Chương 163: CDM 3, Chapter 39: Superstitions

"Wait." Giago held a hand up.

"How are you pronouncing it?"

"Punks-uh-tawn-ee," Nathan said, annunciating slowly.

"Punxsutawney."

"Close enough."

"I heard of the groundhog thing, but I didn't realize it was actually a thing," Giago added.

"Who decided that a groundhog shadow was connected to the weather?"

"Punxsutawney Phil is a fucking fraud," Hornby declared, spitting some chew into the grass outside of the garage.

"General Beauregard Lee is the real thing." Nathan shook his head.

"Bro, I don't know why, but I feel like I have to be offended by that. I don't even know who the fuck that is, but I can't abide someone shit-talking Phil." Hornby shrugged.

"General Beauregard Lee is a groundhog in Georgia. He makes predictions on Groundhog Day, but his are real."

"There's only one magical groundhog making predictions on Groundhog Day. And it's Punxsutawney Phil. Any other groundhog is a poser."

"I'm just telling you the science," Hornby said.

"Punksy Phil is a faker. General Lee is the real thing."

"Uhh… Hornby's right," de Saint interrupted with a tone of shocked surprise. Reading from her phone, she continued, "'The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calculated General Lee to be more accurate than Punxsutawney Phil, boasting an 80% accuracy rate compared to Phil's 35%.'" Nathan snatched her phone.

"No fucking way." After a brief pause to read, he said, "My life has been a lie." Tapping his can of snuff on his palm before opening it, Hornby replied, "Sorry, man, but it's better if you know the truth."

"Oh, look at that," Nathan added.

"He lives in a little mini mansion. That's cute." Megan pulled in and hopped out of her car.

"Load up!" she commanded.

"Don't we have to wait for McDouglas?" de Saint asked.

"He's not available. We're on our own." Giago laughed.

"Second mission for the Cold Rollers, and mom and dad are already leaving us unsupervised."

"I think we can manage," Megan said. Nathan climbed into the driver's seat, punched the address into the GPS, and started to drive. Megan twisted in the passenger seat to address the four of us in the back. De Saint had a laptop open, while Hornby, Giago, and I had the location pulled up on our phones.

"Four children were playing in a backyard at sunset," Megan began.

"The backyard butted up against a wooded area. Mom heard screaming, and by the time she got outside, only one of the four escaped. The other three were carried off. I should note here that the identification of them being goblins is based on the child's account. No adult actually saw goblins. We don't have any reason to doubt that it's goblins, but we should know it isn't confirmed. Rainy, do you have it up?"

"No SOCs or RAID sightings in that area," de Saint replied.

"That wooded area is surrounded on three sides by structures, most of which look like inhabited homes. Farther away from the town, though, we've got a few ruins. A couple of homes, two old industrial buildings, and one small apartment building. Any of those could hold a nest, and there could be something in the forest we don't know about."

"Any Domestic Dungeon hits?" Nathan asked, looking in the rearview to address de Saint.

"Good question," she answered.

"I'll look."

"Police are searching the structures around the perimeter," Megan added.

"They're going to let us know if they find anything."

"Tracking these bastards at night is going to be a bitch," Hornby said, squinting at his phone screen. Megan nodded.

"Agreed. If there's a chance the kids are alive, we have to try. Otherwise, we would wait until morning."

"One post from one of those neighborhood apps," de Saint announced.

"This person says, 'Did anyone hear goblins yelling in the woods just now?' The same person has also posted, 'Did anyone hear that gunshot?' three times in the past." Giago chuckled.

"My mom uses an app like that. It's nothing but 'Did anyone get my package?' and 'What was that noise?' all day, every day."

"Do you have a location for that message?" Megan asked.

"Exact locations are obfuscated in apps like these." After a pause to think, Megan said, "Here's what we're going to do: Hornby, Gray, you're going to see about tracking the goblins through the woods."

"Kimmy and Rainy, I want you to search the forest with thermal. They're probably already back in the nest by now, but maybe we find part of the nest on the move. Giago, you and I will split up. We'll have one of the local police drive us both around the perimeter to double-check those ruins. They might have missed something, so we're going to be sure."

"As soon as one of us gets a lead," Megan continued, "We'll coordinate through Rainy. Make sure your comms volume is up. We're going to move fast as soon as we find something." Everyone nodded. The home was a humble doublewide with bicycles and plastic three-wheelers tipped over in the yard. With the flashing police lights, finding the exact address was easy enough. As soon as we parked, Nathan and de Saint unfolded their stations.

Enforcer Black was in the RAID room that night, and he had begun doing a thermal search with the RAID drone already. As soon as de Saint was online, he ceded control to her. Megan jumped out of the van.

"We're Rapid Response from CDM," she declared.

"Who's in charge?" A mustachioed police officer emerged from a huddle of officers and introduced himself. Megan relayed the same plan to him as we heard in the van, and we split up a moment later. A younger officer led Hornby and me to the backyard.

"The children were playing around the trampoline when the attack started," she explained, gesturing at a trampoline with rusty springs and a half-upright safety barrier. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. It was only a few yards from the treeline. Though it was well into the night at that point, I could imagine how dark those woods would get at sunset. Popping out of there to grab a victim wouldn't be hard.

The edge of the property also had an old above-ground pool and a shed. Those would make good cover for a goblin ambush too.

"The only witness says the children were dragged through there." The officer pointed at what might have been a deer trail, a slit of a passage that parted the tall grass and brambles that weren't in the forest proper but also never got mowed. Hornby and I clicked on our headlamps as well as our flashlights and started to search. Three local police officers stood nearby, watching us with their arms crossed. I was shit at tracking during the day. Tracking at night felt outright foolish.

Even the smallest of shadows could hide the clue we needed to pick up the trail, something no bigger than that of a dead leaf.

"Real fucking rocky," Hornby observed with a frown, kneeling just inside the treeline, looking at stones kicked loose from the dirt.

"Pretty obvious there was a lot of activity here. Kids struggling, probably."

"And they went down the deer trail," I added. The branches on either side of the worn path had been disturbed. No twigs were glaringly broken, but a few leaves were twisted the wrong way, their darkest greens facing the ground instead of upward where the sun would be. We followed the narrow path, arriving at a section that was nearly all tree roots and basketball-sized rocks. There was scarcely room for dirt among them.

When more forgiving terrain resumed on the other side of that stretch, we found three different deer trails branching off. None of them had any obvious tracks to follow.

"We should split up," I suggested.

"We've got three trails to search, and we're mostly in each other's way anyhow." Hornby nodded and quietly picked one trail, and I picked another.

"Not seeing any candidates on my route," Megan reported over the radio.

"Giago, you see anything?"

"No, ma'am. We have a few more up the street to check."

"I just finished the last one on my side. I'm heading back to the original site. Kimmy, Rainy?"

"Nothing on our end either," de Saint replied.

"Hornby and Gray?"

"No leads yet," I reported.

"Same here," Hornby added.

"Rainy," I radioed.

"How far into the woods am I, and how far until it ends?"

"You're almost a half mile in and have maybe a third of a mile to go." I hadn't seen anything useful, but since no one else had either, I opted to continue. A few minutes later, I came across a drainage ditch lined with stones wrapped in chicken wire. That sort of construction was used to prevent erosion, but the creek that ran through was barely a dribble. I guessed that this was probably for rainwater. If I followed it to the left, I would be going in Hornby's general direction.

If I went right, I would soon reach the outside edge of our search. I went right. The ditch continued to descend gently and ended at a pipe that punched through a hillside and under an old road. Even from below, the wire-cord guardrail had clearly been neglected for years, most of it hanging limply from shifted posts. The pipe itself was large enough for me to stand in with only a slight hunch. Scuffs of mud started where the ditch ended and faded to loose dirt a few feet into the pipe.

"I might have something," I radioed.

"Rainy, what's on the other side of this drain pipe?"

"One second, Gray… I can't see a pipe from here, but straight ahead from you is a little more forest and then some railroad tracks. There are a dozen or so railcars sitting on the tracks. They're clumped together. This section of the rail has five sets of track side by side, so the cluster is… 4 cars deep and roughly 6 cars long. There are a few other cars nearby, though, too. Shit. It's pretty fucking bright on thermal."

"Kimmy," Megan ordered, "scout the rail cars. Hornby, Giago–meet me at the original scene. We'll get there faster if we drive. Gray, begin your approach, but wait for Kimmy to confirm potential hostiles. Remember that kids could be around, so be cautious with the voidwood."

"Roger that." I crept through the pipe. I didn't see any goblin footprints, but I did find sticky blood, and a lot of it. Someone suffered a major injury when they were almost to the other side, and based on the streak marks that came after, they were dragged the rest of the way. When the drain pipe ended, the ditch turned sharply and continued on, running parallel to the train tracks. I didn't have a good vantage point on the tracks themselves, but I could see the tops of railcars up the bank.

The goblins had worn a footpath between the tracks and the drain pipe from all the times they went up and down the hillside. Another trail, something akin to a rut, ran to my left into thick undergrowth. A dirty aquarium smell hit me. That wasn't the scent of a goblin latrine, but it felt familiar. I couldn't say why.

"This is a goblin nest," Nathan confirmed over the radio.

"They're using five railcars at the rough center of the cluster."

"Any clues about what cars the kids might be in?" Megan asked.

"I can go lower and see. There's a chance I spook them, though."

"Kimmy, hold for a moment. We're almost there. Gray, on my mark, make a bunch of noise. We'll crash from the other side."

"Roger that." 90 long seconds later, where I waited dutifully at the bottom of the embankment, Megan made the call. I panicked. What noises should I make? What would get goblins to investigate? I had no idea, so I started singing the first song that came to my head.

"Gray," Nathan radioed.

"Three mobs coming your way." I saw their misshapen heads and gnarled ears first, and that was all I needed to aim. When I loosed my first arrow, I heard goblins shouting and hissing over the sudden clamor of battle. The rest of the Cold Rollers hit them from behind while the goblins investigated the strange solo performance coming from the woods. Then it stopped as quickly as it had begun.

"Gray, Kimmy–search the perimeter for stragglers." A little while later, Megan radioed in a defeated voice.

"Clear." I announced that I was coming around the rail cars to avoid anyone stabbing or shooting me and found my party standing outside the door of one of the cars. Their faces and body language told me everything, but I had to see for myself. I poked my head into the car and wished that I hadn't. None of the three children, the oldest no more than 11, survived. Goblin cruelty was on full display inside, and I didn't have the strength to look at it for very long. Which made me feel worse about the situation.

Those kids had to endure it, and I wasn't man enough to fully acknowledge what they went through. A few seconds of observation was all the more I could muster. Megan was already on the phone with the police, and I could see red and blue flashing lights approaching in the distance.

"Kimmy, Rainy," I radioed.

"Can one of you track my position for a moment? I want to check something."

"I'm with you, Gray," de Saint replied. I slid back down the hill to the drainpipe, where I noticed the aquarium smell. The other trail I found was smoother than any deer trail or goblin footpath, and I paused when I saw a brown, papery object shaped like a Cheeto and the size of a football.

"What's in this direction if I keep going?" I asked.

"Satellite images show what's left of an old farm building. Might have been a house with a barn at one point, but it's mostly just a foundation now. I can't get a great visual on it myself because of the trees."

"Thank you, Rainy," I said, and returned to the party on the train tracks. Megan spoke with the police a few yards away from the train car while the paramedics and the medical examiner argued about the best way to collect and remove the remains. Giago and Hornby separated from the spectacle and waited a little way down the tracks for Megan to issue more orders. I walked to join them.

"Interesting song selection," Giago said when I was close.

"Not what I would have picked, but you gave it your all." Hornby held up a piece of grass that he tied into a small, nickel-sized loop. He held it out for me.

"This is for you."

"What is it?"

"A gift."

"Okay…" I accepted it. Hornby sighed, disappointed I hadn't caught on.

"I like it, so I'm putting a ring on it."