#b&tsm-jules

[empty-masks]

Book Five, Chapter Five (Epilogue)

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

Returning to Black Hill both a conquering hero and a failure of a hunter, Piper collected on Blondie’s bounty by tossing his severed head, which had long since cooled down to the appearance of a grisly, fur-covered amber statue, onto the desk of Penelope Hickory. Her achievement in taking out such a large liability earned her an audience with the board members, and subsequently a sizable raise. And though in that moment she was tempted to try and spark an all out war against the ten escapees, she simply couldn’t bring herself to admit to her superiors that the bounty was still technically active. Instead, through gritted teeth, she told a little white lie to save face— their quarry had fallen down into the old Gutter’s Glade Mine crevasse after they had fled into it. And, as it turns out, the way down had completely sunken in, rendering the bodies completely irretrievable. Unless they were to send a search and retrieve operation up into the equivalent of enemy territory, there was no chance in hell to bring those damned miners to corporate justice. And sure, this sentiment brings upon some disappointed sighs and annoyed grunts from her superiors, it’s nothing the money she makes didn’t almost immediately dampen. By that point, she earned equal to the amount of Blondie’s salary, which is enough to keep her and Janet afloat so long as she’s on the grind. So, in a way, she walked out of that board room with a little extra wisdom. Battles you can’t win now were battles you might as well not fight, especially if you could wrangle up some cash in the process.

Piper spends the rest of her days continuing Blondie’s deadly legacy. She worked directly for the board members of Shepherd Gemstone as their right hand (with her squad of mercenaries being their left, no matter how much she despised it), lived happily with Janet and her children, and generally speaking, made the most of her corporately-funded adventures. Even if it means becoming more familiar with death than she ever had been before.

Harry Gilroy, in a similar vein, moved up on the Shepherd Gemstone ladder for a period of time post-success of Blondie’s post-mortem execution, managing the operations of multiple mining outposts across a few square miles— Smokestone, of course, included. Thanks to a couple smart foreman hires and the corporate suppression of any and all magical incidents in his jurisdictions (his paper shredder was consistently the fullest “section” of his office), he kept profits high enough for long enough for his superiors to take notice. He even was held in higher esteem than Hickory at the peak of his internal glory, something he absolutely dragged her through the mud over. Eventually, however, Gilroy’s head becomes a bit too big for his shoulders. He’s fired directly from the Board after news of an unprecedented number of magical afflictions, alongside a sizable number of employee uprisings in his jurisdictions, breaks to the overhead. In a drunken stupor, he blames everyone but himself, storms out of the Shepherd Gemstone HQ and pisses on their front lawn, where he is then arrested for public indecency. He becomes a washed up, former high-roller in his neighborhood, rumoured to have taxidermied Blondie’s head and hung it up above a fireplace somewhere private. He spends his hoard of blood money on expensive booze, golfing trips, and renovating his home in an attempt to gather the attention of the single women in his community. Thus, he is cast out from the one thing he knows, rich and bitter.

Though Honeysett is idyllic as it is, everyones’ plans eventually send them out of the small town, with Pickman’s Hope being far and wide the most popular ending destination.

Azariah and Roxanne leave first, planning to aid with any reconstruction that needs doing (though there wouldn’t be much by the time they get there, seeing as how the town is known for its building expertise). They instead get involved with Samson’s doings around town, organizing the unions for work and acting as the occasional carrier of goodwill to neighboring towns. It ends up being a challenging occupation, especially since they have to compete diplomatically with corporations looking to take jobs from them and their people, but Azariah’s wit usually helps bring home the bacon, and Roxanne’s organizational skills helps make sure they can eat it, too. Pickman’s Hope sees a steady increase in cash flow, and it’s not long before the couple have their own home built, courtesy of the town, with their own garden and everything.

 When they’re not working, they spend their time together indulging in the few, but substantial pleasures around the town; and, as everyone else trickles in, with them as well, acting as the guides they always have whenever something goes wrong. It’s not uncommon to find them filling the same role that Samson does, being everyone’s uncle or aunt and helping them paint fences, weed gardens, or settle minor disputes in bars. And though Azariah initially was tested by some of the rowdier locals about his capabilities (everyone knows Samson’s got it in him to stop scuffles, but this new Hare? and at his age?), but folks quickly realized that there’s to be no funny business with him around. What’s more, the rumour began floating around that Azariah liked the fighting— there was something about his eyes during the days when drunks would challenge him that burned those events into the memories of the sober. And, of course, if Roxanne was around in the case of these events, she was wicked accurate with her cane when she had it (and if she didn’t, you’d best believe she was going to pick up anything around and bludgeon your sorry ass with it), able to knock the buzz out of the most uppity of union workers.

Judith and Leon are next to leave, having decided that the best thing for them to do is just jump into a new life, leaving the adventuring business they’d been drafted into completely behind them. That means pursuing new business, the kind that would be calm, peaceful, and hopefully complimentary toward the skills that they’ve been building up. After a day or two of thinking while on the road, they decide to open a flower shop. 

Judith runs the economic end of the store, taking back the person she once was from the grips of an angry, bitter, corporate version of herself, by indulging in the simple, sweet pleasures of accounting. And it doesn’t take long for her to take to the front desk as well, committing to memory prices and tax ratios, and developing pricing strategies for larger orders such as weddings, feasts, or public events. Every flower, down to the petal, she teaches herself how to price. As the days go by, she feels herself softening more naturally in the presence of customers. Sure, she has a very low tolerance for bullshit, and she’s none too happy when folks take a long time at the counter thanks to their own incompetence, but she absorbs that annoyance with ease, instead of letting it stew in her system. It’s amazing what not letting grudges overwhelm your emotional system can do for your mental well-being! At some point, she considers writing a book about her physical and emotional experiences having escaped from an exploitative mining company, but in a way, she figures that she should wait until she’s not busy with numbers before trying to work some words.

Leon ends up the gardener, and though he’s only blessed with a literally green thumb and not a metaphorical one, a little help from the locals helps him to blossom into quite the flower expert. Arranging, however, is where he ends up finding out his talent is. His touch with colours is subtle, yet when the final piece has been completed, results in patterns that seem to shine the same way a polished gemstone would. It doesn’t take long for him to experiment with complex fragrance combinations as well, though, it doesn’t take off the way that he’d hoped. Instead, he finds himself satisfied with the scent of a particular flower, known as the Cinnamon Cup Rose, as it lets him laugh without coughing up a lung.

Olive and Cherry move down simultaneously, and for a short period of time end up living together in a single-level on the outskirts of town. It doesn’t last long however, as Olive gets tired of the noise from his mechanical work at all hours of the day and moves closer into the town square, where she instead gets to listen to the sounds of the sidewalks.

Olive’s reasoning for leaving what is ostensibly a fangirl’s fantasy villa was that she felt as though the power she was given by the Mountain Thing wouldn’t quite get used to its fullest potential if all she did was sit around Honeysett, which was filled to the brim with folks who could more than handle themselves. The burning inside pushed her toward humanitarian work, and so, she decided to learn the art of field medic-work from Roxanne. She slowly worked her way through the skills presented to her, at first getting stuck on the hurdle of being covered with blood (as that sort of thing is terrible to get out of feathers), but working through anxiety after anxiety throughout the years. Roxanne wasn’t the easiest teacher to work with but she’s definitely a thorough one, and with the incredible diversity of Pickman’s Hope and beyond, there’s a lot for Olive to learn, all while keeping track of her own condition as best she could— with the occasional check-up on her old pals.

By the time she’s learned everything that Roxanne has to teach her, she’s already been working at the local emergency response team, and has more than a few encounters under her belt where her power, and her medical knowledge, has come in handy. There were more than a few times where she saved a life by means of skilled hands and focused eyes, be it removing a bullet or deflecting one, and in time she became well-known enough among such circles to be offered permanent positions in adventuring companies and collectives, parties of many sizes and skills asking if she’d become their in-house medic. The answer she gave them, of course, was a “no,” though she was more than happy to patch them up if she was nearby, and was more than eager to pass her knowledge onto others in the field.

Cherry, on the other hand, realized that it probably wouldn’t be good for him to stick around his dads’ place for much longer. Though they love him dearly, they don’t love the amount of noise that his work and main hobby brings, so he picks up a job at the local mechanics’ Union in Pickman’s Hope and gets his hands dirty. It doesn’t take long for him to be promoted from a shelf-stocker to someone who actually works on vehicles, and his propensity for understanding models that nobody else had seen before turns him into the “I don’t know, ask him” guy for anyone in the know about cars, a label he happily upholds. With the blessing of Samson, Cherry also gets to work on establishing a racing club there in town, working to create a new breed of backwood valley-folk racers that can compete with even the biggest sponsors further out west. It’s another feather in the town’s cap; it’s a new and fresh way for folks to compete among themselves, all while attracting eyes. Aside from that, it means yearly events, and that’s just plain good for local morale.

Brie, of course, leaves last, having to hitch a ride to Pickman’s Hope to pick up her car, to then drive back north of Honeysett to meet up with her girlfriend. After months of being gone and with hardly any money left to her name, she treats her to a fancy dinner to drop the news about how the quarry with Shepherd Gemstone fell through, that she’s realized things about the line of work she’s in that she doesn’t like, and that she’s nearly been killed multiple times over the time she’s been gone (and that she’d like to not repeat this experience ever again). And so, after much talk over a couple glasses of brandy, a sizeable bill for the pork chops they ordered, and a few days to mull everything over, they decide to move down to Pickman’s Hope, where Brie not only knows people, but also where she could get a job doing something less actively perilous. And a job she did get after a brief talk with Samson— she now works as a local detective slash investigator, helping to suss out corporate interests and potential moles from Shepherd from the town, as the discovery of Hieronymus T. Thistle’s treachery was something of a wake up call for the union head. Though it’s not entirely out of the line of fire, it puts her in a spot where she feels truly confident that the work she’s doing is for the greater good. And, of course, the constant reassurance from her peers helps quite a bit.

Jules, Lucille, and Meat all realize that there’s something binding the three of them together, and that thing is their lack of ability to settle down in the place they’ve come to be so fond of. Pickman’s Hope is a no-go for them, because as much as they’d like to go domestic, Jules and Meat are both being hunted by the Carnevale, and Lucille figures that someone like her would be better off sorting out her issues on the road, rather than cooped up in a house somewhere. So, they buy a car from Pickman’s Hope, say goodbye to everyone (with many tears being shed on behalf of Meat having to leave so soon from Brie and Roxanne), and they set out west for new horizons. 

And though they’re not the newest of horizons, they certainly did find a new-er climate to work in. The three of them, collectively, set out as another independent contractor group, doing odd jobs here and there and taking advantage of Meat’s Notus powers to get them done quickly and efficiently. Their plans are to make as much money as they can so that way they can retire early and maybe set something similar to Honeysett up (or find someplace like it that already exists, build a place in the neighborhood, and live the good life). The process of getting there however, has only just begun.

It’s getting into the evening hours, and the first flakes of winter are beginning to collect on the lawn of Piper’s residence. Tanner is crowing about how much snow he thinks they’re going to get, Madrone has dug her nose into a book to avoid the walking annoyance that is her kid brother, and Janet has found a cozy spot right up against Piper on the sofa, their fireplace crackling softly.

After taking a sip of her tea, Janet stands up from her spot, walks around the couch, picks up a wrapped box, and places it on Piper’s lap. “Go on. Open it,” she coos.

“Aw, honey. You shouldn’t have.” Piper replies, ripping into the paper.

It’s a box. A box from the Quilting Club with her name on it, to be precise. And whatever’s in the box is heavy, heavier than the heaviest dumbbell Janet works out with for her calisthenics, anyways.

And when she opens it, it’s as though she’s cracking open a treasure chest of sparkling gold doubloons. It’s a replica of Blondie’s old pistol, the hand cannon that turns peoples’ heads into leaky cans of soup. In the glow of her awe, she nearly forgets to shoo away the kids, who are crowding around the “cool gun that Piper got” (as her children are still getting acclimated to calling her “mom”). Its weight, its design, its finish, all of it is pristine and new and exactly how she remembers it. And now it's hers. The final piece is hers.

“My god. You really shouldn’t have.”

Blondie & The Smokestone March End.

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[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is   © 2020-2023 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.  

Thank you for reading, and have a good night!

[empty-masks]

Book Five, Chapter Two

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

Azariah and Meat both stand a little straighter as a glowing claw knuckles its way through what stray rubble dared to stand in Blondie’s now much, much more open path; without skipping a beat the beast has stepped over the still collapsed android, and Meat barely processes the way that the other claw is moving before their own hand darts up to block a flaming rock before it can strike the Hare dead in the chest.

The fire dissipates with a low whine like a dog at heel, but the rock itself still stings Meat’s palm, causing them to drop it and direct their gaze again to Blondie, who’s closing the distance in hefty, thudding bounds.

“Runnin’ might be a pretty good idea, actually,” Azariah mumbles as he raises his arms, breath steadying in his throat. “Leave it to a friend of hers to talk me into somethin’ sensible when it’s too late.”

Meat swings low, ducking and moving in half-squatted to strike Blondie’s abdomen with both hands, and like back in Fusillade at the moment of contact there’s a small concussive blast— strong enough to blow Meat’s hands back and to halt Blondie’s advance for that brief second.

“That supposed to stop me?�� Blondie grins all fire and brimstone until over Meat’s shoulder comes Azariah, striking him in the muzzle with a hard elbow.

The Hare practically flies through the air, moving just a smidge faster than Blondie’s eyes can follow, leading the Werewolf to spin and swing his arms in an attempt to grab him. What he grabs instead is a metal man, as Azariah had actually ducked between the now standing Jack’s legs and rolled to the side.

Meat turns their own attention to the tumbling ball of speed nearby and immediately sets to join them in what looks like a retreat, as Azariah hops back onto his own two feet, so by the time Blondie’s getting ready to deal with his new dance partner the other two are already hoofing it down the tunnel and away from the lot.

“You son of a bitch,” Blondie snarls before tensing his shoulders and headbutting Jack— receiving a solid thump to his own head in turn, a resounding sound of skull to steel, and nothing less than what might constitute several concussions’ worth of blunt force trauma right between the eyes.

Jack, however, blinks. “Huh, usually people knock themselves out when they try that.” Thick metal fingers dig into the burnt and glowing arms of the werewolf, and with a mechanical twist and the growl of some form of internal engine, Jack shoves Blondie hard against the nearby wall. There the two break, just in time for Jack to get into form, raising his arms with his fists up, tucking his head down and beginning to step closer, though he’s not stepping lightly. Jack’s not a dodger, he’s a blocker, a pulverizer. “Ready to get your bell rung, sir?”

“I’m gonna to melt your sorry metal ass to slag,” Blondie snarls back. Above and around them the ground shakes as Blondie tenses and then darts forward, slamming Jack with his forearm and dragging the robot with him as he powers through the tunnel, each step an earthquake, each bound of each leg a tremble in the ceiling.

Jack’s got weight and power but unfortunately he’s a bit top-heavy, and while his stance is grounded as it can get short of just lying on the floor his opponent’s able to half-lift him with velocity. The densely muscled forearm, brimming with heat and power, thrums and glows against the tin man’s throat. Above him, the glow grows more intense— as it begins growing inside of Blondie’s mouth.

Down the cave hall, down the tunnel, Azariah’s had to stop for another breather as Meat paces. “Don’t be so hasty,” he mumbles. “I’m sure that pup’s got his hands full for a minute.”

“We have to get going, now, or we might not be able to catch up.”

“You kids these days, always doin’ somethin’. Take a minute to breathe, if you have to. That count as offensive? Pardon if it is, didn’t mean anythin’ by it. Even if they get out before us, I’m sure we can—”

From the bend the two had just gone around some moments before bursts Blondie, one arm holding up Jack and the other batting at the robot’s arms, which were flailing in an attempt to close the now near blindingly bright glow lingering in his maw. Azariah doesn’t finish his sentence as he stands to move in, but Meat stops him short there too.

The two only barely manage to toss themselves out of the way and behind a rocky outcropping as Blondie and Jack fly like a missile into the wall where they had been standing just that second previous, sending a sickening crack up to the ceiling from where the android was slammed. It winds its way like a snake up from the point of contact and spider-webs from the rounded corner where wall becomes ceiling, tossing down rubble as the scuffle of their feet tosses up dust.

To their right, Meat and Azariah both see a dark shape hiding behind a similar set of jutting rocks, rapidly loading a weapon and mumbling to herself.

Nancy’s swapped between flechettes and buckshot and God knows what by this point but she’s more than half certain none of them are going to punch a hole in the beast’s hide, not when she’s been unable to even smell a drop of blood or exposed flesh that isn’t charred. “Lacking sufficient ordinance to handle larger quarry— should’ve requisitioned something back in town. Stupid backwater, lacks a proper armory. Need something bigger, stronger, can only knock him around with this…”

Unable to shake Blondie off again, Jack’s been staring down the steadily increasing glow that now threatens to blind him, a vivid red light so searing that it burns his mechanical retinas, but he can’t look away. His fingers can’t find purchase wherever they ply and his kicks are doing nothing; before him lies death, and it’s brighter than he ever imagined. Inside his body his mechanical organs scream past their proper limits, pushing harder, harder, heating up, even Blondie can hear them now.

He blinks, but it’s not enough of an opening for Jack. This is it; this is the part where he overclocks himself to critical just to make sure he isn’t going out alone. It’s going to be bright, furious, glorious—

A dark shape flies from behind the rocks and screams down between the two’s legs, and before either of them process what it is, a shotgun’s shadow blocks the intense red light bathing Jack as the barrel of Lieutenant Nancy’s weapon is wedged up against the lower jaw of the werewolf. Two combustions follow, the firing of her shotgun directly into Blondie’s lower jaw, shutting it hard, and then Blondie’s slow-build pressure cooker of pain popping like a highly explosive bubble inside of his mouth. From between his fangs and through his nostrils a monstrous blossom of red flame and black smoke bursts, knocking him backwards and onto his ass as it tosses Jack the opposite way— all while it punches Nancy into the ground, all the force coming vertically.

Azariah and Meat are a good way down the tunnel again, this time avoiding any stops so that they won’t be caught up to, when there’s a loud explosion down the way behind them.

“Poor guy,” Azariah mumbles. “Robot never stood a chance.”

Meat’s head tilts as they jog just beside him. “Why assume he lost? That could’ve been a… I don’t know, a second death explosion.”

“Then the poor guy’s still dead even if he won. Too bad, I’m sure he would’ve been fun to run from too.” A wheezy, raspy laugh escapes him to punctuate the joke, and though he’s keeping pace it’s becoming very evident to Meat that his bones are creaking and his voice is hoarse.

“We might not be able to catch up,” Meat says, rubbing the back of their neck. “Roxanne’s going to kill us if that robot doesn’t.”

Azariah cracks his knuckles, then his neck for good measure. “Don’t you worry about us catchin’ up. Much as I would like to turn back and finish up my round three, even with these powers I’m no spring coney. Ain’t that just a stick in the craw?”

“I can’t believe you both talk like this,” Meat mumbles. “Alright, so how’re we— hey— no!” It’s too late. Azariah’s already swept the Notus off their feet and into his arms, though he struggles to stay standing proper straight with the weight.

“Nowdon’tyouworrynoneaboutthisit’sgonnabefine,” is the near unintelligible string of words that hits Meat, right as it feels like the world starts vibrating and, despite the weight, Azariah’s blitzing down the tunnel.

Jack’s the first back up and he can feel some of his clothes have started burning, at least whatever’s not melting to his metal hide. “Nancy? Status report, Nancy, talk to me— I can’t see Blondie.” He rubs his eyes, then from his pocket withdraws a small glass cleaning rag to clear them off properly. When his vision sharpens, he spots her, a dark spot on the ground, crumpled and curled up.

Crouching beside her he moves to get at her helmet, but first he receives a smack on the wrist as she attempts to get up on her own, the arm beneath her still cradling the shotgun. Secondly, he takes a wolfy claw to the side of the head and he gets kicked out of the way by Blondie, who by this point has been covered in soot so black that the only vestiges of his formerly white fur are lingering around his legs and shoulders. A quick wipe with Jack’s rag cleans off a bit of his maw and face, but for the most part it’s like he’s been dunked in ink and then manhandled by a washcloth.

Blondie’s wide chest rises and falls as he takes breaths of his own volition, clearing out more smoke and ash from his throat before saying, “Still think this is a fine fight, copper cock? Where’s your boss, huh? What’re you getting paid?”

“Not enough, I’ll tell you that much.” Jack stands again, getting his fists ready and beginning to circle, taking an opposite direction to Blondie, who’s walking in a slow arc around. On the ground, Nancy’s coughing up smoke through her mask, and now that she’s raising her head, half of the helmet’s been blown clear off and the eye beneath looks partially blind. Jack continues, “But as much as I’d like to talk rates with you, I know it’s still better than what I’d get on a dead man’s payroll.”

Calling him a dead man earns nothing but fury from Blondie, garnering a loud and unenthusiastic growl before he tosses himself at Jack again, but this time the robot’s prepared. As The first big, furry arm lands a swinging blow, Jack shoots out both hands to snatch. The first clamps hard on Blondie’s wrist swinging toward him, the other darts to Blondie’s throat to preempt any would-be fireballs while he can still reach it. In the meanwhile, Blondie’s other, still free claw has begun its arc toward Jack's head— when another gunshot rings out and Blondie screams, half-choked, over a newfound pain in his elbow.

Suddenly, something else is against his throat too. Against his shoulder blades are knees, pressing hard as the pipe barrel of Nancy’s shotgun is being pulled back the opposite way; Nancy, glaring like a devil, is panting and snarling over the wolf’s head. “I am not dying to some backwoods forest hick fuck!” She screams, and as Blondie digs his claws into her back with an awkward twist of his body she bites clear through her mask, revealing her snaggled fangs just before she sinks them into the side of his head, thrashing like a wild animal.

She’s screaming, her wound is cauterizing as soon as it’s made, Jack’s trying to shake Blondie’s throat hard enough to snap the werewolf’s spine if he can, and here’s Blondie halfway having a test of strength with the robot and trying to pull the vampire off of his head. All are screaming, thrashing, a mass of hateful limbs and weaponry, torn and burnt and bleeding, and they’re moving, tumbling, they begin twirling and then start spinning and now they’re a ball of hate on the floor.

A particularly forceful kick from Blondie brings them back to the wall he’d slammed Jack into, hoping to bust him against it so he can get out of the hold and get at Nancy, but the robot doesn’t give— the wall, however, does, sending the three into a freefall.

Luckily for Nancy and not so luckily for Jack, they land on top of Jack, with Nancy still on top of Blondie. Especially lucky for Blondie, Jack loses his grip with the fall and in that moment of weakness, the Wolf breaks the embrace and hucks Jack against the far wall of the chamber, a good several meters, before doing the same to Nancy with a screaming roar.

The two Mercs stand and exchange quick glances, eyes darting to the walls, the ceiling, the strangely smooth and untested environment, before Nancy growls. “Let’s get this done, soldier.”

“One of those kitschy military types. You must be from a real shithole.” Blondie narrows his eyes at them, his glow growing more intense as he gathers a fireball in each hand.

Jack, out of all of them, hasn’t made any attempt to intimidate or even assert himself. Instead of some one-liner hoping to end the fight before it starts, he just points behind Blondie and asks, “Is he supposed to have two shadows? Why’s the other one a lot bigger than him?”

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Though it’s taken him a while to get the position right, what with the driving skills of Piper being akin to that of a joy-riding teenager and Sundae’s revolver ringing off rounds loud enough to punch holes in his ear drums, Kranner has managed to wedge himself comfortably onto both the pseudo-middle seat, as well as the floor of the back half of the sedan. His rifle rests comfortably in his shoulder and pokes out between the two front seats, with his arms punched against the side cushions to keep himself stable as he lines up his first shot. And there’s plenty of targets to choose from in the bed of the truck they’re following.

There’s that black haired woman and an Orc. There’s that odd-looking lady with the scarf around her mouth. There’s a mousy-looking woman, one who keeps getting particularly nasty looks from Piper. And then, there’s the Owl, who is the only person standing up in the bed. She’s got a terribly anxious look on her face, and to be frank, Kranner thinks that it’d be lovely to try and hit someone behind her for effect. So, he lines up a lovely headshot on the one that his boss doesn’t seem to like. All it takes now is a light trigger pull—

“Kranner, would you take the fucking shot already? You’re burning time!” Piper yells, turning to face him briefly with a grimace.

“Gettin’ comfortable’s hard to do when you’re stuffed into a dead man’s vehicle!” he replies, setting his finger against the trigger guard. “You want them dead, Boss?! I’ve gotta take my damn time!”

“Yeah, sure. Sundae’s been shooting this entire goddamn time, old man. You better get your ass into gear.”

Sundae empties the revolver’s chamber, and sticks her body back in through the window. “I haven’t hit anything yet,” she comments. “But who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky in another six.” Piper’s hands audibly squeak with sweat as she grips the steering wheel. “Where the FUCK have you been aiming?”

“At them, boss. I’ve never shot out the side of a car before. It’s taken some getting used to. I think I got close a couple times, though.”

“Are you telling me that NEITHER of you fucking imbeciles have done a SINGLE THING since Jack’s split off from us?!” she screams. Both of them notice the venom begin to sputter from the top of her mouth onto the padded car seat. It steams lightly as it corrodes the material. “FINE! Fine. Take your fucking time, just make sure that your shots count. We are not going back. I’ve come too fucking far.”

“Good idea, boss,” Sundae responds. She quickly reloads her revolver, sticks her body back out the car window, and continues to fire at almost absolutely nothing— albeit, with longer intervals between the shots.

Her lackadaisical ass had better be decent in a fight, ‘cause I don’t have the patience for a fucking slacker on my team right now, Piper thinks to herself. Rolling down her own window, she spits out a small mouthful of venom. And that old man had better take a shot soon, or I’m gonna be shoving his rifle down that fucked up eye socket of his.

Cherry’s focus is nigh unbreakable, even with the presence of consistent gunshots from behind him. There has never been a moment in his life where his driving has meant more to everyone else than it has to him, and so, not even the threat of being hit is deterring him from keeping his posture upright with both hands on the wheel.

Roxanne and Jules, on the other hand, have slumped down into their seats in the cabin, and are attempting to give rally-style navigation directions to Cherry from a map that’s about as long as the cabin, floor to ceiling. Roxanne has tasked herself with keeping an approximation of where they are on the map by tracing her finger along the route, while Jules has taken to calling out the upcoming corners and turns whenever appropriate. And, of course, this is all being done in the dimly lit cab of the truck, whose overhead lights have not been replaced in years.

“Medium right,” the Vampire says, jerking his thumb in that direction. “Then, light left. I think.”

“Got it,” Cherry responds, beginning to brake the take the turn, as told, before the shine from his headlights can even illuminate the back wall of the junction.

“Jules, could you tell me what that is on the map?” Roxanne asks, pointing at what looks to be an absolutely massive depression relatively far down the road.

He widens his eyes. “Kinda looks like a pit. Maybe. Why?” And though there’s plenty of other landmarks on the map of similarly massive size, this one puzzles him for but a moment before he solves it. He traces the path back to where Roxanne has kept track of their location, and realizes that the area in question cuts between where they are now, and where they want to head, which is an exit marked in red ink “Near Honeysett”. “Holy shit,” he says.

“What’s next?” Cherry asks, having clearly been too focused to realize what’s going on.

“Hard right, and a ravine crossing in the next twenty turns.”

“Wait, what?”

In the bed of the car, everyone is slightly surprised that the person leaning out the side window hasn’t hit anything, or anyone, other than the cavern walls yet. Even Olive, who has taken to standing up to make herself a target (for the sake of blocking it with her power, though there’s a massive doubt in her mind that she’ll be fast enough (again) to react to a bullet), is a little perplexed by this.

Though, as she gets bored of watching the Elf shoot everywhere but the truck, Olive turns to the cabin, where she sees an awfully mean looking blonde woman who seems to keep having to spit out the window (why would she be packing a lip at a time like this?), and, in the backseat, a glass man with a rifle.

Now, again, something strikes Olive as odd. She traces the sight of the woman driving, and finds it to bounce between the truck bed itself, her, and everyone else, but primarily Brie, who stares right back. This isn’t too odd, as having heard Brie’s story about getting brained by the woman, it would make sense that she’d have a vendetta. And that Brie would be rightfully afraid of her.

But, the glass man with the rifle. Why would he be aiming out the front windshield? And more importantly, where are his sightlines aimed? She peers at the front of the barrel, and realizes that it couldn’t be at herself. It’d be much more clear, then. No, he’s aiming at someone else. And it’s nobody behind her (Lucille), and nobody to the left (Judith and Leon).

The front windshield of the following car shatters inward with the thundercrack of the sniper’s rifle, and in a flash, there’s a metallic “tink”, followed by the crumble of rock. Olive opens her eyes to find that she’s got a feathered hand in front of Brie’s head. And her hand is unharmed, albeit a little sore.

==============================================================

That damned bird. That shot had been perfect. It would have been the cleanest kill this place would have ever seen. It’s an insult to the profession that something as absolutely absurd as a bullet-proof Owl would decide to poke her forsaken beak into the path of this art.

Kranner’s fuming. A series of complications flash through his mind as Olive in the truck bed far ahead continues to move and thrust out limbs, having taken up Meat’s former position near the edge so as to swat munitions fire from the air with overanxious precision. Kranner’s eyes focus a bit more, and he drinks in the details. There’s always a hole in the armor, assuredly. Everyone makes a mistake at a time like this, even the ones who live for it.

Each of Sundae’s bullets get blocked if they dare to soar nearby any of them, but there’s something particular about the way Olive’s moving. The glassy bristle of his jaw rubs up against the mask as it comes to him in small bits and pieces, as though every blocked bullet itself is a part of a puzzle: she’s blocking killshots, whether she intends to entirely or not. Tracing their trajectories might be difficult for someone of a lesser caliber, but Kranner’s on top of his game.

That’s it, then. Can’t shoot to kill or she’ll manage to take the bullet, no matter who it’s aimed at. It’s a laudable performance but ultimately Kranner’s not interested in giving applause to competition or quarry, so her award is going to be something very special indeed as, ignoring the sounds of Piper and Sundae hissing like serpents at one another, he lines up his shot through the windshield, focusing on the bird’s leg.

Olive’s managed to puff out her feathers and swing her arms with a combination of protective knowledge of any vaguely humanoid anatomy and pure instinct, owlish eyesight providing her with a near perfect passive tracking of each gun barrel in the car behind them. Behind her, Judith and Leon are huddled together, the Orc’s arms wrapped around the werewolf, and off to either side she’s flanked by Brie and Lucille— the former’s been shooting, but none of her shots have landed anywhere but the plating, and the latter’s already run out of throwing knives.

Another heavy revolver round bounces off of her arm, and for the briefest second she turns her head without turning her body to face Judith and Leon, saying, “I don’t think I can keep this up for much longer! I’m runnin’ out of steam, somebody think—”

CRACK. Olive tumbles to the floor of the truck bed, half slumping and flailing, only avoiding death by cave floor and car tires as Brie and Lucille both immediately grab her and pull her back toward themselves, right into Judith and Leon, whose eyes widen.

“Okay! Thinking of something, thinking, uh, Brie give me your gun,” Judith babbles out, retreating from Leon’s arms only to be handed the semi-automatic. Well, she snatches it from out of Brie’s hand after the woman reloads, but once she has it she hands it to Leon, whom she presses up against. “This is going to be rough.”

One hand holding the gun, the other arm around Judith again, Leon glances between his girlfriend and the two others in the bed of the truck with a sigh. “Azariah’s been a bad influence. What is this, Plan D? I know it’s low on the list.”

“Would you care to explain to the rest of us?” Brie’s eyes narrow, but she’s plenty busy trying to keep Olive steady as she struggles with the pain. Down by her leg, Lucille’s already bandaging up the wound, repeating small battlefield platitudes about strength and pain.

“Don’t need to,” he says. “If it fails, maybe the truck’ll start going faster with less weight. Jump.”

Kranner’s in the midst of getting a second shot lined up— he’s taking aim at that Orc’s shoulder, hoping to put a round right in the muscle, compromise the whole damned thing— when the target and his little friend disappear into thin air. It’s as much a surprise to the two women still up in the truck bed as it is to him, and his ears tell him that while Piper’s still getting mad and Sundae’s still having a time, neither actually notice it due to their focuses being primarily on the disabling of the truck itself.

The backseat bumps awkwardly and the car sinks a solid chunk, almost enough to scrape the undercarriage against the stone floor of the tunnel, and though it’s already a bumpy ride Kranner knows that such a sound isn’t supposed to come with the sound of the upholstery getting rubbed on by denim or skin. To most the proposition’s absurd, but he’s been in this business for far too long to take chances. His experience isn’t enough to make up for sheer, unaccounted for surprise, that secret weapon of many a victor.

He swivels and takes aim, but there’s nothing there except a depression in the seat, like somebody is there but they just can’t be seen. These briefest of seconds of searching are just long enough. A series of muzzle flares and gunshots go off, a full semi-automatic pistol magazine’s worth of bullets are sent through the air and straight into his face, neck, and chest, without any of his professional finesse or precision. Each bullet finds a home somewhere inside Kranner, singing through glass and blood, spraying this mysterious wraith— wraiths, the blood paints two figures— and revealing them in the back of the car.

Judith, a bout of anxiety and fear taking hold after having to just mentally calculate the trajectory of a jump like that going from a moving vehicle to another, far more enclosed moving vehicle, and having watched her boyfriend just pump something like eight to ten rounds into a man she’d never met, kicks a leg out and strikes Kranner hard in the head with wolfish strength, cracking the helmet and the man’s head. This also has the effect of busting the backdoor open, sending the corpse tumbling out behind the lot of them, rifle having fallen into the floorboards.

Leon lets out a rasping cough, before, bloodied and invisible, he awkwardly kisses the side of her head.

This is right about the time when Sundae’s turned her attention back from the quarry ahead and realizes Kranner’s gone, and that those gunshots were not, in fact, the man going wild with his rifle. It had all the wrong timbre for a sniper, and the wrong rhythm for a trained professional.

When she finds two bloody half-shapes in the back of the car she wastes not even a second leveling her revolver and attempting to empty the full set. However, by the time she’s pulled the hammer back twice the two shapes are gone again, with no sign of truly being there anymore. She almost puts a third into the seat for good measure before Piper raises one arm from the steering wheel to punch Sundae in the side of her head, screaming, “Get back to shooting those freaks you fucking idiot.”

Judith and Leon are back in the truck bed again, splattered with blood but, for the most part, almost entirely unharmed. All that said, Judith is halfway to transforming with the intensity of it all, fangs starting to get a little big for her mouth and eyes getting a bit greener than Leon knows them to be on a good night, so the semiauto is passed back to its owner to be reloaded and returned to proper, trained firing as Leon focuses on calming the werewolf back down, strong arms squeezing around her, lips to her temple.

Lucille and Olive would each be amused, as might be Brie in a less forthright fashion, but the other three are swiftly refocused. Olive isn’t on her feet anymore, but she is up on her knees, with Lucille acting as a support behind her, the two attempting to go back to a sort of less immediately effective version of the Owl’s methods moments ago now that the Sniper’s gone.

“Turning invisible and teleporting were not in the files,” Brie says simply, leveling a shot at Piper, though it banks off of the frame of the car. “I think I am very, very glad to be on your side now.”

“You should’ve seen her wolf out back in Kiln, knocked some former friends of mine clear to the horizon,” Lucille teases. “That rock stuff’s really doing a number on you guys, huh? At least it’s useful.”

Olive lets out something shrill like a battlecry, but the enthusiasm’s too pleasant for that. It’s more like an exclamation of happy surprise, the sort one might make when presented with that oft-requested puppy after coming home from school, or, in this instance, spotting something very, very good.

Leon lifts his head from the tangle of Judith’s hair to ask, in unison with her, “What is it?”

To which the response is, “Azariah! It’s Azariah!”

Chapter Two End.

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[ Table of Contents ] Blondie & The Smokestone March is   © 2020-2023 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Five, Chapter One

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

The sound of the fuel depot exploding is absolutely deafening, and it sends shrapnel of all sizes like a shower of knives into everything in the blast radius. The biofuel that the entire western world runs on, while highly efficient and mostly clean-burning when processed by modern, western engines, is incredibly volatile when combusted while exposed to air. A smoke stack begins to reach high above the treeline, and as the fires begin to spread, Blondie stands for a moment to admire his work. The burning, tickling feeling in the back of his brain feeds him a steady stream of serotonin for every second he takes with his eyes on the fireball. The scene isn’t even particularly beautiful to him— it’s an explosion, and nobody he knows is even in it. Sunsets look better on the regular than this. That magnetizing, intoxicating feeling is the important bit, and the only way he’d be pulled away from it is if the fire brigade showed up unexpectedly, hooked up their hose, and shocked him out of it with a blast of water to the small of his back.

Of course, in that instance, his first instinct is to half-howl and begin sprinting away, the water sizzling to steam as he runs. It takes him a moment to readjust his brain out of feral-creature mode to remember his modus operandi. Find those fucking miners, drag them back to HQ, collect his reward, and get his job and shit back.

An explosion of THAT size has to draw them out, he thinks to himself, as he runs along the now-panicking streets of Pickman’s Hope. They’re like ducks. They think they’re safe on the river until a thunderclap hits their ears, and then they take off real slow, so you can take your time shooting. Just like hunting ducks.

For good measure, Blondie sets a few more buildings in the downtown area of Pickman’s Hope alight. Indiscriminate chaos should help to keep that fire brigade off his back, even if they aren’t actively chasing him. But, as he runs through the streets, he realizes that on occasion, the sound of gunshots follow him closely. And when he stops along a more suburban road to take a small breather (which he finds odd, as he’s recently gotten used to not breathing naturally), he finds himself picking small caliber rounds, only a half an inch or so deep, out of his charred hide. He feels a small amount of respect well up for the people of the town, mostly out of pity.

It’s like throwing rocks at a steamroller, he thinks, turning the bullets to liquid in his palm. It’s stupid, but not about the direct effect, is it. It’s about the psychological effect. Strength in the face of futility. Maybe I’ll go and show them what that really means, then, if they want to get uppity with me. Fusillade was much bigger than this, and he’d heard that they’d lost quite a few city streets as a result of him testing his powers. Imagine what he could do now, after having practiced some on wildlife during the trip up.

He doesn’t get to imagine for quite so long, as, preceded by the sound of a roaring pickup engine, a knife is planted firmly into the square of his back, nearly knocking him off his feet. He looks up at the truck, full of what he assumes to be passing-by refugees— and finds everyone he ever hated, either sitting in the bed of it or assumedly sitting in the cab. The horn is honked a few times for good measure, and even though Blondie’s human brain tells him that it’s bait, his burning-creature brain forces him into a sprint after the vehicle, the fire inside billowing up in licks of flame from his nose.

I can take my time with this, so long as I keep pace, he thinks. Just like ducks.

The force of the explosion causes Samson’s back porch light to flicker, and in a moment’s notice, he sets down dinner onto the picnic table, throws off his hot-gloves, and runs inside to get himself dressed.

“Sorry folks, looks like yer’ friend’s here now, gotta get to work!” he says, sprinting inside.

All ten people, either sitting in the designated seats or leaning up against the deck’s railing, look at one another in a moment of silence. Brie, of course, is the first to stand up and say something. “May I suggest that we try our plan?”

“What plan?” Meat asks, sitting on the railing and letting their flaming feet dangle.

“The plan to use the local system of mining tunnels to escape our chasers?”

“We have a plan?”

Azariah holds up a hand. “I apologize, I was supposed to take the initiative on that. The old mines actually let out pretty close to Honeysett, since it was quicker to cut through the mountains to get back on the roads. Figure we could try to lose ‘em in there, since hardly anyone knows their way anymore.”

“This is the plan,” Brie responds. “Are there any objections?”

“Yeah,” Judith starts, “those mines are abandoned for a reason. Cave-ins, structural integrity failures, monsters— what happens if the route’s blocked?”

“Do you know where we’d be going, Azariah?” Meat chimes in, turning toward Azariah.

This, in turn, causes Brie to frown, and turn to the Hare herself. “You did not mention anything about cave-ins.”

“And the Devils. You know, those things that tend to turn up in old caves?” Judith says, frowning deeply.

“This is looking like a bad plan. Azariah—”

“Hold your horses,” he responds, holding up his hands. “Sam’s got a survey map from the last time the mines were scoped out. He’ll let us borrow it, and if anythin’ gets in our way, well, we’re ten strong, aren’t we? And we’ve got a Notus with us,” he points to Meat. “Nothin’ down there is fond of fire.”

“And it wouldn’t be better to stay here?” Leon asks, raising a hand.

“You think it’d be good to lead Blondie, and whoever else’s chasin’ us, to Sam’s place? Personally, I think it’d be a little disrespectful, seeing as how we’re already benefitin’ off his hospitality and effectively burning down his town.” “He does seem to like the action, though.” Roxanne chimes in.

Azariah snorts. “As true as that is, it wouldn’t feel right to just hole up. I’m of the opinion that we should lure them outta this place, and use the mines to our advantage. Who’s in?”

Cherry, Olive, Roxanne, Azariah, Jules, and Lucille all raise their hands.

Brie holds up a finger instead, “May I ask one more question before I agree?”

“Of course, Ms. Brie.”

“Are we certain that Blondie will be the only one chasing us? I have been having a recurring nightmare about Piper smashing my head like a watermelon, and I cannot help but feel as though my brain is trying to tell me something.”

“There’s no guarantee.” His fuzzy maw twists, threatening a smirk. “You want back at her?”

“Not particularly.”

“You wouldn’t mind her gettin’ hopelessly lost in an abandoned mine, where she might get eaten by a cave creature?”

Brie ponders this for a moment. “I am in.”

“And how about you three?” Azariah asks, motioning to Judith, Leon, and Meat.

“I’m in,” Meat says. “I think our host was getting tired of me anyways.”

“That leaves you two.”

Judith and Leon look at one another, then at those around them. Judith sighs, and Leon offers a thumbs up as she says, “We’re outnumbered.”

“Perfect. Now, that leaves the matter of getting the dog’s attention.” Jules clears his throat, standing up from his seat at the table. “Leave that to us, gramps.” He turns to look at Lucille, who though she seems disappointed that Jules just volun-told her, is equally eager to get back at that burning wolf. “Anyone down for a drive-by?”

Piper, bored and agitated, drums her fingers on the sedan’s dash. They weren’t able to procure any weapons in the past five days that would fit on their vehicles, and people were starting to get suspicious with the amount of money they were throwing around, combined with their conspicuously “civilian” outfits and their very in-a-hurry attitudes. Hell, even the armour plating that they got their cars outfitted with wasn’t all that great. You probably couldn’t bust down a single wall without totalling the car, and in that case, why the hell would you have gotten the plating in the first place? At least their wheels were all-terrain now, instead of the civilian gravel-and-pavement type.

In the passenger seat, Sundae absentmindedly fiddles with her revolver, spinning the barrel every now and then just to hear the sound it makes. In the back seat, Kranner is trying terribly hard to not take a siesta on company time. And in the other car? Jack and Nancy were talking about something, at least as far as she could tell, as they were parked off the side of the road in some brush. 

There is nothing more absolutely boring than a stakeout. Absolutely nothing. Sitting around and waiting for something to happen is a great way to waste your goddamn life. If you can make shit happen, you should do it. Otherwise, you shouldn’t wait for something to happen to you— you should be doing other shit in the meantime. But, what could she be doing, exactly? It’s not like these idiots have anything else to do. And it’s not like she’s been bored these past five days. She’s been annoyed, sure, but not bored.

When she’s fully in charge of her next quarry, Piper thinks, she’s going to make sure there’s no waiting around. Downtime is for fucking clowns.

Right as she’s about to snap at Sundae for clicking the cylinder of her revolver, the rumbling of a truck engine suddenly passes them by, alongside what looked to be a flaming dog keeping a cool forty-five miles per hour jog. Both cars peel out from their hiding places, with Jack and Nancy in the front and Piper’s car in the back.

Now, the fun part starts.

==============================================================

The cave system itself was nothing to take lightly even before the arrival of independent prospectors began turning the natural maze of its interior into a strange and tangled labyrinth. But, after the Shepherd Gemstone takeover and subsequent removal, it’s become one that runs dangerously deep. There are gorges and smaller sub-caverns which swallow any and all light, any wall might be far thinner than it actually appears to be, and that says nothing of the local fauna, much of which decided to move back in after the mine’s abandonment so long ago.

There’s a primary tunnel system that runs the length of the mine, sizable enough for large transport vehicles to pass through, developed when the digging got deep enough that it seemed sensible to just turn the level closest to the actual surface into a spaghetti-string roundabout for trucks carrying hefty loads of rock out. Subsequently, multiple entrances and exits had been carved too, allowing for Shepherd’s attempt to squeeze this stone bloodless to be on a larger scale.

A lot of external supports had to be erected to supplement the slowly eroding natural infrastructure of the caverns, however, and luckily enough the map in Roxanne’s hands has such things marked out, along with a great many various smaller details, such as where what had been mined and how bad it had been hit by the original takeover.

All that said, there is some level of hesitation to trust the map between Cherry and Jules, and most certainly Roxanne, as despite being the most up to date version it can be, they can see that it is, at minimum, more than five years old. Cherry’s a little too focused on making their truck go fast and avoiding potholes to really worry about it, but Jules and Roxanne lack a steering wheel and pedals to fret over so aside from the flaming beast following after their tails the next best thing to fuss about is this map— and the caves, specifically.

“Sure hope none of the exits have caved in since the last survey,” Jules says with an awkward laugh, shooting a fanged grin toward Roxanne. “It’d be just our luck to get away from this bastard and end up slamming into the rocks instead.”

“Jules, quit your jawing. Help with this damned thing, some of it’s getting on the floor,” she replies, trying her best to keep the paper settled in her lap.

An additional point to be made: the map itself sprawls out of their combined grip and into the floor, off to their side enough that Cherry needn’t worry about jamming the paper underneath the pedals. This is because the tunnel system itself runs far and wide beneath the valley itself, not every crack and crevice beneath the dirt’s been mapped out, but a great much of it has. Some think it might even reach all the way back to other Shepherd mining sites, but the tunnels that would connect them in that case would run so long and deep that nobody’s likely to survive, which is to say, anyone stupid enough to think that’s the case and try to run down those seemingly endless tunnels to get somewhere else far away are usually never seen again, and if they are it’s usually between something’s teeth.

So it is that after getting Blondie’s attention and, just as well, getting that of Piper and her crew, Cherry drives the truck hard across the stretch of abandoned road and straight into the wide, waiting mouth of derelict Shepherd Gemstone mining site five, otherwise known as the original Gutter’s Glade Claim, a winding, treacherous labyrinth that acts as the shallow end of a pool so dark, deep, and inhospitable to these surface dwellers that even the fiercest among them might have second thoughts when their minds drift to what lurks down below.

The drive there is tense but not particularly eventful compared to the initial arrival of their pursuer; he’s able to fire off a few shots from his mouth, sending screaming balls of fire toward the vehicle, but with Meat standing guard at the edge of the truck bed none are able to find any solid landing, knocked aside by their bare hands if not outright dissipated like so many embers against wet palms. It’s frustrating, even more so than the constant pelting of small arms fire slamming into his back from the two recently armored cars following hot in his wake.

Each one’s a pinprick of pain at the most, barely noticeable, probably someone trying to take potshots with something low accuracy. It’s a fair assessment; Nancy’s got herself halfway out of the second car’s passenger side window and has been pumping her shotgun nonstop, putting load after load of flechette shot into the werewolf’s hide to no avail.

The gunshots ring out, brief and thunderous amidst the already rolling rumble of the three vehicles and the constant, rhythmic thuds of Blondie’s feet pounding the dirt, gravel, and long uncared for asphalt into a loose, superheated sludge. By this point he’s gone on all fours to pick his pace up, dragging himself forward with each massive, clawed hand like he’s swimming, and by the point where the lot of them can see the entrance to the caverns he’s almost close enough to get a mouthful of Meat’s hand the next time they block his fireball.

In the truck bed, behind Meat, several folks try their own hands at attempting to slow him down as Brie and Lucille both begin pelting him, the former drawing her semiautomatic pistol and unloading a full magazine into Blondie’s face as Lucille greets him with a few cutlery sets’ worth of throwing knives and then a few of Samson’s actual kitchen knives, including but not limited to a chef’s knife he received only last year, a very unsatisfactory paring knife, and a cleaver that actually sticks in Blondie’s shoulder and causes him to lose pace for a brief, but welcome moment.

With that, and some huffing and panting, the lot of them are plunged into darkness— they’ve entered the caves.

Up above are long broken artificial lights which offer nothing, either broken or entirely unpowered; the only light of manufactured origin exists in the headlights of the truck and the two pursuing cars. As natural light goes, it’s impossible to not notice the glow coming off of both Meat and Blondie, a vivid red in contrast to the off-white yellow hue of the vehicular lamps and the soft, but unrelenting light emanating from mushrooms growing out of the corners, floors, and ceilings in small patches wherever a warm, moist corner might have been a prime bit of real estate for something to die in.

Such as it is, though it’s not sunlight, there’s enough of the various unnatural white, magical red, and residual blue to mix into some kind of ambient lavender, which paints Azariah’s features in the softest of violet as he turns toward the cab and knocks on the window. Once it’s opened by Jules, who’s still chuckling like a fool with minutes to live, the Hare pokes his head in.

“Roxanne,” he starts, “I’ve got an idea. It’s a great idea.” A grin crosses his muzzle, poking between the Fox and Cherry.

“If you’re thinking of doing something stupid, you had better stop now. Don’t you dare—”

“All ears here, old-timer.” Jules grins in turn.

Cherry shakes his head. “I don’t like the tone he just used. Roxanne, I can’t look, but is he—?”

“Jumpin’ out. Roxanne, you take good care of these kids for me. I got a tiebreaker to win.” Before another word comes there’s a steady vibration, a whirling, whistling sound, and Azariah’s already soaring through the air in a flying bound.

Blondie’s eyes go wide as from over Meat’s shoulder comes a screaming, stiff-eared bolt from the blue. The next thing that registers is pain in the form of Azariah’s knee getting deeply and intimately acquainted with his forehead, only barely missing the slavering jaws waiting to seize on anything. There’s a pinch too, as the old man digs his fingers into the burnt and broken fur atop Blondie’s head.

The two animals don’t lose much speed between them, even when Blondie’s been kneed in the face. Still running, now blinded by a face full of Hare, the werewolf attempts to keep pace with his legs and one arm as the other claws and swipes in an awkward, clumsy arc to seize at Azariah, who refuses to keep still and keeps shifting position like a jittering wind-up toy between fresh knees to the face.

In the cab Roxanne is raising hell so harshly that it’s overpowering the sound of the engine’s roar and causing everyone to look toward her. “You stupid old man, you get back here now! I did not walk weeks on a goddamn missing foot to lose you like this! Get back in this truck right now, or so help me!”

By the end of her sentence, Blondie’s got his claws in Azariah’s clothes and tosses him like a lump of garbage hurled up by a forceful drop in the trash can. Fortunately, the Hare rolls into the fall and immediately begins sprinting, darting to the right on the wide tunnel floor and actually holding pace with the truck itself, much to the surprise of those who’d only joined their group in Pickman’s Hope and to the fury of Blondie.

Up ahead, there’s a fork in the road; Azariah glances into the truck cab, locks eyes with Roxanne, and then darts down the path on the right with whooping mountain holler as Jules says, without thinking, “Exit’s to the left, kid.”

Cherry, of course, takes the left. It’s the pre-planned path, but now it’s also a good way to get both himself and Jules smacked in the backs of their heads by a wailing Roxanne. “Damn it!” She screams. “Damn it! Meat, do something!”

As Blondie peels off to follow the hooting Azariah, Meat takes a running start to jump after the both of them, heading diagonally across the truck bed from the back toward the front to keep pace with the wolf, saying only “I’ll bring him back,” to Roxanne before the three of them disappear down the actual split in the tunnel.

Jack and Nancy glance at one another before their car, Thistle’s old one with some shiny new armor plating, screams down the right path as well, picking up speed and blazing after the small contingency, leaving Piper, Sundae, and Kranner to follow after the main truck and leaving them in the dust.

“I hope those idiots know what they’re doing,” Piper snarls as Kranner starts lining up his rifle in the backseat, placing it right between the two women up front. Her eyes narrow and lock with Brie’s for a moment long, and she grins. “Leaves the fun bit to us.”

==============================================================

After the initial shock of sending his legs into overdrive has worn off (and his bones had creaked a little, causing him to regret not having stretched before enacting his plan of distraction), Azariah falls into a groove familiar to him from years of dancing in the ring with larger opponents. Fake-outs and false stops send Blondie skidding past him into walls, slow downs earn him a couple cheeky back elbows to the jaw, and sudden speed-ups help him avoid attacks that would otherwise send him off his feet. It’s a complicated dance of trying annoy the flaming dog into doing something radically stupid, while simultaneously trying to keep it behind him.

Meat, on the other hand, is finding themselves concerned by the presence of the car trailing the three of them. While it takes concentration to keep steady pace, as Blondie’s sheer size gives him a speed advantage over their non-lycanthropic body, it keeps getting temporarily broken by the ringing snaps and chugging pumps of Nancy’s shotgun. At the pace they’re moving, the shot is doing little more than shredding their clothing, something they’re certain that Roxanne will be upset by. But, after picking a few stray pellets out from behind their ears, they realize something. Azariah’s idea was better than the old man had probably intended, as now, they have two scapegoats to take the heat from Blondie off the two of them.

While there was an alright chance that they could lose the flaming dog in the tunnels, there was a less-than-alright chance of them actually beating him in a two versus one fight. They’d get tired before he did, and then that’d be the end of both them and Azariah. Now that there’s these two mercenaries, however. That means that if they can get Blondie to be preoccupied with shaking them off, they can book it down a side-tunnel and leave. Putting aside the mental planning for a moment, they look ahead to Blondie, who has taken to launching fireballs toward Azariah.

The hard part is going to be getting that old fart to listen to me, they think to themselves, throwing off what remains of the poncho as they run.

In the car, Jack has plugged up one of his ear-holes in an attempt to dampen the sound of Nancy’s combined war cries and semi-manic shotgun firing. And though driving with one hand isn’t something unfamiliar to him, driving with one hand while trying to follow a string of flaming individuals through tunnels where the clearance between his car seat and a cave wall is nigh unknown? It almost makes him a little annoyed. Which isn’t something he feels often, and it’s something that feels terrible. At the first opportunity he gets, he taps Nancy on the shoulder while she’s reloading.

“Nancy?”

“Not now, soldier! I’m getting my shells in!”

“Nancy, listen to me for a second.” She’s about to lean out the window again, when Jack takes his hand off his head to grab her by the shoulder and pull her back into her seat. “Nancy!”

“What in the WORLD is this insubordination?” she yells, slamming her shotgun into her lap. “Explain yourself!”

“Nancy, I think you’re being a little loud. I’m having a hard time concentrating.”

“It’s an intimidation tactic, soldier! Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of those before!”

“I don’t think anyone but us can hear you.”

“Then I’ll scream louder!” she says, starting to lean out the window again, only to be pulled back to her seat by Jack. “You had better drop the act, or as your superior, I’ll—”

“You’re not even hurting them! You’re using a shotgun, Nancy!”

“Do I need to repeat myself on the matter of war-time tactics, son?!”

The Android frowns. “I’m older than you.”

“And I’m your superior!”

“Listen,” he says, holding out his hand. “Save the rest of your ammo for later, when we’re out of the car. That way, you can guarantee that you’ll hit them. Okay?”

“And what if I don’t?!”

“You’ll be forced to fight two opponents with fire magic with nothing but your knife. And you’ll look like an idiot in front of your subordinate.”

That last line seemed to penetrate her battle-crazed skull. “Agreed. I shall stop screaming and shooting to conserve breath and bullets. Great idea, soldier.”

Jack sighs, and leans back into the seat of the old sedan. “Thank you, god.”

But, something makes him quickly lean forward again, peering into the darkness of the caves. The big flaming guy has stopped in his tracks, and distant thudding can be heard— the kind of thudding that can only occur when something hollow is being hit, banged, or punched.

Jack turns to Nancy and says, “Tuck and roll, soldier,” before flooring it.

Having just lost the Hare and the Skeleton through a thin crack in the wall, Blondie figures that the only way he’s going to catch up is to follow them through it one way or another. Gathering up flame from his belly, he belches fire into the stone in front of him, blackening it and turning it nice and loose for him to pick away at with his hands. Though, he hardly has time to actually do any of this, as quite soon after he’s finished heating up the rock, he hears the rev of an engine. Not a strong engine, mind you, but an engine that’s being pushed to its limit for the sake of one thing only. Even Blondie’s scorched mind can realize what that thing is.

He whips around from his position, watching as the passenger door is opened and a figure tumbles out onto the tunnel floor. He runs forward slightly, braces himself, and gets hit by the car.

Well, that’s a generous statement. As his feet dig trenches into the floor, and his hands sink into the plate that had been sautered onto the chassis of the vehicle quite recently, it’s far more like Blondie catches the car, causing it to skid with him back toward the crack. Once it’s come to a full stop, he looks up, finding himself face to face with a tin man, who is terribly surprised by the prospect that a car doing 75+ would be able to be stopped, bare-handed, by something like Blondie. In response, he smiles, and climbs onto the hood.

“Pick your battles better next time,” he growls, punching through the windshield and directly into the flat of the Android’s chest. Though, surprisingly, he doesn’t feel the crunch of bone. Hell, he doesn’t even feel the metal dent. What’s this guy made of, exactly?

“I think I’ve picked this one pretty—” Jack starts with his witty retort, before Blondie’s claws wrap around his torso, ripping him from his seat and through the cracked wall in a shower of stone.

“Azariah, listen to me.”

The Hare leans up against a pillar of stone, having brought the two of them into one of the natural caves that’d been checked for ore decades prior. “We’ve got time,” he pants. “What’s the need?”

“We need to keep running.”

“Lemme catch my breath first.”

“No, I mean—” Meat attempts to start, before a tin man comes crashing through the wall they had just entered, landing in a pile of his own rubble. “We’ll talk in a second.”

Chapter 1 End.

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[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is   © 2020-2023 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.  

[empty-masks]

Book Five, Chapter Four

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

Honeysett isn’t the largest or most notable town in the world, far from it; if anything it’s something of a nowhere patch of suburb that just happens to exist on everyone’s map, nestled between the politically polarizing Pickman’s Hope and a more financially prolific series of towns that dot the Eternal Autumn up and out of the perpetual season’s territory. It exists, but it doesn’t necessarily exist in the same capacity as a place like Smokestone, Kiln, or Fusillade. It doesn’t have any great or notable exports, and by all means is something that Cherry has very recently started to appreciate— calm and uneventful, save for that lingering memory so long ago.

Its most prominent features are academic and domestic in nature; it has quite the library and a sizable museum, the latter of which in most towns in this day and age would roughly translate to “a great big box full of shiny things people are going to steal,” but nothing really goes missing from the Honeysett Museum for the same reason that Cherry knows it’s safest if they head straight there rather than stop for anything.

It takes a very particular set of characteristics to take up a line of work where your starting equipment, entirely self-funded, tends to be something like how Samson had described it, that being weaponry which was obviously in its second life, having abandoned something kind and clean like acting as a fencepost to take up the dirty, underappreciated but wildly overpaying process of fighting Monsters. Not that every adventurer in the world makes their name by punching up, of course, but that’s usually where they start. Someone, somewhere, has a bad night or a bad day and ends up smashing something creepy or crawly that had intended to eat them and it’s all history from there. In a night they’ve either solidified their need for the normal or a hunger for that dreadful master known as adventure.

Some go the extra mile and sign up with a larger association, such as the guild school, or simply tag along with other freelancers in a party, as Samson did, as Steiner and Baker did. Not all of this work trends toward the humanitarian, as inevitably a burgeoning class of warrior drifters willing to fight for cash tends to lend itself well to clandestine operations, especially in the corporate world and its sister, the criminal underworld, as Lucille and Jules each show. Being good with a gun and willing to use it for whoever pays best, that sort of work has two ways out— early retirement or death.

There aren’t a lot of adventurers who die of natural causes; those that do die in Honeysett, in a specific set of suburbs where those looking to ride out their days coasting on small fortunes from a few hard jobs make their place. Typically these people have a large stash of whatever loot they’ve gathered from trips into dangerous and mysterious climes, often strange and esoteric, beyond that of the normal person’s day-to-day life. Even the very sewers beneath the bustling cities could hold all kinds of creatures, all kinds of treasures, if one is noble, stupid, or desperate enough to pick up a sword and take them.

In Cherry’s neighborhood in Honeysett are the folks who made sure a place like Honeysett can exist, who every night toss themselves into the depths of cave systems like that beneath Pickman’s Hope to take on Cave Shadows and Skitterbears of their own volition, if not to protect others then to earn something to make the world just that much more bearable for those around them— if not to rid the world of something as dangerous and consuming as living, hungering entropy and its kin. Now tired and living out some sense of peace, they were the noble, stupid, and desperate, brave enough to walk into the darkest, most dangerous places in the world with little more to protect them than some sheet metal on their chests, a fencepost in one hand, and some good friends at their back.

If it doesn’t kill them, if they make it to retirement and have stuck it out, they’re like Samson— wavemakers in their own right, the movers and shakers whose names might cause shudders of starstruck awe or muted terror, depending upon the listener, and Samson’s just one.

Another man like this, another product of the bad day, wandering slayer of Monster and man alike, is unable to move his body. The heat fueling it is dying, along with the glow inside. Blondie is getting cold.

Piper, by this point, has run the corpse over six times, give or take a few where she just parked the car with its tire right on the damned thing’s neck. Still, despite her best efforts, it’s done little but turn the body and twist it, though it has managed to get it to stop moving. It almost looks dead for a solid minute as she gets out and grabs her recently acquired best friend, the Doorman crowbar, before he’s working his jaws trying to gurgle something out between globs of what she assumes must be some kind of life fluid. She’d call it blood, but it’s thicker, like dense bile or magma.

Sundae’s got both Jack and Nancy shoved into the back of the car, and that’s at least a slight improvement. It’s not great to think about, given as Jack’s joints are halfway to melted together where they aren’t just busted to hell and back, but he’s an Android, that can be fixed. Nancy might almost be in a state comparable, but all the same, a Vampire’s a Vampire. A few good cuts from a butcher shop or from some random civilian on the way and Piper’ll have her healing up in no time.

“He’s still not dead?” Sundae asks, walking over to stand side by side with Piper, a knife the length of her forearm in hand. “Nancy handed me this. Said you asked for it?”

Piper snatches the knife from the Elf, then looks down at the still gurgling, faintly glowing body of Blondie. “Still not dead. You’d think such a professional would at least do his replacement the courtesy of vacating the fucking premises,” she snarls, striking him in the neck with the heel of her boot, forcing the heavy form onto its back proper.

Sundae pulls the shotgun out of Blondie’s chest cavity, getting one hand on the gun itself and her boot against the bulk of burned muscle. Once it’s out, for good measure, she pulls out her revolver and pumps a few shots into the head. More glowing fluid oozes from the wounds, but the gurgling and the frothing doesn’t stop.

“I ever tell you what my daddy does for a living?” Piper asks, crouching beside Blondie’s head, eyes fixated on the slow, thick trickle running along his broken maw. Slowly, she runs the hook of her crowbar along the crisp, fractured, bony jaw.

Sundae shrugs. “I didn’t know you had parents. I guess it checks out, you seem about messed up enough…”

“Cute.” Piper rolls her eyes before tapping the top of Blondie’s head, earning a soft thudding sound. “He’s a butcher. He likes hunting and fishing in his personal time, but professionally he’s got a butcher shop. For a while he wanted me to take it over, then he let me get that job at Shepherd Gemstone to get some wanderlust out of my system. Now look at me…”

“Are you monologuing at me or at the dead guy?”

“Not… dead,” coughs and sputters Blondie. Each roll of his jaw and tilt of his head is twisting, wretched, and erratic. He can feel the muscles hardening as the flames go out, as the embers smoulder and the smoke begins to fade. “I’ll kill you. I’ll- kill- you- all.”

Sundae nearly doubles over as she laughs, but her cackling finds its end as a bronze tail slams into the back of her head, sending her to the stone floor in a small heap. When she’s back up, she locks eyes with Piper, whose jaw is tense, shut, and threatening to put a snarling set of fangs out from between her lips any second. “Humorless bitch,” is all she gets out before a hiss sends her straight back to the car, lightly wiping a bloody nose and a split lip.

Once alone, Piper turns to Blondie again, staying crouched, white-knuckling her fists around the handle of the hefty knife, the crowbar clattering to the rocks beneath them both. “You’ve got some nerve,” she says. “In the end, it wasn’t enough. Just die already, just die. I’m not going to let some flaming piece of shit get in the way of what I want. Nobody’s getting in my way, not those idiots in the car, not those miner fucks, and not you. I’m finally doing it, just like you told me back in Smokestone, remember? Take what you want, right?”

His dull, glowing eyes linger on her for a time, jaw still and voice silent, before he says, “Who… are you?”

Piper clenches her teeth and stabs Blondie in the throat, driving as far as she can and pressing on the deer antler handle until it threatens to snap under her lycanthropic power. Once it’s in too deep to handle, she picks up her crowbar and begins smashing the blade even further, like someone trying to split a log with an iron wedge.

Half-hearted and vain attempts to bite her as she did this came, but are all the same ignored as she continues to ram the knife deeper and deeper, only stopping once she hears the awkward scrape of knife point against bone, which tells her it’s about time to get to the good part.

Though she has to reach into the wound, she grips the handle tight in one hand and hooks his head with the crowbar using the opposite. Then, she rips them in opposite directions. The charred hide cracks and gives way, and as she slashes the knife free from its prison, she removes the head from the body, severing the spine.

Without a body to give it the strength of a voice, the werewolf’s jaws work themselves without any noise save for the wet sizzle of glowing, magically infused corpse-fluid on stone and jaw on jaw. She tosses the knife away, the blade ruined from the heat and warped beyond belief, before picking the head up with her gloved hands to look into his eyes.

She can see the glow fading, leaving him. The thing in her hands stopped being Blondie a long time ago, but it’s only just begun to stop moving. “Shepherd’s got a crap taste in officers,” she says with a sigh. “I should get Janet some flowers on the way back.”

Sundae flinches in the passenger seat when Piper finally sits in front of the wheel again, the head of the werewolf getting tossed into her lap during the process. A scowl crosses her elfin features, but not a word is uttered until Piper initiates the conversation, her voice rising with the struggling rev of the engine. “Have one of the others bag it on the way if either of them can use their fingers. We’re going to go pickup my car and then we’re heading for Honeysett— and keep your mouth shut, Sundae, or I’ll break it.”

==============================================================

There’s a moment of silence when Cherry finally parks the truck, dusty and covered in bulletholes, out in front of a quaint, red-sided two-level at the edge of the surrounding forest. Nobody but him gets out of the car (leaving the keys inside the ignition, mostly out of sheer exhaustion but also in case they needed to get going again), and nobody but him approaches the house. The front door is left open, with a screen door helping to keep the bugs out, and the smell of sugary, roasting vegetables wafts into his headspace before he even rings the doorbell.

“You’re always on time, Celica,” a burly voice calls out from inside. “You brought the wine this time, right?”

A large, bearded man sticks his head around the corner of the kitchen, working with something hot on the other side of the wall. His hair, a few weeks post-shaving, looks like it could’ve been a deep, rich crimson earlier in his life— it has since turned lighter, more gray-toned, with his long, well-kept beard reflecting this even more so. It helps to hide the wicked, messy claw scar wrapping up and around his right ear and ending at the edge of his right cheek. The glasses, thick-rimmed and square on his head, are fogged up from the hot kitchen work, and it takes him a couple tries of identifying the face at his door to realize who it is. “Cherry?” he asks, rubbing the condensation from his lenses. “Or am I scrambled from stickin’ my head in the oven all mornin’?”

Though he nearly passes out as he pushes the screen door open, Cherry finds himself grinning like an idiot at the sound of his dad’s voice. “I think it could be a little bit of both.”

The sound of a pan being set down on the table is heard, and his dad comes walking around the corner, apron still messy and standing only a few inches taller than his son, to give him a hug that lifts him clear off the hardwood floors of the foyer.

“My god, it’s so good to see you,” he starts. “You got some time off from the ol’ job? Actually, don’t answer that, I’ve gotta call your father inside. He’ll wanna hear.”

Cherry puts his hands over his ears temporarily, as the threat of losing his eardrums to the sound of “ASH! GET YOUR MUDDY BUTT INSIDE, CHERRY’S HOME!”, alongside the response of “WHAT IN THE HELL IS HE DOIN’ HOME ALREADY?! RED, THIS IS THE THIRD SURPRISE VISIT THIS WEEK, YOU GOTTA WARN ME WHEN YOU’RE DOIN THIS STUFF!” from the back of the house, presumably through an open window nearest the kitchen.

“Hey, dad?” he asks, voice muffled on Red’s shoulder.

“What’s up?”

“I’m not on leave. I quit, actually.”

“What?! Why?” “And I’ve got a couple friends to introduce you to.”

“Don’t tell me you’re—” Red begins, before looking over Cherry’s shoulder and into the front yard. There stands everyone from the truck, unwashed and tired beyond belief, some waving hello to him, some leaning up against one another for various reasons, and some working on adjusting the bandages on the others.

“Yup,” Cherry mumbles, passing out onto the floor of the foyer, leaving his Dad to reckon with the nine strangers that now stand in front of him.

“Uh,” he stammers. “I’ll break out the drinks.”

There’s nothing quite like trying to pack twelve people into a relatively small living room and kitchen combo. Though couples like Azariah and Roxanne are more than willing to sit on one anothers’ laps, there’s still a lack of seating / standing room in a house where two large, old men consistently bump into one another when preparing dinner. Cherry, having been wafted back into consciousness by a mug of tea, sits on the back counter in the kitchen (definitely in the way of his parents, but at the moment they’d feel bad making him get down). Red and Ash, the latter of which dons a mane / beard combo of long, curly, grey hair and who stands a few inches taller than his husband, busy themselves settling everyone in, learning everyone’s names, and making room in the kitchen for the surprise party that’s just now beginning.

A cask of Painted Pumpkin wine is brought up from the cellar, and things begin to smooth themselves out. Azariah, Olive, and Cherry’s Dads get themselves into a conversation about adventuring. Jules, Lucille, and Meat hang back from the rest of the crowd, simply taking in the good vibes (and the third of which having to stand near the stone-lined fireplace, as Ash recognizes what sort of affliction they have and knew what it does to wooden flooring). Brie, Judith, Leon, and Cherry all have themselves a few sips of alcohol to reflect on the happenings of the day, and to unwind a little, seeing as how high tensions have been recently.

Olive fangirls out over the fact that Cherry’s parents are somewhat legendary in the area for their adventuring accomplishments, from their Dragon-slaying to their town defending, going so far as to say that they were part of the reason why she took up the axe to begin with. And when Cherry mentions that the whole neighborhood is filled with people just like them, and when Celica Dahlstad, the unkillable robin-hood repossession artist who’s wanted in thirty cities, walks through the front door with a pricey bottle of local bourbon? She looks as though she might explode with excitement.

Meat is eventually approached by Ash, who points them in the direction of a couple only a block away who are similarly undead, but who work with extremely fireproof material, and could, theoretically, get them some proper gear. As the conversation continues, they bond over their experiences on the road, and Ash sympathizes with the feeling of never feeling at peace with the way things are, and always feeling on edge. The only thing that helped him, as he puts it, was falling in love and wanting to keep it that way.

In an awkward, but extensive conversation about the state of Pickman’s Hope started between Brie, Azariah, and Roxanne, Brie asks about when it would be a good time to head back down, since she’d very much like to pick up her car so that she can visit her girlfriend up north, let her know what had happened and that they’re more than likely broke as a joke. Roxanne informs her that if she needs a place to stay, she’s more than welcome down at the old mining town, since there had been talk between her and Azariah about moving there later in the year, since Smokestone is no longer an option (and because they realized that they had missed Samson more than they remembered).

And eventually, things quiet down. Hours turn into days, and those days are spent on recovery, alongside familiarizing themselves with the neighborhood. Many folks drop by to say hello (and almost everyone being recognized by Olive, though she hardly ever mentioned it), each one wanting to talk, meet the new folks, check up on Cherry, or drop off some extra food. It becomes incredibly apparent to the runaways that most folks in this place, regardless of their general demeanor, are willing to help with anything and everything. Everyone grows their own food, everyone helps out with one anothers’ upkeep, everyone looks out for one anothers’ backs. There’s nothing like knowing just how awful the world can be to straighten out one’s sense of community. And there’s nothing like the strength gained from adventuring that turns these sorts of communities into some of the most well-protected on this side of the Dividends.

==============================================================

Damn the calm and the quiet. Every minute since Blondie stopped making noise has been so silent that Piper’s largely left with her own thoughts for company, as even her own underlings have been hesitating to speak unless spoken to— a preferred change over Sundae blurting out whatever she pleases or Nancy giving her a migraine, but the sheer amount of nothing that goes on during information collection and paperwork processing is detestable.

When the three remaining of her squad are patched up, Jack’s joints are all fixed and moving again and Nancy’s up and about, Piper’s found the important stuff. Old admin records of addresses and letters of recommendation, all sent from a nice little suburb in Honeysett. She knew it had to be in Honeysett already, but Pickman’s Hope and Fusillade were each much easier to find anything in. Honeysett has this odd corporate-blackout to it that she doesn’t get, but that’s not as important anymore. If those fucks aren’t hanging around with Cherry’s family, then she can use them as bait.

Nobody’s gone anywhere yet. For all the talk of places to go and work to be done, they’ve spent a lot of time just recovering and discussing their plans without actually acting on them. Cherry’s dads are a fountain of hospitality, and the neighbors are all willing to give their own two cents every once in a while too, especially now that the neighborhood’s nephew, Cherry himself, has returned— even if it means there might be a lot more engine revving in the near future.

When the big, faded luxury vehicle comes to a halt just behind the truck in front of the house, most of the folks, if not all of them, are out on the front porch enjoying something or other. Some are locked in conversation, as Judith and Lucille are, over the tenable nature of a possible flower shop in Pickman’s Hope, with Leon and Jules offering small comments here or there as Lucille runs through some basics of entrepreneurial startups having at one point technically run a small mercenary band during her stint with Shepherd Gemstone. Others are a bit busy enjoying their time with their partners— needless to say Azariah and Roxanne are practically attached at the hip and half-dancing to nonexistent music in the yard, Leon’s practically spent the whole time acting as a glorified lawn chair for Judith (and he wouldn’t have it any other way), and Red and Ash themselves have been exchanging the occasional kiss between shifts handling the grill out front, much to the chagrin of their son Cherry.

Olive and Cherry were each the first to notice the driver, with Brie and Meat being close behind only because the two only just walked around the house to head out front again with arms full of disposable plates, paper cups, and some bottles of drinks both soft and hard.

Piper steps out, grinning near ear to ear, and offers a brief wave before stepping around the car itself to walk onto the lawn. Behind her, the three still living members of the unit exit as well. The general underlying hum of enjoyment halts altogether as the four step onto the grass, and the silence grabs more attention than the throng of life had; neighbors poke their heads out of their windows and stand in their doorways, suspicious looks on their faces, hesitation in their movements only due to a lack of understanding. Were Red and Ash expecting more?

Everyone drops what’s in their hands and puts them up not in surrender but in preparation as Sundae, Nancy, and Piper each draw their weapons.

“Y’all really are stupid, going and hiding here like we wouldn’t have this address on record.” Piper grows taller, meaner looking as her fangs poke out from between her lips and venom drips to the ground, sizzling in the grass as her tail rolls and coils behind her. “At least you’re all in one place. It’ll be hard to fit everybody into the one car, but I’m sure you can handle the luggage stacking, right, Jack?”

A soft, “Yes, ma’am,” exits the bot as he steps forward, raising his fists.

Azariah sighs. “Survived Blondie, got this far, and now…”

“And now nothing.” Red says bluntly, walking out from around the grill, a “Kiss the Cook” apron on and a very, very warm spatula in one heavy hand. “You put your weapons down or you’ll regret it.”

Piper laughs, but Jack complies, immediately setting his hands to his sides and stepping back. This, of course, causes Piper to go from laughing to hissing at him. “What are you doing? It’s an old man, beat the shit out of him.”

Sundae clears her throat and puts her gun away. “Boss, taking on miners is one thing. Care to look around?”

“Why? It’s just some fucking suburb—”

She stops when she actually does glance around, and behind her little group, on the sidewalk and on the street, a throng of neighbors have cropped up.

Cherry’s known just about all of these people his whole life, and a few for a little over half. He knows them as friends of the family, honorary aunts and uncles, but Olive, who’s having a hard time keeping it together beside him, knows them all from newspaper clippings and bar stories passed around in her old traveling merc circles.

In a wide semicircle around the back of the unit stand Cherry’s neighbors, including but not limited to, as Olive hastily describes to Brie, Meat, and anyone else willing to listen as her whispers rise and fall with her enthusiasm, the following: Celica Dahlstad, whose reputation for being nigh unkillable is only really beaten by the near fantastical knife gripped in one of her hands; the Hunter Brothers, a set of middle-aged men with pointed ears, graying slicked back hair, and revolvers that make even Sundae’s seem pale in comparison, with multiple barrels and other odd additions; Mountain Road, a craggled, rocky Golem taller than even Jack with a rifle that actually looks more like somebody put a stock on a medieval cannon, whose appearance is close to a statue of a lumberjack come to life; and of course the couple that Meat had gotten a pair of fireproof shoes from, a tall, strong looking, stern woman with white hair, grey skin, and electric blue eyes. A similar glow creeps up her arms and legs, her pointed ears and icy fangs snaggling slightly out from her cracked, mirthless smile. Beside her is a grinning skeleton in a polo and khaki shorts who only makes it up to her shoulder; they’re Bill and Renee Crawl.

Behind the lot of them is Ash, in whose hands is held something massive, like a log of wood made out of some kind of stone; Cherry knows it as “that damned piece of shit,” from what Red had called it once or twice due to it falling over and wrecking some of their nicer furniture in Cherry’s youth. Olive knows that to be a weapon of literally Dragon slaying proportions, a log of the same stuff Jules’ old stick had been made out of with holes bored into one end for easier gripping. To put it simply, Ash was swinging around about half a tree’s worth of wood strong enough to, even in walking-stick form, force a hard left turn from a careening, out-of-control motor vehicle.

And here he is, eyes blazing with unfiltered rage from under gray eyebrows, stepping from between his neighbors to lean in toward Piper and her cronies to say, “Get off my fucking lawn,” in a voice barely above a whisper.

Every neighbor there is clad in something casual, from jeans to shorts to polos to short sleeve dress shirts, the sort with floral patterns and exotic fruit plastered all over, but everyone is holding something that makes Sundae, Nancy, and Jack stand down. It all makes Piper angry, but more so, she’s deadly jealous of it all. The blatant, casual display of power— everyone here could whoop her ass one-on-one and make it back in time for a beer. It’s equal parts terrifying and maddening, seeing just how much further she has to go before she’s one of them.

She holds eye contact with Ash, having turned around, until behind her head there’s a soft click. She blinks; Brie has placed a semiautomatic pistol to the back of Piper’s head. With a surprising lack of malice, Brie says simply to her, “Leave.”

The set of four make their way back to the car without any pleasantries or goodbyes, tucking themselves inside with their proverbial tails between their legs, save for Piper. She’s marched to the car, personally, by Brie and Ash, the latter of whom has set his Dragon-smashing log down because, as Red shouts from across the yard, “I don’t want to have to pay the town for cleanup, you messy bastard,” with the phrase “messy bastard” somehow coming out very sweetly.

It’s only after getting in the driver’s seat that Piper rolls down the window and eyes Brie, scowling. “This isn’t over,” she hisses.

Brie lifts the gun again, “I would say it is.” The car takes off down the road again as everyone watches.

Ash raises a brow and asks, “I thought you ran out of bullets?”

“I did,” she replies. “But she did not know that.”

A smile presses its way out from beneath Ash’s beard, and as he lifts his club to go stash it away again, he gestures toward the yard. “Alright everyone, stick around! Red’s cooking ribs.”

The neighbors all walk in to mingle too, though most leave after a minute or so to pop back over to their own houses for a moment— it’s rude to not bring at least a side, after all.

Chapter Four End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is   © 2020-2023 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Five, Chapter Three

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

After getting himself aboard and slumping over against one of the truck bed’s walls, Azariah opens his mouth to try and quip about the situation, but the words come out three times fastforwarded, like what happens when you skip through a song to find a funny lyric you’d noticed. “Iwould’vebeenhereearlierbutadogchasedmeontheway back— oopsholdononesecond,” he says. He cracks his neck, runs his fingers along his lips, smacks them a couple times, then finally, turns back to the other folks in the truck bed. “Did someone fall out? Me an’ Meat nearly tripped over somebody’s body on the way past.”

Brie points to the happy couple in the corner adjacent. “They had taken care of someone particularly frightening behind us. I believe they shot him.”

“Looked like someone’d thrown him through a couple sheets of glass.”

“He was glass, Azariah,” Judith rolls her eyes.

“That’d explain it,” he says, yawning. “Now, if y’all excuse me, I need to pass out. My legs feel like they’re ‘bout to disconnect from my hips, and my heart feels like an overfilled water balloon.”

He attempts to put his feet up on Meat’s lap, as a little joke, but they have none of it, pushing him away and standing up behind Olive, who is still in the process of blocking bullets from her knees, albeit slowly, as though Sundae’s firing pattern hasn’t gotten any more accurate, it’s certainly gotten more cautious about the random angles she chooses to fire at.

“Do you need help?” they ask, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“That’d be nice, but I ain’t sure what you’d be able to do,” Olive starts, but upon seeing Meat’s hand conjuring a magical fireball like a toilet flushing in reverse, she decides to just say, “Okay, that looks like it’ll do the trick.”

Piper, half-transformed and having to keep her frustration at a simmer, lest she go berserk and crash the car, grows increasingly worried at the prospect of being hit back by their targets, especially since the flaming corpse and the Hare had passed them in the tunnels, hopped on to the back of the truck, and the former decided to set their hands on fire.

Sundae, on the other hand, is still having a time just firing off her revolver. She’s having such a time, in fact, that her hammer-pulling thumb has gotten quite tired, and she’s physically slowing down, even though her heart tells her to keep firing.

Or, it might not be her heart at all— there’s a part of her that knew instinctively that when she met Piper, it was going to be in her best interest to do the things she says, but only to the degree of a lackey. From the way that she addressed the four of them, to the way that she kicked an old man while he was down, instead of finishing the job then and there. She’s cruel, overconfident, and most importantly, cowardly. The last of which meaning she’ll take any opportunity to put herself over others to ensure they can’t hurt her.

So, the plan had been simple. The others can bust their asses for the jobs, but Sundae was going to have her cake and eat it too. She was going to do her job to the minimum, so that she could revel in the presence of someone like Piper getting absolutely livid beside her. And boy, is Sundae feeling the revelry at this point in time. What’s the bet that Piper ends up getting her pay docked for all this? Ends up getting chewed out by one of her superiors? The last guy didn’t think he had any superiors, but at least he had the balls to act the way he thought. Maybe she’ll even get demoted. Getting her fired would be bad, but having her as a lackey? Sundae’s very own evil, cynical, violent, and insecure lackey? A couple hits every now and then would be worth the trouble in the end.

As she reloads her revolver, grinning from the state of her headspace, she takes another punch to the shoulder, causing her to spill a full handful of revolver slugs onto the floor.

Piper slams the dashboard in frustration, causing it to shatter like the windshield did earlier. “Fuck! Fuck, god damnit, shit,” she says, her defilement of the car’s interior taking the wind out of whatever she was going to berate Sundae for.

“Pick it up, quick. Get back to shooting, idiot.”

“Of course, boss,” Sundae responds, leaning over in her chair. She takes her time sorting out shards of the windshield from the bits of brittle dashboard from the shiny brass casings of her rounds, and time is exactly what she needed to take, as a hand-sized fireball hits her car seat headrest, showering the cabin with flaming dust and cushioning.

She has to muffle a snicker as Piper hiss-screams in surprise, rapidly trying to staunch the setting fires with a free hand. Quickly, she gathers up the rest of her bullets (she knew where they were all along, the effect was to keep the pressure up on the snake) and helps her boss put out all the fire, even if it means leaning up against a seat that’s missing its headrest.

“It looks like you made somethin’ explode in there, Meat,” Olive comments, still bracing herself for any stray shots that their chasers could muster. “But I don’t think you hit the person who was shootin’ us.”

“Fine by me,” they say. With a glance, they notice that the Owl’s leg has been bandaged with one of Lucille’s sleeves. “You should take a break. I’ve got it from here.”

She looks up at them, narrowing her eyes. “I’m not movin’ until we’ve lost’em.”

“Couldn’t Brie just shoot them?”

“My last magazine was spent on Judith and Leon’s plan, Meat,” she comments, holding her semi-auto out for them to see. “And it’s quite difficult to hit anything when the platform we’re on is moving at such a speed, much less in the dark, and of course, when you’re afraid for your life.”

“And nobody else can help?”

Everyone else in the truck bed shrugs.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” they sigh. “I’m gonna end this, then.”

They take their position behind Olive, and begin to charge up a fireball with the intent of hitting the driver square in the jaw. If the one that had missed had caused so much pandemonium in the passenger seat, then who can tell what one in the driver seat can do.

But, the plan is interrupted by Roxanne knocking on the sliding glass door between the bed and the cab, opening it quickly, and calling out, “Everyone grab onto the hand-holds, please. Cherry’s about to speed up, and we don’t want anyone falling out. This includes you, Meat,” she says before sticking her head back in the cab, after seeing that the Notus hadn’t done what she had asked.

==============================================================

It’s a hectic moment inside of the truck’s cab, somehow more hectic than the mess outside with bullets still flying by between Sundae’s reloads and the number of people having to get good handholds in the wood and metal bed of the vehicle. Meat, for added measure out there, has to make sure they’re holding metal, and only the thick parts they can find, avoiding anything delicate as though the truck itself might have some parts mysteriously made from tissue paper.

In front, Cherry’s hands are gripping the steering wheel tight enough to make his forearms ache and both Jules and Roxanne are staring straight ahead of them. On the map’s a chasm crossing, one of the largest in the tunnels and one of the most efficient vehicular shortcuts made during the heyday of the Shepherd operation here; in its original construction it ramped up to a higher ledge on the other side and should lead right outside, which while it means the chase would then be on open road, a place where Cherry assures himself he could definitely beat the car behind him, there’s a new problem. Whatever bridge was there prior had collapsed.

There is, however, a solid meter or so of bridge jutting up and out from their side of the chasm, terminating there in ragged, jagged edges as though ruined by great claws— or perhaps just time, but that’s something Cherry doesn’t have to waste on something frivolous like the why or how of an old, old bridge having fallen in the past five years. What he has to worry about is the logistical danger of trying to make that jump.

As Jules searches Cherry’s features, a fear pools in the hollow of his stomach, right on top of the lackluster meal he’d had of the last of Davey’s mushrooms. “You’re actually going to jump it? Kid. Look, we’re beat, sometimes that’s that.”

“We are not beat,” Roxanne snarls back at the Vampire, but when she sees the ramp getting closer she frowns and glances toward the driver also. “Perhaps we could just stop and overpower them with the truck?”

Cherry shakes his head. It’s hard to feel their voices in the thrum and thrill of the metal around him, the way the frame’s rattling and the engine’s roaring, the give and take of the wheel his fingers are curled around. His eyes don’t leave the ramp, but his mouth moves to offer, “We might lose people that way. We can do this.”

“We’re gonna lose all of us this way.” Jules’ frown grows deeper set in his face. “And here I go dying. I should—”

“We can do this,” Cherry cuts him off. “Everyone’s holding on. I was going to save this for any open road chase we might have, but we’ve got this. Besides, it’s like everyone’s forgot I’ve got magic.”

“Magic that allows you to take things apart, Cherry,” Roxanne points out, but pats his shoulder anyway with a resigned sigh. “You aren’t going to take the car apart, are you?”

Cherry’s right hand leaves the steering wheel to pick an object up off the dashboard; in his hand and against the wheel he holds a simple switch wired into the truck, which he rigged himself during the installation of that little gift he’d gotten in Pickman’s Hope. It’s a handle with a button on top, and from the bottom runs a simple wire into the machine, connected to the payload, the can of Pounder Nitrous.

He’s direly hoping that after all the checks and re-checks, after all the mechanical considerations, alterations, and nights spent poring over this engine like a surgeon, that he hasn’t forgotten something. Every single inch of this truck is rendered perfectly inside of his skull, vibrant and beautiful in its dirty, rust-bait junkheap way. The pedal beneath him is pressed near flat to the metal floor and the truck’s screaming to its top speed, setting the vehicle to rattle and screech between its joints, scraping metal on metal with the speed and shrill tones of a vengeful spirit.

Jules and Roxanne hold onto their seats in a literal sense. In the back everyone else does the same, but it’s only once an overly cautious Lucille looks ahead of the truck that she realizes what’s going to happen. “Hold on even tighter,” she says to the rest of them. “I think we’re about to jump the gap.”

Azariah’s still half-wheezing when he holds up a hand and tries to shout, “Kick it, Cherry!” And it does get out, at least a little, though he’s left sputtering and clutching not only the side of the truck bed but also his literal side.

As the truck beneath them accelerates to its top speed, they’re all shaking hard and watching as Piper’s car is losing ground, falling behind.

Sundae scowls and takes a few shots lower, attempting to hit the truck’s tires before she’s smacked with a bronze tail. “What the fuck was that for?” She screams. “I’m trying to win!”

“And have that truck kill us at the same time? Wreck while we’re both gunning it inside a cave?” One of Piper’s hands slams against the dashboard, balled into a fist. “Fucking useless trash— the plating’s slowing us down!”

“Do you expect me to do something about it? Crap, they’re still speeding up, they’re gonna crash in the gorge ahead at this rate.”

Piper scoffs. “Let ‘em. Anything worth keeping’ll survive the crash.”

“But that’s gonna kill them—”

“We can dig their bones out of the wreckage afterward. We can go find Jack and Nancy, those morons.”

Cherry’s thumb rubs the button, a nice, shiny red one, as his fingers curl around both the right side of the steering wheel and the switch handle. His brain feeds him images of straightaways and tight corners, an open road and a cloudy sky, somewhere to go, to drive, to fly. The world is silent around him as even the rattling and roaring of the truck goes quiet and all he can hear is his own heartbeat and the soft click as he pushes his thumb down on the switch.

A click and a soft hiss, something new being fed into the beast’s organs, life itself. Nothing so pure has touched this engine in a long, long time and it’s almost forgotten the taste of this special flame, burning bright and furious in the dark, longing to abandon the road and chase the sky. The old monster gives its all as it powers beyond itself, rumbling like thunder and speeding like lightning toward the ramp and then off of it, sending itself upward, angling like a shark breaching the water, pointing its blocky nose and roaring maw toward the higher peak.

The animal’s done its part, now comes the driver’s. Cherry hasn’t done it for something this big before, and all his practice hasn’t explicitly been about lifting, mostly figuring and reconfiguring and, even more so, deconstruction. His brow furrows and every muscle in his body tenses at once as, in his mind, he focuses on the whole of the truck, grasping with his mind at every dip and curve of the metal, more familiar to him now than even his own fathers’ faces, because it has to be. If it isn’t the most detailed thing in his mind he’ll lose his grip and they’ll fly into the chasm below.

His body wants to rip apart inch by inch, bone by bone and muscle by muscle. Every tendon wants to snap and his brain itself wants to become a ball of lightning. Luckily enough, his bones are made of rock now. They couldn’t come apart now even if he wanted them to. It’s an anchor of sorts as he feels, physically, like the amount of force he’s exerting is going to make him explode.

His mind is undergoing a similar duress as he takes it upon himself to perform a telekinetic deadlift, doing his best to make sure that the truck goes beyond the peak of the typical arc, having to essentially cancel out the factor gravity plays in this vehicle’s movement. In a single instance it’s like he’s trying to drag the car up with his bare hands, at the same time pressing his shoulders against a ceiling he cannot see pushing him down.

Gravity, wind resistance, friction, these are all just hands attempting to push the truck away from the further ledge. They’re arms of enemies, locking with him as he raises it, canceling them out. He’s taking the hits and suffering their forces as the truck does not.

Piper’s car screeches to a fast stop a meter or so away from the bridge-ramp itself and the two women inside stare, wide eyed and infuriated, confused, as they watch a Stallion Q “Mountain Screamer” model truck, half a step from the grave, fly. Every person in the truck bed is holding on for their lives, screaming, some laughing, some crying. The two watch as it flies in a perfect upward arc up to the higher ledge and over it, where it lands and continues on a beeline for the exit.

Roxanne and Jules are laughing wildly inside the cab, everyone is in the back too save for Brie, Meat, and Judith, the first two simply glad they're alive and the third halfway to transforming in Leon’s arms from the stress while he goes straight from laughing into a coughing fit.

The Fox slaps Cherry on the shoulder and grins over at him, shouting, “You’re incredible, Cherry. Even if you did quite nearly kill us all.” Her smile doesn’t last long, though, as they make their way down the tunnels and toward what appears to be natural light.

Cherry, glancing at her, smiles. Both of his eyes are bloodshot, and when he opens his mouth to speak he has to clear his nose, from which discolored blood punches out. “You really think so?”

Jules blinks. “Just to let you know, Rox, I don’t know how to drive. Just saying.”

“I’m fine, I’ve still got it. Why? Something wrong?”

Jules and Roxanne both shake their heads before she says, softly, “Eyes on the road, Cherry. We’ll worry about you when we’re safe.”

Brie looks down behind the truck behind them, then sighs. “Do you think we really escaped?”

“We didn’t escape, we’re lucky. They screwed up.” Meat’s settled beside her, rubbing their neck to crack it. “Not sure if we’ve seen the last of that asshole, though.”

Brie shrugs. “All things considered, I am sure that we at least have some time, or a head start. Besides, I am out of bullets.”

“Miffed you don’t get to put one between Piper’s eyes?”

“No. I do not like her, but I am not inclined to mourn not getting to shoot her. I am nervous about something else entirely.”

“Blondie somehow coming back again?” Meat’s head tilts.

Brie shakes her head. “We left my car in Pickman’s Hope.”

“Oh.”

==============================================================

So many eyes. So many arms, so many claws, all reaching and ripping and clawing. And they go where they please, too— Blondie would rip one of them off, only for them to reappear somewhere on the Cave Shadow’s body a few seconds later, fending off one of the other two idiots who’re chasing him. It was all far too much to focus on. After getting pummeled and clawed and scraped from every angle imaginable, turning his brain into mush as he waited for his turn to fight back, he realized that he just had to muscle through the pain to hit it while it’s hitting him. And so, that’s what he did.

But as he fought, he began to feel a pulling. As though the thing was sinking hooks into his mind and slowly but surely tugging them in different directions. It would get worse with every slice taken out of him, and every time he’d try to conjure up some kind of flame to make some space, the fire in brain would start to get stomped out. And it was tiring. More tiring than anything he had ever imagined a fight could be. He was fighting infinitely regenerating sawblades, a box of mental fishhooks, and a magic-quelling, fire-retardant boot at once, and it wore him down better than his coat ever did, back when he wore it.

And the thing looked at him. Though the Cave Shadow isn’t a Monster known for its relative intelligence, this one, towering in comparison to even Blondie, had a devilish focus to its eyes that made him want to tuck his tail between his legs (the burnt stub it is), and hunker down into an emotional cage. It would look at the three of them simultaneously, sliding its eyes up and down its body instead of moving its pupils, collecting them and scattering them where appropriate. They were nearly impossible to hit, but when Blondie managed to get a hold of one, it simply closed a shadowy lid, and dissipated back into the black cloud that the Monster calls a body.

But, it had a weakness. Everything has a weakness, and Blondie knew that he’d find it eventually. Even though the assault the thing was harboring on him was brutal and aggressive, he saw that it only ever liked to keep a certain distance, pressuring its prey into corners to be chopped apart. And out of him, the tin man, and the crazy person with the shotgun, he was the one it focused on the most. So, in a half-enraged effort to stop himself from being sliced to pieces, he leaped forward into its body.

It was as though he had entered a dimension of death. The floor underneath him was a swirling shadowy purple, and in the center of the room, there was a spine running up the length of the Monster. And though he didn’t have much time to take in the scenery, as he could feel it writhing and screeching and turning its eyes and claws inward to locate the infection, he knew that as he began to tear chalky chunks out of its one internal weakness, that it was too familiar for comfort.

Cave Shadows do not stop growing in their lifetime, and they do not die of old age. The Magic that holds them together is unknowable to most, and entirely foreign to those Monster Folk who understand their own magical attunements. They chop and they slice and they will kill entire groups of unprepared adventurers without remorse, but they have never once been observed as feeding, as their eyes are capable of uncovering even the most well-hidden of investigations. 

But, the bodies always go missing. Only shredded rags (that were once clothing or armour), chipped, bent, or cracked weapons, and ruined equipment remain at the sites of attack. And of course, the Cave Shadow is always lurking right around the corner from these sites, as they appear to understand their prey’s natural curiosity.

They get bigger with every kill, the bodies go missing, and there’s no telling what Magic makes them whole.

As Blondie ripped another chunk out of the Cave Shadow’s spine, he crushed it in his paws, noting the presence of a Humanoid Skull. Another chunk, this time he noted a handful of ribs, leg-bones and arm-bones and hints of finger-bones, all calcified together into a grisly, limestone-like substance. He didn’t have time to classify everything he saw, or really even consider it— he saw a structure that he could grasp, that he could work at, and so, he did.

But the Monster fought back from the inside. As it screeched in pain from Blondie’s efforts to survive, it pulled more and more of its limbs into its body to hack at him. It shrieked and shook with every corpse liberated from its structure, and its attempts to stop him grew more frantic, more desperate.

He could feel the hooks in his mind begin to loosen, he could feel the fire begin to scorch the boot that stomped it. Even though he was certain it wasn’t the same, he felt something like a burning adrenaline surge through his body. It was hurting. The same way that the Wyrm, the one who was so confident, so sure of itself up until the moment where he had found a gap in its armour, hurt. It was crying in pain, screaming for the pain to stop as it flailed at him while he ripped its support out from under it, chunk by dusty chunk.

But it didn’t beg. And it didn’t ask for forgiveness. It was more like an animal, by the time he had torn through the bone and reached its sight-warping core. He could feel it wanting to run as he wrapped his claws around the center of the spine, wanting to hide from him as he began to pull at its abyssal power source. And in its dying moments, Blondie heard it release one last shriek of intense pain before he felt its core explode in his hands, and the spine that reached so tall into the darkness began to fall, like a beautiful, twisted house of cards.

And in that moment, he began to laugh. The veil of darkness dissipated around him, the hooks released his mind, and back in the real world, he was left in the blue brightness of the grotto, standing in a pile of stony death and wispy, purple remnants of his prey floating through the air. He laughed at the world’s attempt to put him down again, he laughed at the pain that the Monster felt before having lost its pitiful life. He laughed because he was stronger, because he was tougher than anything else in this world. No Dragon, no abomination, nobody could stop him.

His high was interrupted by buckshot hitting the back of his head. The other two were still alive. And they wanted him dead. And when he began to walk towards them, corpses cracking and turning to dust beneath his feet, he realizes that his arm, the one that had dealt the killing blow to the Cave Shadow, had been turned to a blackened, purplish twig from the shoulder down— and that it was nothing but a stump from the elbow down. In its last stand, it had taken one of Blondie’s tools for itself, understanding its power.

It was like being spit on by someone you were holding at gunpoint. And that made him angry. It made him very, very angry.

It takes them a while of frustrated driving through the silence that hangs in the cave system, but when they find the grotto, it’s not hard to tell that it’s the right spot. There’s only one thing left standing in the bioluminescence, and when Sundae is ordered out of the sedan to investigate, she wonders whether it’s going to be something that kills her. After all, the things that lurk in these caves are known to be vicious.

But, she bumps into something on the floor. And when she takes a closer look, she finds it to be Nancy. Scorched, bleeding, broken, and unconscious, but still breathing. She’s missing her shotgun, her clothes have been torn to shreds, and it looks as though she’s knocking on death’s door.

“What’s the holdup, Sundae?!” Piper calls out from the car.

“Can you see Jack?” she asks, hoisting the mercenary up onto her shoulder and working her way back toward the vehicle.

“What are you talking about? I want you to shoot that thing,” Piper yells, motioning violently toward the shape in the center of the room, “so we can go home already!” “Boss, these two aren’t going to live if we don’t—”

Piper blares the horn of the sedan, causing the thing to rear what appears to be its head toward the two of them. “Get on it, you fucking idiot!”

In a moment of horror, Sundae is forced to set Nancy’s body down on the stone, pull out her revolver, and begin firing at the beast, who though is attempting to make its way toward them, appears to be limping, using one of its arms to keep itself from falling over. The bullets don’t seem to do too much, only causing it to flinch here and there where they manage to hit. And Sundae herself is actually a crack shot with her cannon, it was taking effort back when they were actively chasing the fugitives to miss as much as she did.

But it didn’t stop. And as it got closer, the two of them began to realize what a state it was in. 

Starting from the top, its face brings to mind what happens when someone gets their skin peeled off, but what’s left underneath is a bright orange mass of glowing, pulsating magic. Even its maw, missing teeth and slightly broken in one direction, remind the onlookers of looking into a miniature sun, contained within the beast’s mouth.

Its body, if one could call it that, is disfigured beyond use. Deep cuts crisscross its chest, legs, and remaining arm, revealing more of the glowing, oozing orange substance to open air. The twig that’s left of its right arm seems still able to be moved, and the purple shadows that consumed it have begun to work its way up its shoulder, intent with taking over the entire torso. 

Except, of course, for the shotgun in its chest. A hole has been carved out where its breastbone should be, by unknown means, and Nancy’s shotgun, barrel angled up toward the thing’s spine, is wedged firmly into the cavity. That wound instead drips slowly with the same bright orange substance found elsewhere, leaving a trail of glowing material as it drags itself toward Piper and Sundae.

It looks dangerous, sure. Monsters always look dangerous, even when they’re hurt. The fact that it looks like it has a sun inside its body contributes heavily to that feeling. It also looks like it can’t feel a thing with the way it’s determined to cross the room, no matter how long it takes to drag itself. But, Piper knows better. It’s been beaten. It just doesn’t know it yet.

And in the cab of the car, Piper considers to herself what to do. Those miners escaped, but she can catch them later (hopefully without the intervention of these absolutely useless mercenaries). And speaking of the mercenaries, one of them died. At which point she decides that she’s going to leave the old fucker’s corpse where it lies, since heading back home with a body in the trunk would not be a fun thing to report. Especially since it’d have to be HER car, too. But, showing up at HQ empty-handed would be horrible for business. No bounty to claim, no bodies to show, no updates but “They escaped again Boss, so sorry Boss, I’ll have them to you by next week, Boss.” Nothing but a dead Sniper and a fucked up trio of mercenaries, assuming Jack’s still alive.

There’s the bounty on this thing, though. That’d keep Janet and her afloat for a long, long time, since Gilroy’s put out quite the sum on its head. So, that’s what she decides to do. She’s going to take its head, and claim what’s hers.

“What a waste of talent,” Piper says, before flooring it into what remains of Blondie.

Chapter Three End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is   © 2020-2023 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Four, Chapter Nine

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

Jules is still firmly and comfortably settled into a recliner, and nearby Lucille’s been looked at for at least long enough for Roxanne to essentially tape and bandage her nose into something resembling a proper position, operating on the assumption that it’ll heal right if the merc doesn’t go and headbutt somebody. Across from the two sits, Leon, arms crossed and head tilted up so that he can stare at the ceiling instead of at them.

    Olive left the room moments ago at the request of Jules, though only after Leon gave her a nod of a comforting, worry-not sort. The silence hasn’t stirred since the sound of her feet disappeared among the halls, at least not until, finally, Jules clears his throat and says, “I think we have something to talk about, Leon. It’s Leon, right?”

“Yup,” he replies, turning his golden eyes on the two. “I know you two aren’t dumb enough to go after someone you don’t know the name of. I bet you know what size shoe I wear.”

Lucille laughs nasally, then groans and rubs her forehead. “Pain meds aren’t worth shit for me, should’ve known better than to take them. Yeah, we know, but not your shoe size. Just the important parts.”

His good hand raised, Jules clears his throat. “Might as well talk about it now, while we’ve got the place to ourselves. Right, Lucille?”

The woman’s eyes dart from the Vampire to the Orc, and she sighs through her mouth. “You probably know I was the head of security for a couple mining sites belonging to Shepherd Gemstone, with Jules here as my number two. Some guys of ours did some horrid crap to you.”

“That’s a way to put it. I’m sure you got an earful, those pricks seemed like the types to brag,” Leon replies.

Jules offers an awkward, almost diplomatic smile. “Yeah, we did. Busting someone is something our bunch brags about. They didn’t spare any details, either. Now look—”

A gloved hand is raised, silencing Jules as Lucille shifts to sit directly across from Leon, all before she speaks. “Leon, I’m not going to pretend it hurt to know somebody working for us did that to you. I’m going to be clear about it, because as much as I expect this to be grounds for you killing us in our sleep, we didn’t blink. What happened to you did not so much as register on our radar beyond being some new thing some dumb assholes were going to use to try and pick up some vapid morons at a bar someplace when they get really drunk and think being mean to poor people’s a turn on. I laughed when I heard what happened.”

“Lucille, I don’t think he wants to hear about…” He trails off.

Leon is standing up. His lips are curling awkwardly, as though frowning, but the missing tusks are leaving space not meant to be empty. “I’m leaving if you just came here to gloat.”

Lucille shakes her head. “No. We came to tell you the truth, not to gloat. All things considered you’re better off than we are right now. Anyway, the point is that when it happened, we didn’t care. It was just another day. All that pain and suffering, and for us it was another nine-to-five. I was handling guard schedules and worrying about a date the next week. Jules was probably more intimately and emotionally affected by running low on mustache oil than he was by what those guys did to you.”

“Lucille, I love you to death, but I’d really like to not get killed in my sleep—”

“All that said,” Lucille continues, interrupting Jules again, “we’re sorry that happened to you.”

Leon’s eyebrow raises. He sits back down and settles his heavy arms across his knees. He takes a shallow, but effortful breath. “Sorry? Why the fuck would you be sorry? You didn’t even do it.”

“We were their bosses, so we might as well have. If anything you should hate us for not doing anything to the guys that did.” Lucille leans back against her seat.

“Actually, we did do something,” Jules points out. “They were the first round of layoffs. Always get rid of the trouble hires and the guys with an eye for upward momentum when cutting expenses, Leo, saves you a million headaches.”

“Leon. Point taken. But, the guys who took my teeth…”

“Were fired at some point, yes.” Lucille rubs the back of her neck. “I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember their names.”

“I do, but only because I was handing out the pink slips. Never be that guy, Leon. Never. People’ll hate you for something you’ve got no control over, rather than something you actually do. It’s the worst kind of shit to be hated for.” Jules is smiling stupidly again, warm. “Yeah, though, we’re sorry that happened and all. We’ve done a lot of bad stuff in the past ourselves, but uh… I can’t recall anything like that. Even we’ve got a limit, and we’re horrible.”

“Oh, the worst.” Lucille laughs again, though now it’s quieter in pursuit of some sound that won’t make her nose feel like clawing itself off of her head. “We eat people and we aren’t even that fucked up. You know, that bunch of idiots made me feel like a normal person.”

Jules is snickering, and then he says, looking toward Leon, “Oh God, you probably think we’re crazy.”

“You say that like we aren’t.” Lucille’s doubled over and doing her best to keep her laughter down. “We’re every kind of screwed up. At least we’re owning it!”

Leon blinks. By this point his face has returned to a deadpan, and more than anything he’s just surprised. No anger registers on his features, no hate or pain. And then, without a warning, he begins to laugh too. Jules and Lucille both begin to rise in volume with him, and then all three have to force themselves to stop, with Lucille clutching her face, Jules clutching his side, and Leon clutching his chest.

When the sudden sounds of wheezing and pain from the three die down again, Leon speaks, saying simply, “You two are seriously fucked up.”

“That shouldn’t be news to you, pal.” Jules tilts his head.

“It’s not,” Leon replies. “Not in the slightest. I’ll say it’s my first time laughing at it, though, I didn’t know the world had this kind of humor to it. All this shit happens to me, and when I finally meet someone that apologizes and shows some semblance of wanting to take responsibility, it’s the people who didn’t even have a hand in wronging me. Now that’s a joke. You two are braver than I’ve been lately. How do you do it?”

“Do what?” Lucille’s finally sitting up again, readjusting her bandages and dabbing at her nostrils with a tissue from a small box nearby, soaking up a small amount of blood.

“Apologize to somebody you know you hurt, when you know there’s a chance they might fuck off into the sunset. How do you say sorry to someone when it’s only going to hurt? I think that’s the bravest, dumbest thing I’ve seen someone do today.”

Jules chuckles. “Only because you didn’t watch that detective get her ass kicked.”

Lucille, however, gives the question some thought. “Lately, honesty’s been a big deal, at least for me. This world’s fucked up, and you’ve gotta talk to the people you’re working with if you want to get by without losing something important. You can get far if you’re willing to be honest with each other, even if the truth is going to hurt. Sometimes it’s for the better.” She turns to Jules, then.

His smile’s gone. It’s been supplanted by an awkward pursing of lips and a contemplative hum, at least until he speaks again, saying, “I’m never gonna live that down even if you do forgive me for it. Yeah, your best bet is to be honest. If a lie’s necessary to keep somebody in your life, it’s probably a bad idea. Take it from me, Leon— that shit won’t stay hidden forever, and all lies fall through the cracks. Question is, whether you want it to fall out on its own or if you want to be the one to bring it down yourself. The latter’s the safer option, even if it’s scary as shit. Which is why we’re saying sorry.”

Leon actually smiles then. It’s as awkward as most of his expressions, partially from disuse and partially from a quirk of mouth muscles anticipating more teeth than he has, but it’s endearing enough. “Makes sense to me. You two are mercenaries?”

“Sure are. Pays to be a decent talker when you’re a private contractor. Don’t get all those steady jobs like those tight-pantsed guild pricks.” Jules scoffs.

Lucille grumbles in turn. “It’s not like you need a degree to crack skulls. Goddamned frilly plate wearing—”

“And don’t get me started on their rates, fuck! Practically undercutting the whole business.” The Vampire hisses, then grins. Lucille turns to look at him, and both laugh softly, quietly, again to avoid hurting themselves.

“You two really are weird.” Leon sighs, brushing his hair back as he looks down to the floor, between his boots. “If that’s all, I should get going. I’ve got some folks I need to apologize to, if not now then… Soon. Before anything else happens, since there’s always something happening and it’s always happening to us.”

“You mind me asking who?” Jules chuckles. “I can’t lie worth shit, but I can keep a secret.”

“No, he can’t,” Lucille corrects, “but if you’re willing to spill, we’ll listen. We’re sure nobody’s going to be asking us much about anything given I think most of your pals are scared of us, except maybe Olive— maybe— anyway, the point is we won’t tell anyone.”

“...You mind giving me a percentage of success, here? One’s been getting shit on for something I did, which I think he thinks he did. The other’s somebody who actually likes me, who’s been hurt pretty bad. But, uh, I realized I really like.”

Lucille holds up a finger. “Define “really like.” That’ll affect things.”

He rolls his eyes. “Really like. Nine out of ten on a scale.”

“Love?” Jules poses the question, a single word, with a tilt of his head and an infectiously nosy tone.

Leon sighs again, standing back up. “Sure. I didn’t think I was going to have to deal with it until I was somewhere better, to put it in other words.”

“Oh, you’re fucked.” Lucille shakes her head.

Jules nods, eyes shut sagely. “Positively fucked, Leon. Good luck out there.”

All the energy is sapped from Leon then and there. “That’s not what I asked for.”

“Ten,” Lucille says, affecting a near professorial voice. “Ten percent chance, in my professional opinion.”

Jules shrugs one shoulder. “I’ll be generous, you’ve got a fifteen percent chance. That’s all just calculation, though. Percentages mean nothing in the face of skill and gumption. Just don’t screw up, and you’ll be all good.”

Leon’s eyes shut and he places his hand against his face, palming against his nose and cheek for a moment, rubbing at one of his eyes before placing both arms back at his sides. “Thanks for the pep talk, you two.”

“Let us know if you need anyone to ruin your good mood again,” Jules says with a smile.

“We’re not going anywhere soon,” Lucille adds, leaning further back in her seat.

Leon nods, then heads out of the room. “I get the feeling.”

==============================================================

With Brie all patched up and fast asleep in one of the guest rooms, the three old-timers find themselves in the kitchen post-makeshift medical accommodation conversion. Roxanne rinses off her hands for the last time, wipes her forehead, and sighs deeply.

“Good lord. You wouldn’t mind breaking out the bourbon, Sam, would you?” she says, walking over to Azariah and practically falling into his chest.

The Hound chuckles, and takes no time to open a high cabinet, pull out a bottle of dark brown liquor, and pour everyone a glass. “Cheers,” he says, “to old times.”

Both Roxanne and Azariah look at one another for a moment before downing their drinks. It wasn’t entirely unrelated what he had said, but it was a little unexpected.

“I don’t remember much of this happening back in the old days,” Azariah mentions. “My memory goin’ bad?”

“Sometimes I forget where I parked my car. Or when I’m shoppin’, I’ll forget my grocery list. Maybe your head’s goin’ all mushy like mine,” Samson laughs. “In all fairness, though, this whole fiasco’s just reminded me of how things used to be. The excitement of it all. I know we weren’t out there doin’ this kinda stuff, but it’s got the same tune. The same feelin’ in my chest, ya’ know?”

“I would say that’s appropriate. I don’t think anyone within half a mile didn’t feel it in their chest when you pulled the trigger on that snake,” Roxanne chuckles.

Samson points his glass toward her. “And you haven’t changed one bit, neither. Always so literal, even after stitchin’ someone back together.”

“You want literal, you wait until that girl wakes back up. She’ll be the one driving you crazy.” She adjusts herself to not be leaning up against the Hare anymore, and holds out her glass for a refill.  “It’s funny. She finds me nearly dead, and immediately thinks to patch me up. She saved my life, you know. And now, I’ve returned the favor.”

Azariah grabs the bottle and pours her another. “How’s the leg, by the way? Last time we met, you were just gettin’ used to walkin’ again.”

“Wait, you’re missin’ a leg, Roxanne?” Samson asks, raising his eyebrows.

She pulls up on a portion of her dress to reveal the prosthetic foot, all dusty and banged up from the adventure. “A foot, and it’s doing quite fine. I feel I might need to wash it soon, however. I don’t think it’s meant to do the things I’ve put it through.”

“I was more referrin’ to you,” Azariah wraps an arm around her. “Oh, honey. It doesn’t hurt anymore, though I do get some of those phantom pains every now and then. Mainly when I’m feeling a little down, but these days, there’s been very little time to wallow in it.”

“I agree.”

“And how about your back? You seem to be standing taller than usual.” Roxanne gives the Hare a pat on the chest. “Has all the frolicking in the countryside helped straighten you out?”

“‘Straighten’ is a strong word, I think,” he replies. Samson cough-laughs in the background. “I’d say it just ‘helped me realize some things about myself’. And it wasn’t the countryside either, it was a visit from the chiropractor.”

Roxanne frowns. “The last time I checked, there aren’t any of those whack-jobs for miles.”

“You’re right, the one I met recently just died in a fiery explosion.”

The Fox’s mouth opens in disbelief. “No.”

“Yes, honey. That’s exactly what happened.”

“Can ya’ put a friend into the loop with these things, folks?” Samson adds, pouring himself another glass.

“You tell him,” Roxanne says, downing her own.

“So, y’know that guy who’s been chasin’ us?”

“Yeah,” Samson replies.

“Well, right before he died, he found us. And though we tried to get him off our trail, it wasn’t workin’. So, I decided to go round two with him.”

“And?” “I lost pretty bad. And he decided to pick me up with both his hands and try breakin’ me over his knee for good measure. Send a message to the others, you know?”

Samson practically barks with how hard he laughs. “And ya’ got back up, didn’t ya?! Fresh as ever?!”

“Havin’ rocks in your bones seems to help when it comes to that kinda stuff. Put the spring back in my spine.”

“Did ya’ give’im the flyin’ knee? Tell me ya’ knocked his lights out, Azariah.”

“Oh I gave him the works, alright. You could call it a total power grid failure, but that’d assume he had anythin’ more complex than a lightbulb up there anyways.”

“God,” Samson says, smiling like a fool. “What I wouldn’tve given to’ve seen that. Seein’ ya’ get at a pup like that would’ve been better than barbeque. Would’ve been just like old times.”

“I feel better than old times, Sam! He really did me a favor.”

“Are ya’ sayin’ you’d make a comeback in the ring?” he suggests.

“No, no, no,” Roxanne cuts the two off. “No more of this macho crap.”

She turns back to Azariah, and holds a finger up to his face. “You’re lucky we weren’t in Fusillade at the same time, mister. I swear, I would’ve dumped your ass then and there. I can’t believe you’d be so reckless. And at your age too!”

The Hare takes her hand in his own. “I thought we weren’t on?”

“Oh, shut up. You know what I mean.”

“It was life or death. And I made the decision to fight for the former. And I’m still here, at the end of it all, so it ain’t like things were all that bad to begin with.”

“You aren’t acting like the man I knew back at the mine,” she says.

“You’re right, I’m standin’ much straighter than I was before,” he replies, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “It’s fine, honey.”

“Don’t do it again, or I’ll cut you open myself to see if those rocky bones of yours are as tough as they sound.” She pours herself another glass. “Also, Blondie’s still alive, in case you haven’t heard.”

“What?” Azariah’s ears twitch, and there’s a long, uncomfortable silence as he glances between her and Samson.

“You know our friend, Meat? Blondie’s turned into one of those Notuses too.”

“The person who burnt a couple footprints onto my nice wood floors?” Samson mentions, frowning. “They were pretty aloof for someone who causes property damage by walkin’.”

“They’d just been unconscious in your lawn, Samson. Don’t be so hard on them.” “Fair enough. I expect them ta’ help out with the repairs, though.”

“Sam, they’d just burn the planks.”

This hits the Hound quite hard, and he decides to take a swig directly from the bottle to help soften the blow. “Don’t mind me.”

She turns back to Azariah. “Yes, Blondie’s alive. And he’s got the same sort of control over fire magic that Meat does, so long as there’s some consistency in how the Notuses abilities’ are given.”

“So that means…”

“Yes, that means that the guy whose ass you kicked has gotten as much, if not more, of a ‘fix’ than you did.”

“That’s a pickle,” Samson adds.

After another quiet moment, Azariah smiles and says, “So we’ve got a tiebreaker on our hands?”

Roxanne pinches his arm. “You’re not fighting him again, you old bastard! He nearly burnt down Fusillade!” she half-yells.

“The boys’ve been sent out to help with’em,” Samson says. “There ain’t no business like the business of cleanup.”

“It’s that bad?” Azariah asks.

“Ohhhh, yeah. Entire buildings need to be torn down with how much damage that sucker did. Some roads need rippin’ up too, since the heat’s got’em all cracked an’ unsafe. Didn’t realize that was your guy, though. Tiebreaker indeed.”

Roxanne points a finger at the Hound, who chuckles. “Don’t encourage him!”

“What, it ain’t like I won’t be there cheerin’ him on, Roxy. An’ if things go wrong, I’ll be there to kill the bastard anyways. You will too, right?”

“I don’t like the sound of gambling with our lives so that you can have a rematch,” she grumbles.

“Well,” Azariah starts, hugging her from the side. “It’s probably gonna happen anyway, so we should think about what we’re gonna do in that situation.”

“I’ve got a boxin’ bell in my shed we could bring,” Samson adds.

==============================================================

    There’s a nervous energy on the back porch as Judith and Cherry settle down to sit on the step and Leon stands opposite, hands folded in front of himself and his expression dour. The air’s cool and the sky, like his expression, is cloudy. Finally, he raises one of his hands to them both. “Hey. There’s something I’ve been meaning to say. Especially to you, Judith. I’m sorry.”

Judith crosses her arms, then nods. “What, for ditching me back at the bar? You should be, shit. But whatever, I forgive you. It was one time.”

Cherry glances between them both and says, “I don’t think he’d call me out here if it were just about that, Judith.”

“Like there’s anything else to be said about you?”

A cleared throat. Leon watches as the two look to him again, this time with added attention as he again says, “I’m sorry. This is— it’s hard to get out, but now’s the best time. Remember what happened back on-site, when that drill blew up.”

“Hard to forget what Cherry did to me.” A pointed glare is leveled at Cherry, who simply sighs and bows his head.

Cherry mumbles, “Sorry.”

“Cherry, it wasn’t your fault.”

Both Cherry and Judith show some dumbstruck faces before the former lapses into the confusion and the latter into rage, with Judith tersely stating, “He took my fucking hand.”

Leon shakes his head. “No, I did. I fumbled adding that slag to the water supply. Added the whole fucking thing on accident. I’m amazed you didn’t see it, Cherry— and if you did, I appreciate you keeping quiet. You don’t need to worry too much.”

“No, I didn’t. I was distracted,” Cherry says softly, “by the new model and by Judith yelling at me.”

“Well,” Leon begins before Judith can ask why this conversation’s happening, it seemed damn well clear cut to her what happened, “either way, I was the one who fucked it. The stupid machine blew up because my fingers slipped.” One heavy hand reaches up and smooths his hair back as his eyes move from their position staring at the ground to searching their expressions. “And, I let Cherry take the fall. Seemed like the better option at the time. Compared to sticking my neck out over it, at least. Especially after we started talking more, Judith.”

She’s silent, expression far away. No anger’s there, something unexpected on Leon’s side of things, but there’s something else in its place. Confusion. The wheels are turning without a direction; a conflict of interests, maybe. It’s a bit new to her. At least anger’s a simple thing, easily directed, but this isn’t. It refuses.

“I wanted to tell you back at the bar. Those locals started getting up in our shit and I—”

Judith raises her hand. “Leon, stop. Please stop.”

He frowns. “I know it’s bad. I disappeared on you when those idiots showed up, but—”

“I asked you to stop,” she interrupts again. Her hand goes to her face during the silence, rubbing at each eye individually as she keeps her other arm tucked neatly against her body. “Don’t open your mouth. Just be quiet. You too Cherry. Just— fucking—” Her tone’s faltering with each word now. The semi-malicious, self-righteous anger she could normally muster isn’t clicking. There’s no lengthening of fangs or intensifying of the green in her eyes as she finally opens them again, locking gazes with Leon. There are small tears, pinpricks in the corners of her eyes, but no more than that. “Both of you just stay quiet. I need to go take a breather.”

She stands and ignores both men as they make half-hearted, lackluster gestures to get her to stay. By the time actual words come out of Leon’s mouth, “Judith, wait,” she’s disappeared right in front of them both.

Leon puts his hands to his face and grumbles a few curses beneath his breath before he turns and allows himself to drop into a spot beside the still dumbstruck Cherry with a heavy thud. “I fucked that up pretty bad, didn’t I? Shit.”

Cherry sets a hand on the other’s shoulder. “Actually, all things considered, I think that went far better than I expected it to. You know, you’re right, too. I probably would’ve tried to cover for you if I’d known. You two seem happy together.”

“Really? You’d really endure her bullshit for the sake of keeping us close? You’re pulling my chain.”

After scratching his chin, Cherry shrugs. “She didn’t scream at us. She didn’t call either of us idiots, or start getting really, really verbal. She also didn’t turn into a big wolf and kill us, which is definitely something she can do, if you’ll remember.”

Leon shakes his head. “She only does that when she’s stressed. And she doesn’t kill anyone.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t kill me over that Skitterbat thing. Man, I miss Skippy. Hey, do you think I could find one of those things closer to home? I bet Olive would know.”

“How can you joke around right now? You saw her.” Leon’s brow furrows. “She looked like she was having a crisis. She probably fucking hates me now.”

Cherry shakes his head. “I can joke because it’s, uh, really the only thing I can think to do right now. It’s relieving to know that I didn’t actually do anything wrong, but it also kinda sucks. I guess I’m just trying to soften the blow, a little. Get you going again, to try and keep the conversation going when she’s ready. And yes, Leon, she likes you. She doesn’t just hate you less than the rest of us, she likes you. She doesn’t hate us, not anymore I think. And neither do you. You like us too.”

A shallow sigh escapes Leon, who rubs his jaw. “Yeah. The old Hare’s a good listener you’re a good head to have, and Olive’s supportive. Even if she gets the shakes.”

“And you want to sleep with Judith.”

“I never said that.”

Cherry smiles. “Didn’t have to. Nobody with half a brain would admit to what you just did if you didn’t feel something really deep. Or, you know, just really intense. Sometimes it’s shallow and just doesn’t get any deeper but it makes you do things like buy something stupidly expensive from an autoshop because you want to have a brief conversation with the register guy who’s got these magical looking eyes…”

“You’re losing me here.”

“Sorry, I think I was too. The point is, while it’s nice to come clean about this sort of thing, this is far and away the sort of stuff you admit to when you’ve got nothing to lose or a lot to gain, and based on how you two act it just makes sense. It’s like putting a matching pair of puzzle pieces right next to one another, and telling me to solve.” Cherry pats his shoulder again. “So what, though? She’s obviously into you too.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem of her hating me, though. I’m past that everyone and their fucking mom can tell I’m into her. I’m surprised you don’t hate me! She’s treated you like shit this whole time all because I didn’t own up.”

A sigh enters the open air before Cherry shakes his head. “I used to feel pretty bad about it, yeah, and I’m kinda angry that you didn’t own up when I was getting put down for it. All that said, I haven’t had much time to really stew in it. I nearly broke my nose trying to kill someone who I thought was about to kill all of us. Inside that house, right now, is at least two people who tried to kill us and a third who decided against hauling us to be cut up like lab animals only because Roxanne got through to her. Plus, if what Olive told me is true, that man who we saw die is not only still alive, but apparently now has flaming superpowers, plus another ex-foreman is chasing us too.”

Saying this, Cherry takes Leon’s head by either side of it to force the Orc to look him in the eyes. “Being called an idiot by someone whose vocabulary is half swears stopped being a big deal for me somewhere around when I thought Azariah died. Leon, I’m a little mad about all of this, but God— think for a second, man.”

“Point taken.” Leon pulls his head back, then rubs the back of his neck. “So… The Judith question?”

“Let her take her time,” Cherry says. “If she forgives you, she forgives you. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t. It was an accident and she likes you, my money’s on forgiving you. Don’t push her, though. She has every right to be mad over getting hurt, but she doesn’t seem like she is.”

“Okay. Maybe you’re right. Or maybe she’ll toss me to the curb when this is all over.”

“Over?”

Leon’s brows raise. “Yeah, Cherry. Once this is over. When we get out of range of the company? When we’ve got no more reason to stick together. We’re probably gonna split once it’s safe to, right. What, did you think we were gonna be a forever unit?”

“I mean, a little, yeah. Maybe not Azariah since he needs to stick with Roxanne, but at least you three. And where will you go, Leon?”

“Honestly?” He blinks. “I was hoping Judith might help me there. Doesn’t seem too likely anymore.”

“Nowhere to go?”

Slowly, the Orc shakes his head.

Cherry smiles slightly. “There’s a nice couple of guest rooms in my dads’ house. Consider it an offer, if we get there and you’ve still got nowhere.”

“Thanks, Cherry. I appreciate it.” Leon smiles for a moment, then leans up and glances toward the backdoor. “Hope she’s alright.”

“Someone’s got it bad.”

“You feel like telling me more about magic eyes?”

Cherry laughs. “Alright, fine. I’m rooting for you, man.”

Chapter End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Four, Chapter Eight

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

What a bust. Not only was it a complete waste to extend an olive branch to someone in another division, she ends up quitting in her face, too. This has now become an issue of insubordination, of disrespect— so, she adds Brie’s name to the list. It’s not a literal list, of course, she’s not a compulsive note taker like that idiot she just wanted to help, but the names are engraved on a big plaque somewhere in her mind, no, on multiple plaques on the sort of hanging mounts you put taxidermy animal heads on. Each one’s empty at the moment, and she’s just added another wall mount with the following name etched into its shiny, entirely mental and metaphorical nameplate: Brie.

On the bright side, she still has the crowbar. It wasn’t hard to slink back over and snatch it up once those idiots had gone inside and the feel of her insides nearly getting pulped through sheer force had subsided. That uppity pencil pusher had it coming for abandoning ship, though. So what if she’d been rejected (again)? So what if that stupid, insignificant number cruncher practically spat in her face? She can spit back. She’s going to spit on every single one of them, and her spit is gonna feel much, much worse than theirs ever could. She’s going to score each and every single one of them like crispy skin on a holiday roast, just to drip her venom into their cuts, no matter how shallow.

Standing in front of Thistle’s house, she’s breathing heavy, she’s undoing and redoing her ponytail over and over, each time missing some hay-colored lock that refuses to obey her. After three times attempting to get it all in order she brushes her shoulders off and, finally, glances toward a new car in the driveway. It’s not Thistle’s well cared for beater, that’s where it’s been parked since she left. After all, when she and the others headed out initially the old man was in no condition to be going out and about. Alive, sure, but not in any state to be driving.

This car’s fresh off the lot, just expensive enough to show some displeasure with the lower end vehicles available but not opulent enough to draw attention— and there are no identifying brand markers, not even the manufacturer is visible. Whoever parked here isn’t interested in being looked at for longer than the second necessary for the average civilian brain to log and discard the thing in its totality.

She’s been dreading this. She knows it’s not local, it’s not beaten up or seen enough dirt roads to be local. This thing’s from the city, and if they’re here it can only mean one thing— the cavalry has arrived, because this is yet another issue she needs on her plate. Blondie didn’t need any damned peons, but poor little Piper, she obviously needs a squad of goons to help her get the job done. She didn’t, she doesn’t, but it’s just too late now isn’t it?

Hieronymus T. Thistle is barely conscious, heavily bandaged, and sitting at his own dining room table with four frightening-looking folks that didn’t even so much as tell him their names. Two of them have long guns, one a rifle and the other some kind of fancy, big city shotgun, and another has some absurd looking handcannon of a revolver hanging off her hip. The last fellow doesn’t appear to be carrying anything except for a month old issue of a cooking magazine.

Thistle’s eyes are glazed over. The idiot reading the magazine, “Jack” he thinks he heard at some point, overdid it with the pain meds. Not enough to kill, Thistle knows he’s not dying from this, but he’s gone straight from nearly passing out due to pain into nearly passing out because he’s high as a kite. High enough but still hurt enough that he won’t be having the food that was put out anytime soon.

“Mr. Thistle’s not looking too good,” Jack mumbles, having pulled down his mask. “Should we get him to an actual doctor?”

Between a small spoonful of food and a few comforting, albeit unsettling, spins of her revolver the gunslinger says, “Doesn’t really matter. We aren’t going to be here for long, after all.”

“Get with it. We ain’t here for pro bono work, boy.” To punctuate his sentence, and to get the point across, the Sniper leans his chair back and puts his dirty boots on the table. “Should’ve just killed him.”

The Shotgunner clears her throat before putting a fist against the table. “Flagrant inelegance and unprofessional! First and foremost— get your feet off the table! Nextly, how would we dispose of the body? He’s not only a local, but a coworker, in technicality.”

“Could probably mulch him.” Another spin of the revolver’s cylinder ends her statement. “He’s an organic.”

“Plant man becomes plant food.” The Sniper tilts his head, glancing toward the near catatonic Thistle over the twin mountains in his vision that are the tips of his boots. “Heh, I like the poetry of that. Kill him and gimme an hour. I can get rid of it.”

“Again I must ask how you actually plan to discard it!” The woman with the shotgun’s standing now. “That’s an order!”

Jack sets down his magazine, sighing. “Ms. Nancy, you’re not our boss, and there’s no pecking order until—”

“Until I show up,” hisses Piper, who has been standing in the doorway for the past three sentences. “What is this, a fucking sewing circle? Shape up if you’re going to be dragging me down.”

The four get out of their seats and stand across the table from her. She can gather a great amount from just the way they’re standing, the way they’re looking at her, the way they’re pointedly not looking at each other or at Thistle, whom she is surprised to see is out of bed.

In order stands the woman with her revolver, the Sniper, the one with the shotgun, and then their fourth, who appears to not actually have any real weapon on him. Jack’s the tallest, though largely because he’s one of the only two standing straight. The other’s Nancy, the woman with the shotgun, who’s shorter than him but makes up for it with her presence via some kind of salute and a hearty, abrasive, “YES, MA’AM.”

The shortest is the Sniper, since he’s old and stands all hunched. She can tell that if he stands straight he’d be on par with, if not looming over even Jack. Next shortest is the last of them, the one with the revolver, who if all were standing as straight as can be, would actually be somewhat taller than Nancy. She’s shorter due to her posture involving her lean back and her knees bend slightly, as though near perpetually pressed back by wind. It’s a relaxed, but disrespectful posture, the sort with her head tilted to the side as she eyes you up from down an alleyway.

Piper paces from one side of the room to the other, looking them all up and down before allowing the words “Helmets off,” to scrape out between her fangs. “Names, now. And you know what? Previous work experience.”

Smoothly, each one removes their respective helmets and masks, treating Piper to a small menagerie of oddities.

Beneath the Sniper’s helmet is a face of glass, fractured in places and restructured in others, lacking a nose and much of one cheek. What hasn’t been destroyed looks scraped and sanded with age, as one might expect the look of a scuffed lens left in the sand except everywhere on him, save for his eyes. His eyes are clear enough that were someone to stare deep enough with a good light they might be able to see right inside of his head. His old and shattered face contorts into a smile as he says, “Kranner. Several time marksmanship champion down south. I used to do hits, now I do this.”

Piper turns her nose up at him, letting her eyes drift to Nancy, who pulls off her helmet to reveal sharp, gray features and short cropped black hair. Her ears are pointed, though a bit bent, and her nose resembles that of a vampire bat. Her fangs are snaggly as she bares them in a smile, and with her usual gusto belts out, “Lieutenant Nancy, ma’am!”

Piper rubs her own jaw, considers her for a second, and rolls her shoulders. “A glass man and another fucking Vampire. Am I going to need to keep you two busy?”

Kranner clears his throat, then rasps out, “I ain’t fragile. And she ain’t a bloodsucker.”

“I prefer raw meat, ma’am!” Again Nancy raises her voice, causing Piper to hiss.

“Alright, alright, just quiet down!” Her gaze drifts, then, to the revolver nearby— then up to its owner’s face.

White silver strands of straight hair hang to a perfectly even cut bob, whose lower edge is just against the lobes of her pointed ears. Her eyes are wide, and the cool gray, like morning ice, threatens to draw Piper out of her anger. Still, it takes more than a pretty pair of elfin eyes to quash this rage. Besides, Piper’s spoken for. An uncomfortably gentle smile and a soft voice draw her to reality.

“My name’s Sundae.” In time with the soft and sweet final syllable, her revolver’s cylinder clicks into place. “Shepherd hired me on after I got out of prison.”

“And what did you do?”

“To get into prison or to get hired?”

Piper scoffs. “Do I look like I care?”

Sundae’s smile spreads a bit. “Sorry, non-disclosure agreement.”

“The crime or your work history?”

“Yeah,” she says noncommittally, brushing silver locks back behind one ear. “Anyway, my name is Sundae. How do you feel about civilian casualties?”

Piper’s eyes roll. “Just don’t tell anyone who you work for and don’t overdo it. And who’re you?” Finally, her eyes settle on Jack.

His face is simple and metallic. His jaw is dented somewhat, which adds some character to his tin-man charm. “Jack, Ms. Piper,” he says, hands folded behind his back. He smiles afterward, which, with the dented, slightly skewed jaw, gives him the appearance of a child’s well loved posable action figure. “I once handled a contract dispute with some Gretchin closer to the mountains.”

She looks him up and down, then purses her lips for a moment. “You got a gun? You don’t seem to have one.”

“Didn’t need one then, don’t need one now.”

“Alright.” Piper looks them each over one more time, then lists off each name. “Kranner, Nancy, Sundae, and Jack. Alright. You four better tell me some good news.”

Nancy forces herself straighter than before. “We are here and fully prepared to handle the operation at your leisure! Tell us your plan and we’ll execute with extreme prejudice!”

“Also that guy Gilroy’s got an in-house bounty set up for that other guy, Blondie. So, if we nab him while we’re out you’ll get a really, really big bonus,” soothes Sundae.

Piper smiles. “Good. Okay, that’s all good. I don’t need to prep any of you and that just means more money for us. Great.”

“Hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Kranner interjects with a slightly raised hand, “but while we’ve got means to handle him, we still need to find him.”

For a moment, it’s as though the slowly rising good mood’s been crushed. Jack, Sundae, and Nancy all turn their faces toward Kranner, who doesn’t look any worried over the matter. Piper, of course, is the worst, with narrowed eyes and bared fangs and her forked tongue poking out to extend her softer syllables into small hisses as she says, “What do you MEAN we still have to find him? You idiots have no INTEL?”

“Well, ma’am,” begins Jack, awkwardly and anxiously patting his hands together as his softly glowing eyes scan the room, refusing to make contact with his superior’s, “thing is, we know he definitely headed up this way after an encounter with Mr. Gilroy, but we lost track of him a bit west of Fusillade. He— uh— went off-road. I know that’s not what you want to hear right now, but we know he’s definitely coming here. Definitely.”

“And why wouldn’t he just fuck off into the Dividends instead?” Piper’s pacing, her tail’s lashing itself about, she’s starting to get taller. All four step back from the table as the fangs press out from between Piper’s lips and the thrashing appendage behind her swipes a table leg, snapping it and sending the entire affair, with all their food, to the hardwood floor— alongside the still largely unresponsive Thistle, whose only sound is a groan.

Nancy clears her throat. “He was very adamant during his conversation with Mr. Gilroy that he has plans to return to work! I was there in the room while they spoke, ma’am.”

“Stands to reason that he’s plannin’ to hit when least expected,” Kranner says. “He could run, but he’d have nothin’ anywhere else. If what snaggleteeth over there heard is right, we don’t really need to find him. He’ll find us.”

Piper’s claws have busted through her gloves and she’s rubbing her face, feeling it grow harder, scalier. It itches, it itches so much. She wonders often if those who grow fur feel better than anybody whose body’s texture changes with this. Those damn dogs don’t know how good they have it. “You not only LOST a big, flaming corpse,” she spits, entire body contorting as she struggles to keep the transformation down, “but he’s somewhere nearby, getting ready to attack? How is this good news? You’re idiots! You’re all morons!”

Jack clears his throat. “He’s after the miners, right? We can probably handle them all at once if we just let him make the first move.”

Piper stops, turning her gaze on him. “And let him tire himself out dealing with them?”

“As I see it,” Sundae pokes in, “seems like a good way to handle it. Great idea, boss.”

“Yeah, yeah it is.” Piper smooths a claw through her hair, looking down. “Glad I thought of it. Whatever, Kranner and Sundae go get some more gear. Do either one of you know how to outfit a civilian vehicle for a fight?”

Sundae speaks again saying, “No, but I know how to convince someone to.” Piper nods. “Good, get something high caliber on the car y’all rode in on. Don’t touch mine.”

“We’ll get ours and his set up,” Kranner rasps, gesturing toward Thistle on the ground. “He’s one foot in the grave, anyways. Won’t miss it.”

Piper laughs and crouches beside Thistle, looking him over, poking the side of his face with a claw deep enough to draw blood from beneath his thin, but tough hide. “Oh, Mr. Thistle, can we borrow your car? It’ll only get a lil’ dinged up, promise.”

The rest of them laugh too, until the old man on the floor turns his head. It’s a struggle; the command has to go through layers and layers of sediment, like trying to shove his hand through cotton, but eventually he does manage to cast his eyes up at Piper and work his mouth to say a simple, indignant, “No.”

Silence falls, and it looms heavy above them all until shortly, curtly, Piper tells him, “Wrong answer.”

She grabs Thistle by the leg with one large, clawed hand and tosses him into a cabinet nearby, where the finer plates and dining ware had been kept alongside various little knick knacks. The pain takes a second longer than it should for it to register in his body, but when it does he lets loose a croaking, scraping groan.

The only reason the cabinet falling on him doesn’t end it all there is because Piper smacks it out of her way with her tail before she’s on him again, driving the steel toe boot on her left foot hard into his already heavily bruised and somewhat shattered ribs. The sting and burn of fracturing bones and tearing flesh is muffled under the heavy medication, but it’s real, so viscerally real.

He can’t move. What the screwed dosage hasn’t rendered useless to him is occupied by pain and he’s staring to the side. Boots. Black, steel toe boots, all of them are wearing some. On his floor there are shattered plates and wood chips from the cabinet. Stupid little knick knacks and baubles are there too. A small figurine of a cow stares at him from its faux pasture, a little lump of green atop which the black and white ceramic bovine settles.

He can remember where he got each and every one of those insipid odds and ends, but as stupid as they are he can’t help but feel an extra jab in his gut. Surrounded by gifts and small, pointless treasures given to him by people he says he hates, Hieronymus T. Thistle is soaked not only with his own blood, but his tears as well.

After kicking his ribs until they cave, Piper grabs the cabinet again, shrieks, and crushes him with it.

“Stupid old bastard,” she sighs out, rubbing her face, claws receding and skin smoothing over again. She spits out a heavy glob of venom into the blood pooling on the floor, where it sizzles disgustingly. “Got what was coming to him.”

The four are still standing on the other side of the room, each one awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot. Piper’s head tilts. “What are you still doing here? Go gear up the cars. Nancy, weapon maintenance. Jack… Honestly I don’t know what you can do. Stand watch, I guess. Patrol, do something.”

They all mask up again and get their helmets back on, then head out.

Piper glances around, and something catches her eye, something glinting just a touch. A small ceramic cow on a pitifully small green lump made out to be a pasture. She picks it up, turns it around, and rubs off the blood with her coat sleeve. On the bottom of the green blob is something engraved, shallowly, as though with a pencil prior to the baking process: “To Mr. Thistle,” in the handwriting of someone young. “From Billy,” it reads after that.

She pockets it. “I can sand that off. Janet’s gonna love you.”

==============================================================

    “So,” Olive says, breaking the silence in the living room. Jules and Lucille sit across Samson’s living room from her and Leon, and though it’s clear that Leon doesn’t have much to say to them, seeing as how they had attacked the both of them earlier last month, she feels it necessary to break the ice, especially since they’re being let inside and not being told to scram. “Fancy seein’ y’all here again.”

Lucille chuckles, not a trace of amusement in her voice. “Yeah.”

“So. What’s up…?”

“Waiting for your doctor to patch up that girl so I can get my arm and nose checked.”

Olive frowns. “Y’think it’s broken? Your nose, I mean.”

“I know it’s broken,” she replies, cradling her face. “We’re lucky it's not bleeding all over this nice couch.”

“Ah.” The Owl turns to Jules instead, who has slumped into quite the comfortable position in a recliner. He’s more focused in listening in to the conversations happening in the adjacent rooms, especially the one where Brie’s being operated on. “How ‘bout you, Jules?”

“Oh, you know.” He smiles as he faces her, motioning toward his casted-up body. “Peachy keen. I’ll be in decent shape in a couple days, though.”

“How’d all that happen?”

“That guy who’s been following you, Blondie,” Lucille interjects. “Since he couldn’t find you in Fusillade, he went on a rampage. Nearly got the better of us.”

“Shit,” she suddenly grumbles. She darts from the room, holding her good arm under her nose like a leaky ceiling.

The Vampire laughs a little. “By your faces, I’m guessing you didn’t know the bastard was alive.”

And their faces do tell it all. Leon and Olive look at one another with utter disbelief— the former looking as though he doesn’t actually believe the claim, and the latter looking as though she doesn’t want to believe it, but she can’t help her brain accepting it as true right out the gate.

“You know that fried-looking person who walked in with your doctor and the detective?” Jules probes, holding out his free hand. “They’re one of those Notus. Notuses? Notii? Ah, whatever. One of those folks that comes back to life after being killed with fire. Your boy Blondie? He’s one of them too, now.”

“That’s a load of shit,” Leon says.

“Hey, ask anyone else who just got here.”

“There’s no way. We heard an explosion. We saw. An explosion. How the hell could there have been anything left of that guy to reanimate?”

Jules shrugs.

“He got into a fistfight with a fucking Wyrm.”

“Hah!” he laughs, quickly clutching his side in pain. “Don’t make me laugh like that. God, that’s good, though. Did he really?”

“I didn’t catch most of it, but I think a couple of ours did. He wrestled the Fusillade Wyrm. Got it in a headlock and everything.”

“And it exploded.”

Leon laughs back. “You should’ve seen it. Full mushroom cloud, hundreds of feet into the sky. I thought the world was ending.”

“That was scary as hell! I dunno why you’re laughin’, you certainly weren’t laughin’ at the time,” Olive adds.

“It’s funny in retrospect, Olive,” he says. “We were all trying to ignore it at the time. Couldn’t waste any breath gawking.”

Jules scratches his head. “I think I was still on the road with Lucille by that point. I know we heard a boom, but I don’t remember thinking much of it. Speaking of Lucille.” He leans over in his recliner, and yells down the corridor to where the Maw is only just now getting a grip on her nosebleed. “Lucille! Do you need any help?!”

“Don’t try to walk alone!” she yells back. “I told you to stay put!”

“You want me to get the doctor or something?!”

“Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

Jules turns back to Olive and Leon, grinning like a court jester. “Thank goodness. I didn’t want to walk anywhere anyways.”

“I heard that, jackass!”

==============================================================

    Judith, Cherry, and Meat find themselves outside on the back patio, after having been moved out of the makeshift operating room due to space reasons.

“Wait, if you know all there is to know about fire magic now,” Cherry asks, who is having the time of his life grilling Meat for their entire life story— or at least, everything they can remember about themselves up until this point. “Does that mean you could teach it?”

Judith holds up her hands in dissent. “Do NOT teach him any spells. Please. That would be a mistake.”

“Why?” Meat asks.

“Because he’s prone to screwing shit up. And giving someone like that the ability to burn down a house isn’t a good idea.”

Meat turns to Cherry as Judith scowls over at him. “She talk about you like this all the time?” He nods, reluctantly. “That’s kinda shitty, lady.”

“Well, it’s the truth. You think I find it fun?”

“You’re fine putting him down in front of a stranger,” Meat says. “That says a lot.”

“Says what, exactly?” “You’re bitter. I don’t know about what, but you’re bitter.” Judith scoffs. “I’ll admit that. I am a little bitter.”

“What happened, then?” Meat motions to the two of them. “What’s the problem?”

Neither Judith nor Cherry say a word for a moment. But, after being motioned to by the Werewolf, Cherry pipes up. “I caused an accident and made her lose her hand.”

Meat’s skull tilts just slightly. “How does that happen?”

“Mining machinery.”

“He made a water cutter go haywire. He lost control of it, and it took my hand right off. We couldn’t even put it back on if we wanted,” Judith adds. “That’s how bad it was.”

Meat doesn’t respond, instead looking the Werewolf in the eyes for a solid couple seconds. They give her ample time to realize that the kind of person she’s matching gazes with really isn’t the kind she’d like to challenge. Sure, she’s stressed out and sure, she’s got some very understandable beef with Cherry, but in looking into those burning sockets, she sees someone who really, really shouldn’t be messed with. Someone to whom first impressions are everything, someone whose sense of right and wrong is stronger than their capabilities in magic will ever be. Even though all they’ve got is a skull, she can see the experience written into their expression. And, if she’s honest, it’s a little sobering. It doesn’t stop her from narrowing her eyes at them, readying herself. It’s part frustrated and ventless anger, part cornered animal.

Meat sighs. Initially it seemed like a problem to be solved— that idea’s been corrected. “That’s something you two have to work out, then.”

“Agreed,” Cherry sighs, leaning forward on the picnic bench. “But…” he starts again. “About the magic thing.”

“No,” Meat replies, crossing their arms.

“Aw.”

Chapter End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Four, Chapter Ten

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

It’s cold on the roof. The breeze has picked up significantly, but Judith hardly minds, as her head has been placed firmly in a meat grinder on the finest setting.

It makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense at all. Leon’s not a coward. He’s never been a coward. There’s plenty of times that Judith can recall where he’s actively been the aggressor in fights. But he just admitted to something that made him look like the most cowardly person on the planet. By saying nothing, he let Cherry take the fall for something he didn’t do, he let the blame of her having to re-learn how to write, how to eat, how to wipe her own ass, go to that idiot instead.

And she was instantaneously on-board with it. She was so quick to jump down Cherry’s throat, in retrospect, you’d think she’d lost the keys to her house in his trachea. Day in, day out, she’d find herself getting angry at him. Every time she sat down to do something with a hand that wasn’t there, she was reminded of the person she thought had taken her hand from her. And she was ruthless. To a point where even Leon would defend him. And it was all completely misguided. She had verbally shit on Cherry for the past couple months all because of the truth that the person she now feels deeply for had never told her.

But, she can’t muster the anger. Towards either of them, really. Sure, there’s a tiny flame in the back of her throat that’s telling her to scream into the night sky. But, it feels like something’s been uncorked recently. There’s been a release of some kind that’s made her less quick to go berserk.

Maybe it’s him. Though, kickboxing with a true admittance of love for someone isn’t to be taken lightly. A lot of her thoughts have been about him, especially since they got to Pickman’s Hope. With all the downtime, it’s felt nice to be around him. Not just good, or neutral, as though they were the traveling partners from before. It’s been a genuinely good time to just hang around and talk about things. Even if he has been treading into introspective territory recently.

That’s probably why this is happening, isn’t it. Why he decided to come out and say it to her face, right now. It’s because he’s been contemplating things again. Reflecting on things. Which, she must admit, is something she hasn’t been doing much unless it was necessary. Or, unless it was relevant to the grudge she nursed against Cherry. In the latter case, she would make multiple mental notes whenever Cherry had fucked something up, and she would keep them in colour-coded case files against him whenever he had an argument. It would almost be impressive, if it weren’t making her feel so weird.

Is this the person she’s ended up being? A ball-busting blood-feuder? Something that feeds off the misery of someone who’s wronged her (or at least, that she’s perceived as wronged her)? The werewolf overseer with anger issues.

It’s just as that recruiter back at Shepherd Gemstone had profiled her. She didn’t realize it at the time, but he was entirely right to have put her in that specific place with that specific job. He saw what was inside of her, how the position would twist her into exactly what she needed to be. And it worked. She became that person for a long time, and only recently has she had to seriously reckon with that fact.

In a moment of clarity, she vomits up her dinner all over Samson’s front porch canopy and the front of her shirt and some of her hair and she has to struggle to not fall over on her hands into it.

But she won’t be that person anymore. She can’t be. It tastes wrong now.

What Leon did— she’d do the same, especially with how things escalated. Anybody would. It makes sense why he’s admitting to it. There’s something between them now, something that wants to be built.

Judith wipes off her mouth with her sleeve. She needs to level out; she needs a game plan. Something going forward. An agenda. A schedule. She understands that. She can do that.

She’s going to forgive him and place the next brick. That’s the smart thing to do. The right thing. And she’s also going to say sorry to Cherry, since that little— guy, didn’t do anything wrong. Hell, she might as well clean out the whole storage unit of dog-eared memories she has on him. Hope for forgiveness and move on weight-free. The plan is simple, and though it takes her a moment to get her legs stable again, she turns around to peek over the back porch.

Both Cherry and Leon have clearly been staring up there since she cleared her stomach, with varying degrees of genuine concern on their faces. She comes down in the span of a blink and stands before the two of them, just looking.

“Leon,” she starts, slowly turning her head toward him. “Can you come here?”

Visibly confused, he stands up from his seat. “Did you just puke?”

“Yeah, come here.”

“Jesus Judith, we need to get you a clean change of—” but before he can finish his sentence, he’s dragged toward Judith by the shirt, receiving easily one of the sloppiest, foulest kisses one can receive from a romantic interest ever recorded.

“I love you. And I forgive you,” she says after pulling away from him. Ignoring as he instinctively runs to the bathroom to scrub his tongue dry, she turns to Cherry. “And you.”

He holds his arms up in a cross. “Oh, no. I don’t know you like that, Judith. And you’ve just—”

“No, Cherry. I’m just sorry with you.”

“Sorry?”

“Yeah. I think I’d have to say it a thousand times with all the shit I’ve put you through, but I’m starting today. I’m sorry.”

He takes a moment to process this. A long moment, the kind that you’d expect would come along with a dial-up noise or a bad, distorted track of on-hold jazz. And at the end of that moment, he stands up from his seat as well, only to hesitate once again.

“You know, I’d hug you right now if I thought it wouldn’t ruin my clothes,” Cherry says. Instead, he extends a hand. “So I’ll settle for this.”

Without thinking, Judith shakes it. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep saying it. It’s okay.”

“Deal.”

Leon comes back into the room, pointing at Judith. “You need a shower. Or a bath. Or a hose down. You look terrible, god, I’m gonna have to hose off Sam’s roof aren’t I?”

“Shut up or I’ll kiss you again.”

==============================================================

The next five days are uncomfortably calm; each one passes without event, so improbably serene that only Cherry doesn’t notice, and that’s wholly because this sort of pleasant nothing is strikingly familiar. This is what those in Honeysett, as well as those around him now, in Pickman’s Hope, call normalcy.

Five days pass in which the lot of them aren’t attacked, they aren’t given any strange new revelations, and they aren’t forced to endure any new interpersonal reckonings. An actual, factual breather. A moment of respite among the strange and intense events that had been imposing themselves upon their lives, and a span of time allowing for so many to do the normal things normal people do.

In that time, dates occur. Normal dates, the ones where one takes their lover to eat, drink, and dance, where they watch a musical performance— admittedly a local and, while entirely pleasant, not entirely memorable set of people with instruments and a dream— or perhaps even a play, if they’re that set on having some nothing happen around them as their world shrinks and twists to be occupied only by those they bring and themselves. Such is the case for Leon and Judith, who take three of the five days to go on various dates to different venues starring performances they aren’t going to remember, all paid for from a small offshoot of the emergency funds Judith had so long ago partitioned out from their main funding. She currently calls this their “entertainment” budget, and it’s almost exclusively spent on the two’s drinks and various other small affections.

A markedly smaller amount of time is spent complaining between the two of them than is typical of their time together, but one can chalk that up to the grace period after the beginning of a relationship where everything is right with the world and the two are so flagrantly attempting to make up for some strange semblance of lost time— filled with the assumed ungodly saccharine and unironic platitudes one can drum up in the average hormonal teen diary— that people leave them alone due to a mysterious force that bats any would-be facade shatterers far, far away. Again, such is the case with Leon and Judith as, for once, the rest of the group give them their time and space. When they’re not out and about, they’re inside, curled up together, making snarky but not entirely malicious remarks about the world or exchanging fluff— or sucking face, from time to time.

It would be endearing if it weren’t almost always on the couch beside the recliner Jules has been more or less trapped in for the week, and while Lucille’s happy to provide her best friend company she’s not interested in watching an Orc and a Werewolf eat each other’s heads. So, the first day he’s stuck, alone, enduring the fact that the space he’s occupying is the only area inside the house where the two lovebirds aren’t going to be bothered by anyone else and aren’t bothering anyone, with Jules and Lucille being ruled out of the category of “people we actually mind bothering” due to their incredibly off-base calculations. Essentially, Leon’s rubbing their noses in it, and nobody’s about to try and stop him.

However, by day two Jules is at least able to hobble with Lucille somewhere else, leaving that room entirely to Judith and Leon whenever they’re at Samson’s.

Without much else to do, Jules and Lucille simply bum around the house and seek out brief, awkward conversation; aside from Brie, Meat, Samson, and Olive, few are all that receptive to the idea of a prolonged conversation with the two and generally avoid them, especially when, around the third day, they begin worrying when not only Blondie would strike, but when Piper would make another move.

The opinions are split; Brie has every intention to prepare and set up strategies for the inevitable attack, which has actually been on her mind since the moment she woke up all bandaged after her one-sided altercation with Piper. She spends the five days poring over maps of the town, even the blueprints of Samson’s house, and even takes professional advice from the two. After all, they were in the same boat as her.

Meat’s not particularly interested in long, drawn out conversations with people who’ve tried to kill them for a second time, but there’s at least some bonding over the events in Fusillade, and between them and Jules there are a good few jokes on the matter of the Carnevale. They know how to handle a fight and, despite suggestions to the contrary, find no reason to take advice from Jules or Lucille, and only offer advice when prodded by Brie to explain the fire magic, not under the assumption she’d try to use any but as fuel for her developing strategy to fight Blondie.

But, nevertheless, the conversation usually goes something like this—

“Is he here yet?” Meat asks, adjusting the straps on their ramshackle, brick-based shoewear. Constructed, of course, to make sure that they don’t singe any more holes into Samson’s nice hardwood floorboards.

“Is anything on fire yet?” Lucille replies.

“I am.”

“I mean the town. Last time he was around, he burnt down half of Fusillade.”

Jules interjects, “And, people around us started dying. Dunno about anyone else in town. Best bet would be to wait for the fire sirens to start going off.”

“Uh huh. Brie,” Meat turns to the recovering Detective, “when do you think he’ll get here?”

“In theory, he could be here already,” Brie says. “Simply waiting for us to drop our guard, so that he could make a move. But, that theory is a bit flimsy, as Blondie doesn’t seem to be the kind of murderer who would wait for an opportunity. He seems more akin to an opportunity maker.”

“And speaking of making opportunities,” Lucille starts, holding up a hand, “when are you going to tell us what your deal is, Meat?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Their head tilts and their shoulders roll back.

“The more we know about you the more we can expect to understand about Blondie. Far as we know, you two have the same powers. Can you blow shit up?”

“Yeah.”

Lucille frowns. “Okay, how?”

“Magic. You wouldn’t get it.”

“That’s not helpful.”

Jules raises his hand as well. “Listen, we don’t need to know how. Is there anything you think he could pull out his sleeve to fuck us over?”

Meat thinks about this for a moment. “No. If I’m around, I can cancel anything he does.”

“And what if you’re not around?”

“Don’t get hit.”

Jules snorts. “God, I’m sure you were fun to run jobs with back in the gang.”

“I’m just telling it like it is.”

“You think that’s why Leslie had it out for you?”

“I can’t remember. But it might be.” Meat cracks a slight smile. “I’m done talking about this. Let me know if anything comes up, Brie.”

==============================================================

Samson has an actual life to live filled with awkward administration, walks through the neighborhood, and talks with his old pals, so Jules and Lucille get precious little time with the wolfhound, though in the brief moments they converse it’s plain to them both that he most certainly understood their position. Being a former adventurer and a freelancer himself, otherwise known as being a mercenary, he knows well enough the temptations of the open road and a good weapon, the joys and pains of riding after the wind and letting it feed him. It’s a little poetic and uncomfortably nostalgic for the two, but through this they manage to at least draw out some level of strategy, as at their suggestion he takes to getting the local volunteers in the fire department to be on high alert for the time being. If there are going to be fires, the town will be prepared.

It’s then that the two are left with Olive for company, and by proxy, due to Azariah’s preoccupation with Roxanne and Samson, Cherry too.

After everything, Cherry can’t help but be overly helpful as Olive prods them with professional questions. Cherry asks if they need anything to drink, Olive asks how the two go and select their gear, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. It’s like babysitting, except neither Jules nor Lucille are getting paid for this in anything except some decently cooked meals that fail to satisfy. 

One day, while Cherry was working on the truck, Lucille decided to snoop around on a whim— nearly scaring the Techie into cracking his forehead on the underside of the dash.

“Shit, sorry,” she says, holding out an assisting hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he replies. Cherry wipes his forehead clean, sitting upright in the driver’s seat. “Uh, what’s up… Lou, uh.”

“Lucille. Just being nosy, that’s all.”

“Oh, alright. Thought you might’ve had some bad news, or something.”

Lucille frowns underneath her face wrappings. “Not right now. This is the junker you used to get out of Fusillade before us?”

“Sure is,” Cherry beams, “old girl had more spring in her step than I imagined. Whoever had her last took pretty dang good care of her.”

“Reminds me of some stuff I’d see back up north. Fewer sharp edges, though.”

“Up north? You mean—”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Holy shit,” he mumbles. “Wow, that’s crazy. I bet some of the machines you saw could tear up dirt like nothing else. Tundra-based mechanics are off the wall.”

Lucille finds herself raising a brow. “You know that the biofuel they invented was originally an execution tool?” When Cherry’s jaw hits the floor, she laughs, and continues, “Yeah. Back when New Bird was first getting formed, one of the nomad groups had come up with a recipe for fuel that’d burn hotter and faster than anything else you could scavenge normally. They’d use it to roast people in seconds. Now that they’ve been united, folks found out that it could still be used for racing.”

“Hell yeah it can. I’ve seen some guys’ machines hit nearly two-hundred while juiced on that stuff. God, that’s pretty messed up, though.”

She pats the Techie on the arm. “Everything up there has a bad history. Especially the people.”

“Did the races used to be to the death or something, too?! I mean, not to make you dig back up some bad memories or anything,” Cherry holds up his hands, “but considering that, like you said, there’s some bad stuff up there. And you mentioned pointy bits. I know you can put spikes on car rims and stuff to shred other tires. But I bet there’s plenty of ways to make a car more lethal than it is.”

“I never got into any of that crap,” she replies, leaning up against the chassis. “Yeah, the races used to be a form of competitive goodwill between gangs that could tolerate one another. It wasn’t much of a circuit, and people would always die in the process, but the spirit was there. If you wanna call it spirit. More like bloodlust and adrenaline.”

“And then, it turned to just the normal races once New Bird was founded, right? Well, they’re not normal races at all from what I’ve heard. Have you heard the stories too? About the machines they’d build for those races? And how far they’d go out? How many people’d show up to the events?” Cherry asks, eyes full of stars.

“Makes the spots out here look like go-kart rinks.”

“What I’d give to go out there and see one.”

“Hey, maybe you will someday. When the roads are safer, hopefully. That’s not a fun trip.” Lucille stops, scratches the top of her head, and then turns her gaze to the truck again. “Is this thing prepped to handle combat? If you’re driving over rough terrain, can someone reasonably stand inside and use a weapon without worrying about getting knocked off?”

Cherry’s lips purse as his mind drifts, and after gently running his hand against the vehicle he nods. “I think it’ll be fine unless we hit top speed, or other unrelated potential problems.”

“I’d appreciate some confirmation on possible problems. Anything in mind?”

He shakes his head. “No, it’s fine. I know it better than my house at this point.”

“I’m sure it’s handy.”

==============================================================

Roxanne well and should be as anxious as Brie over the eventual, seemingly inevitable arrival of Blondie and Piper, but she finds herself meaningfully distracted by her jackrabbit. Azariah, ever the charmer, refuses to let her stew in her anxiety and, like a recently rejuvenated yet still much older version of Leon and Judith’s sophomoric dates, the two head out and about to enjoy themselves while they can and when they aren’t pestering Samson. Dancing’s awkward, but the two manage; Azariah can overcompensate for her loss of limb by simply sweeping her off of them, twirling her around with a sort of strength he hasn’t shown her since before that first fight with the big white wolf.

“The longer I keep goin’, the harder it gets to act like my best nights are behind me.”

“Hey, that’s a good sign.” Samson smiles, standing on the front lawn with the old Hare, and after his sentence ends the both of them go silent. With one eye shut and the other narrowed, the hound gently lobs a horseshoe into position. It spins almost lovingly around the iron peg that they jammed into the turf an hour ago. “Yer best nights are ahead of you. Means things are lookin’ up, pal.”

Azariah snorts, tossing a horseshoe and landing it just on top of Samson’s. “That so? I thought the best years were back closer to when we spawned.”

“Nah, don’t believe the nostalgia. Your knees might not bend as good and your hands might not grip as tight, but I’ll tell you what, I don’t mind it none. Look around and tell me what ya see.”

Running his eyes along the yard, across gardens and a beaten up but cared for street, across houses about as uniform as the folks who live in them, Azariah sighs. “I see a lot. My eyes aren’t goin’ yet, Sam.”

“Come on now, that ain’t the point. Look at them folks. This is peace and community, Azariah. I might miss knocking skulls with you, and I might miss slaying Monsters with my old pals who’ve all gone and wandered into their own lives, but I wouldn’t give this up for another night as some pup with a fencepost for a sword. I might’ve had more reliable fingers, but that can take a back seat to some pumpkin wine and sweet tea. ‘Sides, we weren’t very good men in our youth. No point in missing that.”

“You were better’n me, that’s for sure,” the Hare mumbles. “Don’t know how you and Roxanne stood me for so long.”

“Don’t know, then again, I don’t know a lotta things. You an’ Rox on right now?”

“Think so, maybe. I think we might be on for good now, all considered. After what happened, I don’t think I could bring myself to leave her again, barrin’ certain possibilities.”

Samson turns. His eyebrows, heavy as they are, still manage to raise themselves in some kind of concern. “God, you’re really gonna try it, aren’t ya?”

“I’ll win.”

“You don’t sound certain. Y’know, I bet y’all could run. Just take Roxanne and get out of here. I’ll keep the kids safe.”

“They ain’t my kids.”

“You act like they are. Both of you do. Roxanne’s come close to throttling me over me fat-fingering that crowbar the gal was stuck with. I’m sure you’d take a swing if I even came close to harming a hair on any of their heads.”

Azariah rolls his shoulders, and he smiles. “Keep throwin’ horseshoes, old timer.”

Another soft ring of metal on metal; the horseshoe comes to rest on top of the previous two. “You don’t have to fight. Took me a lifetime of it to realize you don’t have to.”

“I understand. I ain’t doin’ it to prove anythin’ to anybody. I don’t have anythin’ to prove anymore, just folks to protect. If they run, I run. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure they all get out alright.”

Samson laughs loud and hard, grinning as he pulls his belt loops a bit higher, adjusting his pants. “Well, be careful. Do anything reckless and you’re liable to break my heart. Who’ll I get to play mandolin with the boys during parties?”

“I’m not gettin’ the mandolin out ‘less you get the spoons.”

“Ain’t played spoons in years, Azariah. I graduated to washboard.”

Roxanne laughs behind them, and the two turn their heads to watch her settle into a chair on the front porch. “Are you two out here talking philosophy again?”

“Dog’s gotta howl,” Samson says. “Ain’t much to do but chew some fat and enjoy the taste. You two busy tomorrow?”

“Naw.” Azariah smiles at Roxanne, and she returns it tiredly. “I think she’s a mite danced out, so we’re probably just gonna spend tomorrow doin’ somethin’ low energy.”

She scoffs. “I’m not the magically infused one. If you’d like to drag him to something exhausting, go ahead, but he’s done a damn good job of running me ragged.” Still, despite the words, the tone is sweet.

Samson snuffles. “Aw hell, it’s just like the old days. I’m thinking I might be about to cry.”

“You’re about to lose at horseshoes,” Azariah points out. “Why’d you wanna know what we were doin’ tomorrow?”

“Billy wants to go fishing with some of the old heads. I think it’d be fun. You’re welcome to come, and so’s Roxanne, if you don’t think fishing is too intense for your bones?” Asking this, Samson’s gaze runs from Azariah to Roxanne, and his smile is too wide, too intense for either of them to watch for long without their own smiles threatening to split into grins.

“We’ll come,” Roxanne replies. “Of course, just make sure you buy an extra case of beer.”

==============================================================

On the final day, Piper and company are moving out of the deceased Mr. Thistle’s house, leaving it an empty hollow. They’re preparing to find a new base of operations, her and Kranner, with Sundae and Nancy in tow for negotiations, or “negotiations,” until Jack arrives, breathing heavy, from a long and winding recon patrol.

“I have new information, ma’am, but I don’t think you’re going to enjoy hearing it,” he says to her, standing straight again and dusting himself off.

“Give me the good news first.”

“On my way around town I found the place where Blondie’s been hiding.” With a heavy, metallic sigh he draws a finger to point out toward the southeast. “He was squatting in the woods just south of town.”

Piper’s eyebrows raise. “Was?”

Jack nods. “That’s where we get to what you don’t want to hear.”

It’s an hour or so until sundown on the fifth day, and everyone’s come back for dinner. That’s when the heavy freight truck fueling station down near the south end of town blows up.

Book 4 End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Four, Chapter Seven

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

The Bleeding Scab isn’t the best place to lie low and wait out a quarry, but it’s chaotic enough to cover up the fact that Piper, Jules, and Lucille are very obviously not from around there. Most of the workers busy themselves with their own pockets of enjoyment, so the three oddballs just fade into the corner of the room; especially since they don’t plan on renting a room, nor are they on payroll to be accompanying potential renters. Instead, as Lucille awkwardly sits in her section of the booth with Jules right beside her, picking away awkwardly at some local type of blood sausage— not the sort of blood he needed, but fangs are meant for meat— Piper simply presses heavy spoonfuls of a thick, sludgy soup into her mouth, watching the people move and talk, her tail wrapping around the center pole of the table between them.

They’re nestled into a far corner with easy visibility of the main bar and the front entrance. Anyone who seems to notice them is disquieted by a combination of Piper’s glare, Jules’s grin, and Lucille’s covered mouth, and anyone who doesn’t is too busy going about their business. In a sense, they stick out. But, sticking out just enough to discomfort is, in itself, a fairly good way to camouflage yourself. To lack the comfort of familiarity and the novelty of strangeness both is to convince the viewer not to view at all, and is thus a good way to hide in plain sight.

The fine details of this method, something Jules and Lucille have utilized time and time again to simply wait for their quarry in a populous gathering space and then pounce at the last second, are somewhat lost on Piper. Her shoulders shift and roll to ease the tension, she tilts her head to crack her neck, and after a time the spoon settles into the bottom of the solidifying muck she had called a meal some moments earlier as she’s taken to popping each knuckle on each hand individually, slowly and methodically. Her tail twitches. As though simply to elicit some response, the tip drifts against Lucille’s leg.

This whole time, Lucille’s been staring past her companions and into the sea of people also. She’s careful not to think too hard on the way the moving of boots and feet in this place reminds her painfully of the hustle and bustle of camps in the past, or how the roaring laughter of these people, likely celebrating a finished house or some other project, echoes against those she had once called her peers. The Snake’s touch against her leg is only registered after it gets firmer and runs up her calf, when Lucille nudges it away with her boot.

Piper smirks. “I’m bored,” she says, running a finger along the rim of her bowl. “How long does this usually take?”

“It isn’t always high octane chases or intense stakeouts. Sometimes it’s just sitting in some greasy spoon waiting for somebody to show up.” Lucille’s head tilts. Her eyes linger on Piper’s own golden pair as her jaw sets.

Jules chuckles. “We’re hunters, right. Which means, Pip, that you have to learn to treat the target like they’re animals. Complicated, complex animals, but animals. Shit, that analogy doesn’t really work, huh. Think brutal reality shit, you get me.”

A grin crosses its way over Piper’s features, but she doesn’t respond to him. She’s a bit busy breaking her gaze from the staredown to follow the familiar shapes of Brie and Roxanne, accompanied by the unfamiliar Meat as they plow through the entrance and straight to the front counter. Roxanne swiftly places down a bundle of cash, raises a small ruckus, and is handed a key by the bartender. Once the charade’s complete, the three dart up the stairs and into the hall where the rented rooms reside, just as two more shapes enter.

The two figures approach the bartender, and just from a cursory glance Piper has some idea that they aren’t locals, given as one of them— a tall man, made of literal stone with small streaks of metal throughout his face and bald head like tattoos— is wearing a black suit and a horrendously patterned tie that speaks to having been picked up either in the home of an insane clothier or a low-grade alchemical mentor. The swirling red, blue, green and electric cyan patterns are hard to look at.

The other, an orc, isn’t wearing a suit but his clothes are simple, crisp, and very obviously mass produced; he’s from a real city. On top of his head is a flat cap, chequered, black and white. Similarly, his t-shirt is a simple black, his jeans white, et cetera, over his green skin.

Combined they cut a fearsome silhouette, a mountain of a man made of rock and iron glaring, stone-faced, as an Orc of nearly equal stature cracks and rolls his knuckles as though preparing a weapon. On the Golem’s lapel is a pin, and even from a distance Jules knows the symbol it bears well; after all, Leslie Carnevale wears it all the time and so do the properly initiated members of the crew, as it’s the sign of the family. The Orc isn’t wearing one, but he probably has one, Jules thinks.

Based solely on looks, he can assume who they are. There isn’t any shortage of rocky muscle in the organization but rather few get to the point where they start buying expensive suits; shows this isn’t just some brick-headed associate out to crack skulls. This is a soldier, sure, not a capo like Leslie, but give him a few years and a few more busted heads and he’s going to get there.

The Orc, he knows. Normally the guy works an entirely different track; he’s an urban collector, a soldier who doesn’t work for Leslie and probably already misses the man-made mountains and jungles of concrete, wood, and steel back in the city. Wide at the shoulders and tight at the hips, he’s practically threatening to bust that shirt open during a fight. It’d be attractive if Jules didn’t know the moment the guy gets going things are only going to hurt.

Grant “The Slab” Slate and “Lucky” Luciano. Professionals, even a little above Jules’ paygrade. Leslie’s pulling out all the stops to deal with this Notus. Someone who might be fireproof and somebody willing to put hands on a campfire. Sensible, but it stings a little to know he’s been outmoded for the moment.

The bartender doesn’t tell them anything, and unfortunately for Grant and Lucky, this isn’t a place where they can bust out pieces and have the run of the joint; the moment either one of them pulls a gun on a local, the rest’ll tear them apart. They didn’t account for Jules being there, though.

Some part of him does feel a little bad for the brief wave and the vague gesture pointed toward the stairs up, as that Meat person didn’t seem all too bad when they weren’t trying to kill one another, but family’s family, even if he himself is taking a break from it to keep rolling with his best friend to get a job done. It’s all quick, professional, and mostly painless.

Frustrated, the two goons look around. They eventually spot someone who’s entirely willing to make eye contact with them— that being Jules— who quickly and vaguely points toward the stairs nearby with a slight nod of his head. Then comes another gesture, the slight tapping of his fingers, still only using his good hand, against his chest in the spot where, were he to wear one, he would place a Carnevale pin on his jacket, mirroring the placement of Grant’s on his suit.

Daylight gangsters, the sort with very public facing personas, get pretty good at interpreting that kind of message. It’s easy enough; the two’s quarry had gone upstairs and the gray-faced and messed up looking fellow in the far corner saw, and not only that but also has connections to the family. Had they a few more minutes they’d probably find out that this fellow is, in fact, the guy whose job they just took, but they’re too busy. Instead, there’s a brief nod in response before the two storm up the stairs and past some working men and women, off to start busting down doors.

As the two disappear upstairs, Lucille turns to Jules and lets out a sigh. “Was that needed?”

“Even if I’m off that job, it’s good to stay on people’s good sides. Also, hell, at least one of those guys is on the up and up, and it never hurts to be in with somebody like that.” A fanged smile greets her from beneath a thick and recently combed mustache.

“And who’re they?” Piper asks, eyes still lingering on the staircase, mind elsewhere.

“I think a word for it is “coworkers.” People who’ve dedicated much more to the- er- family than I have.”

“Mafia goons,” Lucille adds. “Doesn’t matter, we’ve got other people to wait for. It’s just a matter of time.”

Piper’s lips purse, and the three go silent and wait for a few minutes more before she finally rises from her seat saying, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

“Are you?” Lucille raises her gaze to Piper’s face again, narrowing her eyes.

“Does it matter?”

“Would you be lying to us if it didn’t?”

As Piper adjusts her coat collar and sets her jaw, she shrugs. “Suppose so. Either way— you two stay here and watch for those idiots, and don’t go starting any scenes.” And then she’s off, walking right past the sign directing those inside the bar toward the restrooms and she’s heading up, heading after the two she’d seen and the three runners.

Brie’s legs want to give out after so much running and the intensity of the standoff inside the room. Her hand’s on the semiautomatic in her bag, and her eyes are focused narrowly on those of the green skinned fellow in a flat cap who’s only just barely keeping his muscled frame from pouncing on Meat who is, at this very moment, literally butting heads with a golem that’s looming over them like a bent tower.

Roxanne’s got the crossbow out, of course, but she’s not in a position for it to be terribly useful; fact is she’s not got a good shot on the Orc and the Golem is, again, made of rock. Even if it’d punch into him, he’d probably just pull it out. While the room had been something of a good bet to hide in, it’s the last place she wants to be in a real fight, especially when she can’t shoot worth a damn at this range and Meat can’t make any sparks fly for fear of lighting the whole town up. Only Brie’s got free range in this room, and even then, she’s not likely to pull the trigger.

“Mack.” The Golem’s voice is slow and heavy, deliberate like the placement of a statue. Every syllable is a perfectly placed brick. “You’re a real long way from home.”

Meat’s brow chafes somewhat from rubbing against stone and metal, as they press their neck and shoulders forward and they stand on the ball of their feet to shove their bony forehead against that of Grant. “I’m not Mack anymore. I’m not in the mood to be explaining this to people I might’ve once known, but I’m not Mack. I stopped being Mack a while ago, and if anybody calls me that again I am going to—”

“Meat,” Brie chimes in, “I do not think attempting to intimidate someone twice your size is going to do much. Sir, please do not call them Mack. They prefer Meat.”

“We come here to tussle or we come here to have tea?” Lucky spits, nose scrunching as he shoots a glare Brie’s way. “Meat, Mack, either way ends the same. Been waiting to take a swing at you for a while…”

Grant raises a hand, then stands back to his full height. “Don’t be a bitch, Lucky. Alright, Meat, I’ll call you that. Still, job’s a job.”

Meat’s arms cross, and their teeth clatter as they work their jaw wordlessly for a second. Then comes an idea, something quick and simple. “We can’t fight here. I don’t know either of you, or at least I don’t anymore, but I get a feeling you two don’t want to have too much… Collateral.”

“What, these two?” Lucky gives a quick glance over the two women before he laughs. “What’s it matter?”

Grant scowls over at him. “Shut your face, Lucky.” Afterward, he turns to look at Meat again. “You sound like you’re about to make a proposition. If it’s happening, out with it.”

“I… Uh…” Meat stops. They didn’t actually think they were going to get this far. Flying by the seat of your pants is good for a fight, but it’s not quite there as conversational tactics go.

Brie steps forward, putting up both hands in a supplicating gesture. “They are technically still working for the Carnevale. It would be in bad taste to kill a coworker before they finish their job, yes?”

“That’s it, I’m gonna shove my hand down this—” Lucky starts, stepping toward her before a large, suit-clad arm stops him.

Grant’s cold, stoic face turns to watch Brie as he says to her, “Explain.”

Meat steps back some, and Roxanne lowers her crossbow as Brie smooths out her pants and readjusts her collar. “Back in Fusillade, your employer tasked Meat with defeating the other Notus, the one known as “Blondie,” whom they— we— are currently pursuing. Blondie was not defeated in Fusillade and thus, the job is unfinished. Obviously Mr. Carnevale expects this to have been finished by the time you arrived, assuming that is who hired you in the first place.”

The Golem and the Orc exchange looks. A small, almost entirely insignificant smile pulls at the corners of Grant’s lips. “Convincing. Stupid, but very convincing. I need more than a technicality to make letting you three go worth it.”

“Unless you can beat a five-figure paycheck,” Lucky breaks in, “I don’t expect anything like this to be worth it. Let’s just kill ‘em.” Though he says this, his hands are already lowered, pressed into his pockets.

Meat rolls their shoulders. “I can’t beat five figures… Let me help them beat this Blondie guy, though. I’ll owe you one. From what I’ve gathered, that’s worth a lot. Apparently my death’s worth that paycheck.”

“And you already stood up again after that Dragon incident. No telling if you’ll stand back up after what we’d do to you, but I guess that can’t be helped. You should’ve stuck to the family life, Meat. You’re good at it. Dealing and all that. You too, sister.” Grant nods, first toward Meat and then toward Brie before he says to Lucky, “I think a favor might come in handy later on. Don’t be too sore over the check, it’ll make you look bad.”

“For a rock, you’re soft as shit.” Lucky snarls, but as everything settles, even his muscles relax.

All just in time for the door to open again and something long to swing out, lashing at the back of Grant’s knees. Unprepared, the giant of a man is sent to the ground, only catching himself by his hands on the floor. By this point another figure’s entered the room and, stepping neatly over the grounded Grant, closes the distance with Lucky.

He’s better prepared. When something bronze and long swings out, lashing toward his face, he catches it between his calloused hands as though clapping his palms to either side of a long blade. Only in the brief moment of calm after it’s stopped in his hands does he realize— it’s not a weapon, it’s a scaly tail. Before he can capitalize on this knowledge, as his soft, blue eyes dart up to gauge the enemy, his vision finds itself blotted out.

Brie, Meat, and Roxanne are dumbfounded as Piper, her tail trapped between the hands of the Orc, just having tripped up Grant, pulls out something strange, some abomination of a weapon derived from strains of crowbar, tonfa, and club. She already had it out by the time she entered, and by the point of her tail making contact with Lucky’s hands she’s spinning it. Now, as Lucky finally looks at her, looks her in the eyes, she’s carving a ragged arc from one side of his head to the other, the pointed, clawed crowbar end of the weapon digging in through one cheek and through his back teeth, through one of his tusk-like canines, and full through the other cheek.

Lucky expects a fight, something real and intense, life or death. He doesn’t expect to be absolutely stunned with cold, shooting pain as he attempts to hold his jaw where it should be on his skull. Blood sputters from his open cheeks and down his neck onto his black shirt and hands, and his attempts to speak only come out as muffled, muted gurgles. His nigh perfect stance from moments ago is ruined as he attempts to back away, tripping and falling as he continues to clutch at his face. He’s been stabbed, shot, clawed, bitten—  but this is new. This is so horrifyingly new.

Roxanne’s breathing fast and awkward, partially out of an instinctive fear, secondarily out of a learned, familiar resentment. She’s realized by now that this isn’t Blondie, it’s just his coat being worn by that foreman, Piper. But that’s just enough to send her brain into panic mode, send phantom pains shooting through her missing foot. And that’s only the beginning of her troubles. It’s one thing to be used to seeing viscera in a medical context; it’s something else entirely to watch somebody lose bits and pieces of their face to a glorified pry bar.

Meat’s been unsure of what to do this entire time. Admittedly, not having to owe him anything would be really, really nice. However, if the guy was willing to let them actually talk it out then they weren’t that bad— and if they weren’t going to condemn themselves for having been a member of the Carnevale, it’d be real hypocritical to let this guy die just because of that. And furthermore, they remember Brie’s worries. Is Brie next?

Brie’s frozen. Inside herself, she’s shut down. The time has come. To struggle is pointless when in the face of this brutality. She hadn’t gotten to see Blondie do such things, only having seen the aftermath for the most part, save for that man that Blondie’d burned to death back in Fusillade at the start of the fight, but she’s seeing it now, in Piper. And God, it’s coming for her next.

As Meat moves to place themselves between Piper and Brie, Piper’s gaze, wild and absent of expression, like the glazed but attentive stare of a predator, passes them over in favor of Grant, who’s trying to struggle his way to his feet again. Being a big man means being hard to topple when he’s ready, but if he’s caught off guard then it’s going to be a while as he gets back up.

When he’s finally on his own two feet again, a strange whistling enters his ears, like something spinning faster and faster, metal clawing the air, leather on leather. His eyes run up in time for the already bloodied metal claw on the heavy end of the weapon to strike down on his bald head.

Now everything’s ringing, swimming, and there’s trickling. Like a stream descending a mountain cliff, blood trickles between the crags and crevices in his face from the place she’d struck him. He bellows deeply, but is silenced as the whistling twirl of the weapon collides with his head again, and then again, each strike pushing him down further and further.

Each song-like swing of hardened steel finds itself a sickening, climactic crunch to cap it off. Again and again she strikes, panting, grinning now. In Piper’s mind, she’s calculating the perfect position to strike to chip more and more away. It’s just mining. Instead of groundwater, though, it’s blood.

Meat calms down alongside Roxanne, who by this point is awkwardly clutching at them and saying, “Please stop her, Meat,” between her steadily calming breaths.

Before anything can be said in response, Brie pushes out from behind the both of them and shoves herself into Piper’s path, raising her arms to take the next blow meant for the Golem now on the ground. It doesn’t land, though; Piper stops her movements, and in that second her features contort grotesquely with rage and confusion.

“If you are here for me,” Brie says, a slight tremble in her voice, “then hurt me! Don’t hurt anyone else!”

Piper glances around the room. Lucky’s clutching at his face still, looking distant and pale, and Grant’s on the floor with a good chunk of rock missing from his head, bleeding profusely but obviously not dead. Hell, she was pretty sure she only gave him the Golemnic equivalent of a concussion, or maybe a bit of internal bleeding if she’s really fortunate. Meat and Roxanne are both gawking at her like idiots but obviously they’d try to take her on if she did anything.

A smile and an almost eerily serene posture take over Piper then, and though her black coat, her weapon, and a bit of her face are all splattered with blood, she looks like she hadn’t even exerted herself. “I’m not here to hurt you, Brie.”

Brie’s arms lower and, in her confusion, she blinks. “You’re not? Then why—”

“To protect you. We wouldn’t want anything happening to our number monkeys, right? Especially not one working directly for Ms. Hickory.” A bloody, gloved hand reaches up to grip Brie’s chin. “You should be careful. They don’t like folks like us around here. We have to stick together.”

Brie’s eyes are wide and her face is hot, hot with anger and dread and all things confusing to the logical mind. “How can you be so candid after hurting them like that?” She snaps, immediately. “Look at what you did! It is all so— so needlessly cruel!”

Piper chuckles, and that hand on Brie’s chin pats her cheek before the snake turns to walk out. “Shit, write it all down in your lil’ notebook and get along with your job. Maybe I shouldn’t have come to your rescue after all. There are better things to do than protect people that ain’t even going to give me so much as a thank you.” On her way out she snags one of the several extra blankets, and as she walks out she takes the time to wipe off the blood. Luckily enough for her, the coat’s been treated— blood doesn’t stick. Blondie thought of everything when ordering these things.

In the room Brie is huffing, face vividly darkened by a flush, face for once twisted heavily in some semblance of fury. She only comes out of some hidden, angry place in the back of her mind as Meat snaps in front of her face. “Hey, I know this isn’t a great time, but Roxanne needs our help moving the gangsters.”

“As in, I need you two to drag them downstairs so that the locals can handle the rest. We have to see Sam.”

Getting the two gangsters situated in the clinic was no easy task, but the working folk of the Bleeding Scab brought forth everything they could muster to help. Roxanne found herself impressed, and somewhat missing that kind of community with her fellow folk. There’s nothing quite like the feel of everyone dropping their beers when someone’s in dire need.

But, the job isn’t finished. As she exits the clinic to a rather overwhelmed Brie and a notably on-edge Meat, she says, “There’s someone we’ve got to see. Let’s get a move on before anything else happens, yes?” Brie attempts to raise a hand, but Roxanne just replies, “We can process what happened in a bit, Ms. Brie. Right now, we’ve got to get to my friend. He’ll know what to do about all this.”

“Where to?” Meat says, eyeing the streets suspiciously.

“Samson’s place. He’s the union head here, and he’ll know how to drive Piper out, now that she’s here.” The Medic starts to walk, taking Brie’s hand as she passes by. “Keep up now, you two. We’ll be safe, but I don’t want either of you getting lost.”

==============================================================

    Covered in grease but satisfied with his inspection and installation of the Pounder nitrous canister into the truck, Cherry pushes himself out from underneath the vehicle, dragging his toolbelt along with him. Now, if he’s done everything correctly, the button on the side of the middle control panel should work for a last-ditch burst of speed.

Though, as if on-queue, Cherry had noticed something odd while working on the truck. Since he had become so familiar with the vehicle’s inner workings, he had slowly begun the process of trying out his power on it. Unscrewing and rescrewing nuts, lifting parts off the pavement for insertion into tight spaces, and other such activities that had tired him out after a while. In fact, after he had finished, he had a thought— since his power seems to consider the process of moving things as a function of building, could he, in theory, move more than one component at once?

To his surprise, he could see it happening in his mind when he closed his eyes. A wireframe map of the truck had been built in his headspace, and when he felt for a section, he could feel it begin to move slightly under his influence. Of course, this was about as strenuous as trying your hardest to lift a screwed-on piece of machinery from its frame, but nonetheless, all he had to do was wipe a bit of blood from his nose before heading inside.

That is, before Roxanne showed up in Samson’s yard with Brie and someone else.

==============================================================

    Brie and Meat stand back from the scene, waiting on the front lawn of a rather well-kept house. They watch Roxanne embrace the Hare and the human covered in motor oil sitting out on the front porch, who Brie correctly assumes to be the ones she’s been hunting this entire time, and soon after, hug the massive Hound who walks out as well. There’s brief, but fervent conversation— something about being followed to town, something about a pair of gangsters, something about Shepherd Gemstone. That last bit perks up the Hound right away, and both Brie and Meat watch as his hand naturally gravitates toward his hip. The Owl standing next to them also becomes visibly nervous, and again, from what Brie can surmise by the instructions she was given at the beginning of her contract, she’s also one of the people she’s supposed to be hunting.

In fact, two more people come out of the house, and they both fit the description perfectly. A toothless Orc and a Werewolf, but one who didn’t like to turn. Her entire quarry, right there, right in front of her. If she were someone else, she’d be leaping at the opportunity to seize them and claim her bounty, complete her contract, and leave this whole thing behind. But, beyond the fact that they looked like tough customers, she doesn’t feel obligated to do that at all. In fact, she feels as though it would be wrong, if not completely morally red, to attempt to break up their panicked reunion with the announcement of her aiming to fulfill her contract.

As she briefly turns to look at Meat, she also realizes that she’s been traveling with someone who knows what it’s like to be hunted. Though they’ve only been alive a few weeks, there’s no denying that they’ve had to have been on-edge the entire trip. And they were right to feel that way, as they nearly got themselves, as well as Roxanne and her, in serious trouble just now. Being chased like that, it must not feel very nice. She can tell somewhat by looking at their face. And when looks back at the group of folks on the front porch, something terrible occurs to her.

She’s been an unknowing predator. She’s been the chaser, not the chase-ee, this entire time, and that fills her with a sense of something she feels is unprocessable. She looks at them, discussing what to do in this dire situation, and knows in her heart that she’s been in the wrong for even thinking that taking that job had been a good idea, much less to follow through on it.

And in that moment, she also realizes that Meat has been knocked on the skull with the flat side of a familiar crowbar, sending them into the dirt face-first and entirely unconscious.

“That’s all it takes? Really?” Piper says, stalking up besides Brie. She makes sure to give Meat’s body a hearty kick as she wraps an arm around the Detective’s shoulder. “You ready to do this thing, pal?”

Brie wants to scream, but not only will nothing come out, the others have already noticed the presence of the mercenaries and have hunkered down inside the house, with the exception of Samson, who stands firm on his front porch.

He yells, “I figured they’d send a dog, but they sent me a snake instead! You’d better make this easy, girlie.”

Piper spits out a bit of venom and smiles. “What do you think, you two?” she starts, turning to Jules and Lucille. “Should we make it easy on them?”

“No,” Lucille replies, “but I think this is fucking stupid. What the hell are we doing here, Piper?”

She ignores her comments, “Good. Then I guess it’s about time you two stop dragging me down.” She releases Brie from her grip, and starts to walk over to the two mercenaries, crowbar spinning like a weed whacker’s blade. “Understand that when I say this is nothing personal, I don’t actually mean it, L. It’s totally personal. I’ve been wanting to brain you since we last met. You’ve turned into a real bitch,” she finishes, raising her weapon in a flourish.

Survival instincts begin to fire in Lucille’s brain, but they aren’t enough to protect her from the blow that she attempts to block with a combination of her left arm and shoulder. She definitely hears something crack, and by the time she’s hit the dirt, she can’t even feel it anymore. And there’s hardly any time to scream either, as it’s lights out with a swift boot to the face.

Though her sadistic side tells her to keep going, Piper decides that she might feel bad if she kept wailing on one of her old colleagues after she’d been knocked stupid. So, instead, she turns to Jules, who has fallen on his ass in the process and is clearly in no shape to fight. Something tickles her brain when she starts to approach him like a slasher flick monster, spinning up the crowbar as he tries to scooch himself away in the grass. The only thing that would make it more perfect is if there was a dramatic score, one with shrill strings overlapping a sinister bassline— or, if he were begging. He’s surprisingly silent, just staring up at her in disbelief of what he’s seeing. And that makes it weird.

“If you get up,” she says, frowning. “I’m killing you. Understood, J?” Jules scowls at her, but nods. “Good. Now, Brie,” she starts, turning back to the Detective.

Through the calls from Samson for her to come to the porch, she doesn’t budge a single inch. In a sense, she’s stalled out. It’s all too much for her to handle at the moment, and to be frank, she feels as though she could sink into the center of the world, through the ground where she stands. She jumps a touch when the Snake touches her shoulder again, and feels like nothing but crying when she’s looked in the eyes by her.

“C’mon. You and me. Let’s get this job done so we can go grab some lunch,” Piper says. “You’re on the payroll too, so we’re in this together. Get your gun and let’s do this thing.”

In a moment of clarity, she gazes down at the pocket where her nametag is hidden. She picks it up, shows it to Piper, and throws it into the road. “I will not. I quit.”

Piper frowns, unsurprised and pitying. “I knew you were soft.”

The claw of the crowbar is hooked behind Brie’s ankle and her leg is pulled out from under her, flipping her into the dirt. The wind’s knocked from her lungs, and the Detective sees the claw rise again before it digs itself into her side and hooks around one of her ribs. She can feel the cold metal up against her insides, and when she tries to scream in shock, there’s no air left to fuel it. All that’s left is the pulling, the tugging of an animal trying to lever one of her ribs from its cage.

“Hickory always had a knack for hiring trash. What do you do to help with this shit? Run around and take notes. Follow the trail, but never to the source. Find the evidence, but never the killer. Who the fuck am I kidding, you hardly even did ANY of that,” Piper chides. “So, I think I’m gonna drop you off in a trash bag at her front door. Maybe that’ll teach her a lesson, huh?”

Before Piper can start the dismemberment process, she’s sent flying off her feet with a thundercrack.

“Never seen a more disgustin’ display in all my years,” Samson sighs, ejecting the spent shell from his shotgun. He quickly makes it over to Brie, who is just now catching her breath. “We’re gettin’ you inside. This is gonna hurt a lot, and yer’ gonna start bleedin’ bad, but we can fix ya’. Just don’t move, okay?”

“You fucking dog,” Piper hisses, clutching her still-steaming stomach. Though Blondie’s vest had taken the buckshot, the force alone was enough to make her want to puke up her breakfast. It was both a jabbing, sharp pain in all the areas where the individual pellets had pushed up against her skin, and a dull pain filling in the gaps. 

She’s able to get back up, but as she does, she finds herself thrown into the street by another thundercrack, and the pain has multiplied by a magnitude of three. Her combat armour torn to shreds, she writhes on the cobbles of the road, trying to get a grip.

“Shut it, snake!” Samson yells, before turning back to Brie.

    The sunlight has become quite hazy in her eyes, and she hardly notices when Samson manages to gently finagle the crowbar out from underneath her rib. From there, time becomes a blur— but she remembers hearing Roxanne’s voice, and she can’t shake the feeling that beyond the pain, she had made the right decision. It’s an oddly warm thing. Or, maybe it’s her own blood.

After getting the Detective inside, under Roxanne’s care and with his emergency kit, Samson realizes that there’s still two people out on his lawn, one of them entirely unconscious. Piper is nowhere to be found, and only moments after tossing it aside the crowbar’s missing too. Ejecting the other spent shell from his gun, he walks back out, and approaches the Vampire.

“You two workin’ with her?” he asks, arms crossed.

“Not anymore,” Jules responds, clutching his side. He offers the Hound a weak smile. “In hindsight, it wasn’t a good idea to begin with. Can I get a hand?”

“You with Shepherd?”

“No sir. We worked security for them before they liquidated that department for people like her.”

Samson frowns. “And now?”

Jules frowns back. “I don’t know.” He gestures over to Lucille, who’s in the process of waking back up. “Ask her. But if I had to bet, we’re done chasing this fuckin’ bounty.”

“You’d better be.”

“Look,” the Vampire says, “I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. But I also know some of those people inside. Not on good terms, but I’d like to change that, since I’ve realized how stupid I’ve been.” He gestures with his head. “Can you please help me up?” It takes a moment, but the Hound does eventually offer Jules a hand, pulling him to his feet. “Thanks. I appreciate it. And I’m sorry for all this, even if I was being a dumb lackey in it.”

“Don’t mention it. Now, can she stand?” Samson points to Lucille, who is in the process of wiping turf off her face, while nursing a noticeably broken nose.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she says, wobbling as she gets up. “I think I’ve got a concussion.”

“You in the same boat as this guy?” he asks.

“Yeah. We’ve got some apologies to make.”

“Good. We can talk later over some coffee.”

“That sounds nice,” she groans, clutching her nose.

Samson snaps his fingers and gestures to Meat, who is also in the process of getting up. “You come too. Roxanne’s got some explaining to do.”

Chapter End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Four, Chapter Six

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

The road to Pickman’s Hope from Fusillade is dull. There’s not much to see, as scenic views have yet to be shaved through the dense, forested mountains for in-transit nature porn. Not even the mountains themselves particularly are eye-catching, thanks to the roadside underbrush masking any idyllic uphill environments. In a way, the road had been made in such a way that would allow for two things— cars to get where they’re going, and people to follow in case they get lost.

Brie felt as though she would prefer the latter, as her mind heats up in an oven of poor sleep and the concept of being sacked. Her hands grip the wheel a little harder than usual, as the thoughts bubble up in her head— she had never been sacked before, what would that even feel like? It sounds like it’s humiliating, or maybe it could be painful. But, it’s just a contract, it’s not like them ripping up a slip of paper could be that painful. Unless they’ve got something else in mind. But what would they have in mind? A company isn’t a single mind, they’re a bunch of minds who operate on the same field. But what if her boss, Hickory was her name, she recalls hazily, what if she doesn’t want her on the job anymore? Why had she taken the job in the first place?

Was the job even something she was interested in? She had taken it on short notice, after all. She didn’t even remember the job prerequisites. There was just a notice nearby, she had applied since she needed the work, and she got the job immediately. Maybe that should’ve been a turn-off. Jobs that accept you on the fly like that are probably a bad idea.

“Roxanne,” she asks, turning her head to the Medic, who is enjoying the cool weather through her open shotgun window.

“Yes, Ms. Brie?” “Would you say that a job is shifty if they accept your application almost immediately after you apply?”

Roxanne turns to face her as well, pointing ahead of them. “Eyes on the road, please. Yes, I would say so.”

Brie turns her head back, and sighs. “I was foolish to have accepted this contract, then.” “I would have to agree, Ms. Brie. This has been a clown show, if I’m being frank. A very deadly clown show. And you haven’t struck me as one for clowns.”

“Do you recall how much a contractor such as me would be paid, if I don’t end up being sacked?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you recall if I am to be paid at all if I’m sacked?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Ah,” she says.

The thoughts begin to bubble again. Wasn’t the reason she had accepted the job in the first place because she needed the cash, and that Shepherd Gemstone was offering quite the large payment upon completion of the contract? If she’s not going to be paid for all of her hard work, then this would mean she’s in the negative. Pretty hard, too. And that’s not something her girlfriend is going to be happy about, considering how her last contract up and voided her once they’d noticed Brie was going out of her way to investigate things outside the perimeters of their agreement. In fact, the only reason Brie was able to avoid proper legal persecution is because the city had backed her, as exposing an underground gambling ring run by her very same employers was something of a heroic deed back in those parts of the world. She was given compensation from the city— but she never saw a cent from the employer. Hell, in retrospect, she realizes that THAT job was probably too shifty for her own good, too. It would be a little funny if it weren’t so dangerous. How does she keep doing this to herself?

She opens her mouth to ask that to Roxanne, but closes it before any words come out, realizing how it would sound. Perhaps a different approach would be more appropriate.

“Roxanne,” she says.

“Yes, Ms. Brie?”

“Am I gullible?”

“Absolutely not,” the Medic responds. “You’re one of the least gullible people I know.”

Brie scrunches up her face. “Are you being sarcastic?” “No ma’am, I am not. I wouldn’t call you gullible, rather something like ‘very good at pursuing things you realize aren’t good for your health in hindsight’, if there’s a word for that. Would you agree with me?”

“Yes, I think I would.”

“The first step to getting better is realizing there’s a problem,” Roxanne says, holding up a finger. “There’s nothing worse than not knowing you have a problem.”

“I would have to agree there, too,” Brie frowns.

Shifting in her seat, Roxanne looks over her shoulder to check up on Meat. Their body, arms crossed and skull resting lightly on a headrest, appears to have shut down somewhat. They said they were going to try and sleep, partially to pass the time and partially to parse whether they could, but it looked more as though the two were transporting a corpse in Brie’s sedan. It’s especially hard to tell, since the flames burning in Meat’s eyes never quite go out. For all Roxanne knows, they could still be awake.

“Well, I suppose it’s as good a road conversation as anything else,” Roxanne says, returning to her normal position.

“Is there something—”

“Did you ever meet my boyfriend?” she asks, cutting Brie off.

A moment of silence falls between them.

“You have a boyfriend?” Brie asks.

“Yes and no. We’ve dated for decades on and off. Some days I would’ve liked to murder him, and some days I seriously considered marrying him. But right now, I would say we’re off again. Thanks to circumstance, mostly.”

“That’s unusual.”

“He’s one of the people you’re hunting for your job, Miss Brie,” she chuckles.

“Unusual doesn’t do it justice.”

The Detective’s eyes nearly bulge out of her head. “I have been hunting your boyfriend as a part of my investigation contract?! He’s one of the escaped miners?!”

Roxanne laughs again. “I should’ve introduced you two back in Kiln. I think you would’ve gotten along.”

“Roxanne, why didn’t you tell me this from the beginning? I would have…” she trails off, realizing that actually, there’s little she could’ve done. “It would have been useful to know.”

“Useful for what? It would’ve meant that you’d have had this epiphany about Shepherd Gemstone earlier in your contract, sure. But at the time, you were still quite adamant about seeing things through, and we didn’t know each other as well. If anything,” Roxanne says, “it probably would’ve put you in a nasty position— leave the little old crippled lady in Kiln as bait for her jackrabbit to come home, or keep her with you as bait for him wherever he may be.”

“I would never do that to you, Roxanne,” Brie says, her voice hitching a little.

“Now, you wouldn’t. But back then, I had to be more careful. Catching a ride with you meant keeping some things secret.”

“I… that is. Very upsetting.”

Roxanne smiles empathetically, and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Oh, honey. I know it was a little mean, but I think it’ll help put things more into perspective for you. Shepherd Gemstone was known to hire folks who’d do that kind of stuff, so when I saw you on the site, I had to assume the same.”

“They do?”

“They absolutely do. How do you think they’re able to keep a decent profit margin despite all the damage they cause?”

Brie pats the notebook she keeps in her left-hand pocket. “Tens of thousands of Tilt’s worth. But they hire… bandit-types to handle it?” she frowns.

“Exactly that. Bandit-types is the appropriate term,” Roxanne says, patting her on the shoulder.

“I am not a bandit-type.”

“And I realized this only once we had left Kiln.”

“Thus, up until that point, you had to treat me as though I was.”

“Yes, Ms. Brie.”

As the silence fills the space between them again, Roxanne decides to break it with something a little more lighthearted. “Would you like to hear how I met him?”

Brie nods, maintaining her deep-thought frown.

“I popped his fingers back into place.”

“What?” Brie suddenly says, her face shifting back to something less pouty.

“He had just finished fighting at a local ring. Had a date to get to, and he wanted to show up with nothing dislocated for once. So, he visits me to pop a couple fingers back into place. Goodness, I remember how he howled like a dog at the moon every time I set one. But, we ended up bonding over it, since he dealt with pain by telling jokes and stories. He had some real good stories.”

“He had a date the same night he got into a fight?”

“A scheduled fight, mind you. From what I heard, though,” Roxanne says, leaning in close, “it never went anywhere. His opponent wasn’t happy about his loss, and so happened to be one of the friends of his date. The loser showed up to the date, got his tail kicked again, and had to run home crying. But, after being kicked to the curb, Azariah came to me. And the rest is history, I suppose. Goodness me, it’s been over forty years, hasn’t it.”

“That’s… a very long time.”

“Longer than you’ve been around?” “Very much so, yes.”

The Medic smiles. “There’s a lot of history there, Ms. Brie. But,” she says, leaning over her seat again, “I would like to know if we have another listener in the car.”

Meat cracks their neck, sitting up and stretching their arms a little. “I don’t think I can sleep.”

“I had a hunch,” Roxanne replies.

“Is that car still following us?”

Both Brie and Roxanne look at one another briefly, then at Meat.

“There has been a car following us?” Brie asks.

“Yeah,” they say. “Ever since we left Fusillade. I think they noticed me looking at them. I haven’t seen them for a couple miles.”

“Well,” Roxanne pats Brie on the shoulder again. “I think I’ll save those stories for later, then.”

==============================================================

    Hieronymus T. Thistle is, by no means, a man of wealth— nor is he one of taste or of staunch morals. As expected of his appearance, that being of a person crossed with a manner of tumbleweed, which has long resulted in him being closer in visage to a skeleton with small, thorny branches for hair and eyes that nearly pop out of his skull, he does have a spine physically, just not one in the less literal sense. A spine of that sort requires some kind of belief to cling to, some great motivation to use as a shield or armor, and to wield as a blade when the time comes. Mr. Thistle lacks these things in plenty, as while he gets to live with many of the older folks in the community and often tells stories of his involvement in the overthrow of Shepherd Gemstone— he’s still on the payroll.

Nobody thinks it even a bit weird that he’s never really had to put himself out there in a long time to keep his lifestyle afloat, that being of a curmudgeonly prick who’s also equal parts nosy neighbor and hermetic jerk. He goes to every single union meeting, sure, and he talks often with those old guard types who come by his rather unsettlingly well kept lawn, but this is all just resource gathering. He hasn’t really cared for these people in a long time, perhaps closer to ever, since he never was one of them in the first place. He’d been on the company payroll for longer than the town had been called “Pickman’s Hope,” and had, ever since drifting in, been a remarkable spy.

It was more difficult back in the day than it is right now, of course. Back then he had to actually pretend to like his neighbors and his companions, to show some investment in his community and hatred toward the over-corporatized hellscape that constituted the big cities. Over time, while many of those he had to fool into being his friends grew thick whiskers and their muzzles turned gray, he simply reverted to being himself. A quirk of being old, he supposes, is that nobody bothers questioning why you don’t like them anymore. They just assume you’re tired, or maybe that you’ve gotten to the point where you’ll be damned before you spend another minute of what you have left pretending to be nice.

His old friends don’t question his loyalty to the town and to the working folk from their time with him; the younger ones don’t question it because he’s always been around and always been like this, so to assume Old Man Thistle’s some kind of corporate spy and has been since before the town rebuilt itself is tantamount to accusing your own great uncle or grandpa of selling your secrets to a serial killer. It could certainly happen, yes, but if you’re not perfectly, one-hundred percent certain that that is what’s going on, there’s a perfectly sizable chance you’re just screaming at someone whose weirdness can still be ascribed to age.

With a combination of time and age, just the right amount of hospitality and curmudgeonly habits, Hieronymus T. Thistle has constructed the perfect cover to often and routinely send out packets of information to Shepherd Gemstone HQ for a very steady pay that, at this moment, he keeps shoved inside of his mattress. He knows better than to live beyond the means expected of a man supposedly making most of his money off of goodwill from the town and some decent investments around it. After all, behind closed doors he was one of the folks helping to bankroll the Bleeding Scab, among various other local haunts that raked in the bucks. Thistle is so perfectly set up that, upon their arrival, he had to convince Piper that this house is, in fact, that of the man she was told about and that, yes, he is the Shepherd informant.

That was irritating enough, and so was having to park his car out on the street like some kind of animal while she put her lavish vehicle in his garage, because if there’s anything worse than his car being out on the street it’d be her car attracting attention. Not to mention the two absolute mercenaries she’d dragged in, along with herself, out in this place looking like the worst of the worst. It’s more than he can handle, and for a moment while the three shove their things into the guest rooms of his house he has a small tantrum.

After the sun’s risen and after combing his bristles and thorns back on his head, readjusting his bedtime robe, he returns to the three of them and says, “Alright, welcome to Pickman’s Hope, best call it that. Second, you three need to be careful. I get it that none of you had anywhere else to go, but I’ve got a good thing goin’ here and I wouldn’t appreciate you blowin’ it.” His first mistake aside from being on the corporate payroll at all is to point even a single finger at Piper during this diatribe.

She’s amused when she thinks it’s directed at Jules and Lucille, and far less amused when she realizes the old man’s talking to her. This earns him a quick, almost businesslike punch in the throat, which sends him to the floor gasping and clutching at his neck. “You speak when I say you can speak, you tricksy lil’ fuck…”

By the time Lucille’s come over to grab Piper by the arms and back her off, Piper’s already kicked Thistle in the ribs for good measure. Jules, an arm still largely out of commission and a leg in a brace, busies himself trying to drag Thistle away, a concerned look on his gray face.

“Get out of my way.” Piper hisses, eyes locking with Lucille’s as the latter continues to hold her— though by the very second she can feel Piper getting stronger, harder to control. “I’m gonna shove my boot into that old rat’s craw! Let go!”

“Don’t make a scene!” Lucille grips harder, twisting Piper’s wrists awkwardly to leverage technique over brawn. “It’s barely morning you ass! We haven’t been here more than a few hours and you’re going to ruin it!”

The struggle continues for a second until Jules returns, clearing his throat and saying, “You two need to cut this shit out.” There’s no comedy in his voice, nor is there any authority. He’s tired.

Lucille lets go first, but Piper doesn’t storm away. Instead she spits some venom onto the floor and rubs at her wrists before telling them both, “Fine. Y’all act like I was gonna kill him or something. I’m not stupid.”

“If you weren’t trying to kill that old man,” Lucille begins, eyes narrowed, “then what were you doing?”

Without a hint of hesitation, the reply is thus, laced with a long hiss and no small amount of malice, “Reminding him of his place, something you two morons need to keep straight as well. Besides, it’s not like there’s any reason to feel bad for him.”

“What do you mean?” Jules tilts his head as he settles back onto his temporary bed. “Damn near snapped his neck with that punch, you’re lucky he can still breathe.”

Turning around to face away, Piper speaks as she stops in the exit to the rest of the house. “The man’s making a living selling the secrets of this town as an informant, J. Names, addresses, exchanging of goods and trade deals, all of it. And all the while, everyone around him thinks he’s just another neighbor.” She grins over her shoulder toward them. “Honestly it’s a little insulting that he’s been so successful and all he’s done is send letters. People have died because of his pen. Amazing, ain’t it?”

Lucille rolls her shoulders, then settles into a spot sitting beside Jules. “So?”

“So he’s a rat.” Piper snickers. “Snakes hate rats.”

Jules gives an attempt at a clap, but stops quickly as pain shoots up his arm and Lucille smacks the back of his head. “You’ve gotta admit that was a good one.”

“Glad to see somebody still has a sense of humor. ‘Sides, this idiot doesn’t work for my branch of the company so I don’t really care what happens to him.”

Lucille bristles. “Don’t kill him.”

“I wasn’t going to.” The tip of Piper’s tail brushes Lucille’s legs. “I’m just going to get every important piece of information out of him. I know he’d do it willingly, but… Well, it’s not like I care about anybody working for Gilroy anymore, and I still need some practice.” Saying this, she picks up a candlestick from the mantle as she heads out. “Whatever you hear, don’t open the door. You might ruin my focus.”

Lucille rubs her face for a moment, lowering her scarf-shawl before turning her tired gaze on Jules, who shrugs. Once she hears another door shut and the muffled sounds of somebody getting upset, she asks, “Why did you humor her?”

“Easy,” Jules nods, “the quickest way to cool someone off is to laugh at their joke. And, I didn’t feel like letting you two start fighting over some old fuck that… Look, she has a point.”

“I know she has a point. I don’t like it, but it’s fair, the guy’s a piece of crap. Still, I don’t like the idea of her doing it.”

An arm heavy with exhaustion wraps its way around Lucille’s shoulders and the hand capping it pats her shoulder as Jules says, “Agreed. She’s the boss, though. Orders are orders.”

“Yeah,” Lucille mumbles. “Guess so. We’ve come too far in this hunt to give up because the person signing our paycheck’s beating somebody up.”

“See, now you’re getting it.” Jules smiles. “If you would’ve gotten in on the Carnevale with me, you’d have fit in perfect.”

Lucille’s head settles into her hands, elbows against her knees with a soft and tired, “Oh, fuck this.”

==============================================================

In the hours of the morning where the crickets have stopped their chirping and the birds have taken their place, Azariah finds himself sitting out on the front porch of Samson’s home, eating a makeshift breakfast of leftover bread and some jam he knows won’t be missed. It’s odd— sleeping was never an issue when he was out in the woods, but as soon as he’s back in friendly civilization, it’s a real hit or miss. Sometimes he’ll wake up before the sun, still deathly tired and certain he never fell asleep to begin with. Other times, he’ll find himself sleeping like the dead until noon.

Olive opens the door behind him, peering out as though there might be something sinister on the rocking chair.

“Oh,” she says, stepping outside fully. “What’re you doin’ up this early?”

“I couldn’t tell you. I think I’ve got some issues to work out on that front, Olive.”

He offers her a piece from the loaf of bread. “How ‘bout yourself?”

“I always wake up at the crack of dawn.”

“You’re tellin’ me that it isn’t Judith or Cherry gettin’ us breakfast in the mornings?” he chuckles, pulling up a chair beside him.

Olive smiles, and rolls her eyes. “No use tryin’ to get Cherry up for nothin’. He’ll just be back in bed by the time he gets whatever you wanted done, done.” She sits down, and breathes out a deep sigh. “Feels weird, don’t it?”

“What, takin’ some stranger’s hospitality?”

“Yeah, kinda,” she nods, “but also not feelin’ like we’ve gotta book it somewhere, y’know? Feels like there’s been so much more time in the day, these last couple. Can you feel it too? Like, when you look back on what’s happened, it feels like before.”

Azariah takes some time to chew on this, both metaphorically and physically, via a chunk of particularly chewy bread. “I think you’ve got a point, there. I guess I ain’t as deeply introspective as you, Olive.”

“I don’t know if I believe that,” she says, leaning back in her porch chair. “I saw the way you were lookin’ at Mr. Samson while he was tellin’ that story. Couldn’t tell if it was playin’ back a movie in your head or if ya had somethin’ for him.”

“I’ve always had a thing for canines.”

“Don’t tell me!” Olive squawks, slapping her knee. “Don’t tell me that’s what was on your mind, Azariah. You got it for Samson Parrish?”

“I’m afraid I do, Olive. Or, did.” Azariah chuckles too, tapping the armrest of his rocking chair with a finger. “And maybe I did feel a little somethin’ last night. But again, I couldn’t tell you what it was, since I’m not that kinda person. Love is a weird thing.”

“You don’t need’ta tell me. My history with that sorta thing is embarrassin’ to say the least.”

“Really, now?”

“Really really. Findin’ someone who’s able to take the fact that I’m not into certain stuff makes it nigh impossible.” She rubs her forehead with a hand. “Not includin’ the fact that a lotta people just friggin’ suck.”

Azariah adjusts the position of his chair to face her. “I understand, kiddo. Even the embarrassment bit, it took me decades to get over some of those one-night stands. Some of ‘em still haunt me to this day.” He fake-shivers as he says, “Nothin’ that’ll burn into your memory quite like getting puked on.”

Olive scooches her chair back away from the Hare with an, “Aw shit, Azariah! You’re gonna make me hock up my dinner! That’s foul, no more talkin’ ‘bout that!” Through his cough-laughs, she manages to get in, “Almost makes me glad I don’t feel pulled toward that stuff. Can’t hear a single good story ‘bout it without hearin’ another where some bodily fluid’s involved. An’ not in an intentional way, neither.”

“That’s part of the fun,” he coughs, having calmed himself down substantially from his laughing fit. “There’s always the chance someone’ll screw it up royally, and by that point, you might as well put a mental bookmark on the memory with how many times you’re gonna be tellin’ it at parties. But, you were sayin’ something about not being into it?” he asks, holding out an arm. “Oh, but if you aren’t comfortable with talkin’ about it, I can ease back.”

“No, it’s okay. I ain’t like, disgusted by the concept,” she replies. “I’m just… I don’t want it like other people want it, I guess.”

“What, throwin’ up? Or bein’ thrown up on?” Azariah teases.

“Ha. Sex in general’s what I mean. And like I said, it ain’t somethin’ a lotta people are alright with. Can’t tell you the number’a people I thought I’d fallen for who’ve taken that as a dealbreaker.”

The Hare frowns, and preemptively spreads a little jam on his bread for later consumption. “That certainly is an uncommon problem.”

“An’ it ain’t like I’m leadin’em on,” she says, motioning with her hands. “I’m usually pretty up-front with everythin’ about me, since, well, y’know. But I’ve even had some guys go a couple dates in before askin’ whether I was bein’ serious or not ‘bout it.”

“Did you feel like you loved them?” he asks.

“Some of them. Others, maybe. I dunno.”

“But they weren’t what you were lookin’ for?”

“They were enough of what I was lookin’ for, at the time. Guess not enough, though.”

Azariah offers her the piece of jellied bread. “Can I give you some advice, Olive?”

She eyes up the bread for a moment, before nodding and taking it.

“If those people weren’t willin’ to give you a shot after learning they couldn’t take you for a ride?” The Hare motions with an open hand. “They weren’t the kinda people you’d wanna settle for anyways. Findin’ someone who fits all your needs and wants isn’t something that most young people do anyways. They’ve got their top three wants, one of them is usually sex, and it’s assumed that everyone else feels the same way. You, though, you think a lot about those needs and wants. It makes sense that it’d be hard to find someone who fits them right.”

“I saw a lot of young people settle for folks they didn’t realize they hated,” he continues, sighing. “I was nearly one of ‘em back in the day. And to be frank with you, I still don’t know how Roxanne settled for me, ‘cause I feel like I won the jackpot.” He holds out a hand to her. “The point I’m tryin’ to make here’s that there’s so many people out in the world, and you’ve got so much time. Those chumps will come to regret not givin’ you a chance when they’re older, when you’ve got someone who fits you like a glove.”

Olive stares out the front porch, chewing her bread slowly. “Thanks, Azariah. That… helps.”

“Won’t help the heartbreak,” he says, scooching his chair to face forward again. “But it’ll help the mindset goin’ forward. Heartbreak is best dealt with when you aren’t constantly inflicting it on yourself. Trust me.”

Chapter End.

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[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Four, Chapter Five

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

There’s no small amount of dedication needed to maintain a backyard the way that Samson Parrish does. Firstly, the yard has not been cleared of its trees. Normally, this would only be a seasonal problem, as the deciduous trees native to the Eternal Autumn usually only drop their leaves during certain periods of the year, but as the name might suggest, the Eternal Autumn has a unique environmental effect on the local forests that makes them drop leaves year-round, slowly but surely. Some say it’s the soil, some say it’s magic, but regardless of what it is— it’s a labour of love to keep a yard clear of leaf cover year-long. Sam’s yard is, as noted by Azariah as soon as they show up, almost completely clear of leaves and creeping underbrush in favour of some natural species of clover and moss that would normally make their home on the sides of rocks and trees. And while there is no lack of small boulders in the yard, there’s a sense that they’ve been moved to the edges of his property by the efforts of a couple large folks and a case of beer, rather than a backhoe.

    Nearest to his freshly painted split-level, Sam also keeps a rather impressive row of neatly trimmed perennial bushes and a well-loved vegetable garden, both marked off with simple iron fences. Heads of painted pumpkin and crimson cabbage poke their way through their thick foliage and vines, and the pink leaves of pigmentine carrots sprout feet above the soil they originate from, though the carrots haven’t been as good this season since he switched off his usual fertilizer, according to Sam.

This, with the well-washed grey brick, hickory wood porch, and the ambiance of a cool afternoon, sets quite an impression for the group as they gather around a picnic table to eat their first proper home cooked dinner in a good, long while. Charred painted pumpkin soup filled with veggies and a sprinkle of cured bacon— excepting in Azariah's serving—  alongside a fresh, local loaf of brown bread. Evening peeper toads have begun to sing in the distance, and during the course of the dinner, things almost feel normal between the six of them. It certainly feels normal for Sam.

“Now, I’m glad y’all are appreciative of the hospitality, but I believe it’s due time that you learn what Pickman’s Hope really all about,” he starts, raising his glass. “I’m gonna give y’all a little history lesson, so long as Azariah’s willin’ to let me venture forth uncensored.” He winks at the Hare, who gives him a brief nod. Then, he begins to weave his tale for everyone to hear. Everyone who’s willing to listen, anyways.

    In the beginning, when this place was still called Gutter’s Glade, it was about as peaceful as the town you see today. The bakery I got your bread from was there. The bar you showed up at was there too, just under a different name and management. Most importantly though, there were a lot more craftsmen around, see. Lots of jewelers, mystics, the kinds that’re attracted to shiny stuff that comes out of the ground. People like that would find Gutter’s Glade on their radar thanks to it being a mining town, but not a mining town as y’all know it— we were independent, and we cared for one another.

Everything was connected, and we all understood that so we looked out for one another’s backs. The artisans would teach the miners what to look for, how to crack geodes to damage the least amount of product. The miners would teach the artisans their methods of dowsing the ground for product, and would keep them updated on finds and prospects. Medical folk would work with the both of them to keep’em happy and healthy, and everyone else in town provided what they could to keep the gems flowin’. I remember days when guys would come up from the mine coughin’ up their lungs and full of soot and dust and completely empty-handed, no product to speak of. And even on those days when you could see how pathetic they felt, they were still taken care of by everyone around ‘em. In fact, one of my old friends who, well, passed away, had developed some kinda apothecarial gas that’d get into your lungs, clean ‘em out, and ‘bout thirty seconds later, it’d come right back out as black gunk. We’re still tryin’ to find out how she did it, but the point is, the town was dedicated to itself and we were dedicated to each other.

Now, while I spawned back in Kiln with Azariah and a few of our old buddies, I found myself makin’ a home in Gutter’s Glade soon after. I was never cut out to be anythin’ but a miner— I didn’t have any particularly useful technical skills, and my hands were too big for those tiny jeweler’s tools anyways. I took to it naturally, in a way. I swung picks around for a couple years, made myself known to the locals, and soon enough I was bein’ treated like family. It made me the man I am today to have had such dedicated people lookin’ out for me, and I don’t dare to think who I’d be without them.

Though, I didn’t stay with ‘em forever. Miners around this region know that there’s an untold number of caves sittin’ just below a certain footage in the stone, and that if you dig too deep, there’s a good chance you’ll wake up some beasties you didn’t know existed. Now, I’m gonna be frank here, this is somethin’ that happened pretty often. Guys would have to take their weapons down into the mines if they knew that they’d hit a deep vein. I was no exception to that rule! Back in the day I had a cheap sword that looked like it’d been a fence post in a former life, and I always took it with me on dives. 

And I did my fair share of Monster killin’. Skitterbears, a heap’a those mushroom things, a few of those boulder serpents, and near the end of my career, I had the displeasure of runnin’ into a Cave Shadow. If you’ve never heard of one, the first thing you should know is that they’re beasties basically made’a magic. They hide in the darkest spots of caves, and ambush ya’ when you’ve got yer’ hands busy. They barely even make sense’ta look at, all eyes and teeth and claws— and one decided to jump me while I was with an exploration party. Gave me a big nasty scar on my belly, but I killed the damn thing, and lemme tell ya’, the adrenaline kept me alive for days while the medics patched me together. I was ridin’ high on that and while I was bedridden, I decided that it was time to put down the pick and take up the sword for a living.

So, after I made a full recovery, I left to adventure on my own. I went beyond these mountains, headed west for fame and fortune. And though I found some of both, lookin’ back on it? I would say I had let my success go to my head. I was self-absorbed to a point where I’d given up on the people who’d saved my damn life, and all because I was obsessed with the idea of seein’ how far I could take my heroism. Maybe it’s the guilt talkin’ there, I dunno. I’ve yet to talk ‘bout that era of my life with my counselor.

But while I was gone, Gutter’s Glade was havin’ the life choked out of her. Somewhere along the line, one of the miners found themselves a plot of land near the foot of the mountains, called it the “big one”. Now, since we were a minin’ town, we attracted the attention of many mining conglomerates who wanted to move in and run shop in our stead. Most of them, we told to beat it. Emphasis on “most,” ‘cause this miner received a massive lump sum of cold, hard cash for the plot of land from, you guessed it, Shepherd Gemstone. And from there, things went downhill.

While I can’t give ya’ specifics since I wasn’t there while this was happening, I trust in my friends enough to give ya’ a summary. The company established itself by hiring off a bunch of our miners at a pretty penny, since they knew that the vein was going to pay back tenfold. From there, they installed foremen and company stores, which respectively completely alienated the rest of the miners from their pals, and began keepin’ the local businesses from their cash with their prices. It hardly took a year before the entire town was workin’ for Shepherd Gemstone, breakin’ their backs strippin’ those mountains of everything they were worth. Everyone, even those artisans who’d never been the blue collar types to begin with, had to grab a pick to survive. That company was fast, efficient, and real goddamn thorough in the way that it destroyed our lives and our land. It got to a point where even if we wanted to, tryin’ to go down into those mines again would cause cave-ins like we’d never seen the likes of prior. 

It was three years of adventuring before I came back to Gutter’s Glade. I had seen enough of my life flashin’ before my eyes, but as fate would have it, it wouldn’t be the last time it’d happen. I saw the life I once knew shattered into a thousand pieces, the people I loved stripped of their health, dignity, and freedom. And my old adventurin’ buddies, the people I’d suffered and strived for greatness with, saw it too.

It awoke somethin’ in me, somethin’ that I hadn’t even had while I was out there chasin’ the Dragon’s tail. I vowed that day to free that town from the company, even if it were to cost me my own life. And from then forth, I dedicated myself entirely to the organization and proliferation of the union that you saw runnin’ the town today.

Now, if you think I make it sound like a piece of cake, I don’t know what kinda cake you’ve been eatin’, cause I don’t think I’ve seen more misery in my entire life than that point there. I put my heart and soul into these people, and there were times where I was afraid that they didn’t have any left to give back. There were times where I had to put my body on the line just to relieve some of the fear that they had toward the foremen.

God, the first fight I got into with a foreman was a guy who they’d hired specifically ‘cause he was the unhinged type. A real sadist, the kind that you’d see and think that they picked up outta banditry work. He was beatin’ down one one of the miners real hard, and in response I knocked the everlovin’ shit outta him. I made that motherfucker eat his own goddamn teeth for breakfast, but I was lucky, since there weren’t any other foremen watching and I knew nobody present would speak a word about it. Not even him, since his pride was too hurt. Not long after the vindictive bastard tried to sneak a knife under my ribs while I was sleepin’, which didn’t work, and I ended up puttin’ him six feet under with the little number I carry on my hip.

Point is, whether by conversation, union pressure, or by force alone, we worked our way up the corporate ladder, dismantling each pawn on the way up. It took years, but by the time I was just startin’ to turn grey ‘round the chops we had forced the company to pull back entirely from the town. Their profit margins were in the red, and so they abandoned everything where it stood, movin’ on to wherever the fuck snakes like them move on to.

Buildings upon buildings of corporate supplies and spoils, ours for the takin’. Though they left a little product around, it wasn’t enough to sustain ourselves off— and so, we had to get creative with our reconstruction. We also abandoned those mountains, as we learned quickly that there was nothin’ left for us either. At first we tried to invest in breweries, since the valley tends toward cool, dark weather. But, brewin’ takes time, so we did everythin’ else we could to bring the town back on its feet.

Odd jobs for nearby towns, sellin’ and movin’ stuff made by the artisans who still knew how, doin’ a little protection work for passing-by caravans; we were the handymen of the ridges, and our plan B turned into our plan A by accident. After a certain point we were on-call anytime a neighboring town needed somethin’ built, somethin’ torn down, somethin’ reconstructed, designed, you name it. Money flowed in the direction of our blue-collar labor force, so we leaned into it and let it carry us wherever it led.

It led to us renaming the town; “Pickman’s Hope”, the name you know today, was what we agreed upon. We’ve helped Fusillade rebuild itself a dozen or so times since our independence, we’ve helped carve out the hills of Kiln for their expansion project, we’ve helped build the road from here to Honeysett and further. And while our brewin’ work’s only now startin’ to pick up some traction, we’ve got a nice, healthy community goin’ now, and that’s what matters the most.

And that’s how Pickman’s Hope came to be, folks. Don’t listen to the folks ‘round here who refer to me with these nice titles, they did this, all this, themselves. All it took was me showin’ them they could do it. The only reason I’m the head of anythin’ at the moment is ‘cause I’m old, and ‘cause I’m good at diplomacy, even though there’s plenty’a fresher spawns here who’re lookin’ like they’ll surpass me someday.

    “I’m surprised you didn’t tell ‘em more about your shotgun, Sam,” Azariah chuckles, having finished his soup. “Practically gnawed the rest of my ear off with that earlier.”

“It ain’t all THAT important to the story. But if you insist,” he says.

In one swift motion, the sawed-off shotgun is pulled out from its holster, and set gently on the picnic table. “She used to be a little longer in both directions, but I found that she was harder to carry ‘round. I’ve turned quite a few of those nasty foremen inside out with ‘er, and I’ve never found somethin’ I couldn’t handle with her in my hands.”

“She?” Judith asks, frowning.

“Don’t be disrespectful, now, Judith.”

“I was just making a comment.”

“You just ain’t human if you don’t attach a pet name to somethin’ you love. Ain’t that right, Charlene?”

“I guess I’m not human, then. I’ve never gendered my gear before.”

Sam lets out a hearty laugh. “Oh, I’m just pullin’ your chain, don’t you worry. ‘Sides I knew you weren’t human from the moment I saw you.” He points at his nose, sending a pang of realization toward Judith. “You got the werewolf smell whether you like it or not. Was worried too, since most of our werewolves don’t smell the same as anyone from Shepherd Gemstone.”

“Anyway,” he says, sliding his gun back into its holster. “I’m glad to have given y’all a little bit of history. I hope it means somethin’, considerin’ y’all are on the run from the same company we beat.” He stands up from his seat, bowl in hand. “If we did it, y’all can do it too. Remember that.”

==============================================================

“You’re a buzzkill, L. I think it would’ve been funny.”

“And I think the fact that I’m still awake is bad enough, Piper. Jules needs his rest, don’t aim for potholes.” Hypocritical, she knows, but Jules is really in a bad way even if he’s faster to recover than just about anyone when he’s had his fill. Lucille’s not in the mood to have to climb into the back of the car— again— to help fix the Vampire’s bandages after a particularly nasty bump or dip in the road just because Piper might get a kick out of jostling him.

Piper’s eyes roll, then settle back onto the road ahead, lit only by the now faint lamps at the head of her car. Her car, her car. It feels delightful to roll that around in her mind, settle on it for a while longer, and enjoy the smooth finish of the thought. She leans back a bit in her seat, easing on the gas. It’s long past being late and has breached into that strange territory where it’s beginning to become early, though the sunrise has some hours left before it claws its way over the horizon. It’s a long ride between Fusillade and Pickman’s Hope, but one somebody can make if they’re willing to take about most of their waking day to drive it, and Piper is nothing if not deeply and entirely dedicated to her work.

Lucille’s eyes, dark as the night itself, linger on Piper’s shoulders, drifting to her throat and then to the snake’s features. Her gaze narrows. Since the ride started, there’s been something eating at her, something about Piper she can’t place, and after a lengthy, engine-noise filled silence, she feels obligated to attempt to place it while she has the time.

This isn’t her Piper. Not the one she had spoken to uncomfortably often over the matter of stolen product back on site for some years during her tenure as head of security; no, this Piper is someone vastly different. It’s hard to notice, but this line of work leans heavy on information, and unless you’ve got someone to handle it, you either do it yourself or you die. She learned that lesson well enough on her way out of the frostbitten shithole she calls home, she learned it well during her traveling freelancer nights, her job as security head, and it seems she’s learning it all over again right now, in the passenger seat of this disgustingly lavish fuckmobile. Survival in a world of snap decisions and split second deaths depends upon power and honed senses, and if you don’t have one, pray you have the other.

Jules on his good nights is a powerhouse. Jules on his bad nights is a piece of cardboard recently soaked in rainwater. Lucille is always attentive, or at least believes herself to be. She’s attentive enough that, after a certain point, she begins to reach conclusions passively, without thinking, as the thoughts coalesce somewhere in the back of her skull, pooling close to where the base meets her spine, before they spring as fully formed ideas into the forefront. It’s a highly developed and effective collecting process that utilizes every scent; it’s that sixth sense that screams in the back of her mind when there’s enough external stimuli to tell her that, despite not seeing any direct signs of it, she is being followed by some monumentally skilled sneak. It’s what tells you you’re being watched. Her gut instinct, in time, has been honed to a razor’s edge. It’s what saved Jules when they first hauled up that corpse. It saved her on her way out of the frozen wastes. She thinks it might save her again, soon, but only if she’s right.

It’s rare she wants to be wrong. Much as she might complain about Piper, she’s not one to want to see her develop like this. The gloves would be a sign on anyone else, but she knows Piper to have been a mining foreman and a Weresnake, gloves with thick material leave little trace compared to bare hands but when one has claws and doesn’t wish to knick anybody, they’re practically a necessity unless you file often, a problem those with simple fingernails don’t run into. Largely it’s the coat, because she knows it.

She’d never really gotten all that chummy with the guy during his brief passes through, but she knows well enough that the coat belonged to Blondie at some point. Hard not to when she once had to endure the constant complaining Gilroy had in store when it comes to Blondie’s ideas regarding the structure of the whole operation top to bottom, especially when near the tail end of her time there many such ideas involved liquidating her own part of it. It’s not an easy coat to miss, it’s a custom job and it’s made to be wrapped around already large lycanthropes and hopefully survive a shift in the heat of battle. Aside from that, there’s an identifiable shape against the snake’s ribs— a weapon.

Piper’s tail shifts and runs against Lucille’s side before curling back behind the seat again. The driver smiles, offering a brief glance at her fangs alongside a sidelong look, the gold in her irises unsettlingly vivid amid the reflecting moonlight. Piper has some height on her, even sitting; she has to look up for her own dark eyes to drink in another change.

Posture, attitude, expression. Surprisingly, you learn to read people pretty well when you fight them for a living, just another set of information for her gut to digest. A person’s face can tell you when they’re about to punch you if you can really get it down pat, or it can tell a lot more. Piper reminds her, in this moment, of those idiots back north who wear their enthuse on their sleeve, or more aptly, on their faces.

The sun burned high in the sky behind cloud cover as Lucille wrapped her arms with rough leather straps, sitting in the back of a ramshackle pickup truck-sled monstrosity as it screamed across the ice. Half of her face was painted with vivid red, some crushed plant, as was what bits of her torso could be seen beneath patchwork leather and metal. Her feet were bare, but they were not cold.

Too recently had she stepped through the smoldering embers of burned tents, rendered to ash by the torches of crazed warriors, raiders and fiends. Those tents which were not crushed by the stampede of motor vehicle abominations were put to the flame by the wilder fighters on foot, those who’d leapt from their rides in pursuit of battle and plunder, taken by the throes of absolute and total war. Many of them wore less than her, painted from head to toe in a myriad of flaming colors, claiming that their flames would warm them so long as they were worn. She found no warmth in the paint, not like the fanatics did.

Across from her sat three other women and a couple men, all of whom also bore the paint and symbols of the gang, though unlike Lucille they were clawing at one another, screaming, laughing as they tossed around trophies from the latest excursion against a small sect of a larger rival gang. The trophies, when not stained by blood, were marked with blue smatterings and swirling symbols in contrast to her group’s sharper, geometric flame-based design ethic.

Between her feet sat a set of knives. Simple knives meant for tossing, they weren’t large or ornate, nor were they particularly expensive, but what drew her to them was the simple fact that they were still in a package marked with an actual brand. Like a cutlery set for throwing knives, though Lucille would not come to know what a cutlery set is until she headed down south.

Her hands balled into fists as she noticed the stares of her companions lingering dangerously on her prize, her lone and simple treasure. She had taken no trophies from her fights, taken no trinkets from the burnt tents, save for this single knife set. It was a set of six, marked with a title: “Crescent House — Daggerist Starter Kit.” A brand name. It did not confuse her, as some might think. It fascinated her. In this place if something had a name it was that of its creator, often in memoriam, so it was strange to see something named as such. After all, she’d never heard of anyone called “Crescent House.”

A man of chalky white skin and of wild hair, half-dyed with the red paint, grabbed the set from between Lucille’s legs. All the while he smiled, casting her only a passing glance, offering little but the derision one shows to someone unfortunate enough to be forced to give tithe. Though he was merely the single largest person on a single truck among a sea of such vehicles bearing the banner of their gang, a no-name like the rest of them, he held himself as the king of this tiny, metal realm, standing amidst his subjects as treads beneath them hauled it all alongside tens of similar machines, with many such similar men claiming many such familiar fantasies.

Lucille crushed his nose beneath the heel of her palm with a shout, pouncing upon him as she swung her leather-wrapped arms. The tall man went down, and she was on top, and the others were screaming with her, beating their sides, stomping their feet, the wind whipping around them as she continued to bring her hands down on him. They’re screaming words, but she heard none of them over those of her own, those of her normal mouth and the ungodly noises of that maw below her ribs as with every raising of her fists into the air it opened wide to let loose a battle yawp the likes of which none of her companions could have dared to match.

Her arms didn’t stop moving until she heard the whimpering admittance of submission, and the smug expression she so detested was ripped from his features by way of might, as all things were, as all things are.

Lucille blinks. Piper’s got that look, that “you owe this to me” look, the sort of entitled expression only backed up or put down by quick and decisive force. Her gut instinct is to strike her now, car crash be damned, but she’s been wrong about plenty lately. She had no clue Jules was working for the Carnevale, and even at this moment holds some reservations that he might start working for them again almost immediately after he recovers. Not to mention she hadn’t been able to predict any of what happened in Kiln, and Fusillade in near totality was an absolute shitshow. She’s been wrong a lot lately. She’s probably wrong right now.

“You’re staring, L.” Piper’s forked tongue slips between her fangs to extend the soft c in the shortening, a play to lighten the mood. It’s flagrant, as though taunting Lucille to question, to urge, to press and poke where she shouldn’t. It’s the rattle of a snake ready to bite, her guts scream. Kill her now, before she can take initiative.

Lucille settles with her head against the window, her arms wrapped around herself as though to shield her body from a chill far, far away. “The new coat looks good.”

“Thanks. It’s a Quilting Club custom piece, you know,” Piper replies.

Lucille’s head turns only slightly toward the dark, faintly moonlit dashboard. “Quilting Club? You can afford Quilting Club with this new job? Even Jules and I haven’t gotten a catalogue…”

“Hey, when you’re on the rise the major players take notice. Get on the ground level, invest in your big spenders. I didn’t buy it, instead just got it from the last guy, but that’s just being cost effective.” A laugh escapes the driver, but she calms herself quickly enough as her eyes drift along the road ahead. “Maybe sometime later on I can forward a letter of recommendation, but I don’t see you guys doing too many jobs that need this tier of gear in the near future.”

“I suppose you’re right, bounty hunting doesn’t need heavy ordnance. Usually just prep time and a decent execution.”

“Yeah.” Piper nods. “In my line of work we don’t only handle random miners, even if that’s my job right now.”

“Of course.” Lucille’s jaw refuses to settle. She needs to keep talking, but the words are awkward. Forcing her gut instinct down alone is enough to give her trouble, but the fact that it’s Piper doesn’t help. “Haircut?”

“Nope.” A grin is offered again. The smooth scales of Piper’s tail rub against Lucille’s hip once more, only to settle right back into position behind the driver’s seat as Jules turns over in the back, as if caught.

“This really isn’t the time to talk about this,” Lucille says, largely to herself.

“Just messing with you, L. Teasing.” Piper’s shoulders roll as she speaks, voice low. “I’m spoken for now anyway.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“Seen the beautiful brunette on the big makeup signs down south?” Piper asks with raised brows, expectant.

“Yes,” Lucille admits. It’s hard not to considering they’ve been up for years. Makeup’s apparently big in cities as far as she can tell, but there are some things a bit of foundation really can’t make look nice. Aside from that, any man or woman interested in her, ignoring the snaggle of fangs she calls a mouth and the maw in her torso, probably isn’t the type to be enticed by the prettier, more human looking sorts. “Hard to miss, considering anytime you enter a big city around here they’re up everywhere. Really? What’s her name?”

“Janet Campbell, and she’s even better looking in person.” Piper nods in faux humility, her smile widening. “Nice place. Wonderful kids. Her boy’s really taken a shine to me, L. I might take him hunting one day, if she lets me, like my daddy used to take me out hunting. The driveway is great, and the backyard—”

Lucille clears her throat. “I didn’t ask about her kids or what she has, I asked about her. What’s she like?” There’s no hint of jealousy, really, it’s just curiosity. “Let’s talk, Piper. We haven’t talked in a long time.”

“What’s there to talk about?” The tail wraps a little more firmly around her seat. “She’s beautiful and caring, that’s fine enough. There’s nothing to talk about, L, that ship’s sailed, the offer’s off the table. I’m seeing somebody. A model.”

“I wasn’t trying my luck,” Lucille mumbles. “You don’t have to repeat yourself.”

“Look, Lucille, I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there looking to get into all of… That. Plenty. Lots of people who’d adore to sort out your icicle hellhole baggage. Just not me, of course, because I’m a bit busy getting all up in—”

“I said I get the point, Piper, I get it.” Lucille sits up, away from the window. “Don’t be an ass.”

“If I find any nice guys, any decent fighter types without the fear that they’re going to wake up bitten in half, I’ll send ‘em your way, promise. Well, if they’re pretty enough then Jules might get to them first. Women too, if I meet any good matches, I’ll send ‘em on over. If anything that might be the safer bet, what with how Jules—”

Lucille lightly but sharply punches Piper’s tail with a rumbling growl not from her mouth but from the maw beneath her clothes before saying, in no uncertain terms, “Do not finish that fucking sentence.”

The pain’s enough to cause Piper’s grip to jerk as she hisses, said jerk subsequently translating into a much larger, more dangerous jerk of the car’s trajectory, sending them dangerously close to the right edge of the road before she compensates and brings them back to the center of the right half as the soon to be conscious Jules tumbles into the floor of the car. “Alright, I won’t. Bitch,” she spits.

Jules raises himself with a groan, using only his left arm, as the two women lock eyes. He blinks, then points out ahead between the both of them. “Sign.”

It’s a big, well carved and well tended wooden sign off the side of the road, with large text lifted out of the carving and painted white for reflection’s sake: “PICKMAN’S HOPE.” Beneath it is the sweet and simple statement, “Welcome home.” On either side of these statements are carvings of wild roses, painted yellow, and plentiful local vegetables painted onto the flat space beside.

Piper and Lucille both collect themselves as Jules settles back into his spot behind them.

“They’re not gonna like us in there,” Jules mumbles from beneath his drooping mustache.

“Of course they aren’t, we’re pretty obviously not your run of the mill migrant workers. You’re too prissy, she looks like she’s ready to kill anybody in the room, and I like to dress for the job I want— which means I’m not going to bother with a disguise. It’s why we’re riding in now rather than later.” Piper straightens herself out, narrowing her eyes at the town far, far ahead. “There’s a Shepherd connection in here that’s been feeding information to us for years, apparently. I’ve got an address, that’s our new base for the time being. Don’t screw it up by starting any random fights in bars over that stupid hat of yours, Jules. Keep civvie casualties to a minimum, ‘kay?”

“You think we’re idiots.” Lucille scoffs.

“No, I know you’re idiots, but you’re my idiots. World of difference. Both of you get ready to get your shit out of the car when we get there, we have to get in fast.”

==============================================================

    AH, ONYX. I EXPECTED YOU TO REQUEST A VISIT EARLIER IN YOUR JOURNEY, BUT IT APPEARS AS THOUGH YOU HAVE BEEN DOING WELL FOR YOURSELF. HOW IS YOUR EGO?

Azariah, opening his eyes to the wall of fog before him, rubs his head and laughs. “Well, if I’m bein’ honest, on top of the world. What kinda question is that?”

ONE OF IMPORTANCE TO CITRINE, AS WE BOTH KNOW.

“You’re right.”

I KNOW. WHAT IS IT YOU NEED? the voice booms. The Hare can see something massive rotating into place from beyond the fog wall.

I’d like to know when I can expect this all to end, he thinks to himself. Things have been going a little too well for them recently, and while he’s enjoying himself, he can’t shake the feeling that it won’t last. They discovered both Judith and Leons’ powers, they got in and out of Fusillade without a hitch. Sam’s still alive and kicking, which is a great bonus, and the only person he’s worried about right now is Roxanne (even if she is one of the hardest people to kill he knows). As far as he can tell, he’s sleeping with the guy right now— things are sweet as candy, and as everyone knows, too much sugar causes problems.

I MUST APOLOGIZE, BUT I AM NOT A SEER, ONYX. I CANNOT TELL YOU YOUR FUTURE. the voice booms again, much to Azariah’s confusion. I UNDERSTAND YOUR SENSE OF DREAD, AS IT IS WHY I CHOSE YOU TO BEGIN WITH. BUT MAY I PROPOSE A QUESTION IN RETURN?

“Of course,” Azariah responds. “Ain’t like I’m gonna refuse you in your own… home?”

OFFICE. REGARDLESS. The shape shifts in the dark again. WHEN DO YOU WANT THIS HAPPINESS TO END, ONYX?

“Well, that’s easy. If I could, I’d want it to keep goin’ ‘til I drop.”

ARE YOU PREPARED TO FIGHT FOR THAT FUTURE?

“Depends.”

I MEAN WHAT I SAY. SO, I SHALL SAY IT AGAIN, IN THE CASE THAT YOU DID NOT UNDERSTAND— ARE YOU PREPARED TO FIGHT FOR YOUR HAPPINESS, ONYX? THERE IS ONE WAY FOR YOU TO SECURE IT, AND THAT IS FOR YOU TO ACT WHEN THE TIME COMES.

Azariah wants to answer right away, yes, of course yes, I’d do anything for it. But something stops him before his mouth can carry him away. It’s a feeling, an old, gripping feeling that had recently slipped away from his conscience. That fearful trap that he had built for himself, the idea that while he can’t stop things from getting worse, the best he can do is enjoy himself while he can in the now. It wants to pull his tongue back down his throat, wants to keep him close in its overwhelming feeling of resignation.

He knows it’s there, he knows it’s a demon of his own design. And for the first time in his life, he realizes just how pitiful it is. The fire inside him had been replaced with a skittering, cowering little beast of burden, willing to carry the weight of his sins so long as he didn’t dare light the flame again. And now that there’s fire once more in his belly, it begs with him, pleads him to just let the future go, as it’s out of his grasp anyways. Something he knows to not be true in the slightest.

The Hare looks back up at the fog wall. He can feel It staring at him, knowingly. It did this on purpose, didn’t It. It put these rocks in his bones for the sake of helping him kill this imp in his gut. All those cryptic messages, all that painful adventuring. It was out to test him, to see if he could make it through this. By god, he certainly did.

So, he folds his arms and looks back at It through the fog. “Yeah. I’m prepared to do anythin’.”

THAT IS GOOD TO HEAR, ONYX. I QUESTIONED WHETHER YOU’D BE ABLE TO OVERCOME YOUR CRACKS, IF I AM TO BE HONEST. BUT, YOU HAVE PROVEN YOURSELF ABLE TO FIX THEM YOURSELF, GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY.

“Opportunity is a pretty light term, considerin’ you single-handedly changed my life,” Azariah chuckles. “I’d say you handed me a one-way ticket to something new.”

THINK WHAT YOU PLEASE. KNOW THAT MY GIFT WAS SIMPLY THE NUDGE, AND NOT WHATEVER FOLLOWED.

“Landslides gotta start somewhere.”

It is silent for a moment. PERHAPS I SHOULD INVEST IN A BETTER ANALOGY. REALLY, IT WAS YOU WHO CRAFTED YOUR FUTURE, NOT I.

“I suppose so. Thank you, by the way. Is this somethin’ you do often?”

YOU ARE VERY WELCOME, ONYX. YES, THIS IS MY JOB. YOU WOULD BE SURPRISED AT HOW FEW BEINGS ON THIS PLANET GIVE EVEN A SIMPLE THANK-YOU FOR MY SERVICES. OF COURSE, DESPITE MY SERVICES NOT TECHNICALLY BEING FOR THEIR GAIN.

Is this thing like, an HR employee? he thinks to himself, without remembering who might be listening.

I AM NOT ENTIRELY CERTAIN WHAT “HR” MEANS, BUT I BELIEVE I HAVE ALREADY OVERSTEPPED MY BOUNDS IN THIS CONVERSATION. IT HAS BEEN GOOD TALKING WITH YOU, ONYX. I WISH YOU THE BEST IN YOUR CONTINUED JOURNEY.

“It’s been good talkin’ with you too, uh. What should I call you? I don’t think I ever got your name.”

THAT IS INFORMATION I SADLY CANNOT SHARE— BUT IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL ANY BETTER, KNOW THAT YOU WOULD NOT BE CAPABLE OF HEARING IT WITHOUT SUFFERING A PARTICULARLY PAINFUL HEADACHE. OR, SO I HAVE HEARD.

Chapter End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Three, Chapter Twelve

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

For a little while everything had been remarkably quiet out front, as Fusillade is sorely lacking in what Lucille considers excitement; in the same vein, anything she considers exciting tends not to be enjoyable if she isn’t going to be paid to deal with it. As far as she can tell, there’s no reason to worry herself over the spreading fires a good way down the street. Even a town this far out of the way has its dedicated fire brigade or what have you, so there’s no point to someone like her jumping to action, even as the flames march closer and closer to the building behind her.

Something else does get her attention, however, as it sounds like something busting down a wall. She doesn’t see where it’s coming from, though, and by all means it could be the fire brigade making their own entrances into the buildings to help whoever’s inside. No reason to worry unless the noise gets closer to her, which after the last one, it’s stopped. If the fire reaches the building, anyway, she’s sure Jules can get out quickly enough and they can get back to the car.

Speaking of, as her thoughts begin drifting to what turns the conversation must be taking inside, the Vampire comes barreling out at full tilt, slamming the front door open as he hotfoots it over to Lucille, to whom he says, “Hey, we need to go. Now.”

“Why? It’s just a fire. We can stick around and pick some valuables out of the ashes later,” she replies, slowly standing from her seat on a bench, brushing off her knees. “Unless it’s some kind of trouble with the Carnevale?”

“Nope, we’re all good with them— this problem is different. We need to leave Fusillade right now. Like, now right now, we need to get on our way to Pickman’s Hope, let’s go.” Jules turns and takes several quick steps toward the car, Lucille walking just behind him with her hands in her pockets.

“It’s not like we need to rush, we’re the only ones—”

Lucille doesn’t get to finish her sentence as a blur of a glowing corpse flies past them and into the passenger side door of the car, right between the two mercenaries. She’s dumbfounded for a moment, and both of them spin around to see that there’s a hole in the brick wall, right beside one of the windows, where before she had known it to be entirely and unwaveringly solid. Behind it there’s a big, white shape holding something, a shirtless man.

“Who the hell is that? He looks like—” Lucille starts.

“Yeah, I know,” Jules slides across the hood of the car, followed by Lucille, “we need to go, now! We can talk on the road!”

“Let me get off your car first,” groans Meat against the door, before standing themselves straight and cracking their neck with their hands. “Sorry about that. It’ll buff out, probably.”

Blondie shoulders his way through what remains of the wall surrounding the window, his fist closing firmly around one of the gangsters’ throats with a sizzle and a squelch before an intense crackling. Not a cracking, but crackling, like the sound of still burning wood giving way beneath some greater force. Burnt and torn lips pull into a wolfish grin to reveal a series of jagged fangs, all a patchwork of burnt black and glowing red.

The head of the man stays just above Blondie’s fist as he exits, igniting with deep red flame which swirls and licks at the whole of it, slowly burning away the flesh until little but blackened bone remains. The body falls to the ground behind him, the top of the headless neck burned shut. There’s no bleeding, it’s just a corpse.

“Wow. Didn’t expect you to stand back up after that, hah. You got rocks in your bones or something?” the Werewolf says with a hearty chuckle, gently tossing the skull up and down in one hand. “And don’t you run yet either, vampy. I need to thank you personally for helping me find my way back here. You bat-fucks always were great bleeders.”

“Duck, now.” Jules hits the dirt with Lucille, hauling her along with him as he rolls.

Meat’s late on the draw; their mind’s preoccupied with a flurry of information coming their way in the name of self-preservation, an unwillingness to part with their second life condensing into a solid ball of refusal. Problem is, actually deciphering all of it takes them a millisecond too long, and by the point they’re processing the real world there’s a skull hot enough to burn through steel hurtling toward their own skeletal features.

Two glowing red hands shoot up from beneath the dragonscale pattern poncho, making contact with the projectile. Fingers find purchase inside the eyeholes, and the thumbs hook right below the top row of teeth.

The sheer force of the pitch doesn’t stop on the catch however, and Meat is sent slamming back into the car again, jamming the passenger side door to the point of fusion with the frame before they’re sent tumbling over the top of it and into the dirt a few yards beyond Jules and Lucille, where they finally come to a stop.

For the briefest moment the instinctual fear of fire seizes hold and the miniscule animal inside every soul screeches in terror— the fireball is in their hands! And then, like magic— because it is— the vibrant flames sink inside the red glow of their hands, leaving Meat with a smoking, fire-blackened skull.

“Oh,” they mumble. “Sorry Tommy. I’m sure you were a fun guy.” Their eyes dart up. The hulking shape is approaching the other side of the car and the two mercs are still on the ground just beside it.

In a swift and elastic bound Meat’s back up, over the car, and the skull in their hand is smashing into the side of Blondie’s head with enough force that once it cracks and practically explodes from the contact, the heel of Meat’s palm slams harder against the wolf’s head than the makeshift weapon ever did. In the quarter of a second after the two finally make contact there’s a sizzle and a spark— and then a bang.

It’s not an explosion the way explosions are meant to be understood; it’s more flame than concussive, but there’s enough of a pop that they both separate again. Meat flies back once more, this time slamming their bare heels against the roof of the car, which would’ve put them in a great deal of pain if they weren’t more focused on the ringing sound in their ears or the insane and dizzying spin that the car just put on their trajectory through the air, which culminates in their going through the window of a business across the street.

Blondie’s sent face first into the dirt because that explosion was localized right around his left ear, a bit above his temple and subsequently meant all that momentum was pointed down. As Meat crashes through the display glass of a sandwich shop, Blondie’s got his own crispy snout halfway to six feet under and his actual feet up in the air.

The sound was comparable to thunder, but it fades quickly enough, giving way to a more typical tense silence as the both of them stand back up.

Meat shakes off a rack of discounted turkey sandwiches and several exploded display salads before they haul themselves through the window again and start on an immediate beeline back across the street.

By this point Blondie’s back up, laughing, and swaggering toward them. “Phew, you’ve really got an arm. Too bad I’m gonna pull it off.”

“Bring it.” Meat’s teeth clack as they shut their mouth, arms flexing as they close the distance. This guy deserves it, they think. What he did to Tommy, what he’d do to anybody else, what he tried to do to Roxanne or Brie, oh he deserves it. Head down, jaw clenched, shoulders squared, Meat’s ready for another round and they haven’t felt this good since they woke up. Protecting themselves from that idiot vampire was all business, but this got personal about five punches ago and by God there’s no feeling on this forsaken hunk of rock that even compares to the righteous fury boiling in the back of their skull. There is no high that compares to the living flame of just hate.

Jules and Lucille scramble from the ground and into the driver’s seat as the two fiery combatants start getting closer and closer, but it’s impossible to start driving. Lucille can get her hands on the wheel and the key in the ignition, but the near ruination of the passenger side and Jules’ intense fear had him just about upside-down in the car like a bungling fool, arms down in the way of the pedals. They’re both grunting and cursing like a pair of panicking morons as, from the flower shop Carnevale HQ, there’s a whistle.

“Hey, big guy,” drawls the limping Roxanne, one arm raising a crossbow.

Blondie’s distracted, he doesn’t see it in time. The crossbow fires, and as he blinks, he sees a sharpened section of rebar, threaded to drill deeply on impact, having skewered his palm. As he’s in the process of recognizing the feeling, as he’s walking past the car Jules and Lucille are still desperately attempting to drive, there are two more successive chunk-chunks from the crossbow. It barely gives him enough time to register that he’s been pinned to the side of the car’s chassis.

When he pulls and hardly makes progress on unsticking himself, he roars in frustration just in time for his jaws to be forced shut by a flaming haymaker, capped off by another localized explosion. It’s not enough to send him tumbling this time, though— his head snaps back to focus his glare on Meat again not more than a second afterward, and when his jaws open again it’s not a scream or roar that escapes his mouth but white hot fire.

It’s a straight, focused line of flame, it sounds like the wolf’s got a jet engine in his gut, and despite their own immunity to flame it still feels like they’re going to be tossed away by the force alone. They’re pushed back no more than a few inches, however, and deliver another quick punch to shut him up.

A dog-like yelp escapes Blondie as his jaws were forced shut again, and with his free hand he lands a blow on Meat— sending them tumbling back another time— and starts to superheat himself, the bolts, the car, everything. He hardly manages to unpin his arm before more bolts stick themselves into his back alongside an entire magazine of pistol fire and several full volleys of high-caliber revolver ammo.

Inside the flower shop, Brie, Roxanne, and the remaining Carnevale goons have just fired off their entire salvo into Blondie’s center of mass. With her final shot, Roxanne pins Blondie’s hand to the car again.

In the car, Jules has just decided that he really, really wants to get out of there, and before Lucille can inform him that the flaming wolf monster that has it in for him is currently half-melted into the backend of their car, he jams the gas pedal down with his elbow, flooring it. “DRIVE!” He kicks awkwardly. “GET US OUT OF HERE!”

Lucille’s still grappling with the fact that they’re moving when they’re already halfway down the street rocketing past several gawking bystanders and a notable number of already burning buildings and they are still gaining speed. In the rearview mirror she sees a white gnarl of fur and glowing eyes, as well as the snarling teeth of the beast. “He’s still stuck to the back of the car,” she says, the shock of it all pushing her into serenity.

“What do you MEAN he’s still stuck?”

“I mean we’re about to hit seventy on a residential road and if we don’t crash and die he’s going to kill us,” she replies. This is how it all ends, is it? It’s not the worst way to go out, she considers. Better than being another faceless raider or gang grunt facedown in the muck. Going over seventy, surrounded by flames, probably going out killed by a monstrous fire beast—  at least a few of the idiots back home would’ve considered that a pretty good death. It’d become a bar story if anyone would hear of it. Did you hear about Lucille? The freak with the belly-mouth? Went down in flames with her best friend and a wolf monster that could lift cars. Fucking beautiful, that.

And then they begin to rapidly lose speed. This pulls her back from the high-speed death serenity that had washed over her, and sound returned. Jules is sobbing on the floor beneath her, babbling about how sorry he is, about how things had come to this. In front of her, beyond the Vampire’s legs, the engine’s screaming to keep going— and behind her she hears the creaking of metal and its liquid form slopping to the ground in heavy, sizzling globs alongside the molten drool of the snarling Blondie.

The first moments after the car had taken off, Blondie was surprised. He hadn’t expected it to get up to that speed so quickly and, additionally, he had been a little more focused on his hand being stuck to the damned thing and the corpse-looking asshole who’d been punching him for the past couple minutes. After what was likely about ten to twenty seconds of having his body dragged against the road like a bad bumper ornament, the novelty of the maneuver wore off. So now he’s solving the problem.

Having gotten himself chest to the ground, he raised his free hand to the other side of the car from that which his other hand was stuck to, and then with more might than even the wolf knew he had he shoved his feet against the ground. This has rapidly decelerated the car— and put a long, black trail following each of his feet where the bright, burning claws had shoved themselves through rudimentary gravel and dirt straight into moister earth.

Now the car’s stopped and even Jules can tell because above him none of the buildings are moving beyond the windows.

“We’re going to die,” Lucille says, staring ahead.

==============================================================

Meat’s rubbing their skull and watching as the car peels off down the road when they’re smacked on the shoulder. Leslie, a good amount of his suit burned along with one hand, smiles awkwardly.

“Hey, Mack.”

“Don’t start, Leslie. Only thing keeping me from finishing what he started is that I’m a bit busy right now.”

Leslie nods and raises both hands. “I get it, don’t worry. I’d feel the same if I were in your position. Any of us would. But right now, we’ve got a problem. That bastard needs to go. More than you do. He killed poor old Tommy— ”

“We both know that’s a lie and I’m an amnesiac. Don’t pull that on me.”

As Roxanne and Brie close the distance with the two, Mickey and the remaining still living congregate.

“Fine, I’ll cut to the chase. Guns aren’t gonna do jack to that nudist dog freak— no offense, lady—” Leslie nods toward Roxanne, “—and I ain’t about to send my boys after him when everything’s up in flames. You deal with this problem, you save my boy Jules, that being the Vampire who tried to kill you a bit ago, and we let you go. His life for yours, how’s that sound?”

Meat looks toward Brie and Roxanne, then toward Blondie, who by this point is just getting his free hand onto the car. Their jaw sets and their head tilts. “Fuck.”

“Please be careful,” Roxanne pokes with a laugh. “And don’t forget to save the last shot for me, Meat.”

After a long sigh, Meat turns to the street and starts running after the car.

==============================================================

Jules has decided it might be best to no longer be in this position if he’s going to die, and after taking his elbow off the gas he’s awkwardly making his way up, and with the lack of a passenger seat and the backseats being doused with molten metal, he’s left to straddle Lucille’s lap, facing her, and put his head over her shoulder to stare back at Blondie, who has by this point called them both every humanoid-based slur one can dream up and a veritable dictionary’s worth of ones solely regarding vampires.

Lucille, the moment he was out of her way, puts her foot on the gas again in the hopes of moving them with the jolt, but Blondie holds them tight.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry for how all this shit went down,” he says, picking his walking stick out of the backseat to prepare for the inevitable fight. “I never thought it’d turn out like this, I swear.”

“What, you didn’t think we’d be dying at the hands of a naked, flaming wolfman?”

“No, I thought that might be the end of a casual weekend party, not my death.”

“Is he your type? You really go for somebody like this?” Lucille’s brows arch.

“No! Fuck, no. I mean he’s big enough, but he obviously doesn’t even care about his hair.”

The two laugh, and the laughs become strained, and then the laughs aren’t laughs, they’re sobs. Lucille doesn’t quite cry so much as Jules, who’s back to bawling his eyes out as Blondie’s growls begin developing into barking, choking laughs. The sky’s exposed above them as the roof of the car is peeled back, pulled off by the wolf’s free hand and tossed aside. Heavy tears roll down the vampire’s gray face and into his mustache, down his chin. Lucille’s soak straight into the scarf around her face, with little distance to travel along her skin.

That is, until a new noise enters the soundscape. Jules’ sobs fade, his eyes blink the tears out. There’s something beyond the wolf, something fast and red and it’s screaming— they’re screaming.

==============================================================

Meat has made an incredible underestimation of their own ability before. After all, if someone’s able to stand up after dying they have to be another breed altogether, but despite this the old business habit of erring on the side of caution is kicking in. That is, however, a problem when while you’re estimating you’re a damned fast runner and have little time, a form of post-death adrenaline combined with justified fury and a healthy dose of incredible magical power all coalesces and after a certain point you’re running, your footprints are flaming, every step has the power of a small incendiary explosive, and the world around you’s rapidly becoming a blur. This is not the sort of speed that comes with actually being fast or being meant to be fast, because by no means are they meant to be fast. There are no stories about flaming skeletons running beyond the speed of sound, outpacing Wyrms and perceiving the world in slow motion.

The world around Meat is a blur because even now they aren’t terribly fast about processing anything and they’re going brutishly fast, the sort of fast that is uncontrollable and entirely about force; the will in each step to go further sooner, to put flaming holes in the earth beneath them and gain, gain, gain, like someone’s suburban van being supercharged with an illegal jetbooster. The framework that is Meat is not meant for this speed even after having died and come back. Meat is experiencing a form of speed most would only know if they were to strap themselves to the tip of a missile and let it rip.

So it is that when they’ve closed the distance and the shape of the car and the two idiots and the monster become firm and real, there’s no chance of them slowing down. Behind them the street’s on fire and around the last ten feet or so the ground has stopped being a thing. Now all there is is momentum, and the street feels about as far away for them as the clouds, and whether or not they intend it they’re burning, burning, burning through the air like a corpse-shaped missile, screaming.

Such as it is, Lucille’s not expecting that the car’s suddenly jolting to a breakneck pace with the added force of Meat’s journey to their destination as a guided projectile made of fire and muscle and rage, and that means they’ve moved another twenty feet before she’s aware that this vehicle is under her control. She’s white-knuckling the wheel to keep it from jerking either direction, which is slightly helped by her arms being under Jules’, thus meaning she couldn’t actually turn the wheel all that much even if she wanted to.

Meat’s collision with Blondie is enough not only to lift the wolf’s feet from the ground, but in the process the both of them are dragged into the backseats of the car, where the two immediately begin screaming and punching, clawing and biting like wild animals, all while a similarly screaming Jules is hitting either one of them on whatever parts he could strike with the knobbled clubbing end of his walking stick, coating it in burnt muck and some embers.

“Fucking shit! New problem, Lucille! Two new problems!”

“Care to tell me what they are? The rearview’s out.”

Meat’s head turns as their fist collides with Blondie’s jaws, pressing it between to block a burst of flame with their fingers. “One, assholes, I’m here to help.”

“The corpse is here?” Lucille asks. She’s trying to discern a way out, a path to safety, and unfortunately this long street’s practically all businesses and a hard left turn at the end. That’s hard news to break.

“Yeah, they’re here. To help, apparently, but they also put the other guy in the car with them, so maybe not?”

Blondie coughs out Meat’s fist, then snaps his jaws at it as his hands come up to clap on either side of Meat’s head. “After I’m done with barbecue face, I’m gonna skullfuck you both, mark my fucking words!”

“Shut up!” Meat screams, the glow between them both growing brighter as they slam their fists hard against Blondie, who laughs after each blow.

Jules has stopped trying to intervene in the fight by this point, and turns his head to speak only to Lucille. “We should just leave, right? They’re going to be busy with each other, let’s just go!”

“That’d be the smart thing to do, yes,” she nods. “Unfortunately not in the cards right now.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been trying the breaks for the last few seconds and it hasn’t worked. I also think the gas pedal fused to the floor, because it’s getting really, really hot and my foot isn’t on it anymore and we’re still going.”

Jules hums. “Shit. That’s what I get for hoping, I guess.”

Meat, in the midst of having their head engulfed by a clawed hand as the other continues to strike their side, screams. The back of the car is more molten metal than vehicle by this point save for the seats, which are burning up.

Blondie is growling viciously. One of Meat’s hands has managed to nearly bury itself into his ribs and it’s the sharpest pain he’s felt since waking up. He makes sure to return it in full, roaring, mouth frothing with hate.

Lucille can make out a small crew of men and women in fire-resistant gear wielding an old, basic hose and putting water on fires down the road. However, what she also notices is that the hose runs around the corner. The fire brigade, as she had assumed earlier, were quick to act in the case of fires. Through the already ruined remains of a remarkably small shop she can see their truck and, of course, the massive tank of water they draw from, one of several large reserve tanks filled with water from the nearby river.

“Jules,” she starts, her tone rising, “we’re gonna crash into a water tank.”

“Uh.” He glances behind himself, spotting the tank as well as the hard left turn needed to reach it, which is approaching very, very soon, but there’s still some distance. “Maybe we should just jump?”

“Jules, we either crash into the water tank or we jump and the two assholes behind us just survive the crash and come to kick our ass. Work smart, not hard.”

“You’re really stretching the meaning of ‘smart,’ Lucille, but whatever works, right? Jump right before we hit the tank?”

“Of course, don’t be stupid. Okay, turning left now—” Snap.

She blinks and withdraws her arms, and in one of her hands is the steering wheel, whose connector to the main body of the vehicle is molten orange. It drips between the two of them, and with a sharp, pained whine she tosses the wheel without a thought.

“Fuck, we needed that,” the Vampire says, eyes widening. He turns his head to look over his shoulder again, considers, and then looks to Lucille. “New plan. Really stupid plan. Trust me?”

Her eyes narrow. The seat’s kicked roughly by a writhing wolf monster and a screaming corpse, both of which are on fire. She nods, sighing. “Always, Jules.”

“Good, because this is either going to save us or kill us both. Arm!”

Lucille raises her left arm and pulls back her coat sleeve to reveal the skin, and with a flourish of his walking stick, sharp end pointing out of the car, he bites down into her wrist and starts drinking. Blood, strange blood, coats his lips and chin and mustache as he bulks up rapidly, eyes brightening and muscles tensing. He turns the stick in his hand and then wraps his newly pumped up fist around the club end of it, pointing the sharp end straight down. His fangs leave her arm. He’s planning to flip the car with his arm, she realizes.

“Your shit’s gonna break, Jules!” Lucille screams.

“I know!”

“This is gonna hurt a lot!”

“I know!”

“The turn’s just about to—”

“I KNOW!” Jules screams, and with one arm around Lucille— that hand digging its fingers straight into the seat itself, pressing into the heat weakened metal— his other arm slams downward, driving the point of the stick into the ground.

==============================================================

The vehicle is glowing hot. The back half looks like it’s well on its way to having melted in an oven, the two screaming and clawing at each other in the backseats looking like figurines behind a drawn curtain of light. The two sitting in the front are in a strange way also, one clutching desperately to the other as said other has a wooden walking stick, treated with various methods to make resistant even to the finest and strongest of axes, stuck into the ground. The fire brigade, frankly, has no clue what they’re looking at. It’s a massive ball of mayhem, and it wheels right past them and then around the corner and straight at their water tank. It’s a bolt of flame, blazing an orange-white among the deep and shadowed glow of the daylight fires surrounding, engine, tires, and metal frame screeching in near perfect tune with the writhing dead.

There’s a window of approximately five seconds after the turn’s completed where there’s several sickening snaps, one of wood and several of bone, and there’s an opening. Jules seizes on it, the blood in his system supercharging him. Unlike Meat, in this condition, this speed is his element. He’s bigger than it all, better than he is, better than he ever thinks himself to be. Lucille is pressed hard against him, the arm holding onto the seat going rigid around her, under her arms, as his legs tense and spring.

He jumps, keeping Lucille close, in the opposite direction the car’s going. They’re airborne for an unsettlingly long time. However, those on the ground see Jules’ opposite arm, the one that had been gripping the now broken stick, sagging limply beside him and bent in a direction an arm is not meant to go. He’s wrapped around her like a giant ball of grey, buckskin clad muscle, hat having flown off and his wild black hair whipping in the wind.

And then the two slam into the ground at top speed and go rolling for several meters. Meanwhile, the car slams into the truck and the water tank, which results in the strangest of sequences: first, the car and the firetruck both blow up. The impact’s more than enough to set off the truck’s bio tank and the car is already on its last legs, barely holding out under the heat, not to mention that the melting metal had finally reached the extra bio tank in the trunk.

Blondie and Meat are making no headway during any of this fight, with Blondie unable to properly land a killing blow or get any real effect out of his fire as Meat’s unable to do little to affect the wolf in the slightest, as even their strongest strikes did little but bruise the already dead muscle.

And then the two are slapping, clawing each other when the car strikes the truck and the explosions occur. Neither are affected by the heat, the flame. No, what affects them is the force of it, which sends the smaller Meat flying diagonally up and out of the car, away from Blondie and into the burning building that the fire brigade were trying desperately to put out until the next moment in the play by play.

Blondie, being much larger, does not get tossed far, and since there’s more force coming from the car than the truck’s bio reserve, plus the already extant momentum, Blondie’s trajectory points him like a huge, man-wolf shaped cannonball straight into the water tank, whose metal siding he punches through and into entirely.

It’s a second after that when the water tank explodes not with water but with steam. Everything is white for several moments, the water ceases to flow to the hose, Jules and Lucille are silent on the ground and Meat’s nowhere to be seen. During the whiteout, a few of the fire brigade’s volunteer members swear they could hear panting and stamping in the mist, but by the time that the steam clears Blondie is gone.

Another few moments later, the fires seem to begin to simply disappear, as though called away by something inside. When Meat exits the building, clothes heavily burnt save for their poncho, they walk up to the fire brigade. When neither hide nor hair of Blondie turn up, they head toward other buildings, raising their hands to the flames to begin calling them in. It’s a slow and awkward process, unrefined as of yet, but the locals are awestruck, sticking around to see before one of them runs off to go get another truck and another tank of water.

As this has all gone on, the two mercenaries are also nowhere to be seen. Lucille hoofs it back up the street toward where it all started, the very big and very unconscious Jules on her back, one of his arms still bent the wrong way and one of his legs similarly mangled after their landing. “Dumb son of a bitch,” she mumbles. “Dumb motherfucker. Stupid. Stupid. Fuck.”

==============================================================

An hour or so later, Blondie leans heavily against a building, basking in the shade of the Jim’s Trafficular Jam sign, panting like a dog. His glow is low but returning as he trudges over toward the lot itself. His claws run over his face, dragging long, sooty lines along his maw. It was supposed to be fun, it was supposed to be easy. That was neither of those things. That was shit.

Each step he takes is heavier, angrier than the last, and by the time he gets close to a decently sized van he’s frothing again. Taking both hands he grabs at the roof of the van and peels it back so that he can sit in the driver’s seat without his head brushing up against it. He opens the glove compartment by simply removing the hatch, from inside of which he withdraws the key and starts it. He just needs to go and restock, resupply, gear back up. He needs the best stuff, though. The fire and the muscles aren’t enough, he needs swords, he needs guns, he needs men.

The engine refuses to start, whining like an injured animal as he twists the ignition over and over. He could get it all down south, something tells him, deep in the back of his head. Shepherd. An armory, his bosses, they had it all. With all that and all this, he could wipe this place off the map along with every little insignificant piece of shit that calls it home, and then he’d keep on the warpath until he finds his quarry again. Names float in his head. Hickory. Gilroy. Penny can go fuck herself, he’ll break as much as he wants and Harry’s going to look like the stupidest brown-noser in the universe when Blondie shows back up, alive and well, ready to keep working.

When the engine continues to refuse him, he punches through the dashboard and into the engine block screaming in rage as the other hand squeezes the wheel tight enough to bend it. And then it roars to life, screaming into reality like it’s just woken from one nightmare into a whole new one, so much worse than the last. His foot puts the pedal to the floor and it lurches forward, Blondie beginning on his way south, away from Fusillade and back, back to the start of this shitty, shitty mission.

==============================================================

It’s evening now, and Meat, Brie, and Roxanne sit around a singed table at the sandwich shop across the street from the Carnevale flower front. Brie’s just finished a sub that had been smashed inside its wrapping, while Roxanne’s still in the process of finishing a chicken salad sandwich, and Meat hasn’t bothered touching their “thank you for helping the town not burn down” grilled cheese.

“And you’re certain you lost him?” Asks Roxanne, just having swallowed. “I suppose we’re back to square one, then. And, I’m out of those fun bolts I got back in Kiln. What a shame.”

Brie clears her throat. “I have a feeling that if we continue on this mission as we should, we will be seeing him again. Unfortunately.”

“Yeah. Probably.” Meat’s head tilts.

Roxanne sighs. “Meat, lift your head. It isn’t becoming of a town hero to mope.”

“I’m not moping. This is just thinking.”

“It doesn’t matter what you might be thinking, it’s moping if you look like a kicked puppy while you’re doing it. You’ve just saved a town, Meat. You should enjoy yourself a little.”

Brie shifts in her seat. “I would not think that is the source of their worries.”

“Nah. Just thinking about that asshole. What’d you call him? Blondie? I mean, he’s like…” Meat gestures vaguely toward themselves.

Roxanne laughs. “Oh no, don’t you start with this. You aren’t even a lick alike, don’t even consider it. I might be a Fox, but that doesn’t make me the same as whatever rabid little bastard eats people’s pets around here. Those stories never specify whether it’s the good or the bad that get back up.”

“Actually, if I recall correctly, more than a few state just those sorts of claims though without—” Brie’s cut off by an elbow in her side, followed by a small hiss from Roxanne.

“Don’t you worry your head, Meat. It’s not important to think about right now. Right now, you should just be basking in the good graces of a town well-saved while we handle the heavy thinking. We gotta plot a good route to Pickman’s Hope.”

==============================================================

“Jules, you’re an idiot.”

“I know.”

“You’re the dumbest person I think I’ve ever worked with.”

“I know, Lucille.”

“And I have no idea how, but you have saved my life more times than I can count.”

“I kno— oh, that one was actually kinda nice.”

Lucille’s pacing in a backroom surgeon’s office, hands clasped behind her back. Jules is lying back on a couch with one massive arm all tied up into a position where it might heal well and one of his legs in a splint, all awkwardly done with tightly wound, nearly elastic bandages to anticipate the lessening of his muscle mass as the recent feeding eventually wears off.

Lucille rubs what little of her face is exposed with one hand. The other arm, meanwhile, had been wrapped up tightly when they got there sometime earlier and still stings like hell. “We’re going to need backup. You heal fast, I know, but with that bastard still on the loose we need to have all the prep we can get, we’re out a car and you’re all fucked up.”

“That’s okay, we can work around that. It’ll take a little more time, but we’ve got this. You trust me?”

“Don’t do this again, Jules, don’t, this isn’t the time or place. I was— look, I was all fucked up about that in the car, don’t.”

“Okay! Still, just know that you’re my best friend. I’m not going to let you die on a job like this if I can help it. Plus, we can just try and contact someone who does have a car. Piper’s got one, right?” Jules smiles, his mustache rising with the corners of his lips.

Lucille, sighing again, walks over to him and gets her arms around his broad shoulders. “You’re a bastard. You’re a real bastard.”

“I know. Watch— watch the shoulder, jeez! I just had that popped back in!”

She squeezed him tighter, earning a grunt. “No.”

Book 3 End.

============================================================== 

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Four, Chapter Three

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

Jules sips his cup of blood, stale and tasting of IV bag. Though it wouldn’t be enough to fix him up immediately, keeping himself juiced would be imperative to a speedy recovery if he and Lucille plan to get back on the road. He had gotten all his bones set and splinted, his cuts stitched shut, and his eyes checked for any concussions. All they had to do now was wait for the magic to happen. Which would take up to a week for him to walk, not run, without a cane. He sets down the cup, and adjusts himself in bed.

    “Hey, thanks again,” he says.

“Don’t mention it,” Lucille grumbles. She sits on a rickety old chair, nursing her own cup of something with both hands. There are bags under her eyes from having spent the night keeping Jules stable.

“I’m sorry for this.”

She looks up at him. “For what?”

He motions to his body. “This. Having to do something stupid to save us, ‘cause I fucked up.” He also motions to her. “And for that. You look terrible, Lucille.”

For a moment she looks as though she wants to argue with him, but with a tired sigh, she just replies, “It happens.”

“They happened ‘cause I was an idiot. I didn’t think ahead, I didn’t consider the you factor, and it got us both burnt.”

“Don’t tell me you had anything to do with that monster.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the gang thing. You know, the mafia I didn’t tell you about?”

“That barely matters to this,” she says, motioning to him, “right now. That thing did this to you, not the gang.”

The Vampire frowns. “I know, but you were mad at me earlier for it, and we wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t fucked up in the first place. I want to make amends. Somehow.” He looks at her, all sad eyes and untamed facial hair. “For real.”

She looks back at him, eyebrow raised and cup of joe in hand. “You’re out of commission, Jules. What can you do?”

“I can quit the Carnevale,” he replies. “They don’t let people quit.”

“Then I’ll leave. Stop taking calls, stop doing their work.”

“Really?”

“Leslie will want me dead, but if it means being honest from here on out to my partner? I’ll leave today, I don’t give a fuck.”

“Really.”

“Really really,” Jules says, grabbing his cup of blood. “When I can visit to break the news, anyways.”   

“Which will be?”

He begins to sit up in bed. “Let’s see.”

She stands up from her chair, and quickly moves to his side. “I get your point,” she chuckles. “But don’t fuck around like that, you’re still too screwed up. Idiot.”

“I’m serious! You think I’m not committed, Lucille?”

“Committed to getting yourself hurt.”

“To this,” he motions to her with his cup. “And to this,” he motions to himself, before finishing the rest in a single swig. “Because I don’t think there’s anything I love more than us. Maybe I was taking it for granted, but mashing my bones to paste and hurting my friend has taught me better.”

Lucille finds herself struggling to respond for a moment. Never, not once in their entire partnership, have they ever had a heart-to-heart about the nature of their job. Appreciation was always in the form of banter, gifts, medical care. Money. It was easy for her to grow a little cold toward him, because in her head, she had also taken him for granted in a way. He would always be around, and so, it was impossible to imagine what it’d be like without him. But now that he’s in this state, having nearly turned himself to jelly to save them both, she realizes just how mortal he is. And how mortal she’d be without him. She sets her cup down, then leans over the bed to hug him.

“I’m sorry too, Jules.”

He accepts the hug lightly with his good arm, not particularly sure what to think, seeing as how she has a maw on her stomach. “Uh, for?”

“Being a dick and not understanding what this meant.”

“This being?”

She pulls away from the hug, and motions to the both of them. “This, prick.”

“Oh!” The Vampire beams. “That means a lot, pal.”

Lucille walks back over to her seat, and wipes her eyes free of any errant tears.

“I know.”

“Wait, are you crying?” he asks, leaning forward in bed.

She shakes her head no— but as she does so, she also leans forward in her seat, and holds her eyes with one hand. “Aww, Lucille! It’s okay!”

It takes her a while to recompose herself, as the last time she’d cried was during the funeral of one of her closest enemies— the kind that gives you purpose in the same way a good friend does. And when the waterworks start to flow, it’s difficult to get them to stop if the pipes haven’t been used in a while. Jules finds himself comforting her to the best his body can muster, even if it means that she has to kneel next to the bed so that he can put his non-splinted arm around her.

Eventually, she looks up at the ceiling, gives herself a good slap, and dries up her eyes with her sleeve. “God, that was embarrassing,” Lucille says with a sniff.

“My lips are sealed,” he responds. “No shame from me. Most people do it all the time.”

“We’re not most people.”

“You’re right on that front.”

She stands up, shaking out her legs. “Well. I gave Piper a ring while you were out.”

Jules bunches up his face in light disgust, “Piper? Why her?”

“I thought we could use a little assistance. Since you’re all fucked up, and all.”

“Piper…” his voice trails off.

“Yeah. I had to leave a message, though. Hopefully she gets it. I know it's a few days drive up from Shepherd HQ,” she says, sitting back down in her chair.

“She knows about the quarry, right? About how we’ve got no idea where they’re at?”

“Everyone in that company knows. I figured we’re out of the game, but I didn’t want to stay here. Not where the Carnevale can keep on our asses.”

“So you called her, a Shepherd Gemstone foreman, to take us to Pickman’s Hope. AKA, the only place in the valley where she can’t go.”

“She won’t want to stay. What’s there for her? Those bounties never stay put anyway. She’ll be on their trail.”

“Good point,” Jules says, not entirely believing himself.

==============================================================

    Piper’s lips purse as she runs her fingers over a fabric that she would have feared to tear mere weeks ago, her fingertips gliding across the soft, handwoven dress. It’s blue, and about the right size for the girl. All things considered it might be enough to smooth over their talk, given some time.

She’d already gotten something for the boy. Luckily, while many of the shops in Fusillade had been more or less decimated by whatever hell had come calling, the one toy shop had not. She’s standing in the middle of it now, still feeling over the dress. The work that goes into making dresses for dolls can also go into making dresses for girls, and much the same for the clothes of the good soldier toys and much of boys’ clothing. Besides, if you’re buying toys for kids, you might as well undercut the obvious front shop’s rates for children’s clothing.

She brings the dress to the owner of the shop, a frazzled looking old bird in a bandanna and a simple overall dress, and places down the dress before setting a wooden pop pistol— the sort with the cork on a string you place in the barrel before pulling some mechanism to make it ‘pop’ and, as such, shoot— atop it.

“Got kids?” The old woman squawks, beak clacking and black feathers ruffling.

“I do now.”

“Ah, okay. Want these packaged and labeled?”

“It’d be appreciated. Pistol’s for Tanner, the dress is for… It’s for…” Her eyes are trailing after someone just outside the window, a human woman with brown hair and an unbearably boring style of dress. “Brie?”

“Tanner and Brie, gotcha.”

“No, Tanner and Madrone, actually. There’s somebody outside—”

The toymaker nods. “Tanner and Madrone, got it.” And with that, she’s crossing out the already written “BRIE” on the packaging, placing some entirely opaque tape over it, and writing “MADRONE.”

Piper doesn’t need to head outside to cut off the investigator, because she actually walks inside, notebook in one hand and a well used pen in the other. “You,” she says, clicking her pen in anticipation of noteworthy material. “You are one of the foremen from the Smokestone location down beyond Kiln. Piper, yes? I remember you.”

“That situation’s a little complicated at the moment.” Piper, smiling, places a small wad of cash in front of the toymaker and is given a bag with her two packages inside. “And you’re Brie. I remember you plenty, too. Surprised to find you here of all places, considering as you’re playing lackey for that parasite Hickory. It safe to assume those runaways have come through? They what did all this?”

Brie shakes her head, then walks over to the owner of the shop, with whom she begins asking basic questions, if anything had been destroyed and the like. Meanwhile, Piper goes and stands outside, opting instead to wait for the end of that incredibly boring bit of work on the insurance department’s end so that she could continue prodding Brie for information. Jules and Lucille can wait a little longer for this.

A few minutes later Brie’s exiting, eyes trained on her notebook, and Piper falls into step alongside her. “You didn’t give me an answer on the whole thing going on around here, B. So, it wasn’t the runaways?”

“No, Ms. Piper, it was not.”

“Huh. Weird, so far, utter destruction has followed in their path. What the hell happened, then? Looks like somebody tried to grill the town.”

Brie frowns, but taps her notebook with her pen. “I am still processing it myself, but there’s quite a lot to catalogue at the moment.”

The two come to a halt at an intersection, or at least a crossroad that could generally be considered the dirt expy of one. The fires were put out a long, long while ago, so now all that’s left is for the wood and stone to crumble or be rebuilt. In some of them folks are working on patching up what’s there, in others there are tough looking types with hammers clearing away the ruin to make room for something new. Either way, Fusillade’s quick to recover.

Brie gestures around with her pen. “It is all necessary to write down because, technically, it has happened in part due to Shepherd Gemstone. If not entirely due to Shepherd Gemstone, because a great deal of it has been destroyed by one of their own employees.” She stops, then squints at the coat Piper’s wearing.

“How unfortunate. Well, I’m sure that Ms. Hickory’ll be real happy to hear about how this investigative endeavor of yours has gone from finding murderous runaways to letting her know how much all of these people are owed by the company because of some wild arsonist. Bless your heart, I could never do this sorta thing myself.” Piper laughs, looking around. “Yeah, damage control just seems like a good way to get walked all over, since it looks to be all about you tallying up the shit other people get done while your work gets away from you.”

Piper slings the bags over her shoulder and begins walking back toward her car, adjusting the weight of the presents against her back as her tail sways and curls against the ground behind her. “That’s why I’ve decided to move branches, I’m done with mining— and write that down for your stupid little report, too. I couldn’t be the culprit, I was a bit too busy getting a position in acquisitions down at HQ whenever this happened.”

Brie clears her throat. “I do not need evidence as to who did it. The identity of the perpetrator is not an unknown factor here, Ms. Piper, as it is none other than Blondie… Whose coat you appear to be wearing.”

Piper lets out a rattling laugh as she turns around to face the woman, fangs bared by her grin. “Good one, B, good one. And here I thought you didn’t know how to tell any jokes— right, corpses stand back up and start setting fires.” She pantomimes wiping a tear from one eye, then laughs again. “Don’t be disrespectful of the dead. Back at HQ they were pretty sure he’d bit it trying to save a local party of concerned civilians from that nasty Wyrm they had flying around. Bless the fool’s heart, he went out a hero.”

“Corpses actually can do that, as I learned earlier, under the right circumstances. Have you heard of a Notus before?”

Piper shrugs. “I dunno, daddy once told me about ‘em as a reason not to play with fire. Never met one, pretty sure they’re fake.”

Meat clears their throat as they approach, and Piper has neither the time or the restraint to keep herself from making a face at the sight of them as they walk over to Brie, saying, “I’m getting tired.”

“No you are not,” Brie replies, “I remember that you do not actually get tired like someone still living.”

“Okay, I’m getting tired of this. We should be heading out to Pickman’s Hope to go kick that wolf’s ass.” Their jaw clacks as they shut it hard, and then both their and Brie’s heads turn toward Piper.

She’s smiling now, at least. Not on the inside, but she’s smiling outwardly. “Real nice to meet you, uh, guy.”

“Meat.”

Piper’s smile twitches, threatening to fall. “Yeah, I said that, nice to meet you.”

“No, my name’s Meat and I’m not a guy.”

Brie turns to look toward Meat. “I thought you were still undecided?”

They shrug. “I’ve settled into it again. I think I was like this before the fire anyways. Memories are still fuzzy, though. Who was your pal?”

“Was?” Brie turns to look toward Piper again— and she’s not there. “Oh. I had questions for her.”

Meat rubs the top of their skull. “And you didn’t answer mine. You got a girlfriend you aren’t telling us about?”

“One, I would not date her if she were the last eligible bachelorette on the planet. Two, not one either of you two would know; she lives north of Honeysett.”

“The blonde woman in the tac-jacket or your girlfriend?”

“My girlfriend, Meat. The blonde woman in the tactical coat is not my girlfriend and she does not live north of Honeysett. That woman is or was a foreman at the same site that I met Roxanne at, the one where she got attacked by Blondie. The big wolf monster?” Brie clicks her pen rhythmically, following the tune of their footsteps.

“You didn’t mention anything about a girlfriend, Ms. Brie,” comes a new old voice, who falls into step beside the other two. Roxanne grins. “Color me impressed, dear. Enough about the dog we’re hunting though, you should catch us up to speed about why you were conversing with that Shepherd employee.”

==============================================================

    Piper gently places the presents into the trunk of the car just beside the Quilting Club box before locking said trunk and settling into the driver’s seat again. An entire second of silence passes after she’s shut the door when she begins screaming and throwing her fists against the dashboard.

It’s a harsh, visceral sound escaping her throat that rolls into a high hiss as claws begin to poke dangerously at the tips of her gloves’ fingers, warning her to stop her tantrum before she ruins her clothes with an unwilling transformation. It gets bad enough that she can feel her hate dripping from her fangs in a literal, liquid form, and the soft sound of a single droplet of venom touching her coat is enough to force her to calm back down.

She grips the wheel as though she could wring its neck as the changes subside again, and after a moment she leans out the window to spit the remaining venom out into the dirt. This is a problem, she realizes. This is most definitely a problem.

He’s supposed to be dead. He’s supposed to be dead because if he isn’t, then a lot of things are going to pretty quickly go from being great to being problems too. The car’s one thing, the weapon, the job, the wife, everything’s about to go sideways at best. What was it that the square had said, though?

He’s a Notus. Stupid old stories about corpses coming back to life and lighting things on fire. Right, of course, okay— she can work with this.

That means she’s at least keeping the job. If he died, as one needs to in order to become a Notus, then from a contract standpoint his is null, he’d have to be reinstated by top brass and the amount of time that’d take would give her at least a week to figure out how to kill him again. As for Janet, the problem’s less with Janet and more with Blondie.

“She traded in for the new model,” she says to herself. “Not going to ditch me for a flaming corpse. Okay. Okay.” She rolls her shoulders, snaps her jaws, looks herself over in the mirror. No tears this time. She’s getting better.

Another name added to the list. Jules, Lucille, and now Blondie. She can handle them.

Time to go pick up those two numbskulls and hope they can at least act competently enough to lead her to the five before that awkward weirdo and her corpse.

==============================================================

A steady stream of cash has always flowed through the center of Pickman’s Hope. Before the Shepherd Gemstone takeover, the mining and spelunking business gave the town sufficient funds to build up its city centre into something great— one with multi-level, affordable apartment buildings, an outdoor venue for performers to earn a little extra cash, and a bustling plaza where traveling vendors could come to peddle whatever wares they might be selling. The money traveled up and down the streets, too, with especially successful shops decorating their roads and the neighboring buildings to match what they were selling.

Gutter’s Glade, as it was known, was never large enough to become a city, and it never seemed to want to be. Outside the town center, buildings were mostly residential and built with local materials, each one a labour of love for the inhabitant in question. Construction was done around trees of particular size and age, and the shade was much appreciated on those warmer autumn days.

But, while the money did not stop flowing while Shepherd Gemstone was in control, the people certainly did. Shops that once thrived were forced to shut down, as their product was now in corporate hands. Certain roads in the town center became desolate as shopfronts, carts, and residential buildings were abandoned outright. The surrounding residences began the slow strangling process of being taken over by nature once again, since there were no longer folks to help balance things out. Sure, the cash was still there, product was being moved out of the hills at an incredible rate— but only drops of it went to the town.

Nowadays, the town of Pickman’s Hope, in all its autumnal glory, is in the process of waking up from its dormancy. The money is back in the hands of the people, and reconstruction has begun. Those abandoned streets have been cleaned and fixed, buildings being repurposed and sold to those wanting to start their own businesses. The venue in the center of town occasionally gets a band or a play again, which many of the citizens mark their calendars for. And while their population isn’t what it used to be, the sense of neighborly love more than makes up for the distance between homes. It may be a shadow of what it once was, but Pickman’s Hope is recovering steadily, and it wears its history like a badge of honour.

After driving around town for a minute, Olive and Cherry eventually walk into the Mechanic’s Guild Storefront. The only door they can find is a sheet of corrugated metal controlled by a chain— and though it’s marked as “ENTRANCE” in big, welded letters, it can be hard to tell whether it’s a door for cars or a door for people, with these places.

    Once inside, Cherry realizes very quickly that this place is a trap designed to keep him there for as long as humanly possible. The building itself is an old storehouse, which means that they’ll have a surplus of the parts he wants, and it’ll have been stacked all the way to the roof. Parts of all kinds; performance pieces from the manufacturers in the Great Bayou across the Dividends, legally-questionable parts from New Bird, the new racing capital of the world. Custom parts too; Cherry could tell by the sound of saws, soldering irons, flying sparks, and metallic hissing echoing through the building. It smells intensely like grease, motor oil, biofuel, and ozone. To him, like his favourite version of home.

It’s a trap that pertained directly toward his main interest, no, his fixation (he fondly remembers his fathers having to pull him away from his car to have a talk about getting a real job), and it’s almost too much for him to take in again.

While Cherry stands there ogling, Olive waves a feathered hand in front of his face. “Yoohoo, Cherry. You gonna answer me or what?”   

He blinks. “Oh, sorry. What, uh, was the question again?”

“Are you sure they sell bio at these places? Looks like they just keep metal bits on the shelves.”

“It’s illegal to stock it in a customer self-serve section,” Cherry replies, “since it’s so dangerous. Well, most of the time it’ll be illegal. I’ve been told it’s illegal, but I don’t know who could stop them if they did anyways. They probably keep it behind the desk, though. Don’t worry.”

“Oh. It burn easy?”

“Very. It’s genius, really. I’ve seen high-quality bio combust when someone stomped on a puddle of it in the asphalt.”

“Oh,” Olive rubs her head. “Yeah, I’d see why they’d put it in the back, then.”

“Makes sense, right? Now,” he starts, explicitly moving away from the front counter. “Before we do that, I’ve got something I wanna look for. I bet a town like this would have it stocked, but I don’t wanna be the guy who walks up to the counter asking for something before looking, you know?”

The Owl raises an eyebrow. “Uh, yeah. What’re you lookin’ for?”

    Earlier in the day, after they had arrived at Pickman’s Hope and parked the truck, Cherry was getting into learning how it was put together. And boy, was it a glorious patch-job. Hardly anything was stock anymore, and anything that was had been recently replaced. Some very, very big replacements, too. Nearly brand-new stock transmission, which explained how butter-smooth it felt shifting gears. The suspension was the oldest thing in it, and though it was Blizzard Blitz-brand, which was known for its good dirt-and-stone performance, it had seen a little too much love over the years and could use a nice retirement. Cherry made a mental note at the time to mention to Judith that he’d found the reason why some bumps in the road felt worse than others.

But, one of the most enticing things Cherry found while exploring was the presence of a compartment, accessible by the driver’s side of the interior, which looked as though it would perfectly cradle a can of nitrous oxide. Now, while he had never gotten the chance to use the stuff himself, since it was banned at many of the meets he would attend for its tendency to send racers flying off the tracks and into trees, just the thought of being able to use the boost juice was far too tempting to let up. There was a brand he had in mind, too—

“Look for the word ‘Pounder,’ Olive,” Cherry says, as they come to a section in Isle 6.

Her face scrunches up. “Pounder?”

“The name’s a little weird, I know. Trust me.”

The Owl turns the name over in her head one more time, then gets to browsing the shelves. Momentarily, of course, since the shelves are quite big and any given selection of nitrous oxide canisters is bound to be small. She picks up one of the metal canisters, painted off-white and labeled with a sticker. “Pounder Nitrous,” it says, underneath a stylized icon of a tall canister between two tires. “Lasts longer than any other brand, or your money back!”

“Why the cock an’ balls?” she chuckles.

“I think it has something to do with the owner’s name. Maybe they figured it’d be funny to lean into it. Or something. Maybe,” Cherry replies, scouring his section of the shelf.

“It is pretty funny.”

“Wait, did you find some?”

“Yep.”

The Mechanic whips around, beaming. “Holy shit, great! That’s really good, wow!”

“You still haven’t told me what it’s for.”

“You stick it in your car and it makes it go faster. C’mon, we’ve gotta get to checkout!”

“Next you’re gonna tell me the paint job could make it go faster. Cock and balls makes it quicker?” she asks, genuinely confused.

“No, no! It’s just a branding thing, the stuff gets gassed into the engine and it makes it burn fuel quicker, making the car go faster!”

“How in the world’s that work?”

“I’ll show you if you want, but later! When we’re back with the others!”

“If you say so, Cherry.”

    They approach an empty front counter to the sound of an angle grinder around the corner. And despite there being a bell for them to ring for that exact scenario, it takes a couple before someone pokes their welding masked-head out, slaps their greasy gloves onto a table, and begins to jog over.

“Sorry about that, folks! What can I do ya’ for?” the employee says, slicking back a sweaty head of black hair.

Cherry hesitates for a moment despite his excitement, as the man behind the counter has turned out to be far more attractive than he was prepared to deal with. He’s taller than both him and Olive, clocking in around 6’2”. He’s toned underneath his work shirt and apron. And his face, though hardened and pocked with scars from flying sparks, is young and sharp, with a cheekbone-jawline combo you could cut gemstones with. If one were to guess, he wasn’t Spawned, rather the baby of a Basic Human and some sort of Orc. And to Cherry, he might’ve been even more attractive than the nitrous in his hands. Maybe.

In the silence that broke between the three of them, Olive clears her throat to break Cherry’s trance.

“Yeah, uh, sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “We’re buying this. And a few gallons of bio, too.”

“Sounds good!” the clerk responds, cracking the Mechanic a smile. “Ahh, the ol’ can of cock and balls,” he comments upon seeing the canister.

“That’s what I said!” Olive chimes in.

“We usually don’t get people lookin’ for this stuff. You got something that can take it?”

Cherry nods. “Uh, yeah. We kinda, uh, stumbled into a truck. Has all these mods, bought it from a guy down in Fusillade. Turned out to have nitrous compatibility built in, who would’ve guessed.”

“You might wanna consider installing some handlebars in the back then, if you’re plannin’ on using it for transport!,” the clerk laughs. “Wouldn’t want your pals flying out when you hit the gas!”

Olive laughs as well— but Cherry, in his anxiety, just smiles and nods.

After punching a few numbers into the cash register, the clerk holds up a finger. “I’ll be right back with your bio. Don’t go anywhere, ok?”

Olive grunts as she adjusts the jug of bio they’d bought on her shoulder.

“So,” she starts, “you liked what you saw?”

“Yeah,” Cherry responds, holding his arms out to the sky. “God, I missed this.”

“The cock an’ balls an’ the hot clerks? Or the clouds?”

“The former. I missed it so much.”

“Hah!” she squawks more than laughs. “There’s no way that you got around thanks to cars. No way.”

“You’re right, I didn’t. But there’s something about them that just… attracts hot people. You know?”

“I always thought that people who’d work on cars’d be all gross. Workin’ with all that grime an’ grease all the time.”

“That’s the look, though,” he replies. “It’s great, right?”

She motions to her feathers. “You think I’d wanna get down with someone all nasty like that? Have you seen what happens to birds who get muddy, Cherry?”

“Fair point. It’s not for everyone.” He turns to her, pointing a finger as they walk. “But it’s hard to see why not! You saw that guy, right?”

“I did.”

“And you didn’t feel some butterflies?”

“No sir.”

Cherry squints.

“Nope!” Olive replies, throwing up her free arm. “I didn’t find him attractive, Cherry.”

“You’re not screwing with me?”

“You were the only one wantin’ to hop his nitrous in the room, buddy.”

“Okay. Fine, okay,” he says, giving up. “The cock and balls jokes end once we’re at the car, okay?”

She squawks again, nearly dropping the jug of biofuel. “No promises!”

Chapter End.

==============================================================

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Three, Chapter Eleven

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

The Corpse, the Medic, and the Detective shoot their hands into the air as the gangsters’ pistols are pulled and the barrels are leveled their way. “What the fuck do you think you’re doin’ back here, huh? This is a private area, you fuckin’ idiots!” one of them says, shirtless, pushing the master clothier behind him with his free hand. “Get the fuck out!”

    Meat looks around the room. This is it. This is what they remember, a back room full of expensive suit-making fabric, pre-made three-pieces hanging from ceiling to floor, a full body mirror, and private appointments with the local master anytime they wanted. The gang pays for everything, but you couldn’t have more than a couple suits if you were a lackey. Meat remembers having more than a couple in their time.

    The floodgates are closing. The memories are settling in their mind, quickly sinking below to act as silt in a river of flame. In a desperate attempt to keep them flowing, Meat asks, “Wait, who’s the capo?”

    They look at one another, then at the Clothier, who looks as though he could put a stain in his pants at any given moment. The shirtless one cocks his head to the side. Not in a way that implied disbelief in the confidence of his victims, but rather genuine confusion that a talking skull would ask such a question of him. “The fuck did you just ask me?”

    “I asked who the capo was,” Meat repeats.

    “Why’s it matter?”

    “Doesn’t it?”

    The gangster’s face contorts. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

    “My memory’s gone. I don’t remember a lot, but I remember this,” Meat says, gesturing to the room. “Can you tell me who the capo is?”

    The gangster and his cohort look at one another again. Still holding their guns to the group, they convene for a few moments to discuss. In hushed conversation, they assess the situation in-depth, or at least as in-depth as a couple of ground-level pawns in organized crime can get. Eventually, the shirtless one responds, “It’s Leslie Carnevale, still. Hasn’t changed for years.”

    Another spark sends Meat’s memory into overdrive. Leslie Carnevale, the capo of the surrounding area, the guy in charge of keeping Shepherd Gemstone out of their northern territories. Rumoured former union worker who didn’t like the post-capitalist environment and abandoned it to do things his way. Both overly ambitious and overly familiar with anyone he thinks has promise.

    “The boss,” Meat says. “He’s still the boss.”

    Again, the gangster’s face contorts in confusion. So much so that he drops his gun arm in disbelief. “Who are you, anyways?”

    The Corpse shakes their head. “I don’t know. Leslie was my boss, though.”

    “Shit, man,” he says, tucking the gun back into his waistband. “You were one of us? What the fuck happened to you?” He approaches Meat carefully, looking to put a hand on their shoulder for comfort. “And who are these clowns you’re saddled with?” he quietly asks, motioning to Brie and Roxanne, who remain silent.

    “Friends.” Meat looks the gangster in the eye, and he quickly takes his hand off their shoulder. “Can you take us to Leslie?”

    “Hey, hold on a freakin’ minute,” the other gangster interjects, raising his gun again. “You’re that guy. You remember what the boss said, Tommy? About the Dragon thing, about how we was sackin’ that buster for good?”

    Tommy’s eyes widen and he jumps back a few steps. His gun is quickly swiped from his waistband and aimed at the group again. “Ho-ly shit. Nearly got chummy there for a sec! Thanks, Mickey,” he says. “Yeah, we can take you to see the boss.”

“There a problem?” Meat asks.

“He’s out for your head, buddy. And that means you’re comin’ with us whether you like it or not.”     Meat sighs. Though it’s better than nothing, being dragged to their former boss— that they just remembered they had— against their will isn’t what they would’ve preferred when attempting to remember their personal history. They turn to look at Brie and Roxanne. Brie looks surprisingly calm, inquisitive, and Roxanne seems similarly annoyed at the circumstances. At least there are no objections.

Back at one of the Carnevale’s HQ offices, the back room of a local florist’s shop, Jules finds himself before the desk of the capo, Leslie Carnevale, who has leaned back quite far in his cheap, faux-leather office chair. As Leslie takes a puff from a cigar, he motions for the Vampire to sit down opposite, in a far less comfortable plastic chair.

Jules does as he’s told and says, “So, as I was saying, there’s been a problem.”

    “I can see that,” Leslie responds. “I can also see that you’ve been runnin’ with some lady I’ve never met until now.” The Capo’s tone turns ice-cold. “Let’s talk about that first, Jules.”

    “Well, uh,” he starts. “We met on a security job. Before I was in the family. And we fell in love. And now she’s my fiance?” His voice peaks at that word, “fiance,” and it struggles to leave his throat. Lying outright is a difficulty; things are so much easier when you can cover something up by simply not saying anything. As if to add some sugar to the dreadfully told lie, he smiles, raising the tips of his carefully groomed mustache in the process and baring his fangs sweetly.     “C’mon now, Jules. You think that line’s gonna work on me? We all know you’re gayer than a fuckin’ fruitcake. I know, all the boys know, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the northern territory knows,” the Capo responds, leaning forward in his seat. “There’s no way you’d fall for a chick, and I know she hasn’t been in the picture since before us, so don’t feed me that bullshit. Tell me what’s been happenin’ between you two. Be straight with me— and I ain’t tryin’ to joke around, here.” Leslie chuckles, his dour expression tilting up at the corners.

    Jules’ smile fades and he clenches his jaw, rocking his head from one side to the next like a child caught in a lie before he spills, “We’re partners. Met when I was working that job for Shepherd Gemstone. We do bounty work now, usually outside family territory. But, our current quarrel led us here. And so, here we are.”

    Leslie frowns. “I see. And you like her?”

    “I thought you just said you knew I was gay, boss?” The corners of Jules’ mouth pull down further, mirroring the boss’s frown.

    The Capo chuckles. “I ain’t talkin’ about that. I’m talkin’ partner-wise. ‘Cause we could get you a new partner, Jules. You’re worth a lot to me, and if she’s givin’ you trouble, we could do a lot to solve that problem.” he says, moving to open a cabinet.

    Jules’ eyes widen, and he holds up his hands in protest. “No, no! She’s my best goddamn friend! I wouldn’t swap her out for the world.”

    “Just checkin’, Jules,” Leslie leans back in his seat again. “‘Cause we saw how she was lookin’ at you, and I figured that you might be trapped with her or somethin’.”

    Jules thought about this for a moment. “No, sir, I think right now she’s trapped with me. If you wanna put it that way.”

    “How so?”

    “Well…” he starts, before there’s a series of knocks on the door behind them.

    The Capo holds up a finger, and calls out, “Hey, what the fuck’s the deal? I’m havin’ a meeting here!”

    From the other side of the door, a muffled voice says, “We’ve got’em, boss! That guy you wanted!”

      Jules now stands behind the Capo and Meat stands on the opposite side of the desk, their hands bound with rope and with Tommy and his pal, Mickey, sticking their guns into their back.

    “Are you Leslie?” Meat asks.

    “I sure am,” he responds. “And you’re supposed to be dead.”

    “I’m just as confused as you are.”

    “Confused isn’t the word. I’m absolutely fuckin’ baffled. We sent you to fuckin’ die, Mack. You shouldn’t have come back.”

    “Mack?” A tickle of a memory begins to burrow into the base of Meat’s skull.

    “Your name. It’s Mackenzie,” the Capo raises an eyebrow. “You know, somethin’ just hit me. You’ve obviously been turned to a piece of charcoal by that fuckin’ Wyrm. There’s no doubt about that, but what I’m wonderin’ is, did you actually die? Is the person I’m seein’ now the same person I knew?” He takes a deep puff of his cigar. 

“I’ve got a hunch. Grab their medic friend, I wanna hear her opinion,” he says, motioning toward the guards.

    Mickey and Tommy look to one another, then to Leslie as Tommy asks, “What about the nerdy looking one?”

    “What’s she gonna do, take you both down? Ain’t like there are cops to run to. Just get the fox broad.”

    Soon after, Roxanne is brought into the room. She shoots a nasty look at Jules, who shrugs, before she turns to answer the Capo’s question. “Yes, they’re quite dead. Their heart isn’t beating, and their lungs only work for show. That’s as far as my field diagnostic went.”

    “So they’re a Notus?” asks Leslie.     Both Mickey and Tommy lean around Meat to stare at Leslie with dumb looks, partially out of a sudden feeling that they’re out of the loop and partially because the word drives them to bear an expression akin to that little kids wear when they can tell someone’s swearing in another language, if only by tone. The ignorant but curious looks make Jules chuckle, and neither Meat nor Roxanne take the sound lightly, glaring at the Vampire.     Leslie rubs his brow with a ringed hand. “It’s an old legend. If someone with unfinished business dies in a fire, there’s a chance they’ll sit back up. Sometimes they’ll keep their memory, sometimes they’ll only remember enough to keep the lights on. And they always come back with enough firepower to wipe places off the map. Literally.”

    “I knew that,” Mickey says.

    Tommy’s curious expression shifts to a glare, pointed directly at his peer beside him as he growls, “No, you didn’t.”

“Both of you shut up,” snaps Leslie. The Capo points to Meat. “You’re one of those things now, aren’t you?”

    Meat doesn’t respond. Their mind has been put in the metaphorical meat grinder. Leslie clearly isn’t a spring chicken, and by the way he’s looking at Meat, they can tell that there’s some quiet fear in his eyes over what they could do. He’s looking at them and seeing a burning city. And that terrifies Meat, too.

    “The dead are meant to stay dead,” Leslie says. “Ain’t supposed to be an issue for livin’ people, and on top of bein’ a monster, you’re a liability. It’s a shame, ‘cause you really were good. Boys?”

    The gunshots don’t sound out. Both Tommy and Mickey are staring at something, something behind Jules and their boss, and the shirtless man asks with a hint of trepidation in his voice, “What the hell’s that?”

Behind Leslie, a bright light slowly begins tracing its way up the wall, forming a right angle, moving horizontally, then turning again as it moves back down the wall. Everyone in the room notices as well, as a result of the loud hissing, alongside the smoke that comes with melting mud-brick, the interloper carving along like a hot knife through room temperature butter. Before long, the cutout has been kicked down by a monstrous, clawed foot.

    Blondie trods inside, leaving burning prints in the stone behind the florist’s shop. “Am I interrupting something?”

==============================================================

    “Okay, but her? You literally just met.”

    “Penny, I don’t know what isn’t clicking.” Janet smiles over at the werewolf, brown hair pressed back out of her face by a delightfully kitsch red hairband with white polka dots. “Connect the dots, then get a swimsuit on and join me. It’s boring to swim alone.”

    Hickory lets out a huff and sits herself down in one of the deck chairs beside the pool, a drink in one hand. “I don’t feel like swimming and I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” she replies, her red eyes watching the human drift in the water. “What dots are there to connect, Jan? You— you—”

    “I ensured the financial stability of my children’s future and maybe landed a new partner, not a big deal.” She shrugs, adjusting the big, round sunglasses that covered just about most of her upper face. “If I didn’t know any better I’d think you felt jilted.”

    A heaving shrug is given in response before Hickory takes a long sip from her glass, which is filled mostly with some kind of frosty slush cut by a sour, acidic fruit and no small amount of alcohol. “I’m not jilted. You know I don’t swing that way. I was just surprised to see that you swung that way, Janet. I half expected you to go for someone like…  like Gilroy or—”

    “I wouldn’t sleep with Harry if he were the last man on the continent,” Janet points out, resting her arms on the cement border around the pool, “And I’m glad to hear you aren’t upset. It’s funny you mention assumptions, since I had assumed you were about as straight as a circle. Well, that’s neither here nor there. It’s not as though I don’t like her, Penny. She’s really nice.”

    “Is she?” Penelope’s lips pull into a half-frown, eyes narrowing down at her drink. “Seems like another crazy adventuring type to me.”

    Janet laughs, and it’s a soft, confident sound. “I had two kids and a decent marriage with one before, so I don’t see how it’s all that different to pick up another when the old one kicks it.” She lifts her glasses to try and make eye contact with Hickory from the poolside, and it takes a moment or so to stick but in time the suited werewolf is stuck looking her in the eyes properly, rather than staring into her drink. “It’s what I’m into, Penny. You can’t go wrong with a lycan who likes to get their hands dirty, especially the ones willing to do high paying work. Don’t act like this is all her doing. She fits the bill and is willing to help— and those shoulders are to die for.”

    “I guess being a killer has some benefits to the physique. Come on, though. Is it really that easy to replace Blondie?”

    Janet brings a hand to her own collarbone, feigning offense. “I guess I should be insulted that you think it’s just replacement? You know I cared for Blondie, but we were friends. The whole marriage thing’s mostly been transactional, you know? I thought we’d have some cute kids, and with our combined incomes we’d live like suburban royalty. With Blondie gone, there’s a space there, one best filled by someone like him. Someone interested in that sort of thing, Penny.”

    The point lands, and Hickory chuckles. “You know, I wonder if it’s accurate to call you bisexual, then. Is there a word for attraction toward moneyed, aggressive lycanthropes?”

    “I’m not interested in such specific labels, Penny.” Finally, Janet pulls herself up and out of the pool, sitting with her feet still gently disturbing the water. “My relationship with him was like living a dream. If you were living your dream, would you want to wake up?”

    Hickory’s eyebrows raise. “No, I don’t think I would.”

    “Exactly. We understood each other and when he was here, he tossed money at us until he had nothing else to toss, and took us on stupidly expensive vacations. He prepared funds for the kids’ education, he gave them toys, he got me shiny new things and sometimes we might’ve hung out for a little while to enjoy our time, but it was nothing more than that. Blondie and I were friends with rings who fucked. That was my dream, and in a moment,” Janet snaps her fingers, “it seemed to be over. But, when I lost a friend, I was gifted the opportunity to make a new one. My boy’s going to be an adventurer and my daughter’s going to go to one of the best colleges in the world.” Her lips part in a grin. “If Piper goes where I think she’s going, she can do that for me, for my family.”

    Hickory considers this, taking a sip of her slushy drink. She has to at least get some of it in her system before it melts, as philosophizing with a housewife takes time. As she does so, Janet rises again, steps her way over to stand beside the reclining Hickory, and undoes the werewolf’s bun to let her darker, coarser brown hair fall in wild curls, and Janet says, “Please treat her right, Penny. For me? Though I’m confident, I can tell that she’s got— what’s the word, a little more pride and a little less skill, than Blondie? Bluster. She’s an investment at the moment, and I would like to see it realized.”

    A long moment of consideration passes, as does a carefully manicured hand through Hickory’s hair as Janet pats her atop her head. “You’re asking me to give her a boost.” Hickory states, flatly. “You know that’s not allowed.”

    “Aw, don’t be like that. Did you see the way she jumped at the chance to get into his old gear? She’s got the chops for it, but I have a feeling that she’s a little low on experience. I’m not asking you to promote her,” Another unerringly pleasing laugh exits Janet, and Hickory lets out a sigh. “I’m just asking you to make sure she doesn’t bite it before things become stable down here. Pretty please?”

    The Werewolf looks to her drink, then to the woman, and finally to the pool. “I’ll see how long of a leash I’ve got. Hey, let’s talk about this later. If you’ve got any of that bastard’s swim trunks, I can cop one of his shirts to go swimming. None of yours will fit me.”

    “I’m not short, Penny,” Janet says as she leans in to prod one of Hickory’s cheeks. “You’re just tall. And once we’re done and the kids are asleep, how about we go out and see a show? Plenty’s going on.”

    Finally, Hickory’s prodded enough that she gets up, hands on her hips and her drink abandoned on a small table beside her chair. “You know what? I’d like that. I’ll think about all this shit later. It’s not like anything important’s happening.”

Chapter End.

============================================================== 

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Three, Chapter Nine

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

There’s little conversation between the two mercenaries as they eat their lunch. Morning had been preoccupied with scouring Fusillade for supplies— at the top of their list was something to combat the literal firepower of that walking corpse, Meat. They eventually found someone who was able to procure a small amount of burn salve, as well as their medical supplies for the foreseeable future. Jules caught a severely odd look from the clerk when he asked whether they had any blood bags lying around, especially when he bore his fangs as an example for why.

    He now sits across from Lucille on a painted park bench, the seating for a local outdoor bistro, lightly cradling his side while sipping the blood he’d bought (placed into a glass from the bistro) through a straw. He hadn’t taken the time to preen this morning, and when his moustache tickles the rim of his class, it adds to an already overwhelming feeling of dirtiness. At this rate, he figures that he’s going to have to scrub pretty hard to get himself back to where he was.

    “Look,” he says, in an attempt to break the silence. “I’m sorry.”

    “You already said that,” Lucille responds. She takes a bite of her roast pork sandwich, not breaking eye contact. “And I already said that it’ll take more than that, Jules.”

    “Okay, shoot. Let’s talk about what that entails, then. Communication is key, right?”

    Lucille takes a long sip of her drink. “When I figure out what that is, I’ll tell you. Eat your lunch.”

    “I will in a second, just,” Jules looks down at his plate. It’s a pork sandwich as well, but when he checked the contents of it earlier, he found that she had ordered it with extra greens. There’s a handful of foods that vampire teeth don’t agree with, and leafy lettuces are up there with the best of them. “How about this. I’ll answer questions about the Carnevale thing. You want transparency, that’s transparency.”

    “Jules, shut up.”

    “Here’s one. I’ve been with them since before we left for Kiln. I had to keep it a secret from Piper mainly, ‘cause she was with Shepherd Gemstone,” he starts, motioning with his arms. “Here’s another. Remember Davey? Yeah, I’ve known him for years now. I knew he’d been living near Kiln, but I completely didn’t expect to run into him. I thought I was going to have to send you to la-la land when we walked in, since he’s one of ours. Thank god you didn’t clock him.”

Seeing no interruption from Lucille, Jules continues, “And, god, the reason we’re hunting that corpse? The capo wants them dead. They were one of our best, but they started to get insubordinate, so they got sent off on the Dragon hunt to go die for sure. But, the capo wanted some of us to go and check to see if they were actually dead.”

    Lucille leans over the table, slapping one of her hands over his mouth. She hisses, “I said shut up, Jules! Look around you!”

    What he finds is a group of well-dressed, broad-daylight gangsters a few tables adjacent at the venue, unknowing of their presence but definitely keen-eared, and definitely armed. Jules widens his eyes, and gently removes her hand from his face.  “Yeah, I know those guys! They’re with the capo, actually. Must be out on their lunch break.”

    “They don’t know me, though, and I don’t think I want to know them. Just be quiet. We can talk about this shit later.”

    At that moment, a voice calls out from that corner of the venue, “‘Eyy, Jules!” Lucille sits back down in her seat in a huff, and takes another angry bite of her sandwich. Her eyes read “You’re fucking this up again,” to the Vampire. Jules starts to sweat as he turns around on the bench, waving his free hand to the gangsters and giving them a greeting.

    A masculine figure, all slicked-back hair and expensive finger rings and surrounded by tough-looking folk in dark sunglasses, puts a hand to his forehead to confirm his suspicions. He wears an obnoxiously loud green and yellow, diagonally-patterned sports coat over a loose black blouse, and when he realizes it’s Jules, he beckons for the Vampire to come over proper. Jules holds up a finger in response, and turns back to his companion. “Lucille, they want to see us.”

    “They want to see you, Jules, not me,” she says.

    Jules points toward Lucille with a finger, and raises an eyebrow. The capo shakes his head “sure,” and beckons them over again.

    “He’s fine with it, don’t worry! Come on,” he says, standing up. “It’ll be weird if you don’t.”

    Lucille says nothing, but stands up from her meal and follows him over to the table, where she finds the group of gangsters to be all male, already a pitcher of fruity summer mixed drink in, and all annoyingly young. It’s impressive, really, how young some of them are, as usually it would take a couple years of existence for those who’d been Spawned to lose their innocence fully. When she looks at two in particular, she figures that they could have a couple decades before their Body Ages catch up with them. There’s a certain vigor behind their eyes that tips her off, puts her on edge. These are the kind of folk who wouldn’t know danger if they had a sword in their gut, and that’s not a quality you look for with long-term positions as gangsters.

    She finds herself clenching as Jules converses with them, trying to not look as upset as she is with him. He’s had all these friends, all this business going on this entire goddamn time, she thinks to herself. And his empty-headed ass didn’t think to key me in to any of it. Any of it at all.

“So, J,” the Capo starts, having sat back down on his bench. “You gonna introduce us to your pal here?” 

It’s not hard to tell what the gangsters might be thinking, and by the expression on Jules’ face, he doesn’t like one bit of it. Though, the capo seems to be looking at her a little differently, perhaps with a little more respect. Fuck it. Reap what you sow, she thinks again. “I’m Lucille, and we’re getting married,” she says, as confidently as she can.

Everyone at the table goes silent, and she shoots Jules a look so sharp that it could be considered telepathy in certain circles, saying directly into his mind, “If you don’t shut the fuck up right now, you’re going to regret it.”

She puts an arm around the Vampire, and continues to weave her lie.

“It’s been three years, but he finally popped the question,” Lucille says, pulling his cheek. “Feels like just yesterday we were on that security job, and he helped me sharpen my knives.”

    Jules is then flooded with cheers and congratulations from the gangsters, including the Capo, who though is clearly suspicious, decides to go along with what’s going on for now. The Capo stands up from his seat, walks over to where Jules is standing, and gives him a hearty pat on the back, looking him in the eye when he says,

    “So when’s the wedding?”

    “I don’t know,” he responds, looking to Lucille. “When is it?”

    “Oh, we haven’t worked it all out just yet. We were waiting for him to finish this last job before deciding,” she says.

    The Capo narrows his eyes. “Which job would that happen to be?”

    “The—” Jules starts.

    Lucille cuts him off, “I think he said something about cleaning up after a Dragon? It seemed pretty dangerous, if you ask me. Nothing he couldn’t handle, though.”

    “Yeah, that one.”

    “Right, and what’s the news on that? You were on that party from what I heard,” the Capo responds.

    “Well, the news is that they’re not dead,” Jules says, pointing to his side. “Turns out they know some kind of fire magic. Learned that the hard way, ‘cause they burned me pretty bad.” He frowns. “Sorry, boss.”

    The Capo’s face scrunches up in a mixture of concern, confusion, and disappointment. “Okay, you’re gonna have to rewind the tape on that one, pal,” he says. When he notices Lucille glancing back over toward their food, he pats Jules on the back again. “Later, though. Don’t wanna spoil the occasion with business, you know?”

    “Whenever you need me, boss,” Jules responds.

    “‘Course. It was nice meeting you,” the Capo says, waving the two of them off.

    The Vampire visibly deflates and follows Lucille back to the table, where she looks as though she wants to slap him with his sandwich instead of letting him eat it.

He moves to talk, but she holds up a hand, takes a bite, chews, swallows, and then finally lowers it.

    “Have fun explaining this to your boss. And how I don’t have a ring on,” she says. “He noticed, and he was about to drill you for it, Jules.”

    “Fuck.”

    “Yeah.”

==============================================================

The truck jolts Judith awake on a warm afternoon that would’ve been better spent in bed with the curtains drawn. She reaches up and rubs her face as another jolt comes, the heavy vehicle barreling down the road and Fusillade fading away, disappearing as the trees become less and less decrepit, returning to a more typical, rusty-hued canopy as they gain distance. Beside her in the truck’s cab is Cherry, who’s too busy focusing on the road to notice her, and on her other side is Olive, who hadn’t fallen asleep once during the entirety of their ride so far.

    She could kill for a decent conversation to eat the time, with how hard it is for her to stay asleep in this roaring monster. Glancing over her shoulder, she shoots a look toward the two in the bed of the truck, Leon and Azariah. They, too, are too focused to spare her a glance at the moment— Leon on the disappearing Fusillade, Azariah on the road itself as it stretched out behind them.

    “Next stop maybe you can sit in back with them,” Olive says quietly, only barely audible over the bubbling thrum of the engine. “I get it, it’s kinda cramped with the three of us in here.”

    “It’s not that, Olive. Don’t act like that.”

    The Owl looks past Judith toward Cherry, then focuses her large eyes on Judith. It’s a strange feeling to stare deep into eyes multiple times the size of your own, especially those of a large, potentially magic suffused avian. And then those eyes turn toward the folks in the back, her entire head turning to get a look, and then they’re back on Judith. “Maybe next stop Azariah’ll switch seats.”

    Judith blinks. “Why?”

    “Because you want to sit with Leon.” Delivery is flat. A matter of fact, not of opinion or surprise, just left her face.

    Judith shifts awkwardly in her seat, directing her own eyes down to her shorts rather than keep eye contact with Olive. “I don’t know what would make you say that. We’d just complain all the way to the next town.”

    “You two like complainin’,” she says. “More importantly, y’all like complainin’ together. It’s just about all you do. You did it even before we left and you’ve been doin’ it even more now that we’re on the run. When we have to split up, you complain, but you complain especially when you’re not saddled with Leon. I might be dumb, but I’m not that dumb, Judith.”

    “Never said you were. You just don’t give me a lot of faith with your whole anxiety schtick.”

    “It’s not a schtick. I’m attentive all the time, nervous as all hell, tryin’ to survive. That means, though, that I see a lot, hear a lot, and I connect dots. I don’t always connect ‘em right, of course, because sometimes I connect dots that shouldn’t be connected. Sometimes I screw up and connect dots that are entirely unrelated just because somethin’ vaguely implies they might be connected. Understand?”

    Judith’s lips purse, and then she shrugs. “I guess.”

    “No you don’t.” Olive leans in. “You don’t understand. You’re not used to survival situations, Judith. You ain’t trained for this. And that trainin’ has made me realize you and Leon—”

    “Whatever,” Judith interrupts. “Doesn’t matter, shut up. You can see whatever you want to see, I don’t care. I’ve got more important things to worry about, like whether or not Cherry’s going to crash this junkheap into a tree or if I’m going to be cut open by people I used to consider coworkers.”

        Azariah scratches the underside of his jaw and watches as the trees begin forming into a woody, orange blur on either side of the road. “Already told you Leon, Gutter’s Glade is our best bet short of headin’ to Cherry’s hometown.”

    “Right. Just checking. That was the plan from the beginning, right?” Leon asks, leaning back against the side of the truck bed, his vest taking most of the roughness from the wood. “And it’s not called Gutter’s Glade anymore, hasn’t been for years. They renamed it ‘Pickman’s Hope’ a while back for the optics.”

    Azariah’s head tilts to the side as he rubs a temple. “I suppose that’d be best, considerin’ the first name wasn’t exactly the cleanest sounding, regardless of whether you took gutter to mean garbage trench or somebody with a knife. I like the old name better, still. Tough name, tough town.”

    “It threw Shepherd out on his ass, allegedly. Back when I first tried to run, Pickman’s Hope was our goal, too. We thought it’d be our win condition.”

    “A fair assumption.” The Hare’s muzzle pulls into a smile. “Just about one of the safest places we could go, I think, but we run into a different problem there. While I know some folks up around the place, even some who’ve moved up in the world, we can’t really stay. Don’t think any of us really know a trade, and as tough as the town is, those folk followin’ us aren’t gonna try to set out for all-out war. They’re hunters, not strikebreakers, and while Gutters— Pickman’s Hope can handle a line of strikebreakers, it ain’t a place built to protect against anyone who’s only after a couple people. From what I’ve gathered, we’re safer from them with Cherry’s family further along.”

    “Agreed.” Leon rubs his jaw, fingers lingering on either side. “Family can be reliable. Sometimes.”

    “You even have a family to base that on or are you just basin’ that on Cherry?”

    “Do you, Azariah?”

    The old man laughs. “I slept around a lot before I met Roxanne, so maybe. We’ll call it a non-zero percent chance of me bein’ somebody’s papa. I think if I had any kids, though, they would’ve already come knockin’ at my door by this point. So, no, no family.”

    “No family here, either. Friends did, and it was useful. Never had anybody to rely on.”

    “What about yourself, Leon?”

    “If I could rely on myself, I would’ve gotten out the first time.”

    Again, the Hare laughs. “I suppose so! That’d be real unfortunate for us, I think. You’ve been a big help.”

    “If you get caught, I get caught. Can’t let that happen.” He shifts to sit forward a bit, heavy arms on strong knees. “Don’t oversell me, though. I’m not the one fistfighting men twice my size.”

    “You had the routes set up that got us out of there— and Judith’s more tolerable around your grouchy ass than she ever was on the job.”

    Leon’s face twists some as he brings one of his hands up to rub the back of his neck. “Let’s not talk about that.”

    “It’s not like she can hear us, Leon, truck’s too loud. Watch— Judith, Judith, Judith!”

    The both of them turn their eyes toward the cabin window, which was shut, and watch those inside.

    “Cherry, we asked you something.” Judith’s voice takes on a slight growl as the words slip between her teeth, which are looking very sharp today. “What’s the deal with all this truck shit? I thought you were a heavy tools sort of mechanic.”

    He opens his mouth, considers what was about to exit it, and then shuts his mouth again to give the thoughts a few extra moments to cook. Only when the alarm rings somewhere in the back of his head does he finally give them an answer. “Well, maybe I used to, uh, really enjoy driving. Before I came to work at Shepherd, anyways.”

    “Maybe? That’s not an answer. I want something good so I can justify the giant fucking hole you put in our finances for a piece of garbage on wheels.”

    Olive clears her throat. “Come on, Judith, what do you expect to hear? He probably just worked as a mechanic or somethin’ before comin’ to Shepherd. I mean, it’s not like they’d hire someone whose only merits are street mods.” As she finishes speaking, a look of utter fear washes over her. “Oh God. Cherry please tell me—”

    “I knew he was far too young to be a properly trained mechanic, I knew it, I knew…”

    “Hey!” Cherry raises his voice, taking a single hand off the steering wheel to get the two’s attention. “I also had letters of recommendation from my neighbors. That has to count for something, right?”

    Olive, shocked with terror to the point of resignation, sighs. “We should’ve walked.”

    Judith nods. “Agreed.”

    Azariah’s been knocking on the window and calling names for a solid half minute and none of them have noticed. So, he shrugs and returns to lounging in the truck bed, moving to settle on his back to look up at the sky. “Be open, Leon. You could admit to murderin’ somebody right here and I’d be the only person that hears.”

    “I’ll pass. I’m not in the mood for a heart to heart right now, old man.” The Orc’s eyes drift toward the window, following the movements of Judith’s wild hair as she and Olive gesticulate wildly. He puts a hand in his pocket. He can still feel it, the dust particulate bag. “...I don’t know. Maybe I feel like what happened to her’s my fault.”

    Azariah yawns. “What, like you’re the one who chopped off her hand? Don’t be too hard on yourself, the thing was probably gonna blow no matter what we did. ‘Sides, she blames Cherry anyway. Really tears into the poor kid. I mean, I get it, but still— he did all he could.”

    “Yeah.” Leon rubs his face. “I guess so. So, how long to Pickman’s Hope?”

    “No clue, only ever walked there. Never went by truck, this is a new one.”

    Far behind them, Fusillade fades into the trees, the blackened wood and cold ash mingling beyond the warm colors of the autumnal forests. With every moment, they get further and further away.

==============================================================

Meat finds themselves assaulted with the fragment of a memory as they walk into a clothier’s shop with Brie and Roxanne. Their eyes begin to dart around the place in an attempt to find anything they feel an attachment to. Racks of shirts and jerkins, made from plain, rough-spun, neutral-coloured fabric? Nope. Gaudy shauls and robes, hung up high so that shoplifters could be identified through the sound of a jump? Not those. A young apprentice, who is clearly having a hard time processing what she is looking at, but is still trying her hardest to maintain her sense of customer-decorum? Close.

    There’s something else, something that makes them tap Roxanne on the shoulder and say, “I know this place, but I don’t know why.”

    “There’s a chance you’ve been here before, Meat,” she responds. “Anything in particular tip you off?”

    “I’m trying to figure that out. Nothing I can see is making me remember.”

    Brie interjects, asking, “Are you seeing these textures? I would not have thought residue from Dragon’s breath would have this effect on fabric. It’s fascinating.”

    Roxanne smiles. She puts a hand on Meat’s shoulder, leads them down an aisle. “Let’s get you clothed before we start chasing memories. How about that?”

    Meat nods, not realizing what they had just gotten themselves into.

    “Is it to your liking?” Brie asks, knocking on the door of the changing room.

    Meat looked at themselves in the mirror. Loose canvas pants, ash grey. Loose canvas shirt, sleeveless, light grey. Black and red poncho, chest-length, dragon-scale patterned. It left their fiery orange limbs exposed to the ground and air, as well as abstained from covering their head, just in case there were any sort of hidden fire-breathing capabilities they hadn’t manifested yet. It was plain but efficient, and Roxanne had absolutely no part in putting the outfit together. Brie had done it all by herself, after much thought and consideration, and she was quite proud of it.

    “I have another poncho picked out, in the case that you find this one to hit an emotional nerve,” she says, knocking once again. “Are you alright in there, Meat?”

    “This is good. Don’t people usually wear shoes?”

    “Your feet would burn through them, yes?”

    Meat thinks about this for a moment. “Good point. I’m coming out now.”

    “Wonderful. I look forward to seeing it for myself!”

    They find themselves under the intense scrutiny of Brie, and the amused interest of Roxanne as they walk out of the changing room. The Fox holds a hand over her mouth, lightly masking a smile. The Detective holds her fist up to her chin, re-analysing the three pieces, individually, of the outfit that Meat was to wear.

    Brie is the first to say anything. “I struggled to choose between a more red-toned off-white, and the grey-toned off-white you wear now. I am second-second guessing myself on this decision.”

    Meat shrugs. “It feels like I’m wearing a sack.”

    “It’ll get softer as you wear it, don’t worry,” Roxanne responds. “You look cute, Meat.”

    “Cute? They look like they are dressed accordingly,” says Brie. “I didn’t choose these pieces for their supposed ‘cute’ traits. Have I missed something crucial?”

    “No, no. I just think they look very old-fashioned. And that’s cute, to me.”

    “Ponchos are old-fashioned?” Brie asks, scrunching up her face.

    “They haven’t been in vogue for a few decades or so, Ms. Brie.”

    “Oh. Shall I choose something different, then?”

    “I like it,” Roxanne says. She motions to Meat. “Do you like it?”

    Again, Meat shrugs. “It’s like a sack, but it’s nice. I like black, I think.”

    “See, Ms. Brie? They like it too, and you helped them find another piece to their brain puzzle.”

    The Detective beams. “I’m glad I could be of service.”

    After more shopping that results in Brie choosing a single scarf, coloured and patterned in a similar way to Meat’s poncho, they exit the clothier’s store, and park themselves on a bench outside. Though now clothed, Meat still finds their head unsatisfied, as the fragment of a memory that plagued them earlier yet lingered. It paced around their skull as they listened to Brie and Roxanne talk about where to go next, what to do. It danced around their vision, taunting them this way and that, toward pathways that they know they’ve treaded before, but can’t seem to take the first step down.

    Then, something happens that pulls a rip-cord in Meat’s head. A pair of men, both wearing tucked-in dress shirts and a pair of dress pants, walk past their bench. They’re clearly missing their coats, but that didn’t seem to bother them one bit. They talk loudly and proudly, walking into the clothier’s store to announce themselves to the owner, and move down the main aisle, past the dressing area, through a heavy door into a back room.

    “Can we go back inside?” Meat asks quickly. “I think I remember something.”

Chapter End.

============================================================== 

[ Table of Contents ]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[empty-masks]

Book Three, Chapter Four

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

It’s a bumpy ride to the source of the ash and smoke, or at least what large, generalized section of former forest one might find it in. In the driver seat of the van is Vinny, and in the passenger seat is Jones. Behind that, in the first of the triple-seater rows, are Jules, Lucille, and John. On the next are Brie and Roxanne, settled neatly in the back to the left of Todd.

In total, there are eight of them. It’s not the biggest group for an expedition into a potential biohazard zone, but it’s larger than any single member expected it to be and in all honesty, now that Jules and Lucille are here, just about everyone’s glad the group’s so large. It means, hopefully, nobody will feel motivated to pull something. The two mercs are tough, but it’s in bad taste to beat up well-intentioned locals, or an injured old fox, or a freelance investigator who’s currently on the job. Brie and Roxanne are kept in check because, as much as the two would like to watch Jules and Lucille, if they end up starting a fight? The townies won’t take to it, and then they’ll be the ones dealing with the public ire. And, of course, none of the locals have any intention of crossing some drifting manhunters or the strange duo who’d shown up in town. Best case scenario, they trudge around in the ash for a bit, find nothing, and go to some other section of the forest before eventually leaving (and getting paid). The next best thing would be if they find corpses— sure, it might be the mission objective, but it’s not anything anyone in their right mind wants to see.

No smalltalk is made on the way, though there is a while where Jules sits in his seat with his knees up and his hat tilted. He stares with milky eyes over toward Brie and Roxanne, leering. It’s a minute of staring down the detective before Lucille taps him and he snorts to life again, blinking as though waking up from some manner of slumber and saying, “Oh, shit, didn’t mean to conk out like that. Pardon me.”

Neither Roxanne nor Brie are sure what to make of that little moment. Sleeping with his eyes open is one option, but he very well could’ve just been covering his ass for some weird thing he wanted to do that didn’t work out. Neither voice any concern, but they share glances of understanding over it. Jules is an odd one, an odd one indeed, as he’s a Vampire— and he’s hunting those folks that Roxanne, at least, sought to protect— there’s no telling what his goal is overall. For all they know, it’s some ploy to get them off guard, something to unsettle them. After all, it’s public knowledge that Vampires will act odd if they’re hungry.

Jules rubs his eyes and blinks them a few more times before he spends the rest of the trip staring ahead, burying his gaze in the headrest of the driver’s seat.

Lucille sighs. Jules falling asleep with his eyes open isn’t anything new to her, it just tends to be more prevalent when he’s starting to get low on blood again. He had yet to start shrinking much, so she’s not inclined to get to cutting and offer him a bit more of her own. She does, however, take a moment to regard the other people in the vehicle as well. Provided they could play their cards right, a bite to eat might not be out of the cards yet. It would, however, need to be on the way out and after they’ve done the job, though. It wouldn’t be hard to connect the dots after it happens, but by the point anyone realizes there are dots in the first place they would be long gone.

The van parks at the edge of the road (which they had only followed by the clearing of trees, seeing as how everything is covered in ash), where a wooden marker with a small, yellow flag has been pounded into the soil. The back is opened and the rest of them follow after Vinny, who steps out from behind the wheel to start trekking into the woods.

When Brie and Roxanne exit, they stick close to one another and speak in low, whispering tones. “We should keep an eye on them.” Says the Detective, keeping her arm stiff for Roxanne to hang onto when crossing the rough, craggy terrain closer to the incinerated trees. “The Vampire does not look well.”

Roxanne chuckles softly, then shakes her head. “Don’t worry too hard now, Ms. Brie. So long as they stay close, we have nothing to be concerned about.”

Not too far away, but already well further into the forest, Jules chuckles. “I hope we find something worth looking at while we’re out here. All I smell is ash, we’re lucky I’m not sneezing my head off.”

A bandanna is pressed against his chest by Lucille’s gloved hand, and soon enough the Vampire’s lower face is hidden behind the red fabric. The way his eyes crinkle, she can see that he’s smiling that stupid smile again. “Don’t be a dork,” she mumbles from under her scarf, “I’m sure we’ll find something. Just make sure to keep an eye on the Fox and the tagalong, no telling what they could be up to.”

He nods and glances around, but only lets his gaze rest on the distant duo of Brie and Roxanne for a moment before he’s searching elsewhere, trudging through the forest. Above them there are no leaves, not anymore, and up above that there’s only overcast sky. Some claim that the clouds are mostly smoke and ash that refused to come down, others think it’s just cloudy because it’s always autumn around here and that they were expecting it to be cloudy anyway, but it’s still a strange sight when coupled with the leafless, blackened trees and the seemingly endless, ash covered ground. It’s a long, gray-white canvas, and out from beneath it sprouts black, bony limbs of varying levels of decay clawing at the sky.

Lucille is slower to search, but after a minute or so of off and on glances between herself and Roxanne she does find something better to focus her energy on, making her way over to a single flower poking its way out through the ash and crackling charcoal. Its stem and leaves are pristine, but unlike the normal green such plants ought to boast, they’re black, and where one might anticipate the small, but thicker veins through which they pump their nutrients, she can see faintly glowing embers.

The petals are bone white, each tinged and burned, looking more like ash and flame formed into the shape of a flower than an actual plant. The glow itself is a deeper orange than she knows most flame to be; it’s almost red, and when her gloved finger presses against the petals themselves there’s the soft sizzle of a burn.

Brie has taken to following a specific path after a moment, though Roxanne and the townies aren’t exactly certain why it is she’s decided to walk this specific direction until Roxanne stops them both to say, “Ms. Brie, if you could fill us in as to why you’re leading us this direction, that would be wonderful.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, I am heading in the opposite direction of anything I find that is not burned.” When what she says earns little more than curious stares, she continues, “If something has not been burned, say, one side of a tree or a rock or what have you, then because the dragon apparently exploded when it died, the origin of the explosion can be found by heading in the opposite direction of that which is unburned. Like that.” And so saying, she points toward a rock nearby, which nestled itself at the trunk of a large tree.

“I see.” Roxanne mumbles, “Completely scorched from one side, that makes perfect sense.”

“When it comes to a larger investigation you would be surprised to know that even the little things become a surprisingly prevalent factor,” Brie replies.

One of the townies, Jones, is further ahead, alongside Vinny. The two have stopped at the edge of something, a clearing, the rest realize. They only realize this as a whole when they come to stand behind the two, staring into the flat space.

Brie blinks. “Is that a crater?”

“Yes,” adds Roxanne. “And our first corpse.”

The eternal slumber, the everlasting cradle of darkness, the silent calm of a life ended with some modicum of preparation and acceptance— is interrupted by the sound of Humanoid voices calling out that a body has been found, and that someone has to go down into a crater to retrieve it. The grey glow of sunlight, harsh and stabbing, is as remembered prior to death. Warm, sandy liquid threatens to fill the mouth and has to be violently coughed up, pulling thick, ashen air into the lungs. As the brain begins the process of restarting its primary functions, the figure sits up on its hands and knees, hanging its head low between its shoulders and taking in deep, desperate gulps of air (only to find that, despite the calming process of breathing, their body does not naturally continue the process).

The loud calling from the Humanoid voices high above prompts a brief look, where blurry bodies of unfamiliar shape have begun to try and descend to its level. Blinded by the bright sun, even in its greyscale tones, it looks back down and attempts to stand up. The ground beneath it is slick, cracked, and nigh molten— it’s as though a bomb went off that put the entire area in a kiln. It crouches down to try and pry off a piece of the earth, but fails as its glowing red fingers simply can’t find a good enough handhold to grab onto.

A spark hits its frontal lobe, and it brings both hands down to its gaze. The red they emit is fuzzy and comfortable, like a quietly crackling fireplace in the dead of winter. Its fingers, palms, wrists, and most of its forearms are glowing in this fashion, and as it finds their surface to be just as solid as the ground it stands on. It traces veins of more intense red up from its wrists to its chest, where it brushes off a few stray scraps of charred, unidentifiable cloth. As it continues to explore its body, it finds itself to be almost entirely coated in heat-blackened skin, crack-patterned like igneous rock on a volcanic island. Even underneath what remained of its pants, this is the case. It wishes it had some kind of mirror to look in, so that it could see the state of its head. Its legs, up to the knee, glow the same way its arms do, and it finds it a simple matter to locomote with them, even if the voices it was shambling toward had little idea who it was, or what it was. It, itself, has little idea what it is.

Its vision comes properly into focus, and there is little doubt now— it’s in an earthen bowl, excavated by an explosion of massive proportions. Where it was lying asleep before had begun to fill up with dirty, ash-polluted water. And as it looks up, the sky is nothing but grey. It wonders for a moment whether the world had died with it. Though, as the voices grew louder, it decided to set its attention on them instead. One is a woman, just a Human, carrying a bag and aiding another, a Fox. They both have a look of urgency on their faces, and that brings some semblance of worry to its mind. People normally don’t look the way it looks, it remembers. The line of thought brings it to realize that it doesn’t normally look the way it looks. 

Another spark hits its brain, and it stops in its tracks. It begins searching its brain, and everywhere it looks, it finds holes. Holes when it looks for how, holes for when, holes for what, holes for who, most importantly. Black lines etch into every account, every memory it has that could remind it of who it is. All names in its mind have fallen away like the clothes on its back, and it finds itself beginning to worry whether there’s anything left of who it was entirely. A thought suddenly hits it, and it realizes that there’s something metallic hanging from its neck. Though the steely beads have partially melted to its neck, it manages to rip the pendant off with little struggle. The pendant itself is a titanium coin, its face blasted and blackened with soot. Part of it has deformed from the heat of the explosion, but as it’s flipped over, there’s information to be found. It reads—

“S—FU- S—UT—N-

M—-E—-E -A—AT—N

5’-1, 1—lb-, BA—- -U-AN, O-NEGATIVE

S—-HW—- FUS—-AD-, 0038 17th St.”

Does that say “Meat”? As it begins to turn the thought over in its head, the two have finally reached their destination, and have slowed their pace to a crawl out of caution. The Human holds up a hand to the Fox, and takes a few more steps forward with her hands up in an attempt to look somehow less intimidating. Neither of them look as though they’re arriving with ill will, though both of them wear varying faces of concern. In response, it holds up its dog tag for the two of them to see and asks, “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” Roxanne says from behind Brie, stepping closer and eyeing the skeletal features, as well as the dog tag. “I am not even sure what you are, to be frank. How much can you recall?”

“Nothing but the fire,” it says. No, not it. There was something else, something important, something vivid and powerful and— they are not it. They are themselves. “I remember the fire,” they say to the women. “This tag says “meat.” Am I Meat?”

“Is that what you prefer to be called, si- ma’am- er, nevermind. Is that your preferred name?” Brie clears her throat.

After careful consideration, the figure stands. “It works as well as anything. I’m Meat, nice to meet you.”

Roxanne laughs. “Oh, lord. Let’s get you out of this hole, yes? We have much to discuss.”

“Are they safe to touch?” Brie looks to Roxanne, then back to Meat.

“Well, there’s only one way to find out, yes?”

The Fox holds out a hand for Meat to grab, but Lucille calls out from over the crater’s edge, “That’s a bad idea. If the resurrected corpse can walk, let them walk.”

Meat’s skully head tilts. “Resurrected?”

“This isn’t a designated spawn point for Humanoids,” points out Jules from just behind Lucille, his jovial tone having somehow fallen away. “And you aren’t a Monster. Kinda. You’re a glitch in the system, pal.” The way he speaks, the flatness of it, it even puts off Lucille, who turns to him just in time for his smile to reach his eyes again and for him to immediately backpedal into a more cheerful voice, saying, “Might wanna get that checked with the doc! You’d better bet it’s not contagious.”

Meat stares for a while longer, though the lack of discernible eyes makes it hard to tell where they’re actually looking until their head turns again to face Brie and Roxanne, both of whom are just now turning to look at Meat again after staring at Jules. “Mind giving me a once over, if one of you’s a doctor?”

 Roxanne nods. “We’ll set up camp immediately, yes. I’ll give you a full physical once we’ve settled in, though… I will say, Meat, that what I find may be alarming.” Roxanne turns to those up at the edge of the crater, calling to them, “Let the others know to start setting up, please! We’ve found a live one, and I would like to give a diagnosis as soon as possible!”

Jules and Lucille retreat a ways back, following the townies as they move to go back to the van to get the camping equipment. However, Lucille slows the two of them down a bit as they get away from the crater itself, out of earshot of those still in it and out of earshot of those heading back to the van. “What the fuck was that?”

“What was what?”

“You sounded like you were ready to murder somebody, Jules. It’s a corpse. What’s wrong?” Lucille gets an arm around his shoulders. “Are you getting low? Is it starting to affect your mood, too?”

Jules shakes his head. “Nope, not at all.” He glances to the side, searching for something, anything other than her to settle his eyes on. “Remember what you said? Dead things should stay dead, or something like that?”

Sighing, Lucille nods. “Yeah. They really should stay dead.”

“Exactly.” He adjusts his bandanna. “I’m just running a little low and dead things are supposed to stay dead. I didn’t expect it. Surprised me, just a little.”

Again, Lucille nods. “Alright. Glad to get that sorted out, you’ve been weird since we left that stoner’s place. Those mushrooms actually good? Sure they weren’t some kind of fucked up super-shroom that just tastes like off-brand people?”

“Maybe they were,” he says with a laugh. “Whatever, let’s help these locals get their shit ready. I don’t think any of them know how to pitch a tent.”

“And you do?”

Jules chuckles. “Nah, but I’ve got you for that!”

==============================================================

“Ding dong,” Piper says.

The man before her isn’t anything special. Brown hair, brown eyes, starting to go bald. Wears sweatpants and t-shirts on his days off. Doesn’t wear shoes or socks in his own home. And though he’s only a little taller than Piper, she can tell that she’s the stronger of the two. He is not getting her off this porch unless he makes the first move.

“Oh. It’s one of you,” he responds, closing the door slightly.

“What’s that supposed to mean, Freddie?” She mentally curses. Was his name Frederick? Or was it something like Franz? Damn, she just said the more generic of her options right off the cuff. Hopefully it’s the right one. Looking him in the eyes, it seems like things may’ve worked out.

“It means that I’d like you to leave. So, please leave.”

Piper sighs and pushes against the front door with a hand. “You know I can’t do that. I’m here to talk— and if the sooner we get to talking, the sooner we get to going about our lives, Freddie. You hear me?”

He looks down at his ‘Welcome!’ placemat for a moment before letting her in. “What the hell is there to discuss? I thought I was let off the hook when I left. People liked me back at Shepherd.”

Piper moves to respond, but is taken aback by the sheer domesticity of the home she’s now standing in. Patterned wallpaper runs down corridors leading away from the foyer, coloured off-whites and purples and blues, as though to replicate the aesthetic of wealth without actually paying an arm and a leg. The floorboards are a similar facade, appearing as thin strips of staggered and polished wood, in reality some kind of laminate that doesn’t require nearly as much upkeep, and as she can tell through her boots, doesn’t even feel the same. The only things particularly lavish about the home is the modestly-sized bronze chandelier hanging above her (which hasn’t been taken care for properly, since it’s begun to green in some areas), and the piano in the sitting room beside her, whose thin body seems more for the purpose of practice rather than spectacle. 

But, on nearly every cabinet, every table, every wall, and scattered about most of the floor, are the surest signs of family life. Pictures from vacations past framed in hardwood, pinned up on the walls along every corridor. Knick knacks set in bowls on various cabinets as sentimental centerpieces. Child-sized shoes and new cloth dolls and ink-splattered action figures, half peeking out from underneath cabinets and dressers and tables. Hell, when she glances down at the floorboards, someone must’ve hit a creative streak recently, as they’ve been used as a canvas for some rather expressive marker art.

It’s all rather welcoming, she feels, and when she turns back to face the man she’s supposed to be interrogating, a twang of guilt threatens to throw her out of whack. This guy’s got so much going on in his life. This is nothing like the old man out in the woods. Nothing at all like it.

He’s been thinking of re-entering the mining business. Specifically, he’s been getting offers from one of Shepherd Gemstone’s top competitors in the area, Hole Divers Inc., under the pretense that if he shares some of his former company’s secrets, they’ll give him a high-ranking role right out the gate.

“Nothing you said is wrong,” she says finally. “We both know why I’m here.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yeah, you do.” Piper growls, and sticks a finger on his chest. “Comb your brain real carefully here. Let me know when you find a reason why they’d send someone like me out to see you.”

It takes him a moment, but when he finds his answer, Piper can clearly see it dawn on his face for a moment before he realizes what he’s doing and returns to frowning at her. Looks like he’s decided to play hardball with her. That’s okay, she likes hardball.

“Nope. I cut my ties. I shouldn’t be seeing you at all.”

“Fine. Let me remind you then, since your head’s all fucked up. I’m here because you signed an agreement to never work at another mining corporation after leaving Shepherd Gemstone. We have your signature on file.”

“I’m not working at another company,” he grumbles, breaking eye contact. “I’m working at an insurance firm. But you should know that.”

“You got fired, Freddie. Don’t try and talk your way around me,” Piper hisses as she grabs his shirt. She forces him to watch as her fangs begin to poke their way out the top of her mouth. “I’m not like the rest of those idiots.”

The venom has begun pooling in her mouth, but he hasn’t stopped ogling in terror to say something in return. Half to snap him out of his stupor, and half because she has to, she spits out some excess venom onto his floorboards, where it almost immediately sizzles through to the beams underneath. That gets his attention again.

“Uh, yeah. I can tell, holy shit. Please don’t hurt me.”

“You think I’m gonna hurt you?”

“Yes?” Freddie squeaks.

Piper lets go of him. Turns out, her hands had also been in the process of transforming— there’s a couple distinct claw-marks torn into his shirt. That’s fine, though. He could use better taste in leisure-wear anyways. “Tell me what I want to hear, and I might not.”

Freddie nods his head in agreement, as though to say “good idea, miss snake monster.”

“I want to hear you say that you won’t join up with that other mining company. Say that you’ll honor your contract,” Piper hisses.

“I won’t join up with that other mining company, and I’ll honour my contract.”

“Say that you’ll find another job here in Black Hill and you’ll live quietly with your family.”

“I’ll find another job here, and I’ll live quietly with my family.”

Piper pauses for a moment. “Say “I’m a little bitch who considered selling secrets to get ahead in life.””

“What? Why?”

“Do it.” All it takes is another flash of the fangs for him to reconsider.

“I’m a little bitch who… uh, what was it, again? Please?”

Piper scoffs, spitting another glob of venom onto his floor. “Good enough for government work. Now,” she says, opening up his front door again. “If you go back on any of those things you just said to me, we’ll be having a much more serious talk, Freddie. You don’t want that.”

He doesn’t say anything now that she’s leaving, instead opting to just nod his head.

“Do you want that?” She threatens to walk back in the house at his lack of response.

Freddie holds out his hands to try and shove her out his house, yelling, “Nope! I definitely don’t! Now goodbye!”

Piper instead shoves him back inside, locking the door behind her. There’s something still shifty about this guy. Maybe she should stick around to snoop, see what he’s got hiding in all these cabinets and dressers. After all, she’s only really seen one room, and that’s the foyer.

She peers back at Freddie, who has become very, very upset at this whole situation. He’s gone from slightly confident in the face of a company auditor, to a sweaty mess of a man with a ripped shirt and a bruised ego. 

“You’re not lying to me, are you?” she asks, threatening to grip his shirt again. “You’re giving me some pretty fucking strong reasons to believe you’re lying to me, Freddie.”

“What? No! I wouldn’t lie to someone like you!”

“What’d you tell them?”

“Nothing! I haven’t told anyone anything, I swear! They just gave me an offer and I said I’d consider it!”

“Mind if I check your records for that?” Piper smiles. Whether or not he panics here will determine whether she brings him back to base in her trunk.

“Fine! Go ahead! I swear, I haven’t done anything!” he practically begs.

She stares him down for a moment, trying to find any other hints of guilt she could wring him dry of. But at the moment, he frankly seems as though he’s about to cry. Let’s get those waterworks going before she leaves.

“I believe you, Freddie,” she says, patting him on the shoulder and turning around.

“What?! Really?!”

“I didn’t before, but now I do. You’re pissing your pants over this— someone who had something to hide would try to act more normal.” Piper unlocks his front door and begins to step outside. “If my boss doesn’t like what he’s heard, it would break my heart to come back here and turn your insides to soup.” She lets loose a cackle before closing the door. “We’ll see how things turn out, Freddie. Live a good life.”

As she walks back to the car, she finds herself with a bit of a spring in her step. He was resistant at first, but a couple words here and a little implication there, and boom, she got what she needed. Well, not exactly what she needed— she doesn’t have a hard confirmation that he isn’t working for Hole Divers Inc, but she squeezed him well enough to be confident.

The hum of the engine helps her focus on her brain. She knows what she just did was terrible. He’d just gotten fired, he has a family, and he otherwise seemed like an inoffensive, invisible pedestrian. And she knows that threatening him in such a way would be considered cruel by many people. But there’s a large slice of her brain-pie that is juicing her with serotonin when she thinks about how well she got him to squirm under her metaphorical thumb. Exerting that kind of power on someone you aren’t already in a power structure above? There’s nothing quite like it.

Sure, Blondie said that if you want something, you have to take it. She’s internalized that a hundred thousand times by now. What he didn’t mention was this. This feeling of loving the process. Hell, she bets that it’s an even sweeter feeling than the end result itself. If getting what you want was a spoonful of honey after a long day of yelling, making someone totally at your mercy is comparable to a triple-scoop ice cream sundae with all the fixin’s on a hot summer day.

She puts the company car in reverse, and starts on the road back to Smokestone. I’m gonna be riding this high for days, she thinks to herself.

==============================================================

    It’s been a long day and the rest of the corpse-hunt has been a bust; now everyone, save for Jules and Lucille, are huddled in and around the tent that’s been taken by Brie and Roxanne, which has also been appointed as Meat’s treating space and soon to be bunk. Bunk is a bit generous for what they’ve got, though. Being a bit dead, they find it difficult to tell the difference between the floor of the tent and the roll of fabric they’ve been placed on, which by this point has already started to bear some very nasty burns. It hasn’t burst into flames, but it’s not out of the question.

Meat, trying very hard to ignore all the eyes, turns their attention back to the doctor, who is rooting through her doctor’s bag and making a concerned face. She’s got all the usuals— bandages, antiseptics, pain meds, etc. But, as she rummages, they can tell she’s got nothing for burns.

“It doesn’t hurt, doc,” Meat mentions.

“You know, I had a feeling you’d say that.” Roxanne responds, pausing to look up at them. “You’re very, very oddly responsive for the state your body’s in, so I’m operating on the assumption that you cannot feel a damn thing.” She frowns, and lightly scratches a claw across Meat’s forehead. “Just as I thought.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Meat, you may want to see yourself before I commit to any other procedures. Trust me,” Roxanne says. She finally finds what she’s looking for, which is a tiny, splotchy, fold-up mirror. Unfolding it, she holds it up to Meat’s face and says, “This will sound rough, but I’m not quite sure how neither Brie nor I didn’t puke when we first saw you. Your body has been through the wringer, to say the least—”

Meat peers into the mirror, brushing away a light dusting of ash. What they expect to find is something akin to human face in a similar state to its volcanic skin, but what they get is something more like a soot-covered human skull with glowing red lights where the eyes should be, with remnants of charred skin surrounding it past the ears, forehead, and chin. It’s as though the skull is wearing a burnt, crispy skin jumpsuit, an image which has kept Brie both from getting too close and from looking directly at Meat.

They, on the one hand, are surprised. If there was one way to find out who they were before they woke up, it’d be through their face. Though there is that address on their dogtag, there’s something about the prospect of waltzing back into town, lit up like a necrotic glow stick and face like a Hallow’s Eve decoration, that doesn’t sound appealing to them. On the other hand, there’s something obviously curious about the state they’re in. If the skull is exposed, if their eyes and nose and mouth and ears and skin have been burnt off their head… shouldn’t they be dead? For good, dead? And what’s with the eyes? Meat takes a finger, and mimics what Roxanne had done a few moments ago, scratching their forehead. It is what it appears to be— hard bone. But then they take said finger and lightly poke at the light in their eye sockets. Nothing. They feel nothing.

Roxanne, meanwhile, nearly jumps at the opportunity to stop them from doing that. “Meat! What in the world are you thinking?”

“What? It doesn’t hurt,” they respond.

“Just because it doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean you should be doing it.”

“That’s good advice,” they say. Meat takes their finger out their eye, and the light shines brightly back at Roxanne. “So, what’s the verdict, doc?”

The Fox can’t help but shrug. “By almost every measure you’re dead. You have no heartbeat and you’re not breathing unless I mention it. Your skin has been completely burned away, and the substance you’re covered in instead is like… bark, on your muscle. Your skull’s exposed to the open air, and has been since a day ago. So,” she says, putting the mirror away and zipping up her doctor’s bag. “I would not call it a stretch to say you’ve got something magical going on.”

“How can you tell?”

“You looked in the mirror, correct?” she chuckles. “Aside from my expertise in the subject, but you would not need a doctor to tell you this. Whatever magic is keeping you alive is the strongest I’ve seen yet, Meat.”

“Magic?”

“That is correct. Welcome back to the land of the living, Meat, courtesy of something entirely beyond medical understanding.”

The locals take their leave of Roxanne and Brie’s tent, backing away to find their own preferred haunts for the night; Jules and Lucille are already settled into theirs, having retreated to it just after the lot of them had elected to turn in for the time being, and with the roads as they are around the ashen waste, a drive back in the dark might as well have been asking for them to crash. As well, for all they know they could be approached by a survivor looking for the signs of a campfire— or in this case the vague glow of someone who ought to be dead— and it saves them the commute back up.

Brie glances toward Meat, fluffing the rolled up bit of blanket that had been pawned off on her as a pillow. “What is it like? I refer, of course, to being made of magic.  Not of being dead, I do not think I would like to find that out.”

Meat turns to run their gaze from the human to the Fox, the latter of whom responds with a wide, fangy smile and a snicker, saying, “Very odd, I’d imagine. Especially if you had once not been made of magic.”

Magic’s a dangerous thing, they know. Still, Meat’s not in any condition to contradict her. They are dangerous. Is it the fire that makes them dangerous, though? No. There’s something else.

Lucille’s halfway to just curling up beneath the makeshift rag-blankets they’ve acquired when she notices that Jules is still up. He’s not lying down yet. He just keeps twisting the ends of his mustache, occasionally opting to comb it before staring at the far wall of their tent, at the canvas fabric that separates them from the burnt world beyond.

Following his vacant stare, her own gaze travels to the faint light of a fire outside. It had been set to burn well through the night, prepped in such a position that there was no chance of it growing out of control. It’s there to be a signal, a beacon to anyone who might reach out from amidst the ash and charcoal to claw their way back to a little sliver of civilization so much closer than Fusillade, like a frostbitten pariah dragging herself to the first bonfire she can see on a great, white expanse.

“It’s going to be fine, Jules,” Lucille says lowly, tiredly, though it does still manage to make the vampire jump. “That fire’s going nowhere. Old trick from up north for nightlong bonfires.”

Jules clears his throat. “So you said. Sorry, just don’t have it in me to fall asleep yet.” The smile he punctuates the sentence with does nothing to comfort her, even as he turns his attention to Lucille’s prone form. “Don’t let me keep you up. Consider it like this, I’m taking first watch. You never know what any of these folks might try while we’re sleeping, or if our evidence over there isn’t going to try anything.”

“Alright,” she sighs. “Just wake me up whenever it’s my turn to take watch. Got your stick?”

As an answer, Jules lifts the walking stick from his side just enough that Lucille can see it. Afterward she nods and turns over to curl up, drawing her arms and legs close to her body, still in full gear. Just in case.

Before she can drift off, however, he clears his throat. “You got your knives, right?”

She doesn’t turn back over to reply, grunting out, “Always. Just in case.”

“Alright.” Jules nods. His smile fades entirely and his brow furrows. Turning his eyes toward the faint, fiery glow once more, he runs his hand along the walking stick and gets a firm grip on its head. His jaw sets. Under his breath, so low that only he can hear, he’s counting out the seconds, the minutes.

Jules waits.

Chapter End.

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