Day 2,380

There's a carnival at the bottom of the lake - a remnant of the town they flooded when they put the new dam in place, hoping to generate more work with it to replace all the livelihoods lost in the flood. Anyone gutless enough to go back there rarely lasted more than a week and none of them lasted past early summer.

Although the official reports and broadcasts say that everybody was evacuated months before the flooding, they're all covering up what's down there. The real reason for effectively destroying and sealing the town up for good. The reason they 'accidentally' collapsed half the old silver mine and let the toxic waste fill the waters til all that remained were the remains of dead fish and whatever birds were dumb enough to eat them.

You can still see the ferris wheel when the summer's been adequately dry - just one little carriage poking a couple of feet above the water. Some say if you sit there for a good while, til nature forgets you're there and goes about her own business, you'll see someone climb out of the water and sit in that lone carriage. 

They'll sway it back and forth like a child... like the child who went missing a few days after the flooding, though his parents say he ran past the barricades and right into town right as the waters hit. Not that anyone official has anything more to say than "there was a successful evacuation of all human life five weeks before the dam's completion" which only tells us that the kid wasn't human.

Never says what he was or how he's still alive but if you wait for him to finish playing and dive back into the waters you can see him come swimming right for you. If you aren't scared off by the time he surfaces he's real pleasant to talk to, or so say the ones who managed to stay. I legged it out of there soon as he surfaced by the ferris wheel.

Whatever manages to survive and thrive down there seems like it'd be real hard to kill and I don't want to find out if I'm right. I'm much happier warning tourists away from that hellsite and hoping they stick to the nature trails up north instead. Less monsters up there and the ones that are about are easy enough to kill if they get too close.

The kid in the lake - not so much.