by David Reed
I beelined for the back shed, where I hoped to find some kind of weapon that’d put a dent in the beast. I guess the shed isn’t really a shed so much as a lean-to, a little working area with a corrugated sheet-metal roof, a shaded spot where I can get some work done without roasting alive in the South Dakota summer heat. Problem was, I didn’t have anything bigger than a chain saw in there, and the crusher was at most ten seconds behind me. This was before I got my grenade launcher, see—actually, the crusher is the reason I got my grenade launcher. I picked up the chain saw, revved it up, but knew it was pointless. If an exploding Pinto didn’t bring the crusher down, nothing in my arsenal was gonna. I had maybe five seconds left.
Let’s review what I knew about my situation:
• I’d recently pissed off a trickster, a being of godlike power with a short fuse.
• I seemed to be suffering from karmic payback for all of the bad things I’d done to the cars in my salvage yard, which to me sounds a lot like “just deserts,” which lines up with trickster MO.
• Tricksters like to kill people in innovative, out-of-the-ordinary ways, and this fit. Or at least it would, once the crusher ground me into paste.
• Now I had like two seconds left.
So here’s the real lesson:
There are times when you’re just too screwed to keep fighting. The odds against you are too great, the monster you’re fightin’ too big and toothy (that’s specific to my line of work; your mileage may vary). But with one second left on my clock, I hadn’t given up yet. Screw the odds.
I flat-out leaped clear of the lean-to, which shattered into a million pieces when the crusher hit it. The sound of rending metal and splintering wood filled my ears as I rolled clear, and saw what I was after. A two-by-four. Not what you were expecting?
I was fighting a trickster, and even if it was manifesting itself as a giant lumbering industrial compressor, it still had to follow its own rules—Anansi’s rules. After all, the crusher was moving like a spider—if Anansi had taken on the form of anything in the yard, it was the crusher.
Trickster lore: Can be killed with a stake dipped in the blood of one of its victims.
That’s all I needed to know. What was a two-by-four but a giant wooden stake?
As for the blood of the trickster’s victim—I was losing blood fast out of the cut on my leg, but I wasn’t dead yet. I only had one chance at killing the thing, and I wasn’t sure how literally “victim” had to be taken for the trickster’s vulnerability to work. Across the salvage yard, the flattened wreck of the Pinto was still smoldering where the crusher had dropped it. What was left of it, anyway. I could hear the crusher chewing through obstacles as it chased me, but I didn’t turn back. If it was going to catch me before I got to the Pinto, I’d rather not know about it till it was too late. This was a Hail Mary situation, and I wasn’t going to get another shot.
Motor oil was pooling beneath the Pinto’s mangled hull. I slid to the ground next to it, coating as much of the two-by-four in the stuff as I could, the shuddering ka-chomp ka-chomp of the crusher getting closer. If Anansi was going to bring the cars to life only to kill some of them himself, they sure as hell counted as his victims.
Satisfied that I’d coated the board with enough ”blood,” I turned—and was suddenly inside the crusher’s jaws. It dug into the ground underneath me, lifting me and a sizable helping of dirt up into the air before starting to chomp down. My equilibrium was thrown off, I had no way of telling which way was up and which was down, all I knew was that the world around me was getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. . . .
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the two-by-four, resting on a pile of earth inside the crusher’s compartment. With the whine of the hydraulics straining in my ears, I propped the board between the upper and lower metal crushing plates, hoping against hope that it’d have some effect—but it snapped in half almost immediately. This, this is when I was really, truly screwed. For a second, I saw Karen’s face. I was ready. A monstrous scream was the last thing I heard, then—
I was sitting in the dirt of the junkyard, and everything was still. Silent. In the distance, I saw the crusher. Inert. Sitting in its corner like it was any other night.
Out of the shadows, a man emerged. Anansi, in the form of the widower from Calico Rock. He was holding his jaw, as if he’d just been socked.
“Bobby Singer,” he said. It’s never a great sign when the monster knows your name.
“Anansi,” I replied, pretty sure I was about to be turned into a tire or a steering wheel or some such trickster malarkey.
“That was clever,” he said. “Using the oil. I hadn’t thought of that; if the board hadn’t broken, I would have been in real trouble.”
“And what, you couldn’t go through with crushing me?” I asked. “You just gonna talk me to death now?”
What he said next, well, until recently, I would have said I’d never forget it. Now I’m not so sure. He said, “Bobby, I understand you. What you do, someone needs to do it. It’s not so different from the job that I do.”
“What job is that?”
“Righting wrongs,” he said. “Looking after my people, no matter how far the winds have scattered them.”
I shook my head at him. Couldn’t believe it. “Blowing up old ladies ain’t righting a wrong, it’s murder. Call the cops next time.”
“You tried to murder me,” he said, and he kind of had a point. “On the fringes of the world, the only justice is vigilante justice, and hunters have known that for thousands of years. What you don’t know . . . is that you’re not the top of the food chain. Everyone thinks that they’re the lion, but somebody has to be the gazelle.”
“That make you the lion?” I asked.
He nodded. “One of the lions.”
“So what was all this? A lesson?”
“A warning.”
Anansi wanted me to keep hunting. He put just about everything back the way it was, minus my leg, which he said I needed to patch up myself. His warning was simple: don’t presume that I was the only force out there trying to set things right. And don’t for a second forget that there were things in the world that could snap me like a twig.
After Anansi had gone, I looked around the salvage yard, at all the cars, now peacefully resting. His lesson had worked—I’d never think of myself as king of this place again. There’s always gonna be something bigger than you, stronger than you. And they’re probably closer to you than you think.
And Then, I Ran
I WAS JUST OUT THERE AGAIN, looking at the Chevelle’s windshield, the word “Karen” scratched into the glass, and it hit me. This could really be it. My last tango, my last hunt, my fuse finally fizzled out. The hour come ’round at last. Maybe all “Karen” means is that I’ll be with her soon. Kind of comforting.
There’s a reason I didn’t tell you the rest of the Karen story earlier. It didn’t begin well, and it don’t end well, either. It’s important, though, the rest of it. . . . It’ll tell you who I really am, and that’s the whole point of this, right? To get the real story out there, so people don’t have the wrong idea about the reasons I did the things I did. Besides, I don’t have any other leads at this point, just that one word. Just Karen. So here’s how that story ended.
See, after Rufus exorcised the demon from Karen’s body, he gave me the starter course, Monster 101. The same starter course I’m giving you, only he didn’t spare me from any of the darkest stuff, didn’t pull any punches. He told me about things he had seen in the line of duty that made me sick to my stomach, and that was the entry level stuff. Rufus had a purpose behind the grisly info-dump: for whatever reason, he thought I had potential.
Rufus had been tracking the demon across several states, knew its MO, so he was expecting a bloodbath when he got to my house. He had seen omens (which I had seen too, but dismissed as South Dakota weather), and followed them right to my front door. What he found inside didn’t match up with his expectations—y
eah, there was blood, but it wasn’t mine. I hadn’t been able to expel the demon, but I’d held my own against her, and I guess Rufus saw something in that. Thought I’d make a decent hunter, if I got the proper training. It just so happened that Rufus was starting to feel a little lonely out on the road, and was looking for an established hunter to partner up with—only most hunters aren’t the extroverted sort. Everyone he’d talked to about it had dismissed it out of hand. Training a partner suddenly seemed a hell of a lot easier than recruiting a veteran.
Rufus was different from a lot of hunters—he had a family. He had a girlfriend of sorts in Omaha who he was madly in love with but couldn’t stand to be around. He had a daughter with her who was about nine or ten when I first met him. Rufus never married his girlfriend (her choice, not his), but they were as much a family as anybody, just with a few little idiosyncrasies, like he was never home and when he was, he brought home monster heads, not the bacon. Both his girlfriend and daughter knew what he did, and both of them supported it (as much as you can support your loved one putting themselves in mortal danger on a weekly basis).
Guess he saw a kindred spirit in me, wanted to take me under his wing, but after a few hours of “Story time with Rufus” I’d had enough. I told him in no uncertain terms that I wanted him to go, to leave me with my dead wife and let me grieve. That’s when he told me the worst part. Once you know about these things, the hits don’t stop coming. The demon had been exorcised, but not killed. It was still out there, and could come back at any time. What’s worse, other stuff will start finding you, too. Like there’s the smell of crazy on you, all sorts of critters will come out of the woodwork once you’ve had an experience like that. I know now that he was exaggerating—most people can go back to living their ignorant lives and just pretend that they didn’t see the horrible things they saw, but at the time, it was like he was giving me a death sentence. Not only was my wife dead, but there was no way for me to continue my life either. My choices, as he laid them out, were between going to prison for my wife’s murder or to take up hunting with him.
I’m not at all proud of this, but I took the third option. I ran.
After Rufus had helped me deal with Karen’s body, the blood, and the authorities, I slipped away during the night. I’d packed a duffel bag while Rufus was scrubbing blood off the kitchen floor, and that was all I took with me. I drove west, towards California, which Karen had always wanted to visit. She had family on the East Coast, but hadn’t ever seen anything west of the Rocky Mountains. As I crossed over into Colorado, I would’ve given anything in the world to have her in the passenger seat. To let her see the sun rising over the mountains, the clear blue sky . . . I don’t want to get all emotional here, but as I drove, I made a deal with myself. I was going to do whatever I had to do to forget what I’d seen, and to live my life as if I was still the same man that Karen had married. Should’ve known that wasn’t possible.
I hadn’t set out with a destination in mind, only the desire to get as far away from Sioux Falls and Rufus as possible. That left me with a lot of options—at each fork in the road, I’d make a split-second decision, right or left, north or south, civilization or farther into the wilds. Mostly the wilds won out. There wasn’t much I wanted to say to other people at the time—no one could bring my wife back, so what was the point? I spent a week at a campground in the Rockies, living off of small game (I had a hunting rifle in the car when I left my house) and avoiding the locals. Even that was too close to home. I’d been camping with Karen only a few weeks earlier and the memory wouldn’t stop barging into my head, no matter what I tried to distract myself with. Mostly booze, if you’re wondering. I had to get farther away, somewhere with no connections to my old life.
It wasn’t until I drove up one of the hills overlooking San Francisco that a destination came to mind—a freighter called Nishigo Maru, out of Japan, that was docked at the shipping yards. Couldn’t get much farther away from South Dakota than the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I’d always wanted to take a steamer ship to someplace exotic; there was something calming about the idea of a long journey like that, nothing but the sea around you, salty wind blowing through your beard. I didn’t know word one about ships, but I knew enough about engines to be helpful, so I figured it was worth a shot.
Let me tell you, Rufus was right about one thing—for me at least, there was no escaping the life of a hunter. I’d crossed into the world of the supernatural on a one-way bridge, and by the time I thought to turn around, a hundred different freaks and monstrosities had followed me. I may have thought I was running away from it. I wasn’t. I was diving right into it.
Nishigo Maru
NISHIGO MARU’S FIRST MATE WAS A GUY by the name of Yoshiro. I tracked him down at a local dive bar where he was celebrating the freighter’s impending launch by getting fall-down drunk. Didn’t take much to convince him that I’d be an asset to the crew, especially when he couldn’t pay his bar tab and I offered to cover him. I was to report to the ship the next morning to meet with the skipper, who Yoshiro assured me was a very reasonable and understanding man. Without anyplace better to go, I decided to make sure Yoshiro got back to the ship safely so I could meet with the skipper that same night. I was glad I did, since the ship was preparing to leave dock when we arrived. They had been warned by the weather service that a large storm was due near the San Francisco harbor the next day, and their captain wanted to avoid it if at all possible. Yoshiro was the last crew member to return, having missed his curfew by several hours.
For bringing the slobbering drunk back to the ship, I’d already ingratiated myself with the skipper, but he didn’t have need for any extra hands in the engine room. He was sympathetic to my desire to find work, but couldn’t afford to take on any more crew. Yoshiro’s drunken promise wouldn’t be honored. Since I wasn’t in great spirits to begin with, that was quite a blow. I stood in the skipper’s office, staring at his vast collection of books and charts. I wondered what it must be like to have read that many books, to know so much about the world. Looking back, the captain’s library pales in comparison to the one I’ve got, but at the time it was real impressive.
I left the captain’s office with no plan. At some point, I was going to have to get a job. Probably as a mechanic at an auto shop, and since I was running out of money, it’d have to be close by. The thought almost killed me. I couldn’t imagine showing up for a nine-to-five job and not having Karen to come home to at the end of the day. Getting out of the country was the only thing that felt right. Once the seed was planted, it was all I could think about—I had to go someplace where nothing would remind me of her. I turned on my heel and barged right back into the skipper’s office, laid out my case. Told him that I’d lost everything I’d ever loved, that I was a broken man, the whole sob story. They still didn’t have a job for me, he said. I told him I’d buy a seat on the boat if I had to, but like I said, I was almost out of money. I only had my car to trade, but that was enough. Luckily, the skipper was a fan of Chevelles. I handed over the keys and told him where I parked it in the port lot. When Nishigo Maru returned from Japan, he’d pick up his new ride. And if I found myself bored, I was welcome to help out in the engine room—but they weren’t going to pay me a single yen for my services. That was fine by me; as long as I could eat at the crew mess, I didn’t need money.
We left port within the hour, but I didn’t feel any relief. From the aft deck, I watched the lights of San Francisco disappear over the darkened horizon, and everything was the same. My wife was still dead.
The next morning, I partook in an absolutely disgusting Japanese breakfast of broiled fish and dried seaweed. Honestly, if I’m gonna eat seaweed, I’d almost prefer it to still be dripping wet. At least the salt water would mask the flavor a bit. After gagging down the food, I took a self-guided tour of the ship and came away impressed. She was a cargo container freighter—there must have been hundreds of containers aboard, most of them now empty after dropping their shipmen
t of televisions, game systems, and compact cars in San Fran. They’d reload in Japan and be back in a month.
The crew lived the lives of ancient nomads, going from East to West and bringing the treasures of each across the sea. That’s the polite version of the story. The truth is that they may as well have been a band of pirates. Dean Winchester could have taught that lot some manners, and that’s saying something. The officers were all right, but the crew had been out at sea too long, and it had turned them into crude, hormonal animals. Any time more than two of them gathered, it was like a seventh-grade boys’ locker room. I couldn’t imagine how they must have acted when they were at port in Japan, where they knew the language—their English was shoddy enough that I didn’t see them getting far with American women, though not for lack of trying, and hey, some women value persistence over manners.
My second night on board Nishigo Maru, we ended up smack dab in the middle of the storm that we had left early to avoid. I didn’t think I got motion sickness, but just try and hold in your dried seaweed after getting rocked around by thirty-foot swells. While trying to keep from hurling, I noticed that my duffel had fallen off the shelf, spilling out its contents. A few shirts, some boxers, and a small leather pouch that I’d never seen before. I picked it up and noticed markings on its side—a pentagram and some gibberish in a foreign language that I couldn’t understand. All I knew for sure was that it wasn’t Japanese, which meant it wasn’t from Nishigo Maru. It must have ended up in my bag before I got on the ship, but when?
I opened the pouch and found several small bones and a collection of herbs inside. Even as a layman, I knew that it reeked of witchcraft, and that meant one thing—Rufus had put it there. He must have found my bag after I packed it and added the hex bag. Not knowing anything about the purpose of the bag, I assumed it must have been used for keeping tabs on someone, locating them or even eavesdropping on them. After what I’d seen in the last few weeks, anything was possible.
