Chương 179: CDM 3, Chapter 55: Contractors

George Baker is being framed. This footage has clearly been altered. Who cares if he killed crashers? He's doing our country a service by getting rid of that scum. Why is this news? CKing is legal now, or did everyone forget? I refreshed my feed. World leaders scramble missions to Talatal Ghar to investigate high-level natives. United Nations issues statement urging caution in approaching wild crawlers. The Wilds: Race Asia producers accused of elaborate publicity stunt. Are the Talatal Ghar crawlers real?

5 shocking clues that the story is a fake. I hit refresh again. 78 dead after frost drakes attack Canadian passenger plane. 22 dead in New Eden after wild Stage 2 D gate surge sends bigals into settlement. Extremist doomers promise more surges are imminent. CDM's efforts to limit crawler fatalities are too little too late.

"Are you okay?" de Saint asked just before our orders were called.

"I sometimes wonder if being informed is the good thing I thought it was." De Saint laughed as she checked the lids on the cups in the drink carrier.

"Ignorance is bliss until it isn't. For what it's worth, I wish I could look away too."

"Feels like the whole world is about to lose it," I said.

"I try to imagine what it felt like to be someone who saw concentration camps at the end of World War II, only to come home to dungeon gates dumping monsters into the streets. They must have thought that was the end of it all right there."

"And you wonder if how they felt about all of those horrors then is how you feel now."

"Yeah." Outside, we waited for the lights to change so we could cross the street back to the CDM offices.

"I don't mean this to sound snarky, but why does the comparison matter?" de Saint asked. I thought.

"For some reason, it feels significant to think, 'Has it ever been worse than this?' I couldn't tell you why, though."

"Of everything going on right now, I'm most freaked out about how we're handling the potential of isolated tribes having levels over 30."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Every other instance of humans 'discovering' new people has come with a crazy power imbalance. Native Americans didn't stand a chance against settlers, for example, and the story is the same all over the world. The Inuit, Mayans, Incas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People–they got run over by more modern cultures."

"Right…"

"These people Louis found? This might be the first time we have found people stronger than the rest of the modern world. What would have happened if settlers came to America with muskets and discovered that Native Americans had machine guns?"

"A whole different kind of history would spill out of that." De Saint nodded as I held the door for her.

"If we treat these people like we've always treated indigenous communities with desirable resources, they actually have the power to fight back. Louis was scared of them because he understood right away that he was outmatched. How much damage could one level 40 do before they're stopped? What about 20 or 50 of them?" I sighed.

"What?"

"You just gave me a new apocalypse scenario to worry about."

"Ah, yeah. That probably didn't help your stress levels, huh?" I laughed.

"Not in the slightest."

"Sorry about that."

"It's okay," I said as we did our rounds, passing out tea to coworkers.

"I've expected the world to end every day of my life, so this isn't really new for me."

"Still." A little while later, we had been at our RAID stations for about 15 minutes when Enforcer Chapman approached.

"Good morning, Enforcers. I have an assignment for you both."

"How can we help?" de Saint asked.

"West Virginia is getting hammered by bugbear attacks. Their CDM office keeps saying it's under control, but the numbers they're releasing don't match the number of monster incidents coming out of the state each day. When you've wrapped up your usual tasks, I'd like each of you to take a RAID drone and give our southern border a few passes. You don't need to do the whole border, just the southwest corner and then east as far as Cumberland.

I emailed you a new patrol routine that should automate this, but I'd like you to monitor it as it runs since this is our first time using it."

"Yes, ma'am," de Saint and I both replied.

"Thank you. Pull drones off of C or B gates if you need to." That was odd.

"Not E and D gates?"

"Correct. E and D gates are in the most danger of Stage 2 surges. We'd rather miss a few citations than have a surprise surge."

"Understood." We needed a little more than an hour to finish our routine tasks before we pulled four RAID drones, set them each five miles apart with three on the Pennsylvania side of the state border and one on the West Virginia side. De Saint and I double-checked that we had the right patrol routine in place and then let the drones run.

Like goblins, bugbears had higher average body temperatures than most Earth-based creatures, so between thermal detection and visual scanning, the drones should have been able to identify roaming bugbears. Stolen story; please report. Once we confirmed the routine worked as intended, de Saint said, "The Domestic Dungeons feed for West Virginia bugbears has been pretty crazy."

"Social media makes it sound like a few steps shy of a warzone."

"You've been keeping up with the scraper?" I nodded.

"I've had bugbears on my mind since the Cold Rollers op. I thought maybe I'd learn something useful."

"Did you?"

"Sort of. More than anything, it's been confirmations of what we already knew: They're good in the dark, they're organized, and they're capable of sophisticated tactics. If they hit a house, they go in every door, not just the front or just the back. If they enter an area to pillage, they set up ambushes for when people try to run. One person said they were like 'Viking raiders who played Call of Duty.'""They are definitely smart," de Saint admitted.

"Has anything caught your eye?"

"How isolated some places in West Virginia can be. I've seen posts about people finding little towns that got ransacked days earlier, but nobody knew, and no outsiders got away to tell anyone. You had said there were a lot of towns and people cut off from the rest of society, but I underestimated how prevalent they really are."

"It's an interesting state to drive around," I replied.

"There are so many hollers and out-of-the-way little valleys. It can be kind of scary turning up in a neighborhood that doesn't see visitors very often. You feel their eyes on you the whole time."

"Because they don't trust strangers."

"That and drugs absolutely wrecked those places. Meth heads aren't above muggings and robbery, and it's not like there are cops anywhere nearby to stop them or even to respond if you need help." My phone buzzed. It was Beth messaging the Divas group chat.

"Hey, everyone! Two quick things. One: The controversy around how many of the Divas might be dudes is giving us a bump in traffic. Should we make a statement on that or something? Two: Jessie's Cookies wants to sponsor the channel. They do ice cream sandwiches with gourmet cookies. They'll say yes if we agree to put Jessie's Cookies on the Diva van. I think that's a good idea for all of our sponsors. We wouldn't have to blur it out if it were covered in sponsor logos."

"Won't Dorion get made pretty much immediately?" Giago asked. Beth dropped a hyperlink to a Pittsburgh sign shop that printed giant car magnets.

"Put the logos on for filming, take them off when we're done."

"bethtastic does it again. gg super manager."

"That is smart," Giago said.

"Fine by me," Megan added. The rest of us in the chat liked that message to show we agreed.

"Great! I already ordered the magnets. I'll pick them up tonight."

"Hard to believe Beth is only 18," de Saint said aloud to me.

"She's always been really smart. She and my parents used to fight all the time about how her place was in the kitchen and her job was making babies. If they actually nurtured her brain? Bums me out to think about how much farther ahead she would be right now if they had."

"It sounds like you've always supported her, though, and you're supporting her now. That's something."

"Thanks," I replied a bit sheepishly. The next several hours of our shift were relatively unremarkable. The RAID patrol routine seemed to function as intended and so far had identified three different groups of bugbears. We reported them each time and braced for the Cold Roller to get called in to deal with them, but no such orders came. Only one of those tribes was a known SOC, so that was a bit surprising. Then again, Blast Furnace might have gotten the assignments instead.

We had no easy way of knowing if they did.

"dudes," Nathan texted the group chat and attached a link to a news story. New Yorkers advised to shelter in place and not to drink tap water in the wake of the Central Park disaster. Harlem Meer, a man-made lake in the northeastern corner of Central Park, appeared to be the epicenter of a rapidly spreading blight. Photos and videos showed the plant life surrounding the water shriveling to brittle browns and grays. In an hour, a 500 ft radius around Harlem Meer had succumbed to devastation.

De Saint put her phone down and rubbed her face with both hands.

"Good God, another major disaster. Fantastic." None of the articles had named a potential cause beyond "contaminated water," but I recognized the damage.

"Plants affected by blight slime look like that," I said.

"Really?"

"Yeah. We found an undisclosed barrel full of them a few months back. When everyone freaked out about it, I read up on how bad they were."

"City drinking water shouldn't be affected by a contaminated lake in Central Park, though," de Saint mused.

"Welcome to another round of 'Is it a reasonable precaution or is it proof the problem is far worse than the government is willing to admit?'""Oh, I love that game."

"I know. It's my favorite too." De Saint continued to read. Less than 30 minutes later, The Heavenly Rock Baptist Church, the organization that claimed responsibility for forcing dungeon gates to surge, claimed responsibility for the blight. Their statement read: Fear the Lord thy God. Sodom and Gomorrah were cleansed by fire. Our planet was cleansed by a Great Flood. The Egyptians were cleansed by plague and pestilence. The slate must be wiped clean for life to begin anew. A heaven on Earth awaits us all.

Welcome the Rapture. I did my best not to think about it because what was the point? Nothing I could do would help New York City or stop the Heavenly Rock Baptist Church from unleashing another attack. All I could do was my job, so I tossed my phone in a drawer and put my focus on the bugbear scouting project Chapman had assigned.

By the time our shift ended, we had identified three more tribes, all of which were on the West Virginia side of the state line, but they appeared to be moving north, so they would be in Pennsylvania eventually. And still the Cold Rollers weren't assigned to go after any of them. When my shift ended, I stopped by Chapman's office to ask her if we should expect a bugbear assignment that night, but she wasn't there. I checked on the Enforcer floor as well and didn't find her there either. That night, around 9: 30 p.

m., I was in the middle of doing laundry when Chapman called each of the Cold Rollers individually. She put the six of us on a group call with her and Enforcer McDouglas.

"Listen carefully, Cold Rollers," McDouglas began, his connection sounding scratchy and distant. I wondered where he was. Running a secret S gate, perhaps?

"Chapman and I have been watching the bugbear problem in West Virginia for a while now," he continued.

"I know you've all seen the news reports about it too, but what you haven't seen is the absolute shitshow-" McDouglas cleared his throat.

"Sorry, Chapman. What you haven't seen is the chaos going on behind the curtain. The West Virginia branch of the CDM is a mess, and state politics have been making that worse for years. We're sending you all to West Virginia for the indefinite future to hunt bugbears. These aren't day trips. You will stay in hotels when they are available and camp when they aren't. We'll feed you intel as best we can, but that's where this assignment gets tricky.

"If we're found sending our people into a different state without permission, the blowback would be massive. At the same time, we can't let the bugbear problem continue to worsen, and trying to keep them on the other side of an imaginary state line doesn't solve anything. So, we'd like you to go as Dungeon Divas. You'll get hazard pay on top of bounties per bugbear kill, and we'll set you up with the extra gear you'll need to be in the field for that long." Chapman spoke next.

"You are completely within your rights to decline using your private business for government purposes. Please don't feel like this is mandatory. This is truly your choice."

"Can we film the hunts?" Megan asked.

"Yes," Chapman replied.

"Do we have to give you an answer right now?"

"We'd like you to leave tomorrow morning," McDouglas said.

"So you have tonight to think and talk about it." Meanwhile, our Diva group chat blew up. All of us were excited about the adventure this could become. As soon as McDouglas said we could take time to think about it, the chat was filled with variations of "I'm in." Megan spoke for all of us.

"We'll do it."