Caroline attempts to force herself to ignore the writhing swarm lurking somewhere beneath her, scanning the room for anything of possible interest. In a bid to distract herself as much as to find something of use, she begins rummaging through the stacks of papers and documents, focused on finding anything that seems unusual or that ties in to the major events the group has already been made aware of. She tests each board gingerly with her foot as she moves about the room, the thought of what awaits only a few feet below never far from her mind.
Joaquin can read - in two languages, in fact - but has no interest. His talents are best used elsewhere, and thus he stands on the stairs between Stuthman and Caroline, hand on the handle stocks to his shotguns and watching both the basement and the upstairs door.
Stuthman's earlier words seem to have a ripple effect through the mice. As he waves them off, the squeaking stops and there is a pregnant moment of silence. Then, they start to leave.
The sound of a thousand mice skittering over paper is quiet, but it is so present, so -everywhere- that it is a near-overwhelming sound. Parting so as not to touch any of you but perhaps coming a little closer than Caroline is strictly happy about the ludicrous number of mice in the house swarm out past you... and out into the town.
However, the newspaper office is now free of mice and free for you to look around.
Caroline flinches, recoiling against the wall as the mice pass. She continues to stare, wide-eyed, for several moments after they've left
Slowly regaining her composure, she pushes off of the wall, attempting to regain some small measure of her dignity by turning back to the work of looking through the documents.
Stuthman manages to sort through the newspapers with a certain clinical efficiency, and now with the mice out of the building you follow Caroline's lead in piecing together an idea of the town's history and major events:
- John Daly's yankee money got him the Crooked Earth claim which kick started the boom town
- A gambler's fallacy clearly plays out as headlines about him buying new investments, and third-page articles abut the claims going bust pretty quickly.
- Daly starts to make rash decisions, one of which was hiring the toughest, meanest lawman in the west - one Marshal Bryce who as supposed to put a stop on the petty crimes coming from the out of work miners.
- Reverend Cheval's flock was another major moment in town, and it seems to have really lifted the town's spirits to have a huge religious congregation.
- The arrival of Cheval's flock last year is the last major positive event in the town's history. The paper becomes sparse and less frequent after that point - Daly ceases buying up new claims.
- After that point the accounts get weird. Claims of disappearances, claims of twisted monsters in the hills and even the walking dead. An editorial speaks of everyone in the town jumping at shadows, seeing twisted things in reflections, and people turning mean.
- The final issue occurs after a month has passed. Daly's death, the burning down of o his mansion, and Marshal Bryce hanging one Mister Jim Wilson for the crime. The paper openly opines at the lack of evidence and motive.
”Well,” Caroline says, setting down the final paper, ”it seems that the town’s more unusual troubles predate the fire by a good bit. This Brother Cheval, though...” She thoughtfully worries at a corner of her lower lip with her teeth, brow furrowed.
”Things appear to have truly started going wrong once they settled in. Whether they’re the cause remains to be seen, though their odd behavior yesterday doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence about their holy mission.” She smirks, but all the same, she casts a brief look over her shoulder towards the street. ”It’s possible they have nothing to do with any of this, but it would be a hell of a coincidence. Lizzie didn’t seem especially taken with them, either.”
Brushing off the dust and detritus that has accumulated on her clothes from rummaging around in the dilapidated building, she raises her eyebrows at the other two.
”So what now? Thoughts?”
Joaquin shrugs slowly, not knowing what to do.
"Boneyard? Senor Stuthman, he wanted to go there. See his next bed is ready for him, I reckon, after he's done coughing."
As always, Brutto's wisecracks make Mr. Stuthman more aware of his lungs, and he attempts to stifle the coughing (ultimately making it worse, of course).
"Ye- hhhhh-s. The graves. Le... Let's see them. Buhhhch, Cheval-urgh. Have to get rid *hachem* of the churhheh - HHEM."
AHHHEH AHUHUHHEM Ahecch HEHHEHUH
Leaning over a desk now, his pale face suddenly beet-red, Stuthman gasps for breath. One hand waves for the door, indicating he thinks they should move along; the other hand reaches for his canteen.
You make your way out into the street - although msot of the homes near the newspaper are abandoned, not all of them are and you hear screaming about mice coming from at least one of them. However, as you start to get your bearings you see something far more peculiar as you stare down the street. A man staggers out of the cemetery and starts making his way down the street past you. Normally not something to note, but the fact half of his face is rotted off and he's missing a hand is a little more concerning. He seems to be making his way to the ruined Daly mansion.
Caroline’s first instinct is to recoil from the horrible sight in front of her.
Her second instinct, coming almost as quickly, is to document the story before it’s too late.
Keenly aware of both Stuthman’s and Joaquin’s likely natural inclinations in this situation, she thrusts both arms out to hold them back and hisses, just loud enough for the two of them to hear, ”Wait.”
Without any further explanation or waiting for a response, she hurries over to her hitched-up horse and retrieves the hard black case. She snaps it open, revealing a contraption that resembles, at least in broad strokes, a camera. After a few moments of arcane, intricate adjustments, she rushes to try to get in a good position to capture the walking corpse’s most shocking, undeniably unnatural details.
"Madre de Dios..." Joaquin mutters, hands already on his weapons. He marvels as much in the moment that follows at Caroline as he does at the apparently-undead thing, his mouth falling slowly agape.
"What the hell is this!" he hisses back at her. "What the *hell* are you doing? We need to... I don't... Ehhhhhh, f+$$ this shit!"
Riled up and driven by a vow to destroy such things, Joaquin pulls both his shotguns and prepares to follow the shambling corpse down the street.
Stuthman, still wiping tears from his eyes, looks at the 'man', wipes at his face again. The instant he recognizes the creature for what it is, his rifle is at his shoulder.
"Wait."
Hesitating, glancing over his shoulder at Caroline, Stuthman sees her pull out the strange contraption, and dismisses it. Turning back, he notices the corpse has moved off down the road and curses. Moving cautiously but quickly, Mr. Stuthman follows to get a better shot.
The walking dead man don't pay you much heed. As he shambles down the streets you take around to see if anyone else is seeing what you're seeing. Turns out they ain't - yet. The few occupied homes on this street seem concerned with their new mouse problem.
The corpse keeps on shambling. As you get a better look at him he's an older man dressed in far finer clothes than you'd ever expect to see in Coffin Rock.
Making sure to frame the shambling figure up such that his decay is clearly visible, Caroline presses the button on her Epitaph camera to open the shutter.
She turns to see Stuthman and Joaquin walking after the man, guns at the ready, and immediately guesses their intent. She quickly moves to interpose herself between them and their target, hoping to buy at least a few seconds.
"We should see where it's going," she hisses. "Look how it's dressed. This isn't some random yokel. It might provide some clues, but not if you put a hole in it."
With a quick glance over her shoulder to see if the thing's attitude has changed at all, she adds, her voice still a harsh whisper, "Besides, if something changes, you can always shoot it THEN."
Joaquin hesitates. Free-wheeling, impulsive and driven by his vow as he is, Caroline is a smart woman and may have a point. Making a low guttural noise of frustration, he looks at Stuthman and slowly puts his weapons away.
"... Okay." Il Brutto's face makes an unpleasant sneer out of a lifetime of habit. "We follow it. Later, we shoot it."
He falls in place beside Caroline, following her protectively from a step back. "You think the dead gringo is Senor Daly?"
Mr. Stuthman hesitates for a moment — a slight lowering of his weapon, a hitch in his step — before returning the rifle to his shoulder and stalking his prey. Yet, as he draws a bead on the creature again, he hesitates again — perhaps having reconsidered Caroline's words: "Perhaps it will lead us to more of them," he concedes, but he does not lower his weapon. Through the clouds of uncertainty in his life, one thought, one conviction is crystalline sharp — this abomination, and all like it, must be destroyed.
As the screams of those being assailed by mice fade behind you, you follow the shambling corpse of the richly-dressed man. It finally makes its way to the mansion. There, it turns to regard the mansion, and then just stares at it.
To Joaquin, Caroline remarks, "I wouldn't be surprised - I doubt there are that many men of means lying in that cemetery. Or, well, formerly lying."
She follows the corpse until it comes to a halt in front of the mansion. Caroline also comes to a stop, tilting her head and simply staring at the walking corpse that is, in turn, staring at the ruins of the mansion. She regards it for several long moments, her brow creased in bewilderment.
"...huh."
She glances over at Stuthman and Joaquin, raising her eyebrows and offering a small, helpless shrug.
Right as she's on the verge of writing the whole experiment off and letting the two men do as they will, she gives in to a sudden impulse.
"Mr. Daly?" she calls, pitching her voice to carry to where the thing is standing. "Mines? Crooked Earth? Cheval?" She rattles off several words, seeing if any of them provoke a hint of recognition (or, indeed, any reaction at all) from the dead man.
The dead man's torso abruptly twists to stare at Caroline, the feet awkwardly shuffling afterwards. Its mouth hangs open for a while before it wheezes out a word.
LOSSSSTTTTT
Caroline takes a half step backwards, more out of surprise than fear. Once again, she casts a look at her two companions, somewhat at a loss.
It does not take long for her to regain her composure, however, and she quickly begins fumbling with her camera to swap in a new plate without ever taking her eyes from the dead man.
”What’s lost?” she asks. ”You? Are you lost?”
The hairs on Joaquin's arms stand straight up. Normally a volatile mixture of anger, emotion and paranoia, adding the strange happenings of this town and an undead thing that talks does not improve the overall concoction.
Nonetheless, he feels his vow will be fulfilled momentarily. He stands beside Caroline, guns in their holsters, and nods back to her when she looks at him and Stuthman, suggesting she carry on.
His eyes flick to Stuthman to check his positioning, and then quickly around the streets.
The corpse - apparently Daly just repeats the word 'lost' in a gravelly mutter before it twists to stare at the mansion again.
You start to realize that a couple of townsfolk are starting to pick up on what's going on. A white-faced woman is stammering and staring at the scene and looks about ready to have a come apart.
Stuthman's mind freezes as the creature tries to speak - the world goes white as a hot effervescence crawls up the base of his skull. BREATHE! Oh God, I can't breathe...
BLAAMMM!!
Mr. Stuthman's rifle fires as his face hits the dusty street, overwhelmed and unconscious.
Upon noticing the gathering townsfolk, Caroline mutters ”Oh, hell.” as she imagines the situation quickly getting out of control.
She’s just about to call out to the woman when the sound of Stuthman’s rifle makes her jump, freezing any potential platitudes in her throat.
Caroline - 6C
Stuthman - KD
Il Brutto - 6S
Zombie Daly - 10S
The gunshot goes off, startling everyone - but particularly Daly who takes the shot in the shoulder. It blasts off old Daly's arm, which falls to the ground. The zombie picks up the arm and stares at it blankly.
Stuthman (unconscious)
---
Zombie Daly (shaken)
----
Il Brutto
Caroline
Il Brutto almost jumps a little at the gunshot; he hadn't expected it. His shock turns to confusion when Stuthman goes face-first into the dirt.
Assuming that the zombie has done something to him, he steps quickly in front of Caroline and power-walks towards the thing. His guns are somehow in his hands, and he levels them at Daly's corpse, firing one barrel from each.
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It's cold in the basement workshop.
The familiar smell of formalin makes me light-headed; the room foggy; my lungs burn.
Poor Mrs. Lowry, stretched out on the table, naked. The lines on her 60-year-old body smoothed.
Reaching forward, scalpel poised, Mrs. Lowry's hand knocks my elbow.
Random electrical firing after death can cause the body to twitch - nothing to worry about. It's fine.
It's Fine!
Except she's been dead for two days...
Her eyes flutter open.
The black cavern of her mouth opens forever. "LOSSSTTT!!"
I fall into the darkness
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
Mr. Stuthman's eyes slam open but all he sees is darkness.
He screams but his mouth is full of dirt: "RAAHHHHH!"
Rolling onto his side, fetal, cradling his rifle, Stuthman babbles — half-recitation, half-prayer: "HumerusRadiusUlnaMetacarpelCarpelPhalanges...
MaryMotherAndJosephTheLordIsWithThee...
BicepsBrachialisCoracobrachialisTricepsAnconeus...
GreatSpiritGuideMeThroughThisLandSoDead..."
He breaks off as he is wracked by uncontrolled sobbing.
Caroline seems to be caught flat-footed by the sudden explosion of violence. She fumbles with her camera, letting it hang via the strap over her shoulder but trying to get it out of the way as she grabs for her pistol. She finally manages to get the gun out of its holster and brings it to bear on the corpse just as Joaquin fires.
Joaquin's first shot goes wild but that was just to set his sights - the second blows the back of Mister Daly's head clean off and the corpse crashes to the ground. You hear screaming as some of the bystanders flee the sudden violence.
End of Combat
Caroline points the barrel of her gun at the space previously occupied by Daly's head for several seconds after he hits the ground. Finally, she lowers her gun, glances at Joaquin, and only then turns her attention to Stuthman, her brow creasing in sudden concern at his predicament.
She moves to his side and kneels down, reaching out a hesitant hand to not-quite touch his shoulder. "It's done," she murmurs. "It's, ah...dead. Again. It's gone."
Looking over her shoulder at the fallen corpse, she adds, mostly to herself, "And it was disappointingly unhelpful."
She clears her throat. "Ah. Anyway - Mr. Stuthman, it's all right now. I would suggest perhaps we should get moving before the marshal comes to investigate the disturbance."
Joaquin reloads each shotgun silently as the dragon in his head roars within his skull, slamming itself about in there. Only as it begins to slow its movement does he slip them back into their sheaths, look over Daly's corpse, and spit soundly down upon it.
Bending, he goes through it's clothing thoroughly.
"Ah. Anyway - Mr. Stuthman, it's all right now. I would suggest perhaps we should get moving before the marshal comes to investigate the disturbance."
"Shut up, Stuthman," he snarls quietly as he loots the corpse. "God isn't here, amigo... and there going to be lots more to kill soon. Like the Marshall, maybe," he adds to Caroline, his voice a little lighter. "If he's coming, this will end bloody."
YOU'D BEST BELIEVE THAT, HOSS, the snorting, fuming dragon says inside his head.
Seeing a hand come down towards him, Stuthman flinches violently, then scrabbles quickly backward a few feet before realizing that it was Caroline. Taking a deep, if shaky breath, he scrubs a hand over his face; his scratchy voice pants: "*huh* *hum* I'm... I'm fine. Le... le's go..."
Rising slowly to his feet, using his rifle for support, Mr. Stuthman absently brushes at his once nice clothes. His gaze is fixed on the corpse of Daly, making sure that its head is well and truly destroyed.
Dragging his gaze back to Caroline, he croaks: "Where?"
”Well, if you’re quite sure you’re up to it-“ She gives Stuthman a brief once-over, not entirely succeeding in hiding her skepticism. ”-I suppose we should see about finding this Brother Cheval. I would bet that he’s either at the root of things here or he has some idea what is.”
As she moves to her horse and begins stowing her camera, she adds as an aside, ”And do let’s try not to murder anyone if we can avoid it, Mr. Ramirez?”
Mr. Stuthman frowns, annoyed, muttering: "Said I'm fine - means I'm fine"
Despite his words, he moves shakily toward the horses. Taking a long swig from his canteen, Stuthman momentarily rest his head against the saddle, letting out a long sigh. Then, dragging himself onto the horse, he croaks: "Right, into the *huh*ills, then."
”And do let’s try not to murder anyone if we can avoid it, Mr. Ramirez?”
Joaquin turns his ugly face away from Stuthman towards Caroline, having finished rifling for anything of value in Daly's corpse.
"You're smart, Senorita Caldwell," he replies with the same unsettling, quiet confidence he mustered with the miners. "You know as well as Joaquin this whole town, it will be covered in blood soon. Already is. Can smell it everywhere. Going to be a reckoning here." He spits on the ground and forces a grin he doesn't feel. "Il Brutto, he pulls the trigger first. Better chance of staying alive that way."
The big man pulls himself up on Stuthman's horse, sitting behind him. After a moment of travelling, he speaks from behind him.
"What happened, Stuthman? Figured the dead thing, it got you, so I shot it."
Mr. Stuthman glares at the brute, but doesn't prevent him from mounting up behind him. At his words, though, Stuthman growls: "You talk too much," before falling silent as they group rides out of town.
After brooding for the next half hour, Mr. Stuthman finally sighs, and in a low voice: "It didn't 'get' me, at least not by any power of its own. There's too much ...wrong... with them - it... it overloads my brain. The last time..." Stuthman quirks a half-smile that Joaquin cannot see and speaks in a light-hearted tone that he clearly does not feel: "The last time, I woke up in a church; at a funeral; removing my scalpel from a dead man's skull. The bereaved were... unimpressed."
"Anyway," he mumbles, hanging his head, "I'm fine. Evverything's fine..."
Leaving behind a worrisome horde of mice and the recently self-exhumed corpse of the town's founder, you get up on your horses and head off north before the sheriff's men follow up on the gunshot.
A wide shot of the expanse of the Colorado foothills in the morning shows a hard, landscape dotted with trees, grasslands, and low bushes. from below, our posse rides in with Il Brutto stomping along in his surly fashion.
The road isn't particularly clear of stones and debris and makes for hard going. The horses are bathed in sweat and Il Brutto is wheezing when you finally spot what looks like a good place for a rest up ahead.
BANG!
The careen of a bullet off of rock starts all of you. Your weapons are in our hands quick enough but no immediate threat is visible. More gunfire sounds off though, and it looks like there's a firefight in the trees up ahead on the trail out of sight.
"The last time, I woke up in a church; at a funeral; removing my scalpel from a dead man's skull. The bereaved were... unimpressed."
"Anyway," he mumbles, hanging his head, "I'm fine. Evverything's fine..."
"Mmm," Joaquin responds, showing some surprising empathy for the relatively feckless thug he is."So sometimes you go to sleep, and sometimes you just kill 'em. Again, I mean. I can work with that -- "
Joaquin - who's insisted on riding on Stuthman's horse, not walking - is off the back of it and hunched over. He puts his guns away; shotguns, especially the sawed-off kind, are of no use for anything at this range. Instead he produces his cards under his poncho and begins to creep up for a better look.
Giving Joaquin a bit of a head start to creep along, Stuthman turns to Caroline: "Should we begin to approach from a slightly different angle?:
Caroline, who has freed her shotgun from the sling on her saddle, shrugs helplessly in response.
”I’ll follow your lead,” is all she says, checking that all of her necessary possessions are in order.
Joaquin creeps up to where the path flattens out, allowing for a look.
A slow pan down reveals a strange battle in the copse of trees. A woman in threadbare clothes with a determined expression is firing away at some huge horrific creature that is loping towards her at alarming speed. The... thing is a twisted humanoid with a bent spine and one arm far longer than the other. It appears caked in mud, but its eye sockets and mouth are open, and pouring blood. It flings an arm, and a blast of mud and blood fires into a tree, tearing through wood with incredible force. The woman, to her credit, doesn't change expressions and just keeps firing.
The sight of such a creature is almost enough to turn a man's blood - but not Il Brutto with murder on his mind.
Joaquin - KD
Stuthman - KC / QC (queen)
Caroline - AD
Blood Man - 9S
Woman - 8S
Caroline
Joaquin
Stuthman
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Blood Man
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Woman