of persecution are all prominent in some of the drug users who suffer from it. And if it goes on too long, some people continue to suffer from the symptoms even after they are no longer using. It converts itself into a run of the mill psychotic disorder.

In my case, my primary symptoms were paranoia and anxiety. I started seeing threats everywhere. That old couple I saw at the grocery store every double coupon day? Clearly they were working for the DEA. Anyone who glanced at me more than once on the street? They were undercover police. I thought I heard blacked out helicopters circling our town at night. For a while, I considered the possibility that everyone else in the world was an alien and I was their test subject. I thought if I could turn my head fast enough, maybe I could see them in their true forms instead of the masks that they quickly donned whenever I looked at them. I never could turn my head fast enough, though.

Then, I started looking for patterns in the news. Clearly some of the things I was seeing couldn’t be happening by happenstance. Did the Illuminati control the world or was it the aliens? Was the government about to round us all up and put us in concentration camps in repurposed Walmart stores? How much of the news was real and how much was just planted to ensure that we remain a nicely compliant population. Was it true that some celebrities had lived for centuries? After all, there was photographic evidence.

Of course, the primary way for me to connect to like-minded people was the internet. I started researching. I engaged in discussions on internet forums and through various chat apps. I was surprised at how many people thought the way that I did. Sure, even at that point some theories went too far for even my drug-addled mind, but I thought I had found some kindred spirits, a place where I belonged.

Of course, some of those people were more experienced than I was, and had thought things through another step. Had I ever considered that the mainstream internet was subject to manipulation? How could I trust that the people I was talking to weren’t planted by the government or some other organization, and that their true purpose was to lay down a smokescreen to steer us all away from the truth?

When I had built up enough credibility in the community, I started getting invitations to groups on the dark web. Accessing it was easy once I had the right IP addresses, and downloading a TOR browser was just a couple of clicks away. When I participated in my first discussion there, I felt like I had taken a huge step towards finding out what was real. I was one of the select, part of the inner circle.

Eventually, I focused most of my online time on a website and discussion group run by a group known as Illi Qui Noverunt. Google translate told me that the phrase is Latin for “those who know”. They seemed like they wanted to be some sort of crowd-sourced X-Files-type organization. There were clearly some smart people associated with it. Software developers, government employees, military and ex-military, attorneys, and scientists were all members. Because there were some backers with deep pockets supporting its operations, the group obviously had financial resources. They even claimed to deploy field teams to conduct investigations.

I soon realized that there was an application process to join the field teams, and I decided to apply. The application process had many questions meant to assess the applicant’s suitability for field operations. They asked about skills like technological surveillance, the use of firearms, the ability to fight without weapons, medical training, counter-surveillance techniques, and a host of other things.

Let’s just say that when I filled out my application, I may have fudged things a little bit. I never outright lied, but my time hunting with my family became advanced firearm skills. My couple of years learning canned martial arts at the McDojo translated to proficiency in unarmed combat. My camping experience I equated to significant survival skills, and my ability to research conspiracy theories on the internet was listed as experience in investigations. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I filed the application in a drug-fueled haze, and after I hadn’t heard anything in a few days it slipped out of my mind. Then, I got busted.

After I got clean, after Sara walked out of the parking lot that day, I talked to my probation officer and asked to have my probation transferred across the state. I mentioned a phrase I had learned in treatment – playgrounds and playmates. Staying sober here was going to be a problem, I said, because I was around the places that I associated with my meth use and that I was tempted to contact the people who I used with.

She congratulated me on my self-awareness, my maturity. She said she would forward my request on with a favorable recommendation.

After all, I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t tell her that I was enraged and love-sick. I couldn’t tell her that I was afraid of what I might do if I stayed, or what might be done to me.

My application was approved and I moved to the big city. After a short stint in another sober-living house, I was deemed to be ready to try to make it on my own. I got a job in a warehouse. My employer was willing to overlook my criminal history as long as I was willing to be frequently drug tested and would accept wages that were paid at sweatshop rates.

I found myself in a new city, a place where I had no friends. My wages were barely enough to support my lifestyle in a tiny studio apartment. I didn’t make enough money to go out, to meet new people, to develop a social life, so I largely kept to myself. Sure, I was friendly with my coworkers, but many of them had history that was similar to my own, and we lost people every week who succumbed to their old temptations. I declined many invitations to hang out because I was scared about where those invitations might lead.

And I still hurt so badly. Although I blamed myself and not Sara for the choices that I had made, the feeling of betrayal had not gone away. Maybe it had faded some, but I was not ready to open myself back up to new people, to risk being hurt again.

Eventually, I was released from probation. I was still clean. It remained a struggle, but it got a little bit easier.

Now, I was one of the lucky ones. I had not used long enough to develop any permanent psychological effects from my addiction. The paranoia had long faded. Being bored with nothing to do, however, I threw myself back into the world of conspiracy theories. This time, though, instead of thinking they were deadly serious, I viewed them as an outlandish form of entertainment. What some of those people believed was a real hoot. I couldn’t believe that I had ever taken most of this stuff seriously.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

That all changed one day when I received a private message on the Illi Qui Noverunt site. When I opened the message, I realized it was an offer to join one of their field response teams. They congratulated me on my qualifications for the job, and offered me $500 a month to be on call for possible deployment. If I were deployed, they promised me $2000 per week, plus reimbursement for travel expenses.

I didn’t have to think about it too much. Although it was not a ton of money, an additional $500 per month would change my life. After all, I thought that if I got activated they would probably want me to do something like stake out a pizza restaurant, looking for evidence that the country’s elite were dragging children into hidden tunnels under the restaurant to meet the insatiable needs of the pedophiles among them. I didn’t really think anything would come of it.

After I was accepted, I was told to open up an account at a major cryptocurrency exchange. I felt like I was about to be scammed. Part of me expected that I would be told that I had to make a test deposit to the account and then asked to send them the account number. Then, I expected that they would drain the account and I would never hear from them again. That didn’t happen, though. I didn’t even give them the account number but somehow, a day after I opened the account, I was $500 richer. And every month another $500 deposit would arrive.

I was careful with my withdrawals. I didn’t need Uncle Sam breathing down my neck for tax evasion. Because cryptocurrency was appreciating, and because of the frequent deposits, my account balance kept increasing. And the best thing about it was that I didn’t have to do anything to get paid, just check in on a messaging app they sent me and be active in the discussion forums. I was also instructed to work at maintaining and enhancing my skills. There was not much to maintain.

My standard of living slowly improved. I started to heal. I accepted a few social invitations from coworkers who had been with the company for a long time. After all, if they had made it for that long without finding more trouble, what was the likelihood that they would suddenly decide to throw it all away at a backyard barbecue or during their weekly bowling league?

I started thinking about going back to school to finish my degree if any university would have me. In the midst of my addiction, I had dropped out on the verge of failing out and my drug conviction likely prohibited me from receiving any federal financial aid.

Meanwhile, much of the message board activity became focused on missing persons. The number of missing persons reported in the United States alone exceeds half a million people a year. Most of those people are eventually found unharmed. The majority of those cases are not nefarious, but some are. People decide they have just had enough and walk out of their lives, which is not a criminal offense. Kids run away. Mommy and daddy freak out when they haven’t heard from their college-aged daughter, only to find out that she had shacked up with a new boyfriend for the weekend and had forgotten to bring her cell phone charger.

But bodies are found in the woods, in ditches, buried in barrels. Men and women and children are abducted and murdered. People go off to party and turn up dead from fentanyl overdoses. Drivers careen off the road in the countryside and are found days or weeks later. Some individuals slip through the cracks of the world, present one day and then never seen again. These disappearances offer no closure for those left behind, haunting family and loved ones for life.

Recent message board activity was focused on an increasing number of the last type of disappearance. Individuals were going missing in major tourist cities throughout the world and never turning up again. One day they were out enjoying the sights, gambling or skiing or zip lining or partying, living the good life, and the next day they had vanished without a trace.

Of course, people had always gone missing in tourist areas. When on vacation, many people engage in risky behavior that they never would consider at home. One night stands or partying with complete strangers, walking down unfamiliar and unsafe streets at night, excess drug and alcohol use, there are too many causes to list exhaustively. But slowly, over the course of months, a pattern began to emerge and the alarm began to sound. The regular authorities tasked with investigating these cases didn’t seem to have a clue but, for those of us who watched from the shadows, what was happening began to take shape.

Our hackers forced their way into police databases, and our data analysts used this illicitly obtained data as well as social media and news resources to pinpoint the start of these disappearances eighteen months prior. A distinct narrative began to emerge.

In a particular city, disappearances would experience a statistically improbable peak for three to five days, then they would revert back to a more normal level. During this time, several people would go missing without a trace. It could be as few as five or as many as two dozen. The victims were from diverse backgrounds, and no unifying factors could be identified that linked them. This made the analysts conclude that it was unlikely that the disappearances were the work of a prolific serial killer. Each serial killer tends to have a specific type of person that is targeted. Instead, the missing seemed to be selected almost randomly, as if someone or something was merely striking when opportunity presented itself.

After the disappearances in a city ended, there would be a lull of several days to a little more than a week, and then the pattern would replicate itself somewhere else. But those other cities or areas weren’t randomly distributed. It wasn’t like Ibiza would be followed by Bangkok, then Dublin. The disappearances were grouped geographically, not so closely that they would likely come to the attention of regional authorities, but closely enough that it began to be possible to develop a general sense of where the next likely target might be.

They had begun in Western Europe and moved slowly eastward. They proceeded through the playgrounds of the Middle East, spent quite a bit of time meandering around Asia, and landed in North America in Vancouver a month prior.

Of course, there were an abundance of theories about who was causing these disappearances. All the usual suspects were considered – governments, street gangs, secret societies, cults, alien abductions, vampires, time travel, the rapture in slow motion, and a host of others. None of these theories could be definitively proven or disproved.

That’s likely why someone decided that we needed boots on the ground.

I had gotten home one Friday night after a double shift at the warehouse. It was summer, and the warehouse was not air conditioned, so I was exhausted and dehydrated. All I wanted to do was to eat and drink something and go to bed because I had to work again the next day.

As I sat there, pounding glasses of water and waiting for my frozen pizza to cook, I started to doze off. I jerked abruptly awake when my phone began loudly blasting music over and over. I sleepily recognized it as the famous part of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

I pawed at my phone, trying to turn the music off. The phone’s screen was blinking with a notification from the Illi Qui Noverunt messaging app. The app had completely taken over my phone, and I couldn’t get the sound to lower in volume or to stop until I accessed my messages.

Real subtle, you assholes.

I accessed my messages and began reading. I was being activated. I was ordered to report to New Orleans within the next three days to meet up with other members of my field team. I was given the contact information for the three other people also assigned to the investigation and told to report any findings on the discussion forum. An additional $2000, my first week’s pay, was deposited in my account to make certain I could cover the cost of travel. The message told me to keep my receipts for reimbursement of travel expenses. You can’t even escape the bean counters on the dark web.

It seems that the latest disappearances had ended in Las Vegas the previous day. The powers that be had decided to saturate the next probable targets with field teams. They must have gone pretty deep on the bench to get enough people to cover their list of possible locations, deep enough to reach me.

As I was reading the briefing, I immediately considered ignoring it. I really didn’t want to lose my job. It was a shit job, but finding a new one would be tough with my record. Although the extra money was nice, having it cut off wouldn’t ruin me. It’s not as if I was truly field team material anyway.

But, the more I considered it, the more I realized that I had to go. If I did not live up to my side of the bargain, the organization clearly had enough resources and connections to ruin me. It wouldn’t be too difficult for them to gin up false records to prove that all the money that I had been paid was in exchange for drugs, or kiddie porn, or any of a number of other things that would result in me spending the prime of my life behind bars. I didn’t think I would do very well in prison.

And what’s the worst that could happen anyway? New Orleans was only one possibility. Even if it was targeted, how likely would it be that we would encounter anything?

I called in to work and told them that I had to take some time off because my mother was sick. I was told to expect to be drug tested on my return. I hadn’t talked to my mother in more than two years. I hoped she wasn’t actually sick.

As I packed my things, I thought this should be easy money. It will be a piece of cake.