Nomads

3: Setting up the trap

   Right now the only problem was trying to find that Ramesh guy. He likely wasn't even in the school when Caroline searched for him yesterday, so maybe he was at his house. We also don't know at what time he goes to work or if he's even willing to tell us anything.

   All of a sudden, we saw a couple of policemen being called by a third one. "Hey you both, come here immediatly! We have found a suspect inside one of the classrooms!" They quickly ran in that direction.

   "I have a guess on who that might be," whispered Tris to my ear. I'm pretty sure we were thinking the same thing. That suspect had to be that teacher. 

   We headed there, and found the three officers interrogating a very shaky and nervous man in his mid 40's. He was somewhat tall and had wavy black hair growing upwards. But the most eyecatching thing was that over his white shirt and brown tie, there were noticable stains of blood, now dried up. As the man told them what had happened, they looked at him as if he was crazy. "A monster? Yeah right, and I'm the king of Spain. He surely killed the girl," one of the policemen accused.

   "N-no! You've got to believe me! That thing killed my student!" replied the scared man, knowing they wouldn't take him seriously. But luckily for him, we did hear what he had to say.

   "What kind of officers are you, who can even let a man finish his testimony? Sheesh" I said mockingly, looking down on them for not doing their job properly. Tris stepped forward and grabbed him by the wrist, taking him away from that classroom. The officers probably didn't do anything because they knew they couldn't really stop us from our investigation.

   Outside of the classroom, we tried to calm him down, but it didn't work. He confirmed us that he was, indeed, Mr. Ramesh, and we convinced him to tell us what happened yesterday. "Miss Newhall did ask me if she could take the exam she had missed. I told her I had one in my office, so I headed there to get one. But when I was looking for her to hand her the paper, I saw that monster running down the hallway, so I panicked and hid far away. After that, I assumed Miss Newhall had escaped, and quickly left the building."

   Tris looked very pensative and concentrated, and put his closed hand on his mouth. This didn't make Mr. Ramesh any less stressed. "I-I swear! That's all true!" Tris answered without changing his position. "I know, I'm just thinking."

   Mr. Ramesh felt like a heavy weight was lifted from his shoulders. We let him go, which gave us time to think about it all.

   "You know Tris dear, there's something weird about this." Tris seemed to have read my mind. "You mean the Dweller's behavior?"

   "Yeah exactly. Dwellers usually have a very basic instinct. They just eat and run. But this one feels different."

   "Yeah, it's like this particular one is smarter than the usual fog monster," replied Tris, biting his thumb. "Not only that, but they normally devour an entire human, multiple if possible, but Caroline was only missing her head."

   "Either it was interrupted somehow before it could eat her entire body, or it had some other motives." I kept thinking why the Dweller wouldn't just act like any other one. "Could it be... that it tried to hide the fact that a creature like it had killed?"

   "Perhaps, but we shouldn't jump to conclusions yet." Tris was right, it was too soon to just leave it at that. We needed more time to really think it through.

   "I have an idea." Tris looked at me intrigued. Although I was pretty sure where I was going with that. "What's your plan, Sol?"

   "Maybe what we need is to try and get this Dweller to come to us. This one would most probably just stay away from us, but if we somehow lure it, we could exterminate it." I felt very confident about my idea, even if it was rather... unorthodox.

   Tris quickly got what I was trying to say. "And what we need... is something to bait it, or rather, someONE to bait it..." We both had an evil grin in our faces and couldn't contain the evil laughter.

   What we were lacking here was a way to attract the Dweller to us. And what better way to do so than bait? More specifically, a human bait. The one thing Dwellers love more than anything else, it's the taste of human flesh. We needed someone to volunteer themselves. If we tried it ourselves, it wouldn't be believable. I mean, we were a little too tall to be teens, and we were in our early 20's.

   Suddenly, both of us had an idea, and looking at Tris' expression, it was safe to assume we had the same one. "Georgia..." I said, and Tris replied. "And Natalie..." They were the perfect candidates for our little trap. If a school girl was attacked and killed, having two of them be the bait for our murderer was going to work. The only problem was...

   "How do we convince them to do this?" Tris was right, we would be asking them to risk their lives. That was no small thing. But we still had to try, or our target could likely get away.

   Finding them again wasn't hard at all. The girls were right were we had left them, outside of the murder scene, sitting in front of the lockers beside the door. I thought getting them to colaborate with us was going to be a challenge, but they actually agreed with no problem.

   "Caroline was our best friend. I'm pretty sure she would've done the same for us." Georgia was quite determined to get revenge on the monster that murdered her friend. Natalie agreed as well. "We can't let that thing get away with this."

   Now all we needed was a place to set everything in motion. Right there was useless. The Dweller could likely tell that the police officers all had guns and such, so it wouldn't risk it. To make sure no policeman interfiered, we went to the other side of the school, one story above, to classroom 59.

   I gave the girls all the instructions and they went inside. The moment they saw the monster, all they had to do was scream at the top of their lungs, and Tris and I would come in instantly to save them. All that was left at that moment was to wait... Which didn't take long...