Day 178

"Welcome to our room!

As we walk in you'll see why you had to give a blood sample beforehand.

Its where we store everything people need to find.

This aisle we're in is for lost children trying to find their families.

As you can see, its one of our larger aisles.

The aisle you're looking for is one of our lesser used ones - bodies.

Here you'll find her body.

What's left of it anyway.

I mean, its been five years now.

You really took your time didn't you?

Oh I see, you were waiting for the investigation to die out.

Well here she is.

Now remember, you have half an hour to note down the coordinates.

Don't wander about or you'll end up in our aisle of missing persons or worse.

Don't take anything else."

---

He thought about these terms as the attendant wandered off to tend to the next in line.

How did they know about - -he stopped that train of thought and focused on the

task at hand.

The remains of her body lay there in a metal box.

Just as he'd left her, only here somehow and not in the pit he'd dug and filled

with animal carcasses to throw off any sniffer dogs.

It had worked,or so he thought yet when he went back on the fifth anniversary of her

untimely demise the pit had been reopened and she was gone.

A week or so later he received a letter with the geographical coordinates to a place 

called UCL.

When he arrived a month later (this place was hard to find!) he found it stood for

the Universal Collective of the Lost.

As ridiculous as it sounded, they had the evidence of his crime and he needed that box.

He wondered what other damning evidence they had.

Peering around the corner or "his" aisle (full of miscellaneous items he'd lost like keys)

he saw someone very familiar.

He'd seen them on TV multiple times, they were quite the famous politician.

they were also clutching a folder, face white as a linen sheet.

If he could distract them and grab that folder, he could be rich!

Throwing an old pair of nail clippers he managed to frighten the already nervous person

and they fled, dropping the folder's contents in their haste.

The second he stepped into that aisle everything went black.

He awoke in a glass container, like a giant Barbie case.

Squinting through the front he saw countless other people, the number of cases seemed to

stretch on forever.

The attendant walked past him with a middle aged woman.

He caught the tail end of their conversation.

"...many people are lost and we're caring enough to bring them all to one safe place.

The one you're looking for sadly expired, they only last two weeks in these storage cells.

Oh don't cry, we can restore them... for a price."

What can you stand to lose?