Boneyard Rumblers

by Gina Ranalli

  Bliss stared down at him for a moment longer, considering his options. A second later, he began removing the man’s clothes, slicing through fabric with careless claws and taking a good amount of skin with every cut.

  CHAPTER 16

  Helena awoke with a jerk, in both pain and confusion. She immediately tried to sit up and found she couldn’t.

  “Whoa,” Quinn said, gently touching her shoulder and pressing her back against the pillow. “Take it easy.”

  “Wha…where am I?”

  “You’re in the hospital. You’ve got four nasty gashes in your belly. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  She gaped at him before glancing around the room. It was too bright, too sterile, with too much machinery. “I…I can’t be here.”

  Struggling to sit up again, she felt a prick in her arm and was distressed to see she was hooked up to an IV. “What the hell, Quinn?” she asked, irritated.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “Your guts were peeking out of your damn stomach, Hel.”

  “Where’s Sam?”

  His face paled noticeably. “They took him.”

  “What?”

  Justin Cash walked into the room carrying a can of soda in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other. “Oh, you’re awake. Welcome back to the land of the living.” He handed Quinn the coffee, popped the top of the soda and slumped into a chair in the corner of the room, slurping loudly. “They don’t make cream soda like they used to, I can tell you that.”

  Helena glared at Quinn. “Are you fucking crazy? What’s he doing here?”

  “He saved your life,” he told her, looking guilty nonetheless.

  “You can thank me later,” Cash said and combed a hand through his slicked back hair. “Maybe with a kiss?”

  Instantly, Helena clenched her fists into tight balls and then instinctively reached for a blade that wasn’t there. “I’m in a fucking hospital gown!”

  “Well…yeah,” Quinn said. “You’re in a hospital.”

  Cash said, “I would have thought that’d be obvious. Does she have a head injury, Quinn?”

  “Shut up,” Quinn told him.

  “I was kidding about the kiss,” Cash went on. “You’re really not my type, Helena. Sorry. Too much tomboy for me.” He drank more of his soda and Quinn looked away quickly, sipping at his coffee and suddenly seeming very interested in the monitors next to the bed.

  “When can I get out of here?” Helena asked.

  “Doctor said about a week,” Quinn replied.

  “A week? I can’t stay in here a week!”

  “Maybe four days.”

  “At least four days,” Cash added helpfully.

  Helena’s hands balled into fists again and she glowered at the ceiling. “You fucking assholes.”

  A rotund nurse popped her head into the room, saw that Helena was awake and came in wearing a bright, friendly smile. “There she is!” the woman announced cheerfully. “How are you doing, hon?”

  Helena debated ignoring the woman but decided against it. “Fine.”

  “You’re a very lucky woman,” the nurse told her, hands on hips. “Not too many people can say they survived a bear attack with the scars to prove it.”

  Looking up at the nurse, Helena said, “Huh?”

  “She doesn’t remember anything,” Quinn said quickly. “Passed out from the pain or shock, I guess. Memory loss.”

  The nurse stopped smiling, her face suddenly concerned. “Really?” She began checking the medical equipment. “I’m going to take your blood pressure and check your temperature, okay? Then I’m going to check your sutures.”

  “What?” Helena asked, clearly mystified.

  “We didn’t tell her,” Quinn said to the nurse.

  The nurse cocked an eyebrow at him before returning her attention to the patient. “You have close to a hundred stitches in your belly, honey. And some in your back too. You don’t remember anything?”

  “The camping trip,” Cash prodded.

  “Ohhh,” Helena replied. “Yes. The camping trip. I remember now.”

  “You remember the bear?” the nurse asked, wrapping the blood pressure cuff around Helena’s arm.

  “Uh…yes. Yes, I sure do. Um. Scary stuff.”

  “I bet it was!” the nurse agreed, nodding. “You’re lucky your brothers were able to scare it off.”

  Helena forced a thin smile. “Yeah, I sure am.” After a beat, she added, “One hundred stitches lucky.”

  The nurse went about her work, exchanging pleasantries while the men sat silently and Helena politely tolerated the poking and prodding, but her mind was elsewhere. She remember the woman who had been on top of her, the woman who was no longer really a woman at all, but who had given birth to Helena just the same. Helena recalled the fierceness of Melosia, the monstrous eyes and fangs and tusks. The razor claws tearing open her body while the thing snarled in her face. She also remembered the Phoenix Blade sinking into the monster’s belly. An eye for an eye, she supposed. A scar for a scar. She hoped she had killed the thing, hoped it was already rotting in the ground or in a ditch. Maybe dumped in a ravine. She didn’t care. She just hoped it had suffered.

  She knew she had to accept the fact that Sam was almost certainly dead, or close to it. The only reason the monsters would keep him alive, she knew, was to pry information out of him. Information about the hunters.

  Sam had been a father figure to her since she could remember and she felt the sting of tears burn her eyes, but she quickly blinked them away, not wanting anyone to notice.

  Would Sam hold up under torture? She thought he would, for a while anyway. But the truth was, no human being could hold up under such pain and terror forever. She and Quinn had to prepare for the fact that the monsters would be coming for them, probably sooner rather than later.

  It seemed as though an age passed before the nurse finally left them alone again but when she did, Helena tried to sit up. The room blurred around the edges and she sank back into the pillow with a sigh.

  “Morphine,” Quinn said, sounding far away, though his chair was just a few feet from the bed.

  “Oh, crap,” she replied. “Why did you let them drug me?”

  It was an absurd question and Quinn gave her a helpless look. “Because you have a hundred stitches and lacerated intestines and…”

  Helena stopped listening to him, losing herself in a pleasant enough fog, though she was still afraid for Sam. She didn’t want to think about what the things from Hell would be doing to him, assuming he was still alive for them to be doing anything to him.

  Drifting, she recalled her childhood, which was anything but normal. When she was ten, Sam had told her the ugly truth about what happened to her parents. Being a child, it had never occurred to her that he might not have been telling the truth. Of course monsters were real.

  By twelve, she had extensive knowledge of firearms, blade work and hand to hand combat. She’d gone on her first hunt at the age of fourteen and killed her first monster less than a year later. As a gruesome trophy, she’d carved a fang from the things gums and wore it around her neck for many years, earning her the nickname The Carver. It was ironic, she thought, that Quinn must have remembered this story and her telling him that whenever anyone asked about the fang, she’d lied and said she’d found a partial bear skull in the woods while camping and had kept a single tooth as a souvenir. And now here she was, laid up by a “bear” attack.

  The day she’d had to kill an eleven year old boy who’d been turned by Bliss was the day she’d tossed the fang out the window of a moving car. She found she no longer wanted the reminder of what she and the other hunters were up against every day. Not that she could escape it. Not really. But at least it wasn’t constantly laying against her skin or visible in every mirror she passed. Some days she regretted throwing that fang away.

  On the edge of sleep, she decided she would carve herself another with the Phoenix Blade. Hopefully one belonging to the king himself,
Gunnar Bliss, but if not, she’d be satisfied with either her mother or father. Provided her mother was even still alive at this point. If the blade did what it was rumored to do, the beast would be slowly burning from the inside out, her innards turning to ash before she could realize what was happening to her.

  But Sam had believed something different about the blade. Not because he had evidence, but because of its name.

  Sam had hypothesized that the Phoenix Blade could heal the monsters, return them to human beings, break the curse, so to speak. Helena remembered him asking, “Why else would it be called that?”

  Helena wondered.

  The story went that the blade had been discovered in an ancient cave in some dark, dangerous part of Africa. No one seemed to know the exact country of origin and no amount of research through the hunter’s literature could uncover who had created it. But it was obvious why. It killed the monsters. Some called them demons. Or werewolves. Or vampires. But they were just monsters, plain and simple. Official labels didn’t matter to them, nor should they matter to anyone.

  The blade then came into the hands of a hunter named Duffy somewhere in the deep south of the United States. Louisiana, they said, but no one was sure. How he came upon it or discovered what it was and what it could do, no one knew. Some believed he’d created it himself, with his own blood and bone mixed with the iron when it had still been boiling liquid. But that didn’t mesh with the Africa origins and most believed Duffy himself had created that part of the myth for his own amusement.

  But, still, Helena wondered.

  The blade was hers now, or at least in her possession. She tried to turn her head to look at Quinn, ask him where it was, was it safe. But found the task impossible. In fact, her entire body seemed to have turned to heavy stone, even her eyelids, and she, a mere human woman, could not defy the weight of gravity.

  CHAPTER 17

  Bliss was in the process of skinning Samuel Cotton. Not completely. The man was still alive, though in and out of consciousness. Bliss’s first thought had been to scalp him but he’d decided that was too passé. He wanted to do something more unique. So, he’d decided to peel the man’s beard from his face instead. He thought when he was done, he’d wear it himself for a while, just as a joke. Bliss had never been able to grow much facial hair beyond scraggly whiskers on his chin, but Sam Cotton had a beard any man would envy. Or, at least, he used to.

  It was a delicate operation and Bliss knew that one slip of his razor sharp claw would ruin the whole project. He had to be very careful.

  Walt was the only one sitting nearby, watching, brimming with glee, giggling with the delight of a child on Christmas morning while he pounded back more booze and smoked countless cigarettes.

  The rest of the Rumblers were gathered around Melosia, who was probably dying. No one knew what to do, least of all Bliss, and he was the one they were all looking to for answers. He didn’t have any and so he distracted himself by peeling the lower half of Cotton’s face off.

  Being a leader was never easy, even on the good days. After all, he was the one who made the good days good. It stood to reason the others would hold him responsible for the bad days. But he would think about that later. Right now, he was performing a surgery. A transplant, he thought, with amusement.

  The illusion of being in his safety bubble was shattered however, when Opal entered the room and said, “You told me only fire can kill us now.”

  He froze and closed his eyes, hoping she would just go away.

  She didn’t.

  “Or beheading,” she added.

  Bliss sighed heavily and looked up at her. “Can’t you see I’m busy right now, Opal?”

  She glanced at Cotton, half of his face flapping loosely over his neck, his eyes rolled back inside his head. Opal crinkled her nose in distaste. “That’s gross.” When he made no response, she said, “Why don’t you just turn him? Wouldn’t that be the worst kind of torture for a hunter?”

  She had a point, but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought of it. In fact, he’d done that very thing many times over the decades but it took a special kind of being to survive long in the monster world. A regular person-a decent person-tended to lose their minds within a few short days and more often than not would do ridiculous things like throw themselves from bridges and attempt to slice their own throats open, always to survive and go even more insane, making them more trouble than they were worth.

  Bliss knew the new girl, Willa, was going to be just such a case but had resolved to let Opal deal with it. Maybe she’d learn a valuable lesson and learn to follow rules. With this in mind, he said, “Where’s your pet? Maybe you should take her for a walk.”

  Opal didn’t reply for a long moment. Long enough for him to return his attention to the task at hand but then she announced that she would do just that.

  “We might not come back,” she added as she spun on her heels and left the room. A few seconds later, Bliss heard the back door slam.

  “Women, huh?” Walt chuckled.

  Bliss finished removing the beard from the man’s face and then proceeded to parade around with it stuck to his own, glued by quickly congealing blood. Only Walt was amused, begging for his own turn with the gruesome prize.

  After he gave it to Walt, Bliss found himself bored again. Cotton was not being very entertaining, as he was delirious and probably close to death due to blood loss and shock.

  Bliss checked in on Melosia and found her also drifting in and out of consciousness, John holding her hand. It was a wondrous thing, the love that existed between the two of them. Monsters in love. How was it possible? Bliss himself had never felt anything like it. Lust, yes. But love? Definitely not. He supposed that could be why he was so good at what he considered to be his job.

  John lifted Melosia’s blouse to show Bliss the knife wound. It had grown. It was, Bliss realized, spreading, now covering most of Melosia’s lower abdomen. But it didn’t look like a regular stab wound. It looked more like a burn, as though maybe she’d been stabbed with a hot poker but instead of cauterizing the skin around the opening, it was burning it further.

  It made no sense and Bliss couldn’t stand it when things didn’t make sense.

  “I’m going to find out what this is about,” he told John, his voice determined.

  He left the house and walked through the backwoods to where he’d stashed his Indian, wheeling it to the road. Once there, he climbed aboard and started her up, roaring off down the street and away from the house of madness that the current hideout had become. He’d barely gone a mile when he passed Opal and Willa walking along the side of the road, but he neither slower nor waved. He did notice they were holding hands and was puzzled by the affection they seemingly had for one another, just as he was puzzled by Mel and John’s relationship. Maybe only he and Walt were the true monsters, he thought.

  Eventually, he found himself pulling into the parking lot of a place called The Mud Tavern. It was late afternoon and there were a few vehicles in the lot but not many. He parked beside an old Ford pickup and went inside. The place was dim, a TV mounted over the bar playing a football game, though not many of the patrons seemed to be paying it much mind.

  Bliss slid himself onto a stool and the barkeep, a pretty brunette in her late twenties, came over and took his order.

  He sat nursing his whiskey, occasionally looking up at the TV, for a long while. He realized his mood had gone sour and had been so since the night in the cemetery. Those fucking hunters. Why couldn’t they just leave the Rumblers in peace?

  Because they were killers, of course. Feeding on human beings. But they needed to feed, just like any other living creature. Was it their fault, what they needed to remain sustained? Could you fault a lion for eating a gazelle?

  Bliss had not asked for this life. It had been thrust upon him and he, in turn, had thrust it upon others. He didn’t know where his supernatural powers came from, how he had gained the ability to raise the dead, but he had it and what was h
e supposed to do? Set himself on fire? Did the lion lay around feeling guilty when its belly was full? Of course not. And neither did he, or, for that matter, any of the others he’d brought back to life. They were predators. They’d been predators in life and they were predators in this afterlife state they were in.

  He ordered another drink and kept his eyes mostly down, except for a glance every so often, not just at the TV but also at the nearest window. He was patiently waiting for the sun to go down. He was going back to the cemetery, he decided. Joshua Meadows would walk this night, beside Bliss, and then Bliss would bring him back to the farmhouse to meet the others. He would need to stop off and get a shovel before the stores closed but he had time. And once it was dark, he would do what he did best. Smile and charm a dead man into living again. Bring forth a new and improved predator and he would keep doing it until he had an army. Then he would turn the worthy ones loose, just as he’d been turned loose, to create more just like them until the entire world was an even playing field. He assumed at some point one of his Rumblers would turn on him, as he had turned on his own maker, but hopefully by the time that happened, everything would be in order. He could rest easy knowing that a superior race was dominating the world and no matter what foe they were faced with, they would always ultimately prevail. He didn’t care what was thrown at them in the future. He remained confident that even aliens from another world would not be able to overthrow the army he’d built. They could survive virtually anything. Hunters would be a memory, an extinct example to be shown to anyone who dared attempt standing against them.

  Hunters would be a joke they told around fires while other predators cowered in the shadows praying for the light of day.

  Bliss remained in the bar for about forty-five minutes before paying his tab and heading back out to his beloved Indian. The sun was nearly set and he rode towards it, almost as though he were racing it to some final resting place that was yet to be determined. He had work to do and raising Meadows was just the beginning of it. He had to find a way to save Melosia, one of his best and most trusted soldiers. Even if he had to drive right into the lion’s den to do it, he would. There could only be one king of the jungle after all, and this jungle was his.