by Sam Sisavath
“You haven’t given up yet, have you?” it asked in an almost singsong voice. “Well, have you?”
“Not tonight, asshole,” she said. Or grunted out. Just breathing hurt.
“Show me,” it said. “Let me see that human spirit. Let me taste it.”
Then it was in front of her—again, moving so fast she couldn’t keep track of it.
Instead of trying to figure it out, Ana swung.
And missed.
It had stepped to the side, its taunting grin widening. Before she could balance herself and strike again, cold, skeletal fingers grabbed her around the throat and lifted her into the air, and Ana thought, This is it. This is the end. God, I’m going to die out here in fucking Texas.
I hate Texas…
But she didn’t die. At least, not right away.
Instead, Ana was moved through the air, maneuvered like she was little more than a rag doll in the hands of an impatient child. There was pain in all her extremities, but maybe the worst was the burning fire in her chest, threatening to cave the universe in on her. Her legs kicked at empty air as it held her up with hardly any effort. She couldn’t even fight back with her boots or her fists because she didn’t know where it was behind her. The damn thing couldn’t even give her that little bit of dignity in death.
“You took your time,” it hissed.
What?
“But you’re finally here,” it said.
Finally here? What the hell are you talking about, you stupid piece of shit?
Ana’s mind went blank when she saw him stepping out of the darkness. He walked toward them with all the patience of a saint, and there was nothing that even looked remotely looked like fear on his face.
She didn’t think she’d ever see him alive again, but there he was.
Wash.
His eyes lingered on her, and Ana felt suddenly embarrassed. She tried to imagine the sight of her face—purple and bruised, her cracked lips bleeding. It was anything but the image she’d wanted to give him when they finally reunited.
There was just a ghost of a smile on his lips, as if he was saying to her, Everything will be all right. Everything will be fine.
She wanted desperately to believe him, but she couldn’t. How could she?
Then Wash looked past her even as he continued walking toward them. He wasn’t armed with anything but that strange knife of his, still in a sheath at his side. He hadn’t even pulled it out yet. Why hadn’t he taken it out yet? What was he waiting for?
“I told you I’d find you,” Wash said. He wasn’t talking to her.
One Eye might have snickered behind her. It made something that resembled a snicker, anyway. “Find me?” it hissed. “You didn’t find me, boy. I allowed you to catch up. There’s nothing you’ve done up to this point that hasn’t been with my blessing. The girl at the farmhouse, the one in the road…”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Wash said.
“The truth hurts.”
“The truth is that I’m going to kill you.”
“You think so, don’t you? You really, really think so.”
“I’ve killed plenty of your kind. What makes you so different?”
It grunted. “I saw you, through one of my children’s eyes. Escaping from the barn earlier. But I knew you wouldn’t follow the woman. I knew you would turn around and run toward the fire. Because that’s who you are. You can’t deny your nature.”
“You told them to hold me in Jasper until you came back. That mistake is going to cost you.”
“Please. I told you I wasn’t going to end our little game until I was ready.”
“Are you ready now?”
“I’m bored now,” the monster said. “So it ends here, tonight—”
The creature stopped in mid-sentence and made what might have been sniffing sounds, and Ana thought, Why is it sniffing the air?
“You’re not alone,” it hissed. “You’re trying to hide someone from me, but I can smell him. I can hear his heartbeat—”
Wash’s eyes had suddenly shifted back to her about a split second before he shouted, “Now!”
Now? Ana thought just before thick warm wetness splashed her from behind and she was suddenly free from the creature’s icy-cold grip.
Then she was falling, falling…
Wash
Twenty
He didn’t hear the gunshot, but he felt its heat as it punched through his left thigh. There was an instant jolt of pain, but not the unrelenting torture that would have accompanied a better-placed shot. It was good enough, though, to knock him down. He managed to stick both arms out just in time to keep himself from eating a mouthful of dirt.
Wash remained that way—on his knees with palms pressed into the ground, bent over like a victim waiting for the final blow—for the next few seconds. He closed his eyes and counted to five. There was no point in getting back up and running. The shooter had already spotted him, and now all they had to do was move their weapon slightly and finish Wash where he kneeled.
Four seconds…
Three…
Two…
One?
Wash sucked in a deep breath before sitting down and taking a long look at his wound. If the sniper was still intent on ending him, he continued to have a perfect opportunity. Wash wouldn’t have even seen or heard the bullet coming, just like he hadn’t seen or heard the first shot.
“Walked right into it, huh, kid?” the Old Man said. “Should have stayed back at the barn.”
I should have done a lot of things. What’s one more wrong move?
For a brief moment, Wash entertained the idea that he’d been clipped by a stray shot from the town he’d been running toward, but that couldn’t have been true. He was still too far from the place; not that it would have been impossible, just very improbable. Besides, while he could continue to make out fire flickering in the distance, the gunfire had lessened to only the occasional volleys, signs that the fighting was almost over.
Wash let the rest of the cold night fade into the background and concentrated instead on his immediate surroundings. Whoever was out there, they were using a suppressed rifle. No one was going to hit him from a distance with a pistol. But there’d been no muzzle flashes. It might have been dark, but his night eyes had adjusted and he was seeing fine enough despite the lack of light. You didn’t do the kind of work he did without developing extraordinary night eyes.
“And yet, he tagged you first,” the Old Man said.
What’s your point?
“Maybe your eyes aren’t as good as you think?”
Wash unfurled the cloth he’d been using to cover up the rope scars on his left wrist and tied it around his thigh. The bullet hadn’t missed by much, but it could have been a lot worse. He would take the small amount of blood over a shattered femur any day of the week. Still, the impact site throbbed noticeably and continued to do so long after he had tied the fabric around it to stanch the minor bleeding. It wasn’t the blood he was worried about; like everything else out here, it was the infection that killed you.
He worked calmly, without hurry. If the sniper had wanted to finish him off, he would have done so a long time ago. So Wash wasn’t worried about that. He’d find out the who and why of it soon enough.
In the meantime, he lay down on the ground to catch his breath and stare up at the dark, starless sky. He was tired, his legs sore even before the shot. How many kilometers had he run from Jasper? Two? Three? Somewhere around there. It was a little tricky to gauge distance when you couldn’t really make out more than a few meters in front or around you at any given time. And no matter how long he ran, the burning town never seemed to get any closer.
“So you’re just going to lie here and wait for death?” the Old Man asked.
Sure, why not.
“I thought you had a mission, kid. What happened to the mission?”
It’s not going anywhere.
“It?”
It…
Footsteps
, getting closer.
“Uh oh. Here comes the Grim Reaper,” the Old Man said. “Maybe it’s time to get up now?”
No.
“You sure?”
Yes.
“Well, it’s your funeral.” Then the Old Man chuckled. “It’s our funeral, actually.”
Har har, Wash thought as the tick-tick-tick-tick on his wrist counted down the seconds since the footsteps initially registered.
Thirty seconds now…
Tick-tick-tick-tick…
One minute…
Tick-tick-tick-tick…
“You going to just lie there?” a voice called out. Wash easily recognized the voice.
Keith.
Of course it was Keith. Who else would be lying in wait for him all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere? The man was a bane on Wash’s existence.
“There’s a lot of ways to get rid of banes,” the Old Man said. “That kukri would work just fine.”
The machete was on the ground next to him, where he had laid it down, but Wash didn’t reach for it. His hands—both of them—were on his chest, rising and falling with his shallow heartbeats. He was calm and under control, even as everything Lyla had told him about Keith echoed inside his head.
But it was one thing she’d said that stuck out the most:
“He’s working with it… He does what it tells him to do. He says it’s to protect us, to keep the town safe…”
There’s the angle. There’s my opening.
He sat up and looked forward, in the direction the shot had come from. Keith stepped out of the darkness, cradling a semiautomatic rifle with a suppressor at the end of the barrel. Like that first night when Wash saw him, Keith was wearing black from head to toe; he might have even had the same trench coat on. And there was the gas mask, swaying back and forth from his left hip, over a big sheathed knife. He had a gun holster on his right.
The man walked over casually, his eyes on Wash. Small flickers of flame from the no-name town continued to move sporadically in the background, casting Keith in an almost eerie silhouette that could have passed for the specter of death.
“Not too far from the truth,” the Old Man said.
This isn’t the time, old timer.
“When is the time?”
When I’m dead.
“Soon, then?”
Wash smirked.
“What’s so funny?” Keith asked.
“Private joke,” Wash said.
“Oh, come on. You can share.”
“Not with the man who’s almost killed me twice now.”
“If I’d wanted to kill you either times, you’d be dead.”
“He’s got a point,” the Old Man said.
Yeah, he’s got a point.
Keith stopped about ten meters from Wash, that rifle of his held in such a way that all he had to do was tilt it slightly upward and pull the trigger, and Wash was a dead man. Not that Wash thought Keith was going to do that. Not the “dead” part, anyway, but there were other options available to Keith. Like how he had shot Wash in the leg earlier, when he could have aimed for any body part…
“Nice shot,” Wash said, rubbing his bandaged thigh.
“Could have been better, but you were moving too fast.” He looked past Wash for a second, toward Jasper. “You ran all the way from Jasper?”
“Pretty much. Had to stop to take a breather or two.”
“Impressive.”
“You’re too easily impressed.”
Keith smirked. “I meant for a guy in your condition.”
“No thanks to you.”
“We all do what we have to.”
“Is that why you’re doing this? You’re surviving?”
“What do you think?”
“You’re trying to protect your town. I get that. Maybe I would have even done the same thing, in your shoes. Your back was up against the wall. You didn’t have a lot of options. I get that. I really do.”
Keith narrowed his eyes at Wash. “You’ve been talking to Lyla.”
“How do you think I got out of the barn?”
Keith grunted. “I told that girl so many times…”
He looked past Wash and toward Jasper again, as if he could see it in the distance. “Is she out there somewhere? You didn’t do something stupid like bring her with you, did you?”
“No,” Wash said.
Keith didn’t look like he believed Wash.
“She fled,” Wash said. “She knows where you were, and she went in the other direction.”
“Of course she did.” The Jasper man sighed. “It’s okay. Not the first time she’s done something like this. That kid is too headstrong for her own good.”
The way he was talking about Lyla, including his reactions, struck Wash as funny. He had expected Keith to be angry, but instead there was this odd…acceptance?
“She’s your sister, isn’t she?” Wash said.
Keith looked back at him. “She told you that, too?”
“No. But it’s not hard to figure out. The only people in this world who can drive us as crazy as she’s clearly driven you is family.”
“You speaking from experience?”
Wash shrugged.
“Yeah. She’s my little sister,” Keith said. “Although, she doesn’t always act like it.”
“Family, right?”
“Yeah, family.”
“Is it all true? Everything she said about you and why you’re doing this?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“You hung me up in your barn for a whole day, and you just fucking shot me. I’m thinking it’s my business.”
“Fair point,” Keith said.
Keith glanced behind him, toward the unnamed town. There was still some sporadic gunfire, but they were far and few now. Whatever was going on back there, it was definitely winding down. If it was a fight, someone was winning, and someone was about to lose very soon.
“I can kill it,” Wash said.
Keith looked back at him. “Kill what?”
“It.”
“It?”
“It,” Wash said.
“Nothing can kill it,” Keith said. “I’ve seen them without their heads. Silver can kill the black eyes, but this one….” He shook his head. “It’s different. The blue eyes are different.”
“You’re right, they are. But they have their own weaknesses. You can kill them if you know how.”
“Bullshit.”
“The brain.”
“The brain?”
“Destroy the brain, and you kill the blue eyes.”
Keith stared at him but stayed silent. Maybe he was trying to decide how much to trust Wash. Or maybe he was trying to figure out where he could shoot Wash again and still keep him alive for One Eye. It was difficult to read the man’s face, and the lack of light, coupled with Keith’s naturally placid expression, didn’t help.
“So this is your plan?” the Old Man asked.
Yup.
“Then I guess you better make it one hell of a sales pitch, kid!”
That’s the plan.
“It’s true,” Wash said. “Take out the brain, and you waste the blue eyes.”
“And how exactly did you come by this knowledge?” Keith asked.
“It’s my job. It’s what I do.” Wash nodded at the kukri on the ground next to him. “I’m a slayer.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen what you look like underneath those clothes. You don’t have the marks.”
“Just like the nightcrawlers, not all slayers are the same.”
Something flashed across Keith’s face. Was that…doubt?
“But is he doubting you, or One Eye?” the Old Man asked.
“You saw me at the RV,” Wash continued. “You saw what I could do. I would have beaten them back—all of them—if you hadn’t shown up.”
“Maybe…” Keith said.
“I can kill it,” Wash said. “We can kill it. Then you wouldn’t have to keep doing what you
’ve been doing. You wouldn’t have to work with it just to keep your town safe. You wouldn’t have to stay its slave. And you know what happens to slaves. They survive at the whim of their masters.”
Another silent response from Keith, though his face had changed. It was subtle, but it was there: More doubt.
At least, Wash hoped he had read it correctly, because if he was wrong…
“If you’re wrong, so what?” the Old Man said. “What’s he going to do that he wasn’t going to do before you started your little sales pitch?”
Good point.
“That’s what I’m here for,” the Old Man laughed.
“How?” Keith asked.
“How good are you with that rifle?” Wash asked.
“Before that”—Keith nodded at Wash’s bandaged left thigh—“I would have said pretty good. But now, maybe adequate would be more appropriate.”
“Like you said, I was moving. But you still got me.”
“Barely.”
“Barely counts.”
“You trying to make me feel better?”
I’m trying to get out of here alive, and if that means making you feel better about your shooting prowess, then that’s what it’ll take.
“It won’t be moving when you take your next shot,” Wash said.
Keith cocked his head slightly to one side, as if to say, Go on without actually saying it. Maybe he was worried One Eye might overhear. Out here, sounds traveled, and Wash knew that the blue eyes had hypersensitive hearing. Keith might know that, too.
“It’ll be too focused on me,” Wash said. “While it’s doing that, all you have to do is shoot it in the head.”
“That’s it, huh?” Keith said. He looked like he was about to laugh, but didn’t. “Just shoot it in the head?”
“In the brain, to be more specific. Do that, and your troubles are over. Jasper will be free.”
“Jasper is free now.”
“As long as you help it. As long as you stay its slave.”
“It’s called cooperation.”
“It’s called slavery,” Wash said. “Jasper is safe as long as you do its bidding. What happens when it changes its mind? When it decides it’d rather play with you than those poor bastards back there?”