02 – Urban Exploration

Erika pulled her long coat around her a little tighter as she walked down the streets of Chicago. A few days into November, and the winter chill was really starting to hit hard, but her movements were more unconscious. A desire to wrap herself away, not from the frosty air, but from the people.

People moved along the sidewalks, going about whatever duties they had. A salaryman carried a small case while keeping his phone pressed to his ear. A fast food worker sat around the side of the building, cigarette hanging from her lips as she stared blankly at a wall. Two older ladies walked at an excruciating pace, forcing everyone else to step into the street to get around them.

Erika eyed everyone with suspicion. Especially those two old ladies. If a whole bunch of regular people, like the bowler guy or the postman, could secretly be carrying around those masks, anyone could be. And if anyone was secretly evil, it was probably those two old ladies.

With a slight shake of her head, Erika pushed past the women and carried on with her day. She knew she was being paranoid and a bit unrealistic, but given everything that had happened, she was fairly certain some level of paranoia was warranted. People were after her. An entire cabal of masked cultists wanted her to break more chains.

In retrospect, Postman’s actions made a lot of sense. Once he realized who she was, the obvious choice was to bring her to the chains—or ‘binding coils’ in his words—that kept their god trapped in whatever nightmare realm those portals connected to. They had been waiting for someone like her.

The Fixer suspected that there were other temples like the one at the museum, all dedicated to dark gods of the cult, like the Mother of Maggots, and all harboring chains that would eventually free that creature down below. The fact that the world hadn’t ended over the last two weeks, after Erika broke some of those chains, was proof enough that there were more.

The crowds on the street started thinning out as Erika turned down another block. Ahead of her, wooden barriers had been set out, redirecting traffic away from the area. Large warning signs were posted about, advertising dangers of gas leaks, providing phone numbers to call if anything seemed amiss, and all that kind of stuff. Beyond the barrier, a three-story building was covered completely in massive tarps. Not like a fumigation tent, where it was fully sealed. This was just large blue tarps anchored to the sides of the building with bungee cord-like ropes.

Erika stopped short of the barricade, folding her arms as she stared up at the building.

It certainly stuck out like a sore thumb, but everything was more subdued than expected. Half of her expected lines of riot officers standing about, blocking access. There was one cop car on this side of the barrier. It wasn’t even occupied.

Glancing around, she spotted two uniformed men through the windows of a coffee shop. They sat at the window seat, watching her, but otherwise didn’t even bother getting up. As soon as Erika turned away from the barricade and started walking back into the rest of the city, they lost interest entirely.

Erika spotted a familiar minivan parked well away from the barricade. That was what she had been looking for. They must have moved away because of the cops. Walking right up to the van, she pulled open the side doors and hopped inside.

Rick, behind the steering wheel, jolted. He scrambled for his cardboard tube, fumbling with it before realizing who had opened the door. He settled down, patting the chest of his button-up Hawaiian shirt where it looked like he had spilled a can of Pringles all over himself.

“You could have knocked,” he muttered.

“Uh-huh. You knew I was coming,” she said, frowning slightly. “Danny? I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

Daniel sat in the back, phone out but focused on Erika. “Yeah, I… uh…” He shrugged lightly. “I’m here to help.”

“He asked if he could come,” Leslie said, nodding along with a note of pride in his voice as he turned slightly in the passenger seat. “Finally getting interested in the family business.”

Daniel rolled his eyes, only to freeze. “I’m not interested in ghosts,” he muttered to himself, glancing down at his phone again.

Erika, taking the seat next to Daniel, leaned over and looked at the screen. It was open to some site tracking all the odd closures as of late. Apparently, the local government was claiming that a renovation effort had gone wrong. Not every site closed meant that a leak was occurring, only that they required some infrastructure replacement to prevent issues. Either way, a suspicious number of buildings had closed down, and only a handful had reopened.

Even someone with their head stuck in the sand like Daniel wasn’t blind. He might be able to come up with excuse after excuse regarding ghosts, but this wasn’t so obscure and isolated.

Then there was The Fixer. That was a whole other ordeal. Erika had told Daniel the same thing she told the other ghost hunters. The Fixer was her mother, sometimes. She had been tempted to call him a demon to their faces, but Sofia always looked so sickly these days. Knowing her religious inclinations, Erika decided to neglect that word, simply referring to him as a cryptid.

It was close enough.

Speaking of… “No Sofia today? Or Anna?”

“They both have real jobs,” Rick said with a small shake of his head. “Asking them to come down in the middle of the day without three weeks’ prior notice isn’t easy. What about… him?”

Erika kept her smile. Internally, her mood soured. “The Fixer is apparently more concerned with getting the Walker family situated than the monsters infesting the city.”

Erika didn’t know what The Fixer was thinking. Wasn’t hunting down The Mummy supposed to be his entire life’s purpose? Not that she was really complaining. If they were more proactive, she would have her parents constantly hanging over her shoulder like an old rag while on outings like this. Erika wouldn’t want that at the best of times and especially not while they were… merged together, and she had to get a lecture from two sides at once, and why is my life so complicated, she thought to herself.

“And they’ve given permission to go out and likely break a few laws?” Leslie asked.

Erika leveled a flat look in his direction. She understood that he had the most experience with the supernatural among The Hunters, but she still felt like he was taking everything a bit too in stride. Normal people should have some hang-ups when they found out that someone’s parent made a deal with a devil, got pregnant from that devil, then went and became that devil.

“Even if they hadn’t, I’m a month away from turning eighteen. I am perfectly capable of making my own bad decisions without them weighing in on it.”

Leslie lightly chuckled to himself, looking to Rick. Rick just shrugged.

“Right,” Rick said, grabbing a small backpack. A lot of the items on the rack in the middle of the van were missing, presumably within. He slung it over one shoulder, leaving his other shoulder free to hold the straps of his cardboard shipping tube. “The roads are being watched. The plan is to slip around through the alley. Since the cops here are watching from a coffee shop instead of their car, we can just walk right over without them seeing.”

Erika grabbed a flashlight from the rack, checked that it turned on, then stuffed it into her coat pocket. “We waiting for anyone else?”

“Nope.” Rick popped open the door and stepped out.

Daniel did as well. When Erika went for her door, Leslie held up a hand.

“You have your gun?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Erika said, lightly patting the holster under her arm. She had her bat as well, hidden beneath her coat. “Should I not?”

He slowly shook his head before opening one side of his camo jacket. He had a revolver shoved in a holster under his arm and a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun hanging from a leather strap attached to the inside of the jacket.

“Just a word of warning,” he said. “Police officers are around. Despite the words of our constitution and its amendments, they won’t take kindly to firearms. Even my concealed carry permit won’t save me, and you lack even that meager protection.

“In addition, my son is with us. Any negligent discharge, even if you hit nothing, will not be acceptable. Am I understood?”

“Crystal,” Erika said. “I double-checked before I left. No round in the chamber. There won’t be any accidental shots from me.”

She had considered leaving the pistol behind entirely. It hadn’t exactly been useful back at the museum. The one time she tried to use it, she hit exactly nothing. The noise did summon The Stalker, so maybe that counted as a success, but she otherwise needed much more experience before she felt comfortable using it in a stressful situation again.

There was also her pocket storage to consider.

The Fixer had tried to explain how some of Erika’s abilities worked. Outsider-class beings were extra-dimensional. Not some weirdo parallel universe situation, but literal extra spatial dimensions. It wasn’t quite the same for Erika, who had been bound to her regular three-dimensional body her whole life, but he theorized that she could still interact with what he called the w-axis to simply lift an object through spacetime and to her possession.

The way The Fixer explained it was to use the example of a two-dimensional being on a flat table. If a box were placed on the table, it would appear as a line to the being, one appearing from nowhere. The being could go above or below it, but not through or around it, even though the box had a limited third dimension. If Erika lifted the box, the line would vanish from the being’s perspective.

Or something like that. It all sounded kind of nonsensy to her. And, if she were being honest, it didn’t sound like exactly what she was doing. She still liked her quantum uncertainty method of explaining it. Not that it mattered. The effect was that she could retrieve her gun from any known location. Maybe when she was some wizened old crone with plenty of time on her hands, she would look into the how. Until then, she really only cared about how useful the ability was.

But, The Fixer had banned using any abilities in any location that anyone they cared about, stayed at, or even visited regularly. That meant no leaving the gun at any hotel she intended to return to and certainly not at any rental homes, friends’ houses, or Varn’s.

Not that leaving a gun in a hotel room sounded like a good idea to begin with, but that was another topic.

So, for now, she carried it with her.

Warning delivered, Leslie got out of the van and Erika quickly followed. Rick and Leslie took the lead, walking across the street and into an alley. Erika fell back alongside Daniel.

“I think your dad just gave me the shotgun talk,” she whispered as they walked.

“The… what? He taught you how to shoot a shotgun?”

“No, no, no,” Erika laughed. “You know the thing where the girl’s dad tries to intimidate the boyfriend picking her up, usually by polishing the family shotgun right in front of them? It was that thing except with your dad and actual guns… and it wasn’t about sex, it was about guns.”

The tips of Daniel’s ears turned a little red—probably not because of the chill air. “So not like that thing at all,” he said with a slight cough.

“Well… no,” Erika admitted with a small chuckle as they approached the alley door to the tarped-up building.

She hesitated. The door was surely locked. They probably wouldn’t be sticking around long enough for someone to track her down if she used her abilities—The Fixer suspected that the masked men only showed up to the museum so quickly because it was a place of importance to them. At the same time, she was wary.

A bit nervous too. Especially once Rick glanced in her direction.

“You didn’t come all this way without a plan to get inside, did you?” Erika asked, projecting false confidence. She made a show of patting down her pockets. “Not sure I brought my bobby pin today.”

“No need,” Rick said, flipping up a small weather protector over a keypad on the door. “Called up the building manager after digging his name out of some city database.” He pressed a few buttons, after which a faint light flickered green. “I said I was one of the final inspectors for this place, but I misplaced the entry code. He was more than happy to provide if it meant getting the building open sooner.”

A light push against the door, and it swung open without a sound.

“What do you think we’re going to find?” Daniel whispered as Rick started handing out tools from his backpack.

Erika recognized the EMF reader and the Geiger counter, the latter of which he handed to Erika while the former went to Daniel. Rick kept an odd device for himself, one Erika hadn’t seen amid the rack of tools back in the van. It looked like a solid-black Death Star, 3D printed at a fairly low resolution, with a bright green light where the divot was. He didn’t bother explaining before handing Leslie a parabolic microphone.

“A whole lot of nothing, probably,” Erika said, eying the little Death Star as she turned on her Geiger counter. “I checked out that hospital your sister mentioned last week—just a quick walk past, nothing in depth. Didn’t see anything I wouldn’t expect. Apparently, it’s reopened already.”

“Nothing, huh?” Daniel sighed like he expected that. “Guess nothing is still better than Home Ec. huh?”

“That’s the spirit,” Erika said with a grin as the door clicked shut behind them.

There wasn’t much light inside. The building was some kind of office with a fairly open layout, at least on the first floor. All the tarps over the windows didn’t block the light completely, but they did enough to make the flashlights a necessity. Erika’s beam cut through the gloom.

Rick flicked on his flashlight and then did the same for his mounted GoPro on his headband, adding a second beam to hers. Leslie and Daniel swiftly followed, making the room almost light enough to see without trouble.

“This place is a mess,” Rick muttered, sweeping his light past overturned desks and scattered paperwork.

The building’s interior looked like it had been evacuated in a hurry—chairs knocked over, drawers half-open, a coffee mug left half-filled on one desk. Flies buzzed over the moldy remnants of a half-eaten lunch on another desk.

Leslie pressed an earbud to his ear, motioning for everyone to be silent as he flicked on his parabolic mic. He swept it around slowly. “No voices,” he whispered. “No movement. Just ambient noise from the streets outside.”

“That’s good, right?” Daniel said, gripping his EMF reader a little tighter than necessary.

“Not really,” Erika said in response, keeping her voice to the absolute minimum as Leslie aimed the microphone upwards. “Can’t do much about nothing. If we want to find out why all these buildings are closing down, we have to find something.”

“Might have something above us,” Leslie said, gruff voice hesitant. “Or maybe just a helicopter somewhere out there.”

Sticking together, Rick led the group toward the stairs, and the group slowly made their way up. Everyone waved around their devices, though the only one that really seemed useful was Leslie’s microphone.

“It almost sounds like scratching,” he muttered as they carried on.

Erika’s Geiger counter gave a soft, intermittent click, making her jump. Not radiation—at least nothing significant—just the background noise of the universe.

“Did one of you…” Rick’s nose wrinkled. He paused in the aisle between a few rows of cubicles, glancing around the group with his face contorted in distaste.

The smell hit Erika a moment after, making her grimace as well. A damp, stale smell mixed with something faintly sweet, but not in a pleasant way—like rotting fruit left out in the sun or a compost bin filled with detritus but topped with a few rotten tomatoes.

“The scratching is getting louder,” Leslie said.

Daniel grit his teeth. “Is this really a good idea?” he asked, swinging his flashlight back and forth rapidly, as if worried something might leap at them if the light left any one spot of darkness for too long.

Erika caught a glimpse of something odd in one of his frantic sweeps and pointed her flashlight to the spot as she slowly walked forward.

Dark, greasy smears marked the walls near the floor, trailing along the thin office carpet. Something had been dragged along the baseboards. The streaks led to a closed door at the end of the rows of cubicles, one bearing a greasy plaque for a manager by the name of Randal Steward. Its handle, crusted with something that glistened faintly in the flashlight’s beam, filled Erika with a sense of apprehension.

She could hear something now too, even without a parabolic microphone. A wet, skittering sound. Rats?

She doubted it. Something mundane would be lucky.

“Over he—” she started to call out, only to cut herself off as the door rattled, like something was pressing up against it repeatedly.

The door’s flimsy latch bent against the force, shoving the door open. Erika barely had time to stumble back before the thing surged into the aisle of cubicles. A blur of wet, glistening segments, all undulating and squirming forward like a worm. Mouths, each one a ring of needle-teeth, gnashed in the dim light. The stench hit like a physical blow—spoiled meat, bile, and that cloying sweetness of decay.

Then the thing unfurled. It wasn’t one creature, but dozens.

Maggots. The same overly large monstrosities from the museum. Fat, sluggish grubs the size of pitbulls. Some were even larger, like a rottweiler.

Rick screamed a loud, shrill yelp.

Leslie planted a hand on Erika’s shoulder, bringing her back even as he swung his double-barrel up from where he had it aimed at the floor. With her out of the way, he fired, unleashing a thunderous, ear-splitting crack into the cramped quarters.

Black tar splattered against the walls and floor. It wasn’t enough. The undulating wave of yellow-white maggots squirmed forward.

Erika didn’t think. She closed her fingers around the handle of her baseball bat, ripping it out from under her coat just in time to swing it at a maggot lunging through the air. More black bile splattered upon impact.

Leslie fell back, switching his double-barrel out for his pistol rather than reloading. But he didn’t fire, merely remaining at the ready as he moved to protect his son. Rick stepped forward in his place. Despite his earlier scream, his face was set in an almost bloodthirsty, feral grin.

In Rick’s hands, he held a sword. A short spatha with a bronze pommel and short cross-shaped handguard. The blade itself was an ominous black-red metal that Erika couldn’t begin to identify. With movements befitting a practiced swordsman rather than the computer nerd he was, Rick stepped into the mass of maggots, easily dispatching them one after another. One bit into his leg, but he just laughed, ignoring the sharp, needle-like teeth as he swept his sword through the air. The blade almost took his leg off, shearing a part of his pants off along with the maggot as he delved into the office the maggots had come from.

A few more cracks of Leslie’s pistol perfectly dispatched a few more maggots that Rick missed. Erika swatted another that had been trying to skitter forward, using its fellows’ bodies as cover. All the while, the sound of Rick’s blades slicing the maggots within the darkened corner office made her wince with every noise.

“Is that—”

“Quiet,” Leslie hissed. “Don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Erika clamped her jaw closed even as she hammered her bat into another maggot. There was something about Leslie’s tone that made her take him more seriously than normal.

The sound of fighting within died out. Shortly after, Rick reemerged, holding his sword low and lax to one side, yet still clearly in the throes of bloodlust. When his eyes found Erika and he took a step toward her, she gripped her bat all the tighter.

A black leather scabbard, flung through the air, struck Rick square in the face. He staggered with a small oof, blood trickling from his nose. Wiping the blood with one hand, he stared down at the scabbard on the floor, his full attention on it as if it were the most interesting thing around. A tremor ran through his body as he knelt, grasping the scabbard. With obvious effort, he thrust his sword within, rotating little metal clamps welded to its end to clamp down around the spatha’s short cross guard.

Rick unleashed a faint, trembling sigh as the tension in his body fled.

Nobody spoke. Nobody even moved. Rick clutched the sword, panting and breathing. Maybe even crying? It was hard to tell with his head hung. Erika wasn’t sure if Daniel had moved a single muscle since the office door broke open. It seemed his fight or flight instinct was more of a freeze. And Leslie just stood, a few steps ahead of Daniel, frowning down at Rick.

“They all dead?”

Rick, still panting, bobbed his head. “I didn’t leave—”

“Who are you?”

Four heads snapped up, whipping around as one to face a voice that sounded like the bow of a violin drawn violently across the strings of a guitar overlaid on a feminine voice. Leslie, pistol out, swept his arm out to grab Daniel, repositioning both of them so that Leslie was closer to the source of the noise. Erika, bat in hand, readied it once again.

A creature clung to the ceiling of the room, fingers gripping the metal braces that held up the drop ceiling tiles. At first, Erika thought it was another of those masked people from the museum, with the way this thing’s face was unnaturally smooth, glistening in the flashlight beams with no holes for eyes or a mouth or a nose. But, as her eyes trailed over the rest of the creature’s body, she realized it wasn’t just the face that was unnaturally smooth. The entire body was like a mannequin, feminine and detailed yet made from a rigid porcelain-like material, held together by doll-like ball joints. The only part that didn’t look manufactured was the hair, made up of thick, sinewy strands that seemed to move of their own accord in the still air of the office.

As the creature released her hold on the ceiling, dropping to her feet with a light clacking noise, Erika realized that she stood quite a bit taller than anyone else present, reaching a full head and shoulders above even Leslie. She loomed, but at a distance. Clasping hands behind her back, her head turned to observe all four people in the room and the mess they had made of the maggots. Once again, that guitar-string voice filled the air.

“Who are you, humans?”

That was a lovely question, all but confirming that whatever the creature was, she wasn’t human. As if Erika really needed confirmation. Erika was fairly certain she spotted eyes in some of those tendrils poised as hair.

She glanced over to Leslie out of the corner of her eye. He was impressive, standing steady, both hands gripping his gun. At the same time, he also didn’t look like he knew how to react at the moment. The way his head twitched, it looked like he wanted to look at Rick.

Though Rick didn’t seem like he would be much help at the moment. The man was trying to get back to his feet, but his legs were shaking and he was using his sheathed sword as a crutch. Erika wasn’t sure if it was the wound in his leg or the aftereffects of whatever that sword was, but he looked too unsteady to be of much use.

“Does it matter what we answer? I doubt our names would mean anything to you,” Erika said, drawing the creature’s attention to her. With a cockiness she didn’t really feel, she grinned. “Besides, it’s awfully rude to ask others for their names without introducing yourself.”

The creature stared at Erika for a long moment, saying nothing before finally turning her head to each of the others. Without even looking down to the floor, she slowly bent, stretching a hand out. Although her fingers were made from the same rigid material as the rest of her body, tendrils matching her ‘hair’ stretched out from the tips of her fingers as she grasped the little Death Star ball Rick had been carrying. Righting herself once again, she stared at the device before looking back to Erika.

“Cursed sword. Ghost hunting equipment. I see. You are The Hunters.” She lightly set the ball on the edge of the nearest cubicle. “I am The Art. Your presence is neither wanted nor warranted. There is no afterlife here. Only death.”

“We are concerned with more than just ghosts,” Leslie said, finally speaking. “Anything that threatens our city—”

“A hundred incidents such as this pass by every week without your notice, human,” The Art said, turning away. She paused, head spinning a full 180. “The Eclipse does not request nor require your assistance with this one. Leave. Tend to your wounded. Return to exorcising your specters if you must busy yourselves.”

With that said, The Art stalked away, feet clacking against the carpeted tiles of the office.

Erika watched her go, slowly lowering her bat only after The Art stooped to move through the doorway leading back to the stairs. The Art. The Eclipse. She heard of The Eclipse before. They were the ones who accepted the bounty. It made her tense, even if The Art had not recognized her.

She really needed to figure out what to do about that issue. The Fixer had tried emailing The Church again, but it seemed as if they had abandoned that method of communication for now. It was a problem, but one for later.

For now, Erika slowly relaxed.

“What the fuck?”

“Language,” Leslie grumbled, lowering his own weapon as he looked around, confirming that Daniel had escaped unscathed.

Erika just chuckled at the look on Daniel’s face. Her laughter died immediately the moment she noticed the state of her attire. “Gross,” she grumbled, trying to wipe some of the sticky tar off her coat. “This better wash out.”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Daniel asked, his tone a little more shrill than usual.

It wasn’t really. Those creatures from the museum were spreading. Maybe more of those portals to the temple opened up. She wanted to look around, maybe see if there were any statues or murals like the ones at the museum, any evidence that something was needed here for a portal, but she wasn’t sure they had time to spare.

For now, The Art was right about one thing.

Rick’s leg was bleeding. Quite heavily at that. They not only needed to bandage him up, but also to submerge him in a vat of disinfectant. That went for her and Leslie as well. There was no way these maggots weren’t carrying every disease in the book and then some.

At least she now had a suspect for who was cleaning up these messes. Assuming all the ‘gas leaks’ were these maggots, The Eclipse must be handling them. That was…

Good?

Erika didn’t feel too good about it. She had confirmation now, evidence that her worries were true. Even if she hadn’t known what she was doing at the time, breaking those chains caused this. She set these monsters loose.

She needed to find a way to fix it before more people got hurt.