Chapter 9 Red Dancing Bear

Copyright David A. Kearns

“…Feathered lizard was a wary thing. He was a creature who viewed himself as a god, as a sleeper of ages. He was roused once again, by the doings of human kind, and though he pretended to be happy for humans and their achievements, he was not.
“When feathered lizard awoke, he found he was alone, without any of his kind left.
“Feathered lizard had the mind hearing. That very skill that made his kind perfect for the long ages of silence, made him dread contact with humans whose minds were so joyful and active that they sounded to him like the thunders of many musical waterfalls.
“Yet he realized he needed humans now more than humans needed him, and so began his jealous quest…”
-The Book of Aztlan

July 2, 2011 Melbourne Beach
“So World Ender, we find ourselves again talking to each other,” said a familiar voice.
I stopped and looked up toward the dune-line and there he was sitting under a high vertical bluff that had eroded in a spring tide, allowing sea oats and palmettos to overhang and give the Seminole-Ais Indian some shade while he worked.
He was dressed in a simple white cotton shirt, a shredded pair of camouflage pants and a blue and white bandana. He didn’t look a day older than when I had seen him last.
“Red, is that you?” I asked.
“The same,” he said.
I looked down at his feet and there was a dead sea turtle. He had opened up the shell to take out what he needed. The missing chunk of shell that had been so familiar to us that long, forgotten summer was plainly visible.
“They are at it again,” he said pointing his eyes and lips out to sea. “But it is their time.”
I looked toward the sea and noticed a small, raven-haired, brown-skinned child playing with a stick in the surf, dressed in a simple pair of swimming trunks and a soggy pair of Converse tennis shoes.
“Who is he?”
“He is me, and I am him,” Red said matter-of-factly.
“Your son?” I asked.
Red didn’t answer. He merely took a knife and removed those parts that would make up green turtle soup.
“Did they leave you any eggs?” I asked.
He held up a single finger and smiled, “...and it’s new. Good to eat. It would die otherwise without the warmth of its brothers and sisters, so we will use it for breakfast.”
I watched him work and felt good to be in his presence again. Finally I asked the question that had plagued me since I was a boy.
“Why can’t I ever remember you clearly, Red?” I asked.
“World Ender, you and your kind are learning what it feels like to have your histories stripped from you. And it is surely unpleasant, to have bits and pieces of your past taken from your mind like missing frames from an old movie. When they have taken your concept of god, your heroes, your land, your language, your very seed, then come talk to me about loss. I am sorry, for I am not a vindictive person but, it does amuse me,” he said.
“What amuses you?” I asked.
“Your surprise at the fact it is happening, to you,” he said. “But your friend is dead. He was a true warrior. The world suffers his loss with you. Strong, brave men; those are the ones they fear now, for they want all of this,” he said waving his hand expansively to indicate everything, the beach, the land, the sky, the seas, all of it.
“No place for humans. They feel it is their time,” he said wistfully as he turned to work on the flesh again with his knife. It was rough going on the flippers. He struggled with the dull edge, tested it, then set it to the leathery meat again.
“I got this knife at the huge place called Wal-Mart. I am not happy with it,” he said. “I think I would like to take it back but, I have lost the receipt.”
“Go to customer service,” I said. “They’ll listen.”
“Yes, go stand in line. Like the old Indian waiting for the typhoid blankets. You ever notice, World Ender, how always, all this convenience called technology requires the nothingness of line-standing? So much time spent line-standing.”
He looked up to me and thumped his chest with his free hand.
“Hear that? That’s the heart-beat of a free man. Ooops, there goes another and another – good thing I am standing in line. They will give me what I need if I wait long enough, surely their mercy will see me through.”
I had no answer to that.
“Don’t you worry about the wildlife officer?” I asked, as Red Dancing Bear took the innards, the one egg, the flippers and put them into a large leather bag.
“Wildlife officers,” he snickered derisively. “The agency of which you speak will be subsumed into a thousand other agencies when those other creatures return for their nesting season again.
“The agencies will be so under-funded, and no one will care. By then these condominiums will cover this coast, and maybe even a Wal-Mart, and gembe sea turtle will be forced elsewhere. Ha, if there is an elsewhere,” he said.
Again I was speechless.
“You worry too much, World Ender,” he said.
“Why do you always call me that?” I demanded.
“You were once a great shaman, a very dangerous one. You were a rage eater, a conqueror. You have forgotten your histories, and now you are nothing more than a silly white man,” he smiled and laughed. “A white man who stands in line.”
“Red, why are you always so enigmatic? You never speak plainly. You always speak around what it is you want to say,” I said.
“No. Your kind has so long listened to and repeated lies, the truth hurts your ears. This is how human beings talk. They have been teaching you too much in their ways. You have been so long living like that, that you don’t hear human speech well. It makes you angry,” he said.
“Best you forget about beating them. You are not the warrior anymore, World Ender. But, Ryan’s brother is. You want the plain talk, I’ll tell you. Best you worry now about what they could do to him!”

July 2, 2011 Melbourne Beach
“Wake up, Tim!” Gary was saying.
I was lying on the beach. I checked my watch and rubbed my eyes: 12:32p.m..
“Must have slept,” I said.
“Yeah, and you’re roasting,” he said. “You’re as pink as a damned lobster. You need to get out of the sun for a while.”
I had been lying in the sand for more than two hours near the Ebb Tide condominiums. I jumped into the ocean to cool off.
When I felt refreshed I exited the sea, looked up to the bluff in the dune for signs of Red Dancing Bear. I wondered if he had even been there. I hated it when he did that. Within a couple of days I would scarcely remember we had spoken, or that I had dreamed it. I never could keep it straight as a boy.
I checked the sand to see if any clues were still visible pointing to the reality of our conversation. Several sets of turtle tracks could be seen near the dunes but all appeared to be false crawls: areas where the turtles had been disturbed by humans, or lights or dogs, and so wandered back into the surf. No guts or gore from a dead turtle. No marks where one would have been dragged on her back to the edge of the dune.
Had Red erased his tracks? Or had I dreamt the whole thing? If so when exactly did I pass out?
What the hell was going on with me? I took mental note that the first thing I needed to do when I got back to South Carolina was schedule a CAT scan, followed by a trip to a shrink.
“What are you looking for, Tim?”
“Elvis, he’s not here,” I said with a smile.
Gary looked into my eyes to see if I was joking and breathed a visible sigh of relief when he saw that I was.
“Let’s get back,” I said, not wanting Gary to think I had gone round the bend any more than he already suspected.
“The guys want to talk to you about what’s been going on,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Ryan’s death, for one. They want to know what’s up with that?”
“He’s dead.”
“Yeah, but there’s talk, you know, Camerdyne, spooks hanging around his house, his mom’s house. Then a few of us still think we remember the UFOs and so forth, and some of us, apparently, think this is related to what you’re going through…”
“Wait a minute, you don’t remember any of it, do you,” I said.
“No, no I don’t Tim, but I was younger than you guys. It’s all kind of a blur to me man. Or at least it was, until I got the crazy-letter from Ryan,” he said.
“The what?”
“Yeah, we all got something from him through snail mail. He didn’t trust the internet anymore, part of what he was going through, you know, the paranoia. A lot of what he says doesn’t make any sense. We thought you could help in that regard, so, I’ve been asked to broach the subject with you, painful though it may be,” he said.

July 2, 2011, 1 p.m. Melbourne Beach Florida
“Alright here’s the deal,” I said, “There are boxes and boxes of documents over at his mother’s house. Half of which come from his father’s job as an Air Force psychic,” I said.
“A what?”
“A remote viewer, a reader. Yes, you heard right,” I said. “The whole time he was supposedly working as a contractor at the tracking station and up at the Cape, Doug Cogswell still was working for the Air Force as a remote viewer. His job was to review documents related to the launches, and try to get impressions for the government about whether or if a failure somewhere existed in the mechanisms.”
“Holy shit,” someone said.
“Yeah, and it gets weirder,” I said.
“They also had Doug Cogswell working on another project. In this one, he would analyze documents, photos, video footage, and look for suspected activities of some folks they called ‘friendlies’. Doug Cogswell would also tell his bosses where on the monitors he thought ‘unknowns’ would show up and watch the launches.”
“You mean?”
“I mean he had an excellent track record predicting if, where and when UFOs would be seen monitoring our space launches,” I said. “And, whoever were inside those UFOs were deemed ‘friendlies.’” I said.
“Un-fucking believable,” Tom said.
“Believe it. You can also see at least one of the reasons Ryan was scooped up by Camerdyne right away after college. I warned him that place would make him crazy just like it did his old man,” I said.
“I thought you said he was still working for the Air Force,” Russell said.
“There’s a point in between the contractor and the client, where there doesn’t seem to be any difference between the two, according to the documents I have been reading,” he said.
“It goes deeper still,” I said. “If you guys still want to hear it.”
“Sure, what the hell, shoot,” Gary said.
“Ryan’s father apparently saw or was contacted by UFOs as a child growing up in Maine. He was directed to make recommendations for making the research results of Project Blue Book more palatable to the public. His recommendation was to trash the conclusions of Blue Book and keep all the data,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Hey I’m new to all this Black Vault shit myself. Don’t climb all over me,” I said.
“Alright, sorry,” Chuck said.
“Apparently there were 12,000 or so cases presented to the group of officials, this Majestic, or whatever panel. Some of these hard cases involved radar and group sightings, like simultaneously. In the air, on the ground on radar the whole works, as in documented evidence,” I said.
“Yeah, but they said it was only like one percent of one percent were still unclassified,” Jay said.
“No. It’s more like 700 cases, good solid cases, multiple witnesses, radar, photographs etc. And not your lunatics either, pilots, air crew, professionals, engineers, even a little-known governor of Georgia named James Earl Carter. And by the way that represents nearly six percent as unexplained by conventional means, i.e. atmospheric effects, whether balloons, so on and so forth. Six percent, that are none-of-the-above.”
“As in genuine, UFOs,” Gary clarified.
“Exactly,” I said.
“Yeah, and?” Jay asked.
“Ryan’s dad was among the minority of Air Force personnel who fought to get the information released to the public, and he was told to shut the hell up. He was passed up for promotion, sent down here to work at the Cape. He had to go to work everyday out of the uniform he loved, toiling away in a dark box as a half-asleep psychic bean counter,” I said.
“Why didn’t he go public?” Jay said.
“A good friend of his did, spoke to congress about what he knew, wrote a report about it to the subcommittee of Aviation and Atmospheric Anomalies in 1971, included dozens of cases where Blue Book dropped the ball, or outright lied, fabricated, dismissed cases ad hock with explanations that stretched scientific credulity worse than the reported cases themselves,” I said.
“Yeah, and?” Gary demanded this time.
“Well, they found this guy in the desert near Tucson, Arizona with a bullet in his brain, exactly the way they found Ryan,” I said, adding, “Whatever has been going on with Ryan’s family, has been occurring for two, maybe three generations, if some of the stories about Ryan’s grandfather are to be believed.”
“So Ryan was whacked by the US Government? Just like this other guy?” Dave Finklestein asked.
I shrugged. Did I know?
“Hey, these goons are all over his mom to let them in to see the remainder of his papers. They’ve bugged the hell out of his wife, what does that tell you?” I said.
Jay shook his head. He was about to say something unpleasant that many of the guys were thinking. I could see it coming.
“Tim, whatever Ryan knew, he was a babbling incoherent toward the end. I hate to break it to you but, he sent me something, a story of some kind that was absolute gibberish and it was incomplete, not to mention some other unpleasant details about his life I won’t repeat here,” Jay said.
“About the feathered lizard?” I asked.
“You got one too?” Tom asked.
“Worse, I’ve seen the whole thing,” I said.
“What?” asked Gary.
“Start to finish,” I said.
“What you guys got were pieces of it. I gather, we’re supposed to put the pieces together and read the story as a group so we can see how it works out,” I said trying to explain at least part of what Ryan was up to. I certainly didn’t understand all his motivations yet but, I could see he was trying to let us all take part in what he had been going through to some extent.
“I thought you said you saw the whole thing?” Chuck asked.
“Mayan, I saw the whole thing in what looked like Mayan writing,” I said. “It’s all over his old room and his mother’s garage.”
“Ryan knew Mayan?” Gary asked.
“Not that I was aware of,” I said.
“So he was, insane, clearly,” Jay said.
“I don’t know, Jay. Before we judge our friend who is dead and not here to defend himself, why don’t we sit down and put the pieces together and see what we get?” I said.
“Look I’m sorry, Timmy, I just don’t believe this stuff, man.”
“Or is it better to say, Jay, as a local realtor and the mayor of surf city, you can’t afford to?” I asked.
“Hey, easy goddamn it. My brother doesn’t lie just to cover his ass,” Gary said.
“Then explain what the fuck we saw?” I said.
“We can’t. Hell, we don’t even remember it, Timmy. And you guys were the ones getting high back then, shit,” Gary said.
“Now who’s being unfair?” I said. “I wasn’t high that night those lights knocked the crap out of us and burned up half the dune line and…and.. Christ, I’m getting a headache again,” I said.
“Why don’t we all just take it easy here, guys,” Russ said. “We’re all friends, and all of us adored Ryan, even though he could be an asshole sometimes, as can we all, before you jump on me, Tim; we all loved the guy. We loved his crazy ideas and his fighting spirit. And I don’t think there’s a person in this room who would lie or make shit up just to trash on his memory for personal means,” he said.
And we all nodded. I could live with that.
“So let’s go get the envelopes and do what Timmy says, which is to put it all together and see what we’ve got, alright?” Russ said.
After about an hour we realized we were missing the very last chunk of the work. It was an interesting story but it made little sense without a conclusion of some kind.
All the guys agreed they wanted to see Ryan’s room, to see this Mayan writing.
Dave snapped his cell-phone shut.
“Mystery solved, guys, part-way at least. Loni just called me. She said Trisha’s mother called her. Trisha has been sent one of the envelopes; just like the ones Ryan sent us.”
“Her mother won’t open it and she won’t tell us what’s inside without Trisha’s say so. Someone has to go over to Whispering Pines and talk to her to make that happen,” Dave said.
Everyone looked at me.
I walked out onto the deck and stared at the waves, thinking about Trisha.





July 2, 1981, @ 12:30 a.m. South Melbourne Beach
“Does anybody know where Trisha and Ryan have gone?” I asked as Hank moaned in pain from the bullet graze to his leg. We loaded him into the El Camino gingerly.
“I have got to get to the hospital, now,” he said. “Where is that dumb-ass little brother of mine?”
“Alright, you go, Hank. We’ll find him,” I said.
“Can any of you dumb-asses drive?” he asked.
“I can,” Jay said. “I drive my dad’s truck all the time when he’s hunting.”
Jay plopped himself in the front of the cab with Brittany and Loni. Tom and Gary went with them in the back tending to wounded Hank.
Dave, Chuck, Smokey and I agreed to stay behind and search for Trisha, Myles and Ryan who were all still missing.
Hank grabbed me by my arm.
“Here, take this!” he said, trying to hand me the gun.
“Why?”
“In case they come back,” he said. “You look out for my little brother, got it?”
I nodded.
“No shit, now. I mean that. Can you handle it?” Hank asked.
I reluctantly held onto the weapon and nodded again. I could.
Suddenly a huge C-130 roared overhead, very close to the ground, followed by three Air Force helicopters. They had come from the west. We all knew there was an Air Force tracking facility on the mainland there. I supposed that’s where these aircraft had come from.
The big bird swung in a southward parabola and came around again for another pass over us.
The El Camino took off heading north toward the bridge and the mainland hospital with Hank rolling around in pain in the back.
Our night was just beginning.

July 2, 2011, 1:20 p.m.
They were standing above me as I squirmed on the deck holding my head, which felt like it was about to explode.
“What the hell, Timmy? Are you alright,” someone asked.
“He just fell out. I had an aunt who used to do that every now and then,” Chuck Naigle said.
“Damn Tim, will you cut that out,” Gary said. “He just keeps doing it.”
They helped me to a seat in the living room and someone thankfully brought me a cold Diet Coke.
“Man, I can’t. I just can’t remember this shit. It’s too painful,” I said.
“Then don’t,” Gary said.
“I think I have to, Gary. That’s what Ryan wants me to do,” I said.
“Ryan’s dead, Tim. He doesn’t want anything right now. No pain. He wouldn’t want his best friend in pain, man,” Gary said.
“There was something he was trying to tell us, Gary. We owe him that much to listen to him,” I said.
“Guys, I have to take a drive to clear my head. I’ll go over and see if I can talk with Trisha at Whispering Pines, and get the final piece to this puzzle. I’ll be alright, I swear,” I said.
“Should we tell him about the phone call, Jay?” Gary asked.
“Yeah, go ahead,” Jay said.
“Timmy, when you were down on the beach someone called your cell phone,” he said. “It was here on the table and so I picked it up.”
“Who?”
“Some guy.” He said ‘Tim Stanton is dead’,” Gary finished.
I checked the cell. The number was untraceable.
“Bullshit. It’s the spooks hanging around Ryan’s mother’s house,” I said. “They want to see Ryan’s old room, that’s all. They’re not above this sort of thing.”
“Just thought you should know,” Gary said.
“Jay, you’re the mayor of this little beach town, should you tell the cops?” I asked.
“They file a report and then it’ll make the papers. And since nothing ever happens here and I’m the mayor, that’ll be news,” he said. “My guess is, you’re probably right. It’s spooks making noise but, if they call again, I will say something to the cops.”
“Great, I’ll head over to the mainland and see Trisha,” I said.
“Don’t you think someone should drive you? To make sure you don’t pass out at the wheel?” Jay said.
“Alright, how about Gary? He seems to be the one catching me do it the most,” I said.
“Sounds good,” said Gary. “We can go over to Ryan’s house and see some of the Mayan glyphs.”
“Hey, I want to see them too,” said Russ.
“That’s a roger,” echoed Tom.
“Let’s boogie,” I said before we had a whole crew busting in on Thea Cogswell.
When we arrived boxes of documents were being carted out of the house by the goons from the black Crown Vic. We watched them enter the house and walk across the yard to the Vic’s gigantic trunk.
“I don’t believe this,” I said. “I can’t believe she did that. She was supposed to wait.”
“Huh. Would you look at that: actual Men in Black,” Gary marveled with a slight laugh.
“Holy fucking shit. Look at the piece the older guy has in that holster,” Tom said admiringly.
“Freakin’ Dirty Harry special,” I said.
“No, man, that’s a semi-automatic with a silencer,” Russ said.
“C’mon, let’s see if we can stop them,” I said.
“No dice cowboy,” Russ said. “I’m staying right here.”
“What?”
“Tim, that business in Costa Rica may or may not be over with. Those are feds, and I need to stay under radar, man. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. I’ve got investors, the movie is halfway shot, and…” Russ said.
“Okay, okay I can understand that, Smokey, now how about the rest of you guys,” I said.
“Looks like they’re finished anyway,” Gary said.
The MIBs slammed the trunk, hopped into the Crown Victoria and slithered on down Surf Road, coolly making the right at Orange Street.
We got out of the car and Gary placed a hand on my shoulder; “Go easy on her, Tim. You don’t know what she’s been through. Jay told me Ryan had been pretty notorious around town before…you know,” Gary said.
I nodded.
Thea met us at the door.
“I’m sorry, Tim. I just couldn’t wait any longer,” she said.
“I know. Can we at least see his room, Thea?” I asked, and she relented.
The aluminum foil was still up everywhere but most of the Mayan glyphs had been torn down, ripped apart or carted off.
“None in the garage either,” Gary said.
I sat down on his bed. Tears filled my eyes. I really couldn’t believe she had done that but then I supposed it was all about ‘getting back to normal,’ whatever that was anymore
“Here’s one of them, Tim,” Gary said finding a glyph on the floor under his bed.
“You say these were all over the wall?” Gary asked.
I nodded. I pointed to a little piece of paper that read, “The Story of Feathered Lizard” on the night stand.
“That’s what this is about. The glyphs had the entire story, start to finish…it was proof.”
“It’s okay, Tim. We believe you,” he said. “Obviously, his imagination was on a run-away train.”
“So the foil is to, uh, keep out signals from space?” Tom asked.
I turned my palms upwards as a tear fell down my cheek. Did I know about these things?
“They call that degaussing, or something like that,” Tom said.
“Naw, man. That’s what they do to ships. I think what he was going for was a Faraday Chamber, Tim. But, he was an engineer, he would have known that a covering of tin foil does not a Skiff make,” Russ said.
“What?” I asked.
“A skiff. The spies need what’s called a skiff, a true sealed Faraday box, to do their secret business, make their secret phone calls without being heard or having their stuff scrambled by jamming waves, electromagnetic signals,” Russ said. “I thought everybody knew that.”
I tilted my head. Russ had certainly learned a lot about this sort of thing, being semi on-the-lamb after that drug business in Costa Rica. None of us knew precisely what had happened nor how Russ had gotten out of it, only that it helped fund his new business, shooting worldwide surf videos. Obviously, he knew a lot about the intelligence community.
“Pleas elaborate for the stupid, Smokey. I can’t understand what you’re saying,” I offered.
Russ continued.
“Yeah, the whack-jobs in trailer parks do the aluminum foil thinking that solves any problems they may have with incident electromagnetic frequencies, and there is some sense to it in that the tin foil does cut out some of the signals but, not all of them, see? And you see only the top half of the room is covered. What about long wave EMFs and signals from the side, shot below hip level?” Russ said.
“What are you babbling about, Russ?” I asked.
“Timmy, Ryan was smarter than this. If he thought some tin foil was going to keep out any sophisticated signals, he had really gone off his rocker. Even insane, his training as an engineer would have kicked in and told him what he was doing was useless,” Russ said.
“Unless there was another purpose,” I said.
“Right, unless there was another purpose,” Russ said and now everyone was looking at me.
“What other purpose?” Russ said.
“Close the door,” I said and Tom did. I found a sheet of paper and a pencil, went to the place where Ryan had creased the foil with his cryptic Q and A.
Question: Eloi?
Answer: Morlock!
I completed a rubbing of the message founded in dented aluminum, handed the paper around and sat back down on Ryan’s bed.
“Any ideas?” I asked.
“Dude, this is from H.G. Wells,” Tom said. “You’re a teacher, Tim. You didn’t see that?”
“Yeah, War of the Worlds,” Russ said.
“No, guys it’s from Time Machine,” I said. “Now what am I supposed to do with it? Is this a government code word? A password for the spooks not to hassle me?”
“It does sound like one,” Russ said.
“Well, is there a handshake to go with it?” I asked in frustration.
“Wait a second, who were the Morlocks again?” Gary asked.
“They were the workers who lived above ground, but the Eloi, who lived below ground, they were the ones who were actually in control of everything in the future,” I said.
“Uh-duh?” Gary said. “Below? Underneath? C’mon guys. You all smoked way too much weed back in the day.”
“Of course,” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t catch that.”
After we had pulled down as much of the tinfoil as we could reach, we were bug-eyed. It was everywhere, documents, glyphs, directions, all meticulously reduced to a quarter of their actual size, clipped and taped to the wall and the ceiling. There was even a cellophane bag with photographs in them: the Mayan glyphs, all of them had been photographed underwater somewhere. It was a gigantic puzzle that filled the entire top half of the room.
“He knew,” I said. “He knew this would happen. She would let them in. So he gave them some of it.”
“So they would think they got all of it,” Russ said. And I felt vindicated. Russ knew about these things and he was agreeing with me.
“So he wasn’t nuts, after all?” Gary marveled.
“Maybe, Gare. It just may be that going nuts is part of the role he had to play, to get all of this, into our hands.”
Gary clapped a steadying hand on my shoulder as we both looked at the ceiling.
It was a masterpiece. Arrows pointing from one document to another, engineering designs, bits of code, the word “Virus 1” in bold black on one sheet, “virus 2” on another, and so on. Arrows from those pointing to the Mayan glyphs. A letter from an archeologist from Ruinas Copan, Honduras, “…your translation of the glyphs seems partially accurate, Mr. Cogswell, congratulations, however the dates of these glyphs seem to indicate an unknown, earlier chapter in Mesoamerican history, earlier than anything previously recorded. It also hints to connections between cultures of Europe, the Mediterranean, Mesoamerica and North Africa, that predates known historic record.”
“Therefore, we agree to complete the translation for you, in exchange for any information you can give us as to the location of these glyphs, their history of discovery and their condition today…”
Another letter from a chemist at FIT:
“Dear Mr. Cogswell, The DNA from the sample you provided is unlike anything we have ever seen…”
All of his father’s documents regarding remote viewing and UFOs were there as well.
There were pages of Ryan’s handwritten notes. He had even drafted something called a “Human Declaration of Independence and Articles of War.”
In a note to me he said “Read this first, Tim. Make copies and get everyone you can to sign it.”
We had to capture the top half of this room on film.
“Russ, can you take my car, go back to Jay’s and get your cameras? We need to document this thing, every inch of it.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not leaving until we do,” I said.