(This fic will contain medical horror, autopsies, some strong language, a potentially gory tale of fantasy war, and is more of an homage to slasher/thriller Halloween films than previously themed stories. While most of these events will not be detailed in an overly grotesque way, they're still, well, gross in their own right.)

Riders on the Storm: A SHIELD Codex Halloween

This is the strangest life I've ever known ~ Jim Morrison, Waiting for the Sun

. . .

1. Good Omens

. . .

"I want you to know that this was not exactly my idea." Loki didn't look at his passenger when he finally spoke. He kept his eyes forward, both hands on the wheel. His knuckles were white, but not because of the full four lanes of jacked-up traffic ahead of him on the westbound freeway. No, not because of that.

"No, but the car certainly was," replied Stephen Strange. He also looked straight ahead. His gloved hands were folded with deceptive solemnity on his lap. Both men knew their other option was going to be attempted strangulation.

"You rented it." Under his palms, the plasticky but real leather of the Lexus's wheel began to buckle slightly. The vehicle was a welcome upgrade from the standard SHIELD-approved sedan, but still. Loki had been forced to accept Strange's handling of the matter with grudging politeness. At least while they were still in the rental office, the young male clerk watching them both with enough nervousness to say he could practically smell the tense energy building between the pair of black-suited sorcerers. Now, one long hour on the road behind them spent in freezing silence, Loki was already fed up with this particular layer of the situation. "Aren't you supposed to have a vow of poverty these days or something?"

"Aren't you supposed to be able to warp the dimensional light transcendent?"

Squeak, went the grey leather wheel. "I like driving."

"Oh, yes, Loki, I can tell." Strange unfolded his hands and reached for the console. "You've been breathing galactic obscenities at every car ahead of us for the last twenty minutes. You're having the time of your life."

"If you touch my phone, we are going to have a problem."

"If you're going to make me listen to The Best of Queen for another two hours, we will have a worse one."

Creeeeeeak. "Fine. Pick something else. But I warn you, with full knowledge of exactly how tactless this threat is to you specifically, I am capable of crashing this car so that only you suffer."

"Not in this traffic jam, you're not." Strange snorted, scrolling through Loki's playlists and debating adding commentary to the odd array of musical choices available. He found a folder of Mozart, however, and decided that was safe enough to prevent mutually assured destruction. A moment later, the soft strains of Don Giovanni began to fill the car. "I read the case file."

"Oh good, so you did the absolute bare minimum of preparation necessary before meeting me. Very solid of you. I appreciate it."

Doctor Strange began to inhale, slowly, attempting to use it to focus and center himself before responding. Then the inhale continued, exasperated, until his entire chest was full and tight with air. He let it all back out before he considered another word. "All right. Was there not literally anyone else who could have done this with you?"

"Agent Simmons is our other qualified medical expert, and she's off on some well-earned solitude with Agent Fitz. I could have borrowed a van and filled the back of it with half a dozen younger agents of varying but dimly relevant specialities and spent the matter herding cats to the tune of a migraine dense enough to be picked up on satellites as a black hole, but I was forced to agree with Coulson's suggestion that, being that you're on the damned charter of my damned division, it would be more efficient to put up with you."

Loki followed it up with one more good squeak of the steering wheel, abruptly jockeying two lanes over in the faint hope that he might actually get into the merging lane that waited a mile ahead sometime this century. "Damn me, right?"

"Right." The internal temperature of the car dropped another three degrees. Strange ignored it and reached into the back seat for his tablet. "It's an autopsy, Loki. SHIELD probably has five hundred contracted civilian medical examiners on contact across the globe."

"And most of them aren't qualified for the other specialities I need. You show them anything stranger than a double set of organs and a gunshot wound the victim walked away from and these coroners wind up in SHIELD mandated therapy for a year. It's exhausting. I hate dealing with these people. You'd think they'd be hardier for all they've seen."

"You're already a sorcerer. Do the rest yourself."

"There is an operations protocol that I actually agree with that suggests having multiple viewpoints on a situation is beneficial. You're on call, Strange. You signed the paperwork, because, and I paraphrase your own signing statement, you also believed it might be beneficial to SHIELD to have a department trained and capable of handling supernatural and paranormal matters."

"Damn me, right?" muttered Doctor Strange, staring straight ahead again.

"Right." Loki jumped the car over one more lane with a jerk of the wheel and a snarl under his breath when the smallest opening revealed itself, ignoring the way Strange's gloved fingers reached up to dig hard into the dashboard. The tablet threatened to slide off Strange's lap and under the seat. He caught it with his knees. "If I were less responsible, I'd just levitate the godsdamned car. The turnoff is right there."

"For once in my life, I almost wish you were. This traffic is absolutely unnatural, and I knew Jersey pretty damned well to judge unnatural." Strange let go of the dash and picked up the tablet again. "All right. What's not in the open case file? Because what I was given indicated a fairly normal corpse is waiting for a good prodding. Why did it get tagged to you?"

"The medical case is seemingly mundane, correct. What I wasn't authorized to hand over until your foolish arse got into a car with me is the incident file created after the Winnipeg police were called to the scene at the medical examiner's request." Watching the traffic to be certain he was indeed as firmly stuck in a new lane of congestion as he was, Loki reached over to take the tablet from Strange. A moment later he found the password entry and unlocked the rest of the correlating files. Then he handed it back. "Just to help make it clear, the corpse was already thoroughly a corpse by that point. It was something else."

Strange looked at the profile of Loki's face, taking in the weary tone. "I assume the primary side effect of this new divisional sack of problems of yours is you never get to do anything normal anymore."

"No." Loki snorted. "To be fair all it really does is it formalizes that fact. I'm told that before Coulson forged his own little team a few years back, Agent May was happily doing desk work and was somewhat resentful of being pulled out of her time of quiet. And Gods help me, I'm starting to understand." He glanced at Strange, droll. "I used to complain if things were boring. Rather a lot."

"The Gods curse us best by giving us what we desire." Strange flipped to the new files to start reading.

"Oh yes, they do." Loki slumped further in the driver's seat, watching someone's hazard lights go on in the lane just ahead of him. "Rat bastards, the lot of them."

. . .

Doctor Strange spent almost a full hour in silence as he worked and reworked his way through the SHIELD file, looking up once in mild astonishment as the traffic began to open up on the way from Chicago to a North Dakota border crossing. Why they were not flying - much less teleporting - was a vague mystery to them both, wrapped in some sort of mealy-mouthish directive from the accounting department of the agency about this method being less expensive.

Strange had a clear suspicion that the real answer was Coulson thought forcing this tragic scenario would be funnier and wanted to listen to Loki complain dramatically for about a week when they were done. Regardless. "I'm on my fourth reread. Let me get this straight. Winnipeg police received a call on a corpse in a residence, no current incident in progress. They go over, do their thing, pick up this poor stiff, name of Jackson, and off he goes to the queue for the CME, where he sits in his little steel box and plastic bag and he waits for something more than a preliminary examination."

"For over three weeks. Winnipeg is having another hot streak, according to local law enforcement. We checked. They were not in a hurry to get to this particular fellow if no one was going to scream for his justice or suchlike."

"I did a brief stretch in Camden a long time ago, on an ER rotation. We made some dark jokes about the bad parts of Winnipeg back then. All right. Finally the examiner's assistant pulls him out of his box and puts him on the slab. Then, according to this, he remembered his date with a burger, leaves the corpse, and goes off for lunch. It happens. One lunch a shift, you do what you need to do." Strange scrolled down, collating his thoughts. "And then he gets back."

"And all hell breaks loose."

"And ye verily, all hell breaks loose. Witness report from the assistant says there was somehow someone else in the autopsy lab, and he wasn't up to the first usual guess. Witness report says…" Strange trailed off. Some things still threw him for a loop. "Report says the intruder was eating."

"Yeah." The single human word, normally out of character for Loki, seemed oddly and perfectly weighted this time.

"Eating, what in merry hell, and not only that, witness states the fellow had brought in with him one of those little kitchen scales and seems to have weighed off what he ate. Didn't just nosh down, he neatly sliced off a bit like Hannibal Lecter moonlighting in a deli."

"Yeah."

"And this intruder somehow tears off, uncaught, with his freshly thin-sliced long pig and the scale and this poor assistant who's no doubt already seen a few things in his life is now probably pissing himself, and then-" Strange shook his head.

"Mmhmm." Loki was slumped comfortably in the driver's seat, one hand guiding the Lexus down a quiet rural road.

"The attendant reports on a light show over the body."

"Mmmhmmm."

Strange inhaled, held it, let it go. "I'm starting to understand why I got called."

"Welcome to my entire new life." Loki reached over to knuckle at the tablet. "Guess what?"

"I don't want to."

"They have footage of the whole thing, including the phenomena. Assistant left the camera running when he went to grab his lunch."

"Oh, gods."

"They wouldn't release it to us when we got wind of the incident. Said they didn't want to upload it to our servers and then find it on Youtube tomorrow which, let's be honest, if the video shows half of what's in the report, I know at least three people under Coulson's roof that would wrestle with themselves for a week before they leaked it to one of those awful 'science' shows for a laugh."

"One of them is that Miss Johnson."

"She'd at least scrub the data trace and look perfectly innocent for the internal investigation that would arise. In any case, now I need a specialized autopsy from you to compare what was found by the police and what we've got now, and see if there's any trace of the potentially paranormal effect on the corpse, and then the two of us can aggravate the unusual footage out of them in person."

"Well, if there's one thing we can probably accomplish together, it's making everyone else in a fifty foot radius loathe the utter hell out of us both enough to get us what we want just to make us go away."

Loki took that in, then echoed Strange's earlier thought. "You know this is all Coulson's fault somehow."

"I'm not convinced they're not following us with a drone for a laugh."

The car filled with dramatic silence as they both considered that. "I don't sense one," said Loki, finally.

"Me either."

"Might be a satellite was retasked."

Strange inhaled, trying to make peace with the situation. "We can spend this job being angry and paranoid, or we can get it over quickly with with a fraction of professionalism."

"I can be angry and paranoid for decades, Strange. This isn't a boast or a threat, this is a plain and well-tested fact."

"Do you want to be stuck with me in a car hunting some ghost-summoning cannibal or whatever the black hell is waiting for us for those decades?"

Loki sighed. "Obviously not. I'm just arguing for the sake of it."

"Some people have actual hobbies, Loki. Could you try origami instead?"

Loki glanced over to read useful details on a sign guiding him towards another freeway he needed, changing lanes. "No. What's your first thought on the light phenomena?"

"Without more detail than 'weird floaty thing about a corpse' I'm at a loss." Strange gestured vaguely at the tablet still in his hands. "It… could be some sort of soul gleam, yes. Could be some localized atmospheric change. Could be a haunt or an imp summon. Could have even been a chemical reaction from the corpse, or a glint of something on the camera lens. There's a big list, and not all of it is immediately supernatural."

"I'm going to be very annoyed if this turns out to be another stupid dog chase, but then again, sometimes I say that, it turns out not to be, and then I regret it."

Strange sat quietly in his seat for a minute, trying to figure out of that really was a vague crack on Scooby Doo that he'd heard, then decided it had to have been. "Pretty sure this won't be over a demon book this time." He felt the hard glance that came his way. "True, we don't know yet. But I doubt it."

"If it is, I'm going to throw myself off a cliff."

Strange decided he wasn't going to say the first thing that came to mind.

. . .

Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, on a grey autumn afternoon. A sprinkle was in the air, not enough to make the roads dangerously wet, but enough to leave dewdrop gleams on the shoulders of dark suits and jackets. The air had a hard chill in it, and brown leaves stuck to the surfaces of cars and empty newspaper boxes like tossed paper bags. The skyline was a mix of new steel and forgotten concrete, all the neon and bright lights still fading into something shadowed and cold.

No one stopped to look at the intruders as they stepped onto William Avenue, the rental locked away safely in the parking garage. Loki glanced down at the privately acquired directions on his phone, knowing hospitals seldom put the morgue on their public maps. It let the living pretend that houses of healing weren't also the places of the dead, among other reasons. He had no time for that sort of illusion, and immediately found where the cold storage was going to be. He gestured for Strange to follow him, ignoring the startled mutter of a security guard the moment he stepped off the beaten track with the flash of an official looking badge and the power of a well-made suit.

The morgue was kept behind an elevator with only a button indicating a secure floor below, and another guard station with a large and locked door where simple arrogance wasn't enough. Passing that hurdle took a few brusque words, a phone call, and summoning the pinched face of the current attendant, who hadn't been warned in advance of their arrival.

Which had been all to Loki's plan. That said, the encounter left him with the question of how the hungry intruder had gotten into the morgue - much less depart it.

Now he settled on a cold stool in the corner of the morgue, watching as the quiet young attendant helped Strange load the corpse in question onto the table with hands that shook slightly. He noted the camera, set high in a corner of the room behind the glass protector that also guarded the door, then looked back at the young man when he spoke. "D-do you need any further assistance?"

Strange glanced at Loki, unamused. His usual gloves were already gone in favor of a lightly powdered set of latex ones. Thin enough, Loki could see the old scars underneath that marked the sorcerer's own changed life. He thought the matter mostly irrelevant here - the corpse wasn't going to get any deader if a knife edge slipped a mite out of true. "I expect we've got this, young man."

"All right. I'll, uh…"

"You can call and tell the ME we'll be visiting his office next. He might appreciate the warning we didn't bother to give you." Loki shifted his weight on the low stool, watching as the bag was unzipped.

"Ah. Er. Right." The attendant vanished with remarkable speed.

"Was it the lightly mutilated corpse that had that effect on him or was it your own soothing presence?" Strange didn't look at Loki as he picked up the chart to start noting comparisons.

"I like to think I exude a kind of natural charm."

"We all have our little fantasies." Strange set the chart back down without reacting to the irritated noise Loki made and frowned at the torso with its unusual and tiny slice high along the left side. "Brent Jackson. Age, 67. Official cause of death is myocardial infarction, time of death guessed to have been around 72 hours before discovery, which is the most half-assed guess I've seen on a chart in a while. Almost takes me back. State of the corpse doesn't justify that at all. I checked the weather before I came down here, Winnipeg's been rather warm but not quite enough to rate running the AC at all hours if you're on the dole. This fellow would have been roasting slowly, but the body doesn't show the signs of longer term decomp. So I'm going to softball, reminding us both I'm not a coroner, much less even a diener, and say he was dead maybe a day before the police came to pick him up. At most."

Strange picked up a pair of forceps and studied the preparatory marks on the body. The full autopsy hadn't been completed after the 'incident,' leaving them with only the prelim. If he wanted to be sure the cause of death was correct, he was going to have to do his own work.

Or drag in the CME. He considered it, but then waggled the forceps in his hand, feeling the distant ache in his finger joints. Corpse or no, this was still going to be work. He missed that, sometimes.

"You know, you could use sorcery to do the fiddly bits."

"It's habit. Sometimes I like habit." Strange wrinkled his nose, admitting the obvious. "Also I can't mangle a dead man overmuch."

"Thought the same."

"You know, it would be a huge favor to me if you'd go and eat a sandwich or something for about three hours while I do this." The stool creaked, but there was no other movement from Loki. "It'd also make the work go faster."

"I thought as a fellow sorcerer you'd be a master of mental focus, and here you are letting little old me distract you."

Strange took a long, deep inhale, and got his nostrils full of fresh corpse for his trouble. He put the tools down and pressed both palms against the edge of the cold slab, and he didn't say a single word.

Another creak. "I'll bring back a coffee for you," Strange heard Loki say, obnoxiously cheerful as he sailed towards the door. With all his heart, Strange wished the man would crack the tender part of his elbow on the corner of something sharp while he was gone.

. . .

Doctor Strange didn't look up when Loki returned, only dimly noticing the nostalgic smell of five hour old hospital cafeteria coffee and the crunch of a kettle chip inside a crinkly bag. He kept staring at the body, and the notes he'd made. The weak styrofoam cup appeared by his hand. He didn't pick it up.

Loki's voice filtered into his ear from close by, conversational. "There's an interesting planet about two systems over from the Kree homeworld. They're barely up into local system spaceflight so no one bothers them much yet, but they have an interesting interpretation of sky burial. Very tall trees, they have. Non-carbon based biosphere, so the degradation process is remarkably different than most of ours. Silt-like decomposition. Like ash fields. Very lush world, actually, if paradoxically soft crystalline structures can be considered lush."

"Why bring that up?" Strange glanced up, saw the distant look on Loki's face as he finished off his tiny bag of potato chips.

"Because I'm in a morgue and I've already seen enough dead human bodies in my lifetime to be generally bored with the process. Have you found anything notable?"

"There's nothing boring about the process." Strange looked down at his notes again, freshly annoyed with him.

"You're human. You have a bias."

"There's 21 grams missing when compared with the preliminary report, presumably from the slices made by your unusual intruder. Thin, small slices. Even less than you'd get from a high end charcuterie variety plate. I suppose I'm off jamón Ibérico again. I keep forgetting I'm trying to be mostly vegetarian these days. Put a good meat and cheese plate in front of me and I leap off the wagon. Moments like this remind me why I clamber back on." Strange looked up at Loki's blank face. "The amount is notable. I found nothing else besides that, magically or medically. Cause of death was likely his heart, although that's not my department. Spiritually, his life force has been gone for just over three weeks, confirming my guess. But nobody wants that on a morgue chart."

"Our intruder wasn't too terribly hungry?"

"There's an old, widely discredited tale that the human soul weighs precisely 21 grams. Medically discredited, and of course all my study at Kamar-Taj and elsewhere has thus far backed that up. The soul is not quantifiable by mortal means. The idea persists, nonetheless. And our intruder, being as he was so specific about it, is clearly aware of that belief." Strange gestured at the small but deep wound. "Good cut of flesh there. Never nicked the bone."

Loki was quiet for a moment, taking that in with a return to businesslike consideration. "If it's discredited, why bother to do it?"

Strange answered with a small shake of his head, snapping off his latex gloves and flexing his aching hands. Then he picked up his coffee."Where's the medical examiner's office from here?"

"Up the main road, closer to the river. Could walk it." "I want fresh air. I need to think." The coffee was terrible. Strange almost liked it anyway. 21 grams of raw human flesh, taken and eaten. The over-roasted flavor of the beans suddenly turned to acid in his mouth.

The question hung in the air - why? Strange didn't ask it aloud as Loki led him out, it was obvious he was working on the same problem. The man's argumentative behavior had gone away, at least for now. It was time to work in earnest.