21 – Spread

“Left.”

Erika pivoted at The Stalker’s call, not hesitating as she swung her bat into the crunch of a human’s chest. The body broke as a ripple of Erika’s power shattered every bone in its body. It still lived. The body squirmed on the floor, still moving but unable to maintain its own structure.

She stared for one moment, feeling revulsion deep in her chest, but focused as movement caught her eye.

“Behind you,” Erika said, even as she swung her bat at another zombie approaching from the front.

The Stalker teleported, leaving behind a copy of herself that rapidly faded into static. The zombie couldn’t tell the difference, latching onto the clone. It bit through nothing but air. The Stalker, appearing behind it, stabbed down through its skull with a long machete.

“Good thing we didn’t fuck in front of all these zombies, eh?”

Erika rolled her eyes even as she jabbed her bat into another zombie’s face. “You wouldn’t find that hot?” she asked as it collapsed at her feet.

The Stalker laughed, wrenching her weapon out of the zombie’s head. A swipe to the side splattered coagulated blood against the wall. “I’m calling bullshit on every zombie movie ever. No way anybody fought zombies up close and didn’t get doused in blood. Everyone would get infected.”

Erika’s eyes widened, flicking her gaze to The Stalker. Doused was an exaggeration, but speckles of blood dotted her face, bare arms, and legs. Her black dress hid any blood there, though that didn’t mean there wasn’t any.

Glancing down at herself, Erika grimaced. She had focused on bone-breaking, as it seemed like the best way to get them to stop attacking if not stop moving, but little red dots marred her skin as well. Despite being mostly dry, attempting to brush some off just smeared it around. “How much do you know about zombies? Are we screwed?”

The Stalker teleported, jamming her machete into the spine of another zombie. “Fuck if I know.” She raised her pistol, but hesitated firing it—the ammo she carried was not unlimited. “There are a lot more of these bastards than I thought. Where’d they all come from?”

“Delilah said there were about a hundred people here.” Erika glanced back down the hall, quickly counting bodies. Assuming that number was even mildly accurate, they still had a good eighty to work through. While they staggered in one-by-one at first, the number grew thicker. She couldn’t even see the pews and altar with how many were between her and altar.

One or two were not a threat, but an entire horde would drown her.

“Get behind me,” Erika said.

Trusting her completely, The Stalker teleported back.

Erika slammed her baseball bat into the ground. A fissure raced forward, splitting the cheap linoleum tiles and the concrete beneath. As the crack reached the horde of zombies, the floor fell away entirely, dropping the moaning masses down a level. Erika glared down at them, standing at the edge of the hole she made.

A slight shift in the tiles below her feet made her yelp.

The Stalker’s hand clasped around her wrist, dragging her back onto the more stable part of the floor.

“Gotcha,” The Stalker said, wrapping her arms around Erika.

“Thanks,” Erika muttered. She waited a moment before giving The Stalker a frown. “Are you going to let go?”

“Got to make sure you’re safe.”

“Uh… huh.” Erika sighed, but didn’t bother breaking out of The Stalker’s grip. “How about you? You good?”

“Oh, I’m doing just great. You’re a lot warmer than… me, I suppose.”

Erika raised an eyebrow. It hadn’t sounded like The Stalker was going to say me, but she decided not to question it. “That’s what you get for dating someone who is still living.” Pulling back, suddenly conscious of the zombie blood, Erika groaned. “Though that might not last long if zombies are contagious. I’m going to call The Castle really quick—hopefully they answer the phone.”

“The Castle?” The Stalker clicked her tongue.

“The Doctor and The Orderly probably know more than anyone else about these sorts of things.” Erika glanced down at the tide of zombies. She couldn’t count the moving and bobbing heads, but it sure felt like there were more than a hundred of them. Had others gotten dragged into this? “Could you run through this floor and check for any zombies? Or other stairs?”

“Going to break them too? I can teleport, but how are you going to get out of here?”

“There was a fire escape outside.” Failing that, Erika’s contact list for supernaturals had grown extensively in the last few weeks, with the addition of several of The Eclipse. They probably wouldn’t be happy, but someone she knew would be able to get her off a building.

Knowing The Stalker, Erika left her backup plan unspoken for the time being.

“Fair enough.” The Stalker reluctantly let go. “Shout if you’re in trouble.”

“Same for you.” As The Stalker teleported off, Erika took out her phone, but didn’t go straight for The Castle’s numbers.

“Rick here.”

“Hey—”

“You in trouble again?”

“Me?” Erika paused, smiling. “Always. This time, it’s with Delilah’s old cult. They’ve all been turned into zombies.” Rick hissed over the line, making Erika hesitate. “You got experience with zombies or something?”

“No, but I’ve seen every movie since Romero’s first. What kind we dealing with? Runners? Any specials among them? Tall implacable men wearing oddly nice trench coats? Ones that have swelled up to the point where they explode in zombie-attracting bile?”

“What? No.” Erika leaned over the edge of the broken floor, frowning at the zombies down below. She watched them move for a long moment—none of the zombies she had killed were special, but there were a lot more down there. After a minute, she shrugged. “They’re just shambling dead bodies.”

“Kinda lame… you didn’t get bit, did you?”

Erika started to shake her head, then quickly switched to a verbal response. “No. I did get blood on me—going to call The Doctor in a minute—but I wanted you to start organizing something, probably with The Eclipse. Don’t want these things getting loose in Chicago.”

“Good idea. The Prescient foresaw an apocalypse and zombies are pretty traditional.” Rick let out a long, tired groan. “They’re going to be pissed we’re causing more problems and you’re pushing it off to me.”

“They better be grateful we’re cleaning up more problems,” Erika snapped back. “Seriously, I can’t believe this city didn’t turn into a smoking crater decades ago.”

“Come now, we’ve been doing our best, and I’m sure they have too,” Rick said with a small, almost weary laugh. “I’ll call The Adjustment. You figure out if that blood is going to be a problem—let us know so we can prepare too.”

“You don’t sound very worried about me.”

“You don’t sound very worried either. Guess we both figure you’ll break the zombie curse or whatever, right?”

Erika’s tone turned to a faux pout. “You could pretend. Good—”

“Erika!” The Stalker shouted from further down the hall. “Might have a problem here!”

“Good luck. Gotta go,” Erika said, already running before she hung up. “Stalker?”

“Here!” she called out.

Following her voice, Erika turned down a hallway of bare structural frames. Spare electrical wire, plumbing equipment, and metal braces lined the sides of the hall, clearly intended for construction work. Judging by the thick layer of dust over it all, they had given up long before becoming zombies.

Spotting The Stalker at the entrance to a stairwell, placed directly adjacent to a pair of old-fashioned elevators, Erika readied her bat to smash the entire thing to pieces. From The Stalker’s tone, Erika worried that zombies would be charging up en masse, but when she reached The Stalker’s side, the stairwell was empty as far as she could see.

The stairwell was empty of zombies, but one of the boarded-up windows had been smashed inward. One bronze feather stuck out of the frame, catching the light as Erika swung her flashlight.

“How long ago did it break in?”

The Stalker shrugged. “Was like this when I got here.”

Checking for zombies and birds, Erika descended the staircase until she reached the break in the plywood. “I think this was recent,” she announced after sweeping her foot across the puddle on the floor. “With as hard as it had been raining, the floor would be flooded all down the stairs if it had been broken in the bulk of the storm.”

“Great deduction,” The Stalker said, tone flat. “Does that mean anything?”

“A bird is inside?”

“Amazing.” The Stalker’s tone remained flat as she looked around the landing. “Who is that detective with the funny hat?”

“What?”

“I want to make the joke, like ‘you’re a regular detective name’, but—”

“Come on,” Erika grumbled, taking The Stalker by the arm as she dragged her down the stairs. “Let’s figure out where it went.”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s weird, isn’t it? Why did it break in now?” Erika frowned, considering how the evening had gone so far. “In fact, why did all the zombies wake up only after we killed the leader zombie? We were yapping in front of them for a good ten minutes there.”

“Probably a trap left behind for any nosy bitches like us—”

A loud wail echoed up the stairs, stopping both Erika and The Stalker in their tracks. The human-like shriek descended into sobbing, wracked with shuddering, gasping breaths.

“Is someone still alive here?” The Stalker asked, surprised despite herself.

Erika didn’t stand around wondering. Some of Leslie’s training rubbed off on her, driving her to check every corner—including the ceilings—as she followed the sound, but she still moved with haste. Moving past the third floor made her nervous, putting the zombies back above her, but worries that someone might actually be alive among all this mess kept her moving.

The bird had been this way as well. Thin scrapes marked the walls and floors, just wide enough to fit with the blades of their feathers. Every few steps had deep gouges where talons had gripped the ground. It all looked haphazard and clumsy, like the bird had tumbled down rather than walked or flew. A moment of thought and that made a fair amount of sense; it wasn’t like the birds had evolved for staircases.

Reaching the second floor, Erika followed the tracks to a broken door. Hoes, rakes, shovels, and trowels sat in racks along the walls of the converted apartment unit, but Erika stopped and stared at the dead center of the room.

A human body sat on the floor. It looked as crusted-over and decayed as the rest of the bodies in this place, but if it hadn’t been dead before, it was now. Large gashes dug into the moist innards. Blood, coagulated and sticky, left spatters across the floor. The eyes had been pecked out and the skull cracked open. Brains leaked out onto the floor.

A bird perched over the corpse, smaller than some, with red dripping from its beak.

It wasn’t attacking the body. Not anymore, at least. It sat with its wings up, covering its eyes as it shuddered with repeated sobbing breaths.

“What the fuck?” The Stalker whispered, stepping up next to Erika.

“I don’t—”

“Heeeeee,” the thing wheezed. Erika started, readying her bat, but the thing just slowly lowered its wings. Angling its head, one piercing, yellow eye stared directly at Erika. “He̷ spoke̷ the̷ truth̷!” it shouted in choppy, broken speech. The beak wasn’t designed for human words, but it managed to be intelligible anyway.

“What the fuck?” The Stalker said again, a little louder. “Did it just talk?”

Erika’s eyes flicked down to the corpse, then back to the bird—a servant of the Carrion Eater. An unpleasant feeling began to well in the pit of her stomach as the thing started crying again. No tears actually fell from its face, but it mimed the action in a human-enough manner to give Erika jolts of unease.

“We̷ are̷ saved̷ in̷ the̷ Glory̷ of̷ the̷ One̷!” it wept, staring upwards at the ceiling. “Praise̷!”

“I think…” Erika said slowly. “I think something bad is happening.”

“Great fucking deduction, detective.” The Stalker leveled her pistol, aiming at the bird. “We killing this thing, right?”

It snapped its gaze down, bird-like eyes staring out from behind the bio-metallic plates on its face. It stared with something akin to pity as it spoke softly. “You̷ will̷ be̷ saved̷ too̷!”

“Definitely killing it,” Erika said.

The Stalker didn’t even wait for her to finish speaking. A flash of yellow light shot from her revolver, formed that rune in the air, and struck the bird dead-center in its chest. It staggered back, but swiftly planted a talon down, crushing the human body as it clawed its way forward. Hoes and shovels clattered to the floor as it spread its wings.

Erika shoved The Stalker aside. The razor-edge of its wings sliced through the air toward her, but caught dead against her bat.

She broke only the momentum, not the wing—the shards of metal would have sliced into her. Rearing back for a second swing, Erika shouted as The Stalker dragged her down by the back of her shirt.

The bird’s other wing swept overhead, slicing straight through where her neck had been one second earlier.

“Yellow again,” The Stalker announced, jamming her gun right up under the bird’s beak.

The flash of yellow light jerked the bird back a step, and nothing more. Expecting that, Erika kicked up. Her boot barely connected with the bird’s ribs, glancing, but Erika didn’t care. Her power didn’t require physics.

The metal plating coating the bird shattered, breaking apart into small chunks that clanged as they hit the floor. A short jab with the end of her bat shattered its beak, and a third hit to the side of the head broke the bird in its entirety.

Erika scrambled out from under it as it wobbled and collapsed. It twitched, jerked, and thrashed, but did not get up or speak again. Whatever it was—whatever it had become—it wasn’t like Jack.

Pulling back, she swung the bat down again, crushing its skull entirely. It still twitched in a few final death throes, but finally settled down.

Erika let out a few heavy breaths, panting despite the relatively light exertion. Despite the bird being dead, the bad feeling hadn’t gone away.

“Did you have to shove me down?” The Stalker asked, dusting herself off.

“I wasn’t sure you’d get out of the way in time.”

“I teleport.”

Erika rolled her eyes. “You are welcome… did you have to use yellow twice despite knowing it didn’t work the first time? Where did the molten metal bullets go?”

“I swapped to yellow when we started fighting zombies. Didn’t exactly have time to swap. I stunned it long enough for you to hit it, didn’t I?” The Stalker glared, first at Erika, then at the bird. She kicked it, hard, before jumping back like it was going to swipe at her. “It’s dead then?”

“Seems like it.”

“What… Just what? It ate the person, then got smart or something?”

“More likely it’s the cultists. They’re undead. These things are part of the Carrion Eater—”

Erika cut herself off as she heard another howling wail echoing through the apartment corridors. Then another. And another. Boards cracked and glass shattered, leading to more noise.

Her heart sank as she realized what was happening and why so many birds had been hanging out outside the building. “We should meet with the others. I don’t really want to be buried under hundreds of smart birds alone.”

“You wouldn’t be alone,” The Stalker said as she pulled cartridges from her revolver, swapping in different colored bullets.

“Don’t really want both of us buried,” Erika said with a light smile. “Besides, should probably make sure The Eclipse knows.”

“I’m guessing they’ll be pissed no matter what happens. It’s what they’re good at.”