The Mission Is Never Over—The Web

 

From the movie Hereditary.

 

December 17, Night

Rex and Wren came up with a plan to interview the previous abduction victims under the auspices of a medical study investigating brain activity in people claiming supernatural experiences. Rex used his medical credentials to arrange for lab space in a hospital equally crummy to the one where he worked in Denver.

Meanwhile, Malachi left to visit a sporting goods store and came back with a shotgun.

December 18

After sleeping through the morning, Rex and Wren met with Eileen Brown and her mother in Rex's borrowed lab space. While asking about her medical history, Eileen let slip that she'd recently had a spinal tap but shied away from sharing further details. A brain scan revealed high activity in regions of her brain usually dormant, but without asking about her abduction directly, they let her go without further information. Rex then tested Wren (who showed similar activity to Eileen) and himself (who displayed extremely high, unprecedented activity).

Malachi decided to try canvassing Clay County, looking for isolated houses... a big area with plenty of isolated houses, unfortunately. However, every trip took him past a big church with a few groundskeepers walking in and out. Keenly aware of the consequences for showing up unannounced as a black man in the Deep South, Malachi noted its location and left.

That night everyone went back to the Hunt, with Wren going in while Rex and Malachi kept watch outside. Spider told Wren to thank Rex for the spider he gave her while nervously asking what it ate: her roommate's parakeet had disappeared ever since it came home. Wren hurried the conversation along and asked Spider about a "Karen"—literally named Karen—saying she hoped to learn about the occult from her; Spider didn't know the name, but with a little prompting she remembered a middle-aged white woman talking to Gina the night she disappeared.

Ultimately the team didn't get many leads from this visit. They got the sense Karen had been looking for something in the other women she'd abducted and finally found it in Gina. The Hunt was just a convenient place to attack.

December 19

The team slept through another morning, then hit the search engines. A string of searches for "Karen/ Sidney/ Alabama/ cancer" brought up the GoFundMe page for Silvia Valdez. Silvia's grandmother and father had both died of pancreatic cancer, and now she had it too; the page was last updated three years ago to announce her death at nine years old. Silvia was survived by her mother Karen Valdez, a local pediatrician, and her older sister Sidney, who would be 14 now. And Malachi realized the picture of the whole family used on the GoFundMe page was taken outside the church he'd stumbled upon.

Rex posed as member of the state health board to visit Karen's clinic and trick a nurse into talking about her. Karen was good at her job but never the same after Silvia died; she quit a year to the day after it happened, which relieved everyone because there wouldn't have to be a scene over firing her. Apparently she had become erratic, pushing her patients towards alternative medicines.

Wren used her bureaucratic connections to look for more info, but Karen had no prior criminal record, and her home address didn't appear on any maps. She put in a call to MARCUS for anything Delta Green might turn up, recalling from the mission briefing that NSA assets were attached to the case.

Malachi went shopping again, this time procuring a lockpick gun.

That night, the whole team drove out to the church Malachi found. They searched the cemetery but found no graves for Silvia or the rest of the Valdez family. Malachi used the lockpick gun to break in, but they found no loose tiles in the floor, no secret doors, nothing to suggest a hidden cult hideout, despite his and Rex's surety something would turn up.

While they were inside, a car passed the church, its headlights obvious in the dark; Malachi hadn't noticed anyone else on the road at the height of the afternoon. The team parked off the road, so they doubted they'd been found out, but this was the sign of activity they wanted. They took off down the road with headlights off.

Going uphill, Malachi realized the drive was too easy, being pulled uphill like the first car on a roller coaster. And at the top of that hill was a house overgrown with briars and vines and their target car parked out front. They called MARCUS to report Karen's whereabouts, but MARCUS had a warning of his own: over months, someone inside had been searching the internet for increasingly bizarre and esoteric cancer treatments, followed by sudden shift to trap- and bomb-making.

Wren called upon her power of visions to search the area. She identified multiple traps around the front yard and inside the house, but the strain of it briefly sent her into catatonia. Rex and Malachi, seeing they were down an agent, debated the merits of simply burning down the house with everyone inside. By the time Wren came to again, daylight was breaking. If they left to rest up, it would be midday before they could get back here.

December 20

Up popped the trunk on the car, borrowed from the local FBI motor pool, and the agents took stock of their weapons. They decided to have Wren approach the house in the hope a less-violent outcome could be negotiated, while the others stayed outside, ready to provide covering fire if dilaogue failed.

Wren approached the front door and knocked, calling for Karen: a loudspeaker squawked telling them to go away. Wren claimed they were with the FBI to serve an arrest warrant for... wire fraud (from the tree line, Rex gave Wren a big thumbs-up). The absurdity cut through Karen's resolve; she told Wren to leave her gun outside but permitted her come in through a side door. In the kitchen, Karen played dumb until she realized this was all about Gina Bullock and that Wren had "the Gift;" that she too was a child of the "Mother of Moons." She was more than happy to introduce Wren to Sidney, leading her upstairs.

Malachi and Rex circled the house, looking for views inside, but all the blinds were drawn. They returned to the tree line, keeping line of sight with the side door.

Sidney lay in a hospital bed slipping in and out of consciousness, but the room itself was decorated like a shrine to the nymphs and spirits of Greek mythology, complete with animal sacrifices, asphodel burning in braziers, and Greek writing on mock pillars around the bed. In a brief moment of lucidity, Sidney recognized Wren from her vision in the Red Fox Inn and apologized for trying to kill her earlier. A strange growth bulged out from Sidney's body as she spoke, and a spike like hypodermic needle or insect stinger slid out from it, before subsuming back into the skin. Karen said this was how the Mother would not just heal Sidney but keep her alive forever, she just needed Gina Bullock to be the "vessel..." and here the conversation began to sour. Wren pushed back, asking if it was worth killing someone else's daughter to save Sidney's life; to Karen, the answer was obvious, but Wren's Gift wasn't powerful enough. Only Gina can fill that purpose... unless Wren knew someone else to sacrifice?

Wren felt the same twin-like connection with Sidney as she had in her earlier vision, and she tried to convince Sidney psychically not to go along with this. But while Sidney didn't want to hurt people, she hurt so much too. She didn't want to die either. And her mom said this is the only way to save her life. Karen realized something was happening between Wren and Sidney, and she drew a handgun from her waist, forcing Wren back down the stairs. She told Wren curtly not to come back without Gina.

But with the rush of meeting another with the Gift, Karen got careless. She was standing too close to the side door, and as soon as Wren cleared it, Malachi fired the rifle. She died before she hit the floor.

Back inside, Wren spoke to Sidney one last time. She asked Sidney not to keep hurting people, knowing this would kill her, and now Sidney relented. She'd heard the shots downstairs, and she wanted her mom. Not the Mother of Moons, but her real mom, and her dad, and grandma, and Silvia, and to be with them somewhere none of them could get sick anymore.