The interior of Columbus was as grim and functional as its exterior was ugly. The streets were wide and clean, designed for the easy movement of those who might need to escape at a moment’s notice. The buildings closest to the wall were concrete and steel, with few windows on the lower floors. Further in, they could see buildings with more color and age behind their exteriors. Those particular buildings usually had brick exteriors; still, as a whole, the city seemed remarkably drab and dull.

  Despite the outer appearance of the city, the people on the streets seemed happy and moved about with smiles on their faces. They had been expecting a fortress, a military base where the civilians simply happened to live.

  That wasn’t the case, or at least that wasn’t the full truth.

  The truth was that this was just like any other city, just with a slightly scarier exterior and a rather dull interior.

  It took them a while to find the Merchant Guild building. Unlike in other cities, the building there wasn’t grand or ostentatious; in fact, it was muted, much like the rest of the place. It had a certain brutalist architecture going on that lacked the elegance they had come to expect.

  ***

  That evening, the mood inside the RV was significantly lighter. Angie had taken over cooking duties, preparing a spicy noodle soup that filled the small space with a fragrant, welcoming steam. She was even humming softly, with Mika perched on her head, occasionally dipping a curious nose into the rising steam.

  “This is really good,” Nate said once she had dished it up, and he had taken his first bite, genuinely relieved to see her returning to her usual self.

  Angie gave a small smile. “It’s my ‘I’m sorry for being a grump’ soup.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Lindsay said, bumping her shoulder gently. “Last night sucked. We’re allowed to be grumpy about it.”

  “I know. But I still feel bad for snapping,” She admitted, glancing at Nate. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s forgotten,” Nate assured her. He caught Lindsay’s eye, and she gave him a small, knowing nod. They were going to be okay. “We can’t always control our reactions to trauma, and that is even more true if we haven’t acknowledged it before."

  After dinner, while they were cleaning up, Nate went outside with Aura and Mika. The two had business with a copse of nearby trees. Nate wasn’t needed for that, but he wanted to make sure that no one caused any problems for them.

  They were parked outside the Licensing Bureau and the general prepping area that the expeditioners used. One side of the massive lot held the larger rigs and trailers that went outside the walls, while the other side held the vehicles they used inside the city.

  While they were doing their thing, Nate gave them some privacy and accidentally drifted closer to a couple of men prepping their rig for an early-morning departure. They were talking in low, serious tones.

  “…saw it again just outside the walls last night on our way back,” One man said, his voice raspy. “Just a flicker at the treeline. The one they call the Shadow-Cat.”

  “You’re sure?” His companion asked doubtfully.

  “Positive. Big as a panther, dark as a shadow, and faster than anything I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t attack, just… watches. They say it’s been pacing the roads between here and the Kentucky border for years. No one’s ever gotten a clean shot at it.”

  Nate stopped moving and listened to the two until the topic changed to something else. They hadn’t said much more about the Shadow-Cat, but what they had mentioned had been enough to make him certain that the beast was the same one Aura had spotted earlier.

  “Did you hear what they were saying?” He asked Aura as she joined him, along with Mika.

  She nodded once. “I did, and I know what you’re thinking. But if they’re right, then this Shadow-Cat is a special being. From what they were saying, all it does is run alongside their vehicles. It doesn’t attack them, merely watches…” Aura said, her ears flicking about, picking up noises and conversations that he couldn’t even begin to hear.

  They began to head back toward the Overlander, while Nate deftly pulled the list of dimensional zones in the area. There were fewer, it was true, far fewer than they were used to seeing, and none extremely close to the city. That said, there were still several in the state of Ohio and many more in Kentucky.

  He was guessing that the Shadow-Cat came from one of the dimensional zones nearby since it had been seen by the road for several years. There weren’t any zones particularly close to the road on the Ohio side of the border. Kentucky was another matter, with one zone being within roughly a dozen miles of the highway.

  Unfortunately, that was all the information the Sub-DCD gave him. It didn’t provide him with more information on the dimensional zone or what beasts or monsters it was allowing into the world at large.

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  Still, it was the dimensional zone that he thought had the best odds of being the one responsible for this Shadow-Cat. It wasn’t something that he needed to worry about, at least it didn’t seem to be. The cat didn’t attack people but watched them.

  Opening the door of the RV, he let Aura and Mika inside first and then hopped in after them.

  Inside, he sat at the table and relayed the conversation he’d overheard. Angie and Lindsay exchanged a look, the memory of the flickering shape in the woods that had run beside them in the woods the day before suddenly taking on a different meaning.

  “It was pacing us for fifteen minutes,” Lindsay recalled softly. “It could have attacked at any point, especially on these roads.”

  “But it didn’t,” Aura mused, her tails swishing slowly. “It was observing. That implies an intelligence beyond most common monsters or beasts. It was also running through the woods, dodging trees, and constant debris. Who knows what its actual top speed is?”

  The idea of meeting another intelligent beast was clearly something that appealed to her. Mika had begun to fill a void that her humans simply couldn't fill with their presence. However, at the same time, she wanted someone closer to her own age who wasn’t a toddler hopped up on sugar.

  ***

  The Overlander rumbled through the outskirts of Columbus, its large tires crunching over broken asphalt. The city loomed behind them, a jagged silhouette of steel and massive concrete walls clawing at the overcast sky.

  In front of them, rust-streaked, forgotten towering structures, their surfaces pitted from years of neglect. Yet they stood defiant against the encroaching wilderness. Vines snaked up the sides of abandoned factories, and the air carried the sharp tang of metal and decay. Nate’s eyes flicked to the side mirrors, half-expecting that dark shape to reappear in the tree line. It didn’t, but the tension in his shoulders didn’t ease.

  Angie sat slumped in the back, her tea sitting cold and forgotten on the table in front of her. Mika’s small form curled tightly around her neck like a living scarf. Her fingers toyed absently with the ring on her hand, its faint glow pulsing in time with her uneven breaths. The weight of last night’s encounter with the Japanese cultivators clung to her. The things they had said in their whispered conversation were something she couldn’t forget.

  Lindsay, at the wheel, kept her focus on the road, but her knuckles whitened as she gripped the steering wheel, her own frustration simmering beneath her calm exterior. The cultivators the night before had affected her as well, but she hadn’t been the target of Jace’s ‘affections’ as her friend had, so she didn’t have the same trauma associated with simply hearing what they wanted to do to them. She hadn’t enjoyed it, not in the slightest. It made her angry, but at the same time, they hadn’t actually done anything.

  It was a small comfort.

  Aura, perched near the window, remained vigilant, her five tails swaying slightly, each movement a silent warning of her readiness.

  Up to that point, the road trip had been mostly enjoyable. Sure, there had been some danger, but it was things that they had been able to handle. This time, the physical danger had been minimal; however, the emotional damage that they had suffered at that time had been real.

  An old steel mill came into view a few minutes outside the city. It was a hulking relic of a bygone era. Its ruined towering smokestacks jutted into the sky. The ground around it was littered with pieces of broken concrete and ancient, rusted machinery that hadn’t moved in years.

  The mill loomed closer, its skeletal frame cutting sharp lines against the gray clouds. Whole rusted walls of the factory had collapsed inward, leaving gaping mouths of tetanus and shadow. Windows that once reflected furnace light were now grimy black cavities. The rain, steady and cold, traced dirty streaks down the surviving sheet metal, and the air hung heavy with the smell of oxidized iron.

  Lindsay slowed the Overlander, her eyes flicking across some of the windows on the bottom of the floor of the factory. She eased the vehicle onto the cracked edge of the lot. The large tires crunched over loose gravel, and the silence that followed when she turned off the magitech engine seemed heavier than before. The building stared back at them, defiant and hollow.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Angie’s voice was quiet, her tone flat.

  Mika stirred from her place on Angie’s shoulders, lifting his head as if to echo the question.

  Aura’s ears flicked toward the ruins. Her tails stilled, hovering in mid-air for a beat before slowly falling as her gaze sharpened. “There is something inside,” She answered for Lindsay. “I can’t tell what it is from here, but the presence feels different than what I felt with the Shadow-Cat yesterday. Whatever, or whoever it is though, it’s watching us. I can feel it.”

  The words drew silence across the RV’s cramped interior.

  Nate reached for his jacket, his expression grim. “And you thought it would be a good idea to stop and say hello to whatever is in there?” He quipped in confusion.

  Normally, they just drove past these sorts of ruined structures. They were common and dotted the landscape around the older roads. What had made this one so special that she had felt the need to stop at it?

  Angie scoffed lightly but without humor. “You mean walk into that thing?” She gestured toward the dark ruin. “That place screams ambush.”

  “It’s hiding in the dark,” Mika said softly. “That means it has some intelligence, right?”

  Nate pulled the collar of his jacket up and looked at the little weasel. “Or it means a predator who likes to play with its food.”

  The weasel on Angie’s shoulders hissed quietly, then ducked low again. Neither did Angie, but she swallowed her retort. Instead, she grabbed her own jacket and followed Lindsay to the door, where Mika jumped onto the other girl’s shoulder.

  Lindsay looked at them as she opened the door and finally answered their questions from earlier. “I didn’t stop here for any special reason,” She told them with a small grin, pulling her halberd out of the storage space inside her Sub-DCD. “I just thought it looked like a good place to explore, was all. A break from the monotony of our day. The silence in the RV was bugging me. The fact that there might be something we get to fight is merely icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.”

  Nate snorted and smiled. “Yeah, sounds about right. I can get behind a reason like that.” He nudged Angie forward and ran a hand along Aura’s side as she passed him. He was the last one out of the Overlander.

  The five of them stepped out into the drizzle, wincing as water soaked quickly into their boots. The parking lot around the mill was littered with half-concealed trash of every sort, pieces of metal, both sharp and rusted. Thick weeds had clawed their way through cracks in the uncared-for pavement and simple gravel covering.

  As they approached the main building, they became aware of how every sound would echo unnaturally. The raindrops as they fell on steel, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the faint creak of wind through loose high beams, all of them made noise, and it was all amplified by the hollow frame of the building.

  Thank you to all the people who have taken the time to rate the story and to my latest Patrons! I have other stories up on my Patreon, including my current WIPs. Which are now Created G.H.O.S.T. System(My Cyberpunk story), WetWorks2, plus The Restaurateur and His Daughter and DungeonFall. :)

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