Chiron Academy

Chapter 32: Even Ghouls Have Skeletons in the Closet

 Gary felt something under his shoe as he walked across the cafeteria. He reached down to pick it up and discovered it to be a green and white flash drive. 

It said on the side that it had 500 gigs of space on it. It didnt look like any that they sold in the school's shop. They all topped out at thirty gigs. There was no name or other clue  who it belonged to he could see. 

It was easily the best thing that had happened to him all day.

He thought about just pocketing it.

Half a terrabyte would hold a lot of movies, at good resolutions even. The paltry storage on the phones they'd received could barely fit anything and he had seen his only movie he'd been able to download on from the school wifi, Transformers 2, about a million times. Ryan had said that if he had to watch Optimus Prime die and come back to life one more time, either he or Gary was going home.

Still, he didn't know who it belonged to. And whoever it was had gone all the way into town to buy this.

"Oh dear. Another one?" the lady in the office that had the lost and found asked when Gary asked her about it.

"Do you get these a lot?" Gary asked.

"Well, not this exact model, but yes. At least four or five get turned in a day. You just can keep it if you like."

"But," Gary stuttered. "Isn't supposed to go the in the lost and found? What if whoever owns it-"

The lady pulled out a small cardboard box with 'Lost and Found' written on the side.

The box was filled with flash drives. Big ones, smaller ones, some green, some red, some black. 

"You are the second person today to drop one off and it's not even lunch yet. Doesn't make any difference to me, but since not one person has ever shown up to look for a lost one, I think you're safe to just keep it."

What is the English phrase, Gary? One's loss is another's treasure. Did Ryan not say the other day that if we were to have such a recepticle, we could access more video recordings? Perhaps we could use this drive to finally watch The Fast and The Furious 6. I rather like the Dominic Toretto and his little family. Plus I think it would pacify the large one.

Harvey always called Ryan 'large one'.

"Well, can you at least check if it has anything on it first? Just in case, they left somethin- "

The secretary let out an angry sigh and took the flash drive out of Gary's outstretched hand before he could even finish his thought.

She fiddled a moment getting the thing into the her computer and then made a few explosive quiet clicks of with her mouse.  

"There," she said, swinging the screen towards him. "There's your evidence trail to follow."

The drive was empty.

"They are all like that," the lady said. "Don't you think that if was easy to track people down I would have done it already? Just take it.

"Kids today," she grumbled. "No wonder everyone keeps losing their thumb drives. If their heads weren't bolted on..." 

You see, Gary? Even the office administrator wants you to take it. Why bother her further?

"But someone paid good money for this," Gary said weakly. "We can't just leave them."

"If you really want, sweetie," she said in a voice that didn't seem think he was a sweetie at all. "I can drop it in this box with the other twenty just like it that are gathering dust."