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Alex waited until the dust cloud from his father's truck had settled before moving back inside the Project Shepherd bunker. His plan had worked, for now. But he was well aware of how manipulative his father could be. Who knew how many people he had in his back pocket, whom he could bribe or cajole into trying to break into the bunker or attack him. God knew that, despite the trash Jesse Manes had spouted earlier about protecting Alex, there was no love lost between father and son.He had only had time to add his own biometrics to the system before escorting his father out. Now, he settled into the computer chair and took the time to start restricting access to the bunker. Jesse Manes was the first to go. The rest of the people in the system had not accessed the bunker in over eight years, since the project had been shut down Alex was surprised at some of the names in the system, though. Colonel O'Neill had always struck him as a practical airman, not the type to think that aliens were real.Once he was the only person left in the system, Alex started a deep dive into the files his father had collected. there were thousands of files; records of almost everyone in town Those in leadership positions or whom had police records, even if it was just a speeding ticket, went more in-depth. The Evans family all had files, as did Noah Braken. The Valenti family was well represented in the system, with Jim's medical records and a paternity test that proved that Rosa was his daughter. Terabytes of surveillance footage and pictures of people he recognized from high school. Alex sucked in a shocked breath when he found the feed from the UFO Emporium. There was a camera pointed at the ticket booth and several around the museum. Had his father seen? Is that how he knew to look for Alex and Michael in the shed that day?He scanned back through the dated and saved files, but the ones for that day were conspicuously absent. Had Jesse Manes deleted proof that his son was "an embarrassment"? If so, how had he managed to keep it a secret from the others involved in the project? Alex had enlisted soon after and all it would have taken was for one other person to have seen the footage and report it and Alex's career would have been over. The next thing Alex was aware of was the fact that he was kneeling on the floor, shivering and dry heaving into a trash bin. His face was wet with tears and he could smell the sick and bile in the bin despite the snot that dripped from his nose. Michael's screams reverberated through his skull.He slowly sat up, wincing at the ache in his knees and hips. Lying on a cold concrete floor did him no favors. Neither did the adrenaline crash that followed the episode. His next session with psych would be hell. So would physio.He made it back into the chair and started reading through the file on Michael. The data file had been small until around eight years earlier, after Project Shepherd had officially been shut down. It was further proof that his father had targeted Michael simply because of their relationship. He couldn't focus on Michael while there was any sort of oversight.His father had detailed lists of Michael's arrests, drunk and disorderlies and public intoxications. No DUI or assault. No petty theft. One trespassing on Foster Homestead Ranch when Michael was a teen, which should have been sealed when Michael turned 18, the same as the social services reports of abusive foster homes. An interview with his social worker when he was 16, explaining that Michael had been removed from his latest home after having called the police on his foster father, who had been sexually abusing a young foster daughter. Another interview expressing the belief that as long as Michael was still attending school and maintaining good grades, there was no need to force him back into a home, despite rumors that he was living out of his truck, or at Sanders Automotive. The pictures of the women Michael left The Wild Pony with made him wince. He had believed Michael when he said that he had been using his trailer for a lot of casual sex, but that did not mean he wanted to see the details. His father had tracked each woman for a full year after the encounter, possibly checking for unforeseen "consequences" that he could use against Michael. Or could wave in Alex's face.Oddly, video surveillance had only been in place for about a week. That was when someone labeled "JC" told his father to look into Max Evans as a possible alien. He must have jumped at the chance to prove that anyone connected to Michael was other, to gain further proof in his one man crusade.He pulled up the camera feed that featured Michael's trailer. He needed to figure out where the camera was placed so that he could retrieve it. Cutting the feed would not be enough, not when someone else could hijack the signal. He'd start with Michael, then work his way through town.As he watched, Michael pulled into the junkyard in his old beat up Chevy. Liz pulled in behind him and Alex tensed. Surely not. Not when Liz was so starry-eyed over Max and had Kyle to relieve tension with. She wouldn't need Michael for some no strings attached fun. But the two did not look like lovers. Michael was not gently guiding her, the way he had done in the pictures Alex had just seen. The way he had experienced firsthand. And even in thee grainy surveillance video, he could tell that Liz was not gazing at him with that same expression he had seen her use so often with Max and Kyle. No, this looked more like the Liz he had interrupted in the lab: the mad scientist. The two approached Michael's trailer and stopped. At first Alex thought he was imagining it, that his father's paranoia had somehow transferred itself to him, but as he watched, the trailer shifted. Then, after a moment, Michael disappeared into the ground, followed by Liz."Huh," he said as he sat back in the chair and continued to watch. Liz reappeared after several minutes and got into her SUV and left. Michael took a little longer, staying in the hole for no more than 30 minutes before coming back up. Then, his trailer shifted again, covering what he could only assume to be a bunker similar to the one hidden in the cabin.Alex exited out of the feed as Michael entered his trailer. He pulled the archived files for the camera and deleted them all and cut the connection. Next, he pulled up the feed from Max's house and noted the position of the camera before doing the same. He continued to the feeds for Isobel, Kyle, Liz, and his own cabin, damn his father, deleting as he went, scrubbing the files from the system. He would have to degauss the drives themselves, to be sure that nothing remained. Maybe he did have a bit of his father's paranoia after all.Task done, he started packing the physical files back into their respective boxes. He could leave everything here, continue using the Project Shepherd bunker as it had been intended, but the risk of his father coming back, or of some paper pusher in DC deciding that the old post needed to be leveled, was too high. It would be better to transfer everything to a safer location. The question was: where?His cabin was a possibility. The security was not up to snuff yet, but at least he could look through everything without obviously changing his patterns. But Kyle knew about it, so it was not as secret as he would like. He could also take it to Michael. But moving his trailer too often would increase the chances of his secret getting out. He would need to talk to him about that, suggest an easier object to shift, one less obvious. An artfully arranged pile of trash, for instance. He'd seen it used often enough in Iraq to hide weapons caches.in either case, security was a priority. So was technology. The cabin wasn't wired for the servers he would need to store the information. He doubted that the junkyard was. For that matter, the cable running to the computers in the Project Shepherd bunker was only Cat 4. His mind whirled. Bringing the cabin up to speed would probably be easier and be less likely to raise questions. He could run a lot of the wiring himself. Add in a security system from the Dark Web... Better than a hole in a junkyard or a bunker that the military could reclaim on a wim.His mind still half focused on planning, he exited the bunker and used the pathetic scrub brush to cover the palm scanner. He was halfway to where he had hidden his SUV, using his cane out of sheer physical and mental exhaustion. Part of him wanted to go to Michael, to curl up against him and be held. But he knew that he was not in the right state of mind. Not yet. He needed to process the events of the day first, needed to be alright in his own mind before he could even think about making things right with Michael. No, for tonight, he would go home, take a hot shower, possibly get blind drunk, and deal with his own emotions. Tomorrow, he would talk to Michael, tell him what he knows. They could plan from there. Together.