The older a given piece of technology is, the less likely it is to break around wizards and our magic. I'd normally say 'magic in general,' but the Monsters having cell phones sort of blows that theory out of the water. So it was nice to hear that our hosts had a white convertible Oldsmobile from the 1970s, built like a tank and with a similar turn radius, that we were in the clear to borrow. The only real trouble with it was that there were only two massive doors, so anybody getting into or out of the back had to wait until one of the seats had been shoved forward. Not exactly a prime getaway vehicle unless the top was down for easy entry, and in October that'd be more than a little bit of a pain in the ass.
Thomas was driving us over to the Morgue through the morning traffic, with Undyne yanking at her seatbelt, apparently holding in the urge to scream at every other car on the road. Mouse and I shared the bench in the back, and I had laid the Necromancy map over his back when he put his head in my lap. After considerable argument, and a surprise suplex of Papyrus by Undyne when he tried to insist on coming with (apparently it was friendly and expected, and nobody got hurt), it was agreed that only the four of us would be going.
The 'safety in numbers' argument Alphys had made while giving Mouse his chewy "no mustard gas" supplement had backfired on her when Undyne yelled that the safety of the mansion and its inhabitants was paramount, and that she could hold her own against 'any human who tried to stop her.' Sans was the other likely candidate, but he apparently had other things he wanted to do, like go shopping for more ketchup.
I suspected his true plans were something a little more important than that, but from the responses everyone else gave, nobody seemed to recognize him as powerful.
I put it out of my mind, focusing on the map. After the Morgue, the closest splotches of Necromancy were the University of Illinois, just up the road, and the Field Museum, next to the aquarium and Northerly island just off lake Michigan. I'd already warned the Alphas to keep an eye out, but they were on the way and I considered stopping over to see them anyway. It probably wouldn't hurt.
That little dot on the interstate bothered me, too. Why would there be something happening out that way?
"Argh, do I have to wear this stupid belt?!" Undyne complained for the sixth time, yanking it away from her black tank top and engaging the safety catch. "It's not like I'll get hurt even if we crash!"
I sighed, folding up the map. "Other than the law?" I asked. "Trust me. You'd be surprised at how quickly you can exit a car without a seatbelt, and if we need to flee from a hitter, I'd rather you were still in the car if it could still run. And this thing?" I tapped the side of the car. "Compared to this, newer cars are like empty coke cans, folding in on themselves at the first sign of pressure. This thing probably barely notices it was crashed into."
Undyne stopped fiddling with the seat belt again, and I mentally prepared another answer for the seventh time she bothered to ask about her seat belt.
Thankfully, we arrived before too much longer.
The Morgue is a 24/7 kind of place. The dead and dying don't really care about normal hours of operation, and in a big city like Chicago, with nearly three million residents, there are always more on the way. It's one of those unfortunate facts of life you don't really think about until you have to deal with it. There are always cars in the parking lot, no matter what time you're there, with the families of the recently deceased being called over to identify a body or to declare the last wishes regarding the remains. Them, and the homeless who can't survive the winter, keep the morbid location moving at all hours. It's the kind of thing that makes your heart skip a beat, some way or another. Death may not be coming for you today, but he's always there, working in the background.
So when we pulled into the parking lot and there were only three cars among the hundred spaces, Thomas naturally slowed down. I mentally logged the cars, in case they mattered: an old Plymouth road runner, an unmarked Crown Victoria like all the police drive, and a newer Chevy Silverado truck. Their tires were all slashed.
"This is normally the time you'd make some joke about things being too quiet," Thomas murmured, trying to decide whether he wanted to park or drive us right back out of the low-walled area.
"Not until I was ready for the ambush," I whispered back as Mouse sat up.
"Why are we whispering?" Undyne asked in a breathy whisper loud enough to make it back around to a normal speaking volume.
"Undyne," I told her firmly as Thomas finally parked just in front of the exit, the car pointed toward it. "I need you to focus here. Look around. Do you see anybody walking in this area, on any of these streets, despite how close we are to the hospital? The day just started. Somebody should be moving out here, but no one is. Those tires? All slashed. Somebody wants people, and not many of them, stuck here. Keep your guard up, and listen if Mouse tells us something, got it?"
For all her bluster and shouting, she seemed to realize we meant to take things seriously. She nodded, flexing her hand like I'd seen her do before conjuring one of those blue spears. "I should have worn my armor."
I chuckled softly. "Preaching to the choir here. I really missed my equipment yesterday."
I was lucky I'd gotten back my gun and force ring, even with the loss of my blasting rod. I'd have to carve another one eventually. Another thought for another time. We all checked ourselves for gear as we got out of the car, the doors swinging like great bank vault doors. Undyne pulled a latch to let me out of the back, Mouse following, and Thomas popped the trunk to grab the Monsters' party favors.
We may have only had Undyne along with us, but Alphys had insisted we take some semi-modern walkie talkies with us. Even me, despite my insistence they wouldn't work for long if I had one.
"T-take it anyway," she'd managed to say. "If we want to understand the interactions between modern technology, and- and human magic, we need to have more, um, more data points to draw our conclusions from. P-please."
Then she'd sputtered a little more and told me I didn't have to if I didn't want to.
I took one from Thomas and clipped it to my duster's left pocket as he clipped his to a belt loop. Undyne took a third. We left the one we'd gotten for Mouse behind as a backup.
"Hey, Alphys! Come in Alphys! Uh, over," Undyne spoke into the little box.
Thomas shook his head, then reached over and turned the dial. It clicked, and a little hiss of static informed us it was then turned on. "You either need to hit this button here," he indicated a little black rubber patch on the side, "to make it send, or you need to turn this dial so it's constantly sending and receiving. I recommend the former for now."
Undyne smiled awkwardly, and I quietly turned the dial on my own radio, glad she'd been the one to screw that up so I hadn't had to. I'm not exactly up to date on gadgets like radios. If I'd ever watched Star Trek, maybe I'd know a bit more about them, but I was firmly stood in the Star Wars geekdom.
The byplay was a good way distraction from the impending sense of doom I was feeling from the morgue, but it was getting stronger. I could practically feel the air moving, pressing with unhearable sound pounding against us rhythmically, like somebody had a huge bass somewhere thumping to some beat too low for humans to hear.
Mouse growled, just barely, tensing up.
Apparently I wasn't the only one.
Undyne conjured a spear, taking a stance of her own, and I took a deep breath, smelling the crisp morning air. I might have felt more comfortable if it had been gloomy and dark. At least then I wouldn't have cognitive dissonance over the competing sensations of safety and unease.
"Thomas to Alphys, come in Alphys," my brother said out loud.
"Alphys here, uh, over," all of our radios chirped.
"I'm going to leave my radio on constant send, so you should hear us as we proceed. There's something wrong here, so don't send any messages unless you absolutely have to. You might startle something we're trying to sneak up on."
"...oh, oh-Okay. I'll just listen, and watch, and not… do anything…" Alphys trailed off.
"We'll call if we need you," I spoke up.
We didn't get a response, but then, I guess we'd said not to. I nodded to the others.
"Let's go," I told the crew.
The visitor's entrance immediately destroyed any remaining happy thoughts I might have been having, and I fought down a taste of bile at the smell. Sterilized air doesn't mix well with a faint hint of sickly, infectious copper, and the cool temperature the morgue always kept was only marginally warmer than outside. The reason for the smell was painted on the wall behind the security desk you have to pass in the lobby, splatters I'd guess were from the heart beating after someone had been nearly decapitated. I idly noted the angle of the splatter, up and to the right, like the victim had turned and fallen against the wall as he fell, leaving a small pool on the ground. That pool, in turn, turned into a long, dragging stain around the corner, through the door and into the medical examiner's offices.
Some small, dark part of my mind told me the effect was somewhat ruined by the florescent light bulbs buzzing overhead, lighting up the room completely. Another part wondered if whatever was waiting for us simply didn't give a damn if we knew it was there.
"Is this… regular… for morgues?" Undyne asked hesitantly, slowly walking forward.
I held up my staff to stop her. "No. No it isn't. So don't touch anything that might turn into a mons- er, I mean-"
"I knew what you meant," she cut me off with a glare. "Your monsters aren't our Monsters," she emphasized the Capitalization. "So don't bother apologizing. We know you don't mean us."
"We've got heavy bloodstains at the Morgue entrance, no security guard to greet us. Poor bastard probably died quickly," Thomas narrated for Alphys' benefit, ignoring the byplay. He looked at me. "You still want to go through with this?"
A slight thumping sound echoed from further in, like something smacking a wall frantically, from behind the double doors the bloodstain was obviously meant to lead us down. I shook my head, grimacing at the increased pounding of silence in my ears, like the base outside had been turned up all the way. "I don't want to be here. But we need clues. And if somebody is left alive in there, we need to get them out."
"You know what we're getting into," Thomas didn't word it like a question.
I shook my left arm, freeing up the shield bracelet I wore there from my duster's sleeve. "You can wait here if you want. I'm going in."
I stepped neatly around the bloodstain, leading the group into the room with my staff.
The empty pounding from outside beat into the walls, setting my teeth on edge. I walked slowly, looking left and right at each of the rooms as we moved further in, keeping an eye out as we passed the doors with little viewing windows. For all the gore I might have expected, the rooms were all sterile, not a drop of blood out of place. None except the steadily thinning lines on the floor toward a room in the back, where my favorite Medical Examiner normally worked. Normally, I'd follow the sounds of polka music to find the M.E.'s office, but the blood trail got us there instead. The tapping we'd heard was getting louder as we approached, more frantic, a chilling counterpoint to the impossibly heavy, incessant bass beat.
I pushed open the door, and saw that the blood trail had thinned and ended with a bloody handprint on one of the eight steel doors that marked the holding drawers for corpses to be examined. Something was beating against the door from the inside. I met Thomas' eyes, then glanced at Undyne somewhere close enough for her to see mine, and finally down at Mouse. His hackles were up, his light growl barely cutting through the gloom.
I reached up, shield bracelet held firm, then yanked the drawer open and jumped back.
Coughing, a pair of bloody hands reached out and grabbed the walls, pulling himself, and the drawer, out into the room.
"Butters!" I called, stepping forward.
The scrawny medical man was laying on top of an overweight security guard's corpse, and he shoved himself off of it and onto the ground, gasping for air. I dropped my staff and shot to his side, getting him turned over and into a sitting position while his face slowly turned from a light blue back into a faint pink.
"Broke the safety," he coughed, "shouldn't… have been stuck… in the drawer."
"Breathe, man, breathe," I urged him, and looked him over for injuries. His green hospital smock had the dried remains of the guard's blood on his front, and his knuckles were bruised and bloodied from beating on the inside of the metal door. In contrast to the rest of him, his fluffy bunny slippers were unmarked.
With a breathing exercise, Waldo Butters managed to finally calm down enough to get his bearings. He looked around at the four of us, then caught a glimpse of something in the corner. He blinked a few times, pointing to it. "I was going to play that at Oktoberfest," he told us. I looked over and saw a huge drum and one-man-band kit, something you'd strap to your chest or back, and it was ripped into pieces.
A deep voice called down the hall before I could do anything more about the little medical examiner, and Undyne lifted her spear at the ready at the door.
"Dresden," the voice echoed down the hall, sounding amused. "Welcome, once again, to the morgue. You're rather late this time, aren't you? No matter. As usual, you've taken the bait. As usual, you're going to die."
The heavy pounding somehow further increased in volume, and Mouse jumped over me. I ducked and dragged Butters, now blabbering nonsensically, away from the wall of drawers. The security guard Butters had been trapped with had sat up in the metal bed, and Mouse had his teeth around the guard's slashed throat. The thing tried to bear hug Mouse's huge frame, but with a blue flash around his teeth, Mouse broke its neck.
The other seven metal drawers shook, then started breaking open, revealing faces with empty eyes, some wearing medical smocks, others thin sheets, and a naked man with a chunk of rebar speared through his ribcage. Apparently the other safe-escape hatches weren't broken. That, or they'd just smashed their way out with sheer force.
"Shit!" I cried as Thomas' blade cut into one and Undyne speared another through the eye. I forced myself to my feet, snatching at the revolver in my duster's pocket, bringing it to bear while my staff rolled toward the wall. I fired wildly, only half of the six shots going into the zombies while the others ricocheted off the metal doors they'd burst out of. I half dragged, half carried Butters away as I shoved myself up, toward the door we'd come in through, but it burst open with even more corpses, reaching down for us.
"Defendarius!" I shouted, dropping Butters to bring my left arm around. A dome of my focused willpower came up just in time to catch the hoard smashing down. I was close enough to the door that my barrier bottlenecked the bloodied, broken bodies of the ex-living, forcing them against the edges of the wide door, unable to push past me into the room. I could feel every strike as I caught my breath, but there wasn't a hope in hell of them breaking it down.
Holding them back, I turned to watch Thomas floating like a leaf in the rain, easily sidestepping and dodging every wild swing, parrying and chopping his pale opponents to pieces. Next to him, Undyne's spear worked overtime, stabbing forward, darting back, stabbing forward again. She stepped back, dropped down, then stabbed toward the roof, and a huge mass of blue spikes shot out of the ground and skewered most of the remaining bodies. Mouse wasn't in the fight; I looked down, and Butters was clutching my dog tight to his chest, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.
I focused my attention back on my side of the fight, where the sheer mass of bodies was threatening to push me back into the room. "Butters!" I called, "Grab my staff!"
"What?" He asked, lost.
"My staff! I need it to get us some breathing room!" I held my left wrist forward in my right hand. "Now would be good!"
I watched Butters out of the corner of my eye as he untangled himself from Mouse and crawled, hands and knees, over to the wall where my staff had come to rest. He grabbed it, turned around, and crawled back, keeping his head down as though bullets were flying overhead. I reached down, and he handed it to me, wrong-side-up. I spun it in my hand, pointed it at the back of my shield, and dropped the defensive wall.
For just one second, the hoard pushed forward.
"FORZARE!" The shout practically tore my throat as I dug deep for extra power, and a faint whiff of brimstone hit my nose as the wall of force tore forward. I didn't quite destroy the door, but hands were torn off when the zombies tried to keep hold of it as they were shoved back into the hall. I dropped the staff into the crook of my left arm and reached into my coat as I fell toward the ground, kneeling and pulling the chalk into my right hand in one swift movement. I spun in place, leaving a clear, perfect circle of chalk, then bounced up and back into the room. I took the staff in hand and shoved it down into the circle, infusing it with willpower.
The circle sprung to life just before the first zombie smashed into it, and I pressed my left hand against the invisible working to add the intent of my shield bracelet into the new, stronger barrier. It wasn't unbreakable, but they weren't getting through by pushing, either.
I turned back, staff held out, but there wasn't anything left to do. Thomas wiped his blade on the smock of one of the already-autopsied zombies, standing otherwise unconcerned among the corpses. Undyne was breathing hard, but when she caught my eyes, it was anger rather than exertion that fueled it. I quickly looked away; holding a spell through a Soul Gaze wouldn't be impossible, but I wasn't willing to chance it.
"Oh god, oh god, oh god," Butters kept saying, trying to make himself small against the wall. He was shivering, holding himself, rocking a little back and forth. "Oh god, oh god, oh god…"