All Chapters of Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

The lock clicked open.Control standard. Of course it was. The vetala wanted me to have a shot, not a guarantee, not an easy win, but a shot. That was the game.I slid the panel aside. Inside was a tightly coiled mess of wires, tubing, and what looked like a modified pressure regulator. Some of it was old tech. Repurposed. But what to my layman’s eyes looked like a trigger mechanism was cutting edge and had the Control symbol on it, like my multi-key and the access panel. Control issue.A faint hiss reminded me that oxygen was being slowly bled out of the chamber below. Ten workers, the message had said. Probably knocked out or sedated. Maybe in an old pump tunnel or one of the service pockets beneath the floor. If I botched this, the best-case scenario was a flash fire. The worst involved limbs.I breathed in slow and tried to push the image of Savitri out of my mind. If she was walking into something worse than this, I owed it to her not to screw up.The vetala hadn’t booby-trappe

I wanted to believe the worst was over. That getting J out of that train station alive was the win I’d been fighting for. But I knew better. The game wasn't over—just between rounds.J sat beside me on the underused transit shuttle I’d commandeered from a maintenance line. He didn’t say much. Didn’t cry. Just stared at the cracked floor like it owed him something. I knew that look. Grief diluted with shock. A cocktail I’d tasted too many times.We arrived at the Underdenver hospital before long. The place had been carved into the side of a long-decommissioned DUMB medical outpost. Sterile concrete walls softened by years of community. This was home for J. He’d been born here. Raised here. His mother, Lisa, had worked here until she passed. X had converted her old administrator’s apartment into a home for the two of them.It wasn’t just a building. It was memory. The nurses doted on him. The custodians brought him snacks. Doctors taught him things no kid should know. This was the one s

So that’s how things ended for us in Underdenver, dear reader. I went there accompanied by X and left accompanied by his son J. I picked up a hoodie and a baseball cap for J so he wouldn’t stand out so much being crayon white and bald. Ironically, I didn’t have any money to spend in one of the shopping malls there because my Carl Jones identity hadn’t been paid by Underdenver payroll yet. X had been covering all my meals and such. J had some money, though, on a card X had given him to carry in his wallet for emergencies. In another irony, we actually took J’s card to an ATM and got cash. Here we were, in a secret underground city that the government would deny existed, the same government that each year makes moves so that society moves inexorably toward a cashless society, and we were using an ATM card and pulling out cash in the form of American dollars. J is curled up asleep on a seat nearby as I write this. He looks peaceful. I took the liberty of pulling his cap down over his f

The attic creaked.Not from the wind, not from the old bones of the house settling. This was something heavier. Intentional. Something that wanted to be heard.Everyone in the farmhouse froze."It came from above," Liz-1 said, pointing toward the ceiling with the barrel of his shotgun. "Attic window."Dr. Schnell, who had been standing near the table nursing his third glass of water since our arrival, suddenly set the glass down with a sharp clink. He didn’t move to a weapon. He didn’t shout or start barking orders. He just said, very quietly:"It is here."I turned toward him, my own sidearm already halfway drawn. "You know what that is."He nodded once, very slowly. "Ja. Ze Slitherer."None of us knew the name. But his voice made it sound like a curse."It moves in trees," Schnell said. "But zere are few trees here. It has found anozer perch. Ze house."The sound above changed to a scraping noise. Something long, like a nail dragged across old wood. Or claws. The kind that didn’t cl

Returning to Dust Bowl was like stepping into a collective fever dream that had only grown darker in our absence. The storm still hung over the town, that never-ending cascade of dust and red haze that turned sunlight into a sickly smudge. You couldn't tell the time of day by the sky, not anymore. The Dirt had claimed the horizon, and the town felt like it had been abandoned by the sun.But it hadn’t been abandoned. Not completely. You could feel it. The people were still here. They just weren’t outside.Every window we passed was dark. Shuttered. Covered in blankets, plastic, aluminum foil. I saw rosaries pinned to front doors, and chalk markings in a dozen different languages scrawled on stoops. Wards. Prayers. The last defenses of people who understood, somewhere in their souls, that locks and latches weren’t going to keep the Dirt out. Not if it wanted in.We moved slowly, the whole group sticking together in a loose diamond formation. Spitfire flew tight spirals above us, her na