Chương 184: CDM 3, Chapter 60: Board Meeting

Traveling in a straight line was a modern convenience, I realized. Hiking up and over a small mountain with no trails was a never-ending game of minor detours and course corrections. Go around that rock. Cut left a few steps to avoid the briars. Loop right to where the ground isn't quite so steep. Back up and try another way because no way am I traipsing through a giant patch of poison ivy. I ran a weedwhacker through poison sumac when I was a kid and spent a good chunk of my summer with it all up my arms and neck.

Lesson learned. Leave the mean plants alone. But this wasn't a pleasure hike, I couldn't forget. I could risk getting a rash if it meant getting a child out of a literal cage. Nothing was more important than finding our way to the other side so we could pick up on an old road. I wasn't extremely hopeful that said road would be in excellent condition. I knew from growing up in a similar area that the country roads that ended up on maps were only barely such.

Dirt and gravel were quick to switch their allegiance to nature and allow themselves to be overrun. We didn't speak with one another as we pushed through the brush. We may have been three-quarters of a mile away from our destination, but Hornby and I were pretty certain a lookout had spied us in Red Jacket during our first visit, so at least one or two people from this group watched their borders. Furthermore, sound behaved oddly in the mountains.

If you were in a neighboring valley, you weren't likely to hear what was happening right next door. But if you were in the valley when a tree fell, or a gunshot went off, the mountains turned into an echo chamber that carried the bang for miles. The people in Matewan were likely to hear if I loudly shouted "Fuck!" when I walked face-first into a low branch, for example. I tried to keep my mind on the mission and braced myself for what horrors we might see when we finally laid eyes on the town.

If I allowed shock or disbelief to cloud my thoughts, my reaction time could suffer. My choices needed to be quick and decisive if we ended up in a battle. If they weren't, my friends, the people trusting me with their lives, would pay the price. We found our road shortly after we began our descent down the other side of the mountain. Two parallel ruts were worn into the earth, cutting through waist-high grass and weeds.

This path was used often enough that its scar stayed fresh, but those journeys weren't frequent enough to leave any sign–even bent grass–that anyone had traveled this road in the last month. Following the road was much easier than climbing the mountain. On occasion, we would pause and crouch when one of us heard something. After a minute of quiet stillness, we resumed. Soon, we came to a break in the forest cover where we could see down onto the town at the bottom of the valley.

I uncapped my binoculars and started to scan. None of us spoke, but we each shared the same reaction. What were we looking at? The town was composed of legacy brick buildings built during the coal mining boom, with a mix of newly constructed log cabins sprinkled between. In several cases, one part of a building was more clearly residential, old and faded, but not unlike something I might see on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, and then the rest of it was more recent log walls.

A set of railroad tracks passed by the perimeter of the town. A palisade wall followed the railroad tracks on the far side, encasing the community in a protective barrier. Across the river, a town that was quite clearly larger than this one at one point was nothing but charred buildings overgrown with weeds and vines. Inside the walls, four elderly men sat in rocking chairs in the shade of a porch. Gravity had begun to shrink them from the strong men they once were.

Their wrinkled skin had the heavy texture common to farmers and laborers, and their hands were gnarled with arthritis earned from a lifetime of hard work. They all puffed on pipes and watched children chasing each other up and down the old streets. I scanned the rest of the town. A small solar farm occupied one corner. Women did laundry by hand with basins and washboards. A crew of men with axes, hatches, and hammers prepped timber joints for new construction.

A pair of people walked toward the fields with a wheelbarrow loaded with tools like hoes and rakes. Not far from them, two men stood by and watched with concern as a third man reached inside a tractor engine with a ratchet, occasionally gesturing to be given one of the parts scattered around him on the ground. I counted five more cages, built in the same manner as the first, but they were empty.

My church community probably looked something like this to an outsider, so I tried to remind myself that an idyllic surface could easily mask darkness beneath, but still. I expected to find a camp full of evil people. This, however, seemed like a nice, friendly place. Something metal tapped my helmet.

"Don't move," a raspy voice said.

"Anything sudden and you're a goner, you hear?" Fuck. I hadn't heard a thing. Was my guard down, or was the man behind me exceptionally stealthy? I slowly turned my head. The rest of my party had their own captors pointing blades at the backs of their necks. The chances that all four of us slipped up were slim. Were these men rogues, perhaps? Or rangers or druids. Those classes could move quietly through the forest as well.

"Leave the bow on the ground, raise your hands, and stand slowly. You got me? Slow." Nodding, I did as I was told. When I went to turn, he slapped me in the head to stop me, forcing me to look away.

"The fuck you doing creeping around out here?" the man behind me asked.

"Hunting bugbears."

"Funny guy. Are there more of you?"

"No," I replied immediately. Nathan and de Saint were a decent distance away from here, and we surrounded the truck with firecracker trip wires so they would know if anything attempted to sneak up on them. I had to hope their presence wasn't already known to these people. A young boy, perhaps 12, in stained denim and a dingy white t-shirt slipped by me and grabbed my bow. I felt the compulsion to stop him. That was my most important possession. No one should be allowed to touch it but me.

The boy inspected the frame.

"What tree grows purple?" he asked. I heard the other captors shift abruptly. A harder tap hit my helmet.

"The fuck you doing with voidwood? Who the hell are you people? FBI? ATF?" In that moment, it occurred to me that we had never discussed or addressed the topic of potential capture. We had no unified story. No strategy. No secret plan. The man pointing a blade at me, which I was beginning to think might be a spear based on how far away his voice sounded, seemed untrusting of three-letter acronyms, so I decided not to mention we were CDM.

"We're the Dungeon Divas," I explained.

"We hunt monsters and put the videos on YouTube."

"The hell is a Dungeon Diva?" the man spat.

"Sounds like an internet thing," one of the others suggested.

"Maybe they're homosexuals? Just one girl and a buncha boys calling themselves divas is kinda weird."

"I'll give you that it's weird," I said.

"It is the truth, though. Look, we are all wearing cameras."

"And you're down here looking for bugbears." I nodded.

"We've killed a few dozen so far. We had a tip that more were seen near Red Jacket."

"Just four of you going after tribes of bugbears? That doesn't make sense." Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"We're really fucking good at killing monsters."

"Yeah? What else you killed?"

"Can we talk without the weapons pointed at us?"

"Hell no," he growled.

"Answer the damn question."

"Umm… Lots of stuff in dungeons. For wild monsters, goblins mostly. Giant water moccasins, a few trolls, a helminth horror, and uhh…"

"Wraiths," Megan added.

"Had to run from wisps on that one. A werewolf once."

"Werewolf hunters, huh?" The way he asked the question suggested that we shouldn't have mentioned the Backyard Werewolf.

"All of you, helmets off. Slowly." We did as we were told. To the rest of his men, he said, "Tie 'em up good. Be careful with that one. I'll bet she's a lot meaner than she looks."

"Let me explain," I began.

"We didn't-" A thick, scratchy rope looped around my head and mouth, gagging me. That put an end to my attempts to placate our captors, at least for the time being. We marched down the mountain with speartips in our backs. The boy who took my bow was one of two who had accompanied the adults holding us hostage. Those boys now carried armfuls of weapons as well as crowbars, radios, and our bandoliers of flares and breach pens. After about 15 minutes, we emerged from the forest to step across the valley floor.

The people in town went quiet and stared as we passed. No one, not even the children, looked afraid of us. They did, however, look pissed. They split us up and put us each in one of the cages. I suspected that was the case at the time, but none of the cages were within sight of each other. I couldn't officially confirm where the rest of my party ended up until later. In the moment, all I knew was that I had been separated from my people, and they had been taken out of my sight.

This was the third time I had my hands bound behind my back. I couldn't decide what was worse, getting brake-checked by a patrol cop flunky who wanted to see my face bounce off the glass or these guys who left the rope gag in my mouth. After a minute, I was certain the rope was worse. It was the thick, hard material that was rough enough to leave rope splinters behind. It felt like licking a jagger bush and tasted like motor oil.

A few much younger children meandered by my cage, looking at me curiously and whispering.

"The hell you doin'?" a woman I couldn't see yelled.

"Get away from there this instant, and don't think about sneaking back unless you want a whooping." They scurried away. A few adults passed to gawk, and I wished they had been scolded as well. Strangers staring at you through layers of chain link is unpleasant. The helplessness felt like being back in a holding cell, but worse. I wasn't still handcuffed then, and I had access to a toilet. God damn it. I shouldn't have thought about having to pee. Now I couldn't stop thinking about having to pee.

We had set out on this excursion at dawn, and it was maybe 10 a. m. when we were captured. I sat in that cage, hands behind my aching back, rope in my mouth, until the sun started to set. I was about to accept that I had no choice but to pee my pants when I looked up at a familiar face.

"Hornby?" He smiled, a rub bulging his lower lip. A middle-aged man with a bushy beard and his own chunk of chew removed the padlock and unthreaded the chain. It took him a minute, but he eventually got the ropes off, triggering a new wave of soreness as my joints tried to move again.

"Thank you, but I really have to piss," I said. The man led me around the back of a shed, and Hornby followed. They stood at my back a few feet away while I relieved myself.

"We've got more talking to do," Hornby said, "but no one's dumping our bodies in the river. This is Rankin, by the way."

"Uhh… nice to meet you," I said, still peeing.

"I hear you're a West Virginia boy," he replied with a bit of a twang.

"We got a doomer runaway or two." When I was finally finished, Rankin added, "Alright. Town hall is this way." The moment Rankin wasn't looking, I shot Hornby a look. He gave me a reassuring nod that this was going in a good direction.

"You've got a beautiful place here," I said, trying to make conversation.

"Can't talk to you about nothing yet. Not personal."

"Yeah, okay. Fair. But do you two know each other or something?"

"Rankin and I like the same brand," Hornby explained, pointing at his rub.

"Then, when I told him I'm from Kentucky, he started in on some Hatfield bullshit. We eventually figured out that we were both decent folk."

"What is 'Hatfield bullshit?'" I asked.

"The dirty McCoys over in Kentucky kicked off a feud with the Hatfields, not long after Gettysburg," Rankin answered, barely turning his head as we walked.

"Bastards were disrespectful as all hell, and it kept going." Hornby shook his head.

"See what I mean? Everybody knows the Hatfields started it and kept it going. There was even a Romeo and Juliet moment at one point, and the Hatfields ruined that too."

"You know what the difference between a cow and a Kentuckian?" Rankin asked.

"Can't say I do," I answered.

"A cow's bullshit comes out their ass."

"He just wishes the Mountaineers knew what to do with a football," Hornby poked.

"Wildcats always make 'em look bad." Now that reference I knew. They were college football teams.

"If Hornby was a Jarhead, we woulda got along from the start," Rankin joked, kind of.

"The Army is good at recruiting, though. Can't hold that against him too much." We climbed the steps of an old one-room schoolhouse. Rankin held the door open to let us inside. Wooden folding chairs were set out in rows with three foldout card tables at the front, making the space look like any other rural town hall. Megan and Giago were already seated. Where Rankin behaved like he knew I wasn't a threat, six men, three on either side of the room, carried spears and eyed us suspiciously.

Hornby had succeeded in convincing one of them not to hate us, so I had hope we could do the same with the others. The depth of their scowls, however, suggested it wouldn't be easy. A scrawny man with a comb-over bald spot and a long white beard–looking the part of a cliché country boy who played a banjo and brewed moonshine–came in behind us. Two other men his age joined him, as well as two who looked closer to my age. When Megan could see my face, she mouthed, "Are you okay?" I nodded.

"You?" She nodded back, and I didn't sense any degree of posturing in her response. She wasn't being tough for the sake of the rest of us. She really had been treated okay. When the old man and his entourage claimed their seats behind the tables, I took that to mean these were the village elders or whatever the equivalent title was in this particular town.

"My name is Silas," the old man began.

"We've got ourselves a mess to deal with here. Y'all weren't supposed to find this place, but it's hard to fault someone trying to help a child. Saw some of the video on your cameras too. We know you ain't lying about hunting bugbears. Now, who's the leader of this posse?" We all inclined our heads toward Megan, except for her. She raised her hand.

"Do you know why we wanna be left alone?"

"If I had to guess, it's because werewolves live here," Megan answered.

"Now what makes you say that?"

"The men who found us got upset when we told them we had killed a werewolf before. Just so everyone present hears this, we didn't know it was an Earthborn werewolf. It was the first one ever recorded. We thought it was from a gate, and our people have turned down requests to hunt other werewolves." That was a generous interpretation of our declining the EPA's request to investigate a possible werewolf in Buffalo, but Megan wasn't lying, technically.

"Sounds like we need a bit more training for guard duty if you figured that already," Silas said with a sigh.

"We ain't all got the virus, but enough of us do that we weren't keen on Uncle Sam knowing about it. I wasn't around to see them, but I know they put Japs in camps just for being Japs. And this used to be a company town, which is its own kind of internment camp. Easiest thing to do would be to bury your bodies, but it sounds like you got people who would come looking." Our party nodded emphatically.

"We do," Megan added.

"Protecting our own comes first. If we let you leave, we risk you blabbing all about what you seen. That's just as bad as having folks looking for you."

"We have no desire to disrupt what you've built here," Megan said.

"I know that a verbal reassurance isn't enough to convince you, but it does need to be said. We hunt monsters so they don't hurt people. We don't hunt people." Silas looked to his left and right.

"Most of us believe that you are just monster hunters like you say, but a promise and a handshake won't do it, no."

"Maybe we could help you in some way," Megan suggested.

"How's that? We got everything we need already." Megan looked to her party for support, inviting us to contribute our own ideas.

"But you don't, though," I said.

"How's that?"

"You are justifiably concerned about your safety here. You don't have the level of certainty in your security that you'd like to have."

"Don't have to talk fancy to make us respect ya."

"... This is just how I talk."

"Sure is," Hornby confirmed.

"What would you do to make us safer?" Silas asked.

"Well, I have a few thoughts."