Mary Cooper was going to shoot the Sheriff. She didn’t care that he was her cousin. Swear to Christ, she was going to rip the damn pistol off his damn belt and put two between his eyes if he saw fit to roll them at her one more damn time.
“What, Jimmy, what,” she spat, “is so damn funny about all of this.”
He tucked his thumbs into his pockets with a smirk. Her Cousin Jimmy, or Sheriff Murphy to the rest of Dudlin, was a handsome and naturally charming man, infuriatingly so. Mary had watched him grin his way through life, failing upward at every step. Now the entire town was cursed to have the Murphy clan’s prettiest, most empty-headed buffoon as its lead law enforcement officer.
“Mare, are you kidding? I said your boy’s probably at a girl’s place, and you said, ‘No, Jim, sum’ins afoot. I’m telling you. He left here with only one change of clothes and a few granola bars.” He chuckled. “I mean, listen to yourself, woman.”
She grit her teeth. “No, I said—”
Jimmy continued, interrupting her. “And by the way, I’d hate to say it, Mare, but the kid’s probably been doing this for a minute, because the granola bars? Let me tell you, that’s a pro move, right there. I mean, my man’s brought snacks.” He laughed loudly. “He might be a Cooper in name, but he’s a Murphy when it counts!”
She clenched and unclenched her hands in rage. Dale, her sweet husband, had the presence of mind to speak up, saying calmly what she couldn’t.
“Sheriff, Salem – he, he doesn’t do this. His room looked like he’d left in a tornado, the kitchen cabinet was still open, the front door was unlocked. This is a kid who’s read a book called Organizing for Creativity twice. He has a job on the internet. I mean he makes near as much as Mary does full-time at the diner. He’s more a man than a boy, really. And he’s definitely not the sort of man who’d run off like this.”
“Dale,” said Jimmy, “you were the most boring teenager I ever met, and at Salem’s age, you’d already knocked up my cousin.”
Mary started crying. The sobs bubbled out surprising her with their force, racking her thin frame with spasms as she tried to fight them back. Dale tried to wrap her in a hug but she had other plans, lunging for a vase to throw at her bastard of a cousin.
Jimmy caught the vase out of the air with ease even as he jumped back in surprise. “Woah, woah! I’m sorry, alright, I’m sorry. I crossed the line, that’s my bad, alright? I get it, your son is missing. You know I love that boy.” He awkwardly set the vase down on the floor. “I didn’t know he was making money on the internet. That’s sick as hell.”
She let Dale pull her into him, almost going limp against his barrel chest.
“But it is nighttime, there is still a State of Emergency, and I am sheriff for the whole town, not just my kin. Now, my boys will be rolling around checking up on curfew anyway, and they will obviously know to be on the lookout for Salem.” Jimmy’s reminder that there was an active State of Emergency hit her like a punch to the gut. “Uhh, and uh, you know,” said Jimmy, floundering in the face of a crying woman, “if he’s not back tomorrow, say, noon – you know to give him time to wake up late and get breakfast – we’ll do a big, proper search party.”
It took two or three minutes Jimmy-free, weeping into the floral print of their couch to calm down enough to function. Dale had dutifully been rubbing her back, kneeling alongside her the whole time. Her sweet man, he deserved a better woman.
“Dale, it’s only 6:30. I’m not waiting for noon to do something.”
“Okay,” he said in his even keel. “What do you want to do?”
“We called everyone we could in town,” she said. “Dale, what if he ran into the woods?”
Dale thought silently for a moment. “The closest Helcat sighting was 150 miles from here. The Hunting Lodge would have noticed if it was near.”
The blood fled her face. She looked through him, into the middle distance. Dale had no idea what she was talking about. And he never would.
“The Hunting Lodge…they must have ways of finding people who got lost,” she said.
Dale nodded. “I know they keep dogs. Couldn’t hurt to ask.”
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Mary watched him as he got ready. She could barely contain the contempt as he took the time to properly lace up his boots. He had lost his sense of urgency after Jimmy’s banter. It was unbelievably disappointing.
She waited until they were in the car to say sharply, “He has an online girlfriend.”
“Hmm?” asked Dale.
The streets of Dudlin were all but empty and the town near pitch black. Once upon a time, Penn State University had operated an observatory atop a nearby hill and paid the town to not use its street lights. The University had long left, but Dudlin remained dark. Someone had done the estimates on how much it would cost to modernize the gas lights and that had been the end of that.
“Salem has an online girlfriend, so what Jimmy was saying was completely ridiculous.”
“Really?” he said, surprised. “Salem is dating? Who is it?”
“Another artist he met on a forum. And our son’s not a cheater, so—”
“Ah.”
Dale let on the gas some more, accelerating to ten above the speed limit, a sprinting pace for the man. “Sorry,” he said. “Fucking Jimmy.”
Mary laughed. Dale swearing could always get a titter from her. “It’s okay.” She petted his arm to let him know she meant it.
“He told you about this?”
“I asked him who he talked to for two hours every day at the same time.”
“Oh. Ha, yeah.” Dale coughed. “Did he show you a picture of her? Is she…pretty?”
“Dale!” she scolded with a smile. He laughed.
They sat in companionable silence for the rest of the drive. Oak Crescent Hunting Lodge was a hundred years old, a grand estate once the summer home of a steel millionaire. It sat perched upon a ridge, one side overlooking Dudlin and the river, and the other a view of the vast Game Lands and State Forests, and the rolling hills of Appalachia beyond.
After a hundred years, it remained one of the few profitable businesses left in the area to still be growing. As the folk of the country crowded into major cities, the desire to escape back into the peace of it grew. The Lodge provided a way for rich men to embody a fantasy in an idealized version of the woods, where they could partake in traditionally masculine blood sport with talented hunters to ensure the trip was worth its exorbitant cost.
Mary grew worried at the sight of the place, looking so much prettier than everything around for miles. She had heard stories of the sort of work this place offered young women in the surrounding county. The sort of things they expected from their staff – it was why she’d never tried waitressing for them.
Dale reassured her as they neared the wealthy retreat, parking a few spots down from an Italian sports car worth more than their home.
“I know the man who trains their dogs, Mary. He’s a good man, whip-smart. He’ll find Salem. I know it.”
````
Salem was delighted to find that he could freely speed up his perception of time. Or slow it to a crawl or a halt should anything interesting happen, as unlikely as that may have sounded to him at the moment. He had extended little air cracks out to surrounding hills to stimulate a breeze, with the hope it would carry the smell of salt to some nearby deer. It was just a waiting game now.
Perhaps sensing his boredom, his tunnel wolves took turns hopping over one another, playing tag through the stalagmites. It was cute, but could hardly hold his attention. Sped up, at least, they looked like spiraling blurs, making an entrancing pattern.
If he wanted to, he could experience time millions of times faster than normal, and let entire years pass by in a blink of an eye. It made sense, he supposed. He was a place now, after all. In kind, however, accelerating time too much made him feel inhuman, and made the world feel too much like a video game. An hour of real time in a subjective ten minutes was the most he felt comfortable with at the moment.
He had spent the remainder of his energy ‘carving’ an elaborate statue of Samiah, his girlfriend, and turning it into a Lure. Salem had realized shortly after completing the Tutorial that he hadn’t remembered to message her what was going on before he ran into the woods. He’d forgotten to leave anything for his parents as well, but they could feasibly figure out what happened on their own. Samiah lived in Tehran.
Hence the statue; if he could get a lifelike replica of her to go viral on the internet then she’d have to know he was still thinking of her. She knew where he lived, it would be impossible for her to believe it was just coincidence.
Salem felt confident the Lure built into the statue would make waves. From her eyes flowed a small but steady stream of water, dripping down her face into her cupped palms and then into the cracked earth at her feet. Where the water touched, it left a visible golden streak, fine dust in enough quantity that it looked like paint at first glance.
Gold drove people insane. He had lacked the energy to add in a full vein, but this pittance every day was within his budget and people had still killed for less. It had also increased his daily power draw by over five percent. Salem didn’t understand why making himself more valuable increased how fast he accumulated energy, but he was happy to oblige his new ‘biology’. If he had to be a cave, he wanted to at least be the coolest one.
Two dogs at his entrance snapped him out of idly sketching scenes into the walls of his cave through cracks in the rocks. They were hunting dogs, he’d seen enough growing up in the area to know that, and wore tear-away collars. Each stopped for a moment to lick at the mineral crystals spread about the entrance, but quickly moved into the cave, sniffing with a purpose.
That was odd. Dudlin was exactly the sort of place to have hillbillies who’d leave their dogs out unattended or locked up at night, but he was a way out from the town and publicly available land. Maybe someone was out here poaching – he had no idea when the hunting seasons were.
Salem briefly contemplated setting his tunnel wolves to ‘Subdue only’, the best he could do to limit their violence, but a Dungeon had to eat, and they weren’t his dogs. Besides, if he ever wanted to communicate with his family again, he needed to race to unlock higher-level intelligence in his creations – and that meant obliging his new nature.
The dogs ignored the statue completely, tentatively sniffing at the crack at the far wall. They were low enough to be able to ignore the dense field of webs that clogged the top half of the crack.
He could see everything within him perfectly, as though it was lit flawlessly at all angles, but the dogs were operating in total darkness. The first cautiously navigated the crack, narrow enough to traverse with ease but blind to the danger lurking within.
His tunnel wolf had propped itself between the stone walls at an angle, holding its body almost completely vertical to the ground. The moment the dog wandered underneath, the monster lunged down, snapping its maw around the animal’s neck, and dragged it upwards into the crack until its torso was lodged trapped between two jagged, jutting rocks.
Its dying whines and wails were horrifying. Once it was fully caught in the stones, the tunnel wolf was quick to disengage from its thrashing prey. The sound of its extended agony was soon drowned out by frantic barks and yips from its companion. It began to sprint back and forth through Salem’s tunnels and out from his entrance, trying its best to summon help.
Salem watched as his tunnel wolf began to devour its prey while it was still alive but too tired to fully resist. He was filled with a mix of horror at the event and pride for his creations, who could do no wrong in his eyes.
That said, he did have to speed up time until the dog finally died after almost ten minutes of agony. The burst of power from its death was far greater than he had expected, almost ten percent of everything he’d spent the whole day. It was more than enough that whatever discomfort he felt over the creature’s death was quickly lost to the fun of planning out further expansions for himself.
First thing to do was prioritize luring in more visitors. His appetite had been whet.