Following a week of vanishing leads, days of neighborhood canvassing that went nowhere, and scrubbing through hours of useless video footage with Varny Prince and his team, Jerry, Noura, and Braxton ceased patrolling near the location where Bradley and his poor, long suffering mother were last seen. They exited their car to stand by the burned-out truck Bradley had used to escape New Chemeketa. The blackened truck was still there because moving it would be too much of an expensive hassle and no good evidence was found on or near it in the end.

  The three Rangers were exhausted from a long day of questioning people who knew nothing, getting doors slammed in their faces, and being told strange, wild, and flat-out inaccurate claims concerning Bradley’s whereabouts. While burning through his sixth cigarette of the night, Jerry wondered how the hulk would look within a few weeks when the local teens and transients lost their fear of the new plaything near them. A few vivid images popped into his head.

  Graffitied by so-called aspiring artists with too much time and shoplifted spray paint cans on their hands. Riddled with bullet holes by hunters or other gun owners, legal and otherwise. Sprouting flowers of littered aluminum cans and glass bottles from partiers who found a cool new spot to get hammered.

  Jerry snickered to himself. Probably the best thing the Mendakian Union let North New Chemeketa have in decades, he thought.

  Jerry looked up. Though the strigikings were nowhere to be seen for now in the velvety darkness of the starless, nocturnal sky, they were easy to hear. The drones had an ominous, anxiety-inducing soundtrack for their constant flight—something like distant lawnmowers mixed with a vibrating sub-bass that made the teeth in his head rattle ever so slightly.

  In a rare moment of true sympathy, Jerry hoped the strigikings weren’t driving the beings that lived in the rural and suburban hinterlands bonkers. While he and his coworkers possessed the option to leave the soundtrack of the strigikings, the inhabitants of this area did not.

  “You know what’s one thing I’ve been thinking about for a real long time?” Jerry asked Noura and Braxton and nobody in particular.

  “I’m listening,” Braxton said.

  “Me, too,” Noura chirped.

  “Do you think the first person to discover oysters was killed?”

  Braxton furrowed his brows at Jerry. “I do not follow.”

  “What?” Noura added. “Where are you going with this one, Jerry?”

  “I’m going to interesting places with it, but you two need to trust me on this.”

  “As always,” Noura said.

  “Sweetheart, nobody’s stopping your apparent flashes of genius,” Braxton said. “So go ahead and speak your truth to us.”

  “Imagine you’re some kind of prehistoric, neolithic caveman son of a bitch walking on the coast. You’re starving, your feet are sore as Vullen, and some giant bastard of a bird snatched up your newborn, so you’re really going through it. You’ve had enough of it, so you decide to top yourself with the help of the ocean. But as the saltwater begins to overtake you, you notice there’s a weird rock at your feet. You pick up this weird rock, and find out there’s a funny crack in it. You open this crack, and wham! You have discovered a new source of protein that will keep your battered body and soul going. You run back to tell your tribe this information in cavemanspeak, and they are all onboard. But you and your tribe realize that most rocks are just rocks instead of delicious oysters, so they drown you in the ocean as punishment.”

  “So…was that story just meant to be a strange thought experiment of sorts or have some sort of moral to it?”

  Jerry shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “I think I get it,” Noura said. “I think I get what you’re really saying here, Jerry.”

  Braxton sighed. “Please don’t enable the man.”

  “Jerry’s tale reminded me of a different tale from when I was a child back in Ashoka,” Noura said. “As a loathsome, mischievous imp of a child, I once tricked my twin sister, Nova, into thinking some necklaces were candy by biting into one I painted to look like real metal and jewels. When she nearly chipped her teeth on a real necklace, she whipped me raw with it until my dad had to break us up. I cried for an hour, even if I deserved it.”

  Jerry guffawed. “That’s a great one! When you share stories from your youth, I feel like you’re the long lost little sister of the Genovesi family.”

  “Thankfully, I grew a proper brain and some empathy to go along with it,” Noura said.

  “Alrighty then,” Braxton said. “Do you two mind if I vent a little about something that’s been bothering me for some time?”

  “I’d like that,” Noura said. “I feel like you don’t open up enough.”

  “Brax, you know I would let you use my back as a soapbox,” Jerry said. “Let it all out hang out, big man.”

  “Even though it’s been some time since we all saw the footage of Charles hitting his mother and kidnapping her,” Braxton said, “I can’t get it out of my head when I’ve been trying to sleep, and not to brag here, but a lot of things don’t usually get to me. I really hate being reminded of how sick this world is sometimes.”

  “I hear every word you’re saying,” Jerry said, “and I’m glad to see you’re finally getting it, too. This is a sick world we live in, and there’s no cure in sight.”

  “Do you think doing victory laps around my continued disillusionment towards the world is how you should go about things?”

  “Yeah,” Noura said. “Sometimes I feel like something is really wrong with you, Jerry.”

  “I have never once in my life denied my profound cynicism, deep bitterness, or my certain issues with certain substances to cope with the sickness of this world.”

  “If you say so,” Braxton said. “But like I was saying, I really don’t get it all. I never really knew my mother like Noura did, so we both don’t understand how somebody could sink to such levels of evilness.”

  “Way I see it,” Jerry said, “trying to understand the evil that some men do is like trying to understand gravity by jumping off the highest bridge you can find. You will get no real answers and perish before hitting the depths of evil, which, I remind you, has no true depths. The best course of action any sensible person can do with genuine evil is to see it and strike it down. No remorse. No recourse. Just righteous violence against those who deserve it.”

  “There’s no such thing as righteousness when violence against others is committed,” Noura said. “Just the wounded and the dead and those who are the wounded and the dead in other less visible ways. I would go as far to even say that even if an executioner slits the necks of the wicked, invisible scars of a sort appear on the neck of the executioner.”

  Jerry found himself subtly targeted and put on the spot by Noura. Several snaky veins bulged on his neck as he glared at her. “So you’re saying just because I have enough common sense, courage, and intelligence to correctly identify evil and strike it down as needed, I’m the real monster who’s dead on the inside, huh?”

  “No?” Noura looked confused at Jerry’s sudden outburst. “I would never say anything like that about you.”

  “Jerry,” said Braxton, raising his voice. “Knock that shit off and calm down. Noura would be one of the last people in existence to antagonize you, overtly or covertly, and you know it.”

  “Fine.” Jerry huffed and threw his hands up in the air. “I don’t have much else to say, but if there’s one last thing I need to say, it’s this. I’m glad there’s people like you and there’s people like me, Noura.”

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked.

  “People like you. The soft, warm hearts. The kind, cuddly ones. The people who know when and how to color in the lines, and make the world feel like less of a sick place.” Jerry jabbed a thumb towards his chest. “Then there’s the people like me. The cold, hard hearts. The mean, ornery bastards. The renegade pricks that scribble outside the lines of polite, civilized society because we know what we need to do to make the world less of a sick place with our actions.”

  “That seems like not only a reductive, black and white description of you and I, but also the world at large,” Noura said. “You simply can’t make things seem that simple, Jerry.”

  “Then just watch me simplify what you claim isn’t simple through sheer force of fucking will,” he hissed. He looked at his wristwatch and sighed. “Either way, work time’s done. Let’s all go home and get out of this busted, vullenpit of a lot.”

  Jerry walked towards the car in a foul mood, opening up the left passenger side door to sit in. He watched as Noura and Braxton shared an uneasy glance before they returned to the car as well. The silence within the vehicle was enormous and all-consuming.

  Another week passed, and several fascinating developments took place.

  Predictably, the grating noise of the strigikings upsetted so many of the rural, suburban, and urban populations of North New Chemeketa with such effectiveness, it united them against their presence. They peacefully marched to New Chemeketa’s city hall before they decided to get louder, but not cause much trouble or damage beyond chanting or expressing their collective frustration.

  The unprepared gendarmes of the New Chemeketa attempted to maintain the peace with rapid and unnecessary overcorrection. They violently arrested random people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They haphazardly deployed tear gas and pepper sprayed random crowds. They even beat people with electric batons or the stocks of their carbines.

  Dozens of vicious fights involving bare fists, thrown bricks, and bottles occurred. It seemed that rather than pacifying the already tense situation, the gendarmes threw petroline on what was a small fire, creating a true inferno.

  Since Mendakian Unionists, especially of the North New Chemeketa variety, were never the type of citizens to let the chance to riot go to waste, they eventually started one near the New Chemeketa city hall.

  A few cars were overturned, danced upon, or set ablaze. Several businesses had bikes thrown through their windows and were emptied of everything not nailed down. Even a few building fires were started, but were quickly put out by New Chemeketa’s finest firefighters. The rioting went on for hours until the mayor of New Chemeketa, a well-liked, deeply respected, and one-armed man named Barnier Pelicor, personally took it upon himself to pacify the rioters, but also hear their demands in a more civilized manner.

  Because of Pelicor’s experience as an veteran officer in the Mendakian Union’s Expeditionary Gendarmerie, he faced little difficulty leading from the front to restore peace. One armed or not, the man knew how to command. Once the riots were quelled by him and the hundreds of gendarmes serving underneath him, he sought some of them out and listened to what they had to say. Once the negotiations were finished, the strigikings were ordered to be returned to the Mendakian Union Air Force.

  Immediately.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Though Jerry and the other Rangers were lucky enough to avoid any true contact with the riot via shelter in place orders from Mr. Moon, none of them were surprised that things arrived at this conclusion. North New Chemeketa was like a society within a society that reacted poorly to “outsider interference.” Jerry wondered how much bitching Varny Prince would do concerning the dismissal of his loaned, but beloved strigikings.

  Despite being the cause of the rioting, the strigikings were able to detect several secret drug labs and illegal Lascauxian landshark fighting rings scattered across North New Chemeketa’s outskirts. Jerry considered these two things a sort of silver lining to the whole strigiking catastrophe.

  As for another fascinating development, since the trail of Charles had long gone cold, the Rangers were authorized by Mr. Moon and his higher ups to go public with the case. Anthony and Noura, being the most mass media friendly faces of the Rangers, took to radio, television, print, and the Mendakian Union’s National Internet to ask where Charles had run off to.

  Hundreds of tips flooded in, but zero of them were useful. A handful of attention-seeking assholes or the mentally unwell claimed they were Charles or eating his mother. The assholes were arrested or fined for wasting time and resources while the mentally unwell were tracked down and forced into psychiatric hospitals. There were also some who wanted to take Noura’s hand in marriage after seeing her, which she considered more obnoxious and creepy instead of flattering and charming.

  As for the final fascinating development, the distressing trend of people falling to their deaths out of windows or being found rendered unrecognizable with knives that followed the mysterious Carber Carpentry workshop burning not only continued, but intensified.

  Instead of the defenestrated or mutilated bodies being found once or twice a week, it was now three or even four times a week. The reasons for these increasing deaths were still unknown to the Rangers, but one unnerving pattern emerged according to different Triple I Division agents working on this separate case—all of the dead men and women were in possession of suspected or confirmed links to the Grey Men.

  Jerry’s overactive suspicions were correct—a fresh Triple I Division shuffle was in full swing, and it seemed like the Rangers were the main dancers of the show. Jerry had an ominous feeling before his final year with the Rangers ended, he would fail to bow and walk off the stage with everybody else to enter the next act of life.

  During another cautious shelter in place order from Mr. Moon, Jerry had spent the day drinking and drunkenly playing with the pack of stray dogs until the alcohol consumption made him unfit for that activity. He decided to take his shirt off and sleep the booze off on the couch while Braxton slept in their bed above him. Braxton often tolerated a little too much from Jerry, but one of his strongest, longest-lasting boundaries was not sleeping in the same bed with him when he was drunk to the point of incoherence. According to Braxton, Jerry rambled a lot in his sleep, and this phenomenon was even worse when he was hammered.

  Jerry was fading in and out of consciousness while an alcoholic stupor gave him the spins so severe, he felt like he was a leaf trapped in a hurricane gale. He laid on his back and held a pillow over his head to fight the spins, but it did little to nothing to truly help. So all he could do was moan, ramble incoherently, and wait for his system to reduce the vast amount of alcohol in his system.

  While he suffered by his own hand alone, he heard the front door open, followed by muffled footsteps. Were Jerry in a more sober state of mind, he would've immediately gotten the pistol hidden underneath the couch and investigated the strange lack of sound. But since he was up to his eyeballs in Gadsur’s brand whiskey, he found the muffled footprints more annoying than alarming.

  "Bra...Braxton...is that you, dear?"

  There was no reply. Moments later, he felt a single gloved finger trail down his shoulder to top of his happy trail. Jerry's initial annoyance vanished, then was replaced by a strong stabbing of lust. "Oh, Brax Baby! You know I want it as bad as you want it, but we both know I'm in no condition to perform mentally or physically for you."

  The gloved finger reversed from Jerry's happy trail to his shoulder. Contrary to what Jerry said, he soon became more than ready to perform physically. The glove thing was new to Jerry, but he was open to exploration, especially with Braxton. His hardness stabbed into his boxers like a hunting knife into the belly of deer ready to be field-dressed.

  "Gonna tease me a little before we really get into it, huh? I like the way you think, big man. How else are you gonna surprise me?"

  The surprise was not a desired one. The gloved finger was replaced with the unmistakable edge of a large knife pressing against his collarbone. "Whoa!” Jerry yelped. “Brax, what the fuck is this about?"

  Jerry tossed the pillow off of his face. He took in a sight that instantly sobered him, zapped his erection, and filled him with ballsack tightening dread. Standing before him was a tall, eerily pale, scantily-clad Touched woman in “clothing” that looked like the freakish hybrid of a black, BDSM outfit crossed with tactical gear covered in knives, enough pistol magazines for an entire squad of soldiers, and a few tear gas grenades. The female Touched’s mouth was slightly ajar, exposing two rows of selachian teeth and a long, black tongue full of five metal piercings. If this wasn't alarming enough, the woman lacked eyes yet had perfectly placed her pistol with an integrated silencer placed directly against his forehead.

  "Who the fuck are you?" Jerry hissed. "And what did you do to Braxton?"

  "I am a secret admirer," she said, "and you happen to be my admired."

  "What did you do to Braxton?"

  "Nothing, even if he inspires great jealousy within this cold, black heart of mine," she said. "Your lover is safe above us, accompanied by your big, lonely bed, while you are here, accompanied by me."

  Jerry said nothing for a few moments. "So I guess this is gonna be one of those 'scream and die" kinda situations, huh?"

  The Touched woman nodded, then climbed on top of Jerry, carefully mounting him with the slow sensuality of a long time lover. The wrathful urge to throw the Touched woman down and pummel her to death with his bare hands until raged in Jerry's chest, but his sense of self-preservation, atrophied as it was, performed the miraculous job of convincing him otherwise. Raw aggression was not the winning path tonight, so Jerry selected his second most utilized weapon to fight against his growing powerless—his bitter, razor-edged wit.

  “I’m gonna guess you’re quite the expert at infiltration,” Jerry asked. “You strike me as somebody who struggles with the simple concept of consent.”

  "Come on now," she snarled at him. "I'm not some dastardly nocturnal rapist, creeping into homes to force myself on who I please. I am a professional with the highest degree of impulse control. However, you insult me deeply with your resistance to having a simple conversation.”

  “Conversations usually aren’t productive when the threat of serious personal harm or even death is involved,” Jerry said. “For example, I tried to talk a guy out of shooting me and my husband some time ago. That did not end well.”

  “I don’t do threats,” the Touched woman said. “I either do what I say I will do or I don’t do anything at all. And what I feel like doing right now is having a little taste of you.”

  “I have something you can certainly taste, you crazy—”

  The Touched woman slashed Jerry across the right cheek with such easy efficiency, Jerry barely registered the blade parting his face even less than usual. As the blood ran down his face, Jerry watched the Touched woman licked the wet blade. It was a sight that nauseated him to his core.

  "Since you have captured my attention many weeks ago," she said, "you have had this strange effect on me when I look at you. I don't know if I want to fuck you or if I want to kill you."

  “This might come as a surprise to you, but that is not the first time I’ve been told that.”

  The Touched woman scoffed. "Heed my words, Jerry. Every time I was the witness to you and Braxton making the beast with two backs, I didn’t know if I wanted to be Braxton or sneak into your bedroom and slaughter the both of you. As a matter of fact, look at this." The female Touched placed the handle of her large knife over her crotch at a curious angle, creating a grotesque parody of a man's phallus. "Behold! Now I too have a grand penetrator! Would you like to taste it like I tasted you?"

  "What do you actually want from me?" Jerry asked. "Did you break into my home just to do and say a bunch of sick, twisted shit, or do you have an actual goal in mind?”

  “I am Marella, the so-called Murderess, Saudins,” she said, “and after weeks of watching you and your allies run in circles around New Chemeketa like ants in a death spiral, I have decided to put an end to that.”

  “By systematically stalking and murdering us one by one, I guess?” Jerry asked. “I can’t lie here, lady, I saw an end to us like this coming one day or another. It makes sense you would come for my husband and I first, seeing how we’re the Rangers most capable of defending ourselves in a fair fight.”

  “No, you lovely, self-centered piece of shit,” Marella said. “I have come to help you and your allies with your Charles Adnot and Bradley Sandaux problem.”

  Jerry’s eyes went wide. “How do you know about those two pricks?”

  “Do you remember when I mentioned that I am a professional?” Marella asked. “What do you think I am a professional at?”

  “Judging by the loaded gun you have pointed at my head and the sharp knife you just cut my face with, I’m going to guess it’s not hospitality,” Jerry said. “Contract killer?”

  “And proudly,” Marella said. “Though I myself do not have any ideological interest with the nonsense the Grey Men babble about, our now dearly departed Claude Carber approached me with an offer I couldn’t refuse some time ago. In the event of his death, he gave me five hundred thousand drancs and told me that I had full authority to ‘restart’ the Grey Men chapter of New Chemeketa as I saw fit. I’ve been having a lot of fun ‘restarting.’”

  “So in other words, Mr. Carber gave you the opportunity of a lifetime by enabling you to be a family annihilator on a city-wide scale? The Grey Men attract some interesting leaders.”

  “I haven’t thought of it like that, but yes, you’re correct,” Marella said. “What an insightful man you are!”

  “I have my moments,” Jerry said. “And would like to have more of them, actually.”

  “Begging for your life, are we?”

  “Fuck no,” Jerry hissed. “I’ve been at peace with having a violent death for an alarmingly large section of my life, but if I can keep it going, you bet I’ll try to keep it going.”

  “That saddens me.”

  “Then cry about it. Or not, considering you got a bunch of skin where your twelvedamned eyes are supposed to be.”

  “Crying isn’t just an action you do with your eyes,” Marella said. “It is something you can do with your soul, which I am doing right now for you, Jerry.”

  “Cut the bullshit poetics,” he said. “Are you really telling me you’re the woman who’s been cutting extra holes in people or pushing them out of windows?”

  “Do you know how tired your arms get after stabbing somebody thirty-four times in the face, neck, and chest?” Marella asked him. “Murder is a workout like no other. Sometimes you need rest days, and to take shortcuts by giving people shortcuts to the ground through their windows.”

  “Noted,” Jerry said. “So how do you plan to help my friends and I with our Charles and Bradley problem?”

  “When it comes to Charles, I will give you a name because I love encouraging the hunt in others,” Marella said. “Daniel Gonzales. Even though he is obviously not a Grey Man based on his Zapotekan surname, he has been blackmailed, threatened, and endlessly cajoled into providing them assistance. He inherited a farmhouse somewhere in the North New Chemeketa outskirts where I suspect Charles and several other Grey Men are hiding.”

  “And what about Bradley?”

  Marella laughed, low and sinister. “You’re firmly on your own with that tricky little bastard. What I do now about him is that even though you helped to kill him, he’s somehow back in a very big, bad way, and wants to meet you and your husband. He’s Touched with powers that hard counter mine, so I’m not even thinking of approaching him even if he is one of my targets. Killing is my trade, my longest-lasting lover, and my passion, but I’m a smart enough woman to realize the fact that I should do the opposite of approaching him by running very, very far away from him and this city.”

  “What kind of Touched powers does Bradley have that is so powerful, it makes you scared of him?”

  “I’m not scared,” Marella said. She sounded offended and defensive. “Unlike you, I just have a well-developed sense of self-preservation, Jerry. Bradley is some kind of Touched that can manipulate gravity. What kind of damage do you think I could inflict on somebody that could not only crush me when I get within stabbing distance, but is immune to my signature defenestration technique?”

  “Not much, I imagine.”

  “Exactly. Not much,” Marella said. “So I’m leaving New Chemeketa tonight for better killing fields, five hundred thousand drancs richer, but I wanted to be a darling girl by helping you and your friends finish up our entwined jobs.”

  “Aren’t you just the walking, throat-slashing, gut-stabbing, defenestrating ideal of Twelvian virtue?” Jerry asked. “You’re just another sick, nihilistic sociopath in a world full of them, doing whatever you want to whoever you want because you get off on victimizing others.”

  “Actually, I am of the opinion that sincere nihilism only provides you with poor pathways in life,” Marella said. “So I choose to believe in the power and purpose of spilling blood for cold, hard pay in this cold, hard world of ours. Now, before I leave this wonderful playground of a city called New Chemeketa tonight, do keep in mind that I will be in the background of your life for some time. You’re just too attractive and interesting to not to keep a close eye on.”

  “Anything else to share concerning your wicked agenda or are you going to kill me, Braxton, or finally get the fuck out of my house already?”

  “Just this before I do that.” Marella Saudins grinned like a nocturnal shark. “Here is a parting gift from me to you, my lovely quarry.”

  She leaned over to kiss Jerry deep and hard on the mouth without even the pretense of consent. It took every last bit of Jerry’s self control to not grab her by the neck and squeeze until the vertebrae within cracked, but he let it all happen, just like he let those incidents in that foul boarding school happen to him decades ago.

  Marella slithered her black, unnaturally long tongue inside Jerry’s mouth, filling it with the metallic taste of her many piercings and the stronger metallic taste of his blood she tasted earlier.

  When the forced kiss was finished, Marella Saudins dismounted Jerry. She slipped out the front door while he blankly watched her the entire time, too paralyzed with dread and refreshed trauma to even think straight. Marella was even polite enough to gently close the door like she was a naughty teenager sneaking out instead of a serial killer assassin escaping into the night.

  Jerry stared at the closed door for several moments that felt like years before turning his eyes to his boxers. The boxers and the couch cushions beneath them were soaked through with piss that reeked with the bitter scent of adrenaline and fear and defeat.