The Lets Read Podcast - 358: I'M NEVER ENTERING THE WOODS AGAIN | 6 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 344

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Siblings & Deep Woods.HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?[e-mail] ME ON -►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/♫ Music & Cover art: INEKThttps://www.youtube.com/@inekt

My name's Debbie. I'm from Chicago, and after recently subscribing to your channel, I noticed that you accept story submissions from viewers. I don't have any stories for you, per se, and thank God for that, too, but I think you might be interested in the story of my late grandma, Zelda. It's not one she told often, but I remember it just about word for word, and with the help of my mom to fill in the blanks, I'd like to share it with you. She was born in a place called Sopotskin back in 1931, in what was then Poland but is now part of Belarus. There were around 1,300 people living there when she was a child, and Sopotskin was a Stetto, meaning most of the nearly 250 families there were Jewish. Zelda used to wake up to the sound of cows being led out to pasture, as most families kept a milk cow in their barns. She and her family named their cow Nuri, after the... a Yiddish word for buttercup, and would feed her straw or potatoes that they grew in their cellar.

Her father was a tailor, stitching coats and pants in his tiny workshop, while most others did physical labor or traded grain and cattle. Her dad did okay money-wise, but she said that money was always tight. The Polish government slapped heavy taxes on them and banned them from owning land, meaning that they had to pay rent every month instead of owning their homes outright. But even so, the villagers found ways to take care of each other. The rabbi's wife used to organize what they'd call Mutan Besseter, which involves secretly donating food or other goods to needy families to ensure nobody went cold or hungry.

And there was also a volunteer group called the Linus Hatsedek, which was kind of like the Red Cross, and that they went to homes of the sick to take care of them so their families wouldn't lose out on work. Grandma Zelda said that life was hard, but holidays brought the town together like you wouldn't believe. For Passover, families grouped up to bake matzahs and big communal ovens, needing dough till their arms burned but laughing all the while.

And then during other holidays, people would build bonfires in the fields and celebrate with songs and stories. But the joy didn't last because, on September 1st of 1939, when Zelda was still just eight years old, Germany invaded Poland. All of Soputskin was terrified because, while they might have been in the far east of Poland and thus far from the fighting, they knew what the Germans would do if they got their hands on them. Warsaw was under siege, the Polish army was in full retreat, and all hopes seemed lost. But then on September 17th, the Soviet Red Army invaded Poland from the east. It turns out that Russia had made a secret pact with Germany to carve up Poland, but since the

they kept Sapolskin far from the German clutches, Grandma Zelda said the invading Russians were treated like liberators. Anybody seemed better than the Germans, and at first, the Soviets treated them just fine. But over the next 18 months or so, things began to change. The Russians began kicking certain families out of their homes for arbitrary reasons. After that, they shut the stores down and herded craftsmen like my great-grandfather into compulsory collectives. The old wooden synagogue got turned into a movie house and then the secret police started going around questioning and arresting people. Life became a new kind of heart, but it was nothing on what was to follow, because in the summer of 1941, Germany broke their secret peace pact with the Soviets and launched a surprise attack

aimed at Russia's heartland. Grandma Zelda's home village of Sopoldzkin was very close to the new German-Soviet border, meaning that when that surprise attack launched, they were some of the first to feel it. The Russians stationed there would tell them how the Germans wouldn't dare invading the mighty Soviet Union, not least because they were too busy dealing with a still defiant British. But then at 2 o'clock in the morning, on the night of June 22nd, the Germans launched their attack. Their artillery began pummeling Sopoldzkin, setting houses, barns in the old synagogue on fire while killing dozens and dozens of people. And by morning, the artillery had stopped. But as the villagers were putting out fires and retrieving the bodies of their loved ones,

German soldiers advanced on the village and began rounding up the survivors. Grandma Zelda remembered how they forced all the villagers, women and children included, to dig a huge mass grave in the fields outside of town. Their hands were blistered and bleeding by the time that they were ordered to stop, and when they asked for food and water, the Germans refused them. Instead, they ordered the people of Sopotskin to drag their departed loved ones from the ruins of their village before unceremoniously dumping them into the huge earthen pit. Grandma said it was truly horrifying, and at one point she saw a neighbor carrying what was left of his wife toward the pit. She was in pieces, and so was he. And yet the young German soldier who

shepherded him, showed him no pity at all. He kept yelling schnau, schnau, over and over, which I think meant hurry in their language, but it was as if the grieving man couldn't even hear him. He just kept walking towards the pit, carrying his wife's remains, whispering prayers for the dead under his breath. Grandma Zelda always said that they might have survived, had the Germans not made the faithful discovery that more than two-thirds of the village were Jewish. But once they did, All hell broke loose. The German commander had the villagers rounded up again, and then he told them,

Poles stepped to the right, Uden to the left. People only realized what was happening when the Germans began marching the town's Jews back towards the mass grave. Villagers began to break from the column, yelling out, run for your lives, only to be shot dead by German soldiers. A few brave men rushed the captors

and attempted to overpower them, but there were too many Germans, and too many guns. Yet their sacrifice, and the chaos that unfolded afterwards, allowed a handful of villagers to slip into the nearby forests, and one of them was my grandma Zelda. And she ran as far and as fast as her little legs could carry her, each step taking her deeper and deeper into the woods.

My great-grandmother had told her to run, and in her naivety Zelda believed that she'd come running after her. But when she finally stopped to look around, panting and shaking from the ceaseless exertion, her mother was nowhere to be seen. She cried out, hoping my great-grandma was just out of sight, but not only was Zelda alone, she had no idea where she was. The only thing she did know is that she couldn't go home. And so instead, she carried on walking in the opposite direction,

hoping that she might find safety before the Germans found her. She said she walked for hours and hours, stopping only to drink from the canal before she swam across one of its narrower points. That would have killed her had been winter, but the warm summer evening kept her from shivering and her clothes were almost dry again by nightfall. Zelda tried to keep going, but before long it was so dark that she could barely make out the ground in front of her. She knew that she had to find a place to stop and rest for the night. But just as she was about to stop and curl up on the fore. forest floor where she was, she spotted the glow of a campfire through some distant trees. Grandma Zelda kept on creeping through the woods, getting closer and closer to the fire,

when she suddenly saw a big makeshift shelter made of mud, leaves, and some dead wood. Over the fire was a huge cauldron of something which boiled and bubbled, and it was only when she got closer that she realized that hanging from branches all around were the bodies of skinned in headless animals. Grandma Zelda said that she was terrified and believed that she'd come across the home of some witch. Then when some old hunchbacked woman came staggering out from under the blanket which served as the shelter's door, her worst fears were confirmed.

The woman had patchy gray hair, a hooked nose and small beady eyes which locked under her in an instant. Grandma Zelda remembered a crooked smile stretching that woman's lips, revealing a mouth of blackened, pain teeth. And then she ran, exhausted but renewed with terror, as this old woman called after her through the darkness. Little girl, come back here at once. She cried, trying to sound motherly at first. But Grandma Zelda soon heard the woman lose her temper as she screeched out, I'll find you. Just you wait and see. Grandma Zelda said that she can remember that feeling of terror. She just lost her family and then found herself being hunted by some forest witch.

But looking back on it, that was obviously not what happened. That woman was no doubt a local villager, one who'd been kicked out of her home by the Russian occupiers, and many such people took to living in the forest, preferring a life in the wild to one in a Soviet labor camp in the country's far east. The woman no doubt wanted to help my grandma Zelda. but in her traumatized and exhausted state, she assumed the worst and went running off into the forest again. She said it was awful, that she tripped and fell and hurt herself many times, but driven near mad with horror, she couldn't stop herself.

She grazed her knees, tore up her elbows, even bashed her head on the roof of a tree so hard that she felt blood oozing from her hairline. But she only stopped when she was sure that she was safe, and after curling up among the crook of some tree stump, she soon fell asleep. Grandma Zelda said the nightmares woke her up before dawn. She was screaming in her dreams, and then she was screaming when she woke up, too. And since she was frightened that someone might have heard her, she was soon on the move again. She walked for hours again, feeling her stomach starting to rumble,

but not daring to touch any of the many mushrooms and fungi which sprouted from the earth around her. Yet the longer she walked with no food or water, the more she weakened, and she knew that it wouldn't be long before she could no longer walk at all. So imagine her joy when she found a wide dirt path snaking through the trees, because this no doubt led to a settlement, and a settlement meant salvation. Grandma said that she felt a sense of hope for the first time as she followed the track through the woods, a sense of hope which only doubled when she heard the sound of an engine heading down the track. towards her. Since it was coming from the direction she was traveling, Grandma assumed it was a truck full of Russian soldiers headed to the front lines, but when it came into view, her heart jumped into her throat. Because it wasn't the green of a Russian military truck. The truck was a distinctly

German gray. Grandma Zelda rushed off the track and into the trees, knowing that the truck's driver must have spotted her. She could run and risk being shot by any soldiers in its rear. or she could gamble her life on a hiding place. I'm not sure how she managed to hold her nerve and select a suitable hiding place in what must have been mere seconds of deliberation, but that's what she did. And by some stroke of luck,

she found a hollowed-out log large enough to hide herself in. Zelda crawled inside. The interior was wet with slime and wriggling with bugs, and they skidded across her skin nestling in her hair, but she had to stay quiet and didn't move. She said it was only moments later that she heard the truck come to a stop. Its engine cut off and then a voice cut through the silence, yelling something sharp and short in German.

Grandma then heard soldiers piling out of the back, then after another yell, she heard their footsteps getting louder and louder and louder. They were searching for her, and she said one of them was no further than 15 feet away at one of them. point, when a shrill and sudden shriek grabbed their attention. The girl had a distinctly local dialect, not Yiddish or Polish, but Belarusian, and she was yelling out things like, haven't you got enough? Leave her alone. You Germans are animals, nothing but animals.

The Germans just laughed at first, and I came to realize that there were several other prisoners, all women and girls from the sounds of things, and I heard one beg the shouting girl to be quiet. and not to make trouble, but she didn't listen. The German suddenly went from laughing to shouting, and then one of them cried out in pain. I think one of the prisoners must have scratched or bitten him, most likely the one that was yelling, but after she cried out, it went from calm to chaos.

She thinks the girl who hurt the German soldiers tried to escape from the back of the truck because Grandma Zelda heard much faster footsteps moving away from them as the soldiers rushed to control their captives. She said that there was a lot of yelling and screaming in that for every angry male German voice, there was a Russian or Polish one, much higher in the lilt, that sounded scared to death.

Something terrible was happening, but Grandma could see none of it, and then suddenly there was a gunshot, so loud that it made her jump. And then while the Germans were silenced, their female captives became hysterical. Grandma said one of the Germans yelled Scheisa, which I'm sure needs no translation here, and then he began to berate another much younger sounding soldier, presumably for shooting one of their captives.

Grandma said that she'd assumed that they'd resume their search, but instead, their commander ordered them back into the truck, and they kept on down the track until Grandma could no longer hear them. Only when a deep and terrible silence had returned to the forest did Grandma emerge from her filthy, grimy, hiding place. She made her way back to the track, creeping through the trees until it came into view, and when it did, she saw the body of a young woman, lying dead in the dirt. She was face up, staring up the sky with these wide, terrified eyes like she'd been frightened to death. Grandma Zelda said that she'd stopped and stared for a moment, overcome by the horror and senselessness of it all. And then she turned and kept on walking.

And she only took a few steps along the open track before she decided it was a bad idea. If one German truck had been driving along, why not another? And so she skipped back into the trees again, into the deep, dark woods where she could hide. She hoped that by wandering through the woods, she might find the villages of Kaddish or Kaleity. But the woods outside of Sopotskin are vast, and she once again found herself walking miles and miles without so much of a trace of civilization. She walked and walked, feeling herself becoming more and more parched and hungry, until finally, she began to feel sick and lighthearted. She staggered along, wondering how much longer she'd be able to continue until suddenly

she heard the sound of something shrill creeping through the trees. It was music, a violin to be specific. And then after hunting down its source, she found a small Russian encampment, along with a wounded soldiers sitting on an ammunition tin. She stopped, leaning against a tree and watched him make that violin sing a sad, old Russian song. And then once he was done, he looked around and saw her, but she did not startle him. Grandma didn't speak Russian, only Yiddish and a little Polish, but she could understand enough to know that the man was inviting her to come and have a seat.

He gave her water and some bread, and then as she ate, Grandma noticed the blood. bandages around his abdomen and how pale and gaunt the man looked. When he talked, she barely understood a word of what he said, but it was clear that he was dying and that in his final hours, he only wished to play his violin. When my Zelda was finished eating, the man pointed off into the trees. Grandma understood soldiers, bread, and water, and that's all she needed to hear. When Grandma Zelda thanked the wounded soldier, he smiled,

and then as she walked away, he began playing the same sorrowful tune that she'd heard on her approach, and then she walked and walked, till she could hear it no more. Grandma Zelda said that by that point, her feet and legs were aching from what felt like endless walking and running. But having eaten and drunk her fill and knowing her salvation lay on the other side of the forest, she found both the strength and will to keep going. She kept on pushing through the woods, praying that she'd find safety before she had to spend another night in the woods, until suddenly there was a loud whizzing as something flew past her head before the sound was immediately followed by the loud crack of a rifle being fired. Grandma Zelda said that she darted behind a tree, convinced that she'd run into a German patrol.

And then when another bullet struck the tree that she was hiding behind, so hard that it made the whole thing shake, she started to scream. Zelda said that she unleashed all of her pain and grief and terror and exhaustion with those screams. There were no words, just wild shrieks as yet more bullets struck the tree that she was hiding behind, then suddenly the firing stopped. Grandma said that in the moments that followed, she believed that she'd be overcome by German soldiers. They'd swarm her, beat her, and she didn't know this at the time, but she'd be lucky if she was merely killed, as the fate that awaited her in a German slave labor camp would be a thousand times worse than simply a quick death. But no sooner had the shooting stopped, she heard a voice

yelling out, it's just a girl, it's just a little girl. A man was yelling in Polish, chastising another for shooting at her. And then the next thing, the voice is calling out to her, telling her to come out, that they're friendly, and they wanted to take care of her. Grandma said that she believed it was a trick and could only bring herself to peek around the tree that she was hiding behind. But there, walking towards her through the trees were a group of Polish and Belarusian partisans, civilian fighters wearing civilian clothes. By nightfall, Grandma Zelda was in a mixed encampment of partisans and Soviet soldiers. All had been taken completely by surprise by the German attack.

so the scene was a chaotic one. But once again, she was thankfully given food and water by the soldiers before accompanying various groups of Russian soldiers as they retreated back to Moscow to mount a final valiant defense on their nation's capital. There, she lived in a home for orphaned children, and it was there that she heard of the war's progression. Everybody seemed to think that they were doomed when she first arrived,

yet slowly but surely fortunes were reversed. First, the Germans failed to complete their Pinser movement by which they intended to encircle Moscow. And after that, the Russian counterattack started and each one seemed to be a resounding success. The first real celebration came when it was announced that the Germans had officially been driven out of Russian territory. And then the next big celebration came when the first Soviet soldiers stepped foot on sovereign German territory. The war they started had returned to their homeland, something. which brought the entire world a great amount of joy. Yet that joy paled in comparison to which was felt when the greatest news of the 20th century hit the airwaves. The leader of Germany,

and commander-in-chief of their great and powerful armed forces, was dead. You know his name. No one really believed it at first, as it was very hard to distinguish between real news and that which was merely propaganda. People had to wait to have headlines confirmed by friends or relatives who'd seen evidence of such things with their own eyes. Obviously, the allies were unable to recover the remains of their leader, and to this day, this gives rise to theories that he really didn't die and somehow escaped. Some accelerated the news, and others took it with a grain of salt, but not a single person could contain their jubilation when news came that the Germans had surrendered. The Russians kept much of the territory that they had taken from the Germans,

including the eastern portion of Berlin, and then in 1949, when she was still just 18, my grandma Zelda was sent from Moscow to Poland as part of a work program. And there she met an American journalist of Polish origin, and the two conversed in Polish as they worked on and documented the rebuilding of Warsaw. They fell in love, got married,

and Zelda moved to America with him once his assignment was over. She later found out that she'd been declared a traitor by the Soviets, as technically she abandoned her post before her work assignment was finished. But Grandma didn't care. She had no intention of ever returning to Europe, even when the wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. She said the memories were all too powerful and that the traveling through the continent would be like traveling through a giant cemetery

in which she had no idea where her family was buried, or if they were even buried at all. She knew where the mass grave was. she could never forget. But as they began to lose the war, the Germans often dug up the mass graves containing the bodies of those they'd slaughtered and burned them in a giant pile

to conceal evidence of their crimes. There would be no guarantee my ancestors' bodies would even still be there, and even so, it didn't matter. Grandma Zelda carried her memories of them in her heart from place to place, and they were only extinguished on the day she died. In that way, her heart became a cemetery all of its own,

a living, beating memorial to the loved one she'd lost. A part of preserving that memory was passing on the story, first to her daughter and then to me. So here's to you, Grandma Zelda, and your incredible story of resilience and survival. You may well have a grave here in America, but just as you did, I'll carry all my happy memories of you in my heart,

where they can never be dug up, burned, or erased. Growing up, my brother Nate was my hero. With him, I felt like I could do anything because he'd say stuff like, if we can send a rocket to the moon, you can learn to ride a bike, Sammy. And that's what Nate wanted to do, go to the moon in a rocket ship,

so his big dream was to join the Air Force. Now, I can already hear a bunch of nerds yelling. NASA doesn't recruit pilots to be astronauts. They're civilian scientists and engineers, blah, blah, blah. Well, true. But don't go breaking your arm jerking yourself off there, Mr. Noa at all, because finding that out didn't deter Nate one bit. He still wanted to join the Air Force just as a fighter pilot,

with a view to flying test aircraft. Now, sadly, that didn't work out for him, and things might be a whole lot different if it did. But still, that didn't deter him. Nate was happy just being around test pilots, so he volunteered with a 412 test wing at Edwards Air Force base down in California. None of the stuff that he was working on as an aircraft engineer was classified back then, so he was free to talk about it.

Boy, did he talk about it. This was back when they were still testing the F-35, and Nate was having a whale of a time working on it with his buddies. He said he'd be the happiest son of a gun in the whole damned Air Force if he got to see out his career at Edwards. But then came the day they, he came home with an announcement. He'd been given a brand new assignment, one he was very happy about.

And then when Dad asked where he was headed, Nate got this big grin on his face and said, he couldn't tell us. Dad was excited, like majorly so, and he kept joking about Nate going to Area 51 to work on UFOs and hang out with little green men. And we all just laughed, Nate included. He transferred a few weeks later and he still came to visit us. but unlike his other visits, he obviously couldn't say much about what he was doing. He was based out of Las Vegas, and officially speaking, he was stationed at Nellis.

But the Air Force flew him out to different sites all across northern Nevada. He wasn't permitted to name any of those bases, but even if he did, there was no official record of them existing anywhere. He stayed with that same unit for a couple of years, and he always seemed happy. But then came the day that he called our parents and said, that he'd been placed on medical leave. When he came home to visit, Nate told mom and dad not to worry, as he was just exhausted, overworked, and needed a little time off. Apparently, his commanding officer said that he could get him 30 days medical leave

on grounds of stress, which meant that it wouldn't eat into his regular annual leave. Nate said that they all took care of each other that way, and he'd be back to work before he knew it. But then, at the end of those 30 days, Nate didn't go back to work, and he had his leave extended by another 30 days. Now, we didn't find out until way later, but not only had he not been to work in months, but he had to go through some kind of medical evaluation to see whether he was still fit for service or not. Dad and him spoke on the phone a few times, but Dad knew better than to ask too many questions.

The whole thing was clearly bothering Nate a lot, and Dad figured that he'd talk about it, what he could talk about at least when he was ready. But then came the bad news. The board had decided Nate wasn't fit for service anymore, and he was discharged with immediate effect. I think Nate kind of knew that that was going to happen, but when he got the news, it was bad. Dad drove out to Nevada to help him move out of the Air Force housing,

which obviously wasn't at any of the secret sites he'd worked at. He called saying that Nate was putting on a brave face with these things, underneath, you could tell that he was in some pretty bad shape. All he'd say was, I can't do it anymore, Dad, and the Air Force agrees. But there was clearly something going on, and obviously lots, that he hadn't and couldn't tell us. Mom and Dad offered him his old room back till he could get back on his feet, which no one thought would be very long since Nate had a nice amount in savings tucked away, it seemed. But I remember thinking the second I laid eyes on him that it was going to be way,

longer than just a couple of weeks. Nate looked like crap, and I'll be honest, that's putting it kindly. He'd lost a ton of weight since we last saw him. He looked like Billy Bob Thornton, and he obviously wasn't sleeping great, and it was honestly feeling like he'd had some kind of personality transplant. It had been at least nine months since we last saw him, and instead of this confident, outgoing guy showing up on our doorstep, this twitchy, nervous-looking shell did instead. He was still Nate. We still talk football and laughed about old times. But when there'd be lapses in conversation or you'd catch him on his own someplace, there'd be this look on his face like he had the weight of the world bearing down on him. He kept saying how he wouldn't be there long that he already had an apartment and Eugene lined up, but when weeks turned into almost two months of him rotting in his old bedroom, he and our parents started to clash.

Dad kept saying how he needed to get help, like from a therapist or psychologist or something, because he was clearly dealing with some kind of mental issue. But Nate said he didn't need to, that he'd talked to enough shrinks and doctors over the past year or so to last an entire lifetime. Dad would ask him over and over to just talk to him, at least about the stuff that he was permitted to. But Nate would just yell back, I can't. You know, I can't. Like he couldn't even touch on what was wrong without God. violating his non-disclosures or getting carted off to jail.

And he ended up moving out not long after, but that and getting a job was made real difficult by the fact that on his resume, and thanks to the secret work that apparently he'd been doing, it basically looked like Nate had been out of work for almost a year and with zero explanation for it. He said employers and landlords alike both treated him like he was some kind of bullcrap artists or homeless. They took one look at this skinny, unshaven dude with longish hair who claimed to have worked on classified projects for the Air Force and thought, no dice. He still managed to find a place in a job, I guess after the Air Force sent him a letter of recommendation or something. But going from the Air Force to civilian life is tough for anyone, even at the best of times.

And so given Nate's special and rather awkward circumstances, it made it all even the harder for him. and since he and my dad weren't on speaking terms at that point Nate stayed away for a while but I'd talk to him via text most days just checking in on how he was and all of that while talking about the ducks or the trailblazers sometimes he'd be up and sometimes he'd be way down and then on one of the weeks that he was way down I decided screw it I'm heading over with some rotussie chicken and a bunch of drink to cheer this idiot up and that's what I did

I stopped at this Jamaican place and Eugene and picked up some chicken and then after grabbing the sodas, I drove over to Nate's place after making sure that he was home. And we just hung out for a while, talking about the usual kind of stuff and then touching on how Dad wasn't mad anymore and was basically just waiting for him to reach out. He was relieved at that, but that also gave me a window to ask him about the stuff that happened at his job, as in like the reasons for his discharge. I told him it was cool if he really didn't want to talk about it. But he kind of sighed and said something about having to talk about it sooner or later, and then started telling me about this mental breakdown that he had after being overworked and overthinking. He talked about it at length, like all the mandatory counseling and psychiatry sessions he had to attend.

But there was something about the way he talked when he described the reasons, and having known him all my life, I could tell. He was lying. The guy who would have happily skipped sleep to work on airplanes was complaining about being overworked. And I didn't know this at the time, but in a role where the Air Force takes real care not to overwork their airmen, my brother had somehow become the sole exception, I guess. And that's besides the fact my bullcrap detector was going off in a very big way.

And so I slowly approached the subject and asked him if he was lying because he had to, or he just didn't want us to know the truth. And this was something that had happened a bunch of times, actually, not because Nate was some big liar or anything like that, more like he had a habit of trying to protect me from painful truths, like the time Grandma fell down and had to go to the hospital. Nate told me that she was just tired when, really, he knew all too well that she was a goner. I cried till Nate said Grandma was fine,

how she just bonked her head after falling asleep standing up. He said she'd get her whole head bandaged up in the hospital and then made jokes that she was going to look like a mummy coming out of some big old tomb over in Egypt. Now, he used to take me from crying to laughing in just a few short minutes, but I didn't need protection anymore, and I told him that. I just wanted to know what had happened to him, not his job, him. After gathering his thoughts, Nate started with a kind of disclaimer, saying that he obviously couldn't tell me exactly what he'd been working on, or what he saw, or what he knew. But he could bring himself to talk about how it made him feel, and how he felt, was scared.

Nate said that he'd been working on something with a whole team, and then during a simulation they'd been running one day, the team realized something terrible might happen if their little project got working. In fact, not only was the thing obviously terrible, but the more they thought about it, the more they realized just how utterly catastrophic the worst-case scenario might truly be. Nate said it caused a whole thing in their department because some guys didn't

seem to recognize what the problem was, while others did, and both groups were at each other's throats over it. There was a whole review. Each group argued their case, and by the end of it, Nate said the people rightfully in a panic thought that they had the whole thing wrapped up. The solution was obvious. Radically changed the direction of the project or mothball it entirely, because if they didn't, just about everyone was going to be an honest. a whole world of hurt. It seemed like an open and shut case, and even some of the more chilled out members of the team changed their minds and decided the risks were worth paying attention to.

But then the review board made their announcement. Continue the test project as planned without any deviations whatsoever. And everyone was stunned. But none more than Nate and his buddies, who as engineers, were the first to figure out the practical application of what they were working on, but also what might have. if it all went south. They pretty much led the protests against the review board and commanding officers, and as you can probably guess, the higher-ups didn't like that one bit. There were accusations of insubordination and threats of jail time, as the Air Force threatened to throw the

book at the whole test team if they didn't tow the line. They weren't happy about it, but they did as they were told for the sake of their jobs and freedom, but over time, they wore them all the way down to the bone. Nate couldn't tell me the names of the dudes he worked with, but he could tell me roughly what happened to them. He wasn't the first to be put on extended medical leave. It happened to a couple of the other engineers and scientists who'd protested too. The Air Force strung him along for a while, telling him that he'd be back to work in no time after nothing but a cool-off period. But finally, his turn came too, and there wasn't a thing that he could do about it. Nate said that he was still a true believer for a time, and although he'd been kicked out,

he got a big payout. And that must have really sweet in the pot, I guess, getting a golden goodbye like that, but Nate still firmly believed that his old COs would cease sense and make the right decision. But then not long after moving off base, he ended up talking to an old buddy of his who heard rumors that they were pressing on with the project harder than ever. Nate couldn't believe it in the stress of knowing his wife. worst fears might come true, had him almost losing his mind. And that's why he and Dad were clashing so much. Dad Casilla was tearing him up inside, but Nate warned that if he told him what

was coming, Dad would think he was crazy. And not only that, if he was foolish enough to repeat what he'd been told, Nate might end up going to prison for a long time. But even if Dad did believe him, there was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do to stop what was coming, and when it happened, life as we knew it would change forever and not for the better. I remember being so freaked out and scared by what Nate was saying that it was like, dude, please tell me you're not serious. I mean, if you can't tell me okay, but don't just make weird crap up. And Nate exploded. He knocked over his soda from getting up so fast while shouting, does it effing look like I'm making this up? He was red in the face as

he went off on a big, long rant about how, if he told everyone what he knew, and people really understood what frightened him so much, there'd be mass panic, along with riots, martial law, you name it. Society as we knew it would break down completely, and that's before the thing that scared Nate happened. I asked him about things like bunkers and all that stuff, if folks could shelter from it, like they would from a nuke, and Nate just shook his head and told me that I didn't get it. It didn't matter if you were on the goddamn space station or in a presidential bunker. Everyone was going to suffer, and in ways they could barely even imagine without being told explicitly. And if you did tell them, we'll say goodbye to society because no one's showing up to work

on Monday once they know what's about to happen. I remember sitting there just sort of speechless, basically. I didn't want to think a single word Nate said was true, but he'd never like to to me before, not after demanding he'd tell me the truth anyway. He also told me if I breathed a single word of what he'd said to anyone we knew, he'd kill me. I promise I wouldn't say a word, not to anyone we knew anyway, and definitely not to mom or dad. I just didn't know how he could sleep at night knowing something was coming that no one could stop. And he told me alcohol helped, but regardless, he didn't have much other choice. The thing that stopped him from good, going completely crazy, was knowing that there was still good people working on those projects

and how sooner or later they'd see sense. How they were just individuals and any pushback they gave would once again be met with a full force of the big blue machine. And so even though there was hope, it wasn't enough to keep Nate calm or optimistic. He reminded me to keep my mouth shut, but at the end he thanked me for the talk. And then over the next few weeks, Nate started to get a lot better. He patched things up with our dad, started coming over on Sundays for dinner and football, and it seemed like each and every day he looked and acted a little bit different.

He was eating properly again and hitting the gym, and he also got fast-track for promotion at the warehouse job that he had, which meant a little more money and a lot more freedom. And so after just under a year of being back home, Nate was practically back to normal again. He was still in touch with his old buddies from the project, the ones who were also discharged, but he seemed to stop worrying and fixating on it like he had before. Nate became a regular part of our lives again, and it seemed like nothing was going to change that.

But then came the day that he stopped answering texts or calls, and my parents got so worried they asked me to drive over to check on him. I remember thinking they were just overreacting. Nate had been doing great, and it was good to have his old self back again. Besides, the better he got, the busier he got, and the last time he was. he spoke, he mentioned something about a girl he'd been seeing. But then, when I did drive over to Nates, there was no answer. And then when I tried the door, I found it was locked. I got nervous right away because in my head, or rather in my worst fears, it was about finding Nate's body. My heart was just about pounding in my chest, and I remember like sniffing the air and thinking,

okay, no smell of death, this is a good sign. But seconds later, after walking, into the kitchen, I saw a note on the table. And seeing the note had fear and terror hitting me like a truck. I could barely bring myself to read it, but when I did, I was so relieved that I felt a lump in my throat. The first line said something like, whoever finds this rest assured, I didn't do that. And as far as I know, I'll still be alive when you find this. I had my hands on my knees like, oh, thank God. And that's about as far as the relief of went, though. In the note, Nate explained that he hadn't been doing any better. He just found a way of coping, and it was by finding a way of stopping what he'd previously been working

on and with the help of his old friends. Obviously, he didn't leave any real details, just that he was driving up to Washington to meet with an old friend, and he had to leave in the middle of the night in a rental car, so the Air Force couldn't tail him. That was the first I'd heard of anyone following or tailing him. I hadn't seen anyone around our parents' place when he was staying there, like any creepy-looking unmarked cars parked at the end of the driveway, and I hadn't seen any at his place in Eugene either. And so, was nature real? Or was he just going insane? His note didn't seem crazy, not at all. He said that he wouldn't be home for a while, but when he returned, we'd be the first people that he checked in with. And he also couldn't take his phone with him,

for tracking reasons, so he apologized for worrying us and making it so we couldn't reach him. There were, like, extra notes at the bottom explaining what to do if a friend found it or if me or my dad found it. We weren't to tell anyone what he was planning and we were to go on acting like normal. But he did want mom and dad to know that he hadn't just run off and he was going to come back. I was kind of relieved at the news that he'd be back and I was still worried about him and I wondered where he was going, but I didn't pay him. I told mom and dad a version of the truth and, like, very casually told them that Nate was on a sort of adventure vacation out in the wilds and had turned his phone off for no distractions. And they were so used to him being his old self, the news of a phoneless vacation didn't worry them at all.

And it was only when the Oregon State Police knocked on our door and told them that they had some very bad news for us that they really started to worry. and they were right to worry too because the news that the state trooper had for us was absolutely devastating. Tragically, Nate had been involved in a car accident while driving up to Washington in the middle of the night, and although the firefighters and paramedics had done everything they could, they figured Nate was dead before they even got there. We were told a drunk driver had smashed into the front of him after crossing over the grass divide, and he was going so fast that Nate was probably killed on impact. And that was a small mercy, I guess, knowing he hadn't suffered too much before he passed.

And we heard the other driver had been killed, too, only his car had exploded into a fireball and he got burned up in the wreck. Like I said, it made what happened to Nate seem like a mercy in a way, and then came the funeral, and that was rough. Mom took it especially hard. She thought she finally had her son back, only to have him die and some car crash in the middle of the night without ever. getting a chance to say goodbye. She stayed grieving for a long time, too, and didn't get out of bed once for almost three days straight, but the way Dad dealt with it was different. He wanted answers.

So while Mom cried and ate food that the neighbors brought over, Dad was on the phone with the Air Force trying to get as much information as he could about Nate's final days there. They ended up sending someone over to the house who explained to my dad that basically they had no record of Nate ever working at any top secret. facilities, meaning he hadn't been told anything that qualified as classified information. And the Air Force kept Nate's medical records sealed, so the guy who visited wasn't allowed to say what the medical leave was for, but he could say that it was the medical condition that caused him to be discharged, which was nothing we didn't already know. I'd already mentioned what

Nate said and told my dad how he thought he was being followed, but the guy from the Air Force said that there was no way that could have been the case. It wasn't unheard of, for Air Force defenders, their version of military police, to monitor those that they were concerned might give away classified information. But with Nate, that had not been the case, because, simply put, he didn't have any classified information to pass on. And after that, Dad didn't know what to think anymore. Thinking Nate had lied to us for all those years almost broke him, and then it was mom's turn

to take care of him when all he wanted to do was drink and go walking in the woods with his gun. I went to go have a talk with him, not telling him all of what Nate said to me, but making it clear that I didn't hear my bull crap detector going off when he was talking about it. I knew my brother, and I knew when he was lying, and unless he really was insane, crazy enough to believe his own imagination or whatever, then he must have been telling the truth about what he saw and what he knew. But my dad was just like Nate in a way, with his sort of innate trust of authority, and so while he chose to believe his son had been honorable, hadn't lied, and had done the right things,

what the Air Force guy said weighed very heavy on him. Myself? I believe every word Nate had told me. I believe something scared him so bad that it cost him his career and almost drove him crazy. Because I believe the military would mess with very powerful stuff that they don't fully understand. I mean, look at that Oppenheimer movie. The scientists figured that there was a chance that they may blow up the information. entire world by testing their device, but they did it anyway. So with Nate making out that he'd seen something like that, and knowing his track record of honesty growing up, I've got basically no reason

at all not to believe him. And sometimes, considering what he wrote in that final note, I start wondering if his death really was an accident, or if someone was so desperate to silence him that they were able to stage his murder as something accidental. And I don't try to think about that I've got plenty of other things to worry about, and I don't worry about what Nate said about things going so wrong for so many people, because, like he said, there ain't nothing we could do about it if we tried. My name is Katarina. I recently became a subscriber of yours, and I think I have a story from my younger years that

you might be interested in. I currently live in London with my husband and my grown-up daughter, but I grew up in Russia during the Soviet times. and in the summer of 1984, I was a 26-year-old junior researcher at the Leningrad Institute of Geology. My work was, in a word, boring, but back then, working at a university allowed you certain privileges, such as the opportunity for travel. So when I was offered a spot on a research trip set to Siberia, I jumped at the chance. Myself and a team of seven other researchers flew from Moscow to Omsk, then to Krasnoyar.

Then from there, a much smaller plane would fly us out to a town on the banks of the Yenasee River named Zotino, where we'd study nearby coal deposits. The plane was an old Antonov, the smaller propeller-driven kind that smelled of oil and was horribly uncomfortable to sit in. We sat on the metal benches, holding our sample bags on our laps, shouting to be heard over the plane's rattling. But then, around two hours into the flight, the engine was... start coughing, first one, then the other. The pilot came on the intercom and said it was nothing

to worry about, but only a minute later, the plane dropped hard. People screamed, and I remember gripping the metal bunch so hard that the edge bit into my fingers. The sound of rushing air got louder and louder until it sounded like it was screaming. Three branches came rushing up at us through the windows before a sudden impact through all of us forward. The glass smas, and metal groaned, and then the next thing I remember, I was waking up in the wreck to this horrible silence hanging in the air. My head hurt, and my knee was in agony, but I could just about stand. The pilot and co-pilot were still in their seats, but they hadn't made it. The rest of us were alive, but in bad shape. Yuri had a broken leg. Tanya's arm was so badly broken that she couldn't

stop crying, while the others had an assortment of broken legs and twisted ankles, along with cuts, bruises, and a few cracked ribs. The plane's radio was broken so there was no calling for help. Nobody could walk far, and I was the only one on my feet. And so it only made sense that it was me who went to look for help. We had some supplies that survived the crash. It was little more than two plastic bottles of water from the cockpit and three small bags of peanuts that the steward had handed out before takeoff. I knew I could make them all last quite a while, but we were in one of the largest uninterrupted force in the world. It stretched in every direction, thick, dark, and endless, and we didn't have even the faintest of idea of where we were. There was a flare gun, but we had to wait

until the sun had set for that to be truly effective, and until then, what choice was there other than to make the most of what little energy I had. I stuffed the bottled water and peanuts into my coat pockets, listening as my injured comrades wish me luck, and then I started walking towards what I assumed was the east. The first day was the easiest. I followed what looked like a game trail, one that was infested with mosquitoes which bit at my face and neck.

And by the evening time my knee was throbbing, and I'd already drank more than half a bottle of water. I stopped where there was a shelter, ate a handful of peanuts, and then slept against a fallen log for a few hours into it got too cold to sleep. On the second day, the wolves found me. I heard them first. Their low howls far off at first, but then they got closer. I saw their shapes between the trees, all gray and thin, and there had to be at least six or seven of them, and they didn't rush or charge me. They just followed it first, keeping 20 or 30 meters.

back. I picked up a branch and waved it, shouting at the top of my voice to seem big and scary. They stayed away, but they didn't leave. That night I made a small fire with dried twigs and pine needles. I sat with my back to the flames, watching for any sign of those wolves, and before long I could see the flames glowing in their eyes. I took a stick from the fire and waved it around while shouting in hopes that it'd scare them off. It didn't. They just kept watching and waiting. And by the third day, my water was almost gone, and the peanuts were down to one bag. My lips were cracked from the dehydration, and every single step hurt like a fresh wound. The forest looked the same in every direction, nothing but tall pines and fallen logs covering as far as

the eye could see. I started talking to myself just to hear a voice, telling myself the others back of the wreck were still alive and that I was going to make it. The wolves were still there, getting closer the more I slowed. I kept the branch in my hand like a club, but I knew that if they came for me, I was done for. Late on the fourth afternoon, I smelled wood smoke from a campfire. As far as I thought, I was imagining it like a kind of forest mirage or something, but then I heard the sound of loud saws and I started walking faster. My heart was beating so hard it felt like it was going to burst, because I knew.

knew I'd done it. And then as the trees opened up a little, there it was. A small logging camp stretched out in front of me. There had to be five or six wooden huts, a big pile of cut logs, and a generator chugging away and belching out some black smoke. Men in padded jackets and felt boots moved between the buildings, but they didn't seem to be Russian, and I'd soon discovered that they were actually Chinese migrant workers working under an international labor program. I'd heard rumors that some contract workers came from China to cut timber in the Far East, but I never thought that I would ever see them up close. As I approached, one of them spotted me and shouted.

They all stopped, and then a short man with a black cap came forward, and he spoke with a very heavy Russian accent, but I could understand him. He asked where I'd come from and what had happened to me, and I told him that there was a plane crash, that others were hurt and that they needed help. He didn't ask many questions. He simply brought me inside to the nearest hut to warm me up. Someone gave me some hot tea with sugar and then they fed me rice and some kind of salted fish. I told them about the wreck, about the wolves, about the peanuts I had left.

And then when I thought about my comrades, I started to cry. The man with a black cap, his name was Lau, and he tried to comfort me and then promise that he would get help. There was a phone in the hut. Lao picked it up, spoke fast in some Chinese, and then waited a few moments before he switched to Russian. He said that there were survivors who needed rescue, and then began reading off a set of coordinates while looking at a map. The search team came the next morning in two helicopters. They asked if they knew which direction I'd traveled, and since I had a rough idea, they flew us west. It looked like a great ocean of trees out there, like it would be impossible to find the wreck and my comrades.

but then suddenly someone pointed and shouted and there it was. It looked tiny from the air, just a crumpled metal shape in that ocean of green. My comrades were still alive, huddled under his shelter that they made out of a tarp thrown over the crash plane's wing. When they heard the helicopters, some of them hobbled out and began waving. There were no places to land so the rescue workers had to haul my wounded comrades up on stretchers attached to ropes. I was in a helicopter with Yuri and Tanya, and they were too weak to talk, but they didn't need to. No words could have been adequate to describe what we felt in that moment.

They took us to a hospital far away, and doctors set bones, gave us shots and fed us broth, and then after a week of treatment and rest, they flew us back to Leningrad. We thought that they'd be happy to see us. But when our colleagues from the Institute met us at the airport, they looked nervous, and then when we got back to the Institute, they told us the bad news. Thanks to our failure, the ministry had decided to cut our funding.

That was how things worked back then. We were punished for things we had no control over, quite literally adding insult to injury. And I was back at work after about six weeks. And for a long time, my knee would ache whenever it rained, and sometimes at night I'd wake up sweating after nightmares about the wolves. I still have one empty peanut bag in a drawer at home. It's faded and torn, but it serves as a reminder of what I've lived through and achieved.

We survived not just because one person could walk, but because others were kind and because sometimes fate gives you a chance. So my mom passed away when I was eight years old, and it was every bit as devastating and heartbreaking as you can possibly imagine. My dad waited a whole six years to start dating, and when he did, he introduced the idea to me very slowly and very carefully. I wasn't very happy with the idea of getting a wicked stepmother, so I was dead against him dating. At least until I met Jen, who ended up being his long-term girlfriend, and Jen turned out to be great. She understood that, and without trying to sound too self-centered here, that the most important component of her relationship with my dad was me. She worked very hard to win me over, and for that I owe her a lifetime of appreciation. She made it clear that she wasn't out to replace my mom because no one could ever do that for me, not really.

All she could ever offer was patience, compassion, and friendship. And it was her idea that she and my dad put off moving in together for at least a couple of years, and not just because that distance made me feel much less anxious about her dating my dad, but also because she had a child of her own, a boy of 13 named Braden. I was 15 when Jen and Brayden moved in and Braden was 13, like I said, and I'd met him once or twice beforehand, and while he seemed really shy and quiet, I figured he'd be a good kid if Jen helped raise him. Now, I really fell for him, too. Jen hadn't told him that she'd been dating until maybe a couple of months before they moved, purely because she was scared of how bad he'd take it. And so when he first met me and my dad, I really sympathized with how anxious and helpless he must have.

felt. I figured he'd warm up to us, come out of his shell a little, and then we could be something like a family together. But unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Braden never did warm up to us, and while he hadn't been the happiest child prior to his teenage years, by 13, bad seeds were bearing some rotten fruit. Now, I thought that when he had that confidence, his personality would start to show, but I totally made the mistake of thinking that personality would be like his moms. And so when it emerged, he turned out to be a bratty little asshole, and it was disappointing to say the least. The Braden that showed up after that period of silence was easily one of the most obnoxious people I've ever had the displeasure of meeting.

But living with him was a living hell. He had zero concern with being loud at night. He had terrible personal hygiene, and he'd throw these teenage boy tantrums to try and manipulate his mother. It was some of the grossest behavior I've ever seen, from either male or female in my whole life, and I asked Dad why the heck he didn't step in. He said it was complicated, that both he and Jen knew that Brayden would not react well to Dad trying to parent him, and so instead he'd just put up with it. When I asked how the heck he was so patient with him, Dad said every time he got close to losing his temper,

he'd remember just how much he loved Jen and all that anger would subside. But when I asked how I could try and cope with him, Dad just kind of looked off and said, well, you can look forward to college, I guess. It helped that we could have a sense of humor about it. I guess we kind of had to to keep our sanity, but as time went by, it got harder and harder to see the funny side, especially after I turned 18 and decided to take a year off

so I could decide what I wanted to study in college. Braden apparently was flunking hudgeon. school and only seemed interested in two things, chicken tenders and playing Minecraft. He wasn't as bad as like the Tendies meme that you've seen, but Jen really did have to fill the freezer with frozen tenders if she wanted Braiden to eat anything. And boy, did that kid eat. I think he was pushing 190 by that point, so not huge, but well on his way with the amount that he ate. And the only times that you'd see him was when he came down to put them in the oven and when he came down to take them out again.

The rest of the time, Brayden was in his bedroom, playing Vidya. And so once I turned 19, I started seriously knuckling down when it came to my college applications. But that meant that I needed to look into getting a student loan, and then, and long story short here, I found out that I was already in debt

and was almost 1,500 bucks in the red on a credit card I didn't even know that I had. It was obviously identity fraud of some kind, because I hadn't applied for any credit card. But then when I looked into it, I saw something I recognized right away. First off, the company was Microsoft, so I knew all the purchases were, like, computer-related. But when I checked out the actual purchases and what they were, almost all of them said Madden Points.

Jen and Brayden had argued about something called Madden Points maybe three or four months prior, and from what I understand, they were something Braden apparently needed to play his football game. But then it turned out he didn't need them, and it was all just a way of milking yet more money out of people. But when Jen refused to give him any more money and told him to make do with what he'd already bought, he went nuts. It was a whole thing, and it only stopped when Jen threatened to take his Xbox away altogether. But then, it hadn't stopped, because all Braden had done was applied for a credit card in my name. and then spend almost 1,500 bucks of money I literally didn't even have. I was mad, obviously really mad, but I knew I wouldn't have to pay anything.

It was literally identity theft. And the only thing was I had to file a police report if I wanted to sort of convince them that it wasn't just me doing a scam. And that was obviously really bad for Braden. And his mom went ballistic. My dad got involved for the first time saying that he, could go to prison for stuff like that. But then the whole time, Braden's saying, I don't know what you guys are talking about. I swear it wasn't me. Well, it was him,

because all it took was a visit from a police officer, and he sang like a canary while crying like a baby. I didn't have to press charges, so I didn't. But that meant that dad and Jen had to pay off the money, otherwise the credit card company was going to pursue charges instead. And needless to say, they were seriously mad at Brayden, but they got to even matter when he basically refused to apologize to me. From Braden's perspective, I'd majorly wronged him by trying to get him arrested, which I hadn't, and over something that in his words wasn't even that much of a big deal. And he actually offered to do yard work around the neighborhood to try and cover 1500. But I digress. He wasn't going to apologize, and it was actually starting to put a strain on

dad and Jen's relationship. But then one night, around 1130, Radin knocked on my bedroom door and said he wanted to apologize. It was 1130 at night. I'd been lying there trying to sleep for maybe 15 minutes or so, and I was in no mood to have such a heavy talk with him. But what I did do was thank him. I genuinely appreciated his attempt at reproach, so, well, at the time I just wanted to sleep, I told him I'd talk with him in the morning so he could make up properly. I wish Brayden good night and then rolled over to go back to sleep. But he knocked again and said he wanted to apologize. Now, I just responded, Brayden, please, just go to sleep.

I'll talk to you tomorrow. But again, this kid knocks on my goddamn bedroom door again. I said I wasn't going to tell him again, and I was definitely starting to lose my crap, so I probably sounded like it too. But then Brayden says, and in his real aggressive and creepy way, Open your door, Jessica. I want to apologize to you. Brayden tried opening my door, forcefully too. But since I've been keeping it locked since the whole credit card debacle,

his attempt was unsuccessful. And that's when I realized something was going on, and Brayden never intended for some heartfelt apology. I remember sitting up in bed and telling Brayden much louder to get the hell away from my door. And I guess this alerted my dad because I heard the bedroom door opened down the hallway. I expected my dad to tell Brayden the same, to go get to bed and quit bothering me. But all I heard was, oh my God. Before it sounded like he bolted back into his and Jen's bedroom. Brayden started banging on my door while jiggling my door handle, and he also raised his voice and started saying,

open the door, Jen, open the freaking door right now. And as you can imagine, I was never about to open my door to him, especially not after hearing my dad say something like, oh my God, the way he did. And that made me think that Brayden had something, something in his hand, something that was probably sharp, or went bang. Braden was still slamming his fist against my door

when I heard my dad suddenly start yelling, Brayden, put the knife down. Brayden, right now. I could hear Jen, too, yelling for him to stop, but I mostly could just hear Braden screaming and then this sudden sort of wood-chipping sound almost from where he was stabbing at my bedroom door with the knife he was carrying. My dad didn't shoot him, thank God, but he sounded almost close, you know. His stepson was in the process of trying to murder his biological daughter, and while he loved

Brayden's mom, I don't think he'd have any trouble with him. whatsoever in shooting him dead if, say, he managed to barge my door open and get inside. But then, that would have obviously been a huge drama. There's no way Dad and Jen's relationship would have survived that, and, heck, maybe he'd even go to prison, or, at the very least, have stuck with the memory of shooting a kid dead in his own house. And so, yeah, thankfully, Brayden eventually put the knife down. And then, as his mom screamed at him to go to his room, he started crying.

Dad came into my room to see if I was okay, which, yeah, sure, I technically was fine, but not so fine at the same time. He promised me he was going to do something about Braden's behavior, and that his mom said she'd back any play he suggested. And that is how Braden ended up going to military school for two years. He ended up going into the army after he graduated because, in a tale as old as time, all he really needed in life was a father figure. My dad always felt bad about not being able to provide it, and he has an okay relationship with Braden these days, but I don't rush to go see him whenever he's home. Now, he might look all square-jawed and dapper in his army photos, but I still see that same kid inside of him, the one that tried to kill me in the middle of the night.

Many years ago now, at a Thanksgiving get-together, me and my cousin were talking about old Kevin Costner movies, this one specifically called The Postman. Now, for those who haven't seen it, it's pretty simple. Society goes to crap, anarchy reigns, but then Kevin Costner rekindles civilization by restarting the Federal Post Service. As me and my cousin were watching it, we started discussing how unrealistic it all seemed. But what we didn't know was that our old great-uncle had woken up from his nap and was actually listening to our conversation.

Now, I think I said something about movies lacking authenticity and not being, like, believable, and then kind of jumped as our great Uncle Joe piped up and said, There are much stranger stories than that that have never been put to film. I'll tell you that for nothing. Now, me and my cousin asked, like what, Uncle Joe? To which he replied. Like, what about a story about a town called Story? And the Wolfman living out near Murder Creek.

My cousin and I waved him off, saying that there was no such story about a town called Story and no such place called Murder Creek. But Uncle Joe swore blind that it was true, and he even said that he met the wolfman, and that he was covered in hair and had these big yellow eyes, and that it was as real as you or me. When me and my cousin responded, swear on the Bible, Uncle Joe? He told us he'd swear on anything we wanted him to, and then in exchange of grandkids. grabbing him another beer from the fridge, this is the story told us. Our Uncle Joe was born in a little Arkansas town called Mount Ida back in 1921.

It was the largest town in Montgomery County, but there were only a couple of hundred people living there at the time that the story actually took place. The rest were spread out among little hamlets named things like Malden, Gibbs, Washita, and Story. Now back then, Story was nothing more than a couple of times. couple of houses and a site that they'd marked out to build a Baptist church. But just like today, it's almost entirely surrounded by dense pine woods as it resides on the western edges of the Washita National Forest. Uncle Joe went to high school with a girl who lived up in story named Emily Bandy. She was a pretty young lady with light blonde hair and big blue eyes, and all the

boys at school had a crush on her. But then one day in 1935, a 14-year-old Emily walked off into the woods to find a toy arrow her little brother had lost, but she didn't walk out again. She was found a few hours later by her distraught father and uncle, and what they saw horrified them. Emily Bandy had been beaten to a pulp and stripped of her clothes, and when they found her, she was clinging to life. A doctor was summoned, who arrived at the Bandy residence as quickly as he could, and then after stemming the girl's internal bleeding and administering a cutting-eat, treatment known as a blood transfusion at the time, Emily's father was told the girl might just live. Thankfully, Emily Bandied did end up surviving her ordeal, but was unable to describe her

attacker until she was properly rested. And yet when she did, the blood of those who heard her description ran cold. Because according to young Emily, the thing that attacked her was no man but a monster. Emily said she'd been walking through the woods. eyes on the ground in search of her brother's toy arrow. He'd been crying about losing it for almost an hour, so rather than listen to him wailing on about it for any longer, she took it upon herself to find it for him. And yet as she walked through the pines,

determined to stop her brother's crying, something jumped out from behind a tree and struck her so hard in the side of the head that she blacked out for a moment. She woke up on the ground with something on top of her, something which appeared to sport jet black hair all over its body. It drooled as it let out a guttural growl, savaging her on the forest floor. And then as she tried to resist, it began striking her again.

The next thing she remembered, it howled before it rolled away from her and found its feet. She thought the ordeal was over and that the creature believed that she was dead, until suddenly it lunged at her and began hitting her around the head and neck until she blacked out again. She later said that she believed that she was in heaven when her father and uncle first woke her up. And then when she realized she was not, the pain was so great that all she wanted to do was die.

But then once she recovered, the only thing which frightened her more than that thought was the image of that monster, writhing and howling on top of her. One of the men in attendance when Emily described her attacker was the county sheriff, and he soon organized a search of the woods around story, a search which included not only deputies,

but also a whole bunch of volunteers armed with shotguns and rifles. But on account of just how nervous and twitchy everyone was, it took just about all the deputies' organizational skills just to keep the volunteers from shooting one another. Needless to say, the hunt for Emily Bandy's attacker was unsuccessful, and the same could be said for the second hunt, which was mounted that very next day. But in the early morning hours of the third day, a deputy named Adams got up before dawn,

put on his uniform in a blaze orange hunting cap, and then went walking off into the woods with a rifle slung over his shoulder. According to my great-uncle Joe, Deputy Adams was half Choctaw on his father's side, and that his daddy had taught him all kinds of hunting and tracking skills as a boy. The county sheriff hadn't wanted to let him off the leash, as it were, on account of all of all of his own. volunteers. But on that third day, and tired of a bunch of clumsy but well-meaning hunters slowing him down, Deputy Adams walked off into the woods to bag himself a monster. He started right back at the place the attack happened, and then from there, he wandered deeper and deeper into the woods until he reached a stream out near a hill they call Callibiate Mountain. It was just after dawn

had broken, so there was a soft blue light breaking through the trees, and then as Deputy Adams was walking by the river's edge, smack bang in the middle of nowhere, he looked up to see something which stopped him in his tracks. Downstream from him by maybe 50 to 60 yards, a man was kneeling by the water's edge and drinking from the stream, only it couldn't have been a man. The thing was dressed and would look like rags and was covered in that same thick, dark hair that Emily Bandy had described. Dark fur covered its exposed arms and shoulders and ran all the the way down to his legs before stopping at filthy black pads on the soles of its feet. Adam stared in disbelief of this creature, as unaware of his presence it continued to drink.

Then finally, Adam suddenly snapped out of his stupor and brought his rifle to his shoulder. Yet after hearing the distinct chambering of a round of Adam's rifle, the creature looked up, saw him, and then bolted off into the trees on two legs at speeds that seemed impossibly fast. Adams later said that he was too shaken to even attempt to shoot, not just because of how shaken he was, but because whatever that thing was, it needed to be brought in alive. Even as far back as the 30s, people believed in Sasquatches and Mountain Men. Deputy Adams was a practical man and didn't believe that there was a single animal out there

that he hadn't seen during one of his hunts in the woods. So imagine his shock and surprise when he saw what he believed was something. some kind of missing link right there before his eyes. He told the county sheriff what he saw the moment he got back to Mount Ida, and when he did, the sheriff went about organizing a third search to be conducted that very next day. Only, instead of combing the woods through the morning and the afternoon, the deputies in just a handful of the best hunters would set up hides near bodies of water,

where they would watch and wait for any sign of this strange creature. Unfortunately, the attempt to catch it unawares again was unsuccessful, but that just made it clear that they were dealing with a highly intelligent and therefore highly dangerous predator. But Deputy Adams wasn't ready to give up yet. After their unsuccessful stakeout, he stayed in the woods and made his way back towards Calibiate Mountain, where he'd first set at the strange beast. He walked from miles and miles, zigzagging through the woods,

searching for any and all traces of it, and he even had to spend a night in the forest to cover all the ground he wanted. He said being huddled around the campfire, knowing that thing was out there in the darkness, it was the most scared he'd ever been in his life. But he made it through the night all the same, and at dawn he kept on searching for that thing

that attacked Emily Bandy. Deputy Adams kept on creeping through the trees, knowing that he could be just seconds away from running into that thing again, since it seemed to be active around dawn. And then right as he started to get within a mile or two of Murder Creek, which actually is a real place, we even looked it up, he started seeing all kinds of animal carcasses,

all of which appeared to have been stripped of their meat. And when he found tufts of that thick black hair around some of the skeletal remains, Deputy Adams knew that he must be close. But as he got closer and closer to Murder Creek, he could have never prepared himself for what he was about to discuss. because as he crept along the side of a hill, he spotted a small cave. It was no more than a flat, triangular tunnel. But right there, feasting on the raw meat of some small furry animal, was the creature he'd spotted just two days prior. Deputy Adams raised his rifle,

aiming it at the creature and trapping it inside of its own shallow den. But as it looked up and locked eyes with the deputy, he realized it was no wild beast. because despite the thick black hair covering the thing's body, its eyes were distinctly human. The thing held Deputy Adams gazed as it dropped what it was eating, but it didn't try to escape. Instead, it began to shake its head, and a voice that sounded like it had only the slightest grasp of English as it pleaded. No. Deputy Adams was so stunned that he thought he might fall down. But as he continued to stare, aghast and... open mouth. He realized the thing was not a thing at all, but rather a man, a young man, and

one with a very peculiar affliction. Since Deputy Adams had already resigned himself to wandering the woods after that previous morning steakout, he was carrying some hard cheese and bacon wrapped in a little cloth. He took it out and offered some to the strange young man who gobbled it down greedily as soon as was offered. And then over the next day, and then over the next few hours or so, he gained the young man's trust and began to learn a thing or two about him. It wasn't clear exactly how it happened, but Deputy Adams realized that while the young man must have been abandoned as a child, fear and suspicion had led him to a life in the wild. He spent his formative years in the small town of Washita back in Montgomery County,

but whenever people saw him, they got scared, and when they got scared, they got violent. The man had become all too accustomed to fleeing at the sight of them, and even when Deputy Adams felt he'd earned his trust, the young man was still flinch whenever he spoke too loud or moved too fast. As night drew in, Deputy Adams made a campfire just a few feet away from the young man's den. Now, it must have been the first time that he'd seen a fire up close in decades, because while he wasn't strictly scared of it, the process of its creation fascinated him. And then while demonstrating a much stronger ability to comprehend rather than speak,

Deputy Adams spent that night convincing the strange young man to follow him back into town that next morning, not only to begin his reintegration into society, but to prove that he could not have been the one to attack young Emily Bandy. But then, right around the same time Adams was earning the man's trust, something terrible was unfolding back in a tiny Montgomery County Hamlet, known as Sims. That afternoon, a homemaker by the name of Carol McCormick was putting away some of her husband's laundry.

Prohibition had ended not just two years before, and her husband, Robert, liked to enjoy a few drinks with his buddies after work, without having to worry about the sheriff showing up to throw him in jail. And this meant that he wouldn't be back till after dark. But this also meant that when she found a small, silver-hard necklace tucked into the back of his sock drawer, with a name May engraved onto it,

she had hours and hours to wallow in grief and anger before Bob finally came home. Carol was convinced her husband was having an affair. It had been months since he touched her. He was heading out at odd times to do things he didn't want to talk about. And even worse, he'd been forgetting to pick up her crocheting supplies from the Mount Ida General store. And so when he staggered through the door sometime around 10,

Then, stinking of whiskey and cigarettes, Carol McCormick demanded to know who in the hell this May lady was. Her husband, unprepared for such an ambush, couldn't provide an answer to her question. And while Carol, rather, correctly interpreted this as a sign of Bob's guilt, he wasn't guilty of that which she accused him of. And when everything went down, when Carol suddenly realized who May was and who the necklace really belonged to, she ran screaming. from the house and out into the night.

Carol had remembered hearing something about how, while all of Emily Brandy's torn clothes were found around her body, one thing was missing from the scene, a necklace, given to Emily by her sister, but one that had originally been a gift to her. And the name of Emily's older sister was Mabel Juliet Bandy, more commonly referred to as Mae. Carol knew most of that. Everyone knew everyone in Montgomery County back then. She just couldn't bring herself to entertain the possibility till she saw that look in her husband's eyes. But Bob didn't just let her go that night. Oh no, he couldn't. He couldn't have his good lady wife going around telling tales and ruining his good reputation

over what he considered to be a drunken mistake. And so he followed her outside into the the night and tried bashing her head in with a shovel. Carol's screams were the only thing that saved her life, that in the shotgun one of their neighbors held when he came out to see what in the hell was going on out there. He told Bob if he so much has moved, he'd blow his goddamn head off. And then his wife came out to join him, and after gasping at the sight of her husband holding their beloved Bob at gunpoint, she grabbed the rope that he used to tie Bob up and he was off in the direction of Mount Ida to grab the sheriff. Uncle Joe said Bob McCormick spent the night in the county jail and did so on two charges of

attempted murder among other things. The next morning, a still weak Emily was brought to his cell and asked if that was the man who attacked her. She didn't have to say yes, because when she erupted into screams and cries, stumbling into the arms of her father to cry and cry and cry, it was all the confirmation of her. anyone needed. And then by pure happenstance, right around the time Emily Brandy was led away from the county jail, Deputy Adams walked back into town with that young man following close behind. Adams had told him not to be scared and that any sour reactions from the Mount Ida citizenry

would be met with a brief but all-encompassing explanation. The man was no monster. He had an illness. He'd been neglected, and it was a time to start making things right for him. While Bob McCormick had to await the date of his trial in the county jail, the young man stayed with Deputy Adams, along with his wife and young son. He was taught to live like a person again, how to wash and dress himself, and how to eat at a table using knives and forks. It wasn't an overnight transformation. It took time, and as he learned to speak again, the young man took the name Joseph, another reason my great Uncle Joe remembered the tale so well. He took the name after Mrs. Adams' Bible studies sessions, helped him learn to read, and saying he was inspired to do so by Joseph's story. Joseph was a man betrayed by his family, one who was sold into slavery and became a prisoner

in a foreign land. Joseph eventually forgave his family and reportedly told them, in Genesis 50-20. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. And by the time Bob McCormick was being sentenced to 50 years of hard labor, Deputy Adams was trying to find young Joseph a job. Given how skittish he was, as well as his lack of general education, Joseph was far too anxious and frightened for regular employment.

But Deputy Adams didn't give up on him. And after hearing of a freak show that was attached to a traveling carnival, he paid the show a visit when it passed through Montgomery County. But rather than find a cruel, in an exploitative operation that took advantage of the so-called freaks in its employment, Deputy Adams found a sanctuary for such people. There was a bearded lady named Lila, a tiny little dwarf man who danced the Lindy Hop, and a fellow who called himself the lizard man, but who in reality just had some kind of skin condition.

These people welcomed Joseph with open arms, telling them that he was finally in a place where folk understood and didn't judge. And then, since he was born and raised in Wachita, a little town just down the road from story, young Joseph's stage name had just about been decided for him. For backstage, he'd be Joseph, their compatriots and co-worker, but to the audience, he'd be the weird and wonderful Wachita wolfman, and they'd be charged money for the honor of seeing and talking to him. Word has it that Deputy Adams cried a few silent tears in the day that the carnival left, town, not out of sadness, but because of the way Joseph had thanked him for saving his life. And then after that, the story of Emily Bandy, Deputy Adams, and the Washington

Wolfman passed on into legend, and became a tale passed down from one generation to another. Like I said, my cousin and I went away and did our own research because we didn't think that there was a single chance in hell that a town called Story and a creek called murder were real places. And like I may have also said, every single piece that Uncle Joe mentioned checked out. And so to me, the story of the Washetal Wolfman is all the proof I needed that sometimes the truth is far, far stranger than fiction could ever be. My name's Abbey. I'm from the UK, and I've been a fan of yours for quite some time now. I try to check out the live streams whenever possible, and I love the banter between you and the

viewers, but they're often too late for me to hang around for long. Don't change them on my account, I'm just saying. Now, anyway, the reason I'm writing to you today is because, well, my brother disappeared. I'd always hope that I'd never have any reason to write to you, and I should probably say now that my brother's disappearance won't be like any you've read about before, because technically he hasn't disappeared. It just feels like he has. So my brother's name is Thea, and he was always a bit of a moody one. His favorite film when he was little was Kedalt Hood, a film about gangs in London,

and then he was mad into Top Boy when that came out too. He once got in trouble for skipping school to go home and watch Battle Royale when our mom walked in on him watching it, and she double panicked because not only was he skipping school, but he was doing it to watch these crazy violent films where Japanese schoolgirls get machine-gunned. But as our dad said, boys will be boys. He seemed to mellow out a bit once he reached year nine,

which I think is like eighth or ninth grade over there, because he had to focus on his GCSE exams. He loved reading about history, so that was by far his strongest subject, and he liked doing Shakespearean plays in English, too. All his teachers thought that he'd get good enough grades to continue on to A-level, so we were all really excited about the idea of him going off to uni somewhere and having all the fun associated with that.

But then, right at the moment of truth, just as exam week started, Theo decided that he didn't want to sit them. Mom managed to convince him to sit his history exam and do his biology and English exam so he at least had the grades to do his A levels. But when his results came back, I think he got a D and two E's. And so the mom, dad, and even his teachers,

it was like Theo hadn't even tried. And remember the big argument that erupted on Results Day, how Dad said, what were you thinking? Do you know how much resets are going to cost? Theo's response came in three stock lines. I don't care. I'm not bothered. And what's the point? And her parents decided that there must be something wrong with him, like mentally or emotionally.

And so they sort of them out with a visit from a psychologist or psychotherapist, I can never remember which. and then after a few weeks of sessions, the women told mom and dad that Theo was suffering from some kind of depression, as well as a serious sort of behavioral disorder. The psychologist woman recommended he undergo some therapies, and he was going to all these doctors to talk with them, do some brain exercises, and to write down all of his feelings. He was put on antidepressants, too, and while he didn't want to take them at first, all it took was a talk with our dad who convinced him to just try them. and Theo seemed only too happy to take them. It wasn't transformational, and we were warned that the process might seem painfully slow, but over the next couple of weeks, I started noticing improvements. He started leaving the house again, mostly just to the shops and back,

but it was still an improvement, and we hope that he might start seeing his school friends again because at least two other families live within cycling distance of our house. But Theo said that he wasn't interested in seeing them anymore, because they didn't have anything in common. We were all quite sad to hear that, but Dad wasn't that bothered by it. He said teenage boys could be fickle and emotionless and reminded us all that all teenage groups get disrupted by the end of secondary school.

Theo, falling out with his friends, was concerning, but in the grand scheme of things, he was doing much better. He made an okay point, I suppose. Theo had been leaving the house more and more, and in addition to getting himself a gym membership. And then his time went by, he landed a part-time job, stacking shelves in a supermarket, and started talking to a whole new group of friends. But not in person, only online.

I say not in person, as he did end up going to see some of them not long after his 17th birthday. But for the most part, they either talked via social media or in group chats whenever they were playing Xbox games together, probably. And Theo would end up getting really loud with him sometimes, laughing and making me. making jokes or shouting and excitement whenever they were playing shooting games together. It was really annoying, but me and our parents were so happy to see him socializing and having fun that most of the time we just sort of put up with it. By the time Theo turned 17, he was doing way better than before. I mentioned that trip that he made to see his friends, but he joined a club too, a shooting club,

and at first, Dad wasn't best pleased about this. He ended up driving Theo over one day and talking to the man in charge, and then he got back and seemed completely reassured. Dad said that the guy running it was ex-Army, a little bulldog of a man who said discipline, respect, and safety were his top concerns. He didn't let any idiots into a shooting club because his life quite literally depended on that. And so when he said that Leo was quiet, respectful, and took safety very seriously, he was only too happy to have him around.

This made Dad really proud, and to us it seemed like the end of a very long and very dark chapter in Theo's life. But then came the night that we were all sitting down for dinner, and everything seemed to just fall apart before our very eyes. Theo had been to shooting club that evening, which usually had him in a good mood. But that evening, he seemed a bit subdued. When Dad asked him what the matter was, Theo said that he was getting sick of his job. And then when Dad suggested getting him some hours at his place, he said, only idiots work jobs like that for no money. And there was a clatter of cutlery as dad put his knife and fork down.

Then after looking over at Theo, he said, And what's that supposed to mean? And that's all I can remember word for word, honestly, because after that, Theo and Dad started going back and forth about how much money he was earning, with Theo saying some pretty horrible things about what he called wages or wage slaves. And the only thing that really stands out in memory, amid a lot of shouting about stuff I just didn't understand, was when Dad said, well, what are you going to do with your life then? And then whatever Theo said in reply sent Dad ballistic. Me and Mom had left the room by this point just to give them some space.

But then Theo came bursting out of the kitchen with my dad behind him shouting, well, I'm not having you living here if you're going to talk like that. You got a month to move out, and at the end of it, you can go F off. Theo didn't end up moving out at the end of the month. He and Dad had a talk and work things out. And they agreed Theo was well in the wrong for saying the stuff about Dad's job, and in light of that, he could stay as long as he wanted. But ever since that night, when Dad and Theo had that big argument, it was like I noticed how much he changed.

He'd always been my little brother. By five years, by the way, but watching him grow up had always been a joy to me. It was hard watching him go through his depression, and I was proud of him watching him drag himself out of it. But while he'd always been a bit more inclined to all things weird and spooky, he'd always been quite positive and kind-hearted, whereas after the Depression, there was a new and strange sort of nastiness about him.

He only seemed to laugh at sort of really negative or terrible things, and the sort of joyfulness he once had about him seemed to just be gone. He spent more and more time online, and whenever I walked into his room, he'd always changed his screen really quick and act all impatient until I left. Or sometimes he'd just shout at me to go away, even when I knocked first to give him his privacy. Now, I remember being quite sad and talking to Mom about it, and she reassured me by saying my Uncle Robbie was a nightmare when he was a teenager, but then grew into a sweater vest wearing florist and a thoroughly charming fellow at that.

and Theo would grow out of it sooner or later anyway, and when he did, we'd all be better off for it, and we just had to be patient. A few more months came and went with Theo having settled into the rhythm of going to work, going to shooting club, and then playing video games with his mates till late at night. He'd start taking driving lessons finally, which Mom and Dad were really excited about. But other than that, he'd spent all of his time in his bedroom. We hardly ever saw him for days at a time sometimes, and Dad started to do. jokingly referring to him as the shadow.

But there were no more racist outbursts or anything like that while gaming, just the usual aloofness and an almost constant need to be left alone. I suppose that was our mistake, leaving him alone. We should have been more involved in his life, especially after he said those horrible things about people who worked for a living. But Dad really did think that he'd talked him away from a dark place when they patched things up after their little argument. Well, it turns out he was wrong.

Theo hadn't moved on from it. He was just masking, as my Gen Z nephew likes to say. I'll never forget the night that I woke up to the sound of this terrible crashing sound coming from downstairs. And it was like these slow but heavy banging sounds, and just from the noise alone you could tell it was coming from our front door. Thinking the house was being burgled, I jumped out of bed, threw on my robe, and then ran to my dad's room to wake him up. He was already up, obviously. Everyone in the house was. And when I met him on the landing, he had his baseball bat in his hand, the one he kept under his bed. Now, he was ready to face down any burglars who smashed their way in, or to at least keep them from coming up the stairs. But no sooner had he called out that there were people in the house, someone cried back, armed police, as the door burst open and a load of policemen with guns came pouring into our house from outside.

They made me, mum, and dad come down the stairs, but Thiel hadn't come out of his room. And then as a few policemen started looking around downstairs, a load more ran up the stairs to Theo's room. I didn't see it myself, but I later heard that they found him destroying his computer, or at least trying to, because from what I understand, you can always pull stuff off of a computer drive even when it's damaged. They took him away with my mom crying, and dad asked what was going on, and I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. My kid brother, being carted off in handcuffs by police with big guns and body armor and helmets, it looked like they were going off to fight a war or something, but they'd come to our house from my little brother. But why?

All we wanted to know is the police were taking him away was why they felt it was necessary to smash their way into our home to drag away a 17-year-old. We were entitled to know, so they had to tell us once the scene was secure. But then they did, and it really did feel like the words alone knocked the wind out of us, because Theo had been arrested under suspicion of planning the importation of drugs, firearms, and even explosives. Mum and Dad were stunned, but they got Theo a solicitor right away, and it was through him that they found out exactly what he was being charged with. The charges alone were bad enough, but when they found out that he was looking at literally

decades in prison, Mum nearly had a breakdown. And that's why Theo had been learning to drive, not because he wanted a car so he was free to get around, but so he could rent a big, moving-style truck, drive it down to Calais, and pick up a huge shipment intended for a local gang, who in turn were going to use it to wage a turf war that, given they were trying to import hand grenades, would result in innocent people being hurt or even killed. The police took all Theo's computer and phone stuff away after they arrested him, and after going through everything that was on there, they found all kinds of chat logs relating to this plot.

The solicitor, Mum hired, said the fact a bunch of older guys had groomed him into doing it would work in our favor, as like a mitigating circumstance. But Theo would have to tell the judge how sorry he was, how foolish she'd been, and how he was committed to changing his ways and bettering himself for the future. It amounted to groveling for mercy, but anything to get time off of Theo's sentence, right? Well, wrong. Because even though it meant going to prison for many more years than he would have otherwise, Theo refused to play ball.

He pled guilty, but refused to make any sort of statement showing remorse for what he'd been planning to do. And then since he was sentenced when he was 18, he was sent straight to an adult prison after the court proceedings finished. Dad went to see him while he was still unremanned because the magnitude of Theo's offenses meant he couldn't get bail. And he said he gave him some big speech about how he needed to cooperate as much as possible because he could end up ruining his entire life over one stupid mistake his younger self-made. It sounded like Dad practically begged him to accept all the prosecution's offers regarding cooperation,

but still, Theo refused to play ball. The solicitor said it was possible to be able to. that the gang, Theo, believed he was a part of, had promised all kinds of rewards for his loyalty, meaning if he kept his mouth shut and did his time, he'd be richly and lavishly rewarded once he got out. She told Dad that for the time being, Theo was probably being supported in prison by the gang's network, which was split between those in prison and those on the outside. It had given him the impression that he'd made the right decision and that the support would continue, whereas in reality, it had wane over time before disappearing completely.

And after that, if Theo tried to leave and he had enough incriminating information in his head, he'd be killed. Dad tried telling him all of that, but it was no good. Theo had made his mind up, and to the gang, loyalty was everything. That was the last time he and Dad spoke. Mom's been to visit him a few times, and it never ends well. She cries when she gets back, and while me and Dad try our best to comfort her, it never seems to do any good.

I've written to Theo a few times. Quite emotional stuff, it's probably best I don't go into, but you can probably imagine what it consisted of. I've never heard back from him, and even if we do talk again in the future, it won't be with a Theo that I miss, the one who was my little brother and who always had the brightest of sparks about him,

even if he was into some dark stuff. Now, I don't even know who he is anymore, and like I said, it's like my little brother just disappeared. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube,

where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9 p.m. EST. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.