Chương 383: Book Eight, Chapter 50: Outpost

The outpost was a shopping center with a large metal fire lookout tower rising above it. At first, I thought the military, or whatever this storyline was calling their troops, had constructed it themselves. But as I got closer, I noticed that it had advertisements on it. One was for a BBQ restaurant, and the other was for a clothing store. Had the tower been there hundreds of years earlier, and the military had only reinforced it? The glass was tinted, so I couldn't see inside.

A large fence had been erected around the shopping center's parking lot, with an electric gate that opened as we arrived. We had been On-Screen for quite a while, and we did our best to give that scene some emphasis because, due to our strange pathing, this outpost was the most intact building we had come across. But it wasn't exactly full of life. There was no one in the parking lot, which had been converted into a defensible position with lots of sandbags and barricades made of upturned cars.

In fact, we didn't see anyone even as we walked to the entrance, which, unlike the gate, didn't open on its own. However, there was a familiar-looking speaker system that could have been seen throughout the buildings at the terradome.

"This is Echo Squad," Antoine said.

"We've been instructed to resupply at this outpost."

"I hear you loud and clear, Echo Squad. Admission is granted. The troops are out on maneuvers right now. Please respect all posted signage. Things out here don't work the way they do back at home."

"Can you tell me where Captain Charles Stone might be found?" Antoine asked. That was his character's brother's name.

"Out on maneuvers," the voice called back over the intercom. There was a buzzing sound, and the door to the shopping center opened. It was clear that many upgrades had been made to the interior, including a decontamination room that would allow us to take off our suits. We thought it better to just remove our helmets. We didn't know whether we would have to leave in a hurry.

As soon as we got out of decontamination, the next door opened up to a system of hallways and rooms not unlike those that could be found back at Culver's Bay. But again, there were no people. Antoine walked over to the nearest intercom and buzzed it.

"Miller's Crossing Outpost," the voice on the other end said.

"Tower Command. What can I do for you?" It was the same voice as before.

"This is Captain Antoine Stone. Can you please direct me to where I might find the field commander of this outpost?"

"Out on maneuvers," the voice chimed back almost instantly, but there was a nervous breathiness to it.

"You're telling me that every single person in this outpost is out on maneuvers right now?" Antoine asked.

"No, sir. Captain Stone."

"Then who is available for me to talk to?" Antoine asked.

"You're talking to him," the voice responded. I didn't know if it was the speaker's sounds or the dialogue that was creeping me out. There was a ghostly quality to it.

"And who is this exactly?"

"Tower Command communications operator Dwight Teague, sir." We all looked at each other because the man's tone was beginning to sound disturbing. At first, he had been chipper and helpful, but now it seemed strained.

"When can I expect others to be back at the outpost?" Antoine asked. There was silence on the other end. Antoine buzzed a few more times, hoping to get a response, but he never managed to. We were still On-Screen, so Antoine said, "Restock our provisions. See if you can find us a place to sleep for the night. And if you find someone, do an all-call over the intercom."

"Yes, sir," we responded. Off-Screen.

"So let's find out what happened to the soldiers," I said.

"It sounds like we might have one loony holdout. Be careful. They may be doing some sort of gone-mad-on-the-edge-of-society type of play. This guy could be dangerous."

"Let's hope he's not dangerous, because we don't have any guns," Camden said.

"I feel like there's something supernatural happening," Cassie said.

"I don't have a trope to tell me what's going on, but I feel magic or psychic energy or something. Do you, Riley?" It was time to use my third eye.

"It's hard to feel anything through this suit," I said, "but yes, it feels like we're being watched. That being said, I am carrying a shoulder-mounted camera, so everything might be just transmitting back to base."

"No, that's not it," Cassie said.

"Something is very wrong."

"A post-apocalyptic storyline with magic," Anna said.

"How often does that happen?" I scanned my memory trying to find a prominent example from cinema, but nothing I thought of satisfied me. Maybe a prominent book or two existed, but I had few other references.

"It's definitely possible," I said, "especially with the weird dreams my character has been having. I think this may just be a case of a supernatural world that came to a pretty mundane end." What happened to all the things that went bump in the night in a world that had ghosts and ghouls and goblins after the humans made a dumb decision and bombed everything? It's not like they would disappear.

Unfortunately, that type of genre mishmash wasn't as successful as some others because it combined competing types of escape fantasies. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Worlds with magic were about wonder and discovery, whereas post-apocalyptic worlds were about exploring a place where the rules and the past didn't matter so much anymore. But Cassie was right. There was magic here.

I just had to wonder if our characters would have the vocabulary or cultural knowledge to be able to call it out, given our upbringing. Would we lose points if we figured things out immediately? Was superstition a trait that belonged to a vault dweller? We were about to find out. I felt safe traveling around the abandoned outpost because I could see when I was about to go On-Screen, and since that number never jumped up to five seconds or something, I knew I wasn't being attacked.

But just to be sure, I put my helmet back on like I was paranoid and did my best to be oblivious. These guys had left so much behind, from ammunition to food provisions. When I found the soldiers' bunks, I counted only two dozen or so soldiers at the outpost, because those were the only beds that had been made. I noticed something strange as I walked along. I found myself perplexed with shadows in a way that I had never been before.

Whenever I came across a dark room, it was like I was drawn to it in a way I couldn't describe. Like the potential for a monster to exist in the shadows itself was a force that my psychic abilities, inherited from my fictional grandmother, were picking up on. Then I would flick on the light, and suddenly that sensation would disappear. I wanted to investigate it more, but Antoine's voice came over the loudspeaker.

"Echo Squad, converge on the radio tower," he said in a solemn voice. I was Off-Screen, so my reaction didn't matter, but I was a bit displeased that he didn't tell us where the radio tower entrance was. So I had to wander around for fifteen minutes looking for it until I found that it was a ladder leading up into the ceiling through a missing ceiling tile, and then again through a hole in the roof. Clearly, the decontamination room was just for show.

When we had all made it up to the command tower, which was once a real radio tower used by a DJ hundreds of years earlier, we found Antoine there. As we entered the small cabin of the tower, we went On-Screen.

"Where's the communications operator?" Camden asked.

"Nowhere to be found," Antoine said.

"In fact, from the look of this, no one's been up here in weeks, maybe months." We all looked around to confirm his findings. There was no evidence that anyone had been up there for a long time, and the dust accumulation was evident.

"They must have been communicating with us remotely," Camden said.

"But why?"

"I think I know why," Antoine said.

"Listen to this. There's a message that has been set to play every thirty minutes on an open channel. Short range." Cassie stepped forward. Her character, after all, was a communications expert. She should say something. She stared at the panel for a little bit and then said, "That signal isn't strong enough to make it all the way back to Culver's Bay. Why would they do that?"

"A better question," I said, "if there's no one here, then who's been communicating with home base? It's not like they would send us out here if they haven't talked to anyone on the ground in months." With that thought, Antoine reached down and pushed the play button so that the message being broadcast would play over the speakers in the lookout tower.

"This is a message from someone who left Culver's Bay for good. We were told the outpost was the edge of the world. It isn't. Beyond it, there's a settlement that lives without oversight, without quotas, without permission. People choose their work. They sleep without fear. No one is watching. Command doesn't know about this place. And if they do, they don't want you to. If you're tired of being measured, stop when your device tells you to turn back. Walk past the outpost. Follow the broken road. We're still here.

You can be too." The transmission ended.

"So everyone at this base was a traitor," Camden said.

"There's nothing to betray," Cassie said.

"I don't remember signing a loyalty oath to Culver's Bay. We were born there. Never got any other choice. Maybe the soldiers here, they were given another choice, and they took it."

"Or maybe there's an enemy that direction who wants to send us down that path so we can get robbed and murdered," Camden said. We didn't have a good skeptic, but someone needed to play the role.

"My brother's not here," Antoine said.

"If that means he's gone to this other settlement, then I need to go check. He's no traitor. Maybe that's why he's been sending me messages." We all had different things tugging us toward this new settlement, so we had to take turns commenting on it. Cassie had to talk about how she knew there were people in that direction that needed saving, and I was supposed to talk about how I had dreams of documenting whatever lay in that direction. The truth was, none of it made sense for the wider plot.

It was a bunch of noise. And more than that, when did the horror show up? I knew this storyline was way out in the boonies, but surely Carousel didn't forget to throw in a monster or two. We did our best, running some lines, giving Carousel as many options as we could, each of us expressing our specific emotions and motivations. Camden played his character as if this were all business as usual, as if the settlement was obviously just the other terradome that we were looking for.

So, of course, we were supposed to go to it. It was confirmation of everything we were supposed to find. Antoine had the familiar I want to go find my brother storyline that he had a lot of practice with. Cassie wanted to save people, and Anna wanted to find out why the woman in her daydreams was trying to draw her toward this new place. I more or less kept quiet. My motivation was not so strong. We climbed back down the tower to the main building and continued searching. We didn't find much.

"We're about to go On-Screen," I said as we were walking through the mess hall for the third time. We had already stocked up on provisions, but those were in the supply rooms, not in the kitchens. As we made our way through the room, we were assaulted by flies. Not a swarm of flies, but just a few flies, and it was so important that Carousel had to get footage of it.

"They must be eating the abandoned food in the kitchens," Camden said. We followed the buzzing of flies to a room in the distance. It wasn't the kitchen, but it was a pantry. And when we got to that door, Antoine opened it up, and as he did, someone who had been leaning against that door fell backward out onto the ground. He had been leaning against that door for a very, very long time.

"Now we know where the flies came from," I said.

"Oh my god," Anna exclaimed. Inside the pantry were three more bodies in addition to the one we just found. They didn't appear to have been wounded, but they still died all the same.

"I can't confirm the cause of death," Camden said.

"This isn't my specialty." Antoine quickly checked to find his brother's body, but it wasn't there. We examined the bodies the best we could. They were wearing very similar outfits to the ones that Cassie, Anna, and I were, so they were pretty basic troops. The biggest difference, other than them being dead, was that these men had guns, and they were loaded.

"What happened here?" I asked as I made sure to get good footage with my camera, although that was difficult. I also looked really silly trying to move my shoulder around and lean over so that the camera would catch everything. We couldn't find any reason why they were doing any of this. It didn't look like anything had tried to slam against the door, and there was no lock that would have forced them to stay in the pantry. But as we examined the men, we noticed that they each had an item of flavor.

One of them had a textbook on communication, not the kind with the radio, but the act and art of talking to people. Another had a religious book similar to a Bible. Still another had a medical textbook about psychology and hallucinations. And the fourth one, well, the fourth one held a book in his arms that Cassie pried loose and looked at closely. Morgenstern's Book of Fairy Tales was what it was called, and Cassie was immediately drawn to it.

That was particularly interesting for me because Cassie had a trope called It Is Written, which guaranteed she would find a text related to the supernatural nature of the storyline that would contain information to help her character. When she found that book, she would also be supplied with all the information her character would know about its contents. So if that book was about fairy tales, she would suddenly know about them too.

So what was a book on fairy tales doing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and why, out of all the books there, was it the one that was most relevant to our situation?