"Ow. Ow, ow, ow, ow! OW!"

"Stop moving and maybe it won't hurt so much," the town doctor said to me as she shoved an object the size of a grape up my nose. Another fountain of blood jettisoned from the other nostril as I felt the bone slide around underneath my skin.

You could say whatever you wanted to about that selfish bastard, but you certainly couldn't say he wasn't a weak hitter. The bridge of my nose had been, in the doc's exact words, "Demolished" and I was probably going to be walking around with a slightly squashed sniffer for the rest of my days. Oh well, it had been broken before and this time I still had all my teeth so there was that to look forward to.

Sheira was sat by the window, peering out into the crowds as they sifted through the rubble for anyone who had gone missing. It was obvious who she was looking for, but something told me not to get my hopes up. For the last hour or so the two of us had been watching the door but it seemed that Shadow really had buggered off for good this time which, in hindsight, really wasn't a good thing. He was the most powerful of us all and he had that magic compass thingy so now we were minus one bodyguard/navigator. Wunderbar.

I didn't regret goading him into punching me though. Sheira spent a full five minutes screaming at me afterwards but I couldn't care. The only reason he'd actually struck me was that I was right, I was making sense and he couldn't handle that. He was a coward and he knew it. Still, punch or no punch I looked up hopefully when a frantic knock slammed against the door of pharmacy only to have Lillian practically fall into the room.

"Still not back?" She looked up at Sheira who shook her head glumly. Her shoulders sagged a little, but she recovered enough to walk over to me and examine my fractured nose. "Well, it could have been worse."

"Don't worry about it, it has been broken before. It's not like it's going to damage my rugged good looks." A snowball collided with the back of my head. Yeah, I probably deserved that.

Lillian sighed. "Well with or without your friend we still owe you a ride to the mainland. Once a truck frees up we can give you a ride out to Port Alderman and you can get a boat from there."

"What about everyone else?" I watched her as people with young children were piled onto enormous flatbed trucks and driven off.

"Evacuated," she said simply. "Even with everyone on hand, there is no way we can rebuild that stupid thing. Even so, there are still going to be some who won't be able to get out till tomorrow."

"You don't have till tomorrow," I pointed out. "There's going to be another attack tonight, with those poor possessed sods leading the charge, and you don't even have a fence."

"We're getting the families out first."

"What about you and Tulip?" Sheira said.

The mayor went quiet and studied the ground carefully. "I'm not leaving anyone behind, and I know she won't leave, not with Jasmine still missing, so we don't exactly have a choice."

The strong and fearless leader I met yesterday was as good as gone. She was broken, hopeless with nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to. The only thing that was left was her dignity and pride and that had almost been stripped away, ripped from her by the woman she used to call family. She hadn't been the same since seeing Rose.

Sheira and I exchanged a glance. I knew she had been thinking, and she knew I was thinking too, I could almost hear the gears whirring around inside her head as the two of us poured over maps and bounced theories and ideas off of each other. While we both had varying opinions we had the exact same destination in mind. For a brief moment, we locked eyes and with a wordless nod, we came to an unspoken agreement.

"We're not going," I said firmly.

She blinked in surprise. "Excuse me?"

Sheira got up from her seat by the window to stand beside me. "Look, one way or another, whether we be right or wrong, we feel responsible for what happened last night. It's the least we can do to stay until the whole village is evacuated."

"Count it as an apology for breaking your fence," I said cheerily.

Lilian looked stunned with surprise. "Don't you have a deadline to meet?" she asked.

I shrugged, "we've got five days before backup arrives and Molly while being let's be honest an incredibly unstable individual who is in dire need of a CAT scan, isn't about to kill off my family. She wants all of us, and if that means she has to wait she'll wait a little longer."

"That's a big risk..."

"But I'm an incredibly stubborn individual who is completely unable to let those in need suffer. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if we left you defenceless."

"Anyway," Sheira said gently, "he might change his mind."

That didn't seem all that likely, to be honest, but hey, what else could we do?

Lilian's expression was somewhere between surprise and gratitude. "Well, if you insist I certainly won't turn away help, especially not now."

Sheira and I exchanged another knowing glance. "We might be able to do a little bit more than that." While we'd been waiting for the doctor I had managed to burble out a few theories between spitting out globules of blood. We actually had proof for some of them as well, so they weren't really theories in hindsight, more like ideas with a somewhat decent backbone.

"What do you mean?"

"We might be able to find out where these things are coming from."

Lilian's giant bat Nightshade had been hanging upside down from a beam on the ceiling. She was now lying in a crumpled heap on the stone floor, on Flame's tail which led to him yowling in sudden pain, having fallen out of the sky in shock. Her master remained much cooler in expression. "Explain."

I let Sheira do the honours. "Last night Nick and I noticed something about the pattern of the dead. They mostly come from the west, correct? That means they're coming from the centre of the island."

"We figured that," Nightshade said. She had pulled herself into a more dignified position while Flame rubbed the sore spot on his tail. "We've scanned the area a thousand times and found nothing. It's empty."

"Or at least that's what you think," Ice said.

The bat bristled. "Are you saying we haven't looked?"

"I'm saying you haven't looked hard enough," Ice said coolly.

"What she means is," Sheira stepped in quickly before fur could start flying, "you haven't been looking in the right place." At that point, she pulled out a small piece of plant. It was a mossy thing, small and uninteresting but as I'd discovered it was a lot more intriguing than it seemed. "This is peat moss."

Yes, I'd already made the joke about him being a wee little fellow and yes, I got a slap for it.

"It's not a particularly special plant by any stretch of the imagination but what it is is very specific to one type of environment. Mashes, bogs, swamps, these things store water like you can't even imagine."

"Why is this relevant?" Lilian asked.

"The zombies are covered in it," I said. "The two of us spent, what? Five minutes down there and we got covered in the stuff. It was on our clothes, shoes, even under our fingernails."

"So they have to be coming from somewhere where this specific type of plant can flourish. So we checked out the maps and found that there is only one location west of town that has a peat bog, and its right here." She pulled out the map she'd been studying and jabbed a painted fingernail at the spot.

"It also explains why they burn so easily," I said as I remembered the composty smell they gave off. "They're like Creepers, give it a poke and they blow up. Simples."

No one seemed to clock the reference, or perhaps they were just ignoring my nerdy ass. "This marsh would be big enough to act as a giant storage tank for the dead ones but shallow enough for them to be able to climb out easily," Sheira explained. "We want to go check this place out and try and find out what's causing the dead to become the walking dead and maybe put a stop to it. If you'll allow it of course."

Lillian pondered. It was madness, with a shadow of a doubt it was completely insane and was probably going to result in serious injury/death/disembowelment to one or both of us. We could either be walking into a ticking time bomb of soon to awoken dead things or we could just be taking a light hike out to a swamp in the middle of nowhere. Then again, we could also drown without the aid of a zombie so that was also to look forward to. But it was a plan, and if there was nothing there we'd come back empty-handed and by then the evacuation would be almost complete, or if there was something going on and we died in the process we weren't her citizens and ergo not her problem. Plus, there was always a chance, the most minuscule, teeny-weeny of likelihoods that we might come back with something that could save her home.

We were willing to risk it, it was just up to her to make the final call.

She consulted quietly with Nightshade, the two of them frequently looking over to the lunatics in the corner. Eventually, the mayor turned back to us and said, "Are you two willing to pay the cost if this goes wrong? Because this is on your heads if anything goes wrong."

"Anything we can do to help," Flame said from underneath the bench.

For the first time since the wall had gone down, I saw the woman who had become the only rock this village had, smile.

***

Anglesey wasn't a massive island and all I can say to that is thank god. It was still morning. Dew clung to the leaves, the sun wasn't even visible through the dense canopy but the chill of the night was very much gone. Twenty degrees. How in the name of mother nature could it be nine in the bloody morning and twenty degrees celsius? Thank god for the shade or we'd be roasting in our own sweat. I know, delightful image right there.

For the last half an hour or so we'd been trekking inland, following the map and compass we'd been leant to find our way to this ancient, crumbling church that had been abandoned after, I kid you not, a priest went mad and murdered four people. I don't like churches, never have and never will. They're creepy, cold and they're all haunted and no one can convince me otherwise. Graveyards are worse though, and this one had the added bonus of being filled with zombies.

Luckily for me and my paranoia, it was only going to be a short trip. A quick scope of the place, a dash in, dash out affair that Lillian had further reinforced with the warning of "if you don't get back by nightfall you're going to be locked out and at their mercy" and I personally didn't fancy the idea of becoming lawn chicken.

I knew we were getting close to our destination when, despite the intense heat and blazing sunshine, my foot suddenly sank about an inch into the sodden ground. A strange smell, similar to that of a brown bin in summer crossed with rotten eggs, filled the air and with one glance at us we pressed on until our shoes were caked in mud and brambles had slashed our arms into bloody ribbons.

"Look!" Sheira suddenly pointed and slashed another bramble with a spear of ice.

The thick jungle of vicious plantlife subsided enough for me to see a crumbling wreck of a building that used to be a place of worship. The spire was gone, as was most of the roof, either rotten away by time or pinched by people wanting to make a quick profit from the lead. The remnants of stained glass windows sat jaggedly in their empty frames and the vacant doorway yawned like a great dark mouth. The graveyard had become a mire. Waterlogged and crammed full of the dead, decaying tombstones were either broken in half or had been swallowed by the mud just like their namesakes had all those years ago.

"Do you think this is the place?" I said. Flame, who along with Ice, was sniffing at the edge of the bog. The moss that we'd pulled from the zombies was everywhere. More common than the grass itself.

She checked the map and then looked back up at the structure with a frown. "It has to be, but it doesn't look big enough to hide that many creatures. I mean, there were easily a thousand, maybe two, at Truespear alone and there are sixteen settlements all over Anglesey. Where are they all hiding?"

"I'm not sure if I want to know the answer to that," I said.

"Me neither. Come on let's get a closer look."

"We'll go up ahead," Ice said, "our senses are better than yours. We'll let you know if we find anything."

Out of everything this graveyard had been through in its life a fully grown lion and snow leopard slinking through the tombstones was probably on the weirder end. While they checked the perimeter the two humans crept closer to the door. The ground was treacherous, to say the least, one wrong step and you were up to your thighs in thick, watery mud as I may or may not have discovered. Even with Sheira freezing the more deadly looking areas and my instant baking of the earth, the only way to traverse the swamp was to literally jump from one shattered gravestone to the next but let's be honest we couldn't really disrespect this place anymore than it already was.

The inside of the church was dark and damp with black mould climbing up the walls like ivy. The cats returned with nothing to report other than a few limbs sticking out of the ground, which apparently didn't smell right, which at least proved that this was where they were being stored before their night on the towns. But that wasn't the problem and if we hadn't gone inside I wouldn't have questioned their findings. They hadn't been able to find any trace of people, no scents, no footprints, no nothing. So why the Hell was there an encampment in the church?

Tents, outdoor stoves, sleeping bags and cans of food were littered throughout the interior but the expert hunters said that there wasn't the remotest whiff of a human being. The only smell was the constant aroma of death and nothing else. What the Hell was going on? We walked a bit quieter from then on.

"Where is everyone?" I whispered. It hadn't been abandoned, everything was still in its proper place.

"It's like they've all just left," Sheira said as she examined a gas bottle. It was half empty.

Ice emerged from peering into one of the tents. "Three sleeping bags, but there's no smell coming from them. Do you think it might be them?"

"The numbers match up," Flame said. "Three tents, three sleeping bags, three stoves, three possessed lunatics."

"One of those lunatics happens to be one of my best friends," Sheira said stiffly.

Flame went quiet and rubbed his massive head against my leg. It was too quiet, deafeningly silent in fact. Our footsteps didn't echo but yet they resonated in my head, my brain filling in for the lack of auditory input. If this was the campgrounds of Rose and the other taken souls then it wouldn't surprise me. It was creepy enough for Molly and the suspicious stains on the floor just added to the attraction for Madame Murder.

I stepped away from the rest of the group and found myself walking towards the altar. The crosses, visages of the big JC and cloth had all been stripped away, leaving the stone block surprisingly naked and out of place in the rest of the building. Anything of value was gone, right down to the candlesticks which had actually been ripped from the walls, picked clean by the scavengers and low lives that made up Molly's ranks. I scanned my firelight over the walls to where the tapestry's used to hang and froze.

"Sheira?" I called out, my throat dry.

"Yeah?"

"You might want to take a look at this."

Ten feet, Sheira's light footsteps and eight clawed paws scratching against the cold marble, hopped up the stairs and rounded the corner until I felt the three of them standing behind me. "What the Hell?" I heard Sheira mutter as she took in the bizarre scribblings on the wall.

What was in front of us was both a combination of something you'd see in Saw (The first three not the later ones where it started to get weird) and that really wired movie the Witch, you know, the one that no one could understand because it was all oldy-worldy English. I'm British as hell and I didn't understand a word they were saying throughout the whole bloody thing, but I digress.

What was frantically and haphazardly scribbled onto the ancient stonework seemed to be an enormous map, specifically of Anglesey. All the Elemental towns were highlighted with green glowing stones that pulsed like a heartbeat, casting a weak glow into the room which made us all look like we were either incredibly ill or zombified. Despite that seeming to be the most serial killer like think about the diagram, it got worse. Beside each town was a number several of which had been scratched off and replaced. A literal countdown, god knows what of but I couldn't help but have a very bad feeling about it. Some of the dark, viscous liquid was still shining with wet.

"Please god tell me that not blood," I said, rather unwilling to poke the thing.

Luckily for me, Flame was more than willing to assist. Not only did he sniff it but got a good taste of the thing as well. He literally chewed it over as he rolled the flavour around on his rough tongue. "Don't worry, its some sort of ink-based paint. But it wouldn't have surprised me if it was your idea."

Why else did he think I didn't want to touch it?

Sheira scanned her torchlight over the rest of the diagram. It wasn't just a map. Diagrams for machines, drawings of...something and scientific equations that made my head hurt to look at framed the edge of the map. "What are you planning?" she said quietly.

Ice peered at an equation that reminded me of some sort of chemical concoction. "Do you think it might be the serum?"

Even I had to admit that that probably wasn't the case. Molly was as secretive as she was insane she wouldn't just leave her secret recipe lying in the middle of nowhere for any backpacker, naturalist or squatter to see. No, she wasn't stupid. I sighed and took a step back. "You don't think this place might just be a base for Rose and her lot?"

"I don't know," she said with a shrug, "there's nothing here to suggest otherwise, but I don't think they have the free will available to make something like this which could only mean..."

"There's something else here."

Sheira stood up and brushed the dust and rubble from her jeans. "Flame, Ice, scan the floors for any anomalies. There might be a trapdoor. Nick, you stay up here and I'll try the pews."

"What are we looking for?" I asked.

She spun around at an alarming velocity. "Those three appeared with the zombies, right? The zombies only appear at night time."

"Yeah..."

She gestured to the building, "where are they? There's equipment, camping gear, but no owners. They wouldn't just wander off so there has to be another room to this place. Old churches like this could have dozens of secret passageways so start looking." And with that, she darted off to the main sector.

"What the heck I am supposed to be looking for?" I yelled

She didn't even turn around as she called back, "anything that looks out of place. And keep your voice down, we don't know where they could be hiding!"

Now she tells me. I sighed and looked around my little section. Churches in England tend to be shaped like crosses which means I had the head and the arms of the building. Anything that looks out of place she said, hmmm. If I wanted to hide a secret entrance to an underground murder lab, where would I put it?

I tried all the usual places first. I peered behind tapestries, pried open doorways and even spent a full five minutes trying to force the altar upwards because there might be something under it. No such luck and all I got from my little adventure were a few bible verses and a very strained back. My pop culture knowledge had failed me.

I looked up at the map with its glowing thoughts when I suddenly had my own little eureka moment. What if I was thinking too much like a human? Well, a normal human that it. What if I tried to see this like an elemental. So I started scanning for sigils, in the tables, in the wood, even in the stone itself but yet again nothing turned up.

Right, now to start thinking about it. I sat on the window ledge that still had most of its window still intact and pondered. If people were using this thing, it wouldn't be something small that could easily be misplaced or forgotten about. It would have to be pretty obvious but only to those who knew it was there. And it would have to be pretty easy to reach too.

I drummed my fingers against my lips and scanned the room. My eyes rested upon the giant map with its pulsating light and serial killer vibe. It was too weird to just be a map. It was like someone had had a brainwave and frantically started scribbling on the walls before they lost it. I had a maths teacher that did that once, we came back from half turn and it was like he'd had a breakdown (Well he did later on but that's another story). It was like walking into a madhouse, writing everywhere. The wall followed the same pattern. Drawings, etching, plans all written in some spiky handwriting that covered every available area.

Except for one teeny weeny little spot.

Well, teeny weeny actually meant a ten-foot square of a bare wall. The natural stonework and dusty mortar were clean and well preserved and barely a mark was on the whole section, besides one little circle. One circle sat halfway up and slightly to the right it was an odd position for a diagram, especially when all around it was barren, but maybe it wasn't some random doodle.

I hopped up and gingerly placed my fingertips against the circle. At first, nothing happened and then, right in front of my very eyes, the stone twisted and extended to fit my empty palm, pulling centuries-old brickwork with it, straining the sandstone until it was ever so slightly afraid it was all going to come crashing down and I would become the worlds largest pancake. Thankfully I remained as a three-dimensional object and the circle had become a sphere, too low to be studied but just the right height to be a doorknob.

Never letting go, just in case, I popped my head around the wall, no doubt with a stupid grin on my face. "I'm a genius!" I announced.

The others seemed a little doubtful when I said that, but their confusion quickly turned to surprise when they saw what I, the most pathetic excuse for an elemental in the known universe, had achieved.

"Beginners luck," Ice growled which earned her a swat from Flame.

"How did you figure that out?" Sheira asked.

"I dunno, maybe I'm just fabulous," I said posing dramatically.

I could hear the zombies in the graveyard rolling their eyes at that one. Sheira managed to overcome her desire to roll her optical receptors. "Come one," she said, "let's see where this leads."

I carefully twisted the knob and a click resonated from within the stone. At that moment I realised that booby traps are a thing so I braced but thankfully nothing blew up. I twisted until I could twist no further and with one final reassuring glance at Sheira, who at this point had a spear of ice formed in her hands, pulled back on the door. A cloud of dust and spiders billowed out from the dark abyss and once the carcinogen-filled smog dissipated through the broken windows, a thin stone staircase that descended into a black void of nothingness was all that was left behind.

So, naturally, we descended.

The temperature dropped off to freezing by the sixth step and all light was gone by the twentieth. If we hadn't of had Flame pacing in front of us, his burning mane and paws casting a gentle glow onto the surrounding walls, we probably would have fallen god knows how far down into the gloom. It was completely desolate in there, no echo, no fresh air, no sign of life and yet, it felt like we were walking into a supervillains base at the heart of the earth itself.

After the five minutes that felt like five hours, the stairs levelled off into a thin and claustrophobic tunnel that the cats, with their broad shoulders and massive heads, were struggling to squeeze through. I'm not claustrophobic, but something like this could convert me to the way of the wide-open spaces as the air was running a little thin, although that might be my imagination. I tried to ignore the tightness in my chest and pushed onwards.

The earthen tunnel didn't go on much further as the gentle thump of hard-packed dirt turned into the click-clack of metal. I looked down and saw metal sheets, pinned together smothering the floor. It was the walls and ceilings as well as if the tunnel had become a great metallic cage. Sheira noticed as well so when we pressed on we made sure to step a little quieter, claws very firmly retracted.

Before long the tunnel extended into a maze of metal, crossroads and side rooms and locked doors everywhere. We'd found the secret base at least. But where was the supervillain?

"Smell anything you two?" I asked.

Flame had dimmed to the point he resembled a lioness. He sniffed at the air and growled unhappily. "The metal overpowers everything, too much fake stuff. It's disgusting."

"Something is there though," Ice gestured towards a winding passageway. "I smell sweat and adrenaline and fear. People crammed together, like a zoo." She sounded bitter at the idea. The thought of where had these two come from suddenly struck me, but I pushed it out of my head as we followed Ice and her nose down the tunnel.

Fluorescent lightbulbs began to populate the ceiling, casting a sickly blue light over all of us, and the smell of burning was now a constant companion. At one point I swore I heard voices, but when the others claimed to have heard nothing I reconsidered the fact that I might be going mad. Again. Though let's be honest I think some else already beat me to the punch.

Finally, our state of the art SATNAV brought us into a room. It looked like the corridors, metal-plated floor and walls, but it differed slightly and that mainly came from the fact that the ceiling was made out of glass and behind it were a whole lot of dead people. I have to admit I almost yelled in shock but when you see a slowly decaying face staring right back at you, you're going to scream.

And it wasn't just the one of them either, oh no my sweet summer child there were hundreds, possibly thousands of the little buggers all crammed in there, forced together like the sort of jigsaw puzzle Hannibal Lecter would be into. What seemed to be mud, although it could have been anything that leaks out of your standard corpse, seeped through the gaps between the interlocking bodies. We were directly underneath the deepest part of the marsh.

"Well, ...at least we know where they keep em."

Do you know the feeling where something is so horrible, but you can't stop looking? No matter how hard you try you can't tear your gaze away from it. It took Sheira saying, "What's that?" to get me to stop. Besides the worlds weirdest skylight the only other piece of equipment in the whole space was a central console that gave of readings such as temperature, depth, density, all gibberish to me but Sheira to understand it.

"There's something weird about these readings..."

"It's not going to be normal, is it?" I said.

"Look here, it shows the data from...that, for the last twenty-four hours. At about ten-thirty last night there was a spike in something and suddenly the density dropped."

"So they all climbed out when something was added to the mix."

"But what did it? What was the trigger?"

"Plumbing."

"Eh?"

I pointed up to the wall by the edge of the sunken dome. Glass pipes were connected to the edge of it, empty for now but as I realised upon closer inspection a pale white residue was coating the edge like a coating of satans dandruff (That's snow to everyone else). "Follow the pipes."

They weren't an easy thing to follow as the would vanish into walls at a moments notice but, despite a few turnarounds, I think we were going int the right direction. And it was getting colder, much colder. That part wasn't surprising, with the number of dead people up there the whole building had to be like a morgue or you'd have dead people soup on your hands.

"Is it possible," I asked, "can a chemical really bring people back from the dead?"

"They aren't back from the dead," Sheira said, ever the voice of reason. "They've just been reanimated to look like it. They're still rotting. Still dead."

"But could it be done?"

She paused. "I don't know...but whatever it is, it's unnatural and it needs to stop. Now."

That was a statement I could wholeheartedly agree with.

The pipes had now congealed into a mass of glass that eventually morphed into one massive main unit. It was so large I could have crawled through it with half a foot on either side and it was covered with that same white stuff we'd seen on the smaller ones, only thicker and darker. It was now the same shade as stale mustard and it didn't smell all that much better. I was almost gagging by the time we reached the huge door. The pipe continued going even though we couldn't.

I pressed my head against the door and listened. At first, it seemed as silent as the dead above us but then, buried beneath the deafening silence was the sound of voices. Light breathing, hushed whispered and quiet sobs from children. I looked at my friend and from her expression, she'd heard it too.

The door barely squeaked on its hinges as I pushed it open and the sounds vanished as soon as we stepped inside. But if there were prisoners in here we certainly couldn't see them. The place resembled a witches kitchen, giant test tubes, tables covered in what I could only presume were dismembered limbs and bubbling barrels, dozens of them, all filled with the dull yellow paste we'd seen on the pipes. I lifted the lid on one of them and retched. It was like someone had tried to cover up rotting with stale perfume.

More rooms branched off from this one and each of them was more horrible than the last. One was filled with glass containers each one containing what had once been a human being, some being fresher than others. In another room a vat of blood that was clotting and turning black. In another was case after case of body parts, arms, legs, torso's, heads, all ready for the picking by your average serial killer. Another had a body strapped to a table, so badly disfigured and mutilated I honestly couldn't tell if it was male or female. Eyes had been plucked out and replaced with stones, the tongue had been split in half and the legs had been fused together and slashed into a bloody pulp.

It was taking every last thread of willpower I had not to throw up.

Sheira was trembling with rage and from her angered state one word was spat out like a piece of hot pork. "Marx."

The little kid I'd met on my balcony with the wild white hair and bloodstained eyes couldn't have been older than eight years old and he was capable of this...God help us all. We walked out of the room in silence. There were other people in here and if this was their fate then we needed to get them out, and fast.

A muffled sob punctured the silence. Our little party whipped around to face the only remaining room left. Whatever was inside was being shut in by massive metal bars, like a prison or a cage, but the frantic whispers and shallow, frightened breaths were just out of eyesight. A poured a little extra energy into the flame on my palm. It flickered and sputtered but eventually warped so it was large enough to illuminate the room and the people cowering inside it.

There must have been at least fifty, maybe even a hundred, dirty, ragged humans curled up together in one mass, all recoiling away from the light. Men, women, children, the elderly, all thrown in and left to rot in a literal cage. Nothing more than lab rats.

I extinguished the fireball and crouched down to their eye level. "It's okay," I tried to speak as gently as possible, "we're not going to hurt you. We're here to help, we came from Truespear Hollow, they sent us to try and find, well, you guys. We can take you to safety!"

"How can we trust you?" The voice came from an elderly woman in her sixties, but she could have been much younger. She was just skin and bone, grey hair hanging greasily and laky against her pale gaunt face.

Good point. We were strangers. For all, they knew we were just there to torment them knowing the sick, twisted mess of Doc Frankenstine Jr. Hm...I wonder. "Is there a Jasmine here?" I asked.

There was a pause filled with uncomfortable shuffling but then a young woman stood up, against the protests of the others. She was a few years older than I was with the same pale face and dark shadows as the rest of the poor sods but she had a crown of thick straw-coloured hair and big doe brown eyes that stared right into your soul. Her voice was hesitant when she spoke, "that would be me. What do you want?"

I smiled. "Tulip misses you."

The mention of her girlfriend's name seemed to inject new life in Jasmine, One moment she was in the middle of a clustered crowd and the next she was two inches from my face with alarming speed. I jumped back in surprise and she started talking at about a million miles per hour. "You saw her? Is she okay? Is she hurt? Is she eating well enough because she doesn't eat when shes worried and I know that she'll put that off because she thinks she needs to do something?"

"Woah, Woah, Woah, slow down there amigo," I gestured to try and stem the verbal flood. "She's fine, not injured and I saw her eat a cereal bar so I think she's okay. Ish. The wall's kinda broken and err...yeah, it's not going to great on their end, but they are evacuating people."

"Which we need to do with you." Sheira, always there to get you back to the subject.

"Ah, yes. Any chance of you guys giving us a hand, but I'm presuming that that's not likely."

Tulip shook her head and tried to conjure something but she could barely manage a spark from within the cage. So I decided to try a little experiment. I set fire to my hand, a light glow of smouldering coal that coated my skin, and gingerly pushed it through the bars. Simple bars wrought iron, but by the looks of it and the fact that my hand was now pulling a Harvey Dent, no one was going anywhere. I pulled it back slightly so my fingers were blazing like a bonfire and the rest of it was, well, normal. Freaky.

"That's weird," Flame said simply.

"You're not wrong."

"Who has the keys?" Sheira asked.

"There's a couple of em," a guy in the back said. By this point, the entire group were significantly more cooperative. "The little kid has one."

"Marx," the four of us said at once.

"Yeah, that sounds familiar. There are a couple of lab assistants and the husks have a set."

The husks? Well, I have to admit, the name makes a hell of a lot of sense. No independent thought, no odour, no sound. They were just empty. Stripped of everything that made them human.

"Any chance we can steal a set?" Ice quizzed.

Pretty much everyone shook their heads. "They never leave them unattended and finding them in this mess would be next to impossible."

"Could I melt it?" I asked Shiera.

She spent a moment with Ice to examine the bars. "This is titanium." Ah, titanium, also known as the metal that can take a nuclear bomb to it without a single scratch. "You'd run out of juice before you made a dent. Although..."

"What? I could boost my power with the Vulcan Star."

She just gave me that look. The look that a parent gives a kid when they suggest putting fireworks on their shoes to make rocket boots. It's a minor miracle I haven't died yet. "Not a chance in Hell, fireboy. But I might just have an idea."

Thunk

I felt my heart stop as something slammed against the steel doors a few rooms away.

Thunk!

"Is it me or is that getting closer?" I whispered frantically to Sheira. She didn't move, she just stood frozen in place like a statue.

THUNK!

The prisoners shot back against the far wall and cowered in fear while us dumb shmucks stood out in the open as a pair of voices drew closer. Loud and angry. Arguing and getting closer. Horrifically closer. Where to go? Where could we hide?

Click

The door swung open and stepping through the blackness, flanked by the monstrosity that should never exist, a small slender figure stepped through the doorway. The voodoo master himself and Molly's right-hand man. The butcher. The demon in human form.

Marx.