25 – The Ziggurat

Black bile splattered across the steps of the ziggurat. Chunks of viscera arced through the air, flung from the end of Erika’s bat. Each turned into a projectile in its own right, splattering every maggot in the way.

Grime coated every inch of her face. Erika opted for garbage clothes knowing she would end up getting dirty, but she hadn’t quite realized just how messy the night would become. Her hair felt tangled and greasy, a rat’s nest despite pinning it in a neat bun to keep it out of the way. The maggots tended to pop, leaving her with blood seeping down cracks and crannies all over her body.

Erika didn’t stop smiling.

A single swing of her bat, one home run hit against a bug charging toward her, and she could clear out swathes of the creatures. In all her life, Erika couldn’t remember a time when she just let loose; maybe when she fought the monk, breaking every bone in his body counted, but her injuries and the stress of her friends being injured left her unable to enjoy that.

Erika wasn’t sure if she was enjoying herself, but invigoration surged through her with every crushed maggot splattering through the cavernous chamber. She had to hold back a little, not wanting to cave in the cavern while she was inside it, but that wasn’t where her energy came from. For the first time in a long while, she was on the attack, not sitting about discussing what could be done, hiding, or reacting to something. The only damper came in knowing that she wasn’t focused on The Mummy; the goal today was the Mother of Maggots.

“Headcrab behind!” Daniel barked out, making Erika hop aside.

One monstrous human lunged, missing Erika thanks to the warning. She didn’t know why Daniel was calling them headcrabs—it looked like maggots forced their bulbous, squirming bodies straight down some guy’s throat, bulging and bloating it, forcing his neck back at an angle while a ring of sharp teeth replaced the guy’s normal mouth.

Erika squared up, readying her bat, but the glint of a blade flashed before her eyes. The infected’s head slid off to one side while its body fell to the other. Rick stood in its wake, staring at Erika with hazy eyes, sword drawn. A talisman hung from his neck, glowing with faint yellow lines—a present from The Warrior. Eyes focusing for a moment, Rick turned, pivoting into a swing of his sword to bisect another of the humanoid monsters.

With a shudder, Erika swiped, splattering another maggot that leaped toward her, sending its carapace and viscera into a small crowd squirming down the side of the ziggurat. She didn’t know what effect that talisman was having, but Rick hadn’t attacked her yet.

The attack wasn’t going as Erika envisioned, with far fewer flames than expected in the name of ammo conservation, but in a way, she was glad for it.

She would set a record for breaking things today.

“Not many left,” The Stalker said, teleporting in to stab an infested in the back of the head—her glowing orange blade trailed heat haze in the air as she wrenched it out.

Blinking, Erika glanced around, focusing on the larger picture. Sure enough, while a dozen odd maggots still squirmed down the stepped sides of the ziggurat, most of the initial wave pooled around Erika’s boots as black bile and chunks of carapace. “That it?” Erika shouted up the stone steps. “Pathetic for an apocalypse!”

“Idiot,” Sofia hissed from somewhere in the back. “Do not taunt the unrelenting waves of bugs.”

“Looks like they relented pretty quick to me,” Erika snapped back, a little frustrated. Here she was, soaked in bug guts, arms sore from swinging her bat; Sofia looked ready for a casual-themed beauty pageant. It wasn’t just Sofia—only Rick and Erika had been in the thick of things, with the occasional teleport-support stab from The Stalker. “That was, what? Thirty minutes? I expect my apocalypses to last at least an hour.”

“Based on what I saw before we entered,” The Stalker said, stabbing another maggot, “The Eclipse wasn’t doing too hot. They looked like they were retreating, although it is a bitch to figure out what is going on in a fight when you can only see one side.”

“Can you still see them?” Erika asked, earning herself a shake of the head.

“This place is completely cut off,” The Stalker said, turning her head with shimmering eyes. “Maybe if they were standing in front of the portal…”

Erika glanced back, as did half the others. The portal still stood at the base of the ziggurat, edges aglow in the orange light of the flare. Even though they had just escaped another parallel dimension, an undercurrent of unease followed by relief swept through the group as they confirmed they weren’t trapped.

A crackle of mundane gunfire sent a maggot crashing to the ground. It bounced with a squelching crack before vanishing over the side of the ziggurat. “Keep focused,” Leslie said, lowering a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. “And watch the ceiling.”

Erika cast a suspicious gaze upward, hoping that Leslie would continue to watch the ceiling—her bat wouldn’t reach.

A sharp scrape of metal brought her attention back down, making her hop in startled surprise. Rick, three steps ahead of her, slammed his sword back into its sheath with a gasping breath. Only when the clasps were in place did the faint glow of the talisman fade away. He stood there, just breathing, forcing Erika to move ahead to swat away another of the maggots.

“How was it?” The Warrior called out, chipper.

“No idea.” Rick’s words came with a heavy exhale. “Better, I guess. I don’t feel so out of it.”

“You didn’t attack me, so whatever it was, it worked about that well.”

“Come, let me inspect the counterspell,” The Warrior said as she hurried up the ziggurat steps.

“Is now the time?” Erika said, glowering at the last few maggots still squirming around. None were within reach.

The Warrior pulled out the silvery catalyst, jabbing it at the talisman. “It is if we don’t want this failing in the middle of a fight. Probably best not to be next to him if that happens.”

Erika grumbled under her breath, watching as The Stalker teleported around to stab the remaining maggots; given that she was the one most likely to be closest to Rick, she didn’t argue. The inspection gave her a chance to catch her breath, letting her rest her arms even as she tried to keep limbered up. She could hope that there weren’t going to be too many more monsters between them and the Mother of Maggots. Erika flexed her sore arms, exhilarated but not sure she could keep this up for another hour.

The thing was called the Mother of Maggots—there would be maggots.

“Say, what’s stopping those cultists from just rushing me with those sympathetic link chains hidden under their shirts, tricking me into breaking all The Mummy’s restraints at the same time?”

“No idea,” The Warrior absently hummed, twisting the little talisman back and forth in her fingers. “Doubt they’re using my brand of magery to create those things. Maybe complexity in construction, maybe physical proximity—the way I might make something similar would fall apart in an instant if it crossed the boundaries between realms.”

Erika ground her teeth, angry and wary. “So I should have stayed home.”

“Not necessarily.” The Warrior looked up, rubbing her thumb along her glasses. “I don’t think this is the same place where we were earlier. It feels different.” She shrugged and poked at the talisman once again. “You already broke the chains here, right?”

“Unless I missed one.”

“Hm. Well, the counterspell degraded, far more than I would have expected,” The Warrior said as she stepped away from Rick. “I’ve fixed it, but just as a patch job. Please avoid having your sword out for longer than ten minutes at a time.”

“If that’s an option. If not… Well, I’ve used my sword in the past without too much trouble.” Rick paused, frowning down at the hilt on his hip. “I’ve never ascribed emotion to it before, but something makes me think it was happy with the last hour.”

“Concerning.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t like unexpected change. It certainly isn’t a sapient or sentient sword, so you calling it happy makes me worried.”

Still looking at his sword, Rick stared, removing his hand from its hilt. “Probably projecting. I didn’t feel quite so out of it after sheathing it, so I was happy.”

“Well,” The Warrior clapped her hands together. “Deal with it. No time to rework it now.” Looking around, she cocked her head. “What are we all waiting for?”

Everyone gave her a flat look, but nobody bothered saying anything as they started the climb up the ziggurat’s steps. The steps felt odd; one step to the next felt twice as tall as any regular staircase, but the one after felt longer than high. Visually, Erika couldn’t tell the difference between the two, despite feeling it with her legs. She couldn’t remember if that was how it was the first time around, if she even paid attention with all the other things on her mind.

Leah being missing, for one.

Of course, The Fixer and Leah were missing again, so not much had changed. Erika didn’t think they ended up kidnapped by The Mummy this time, given that the Cheshire woman had run away rather than face the clockwork angel. However, part of her expected to turn a corner to find The Fixer trussed up again.

It grated in the back of Erika’s mind. Somehow, despite knowing more about the supernatural and the scene in Chicago, she had even fewer clues as to their whereabouts than she had the first time around.

If they were here, Erika would try to rescue them. If not… she could only press on and hope they would show up later.

The trickle of maggots continued squirming out from the mouth of the ziggurat. Erika introduced her bat to each as they ascended. The group reached the top and halted.

As she had spotted from below, someone cleared away the rubble. All that remained was a wide opening, where that fleshy membrane once was, that led down into the depths of the ziggurat. The light from the flare didn’t reach far, but it wasn’t the darkness that stopped them.

“Oh god,” Sofia moaned, hand clasped to her nose.

Erika switched to breathing through her mouth, which just let her taste the stench. It was like a combination of high school locker room, ass, and rotten meat.

Gagging, The Warrior leveled her shotgun and fired another blast of lemony-scented cleaner air down into the darkness, which helped, but not as much as it had earlier.

“How many more of those have you got?” Anna asked, surprising Erika with her calm voice and lack of even a slight wrinkle of her nose.

“Not as many as I would like,” The Warrior answered, pulling a floral-pattern cloth mask from her pocket. As soon as she had it in place, she swapped to her flare gun and fired off into the darkness.

The bright light streaked past a litter of bones covering the floor. Most were nothing but bone, lacking sinew, muscle, or skin. Others possessed remnants of life, though long decayed. Not all of the bones were human; from a quick glance, humans appeared the least, with most belonging to rats or mice, and other small vermin.

The piles of bones reached higher than Erika stood tall, filling the large antechamber. Only tiny pockets of stone poked through the gaps between the bones, leaving one small trail to walk—presumably used by the infected humans. Erika, figuring she was still going to lead, started down the shallow ramp; nicks and scrapes covered it, as if the bodies had been tossed down from the entrance. A heavy hand on her shoulder stopped her.

“Ceiling,” Leslie said, stepping in front of her with his submachine gun up. The muted crackle of his subsonic ammo still ripped holes through a quartet of maggots, knocking them off the ceiling and into the piles of bones.

As soon as he lowered his gun, The Stalker teleported ahead, stabbing down into a mass of deer antler. Thin red scrapes lined her arms, but she ignored it as she ripped a maggot from the mound, stared at it squirming on the end of her blade, and flung it against the wall with a wet plop. “There are a few lurking in the bones. Careful,” she said, wiping the black bile on her thin dress—which had started the evening white, but wasn’t so clean anymore.

A bit more cautious, Erika advanced. An eerie feeling settled in. Despite The Stalker pointing out hidden maggots, or handling them herself, the difference between being swarmed not five minutes ago and creeping through the remnants of their meals with barely a peep from them set her teeth on edge. They couldn’t all have come out to attack them.

Everyone else felt it too. A tense, ominous silence kept anyone from conversing. Even The Warrior, who felt more chipper than a normal person, simply held fast to her shotgun and scanned every inch of the ceiling as they walked.

Anna broke the silence first, approaching a wall with a deep gouge marring the stone bricks. “What do you suppose this is?” she asked, leaning in.

Sofia grabbed her and pulled her back. “What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed. “Don’t get close to a crack in the wall. Have you never seen a horror movie? Did you lose your common sense when you… Sorry…”

“There’s no monster inside,” Anna said, shrugging Sofia off, though she didn’t get quite so close this time. “Look, you can see… a bowling alley?”

Against her better judgement, Erika moved to peer through the crack as well. Though the gap would barely fit her hand, she could see clearly enough that Anna was right. A whole bowling alley, complete with electric lights, greased lanes, and televisions displaying those slightly creepy bowling animations sprawled out on the other side. It wasn’t some weird, twisted, liminal bowling alley that extended forever or had pins defying gravity on the ceiling, it was just a regular bowling alley. There were no people on the other side, though it looked like some food had been left out. A few trails of black slime dragged away from the crack in the wall, mostly toward the front doors.

“I can see The Eclipse, still fighting,” The Stalker said, leaning over Erika’s shoulder with her eyes shimmering.

“That’s Chicago for sure, then?”

“Must be how the bugs are getting out. Little cracks in the walls,” Anna hummed, reaching for it, only to be dragged back by Sofia again. “That bowling alley will probably be shut down for ‘gas leaks’ tomorrow.”

“Might explain where all the maggots have gone,” Erika said, narrowing her eyes as she scanned through the antechamber again, this time focusing on the walls and ceiling—sure enough, she spotted a handful of other cracks. There was no guarantee that each had little mini portals back to Chicago—she couldn’t see through any of them from an angle—but if even a handful did, it would explain a lot. “I expected to have to wade through the corpses of maggots to get to their mother. What we fought outside didn’t account for even half what I thought there might be.”

The Warrior cocked her head, her curious eyes shifting toward Erika. “How did you estimate how many there would be? Did The Prescient put a number on it?”

“Well… no. He just said apocalypse,” Erika shrugged. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure that he had actually used that word. Not that it mattered at this point. “When I think of maggots, I generally think of lots of maggots, squirming in the trash or whatever, not just one or two. So when I think of an apocalyptic number of maggots, I multiply that by at least a hundred.”

“You’re guessing,” The Warrior said like it was a gotcha.

“To be fair,” Simone cut in, “I feel like what we fought outside fit my definition of a number of maggots I wish I had never seen, and I know that can’t be all of them.”

“Agreed,” Sofia said, shuddering. “I hope they stop if we get rid of this mother… but…” she trailed off, looking around. “There’s several ways to go. We aren’t splitting up, are we?”

Four distinct passages split off from the large antechamber, all without lights of their own, making it impossible to see further in than a few feet. The Warrior fired a flare at one, revealing a curved corridor, then started reloading.

Daniel pointed down the opening on the opposite side of the room. “That one,” he said, grimacing.

“What makes you say that?” Leslie asked, calmly repositioning himself to be between Daniel and the door.

“I think the smell is coming from there, so it’s either their toilet or their…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

Sofia let out a long, sorry sigh. “I agree,” she droned. “Not because of the smell… I just have a bad feeling, which means it is probably the way to go.”

“Psychic feeling or gut feeling?” Erika asked.

“I don’t know the difference.”

“Fair enough.”

“Any objections to the stinky passage?” Rick asked, sweeping his gaze over the entire group, but lingering on The Puppet.

The Warrior shot a glance at The Stalker, got a faint shake of the latter’s head, and raised her flare gun. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

The bright light sailed down a long, narrow tunnel that dipped downward on a smooth slope. The flare plinked at the end, jammed into the wall just above a large circular hole in the floor of the far end of the sloped path.

With a wary glance at the others, Erika took the lead. After the cathedral sprawl of the antechamber, the corridor pressed in close—low ceiling, few bones, and nowhere for anything to hide. Murals carved into the walls depicted some beings throwing or vomiting down a similar tunnel, but Erika wasn’t an archaeologist. She kept her focus on the few stray maggots, dispatching them almost too easily.

A wet, warbling noise echoed from the far end, growing louder and louder with every step she took. Wet smacking of flesh against flesh filled her mind with unpleasant imagery.

Erika focused on the maggot ahead of her, stepping forward with a swing of her bat. The metal connected, splattering the maggot across the walls, but Erika’s boot came down on a sharper slope, hitting a patch slick with blood. Her foot slid out from under her, throwing her into painful splits as she slid down toward the circular pit at the end.

Half the others yelled out, like that would help. Teeth grit together, Erika jammed her bat into the wall, breaking through the stone until she stopped trying to break it. Her bat caught, almost tore out of her grip from the force. Her fingers strained, keeping hold of the bat’s haft with every ounce of grip strength she had.

Erika jerked to a stop with her legs dangling into the circular hole and the concert hall-sized chamber beneath.

The flare, caught in the wall overhead, shone down through the hole at a smooth, gray, pulsating mound of flesh. An entire mountain of thin skin pulsed and squirmed; cracks and splits bled where the skin rubbed against the walls of the oubliette. Orifices dotted its surface, their sphincters pinching and squeezing, dribbling slime before popping open. Each pop spewed out more maggots than Erika had killed, sending them sliding down the sides of the mountainous mass of flesh. Dozens—hundreds ended up crushed between the stone walls and the creature they contained, but more than enough managed to crawl away, scurrying down other passages.

Directly beneath the hole, right underneath Erika, one sphincter popped open and closed, squeezing and pushing rings of sharp teeth that led deeper and deeper into the meat.

A crack of stone jolted Erika’s hammering heart. She glanced up, watching in horror as the bat she clung to for dear life broke a small chunk of weakened stone away from the rest of the wall. She grasped, fingers slipping over the bile-slick walls without finding purchase.

Another chunk of stone cracked, and the bat tore free.

Erika slipped through the hole.

Hands clamped down over Erika’s shoulders. Erika craned her neck up, finding Anna on her stomach, upper half hanging into the hole. Her arms stretched out, hands disconnected from the rest of her arms except for a few thin strands of sinew. Her face contorted with strain as the sinew slowly dragged Erika back to the opening.

As soon as she was up close enough, The Stalker reached over the top of Anna, helping to pull Erika to safety, while the others kept hold of Anna and The Stalker to keep them from joining Erika down below.

The slick, viscera-coated floor never felt so welcoming.

Erika should have thanked them, but her breath felt short. Her heart hammered in her chest, trying to escape, even as she sucked down far, far too much of the foul air. None of the others spoke either, not even commenting as Erika retched. Standing well back from the hole, they stared down in horror.