I woke up to a rumbling crash. I ran out of my bedroom at the fastest pace that my discordant sleepiness would allow. My jaw locked itself open. There was a bloody car in my living room. The driver was obscured by the white balloon of the airbag which may or may not have saved their life. By the time the wall of my apartment building had finished with the front of the vehicle I couldn't tell what model it was. I looked past the car and found there to be a line of people keeping their distance from the building. Most were looking up. Many were recording everything from the car to the roof to the ground around my apartment.

That's when I remembered that I opened the door of my bedroom by pushing aside broken pieces of my dresser. How could this car have broken my dresser in the other room? And then the pink elephant in the room charged at me full force. Why were there people outside my window?! Why was I suddenly on the ground level? One of the people out there saw me gawking at the car and beckoned me to get out of the building through the new opening in my previously well-decorated wall.

Then the building...shrugged. It lurched downward by about a foot or two and I could see the ground now pouring into my previously seventh floor apartment. The walls buckled and waved. Where the drywall split, there was insulation pouring through under a pressure like the filling of a pie oozing out of the sides. I took the hint and scrambled, barefoot, out of my previously cozy apartment and onto the unforgiving asphalt of the streets. I turned around and saw firsthand what everyone was filming.

My building was sinking. But only briefly while the sounds of metal and concrete groaned and snapped under the weight. It went into freefall as the upper part of the building collapsed into the lower part, giving it the shove it needed to finally give in to the demands of this apparently hollow ground. What was left was an image of pure terror. The ground had given way into a sinkhole the size of an entire block. Then I looked around at my town and saw that the skyline was different. It wasn't normal. Other buildings were missing too.

The whole town was in jeopardy at this point. It was just waiting to go. I saw that there was a car door left open and someone was filming a few meters away. The dashboard lights were all on, so I figured the keys were still in, took a chance, and made my escape via the car. The woman never bothered to check if her car was running away or chase after me. I had to dodge traffic that had stopped all over the place so the drivers could record everything on their damn phones. I knew better.

I wasn't far from the edge of the town. I had no idea if I was driving towards the source of this madness or away from it. All I knew was that it was a better option than staying and the farther away I got, the better. I saw several more buildings give way before I left. I heard the structures give up their loads to an uncertain abyss, and the ground with them. What a rude awakening it was for me when mine apparently went down in my sleep. It would be worse for them. So, I kept driving for 30 minutes until I was a little bit outside the town border. I stopped and turned around to look at an entire town that wasn't there anymore.

I was completely stunned. How could this all happen so fast? There were no warnings and no alarms. No police, no firefighters, just the people. A town of 10,000 suddenly vanished into the earth. There was a town not too far away. I'd go straight to the police and tell them to call the feds. I would have done so myself, but my phone is currently wherever the town of Bentley now lies.

I reflected on just how lucky I was that my building decided to stop falling six floors into the ground for just long enough for me to escape. And then I remembered how there were investigations into a local mining company's operation in the area. The government's complaints were settled in court, and many accused the company of bribing officials to get away with unsafe practices. But a whole town? Come on! This had to be something natural.

I found the police station and there were perhaps 12 officers standing outside. I thought that was a little strange given that it was two in the morning, but I wasn't thinking clearly, so I imagined maybe they'd help me. As I pulled into the station, all twelve of them tracked me with their eyes, as if trying to count how many people were in the car. I should've run.

One of the officers came up to my window.

"From Bentley?"

"Yes, sir," I said, trying to hide my fear behind a veil of politeness. "Has there been anyone else, then?"

"Yeah..." He said, trailing off to look into the backseat. "Just you?"

I confirmed yes and he said, "Damn... alright." He continued on to his next question. "Your car or someone else's?"

It wasn't the question that was off-putting, it was how he said it. So non-chalant as though a town gets destroyed and people have to steal each other's cars to escape every day. I figured I shouldn't lie.

"Someone else's," I admitted. "It wasn't a violent robbery or anything! You see they were all taking pictures and she just left the door open and-"

"Yeah, I don't care," He said flatly while looking toward the other officers. One of them nodded and he leaned back down to the window. "Step out of the car. We'll take you inside the station."

I was beyond offended, but I figured maybe he had heard similar excuses. I got out of the car and was led to the front door by the officer who was talking to me. Another one came up to the door of the car and threw a bag with white powder into the passenger seat. I was alarmed, but I was so shaken up in general that I didn't really clue in until a few minutes later. The officer I was with passed me off to another guy who led me down some hallways. I had a really bad feeling that had fully matured in my soul from all of this. The incident, the police standing outside, the unprofessional conduct. Something was deeply wrong here. I was led into a room where there was another officer already waiting at a table. 

The one leading me guided me to sit down and joined his colleague across the table. It was then that I noticed none of them were wearing their badge numbers or nametags, except for the officer who was already at the table when I entered the room. His name was Jackie Crosby. He was a blonde-haired man who was young, almost too young to be a cop. He had a slender figure and an anxious demeanor, but he was very good at holding a serious face. Something they taught him as an interrogator, for sure.

"How much can you lift, if you had to do it repeatedly during the day," he said bluntly and without any introductions.

"Uh..." I stammered. "Maybe 60 pounds, I don't know-"

"Perfect. Have you had any experience with manual labor?"

"Well, no, not really. There was some fast-food work I did when I was younger, but that was ten years ago..."

"Damn, well you'll learn," he said while turning to his partner. "Alright, you go bring the next one in, I'll take him out back." With a nod, his partner left the room.

I was still in shock when he was walking me down the empty hallway at the back of the station. I was fully convinced I was dreaming now, but as we approached the back door, he shoved me up against the wall hard enough to wake me up from whatever dream I might be having and said to me very quickly, 

"Shut up and don't say a word. I'll tell you everything so that one day you can write it all down and seek justice. I have to do this; we all have to. What happened in Bentley wasn't an accident. It was a mining company, I don't know which one. None of the men you saw outside are officers. They're henchmen here to watch us. Some paramilitary types paid by the company. They're paying all of us some crazy money and threatening our families for insurance to keep us from straying. 

"You're being sent to work for the same company that destroyed your town. There's a big claim, like, half a trillion dollars under that township and the council was blocking it. This conspiracy," he checked each direction down the hallway, "it only took like 200 people. Around 150 officers and fifty people from the mayor's office, town hall, and the District Attorney's office, combined. They did a survey a year ago. Almost no one has family out-of-town. So, there's no one who's going to sue to get you all back.

"They had it all figured out. The statistics, the money. Their even planting drugs in the cars of anyone who comes to us for help. You might have seen it yourself. They aren't trying to hide it. You'll be found holding enough drugs to distribute, sentenced to manual labor and you'll do ten years. The same is true for any other survivors. Bentley has been scrubbed from search engines. It's not online. It's like it never existed. If you get out, write this all down and rain hell on them. Make them pay for threatening my family, just give me a fake name when you write it. I'm so. Fucking. Sorry."

He then shoved me out the door where I was handed to a couple henchmen and put in a van with other survivors. He was right. I did ten years in the mines. I hogged all the easy jobs I could, and I was released, believe it or not. I thought I knew for a fact that they were going to kill me. I've written this account of what happened in conjunction with others who were also released. Who knows if anyone will believe us convicted drug dealers who were caught during "The Largest Sting Operation in Modern History". That's what the media ran with. The conspiracy was much larger than 200 people, Officer "Jackie". They claimed they caught thousands of drug mules in a wide area all at once. It was us survivors. This was the story of the town of Bentley, population... zero.