Page 1 failed to load.
Marshal Carper -- Character-first adventures! - CDM 4, Chapter 15: Self-Sabotage
More from Marshal Carper -- Character-first adventures!
Marshal Carper -- Character-first adventures! - CDM 4, Chapter 5: On Loan
About This Title
Enforcer McDouglas looked like he had aged five years since I saw him last.
Today, he wore a chartreuse polo and a tired frown.
“Jesus Christ, Gray,” McDouglas said when his office door shut. “I told you to stay on the reservation, so you solo a dungeon gate?”
“I don’t have any excuses.”
“None at all?”
“No excuses that actually justify the choice.”
McDouglas rubbed the bridge of his noise. For a moment, he looked like he might fall asleep right there at his desk.
“I heard about your parents,” he said softly. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sure that trip was weird as shit for all kinds of reasons. You don’t have to tell me any of the family pieces, but I’m curious. What was your impression of New Eden?”
“Well, I’m not very well traveled,” I answered. “It was weird, though. Everything felt artificial and empty.”
He nodded. “Interact with any crawlers while you were there?”
“Dante Cortez. He was my partner here for a bit.”
“I remember Cortez.”
“Otherwise, no,” I continued. “We went right to the funeral and then came right home. The bus ride was our sightseeing.”
“How’s he doing these days?”
“We’ve kept in touch. The New Eden contract has been a slog for him, but he’s almost level 17. When his contract is up, he wants to take a job resettling Australia.”
“What was his sense of how the country itself was progressing?” McDouglas asked. “If the topic came up, that is.”
“He said there was a lot of in-fighting between the different denominations, and that’s slowed or stalled a lot of progress.”
Sighing, McDouglas replied, “That was inevitable. Ricky always had his work cut out for him. I don’t know how you solve that kind of conflict.”
“Meehan pointed out that Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses was in the early 1500s.”
“And there’s been conflict ever since.”
I nodded.
“Did Cortez say anything about Heavenly Rock?” McDouglas asked.
“He mentioned they had fans in New Eden, but we didn’t talk about it much more than that.”
“Figures.” He wheeled his desk to a file cabinet and pulled a warm Nad-Nade from the bottom drawer. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sick to death of this shit, huh?”
I laughed.
“Alright, Gray, here’s the deal,” he said, returning to his desk. “You fucked up with that D gate, which you already know, but you’re lucky you fucked up in the right direction. If we weren’t in the middle of one of the worst humanitarian crises in history, that move would have done serious damage to your career.”
“I understand.”
“We can't afford to bench solid hunters right now. You're like that hyperactive kid who acts out in class, but it's really the format. They're teaching birds to fly and you're a fish.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“There’s some kind of saying about how we try to teach all kids the same way when all kids aren’t the same, but forget it. This is the part you care about: When the Cold Rollers are back online, you will all be fulltime hunters. You’re still on call if something like the Kittanning debacle goes down again. Good work there, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
“What I’m about to tell you is privileged information. You’ll be arrested if this leaks, and that means inside the CDM as well. Blast Furnace doesn’t get to know this. Are we clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re leveling the Cold Rollers. Whenever possible, we’ll hold a C gate from hitting the crawler portal, so you can run it for the XP. Osheski and Chapman are on the phone right now, by the way. She’ll know all of this too.”
Recently, I learned that the CDM used a similar method with S-ranked gates. If the gate was remote enough to not be spotted by the public, it never hit the dungeon portal, and the Unsung Heroes closed the dungeon in secret. This sounded like the same method but for crappier gates.
And also: Fuck yeah.
“That means you will be removed from the Enforcer pool indefinitely,” McDouglas continued. “No inspections. No RAID shifts. You’ll do nothing but hunt.”
I tried to suppress my smile.
“This isn’t good news, and this isn’t a reward. This is us trying to tire the dog out so he doesn’t jump on company when they come over.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” he said. “I think that catches us up.”
“May I ask questions about a different topic?”
“Can’t talk about Assam.”
“I wasn’t going to ask about that, but now I want to.”
“Nothing to talk about.”
“Right,” I replied. “I wanted to ask about Kielar and Baker. Is the Kielar case closed, and what do you think happens to Baker?”
“Kielar case is closed,” McDouglas answered. “The assassin died before he got to trial. Since no one doubts that he was the killer, that’s it. As for Baker, he’s ahead in the polls for the governor race, and he’s a seasoned crawler in a time when crawlers are more valuable than ever. Either thing or a combination of both could keep him out of jail.”
“Understood.”
“That doesn’t piss you off?”
“No more than I already was.”
“Suppose that’s fair. Got anything else for me?”
“How are you doing?” I asked.
McDouglas chuckled. “I’m fine, thanks.”
Intern Ali found me in the RAID room, cleaning out my desk.
“Enforcer Gray?” he asked with concern. “Are you leaving the CDM?”
“Nope. I’m doing fieldwork fulltime now.”
“Enforcement?”
I shook my head. “Rapid Response.”
“I guess I won’t be seeing you around the office much.”
“Probably not, but I don’t really know what I’m in for yet.”
“Well, I wanted to tell you, ‘thank you.’”
“For what?” I asked.
“Tomorrow I start with the investigation team. This is my last day as an intern.”
“Congratulations!” I said. “That’s great news, right?”
Smiling, he replied, “Definitely. I’m really excited about it.”
“You earned it. By the way, is that vampire case still open?”
“Oh, you were out of town for that. Mt. Lebanon police found him. It’s probably still on YouTube.”
“The arrest is on YouTube?”
“When the CDM wouldn’t loan RAID drones for thermal searches, the local police department staked out the major transit points in the area with more portable thermal tech and scanned people that way. They kind of beat the shit out of him during the arrest. If you watch the video, it looks like the guy doesn’t resist at all. He claims he wasn’t the vampire who did the murders.”
Out of curiosity, I did a quick phone search for the story.
Local Nurse Lives Double Life as a Vampire, Claims Innocence in Recent Murders.
Human Rights Groups Argue for Providing Blood to Imprisoned Vampires.
Heavenly Rock Threats Against Local Vampire Nurse Deemed Credible.
“Do you think we got the right guy?” Ali asked. “He’s adamant we didn’t. Apparently his immediate family has been donating blood for him, and he stole a few bags from his job. Says he never hurt a person.”
“Do you think he’s the right guy?”
“His wife was on my list of pig blood suspects, but that doesn’t tie him to the murders in any way. That just means his family looked for alternatives to help him. As far as I know, no one outside of the CDM looked at those leads either.”
I nodded.
“Dempson says we can’t do anything. It’s a police matter now.”
“I got a bunch of werewolves locked up after I promised they would be treated fairly,” I said. “I was told that it wasn’t my job to make decisions like that, so I should forget about it and focus on my actual assignments. I’m still pissed.”
“Yeah, I heard about that.”
“And one of my coworkers got sent to a detention center because she tested positive for lycanthropy. Great person. Liked working with her a lot. Same thing: ‘That’s not your job to worry about.’”
“I don’t know that I understand what you want me to do,” Ali admitted.
“I’m not telling you to do anything. No wink-wink nudge-nudge. I’m venting and saying it’s a shitty situation all around, and I wish I had an answer myself.”
“Dempson said being a good investigator was the best way to keep innocent people out of prison.”
“That sounds like something he’d say. He always seemed like a good guy to me. I’m glad you get to work under him.”
“Would it annoy you if I kept in touch?” Ali asked.
“Please do.”
“I uhh… I heard about your parents. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“Three on and three off doesn't sound bad at all,” Nathan mused over a beer at the High Bar Pub. “With the pay bump and the per diems? I think I'm going to like it.”
“Leaves a good bit of time for Diva content too,” I added.
“Sure does. I know the work is going to be hard, but I like this better than switching between HVAC jobs and Cold Roller ops. I think I might have lost my mind eventually if we did it like that for another year.”
“I'm sorry you and Rainy don't get to join the training,” I said. “Training” was what we agreed to say instead of talking openly about running off-the-books C-ranked gates.
“Dude, I'm not,” Nathan replied. “Leaving us outside to scout is smart. It might be a little boring, but maybe the Army guy they leave with us isn't an asshole. That'd be cool.”
Megan was informed that our C gate runs would sometimes be accompanied by Army field researchers. We weren't allowed to know the specifics of what they were actually studying, but I suspected it was more Stage 2 data gathering.
While we were in a C gate, Nathan and de Saint were charged with closely scouting the area around the gate for potential nests. Since the only gates we would get to run were the shitty hard-to-reach ones, we were likely to have to hike a good bit to get to the gate in the first place. The CDM believed that was an opportunity to more closely scrutinize remote locations.
If the drone team found something, we would address it while we were in the area.
A similar philosophy would be applied to our hunts as well. If an op was nearby a known SOC, we could be assigned to clear it to save the EPA the trip. None of those decisions were ours to make, by the way. Our only job was to go where they said to and to kill the stuff we found when we got there.
“If the Strikers weren't bullshitting you,” Nathan began while we waited for the rest of the Cold Rollers to arrive, “would you take an offer and go private?”
“Definitely not now with this schedule. If I got stuck in the office I would consider it, but I don't think I could say ‘yes’ even then.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“Because it screws up everyone else’s lives. It would be shitty to drag you into CDM work and then bail.”
“That would have sucked.”
“Right? And the job is all private security contracts. I wouldn't be on any of the crawl teams, and I have to imagine that wild monster encounters would be kind of rare. We're guarding a perimeter, not going out to find them.”
“Super duper mall cop,” Nathan joked.
“Basically. How are you feeling about going back into the field?”
“I’m anxious about it. Not going to lie. Kittanning was a god damn hellscape, like apocalyptically so, but it was also an outlier.”
“True,” I agreed. “Most of our jobs were small nests before that.”
“I haven't decided how to classify the Matewan thing in my head since it was so weird, but I have to call that an outlier too if I'm going to keep my nerve. If we run into another one of either of those, I don't know, Dor. That might be it for me.”
“You deciding to step away for any reason will never bother me. I promise.”
“Thanks, dude. Appreciate it.”
Right then, a man we didn't know pulled out a chair at our table and sat. He wore a camo ball cap with worn out jeans and old work boots. His pale face had splotches of red that ran down his neck.
“Hey, friend,” Nathan said to the man. “What brings you to this humble table?”
“Shut up,” he replied with a distinct southern twang.
“Hornby?!” Nathan exclaimed. “You shaved your beard?”
“I don't want to talk about it.”
“Too bad,” I countered while Nathan nodded.
Sighing, Hornby said, “I was trying to give it a little trim, and I fucked up. Then I kept fucking up until my only choice was to shave it all off and start over. I know I look ridiculous.”
“You look like a very serious 15 year-old,” Nathan replied. “Can I buy you a beer in honor of your lost beard?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Do you have your ID? I don't want to get busted for giving alcohol to minors.”
“I knew this was going to be terrible,” Hornby groaned.
Enforcer McDouglas looked like he had aged five years since I saw him last.
Today, he wore a chartreuse polo and a tired frown.
“Jesus Christ, Gray,” McDouglas said when his office door shut. “I told you to stay on the reservation, so you solo a dungeon gate?”
“I don’t have any excuses.”
“None at all?”
“No excuses that actually justify the choice.”
McDouglas rubbed the bridge of his noise. For a moment, he looked like he might fall asleep right there at his desk.
“I heard about your parents,” he said softly. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sure that trip was weird as shit for all kinds of reasons. You don’t have to tell me any of the family pieces, but I’m curious. What was your impression of New Eden?”
“Well, I’m not very well traveled,” I answered. “It was weird, though. Everything felt artificial and empty.”
He nodded. “Interact with any crawlers while you were there?”
“Dante Cortez. He was my partner here for a bit.”
“I remember Cortez.”
“Otherwise, no,” I continued. “We went right to the funeral and then came right home. The bus ride was our sightseeing.”
“How’s he doing these days?”
“We’ve kept in touch. The New Eden contract has been a slog for him, but he’s almost level 17. When his contract is up, he wants to take a job resettling Australia.”
“What was his sense of how the country itself was progressing?” McDouglas asked. “If the topic came up, that is.”
“He said there was a lot of in-fighting between the different denominations, and that’s slowed or stalled a lot of progress.”
Sighing, McDouglas replied, “That was inevitable. Ricky always had his work cut out for him. I don’t know how you solve that kind of conflict.”
“Meehan pointed out that Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses was in the early 1500s.”
“And there’s been conflict ever since.”
I nodded.
“Did Cortez say anything about Heavenly Rock?” McDouglas asked.
“He mentioned they had fans in New Eden, but we didn’t talk about it much more than that.”
“Figures.” He wheeled his desk to a file cabinet and pulled a warm Nad-Nade from the bottom drawer. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sick to death of this shit, huh?”
I laughed.
“Alright, Gray, here’s the deal,” he said, returning to his desk. “You fucked up with that D gate, which you already know, but you’re lucky you fucked up in the right direction. If we weren’t in the middle of one of the worst humanitarian crises in history, that move would have done serious damage to your career.”
“I understand.”
“We can't afford to bench solid hunters right now. You're like that hyperactive kid who acts out in class, but it's really the format. They're teaching birds to fly and you're a fish.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“There’s some kind of saying about how we try to teach all kids the same way when all kids aren’t the same, but forget it. This is the part you care about: When the Cold Rollers are back online, you will all be fulltime hunters. You’re still on call if something like the Kittanning debacle goes down again. Good work there, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
“What I’m about to tell you is privileged information. You’ll be arrested if this leaks, and that means inside the CDM as well. Blast Furnace doesn’t get to know this. Are we clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re leveling the Cold Rollers. Whenever possible, we’ll hold a C gate from hitting the crawler portal, so you can run it for the XP. Osheski and Chapman are on the phone right now, by the way. She’ll know all of this too.”
Recently, I learned that the CDM used a similar method with S-ranked gates. If the gate was remote enough to not be spotted by the public, it never hit the dungeon portal, and the Unsung Heroes closed the dungeon in secret. This sounded like the same method but for crappier gates.
And also: Fuck yeah.
“That means you will be removed from the Enforcer pool indefinitely,” McDouglas continued. “No inspections. No RAID shifts. You’ll do nothing but hunt.”
I tried to suppress my smile.
“This isn’t good news, and this isn’t a reward. This is us trying to tire the dog out so he doesn’t jump on company when they come over.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” he said. “I think that catches us up.”
“May I ask questions about a different topic?”
“Can’t talk about Assam.”
“I wasn’t going to ask about that, but now I want to.”
“Nothing to talk about.”
“Right,” I replied. “I wanted to ask about Kielar and Baker. Is the Kielar case closed, and what do you think happens to Baker?”
“Kielar case is closed,” McDouglas answered. “The assassin died before he got to trial. Since no one doubts that he was the killer, that’s it. As for Baker, he’s ahead in the polls for the governor race, and he’s a seasoned crawler in a time when crawlers are more valuable than ever. Either thing or a combination of both could keep him out of jail.”
“Understood.”
“That doesn’t piss you off?”
“No more than I already was.”
“Suppose that’s fair. Got anything else for me?”
“How are you doing?” I asked.
McDouglas chuckled. “I’m fine, thanks.”
Intern Ali found me in the RAID room, cleaning out my desk.
“Enforcer Gray?” he asked with concern. “Are you leaving the CDM?”
“Nope. I’m doing fieldwork fulltime now.”
“Enforcement?”
I shook my head. “Rapid Response.”
“I guess I won’t be seeing you around the office much.”
“Probably not, but I don’t really know what I’m in for yet.”
“Well, I wanted to tell you, ‘thank you.’”
“For what?” I asked.
“Tomorrow I start with the investigation team. This is my last day as an intern.”
“Congratulations!” I said. “That’s great news, right?”
Smiling, he replied, “Definitely. I’m really excited about it.”
“You earned it. By the way, is that vampire case still open?”
“Oh, you were out of town for that. Mt. Lebanon police found him. It’s probably still on YouTube.”
“The arrest is on YouTube?”
“When the CDM wouldn’t loan RAID drones for thermal searches, the local police department staked out the major transit points in the area with more portable thermal tech and scanned people that way. They kind of beat the shit out of him during the arrest. If you watch the video, it looks like the guy doesn’t resist at all. He claims he wasn’t the vampire who did the murders.”
Out of curiosity, I did a quick phone search for the story.
Local Nurse Lives Double Life as a Vampire, Claims Innocence in Recent Murders.
Human Rights Groups Argue for Providing Blood to Imprisoned Vampires.
Heavenly Rock Threats Against Local Vampire Nurse Deemed Credible.
“Do you think we got the right guy?” Ali asked. “He’s adamant we didn’t. Apparently his immediate family has been donating blood for him, and he stole a few bags from his job. Says he never hurt a person.”
“Do you think he’s the right guy?”
“His wife was on my list of pig blood suspects, but that doesn’t tie him to the murders in any way. That just means his family looked for alternatives to help him. As far as I know, no one outside of the CDM looked at those leads either.”
I nodded.
“Dempson says we can’t do anything. It’s a police matter now.”
“I got a bunch of werewolves locked up after I promised they would be treated fairly,” I said. “I was told that it wasn’t my job to make decisions like that, so I should forget about it and focus on my actual assignments. I’m still pissed.”
“Yeah, I heard about that.”
“And one of my coworkers got sent to a detention center because she tested positive for lycanthropy. Great person. Liked working with her a lot. Same thing: ‘That’s not your job to worry about.’”
“I don’t know that I understand what you want me to do,” Ali admitted.
“I’m not telling you to do anything. No wink-wink nudge-nudge. I’m venting and saying it’s a shitty situation all around, and I wish I had an answer myself.”
“Dempson said being a good investigator was the best way to keep innocent people out of prison.”
“That sounds like something he’d say. He always seemed like a good guy to me. I’m glad you get to work under him.”
“Would it annoy you if I kept in touch?” Ali asked.
“Please do.”
“I uhh… I heard about your parents. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“Three on and three off doesn't sound bad at all,” Nathan mused over a beer at the High Bar Pub. “With the pay bump and the per diems? I think I'm going to like it.”
“Leaves a good bit of time for Diva content too,” I added.
“Sure does. I know the work is going to be hard, but I like this better than switching between HVAC jobs and Cold Roller ops. I think I might have lost my mind eventually if we did it like that for another year.”
“I'm sorry you and Rainy don't get to join the training,” I said. “Training” was what we agreed to say instead of talking openly about running off-the-books C-ranked gates.
“Dude, I'm not,” Nathan replied. “Leaving us outside to scout is smart. It might be a little boring, but maybe the Army guy they leave with us isn't an asshole. That'd be cool.”
Megan was informed that our C gate runs would sometimes be accompanied by Army field researchers. We weren't allowed to know the specifics of what they were actually studying, but I suspected it was more Stage 2 data gathering.
While we were in a C gate, Nathan and de Saint were charged with closely scouting the area around the gate for potential nests. Since the only gates we would get to run were the shitty hard-to-reach ones, we were likely to have to hike a good bit to get to the gate in the first place. The CDM believed that was an opportunity to more closely scrutinize remote locations.
If the drone team found something, we would address it while we were in the area.
A similar philosophy would be applied to our hunts as well. If an op was nearby a known SOC, we could be assigned to clear it to save the EPA the trip. None of those decisions were ours to make, by the way. Our only job was to go where they said to and to kill the stuff we found when we got there.
“If the Strikers weren't bullshitting you,” Nathan began while we waited for the rest of the Cold Rollers to arrive, “would you take an offer and go private?”
“Definitely not now with this schedule. If I got stuck in the office I would consider it, but I don't think I could say ‘yes’ even then.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“Because it screws up everyone else’s lives. It would be shitty to drag you into CDM work and then bail.”
“That would have sucked.”
“Right? And the job is all private security contracts. I wouldn't be on any of the crawl teams, and I have to imagine that wild monster encounters would be kind of rare. We're guarding a perimeter, not going out to find them.”
“Super duper mall cop,” Nathan joked.
“Basically. How are you feeling about going back into the field?”
“I’m anxious about it. Not going to lie. Kittanning was a god damn hellscape, like apocalyptically so, but it was also an outlier.”
“True,” I agreed. “Most of our jobs were small nests before that.”
“I haven't decided how to classify the Matewan thing in my head since it was so weird, but I have to call that an outlier too if I'm going to keep my nerve. If we run into another one of either of those, I don't know, Dor. That might be it for me.”
“You deciding to step away for any reason will never bother me. I promise.”
“Thanks, dude. Appreciate it.”
Right then, a man we didn't know pulled out a chair at our table and sat. He wore a camo ball cap with worn out jeans and old work boots. His pale face had splotches of red that ran down his neck.
“Hey, friend,” Nathan said to the man. “What brings you to this humble table?”
“Shut up,” he replied with a distinct southern twang.
“Hornby?!” Nathan exclaimed. “You shaved your beard?”
“I don't want to talk about it.”
“Too bad,” I countered while Nathan nodded.
Sighing, Hornby said, “I was trying to give it a little trim, and I fucked up. Then I kept fucking up until my only choice was to shave it all off and start over. I know I look ridiculous.”
“You look like a very serious 15 year-old,” Nathan replied. “Can I buy you a beer in honor of your lost beard?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Do you have your ID? I don't want to get busted for giving alcohol to minors.”
“I knew this was going to be terrible,” Hornby groaned.
Comments (0)