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by Brent Knowles
Dark Fantasy, 18 pages.
Originally Published in Not One of Us #35, 2006
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Wanderer looked down in satisfaction as he walked the old mountain road and saw the town below him. The stagnation of the human race was at an end and the survivors were now rebuilding. So ended the apocalypse. Wanderer continued towards the hotel from his past, an old, sprawling structure sitting high atop a cliff, until loud noises from ahead made him pause.
A cat’s howl. A woman’s cry. The raucous laughter of boys on the verge of manhood, the cruelest and most dangerous of ages. With a sigh he resumed his pace. He was the Wanderer and he would do what needed doing before doing what he needed.
The boys ahead were stupid, but even Wanderer had once been a boy (though he remembered little of that time). The skulls of the last ghouls rattled against the metalskin armor he wore as he rushed towards the boys. He thought of the losses suffered along the way, the Feast Wars, the long ghoul hunt, and how he, Wanderer, was now the last again. For how long had it been this way? He did not remember. The armor squeezed the thoughts out of his mind.
The cat stopped screaming just as Wanderer crested the hill and saw the boys, eight of them clustered around a young-going-on-middle-aged woman, who lay on her back in the wet snow, shrieking up at them. Behind them all stood the hotel, his destination, still clinging to the mountainside after all this time. The boys shouted their complaints down at the witch — father dead from exposure, vermin in the food, one family’s entire herd missing. Valid tragedies, yes, but none of them were the woman’s fault. The stupid boys should have been smart enough to realize that if this bawling woman with the tar colored hair was a witch she would have had power enough to stop them from nailing her cat to the weeping willow.
The cat, a yellow and black male, had cried a long time before dying.
The boys saw Wanderer and he shouted at them to back away and they obeyed, momentarily awestruck by this icon from the past, a living legend spoken to them by their grandfathers — Wanderer, the ghoul hunter. The armor glimmered, still functional all these years since the Feast Wars when it was stolen from the aliens.
The smarter boys scattered for town as Wanderer closed in on them, but four remained. One of them said, “We’re just punishing, is all. God’s word says not to bear a witch to live, it does.”
“Shut up,” Wanderer said, his patience lost to the past. “The cat you killed is price enough for the crime she never committed. Go.”
“But God’s-”
“I told you to shut up. If you are looking for someone to blame, maybe He is the one you should be calling out. Get, now, or your skulls will rattle alongside my ghouls. Go.”
The smallest of the boys said, “Pa says you’re the righteous hand of God, the one who punishes. Punish her, punish the witch!” The other boys lent their agreement with loud shouts. Wanderer turned his head to stare at the small, stupid boy; his alien helmet resembled a ghastly bug’s head, and its ebony surface reflected the boy’s pale face as he shrank back. A taller, broad shouldered young man with brown hair and carrying a heavy hammer splotched with the cat’s blood stepped forward and handed Short-boy a cut-off shotgun.
Wanderer looked into Tall-boy’s eyes and saw how truly stupid these town boys were and shook his head sadly. “Go.” His last offer.
“Jacob?” Short-boy asked the Tall-boy.
Jacob said, “Kill it!”
Short-boy leveled the shotgun and the others stepped to the side as the gun fired, its roar echoing throughout the valley. The boys who had ran earlier probably heard it, stopped a moment, and then continued their run, planning their friend’s funerals in their heads as they sprinted over the half-frozen land.
The blast caught Wanderer in the upper thigh and he thought he heard his leg crack but felt no pain as he fell to his knees in a burst of wet snow. Jacob walloped him across the head with the heavy hammer but Wanderer remained kneeling as the spears the other two boys carried shattered on impact with the armor.
Wanderer’s glove hummed as a shield of energy covered it and manifested a razor-sharp laser around the perimeter of his hand. He swung out, severed Jacob’s leg at the knee. The shotgun pellets absorbed by the armor, now popped out of the elastic skin, each one dropping into the snow, steam rising from them. Wanderer stood up and the boys dropped their weapons and dragged Jacob away, a trail of blood marking their panicked flight.
The witch squatted at the base of the tree, rocking on her heels, her wild eyes tear-filled, snot coursing overtop her lips. She looked up at him as he moved beside her.
“You wear the black mask of the ghouls, I see the dead float in your eyes Wanderer.”
“You know of me?”
“Aye, my husband’s fault, that is.”
Husband? Wanderer looked around, detected no others nearby. -- [End of Preview.]