Chapter 289: Posthumous Work (8)
Everly and Misha had once bought tacos from Wendy’s, and she remembered that the shop’s main entrance faced southeast.
Using the taco shop as a reference point, she quickly determined the four cardinal directions and roughly identified her current location as the center of Gilosha.
With her bearings established and a map in hand, finding the harbor wouldn’t be difficult.
The human mutation outbreak in Gilosha had erupted with shocking suddenness.
At the time, the raging radiation sickness had already been brought under control. The city’s residents had returned to their normal routines and resumed traveling around the city.
As a result, the streets were littered with vehicles that had crashed into one another. Among them were plenty of smaller means of transportation, such as bicycles and motorcycles.
Time was of the essence.
Everly promptly “borrowed” a motorcycle parked by the roadside—one that still had its key in the ignition. After casually wiping away the bloodstains splattered across it, she swung onto the bike and sped off.
The city’s roads were in terrible condition.
Moreover, it was obvious that the closer she got to the harbor, the more extensive the destruction became.
The buildings were increasingly devastated, while the roadsides were strewn with ever greater amounts of blood and dismembered body parts.
By the final stretch of the journey, the road itself was almost completely covered with mangled flesh, severed limbs, and gelatinous slime.
The air reeked with a nauseating stench of blood and decay.
Everly had no choice but to slow down and drive with extreme caution. Otherwise, the motorcycle’s tires would easily lose traction, sending both the bike and herself crashing to the ground.
After nearly twenty minutes of careful riding, she finally arrived at the harbor marked on the map.
The ship carrying the ancient relic statue was somewhere out on the distant sea. Everly had no idea of its exact location, making it difficult to search for.
But she had a fairly good idea where the cultists’ ritual array was.
When the Gilosha mutation incident had occurred, a video filmed from atop a high-rise building had circulated in one of Misha’s group chats.
By sheer coincidence, the person recording it had inadvertently captured what appeared to be members of the Dagon Order performing a ritual.
There weren’t many high-rise buildings near the harbor, and Everly remembered that the background of the overhead video had shown one particular corner of the docks.
Combining those two clues, she quickly identified a building on the harbor’s southern side.
Corresponding to that building were the harbor’s southwestern and southeastern corners.
With a motorcycle at her disposal, searching those two areas one after the other should have been a simple task.
However, not long after entering the harbor, Everly realized she had been far too optimistic.
There were monsters in the harbor.
She had assumed that the only creatures trapped inside this painted world were herself and the Weeping Mother with her child.
She hadn’t expected there to be other monsters.
These creatures closely resembled the mutated humans that had appeared in the videos from the Gilosha incident.
They still wore the clothes they had been dressed in as humans. Their bodies were coated in thick layers of yellowish-white slime. Some had heads transformed into those of octopuses, while others had arms—or other body parts—that had become writhing tentacles.
Each one was grotesque in its own way.
All of them were vicious and highly aggressive.
For some reason, instead of throwing themselves into the sea, these monsters had remained within the harbor area, wandering aimlessly.
The moment Everly entered, the roar of her motorcycle engine attracted their attention.
In an instant, more than a dozen monsters charged toward her.
They ran with astonishing speed. As they sprinted, blobs of slime splattered onto the ground with wet plap-plap sounds. Once the slime dried, it quickly became the same translucent gelatinous substance Everly had noticed scattered throughout the city.
She hadn’t even had time to grab a harbor map before the first monsters were already upon her.
If there had only been the few directly in front of her, it wouldn’t have been a problem.
She could have turned them into human speed bumps and sent them straight to the ground.
But perhaps drawn by the commotion, fresh monsters continuously poured out from every corner of the harbor.
As far as the eye could see, they came in dense, overwhelming waves.
It was even more horrifying than kicking over a nest of cockroaches.
She couldn’t win.
There was simply no way she could fight them all.
To avoid being overwhelmed by the monsters, Everly gripped the handlebars, made a sharp 180-degree turn on the spot, twisted the throttle to its limit, and sped back out of the harbor.
Strangely enough, the moment she crossed the harbor’s boundary, the savage creatures immediately abandoned the chase.
Reluctantly, they retreated into the harbor, dispersed, and resumed wandering around.
Everly hid at a nearby street corner and observed them for a while.
In her judgment, there could only be one explanation for their behavior:
They were guarding something.
Horror Movie Survival Rule #1: Pay attention to the hints.
The cultists’ ritual array was hidden somewhere in the harbor.
Could that be what the monsters were protecting?
Very likely.
But that made things much more troublesome.
Everly was alone, and the weapons she had were limited.
Meanwhile, the harbor contained an absurd number of monsters.
If she had to kill them one by one, who knew how long it would take?
Time wasn’t on her side.
Earlier, she had passed a skincare advertisement and happened to glance up at it.
She discovered that the model pictured on the poster had progressed beyond merely wearing an eerie smile.
Several red-and-black tentacles had silently emerged from the figure’s eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ears.
They had broken through the boundary between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, protruding from the surface of the poster itself.
When Everly walked past, they seemed to sense the presence of a living person.
The tentacles writhed frantically across the poster, repeatedly reaching toward her with tips lined with razor-sharp fangs and claws, trying to seize her through the air.
Fortunately, they were still too short to reach her.
For the time being, they posed no immediate threat.
But Everly knew that if she delayed much longer, it was only a matter of time before those revolting things broke free of the paper and entered the real world.
She had to act quickly.
For the next stretch of time, Everly remained hidden outside the harbor, conducting a series of experiments on the monsters inside.
The results of her experiments showed that, regardless of whether the monsters still possessed recognizable eyes, ears, noses, or other human sensory organs, their vision, hearing, and sense of smell remained exceptionally sharp.
That meant it was practically impossible to sneak past them using the usual zombie-movie tricks—such as masking her scent with foul-smelling substances or keeping perfectly silent.
There was, however, one piece of good news.
By chance, Everly discovered a fire station nearby.
A fire engine was still parked inside the garage, and its keys hung on the wall of the nearby duty room.
The truck had likely been assigned specifically for fighting fires around the harbor.
Its chassis sat high off the ground—about 1.2 meters (nearly 4 feet)—and its oversized tires could easily traverse rubble, steep slopes, and even collapsed sections of buildings.
The body was built from high-strength steel, giving it excellent fire resistance and stability.
Mounted on the rear were a water tank and an extendable ladder.
The firefighting equipment wasn’t particularly difficult to operate.
After only a few attempts, Everly managed to open the lid of the water tank.
Perhaps to prevent rust from forming inside, the tank was currently empty.
Perfect.
An empty tanker was exactly what Everly wanted.
After spending a little time familiarizing herself with the controls, she stepped on the accelerator.
In the span of a single second, she completed the transformation from a bright, cheerful college student into a fire truck driver.
Following the directions on the map, she drove straight to a nearby chain gas station.
Relying on the truck’s high ground clearance and rugged construction, she forcefully shoved aside the smaller cars blocking the pumps until she had squeezed the fire truck between all four fuel dispensers.
She then inserted all four fuel nozzles into the opening of the empty water tank at the back.
After that, she ran into the convenience store, grabbed a stack of prepaid fuel cards, activated each pump, and had all four dispensers simultaneously pumping gasoline into the tank.
The filling process took another ten minutes or so.
While she waited, Everly also took the opportunity to gather a few useful supplies from the convenience store.
Once the tank was about two-thirds full, Everly shut off the pumps and drove the fire truck—now loaded with highly flammable fuel—to the tall building on the south side of the harbor.
The building was in complete disarray.
Tables, chairs, and other furniture lay overturned everywhere, and every few steps she encountered another large pool of dried blood.
Fortunately, since it stood outside the harbor, there were no troublesome monsters lurking inside, and the elevators were still functioning normally.
Everly took the elevator all the way to the rooftop.
Using a pair of binoculars, she surveyed the harbor below.
It didn’t take long before she found what she was looking for.
The ritual array was located in the harbor’s southwestern corner, surrounded by several stacks of shipping containers.
It looked almost exactly like it had in the video.
The only difference was this:
In the video, the ritual array had been encircled by a dozen or so cultists dressed in black robes.
Now, surrounding the array were a group of enormous masses of flesh draped in black cloaks.
They were, quite literally, mountains of meat.
Perhaps because of the ritual’s influence, the cultists below had completely lost every trace of their human form.
Their bodies had grotesquely swollen and warped.
Their bones had seemingly melted away.
Their heads, limbs, and torsos had fused together into enormous heaps of soft flesh that sprawled limply across the ground, resembling gigantic human-flesh slugs.
Only the skull-like halves of human faces protruding from the tops of their bodies, along with the black cloaks covering their backs, still hinted at what they had once been.
Like the other monsters in the harbor, these flesh-mountains were on patrol.
Centered around the ritual array, they tirelessly wandered within a radius of roughly twenty meters.
Whenever the angle was favorable, Everly could even see countless fleshy tendrils writhing beneath the monsters where they touched the ground.
Those appeared to serve as their “feet.”
As the gigantic flesh monsters crawled along, their damp, tentacle-like appendages left behind trails of translucent gelatinous slime.
The scene was so bizarre, so mentally disturbing, that it was enough to make anyone feel sick to their stomach.
And yet, Everly couldn’t afford to look away.
As she watched, Everly carefully studied the monsters’ patrol patterns.
She needed to identify their routines, plan the safest route from the harbor entrance to the ritual array, and prepare several backup plans in case something went wrong.
When she finished her observations and left the building, she discovered a fourth thing scattered across the ground, in addition to the bloodstains, severed limbs, and gelatinous slime:
Living, crawling tentacles.
They weren’t very large—about the size of an adult’s hand—and resembled flattened sea anemones.
Around the outer edge of each creature writhed a dozen or so crimson-and-black tentacles.
At the center was a circular, sucker-like mouth, its rim lined with several dense rows of razor-sharp teeth, giving it an utterly horrifying appearance.
Despite their small size, these anemone-like creatures possessed astonishing jumping ability.
Whenever someone passed by, they would hide in dark corners, then suddenly spring out in an ambush.
All of their tentacles would flare open at once as they lunged forward, using the tooth-filled sucker in the center to bite their victim.
Fortunately, Everly had been worried that the gasoline-filled fire engine might explode in flames.
To be safe, she had deliberately put on a firefighter’s protective suit.
Although it did absolutely nothing to keep her warm, it completely blocked the first sea-anemone creature’s attack.
At the same time, it alerted Everly to the existence of this new kind of monster.
As for where they came from, it didn’t take her long to find the answer.
They had fallen out of the eerie smiling portraits.
As time passed, the dangers lurking within the painted world were steadily escalating.
She had only spent a short while on the rooftop gathering information.
Yet by the time she came back down, the portraits lining the streets had changed again.
The smiles on their faces had disappeared.
In place of their eyes, noses, and mouths were enormous black holes.
And writhing their way out of those dark openings…
…were countless crimson-and-black sea-anemone creatures.
Transitioning from two dimensions into three apparently required an enormous amount of energy.
As a result, the sea-anemone creatures didn’t emerge very quickly.
But that hardly mattered.
There were simply too many human images scattered throughout the city, and there seemed to be no upper limit to the number of sea-anemone creatures each portrait could spawn.
For now, there still weren’t that many of them.
But if she allowed this to drag on…
Everly didn’t even dare imagine what the city would become.
Fighting back a wave of goosebumps crawling over her skin, she sprinted back to the fire truck.
She slammed her foot onto the accelerator.
Once again, she charged straight toward the harbor.
