Sean’s goblin wound was bandaged, but he seemed to be using the arm just fine. It had to be mostly healed at this point.

  “The EPA did a sweep and says this area is goblin-free,” Sean said as we pulled into another rust belt ruin.

  That was the usual process for finding a monster nest: report it to the Environmental Protection Agency so they could come clean it up. If they said it was goblin-free, they likely had cause to be here recently to confirm that.

  “They’re usually decent at that sort of thing, but from now on we sweep interiors with weapons ready. One goblin nest equals a hundred goblin nests.”

  “Understood.”

  This particular town was built on the river like the first, but the terrain was more forgiving, so the houses and businesses were more spread out. Main Street was two blocks from the water, and then the majority of the residences were built up a hillside. The sign on the way in said, “Population 4,333,” so the community had been decently busy at one time.

  We started with the street nearest to the river.

  “This job might look big, but a whole corner of this place got flattened,” Sean said as we went from abandoned home to abandoned home. “Can’t really see it when you drive in, but when we get up the hill a bit, you’ll see.”

  “Flattened?”

  “Apparently shit hit the fan in the 50s, and they started to bomb monster nests. This place got hit by mistake, killed a bunch of people, and nobody rebuilt.”

  “Wow.”

  Sean nodded.

  I pried open the door to a boarded-up storefront with an apartment on top.

  “Old pizza shop,” Sean observed as we cleared. “Every time I see one of these, I wish I could get the oven out somehow. Chances are it's nothing but scrap by now, but fix one of those up? Get a few grand for that, easy.”

  “I’m surprised more people don’t do things like that.”

  “Oh, they have. These places have been picked over real good. From furniture to copper pipe, trust me, it’s all gone. Getting a broken pizza oven into a pickup isn’t worth it. If it was, it wouldn’t be here.”

  That made sense.

  A few sweeps later, we forced our way into an old drugstore.

  “Wait,” I whispered. I heard a rustle and the soft scrape of movement over old linoleum.

  We stood still, just inside the doorway, and waited.

  The noise came again. This time whatever was inside seemed to scramble a bit. With shields up and swords drawn, we crept down an aisle of empty, rusted shelves toward the counter at the back. Our headlamps cast harsh shadows that were easy to mistake for movement. A shadow changing because the light source shifted could look a lot like a monster moving, especially at the edges of your vision.

  The scratching was behind the counter. I was certain of it.

  Sean counted down from three on his fingers, and we looked over the counter, swords ready to thrust.

  Two creatures hissed and panicked. They slipped and slid as they attempted to escape, knocking over old pill bottles and kicking up dust.

  Raccoons. Not monsters.

  We chuckled a little bit and continued our sweep, working our way through several more storefronts, an old movie theater, and an old dentist’s office, which was by far the creepiest place I had seen thus far. The torn-up seats, broken lights, and scattered implements gave each room a sinister air.

  I was about to pry the boards off an old taxidermy shop, but Sean put a hand on my shoulder.

  “That’s on our no-go list,” he said. “Too dangerous.”

  “The dead animals?”

  Sean laughed. “These old family businesses tend to have buckets of chemicals kicking around in dark corners. It’s not done anymore, but arsenic was a major part of taxidermy for a while. They literally painted the inside of the hides with it. Doesn’t take much of it to mess you up, and sometimes the old workbenches are coated in the stuff.”

  “I didn’t know that. What else is on the no-go list?”

  “Exterminators, lumber plants that produced treated wood, electronics manufacturers, tanneries, and farmer supply stores that were open before 1990.”

  “Those all make sense when you say them out loud,” I replied. “I’m guessing pesticides are the worry for the farming one?”

  “Yep. Nothing will ruin your day like spilling a few gallons of Diazinon all over yourself.”

  At the opposite end of main street, the road bent into a small tunnel with train tracks built over top. Sean frowned and held up a finger to request quiet. He played his headlamp around the tunnel for a minute, lingering on the crumbling, puddle-covered road that went through, and then turned to survey the structures around us.

  A two-story house was built into the hillside next to the tunnel. A long set of leaning, cracked concrete stairs went up twenty feet or so to the front door. We started our ascent. Just before the porch, an intense odor of cat urine hit me. Even through my mask, the smell was like a physical wall.

  Sean tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for us to go back down the stairs.

  Didn’t have to tell me twice. Instead of continuing our sweep with less noxious structures, Sean led us a block over from Main Street to put the house out of sight and waited another block before speaking.

  “So,” he began.

  “That was the worst cat piss smell I’ve ever experienced.”

  Sean shook his head. “If that’s what I thought it was, we would have still done our sweep. I’m betting it was ammonia, and that house was a meth lab.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Tunnels and overpasses are popular landmarks for those types. They park where satellites can’t see and set up shop in the next closest building. That tunnel had seen a lot of traffic recently, so I had my suspicions.”

  “Ah.”

  “There are all sorts of risks that come with going into a meth lab.”

  “Oh, I’m aware,” I said. “From toxic fumes to meth heads with guns.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “You’ll see way more meth labs than goblin nests on this job. If goblins learn to cook, they might take over the world.”

  I laughed as Sean grinned.

  “That’s only half a joke,” Sean admitted. “I actually worry about stuff like that sometimes.”

  “Don’t blame you. So what’s next, do we call this in?”

  “Yeah. Once it's confirmed to be safe, this site will get put back on the inspection schedule.”

  “Ever run into actual trouble?” I asked.

  With a nervous chuckle, Sean answered, “I’ve had guns pulled on me on three separate occasions. Two were meth labs. One was a squatter.”

  “Damn.”

  “Not my best days at work, that’s for sure.”

  When we got back to the SUV, Sean had me pull up the addresses for the next inspection sites on our list while he phoned our handler to report the possible drug den. Our next stops were all old farms, it looked like. We were more likely to run into raccoons than meth labs for those, Sean assured me.

  That evening, Beth was on her way out for work as I came in.

  “Want a ride down the street?” I asked.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Promise to call me when you need picked up?”

  With an eye roll, she nodded. Working at a bar meant late hours, and the first time Beth walked home at 2:30 a.m. I thought my heart might explode. From then on, the rule was she called me for a ride home. If I was on a crawl, she had her own ride-share account with my credit card on it.

  She didn’t fight me on any of this, but I was very aware that she felt I was being overprotective.

  “Am I being crazy?” I asked Nathan when Beth had gone.

  “About walking Carson Street in the middle of the night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bro, no. Fuck doing that alone like that.”

  That made me feel better.

  After a quick shower, I flopped onto the couch, looking forward to several hours of mindless scrolling.

  “My hours are going to get weird for a while,” Nathan warned. “We’ll be working at the airport for who knows how long.”

  “Oh, for the remodel?”

  “Yeah. I talked to a few guys in the carpenters’ union who are already there, and it’s supposed to be a pretty good assignment. Two days a week they have food trucks, and then they do these ‘all-hands’ meetings that can take two or three hours, so you’re getting paid to sit and drink tea.”

  “Food trucks are pricey,” I said.

  Nathan smiled. “All paid for by the airport.”

  “Damn.”

  “I’m still pretty low on the totem pole, but if you want, I can put your name in for an apprenticeship. I don’t know how much weight that would carry. Wouldn’t be nothing, though.”

  “I’m not ready to give up on crawling, but I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

  “Yeah, dude. No worries.”

  Later that night, when I was an hour into watching videos of excited dogs knocking people over–the children were always the funniest–Nathan sent me a link.

  “You see this?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered. “What is it?”

  “If you click the link, it will tell you.”

  “I was going to. I’m busy right now.”

  Nathan sighed. “There’s a standoff at a B gate in Butler.”

  Butler was a relatively rural area north of the city.

  “Standoff?” I opened the link.

  An estimated thirty people erected a makeshift blockade of pickup trucks, portable fence panels, and pallets around a B-ranked gate and refused to let anyone near. Not CDM employees, not police, and definitely not crawlers.

  Nathan pulled the stream up on the television.

  A vlogger with a selfie stick and a microphone stood in a wooded area with half a dozen police and CDM vehicles behind her. She was already partway through her spiel when we tuned in.

  “-is unknown. It is also unknown what the response will be if authorities do not meet their demands. Warning shots were fired earlier today when CDM enforcers first arrived on the scene, and it’s clear the campers are well-armed. This isn’t the first time someone attempted to claim ownership of a gate appearing on their property, but in every instance, the courts sided with the government. With that precedent, authorities are unlikely…”

  “Think you’ll get called in for this?” Nathan asked, his eyes fixed on the television.

  “I’m not sure what an intern could do to help.”

  “Fair. These guys have balls, though. Not a chance any of them have the levels to run a B gate, and they definitely couldn’t win a fight against a crawl team that does.”

  The minimum suggested level for a B-ranked gate was 12 with 15 being the recommended. Then you needed a harvest team to get the real value out before it closed. If the campers had the levels to clear the gate, I suspected they would have done so already. They were banking on someone handing them a stack of money to prevent a dungeon surge.

  “Looks like it’s a Buttymen gate,” I said when I spotted the pickaxe logo. “I’ve been on a few of their sites. They go hard but usually have their shit together.”

  “Did you ask them what it means to be a ‘buttyman?’” Nathan asked, jokingly.

  I laughed.

  “Oh, you actually asked!”

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I? It’s an old coal miner term for a coworker. Working in a mine often meant working ‘butt-to-butt’ because there was hardly any room. Therefore, the guy with you was your ‘butty’ or ‘buttyman.’”

  “Go figure.”

  “Don’t quote me on that,” I said. “It’s very possible someone was messing with me, but that’s what I was told.”

  Nathan shrugged. “It’s a good story even if it’s fake.”

  Everyone on the stream ducked suddenly at the pop of gunshots somewhere off-screen. The vlogger we watched scrambled for cover, turning her footage into a blur of grass, sky, trees, and cars. When it stabilized, she sat with her back against a truck tire. The scene got quiet again.

  “Those were gunshots,” she confirmed. “I counted five. It’s not clear who fired, though.”

  She used the selfie stick to look over the hood of the truck. Anyone who wasn’t a police officer crouched behind cover like she did. Anyone who was police pointed a gun in the general direction of the gate or yelled into their radios.

  “Listen!” she whispered.

  Someone distant spoke through a bullhorn: “The fifth amendment says that ‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.’ We are defending our constitutional right to property. This gate is on our land, and we have the right to be compensated for it.”

  One of the police officers on scene replied, “That’s something for a court to decide. Please put down your weapons and step out with your hands up.”

  “We will not surrender our property without just compensation.”

  “Blocking the gate from being cleared endangers the public. Nobody wants the bloodshed of a dungeon surge.”

  “We don’t want that either. Pay us like the constitution says to, and this is solved.”

  “Haven’t these guys ever watched a movie?” Nathan asked. “Even in fiction, nobody holding up a place like this gets what they want. Never. Not once.”

  “If they’re quoting the constitution, this is at least partially a moral stand of some kind,” I said.

  “Ah, that’s true. Not quite the same as hostages in a bank. Still dumb as shit, though.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  My phone buzzed. I answered.

  “A D gate needs cullers by 9 p.m. Are you available?”

  “Did you say D?”

  “Yes, sir. There is presently a shortage of available cullers.”

  I wondered if that was because of the B gate standoff. It would make sense for the CDM to start scrambling to contain a potential dungeon surge. A D gate, though? I had never run one of those before, and I was only level 2.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  “Thank you for your service. I am texting you the address now.”

  “They sending you into the standoff after all?” Nathan joked.

  “Yep. They figure if a level 2 archer gets out there and flexes a bit, it will scare everyone off.”

  Nathan laughed. “Good luck on the crawl. I can pick up Beth if you’re not back in time.”

  “She can call a rideshare. It’s okay. I can’t wreck your sleep like that.”

  “I don’t mind, man. Just let me know.”

  “Thanks. See you in a bit.”

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