Who: Natalie Kelly (Narrative) What: Croatoan virus. When: Friday, January 22, 2010 Where: Azazel's new ghost town in Illinois.
Her first thought when Azazel mentioned Illinois had been for Dex. That if anything had happened to him and Jax, or Jeff and his daughter, she would hunt down that yellow-eyed bastard and kill him with her bare hands--which shouldn't be all that difficult, with her demon mark, providing that she could get close enough to touch him. That was the iffy part.
It wasn't hard to find out where Azazel had been. A city-wide incident like that tends to make the news, even if it was just a small town. They were saying no survivors, but Keleios was disinclined to believe it, having lived through hells that no one ever lived to tell about. If there were no survivors, then where did the stories come from? Natalie supposed that in this case they could have been fabricated by those who'd stumbled upon the evidence after the fact--but she still had a hard time suspending her disbelief.
She'd taken the MTN to Chicago, as usual, and taken a bus from there--sending Dex a message to make sure he was okay while she was en route to the town in question--and hiked into town on foot, using her hockey-stick's invisibility charm to avoid the police cordons and media crews that might still be lingering in the area. The fact that Dex hadn't answered back yet gave her some concern that he had seen the news and already gone rushing to the scene just like she was about to do, but the sight that greeted her on main street swept her mind clear of any other thought but one.
Sill holding the hockey stick like a weapons, she crept around the abandoned buildings, her ears ringing with the pressure of such deathly silence. She wasn't sure if she'd expected the place to still be crawling with zombies, or what, but this...this just gave her chills. It looked like the place had been swept clean, as if Azazel and his new playmates had carefully burned all evidence of a body-count.
She could almost feel the virus seeping into her pores, through the open sore on her left palm as she dragged her fingers through the dust on a certain window sill, tasting blood and ashes. The demon magic in her own blood stirred, rising to first counter, and then neutralize the offending taint. All that was left was the graffiti, written in blood, and carved into telephone poles; and the acrid tang sulfur on the back of her throat, like rotten eggs, and the strike of a Lucifer match.