Time to Think

Despite being a “Preferred Contractor” for the city government Maria could not afford much in the way of living. The block of flats she pulled up in front of was just on the wrong side of rustic/dilapidated, with the plaster coming off of the walls in the close in chunks. The flat itself was barely two rooms with a tiny kitchenette and a threadbare couch.

She had decided it wasn’t worth going back to the office, it had already been late in the day when she left the morgue and the one nice thing about her job was that she was her own boss. So instead she had headed straight for home, the rain finally starting to let up about halfway there.

As she climbed the stairs to her flat she turned the things she had learnt today over in her mind. The fact that the girl had turned up dead was not in itself odd, sad yes, but pretty much how she had expected this to end. Even the signs of having being held against her will where not too odd.

It was the scar that didn’t fit, she had been ready to write this all off as another cult and kick it over to the Police, after all even the cults that got as far as **** and **** rarely had any real vodoo to back it up. Yet somehow this young woman, who as far as anyone had known had never had sex, wound up carrying a child to term in just over four months.

It was impossible, at least in the same world, but in the world that Maria worked in it was far too easy to imagine. Plenty of nasties from beyond the vail liked to use humans as a vector to enter our world. Two years ago she had helped bust up a cult that had been using illegal immigrants to try and mass produce Screamers.

In those cases however the bodies had been burned or dumped, usually whatever was birthed tended to bypass the birth canal and just claw its way straight out. The cultists sure as hell never cared about the women they used, certainly not enough to sew them up.

Maria collapsed into bed, groaning to herself about having to keep this one. The impossible pregnancy kept the case firmly in her department and the C-Section scar meant this was something new.

Neither of those facts made Maria feel happy.