Lacey can no longer count on her fingers how many times she's yelled at Gideon to stop or slow down through the parking lot, but for all her vocal strain, he keeps on keeping on, and with quite the lead, too. So much of a lead, in fact, that he's able to pop into the lonely corner store down the road and be at the check-out counter by the time she can stomp the automatic doors open. She stands in the way, panting, as he shovels out change and hooks his fingers around the plastic bags.

I'm gonna grab him by the collar and throw him into the sun.

When he sees her, he grins - is that genuine or smug? - and digs around the bags. As he passes her greedy little fingers, ready to snatch at his throat, he slaps a flashlight into her open palm. She makes a face. "You'd better say you only got this so I can hit you upside the head with it, you masochistic bastard."

He merely shakes his head and wanders over to a bench, where he unceremoniously dumps the contents of the bag out. There, she counts two water bottles, two pairs of gloves, two surgical masks, a second flashlight, and a small first aid kit. He takes his half of each of these items. Impressively, most of them fit in his pockets, which leaves Lacey confused as to where she'll put everything he's trying to hand to her now. She shakes her head - she won't need to put them anywhere because she's not taking them.

She crosses her arms over her chest. "No."

He cocks a single brow, stuffs the gloves into the crook of her elbow, then collects the rest back up in the plastic bag and carries on with the same determinedly ignorant march. A puff of air leaves Lacey's mouth and her spine hunches over. Alright. Guess we're playing follow the leader, then. God forbid I leave him alone. Who knows what he'll do.

He walks along the side of the road for a short while, and part of her is simply curious to find out where he's going, which location on the map he's selected for the both of them without consulting her until now. The other part of her sighs, wants to go back home, wants to crawl back into bed. Surely the flooding down in lower Carrick is excuse enough, and yet, with Gideon's house half submerged, he doesn't miss a beat. It strikes her now, suddenly, that maybe he's got some crazy floating around up in that head of his. Certainly his priorities are a bit loose.

The mess of brown atop his head ruffles in the breeze as he pauses and glances down at his phone, squinting at the screen and then to the left, towards the sparse woods sitting beside the road. They run thin here, but they stretch on for what must be miles - she can't see an end to them. She guesses what he's about to do before he does it, but still lets her hands splay out in exasperated surprise when he slings his leg over the silver rail dividing nature from asphalt and starts his trek into the woods.

Lacey steps up to the rail but doesn't cross it; instead, she lets her knees touch the cool metal. Leftover rain slicking the surface soaks through her jeans. He's gonna get himself killed out there but if I follow I might be putting myself in the same boat.

He must realize at some point that the crunch of leaves doesn't follow him, and he turns back, brow raised. "You already followed me out this far and I bought supplies for two," he calls, a lack of humor in his voice, a lack of curves to his mouth. It's unsettling. "And with the demons out and about, you really wanna walk home alone?"

A challenge. He's got a point. She narrows her eyes and he finally grins, small but present. He turns back to his unbeaten path and starts walking. She would've cursed out his confidence - no, ego - in thinking himself to be a persuasive genius, if she weren't already struggling to sling her legs over and catch up.

Once she does, he glances up from his phone again. Must be using it to find the x that marks the spot. "You have salt?" he asks.

The weight makes itself known in her pocket. "Yeah, I brought the salt. The kind that works. I'm not using it for just anything, though. We have a limited supply and need to, like, ration it. So no challenging the occult or anything. Not until we have a nice, steady stream of salt coming in." She knits her brows, rethinks the words she can't take back. "I mean never. Never challenge the occult."

They walk only a few minutes more, though it feels much longer traversing a landscape that looks no different five minutes forward than it does ten minutes in or probably an hour. The trees are still naked, but there must be some weak life in them yet, what with the little green buds hanging from the tips of branches, waiting to burst open, moist blooms. Water trickles down the bark, drips from the young life, lands on Lacey's brows and in her eyes. She blinks it away and makes strangled noises as it continues to happen, and at some point she forces herself to walk with her head down. By extension, then, she only knows they've made it to the first place on the map when Gideon wraps a gentle set of fingers on her shoulder, more to rest them there than anything, and says, "This is it."

The whole building stinks. That's what she registers before she even gets a good look at the place. Like mold and age and dead things. The outside panelling is shorn of paint, the exposed wood left to rot. A portion of the roof is caved in and shingles lay half-decomposed in the dirt. Two full stories of desolate filth, left to Mother Earth to wrap her teeth around and suck on, eroding it away bit by bit. She imagines the family that used to live there must've been swallowed whole by the great lady years ago, appetizers for the main course here. If Darcy weren't playing games, she would be able to verify if that theory were true.

A snap of plastic sounds as Gideon works the gloves onto his fingers. They're tight against his knuckles, and he wraps them around the flashlight, squeezing in a way that leaves Lacey concerned for whatever poor rotting board he might very well crack the bulb against if things don't turn out. She parts her lips to ask how long he thinks this is gonna take, but by the time the words start up her throat, he dives right in. Without checking around for anything or absorbing the scene, he marches towards the front door and pounds his way up the porch steps, the only part of the house that seems stable enough to walk on.

"Slow down," Lacey calls, taking a few cautious steps forward. "You need to watch where you're going first."

"Do you see a basement, cellar doors, anything?" He steps through the doorway, the front door flung off its hinges, and a darkness shrouds him.

"Get back out-"

"I think this one might just be the ground floor and then the second. Erie probably isn't in this one, but we should still look to see if there's any evidence that anyone was held here or that Isaac was-"

A vicious crack splits free of the doorway and Gideon cries out, followed by a heavy thud. A painful rush strikes Lacey in the chest and she sprints forward, breath gone shallow. Just as she makes it to the steps, Gideon comes stumbling backwards, the back of his pants covered in a thick layer of dust. He whirls for a moment, trying to reorient himself, and then he focuses on Lacey. "The floor broke," he says, "I almost fell right through."

And then the fear ebbs away - or maybe it culminates - and a deep heat takes its place, radiating out and making the world waver with burnt air. She clenches her fists, one set of nails digging roughly into the pair of gloves he'd given her. Then, with a frustrated growl, she throws them at his chest. They flop to his splinter-coated shoes. He furrows his brows, gives her an odd look. That look is the breaking point.

Lacey throws her hands in the air. "I'm getting real fuckin' tired of this, Gideon! You keep doing things on impulse and not listening to me! First it was searching the riverbank, which was Malevolent-infested, for your information. Then it was breaking into Isaac's house and running around like a madman on meth, which, at this point, I wouldn't doubt you're taking. Now we're here and we didn't even really get to agree on any of this and on top of that, when I tell you to chill the fuck out, you keep going like you can't hear a word I say. And not to mention your emotional tirades whenever something turns out wrong or empty? You need to get all that in check and, and- and you told Sonia about Isaac? Really? What's the next piss poor decision you make gonna be, inviting demons to tea and giving them your social security number?"

A crease in his forehead frowns, but he still scrambles for a defense. "Well, would you've preferred I tell her about the ghosts? Because don't think that hasn't been warping my whole mind for the past few days, either, thank you very much!"

"Nothing! You tell her nothing, Gideon!" A sharp inhale burns her nostrils with the stench wafting through the door. She stumbles back and blocks her nose with her sleeve. "You know that telling anyone puts the risk of Isaac finding out there's someone onto him out there. Not to mention, he had an accomplice who we don't even know-"

"Wait. He had an accomplice? What do you mean?"

"I- It's complicated. I touched a thing and had a vision, it was...not pleasant. Basically, there were two individuals keeping Stella in a basement. So Isaac must've had an accomplice. They were burning clothes."

"Oh..."

"Yeah, so if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, it means the risk for Erie goes up about twenty times. So be smart, listen to me, and stop to fucking think before doing."

"I-" He stops himself short, bites down hard on his tongue. She sees the wince of pain on his face when he does so. He hides it fast, though, ducking his head, giving a curt nod. "Fine. You're right. I'll..."

"You'll promise to listen to me and be more careful. That's what you'll do."

"Yeah. That's what I'll do." A pause. "Oh, God," he says, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing his gloved palm to his forehead. "It keeps getting worse. Worse and worse and worse. We need to keep going, Lacey, let me keep going."

Although she doesn't want to give him the go-ahead, she does. In all honesty, he does most of the work here - she tells him when to slow down, when to stop and listen for the creaking and scratching and moaning, and when to keep going. She plays supervisor and follows close behind, him taking the lead and lifting up objects inside the house and dropping them back down in flurries of dust. It's not the worst job, not the most taxing, but she still doesn't like the crawly feeling that being inside this desolate house gives her. They check the upstairs, downstairs, but the only fruit garnered is shriveled and brown and was probably dragged in by a cluster of rats a few weeks ago.

They step over it, down the porch steps, and relish in the fresh air of the dead woods. She takes a deep, refreshing breath of it, and then turns to Gideon, already squinting down at his phone screen again. "Where to?"

"Just up this way. It's closer to the river but it shouldn't be flooded since it's still part of the higher elevation of the, y'know, nicer part of town." He sighs, and she glimpses a long blue arrow pop up on the screen, expanding to show the whole path. It takes them back to the road, but Gideon ignores it, continuing to cut straight through the woods. "Someday I'm gonna get my degree, get a nice job, and all I'm gonna do with it is move my mom up the hill. That's it. So we don't have to deal with this crap again."

She doesn't know what to say so she says nothing; again, Gideon is in one of his moods, so he shares the silence with her. It's not as comforting as she usually fantasizes it to be.

Eventually, they come upon another building, a one-story this time, more like a shack than anything. Upon further inspection, they find that it truly is - the main room used to be a shed for tacks and saddles, and deeper in, stables, some of the support beams having fallen over or rotted. Most of the gates hang off their hinges, if they aren't missing entirely, and the back wall opens up to what must've been a riding area. She peers through the open threshold - that door is gone, too - to find a circle of overgrowth, the only sign of habitation out here being the bare bones of a fence stretching out far and wide until the trees close up around them again. There's something she thinks must be where the path towards this place used to be, but that's overgrown with shrubbery and weeds, too.

Naturally, it doesn't take long to dismiss this place as anything more than useless. "Next?"

"You're not gonna like it, but it's on the clear other side of town. You know where that playground was? It's a little way up the hill from that, closer to the trailer park we went to. Shouldn't be submerged, either."

"You expect me to walk that far? Are you kidding me?"

"No, I mean, just listen. I really think this one has a good chance of being the right one. We stopped at these two 'cause they were on the way and, well, I pegged them as good places to check too, but this one, this is the one I really wanted to look at. Just this last one, and then we'll call it a day. Okay?"

"No more games. No more surprises. 'This last one' means 'this last one.' Or I'm never picking up your calls again."

"Fair enough. I promise."

And so they finally return to the road, the one leading towards the bridge, now flush with water that doesn't quite make it up the way they're headed. Curiosity sends her gaze back, but she can't see much, just water sloshing over the asphalt and expanding onwards until she can't see beyond the curving treeline. It's probably much worse than she can tell.

They follow the long road across Carrick, bypassing downtown before they break away and start into the woods again, Gideon glued to his screen. The air is wet and smells of earth. After so much time out here, she probably does, too. Her shoes suck into the mud, and for a moment, she fears that nature will drag her down and gorge itself on her. More likely: the most malevolent of beings, delivered from Hell down under. She picks up the pace, chest fluttering with fear pains.

But just as she's beginning to tire from trying to keep stride with Gideon, she hears a quiet sloshing, too near for comfort. The trees are still in abundance here but further apart, and when she glimpses to the left, she's able to see with full clarity the damage done. To the woods below, at least.

She scrunches her nose and takes a few wary steps closer to the hill, a sharp hill that dives down much like the rest of Carrick. There's quite a distance between her toes and the water, and yet, she doesn't feel safe staring out across the monstrous size of the flood, stretching on for miles. It's so big and quiet out there that it makes her think maybe it could rise up and take her with it before shrinking to its original size without anyone ever blinking an eye or hearing a word. With Gideon as dazed off as he is half the time, she fully believes it's possible.

He surprises her by coming up beside her. They both stare out across the waters, muddied from debris and picking apart the ground, becoming one with it. There are two or three patches of land high enough to not be submerged, and instead they live as islands atop the water, the tops of dead trees brushing their grassy shores or standing lopsided against one another. Other than that? Everything's awash.

When she glances back at Gideon, she finds his face solemn. He notices her staring and tries to bend his frown upwards, but it doesn't reach his eyes, blue and bright and trying. He nudges her on with a cheery sigh. "It'll start gushing back out to the lake soon enough. Let's keep moving."

With reluctance, they do, and after forty minutes of walking, they finally come upon their third - and final, Gideon be damned if otherwise - location of the day. It's much like the first location, just an abandoned two-story home, but this one looks much older, much less secure in its once-sturdy foundations. Even under the light breeze, it creaks and moans something fierce. Naturally, Lacey's lip curls down and she starts shaking her head. "You couldn't pay me to go in there."

"You sure? I have a twenty on me right now but there's more back-"

"Shut up. Check the perimeter of this place first. We won't be able to hear anyone outside once we're in with the house settling like that."

He nods and follows her demands, coming back a few minutes later with both thumbs up. "I saw mold growing on the back wall," he says, "so we'll definitely need those masks I bought. Here."

He starts for the front door and she follows, fitting the straps of the paper mask over her ears. It's an uncomfortable fit, but she doesn't fuck with lung disease. Mold isn't the only danger to them here, either. Before she's even inside, she can see the sparse rays of light working their way out of the clouds and into the broken panelling and windows of the house, streams of grey sun illuminating an atmosphere completely packed with dust.

She swallows a harsh lump. "Where are our exits?"

"Front door. Window there," Gideon gestures and shrugs. "I saw a back door." He's patient in answering her questions, but still she sees the rapid bobbing of his knee and drumming of his palms against his thighs.

She flicks her wrist towards the entrance. "We check to see if Erie's here, and if he's not, we're done. No funny business." A pause. "After you."

Gideon wastes no time, and although Lacey cringes at the webs slung in the corners of the porch, she follows. Darkness grapples at them, and they grapple for their flashlights. The first place Lacey's light lands is an old table boasting ten cockroaches, all of whom scuttle away from the searing bulb. She makes a noise of disgust. A few steps later, she cries out, for a rapid thumping runs out in front of her and into another room, a few rabbits hopping for refuge.

She turns her light to other places, more to watch out for any beetles or creatures that might drop on her from the ceiling, and while she does find those, she spots something else. She shines her ray at a spot of warped, sagging ceiling. "Floor upstairs is bad, then. I don't think they'd keep him somewhere that's bound to collapse. Don't go up there."

She can't see the sort of face he makes. As if her voice cued it, a scurrying sound rushes across the floor up top. His long strides creak as he heads for the stairs, and she's nearly about to just cut and run when he yelps and the scratching comes bumbling down the steps.

Beady little eyes catch the light. Small teeth bare themselves at them. The family of raccoons scuttles between them, two chunky parents and several stumbling babes. Lacey makes a noise and Gideon stumbles back. One of the big boys turns back to her and hisses with deep malice before marching out the front door. Lacey presses a hand to her chest. What a little shit.

A nervous chuckle emanates from Gideon but by the time she looks back to him he's at the top of the stairs, glancing left, right. It must give him a solid view of the entire upstairs because his shoulders deflate and he comes down with his eyes cast to the ground.

"I told you not to go up there," she says.

"Doesn't matter. Nothing's up there anyways. It's all cleared out except for piss and feces. F-" He squeezes his hands together in the air, staunching the curse with a sharp bite on his lip. "Maybe other rooms. Maybe..."