by Sam Sisavath
Wash shook the man’s hand. “It was good timing for both of us. I needed some supplies, and you needed a hand.”
“I think we got the better end of the deal, if you ask me.” The mayor took a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and briefly glanced at it. “This is everything?”
“That’s everything.”
“Most of what’s on here is no problem. The only thing we don’t have is coffee. Sorry. There hasn’t been coffee around here for years.”
“And everything else?”
“We can spare everything else.” He put the paper away. “When do you need them?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow, so whenever you can put them together for me.”
“So soon?”
“Like I said, I have to get going.”
“Texas.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’ll make sure we have it ready for you by morning, then.”
“Thank you.”
The mayor stood up and walked around his desk, then nodded for Wash to follow him. Wash sighed. He could feel a sales pitch coming from a mile away, but he let the mayor lead him out of the one-room office and out onto the front porch anyway. It wasn’t like he could do anything or go anywhere until morning anyway.
Harrisonville, like every other ghoul collaborator town Wash had been through, was small and self-contained, with a single main street and a handful of alleyways and side roads. It wasn’t anywhere close to a main highway and was surrounded by walls of trees to one side and a lake behind it. The water made it ideal and allowed the town to be self-sustaining as the resettled population learned to farm and raise livestock. It was as “country” as you could get, and Wash had crossed hundreds like it since he began traveling the country with the Old Man almost five years ago.
And yet, despite his familiarity with places like Harrisonville, the alienness of his surroundings lingered. He didn’t belong here. Not with these people trying to carve some semblance of a life for themselves the best they could. He wasn’t like them, and he would never be.
“You’re a slayer, son,” the Old Man once said to him. “You don’t have the scars like the rest of us, but you’re a slayer through and through. You were made for this. I knew you were a natural the day I met you.”
Wash wasn’t sure how much of that was true, especially since he hadn’t killed a thing—living or unliving—before he met the Old Man. But there was no denying that the old timer had been right. Wash was good at this. Really good. So good, in fact, that sometimes it scared him when he allowed himself to think about it for too long. Which was why he tried not to.
The tick-tick-tick-tick of the watch on his left wrist, hidden underneath his sleeve, echoed softly in his ears, pushing away the questions and doubts like they always did.
“How old are you, son?” the mayor was asking him.
Wash flinched at the word son, but the older man probably didn’t notice because he was too busy lighting a homemade pipe. He took a long draw from it, then pushed out a puff of smoke into the chilly night air around them. The older man shivered slightly and clutched his sweater tighter around him, but Wash had been knee-deep in the temperature for so long during the last twenty-four hours that he hardly felt it.
“Twenty-five,” Wash lied. It wasn’t too far from the truth, and he had the grizzled face of experience to sell it to most people. At night, it was even easier.
He leaned against one of the poles holding up the awning while the mayor sat on an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair and puffed away. Harrisonville resembled towns in all those cowboy movies that the Old Man loved so much. Except for the lightbulbs, cars, and every technology invented since the horse and buggy that didn’t need 24/7 electricity to run them. There were enough lights in Harrisonville thanks to the strategically placed solar-powered LEDs to see with, but they were dimmed to conserve energy.
Wash’s eyes were drawn to the windows of a big brown apartment directly in front of them, each one fastened with rebars on the outside. The place was almost completely dark except for a couple of windows, and in one of them, along the second floor, Wash watched a woman moving around on the other side. An early riser. It was easy enough to tell she was a woman when she pulled her nightgown over her head and the shape of her breasts were revealed, just before she turned and open a dresser to sift through its contents.
Wash pulled back his sleeve to check his watch: A few minutes past five. It would be sunup in thirty minutes or so.
He returned his gaze to the woman on the second floor as she slipped a long-sleeved shirt on and did the buttons. The way she stood, the outline of her feminine frame perfectly exposed to the window by the candlelight behind her, made him wonder if she was putting on a show for his benefit.
“Twenty-five,” the mayor was saying. “Isn’t that too young to be doing what you’re doing?”
Wash smiled. “You haven’t met a lot of slayers, have you?”
“Can’t say that I have. Why?”
“Twenty-five isn’t young. It’s old.”
“Is that right?”
“Most slayers are in their twenties. I’ve met a few in their teens. The ones in their thirties are far and few. The ones older than that…” He paused before continuing. “It’s not the kind of life that lends itself to retirement plans.”
“I guess not.”
Wash wondered if the mayor was being naïve on purpose, but he quickly dismissed that possibility. Most people didn’t know what it took to do what he did; they just knew that he did it so they didn’t have to.
Just like the woman on the other side of the second-floor window. She would never know what it was like to voluntarily go out into the darkness and wait for the monsters. She would never get close enough to smell them, get so close so often that she instinctively knew if they were around when there was even the slightest shift in the air.
The mayor had gone quiet next to him and seemed content to sit there, puffing on his pipe in silence.
Wash shuffled his feet. “What’s on your mind?”
“You could stay here,” the mayor said. “We need people like you.”
“You expecting more ghoul trouble?”
“That’s one reason. They’re never really going to go away, are they?”
Wash shook his head. He liked the way the mayor had said that, with certainty. He’d met too many people who had their heads in the sand and tried to pretend The Walk Out solved everyone’s problems. It did—a lot of it, in fact—but the monsters didn’t all go away in the blink of an eye. Some of them stayed behind. And some of the ones that refused to vanish were even more dangerous than the black-eyed ones.
“No, they’re not,” Wash said.
“I don’t expect so,” the mayor said. “But the reason I say we need you isn’t for your abilities, son.”
Wash flinched again at the word.
“We need men,” the mayor continued, as if that should explain everything.
And Wash guessed it did. Women outnumbered men by a healthy margin everywhere he went. Most of them were single moms, and everyone knew why. Just as everyone knew the reason the vast majority of children across the world were either five years old or under. Harrisonville had its share of those. Everyone did.
“I gotta get to Texas,” Wash said. “There’s something down there I gotta do, that I can’t put off.”
“You can have your pick,” the mayor said. “You’re not a bad-looking young man. Women would be throwing themselves at you.”
Wash smiled at that. He knew a few slayers who would beg to disagree. Even the woman from earlier, in the woods, who kept calling him an asshat might have a different opinion of his looks.
“You wouldn’t have to know anything about farming or ranching,” the mayor continued. “You could learn those skills if you wanted, or you could do something else. There’s plenty of work around here, but it’d be your choice. I’m opening the world to you here, son. Just say yes.”
It was tempting, Wash h
ad to admit, even as he watched the silhouette of the woman on the second-floor apartment sit down on the edge of her bed and slip on a pair of pants. She was tall, with long hair, and from what he’d seen of her outline, slim and athletic. He wondered what she looked like in real life.
“There are plenty of single women who don’t have kids yet,” the mayor said. “You have choices, is what I’m saying. A lot more than what’s out there, I’d bet. A lot more than what’s down south in Texas. Think about it. Harrisonville can use someone like you; you could make a good home here.”
“It’s not about choices…”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. I gotta go south. That’s not a choice. That’s just something that is.”
“You have to, or you want to?”
“I have to.”
“That’s too bad.”
Yeah, it is too bad, Wash thought as the woman blew out the candle and her apartment went dark, her figure vanishing along with the light.
He heard the Old Man’s voice in his head, saying to him, “The job’s done. It’s time to move on to the next one. Next!”
Next…
Wash looked over at the mayor. “When you hired me to clear out those ghouls in the woods, you said you hadn’t seen another slayer in years. Is that right?”
The mayor nodded. “Yes. Why?”
“There was someone else in the woods at the same time as me. A woman.”
“Another slayer?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
The mayor seemed to think about it for a moment. “We didn’t hire anyone else. Just you. If there was another slayer out there, she was on her own. Did she say what she was doing around here?”
“She didn’t stick around to answer my questions.”
“Sorry I can’t help you, son,” the mayor said. “I don’t know why anyone would be out there at night, alone.” Then, with a grin, “Well, you know what I mean.”
Wash grinned back. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
But his mind was already back to a few hours ago, when he got his first glimpse of the ginger as she moved through the woods without any semblance of fear.
Who are you?
The question nagged at Wash long after he collected his payment and rode out of town a few hours later, with the morning sunlight in his face. He knew a dangerous person when he met one, and the redhead was that. Not only because she could handle herself out there with just a knife, but the way she had gone from looking like she wanted to kill him to smiling at him a moment later.
Which made what she’d said to him even more ironic:
“There are a lot of dangerous people out there these days. You can never be too careful.”
Four
He walked into Harrisonville on foot with supplies that barely filled out half of his pack’s available space and rode out on a big brown-orange horse while pulling a light black one behind him as a pack mule. It wasn’t a bad haul for a day’s work, and being mounted instead of walking was going to greatly increase his speed heading south.
“You have choices, is what I’m saying,” the mayor had said. “A lot more than what’s out there, I’d bet. A lot more than what’s down south in Texas. Think about it. Harrisonville can use someone like you; you could make a good home here.”
He had thought about it, during the conversation and again afterward as he waited for them to saddle his horses. It was a tempting offer, and it still was now as he put the town behind him, the sounds of doors slamming, horse hooves, and people getting ready for another day ringing in the crisp morning air. The mayor had wanted him to stay, but in a day or two they would forget about him as life continued. It was just how it is; he had made peace with that a long time ago, ever since the Old Man first showed him how to fight.
“You were made for this. I knew you were a natural the day I met you.”
Was that a good thing? He wondered what his mother would say if she knew about the path he’d taken, or the one he was on now. Like so many others, she hadn’t survived that first night of The Purge. Wash could hardly remember what she looked like six years later. It was something he hated to admit, but it was the truth. Maybe, he thought, that was for the best. Would she approve of what he had become now?
It doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Just like a whole lot of other people...
He rode along a dirt path barely larger than a single road lane flanked by thick towering trees on both sides. Harrisonville was isolated from the main roads, which was exactly how they liked it. Wash only knew it existed because of the map he carried. Without it, he would have passed the town by, clueless of its existence and vice versa.
The temperature was still low enough that he was glad for his thermal clothing, but warm enough that he couldn’t see his breath. He’d hated to burn the shirt and pants from last night, but there was no use in trying to wash out ghoul blood. It always lingered, even when you thought you had gotten every last bit of it. Maybe most people didn’t notice, but Wash did.
“I gotta go south,” he had told the mayor, and that was the direction he pointed the big brown-orange horse now, while the black carried most of his supplies behind him. A lead rope attached to the black’s bridle and wrapped around Wash’s saddle horn ensured the animal wouldn’t take off.
Horsepower was the preferred mode of transportation these days, with gasoline being a pain in the ass to find. That hadn’t been the case during The Purge year, but the five or so since The Walk Out had seen survivors scattering across the country gobbling up what hadn’t rotted or become unusable. Hoarders were everywhere, and people in towns like Harrisonville had collected everything they could around them, some even sending searchers far and wide to claim what was left behind before someone else could stumble across them.
Someone like him, for instance.
Wash got around that, as did most slayers, by providing services in return for payment. “You got a ghoul problem? We’ll kill them for you. For a price.” Someone in Iowa had even made a song from that, based on some horror movie Wash had never seen but heard the Old Man talk about once or twice. Something about ghosts…
He had put a good five or so miles on Harrisonville when he felt that familiar sensation, like a gnat nipping at the edge of his peripheral vision. It was hard to explain, but Wash always had a good sense when someone was watching him, like now.
He remained poised in the saddle and kept the orange-brown moving forward at the same unhurried pace he’d been on for the last hour or so. He kept his head straight while his eyes snapped left and right; the problem was that he couldn’t see behind him. The black animal was quiet back there, its unshod hooves plop-plop-plopping against the uneven dirt underneath them. The horse Wash was sitting on was similarly unshod, which was common because of the lack of skilled blacksmiths. It was just easier to let them move unencumbered by loud clopping steel shoes.
Wash calmed down his breathing—his heartbeat had accelerated slightly—so he could hear better. Gradually, the deliberate plop-plop-plop of the horse under him and the one behind him quieted. Even the familiar tick-tick-tick-tick of the watch began to fade into the background.
He listened, and heard…
Nothing.
He couldn’t hear a single thing coming from either his left or his right, or from behind him that shouldn’t have been there. The only noises other than his own breathing and the animals’ were the birds in the trees. A flock of them, forming a V, flew by overhead.
Maybe I’m wrong…
If he were, it would be a first. He’d never been wrong before, and Wash had learned to trust his instincts. It had saved his life too many times for him to start doubting it now. There was someone—or someones—out there, watching, and following him.
“That’s what instincts are for,” the Old Man once said. “Either you trust it, or you don’t. There’s no in-between.”
Wash’s left hand held the reins while his right rested lazily on his high. The holstered Beretta was wi
thin easy reach, and that was the weapon he would go for first. The Mossberg 590A1 tactical shotgun slung behind him from a strap would have to remain a backup since unslinging it would take too much time and effort. The sheathed kukri on his left hip was also a good weapon as long as whoever was following him didn’t have a gun of their own.
So it had to be the Beretta. The M9 had seventeen silver-tipped rounds in the magazine with an additional bullet in the pipe. Eighteen in all. That was more than enough to deal with whoever was out there…as long as they didn’t already have him sighted with their own gun. In which case he was a dead man, regardless of what weapon he grabbed first.
It wasn’t a very appealing conclusion, but wishing for something better didn’t make it come true. He’d learned that from the Old Man, too.
Wash took some comfort in the knowledge that if there were guns already pointed at him, they could have shot him anytime and he wouldn’t have seen it coming. People got killed on the roads on a regular basis. It wasn’t just the complete lack of law enforcement, but also the abundant availability of weapons everywhere. That was just one of many reasons why people like the ones in Harrisonville rarely ventured outside their comfort zone. Only a fool would do that.
He had already planned to stop and let the two horses graze in another hour, but whoever was out there (Unless you’re wrong) didn’t know that. Still using the same unhurried pace, he pulled the orange-brown off to the side of the path and calmly climbed down from the saddle. He tied the reins to a large branch nearby, even though he was pretty sure the horse could snap it if it wanted to. The animals immediately knew what stopping meant and began chewing on nearby green grass while standing side by side.
Wash began stretching, his ears opened for every sound besides his own quickening heartbeat and the chirping of birds in the trees around him. There was a time when birds were too scared to make any noise, but The Walk Out had changed everything for them, just as it had for Wash and the rest of humanity.
When he was done stretching, Wash unzipped his pants with one hand while walking away from the road. He didn’t go completely through the charade and pull himself out to take a leak, but he made the motions. He hoped it was enough to convince anyone who might be watching from nearby.