6. Cabin Fever

. . .

Melinda May, alert and aware and on point after two hours of an early morning catnap when the hideously screaming things outside gave up at the first light of dawn, was not ever going to be anyone's dummy. It was going to be Loki that went out the door of the ranger's shelter first, just in case, and she would be right behind him with the SHIELD issue shotgun she'd silently unpacked from the gear bags. Along with a couple packs of granola bars for a fast breakfast.

One look at Loki said he'd gotten about as much sleep as she had, and was about as neatly on edge. He didn't take another 'mundane' weapon from the small stockpile she'd insisted they bring, he didn't need one. In the soft gleam of the morning coming in through a window stained with some unnatural ooze, she saw his hands glowing a soft greenish-white. "Of course there's nothing out there now," he said, just a normal mage in the morning, making utterly normal conversation without a care in the world. "Not a single lick of trouble awaiting us outside."

"Sure," she said agreeably, leaving the bags by the door so she could have both hands on the shotty on the first sweep. Buckshot. High impact, short range. If it was mortal, it was paste. If it was demonic, it was still going to have a hell of a bad few seconds while Loki hit it with the followup.

"No problem."

"None whatsoever."

He tensed up like a wild thing, she kicked open the door and then stepped behind him far enough to give her a clear shot and plenty of cover. Sunlight poured in and the motion of the thankfully sturdy door whipped up a cloud of dust particles, and there was nothing else. She lowered the business end of the shotgun and stuck her head out for a fast visual sweep. "Already kinda hot out," she said, deadly calm and mild.

"So it is." She could sense him relax, the electrical aura of whatever enormous elemental assault he had ready just in case draining away. "Did I ever happen to bring up the story of the first time I was bivouacked in the field with a mess of hostile demonic foes just outside the sanctified ring?"

"You've been kind of busy." She slung the shotgun over her shoulder and bent for her daily share of the bags. As the sounds worsened in the night, she watched him become ever more tense and alert, all his senses focused on making damn sure their defenses stayed up. After midnight, the sounds outside took on a disturbingly organic tone, wet slurps and chewing noises and what she suspected was the amplified rattle of cracking bone. Along with the continuing screams. Disgusting enough that her stomach had rolled over when she saw the packs of beef jerky in with the granola bars. It was going to be a vegetarian kind of day.

"I wasn't the primary sorcerer that time, of course. Far too young. I was acting as assistant to an old friend of the Queen's, making our way carefully across a portion of fire-blasted Muspelheim to position ourselves against an incursion we had been just recently warned of. We lost four Asgardian warriors the first night because they were stupid and prideful and they crossed the defensive ring spoiling for a hands-on fight despite all our cautions. We didn't have that problem again. Have you ever seen demons eat a man?" He clicked his tongue, still falsely cheerful.

"Can't say I have."

"Well, it's very interesting, actually." He lifted up the heavier bags without a wince and then stepped out into the sunlight, looking back at her. "Because now you know what it sounds like." He looked up at the sun, squinting at it with an odd amount of relief on his face. "Just like my old memories. Funny, that."

. . .

The pair of agents crossed the town line into Byrnesville around five PM, moving slow due both to even more debris that had built up during the night, and May's careful ground-tracking work. She'd found a possible set of recent shoe tracks several hours earlier, leading the way north into the curving, cracking road and took it as a good sign. Loki remained on edge, looking at the flat, dirty places where homes had once been.

Save for a shrine to the Virgin Mary, nothing remained in this abandoned town except the ruined roads and graffiti smeared by time and the recent storm. May sighed as he studied the shrine from a distance, her hands on her hips as she stared off up the broken road. "There's no shelter out this way and we won't make it back to the ranger shed before nightfall. Going north after her track is the best option."

He didn't say anything, just continued to study a few dead flowers stuck fast to the white stone.

"Last update says there's still a couple buildings up over the town line, belonging to residents that finally gave up and left. Or died." She shrugged. "Next demolishing tour wasn't scheduled for a while, they seem to like to fight it out in the state budget."

"I'm very tempted to suggest we leave. I detest saying that because it might show cowardice, but our quarry has been in the woods two nights and I cannot fathom how she's survived. It may be I don't want to. We leave, even if we must camp in the woods closer to our last refuge tonight with me holding up a barrier as best as I can in the open. It won't be pleasant, but we'll survive if we head back. Then we go and get that annoying goat, Strange, and we come back with, how to put it, magical napalm and wipe the damned place out as we recover the damned book." He turned away from the shrine and looked up the road, his face drawn. "Two nights, Agent May, and she obviously did not use the shed we used on the first."

She didn't show her surprise at his obvious new levels of tension. The fact that, when given opportunity to show off more what he knew about old magical lore, he hadn't, had said plenty. The black book still scared the hell out of him. Based on what she'd herself seen, yeah, that seemed like a pretty sensible response. Just how much he was willing to admit it, however, was unnerving. "That your professional final opinion?"

He shook his head with a look of visible annoyance with himself. "The tracks you found were very recent. I still whiffed a trace of energy off them. If we can't confirm her life or death before we leave off our scouting, then we run the risk of abandoning someone alive, alone, and within the approaching influence of that damned thing." He looked wounded, somehow.

May remembered Simmons, who had accidentally touched the thing and paid for it. She'd come back from the experience just fine, but only because Loki himself was the better target. He hadn't taken any of that well, much to everyone's surprise, and his immediate about-face in handling the problem had kept him from being tossed out of the back of the in-flight Globemaster plane with about a hundred well-placed bullets in him. Loki spoke, interrupting the memory almost mournfully. "I can't do that. I'm still capable of a fair amount of bastardry, mind, but I can't quite do that to someone else."

She resettled the packs on her shoulders as he stepped back onto the shattered asphalt, looking down at an unreadable piece of pink and white graffiti. He'd said enough to tell her the rest, so she put on her calm agent's voice. The job was still the job. "We can get into Centralia before night if we pick it up. I've got the GPS locations of the remaining homes, might be able to make it to one of those if we really hustle."

"How's the cell reception out here?"

She shrugged. "Bad."

"There's a marvelous sign." He shrugged around the packs he was carrying, stalking his way up the road with his voice trailing behind him on a sardonic puff of wind. "Really how I planned to 'get away from it all.'"

. . .

The roads began to crack further apart as they approached the ruined city, at one point having to take a major detour around a segment that had bubbled up like a volcanic fault. It exuded boiling hot air and enough chemical smell to warn her away. Loki moved closer to peer in, tapping one foot to test how stable the ground was. He suggested widening the detour further in that even tone of voice that said there was a real problem here, so they did as the sun continued to shimmy down towards the horizon in ignorance of what that meant.

May realized she was getting nervous as sunset came into the last hour of remaining light, forcing her breath to become meditative. Not naturally nervous - more like it was being forced on her, and not by Loki, who now looked as prickly as a cat. Certainly they needed cover if possible, and a little time for him to do his magic barrier work, but still. She considered this, in between calming exhales, and then asked a question that she didn't really want to say out loud. "If we're getting closer to the book, can that mean we might still be in danger right now even though it's not full dark?"

At first, silence. And then he said the unusually taciturn, distinctly human word, "Yeah."

She unslung the shotgun again and kept moving, not able to pick up the pace any further due to the increasingly dangerous terrain. One wrong footstep on a bad patch of earth, and it wasn't going to be demons getting the last laugh. "Are we going to be in real trouble if we end up in the dark with you having to slap up a magic thingy in a hurry?"

"Oh, yeah."

She checked the ammo load with a quick, trained motion, finding it satisfactory. "Terrific."

. . .

The sun was a sliver of blood red. May found she almost couldn't take her eye off of it, squinting to protect her vision each time she peeked and resisting the urge to check the cached GPS map again. They were still about a quarter of a away from one of the last known standing houses, and if the map was wrong, it was going to get interesting in a hurry. Loki kept a fast pace ahead of her, hands working in a set of complicated runes to set anchor and raise an assault if they had to give up and hunker down where they were. His drawn face gave answers to the questions she wouldn't ask. The rest was underlined by the sounds in the trees, liquid purrs and throaty calls from the shadows themselves.

They were being toyed with. It was obvious. They could lunge any time now, but they were going to wait until they thought their prey was going to be the most frightened. Bad news for you guys, she thought, resettling her easy grip on the shotgun. If I get eaten, I'm not even going to scream. Hope that makes me taste just a little bit more sour than you like.

A hiss rattled out from the trees, as if answering her thoughts with whatever a demon considered a laugh. She grit her teeth and kept moving fast behind Loki, glancing at the sun again. And again.

It dipped lower, a single thin line of quicksilver light that invited her to hold her breath and wait for the assault that was going to happen in a few more seconds. She continued to breathe normally anyway, then paused to taste the air coming in between still-gritted teeth. Fresh ash and natural smoke. She glanced at the ground, realizing they were walking through the remains of a recent firefight. Someone had been there before them, struggling against a similar assault. She had a damn good idea who, but what sort of shape Harkness was in was still in question. "Loki?"

He wasn't looking at the ground the way she had; the smell was enough and he needed his focus elsewhere. He watched the sun as it flashed a single flicker of wild green across the horizon, disappearing and leaving them only with the purpling black. He whirled towards the closest line of trees, hands up with the fingers curled like claws. Light flickered in the palms, ominous starlight. She could feel the thrum of elemental energy building up around him. "Brace!"

She got behind him and readied her aim with the shotgun as the sounds began to crescendo into a hungry howl, prepared to fix on a target when he lit one up. She felt him tense again, same as the morning, and her finger began to press the trigger when the trees lit up in a flash of greenish-white fire and strange noise. Her eye fixed on the primary target, a thing with an oval face made of impossible rotating fangs and black eyes that seeped fluid down the freakishly hollowed cheeks. It hooted something in a language that made her ears ring and she snapped two shells worth of high impact shot at it as it pushed its way out of the trees, already enraged by Loki's feint.

The head snapped back and she saw tooth fragments fly through the air as Loki's first sustained magical assault began to fade. She noted the effectiveness of her attack with clinical detachment, already slapping in a reload and popping another demon hard in the center of mass. This one dropped to the ground and began to twitch, shrieking. May saw Loki's hand snap around, the fingers doing something elegant and clawlike both, and the thing began to freeze from the inside. Just as the dark cloaked back around them, she saw an icicle forcibly jam its way through the thing's skull. It cut off the shrieks, at least.

The handful of demonic creatures still remaining in the trees howled their offense and began to scrabble around to reposition. "Coming around behind," May snapped, getting her back against Loki's to cover him and raising the weapon again. Hard to track motion in the new dark. Too much sound to focus in on her own. She whipped her head around to identify where a new sound was coming from, marking it as north. Footsteps, human. The very way they needed. She was not in a mood to hope for the best. "We have hostiles incoming from the south. North, identify yourself!"

"Later," said someone hidden in the trees just on the other side of the road, monolithically calm and even. Almost robotic. "There's more of them on the way than just these. Shotguns don't bother them for long, and you're not going to hold out in the open. Follow me. You're right on top of the shelter. And watch for the line, you'll see it."

May glanced up at Loki as the shadow disappeared back up the road, the two of them wrapped in the smell of magic smoke and wafting demon blood. She could sense his bemusement. "Yeah?"

"Or we can have a standing shootout with at least fourteen hungry de-"

She shoved him hard with her elbow to cut him off, then got running.