chapter3

 "Brother?"

　　Hearing Gregorio's voice, Marvin, who had been hiding in the corner with his shovel held high, ready to give someone a headshot at any time, poked his head out.

　　Seeing that it was indeed Gregorio, he breathed a sigh of relief and said, "I thought it was someone else, have the zombies been resolved?"

　　"Renato's over there." Gregorio didn't say much, he continued to crouch down and check the ranger's pockets, from which he fished out a box of matches and a pack of cigarettes, there were only three left in the carton, and the tobacco was already sticking into a ball because of the time, it couldn't be smoked anymore.

　　"Can rangers smoke?" Marvin asked.

　　"It should be okay in non-smoking areas." Gregorio shoved the cigarette back in, tried to rub a match, it worked and tossed the matchbook into his bag.

　　Marvin also began to search the house, he had just come in through the back door when he heard the slightest rattle of a window being tumbled and hurriedly shunted a shovel in preparation for a drubbing of the enemy before he had a chance to take a closer look.

　　Gregorio had found a palm-sized workbook in the ranger's breast pocket, a hardback notebook with brittle paper, written in Spanish, which Gregorio had studied in college and understood, but the rest of it was pretty much self-explanatory.

　　The general idea was that the ranger had found an unconscious man one day while patrolling the forest, and he had kindly taken him back to his home to take care of him. The man was a young man who called himself a troubadour and had fainted because he was lost in the forest and was hungry and thirsty. When he left, the young man gave the caretaker the pendant on his flute as a token of his appreciation and left whistling an unknown tune.

　　Since then strange things seemed to start happening in the forest one after another, a dog of the ranger ran out to play during one of the forest patrols and never came back, and the chickens and ducks in the enclosure all flipped over the fence one night and scampered towards the southeast, with the sound of the flute faintly heard.

　　Even weirder was the discovery of a cellar in his yard, where the sound of something howling seemed to come from under the deep, bottomless stairs, the contents unknown.

　　The ranger didn't dare go down to look, he decided to go outside the forest and call the others.

　　Gregorio turned to the next page, which should have contained the last journal entry, but it was covered by a large patch of blood.

　　The remaining small half of the book was completely blank, and the two on the back also recorded expenses for purchasing necessities, the end was obvious, the ranger had been killed here before he could get out.

　　Gregorio put the book in his bag, turned his head without seeing Marvin, and called out, "Marvin?"

　　"Over here!" Marvin's voice came from the direction of the backyard, "Brother I found a cellar!"

　　Gregorio immediately went over, the structure of the hut was simple, living room bedroom bathroom kitchen four piece house, dogs chickens, and ducks were kept in the front yard that was opened up while the back yard was used for growing vegetables and was already full of weeds, there was a pressure pump well in the center.

　　The cellar that had suddenly appeared was in the southeast corner, the door was open, and Marvin was crouching beside it, holding up a horse lamp to try to peer inside by the light.

　　"I saw it as soon as I entered the yard." Marvin looked up and asked, "Wanna go in and take a look?"

　　"Just got the log from the ranger, and it says that this cellar appeared out of nowhere in his yard, that the stairs don't look up, that something seems to be howling incessantly underneath, and that he was strangled alive." Gregorio breezes through the recapitulation and asks, "Still want to go see it now?"

　　Marvin: ............... ......

　　Marvin: "No, it's time to go down there and see it... the more it's been said, the more it proves that there will be clues down there."

　　Gregorio: "Yeah, I'm just giving you a precaution in case you meet something weird, don't overreact."

　　Marvin looked back to the cellar opening, his back started to get a little hairy, he was just an eighteen-year-old teenager, he had just finished his high school exams and hadn't even surfed for a few days before he came here with Gregorio, the novice level before wasn't that hard, he had passed it haphazardly by following Gregorio, he hadn't gotten much of a workout at all.

　　It was a little scary, to be honest.

　　Marvin sighed, "Brother, why didn't I realize you turned out to be so badass before?"

　　"You'd think I was worse if I didn't warn you in case you met something after going down there unprepared." Gregorio rubbed a match and stuck it in, seeing that it burned quietly and tentatively determining that the oxygen level inside was fine, took the marquee from Marvin and said, "Stay behind me."

　　The two of them stepped onto the stairs and headed deeper into the cellar, it wasn't too dry, there were traces of moss in the corners and the stairs were a little sticky on the soles of their shoes, but Marvin didn't want to know why that was. The horse lamp illuminated the small flight of stairs ahead of him, while the sloping bottom was dark and seemingly endless, and the air had a peculiarly fishy sweetness that made him want to vomit if he smelled it too much.

　　The stairs were narrow, about as wide as a single bed in a dormitory, and the walls on either side gave off a suffocating sensation that Marvin could only hide his nervousness by talking, "What's that smell?"

　　"I don't know."

　　Silence fell again, Marvin swallowed and couldn't help but lean closer to Gregorio, twenty-six Gregorio was a little taller than the still-developing Marvin, his back was solid and reliable, and the gauze on his wounds was showing blood, and it hurt to look at but he didn't seem to care.

　　Gregorio, sensing his brother's nervousness, glanced back at him and said, "Don't be afraid."

　　Marvin braced himself and said, "I'm not scared."

　　Gregorio had stopped talking.

　　Marvin wanted to cry, adults are annoying, why don't they say more, doesn't he find it scary?

　　Fortunately, the stairs had reached the end of the room, and as they walked down the last step, their eyesight immediately opened up they were in a large "room", with few furnishings, and a chair in the center, one of the legs was broken, and was slightly askew, but still able to stand up.

　　On the wooden table were two kerosene lamps and a volume of parchment, which Gregorio looked at for a few moments, he recognized it as Latin, but could not understand the content. Against one wall leaned a huge double-door cabinet, dusty and cobwebbed.

　　On the other wall, there was a small space with nothing more than a bed covered with straw and a barrel for defecation, surrounded by iron bars, apparently a prison cell. But several iron bars have been deformed, revealing a big hole, as if the person inside had broken the cage from the center alive.

　　The strange smell was coming from inside, Gregorio wasn't interested in finding the source of the odor, and asked Marvin, "The door was open when you first found the cellar, right? The thing that was locked up inside had already escaped, and the ranger might have been killed by that thing."

　　Marvin said, "Huh?" Cried, "So that means there won't be any danger here for a while?"

　　"Not necessarily, search it and see if there are any useful clues or props." Said Gregorio as he once again turned his attention to the parchment scroll on the table, his intuition told him that this time it was a key prop.

　　Gregorio lit a lamp with a match and began to delve into its contents, trying to find something he could read, while Marvin, carrying a horse lamp, searched around.

　　He found a double-barreled shotgun in the cracks of the bedpan after burrowing into the cell and removing the bed, moved the manure bucket and found two boxes of large-caliber shotgun shells underneath it, and felt out a box of medicines secured there with duct tape from underneath the surface of the chair where a normal person wouldn't have been able to look.

　　All in all, in five minutes Marvin had searched every place he could, even the rat holes, and he'd come up with quite a haul.

　　Sure enough, it is a key location, only so many supplies ... always gives him a not-so-good feeling, like playing a horror game, there must be supplies before the big battle.

　　When you come out of the cellar, you will probably encounter enemies or something.

　　Marvin thought, turning his attention to the only closet he hadn't searched yet, he held the lamp in one hand and pulled it open with the other.

　　Dust rose and Marvin subconsciously held his breath, the dust interfering with his vision in the dim light, but in the next moment, he could still clearly see the bandaged body in the closet, shriveled up as if it had been exposed to the hot sun and cold wind for decades, its dark eyes facing him, its mouth grinning out to either side of it as if it were a sinister, evil smile.

　　Marvin's eyes widened in horror, and he was about to scream, but the moment before his voice left his mouth, the dry body jumped on him with lightning speed, and grabbed him by the neck with his hands in an iron vise, stopping all the sound in his chest!

　　Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

　　Marvin could smell the sweet stench of the dry body's mouth, the bones wrapped in its shriveled skin were strangling his windpipe, the tall and strong teenager tried his best to break the hands but couldn't get them to loosen up a bit, and soon suffocated his face with redness.

　　He remembered what Gregorio had said about the ranger being strangled.

　　Brother!

　　Gregorio, who was reading the parchment scroll with his back to him, was oblivious to all this, frowning, his fingers gesturing what looked like a formation on the table.

　　The intense choking sensation made Marvin's eyes black, the dryer's weird and evil smile was right in front of his eyes, his hands were already about to lose their strength, and his cervical vertebrae were making a dangerous clicking sound as if they were going to break in the next second.

　　... Brother!

　　Dying?

　　The congestion of his eyeballs made Marvin couldn't see anything anymore, he suddenly felt his body become light, as cozy and relaxing as when he was on an island in the Maldives with his whole family, blowing the sea breeze and drinking coconut juice - yeah, he should have been spreading out on the beach, how did he end up in this weird place?

　　It was all a dream, right, just wake up.

　　"Bang-!"

　　A loud bang seemed to be in the sky and front of his ears, the vise of his skeletal hand finally loosened, and the burning sensation of air rushing back into his lungs made Marvin couldn't help but well up in tears from the pain, covering the severe pain in his throat as if he was going to spew his lungs out he couldn't stop coughing hard, he took two steps back and crashed against the wall, his eyes were dimmed, and he could faintly hear Gregorio yelling:

　　"Go up!"

　　Marvin barely found the direction of the stairs and ran up them, while Gregorio copied the kerosene lamp and smashed it on the back of the zombie's head again, drew the dagger from his waist, and plunged it into its mouth!

　　The dagger penetrates the zombie's entire brain stem, but it's still able to move and tries to go for Gregorio's neck.

　　Gregorio slams his fist into the exposed hilt of the dagger, and while the zombie is forced to tilt its head back, he lifts his foot and kicks it in the stomach, taking the opportunity to twist and run.

　　Marvin almost collapsed as he climbed up into the cellar, staggering two more steps before finally laying down on his back on the barren grassy floor. He'd never felt breathing as such an agonizing and blissful thing, a sharp pain, but one that told him he was alive.

　　Gregorio ran out right after him, the zombies behind him seeming to catch up, and he struggled to lift the cellar door, trying to keep the thing inside. But the cellar door was much heavier than he thought, Gregorio was wounded and running upwards, his shoulder was already oozing blood, and his physical strength was not as good as his peak state, so it was difficult for him to move the slightest bit for a while.

　　No wind in the night the crows sounded harsh, and he could hear the hissing of the dry corpse on the soles of his feet, Marvin fell to the side just focusing on the rough gasping and unable to move, is to leave him to escape first, or to fight to the death?

　　Gregorio barely thought about it before he made his decision. He drew the double-barreled shotgun that his brother had pinned under his back and aimed it at the cellar door.

　　He didn't know if there were any bullets in the gun in the first place.

　　Life or death.

　　In the nick of time, a small stone flew from behind Gregorio, traced a parabola in the air, and fell with perfect accuracy into the cellar opening.

　　The hideous howl came to an abrupt halt.

　　"Looks like I came just in time."

　　The teenager's voice rang out through carelessness as he tossed a handful of casually picked-up stones in his hand and walked over to Gregorio, pressing his toes against the heavy cellar door and seemingly kicking it to completely block the cellar opening with the slightest force.

　　The bandages on Gregorio's body, already thoroughly stained with blood, made Sylver frown, and he sighed helplessly, lifting his hand to depress the muzzle of the unloaded shotgun.