Wickerman Cove

Part 34: At Large

It was pitch dark, and the inside was coated with dust and grease. The stench of rotten fish was pungent here, almost enough to make her heave as she crawled, hurrying aimlessly through the dark. Most of the rooms were unlit, making the vents she passed pretty much useless. There was no point climbing out into another locked room, or somewhere there wasn't anything to climb down on.

The real question would be how well the cultists knew the vent system. It didn't branch, but it turned a lot, making a path through the building that probably made sense to whoever had designed it. She'd more than half expected someone to follow her, but a shattering metal crash a second after she'd made it into the crawlspace suggested the shelf hadn't taken their weight. That, or they knew she had nowhere to go.

The first shaft of light came after what felt like a mile of filthy, painful crawling. Voices drifted up – yelling out directions that didn't make sense. Yet. From what she could hear, there was a loading dock, and a ritual room, and those were being checked.

Steph edged closer to the opening. She moved with glacial slowness to avoid making a sound as she closed in on the light. It was a concrete corridor, with flaking green paint. She was just above head height, meaning that the vent had sloped down and she hadn't noticed.

A voice – croaking and half-broken – barked out commands. "I don't care if Lucien is dead. Find out where the vents go. Google it. For all we know, she could already be out of the complex."

Throat Strike.

Steph could hear better now, away from the pattern inside her makeshift cell. Footsteps echoed on the concrete as people hurried away. She could feel the Wyrd again, too. Technically, she was still just calling it weirdness, but she figured that imagining it with a 'y' made it a mystical term.

It was strange, now she had a second of near-sensory-depravation to concentrate. She could feel how weak the boundary was between her being in the vent, and being in the corridor. It wouldn't take much to go from one place into the other. A little more work, and she could be in both places at once.

Steph tried to see into the corridor – pressing her eye to the fold between places – but it just made her temples throb.

So, whatever she could do, remote viewing wasn't part of it. At least not at the moment.

It sounded like Throat Strike was still out there. Her breathing was audibly strained. Then again, it probably would be for a few days. Someone else was moving. They didn't talk, but they were heavy.

No way she was going to be able to take on whoever it was. Not by herself. Not in this condition.

Reluctantly, she used the light to peer at the next few feet of vent. The crawlspace was getting narrower. Crap. At some point it would get too tight, and she'd either have to back up or be stuck and die surrounded by the smell of rotten Atlantic Pollock.

Steph felt out through the Wyrd. She could sense the shape of the corridor, and the people. The larger cultist was a guy – taller than either her or Throat Strike. More muscular than the others. He had something made of metal. It felt like a rod or a pipe, although for all she knew it was a firearm and she just couldn't tell.

Throat Strike felt like she was unarmed, but then again she mostly seemed to give orders. Unlike Dave Jr.

It was hard to feel bad about killing him, although she felt she should try. He'd been in the act of stabbing her to death. He would probably have succeeded if not for whatever kept putting her body back together.

Steph reached out for the big guy. She could feel his body in the same way as she'd been able to sense Dave Jr's: his soft tissue, bones, blood. It sparked a plan. Christ, there had better not be a hell after all this, because if it existed, she was on her way.