Chapter 5: Run

Chapter 5: Run

For a frozen heartbeat, there was only the grotesque tableau: the blood-stained machine, the circle of placid cultists, and Savannah, her arms raised in rapturous welcome to her hungry god. David’s mind, the organized, logical tool he had always relied upon, simply shattered. The meticulously planned world of logistics and aid dissolved into a primal, sweat-slick reality of predator and prey.

The dream wasn't a warning anymore. It was a script. The grave Baron Samedi had offered him was no longer a threat; it was a mercy he had foolishly refused. Now, the grinding gears waited.

The Baron’s words, a forgotten whisper from that sun-scorched nightmare, became a primal command etched in his soul: Run.

The wordless, animal terror that seized him was a force of nature. It bypassed thought, bypassed reason, and erupted from his lungs in a raw, desperate scream. He shoved Cassara, hard, not towards the enemy but sideways, towards the narrow gap between two crumbling, angel-topped tombs.

“RUN!”

The sound, the sudden, violent motion, was the spark that reignited Cassara’s combat instincts. The spell cast by her mother’s name shattered. The vulnerable, lost daughter vanished, and the Guardian of Penthesil returned with explosive force.

As the nearest cultist, a burly man with a tire iron, lunged forward, she didn’t meet his charge. She pivoted, her body moving with an impossible economy. Her hand shot out, not in a punch, but with a stiffened palm that connected with the man’s elbow. The crack of bone was sickeningly loud in the sudden silence. He howled, the tire iron clattering to the hard-packed earth. Before he could fall, she drove her boot into the side of his knee. It buckled with another wet, tearing sound, and he went down in a heap of broken limbs.

It was brutal. Efficient. She wasn’t trying to win a fight; she was carving a path.

“David, move!” she snarled, grabbing the collar of his t-shirt and hauling him after her.

The graveyard erupted into a bedlam of shouts. The placid expressions of the cultists twisted into masks of fanaticism. They swarmed forward, a clumsy, uncoordinated wave armed with machetes, clubs, and farming tools. A scythe whistled through the air where David’s head had been a second before, embedding itself in the soft plaster of a tomb.

Cassara was a whirlwind of controlled violence in their midst. She moved through them like a blade through soft wood. An arm was broken here, a shoulder dislocated there. She wasn't killing them, David realized with a detached corner of his terrified mind. She was dismantling them, disabling them with a cold, terrifying precision that spoke of countless hours of training. She was the Angel of War’s finest student, turned loose in a garden of death.

He stumbled after her, his feet catching on roots and loose stones. The air was filled with grunts of pain and the chilling, rhythmic chant that had started up from the cultists who kept their distance.

“Congo-Savanne, li grangou! Congo-Savanne, li manje!” (Congo-Savanne, he is hungry! Congo-Savanne, he eats!)

They burst through the rusted gate and plunged back into the oppressive darkness of the alleys. Behind them, Savannah’s voice rose above the chanting, not in anger, but in a tone of chilling, ecstatic encouragement.

“Do not let the offering escape! The Loa is hungry! Bring him his feast!”

They ran.

The world became a blur of crumbling walls, piles of reeking garbage, and flickering, distant lights. Every turn was a blind guess. The labyrinthine streets that had been disorienting before were now a death trap. A dead end could be their tomb. A lighted window could be an enemy.

Cassara was in her element, her senses alive to the hunt. She led them, her powerful strides eating up the ground, pulling David along whenever he faltered. His lungs burned, his side ached with a stabbing pain, but the terror was a merciless fuel.

“This way!” Cassara hissed, yanking him into a narrower passage between two buildings, so tight their shoulders scraped the corrugated tin walls. The sharp, metallic scent of rust filled the air.

They paused for a breath, hidden in the absolute blackness. David leaned against a wall, gasping, his heart feeling like it would tear its way out of his chest. The chanting was fainter now, but a new sound was emerging. The sound of pursuit. The slap of bare feet on packed earth, the excited shouts of the hunters closing in.

“They’re splitting up,” Cassara whispered, her breathing already steady. “They know these streets.”

“What do we do?” David gasped, his voice ragged.

Before she could answer, a voice echoed down the alley they had just left, impossibly close. It was Savannah.

“The fire burns so brightly! I can smell your fear, Guardian. It is a sweet spice on the wind!”

Her voice was wrong. It was deeper, rougher, with a strange, resonant quality, as if two voices were speaking at once. A cold dread, separate from the fear of the chase, trickled down David’s spine.

They peered around the corner. Far down the alley, a figure was moving. It was Savannah, but she wasn’t running. She was loping, her body moving with a fluid, unnatural gait. She flowed over obstacles—a pile of rubble, an abandoned handcart—with a predatory grace that was utterly inhuman. She was faster than any person had a right to be.

The kind hospital administrator was gone. The mask was not just off; it had been devoured from within. The thing wearing her skin was now in control. Congo-Savanne was hunting them himself.

“Lyra wouldn’t have run!” the Savannah-thing shrieked, the sound a horrifying blend of a woman’s taunt and something ancient and guttural. “She would have burned for a real god!”

The psychological blow landed. David saw Cassara flinch as if struck. The mention of her mother, twisted into a weapon by this monster, was a unique and terrible cruelty.

“Don’t listen to her,” David urged, his own fear momentarily forgotten in the face of her pain.

Cassara’s eyes were chips of ice in the darkness. The grief was gone, burned away by pure, unadulterated rage. “We need to get off the ground,” she said, her voice tight and lethal. Her eyes scanned the walls around them. “Up.”

She pointed to a rickety-looking drainpipe that ran up the side of a three-story tenement. It was their only chance. Without another word, she leaped, grabbing the pipe and beginning to climb with the practiced ease of an infiltrator. The rusted metal groaned under her weight.

David followed, his trembling hands slipping on the corroded surface. His mind screamed that it wouldn't hold, but the sound of the approaching cultists was a more immediate terror. He hauled himself upward, his muscles screaming in protest, the alley shrinking below him.

He was halfway up when Cassara, already at the roof’s edge, hissed, “Hurry!”

He looked down. The Savannah-thing had entered their alley. It paused directly beneath him, its head tilted back. In the faint, ambient light from the city, he saw its face. Savannah’s features were still there, but they were stretched, distorted, pulled into a rictus grin that split her face from ear to ear. Her eyes glowed with a faint, predatory phosphorescence, like a deep-sea creature.

It saw him. Its grin widened.

With a final, desperate surge of adrenaline, David scrambled the last few feet. Cassara grabbed his shirt and hauled him over the ledge onto the flat, tar-papered roof just as the drainpipe, ripped from its mountings by the unnatural force leaping up it, clattered to the ground below.

They lay panting on the roof, the city of Port-au-Prince spread around them like a field of scattered, dying embers. They were exposed, trapped between the sky and the hungry god below. The chanting of the cult was all around them now, a tightening net of sound. They had escaped the graveyard, but they hadn't escaped the hunt. They had only found a higher, more precarious killing ground.