I Won't Hurt You
A pained screech rang out far in the distance. It was a shrieky screech that almost sounded human-like, but the way it lingered before dissipating into the cold wind reminded him of a fox more than anything else. Killjoy turned his gaze to his left; northwards, it seemed. Pulling out his pair of binoculars, he squeezed them against his eyes.
He zoned in on the dense canopies of trees around the noise, barely discernible from the shrouding blue moonlight. He saw only a flock of birds and heard their screeches as they flew off into the air, the treetops moving like the waves of an ocean tide, and then silence again.
It confused him: was he simply imagining it? No, he never does. If he had in the past he would've been at the warm embrace of hell's gates a long time ago. This line of work left little room for error, and that little line was always lethal.
It could have been a fox, but none of those critters screamed that loud unless they were being hunted…so it had to be a person. But why alone, why there, and why now?
A victim.
Maybe he never was alone from the start.
Killjoy hummed to himself, not expecting the job to end so soon.
But an opportunity beckoned in his head. If he played his cards right, he could figure out how many of them there were and where they were headed and tip it to the army. All within tonight.
The hunter humphed; he could practically feel the dividends of tight, free money coming in, without having to lift a single finger ever again. It felt a little too good, too easy for the experienced Killjoy.
Killjoy leaned on the edge of the branch and clutched the wood with his gloved palms, lowering himself into the air, hanging, and then dropping himself to the ground. He killed the momentum with the bend of his knees, the snow making a crisp crunch as he landed.
He raced through the mining site and back into the woods where the sound came from, each step landing on his toes and every swing of his leg being precise and soft to make as little noise as possible.
Killjoy approached as seamlessly as the patter of snow around him. He was not certain of the number of Lakota probably roaming the area, where they were, nor what kind of weapons they had; he was marching into no man's land.
The hunter reached behind his back as he lurked, swiping the rifle from its strap and carrying it forward. He used his thumb to swipe the safety off.
Killjoy held it forward, the barrel pointed away from him, his fingers close on the trigger. He used to practice trigger discipline, but where he was right now, with who knows out there, there might've been no luxury to do it.
His stomach growled, growing emptier and the pain sharper. Now was not the time, dammit. Ever since he went into these damned woods, it was like Killjoy hadn't eaten in days; it was getting worse. Was it illness, or was there just something to these particular woods that left him…famined…? That wasn't the word. Famished, not famined.
No, why was Killjoy trailing off in his thoughts?
Killjoy forced a shake of his head and quickly glanced at his surroundings. The woods still extended over miles around him, and the leaves and canopies above left little moonlight to be desired, barely illuminating the dark forest. He checked his six for a split second. He could no longer see the mining site, whatever was left of the sight blending in with the distance.
The hunter slightly murmured: he was truly in the deep of it now.
"Help…Help!" A faint voice yelled in the distance.
Killjoy paused in his tracks immediately and jutted his head to the right. It was such a light tone, despite being a shout, that Killjoy wondered if he would have missed it had he not been paying close attention already. It was closer, much closer, perhaps within walking distance.
"Help me…" It spoke again, and he paid attention to it this time. It was high-pitched, quivering, like that of a little girl. It sounded human, at least.
Wait, a girl? It could be the same person who made that terrible scream earlier. The Indians could be nearby, but if she's alone, then that means she could be escaping.
He picked up the pace again, treading faster and faster as he chased the noise. If Killjoy was going to rescue her, he had to do it right away.
If she screamed anymore, they would catch her, and he would much rather avoid a gunfight. Get to the child, shut her up, and bring her out: a sufficient plan. It was a plan, indeed.
The snow crunched, deeper than usual. Killjoy still tried to walk ahead, ignoring the uneven grounding. But then, his boot rolled off something under the dirt. He tripped ahead but caught himself before he could fall. Killjoy glanced back to see what it was that tripped him.
A face.
Peering from the cold, white sand was the partially covered face of someone, a man. His eye, peaking out of the expanse of snow, stared at Killjoy, or rather through him like he was never even there.
A fog of confusion set in his mind: was that a face he was seeing, or was he just hallucinating?
Killjoy stumbled back and kneeled close to the thing, holding the face with the palm of his glove and pulling it up into the air. He pulled it up faster than he expected, thinking that there would be a body connected to the head…but the head was all he picked up. The grey skin was taught and sunk tightly into the flesh, devoid of any colour, and across its face were wounds, deep gouges, mutilated beyond recognition.
What little discernible features remained of the frozen head was that the man's face was round. Killjoy studied it, and the cheekbones seemed to sit high, and the remaining eye, which continued to stare at the hunter, was sharp like an almond; it seemed to be a native. All of this looked like the work of some animal or psychopath, he thought…but no bear or wolf would do something so…beyond.
Whatever did this was human.
"What the fuck," Killjoy mutters to himself.
He sets the head back down on the ground, unsure of what else to do with it: the main priority was the girl. It made the situation even worse since whoever did this was probably behind the other disappearances as well, and could be here at this very moment. Maybe it wasn't Indians, but rather just a deranged cult of some kind.
Killjoy began to rush toward the screams, forgetting about being quiet. If he was too slow, whoever was out there could catch the girl at any moment, and it would all be for nothing.
The further he went, the more he began to spot long masses sticking out of the snow around him. At first, it was only one or two small mounds, but it continued growing, and the snow grew shallow, and whatever was under began poking out, until they looked to be bodies; corpses.
One to his left seemed to be missing an arm, and Killjoy passed another with nothing beneath its waist. From the different heads that he could see, he made out some to be native, like the first one he had found, but others were white when they still had colour on their skin, some brown and olive. All of them were torn in some way or the other.
For all his years, he had never seen anything like this. He saw people being lynched, others putting bullets behind people's skulls, and other acts of murder; hell, he carried out some of them himself. But never something as depraved as this. Killjoy figured whoever was behind this was truly savage.
The hunter opened the latched iron sight of his rifle to aim better, something he had never really done since forever. But he felt something unfamiliar coursing in his hands, his bones, something that shook them. It felt familiar but distant enough for him to have forgotten it, probably.
He ground to a halt at the foot of a clearing amidst the woods, catching his breath. There in the middle, sitting on top of the snow, looked to be the silhouette of a small, crunched-up. She was in a little gown hugging their knees, vaguely discernible as they hid in the shadows. Their back turned away from Killjoy, and he could hear faint whimpering from the child.
Killjoy eyed the girl, his posture low, the barrel still raised. There didn't seem to be anyone else in the vicinity, and that was more than just a good sign for him. But still, he had to practice caution, and if he just announced himself right then and there, a child screaming in fear was not ideal.
"Help me…" The girl softly said amid her crying, as if answering his uncertainty for him. Killjoy did not know how she knew he was there or if she was simply asking out for help from the empty air again, but he heeded her words. He began to slowly approach, walking with care towards the girl.
"Help me, help me, help me…" She began to repeat her words, sobbing as she did. The girl said it faster and faster, over and over, until it was barely intelligible from the muttering and rambling, making Killjoy uneasy.
"I'm here—it's alright," Killjoy finally answered with haste, not sure how to calm down a child; he seldom talked to his daughter, let alone a stressed little girl in the middle of the woods. "...What happened?"
The girl grew silent but continued sobbing. For a few moments, the wet cries were all that echoed through the dark forests.
He grimaced a little at the lack of progress. Well, it was understandable: she was just a girl.
"You're gonna have to help me here, kid…" Killjoy tried again, more softly and his words quieter this time.
The hunter took another step, lowering his rifle and offering a hand. "Look, y'don't have to say anything, just come with me. I won't hurt ya', I promise."
Killjoy tried to be as gentle, as slow as he could. He never often saw children out on the job, but obviously, he knew they weren't as tough as adults. Maybe as cunning or smart, sure, but never so strong, or insincere, cruel.
He would make sure the grip of death would feel slow once he caught whoever would dare do this to a little girl.
Almost in the blink of an eye, the girl stopped crying with a little gasp at the end, like a release. The halt was so abrupt Killjoy raised a brow, but at least she did stop; less trouble on that end.
She then began to get up, pushing herself off the knee-deep snow, her face still eternally turned away from him. The girl made no noise as she did, not a single crunch, and the snow barely turned in her feet, while Killjoy's steps made the ground crunch like fresh walnuts.
He didn't know if it was just him, but things were getting weirder by the second. But still, he had things to do, and the man did not want to waste any more time. Killjoy stomped ahead confidently now that the girl was cooperating.
Her back then rose. Not the girl, but only her back; with a snap, her spine seemed to elongate and almost try to pry itself out of her shoulders, the ribs and edges pushing against her skin, even showing through the fabrics.
Killjoy jolted back immediately, not knowing what the hell was going on. Was her bones…growing?
It grew again, with a gross crack from the bones. It rose like a tent with how high the gown stretched itself with the distending spine. The rest of the girl's limbs began to similarly morph, the skin on her hands stretching and ripping like a cocoon as the bones underneath split through and expanded.
The girl, or whatever she was, fell over as the legs beneath her knee rapidly grew, breaking itself to form what was akin to hindlegs on a deer. But the enlarged, bony feet were still humanlike.
If he wasn't convinced before, he was certain now. Killjoy had to be imagining it, because what else could explain why the girl's bones, her entire body, were shapeshifting? He stepped even further back, still not understanding what was going on. His breaths grew shallow, and he gripped his gun so tightly he could've crumpled the steel had he gone further.
The girl—no, it—continued to grow, its body taller and just bigger, much bigger, much taller than even Killjoy; the creature that stood before him towered like a statue of flesh, as tall as the branches it brushed off.
It just stood there, back still turned away like how the girl was, but hunched over, so hunched the hunter could not see its head at all from behind. The gown it wore was ripped long ago, and all that remained was a bony mass of grey, almost rotten skin that did not speak.
Killjoy craned his neck to look up at the thing while stepping back with long, steady strides. He wanted to move his barrel too, but something kept him from even moving a muscle, like a shuddering shackle that forced him to choose between fight or flight. With how his body let him walk back but not even raise his only resort of defence, it was clear what it wanted him to do.
Within an instant, the monster turned and snapped its head around, the neck wrapped around the shoulder to an impossible degree, and stared down the small man before it. Its head was like that of a human, but closer to a corpse instead, with its eyesockets sunken and dry with only shadows filling in the void. Its rotten mouth unnaturally widened at the prey before it, and like some sort of insect or spider, the rest of its body rotated with squishing and snapping between its ligaments, turning in tandem.
The thing merely smiled at Killjoy.
A rancid, fruity smell passed from itself, and it stunk in Killjoy's nostrils. It was a familiar scent, the smell of death, but it was worse. Even a mere whiff of the stench, which he could almost even see with how pungent it was, not only revolted him but almost told the hunter how hungry the monster was…if the hunger Killjoy felt earlier was bad, this was like that of a starving orphan.
"What in god's name are you…?" Killjoy muttered out at the beast before him. It was all he could say.
The monster then snapped its head to the side. The sudden move made Killjoy instinctively take another step back when he tried to hold his ground. And as if on cue, the monster's stretched grin opened agape towards the retreating hunter, its massive mouth curled into a wide smile.
It screeched as it lurched for him.