Today was the day when they were all going to check out the closed institution. They all met up outside Mica's house and decided Rue and Luca would be driving behind them in Mica's car while the others would drive the van they had borrowed. They agreed on how to get there and made sure they had their maps in hand.
They drove through woods-like terrain and even had to drive through a shallow body of water. It was clear that the people who had run the institution did not want it to be easily located by anyone who didn't work there or intend to have someone admitted. Surely that meant they knew they were in the wrong? Why else go through so much to hide from the world?
The institution had been built only a few hundred metres from the foot of the mountains that were called "Trinity" by the locals. Oddly enough, there were only two of them. Surrounding the institution on either side were lush trees and moss. The institution was protected by a tall cast iron fence on all sides. In the middle of the fence there was a wide gate with multiple locks. Whether the fence was to keep the patients from leaving or wild animals from coming through, it was not doing its job. The fence was overgrown with weeds, and some had grown through the lock and hinges on the gate, so it now only hung in place.
Luca parked the car and Mica, Jules and Marcus lifted off the gate and leaned it against the fence next to it. As they were doing that, a family of deer walked by. It would seem their presence had bothered them and interrupted their meal.
To be on the safe side, they decided to drive their cars inside, hanging the gate back up once they were safe inside. The building was so large that it reminded them of a fortress. It made the other institution seem small in comparison. They half expected to see a moat surrounding the building, but all that they found were toads, rats the size of ferrets and plenty of more weeds. It seemed odd to think that while surrounded by such lush nature, the patients would have been left in darkness as they were never allowed to leave or ever even go outside. To live out their lives in this place without ever seeing the sun again, that made it worse than a prison. Prisoners were at least allowed to take supervised breaks outside. And they had committed crimes. The people who'd been committed on the other hand, would've been guilty of nothing more than being an outcast. Condemned without cause.
It was safe to assume there would be no one like Mrs Elena Wilkins there to greet them. The place looked like it had been abandoned for quite some time. It was unkempt and the black stone walls were covered in poison ivy. A suitable warning for outsiders no doubt, but they hoped it meant no poor soul was still stuck within its walls.
Before they entered, they walked around the land to find out more about how the institution had operated. Once they reached the back of it, they saw a cobweb covered stone staircase leading down to what appeared to be a cellar entrance. There was a divide at the middle of the door, so that it could be opened up twice as wide. But why?
The soil around there was different too. Unlike the rest of the land, there were no weeds, no grass growing. There was what looked to be a small field, only nothing was growing there. The ground was slightly raised and there was a metal rod in each corner, as if to mark where it began and where it ended. Barren land where nothing would grow, in a place like this, surrounded by nature... it didn't make sense.
"Should we try this entrance instead?" Lune asked.
Bly nodded and went with him to break the lock and open the door. Only there was no lock to break. The door just opened when they tried it, and they almost wished it hadn't. The stench that seeped through was the foulest scents they'd ever smelled. What could possibly smell that bad?
When they went inside, their questions were answered. There was a corpse lying on the ground. Against the wall furthest back, there was a large incinerator, like a wood burning oven made out of bricks and hard metal, only it was impossibly large. They could imagine what it had been utilised for, but none of them wanted to think about that any longer than they had to. The dead person was a man, or it had been once. He must have been dead for quite some time. The body was decomposing to be sure, but there was still a fair amount of flesh to its bones.
They didn't dare touch him, lest they caught something. Given the barren ground and the many rodents, it wasn't likely to be safe. They knew they couldn't avoid reporting all of this to the police, so it was best to leave everything as they found it.
A little ways from the incinerator, there were many black garbage bags placed in piles. Marcus ran out to the van to grab some gloves and a mask, before he dared look inside.
"It's... clothes. Hospital garments. They say 'Property of Fallen'."
"It can't be their laundry, can it? Not like this, all the way down here?" Lune wondered.
"It doesn't seem like anyone wants to say it out loud, but I think we're all thinking it. The incinerator, the plot outside, it must've been how they dealt with their dead. And the clothes... something must have happened here. Something very bad. Either they all got sick at the same time, or–"
"Or times were changing and they decided to cover their tracks." Bly finished for him.
"Exactly."
"So my grandmother might be scattered in this place? A bit of her here and a bit of her there? Like she wasn't even human," Rue asked, his voice breaking. To imagine that his grandmother, the angel of a woman he had seen on his own death bed, had met her ending in a place like this... it broke his heart. "How can we give them justice? How can someone even begin to piece them together?"
Mica wrapped his arms around him. "I don't know, son. I wish I had the answers, but this is far worse than I could have imagined. We'll sort it out though. I know people still, people whom I considered to be my colleagues at one point. We'll call for them, and they will call for the police. It will be up to them to sort it out, but we won't give up until these people - and your family members - have been given justice and peace. Before they receive the respect and care they deserve."
"They must have been so lonely in this place. So scared. Those poor souls." Rue sobbed quietly.
The floor in the cellar was filthy, with dirt, dust, waste and rat droppings lying wherever you turned. There was a staircase at the right side of the room. They decided to venture upwards and see what else they'd find before they'd call for someone. In their minds, they were all praying there were no more dead people waiting upstairs.
Though the building had seemed most grand from the outside, and it may have been once, the inside was anything but. There were no colours anywhere. It looked like they'd entered a black and white movie. The windows had been covered with screens, and so there was no light coming in. They had to light their way with the flash lights from their phones. Unlike the rooms at the other institution, there were no glass windows to the doors. And inside, there were no lights. The patients would have been surrounded by darkness day and night.
Some of the rooms were padded, and some had all sorts of contraptions that none of them wanted to let their minds linger on. It seemed the patients had been tortured in more ways than one.
There was no lunch room, so they had to assume the patients ate in their rooms or not at all. How they could eat in complete darkness was anyone's guess.
In what seemed to be one of the offices, there appeared to have been electricity once. Along with a heater, there was also a fan, a kettle and other measures of comfort. A far cry from the squalor and misery their patients lived in.
If they lived in darkness, and they were not allowed to leave their rooms, not to eat or relieve themselves, it was possible they didn't even know where they'd been taken. Or that there were others there, brought there against their own free will, just as they had been.
How had Johnna gone through a whole pregnancy in that environment, and how was the child delivered?
Before they decided they'd seen enough, more than their hearts could bear, they managed to find a storage room. Wall to wall, it was full of shelves. One of them was even leaning on one of the others, as if it had been searched through so vigorously it had tipped over. There were papers scattered on the floor, and large trash bags in the corner. There were ashes too, piles of them, so it seemed likely they had indeed endeavoured to hide what they'd been doing, and for how long they'd been doing it.
Lune, Bly and Marcus decided to gently go through what they could, while Mica stepped out to call his former colleagues. This was beyond them. The sins that had been committed within these walls had to be brought to light, and those who committed them, or in any way contributed, must be brought to justice. As much as they wished it wasn't so, they needed the authorities and the police for that. This was a mess far too big for them to clean up themselves. And that wasn't their job.
The police and Mica's friends in high places soon arrived. After they had explained what they knew and had been interviewed one by one by the police, they were told they would be free to go. They weren't to be questioned in the sense that they were accused of anything, but to properly deal with a crime of this magnitude, the police had to find out as much as they could. It made sense to find out what they could from those who had been able to find Fallen, hidden as it were. Even the police themselves had trouble making their way there, though they had received thorough and clear instructions.
Rue and the others all ended up having to sit down outside the building and go over everything that had happened to them and what they knew of what had happened to Rue's family, from start to finish.
The investigators had brought scanning devices to see what was in the ground before they started digging, and it turned out Lune had been right. While there were only a few skeletons whole skeletons buried further down, they managed to test the soil and it did contain remains, ashes from the incinerator. While there were only small pieces, the bones found in the incinerator, and even in the shallow layers of soil on top of the plot, were indeed human.
It would take months, if not years to find out how many people had been buried there, and who they were. That is, it would have had the boys hadn't found a most precious document inside the institution, one that held a drawn map with a long list of names. The map showed who had been buried and where, all laid down in layers over the years, covered with soil in between. The police would make use of the document as they carefully planned how to excavate the remains, and confirm everything they found with records and with the proper authorities. They could only hope the names written down by the institution were real. It would make it far more difficult to do what they sought out to do. To try the families, possibly charge them for the part they played in this inhumane act against humanity. To find the people who had been in charge of this place, and those whose money had kept it running.
"I want to be informed as soon as you find out anything related to the boy's family," Mica told his former colleagues in his authoritative tone. "We will be wanting access to his grandmother's remains as soon as possible, even if you find no more than a handful of them. We shall also be wanting to apply for a permit to move his mother's remains from the cemetery for the unclaimed. He wishes to bury them both together, properly. Both women were thoroughly failed by our society, and they deserve a proper burial just as much as the boy deserves to have a place he can go to honour and mourn them both."
"Yes, we understand. We must be realistic though. This is no small matter and you know the system better than most, Mica. It will not be a swift operation to investigate all of this and put things right. We'll take any help we can get."
—-
Before they went back home, they needed a form of distraction. Something positive to take their minds off of the horrors they had seen, if they could. Mica suggested they went to collect a few pizzas for them all, even if they didn't feel inclined to eat.
"The mind needs support from the body to be able to deal with matters of great distress. If we do not eat, our bodies will have no nourishment to feed off of, nowhere to gain strength from." Mica had told them. None of them wanted to argue with him, and so to the pizzeria they went. After they picked them up, Rue decided they needed hope. Therefore he decided to take them to see the piece of land where most of them would soon come to live. Marcus, Lune, Bly and Jules as well would be moving there within the week.
Mica and Skyler made a promise to come by Luca's apartment in the morning, and they would bring all the necessary paperwork for Rue to sign, to make his inheritance his, officially. They would then arrange for the Wry's house to be torn down, and for the new buildings to be built on the land he owned. Matters were urgent since the demolition notice was final. In a matter of days, The Place would be torn down, and the people living within its walls would have nowhere else to go. Unless Rue and the others made good of their plans.
Rue felt it was most important that they got to see where they would be living, and that they were thoroughly informed of what would happen in the following weeks and months.
They parked the cars and laid down their jackets on the ground to sit on. Marcus opened up the pizza boxes and handed out beverages to them all. There they sat, envisioning their new future, daring to hope for a better tomorrow. Mica had been right. With food in their bellies, their minds and bodies were better equipped to deal with all that they had seen that day.
As they ate, Rue explained his ideas to them and they clung to his every word.
A well would be built on the land, and temporary container homes and yurts would be rented and transported there. They would be used as alternative housing for the people from The Place to stay in until the building process was finished. It was late September, but time passed quickly and none of them would manage living on the streets during winter. It had been difficult enough managing in The Place, without proper utilities to utilise.
It was too late for them to plant any food this year. However, they would have time to prepare the beds with twigs and branches, leaves, compost and some soil in each one. Come spring, the soil would be ready for their seedlings.
Jules informed the others that he knew where they could get various kinds of building material for free, such as free windows. They decided to collect as many as they could and turn that into a greenhouse where they could grow some of their food all year round.
Since they would be growing their own food and producing and harvesting their own water and electricity, they decided to arrange for more than enough compost toilets to be sent to and installed there, as well as a sauna on wheels and a few shower rooms made out of containers. The waste from those toilets would be used as humanure, whereas the urine would become a nitrogen rich fertiliser. Good thing there were so many of them. Considering much food they would need to grow to keep them all fed, they would need a lot of humanure.
Apart from the beds, they would have fields to grow potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic and oats on. In another greenhouse, with its outside made from collected pet bottles, they would grow their own mushrooms and micro greens.
Lune and Mica sat down to figure out an estimate of how much food they'd need to grow and what foods they would need to make themselves. Each family would get their own plot to plant their foods on, and then the staples would be grown in a larger scale at the fields, where everyone would have to chip in. Each family would also receive a sourdough, a gas burner, pots and pans, a kitchen knife and some other essentials. That way they'd be able to cook, bake and otherwise prepare all of their meals themselves, which was more than they could now.
It would not be cheap to house around ninety people in container homes, even if it was only temporary. Nor would it be easy to figure out which housing solution, which type of homes would be large enough to house them all, but cost effective to create and quick to have ready for them to move into. Fall was here, and winter would soon follow. This was a fight against time, one they would have to win.
Fortunately for Rue, his grandfather and great aunt had been very well off, something he never would have guessed growing up. They had been incredibly cheap when they were alive, and now the entirety of their fortune had gone to Rue. It would be enough for him to pay for the container homes and everything related to Freedom, for the expansion of his own business and to finish his own apartment building so that each one of his tenants would be happy.
If they knew how he spent their money, they would be turning in their graves. Somehow that made Rue completely sure he was following the right path. If the Wrys would have opposed it, he knew he was onto something.
---
Since The Place was being demolished in the days to follow, time was of the essence. They decided to create a plan to forage and remove as much building materials as they could from there. They ended up taking down doors, windows, tearing up floor boards - anything they could use, they removed- and brought with them for the move.
Many of the garden beds ended up being assembled from the material they took from The Place. The rest went towards building a "grocery store" for them all. A collective pantry that they all would contribute to and "shop" in regularly. In time they would be completely self-sufficient and they would never have to worry about going without ever again.
More than a building, Freedom would be a close community where everyone had a task to do and where everyone helped out and shared whatever they had. It was like the saying. "When all you have is nothing, there's a lot to go around." They would become a source of comfort to each other, and to help them keep the homesteads running, they would each be in charge of their own tasks. Some would keep bees and harvest honey. Some would make jams, jellies and cordials. Those interested in natural medicine would be given the opportunity to learn more so that they could eventually be in charge of the health of the community.
Every person in the community would have to figure out and list their own talents and based on that, their assignments would be given to them. Together they would find ways to fill all of the community's needs without having to take part in the cold society that screwed them over.