I decided to stick with my original plan – investigate the slaughterhouse and if there’s illegal stuff there, call the cops. Then if the guy magics or vampires his way out of it, that’s when we go to plan B – confrontation.
Since snooping is best done at night, we stopped at a roadside motel to rest up. When I came out of the bathroom Gary had the porn channel on. I guess that’s another good sign that he’s coming around? I told him that most of those girls were molested as kids. He sighed and said “Why do you have to ruin everything?”
Yeah, he’s the corporate executive dark mage social puppeteer abusive blackmailing porn watching probably murderer and I’m the one who’s ruining the world.
At midnight we headed back to the slaughterhouse. Midnight seems like the right time for that kind of shit. I was on my phone trying to see if I could tell from google maps where the office was, figuring that’s where you’d hide your illegal goods, when Gary poked me. He said he didn’t think that would be necessary and pointed.
On the east side of the slaughterhouse was a big parking lot. Too big it seemed to me, how many people would ever be there at one time? Beyond that lot was what looked kind of like a campground. Sort of. There a large bonfire was burning. Walking up to the fire with a human leg over both shoulders was the Maybe Vampire.
What was frightening was how causal it was. You expect a thing like that to be dramatic like in the movies. Scary music, rain, a crash of lightening, a woman screams. This was like watching someone take their trash to the curb. That’s what made it so awful, how mundane it was. Like throwing body parts in a fire was something he did so much it was boring.
After tossing the legs in the flames, Maybe Vampire went back to a pick-up truck where several more bodies were under a tarp. Gary asked if he should call the cops now. I ran out of the car. I tried to cast my armor spell as I ran, but you can’t do that.
Maybe Vampire frowned and looked around when he heard my footfalls pounding towards him. He had a jowly too-big head with a grey-smattered beard. He wasn’t threatening at all. The look on his face right before I slammed into him was one of utter confusion. Like he had gone into the bathroom to take a shit and instead of a toilet, there was a giraffe there looking at him and chewing on a leaf.
I knocked him to the ground and then elbowed him in the back of the head and that was it. I was all amped up for a fight. He just lay on the ground making noises like he was dying. I stood there waiting for someone else to attack me or for something to happen.
Gary was walking up fiddling with his phone when something did happen. I heard a loud crack and then part of Gary’s stomach exploded out from his body. He looked down at his bloody gut and then kind of sat down in the dirt. I saw a dude behind him in mechanic’s overalls holding a fucking assault rifle.
I blinded him with my light spell and then hit the deck as he fired wildly into the night. I crept up on him and tried to take him down, but he was strong. Because of my size and my job play fighting, I have a bad habit of forgetting how much stronger a lot of men are than me. I had to take out his knee to get him down and when I tried to choke him out, he pulled my arm off his throat so easily it rattled me.
He was swinging the rifle around blindly like a club. I gave him a shot in the groin, followed by one to the throat, followed by a knee strike to the side of the head. That still didn’t stop him. I managed to strangle him with the strap on his gun until he stopped moving.
That was more what I was expecting. I went over to Gary, who was now lying on his side and bleeding buckets. I almost slipped, there was so much blood on the ground. I told him this was it. If he wanted to die he could die. If he wanted to live though, he had to decide right then.
Quickly.
