Et tu, Assiah?
Lost
The ghoul had been gone for a good twenty minutes when Sam's cell buzzed. He flipped the thing out of his pocket unthinkingly, bringing it up next to his ear only to be greeted by the shrieking of static. Frankly, he was surprised the thing still worked at all, out here amidst the dust of old wars.
"Le Chevallier," he inquired into the static, curious. The ID came from no known number.
"The adoni ha'aretz is nervous," came a distorted, but female, voice through the buzz of white noise. "Whatever you've got, hold onto it. Keep running, and don't look back." Then the line clicked dead and all Sam was left with was a beeping piece of plastic. He folder it up, pushing it back into the pocket of his tunic, and shifted his gaze back out into the fog. It was giving him a headache; his eyes needed something to focus on, not this depthless infinity, so he shifted them back to the inside of the van. The phonecall had surprised him, but he knew better than to dwell on it, especially out here. Getting strange, annonymous phonecalls was all part and parcel with being a grey. You simply noted them down and left it at that. The ha'aretz could panic all it liked, but it couldn't send the Protectorates after him if they didn't know where he was. Or how to get there.
He sighed, glancing at his watch. 25 minutes. The ghoul had said he could track down their missing cargo blind in the fog using... weird ghoul mumbo jumbo, or whatever, but now Sam was getting uneasy; how far could the kid have gone? Thankfully, the howls had nearly died down; one or two mournful voices still raged every now and again, sometimes closer, sometimes not. Sam wondered what they'd do to a lone ghoul, lost in the mist. Not to mention the kid.
Sam shuddered. The worst part was, he was getting hungry.
Thirty minutes and he decided to go looking. Nails had taken a beacon with him, and Sam was hoping like hell it would still work out here. He found the tracker buried under a pile of blankets and shook it awake. For a long time the screen was blank, then it gave a few tentative beeps. Dots appeared on the screen; one for the van, right underneath the center of the field which indicated Sam's current location. A hazy cone extended out to the... Sam wasn't sure of the directions out here, since the compass had gone offline, so he nominated that direction as west. That would, he figured, be just about right for the direction Nails had taken in the five or so feet before he was totally obscured in the mists. So the tracker wasn't completley useless. Every single piece of common sense and ops training in his entire body was screaming at him that this was a bad idea; nay, the worst idea, but what else could he do? The van was... dead. It had stubbornly refused to start when Nails had first suggested he track the kid. Sam had poked around under the bonnet for a while, trying to find a problem, but could see nothing wrong. Eventually, Nails had suggested bitrot. Some places just made technology break down, he'd explained, before launching into a long lecture about quantum chaos and entropy fields. Sam had half-listened; Red Ops agents lived and breathed tech, and it looked like this one hadn't lost all his memory of it since his death. Eventually, Nails had taken the beacon and disappeared into the fog, following what looked like a fingerbone tied to a piece of hair. Sam had been skeptical.
He was halfway through holstering guns when his phone rang again. He picked it up, bracing himself for yet another burst of static, and was surprised when all that came through was a clicking noise; like a cockroach eating only magnified a million times.
"Le Chevallier..."
The noise was... eerie.
"Hello?"
The clicking continued. Sam's brain began churning up images of maggots and dark, moist places in long-forgotten basements. It was almost... hypnotising, in a way. He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there when the wailing started; impossibly loud and devilishly inhuman. Gut instinct took over, and Sam had thrown the phone to the other side of the van and put a clip through it before calming down.
"Shit!" His heart was beating far, far more quickly than it should have been. Suddenly, the inside of the van was feeling far, far to cramped.
It took him far longer than he would have liked before he had talked himself into lowering the gun, and it was only then that he heard it. Right on the edge of hearing, a slightly clicking sound, like beetles on stone. Cautiously, he bent down to examine the shattered cell, he stretched his fingers, and had almost touched it when something the size of a small car hit the side of the van, and everything went sideways.