Didier and Ray drive down to shack while "invalids" wait at top of road to watch. But people are already at the shack. Since it's starting to get dark and we have our headlights on, they see us as soon as we see them. Someone shoots at Ray and Didier's truck and they dive out of the vehicle in opposite directions. Someone shines a floodlamp at Ray and he shoots out the light, then is pinned down in the bushes while someone tries to shoot at him.
The gist of it is that the goons at the shack (there are four of them, one named "Whalen"), one of them gets Didier in the shoulder with some buckshot. They jump in their truck and take off up the trail. Ray radioes Adam that they're on their way and runs for the truck, yelling for Didier. Dysfunction reigns once again, as Didier says he wants to check out the cabin first, so Ray takes off in the truck and leaves him there (not realizing he's been shot).
Adam, Hazel, and Alastair have turned their vehicle sideways in the trail to block the escape route, and hide in the darkness and bushes on either side of the trail, with Adam (in his full-leg cast) underneath the truck. The 4 goons in their truck skid and smash sideways into the other vehicle, throwing two of them from the truck. Some shots are exchanged, mostly cover fire. Adam hears them break the window of our truck, then something large and heavy is transferred from the goons' truck to ours. Unfortunately, Alastair had left the keys in the ignition.
They take off in the stolen vehicle, leaving one of their men behind in the swamp in the dark. Presumably he gets away. Eventually Ray and Didier catch up with the others. The thing transferred into the other truck was a large metal box, the kind mounted in the backs of some pickup trucks for storage.
The group splits up. Ray, Adam, and Alastair take their remaining rental vehicle and change hotels; Hazel takes Didier to the hospital in the goons' truck. This is now the second time Didier has gone to the hospital today (if I recall correctly).
Hazel and Didier are in the same hotel we were in before; Alastair and the Stark brothers have shifted to a hotel in a different town. Sometime in the night, Hazel awakes and finds some kind of slimy, muddy, swampy thing that is mostly eyeball, sitting at the end of her bed watching her. She tries to hit it with a lamp and it squelches under the door. She gets Didier and they track the slime trail out to the woods, then lose it. Not wanting to encounter the thing again, and not wanting to be alone, Hazel spends the rest of the night in Didier's room, and Didier is subjected to the joys of having her as a roommate.
(It's now May 6, in game) In the morning Didier and Hazel relocate to the town/hotel where Alastair, Ray and Adam are, ditch the "borrowed" truck, and have breakfast. Adam shares that he had a dream in which he talked to Kay; she said that the astronomer Wix had come to her, appeared nervous, and told her that all the data from the observatory should be destroyed. Kay seemed to think the data should NOT be destroyed and that there was more to it.
Then follows some down time while Adam does online research, Hazel works on translating her Japanese spellbook, Alastair tries to make some sense of Wix's data, and Ray and Didier go to a shooting range to get some target practice.
What Adam found: the truck was registered to Ollie Tucker, who lived on the opposite side of the swamp from the Ekloff estate. His three grown sons lived with him: Leonard, Clayton, and Milt. He had a hefty police record, mostly misdemeanors, though no arrests for the last five years. His wife died five years ago.
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