I woke up to a rain of flesh this morning. Fist-sized chunks of meat fell on my bed, blood sprinkling my blankets and body. Someone does not appreciate that I am writing this down, sharing my experiences, letting you read the words published by Douglas Ray Cleavon and the brave individuals who helped him bring Grouse Springs to light. This will be my final word to you, dear reader, before I hide myself in some deep place where I may be safe. Take care.

***

Blast Radius: An investigation into the tragedy and coverup of Grouse Springs

By Douglas Ray Cleavon

Published August 2021

​

Part One: an Interview

​

Part Two: the Autopsy

​

Part Three: a Letter

​

I received an envelope in my mailbox, the day after I spoke with Cole. It had no address, and when I asked my neighbors, nobody could recall seeing anyone near my home that day. Inside was a typed letter, along with a video cassette. The author of the letter included a note that I do not release this video publicly, so her identity is not revealed, but she has permitted me to include screencaps. I watched the video in its entirety and have no doubt of its veracity. The event as Grouse Springs was not a nuclear accident

I will let the letter speak for itself.

Mr. Cleavon,

Project SKIPJACK was a power plant, that much is true. The city of Grouse Springs did get its electricity from whatever they were doing down in the bowels of the building known to the public as the Grouse Springs Nuclear Power Plant. It wasn’t my job to understand how, though. I was just there to provide security. Keep people out, they told me. Keep people in too, if it came to that.

I’d been on details like this before. They’d tell you just enough that you’d get a feel for what to do in an emergency. You learned early on not to ask too many questions.

Things were bad before June 23rd, but the public didn’t know about it. Way back when the power plant first opened, in 2008, a kid went missing from a neighborhood close by. He was only four or five, the same age as my son at the time. Later, sometimes people would see flashing lights in the woods, or cigar-shaped objects hovering in the sky. The higher ups did a real good job of covering it all up. A scientist had been killed, too, in the laboratory. I didn’t have to work that cleanup, but my buddies who did came back up a bit shellshocked. One of them requested to transfer, after that, but it wasn’t allowed to happen. He didn’t survive the accident.

It started in the afternoon. We were told that’s when the technicians would rotate shifts, so we’d know to be extra alert. The main lights went off, and the emergency light system came on. The alarms didn’t start yet, though. They wanted to wait to see if it could get it back under control.

This was relayed to me and my partner, I’ll call him Delta, over radio by the head technician. No worry yet, they said. By time the fire started, the alarms still hadn’t gone off, so we radioed back. No word.

Someone I didn’t recognize came into the security building and told us it was code red out there, and the entire security team needed to be deployed to the plant, where the main power core was contained. We weren’t told what it was, just that we needed to help survivors put out the fire, and that under no circumstances could anyone found at the plant leave without checking their identification. Even in the middle of a meltdown. If they didn’t have ID, we were told to kill them.

We got suited up. Our core team was Delta, and other people on the detail I’ll call Gamma, Beta, ad Epsilon. I had body armor, a side arm, a knife, and a helmet. I was also tasked with keeping record of the accident, on behalf of the researchers, so my helmet had a camera. Our fire suppression team went out ahead of us. [Image One] They were successful in putting the fire out, here, so I have no idea how it ended up spreading to the rest of the city.

It initially played out like a standard search-and-rescue. Many of the rooms were hollowed out by the fire, charred black. Smoky. It smelled strange, though, like someone had been spraying hair product. There was a lot of searching, but not a lot of rescuing. We cleared about three rooms before there was any sign of life.

Down the hallway, there was a figure. [Image Two] It was small, and it looked like it was coated in dark grease, or oil, or something. I couldn’t tell if it was facing us or facing away because whatever was dripping off of it was so thick its head was completely obscured. Epsilon called out, “Hey! You there,” but whoever it was didn’t respond. They just ran off, feet slapping against the floor, down some random hallway. I wanted to pursue, but Delta got me back on track.

“Remember,” he said over the earpiece, “We gotta get to the core.”

I nodded, and we kept going. There was ambient noise, as we got closer, like a crowd of people talking and laughing at a party in a nearby room. Sometimes lights would go on and off in other rooms and we’d look and nothing would be there.

About halfway down the staircase to the basement level, where the core was, one of the walls burst. A long, skinny arm reached through a hole and started groping around with an oversized hand. It was burnt to a crisp, but whatever it was, it was reaching excitedly like a kid getting the last Skittle out of the bag. Gamma and Epsilon fired at it, but they either didn’t hit it or it didn’t care, because it picked Gamma up and it squeezed, before anyone could help.

The thing played with his limp body through the hole in the wall, tapping Gamma’s feet against the floor and shaking him up and down so his arms were flopping around. And I swear to God, when that hand squeezed him to death, the only thing that came out of Gamma’s body was strawberry ice cream.

We ran before the rest of whatever the hell that thing was decided it wanted to grab anyone else, too, sprinting down the stairs. Dark splotches were smeared on the wall, sometimes there was an arm or a leg sticking out. At one point we passed a human face lodged in the wall, which just wept and wept. I don’t remember if it was Epsilon or if it was Delta that put a bullet in his head.

The last flight of stairs was too damaged to access, so we had to cross the first floor to find the alternate staircase on the other side of the building. I was hoping maybe we’d actually find someone we could help, here, but I was wrong.

It sounded like people were having a conversation all around us, but not one that made any sense; the voices were cackling, howling, whimpering. The sharp tangy smell from earlier was becoming overpowering. It felt like someone was touching the bottom of my boots. Epsilon turned to me to say something, but before he could his tongue fell out of his mouth and onto the ground.

Then his fingers started falling off. His eyes dropped out of his head. He was thrashing and moaning; blood made the floor slick enough that he slipped and fell. I knew it was Delta that took the shot, this time. Epsilon didn’t die, though. He just kept falling apart all over the floor.

Delta and I kept going, dutifully forward. Maybe we could stop whatever this was, if we just made it there.

Noise from Epsilon’s collapse must have gotten attention, because back near the entrance to the first floor, a door creaked open. It was so loud that Delta and I turned around to look. It was a woman.

She peeked her eyes out from the now-open doorway. They were open manically wide, the whites visible even at a distance. She disappeared for a moment, and after a pause, slunk out of the doorway. She was grinning, or grimacing, maybe. It was hard to tell. Her expression wasn’t lining up with the sheer unhinged malice she seemed to exude. Shoulders slung low, head facing up, I could tell that if she got her hands on us, that would be it.

It was me. It couldn’t be me, but it was. She was nude, and every mole on my body, every crease in my skin, even my c-section scar, were all perfectly mirrored on hers. Slowly, she approached. Behind her, it seemed like she left a shadow, solid almost, a faint after-image doubled over where she had just been.

She waved, when she saw us staring. We were in shock. That’s the only way I could justify it to myself when Delta waved back.

The woman went into a sprint, running towards us at a speed I’ve never been capable of achieving. I fired my sidearm and saw that I had shot her straight through the forehead. She stopped for a moment, a line of after-images slinging back behind her, before they snapped together and she was left wholly unharmed.

We just had to beat her to the stairs. We just had to get to the core. Delta and I turned and started moving as fast as we could towards the stairs. She got closer and closer, and I could tell she was laughing through her clenched teeth.

Right at the staircase, she was on us. [Image Three] I looked and she was there and I could feel her hot breath on my neck. I didn’t realize I was doing it but my feet were still moving, taking me down towards the basement. She was tearing apart Delta with her teeth. He didn’t even scream, just looked at me like big eyes like he didn’t know what was going on as she pulled loop after loop of intestines out of his torso.

The basement was a slaughterhouse. [Image Four] Carcasses swung on hooks from the ceiling. Some animal was alive, dragging itself on the ground while it bleated pathetically. I moved down from the catwalk to the floor, where the animal scooted past me before sinking into the floor, still bleating. Charcoal bodies hung suspended in the air like they were held by an invisible string. Some of them were reaching out, grasping for help even in death, and some were curled up, comforting themselves.

Towards the middle of the room, sat four giant batteries, sticking out from the floor. There were four of them, all inscribed with some language I didn’t even recognize. Connected by cords, there was a seat between them all. It resembled an electric chair, with a helmet and restraint straps, but the restraints had clearly been snapped.

I was taking this all in when I heard the woman come into the basement. There was nothing I could do. Whatever had done this, I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend it. I took a breath before running to hide. There were pipes everywhere, and I tried to find some that made a corner small. I contorted my body and compressed myself down into a fetal position. Tears streamed down my face, but I was silent. My son would wonder why Mommy didn’t come home. Or maybe she would come home and it would be whatever the fuck just killed Delta.

“Found you,” she whispered. It felt like four hands were scratching me and digging into my skin, tearing through my clothes and ripping chunks out of my body. Then it felt like six hands. Twelve hands. Eight hands.

I was kicking and screaming, too panicked to do anything other than try to protect my face. She was laughing and it sounded like a room full of people laughing. Maybe I started laughing. I don’t know. My eyes were screwed shut and I could tell I was bleeding and I just wanted it to be over.

Something made her stop. She pulled away from me and I felt a cold little hand on my face. It was filmy, and greasy, but I leaned into the relief the coolness provided and sobbed.

It pulled away. I heard wet footsteps walk away from me.

And then I was standing at the entrance to the power plant. It was the next day. I was covered in blood, and some black substance that reeked like garbage. But I was alive. I collapsed on the ground and radioed for assistance.

I was given a significant amount of cash and a medical retirement. The first thing I did with my newfound wealth was buy a house on the west coast and get the hell out of there. Whatever was in that power plant, whatever force killed all those people, it's still out there, as far as I know. Nobody stopped it that day. The incident at Grouse Springs only ended because it wanted it to end, do you understand?

I told my employers that my camera broke- I’m not sure why they believed me, but they did. I kept the cassette. At the time I wasn’t sure why, but now I realize.

I need people to know what happened.

-Good Luck

***

In the early 1940s, the U.S. State Department, along with the Army, deliberately infected prisoners in Illinois with malaria, in hopes of studying the effects on the human body. In 1943, the U.S. government conducted what is now known as the Philadelphia Experiment, using unified field theory in the effort to make a ship completely undetectable. This ended poorly, and many sailors aboard were left with PTSD as a result, and one man lost his hand. Following this, the U.S. government continued experimenting with magnetic fields in Project Montauk, using the underprivileged as test subjects. In 1950, the U.S. Navy sprayed an allegedly harmless bacteria over San Francisco in an event called Operation Sea-Spray. It turned out the disease caused pneumonia-like symptoms, and many people became ill. Between 1960 and 1971, the Department of Defense paid to irradiate cancer patients to record data on how high levels of radiation affect the human body.

These are just a handful of examples the United States government has experimented on its own citizens, which were only revealed through the Freedom of Information Act. It is likely that there have been countless more times the United States has subjected civilians to unethical scientific research well into the modern day. I believe that the alleged paraphysical force powering the city of Grouse Springs was one of these times, resulting in one of the most dangerous industrial accidents of all time. Information on Project SKIPJACK needs to be publicly released. The government needs to be held accountable for this tragedy- it is unacceptable to subject an entire town to understudied, highly lethal physical forces, and it is time for this matter held secret in the dark to come into the light.

We, the citizens of the United States of America, demand honesty.

***

​

As a collector of newspapers, I have a vast collection of articles on missing persons. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence that a young boy went missing here, in our world, in 2008, in the neighborhood located near the woods in which I found the bodies Cole describes as vanishing. I have been seeing lights, recently, near my home. In my dreams, I see her face, laughing at me. She is saying something, but I cannot understand.

Douglas Ray Cleavon’s diligent research and commitment to the truth is commendable. However, in his analysis of the events at Grouse Springs, I believe he made a grave mistake. This could not be dismissed as an industrial accident. The Philadelphia Experiment, project Montauk, the testing on American civilians conducted in the past, these events weren’t about discovering new power sources-

THEY WERE ABOUT DEVELOPING A WEAPON.