Day 22 of "THE PERPLEXING PATH OF ABIGAIL HERANT" - a new social media choose-your-own-adventure from myself, Angie Low-Ryder, Maria Neal, Leani Lopez, and Isaac Vars! Read away and be sure to participate every day of the month!
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Why was it always the stairs that went downstairs?
Downstairs, underground, was never a good place to be. Abigail had only come back from underground and wasn’t eager to go back. Yet what good were the offices going to be? Above ground, with paper-thin doors easy to break through? No evil shell corporation worth its salt would keep anything of value aboveground.
“Down the rabbit hole,” Abigail muttered, causing Tess to peer at her quizzically. They were indeed late for a very important date but it was one Abigail wished she didn’t have to attend in the first place.
Her tattoo was starting to itch.
She broke out in a sweat, an instinctual reaction by her body more than anything, though terror ran cold and quick through her veins.
Her tattoo only itched for one thing, and if it wasn’t her Dad on the line right now, she’d turn and bolt all the way to Antarctica, or at least whenever her tattoo stopped itching, whichever came first.
She didn’t notice the adrenaline at first, though that was the cause of the sweat. Her throat immediately went dry, her heart was hammering, and she was sweating.
Of COURSE there would be goddamn vampires here.
She hated goddamn vampires.
The tattoo her father gave her, run deep with the ashes of her father’s latest vampire execution, was one of her first introductions into the world of the misaligned and supernatural. Not only was the tattoo’s ink mixed through with the ashes of sun-squashed vampires, but it was also mixed through with minuscule gold flakes.
Her father had asked her three times, as was customary, and in her youthful exuberance, she took the oath. She swore the words of her father and mother, as had countless ancestors behind them. Sworn soldiers committed to their last breaths, committed to fighting the endless parasitic and cancerous scourge that was vampires.
Pips, she called them.
As in PIP-squeaks. Everyone thinks, before they know any better, that vampires are sexy. They’re not, actually all the way opposite on the dial in fact, and gross. They seem to carry with them a slow rotting process that their thirst for blood staves off. They run in packs, but they’re small, about three feet tall each.
Literal pipsqueaks and one of the reasons she was so eager to take the oath and swear her life to fighting the infection that was the Pips. Her father, somber and serious as always, explained clearly what they were about, how they were like rats and cockroaches and the worst infection you could imagine. That, once a nest had become established in an area, it was almost impossible to clear it out.
It was best that anything with a pulse clear out of the area, as fast as they could.
It wasn’t bad that they were small, ran in packs, and would suck you dry in under a minute. No, the worst part was how they reproduced. They’d latch hold of you, most likely a dozen of them but certainly no less than three, and you’d be dead before dawn, as the saying goes.
While latched upon you, the Pip’s saliva enters the bloodstream of their victim, infecting them. Within the hour, unless your body has been burnt, your chest bursts open, and out crawls a smaller, bloody version of yourself. Somehow, in the transformation and infestation process, the heart muscle is what twists, shapes itself, and breaks free from the chest cavity.
After finding the nearest source of blood, the Pip then finds the closest hive or creates a new one out of its first victim. With their reproductive cycle worse than radioactive rabbits on steroids and Red Bull, they were the number one threat to humans.
They were, out of all the physical monsters she knew of, the closest thing to humanity’s extinction that was running around on the face of the earth. That’s why her family was sworn to fight them, no matter what was happening in their lives at the moment. Their sacred duty was to stop everything and combat their presence, no matter what happened.
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was the first time they’d had to burn a city down, or most of it anyway, to stop the spread of the swarm.
Chicago was the first, but not the last.
For over 500 years had the Herant family been so foresworn.
The tattoo was itching, throbbing from its place on her solar plexus. It would itch and pull at her until she found any sight of the swarm. And so long as she was in the presence of them and they were anything but ash, the tattoo would itch.
For a brief moment, she thought this may be unrelated to her current mission, that somehow she’d stumbled upon an infestation, confusion setting in right behind the alarm of the situation developing as it had, and so quickly. She thought it was unrelated until, that is, the amulet with Jilliup tucked away inside seemed to be pulling in the same direction as her tattoo was pulling her.
Down a rabbit hole indeed, and she put one foot in front of the other, with Tess close behind. They’d only gone down two flights of stairs before they ended at a single, metal door.
The door pushed inward, and they found themselves in a hallway. Suddenly, everything changed. Instead of pulling her in the same direction, she could feel like she was made up of two magnets - the first, her tattoo, now pulling her to the right.
Then, the spirit trap pocketwatch that held Jilliup was now pulling her to the left.
She and Tess could only go in one direction.
And they certainly weren’t splitting up.
👍 LIIKE THIS POST to have Abigail and Tess go left, the direction Jilliup's amulet is pulling them
❤️LOVE THIS POST to have them go right, in the direction Abigail's tattoo is pulling them
POLL RESULTS: 2❤️ 13👍
