The Annihilation of Foreverland

Danny wasn’t going to lie down. He planted a data bomb inside the FBI network and wiped it out. Their evidence disappeared. But not all of it.
    They came to the door disguised as the UPS man dropping off another package. Danny answered the door in his sweatpants. They put him in the back of a black Suburban. His friends sat next to him.
    He was back home by the time he was thirteen.
    Despite the federal shadow watching his every move, he went back to his Vegas accounts and set up two more. He could retire when he turned eighteen.
    That’s when the house burned down.
    That’s when Danny’s life – as he knew it – ended.
    Danny Forrester was acquired by Franklin Constantino.
    The file said he’d been acquired by this man.
    Acquired .
    Franklin Constantino made his money in real estate and other businesses. He had lung cancer and had not been seen in public for quite some time. Some reports stated he had died in a boating accident.
    But Danny knew he wasn’t dead. Franklin Constantino stood in front of him as the record book projected his image before him.
    Mr. Jones.
    The house had burned down. The police found two bodies. One was a woman and the other was a boy. Each was beyond recognition but assumed to be the bodies of Danny and his mother. The fire started when she fell asleep on the couch and dropped a lit cigarette. Danny was asleep in the attic and couldn’t escape.
    None of it was true.
    He didn’t fall asleep in the attic. On the nights he did sleep, he went to his room. It was too cold upstairs and there was nowhere to lie down. But to the world, Danny was dead.
    And there was no family left to care.
    No family left to look.
    Like the database at the Federal Bureau of Investigations, he had been erased from the world.
    He had been acquired .
    The record ended there.
    No explanation how he got to the island. Only when he got there and who he belonged to.
    Danny closed the book. It flew back to the shelf. So many books, each someone that had been acquired. And every one of them boys, each of them brought to the island, fed and cared for, each marched to the Haystack where they gladly stuck a needle in their head. Every one of them doing what they were told to do and the world would never know.
    All of them following this trail to Foreverland. All of them but one.
    [Reed…] Danny thought-commanded.
    The room shifted. One book came out, front and center.

    Reed Johnston, born in Wooster , Ohio .
    He was an only child, too. Grew up on a farm. His mother had died when she delivered him.
    He was raised by his father. He stopped going to school before he graduated so that he could help with the crops. Reed planted the fields and helped harvest at the end of the season. He also cleaned out the bottles of vodka that rolled from beneath the seat. When his father went on a real bender, he’d be the only one in the fields. He was the one that answered the door when the creditors came knocking and he was the one that called the bank when they needed money for seed.
    Reed didn’t socialize much. He wouldn’t talk to anyone at school except for a girl that sat behind him in most of his classes. Her name was Lucinda Jones.
    Lucinda lived with her aunt and uncle and their twelve kids. They weren’t thrilled about it; they had enough mouths to feed. She was given custody to them when her father died serving in the military and her mother died of breast cancer two years later. Lucinda was only five.
    She made plenty of trouble by the time she was ten.
    Reed spent years watching her. He even went to church just to see her walk back from communion. He’d sit in the back row while his dad was sleeping off a long one and slip out before mass was over. But she knew he was watching.
    She would meet him out in the field and they’d find the shade of a tree to sit and talk. She would sometimes sneak out after midnight and meet Reed waiting on the road in his father’s old pick-up. They would drive the deserted country roads and look at the stars until she fell asleep in his arms. He would take her home and help her back through the window.
    There was no mention of Reed being an ideal candidate.
    When Reed was seventeen, he finished the morning rounds. The tractor needed parts. He ate lunch before heading into town. When he got back, his father was still asleep. At supper, he finally checked on him, found him dead in his bed.
    Reed didn’t bother calling an ambulance.
    He buried his old man in the soybean field out