Chương 157: CDM 3, Chapter 33: Launch Day

We pulled out of the garage at 4: 30 a. m. with Enforcer McDouglas following in his personal tricked-out SUV. Megan rode with him to explain her plan for the op on the way, and Nathan giddily accepted the keys to drive the van. The hour was awful, but my idea of sleep had changed a great deal in the last year and a half. Between late-night culls in the middle of a workweek and back-to-back night and day shifts for RAID, the notion of a static sleep schedule was so unrealistic that I abandoned it completely.

I slept when I could, and when I couldn't, I put my focus on the task before me. Feeling tired was like being a little sore from a workout the day before. Everyday tasks weren't pain-free, but I could tune out the ache and go about my day when I had to. On the way to the mall, we reviewed the maps and movement plans in the mission brief that Megan assembled. Meanwhile, de Saint used the drive to review last night's RAID footage of the nest site.

Now that she had a secure connection, she could scrub through to see if our enemy revealed anything else about themselves while we weren't watching. She didn't glean anything new, but the movements she saw at night matched our theory that the JCPenney was a goblin nest. When we arrived on site, I expected McDouglas to make a bunch of suggestions for how our plan should change, but all he said was "good luck." In my mind, I heard Investigator Dempson say, "McDouglas won't coddle you.

He'll put you in the driver's seat and push the car down the hill." So I put on my seatbelt and went for it. We returned to the garage a little after 11 a. m. Hornby was upset that we missed the window for fast-food breakfast, but a morning milkshake satisfied him. We carried our bags of greasy food from the van to a video editing bay in a separate room.

Since Blast Furnace and the Cold Rollers were both recording every second of their runs, the servers for ripping and backing up all of that footage were on-site at the garage for the sake of efficiency and security. No memory cards had to be handed off or sent out, and the massive file sizes didn't have to be pushed through a slow remote upload. That meant McDouglas could debrief our run as soon as it was over. While he queued up the footage, we unwrapped our burgers–after washing our hands.

We were still sweaty and dirty from the hunt, and no one wanted to know what goblin goop tasted like.

"Alright, good work today, everyone," McDouglas said to begin the debrief.

"The original plan was a good one, but as you learned, predicting the exact conditions on the ground is difficult to do. Entering on the second floor as you intended was the right thought, as was coming in the lower entrance if the first option ended up being unavailable. Making the adjustment to come through a maintenance hallway was a solid pivot." He hit play on Megan's helmet cam as she watched Giago force the metal door with a prybar.

The perspective switched to Nathan's scouting drone, showing the journey down the long cinder-block hallway. McDouglas continued, "This kind of terrain is common in urban hunts, but don't let that numb your sense of danger. 100 ft down a hallway with only two exits, ahead and behind, is a bad place to get hit with an ambush or a trap. None of you chocked the doors. That's not a foolproof way to keep yourselves out of trouble, but making it more difficult for the enemy to lock you in is always a good idea.

Larger hunting teams can get away with skipping that process and focus instead on a swift and efficient sweep. Your numbers will mean you're moving more slowly, and you have fewer people to help if something goes wrong." I noticed Megan hadn't opened her bag of food. It sat under her chair while she scribbled down notes instead. Yeah, making her the leader was the right call. I knew that McDouglas would offer valuable advice, so I paid attention, but Megan's approach was proof that I could have been more studious.

"See all this standing water?" McDouglas asked, pointing at the many puddles that had pooled in the maintenance hallway.

"Goblin shit smells awful, but you need to keep your nostrils open. Larger goblin nests, hobgoblins, and bugbears understand how gasoline works, so that puddle of water on a scouting feed could actually be a nasty firetrap." The run progressed, and McDouglas fast-forwarded through footage of Nathan's drone scouting the abandoned mall, inspecting storefronts with jagged shards of broken glass and filled with soppy-wet debris and trash.

"The party waited in the hallway for 7 and a half minutes while Kimmy investigated the area," McDouglas said.

"We need to get that time down. Moving cautiously is good, but remember that you just forced a metal door open. That's a lot of noise, and 7+ minutes is a lot of time for your enemy to get their shit together. Meehan, when you enter a new zone, your scan of the immediate area needs to be quick. Use thermal to confirm if any enemies are waiting, and then do a quick sweep for potential traps. By the time the party enters, you should be finishing your larger sweep and moving ahead to the next choke point."

Nathan swallowed his nerves.

"That's a lot of responsibility, yes," McDouglas admitted when he saw Nathan's concern.

"Every single person on the squad is responsible for environmental awareness, and your teammates should operate with the understanding that you could have missed something. The squad's safety is a duty that everyone shares equally. Ideally, I'd like to see that 7 and a half minutes in this spot cut down to less than 60 seconds." The footage continued, and we watched ourselves climb the escalator to one of the two second-floor entrances for the department store.

McDouglas paused on a view of muddy footprints going in and out of the boarded-over double doors.

"What do these prints tell us?" he asked the group.

"Goblins came and went," Hornby answered.

"To use the shitter," Giago added. McDouglas nodded.

"The goblins came out this door to shit and piss off the mezzanine. What does that tell us about what's on the other side of those doors?" No one had an immediate answer that was anything more than "here be goblins."

"Goblins are lazy," he continued.

"Very rarely will goblins walk farther than one doorway to a latrine. They want the minimum distance to keep their own shit from dripping on their beds and food. If you find the latrine trail, chances are the core of the nest is very close, which you confirmed a moment later when you breached the doors. If you knew that tidbit before the breach, how would your tactics change?"

"More aggressive entry," Megan answered.

"We were still trying to be sneaky, so we entered slowly. If we behaved like goblins were for sure on the other side, we would have come in harder." McDouglas nodded.

"Meehan should still go first, but there's no waiting. Osheski has to assess the situation and make calls quickly, which means the rest of you have to be ready to adapt to her calls. Meehan, your job in this scenario is less about identifying immediate threats and more about getting the lay of the land. The squad is going to be moving for cover as soon as they're through, so they'll have eyes up for immediate threats. Your job is to get an idea of the bigger picture as best you can. See the things they can't.

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"Other thoughts?" McDouglas asked the group.

"I could have sprayed the room with arrows before we breached," I offered.

"We were waiting until we were sure the nest was close. If we knew the latrine trick, we could have whittled their numbers down before totally revealing our position."

"Definitely," McDouglas replied.

"Your spray could have accounted for both levels as well, especially with Splintering Arrow at your disposal." The video played through our first contact with goblins, 12 grunts and 2 berserkers fighting amongst piles of old mannequins, clothing racks, shelves, and cardboard boxes. Our formation and our levels made them relatively easy to clear. McDouglas paused the video on a frame where Megan looked down a lane. Her perspective was slightly lowered because she had been looking for traps.

"What's this ring on the floor?" McDouglas asked.

"A dried-up puddle," de Saint answered.

"Why is that significant?" No one had an answer.

"See how big the outline is? A big puddle used to be here, but it's not now. Were the puddles anywhere else dried up?" We shook our heads.

"In buildings like this, water was never meant to get inside, so there's no drainage system for when it does. For this puddle to dry up, the goblins either patched the ceiling or punched a hole in the floor to let it drain. Most of the time, they choose destroying rather than fixing, so if you see a dry puddle, assume that the integrity of the floor is compromised. Avoid walking over areas that very obviously held a bunch of water at one point."

I wouldn't have thought of that, but now that I knew what to look for, I wondered how many times I had gotten lucky with the stability of the floor I crossed. McDouglas hit play.

"The rest of the hunt was solid. Meehan scouting the shaman early kept it from getting a good spell off, and you all did a good job of minding your corners. When the nest looked clear, I would have liked to see another spray of void arrows. We know what entrance and exit they preferred, so in the future, Gray, coordinate with your support team to line up the exit and see if you can get a few easy kills if there are runners." I nodded.

"If I were a teacher, I'd give this a C+ grade. Solid performance for your first official op, but we have a lot of opportunities for improvement. Anyone have anything else?"

"Could I have done anything to be more helpful?" de Saint asked.

"I don't feel like I did much."

"You did a lot, actually," McDouglas answered.

"On top of actually finding the nest, your role in the prep was critical, but you're always going to feel a little bit useless in a setting like this one. I was sitting behind you the whole time, so I saw you keeping an eye on our squad position trackers as well as watching for movement outside the mall. All of that matters because we'll need that intel if something goes sideways. When things feel boring, that's usually when paying attention is most important." That seemed to ease de Saint's mind a bit.

"Good work today, everyone," McDouglas said to wrap up the debrief.

"Don't forget we have wilderness training this weekend, and there's always a chance we get called in before then. Otherwise, shower up and get back to your normal shifts." He didn't linger to talk. McDouglas was out of the room seconds after the monitors cut off.

"Thank you for the hard work today," Megan said, addressing the group.

"I knew from our dungeon runs we worked well together, and it was good to see that continue into a hunt."

"Job is easy when the boss makes good calls," Giago remarked. Megan smiled sheepishly. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Nathan slipping out of the room. He seemed tenser than usual, so I followed him into the garage with the two vans and an SUV–one van for us, and the rest for Blast Furnace. He leaned against the wall with his face in his hands.

"You good?" I asked.

"Don't know, bro."

"What's up?" He dropped his hands to look at me.

"If I miss something, everyone in the squad pays the price while I sit in the van all nice and safe. I knew scouting was a lot of responsibility, but the speed McDouglas is pushing for? Scares me, dude."

"It's not all on you, though. He said as much."

"That won't make me feel better if one of you gets hurt. I'm not a crawler or a hunter. I don't have the fearlessness you guys do. I'm not used to being in combat scenarios, you know?"

"You've done well with the Divas."

"That's completely different," he said.

"Diva hunts are dial-up speed compared to what McDouglas wants us to do."

"That might be true, but he also wouldn't have agreed to put you on the team if he didn't think you could learn it."

"I don't know, bro. Everything I've heard and experienced with that guy says he's a little… out there. Maybe he's giving me a chance to bow out gracefully, now that I've seen the performance he wants, I mean."

"I doubt that's the case," I replied.

"Would you hate me if I backed out of this?" Nathan asked.

"Not at all. If it's not for you, it's not for you. Are you thinking of backing out?" He sighed deeply.

"I don't know."

"It seems like you're going through a late adrenaline dump. That's a big chemical swing in your brain, and it can mess with you in a lot of ways. Maybe come back to this tonight or tomorrow when your head is clear." Nathan nodded.

"That's good advice, but be straight with me. Am I cut out for this?"

"I trust you more than anyone, and you're one of the smartest people I have ever met. I think you're totally capable of learning the job, but that's different from wanting to learn the job. My view is…"

"View is what? Spit it out."

"My view of the world is fucked up," I admitted.

"I am definitely not fearless, but growing up a doomer has warped my reality a bit, and for once, it actually works in my favor. We were taught that invisible demons were everywhere all the time, trying to influence and trick us. When no place is safe, not even your own bedroom, the whole world looks like a battlefield. Being on a hunt feels a lot more like the reality I grew up in, where you can't trust anything or anyone and your eternal damnation is hiding around every corner."

"You've been thinking about this a lot."

"Recently, yeah. That's my best guess for why this work feels more natural for me, why it makes sense to me." Megan cleared her throat. Nathan and I turned to see her and Hornby standing in the doorway.

"Wasn't trying to eavesdrop," Megan said.

"I was," Hornby added with a grin.

"You make religion sound pretty violent." I thought.

"I never looked at it that way, but yeah, I think that's true."

"We weren't doomers, but we did Sunday service when I was a kid," Hornby replied.

"My takeaway was more 'love thy neighbor' than something violent. Tell me to fuck off as soon as this is none of my business."

"The Old Testament is a series of God-commanded genocides. Even if you take the Israelites out of it, you've got stories like Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Plagues of Egypt, the Great Flood, and the Crucifixion. A lot of the apostles died in horrible ways, and the book of Revelation is all about the apocalypse.

Every Easter, my youth pastor would give an hour-and-a-half sermon where he detailed all of the suffering Jesus endured when he was whipped and hung on the cross, medical detail by medical detail, and then we would always hear about how unfathomable the pain of hellfire was. I was in first grade the first time I heard that sermon."

"That is a lot of violence," Hornby conceded. I shrugged.

"Meehan," Hornby said next.

"For what it's worth, I think you did a good job with the scout drone today. It's a good sign that you give a shit about doing this right. Always better to follow a guy-" He coughed.

"Or girl who wants you to stay alive."

"Thanks," Nathan replied.

"No one would think less of you for bowing out, but for what it's worth, brother, I hope you stick around. You're the only one around here with a decent sense of humor."