Venue: The Secret World
Created by: Funcom
Event: Samhain (Halloween 2013)
Mission:The League of Monster Slayers presents: Spooky Stories of Solomon Island
Location: The League of Monster Slayers' Clubhouse near Innsmouth, Solomon Island, Maine
Chapter Five: The Hitcher
Chapter Six:The Organ Smugglers
Chapter Five – The Hiker (By Sandy “Moose”)
Andy tells me you're harvesting a crop of urban legends. Fascinating things, living stories. They go from mouth to ear to children's book to internet forums to mouth to ear again. They evolve and mature. They're stories that actually travel, wandering with an almost-purpose. I guess that's why I like them. They're the still-functioning vestigial bits from ages ago, from a time when people carried stories like parcels and passed them out around fires during the uncertain nights. But now I'm woolgathering. On with the story. --Sandy
Walk into a truck stop at 3am, lend your ear to the right denizen, and you might hear anything. The open road is intriguing and peculiar, and so are those wandering souls swimming through the dead water of late night pavement. It's sort of "limbo of lunary souls," to quote a certain E.A. Poe. Get a trucker gabbing and it's like a nicotine-stained copy of Arabian Nights. Get a trucker talking long enough, and, sure as the sunset, they'll tell you a black dog story or a hitchhiker story. This one's mine.
I came into Kingsmouth just as summer died, just as the warmth began leeching away, but before the rigor mortis of winter. Post witching hour, and I was eating pavement on Solomon Road. Right out of the tunnel, I saw a figure in my headlight.
I braked. It was a girl, early teens. She was dripping with water, from her hair, from her dress. How did she get out here? Where had the water come from?
"Cold," she said.
I gave her my leather jacket. It was the thing to do. Poor thing was like ice. I asked her name, mindful of the signs of hypothermia.
"Chloe," she said.
I said I'd better get her home, and quick. She hoped up on the back of my bike and pointed down Solomon Road, and I didn't hesitate to gun the engine.
It happened somewhere around Langmore Bridge. Just before? On the bridge? Just after? I can't be sure. She was a little thing, light as a sack of feathers, and I didn't feel the moment she left my bike. On the other side of the bridge, I looked back, and she was gone. I was terrified that she'd fallen off. I'd been going fast. So I doubled back. No girl.
That's what brought me to the Sheriff's office. They had no missing Chloe to report. They did find my jacket the next morning. It was neatly folded, laying across a tombstone in the graveyard at the Kingsmouth Congregational Church. I read the writing on that stone. It said:
Chloe Mercer
To die will be an awfully big adventure. I think I would have liked Chloe. I meant to get her flowers. But then...well. You know the rest. It seems that just like the living, it's the quiet and polite who get neglected, while the noisy and belligerent get all of our attention. I hope you've found peace, Chloe. I don't know what made you restless.
That's my hitchhiker story. Believe or disbelieve at your own peril.
Chapter Six – The Organ Smugglers (By Marianne Chen)
"I don't like my chances of surviving. The cold, the freaky creatures and the complete lack of response from home base are telling me one thing - don't expect to get out of here anytime soon. The rest of the team is gone and there are...tourists. People passing by, want to help but mostly wanting to get on with it. I can't tell you what kind of secret world I have stumbled into, but this isn't my first peek through the curtains. I'm freaking myself out, mostly, and though everything seems to indicate that I will be okay if I stay here at the camp and I somehow manage to keep finding food, I just have a feeling, you know. I don't want to die, but if I am going to, I want to face...whatever comes...with a clear conscience. The operation in New Orleans...it has become an urban legend for good reason. For the part that I played in covering it up, I am sorry. This is what I remember of that night. Consider it a confession."
- Marianna Chen
New Orleans has always been a haunted town. I don't believe in ghosts - I never have - but New Orleans is the place where you could believe in ghosts, if anywhere. It's the violence and the history, the crowding and the crowds, and the dead. Always the dead.
This was Mardi Gras and the streets were full of drunk tourists, drowning their desperate lives in pints of liquor and glimpses of flesh traded for cheap plastic beads. In the alleyways, shadows shaped like men preyed on the drunk and gullible, relieving them of money, IDs and consciousness, not necessarily in that order.
My small team had been sent down from Altanta - most of us still in training - to get some "field experience". I didn't know anyone in the group except Michael Venderman, a biology major like myself. The others were from all over the various disciplines. And our chaperone on this little field trip, Mark Davies. Davies was also from some part of the Centre that I'd never visited. Some sort of specialist.
None of us really had a clue what we were doing there, though Venderman had a theory that we were going to try and chart the spread of an STD over the course of the week. He volunteered to be Subject Zero, of course. Venderman was someone you could always count on to be idiotic.
Davies let us get settled into our lodgings, a shitty little bed and breakfast in the French Quarter and then he briefed us in the entry hall about the real work we were supposed to be doing there.
"The authorities are concerned. You may or may not have heard the rumor about this supposed organ smuggling ring operating out of New Orleans. Maybe you've seen the emails?" He waited, but nobody had.
"We're mostly here as precaution. The black market in organs barely exists in the United States and the complication of long range organ transport are beyond all but the most wealthy of criminal cartels. The District Police Commanders asked that the CDC have a presence here, in case anything does happen."
"We'll be patrolling in plain clothes. Keep an eye out for anything suspicious, and keep your identification handy in case the police find something. They have been given order to expect our presence."
"Any questions?"
Venderman raised his hand.
"Alone, sir, or?"
"You can partner up. It'll probably be the best way of stopping you getting too wasted, Venderman" Davies said. Venderman winked at me and I rolled my eyes. I knew where this was going.
Six hours and uncountable shots later, Venderman was a mess. I wasn't drinking, figuring that one of us had to stay sober in case we saw any random kidney harvesting going on.
We were holed up in a bar on Bourbon Street, trying to avoid the crush of the crowd and holding a shouted conversation over the racket.
"I'm telling you she was into me!" Venderman was shouting.
"She was a prostitute. She was into your wallet" I yelled back.
"Bah!" Venderman sprayed his derision. "You're just jealous!"
"Of a hooker? Oh yeah."
"Seen anything yet?" It was Davies, elbowing his way through the crowd to our table. He was carrying three glasses of beer, which he slammed down on the table. "We've seen a lot of tits. And the bottom of a few glasses. But no kidney smuggling, sir!" Venderman reported loudly. Davies swore and looked around, but nobody seemed to have heard Venderman over the din. "Weren't you supposed to keep him sober?" Davies asked me. I cocked an eyebrow.
"Him? I'm not sure the pope could manage that, sir." Davies pushed the drinks across the table. Venderman grabbed his immediately, upending it. Davies gave him a disgusted look, then raised his glass to me. I raised min in polite reply.
"To field work" he said. We drank deeply. Afterwards, we dragged Venderman out of the bar and kept walking the streets.
"It doesn't make sense, sir" Gasping, I wiped my mouth. The contents of my stomach lay splattered across the cobblestones in front of me. It was later, much later, and I was dizzy and sick, but still not drunk.
"It has the signs of gastro. I know you haven't been drinking, Chen." Davies said, supporting me. Nearby Venderman was curled into a fetal position, snoring loudly.
"No, I mean these organ thieves. You'd need...equipment. Sterile equipment and at least a couple of competent surgeons. And...the right blood type and...and time. Lots and lots of time. Surgery like that takes hours. It doesn't make sense." I collapsed to my knees again. Vaguely I could see Davies moving over to check on Venderman.
"You're right. Equipment and surgeons. Who has those?"
I passed out.
When I came to, my head was aching and my arm was numb, presumably because I had been lying on it. I was lying on a metal bench in what was quite clearly an operating theatre. The cyan logo of the Vali group was imprinted in the walls. Gathered around the operating table in the center of the room was a small group, dressed in blue scrubs and wearing elbow-length plastic gloves.
As I watched, unmoving, they were lifting a glistening organ from an incision in the back of the patient who lay face down on the operating table. The nearby machines sounded their tones steadily to indicate all was well.
Carefully the organ was lifted and carried over to the bench where I lay. It was lifted into an icebox, down near by feet, and I must have recoiled or made some other movement because one of the masked figures cried out.
"She's awake!"
"Secure the cargo! Don't worry about her." It was Davies. He pulled off his mask. "Easy now, Chen, just lie there. We'll finish harvesting Venderman and then we'll be on our way."
"What is this? Who are you? You don't work for the CDC!"
"We work *with* the CDC. How do you think we knew that Venderman had the right blood type?" Davies gestured. "How do you think we got ot borrow such excellent surgeons so quickly?"
"I don't understand."
"And you won't. We're interested in only one thing, Venderman. He has what we need. You were just...in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"But I'll tell the police. I'll tell them about you."
"About who? Davies? That was a fiction. This field trip? Also a fiction. As far as the CDC is concerned, you and Venderman ran off without permission for a week of Mardis Gras. And even if they didn't...we have people at the CDC. We have peole in the police."
"No, here is what happens next..."
I woke up in a seedy hotel room, and it was just like Davies, or the man who I knew as Davies, had said. My suitcase and everything I had brought with me to New Orleans was near the door. I crept into the bathroom.
Venderman was lying, heavily sedated, in a bathtub full of ice. The blood was slowly seeping from the incisions on his back. In the fitful flickering of the bulb, he looked pale, but peaceful.
I turned to the sink, where a tube of lipstick lay open on the bathroom counter. I picked up the lipstick and, with trembling hand, began to write, just as I had been instructed.
"DO NOT MOVE OR YOU WILL DIE. TAKE THE PHONE NEXT TO THE BATHTUB AND CALL 911. YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT."
And then I left the hotel and returned to my life. Just as I had been instructed.
Created by: Funcom
Event: Samhain (Halloween 2013)
Mission:The League of Monster Slayers presents: Spooky Stories of Solomon Island
Location: The League of Monster Slayers' Clubhouse near Innsmouth, Solomon Island, Maine
Chapter Five: The Hitcher
Chapter Six:The Organ Smugglers
Chapter Five – The Hiker (By Sandy “Moose”)
Andy tells me you're harvesting a crop of urban legends. Fascinating things, living stories. They go from mouth to ear to children's book to internet forums to mouth to ear again. They evolve and mature. They're stories that actually travel, wandering with an almost-purpose. I guess that's why I like them. They're the still-functioning vestigial bits from ages ago, from a time when people carried stories like parcels and passed them out around fires during the uncertain nights. But now I'm woolgathering. On with the story. --Sandy
Walk into a truck stop at 3am, lend your ear to the right denizen, and you might hear anything. The open road is intriguing and peculiar, and so are those wandering souls swimming through the dead water of late night pavement. It's sort of "limbo of lunary souls," to quote a certain E.A. Poe. Get a trucker gabbing and it's like a nicotine-stained copy of Arabian Nights. Get a trucker talking long enough, and, sure as the sunset, they'll tell you a black dog story or a hitchhiker story. This one's mine.
I came into Kingsmouth just as summer died, just as the warmth began leeching away, but before the rigor mortis of winter. Post witching hour, and I was eating pavement on Solomon Road. Right out of the tunnel, I saw a figure in my headlight.
I braked. It was a girl, early teens. She was dripping with water, from her hair, from her dress. How did she get out here? Where had the water come from?
"Cold," she said.
I gave her my leather jacket. It was the thing to do. Poor thing was like ice. I asked her name, mindful of the signs of hypothermia.
"Chloe," she said.
I said I'd better get her home, and quick. She hoped up on the back of my bike and pointed down Solomon Road, and I didn't hesitate to gun the engine.
It happened somewhere around Langmore Bridge. Just before? On the bridge? Just after? I can't be sure. She was a little thing, light as a sack of feathers, and I didn't feel the moment she left my bike. On the other side of the bridge, I looked back, and she was gone. I was terrified that she'd fallen off. I'd been going fast. So I doubled back. No girl.
That's what brought me to the Sheriff's office. They had no missing Chloe to report. They did find my jacket the next morning. It was neatly folded, laying across a tombstone in the graveyard at the Kingsmouth Congregational Church. I read the writing on that stone. It said:
Chloe Mercer
To die will be an awfully big adventure. I think I would have liked Chloe. I meant to get her flowers. But then...well. You know the rest. It seems that just like the living, it's the quiet and polite who get neglected, while the noisy and belligerent get all of our attention. I hope you've found peace, Chloe. I don't know what made you restless.
That's my hitchhiker story. Believe or disbelieve at your own peril.
"I don't like my chances of surviving. The cold, the freaky creatures and the complete lack of response from home base are telling me one thing - don't expect to get out of here anytime soon. The rest of the team is gone and there are...tourists. People passing by, want to help but mostly wanting to get on with it. I can't tell you what kind of secret world I have stumbled into, but this isn't my first peek through the curtains. I'm freaking myself out, mostly, and though everything seems to indicate that I will be okay if I stay here at the camp and I somehow manage to keep finding food, I just have a feeling, you know. I don't want to die, but if I am going to, I want to face...whatever comes...with a clear conscience. The operation in New Orleans...it has become an urban legend for good reason. For the part that I played in covering it up, I am sorry. This is what I remember of that night. Consider it a confession."
- Marianna Chen
New Orleans has always been a haunted town. I don't believe in ghosts - I never have - but New Orleans is the place where you could believe in ghosts, if anywhere. It's the violence and the history, the crowding and the crowds, and the dead. Always the dead.
This was Mardi Gras and the streets were full of drunk tourists, drowning their desperate lives in pints of liquor and glimpses of flesh traded for cheap plastic beads. In the alleyways, shadows shaped like men preyed on the drunk and gullible, relieving them of money, IDs and consciousness, not necessarily in that order.
My small team had been sent down from Altanta - most of us still in training - to get some "field experience". I didn't know anyone in the group except Michael Venderman, a biology major like myself. The others were from all over the various disciplines. And our chaperone on this little field trip, Mark Davies. Davies was also from some part of the Centre that I'd never visited. Some sort of specialist.
None of us really had a clue what we were doing there, though Venderman had a theory that we were going to try and chart the spread of an STD over the course of the week. He volunteered to be Subject Zero, of course. Venderman was someone you could always count on to be idiotic.
Davies let us get settled into our lodgings, a shitty little bed and breakfast in the French Quarter and then he briefed us in the entry hall about the real work we were supposed to be doing there.
"The authorities are concerned. You may or may not have heard the rumor about this supposed organ smuggling ring operating out of New Orleans. Maybe you've seen the emails?" He waited, but nobody had.
"We're mostly here as precaution. The black market in organs barely exists in the United States and the complication of long range organ transport are beyond all but the most wealthy of criminal cartels. The District Police Commanders asked that the CDC have a presence here, in case anything does happen."
"We'll be patrolling in plain clothes. Keep an eye out for anything suspicious, and keep your identification handy in case the police find something. They have been given order to expect our presence."
"Any questions?"
Venderman raised his hand.
"Alone, sir, or?"
"You can partner up. It'll probably be the best way of stopping you getting too wasted, Venderman" Davies said. Venderman winked at me and I rolled my eyes. I knew where this was going.
Six hours and uncountable shots later, Venderman was a mess. I wasn't drinking, figuring that one of us had to stay sober in case we saw any random kidney harvesting going on.
We were holed up in a bar on Bourbon Street, trying to avoid the crush of the crowd and holding a shouted conversation over the racket.
"I'm telling you she was into me!" Venderman was shouting.
"She was a prostitute. She was into your wallet" I yelled back.
"Bah!" Venderman sprayed his derision. "You're just jealous!"
"Of a hooker? Oh yeah."
"Seen anything yet?" It was Davies, elbowing his way through the crowd to our table. He was carrying three glasses of beer, which he slammed down on the table. "We've seen a lot of tits. And the bottom of a few glasses. But no kidney smuggling, sir!" Venderman reported loudly. Davies swore and looked around, but nobody seemed to have heard Venderman over the din. "Weren't you supposed to keep him sober?" Davies asked me. I cocked an eyebrow.
"Him? I'm not sure the pope could manage that, sir." Davies pushed the drinks across the table. Venderman grabbed his immediately, upending it. Davies gave him a disgusted look, then raised his glass to me. I raised min in polite reply.
"To field work" he said. We drank deeply. Afterwards, we dragged Venderman out of the bar and kept walking the streets.
"It doesn't make sense, sir" Gasping, I wiped my mouth. The contents of my stomach lay splattered across the cobblestones in front of me. It was later, much later, and I was dizzy and sick, but still not drunk.
"It has the signs of gastro. I know you haven't been drinking, Chen." Davies said, supporting me. Nearby Venderman was curled into a fetal position, snoring loudly.
"No, I mean these organ thieves. You'd need...equipment. Sterile equipment and at least a couple of competent surgeons. And...the right blood type and...and time. Lots and lots of time. Surgery like that takes hours. It doesn't make sense." I collapsed to my knees again. Vaguely I could see Davies moving over to check on Venderman.
"You're right. Equipment and surgeons. Who has those?"
I passed out.
When I came to, my head was aching and my arm was numb, presumably because I had been lying on it. I was lying on a metal bench in what was quite clearly an operating theatre. The cyan logo of the Vali group was imprinted in the walls. Gathered around the operating table in the center of the room was a small group, dressed in blue scrubs and wearing elbow-length plastic gloves.
As I watched, unmoving, they were lifting a glistening organ from an incision in the back of the patient who lay face down on the operating table. The nearby machines sounded their tones steadily to indicate all was well.
Carefully the organ was lifted and carried over to the bench where I lay. It was lifted into an icebox, down near by feet, and I must have recoiled or made some other movement because one of the masked figures cried out.
"She's awake!"
"Secure the cargo! Don't worry about her." It was Davies. He pulled off his mask. "Easy now, Chen, just lie there. We'll finish harvesting Venderman and then we'll be on our way."
"What is this? Who are you? You don't work for the CDC!"
"We work *with* the CDC. How do you think we knew that Venderman had the right blood type?" Davies gestured. "How do you think we got ot borrow such excellent surgeons so quickly?"
"I don't understand."
"And you won't. We're interested in only one thing, Venderman. He has what we need. You were just...in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"But I'll tell the police. I'll tell them about you."
"About who? Davies? That was a fiction. This field trip? Also a fiction. As far as the CDC is concerned, you and Venderman ran off without permission for a week of Mardis Gras. And even if they didn't...we have people at the CDC. We have peole in the police."
"No, here is what happens next..."
I woke up in a seedy hotel room, and it was just like Davies, or the man who I knew as Davies, had said. My suitcase and everything I had brought with me to New Orleans was near the door. I crept into the bathroom.
Venderman was lying, heavily sedated, in a bathtub full of ice. The blood was slowly seeping from the incisions on his back. In the fitful flickering of the bulb, he looked pale, but peaceful.
I turned to the sink, where a tube of lipstick lay open on the bathroom counter. I picked up the lipstick and, with trembling hand, began to write, just as I had been instructed.
"DO NOT MOVE OR YOU WILL DIE. TAKE THE PHONE NEXT TO THE BATHTUB AND CALL 911. YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT."
And then I left the hotel and returned to my life. Just as I had been instructed.
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