The town has been playing hide-and-seek for the past fifty eight years and nobody has been able to find them.
It began with the local military base being evacuated though their official reports claim that everybody was sent to their duties, nothing more and nothing less. The fact that this occurred alongside the mass disappearance of an entire town is pure coincidence.
What nobody will want to tell you is how everyone was meant to go quietly, let the entire town fall into obscurity and let the nation prosper as a result. What nobody will want you to know is that there is one survivor, the only one who made it out when she was just a child.
On that day her parents told her that everyone was hiding and that she had to come back in five years to find them. Being all of four years old she agreed and started running, ignoring the shaking ground and cacophonous roaring that threatened to send her sprawling any second.
By the time all was silent and still, she was lost. Eventually she stumbled upon a farm wherein the staff called the local police, or rather, they tried to. The line was answered by the next county who claimed that there was no town near them and that there had never been one.
It stirred up enough confusion and distrust that when the police finally arrived at their doorstep to collect the surviving girl, she'd already been hidden deep below the farmstead. They claimed she'd run away when they'd gone to feed the pigs. They were believed.
Now twelve years later the child returns after a lifetime of hiding from the law that wants her to vanish as well. She goes to see the remnants of her home. She goes to pay her respects to wherever her parents bodies might still be.
She finds a town frozen in time, left with no fence and no guards and barely a single detail is skewed from her childhood. Though the streets are a labyrinth of broken tarmac, rusting cars and trees whose branches have been hacked away from all windows.
Her house still stands, the doors may have been blown clear away. The path to her parents room, to where she'd last seen them alive, beckons. Her heart feels like it's trying to beat the air from her lungs - everything is suddenly too much and her answers are too close.
She heads to her old bedroom, hoping to find the peace she'd cultivated there as a child. On her bed (sheets still perfectly made, just as her mother had done before she was sent to seek while they hid) was a note whose handwriting was achingly familiar.
It gave a list of "hints" for the seeker.
For her.
With a final deep breath she began to count from zero to one hundred, not noticing the voices quietly joining in with her.
Before she could say "ready or not, here I come", she heard the front door slam.
It began with the local military base being evacuated though their official reports claim that everybody was sent to their duties, nothing more and nothing less. The fact that this occurred alongside the mass disappearance of an entire town is pure coincidence.
What nobody will want to tell you is how everyone was meant to go quietly, let the entire town fall into obscurity and let the nation prosper as a result. What nobody will want you to know is that there is one survivor, the only one who made it out when she was just a child.
On that day her parents told her that everyone was hiding and that she had to come back in five years to find them. Being all of four years old she agreed and started running, ignoring the shaking ground and cacophonous roaring that threatened to send her sprawling any second.
By the time all was silent and still, she was lost. Eventually she stumbled upon a farm wherein the staff called the local police, or rather, they tried to. The line was answered by the next county who claimed that there was no town near them and that there had never been one.
It stirred up enough confusion and distrust that when the police finally arrived at their doorstep to collect the surviving girl, she'd already been hidden deep below the farmstead. They claimed she'd run away when they'd gone to feed the pigs. They were believed.
Now twelve years later the child returns after a lifetime of hiding from the law that wants her to vanish as well. She goes to see the remnants of her home. She goes to pay her respects to wherever her parents bodies might still be.
She finds a town frozen in time, left with no fence and no guards and barely a single detail is skewed from her childhood. Though the streets are a labyrinth of broken tarmac, rusting cars and trees whose branches have been hacked away from all windows.
Her house still stands, the doors may have been blown clear away. The path to her parents room, to where she'd last seen them alive, beckons. Her heart feels like it's trying to beat the air from her lungs - everything is suddenly too much and her answers are too close.
She heads to her old bedroom, hoping to find the peace she'd cultivated there as a child. On her bed (sheets still perfectly made, just as her mother had done before she was sent to seek while they hid) was a note whose handwriting was achingly familiar.
It gave a list of "hints" for the seeker.
For her.
With a final deep breath she began to count from zero to one hundred, not noticing the voices quietly joining in with her.
Before she could say "ready or not, here I come", she heard the front door slam.
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