something wicked: chapter three
May. 23rd, 2024 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
angelapleasant posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
belladonnacove
Content warnings: death, grief, language, mild alcohol use, mild violence, Strangetown alien abduction. Also, even though nothing bad happens to the cat in this chapter, let me give like... an anti-warning I guess??? that she is gonna be totally fine bc I know some horror movies/ stories include a pet just to kill them and I haaaate that lol
III.
Strangetown is burning.
——
–Several hours earlier–
It was Juliette’s would-have-been wedding all over again. 
In her desperation, Hermia had torn through the modestly–appointed motel room so fast she’d pulled the shower curtain down. Whatever, she would pay for it. There was nothing left of her sister. She had even looked under the bed. The absurdity of a situation where Hermia might even consider that Juliette would have crawled underneath it like some kind of childhood monster wasn’t lost on her.
You’re losing it, she’d told herself, breathing methodically, forcing herself to relax and think. Hermia had never been so rash in her actions in her life. Tybalt was the one who always flew off the handle and Juliette followed her emotions–albeit in a healthier way than their brother–but Hermia had always been the one to go with the flow, keep her calm, and behave at least relatively rationally.
So the fact that she had damn near had a panic attack because her sister–who was probably just down at the vending machine, or staring into the pool for a change of scenery–hadn’t been twiddling her thumbs in their motel room was quite concerning.
But of course, Juliette wasn’t at the vending machines. 
She wasn’t at the pool. (Or face down in it, thank the Watcher.)
And when Hermia had found the night guy lounging in the office with his feet on the desk, focused on his handheld video game, he’d shrugged and said he hadn’t seen her either.
So Hermia had set off in her car in a fragile, manufactured calm, telling herself that there was no way Juliette could have gotten very far on foot.
——
“Are you sure this is it?” Lilith asks impatiently, fidgeting with the newspaper clippings and various scans of missing posters in her lap. She and Dirk had spent their afternoon in the nearby library, printing what they could find archived on the web, suffering the ancient computers and agonizingly slow internet connection in order to bring some proof of her identity back to Bella. If she really was Bella.
Dirk’s brow furrows. “I thought it was supposed to be open by now.” They’d been sitting on the street in front of the nightclub for over an hour past sundown already. The architecture–simple, sharp, and more elegant than the surrounding buildings by a mile–sits darkened under a sign illuminated only by the full, red moon above. It reads Purgatory, the name they’d been given at the service station. There are no windows. “Maybe it’s just too early for anyone to be out yet, and this is their dead time.”
“I’m gonna try the door,” Lilith says, shoving the papers off her lap and stepping out of the car. “Maybe the sign is just broken.”
“Wouldn’t be out of place here,” Dirk muses, leaving the driver’s seat to follow her. There’s a chill in the air as they make their way up the steps, and goosebumps prick up on his skin. Something seems off here, but exactly what, he isn’t sure. Lilith continues ahead of him, completely oblivious to anything that might be wrong, as usual.
Suddenly, the front door flies open, and a familiar woman storms out with her bag over her shoulder.
“Holy shit!” Lilith exclaims as the woman nearly crashes into her, so entranced in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed them at the top of the steps. “Bella?”
The woman who would be Bella Goth starts, and stumbles back. “Sorry,” she grumbles, clearly annoyed, and tries to step around them. “We’re closed tonight.”
Lilith side-steps and blocks her path, and the woman huffs. “Don’t you recognize us?”
“I’m sorry,” she says, breathing slowly through her nostrils, trying to be nice, but it’s clear to Dirk that they’re testing her already-thin patience. “But no, and I need to get home before it gets any later.”
“Bella, come on, they’ve been looking–” Lilith starts, before the woman cuts her off.
“You have the wrong person. My name is Laura. Now please,” she says, looking around nervously. In the moonlight, she looks even more like Bella than the photo that had led them to her. “I hate it out here at night, and I have to walk home in this. I just want to get it over with.”
“We could drive you,” Dirk offers, feeling very sympathetic to her desire to get out of there. This was a conversation to be had indoors, maybe under the fluorescent lights of the diner. “We could buy you dinner.”
She eyes him suspiciously. Lilith fidgets nervously. “Why?”
Dirk pulls up a screenshot of a missing poster on his phone. It was the only thing that searching her name ever brought up anymore; she’d gone from an influential socialite to an urban legend, a cautionary tale. He holds it out to her, and she takes it reluctantly. “You don’t remember your name?”
Her eyes widen when she sees the photo, then narrow when she looks back up at Dirk. “What is this?”
“It’s you,” Lilith says. “You’ve been missing for years.”
Laura’s eyes move back to the phone, the cool light illuminating her face. The faintest trace of recognition ghosts across her features. She hands the phone back to Dirk. “You’ve got some explaining to do.”
——
She hadn’t spoken on the drive back to the aptly-named Road to Nowhere, clutching her purse close to her body as she glanced nervously around the backseat of Dirk’s car. 
He could understand why she might feel that way, after all–getting into a stranger’s car at night, out in what might as well have been the middle of nowhere, was probably near the top of the list of Highly Avoidable Ways to Get Murdered. He wouldn’t want Lilith doing it, though she probably would. Hell, he wouldn’t do it himself. Even Lilith, who was arguably the loudest, most impulsive person he’d ever met, had sat quietly, fidgeting with her phone, until they’d all three breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled into the relatively well-lit parking lot of the plaza that housed the diner.
And now, under the cool bright lights of said diner, the woman-who-wasn’t Bella Goth was doing a damn good job at impersonating her. 
Her arms crossed tightly across her chest, Laura-not-Bella eyes Dirk and Lilith warily across the booth. Her skin is smoother than he remembers, her face a little fuller, but there is no doubt in his mind that they’ve found her.
On her first trip to the table, the waitress sets down a glass of cola with a wedge of lemon and a small cup of coffee before turning to Dirk and Lilith. “And for you?” They ask for coffee and water, respectively, order their food, and thankfully, Lilith doesn’t give them the chance to return to their awkward silence.
“So what happened, Bel–” she blurts out, and Dirk elbows her in the ribs. “I mean, Laura?”
Laura squeezes the lemon into her cola and stirs it gently with her straw, staring intently as the ice swirls around the glass. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember anything?” Lilith presses, and the waitress returns to their table with their drinks, and the jumbo slice of pie Lilith had ordered in lieu of a hot meal. 
Laura’s nose wrinkles at Lilith’s tone, and Dirk grimaces. Lilith was always one to rush in, guns blazing, without regard for delicate situations. They already knew that she had amnesia; they’d gathered that much by asking about her around town. “What she means to ask,” he says gently, “is what’s the earliest you remember? Were you here? Or somewhere else?”
“I don’t remember anything before here,” she says quietly. “All I know is I woke up in the hospital a few months ago. One of the nurses told me that a deputy found me wandering in the desert, severely sunburnt, incoherent–I couldn’t even tell him my name.” She looks Dirk straight in the eye. “I still couldn’t.”
“So Laura–” Lilith starts.
“That’s the name my nurse gave me,” she cuts Lilith off. “Because I needed one, and she said I looked like a Laura. I spent several weeks in there with her, until I was deemed able to care for myself as an outpatient, then she helped set me up with their program to find a cheap apartment and a bartending job, which is where I should be right now, but one of the regulars rushed in to talk to the owners and suddenly it doesn’t matter that I have to walk home alone at night or might not be able to pay my rent.”
“What if we could prove we know who you are?” Dirk asks as their food arrives. “That you have somewhere to go?”
“Why?”
Lilith fumbles in her bag for a business card. “You can look us up,” she says, sliding it across the table. “We’re a legitimate business.”
Laura frowns at the card– a plain, thick cardstock with PLEASANT DREAMS PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIONS in a basic, professional type across the front with a tiny icon of a ghost next to their information beneath it. “Do I look like a ghost to you?”
Sort of, Dirk thinks, as he and Lilith glance at each other. “We were neighbors,” Dirk explains. “When you went missing all those years ago, it was all anyone could talk about. Your daughter never stopped looking for you. I don’t know what happened in-between when you disappeared and when that deputy found you, or why they never put two-and-two together, but I know your family will want to see you.”
And Cassandra could probably solve that mystery, he thinks.
“You really think I’m this ‘Bella Goth’?” she asks, pushing the spoon around in her chili. 
Lilith slides her the folder of “evidence” they’d gathered for her for her to browse. “If you aren’t,” she says, grinning, “then you’d have to be her clone.”
——
Tank had given up on trying to sleep.
Buzz was staying over at the base again, and Buck had never been a night owl, so with nothing else to do, Tank had turned in early too. But his body was so used to the overnight shift that he’d spent multiple hours just staring at the ceiling, mind racing back and forth throughout the events of the past few days and the life that had led up to them, reliving embarrassing moments and thinking about how he should have done this or that differently–as one does–and then the cat had scratched and scratched and scratched at his door, until he’d finally given up falling asleep, pulled his clothes back on, and let the damn thing in before heading out to find something else to occupy his mind. 
At this time of night, it was either seedy nightclubs or the Night Howl saloon, so he’d driven out to Deadtree to nurse a single, shitty beer and continue reexamining his entire life. But hey, at least now he was doing it in a bar instead of a too-firm twin-sized bed.
“Think we might close up early tonight,” Hoot Howell grunts, wiping down the bar near Tank. Not that it needed it–Tank hadn’t seen anyone else in there since he’d arrived. 
Tank nods. He’d never been much of a drinker, and probably wasn’t even going to finish the single beer he’d ordered. “Well, you can’t keep the lights on just for my sake.” A late night breakfast plate at the diner would probably be better anyway. Or a doughnut from the convenience store…
Hoot nods back in thanks, continuing his cleaning, then looks toward the window. “Be careful out there. Something in the air tonight.”
——
Tank had realized, upon leaving Deadtree, that Hoot had been right. Things just felt… off. The newest nightclub, Purgatory, was closed. On his way back to the main road, he’d seen the usual assortment of night owls, and people jogging, or walking their dogs, but they seemed to be in a sort of haze, like the cool, night breezes were too much for them, making them sluggish.
The little hairs on his arms prick up as he nears the junction of main and side roads. The nightclub on the corner is lit up and open, but the parking lot sits empty. Strange, he thinks, but only because there was barely anything else to do there after dark. If he had been on patrol back in SimCity, he would have been itching to radio for a few more cars in the area, just to make sure things truly were as quiet as they seemed.
It’s only by chance that he sees his brother’s best friend, whom he had never gotten along with, being chased by someone—or something— from the dumpsters of the next door apartment complex.
On instinct, Tank swerves into the parking lot and toward the confrontation. Whoever or whatever was chasing Johnny had swiftly caught up with him and knocked him to the ground near the empty club. 
Johnny flails frantically, scrabbling for anything he can find to defend himself, as the creature looms over him. It’s humanoid but covered in thick, pale fur, with ragged, unforgiving claws, and… tiny denim shorts and pigtails?
It lets out a loud, angry yelp as Tank smashes into it with his car before it runs off into the night.
“Holy shit, was that… Annie?” Tank asks, stepping out of the car. 
“Tank?” Johnny says, and attempts to stand, but has to settle for a seated position. From here, Tank can see the ugly tear on his arm where those claws must have got him, and knows his ankle had probably already started swelling from going down the way he had. “What the hell is going on?”
“No idea,” Tank replies, as a loud, mournful howl sounds from somewhere much too close. “But we better get the hell out of here.”
——
Johnny really couldn’t stand on his own, so Tank had had to almost carry him into the car. Both of them had bristled at this, the bad blood between them still fresh, but the howling was moving closer—and sounding angrier—by the second, and Johnny needed medical attention. 
“I can’t get ahold of Buck,” Tank says, speeding down the Road to Nowhere, while Johnny clutches his arm in the passenger seat, gray-faced and breathing raggedly. They’d wrapped his arm quickly and tightly with an old sports bandage from the glove box, but the bleeding wasn’t really the issue. The tears in his flesh had looked as nasty as the claws that made them, and Tank was sure they felt like it, too. “I don’t know what that thing was, but dad’s not home and I don’t have signal.”
Johnny’s head whips toward him. “My mom’s on night shift at the hospital, but my dad and sister—”
“The hospital has security and isn’t far from the base, and your house is all the way out in Paradise Place. Your dad has probably been asleep for hours and unless your sister is sneaking out now, she probably has too,” Tank says. “We’re almost to my house and I can raise the general there and see if he knows anything. Then you’re going to the hospital.” 
Johnny opens his mouth to argue, but Tank interrupts him. “And if I have to, I’ll go out to Paradise Place myself.”
He was in tactical mode now. If word had reached the base already about some kind of violent creature roaming the streets, then Buzz would have orders for him. And if they weren’t aware of the situation, they needed to be so they could get it under control before anyone else got attacked. And Buck was scared of the wind rattling the windows, so someone needed to check in on him, and make sure he kept the house locked up tight. 
When they arrive at 51 Road to Nowhere, the front door is unlocked. Worrisome. Tank was sure he’d locked it on his way out, but a creature like the one that attacked Johnny certainly wouldn’t have knocked and politely closed the door behind itself. Still, he was feeling particularly stupid for leaving his weapon locked up in its case in the bottom of his duffel bag instead of carrying it on his person like he should have been. He’d never had to use it–except for training at the range–and obviously hadn’t planned to tonight, but now he sorely wished he was carrying in case he ran into that howling creature again and needed to defend himself or someone else. 
With Johnny left to fume in the car over his arm and the fact that in his current condition, he couldn’t do anything to help, Tank quietly surveys the downstairs open area. Everything is as he’d left it. No one in the other rooms, no one in the closets. Buck was likely sleeping soundly upstairs, blissfully unaware. Tank would let him know the situation, then call their father, grab his weapon, and drive Johnny to the hospital. Then he’d go from there doing whatever the general ordered to help secure the town.
Upstairs, Buck’s bedroom door stands open. 
Tank glances quickly around the hall before he rushes to the bedroom, but his brother is gone.
No one in the bathrooms, the office, the closets, the other bedrooms. Even the damn cat is missing.
He inhales deeply and closes his eyes for a brief moment, settling his racing thoughts, before heading into the office and grabbing the phone from the desk. This was something he could do: remain level-headed in a crisis even if he struggled with anxiety in other areas of his life. The dial-tone drones as he punches in the number for his father’s division of the base and makes his way to the guest bedroom.
Mercifully, someone picks up on the second ring.
“This is Tank Grunt calling for General Buzz Grunt,” Tanks says as the soldier on the other end of the line asks for identification.
“One moment,” she says curtly, and places the call on hold. 
With the phone cradled between his neck and shoulder, Tank sorts through his neatly packed bag and pulls out a small locked case. He retrieves and inspects his gun, then clips the holster to his belt and secures the weapon, pulling his shirt back down over it. Just in case.
The phone clicks softly. “Go for General Grunt,” his father says.
“Dad,” Tank replies, and cuts right to the chase. “There’s something out there attacking people, and Buck’s gone.”
“Buck’s here,” the general replies, and Tank’s breath comes out in a low whoosh. “And we know. We’ve had reports of something brewing out there all night from every sector. I had Duncan stop to get him, but you weren’t there, and cellular is down.”
“What can I do?”
“We’ve got more units out picking up those in the most affected areas now,” Buzz responds. “Paradise Place has been fully evacuated of everyone present, and we’re trying to breach Deadtree now, but there’ve been… problems.”
“You have the Smiths?” 
“Oh, this place is greener than that damn lawn,” Buzz says drily. “We have the whole clan, except the hospital staff, but that’s locked down tight–no one in or out.”
“Dad…” Tank pauses, and then lowers his voice. “What the hell is going on?”
Buzz pauses for a moment at the informality, then levels with his son. “I don’t know, son, but we’re doing what we can to figure it out. Duncan’s back out there looking for Ripp now. Listen, you need to get–”
With a nasty crackle, the lights cut out and the call dies. 
A loud hiss sounds from beneath the bed. 
Tank curses, kneels down and pulls out his cell phone, the little flashlight illuminating just enough that he can see the cat, with it eyes glittering in the darkness, its fur raised, backed into the corner as far from him–and anything else–as it can get.
Get to the base, Buzz was likely going to say before getting cut off.
Damn it, Tank thinks. The cat was a menace, sure, but he couldn’t just leave it there to fend for itself against whatever weird shit was happening in Strangetown. Slowly, he reaches his arm toward it, bracing himself for a bite. “Come on,” he says quietly, in the most calming voice he can muster. “We can’t stay here.”
Shockingly, the cat relaxes, and hesitantly approaches his hand. Tank flinches slightly as it sniffs him gently, expecting a lunge and at least a nasty scratch, but instead, the cat leaves his arm be and slowly pulls itself out from under the bed, watching him expectantly as he sits up on his knees and zips up his bag.
“Want to go see Buck?”
The cat cocks its head to the side as if it really understands him, then rubs along his legs and follows Tank docilely into the office to grab the general’s old communications radio from the closet–just in case–and the first aid kit from the bathroom, and then out to the car.
“Change of plans,” Tank says, letting the cat jump into the backseat and then stowing his bag on the floorboards before her. Johnny’s eyes are squeezed shut tight from pain, but he looks over at Tank as he slides into the driver’s seat. “We’re heading to the base. Let me see your arm.”
“What about my family?” Johnny asks through gritted teeth as Tank unwraps the stretchy bandage.
“They’ve been evacuated to the base. The hospital’s locked down, but the military infirmary can take care of you.”
Johnny frowns at that, and then lets out an angry groan as Tank dabs antiseptic on the jagged gash. As if that was going to do anything for it.
Tank studies him. He could understand Johnny’s hesitation. The military in Strangetown wasn’t exactly secretive about its suspicions regarding extraterrestrial activity, so to walk right into their base, and injured on top of that, was going to be uncomfortable at the least. But his family had lived in Strangetown for years and been fine. His aunt Lola even worked at the base, acting as a sort of liaison between the military and the “frequent flyers” who seemed to be spotted most often in the desert airspace. Their concentrated activity there had actually been why Strangetown had become what it was; the military had noticed, set up their operation, and the town had grown up around it. Otherwise it would have just stayed a dusty little pit stop in the long stretch of desert in between the canyon and Oasis Springs.
Tensions did rise a little every time someone got abducted and came back pregnant, but that hadn’t actually happened much, and every time it did, the person in question had insisted it was something they wanted. Of course, there were the conspiracy theorists who cried brainwashing, and the really crazy ones who claimed that the military was in league with the aliens and was forcing them to say that as a coverup, but there was a lot of weird shit in Strangetown, so most civilians just kind of went with it as one more odd thing on the ever-growing list.
It might have even stopped being an issue entirely if Johnny’s father would just do the bare minimum and consult with the leaders there and give any insight as to why Strangetown’s airspace was such a hotbed of activity, but he had always insisted that he was Retired and was going to stay that way. This had been a point of contention with Buzz for years–he and Lyla been the first to extend a hand to the Pollination Technician, invited him and Johnny’s mother, Jenny, to dinner to bridge that connection, and been so genuinely shocked at the PT’s refusal to be of any kind of service for the place he was now trying to call home that it had soured any chance of friendship between their families for good. In Buzz’s eyes, and the eyes of his colleagues, it confirmed that constant vigilance was required, as if the aliens had something to hide. Tank had never been sure whether Lola had joined the military as the gesture of good faith that her father was unwilling to provide, or if she simply had ambitions that required military service.
Tank and Johnny had their own conflict, of course, and it was completely unrelated to any UFO activity. In another world, they might have been friends, bonding over their shared love of sports and fitness, but instead their teen years had been Ripp vs. the General, which in reality had translated to Ripp and friends against the world–including Tank. And Tank would almost certainly die before admitting it, but he had secretly been jealous that Ripp had found such close friends and he hadn’t. Things with Ripp were settled now; he’d reached out after Tank had dropped out of LFT, finally seeing his brother as human, Tank supposed, but as they weren’t family, neither Tank nor Johnny had ever felt any obligation toward each other.
All that aside, they were in a state of emergency, and the rest of his family was already there except for his mother, and his injuries needed tending, so Johnny was just going to have to deal with it. Still, despite the resentment between them, Tank had never actually been as unreasonable as his brother made him out to be, and he could understand. “It’ll be fine,” he says awkwardly, turning the key in the ignition after finishing up with wrapping Johnny’s arm tightly in fresh gauze and a new stretchy bandage. “I just want to make one more stop.”
——
Hours of searching, and Hermia had nothing to show for it.
She’d searched all of the areas within walking distance of the motel as thoroughly as she could without breaking and entering, and had found no sign of her sister. So she’d widened her search area a little bit more, each passing minute distancing Juliette further from her, sending her spiraling further down the rabbit hole of all the terrible things that could happen to her sister.
Aside from the terrible things that already had.
The diner had been her first real stop after she’d searched the public areas in and around the motel, and now it was going to be her last before she went back to search it yet again, thinking that maybe Juliette had wandered somewhere familiar. At this point, it was desperation more than hope.
She would wait for a while, but she’d eventually have to call someone. Tybalt would certainly drop everything and race to her in record time, but he’d just as likely get into a wreck in his haste and leave her well and truly alone. She hated the thought of calling the sheriff’s department. The authorities there would certainly find Juliette, and there would go Hermia’s chance at ever seeing her sister again, at her sister ever having a normal life. But her time, and her choices, were running out.
Juliette, of course, is not at the diner.
In fact, almost no one is. Only the table in the back corner is occupied, and Hermia barely registers the pair she’d asked for directions earlier. The same waitress from the lunch shift calls out a greeting, and Hermia slumps over the counter, angling herself to face the door.
“Couldn’t find her?” the waitress asks sympathetically, setting a coffee down in front of Hermia, who shakes her head without making eye contact. “It’s on the house.”
Hermia thanks her, feeling pathetic. “Has she been here since I checked earlier?”
“Sorry, honey,” the waitress replies. “But I can get the sheriff himself down here. He eats here enough for free that he owes me a favor.”
“No!” Hermia says loudly, and the other woman starts, so she scrambles an excuse. “Sorry… she’s an adult, she can go where she wants, I just worry…” 
The waitress doesn’t look quite convinced, but she nods. “If you need anything…”
Hermia thanks her and takes a sip of the burnt coffee. The wind howls loudly, almost angrily, outside. She pulls out her phone, frowning.
By now, Hermia knows better than to try calling Puck. If she had to hear that automated voice telling her that the number she dialed could not be reached one more time, she was going to snap.
Instead, she opens up their text thread and begins typing furiously.
By the time she finishes, multiple long text bubbles full of expletives and accusations fill the chat. She’d sent him every negative thought she’d felt over the past few days. Let him know exactly how it felt every time she’d tried to call and beg for help, or hell, even comfort at this point, and have it thrown in her face by some computer that she had been abandoned, left completely and utterly on her own. What had even been the point of helping her look for Juliette if he was just going to abandon her when she needed him? Had he ever cared about her, or had she just been the first one to see past his shyness, to not care that his family was stranger than most?
And FUCK YOU, Puck, for abandoning me when I needed you most of all.
Breathing heavily, Hermia sets her phone down hard on the counter. Maybe Puck didn’t deserve all that. After all, he hadn’t killed Juliette. Hadn’t even known she was going to look for his mother and do anything like… what she’d done. Probably would have told her not to, that nothing good would come of it, and been right.
But the messages come back one by one, with a little red exclamation point beside them.
Sorry, your message cannot be delivered at this time.
Not that it mattered whether he deserved it or not. It wasn’t like he was going to see them anyway.
——
“Seriously?” Johnny asks irritably as Tank pulls right up to the door of the convenience store. “You had to stop and get a snack?”
“Oh, shut up,” Tank says. “I have to check on someone, and it’s on the way.”
“Barely,” Johnny mutters, wincing at his injuries. “At least be fast.”
“Obviously.” Tank steps out of the car, leaving it running. And pauses, feeling more sorry for Johnny than he’d ever admit. “You want anything?”
Johnny rolls his eyes, then thinks twice about it and accepts the olive branch, at least for now. “A PowerSip and a protein bar.”
Tank rolls his eyes to himself, but heads into the little shop anyway. It’s just as he suspected–Erin there, working the night shift alone, focused on fixing her radio. It wasn’t in the evacuation areas he knew of, but he still hated the thought of her being there by herself, with that thing on the loose. 
“Tank?” a gratingly familiar voice asks, and his brother comes out of the bathroom, drying his hands on his shorts. 
“Ripp?” he asks, just as surprised to see him. Wasn’t Deputy Duncan supposed to be out collecting him from his job? “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
Ripp grins, heading over to the hot cases. “I’m on lunch.”
“Right.” Leave it to Ripp to drive out of the way for whatever odd junk craving he was having instead of just eating closer to his job, or packing from home. A horrible thought passes through his mind that maybe Ripp was the reason for Erin’s current state–he would be the one to accidentally get someone pregnant–but Tank sets his jaw and returns his focus to the situation at hand. At least their dad would have less to worry about if he showed up with Ripp too, and that freed up evacuation efforts for others. Might as well keep him and Johnny fed on the way, so they’d both be less cranky when they got to the base. 
Tank grabs a couple of protein bars for Johnny and a PowerSip from the cold case before heading up to the register, trying to decide the best way to convince her to come to the base with them. “Hey, Erin,” he says, then calls to his brother, who is juggling multiple burritos, a hot dog, and a small box of doughnuts as he tries to fill his soda. “Come on, Ripp. I’ll get it.” Bribery would work on him. Probably. He gives Erin an embarrassed smile. 
“Awesome, thanks man,” Ripp says, setting his food on the counter, then he narrows his eyes at Tank. “What’s the catch?”
Tank sighs. “Have you heard from dad?”
“You know the less we talk, the better we get along,” Ripp jokes, but to his credit, takes the frown on Tank’s face seriously. “Why?”
“I think maybe it’s better if you hear it from him,” Tank says. “But the short version is that there’s some kind of night beast running around attacking people, so we need to evacuate to the base.”
“No way,” Ripp says, at the same time as Erin says “Okay,” her hand on her belly.
Tank sighs heavily. He should be happy– Erin agreeing so fast had been unexpected– but of course Ripp was going to be a problem, and of course he couldn’t leave him there. “Look, I have Johnny in the car–”
“Johnny agreed to this?” Ripp asks incredulously, peering toward the door, where Johnny was indeed in the car of his own free will. 
Well, mostly. “He had no choice. It got him and the hospital is locked down. His leg might be broken and he definitely needs stitches.”
“Fuck,” Ripp says, taking in the situation. “Alright then. We can take my truck.”
“I’ll shut down,” Erin says. “It’ll only take a few minutes. I’ll leave a note for the morning clerk that they’ll have to do some extra cleaning.”
“Oh, they’ll hate that,” Ripp grins, gathering his food.
“Grab anything else you want from the fresh stuff,” Erin gestures. “I have to throw it out anyway.”
That was the wrong thing to say to the bottomless pit that was Ripp. Tank gathers the rest of the garbage while his brother plunders the hot cases–did he think they didn’t have food at the base?–selects a burrito and a doughnut from the leftovers for himself, and then tosses the rest. By the time he’s finished taking out the trash and gathering his bag from his car, Erin is locking the doors, Ripp has pulled his truck around, helped a frowning Johnny into the bed, and begun passing him snacks. 
“You better drive,” Ripp says from the bed, tossing Tank the keys as he helps Erin into the front seat. The cat, who had been pointedly ignoring everyone in the shuffle, moves for her, and climbs gingerly into what’s left of her lap. Erin pets it absentmindedly as Tank slides open the back window so she can hear what’s going on. Something like gunfire sounds in the distance as he pulls the communications radio out of his bag. 
He doesn’t even have to connect the radio to power; Buzz had been prepared for anything, and kept the emergency battery well-charged. It doesn’t take long for someone at the base to respond and connect him to his father. 
They barely have time to acknowledge each other before Buck’s voice takes over. “Tank??” he asks breathlessly, like he’d been crying. “You h-have to go back, Jeanie–” In the background, Tank can hear Buzz telling his youngest son to calm down and let him have the radio back. Buck must have truly been hysterical. “D-duncan wouldn’t let me f-find her–”
“Don’t worry, I got her,” Tank assures his brother. “And Ripp, too.”
Buzz manages to get the handheld back from Buck, whose blubbering keeps the voice-activation transmitting. “I told you, she’s a brave soldier,” Buzz tells Buck.
“She’s a cat, dad,” Ripp mutters.
“Dad, we’re on the w–” Tank starts, but Buzz interrupts him.
“Switch to our training channel,” the general orders in a hushed voice, and Tank quickly obeys, adjusting the radio to a channel with less ears–the one on which Buzz had trained him how to use the radio as a child.
“You have Ripp?” Buzz asks, once the new connection is established.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m here,” Ripp chimes in.
Their father sighs in relief. “You two need to leave now.”
“We’re heading to the base now,” Tank says.
“No,” Buzz corrects him. “I don’t want you going through Deadtree, and they’ve closed off the backroads into the base. You need to leave Strangetown. We’re about to announce a curfew, but what we really mean is quarantine. It’s better for you to leave entirely.”
Tank stares at the handheld in shock, then meets Ripp’s eyes. His face echoes Tank’s surprise. A quarantine meant that things were just about as bad as they could get, and then even worse than that for their father to risk the operation and his career by warning them to leave ahead of it.
“Dad,” Tank says, holding the radio tightly. “What is going on?”
“If I knew, I would tell you,” his father says, and Tank can almost see him pinching the bridge of his nose. “But it’s bad out there. The dead started climbing out of the ground in Deadtree–”
“What?”
“–I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t read the reports myself. Luckily that cemetery is old, and the inhabitants weren’t very… put together.” Tank grimaces as his father continues. “When we got that mostly under control, people really started losing it, and couple that with your standard full moon crazies–” Tank knew all about those from his night patrols, where it was clear that a full moon brought out not necessarily the worst, but definitely the weirdest, in people– “On top of that, there are reports of some kind of creature attacking civilians near the main road, and now apparently the dead are rising at the old Specter cemetery too. Specter’s refusing to leave–barricaded herself inside her house and laughed when they tried to rescue her...” Buzz pauses, considering that Ripp is in the car too. “Might want to tell the girl.”
Johnny lets out a bitter snort. “Like she’d even care,” he grumbles. 
Ripp throws him a warning look, and Tank ignores them both. Whatever had gone on between them while he was gone was none of his concern, and quite frankly, he didn’t really care.
“Look,” Buzz continues, with a finality that meant the conversation was over. “The base is safe as it gets here. Start driving now and don’t stop until you reach the canyon. I mean it. Call me on this channel when you get settled. And Ripp…”
“Don’t worry, I won’t do anything stupid,” Ripp finishes lightheartedly. “Tell Buck we’ll take good care of Jeanie.”
The radio sounds one last time, and they can hear Buzz sighing heavily. “Over and out.”
——
Bella had had questions, and lots of them. They’d had to order more coffee, and–more, in Lilith’s case–dessert. But ultimately, neither Dirk and Lilith nor Bella had had any satisfactory answers for each other.
But Cassandra would. At least for Bella.
“They can’t really complain when I don’t show up for my next shift if they never told me why or for how long they were shutting down in the first place,” Bella muses, picking at her cobbler. It had been settled after she’d studied the dossier Lilith and Dirk had prepped for her. Whether seeing her own face staring back out at her, page after page, had triggered some sort of recognition in her or if she was simply desperate enough to try anything to get her life from before back, Dirk couldn’t gauge, but they were headed for Pleasantview in the morning after they’d dropped her off at her apartment to pack. And sleep, if she could.
If any of them could.
“I’ll go start the getaway car,” he jokes, leaving Lilith and Bella to wrap up in the diner. 
A fire engine barrels down the road. Dirk fiddles with the radio, searching in vain for a local news station. He’d noticed more and more sirens in the past hour or so, passing and fading off into the distance. The wind seemed to have picked up too, howling loudly, signaling a nasty windstorm approaching–the other side of the road had already lost power, by the looks of it–but the night felt impossibly still.
Giving up on the radio, he pulls out his phone to check the news feed there, and nothing. No service. They were in the middle of nowhere, so it was probably something the locals were used to… but still. A police cruiser blares past, and the sound drops off at the same time as all the others before it. 
It’s then that Dirk realizes the occasional howls of wind and sirens are the only sound in the eerie quiet that has settled over the plaza. He rolls down the window to silent, stifling air. He wasn’t stupid–of course it wasn’t going to sound like Sim City in a small desert town. But dead silence? It’s the same wrong feeling he’d had at the nightclub.
Lilith breaks said silence as she climbs into the car, chatting with–or rather at–Bella, who slides into the back seat. 
“Do you have service?” she turns to Dirk as she fastens her seatbelt. “I had to call Cassandra on the payphone.”
It wouldn’t have been Dirk’s choice to call Bella’s daughter before they were safely on their way, just in case Bella changed her mind, but Lilith was going to do what she was going to do. “What’d she say?”
“I don’t think she believed me,” Lilith admits. “And we didn’t think putting Bella on the phone so early was the best idea.”
At least she had the sense for that.
“But she’s expecting us?”
“I told her we’d be there tomorrow.”
Dirk turns back to face Bella. “And you’re sure you’re okay with this?”
Bella meets his eyes. “It’s not like I have much else to lose.”
“Cassandra sounded worried, though,” Lilith says, frowning. “She didn’t know why, but she said we should get out of here as soon as we could.”
Dirk shakes his head. If Cassandra, with her weird sixth sense about things and her dabbles in the occult, was worried, he definitely didn’t want to be there any longer than he had to. 
“I have a bad feeling too,” Bella says quietly, and they both turn back to stare at her. 
The howling picks up again, loudly, causing Dirk to jump slightly. But this time, he isn’t quite sure it’s just the wind. Through the rear window, he can see smoke billowing up over the dunes.
“That’s it,” he says, popping the hatchback and stepping out of the car. He returns to the front seat a few minutes later with a police scanner. “Time to find out what’s really going on here.”
——
As if the night wasn’t bad enough, Hermia’s car refuses to start. 
Not long after the other group had walked out of the little diner, the waitress had—apologetically, at least—kicked Hermia out. “Best be getting back before the wind gets any worse,” she’d advised, looking anxiously out the glass doors.
Hermia couldn’t blame her. It sounded uglier and uglier by the minute, and apparently a bunch of houses had already lost power. She didn’t want to get caught in it either.
But her damn car had just died. Whether it couldn’t handle the desert heat, she’d let it go too long without a tune up, or the universe simply hated her, Hermia didn’t know. And of course, she had no service.
It had to be option three, then. The universe just hated her, and was punishing her for her brief foray into necromancy.
Regardless, she was done sleeping in her car, and she needed to be at the motel if Juliette somehow found her way back. So she does the only thing she can do, and starts her lonely walk down the highway.
The wind howls louder, and Hermia instinctively wraps her arms around herself. The air is mildly chilly, but oddly still. No one is out, except a single truck that zooms past her.
Another howl, and Hermia’s stomach ties itself in knots. That didn’t sound like the wind at all.
She holds herself tighter. Far off in the distance, she can see a fire blazing—probably some unfortunate symptom of the dry air and incoming windstorm—which explained the sirens that had kept passing the diner. A worrisome thought strikes her—did Juliette have enough capacity to wander away from the fire, instead of into it?
Even worse, had she already been caught in it?
Great. Now she had a whole new set of anxieties to fret over.
At least the wind had quieted, and she could be alone with her thoughts. But without the wind, there was no sound at all.
Aside from a low, whining growl at her back.
Hermia whips around as the hot, damp breath touches her neck, only to be face to face with something out of a nightmare. Almost twice her size, covered in thick, matted fur, and monstrous, evil-looking fangs, the beast looms over her. For a moment, she’s too stunned to think, let alone react, staring right back into its eyes as if in a trance.
Putrid drool drips down the creature’s chin, its lips pulled back over its teeth, and suddenly it breaks their shared gaze, throwing its head back in a ghastly howl. 
Hermia snaps out of it, and starts running.
She’d done ballet almost all her life, and kept up her regular workouts at the gym even after she’d given up dancing in a studio, so she was in shape and had a healthy endurance. But she was no sprinter, and the creature had clearly evolved to chase. And tear. And kill.
It’s barely a car’s length behind her when one screeches to a stop in between them, and someone in the backseat throws open the door, screaming, “Get in!”
They don’t have to tell her twice. Hermia scrambles in and slams the door behind her. A horrible scraping sounds as the beast scratches along the side of the car, trying to tear the driver’s side door off its hinges, and Hermia slams into the woman in the backseat with her as they peel back onto the highway.
“All right! Let’s get the fuck outta here!” the girl in the front seat exclaims. It’s the pair from the diner, Hermia realizes, and in the backseat with her, she assumes, the woman they’d been looking for.
Hermia adjusts herself in her own seat and fastens her seatbelt. The woman beside her straightens her clothing, and Hermia looks at her apologetically. She nods back.
“I’m Lilith, and this is Dirk,” the girl in the front seat says, peering back at her.
“Hermia,” Hermia responds.
“Lau—,” the woman in the backseat with her starts, and then corrects herself. “I mean, Bella.”
Hermia does a double take. So it really was that Bella Goth they’d found? 
Bella notices her, and shrugs.
“Thanks for saving me,” Hermia says awkwardly, unsure of how things were going to proceed.
“Well, we couldn’t just leave you,” Dirk says, looking back at her in the rearview mirror. “We can drop you somewhere on the way, but this place is about to be quarantined, and we have to go.”
“Quarantined?”
“Yeah,” Lilith says. “Apparently the dead walk the earth, and also large monsters attack innocent young women in the night!”
Dirk snorts, clearly used to Lilith’s antics, but Hermia struggles to keep herself from panicking. “My sister is missing.”
She doesn’t say what she’s thinking. My sister might be involved in this somehow. Lilith’s comment had been a little too on the nose.
Bella frowns. “Here?”
“I’ve been looking all night. Everywhere I could. She had to be on foot.”
“If you haven’t found her yet,” Bella says slowly. “You probably won’t.”
Hermia fights back tears. “I have to keep looking,” she insists, unbuckling her seatbelt. “Let me out.”
“The military has been evacuating civilians to the base all night,” Lilith says, in what’s clearly an attempt to reassure her. “They probably found her hours ago.”
That’s even worse, Hermia wants to wail, but instead just says “Please.”
“Look,” Dirk says calmly, and she meets his eyes in the mirror. “If you go back out there, you’re probably going to get killed. You literally almost got torn apart less than five minutes ago. If she’s safe, you’ll go back out for nothing. If she isn’t, you’ll still go back out for nothing.”
Hermia swallows. She knows he’s right. She couldn’t find Juliette on her own, and she definitely wouldn’t be any use to her torn to shreds and eaten by some sort of wolfman.
“But,” he continues, his eyes back on the road. “We know someone who might be able to help you. And she’s expecting us.”
——
Then it took me 2 months to take the pictures because I had to spend a ton of time navigating crashes (I reached the object limit lol, and then kept reaching it again after cleaning it up and adding more stuff) and just having a ton of different locations featured this time around and just being super busy with irl stuff it was just A LOT. I ended up having to cut several planned shots because they just weren't possible to do well in TS2 which was sad but hopefully you still enjoyed it. Next chapter will hopefully be easier because there are less locations and the 2 main groups for the next good while are merged. And less car pictures thank godddd. Also I hope it was clear that the werewolf chasing Hermia was Annie fully transformed, and when she was after Johnny she was mid-transformation. If not, shame on me but it's all the same Nightbeast!
Comments/ messages are 💚💚💚 Until next time 👽