On the third night, Fonz Trepanier kept the police busy at the front of the house while the rest of the cadre went over the facts of the case with Nadia in the breakroom.
- Edgar, disgraced cop and Epideromancer
- Jazzy Boulevard, ex-con and mad bomber
- Laine Kornell, elderly bombe addict and Fool
- Thad Albright, juvenile delinquent and Wage Slave
Nadia scooped out the useless jelly of Laine's eyes. She had to steady herself with a hand on the blocky pistol she carried concealed inside her waistband. According to the instructions on the folded page, handwritten in block capital letters, she screwed the lenses into the empty sockets. The rest of the cabal watched with interest, uncowed by the gore. Laine tried to blink. The Charles Bonnet style visual hallucinations were replaced with an actual view of the room. He reached up to touch his eyes and Nadia slapped his hand away. The last thing he wanted to do was smear the lenses right out of the box.
Fonz told some joke to Arch and his friend, an enormous woman in an unzipped Chelan County Sheriff Dept tactical vest that wouldn't fit over her giant body. Though his comedic timing left a lot to be desired, the cops liked the teenager's enthusiasm and guileless hero worship. Nobody else at the restaurant wanted to talk with the police except Edgar, who had told Arch to meet him at the restaurant. They sat down at a booth. Rob Dogma, Sheriff Deputy, explained through a mouthful of food that she was bulking for the County tactical unit. She ate chicken like sunflower seeds, shoveling the whole thing into her mouth and spitting out the bones once separated from the meat.
Arch explained the situation. Maria Menchaca was a former cop, retired from the force after a bad shoot. She was still a competent investigator and the city's detective still occasionally turned to her for help with difficult cases. At the moment Rage Maria was in custody but even without his interference it was hard to prosecute her because she had a good alibi: not only was Noble Maria giving a speech in the maternity ward, but Fear Maria was waiting in an emergency room bed for placement at an appropriate psychiatric facility. Noble Maria was still unaccounted for after wandering off with the women and babies (and some of the hospital staff). If the Colonel's Secret Coterie wanted to win his friendship (and therefore that of the rank and file police in the valley), they needed to find that third Maria and bring her back to him.
Then they left. Was Rob taller than when she came in? Her hair was certainly longer. Fonz told the Cadre that the big lady was hot.
The old Fool pulled over and the Cadre got out to see what was going on. The clean cut open carry guys welcomed them. They were from the Grace Church on the north side of town and they were partnering with local businesses to do community outreach. They had Good Food and Good News free for the taking. Jazzy took a pamphlet and asked about their theology. They excitedly explained the Church's acceleration program, by which Christ could accelerate their personal and business development goals. Like if they had some kind of objective, measured in percentiles, which they wanted to increase numerically. The Cadre noticed that amid the food on offer was a big pile of cheeseburgers. Alice gave her rivals a thin smile. She was dressed in an ill-fitting sundress and jacket, a far cry from the sharp suit they last saw her in. She clearly wanted to smoke but couldn't. She at least got to insult the Cadre by offering to connect them with the Church's faith based addiction counseling services, implying they were hopheads.
Edgar talked with the churchgoers about the incident at the hospital. One of them had a sister in the maternity ward who wandered out with Maria. None of them knew who the culprit was or why the incident happened. Either the Church was innocent or they didn't inform the low level goons about their secret plan. Thad talked with the crowd of homeless people. Edgar was too obviously a former cop but he fit right in. He learned that Sauza was camping the pedestrian path on the south end bridge. Alice encouraged the Cadre to eat a burger and they declined. Laine tried to hand out drugs to the crowd of addicts and the Churchmen moved to eject him from the premises. He vomited gravy and dissuaded them from coming any closer, covering the group's escape as they got back in the car and left.
In the rear view mirror, Jazzy noticed one of the drug addicts in the crowd snap out of her signature slump. There was an aura about her, a regal bearing that the crowd around her recognized. Then Laine took a corner too hard and she disappeared from view.
The mercenary Troll was where they expected. Blocking the pedestrian path, waiting for people to shake down in exchange for safe passage. By this point Laine had donned an improvised priest outfit with a bucket miter and coupon scapular. Sauza told him he wasn't interested in any special orders that transubstantiated themselves. He had tried eating humans and it wasn't for him. What the group wanted was information, and Edgar was willing to pay a day old piece of charged chicken to get it. He used his flesh magick to gently heat the bag with his own hands, then handed it over to the mutant. Sauza ate the whole thing in one bite and told the Cadre that Noble Maria had led her cult to the Gentry orchard west of town. Then he vomited all the bones over the side of the bridge like an owl pellet.
The Gentry family were local petty tyrants of the type who always controlled large towns and small cities. They owned car dealerships, restaurants, agriculture, a couple vacation rentals. The orchard of which Sauza spoke could be reached by a county road or by hiking into the network of mountain trails west of town. Laine's car was extremely loud so they decided to park at the park and proceed on foot into the hills to avoid giving up their approach. With the car no longer rattling and belching smog, the Cadre heard a sound from the dead sagebrush carpeting the hill. A tortured whalesong that resolved into a voice. A guy singing Tennis' My Better Self as slow as he could and still be intelligible. He slapped his badge against the window of the car. Chelan-Douglas Health District, Restaurant Inspector.
Laine rolled down the car window. The pink-suited health inspector explained that he was following up on a report about a bodily fluid incident involving a KFC employee. Someone had vomited a mouthful of gravy at a sanctioned community outreach event run by the Grace Church and the East Wenatchee Burger King. The elderly drug addict said he wasn't working tonight. He was taking sick time after receiving a new pair of prosthetic eyes. The health inspector squinted at Laine's cybernetics, tanked the unnatural shock, and warned him that he should cover them up while working. Maybe half of all people who saw them would freak out, and of those people perhaps one third would try to kill him as a result. But since Laine was just a private citizen unaffiliated with any restaurant when he puked all over everyone, the inspector's involvement ended there. He bawled out Innocent When You Dream as he wandered off into the darkness.
The Cadre hiked the trail without injury in the dark. They left the marked path and pushed uphill until they came to a fence with warning signs that they were no longer on public land. On the other side, rows of apple trees. According to the map this was the place. Edgar hopped the fence and silently approached a little shed in the middle of the orchard. Laine shouted on a megaphone and asked if anyone was there. A red light came on in the shed. A woman came out to investigate. She asked Edgar if he was here to witness the miracle of Maria. He agreed and asked if he could bring his friends. The woman said that was okay. He told the rest of the group and they climbed the fence to join him. Thad and Laine recognized the lady as Ada Kallio, nurse and drug-diverting addict. She took them inside to meet the leader.
The room was a storage shed for tractors and other machinery. Ten, twenty people huddled inside. Pregnant women, new mothers, babies, a doctor and a janitor. It was clear that they needed to go back to the damn hospital but they sat and listened to Maria tell her story. Noble Maria was happy to see Edgar and the Cadre. She finished her inspirational tale, where she got exiled from the police force after killing a wizard under dubious circumstances and delved into demonology to help detectives with difficult cases. The demon told her to put on the necklace and she did, and that's how she freed herself from her fear and rage and made all her wonderful new friends. She told the newcomers to share inspirational tales of overcoming hardship. Edgar told a story about his ex-wife's miscarriage. Thad talked about his experience in a group home. Laine loudly interrupted them both. There was a barbed wire fence outside the hut, enclosing a sector of the orchard with larger trees. Nets were draped over the trees to stop birds from getting them and beneath the fence to stop anything tunneling under. He shouted because he spotted something moving inside. He tossed a rotten apple from the orchard floor and a hand reached out from the undergrowth and snatched it from the air.
Maria said there was some kind of animal trapped in the wire enclosure. The orchard keepers must have locked the poor thing inside at the end of the work day. Edgar offered to free it if she would allow her cult of women and babies to return to the hospital. Some of them needed medical care and while it wasn't freezing cold out yet they had no heating in the shack. Maria agreed to take her cultists back, but refused to reunite with her Rage and Fear selves. She hated being the same person as them. The Cadre convinced her to give Fear Maria a rousing speech about facing her fears, which she agreed to.
The Cadre circumnavigated the fenced off area and found a padlocked gate. The fence was blazoned with warning signs: APPLE MAGGOT QUARANTINE ZONE. The trees were thick enough that they couldn't see the light from the shed through the undergrowth. Edgar tried to pick the lock and when that didn't work Jazzy just broke it with a hammer from the shed. The gate opened without a sound. Laine ventured in and picked one of the midnight black apples from the huge trees.
A mottled green hand reached out from the ferns and cycads at the base of the tree. Laine looked down at the waxy being. A humanoid with a toothless, sucking maw where the face was meant to be, like a leech. He snorted crystal from a baggie and upended the pouch of speed into the fluttering orifice on the creature's face. The meth overdose stunned the monster, allowing him to drop the black apple down its throat. The monster's limbs atrophied into webbed flippers, leaving it gasping on the ground like a lungfish or salamander. Edgar steeled himself and, terrified he was about to witness another overdose he could have prevented, used his flesh magick to save the creature. He almost freaked out when he realized that the spell had caused the monster to sweat the uppers out through its pores and onto his hand, but dismissed the feeling as a fear response rather than actual contamination.
A stampede of leech-faced humanoids, red and green and brown and gold in color, burst from the undergrowth and ran out the gate. Edgar was knocked down by the beasts. Jazzy scaled a tree, pocketing a black apple for himself on the way up. Thad went to follow him but was pushed to the forest floor by Laine, who climbed on top of him to get away from the monsters. The beasts ran out through the gate and disappeared into the orchard.
Back in the shed, one of the babies wasn't breathing. Ada massaged the heart through the chest but couldn't do anything without an AED. Maria commanded the baby to fight for its life but it couldn't hear her. Edgar placed his hand on the child and used his blood magick to save the child from suffocation. Maria agreed to lead her impromptu cult back to the hospital. They weren't happy about being abandoned but she told them it had to happen. She had done everything she could for them and now it was time for them to fight their own battles.
The procession went out of the orchard through a hole in the fence the Cadre didn't find previously. Ada, the doctor and the janitor helped the women and babies down the trail back to the park at the edge of town. Ada asked if the Cadre was holding. They didn't have any special orders left but Laine offered her a blunt. She tried to resist but took a hit off it anyway. The cultists said their goodbyes and walked the two miles back to the hospital. Maria got in the car with the Cadre and they took her back to the restaurant to meet with Arch. She liked him. He never believed her story about the evil sorcerer and his animated statues but he fought for her every step of the way.
There was a moose in the drive through lane at the restaurant, just standing there. Fonz wanted to shoot it but Nadia wouldn't let him. She got the cars behind it to back out before it got agitated and tried to ram them. It didn't react to Laine's loud ass Firebird but when Arch showed up in his black and white it slowly trundled down the sidewalk, past the train tracks toward the river.
Arch was happy to see Maria, but not enough to investigate the Grace Church on behalf of the Cadre. Too many local officials were members or even donors. It was one of the few things that could actually get him fired. Nadia debriefed the burger warriors. She was happy that they rescued a baby and successfully co opted the police officer. Releasing strange monsters from a cage in the hills was not ideal but they had no way of knowing if the creatures were dangerous or just wrongly imprisoned. The Court's partnership with the church on homeless services was a real concern. They were obviously using Special Orders as a kind of magick methadone clinic, displacing the hopheads' addiction with a drug that they had exclusive control over. She was frustrated that she hadn't thought of it herself and wrote a self-criticism in her notebook. Even if the Coterie tried to challenge them it would be tough. She could make a maximum of nine special orders a day if she did nothing else with her spells. The Court had a supply line that gave them as many charged burgers as they wanted.
Jazzy and Thad suggested an attack on the Court supply lines. Nadia snapped her notebook shut in surprise. She had thought about such an operation but would never send recruits on it unless they volunteered themselves. It was not only a treaty violation, it was also incredibly dangerous. Court shipments were protected by their elite troops and fighting them was flirting with death itself. But if they pulled it off, it would cripple Court operations in the area.
An agitated moose bellow echoed from the waterfront, accompanied by the sound of a car horn and shattering glass.
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