Lucivaldo didn't mean to join a cult. He was a biologist in Brazil before the war. He found himself displaced and made his way to America. He tried to find a job, but there weren't many people hiring Brazilians at the time, even educated ones, after America lost the South. That's why when the cult sought him out and offered him pay in exchange for his expertise, he was all too happy to agree. He didn't believe in their mythology. He realized, though, their experiments were producing results he had been incapable of achieving back home with the limited resources and limited moral flexibility of the university where he was a professor.

  He had a curly mop of black hair. The cult, for whatever reason, required all members to wear the same robe. The sinister cloth garment was hooded and black, tied at the waist with a red rope. Lucivaldo lamented not being able to find a nice academic job.

  He was working on dissecting a cat. Its long white hair lay on skin split at the chest down to the belly. He was extracting organs. They fell into a jar of formaldehyde with a neat plop. The cat's collar read "Mr. Snowball". He tried to ignore how this was someone's pet. He reasoned they didn't deserve the cat given how it was captured outside. With the results they had been achieving, the cat wouldn't remain dead for long, at least not all the way.

  He was the sole occupant of the alchemy lab. It had been set up in a former maintenance room of the sewers under the city where the cultists had made a temporary headquarters for their current project. They needed lots of space, and lots of secrecy. The sewers offered an almost perfect, if smelly, environment. In fact, the smell helped them conceal part of the work as it involved so many dead animals.

  The alchemy lab was modest in comparison to the bright, sprawling labs of his former university. But here, at least, he could work in private and quiet and without being disturbed.

  So he was surprised when a hand grabbed the back of his head and smashed it into the desk. The tools in his hands clattered to the ground.

  He

  held his hand to his head and tried to stand up, but was forced back

  down. He was not a strong man, but he was still tall, and he shot an

  elbow out behind him to try and strike his attacker. He was almost as surprised as his attacker when it connected. He heard a stifled grunt, and he whirled around, grabbing the tray that the cat was on, swinging it toward where he imagined his attacker standing. It smashed into a hand before stopping. A woman stood holding the tray, exhibiting strength he would not have expected from her size. She grabbed his throat, knocked the tray out of his hand, and pulled him down to headbutt him. His nose broke against the top of her head.

  Her forehead was now covered in his blood. Before he passed out, he noticed one of her eyes whirled with glowing runes and spun as she looked at him.

  Sam

  had undone the cover on her eye and stitching on her eyelid before

  creeping into the room where a man with curly, dark hair and smoky skin

  sat hunched over what looked to be the remains of a dissected cat. She

  crept up behind him and smashed

  his face into the workbench, hoping to knock him out before much of a

  fight. He flung his elbow out and caught her in the stomach. She must

  have been rusty for such an attack to work on her. She'd have to start

  training again if she was going to keep making forays into the sewers. Then again, if she had been drunk, she would have ignored the hit, so she resolved to drink more.

  The man spun around, now hopeful he was going to win. He picked up a tray and smashed it down on her. She caught it with her hand. Pain blossomed from her fingers but she caught the blow. She knocked the tray out of his hand with her now broken hand, caught him by the throat with her good hand, and smashed his face with her forehead. His eyes rolled back into his head. Blood gushed from his nose and he almost

  fell onto the floor, but she stopped him. She sat him on the bench,

  sagging backwards, his elbows propped on the work table behind.

  While she had a few minutes, she examined the room.

  Back in the sewers, she had come across a zombie rat. The undead

  were not unheard of, but they were rare as the price for making them

  was high. They were sometimes the result of a mad sorcerer offering life

  for life, not understanding the contract, and getting only an animated body with no soul.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Or a depressed lover, mourning their loss, and advanced enough in sorcery and magical spell contracts, would attempt to raise the dead. Most often, they ended up getting back something monstrous.

  To do so with an animal, however, was worthless, as far as she understood, because of the equivalent exchange involved. Why would anyone bother raising zombie souls into dogs and cats and rats when such things provided almost no utility after the fact? They would still be a rat or a dog.

  As she pondered the mystery of the undead

  rat, she crushed its skull and left it in a quivering pile. After a

  while, with the vessel broken, the magic animating it would dissipate.

  Sam made her way further into the sewers. It became darker, until she almost couldn't see. She came upon an open doorway with some light spilling through, and she crept up to it.

  Inside the laboratory were a few tables, bottles, various acrid-smelling equipment or potions, burners, and what looked to be organs and various other body parts of animals preserved in fluid. It had a curved brick ceiling. It was a maintenance room repurposed into a twisted alchemy laboratory.

  Not seeing any effective answers coming from the room itself, she took a look at the cat on the table for a moment. She realized she'd found Mr. Snowball. She'd have to send condolences to her neighbor. She reached and snapped the collar off, pocketing it.

  Her

  anger now kindled, she slapped the man awake, not bothering to restrain

  him. He was such an untrained fighter he wouldn't present a challenge

  to her once intimidated. After a round of vigorous slapping, the man's

  eyes rolled into focus. He cowered back from her, terrified. Not quite enough, she decided. She picked up his scalpel and jammed the point into his ribs. He cowered back, clutching his side where she had poked.

  "Tell me what the hell you are doing here," she said.

  He shook his head.

  "Tell me, or I am going to start dissecting." She brandished the scalpel under his nose. "You want to see how Mr. Snowball felt?"

  He tried to push her away so she slashed his hand. A good, deep gash opened up. He yelped and brought his hand back.

  "Please, please, please," he said. "They tell me I cannot speak it. They tell me if I speak it, I die."

  Sam realized he was under a compulsion contract. She was familiar with this type of magic which prevented one from divulging secrets. However, it seemed like whoever had designed the spell had missed an important point.

  "Means you can write it down," she said.

  He nodded his head, eyes wide.

  "Grab a pen and get to writing," she ordered.

  Magic required careful wording and a price to be paid. These were the only requirements, and sufficient knowledge to draw the circles or intone the words to enact the contract. The contracts were literal and would follow the exact letter of their agreement and no more. So she knew if whoever designed their binding specified they could not speak of what they did, they could write it down.

  She picked up the paper he had scrawled on. It was written in Portuguese. She held the scalpel to his throat this time.

  "Are you fucking stupid? English. Now."

  The man flipped over the paper and started scribbling notes again.

  "Experiments in resurrecting the dead. We are trying to gather enough souls and knowledge for the Elixir of Life."

  "Elixir of Life? What is that?" Sam asked.

  "For the cult master Gul Zerah," he wrote. Sam noted he didn't write cult leader, and he didn't answer her question.

  She asked where to find the rest of the cult. He scribbled: "In the sewer junctions."

  Sam had heard enough cult

  bullshit to know she wasn't going to get anything more coherent out of

  this guy if he had to write it down with a shaky hand under threat. She

  couldn't be sure anything else he gave her was going to be truthful or

  not. Her eye didn't work on writing.

  She picked up a nearby spare bit of pipe and smashed

  him in the head. He put his hands up to protect himself but she smacked

  them out of the way with the pipe. She didn't stop until he was

  unconscious or dead. She didn't bother to check. She didn't care.

  Anybody sitting in the sewer wearing a black hooded robe dissecting Mr. Snowball didn't deserve medical consideration as far as Sam was concerned.

  She picked up a bit of gauze from the desk to use as a bandage. She set the bone in her hand, wincing at the pain now no one was watching.

  Sam searched the cultist's body for anything useful. He had an electric torch

  hung from a leather strap around his neck. These were new inventions,

  but had found such use in war they made their way back home with many

  soldiers. Sam was familiar with their use. She would only have a couple of hours of light provided by the torch, but it would be better than nothing.

  She

  left the room and made her way further into the tunnels, looking for

  the nearest junction room. She hoped she'd be able to find them without

  being caught.

  She had only made it a few minutes when she heard the growling. She shined her light further up the tunnel and saw standing there a rotted dog. It snarled at the light and glared with milky-white eyes Underneath the dog were rotted rats, and beside the dog was a rotted cat - all animated corpses. As she shined the light further back, it fell on more and more dead eyes.

  As one, the beasts snarled and lunged toward her.