III

It was a moonless night, the inky blackness of the sky pierced only by the winking of the scant few stars which were visible in breaks of the thick cloud cover. A cherry red glow faded in and out of existence at the base of a tree, a beacon to anyone making their way through the woods at that time of night.

With a sigh, Ansel covered the face of his wristwatch with his sleeve — it and the clothes on his back being two of the few personal items coming with him out of Hayes — and leaned back. Wolcott was a half hour late. By the man’s standards, that still put him on time, but they weren’t running on his or Ansel’s clock that evening. 

He dropped the cigarette into a puddle where it was snuffed out with a hiss and debated whether to light a fresh one. Instead, he knelt down to retrieve the bottle of rum at his feet and drank until the taste of smoke was chased down from his throat. He wasn’t drunk, exactly, but his head was surrounded by a comforting warmth that helped to soothe his jangled nerves. He needed to focus if they were going to pull the plan off without a hitch and without him throttling Wolcott’s neck himself. 

And to speak of the devil, there was a crunching of boots on gravel where the road turned to mud which hearkened his arrival. Silhouetted by the distant lights of the town, one lanky arm raised up in greeting, Ansel was at least glad the man had the presence of mind not to call out and announce their presence to anyone within earshot. 

“You got some nerve being late,” Ansel said, once they were face to face. He discarded the rum bottle at his feet with a soft tink against the tree’s roots. 

“Gimme a fuckin’ break, Rusty,” Woolcott said, holding his arms out like he’d been crucified. “We aren’t all used to running around in the mud in the dark.”

The look he gave Wolcott could have soured milk. “Y’got your gun?” he asked, checking for his own pistol before shouldering the shotgun he had leant against the tree. 

With a snort, Wolcott flashed the handle of something in his waistband. “Yeah I got my fucking gun,” he said. “I also got this.” 

Like a stage magician, he produced a dark, heavy object which Ansel first mistook for an odd-shaped pinecone. It was only on closer inspection — too close inspection, he realized — that he saw it for what it was.

“Jesus Christ,” he cussed, recoiling into the tree. “What the fuck, you don’t even know how to use one’a them things.”

“It’s a grenade, Rusty,” Wolcott said and he was sure he’d heard an eyeroll. “It’s not exactly complicated.”

For a brief moment, the air around them was silent except for the hooting of an owl and the grinding of Ansel’s molars. “Give it to me,” he said, thrusting out a hand. 

“No, get your own,” he said, spinning to one side and clutching it to his breast like a newborn. “We didn’t all get to play with these in France, lay off.”

“So help me God, if’n you don’t hand that fuckin’ thing over, I’m walking,” he growled through clenched teeth, two seconds away from cracking him in the face with the stock of his gun and washing his hands of the whole thing.

“O-kay o-kay,” he sighed, slapping it down into Ansel’s hand with a weighty motion.

Ansel’s stomach dropped as if he’d been handed a live beehive, but he took it with a self-satisfied grunt. Though his instinct was to ditch it somewhere during their walk, he instead threaded the lever through his belt loop. It bounced dangerously against his hip as the two made their way deeper in the woods.

Their ambush spot had been selected by Ansel the day before and marked with a beer can threaded on a branch. It was a natural bend in the road, an almost hairpin turn that wove around a dense cluster of trees. The road beyond the turn was pockmarked by deep ruts and rivulets left behind from the seasonal downpours of late autumn. A truck with a fragile payload would need to slow down to make the turn and continue on without damaged goods, and anything further than arm’s length from the path was obscured by low hanging boughs. It was a beautiful hunting blind and Wolcott slapped his arm on Ansel’s shoulder in a rare display of praise. He tipped his head and jogged across the road to wait out their quarry in the dead of night. 

After what felt like an eternity, the tell-tale rumble of an engine cut through the silence and a set of headlights was visible on the other side of the trees. Slick with sweat, Ansel wiped the palms of his hands against his thighs and checked his shotgun one last time before readying it. When the nose of the truck rounded the corner and dipped into the first trench, he glided forward. In one fluid motion he jerked open the door and blew the driver in half with the shotgun before shock even registered on his youthful face. 

Pops rang out all around him at that moment, Ansel dipping back into the trees as Wolcott took his turn, firing into the gunmen at the open back of the vehicle. As Ansel ejected the spent shells and slammed a fresh load into the barrel, a scream pierced the air.

No, a shriek. A primal noise more animal than man that froze Ansel’s body in place even as his mind was transported back to the hell on earth of the front lines. 

The wash of light from the headlights splashed against Wolcott’s frame as he darted out to the open road, his face a rictus of terror. His gun forgotten, his hands thrown up in desperate plea, he let out a cry of “NO—” before he was cut off too soon. A streak of shadow slammed into him with all the force of a striking predator and drove him into the ground, mud and dirt and something horrible arcing up in front of the headlights.

With his mind still miles away, Ansel’s legs took charge and he bolted into the woods like a flushed deer. Branches whipped his face and thorns tore red, burning streaks into his hands which he scarcely noticed. The lights behind him were quick to disappear and as the darkness swallowed up the truck, he prayed to God he might just vanish, too.

He stood a good chance of doing it. It was dark as pitch amongst the trees and it was only through the long-dormant muscle memory of roving the woods in the holler of his youth that he didn’t crash headlong into a trunk. It was as if he could sense the position of any obstacle in his path, either through some divine favor or else supernatural ability.

But the same held true for his pursuants. Though his ears were muffled by the sounds of his own panting and the blood rushing in his head, they tuned in to the crashing of heavy feet against the underbrush. His efforts redoubled and he juked hard to one side, throwing himself at the sturdiest tree within reach and clambering up with a speed he didn’t know he’d possessed. Trembling a good sixty feet in the air, he clasped his wrists tight around the willowy upper trunk of the pine and bit the inside of his cheek to stop his chattering teeth. He tasted blood and swallowed it down.

His mind joined him at that moment and played out the last few minutes in stark relief against his memory. Wolcott’s face, blanched and awash in the lights of the auto, had suddenly been streaked with blood as a gout of arterial spray had erupted from his neck. For just a moment, Ansel was sure he’d seen one of the gunmen with his mouth latched onto Wolcott’s throat like a panther.

There was a sudden gust of wind and Ansel’s head dipped and swirled as the tree swayed. With herculean effort, he kept a solid grip on both the trunk and his stomach, allowing the wave of nausea to heat his skin, leaving him with flushed cheeks. The adrenaline of his flight through the forest had left him by then, and he pressed his cheek against the rough bark of the tree to keep from toppling off into thin air.  Cautious footsteps sounded below him and he could just make out the shadows of the two who had him treed. As near as he could tell from his position, they moved like ordinary men, but something about the way they stood stock-still raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck. The image of one of them throwing himself forward in the night at an astonishing speed wouldn’t leave his mind.

He thought of his pistol tucked impotently under his arm. A shot from such a distance in the dark was sure to miss and would only announce his presence. Waiting them out would do little good, either, the sun was due to rise in a few hours and he’d have no time to slip away undetected on foot. He ran a wavering hand across his scalp, sweat and debris from his escape attempt sticking to his palm. When he lowered his arm to wipe it against the seat of his trousers, his thumb bumped against something cold and dangerous. He recoiled like he’d touched a lit stove. Guilt gnawed at him when he thought of Wolcott, but maybe thanks to him at least one of them might survive the ordeal. 

With the tender care of a jeweler, Ansel slipped the grenade from his waistband. The pin pulled free from its housing with a small amount of force and he eased up the lever. Praying Wolcott hadn’t been duped into a dud, he counted a full three Mississippis before releasing it back to the earth.

Confusion surrounded the figures below, but Ansel was too far away and too delirious with fear to make any sense of the words. He could just about hear part of a warning cry before the world around him flickered from black to blazing white. 

Sound erupted in a roar which was snuffed out by a blistering heat and for a moment he felt as if he was back in the hell on earth he visited in his nightmares.

Night returned as swiftly as it left him with silence pressing against Ansel’s ears like a pillow. When it faded into a dull ringing, he peeled open his eyes and found himself staring up at a vast expanse of night sky, crisscrossed by tree branches. Some miracle had kept him wrapped to the pine even as it had toppled sideways, and its willowy limbs had tangled with those of its neighbor, preventing him from being crushed. He glanced beneath him and his insides dipped to see he was at least ten feet up, and it took no small amount of coaxing to release his arms, to drop to the ground below. He stumbled, his legs a quivering mass of spent adrenaline, and he doubled over to vomit up the contents of his stomach — a bitter mixture of rum and bile. With burning nose and throat, tears stinging the corners of his eyes, he dragged one rough hand over his face and turned to survey the damage. 

The epicenter of the blast was a gnarled mess of branches, woody shrapnel, and bark which stank of viscera. Ansel noted the streaks of gore with a small amount of satisfaction, even as the sight made his stomach flip over once more and he tasted something acrid in the back of his mouth. Resolving to return to the road, he’d tumbled over another fallen tree and he grabbed at a branch to steady himself. Something at the end of the branch groaned in pain and Ansel pulled his hand back, sticky with a dark fluid that stank of days-old blood. He froze in place and his eyes snapped down when he heard another mournful sound from the forest floor. 

Ansel had encountered haints before, the shades and creatures that moved nearly undetected through forests and fields where men had died. Spirits which followed the living to tempt them into death or else to remember what they themselves had forgotten so long before. But what lay before him defied all of his earthly experiences. 

A bough the size and width of his arm had been punched through the midsection of one of the gunmen, his blood a gleaming, ruddy stain on the bark. Ansel stared at him in fascinated horror. What he’d taken for a man earlier was now a living corpse at his feet, gaunt and ashen with milky eyes that searched up and beyond him. The sounds he was making were close enough to human, but the teeth which flashed in his mouth as he lay there panting were too large, too sharp to belong to someone of flesh and blood. It was some creature wearing a man’s face. 

The twisted figure on the ground moaned and made sudden eye contact with Ansel. One trembling, bloodied hand reached up at him and it opened its mouth to croak out, “Help—” Ansel put two bullets in its skull before he even realized he was holding his pistol. The hand landed on the ground with a thud and the woods were silent and still. Involuntary tears spilled from the corners of Ansel’s eyes and he tore himself away from the thing, back to the man-made comfort of the road. 

On leaden limbs, he picked his way through underbrush, the yellow headlights of the car beaming out at him like a pair of will o’ wisps. Some scavenger hissed at him as he stumbled out onto the dirt path, its meal interrupted, before disappearing in a flash of fur. Though he did his best to avoid looking at the grisly sight, pieces of Wolcott were strewn all around the front of the truck and catching a glimpse of something horrible was inevitable. Ansel’s stomach was a compact knot pressing against his spine, his heart hammered in his throat, and he didn’t half wonder whether the stress and terror of the night would just strike him dead. 

But death had been slow to claim him in the past, and it wasn’t meeting him on that miserable road. He trudged past the open cab of the truck, engine still idling. He didn’t even spare a thought for the driver staring with his mouth agape up at the windshield, his blood a congealing mess on the floorboards.

Hauling himself into the back of the truck, Ansel claimed his prize of five bottles of rum. He tore at the cork in one with his teeth and drained a quarter of it in one desperate pull, spluttering out a wet, hacking cough as the alcohol burned his raw throat. He retrieved a sack from the bed of the truck for his payload and slung it over his shoulder with a gentle clanking of glass.

Draining another few mouthfuls of rum to steel himself, he hopped down to the ground and surveyed the road. He could walk back to Hayes, try and lie low for a few days. Marv didn’t like him, but neither did he hate him enough to allow Ansel to be rent limb from limb.  That was assuming a search party would be out for his blood in particular. Even if what was left of Wolcott could be identified, there was nothing tying Ansel to the scene. Sure, Wolcott had spoken to him, but Wolcott spoke to everyone and he was positive the man had been greedy enough to only loop Ansel in on the plan. Ansel himself had told Sly — 

A flash of heat went through him and he put any thought of Hayes out of his mind.

He crossed to the front of the truck on unsteady legs. It was only thanks to the half bottle of rum sitting in him could he stomach the carnage spread out across the road. Wolcott’s throat and belly were both torn open and deep red gouges marred his once-handsome face. Ansel had seen men ripped to shreds before, but the brutality that had been inflicted directly on Wolcott was what had shocked him to his core. Heat prickled up Ansel’s collar to his face and he grabbed Wolcott’s ankles, praying that the two of them would stay in one piece. 

Divinity favored him that round, and Ansel dragged Wolcott off the road into a ditch, rolling him over the last half foot so his face was no longer visible. With his feet, he scattered leaves and underbrush into the ersatz grave like a dog. When the last evidence of Wolcott had disappeared, he ran a filthy hand over his hair and rubbed at the base of his neck. “Sorry you went out like this,” he said, by way of a eulogy. “Weren’t a bad plan, y’know, notwithstanding.” He snorted to clear the back of his throat and rubbed his nose with a set of bruised and battered knuckles. 

Then he was off to Odette.

It was dawn in all its grey dreariness when Ansel came to the outskirts of town. Hayes’s nearest neighbor was over double its size, with a more stable population that catered less to itinerants like himself. The shacks on the street showed signs of life with smoke curling out of chimney pipes and a few passersby shuffling off to start their day who had the sense to ignore Ansel completely.

The first boarding house he came across was the most promising in his eyes. One of the windows was boarded up and the proprietress looked as if she was permanently attached to the worn out chair on the front stoop, a wary eye fixed his direction as she gnawed on the end of a foul cigar. He paid for his room with two bottles of rum and showed himself to his quarters, the woman’s eyes following him as he climbed the swaying set of stairs affixed to the side of the house. To his great surprise, he had the strength to make it to the top unscathed; after the night he’d had it would have been poetic justice to break his neck in the yard.

He hadn’t been in a room so dire since his time in the war. It seemed built around the sagging twin bed taking up the length of one wall with a rickety chair and a small wood stove claiming most of the rest of the floor space. When he lowered himself to the bed to unlace his boots, a cloud of fleas erupted from the straw, spurred to life by the promise of a warm blood meal. He swatted a few, but the majority hopped out of reach and lay dormant, waiting for their next opportunity. Any other time he would have reconsidered his accommodations, but exhaustion and the fog clouding his mind forced him to ignore the multiplying welts on his exposed skin.

He opened the window a crack to air out the heavy musk of the room and to better listen to the activity outside. The door’s broken latch worried him and Ansel wedged the back of the chair underneath the door knob to bar it closed from the inside. It wouldn’t be a deterrent to entry for someone determined, but it would make enough noise to rouse him.

It was only in the confines of the room that Ansel at last allowed himself to get drunk, finishing the bottle he’d started and a good portion of a next. The night’s events were washed away and he slipped into the warm waters of unconsciousness. His dreams were nothing coherent, with splashes of light and the memory of heat as he burned alive breaking through the darkness of his mind. Now and then, pinpricks of sensation brought him closer to the surface of awareness as the parasites in the room took advantage of their host’s incapacity.

Directly, an overwhelming nightmare gripped at him and he felt himself in the choking grasp of a night terror. He was pressed into the mattress, the timber frame of the bed below digging into him and sending spasms rippling through his back. He couldn’t breathe, some incredible force was bearing down on his chest and throat, squeezing the life out of him. When his conscious mind at last caught up with the panicked messages being sent to him, his eyes snapped open wide.

And he met the eyes of another, emerald green, shimmering with the cold light of polished glass.  A scream was snuffed out in Ansel’s throat. A strong hand clamped down over his windpipe, tightening so hard and fast that he feared he would be wrung like a chicken. The stranger was straddling him in bed like a sinister lover, his body devoid of any comforting warmth. Instinct took over and Ansel froze in place beneath him, even as his mind was screaming for him to move, to fight. 

The fingers uncurled and the eyes moved back, seemingly satisfied by this supplication. Ansel could clearly see the face before him now, a stranger anywhere between 30 and 50 years old. His skin was smooth and pale, all the features of his face — from his Cupid’s bow lips, sharp cheekbones, and classic aquiline nose — were so beautiful and perfect as to appear sculpted. Those hollow green eyes pierced into Ansel, unmoving, and the man’s head dipped close to his own again. Locks of his long, ash blond hair brushed against Ansel’s jaw and every muscle of his body tensed underneath the man’s crushing presence.

“You have caused me a great deal of trouble,” he said. His accent was French, not unlike that of the field doctors and nurses Ansel had known during his agonizing recuperation just outside of Nancy. 

The disparate clues slotted into place and Ansel furrowed his brow in dawning comprehension. “Baptiste?” 

Any further questions were again choked out of him by slender fingers and stars danced before his eyes. “I did not tell you to speak,” Baptiste said, his chiding voice seeming to come from miles away. He stayed wrapped around Ansel’s throat, face impassive as he choked the life out of him. It was only when consciousness began to slip away, when Ansel’s chest was bursting with stale air, did the hand release. Coughing and gagging, Ansel swallowed in great lungfuls, hot tears stinging the corners of his eyes. 

With a forceful hand, Baptiste cupped Ansel’s chin and tilted it up to face him once more. A sensation like electricity pulsed between the two of them, flowing from Baptiste’s eyes and burrowing deep into Ansel’s mind. “Who are you working for?” Baptiste asked, a faint echo of his question ringing between Ansel’s ears.

“No one,” he said, the answer tumbling out of him.

The hand on his face slackened minutely before returning to its vice like grip. That electric beat thrummed harder as Baptiste drew himself as close to Ansel as physically possible while still being able to speak. “Who are you working with?”

The pulsating energy in Ansel’s field of vision danced perfectly in time with the hammering in his chest. He was too frightened to speak, but again an answer poured from his mouth without his conscious thought. “No one,” he whimpered. 

For the first time, Baptiste blinked and the flicker of an emotion passed over his face. The connection between the two men vaporized and he sat back on his haunches. With a fingertip resting on his chin, he seemed to be truly looking at Ansel and this — more than anything — chilled him to the bone.

“No one,” Baptiste repeated, his eyes ticking over to the left. With a jolt, Ansel realized a second man had been there all along, standing sentinel with the door — still closed and barred with the chair — at his back. There was more life in that one’s face, but when Ansel tried to meet his eyes, the man sharply avoided his gaze. 

A frigid finger traced the outline of Ansel’s face from cheek to jawbone to throat, resting on his pounding jugular. “Two of my men you have killed,” Baptiste said.

“Three,” Ansel said before he could stop himself. 

The fingers jabbed into his skin, but did not close off his throat just yet. “Pardon?”

“Three. I done in your driver, too,” he croaked. 

Baptiste regarded him in stone-faced silence before he threw his head back and laughed, a sound so devoid of mirth that Ansel’s blood chilled to ice. It filled the room like a radio broadcast, bouncing off the walls at all the wrong angles before Baptiste snapped back into silence. “I came here to kill you,” he said, smoothing his hair back against his head. “And I may yet. However,” he paused, his eyes boring into Ansel’s. “However, I will give you this choice: die in this room or work for me, to replace the two men of mine you killed.”

Terror melted into a thin veneer of bravado and Ansel’s lip curled. “Be your dog, y’mean.”

“Dog,” Baptiste repeated, his mouth spreading into a smile. “I like that. Your answer?”

Ansel chewed at his cheek and the silence of the room stretched out to infinity. From the moment he’d been drafted, death had nipped at his heels in dogged pursuit and there had been long, cold nights when he’d slowed down, hoping it might overtake him at last. But in that dingy room, his whole body tense and aching with fear, a spark caught in his chest and began to burn at his heart. He wanted to live. “I’ll work for you.”

The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Baptiste’s odd smile widened, the expression slashing his face in two. The horrible visage melded with Wolcott’s in Ansel’s mind, and he had a vision of Baptiste’s mouth stained with blood. One last surge of adrenaline flooded his system and he bucked and writhed under Baptiste’s weight in sudden desperation. The man’s eyes danced with delight at his struggles and pinned him in place with his cold gaze. The electric buzz from earlier returned with a vengeance causing his pulse to ring in his ears, heart hammering in his chest so hard he thought it might leap out of his throat. The word Sleep floated across his mind, unspoken in the air around them, and his vision blurred as his consciousness betrayed him and shut out the waking world.