Misery County

Chapter 13 - Part 2

"Which one of you is breathing into your microphone like a suffocating bulldog?" Eric said as he set up the bipod on his rifle.

A mumbled but unmistakably feminine "For fuck's sake" was heard before the breathing stopped.

That was better, Eric thought.

"All right, brother, this is it. I'm all set up here, so go knock on that door when you're ready," he said as he scanned the inside of the building through his rifle's optics.

Pulling his head away, he watched Jerry in the distance take a few deep breaths and walk over to the front door of the industrial building. For a moment nothing happened.

"You all right there, Jer?"

"Yeah, yeah, just peachy here," Jerry murmured under his breath.

"Well, I don't want to rush you, but I'm sure Cassie's itching to kill something right at this very minute," Eric said in an attempt to bring some levity to the situation.

Neither of his compatriots responded.

Knowing better than to aim his rifle at his old friend, trigger discipline or not, Eric kept a watch over Jerry with his naked eye.

"OK, this is it. I'm going for it," the portly man whispered into his microphone.

In a second, Eric heard the knock-knock-knock loud and clear through his earpiece. He watched the inside of the building as what looked to the untrained eye as humans started looking around, evidently alarmed at this break from routine. A tall man – or whatever he really was – walked over to the door and opened it.

"Sher- uh, Sheriff's Department. I'm uh... uh..." Jerry stuttered.

"Come on, Jer. Keep it together," Eric urged him.

"Can I help you?" The man at the door said, annoyed and yet somehow nonplussed by the whole affair.

"Warrant," Jerry blurted out, holding up the forged document. "I've got a... I've got a... uh..."

"Come on, man. How many times have you done this for real?" Eric said, although in retrospect, he feared that his pushing would only stress Jerry out even more.

"Lemme see that," the man at the door said, grabbing for the warrant. "We ain't doing nothing illegal here. I know my rights, goddamnit. I went to community college for this shit."

Jerry said nothing in response. He seemed to be frozen in fear, but the jury was out regarding whether that was because of the man at the door's suspicion or the fact that he was facing a real monster – in the very literal sense – for the first time.

"Minor blip, Jerry. Don't lose your cool," Eric said.

"All right, I see," the tall man said. "You got the wrong place, Deputy, but I guess I got no choice but to let you in."

Community college must not have taught him how to spot a fake search warrant, although Eric, with Jerry's expertise and experience on the topic, did spend a lot of time making it look perfect. How funny, Eric thought. The one time a target actually stops to look at the warrant, and it's a perfectly-crafted fraud. He shuddered to think of all the times he'd tried (and somehow succeeded) to pull this very scam off with a few folded-up pages from the phone book. The gods were surely watching over them, and evidently had been for a while.

"Could you, uh, gather everyone around?" Jerry said as he followed the tall man into the building.

"Why? I thought you was here to search for drugs."

"Yeah, but... but... I need to..."

"Breathe, Jerry," Eric whispered as if there was any chance of the men in the building hearing him.

"I need to report on anyone in the building at the time of the search," Jerry finished with what little confidence he could muster.

Eric zeroed in on the tall man, ready to pull the trigger.

"That shouldn't be a problem," the man said. "Hey, guys, come gather 'round."

Eric didn't like this. Yes, the monsters were all gathering as Jerry had requested, but they seemed to close in all around Jerry like a pack of predators circling their prey.

"Cassie, I don't like how this is looking. Get ready to bust in," Eric said.

No response, but no argument either, so he took that as an affirmative.

"Do you... do you guys have any ID on you at all?" Jerry was struggling to say, probably feeling no better owing to Eric's last transmission.

The men were getting uncomfortably close to Jerry, and he must have been feeling it; he was walking backward, away from the core of the crowd. The men behind him were making way for his retreat.

"Watch out, Jer. You're getting dangerously close to the east wall."

His old friend could neither reply nor even indicate that he heard the transmission, though it was all moot since he kept on walking backward.

"I need y'all to... I need y'all to step back a bit," Jerry said, but the men gave him no quarter, and he kept on retreating.

"Jerry, you need to stop walking back now. You're at the limits of what I can see," Eric said, but it was no good. A few seconds more passed, and Jerry was entirely out of view, the men that were hounding him following suit in no time.