Chapter Text
Ewron wishes it was raining. Snow, even! Ice! A sandstorm, or an earthquake, or even a goddamn volcano.
But it's so sunny there isn't even a cloud in the sky, the road around him is completely empty, he's far enough from the nearest town that he doesn't even know where he is, and there's a dead little girl stuck to the grill of his truck with her neck snapped and her arm dangling off of her shoulder attached by just a single red line of sinew.
Objectively, he should be horrified. He's pretty sure that anyone else would be in this situation, but he is not just anybody else. This isn't his first kid he's run over in his life, and it probably won't be the last.
Still. Ewwwww.
He pulled his truck over a few blank seconds after he registered the familiar thump of a small child getting smashed at 145 kilometers per hour. Then, he calmly turned his truck off, opened the door, got out of the truck, and went around front to inspect the damage.
That was at least five hours ago. (Or more like two minutes or something, but who's counting?)
The girl's dress is purple. She had a bow in her hair; now, it's hanging on by a thread and covered in ooey-gooey blood.
Ewron sighs and looks down at what he's wearing. Of all the days to wear his white hoodie…
With another sigh, he smoothly pulls his hoodie over his head and tosses it into the truck through his open window.
There's blood spatter going down the road from where the kid got hit and along the side of Ewron's car and lightly brushed across his cheek. It's a familiar sight, if not one that makes his back groan in anticipation of the aftermath.
Looking at the corpse, he tells it, "Well, I'm sorry it had to go like this."
He really sort of actually barely is. Kids die all the time, occasionally even by his hand, but that doesn't mean they deserve it. Sometimes. Occasionally. Every once in a while.
There was a little boy, Ewron thinks as he gets to work peeling the kid off of the grill, in Austria. He doesn't remember the boy's name, but he does remember the unflinching look in the boy's eyes as he looked down the barrel of Ewron's gun and smiled and said in heavily-accented Polish, "It took you long enough."
Creepy kid, and surprisingly not the first to tell him that. There was the girl in Serbia, the weird twins in Italy…
With a grunt, the body pops off of the grill, and the girl's detached arm pops the rest of the way off of her body. One of her Hello Kitty-themed pink plastic shoes falls off of her foot and lands on the toe of Ewron's boot. The other just sort of… hangs.
Blood is sticky. It gets under Ewron's nails, but he hates the feeling of plastic gloves even more. That's why he never uses them when disposing of a body, only when killing; no one ever finds his targets, so he's fine!
He grits his teeth at the feeling, though, as he hikes the body over his shoulder and goes to the bed of his truck. He opens it, grabs the stained shovel inside, closes the bed, and starts off into the woods on the side of the road with a whistle.
(He's never happy about killing someone, but body disposal is one hell of a workout!)
The burial goes off without a hitch.
The site is far enough into the woods to be undiscoverable to anybody not specifically looking for a grave, but it's close enough to the road for the walk back to not be a total pain. The grave is shallow, but Ewron was kind enough to put together a little cross out of sticks he found on the ground and a blade of tall grass to stick at the head.
"I hit a deer," is what he'll say when he gets to the next town. Everyone will nod and understand and not question why he keeps picking at the mess under his fingernails and why it looks like he just crawled out of a lake.
Crawling out of the lake, Ewron shivers at the breeze and starts pulling his clothes back on.
He can change his clothes back at the truck, but he never drives with dirty hands. His poor truck doesn't deserve that! Luckily, there was a lake right next to the grave.
How convenient!
It's quiet, in the woods. No squirrels or birds or weird little flying bugs or anything, just the sound of the breeze singing through the leaves and the lapping of the lake's water at his feet.
Ewron can see the grave from the lake's edge. He pauses in pulling his shirt back on to look at it.
"I'm sorry," he says again, just to break the silence.
He smiles, then, and he pulls his bloody, dirty shirt over his head and adds, "But, hey! At least you got a tombstone, you know? I don't normally do that!"
The grave does not respond, of course.
But there is just the briefest of cracking sounds from the bushes beyond it, something stepping on a stick. A deer, probably. Or maybe, like… a zombie?
Ewron snickers and sticks one leg into his jeans. Yeah, right!
(Not without his ritual, anyway!)
There's an island in the middle of the biggest lake in the country. It has a post office, a bank, a KFC… and, most importantly, it will now have a Żabka.
Ewron got a WhatsApp message from Multi a few weeks ago while he was trying to kill this old guy with a crazy huge collection of crucifixes all plastered over the walls of his home. Apparently, the convenience store in his town had closed down because of some weird political bullshit that Ewron genuinely could care less about, and the building was being rented out.
"Please, Żabka, please!" Multi had practically begged, and who was Ewron to deny him Heaven on Earth?
And so: the tiny little island. One bridge connecting it to the mainland, no hospital, only one single police officer who has to keep their jail in the post office's mail room.
It's the perfect place to lay low after a year of hard and heavy assassin work. Who would recognize Ewron except for his good good Polish friends?
The island is two days' drive from where he committed vehicular manslaughter, so the whole incident is out of his head with one million other easily-forgettable things by the time he finishes crossing the bridge and enters town.
The place where Multi and the others are staying is on the far edge of the island, down the town's only main road and past a water tower so old that the letters of the town's name have faded from it; all that remains is the letter 'Q', red and attempting to be intimidating.
Ewron has Multi's latest mixtape playing from his phone as he drives. It's… fine, but nothing to write home about. (Which he will not say to Multi! If he wants to make a weird concept album about nuclear holocaust, then that's his choice!)
Past the post office-slash-police station, past the KFC and the woman washing its windows from the outside, past the library…
Past a telephone pole with a poster on it with a photo of the child Ewron just killed on it…
…Whaaaaat!?
Ewron casually screeches his truck to a stop, sending his water bottle flying from the cupholder and across his radio.
He even more casually backs the truck up, coming to a stop next to the telephone pole so he can get a look at the poster.
'Missing,' it says. 'Ghosty. Nine years old, last seen camping with her father at Camp Fatal.'
(What a crazy name for a camp!)
'Please contact the Regime if you have any information.'
And then a phone number.
There's no name attached, just 'the Regime', which Ewron vaaaaaguely remembers Multi telling him about once a long time ago over a phone call when they were both drunk and reminiscing on that one time they went on a Mediterranean cruise.
"Those fuckers!" Multi swore, and Ewron didn't have to be able to see him to know he was shaking his fist like a cartoon supervillain. "They came to my town, and-"
He said a name, then, but Ewron can't remember it, so that means that whoever it was that Multi was angry about isn't that important. (Ewron only keeps important things in his brain, like the best places to get chicken sandwiches in his home city and Grezegorz Brzęczyczykiewicz.)
What is important is the fact that someone actually misses this dead little girl. Like, what the fuck?
From outside the nearby KFC, the woman clears her throat and calls in English, "You seeing that poster?"
Across the street from her restaurant is the freshly-empty storefront that Ewron is set to inherit once he finalizes the paperwork with the mayor.
He cleverly chooses not to say this as he smiles at the woman and responds, also in English: "Yes! It is sad, no?"
The woman nods with a hum. "Mhm. Mhm. Poor Ash, I hope his kid is alright…"
Her suit is awfully pink, and awfully familiar. As is the name she says, but where has Ewron heard it before…?
She looks intently at the poster, arms crossed.
Ewron slowly starts rolling his window up.
And then, suddenly, the woman is opening his passenger door and climbing into his truck and pulling on the seatbelt and saying, very casually, "Yeah, so, it's right down this road right here and past the water tower, but not too far past it because that's where the Poles live, and the only way Ash is getting caught there is if he's breaking-"
She breathes, pauses, and then corrects herself: "I mean, he wouldn't be there at all."
Ewron, with one hand already subconsciously twitching towards the knife sheath on his ankle, looks between this extremely audacious woman and the loaded shotgun sitting at her feet. She hasn't seemed to notice it yet, thank God, but… hello???
After a brief moment of listening to the woman give directions, Ewron asks, "Can I help you?"
She nods seriously. "I'm glad you asked. I need you to take me back to the Regime."
Gravely, she holds up a bottle of cleaning solution. "I'm afraid I've run out of Lysol, and the restaurant is expecting many valued customers this evening."
To the Regime, presumably home to the little girl whose blood is still stuck under Ewron's nails. She probably has parents there waiting, or at least a family, and he's supposed to be at Multi's, like, ten minutes from now, and he doesn't know this woman! What the fuck?
But he's a good guy, and he's going to ruin her entire business operation with his Żabka soon, so what's wrong with giving her a lift?
As he shifts the truck back into drive and starts back down the road, Multi's mixtape restarts: the first nukes fall, and the screams of millions backs Multi's sad attempts at poetry.
The woman smiles, though, and bobs her head along to the music and pats her hand against the dashboard.
"Dude," she says, "this is tough!"
"You speak Polish, then?" Ewron asks, already knowing the answer.
"Not at all!" (Of course; no one who actually speaks the language would give Multi's lyrics a compliment.) "But you don't need to know it to appreciate it as art."
Ewron bites his lip. "Of course. It is excellent."
The second verse starts:
Clouds are in the air / and there are no bears / They all died from the acid rain / the world is in pain! / Haven't you heard? / There also aren't birds… / Yuh!
It's shit. But it makes Multi happy, so it isn't that bad. (It could be worse, actually, like the jazz album he put out a year ago about Chernobyl written from the point of view of a single lonely uranium particle.)
And so down the road they go. Past what Ewron assumes is the town hall, past a park, and past a little brick building with paintings in the windows.
"What is the name of this town?" Ewron asks, because he doesn't know. Multi begged him to move there, but he only gave GPS coordinates, and the entire island is a redacted black square on Google Maps.
"What, you don't know?" the woman laughs.
She doesn't answer him, though, not as they drive past a sandwich shop and a hardware store.
Ewron retorts, "Do you?"
She's quiet at that.
Verse three:
The fish are dead / It's all in my head / The Earth's screams / Are in my dreams / When will it come? / Will it be done? / The world's doom / It will be soon / Yuh!
One final explosion sound effect, and track two starts.
The truck makes it out of town and immediately starts groaning in protest as the paved road turns to dirt.
"Are you Polish?" the woman asks.
"No," Ewron immediately responds. "I am…"
He mutters to himself in Polish, trying to find the words in English, but he comes up with nothing.
So, instead, he cheerfully says, "I am Ewron!"
He beams, turning his head briefly to show the woman how brilliant and charming his smile is.
But she gasps, and not in the impressed sort of way he usually gets from people when he smiles at them:
"Oh, shit!"
His smile doesn't flicker because he's a professional.
He does look back at the road, though; he notes a billboard with a blue fox on it and the words, 'SAVETHATBOY', and the same phone number from the missing (dead) child's poster.
"I remember you!" the woman exclaims. She pushes her sunglasses up from her nose and into her hair. "From the cruise!"
From the… ohhhh, right! Of course! The cruise!
(Which fucking cruise?!)
"Oh, shit!" Ewron cheers. "That's crazy!"
(Alaska? South Africa?)
"I know, right! What a small world!"
(Antarctica? Caribbean?)
He has no fucking clue who this woman is. But she's suddenly much more chipper as she gives him directions, pointing down a small side road leading towards what looks like a small factory.
"It'll be fine, you're with me," the woman assures him. "Not to brag or anything, but I'm a pretty big deal in the Regime these days."
Politely, Ewron humors her. "Really?"
"Yeahhh, they'd be lost without me."
Soon enough, track three of Multi's tape starts, and the truck emerges from the road into a big gravel parking lot in front of a big brick factory missing all its windows and doors. A big red letter 'R' has been spray painted onto the side of the building.
The woman takes her seatbelt off and accidentally nudges the shotgun at her feet with the toe of her sneaker; Ewron holds his breath, but it doesn't go off.
"Thanks for the ride," she tells him, getting out of the truck.
She slams the door behind her, shaking the cabin wildly.
As she walks towards the clearly-abandoned factory, Ewron briefly considers being worried for her. What if there are wild animals in there? Or, worse, Nexe?
But nothing happens. She walks right through the gaping hole that used to be the factory's front doors, and she vanishes into the darkness inside.
Oh, why was Ewron worried, anyway? It's not like there's anything dangerous on the island; Multi even says that-
CRASH!
Ewron definitely doesn't scream and recoil and scramble for his ankle knife as a baseball bat crashes through his window. His fingers fumble so badly with the sheath's snap that he just gives up and decides to surrender.
"Whoops," a deep, flat voice says from outside. "My bad."
"Hey!" Ewron cries, both hands pressed to the top of his head. Ah, but his heart skips a beat in his chest… where has he heard this voice before?
The bat slowly removes itself.
Ewron sits up, a shouted complaint on his tongue, but then he sees the 'face' of his attacker, and he goes quiet.
(Ah. That cruise.)
Ashswag doesn't have a face, not one that Ewron has ever seen. He, instead, wears a pair of dark-framed sunglasses and a(n admittedly-fashionable) black cloth surgical mask at all times. This was true on the cruise, and it remains true now; the only difference in appearance is the loose ponytail and the purple ribbon tying it back.
That ribbon was the second thing Ewron saw when he looked his good friend Ashswag in the lenses for the first time in years. It is the same shade of purple as the dead girl's; the same fabric, even- Ewron can't get it out of his mind! He can't!
It's the ribbon that he's thinking about as he jabs his shovel into the earth again and again and again and again. Like father, like daughter, even if said father is apparently Multi's new worst enemy and said daughter is roadkill.
Ewron grits his teeth, arms burning.
It's raining, flattening his hair into his face. His eyes itch from it. He needs to trim his bangs. He needs to cut his hair.
He needs to get this kid out of the ground before the worms get too far deep into her skin. The ritual will still work, but she won't be nearly as adorable as she was if she comes out of the grave with hungry little maggots playing peek-a-boo with her face.
It was easy to get away, all Ewron had to do was pretend to get a WhatsApp message from Multi and exclaim that, Oh my God, Multi blew his hand up, I need to take him to the hospital immediately!
(There isn't a hospital on the island, or even a doctor's office beyond Multi's sitting room, but Ewron is such a good friend that he would drive his definitely-dying bestie all the way back to Poland if he had to!)
The explanation to the other Poles was harder, but they all know better than to question what each other gets up to. (The exception, of course, was a series of flustered and annoyed voicemails from Multi, whose demands for an explanation were promptly and absolutely ignored.) (That'll be a bridge to cross later, not something Ewron can explain properly, but something he's sure he can lie around.) (Multi will understand.)
Two days on the road cut down to one thanks to an energizing spell and a six pack of Monster Ewron picked up at a gas station just off the island. Fifteen minutes into the woods with a shovel, a bright red raincoat and matching red rain boots, an umbrella with a sharpened point and a knife hidden in the handle. His staff is stuck in the dirt on the edge of the grave; rainwater drips impatiently from the notched designs curled around its body.
Such dedication for a man who destroyed Ewron's poor truck's window… Ash won't be able to call Ewron a bad friend after this!
The grave was shallow, not even two meters into the ground. Barely even one.
The grave marker has been long knocked-over by the rain, but Ewron is sure he's in the right place. He knows where he puts his bodies; it's one of the few things he never truly forgets.
But, as the first roll of thunder hits the forest, there is no body.
The first strike of lightning hits just a foot away from Ewron and the grave, piercing the ground in front of him and shattering the cross.
Ewron cries out and shields his face. Shards of wood cut his skin; it smells like ozone and…
…and maybe he's just in the wrong spot!
Chuckling to himself, he clambers out of the hole and shuffles a meter to the left. Maybe the wind moved the fallen grave marker, it happens!
But, four feet down into the Earth, there is nothing.
So he tries one meter to the right of the original hole.
Lightning crackles above. Ewron's staff glows faintly in the dim light, pulsating along with the beating of his heart.
But, four feet down into the Earth, there is nothing.
The hair on the back of Ewron's neck raises and a shiver goes down his spine, but he tries another hole above where the original was.
But, four feet down into the Earth, there is nothing.
And then a hole below it.
There is nothing.
One diagonal.
There is nothing.
One near a tree with broken limbs that look like fingerbones.
There is nothing.
One far from the tree with bones for branches.
Nothing.
By the lake.
Nothing.
Panting for breath, Ewron pulls him out of a hole attached to a different hole. The rain is so heavy that he can barely see his hand in front of his face, and the wind is so strong that he can feel his coat trying to break free and run back to the safety of his truck.
After a desperate look around the area, Ewron takes his coat's advice.
His staff is clutched in one hand as he trudges back to the truck, his shovel is held in the other.
Ash doesn't even know his daughter is dead, is the thing. They were at this Camp Fatal and she disappeared, which is probably something that happens pretty often at someplace named that. Maybe he suspects she's dead. Maybe he wouldn't care if Ewron told him beyond a disappointed sigh. Maybe he'll blame himself instead of Ewron- who lets their child run into the road, after all? Not a good parent, that's for sure.
There's something cold settled at the bottom of Ewron's stomach as he approaches the break in the trees. He knows what it is, but he tells himself that it's just that: a cold. He has a cold. He's sick.
He doesn't even have the energy to jump as lightning strikes a tree on the opposite side of the road.
Something's in the flash, though: something white and long and far too skiny and with too many and not enough limbs, with a black, crooked smile and two gaping holes for eyes that stare directly into Ewron's.
But it's just that. A flash. And then it's gone, and Ewron is alone with the spirits once more.
He stands at the edge of the road for a moment, body tensed as he waits for whatever that was to come back.
Quickly, though, he gets bored of that, and he opens his truck's door, ready to grab the last of his Monsters and take a break to wait the rain out.
The smell hits him first. Rot.
He lunges for the ceiling light, slamming the button and turning it on with numb fingers.
His staff is in front of him, but there's nothing to protect against. It's empty inside the cabin, but it is not untouched.
Blood. It's under Ewron's nails, and it's sprayed across the inside of his truck to the point where he cannot see out of the windshield.
Gagging, Ewron drops his shovel and claps his hand over his mouth. He staggers back, eyes wide in terror because, right in front of him, three words are engraving themselves on his passenger-side window in the blood:
"You came back!"