Holden

Holden was four beers deep on a Monday night, and getting too old for this shit.

That was what he kept telling himself, anyway. It didn't seem to help. He was still here, at a college bar, with Kyle and some girls Kyle met four hours ago. Holden didn't need a rebound—didn't want a rebound—but Kyle was convinced he did.

Going to a packed college bar, sitting in a sticky booth, and getting drunk wasn't how he wanted to get over his ex. He didn't want to get over his ex at all. And yet he continued to say yes to cheap beer and pretty girls younger than him. Women in a different phase of their life. Women he didn't connect with at all.

The girl of the night was named Chelsea—smart, pretty, driven... blonde. Had just graduated with her MBA. Out of his league, if she'd only realize it herself. She would, eventually—smart girls like her always did, even if it took them a minute. Holden inherited his height from his father, his olive skin and eye smile from his mother. Handsome, yet perfectly unambitious. And he wasn't about to be a mistake on Chelsea's dating curriculum vitae.

He'd never really been interested in a quick fuck. His roommate once called him a demisexual, which forced him to be introspective for once and somehow made his whole dating situation even weirder than it needed to be.

Kyle's tongue had been down Chelsea's best friend's throat for fifteen minutes, and Chelsea was leaning against Holden, her boobs pressed to his ribs. She had tanned satin skin and green fuck-me eyes, and winced every time she took a sip of her tequila soda. "So, what do you do again?"

"IT for OSU." He'd already told her this eight times.

"So, you're an engineer."

No. "Yeah, sure," he said.

"That's cool."

Girls only said his half-assed career was cool when they assumed he made a lot of money. Joke was on them. He'd graduated with his BS in Computer Science years ago, had no desire to get into software, and had been working at Oregon State University since he graduated. He could make more money bartending.

And it didn't really matter one way or another what Chelsea believed. He wasn't planning on screwing her tonight.

Holden peeled Chelsea off him and went to take a leak. When he returned, Kyle and the BFF were gone.

"Fuck that guy," he muttered.

He'd been friends with Kyle since undergrad, when they were both majoring in CompSci. Kyle used to be mildly interesting, moonlighting as a dungeon master for his DD group but also driving a Dodge Ram. Self-identified feminist, but had a million shirtless photos on his camera roll queued up for Tinder. Then he'd graduated and let the Douche McGee part of his personality take over. Holden should have broken ties the first time Kyle tried recommending Joe Rogan.

Chelsea was the only one left waiting for Holden, glassy-eyed and extremely drunk. "I'll call you a Lyft," he said with a sigh, and pulled up the app on his phone. Chelsea was not happy to hear this, but also too drunk to protest. He guided her into the Lyft within thirty seconds of it arriving—a record for him—and then walked home.

He lived only a handful of blocks north of the bar. It was pissing rain, a normal night for Oregon in March. He preferred the years when it was pissing rain to the years when it was furiously dry in the early spring, wildfire smoke filling summer skies. Plus, the rain suited his mood as of late.

He was completely drenched by the time he made it home, tromping up the outdoor stairs and shoving the keys into 23C. When he entered, Francis waited for him.

"Hey, boy." Holden scratched behind the German shepherd's ears. Francis gave a happy whine, spun, and thwacked Holden's leg with his tail. Holden tossed his keys in the bowl on the kitchen island and read the Post-It on the counter.

Late shift. Took Francis out @ 8. -L

Holden crumpled the note and threw it in the trash. Lauren had been his roommate for two months. He knew little about her, only that she'd given up a biofuel engineering job in California, moved to Oregon, and now worked the desk at the Corvallis Marriott. She paid her rent on time and took Francis on walks. Holden didn't ask questions.

It was already well after eleven, but he could feel in his bones that he wouldn't be able to sleep. He kicked off his shoes, hung up his soaked coat, and padded across the living room to his desk, rolling out the chair until it smacked the back of the sectional. Holden plopped down and wiggled his desktop mouse. His eyes drifted to the external drive next to the keyboard.

The dweeb who manned the desk in Life Sciences had handed him a box of these things last week. They'd been sitting in lab storage, and no one had the time to check them for residual sensitive data—not even the postdocs. Which meant Holden was stuck doing the bitch work.

He untangled the drive cord and plugged the end into his desktop port. OSU didn't pay him enough to work nights, but if he got through a few of the drives now, he could dip out of the office early tomorrow.

He was halfway done with culling this drive, and all he'd found were a bunch of corrupted files and some old effort reports he'd already forwarded along to the central admin office. He popped in his earbuds and sank deeper into the chair, scrolling through the next hundred or so temps, deleting as he went.

His finger stalled on the mouse wheel, and he inched back to a ZIP file titled Comprehensive analysis of Alpenglow meltwater.

Holden dragged the folder to the desktop and extracted everything. A new window expanded with 324 files.

"The fuck?" he whispered.

The files weren't just corrupted CSVs or the ghosts of old saves like everything else on the drive. They were PDFs, documents, images... audio files. Loads and loads of audio files.

He killed his music app and double-clicked the first WAV.

"This is Dr. Siena Dupont, and it is day thirty... fuck... thirty-two... I think... of the Alpenglow study in Deadswitch Wilderness. I... I..."

Holden sat up, amping the volume on his desktop.

"I'm so tired," she sobbed. "I'm so, so goddamn tired. His blood is all over my arm—has been since yesterday. I smelled it when I tried to sleep last night but don't have it in me to wash it off."

Dr. Dupont took a few deep breaths, and Holden shut his eyes as he tried to recall where he'd heard her voice before. A lecture? A podcast? YouTube? No... none of that felt right.

Dupont continued. "I scraped some of it off me and ran the cells beneath the scope. Something's not right with them... maybe. It's not like I'm a biologist or anything. I took a few pics with my phone. But it doesn't matter. I won't be escaping this place soon. And the others...

"Cam ran off yesterday without saying goodbye. Emmett's off looking for her... never came back last night. Which means I have to bury Isaac all by myself."