Agricultural drama ahoy – what mysteries today await in the fields? Uh. A much more action-packed one. That's for sure.
Cover Art: Kirire
Chapter 12
The Bullhead had yet to leave so it wasn't too much to ask for it to take them over the valley in a low sweep. From high above the devastation was clear. Fields of crops that would have been a bright shade of yellow, orange or green were blackened and pitted, mired like swamps with their tall stalks bent low or flat to the ground. It wasn't every field by a long shot but it was enough that it felt like she was looking down on a patchwork quilt that someone had spilled a pot of ink onto. Some of them were burning as the farmers took matters into their own hands to protect their crops, the acrid smoke coiling up into the air and forcing them to swerve lazily around and between them.
"This is too indiscriminate to be intentional anymore," Blake said. "I could believe it was sabotage against the faunus family before, but not to this degree."
"Maybe it got out of control." Jaune said. "Whoever was using it to poison the Tawney fields might have accidentally let it spread. It wouldn't be hard if it was a living organism. Just a few instances of the anomaly escaping into the soil and you have an outbreak waiting to happen."
That was reasonable enough that Blake nodded. They swept across the valley and back again before slowly coming down to land in the same field they'd started at. About half the farmers had left to clean up their fields, drown their worries or get back to work, but the other half remained and confronted them again when they came out the aircraft.
"Well?" one of them shouted. "What are you going to do?"
"We're going to get to the bottom of this." Jaune promised them. It was good he did because she'd been about to ask what they expected of them, and Ruby looked too surprised by the sudden anger to react properly. Jaune stepped toward the crowd and raised his hands placatingly. "I know this is stressful but we're here for a reason and that reason is to help fix this. I'm going to have to ask if anyone has a field recently affected that hasn't yet been burned. Anyone?"
"I do." A young man raised his hand. "Pa had two fields infected and should still be burning th' first."
"This is the Tawney's fault!" someone else shouted. "It was their fields first and the rot has spread."
"What, you think they'd poison their own crops?"
"Not on purpose, no, but they might have tried some fancy super-grow formula or illegal pesticide. You know how people are always trying to add stuff to our foods. Something went wrong and now they're covering it up."
"Bullshit. They're old-fashioned folk that hate that stuff as much as any of us."
"You can't deny it was their fields hit first."
Blake tried to listen in on the conversation but was drawn away by Jaune and Ruby, left to follow them as they hopped into the tractor the young man who spoke out had brought along. This time they had to balance between two bales of hay and some farm equipment, which reminded her of their original plan to investigate that. It seemed pointless now that the problem wasn't limited to the Tawney farm.
"Seems there's a lot of blame going around." Jaune said conversationally to the farmer. "Is the Tawney family really that poorly respected?"
"Ah, it's just old folks going at it." The boy, around sixteen, laughed. "If they're not insulting one another, it's the weather, the seasons or those city-folk like you. You could have the best harvest ever seen and they'd be at us for being lazy harvesting it." He adopted a crooked tone. "You boys don't work hard enough. Back in my day, we did this all by hand under the burning sun with whips cracking our backs. And we had to fight off Grimm while we did it." He snorted. "The Tawney are alright folk. Most people don't care one way or another about them. Is just that farming is our life, our livelihood, and we're in a privileged position here, which isn't always a good thing."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, we're all pretty well off." The boy scratched his cheek which had a tint of sunburn. "And life is easy compared to a lot of places. The soil is good, we're well protected and we're paid good money for the crops and meat we send to the city. Thing is, that comes with a certain expectation. Da' calls it a responsibility. We're too important to let fail, which is great when we need help but not so good when we're not producing enough. Even if we're all well enough off to miss a harvest and get by, the city won't be, and they might decide it's better for the sake of Vale if other farmers oversaw the valley."
"They take your land away if you don't produce enough?" Blake asked. She couldn't believe it from a city so unintrusive as Vale. It sounded like the kind of thing Atlas would do. "Isn't that illegal?"
"They make the laws. And It's not like they'll toss us out. We'd probably be ordered to sell the farm and move out. Only happened once before that I remember, and not unfairly. There was an inheritance dispute after old man Caulders passed away. His kids weren't interested in farming but did want the valuable land for investment. When the alarm was raised that crops weren't being planted, the City Council stepped in and gave them an ultimatum – farm or sell. They sold. New family moved in and took over and everything was back to normal. It wasn't unfair or anything, but it'll sure as hell feel it if we all lose a harvest."
Wheat Valley was just too important logistically to Vale by the sounds of it. She wanted to say that was the city's mistake in having all its bread in one basket, but it wasn't like farming was easy with the Grimm around, and valleys as plentiful and fertile as this didn't occur too often. This was the kind of land wars were fought over.
It didn't take long to reach the field in question even as they passed others where dying crops were being burned. The field had once held corn and the ears still stood wrapped in their grassy sheaths, suspended on their stalks. They were black and brown all over however, with the plant life on the edges wilting and the ears of corn drooping and even rupturing out their sheaths in some cases. It was a sorry situation.
"Da' will want to come burn them down to prevent any disease spreading to the fields nearby," the farmer said as they all climbed out the back of the tractor. "But he'll be busy with the rest for now. You can do whatever you want to."
"Can we borrow some shovels out the back?" Jaune asked, lifting one from the trailer.
"Sure. Not like I need them."
There were only two so Jaune tossed one to her and took the other for himself. The farmer waved and the tractor rumbled away, no doubt to help his father clear out the other field. Jaune turned to the two of them and opened the wooden gate leading into this one. There was remarkably little stench in the air despite the rotten crops, and it might have been because of how fresh the air was otherwise.
"What are we looking for?" Ruby asked.
"Literally anything unusual. Blake and I will dig the seeds up and check the soil. You…" He trailed off, and she didn't think it was because of any doubt toward Ruby as much as lack of knowledge in the subject matter. "I don't know. Check the crops? See if you can find anything strange? I'm not an expert in farming."
Ruby didn't seem to mind. She saluted and darted into the crops. Blake was a little less thrilled, especially with how warm it was, but she hefted the shovel in two hands and dug it into the soil. It was surprisingly soft and easy do cut through, not at all tough like she expected. That must have been so the plants could grow easier, what with the soil being tilled probably by tractors. There were a few rocks here and there but nothing to resist her churning the soil up and over.
They worked in silence for the most part with the rhythmic thcck of the metal shovels biting into soil and then a tsss as they let the grains of soil drift off elsewhere. She wasn't sure what she was looking for but Jaune's suggestion of checking the seeds seemed as good a place to start. Corn obviously didn't grow its main crop underground like potatoes would, but there was still a seed originally and a root structure. The latter looked intact as far as she could see. In fact, pulling the white fibres up, she might have believed the crops were still alive. They obviously weren't so they must have died recently, and it must have been quick.
Ten minutes went by without anything but the soil, the shovel and the sweat running across her face and making her white shirt turn partially sticky and see-through. Jaune had moved on from his first spot to dig a little elsewhere, pushing aside some of the corn as he dug in the centre of a few stalks. Blake dug her shovel down and then pulled it, dragging a furrow in the loose soil and kneeling to peer down into it. There was a tiny amount of movement from the odd spider, thankfully a million times smaller than Timothy, and a few beetles here and there, but nothing about that looked unusual. A bird had even landed and was following her at a short distance, hopping up onto the displaced soil to snap its beak down and eat the bugs she'd unearthed.
A sharp scream quickly put a stop to that and had Blake near jumping out her skin. It came from within the corn field and Blake threw down her shovel, rushing in even before Jaune could react. "Ruby? Ruby!"
Dragging herself through the thick corn, she found the girl sat on her rear, eyes wide and hand pointing ahead of her deeper into the corn. Blake turned that way, hand falling to Gambol Shroud, only to gasp and pull it away and to her mouth. "Jaune!" she shouted. "Jaune, get here now!"
He came bursting through the corn, no less concerned than she but a lot slower. "What is it? What's wro- oh hell!" he cursed as he saw it.
A body.
A human body.
It – he – was laid out flat on his back with his arms spread at his side. A bucket lay by his left hand on its side with a shallow puddle of brackish water inside it. His eyes were shut but swollen, his eyelids extending outward, and his chest was ballooning out. Blake had, to her own dismay, seen her fair share of bodies before. It was inevitable in the White Fang. Most died of violent causes and thus were torn apart or had been shot, but some drowned or died of diseases, and sometimes those would bloat and expand horribly. It was a part of rigor mortis, or so she recalled. There were old stories about how corpses could even appear to move as well, though it was usually more to do with skin tightening or muscles loosening and simulating little movements.
"D-Did the anomaly get him?" Ruby asked in a frightened whisper. "I thought it didn't go after people."
"We thought so as well." Jaune said. "Stay there – both of you."
He stepped forward nervously, hand extended with his black gloves still on. It was times like this she thought he might have had the right idea with them, though had she worn any then she might have had to touch the body as well. Nothing came out the corn and it wasn't rustling ominously like it contained some horrible monster, so he crept closer still, enough so that he was stood by the corpse without issue. Then he knelt, first to touch the bucket and right it, then to gingerly touch his fingers to the man's neck.
It felt so hopeless to imagine he might be alive and surely enough Jaune shook his head. He then moved over to the other side, rifling in the man's pockets and bringing out a leather-bound wallet that he opened. "Alan Risgby," he read. "Seventeen."
"Isn't that the other family you talked to yesterday?" Blake asked.
"Yes. They had one field that had been affected compared to the numerous ones from the Tawney. Theirs bordered a Tawney one, which made me think they might have been hit by accident. Someone trying to damage the Tawney fields and making a mistake in the dark. It wouldn't have been hard when all the fields look the same."
"This isn't even remotely close to the Tawney farm." Blake pointed out. "So, it can't be close to the Rigsby's either. What was he doing out here so late?"
"That is a very good question." Jaune said. "Out late in someone else's farm with a bucket. A bucket of what-? Whatever it was, it's not here now, which means he must have upended it here." Jaune knelt and looked the man over, then hummed and reached into the pocket on his shirt. A small piece of paper was teased out of it. Jaune unfolded it. "It's a map of the farms. There's a cross on this one and another two back the way we came."
"That was another dead field!" Ruby said.
"It was." Jaune rubbed his chin. "Which means this fellow visited both fields. Maybe we were right the first time with this being a targeted attack on the Tawney family. The fact it's out of control now…"
"It isn't." Blake said. "This map has these two fields directly targeted and he came here with a bucket of something for both. That's the opposite of random and uncontrollable."
"Oh!" Ruby stood up and slammed her fist into her palm. "It's hitting all the fields now to hide the evidence!" she said. "Because we came and the bad guys got scared and tried to cover their tracks."
"Or it's to keep us busy." Jaune agreed. "One of the two. I think we need to have a talk with the Rigsby family again. Ask them why one of their family members was out late. This might not even be an anomaly. There's probably a thousand ways to poison crops and farmers are the ones who would know most of them."
"What do we do about the body?" Blake asked. "We can't leave it here for the farmers to find."
"We'll tell them and cordon off the field and then-"
"Body!" Ruby shrieked.
"I know, Ruby, I'm say-"
"IT'S MOVING!"
Bodies could, and did, as she knew, but the way Ruby said it implied a lot more than some tiny flutter of the lips or eyelids or a seeming exhale of breath as gasses naturally left the lungs. It was just panicky enough that Blake stepped back – and that Jaune flung himself back, which was probably thanks to him meeting all sorts of horrors in his line of work. This was evidently going to be one of them, as the dead body was trying to push itself up off the ground. She said trying because it was a horrible effort. The thing looked drunk and uncoordinated, like every limb was moving independently and fighting itself. It stumbled up onto its knees, then lurched forward and smacked its face down into the soil, then continued to try and stand without even trying to right itself. The motion caused it to stick its butt in the air, then trip up again and roll gangly forward onto its back. The corpse's arms began moving again, flailing slowly and erratically.
"Still think it's not anomalous?" Blake asked tensely.
"I'm revising my opinion." Jaune hissed. "Kill it."
"M-Me!?" Blake half-gasped and half-whined. "Why me? You have a sword!"
"You have a gun." Ruby pointed out. "Zombie rules."
"Those aren't a thing, Ruby." Jaune said.
"They'll do for now."
Gambol Shroud came out and she took aim on the thing's head. It wasn't hard since it was struggling to move, and any concerns she had for killing a person were washed away because this clearly wasn't human anymore. Clicking off the safety, she squeezed the trigger once and sent a shot slamming into the top of its skull. Blood did not come out, nor did brain matter, gore or anything else she might have expected. Even for a shot going in from the top and doing damage down toward the body, she would have expected some blowback.
"No blood."
"It's not Blood that Feeds then." Jaune said. "Which is lucky because we might all be dead. It's… uh… still moving, too."
Indeed, it was. Her execution hadn't done much of that and didn't look to have bothered it either. Despite the bullet through its brain, it kept trying to pull itself up into a rudimentary standing position again.
"Ruby." Jaune said with a heavy sigh. "Can you go grab one of those shovels?"
"Y-Yeah. Sure."
"I am not hitting that thing with a shovel." Blake said.
"Guns aren't doing anything."
"Oh, I know. Melee is the answer. I'm just saying I'm not the one doing it."
Jaune sighed and accepted the implement from Ruby when she returned. He took it in two hands, took a deep breath and approached the twitching body. The following, Blake assumed she had down. Jaune would raise the weapon up and bring it down on the thing's head. Brutal but simple. Not so. Whether this was a technique of ARC Corp or he just thought in different, horrible ways, Jaune's answer was to plant his foot on the thing's head to keep it still, then place the edge of the shovel against the back of its neck. Ruby squealed and turned away in horror and Blake wished she'd thought to do the same. Alas, morbid curiosity forced her to watch as Jaune brought his foot up to the top of the shovel's blade, positioned it, then drove down with all his weight.
The sound, oh hell, the sound. The smell, too, like rotten fruit, and then the sight which had Blake clapping her hands to her mouth. Instead of blood, bone and gore, what came out of the corpse's neck to spill onto the soil was hundreds of tiny, wriggling slugs. Jaune stepped back even as the body continued to try and stand. It didn't need its head since the body was obviously just a shell for a horde of nightmarish creatures writhing about inside. Stepping back, Jaune eyed an ear of corn and quickly snatched it. He held it between his gloved hands and snapped it down the middle with a dull crack. More slugs poured out the shattered corn.
The whole field was infected.
"Fire!" Jaune said loudly. And quickly. "Burn the field. Burn it all!" The farmers burned the crops to stop the spread of normal diseases, and in doing so they had been stopping the spread of this nightmarish anomaly. "Ruby, go find the farmers and tell them to hurry with the burning. Bring them back here and torch the place. If they're still busy, find fuel and do it yourself. Leave nothing left."
"M-Me?" she squeaked. "What will you be doing?"
"Blake and I are going to the Rigsby farmhouse to find the root of this."
"Want to switch places?" Blake offered.
Ruby looked at her, the living corpse, imagined a farmhouse full of them and backed away. "I…I'll handle things here. Aheh. Good luck!"
Blake didn't blame her. "How bad are we expecting this to be?" she asked Jaune.
"Bad. They were clearly able to keep whatever it was under control when they were poisoning the Tawney's fields but it looks like we spooked them. It must have been my visit." He made to drag his hand down his face then considered what it had touched and thought better. "Whatever happened to this guy is probably because they panicked and took more risks to divert attention away. And for them to not come and try to hide his body doesn't fill me with confidence."
"Should we maybe get some fuel cans before we go?"
Jaune considered than and then nodded. "Yeah. I think that's a good idea."
/-/
The Rigsby farmhouse was big. It had a large wooden fence separating it from the roads and fields but the building itself was two storeys tall and had that `patched-together` look that showed how the original building had been expanded time after time, with each new annexe or addition looking just a little more out of place. There were two barns off to the side of it as well, one smaller with a metal gate and some machinery outside, probably to keep tractors and other valuables safe, and the other with a wooden door and so much hay outside that she could only assume that was what lay inside.
It was that which Jaune took them to first, and she couldn't blame him. No one from the family had come to challenge them and it felt obvious that you'd keep something horrible outside your home and inside the barn where it'd be out the way. The large door creaked open and the scuttling of rats had Blake tensing. They were just that, though. A pigeon fluttered out, startled by them opening the doors, but no one and nothing attacked them.
Inside, large round bales of hay were stacked on top of one another at the back end, with a spiked tractor-attachment for puncturing and picking them up resting on the ground nearby. There were little lengths of coloured rope on the floor, likely used to tie the bales shut, and enough animal droppings to make her believe the bales were home to rats, stray cats and all manner of beasts. No worms, though. Or slugs or whatever they were. The place was dry and messy but not otherwise suspicious.
"The bucket had water in it." Blake said. "I don't think they can live without moisture."
"Hmm." Jaune scanned his torch around the inside a few more times, perhaps looking for barrels or any hidden compartments or stable sections. There weren't any. "I want to believe people wouldn't be stupid enough to bring an anomaly into their own home but it's looking like they might have."
"It'd be easier to keep it secret."
"Easier to die."
"They obviously didn't know it was dangerous to them."
A worm that ate crops might, to the untrained eye, have seemed like any other insect. One that was dangerous in a place like this that relied on its farmland, but nothing impossible or unnatural. There had to be a host of other pests they dealt with on the regular. None of those had the potential to infest and take over a human body, so the Rigsby's wouldn't have expected this to either.
"Into the house?" she asked.
"We'll at least try and be polite first." Jaune led them back to the front door. The place was eerily quiet. That might have just meant they were panicked, however. They were the suspects – and seemingly the perpetrators – in everything going wrong in the valley. Jaune slammed his fist on the door. "Hello? Mr Rigsby. Mrs Rigsby. I'm here from Vale to ask about the state of your farmland. Are you in there?" He knocked again, pounding his fist on the door. "Hello?"
"Looks like they're not in."
"I can see that, Blake. Thank you." Jaune stepped back and drove his shoe into the door by the handle. The door vibrated angrily and Jaune hopped back.
Blake snorted. "My hero."
"Shut up. Why don't you try it?"
In answer, she knelt, scooped up a rock off the lawn and used it to smash the small window on the door, then scraped the shards away before reaching her hand through and down to turn the lock on the inside. The door clicked and swung inward.
"You smashed the window."
"You were tyring to kick the door open. I assumed property damage wasn't a concern."
It was dark inside. Dark and quiet. The floorboards creaked as they stepped inside, Jaune flashing his torch in the closest doorways and Blake letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. It was bright outside, and so light came through the door, but the curtains on the windows were drawn shut, cutting off much of it. The floor was dusty though not overly so, and there was a moisture to the air that made her feel like the place was suffering from a fungal rot. Of the occupants there was no immediate sign, not even as Jaune continued to shout for them. "We're going to have to look around."
"If the next words out of your mouth are how we should split up…"
"No." He smiled tensely. "I think we should stay together." He gently shut the door behind them and then turned the lock again, presumably to slow anyone running away. "Don't shoot if you think they're alive. It's hard explaining murder away."
"Do you think they are still alive?"
"A man can hope."
Hope. Yeah, that sounded nice. Blake wished there was enough to go around. The wooden floor continued to creak as they walked through the hallway but stopped when they reached the kitchen. There were plates out as if a large family had eaten only hours before, and to her relief this wasn't plates, bowls and cooking pots full of slugs. Cracked eggs and crumbs of bread suggested a normal breakfast, and the fridge was filled with the usual foods you'd expect to find when she opened it. They weren't past their sell-by date either, so the family were still living here.
"Maybe they're out reacting to the fields." Blake said. "In which case they'll be angry when they come back and find us here."
"Not as angry as the others will be to hear that these lot were responsible. It's more likely they're out trying to find their missing members and find out what happened to them." Jaune shone the torch to a doorway at the back of the kitchen, set into a corner. "I'd rather get in trouble for trespassing than waste time ordering a warrant from the council. If these things are breeding and multiplying in infected crops, they'll keep spreading, and if they can reproduce within humans and livestock as well, then we don't want them getting sent back to Vale."
"Just to be clear. We're killing this, right? We're not containing this one?"
Jaune sighed. "Sadly. Yes. I want to contain as much as we can but anything that can replicate or is potentially infectious has to go. Maybe if we had better containment facilities…"
"Or containment facilities at all."
"Yes. I've asked my father time and time again. ARC Corp has the money to afford to buy warehouse and hire people to man them. It's not impossible for us to bring back the glory days if we wanted to."
"He won't have it?"
"That which has failed once can fail again." Jaune sounded like he was repeating something that had been said to him. "And then he goes on about how we wouldn't have learned from our mistakes if we went and repeated them. He's not wrong, I know, but the breaches weren't caused by us. Ozpin breached his containment and released most of the others. The rest were weakened because ARC Corp had to divert teams to try and stem the bleeding on the first. It was a chain reaction." He paused. "Or so I've read."
"Why did Ozpin release them?"
"I'm sure he had his reasons." Jaune said tightly. "Just as I'm sure he'd be happy to sound off on them if someone other than me asked. He'll justify it like he usually does. How anomalies aren't evil and didn't deserve to be locked away forever. And he's right to a degree. They're not evil. But then cancer isn't evil and that doesn't mean we welcome it into our homes. We find cures for diseases and infections and they're just microorganisms trying to live their lives. Is it unfair we treat those?"
Blake hummed. "Would you be offended if I asked him?"
"As long as you keep in mind his bias. I don't tell you how to think, only what to do." He spared her a glance. "As an employee, I mean."
"I get it. I'd still work here. Whatever he says, some anomalies are clearly too dangerous to leave running around."
"You don't know the half of it…" Jaune muttered. The door pushed open and revealed a dark staircase. Another cellar. Blake grimaced as she recalled the last. "Those slugs were in water, so somewhere dark and dank is probably best for them." He shone the torch down and then said, "Those with perfect night vision first."
Son of a bitch…
He was right, though. If those things were down there then she would see them first and be able to react, while he'd be blindsided. That didn't stop her grumbling about it. Stepping down with Gambol Shroud drawn, Blake kept her wits about her. The cellar was dank and wet as expected but it was not entirely pitch black. Once she reached the bottom of the staircase and peeked around the corner, she saw a few dim lights at the far end, suspended above what looked to be a trough with some soil in it. They were much too dim to provide light for normal plants. Fungal farming, maybe? Blake reported it back up to Jaune.
"Is there any water?"
"I hear something." Perfect night vision or not, she couldn't see any water. "Hang on, there are a few wooden barrels over by the back and I swear I can hear water behind that."
"Check it out."
Damn it. Now she wished she hadn't said anything. She grimaced and stepped down into the basement, then gingerly made her way over. The sound grew louder, though it wasn't at all like the river running through the valley. They'd tested that, too, and it came back clean. Things like those wriggling worms would have been visible to the naked eye. As she crept over, Blake eyed the trough of soil nearby in case anything came out. There were indeed fungus growing in it but they looked normal to her untrained eye. She was sure she'd seen similar types in the wild. Food for the slugs, though? A vehicle by which to reproduce? Skirting the barrels and avoiding touching them, she peered around at the sound of the noise.
There was a crack in the stone floor and a small, murky pond. She didn't think it was a spring because a pipe had been left above it and continued to trickle out a small amount of water that fell a few inches before splashing in the water. That looked clean, but the water down below in the artificial pond was so dark she couldn't see into it.
"I've found a pond!" she called back. "Looks dirty."
"Don't touch it!"
"As if I was going to stick my hand in…"
Jaune came down anyway, shining the torch around before approaching. The rest of the cellar was clean enough that there wasn't any risk for him beyond tripping and falling into the pond face first. He did stop to pull the lid off the barrels and look inside, however. Blake peered over his shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of stacks of potatoes instead of worms or body parts.
That didn't stop Jaune reached in a gloved hand and picking out a potato. She had a good idea why and took a safe distance from the pond, which proved accurate when he went and tossed the vegetable underhanded into the water. It splashed through the surface with an audible plop. No sooner had it, than did the water begin to roil and twist as wet and reflective forms broke the surface and dove after it. The water seemed to come alive, teeming with tiny bodies fighting to have access to the vegetable.
"If that pond reaches outside-"
"It doesn't." Blake said. Jaune looked to her and she explained. "It can't or the water wouldn't be this filthy and they wouldn't need to keep adding more. Plus, the river water would be contaminated by now and we'd be in a lot more trouble. We're also below ground level so it's seeping down at worst."
"Good point. Still, I'd rather not take any chances with this. We're going to have to close off the whole building and kill these things. I don't even know if pouring bleach in would. Maybe we can turn the water off, evaporate it and then incinerate them when they're exposed. If they don't die outside the water on their own."
"What about the Rigsby family? They're clearly feeding these things. Breeding them."
"We expose them and have them arrested. These are clearly anomalous for what they can do to the human body but they otherwise look like parasites. We'll just say they found and bred some in secret and used them to infect their rival's fields to try and get at the land. That's pretty much what they were doing anyway. I highly doubt they tested these on people. That one who died must have splashed himself or let one into his body somehow."
A sound came from above their heads and a little dust fluttered down from the ceiling. It was followed by another, an impact of a foot, and then a voice, "Ma'!" a man shouted. "Someone's broken into the house!"
They're back, Blake mouthed silently.
Jaune nodded and indicated the staircase with his hand. She started to make her way over even as the heavy footfalls above increased in number. The whole family had returned from their morning trip, and from the loud and harsh sounds of their voices, they weren't best pleased about it. The fact was enough to have Blake activate her aura and push it to the fore. Better safe than sorry. She took to the staircase and crept slowly up it, finger brushing over Gambol Shroud and eyes locked up and ahead. If they were responsible for this, and that looked all but certain now, then they wouldn't be happy to see two government agents mucking around in their home.
Sure enough, the open door at the top of the staircase didn't go unnoticed and a scrawny man with white hair and bald spots appeared at the top of it looking down. He was dressed in grey overalls over a pale blue shirt with thick brown farming boots. "Oi!" he shouted, both at them and the rest of his family. "What the hell do you think you're doing in our home!?"
"Mr Rigsby." Jaune spoke past Blake and with remarkable calm. "I spoke to you yesterday. I'm from ARC Corp in Vale. We need to have a talk with you about the situation in the fiel-"
The man at the top of the staircase reached to the side and came back with a gun. It was a shotgun, double barrelled, and had she not been prepared then it might have caught her by surprise. Before he could take aim, however, Gambol Shroud was up and barked off a shot, striking the man in his left shoulder and knocking his aim off. The buckshot scattered high, though it pinged off the stone ceiling and ricocheted painfully against her aura, forcing her back a step. The man screamed and toppled forward, rolling down the narrow staircase and forcing her and Jaune off it before he hit the floor and didn't move. She hadn't shot him anywhere fatal, but at his age and with that fall-?
"They killed Da'!" a man howled. Another of the Rigsby's appeared at the top of the staircase but this one slammed the door shut. Swearing, Blake leapt over the body and rushed up, but she heard something heavy scraping against the floor before she could. When she tried, the door opened a fraction of an inch and then struck something solid and heavy.
"Open the door!" Blake shouted. "We're with the police. You're under arrest."
No answer. They had no reason to comply now that they knew they were in trouble. Blake growled and slammed her shoulder into the doorway instead, then made way for Jaune as he came up and tried to help her. Between them, the obstacle began to move, but then they felt something push into it even harder and slam it back. They were fighting against two or more people on the other side as well.
A gurgling noise played overhead at the same time, making both her and Jaune pause and follow the sound with their eyes. It gurgled and sloshed above them, down behind the staircase and then below. As they traced it to its end, the pipe above the pond suddenly began to slosh out a far greater quantity of water. It poured into the pond, slowly filling it up and even causing the water to slosh out over the edge, spilling a few wriggling slugs onto the stone floor.
They were going to drown them down here – drown them in a rising pool of water filled with anomalous worms hungry for human flesh. Blake threw herself back against the door with reckless abandon and was about to demand – screaming – why Jaune wasn't doing the same.
"Hello. Ruby?" Jaune had his scroll out. Blake could have slapped herself for not thinking of it. "It's the Rigsby family. Blake and I have been locked in their cellar, which is rising with water. The you-know-what is down here as well. No, don't come alone. I need you to gather some of the farmers, tell them what is happening and come in force. These guys tried to shoot us so they're prepared to kill to keep this a secret." He listened and nodded. "Thank you. Please hurry. I'm not sure how much time we have." He stashed the scroll away and said, "Help is on the way."
"How long will she take?"
"Less time than it would take for a whole cellar to be flooded."
He didn't sound certain but then neither was she, and the room was by no means small. It took time for a bathroom to floor if you left the tap on, a lot of time, and this was bigger than that by two or three times. The water was still lapping over the edge, clearly rising, but it would need to rise a good four or five feet to really threaten them. Panic aside, they were mostly safe. That didn't mean she was about to climb down the stairs anytime soon.
Minutes ticked by with just the gushing pipe and the arguments they could barely make out above to keep them company. The Rigsby family were obviously discussing what they should do about the two government agents in their basement, or maybe about how they'd hide all this from the rest of the farmers. The occasional words could be made out but rarely enough to piece it all together, not with the water echoing all around them. Blake gave the door another experimental push but it was still wedged shut, and now with even more obstacles.
Maybe we should have split up, she thought with some annoyance. That way only one of us would have been stuck in here and the other could mount a rescue. Ugh. Damned if we do and damned if we don't.
The water reached an inch deep after several more minutes. It lapped around the bottom of the barrels nearby, and those were beginning to shake slightly. Were the slugs gnawing through the wood to get inside? There was nothing to do but watch, so no matter how disgusting it was, she and Jaune stared at the barrels as they quivered and rocked, the vibrations getting so much that the lid fell of one and splatted onto the slugs, probably killing a couple.
Eventually, they found a way in. The shaking didn't stop but it wasn't as violent, and she imagined them eating away at the potatoes inside. There was a sound not unlike quiet squelching, then the barrel began to shake even more than it had before. Suddenly, it began to swell and bulge. The metal held but the wood expanded, cracking in places as the barrel inflated like a balloon. "J-Jaune…?" she whispered.
"I'm seeing it." he said. "I'm not sure what it-"
The wood cracked and the barrel didn't so much explode as burst open, spilling out a deluge of squirmy, crawly, wet bodies onto the floor. More than before – more than seemed even possible to keep in that little pond. They splashed and spread across the floor like water itself, all wriggling and shiny from the torchlight, covering the floor like a carpet some three or four inches deep, and spilling back into the water. As they did, the water rose, displaced by the sudden weight and mass of the slugs filling it. The water that had been only an inch before was nor a shallow pool of five or six, much of it being a mass of slugs displacing water.
"They're explosive breeders!" Jaune said with a gasp. "The water rising isn't the problem, it's the food and the breeding-"
"The body!" Blake cried in despair.
It was too late. The body of the elder farmer who had fallen to the ground floor had been swept up under the mass of slugs, half submerged in the water. It, like the barrels was beginning to shake and twitch as the slugs found their way through orifices, into his eyes, nose, mouth, ears and even the gunshot wound in his shoulder. Like the vegetables, they would start eating him from the inside out, then, once he was hollow, they would breed explosively inside him. The human body must have had as much meat as a whole barrel of potatoes, maybe even more, and if they pushed the water higher, they'd get access to the fungal farm, then it would rise higher still!
Jaune lurched back for the door and started fighting against it along with her. They braced and pushed and heaved as hard as they could, even managing to move the barricade a few inches. Someone outside shouted a warning and they were pushed back again, the obstacles slammed into place as the family trying to kill them forced it back.
"You're only making things worse for yourself!" Jaune shouted through the closed door. "Open the door, surrender, and you might only be in trouble for sabotaging fields! If you continue this, you'll be taken down for murder!"
"T… They're right," a feminine voice above said. "This is – We was only showing the Tawney their place. I don't like this-"
"Don't you dare, Sammy," a man's voice snarled. "Ma' says to lock 'em up. Ma' won't lead us wrong."
"Ma' is dea-"
A slap echoed beyond the door and a startled cry. It was followed by several more.
"Don't you dare finish that! We're family! Family sticks together. They're not family. They're outsiders who think they can come here and tell us what to do, what not to do and how to do it. Tellin' us how to do things we been doin' for generations. Tellin' us who to like, who we can't like, how we have to act aroun' faunus. They're tryin' to control us!"
Jaune had heard enough. "Blake." He mimed shooting a gun.
The man speaking might not have aura and he might not have had any way to defend himself. In any other situation, she'd have taken Jaune's callous call as a reminder of Adam. This was not any other situation. This was them stuck in a flooding cellar about to be fed to a million worms that would burrow into and eat her alive. Blake aimed, adjusted for the voice, and fired. The solid wooden door and whatever else was behind it might have held up against their pushing but it couldn't withstand a gunshot. A small hole was slammed through it all in one go.
"Ahhhh!"
Then a body dropped.
"They shot Todd!" someone screamed. "Monsters!"
Yeah, sure, we're the monsters. Pull the other one.
"We won't stop at just Todd if you don't let us out of here." Jaune called to them. "Do yourselves a favour and submit to the law. Most of you haven't committed any serious crimes. You might spend a few weeks in prison. How serious do you think poisoning some crops is? You'll be fine."
"D-Don't let them out." Todd, still alive, wheezed. "W-We'll lose the farm!"
"You're going to lose the farm anyway for what you've done!" Blake shouted at them. "The question is whether it's worth losing your lives along with it!"
"Continue on this path and you'll face life in prison." Jaune echoed.
No answer. They'd committed to this, or so it seemed when yet another obstacle scraped loudly across the kitchen floor and in front of the many blocking the door. Blake snarled and unloaded five more shots through but didn't think she hit anything. The noise would hopefully travel and draw people's interest, however. "Bastards!" she snapped. "They better go to prison for this."
"They will. We're here on the council's orders and they don't take lightly to-" A splashing sound at the bottom of the stairs interrupted him. "Oh, bloody hell."
Blake looked back. She wished she didn't, but she did, and what she saw only made her whimper and flatten her ears to her head. The old man who had fallen down the stairs after being shot by her was moving again, flailing his hands and feet in the mass of water and squirming, wriggling bodies. One of its arms slapped down on a step higher than it, and the body began to crawl itself slowly and difficultly up the stairs. The man's slack face stared up at them, mouth open and slugs rolling, flopping and dropping out past his lips.
Gambol Shroud barked once, twice, three times, and the shots punched through the man's forehead, lower jaw and shoulder. Slugs poured out the wounds to fall and flap on the steps, dying in the lack of moisture, but the man's corpse continued to drag itself up toward them, somehow far more organised and capable of independent movement than the one all the way in the field. The slugs here were working together, moving in concert, and while their actions still defied the limits of the human body, they were slowly making their way closer and closer.
"Ruby had better hurry the hell up." Jaune said.
"How are you able to stay so freaking calm?"
He looked to her, smiled and tilted his head. "I fake it."
Son of a bitch.
Jaune and Blake locked in a basement, eh? Sounds like a Coeur al'Aran recipe for some steamy romanc- oh wait, there's a dead body being eaten alive and now they're about to be drowned and torn to pieces.
…
…
Sounds like a recipe for some steamy vore romance!
Uck. No. Kill me.
Next Chapter: 11th July
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