The Cabin Is Always Hungry (A Dungeon Core Horror Slasher)

FINDERS KEEPERS

Part 5

LEO

Leo drove the van out of the summer camp and took the road back to town. He didn’t have to go far to find the road he was looking for—one that didn’t exist a week ago. He stopped the car in the middle of the three-way junction, peering ahead at where the pavement met the newly-applied gravel road, illuminated only by a single street light.

The darkness beckoned.

Leo looked down at the GPS on his phone. No off-shoot road showed on the screen from where the blue dot—his current location—hovered. He glanced at the road again, confused.

“What’s the hold-up?” John asked, sitting on the passenger seat.

Leo wanted to tell him that they should get out of there and take their chances with Mercer, hoping he would be in a good mood, which he hardly ever was. Leo didn’t want to go to jail. If Eddie did work for the DEA, it would implicate him if Eddie survived the woods and made it back to Portland. He might go into hiding and luck out into witness protection with the FBI, which would give them time to build a solid case around Mercer and his organization. Eddie would be an excellent prime witness that could testify against his cousin and sink him for good.

What would that be for me? Kidnapping charges? Attempted murder? Conspiracy? Felony Assault?

Those were just the things he could think of at the top of his head. He needed the money after he got out of the military, which left him with three bullets to the gut and shoulder, a couple of months at the hospital with several months of extensive physical training after, and then an honorable discharge that couldn’t even pay the bills even with the meager change the VA could dish out for folks like him. Thank you for your service, my ass. From a guy who never went to college, he stared at plenty of minimum-wage jobs that didn’t appeal to him. Even taking an associate’s degree would be costly.

But a handful of powerful and wealthy people sought his unique skillset, the ones he knew he was good at. How to carve a man and the hundreds of ways he could die. It paid the bills. He paid for an electrical technology degree at a community college so that he could become an electrician. Earn an honest job for once. And it also helped put his younger brother, Danny, into a prestigious four-year university down south. He was set to be a doctor, and Leo remembered how proud he was when Danny got top marks for the MCAT.

“Hey, Leo?” John shook his shoulder. “What’s up?”

“I grew up around here for most of my life, John,” Leo said. “And I’ve never driven past that road before. It’s like it just….”

“Just what?”

--Appeared out of thin air. Leo gulped. He didn’t scare easily. He had camped multiple times in the woods alone in the dead of winter with meager supplies for days, hearing the wolves and coyotes howl in the pitch darkness. But this?

This was something new.

Something that he shouldn’t get involved with.

Maybe I never noticed it before. After all, it’s been years since his mom sold the house, and everyone moved out to Portland. Hell, Leo had only been around the property once or twice a year since then. Someone could easily have built a cabin for the past five years and placed that gravel road.

But he was pretty sure it didn’t exist a week ago. He remembered walking along the lake, hiking into the woods, and reminiscing about the old times with Danny. They never saw a cabin. Never saw the gravel road. Never saw that street light.

“Are we moving or what?” Art asked at the back, breaking him out of his thoughts.

Leo looked over to John, who gave him a puzzled arch of his brow. Taking a deep breath through his nose, Leo pushed the gear stick to drive and steered the van onto the narrow gravel road. Under the forest’s thick canopy, the night grew darker.

Leo had a nagging feeling that they were all being watched.

As Leo and the others entered the gravel road and drove for several hundred feet more, a huge chunk of an Atlas Alder broke off and blocked the way out. It was the first of my new traps that got activated, and I spent a considerable amount of crystals to get a hold of the fake tree so I could put it back and dismantle it over and over. It was supposed to cut off the cultists from the outside world and prevent them from leaving, but Leo and his crew would be a good test run for tomorrow’s events.

And don’t forget to put it back on the tree; I made a mental note. If the cultists arrived tomorrow and found the road blocked by it, that would be so embarrassing.

The four men didn’t even hear the branch crash in the middle of the road.

I watched the van drive across the small rickety wooden bridge over a tributary called Crimson Creek, which fed off Cedar Lake to the large Clackamas River.

As they passed the threshold, the bridge’s trap activated to standby.

At some point tonight, if someone managed to drive away from the dungeon (evading all of my monsters) and reached the bridge, it would collapse underneath them, plunging their vehicle (and them) into seven-foot-deep water. They’d have to swim through murky water to get to the riverbank, blocked by oily-black vines that smelled like rotten days-old flesh and thorny brambles that would weep blood when a delver made contact.

At least that’s what the description said before I bought it from the market.

They would just run into the Alder branch if they braved through the brambles and returned to the gravel road. They had no choice but to go around or over it…where, hopefully, some of the monsters were already waiting.

I made a point to make the gravel road long, winding, and claustrophobic, as if the forest were close to pressing against the van’s windows. It was meant to disorient a delver, and if it was the other way around, it made it challenging to navigate if they tried to escape. I purchased a handful of medium-sized boulders camouflaged by bushes and thickets for five crystals. If someone ran off the road, they’d hit these boulders instead, hopefully totaling their car.

I even made a neat illusion trap for it.

I got inspired by those cheap jump scares in horror movies when a character managed to drive away from the house of horrors, and they’re stupid enough to take their eyes off the road. And suddenly! They look back and—shit!—there’s a person, ghost, killer, or monster standing in the middle of the road, and they swerve to avoid it, reducing their chances of survival by half since they fucked up their vehicle and they could no longer escape, leaving them in the mercy of their pursuers.

I was hoping it would work like that here, too.

For a hundred crystals, I bought the ghostly illusion of a veiled lady in a tattered, dirtied bridal dress, crying in the middle of the road. It’s not an official monster since I didn’t buy it off the [Monsters] tab, but it was meant to scare a driver off the road and cause an accident. However, it only had a one-time use per dawn, so I had to trigger it carefully. I didn’t bother purchasing the higher-end versions of the trap, where she could be projected as a vivid hallucination to the delvers, but it'll do the trick for what I had in mind.

“Can’t see shit,” John muttered.

I projected my consciousness inside the van again, where John wiped the fogging windshield with his jacket’s sleeve, and the heater was on full blast. Thick mist rolled in from the woods and enveloped the van.

“It’s foggy out there,” Art said, unsure. “Where’s it coming from?”

John tapped Leo’s arm. “Be careful. I don’t want to get into an accident. We just fixed the tire.”

Leo nodded. “I’m trying.”

“How long until we reach the cabin?” Scottie asked.

“It’s the opposite side of Cedar Pine, so…a mile? Maybe two more?”

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“Just get us there before Eddie does,” John said.

While I waited for them to arrive at the cabin, I opened up the prompt to review my [DUNGEONS] tab and then selected North Cedar Lake.