by Sam Sisavath
Cold—impossibly icy cold—fingers wrapped around her leg as the nightcrawler raised its head back up. Clumps of thick liquid covered the center of its face where its nose used to be. Blood (or she assumed that was blood) trailed down the monster’s top upper lip and into its mouth, and that seemed to only encourage it.
Already?
There were sudden and quick shuffling movements from the corner of her eye, and Ana suddenly remembered it wasn’t just her and the ghoul inside the basement.
Gabriel!
She glanced over, but he wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs anymore. He was moving around, dodging and weaving, trying to get a better look at whoever was at the top of the stairs. The problem for Gabriel was that he didn’t have any places to hide. The only cover Ana could see were the boxes at the back of the basement. But depending on what were in those boxes, they might not be much help against a bullet. It looked, though, as if Gabriel had decided the best course of action wasn’t hiding but trying to kill the newcomer before the man could get him first, and that meant staying close to the stairs.
Forget about him!
She did, because she didn’t have any choice. The smell was back, slamming into her like bricks. She wished she could ignore it, but it was everywhere, scraping at the exposed parts of her skin, including her face. If its stench wasn’t enough, there was the feel of the thing using her legs as a ladder.
Ana went back to trying to rip the tape off her left arm. That was the key. If she could get both hands loose—
A bang! from somewhere on her left, followed by two more—bang! bang!
Gabriel, shooting.
She ignored them, because he was shooting at someone else and not her, and because right now she had other things to worry about.
Boom! as the newcomer fired back.
The shotgun was a little harder to ignore, especially when the basement walls shook from the loud blast and pieces of the banister that had been hit showered the air around her like wooden sprinkles.
Ignore it. Ignore it!
She stared down into black eyes instead. They were reminders that, once upon a time, the ghoul had been a person. That, in another life, it had a name and a gender and a family and loved ones. But all of that was gone now, replaced by this bony husk of a thing that only wanted one thing from her.
She could see its desires in the way it snarled, the thick liquids slipping and sliding from its yellow caverns of jagged teeth and down its chin. It wanted her. Not her, exactly, but the blood that flowed through her veins.
Ana couldn’t let it have it. She hadn’t given it up willingly years ago when everyone else was surrendering themselves to the night and joining collaborator towns. Instead, she had fled and hidden with Emily, fighting every day to find food, every night to stay hidden from the monsters that were everywhere.
All those nights, all those close calls, and she had never given up once.
Not once.
And she wasn’t going to give up now.
Ana hit the ghoul again with a balled fist, getting it in the cheek this time. Bone collapsed under her knuckles, but the monster refused to let go of her legs. If anything, she swore its grip only tightened.
So she hit it again, and again, and again.
On the fourth blow, it finally let go and careened backward for a second time.
Ana gave herself a brief moment to catch her breath, to force her heartbeat to slow down before it exploded out of her chest—
Boom!
Another shotgun blast, just as impossible to ignore as the last one.
She glanced over in time to see Gabriel backing up, his gun still aimed up the stairs at whoever was up there. Ana couldn’t see anything of the newcomer. The lights didn’t reach that far up the stairs, and the man was smartly hiding on the other side of the open door.
She waited for Gabriel to return fire, but he didn’t. Instead, he seemed to be moving very slowly, as if he were having trouble getting his legs to obey. She discovered why when she saw red drops of blood dotting the floor as he retreated.
He’s been shot!
The man was clutching his left side, even as blood pooled around his fingers. He was wounded, the wetness spreading quickly along his shirt and pants, but he was somehow still on his feet even if his face was twisted in intense concentration.
Go down, you bastard. Go down!
But he didn’t, and Gabriel continued squinting up the stairs even as he blinked away beads of sweat.
Fall down, damn you! Fall down!
Gabriel refused to do that, too, and continued backing up, though he was moving much, much slower now than he had been a few seconds earlier.
“He’s wounded!” Ana shouted. “Hey! You up there! He’s wounded! Now’s your chance to finish him off!”
Gabriel whirled in her direction, pain and anger flaring across his face. He mouthed something (she thought she might have caught the word bitch in there somewhere), before turning and pointing his gun at her.
I should have kept my mouth shut! Ana thought and squeezed her eyes closed.
Instead of the bang of a pistol firing, there was another boom! as the newcomer’s shotgun unloaded once again.
She opened her eyes slightly, just enough to peek at Gabriel as a big red blotch appeared across his chest. He took a hesitant step back once, twice, before collapsing to the floor. His gun flew out of his hand and clattered somewhere out of Ana’s peripheral vision.
A rush of joy overcame her, but it was short-lived, because a second later she felt fingers digging into the fabric of her shirt, and when she looked forward and down, she saw the ghoul’s deformed head appearing at her waist again. Its mouth snapped impatiently, dark liquids sliding between jagged teeth as pitch-black eyes zeroed in on her.
It was going to keep coming as long as she couldn’t get out of the chair. She had one hand free, but she was no closer to getting her left out. The fingers of her right hand were covered in strips of sticky tape, but there was still too much left keeping her left arm pinned.
Ana turned to the stairs and shouted, “He’s down! Gabriel’s down!”
“Ana?” a voice called from the top of the stairs.
The voice sounded familiar, but Ana couldn’t place it right away. Maybe it was the overwhelming sensation of the ghoul crawling up her body dominating everything, but she couldn’t even be sure if the shooter had actually said her name or someone else’s.
“Hurry!” she shouted. “Please, for God’s sake, get down here! There’s a ghoul in the basement with me!”
“Ana?” the voice said again. “Is that you?”
She was sure the man had said her name that time.
“Yes! It’s me! For the love of God, get your ass down here and kill this fucking thing, please!”
That did it, and she heard pounding footsteps. She only heard it because she couldn’t bring herself to look away from the ghoul as it reached up for her face, brushing at her neck with its long, slender fingers instead.
“Jesus,” a voice said.
Ana looked over as Shelby (!) jumped down the last couple of steps to stand over Gabriel’s unmoving form. The young slayer stood frozen, looking at the ghoul as it pulled itself well past her waistline, one hand reaching up for her throat…
“Shelby, for the love of God!” Ana shouted.
Shelby didn’t fire the shotgun. Instead, he laid it on the stairs and rushed forward, drawing the long machete strapped to his left hip.
Thunk! as he slammed the blade into the ghoul’s back, nearly cutting it in half. The only reason he hadn’t was because the sharp edge had gotten stuck in the spine. Ana didn’t have to ask or wonder if the machete was lined with silver. Shelby was a slayer, and everything he carried had silver in it.
The proof was the sight of the creature sliding down her body before finally slumping to the floor at her feet. Shelby pried the blade out of the dead (again) thing’s back, black blood dripping from the edge.
“Jesus,”
she whispered. “You took your fucking time.”
Shelby smirked. “You’re welcome.” He stared down at the ghoul. “Where’d that thing come from?”
Ana looked over at Gabriel. “He brought it.”
“Why the hell did he do that?”
“He’s a sick sonofabitch, that’s why.”
“I guess that’s a pretty good answer.”
Shelby walked over to Gabriel and picked the shotgun back up. Ana recognized it as Randall’s “Ol’ Pumpy,” as the other slayer called it. Shelby stood over Gabriel and nudged his body in the side with the steel toe of his boots a couple of times.
“He’s dead, Shelby,” Ana said.
“Just wanted to make sure,” the slayer said.
“How did you find—” she started to ask, but never got the chance to finish before people appeared at the top of the stairs.
One of them was Kelloway, who had a gun in her hand as she charged down to the basement. Two others, also armed, followed behind her.
Kelloway immediately saw Shelby standing over Gabriel’s body and pointed her gun at the slayer. “Don’t fucking move!”
Shelby dropped Randall’s Ol’ Pumpy and raised both hands into the air. “I can explain this.” Then, after a couple of seconds, nodded in Ana’s direction. “On second thought, she’ll probably be able to explain it better than I can.”
Kelloway looked down at Gabriel before glancing over at Ana. It took her a few more seconds before she finally noticed the dead ghoul crumpled at Ana’s feet. “What the fuck.”
“What I said,” Shelby said.
“Shut up!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Kelloway walked over as the other two kept their guns trained on Shelby. Gabriel’s second-in-command stared down at the ghoul for a moment before finally looking at Ana as if to say, Well?
Ana sighed. “It’s a long story…”
Thirteen
“He didn’t take you very far. I guess he didn’t have a lot of time and had to make do. Just took you one building over. It was under renovation, and the basement was pretty much the only still-usable part of it.”
Shelby talked and ate at the same time, and given that he had just saved her life, Ana didn’t mind watching him spill SPAM over his already-stained shirt as he forked the meat out in big (probably a little too big) chunks at a time. She was starving and had joined in as soon as he opened up a second can for her.
“I wouldn’t have found you if Rand hadn’t told me to keep an eye on that skunk,” Shelby continued. “He was sneaking around all night like some thief. I guess no one noticed. His people, anyway. But I noticed.”
“I’m glad you did,” Ana said.
“Had to skip a little sleepy sleepy to do it, too. But after what happened to Chuck, I wasn’t sure I was gonna get any anyways. Also, someone had to keep an eye on this gimp”—he nodded at Randall—“in case those boys came back to finish him off.”
“You did good, Shelby. I wouldn’t be alive now if it weren’t for you.”
The young man grinned. “I got my moments.”
“Thank God for them.”
She spooned another piece of SPAM and wolfed it down. Unlike Shelby, she was a lot cleaner with her food, even though she just wanted to shove the whole thing down in one gulp. She had never been so hungry in her life. Coming so close to death—never mind that foul-smelling ghoul—always had a way of doing that to her.
“What made Rand tell you to follow Gabriel around?” she asked. “Why was he suspicious?”
“He didn’t buy the guy’s story about what happened last night with you,” Shelby said.
“Which was?”
“Those four that took off earlier in the day came back to steal food from the kitchen, but ran into you and that two-faced dog instead. Then they absconded with you.” He paused. “Did I use that right? Abscond?”
She smiled. “Yeah, you did.”
“Cool. Anyway, when I told him about it, Rand said it didn’t make any sense. I guess he was right.”
“What about the others? Kelloway? Did she buy his story?”
“Kelloway might have been suspicious, but she didn’t say anything. At least not to me or Rand. They put up an extra guard rotation around town, but that was it. I guess they’re too used to that skunk being one of them. One of the”—he made air quotes—“good guys. Makes sense. Hard to question what he says after all these years.”
He had them all fooled. Me included.
She remembered Gabriel calling her a dangerous woman, that she was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“Look who’s talking,” she had said.
He had smiled in response. “I guess we both have that in common.”
“He had them fooled, all right,” Shelby was saying.
“Yeah, he did,” Ana said.
“And you say he told you he did it because he was bored?”
She nodded. “That’s what he said.”
“Well, damn. I could think of a lot of reasons to do what he did, but because he was bored? That’s some sick shit right there.”
“Tell me about it.”
“He say where the other four went?”
“Three.”
“Right. Three.”
She shook her head. “But no, he didn’t. Just that they’re out there somewhere.”
“Close by?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. If they’re smart, they won’t come back once they hear about what happened to Gabriel. I wouldn’t.”
“Neither would I,” Shelby said. “But I’m not a psychopath. At least, momma never said I was.”
They were back inside Randall’s room in the town hospital, watching him sleep peacefully on his bed while they sat on the windowsill nearby and ate. According to Shelby, the town’s doctors had given Randall an extra dose of sedative for the pain, which was why he remained oblivious to their chatter.
Ana herself had been treated by those same doctors. The cut along her right temple, where Gabriel had hit her with the frying pan, was stitched up and re-bandaged. They’d put ointment on the bruising along her face where Gabriel had punched her and knocked her out, but it was going to stay with her for a while.
That was fine with her. She wanted the extra reminder that she had screwed up anyway. She needed it. She’d been too trusting and let her guard down. Maybe it was the whole cowboy persona, or the good looks; whatever the reason, she’d made a mistake, and it’d almost cost her her life.
Can’t let that happen again. Never again.
She shivered slightly, remembering the sensation of the ghoul climbing up her legs, its fingers reaching for her throat…
Never again.
It was almost sunrise outside the window, and a soft glow had descended over the town of Mayfield. It had only been half a day since Gabriel put her in the basement, though it had seemed longer at the time. She should have been tired, but Ana wasn’t sure she could get any sleep even if she tried. She was too wired up.
“He tricked everyone,” Shelby was saying. “Even hoodwinked Chuck, and he’s usually pretty good at reading people.”
She nodded, remembering how sure Chuck had been that Gabriel was one of the good guys, just like Kelloway and the rest of the townspeople had been all these years.
Everybody screwed up. Especially me.
Another involuntary shiver at the still-fresh memory of the ghoul crawling up her body…
“You okay?” Shelby asked.
She gave him a pursed smile. “It’s been a long night.”
“That was a hell of a thing, the skunk putting that ghoul down there with you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one before.”
“The man was sick in the head. I don’t know how else to explain why he did the things he did.”
“I’ve seen some pretty messed up things since The Purge, but man, putting that nightcrawler in the basement with you…” He shook his head. “That’s a first.”
“Hopefully the last.”
“Amen to that, sister.”
They went back to eating, with only Randall’s snoring to interrupt the sounds of their spoons moving against the tin. Shelby was almost done with his can, and she’d gotten through half of hers when the door opened and Kelloway came in.
The Mayfield woman looked tired and worn down, and Ana had no trouble believing that she hadn’t slept a wink in the last twenty-four hours. Ana wished she could have felt some sympathy for the other woman, but she was the one who had been tied to an armchair in a basement just an hour ago.
“You guys need more food?” Kelloway asked.
“I could always use more food,” Shelby said. “Chuck says I have the metabolism of a horse. I don’t know what that means, but it sounded pretty good.”
“The cafeteria’s opening in thirty minutes for breakfast. You can grab what you need then.”
“I’ve never turned down free food before.”
The slayer hopped off the windowsill and hurried off, leaving Ana alone with Kelloway. Almost alone, anyway, except for the snoring Randall nearby.
“What did you find out?” Ana asked the other woman. She put her can down on the spot formerly occupied by Shelby.
“There were three more ghouls in the old mine. Tied up. It looked like they’d been…” She stopped.
“It looked like they’d been what?”
“Tortured,” Kelloway finished.
“The ghouls?”
“Yeah. Either that, or played with. I don’t know. Maybe there’s no difference.” Kelloway walked over to a chair and sat down. “Anyway, we put them out of their misery.” She looked toward the window behind Ana. “The sun should be doing its job on their remains right now.”
“No one ever checked the mines?”
“Why would we? It hasn’t produced anything in decades. There’s a reason we call it the ‘old mine.’”
“What about the others? The three that’s still out there?”
“Keenan, Patrick, and Sullivan.”
“Yeah.”
“And he told you that Bates wasn’t part of it?”
“He said Bates was his stand-in. I got the impression they either killed Bates or took him with them to put Gabriel in the clear.”