Chương 112: CDM 2, Chapter 48: Peer Education

"You weren't kidding. Working the helpline sucks ass." Cortez was not enjoying his temporary posting.

"Sorry, man."

"This too shall pass." Meanwhile, my first day with Enforcer de Saint had gone well. Though I didn't miss college in general, I did miss being surrounded by people like de Saint who knew all sorts of things I didn't and loved to talk about them. Since graduating, I found that I encountered fewer new ideas overall. My internet bubble was small even if I tried to be well-read, but someone like de Saint flung weird doors open all the time. It was fun. My other job, hunting monsters for views, was fun too, though.

"What's a leadership workshop entail, exactly?" I asked as I drove Megan and Nathan out to the scene of the cow slayings. Nathan chuckled from the backseat.

"The first day was a review of assigned readings and exercises," she answered.

"We're expected to have all of it complete by Monday so the workshop can 'actually begin.'""Is this keeping you from that?"

"Yep, and I'm grateful. I can only read so much about personality assessments and archetypes." Nathan leaned forward to poke his head between the driver's and passenger's seats.

"This is a very type 37D personality question to ask, but when are we getting the van?"

"Man, I paid off the drone yesterday," I said.

"Can we go like a week without talking about major expenses?"

"Easy for you to say, dude. You don't have to work out of the D-Wagon."

"I'm just saying. Let the ink dry. My heart can't take another big purchase decision right now." I looked at Nathan through the rearview mirror.

"Please don't go buy a van in secret."

"That doesn't sound like something I would do." I sighed as he grinned. A bump in temperature turned the Pennsylvania winter wonderland into a muddy mess of melting snow and freezing rain. We pulled down a dirt driveway and parked next to two rusted-out pickups that had been sinking into the yard for years. The farmhouse was blue at one point, but weather had stripped nearly all of it away and now beat at raw wood siding. Megan and Nathan wrinkled their noses when they smelled cow manure.

Weirdly, I found the smell comforting. It reminded me of my adventures as a kid growing up in West Virginia, the moments where it was just me and my imagination, and maybe a few cows staring at me curiously. A storm door slammed, and a tall man with a clean-shaven face came down the porch steps in blue jeans, muddy work boots, and a John Deere sweatshirt.

"You must be Tim," Megan said, getting out of the car to shake his hand.

"Guilty as charged. You were serious about the cameras, huh?" Tim looked dubiously at the GoPro strapped to my forehead and even more so at Kimmy, the googly-eyed drone, ascending into the air.

"Are you still okay with us filming?"

"Doesn't make a difference to me. Not used to the gadgets is all. Come on. I'll show you around." After I grabbed my backpack from the trunk, Tim led us to a utility vehicle, which looked like the well-funded love-child of a golf cart and an ATV. Nathan and I sat in the small bed sticking out the back, while Megan sat up front with Tim. We drove along a barbed wire fence for a few minutes, then Tim unlocked a gate and drove us into the cow field, at which point the ride got far muddier and bumpier.

Tim's dairy farm wasn't very big, so his cattle trod and retrod the same fields until they were nothing but lumpy dirt with the odd sprig of grass.

"We've lost a cow every few weeks since winter started. I called you when I found the fifth." The farmhouse disappeared behind a hill as we drove deeper into the field.

"There's the latest," he said, pointing to a rib cage with scraps of rotting flesh dangling from the bones.

"Scavengers don't let a bounty like this sit. By now, they've run off with a lot of what was left." The photos of the fresh kill were far more gory, but now that raccoons and turkey vultures and whatever else had the opportunity to feed on the carcass, the scene looked more like old roadkill than a savagely bloody killing.

"You said every few weeks," I began.

"Does that mean you're seeing a pattern to these?" Tim shook his head and lit a cigarillo.

"Not really. Happens overnight like any other predator." He gestured to the trees on the other side of the fence.

"Always far from the house and closer to the woods, but that's pretty normal for predators too."

"How often do you see bears?" He laughed.

"I mean, they're around, but they're basically big ol' raccoons. If you don't lock your garbage up tight, a black bear is gonna come around and help itself. Mostly, I'll see a few prints every now and then, but folks in town see them more often than I do. They go where the food is, and people down there are more likely to leave something out, you know?" That description matched my YouTube education on black bears. An animal that ran from small dogs barking didn't seem like the kind to take down an adult dairy cow.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Megan asked, "How about monster sightings? Any issues with those?"

"Had a bad goblin nest a few years back. EPA cleaned it up and haven't seen the fuckers since." She turned to Nathan and me.

"Any early theories?"

"There aren't wolves around here, right?" Tim shook his head.

"Nope. We get some brave coyotes, but they go after chickens. Not big enough to hunt much else on a farm."

"Technically, anything that comes out of a gate is a potential suspect," I added.

"That's a pretty broad list. Mind if we look around a bit?"

"Help yourself." Megan looked around at the field and frowned.

"I thought with the snow and the mud we'd find some kind of tracks." The movement of cattle tore up the field as did the flurry of scavengers visiting the site, and we were too late to track a blood trail. Snow fell shortly after the kill, and now the melt and the rain wore that away too.

"I looked for tracks," Tim said, reaching for his phone.

"I found this one near the second kill. EPA told me it was probably a stray dog and not related." The nail and prints certainly looked like they could be canine, but Tim had taken the photo with his hand next to the print for scale. A domesticated pawprint would maybe be the size of his palm, but this was closer to being as big as his hand.

"Big fucking dog," Megan mused, voicing my exact thoughts.

"What made you hold this photo back from all the others you sent us?"

"Guess I had that guy's voice from the EPA in my head telling me it didn't matter." While Nathan took the drone out over the forest to search from above, Megan and I walked along the fenceline between the pasture and the forest.

"No shortage of game trails," Megan observed.

"Could have come and gone through any of these."

"True, but there aren't cattle on that side of the fence stomping all over tracks." I sucked in my stomach and slid between the barbed wire. Megan reluctantly followed.

"I think we should check every game trail on the fenceline here," I proposed.

"Do like Domonkos said and make it a really narrow search. 10 ft or so down the trail. If there's nothing, then we look at the next trail over." Megan nodded, and we split off in opposite directions. I was on my third trail when Megan yelled that she found something. She squatted at the edge of a low point in the path where water seemed to settle regularly. It was all mud, and among the few dozen deer prints were the same kinds of paw prints from Tim's photo.

"Definitely not bears," I observed. Megan nodded.

"Looks like your trail cam idea was a good one."

"Think this is a good spot?"

"I do." While I set up the trail cam, training it on this well-trodden part of the trail, Megan went a little bit farther into the woods. On the drive here, we collectively agreed that wandering into the woods with no real sense of what we were hunting was a bad idea. If we went too deep, we would be in its territory and potentially vulnerable. My idea for a trail cam came from the old CDM practice of mounting trail cams outside of dungeon gates to catch crashers.

We didn't do that anymore now that RAID put a drone on every gate, but the practice made sense to me. We couldn't stake out Tim's farm indefinitely, but we could hope that our target tripped the cam and gave us a good look at what we were dealing with.

"There are more prints in that direction," Megan reported when she returned.

"What are you thinking this could be?"

"Something canine, but that doesn't narrow it down all that much. Gnolls, hellhounds, barghests, dire wolves, werewolves, worgs, frost wolves, umm…" Megan added, "Blink dogs, bat dogs, death dogs, yeth hounds, shadow mastiffs, haunters, moon callers, cerberuses."

"Maybe the print size will help us narrow it down." She laughed.

"Yeah, I hope so. Right now, we have half a bestiary for a suspect list." When we returned to the cow bones, Nathan sat in the utility cart with his laptop open while Tim watched curiously.

"We found more tracks," Megan reported.

"Did you have any luck?" Nathan wobbled his head.

"If we're looking at the fence from this direction, that's mostly east. There's a garbage dump southeast, and then a trailer park not far from that. Straight east is more forest, but there are some rusted buildings and an old access road if you go far enough. Tim says that's an old coal mine. It gets really mountain-y if you head north or northeast. Tim says there was a bear den or two that direction when he was younger." Tim nodded with each mention of his name.

"No obvious signs of a predator," Nathan said.

"Lots of hiding places, though," Megan observed.

"Yeah. There's a bunch of those." On the ride back to our car, Tim agreed to check the trail cam every few days and to send us the files if it caught something. For our part, we were going to try and match the print and behavior to a monster. At the very least, we hoped to eliminate a few of the possibilities. Depending on what turned up, we would return as early as next week and go hunting.

A few minutes into the drive home, Nathan, with his eyes on his phone, asked, "You guys heard anything about this gate memorial?" Megan and I exchanged glances. Neither of us had.

"They're putting a monument in Arsenal Park to honor all the people who died in the gate. This article says there's going to be a memorial service in two weeks. Does the CDM get involved in that kind of stuff?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Megan answered.

"I guess it's possible, though."

"So you might have to work it?"

"I really hope not." I nodded that I agreed with Megan. That sounded miserable.

"They should really just make it a Lou Jackson statue," Nathan joked.

"We'd be in a world of shit if he wasn't on that crawl."

"I like the idea of you being in charge of roadtrip entertainment," Megan said.

"What other interesting things do you have to share with us?"

"Dude, it's not fair to put me on the spot like that. Umm…" He scrolled frantically.

"Rick Young wants to turn New Eden into a tourist destination. Valcuree is rumored to be dating a shrimp fisherman. Ethiopia is talking about resettling Saudi Arabia. Doomers are protesting the doomers flying to New Eden. Goblin nest near Nashville. Japan had a rocket explode on the launchpad…

"Oh, you guys might find this interesting: 'Rumors are swirling in DC that a new wave of harvester safety regulations is likely to come down as a reaction to the recent Pittsburgh S gate. The draft we acquired would bar harvesters from entering an unknown dungeon.'" Megan turned around.

"What does that mean?" Nathan skimmed a little bit more.

"They're defining an unknown dungeon as 'any dungeon that has not been previously recorded.' That makes sense, actually. That will kill the profit for a lot of S gates, though."

"Crawlers are going to fight that hard," I predicted.

"Really hard," Megan added.

"Since we have a good bit of driving ahead of us," Nathan began, "I'd like to propose we discuss having Dungeon Diva kills stuffed and mounted. I think it would really bring the guild house to life." I turned up the radio.