I waited patiently for him to continue.  The notion of fighting or responding didn’t even occur to me.

This part is much like the original zombies, though, I believe.

Let’s take a moment to analyze, on the assumption that this is a nightmare:

• Everything up to entering the room: Taylor feels like she’s fighting Coil and his lackeys to save Dinah.
• Coil kills Dinah: She feels like it’s fruitless, and whatever she does, Coil will hurt Dinah.
• Knife split: Fighting Coil directly is also fruitless.
• Zombie powder: Instead of saving Dinah, she just ends up becoming a mindless lackey of Coil against her will.

“It strips imbibers of volition and renders them eminently suggestible.  As you can see, I attempted to use it on my pet, and the results were… tragic.  The price of hubris, I suppose.”

In reality, this is absolutely something Coil would use his power for if he were to try it, but Taylor’s subconscious didn’t read Interlude 8b.

He sighed.

“Take off your mask,” he instructed me.

I did.  My hair fell across my face as I let my mask fall to the ground.  My cheeks were wet with tears.  Was that from before, from when I’d first seen Dinah?  Or was I able to cry about my present circumstance, even if I was helpless to do anything about it?

Who knows. I wouldn’t be too surprised about the latter, though.

In one of those rooms, I stabbed Coil in the chest.  There was no satisfaction in doing it, no relief.  I’d lost, I’d failed in every way that counted.  The fact that I’d put him down barely mattered.

And, in fact, it wouldn’t matter at all as long as the other Coil kept from getting stabbed.

In the other room, he stepped back out of reach of my first lunge, raised one hand and blew a handful of pale dust into my face.  While I was blindly slashing in his direction, he grabbed the wrist of my knife hand and held it firm in his bony hand.

What’s that dust? Just powder he carries with him to blind attackers? Or something to do with the “candy”?

That room where I’d succeeded in stabbing him faded away.  The only me that existed, now, was coughing violently.  My knees buckled as I coughed hard enough to bring up my lungs, unable to get the powder out of my nose and mouth.  I pulled at my hand, trying to free it from his grip.  Futile.

Yeah, sorry, you’re fucked.

“Stop,” he ordered me, and my struggles stilled, though I was still finishing my coughing fit.

“Diluted scopolamine,” he spoke, his voice calm, sonorous.  He let go of my wrist, and pushed at the knife in my hand.  I let it drop.  “Also known as Devil’s Breath.  The vodou sorcerers, the Bokor, were said to use this along with the venoms of the puffer fish and other poisons.  With these substances, they could create the ‘zombies’ they were so famous for.  

Oh, huh. Zombie powder, to incapacitate her and make her vulnerable to suggestion.

These zombies of theirs were not raised from the dead, but were men and women who were forced to till fields and perform crude labor for the Bokor.  The uneducated thought it magic, but it was simple chemistry.”

Yep! The idea of zombies as we know them today largely comes from Night of the Living Dead, despite that film calling its monsters “ghouls” and the creator not thinking of them as zombies.

But no.  As I stared at Dinah and registered what I was seeing, I realized the image would be burned into my mind’s eye forever.  She lay on the cot on her side, her eyes open, staring at me, through me.  A bloody froth was drying at one side of her mouth and at the edges of one nostril.

…

Well that’s unpleasant. What did he do? Poison her? If that’s the case, why? Or is this just what she’s like immediately after getting the “candy” (which isn’t that different from poisoning her)? Is she overdosing?

So far, this is questions: the chapter.

I didn’t consider myself a religious person, but I prayed for her to blink, to breathe, to give me some relief from that cold horror that was gripping me.

Is this all Coil fucking with Taylor in a throwaway reality?

I was too late.

My vision practically turned red as I charged Coil, drawing my knife as I ran.  I felt him use his power, and suddenly there were two of him, two of me, two cells with two dead girls named Dinah Alcott.

Okay, that’s not right. Taylor has nothing that should let her sense that, and Coil has no reason to kill Dinah in the alpha reality.

I think this is a very vivid nightmare.

I opened the door, and it was far too loud, creaking, then banging into the wall with a crash despite my last-second attempts to stop its momentum.

Ouch.

The room looked like a prison cell.  It had concrete walls and floor, a cot and a metal sink and toilet.  Coil and Dinah were both there.  I couldn’t say whose presence left me more devastated.

Well, shit.

And even if this is the scrapped timeline, alpha Coil will now know that Taylor tried to do this. Or, maybe that’s why he’s here in the first place, since the timelines’ divergence is defined exclusively in terms of consequences of Coil’s actions in each. Perhaps he decided to be somewhere else in the base in the other timeline, found out Taylor was breaking in in that one, and used that information to go to Dinah in this timeline?

I could say Coil’s presence was the worst thing, because it meant my info was bad.  His power meant I was probably fucked on a lot of levels, that the odds were suddenly astronomically against me.

Oh, absolutely.

It seems to me they were already against you, but you did make it this far.

I was caught.  My gut told me that I wouldn’t make it out of the compound in one piece, now.  He was washing his hands in the sink, he turned to look at me, apparently unconcerned by my presence.

Yeeah, if Taylor does something he doesn’t approve of, chances are he can just scrap the timeline.

I’m confuse.

But if Taylor’s shocked about her injuries just now…???

I swallowed hard.  My heart had climbed up so far into my throat that I almost couldn’t breathe, and my heartbeat felt oddly distant and faint for how terrified I was.

If this is indeed the Slaughterhouse, that’s probably appropriate.

And/or of parahuman origin. Maybe Shatterbird’s power is like Glory Girl’s, but supercharged?

Although, I mean, it’s not like getting bombed or otherwise attacked this hard isn’t reason enough to be terrified regardless of who did it.

Coil’s base was deserted.  I knew his men were out on patrols, that the only people in here were a handful of the capes that were working for him.  He’d left it almost undefended.

Well, shit. That didn’t exactly work out for him, did it.

What about his power? Is he not using it at the moment, or did the other timeline turn out worse?

If I was going to act, I’d have to do it now.

My costume’s feet lacked hard soles, so I should have been nearly silent, but the interior of Coil’s base was deathly silent and my feet were slamming down on the metal walkway as I ran.  The noise of singing metal filled the dark space, echoing, seemingly louder with each step I took.

Wait.

What??

Taylor did you knock them down?

That would explain why she “didn’t have to worry about” people who would typically be on her side.

Shit, Taylor, what are you doing? Are you trying to break in and counterkidnap Dinah???

Are you on your own? Because there’s no way in hell the others agreed to this if that’s what’s going on.

Trickster, Ballistic and Circus lay in front of me.  Another cape had fallen over the railing and lay on the concrete floor below, unmoving.

Alright, definitely got some new action.

Between the metal walkway and the people present, it seems we’re at Coil’s HQ, or one of the similar bases. Apparently there’s also someone Taylor doesn’t know the name of involved, but that could just be Coil having more protegés than just the Undersiders, Trainwreck (not Roadblock), Circus and the Travelers, or capes working directly under him.

The big question is who’s attacking. One likely option is the Slaughterhouse Nine, in which case we’ve got some serious trouble. Also quite likely is Fenrir’s Chosen, which fits well with the gash Taylor has.

…then again, it just occurred to me is that this was probably a bomb. We’ve got plenty of capes here and whatever just happened knocked down this many of them, and Taylor’s in shock? Sounds like a bomb to me.

At least we (unfortunately) know it’s not Bakuda, I guess. Could be some of her tech, though, if someone managed to get into the PRT’s confiscated weapon reserves somehow, or to a Bakuda bomb storage the PRT never found. But it’s not like she’s the only one who can make a good old-fashioned explosive.

They were all either unconscious or hurting badly enough that I didn’t need to worry about them.

Ouch.

I stared down at the metal walkway as I caught my breath.  I had one gash at the side of my head, and another trickle ran from beneath the armor of my shoulder, down my arm and to my fingertip, where it dripped almost in sync with the head wound.

Welp. Looks like we’re diving right into Taylor being hurt. Is this right after where we left off, as she finally examines her wounds from Miss Militia shooting her with a shotgun?

It should have hurt, but it didn’t.  Maybe it would when the shock wore off.  If so, I didn’t look forward to it.

Then again, it seems she’s still in shock about this, suggesting it’s a lot newer. Are we in the middle of combat?

Hell, did the Undersiders manage to run into the Slaughterhouse Nine before we even got into the Arc?

Also, Wildbow showed recently that he’s willing to do flashbacks. Maybe he’s continuing to experiment with that, trying his hand at an in medias res retrospective, in which we get dumped into the action and then look back at what led up to this moment.