Kira Dallas's Arc

Chapter 5 of 13

The shells sat crated at HQ. But Kira wanted eyes on the ghoul source before she burned anything. She led a scout team to the ridge over St Alphonse's before dawn. Donovan carried his field radio. Kira carried her camera. They crawled to the lip and looked down. The view was worse than the reports. Ghoul raiders moved between the barracks and a church shrine. Chains hung from a stone wall. A huge mutant ghoul strained against them, far larger than the rest. Beside the barracks lay the remains of their last victims. Kira worked her camera in silence. She shot the shrine, the chains, the mutant, the bodies. Each frame locked a fact down. Beside her, Donovan hunched over his radio. His ears flicked under his cap. "Oh man. They're on the air." He scrawled fast in his battered notebook. "Not raider chatter. Not loot runs. They're praying." He tapped a line of coded scrawl. "That big one on the chains? They call it holy. They feed it." Kira lowered the camera. "Feed it what." "Hell if I know yet." His voice stayed flat. "But it ties back to your road. Same reverence. Same words I pulled off the ghoul bodies." He closed the notebook. "We've got enough. Let's move." They pulled off the ridge and ran the long way home. Back at HQ, Kira spread the photos across the table. The team crowded in. The chains. The mutant. The dead. Nobody spoke for a moment. Donovan opened his notebook beside the pictures and read off the intercepts. "They're not scattering. They're worshipping. The ghouls on Kira's supply road weren't rogue. They were sent. Pilgrims, headed out, headed back." Tammy Lammens pushed through to the table. The medic set down a heavy board covered in notes, pins, and red thread. She had run the tissue from the dead ghouls on Kira's road. "Then this closes it," she said. Her finger traced the thread from one report fragment to the next. "The samples off your ambush ghouls. The vault mutant tissue. The St Alphonse's material." She looked up. "They're near identical. Same source. One mutation, spread across all three sites." Kira stood still. She ran it in her head the way she ran a manifest. Donovan's intercepts. The photos. Tammy's thread. Three sources, one answer. It held. "So burning the staging posts kills the symptom," Kira said. "Not the cause." "Right." Donovan tapped the shrine photo. "The cause is here. They'll keep sending pilgrims down your road until this is gone." Kira gathered the photos into one stack. Her supply line was never a raider problem. It was a pilgrimage, fed by one shrine. The fire she bought would clear the road for a week. The shrine would send more. She set the stack square on the table. "Then we stop treating this as two problems," she said. "It's one. And it starts at St Alphonse's."