Climbing out of the truck, I realized my eyes were lying to me again. Instead of a bloody-red sky, a vast field of robin’s egg blue stretched out above us in every direction. Not a single cloud marred the horizon, and the air carried that fleeting perfection you only get once or twice each summer. The sun blazed overhead, cooking the freshly laid asphalt beneath my boots, but for once, I didn’t mind.

  After months stuck under buzzing artificial light, there was something deeply refreshing and satisfying about being outdoors again, even if it was hot as balls. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve sworn we’d noclipped back into reality.

  We were right in the beating heart of an up-and-coming housing development—a patchwork quilt of freshly built homes, large empty lots waiting for construction, and sprawling green spaces that seemed to stretch forever. Far to the east, a dense wall of green marked the beginning of the cornfields. From my experience, most small towns in America were like that. Human habitation, just plopped down in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland in every direction.

  The floors I’d visited so far had been vast, but this beat them all by a country mile. I knew the Backrooms could play tricks with perception and space, but how could something like this even exist?

  It was impossibly large.

  And it all looked so real. Felt so real.

  Like I could hop in my pickup, drive ten minutes, and be at the local bar for a cold beer—or maybe grab a steak at the nearest Outback. The air was thick with humidity, carrying the scent of fresh-cut grass and the smoky aroma of a distant barbecue. A gentle breeze tugged at the edges of my bathrobe, and I caught a whiff of sunscreen and chlorine.

  It smelled like being home again.

  “Wow, this is beautiful,” Croc said, padding over, then dropping down beside me.

  I almost had a heart attack when I got a good look at the mimic. Croc wasn’t blue anymore. The dog’s odd, pock-marked, rubbery skin was gone and so were the ridiculous googly eyes. Even though it seemed to defy any sort of rational explanation, Croc now looked exactly like the golden retriever it had always pretended to be.

  And the mimic wasn’t alone.

  Jakob’s scales and horns were gone too, and though his facial features were the same, he looked… entirely human. Even his clothes had changed. The duster had disappeared, replaced by a douchey-looking knit cardigan, while someone or something had swapped his combat boots for boat shoes. Temperance suffered a similar fate—though she was stuck wearing a yellow sundress and black flats. The glower on her face told me she was none too happy about the changes.

  The twenty-fourth floor hadn’t spared me either.

  Although I could feel the coarse fibers of my bathrobe rubbing against my arms and the leather suspenders of my tool belt digging into my shoulders and back, I couldn’t see them. I was in a pair of plain khaki shorts with a collared golf shirt, tucked neatly into my waistband. My heavy work boots were still there—I could feel them against my toes—but now they looked like a pair of New Balances, complete with calf-high white socks.

  “Amazing,” Jakob wondered aloud, examining his own appearance and clothes much the same way I was examining mine. “It must be some sort of massive illusion. One cast over the entirety of the floor. That’s the only reasonable explanation. It’s no wonder this floor is considered a Cognition Hazard.” He shook his head. “You cannot even trust your eyes.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Shouldn’t my fancy new Crown of the Burger Baron make me immune to this type of mind-fuckery?”

  Jakob shrugged and offered me an apologetic smile. The expression looked genuinely weird on his now-human face.

  “Perhaps there is more at play here than we understand. Those potions we drank, in theory, they should fortify Grit by approximately twenty percent for the next thirty-six hours or so.” He faltered, unsure of himself. “Yet here we are, mass hallucinating all the same. I cannot explain it.”

  “They made me wear a dress,” Temperance growled, her hands balled into angry fists. “I have not worn a dress in two-hundred years. When I find the culprit responsible for this indignity, I’m going to gut them like a pig and stuff their carcass with ten thousand spiders.”

  I wasn’t sure what to think or believe, but I wanted to find the next kiosk and I wanted to do it fast. Even though this was the most “normal” floor I’d seen so far, there was something about it that I hated to my core. Despite the sunshine and clear skies, there was something dark and cancerous here, festering like an open wound.

  I cast Unerring Arrow, this time focusing on the kiosk that would eventually teleport us down to the 49th floor. The blue beam of light exploded outward from my chest, unseen to everyone but me, and disappeared down the street before doglegging sharply to the right a few blocks up.

  “We’re going that way,” I said, waving in the general direction the arrow had gone.

  “What about the ice cream truck?” Croc asked, even as I started to trudge across the blistering hot blacktop.

  “What about it?” I called back.

  “Shouldn’t we try to do something with it?” the dog asked. “Clearly, we can’t drive it around without summoning an army of those hungry kiddos, but I don’t think we should just leave it here.”

  “Croc brings up an excellent point,” Jakob added with a nod. “Finding a working vehicle is a rarity, and one that doubles as a mobile access point to the kiosk network? Could be quite valuable and handy, especially if we can find a way to disable the external speaker system.”

  I cursed under my breath but conceded that they maybe, probably, kinda had a good point. In the Backrooms, resources were scarce and when you came across something like this, it was never a smart move to let it sit idle. The floors were temperamental and could shift at any moment. Attempting to backtrack to the ice cream truck—even using the kiosk network—could add days or even weeks of time, assuming I could manage it at all.

  The problem was, I didn’t really know what to do with the damned thing.

  The truck had to weigh two tons, easy, which meant it was too big to fit inside my personal Storage Space. And Croc was right, I didn’t really want to drive the monstrosity around, blaring that godawful ice cream music. The one thing we absolutely didn’t need was a massive bike gang of hangry children dogging our trail, demanding that we sling SoftServe every ten minutes.

  In the loosest sense of the word, the vehicle likely qualified as a “structure,” which meant I could probably use my Blanket Fort ability to tack it onto the store just like I’d done with the concession stand from the Jungle Gym Jamboree Arcade. But that left me with a laundry list of other questions and concerns, which I didn’t have any answers to.

  Like, what would happen if I randomly amputated a piece of the kiosk network?

  Or what if this thing was infected with some kind of mind virus?

  Or, most importantly of all, would those with access to the kiosk network suddenly be able to pop into my store without having to go through the normal screening protocols? The last thing I wanted was to bring a Trojan Ice Cream Truck into my store, which could be then used by agents of the Flayed Monarch.

  I just didn’t know how it would work, but I didn’t want to leave it behind either. Which left me with only one viable option. My Unhinged Taxidermist Relic. Although I couldn’t put this thing into my regular Subspace Storage, maybe I could Frankenstein the son of a bitch. Transform it into a Horror. Then I’d be able to summon and banish it from a unique Subspace Storage area, which—lucky for me—didn’t have any effective weight limit.

  It was a bit of a stretch but was worth a shot, at least.

  “Fine,” I finally said, pulling a few key items from my storage space.

  Although I’d moved most of the corpse parts to the refrigeration unit back at the store, I still had a few odds and ends lying around. Some spare mimic pieces. A couple of spare limbs I’d plucked off some of the bellhops on floor five.

  With parts in hand, I opened my Taxidermist Overlay and quickly added a variety of gangly arms and misshapen legs to truck’s exterior. They jutted off from the sides at odd angles that didn’t really make any logical sense. But that was fine. This was just a Pass/Fail assignment, and the truck didn’t have to be structurally sound. By the time I was done, the truck was festooned with mismatched, left over body parts that I didn’t have any better use for.

  “Well, that is truly awful, Dan,” Croc noted, appraising my work with totally normal eyes. “Honestly, I am as dismayed as I am impressed.”

  Croc wasn’t wrong. The truck was…

  Gross. Was the kindest word I could come up with.

  When I finally brought the monstrosity to life, it let out anguished moans through the speaker system. I quickly banished it back to spatial storage until I had the time and resources to do a more thorough job.

  “You wanted me to save the truck,” I grumbled, “I saved the truck. You have no one else to blame for that abomination. Now, if everyone is done complaining, can we please get our asses in gear?” The hair on the back of my neck was standing stiffly at attention. “I’m pretty sure there’s something watching us.” I glanced toward the closed blinds of a nearby house and thought I saw a brief flicker of movement. “Maybe a lot of somethings.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “By all means, do lead on,” Temperance said, brandishing what looked to be a cast iron skillet. Except I could tell from the way she swung the weapon that it was really her meat cleaver. Like everything else, it had been cleverly disguised to blend in with the surroundings. “I should very much like to find and murder all of those ‘somethings’ you speak of.”

  ***

  With the truck gone and no new dangers in our immediate vicinity, we set off down the street, following the path Unerring Arrow had laid out for us. As we made our way deeper and deeper into the suburban hellscape, the feeling of unseen eyes only became more intense, until I was sure we were being watched from almost every house we passed. I didn’t see any activity on my map, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling.

  For the time being, though, the unseen watchers left us alone.

  Something I was immensely grateful for.

  As much as we needed the experience, a small part of me relished the peace, quiet, and relative boredom. If I could shove my deeply ingrained paranoia to the side and avoid looking too closely at anything, I could almost trick myself into believing I was back home. Just an ordinary person, walking my normal, human dog—who absolutely didn’t talk or make bizarre comments about the Twilight series.

  Occasionally, we caught glimpses of roving bicycle gangs, just like the one that had accosted the truck. There were a lot of them and as time wore on, I got the sickening feeling that they were keeping tabs on us. Like the watchers, though, the kids kept their distance and never got too close for comfort. As the sun carved its way toward the horizon and the blue sky gave way to the bruised purple of evening, we started to see the faint stirrings of life inside the houses themselves.

  It was subtle at first.

  Shades opening.

  Lights flicking on inside.

  Automatic garage doors rumbling in the distance.

  Then when twilight was finally and fully upon us, radios in every single house blared to life. There must’ve been external speakers hidden somewhere, because the sound came from everywhere all at once, reverberating off the houses and bleeding from the air itself.

  “Good evening, all you Sunnysiders getting ready to unwind after a long day of work. As always, this is Seth Nickles, the voice of WBSC – Sunnyside Community Radio. For those in Quadrant 13, a friendly reminder that we have out-of-towners visiting. Make sure to keep an eye out for them and please be sure to roll out those welcome mats and show them a big ol’ dose of Sunnyside hospitality. Remember what the HOA always says: outsiders are just future neighbors we haven’t converted yet.”

  A cold trickle of fear washed over me.

  The announcement confirmed what I already suspected. We were being watched. Strangely, knowing the truth didn’t comfort me. If anything, it made me feel worse. Whenever I wandered the Backrooms, I always operated on the assumption that something was out there, watching. Waiting. Patiently biding its time for me to let my guard down so it could strike—whether it was a mimic, an Aspirant of the court, or some nameless Dweller looking for an easy meal.

  This was different, though. This wasn’t random. This was organized.

  I was sure the things that lived on this floor were Dwellers, no matter how human they might’ve appeared at first glance. But I’d never known Dwellers to act like this. Although the denizens of the Backrooms might share tiny little fiefdoms with others of their species, for the most part, they were chaotic and violent—prone to infighting and cannibalizing their own as often as attacking outsiders. The Sales Sirens were perfect examples. But an entire floor, where all the Dwellers obeyed a single entity? Where they all worked together as a community?

  Now that was something to be scared of.

  True, these things had been friendly so far, but if whatever was calling the shots here decided it wanted us dead, it could mobilize every single Dweller and bury us in bodies.

  Period. End of story.

  “Also be on the lookout for Mr. Edward Myrl,” the radio announcer said interrupting my train of thought, “the former Sunnyside maintenance worker. Mr. Myrl is still missing after last month’s incident outside of the Sunnyside Tiny Tots Preschool facility. I repeat, he is still missing. Despite all appearances to the contrary, he is not the same and has been deemed a contamination risk by the board for thought crimes. If you see the man formerly known as Mr. Myrl, do not engage him in conversation. Do not make eye contact. Do not accept anything he offers you. Nod politely, move on as quickly as possible, and report his location immediately. Trust the HOA. Obey the HOA. We are always watching. Always listening. The signal never sleeps.”

  The radio signal cut off abruptly, leaving the air buzzing with the sharp crackle of static. It lasted only a few seconds before another sound took its place. As someone who’d spent years working alongside countless landscaping crews, I recognized it instantly.

  Lawn mowers.

  A whole army of lawn mowers, all firing up at once.

  I watched in mute fascination as a garage door slid open and a man, who could’ve been the poster child for “normal suburban dad,” trotted out with a meticulously pristine lawnmower rolling in front of him. Just like with the kids from the ice cream truck, his icon displayed as neutral on my map. A tag appeared above the man’s head, though it told me almost nothing of any real value.

  Kevin 0.19731B – Normal Human Dad [Level 31]

  This is Kevin, just a totally normal human dad. You know Kevin, right? Or was it Steven? Kurt, maybe? Eh, doesn’t really matter. Kevin, Steven, Kurt, Bob, Bill. They might have different names, but these guys are all the same. Just normal dads doing normal human dad stuff. He probably works in IT or maybe he sells insurance, though you’re not sure which.

  It’s definitely something boring like that, however.

  Despite living next door to him, you don’t really know Kevin all that well. When you see him out mowing his lawn or hauling the trash cans to the curb, you’re obligated to wave and offer a tightlipped smile while simultaneously praying that he doesn’t try to talk to you. Don’t worry, he won’t. He’s praying just as fervently that you won’t try to talk to him, either.

  Kevin nailed the part of normal human dad.

  He wore khaki shorts, a generic golf shirt almost exactly like mine, and those same eggshell white sneakers with too high white socks. True to the description, Kevin offered us a tight-lipped smile and a small wave, then he fired up his mower and was off to the races, cruising along the edges of the yard with expert precision.

  We crossed the street on principle, but that didn’t help much.

  More Kevins were streaming out of garages all along the block, each pushing their own lawn mowers. Just like the Timmys and Tammys, they were all Kevins. Even though they had the same name, they all looked slightly different from one another. Still, there was a generic “sameness” about the Kevins that made them all look like NPCs in a weird Sim City game.

  Although lawn mowing seemed to be the most common activity amongst the totally normal human dads of the twenty-fourth floor, we quickly discovered that other past times included building completely unidentifiable furniture in the garage, painting the house exterior, or cruising around on golf carts with a beer clutched in one hand.

  Honestly, cruising around on a golf cart with a cold beer didn’t sound half bad.

  Ten minutes later—as though the universe were eavesdropping on my thoughts—we stumbled across an unoccupied golf cart sitting in an open lot with a For Sale sign propped in front. It wasn’t an Artifact, but it ran like a dream and would sure help us cover ground a lot quicker. Best of all, unlike the god-awful ice cream truck, it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

  Just the opposite, in fact.

  Turned out, the residents paid us even less attention once we were mounted and cruising through the neighborhood. Almost as if the cart were some sort of suburban camouflage. As we drove, we got a glimpse of even more of Sunnyside’s residents.

  The Normal Human Moms were all named Kathy. Most puttered around in small gardens or spent time walking dogs so tiny they barely qualified for the name. Sometimes a handful of Kathys congregated together on back patios, which were invariably decorated with string lighting.

  There were no kids, though. Not one.

  I wasn’t sure where exactly they’d gone, but it seemed the setting sun had driven them away, leaving their parents to free roam the streets in their place.

  All things considered, the situation was… strangely, almost unnervingly, good.

  Suspiciously good.

  The weather was gorgeous, the residents were quirky but nonthreatening, and, most importantly, nothing had tried to kill us yet. It felt like a trap waiting to be sprung, and despite knowing the dangers of this floor—warnings we’d received in no uncertain terms—I let my guard down. It was like the floor had cast a spell over me and the eerie banality of Sunnyside slowly lulled me into a false sense of security.

  Aside from the occasional glance, the Kathys and Kevins were so disinterested in us that it was hard to imagine them as dangerous. They just went about their routines—mowing lawns, walking dogs, living their dull, mundane lives.

  After a few hours, we settled into an easy rhythm, and I started doing what had become second nature over the past few months—leaving Twinning Rings and survival tips for other Delvers who might stumble across this level. Honestly, I doubted anyone would see them. The floor seemed full of life on the surface, but I had a nagging suspicion Delvers didn’t linger here for a damned good reason.

  Still, if we helped even one person it would be worth the effort.

  Every few blocks, I’d pull over, check for any nearby Delvers—just to be on the safe side—then leave a message on a storage shed or house wall.

  Don’t trust your eyes, things are not what they seem.

  The bicycle gangs only come out during the day.

  The adults are nonviolent if unprovoked.

  The first dozen or so stops went without any issues, which was probably why I didn’t think twice before pulling onto the lawn of a corner house at Maple and Park. As usual, I left a hasty message in red spray paint, then pounded in a nail to hang a couple of Twinning Rings. I almost didn’t hear Croc over the thud, thud, thud of my hammer.

  “Dan,” Croc said behind me, its tone uneasy, “maybe you should stop doing that.”

  “Almost done,” I replied, hanging the last ring then pulling out one of the flyers I’d printed using the salvaged computer from the maintenance corridors.

  “I think it might be best if you listen to Croc,” Jakob urged, his normally calm voice edged with uncertainty—maybe even fear.

  I frowned, flyer in hand, and turned around.

  I froze.

  A Kevin stood fifteen feet away, his lawnmower sitting silent and forgotten beside him. His head tilted oddly to one side as he stared at the painted warning on the wall, his expression a mix of confusion and frustration. His eyes darted frantically from word to word, reading them over and over, as if trying to wring some hidden meaning from them, but finding nothing. His expression slowly morphed from confusion to one of dawning horror and terrible rage.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” the Kevin growled, his hands balling into tight fists. “Red is an unauthorized color. Everyone knows RED IS AN UNAUTHORIZED COLOR. The HOA Board won’t approve of alterations that fall outside the community guidelines. Especially if you don’t have a permit.” He paused, staring at me with a furrowed brow. “Do you have a permit?” he asked, the question sounding almost earnest.

  “Yes?” I replied, trying to bluff my way out of a potentially deadly confrontation.

  Apparently, Kevin knew I was full of shit, though, because he absolutely lost his mind a second later.

  “Liar!” He screeched, now sounding utterly inhuman.

  The transformation happened in the space of an eyeblink.

  One second, we were standing on a perfect green lawn beside a boring, but typical two-story subdivision house. The next, the grass beneath our feet became a thick carpet of what I could only assume was hair. Human hair. The house, though still technically house-shaped, was a fleshy mass that sprouted from the ground like an enormous, cancerous tumor.

  Worst of all—worse than the lawn hair or the house made of meat—was Kevin.

  The illusion masking the congenial neighborhood dad had been dispelled in an instant.

  In his place stood a hulking figure with malformed arms, gangly legs, and pale gray flesh covered in yellow boils that looked like they were on the verge of popping at any moment. Like the kids, Kevin had too many eyes and a huge gash for a mouth, studded with needle-like teeth. And the icing on the cake? Kevin’s torso had been entirely replaced with the lower portion of a lawn mower.

  A rusted blade screamed inside the man’s grotesque belly as he charged straight at us.

  “Oh Fiddlesticks,” Croc sighed in resignation.