I’ll just drop the other end of my end-of-month snippet, so let’s call this a start-of-month snippet!
Contains genre-typical depictions of injuries, so don’t read if that bothers you.
For context: there's been a string of supernatural murders, so some special agents have arrived to investigate things. But they don't know about the supernatural, so they think one of the local deputies is the culprit. Meanwhile, that same supernatural has killed the local sheriff.
The footpath led to a small clearing where the camper trailer stood, however someone had managed to get it in. The trailer seemed newish enough, certainly newer than the woods closing around on all sides, as if it had just one day decided to sprout from the soil like a giant mushroom. Keogh’s Triumph Thunderbird was haphazardly parked in front of it, the police radio speaking to an audience that wasn’t there. The ground underneath was red with blood.
“Keogh?” I called, but there was no response of any kind, so I slowly pulled my pistol out of the holster and silently, delicately, pushed the door open.
The inside of the camper trailer was a mess, even by Keogh’s standards, which was actually a little impressive given how sparse it was. The sitting area looked ransacked, what seemed like contents of cabinets spilled everywhere; nobody was in sight, but the door to the bathroom in the back was closed, and the entrance to the kitchen at the front was covered by a curtain. The air was thick with a stench of hard liquor and fresh blood.
Maybe Keogh wasn’t in, maybe he was already in the woods or maybe someone else had brought his bike home. But something was clearly wrong here. I held tight to my Colt .45 and stepped carefully over discarded photo albums. A blood trail led to the kitchen, so I followed it.
It was a surprisingly large kitchen for a two-bed camper trailer, with actually room to move, which was probably the result of it having all of the front for itself. But that also was hardly what was important here, because now I had finally found Keogh. He was half sitting, half laying on the floor at the far end of the kitchen, slumped in the corner against the fridge, dripping wet and bleeding all over the place, nursing a bottle of whiskey at his chest. His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t moving.
“Keogh!” I yelped and holstered my gun. There was a first aid kit on the wall over one of the countertops, and I snatched it as I rushed to him, then crouched on the floor and took stock of him.
Keogh was wearing his deputy’s jacket, over his shoulders like a cape and held in place by the collar latch, and nothing else. Well, nothing except the dog tags on his neck and a contraption that looked like a self-ejecting knife sheath (although without the knife) strapped on his left wrist, but those hardly counted.
There was a nasty-looking stab wound in his chest that was still bleeding, and a trickle of blood was coming from the corner of his mouth. He was in bad shape, deathly pale and his breath ragged, but all in all that was good. It was good. When you look like most of your blood is outside of your body instead of inside it where it should be, breathing at all is excellent news.
“Okey,” I muttered and clasped his shoulder. “Okey. It’s okey. I got you.”
I called it in and cracked the medkit open; it was surprisingly well-stocked, but judging by the scars on his body (there were plenty of cut marks on his chest, and across his neck was a jagged line that looked like someone had at some point attempted to strangle him with a metal wire; I had never seen any of them before, since he always covered them with clothes, but at least I now knew why he was such a fan of high collars) he wasn’t a stranger to injuries, and I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly had he been involved in before coming here.
He didn’t react when I gently pried the bottle from his hands, but when I started to put pressure on the wound he stirred and let out a strange little sound that might have made sense to a zombie.
“Stay with me,” I muttered more to myself than for him. “Screw those feds, what do they know. Stay with me, partner.”
Keogh didn’t respond, but he was still breathing.
Still need to make Vex and Ms.)
