30 – A Surprise Visit from an Unwelcome Guest

Erika checked her watch, mentally counting how long each second took to pass. Normally, time moved at a fairly regular pace of one second per second, but her watch accelerated after she broke things. Starting four hours behind real time, she had until the watch caught up to the current hour before the ripples of her power would propagate, thus becoming detectable to The Mummy.

The tests with the cubes had gone on for an hour, breaking all five of the cubes during that time. She had also performed a few additional tests for another hour, breaking a few random objects, one of her false ID cards, and even a dollar bill into change, just to try to better understand what she was doing. It was, perhaps, the most she had used her abilities since discovering The Mummy’s existence, leaving the hands of her watch spinning rapidly.

There were only about seven minutes left before all the accumulated ripples would drop out into the world. If she had still been in Chicago, she would have been more worried, but being out in the middle of nowhere over an hour away from the city left her feeling mostly safe. Even if the watch failed right now, they would have plenty of time to casually pack up and head out before anyone from Chicago could get down here.

Unless they could teleport.

If they could teleport, they surely would have caught Erika by now, popping in the moment she dispersed the ripples at any other time she had used her watch—or her powers in general.

Even still, it was probably best not to stick around too long.

“How did the investigation go?” Erika asked as Anna dusted off some snow, reentering the old farmhouse. “Find anything?”

“Not a thing. Ran around the fence line and zig-zagged through the fields. If there is a ghost, it is localized to one small area that I must have missed.”

“I rechecked the house for a third time,” Rick said. “Every room, checked again. No pings on any equipment. I’d say whatever ghost was here was taken care of with that circle upstairs.”

“Then I vote we leave for now,” Erika said, glancing at her watch once again. “Five minutes before people start noticing what I’ve been up to, possibly attracting The Mummy once again. Doubt they’ll be here soon, if they bother to come out here at all, but still…”

“I vote for going home, too,” Bethany grumbled, fiddling with her phone. Now that the magic was over with and there was still no sign of ghosts, she had grown bored, and vocal about her boredom. “Don’t even get a good signal out here. Can’t even scroll my feeds without stuttering.”

“What do we tell The Eclipse?” Sofia asked, huddled up in her coat.

“The truth,” Leslie answered. “We came out, investigated, found evidence of a prior banishment, and found no evidence of a current haunting. If that isn’t enough for them because we weren’t the ones to banish the ghost, then we offer another job?”

“Sounds like a good way to get strung along,” Rick said, throwing some of his gear into a backpack. “Going to run through the house one more time, make sure I didn’t leave anything behind. The rest of you can go wait in the van if you want.”

Leslie motioned to his children before turning back to the rest of The Hunters. “We’ll depart first. Give a call when you’re back in town, just so I know you all got back safe.”

“Finally.” Bethany kicked off the wall. “Could have left like an hour ago.”

“You’re the one who begged to go, even though…” Daniel trailed off, giving his sister a pointed look before turning to Erika. “You going to be in school Monday?”

“Unless something more interesting pops up.”

“Sounds about right. See you then, maybe.”

Erika was fairly certain she would shoot him some texts over the weekend, but she nodded and waved as he headed out, leaving her and the other Hunters behind. None of them went out to wait in the van; despite the house being ghost-free, Rick could still fall through a rotten floorboard or trip over a protruding nail and fall down the stairs.

A tick, louder than normal, hit Erika like a pressure wave, making her eardrums pop and a tingle run up her spine. It wasn’t a physical pressure wave, not even a single hair on her head fluttered in its wake, but she still felt it.

Sofia jolted, hopping up from a light crouch like she had touched a live wire. “¿¡Qué chingados fue eso!?” she snapped, staring at Erika. “The hell was that?”

“What was what?” Anna, confused, looked at Sofia first before turning to Erika. “What happened?”

“You felt that?” Erika asked, surprised.

Anna swung back to Sofia. “Felt what?”

“How could I not?” Sofia said with a shudder, clasping a hand to her chest. “It was like a bomb going off right in my heart.”

“Really? It just made my ears pop a little.” Erika frowned down at her watch. The hands weren’t moving, and they wouldn’t move for about four hours, at which point the watch would become usable again. “I did warn you that it would happen, but now I’m curious… Do you feel this?”

Spotting a protruding nail in the wall, Erika took her bat and lightly knocked against it—perpendicular to the nail—shearing it cleanly at the base. With her watch inoperable for four hours, all the ripples she made would propagate immediately, no delay at all. Since she had apparently just set off a bomb here, she figured another little ripple wouldn’t hurt anything.

Looking up, curious to see what, if anything, Sofia felt, Erika found the woman staring off toward a blank wall. Her face was one of open-mouthed shock, eyes wide and pupils small.

Erika started to get a bad feeling.

“Rick!” Erika shouted, right as the man started down the steps once more. “We need to leave. Now.”

“What’s going on?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking,” Anna grumbled, though concern tinged her voice as she walked up to Sofia.

“My watch went off. Now Sofia is freaking out about something. Any other explanations can take place in the car.”

“I haven’t checked the basement—”

As soon as Anna placed a hand on Sofia’s shoulder, the latter woman screamed. She flinched back, hands shaking, ripping herself out from under Anna’s hand. She stared, eyes wide, looking at the shocked members of the group.

Sofia spoke the words which Erika had guessed, but still hoped she wouldn’t say. “Something else noticed.”

“Okay. Convincing argument,” Rick said. “Let’s leave.”

“Come on, Sofi,” Anna said, reaching out for Sofia again. This time, more aware of her surroundings, she didn’t scream or pull away as Anna led her out to the van.

Erika paused partway there while Rick threw his gear in the back—he didn’t bother to rack the equipment—and stared off in the same direction Sofia had been looking. She was fairly certain it was North West, roughly in the direction of Chicago. There was nothing there, nothing visible, at least, but that didn’t mean Sofia was wrong. She was some kind of psychic that Erika thought had been limited to ghosts, but now, she had sensed both the watch ending and something coming.

Maybe that something was a ghost; that would make sense given Sofia’s demonstrated abilities… or maybe Sofia had been lying—or was simply unaware—about the full breadth of her abilities. Given that The Mummy was after Erika, she wasn’t willing to bet on ghosts at a time like this.

“Sofia,” Erika said, slamming the van door closed. Rick wasted no time getting the engine started and the vehicle moving away from the old farmhouse, but Erika’s bad feeling hadn’t dissipated. “Can we outrun it in the car?”

If it was something that spooked Sofia all the way from Chicago, and if it was going to be here in minutes rather than hours, Erika was going to bet that they couldn’t outrun out. With the snow and the fairly deserted stretch of country roads, any pursuer would be able to track them unless they could reach a busy road before it found them. And because of the snow, they wouldn’t be able to put the pedal to the metal without flying off into a ditch.

The normally light brown skin tone of Sofia’s face was unusually pale when she looked at Erika, and that probably wasn’t from the light reflecting off the gray skies and snow. “I don’t know. I can feel it. Is it getting closer? Is it just looking in this direction?”

Grinding her teeth, Erika pivoted, staring out the back window of the van, wondering if there was anything she could do. Her first thought was to lean out the back of the van and drag her bat through the tire tracks they left in the snow, breaking the association of the tracks with the van in the same way that she broke her link to her false identities, but the physical tracks would still be present. Even if they couldn’t be followed while broken like that, The Mummy was tracking her breaking things, meaning they would keep following her. If her watch wasn’t fully depleted, it would have worked, but as things were, it would probably only make the situation worse.

“Any of you have phone service?” Anna asked.

Erika pulled out her phone, but found no bars. It wasn’t a surprise given that she hadn’t had service up here the first time around. Whether odd geology or simple remoteness, the farm wasn’t positioned in a good spot for cell signals.

“I might,” Rick said, handing his phone over while he focused on driving. “Saw a bar for a minute, but it flickered out. No time to fiddle with it.”

Anna took it and immediately started typing, probably a message to warn Leslie and his kids.

“It would be a good idea to send a text to The Fixer,” Erika said as she returned to glaring out the back window of the van. “I don’t know if they can get here in any reasonable amount of time, but they might have advice for dealing with something after us.”

When Erika wound up captured by The Church, The Fixer showed up surprisingly quickly, and they could manipulate time to some extent, so Erika wouldn’t be shocked if they did show up. Still, this was a fair bit further away from home than The Church, and unless Anna sent GPS coordinates, they wouldn’t know exactly where to appear.

“Sofia,” Erika said, trying to focus on the now and not the possibilities. “Any change? Does it feel closer, further, or neither?”

“I don’t… closer, definitely closer, but I can’t tell—I don’t know if I’ve ever felt something like this before.”

“Presumably,” Anna said, speaking slowly as she still focused on typing, “we’ve been living in the same city as these things for at least two months, if not more. Ever since the whole museum thing, at least.”

“Yes, but they haven’t been looking at me. They haven’t been exerting power to get to me. I think that’s what I’m feeling, some…”

Erika’s stomach twisted into a knot as Sofia trailed off, staring out the side window. Erika followed her gaze to find a man standing across an empty, snowy field. It was hard to get a reference for scale in the white emptiness, but she could still tell that he was large, both in height and in width, like The Butler if she had decided to take up sumo wrestling as a hobby—he was dressed as Erika imagined a sumo wrestler might when outside the ring, wearing a dark robe that stuck out against the white snow.

“There’s—”

He lifted an arm, pointing a long, wooden rod directly at the van. Erika didn’t get a chance to shout a warning before her world erupted in pain.

The world spun. Erika’s first thought was that she had been punched in the chest by The Fool’s giant rock monster, but the shriek of metal and the sickening lurch of gravity told her otherwise. The van lifted off the road, her stomach dropping as the seatbelt bit into her shoulder. Anna screamed. Sofia’s hands clawed for purchase. Rick’s knuckles went white on the wheel, but it was useless.

The van twisted in the air, glass shattering as the side window imploded. Erika’s head slammed against the window frame, stars bursting behind her eyes. The world outside was a blur of white and gray as the horizon flipped end over end. The sky passed by, then the ground, then the sky again, then the van crashed down on its roof with a bone-jarring crunch. The roof caved in above Erika’s head, stopped mere inches away by the yank of the seatbelt.

Erika’s vision tunneled, her ears ringing with the cacophony of shrieks—tires, glass, someone’s voice, which might have been her own. The van slid along, scraping and spinning on the icy road, until it finally shuddered to a stop, rocked once, then settled with a groan of ruined metal.

For a long moment, Erika hung there, upside down, blood rushing to her head… and from her head, dripping to the metal roof of the van.

Erika blinked and, in an instant, broke out of her stupor. She was alive. Anna was moaning somewhere to her left. Sofia was crying, soft and desperate. Rick was silent—was he still alive?

That man was still out there. If Erika didn’t stop him, it was likely they all would be dead before anyone else could recover. She didn’t know if she was in shock or what, but she did know that nobody else was in a position to fight a giant.

Erika fiddled with her seatbelt, but it was jammed or stuck. Grasping the straps, she pulled, hard, popping the metal bolts holding it to the car’s frame. She fell a few inches, landing on her shoulder blades. The fall sent a jolt up her neck, but she didn’t really feel it.

It was the adrenaline. The moment she calmed down, she would probably curl up in a ball and cry herself into a coma.

A flash of rage welled in her stomach as she focused on the giant outside. She couldn’t see him; it was just the idea of him that she focused on. If she lost focus, the pain might creep up on her.

Shifting in place, her back grinding against broken glass, Erika kicked at the sole intact window of the van, shattering it to pieces. She started squirming out, unable to move well in the now compacted vehicle.

“Ah. There you are.”

Fat, meaty fingers closed around her ankle, dragging her out of the wreckage. One knee held all her weight as the hand lifted her, bringing her face-to-face with the overly large monk.

“Sorry about that. I didn’t expect such a crash—”

Erika introduced her combat boot to the man’s wrist. It bent, cracking like a log. Erika didn’t get to enjoy the satisfactory noise or the look on his face before she fell another few feet, landing on her back once again.

“Come, now, friend. That is no way to treat your allies.”

Erika spat, tasting copper, and swung her legs around, trying to catch the man by the ankles. He simply hopped back, moving faster than expected from a man of his girth. Erika drained time, dragging on it with all her might, just to squeeze out a little haste as she clambered to her feet.

She was on her feet—that fact almost made her laugh, feeling like the first time she had control since…

The crash had been only a moment ago, a bare instant. She wasn’t even sure a full minute had passed, but it felt like days had gone by.

Erika focused on the man in front of her, getting her first good look at him. As she thought from afar, he was huge, standing at least as tall as The Butler and four times as wide. His several layers of clothes hid most of his body, but what skin he had on display was unnaturally pale, marked with thick, black tattoos just like the woman from the hotel.

Her eyes drifted to his wrist, bent. He didn’t seem bothered by it, but it was definitely broken.

He might have the same tattoos as that naked woman, but he did not have her ability to shrug off Erika’s power.

She could win.

Erika tried to straighten her back, but something in her tugged, protesting the movement. It still wasn’t painful, but she could tell that it wanted to be.

“—medical attention,” the man said in a low, slow voice, made even slower because of the stolen time. He had been talking, but she had been too focused… the constant thumping of her heart beating in her ears didn’t help. “As an added bonus, come with me, and I will leave your… friends behind,” he finished, staring over her shoulder with his milky white eyes.

Erika hocked back and spat another glob of metallic-tinged blood. It didn’t hit him, as she intended, but the way he looked down between his sandaled feet made her feel like she got her intentions across. She would have pulled her gun and started firing without warning, but the holster under her arm was empty—lost in the crash?

“Unfortunate. I am not a violent being,” he said, not even reacting as Erika pulled a fresh bat out from her coat. He hefted his own… staff in turn.

Now that she got a good look at it, it looked smooth and sleek, like some kind of long-barreled archaic rifle, maybe something out of a World War I movie.

“Your last chance,” he said, keeping the barrel of his rifle pointed down at the ground. “Come with me to the ritual site; we have prepared another portal. Break the chains therein, then you are free to wander as you please until we have prepared the next—”

“Go to hell.”

The barest flicker of disappointment touched his lips. “Unfortunate.”

Erika forced her body to move, taking the initiative before he could surprise her with some trick from up his large sleeves. Not knowing what he was or what he could do—except get here really fast and blast the van off the road—all she could do was assume that he was going to be as much of a bitch to fight as that naked chick. She had no allies on their feet and no idea if Anna got a text off to The Fixer.

It was just her.

Scraping her bat against the icy road, fracturing the very earth as she moved, Erika ran forward, closing the distance. The monk raised his rifle, aiming, even as he watched the craig splitting the street race toward him.

Knowing she wasn’t able to cross the ten paces between them before he could pull the trigger, Erika reared back and flung her bat, spinning it end over end in a blur. The monk’s milky eyes flicked to it, and he immediately aborted his chance to use his weapon in favor of twisting aside, impossibly limber for his size. The bat missed his head by inches, striking the ground behind him with a thunderclap, shattering the frozen earth and sending a spray of ice and dirt skyward. It bounced, again and again, each impact creating another gouge in the field.

Erika was already moving, time stretching and warping as much as she could manage. The world slowed ever so slightly, giving her that edge. Reaching into her coat, she grasped hold of another baseball bat and yanked it free. Skidding across the ice, she swung for the monk’s knee.

He brought his rifle down, intercepting the blow. The impact sent a shockwave through the air, the staff vibrating in his grip, but it held. Erika’s eyebrows sprang up in shock.

Her surprise cost her. The monk twisted, pulling his legs back even as he shifted the rifle forward—the bat skidded down its length, slamming into the ground. As the road beneath them cracked, a meaty fist found purchase in Erika’s stomach, sending her flying through the air.

Erika hit the ground, crying out as her hip hit first, sending her tumbling over and over.

A blink of her eyes broke her out of her shock once again. Erika scrambled to her feet, using as much of her haste as she could to get up before he could punch her again.

His rifle was up and aimed, but while his thick finger pulled the trigger, nothing happened. Several chunks of the wooden furniture cracked and fell away from the metal barrel—the bent barrel. Without the wood in the way, she could see that the entire trigger assembly was a mangled mess.

She shouldn’t be surprised that it hadn’t shattered into a million pieces. That naked woman had shrugged off her attacks; they knew her powers, so of course they would have ways of countering them. But they weren’t perfect countermeasures.

They can’t stop me.

Erika grinned, spitting an alarming wad of blood from her mouth. She was pretty sure she had bitten her lip, or cheek, or tongue, or all of the above. Her mouth hurt too much to tell what was what.

The bat she had pulled out was lost somewhere in her fall, but it didn’t matter. Another bat, another toss while she closed the distance once more. The monk bent backwards like he was in a limbo competition, sliding beneath her bat before he righted himself, using the remnants of his rifle as a club. Erika blocked it with her bat.

This time, she heard it: that wonderful cracking noise of rapidly sheering metal against her bat. The monk snapped his head to one side just in time for the rifle to give away. The end of her bat slipped through the space his head had occupied the second before.

The bat wasn’t her only weapon. Bringing her knee up, she kicked straight into the monk’s ankle, earning herself a satisfying snap and a hiss of pain from the monk. His swift slash with the broken dagger-sized chunk of rifle cut a burning streak across her chest, but Erika was far too hopped up on adrenaline to care. She brought her bat around, catching the monk in his wrist, forcing the rest of the rifle out of his hands.

In the same motion, Erika kept swinging, aiming for his blubbery stomach.

The same broken arm she had struck twice now blocked her attack. Erika would have carried through anyway, but his other large hand grasped hold of her coat and flung her to the ground.

Not even stunned this time, Erika pushed herself up on her hands and knees—

A heavy, weighty foot slammed down on her back, pinning her down against the ground. Erika felt the cracks in her chest, ribs popping one by one, each making her cry out in a pain that she definitely did feel. The bat in her grip ripped away, flung off into the distance.

“You… are quite tenacious,” the monk said, sounding winded, at least.

Erika flailed, trying to grab anything; one arm dangled into one of the crevasses she had made, the other grasped hold of a rock, but she couldn’t bend her arm in the right way to hit the fat man.

“I said you would be free to wander between breaking chains, but I’m reconsidering that offer now. Keeping you contained will be troublesome, but ripping off your arms and legs should—”

The man staggered as a crackle of gunfire echoed through the air. The weight on her back intensified before he stepped off her.

Down in the distance, far along the road from Rick’s wrecked van, Erika could make out Leslie’s oversized truck. The bearded man himself stood to one side, aiming down the sights of a hunting rifle.

Erika’s fingers tightened around the rock. With the monk off her back, she could move. It was probably not wise to move, given how much everything had started to hurt in the last few seconds, but she didn’t know if bullets would kill the monk or just mildly inconvenience him.

Erika swung her arm just enough to connect the rock with the monk’s foot. It wasn’t a hard hit, but for her, that didn’t matter.

Every bone in the monk’s foot shattered.

Arm in the pit she had created, Erika had another idea. She had never tried something like it before… when a bat hit a bone, it broke in two; that was simple logic. But if she could propagate a fissure through the ground, what was stopping her from doing the same to a human body?

Erika lifted the rock and slammed it down on the monk’s foot once again.

She heard it. Crack. Pop. Snap. Crunch. Crackle. Under other circumstances, the noise coming from the man might have unnerved her—he even screamed. Right now, the way the ground thumped as the heavy weight of the overly large man collapsed backwards, falling into one of the gaps in the road, was just… comforting.

She didn’t know if he was dead. She didn’t even know his name. He probably had good information that they could have used.

Frankly, Erika didn’t think she cared.

Someone in the distance was yelling. Danny, maybe? Erika found it excruciating to try to lift her head. She could feel the adrenaline wearing off in real time, and it was horrifying. Erika suddenly felt aware of every single cut, scrape, and broken bone she had.

Humans, she was fairly certain, were not supposed to have so many broken bones.

There was another sound, besides the distant shouts, some deep thrumming. At first, she thought it might have been the monk breathing, but it was too regular, too fast. Propellers? A helicopter? Maybe Leslie had called in some Life Flight. That would be nice. Erika had never had morphine before… she wondered what that would be like.

Or maybe she was just delirious.

One thing was for certain: Erika didn’t think she wanted to be conscious anymore.