[center][u][b]Task Force: Sentinel[/b][/u]
[i][b]Chapter I - Dread Harvest[/b][/i][/center]


Very few good things ever happen at 3am. It’s that weird dimension where all the dark thoughts that creep and crawl hatch in the human skull. The darkest and most dead time of night, where you wake from a dream full of adrenaline at a threat half-remembered, but deep embedded. The Witching Hour that stirs the darkness at the back of the mind, letting all manner of vileness bubble to the surface.

Nothing good ever happened in that unholy hour, and the scene laid out on the wooded side of a rural Wisconsin road. The sun was just barely rising, the foreboding red light casting long shadows through the trees. Overhead, tangled boughs hushed and groaned in the faintest sigh of a breeze. Withered leaves tumbled downward as the autumn chill turned breath into fog and gnawed to the bone. 

The sparsely traveled road had more activity that morning that it likely ever saw in a normal year; a single sheriff’s cruiser, silent but for the grumble of the engine. Beside it was a pair of matte-black Land Rovers, the beams of their headlights casting a banal clarity over the scene at the edge of the gravel road. 

A luxury SUV stuck in a road-side ditch; the hood crumpled like an aluminum can as it wrapped around a tree.

A collision wasn’t something that the Division, let along their elite team, the Sentinels, were called in to investigate, but the local Police Chief had their number, and he was terribly insistent. Chief Millar was a quirky, pigeon-chested man of late-middle age and diminutive height, but he was reliable as an oak. Clint hated that Millar was right. [i]Again[/i]. If he kept this up, he’d get offered a job that he couldn’t quite refuse, retirement and pension be damned. 

The car was indeed a nice one, strange for the rural roads, even those with old money. The tinted windows were all smashed, the airbags deployed, and not a soul to be found in or around the vehicle when their OnStar made the automated call to emergency services. Millar knew strange when he saw it, calling in the number on the nameless black business card he’d received after the first Wendigo incident. 

“What do you think?” Millar asked, his greying mustache twitching nervously as he approached the darkly clad figure by lip of the ditch, passing a paper cup of coffee. There was a pause as the Sentinel agent regarded Millar with cold blue eyes, then nodded in appreciation for the burnt roast as he accepted with black-gloved hands. 

“You know better than to ask, Bill,” said the operative, peeling back the tab and sucking down a long pull of coffee, to hell with letting it cool. 

“Oh, don’t give me that shit, Clint. Your crew has come in on all manner of nasty business, and I need to know if this is another… skin-something-rather.” There was a moment of silence as Clinton scanned the scene, watching his teammates get to work, doing what they did best in their own ways. 

“Mm-mmh,” Clint finally grunted in the negative. “A skin-dancer or wendigo would have made a mess. Claws marks, blood, body parts. This…” he paused, clicking his tongue in thought. “This is downright sterile by our standards. I could eat off this crime scene.” The chief nodded slowly, his gloved hands clasping his own coffee for warmth, and probably just to have something to do with his hands. Once again, silence reigned but for the shuffle of the Sentinels at work and the eerie call of a whippoorwill through the trees.      

“So, what do you think it is?” Millar finally said after a pregnant pause. Clint, in no rush, finished the gulp from his cup. 

“Chief Millar, I appreciate your faith in our abilities, but we need a chance to [i]actually[/i] investigate the scene,” Clint said evenly, turning away from the ditch to round on the lead Rover’s trunk. Stacks of hard shell cases in various shapes and sizes were all neatly stacked, and a life-long Wisconsinite like Millar didn’t need to wonder how many of them housed firearms. Shoving a stack aside, Clinton grabbed his molle field bag and slung it over his shoulder. It was an unspoken, expected thing for every Sentinel to have a duty bag, but it wasn’t terribly enforced. After all, when some of their number could effectively command the “source-code of the universe”, something so mundane as a go-bag might seem silly. Alas, Clinton was not one of that esteemed group, but he was as unnatural as the rest.

“Chief, we’re going to need you to close off this road while my team does their investigation.” Clint thrust his scarred chin at the puzzle before them. Between divination, enhanced senses, and good old-fashioned forensics, they [i]should[/i] be able to figure out something. If they couldn't... well, that was something to tackle after the fact.