“Okay, keep washing. No, don’t vomit no–”

“...sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, god–”

“It’s okay, just keep washing yourself off.”

Sarah slowly nodded, shivering in the cold night air, and Michael handed the hose back to her. Water was actively spilling from it, and she aimed it at the grass to dilute down the vomit that was steaming between her sneakers. It faded, and she handed the hose back to Michael with shaking hands, who took it and held it above her as she began scrubbing away at the blood still staining her hands.

The two of them were standing in Sarah’s backyard, her hose plugged into the spigot to get her cleaned off and the dead boy’s body buried just inside the woods, not too far away. The moon was high and the air was cold, though Sarah’s shivering wasn’t from the temperature. She’d held it together through Michael loading the body into her trunk and driving her to a burial spot, but around when he had shoved the body into the hole face down, something had connected, and she had sobbed her way through the burial before going nearly catatonic on the drive back. She hadn’t made a grab for her dagger or tried to attack him, but the swings between crying, staring out the window, and mumbling to herself on how she was innocent had been concerning.

Michael hadn’t taken care of anybody fresh off a first kill before. It was novel. But he understood. There was a difference between hearing everybody talk about what they had done, between knowing that some of your friends would never be seen again, and then being the cause of those very things. Of being at ground zero of an ultimately monumental event.

He sympathized. He hadn’t been there for a long while, but it had been a fearful time.

Though he had avoided getting soaked in hose water in his backyard.

It was mostly to avoid contamination, as one of the few questions he’d been able to pry from Sarah had been a confirmation that she didn’t have anything that would clean bloodstains out of a shower, nor clean her clothes. He had taken her up on that offer in order to get her to stop crying, because he had been navigating the backroads at the time, and he’d have to clean off some of his own clothes anyway. She had struck him right in the heart, and there had been a lot of leakage.

She was starting to get more water on her shirt than blood, frantically scrubbing her hands through her hair to try and get the dried blood out. It was clinging to stray strands, clumped between her fingers and all through what had been smoothly brushed hair before the panic had struck. He was doing his best to hold the hose out in front of her, so the water wouldn’t just drench all of her clothes, but her shaking and constant shifting between keeping her hair out in front of her and just letting it fall down her back. There was mumbling under the burble of the water, something she was doing to desperately keep herself focused and grounded. Hopefully it would help with that.

The relative quiet was broken by the sound of a car rolling into the driveway, the engine low and the movements gradual. No headlights shone around the side of the house, nor did anybody call out a name, and Michael turned to see Sarah freeze up, water pouring through her hands.

“Is that your parents?” He asked.

She shook her head, eyes wide. Her lip began to tremble, and he gently set the hose down away from her, patting her on the shoulder with his free hand. “I’ll go check it out. You stay here and turn off the water. Okay?”

She nodded, shaking as she reached for the spigot, and Michael turned to creep off towards the car. The lack of headlights was something in his favor, shrouding him in darkness as he crept along the side of the house as silently as he could. The grass was dry here, and he had avoided getting his shoes wet from the hose, leaving his steps quiet and the only other noise the quiet rumble of the car’s engine.

It cut off all of a sudden, and he heard the doors swing open before being slammed shut, multiple people’s footsteps scuffing on the driveway up towards the door. There were hushed whispers, and he could pick up on them as he crept up to the front of the house, barely visible between the shadows.

“...see her car, but that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe she’s in the garage.”

“No, that’s stupid. She wasn’t there for a reason. She would have just said no if she hadn’t wanted to come.”

“Or, like, she ditched you. Because she doesn’t like you.”

“She doesn’t like anybody.” “It wouldn’t be that weird, yeah.”

“No, no, she would have been there. Even if she didn’t like me or not, she would have been there, you get it? She definitely would have been there. So clearly something’s happened.”

“She could have driven somewhere else. All that we know is we didn’t see the car at the party–” “Yeah I fucking know we didn’t see her car at the party, dumbass, that’s why we’re here, to see where the nerd is. Duh. Get the fuckin memo.”

Silence for a moment, before the whispering resumed below more footsteps. They weren’t audible anymore, but they were there, discussing something in quieted tones that Michael had a hunch about. He didn’t know who was at Sarah’s house so late, at what had to be nearing midnight, but some of the voices sounded familiar enough that he was getting an idea of who was here. The why was still unclear, but that wasn’t something to worry about, realistically. They would have to go if he wanted to wrap this up with Sarah and get home at the last dregs of a reasonable hour.

So he turned the corner, taking in the four people standing in the light of the lamp by Sarah’s front door, arguing on who should knock first.

He ended the argument for them.

“What are you all doing here?”

All four of them jumped in terror, one letting out a startled noise before slapping a hand over his mouth. It was a boy with close-cut blond hair, one with curly brown hair, one with a muddy-brown and greasy ponytail, and one ginger girl, all in dark athletic clothes like they had come from the gym. Or a party. One of the boys, the blond and the biggest, he recognized immediately.

“Especially you, Brad. Shouldn’t you be at that party?”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Brad Mansill, in his thick-necked, broad-shouldered body, made a strange sight when he shrugged. It was even stranger when he did such a bad job of looking like he was actually nonchalant.

“Nothing. Just, uh, came to check on Sarah.”

“Right.” Michael gave a nod hollow of any real assent or agreement. “It’s a very late time to be coming around to check in on people. Especially those who would realistically be asleep by now.”

“I, uhh, just wanted to be sure. She didn’t show up to the party tonight.”

“Larry’s party. Right. Was she invited?”

“It really–” One of Brad’s friends tried to speak up, a smile just barely strained at the edges on her face, and he elbowed her in the stomach to shut her up. She doubled over, coughing, trying to recover her breath.

Brad looked away from her and back into the dark, staring at the nothing surrounding Michael for a second before finding his silhouette again and focusing on him. “Yeah. I invited her. She didn’t say no at the time. I just wanted to make sure of what she’d done.”

Michael didn’t buy that for a moment. “Why not call her?”

“She wasn’t picking up.”

“So you came to her house at whatever time this is to see if she was still going to drop by your party? It’s late enough that the gas stations are closed. Nobody that isn’t answering their phone isn’t going to suddenly come by a party. And pardon my surprise, but I didn’t see you there tonight.”

“You were there?” Brad made a face like somebody had just ripped the tires off of his car with their bare hands, correcting it after a few seconds. “I, uh, you know, must have been out getting more snacks. They were beginning to run out of drinks, you know.”

“No they weren’t.”

Both of Brad’s other friends snickered, cutting the noise off as soon as Brad twitched and darting away from him. Michael stared at the four of them for a moment longer, lazily, picking out the tension in their postures, the nature of their arrival, the little twitches in their faces that made it look like they were about to run, and came to a conclusion.

There was something wrong here, but Brad’s inability to form an excuse didn’t interest him. It was somewhat entertaining, but not truly something troubling him or even presenting something like a problem at this point. It was late, they hadn’t done anything, and from what he could tell they hadn’t even come armed.

He really didn’t care.

He raised a hand and pointed to the car, a specter guiding the not-yet-dead through the dark. “Go,” he said, “and get out of here. I don’t know what you came here for, and I don’t care, so leave. Now.”

They obliged, running to the car and diving back inside as fast as they could. Brad was watching him from the driver’s seat as he jammed the key back in, starting the car as fast as possible and reversing out of the driveway at an irresponsible speed before slamming it back into drive and peeling off down the road, the headlights clicking on he turned a corner out of sight. Michael watched for just a second longer, to see if he was going to try and come back another way, but the darkness of the streets remained unbroken save for the pools of glowing orange cast down and around by the streetlights. They wouldn’t be coming back.

He turned, trudging back around the house, and almost grabbed his knife when Sarah stumbled around the corner towards him.

“Are they gone? They’re gone, right?” She was covered in even more water than last time, but he couldn’t hear the hose running anymore, and she didn’t look like there was any blood still left on her. It was hard to tell in the dark, though.

“They’re gone,” he answered. “You can wrap this up now.”

Sarah nodded, and nearly slipped as she headed back around the corner. Michael followed her, past the hose and through the backdoor, waiting as she tossed her sneakers into a closet and snuck up the stairs. He followed close behind, matching her steps to avoid creaky patches or unstable steps. She kept her lips pressed together until she’d dug some clothes out of her room and darted into the hallway bathroom, with Michael posted outside and watching.

“You should investigate or whatever it is you do,” she whispered through the door, faintly audible over the shuffling of clothes. “See what–what they wanted. If they had something to do with him. With me. They had to have. They had to have known something.”

She yanked the door open and shoved her bloody clothes into his arms, her tears dried but eyes still frantic. “They knew something. They had to have. They didn’t call me, Michael, they didn’t tell me it was a party, that girl just told me that they were having a bonfire and I could meet them somewhere. It was there, it was that spot in the woods. She told me to go there.”

He slowly nodded, gesturing to her bedroom door. “She could have misunderstood. You’re barely coherent, Sarah. You need to go to sleep.”

She opened the door and immediately spun around, grabbing him by the front of his sweatshirt and pulling him in. Her teeth were chattering again, and her grip was already weakening. He could tell she was running out of steam.

“Michael Jay,” she began, one hand releasing him to wipe some more water from her face, “I know those people had something to do with this. That this boy had something else going. There was something going on, there’s always something going on here, this town is rotten to its core and there’s veins under everything that need spilled blood to run, there is something to this town and he has to be wrapped up in something, there needs to be something. I’m not subtle about how I want to leave, everybody knows, they need to do something with that knowledge.”

She was panting again. Michael gently reached up and removed her other hand, but she kept starting at him.

“There is something going on with this town. There was something going on with this. Please.”

Her eyelids fluttered, and Sarah took a handful of steps backwards before collapsing backwards onto her bed, roughly strewn across the comforter. Michael stepped towards her to just move her onto the side, to make sure she wouldn’t choke before waking up if she threw up again, and leaned back and closed the door. He was out the back door a minute later, closing it and beginning his walk back to his house.

He didn’t believe any of Sarah’s exhausted ramblings. He knew far better than to think there was some sort of mystical process that required death to run. She was incoherent and delirious, any exhaustion felt from being up late compounded by an adrenaline crash and severe stress. But he had to take in the evidence, if he really wanted to know what was going on. It was not good evidence.

The boy from the party had known where Sarah would be. Sarah had been told to go there by somebody that hadn’t been at the party, and Brad had denied that part. The girl must have been about to confess to doing exactly that. Strange story, but maybe just a miscommunication. Sarah could have taken a wrong turn. The boy could have been drunk and tried following a random car. Brad could have been surprised to see him there and his concern could have been entirely genuine. There were many factors left, and beyond having seen Sarah kill a man in self-defense and Brad stammer some poor excuses, he had no evidence. Sarah’s own wording was too incoherent to really trust her.

But he couldn’t rule anything out, either. And there was a question that had been bugging him.

Why had none of Brad’s friends been surprised to see him?