Rangers

by Chloe Garner

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered into her ear.

  “Creaky stairs,” she whispered back. “I bet you two brutes would hit every one of them.”

  She motioned for them to follow her, then started up the stairs, feet running softly along each stair as she went. Skip the third one, use the outside of the seventh, skip the ninth. Jason resented how much he was impressed.

  At the top of the stairs, she waited and they split to go opposite ways on the hallway again. Samantha took her backpack back and turned to follow Sam. The three of them froze when Jason hit a loud squeak.

  Jason looked over his shoulder at Sam and Samantha, but everything was still. One by one, he looked into the rooms he passed. Bathroom, sitting room, master bedroom. Sam waved him down the hall.

  The boy they had seen at the park was sleeping in one of two bedrooms at the other end of the hall, his back to the door. The room was clear.

  “Have we missed her?” Samantha asked. The kid yawned and rolled over. The three of them pulled back out of sight around the doorway.

  “Nope,” Jason whispered. “They sleep like the dead afterwards.”

  They made their way back downstairs.

  “What now?” Samantha asked. Sam and Jason sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Now we wait,” Jason said.

  “How often do you get chased out of people’s houses?” Samantha asked. Sam smiled and shrugged.

  “Sometimes.”

  “How will we know when she gets here?”

  “If we have any luck at all, a window will creak. They almost always go in through a window to the kid’s bedroom.”

  Samantha watched them for a few minutes, then went to lean against a door frame in the dining room.

  “I should have brought a book,” she whispered. Jason glared at her. Waiting was a way of life. Saying it was the hardest part of what they did, or making excuses for it didn’t change anything. You sat. You waited. Sometimes you waited all night and nothing turned up, and you went and did it again the next night. He glanced at Sam, who had one hand flat on the table and the other relaxed on his knee, with the peculiar faraway look on his face that he got when they were waiting for the next thing to happen. Jason figured they only needed one mind present to pay attention at times like these, but he still gave Sam hell for daydreaming.

  A while later, Samantha wandered by, changing doorways. Jason stretched his knees out.

  The next time by, he snagged her elbow.

  “If you wake them up, I will stab you,” he said. She pulled her elbow away.

  “I make less noise walking than you do sitting.” She made it to the doorway, then turned and looked at him. “How do you plan on killing her?”

  He pulled his jacket away to show her the handgun at his waist.

  “Bullets. To the head. Lots.”

  She wagged her head back and forth slowly.

  “That ought to do it, I guess.”

  “That’s how you do it,” he told her. She shrugged.

  “Okay.”

  Jason marked an hour, then tapped Sam’s knee.

  “We should check,” he said.

  They trooped upstairs - three of them was just ridiculous - and checked the boy’s room again. It wasn’t possible to be certain whether or not she had been yet, but he slept quietly. They went back downstairs.

  Sam had returned to his faraway look and Samantha had changed doorways another couple of times when they heard the protesting screech of a window opening. Samantha started for the stairs, but Jason caught her.

  “Let her put the rest of the family under. We don’t need a bunch of people panicking,” he said. She looked at Sam, then nodded. Jason glanced at Sam to see what his brother had indicated, offended that Sam was somehow in charge.

  They heard the squeak of the floorboard in the hallway and Samantha smirked a bit, then Jason nodded.

  “Quietly,” he whispered.

  Samantha unzipped the top of her backpack and slid a machete out.

  “You know that won’t work, right?” he asked.

  “They wear skin, they’re made of flesh. It may not kill her, but she’ll think hard about getting too close,” she said. Sam grinned and pulled his gun out of its holster. Jason did the same. They looked at each other and counted three beats. Just like every other time.

  They headed up the stairs quickly, skipping all of the questionable steps, and went to the end of the hallway. Jason bobbed his head around the doorway quickly, then nodded at Sam. They counted another three beats, then rounded the corner into the room.

  “Back off!” Jason yelled, pointing his gun at the woman crouched over the bed. Sam was at his right, aiming at her head. The woman looked at them and growled, long loose clothes concealing most of her form, but the deep wrinkles on her face and the anger in her eyes clearly visible under a hood. The boy stirred, fighting against the grip she had on his shoulders even as he slept.

  “Get away from him, now!” Jason said. She began to chant. The boy fought harder, thrashing himself awake, and he screamed.

  She let go of him to point at Jason and Sam, chanting louder. Jason estimated his chances of hitting the boy by accident if he shot her now.

  “Child, to me,” Samantha said, kneeling on one knee on the floor between Jason and Sam. She put her arms out to him and he wriggled out of the tangle of sheets. The woman tried to grab his wrist, but he flopped on the floor, screaming and thrashing as his wrist slipped free, then crawled to Samantha. Jason shot.

  The woman chanted louder, motioning to various objects in the room and throwing them at Jason and Sam, who continued to shoot. An alarm clock bounced off of Sam’s shoulder as Jason dodged the nightstand coming after it. A baseball hit him in the chest hard enough to knock him down. Sam’s gun clicked.

  Now the room swirled around the hunched figure standing on the bed, drawers and furniture swiping past them to come around and hit them again. The woman’s voice cracked and broke as it deepened, calling more power. Jason leapt out of the way of the dresser, but Sam didn’t get clear in time and he hit the wall hard, sinking to the ground. Jason’s gun clicked and he fumbled for a second clip, missing the wood block that hit him in the face. The world went fuzzy and he dropped to his knees.

  Someone was yelling. In proper words. He shook his head to clear his vision and his mind and saw Samantha yelling from the doorway, where she was cradling the boy. She tossed him the machete. He struggled to understand her over the crone’s incantations.

  “Decapitate,” he finally understood. He looked at the machete and nodded. He dodged under the nightstand again and deflected a drawer of socks with the machete. Not a bad tool, actually. The swarm of wood blocks went over his head, then he jumped the cluster of belts that threatened to tangle his ankles. The Night Hag’s eyes seemed to be glowing as he finally reached the bed and swung the machete. She caught it with her hand and for a moment he was frozen, staring into her eyes.

  Her chanting changed nature, becoming more intimate, more sinister, as she spoke her spell directly into him. He lost his sense of where he was, what he was doing. He fell against the bed, only avoiding falling all the way onto the floor by holding himself up with the machete. Whose blade she still held in one clawed hand. He looked at the hand, then back up at her, dumbstruck.

  Something hit him in the back of the head.

  “Kill her!” Samantha yelled, breaking into the crone’s spell. He pulled the machete clear, severing all four fingers that held it, then took a full swing that went through her neck like so much dry, rotted wood. The head rolled clear and the body fell over the side of the bed, the arms thudding on the floor next to him.

  The boy was crying. Sam groaned. Jason rubbed the back of his head.

  “I told you to scram,” he said without turning.

  “You’re welcome,” Samantha answered.

  <><><>

  Sam stood in the hallway rubbing his shoulder, watching as Samantha and Jason put the room i
nto some semblance of order. They would carry the Night Hag’s body out of the house, but they only had a few minutes to get out. The rest of the family might not have been able to wake, and Night Hags preferred isolated homes, but there were still neighbors in earshot, and they couldn’t take for granted that no one would call the police. The young boy stood in the middle of the room, sucking on his fingers and crying softly. Samantha saw him.

  “Sam, I need you to finish this,” she said. Sam nodded, the woozy sensation from being knocked out fading far enough for him to focus. She knelt in front of the boy and he hugged her.

  “Shhh, shhh,” she said. “It’s okay, Beloved. You were perfect.”

  The cries muffled as he buried his face in her neck.

  “Just a bad dream,” she said. She pulled the boy back where she could see him and smiled brightly. “Just a bad dream.”

  “Wweewee?” he asked around his fingers. She nodded.

  “You’re sleeping,” she said, smoothing his hair with her hand. He nodded. Samantha glanced up at Sam and Jason and, thinking Sam had missed it, pulled something out of her backpack.

  “Drink this. Everything will be better in the morning,” she said. He curled up against her and she ran her palm along his face, making soft hushing noises. She laid him in his bed and made it back up around him. Jason grabbed the Hag’s arms and nodded to Sam to get her legs.

  “Time’s up. They’ll know something happened, but at least it doesn’t look quite as bad,” he said. Sam nodded, lifting the other end of the corpse. Samantha picked up the head and checked to see if she could get it to balance on its abdomen, but finding that that wasn’t going to work, unsnapped the crone’s cape and wrapped it there.

  “Toys with bullet holes in them?” she asked. There hadn’t been too many, or too many bullets in the walls, either. Most of the bullets had hit true, if Sam’s count was accurate. He shook his head. They took so many hits…

  “Over there,” Jason said. She collected them up in the cape as well and motioned that she would follow them. They made it out to the car without incident, loading up the body and heading out of town.

  The parked on a country lane forty-five minutes out of town and hiked another twenty to find an acceptably remote corner of the world to burn the woman’s body. Samantha spat at it.

  “What did you give him?” Sam asked. She glanced at him guiltily, and he wasn’t sure if she had known he had seen her, after all.

  “You gave him something?” Jason asked.

  “Something to make him sleep. It will make tonight fuzzy. He may be able to believe it was a dream, and some day looking back, believe that he was hearing what was going on in his room, and just didn’t wake up.”

  “What was it?” Sam pressed.

  “I know things,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I make things better.”

  He let it go, and they stood back to watch the pyre burn.

  <><><>

  They drove back to town in silence, unable to so much as see each other in the murky darkness outside of street-lighted civilization.

  “You guys want to get a beer?” Jason asked.

  “Do you look like death?” Samantha asked. He flipped on the overhead light and pulled down the rearview to look. There was a purpling spot on his cheekbone, but no worse than most nights.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Fine with me,” Samantha said.

  He pulled off the road at a bar that looked questionable enough to still be open at one in the morning and they found themselves a booth. Samantha brought her backpack, setting it on the floor between her feet.

  “Be right back,” Jason said.

  Sam leaned against the wall, draping his arm across the back of the booth and slid down, stretching the muscles in his back vertebra by vertebra. He groaned.

  “Just another night, huh?” Samantha asked. He nodded, eyes closed.

  “Just another night.”

  He glanced at her, then closed his eyes again.

  “You were really good with the kid,” he said.

  “I’m good with innocents,” she told him.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “You said you wander. What do you do while you wander?”

  “I kill a few things that need killed. Mostly I just watch the world happen.”

  “You’ve been trained,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You picked up a head and carried it out to the truck, for one,” he said, smiling. She laughed.

  “I guess I did.”

  “What kind of training do you have?”

  She sighed.

  “I really don’t want to talk about it, if it’s okay with you.”

  He looked at her and rolled his eyes.

  “I could ask you the same question. Where did you learn to do what you do?”

  “Well, there’s stuff I can’t tell you, but my parents started us when we were five or six, and then after they died…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago. When they died, Jason didn’t want to give it up. So once we were legal, we set out on our own and picked up things however we could.”

  “How did they die?”

  “Car wreck,” Sam said, then laughed. “That’s natural causes, in our world.”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t usually happen like that.”

  Sam looked at her, wanting to ask what she knew, but refrained. Jason got back with two beers.

  “So…” he said. Sam snorted, rolling his head against the wall.

  “You check for Hepatitis?”

  “She’s cool, man. Don’t be a jerk.”

  Jason dropped the keys on the table, then grinned.

  “Don’t wait up.”

  “Won’t,” Sam said, closing his eyes again.

  “Before I go, though…” Sam opened his eyes. Jason was looking at Samantha. “You disobeyed a direct order.”

  “I was right,” she said.

  “It’s a chain-of-command thing. I don’t care if it worked out right or not, I need to know that you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do.”

  She propped her elbows on the table, leaning her chin on her fists.

  “By that rule, the moment when both of you were incapacitated, no matter what order you put your chain of command in, I was still commanding officer, and I was right, anyway.”

  He grunted.

  “Don’t do it again.”

  She smiled saucily.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Unless you make a bad call like that again.”

  She paused, then, as he opened his mouth, “Don’t do it again.”

  He clamped his mouth shut, looked at Sam, then looked back at Samantha. He laughed.

  “You got balls, lady.”

  “Don’t forget it.”

  Jason nodded, then pushed their beers across the table to each of them and bowed.

  “Good night.”

  Sam closed his eyes again and listened to himself breathe for a minute. Samantha opened her beer on the edge of the table.

  “He do that a lot, I guess?” It wasn’t actually a question. He nodded and looked at her with one eye.

  “As long as he goes home with them, rather than the other way around, I’m happy.”

  She grimaced, then took a drink of her beer.

  “So what’s up tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Dunno. When we get back to the motel, I’ll check my e-mail. Let… the right people know that we got the Night Hag and see what’s the next gig.”

  “Mind if I sit with you?” she asked. He shrugged.

  “If you like.”

  He shifted a bit to watch her, then popped the bottle cap off his beer and sipped at it.

  “We are going to get you to New York,” he said. “I may even be sorry when it happens, but we will. You don’t belong with us.”

  “Why not?” she asked. He shrugged.

  “Too dangerous. Neither one
of us wants to be involved with getting someone else killed, you know?”

  She nodded.

  “Sure. But wouldn’t I feel terrible if you two got yourselves killed and if I had stuck around, you’d have made it?”

  “Even supposing that were possible, how would you ever find out?”

  She shrugged.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” he told her. “We just part ways. Never know what went wrong. Just, one day, they don’t come back.”

  “That’s jaded.”

  He shrugged.

  “Life is jaded on a good day.”

  She smiled.

  “Can’t disagree,” she said, lifting her beer. He held his toward her.

  “To days that don’t end badly?” he asked.

  “To proving you wrong,” she answered. He grinned and they clinked the bottles together.

  Later that evening, he unlocked the door to his motel room, suddenly feeling awkward, but Samantha’s lack of guile as she went and sat cross-legged on Jason’s bed and watched him power up his laptop disarmed him entirely.

  “We usually have at least a few days, sometimes even a week or two, between stuff,” he said. “I’ll let them know that we got the Night Hag, and they’ll get back to us eventually.”

  She nodded.

  “I understand.”

  “And then we’ll take you to New York,” he told her. She nodded.

  “I understand.”

  He opened his e-mail and frowned to have three unopened messages from Simon. He opened the first one.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Hikers are going missing. Says that it looks like an eighteen-year cycle.”

  He looked up at her.

  “We need to head out in the morning to get a jump on this as soon as we can.”

  “Where?” she asked, her face not betraying anything.

  “Yellowstone.”

  The next morning, Sam got up and made himself motel coffee, sitting at a small table in the front window. The room was quiet. No babies in the next room. No rodents in the walls. It was a good morning. He put his feet up on the other wood chair and settled down into his seat, breathing the morning. The morning after a kill was one of the best things in his life. The success, the validation were what they lived for, but they faded so quickly as they either waited for the next gig or spun the next thing up. Mid-job, everything was details and adrenaline and planning. He sipped his coffee and enjoyed the soft light of sunrise behind a gray sky.