I Guess It Doesn't Matter Any More

by Jordan179

Chapter 4: The Cold and Angry Rain

"All right, Mister Hoof," said Long Haul. "I'll take us to Sunney Towne." He reached for the controls.

What he did next was carefully-crafted. He had to assume that Grey Hoof knew something of motor vehicles: after all, the turn-off to Sunney Towne was from an actual, paved two-way road, and automotive technology was over a century old. But if Grey Hoof watched traffic along that road, he had probably also seen breakdowns and crashes. And yet Grey Hoof was probably himself not an experienced driver -- if he was, why would he so badly want Long Haul himself, in addition to his truck?

And one of the things Grey Hoof might well not know is how easy it is for an experienced driver to make sure that his vehicle does not go.

The truck was of course still in drive, with the parking brake off, as Long Haul had never actually parked it in any normal manner, but had stopped it by taking his foot off the gas pedal while running it up on the shoulder and along and into a stand of small trees, until he bled off enough momentum that way that the truck came to a stop. This was less 'parking' than 'controlled crashing.' Short of Long Haul either reversing out from his position, or, less easily, gunning his truck forward through the remaining obstacles back onto the road, the semi wasn't going anywhere.

Long Haul made sure of this by throwing the parking brake on, then pumping the gas pedal until he flooded the engine enough for it to start coughing, and working the stick wildly, grinding his gears. His look of dismay at that last action was not feigned -- he might well have actually damaged the transmission with that stunt, though probably not enough to be a short-term problem (he hoped). It made a wonderfully nasty sound, though, one which might convince Grey Hoof that something had been damaged in the crash.

It also spoke of expensive maintenance down the line. I'm sorry, he mentally-apologized to his truck. I'm making sure we don't both wind up somewhere we'd rather not go.

Though, of course, Long Haul wasn't really sure of the semi's preferences in the matter. He just assumed that a town full of nasty ghosts wouldn't know how to treat a truck right, that was all.

Long Haul looked at his spectral hijacker. "We musta took a little damage when we ran off the road. I think I can get her running in 'bout fifteen minutes. I gotta go outside to do the work, though. You can wait in the cab if you like, where it's warm and dry ..."

"I think not," replied Grey Hoof coldly. "Thou wouldst flee, and I would catch thee, and sorely hurt thee, and then thou wouldst be less capable of serving me well. I would not harm thee, yet. We shall both go outside, together."

"No problem," said Long Haul. "Lemme just get my tools together here." He pulled a small toolbox out from under his seat, opened the dashboard compartment, and took out an even smaller toolset and put it in an inner jacket pocket, quite near to his pistol. He cast a very brief glance at the box of spare ammunition in the dashboard compartment -- he could use it, but there was no way that Grey Hoof could possibly miss what he was doing if he started stuffing ammunition into his pocket.

He closed the compartment. The seven shots in the magazine of his pistol would have to suffice.

Tools ready, he opened the driver's side door and climbed down to the wet road surface. The rain showed no signs of relenting; indeed, both rain and wind seemed to be picking up; whipping in from the south. There were occasional flashes of blue light from that direction, or maybe more to the southeast, where was the fable-shadowed Heart of the Everfree. These were followed at long intervals by the low grumble of far-off thunder.

At least the wind is blowing that damned fog away, thought Long Haul. Better visibility conditions for when I get the hell outta here.

As Long Haul looked to make sure that there was no traffic approaching -- and saw that the road was still as completely deserted as it had been before -- he caught motion from the direction of the cab, and looked up just in time to see Grey Hoof float through the closed driver's side door. The wraith hovered in midair for a moment, then drifted down to stand beside the trucker.

"That's a net trick," Long Haul observed.

"That it is," Grey Hoof replied with a smug smile. "And 'tis only among my minor powers."

"Well, you sure got me beat," admitted Long Haul. "I have to open doors before I go through them." He plodded through the puddles to the front of the semi; reached into his jacket and pulled out his flashlight; played it around the grille and the front-left tires. He could see no damage there.

HIs damage inspection was more than merely a ruse. When Long Haul left, he wanted to leave fast, and this meant that the truck needed to be in good drivable condition. So he looked carefully, and with a professional eye, searching for problems.

"I do not have much need for doors," Grey Hoof boasted, "save for my thralls and those material objects I find useful."

So those 'thralls' of his can't go through walls like he can, noted Long Haul. Might be useful to remember that.

"'Thralls,'" Long Haul mused aloud, as he walked back behind the semi, going around it in the other, or counterclockwise, direction. "That's just an old-time way of saying 'slaves,' isn't it?"

"The association be closer than that," Grey Hoof explained, casually and conversationally, as if he were but discussing farming techniques. "When one such as I slays a mortal by draining away the last of his life, the mortal's soul is trapped within the husk that remains. Its unlife, and what remains of its will, is bound to the slayer. Thus do we Wraiths of Sunney Towne recruit our guards and other servants."

"I ... see," said Long Haul non-committally. He maintained his surface calm as best he could, given the cold revulsion squeezing his heart. I see that, if things go wrong, I'd damned well better save the last round for myself, so that Grey Hoof isn't the one who kills me. That is the worst kind of slavery of which I've ever heard tell -- the slave has to keep on serving after death! Not even the Blackstoners, let alone the old Amareican Southrons, were so vile. Even the Successors only enslave or kill you -- the Sunney-Towners kill you, then enslave you -- forever?

Long Haul went round the back of the semi, quickly flicking his light over vulnerable places, spots where he knew there was equipment prone to damage. There was both less of it than one might think, because semi-tractors were rugged; and more than you might think, because semis were complex, and had their weak spots. They were, after all, designed for pulling semi-trailers on the open highway; not for demolition derbies or battlefields.

He could see no damage there either, which was a result he found encouraging, especially as Grey Hoof's recent statement had just given him a whole new reason to want to get the hell out of here. He would now do pretty much anything to avoid falling, alive into the hands of the wraiths. He would have to shoot and drive fast to survive this night.

Crap, he thought to himself. I'm laying serious plans to shoot a ghost and then flee his buddies to avoid being turned into a zombie. When did my life turn into a weird tale?

Oh, right. When I picked up Ruby, cause it just didn't seem right to leave the poor kid out in that cold rain. The very same cold rain that I'm now splashing around in, hoping I can shoot her dad before he can drain my life.

I really should get harder-hearted.

"'Tis not in truth so bad for them," Grey Hoof abruptly proclaimed. "They sink deep within the death-dream, deeper than ever do we wraiths. In that state, they are almost mindless, barely aware of their surroundings. They do awake from it only when we do rouse them to labor. Most have little wit left to discourse on their emotional condition, but I would ween they are as happy as can be possible with their state.

"Do tell," said Long Haul mildly, as he inspected the right side of the semi. Here, the truck had run past and against a stand of small roadside trees, stripping branches and acquiring scratches and other superficial damage. His main worry was that a critical line might have snagged on something, though most of such should have been protected by the bulk of the cab before them.

There seemed to be no serious damage here, either. The worst thing Long Haul could see was that his right-hand rear-view mirror mount had been bent into a geometrically-interesting but wholly non-functional shape; which was something he needed to get fixed at the next garage he made. The loss of the mirror on that side made the truck a bit dangerous to drive in traffic, and driving the vehicle in that condition could get him cited, but would not otherwise impede him.

Long Haul stepped back from the right side of the truck. The narrow, vegetation-choked space between the side of the semi and the stand of woods was making him feel claustrophobic. He looked directly at Grey Hoof. "Do they sing?" he asked.

"Eh?" The wraith was obviously confused by the question.

Blue fire flashed from the south. Again and again and again.

Long Haul clambered over to the idling engine. He had decided to keep his motor running for obvious reasons: he'd seen enough horror movies where the heroes had the starter fail at the worst possible moment, and had no desire to duplicate one of those scenes.

Thunder grumbled in the distance.

He opened the access hatch to the engine.

It looked fine, running about as smoothly as could be expected under the circumstances. Long Haul hadn't expected to find any damage to the motor. The crash had been controlled and gentle, save for the scraping of the right side; and the semi's engine had been built to survive far more extreme stresses than any he had inflicted.

Rainwater hissed as it spattered on hot metal, which Long Haul hoped would look to the wraith as if there was something going wrong in there. Long Haul withdrew some tools and fiddled with some non-essential wires and screws, keeping his fingers well clear of any moving parts as he did so. He did not want to actually damage his engine -- nor his hands -- in the process of making his fake repairs.

"Do they sing songs while they're working?" Long Haul clarified his question. "Or maybe in the times after?"

It was a dangerous question, Long Haul knew that. If Grey Hoof had paid close attention to the evolution of North Amareican culture, he might be offended, and turn on the trucker.

However, there was a limit to how long he could conceal his disgust at what the wraith had told him. Long Haul came from Darkenbloody State.. In Darkenbloody, the Southron War had been a true civil rather than sectional war, in that some families in the state had fought for one side and some the other. Long Haul's family, a hundred fifty years ago, had fought for the Northern Federation. And one thing he had been brought up to despise, perhaps more than anything else, was the cause of that war -- slavery.

Fortunately, Grey Hoof entirely missed his implications.

"No," Grey Hoof said slowly as Long Haul shut the engine hatch and clambered down onto the wet road, "They sometimes moan, or grunt, or howl. They don't really sing, though. They've usually lost too much of their minds -- and voices, really. Soft tissue, you see, the voice box. Falls to pieces, and there's nothing we wraiths can do to wholly prevent it. Even when they rot but slowly -- and mine eldest son, Gladstone, can keep some of his favorite servants looking fresh a good long time, sometimes for years -- the voice box doesn't hold together well enough for singing. And they don't seem to feel like singing, really. They're too lost in the death-dream for that."

Long Haul learned something interesting about Grey Hoof from that response. Namely that -- for all his surface good cheer and fellowship -- Grey Hoof was callous enough to deliver that horrific little speech without even the slightest trace of sympathy for his slaves, slowly rotting away in the ground, rising only to serve him and his fellows.

Poor, suffering things -- and Grey Hoof meant to make him into just such a thrall. This revelation, of the full depths of Grey Hoof's evil, entirely drove off the strange sympathy for the wraith that he had felt ever since meeting him, and firmed his resolve to fight.

As he thought these dark thoughts, Long Haul turned away from Grey Hoof, crouching down for a moment to flash his light over the undercarriage. It was as good a way as any to buy a moment's more time, and keep the wraith from reading his emotions plain on his face.

Manipulating his tools and his flashlight, Long Haul had noticed an encouraging thing. His manual dexterity had almost entirely returned. It wasn't all the way back yet -- at one point he had fumbled and nearly dropped a small screwdriver -- but it was almost there. It was as good as it was likely to get without longer-term recovery.

He was as ready as he would ever be for the fight.

Long Haul took a deep breath, suppressing the outward display of his anger and tension: forced himself to relax as he put down the toolbox on the left running-board of the truck. He composed himself, then looked up and around at Grey Hoof.

"Minor hydraulics glitch," he told the wraith. "Patched her up as good as I can out here; it should easily hold 'til Sunney Towne. I can finish the work later, in town. Got a garage there?"

"There is a big shed," Grey Hoof said, "well big enough for thine truck. Thou mayest keep the truck therein."

"Guess that's good enough," Long Haul agreed. "I carry more tools and some spares on her. I can patch her there."

He partly opened his jacket, started putting his flashlight away within, turned back toward his truck and toolbox on the running-board as he was doing so. The movement was meant to look natural; he hoped it did so to Grey Hoof. With his back to the wraith, and the bulk of his body and the jacket concealing his precise actions, his right hand fumbled for and found the grip of his pistol. Still keeping it within his jacket, he grasped the pistol firmly, slid off the safety, and positioned his fingers, careful to keep his index finger from the trigger.

"Oh --" he said as if it had suddenly occurred to him. "Just one problem ..."

"What?" demanded Grey Hoof, and the wraith's voice came from right behind him, obviously very close, for the trucker could feel the cold boiling off him, through the jacket and sweater.

The sky flashed very brightly to the south, as if responding to the wraith's frustration.

Long Haul's motion began as entirely unfeigned startlement -- the sudden question and wave of cold coming from behind his right ear caused the trucker to figuratively jump out of his own skin, and literally leap to the left. As he did so he turned around, and his right hand came out of his jacket with the gun in his grip. The wraith's eyes widened at the sight of the weapon, and the trucker knew that he was now fully committed to fight.

He brought the pistol up into a firing position, assuming a two-handed firing stance even though it took a little more time. This was because he did not trust his weakened right hand to hold the pistol steady against its recoil. Long Haul had been in a close-quarters firefight before, and he knew just how horribly easy it was to shoot off a whole magazine at point-blank range and miss every single shot -- if one let fear or excitement master one, and failed to keep the muzzle on-target.

That delay might have given Grey Hoof the chance to rush and grapple Long Haul -- it takes more time to aim and shoot, and less time to cross a short distance, than civilians usually realize -- were it not that Grey Hoof had a very strange reaction to seeing Long Haul's pistol.

Grey Hoof neither charged nor fled.

Instead, he laughed.

He put his hands on his hips and laughed: his mirth seemed quite genuine, his black eyes sparkling with merriment. He might have been about to say something ...

A long roll of thunder began grumbling ...

Long Haul started shooting.

The pistol barked once, the bullet hitting the wraith right in the center of his chest, where his heart would have been beating had Grey Hoof been a living man. That first hit jerked Grey Hoof back slightly, and instantly wiped the smile right off his broad gray face, stopping him in mid-guffaw. It left a mark, too -- not the red-rimmed bleeding hole it would have torn in a mortal, but a sort of widening tear in the substance of the wraith, whose edges leaked some sort of reddish-black liquid and about which played little black and crimson lightnings.

Grey Hoof's expression was one of incredible surprise, as if he had expected the handgun to have had no effect at all.

All this information actually had time to register on Long Haul's adrenaline-charged mind before he could force the muzzle back down on target and shoot again.

But, at that exact moment, Grey Hoof finally recovered from his surprise. His face twisted in fury, sloughing skin and hair and becoming a grinning, black and crimson fire filled skull; his body morphed into matching horror. And he moved -- fast.

Though Long Haul had seen Grey Hoof's speed before, still it caught him by surprise, especially coming after he had shot Grey Hoof right in the chest and he had seen the wraith assume his more terrifying aspect. He had shot the wraith right in the heart. Most normal humans would have been instantly stopped by a .45 slug to the heart; but not always -- a bullet could deflect on a rib or sheer willpower might keep a man fighting for a short while, even with a mortal wound. And what "mortal" meant, where the undead were concerned, was anybody's guess.

Grey Hoof moved almost too fast for Long Haul to react. The big wraith ducked down and surged forward; Long Haul's second shot passing harmlessly through the air where Grey Hoof's upper torso had been. Grey Hoof's own arms were splayed, skeletal claws of hands outstretched to grapple, and Long Haul was hard-pressed to avoid a horrid embrace -- one to whose life-draining power the trucker could not but have succumbed had he been caught in the ghastly grip.

It was only by a quick side-step to the right -- almost a stagger -- that Long Haul was able to evade Grey Hoof's rush. And this evasion was far from complete. For, as Long Haul stepped to the side, the groping bony fingers of the wraith's left hand found Long Haul's left jacket sleeve.

Immediately, Long Haul discovered just how terrible was the touch of the wraith. For -- despite the fact that Grey Hoof was clutching his arm through the leather jacket, rather than contacting the trucker's naked flesh as he had before, the deathly chill penetrated right through the leather of the sleeve, projecting an agonizing cold into Long Haul's left forearm. The horrified trucker could actually see little tendrils of impossibly-black electrical arcs, playing between them -- sucking his very life force into the wraith!

Grey Hoof's touch lasted only a second, for with a violent wrench and pivot of his whole body to the left, Long Haul managed to dislodge the deadly grasp of the wraith. But that second was enough for the trucker to realize that Grey Hoof's power was greater than he had realized; that his earlier touch had been by comparison but light and admonitory application of that dreadful draining. It was as the difference between a light cuff to the cheek of a child, and a hard-driven punch, delivered in deadly earnest to the head of a full-grown foe.

Grey Hoof went stumbling away from Long Haul -- and the semi -- to suddenly lift his legs and spin horizontally in mid-air, in a manner utterly impossible for any mortal man. But then, by his own admission, it had been many centuries since Grey Hoof had been mortal. He landed, crouched on his haunches facing Long Haul, his flaming skull of a face snarling in a manner more befitting a beast of prey than it did anything that had even once been human.

Long Haul saw that Grey Hoof meant to launch himself again at him, and knew that if the wraith could get a hold on him again, it would be all over. Not only would Grey Hoof sap his life, but in the process regain his own strength -- Long Haul had seen the wraith seemingly re-invigorated even by that brief contact. Grey Hoof would drag Long Haul down to a fate in sober truth worse than death, and heal his own wound into the bargain.

So, despite the fact that his right hand was still somewhat shaky, and his left rendered almost useless by the chilling of his tendons, despite the pain and the fear, Long Haul aimed his pistol one-handed at the undead horror and shot again and again and again and again. And, by the grace of whatever good forces there may be in what often seems a cold and uncaring Cosmos, three of his four shots went home!

The first of the four shots he fired struck the right shoulder of the fiend. Had Grey Hoof still been mortal, the heavy slug would have shattered the shoulder and ruined the arm; as it was, the blessed bullet did some equally crippling damage to the structures which served similar functions within the wraith. Black and crimson lightning sparked from the wound, and Grey Hoof fell, rolling onto his right side, leaving a trail of glowing ectoplasm.

Grey Hoof's sudden stumble caused Long Haul's second shot to pass harmlessly over the wraith's head. Long Haul felt a stab of fear as he realized he had wasted a precious shot, but he mastered the emotion and calmly brought the muzzle back down onto target. His third shot was still a bit high, but manged to clip the wraith's left forearm, ripping free more ectoplasm and electrical discharge.

Grey Hoof rolled over his own back and completed the rotation onto his belly. But when he tried to raise his torso on his arms, those limbs betrayed him, too badly weakened by the wounds Long Haul had inflicted. Grey Hoof groaned, tried to rise by levitation -- and rose up right into Long Haul's fourth shot. That bullet, which but for that maneuver might have otherwise missed, or struck him somewhere in the pelvis, instead scored right down the middle of the wraith's back, and very visibly -- because of all the flesh missing in his skeletal manifestation -- shattered his spine.

That seemed to do for Grey Hoof. The wraith fell, unevenly and heavily, right side first, rolling onto his back in a slowly-spreading pool of red and black ectoplasm. Electrical arcs played from his several wounds, eating away at his own pseudo-flesh, which began to vanish in a slowly-spreading zone around those wounds. As Long Haul watched in amazed horror, the disintegration effect began to consume even the underlying bones.

"The problem, you sonuvabitch," said Long Haul, "is that you can't enslave a free man with a gun in his hand."

The weapon to which he referred wavered in the weakening hold of the hand to which he had referred, and there was only one last cartridge left in the magazine.

But he had made his point.

Comments

[Ardashir]

And that's it for Grey Hoof (temporarily). I have to say, there are elements about Long Haul that remind me of John the Balladeer.

[Godiswithus3]

"The problem, you sonuvabitch," said Long Haul, "is that you can't enslave a free man with a gun in his hand."

HURAH!

[CoffeeMinion]

Missing italics:

Better visibility conditions for when I get the hell outta here.

7477991 Darn tootin.