The Mission Is Never Over—The Knight of the Round Table

The full map of Avalon Gardens HQ.

July 8 (con't)

Wren and Danny had lunch at a cafe across town from the Avalon Gardens HQ. Danny was former SWAT with the Denver PD: all the guards with Instant Deterrent were either former cops or former military. Danny hesitated upon learning Wren was with the FBI, but he was too charmed to push back and relented with no more than a promise not to talk about his work at Avalon Gardens. Danny didn't relax, though, until he got up from the table and went to the curb to vape. Wren noted he was in a hurry, like he was rushing to the bathroom. There was an expectation of embarrassment, of pain, if he wasn't fast enough.

 

He'd left his phone case behind, and his case had a pouch with his credit cards and Avalon Gardens security badge, marked with the code K3. She lifted the badge and a few cards, hoping he wouldn't notice until later and mistake them as a random robbery. Sure enough Danny didn't notice when he got back to the table, yet he didn't just seem calmer. He was focused, sharp, despite spending all day getting high. They traded numbers with the expectation they'd keep talking.

 

Neither one noticed a man in a corner of the cafe discreetly take a picture of them with his phone.

 

Meanwhile, Rex left Avalon Gardens to scope out Dakota Knight's condo. It was in a nice neighborhood with no cars in the driveway, but the guy wasn't considerate enough to leave a key under the doormat, so Rex got inside with the creative application of a rock to a window. His first impression was that Dakota did not sleep, ever. There was no food anywhere, just crates of Monster energy drinks; all the lights and the TV were on despite the fact no one was home; and the one element of the kitchen that saw any use was a million-dollar espresso machine with all the bells and whistles. Bile filling his throat, Rex ripped its cord out of the wall and smashed the espresso machine against the ground... and then he saw the phones. Sitting on the counter were six flip phones, each with a piece of tape on the back with a name and phone number. Rex snatched all of them, then moved on to the bedroom. He didn't find a safe full of cash, but he did find a mildewy terrarium with a sad, dried-out marijuana plant inside. He rescued the plant, and one of Dakota's expensive dress shirts, before leaving.

 

The team met up to study the flip phones. These were burner phones: each piece of tape listed that phone's number and the name of the person supposedly answering them. Someone had been catfishing people, mostly through dating sites, but one of them believed they were talking to "Rebecca," an Avalon Gardens social media manager who did not actually exist. The texts stopped completely after arranging a meetup, and further digging showed each person had disappeared shortly thereafter.

 

July 8, Night

The team came up with their plan. Malachi would start a fire at the edge of the Avalon Gardens property, distracting some of the staff onsite. Sure enough, a few minutes later three people came out of the building through the secure parking lot with fire extinguishers: a stone-faced man they recognized from pictures as John Bellamy, head of IDS, and two young men in dirty aprons, presumably gardeners. The team snuck past them into the lot and used Danny's badge to enter the building.

 

Inside, the lights were dim and red. The hallway opened onto a main cultivation floor on their left, full of healthy marijuana plants and a single gardener left to tend to them, while the right wall had three doors with electronic keycard locks: Growhouses C, B, and A. Rex felt the tug pulling him to Growhouse C, but Danny's badge wouldn't work on this door. It was trivial to sneak past the one gardener, but this close to the crop, they could see the Yerba al Cubo swaying gently with no breeze, their stomates visibly opening as the plants breathed. Insects they could not see buzzed and chittered as they tiptoed over hoses and squeezed past stacks of soil bags. They realized the pipes overhead must belong to a powerful fire suppression system, and once the gardener was out of earshot, Malachi called 911 to send a fire truck to the site to buy them more time.

They searched the offices at the front of the building. Nothing came up in Bill Knight's or John Bellamy's, but they learned three things from cracking into Dakota's computer:

• Avalon Gardens separated their employees into four security tiers. Danny's tier, Knight (K3), could access most of the building; but only Merlin (M4) could open the growhouses. Only the Knights had Merlin badges, and since neither badge had turned up in their offices, it seemed the Knights were smart enough to keep these on their person at all times.
• Dakota had installed a killswitch into the building's camera system, allowing him to shut them off at any time. They scanned the system long enough to figure out the building's layout, then killed them and deleted any footage of their break-in.
• Dakota Knight had been keeping an honest to God murder diary in his Google Drive.

He had catfished all those people, butchered them, and used their corpses to fertilize his marijuana crop. Killing for the sake of the plants was rapture like nothing else he'd ever felt. Each growhouse contained new generations of them, growing from his victims' bodies, and the team put together a timeline. GAP seeded the first generation of Yerba Loca when Dakota was working as a consultant; Dakota left and attempted to grow a second generation; the third generation, Yerba al Cubo, had been successful and gone to market; but each growhouse contained a fourth, fifth, and sixth generation. And while Dakota's mental state had clearly deteriorated, apparently barely able to hold back his murderous impulses, he maintained a veneer of sanity purely so he could prepare a seventh generation for planting.

 

The team deleted references to the Unnatural from these entries, then blasted them out on every platform Dakota Knight had: Twitter, Instagram, mailing lists, everyone who followed Avalon Gardens was about to learn (a lightly edited version of) the truth.

 

At this point what had become a fact-finding mission turned to sabotage and assassination. They had to kill Dakota Knight and destroy every marijuana plant on site before the night was over.

 

First, they had to enter the processing lab and sabotage the machinery to start a chemical fire. Malachi programmed their computers to gradually increase the pressure over the next 20 minutes until a tank burst and the entire room went up in flames. That would give them time to shut off the primary water valve on the building's fire suppression system and leave before the building was consumed.

 

Malachi and Rex took a minute to stock up when they realized the lab's chemical storage room was also the IDS armory. With Danny's keycard, they helped themselves to kevlar vests and long arms.

 

From the processing lab, they crossed the building to the employee break room, knocking out the gardener in the main room to get to it, and shut off the valve. But at this point the fire department showed up, and each one hid as footprints stomped towards the sirens: Dakota Knight himself, much bigger, more bloated, more muscular, than his online presence let on. He left the building to investigate the noise.

Wren came up with an idea to lure him back in. She called his phone---his real phone---using the burner for Rebecca. He picked up immediately, and she demanded he go into Growhouse C. While she waited, Malachi and Rex took cover, guns aimed at the door.

 

Dakota towered over Wren, and he demanded to know why he should let her live. But she didn't rise to it. She ordered him to open Growhouse C. He considered it, laughed, and swiped his badge.

 

A wave of snow fell out of the door.

 

And then it started moving across the floor. A wave of white bugs swarmed towards her, climbing over each other to get to her, flowing past Dakota without care.

 

Malachi fired his shotgun into Dakota's side, while Rex willed his skull to explode. If Dakota Knight were still human, they would have been smeared him across the walls. But he was not human anymore, collapsing but still, impossibly, alive. Something within Malachi snapped on seeing it: he didn't panic, but part of him broke in a way that could never be fixed.

 

Round 1

Malachi didn't have time to take a second shot without getting overwhelmed by the bugs, so he fled towards the processing lab, staying one step ahead of them.

 

Rex's psychic attack had left him reeling, stunned from the agony of the blowback. He could not get up under his own power, so Wren had to drag him away towards a garage door that opened to the secure lot. She watched the bugs swarm over the gardener they'd knocked out, their tiny, asymmetrical bodies turning red as they tore him apart. The swarm slowed as they carried pieces of flesh back to Growhouse C. 

And Dakota Knight shivered on the floor, racked with pain as the gunshot in his side slowly closed itself.

 

Round 2

The bugs caught up with Malachi in the processing lab. He suffered several bites, but with quick thinking, he set a fire by damaging the valve on a tank of hydrogen gas tank. The bugs released him and poured into the flames, trying to douse it with their tiny bodies: they seemed to recognize the fire as a greater threat to Yerba al Cubo even if it cost their own lives.

 

Across the building, Wren managed to open the garage door, but it moved so slowly she and Rex couldn't both escape. She rolled him outside while the bugs swarmed over her, biting her. And while Malachi suffered only the pain, Wren felt her power of visions starting to overtake her: phantom sensations of being dragged across gravel, of looking up at a tree line she couldn't actually see.

She managed to get beneath the door, and the bugs let go of her too. They retreated into the building to pool around Dakota Knight, unsteadily rising to his feet.