Dirty Laundry Read online

  “Long pig?”

  Pokey grabbed his gut. “The other red meat,” he said. “People burgers. Manwich, if you will. Get it?”

  “Yes, I get it,” Charity said drily. “Ugh. You said two places. What’s the other?”

  “Real big cities.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Sure it does,” Pokey said. “See, you can hide in a big city. ‘Specially one with a whole bunch of bums. See, you and me would know right away if a ghoul walked in here. They smell, and they just don’t look right. But if a ghoul finds itself a homeless shelter somewhere? It can eat for months. It may not pass for a prim-and-proper schoolteacher, but it can sure pass for a drunk wino who ain’t bathed in a while. Plus, nobody’s gonna look real hard when a bum disappears off the streets.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I know it is,” Pokey said. “I ain’t sayin’ it’s right. But that’s how people are.” He pulled up the bottom of his Female Body Inspector T-shirt to expose his fish-white belly.

  “Pokey, put that shit away,” Charity said. “I’m trying to eat.”

  “Please, woman, you can’t handle all this jelly. I spent two weeks in Atlanta last year huntin’ down a whole pack of ‘em.” It was hard to see in the low light of the bowling alley, but she could make out the ridged lines of scar tissue under a mat of reddish peach fuzz. Something had clawed Pokey pretty good. “I’m still not sure I got all of ‘em,” he said, and for the first time, his expression looked troubled. “How can ya tell, you know?” He drained his beer and smiled. “Guess you just gotta do your best.”

  That was all any of them could hope to do. Once she’d figured out what she was dealing with last night, she slept on it and gave Pokey a call in the morning. After hemming and hawing, he recommended an old-fashioned bait and trap. Ghouls weren’t particular about eating fresh and organic; they were just as happy eating a ready-dead corpse as they were hunting their own. He told her to let it get good and rotten, and then to leave a blood trail to wherever she wanted to stage her takedown. Hot and human was best, but unless she wanted to cut herself open, pig or cow would do. Pokey offered to jump in his truck and help her out, but she wasn’t inclined to wait, nor to admit that she might need some backup. Advice, yes. Backup, not so much.

  Plus, she’d been burned by her last partner. And the one before that. She wasn’t ready to let Pokey make three. For better or worse, she was on her own.

  ***

  Charity closes her eyes. “Lord, please keep me safe on this hunt. Help me find these bastards—sorry—these things before they hurt anybody else. And please help me not get arrested, because nobody’s gonna bail me out this time. Amen.”

  She slings her crossbow over her shoulder, then jumps down from the truck. It’s getting dark now, and the musical hum of the cicadas in the trees has taken on a sinister note. She twists the end of her Maglite to send a bright white beam in front of her and heads into the construction area.

  Her inner child squeals with glee at the sight of the excavated dirt pile. It’s a mountain of red clay that demands to be scaled and claimed in the name of Charity Lee Pierson. Once upon a time, she and her sister would have scrambled up its sides, tussled briefly but viciously for dominion, then agreed to a dual queendom as they pelted the neighbor kids with rocky dirt clods. Because even if they couldn’t agree who was really Queen of the Big Red Mountain, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be anyone but them. Once the neighbors were no longer a threat, they could resume plotting to take each other out.

  She smiles a little, shakes her head, then skirts around the dirt pile. Just beyond the pile is a flat clearing, with a pattern of tire treads in the reddish-brown dirt. They’re leveling out the area for the new amphitheater. There are footprints everywhere, but one set cuts away at an angle and continues into the woods. She goes to the closest print. It looks like something has been dragging its feet across the ground. The dragging steps disappear into the woods that border the park. She sighs. Because of course, she’s going to have to go into the deep, dark woods.

  This kind of thing happens a lot these days. Some new development or construction uproots something that ought to stay in the ground, and then they’ve got a mess on their hands. It’s not her usual kind of gig, but she was in the area. If there’s one thing hunters have in common, other than unusually high rates of alcoholism and divorce, it’s an inability to walk away from a fight.

  There’s a trick she and her sister pulled once before on a revenant that was terrorizing hapless tourists down in the Okefenokee Swamp a few years back. They didn’t want to find themselves in the middle of a swamp wrestling an alligator and a reanimated corpse at the same time. Once they’d laid eyes on it, they taunted it on a chase back to a campground, where they had the advantage of light, flat terrain, and a picnic table laid out with weapons. Combined with Pokey’s tips, she has a pretty solid plan.

  Charity ponders the flat red clearing for a minute, then gets an undeniably brilliant idea. She runs back to her truck and digs a bottle of lighter fluid out of the toolbox. She pours it deliberately on the ground, walking in a wide circle. After seeing the “ring of fire” trick on TV a dozen times, she’s been itching to try it. A ghoul trap is the perfect opportunity.

  After she sets the lighter fluid aside, Charity wrinkles her nose and wraps her hand carefully in one of the discarded grocery bags. The smell leaks out of the bag as she unwraps the spoiled steaks, holding the tray in her bagged hand. “Good lord, that’s foul,” she says, trying not to breathe through her nose.

  With her free hand, she draws her knife and slices down the middle of the tray, then across each reeking slab of meat. A flick of the sharp blade pushes half a dozen chunks of gray-green meat to the ground in the middle of the circle.

  Haversham Park is a city park that spreads over a couple of acres with a tiny lake at the center. A walking trail forms a full loop around the park, with a fork in the road that disappears into the thickly forested woods in the northeast part of the park. The new construction cuts into the edge of the woods, and she found the ghoul last night on the opposite end, where the trail reemerges from the trees.

  Charity takes a deep breath and sheathes her knife, then takes out the squeeze bottle full of pig’s blood. She tentatively walks toward the woods, sprinkling the blood on the ground behind her like Gretel gone vampire. When she gets to the edge, she drops another chunk of the rotted meat in the middle of the path. The walking trail forks here, with a narrow asphalt path disappearing under a dark canopy.

  Up to here, she can still see the white glow of the streetlamps in the parking lot. Beyond, the woods are dark and deep, swallowing the light in a wall of shadow. She maneuvers her flashlight into her hand with the squeeze bottle and takes her first tentative step into the dark. She pauses here, with her heart starting to pound as her instincts rise.

  This is where training and experience have to override common sense. Most halfway intelligent people would look at this, get the very distinct and very probable creepy fairytale forest with cannibal witches inside vibe, and skedaddle off to somewhere well-lit and deadbolted.

  Not Charity.

  She’s not sure whether it makes her really stupid or really brave.

  Probably a bit of both.

  ***

  The ghouls are either gone or entirely too skittish to take the bait. This had better work, because she doesn’t have the time or energy to go crashing through the woods in hopes that she just stumbles upon a nest.

  She’s got one chunk of rotted steak left when she completes the half-mile loop back to the dirt pile. While she’s not exactly afraid of the dark, she breathes a sigh of relief when she gets back onto the main walking trail and in sight of the lights near the construction site. She cuts across the leveled clearing and dumps the empty meat tray in a trashcan next to the orange plastic fence.

  “Ugh,” she groans after giving her hand a tentative sniff. She’s not a ger
maphobe, but she’d shank someone for a bottle of hand sanitizer right about now.

  But the lingering stink of spoiled meat is quickly forgotten. With a smile, she climbs up the side of the dirt pile and stands at the top, surveying the tire tread-marked landscape. For the tiniest moment, she’s little and innocent, and nothing in the world is scary. It’s been a very long time since she learned there really might be monsters under the bed, but there really was such a time.

  But she knows now, and there’s no forgetting. Back to work.

  She sits atop the dirt pile and settles her crossbow in her lap. If all goes well, the ghouls will converge on her bait, and she’ll pick them off one at a time. The crossbow is virtually silent, so she doesn’t have to worry about Leland’s finest getting in her way.

  The night sky is dark and clear, and the cicadas fade into a droning hum. The summer heat has lost its edge, and it’s just warm, with a slight breeze blowing. Balmy, she thinks. If she was sitting on the back porch of a beach house instead of a dirt pile overlooking ghoul-infested woods, it’d be downright pleasant.

  One of these days, she’ll take a real break from this life. Let someone else do the heavy lifting for a few days while she gets away to rest and clear her head for a while. She hasn’t stopped moving in months, like she’s chasing something that’s always out of reach. Problem is, she’s not sure what it is.

  She sighs and shakes her head. Mid-hunt is not the time for navel-gazing. She shifts her position so she’s got one leg out, ready to use her foot to reload the crossbow.

  Soon enough, the first of the ghouls shuffles out of the woods. Its dark clothes hang in shreds from flabby flesh. The clothes could be a dark suit, meaning it was probably male once upon a time. From this distance, she can’t make out any distinct features, and even if she could, they may not be the ones the ghoul came out of the grave with.

  The ghoul looks around slowly, cringing at the light. Then it perks, and stoops to pick up a piece of meat. As it does, a smaller ghoul in a shabby gray dress comes up beside it and swipes for the bait. Daddy Ghoul makes a low growling sound and bats it. Little Ghoul hisses, then turns as she catches the scent of something better. She moves quicker now, walking over the wet line of lighter fluid toward the pile of rotten bait.

  “That’s right, yum yums,” Charity murmurs. Pride wells up in her as the pieces of her plan fall neatly into place. She raises her crossbow, bracing the stock against her shoulder, and targets the small ghoul. Little Ghoul grabs a handful of rotten steak in each dirty hand. Charity’s sight centers on one tiny ear. She pauses.

  Judging by its size, the ghoul was just a child when it died. There’s still a ragged piece of ribbon hanging from the neckline of its dress and a gleam of light off the locket around its neck. Maybe it had been decades or more, but Little Ghoul was someone’s beloved baby once upon a time. Charity shudders. This is not the time to think about those things.

  She squeezes the trigger.

  The bolt pierces Little Ghoul’s ear, leaving only neon-green fletchings blooming from the skull like a weed. Her hands fly open, sending her snack flying. Little Ghoul crumples to her knees and pitches forward into the dirt.

  With practiced movements, Charity hooks the metal crossbow stirrup over her foot, yanks the string back, and locks it into the trigger box. She draws another bolt smoothly and loads it into the flight track. With a slow exhale, she centers her sight on Daddy Ghoul. Her crosshairs line up on one cloudy eye.

  Easy.

  Something whacks her hard in the back, and she goes tumbling down the side of the dirt pile. The crossbow bounces after her, banging against her thigh as she slides all the way down the hill. She rolls awkwardly and comes up on her knees. There’s another ghoul standing on top of the pile. It also wears a dark suit, with the scraggly remains of a graying beard. Grampa Ghoul, maybe.

  “Losing my edge,” she mutters. She looks back over her shoulder to see Daddy Ghoul examining the green fletchings emerging from his chest. And she missed. Damn. So much for the perfect plan.

  Daddy Ghoul lurches toward her, and she scrambles to her feet. She flips the crossbow backward and slams the butt of it into the ghoul’s dirty, distended face. The ghoul’s head snaps back, and it reels drunkenly with black ichor leaking from its nose. Charity sprints across her circle and digs in her pocket for her lighter. She flicks the plastic lighter and crouches to touch the flame to the circle of fluid.

  A ring of fire bursts up around the ghoul, and it recoils. At a staggering six inches high, it’s nothing like the satisfying hellfire she envisioned. But it’s plenty to startle Daddy Ghoul and make him cringe in fear. On the other side of the flames, she plants her foot to reload the crossbow. As she locks the string in place, she watches Grampa Ghoul skidding down the dirt pile.

  She loads a new bolt and fires on Daddy Ghoul inside the ring of fire. In a movie version of her life, there would be dramatic music in the background, and the sleek feather fletchings would catch fire as they passed through the inferno. In slow motion, of course. Sadly, the arrow passes through boring, normal air and pierces Daddy Ghoul’s eye. He spins in a circle before doing a faceplant in the dirt.

  Grampa Ghoul runs around the ring of fire at her. Her stomach clenches in a knot. Split-second decision. She can’t reload in time. Rapid-fire, she considers her options. The Colt will drop Grampa, but it’ll most certainly get the cops out here. Knife is wicked sharp, but requires her to be a lot closer to the ghoul than she wants to be. Her eyes cut to Daddy Ghoul. No sense in changing a good thing.

  As Grampa Ghoul rushes her, she does an awkward sidestep, then slams the crossbow’s stock into the side of his head. He reels, and she hits him again in the back.

  “Come on,” she says as she fumbles to pull back the string.

  The ghoul roars at her and starts to pick himself up again. She rears back and kicks him hard, snapping one bony elbow with a meaty crunch. Grampa shrieks and grasps at his broken joint. Charity takes the opportunity to slide another bolt into the flight track.

  Grampa Ghoul pushes himself up on his good arm, casting a baleful glare at her. The light glints off his cloudy eyes, giving her a nice shiny target. The light goes out when the bolt bursts through his eye. Grampa flattens. She watches him warily, reloading the crossbow while she’s got the time.

  “One,” she murmurs as she jacks the string back. “Two.” After a painfully slow count to ten, she raises the crossbow and tiptoes forward. Her heart thumps. She nudges his side with her foot. She yanks the crossbow up, ready to fire if he pulls the classic dead dude sits up jump-scare. But he doesn’t budge.

  Charity slings the crossbow strap over her shoulder and lets it hang by her side. She does a slow patrol around the dirt pile, scanning the area for another straggler. Grampa snuck right up on her, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that she missed another one. She’s a good hunter, but nowhere close to perfect.

  But the only sound she hears is the music of the cicadas. There’s no movement in the trees. Even the air is still and heavy with the lingering summer heat.

  Charity glances back over her shoulder. She and her sister used to watch reruns of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer when they were in high school. Thus, it came as quite a shock when their first revenant kill didn’t conveniently poof into a cloud of dust. Sure would be nice.

  She crouches and grabs Grampa Ghoul’s ankles. His leg feels like a tube of sausage under tattered fabric, and something wet leaks over her hand. Her throat clenches up, and she tries not to think about whatever is running down her fingers. She drags the body backward toward the truck. Right about now is when she could use Pokey’s help.

  It’s tempting to just leave them here. The undead don’t just poof into dust, but they don’t act like fresh bodies either. Something unnatural takes over a body to raise it from the grave. Once the body is dead for the second time, it goes back to its regularly scheduled decaying. Just in the two minutes it takes her to drag the big ghoul to the back
end of her truck, he’s already half-deflated like a waterbed with a hole in it. And the bones will burn quicker than dry brush.

  But it still takes some time and leaves a suspicious gooey stain. Besides, she’s not confident that they’ll burn up completely before someone happens by the park. It’ll be just her luck that a couple kids come to make out, find three burning corpses, and really cement the serial killer theory. Instead, she’ll drive them out of town, find a nice place to stop, and take care of business there.

  As she manhandles the first ghoul up into the truck, it occurs to her that there’s a disturbing amount of overlap between her skillset and that of a damn serial killer. The world is lucky that her kind of crazy makes her tend toward bad choices in men and embarrassing karaoke, not ritual murder.

  By the time she gets the three ghouls loaded into the back of her truck and covered in a tarp, she’s dripping with sweat and grayish ichor that smells like gasoline and rotten Dumpster. She’s tired, hungry, and in desperate need of a shower.

  And her damn pants are ruined.

  ***

  Charity wads up a handful of scratchy brown paper towels and plugs the sink, then turns on the cold water. While the sink fills, she shakes a generous layer of meat tenderizer onto the bloodstains. For once, the blood’s not hers. One would think that would make more of a difference, but her level of irritation is actually the same at having to scrub it out of her clothes.

  It was a pretty smooth hunt, except for the little hiccup with Grampa. If her sister had seen that third ghoul sneak up on her, Charity would never hear the end of it. But her sister isn’t around anymore, and that’s all right with her.

  Charity’s doing fine on her own, anyway. No injuries, no cops. It’s been a decent night. Well, except for her pants.

  She sprinkles cold water onto the tenderizer, then works it with her fingers until it makes a thick, grainy paste. As she grinds it into the stained fibers, her pocket starts buzzing. She dries one hand quickly on her sweatpants and answers it.