It was 03:17 in the morning, but the thermometer stubbornly read 34 degrees. This wasn't a normal heat; that sickly, yellowish heatwave that clings to one's skin and turns breathing into torture had descended upon the city once again. As soon as Elara opened the door of her patrol car, she was startled by the dense, humid wall that struck her face. It was as if the atmosphere itself was sweating.
Her uniform was already sticking to her back. She hadn't slept in forty hours. It felt as though there were grains of sand behind her eyelids, and those damn purple static halos had already begun flickering at the edges of her vision. She tried to stop her hand from trembling as she pulled the radio from her belt.
"Dispatch, this is Elara. I've reached the Sector 7 Junkyard site. Checking on the reported noise pollution."
No answer came. Only a static hiss. The radios were always like this in this weather; it was as if even the airwaves were melting from the heat and bleeding into one another.
Elara switched on her flashlight and took her first step into the rusty labyrinth formed by the piles of scrap. This place was like the city's intestines. Crushed sedans, skeletal pickup trucks, and heaps of unidentified metal formed twisted towers reaching toward the sickly-colored moon in the sky. Everywhere smelled of burnt rubber and decayed metal.
But then she heard it.
The sound that was the reason for the report. It wasn't the creaking of rusty metal or the howling of the wind. It was much... cleaner.
*Di-di-di, da-da-da...*
A simple, cyclical, electronic melody. Ice cream truck music.
"Are you serious?" Elara muttered to herself, her voice sounding muffled among the metal heaps. "At this hour of the night?"
She moved toward the sound. The gravel and broken glass beneath her feet crunched with every step. The music would occasionally snag and slow down like a broken tape player, then suddenly speed up and return to its cheerful tone. There was something in those distortions that set one's teeth on edge. It was like chalk scraping against a blackboard, but it was a mental friction.
As she rounded the corner of a metal pile, she paused at the scent that hit her nose.
The heavy, metallic, burnt smell of the junkyard had vanished abruptly. In its place came a surprisingly sweet scent that stung the back of her throat. Vanilla. Burnt sugar. And... strawberry? It was so intense it made her stomach churn.
XXXALINTIXXX
> *"Childhood memories are sometimes a monster's favorite mask."*
> *— Dr. Aris Thorne, Archive of Lost Cases*
Elara turned her flashlight toward the source of the scent and caught her breath.
There it was.
In the very center of that rusted, decayed, peeling metal graveyard sat a vehicle that looked as if it had been teleported from another dimension.
A 1980 model Chevrolet ice cream truck.
The truck... was flawless. Its white paint gleamed like porcelain under the moonlight. There wasn't a single scratch or a hint of fading on the pastel pink and blue stripes. Its chrome bumper was so polished that Elara could see the reflection of her own exhausted face. The tires were pitch black and pristine; there wasn't a single speck of dust on the hubcaps.
The presence of something so clean in the midst of such filth caused a primal alarm to go off in Elara's brain. It was that eerie sensation they called the "Uncanny Valley." That feeling of "wrongness" you get when something is too perfect.
"Hey!" she called out, her hand instinctively moving to the gun at her waist. "Is anyone there?"
The response was the music increasing by one notch.
The *Calliope* melody was louder now, more insistent. Elara approached the vehicle. The temperature was 34 degrees, the asphalt was melting, but as she came alongside the truck, she felt a strange chill on her skin. It was as if the door to a cold storage unit had been opened.
The vehicle's service window was closed, but she could see a faint, pink neon light leaking from within. She shone her light against the glass. The interior was as impossibly clean as the exterior. Stainless steel counters, lined-up cones...
And the ice cream.
In this heat, while it wasn't even clear if the engine was running, the colorful ice creams sitting in the transparent freezer behind the counter had not melted. On the contrary, a light vapor was rising from them.
Elara slowly reached her hand out to the body of the vehicle. The moment she touched the metal, her fingertips tingled. There was no sensation of hot metal as she had expected. The bodywork was warm, like human skin. And it was vibrating slightly. It wasn't the vibration of an engine. It was more like a steady, rhythmic heartbeat.
The music stopped abruptly.
The silence that fell over the junkyard was far more terrifying than that sticky melody. Elara jerked her hand back. When she looked at her palm, she saw a pink, viscous liquid smeared on her fingers. It wasn't oil. It wasn't resin. It looked like melted ice cream, but the smell... the smell was metallic and sweet.
Just then, the slider of the service window opened with a loud *CLACK*, as if someone inside had pushed it impatiently.
Elara drew her weapon and aimed it at the dark gap of the window.
"Put your hands where I can see them!" she shouted, forcing herself to keep her voice from trembling.
From within, out of the depths of that dim pink glow, came a voice. It sounded like a human voice, but the words were put together as if on the wrong frequency. Crackling. Mechanical.
"So... ho-ot..." the voice said. It was trying to imitate the reassuring tone a father uses when giving ice cream to his child, but there was a hungry growl in the subtext. "Do you... wa-ant... to cool off... Elara?"
Elara froze. It had said her name. She hadn't used her call sign on the radio. Her ID wasn't visible on her person.
Out of the darkness, a hand appeared, reaching toward the counter. But it wasn't a hand. The fingers were too long, the joints had more knuckles than they should, and the skin tone was the exact same shade as the truck's flawless white paint.
And that thing was holding out an ice cream cone toward Elara, dripping with vanilla-scented, pink leaks.
"Just... a... ta-aste," the voice said, as the static noise began to spin like a drill inside her mind. "Just... like... mo-other... used to make."