The Headhunter (Shorting the Undead & Other Horrors) by Saul Tanpepper Page B

much worse than blood and vomit to defile them, he thought, as he laced them up.
    Finally, he put on his glasses.
    Now the night was fully upon the city. The streets below were as silent as the inside of a crypt and just as desolate. Pausing at the door, he reached down and quietly withdrew the machete from the old umbrella stand. He flipped it in his hand and watched, mesmerized for a moment, as the spinning steel glinted in the faint green glow of his apartment’s security system’s digital readout. Reflexively, his hand snatched the handle in mid-air. A soft ringing filled the air from the handle striking his knuckle.
    He blinked, frowning, momentarily distracted by the absence of his wedding ring. Where had it gotten to? And then he remembered: he’d lost it one night, several weeks ago. It had slipped off as he finished bagging a head. An especially gruesome kill. The beast had struggled, refused to die. So much gore. The ring had slid off his finger and gotten lost. The ring that had always been too tight before.
    It was just another reminder that he wasn’t taking care of himself, wasn’t eating enough. His body was wasting away. In the six months since Karen had been gone from him, he’d lost nearly a third of his weight. His clothes fit him poorly. Only his promise for revenge kept him strong, even as thoughts of death plagued him more and more frequently.
    Drowning. He’d heard it was the best way to go. He wondered how it might feel.
    Darling, do not think such thoughts.
    He straightened up then, shivering, and looked through the peephole in his door. The hallway sloped away in both directions, as if the darkness that grew from either end was too heavy for the world to bear. He watched, but nothing moved in those shadows.
    Finally, convinced he was alone, he thumbed in the security code, waited for the timer to set, then slipped out into the waiting night.
    †    †    †

    A warm October mist had begun to fall by the time Bill reached the old trestle at the edge of the river. The opposite side was where Reggie preferred to hunt. It was far from Bill’s own haunts in the city, the former warehouse district downtown that had, for a while before the Uprising, become the place to shop and eat and be seen. Now it was a wasteland of vacated buildings and empty avenues. Second Street was where Karen had been taken from him, one evening at dusk. So it was there that Bill focused his hunting efforts, always searching for the hideous figure of the she-beast that had attacked them. Always secretly fearing that some other hunter had already gotten to it first.
    It wasn’t unlikely. In the six months that had passed since then, the numbers of hunters in the city had swollen considerably. Heads were harder to come by, and he’d heard nothing of that one particular monster for quite some time. Yet he persisted.
    Besides, there was something about the river that he disliked. It always made him feel restless.
    A week had passed since he’d been out this way, since the last time he and Reggie had teamed up. But even in that short amount of time, the fall rains and unusually warm days had triggered an explosion of new growth along the trails, making them difficult to find in the dim light.
    She is still out there. Just keep hunting.
    He pushed her back. “Tonight isn’t about you, Karen,” he whispered.
    Then what is it about?
    “It’s about…”
    What? Doing a job?
    He wanted to laugh with the bitterness of it.
    “Doing God’s work,” he muttered spitefully.
    That was how Reggie always put it. Reggie, the exiled preacher-turned Headhunter. After all that had happened, how could he still believe there was a God?
    The first time they met, just days after the attack on the East Side, Bill had been sure he’d come to despise Reginald C. Le Grange. Or if not despise, at least resent. Reggie was a study in contradictions, a devoted father and husband, yet an extremely efficient hunter. “Ice flows through