Blood On My Hands.

I killed him.

Ryan wasn't even supposed to be a part of this. The only thing he was interested in before I got there was finding out about some corrupt, small-town cops. Maybe his problem was related to mine, but it was out at the periphery. What killed him was going too close to the core with me. Delving into my problem.

All of the pain of knowing that my uncle had been killed washed back over me. The anger, and worse, the frustration of not having someone to blame. The shock at finding out that everything I'd known growing up was just a thin disguise of the ugliness going on in that town.

I can't close my eyes without seeing him and that nurse and all the blood. Seeing his face is almost worse than dreaming of my own death. Sometimes, I start to think that I didn't really know him all that well; that I don't have to care. That only makes it worse. He was a bystander, and I brought him into this.

When I left the hospital, I just picked a direction and drove. It took me to my hometown's sister town, and I waited there for my nerves to pass. The town I'm from had been the shipping point for lumber in the past. All the logs went down the river to the ocean, there. Then they were bundled and shipped to wherever they were needed. The sister town also had a river, but what had kick-started the town was the pulp factory that they'd built there. The way I'd always heard it, they'd built the factory first, and the rest of the town had been built later to support it.

With the sun just coming over the mountains, I turned and headed back to Nicole's. I couldn't keep Ryan's car - once they realized that he was missing, they'd come looking for it. I couldn't go to the police. Three men dead, including my uncle, and me as the only witness and last person to see any of them alive. Alongside that, I couldn't really explain what had happened to Ryan. Going to them with only a tiny piece of the story was a sure way to get myself locked away for the rest of my life.

It was a tough decision whether to tell Nicole the truth or not. I did what I hoped was the decent thing, and lied. I said that the police had found us at the hospital and shot Ryan. She'd heard there was a sinkhole out in the middle of the sand dunes, and she helped me bury Ryan's car there. It felt like that scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, only in slow motion.

It feels wrong to call our venture to the old hospital a success. Nobody was better off. The only thing I'd gained from going there was that I knew that Menser was a real person, and that he'd been doing trials there. I guess that was the point in going. Ryan had only gone on the off chance that this was what they'd been trying to cover up. We'd found it, I guess. But it didn't feel like were any closer to being able to shut them down. To hurt them.