19 – The Binding Chains

The van jerked and shuddered, throwing its occupants around, as Erika tried to get them back to the ground. She kept one hand tight on the parking brake, depressing the release button and easing it forward, only to rip it back again once they started falling. It was slow, uncomfortable, and giving her a headache, but they were moving.

If there was a better way down, The Stalker wasn’t saying.

“Can’t believe he’s dead,” The Stalker said, gripping the handhold over the rear seat. “I didn’t like him,” she quickly added, “but Michael always seemed like the crotchety old man who would fight off death with his bare hands.”

“Hard to fight with a broken neck,” Erika hissed through clenched teeth, not wanting to bite off her tongue as the van kicked like an angry bull. “I feel like I’m going to break my neck…”

The wheels touched down hard, rocking the van one final time before everything settled down. Erika let out a long, slow breath, sinking back into the seat as she finally released the parking brake in full.

“I feel sick,” Carter grumbled, swaying slightly despite the van now being still.

“Try to hold it in,” Erika said, “we need to keep moving, if only to get back to that crater to find The Warrior and whoever else is here before they end up like Michael.”

The Stalker’s eyes lit up, shimmering as she slowly turned her head. “Not a problem, I know where they are. The Warrior is still alive, as is The Strategist—they’re headed this way, probably because of that bullet, but it will be faster if we meet them halfway. A few of the other cultists might be dead—or just… elsewhere.” The light in her eyes faded as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “This place is strange.”

“Just point the way. I’ll try to get there as best I can with the weird floating platforms and whatever.”

Erika watched The Stalker’s eyes shimmer again, then started following along the road, taking turns here and there. The whole while, she went back over what The Stalker had just told her. “So none of you called me to that trainyard?” she asked, wanting to confirm.

“Not as far as I know. I sure as hell didn’t.”

Erika clicked her tongue in annoyance. They should have come up with some passphrase so she knew the text came from them.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this…” The Stalker’s eyes lost their shimmer as she stared at Erika.

Erika flicked her eyes between the rearview mirror and the road, growing more and more uncomfortable each time she looked up to find that The Stalker wasn’t even blinking. The road wasn’t any better; the magic bullet burned away most of the fog, at least inside the city, but while she could see further on the road, she could also see more birds overhead. They circled around, keeping well away, but still close enough that they could swoop down at any moment.

“The Strategist puzzled out that The Eclipse has some rare magical catalyst thingy. Don’t ask me for details,” The Stalker said, finally turning her gaze away from Erika. “The long and short of it is that, if The Warrior can currently enchant twenty bullets in a week, this catalyst thing will let her do a hundred.”

That was probably why The Warrior told her and Leslie to ask later about bullets. Twenty bullets a week made them fairly rare, probably too rare to hand out to others. “Things didn’t go according to plan?”

“Oh, they went great. We got in, grabbed the safe that we were going to have you break, and even got out. If The Strategist was right, The Eclipse wouldn’t have even noticed it was missing for at least a few weeks with the way we stole it. Things went so smooth that The Strategist wasn’t even worried about you rushing over as fast as possible to break the safe. He said something about The Eclipse being busy with something else tonight that was taking all their focus, but…” The Stalker shrugged. “He was musing to himself more than telling us, so I didn’t get much more than that.

“Then that naked bitch showed up.”

Given what happened to her, that didn’t surprise Erika in the least. “She did some big bloody ritual to trap you all in this place?”

“Something like that,” The Stalker huffed, staring out the window. “Pissed me off. I tried shooting her and stabbing her and it just didn’t take. I don’t know how to explain how we got here, but it probably wasn’t much different from whatever happened to you.”

The pieces clicked together. The Mummy had set this up from the start—luring her here, using The Puppet as bait, maybe even distracting The Eclipse to maneuver The Puppet into the right location. She clenched the steering wheel, jaw tight as her thoughts churned. Erika wasn’t sure how they knew to lure her out—given how clandestine all the masked cultists were, it was perfectly plausible that some random cultist in The Puppet’s organization was a traitor. However they found out, they had done it.

Here The Mummy was, once again fucking with her friends and allies, too cowardly to just come after her alone.

The gnawing in Erika’s stomach doubled as he leaped to another realization.

Hostages.

At first, she wasn’t sure why The Puppet was here at all. If The Mummy had just stolen a cellphone from The Stalker or The Warrior, she would have walked into the trap without any real hesitation. Even the van wouldn’t have been required to lure her out.

A cold knot formed in her stomach. They were here to keep her here. Maybe she could break out of here easily if she thought about it for a moment—or maybe The Mummy just thought she could break out. With her allies here, potentially trapped and definitely in danger, she couldn’t just up and leave.

She wanted to punch something—or someone—but all she could do was keep driving.

The van rattled over broken road, riddled with debris from the explosion. Outside, the birds circled, their metallic feathers catching what little light there was as they flew past the plateaus in parallel with Erika. Erika’s fingers drummed on the wheel, resisting the urge to wipe the sweat on her palms onto her pants.

There was another shoe primed to drop. This wasn’t the endgame. If she were The Mummy, she would have another move at the ready. They had one, singular goal: the chains. As long as there were no chains in sight, there was more to come. They were letting her run loose, knowing full well what she was capable of.

“We need to meet up with The Strategist, as soon as possible.” Erika wasn’t about to pretend like she was a genius. She didn’t know that The Strategist would have any good ideas, but more people meant more options. “None of them look like they’re trussed up on chains, do they?”

“No?” The Stalker said, eyes shimmering for a brief moment. “The Warrior looks like she’s aiming at someone. And talking?”

At least they weren’t hooked into chains like The Fixer was, though that could easily be part of The Mummy’s plan.

“How far?” Erika asked as she followed The Stalker’s pointing finger.

“Unless there is some weird, twisted roads in front of us, about five minutes at our current pace?” The Stalker sounded uncertain.

Which was fair enough. The bridge she had been driving on was above her, upside down.

“Careful wandering around,” The Stalker added. “I stepped through a door right next to the others and suddenly was on the opposite side of whatever this place is. Couldn’t get back through it.”

“How did Michael get so far away?”

The Stalker shrugged. “We got out of the van to deal with that naked woman. He didn’t, keeping it ready to move—”

An amber-hued light lit the dark cobblestone for a brief moment, like the flash of a camera, cutting The Stalker off. “That looks like The Warrior,” Erika said. “Or her bullets.”

“It looked like she was arguing with someone. I guess the argument went bad.” Gun in hand once again, she started fiddling with the barrel, twisting it around and around until she settled on whatever bullet she wanted to use. In the mirror, Erika watched as a curious look settled on The Stalker’s face. The woman quickly turned, throwing herself over the back of the seat to rummage through the rear compartments.

Erika focused on driving, hoping that The Warrior wasn’t running around now that The Stalker was too distracted to update her directions. If The Stalker had been right and The Warrior had been arguing with someone, it was likely that they were fighting something that wasn’t birds. Tattooed people?

“Hey, kid,” The Stalker said, leaning forward between the two front seats. She held out another pair of revolvers, both smaller than the one she used. One, she held up to Carter, grip toward him. “Know how to use a gun?”

Erika shot The Stalker a glare, but bit back her argument against giving Carter a gun. She would very much prefer that he not get in danger at all, but that ship had long since sailed. In all likelihood, they were driving directly toward danger.

“Do not point it at any of us,” Erika said, voice firm. “Not even on accident.”

Carter’s eyes widened in surprise, but he slowly nodded, closing his hand around the grip.

“Finger off the trigger unless you’re shooting something,” Erika added, watching from the corner of her eye. His finger never went near the trigger as he took the gun and aimed it at the ground, but she figured an extra verbal warning would reinforce the idea in his mind. Carter was a meticulous kid; he wouldn’t slip up of his own accord as long as he was thinking about it.

“So uptight,” The Stalker drawled, passing the other gun to Erika, who accepted it without complaint. “You could use a little loosening up.”

“I’ll be sure to pencil that into my schedule between kidnapped to weird Hell dimension and saving your ass.”

The Stalker pouted with a huff, leaning back as she started fiddling with her heavy revolver once again. “I loaded your guns up with heat rounds. They should melt just about anything you hit—it seemed pretty effective against those bird things.”

“These aren’t the big crater-making bullets, are they?”

“No, no, no,” The Stalker chuckled, shaking her head. “We’ve only got like three bullets on that level and The Warrior is going to be pissed that I used one. These are more like shooting globs of molten metal that turn anything they touch into more molten metal.”

“Good to—”

Erika yanked the wheel hard, the van lurching between two looming, obsidian structures. The tires screamed against the cobblestone, but the noise of metallic shrieks from razor-edged feathers scraping against the side of the van drowned out the squeal of the tires. Another bird—corroded bronze—slammed into the hood with a crunch, its talons raking deep gouges through the frame before it tumbled out of sight.

She barely had time to breathe before another bird dove from above, talons outstretched. Erika floored the accelerator, bracing herself as the van jolted violently while a muffled, metallic crunch echoed up through the floorboards.

The Stalker leaned out her window, leveled her gun, and fired a burning stream of molten lava into the air, slicing through another pair of birds before they even knew what was going on. “They’re just ahead,” she shouted, “on the left—”

A series of bronze feathers punctured the hood, flung down from high up. One cracked the glass of the windshield, its stem embedding itself into the dashboard inches from Erika’s hand. Another gunshot from The Stalker sliced a bird clean in half, its pieces falling in a heap of smoldering metal.

“The Warrior is going to be pissed,” The Stalker hissed between shots. “Maybe we should just leave her behind.”

“Might only make her angrier,” Erika muttered, breaking through a flock as they tried to land on the van.

“Going to have to stop for them!” The Stalker continued like she wasn’t in the middle of a battle. “Warrior might be able to pop herself, but The Strategist and cultists have to walk like normal people.” She fired one more shot before ducking back inside the van. “Got to reload. You’re up kid.”

Carter jolted almost as much as Erika. He started to look at her, but didn’t get a chance to say a word before a bird swooped down, clamping against the side of the van. Its sharp beak pecked at the glass, shattering it. Erika raised her pistol, but didn’t get a chance to aim before heat washed through the van. A molten stream of magma from Carter’s gun flung the bird from the side of the van, scoring the obsidian buildings around them.

Carter fell back, panting like the gun had taken effort to fire. The Stalker leaned out the window again to shoot over the top of the van, bisecting another bird.

Erika grit her teeth, blocking out everything but the road in front of her.

She could see them—humans. The Strategist’s height made him easy to pick out, wearing a black suit with an oblong metal box strapped to his back. Three others stood around him, all with guns out, but they were conserving their ammo. The Warrior stood out in the middle of the road, dressed in a midnight-black dress with her shotgun held aloft.

A slight haze erupted from the gun, like a shockwave from a powerful explosion. At first, nothing seemed to happen. The wave passed over the van and Erika, just as it spread out higher in the air.

The birds dropped. They shook, violently, back and forth as if someone were gripping their wings and yanking them around. More hazy pulses erupted from The Warrior’s shotgun, each thrashing the birds until they started falling to pieces.

Erika swerved side to side, dodging some of the falling birds while careening over others. She kept her foot on the pedal right until she slammed on the breaks, screeching to a stop right next to The Warrior.

The Warrior remained where she was, keeping up her suppression even as the birds took to dive bombing her, deliberately aiming their falling corpses to take her out. A belt around her waist, encrusted with onyx gemstones, flashed a faint golden light with every impact, keeping her safe and steady apart from the slowly mounting pile of corpses landing around her.

Each of the cultists helped The Strategist forward, two looping his arms around their shoulders while the third rushed ahead, pulling open the side door to the van. It was only as he neared that Erika spotted the red glisten of blood on his suit.

“Start moving,” The Strategist said as soon as his foot was inside the van.

“But—”

“Move,” he grunted as his two cultists dropped him on the bench to reload their pistols from the same compartments that The Stalker had used.

Deciding not to argue, Erika floored it. She didn’t have anywhere to go but straight. In the rearview mirror, she watched as The Warrior lowered her shotgun, broke it open, swapped a pair of shells with practiced hands, and then aimed it at herself.

A heavy weight landed in the passenger seat beside Erika, directly in Carter’s lap. “Oh! Hello there,” The Warrior said, shimmying over him. Carter, pressed back in his seat, looked horrified. “Pardon me, I just need to…”

The Warrior reached over, pressed down on the volume button, then proceeded to twist the heater all the way up.

The van warped, ripping backwards the way Erika had been moving. It paused a moment, all of its own accord, right next to the pile of birds that had surrounded The Warrior. The brief hiatus ended with the van being pulled backwards, yanked around corners and turns, down streets, and finally to the point where Erika had managed to get it to the ground. The entire drive, condensed backwards in only a few seconds.

As soon as The Warrior released the volume button, the van lurched forward once again—Erika still had her foot on the gas pedal. Unprepared, she just about tipped the entire thing over in her attempt at avoiding a building dead ahead of them.

Erika moved her foot to the brake and stopped the car, knuckles white against the steering wheel as she stared, wide-eyed, out the still-cracked windshield.

“Well,” The Warrior said, clapping her hands together. “Wasn’t that fun?”

“No,” The Strategist groaned. “You say that every time and it is never fun.”

“I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree. Now, whose lap am I sitting on? And Agent? Odd of you to be driving my van…” She trailed off, noticing that Erika wasn’t even looking at her.

Erika kept her eyes outside. She hadn’t seen it before; she wasn’t sure how. With the twisted topology of this place, it was entirely possible that she simply hadn’t looked back toward the bridge after The Stalker’s explosive bullet cleared away the fog.

Massive metal chain links, each the size of the van she was sitting inside, stretched and extended off into the darkness overhead, linked down into the depths on either side of the bridge. They weren’t completely on their own, this time. Spiraling, broken periodically by thick bands of metal, they wrapped around a quartet of towering arms.

Long fingers, tipped with black nails, twitched in the air, unable to move further with the chains restricting their movements.

“Oh my,” The Warrior said, leaning forward.

Erika clicked her tongue in annoyance. At least she had discovered why they were here.