Harness (Death’s own pale horses) and scholarly plough the sands, 6/?
‘Really smart deer’, Bobby thinks dumbly. It’s as big as a man and as silent as a hunting owl, gaping fanged jaws and leathery wings and a stench of rotting meat. Twisted beaked face, eyes intent and animal, Bobby’s on the ground with the thing on top of him, heart pounding and sick as he fires into it, bullets thudding into its body and causing it to flinch back but not stopping it. Its thrown Rufus to the ground as well, wings big and strong enough to encompass the both of them, and the crossbow has gone skittering from his hands. Rufus starts to get up, tries to reach the bow, but the thing throws him back with one clawed, sinewy arm, and the other plunges into Bobby’s shoulder.
For a second he feels nothing beyond the horror of that obscenely wrong thing protruding from his body. Then the pain hits - and he possibly screams, which is a travesty considering what Karen must have endured. the thing moves its other claw and pierces his thigh, opens its beak and puts its head back, absolutely preparing to eat him alive, practically
unhinging its jaw, and that beak plunges towards him, direct for his face -
- with a swish-thud a bolt from the crossbow pierces its back between the wings, its eyes widen and it makes a choking sound. Then its eyelids fall and it pitches forward, all strength gone from its limbs, collapsing on top of Bobby. Forward momentum tears its hooks from his body, gauging upwards, and he thinks, ‘oh, shit’, as he feels something gush from his leg. the pain, formerly unbelievable, starts to dim, and at some level he knows that’s a bad thing, he’s going into shock as the world grays out -
“Goddamit motherfucker-“ Rufus is cursing, pushing and shoving the heavy thing off him, then slapping his face:
“Singer! Singer you keep your eyes open!”
He blinks, but dark mist descends.
*
On TV, people wake from a near-death experience in a hospital, blinking up at a blurred white ceiling and wondering if they’re in heaven. Bobby wakes up to the persistent sound of a slow drip, drip, drip, and a grey ceiling with a crack in it, and he’s reasonably sure he ain’t going to paradise.
“You made it.”
He turns his head and immediately regrets it. The speaker - a woman - doesn’t sound particularly happy about her pronouncement. Nor does she sound unhappy - it’s purely observation. He’s lying on something hard but yielding, a thin mattress, and he’s…underground. He thinks. Some kind of basement?
He blinks, slowly, and when he opens his eyes there’s a face peering over him. It’s a woman in late middle-age, whipcord-lean and acerbic, grey hair in a no-nonsense crop and a legitimate, honest-to-god eyepatch over half her face. She’s smoking. This definitely isn’t a hospital.
“Rufus?” he croaks.
“Taking care of the Olitiau’s body,” she says. “He stuck around long enough to make sure you weren’t checking out. He’s a bastard, but not that much of a bastard.”
“You’re a hunter?” he tries to ask, but his voice gives out into a squeaky croak, and she helps him sit up and drink water from a plastic bottle. her movements are absolutely impersonal.
“Was one,” she says when he’s finished drinking, and gestures to her eyepatch. “Nowadays more of a medic. I can see fine, but depth perception went with the eyeball. I can still stitch,” she adds a little defensively, and he guesses a worried look must have crossed his face.
“I’m sure,” he says hastily. “Uh, thanks.”
She shrugs. “You were lucky with the shoulder, but the thigh wound hit the artery. That’s why you bled so much. You’ll feel like crap for a couple of days but you should be fine. You’ve only been out a few hours. Lucky,” she said again.
Bobby let his head fall back against the pillow. Lucky wasn’t the word he would have used. Now that he felt more aware, he realizes the basement resembles a military bunker. There stockpiles of rations, ammunition and several well stocked first aid kits. He slides his eyes left, and realizes that the walls and floor were covered with symbols. He recognizes several from the books as wardings.
He swallows.
“I gotta say,” says the woman, “I never thought Turner would be the type to take a partner on. There must be something special about you.”
“Or just dumb,” Bobby mutters.
“Or that,” the woman agrees. “You might as well go on back to sleep, he won’t be back for a while.”
*
The medic’s name is Jamie, and she lives on her own in a warded house at the edge of the reservation. He’s starting to notice a pattern concerning hunters and living alone. Since she’s no longer actively hunting things, it seems she’s become a kind of contact point/safe house for hunters in the area, and when Rufus comes back, she gives them dinner and rolls out a camp bed for Rufus in the basement. Bobby’s plucked up the courage to look at his leg. It isn’t so bad. Well, it’s bad, obviously, but it isn’t too horrible to look at. Just a closed gash with some swelling and redness and a neat line of stitches.
He nearly died.
“I ever tell you about the time I got poisoned by a manticore?”
Bobby slides his eyes across. Rufus is a dark shape on the bunk opposite. His voice is directed at the ceiling.
“No?”
“It was in New York, of all places. Normally try to stay out of big cities, too many cops. But I couldn’t get no-one else on it at short notice. Fucker bitch-slapped me with its tail. Didn’t think nothing of it, thought I got away easy on that hunt, but the day
after I started getting sick. Nearly killed me.”
Bobby assumes this tale is supposed to bring him comfort.
“Why didn’t you die?”
“I’m a tough son of a bitch,” Rufus’ teeth flash white in the dark. Pause. “Guess you are too.”
Oh. They’re bonding.
“Guess so,” says Bobby.
“Feels good don’t it?” Bobby raises his eyebrows even though Rufus can’t possibly see him do it. he doesn’t feel like death
anymore. But then, he’s on some strong drugs. Good isn’t the word he’d use for his present state. Rufus clarifies: “Killing the olitiau.”
“Oh! Oh, yeah,” Bobby says.
“Think about it,” Rufus turns to him. His eyes glint, catching the meager light from the basement window. “That thing killed at least four people. People with lives, families. it would have gone on killing.”
“Yeah.” It’s true, but it feels abstract. He knows he’s helped save lives. He guesses this is why Rufus does it, why anyone does it. They can’t go back and prevent their own losses, so they spend the rest of their lives hunting for some kind of atonement.
Or they put their hands up and go batshit insane, one or the other.
*
He probably feels it for the first time when he comes face to face with a would-be victim, meets the guy’s kids, and personally holds off the ghost that’s trying to throttle him whilst Rufus burns the bones.
“Thank you,” says the guy emotionally, “Thank you so much.”
Course it wasn’t that simple: the spirit was a jilted lover taking out men who’d had affairs, but the guy’s wife had forgiven him, they’d moved on, and hey, Bobby isn’t one to judge. What’s that his grandma said: ‘We’re all sinners in our time, Robert’. Doesn’t he know it.
Bobby goes back to South Dakota. He reads and collects books. He wouldn’t call Rufus his full-time hunting partner, more like an associate, but he calls when he needs information and Bobby joins him on two-man jobs, and eventually he starts taking the simple ones on by himself. Then the slightly more complicated. He talks to Karen every night, avoiding the subject, because he can’t exactly ask for her forgiveness but he needs to feel like she’s still hearing him, even if it’s delusion.
He misses her desperately.
Once Cilla Mills realizes she truly isn’t getting any more gossip on Karen, she starts trying to set Bobby up with available women.
“No no no no no,” says Rufus, as though Bobby would have considered it. Karen hasn’t been gone a year and the proposition of anyone else is like a question posed in a foreign language. “Don’t go there.”
“I wasn’t thinking about it,” says Bobby tightly. They’re on the phone, but Rufus is in town and has seen Mariana Holmes walk up the drive with a casserole.
“There are hunters in marriages,” Rufus says, “Usually because they lost a kid. You don’t bring anybody else into this life and you can’t keep it a secret from them. This ain't a goddamn superhero movie.”
‘Your sister does’, he wants to say, but that’s different: she isn’t a hunter.
They kill a rugaru in Michigan, a werewolf in Texas. They salt and burn corpses in Iowa, Minnesota and NC. The good people of Sioux Falls decide regretfully that poor Mr. Singer has finally lost his shit, no doubt brought on by the departure of his wife, but realistically, he was always kind of weird, wasn’t he? No-one could really blame her for getting out when she did.
Then Rufus disappears. After a month Bobby calls his sister and gets no connection. After two months he starts tracking down people he met on their hunts. The only person who’ll talk to him is Ellen Harvelle, the barkeep and wife of a hunter over in Nebraska, and that’s only politeness:
“Ain’t heard from Rufus in months, sorry. Don’t you worry too much. He’ll get back in touch when he’s ready.”
Feeling vaguely like a teenage girl asking her date’s friends if he still likes her, Bobby thanks her and hangs up. He goes back to work on the Honda waiting in bits in the garage.
*
1982.
“I’m on the trail of a demon.”
“What - RUFUS?!”
“Naw, it’s the Black pope.”
Bobby rolls his eyes. “Where the hell have you been? I thought you were dead.”
Rufus chuckles. “Word of advice, son: in this game, don’t count a man out till you’ve burned the body. I been busy. Now, I’m on the trail of a demon in Colorado. Seem to be popping up all over the place….word is, you’ve been keeping up with your hunting skills - you’re quite the name nowadays.”
“Uh - I - am?” Bobby’s dumbfounded.
“Sure. You know how hunters talk.”
Pause. In the year and a half since he’s heard from Rufus, hunters have started to turn up at Bobby’s place looking for information. It turns out he’s pretty good at the research side, and his collection of occult books grows by the day.
“Look, uh,” Rufus shuffles the phone: “You don’t have to come. I mean if you ain’t ready. You can sit this one out of if you don’t want-
“I’m ready,” Bobby cuts him off. And with that he knows he is. Hell, he’s been waiting for this. Leading up to it. His pulse has picked up and he’s gripping the phone. This is one of the nightmares that ruined his life. It might even be the same one! Goddamn, he wants his turn at it, and if it kills him, he’s sure as shit gonna cause it some pain first.
“Alright then,” Rufus says quietly. “I’m in Florence. Meet me at the Super 8 as soon as you can get here.”
Part Seven