Friday night, Nathan, Megan, and I went to Beth’s work to say hi and to have a drink.

  Not surprisingly, she was too busy to really talk with us, seeing as it was Friday night and all. I still wanted to show her some level of support, though. We grabbed a table and shot the shit.

  “Can you tell me where we’re going tomorrow yet?” Megan asked.

  I wasn’t deliberately withholding information from her, but if I explained why I waited until the day before to pick a spot, she would know about my EPA workaround. I don’t know why, but I felt like protecting that information was important. We were least likely to get caught if we targeted recently added Sites of Concern, I believed, so I looked for updates just that morning.

  “We’re going to Brownsville,” I said.

  “Is that far?”

  My head wobbled. “An hour and a half south. I’ve been out that way for my side job, so I’m somewhat familiar with the area.”

  “Including Brownsville?”

  “No, it will be my first time there,” I answered. “This location is a little outside of the primary city ruins, though.”

  I flipped my phone around to show her the satellite view of the location. On the Monongahela River, the site was an old factory of some sort that must have grown steadily over time. I counted nine long buildings bunched together with six different roofing styles between them.

  “That whole place is infested?” Megan asked. Nathan looked at the map with her.

  “I have no idea, but I hope not.”

  Megan tapped the map a few times. “Holy crap. This place is over a mile long.”

  She spun my phone back around. The line from the measurement tool she used was still on the screen. That was a good trick, I realized. With intel this limited, I needed to spend more time getting whatever I could out of the tools I had. Knowing the size of the site wasn’t game-changing, but it was helpful. I was probably missing other easy wins like that.

  “So, you guys show up and poke around until you find monsters?” Nathan asked.

  “More or less,” I answered.

  “That’s a lot of poking.”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Megan and Nathan both laughed.

  Beth suddenly slid into the booth next to me, and a strapping blonde-haired man did the same next to Nathan. Frankly, he was handsome. He looked like the kind of guy who pledged to one of those Harvard-level frats where they all wore jackets and khakis and gossiped about the latest country club news.

  That wasn’t fair, I told myself. I was already assuming he was an asshole, and he hadn’t even spoken yet.

  “Hi guys!” Beth said. “I only have a minute, but I wanted to introduce you all to Jonathan. Jonathan, this is my brother Dorion, his roommate Nathan, and their friend Megan.”

  Jonathan went around the table shaking hands. “Nice to meet you all.”

  “How’d you two meet?” Megan asked.

  “I barback at Deerskull between classes. I was lucky enough to meet Beth before she moved on.”

  Beth chuckled. “‘Moved on.’”

  Jonathan smiled. His teeth were brilliantly white and perfectly straight. “Didn’t want to dredge up bad memories.”

  “I think I should get back,” Beth said. “Good seeing everyone.”

  Curiously, Jonathan took her seat instead of departing as well. “Beth said you two are CDM.” He indicated he meant Megan and me.

  “We are,” Megan confirmed.

  “I want to get into crawling so bad. My pops said he’d pay for college but not gate fees, so I’m learning accounting. Carry on the family business.”

  Megan sipped her beer. “You’ll make way better money in accounting.”

  “Not if I got a few levels and got picked up by a guild.”

  Megan gestured in my direction.

  “It might make you feel better to know that it doesn’t really work like that,” I said. “That was my game plan too. The reality is only casters get hired from the outside. Guilds and teams are pretty much all nepotism hires.”

  “I know the chances are low.”

  Sighing, Megan added, “That’s how we thought of it too. Your chances are literally zero. They’re not small. They don’t exist.”

  “Damn. How about you, dude?” Jonathan asked Nathan. “What do you do?”

  “HVAC. Working at the airport right now.”

  “I drive by that place every day. That project looks massive.”

  “It’s a lot to build, yeah.”

  Looking at the time on his phone, Jonathan scooted out of the booth. “I’ve got to run, but I want you all to know I think Beth is really great. Hopefully we get to hang out again.”

  And he was gone.

  “I don’t know how you’re staying so calm right now,” Megan said. “If I were Beth’s brother, I’d hate knowing that dude is porking my sister.”

  I shook my head. “What the fuck, Megan?”

  ***

  Another lesson learned the hard way: Don’t pick a hunting site that requires crossing a river.

  The GPS told us to cross the Monongahela River via the Lane Bane Bridge, which not only crossed the river but also crossed an entire valley. Some one thousand five hundred feet up, the bridge emptied onto the top of a distant hill where part of Brownsville stood. The rest was down the hill, near the river below. At this height, the buildings were small, and we had a clear view of the several brick industrial structures still standing along the river.

  It was beautiful.

  The valley, not the bridge. Most of the four-lane bridge was still standing, but a stretch in the middle had collapsed, leaving only a single line connecting the two ends.

  Naturally, access was fenced off with several warning signs about the bridge being dangerous and unusable, but someone had moved those out of the way. From some old muddy tire tracks, it looked like people still crossed the bridge using the one lane still standing.

  “We aren’t crossing this bridge,” I said.

  Megan breathed out. “Oh, thank God. I was worried you’d want to go for it.”

  “Yeah, no. I believe in a lot of things, but I don’t believe in that hunk of asphalt.”

  Leaning on the door of my car, I searched the map for another way across.

  “There’s a bridge about twenty minutes north of here in a place called Belle Vernon. Then we’d loop back down along the river to get to the nest. Oh, wait. There’s a smaller bridge that’s closer. ‘Big Blue Bridge.’”

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  “What color do you think it is?” Megan asked.

  Ignoring that, I continued, “It’s not far from here and actually puts us closer to where we’re trying to get.”

  “Let’s check it out.”

  A few minutes of winding country roads later, we could see the ruins of Brownsville again.

  The Blue Bridge was a truss design, putting a big metal cage of beams and supports over the road that crossed the river, giving it a tunnel-like feeling. And it wasn’t very blue. The bridge was now mostly reddish-brown from rust, and the paint that had survived had turned a dirty gray.

  We weren’t driving over this bridge either. The holes were smaller than in the previous bridge, but there were several places with clear, straight-down views of the moving water. There was, however, a pedestrian crossing to the side of the lanes meant for cars. It looked like it was in good shape.

  “We can cross and do the rest on foot,” I said, “or we can go look for that other bridge.”

  “What are the chances it collapses?”

  “Not a clue.”

  Megan thought. “I’m good with walking if you are.”

  We got our gear from the car. We both had the same basic CDM kit, so our armor matched. She had a longsword and shield, whereas I had a shortsword, a bow, a quiver, and a shield. I considered the shield for a long minute and put it back in the car. The protection was a comfort, but in Daisytown it had become a liability. It simply wasn’t practical for an archer class to lug a shield around. I needed two hands for my bow.

  When I looked up at Megan, I saw she too had a GoPro mounted to her helmet, just above her headlamp. Now it made sense why she seemed so knowledgeable when she helped set mine up.

  She smiled. “I had to get one too. If we used just yours, the only footage we would get is from you way in the back doing your bow and arrow thing.”

  “I know you’re trolling me a little, but I agree. Two perspectives will be better than one.”

  Megan also had a coil of rope over her shoulder, her sheathed sword on her back, and a crowbar in her right hand. When she saw me eyeing those too, she said, “Always have to have a rope.”

  “Want me to carry something?”

  “I’m guessing my strength stat is higher than yours.”

  Megan was a level 5 brawler, so she was almost certainly correct. The few brawler build guides I browsed through all prioritized investing in strength to some degree, which was typical of melee martial classes in general.

  So Megan carried the rope and the crowbar in addition to her sheathed sword and the shield on her arm.

  We hit record on our cameras and began our adventure.

  The visible holes aside, the crossing felt relatively sturdy. When we passed by sections that were especially damaged, I saw the state of the beams under the bridge. Swimming across the river to get back to my car might be safer than walking back across again. Too little metal was doing far too much work, regardless of how it felt beneath my feet.

  I wanted to talk to Megan about the many sites and details of the town that caught my attention, like a rusted-out sedan with a lawn chair on the roof or the side of a brick building spray-painted with the words “sorry about the mess” in big swooping letters, but we agreed beforehand that moving quietly through ruins was in our best interest. If monsters were active, noise would draw their attention. We still told each other when we saw something weird, but our conversations were limited to pointing and funny faces.

  We spent relatively little time in the town of Brownsville proper, which I found myself being thankful for. Brownsville wasn’t a big place, but it was gargantuan compared to Daisytown. With a number of multi-story brick buildings lining the streets, there were too many places for a monster–or a person–to hide and watch. Our route had us doubling back to a set of railroad tracks that ran along the river and under the Blue Bridge.

  According to the maps, the tracks would take us directly to our target factory.

  Trees and shrubs sprouted between railroad ties. Their number and density were so great that the few places with older growth on both sides of the tracks felt more like a forest than an abandoned railway.

  The new growth on the tracks was a sharper green and much shorter than the other wooded sections, looking like a scar through nature. It was mostly healed, but the ghost of the railroad wouldn’t go away for a while. I wondered how long it would be until this place outgrew the scar completely.

  We left the main tracks at a small junction, taking us into a construction yard of some sort. Thick metal sheets about half the size of a rail car lined either side of the tracks in orderly stacks, two or three rows deep in some places. A few of the piles were taller than I was, but most came up to my chest. Plants fought their way through the cracks, but this was a giant paved pad, meaning there was far less green here compared to Daisytown.

  Ahead, a freestanding rusted metal arch a few stories tall rose over the tracks and was wide enough that the rows of old materials were within its footprint as well. Megan looked at it curiously.

  I knew it as a gantry crane, a tool for unloading trains. All of the metal we saw likely came in by rail, and once upon a time, this crane would have unloaded it.

  To our left was a trailer-sized building with broken windows and missing doors. Ahead of us was the first factory warehouse. Before we made this trip, Megan and I used satellite images to estimate the width of this place. It came out to about 140 ft, which meant nothing to me, so we sought out context.

  The statue of liberty is 305 ft tall, so the structure we saw was half that size across. Frankly, that felt incorrect when I first did the math, but now that we stood in front of it in person, that estimate struck me as small. The main door yawned like a maw, larger than even the drawbridge-style gates that sometimes accompanied high-level dungeons.

  The sheet metal siding was rusted and dented but was otherwise intact. Inside, through the maw, patches of light shone down onto the factory floor, revealing a long stretch of metal rollers on one side and several smaller rollers on the other, each meant for easing the challenge of moving heavy materials.

  A few stacks of metal were in here too, but they were cut into smaller pieces, and several were shaped into ninety-degree curves. Graffiti tags didn’t blanket the interior like they did in places closer to Pittsburgh, but there were still several pops of intensely vibrant colors here and there.

  Knowing better than to walk right in, Megan and I made to walk around the perimeter to better scout the hunting site, but both sides of the warehouse were fenced off and thick with briars. We could probably get through it all, but it wouldn’t be easy and would definitely not be quiet, so we approached the maw.

  I had given Megan a primer on goblin traps–the little that I knew, at least–on our drive in, so she knew to pause at the doorway. No signs of tripwires or deadfalls. The path ahead was all cracked concrete floors, awash in green weeds and years of dead leaves. Megan also knew not to step anywhere where the ground was completely covered without checking it first. A pit trap in a place like this was unlikely, as the goblins would need a jackhammer to dig it, but we were careful anyway.

  This warehouse was about 280 ft long, so crossing it slowly took time. The smell of dead fish and rotten meat was potent, even at a distance, and the intensity grew as we continued on.

  I scanned constantly, checking every corner and every pile of debris for monsters waiting in ambush, but none came. We passed quietly by giant machines too big and too old to salvage–presses, maybe?–and traveled beneath another gantry crane. This one had vines growing up it wherever trickles of sunlight could leak through the roof.

  The size of this place could hold hundreds of goblins, but I repeatedly reminded myself that a nest needed time to get that big. The structures would be just as large whether five goblins had moved in or whether there were one hundred.

  The next warehouse butted up against the first and was actually longer, but not by much. This structure had three gantry cranes and what looked like an overturned barge. It would make sense for a barge builder to be on the river like this, so maybe that’s what this place used to do.

  Whatever it was, the massive flat surface was a popular canvas, it seemed. The hull looked like it had been tagged over and over to form several layers of paint.

  That was also the first time we saw evidence of monsters. Here and there were little brown footprints from goblins coming and going. Based on their path, they came out of the next warehouse ahead and used an exit on the riverside of this building with relative frequency.

  Megan set down her rope and then quietly unsheathed her sword and put the crowbar in its place. Damn. That was smart. I wouldn’t have thought to do that, forcing me to either leave the crowbar behind or carry it around like a dual-wielding dork. I needed a crowbar sheath too.

  We found the source of the stench. The goblins were using a corner of this building for their garbage. A pile of poorly cleaned fish bones with a few deer mixed in sat in one corner. In the other corner was a pile of goblin feces with a large puddle spread around them.

  Those were clues, I realized. How much did goblins eat? If I knew that, the size of the garbage pile could give me an indication of the nest size. As it was, the pile didn’t strike me as that big. Twenty fish and maybe four deer.

  The next warehouse ahead seemed no smaller than the ones we had passed through already, but its contents were different. Before we approached the doorway, we studied the obstacles we could see from where we were.

  Ten feet in, a wall of scrap and debris stretched across the warehouse floor, blocking our view of anything beyond. Climbing over it was not an option. If the goblins didn’t kill us, a stupid fall would. We also couldn’t see how to get around the wall from our outside vantage point, but the goblin tracks suggested there was indeed a path to take.

  Megan and I looked at each other and nodded. We both knew this was the nest.

  With my bow and arrow ready, I followed closely behind Megan, in part because I wanted to be near someone who actually had a shield and because I wanted to help scan for traps. We turned the corner of the doorway and followed the wall to the left to the next opening in the scrap heap. We were definitely being funneled, I felt.

  I put a hand on Megan’s shoulder. A tripwire was two steps ahead. She nodded and carefully stepped over. I did the same.

  We turned the next corner and got a better view of this warehouse’s interior.

  Goblins weren’t the first squatters to nest here, it seemed. Instead of massive industrial machines, the floor was spotted with cars and campers. I saw all sorts of human garbage scattered about, from beer cans and bottles to foil wrappings from candy bars. Everything circled a relatively central point of the warehouse where part of the roof had caved in. Through the gaps in the cars, I spotted the remains of a well-used burn barrel sitting beneath the hole in the roof, surrounded by old couches, backseats yanked from cars, and ratty stained mattresses.

  We couldn’t see the entirety of the nest, but we saw several goblins asleep. A few in the cars, but mostly on the seating around the burn barrel.

  Megan gave me the look that she was ready. I set my stance and drew my bow.

  My back foot crunched a leaf, and goblin eyes sprang open.