“No,” Wash said.
“Is that the Old Man’s pack?” Williams asked.
“Yeah.”
“He using you as a pack mule now?” Williams said with a chuckle.
Taggert pushed his glasses down the bridge of his nose and leaned forward to get a better look at Wash. “Something happened.” Then, “What happened, kid?”
“He’s dead,” Wash said.
“Who’s dead?” Williams said.
“The Old Man.”
“Did you say the Old Man’s dead?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Wash said, and walked past the two mounted slayers.
“Kid,” Taggert said from behind him, but Wash didn’t stop. “Kid, what happened? Kid!”
Wash kept going and never looked back.
He didn’t know what Taggert and Williams did after their encounter, and Wash didn’t really care, either. He kept walking, heading west. He wasn’t sure where he was going exactly, and it didn’t matter anyway; he just had to get as far away from the bungalow as possible.
He avoided a couple of towns before the day was over. There were people in one, but the other might have been empty. Maybe. Wash didn’t feel like human contact and went around both. He didn’t need a new job so soon after Oakville, not with the Old Man’s share. Not that slayers really did what they did for payment; it was always just a byproduct of what they did instead of the why.
With an hour or so before nightfall and his legs tired from the nonstop walking—his arms were also fatigued from the digging earlier—Wash began looking for a place to take shelter. He considered going back to the last town he’d passed about an hour or so back. It would be a close one, but he thought he could make it. Besides, even if he couldn’t and found himself on the road when it got dark, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Instead, Wash decided not to waste time doing anything. He stashed his packs inside a brush to keep it from prying eyes and climbed up a large tree nearby, choosing a hefty branch about ten feet up from the ground. He latched himself into place with some rope and settled in.
It had been a long time since he used a tree to get through the night. The last time he could remember was a few months before he met the Old Man. That meeting had changed everything. Before, Wash got by, but the Old Man taught him how to survive.
He thought about their first encounter and all the years since, and how it only took one day before he reverted back to his old ways. But he was by himself now, so maybe it was a good thing he knew how to get by without someone to watch his back. Slayers rarely worked alone, and for good reason. When a partner died, you either found another one, or you joined an existing group. Wash couldn’t see himself doing either.
He wasn’t entirely sure what he felt. Sadness, yes, because the Old Man was an important fixture in his life, and he’d taught Wash more about the world than anyone ever had before or after The Purge. And now he was gone, because Wash didn’t look closely enough at the closet in the bungalow. It was his fault, but he didn’t dwell on that. If he were alive, the Old Man would tell him that regrets were meaningless, that the past can’t be altered, so it was better to just get on with it.
“Shit happens to everyone, good or bad,” the Old Man once said. “No one ever said life was fair. You learn from the shitty things, and you move on. Doing anything else is just a big fat waste of time.”
Wash closed his eyes and went to sleep with birds chirping in his ears and land animals scurrying on the ground below. He woke up intermittently through the night but was always lulled back to sleep by the continued noise of nature going about its business around him.
“Get on with it,” the Old Man would say. “Just get on with it, kid.”
He lurched wide awake, his right hand reaching across his waist for the handle of the kukri on pure instinct. He didn’t pull the machete right away, and instead listened…to nothing.
And that was the problem.
The living beings around him had gone quiet, and except for the rustling of branches and a wind howling between the stationary trees, there was heavy silence.
Wash was still perfectly situated on the branch where he’d put himself, so he hadn’t moved very much during the night. He had to admit, he’d been a little worried he might not be able to go right back to his old ways, but that doubt had proven unnecessary.
Why is it so quiet?
He carefully pulled the knot on the rope—all it took was one simple tug, exactly how it was supposed to work for quick disengagement—and let it dangle off the side of the branch. He could move again, but he didn’t.
The crunch-crunch of brittle leaves breaking as something walked over them, like firecrackers in the suddenly still woods. Whoever it was—whatever it was—wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding their presence. Either that, or they weren’t trying. Wash wasn’t sure which answer made him feel better.
He kept the kukri in its sheath as he scanned the woods. There were too many black shadows for him to see everything, the tall tree crowns above keeping most of the moonlight at bay and further adding to the darkness below. The lack of animal noise was what got his alarm bells ringing.
Crunch-crunch.
It sounded like a pair of feet moving down there, but that was just a guess. He could have been wrong—he could have been very wrong—but Wash didn’t think so. With so little happening, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint where the footsteps were coming from.
Crunch-crunch.
East, which was the same direction as the last town—and beyond that, the bungalow.
Crunch-crunch.
Wash slowly eased the machete out of its sheath.
Crunch-crunch.
He was high up enough that he could go unnoticed by anyone passing by below him. Unless, of course, they looked up, which they would have no reason to do. The branches around him were extra camouflage from everything except the squirrels and birds already up here with him.
Crunch-crunch.
Wash focused on the ground, the kukri gripped tightly in front of him, its very sharp silver-coated blade glinting against a stream of moonlight that had managed to penetrate the crowns above. Not a lot, but enough.
Crunch-crunch.
Wash stared, his eyes widening at the sight.
A ghoul.
It was a blue-eyed ghoul.
What…
Wash knew what he was looking at because of the way it walked—slow and purposeful, its body long and straight, sinewy muscles almost glistening in the darkness. He would know even if he wasn’t staring down at its hairless domed head, the skull underneath the flesh peeking through at deformed angles.
…the…
It stopped almost directly below him and seemed to look around for a moment.
…fuck…
Then it craned its head and looked up at him.
…is…
It looked straight up at him.
…happening?
It was wearing glasses. But not just any glasses—aviator shades, the lenses so scratched up that Wash wondered how it could see anything from behind them. Then the damn thing smiled at him with thin strings that could only be mistaken for lips if you had never seen human mouths before. Its nose was shrunken against its gaunt cheeks, and Wash didn’t know how the glasses stayed perched on its face and didn’t just slide off.
The shades, with their scratched lenses…
Taggert’s. He was looking at the same aviator shades that Taggert always wore and had been wearing when Wash saw him this afternoon. So why was the creature below him wearing Taggert’s sunglasses?
Like every ghoul Wash had crossed paths with, this one was naked, its elongated frame giving the impression it was more plastic mannequin than actual flesh and blood. Slippery, pruned black skin wrapped tightly around its protruding bones, as if every movement it made should hurt.
Wash couldn’t see its eyes with the shades on, but he thought he could just make out a glowing blue orb behind the right lens…
> One glowing blue orb.
There had to be something wrong with the angle, because Wash could only make out one pulsating object behind the glasses. Eyes came in pairs. Wash had seen black-eyed ghouls with just one eye—sometimes with none—but it was different with the blue eyes. They could regenerate limbs and heal from bullet wounds. They didn’t lose eyeballs.
Unless he was wrong. Unless this wasn’t a blue-eyed ghoul.
But then, what the hell was it?
Wash was reaching for his holstered SIG when the creature slid the shades off its face to reveal its eyes.
No, not eyes.
Its one glowing blue eye.
What the fuck? Wash thought when the monster lifted a slightly crooked forefinger to its lips.
Then it winked at him—it winked at him—before darting off, leaving the aviator shades on the ground in its wake.
Wash looked after the monster, the kukri and gun in his hands, trying to understand what had just happened.
Or had it happened at all? Had he dreamt the whole thing up? Was he still asleep?
Wake up. Wake up!
But he was awake. He was wide awake and sweating despite the cold night air, despite the fact that every breath he took produced small white clouds.
And then there were the shades, on the ground below him, staring back up at him…
He didn’t close his eyes or go back to sleep again that night. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, and he didn’t.
As soon as the first hints of sunlight began spreading across the woods around him, Wash jumped down from the tree. He picked up the aviator shades from the ground where they’d been dropped, not having moved all night. He’d been certain they were Taggert’s from ten feet up, and up close that certainty proved correct. There were specks of blood on the inside of the lenses and more along the temples. Human blood.
Wash looked in the direction the ghoul had gone, but instead of chasing it, he turned and retrieved his packs, then began running back in the direction of the bungalow. It took him all morning and most of the afternoon, bypassing the same two towns from last night.
By the time he reached the house, he was tired and ready to sit down and never get back up. But he forced himself to keep going, pushing open the closed door with the barrel of his shotgun. The absence of horses outside the bungalow wasn’t too surprising because like most people, the slayers would have put their mounts indoors with them to keep them out of harm’s way. Horses were a more precious commodity these days than most people.
The smell of human blood—so distinct from that of a ghoul’s—immediately set Wash’s alarm bells ringing. He stepped inside, leaving the door wide open behind him to let air in and help with the stink.
Williams’s body was the first one to greet him. It lay stiffly in the great room on its back next to a machete. The slayer was missing almost his entire right arm, and for some reason, Williams’s eyes were open and staring up at the cobwebbed ceiling. His wide-brim hat hung from a hook along the wall nearby. If not for the missing arm and all the coagulated blood that surrounded him, Wash might have thought Williams was just resting awkwardly on the floor.
The same couldn’t be said for Taggert, who sat next to the hearth, almost in the same spot where the Old Man had spent his last few seconds the night before. There was a hole in Taggert’s chest, and his head was lolled to one side, his eyes mercifully closed. His shades were missing, and there was writing on the wall above his head, written in big blocky, bloody letters.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN KID
Wash replayed last night over in his head:
The blue-eyed ghoul—a one-eyed, blue-eyed ghoul—smiling up at him, taunting him.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN KID, the letters read. They were written in Taggert’s blood; or maybe both his and Williams’s. There was so much of it that they had to have come from both slayers.
Wash jumped over Williams’s body on his way to the back hallway. He burst out of the rear door and into the yard behind the bungalow.
There was a hole where the grave he’d dug yesterday for the Old Man used to be. A sleeping bag, the same one he’d wrapped the Old Man in, was unfurled on the ground, pieces of duct tape still clinging to parts of it. Footprints led from the hole and back to the door behind Wash, along with shredded clothes that suggested someone had pulled them off strip by strip.
He ran back into the house, but there was nothing for him to see, nothing to discover that would lead to any conclusions different from what was already reverberating around inside his head.
He walked over to Taggert’s body and stared at the bloody words on the wall.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN KID
Wash replayed the last few seconds of last night when the Old Man squeezed the trigger on the SIG Sauer that he’d pressed against his own temple. Wash had screamed and lunged at him, trying to stop the gunshot, to get to the gun, but he had no hopes of reaching him in time. He wasn’t faster than a bullet, and all he’d managed to do was rush the Old Man slightly.
And that, maybe, just maybe, had thrown off the bullet’s trajectory enough that instead of going through the Old Man’s brain and out the other temple, it had exited his left eye. The Old Man had slumped to the floor then, blood oozing out of the hole on the side of his head, but most of it coming out of the much bigger one where his left eye used to be.
…where his left eye used to be…
The bullet might not have gone straight through the Old Man’s brain, but it had killed him all the same. Wash knew that, because he had checked the Old Man’s pulse and sat there staring at his unmoving body for the remainder of the night, a small part of him expecting all of it to be one big joke.
But it wasn’t. The Old Man was dead, and he stayed dead. Wash had buried him in the back of the house the next morning. His arms were still tired from all the digging.
He looked up at the jagged, bloody letters hanging over Taggert’s head, exactly where it knew Wash would be sure to look:
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN KID, it read, the same now as it did the first ten times he read it.
That was what the Old Man called him, ever since they first met. Kid. The Old Man rarely called Wash by his name.
“CATCH ME IF YOU CAN KID”
“CATCH ME IF YOU CAN…”
“…KID…”
Twenty-Six
NOW
Wash wondered if this was what freefalling from outer space was like for astronauts. The wind ripping at his face, the odd feeling of weightlessness, and then finally, at the very end, the bone-crunching (This is going to hurt!) impact of smashing down to earth.
He was right. It did hurt. A lot.
There was throbbing pain everywhere, but Wash didn’t let that stop him from immediately rolling over onto his stomach and pushing himself back up onto his knees, every joint along his body groaning in protest.
“This is it, kid!” the Old Man shouted inside his head. “This is the end of the road! No time to be lollygagging!”
He still had the kukri safely holstered in its sheath, thank God, and Wash drew it now with his left hand. He would have used his right—his dominant hand—but he didn’t have control of it. The entire arm was numb and dangled at his side like a superfluous appendage. One Eye had pulled it out of its socket with a flick of its wrist.
“It’s too strong,” the Old Man said. “Don’t let it touch you again, kid!”
That’s the trick, isn’t it?
There was blood in his mouth, and Wash swirled it around before spitting it out. He was in the streets of Jasper, surrounded by ghouls and scared civilians watching him from behind curtains, from the safety of their darkened homes. He didn’t believe for a second anyone was coming out to help. They hadn’t when they heard Lyla earlier. And still hadn’t budged when Keith tried to rescue her.
“You always knew it would end like this,” the Old Man said. “One on one. Mano-a-mano. Slayer versus monster. This is the life, kid.”
I know.
“So stop waiting for help that’s not gonna come, and get on with killing the fucker already!”
Yes, sir.
Wash gritted his teeth before slamming his right shoulder into the ground. Roaring pain flooded over him, and it took everything he had not to scream out in agony.
Instead, the only sounds in the streets were his haggard breathing mixed in with the slurp-slurp-slurp of black-eyed ghouls feasting on Keith’s body. From where he kneeled, Wash could make out four, maybe five of the creatures. The rest were dead. The ones that weren’t were either too busy with Keith to notice him, or it wouldn’t let them interfere.
Wash looked over at it now.
One Eye casually hopped down the sidewalk and sauntered over to him, that stupid thing it probably thought was a grin plastered over its bony face. It looked very much like a walking skeleton, as if it had broken free from a high school science lab somewhere, slapped on a thin film of black layer, and called it flesh, then wandered out into the world. There was nothing natural about it, and Wash didn’t see anything that reminded him of what it used to be.
Who it used to be.
“I’m dead, kid,” the Old Man said. “That’s not me. You know that.”
I know.
“So stop thinking about it, and get on with it! Kill the fucker!”
I’m trying, old timer, I’m trying.
“That must have hurt,” the creature hissed, its echoey voice infiltrating Wash’s thoughts.
Wash pushed himself up onto two shaky legs. Fire burned up and down the entire length of his right arm, but he was able to (mostly) shove that into the background. Mostly. He waited for the numbness to set in.
Any second now…
“What’s the matter, kid?” One Eye said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Wash clenched his teeth. “All I see is a piece of shit that needs killing.”
“And then what? Are you going to bury me again?”
“This time, I’m going to cut off your head and drive this knife through your fucking brain first.”
After The Purge: Vendetta Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 73