Jessie's friends burst into the room. She had her own motorcycle gang, three more young women just like her, who lived outside the law and fought creatures that few knew existed.

Silencia quickly put a bullet in one man's head with 38 automatic, a gun you didn't see much outside of central America. She carried this one ever since she was a child soldier in Honduras. The boom of gunfire didn't make her blink. Nor did killing. In her late 20s, Silencia was the quiet type, thus the nickname. Her gun was loud, and it communicated for her.

Pickles was chuckling. While all these girls could be called crazy for what they did, Pickles was truly bonkers. Some in society might say it wasn't polite to joke about it, but Pickles didn't mind. She suffered from mental health issues. Many do, though Pickles was a rather severe case. Pickles wished more people would joke about their mental condition so everyone could lighten up and take the stigma out of it . She was bi-polar, or manic-depressive, whatever the latest terminology was. Pickles had only two speeds, really fucking bummed, or really fucking happy. When happy, she laughed a lot, even when she was swinging a steel pipe down on a man's head, like now. Pickles always liked to remind them, for the sake of not offending anyone, that manic people aren't any more violent than neuro-normal folks. Pickles, make no mistake, was violent. A group of men had tried to rape her in the past, and she took from them the body part they tried to assault her with, and kept them in a jar. When the police arrested her, they found her collection, and called her Pickles. She didn't like being punished for crimes attempted against her, but she did like the name the cops gave her. Besides, the institution they committed her to was easy enough to escape from, because men underestimate women in general, and brilliant women, like Pickles, can outsmart nearly anyone.

Royalty had a cattle prod tuned to the highest setting. It got the last man off of Jessie quickly, allowing them to capture one of the cultists alive. Royalty was from Thailand, and claimed to be the bastard daughter of the royal family. She spoke with a posh English accent, claiming to have been educated in a fancy boarding school in London. It was bullshit, because Royalty was a con-artist. Her friends never called her out on that one particular lie, letting her be whoever the fuck she wanted to be. Also, it made them laugh that anyone, from those she bullshitted to Royalty herself, would believe that a princess needed to sound English, especially a Princess from Southeast Asia.

"Nice of you to join me," Jessie said, not really mad, just poking fun at her friends for arriving a few seconds late. She got up, brushing the dust from her vest. Jessie took pride in the biker vest that she wore, matching the vests her sisters also had on their backs. Sure, it was a bit silly, all of them with their nicknames sewn on the pocket in front and the club name on the back, but everyone rocked their own style. Jesse had a sister in Vicksburg who wore fancy shoes with a red sole, and only other women with expensive shoes knew the sole was red on bottom. So wearing leather, sleeveless vests that said "Bleeding Ladies" on the back didn't seem silly at all. Everyone belongs somewhere, and Jessie and her friends belonged to a sisterhood that kept evil out of the world, while others just had some job somewhere doing something ordinary.

"We searched the rear, like you said," Royalty said, eager to apologize to Jessie. While Royalty was a cool and confident scammer, she was always eager for Jessie's approval.

"Relax," Jessie said, "I was joking."

Still, Royalty liked to make everything dramatic.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

Jessie shrugged it off.

"I'm fine."

Jessie's father, a native American shaman, warned her that enough exposure to this shit would drive anyone mad, it was just a matter of exposure. A lot at once, or enough over a course of time, like radiation. Longer these girls did this, the more likely one of them ended up drooling and brain dead.

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Pickles chuckled. She usually did. Silencia said nothing. She rarely did. Silencia was straddling the lone surviving cultist, slipping zip ties on his wrists, and about to put a gag on his mouth, but Jessie stopped her.

"Chant is too weak when it's just one of them," Jessie assured Silencia.

Silencia nodded, holding the man in place for Jessie. Silencia was a soldier who was as efficient as she was quiet. She never wasted energy or thoughts, just focused on the task in front of her.

"Where's the idol?" Jessie asked the man.

"Soon this reality will be peeled away," the man began, giddy, like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. The man only had one emotion left, and it was a longing for whatever the fuck this cult was awaiting. She had tried to question other cultists about who their leader was, but never got a straight answer. She didn't think they understood it themselves. Her focus tonight was something else.

"Look, fuckhead, I know you don't feel fear, but you can feel pain. I don't like torturing people, but I need to get that idol back. So tell me without this getting ugly."

The cultist stared at her with empty eyes.

"I have seen the endless cosmos. Known the oceans of time–"

Jessie slapped him to shut him up.

"Tell me where the idol is, or my sister here is gonna take that steel pipe to your toes and work her way up, and no alien demon living in a blackhole will come save you."

She waited, not really expecting he'd say anything useful, but she had to try.

He took his time, a hint of triumph in his eyes, despite his circumstance.

"When the stars are right, you will see what the idol can do."

"What does that mean?"

Jessie knew that questioning these people was a mixed bag of responses. They either said shit that wasn't true, but they believed was true, or they said things that made no sense at all. Still, Jessie was trying to learn more about the enemy. Assess the threat, as they said in the Marines.

"Idol was taken a year ago. Where is it?

"When the stars are right, all will see," the man said, with tears or joy running down his face.

"In English. This tuesday? Next century? When are the stars right?"

"Soon", the man whispered, and died.

"Fuck me," Jessie said.

Royalty wanted to cheer Jessie up.

"Good news is, as far as viruses go, they're inefficient, kill the host too quickly. Never live more than a week."

Silencia grunted, either in agreement or disagreement. Royalty got on her nerves. Silencia would kill anyone who so much as looked at Royalty wrong, but still, the woman annoyed her.

Pickles mused, "Five people infected. That's a lot. They're not usually so contagious."

Jesse paced, aggravated, musing, said "That's what I'm worried about. What if it's getting stronger or mutating, I don't know."

None of them had answers. Jessie started this cult-hunting team. Another reason it bothered her was she couldn't give them more concrete direction. Currently they were just running around killing these freaks when they popped up. It wasn't sustainable. One had to pull weeds out at the root, or get some chemicals that killed the whole field.

"My father told me to keep the idol out of the hands of cultists… They killed him and took it, so it must have been important. He never told me everything he knew. Mostly he just told me that he didn't want me doing this shit."

"Because he knew if the cultists killed him, you'd spend your life getting revenge," Royalty added, unnecessarily, but she just loved to talk about Jessie.

Jessie's father being murdered weighed her down, but it also gave her purpose in life. She felt obligated to get the idol back that her father had kept hidden. Jessie had gone from a life that didn't have much passion or interest to a mission to save mankind. There was a mental pandemic that was creeping its way into the minds of humanity, and it just happened to be brought upon the same shitheads who killed her dad.

"Lets search the place," She told her friends. It was a large warehouse, and it could be anywhere, though she didn't honestly think they kept the idol here. Pickles probably would have sensed it, but they didn't know for sure. She had been captured once, and cultists tried to make her see across the galaxy and have her join them, but it hadn't driven her mad. She was already a bit loopy, so instead of converting her, it dialed her in to whatever frequency the cultists operated on. Pickles was the gang's bloodhound. She could pick up on their energy miles away, and zero in on them. Sometimes their scent was left on places or things, and the idol, they believed, had a fuck ton of whatever this energy was. It made their job a bit easier, when hunting monsters, to have someone who could sniff them out.