Night Vale Unsolved

34

"Gone?" Shane asked as Ryan scrambled around the room. "What do you mean, gone?"
"I mean it's not here!" Ryan retorted, his patience gone in his frantic search.
"Where else would it be?"
"I don't know!" Ryan turned his suitcase over on his bed and began rifling through its contents. "It should be here, I know I left it here, but it...it's..."
Ryan trailed off and stared around the room in defeat. The thumb drive, the camera's chip, the files...it was all gone.
What had happened?
Ryan sank onto the bed, his face blank. Shane looked around helplessly at the upturned room, then sat down next to his friend.
"What are we going to do?"
Ryan shook his head. "I don't know." He looked up at Shane. "I mean, what can we do? We only have...I don't even know how many more days left, but it's not enough to reshoot everything."
Shane sighed. "So we really have nothing?"
"No video."
"No proof."
The two men looked at each other, grappling with the idea of loosing not only their video, but also any proof of what they'd learned over the past few days. If their footage wasn't somewhere in the room, there was no way to find or recover it. There was nothing left.
"Right." Shane stood up, a surge of determination hitting him. "Well, we can't do anything now. Let's try and get some sleep, and we'll look again in the morning."
"And...if we don't find it?" Ryan stopped himself from saying when. When they didn't find anything.
"Then..." Shane ran a hand through his hair. "Then we'll talk to Cecil of Carlos. Maybe they'll have an idea. But for now," He helped Ryan up, "Let's out some of this stuff away, yeah?"

A half hour later, Shane and Ryan laid in their separate beds, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. Neither could imagine sleep at the moment.
"Shane?" Ryan asked, breaking the silence.
"Yeah?"
There was a series of small creaks as Ryan shifted in his bed. "Nothing. It's just weird, not being the only one awake on one of these trips."
Shane chuckled. Ryan almost never slept a wink in most of the places they stayed for BuzzFeed Unsolved, mostly because of the reported hauntings they were there to investigate. Shane, on the other hand, usually fell asleep almost immediately.
Not tonight, though.
"Yeah," Shane replied, not sure really what there was to say. He sighed. "Been a hell of a trip, huh?"
As little as two hours ago, Ryan would have laughed. Now, he just sighed.
Neither of them got much sleep that night.

In the morning, Shane pushed himself out of bed. He glanced across the room at Ryan, who was turned with his back to him. It looked like he was finally getting some rest, so Shane made his way to the bathroom quietly, careful not to wake him. When he got out, Ryan was still asleep.
Shane sighed. He knew how much the videos meant to Ryan, and how badly he must be taking this. And so, Shane quietly searched the room for anything Ryan might have missed.
Nothing.
He went through the computer, searching through the files in case Ryan had just looked in the wrong place.
Nothing.
Shane leaned back in his chair and faced the truth. The footage was gone. They had no video for Night Vale.
Shuffling and a yawn behind him alerted Shane to Ryan waking up. He turned. Ryan rubbed his eyes and blinked at him.
"How long have you been up?"
"Not long." Shane answered. "How'd you sleep?"
Ryan groaned.
"That bad, huh?"
"Did you find anything?"
Reluctantly, Shane turned back to the laptop. "No." He admitted. "There's nothing here. Nothing in the camera, too. I...I don't know."
They stood in silence for a moment. It was Ryan who finally broke the spell.
"Well, I'm going to get cleaned up," He said, starting for the bathroom, "And I guess we'll meet up with Carlos or Cecil at some point today, right?"
"Right."
The shower ran from behind the closed door, and Shane did his best to put everything back in its place. As he did, he pushed the frustration of the missing footage aside. With that gone, a nagging thought rose in its place.
If their stuff was gone, then what happened to it?