Liz Sherman

Yamagata prefecture, Japan

2014-01-04T00:47:53Z

Liz doesn't know exactly how cold it is -- she never did get good at the Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion -- but it's definitely under 15° and the wind is stinging the exposed skin of her face. It's cold and dark; they left the lights of the nearest ski resort behind in the forest a good twenty minutes ago. She's got one gloved hand holding a heavy industrial flashlight and the other momentarily jammed in her parka pocket with the thermal sensor. Which hasn't been lighting up, because it's January in the mountains, it's snowing lightly, and all the smart little animals are safe at home inside their burrows or holes, or wherever else animals live.

Liz isn't a nature person.

Even she has to admit, though, that the "snow monsters" that Mount Zaō is famous for are very cool. They may be fir trees that were coated with wet snow and ice and then frozen by the jetstream, but they definitely look like monsters. She started at them a couple times before she started getting used to them; they're eerie and ominous, looming out of the tight circle of light cast by her flashlight. They don't look like trees -- they look like setpieces on The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or like something that's going to come to life and be very unfriendly.

But they're just trees, and they're definitely not what has attacked four skiiers in the last two weeks.

"Anything?" she calls over to Red.

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walking_napalm @ 2012-10-23T00:02:00

2012-10-23T04:12:55Z

It's dark, and the fog is so thick that it goes well beyond atmospheric and into the kind of density that Liz has only ever seen in enormous banks on a fishing boat off the coast of New England.

She stands at the edge of the tree line, wrapped up in layers (pants, boots, leather jacket, scarf, hat, fingerless gloves -- still cold; always cold), her arms crossed.

Out back, Hellboy had said. He'd seen something in the trees; something that had unsettled him.

The fog twists trees and bushes into looming sinister shapes, slow and sinuous in the faint breeze. Liz's heart is thudding in her ears.

She has checked the bar, over and over again; she's checked the library, the garage, the security cells, the halls upstairs, the Caribbean inlet, the lakeshore, constantly feeling like someone or something is watching but unable to see anyone. She left notes with Bar and all over room 4204. She stuck her head in the door at the Bureau and then returned to Milliways with no better idea of where the hell Red is, and with her gun.

The woods are the last place she can think of that she hasn't searched.

Every time she woke from dozing half-forgotten dreams (dreams of fire; dreams of a darkness so cold and absolute that she can't remember what it feels like to exist) over the last few nights, sometimes to find the pillow smoldering under her head, she was alone.

She turns her face into her shoulder to muffle a cough, then crosses her arms again. Fire is guttering just beneath her skin, the leather of her gloves sizzling faintly. She can feel the fire, see it turning her exposed fingers translucent whenever she glances down, but her hands feel ice-cold. She watches the grasping tree branches, fog drifting, and she doesn't step into them.

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Upstairs at Milliways

2012-03-05T02:38:06Z

Liz takes the stairs two at a time, probably leaving a literal cloud of dust in her wake, her heart hammering.

He probably isn't there, she tells herself; don't be disappointed if he isn't there.

The hallways up here show even more signs of what Milliways went through. There's a crack in a wall, dents here and there where objects (and maybe people) must have crashed into them. She nearly trips over a knife embedded in a step.

She's patting her vest pockets down for the key as she approaches the door to room 4204, but then she figures what the hell and tries the doorknob.

It twists in her hand. She immediately shoulders it open, hard.

"Red--?"

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walking_napalm @ 2012-03-04T21:44:00

2012-03-04T21:44:35Z

It's a long, hard slog to the surface, Liz and Mendoza supporting a white-faced hopping Gerrish between them. Greg follows just behind, checking their progress on the GPS and periodically trying the radio. Nobody asks Liz any more questions about what the hell happened to her back there. She thinks they're too tired for it, and too hurt; there's bigger stuff to focus on. She came back in the end. That's what counts.

Mostly, they talk about little personal stuff, to try to stave off Gerrish's shock and keep him responding. Park wants to get a motorcycle but his boyfriend disapproves; Mendoza's apparently addicted to some new medical drama, and Liz and Park both complain as he starts giving them the blow-by-blow on Meredith and Derek's secret forbidden romance.

The radio finally crackles to life just as Liz is beginning to see some light that isn't from her left hand, interrupting a scintillating conversation about the most boring mission each of them has ever been on (Liz's: the time she'd staked out a barn in Iowa for six hours before realizing that the 'ghost' that a little old lady had spotted was a white cat).

"¿Hola?" asks a crackling voice, and Mendoza mutters, "Finally" on Gerrish's other side as they limp along.

Liz smiles faintly and shuts her eyes under the welcome warmth of the sun on her face when they finally emerge from the darkness and pause at the mouth of the cave.

"Roger," says Greg, coming up behind them and clicking the radio off. "Support team's got us on GPS and they're on the way. We've just got to wait by the--" He points down the rocky slope to the long line of twin wheel ruts that might be referred to as a road if Liz was squinting and feeling charitable.

Getting Gerrish down is the worst. It's hard enough for Liz to maintain her own balance, much less hold onto Gerrish -- not a small guy, whereas she's 5'3" and Mendoza isn't that much taller -- who's on one foot and whose painkillers are wearing off. Park would be better suited for this job but he's swearing his way through the shale just ahead of them, his descent made all the harder by the fact that he's only got one good arm to work with, so Liz grits her teeth and slip-slides her way down the steep hill, throwing all her weight against Gerrish every time he or Mendoza starts to overbalance.

When they finally reach the bottom, it's pretty much all she can do to carefully lower Gerrish to the ground, with Mendoza's help (for all their care, he's hissing through his teeth, clearly in pain), and then sit down hard.

"Jesus Christ," says Mendoza, and Liz silently agrees.

They wait at the side of the jeep track for an hour before the cloud of dust finally appears on the horizon.

The two Peruvian agents who'd dropped them off on the other side of the mountain pull up in the same battered, nondescript truck and step out, slamming the cab doors.

"No jodas conmigo," says Agent Rodríguez, lowering his sunglasses and taking them in. Both he and his counterpart look -- grim, at seeing them, and a little taken aback. Apparently, the four of them look as bad as Liz feels. She rises and Greg steps up to help her with Gerrish.

"Is the rock demon killed?" Agent Mozombite asks as she comes forward to slip in under Gerrish's arm, unceremoniously hip-checking Liz out of the way. Rodríguez belatedly takes a hint and takes over for Park, and the two Peruvian agents haul Gerrish over and up into the back of the truck. Liz follows them, arms folded over her vest.

"Liz smoked it," says Greg. "It's history."

Mozombite shoots her an assessing, appreciative look, and offers her a hand. Liz takes it and lets the other agent pull her up into the truck. "Thank you," Mozombite says, quiet and intent, and Liz remembers that that thing killed two agents from Lima -- half of the tiny Bureau post's staff -- last week. The dead agents were Mozombite's colleagues; probably her friends.

Liz's mouth quirks uncomfortably under the regard. She nods and moves to sit on one of the two benches running along the bed of the truck, wedging herself up against where the bed meets the cab. The bed has a shell covering it, which is probably for the best, given the sun, the dust, and the fact that there are four heavily-armed, bloody American secret agents to hide. She shuts her eyes and lets Rodríguez and Mozombite take over, settling Gerrish in and cushioning his knee as best as they can. She only opens her eyes when Rodríguez, who pulled a first aid kit out of somewhere and has been gingerly prodding at Mendoza's face and at Park's probably-broken nose while Greg swears and Mendoza sits there stoically, asks if she's hurt.

"Nope," says Liz, folding her arms and leaning her head against the back of the cab. "Nothing serious. I'm good."

"We are driving," Mozombite warns from the cab through the open window, and the truck creaks into the start of its bumpy journey along the jeep track back to Arequipa.

Reserva Nacional de Salinas y Aguada Blanca is supposed to be stunning. Snow-capped mountains, lagoons, inactive volcanoes, flamingos... But Liz doesn't have her camera and she's more than fine with being unable to see the view. Every rut in the road (and there are a lot of them) makes the whole truck shudder and shake, her ass actually bouncing off the seat a couple times with the jarring force of the bigger potholes, but she's tired enough -- and accustomed enough to traveling like this -- to slip into sleep like it's nothing. The mission's over, and this is the way missions are supposed to end: with sleep.

She wakes up when somebody says her name. "--rman," the voice is saying, and then something quakes under her face. "Hey, Liz."

She blearily blinks awake and pushes herself upright from where she has apparently been sleeping with her cheek pressed against Greg Park's uninjured shoulder.

"Rise and shine, sleeping beauty," he says. She scrunches up her entire face disdainfully to show what she thinks of that nickname. The truck feels like it's idling. Park continues, "This is my stop."

She looks around the bed of the truck and sees that Gerrish and Rodríguez are already gone, Mendoza hopping down off the tailgate. There are car horns and shouts from all around them, the sounds of traffic.

"O...kay," she says, sleep-slurred and slow.

"Last call on whether you want to see a doctor," says Greg, a siren wailing nearby, and some of the fog lifts.

She shakes her head. "Seriously, Greg, I'm fine."

He punches her shoulder, lighter than his usual (it's companionable and a thanks, all at once, since Greg has never been one for effusive words; it hurts like hell, too, thanks to the bruises where she landed while falling into Milliways -- but, no, she's not thinking about Milliways right now; not until there's something she can do about it), then he shifts himself with a grunt -- Liz automatically helps shove him up -- and ducks over to the open tailgate, the truck springs squeaking under his weight. He climbs out, one arm tucked close to his side, Mendoza reaching out to steady him.

"See you at the plane," Park says, Mendoza waving behind him, and then Agent Rodríguez slams the tailgate shut.

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walking_napalm @ 2012-03-04T06:46:00

2012-03-04T07:46:11Z

Ramon Mendoza is having a bad day.

If pressed to pinpoint, he would have to say that the exact moment where it all went wrong was when something loomed out of the darkness and hit Agent Sherman so hard that she disappeared. In retrospect, he realizes that she didn't disappear, she just got sent flying as the light she'd been providing with her hand went out, but in the split second that it happened, it was pretty fucking confusing.

Then it was just him, Park, and Gerrish with crap-ass flashlights in the dark.

"Sherm--" Gerrish began, Mendoza starting to point his flashlight on where he'd thought Sherman would be now and the other two turning on where she had been standing -- and then Gerrish screamed and there was a thud and a cracking sound that Mendoza really wished he didn't recognize.

(He did recognize it; it was breaking bone.)

Everything after that happened really fast. Shots fired, Gerrish still screaming, Mendoza and Park yelling for a light from Sherman, something big swooping in and out of flashlight beams and hurling Park into a cave wall, Mendoza snapping around in every possible direction as he tried to get a bead on where the hell it was coming from next--

But it was gone, and so, they discovered after Mendoza hauled Park up and they checked on Gerrish, was Agent Sherman.

Which is how Ramon wound up at this exact moment in his life, shoving a big Korean guy's dislocated shoulder back into its socket.

That's a pretty bad noise, too.

Park yells something that sounds a whole lot like, "SHITFUCKDAMNSHITTINGFUCKDAMN" and then falls silent, breathing raggedly, hand clutching his shoulder.

"I just don't get it," Mendoza says, sitting back on his heels and giving Parkie a minute to pull his shit together. "She was right there; I saw her."

"Not there anymore," says Gerrish. He's got several broken fingers and what they're all pretty sure is a broken knee cap, and what are probably the beginnings of shock. They threw a space blanket over him, after splinting him up as good as they could and giving him the good drugs, and now he's huddled against the cave wall providing totally useless drugged-out information. "Poof."

"She's not anywhere," Park says, a little thready but present. Ramon has never been so glad that Park is ex-Marine Corps and an Afghanistan vet. "You saw the GPS; her signal's nowhere within a hundred-mile radius."

Gerrish laughs woozily. "Red's gonna kill us."

"I'm gonna kill us." Park shakes his head, standing up. "How the hell do you lose a team member like that?" Mendoza picks his flashlight up off the rock floor and hands it to him. Park grimaces but takes it in his good hand and passes it into his bad, and then draws his gun again.

Mendoza shrugs helplessly. She's got to be okay, he thinks; Sherman is one of the most competent agents he's gone into the field with, and she's got the whole going-nuclear thing going for her. She's got to be.

"The beacon thing's not good," Park grunts, pulling him away from Gerrish. "We've got a serious problem here."

"No kidding," says Mendoza, his voice lowered, too.

Park rolls his eyes, but doesn't reprimand him. That's the nice part about the Bureau's informal hierarchy: no insubordination charges, even from ex-military like Park. You get the traditional beat out of you pretty quick at the Bureau. Park says, "We should get him out of here ASAP, but Liz--"

Mendoza has never been so glad not to be the team leader. That's Park's call, or maybe Sherman if she was here. Definitely not his.

"And fucked if I even know what that was." Park's holding his flashlight stiffly, arm tucked in closer to his body. "It felt like a train hit me. Gerrish, are you sure you didn't see anything?"

"Yep," Gerrish calls cheerfully. "Too dark. It was big and it felt like rocks and it picked me up and broke me."

"Great," mutters Park. "Listen, come on; let's get the EMF and infrared and motion sensors going, see what we can get here," and then there's a terrible grinding of stone from outside the circle of light provided by their flashlights.

Mendoza is forced to admit that it's toying with them.

"It's toying with us," he says, muffled as he probes the bloody now-open space between two teeth with his tongue; "damn."

"Hrnrnlnl," says Gerrish, from where he has tipped over on his side.

"Like a cat with a ball of yarn," Park groans in agreement, picking himself up off the floor. Mendoza turns his flashlight on him, just for a second, before going back to sweeping it across the empty tunnel. Park's face is bleeding. "It could have wasted us a dozen times by now, easy."

"It's got to be the rock demon," Mendoza says. "Christ, it's fast."

"You'd think something that big would be slower. It got my flashlight."

"Mierda," says Mendoza.

The final time that it comes, it's in the pitch black.

It hit Mendoza last time. Park hadn't been kidding about the train thing. It felt like a building crashed into his chest. Mendoza thought they'd been caught in a cave-in for a half a wild second, frantically trying to draw air into lungs that felt crushed; half aware of yelling and gunshots.

He dropped their last flashlight in the chaos. He's pretty sure the thing stepped on it.

Mendoza has been listening to three sets of quick breathing for -- he doesn't know how long it's been now. It's hard to say, this deep underground, in the dark and the damp. He has a hand on Park's good shoulder, so that he knows he's still there, and Park says his foot is pressed up against Gerrish's leg. They stopped talking a little while ago. There's not a lot left to say; Mendoza is scared out of his fucking mind, and he knows Park and Gerrish are, too. For all the scary-ass shit he's seen in the last year, this -- waiting here, in the silence, in the dark, not knowing what's out there or when it's coming, every breath hurting his lungs and his ribs, is the scariest.

There's a soft noise, like a pebble bouncing across stone. Mendoza raises his gun barrel back up in a split second. From the swoosh of air next to him and the way that Park tenses hard, he can tell that he does the same.

They wait. Mendoza's heart hammers in his chest. He's a pretty hardened field agent by now, or so he likes to think, but he dimly wonders if Park would think less of him if he leaned over to his other side and puked right now, 'cause that might be a thing that's happening.

Stone grits against stone, ever so slowly, somewhere in the tunnel.

Mendoza squeezes Park's shoulder tight enough that it's got to hurt.

"Steady," Park says, low, and then -- BAM, the whole tunnel shakes; THUD WHIFF, Park is ripped away from him; Gerrish hollers and Mendoza fires, and is rewarded by another grinding noise, this one somehow feeling angrier. Something displaces air right in front of his face, and he blindly lashes out. It feels like punching a stone wall. He staggers back, swearing, and trips on something warm. From the sound of it, it's Gerrish.

Mendoza stands in front of Gerrish, Glock held in a sure two-handed grip, pointed directly at the direction he thinks he came from, elbows locked. He takes one, two, three burning breaths.

Light flares into being. He's staring at what he first thinks is a pile of rocks. Then it draws itself up with that familiar grinding sound, and the top rock slowly turns toward him, and he realizes: it's vaguely person-shaped and it has eyes.

"Move," says an echoing voice, and Mendoza finds himself grabbed by the suit jacket collar and yanked, hard, so that he staggers backward. Agent Sherman stalks past him, both hands now on fire. Her hair is damp and straggling around her dirty face. Her vest, shirt sleeves, and pants are streaked with -- hell, Mendoza doesn't even know what most of that is; some of it looks almost like dried blood or dirt, but most of it is weird colors and textures and all kinds of wrong-looking. Her vest is torn in a couple places and one of her boots is most of the way shredded. There's a cut above her eyebrow and another one on her lip. But mostly, she looks pissed.

As she gets all the way past him, her hands clench into fists at her sides and she lights all the way on fire with a dull whump.

"Back up," she says.

"Hey," Park says, grabbing Gerrish under the arms and lifting (his face goes gray immediately but he doesn't drop him; Mendoza takes two quick steps over and grabs Gerrish's other shoulder, leaving Park to be able to use only his good arm to hold him up); "Liz, watch the explosions. Cave-ins."

She says something that's pretty shockingly filthy, even by Bureau standards, and then lifts her hands, and everything goes so white-bright that Mendoza has to look away as they drag Gerrish back. Even at this distance, the sudden blast of heat is searing. The grinding of rock sounds like a howl.

Park and Mendoza haul Gerrish behind a big-ass rock and tuck in there. There's a BOOM, BOOM that might be huge steps, then the whole tunnel shudders, pebbles and rock dust raining down from the ceiling.

Mendoza asks, "Should we--?" and Park immediately shakes his head.

"Nope," he says. "She'll say if she needs us."

Fire whooshes, hotter this time, and even though he knows it's a bad idea, Mendoza peers up over the top of their makeshift shelter. He gets a quick look at a cyclone of red-orange-yellow flames before his eyes burn, spots flashing, and he ducks back down. THOOOOM. The tunnel shakes again, this time with a tremendous crash, and then there's silence.

Long silence.

There's a rattle, then footsteps crunching toward them. Park rises up, and Mendoza follows him.

Sherman is picking her way toward them, a pile of ash and charred rocks still smoldering behind her. One hand is raised and burning from elbow to fingertips; her face looks exhausted and pinched under a layer of fine gray rock dust. She stops a few feet away. The three of them look at each other in the flickering light.

"Where the hell have you been?" says Park.

There's a longer pause.

"One minute it was hitting me, the next I was in a lake," says Sherman, finally, shoving her hair back with one hand. "I can't -- don't ask me to explain it."

"Whatever," Gerrish says, from the ground; "let's go find some fucking sunlight already."

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walking_napalm @ 2012-03-04T05:11:00

2012-03-04T05:35:37Z

Liz was not thoroughly briefed on what this would entail, before she agreed to it.

After about a day's sleep, some food and coffee and aspirin, and one tremendously satisfying shower, she'd thought she was as ready to go back to fighting a rock demon under a Patagonian mountain as she was ever going to be; especially since she waited even longer after that for Raven to start sending their little crowd of refugees home.

She knows now: she was not ready.

She isn't entirely sure what she has been magically turned into, but whatever it is, it's small and is being carried within the crook of Raven's talons, and somehow, that's not the worst of it.

The worst is the cold.

Liz has never been good with cold. She gave more than a few doctors startled fits, as a kid, when they checked her temperature. She likes fire; she likes warmth. If she's going to have to be cold, she wants a parka, a hat, a pair of gloves, about fourteen layers of thick winter clothing, and maybe some of those chemical handwarmer things. Given that she's currently some tiny creature with what feel like wings and antennae, a scarf is not gonna happen.

This isn't normal cold. It's the cold that comes to her in dreams, in drowsy half-memories of her life draining away in a wintry Russian mausoleum. What she remembers after that, in those several long minutes that Red and Myers say she wasn't breathing during, is two things: unending darkness, and unending, unnatural, crushing cold. That's what this feels like.

Her fire doesn't like the cold; not like this.

Stop! She has no idea how she's saying it, given her current lack of anything resembling human mouthparts, but she pushes it with all of her flagging strength. Then they're out of the stifling blackness and Raven's wings are beating above; her eyesight is coruscating and blurry and all wrong, but she recognizes a flash of dark cave walls. Enough; seriously, just put me down!

"As you will have it, yes?" says Raven's voice from overhead, and then she's falling -- falling (Raven is laughing, and then the sound is abruptly gone) --- falling ----

When Liz hits the water, it's with all of the correct limbs. She knows because she feels the icy shock in every one of them.

It actually takes her a half a second to realize that she has hit water. It becomes clear once she's several feet under; when she hasn't struck anything solid yet and gravity isn't behaving the way it ought to. Lungs burning, she snaps her eyes open to solid blackness. She lights up her right hand, and -- with a few kicks -- uses spectral unearthly flames to follow the trail of bubbles up.

When her mouth breaks the surface, she takes a huge, shuddering breath in, using one arm and kicking hard (stupid boots) to stay just barely afloat. She holds her other hand above the water. Light bounces back off slick cavern walls; the cave is deep enough that she can't see its ceiling. The black water stretches as far as her fire's light can reach in every direction except for one -- it's lapping against a rocky shore some 50 feet away.

Liz treads water in the middle of an ice-cold subterranean lake somewhere under the Andes.

Hopefully somewhere under the Andes.

Hopefully in the right dimension.

"God damn it," she hisses, and then she starts swimming.

By the time she hauls herself out of the frigid water (the coldest she has ever been in, every stroke sapping her strength, and that includes an ill-advised dunk in the Atlantic Ocean in February), she is perfectly happy to lie there on the cavern floor, just for a minute, as soon as she has dragged her feet out. Her brain feels sluggish. She sighs, shivering convulsively, and mutters, "Okay," to herself, and -- with her cheek still pressed against a sharp rock -- she concentrates.

Her skin lights with fire first, and then it blooms up and out of her; a quick burst that scalds the rock she's lying on and dries her disgusting clothes, warming her to her toes. She reaches down to her belt and fumbles the switch on her locator beacon; it immediately glows red, the way it's supposed to. The Bureau builds its equipment to withstand seriously tough conditions. The locator survived the apocalypse, being lit on fire multiple times, being turned into a grasshopper or possibly a cricket, a long fall, and three minutes in freezing cold water. She'll have to congratulate the guys in R&D the next time she sees them.

Unfortunately, she discovers when she finally drags herself to her feet (Christ, she feels like one giant walking bruise), her gun didn't fare nearly as well. Click, it goes, when she points it back at the water and pulls the trigger. Click, click. The water must have done it in.

Liz huffs a sharp breath, holsters the useless gun, and lifts her flaming hand. She's got a team to find.

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