James A. Hunter
patreon
Backrooms 2: Kiosk Kingdom - Chapter 40
🕑 Added 2024-11-26 20:22:37 +0000 UTCForty – Tiny Tots
As high as kites and with our gas masks firmly in place, we kicked open the front doors of the preschool and went in hot with Temp and Jakob taking point. I gripped my hammer in one hand, ready to obliterate anything that got into fuck-around-and-find-out range, while spell cards and tools spun around me in a slow circle. Croc, Ed, and Woodstock brought up the rear—the bird perched on Ed’s shoulder, its chest smoldering red and gold. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little excited to see the parrot kill something with fire.
“Stay away from the walls,” Ed cautioned in a low whisper as we padded along the entryway hall, which led deeper into the preschool. “They’re covered with a sticky, acidic mucus substance.”
“Of course they are,” I muttered, trying to ignore the squelching sound of my own footfalls. “Because this level is the gift that just keeps right on giving.”
Instead of linoleum or concrete, the floor was squishy, moist, and pale pink like the surface of a giant tongue. Everything inside the preschool was like that, though. An odd mixture of the mind numbingly mundane and the grotesquely organic.
Florescent ceiling lights illuminated pale, fleshy walls, covered in unblinking eyes and random tufts of hair. White storage cubbies held craft supplies and kid’s toys, right alongside bowls filled with fingers or noses. Worst of all were the oversized lamprey mouth holes that pockmarked the walls and ceilings. The circular orifices were about the size basketballs and ringed with rows and rows of barbed teeth.
“Keep an eye on those,” Ed said as we passed a particularly dense cluster of lamprey mouth holes. “They serve as internal tunnels. Like those hamster tubes, but for monster demon toddlers.”
I wasn’t a germaphobe by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, I’d once eaten an unfinished meatball sub directly from a trashcan at work… But this place. This place made me want to backstroke through a vat of industrial grade bleach on general principle. I wanted to burn every single inch of the twenty-fourth floor to the ground and then never, ever look back. I’d assumed that the second floor, with its endless sewer ways, was the worst the Backrooms had to offer, but I’d been both woefully naive and incredibly wrong.
I pulled up my mini-map as we walked and noted with no small amount of horror, that there were red triangular marks everywhere. It seemed that the building’s exterior cloaked the inhabitants from the eyes of my map, but now that we were in the thick of things, the mask had been rudely ripped away. Each triangle indicated the presence of a hostile Dweller and there were so damned many of the marks that I couldn’t even count them all. They squirmed and wriggled, overlapping with one another until the map was just a bright red blob.
I still hadn’t physically seen any of the toddler mimics, which meant they were probably tucked away in the tunnel system running through the walls and ceilings, but I’d never seen such a high concentration of Dwellers in one place.
I glanced away from the map as we entered a circular receiving lobby, with hallways branching off like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. A Welcome banner danged from the ceiling and directly beneath it was a reception desk that held a dated computer, a large directory map, and a wire rack filled with trifold brochures—all extoling the many virtues and benefits of the Sunnyside Tiny Tots Preschool. I picked one up and flipped through the pages, grimacing at the god-awful pictures of smiling, fat-cheeked babies right alongside horrific images of butchered corpses.
Welcome to Tiny Tots, the pamphlet proclaimed, where every day is a lesson in survival!
Everyone knows children are the future, which is why we want only the strongest to survive. We believe that the weak are a burden on societal resources and must be culled, which is why we take a “hands-off” approach to learning, allowing the “students” to develop essential life skills by competing for dominance in a brutal, no-holds-barred murder arena! Thanks to our unique curriculum—focused on self-reliance, ambush-tactics, and overwhelming violence—each of our “tiny tots” leave ready to face a world that is woefully unprepared for them!
I flipped the page and scanned a list of bullet points with morbid curiosity.
Why Choose Tiny Tots Survival Preschool?
· Survival-Based Playtime: Jungle gym or jungle? The line is blurred at Tiny Tots, where playground “games” build resilience and fighting spirit.
· Dynamic Friendships: “Group work” helps foster strong bonds (and boundaries) through teamwork and elimination.
· Ruthless Rewards System: Tots earn survival badges for “outlasting” those in their cohort, encouraging growth, responsibility, and conformity through natural selection.
· Flexible Snack Policy: If they can catch it, they can eat it! Our open-feeding environment encourages creativity (and stealth).
On the back of the pamphlet was a list of quotes from “satisfied customers”—though based on those quotes, I wasn’t sure if the writers actually understood what the words “satisfied” or “customers” actually meant.
“Oh my god, they’re eating me alive. Please, for the love of god, kill me now. They’re inside my torso!” one review read. “I’ll never forget the smell of… whatever they left behind in that playroom,” said another. “Oh Jesus, why do they have so many limbs?! Is that how they move so fast?” I slipped the pamphlet back onto the wire rack and shifted my attention to the glossy directory map. Assuming the map was accurate, this place was an enormous maze of interconnected corridors and hallways, which was impossibly bigger than it appeared to be from the outside.
The library, gymnasium, and cafeteria were all clearly marked out but I ignored them and scanned the map until I found the maintenance staircase, which lead to the sub-basement. According to Ed, that was where we’d find the vestigial tunnels that connected to the radio station. The only problem was that there was about a half mile of twisting corridors between us and the stairs.
Ed slipped around the reception desk and confidently beelined toward a passageway that looked indistinguishable from the others. We followed that for a hundred feet or so, before it ended at a T-juncture with one hallway heading off to the left and another snaking off to the right.
“That way leads to the cafeteria and the gym,” Ed said, using the beam of a flashlight to point down the righthand corridor. “If we get separated for any reason,” he said, “try to get back to the reception lobby but, whatever you do, don’t go that way. Mr. Wiggles is in the cafeteria—”
“—Mr. Wiggles?” I hissed.
“The Preschool Overseer,” Ed clarified. “He’s a thousand-legged eldritch worm as big as a school bus. Real nasty SOB. You see that thing, and you run.” He grimaced and shook his head. “There’s no fighting Mr. Wiggles.”
“Bad monster. Kill you with fire,” Woodstock confirmed, though this time it sounded like a warning and not a threat. The longer I spent with the bird, the more weight and meaning its stupid catch phrase seemed to hold. It was kind of like a Pokémon, which could only say its name, yet somehow everyone seemed to intuitively understand complex and nuanced conversations.
With a sense of growing uneasy, we continued onward, moving away from the cafeteria and Mr. Wiggles, while simultaneously carving our way deeper into the preschool.
It wasn’t long before we started to hear the eerie giggle of children accompanied by the soft rustle of legs. Lots of legs. Too many legs. I could feel unseen eyes watching me from hidden shadows and more than once, I thought I saw something move in the corner of my eye. Whenever I turned to get a better look, though, there was never anything there. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to drop down onto my back at any moment, so I took the liberty of summoning both Synthia 2.0 and Drumbo to guard our collective asses.
That earned a surprised look from Ed followed by a begrudging nod of approval.
“Not bad kid,” Ed said, after thoroughly eyeballing my minions. “You’ve got more surprises than a Thai hooker—and I’m not just talking about the venereal diseases.”
The hallways were filled with eerily normal preschool classrooms; low rectangular desks and plastic chairs, bookcases and toy bins, colorful kid’s art decorating the walls. Except, upon closer inspection, all the art was subtly off. One particularly memorable scene depicted the infamous teddy bear picnic, but instead of enjoying sandwiches or munching on fresh cookies, a group of giant, grinning stuffed bears were carving slices of meat from a child, suspended over an open fire.
We’d been walking for maybe fifteen minutes when the first toddler made an appearance.
We rounded a corner and there, sitting in the center of the corridor, was a tiny, adorable baby—one that couldn’t have been more than eight months old.
“What the fuck?” I asked, shooting a look at Ed. “I thought the bong and the gas masks were supposed to dispel all the illusions?”
“That’s not a Dweller,” Ed said, shaking his head. “It’s a decoy created by a hard light mirage.” He lifted one hand and flexed his fingers. A few feet away another, identical baby appeared. “See? It’s not real at all. If you look closely enough, you’ll see that it’s slightly transparent, but underneath the hard light illusion is a doll that’ll explode if you try to pick it up. The illusion is specifically designed to mask the bomb from Relics that can identify traps.”
He snapped his fingers. The second conjured baby vanished, and so did the decoy. What remained was a creepy, porcelain-faced doll that blazed with a hazy red aura, courtesy of Spelunker’s Sixth Sense.
“I lost a good friend to one of these things,” Ed said, his eyes distant and haunted.
I reached out with a wispy thread of telekinetic power and lifted the doll into the air. The second it left the floor a bright blossom of light filled the air, and the ground rumbled from the force of a titanic explosion.
Fire rolled toward us, but Ed lazily waved a hand and summoned a semi-translucent barrier that shielded us from the effects.
“Another hard light illusion,” Ed explained. “If I had a superpower, that’d be it. Most of the things on this level have some sort of illusion-oriented magic, but a few of them can give those illusions actual physical mass. Turn thought into reality.” He dismissed the shield as the fire died away then conjured a flickering dagger from thin air. “I picked the Relic up off a board member over at one of the bowling allies. It was a bitch to get, but totally worth the three toes I lost in the process.”
He offered me a crazed grin and let the dagger dissipate.
We made it through the next three hallways without issue and just when I was starting to think that this place maybe wasn’t quite as bad as Ed had made it out to be, we found ourselves in another circular hub, much the same as the reception lobby, except this one was covered from floor to ceiling in thicks strands of gossamer webbing. Five additional hallways branched off from the central lobby and each was likewise covered with more of the silver webbing. I didn’t even need my Spelunker’s Sixth Sense to tell that we’d just walked right into a trap.
“Oh no, this is bad,” Croc muttered, sounding more than a little panicked. “I don’t like this at all, Dan. This is a nest. Just like I told you.”
Almost as though to foreshadow how boned we were, a haunting and unnervingly familiar kid’s song filled the air, bleeding from every hallway all at once. It was a lullaby sung by a chorus of different voices, all slightly off tune and in the wrong key.
The itsy-bitsy spider, with eyes so cold and black,
Scurried ever closer, preparing its attack.
Down fell the darkness, smothering the light,
Out came the terrors that feast in dead of night.
They slipped beneath the door and skittered ’cross the floor,
Tiny eyes gleaming with hunger for what’s in store.
Silence turned to screams, then whispers soft and warm,
Leaving not but empty sheets by the breaking of the morn’.
“The dog’s right,” Ed said, as the rhyme began to build to a crescendo. “This is where shit gets nasty. Woodstock?” He reached up and stroked the bird’s feathery head. “You know what to do.”
“Kill it with fire,” the bird agreed. She puffed her chest out, opened her beaked maw, and released a stream of fire so bright I could barely stand to look at it. The flames hit the tangle of webbing, and they went up with a violent woosh like a gas-soaked rag.
The song died in an instant, replaced by mewling squeals of agony and the vast clacking of legs. Thousands of legs. Tens of thousands, maybe.
“Buckle up, cause here they come!” Ed bellowed, pulling something from his jacket.
The weapon gripped in his fist was a matte black Colt 1911, not so different from the one I’d carried during my time in Iraq.
Colt M1911 A1 Service Pistol
Rare Artifact
Type: Firearm, Range (Enhanced)
Manufactured in Hartford, Connecticut by the fine folks at Colt, the M1911 A1 service sidearm has been solving arguments since March 1911—usually by ending them permanently. Although this trusty hunk of steel and lead predates WWⅠ, they haven’t really improved on perfection, and it continues to be the service weapon for soldiers, Marines, and lawmen alike.
And for damn good reason. This bad boy hits like an angry rodeo bull and is as reliable as the postal service—neither rain, snow, nor sleet will keep it from sending rounds down range. The 1911 is also built to take a serious beating, which means there a decent chance this weapon will outlast you. Just be careful with your aim, the Colt 1911 doesn’t believe in second chances.
I jerked my gaze from the pistol and focused instead on the far corridor where dark shapes, punctuated by bright red eyes, poured into the hallway from connecting classrooms. More repelled downward from the mouth-like holes dotting the ceiling. Fear formed a tight knot in my stomach as more screeches erupted in the air from the left and the right, from behind and ahead. We were surrounded and these things were coming at us fast. The red triangles on my mini-map were tightening around us like a noose.
“Everyone, form a circle!” I barked. “Backs together. Croc, I want you in the center of the ring.” I pulled free the Super Slammer of Shielding and pressed it into the dog’s paw, which was now disturbingly humanoid. Then I summoned one of my four Doorway Sentinels. Ed shot me a curious glance, but I just shook my head. “I’ll explain later,” I said before turning back to Croc. “You’re our guardian angel, bud,” I told the mimic. “Our safety net. Your number one job is to help whoever needs it—plug the holes before our ship goes under. Understand?”
“Of course, Dan,” Croc said, nodding its head vigorously. “But what’s this for?” the dog asked, holding up the slammer.
“That’s our insurance policy. Your second job is to make sure we don’t get overrun. If things go south and it looks like these things are going to bury us, use the Slammer and get your ass through the door. The shield should buy us enough time to regroup, and we’ll be right behind you.”
Croc hesitated for a moment, its googly eyes regarding me deeply, before it finally nodded.
The others moved quickly, pressing into the center of the lobby, our shoulders all touching in a ring. Jakob, Temp, and Drumbo were directly behind me, while Synthia 2.0 was on my left—revving her chainsaw and clacking her crab arm—and Ed was to my right, with his gun leveled and steady. Croc was protected in the center along with the Doorway Sentinel, perched on top of its spindly crab legs.
I prepared an arsenal of spells as the first wave of Sunnyside toddlers emerged from the gloomy hallway directly ahead of me.
They were pale, sickly-looking creatures, covered in red veins that pulsed beneath the surface of their almost translucent skin. Each had the bald head of a baby, but the body of a cat-sized spider with eight, segmented legs. A stinger, easily as long as my hand, protruded from the ass end of each nightmare spider.
Dweller 0.24718D – Itsy-Bitsy Swarmling [Level 18]
Question du jour – would you rather fight a hundred spider sized human babies, or one baby-sized, highly-venomous spider? Well great news, now you don’t have to choose! That’s right, the Itsy-Bitsy Swarmlings are the best of both worlds: an unholy amalgamation of arachnid and toddler, all rolled up into one. Plus, there are A LOT of them!
These cutie patooties are bigger than Goliath Birdeater Tarantula, have the same tangy kick of the Wandering Hobo Spider, and love to travel in swarms! It’s a murder trifecta. Individually, the Swarmlings aren’t too tough—they have the upper body strength of a three-month-old, after all—but in a coordinated swarm? These little guys are killer! Be prepared to haul ass or burn everything to the ground, because there is no in-between option.
“Himmel, Arsch und Zwirn,” Jakob grumbled from behind me. “We should’ve listened to Croc, this was a terrible idea.”
“A little late for that,” I called out, channeling mana into my hammer while I prepared to rain down death and destruction on the youth of Sunnyside.
“Speak for yourself,” Temperance said, and I could hear the infectious joy even muffled as it was by the gasmask. “This is even better than the cookout. I think this might be my favorite level of all time. Now have at me, you foul, gorbellied miscreants!” she cackled.
Crazy. These people were all fucking crazy. And so was I.
“Fuck it… Let’s get some!” I hollered feeling a strange surge of excitement and adrenaline.
Today wasn’t the day I died.
Nope.
Today was the day that we brought down the signal and delt a death blow to the HOA.
Today was the day I purged the world of a bunch of monstrous nightmares and gained a metric shit-ton of levels in the process.
