Holden

A body.

Holden pulled his headphones from his ears and leaned back in his chair. Francis snored at his feet, and the living room clock ticked above his head, the time wildly inaccurate.

A playlist of all the audio files he had found from Dr. Dupont's project filled the folder on his desktop screen. Other than this file and the first WAV he'd played a couple of days ago, they were corrupted and unplayable.

Holden opened a browser and typed Deadswitch Wilderness body found into the search bar, the search engine returning thousands of results. He sifted through the first four pages and a couple dozen news articles, but none of the bodies matched the description of the woman Dupont had found.

He could call the Deadswitch Ranger Station in the morning and ask if they knew anything, but they'd been worthless yesterday when Holden inquired about Dupont's permit. Apparently they kept no records dated before the current year. The ranger had blamed the state of their data on their office potato, which still ran Windows 95.

Page five proved less helpful, the results peppered with info sites about an application that would automatically send out a text or an email to a person if the app thought you were incapacitated.

"Deadman's switch," Holden muttered, and kept scrolling. More missing persons never to be found again, something about the Deadswitch Five... It was all too much to read through. He'd be here all night. At least he was actually doing something productive instead of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.

This newfound motivation bordered on obsessiveness. Holden wasn't ignorant of this. His dopamine-starved brain lapped up every new clue about the study and only craved more. He'd felt less depressed over the last few days than he had in months.

Sure, finding the origin of the files was his job. But Holden couldn't deny that his heart raced every time he heard Dupont's voice.

He wanted to learn everything he could. And his only lead was Dr. Chari.