Tiles Soaked in Red
Posted on Sun Nov 2nd, 2025 @ 3:20pm by Hayden Davis & Maeve MacKenna & Jennifer Bryant & Desmond Greene & Narrator
4,532 words; about a 23 minute read
Mission:
Episode 7: Pathogens and Contagions
Location: Coney Island, New York City
Timeline: March 3, 1992
At the very edge of the midway, just past the last of the flashing neon and strings of lights stood an old, freestanding building labeled with a simple pictograph that communicated it was a woman’s restroom. Squat and rectangular, it was made of concrete bricks that were stained from the nearby salt of the ocean. Its fluorescent light had been smashed long ago, leaving the path to the building dark and foreboding. The smell of mildew, cheap disinfectant and something metallic hung thick in the air.
There were no other people around as this restroom seemed like the most uninviting location in all of Coney Island, and as the group approached the bathroom the voices and music of the midway grew faint and warped in the distance. The only sound that managed to reach them was the occasional screams and rattles of the roller coaster that appeared in a rhythmic fashion as the ride ran over and over again.
The shadows around the building seem too dark—too still. The cheap and warped door to the bathroom hung slightly ajar, revealing only more blackness inside. Not even the bare glint of tile or the reflective shine of a mirror—just an emptiness that seemed to suck in the light.
Maeve pulled her scarf tighter, eyes narrowed at the squat little block of a building. “Well that’s inviting,” she muttered, her brogue curling sharp round the words. “Looks like the set of every horror flick where the daft girl goes in first an’ never comes out again.”
She took a step ahead, boots crunching on grit, and glanced back over her shoulder with a lopsided grin. “My gran used to warn us—don’t follow shadows where the light won’t go. Reckon she’d be laughin’ herself sick seein’ me doin’ just that.”
Turning back, she pressed her palm to the cold, chipped surface of the door, fingers splayed. “But we’re not here to scare easy, right?”
Her hand pushed slow, steady, shoulders squared as she eased it open into the dark.
Maeve felt a similar chill to the one she had experienced on the beach as she dared to enter the dark bathroom. As the sound of the roller coaster died down and she took a single step inside she could hear the soft, honeyed voice of a man talking inside.
“You’re so beautiful… did you know that?” He cooed in the blackness and in response a feminine voice mumbled a few inaudible words. “Well it’s true.” He replied with a touch of amusement.
"What about me?" Desmond asked as he stepped forward into the space too. His voice had taken a hard and rough note to it, like ancient unpolished ironwood. For the big man it wasn't quite possible to step in front of Maeve without having to reposition the girl, but he had moved in close enough to move her if needed. "Am I pretty too? Or do you just say that creepy shit to the girls?"
A long, angry hiss rose up out of the darkness at the sound of Desmond’s booming voice. The space grew darker as a feeling of extreme cold filled the small, dilapidated bathroom. Jennifer felt a pull into the blackness, like a familiar friend was calling to her, asking her to come closer.
“Mutant…” The man’s voice from the void grumbled in irritation. He had been watching them on the beach and noticed the whole motley group as they marched through his hunting grounds. They were sticking their noses in his coven’s business and now that they were officially interfering with his kill, it was a declaration of war as far as he was concerned. “You sure do have a lot of pretty girls that follow you around. How about I kill you first and then feast on their blood?”
The chill slid over Maeve’s skin like fingers made of ice water. It wasn’t just cold — it moved, crept under her scarf and down her spine, a wrongness that felt almost alive. The voice in the dark was smooth and warm, honey and venom mixed together, and for a half-second it caught her — like a thread tugging behind her ribs, urging her to step closer, to listen.
Her breath hitched. She swayed forward a fraction before Desmond’s voice cut through — rough, grounding, solid as tree bark. The trance cracked. She blinked, heart hammering back into her chest, and pulled a breath through her teeth.
When the hiss came, low and hateful, the chill deepened until her breath fogged in front of her. The way that thing spoke about Desmond — the lazy threat, the promise of blood — lit something fierce in her. Protective instinct, sharp and hot, burned away the lingering fog of its lure.
She moved up beside Desmond, shoulder to his arm, close enough that her own heat pressed against him. “You’ll touch none of us,” she snapped into the dark, her accent cutting harder now. “You want a fight, come try your luck, but you won’t lay a hand on him or anyone else here.”
The air felt like iron between her teeth, but she stood her ground, jaw set, green eyes fixed on the black. “You picked the wrong crowd to play monster with,” she said quietly — a warning, not a boast — and shifted her stance like she was ready to tear the night itself apart if it took one step closer.
"Come on, Hayden," Jennifer said as she stepped in behind Maeve and Desmond. She shifted a little to the side, trailing the wall with one hand. Lightly. Almost playfully. Her face was set. Her eyes were intent. She didn't adopt a defensive posture, as she saw her two teammates had done. She instead started moving around the enclosed space. She was humming. Literally humming. She was trailing the wall, the sink, the stalls, hand moving lightly over it. "I met your friend," she said to the void. "I think he was your friend."
Hayden lingered near the entrance, peering into the dark but seeing nothing. The air in the restroom felt thick and heavy with the dampness of mildew and... death? She shuddered and tried to shake it off.
Maeve’s defiance burned bright like a torch ahead, and Desmond’s voice anchored her against the urge to turn and run. Jennifer’s humming, strange and melodic, wound through the dark like a thread, unsettling yet oddly mesmerizing.
Hayden took a few careful steps forward, her sneakers scuffing softly against the wet tile. The voice in the dark had called them "pretty girls." It had talked about blood. About killing. Her stomach turned, a cold anger twisting in with the fear.
Her jaw tightened. "I think I'm okay right back here, Jennifer," she said, her voice low and steady.
“Infected ain’t the same as being turned, little lamb. You’re just food that managed to keep walking, a sloppy mistake.” The vampire scoffed at Jennifer, “But don’t worry, I can leave this one alive if you’d like a friend.” With a sad thud the teenager in his arms hit the tile floor. She coughed and sputtered and as their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they could see the victim was holding her neck to stop the bleeding. “Unless of course, you want to turn - in which case dump these losers and I can show you a good time.”
"Jesus dude, creepy and corny." Desmond said, his voice losing some of the hardness it gotten earlier, exchanging it for sarcasm. "Spouting these lines while hiding in the shadows." He slowly edged forward, his hands open and up in a defensive posture that Scott had tried teaching him. "How about you come give me a bite? I'm sure I have a nice crunch to me?" He had closed half the distance between the victim on the ground and his team. Even more of the ironwood had escaped his intonation, replacing it with sneer and derision. "Or are you just that much of a scumbag you only try this with those unsuspecting girls?"
Maeve’s breath left in a sharp snort, half nerves, half dark amusement. “Careful, big lad,” she muttered under her breath, eyes flicking between Desmond and the shifting dark ahead. “You’ll have him thinkin’ you’re actually on the menu.”
The air around her boots began to tremble, grit and tiny chips of tile quivering where they touched the floor. A few pebbles near the broken threshold lifted just enough to hover — barely a breath off the ground — like they were waiting for her to decide what to do next.
Her gaze darted to the injured girl sprawled on the cold tile. “We need to get to her, Des,” she said, voice low but steady. “Keep him talkin’, yeah?”
Without waiting for an answer, Maeve shifted sideways, slow and deliberate, her hand sliding toward the floor as if steadying herself — but really guiding the small bits of debris ahead of her, tracing a path toward the girl. “We’ll shut him up soon enough,” she murmured, every word a promise.
The tiny stones rippled like they felt her pulse, ready to move the instant she did.
Jennifer was along the wall, her hand tracing it, roughly parallel with the position Desmond was taking up. She suddenly turned to him when he addressed the vampire with such sarcasm. She gaped slightly, as if slapped out of a spell. She had not been thinking tactically when she positioned herself here. Not in terms of battle tactics anyway. Perhaps it was a better position for her now with how her powers had changed, but it was not what was truly in her mind. She told herself she had been thinking of a different plan altogether. She'd hoped to talk to them, to tempt them, to draw them out. But that wasn't really it either. She was drawn to something in those shadows. Now she was able to take in her surroundings. Desmond, taking a forward position. Maeve, moving slowly, hand to the floor, perhaps preparing to move to the girl, at the ready. The girl herself, coughing and sputtering. She could smell blood. That creeped her out. It made her feel strange. She was just infected, not turned, as the vampire had noted. Food that kept walking. Still, she felt strange.
Jennifer started moving crosswise, aiming to take up a position between the girl and the shadows, to join Desmond in giving Maeve some cover to move. She moved almost like a cat. Her body was not just stronger but faster, more ready, than it had been before. Even without her spark. But, even now, she didn't feel the adrenaline surge that should come before a fight. Just the pull of that strange power. "I'm always looking for new friends," she said to the darkness. "Thank you." Her voice was low. Her gaze fixed.
“Then let’s dance.” The voice from the shadows said with a laugh that soon apparated into the darkness.
There was a long silence that followed and only the sound of the mewling victim and their breath filled the bathroom.
Then Hayden felt a pair of hands on her ankles, cold like the grave with an iron grip. With an inhumane degree of strength the hands pulled her legs out from under her, causing her to crash to the tile floor.
As the rest of the team whirled around in the bathroom, they managed to catch the silhouette in the doorway. A darkened figure that was dressed in a similar fashion to the man named Peter who they had burned in the sun. But before they could react to the cheap move, the figure was gone again, lost in the darkness that he had created.
"Ah great. Guy's creepy, corny, and fast." Desmond said with more of that deadpan sarcasm. He then quickly shifted his hips and bullrushed the darkness. A roar that sounded like an ancient redwood falling in the forest came from Desmond's throat. He spread his arms wide, tearing into the stall doors on both sides and pulling them down to limit the number of hiding spaces. Either he'd run into the guy hiding in the deep shadows of the bathroom, or he'd run straight through the wall to bring in more light from the other side.
The crash of Desmond’s charge rattled the floor and ceiling tiles alike, dust shaking loose as splintered stalls clattered down. Maeve flinched at the noise, but only for a heartbeat—then she was moving.
The girl on the floor was still coughing weakly, one hand pressed to her throat, eyes glassy with shock. Maeve dropped to her knees beside her, scarf slipping loose as she tore the end free. “Hey, hey—easy now,” she murmured, the brogue in her voice softening with urgency. “You’re alright, love. We’ve got you.”
Her fingers worked quickly, pressing the scarf to the girl’s neck, trying to stanch the bleeding. The tiles beneath her palms trembled, sensing her focus. Bits of debris shifted subtly, rolling outward in a half-circle like a protective ring. The floor itself seemed to hum under her touch—alive, answering her.
“Stay with me, yeah? Don’t look at him,” Maeve whispered, glancing toward the shadows where Desmond had gone crashing through. “Just breathe. That’s it.”
When Hayden hit the floor, she busted her nose and started bleeding. She pushed herself up off the floor when the initial shock wore off and she had come back to herself. Blood was still warm on the tile floor and it was running down her face and neck onto her shirt.
"Crap!" she exclaimed. The humidity in the air had a fetid smell and feel to it, but it was still something she could use to her advantage if necessary. In the meantime, she tried to pull the water off of the tile floor to give everybody better traction.
Jennifer looked down and then sighed. She still felt a pull but it was more distant. Not physically. But her teammates, and especially Desmond's ruthless sarcasm towards the call she found so compelling, were keeping her grounded. "Dammit," she muttered and then she charged into the darkness after Desmond.
The girl on the floor clung to Maeve and she felt her trembling in fear of the man in the dark and the throes of laughter that filled and echoed through the small tiled space. His giddy response drifted off and turned into a melodic little rhyme.
Come walk the night, come taste the red,
Where angels fled and silence bled.
No doors will lock, no prayers will save,
I walk like a shadow from the grave.
Then Maeve felt a pair of hands from above, knotting and tangling into hair before she was picked up and lifted off the ground in a single, strong tug. The girl in her arms gasped and started to sob from the horrible surprise of her rescuer being taken away.
Your heartbeat hums a lovely tune,
Beneath the watchful, waxen moon.
One step, one sigh, one blink too slow
And down the darkened path we go.
Maeve’s scream caught in her throat — a strangled gasp more than sound — as fingers like iron tangled in her hair and hauled. Her boots left the tiles, the world upending in a rush of blood and panic. Pain seared across her scalp, and instinct flared hard and fast.
She didn’t think — she felt.
The fear shot straight through her chest and down into the ground, and the earth — even under tile and concrete — answered. The floor bucked in a ripple, cracked grout popping like gunfire. Shards of broken ceramic rattled upward, orbiting her in a rough halo as her power surged out unchecked.
“Get your filthy hands off me!” she snarled, her brogue thickened by fury.
Desmond's heartbeat doubled and doubled again. That scream. His vision filled with something red as his mind went to nasty places. He turned around to see the what was happening. Maeve being pulled to her feet by a hand coming out of a shadow. A figure hidden in deep dark shadow.
One step took him beyond the awning of the building. It took little effort for Desmond to leap onto the roof. He had taken note of where their assailant was abusing Maeve, and quick steps covered the distance. Long legs and supernaturally strong leg muscles meant that Desmond stood roughly over Maeve and the attacker. He got on one knee, and with both fists curled he punched through the ceiling where he had gauged the vampire to be. He wrapped his arm around the concrete ceiling, and he hoped the vampire, and squeezed it all to his chest with all his strength.
Maeve screamed again — not fear this time, but pain. Her scalp felt like it was being torn clean off as the creature’s grip tightened, the motion jerking her violently side to side. The world spun, tiles and shadows blurring together, her boots kicking at empty air.
She could hear something above — a deep crack, a splintering roar, and debris raining down. “Desmond!” she managed to gasp, though the sound barely made it past her teeth before another wrench of her hair dragged her head back hard.
Her hands flew up, grabbing for the creature’s arms. Cold. Like clutching stone dipped in icewater. Her fingers scrabbled uselessly against it, nails breaking, and she snarled through the pain.
The air around her shivered. Instinct overrode thought again. The tiles in her periphery began to lift, trembling violently — then shot forward like shards from a slingshot, crackling through the dark in wild arcs toward the shape holding her.
“Let—me—go!” she shouted, each word punctuated by the whistling crack of another piece of ceramic slicing the air.
She didn’t know if she was hitting him — she couldn’t see — but she could feel the ground answering her fear.
And then, beneath the chaos, a whisper brushed the edge of her mind: silken, familiar, wrong.
“Yes, little flame. Hurt him. Break him. Show them what you are.”
Maeve’s breath caught. For a heartbeat the voice almost pulled her under again — honeyed, dangerous — but she bit down on the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood. “No,” she hissed under her breath, half to the vampire, half to the whisper itself. “Not you. Not now.”
Her power surged again, tiles cracking beneath the pull of her fury — not controlled, not refined, just raw survival and defiance, fighting against the dark and whatever else dared to whisper in it.
Hayden heard every sound but could see almost nothing of their enemy. She narrowed her eyes, straining to make out shapes in the dark, but it was useless. Desmond was fighting to reach Maeve... but where was Jennifer?
"Jennifer!" she called out. "Where are you? Are you okay?"
"I'm ok," Jennifer said, looking around at the darkness that surrounded her. There was no movement yet. No sound. Nothing seemed to be coming for her. She was oddly disappointed. "They let us charge forward and then came from the rear," she said, noting the obvious. Desmond had already moved back past her. She could hear Maeve's screams. Desmond's rage. Her instinct was to rush to them as fast as her legs could carry her, but she took pause when she wondered if that was what the vampires wanted. Instead, she leaped up onto the wall of one of the stalls and started to knock down the tiles. She wasn't rushing back. She was moving systematically towards where Maeve and Desmond battled a vampire. Denying it a hiding place. "Are you ok? Anything fun you can do with the plumping? I really wish I had my spark right now," she called out to Hayden as she worked.
The whole structure seemed to groan and shake around them thanks to the team’s efforts to take down the lone vampire. Dust knocked loose from the broken rafters, the floors cracked and shattered, the stalls toppled and the plumbing shuttered from the strain it was under.
The vampire hissed and snarled as he felt a pair of trunk sized arms wrap around him from above. The unconventional attack caught him off guard and for a brief moment his grip on Maeve loosened. But Desmond could still feel the strength inside the vampire, its supernatural abilities enabled it to hunt and kill men like they were mice.
They had a brief moment to attack and take down the vampire before it turned savage and lethal.
Tiles were falling to the ground even as the entire structure shook. Jennifer kept going and soon she was on the vampire. Desmond had him from above. The monster's grip on Maeve was loosening. Jennifer noted her teammates. She didn't want to accidentally strike them. Especially Maeve who was not completely free yet. She braced herself on the edge of a stall and struck at an exposed area of the vampire, clear of her friends. She struck with superhuman strength. Again and again, though careful in the chaos of combat. Always aware of where everyone was. This was a very different thing than standing back and shooting bolts.
Hayden nodded quickly at Jennifer's response and turned her attention to Desmond's prey. With the pipes showering water everywhere, she used it to form a solid sphere around the creature's head. Maybe he could hold his breath for longer, but he eventually had to breathe and then drown. At the least, she might slow him down. The difficulty was trying to keep it place as he writhed.
Maeve’s hands went cold with fury. The creature’s grip was finally slackening—just enough—and she took the opening. With no time to think properly, she let every inch of her anger funnel into the ground beneath her. The loose tiles responded like obedient knives: a ring of ceramic lifted, wobbling in the air, then snapped together under her fingers as she forced them into a crude, jagged blade. It wasn’t neat. It didn’t need to be. It was sharp, hungry, and held together by the same force that had made the floor answer her before.
“Now!” she barked, more to herself than anyone, and lashed out.
She swung with both arms, the blade’s edge singing through the air. It met the vampire’s forearm with a sound half-tear, half-ceramic, raw and awful. The thing howled; the motion was mechanical and obscene, then the weight on her hair went loosed and gone. The arm—useless, unnatural—fell away and thudded onto the tiled floor with a wet, sick sound that made her stomach flip. It wasn’t a sanitised moment; it was the ugly sound of something living being undone. Maeve’s breath hitched as the metallic tang hit her tongue and the lights flared in her eyes.
Maeve hit the floor hard on her knees, breath ragged, the vampire’s severed hands still knotted in her hair.
“Get—off—me—” She yanked at the fingers, swearing under her breath. One came free, then the other—slick, heavy. A warm splash hit her cheek and she recoiled, wiping at it with the back of her sleeve, face twisting. “Ugh—Jesus—”
She shoved the dead weight away, heart hammering, then leaned over the girl again, one hand pressing the scarf tight to her neck. “Stay with me, yeah? You’re alright. Keep breathing.” Her other hand kept the jagged tile-blade up and ready, eyes flicking to where Desmond had the bastard pinned.
And then it slid in—soft as a breath, close to her ear.
'Let me help you, little storm. We could make sure no one ever touches them again. Take it. Be strong enough. Unstoppable.'
Maeve’s jaw set. “Get out of my head,” she muttered, low and sharp. “I don’t need you. I’m grand.”
'You could be more than grand. Your friends would never bleed because of you again. Just say yes.'
She shook her head hard, curls sticking to her face. “Not a chance.” A beat, tight and stubborn. “I’ll do it my way.”
She drew a steadier breath, planted her boots, and glanced up to the others—Desmond, Jennifer, Hayden—eyes hard but clear. “I’ve got her,” she called, voice quick and sure. “Finish him.” Then, to the girl, softer again, “That’s it, love. Eyes on me. You’re safe.”
Concrete cracked and crumbled as Desmond's arms flexed. He was pulling the vampire into the concrete, and his strength and the pressure made it fall away from between them. Moments later only the rebar remained, and even that bent as grass under Desmond's strength. But then the Vampire's torso yielded. Wet, foul smelling fluids seeped around Desmond's wrists as his arms broke the skin, only stopping on the spinal chord.
Desmond's arms slid open. His hands wrapped around the exposed spinal chord, fingers locking on. With a final roar he broke the vampire's exposed back in two. The sound was a mix of a high-tension steel wire snapping and a wet-gurgling sound. He sent the torso of the vampire down to the ground at speed, while throwing the lower part deeper into the wooded area.
Desmond was covered in a thick oily sludge rather than the expected gore that would have accompanied the rendering of a human body, a reminder that these vampires were no longer mortal men but lurking monsters that feasted on the innocent.
As the body hit the ground with a sick, heavy thud it soon turned to ash in the same fashion as the vampire who had burned in the sun. A strange aftereffect of whatever curse lived inside of the vampire.
Jennifer propped herself against the rebar and kept punching for a moment. She had never been able to punch like that before, even against the vampire's own resilience. But, once the torso ruptured, she let herself drop to the floor and left the tearing out of spines to Desmond. She looked to the other three (counting the victim) as she landed. "Everyone ok?" she asked gently.
“My neck…” A small voice squeaked from among the rubble of the bathroom. The teenage girl that had been the vampire’s victim stirred once more, her fear subsiding now that the creature had been thwarted.
“Easy, lass.” Maeve cooed as she reached out for the girl. “Let’s get ya back to your friends and the first aid station.”
The trio stood and regained their composure after their brush with the lone vampire, he had been strong, fast, and silent. It would take teamwork and a bit of luck to confront an entire coven of the creatures. Once the girl had been returned to safety they would find the rest of their team and tell them what had happened.
RSS Feed