Derek-Derek did a headstand and flopped over. Hardhat just managed to part his legs before the poleaxe dropped from the sky and buried itself between them. He found he couldn’t stop laughing.
“I bet the missus’ll get lively when she hears about this. Listen, lad, does it work if I just tell her ORG--”
Two high-vis jackets hung off a gnarled tree beside him, one orange, one green. Piled over the roots were the other clothes his co-workers had been wearing, including boxers with blood-stained smiley faces.
“Wha-” Hardhat dragged himself over through shingle, knees too wobbly to support himself. He wrung out one of the dripping crimson socks. “That’s more pints than I go through nightly, but a lot less bones to pick. Hey Orange! Green! Are you about?”
Two dainty pairs of footsteps crunched into the pebbles, getting closer. Hardhat grabbed Derek-Derek and vaulted behind a thick crop of nettles.
Two women ambled over—one as warped and wiry as the tree she stood under, the other hunched over, creases rippling through her tux. They both carried leather-bound menus. The younger woman gasped like a frightened deer upon seeing the pool of blood; the older shaded her face with branchlike fingers.
Hardhat looked around. They were in a sensory garden, the kind paved by little white stones, bounded by little wood fences, and neglected by everybody. Chives overran the plot, stinking up the place. Hardhat picked some and shoved it up his companion’s nostrils. With heavy eye contact, he put his finger on his lips and made a little ‘shh’ sound.
“Evil demons are near!” shouted Derek-Derek, who opted out of the usual drowsiness that comes with waking up. He launched to his feet, chainmail jingling like windchimes, and brandished his poleaxe at the women, who gasped again.
“Bloody idiot,” said Hardhat. “Now you’ve gone and done it.”
“Don’t hesitate, Thais,” barked the crone. “Show them the result of your journey.”
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Thais nodded and proceeded to sweat a tsunami. She prised open her menu, rifled through it, accidentally stuck some pages together, prised those apart, then dropped it on the floor.
“Um, oh, I du-dunno…” she said. “Wi- will it work if I play DECORATION?”
Might be the light from that sepia-tone sun distorting it, thought Hardhat, but now that flashy poleaxe looks right cheap and plastic.
“I see.” The crone’s mouth wrinkled into a smirk. “You’ve disabled the potency of the enemy’s weapon—”
“Justice is no decoration! I’ll make you see, foul demon, that it’s the main event! Exorcism drubbing!” Derek-Derek rapped the lass over the head with his axe, slamming it into her skull. He knocked her down and jumped after her and rained more blows upon her.
The crone wrenched away the axe just before her protégé would have lost consciousness.
“I give up,” wailed Thais, now in the foetal position.
“You’re strong, spinster whose only friends are stinky cats!” Derek-Derek failed to grapple back his weapon. “I can’t allow a demon like you to live! Taste my fist of justice!”
He punched the old woman. She fell like a sack of potatoes; he pounced.
“Easy, easy, that’s enough, lad.” Hardhat struggled to restrain him. “You’re acting bang out of order. Demon or not, you can’t just beast mode on a random person who hasn’t even hurt you.”
“How dare you?” Derek exploded. “Demons have to be killed! Let me go, damnit! It’s, it’s a demon… not worthy of existence… all they do is take lives… it must die!”
“Shut up,” said Thais. The menu shook in her hands. “Shut up shut up shut up! Do you think I want to be this way? You think I don’t miss my family? I’m not evil, I’d never take a life, but you’re going to go ahead and judge me, try to kill me? You might be dressed like a knight, but you’re nothing but a hypocrite, human!”
Derek thrashed in an effort to free himself from Hardhat’s grip. “Stop lying, you monster! I know what it means for a demon to come into our world! I know what you do! You, you think I’ll ever forgive you for what you did to my—”
“STUTTER”, said Thais.
“S-si-s-si-i-, o-o-oh, f-f-f-u-ck-ck…” stuttered the knight.
“Good job on tongue-tying him,” said the crone, “but you should have done that earlier.” She rose to her feet, joints creaking like a hinge that had dodged a millenia’s worth of WD-40. “If he’d decided to play something with that level of hatred, we’d both be dead.”