DarkMatter D20: Drunk Southern Girls with Guns ... UPDATED - 8/18/05!
- Thread starter jonrog1
- Start date
DARK CANADA
CH. 4
First, Flynn and the Agents took a quick trip to the local lover's lane. Like most scenic overlooks, the drop to Lake Ontario below was a bit .... precipitous. Tom Norris' car arced cleanly out over the drop and disappeared with barely a splash into the clear, delicious Canadian waters below.
Next, the local biker bar netted the new team some firepower. Nothing heavy, but everyone was able to get their favorite weapon-of-choice. Jo nestled two new nine-mils between her belt and the small of her back. Andy scored a .45, Denis his usual Baretta. Flynn kept his Desert Eagle, and Ross was even able to score a variant on his beloved shotgun. All this was loaded into the back of Flynn's SUV. The team headed off for the Homeless Undead Bomber's quiet suburban neighborhood as night fell.
"Should we get, hmm, I don't know, stakes or crossbows or something?" Denis wondered on the way.
"Because of the vampires," said Andy.
"They're not vampires. There's no proof of vampires," Denis snapped back.
"Okay, so you're asking if we should arm ourselves against more of whatever Tom Norris became -- "
" -- yes --"
" -- which was not a vampire, but instead just a supernaturally strong humanoid who can suck the life-force from someone and collapses into a pile of dust when staked through the heart." Beat. "But is not a vampire."
Denis checked the map. "We're close, right? Almost there?"
*******************************************
Flynn killed the lights, let the SUV idle up to the curb. Street lights were few and far between here -- too "ambience unfriendly". Norris' house was a two-story colonial with a large yard, framed on either side by almost identical houses. There wer estretches of woodland splitting the development up. The hum of crickets almost drowned out the occasional crackle of a neighbor's television set. All in all, a perfectly sedate little stretch of suburban safety.
The Agents assembled in front of the SUV. Ross tossed Flynn one of their cell phones. "Flip the switch, it's a walkie."
"Got it." Flynn looked around. "No unwanted attention yet, but I can't help but notice -- no lights on at all in the house, or out here in the yard."
"No moon either." Denis shielded his small solid-state flashlight in his hand as he tested it. "Going to be pitch black in there."
Andy circled the yard quickly. "Yeah, and I'm thinking we do NOT want to turn on any lights. What if Norris' cover story is that they're on vacation? Let's take advantage of this, let it shield our entry from the nieghbors."
"What's our entry point?" Ross slid shells into his shotgun. "Force the front door?"
"Nah, could be pretty loud." Andy pointed to the left side of the house. "Look, there's a one-story expansion there, looks like they built a little den onto the side of the house. Above that, they built a crappy little storm door into the second floor, leading out ont the top of the expansion, like a deck."
"I don't like being stuck up there while you pick the lock," said Jo.
"Then don't." Andy moved to the house. "'l'll climb up there, break in. Do first surveillance, come down the stairs and unlock the front door."
"What if you run into trouble?" Flynn asked.
"I'll give the usual signal."
"Which is?"
Jo finished. "It's a scream, followed by some gunshots and more screaming, then like a gurgle, and dry snapping sounds." Andy stared at her. "Seriously, we're going to look at a skinned family. Lighten up."
**************************************************
Andy got on top of the faux-deck easily enough. The lock to the storm door was no problem -- he'd had a pretty dubious past even before joining the Hoffman Institute and puttting the fine sheen on his burglary skills.
He paused at the entrance. This door led striaght into one of the boys' bedrooms. He guessed it was the older boy, the eleven year old. Hockey equipment and jerseys lay strewn over the bed. A little TV had an older Playstation hooked to it. Andy left the door open behind him -- the starlight from outside gave him just a little help in making out the lay of the land. And, to tell the truth, ever since losing his eye, he saw a little ... better in the dark. His gun in one hand, he crept forward slowly.
Although this room looked normal, he could already smell the blood. Old blood, the rich organics gone, now just leaving that weird metal tang. Something behind his eyepatch itched. He reached the interior doorway.
This was the second story landing. A big staircase led downstairs, straight to the front door. Directly to his left was another doorway. The kiddie license plate next to the doorframe read "Jason" -- the younger brother's room.
Still to his left was a bathroom, at the head of the stairs, and then, opposite Jason's room, was what looked like a study. The door was open. He flashed his light, just once to get a sense of the room. He could barely see two kid-sized desks, a computer. Encyclopedias.
Which made the room directly opposite Andy the master bedroom. Not that he could tell for sure. A big, king-sized mattress was propped up, blocking the doorway to the room. A mattress positively soaked in blood ... and strips of something clinging to it.
Andy slid out the door, deked left. He had no desire to see what was behind that mattress -- laying dead behind it, sleeping behind it, or laying in wait for him behind it -- just yet.
He stepped into Jason's room. Froze.
*************************************
The Agents jumped when Andy's whisper crackled over their line. "Uhhh, I think I found the boys."
"Dead?" asked Denis.
"Not sure ...." Andy responded.
Back in the house, Andy kept up his commentary as he advanced. "... they're facing away from me. Kneeling. In prayer. Just ... kneeling there."
He stopped just a few feet from the boys. They were in shorts and t-shirts, on their knees, heads bowed, backs to him. They had to know he was there.
Andy stood there, silently waiting, for a good three minutes. Which is a very long time to be standing in a house of the dead waiting to see if two kneeling children are going to turn around and face you. Finally, he eased a hockey stick off the wall. He reached out, poked Tom Jr. with the blade.
Tom Jr. collapsed.
He didn't faint, or fall to the floor. The outer shell of Tom Jr. collapsed. The skin was an empty husk. As it fell apart, roaches -- thousands of them -- poured from the shape of the boy. A moment later "Jason", too, dissolved. Andy watched as the roaches surged over the deflated skins of the boys. The bugs carpeted the room. Soon they surged over his shoes, up the walls. Carefully, Andy moved from the room. The sound of crunching roaches echoed in the silent house.
A moment later, at the front door. Ross brought his shotgun up as the knob turned. All the Agents relaxed as Andy let them into the house. "What took you so long?"
"Don't go upstairs." Denis started to argue, but Andy cut him off. "Let's just ... search down here for now. Upstairs is going to take a while."
************************************************
The team flipped on their penlights, quickly tackled the bottom floor of the suburban hell house. Oddly, there was almost no sign of violence down here. Jo and Flynn went right -- the dining room connected to a den, and also, through a small waiter's pantry, to an refurbished kitchen. Flynn tapped the large steel fridge. "Oooo, bottom drawer freezer. Been wanting one of those ..."
To the left (under the boys' bedrooms) Andy, Ross and Denis checked the living room and the extension -- which was actually a small library. Andy searched under the bookshelves. "Nothing secret here..."
"Purloined letter," Denis muttered. "Look. Look at what ALL the books deal with."
They started filing through the library's selection. It was all mass-market, all attainable from any Barnes & Noble -- but all of it, every single book, dealth with prolonging one's life. The library seemd to evolve in purchases from left to right -- the men could trace the change from diet and fitness books, to New Age spirituality books, to --
"Ahhhh." Andy pulled a couple older, waterbeaten texts from the shelves. "Matregor, Vienna 1939. The Book of Transpirituality, Volume of the Flesh." He winced, put them back down. "Like 'Nasty Blood Magic 101'. Hard to get, but we're in a major city. Not impossible. The contacts needed to get these, though, lead to other ... avenues. Messier, more hard-core ones."
Ross shook his head. "This is the slippery slope Deepak Chopra gets you. One day you're learning to hold in your breath chi, or whatever, so you can squeak an extra five years out of your nineties. Next you'e bargaining with minor league evil for immortality."
Denis led them back into the living room. "I blame television. Now let's move --"
"Wait." Andy had stopped in the room. He nodded to Ross -- the two moved the furniture out of the way, so the large rug covering the hardwood floor was exposed. "This ... ahh ... this is just --"
"It has an arcane aura?" asked Denis.
"No. Ugly. It doesn't fit the rest of the house." Ross grabbed the edge of the rug. Pulled.
Beneath the rug, carved directly into the floor, was a masssive SUMMONING CIRCLE. Norris had hammered long slivers of cold iron and silver directly into his own floor in certain sections. Scorched into the wood around the circle were SYMBOLS. Symbols which had the distrubing tendency to change shape when you blinked.
"This ... is bad," Andy muttered. He was their resident occult expert.
"Scale of 1 to 10?" Ross whispered back.
"Okay, say there was a race of mind-bending reality shifting Elder Gods. And they wrote a eries of pulp novels in the thirties about their Elder Gods." Andy indicated the symbols. "That's the language they would use."
(DM's NOTE: Yep. Actual quote. That's why he sells tv shows, kids.)
**********************************************
In the kitchen, Flynn and Jo stared into the now-open refrigerator. Neither spoke. Jo squinted a bit in the bright fridge light.
"That's ..." Flynn began.
" ... a whole lot of dissected pets," Jo finished. The fridge was stacked -- like cordwood -- with the various body parts of what had to be fifty or so mixed breeds of cats and dogs. All sawn off, some skinned, some jammed together. All minty fresh. Jo popped two yellows and a blue pill. Flynn silently put out his hand. She dropped two pinks into it. Just to take the edge off.
The team re-united in the foyer of the house. Ross nodded grimly to Jo. "You won't believe what we just found."
Jo shook her head. "Sweetie, got you beat, you'll never believe what we just found."
Flynn called over from the stairs. "Actually, I think I've got you both beat." Everyone joined him. An armoire was nestled under the stairs leading to the second floor.
"It's empty," Denis shrugged.
"Who cares?" Flynn knocked on the wall. "Another set of stairs, under the main one." He and Ross began to ease the armoire away. "We still have a basement to check out."
CH. 4
First, Flynn and the Agents took a quick trip to the local lover's lane. Like most scenic overlooks, the drop to Lake Ontario below was a bit .... precipitous. Tom Norris' car arced cleanly out over the drop and disappeared with barely a splash into the clear, delicious Canadian waters below.
Next, the local biker bar netted the new team some firepower. Nothing heavy, but everyone was able to get their favorite weapon-of-choice. Jo nestled two new nine-mils between her belt and the small of her back. Andy scored a .45, Denis his usual Baretta. Flynn kept his Desert Eagle, and Ross was even able to score a variant on his beloved shotgun. All this was loaded into the back of Flynn's SUV. The team headed off for the Homeless Undead Bomber's quiet suburban neighborhood as night fell.
"Should we get, hmm, I don't know, stakes or crossbows or something?" Denis wondered on the way.
"Because of the vampires," said Andy.
"They're not vampires. There's no proof of vampires," Denis snapped back.
"Okay, so you're asking if we should arm ourselves against more of whatever Tom Norris became -- "
" -- yes --"
" -- which was not a vampire, but instead just a supernaturally strong humanoid who can suck the life-force from someone and collapses into a pile of dust when staked through the heart." Beat. "But is not a vampire."
Denis checked the map. "We're close, right? Almost there?"
*******************************************
Flynn killed the lights, let the SUV idle up to the curb. Street lights were few and far between here -- too "ambience unfriendly". Norris' house was a two-story colonial with a large yard, framed on either side by almost identical houses. There wer estretches of woodland splitting the development up. The hum of crickets almost drowned out the occasional crackle of a neighbor's television set. All in all, a perfectly sedate little stretch of suburban safety.
The Agents assembled in front of the SUV. Ross tossed Flynn one of their cell phones. "Flip the switch, it's a walkie."
"Got it." Flynn looked around. "No unwanted attention yet, but I can't help but notice -- no lights on at all in the house, or out here in the yard."
"No moon either." Denis shielded his small solid-state flashlight in his hand as he tested it. "Going to be pitch black in there."
Andy circled the yard quickly. "Yeah, and I'm thinking we do NOT want to turn on any lights. What if Norris' cover story is that they're on vacation? Let's take advantage of this, let it shield our entry from the nieghbors."
"What's our entry point?" Ross slid shells into his shotgun. "Force the front door?"
"Nah, could be pretty loud." Andy pointed to the left side of the house. "Look, there's a one-story expansion there, looks like they built a little den onto the side of the house. Above that, they built a crappy little storm door into the second floor, leading out ont the top of the expansion, like a deck."
"I don't like being stuck up there while you pick the lock," said Jo.
"Then don't." Andy moved to the house. "'l'll climb up there, break in. Do first surveillance, come down the stairs and unlock the front door."
"What if you run into trouble?" Flynn asked.
"I'll give the usual signal."
"Which is?"
Jo finished. "It's a scream, followed by some gunshots and more screaming, then like a gurgle, and dry snapping sounds." Andy stared at her. "Seriously, we're going to look at a skinned family. Lighten up."
**************************************************
Andy got on top of the faux-deck easily enough. The lock to the storm door was no problem -- he'd had a pretty dubious past even before joining the Hoffman Institute and puttting the fine sheen on his burglary skills.
He paused at the entrance. This door led striaght into one of the boys' bedrooms. He guessed it was the older boy, the eleven year old. Hockey equipment and jerseys lay strewn over the bed. A little TV had an older Playstation hooked to it. Andy left the door open behind him -- the starlight from outside gave him just a little help in making out the lay of the land. And, to tell the truth, ever since losing his eye, he saw a little ... better in the dark. His gun in one hand, he crept forward slowly.
Although this room looked normal, he could already smell the blood. Old blood, the rich organics gone, now just leaving that weird metal tang. Something behind his eyepatch itched. He reached the interior doorway.
This was the second story landing. A big staircase led downstairs, straight to the front door. Directly to his left was another doorway. The kiddie license plate next to the doorframe read "Jason" -- the younger brother's room.
Still to his left was a bathroom, at the head of the stairs, and then, opposite Jason's room, was what looked like a study. The door was open. He flashed his light, just once to get a sense of the room. He could barely see two kid-sized desks, a computer. Encyclopedias.
Which made the room directly opposite Andy the master bedroom. Not that he could tell for sure. A big, king-sized mattress was propped up, blocking the doorway to the room. A mattress positively soaked in blood ... and strips of something clinging to it.
Andy slid out the door, deked left. He had no desire to see what was behind that mattress -- laying dead behind it, sleeping behind it, or laying in wait for him behind it -- just yet.
He stepped into Jason's room. Froze.
*************************************
The Agents jumped when Andy's whisper crackled over their line. "Uhhh, I think I found the boys."
"Dead?" asked Denis.
"Not sure ...." Andy responded.
Back in the house, Andy kept up his commentary as he advanced. "... they're facing away from me. Kneeling. In prayer. Just ... kneeling there."
He stopped just a few feet from the boys. They were in shorts and t-shirts, on their knees, heads bowed, backs to him. They had to know he was there.
Andy stood there, silently waiting, for a good three minutes. Which is a very long time to be standing in a house of the dead waiting to see if two kneeling children are going to turn around and face you. Finally, he eased a hockey stick off the wall. He reached out, poked Tom Jr. with the blade.
Tom Jr. collapsed.
He didn't faint, or fall to the floor. The outer shell of Tom Jr. collapsed. The skin was an empty husk. As it fell apart, roaches -- thousands of them -- poured from the shape of the boy. A moment later "Jason", too, dissolved. Andy watched as the roaches surged over the deflated skins of the boys. The bugs carpeted the room. Soon they surged over his shoes, up the walls. Carefully, Andy moved from the room. The sound of crunching roaches echoed in the silent house.
A moment later, at the front door. Ross brought his shotgun up as the knob turned. All the Agents relaxed as Andy let them into the house. "What took you so long?"
"Don't go upstairs." Denis started to argue, but Andy cut him off. "Let's just ... search down here for now. Upstairs is going to take a while."
************************************************
The team flipped on their penlights, quickly tackled the bottom floor of the suburban hell house. Oddly, there was almost no sign of violence down here. Jo and Flynn went right -- the dining room connected to a den, and also, through a small waiter's pantry, to an refurbished kitchen. Flynn tapped the large steel fridge. "Oooo, bottom drawer freezer. Been wanting one of those ..."
To the left (under the boys' bedrooms) Andy, Ross and Denis checked the living room and the extension -- which was actually a small library. Andy searched under the bookshelves. "Nothing secret here..."
"Purloined letter," Denis muttered. "Look. Look at what ALL the books deal with."
They started filing through the library's selection. It was all mass-market, all attainable from any Barnes & Noble -- but all of it, every single book, dealth with prolonging one's life. The library seemd to evolve in purchases from left to right -- the men could trace the change from diet and fitness books, to New Age spirituality books, to --
"Ahhhh." Andy pulled a couple older, waterbeaten texts from the shelves. "Matregor, Vienna 1939. The Book of Transpirituality, Volume of the Flesh." He winced, put them back down. "Like 'Nasty Blood Magic 101'. Hard to get, but we're in a major city. Not impossible. The contacts needed to get these, though, lead to other ... avenues. Messier, more hard-core ones."
Ross shook his head. "This is the slippery slope Deepak Chopra gets you. One day you're learning to hold in your breath chi, or whatever, so you can squeak an extra five years out of your nineties. Next you'e bargaining with minor league evil for immortality."
Denis led them back into the living room. "I blame television. Now let's move --"
"Wait." Andy had stopped in the room. He nodded to Ross -- the two moved the furniture out of the way, so the large rug covering the hardwood floor was exposed. "This ... ahh ... this is just --"
"It has an arcane aura?" asked Denis.
"No. Ugly. It doesn't fit the rest of the house." Ross grabbed the edge of the rug. Pulled.
Beneath the rug, carved directly into the floor, was a masssive SUMMONING CIRCLE. Norris had hammered long slivers of cold iron and silver directly into his own floor in certain sections. Scorched into the wood around the circle were SYMBOLS. Symbols which had the distrubing tendency to change shape when you blinked.
"This ... is bad," Andy muttered. He was their resident occult expert.
"Scale of 1 to 10?" Ross whispered back.
"Okay, say there was a race of mind-bending reality shifting Elder Gods. And they wrote a eries of pulp novels in the thirties about their Elder Gods." Andy indicated the symbols. "That's the language they would use."
(DM's NOTE: Yep. Actual quote. That's why he sells tv shows, kids.)
**********************************************
In the kitchen, Flynn and Jo stared into the now-open refrigerator. Neither spoke. Jo squinted a bit in the bright fridge light.
"That's ..." Flynn began.
" ... a whole lot of dissected pets," Jo finished. The fridge was stacked -- like cordwood -- with the various body parts of what had to be fifty or so mixed breeds of cats and dogs. All sawn off, some skinned, some jammed together. All minty fresh. Jo popped two yellows and a blue pill. Flynn silently put out his hand. She dropped two pinks into it. Just to take the edge off.
The team re-united in the foyer of the house. Ross nodded grimly to Jo. "You won't believe what we just found."
Jo shook her head. "Sweetie, got you beat, you'll never believe what we just found."
Flynn called over from the stairs. "Actually, I think I've got you both beat." Everyone joined him. An armoire was nestled under the stairs leading to the second floor.
"It's empty," Denis shrugged.
"Who cares?" Flynn knocked on the wall. "Another set of stairs, under the main one." He and Ross began to ease the armoire away. "We still have a basement to check out."
Safana Cain
First Post
Hurray for frequent updating!
But don't you Hollywood fellows have rules about staying away from killing pets in your stories?
But don't you Hollywood fellows have rules about staying away from killing pets in your stories?
carpedavid
First Post
Mmmm...jonrog-y goodness. Thanks for the imagination taffy. It's wonderful, as always.
Kanegrundar
Explorer
Ok, the two kneeling kids creeped the hell out of me. Jonrog, you have just given me nightmares for a while! Excellent!!!
Kane
Kane
KidCthulhu
First Post
Wow. Just wow. Every time I think this Story Hour can't get any better, you and your players blow right through the previous record without even blinking.
I knew all those self help books were evil...
I knew all those self help books were evil...
jerichothebard
First Post
I've thought about running this whole series as adventures for my group.
I don't think I could live with myself if I did.
This is teh awesome.
I don't think I could live with myself if I did.
This is teh awesome.
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