Chapter 2

“Dying is a wild night and a new road.” – Emily Dickinson

The cleanup of the crime scene didn’t take me very long at all. Being quasi-spectral, I don’t leave finger or footprints behind ... unless I particularly wish to. I didn’t. I suppose a patient man with a microscope might find a few stray wool threads with gunpowder marks from where the bullets had gone in and out, but no trace of DNA would ever be found. The crime scene looked exactly like a wrathful spirit had with great ire and fury performed terminal punishment upon the wicked, leaving no tangible trace of itself behind.

I’ve toyed with the idea of collecting a small bag of assorted dogman or sasquatch fur and gilding the lily a bit, by spreading some confusing (and terrifying) false evidence. It is an amusing thought (and this would terrify some suits from several alphabet agencies in both Langley and Washington ... but it will remain just an idle thought.

Most dogmen are nasty, innately evil and thoroughly wicked pricks, and probably ought to be rooted out with extreme prejudice from every cave and crevasse ... but perhaps not quite all of them. At least one of these guys owes me a favor, and I can think of a couple of small isolated tribes with very strong rules against allowing human meat on their menu. They can smell me (and those like me) just as we can sense them, and most of the bad or crazy ones have an implacable hatred for us, and invariably try to instigate conflict ... and most encounters then tend to end rather poorly for them.

As for the much larger bigfoot population, they’re really not a significant problem. They’re a very secretive sort of people (the call themselves the Sabe) that mostly just want to be left the fuck alone ... and I can respect that. In general temperament, they’re a bit touchy, and quick to take offense, but overall, they’re not really different from most mortal humans. Some are good, some are bad, and most are somewhere in-between. No sense in punishing the 95% innocent ones along with the few guilty. Besides, in my very humble opinion, the overwhelming majority of human deaths are due to plain stupidity (see Rule #1), usually by the victim starting a quarrel they stood almost no chance of winning.

As for the Wendigos or Kiwakwa ... if any of them come anywhere near me, they’re dead meat. Period. I’ve got the horns of two of them mounted up on the front of my trailer. Tough, really tough bastards, but I walked away afterwards and they didn’t. They’re originally from some dodgy lower dimension I’d never want to visit and they view anything and anyone living (animal or human) as their prey. One turns up about every ten years or so making a big nuisance of itself, usually in the wilds of northern Maine, and a group of three or four of us (Revenants) will take a nice little hunting trip. Being partially supernatural themselves, in a one-on-one fight they can get really nasty ... but those bastards don’t deserve a fair, even-up fight! There’s a persistent rumor that there is a breeding colony of them deep inside a cave on Mount Katahdin. If this rumor is ever found to be true, then out bosses will invoke the nuclear option and gather up most of the Revenants in North America to go deal with it ... and likely also a few extra posse members for our team, such as calling in a few angels each from both Above and Below, and maybe even some ‘friendly’ Sabe or dogmen, and likely an old retired deity or two as well. Everyone loves to get in on a good epic fight!

There is some shit that neither the powers Above or Below will tolerate, like those guys ... or even worse, the remaining rogue Atlanteans. Even the trouble-making Reptilians are pussies in comparison.

Back to the final task at hand, I found Miss Jordan’s torn blouse and gently covered her dead nude body with it. I wanted her to have a smidgeon of dignity when the local sheriff’s department search team discovered her body in another couple of hours. I just quickly made sure that the five other grave sites were all now clearly visible, each with a cadaverous hand just barely peeking out of the ground, waiting patiently now for one of the donut-squad to trip over. By this evening, they’d be on the way to the local medical examiner for final identification, and afterwards a dignified (proper) burial.

Home. Everyone, despite any poor life choices and an unfortunate violent death, deserves one.

Ten minutes later I had returned back to the nearby rest stop where Edgar Phelps had parked and left his truck, his keys still in the ignition. I turned on the emergency flashers, so that the next passing patrol car would find the driverless truck, and eventually the county sheriff would organize a complete ground search of the local area. Being a short-haul trucker that handled a regular intercity delivery route, my bad boy Mr. Phelps, made regular stops at rest areas like this all over the state, usually just hiring and abusing the local sex workers about every month or two. Sometimes, especially since his daemon had taken firmer control over him, he added the unusually pretty young whores that he took a very special fancy towards for his afterlife harem of slaves, which he’d killed and buried right here.

I helped the officers out by leaving something of a trail for them to soon easily find and follow to the mass grave site. I didn’t have a box of donuts to leave a better trail they could certainly follow. Edgar had certainly never been sloppy enough to ever leave a woman’s shoe in the grass near his truck, or a bra hung from a bush fifty yards later, or a skirt laying in the cold mud only barely out of direct sight from a dead body. The evil spirit that rode him was too ancient and wise to be this sloppy, even with modern forensic techniques. Now, even a half-blind, overweight local Roscoe could follow this trail – most helpful me!

Just for the inconvenience, I took a small tithe of $120 from the late bastard’s wallet, which I found inside the cab. For expenses, but leaving about six hundred dollars still left untouched. I only took what I honestly thought I was owed. His blood was all over my jacket and sweater and my travel schedule doesn’t lend itself to regular trips to a laundromat. Not to mention that I’m no good at stitching up torn clothes, so those bullet holes were there for good. Blood (all if it was his) was on everything I was wearing and that meant it was time to strip down and place everything, shoes and all, into a burn-bag for disposal. I’m pretty frugal, so most of my clothes come from resale shops and now, after every client requiring violent termination, they must be replaced. The C-note should cover all of that, leaving the extra $20 left to splurge on breakfast!

Speaking from just over two hundred years of experience, I’m (un-)living testimony to the wonders of the economic principle of Compounded Interest. Since 1803, I’ve been setting funds aside nearly monthly into a family trust account to invest for my future expenses ... already generating enough for me to live (ha!) rather comfortably if I so wished, but really money (even heaps of it) can’t provide me with much happiness or satisfaction.

Money cannot buy you happiness ... but it does let you select your own preferred form of misery.

My inspection of the truck cab done, I noted with satisfaction that there was plenty of other interesting evidence on hand for law enforcement to find. Edgar had a nasty little collection of trophy panties in the back of the cab from over two-dozen women. Most of the donors were only raped and beaten, but some were not so lucky. Eventually the FBI would very quietly make a post-humous case charging their late suspect with ten murders occurring over six years and across three states. Somebody, in some highly classified dungeon in the FBI basement at Quantico (where all the reports with weird shit get reviewed and filed), would someday hoist a few glasses to me. They know there are a few ‘monsters that kill monsters’ out there somewhere that will never be caught, discovered, or publicly identified – doing the job the authorities can’t, but for reasons and purposes entirely unknown and unfathomable.

Locally, the county sheriff’s department and state troopers will publicly state the case as unsolved, with ‘killer or killers unknown. Privately, among themselves in some quiet bar, they’ll blame aliens or a cryptid as the culprit. They abound in the Appalachians ... even if the authorities won’t ever admit it. Everyone will agree (eventually) that justice was done, and just like sausages – no one wants to really know how it’s made.

I’m half-certain that my name appears in a few very dusty files, since it appears (misspelled) in at least two publicly known magical grimoires that I’m aware of ... and likely a few other tomes too nasty to be advertised. Fortunately, part of my magic is that I cannot be found (if I don’t wish to be). Anyone who even suspects my existence also has the knowledge to know what a Revenant is ... what I do, and the why and how I do it.

And that I answer to a higher authority.

I had parked my venerable old pickup truck and my attached trailer home at the far end of the rest stop earlier, and now I used several careful minutes to change clothes and place everything I’d worn into a bag to be cremated. As I had suspected, I was running low on extra work clothes, and I mentally penciled in a stop to go shopping after a few more hours spent on the road. Already, I was getting the first faint indicators that another client would be waiting for me soon, two hundred miles and a state further west.

Oddly, this call was from quite a bit further west than my usual territory ... almost certainly within someone else’s assigned territory, and they might (rightfully) be annoyed or concerned about my professional intrusion. Very odd, this ... but still a problem for later. The request to attend to this duty was still a weak prelude, and not yet a direct official summons, but I’d receive that soon – I was certain.

If neither the realms Above or Below are quite like they’re portrayed by most historical religious scholarship or modern ‘New Age’ conventional wisdom, then Time is another peculiar factor altogether that defies most simple explanations. For starters, time is most certainly not linear ... at least in the way most of the living sense it. For me, my knack or powers allow me to arrive at my destination precisely when I am needed. I live in a small, semi-vintage Airstream camper, towed along by an only slightly less ancient International Harvester Scout 4x4, largely so that I could camp when needed in one of the hundreds of nearby campgrounds ... never having to deal with motel clerks or curious strangers (with video cameras that only would depict me as a blur).

It’s safer and much less or a hassle to drive the highways and byways of Appalachia, and since I travel mostly by highways and county dirt roads, I ‘know’ when I need to be at whatever location, hours or even days away in the future ... warned quite early enough to get there on time ... even if it’s two states, or more away from where I am presently. Everything happens for a reason.

Still, there was one small ritual to perform first, before spending the rest of the day driving further west than I’d traveled in nearly a hundred years ... and that was breakfast!

Alright, I suppose I should explain that a Revenant doesn’t actually need to eat – or require sleep either, but I told myself when I assumed this stern duty, that I needed to stay grounded ... to keep on a minimal attachment to the small little rituals and things that make a person human. So, as something of a regular routine after dealing with a client (which is usually occurring at night), I’ll go to a small rural diner and have a proper breakfast. I don’t really have much appetite, and even less in the way of functional taste buds, so getting gourmet chow is just a pointless extravagance. Oddly though, a ‘greasy spoon’ diner (even a stop at a local Awful Waffle) is surprisingly satisfying. It has something to do with the benefits of high cholesterol grease, I suppose. Handy, since I have neither a pumping heart, functional arteries ... or even a proper, functional digestive system to process the chow with.