Pearl

Chapter Fifteen: Snacks

The first team from the Facility to make it to the farmhouse came quietly in the night.

They had been on the hunt for over three months now, had extended their search far beyond the state lines of Indiana, through Illinois and Iowa, all the way into Nebraska. Only the occasional, exsanguinated corpse of a deer or other mammal scattered like breadcrumbs let them know that they were headed in the right direction, and even those were starting to rot beyond recognition. Old kills, all of them, done within two weeks of her original escape.

The rest they left to Tom, their tracker.

When a week had passed with no new sightings of her abandoned prey, Tom concluded that the subject had stopped pushing forward and was laying low somewhere. The team had circled back to the last known point of the subject's movement, and had begun to fan out from there.

She would be somewhere isolated, they had figured. Somewhere small enough that even if a few people had gone missing it hadn't hit the major news cycles yet.

So they had spent the last weeks scouting farmhouses, little pockets of human activity among fields and fields of crops. For the most part they found little - one case of infidelity, but nothing of interest to the Facility.

However, the farmhouse they currently approached, known as the McComb household by the locals, was a current subject of town gossip due to the appearance of a certain young female visitor while the lady of the house was out.

The immediate area around the farmhouse provided no cover aside from a few trees in the landscaping around the house itself. The rest of the terrain was made up of flat wheat fields for as far as the eye could see, and so the team had abandoned their transport over a mile out and had proceeded to approach the house in a cautious crouch through the ripening wheat.

There were five of them, spread out just within eyesight of each other, radios all but silenced so that only the smallest whisper could travel through directly into their earpieces.

The tech man sat back in the van, parked just outside the sightline of the house. Thanks to a few drones, despite the enshrouding darkness of the Midwestern night he had heat-sensor visuals on his team, five little red dots slowly moving forward through the graphically mapped-out field on the screens in front of him.

He twisted the earpiece into his left ear and tapped the communications system. The radio crackled lightly into his eardrum.

"Okay team," the tech man began, reading off of a clipboard, "preliminary scouting suggests this house has up to three human occupants at any given time – the father, the mother, and the child. Father is a farmer, out for most of the day. Mother is often gone on long business trips, and is currently on one, not due back for another week or two. The daughter is about 6."

"Shit. I hate it when kids are involved," a recognizable voice interrupted over the radio.

"Well, buckle up, Tamara. So far the subject has shown no inclination to be selective." Tech man looked down at his clipboard again to regain his train of thought. "Oh, right -- occasionally a lady from town will come to watch the daughter, but we have confirmation that she's not around right now. We also got two dogs – collies, trained to guard the house and child."

"Ugh, I hate it when dogs are involved, too," Tamara sighed, and a faint snicker followed her complaint over the static.

"You might say you're in the wrong line of work, there, girlie," came the voice that produced the snicker, Jarmin.

"I never said I cared a lick about adults. Want me to prove it, boyo?" Tamara shot back, and a faint, crackling chorus of chuckles filtered through the comm system.