Fire Drill Part 3.2- The Last Place on Earth
The Last Place on Earth
March 13th, 2031. 0825h. After my interview with Jasper Kirk a couple of days ago, I came back here to my hotel room and began going through and transcribing the voice recordings from my sit-downs with he and Chief Carlyle. It was during the process of editing these (thanks to my Dragonspeak program not being as precise about voice-to-text as I had hoped it would be) that I found myself trying to recall where Sitanski and Norris had gotten their weapons from.
It took a brief bit of digging around online last night to get a quick refresher. Authorities at the time had been able to trace the serial numbers on the rifles to their original legal owner, Travis Whitcolm. They had also found that he had, in fact, two months prior to the Massacre filed a panicked police report, stating that they had been stolen.
Whitcolm, at the time only twenty-four years old and an avid firearms enthusiast, had informed police that he and his brother, Steven, had taken the weapons to ‘The Last Place on Earth’, in order to do some target practice, as was common for them. Equally common, they decided afterwards to leave the rifles there. When he returned a few days later to do some more shooting, he discovered the weapons were gone, along with all of the ammunition that the brothers had brought and hidden in the old plane.
I should explain here, for those of you in the audience who didn’t grow up around these parts. I imagine that’ll be most of you. ‘The Last Place on Earth’ was the colloquial nickname given to a little clearing in the woods on the south side of town. If one headed to Deertrack’s lone McDonald’s location, and walked through the back of the parking lot there, they could follow an old but well-worn pathway about a quarter of a mile back to the rotted-out remains of a small passenger plane that had crashed in the woods back in 1985. Piloted by one Mitchell O’Flannagan, of Atlanta, Georgia, the plane had apparently been struck by a freak, errant bolt of lightning during a light rainstorm in the spring of ’85. Flannagan was said to have been killed instantly by a backlash of electrical current erupting out of his instrument panel, and from my own memories of the plane (I’d gone to The Last Place a few times in my own youth) and the charred interior, especially the exploded pilot’s seat, this seems more than possible.
It was a common gathering place and party location for teenagers and ne’er-do-wells of the town, but Whitcolm and his brother often went there just to get away from the locals and do some practice shooting. They’d made a habit of leaving the weapons there, along with ammo, tucked all into the very rear of the plane. Whitcolm informed the police, during his report, that he even had taken to leaving notes for anybody else who found the weapons to, quote, “Practice all you like, but replace the ammo; it ain’t free”. He claims to have done this because it had become common knowledge around town, at least among younger residents.
At the time, Whitcolm’s biggest concern had been that someone might inadvertently injure themselves or somebody else due to improper handling of the firearms. The problem, it turned out, was that someone with a very sure knowledge of how to handle them, and more, to modify them, got their hands on them.
Reading about this all last night awakened that strangest of creatures from its slumber deep in the recesses of my mind, ‘nostalgia’. As such, I have decided to take my trusty OneNote digital writing tablet with me to The Last Place on Earth, after I fill a Thermos with some coffee. I wonder how different it is now.
**
1010h. Sitting here on a fallen length of pine, situated some twenty feet away from the skeletal hulk of the wreck, I take in the heady perfume of pine and tar, and the fragmentary specters of other odors that linger in the clearing- cheap beer, burnt gunpowder, and stale sweat. The debris littered about the area just in front of the plane wreckage tells me that though time may heal all wounds, there are places that it seems to ignore for long stretches.
There are ancient, rusting, rickety folding chairs still situated here and there from back when I used to come here with my friends and peers, drinking the cheap beer and partial bottles of hard liquor that a few had managed to sneak out of their parents’ liquor cabinets or garage spaces. Smoking a cigarette, I can see dozens of sodden little butts everywhere, and know that only the two others near my left foot belong to me in the now.
Without the crackle of a campfire in the middle of the clearing or the incessant hum of music being piped through a Blutooth speaker from somebody’s phone or tablet, it becomes incredibly easy to see why people have been calling this The Last Place on Earth for so long. It is almost devoid of all sound, with the exception of occasional birdcalls and random sounds of deer or elk or squirrels traipsing around in the denser wooded stretches breaking the silence. Because of how far away from obvious signs of civilization it is, and the fact that no traffic noises can be heard within the clearing, it makes perfect sense.
I have yet to go check out the plane more closely again.
**
1045h. The interior of the plane is, if at all possible, even more haunting now than it used to be back when I was a scrawny high school freshman. The old pilot’s seat still remains, mildew and threadbare, and smelling of animal piss. The instrument panel, charred, blackened, looks like it could crumble away to dust with the slightest provocation.
But it is what is behind the pilot’s seat, in the back of the private single-prop, that hosts the potential to psychically scar anyone brave or foolish enough to look back there. Dozens of pictures and newspaper articles, sealed in protective plastic covers, are taped or glued along the dented but curving walls of the back of the plane. They are memorial photographs and obituary pieces about the students and staff who died in the Delta Heights Massacre; some of the very articles that I referenced earlier in this project are reproduced in faded but still legible InkJet toner among the hangings. A yearbook from the 2019-2020 schoolyear sits on the floor by itself, surrounded by tiny clay flower pots, each one occupied by opaque, scum-crusted water, and the wraith-like stems of long dead flowers.
Deertrack already appears to have a memorial, and it is one that I feel almost compelled to douse in gasoline and put a match to. There is something altogether unpleasant about it. It feels more like a shrine to the Massacre than a memorial for those lost in the incident. I say this because it doesn’t have the kind of jumbled, disorganized presentation that would be present if multiple people had contributed to it; rather, it has all the hallmarks of being the efforts of a singular obsessive.
And that rarely leads to anything good.