It takes a little over a week to get a plan together to cross the Null Domain. Most of this time is dedicated to Silent finding the goods we’ll need to make the journey safely. This isn’t going to be a simple walk. We’re going to have to cross miles of territory, without any powers or gear besides what we carry on our backs. At a touch over ten miles to travel from the house, we’ll probably need to stop. So camping gear, water, and something to eat. Silent manages to scrounge up a couple of tents and some ancient MREs - how, I’ll never ask.

We gather up our packs, everything we need, and take one final inventory.

“Gird your loins, ladies,” Silent says. “We’re going into the graveyard shift of the world.”

Houston proper is separated from the hellscape beyond it by a series of squat, almost pyramid-like towers swarming with antennae, radio dishes, and strange vibrating panels I’ve only seen in dampener technology. Between these pyramids runs a wall of golden, shimmering air, which I’ve heard blocks the ambient emotional energy creeping our way from the Null Domain.

All that to say, it’s a giant magic Fence that blocks the bad vibes Carnality left behind when she died.

Our merry little band hikes from the house to the border of the Fence, using my power to stay out of sight of drones and people. Within a mile of the structure, Houston’s normal smells – swamp and ass – fade away until I can’t smell anything at all. Likewise, I can’t hear any of the usual night noise; no bugs, no distant trains, nothing.

“We’ll rest on the other side,” Epione calls, and suddenly I can hear it, an overwhelming roar coming from the Fence. With Epione’s voice to juxtapose, I can put a shape to it: a wall of white noise that bypasses my ears and projects sound directly in my soul. The Fence obliterates sound. Might be obliterating all the other senses.

Once we get within the final hundred feet of the Fence, the hairs on my arms and neck stand up. My temples start feeling like someone has a clamp on them and is twisting it tight. Mateo looks back at me, his eyes uncertain underneath the shadow of his mask. He reaches out and grabs my hand, and although I can’t hear him, he tries to say something to me.

Ten feet from the barrier. There is only the Fence now. The golden wall has climbed higher than the universe, crawled around our backs, and has swallowed up the city behind. There is nothing else but this. There is no hate or fear or love in me, only this single sound veiled over my Affect.

Epione reaches out and the curtain of light parts at her hand to the width of a single person. Epione goes first, then Silent. Saw Off, following, glances back at me and Mateo. She gives me a reassuring smile, blows a kiss at me, and then disappears through the golden curtain.

Mateo keeps a hold of my hand. He looks up at me, his mask moves as if he’s asking me something, but I can’t still hear him. I point at my ears, he nods, and I keep his hand in mine.

We steel our hearts, and together, step through.

YOU? YOU WERE DEAD. AND YET NOW YOU ARE LIVING. WE ARE BOTH ALIVE IN WAYS THEY CAN’T POSSIBLY FATHOM.

A hand finds my shoulder. “Stay near me,” Epione says. “Unless you want this place to consume you.”

I yelp at Epione’s touch. The rest of our crew huddle close to the barrier, which is silent now that we’re on the outside. Somehow, I’ve walked about a hundred feet ahead without realizing it.

Crimson gore blankets the land to the horizon, rolling hills of pure meat swallow buildings, trees, roads, and anything I could point to as a landmark. Huge mouths sit in the earth like sinkholes, their lips red as rubies, grinning and breathing out a hot, misty miasma. Fleshy towers loll this way and that like reeds in the wind. A maroon aurora, or something rather like it, covers the night sky and obscures the stars.

Red snow falls in flurries and I shiver against the chill in the air. Then I freeze, shocked. My power has never let me feel temperature, not the way others do. But I feel it here. There is a sour taste in my mouth, a companion to the bitter smell in the air. I spit, trying to rid myself of the taste, and shudder at the flecks of black tar in my spit.

The angle of Epione’s head tells me she’s staring at my spit. “The Fear is getting worse.”

“That’s the Fear?” I ask, staring in horror at the tar. The night Megajoule took over my body, I vomited up some of the same stuff.

“A symptom. All those negative emotions infecting our shared psychic space begin to have physical effects, just as our powers do,” Epione says. “Come, we should get moving. Only my power is keeping us safe.”

“Weird to feel cut off.” Hopefully she can provide some explanation I can understand. Why this place suppresses powers; why, so many years later, it’s still a no man’s land of viscera and blood.

Epione sighs, wraps her arms around herself. She’s still so emotionally unimpeachable. Her Affect, as always, gives me nothing to work on. “This place… it’s like we’ve gone inside someone else’s Affect. Carnality’s, to be precise. She left it here, covered the land in it, and that’s the only Affect that’s allowed, if that makes sense.”

“How do you still have your power?”

Epione tilts her head, her way of smiling at me behind her mask. “The virtues of being an empath. I’ve power over the very thing we’re interacting with. That can’t be taken away.”

“Must be nice.” I turn my attention back to the horizon, to whatever secret Pandahead is hiding out in this hell.

Carnality’s Null Domain is so different from the rest of the world, from Houston. Everywhere else, the land is wounded, scarred. But this is a desiccated corpse, flogged and stained with its own blood. And overseeing it all is the Smiling Tower, the monument Carnality left behind to remind the world from time to time what she, demigod of blood and flesh, took from us. I can almost make out the actual details of the Tower from here, the bumps and nodules of flesh, the ridges of bone that give it structure. Like a rope that Carnality pulled up from the earth, braided from the remains of the dead.

A long, baleful moan startles me, somewhere in the middle distance. It’s a feral cry, of pure anguish and hatred, like a wolf out for my blood. The sound lays claws on my skin, teeth in my ear, makes the hair on my neck stand up. The livid howl lasts until I can’t bear it anymore, until the last possible second before I’d be forced to scream and run in terror.

“What is that?” I ask, reaching for Epione, finding her not near me. She has moved a few paces to the side, staring out at the land, her hands folded behind her back as always. For a moment, I almost believe she belongs here, that she is master over this fallen kingdom.

She turns to face me. “We must move cautiously.”

“Carnality?” I feel pale, thin, like I’m fading.

“What’s left of her.” Epione reaches and takes my hand, and when she does, I feel safe. Like whatever is trying to crush my soul lets up for just a moment. “Now, let’s get everyone together. I’ll protect all of you from this place and you’ll be able to use your powers again.”

Silent, checking through all the packs again, sighs in relief as we approach. “That sucked. Like somebody put bloody cotton in all my holes.”

Mateo conjures a ball of light, holds it up for a bit of illumination against the darkness.

Saw Off pulls a handful of shotgun shells from her pocket, tilts her head back, and swallows them, one after another. One, two, three, four, five. She cocks her head to the side, fiddles with her ear, and says, “All good.”

“How in the world did you ever figure out that was your power?” I ask.

“Well you know how kids swallow shit a lot, right?”

“Never mind.”

Epione waits for us to put on our backpacks. Mine is hefty with the weight of MREs, bottles of water, and something bulky at the bottom. I shoot a glance at Silent. “Did you put fucking bricks in my bag?”

“Yeah, thought it’d be funny,” Silent says, flipping me the bird. “Obviously not, dipshit, I put a toolbox at the bottom. You’re super strong, you can carry it.”

I grumble, slinging it over my shoulder, negating some of the weight with my power.

Once we’re all settled, Epione clasps her hands. “Very well. We’ll stick to the side roads along 45 until we reach Dickinson. If we hear trouble, we move double time, until it is safe again. No matter what happens, no matter who or what we encounter, we do not try to stand and fight.”

A solemn mood falls on us. We might die out here, even as strong as we are.

Epione nods, turns, and beckons us to follow. I hesitate, even as Silent and Saw Off walk after her.

Mateo looks up at me and says, “It’ll be alright, dude.” He gives me a reassuring little punch on my arm, and then follows the others, pulling his pack tighter over his shoulders.

With nowhere to go but forward, I tag along behind as we head into the crimson unknown.

#

We move agonizingly slow, at Epione’s pace, because going more than fifteen feet from her means that blanket of dread descending again. Some of it is about our powers, but some of it is the permeating anxiety, the fear gripping each cell in the body.

Epione walks in long, precise steps, her hands clasped behind her back and her head bowed, as if in prayer. The pink light of her mask’s eyes shines on the road, which is covered in a thin skein of gelatinous blood and veins. Silent is in the lead, a compass and the worn map in her hands. Occasionally, she pauses, stopping us by holding up a fist as she listens to something no one else can hear. Then she changes direction, and I know, there are things prowling on the road we were headed down.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

I stay close to Epione, having tasted more than enough of Carnality’s dread, but Mateo lags a bit, and wanders a bit, too, so he can pass his light over the houses we pass. Hiking for several hours is as tiring as it is boring, so I can understand why he wants to examine his surroundings a little.

The houses, all mere skeletons now, carry the stain of blood so deeply that the texture of wood and brick is lost. It’s easy to imagine the people that once lived here, the families that haunt the stained porches, long-dead hands on maroon doors. Before Carnality, they would have sat around talking to each other about what they wanted for dinner or what they were going to do for the weekend.

Now, they are the veins crawling over the pavement. The skin covering the houses. The blood soaking in the dirt.

We walk for a few hours, never losing sight of the Smiling Tower. With each step it obscures another inch of the sky, and after a couple hours of quiet hiking, it dominates our view. It bears sharp fangs at us, a barbaric grin. The monolith has no eyes but I can’t help but feel like I’m being fixed by someone’s gaze.

“We’ll cut through this neighborhood and then I think there’s a major through road we can take the rest of the way toward the PK site,” Silent says, pointing at the map, which at this point has become a meaningless assembly of squiggly lines to me.

“How can you even recognize where we are?” I ask, looking around at the indistinct collection of fleshy lumps she has labeled a “neighborhood.”

“Because I’m radical and very good at reading maps, unlike you. Try not to worry yourself over the navigation and just be ready to hit something if it gets too close.”

Mateo walks over by one of the houses, sweeping a curious gaze across the remnants, and when Epione gives me a look as if to say, ‘Don’t let him go too far,’ I sigh and follow him to bring him back to the center.

“What the heck is that?” Mateo asks, holding his light up to some kind of red, moldy growth on one of the houses. I study it for a second, noting a reflecting, glassy sphere buried in the mass.

To my horror, I realize: “That’s an eye.”

The mass pulses, sighs a hot, wet burst of air, and oozes a spurt of blood out of the underside.

I grab Mateo’s shoulder and pull him behind me.

A hand grows out of the lump - malformed, three fingered. It grasps at the rotting planks of the deck, at the soaked dirt, at the air in front of Mateo’s face, and the mass slides down the side of the house to the ground.

“Epione!” I pull Mateo further inside the boundary of her power. “It’s alive!”

More limbs explode from the mass, turning it into a galloping hand-horse. Its misshapen palms slap on the fleshy ground as it scrambles on all fours into Epione’s zone of power. Coming into Mateo’s light, its shape becomes far more distinct - an equine beast entirely made of arms that are stripped of skin, a barely functioning marionette of muscle and scarlet bone, and a long jaw retracted as wide as a snake. Dark blood spills from its mouth in gags and gargles.

It shrieks a single word:

“GAAAAAAYYYYEEEEEEBBBBBBBEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

I kick it in the face as hard as I fucking can, rupturing the ghoul with kinetic energy.

How the fuck did this thing know my name?

Mateo stares at me, his eyes wide within the shadow of his mask. He heard it, too. Luckily, the others don’t know my real name, so I shake my head quickly - act natural.

“Jaysus,” Saw Off whispers, prodding the now-dead fleshy arm demon with her foot. “HOAs, am I right?”

Before anyone can say anything else, my kinetic sense gives me whispers of movement everywhere around us, bodies rising and stirring in painful, jagged movements. I heft my bat, looking around.

Silent faces me, drawing her sword. “You hear that, too?”

It’s a horrible, retching sound, like someone choking. Times a hundred. From each crumbling, flesh-covered building around us, I hear the sound of gasping, something trying to suck air down a blocked throat.

Silent raises her sword at a nearby house just as the door opens. A haggard, pink face emerges from the shadow, eyes black and bubbling. Mouth spilling ink and blood. The person falls from the door frame, spewing black bile onto the ground.

Doors open all around us. Growling sounds issue from inside darkened houses. Epione pulls us close to her, inside her Vanguard envelope, the only place we can use our powers. “Metis, they’re all her. They’re all still her.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” I hiss.

“They are Carnality!” Epione grabs my arm. “They’re her puppets, the antibodies of the Null Domain. We need to make a break for it-”

One of these puppets scrambles into the light. He actually has more concrete features to go by than most of them: young, male, skin gray and taut so that his teeth protrude from his lips and his eyes seem to pop from their sockets. He gurgles on the blood spilling from his mouth, the same blood that must be connecting him to Carnality.

“GA-GA-GA-GABBBBBBBBEEEEEE.” He speaks in an almost honking voice, like a donkey braying.

A dozen more puppets charge in behind it, hitting our group from the side, and at first, everyone rallies to protect Epione.

But these things aren’t coming for her.

They’re coming for me.

“Run!” Silent shouts.

I swing my bat through their ranks, putting myself between the group and these monsters. I destroy several with each swing, beating back the tidal wave. I cripple another handful - these fall underfoot of the mass charging behind them. They all trample each other to get to me. In one, unified voice, they scream: “GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBEEEEEEEEE.”

The weight of Carnality’s Affect falls on my shoulders again as I accidentally step outside of Epione’s influence. I jump backwards, smashing my bat into the horde as I retreat.

We run. I could go so much faster on my own but I have to stay near Epione to even use my power. And I’m quickly learning that Epione is not a fast runner, at least not while concentrating on keeping our Affects from being smothered. We’re barely going faster than a light jog, and even though we’re almost through the neighborhood, the main road leading to the hideout looks just as threatening. Grisly puppets are coming at us from all sides. Carnality - or whatever is left of her – clearly won’t leave us alone until we leave the Null Zone.

We need to clear a path. I could do that easily. The only problem is I don’t have a way to protect myself without Epione. And then I remember, the night I met Epione and agreed to work with her, Silent waving around that wand that masked their Affects. It’s risky, but it’s a chance. “The PK wands! Do you have them?” I shout to Silent.

“Yeah, why?”

“Does it work both ways? Protect the Affect from the outside?” If it does, my flowering idea isn’t actively suicidal, just extremely stupid.

Epione snaps her fingers at Silent to hand her the bag. Then she pulls the PK wand out, offering it to me. “It isn’t perfect, but it will protect you enough. Saw Off, go with him.”

“No!” I snatch the wand from her hands. “I can do it alone!”

“Home Run!” Saw Off is the only one who’s face I can see, the first Affect I can feel outside of my thundering heart. She’s terrified for me. Then Mateo’s feelings hit me, also scared out of his mind. Both of them reach for me even as I leap into the air, holding the wand, and warp toward the main street to clear the path.

The horde grows, pouring over the houses, over themselves, until they build into an actual moving sea of bodies. They merge into one huge flesh-colored vine, subsuming themselves into a shifting mass of flesh. This cable that could truss up the entire city transforms into a giant’s arm, six fingered and dripping flesh. The arm rears up, a snake about to strike, and then smashes down on me faster than I can escape. It all falls apart - the bodies, the skin, the blood. It pours down on me, a thousand writhing mouths screaming my name.

The PK wand is not as strong a shield as Epione. I have to flex my power just to keep the endless wave of bodies from crushing me. I slam the tip of my bat into the ground to help me stand, to resist the tide of blood and flesh. But if I don’t do something soon, I’ll drown.

Suddenly, something changes. Something in the swarm softens. The prying hands become gentle caresses, and one of the bodies, a gaunt, vaguely feminine creature, pushes through the rest until it is inches away.

With a gentle touch, it whispers, “Gabe.”

Panic sets in. My body chills. “W-what? How?” I breathe faster, on the edge of hyperventilating but unable to get my body under control.

All the joules of energy, all the thousands of degrees of heat coiled in me, rush outward in a mad dash of freedom. A single second of the sun’s fury. A snapshot of the Big Bang.

The entire monstrous horde flash freezes in place, one igneous scab. Clouds of steam and smoke waft up into the red night.

In the calm after, I breathe in, freeing my bat from where I embedded it in the street, and drink in some of the ambient heat to replenish my stock in case there are more enemies. But there are none. Only the Front, scrambling across the hills of charred flesh I’ve created. Relief from the Null Domain’s dread comes with them, with Epione’s Vanguard barrier again.

“Holy shit, Home Run.” Saw Off stumbles over a blackened arm, steadies herself to avoid falling into the burnt flesh.

Mateo rushes down the mound and leaps toward me, wrapping his arms around me in a hug. “You’re okay! I thought- That looked like too much for you!”

“Nah, nothing I can’t handle,” I manage.

Carnality’s puppets knew my name.

#

“Facility’s just ahead,” Silent says, pointing down the street to a four-story office building, nondescript except for the fact that it isn’t covered in blood like the rest of the world out here. A fence at least ten feet tall and made of corrugated metal plates surrounds the facility and what remains of its parking lot. Black, insectile posts project from the fence, resembling the pods from the PK dampener machine. The entire thing is wrapped in barbed wire. Streetlamps buzz in the parking lot. “The lights are on but nobody’s home.”

“It’s been abandoned by PK for years. But someone’s obviously keeping it running.” Epione stands against the corrugated metal, peering through a crack she found in the fencing.

“Man, almost like my lead was good,” I say, glaring at Silent. She flips me off. “Pandahead is using this place!”

Epione shakes her head as she approaches a keypad that presumably controls the gate. “PK abandoned it for a reason. Researching the Null Domain, even with proper protections in place, proved to be lethal for anyone staying longer than three days. So if Pandahead is using it… he’s got to be clever about it.”

Saw Off gasps in recognition at last. “Wait, I heard sumthin’ about this. The scientists out here went insane. Like… culty insane. They started praying to her.”

“Ay dios mio,” Mateo whispers.

At Epione’s touch, the gate opens.

I wince at the metal grinding in the gears. “Seems like nobody’s been home for a while.”

The others share my concern, if their Affects are anything to go by. We enter the parking lot, all exuding worry and trepidation. The lot is completely bare of vehicles, litter, and even the flesh and blood flora of the Null Zone. “How?” I ask, unsure if I’m directing the question at Epione or at no one.

Epione bows slightly, her Affect completely unreadable, but something in her physical mannerism betrays worry. “The fence is Affect repellent… but it should have failed long ago.”

Most of the windows are tinted black, so we can’t see inside the building.

Epione opens the door, despite Saw Off saying, “Wait, what if it’s trapped-” but nothing happens. No explosives, no daggers, nothing. I would’ve felt it coming if there were, and Silent would’ve too.

A brick wall across from the door bears a painting of a woman with livid, crimson skin. Her teeth are bared, her hands held up, blood flowing out of them like a waterfall. It’s almost as religious as any mural to Metis I’ve seen.

“Carnality,” Silent hisses.

Saw Off bows her head, hisses out like she’s in pain. “I told you! Culty.”

There’s nothing to greet us inside but the painting of Carnality and a long abandoned lobby, slate tile and fluorescent lights. The walls are painted off white. A series of doors off the lobby are labeled in random letters and numbers instead of anything actually useful. When I look out the windows, I expect to see the parking lot, but instead I’m greeted with a peaceful green countryside, complete with birds flying or resting on tree branches and a tractor plowing through a field.

We enter one door and find a break area with brightly colored tables, red, yellow, green, and a full kitchen. I test one of the burners on the stove - it works. A television screen hangs on the wall, and Saw Off turns it on. It’s playing a Vanguard propaganda film, some cape from up north fighting a bad guy or whatever.

Every hair on my neck stands up. I put my hand in front of Mateo, instinctively, and he draws up behind me. He feels it, too. Something is very wrong here. Yet, we’re still alone. My thermal sense gives me nothing, not even Carnality’s puppets.

“This is impossible.” Silent draws her rapier, turning around to listen for danger. “Ep, we shouldn’t stay here.”

“Holy fuck, y’all.” This final declaration draws us out of our huddle to Saw Off, who made her way to next door to the break room. I make it first and turn the corner, seeing what she sees.

Skeletal remains litter the floor before what looks like a makeshift altar on the wall, surrounded by the melted wax corpses of candles. In their bone hands they clutch scraps of papers, offerings of Old American dollars, of pages of books, of Polaroid pictures. They have brought these offerings to a shrine that cuts down to my heart.

A costume is pinned to the wall, a cape uniform I recognize immediately, from the black color to the silver and green accents. I recognize it from the phantom that sits on my shoulder nearly every day.

“That’s Megajoule’s outfit,” Silent hisses.

And written in blood above this are the words:

SHE DID NOT KILL HIM.