Adam's heart hammered in his chest as he tiptoed through the dark hallways of the abandoned factory—except it was quite obviously not abandoned. Bare lightbulbs hung from tangled wires overhead, casting flickering light upon machines full of gears and springs, tanks of murky liquid, and stuffed animals with too many limbs.

Most of the machinery lay silent, like mangled corpses of mechanical beasts, but the closer he got to the factory's heart, the more movement and noise he encountered. A steam generator, humming and throwing sparks. A pump, pushing thick red liquid through translucent pipes. Refrigerators crammed to bursting with things that didn't belong outside a body.

A fragment of a melody drifted down the hallway. Singing—that was Mabel singing in that hilariously off-tune way of hers. He followed the song and soon emerged into the factory's main floor. It was lit brightly and filled to the brim with fantastic machinery, but that wasn't what drew his gaze.

Mabel, clad in an overlong lab coat that hung from her skinny frame, bowed over a large table upon which lay—he swallowed—what looked like a corpse. She was humming happily as she stabbed metallic rods into its joints. Her hair was mussed up as if she had just gotten up, and her eyes were baggy and bloodshot behind her thick-rimmed glasses, yet they burned with that fervent energy that had drawn him to her in the first place.

He held his breath as he crept closer. His foot nudged something—a dusty bottle labeled XXX—and it fell over and rolled along the floor. Mabel jerked up and swiveled her head, raising a metal rod in her sleeve-covered hand. Once she saw him, her eyes went wide, and she quickly hid the rod behind her back.

"Adam!" she gasped.

He swallowed, frozen on the spot. "H-hi."

"What are you doing here?" She belatedly interspersed herself between him and the table as if to hide it from view.

"I just wanted to know. Where you always disappear to, what you need all those... materials for." He ran a hand through his hair. "So I followed you. I'm sorry."

She pushed her glasses up her nose. "Did you tell anyone else?"

He shook his head mutely. Mabel exhaled with relief. Letting the metal rod drop to the floor, she kicked it under the table. She looked at him, then away, and fidgeted.

"I was going to tell you," she muttered, not meeting his eyes. "Eventually."

"I can't believe you managed to keep all this a secret," he said, looking around. "From me, from everyone. This is... this is just..."

She clasped her arm with her hand and worried her lip.

"Totally metal," he said, turning to her with awe. "Are you trying to reanimate that thing?"

Mabel's eyelashes fluttered in surprise before a hesitant smile blossomed on her pale face. "You can tell?"

"Only the general idea," he admitted. "I've never seen machinery like this."

"Would you..." She blushed and scuffed the ground with her foot. "Would you like to see how it works?"

He looked her in the eye. "I'd love to."

She threw her hands up, causing her overly long sleeves to flap, and cackled. "Excellent! Follow me, assistant. First, we need to find you a lab coat."

Adam grinned as she hooked her arm around his and dragged him off, her eyes burning with excitement. Time to reanimate some corpses.

She was haunting, he thought as she opened a portal and walked through it. Her long coat and red hood gave her an air of mystery that was getting under his skin. She had turned his way earlier that day and her electric blue eyes passed over him. She didn't see him of course. Not really. Her gaze was fixed some place further away, to something that she could only see or look for. When her gaze finally moved away from him, he felt both relief and a dwindling excitement.

He didn't mean to follow her. Not intentionally. His feet began moving without his knowing, his back pressed against corners before he leaned to peek around them. It totally wasn't his fault. It was some sort of magic spell that he didn't know was at work on him.

One last corner as she turns to walk down an alley. He looks around it as she's pulling her hood down to reveal a long black braid. She pulls it over her shoulder then reaches towards her back to draw a katana. His interest shifts from curiosity into life preservation as he stops looking around the corner.

Both of his shoulders get pressed back against the brick wall behind him as his heart rate quickens and his breathing cycles more frequently than he'd care to acknowledge. He puts his hand on his chest to see in an attempt to will his heart and breath to slow as he looks back around the corner.

The girl slices across the air and a portal opens in front of her with allowing an old factory to be seen beyond. He spies a street sign and recognizes the place to be located at Wolf & Front St. She steps through and the portal closes behind her. He quickly pulls out his phone to look up the location. "But that's across town," he says to himself.

He stops at the corner and looks up the same street sign. It's the same one he had seen before but the building looks different. For starters, it isn't whole as the nearest corner is completely destroyed, exposing an opening into its interior.

Sparks pop from an overhead electrical transformer causing him to jump. He looks up to the utility pole seeing that the lines had been torn away. His feet move him once again as he looks around to the small fires scattered about the parking lot. The only cars present are on fire with one of them on its side and another upside down on top of two others.

"She got here just an hour ago," he says, looking around as more sparks pop from the transformer. "What the hell happened?"

He passes through the large opening as bricks shift and fall from one side. Again startled, he turns and steps away from the falling bricks. Continuing to backpedal inside, the interior is found to be in no better shape.

In the center of the room is a hospital bed with a blue pad and straps hanging loose from each side. Beside it is a long chain that descends from the high ceiling that would be high enough to cover a second floor. The chain hangs, draping all the way down to the bedside where it rounds and travels back up to the same place on the ceiling.

Beside the chain's mount is a large glass skylight with two frames that can open away from each other like a pair of cellar doors. Most of the glass is missing from the frame though, having been shattered and falling to rest on or around the bed with some of it impaling the blue pad.

Two different control panels are near the bed, and a table sits between them. A single table lamp is all that seems to be powered and it's sitting on the in-between table as its light continues to struggle. A generator can be heard sputtering somewhere in the distance as he prepares to let go of the life its struggling to hold on to.

He quickly moves to the table, stepping over various forms of debris and unknown objects. Approaching the table, he brushes away some of the rubble and concrete dust, forcing himself to cough as it becomes airborne. A fanning ensues as he stirs it up more than he causes it to dissipate. He finally steps away and returns again once it's calmed down.

There is a stack of papers that he carefully wipes the top off of. The papers are 18"x24" and filled with schematics and numbered steps. It's almost like the floor plan of a building with each page detailing a different floor. The top page is the outline of a human body, the next is muscle tissue that falls within the same body outline as the previous image. As he flips through, he sees the different organs and bone structures but then finds mechanical additions and a process of raising the bed during an electrical storm.

"That'll get you killed, you know?"

"Geeyah," the boy says, clutching his chest and stepping back. He turns to find the girl in the red hood standing next to him.

"You've got guts, Kid," she says as she kicks at a body at her feet, causing the boy to look down. "Most probably would have turned back at the sight of a werewolf corpse." She pulls out a zippo, flips it open and lowers it to set the schematics aflame.

The boy is backpedaling away with a terror spreading across his face. The girl is looking down at the growing fire, then looks back to see his terrified expression as he stares at the body. "Oh, give me a break," she says. "Did you really not know that was there?"

He backs into the control panel and begins sliding down into a seated position. She walks over, grabs him by the shirt collar, and pulls him back to his feet. "Look, you better get out of here unless you want to get dead. They'll be coming to check on this place, and I won't be sticking around to babysit you."

She lets go of him, allowing him to fall back away from her. He lands on his rear before scrambling back to his feet. "Oh, and stop following girls," she says, looking him up and down. "It's creepy no matter what your reason." She pulls a gun out from the back of her coat and uses it an a shooing gesture. "Now get out of here, Kid."

He turns to run back the way he came as she opens another portal and steps through.

This is using some of the lore and mechanics from a story world that I'm working on. You can find out more on Redux Riding Hood as well as find similar stories here: r/jtwrites

Happy Reading, JT

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