FallOut (BOOK 2)

-02-

"Oh, God..." I sighed. "You didn't come with us because of-remember that Wendigo case I went on with Aerin before we went to Iraq?"

"Yeah," she confirms.

"...Nick is on to something," I admit. "We were at the Blackwood Asylum. The Wendigos had been some former patients as far back as the 1950s. And..."

I didn't know how to tell her the rest of it. Jason is already going through a lot, even before tonight. But she needed to know, and so did he. I took a deep breath before I continued.

"I didn't think anything of it at the time because we hadn't met Jason yet, but...one of the patients looked just like him," I confess. "Billy Bates."

"...What happened to him?" Jayda whispered.

I feel like an asshole, but she needs to know. If Jason is somehow connected to the asylum and the ship, then we need to explore every avenue.

"Billy was one of the mine workers who became trapped for nearly a month after a part of the mine collapsed on December 13th in 1951," I began. "Unfortunately, he and the eleven other miners survived by resorting to cannibalism. They weren't rescued until January 5th..."

"Wait a minute..." Jayda murmurs. "You mean to tell me..."

Being an Empath, Jayda had a hard time hunting creatures that used to be human. She could feel their pain and the humanity that had been lost. Part of me wondered if she could hunt them now with Jason and Salim around. They nullified her power somehow. It's why we never separated them on jobs, aside from their relationship.

"Yes, Jay," I sighed. "The theory is that their case may have brought the wendigos to Blackwood Mountain. After their rescue, Bates and the others are named 'The Miracle Men' in the press and were cared for with the other survivors at the Blackwood Sanatorium, where they were studied due to unusual physical changes that occurred during their recovery. No one knew that the wendigoes had possessed them."

"This is strange," Jayda murmured. "Joe Roberts...Jason's grandfather disappeared on the Medan in 1947. So aside from looking like Jason, how are they connected? And what happened to Billy Bates?"

"The miners eventually became violent, and on February 24th, 1952, they must have turned," I reply. "It was covered up as a riot, and...that's when Dr. Adam Blackwood took over...the one you're hunting."

"I think I remember something about a group of kids that...went camping or something up there?" Jayda asks. "A year after Beth and Hannah Washington disappeared?"

"Yeah, their brother Josh and the group that was up there when the girls disappeared," I confirm. "Josh testified that he wanted them to pay for what happened to his sisters."

"What did he do?" Jayda wonders.

"He played some fucked up pranks on them, but he didn't account for the wendigos. Only a few made it out after those kids had to kill the things to survive, and we were called in to make sure the creatures were gone. Alice saw to their therapy and one of the survivors, Michael Munroe, joined us."

"Oh, I've heard about him," Jayda recalls. "I didn't know his story."

"So there might be some information about Billy in our archives," I tell her. "That leaves us with more questions than answers. How is Jason connected to all of this? And what happened tonight?"