New Cthonic 5

V

The world tore asunder to a deafening orchestra of gales foreign to the skies above Pennsylvania. From the low, mournful howls of the Mojave to the humming of Saharan dunes and the relentless fury of the North Sea, a thousand winds sang together to presage the coming of glory of their champion. Hark! They said, Hark and bear witness! She comes!

Marina wobbled her way through the hole in reality at a jogging pace, her shoulders slumped with exhaustion. Adding insult to injury, the sun was past its zenith – her jaunt through the Elemental Air had taken her longer than flying commercial, longer even than buying a ticket, getting to the airport, and waiting for a flight.

“You get free first-class seats, Marina. Please, girl,” she said, wanting to scream.

It had been a confident, driven Marina Serova who’d left Los Angeles behind. She may have been a mediocre acting talent in LA – yet another flying blonde – but Hollywood was always meant to be a side thing. Before she’d ever been Lift-Off, she’d been a Bridge, a living manifestation of Storm and Thunder. That was her calling, not acting, and those were the skills that mattered to her. She'd done the bare minimum in the way of networking and acting lessons, of course, but she could never commit to training for the camera like she could for firefighting. Being able to lift a van full of people out of the way of a raging wildfire would always rate higher than learning to toss her hair just the right way.

And yet, she'd gotten lost. It was humiliating. Before she'd settled down in Los Angeles, Marina had made a hobby of making trips to cities across North America just for the sake of traveling. At her height of navigating extradimensional shortcuts, there were days she would start in a Montreal café, take in a movie with friends in New York, and end at a Miami nightclub. The Elemental Plane was a shifting, chaotic place, and the Domain of Air more so than most, but she had prided herself on her ability to shift and change to match its ephemeral currents. That was what it meant to be a Bridge. It was more than just wind manipulation; it was an esoteric connection to something greater than human comprehension. A dog or a snake could taste a breeze and know from where it had come and what scents it carried; Marina could tell you where it was going, what its thoughts were, and to which spirits it owed debts. To be a Bridge was to carry a sliver of your unique dimension within you. Marina was the Elemental Air, and it should have been more a home to her than Earth.

Four hours into searching the Cloud Sea for the correct eastward current, the realization that her skills had atrophied had come on heavy and was followed by a deep sense of personal shame. It made sense. What did she think would happen? You couldn't take a half-decade break from something and expect to be as good as you were, but still, it hurt, especially so with the fate of Salem Cooper hanging over her head. One week late for a rescue mission was not the time to find out how unprepared you were. And the hits hadn't stopped coming.

In order to get her bearings, she cast away the remainder of her pride and asked for directions, which was yet another mistake. Marina had filled her balance sheet with quite a few owed favors over the years. It wasn't usually an issue if you were in and out of the Elemental Plane regularly – your creditors felt no urgency when they knew they could easily track you down, but she'd only been sparingly of late. There had been neither need nor desire. Airlines offered different benefits to LSRs depending on how useful they were in an emergency, and Marina was in the highest tier. They gave her free seats, free drinks, special lounge access, etc. – basically anything and everything short of actually paying her to fly with them. There were other reasons to visit the Elemental Air, of course, but in general, she'd been too burned out from Hollywood networking to do the same with fickle spirits and Wind Gods on her off days.

Word of her arrival made its way to an Ifrit she owed for the fire-resistant hair wax she used liberally during her missions. The djinn, in turn, waylaid her on the route out of the Cloud Sea, demanding that she act as an unaffiliated mediator for two of his friends/hated rivals who were locked in a heated argument over the possession of two human souls and a fancy magic dagger. As a Bridge, she was considered nobility of sorts, and along with the respect and adoration of elementals, came certain expectations. There was no way to refuse the request. She'd tried to be quick, not particularly concerned with the fate of two fire elementalists' souls – the maddest of an already insane group of occultists – but the Ifrits weren't having it. Their argument had been going on for years, and if she was to arbitrate, then she would hear both sides in detail or they would freak the fuck out.

It had gone on and on and on, only coming to a halt after she threatened to summon a hurricane wind, fling them to the border of Water and Air, and find a nice glacier to trap them in for a few centuries if they did not shut up and let her speak. Unfortunately, by then, the hours-long public arbitration had drawn a crowd of curious spectators, including a Sylph Marina had persuaded to clear the rain at her sister's wedding for a minor favor. Said Sylph delightedly requested her presence at a party she was throwing, eager to make waves by having a visibly busy and annoyed Bridge take time out of her schedule for her.

In short, it had been a mess and one firmly of her own making. If nothing else, today, or however long she'd been at this by now, was a wake-up call. She didn't know where she was headed after she settled this Salem Cooper business, but it sure as hell wasn't going to be Los Angeles, not for a few years at the very least. Every humiliation she'd suffered could be directly attributed to LA and its promises of luxury and recognition – the siren call of that gilded cage would not ensnare her again.

Marina let out a long, calming breath; the certainty in that statement was like a balm for her overstressed soul. She felt lighter, freer.

Now, just where the hell was she?

The rounded slopes of the Appalachians stretched on in either direction beneath her, a carpet of brown and green for as far as her eyes could see, the forests just beginning to rise from their winter slumber. A hundred million or more years ago, these mountains had stood like giants, but to her eyes, more accustomed to the sharp, towering peaks of the Rockies, they were barely more than hills. It was empowering in a way – wind had been one of the forces to wear them away – and inspiring as well. Perhaps the next time Marina went exploring the Elemental Air, she’d go looking for a spirit who could paint for her what they’d looked like oh so long ago.

Marina pulled out her phone and descended into cell tower range. She had five percent battery and no service, but that was fine. All she needed was a glimpse of her location in relation to her destination on a map, and she would be able to follow the landscape from there.

Five percent with no service was followed by four, then three, and finally two percent with no service, at which point she turned her phone off, giving it up as a lost cause. Instead, she switched tacks, ascending and heading east to look for signs of civilization. Marina would find herself somewhere with coffee and a croissant, and if she was lucky, somewhere quiet she could charge her phone and close her eyes for a cat nap.

The mountains looked like green waves cresting in slow motion over the first valley town she found, forever frozen in time before the devastating moment in which they swept its meager buildings away. It wasn't until she was a hundred feet or so above the ground that she realized many of the creeks she'd seen peeking out between the canopy were, in fact, roads that had been swallowed by nature. Broken and segmented chunks of asphalt, not water, had reflected the afternoon light back at her.

The town, connected only by abandoned roads, was likewise empty, its buildings giving off the distinct odor of mildew and rot as she approached the main street. Marina landed at a crossroads and stared helplessly around her, soaking in the eerie silence. It was as though even the birds and insects were in quiet mourning here, only the banging of swaying branches against windows cutting through the ambient noise. About a quarter of the buildings had been boarded up, but the rest were untouched, implying either that those who left last had no dreams of returning or that they'd been in a hurry.

The latter theory was aided by the ominous fact that the locals had left what looked to be still serviceable cars behind, some with tires that had yet to sag flat. God, that was an abandoned 1999 Mayweather Palanquin – her sister had the same model in blue. This town had died recently. That seemed incongruous with the rot and advanced state of disrepair that afflicted many of the buildings. It felt, not impossible, but unlikely and maybe…unnatural.

She knew she should keep moving and that there was nothing here for her, but morbid curiosity pushed her to approach the car, hoping to find what, she couldn't say, a clue, perhaps, as to what might have happened here. The hairs on her neck rose as she neared, and she found herself rubbing at her suddenly teary eyes, stinging from weariness or unfamiliar allergens. Strange, with her vision hazy, the green of the Palanquin looked almost exactly like the blue of her sister's. Her reflection in the dust-caked windows looked rough, older and greyer in pallor, wrinkled and haggard, thinning hair hanging loosely around a strangle-bruised neck, a black drop of coagulated blood dripping from her nose, clothes stained brown with—

From behind her came a rhythmic rattling from a window, a tap, tap, tapping against a pane of part-broken glass. Something wanted her attention, for her to turn and look.

Marina paused mid-step, her mouth going dry. The sounds had not been sounds in the traditional sense. She didn't know how they'd appeared in her head, but she could say with one hundred percent certainty that they were not vibrations carried by air. As if sensing her hesitation, muffled and ragged wheezing joined the tapping, and when that too failed to turn her gaze, there was a distant, high-pitched whimper.

She closed her weary eyes, rejecting any sense that was not rooted in her powers. The spell was broken.

Nope.

She shot straight into the air and didn’t dare to glance back for a second, the backblast shattering every window on the street in her wake. 

Leave the ghost towns for the ghosts, Marina.

……

After she'd put a mountain ridge between her and the haunted town, Marina slowed her flight to a hover and performed deep breathing exercises to slow her heart rate.

She shivered, thinking back on the few interactions she'd had with the occult. Occasionally, at the end of her thirty-six-hour shifts, when her mind was frayed by exhaustion, Marina would start to see the restless spirits of the freshly dead, suffocated by ash and reduced to unrecognizable cinders, standing woefully over their still-burning corpses. They could capture you, not intentionally, she didn't think, but their despair could act like a snare around your heel, keeping you still when you needed not to be.

She'd nearly died twice like that, once frozen by the sight of one mid-flight, only managing to dodge out of the way of an explosion of gas seconds before it would have been fatal. Another time, she'd heard the wails of a terrified mother screaming for her child in the way only a mother could. The sound had cut through the roar of flames coming from inside an active inferno past a wall of flames. Her physical exhaustion had saved her that day; her mind was almost seized by the need to help, but she'd simply not had it in her to keep pushing. She'd made a hard call then – the hard call – the kind no firefighter wanted to make. The next day, after a night’s rest, she realized that any woman who could have survived in the flames would not have needed her help to escape, and that it would have been impossible for a human voice to be louder than the wildfire in that instance. Returning to the spot, she’d found a grim sight – an incinerated car with two melted lumps in the shape of infant car seats in the back. She’d worked with an illusionist friend for weeks after that, training herself to recognize auditory hallucinations purely so she could know when not to engage.

Surviving as a Licensed Special Responder meant knowing your limits and staying in your lane. Ghosts? Not her lane.

Once the pounding of her heart was no longer deafening, Marina closed her eyes and focused her attention on the shifting currents interacting with her ears. She’d developed this trick to navigate when blinded by clouds of black smoke, but in the past she’d only had to isolate CAL FIRE sirens. This was a bit different. Instead of sorting through the noise, she amplified everything, searching for anything that could only be attributed to civilization, cars, voices, or—

Helicopters - military, if she wasn't mistaken. Perfect, military pilots were usually accustomed to working with fliers. Hopefully, they'd have a few seconds to give her directions, and if not, she could follow them somewhere populated.

Marina rocketed towards the choppers, quickly hitting her max speed of just below Mach 1. She was tired, physically and emotionally, but the idea that she might finally have somewhere to sit down soon was better than any warm cup of coffee.

Had the sound of heavy caliber machinegun fire accompanied the initial sounds of the helicopters, she might have reconsidered approaching, but it was too late – Marina could see the choppers now, and her pride wouldn’t let her leave them to their work. This very much was her lane.

There were two of them, big, fortified, and heavily armed gunships in pursuit of, hopefully, something and not someone. Marina had never had an actual super fight before, and she wasn’t trying to pop her cherry in her current state.

One of the choppers was flying in a jagged line behind its quarry, firing off thunderous quick bursts, while the other circled ahead to try and cut whatever it was off. The latter started liberally laying down suppressing fire, the tracer rounds intermixed in its ammo looking almost like a red-hot laser beam shredding the tree line apart. Lift-Off found herself clenching her jaw at just the sheer noise of the guns. She could feel them in her bones, and she was still a good ways off.

Getting closer, she was, in short order, relieved and then horrified to find that the target wasn't human after all. She still couldn't see the thing, even as it knocked trees down in its haste, but after another quick burst of machinegun fire, there was an angry YOWL of a cat. If the guns had been loud, this was unthinkable. The sound alone almost batted her out of the sky, and the raw psychic rage of the creature temporarily whited out her vision as the most ancient parts of her brain threatened catatonia. She wasn’t alone, either; both helicopter pilots reacted chaotically.

The chopper that had struck the cat pulled up and away. It veered and tilted to one side with such violence that the soldier operating one of the smaller mounted machine guns was thrown clear, left dangling out of the vehicle by a tethered harness. The other dove down almost straight down to only two hundred feet or so above the canopy before the pilot managed to get control back. That was close enough, unfortunately.

A goddamn bus-sized mountain lion cleared the distance with such speed that it blurred – no, amended her brain in the scant few seconds it had, it was a blur; some kind of super-camouflage, she assumed. The monster came into focus moments before the strike, visibly pregnant, claws extended, and yellowed fangs flashing in the afternoon light. Marina, still reeling from the psychic yowl, watched in horror as the lion sheared through the bottom fuselage like paper and caught briefly onto a section of landing gear, dragging the helicopter down twenty feet and sending it into a wild tailspin before ripping the steel clean off.

Instincts honed by years of working side-by-side with firefighting aircraft kicked in, clearing the remainder of the mind-warping fear from her brain. Marina rushed forward, gathering a dense pocket of air as she did. She used the almost liquid-thick air like a pillow, cushioning the blow as she bodily tackled the side of the gunship. The ‘air-bag’ maneuver did the trick in that it kept her alive and sensate, but even still, the force of a spinning and falling armored helicopter slamming into her was keenly felt across her side and face. More than a few bones broke on impact.

The plummeting gunship was heavier than she could comfortably pick up, but she didn't need to; she was well accustomed to how these machines generated lift. Gritting through the pain, Marina mirrored, corrected, and then amplified the force generated by the spinning blades. Together, she and the helicopter produced an incredible updraft, taking them higher with such speed that she felt more than heard steel fittings groan in protest. Behind and below her, the roar of machineguns splintered apart living wood as the other chopper covered their retreat, spitting everything it had in the approximate location of the mountain lion.

One of the soldiers was gracious enough to help pull her inside once she’d stabilized their flight. Her body protested her continued refusal to sit down and get some sleep, and she could actively feel the bruises forming on her entire right side. Seeing the shape she was in, two soldiers wasted no time in manhandling her into a seat and strapping her down. Another attached a spare headset to her.

“She’s on comms,” said the man with the headset. “You good?” he said to her, looking concerned at her left cheek.

“I’m alright.” Marina coughed and clutched at her ribs. “Nothing serious, at least.”

The men were skeptical but sagged with relief at her words, simply glad she was okay enough to speak. There was a pause as the crew of the helicopter looked around, double and triple-checking that despite all reasonable expectations, everyone was still alive. The realization of what had just happened struck two of them to the floor.

"WOOO! Ho-ly shit! Hahahahaha!" The pilot burst into laughter, throwing her head back. "Oh my fuck, I thought that was it for us! Did you see that thing? Jesus." She turned quickly to look back at Marina. "Are you real? Hey, someone tell me she's real, and this isn't some kind of fucked up purgatory!"

“I’m real. Can she make it back to base?” asked Marina, nodding to the various lights flashing red in the cockpit.

The pilot licked her lips and steeled herself. “She’ll fly…Might need your help to land, but she’ll fly.”

"No problem."

“My queen. You’re a fucking angel. You an LSR? Wait, dumb question, don’t answer that.” The pilot paused. “Hey, hang on, you ain’t Lift-Off, are you?”

Marina reeled, herself double-checking that she was alive and awake. She could count on one hand the number of times she'd been recognized in California, and she lived there. Not only was this the middle of nowhere, but there was already a much more famous Lift-Off on the East Coast in New Hampshire. There should be no way this was happening.

“Y-Yeah. What—how the hell—”

"Holy shit, that's crazy! They were talking about you on the radio when we were fueling up. What a fucking world, man." The pilot introduced herself and the crew, though only her name, Stecyk, managed to stick in Marina's head, too rattled to fully take anything in. "And, of course, you already met Big Momma."

“The mountain lion?”

“Yes, ma’am. Queen Bitch of these hills. Helcat numero uno, the fecund cunt from whence they all came. She’s a beauty, ain’t she? Thirty thousand pounds of hate and hunger, and a pretty face to boot – some girls got it all, huh?”

Marina hadn’t known much about Helcats until she’d started looking into Salem Cooper’s situation, but she hadn’t heard of them being quite that bad. “I thought they were truck-sized and more…manageable. Saw a story about a hunter taking one down.”

“The rest are, thank fuck. But Big Momma, well, she’s something special. Capable of something called parthogenesis or some shit. Got a wild power; each cub she pops out makes her stronger.”

One of the men who’d helped strap her in shook his head. “Parthenogenesis, Stecyk. And calm down. You’re going to stain the seat. I can smell you leaking.”

“Fuck you, Doonie.”

"Here," said the man, handing Marina a water bottle. "Recuperate a bit; you look like you could use it. And feel free to take your headset off if you don't want to hear Stecyk yap. We'll shake you when we're close."