Chương 122: CDM 2, Chapter 58: Personal Hygiene

The entire city seemed to be on the hunt for Martin Kielar's killer. Half of Pittsburgh showed up for a candlelight vigil in his honor.

"Justice for Kielar" t-shirts and bracelets appeared all over. And the news seemed incapable of discussing anything else. Even the weather had a lower-thirds ticker of Kielar investigation updates, which was excessive because there were none. In terms of what was disclosed to the public, investigators hadn't learned anything beyond what Enforcer McDouglas already told me. A high-level crawler with a voidwood bow fired their shot through two buildings, a distance that an average Marksman build couldn't achieve.

The unfounded theories ranged from rival American crawlers wanting to eliminate a competitor to a black ops government effort to keep Kielar from talking about what really happened in the S gate. My favorite theory was that a spy from South Africa did it. Apparently, Kielar had done some crawls in that country when he was younger, and finding people there who still disliked him wasn't hard. I just wanted to stop hearing and reading his fucking name hundreds of times a day.

"This is the most bachelor shit I have ever seen," Megan said, stepping into the ground floor of the guild house. We had an overstuffed floral couch with only one questionable stain, a few camping chairs, our kitchen furniture, a dozen totes, our beds, and standing screens around the toilet. We had three space heaters. The walls were still down to their studs. We walked on old subfloor, and we ran a bunch of extension cords for lamps because only two of the overhead lights still worked.

"There's no place like home," Nathan said.

"Want a beer?"

"Sure." I was already up, so I grabbed a can from the refrigerator in the far corner of the room and brought it to Megan.

"How was work?" I asked.

"Same shit. Different day. You have your psych eval tomorrow, right?" I shook my head.

"They pushed it back to the end of the week."

"Why would they do that?"

"They didn't say."

"Sorry, Dor." I shrugged.

"It's fine. If the time off wasn't paid, I'd be freaking out."

"You sounded excited on the phone," Nathan said.

"What's up?" Grinning, Megan considered the couch dubiously before finally sitting down and opening her laptop.

"I have a theory about our mystery monster." She opened a calendar.

"These are the dates Tim lost a cow. See how there's roughly the same amount of time between kills?" We nodded.

"That could be a monster taking food back to its den and not coming out until it was hungry again, or-" she activated a calendar overlay.

"-maybe our monster is following moon cycles."

"Dungeon werewolves don't need the moon to change, though," Nathan replied.

"The moon cycles are old Earth stories. Real werewolves do it on command."

"Have you ever looked into the research that confirms that?" Megan asked.

"Nope."

"There isn't any. Crawlers observed werewolves changing at will inside dungeons, so everyone tossed the moon theory. What if it worked both ways?"

"At will and moon-driven?" She nodded excitedly.

"I think she has a point," I said. Nathan nodded.

"Sure does. So this lone werewolf escaped a gate and has been hiding in the mountains ever since?" Megan shrugged.

"That's the only explanation. Even in human form, it would be feral, but who knows about whether it leaves its wolf form. Maybe the moon just makes them more active, you know?"

"Did we assume the research about lycanthropy too, or does that exist?" Nathan asked.

"That definitely exists," Megan said.

"We guessed that moon phases don't matter, but the other studies on lycanthropy are pretty wild. There's a declassified program where they tried to inject soldiers with the virus. Even intentionally, the virus wouldn't jump to Earth humans. Can you imagine how bad it would be if it could? We would have been overrun decades ago." I looked at my phone.

"The next full moon is 3 days away."

"Correct. I'm trying to get my shift switched. De Saint and Wilson are already cool with it, but Black is being a baby. He'll cave, though."

"So we stakeout the farm and hope it shows up?" Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"I have two ideas," Megan said.

"One, we do what you said. Stake out the cows and kill it when it shows up. Werewolves are fast as hell, though. I'm worried it would bolt on us, and that would be it. So my second idea is that we let it feed, and then Kimmy follows it back to wherever it lives. We risk losing it if we do that too."

"I bet Tim will love a plan where another cow gets merced," Nathan joked. Megan shrugged.

"Neither are perfect."

"If we know where its den is, we could confirm if it's alone or there's more," I added. Nathan wrinkled his face.

"I know Kimmy has thermal, but that forest gets really damn thick and has lots of pines. Even with the leaves down, it might be hard to track a heat signature with a bunch of branches in the way."

"If that's the case, then I'd rather we try to nail it out in the open," I said.

"It has an advantage in the forest, so we get it in the pasture. If it runs, Kimmy does her best, and we see what happens."

"Don't forget that I have to be close to stuff to hit it," Megan pointed out.

"If it's in the middle of a field, I'm not going to be able to run it down."

"I think that's solvable. Give me a minute to call Tim and get his take." Megan didn't believe me when I said I hated the idea as much as she did. I really did, but that didn't change the reality of hunting a wild werewolf. Canines had incredible senses of smell. If we sat in the middle of the field, any kind of dog, werewolf or otherwise, would clock our scent. No question. When we visited Tim before, I noticed he had a stack of water buffaloes and half a dozen unused water troughs.

I asked him to put one trough in the field, and to pile the others at the fenceline like he was getting rid of them. He wasn't thrilled about the labor, but he played along. I lie down in the trough in the field, and Megan hid under a trough near the fenceline. We smelled like cow shit. How you're imagining we did that is exactly how we did it, so this was a rare occasion where we forewent armor. We didn't wear anything we weren't willing to pitch when this was over.

Megan was pissed, but Beth and Nathan believed it would be good for views. They also didn't have to endure what Megan and I did, so that was an easy stance for them to take. I did my best not to think about it, but lying in a water trough hoping a werewolf comes around didn't give me much else to do. Beth and Nathan sat in the car while Kimmy floated high overhead. I learned later that I waited in that trough for 3 and a half hours before Nathan spoke in my earpiece.

"Movement in the woods. Coming down the trail on all fours." My heart rate spiked as I did my best to control my breathing. I needed to be patient.

"It's at the fence. I can see its head moving around on thermal, but no clear- It's over the fence and in the field. This is our werewolf." Be quiet, and be patient, I told myself.

"It's sniffing around the ground now. Dor, it's cutting an angle. The cows are at your two o'clock, and it looks like the wolf is going that direction. It's definitely alone… Okay. Almost time. 5… 4… 3… 2…" I jumped out of the trough with my headlamp on and began loosing arrows. The ogre gate wasn't that long ago, nor was the Hill District troll, but I still felt like I hadn't drawn a bow in ages.

Perhaps that was an appreciation for my freedom after my close call with law enforcement, but either way, the movement felt amazing. Nock. Draw. Loose. Nock. Draw. Loose. The smooth speed. The quickening rhythm as Momentum added up. That satisfying thunk of an arrow finding its mark. I missed it all so much. The werewolf snarled but made no attempt to charge me. Instead, it bolted for the fenceline, galloping on all fours, covering 40 yards in three powerful strides.

"Uh Megan, 3-2-1," Nathan said in my earpiece, counting rapidly. A trough flew to the side, and Megan was on her feet. The werewolf, still panicked by my arrows, was mid-gallop when it saw Megan. It scrambled to stop itself, spraying mud and manure as it slid, clawing at the wet soil to slow itself. With the monster still careening forward, despite its efforts, Megan shimmered, activating her Taunt just to be safe.

She swung her sword like a baseball bat, the werewolf's own speed playing into the blow, cutting the head clean off its shoulders. The werewolf slumped forward, its momentum carrying it a few feet farther, and went still.

"Got him," Megan said through her headset.

"I don't see any other thermal sigs," Nathan reported.

"Bringing Kimmy low to look directly into the treeline… Looks like we're clear. It was alone. Well done, Divas. Excellent show." I heard Beth cheering in the background. With one hand, I dragged the werewolf carcass by its paw back toward Tim's house. I had the werewolf head under my other arm, which I was not thrilled about, but Megan was a good–or rather a kind of okay–sport about masking our scent. I could do a little extra work for her sake. She helped me with the body, dragging the opposite paw.

Hosing off outside at 1 a. m. in late January was the hardest part of the whole ordeal, but we gritted through it, wrapped ourselves in towels and blankets, and went to a motel room in Uniontown. No way were Megan and I sitting in manure marinade all the way back to Pittsburgh.

"Was Tim happy?" Megan asked Nathan. He had gone to give Tim the good news while Megan and I got the hose.

"He thought we would take the body too. I told him he needed to give it to the EPA." Megan laughed.

"Disposal costs extra. How'd it look on camera?"

"Freaking badass," Beth answered from the passenger seat.

"The Hill District troll video is killing it right now too." That episode went live earlier that day. With little else to do in the car, Beth had been checking in on our view counts.

"People are watching the whole thing," she added.

"Plenty still skip right to the troll fight, but we're seeing way longer view times than most of the guides say to expect."

"Megan's editing hits another homerun," I said, and though that sounded like flattery, it wasn't. Megan was coming into her own as an editor. Each video was progressively more well done, and the Hill District troll video was no exception. She really brought out the story, pulling in quotes from news videos and articles from back when rumors of the trolls first began.

She mixed in our interviews with people in the neighborhood, like Krystal at the bar, and she used our prepping and scouting process as a smooth buildup to the final hunt. At this rate, her videos would rival those of the bigger crawler channels, the ones with full teams managing every step of the production and publishing process.

"A wild werewolf is going to catch people's attention too," Beth added.

"That's rarer than a troll sighting."

"I don't want to hunt anything with a good sense of smell ever again," Megan groaned.

"The shit is never coming out of my skin." And that wasn't so far off the mark. When I got my turn in the motel shower, I needed three full-body scrubs to escape my self-imposed stench. I didn't care that much, though. I was happy to put another successful hunt on our record.