The Vice Jubilee

NO!" Trey shrieked.

His screams echoed around the bloody altar outside the Church of Aballon, where six fellow train passengers were already strung up by their intestines. Awakening before their own crucifixions were complete, Trey, Karen, and Jeremy were saved by a mysterious woman Trey had recently freed from a basement cage. She had already slaughtered the cultist villagers—but Trey quickly realized she might have been imprisoned for a reason.

After shredding the church’s memorial into a plate of meatball spaghetti, the woman turned toward them. Four needle-thin, spider-like appendages sprouted from her bare back. Trey’s skin crawled as the razor-sharp limbs crept closer, but instead of killing them, she sliced their bonds and granted them freedom.

.

“This…isn’t real. This is a bad dream. It must be a bad dream,” The woman remained in place, gazing unblinkingly at Trey for what felt like the passing of seasons. She cocked her head to the side, as if confused as to what she should do with him. Trey reciprocated the confusion, grateful for the saving, yet fearful of the inhuman bits.

Karen cocked her revolver and prepared to execute the woman.

“No!” Trey stepped in front of the muzzle. He had no idea why he did it. “She saved us. Why kill her?

“You don’t see all this blood and gore around you?!” Karen spat.

“She did it to save us. She didn’t have to cut us free.”

“And those wide-grinning priests didn’t have to let us sleep in their communion hall or give us food to eat. Then, they knocked us out and disemboweled five of us as sacrifices for their damned god.

“I get it, loud and clear” Jeremy added. “Screw that “trust in others” crap. It’s every man for himself right now.”

The woman opened her mouth. She spoke gibberish, which only made them more paranoid. In a final gesture of peace, she retracted her appendages and took a knee. They all then understood her intentions.

“Juro…” the woman said while pointing to herself. An introduction. Trey introduced himself in kind and urged her back on her feet while the other two sat back and scowled. “We’d be dead without you. I won’t forget that. Why don’t you come with us. Better we find a way out this hellscape together, yeah?”

Juro agreed, following Trey throughout the proceeding evils of Londo City that persisted for an entire week.

Trey could not get out of Londo City. No one could. A massive gate of bodies quarantined the townsfolk inside the carnage. No smartphones could hitch the smallest wi-fi signal or hotspot available. The ones still sane were left to scrounge from sheds, loot empty department stores, fight to live the next day or succumb to the insanity.

But as the midnight clock struck, the air grew hot, thick with the metallic scent of copper and old blood. Day seven belonged to Wrath.

“Just a few more hours,” Trey muttered, forcing a weak smile as he took a sip. “The experiment is almost over. We’re going to make it out.”

By day six, Trey remained sane enough to understand the carnage around him. A fellow passenger, an occultist, had explained the Vice Jubilee: a seven-day experiment where the Seven Sins forced humans to obey their darkest instincts.

Each day brought a new horror. Day one was Greed’s frantic looting. Day two brought Gluttony's cannibalism. Day three introduced Sloth's sleeping mist, followed by Lust's alleyway orgies on day four. Day five birthed Envy's skin-stealing doppelgängers. Now, day six belonged to Pride, mutating people into monsters.

Inside the basement jazz club, The Londo Bop, shattered neon lights flickered over terrified, unyielding survivors huddling in the shadows.

Karen stared down at her bottle, her face twisting into a bitter mask. “Great. We survive a week of hell just to celebrate with stale, piss-warm garbage.”

“Karen, come on,” Trey sighed. “It’s not a big deal. We’re alive.”

“It is a big deal!” Karen snapped, slamming her bottle. “My home is ash. I’ve debased myself for seven days, living like an animal!” She whipped a trembling finger toward Juro. “And we’re acting fine while traveling with this abomination!”

Karen’s veins bulged, her eyes bloodshot. On day two, she had claimed she would frolic in cow dung just to survive another day. This scene—this thick air—was entirely uncharacteristic. Even Jeremy was visibly shaking, tweaking in his seat.

Trey eased out of his booth, backing away. “Karen. Jeremy. Are you still with me?”

“This city was all I had left,” Karen whispered, her anger collapsing into a war deserter's hollow grief. “Now I have nothing.”

But the psychological infection weaponized her sorrow, replacing it with bloodshot madness. Karen whipped out her revolver.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

It happened in a flash of gunfire. Jeremy and two other survivors at the table collapsed instantly, dead before they hit the floor. Karen swung the barrel toward Trey. Trey tried to dive, but the next round clipped him, tearing a jagged, burning furrow across his stomach. Trey collapsed against a leather booth, gasping, his hands instantly slick with his own blood.

Karen turned the gun toward Juro to finish the job. But Juro was already moving.

Dropping flat to the floor, her four multi-jointed spider legs splayed wide, Juro zipped forward like a shadow beneath Karen's line of sight. She emerged under he knees and split her clean down the middle, under the jaw.

The horror was just beginning.

All around the club, the transformation caught like wildfire. Random survivors began to howl, their flesh bubbling and expanding into towering, hulking entities of pure rage. Their human intelligence was gone, replaced by a desperate, crushing violence, yet their skills and raw powers remained intact.

One massive, newly mutated beast, skin stretched gray and splitting over massive muscle, roared at the ceiling. It brought both fists down onto the central structural pillar of The London Bop.

The ground buckled. The concrete cracked with a sound like thunder.

The ceiling came down in a suffocating avalanche of brick, iron, and heavy oak timber. The entire building collapsed into a smoking crater of rubble.

Silence followed the crash, heavy and thick with choking dust.

Underneath a jagged slab of collapsed roofing, Juro was trapped. She lay pinned beneath the weight, her human torso twisting in agony as her spider legs were crushed and twisted out of alignment. A high, agonizing trill—a song of pure physical pain—escaped her throat, echoing weakly in the dark hollows of the wreckage.

A few feet away, Trey lay in the dirt. The shock was setting in, turning his skin ice-cold despite the heat of the fire burning somewhere above them. He stared blankly at the dust motes dancing in the dark, his hands feebly trying to press down on his bleeding stomach, his consciousness slipping away into the gray.

Through the choking dust of the collapsed jazz club, the heavy, rhythmic thrumming of heavy boots approached. The mutated mob was still alive. They clambered over the broken beams of The London Bop, their eyes glowing with the manic, red hue of absolute Wrath. They didn't care about the rubble. They only wanted to kill.

One of the largest men—his skin translucent and webbed with pulsing, purple veins—spotted Trey bleeding out in the dirt. The beast snarled, stepping over a shattered piano, and lunged. He reached down with a massive, veiny hand, fingers opening wide to crush Trey’s skull like a ripe melon.

Trey couldn't move. The shock kept him pinned, his eyes wide as the shadow of the hand fell over his face.

Thwip.

A sharp, chitinous limb whipped out from the darkness, catching the man's wrist inches from Trey's forehead.

Juro had forced herself up from the wreckage. She hissed through gritted teeth.

With a burst of adrenaline, she used her other three back limbs to shove herself out of the debris. She yanked the giant off balance and hurled him backward into a pile of bricks.

But the rest of the mob swarmed her instantly. Juro fought like a demon, spinning through the ruins. Her human fists cracked jaws while her back legs whipped through the air, impaling attackers and throwing them into the collapsing walls.

The brute with the veiny hands roared, lunging back into the fray. He caught Juro by her waist, lifting her human frame off the ground with terrifying strength, and hoisted her high into the air. She severed one of Juro’s limbs like a broadsword.The pain of the severed limb was too much, and the circle of wrathful men was closing in. Left with no choice, Jocelyn gave into the monster inside.

A sickening sound of cracking bone and tearing fabric echoed through the ruins of The London Bop. Her human skin split down the spine as her body rapidly expanded, reshaping itself into a towering, terrifying arachnid nightmare. Multiple pitch-black eyes snapped open across her darkened face, and a massive, armored thorax burst from her back, crowding the narrow pocket of the rubble.

The mob didn't run—the curse of Wrath kept them fearless—but they were no match for her true form.

With a deafening screech, Juro fell upon the mob, her remaining armored legs impaling two men at once. Her massive mandibles tore through flesh with horrific speed as she devoured the mutated attackers in a raw frenzy of survival.

Trey watched dimly from the floor, blood loss making the gunfire-illuminated carnage feel like a distant dream.

When the last man fell silent, the club went dead quiet. Juro turned back toward Trey, drenched in thick, dark blood. Her multiple black eyes locked onto his fading form, the feral hunger in them slowly warring with recognition.

Now, after the slaughter reminiscent of their first meeting in day 1, Juro found Trey and knew he’d have to save her again.

The heavy, iron doors of the abandoned church groaned open as Jocelyn forced her way inside. Every step was an agony of shifting weight, her massive spider form dragging through the aisle, slick with the blood of the mob. Cradled gently against her human-like torso, wrapped in thick strands of protective silk, was Trey. His skin was gray. His heart was barely fluttering.

She laid him down in the center of the chancel, where a massive, intricate geometric pattern was engraved directly into the stone floor. It was a prayer circle, drawn in faded gold leaf in tribute to Aballon, the Goddess of Life.

The air inside the circle hummed with a faint, warm luminescence, stark against the dark violence of the London night outside.

Juro collapsed beside him. She needed to speak the invocation, but her monstrous mandibles clicked awkwardly, fighting against the human vocal cords she rarely used in this form. She forced her jaw tight, focusing every ounce of her remaining sanity to speak the foreign tongue.

"A-Aballon," she rasped, her voice a grating, painful hiss that echoed in the vaulted ceilings. "

The gold lines beneath Trey began to glow a soft, vibrant amber.

"Take," Jocelyn choked out, gesturing vaguely to her own broken body, then pointing a trembling human hand at Trey’s blood-soaked stomach. “Sana vulnera, rege quod est devium.”

The amber light flared, sensing the intent of the pact. It didn't ask for prayers; it asked for a price. The divine magic reached out like tendrils of pure heat, wrapping around one of Jocelyn's remaining heavy back legs.

Juro didn't flinch. She locked her multiple dark eyes on Trey's peaceful, dying face. "Trade," she whispered.

With a blinding flash of golden light, the magic severed the limb clean at the joint. Juro threw her head back, a silent, agonizing scream tearing from her throat as her body convulsed from the shock of losing a second leg.

But as her blood spilled onto the stone, the golden light funneled directly into Trey’s chest.

Before her eyes, the ragged, torn flesh of Trey’s stomach began to knit back together. The gray tint left his skin, replaced by a warm, sudden rush of color. He gasped, his lungs filling with clean air as his eyes snapped open, completely healed, just as Juro collapsed into the dust beside him, gasping for breath.

Trey gasped, his lungs flooding with warm, clean air. The agonizing fire in his stomach was gone, replaced by smooth, unblemished skin. He blinked against the fading golden light of the altar, his vision clearing as he sat up.

Juro sat on the stone floor beside him, back in her human form. She looked exhausted, her breathing shallow. As she leaned forward to check on him, her ripped shirt fell away from her back.

Where two of her powerful, tentacle-like spider limbs should have been, there were only raw, closed-up marks on her skin.

Trey’s breath hitched in his throat. He reached out, his hand hovering over the wounds. "Juro... are you okay?"

Juro looked at him with her two human eyes, pale but entirely present. She let out a soft huff, raised her hand, and gave him a shaky thumbs-up and a tired, genuine smile. Trey reciprocated with his own smile out of utter relief.

Outside, London City tore itself apart in a final, frantic slaughter. The remaining infected, driven mad by the dying gasps of Wrath, turned on each other or themselves in the ruins.

Inside the church, the chapel was a sanctuary of heavy silence. Juro lay curled on the stone floor, deep in a restorative sleep, her body exhausted from the trauma of her sacrifice.

Trey sat beside her, wide awake. His knuckles were white around a makeshift spear, his eyes scanning the shadowed entryway.

Looking down at her, a profound sense of gratitude and wonder washed over him. Before the Jubilee, Trey had suffered from a paralyzing phobia of insects. The mere sight of a spider made his skin crawl with instinctive disgust. Yet, looking at the girl who could become a towering, predatory arachnid, he felt absolutely no fear.

Instead, the only thought filling his mind was a deep, fierce urge to protect her. She had sacrificed her own flesh just to keep him breathing. As the city bled out beyond the heavy doors, Trey made a silent vow into the dark.

He would not let her die for him.

Day eight.

The morning of Day Eight broke over Londo City with a quiet that felt unnatural after a week of screaming.

The heat of Wrath had broken, leaving the streets choked with ash, empty brass shells, and the frozen, grotesque shapes of mutated corpses.

Trey walked with a heavy, halting limp, his hands pressed tightly over his stomach. Beneath his fingers, the jagged wound Karen had given him was closed, bound together by a strange, translucent silk that throbbed with a faint, residual warmth. Juro’s healing chant still echoed dimly in his mind.

Beside him, Juro walked in her human guise, though her shoulders remained tense, her multiple black eyes darting toward the dawning sky.

Ahead of them lay the boundary—the horrific quarantine barrier where thousands of bodies had been fused together into a mountain of meat to lock the populace inside.

As they drew closer, a low, tectonic hum vibrated through the cracked pavement.

The Vice Jubilee was over. The Seven Sins had finished their experiment.

Before their eyes, the wall of corpses began to dissolve, shifting into harmless gray ash that caught the morning breeze and scattered into the atmosphere. The magical weight that had suffocated the city for seven days evaporated into nothingness. The exit was clear.

Just past the perimeter, parked on the shoulder of the cracked highway, sat a abandoned black motorcycle. Its owner was nowhere to be found, but the keys were still dangling in the ignition, glinting in the pale sunlight.

Trey dragged himself over to it, his boots crunching on the glass. He gripped the handlebars, using the frame to steady his shaking legs, and swung his thigh over the leather seat. He turned the key, and the engine rumbled to life, a steady, mechanical purr that felt grounded and real after a week of cosmic madness.

Juro stepped up behind him, her movements silent, and climbed onto the seat, her arms wrapping securely around his waist.

Trey gripped the throttle, looking out at the long, empty highway stretching into the horizon. The entire world outside Londo City was open to them now.

But as he stared at the asphalt, a sudden, cold panic gripped his chest.

His home was gone. The train passengers were dead. He had nowhere left to return to, and no destination ahead.

He looked back at Juro over his shoulder. “I don't know where to go,” he whispered into the wind.

Trey stared at the winding expanse of asphalt ahead, the cold weight of uncertainty lifting all at once from his chest. He finally found his answer.

"Anywhere," he murmured, a genuine laugh catching in his throat.

They didn't need a map or a destination pre-written by the military or an occult circle. They had survived the Vice Jubilee. They had paid the blood price to stay together. They could start their lives anywhere they wanted—they just had to drive out into the world and find it.

Trey twisted his wrist, revving the motorcycle one last time. The heavy engine screamed with sudden, violent power, shattering the morning silence of the outskirts. He kicked the bike into gear and twisted the throttle wide open.

They shot forward onto the empty street, leaving the haunted ruins of Londo City far behind. Behind him, Juro wrapped her arms tight around his waist, burying her face into his shoulder to block out the rushing wind.

As they raced down the open road, the heavy gray clouds finally parted. A brilliant, golden sunrise broke over the horizon, casting a blinding, triumphant backdrop that swallowed them both into the dawn.