by Jon F. Merz
And my soul.
3
Damned hot.
Been that way since the Equilibrium. All those damned fools who used to claim that climate change wasn’t real. Idiots. The temperature’s climbed a few degrees each year for the past five. But all those Bible-thumping morons are dead now. Or worse, they got turned and ended up dead anyway.
Once we caught up with them.
The road was barren, but I wasn’t surprised by that. The dirt was dusty, the sort that’s been seared into dry nothingness by the constant assault of the sun overhead. Days like that, it almost made you hate the sun for beating down as it did. But then you remembered the alternative; the night offered no solace from anything living anymore.
Sometimes I got tired of holding the chain and just looped it around my waist so I could have easy access to my weapons in case we got jumped by anyone too dumb to recognize me for what I was. I wore a Heckler & Koch USP on the side of my right thigh. If I dropped my right hand, the grip would be there to meet it. I had three extra mags for it on my belt. The M4 was on a sling that I could bring up if need be.
But the staff, that stayed in my hands always. It was just over six feet long, made from Verawood, one of the toughest available anywhere in the world, topped with a sharpened end. The butt of the staff had an iron cap on it that I’d forged myself. It was heavy but beautifully balanced and worn smooth from the amount of handling it had taken since I’d milled it. My forearms looked like twisted steel cables thanks to the workout it had given me over the years.
As I walked, I could hear the chain clinking in the dirt and dust behind me. The amount of slack would increase depending on how close she got to me while I walked. So long as she kept moving and I didn’t have to drag her.
Her role was bait. She’d stay alive as long as I needed her and not a moment more.
She’d been condemned to death until I stepped in. You couldn’t call me a savior, because her role these days was only prolonging the inevitable. She’d die eventually; whether by a sucker or by my hand. And frankly, I didn’t give a shit.
Her name was Ares. When I’d wandered into the outpost outside of what used to some city in some state that no one even remembered, she was standing in line waiting with other condemned criminals for her turn at the gallows. I could see that she was a junkie even from a distance, with the lines all over her arms and feet. She was one of the ones who thought they could just pass through life without giving a damn, without ever taking responsibility, just a drugged up mess of humanity.
Supposedly, she killed a man. But these days, who the hell even knew what was the truth anymore? I didn’t have time to argue with the locals about whether she might be innocent or not. That wasn’t my job. As far as I was concerned, she was in decent enough shape that I could use her for bait and then be done with her. And I wouldn’t have to drag her ass anywhere. I learned that lesson the first time when the dude I had on the other end of the chain was a fatty and I’d had to drag his bloated body around half the time.
Ares hadn’t blinked when I’d snapped the collar around her neck. She just moved without much prodding, as if this was just another part of her pathetic existence. But that first night I put her out and waited for the sucker I was tracking to emerge, that first night, she felt real fear for the first time in a long time, I’d wager.
I keep her fed as little as possible; just enough to replace the calories she expended as we walked. Water’s easier to find these days than it was even a few years ago when every source seemed to have been polluted. But Mother Nature has this awesome way of cleaning things up and it was much better getting a drink now than back then.
Even though some places still had too much radiation.
Last night’s kill was the culmination of several months of work. Tracking suckers took time and a lot of effort. The outposts didn’t want to talk about whether they were in the area or not, as if even speaking about them would cause them to show up unexpectedly.
And they didn’t like me because they knew when I was around, there was a good chance that a sucker would be, too. Even though I killed the fuckers, the survivors still hated my guts.
In my previous life, I’d been a warrior employed by the government to do its dirty work - wherever that may have been. I was one of the elite. Best of the best or some such bullshit. That life didn’t matter anymore. It was gone and buried like most of the planet’s population.
But the skills I’d learned…those came in damn handy given my current occupation. Not that I get paid to do this. After all, no one’s got a bank these days. Still, I get a small stipend and if times get really tough, I can hang my shingle out for someone who needs a hired gun. Despite the fact that most of the people are gone, there are still enough scumbags left who need to have their asses kicked from time-to-time.
I used to think that a bit of apocalypse might be a good thing. You know, clean out the pool, so to speak. Get rid of the religious zealots, the racists and bigots, and idiots who foul things up for everyone else. A lot of them got wasted during the preliminary slaughter. But even some of those assholes managed to find a way to survive. Fucking roaches.
“I’m thirsty.”
Ares’ voice snapped me back to the present. I stopped, my boots scraping the dirt and sending up a dust cloud as I did so. I glanced back. She was rail thin. Looked unhealthy, but I knew she was still a survivor. She’d lasted longer than I thought she would, so she had that going for her. One of the guys I’d used as bait up and had a massive coronary the first night I set him out waiting for a sucker to show up. Not exactly a thrilling prospect for a sucker when the bait is already dead.
But Ares was different. She did what she was supposed to do: basically act like a wounded fish and wait for the predator to come sniffing around. That’s when I stepped in and did my business.
I felt for the small canteen I wore on the small of my back, took it off and tossed it to her. She grabbed it, tore open the cap and sucked at it greedily.
“Don’t take it all. I don’t know where the nearest spring is,” I said.
“Fuck you asshole,” she replied between mouthfuls.
I jerked the chain and instantly she dropped to her knees, almost dropping the canteen in the process. “Put the cap back on and throw it back to me.”
She glared at me but did as I commanded. I caught the canteen, which felt a lot lighter than it had a moment earlier, and put it back on my belt. “Don’t fuck us both over. Be nice and I’ll give you extra food tonight.”
“Oh wow, would you really?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm, but I was used to that by now. Bait would often develop the balls to insult you as the job progressed. It didn’t affect me. She was a tool to do my job.
She kept fingering the small thing she wore around her neck. I gave the chain another jerk and she fell closer, putting her hands out to stop from face-planting in the dirt.
“What is that?”
“What?”
“Around your neck.”
She smirked. “It’s your fucking chain, you sick bastard. This get you off? Thinking about keeping a woman as a slave?”
I ignored the comment. “The other thing.”
Her fingers went to it. “Nothing.”
“Let’s see it.” I stopped before her, bringing my hand up until I could reach it. I ran my fingers over it. It looked like a small wooden pipe. She’d probably stolen it from somewhere. Maybe the man she was supposed to have killed.
She could have used it to smoke drugs. I let it fall back on the bit of leather cord and stood. “You won’t be using that anytime soon.”
“I was getting sober,” she said with an edge to her voice. “That pipe represents the demons I was fighting. Until you fucked it all up.”
Yeah, right. “Looked to me like you were getting ready to die.”
“Whatever.”
I smirked and turned back around. She was a tool.
Nothing more.
The road stretched ahe
ad of us, twisting like snake as it rounded copses of trees with barren branches and fields left fallow by farmers who were dead and gone. I could see mountains somewhere in the distance. We were headed west.
I didn’t want to go west. I wanted to go anywhere but there, but that was where I had to go. And no amount of me putting it off would change the fact that my destination was toward the setting sun. Last night’s sucker had confirmed what I suspected, what I least wanted to be true.
I took a breath, gathered up the slack in the chain, and started walking down the road again. I didn’t have to like it, I just had to get it done.
Diablo.
4
Eventually, someone decided enough was enough.
We started turning the tables on the vampires. The hunted became the hunters. All that cliche shit that you read about happening, happened. Somewhere, someone came up with a name for us and it stuck.
Mortal Makers.
We were the remnants of the warriors who used to do the dirty work for governments and criminals. Drawn together to fight the scourge of evil that plagued our planet. We were a mixed lot. Some didn’t last long enough to do the damned job they’d signed up for. Others, well, we did okay. If you can call hunting bloodsuckers “okay.”
There wasn’t much glory in it. Not the way there had been back when I was with the Teams. Even then, though, we did our work in the shadows. No limelight, no recognition. Just the satisfaction of a job well done.
After the Event, our work was gritty and nasty. At first, it wasn’t that hard to find them. They were everywhere. Go into an attic or a cellar and chances were about eighty percent that you’d find one. They were the ones that got turned first. They’d been easy victims when they were human. Now they were easy pickings as suckers, too. There’s a hierarchy, after all. In any group, there are going to be the easy kills - the ones who don’t have a chance of fighting you off.
Those suckers had survived primarily due to fear. If any human had stood up to them, they probably could have fought them off. There’s no real fight putting a stake into the heart of a forty-something balding financial analyst with a paunch and no idea how to put his hands up and deflect a blow.
We mowed through those suckers like they were dead grass. Put them down and hard. We sent a message that we were coming back to retake our world.
That didn’t sit well with the other suckers. Word got around about us - that there was a band of pesky human warriors with the gall to not sit around and wait to get picked off; that we were going to fight back and kill them all.
Naturally, they decided to take the offensive and come after us. We lost a few of our brothers and sisters that way. The ones we lost weren’t really up to snuff with the rest of us. They’d been more like hangers-on. Wanna-bes who talked a good game but had only a modicum of the experience necessary to truly survive with the professionals.
So the suckers took them first.
I didn’t shed much of a tear over them. The way I saw it, they shouldn’t have misrepresented themselves as being something they weren’t. They put us all in danger with their false backgrounds.
In my previous life, in order to get into my unit, they put your face up on a wall and everyone got a vote. Inevitably, people had served with you before - with good or bad experiences. Get enough check marks and you got in. Too many Xs and you were history.
The reason was simple: the unit I was in was tasked with the highest levels of covert operations in the country. You undertake those missions knowing that only the best are serving with you. You have to have absolute faith that the men beside you have your back as you have theirs. There’s no room for ego, no room for bullshit, and certainly no room for fakery. That shit gets you and your teammates killed.
So they culled our ranks for us. As far as I was concerned they did us a favor.
The suckers, though, they got smart.
Instead of coming after us en masse, they started making our work harder. They stopped being easy to find. Easy to kill. It took real work. And they took great joy in tearing apart our brothers and sisters that they caught.
What was once a relatively easy job became harder. We lost a lot more that way. Not that we’d ever numbered in the thousands or anything, but we had a couple hundred hardened souls who were doing good work. Tough men and women accustomed to violence, who knew how to dish it out and get results. Hitmen, soldiers, hell, we even had a few women who’d been professional roller derby stars - they were some of the toughest I’d ever seen.
I missed them the most.
We were whittling their numbers down, that was apparent, but I was never sure if I trusted the assumption that there was a finite number of them. And even if there was, they still had the ability to turn any survivors they found and replenish their supply.
If that was even what they wanted.
We knew there had to be one calling the shots. We knew most of them operated independently and yet there was also this hive mentality at the same time. You could see it in their eyes when you stuck them through the heart. They’d roll over white for a moment, as if they were somehow telepathically connected to the queen bee and letting her know they were about to die.
Fuck me, I’m talking about telepathy in the same way I talk about a cheeseburger. Back in the day, I didn’t believe in any of this shit. I wasn’t a god-fearing man; I didn’t go for superstitions. I enjoyed Halloween and a good slasher flick, but as far as any hocus-pocus mumbo jumbo went, you could keep that silliness away from me.
Funny how your perspective changes when you see vampires attacking people and sucking them dry. That first image sears itself into your brain and it’s never far from your mind anytime you close your eyes.
I used to lock my nightmares away in a box that I kept up on a high shelf in the back of my mental closet. These days, my nightmares walk beside me every single goddamned day.
And night.
Mostly at night.
I looked back at Ares. She was part of this, like it or not. I was using her to kill as many suckers in my sector as I could. But even she had an expiration date. If any of the suckers got to her before I could stake them, there was a chance she might turn into one of them. If that happened, my directive was clear: kill her so she didn’t become part of the problem.
Judging from the track marks on her arm, Ares had been part of the drug epidemic that swept the nation right before the Event happened. And then continue even after the whole world started going to shit. Heroin, fentanyl, opioids…it wasn’t surprising so many humans had been such easy pickings for the suckers. This was what happened when we had an idiot in the White House and an out-of-control pharmaceutical industry intent on creating addicts for their products.
Say what you want, but at least the drug dealers knew they were evil. Pharmaceutical companies used to pretend they were saving people, but in reality the addiction was almost exactly the same.
These days, there weren’t many addicts around. The opioids had been looted first from the pharmacies and drug stores. Hell, even the suckers set up shop so they could make an easy score on the humans stupid enough to go there looking for a quick hit. They got the hit all right, just not exactly what they thought it was going to be.
Some of the outposts, though, they still had a seedy underside. Fucking post-apocalyptic earth and some scumbag is still gonna try to make a buck fucking other people over with their shit. I was giving strong consideration to going into scumbag hunting after we mopped up the suckers. I was tired of seeing people like Ares getting the shaft. I knew she’d done some bad shit, but maybe she wouldn’t have if she’d had half a chance.
Then again, maybe she would.
I frowned and got my head right. Ares was bait. Nothing more. When she’d outlived her usefulness, she was going to die by my hand. That was the deal I’d made with the people who’d had her in custody. Luckily, the fact that I was a Mortal Maker carried almost enough weight to make them give her to me willingly.
A
lmost.
The fact that I was armed and could have dropped them all without batting an eye probably carried its own weight.
Whatever it took.
I stopped and brought my compass out. It was one of the few things I had left from my days with the unit. It still worked like a charm, even though some people thought the earth must have tilted on its axis some when the Event happened.
Me? I didn’t believe it.
Evil doesn’t need much to thrive. Most of the time, all it takes is a willingness on the part of people not to do anything when they see it. They’re conditioned to be sheep. So sheep they be.
Luckily for them, there are still folks like me.
And we hunt the evil.
5
Our numbers started to dwindle. Where once we’d been a force to be reckoned with, the suckers killed enough of us to tilt the odds back into their favor. They culled our ranks until only the best of us were left. And then even the good ones started dying. Eventually, the suckers managed to kill almost all of us.
Almost.
There were a few left. Scattered over different zones, trying our best to kill more of the suckers and work our way back to the Source. That was what we wanted. If we could find the first One who had spawned all of this evil, if we could manage to locate and kill it, then who knew? Maybe, just maybe, we could take our world back.
Maybe.
As the sun beat down on my neck, I stopped and reached inside one of my cargo pockets. The map was old, wrinkled, and torn in place. But I’d managed to find some sheet plastic and coat it so it wouldn’t degrade any more than it already had. The lines and roads were all outdated, but I didn’t care about them. All I wanted to know was the general direction to head in.
Diablo.
As shitty a place as any I’d ever heard of. A border town filled with bandits, scumbags, and every other form of wretched humanity that had somehow managed to eke out a living scraping the bottom of the shit-stained barrel that was our world.