07 – The Way We Deal

Erika sat in her truck, eating a sub sandwich at a parking lot just outside Chicago’s downtown. Heavy metal music blasted from the speakers, vibrating the windows and drowning out the noises of the city. It didn’t seem to matter how much she turned it up; the music still wasn’t loud enough to quash her own thoughts.

Rick had sent her a text earlier—Anna was awake, though not quite ready to leave just yet. Erika couldn’t decide if she should visit. Showing up with a ‘Sorry you died, get well soon!’ card felt painfully inadequate, but she had no idea what else to do. Worse, she didn’t know if Anna wanted to see her—Rick hadn’t said, and Erika had been too cowardly to ask.

Lately, Erika wore cowardice like a slug crawling up her spine; gross and disgusting, but it stayed right where she couldn’t reach to rip it off.

Her phone lit up with a new text, pausing the music. Lately, her phone buzzed incessantly—people checking in, making sure she was alright. Leah messaged three times a day to reassure her that The Fixer said it was safe at home. Daniel wanted to meet up behind his father’s back. The Director, or one of his underlings, sent more details on the Mother of Maggots. The Stalker notified her that The Strategist was ready to call in that favor. A dozen other messages from various people slipped by unnoticed.

This time, relief washed over Erika when she saw the new text—Kassandra wanted to know why she hadn’t been in school since the start of the year.

Finally, something normal; a text from a mundane person about boring, old school.

Erika ignored the message, sinking her teeth into the sandwich. Chipotle sauce oozed out, splattering the wrapper protecting her lap.

Kassandra was someone she could ignore for a while without the guilt eating at her. The question was something she could blow off with an easy lie; school just didn’t matter anymore. Technically, it hadn’t mattered since she got her GED, but she still went for the social aspect.

Now, it was that social aspect that was frightening her—that slug that crawled around on her back.

Being out in the middle of the city, alone, was probably not the best idea, but Erika couldn’t help herself. If she stayed away from others, she couldn’t drag them into her problems. No fat monk was going to barrel through the walls of her school if she wasn’t at school. No naked woman was going to tear the rental house apart if she wasn’t at home. No cultists would burn down Varn’s if she spent her time randomly driving around the city.

It wasn’t like she hadn’t been careful; Erika hadn’t broken a single thing since leaving The Castle’s asylum. She hadn’t bent time or pulled things through space either, instead physically visiting her storage locker for a spare baseball bat and some cash she had stashed away. The only times she visited a familiar location had been the night she left the asylum, staying at home, and the day before while meeting with The Analyst and The Adjustment.

Technically, it wasn’t possible to be alone in the middle of the city. Cars drove past, and pedestrians walked through the parking lot, ignorant of the danger Erika represented simply by existing in their general vicinity.

“I need a pocket dimension of my own,” Erika grumbled as she crumpled up the sandwich wrapper and tossed it in a bag behind the passenger seat. “Wonder how The Castle got theirs.”

She had asked, but The Director avoided a straight answer, then had preempted her follow-up question by saying that The Castle wasn’t accepting new members at this time. They had more than enough rooms for a freeloader to lounge about in, but apparently, those were reserved for The Doctor’s patients only.

“Ugh. This fucking blows.” Erika wished she could break something. Someone. She slapped her cheeks before gripping the steering wheel.

Her life for the last few days had been one of vagrancy, just drifting from place to place, picking hotels at random when she got too tired to continue. Eventually, someone would send a message that she couldn’t ignore, that she couldn’t hide from.

“This isn’t like me. What the fuck is wrong with me?”

Erika threw her truck into gear, lurching as she peeled out of the parking lot. She jabbed at the music controls, irritation mounting with every useless note. The noise wasn’t helping her think, nor was it helping her avoid her thoughts. Silence pressed in, but at least it wasn’t pounding in her head.

Distracted, fiddling with the volume controls, she barely saw the blur of movement—a kid darting out from between two buildings, straight into her path. Instinct took over. Erika slammed her foot on the brake, heart rate spiking. Her awareness of time shrank to a split-second: a foreboding thump, the tangle of dark hair vanishing beneath the hood, and the truck jerking to a halt an instant too late.

“Fuck.”

Erika hurried out of her truck and around to see the new damage she caused, only to find a woman—maybe only a year or two younger than herself—already picking herself up. Black, colorless eyes locked onto Erika, then flicked off to the side for a moment before returning to Erika.

“Help,” she said, sounding surprisingly calm for someone who had just been hit by a car.

Erika started forward, only to pause as the woman shook her head and pointed back over her shoulder, wincing at the movement.

Following her gesture, Erika found herself staring at a bulky man whose mouth was locked in a grimace. She wasn’t sure if it was a grimace of empathy, concern, or anger, for a porcelain mask hid the upper half of his face.

Erika’s eyes narrowed, flicking a suspicious glare at the girl she had nearly flattened. Coincidences did not exist as far as Erika was concerned, especially not as of late. Drawing her baseball bat from her coat, Erika stepped around the woman—whatever her deal was, it could wait.

“Out of the way,” the masked man said, clearly looking past Erika at the woman, obvious even with his eyes hidden.

Erika snorted, starting to grin. “Look, buddy, I have had a shit week. I cannot tell you how happy I am to see you right now. I think I’d be pretty justified in this even if you weren’t some fucking cultist.”

Upon being called a cultist, he tilted his head just enough to make it obvious that his attention shifted subjects. For a full second, he just scowled at Erika, probably believing he could plow right through any regular human with how his friends at the museum just tanked getting shot at. The sudden shift to open-mouthed surprise filled Erika with schadenfreude.

He started to turn.

Erika broke both of his legs with a single swing.

If The Mummy was already here, there was no sense holding back.

He didn’t even try to put up a fight. Granted, even if he couldn’t feel pain in the same way normal people could, it was hard to fight back with two shattered legs. He did reach for something in his coat, but a quick swipe of the bat had his elbow bending in the wrong direction.

“Who is the girl?” Erika asked, walking alongside him as he tried to crawl away on his one remaining limb.

He grunted twice more, pulling himself a little closer to one of the buildings, but did not answer.

“You know who I am, I take it,” Erika said, pressing her bat down against his spine. “You know what I can do.”

“Pain is fleeting,” he spat, dropping his head against the asphalt. “I won’t feel a thing before long.”

“I’ll break your mask.”

“Then I meet The One Without a Face, knowing I served well.”

Erika glowered at that; it was roughly the same thing the cultist at the museum had said when she threatened him. The One Without a Face was probably their title for The Mummy, but with all the chaos of that night, it had slipped her mind; she would have to ask The Fixer about it. Maybe the title held some clues they could use.

Unfortunately, these cultists didn’t fear death or having their masks destroyed, and Erika wasn’t exactly sure how to break something more esoteric, like willpower. A quick glimpse of her watch showed its hands moving at an accelerated rate, putting her on a time limit, but even before that point, she had just hit someone and then left her car out in the middle of the street. Cops would be showing up before long—or a tow truck—not to mention the bystanders. There wasn’t time to test breaking willpower.

Erika let out a long sigh. “You could have tried putting up a bit more of a fight. I really wanted something to wail on.”

His laugh sounded like a pained wheeze. “Stick around. More of my brothers and sisters will be coming before long.”

“The naked woman?”

There was a flicker of emotion around his mouth—a heavy, angry scowl. He didn’t say anything, but it made Erika wonder if there was some discord in their ranks. A conflict between the common, masked cultists and the tattooed woman and monk might be exploitable.

The man started talking. He spoke something other than English, using that same odd language the cultist at the museum used to open the portal to the Mother of Maggots. It could have just been a prayer, but she couldn’t risk the chanting having some effect. Erika kicked forward, striking his mask with the toe of her boot, shattering it into dozens of pieces.

The body went limp, still alive, but utterly unresponsive.

Erika stared a long moment, feeling less satisfied than she had hoped for upon entering the alley, but overall, better than she had been before. While she didn’t get any real answers from him, she had someone else who might know a little more.

After another glance at her watch, Erika decided to dump the ripples right here, figuring that the cultists would find this place anyway since one of their own was down. With that done, she turned.

The cathartic smile on Erika’s face faded after emerging from the alley.

She expected to have to deal with other cars, concerned people looking to help the woman she ran over, and even cops if there had been one close enough to have a reasonable response time. In all three cases, she planned to cut up one of her false ID cards and simply carry on her merry way, hopefully with the woman, if only to find out who she was and what she knew.

Instead, there was nothing. No people, no cops, no woman, and no beat-up red truck.

“Bitch stole my car,” Erika grumbled from the sidewalk. She pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut. “Bitch stole my truck and I just broke so many things.”

She glanced back down the alley, the guy’s shoes stuck out from behind a small set of trash bins. She couldn’t stick around, especially not while she had only one ID card in her wallet. The others were all in her truck’s glove compartment.

Erika bit her lip. Half of her wanted to wait around and just bash in the heads of everyone who came after her; a little more cathartic pummeling sounded good right about now. The more responsible half warned her that a confrontation ending like the one with the monk might not be something she would walk away from this time. She had no backup, no allies nearby, and no idea if The Castle would be tracking the naked woman like they had tracked the monk—she doubted it, given that even The Stalker couldn’t get a hard read on her.

Needing to put space between herself and the alley, Erika started up a jog.

The jog turned into a mad sprint when she spotted the faded red of her truck stopped at the traffic light up ahead. There were other cars around, including in front of the truck, blocking the way forward. The light flicked green before Erika reached her truck, but the few seconds of delay as the line of cars started forward bought her just enough time to reach the passenger door. She pulled at the handle, expecting to have to break it open, only to find it unlocked.

Erika jumped in, noting the girl stiffen, but her attention was on the glove compartment. She grabbed one of her false ID cards, snapped it in half, and flung the pieces out of the window, dropping whatever minor ripples that breaking it caused in the process. The car behind them was laying into the horn, though they did pause briefly the moment Erika broke the card.

“Better drive,” Erika said, narrowing her eyes at the woman. “Not just because of that idiot behind us. More cultists are going to show up if we don’t get out of here fast.”

The woman steeled herself, firming her grip on the steering wheel. Her eyes, cast downward toward the hood, went from uncertain to firm before she looked up and started driving.

Or… she started moving the car forward. Erika wasn’t sure she would call it driving. The truck jerked, braked, then lurched again before they started moving at maybe five miles an hour. Slowly, they drifted toward the oncoming lane of traffic, only for the girl to yank the wheel, overcorrecting to the point where they nearly went up on the sidewalk.

The car behind them was not amused. As soon as there was no oncoming traffic, they illegally swerved over into the wrong lane and floored it, peeling past them with a roaring engine.

“Are you fucking with me right now?” Erika asked, bewildered.

“I haven’t been in a car since I was like eight. I don’t know how to drive.”

“Stop, stop, stop,” Erika said as another car blew past them in the wrong lane. “Just… pull over… no, just stop. I’m surprised you got it out of park, let alone made it this far down the road.”

“I wasn’t taking it. I just thought it would draw less attention if it wasn’t sitting in the middle of the—”

“Don’t care.” Erika reached over, putting the truck into park. “Out. Get in on the passenger side. Light’s red again, so nobody is going to rush past for a few moments if you hurry.”

She sure as hell wasn’t going to get out of the truck again. For all she knew, this was a trick to get her out, then the girl would floor it like that car from before, leaving her in the dust. However, the girl did not argue. She got out and started running around the truck, leaving Erika to awkwardly climb over the armrest.

By the time they swapped sides, the light was green again. Erika wasted no time going. She didn’t have a destination beyond not here.

The woman sank into the passenger seat, her silence heavy and uneasy, but she didn’t break it. Her fingers twisted the frayed strands at the hem of her skirt, she shuffled back and forth, and her eyes kept darting to Erika before looking away as soon as she realized Erika was paying attention.

Erika slowly calmed herself down, angry, but not feeling any overwhelming threat from the woman. Her arm was bleeding, skinned from the elbow to the shoulder—which was probably Erika’s fault—and her clothes hung off her thin body, loose and threadbare, streaked with grime. Judging by the look of her gnarly hair and the body odor in the cab, she hadn’t showered in weeks.

“How did you find me?” Erika asked, turning down a road that would eventually take her to one of the cheap motels she had been cycling through lately.

The skittish woman jumped, giving Erika a blank stare like she wasn’t sure if she was the one being addressed. Only after a shifty flick of her eyes toward her lap did she finally start to speak. “Find you? What makes you think—”

“If you lie to me, I will kick you out right now,” Erika said, pulling the car off to the side of the road. “One more chance: How did you find me?”

“I… Nya told me.”

“Nya?”

“A little black ball of fluff with pointed ears, sharp claws, and a tail that swishes back and forth.”

“A cat,” Erika said, tone flat. “A cat told you how to find me?”

“No. Nya told me.”

Erika mentally filed away Nya as some kind of magical animal and decided further questions about the creature could wait. “How did Nya find me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve warned you—”

“I seriously don’t know,” the girl said, panic in her voice. “Look, I don’t know a lot of things, okay? I don’t know how to drive, I don’t know why they did all the rituals, I don’t know where this came from—” She tugged down her tee-shirt, showing off a massive black tattoo running from her shoulder to somewhere down underneath the rest of the cloth. “These people started chasing after me, and I tried stabbing a few of them, but half the time that doesn’t work, and even when it does, another one just shows up the next day. I have been running for weeks, and I am so tired. Nya helped me get away, and now I’m here.”

Rituals, tattoos, magical creatures, chased by The Mummy’s cultists. Erika mentally ticked off the important words, not knowing if she was being played, but already she hated everything about the situation. Especially the part where people kept showing up. “How are they finding you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Great. Fine.” Erika could hide herself just by not breaking things, but now this? If the woman was telling the truth, she was important to The Mummy. That meant that Erika couldn’t kick her to the curb, even if she was callous enough to do that. The Fixer had experience hiding other people from The Mummy, so calling them was her next step.

Or, Erika thought as the smell of sweat started permeating through the truck, the step after a shower.