My Lab Partner Left A Bizarre Recording Before Vanishing — Now I Know His Terrifying Secret

Part 1

The police gave up searching for Brian three weeks ago.

I sat at my desk and stared at the empty chair across the lab.

They claimed he had a mental break and wandered off into the woods.

I rubbed the back of my neck.

None of that made any sense to me.

Brian was obsessive about his soil remediation project.

He practically lived in the laboratory.

He never left the building without logging his exact progress in the central database.

I dragged my chair over to his workstation.

Brenda from corporate had already boxed up most of his things.

She told everyone not to touch his remaining equipment.

I ran my hand under the heavy steel of his desk anyway.

My fingers brushed against a small strip of duct tape.

I peeled it back and caught a tiny black flash drive before it hit the floor.

I slipped it into my pocket and glanced at the security camera in the corner.

Its red light blinked in a steady rhythm.

Keeping my head down, I pretended to tie my shoe to avoid the lens.

The break room offered a brief sanctuary smelling faintly of stale coffee.

Shift change couldn’t come fast enough that evening.

A biting wind whipped against my face as the automatic doors slid open.

Traffic was light on the tense drive back to my apartment.

Heavy blinds were quickly drawn shut across the living room windows.

The tiny black drive fit perfectly into the side of my personal laptop.

It contained a single audio file titled with a string of numbers.

I clicked play and leaned closer to the speaker.

Static hissed through the room.

Brian’s voice broke through the noise.

“The potassium… the potassium butt acid… the potassium but as…” I paused the recording.

My pulse hammered against my ribs.

It sounded like he was rambling.

He sounded exhausted and completely out of breath.

I hit play again.

“The potassium but acid… the potassium but as I am… that’s all I’ve got.

Have a good night.

I am.” The recording ended with a sharp click.

I played it five more times.

None of it made logical sense.

Brian didn’t talk like that.

He was precise and endlessly analytical.

He hated repeating himself.

I opened a spectrogram analyzer and dropped the file in.

The visual waves painted a jagged mountain range of sound.

I adjusted the contrast on the screen.

The background static wasn’t random.

It held a repeating rhythmic pattern hidden beneath his voice.

I isolated the frequency and ran it through a basic decoder.

A sequence of coordinates appeared on the screen.

I wrote them down on a yellow notepad.

I typed the numbers into my mapping software.

The location pinned a spot fifty miles north of the city.

It was the exact site of the company’s old waste treatment facility.

They supposedly shut that plant down ten years ago.

I shoved my laptop and the flash drive into my bag.

A heavy knock echoed through my front door.

I froze in the middle of the room.

I hadn’t ordered any food or packages.

I crept toward the peephole and looked through.

Craig stood in the hallway.

He was the head of corporate security.

He wore his usual dark suit and crossed his massive arms over his chest.

I backed away from the door slowly.

My phone buzzed loudly on the kitchen counter.

Brenda’s name flashed brightly on the screen.

I silenced the call and shoved the phone deep into my pocket.

The knocking grew louder and rattled the wooden doorframe.

I grabbed my bag and headed for the fire escape in the bedroom.

I climbed down the rusty metal stairs as fast as I could.

I hit the dark alley and sprinted toward my car.

I checked my rearview mirror three times before pulling onto the highway.

The drive took exactly fifty-four agonizing minutes.

The abandoned facility loomed against the dark night sky.

A rusted chain-link fence surrounded the massive perimeter.

I parked my car behind a cluster of overgrown pine trees.

I grabbed my flashlight and slipped through a broken gap in the fence.

The air smelled thick and horribly metallic.

I pointed the beam at the main loading entrance.

The heavy steel doors hung open slightly.

I stepped inside the cavernous warehouse.

Empty chemical drums littered the cracked concrete floor.

I swept the light across the far back wall.

A massive canvas tarp covered something huge in the corner.

I walked toward it and pulled the thick plastic back.

My breath caught sharply in my throat.

Dozens of glowing glass vats lined the concrete wall.

Each one hummed with a low vibration.

I froze as I noticed a familiar leather notebook resting near the first vat.