Valeria entered the place, and sat down on a pillow she had brought with her. The ‘test o courage’ supposedly took place in the late evening, but before the absolute time before which David was supposed to return home.

  In other words, she would have to wait for about half an hour.

  Luckily, with age comes patience. Half an hour didn’t even count as waiting.

  Valeria approached the wall, and took out her bar of silver. It wasn’t the lightest thing in her possession, but there was no way she would use her wedding ring for what she was about to do.

  She looked at the drawing little Maria left her, and reproduced it on the stone, grinding silver away.

  Line here, curve there… Halfway through, Valeria knocked at the wall.

  The sound was different than the last time.

  Curve there, and fill this up, and…

  The symbol lit up, and the wall opened.

  “I did not expect that to actually work. Not even ‘Open sesame?’”

  Honestly, this was something she did because of a hunch, but… Seriously?

  The newly created doors did not react to this question, and instead stood open invitingly.

  ‘Very well. I suppose there is only one way for me to go if I want to find a missing child. Business like usual, don’t mind me.’

  She stepped through the gate, which closed behind her. Before her, two human sillhuettes were barely standing, and once they turned her way, started to creep closer to her, muttering something unintelligible, like crackheads usually do.

  Her nostrils were assaulted by a stench of rot.

  “My, it’s been a while since I’ve seen young people in such a horrible state. To think someone can walk around with gangrene in the twenty first century… unbelievable.”

  But it wasn’t a problem. They were both swiftly struck behind their ears. Both started falling towards the ground… And both recovered their footing.

  Unusual again.

  “I wonder what you are using… You are quite tough.”

  The left one swiped at her violently, but didn’t hit. The rightmost crackhead opened its mouth, and attempted to take a bite out of Valeria with its rotten teeth.

  “Enough. I’m too old to play around, and I have places to be.”

  Valeria shrugged. It wouldn’t be difficult to claim self defense against a pair of junkies so high off some drug, they didn’t even notice they were rotting.

  Both of them fell to the ground, their skulls lightly cracked, not unlike the way you would crack an egg.

  After all, junkies carried all sorts of diseases. Avoiding spilling their bodily fluids is absolute basics.

  Getting their blood on you is a great way to get eleven different ailments, six of which would be a pain in the ass to cure, three would be incurable, one wouldn’t be detected until a decade later, and one might even be named after the surname of your doctor.

  Luckily, Valeria went through so many crackheads, cracking their heads felt completely safe and natural, like a baby shampoo.

  She continued searching through the corridor, until she saw something shiny on the ground. She kneeled down with a painful grunt, and picked up the thing.

  It was a silver coin, its edge scratched.

  ‘Bet that’s David’s.’

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  She deposited it in a plastic bag. There wouldn’t be any of her own fingerprints on it, since she was wearing gloves.

  Valeria turned around, and saw that the entrance closed behind her.

  ‘ I wonder If I can go back.’

  Valeria approached the closed wall, and drawn the symbol on it.

  Nothing.

  ‘Let’s try something else.’

  She drawn the symbol again, but this time, in a mirror image.

  The wall lit up, and the door was opened once again. It closed after a minute or so.

  ‘I see. So he probably tried to return, but when he failed the first time, the junkies scared him off, and that made him drop his coin.’

  Valeria finished examining the room and moved on through the corridor, and up some stairs. In a room, very similar to the one in the abandoned house, four more crackheads were walking in circles.

  ‘Wow, shit!’

  One of them didn’t have an arm, and the other was missing his lower jaw. None of them had regular noses or ears. Once they spotted Valeria, they mindlessly attacked, like crackheads often do.

  Once they were on the ground, Valeria sniffed the air, and noticed something strange. The only stench present was rot. No scent of feces, none of piss. And, yes, something like this is quite strange.

  Any junkie so far gone, that they won’t even notice their body parts missing, will not be so civilized to walk all the way to a toilet in order to satisfy their bodily needs.

  Quite the opposite.

  There are four stages of being a junkie.

  First. The ‘normal’ stage. The crack/meth/somethinghead is still able to somewhat function in society. They try to convince others and themselves that they aren’t addicts, and satisfy the need for drugs by paying for them with money stolen from their parents. Sometimes still attend school. They rarely have jobs, but if they do, it’s something not entirely legal.

  Their catchphrase is ‘I can stop whenever I want’

  Second. The ‘Street’ stage. The parents noticed nothing gets through the shrouded skull of their offspring. They hide their money well. Once the junkie tries to threaten them into giving it money, the parents throw it out of the house, to not let it influence the rest of their offsprings. It’s most likely too late, they are already influenced. The junkie then tries begging, mugging and stealing. They start smelling more and more dirty, and it’s family pretends to not know it. Depending on their gender and other factors, this is the stage where junkie will try prostitution. (If it didn’t try it earlier, of course.)

  Their catchphrase is ‘Spare a coin?’

  Third. The ‘gutter’ stage. They can no longer ask for anything, and their motor functions are no longer fine enough to shop lift. No one will pay for sex with them. Therefore, they can only try mugging, but their speech gets a bit incoherent, therefore an unfortunate victim doesn’t know what’s going on, and is simply attacked. ‘Gutter’ is a stage with the most cases of the junkie getting shot in self defense. They smell of human waste, and will most likely never recover, inevitably falling into the fourth stage. Some theorize that a rapid increase in aggressiveness is caused by their subconscious desire to end their lives with some semblance of dignity left, through a ‘Suicide by cop’.

  Their catchphrase doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be anything a normal person could ever understand.

  Fourth, and final stage, ‘Garbage truck’. The junkie is dying. It no longer feels the need for sustenance, nor sexual desire. The smell of human waste is transformed into something even more putrid, until it becomes a stench of a rotten corpse in a sewer. A junkie might still move for some time, but it’s effectively dead.

  Their catchphrase is their final breath.

  Of course, this is just an approximate, it varies depending on a person and the drugs they take.

  As we can all see, the figures shown Valeria’s mercy looked like the fourth stage, moved like the third, and smelled like a dead body.

  ‘Weird. Maybe there are some humanitarian activists cleaning them around here?’

  ‘Ah, who am I kidding. I entered this place by drawing a mysterious mark on a wall in a ‘haunted house’ with a bar of silver.

  Those might even be zombies or something. At least they go down without a fuss.’

  She had read about some tribes using strange drugs to control effectively dead people, and even personally encountered a cult that tried out the idea. If that’s what was going on, she would have to hurry, and be careful.

  She entered another corridor. The layout of this particular building was different than the one on the other side, so she marked the walls on every turn. The goal was to secure the perimeter of the entire building. She would have to come back here eventually, hopefully with a child in tow.

  Eventually, she felt a breeze. Valeria followed the smell of fresh air, and approached the exit. But instead of using it, she headed upstairs. More crackheads, more bodies. None of them responded to her words, all of them to her strikes.

  ‘O, right. Gotta clean up.’

  She went through the place once again, and gathered all the bodies on the first floor. After all, what if they attracted local stray dogs? Fighting rabid animals was, once again, not something Valeria wanted to do while protecting a kid.

  She approached the exit, looked outside, and barely dodged an arrow.

  She took cover behind the wall, and put her hand near her guns’ holster.

  ‘Wait, no. If people here use arrows, it’s may be for a reason.’

  Valeria grabbed her bar of silver. It was smooth on one side, and so it nicely reflected light, just like a mirror.

  She placed it in a way that allowed her to watch the street, and began observing it.

  The vegetation was almost nonexistent, aside from some fungi of weird shapes and sizes. The buildings definitely didn’t look modern.

  Between the gothic architecture, and a canal with somewhat filthy looking water nearby, this place looked like post apocalyptic Venice.

  ‘Enough admiring the architecture, let’s see who tried to shoot me.’

  Valeria decided, and reached for a corpse.