by T. M. Catron
So O’Brien brought in linguists to decipher them. No one did. When he showed photographs of the markings to a secret congressional committee in DC, they ordered research halted.
O’Brien was angry. He fought them, threatened to go public with the information. What good was ARCHIE if they weren’t allowed to investigate the very phenomena they were created to study? He had proof of something, even if he wasn’t sure what. The mine disturbed him, but he couldn’t convey to them the intense, nameless feeling he got whenever he visited the mine.
No one listened.
Then O’Brien realized he was being followed around DC, watched at his house. His career was already in shambles. No need to make things worse, or he’d never get another assignment. And he had a family to think of.
After that, O’Brien made sure everything was packed up, put in storage or just simply burned—photos, reports, maps. He even cleared out the town, relocated the people. He made a lot of enemies, but hey, it was his job. Then ARCHIE ordered the buildings bulldozed and cleaned up. They even removed the rail line to the mine.
A few townspeople tried to create trouble for ARCHIE, spread rumors. One of them was Loggins. O’Brien had him hushed up. No one was difficult after that.
Alice Peters and Ray Peters were never seen again, of course. Years later, O’Brien thought of them sometimes. Thought of what had spurred them into the tunnels on their own. He never found out.
Charlie Satchel was institutionalized for a time and then sent back to his parents’ new home in Richmond, Virginia. He recovered enough to make a life for himself, get married, have his own family. But he always insisted on sleeping with the lights on.
In total, fifteen people had gone missing around the mountain. Each disappearance was kept out of the papers—O’Brien made sure of that. The forest surrounding the town and mine was allowed to take over. For a time, it gained a reputation as being haunted.
O’Brien never spoke again of what he had seen. When he died, the majority of the findings died with him. Except one thing—a map of the mine. His daughter found it tucked away in a nightstand. Since it was stamped as property of the Department of Defense, she unwittingly returned it.
It was placed in an evidence box on a shelf, mislabeled as a historic document, cataloged as a remnant of another government program gone extinct. And it sat there for years until a man named Paul Cummings ordered it retrieved.
It was just a map, smudged and brittle and half-drawn. But it was a seed—the seed for a rebellion that would embroil the entire Earth in war.
Book 1, Shadowmark
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Book 1 of The Shadowmark Series.
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About the Author
T.M. CATRON IS AN AUTHOR who lives in Tennessee with her husband, son, and three spoiled dogs. When she isn’t writing or reading, she’s waging war on the flowers she planted in early spring.
Thankfully, she puts more effort into her writing than she does her gardening. She’s the author of Shadowmark, its soon-to-be-released sequel, Aether, and The Mine, a prequel to the Shadowmark Series. Also in the works is a new series for elementary children, co-authored with another teacher.
She can be found at tmcatron.com. Catron loves to hear from readers, so connect with her on Facebook at authortmcatron, Twitter @tmcatron, or just send an “old-fashioned” email to [email protected].
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Other Books in the Shadowmark Series
Shadowmark, Book 1
Aether, Book 2 (Fall 2016)
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