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.

Dog and Her 12 Boys. Seasoned one. GATELOCK prime. – Episode 15: The Overlook The sewer tunnel curved downward like a throat swallowing us whole. The artifact’s pulse had shifted, no longer the erratic ping of something hidden, but a steady rhythm that matched my heartbeat. Or maybe my heartbeat had matched it. Hard to tell anymore. Boy Six touched the wall as we descended. Stone. Carved stone. I felt his recognition through the lattice and concrete had given way to something older. Symbols etched into black rock, worn smooth by time and touch. Not human script. Not recent. The kind of markings that made your teeth ache just looking at them. The tunnel widened into a natural cavern. The air thickened, carrying weight and dampness that pressed against our skin like wet wool. Then the ledge, a narrow stone jutting over an impossible drop. We crouched in the shadows, looking down into a chamber that stole our breath. A cathedral. Not built—carved. Hollowed from living rock like someone had scooped out the earth’s heart and decorated it with nightmares. Impossible architecture stretched below us, all flowing curves and gravity-defying arches. No mortar. No seams. Just one continuous piece of stone shaped by will or madness. Suspended from the ceiling, hundreds of corpses swayed in perfect formation. Neither random nor chaotic. Flayed bodies hung like meat in a slaughterhouse, skin peeled back to expose glistening muscle and yellow fat. Some were mummified, leather-dark and shrunken. Others were fresh enough that blood still dripped from fingertips into brass bowls positioned beneath. Each body hung at a precise height, specific angle, creating geometric patterns that hurt to follow. They moved like wind chimes in a breeze that didn’t exist, their positions shifting with mathematical precision. Below them, arranged in neat rows like a church congregation, sat the zombie choir. Forty, maybe fifty figures in various stages of decay, all facing forward, all humming in perfect harmony. Their voices rose up to us, hauntingly beautiful, wrong in every frequency. At the altar, two figures stood with arms raised, conducting the choir with slow, deliberate gestures. Tall. Impossibly lean. Their robes hung from frames that seemed too long for human proportions, sleeves extending past where hands should end. Even from here, I could taste their psychic presence—cold, ancient, patient as stone. I studied the layout, tactical mind sorting through the musical madness. The suspended corpses weren’t just decoration, they were instruments. Resonance chambers. The cathedral’s acoustics were designed around them, creating amplification nodes throughout the space. Every surface, every curve, every hanging body served the sound. The artifact pulsed faintly, somewhere beyond this chamber. Whatever we were tracking lay deeper still, but these Necromancers stood between us and our prize. I pulsed the command: Formation. Descent. Silent. We moved down the hidden stone steps, each footfall calculated, controlled. The music grew louder as we descended, more hypnotic. Harmonies layered on harmonies, voices that should have been dead weaving melodies that made the air itself vibrate. Boy Six stumbled once, caught by the music’s pull. Boy Nine’s eyes glazed over for a moment before I pulsed a wake-up call through the lattice. The song wanted to drag us in, make us part of the performance. Not today. I crouched behind a pillar, studying the suspended corpses one last time. Each one positioned just so. Each one part of the greater instrument. Time to break the symphony. I growled low. The boys moved.

A Dog and Her 12 Boys. Season one. GATELOCK prime. – episode 14: Zombie Liquid. The Cafeteria of the Damned.. Then we reached it. The cafeteria. Wide. Warm. Tiled with flesh-pink floors. Full of Humans. Or what was left. Hairless. Fat. Wearing plastic aprons soaked in blood. Eating. Bowls of zombie stew. Slices of gray meat stacked like pancakes. Sandwiches made with arm meat and spinal jelly. A fountain of red ichor bubbled in the center. I dropped the cloak. They looked up. We smelled their fear before they made a sound. Then the first one screamed. We charged. Boy Three took the left flank, bashed a jaw with a cafeteria tray, then stabbed through the throat. Boy Two flipped a table and fired three shots point-blank into a cook’s chest. Boy Four dropkicked a diner into the stew fountain. He didn’t resurface. Blood hit the lights. The room flickered. Boy Eight, still limping, used a broken chair leg to rupture a knee. Boy Ten poured scalding stew onto two of them and ignited it. The smell was revolting. We liked it. One tried to run. Boy Five caught him with a meat hook and reeled him in like a fish. Then the floor shook. A low, sucking noise rose from the back of the room. The grease pit, an industrial drain clogged with decades of fat and meat, began to bubble. Chunks of congealed lard floated to the top and then fused into something with a shape. A slick, black, three-eyed thing clawed its way out, dripping fryer oil and human teeth. It shrieked like a boiling pig and whipped a chain of intestines across the tiles. Boy Nine slipped. Boy One dove and pulled him clear as the chain slapped the wall hard enough to leave a smear of bone shards. I barked once. The boys swarmed. Boy Six drove a bread knife into its eye. Boy Eleven leapt onto its back, stabbing with a steak fork until his arms went red to the elbow. The creature thrashed, vomiting a spray of rancid oil and chopped cartilage. Then Boy Seven had an idea. He ripped a tray of cafeteria bread rolls off the counter, dunked them into the puddle of leaking grease-monster juice, and started eating. The others followed. Boys sopped up the monster with bread, chewing like happy demons at Sunday Black Mass Communion. They ripped meat from its body and dragged it across baguettes and sandwich loaves. They stuffed rolls into the empty eye sockets and wounds like sponges. Every bite made the thing weaker, smaller, wetter. By the time it stopped moving, half of it was inside the boys and the rest was mopped up with sourdough. Thirty seconds. All dead. All consumed. We sat. And we ate. Our appetites were endless. They passed the zombie meat like it was a roast. Boy Seven found a skull-stew with some kind of garnish. Boy Twelve hoarded a plate of spinal pastries. I found something that looked like heart jerky. It crunched perfectly. We ate like kings. After the feast, we looted. The kitchen was full of gear, blades, masks, stimulant injectors. We took it all. In the corner, a treasure chest. Old-world lock. Boy Eleven picked it in six seconds. Inside: ration packs, stim packs, antique ammo — and a black card with a silver strip. No name. Just a skull icon. Chip intact. Cryptic-Cred. I froze. These were rare. Pre-fall. Still functional. Worth entire war-zones in trade. Can buy anything that still remembers cost. I wrapped it in a mental seal and stored it in my flank pack, away from their greasy, curious hands. None of them dared touch it. The artifact chimed in my head as if on cue. The back of the room housed a sewer hatch. It hissed when I approached. The boys looked at me. I opened it. The smell hit like a memory, rot, acid, burnt fur. But not bad. Not to us. Not to a dog and her twelve. We descended into the dark following the stronger artifact pulse.