Modern/Delta Green - The Beginning of the End (COMPLETED)

[talien]

Dawn Biozyme: Part 6 – Cnidocyte Containment

Hammer slipped past two steel doors. The prominent magnetic card reader and the “airlock” between the exterior and interior chambers demonstrated the scientists’ desire to secure the interior chamber. However, both doors stood wide open.

Inside, stainless steel plates lined the large room. Six-foot tall metal and glass containment vessels lined the walls, while at least twice as many three-foot tall vessels marched in long rows down the center. The vessels all resembled incubators for premature newborns, except for their varying size.

Flashing lights lined the bases of many of the vessels, apparently displaying interior temperature, humidity, and more obscure data. The glass fronts of many vessels were fogged by humidity, but despite the translucency, it seemed that some of the largest containers may contain people. About half of the vessels, both large and small, were smashed open, dark, and empty. The floor near these vessels was slick with clear, gelatin-like smears.

Hammer tapped on the glass of one of the nearest small vessel. It jerked suddenly from the struggles of a tertiary cnidocyte trying to get out. Tentacles probed the glass looking for a way to get at Hammer.

Besides the incubator vessels, a small countertop in the room’s center held several sealed liquid nitrogen vats. Each vat was labeled “PRIMARY SOURCE.”

Hammer rolled the vat to the doorway. Jim-Bean nearly tripped over it.

"What's that?"

"Liquid nitrogen," said Hammer. "Thought we could use it."

Jim-Bean stuck a few blocks of C-4 to it. "Maybe to stop those tentacle things."

"The tertiary cnidocytes?"

Jim-Bean shook his head. "Bigger. And angrier."

"That'd be the secondary cnidocytes." Hammer gazed ruefully on the larger smashed containers. "What about the security team?"

More explosions echoed from further down the hallway. "What security team?" asked Jim-Bean with a straight face.

Glass smashed behind them. The familiar squeaking whine joined the roar of the klaxons and WTHQ.

Jim-Bean and Hammer left the large vat where it was. The secondary cnidocyte in the hall reached the vat just as the one in the containment chamber exited. The agents got a good look at them and wished they hadn't.

Their skin was the color of a submerged corpse. Three clawed legs stumped along in an awkward gait, supporting a headless torso. At its center was a wet anus/mouth, which puckered obscenely and was the source of the mewling. Tentacles fanned out behind it, containing a boiling mass of what might have been red worms but were probably intestines.

Jim-Bean pressed the remote detonator.

The vat exploded, tossing the things backward and filling the air with white mist. The mewling turned to shrieking, but only for a moment. Then it became a different sound all together.

"Are they…cooing?" asked Hammer.

The hallway was covered with a white phlegm-like substance. The secondary cnidocytes used their tentacles to grab great globs of it and shove it into their red orifices at the center of their bodies.

"What was in that vat?" asked Jim-Bean.

"I don't know," said Hammer. "But whatever it is…I think they're eating it."

 

[talien]

Dawn Biozyme: Part 7 – "Power Plant"

The agents kicked open iron doors stenciled with the words “Power Plant.”

Inside, an ominous cylindrical metal device was mounted on iron clamps in the center of the chamber. The vaguely bullet-shaped apparatus sprouted a jumble of wires that snake into a hole in the floor.

Hammer looked at it curiously. "Weird. It's not running."

Jim-Bean frowned. "That's because it's not a power plant." He pointed to a curious-looking chamber at the center. "This is a firebomb."

"Is it armed?" asked Hammer.

Jim-Bean shook his head. "Not yet."

They backed out of the room and entered another across the hall.

Comfortable chairs were gathered around a central island on which several personal computers are situated, quietly displaying innocuous screensavers. One wall held a wide window of glass allowing a view of another large chamber beyond. A bank of television monitors covered another wall.

Jim-Bean tapped some of the keys. "Password protected."

"I wish Guppy was here," muttered Hammer.

Jim-Bean sat at one of the workstations and cracked his knuckles. "Who needs Guppy when we can just have the owners tell us?"

He concentrated…

Dr. Finley tapped some keys and moved the mouse to click on a folder labeled PROJECT MOTHMAN. It was uploaded from a shared server titled MAINFRAME.

Jim-Bean took note as he typed the password. "Alhazred." He also noticed that on the table was an emergency shutdown procedure with the word spelled backwards to initiate the firebomb.

Back in the present, Jim-Bean tapped the password.

The television monitors turned on.

"What did you just do?" asked Hammer.

"I don't…I'm not sure," said Jim-Bean, turning to face the monitors.

There was a soft mechanical clicking coming from the server room next door. A low whine began. The fluorescent fixtures in the other room turned on.

The cameras showed a large, empty room--the center of which was overlain by a tarpaulin—encircled at the edges of the room by a locked chain-link fence. In the center of the chamber, embedded in the concrete, was a large flat obsidian block, barely higher than the surrounding floor, irregular and featureless. Spaced around the chamber at about the fifteen-foot level were four circular steel plates about a foot in diameter each.

As the pitch of the generator heightened, the lights dimmed slightly, their hue pinkening. The air thickened.

"I don't like this…" said Jim-Bean.

"Can you stop it?"

Jim-Bean tapped a few keys. The tinny rasp of WTHQ finally shut off. Jim-Bean smiled at Hammer.

Hammer sighed at Jim-Bean.

"I know the password to blow the place up, if that's what you're asking."

The chain-hung light fixtures in the large room swung toward the center of the cylindrical chamber, straining against their light chains to illuminate the center of the floor. Intense vibrations rattled shelves and loose objects: a great cloud of darkness seeps into the large chamber on the camera.

WHAM! The door they had come through shuddered. It was met by familiar squealing.

"I think the babies want their momma."

Hammer set his jaw. "Engage the self-destruct mechanism. Now."

WHAM! The door on the opposite side of the room nearly splintered from the impact. Bleach-white tentacles squeezed through the cracks.

Hammer blasted the window with both pistols.

"What'd you do that for?" shouted Jim-Bean over the roar of the vibrations.

"Giving the babies a clear path!" He opened the door to the server room. "Get inside!"

They closed the door and hid in the cool darkness of the server room.

Judging from the crunches and cracks they heard, the secondary cnidocytes had battered the doors down seconds later. Their mewling was unbearable.

The server room wasn't dark for long. EM displays—ball lightning, electrostatic charges, strangely-colored auras--nickered and eddied across the room. There were no surges in the electrical supply, but strange odors and howling noises assailed the agents.

"Are they gone yet?" asked Jim-Bean.

"I can't tell!" shouted Hammer, straining to listen. "I'm not sure if they're in the main chamber."

Jim-Bean put his fingers to his forehead. "I'll take a look."

"No wait!" was all Hammer got out before Jim-Bean got a front row seat to a mind-blasting display.

 

[talien]

Dawn Biozyme: Part 8 – The Summoning of Shub-Niggurath

Jim-Bean was witness to the source of all miscreation and abomination.

For at the center of the room was a gray mass that quobbed and quivered, and swelled perpetually; and from it, in manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side through the chamber. The shivering little blobs known as tertiary cnidocytes formed spontaneously from the goo while larger, pulpy white forms crawled across the heaving mother-thing's mass, searching for sustenance.

And madly, insanely, a beast with no such discernible anatomy possessed teats, and the mewling white wormy beasts set their puckered mouths upon them and sucked.

Mechanical hoses snaked forth from hidden chambers and probed the seething mass. Finding a teat, they began pumping the white, stringy fluid that dripped from them, filling a set of ten-gallon carboys at the far end of the chamber.

The thing occasionally faded slightly, in coordination with changes in the pitch of the field generator.

Jim-Bean recoiled, back, back, back into his own insignificant body. Back with the knowledge that in some way, he was part of this thing and she him, that this perversity way his mother, was everyone's mother, and that the benefits of her milk pumped through his veins.

Back in his own mind, Jim-Bean found himself screaming. His nose leaked blood. Jim-Bean curled up into a ball and tried to contain his form lest it melt away and crawl down into the chamber to sup at the All-Mother's teats and slurp from her…

BLAM! Pain slashed through Jim-Bean's thoughts, dragging his disembodied spirit back into his skull, hard. Blood leaked from a bullet hole in his forearm.

Jim-Bean wiped the blood from his nose. "What the hell?"

"I had to snap you out of it!" Hammer shrugged. "We've got to get out of here!"

A humming resonance assaulted their ears. A virulent orange light began to leak in everywhere in the building, almost like a seeping, glowing liquid. Smoke curled from machinery. The machinery that contained the seeping monstrosity began to fail.

Hammer yanked a hard drive out of one of the servers. "This should help. Let's go."

As they fled through the server room, a countdown clicked on the computer screens. They had just five minutes to go.

They ran down the hall back the way they came, jumping over corpses and the spattered remains of cnidocytes. All the remaining living cnidocytes had crawled their way to their mother's welcoming bosom.

Hammer reached a stairwell labeled EXIT. He tried the door. It was locked.

He fired his pistol into the lock mechanism and tried again. Nothing.

"Damn it! This place is locked down tight."

Behind them, there was the sound of steel girders snapping. Parts of the roof were collapsing as the thing burst free of its confines.

"Stand back," said Jim-Bean. He wiped his nose again – the nosebleed hadn't stopped – and tried to marshal his mental energy for one last push.

With a roar he shoved his palms forward at the door. The door blasted open from his telekinetic shove, tearing upwards as if it had been sucked through the air by a tornado.

Upstairs, a fire alarm rang. Hammer and Jim-Bean fled the building, flanked by accounts, lawyers, and Dawn Biozyme staff.

A safe distance away, they turned to watch.

A portion of the outer warehouse wall collapsed, crumpled to a heap of concrete and corrugated steel by an incidental blow from the Outer God. Tentacles and hooves and mouths and worse surged upward out of the wall just as the firebomb went off. The explosions tore across Dawn Biozyme with ruthless efficiency, each explosive rigged to blow a critical foundation. As the flames and smoke billowed outwards, tentacles probed hungrily for purchase…

And then it all sucked in upon itself. The flames, the smoke, and the Thing – gone in an instant. The suction was so strong that it ruffled the hair of onlookers.

Jim-Bean wiped more blood from his nose. The nosebleed had finally stopped.

"Next time," chastised Hammer, "never, EVER use your powers around an Outer God."

 

[talien]

Dawn Biozyme: Conclusion

"Mission accomplished," Hammer reported to Sprague. "We have taken down Dawn Biozyme."

"I heard," said Sprague over the cistron. "Using the files we found on the hard drive, we initiated a full-blown federal investigation."

"Great—" began Hammer.

"But one of MegaCosmo's board members, 58-year-old David Melton, was found dead of his own hand. His suicide note confessed guilt in the funding and covert manipulation of Dawn Biozyme, and records accompanying the note contained information implicating Melton and Matthew Lewis in a plot to fleece millions from Dawn Biozyme, Tiger Transit, and MegaCosmos. The state of California is prosecuting Lewis now."

"So we didn't eff up, huh?" said Jim-Bean, fishing for a compliment.

"If you define not f*&king up as letting the head researcher go in a witness protection program deal that you had no authority to implement, yes, you did a great job," snarled Sprague. "But first things first. I'm sending you information on the Finley's experimental farm he was using to grow Fumo Loco, the predecessor to Coca Loco. Find out what you can, remove the evidence, and make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Finley's still out there; we've had his mansion cased for days but he hasn't returned. If he's at the farm, bring him in."

"Can't we just use the JERICHO jets to just scour the place clean…?" began Jim-Bean, but Sprague had already cut him off.

"Guess that's a no," said Hammer.

 

[talien]

Chapter 48: Landscrapes - Introduction

This story hour is a combination of the scenario from “A Night on Owlshead Mountain” from Arc Dream's Delta Green: Eyes Only by Dennis Detwiller, At Your Door, and The Killing Jar by Bruce Cordell for the Dark*Matter campaign. You can read more about Delta Green at Delta Green. Please note: This story hour contains spoilers!

Our cast of characters includes:

• Game Master: Michael Tresca
• Kurtis "Hammer" Grange (Fast Hero/Gunslinger) played by George Webster
• Jim “Jim-Bean” Baxter (Charismatic Hero/Telepath) played by Jeremy Ortiz (Jeremy Robert Ortiz)
  

At Your Door gets a lot of flak for being goofy, but Landscrapes is singled out as being superior. The irony is that the agents, upon arriving at the farm at night, refused to enter because "that's when all the bad things happen." Of course, that wasn't the case at all.

I combined this scenario with the Tiger Transit's background, which provided a perfect backdrop for "showing, not telling" the dark history of Dawn Biozyme and Fumo Loco. The last part of this scenario is from The Killing Jar, which takes place in a series of winding cavern passages and ultimately a Mothman base.

Both the Landscrapes and Killing Jar scenarios provide a great setting for conflict but little guidance on how to create narrative tension. In the case of Landscrapes, I created a scene, triggering the intoxicating scent of Fumo Loco with the Gelid-Creature's attack. The Killing Jar, on the other hand, had a series of dangerous environments without an accompanying stress point like an attack. So Agent Balance and friends showed up at the worst time.

Still, the Fumo Loco incident played out more effectively than the underground scene. And the ending? The ending worked out far better than I could have hoped.

Defining Moment: Brain Jar + Elder Sign = a showdown the agents will never forget.

Relevant Media

• At Your Door: source of the serum blob.
• Delta Green: Eyes Only: Source of Night on Owlshead Mountain.
• The Killing Jar: Source of much of this scenario.
• Feed Me (Git It): From the Little Shop of Horrors soundtrack.

 

[talien]

Landscrapes: Prologue

If you want a rationale
It isn't very hard to see
Stop and think it over, pal
The guy sure looks like plant food to me.​

--Feed Me by Lee Wilkof​

It was a hundred and thirty miles to the hamlet of Delilah, a devolutionary journey from freeway to highway to road, from city to suburb to crossroad. The town was small and ugly, in a plain and boring way.

When they arrived, a convenience store, a service station, a post office and a tavern were open. An assortment of pickups and old autos were parked in front of the drinking establishment, where locals came to down a few at the end of the day.

Hammer and Jim-Bean opened the door to the tavern.

Inside, older men and women sipped their drinks and listened to Elvis croon in crackling tones from the dusty jukebox: the dead man's songs brought back memories of when they were younger and the world was bigger.

"We're looking for a room," said Hammer.

The bartender/hosteller looked them up and down.

"Two rooms," said Jim-Bean forcefully.

With a nod and a smile, the bartender rang them up. A credit card was exchanged for a key.

"Been a bad year all round really," muttered one of the locals, sipping his beer at the bar. "There's the sudden drought, and there was that bad frost in the Spring; some farmers might be seeing their last summer. There's no predicting the weather these days. And then there's the whole thing with Tagget."

Jim-Bean pivoted on his heel. "What about Tagget?"

The man peered quizzically at Jim-Bean. "Pardon?"

"Sorry," Jim-Bean flashed him a smile, then addressed the bartender. "His next drink's on me."

The older, weathered man returned the smile. "Frank Tagget's boy, Steven, still isn't back after running away. That makes seven times he's pulled the stunt now."

"So he disappears a lot?" asked Hammer, his curiosity piqued.

"Frank isn't too worried, even though it's been a few months: he reckons Steve'll be back when he’s broke and hungry. You'd think a lad of sixteen would know better. He took Greg Yardleigh's dog with him. Greg reckons Frank owes him a dog."

Jim-Bean and Hammer exchanged glances. "That's one dog and a kid missing." Hammer frowned.

"All the more reason not to visit the creepy farm at night," muttered Jim-Bean.

"You mean the Finley farm?"

"Yes, that one."

"The best for miles around. Man knew his soils."

"I bet," said Jim-Bean.

 

[talien]

Landscrapes: Part 1 – Barking up the Wrong Tree

The route to the farm was much easier to follow by day. The pavement turned to gravel in parts, and the road took the agents far from other farms.

Further down the road was the turnoff to the Finley farm, recognizable by a galvanized mailbox with RR#3, 237 painted on it. A graveled road led to the farm, sprawled across a narrow valley.

A long driveway led up to a gate and the farmyard. In the distant fields a solitary scarecrow stood sentinel. Around the yard were a farmhouse, barn, woodpile, equipment shed, chicken coop, garage, and a few small sheds. Out to the left of the yard was a greenhouse and attached to a wooden frame building, the laboratory. A fence surrounded the farm buildings and yard; to the outside of the perimeter fence was a fifteen-foot-wide band of scorched earth. Through a second gate a track led uphill from the farm to the forest which crowned the ridge beyond.

The agents stopped the car at the band of earth. Hammer got out to inspect it.

Next to the trees on the outskirts of the fields was a five-yards-broad band of earth that had been laid bare, burned, and flattened.

Hammer stuck one finger and the dirt and tasted it. "Lyme…some other defoliants. This patch of earth was chemically stripped."

"Finley trying to keep the woods out?" asked Jim-Bean, looking around at the scraggly oaks and junipers that led up to soaring sugar pines.

"Or keep something in." Hammer checked that both pistols were loaded. "Look at the gate."

The gate was off its hinges, lying by the side of the road, broken and bent. Glass twinkled around it in the dust.

"Someone rammed right through it on his way out," said Hammer.

The agents made their way into the yard. Wild swerve marks across the ground showed the starting point of the automobile's flight.

The buildings were shut and silent, darkened windows mute to what was seen through them. The yard contained a chicken coop, barn, equipment shed, and farmhouse. Other buildings facing onto the yard included an empty garage.

"You see that?" Jim-Bean pointed. There was an unusual shade of red in a fallow field uphill from the farm.

As the agents walked toward the forest, they came to the crimson splash, a tiny plant, bright-red like Fall maple, no more than a little shoot; it was growing out of the rib-cage of a decaying field mouse.

Hammer kneeled down to inspect the plant. "It has no roots in the earth; looks like flesh and innards are its sole nutrients."

That was just the start of it.

Hammer stood up to look around. They were on a lip of ground that sloped down a short way before rising again.

There were similar splashes of red everywhere. Some were shoots, some bushes, some were saplings, and there were even a couple of small blood-red trees where the swale deepened into a draw.

Each and every red plant sprung from the remains of an animal—mice, birds, rats, chickens, roosters, foxes, rabbits and pigs.

"Creepy." Jim-Bean held his cistron up and took a picture. SINNER flashed through all possible matches and found one: it was the strain of bizarre plant they had seen in Hellbend. "We've seen this before."

"But what's it doing out here?" asked Hammer.

"Maybe it walked," said Jim-Bean.

"Or it was transplanted. I don't recall it growing out of corpses."

Jim-Bean nodded. "Yeah, that's new. A Dawn Biozyme improvement?"

Hammer started walking towards the farmhouse. "Let's hope that's the only improvement."

 

[talien]

Landscrapes: Part 2 – The Greenhouse

The farmhouse was unlocked. Inside, all seemed orderly. There were two bedrooms (one unfurnished), kitchen, living room, bathroom, and a utility room with big concrete tubs. Here and there items and utensils were knocked over, or left on a bench. Other than the odd moss that grew in the sinks, over old food and between the sheets of the bed, there wasn't much to see. Finley had obviously not returned to the farm in months.

The agents headed back outside.

Out in the fields stood a relatively new building, about five years old--a greenhouse. Through the glass walls could be seen a riot of vegetation. Adjoining the greenhouse was a newish wooden frame extension, the lab.

Hammer tried the door. "Locked." He smashed the glass door with his elbow and reached in to unlock the door.

The insides sprang out as a mass of billowing greenery--the first impression was of something bursting out. However, the fronds simply bounced and waved, and it was apparent that they outgrew the walls.

Tobacco plants grew where they had no business growing. They towered at twelve feet in height, with stalks as thick as four inches and veins bulging like a bodybuilder. The nicotine in the air among the vibrant plants was palpable. There was a tantalizing flavor that was extremely aromatic.

What the smell was, Hammer could quite pin down.

Hammer stood in the open doorway, taking in the scent, as the tobacco plants known as Fumo Loco waved in a wind that wasn't there.

Deep within the dense foliage, something rustled.

"Hammer?" asked Jim-Bean. "What's up?"

Hammer didn't move. At times he thought the smell of Fumo Loco tasted like flowers or some kind of fruit. Or even the scent of a lover.

Whatever was in the brush was moving fast now, charging towards them with purpose.

Jim-Bean shoved Hammer out of the way just as a red dog lurched out of the foliage, teeth snapping inches from Hammer's face.

Jim-Bean fired several bullets into the hound. But then he realized it was no hound.

It was covered in the same red plants that were growing out of the corpses of so many other animals. Its eyes were replaced by red shoots that undulated of their own accord. Tendrils of the plant were wrapped around the joints of the dead dog, like a creeper vine gone mad. When the bullets from Jim-Bean's Glock punched through it, they just kicked up more curious red spores.

The hound moved unnaturally, like a poor animatronic attraction at a theme park. It reared back on its hind legs for another attack at Hammer. He stood still, dazed, seemingly unaware of the hound's pending assault.

Jim-Bean reached out one hand just as the plant-dog lunged. It hung, telekinetically caught it in mid-air.

The hound struggled a foot from Hammer. Hammer didn't react.

"What the hell are you, huh?" asked Jim-Bean, turning it this way and that with his open hand.

Red goo dripped down its legs into the weeds below. It looked as if the plant-dog had peed itself. But that wasn't possible, was it?

The creepers binding the corpse together turned gray in seconds. The head of the dog fell off, plopping to the ground.

Jim-Bean released his telekinetic grip on the thing.

The rest of the body collapsed in a puff of red spores as it hit the ground. All that was visible was a glittering dog tag, "IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO GREG YARDLEIGH."

Hammer blinked, coughing. "What…?" He looked down. "What the hell is that?"

"A very bad dog," said Jim-Bean. "That red plant does more than just eat dead bodies, it animates them. What happened to you there?"

Hammer frowned. "I had a…a vision, I think. There's something beyond the plants in that greenhouse. A hole. It goes very deep. I heard a buzzing…"

Jim-Bean nodded. "The alien dogs. Or Mothmen. Whatever they are, they're trying to tell us something. We need to go in there."

Hammer rubbed his forehead, trying to clear the cobwebs. "Right." He looked around, checking his surroundings a second time. "I know I was out of it for a little while but…wasn't there a scarecrow over there?"

Jim-Bean didn't even bother to check. He knew why it was missing.

"Work shed," Jim-Bean telepathically beamed to Hammer without moving his lips.

 

[talien]

Landscrapes: Part 3 – "Work Shed"

The equipment shed was cluttered and dirty, filled with agricultural tools and implements. A gasoline-powered electrical generator supplied emergency power to the house.

"Weed killer," said Jim-Bean, pointing at one of the many containers in the work shed.

A humanoid form silhouetted the entryway to the shed. But it was not a human being – not anymore. What was once the corpse of a youth was now a mess of living red creepers that sprouted from his rotting body, his guts, his mouth, and his eyes.

Jim-Bean fired a spray of bullets into the dead kid's plant-inhabited corpse. It reached upwards, tendrils stretching and gripping, and then it was gone.

"What the hell was that?" asked Hammer.

"Steven Tagget, I'm guessing," said Jim-Bean. "I don't think we're going to find Finley here."

The roof thunked as the Tagget-thing clambered around on the shed.

Hammer pointed both pistols at the ceiling.

"No, Hammer, wait—"

Hammer sprayed the ceiling with gunfire.

The thin shed roof, already straining under the weight of a body, collapsed. Hammer and Jim-Bean fell backwards under the debris.

The Tagget-thing rose up out of the wreckage, its expressionless red visage awful in the beam of sunlight from above. It turned and grabbed two sickles off a nearby rack.

Hammer rolled to his feet outside of the shed. "It can use tools?"

Jim-Bean, trapped on the other side with Tagget blocking the doorway, danced backwards as two sickle swipes narrowly missed his face.

Spotting an opening, Jim-Bean shoved his Glock up against the things torso and emptied the chamber.

The Tagget-thing stumbled backwards a few feet, the barrage powerful enough to blow a hole in its ribcage. Jerking itself forward again on numb legs, it relentlessly advanced on Jim-Bean.

The Tagget-thing's head exploded in a cloud of red spores. It fell face forward in front of Jim-Bean. Behind it, several yards away, Hammer lowered his rifle.

"Did you see that?" shouted Jim-Bean.

"What?"

"Goo. Red goo." Jim-Bean craned his neck to look, spotted the fast-moving blob and pointed. "There! It's coming your way."

Hammer lowered his rifle and drew his pistols. By the time Hammer's weapons were at the ready, a mound of dirt and twitching grass burrowed a path right between his legs and blazed a trail into a copse of trees behind him.

He spun at the sound of cracking wood, prepared to dodge aside should a tree fall on him. But then the sun was blotted out by the shadow of something huge.

Hammer looked up in awe. "You've got to be kidding me."

 

[talien]

Landscrapes: Part 4 – Beating Around the Bush

Hammer ran towards the shed.

"The thing is animating plants!" shouted Hammer.

"What?" Jim-Bean shouted back, reloading his pistol.

Hammer didn't bother to explain. He reholstered his pistols and cocked the rifle slung over his shoulder without losing his stride.

Behind him, an oak tree stumped along relentlessly.

"Is that…?" asked Jim-Bean.

"Yes!" Hammer spun, took aim, and fired.

A burst of wood splintered out of the trunk. Some leaves fell. But it was about as effective as shooting a tree might be – which is to say, not effective all.

"I need a can of gasoline!"

Jim-Bean handed Hammer the gasoline can, dumbfounded.

Then Hammer was off again as a mighty tree limb smashed in front of the shed. He ducked under one of its branches and ran in the opposite direction.

Jim-Bean couldn't tell how the thing saw, but he knew it had changed targets to focus on him.

Two limbs drew back to swat at the shed.

Jim-Bean had a tactic he used in only the direst of situations. He connected all the blocks of C4 to detonators by a wireless link to his cistron. They were normally snugly hidden in his satchel. But in times like this, with a two-story oak attacking the building he was in, bullets clearly wouldn't do.

So he threw it.

The bag caught in the tree's limbs. It paused in its attack, perhaps to observe the satchel, perhaps in surprise at the seemingly ineffective attack.

Jim-Bean stumbled backwards over debris to the back of the shed. Then he pressed the detonator.