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It was a case Bullfinch had dragged in, unfinished, and dropped on his desk like a cat presenting a dead bird. It was straightforward, as cases go--a farmer from Nordhagen wanting to know a little backstory for their most recent hire, just to confirm the guy wasn't a raider in disguise or a secret arsonist or anything of that nature. So Valentine didn't think anything about taking Ellie along with him. She'd been badgering him for a while that he needed a partner on the road, and what better way to solve two problems with one stone?
So it was natural enough to head out together toward the farm where the new hand had last worked, and they enjoyed a fairly uneventful trip. It just seemed to last a long time...
"Shouldn't we have reached it by now?" Ellie asked, squinting at her notes in the growing twilight. "Or are we going in the wrong direction?"
"Even if we were, you'd think we'd still be able to see it," Nick said, gesturing around at the flat land that surrounded them. The low-lying plain gave him the simulated heebie-jeebies. "Maybe we should try at that metal building over... whoa!"
Ellie grabbed him by the sleeve, tugging as he scrambled back from a sheer dropoff that plunged down into darkness. "Jesus, Nick!"
"Sorry, sorry." The longer he looked at the pit, the more he noticed movement in the darkness. Tiny pinpricks of light moved around, and he could hear the echo of voices.
"Raiders?" Ellie whispered.
"Sounds like it." He glanced around, this time picking up on a jagged dropoff that ran for a dozen yards or more in either direction. "We hit the quarry. Dunwich."
"But what about the farm? It was supposed to be around here somewhere."
"I don't know." He consulted his mental map. "Look, we're not far from the Slog. Let's go see what they know about this farm."
So that was what they did--they snuck away from the raiders in the quarry and headed over to the Slog. Wiseman met them at the forward guard post and listened to their tale.
"So I have good news and bad news," he said when at last they had finished. "The good news is, you can stop looking. The bad news is, there isn't any farm over there."
"Damn." Nick glanced back the way they'd come. "Raiders?"
"You're not hearing me. There is no farm from here to the coast. There never was any farm. Wherever your guy came from, it wasn't there."
They practically flew back to the settlement, and Nick cursed himself for having brought Ellie along. If she'd been back at the office it would have been easy enough to radio her and have her send a message to Nordhagen Beach, but instead the settlers were alone with somebody who lied about his past.
They found the settlement around nightfall, just as a nor-easter was beginning to blow in across the ocean. The settlement was dark, which did not seem to bode well. They braced themselves for a synth infiltrator or a raider attack.
They were not braced for what they found.
The four original settlers were lying side by side in the sand, each bound within an inch of their lives, as the infiltrator sketched what appeared to be a pentagram around them.
"What in the hell...?" Nick muttered to himself. Ellie, glued to his side with her baseball bat at the ready, shrugged.
The infiltrator finished his pentagram, then turned to the ocean and began to chant loudly.
"I get it," Ellie whispered. "He's nuts."
Nick nodded. "You get the settlers. I'll take care of him."
They crept out from behind the beach house, slipping on the damp sand. Ellie knelt down by the first settler, who flinched so hard that the others turned to look. She held a finger to her lips to shush them.
Nick, meanwhile, crept up on the man chanting, and now waving his arms around. It's just as Nick goes to grab him that--
--the sea splits open to its depths, a dark whirl of water revealing something worse than a synth, worse than a raider. Something bigger than a behemoth, something long and tentacled and slimy, and the entire beach smelled like decaying fauna. Its beady black eyes swept the beach and landed on the chanting man.
"Master!" the man called, waving his arms wildly. "I'm here, master! Just as you ordered!"
The thing looked down at him, and then a single tentacle shot forward and wrapped around him. It lifted him high into the air before flinging him over its shoulder into the waiting water below.
Now its eyes turned to Nick.
"Oh, that's real special," he grumbled to himself, setting off down the beach at a dead run. "Real cute. Not only a bust of a job, but the fish equivalent of Godzilla is a participant."
Behind him a tentacle slammed into the sand, followed by another and another. He didn't dare look back. He could hear the echoing crack of the settlers taking potshots, which only aggravated the thing more. He heard it lurch around behind him and skidded to a halt, half-turned around, and, sure enough, it wasn't paying attention to him anymore but reaching out its tentacles toward the settlers.
"Son of a gun," he cursed quietly to himself, then commenced running back down the beach. He raised his gun, carefully trained it on the thing's beady little eye, and pulled the trigger.
The thing roared, rearing back in the water, then sunk beneath the waves.
Ellie and the settlers were waiting for him when he got back.
"Show of hands," he said. "Who agrees we should never mention this again?"
They were all very clear in their assent.