I really need to do more cardio.

  My chest hurts. My lungs burn. My legs already ache, and I think I’m getting a shin splint after, what, five seconds of sprinting? Ugh. I am way out of shape. Fuck paranormal magic shit, next step in my upgrade should be to start getting fit.

  All these thoughts reflect off the glass as I run, the sound of fungal spores screaming following behind me much too close.

  Jay runs at my side, faster than me by half a step, both of us breathing in that panicked way that’s half-scream, half-inhale. Behind us, I can hear skittering noises, the sound of long, slender fingers that are much too sharp dragging something in closer, coming close.

  I keep sprinting, my heart beating so hard in my chest that it’s already starting to hurt, the blood in my veins thick like treacle. I feel something in my reconstructed arm shifting, redirecting to the rest of my bloodstream. It leaves behind a stiffness that feels alarming, a sudden numbness in the limb that I’m really not comfortable with stopping to analyze- but in that same transformation, I feel my heart thunder, and something hit my system like a fucking shot.

  My chest hurts. My veins balloon, stressed, pushed, filled with more blood than it should be- and my legs start moving even faster, blurring as they stomp forward, thundering forward. I actually have to grab Jay by the back of his jacket as I run, shoving him ahead to give a little bit of a push to stay ahead of me.

  Ahead of me, always. If we’re going to get caught, I’m going to get caught first. Let it tear me apart before it touches him. In this, the part of me that is behind the glass and the rest are in perfect alignment.

  It’s not enough.

  NO TRESPASSERS IN THE MILL.

  The “words” echo through the space around us, reverberating much, much more than they should against these wood walls. The stillness, the sense of stasis, vanishes in an instant, and suddenly what was wood and solid architecture stops being that. The floor starts to give a little, a springiness to it that feels uncomfortably warm even through my shoes. The walls bend a little, as if suddenly letting go of the need to support the ceiling above, turning instead towards us, bending inward in a way that simply should not be.

  Jay stumbles, the floor’s weird amount of give and his inability to properly perceive it doubling up on him. He slips, almost falls to his hands and knees, and the screaming in my blood reaches through me to grab him, my hands shooting out to nab the same spot I pushed not too long ago. My right hand is off-center, and I see lines on it, red beading up from between reopening cuts, but the sharp-edges tips of the Glove cut into his sweater and help me get a grip anyways. I drag him up, throw him forward, slowing as I do but not stopping, and-

  It’s not enough.

  The Foreman stops being behind me and ends up beside us instead. It doesn’t grab at me like I expected it to, doesn’t sprint directly into us and tear us apart- instead, it moves along the wall, dragged forward as if on hidden tracks beneath the wallpaper. Its shoes clack against the ground and push it forward, but it’s the limbs that drag it, like those sharp-edged fingers are puppet strings that skitter and pull it along at the same time. It’s not animalistic, it’s not human, it’s not feral or sociopathic; it’s like some kind of alien thing, between machine and puppet and something softer, spongy and wrong.

  We’re down for barely a second, if that, but it’s enough. That impossible movement, like it’s being dragged along even as it convulses forward, like a spider but worse, has it beside of us, and then in front, and-

  The Foreman stops, one hand on each side of the hallway frame as it stares back at us from those empty eyes full of writhing grey.

  It’s blocking the way we came in. Blocking the exit, back towards the entry office and the locker rooms.

  No time. Its face is distorting, the skin too loose and slipping back like a mask as its empty mouth of wriggling, chattering teeth gets bigger and bigger and starts looking less like a mouth. It’s leaning forward. The teeth are extending. The sharp-tinged fingers crack into the wallpaper, as if excited, as teeth on worm-like strings of grey start to emerge and move forward like scorpion tails-

  Fuck this shit. No time.

  I’ve grabbed Jay and thrown him, not towards the exit but down the other way, towards the office-doors of before. I’m betting that when I sensed something behind them, it was the Foreman, inhabiting a space that whoever it used to be was more familiar with- if we can find a window, then we can get out.

  An exhale of air, not words this time but just a spray- behind us, I hear the sound of spores exhaling like a pressurized gas. The walls crack again- removing its fingers? Preparing to dash after us again?

  Doesn’t matter. Jay gets his feet back under him just in time to shove hard against the door to the office building of the campus, and I’m right behind.

  NO TRESPASSERS IN THE MILL-

  I don’t listen to the rest of the sound, turning to slam the door shut as hard as I can. My hands scrabble at the lock, the inhuman pressure in my veins traded for numbness on my right side, and I fail to get at the lock properly. It’s too small, and my hand is all wrong, all clumsy, and-

  Jay slams a broomstick that he got from somewhere into the doorframe, the size of it just enough to jam perfectly between each side. A second later, faster than I would have gotten the lock, I feel the thing chasing us slam against the door, knocking me a few feet back- and stopping as the improvised barricade locks it into place.

  It slams again, harder, and I can see the broom shaking, the middle of it aching and starting to splinter. It won’t be enough.

  I turn to Jay, and he’s already moving, hands around a heavy-looking metal file cabinet that he’s trying to drag. My heart thunders as over-thick blood moves through it and pulls me forward, making every part of my body feel pressurized except my arm, which is bleeding now from rents all up and down its musculature. It doesn’t matter. I’m holding together, and it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt yet, so I just move, grabbing the other side of the file cabinet. I shouldn’t even be able to lift it, I can tell how heavy it is-

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  My blood pulls me from inside and throws, the dense metal of the cabinet making a horrendous crashing sound as it crashes violently against the ground. The top of it lands against the doorframe, further blocking it, and the next time the thing beyond throws itself against it, the broomstick doesn’t splinter as much.

  It’s temporary. The work of… maybe a minute? If that.

  “Jesus FUCK Ilia, what the HELL!”

  Internally, I can’t help but agree. Externally, I stay silent, eyes roving, looking for something else to block the door with. My head hurts. My teeth ache, and I realize I’ve been gritting them together so hard I can hear them grinding. My chest hurts.

  Behind the glass.

  Look for a window, door, anything.

  “Come on, we need to go.”

  Jay goes to say something else, but I’m not really listening. I need to get him out, get him out now. He needs to be someplace safe.

  This was a productive trip. It won’t be a total fuckup so long as Jay gets out ok, and I get out intact. I got new supplies, I learned more about the surroundings, about what’s possible, and I have new ideas about what might happen in other places. I know more about myself, too, if I can factor in how the fuck this blood thing is working. The Bloodling, swimming through me, seemed to respond to what I needed, even as it’s making my right arm number and number, even as the red starts to soak into my sleeve. With the sample of the fungal mess that I took, maybe I can start working on something entirely new, especially if I can generate a lure, and-

  Priorities. Focus. Don’t panic.

  My head hurts.

  Don’t let it distract you. Too much bloodflow. Your intracranial pressure is probably stupid high right now, and considering how much your throat hurts, you might be hyperventilating. If not hyperventilating, then maybe hyper-oxygenated.

  My teeth hurt. My throat hurts. My head hurts. My chest hurts.

  Focus.

  Behind the glass. Be objective. Think.

  “Jay, go, go see if we can find some windows, someplace we can crawl out of. Break open a way out if we need. I’ll look for doors. Stay together though, ok? We stay together, I keep an eye out for dangers, for-”

  “Ilia you are fucking bleeding!”

  I don’t look down at my arm. I can feel the Glove, where it connects, even as numbness continues to grow up along the lines where my arm was torn from me.

  “Yes, I am. I can fix it. We need to go.”

  I don’t know if it’s my voice, or the situation, or, I don’t know, fear, but he doesn’t protest further. I can barely keep track of him- it feels like my head is literally swimming, like I’m staring through a fisheye lens and can’t quite keep track of what to focus on.

  The broom splinters audibly behind me, and the door alongside it… but the door doesn’t splinter. It squelches. Rubbery. Like the rest of the building, somehow both incredibly solid, incredibly static, and soft, yielding.

  There are desks here, and cubicles, and hallways, but the space isn’t very big. I see signs to a stairwell off to one side, a second story with more offices up above, but-

  Focus. Upstairs won’t help. Find a window, find-

  Boarded. Boarded.

  Glass.

  Jay sees it a step before I do, my head spinning, dizzy, but I glimpse it a second later. Daylight, streaming in, bright but muted somehow. It’s like a stained glass window, but all grey, all free of patterns.

  Jay is already there, grabbing a file-holder from one of the desks in the surprisingly open-concept space and throwing.

  It bounces off, and it doesn’t sound like glass.

  It sounds rubbery. It sounds… not wet, but not something I can describe otherwise.

  Fuck.

  I join in a second after, my right arm still at my side as I grab a binder from another desk. It’s heavy, it’s got metal rings, and I am having trouble holding it one handed, but I throw it against the window. Less bounce that time, more impact (my arm hurts how hard did I just throw?), but it still remains intact, like it’s more of a membrane than glass.

  “FUCK!” Jay yells, swinging his knife by the hilt into the glass, over and over. “Fucking safety glass magic bullshit!”

  I…

  Hmm.

  Turn and fight? Resources low. Can’t stay in this state much longer, or something’s going to go wrong, whether it’s my arm falling off or my heart collapsing.

  The door is splintering open further. I can see hints of something beyond, and there are bright little lights reflecting off-

  Oh. Those are the teeth. Wriggling on long grey tendrils like worms, jabbing at the air and digging through the door.

  It’s eating its way through. Or… chewing. If that makes any sense at all, when there is no jaw, when there is nothing but fungal muscle and teeth.

  “Ilia- Ilia! Focus!”

  I blink. That word, from outside my head, surprises me. I-

  Jay is looking at me.

  “Whatever you’re doing, stop it. Your arm is falling apart. Stop it. Get clear headed, and help me think of a way out of this. There might be something upstairs we can use to get out, and there’s emergency doorways in places like this. We can do this, alright? But just… stop.”

  My head hurts.

  I…

  Ok.

  Ok.

  I ask my blood to stop. I ask it to go back to my arm. I reach out through a mind that feels like it’s sped up and slowed down at once and ask it to stop what it’s doing and go back.

  Please.

  The door splinters, wet and soft and strange. The thing behind it screams with a voice of spores and silence.

  NO MOVING FLESH IN THE MILL

  My arm starts to pull together. The numbness becomes sharp, cutting like piano wire through my skin and deep, deep into my flesh.

  The door is breaking.

  And then…

  A sound. From the desks off to one side.

  A shuffling noise, something with weight and form together.

  Jay and I turn to look, both of clutching our knives, my bleeding hand falling into my bag towards the last item I have.

  Something from the back of the room stands, like a broken puppet. It leans on one of the desks, like a beached whale climbing up off the surf.

  I feel the ground around me get softer as I begin to sink. I start to smell the must, louder than before.

  The figure rises up to its height, leaning strangely to one side, its skin draped open as something that was once a man, wearing a stained button-up and jeans, turns its “face” to see us.

  And then another sound of shuffling, coming from a different direction. And then another, fainter, coming from down the hallway we came, the other side of the building with its own desks.

  Echoing like thunder, this place of mold and quiet hunger and inhuman un-life speaks from so many mouths, from behind the walls, from under the floors and in the shadows and from a million veins that echo through the building.

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROPAGATED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT

  …

  Well, fuck.

  7-8 ish (it's fluctuating with this week's mad dash!) chapters on Patreon and more to come!

  And just for funsies, here's the discord!