Ch 41

What Ben noticed first, was that there was an awful lot of blood, and no bodies. Red, wet smears on the side of large rocks and other tall flat surfaces, splatters from the impact of a bloody back or hand. The ground was littered with dark stains, the tan earth turning to a brown, almost black mud. There was a terrible stink of smoke in the air, and obvious signs of a struggle. In the midst of the grime and wreckage, ordinary objects like backpacks and little wooden chests were scattered about, totally clean and sitting perfectly still on the ground. In the center of it, there was a pack that had been torn open, and a thick pile of shiny golden coins had spilled out like guts from an eviscerated whale. Upon closer inspection, golden glints and gleams could be seen from partially cracked zippers and rips in fabric.

Ben held up a fist and shot Louden a dirty look.

“Ignore it, it's a trap. Don't disturb any of the bags and don't open any of the chests. Observe,” he said, and raised his gunmetal gray mana rifle, took Aim, and fired at the closest bag. The bright shot ripped through it, scattering gold coins, bottled water, and what looked like small brown grocery sacks that smelled like a hot lunch. The items scattered, a few of the water bottles bursting, and some of the lunch sacks scattering what looked like a bagged thanksgiving dinner across the ground, ruining it.

Ben growled and took Aim again, bursting another bag and ruining another bag of treasure.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Louden finally said, sounding angry and shooting covetous looks at the golden coins.

“Shut up,” Ben said, taking Aim a third time and firing into a larger backpack. Bright red mist sprayed from it, and the pack unfolded like an insect, an enormous mouth with sharp teeth appearing where the zipper had been, and two beetle wings forming from the straps. All three girls began to exhibit signs of immediate and intense panic.

“Mimic,” Ben said, voice betraying a hint of disgust, feeling the memory of pain in his left elbow. He fired several more shots before it could begin to charge, and it died, bursting into a cloud of glowing green smoke that rushed towards him, leaving a large cloth sack in it's place. The rest of the packs, and there were dozens of them laid around, stood unmoving on the ground.

“There's shit like this scattered all over the place, super dangerous if you don't know what's going on. Casimer's been. . . absent lately, I guess. He's basically on auto-pilot while we're getting the environment to the point where it can sustain him more substantially. Normally, I'd clear something like this out with Ahr but. . . nevermind. What's interesting is the bus, I have no idea how it got here.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Louden asked, still clearly shaken by the mimic.

“Casimer can, usually, only recreate things. Stuff that's been abandoned here, things that have fallen out of sight and sit undisturbed for a while. He'll absorb them, and then he can make as many replica's as he wants, with minor modifications. I never brought in a bus, so how did it get here?”

“Excuse me,” Alice said, something suddenly clicking in her mind “But did you say you never brought one in? Are you telling me you intentionally bring things to this place, to this, this. . . monster?”

“Ben, you fuckin rat,” Louden said, eyes narrowing, nose scrunching “Have you been working with this thing? What's your fucking problem?” Polk looked at him, eyes wide, not saying anything.

“Now hold on a fucking second,” Ben snarled, then gestured towards the field of potential mimics “You see this? This is fucking nothing compared to what's going on deeper in the mountain. If Casimer got himself worked up enough, he could probably uproot this whole place and crawl across the earth, killing everyone and everything he encountered. You know what I've been doing for almost a year? I've been keeping that from happening. Casimer eats whatever he can get his hands on, and he likes eating people the best. He's not proud of that, but it is what it is, and we're building a solution.”

Ben pointed his gun at the blood spatters, some of which were suspiciously close to backpacks and chests.

“And it looks like, some how, some people managed to wander in. A lot of people, judging by the bus. If I know Ahr, he showed up before us and did his damnedest to get them out of danger, and probably got himself killed again in the process.” Polk looked at him, then at the killing field of mimics, then at the mountain.

“Ben,” She said, eyes wide “Where the fuck are we?”

“The outskirts of the Dungeon, Oasis Mountain,” Ben said, motioning towards the ATV “I've got some extra guns in the duffle bag, you three might want to grab some.” Ben took Aim again and fired a sustained salvo, this time at a pack with clear bloodstains on it. The mimic's body began spraying red liquid, simply slumping to the ground from the lethal damage, then burst into flowing green smoke that diffused into Ben's skin.

“If you need me, I'll be cleaning up.”

–

Hours earlier

Normally, Leeroy would have found it strange to have gone from 'Calmly explaining to his fellow tourists that their bus was stranded in the middle of the desert' to 'piling all their non-essential resources onto the bus and setting it ablaze' inside of the same day. That had been before, though, before a mouse the size a great dane had charged their group, put up a bit of a weak struggle, then died spontaneously. In the brief span of time Leeroy got to look at it, he noticed large, rock like scabs all over it's body. Upon it's death, it burst into a bright green smoke that entered the nearest person, and left behind a potato sized cloth sack filled with chunks of obsidian like stone that seemed to glow with a dim inner red or green light.

After that, things grew confused, people picking up stones and examining them, putting them in their packs, or just dropping them on the ground, deeming them worthless. At some point, Leeroy had seen a backpack devour a man while he was wearing it. It had been an involved, slow process, long spiderlike legs that wrapped around his chest and abdomen, while powerful jaws where the zipper used to be started at the head and worked it's way down, swallowing the man whole, a seemingly bottomless stomach allowing the entire body to be consumed.

Shortly after that, a shirtless cowboy nobody recognized had entered the chaos and began firing laser guns at the now hostile packages and indicated with several yells and clear hand gestures which way to run.

As he ran away, Leeroy couldn't help but think that his brother had been one hundred percent correct about what visiting the USA would be like.

Things were marginally better now. After everyone had been safely shepherded away, a hologram, like something Leeroy would see in a VR headset, appeared before him and the rest of the group. It was a blue window, a status window really, with a quest entitled 'Emergency Evacuation I'. It was a tight package of information, telling them Ahr's name, his position on their survival, and how much he was willing to help. The jist of it was, “Come with me if you want to live.”

When the green smoke signal was heard, then seen off in the distance, Ahr had looked frustrated, then sent out another quest, this one called 'Calling for backup I', asking for a way to signal back. Someone had helpfully suggested they light the useless bus on fire before it turned into a monster too; he had been someone who had managed to notice that his backpack was trying to eat him and got if off before it succeeded. Several shots from the laser pistols later, and the bus was burning. They all agreed that an enormous monster was the last thing they wanted to deal with right now.

They had fully intended to wait it out as well, for whoever else was coming to help them, but then a strange, enormous white beast with a large opal on it's forehead, looking like a cross between lioness and a bear had appeared and began menacing them. It had been unbelievably fast, when Ahr tried to open fire, the creature pounced on him and tore him to shreds with cold, savage violence. All it had taken was a single roar to send everyone running, scattering them in all different directions.

When Leeroy ran, he had seen a small child, a boy, standing alone, frozen on the spot. He had recognized the boy, his mother had been a larger woman in her forties, and was nowhere to be seen. In a split second of thinking, he grabbed the boy and picked him up, carrying him as he ran with Tonter and two other men who had been nearby.

--

Ben sighed, having taken to triggering the mimics with a rock before opening fire, thus preserving the contents of the dummy bags. He was reasonably sure he had gotten them all, and cautiously approached the killing field, eyes flaring with Analyze for a moment, then visibly relaxing.

“Got em,” Ben said, motioning for the girls to come off of the ATV, where they were waiting with the AC on. Ben had eventually solved the water bottle distribution problem by taking one for himself and leaving the other two in plain view, and outsourcing the issue to the women entirely.

With a swift kick, Ben tested each bag, including the cloth bags dropped by the mimics, before opening them and rummaging around. The backpacks were promptly emptied of their gold coins, dumped to the ground and forgotten by Ben. With the cloth loot sacks, Ben opened them by cutting them with a knife, then dumped the contents on the ground. Strange, grotesque statues made from gold and silver clanked and rang as they landed, and Ben rolled his eyes. There was also what looked like a motherboard and a high end graphics card, neither in any sort of protective container.

“What in the fuck is that thing?” Louden said, reaching down and picking up one of the fist sized golden statues “Wait is this solid gold,” she said, surprised by it's weight “Ugh, holy shit that thing is ugly.”

Though she did not know it, it was a perfect, to scale replica of Casimer's first attempt to create a body, a hideous abomination of insects fused together like a slug or a very fat snake.

“It's too heavy, just leave it. If you really want one, I've got a couple of each back at the RV somewhere. Let me know if you find a statue of me though, we'd have to be really lucky though. That's the rarest one, by the way, and I've never seen it drop.” Louden looked at him like she was about to have a seizure.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” she asked “You're worried about, about. . . Collectibles right now? Are you fucking high?”

“Look, I told you, this is nothing compared to some of the stuff I've seen. Oh dammit,” Ben said sounding only mildly frustrated, opening a cloth sack and finding two familiar guns, a set of clothing, and a cowboy hat. “Ahr's dead.” He rushed over to the ATV and fired off another flare.

Ben then looked around, past the devastation around the burned out, still smoking bus, and Analyzed the area for a full minute.

“Looks like something big came through here,” he said, eyes never blinking “and it scared everyone in different directions. Fuck.” Ben whispered. “We're never going to find them all in time to keep them safe.”

“Ben,” Polk said, gently slapping him upside the head, then pointing to the bright smoke in the sky. “Flaregun, come on. If they don't come to this, they're not coming.”