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[TRANSCRIPT]

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I spent last night looking at the map of West Virginia and trying to remember where exactly that doomsday cult was supposed to be. There’s three towns that sounded sort of familiar for some reason, so that’s what I’m doing today. I got up early and I’m gonna drive to each of these towns and see what’s what. 

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If there are other people out there, I bet a lot of these kinds of groups have sprung up. The one Harry had heard about was panicked about nuclear war—but who isn’t, right? 

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It used to scare me, the idea that just a handful of people in the world could wake up one day and decide to end the world. All it would take is for one country to decide to drop a bomb and then it’d all be over. It never seemed that far-fetched either—America already did it. 

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When we first realized that something was different—that something had gone wrong…we’d been hiding out in this little abandoned cabin deep in the Pennsylvania wilderness. And I couldn’t hunt for shit and Harry certainly didn’t come with survival skills, so things were starting to look a little bleak. We weren’t strangers to planning outings that require a certain amount of stealth, so it was decided—we’d make our way closer to a town and scope it out for supplies. 

But when we got there, there was no one. It was a ghost town. We figured maybe it was an old coal town or something that had gotten abandoned when a mine closed—you see some of those types of towns out West, but we didn’t see any reason that it couldn’t happen in Pennsylvania too. So we kept going. And it was the same thing in the next three towns.

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Of course we thought that nuclear war had broken out. What else could we have thought? Everyone disappears overnight, leaving their cars parked on the street, leaving the lights on—some of them, anyway. The breakout of nuclear war didn’t explain everything, but it seemed like the only possible explanation. 

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Except…wouldn’t we have died long ago? Wouldn’t we have gotten sick? In my driving these last two weeks, I haven’t seen any evidence of a bombing or nuclear fallout.

So who was responsible then? Who made all the people disappear? Was it like it is with nuclear war—were there only a select few who had the terrible power to make that happen? 

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And if that’s the case, what the hell kind of button did they push?

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