27 – Did It Work

Erika’s skin tingled and burned, rubbed raw from her scrubbing. The water running down her skin felt exquisite anyway, and yet it wasn’t enough. Two empty body wash bottles littered the floor along with three bottles of shampoo, but Erika could smell the bile and sludge. Some still circled the drain, sticking to the edges of the stream where the water pushed it aside; the stench was as strong as ever.

“I think I got it up my nose,” Erika groaned, rubbing around the interior edges of her nose. Her fingers came away clean of slime, but still the scent lingered.

The Stalker called out from across the room. “My senses are deadened, but I think I can still smell it.”

“Could be worse,” Simone called out, standing in front of another showerhead, “could smell like a middle-school locker room.”

“Not a person here wouldn’t prefer that,” Sofia muttered. She looked miserable, lathering tar-tinged soap over her face.

A part of Erika wished she had a bath to soak in, but with all the filth, the water would have turned black in an instant. The middle-school locker room they had broken into would have to suffice for now.

Maybe they could break into a public pool with a hot tub afterwards.

“Fighting normally gets me horny,” The Stalker continued, ignoring the quipping.

Erika waited a moment for an explanation, but The Stalker returned to stringing her fingers through her hair. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that information.”

“Ignore it,” The Warrior grumbled, upending another pilfered bottle of shampoo over her head.

“I’m just saying, I’m not very horny right now.”

“Same,” Simone growled, cranking her hot water handle. Her comment earned a roll of The Warrior’s eyes and a look from Erika, but the sudden chill in Erika’s water stream made her fight back with a twist of her own handle.

“Maybe because we’re disgusting?” Anna offered, using a sponge to rub herself down.

Erika turned to her. Things had moved so fast lately; Erika hadn’t found the time to talk to her. Looking at her now, really looking, Erika spotted evidence of The Doctor’s handiwork. Discolored parts of her skin, separated by thin seams, covered her body. Thin black thread still stitched together a few of the worst-off areas, especially her legs and arms. Although The Gadget practiced tattoos, some corrections still didn’t quite line up with the rest. Every part of her body ended up somehow out of sync with every other part.

A disquiet simmered in the back of Erika’s mind, looking at Anna. The unease felt more academic than visceral. She wondered if the pain stemmed from empathy, recognizing she got off light on her injuries in comparison, or if it signaled something deeper: The Orderly and The Butler mentioned that those of The Castle were just off enough to trigger the uncanny valley, and now Anna might be in a similar position.

Erika’s eyes dropped down to Anna’s arms, eying the razor-thin seams that split her forearms in two. With all the chaos, she hadn’t even acknowledged the oddity of Anna’s arms stretching out to catch her. Moving her gaze up, over the deep Y-shaped scars across Anna’s chest, Erika found the woman looking right at her. Caught staring, Erika offered a smile.

“Thanks.”

Anna raised a questioning brow as her fingers worked a lather up around her shoulders.

Erika shrugged. “I’m surprised you aren’t scraping up this muck to put under a microscope later,” she said as conversationally as she could manage.

“I got three vials back with my… clothes,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

Deciding she hadn’t scrubbed enough yet, Erika grabbed a half-empty bottle and a scrunchie. “We’ll loot some gym uniforms on the way out for you guys. Might stink like sweat, but it’ll be better than…” Erika trailed off, gesturing around her.

“We just going to leave them here? The clothes and the bug guts?”

“I’m not touching them again.”

“I mean, kids will be here on Monday…”

“Ah…” Erika looked around, scowling at the sticky black liquid on the edges of the water streams, the flaps of flesh caught in the drain, and their stained clothes, mounded in a corner of the shower. “Soak it in bleach?”

“Call in an anonymous tip to The Eclipse, let them know there’s a supernatural biohazard here… Ugh. I hope the sewage treatment can handle maggot innards…” Sofia spoke, tone vacant until she noticed the looks she was getting. “What? It’s their job, isn’t it? Clean up shit like this?”

The Warrior eyed her, but eventually turned to The Stalker. “Maybe if they aren’t busy elsewhere.”

The Stalker activated her power and slowly started turning around. Her wide, bloodshot, shimmery eyes stopped on Erika for a long moment before she looked past her. “They’re roughly where they were before. Some of them look like they’re still fighting, but I’d say the intensity has dropped by half, at least.”

“So… it worked then?” Sofia asked, sounding hopeful. “We got it?”

“It didn’t die,” The Warrior corrected.

Erika shuddered as the squirming, undulating, and dilating popped back into her mind. The creature did still live, Erika knew that much. However, it had not been birthing. For as long as they were willing to stay and watch, no new maggots erupted from its mass.

After The Warrior warned her that killing a god might not end it, she hadn’t tried to do so; she had chosen an alternate method of stopping the threat.

“What do you suppose the odds are that we stopped it permanently?” Erika asked, directing the question toward The Warrior.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? I don’t know how you work. I only know how I work.” The Warrior grabbed the shower knob and twisted it closed. “And with everything I know now, I think I need to get back to work.” Her eyes lit up as a smile crept across her face. “I need bigger, better bullets. Maybe something that floods an everburning fire across that entire realm. Can’t kill the ██████ of Maggots, but we can sure kill everything that comes out of it. Forever.”

Erika blinked. “Wait, what?”

“Unless you want to leave it to The Eclipse,” she sneered. “We’ll have another maggot invasion in a week if they take care of it.”

“No, no, what did you call it?”

“It? The Eclipse? A maggot invasion?”

“No, the creature.”

“The ██████ of Maggots?”

Erika furiously rubbed at her ear, hoping bug guts clogged it up. “Say that one more time.”

“██████ of Maggots?” The Warrior said, now confused. She reached up as if to touch her glasses in that habit she had, but they weren’t on her nose at the moment.

Erika just stared. She wasn’t sure what The Warrior was saying, or how it was possible for a human mouth to make that noise—like every noise ever made in the history of time, compressed into the span of a single word. Erika turned to ask one of the others, only to find all of them staring, confused, but not at The Warrior. They looked at Erika like she was the weird one.

A deep seed of dread gripped Erika’s stomach, ripping it right out of her chest. “Anna, we dropped somebody off with Leslie’s family before coming over here. Who was that?” she asked, breath bated as she watched Anna’s face twist even deeper into confusion.

“My mom?”

“And what is another word for mom?”

“Erika, what—”

“Just, bear with me.” Erika held up a finger, eyes closed, taking a moment. Steadying herself, she snapped her eyes open once more. “Answer the question, please.”

Anna glanced at Sofia, got a shrug, and looked back to Erika. “Mother?” she answered, slow and uncertain. “She’s my mother.”

Erika gently closed her eyes, releasing a long, relieved sigh. “Okay,” she said, breathing. “Okay. Good.” Deciding she had been in the hot water for long enough, Erika shut off the valve. “Great.”

“What’s… going on?” Sofia asked, her voice uncharacteristically tense.

“Oh, nothing. I just thought I unintentionally doomed all multicellular life,” she said, letting out a nervous laugh.

“What.”

“She isn’t saying the creature’s title,” Erika said, pointing a trembling finger at The Warrior, “which got me worried that I broke a lot more than I meant to.”

Sofia shot a look at The Warrior, then raised an eyebrow at Erika. “██████ of Maggots?”

“Exactly. None of you can say it right, and none of you seem to realize you aren’t saying it right, and I notice, but I don’t know if I can say it right—or should, because it might break whatever I broke.”

Erika had never done anything quite like that before. The closest was destroying ID cards, and with those, people would know who she was if she reintroduced herself—and they generally seemed immune if they really knew her. Because she could at least partially undo that, Erika decided not to speak on the topic again for fear of giving the maggot its ability to birth monsters again.

Maybe she would tell The Director and he could use his geniusness to figure out why or what would happen if she spoke too much, but she did not want to ruin everything at this juncture. She went through far too much shit—literally—to risk that.

“I’m going to loot some clothes,” Erika said, stepping away from the showers before anyone could stop her. Some quieter discussion started up in her wake, but she didn’t have the focus to pay attention. Stepping out into the locker room proper, she approached a random locker, ripped the door open, and stared inside without seeing the locker’s contents. “Holy shit,” she whispered to herself.

Erika broke something big; she didn’t know what she broke, but the fact that nobody could say the name of the creature meant this wasn’t on the same scale as anything she had done in the past. Butterflies still squirmed in her stomach over the thought that she had broken the very concept of motherhood in general. She would probably have to visit a hospital maternity ward to be certain, but Anna gave her hope that she hadn’t just ruined life.

A surge of exhilaration shot through Erika, breaking out in a small nervous giggle before she restrained herself. If she could break something like that, what else could she conceivably break? One of her biggest problems right now was The Mummy’s impending freedom due the slowly forming pattern of her accidentally breaking its chains, but what if she simply broke the idea that The Mummy could be free at all?

“Simple,” she muttered with a scoff, shaking her head as she pulled a towel from one of the lockers.

Instinct told her that a baseball bat wouldn’t be enough again, and she didn’t even know where to begin. Breaking the maggot’s motherhood had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and she still wasn’t sure it would stick.

When Erika broke into a lock via bobby pin, it didn’t destroy the concept that the door could lock—flipping the deadbolt reset things back to normal. Smash the lock off and someone could buy a new one at the hardware store. If she destroyed the whole door, wall, or even the entire building, some contractor would put it back together again, thus repairing the lock in some sense of the word.

Motherhood could be the same, Erika didn’t know. She couldn’t even picture what might repair whatever she broke, given that she somehow made the word taboo, but someone more knowledgeable in esoterica might figure something out—The Mummy, or its henchmen, for instance.

If maggots showed up again en masse, it would mean her fix got broken—or vice versa—which meant that The Prescient could tell her just by foreseeing another invasion. She would have to text him…

Erika groaned.

After she replaced her phone. At some point during the evening, her phone disappeared on her. She suspected that it slipped out of her pocket while she had been sliding down the feeding ramp, but it could just as easily have fallen when she leaned into the hole to shoot, or even during the fighting outside the ziggurat. Regardless, she needed a new one, and maybe more than one. Having a disposable phone that she could lose when out fighting the foes of humanity sounded wise.

Pulling open a few more lockers, Erika found a small pile of clean-smelling uniforms. Someone left the locker unlocked, possibly intending it for students who forgot their clothes. Sized for middle schoolers, they were a bit small.

Erika didn’t care, reaching into her armory to pull out a fresh set of real clothes for herself—baggy trousers, a cheap coat, and a short top. The others would look ridiculous; an eager grin spread across Erika’s face.

“Something amusing?” Anna asked, stepping into the rows of lockers. Erika had tossed towels over the open doors, ready for any of the others, and Anna grabbed one without hesitation.

Erika’s smile slipped slightly as a momentary uncertainty hit her. “I feel pretty good about tonight,” she said as Anna started dabbing at her short hair. “I mean, it started off shit with me and my brother dragged off to hell-dimension, but I think it ended well.” Erika paused, reflecting. “It felt like we accomplished something.”

“The repeated ‘gas leaks’ concerned Rick the most, so if tonight stops more of those…” Anna trailed off, wiping down her face before wrapping the towel around herself. “The maggots weren’t the ones who attacked us though.”

Erika tensed, nodding slowly. “The tattooed guy. The Monk, I guess is a simpler way of naming him. He’s part of this, somehow. The… maggot thing is a servant—or part of?—The Mummy, and he is trying to free it…”

“The Monk. Is the naked woman getting a simple name now too?”

“Jack?” Erika said, shrugging. “Nude bitch?”

Anna offered a noncommittal hum as she picked up one of the school uniforms that Erika had laid out. One eyebrow popped up as she ran her gaze over Erika, frowning at her well-dressed, if not fashionable, attire.

“If you get me some spare clothes, I can pop them in next time something like this…” Erika trailed off, watching Anna throw on the shirt and mesh polyester shorts.

She picked at it, frowning as the shirt strained to fit. There were no bras or spare underwear, not that they would fit at all, but it was enough to last until they got out of here… even if the shorts were especially short and the shirt left her whole abs visible.

“Are you alright?” Erika couldn’t help but ask.

“I’m managing,” Anna answered, her tone neutral. “Rick mentioned you were feeling guilty and on edge around us. He said it wasn’t your fault; you couldn’t have known we were in danger. I think you’re right to feel guilty.”

Erika grimaced, shrinking in on herself.

“Not that I think he is wrong, but if we’re to be allies, you need to be open.” Her tone contrasted with her almost comical shimmying to fit into too-small shorts, and would have made Erika laugh if not for… everything. “A whole lot more than you have been,” she continued.

“I know. I told the others, but I plan on warning everyone about everything that I can, going forward.”

“Speaking of, you’ve broken a lot tonight. How is your watch?”

Erika held up her arm, brandishing the one bit of her attire that she had not sloughed off into a corner of the showers. Protected under her sleeves, it thankfully wasn’t too filthy. “There are about thirty minutes before it goes off. I wasn’t using it in the ziggurat—it would have overloaded before we even fought off a quarter of the maggots—so the only ripples are from breaking into the museum and into here. Leslie and I have already discussed how to deal with them: we’ll head downtown and dump the ripples in a crowded place before heading back to Varn’s.”

“And that’ll be safe?”

“I do this all the time,” Erika shrugged. “They’ve never attacked in public. I don’t know if we can count on that forever, but it is what it is so far.”

Anna nodded and opened her mouth to speak.

The Stalker popped between them, snatching a towel, and started grinding it into her scalp. “You bitches sound all whiny and serious.” She switched to rubbing the towel over her body hard enough to give Erika second-hand rope burns. “Know what we need? Some good cheap beer, and loads of it.”

“Does your…” Erika rephrased with a frown. “Can you even get drunk?”

“That’s not the point,” The Stalker snapped, staring at Erika with wide, intense eyes. “Got to celebrate. We just shoved a middle finger up some fake god’s ass.”

“Who’s we?” Sofia muttered, exiting the showers alongside Simone. “I just held her legs down and…” She grabbed a towel, but stopped and stared at Anna, then turned to Erika, then the pile of uniforms. “You have got to be kidding.”

Erika pushed her grin back onto her face. “Unless you want to walk out of here naked? Or worse, with your old clothes.”

“Tempting,” Simone said.

A litany of Spanish curses filled the air, making Erika chuckle. The Stalker didn’t seem to mind half as much; still damp, she grabbed a shirt and tugged it over her head, piercings pressed against the fabric.

“Whatever,” she shrugged, only to stop and stare back toward the showers.

The Warrior stepped out, fully dressed in a floral-pattern sundress with an amber cardigan thrown over the top. Her low heels clicked against the locker room floor as she strutted out. “What?” she asked, smiling a far too innocent smile as she took in the stares. Dipping her head in an acknowledging nod, she continued right past Erika toward the door. “Some of us come prepared to these sorts of outings,” she called out, hefting a pristine shotgun onto her shoulder before vanishing into the other room.

“That fucking bitch,” The Stalker snarled, stomping after her without even grabbing a pair of shorts. Simone threw a helpless shrug to the others, wrapped a towel around herself, and chased after The Stalker.

By the time Erika, Anna, and Sofia left the locker room, The Stalker and The Warrior departed along with their cultists. That left the boys standing around, having found their own cache of ill-fitting clothing. Daniel’s ears burned red, but Erika was too busy laughing at Leslie’s barrel-chest disagreeing with his looted middle-schooler-sized shirt to tease her friend.

For the first time in January, she felt like she could breathe a little easier.

---

As the truck pulled up to Varn’s, Erika tensed.

A familiar young woman sat slumped against the rear door, chest rising and falling in faint, shallow breaths. Blood streaked across the door in long, grasping, desperate arcs, as if she had been trying to pry it open. Her shirt, tugged down, showed off a midnight-black tattoo against her light-tan skin, drawn in the shape of a crescent moon. Unlike the last time Erika saw Delilah’s tattoo, it now sported two thick bars jutting from the tips of the moon, forming an X that wrapped around her neck and shoulders.