March 13th, 1990
Rain hung over the town like a nicotine stain on the ceiling of God’s waiting room.
The hunters regrouped at the hospital, circling the bed of Cooter, who had recently survived an encounter with Sarah, the redheaded carrier of the Spiral Rash. The infection had already left its fingerprints across his flesh: geometric lesions crawling under the skin like frost patterns learning mathematics. Most people would have stayed in the hospital.
Cooter demanded his pants and a cigarette.
The hunt resumed immediately.
The Saint Bibiana’s Operation
The team, consisting of:
- Chad, an IT specialist with the thousand-yard stare of a man who has Googled things no human being should Google,
- Clara, reincarnation of Joan of Arc and wielder of a flaming sword,
- Knuckles, a former criminal whose reputation arrived in rooms several minutes before he did,
- and the barely ambulatory force of nature known as Cooter,
devised a plan to establish a makeshift treatment clinic in the Sunday school basement of Saint Bibianus Church.
Their logic was questionable but strangely sound:
- The Spiral Rash seemed vulnerable to ultraviolet light.
- Tanning beds produce ultraviolet light.
- America contains many tanning beds.
Thus began the least medically accredited healthcare initiative in county history.
Through Knuckles’ criminal network, the hunters located a deeply suspicious tanning bed and hot tub salesman who agreed to trade several used tanning beds in exchange for “a small favor,” a phrase universally recognized as the opening line of future police reports.
The favor involved dealing with his wife’s lover: a man named Jack, known locally as “Python.”
The hunters responded with all the grace of a tornado in a trailer park.
Python’s home was ransacked. Property damage occurred on a spiritually meaningful level. At some point, his dog was encouraged to urinate on the floor, an act which somehow felt central to the operation despite offering no tactical value whatsoever.
No arrests were made.
The Voss Connection
Following the Python incident, the hunters tracked down the children of Elias Voss, whose name had surfaced repeatedly during the investigation into the Spiral Rash phenomenon.
The Voss family records they recovered hinted at increasingly disturbing truths:
- references to “threshold geometries,”
- sketches of spiraling anatomical structures,
- and repeated warnings against “opening the breach completely.”
The records were delivered to Jimmy in a bulging, duct-taped cardboard box for analysis.
The Girls at the Church
Back at Saint Bibiana’s, the hunters prepared the basement clinic and waited for infected townsfolk to arrive.
None did.
Instead, they noticed two teenage girls stealing holy water from the church upstairs.
A confrontation followed.
One of the girls kicked Chad directly in the groin with astonishing precision and velocity. The pair then escaped into the night laughing while Chad experienced what witnesses later described as “a full Windows shutdown noise.”
At the time, the hunters assumed the encounter was incidental.
It was not.
The Warehouse
Using the contained infection in Cooter’s arm as a kind of biological compass, the team tracked Sarah to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town.
Outside, they found the two girls from the church, who later identified themselves only as Tiffany and Darkness, which the hunters accepted with almost no follow-up questions despite both names sounding like rejected goth band aliases.
Inside, they discovered something that permanently altered the trajectory of the investigation.
Sarah had transformed the warehouse into a grotesque shrine.
Victims of the Spiral Rash had been fused together into a massive wall of flesh and spiraling lesions. Skin overlapped skin in impossible geometries. Faces emerged from the borders of the mass like drowning people trapped beneath ice.
Tiffany and Darkness later referred to it as:
The Skin Psalm
Near the fleshy construct yawned a massive fissure in the concrete floor. The hunters quickly realized it was not geological.
The crack descended into somewhere else and something tentacled partially emerged from within.
Light bent strangely around it. Sounds echoed before they were made. The air smelled simultaneously electrical and rotten, like overheated hospital machinery submerged underwater.
The breach appeared extraplanar in origin, likely connected to Elias Voss’ experiments.
And standing before it all was Sarah.
Final Confrontation
The battle that followed resembled a religious vision experienced during a gas station explosion.
Tiffany and Darkness unexpectedly reappeared during the fight. Tiffany summoned a tiny two-headed dog that contributed almost nothing strategically but barked in stereo. Darkness demonstrated genuine supernatural ability by causing blood to erupt violently from Sarah’s throat.
Meanwhile, the hunters executed perhaps the most deranged tactical maneuver in recent memory.
Using a U-Haul packed with active tanning beds, they flooded the warehouse with ultraviolet light.
Knuckles physically maintained the overloaded electrical connection even as the current burned through him. Witnesses described arcs of blue-white electricity crawling across his body while the tanning beds hummed like industrial beehives.
The ultraviolet light immobilized Sarah long enough for Clara to engage her directly with her flaming sword, carving burning wounds across the monster’s flesh.
Finally, Chad stepped forward and ended the fight with a shotgun blast that removed Sarah’s head in spectacular fashion.
Tiffany turned the tentacled monster into what could most accurately be described as ‘Cthulu cracklins.’
The warehouse fell silent except for the electrical buzz of dying tanning bulbs.
The Skin Psalm continued pulsing.
The Change in Cooter
The victory did not come cleanly.
As the hunters surveyed the aftermath, Cooter’s infected forearm became adhered to the wall of flesh itself. Witnesses reported the lesions across his arm briefly synchronizing with the pulsations of the Skin Psalm.
By the time the others pulled him free, the infection had changed.
No one yet understands how.
But Tiffany and Darkness seemed deeply interested.
And somewhere beneath the warehouse floor, beyond the fissure in reality, something vast appeared to shift in its sleep.