"I still can't believe it took the commissioner two days to approve this search." Brian wasn't usually one to complain, but apparently he found the delay weird enough to comment on it, and to do so often. "What does he expect us to find on the town's streets? Jaywalking?"
"More like drug-deals, probably." Dan's tone was tired and disinterested, as if he really couldn't care less about his job anymore. "Nothing to do with the case, though."
"I'm more annoyed that we could only get one cruiser for this trip." Sam was more agitated than Molly had ever seen him, practically growling his words out between his sharp teeth and gripping the steering wheel roughly enough to leave scratch-marks. "Officers aren't supposed to be sitting in the back, unless they betray the law." Molly quirked a brow in his direction, incredulous even as she knew nothing of Sam's casual hypocrisy.
"You expect to find someone in need of being arrested out here?"
"Not really, but I hope so." He smirked. "It would sure make me feel better." Molly just shook her head at him and the other two officers chuckled quietly, Sam's grip on the wheel easing slightly. "How's Margaret doin', by the way? I expected her to be causin' some trouble out on the streets again by now." Molly sighed heavily, thinking back on how Candy and Stan had taken the news about their daughter being in the hospital yet again. They were worrying themselves to death and Molly wasn't fairing much better herself.
"All the tests they ran came back negative, but she's still asleep. It's almost like she's in a coma with no clear cause, except that she sometimes mutters gibberish in her sleep. It doesn't make any sense at all."
"Normally I'd say you should let the doctors worry about that mystery and focus on this one," Sam said simply, though a grimace of sympathy was slowly forming on his face. "But in this case-"
"No, what you'd normally say is right. If I let my personal attachments get in the way I won't be much use out here, and I really want to catch the fuckers who did this." Sam was as surprised that Molly was listening to him as she was that he was giving good advice, doing a double-take as he glanced at her briefly before returning his attention to the snow-covered dirt road. Whatever had happened to Mae seemed to have sobered them all, and the four of them had been working together much more smoothly since that event. Molly couldn't shake the feeling that what happened was related to the big case somehow, even though the thought was both baseless and ridiculous on the face of it. How could the disappearance of one group of people have anything to do with someone else suddenly going comatose over a week later? No rationale she applied could banish the absurd thought from her brain, however, so she was just trying to ignore it and do her job.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Sam placed a hand on her shoulder, giving her a look that spoke of understanding, his eyes deep with calculation and his lips forming a worried frown. "If you need a few days off to regroup, I'll make sure you can have 'em." She released a shuddering breath she hadn't noticed she'd been holding.
"Thank you, Sam."
"Well, on a more pleasant note, we're plenty far in to get the fuck out of this cramped car now." Since Molly was nodding along with Dan's words as some upturned old mine-carts came into view Sam decided to defer to their judgment on the matter. This was their town, afterall. Soon the cruiser was parked and they all piled out, ready to begin.
"Welp, the entrance to the mine is caved in." Molly's observation was said in a manner that conveyed that she had no idea what to make of this information, but they were all happy to have found something right away. The snow easily hid the story the ground may have told from their sight.
"Alright, that's a great start right there. Spread out slow and steady, torches to the ground." He clicked on a flashlight even though they were awash with daylight, banishing even the shadows of the trees wherever his gaze fell, and the others followed suit. "We don't wanna destroy anything that the snow hasn't mucked up yet. Record anything weird and start doubling back in a couple hours so we can compare notes and figure out what in the Sam Hell happened here. Once we have the lay of the place we'll search around the mine entrance together."
The search began in earnest as they all separated to cover as much ground as possible, Brian's feathered fingers in particular itching toward his pistol out of a steadily developing nervous habit the further they all moved from one another. There didn't seem to be much to fear from such a routine search, but there didn't seem to be much reason for their mission to be approved so slowly by the commissioner. There definitely wasn't any sensible reason for someone to just pass out and stay out for as long as Mae had. It seemed pretty odd that the snowfall had suddenly become almost like a blizzard the night before their search was to start, as if specifically summoned to impede their work.
"Don't think that way, Brian." He chided himself quietly. Despite his fascination with mysticism and the occult as a child and the weird atmosphere of Possum Springs, Brian was an adult, an atheist, and a police officer. He didn't have time to be worried about ghosts and summoned storms when there were real problems for him to deal with.
On that thought his mind wandered to Bea, as she'd introduced herself, and he wondered just how old she was, or rather how young. The amount of responsibility that was being shoved on her really didn't sit right with Brian, especially when he considered what a useless mess of a man he'd been at her age. He tried to come up with a good excuse to have a chat with her father sometime without distressing the poor girl further. He needed more information to come up with a good strategy, and that meant talking to the problematic elements directly. He needed to know how they thought, what their motives were, and what they were doing to wreck the resolve of the strong young woman running their store. Certainly she'd only really talked about her father, and that was the best place to start, but Brian didn't suspect that any older men or women whom Bea was meant to instruct would show her much respect.
As a gust of wind rolled through the trees above and the hoot of an owl sounded Brian had to ponder why he couldn't get his mind off of Bea and her struggles, even though he had plenty of problems of his own and a case to solve. It was exactly like when he'd obsessed over some way to help Candy and Molly get those dipshits who had been held back a grade to leave them alone and maybe get their attention at the same time.
"Nonono..." He muttered to himself, shaking his head as if disgusted by his own thoughts. "Just help Bea, like a friendly, not-creepy-at-all person, and then confess to Molly so she can reject you like you've been preparing for your entire life." Brian scowled, sweeping his flashlight over the indifferent snow erratically. "But first, solve the damn case." He had been wandering around uselessly for over an hour, not sure what he was even looking for, and finding nothing of even mild interest. The owl gave another hoot. "Solve the case!" Hoot. "Find literally anything related to your job, you pathetic piece of garbage." Hoot-hoot. "Oh shut up!" As the owl flew away in distress, Brian's left eyelid began to twitch. "I think I'm going insane." The wind breezed through the branches, and they groaned quietly as if in somber agreement.
Molly's ear was twitching, and it wouldn't stop.
She wanted to find tracks, or a sign of a struggle, her boots carefully pushing aside patches of snow to give her a better view of the ground, but in spite of her best efforts to remain calm, careful, and slow, she couldn't shake the sound in her ear. It was so faint that she was sure she was imagining it, and besides that it almost just sounded like a dull ringing, like she heard as if from her own skull after moments of euphoric pleasure, and just like in those moments it mostly registered as a feeling rather than a sound. It was wrong, though. It felt like that pleasant buzz was reversed, clawing and agitating, and heralding the arrival of something rather than the end of a moment of bodily bliss.
Molly shook her head viciously, refusing to acknowledge such ludicrous phantasms. Her nerves were just getting the better of her.
Yet, the not-sound was getting stronger. Molly navigated toward the source as if by primal instinct, her posture lowering to a pent-up crouch, as if she was ready to pounce. As she got closer to the source an actual sound blocked out the odd sensation, but the wet squelching just made her more uneasy. You know how many times I've shot someone? In haughty defiance of the feeling of dread creeping through her, Molly's fingers didn't tremble in the slightest as she quietly slipped her gun free of its holster. Once. Many more shots had been fired in ranges at inanimate targets, and Molly flipped off the safety with confidence, creeping up to the tree that hid the source of that horrible noise. You should carry a battleaxe. There was no logical reason to believe she would find anything other than one animal eating another as she heard wet flesh ripping with an odd pattern and somehow cavernous cadence, but the many illogical reasons were enough for her this time.
Black, disgusting chitin, both solid and shifting with twisted, tortured shapes. Eyes that bled a constant stream of green ichor, the substance bending to form shapes that she couldn't define off-hand before funneling back into the eyes that bled the streams, a constant supply of physics-defying gore. Quadruped, but more limbs sprouted from its back, clutching a bone. Three separate maws with smiling rows of teeth that were as white as maggot flesh. Flickering embers sputtered from gaping holes on its back, and the thing turned toward her.
Molly screamed, most of her body frozen in terror and confusion, but her finger pulled the trigger.
Suddenly it had vanished from sight, or even having been seen, and the memory of it was a hazy mess that fought with the totally contradictory sight of having turned to see absolutely nothing chewing on the corpses, but the corpses and the chewing itself remained in her mind, even the floating bone that once seemed to be held by the beast. The corpses were still there, even though the bone was no longer suspended in the air, and Molly fought the urge to vomit.
There might have been four of them, and she could make out both feathers and fur, but there was nothing else identifiable about the mess of melted people in front of her. The mass had frozen in place after they'd been melted, if that was even the right way to describe what she was seeing, and the remains formed a perfect square in the snow, bones shaped into symbols on the surface, with a twisting spire of frozen blood reaching up from the center, as high as the top of Molly's chest. The smell on the air was like a toxic fire's hazardous fumes, but the smell of death was conspicuously absent, and Molly squinted at the mass in front of her, sure that it had been a more definable group of individual dead just seconds ago, but the memory wouldn't form.
She did remember what chewed at them, even as her mind screamed that it wasn't real. A scuttling noise in the snow settled the matter for her nicely, Molly scanning the area around her to no effect. She still couldn't see it.
"Molly, was that you screaming?" Brian's voice came from her hand radio, worry clear in his tone. "We're on our way, just hold on."
"Molly, if you can answer I want a situation report!" Sam's voice was demanding and self-assured, interspersed with huffs of breath as he sprinted back toward where they started to follow her path out. "Why did you open fire? Who are we fighting?"
When her off-hand pulled her radio up to her mouth and depressed the transmit button her fingers did tremble. "I-I have a contact." Her voice sounded meek and terrified, and she couldn't have that. Not now. She swallowed hard, trying bury her dread in calm resolve, ready to speak with confidence.
Except, she had no idea how to describe what she had seen. "What contact?" It was Sam's voice again. "Details, lass! Details!" She heard movement in the snow to her right. Did you kill 'em? She didn't finish pulling the trigger, Dan holding his hands up calmly, his own radio in his hand.
When Molly lowered her weapon he spoke into his radio. "It was just a wolf. A really big one, but I think Molly scared it off already." There were several things wrong with what he'd just said, the least of which being that there were no tracks in the snow. With Dan behind her Molly crept forward to where she first saw the monstrosity, and the mess of melded together bodies was nowhere to be seen, but the strangely benign imprint they left in the snow remained. She was already trying to find ways to make the others believe her, considering how unhelpfully vague her only piece of evidence was, but such thoughts were formed mostly to distract herself from what she'd seen, heard, and felt in the last few moments. At first she had expected some admonishment from her peers after Dan's assessment of the situation, but none was forthcoming. They had heard the pure terror in her voice, the truth in it keeping mocking far from their minds. Regardless of what had really been seen, there was no denying it had been traumatizing.
"We're still on our way. We'll all head back to the mine entrance together." None of them knew for certain how close they were to the jaws of death, but at least Molly was finally displaying a fraction of the appropriate level of fear for them being so near The Hole.