A Dog and Her 12 Boys season one. GATELOCK Prime – Episode 16: Zombie Liquid. The First Note. Boy Three moved first. Always did. I pulsed the formation through the lattice. Spread. Circle. Silence. The Necromancers continued their ritual, arms weaving deliberate patterns in the air above a tall, narrow altar between them. Male and female, orbiting one another with a slow, gliding step. Their feet barely touched the stone, yet each motion carried weight, as if the air thickened around them. They hadn’t noticed us. Or pretended not to. I tasted the air. Incense. Decay. Old stone. But beneath that, something patient. A predator’s patience, not prey. It didn’t care we were here. It knew we would stay. Cloak. Psychic shroud dropped over us like fog. The boys vanished from sight, from scent, from the cathedral’s awareness. I brushed the surface of the Necromancers’ minds—thin membranes stretched over deep, dark wells. I saw flickers of shape and sound I didn’t understand. No heavy psychic armor. No obvious weapons. Just… resonance. Formation. Advance. We entered the cathedral proper. The space swallowed sound in the wrong way—our boots made no echo, yet the faint, constant hum of the choir pressed into our bones. Bodies hung in the vaulted shadows, swaying from blackened hooks, their flesh waxy and half-mummified. Every sway made the overhead chains sing in a high, brittle note, blending into the drone below. The zombie choir flanked us on either side, each seated rigid in the ancient pews. No one looked up. No one blinked. Their mouths were open just enough to let the harmony leak out—a layered, endless note that rose and fell without a single breath. Lips cracked. Teeth black. Tongues stiff and gray. Yet the sound flowed steady, as if the air itself passed through them. The aisle stretched forward in a straight line, a black river of stone leading to the altar. Every step we took, the shadows seemed to bend inward, as if we were passing through the throat of some enormous thing. Positions. The boys spread out. Boy Three took point, rifle steady. Boy Seven drifted left, almost level with the first row of pews. Boy Five mirrored him on the right. The rest formed a containment ring just shy of the steps to the altar. No one broke formation. No one breathed loud. Drop cloak. The shroud peeled away from us like mist dissolving in sunlight. The Necromancers didn’t stop. The female’s long, narrow hands swept upward in a slow arc, fingers bent like claws catching invisible threads. Her hair was bound in a lattice of bone pins, each carved with the same repeating glyph that glowed faintly as she moved. Her robe was layered silk, black over white over black, but it clung wrong, folds that suggested extra limbs beneath. The male was thicker in frame, but the robe draped oddly over his torso. His shoulders were hunched forward, as if weighed down by the ribcage of some other creature. When the silk shifted, I saw his chest was split vertically, and inside was stone—not flesh. A slab of black granite carved into ribs, every edge etched with deep-cut markings. Shield formation. Prepare. The psychic barrier slid into place around us, a glassy dome humming low. The female stopped dancing. Her head tilted, not toward us, but toward the air above us, as if she saw something we couldn’t. Then she opened her mouth. The screech was a thin, needle-point sound, aimed with surgical precision. It bypassed flesh and went straight for thought. My skull rang like a cracked bell. The right side of the cathedral answered. Forty zombie throats opened wider. They repeated her cry perfectly, not just in sound, but in tone, in psychic flavor. It was her voice multiplied fortyfold, braided into a rope of noise. The walls trembled. Dust sifted down from the beams. Overhead, the hanging corpses swung violently, their chains grinding out sharp, metallic harmonics.