“Half an hour,” Czar says. Half an hour ago, Cadillac waved at you, smiling, when he waded to the first tussock. First time scouting. A student. Wanted to buy a luxury car. He should’ve been back already.
“Maybe he got lost,” Butterfly says, quietly.
None of you really believe it. The only question is whether you go look for him or not. With a group like this, you cannot do that without being seen. A silent vote takes place as you look at each other. Then Spark wades into the water, ready to shoot even a litter of ducklings at the first sign of move- ment. The rest of you follow in a loose formation so as not to get into each other’s way. At its deepest, the water reaches up to your chest. Tree roots cover the bottom. Spark raises his hand. Cadillac’s cap floats in the water. A stupid rapper’s hat that you were joking about before the expedition. Water around it looks smoky but you know it is blood.
Spark picks it up and shows a tear at the top of the head, big enough for four fingers. It looks to you like the blood trail leads off to the left and search the forest with your binoculars. Movement in the haze catches your eye. Some monster straight from a horror film is tearing at a dark lump on the ground. You think you can make out a human hand poking up from it, so it has to be Cadillac.
First you think it’s a bear that’s eating him but the snout is too long. Czar is aiming his rifle in the same direction and fires as soon as he has it in his sights. Something dark sprays from the creature, too thick to be blood. It rises to its hindlegs, and you shiver.
It is nearly three metres tall and looks like a hairless bear with terrible claws. The mottled skin is covered in pustules and tumours. If it ever had eyes, they have vanished in the lumps and abscesses covering its head. They also pull the skin on its maw, making it look like it is grimacing. Czar’s shot should have torn a hand-sized hole into the beast. Blood and pus runs down its neck, but there are already new abscesses forming on top the wound. The pain must have impressed it, since it jumps off the tussock, diving into the water, making barely a splash for a creature of its size. You head to the body, ready to dish out more pain if it wants to fight over its catch but the waters are calm and quiet. The others are already calling it a Pox Bear, but you are not convinced. There were no bears here before the Visitation and when it rose up, it looked all too familiar.
“Gorgon” (toughness 30)
Shells on the ground. Piles of them and five bodies in Institute whites. You didn’t even know the field ops carried guns now. You never did but Spark is inspecting an assault rifle. British make. There is a thumb-sized hole in its steel body going straight through. The edges aren’t bent. More like cut. When you find a fresh body in the Zone, the killer is rarely far away. The sun is shining now but at night this junkyard would be a dark maze. The purple scales growing from the cars are razor sharp. Only a few weeds and the mould in their upholstery reminds you that this is an Oasis.
Butterfly whistles. She’s found a video camera and going by the lights, there is still power in the battery. That’s odd. When you pulled the mask off one of the corpses, the body looked old, mummified. The brown, curled skin was streaked with black marks. If there is still power in the camera, it cannot have been more than three days. The recording is dated. A bit over two days, in fact. You all gather around the little screen.
They came here in the twilight. Set up camp in the light of their low-energy lamps when the night fell. The cameraman was shooting the scales on the cars, when something seemed to move between the wrecks. It was like a dark mass of moistly glistening snakes, red in body, tapering into dark points.
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THE GAMEMASTER’S BOOK
Suddenly, they shot at him, blood red tentacles, sharp as death. The image shakes when the cameraman falls but the finger was spasming on the button, and he kept shooting. Flashes, snippets. Short, panicky moments.
Czar notices something and rewinds. You watch it frame by frame, until he pauses it. A human silhouette amidst the gunfire, the night sky and the coils of ropelike extrusions. They grow from its thin body like snaking roots and hold it up. It moves with them like a giant spider on its thin legs. There must be tens, even hundreds of the whiplike tentacles. Far longer than the huma- noid figure they are holding up. The tentacles are thin, barely a thumb’s width but still strong.
You press play and the images change. Black-tipped tentacles break a lamp on the campsite. Someone crawls, squirming, past the camera. Then the red strands pierce the back of his white coat and lift him off the ground and out of the picture. He soon falls back into it, limp like a rag doll, his suit deflat- ing as if there were nothing inside it. Nobody is moving or shooting anymore. Finally, the camera twitches and the recording stops when the cameraman’s death grip finally gives out.