Chapter 23: Swarm

Time left until monsters respawn: 4 hours, 34 minutes.

We exit the boss room into the hall with the third floor safe room. We keep going past the safe room and find an escalator. It's motivating upwards. I slap the emergency stop button on its side and we head down.

On the second floor now, we find ourselves in housewares. Bedding, table cloths, towels, shower curtains etc. In the old store this section is long, with short aisles. In the new store it's a long white tunnel. The aisles are perpendicular to the tunnel walls, so to get through it looks like we're going to have to serpentine between narrow passages.

We step off the escalator. The wall of shelves before us is lined with bright white towels. Dozens of identical towels. In the old store there was a variety of shapes, sizes and colors of towels. Not here. Just plain white bath towels. Forever and ever.

I look over at Jose who is eyeing another escalator right next to the one we just came down. It seems to go up and west into a different section of the third floor. “Joseeeee,”

“Yeah?”

“We don't have time for detours anymore. If we miss the toy department I'm sorry but we gotta go.”

“Not worried about that. Checking to see if hostiles will come down.”

I nod. He's right to check it. I had slipped back into thinking about the store as a video game dungeon, where the monsters stay in their rooms until you open the door. But we have no guarantee of that. In fact, the dogs on the fifth floor chased down the hall after us.

After a few minutes of waiting for enemies he calls out, “clear,” and we move forward.

We silently take to leapfrogging around the corners of the aisles. I move in first, say if the path is clear and post up there at the end of the aisle. Then Jose does the same around the next aisle.

We clear four aisles like this. The whole thing is set up to make us weave through a simple yet annoying non-maze. We clear four more aisles and still no hostiles.

I tilt my head at Jose in a “any ideas” pose. He shakes his head no, so we carry on. We clear another five aisles when we see the escalator up. That's also when we see our first bodies. Seven of them, in horrible states. They look like they've been gnawed on.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I walk over to one. It was an employee. I see from the name tag it was Venecia. She was Italian, grumpy, and barely spoke English. But she didn't deserve... This. I look at the others. Reginald, he worked bedding. Nice guy. Believer of just about any conspiracy theory you could name, but a nice guy. The others are customers. One is, or was, a kid.

That part, that part is fucked. The others I can deal with. I've seen death. Too much death. But a kid? No, no way.

“We gotta kill whatever did this,” I say to Jose. He nods in agreement. He can't even look at the kid. He has kids around that age.

We still haven't made contact with the enemy. I look up in the corner of my vision to my new radar. It's a light grey, translucent circle. In it all I see is a blue dot next to me, indicating Jose. I step towards the escalator and that's when a couple of things happen.

One, I see on my radar dozens and dozens of moving dots just on the periphery of my radar. Two, hundreds of rats swarm out from underneath the escalator, and three, we turn and run like hell.

We run and turn the corner down the first aisle. I remember I have pretty much exactly what we need for this so I turn, hold my hand palm up, fingers spread, and jerk my hand up, casting Stalagmite Caltrops. A 5 foot diameter circle of 2 inch stone spikes pops up from the white tile floor. The brown stones look like they aren't even attached to the tile but as the rat swarm crawls on and over the spikes, they don't budge. They don't do jack shit, but they don't budge.

I curse and cast Stalagmite Caltrops again, this time directly underneath the swarm. This time blood is spilled as dozens of rats get impaled. Not enough to discourage them though, so I have to keep running. I bolt around the corner and don't see Jose. Is he that far ahead of me? I keep running, turning another corner, then another.

When I've got enough distance to stop and turn, I wait for the swarm, then cast Stalagmite Caltrops twice, spearing the swarm's front and back half. More rats die. I think I have half of them dead now. But I have to move.

I keep running, turning the corner twice, then repeat my caltrop attack. It's working. I have to repeat the process just one last time and then the swarm is just a handful of disease carrying little bastards. At that point I'm out of Arcana anyway so I move in and start cutting with my knife. The jerks climb me, biting my exposed arms and neck as I jab with my knife. I finish the last one right as it's climbing my face and I see its little incisors going for my eyeball.

The image of the inside of a rat's mouth centimeters from biting down is probably something I'll remember for the rest of my life.

I call for Jose as I kick the rats until they fade and drop treasure. When the Stalagmite timer expires each tiny spike crumbles into tan dirt. Every rat drops a Sacagawea, but I diligently pick them all up. I just made 405 dollars off of ten minutes of work. Suck it, over paid lawyers.

Jose catches up to me by the escalator that dispensed all the rats. “Rats,” he says. “Don't like ‘em.”

“Yeah, well, this time I had a spell that was actually exactly what we needed.”

“Good,” he says, purposefully not looking at the bodies around us. “Maybe they can rest.” He makes the sign of the cross.

I'm not religious but I also don't disrespect others, so I just turn to our path forward. Again the escalator is going in the wrong direction. I punch the emergency stop button so we can be on our way. Honestly it's pretty fun to slam your fist into a big red button.

“Let me go first,” Jose says. I peer up the escalator and see why he's volunteering. It's dark up there. He said he has a vision technique that lets him see in the dark. I'm going to have to rely on him for this section. It's okay. I've done it before.