Prologue
On a long and lonesome highway
East of Omaha
You can listen to the engines
Moaning out its one note song
You can think about the woman
Or the girl you knew the night before
“Now this is a jam.” The passenger said, air-drumming the song in the silver truck as it peeled on down the road at over 80mph. It was still gaining speed. “We should come out this way more. I like this station.”
The driver didn’t glance over at him, but a smile remained on her lips. “Yeah, that’s what we should do,” the sarcasm was obvious. “Come here, to Ohio, and not some place like California or Florida.” Pedal to the metal as they came upon a black iron gate. “Hold on.”
The man reached up to grab the suicide handle, as he called it, and the truck’s nose pushed through the gate and broke it right open for them. The vehicle bounced a bit as it went over the rough terrain, heedless of tombstones on its path towards one of the mausoleums
Later in the evening
As you lie awake in bed
With the echoes of the amplifiers ringing in your head
You smoke the day’s last cigarette
Remembering what she said
What she said
The truck came to a stop right outside those doors. “What, not gonna ram it, too?”
“No, it’d hurt her too much,” the driver said, reaching over and pulling the door open without bothering to turn the truck off. She hopped out, and the passenger followed suit. She went right to the back of the truck, where there metal boxes on the sides filled with hunting equipment. She hopped right into the back and began to pull out some things.
“I booked us a cruise to Bermuda.” The comment seemed to come out of nowhere, causing the driver to pause in sorting out tools.
“Vacation or job?”
He chuckled, “Why not both?”
She went back to grab a few of the items, then walked to where he waited, and took his hand down. He explained, “I did some research on the phenomena of the Bermuda Triangle when you were making a supply run. It seems to cause chaos only under specific circumstances, and I got us tickets for a cruise that’s going through it at such a time.”
The two made their way to the mausoleum doors, truck still purring with life. The woman passed the flashlight to the man and asked, “What are the circumstances?”
He held the flashlight and explained as she dug out her lock picking tools. “The fourth Lunar Eclipse in a Lunar Tetrad. It’s also called a Blood Moon by Christians who like to prophesize. It happens now and then, used to be rarer than it is now.”
“Funny how that happens a lot,” the words were muttered, and the man laughed. A click, and she pushed the door open.
“I know,” he agreed,“Feels like something big is coming, doesn’t it?”
The woman didn’t voice her concerns, but she agree with the brown-haired man. She didn’t want to, but she did.
They both went inside, and the woman shut the door after them. “Find the phylactery. We don’t know how close the lich is.”Locked, not that it mattered. What mattered was the oil, which she spread in a line across the doorway and then moved to the windows. She intended to walk along the walls, but first things first were the vulnerable points. “We’ll head on to the east coast after this.”
The man began to move about, first to the desk, which he began to shuffle through the items. “We don’t even know what it looks like,”he muttered, more to himself. “I’m convinced that’s not even a word.”
The woman ignored his complaints and continued with the oil. A gust of wind against the building soon caused both of them to look up, and then look at each other. The man moved quicker. The woman found her matchbox and quickly tried to light one. She threw it onto the oil, which lit immediately—white flame. “It can’t cross. It can’t.” She was speaking for her own sanity.
“It can put it out.”He reminded. They had to book it when they learned that nugget of information earlier.
She knew, and so she set aside oil and matches on the desk and began to join the search for the phylactery. “It should be a box made of skin,”she told him. She’d told him this before.“It will have writing on it, but the skin should be the giveaway.”
“Oh, yes, because ski—holy fuck.”The man’s hands jumped back from what they’d stumbled on. “That…is not leather.”The woman’s hazel eyes lifted from her own search to see what he’d found. She picked up the skin box, put it on the table, just as the sprinklers of the building were set off.
“I was expecting it would be dried, not—”
“Just destroy it!”Impatient. They were running out of time. The fire didn’t set the sprinklers off. The fire didn’t smoke.
He lifted the axe, and brought it down on the box just as the fire at the doorway was cleared. The door was thrown open by a gust, and in walked the man with the thin skin, and skeletal form. The door was blown to pieces by the gust, and flew at the two humans. The woman ducked, but the man was caught up in his task. The axe fell on the box, cut it in twain, but several pieces of wood plunged through him for it. He remained standing, rigid.
The lich in the doorway collapsed, body becoming dust as that which kept its body immortal was destroyed.
The woman rose from her ducked position and first glanced towards the doorway. The clothing of the lich was in a pile. “You did—”and the rest of the sentence caught in her throat as her dark eyes caught sight of the man. There was a stake of wood through an eye, and others penetrated his arms and chest. He was trembling, clearly still alive, and in pain.“Wyatt, I—hold on, just—hold on!”
Last edited by a moderator: