章 138: Chapter 138: The Sinister Family
The so-called Eugene family indeed has a long history in the area. As early as the Mexican-American War in 1846, the ancestors of Sam Eugene followed the footsteps of the invaders to this land.
They developed the land in the valley and established a vineyard. However, due to the climate of New Mexico, the quality of the grapes was mediocre. From modern times to the present, no particularly famous wine brands have emerged from here.
The Eugene family, like the local wine, remained obscure, and the family did not grow large. They quietly thrived, relying on the local struggling wine industry.
This situation persisted until the end of World War II. At that time, the old Eugene, who was a forest ranger, Sam's great-grandfather, discovered hundreds of wretched-looking redneck immigrants in the forest.
Some of them had severely burned eyes, almost blind, and others were covered in sores. At that time, people did not understand what radiation sickness was. Old Eugene was very afraid that it was a plague and even thought these people were cursed by the devil.
But a few years later, old Eugene was surprised to find that this group had successfully settled in the mountains. Although the survivors were still in poor health, they still had newborns, albeit hideously deformed ones with a high mortality rate.
Old Eugene always believed that this group was cursed and dared not have much contact with them until one day, one of them came to him with a small bag of gold.
If old Eugene had objectively provided shelter for these unfortunate rednecks by purchasing supplies and food for them in exchange for handsome rewards, then his son, Sam's grandfather, Baddum Eugene, was an outright scoundrel.
In the late 1950s, after a few years of living as a hippie, the penniless Baddum Eugene returned home and set his sights on the deformed tribe hidden in the mountains.
According to Sam Eugene, his grandfather Baddum was a very clever scoundrel. He spent a lot of time dealing with these mountain people.
Soon, he discovered the secret of the gold mine. However, he did not intend to disclose this secret because the land was not privately owned. Even if he sold the secret, he could only make a small fortune, far from meeting Baddum's expectations.
So, he came up with a better idea. It is well known that gold mining is a very arduous job. In the history of the American West gold rush, those who made a fortune were never the miners but those who sold tools like shovels to the miners.
Baddum wanted to be the one selling the shovels, becoming the only collaborator of these 'gold miners' in the mountains.
After a series of bizarre deaths, the monsters in the mountains gradually became an unmentioned legend, and the secret gold mine became a stable source of wealth for the Eugene family.
By the late 1970s, a problem emerged that troubled the Eugene family. Perhaps due to long-term inbreeding or other reasons, the number of deformed people drastically decreased. Many newborns died young, the population dwindled yearly, and labor became severely insufficient.
If this trend continued, within a few years, the deformed people hiding in the mountains might become extinct even before the gold mine was exhausted.
Baddum was anxious and soon devised a sinister plan, guiding these monsters to systematically rob tourists in the mountains.
In fact, the Eugene family had long discovered that these beings, who had already degraded into monsters, occasionally hunted hunters and tourists in the mountains. Some uneducated newborns treated these people like wild animals, killing and eating them, sparking local Wendigo legends.
Baddum seized the opportunity. Using his good relationship with the deformed people, he proposed a new collaboration: the Eugene family, which had a certain degree of control over the area, would select targets, regularly hunt tourists in the mountains, and handle the cleanup afterward.
The ogres would kill all the male victims for food and use the captured females as breeding tools to improve the newborn survival rate.
For half a century, the Eugene family controlled the number of these ogres through this method. All captured females had to be 'screened' by Baddum and his sons, who enjoyed them first.
As Baddum aged, his sons and grandsons inherited his business.
They built a mountain villa near the mine. Every year, around this time, the 'hunting season' began, and the Eugene family men awaited the ogres to deliver their prey, starting their revelry.
With a squelching sound, Jessie stabbed Sam's vital area. Jack's eye twitched. This knife was ruined, a top-quality $200 knife wasted like this.
Sam, firmly stepped on by Jack, was in too much pain to scream, writhing helplessly on the ground like a gutted live fish.
Jessie stabbed him again and again, and Sam died a painful death in the process.
"Go wash your hands by the river."
Jack thought to himself that this girl, even if she wasn't the protagonist of a horror movie, had the potential to be one. She was terrifying.
"What do we do next?"
Jessie returned from the river, wiped her hands clean on her pants, sheathed her knife, and found Jack fiddling with something in the Jeep Wrangler.
"There's a car radio. I'm trying to see if I can contact anyone."
It was a CB-Radio, the most common unlicensed civilian radio band in North America, usually covering about 20 miles. While this distance wasn't enough, with a simple modification, extending the antenna and slightly increasing the power, Jack could easily manage it.
Of course, he didn't dare to contact the local police casually. Who knew how deeply the Eugene family had infiltrated the area? But many amateur radio enthusiasts in the USA often chatted on civilian frequencies.
He searched for a long time on the 27MHz band and finally found a frequency used by nearby truck drivers and sent out a distress call.
Jack did not reveal any specific information, not even disclosing that he was in Lincoln National Forest, instead pretending to be a stranded tourist named John Nolan, asking for help with a broken-down vehicle in the desert.
Within half an hour, a stranger's voice came through the public channel, calling Jack. The caller introduced himself as Rod Dale, clearly one of David Rossi's men, using the name of a mutual 'friend,' serial killer Rosalind Dale, as a code.
End of the month, got some unused tickets? Throw a few my way, okay?
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