Too Old to Rock and Roll, But I Am Too Young To Die

I am, as Miss Waterman revealed in her last update to this blog, alive. Granted, I am alive with a case of second-degree frostbite in my toes and first-degree frostbite in several of my fingers, and I am apparently missing much more of my memory than I had first thought, but I am alive nonetheless.

Typing with numbed fingers is, unsurprisingly, an extremely frustrating exercise, made all the more difficult and annoying due to my current location in the back seat of Miss Waterman’s van while she careens along the highway at unnecessarily high speeds. She says that it might serve to keep Thaddeus off of our collective tail; I am not so sure. The man is annoyingly persistent once he has selected a target.

Still, the sentiment is a good one, and she has been doing this longer than I. As have James and Phillip. You will have to pardon me for refraining from bestowing upon you their last names. While Miss Waterman and I are the last of our respective bloodlines, James and Phillip still have family to lose, and making their identities public would undoubtedly place their relatives at the mercy of certain Proxies, even if their masters hold no interest in the other members of the family.

As an additional precaution, you will have to excuse me also for not handing out any information on our appearances. The less information there is out there which might be used to identify us, the less likely that some Proxy or another will catch sight of us on a street corner and decide to kill us all before we get the opportunity to react. To bastardize a phrase from Orwell, the Operator, or one of his ilk, is watching you. Or, at the very least, one of their myriad servants is.

I can, however, say a little about myself. As I have noted above, my family is dead. There really is no reason to keep my own identity secret any longer. My name is Archibald Sullivan. The journal that I uploaded when I first began this online archive belonged to my son. That was how I discovered the existence of those creatures collectively referred to as “Fears”. More specifically, it is how I discovered the existence of the being designated the “Epping AquaTarkus” – EAT – and the gestalt entity known as The Camper.

Miss Waterman has already explained how we came to meet in as much detail as I consider necessary. The details of the intervening time are likewise unimportant. My investigation into the details surrounding the death of my wife and the disappearance of my two children bore no fruit until I overheard a conversation between Miss Waterman, Phillip, and James when they passed through my city. In her own words, it was “a careless fucking slip-up that could have killed all three of us”, but I am no Proxy, and instead of spelling death for the three Runners, it gave them a contact. Granted, I was a contact that could do little to assist them, but I provided them with occasional safe haven in exchange for being sent all information that they could gather on these so-called “Fears”, in the hope that I could put it to use in my hunt for my children.

Of course, before long I had discerned that rescuing them from the clutches of The Camper would be all but impossible. My archives turned from a potential weapon against the beings that stole my family from me into a repository of useful information for Runners – or, at least, those Runners who happened to stumble across it. There were more than a few, over the years. Many of them made donations. Miss Waterman’s group regularly mailed me their journals. Others took the time to send in sporadic accounts as well. And some letters came from seemingly nowhere, with no return address and no names in the accounts.

And so my archives grew unchecked, until quite recently. As I exposited in my first post, my long years of research have finally drawn their attention, and so I am now on the run with Miss Waterman’s group. They are no doubt not far behind, and Thaddeus is likely still hunting us despite Miss Waterman’s best efforts to the contrary. But, for now, I have those records that I judged most valuable, and I am safe. The archives will continue to update.

This is Archibald Donald Sullivan, alias “Locomotive Breath”, here to say that I am not dead yet, you bastards.