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The rental from the airport was a boxy gray six-seater all-terrain, nothing more glamorous than a bulked-out tour van. Veser insisted on driving, having had a license for so long with so few opportunities to use it in the city, and Conrad remained white-knuckled in the passenger seat, fretting over Veser's premature bravado in handling a car as huge. It was Toni's friend, Mel, who cited experience as a trucker's daughter and was allowed the driver's wheel (to spare Conrad's nerves). Toni and Veser hovered over their phones in the back seats to check the GPS and yell out turns, headphone earbuds shared between them, insistent but kind bickering over music filling the otherwise terse silence of the van as it coasted down the empty midnight four-lane.
"Motel's just on the left, here," Conrad reminded their driver - tall, blonde, the member of Toni's band he recommended go in the middle. Mel, short for Melody (ironically, as she was the one who sang off-key and had irritated their theater's spectre, all that time ago).
"You got a condition with sunlight?" Mel gruffed, long hair snapping out of the open window as she drove them down the highway and slowed to take the lamplit exit. "An allergy, right?"
Conrad clenched his teeth. "Yes."
"Cool. My cousin's got Alopecia. I know how it goes."
Conrad didn't dare to answer that, rolling his eyes out the window, mouth a set line.
"Be cheaper if we all got one room," Veser argued from the back seat. "Two beds, segregated."
Conrad whipped around, smirking coldly. "We could get one room, sure."
Veser perked and Toni raised an eyebrow.
Conrad continued, "One bed, even."
Veser's grin spread, "Yeah?"
"Sure. You and I would sleep in it during the day, and Toni and Mel could have it for nights. Economy living."
Fielding the snark, Veser slouches back in his seat, eyes gone sly. "So you're saying you do wanna share a bed."
Mel snerked, then glanced from Conrad to the road. "How do you know Junior back there, anyway?"
Conrad's eyes flickered from his laptop. "Mutual acquaintance. We're roomates." He set a foot up on the dash, ankle bare in canvas pull-ons, dressed in light polo and khaki for Florida's muggy winter. "How do you know Miss Ipres?"
"Mutual acquaintance." Mel dead-panned. "We're roomies."
"And in a band," Conrad supplied archly.
Mel scoffed. "And you and scary-face are in some sort of, what, amateur cop agency? P.I. clique? Conspiracy theorist ring?"
Conrad's mouth went crooked. "Support group for the terminally spastic? No. Just roomates."
"Hey," Veser's protest interrupted late. "I only spazz out when shit gets real, and I still get the job done don't I."
"What job?" Mel continued. "What do you guys even do? Chase ghosts? Are you trying to get on TV?"
Conrad felt woefully inadequate to answer any of these questions, wishing Hanna was there. "I'm an illustrator and Veser bags groceries, lady, what do you want me to say. We're helping out a friend, is all."
Toni chimed in, "Yeah, Mel, cool it on the suspicions. Just because I'm different doesn't mean I have an angle, does it? Same goes for Vampires."
The van goes skidding into the cheap gravel parking lot of the motel, Mel slamming on the breaks. Furiously, she whips around in her seat and shrills at Conrad, who has just rescued both laptop and coffee, "YOU'RE A WHAT? Oh, I fucking knew it -"
Veser has already whipped his seatbelt off and dove between the two, back to Conrad, confronting the outburst with every sputtered reassurance that woah, babe, it's not even like that, calm down, be chill, he's cool, nobody is going to eat anybody else - by the time Veser is cracking a lousy joke about 'biting only if someone cute enough asks', Mel has already grabbed up her bag and left the van, stalking up to the motel's office in furious red-faced silence.
The van stills. Veser turns to bundle Conrad out of the passenger side door, coffee spilling in the gravel, laptop clutched under a rumpled tie. Veser tugs Conrad along, who is too stunned to protest, Toni following after securing the van doors shut in an exasperated set of heaves.
Mel stiffens as all three step through the sliding glass door of the motel lobby, Conrad's glasses askew, every step off-balance for the (jesus, what, do you workout now, fucks sake) arm tugging him forward.
"He's not even a proper vampire, and even if he were, you're being a huge jer-" Veser's tirade tapers off as he catches sight of Mel's face.
Conrad could sink into a puddle and disappear through the (surprisingly clean) carpet, because Melody Sandson is blushing and hurried in her quip with the motel clerk at the desk. They are getting one room with two beds and the guys will sleep in it during the day for obvious reasons but for then could they just - please - "Please," Mel stresses, sleepy-lashed eyes closing in concentration. "Forget I fangirled back there."
Toni jogs up laughing, smacks Mel in the back and swipes a card key from the desk. Conrad uses their luggage as an excuse to leave, lighting a cigarette as soon as he is outside in the sticky air of the moth-crowded night.
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"We doin' this?" Veser smells like industrial strength bugspray, his eyes wide and bright in the flood of the parking lot's overhead. The light is strong, but sterile - Conrad is unnerved with how few insects there actually are in the movie theater lot which Hanna's coordinates had led them to. The facility sat off an abandoned (flooded, unfinished) stretch of road that had been overtaken by swamp fauna and southern jungle, its building long and flat and cut like a replica of golden-era film marketing.
"I suppose I'm the only one who can get in?" Conrad shrugged, accepting the flashlight from Veser's clammy grip. "If I'm not back in an hour... you know."
"Call Hanna," Veser answered, solemn.
"Er. Come in after me. I'll be able to call Hanna. Not much good it would do us."
"Yeah but," Veser glanced from the gaping black mouth of the broken theater doors to Conrad, to Toni, to Mel sitting in the van drinking hot tea from a thermos. "It ain't anything dangerous, right?"
"Would Hanna be involving himself, or us, if it weren't?"
Veser pulled a face. "You mean that, like, we're the A-team, right?"
Conrad sighs. "I mean our Mr. Cross has a very long and very constant record of under-estimation. In a lot of things." A forgiving afterward, "But this is just a delivery; we've not been called on to solve anything."
Veser shrugs, nodding. "One hour. Got it." A smile eases its way back into his eyes, "I'm sure we can think of something to keep busy."
Mel's voice cracks out from the window of the van, "That better mean you brought a deck of cards, Junior."
Toni looks up from her phone, approaching. "This place feels weird. You sure you don't need an escort?"
Conrad shoulders the canvas messenger bag he'd packed with items tucked in individual ziplock bags - waterproofed - phone, mystery book page, first aid kit, sewing kit; and shrugs. "We can see how far the living can go. If Worth made the journey I guess I don't see why you couldn't." He waves his hand at the building, wrist twisting. "Unless, you know, general magic garbage."
Toni nods, thumbing her own flashlight on. "Don't skeeve on Mel, 'k Ves?"
"H-what, I'm going with you two."
The van door slams shut and a pair of heeled boots clacks across the bone-dry pavement. "We going in now or what?"
Conrad frowns. "Uh. Mortals watch the van."
Mel pulls a face, Veser scoffs.
"I'm serious," Conrad presses. "Last time I lingered too near Hanna's magic bullshit I died."
"Hanna ain't here," Veser coaxed, passing Conrad to pull open a broken metal door with a heaving scrape. "Just the A-team."
"That's kind of my point," Conrad argued, even though Mel and Toni were already stepping through arm-in-arm. "There's nobody here to rescue the A-team."
"Good save," Veser congratulates, clapping Conrad's shoulder as he passes.
Conrad mumbles a half-hearted 'shut up', stepping through the theater doors and
finding himself immediately alone, and in nothing so close to a theater at all. Around him was only swamp, and fog, and darkness. No stars, no insects, no wind. A stench like an open wound, the damp and heavy press of fetid bog. His flashlight sweeps nervous arcs across a beaten foot-path of cool dirt, mist sliding away from the beam like ethereal rodents slinking from view.
Cellphone burbling its ringtone, Conrad startles, dropping the light. He digs the phone out of its double layer of bags and answers, quips some reassurances to Veser on the other line, and warns against tetanus should the group feel the need to inspect the broken and undoubtedly rusting interior of the theater Conrad could no longer parse into existence. Veser grunts his relief and reassurance, and hangs up.
Conrad is finding it easier to simply not breathe, never so grateful for his status as that moment when he didn't have to inhale bog funk - but inwardly seething at what his clothes were going to smell like on his return. Not ten minutes of stomping down a perfectly uneventful wilderness path was Conrad passed by a short dark figure -
Eyes flashed his way, a surprised 'oh' dropped between them, and the stranger turned fully around, slowing his step, then stopping altogether. "Hello," the kid (guy? man?) greeted, expression warming.
"Er." Conrad side-eyed the beam of his light, which still lay forward to remind him which way he was headed. "Hhhhi?"
"You've come to the separation to find something? Or are we lost?"
"Not lost," Conrad stalled, on edge, suspicious. "Looking for someone. Someones. Are there more people here?"
"Oh, a dozen at least," the stranger waves his hand, small and brown. No, not small. Just short. He looks petite, but also doesn't, and Conrad is having a hard time sorting out what his face might look like, even though he can settle on individual parts - dark brown eyes, black eyebrows, a flop of black hair - young, somehow. But also old. "You can only get through this seventy-second moon, but can take as long as you need to get back out. Did you bring supper, maybe?"
"I... did not," Conrad starts to turn back to his task, confused and irritated.
The stranger clicks his tongue and joins Conrad's stride down the path. "I have supper going at the shack. When you get to the cross-roads, there will be a sign." His voice is lilted, nearly musical. A note of posh old-money Britain to it. Out of the corner of Conrad's eye, the man looks East-Indian. Or Middle-Eastern. Something. "You'll want my name."
Conrad quickens his pace. "I don't want anything from you, thanks. Just here to find my friends." His grip tightens on the flashlight, fist balled atop the flat cool canvas of the messenger bag.
The stranger falls back at last, calling after Conrad - "It's Noah. My name."
Conrad is startled to find he's stumbled on a cross-path. There is a lopsided wooden sign, words etched into arrowed planks. He turns back to shine the light after the stranger, who is standing still five paces back, smiling expectantly.
Conrad can see the man now - a guy his age perhaps, cute the way maybe girls would say it to really mean 'handsome if he were taller'. The features all come together sharply, now, an actual face; Conrad's dead chest gives a pained squeeze - he is reminded of someone, but also nobody at all. "Well," Conrad supplies. "Thank you, but I don't think - I mean - have you seen, um, a dead man? Green? And maybe a tall prig with a foul mouth? Blonde?"
Noah nods at the sign. "Those are west. You came from the south. The paths go straight - you can't get lost. Oh!" He pivots from his turn back south-bound, "If you find an old animal-fat lamp, it's mine. The shack is east. Leave it there, if I don't see you. If you find it, I mean."
"Okay," Conrad nods, strangely relieved. He holds a hand up in goodbye, starting down the west-labeled path with both fists shoved back atop the canvas bag.
The zombie is sitting on a tree stump five minutes down the path, pantlegs rolled up over wet bones, only one leg still attached. He is on a cellphone, Hanna's voice piping out between the zombie's even, low replies.
"Er, hi." Conrad crouches to a kneel, flipping the messenger bag open before dumping its contents entirely. "I can sew, but maybe you want the Doctor here to help with this?"
"You have the paper," the zombie inquires in that placid voice of his.
Conrad shuts his mouth and nods, plucking the bag out of the pile and tossing it to the waiting gloves.
"This is nothing worse than an illusion," the zombie goes on to explain, pulling his bright orange button-up open, exposing the deep autopsy scars. "I pulled the leg off to prevent the spread of decay; but there is no decay. Ah," the piece of book page is unwrapped, folded doubly small, and tucked neatly past the gash of an autopsy scar. "There."
Conrad blanches, but by the time he looks back the zombie's legs have fleshed out once more, bone and gristle covered now by the same leathery green skin as the rest of him. "Well that's -"
"I'll have to sew the leg. Is Worth finished in his task?"
There is an expectation there that twists Conrad's mouth into a frown. "I suppose I could go find out. What task?"
"He is looking for something, I believe. An artifact pivotal to - well," A dry cough. "He's made it clear he won't leave without it."
"I could drag him," Conrad grumbles, standing. "If it's one of those impossible bullshit magical things. Wasting his goddamn time."
The zombie's smile is small and sad. "That might be best. Do you suppose you could?"
Conrad gazes imperiously down his nose at the path, as if its stretch of dirt was the only thing to challenge his ability. "First time I met the man, I kicked his ass."
"Mm." The zombie agrees. "I remember."
Conrad huffs, trying not to smirk. Hanna's voice chirps from the phone, which is still hovering near the zombie's ear. The zombie answers the question, watching Conrad stride down the dark bog path, flashlight beam steady and determined.
