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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/sandboy810 on 2024-10-28 16:11:33+00:00.

I was born in Sunset Bay, Florida, or at least I thought I was born there. I thought I was raised there, spent seventeen and a half years of my life there, went to school there, had my first kiss there, and almost lost my virginity there, but now I can’t even be sure. You see, as far as the world seems to be concerned, there is no such place as Sunset Bay, Florida, and there never was.

Unfortunately, this story began with Hurricane Milton. As we’re all well aware by now, Milton was utterly devastating for many fellow Floridians this month, and let me just say that my heart goes out to them all, well and truly. Luckily for me, though, I’d moved out of Florida with my family in 1995, just a few months before I turned eighteen, and I now reside in British Columbia, here in Canada.

Understandably, though, when I heard that Milton made landfall in Florida, I was concerned for my hometown. I’d never been incredibly attached to Sunset Bay, and frankly, it’d been years since I’d even thought of the place- I have two sons and a wife, so there are more important things in my life than reminiscing about my formative years down south. However, when I learned Milton had made a pass around near Big Cypress down by Ochopee, that got my blood pumping something fierce. You see, Sunset Bay is (or was, or maybe never was) only a handful of miles away. 

Naturally, I hopped on my computer when I got the chance and did some searching. I looked up ‘Hurricane Milton Sunset Bay’. At first, I was relieved to find I’d come up with zero results. I figured that meant there hadn’t been anything newsworthy there, which could’ve been good news in and of itself. But I was soon struck by the realization that I wasn’t seeing any news about Sunset Bay because the search engine had taken the liberty of assuming I was asking about Sunset Beach down on Treasure Island. So I tried rephrasing- ‘Hurricane Milton Sunset Bay, Florida, Ochopee’, but… Nothing.

All I got was a handful of irrelevant pages on Sunset Beach, Siesta Key, and even Tampa. I was hit each time with a prompt asking me something like ‘Did you mean Hurricane Milton Sunset Beach’? I found myself, like a real old man, sitting there while verbally beginning to chew out the computer.

“No,” I would say, “NO, not Sunset Beach, Sunset Bay.”

I found myself getting so fed up with what I took to be some sort of Abbot and Costello-style mixup that I ended up trying to soothe my seething self by simply typing in ‘Sunset Bay’ with the hope that’d get me somewhere, but to my shock and SEVERE annoyance, I found myself yet again redirected to Sunset Beach. For context, Sunset Beach is a whole five or so hours from where Sunset Bay should be, they are not the same place in any sense of the word. 

I found myself seething even further, typing in ‘Sunset Bay’ into my search bar with every sort of permutation I could think of. ‘Sunset Bay’, ‘Sunset Bay Florida’, ‘Sunset Bay, Florida’, ‘Florida Sunset Bay United States’, ‘Sunset Bay Ochobee Florida United States’, but never got a SINGLE result. 

By then, I was livid, but I was also determined- determined to beat the computer, as dumb as that sounds, to get the results I was looking for. Call me stupid, call me stubborn, call the endeavour pointless, I simply wanted it to work, ONCE. But it never worked, not even once. Not even a hint of acknowledgement that Sunset Bay EVER existed. Not even Google Maps would acknowledge its existence- believe me, I tried.

Eventually, it got to the point where I figured that the only way to get this damn thing working would be to stop looking up Sunset Bay itself and instead look up some specific place in Sunset Bay that may have some sort of website, maybe online reviews, maybe a blog post… something, anything.

So I took a pause, rolled back from the desk, furrowed my brow, and got to thinking. I tried to think of where the most significant, internet-worthy place from back home might be, but the moment the neurons began firing off in my mind I was struck with a pain so intense I can hardly even describe it. I’d imagine it felt like how it would feel if your skull was cleaved apart with an axe and then boiling pitch was poured into the gaping wound. I screamed my lungs out, grabbed my head with both hands and came careening down onto the floor, gasping and panting like a drowning man.

The world felt like it was going out of focus, but, my ear on the ground, I could hear the dull footsteps of my eldest son running into the room, followed shortly by my wife, as they hoisted me onto my feet as best they could. They asked me what was wrong, and why I had shouted, and I could only respond by telling them it was probably nothing, just a bad headache. Even so, my wife, who has some sort of sick addiction to these medical channels on YouTube, made me promise to see a doctor because she told me there was something called ‘Thunderclap Headaches’ and they could be a sign of something really dangerous. Before you ask, no, I haven’t gone yet, but I’m booked in for next week with my GP.

To my relief, it seemed as though as soon as the subject was changed and my mind drifted back from the vague memories of my home town, I felt good as new again, as though nothing had even happened. I gave my family reassurances as best as I could, gave my wife a quick kiss and my son a hug, and placed myself firmly back down in my chair.

I was back in the saddle, and I hadn’t been bested yet. 

“Piece of shit,” I murmured as I slapped the keyboard, looking up to see my wife, hand outstretched with some Tylenol for me, to whom I quickly clarified that the computer was the piece of shit, not her. She gave me a quick, understanding chuckle, and left, leaving me alone once again with my new arch nemesis, the computer.

However, it only took me a few more failed searches to get utterly fed up, and one “Ah, to hell with it…” later I was storming out of the room, throwing in the metaphorical towel.

I had better things to do with my time… Or so I thought. Because, that night, as I lay in bed, I found myself grumbling, huffing and puffing to myself like a candy-deprived child about the whole debacle. However, the more I ran over the whole situation in my mind, the more my frustration began to morph into unease, and the more thoughts like ‘Why the hell couldn’t I find anything about Sunset Bay?!’ to ‘Why couldn’t I find anything about Sunset Bay?’ Surely it’s an abnormal occurrence for a town with a public school, thousands of residents, and several notable businesses to simply disappear not just from the map, but from the veritable neo-library of Alexandria that is the internet, right?

I couldn’t take it any more. My annoyance had morphed into an overwhelming sense of dread, and I found myself in desperate need of SOME assurance that this was all some huge mistake. So I went digging- not through the computer this time- but through an old wicker cabinet by the edge of the bed full of keepsakes and mementoes. After a few moments of searching I found what I was looking for: my middle-school yearbook from Sunset Bay Public School- an incredibly creative name, trust me, I know.

To not wake my wife I slipped away with the book back into my office, cracked it open across the desk like some sort of ancient scroll, and found my dread quickly turning to terror.

There I was- my page was bookmarked- and to my right should have been Brock Tanner, but I found my greasy, pimple-pocked face next to a pale, grey square, and below, where the name should have been, was an amorphous black smudge like the ink had been nearly rubbed out with a cloth. 

A misprint, maybe? I thought so, but I became less and less certain the more laminated pages I turned, finding myself faced with an ocean of grey squares and black smudges swirling into a blobby mess like a horrifying Rorschach test occasionally broken up by a calm, unbothered young face on whom the horror of this whole ordeal was understandably lost. 

Eyes glued to the page, I found myself fumbling for the landline, dialling the school’s phone number as if from muscle memory from all those days playing hookey as a kid. It never even crossed my mind that even if this was all some huge misunderstanding, they’d certainly be closed in the dead of night. 

But the phone rang. It rang, and rang… and then it rang again, but a little softer… and softer still. The quivering sounds of the line grew faint and distant, quieter still, as though the phone were being dropped down a bottomless pit, falling away until it was entirely indistinct. I nearly screamed in surprise when breaking up the dead silence, a robotic voice boomed, crackling and monotone, telling me the call was unable to be completed as dialled, before booting me out, leaving me right back where I started, eyes wild, panting in distress, fists clenched on the arms of my chair.

“Mackenzie, Mackenzie…” I stammered to myself, in a fervour now, glancing down at the face of Mackenzie Connors, one of the few remaining human buoys in the ocean of nothingness which glared back at me from the page.I went right to the computer, booted it up, and typed in ‘Mackenzie Connors, Sunset Bay, Florida’, and to my surprise and delighted relief I was able to find what seemed to be her LinkedIn page which, while having no visible mention of Sunset Bay, did mention that she was from Florida, and she looked to be about the right build and age to be her.

…

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