They arrived at a two-story house and saw black smoke pouring out of the windows at the end of the driveway. In the front yard were two black women in their 30s, one had the other wrapped up in a blanket and appeared to be restraining her.

"What happened?" Casey asked as they got out of the truck.

"This is my neighbor, Charlene Peterson," the first woman told them as she kept a strong hold on the other, who leaned against her and was screaming and crying in pain. "I live next door, I saw a fire in the kitchen windows and ran over...she ran out here screaming, her clothes were on fire, I got her down and smothered them, I didn't know what else to do."

"EMTs will take it from here, they'll need you to answer some questions," Casey said as they got ready to go in.

They went in the front door and saw the fire was still limited to the kitchen, the curtains were long since gone and now the fire was working its way through 7 layers of old wallpaper. They were able to get the worst of it out with a couple of extinguishers, then opened the rest of the windows and the back door to get the smoke out.

The wall where the fire had spread was on the opposite side of the room from the stove, but there was a burner on, the front left burner next to the sink. Cruz went over and turned it off.

"There's nothing here," he said, stating the obvious since everybody could see there was nothing on the stove, it looked relatively clean aside from usual wear and tear from years of regular use, there was no grease on the stovetop or around the burner, no pans with anything heating that could've caught fire, it didn't make any sense.

"So what happened?" Mouch asked, "How does a fire over here, get all the way over there?"

Everybody looked around trying to find what could possibly have started the fire, but nothing obvious stuck out. The kitchen was well kept, aside from the fire damage, nothing was out of place, everything was neatly organized, the table wasn't cluttered up, one side of the sink counter had a dish rack on it full of plates and silverware, the other side of the counter housed a bottle of dish soap, a dish brush and scratcher, containers for the utensils, a bacon press, a bottle of cooking oil and a coffee can full of bacon grease that were too far from the stove to do any damage, and...

"Oh no," Casey groaned as he saw the opened bottle of nail polish sitting on the countertop, the lid was off and the brush had by now become glued to the countertop when its brown sparkle contents got exposed to the open air and dried up.


"That woman had second and third degree burns clear up her arms," Sylvie told the guys when they returned to 51, "from there it just spread to her blouse and then presumably the curtains when she was running around screaming in a panic."

"Did she say anything?" Otis asked.

"Briefly, for the most part she was in too much pain, but when we asked if she knew what happened before the fire, she said she was doing her nails."

"Think she'll recover?" Cruz asked.

"If she does, it's going to be a bad one," Sylvie said.

"So there's an open bottle of nail polish right next to the stove where a burner's turned on," Herrmann didn't get it. "Don't women know that stuff's flammable?"

"Why was the burner on in the first place?" Casey asked. "There wasn't anything cooking, there were no pans on the stove, I didn't even see a coffee pot."

"Besides, as soon as her hands caught fire, the sink's right there, why didn't she turn on the water and put it out?" Cruz asked.

"If her shirt only caught fire after the fire already spread up her arms, how did it spread from her nails? It might've singed the hairs off but it wouldn't have gone straight up her arms," Otis said.

"Not without some kind of accelerant anyway," Severide remarked.

"Now there're a lot of stupid people have all kinds of crazy accidents around the house," Herrmann said, "but unless this woman doused herself in gasoline and turned the knob, nothing about this makes any sense."

"What would make sense about that?" Otis asked. Then a thought seemed to come to him and he got a distant look in his eyes and bit the corner of his lip.

Casey noticed this and asked, "Otis, something you'd like to share with the rest of us?"

Brian came back to the discussion and shrugged it off, "Oh nothing, lieutenant..." but the look in his eyes said otherwise.

"I thought Halloween was supposed to be the day all the nutsos were running around on the loose," Herrmann said, "did they hold it over or something?"

"You know," Mouch told him, "Halloween originally lasted for three days...maybe somebody's got a touch for history."

"Three days of crap like this?" Herrmann groaned and shook his head.

The bells went off again.

"I guess we're gonna find out," Casey said as he put his jacket back on.


The next call was another fire at a cemetery several miles away from the first one, but this one was nothing like the first. This was a raging inferno that had spanned across four rows of graves. It was another older cemetery that was off the beaten path and there weren't any immediate neighbors, there was also no hydrant in the vicinity so they exhausted the 1,000 gallons of water in the engine's tank, anything that was still burning after that was doused with the new extinguishers they'd loaded on the truck earlier in the day. Now that the fire was out, the men from 51 quickly realized there was a bigger problem than the ground surrounding 40 tombs being burnt down to the soil and the stones being blackened from the flames. Casey used his radio to tell dispatch to call CPD, and he specifically requested the 21st District, as he had a feeling Antonio would want to know about their discovery.

Within an hour, there were 20 police vehicles lined up at the cemetery gates, and a whole roll of crime scene tape had been used to cordon off various areas from any passersby.

"What the hell happened here?" Hank Voight wanted to know as he looked at the pile of charred bodies found near the scene.

"That seems to be the question of the day," Otis commented.

Casey shook his head. "When we got here, this whole section was engulfed in flames. I can't say how long it was burning but there was definitely a lot of accelerator used because the fire must've been about seven, eight feet high."

Any firefighter saw more charred bodies in his life than anybody should have to, and if you worked at an active firehouse that was doubly true, and Casey himself had lost count of how many fire victims they'd found during secondary searches when it was too late to do anything, but all his years of experience in this field still could not prepare him for what they'd stumbled upon, and despite all his training, he couldn't dissociate from this enough that he wouldn't puke his guts up if he didn't get out of the immediate area soon. It wasn't just the bodies, it wasn't the state they were in, it was how many there were, and how young they were.

A dozen bodies, maybe more, all of them high school kids, some just barely, only some of them were burnt, the way they were strewn on the ground around one another it was obvious that none had died from the fire and were only burnt postmortem, though some may have succumbed to smoke inhalation, but most, the ones with few or no char marks on their skin or clothing, were all sprawled neatly on the ground, almost as if they'd just gone to sleep.

Casey swallowed and told the Intelligence sergeant, "Sorry, I've got to..." but he didn't finish, he walked away, and made it just outside the wrought iron gate before he doubled over and threw up.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Squad truck coming up the street, it pulled over along the gate and loudly stopped. Severide hopped out with a couple bottles of water and went over to the Truck lieutenant.

"We were on call when we heard you with dispatch, you okay, Casey?" he asked as he held one bottle out to him.

Casey straightened his spine, took the bottle, drank a mouthful, spit it back out and told him, "They're dead, they're all dead."

"What happened?"

"I don't know, it's...a dozen kids, maybe more, all of them just sprawled on the ground, somebody set a bonfire in the middle of it all." He shook his head, "I've never seen anything like it."

"Casey," Antonio exited through the gates and came over to them.

Matt turned to Dawson and demanded to know, "Is that ballpark, Antonio?"

Antonio kept cool and told Casey, "We're going to figure this out."

"What is it, some kind of cult thing?" Severide asked, "a mass suicide?"

"We don't know yet," Antonio answered. He turned to the other lieutenant and told him, "Casey, there's nothing more you guys can do, just head back to 51 and we'll take it from here."

Casey jabbed a finger in the direction of the gate, "Who..."

"We'll find out who they are and we'll notify their parents," Antonio said.

"Is it connected to the girl from this morning?" Severide asked.

"When I find out, you'll be the first to know," Dawson replied.


"Alright, everybody," Boden addressed his men when they returned and gathered in the common room, "in light of what's been going on today, I'm having Chaplain Orlovsky come down here and counsel anybody who needs it. Anybody got anything to say, take it up with him. This has been a very unusual shift, we don't need any unresolved issues coming back and biting us later."

"Better keep him on standby, Chief," Herrmann said, "I got a feeling that we ain't seen the end of all this gobbledygook."

"You know something we don't, Herrmann?" Cruz asked.

"Just that I talked to the guys from 1st Watch and they say yesterday was fairly uneventful, so you know all that craziness is gonna come in from somewhere."

"So..." Cruz raised a questioning hand, "do we think there's a connection between the torched graveyards and that woman that set herself on fire today?"

"I don't know what it'd be, even the two cemeteries barely look connected," Otis said, "one has a little trash fire and a girl who walks out, the other one has a bonfire and 12 dead bodies. I mean if we're real about this, how many times does something weird happen in cemeteries at Halloween? More than anybody wants to think about."

"There's a big difference in knocking over a few headstones and slaughtering 12 kids and burning the place down, Otis," Herrmann felt a need to remind him.

Brett passed by and commented, "All I know is when this shift is over, I'm going somewhere and drinking heavily. We just got back from a call...this guy cut open his whole face with an electric knife...he said he was shaving."

The men all looked around at each other in confusion and disgust.

"He make it?" Otis asked.

"For now," Sylvie answered and shook her head, "I've seen a lot of stoners do some stupid stuff but I've never seen anything like this. If he does live, he's going to have one long, painful recovery."

With that, she sauntered off down the corridor. Casey took off in the other direction and answered his phone.

"What's going on here?" Herrmann wanted to know, "Has everybody outside this firehouse completely lost their minds?"

"It's almost like the pod people are taking over," Otis commented.

"I never saw any pod like this," Mouch felt a need to interject.

Casey put his phone back in his pocket and came back towards the others and said, "That was Antonio, Intelligence isn't sure yet if all the cases are connected or not, but he stopped at the hospital to speak to that woman who set her hands on fire."

"And?" Mouch asked.

"She said the last thing she remembered was putting on lotion, painting her nails, and turning on a fan to dry them," Casey said.

The guys all looked around at each other again in question.

"There was no fan in that kitchen," Otis said.

"And only the nail polish, no lotion," Herrmann added.

Casey nodded, then his eyes glazed over, and he looked at them like a man possessed, and remarked, "But there was a bottle of cooking oil."

Brian's mouth slowly formed into an 'o' of horror and understanding. "Highly flammable oil." He ran his hands over his sleeves and said, slowly nodding, "she rubs the oil on her arms, paints her nails."

"Then turns on the burner and sticks her hands into the flames," Casey said, looking totally lost. "Why? How could she possibly mistake the two?"

That was the question that nobody had an answer to.


"You think Otis is right?" Casey asked Severide as they left the firehouse during the shift change the next morning.

"About what?" Severide asked.

"Something very weird is going on around here, even you have to admit that," Matt said.

"Yeah but aliens taking over and replacing people? Come on, Casey."

"Well, you got any better ideas?" Casey asked.

Kelly thought about it for a minute before answering, "No."

Casey got out a small laugh as they walked to the curb, he just about reached the driver side door of his truck when they heard the sudden noise of tires squealing from somewhere nearby. They looked and saw a truck make an illegal turn through an intersection and barreling right towards them. Casey jumped out of the way just before the driver smashed into the side of his truck.

"What the hell!?"

"Casey, you alright?" Severide asked as he ran over to him.

Casey felt a hot sensation of pins and needles in his back but nodded, "Yeah, I'm fine."

Severide marched over to the other truck to find out what was going on, he jerked the door open and the driver just about fell out. It was a guy in his mid to late 20s who for all intents and purposes appeared to be higher than a kite and didn't seem to even know where he was.

"Just what I needed," Casey grumbled.

Severide put the driver in a headlock and told Casey, "You call a tow truck, I'll call the cops, since we're both going the same way I'll give you a lift."

"Appreciate it," Casey replied as he took out his phone.

An hour later after the police had come and gone and taken the driver into custody and everybody else from 51 had gone home once all the commotion died down and everybody knew Casey was alright, it was just the two lieutenants left. Casey got in the passenger side of Severide's Mustang, and as they pulled away from the curb, Casey said to the Squad lieutenant, "You still sure the pod people aren't taking over?"

"Bad luck, that's all that was," Kelly said with a dismissive shake of his head.

"I wonder," Casey said as he looked out the window as they drove off.