Chapter Text
You’re thirteen years old, and you can taste the acrid tang of a dead ocean at the back of your throat as you step out onto the salt flats.
The night’s cold, and the moon’s almost completely shadowed, and one of your friends told you just last week that if you get past where the shoreline used to be, right by the roads and the streetlights – well, you go too far, you don’t come back. The ghosts take your body and drain all the water out of it, to quench their eternal thirst. That or the monsters get you, anyway.
Your moms refused to drive you out here yesterday, when you actually wanted to go, and you’ve never even snuck out before. But the cops clearly aren’t going to do anything about it, didn’t even pretend to start the recorder or take notes when they took your statement. They don’t care, and they’re not going to help.
You have to know. Even if it’s dangerous. Even if you’re terrified. He’d do it for you.
So you’ve got the old family camera, the one with the zoom lens, and you’ve got a kitchen knife wrapped carefully in foam in your back pocket, in case things get ugly, and you’re out on the plains, looking for your brother. The salt crunches softly underfoot, and your finger itches on the camera’s shutter, and there’s no one around anywhere you can see, but you keep going. You go on and on, further and further away from the fading city lights, until all that’s left is the wan light of the moon.
Your breath catches when you see it; a flicker of movement in the distance. You crouch down, half hidden behind the wizened, dried husk of some long-ago plant, and then slowly, carefully, you move forward until you can almost see it – see them.
They’re silhouetted against a distant horizon. Three figures, one knelt to the ground, two standing. You flick the camera on, zoom in until you can make out details, and…
There’s a shape on the ground. The shape is hard to make out behind the person kneeling, but you trace the long lines of the side of a body, an arm splayed out on the ground, stiff and still. A body. It looks a lot like a body.
You raise the camera properly to your face, trembling enough that you nearly drop it. In the viewfinder, you can see the whole scene: the people kneeling over the body, the body whose lighter upper half looks at least a bit like the sweatshirt you gave your brother for his last birthday, the one he went out in the night he went missing, and you want to throw up onto the desiccated ground but instead you take one, singular photograph.
The flash clicks up before you realize what’s happening, and the light shines out into the desert. The people turn, all three of them looking at you, and their eyes flash like alley cats in the headlights as they all look directly at you and you stumble to your feet and run like you’ve never, ever run before.
You run all the way back home, checking every few steps to see if they’re following you, but they fall away on the horizon as you leave those stark, unsettling plains behind you.
That night you print that photograph out as quietly as you can on the family printer, find an old shoebox. You settle it carefully in the bottom. You know one blurry faraway photograph isn’t enough. The shape on the ground could easily be a rock, or a dead plant. It isn’t going to make them take you seriously. You need more evidence.
On the lid of the photo box, you tape a picture of you and your brother. He’s so much taller than you, although you were starting to catch up. He’s beaming at the camera and you’re looking up at him and the sun’s shining on both of you. He was a good brother, and he loved you so fiercely, and now… now.
You’re going to find his killer. Even if no one believes you, even if it takes you years. It’s the only way to keep moving forward.
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You come to know those shadowy figures very well, over the next few years.
There’s not much about them on the internet message boards. Or conversation about them at the sorts of seedy bars that let sixteen-year-olds in to ask questions. The Harm in Halifax true crime podcast, as low budget and ethically dubious as it is, has a bit more: personal stories, from families and friends of the missing. You even listened to the episode about your brother, even if you had to stop every few minutes to do the breathing exercises your therapist recommended. They were wrong about a lot, sure. But it gave you somewhere to start.
Your information outgrew the photo box fast. By the time you’re seventeen you’ve got a file on each of twenty-one different mysterious disappearances over the last decade, most of them on or around those weird salt plains. No one’s ever recovered a single body, nothing beyond some bloody clothes, and privately, you’ve wondered if the cult has some kind of agreement with some crooked cops to cover things up. You’ve got a lot on the cult themselves too. Background info on a few of them, of their group. Pictures, taken furtively on the salt plains, and a couple of times near Salty’s, the diner they like to frequent. You even managed to catch one once where it almost looked like they had a different body, loaded into a wheelbarrow like some kind of discarded equipment, but there are these weird lights blinking between you and them and you can’t get a solid photograph, and then you start hearing whispers and you know it’s time to leave the plains.
It's never quite enough. You don’t find a smoking gun, only a lot of circumstance and rumor, but you know what you saw. You’re not going to give up on him, even if everyone else does.
Sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.
You played blaseball as a kid, after school blittle league. You stopped after his death, and the last bat you owned is kid-size, so you go to a splorts store and buy a bat and a glove and a punch card for the local batting cage. Then you go out and hit balls until you’re serviceable. You also buy, and read cover to cover, a book about how to be less susceptible to cults, and a pinhole camera, and you pick a fake last name for the sign up sheet – Cardinal – so there’s no chance they recognize the one you and your brother share. Your first name’s different than it was back then anyway, so you don’t bother changing it. And besides, you want them to know your name, when you take them down.
It’s probably a recruitment scheme, is what you figure. They want new members, and having a shiny new blaseball team probably helps. Whatever their reason, you’re going to use it to your advantage. You’re going to figure out why they killed your brother, and you’re going to get proof.
When you step up to the plate under a clear, cloudless sky, the cult leader and one of ver lackeys right there watching, you think about his face again one more time and you think about justice and you drive the bat straight through the ball and send it flying deep into the outfield.