28 – That Which Cannot Die

The birds did not follow.

The SUVs carried on down the new path The Emperor carved towards the mountainous terror bird, but none of the birds were interested in them anymore. They stayed clear, still dotting the red skies in the distance, back toward the bridge, but without approaching.

On one hand, it meant they weren’t having to fight endless hordes off while driving.

On the other, Erika wondered what they were wary of. Nya said they feared the Carrion Eater, but it hadn’t moved since falling without its head. Did they fear The Emperor, The Art, or anyone else in this convoy? They hadn’t been afraid before.

Then why were they so far away?

“Its head came off. We all saw it.” The Art turned the plastic crash-test dummy’s head to stare its black holes-for-eyes directly at Erika. “You’re saying it is still alive?”

Erika grimaced as she looked away from the window, feeling a little odd sitting in front of The Art. It wasn’t so much The Art herself—three other dummies were thrown in the back of this SUV, spare bodies for her, but there wasn’t room to position herself like a human would. The Art sat atop her spare bodies, jumbled up together with the others to the point where Erika wasn’t sure which limbs were attached to which body.

“Nya said it couldn’t die, and I was told something similar about the maggots. Killing them isn’t good enough.”

Erika turned away from The Art, grimace shifting to a scowl as The Hanged Man glared down at her from the other side of the SUV. Sofia separated them, glancing back and forth with a miserable look on her face.

“And what,” he said with a sneer, “might I ask, is good enough?”

Erika wasn’t sure about these new seating arrangements.

Not that she had much choice. Between half her SUV being torn apart and another having its engine block riddled with feathers, they had to do a bit of rearranging. It wasn’t as crowded as it should have been.

Erika didn’t sit easy knowing that. If she had been faster, shooting her gun to break everyone out of their panic just a little sooner, they might not have died.

“Believe me,” The Hanged Man carried on after Erika’s long pause, “as a Specter, I am well aware that death is not necessarily the end. My kind usually require an intact body, however. I have perhaps heard of an odd situation where someone returned without an arm or a leg, or maybe an occasional internal organ. Never have I seen a revenant without a head.”

Erika clicked her tongue in annoyance, but wasn’t quick enough to respond.

The Lust turned in the front passenger seat with an expression Erika couldn’t read—rapturous or airy, she couldn’t decide. The faint blue glow in her right eye intensified as her smile widened.

“Woe be unto those who speak in absolutes, for this world holds more mystery than any can hope to unravel.”

The Hanged Man’s eyes rolled as he let out a faint sigh—a surge of foreign annoyance hit Erika when she breathed in. “Yes,” he said, looking back to Erika. “Which is why I asked what is good enough.”

Erika tore her eyes off the shifting white tattoos swimming across The Lust’s dark skin to give The Hanged Man a half-shrug. “Nya says that as long as the idea of these things exist, they can’t die even if they’re killed. They’ll just return in another form. The Mummy is big on immortality, so I believe it.”

“Ah,” The Lust said, twisting in her seat even further to stare at Erika. “How does one kill an idea? Ideas, Miss Agent, are bulletproof.”

Raising an eyebrow, Erika shook her head. She wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean—Erika had heard a lot of bad ideas in her life, many of which came from her own head. “Not to my bullets,” she said, earning a wide grin from the exotic dancer.

“Forgive me for doubting, but how sure are you about that?” The Hanged Man asked. “You’ve already failed once, and if I heard right, you don’t have many opportunities left.”

Erika shrank back, stewing.

He wasn’t wrong. She clearly had the opportunity, but where she had taken her time, focusing and intending to break the maggot’s motherhood, here she had panicked. Realizing that they were inside the Carrion Eater’s mouth was like a syringe of adrenaline straight to the heart. She had fired, not with the intention to break the Carrion Eater, but to break out of its mouth.

“It’s my fault,” Sofia said, hunching her shoulders as she fiddled with the grenade launcher between her legs. “I shouldn’t have shot. They had it under control and I just thought—”

“You were fine,” Erika answered, lightly bumping her shoulder into Sofia’s. “Jack was getting up and she probably would have been a whole lot more distracting than a little glue.”

“Did you know you were shooting glue…?” The Hanged Man trailed off with a small frown. “What was your name again?”

“Sofia,” she hissed with an unusually heated glare.

“Ah yes. Sofia.”

“We met before, at the subway incident. I told you then.”

The Hanged Man dismissed her with a casual wave of his hand. “You can’t expect me to recall the names of every insignificant ghost hunter who crosses my path.”

“You had your goons drag me down to the station—they took my fingerprints.”

“Did they give them back?” The Lust asked, making everyone stop and stare.

Erika tried to figure out if she was serious, but her airy-rapturous expression didn’t change from before. Her question did seem to reset the SUV’s mood, with Sofia shaking her head and turning to Erika.

“I did know what that grenade did,” she said, fiddling with her bandoleer of large, rainbow-colored shells. “It came with instructions for each color.”

“What of the one you buried in the glue?” The Art asked, lightly tugging herself forward in the tangle of plastic limbs. “I want that bitch’s head on a pike, but hearing she suffocated painfully with her lungs filled with sticky ooze is acceptable.”

Sofia didn’t have an answer for her, shrugging lightly, but Erika had some bad news.

“She wasn’t inside the mound. We checked while everyone was organizing the cars. Just a human-shaped hollow in the hardened glue and a little blood on Rick’s sword.”

Erika hadn’t been surprised upon breaking open that shell of glue. She didn’t know how Jack reappeared, but she had seen Jack vanish enough.

It was interesting that she hadn’t reappeared. When Erika first noticed Jack, she thought that The Mummy’s cult wanted to protect the Carrion Eater. Now, calmer and able to think a little better about the actual words Jack had said, it sounded more like Jack had been there to get Erika out—to save her from being eaten.

When The Monk said they could wait for another one like Erika to appear, she figured they would be happy to fight and kill her the moment she turned down their little offer. Now, she was wondering if that might have been more of a bluff than it seemed.

Jack notably hadn’t tried to rescue Delilah.

Just as Erika’s eyes started to wander out the window again, their driver’s radio faintly beeped. He put a finger to his ear, listening for a moment. “Roger,” he said before removing his finger. The SUV ahead of them lit up its brake lights, forcing him to slow as well. “The Emperor is stopping the caravan to clear more path. It should only be a few moments.”

“Has Delilah or Nya said anything?” Erika asked before quickly amending, “Anything important, I mean.”

If Delilah was complaining about throwing up again, she didn’t want to hear it.

“Wouldn’t know, Ma’am.”

Sofia snorted at the title, but Erika ignored it. If Nya did say anything alarming, word would have traveled over their radios.

Erika breathed out. No birds. The Carrion Eater was down—not dead, but not attacking either. No sign of Jack. She just needed to focus on herself and on how she was going to ruin this headless chicken’s appetite.

The Emperor cleared another path ahead, glassing everything in the way. A faint tension swelled up for the several minutes they waited for the route to cool. The last two times The Emperor used her flames heralded the initial bird attack and the Carrion Eater’s rise. Erika’s leg thumped in impatience, eyes darting out the windows to check for threats.

The brake lights ahead winked out, and Erika breathed a faint sigh of relief as their driver rolled the car forward. Heat shimmered off the freshly-glassed track, hazing into the air. The wavering air didn’t block her vision, but the brier and other SUVs did.

“How close are we?” Erika asked, frustrated that she couldn’t see. “Any estimate?”

“Close enough to taste it,” The Lust interrupted before the driver could answer. “Mhmm… Barbecue. But I’m a vegetarian.”

Erika sniffed the air, despite herself, and found that The Lust wasn’t wrong. That rot that had been present since earlier lingered, but hidden underneath, Erika detected a faint sensation of grilled ribs. The Emperor’s flame must have tickled the corpse.

Based on previous experience, that meant between fifteen and thirty minutes at their current pace.

Fifteen minutes and everyone would be looking at her, expectant, waiting for her to fix everything so they could all go home.

The SUV swayed as the driver corrected for a long, curling crack in the glass road. Beyond the window, the brier patch grew thicker and denser, making it difficult to see even a foot beyond the charred, glassed edges. Her eyes drifted downward where The Emperor’s work only touched, leaving an upward slope of wet, veined ground from the plateau they first came off the bridge. The cars climbed it slowly; Erika felt the angle in her stomach more than she could see it.

Erika craned her neck, rolling down the window to peer forward. Up ahead, past the lead SUV, past The Emperor crouched on its hood with her coat snapping in the wind, the slope crested before it fell away into another vast chasm. The headless neck of the Carrion Eater obstructed the path, blocking a full half of it. Beyond it, the rest of the Carrion Eater’s body mounded in the brier patch.

“Holy shit,” Sofia whispered, leaning over The Hanged Man’s lap to see out the opposite window.

Erika squeezed over to see and couldn’t help her gasp.

She hadn’t quite been prepared for the scale of it lying down. Standing, it had been a bird pretending to be a mountain, but it had been so distant and there had been no real reference points nearby that that sight had been abstracted—it was obviously massive, but not in a realistic way. Now, seeing it much, much closer, it still didn’t quite feel real. No real creature could possibly be that large. It wasn’t so much a mountain, lying down, as it was a range with a round, rolling hill for a belly and spiked ridges where the feathers jutted up off its angled wings. It stretched on and on until the upper edge of the brambles finally hid the rest from view.

That belly slowly raised and fell, inflated then deflated, like it was still breathing.

Everyone knew the odd stories of chickens living with their heads cut off, but seeing the landscape breathe knowing it had no head filled Erika with a strange sense of dread.

The stump of the neck and small, rear section of the head were the only things really visible down low, and that was only because The Emperor’s work cleared away the bramble leading toward it. It moved more than the rest of the body, its end flopping and pulsing. Blood gushed from the end, cascading over the chasm’s edge. Bits of feathers and flesh kept getting sucked down the gaping tunnel of an esophagus, even with a portion of its own neck being drawn in, torn from the main mass with every heaving breath. The swallowed chunk of the bird never quite broke, drawing in more and more like a thread unraveling a worn blanket.

“I’ve heard of an Ouroboros,” The Lust said, loud, unashamed voice making everyone else jolt. “Never a chickboros.”

Erika couldn’t take her eyes off the mound long enough to give The Lust a strange look. She just shook her head, keeping her eyes steady.

“Oh… Oh no.” Sofia, pulling back from the window, pushed Erika aside anyway, breaking her view. “If we have to go into that, I’m going to kill someone.”

“I…” Erika shuddered. Its head and mouth were no more, and the throat wasn’t really considered a significant aspect of eating despite being the bridge between the stomach and the food. That probably meant that, if she wanted to break its concept of consumption, its stomach was the only real target she had. “Maybe.”

“Fuck.”

The driver’s radio beeped. He listened, frowned, and said, “The Emperor doesn’t want anyone, including in the cars, getting closer than about a hundred meters. Nobody gets sucked in. Nobody gets knocked off the chasm if the bird’s wings twitch.”

“If they twitch and hit anyone,” The Hanged Man said with a thin smile, “I imagine we will rather not have to worry about a fall killing us, given how flat we’ll be.”

The driver let out a snort. “Not my call. I go as close as The Emperor says and no closer.”

Erika dragged her gaze away from the monstrosity to give the driver a look, wondering how regular people got roped into things like this. Shaking her head, she looked back at the Carrion Eater, trying to figure out a way to break its concept without venturing inside.

Could The Emperor slice open its belly? Or anyone else, for that matter? Erika thought she might be able to; fissures in the ground weren’t hard to make and the differences between the ground and something that large weren’t significant.

It would still make a mess. The entire brier patch could flood with blood and bile, for all she knew. Erika would have to ensure they had a valid escape—or a safe place to sit and let things settle—before she did anything.

The convoy rolled the last several yards in silence. Even The Lust seemed to run out of off-kilter quips. Sofia’s hand snaked across the seat and found Erika’s wrist, holding it tightly. She wasn’t sure if Sofia held on for support or to try to stop her from breaking anything rashly. Erika hadn’t noticed when, but didn’t shake her off.

The SUV pulled to a stop. It felt further than a hundred meters, but when Erika stepped out, she could feel the Carrion Eater’s inhalation tug at her. It suddenly felt far too close.

She noticed something odd as well; the slope of the terrain still went upward, and yet she could see down beyond the chasm just past the fallen Carrion Eater. Red mist obscured most of the area beyond the plateau, but she could just make out another black bridge stretching between two distant islands.

“Would you take a look at that,” The Lust said, grinning at the bridge. Erika had already turned away, far more concerned with her job, but The Lust nudged her in the side. “Euclid is in shambles right now. Can’t stop his tears.”

“Sure,” Erika said, brushing past her to meet up with The Emperor.

Delilah was already next to her, having been in The Emperor’s vehicle. Unfortunately, it was Delilah. Her timid stance gave her away long before Erika saw her glossy, fear-filled eyes. Leslie stood with her, gaze alternating between the bramble walls and the red skies overhead.

The Emperor jumped off the hood of the lead car, landing hard against the ground. She straightened her back, adjusted the cuff of her suit sleeve, and swept a lock of hair from her eyes. Her coat fluttered in the breathing as she turned to Erika, staring down with slit-pupiled eyes.

Erika had to wonder if her imperious nature came naturally or if she was putting on a show.

“Agent. Handle this.”

“Right,” Erika said, taking a breath—almost choking on the stench as the Carrion Eater suddenly breathed out. “I think I need to get to its stomach.”

Nodding, taking Erika’s words at face value, The Emperor turned to consider the Carrion Eater. “Internally or externally?”

“Either, probably.”

“Probably. You think. Maybe.” The Emperor’s tone turned derisive. “Do you always shield yourself with uncertainty?”

Erika’s eyes narrowed, glaring at the back of The Emperor’s head. “When I’m uncertain, sure.”

“I would have you be assured and confident,” she said like it was a command. “It is an insult to those who have died to be so…” Her lip curled as she looked over her shoulder, wrinkling her nose as if she found Erika to be an overlarge piece of trash. “Flippant,” she finished.

Erika straightened her back, teeth clenched. “Fine. I need access to its stomach. Can you provide?”

“I will.”