Nathan’s suggestion to talk to Sean about wild monsters in the region got me thinking.

  Whenever the Department of Health stumbled into a monster, they immediately left the area and reported it to the Environmental Protection Agency, who then deployed exterminators. I experienced the first half of that process myself when Sean and I found that goblin house some days back. All wild monsters got reported to the EPA eventually, regardless of the originating agency.

  If I knew where the EPA was planning to send exterminators, I could do the surface-hunting equivalent of dungeon crashing: Show up before the government does and kill everything for my own benefit. I wasn’t sure that was illegal, technically. What could be illegal about killing wild monsters?

  Trespassing and interfering with government business could be an illegal aspect of killing monsters, actually. Had anyone actually been prosecuted for that, though? That seemed unlikely. In my expert legal opinion.

  If I was okay with the risks, how would I get that data anyway?

  Those records probably weren’t kept secret. Certain government agencies regularly shared certain kinds of information to avoid conflicts. For example, it made sense for the DOH and the EPA to share information on what each other were doing across the state. I might even be able to access that with my intern CDM credentials, but then my name would be permanently attached to that search. If this was illegal, that made it easier to get caught.

  I could ask Sean directly, but I didn’t really know him that well. That would also put him in an unfair position, which wasn’t right to do when he already discouraged me from doing exactly this.

  When I returned to work the next day to continue my project in the document dungeon, I kept thinking about how I could get specific information on where wild monsters could be found.

  On my lunch, I searched through publicly available satellite information. I could track planes, boats, and weather in real time. I could browse through several years of images of the same place to see how it changed. And I could explore the Earth and the universe via any one of NASA’s many public satellite tools.

  I was an idiot.

  The EPA had a slew of freely accessible satellite information, and I almost didn’t think to check EPA resources directly. Among the fifty-some layers of data, topics included things like “Harmful Algal Blooms” and “National Air Toxics Assessment.”

  Then there were a few categories with the Species tag: At-Risk, Priority, Invasive, Other.

  Under the invasive category, I could filter by type: Bird, Amphibian, Reptile, Aquatic, Mammal, Invertebrates, Plants, and Monsters. From the data points I saw under Monsters, georestricted to Pennsylvania, “Sites of Concern” updated every twelve hours. This was what I was looking for, and it was right there, out in the open.

  I needed one last piece of information for this to be the win I hoped it was.

  Texting Sean, I asked, “What is the turnaround time for an EPA cull? Our cullers only get a few hours' notice.”

  He replied, “Few hours? That’s funny. I’ve seen EPA extermination requests take two weeks to a month to process. You’re lucky if it’s within a week.”

  My stomach fluttered. My plan could work. It was such a small victory, barely the beginning of one really, and yet I felt like I could make this Unsung Heroes plan actually work.

  And I knew Nathan would think it was crazy.

  ***

  For the rest of the week, I observed the changes in Sites of Concern via the EPA tool. Seeming to support Sean’s story of how slow the exterminator response time could be, a few sites within two hours of Pittsburgh dropped off over the next three days. In that same amount of time, only one more Site of Concern was added.

  From the few years of historical data the tool provided, I could see that Site of Concern activity spiked and troughed and did so with relative unpredictability. The spring and the fall saw fairly consistent spikes, and then other bursts of activity appeared more randomly throughout the year.

  If surface-hunting was going to become a regular pastime of mine, it may behoove me to pay attention to whether we were in the midst of a spike or a trough. A spike meant the EPA was busier and therefore more likely to be slow getting to any one site. That was my thinking, anyway.

  On Friday morning, a new Site of Concern appeared in Daisytown, which was an hour and a half east of Pittsburgh and not far from Johnstown, another part of the state that suffered greatly with the exodus of industry. A few people still lived there, transplants who relocated to escape smaller, undefended towns, but it sounded bleak.

  Daisytown was completely abandoned.

  This was a dumb, dangerous idea that would cost a good bit of money I didn’t really have. I was still healing from getting my shit tossed, but my ribs felt pretty okay, as did the sprains. I wasn’t supposed to put my nose at risk, but my helmet was full-face, so it was protected.

  I hardly got any work done that day. Instead, I spent the time planning.

  Daisytown was a trek, so I needed to check my spare tire to make sure it was in good condition. It had sat in my trunk for a while. Might as well check the donut too while I was at it.

  A full gas can would be wise, as I wasn’t likely to have many options once I got outside of Pittsburgh. Jumper cables were a given, and I already had those.

  Would a second power bank be overkill? My cellphone dying was almost as bad as running out of gas, which reminded me I should get a paper map to be safe. I wasn’t sure who sold paper maps, but I could figure it out.

  Some emergency camping supplies would be worthwhile if I decided to do this regularly, but for now, a few blankets and a flashlight would have to do. A well-stocked first aid kit was a must, and then food and water.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  And weapons. Right. I definitely needed weapons. How was that the last thing I thought of?

  Reviewing my list spiked my adrenaline. This felt like a dungeon crawl, but I needed to remind myself not to treat this first outing like a hunt. This was more like a dress rehearsal with the primary aim of confirming whether or not the EPA data was accurate and reliable for how I intended to use it.

  If I encountered anything, I would either run or take it down from a distance. I was an archer, after all. Fighting at range kept me out of most dangers by default.

  I mentioned none of this to Beth and Nathan that night because I knew how easy it would be for them to argue that this was reckless and glaringly unsafe.

  ***

  Leaving shortly before dawn Saturday morning, it wasn’t long until civilization was behind me. Everything ahead was either wilderness or ruins. Like most of America, this region had its share of small roadside towns, and driving through their husks every so often created a sort of rhythm to the drive.

  Long stretches of nature would pass only to be punctuated by the corpse of a dead community before becoming nature again. At this time of year, late summer, the state was awash with green hills and trees. Blue skies. Summer flowers. Rippling reflections in creek water. The living vibrancy of a storybook illustration made it easy to see what drew people to live here in the first place.

  To pass the time on the drive, I listened to an audio guidebook about goblins. My primary interest was learning more about their habits and behaviors to make them easier to hunt, but this book also talked at length about the goblin impact on the environment and whether or not it was truly possible to eradicate goblins entirely.

  As you may have guessed, goblins were quite bad for an ecosystem. They ate and killed everything they could. They rapidly reproduced. And left long enough, a goblin nest could be a literal biohazard. They weren’t sanitary creatures, so a goblin latrine was not a pleasant thing to have next to a stream, for example.

  Eradicating them completely was more difficult than it should have been. For all of the species humanity had hunted to extinction without deliberate effort, goblins never seemed to truly go away, leading some to believe that goblins were more akin to a curse than a traditional invasive species. No matter how thoroughly you hunted them, the curse always made more.

  Cramming in goblin studies right before I went hunting was irresponsible, I know, but I may have been even more reckless than you realized.

  See, the EPA map didn’t say what kind of monster occupied an SOC. Goblins were the most likely, but this part of the state could also have trolls, earth elementals, water elementals, giant rats, and a few varieties of giant snakes. They were rare this far north, but harpies were a possibility as well.

  Frost trolls on Wild: Alaska killed three level 20 crawlers. The standard troll species around here were a handful for level 10 crawlers, so running into one of those would be bad. Trolls were mostly nocturnal, however, so I hoped hunting by daylight would be enough to avoid running into one.

  Elementals weren’t likely to be near ruins. They were more likely to be found deep in the wilderness, if they were found at all. Rats and snakes could be just about everywhere. Giant rats I could handle if there weren’t too many, and most varieties of giant snake would be fine too. A few varieties, however, would not be fine, like a giant water moccasin. They weren’t common, but they had been found in rivers in the Pittsburgh area before.

  When Johnstown came into view, I had the sense that this place could have been as big as Pittsburgh in another timeline. Like my home city, Johnston was nestled into a valley, surrounded by rolling, forested hills. The Stonycreek River split off into the Little Conemaugh, giving the city that same distinct peninsula shape I associated with Pittsburgh.

  Johnstown even had its own incline. In a distant past, it climbed a steep grade to connect a hilltop town to the city below, shuttling people and equipment up and down throughout the day.

  Though it was inhabited, the city itself felt like a larger version of the Rust Belt ruins Sean and I searched. The streets were cracked and uneven. Imposing buildings of dark red brick lined the streets, especially near the river, where most of the local industry used to be. Most of those buildings were abandoned, and time had caved in rooftops and forced hardy green plants through the walls and foundations.

  I lucked into finding a small grocery store. Though it wasn’t even 8 a.m., two gray-haired men with wrinkled, liver-spotted skin sat out front with a game of dominoes between them. They stopped playing as soon as I parked out front, and they stared at me curiously my whole way to the door.

  “You got family in the area or something?” one of the men asked. This one had thick glasses and wore a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hat.

  Shaking my head, I answered, “Just doing some exploring.”

  “One of them flood history buffs?”

  “Huh?”

  “The Great Flood of 1889. If we get visitors out here, it’s usually because of that.”

  “I’m not familiar,” I admitted.

  Floods were pretty common in this part of the country. All sorts of little towns were built right next to rivers and creeks. Any hard rain put them at risk.

  My ignorance of the Great Flood turned me from an oddity to a downright mystery in the eyes of these two men.

  “Used to be a dam up near South Fork. Bunch of big-city Pittsburgh types had fancy retreats built around the lake it formed. Guys like Carnegie, Mellon, Frick–All those assholes with their names on buildings–vacationed out this way. Nobody took proper care of the dam, though. Big rain came in, and that was it.”

  When I looked this event up later, the problem was more than a lack of “proper care.” There were accounts of people taking metal pipes out of the dam to sell for scrap, and that was on top of the out-of-mind policy everyone living around the dam at the time seemed to have for fixing obvious signs of impending failure.

  The other old man sucked his teeth. His hand shook when he spoke. “There’s a sign around here that says the water that came down was equal to the Mississippi River. Two thousand people died, and my granddaddy was nearly one of ‘em. He said it felt like God was wiping the town out like it was Sodom or something.”

  “We sure been kicked in the teeth a bunch,” the man with the VFW hat echoed. “Folks here are tough. We’re survivors. Not enough work left for everyone, though. Sent all our jobs to Africa. Nobody builds American anymore. They want cheap, cheap, and cheaper. Us normal people be damned.”

  “I appreciate the history,” I said. “I’m actually going a little bit farther down the road to Daisytown.”

  “Why in the hell you want to go there? Nobody there but maybe one of them dope fiends.”

  “I heard there might be a monster nest.”

  “Son, you saying you’re hoping to find monsters?”

  “Yes. Heard about any around?”

  Taking off his glasses, the man with the VFW hat used the corner of his shirt to clean the lenses. “Goblins and trolls like anywhere else. EPA comes through a few times a year, but anyone who lives here knows to stick close to town at night. Attacks ain’t happening all the time, but that’s because we’re careful.”

  “Anything I should know about the area?”

  “GPS will tell you Frankstown Road is the easiest route, but you’re not getting up it in that car of yours. You’re better off going the long way, Singer Hill Road.”

  “Thank you.”

  When I came back outside after using the restroom, a shaky voice called after me, “Good luck out there.”

  “Thanks!” I called back. My GPS did indeed tell me to use Frankstown Road.

  I changed the route, and a few minutes later, I began the long climb up Singer Hill to Daisytown.