40 – Facing Fear

As he untied the prisoners, cutting their bonds with his razor-sharp spear blade, Sandy spun a tale right out of a horror movie. In a hoarse whisper, she said, “He was feeding people to his pets! That damn snake, included! He had something big outside the wall, too. We could hear it moving around, and he fed someone to it. The screams! Oh, Andy!”

“Sounded like a hog to me,” one of the men said.

“Wait a minute…” Andy winced as he gently probed his wounded chest. “You’re telling me those people with him were in on that? They just let him feed folks to his pets?”

“They’re his friends! This is his buddy’s house. We need to hurry—”

Andy shook his head. “No, they’re dead.” He gestured to the back door. “Come inside and see for yourself. I need to check on Lucy. She’s out front.”

“What about that thing?” another woman asked, rubbing her wrists where the ropes had cut off her circulation.

Andy followed her gaze to the pool where the snake, pregnant with its last meal, lay like a nightmare made real. “Let’s get Lucy. I figure we have to kill it if it’s got a taste for human flesh.”

“Right, okay, but, like, can we get past it?” the woman asked, still peering warily toward the edge of the pool decking a dozen yards away.

Andy shrugged. “It didn’t come after me. Just move quietly.”

Sandy followed Andy, almost uncomfortably close, as he moved past the pool to the back porch and then through the sliding door into the great room. The others were close behind, crowding past the dining table and into the great room where the two corpses of the men who’d been tormenting them were on display.

“You weren’t lying,” Sandy said, peering at the dead bodies.

“That fucking scumbag!” one of the men growled. “If he weren’t already dead, I’d rip his goddamn head off!”

“Easy to talk tough now that someone else has done all the killing,” one of the women said.

Andy sighed, shaking his head and walking past them toward the hallway. He didn’t have time to listen to bickering. “I’m gonna get Lucy. You guys should search the kitchen for food and stuff—load it into shopping bags or whatever.” He pointed toward the hallway to the laundry room. “There are boxes and boxes out there. Check ’em out.”

“Where will we go?” another woman asked.

“Our settlement. We’ll be safe there… for a while at least.” With that, he stepped out into the garage and jogged to the truck where he’d left Lucy. She was sitting up, and when she saw him coming, she waved.

“I’m feeling a lot better.” She smiled wanly. “Still a little woozy. What do you think they gave me?”

“I have no damn idea. You gotta hear what those assholes were up to.” Andy pulled the tailgate down and held out a hand for her. She grasped it, and he tugged, helping her slide out of the rubber-coated truck bed.

“Like what?”

“Like, remember that boar we killed? The wolves?” Lucy nodded. “Those were Whistler’s pets. Maybe he got some kind of class that let him tame monstrous animals or something. Anyway, he was feeding people to them.”

Lucy gasped. “Well, I mean, we knew he tried to kill us with the wolves, so I guess it’s not really so much of a surprise. Maybe that’s what made them big. Maybe he figured out how to ‘improve’ his pets by…” She trailed off, and Andy nodded—no need to describe the asshole’s behavior any further.

“Anyway, I have bad news: there’s another one.” He pointed. “Grab your bow.”

“Oh, God. What is it?” She collected the weapon and then, bracing on Andy’s shoulder, slid down from the tailgate. “Wait! What about Sandy?”

“She’s all right. Five other folks, too. C’mon, I’ll show you.” Andy led her past the woman’s body, into the garage, and then into the house, where everyone was gathered in the kitchen, drinking glasses of water, munching on snacks, and packing grocery bags with supplies.

Sandy looked up from a bag she was stuffing when they arrived. “I think they raided most of the houses. This place is full of stuff!”

Andy nodded. “Awesome. I wish we had a damn truck.”

One of the men looked up from where he was inhaling a bag of potato chips. “Hey, I’ve got a flatbed trailer at my place. I use it to haul trash to the dump. If we load that up and, I dunno, rig some kind of harness, we could pull it. How far are we going?”

This text was taken from NovelBin. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Andy visualized the concept, imagining three or four of them hauling on the trailer at a time. If they stuck to the road, the trip would be longer, but it shouldn’t be hard to get a trailer moving. He nodded, grinning. “Hell yeah, man. That’s the kind of idea I needed to hear. Where’s your house?”

“Just up the street—four houses from here.”

“Cool. Um, what’s your name? Hell, why don’t you all tell me your names? I’m Andy”—he put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder—"this is Lucy, and you all know Sandy already.”

“I’m Jordan,” the man with the flatbed said.

The other man gulped down the last of his water bottle and said, “I’m Tyler.”

One of the women stepped forward. She looked to be about forty, with dark, well-tanned skin and wiry arms exposed by a Gold’s Gym tank top. “I’m Kayla.” She pointed to a teenage girl. “My niece, Alexa”—she moved her finger to another girl—“and her best friend, Brittany.”

Andy nodded. “Cool. Well, glad to meet you all. Um, Jordan, let me help Lucy deal with this snake and then—”

“Snake?” Lucy cut him off. “I don’t think so, Andy!”

Andy looked at her, ready to laugh—like she was messing with him—but her face said otherwise. He saw real panic there. Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed, and her breathing quick. She was shaking her head.

“What’s the matter? You don’t have to get close.”

“I had a bad experience.” She licked her lips, glancing around at all the faces staring at her. “What? A rattlesnake bit me when I was a kid. I spent three days in the hospital—twenty vials of antivenom! I limped for four months!”

Tyler held up a hand. “I can shoot a bow. Let me borrow yours and I’ll pump a couple into that mother fuck—”

“No,” Andy said, chopping his hand to cut the guy off. “Let me talk to Lucy for a sec.” He reached down to take her hand. “Just step out back with me,” he added in a much softer voice.

She pressed her lips together, scowling, but nodded, acquiescing. Andy took two steps toward the back door when Jordan spoke up again, “Yo, Andy. How about me and Tyler go and get my trailer? I’ve got some ratchet straps I can rig up as a harness. I’m sure we can pull it up to this house.”

Andy looked at him, wondering if there was any duplicity in the man’s words. Was he going to ditch them? Run off to join some other band of creeps? It seemed like an absurd question, and he hated how his experience with people since the System’s arrival had made him so paranoid. Rather than give in to the mistrust, he just nodded. “Yeah, that’s cool. Just come back if you need help. Hey, might as well grab some weapons off those dead guys. Keep your eyes open.”

“Right on, brother.” Jordan stood and clapped the younger man, Tyler, on the shoulder. “Let’s do it.”

Meanwhile, Andy pulled open the back door and urged Lucy outside. He led her over to a cushioned patio chair and helped her to sit down, taking her bow and setting it on a side table. In a quiet voice, he said, “I didn’t want that dude to use your bow to kill that snake because it’s going to be worth a shitload of experience. I want you to get it.”

“It’s a snake, though, Andy!” He could almost see her heart rate picking up.

“Just breathe for a minute. I’m not going to throw you at the damn thing, I promise. Just hear me out.” He gestured toward the empty pool. “See that pool?”

“Yeah…”

“The snake’s sleeping in the deep end. It’s full from eating a human a little while ago.”

“What. The. Fuck?”

Andy grimaced, nodding. “I know. It’s insane, right? Anyway, I figure if you can put one of my enchanted arrows into its head, pretty much anywhere, it’ll be lights out for it.” He held his hands apart, indicating a shape about the size of a five-gallon bucket. “The head’s about this big. I don’t think you can miss.”

“But—”

Andy held up a hand, “But! If you do miss somehow, I’ll be standing between you and that snake, and all you have to do is run for the house. You’ll already be far away…”

Lucy frowned, but it was a different sort of frown—not the trembling-lip, panicked sort, but the resigned, “I know this is the right thing to do,” kind. “You think it’ll be worth a lot of experience?”

Andy grinned. “Definitely.” Suddenly, an idea struck him, and he added, “Hang on one sec!” He ran back inside and scanned the countertops.

“What is it?” Sandy asked.

“Any booze?”

“Tons! Look in those boxes.” She pointed to two good-sized cardboard boxes stacked along the wall. Andy looked inside the first one and saw what he wanted—a bottle of rum, Bacardi 151 to be exact.

“You aren’t, like, about to tie one on…” Sandy trailed off, looking at Andy’s bloody shirt. “Oh, are you, like, hurt?”

Andy shook his head, then frowned and said, “Well, yeah, but this isn’t for that. I want to make sure that snake dies, so, yeah—fire.” With that, he slipped outside and looked at Lucy, still sitting where he’d left her. “I know, logically, that snake should die if you shoot it in the head, but I don’t want to take any chances, considering we’re dealing with magic and monsters and stuff.”

“Well, I appreciate that.” She tried to smile, but her jaw was clamped tight, and it looked more like a grimace.

“Where will you stand when you shoot it?”

“I guess near the steps.”

Andy nodded. They were directly across from the deep end of the rectangular pool. He took his spear from where he’d leaned it, then walked over to the pool decking, slowly approaching the edge. The snake hadn’t moved. The damn thing looked like it was awake, but he knew that was a thing—snakes don’t close their eyes, at least not like mammals do.

Standing on the edge of the pool, he reached into his System-granted knowledge and looked for his understanding of his new skill, Scorchmark Glyph. There it was, like he’d always known it. He reached down to the faintly tan-colored pool decking and traced his finger along the rough surface, channeling some warm, tingling mana out of the center of himself and through his finger. A fiery, angular rune took shape on the ground, complicated and kind of beautiful. When he finished, it flared brightly and then faded to a faint glimmer. He knew implicitly that only he could see it now.

He took two big steps back, then turned and nodded to Lucy. “Stand here.”

“Um, what’s the booze for?”

“I’ll throw it when you shoot. The arrow should ignite it. You know, like a Molotov cocktail.”

Lucy giggled softly as she walked over, bow in hand. “I get it.”

Andy held the bottle in his right hand, his spear in the other, and said, “Ready when you are.”

Lucy nodded, inhaling deeply through her nose and slowly exhaling through her mouth. When she looked at the pool and laid eyes on the snake for the first time, her eyes widened, but she didn’t freak out. She pulled out one of Andy’s enchanted arrows, nocked it to her bowstring, then drew it back. “Here we go,” she whispered, then released her arrow.