I got a steady job. I am a glorified highway inspector. I don’t mind. The job is genuinely important and I am saving lives. We are checking a highway and its environs for intrusions and, necessarily, by sheer driving at a certain speed, for monsters. Fast movements attract them. By the way, should somebody tell you that you can do the Jurassic Park thing and hold absolutely still and the monsters will lose interest they have been bullshitting you. Once you’ve attracted them they are on to you. If you are unlucky they’ll even call in their friends. If you can run, run. If not stand and fight. Your chances are low, but you better fight while you are fresh. They don’t tire in most cases, not by our standards.

They are also keeping teams together. The nice thing about draftees in the government’s mind is that you can forget about overtime rules. We are given a task and that’s it. Ours was to patrol a highway to the Czech border. Nominally it was in a B zone. It was in a B zone because the highway itself was declared a B zone. You have to keep at least some of the trucks running. Dear Australians, you tend to live generally with the coast in walking distance. Other continents do not. We cannot substitute with shipping. We need to keep at least some roads open.

That morning I got my first hit I got my consumables, mainly coins, right before dawn, like usually. You do not go out in the dark if you can help it. Many monsters can see in the dark. We cannot.

That day we started out in our usual 4WD with an ultraheavy machine gun on a pintle. They don’t really want a civillian handling a machine gun and I was not really trained in radio operations, but I have a driving license, so I drive that thing. If we had only done the trip along the road and stopped every few kilometres at a place with flat ground where I could do my ritual the task would have been easy. We even had a few freshly poured concrete squares on the shoulders of the road with the vegetation around them cleared with extreme thoroughness, property rights or environmental regulations be damned. But if you do that you won’t catch those intrusions so close to the road that the monsters will just wander in. So we regularly left the road to either side creating a zig-middle-zag pattern along the route.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It is embarrassing to admit it. We were in a middle spot of the pattern. I got a hit to the northwest, about 4km distant, one pathway, early stage. We radioed it in, got orders to continue and saw helicopters departing on the return leg.

The first monster was on the back leg from the ruin of a farm house abandoned decades ago. We live in Central Europe. Our salamanders are tiny slender animals shaped like a lizard. That thing we hit was still slender for its length, which was around 4 meters with 10 pairs of legs. I inadvertedly ran over it as it was resting its well camouflaged form on the dirt road I was driving us on. It was severely wounded and apparently unable to pursue us. But Dejan gave it a good long burst from our machine gun.

At that time we did not the monster recognition software, but the monster handbook was already available in electronic, easy to search form. Ulrike found it under „greater camouflage newt“. It is poisonous. We had no flat ground for me to make a good looting ritual. Ulrike did not need further input to pull her few weeks seniority to make a command decision that taking an enemy we must not touch into our vehicle was right out and spanning our tarpaulin on a dirt road with bushes close to the road was also right out. She elected to abandon the kill.

Thus passed our first five days. On the sixth day our supply run had been delayed. As it arrived only in the early afternoon we were ordered to shift the run to the next day, when we would get a support vehicle with heavy weapons from the army.