For all the dangers of the enemy being equipped with the full powers of Logic and Reason, it is important to recognize that Logic and Reason are not why we hunt, nor why we face such a uniquely dangerous task in our pursuit. Just as they are gifted with what the Lord has given us, the gifts of intellect and emotion, and should never be underestimated on that front… they are also host to things alien to God’s plan. Things bereft of the sanity and holiness of the human mind, which will take any opportunity to subvert and unmake those human elements to their own benefit.

  Never forget- the unholy is not a thing that can be comprehended, and to try is to lose oneself to madness, or, more likely, the machinations of the enemy. As much as one must remember that we battle those with the minds of men, we also are battling against things that defy the laws of God, and cannot truly understand or exist as a part of His world. One of Satan’s beloved, once all pretense is gone, when driven into the hole that they deserve, will lash out, as an animal will lash out when caught in a trap- but where an animal has teeth and claws, the Enemy has tools with which to unmake all the logical workings of God’s earth.

  Some may call such a thing heresy. I call it truth. God’s work is Divine, and the very fact that it can be so harmed by the enemy’s presence is what so necessitates our labors.

  Some may claim in turn that the enemy might be redeemed, if brought back into the loving grace of God. To those with such naivete, I can only remind you that God’s loving grace is not for all in this world. He does not love us equally, and just as he judges sinners and saints, so too does he judge these abominations as apart from his flock.

  Our role in this world, under God’s grace, is to preserve the majesties of his works and eliminate those things that might pervert and unmake them- and to suggest that such things are capable of existing as part of his great work, of fitting into the world as we know it should be, is nothing but an invitation for the Devil itself to sit at our table.

  They are not a part of His plan, and not a part of His world. The only answer allotted, then, is to remove them from it, as the unknowable, alien things they are.

  -A Guide ‘Gainst The Enemy, 1745, by William Hunt

  ____________________________________________________________________________________________

  Five, I think, counting the Foreman.

  The four that are in the space with us, blocked by a half-maze of cubicles and desks, are slower than the Foreman was. They might still be waking up, for all I know, but… they seem slower in general, their shapes less well defined. They remind me more of the lure, out in the water, except even then, that one was slug like and vast, bloated with mold.

  These guys mostly look… dead. None of the illusion, none of the strange pull I felt before. As the blood rushes from my head back into my arm, finally returning me to some semblance of homeostasis, I get a glimpse, and…

  Actually, some of them aren’t corpses.

  I can only see three of them from where I am, but of those three, only one of them has skin to cover up the grey rot with. The others, which barely look human, more like blobs of fungal grey ooze pretending at human anatomy, are on full display, half-infesting outfits that look like they’ve been eaten through.

  Clothing, left behind and inhabited? The Foreman, or the mill’s original “concept”, infested by the mold and taught to grow in certain shapes? Bodies that were useless, and thus ended up eaten outright?

  I don’t know. We don’t have time to find out.

  I feel lightheaded, and my right arm is screaming at me, but I force myself to take a deep breath of the cold, stagnant air. They’re slow. Enough slow things together can absolutely still corner someone in a trapped environment, but they are slow, and that matters.

  Fuck it. Out of options.

  “Jay?”

  “Upstairs?”

  I blink, then nod. He’s working through the problem too, rather than panicking. Good. It’ll be easier to get him out this way, until I have to debate the order of priority.

  “You watch the right, I’ll watch left.”

  His eyes dart to my still-bleeding arm as I say it, but he only gives me a nod in return. I keep a grip on my knife, blade out, and we move forward together, keeping almost back-to-back as the things that are not people turn to watch us move.

  The one with some skin, and some semblance of a bone structure, tries to follow- but it is slow. The Foreman outran Jay and I at a dead sprint- these guys look like they could be outrun at a steady walk. Still, I keep the blade pointed out and my hand steady, my eyes tracking from one enemy to the next.

  We both stumble a bit as we walk, but between his inability to “see” things fully and my deeply disoriented brainstem, I come out a bit behind.

  Focus. Keep walking. Stay upright. Track where you’re stepping. Track the enemy.

  We make it to the stairwell, right there in the middle of the room. The stairs face the doorway out directly, which is still straining, still half-broken; we’ve got maybe thirty seconds before the Foreman’s dug / chewed its way through enough of the door to come after us.

  With both sides of the cubicle-space full of at least one new undead horror, and the doorway to one side slowly being peeled away, the options are pretty straightforward.

  Jay turns to me, pointing up the stairs with his head. “Go. I can see these fuckers moving around, and you can pick up traps I can’t. You first.

  Part of me screams that he should go first, should be protected, but… I can’t protect him right now, can I?

  Fuck it. I nod and step past him, into the stairwell and up towards the second floor.

  I make sure to move as fast as I can, my disorientation and caution keeping me from running but not from hearing the sound of the door continuing to erode. Jay is right behind me, one hand on the railing, one on his knife, facing back at the slowly shifting corpse-thing that’s coming around the corner onto the stairs.

  I make it to the top of the steps just before I hear the door come apart.

  So… a little less than thirty seconds, maybe.

  “Ilia-”

  “Run!” I yell, already moving.

  The upstairs is more closed off, clearly delineated doors down long narrow hallways instead of the semi open-air affair of the downstairs cubicles. The offices have names, but we’re moving too fast for me to see more than the very basics, sprinting down past them towards a door down the hall.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  I focus on my abilities, pulling as deep as I dare right now from that strange part of myself described by Glimpse Beyond. If it could tell me the Foreman was here before I even knew I was looking, then-

  Not that one. Not that one. We pass doors, Jay following my lead as the skittering sound of something being puppeteered up the stairs echo towards us, and I try to trust my gut, the sensation alien. Desperate times and all- and it works, at least enough that I skip the first two doors without needing to check, the feeling of spongy softness and something unknown in them making its way to my mind.

  No bodies. No sounds of movement. But something.

  The third office door is the first one I don’t instinctively pull back from when I reach for it, so that’s the one I choose. The door squeals as it comes open, hinges left static for decades suddenly having to perform for us, and I catch the barest glimpse of something coming up the steps as I grab Jay and shut it behind us.

  I’m breathing so hard it hurts, but I force myself to stop, hard enough I almost choke. I can feel my lungs begging for air, the same dizziness from earlier coming back with a vengeance… but I don’t hear the skittering.

  The moment I heard the door slam, I heard the step of hard-soled office shoes hit the second floor.

  I turn to look- I shouldn’t have bothered. Jay is already at the window, already trying to pry it open quietly. It seems less spongy than the downstairs window, and isn’t boarded up- but it refuses to give anyways. I have no idea if it’s more to do with age, disuse, or the alien infection running through this place, but despite bracing his feet against the ground and heaving upwards, it remains perfectly locked in place.

  The footsteps outside stop, and I hear the sound of an office door being opened.

  Silence. Jay is looking around the room, but there’s barely anything here- a desk, an empty bookcase, a mouse skeleton in the corner that whispers even quieter than the ones downstairs. A file cabinet, its every drawer opened and empty save for a few folders- and a window that won’t open.

  The door closes, and again, the clicking of shoes down the hall.

  I can feel Jay panicking, feel the heat coming off him.

  I’m…

  Fuck. Focus.

  I’m tired.

  Backlash from the thing I did with my blood. Exhaustion from the adrenal spikes and the ways that the heightened blood pressure hurt my system. I’m crashing.

  Fuck.

  I…

  I have the totem, still, but it’s not designed for this, and I don’t think I have enough in me to activate it. I don’t think knives are going to be enough here, even if they don’t just help the Foreman get us infected. I could hold it off for a bit, but I’m too weak to guarantee it wouldn’t also be able to reach Jay, swipe him or grab him as he tries to get away- and he wouldn’t leave me.

  I…

  What do I do?

  The second door opens, creaking on old hinges- and again, silence.

  Silence.

  It didn’t walk in.

  Why?

  Blood loss or adrenaline-crash or exhaustion or panic grab onto a thought, and my first instinct from behind the glass is to discard it.

  Then again…

  Something’s tickling at the back of my mind. A connection I’ve glimpsed, but haven’t fully formed yet.

  It’s walking. Politely, rather than being pulled along. It’s opening the doors, but it’s not walking into the offices. Maybe it’s crawling on the ceiling, but then…

  “No trespassers at the mill,” I whisper.

  Everything it’s said. Everything the others have said. Variations on… on a theme, sort of.

  The second door closes, and I hear the sound of footsteps coming towards us.

  “Ilia…”

  I don’t want to look at Jay. If I look at him, and he’s panicking, I’ll panic. Focus.

  What did you See.

  I look around the office for a moment… and then get up from where I’m half-fallen, walk behind the desk, and take a seat.

  “Grab a folder,” I whisper.

  I don’t look at him… but he doesn’t ask any questions. He just pulls out a folder and flips it open, knife still in hand, before looking at me in confusion.

  As he does, I grab hold of the nameplate at the front of the desk, and with the honed claws of the Glove, scratch the letters I-L-I-A into the front of it before setting it down.

  The footsteps make it to the door.

  The thing behind it, visible through the translucent glass, grasps the handle, and opens it.

  It opens smoothly this time, with a slight hissing noise rather than the squeal of metal of before- and the Foreman looks upon us.

  Its face is still distended, the lips of its “mouth” pulled back until they form a tunnel from which its teeth and mold extend… but it stays still. It waits at the doorway, looking in at us.

  It doesn’t have eyes, I know that. It sees through the mold, through some unknown and maybe unknowable weird magic bullshit.

  But I can feel it’s attention on the nameplate anyways.

  “Yes?” I ask, my voice surprisingly hoarse. “Can I help you?”

  Silence.

  The lips of the host’s mouth pull a bit closer together, just enough that the stretched-out illusion of a face becomes visible.

  Silence for a bit longer.

  I can’t breathe. My head hurts, and I can feel the sweat running in rivulets down my face… but I don’t break character. I don’t reach for the knife. I stay there, seated at the desk with my name on it, in the mill, during business hours.

  Trespassers In The Mill.

  “I see. Well, make sure to have security escort them out of the premises.”

  The Foreman seems to twitch at that. I say “seems” because it’s much too slow to be a twitch, and much too small to be a convulsion. Like something done in slow motion, deep inside its body, pulling at itself to go in slightly disjointed ways.

  A single hand raises, a long finger pointing out towards us… and then turning to point right at Jay.

  Trespasser

  I blink, feigning surprise. I do a shit job of it, but I pretend anyways, even as I feel my brain roiling in my skull as I turn to look at Jay, and then back at the Foreman.

  “Him? I’m sorry, I’m not sure you two have met before. This is Jay, he’s my new assistant. Just came in today for the first time, isn’t that right Jay?”

  “I… that is, yes, sir. First day at the office, sir. Couldn’t be happier to be here. Getting… coffees and whatnot.”

  The Foreman says nothing for a long moment.

  I feel the way its presence shapes the room. The way that the hinges of the door turn softer, how the doorframe seems to warp ever-so-slightly, how the room goes from grey-beige to a purer grey, softer, almost rubbery in places. The chair I’m in sinks ever so slightly down further into the floor as the whole room becomes less static, less preserved, as the attention of its primary host turns upon it.

  And then… its hand comes down.

  I don’t breathe. Don’t exhale. No signs of relief.

  Pros… Prospective. Customers. Requested… Samples.

  “Oh? That’s… well, that’s good, right? More… more Propagation, yes?”

  A shudder, rippling through the body of the thing that towers in the doorway.

  For a second, the tunnel of molar-tipped tendrils waves, expanding, and I can see beyond them into a deeper roiling, churning mass of fungal tissue and rotten meat long-since transformed into something calcified, filled with teeming life that is not alive as I understand it but lives nonetheless.

  And then the skin of the Foreman’s face begins to soften, pulling back towards something resembling human anatomy. The teeth in its “skull” retract back into shape, making a poor analogue of a human jaw… and then the lips close, and hide even that.

  And there’s just those two empty sockets, staring at me, roiling fronds of mold beyond and below where eyes should be.

  PROPAGATION

  “Yeah. Working on it. Working hard. Great to see you being so active about it. It’s good work. But… we’re sort of in the middle of a review. Some prospective ideas here too. Mind giving us the room?”

  I can feel Jay staring at the back of my head like I’ve gone fucking insane.

  Maybe I have.

  But is it really insanity if it works?

  The Foreman tilts its head into something that might be a question, might be a nod… and then steps back, and closes the door behind it.

  I hear it walk over to the next door over and let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

  “...Did you just gaslight a zombie into thinking we’re coworkers?”

  I can’t help it. A little bit of air escapes me in a laugh.

  And then I lay my head down on the desk. I can think later.

  Her head hurts, and I have a hard enough time thinking as it is. I could use a nap.

  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!