Chapter Text
First of all, you don’t take jobs off Craigslist.
Otabek says as much, idly packing salt into bullet casings while Yuri sits cross-legged on the motel bed and trawls the internet in search of someone who might need the assistance of two people with a particular set of skills- no. One person with skills, and one teenager who’s decided to follow him around.
This is (mostly) Viktor’s fault. Viktor, faced with some 15 year old from the middle of nowhere running away from home to become “an awesome demon hunter or whatever”, instead of responding like a responsible adult, said “sure kid, buckle up!”. Any hopes of marriage finally making a rational man of him are officially dashed. Fortunately, Katsuki had the good sense to insist they couldn’t keep their new sidekick/child. Unfortunately, Viktor apparently had some “extremely important business” that meant he couldn’t take Yuri home himself, and Otabek happened to be in the area.
Yuri pretty much took one look at the motorcycle and decided with stars in his eyes that he would never leave. He still won’t tell Otabek where he lives, which to his logic is probably a foolproof plan for not going back. So far, it’s worked, for which Otabek has no good explanation; he really should just leave Yuri at the nearest Greyhound stop and be done with it.
“I don’t take jobs off Craigslist,”
“Why not?” Yuri asks.
“It’s always either paranoid people afraid of the pipes rattling or creeps with a tripwire and a basement full of handcuffs,” says Otabek, “Either way, you almost never get paid. If they’re not nearby, it’s not worth the gas money.”
“Jeez. Well, this one doesn’t sound like a crazy person or a serial killer-”
“Nobody sounds like a serial killer. That defeats the purpose.”
“Whatever. Anyway, it’s some rich couple, about to have their first kid, decided to move to the country, bought some old farmhouse everyone said was cursed,” Otabek is already mentally marking this one down as ‘paranoid people afraid of the pipes rattling’ “figured the rumors about it being haunted were bullshit, tried to renovate it, big fucking surprise, they weren’t!”
“Was it built on an old Native American burial ground too?” Otabek asks dryly. Yuri sticks his tongue out then scans the page.
“Doesn’t say. Wait, no, I don’t think so. Says there was a sealed door in the basement leading to some old mine shaft or tunnel or something, and they think some ‘ancient evil’ lurks within.” Yuri’s voice drips with scare quotes and sarcasm. “Anyway, so they think they’ve pissed off some elder god or something, ten thousand bucks to whoever can get rid of it so they can finish renovations before the baby’s born, blah blah blah, you get the point. Very Ghost Hunters.”
Otabek hates that show. Every third person he tries to explain his job to thinks it’s about prancing around in drafty houses with a bunch of bullshit looking for ghosts.
OK, so he does have an old EVP recorder stuffed in the panniers of his bike somewhere, but he’s used it about twice. His job rarely involves ghosts, and usually not the kind that require fancy machinery to locate. He’s mostly located ghosts by cold spots and heavy objects flying at his face.
Wait. Otabek’s brain catches up with what Yuri just said.
“Did you say ten thousand dollars?” Otabek hops over to look at Yuri’s screen, almost jostling the laptop onto the floor. Yuri slaps at Otabek’s knee in annoyance.
“Good listening, dumbass. They’re rich yuppies who moved there all the way from Atlanta, so I bet they can afford it, too. This looks legit. So what do you think?”
Otabek thinks this is probably a terrible idea.
“I think ten thousand dollars will cover the gas money.”
Yuri pumps his fist triumphantly.
“Ha! You said this was a waste of time, but look who was right!”
Otabek ignores this and crosses the room to begin packing. Yuri follows.
“Good thing you had me here then, huh? What would you do without me?”
Otabek doesn’t answer.
Everything starts out like a horror movie. Otabek can’t even count this as a warning sign; it’s pretty normal in his line of work. It’s usually the ones that don’t start out ominous that turn out the worst, honestly.
A long winding road, not a soul in sight, crows thick as leaves in scraggly trees, early morning fog draped low over muddy brown farmland that slowly turns wilder and more unkempt as they approach the house – the works. A poet might think the land itself feels the effects of the evil lurking beneath; Otabek chalks it up to the farm being abandoned for who knows how many years.
The couple actually offers them lemonade. In the middle of the drafty remains of a half-refurbished, potentially haunted house, and there the wife is with her white dress and her baby bump, offering them fresh squeezed lemonade in her moonlight and magnolias accent. Otabek refuses on reflex, but Yuri seems impressed. They receive a lot of earnest but fairly generic details, lights and things moving, and also something confusing about birds.
“So, this is weird, right?” Yuri asks in an undertone as they make their way down the basements steps. Otabek shrugs.
“Lots of things live in mines. It might be just bats, or it might be… something else. If it’s nothing, we make them pay us anyway. If they’re still convinced it’s haunted, we do a fake ritual like in a movie. Blood, candles, Latin chanting, that kind of thing.”
“You speak Latin?” Yuri sounds so enthused Otabek almost hates to disappoint.
“No, just some fake ritual stuff that sounds cool. These things don’t magically respond better to a dead language from the other side of the planet.” Otabek can hear Yuri take a breath to respond, but a gasp swallows it.
“What the fuck?” Crossing the threshold into the tunnel is like stepping out into a snowstorm. It’s often cooler underground, sure, but Otabek has never felt the air so neatly divided. Yuri waves a hand through the doorway, testing the temperature on the other side, and repeats,
“What the fuck?”
Well, it doesn’t look like Otabek will need his Latin skills.
“Uh, so,” says Yuri, jogging a few paces to catch up, “What happens if it isn’t bats?” He tries and fails to sounds casual so hard, it’s kind of adorable.
“Same as normal. We figure out what it is, then figure out how to deal with it from there.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I’m not sure,” Otabek admits, trying not to show how nervous that makes him, “Like I said, lots of things live in caves.”
“You should let me carry a gun, come on,” Yuri starts this argument again, probably to distract himself, “I don’t need a big one or anything,” Otabek owns one big gun, a hunting rifle currently slung over his shoulder, and Yuri is not touching it no matter what. Both because the kickback might dislocate his shoulder, and because it really does feel safer carrying around an intimidatingly large gun.
“You gotta at least give me something better than this stupid charm that ‘wards off evil’” Yuri continues, and Otabek doesn’t have to look at him to see the sarcastic air quotes.
Something moves.
Otabek reflexively grabs his gun, and Yuri reflexively grabs Otabek’s arm, which puts a damper on trying to aim. They’re going to have to work on that. Otabek shakes Yuri off, but then gets a good look up ahead and relaxes.
“There you go. Bats.”
Yuri makes a noise of disgust and pulls his hood up.
“They don’t actually attack, you know,” says Otabek.
The bats don’t seem to do much of anything, actually. Otabek is no expert, but shouldn’t bats move or make noise, at least a little? Instead, they sit immobile, hanging from the ceiling or standing on the ground, all wrapped up like little black parcels. Their unblinking eyes catch the light and fill the tunnel with so many luminescent circles it looks like someone’s strung up Christmas lights. Otabek keeps his flashlight trained on the ground after that.
“Shit,” Yuri mutters under his breath. Then, in a slightly louder whisper, “Are- are bats supposed to be that big?”
“I don’t know,”
The tried and true rule of thumb: if it’s not hurting you, don’t mess with it. Nothing good can come of curiosity where potential tunnel monsters are involved. Unfortunately, Yuri hasn’t yet figured this out. He points his flashlight towards the big bats sitting on the ground – wait, do bats even do that? – and lets out a startled, “what the fuck!”
Otabek privately agrees. They’re birds. Birds ranging from doves to… is that a fucking bald eagle? Hundreds of birds, lined up against the walls of the tunnel like they’re waiting for a parade to start, watching without stirring a feather.
“Is this…” Yuri’s voice comes out both hoarse and shrill at the same time, “is this supposed to happen?”
“Probably not, no.”
“So at what point do we-” Something crunches and Yuri jumps about a foot into the air. He swings his flashlight towards the floor and exclaims,
“Eww, gross!”
The birds have begun to die. As they move further down, the birds have died where they stood, their desiccated corpses toppling into the path.
“Don’t worry,” Otabek says, “they’re dead. They can’t hurt you.”
This is both not very comforting and not, in his experience, true. And Otabek still feels a revolted shiver up his spine when a bird skull pops beneath his boot with the texture and sound of crushing a raw egg. He does not envy Yuri his Converse.
“Anyway,” says Yuri, “so at what point do we say ‘fuck this’ and bail? …hypothetically.”
“I don’t know. It’s a know it when you see it kind of thing. You can head back whenever you want, though.”
Yuri scoffs,
“Hell no! I’m not scared!”
“I never said you were.”
“I just don’t want to go back through the gross bat room by myself. What if I need a human shield?”
Otabek doesn’t call Yuri on his flimsy excuse. They continue on for a couple minutes, and the dead birds mercifully thin out. Just as Otabek is starting to hope that they might be free of mummified avians forever, Yuri lets out a yelp.
“What’s wrong?!” Otabek says, whirling around, and finds Yuri clawing at the front of his hoodie. A moment later, he extracts one of those mall-goth-edgy oversized cross necklaces, now glowing a soft orange in the darkness. He rips it off and throws it on the ground, jumping back, as the pendant melts into a dark gray puddle in the dirt. Otabek lets out a breath a little, relieved.
“What are you so happy about?!” Yuri demands.
“It’s not trying to hurt us. Whatever’s here, it’s just messing with us, trying to scare us off.”
“What part of that looked like ‘not trying to hurt us’ to you?!” Yuri shakes his hand as though burned, but Otabek gestures towards the liquid metal on the ground.
“It’s just a myth that the sign of the cross repels demons. Anything powerful enough to do that isn’t going to be affected by something you bought at Hot Topic-” Yuri scoffs indignantly at this, “so it’s just doing party tricks, trying to get us to run away and leave us alone.”
“Melting things with your mind is a hell of a party trick,” Yuri grumbles, but determinedly keeps pace with Otabek.
They’ve barely taken three steps when they hit a splash. Looking down, they find their shoes immersed in an inch or two of dark water.
“Ugh, my fucking shoes are going to get…” Yuri breaks off as his gaze moves upward, following the beam of Otabek’s flashlight. It reflects off endless water, which stretches in every direction, rippling at their feet but so still further out that it looks like they’ve stepped onto a sheet of deep purple glass. It would be eerily beautiful if not for the red flags and alarm bells.
“Where did… where did this come from?” Yuri asks, sounding apprehensive but mainly confused. It’s not like they were staring at the ground this entire time – a moment before, the tunnel ahead had, well, been a tunnel. Otabek has an uncomfortable prickling feeling that means either they’re not safe and should bail immediately, or he’s being watched. Most likely both.
“Maybe we should- oh, come on!” Otabek says in frustration, while Yuri shouts,
“Fuck, no no no no no,” as their flashlights begin to flicker wildly. Otabek holds his flashlight up to his face and squints to see thin silvery liquid dripping out of the battery slot, the sound of the droplets hitting the water on the floor echoing out into the darkness as the flashlights give out altogether. For a few seconds, all Otabek can hear is Yuri trying valiantly to calm his breathing. Then something somewhere slowly glides through the water. The flashlight in Yuri’s hand blinks one final flicker out towards the darkness, and something casts a shadow.
Now is definitely the time to get the fuck out. Unfortunately, Yuri picks the wrong fight or flight response. When Otabek’s hand finds Yuri’s shoulder, Yuri is squared off against the dark.
“Whatever’s out there, you can go to hell! And if you get any closer, I’ll kill you!” he shouts, and removes whatever he found in his pocket. Otabek suddenly remembers the charm to ward off evil he gave Yuri, but it’s too late and Yuri continues, louder, “So just fuck off and die!” He throws the charm hard out towards the depths of the cave.
Otabek holds his breath for a second, then there’s a deep, resonant splash, and he holds his breath for another second. Then he grabs Yuri by the scruff of the hoodie and runs.
“Get off! What are you doing?!” Yuri shouts, twisting free but keeping up. The sound of their splashing footfalls is joined by a rushing like a waterfall, and a wave rushes up to lap around their ankles. It’s not icy like Otabek would have expected, but lukewarm as it soaks into his socks.
The sound grows louder behind them, like someone running through water while dragging swathes of heavy wet fabric. But their eyes have adjusted enough to the darkness to take the right twists and turns, dodge the dead birds bobbing on the surface, and suddenly the temperature changes like running through a warm wall and they’re back in the basement. The mismatched gaggle of birds flies around the room in distress, apparently free of whatever held them so still underground.
“What…” Yuri wheezes, out of breath, then decides instead on elbowing Otabek and pointing back towards the direction they came from. At the threshold to the tunnel, right at the point of the temperature divide, there is no tunnel. Rough stone covers the entire entrance, and when Otabek touches it, it doesn’t seem hollow. Everything looks the way it should, as though whatever lived in that mine were gone forever. Otabek has a sinking feeling and looks sideways at Yuri.
Someone screams and they whip around, but it’s just the husband opening the basement door and getting a bird to the face.
“Everything OK down there?” the man says once he recovers his composure.
“Yeah, fine,” Otabek lies, “Sorry about all the birds in your house.”
At least he doesn’t have to lie in the next conversation.
“I’m not entirely sure what that was, but it’s gone now. It shouldn’t come back here anymore.”
The wife cries and hugs him, which is awkward, but they give Yuri a bag of cookies and Otabek a bag of cash. This is more money than he has seen in his entire life. More money than he suspects he ever will see, even if he lives a long and full life, which he has a lurking suspicion might not happen.
“What’s your problem?” Yuri asks as they make their way back down the path to the driveway, “Whatever that was is gone and we got a lot of money!”
“I think… we may have fucked up.”
The scenery is beautiful, for a while. Flat plains of grass sweep gently towards the horizon, broken only by the occasional mirage shimmering over a dip in the road, the gentle peaks and valleys of telephone wires sailing evenly by. Then it’s boring. Then a little uneasy. This part of the country is known for, well, country and not a whole lot of anything else, but surely they should have passed a house or a gas station or at least a road sign. Something.
When they pull over to stretch their legs in a ditch on the side of the road, Otabek pulls up his phone’s GPS. He has a pretty good idea of what to expect – yep, there it is, “signal not found” – but his phone pings their last known location before losing service as the middle of Lake Superior, so that’s a nice touch. He kicks at the half-crushed can in the ditch and it rolls over to reveal a brand of soda that was discontinued in the late 90s. Otabek figures there’s about an equal chance that it’s spooky demon time magic and that there’s just a warehouse full of the stuff in the middle of nowhere around here somewhere.
“So, are we nearly there yet or what?” Yuri demands. “You said it wasn’t that far!”
Otabek just shrugs.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” When he gets no answer, Yuri continues, louder, “You do know where we’re going, right? Are you seriously saying we’re lost?!”
“We’re not lost. I just-”
“Oh, let me guess, we’re not lost, you just don’t know where we are,”
“That’s not it,” Otabek runs a hand through his hair, trying to think of how to explain this. “I know where we are, and I know how to get where we’re going. We’re just not.”
“Not what?”
“Getting where we’re going.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
The world’s loudest foghorn noise swallows Otabek’s next words. Yuri startles so hard he fumbles his phone and Otabek looks up just in time for the semi’s tires to spit gravel as it passes. He can hear asphalt bits ping off his bike. They better not have scratched it. A hard wave of air hits them in the truck’s wake, sending the soda can skittering into the grass and swirling Yuri’s hair like an ocean current. By the time Yuri has recovered from his horn-induced heart attack and begun cursing out the driver and his mother, the semi has already vanished into the mirage, leaving a faint haze of dust in the air.
“Was that… something to do with whatever’s going on?” Yuri asks as Otabek reaches for his helmet again. At Yuri’s words, he reflexively looks around them. The back of his neck hasn’t stopped prickling like someone is watching since they left the farmhouse, but if the grass sways differently than it should, he doesn’t notice.
“I don’t think so. I think that guy was just an ass.”
“Then why are we leaving?”
Otabek glances up at the sun, solidly past its apex by now.
“I have a feeling we’re going to end stuck out here at night or on foot. I’d rather not have it be both.”
His prediction comes true about half an hour – and no closer to civilization – later. The landscape has long since blurred into a washed out blue and green blur cut by a black streak, with the wind against his face turning his skin papery cold and Yuri’s solid warmth against his back. Then something is wrong.
Otabek knows his bike like it’s part of him. He could ride it in his sleep. So when something feels off, he notices, and he hits the brakes. This proves a bad choice. The bike makes a cringe-inducing sound like cutting steel and wobbles. When your bike wobbles like that, you know you’re probably about to eat it or die. Or both.
The instant they skid to a near stop, Otabek bails, tipping Yuri off as violently as possible so he lands clear, then digs in his heels and braces the bike with his back before it falls too far from upright and gravity takes over. For a breathless instant, his boot treads slide across the dust and pebbles and threaten to slip out from beneath him, but then, somehow, physics rules in his favor and everything stabilizes. Getting crushed by your own bike in a ditch isn’t great, as ways to break your legs go.
“Beka, what the fuck!” Yuri shouts from several feet away.
“Sorry,” Otabek says, and doesn’t mean it much. “Are you OK?” he continues, and does. He hastily pops the kickstand and moves to check on Yuri, but Yuri has already bounced back to his feet and is inspecting the dust that’s turned half his clothes beige with unbridled irritation.
“Yeah, I’m fine. No thanks to you! What the hell was-”
“I was trying to get you out of the way so the bike didn’t crush you.”
Yuri’s snarl dies in his throat and he simply lets out a deflated, “…oh." Otabek turns to inspect the bike instead.
Well, shit.
“My fault. You’re supposed to ease into a stop on a flat,” he says.
“We have a flat tire?”
“More like someone slashed them,” Otabek kneels down to squint at the damage. He better not have to replace the rims. Well, he can certainly afford it now, but…
“Someone slashed our tires,” Yuri says, voice dripping with sarcasm, “while we were driving. On an empty road. In broad daylight.”
Otabek doesn’t have a better answer, so he just shrugs. The rims look salvageable, but still, of all the- Yuri stomps over and leans over Otabek’s shoulder.
“Shit,” he says, pointing, “look at that,”
On closer inspection, the floppy carcass of the tire bears five clean cuts horizontally, one spaced slightly further apart than the other. You could probably pretend they’d just run over sharp trash if you really wanted, but, yeah, those are obviously claw marks.
There isn’t even anything to kick in frustration, just vague colorless dirt and scraggly weeds, so Otabek settles for throwing a change of clothes and some supplies in his backpack with more force than strictly necessary. Yuri delivers a stream of toothless complaints in the background. Otabek has, in fact, realized that walking the whole way with a vengeful powerful mine entity on their tail will be both dangerous and an enormous pain in the ass. He doesn’t even get to say a proper goodbye to his bike (not forever, they are absolutely coming back for it) because in front of Yuri that would look uncool at best and insane at worst, and for some reason, he actually cares.
For all he raises his eyebrows when Yuri decides to put on music, it is nice to listen to something other than the uneven rustle of grass and occasional birdcall. Otabek also gets quite a bit of enjoyment out of watching Yuri try to play it cool while nervously checking to see if Otabek is judging every song. It’s pretty typical edgy teen stuff, but that’s not a bad thing. Yuri slowly relaxes as more songs go by without Otabek mocking him, or whatever Yuri is afraid of. No cars pass, leaving them alone with the wind and Panic! at the Disco.
Seeing a flat rectangle by the roadside in the distance, Otabek almost lets himself hope for a road sign, but life is never that easy. REPENT. YOUR SINS reads faded scarlet letters almost as tall as Yuri, neatly set on a plain white billboard background and slightly yellowed with weather.
“Sick,” says Yuri, whipping out his phone and jogging off to take photos in a variety of back-bending poses. After a minute or two, Otabek just sits cross-legged in the sparse grass to watch. Getting the perfect angle for Instagram is apparently serious business.
Though he’d never admit it, Otabek has Yuri’s Instagram bookmarked. It’s still composed half of MySpace angle selfies, but Yuri has recently taken up posting artsy shots of their trip with emoji-laden song lyric captions. So far, he’s kept his promise of no pictures that could reveal their location or the details of their job, but Otabek’s sister has already found it anyway. “keep him around, i like being able to see what youre up to. you never tell me anything” she texted him this morning.
She also sent a lot of winky faces. Otabek doesn’t know how to feel about this.
Yuri’s phone blares the unmistakable first notes of Bad Romance, and he yelps and frantically jumps to change the song, spluttering about “it’s on shuffle”, “don’t know how that got on there”, “I never listen to this song anyway!”
“It’s fine,” says Otabek, “it’s not a bad song.” Yuri stares.
“You like Lady Gaga?”
Otabek was in middle school once too and he has opinions on classic Gaga, but this isn’t a hill he’s willing to die on, so he just shrugs. He loses track of how much time after that they spend walking in discussion of bands.
Much walking later, the next billboard is both better and worse. Better, because it points towards civilization. Worse because of absolutely everything else. Applejack Molly’s Ol’ Fashioned Honeycrisp Apple Ranch, it reads in loopy blue lettering, above a painting of a grinning girl in gingham and ginger braids, carrying a basket of apples through a brightly painted orchard. People in the 1950s loved this kind of twee shit but…
“Holy shit, this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” says Yuri with a grin as he snaps a series of photos.
“This is a good sign, though,” says Otabek. Yuri groans.
“I mean it’s a good… um…” He fails to find anything that isn’t a bad pun.
“What makes you think it’s…?” Yuri says disbelievingly, and Otabek gestures towards the smaller blue cursive reading Come join the family! Exit in 1 mile.
“Seriously? You want to go here?”
“At least it’s something. I’ll take anything over walking through the night, even if it’s…”
A sharp smile plays at Yuri’s lips.
“Even if it’s what?” Oh hell no. “C’mon, tell me, what would you take over walking?”
“I am not saying that.”
“Don’t just leave me hanging like that, douchebag! I want to know!”
“That’s unfortunate for you.”
“Aww, come on, Beka, it’s just-” the grin falls off Yuri’s face and his eyes go wide, fixed on something in the distance. He whips around to face Otabek. “Holy shit! Did you see that?!”
“See what?” Otabek scans the landscape but sees only an overgrown meadow, punctuated by a single oak tree.
“I think I just saw Bigfoot!”
“What? Where?” Otabek says before his brain catches up.
“Over by that tree, it-” Yuri begins, but Otabek cuts him off.
“Bigfoot isn’t real.”
“Yes it is! I just saw one!” Yuri half-shouts.
“It’s not. And you can’t have just seen it – there’s nowhere here it could hide. You probably-”
“What, so we just got screwed over by a magical mine demon, but Bigfoot isn’t real? Fuck off,” Yuri says, and stomps off towards the tree. Otabek follows helplessly. They find no sign of Bigfoot, or anything else.
Having realized that playing music for hours on end will tank his phone battery, Yuri just talks. “Complains” might be a better word, but that carries a negative connotation that Otabek does not share. He spends a lot of his time – almost all of it, actually – alone with his thoughts and the ambient noise, and that doesn’t bother him. But Yuri seems content to do all the conversational heavy lifting, more like a monologue with occasional audience participation. Yuri never says it outright, but Otabek gets the feeling this is the longest Yuri has ever gone without anyone telling him to shut up.
Yuri likes tigers and video games. He hates a whole lot of things, chief among them his mother’s various ex boyfriends. He once got suspended for three days because he drop kicked a kid who stole his Capri Sun. He wants a cat but his mother refuses. He lived in Moscow with his grandfather for a few years as a small child, and preferred it to everywhere he’s lived since, which includes at least five states. He has a small scar on his left wrist from rollerblading into a fence as a kid. He’s never met his father. Viktor had called Yuri “kind of annoying but cute” when he asked Otabek for this favor, but the next hour or so is far more pleasant than trudging through a ditch has any right to be.
The second time they run across a sign for Applejack Molly’s, Come join the family! Exit in 1 mile , Otabek wonders if they’ve made a mistake. He could swear they’ve walked a mile. They haven’t even seen a passing car, let alone an exit and an apple farm. The little redhead girl grins sickeningly down at them.
The third time, they spot the billboard in the distance and break into a jog, too full of hope and trepidation for what it will read.
Applejack Molly’s Ol’ Fashioned Honeycrisp Apple Ranch. Come join the family! Exit in 1 mile.
While Yuri curses, Otabek looks around. Nothing but grass, the plains undulating slightly but not significantly, all the way to the dull green-brown mountains along the horizon. Exactly the same as the last time, but is it exactly the same?
“Do you have a pen?” he asks.
“I think so. Why? What do you want-” Yuri’s eyes go wide and his face lights up, “Are we doing vandalism? Can I draw on Applejack Asshole’s face?”
“Sure,” Otabek shrugs. Yuri heaves his backpack onto the ground and rifles around recklessly, tipping half the contents out into the grass. After a moment, he triumphantly extricates a dirty cheetah-patterned pencil case and removes a Sharpie, which he offers to Otabek.
“If you want to draw on the sign, go ahead. I was just going to draw some X’s.” Otabek says.
“Why?”
“I’m trying to figure out whether we’re being looped back to the same place over and over, or…”
“Or what?”
Otabek doesn’t know how to answer that. Mostly, he just prays they don’t have to. Looping something simple like a road and empty field is one thing, but the alternative is another. If this thing has that kind of power, then… Well, they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it. For now, he shrugs off his backpack and lets Yuri sit on his shoulders to reach Applejack Molly’s face and tries to ignore the sinking dread that they’re in even deeper over their heads than he thought.
Yuri gives her a top hat, eye patch, curly mustache, and several missing teeth. It is incredibly, delightfully childish.
They see nothing for several hours. Nothing useful, anyway. Otabek spots a golden eagle perched on a telephone pole. Yuri throws a rock at it and misses, but only barely (consider Otabek impressed) and the bird takes off in a huff. When Otabek questions him, Yuri just makes a face like his reasoning for harassing innocent eagles should be obvious.
Well, it is the most interesting thing that has happened in at least an hour.
Halfway through a story of the time he declared vengeance on all goatkind after one stole his ice cream at a petting zoo, Yuri freezes, then turns and practically tackles Otabek’s arm.
“There it is again! It’s Bigfoot! Look! It’s right-” Yuri’s voice and pointing finger wilt as he takes in the tumbledown old horse shelter, more a few sheets of rusty corrugated metal on sticks. Noticeably empty, and nowhere to hide.
“I- I swear it was there! I’m serious!”
“I know,” says Otabek. He doesn’t add that Yuri is probably just on edge after his first horrifying mine monster experience. Then again, that was Otabek’s first horrifying mine monster experience too, and he’s holding up just fine.
The sun has sunk low on the horizon and bled the sky golden by the time they see the next billboard. Silhouetted against the setting sun, they can only see a looming outline. They break into a jog, squinting against the blinding light. Never has a thin wooden rectangle on the side of the road commanded such hope and tension.
Applejack Molly’s Ol’ Fashioned Honeycrisp Apple Ranch. Come join the family! Exit in 1 mile. Applejack Molly’s perfect, unblemished, nauseating little face seems to mock them.
Well, this isn’t good.
Yuri has something quite a bit less polite to say. He flings a dirt clod at the billboard, setting off a mediocre dirt explosion and a hollow thunk. Then he pulls out his phone and snaps a photo of himself giving Applejack Molly the finger. Otabek dashes over and adds his own middle finger to the shot.
As he waits for Yuri to finish flicking through the camera roll, two things suddenly hit Otabek: first, that they haven’t seen a single apple tree, and second, that he’s an idiot.
“Yura, next time you see Bigfoot, don’t stop looking at it.”
Yuri looks up from his screen, confused.
“What? Why?”
“No reason,” Otabek intends to worry Yuri less but gets the sense it doesn’t work, “just tell me if you see it, but don’t take your eyes off it.”
“OK, but-”
“Let’s get going. The sun will go down soon.”
Yuri pockets his phone and jogs to catch up with Otabek’s longer strides. He looks more irritated than usual, and Otabek holds out a probably vain hope that it’s just because of the obnoxious apple signs and being tired and hungry.
“Don’t fuck with me, Beka. What’s going on?”
Otabek sighs.
“I think we might be kind of screwed.”
That might be kind of an understatement.
As the sun slides further towards the horizon and Otabek grows increasingly uneasy, they pass exactly three things of interest.
First, a sign reading “WE BUY GOLD”. Anything on the road counts as something of interest at this point, and as Yuri points out, the lack of anything resembling contact information turns an unassuming sign a little ominous. Who buys gold? They may never know.
Second, a field full of piles of white objects that have turned ghostly in the falling twilight, but on closer examination turn out to be hundreds of cheap paper and wire yard signs, the kind that pop up like mushrooms on your front lawn in the run up to elections. Yuri flips one over to find bleached red and white stripes and the name of a political candidate neither of them have ever heard of. Yuri kicks the sign back into the trash field where it belongs.
The third interesting thing comes in the midst of a radiant red-purple sunset that Otabek is too preoccupied with the imminent nightfall to appreciate. Halfway through a sentence about life in Moscow cut with poorly disguised longing, Yuri shouts,
“Dinosaur!”
Otabek, who had been listening more to the cadence of Yuri’s voice than the actual words, startles and looks around. Yuri points wildly at something in the distance. Standing proud at the top of a small hill overlooking a sparse copse of oaks, there is in fact a dinosaur. Huh.
The hill lies a few hundred feet off the road and the light is fading fast, but obviously they go check out the dinosaur. Someone has lovingly constructed a life-sized, or at least pretty damn enormous, fiberglass statue of one of those stubby dinosaurs with the long necks and tiny heads, complete with mottled gray skin and a dopey expression.
Yuri wonders what the fuck. Otabek has long since given up on that question. They’re not dead yet, which is what matters, and he’ll take a dinosaur statue over terrible billboards any day.
“Hey, Beka, help me up!” Yuri calls. He’s finished snapping photos, thrown his backpack aside, and is jumping fruitlessly against the dinosaur, his raised hands sliding off its flank.
“Be careful,” Otabek warns, but gives Yuri a leg up anyway.
“Of what?” Yuri snorts, “It’s, like, six feet tall,”
The sun has half sunk beneath the distant mountains, stretching out the shadows, and the feeling of being watched has increased to the point it takes real effort not to look over his shoulder all the time. But Yuri finally seems anything other than irritated and on edge for the first time since “Bigfoot”, so Otabek says nothing and lets Yuri enjoy his dinosaur selfies in peace.
Yuri extends a hand, but the statue’s spine reaches roughly the height of Otabek’s head, and Yuri weighs so little that taking his hand would definitely fling him comically off the dinosaur. Only a tiny bit disappointed, Otabek settles down in the tall grass and leans up against one of the legs, relishing the rest, the cool grass brushing up against him, and the shade cast by the enormous body. They’ve spent the better part of the day walking in open sunlight, and at least Yuri has a dusting of pink across his nose, cheeks, and the tips of his ears.
Yuri clearly does not want to leave his dinosaur perch, and they really should eat so they don’t have to stop in the dark. Dinner is lukewarm whatever they could stuff in their backpacks from the motel continental breakfast this morning, a lifetime ago. Mostly pastries and bread roll bacon sandwiches turned dubious by hours in backpacks in the direct sun. They’re still fine… probably? Yuri also took handfuls of those little plastic containers of jam, for some reason.
“Ha!” Yuri shouts, removing from the recesses of his backpack a battered black and white notebook, “Look! I’ve still got my algebra homework in here!” He reaches back as far as he can and shouts “Get fucked” as he hurls it toward the far-off blue mountains. Unfortunately, paper isn’t very aerodynamic, and the notebook flies only a few feet before plummeting and disappearing into the grass.
Otabek starts to see how all this weird roadside shit got here. Years from now, someone will probably find ancient algebra and wonder how the hell it ended up on a hill in the middle of nowhere, just like a pile of propaganda or a fiberglass dinosaur.
“You brought your homework with you when you ran away from home?”
“Hell no, of course not! I just packed in a hurry so I could make it before Viktor got back to his car. I thought I got all my school stuff out of my backpack but, guess not.”
“Make it before Viktor got back to his car?”
“Yeah,” Yuri says smugly, “When I asked if I could come with him, he said no, so I packed up all my stuff and hid in the backseat of his convertible. It took him forever to notice, even though his dumb dog kept barking and licking me. By the time he finally checked back there, he was just like ‘oh well, what can you do’ and let me stay.”
Otabek cannot believe this. Except that he can. Viktor is infuriatingly talented at not only surviving, but looking cool despite a complete lack of common sense. Only Viktor could forget to check the back seat of his car (his convertible!) and ignore his dog’s warnings, but not get murdered, make a friend, and end up not having to take any responsibility. Meanwhile, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Otabek’s life has rapidly spiraled out of control due to Yuri-related circumstances.
“Wait, isn’t school out for the summer already?” he wonders out loud. He can practically hear Yuri’s look of disgust from above him.
“Ugh, my school gets out so late! We still have, like, a whole month left. Not that summer was going to be any better,” he adds bitterly.
“Why not?”
Yuri sighs heavily in distaste.
“I got a job at the movie theater for the summer. It was gonna suck, but my mom and her boyfriend had been fighting a lot, so I figured we’d probably need the extra money for whenever he finally kicks her out. And it’s not like she was gonna do it. She’s too busy moping around and spending all her money on headshots and shit.”
“Head… shots…?” Otabek says, a little alarmed but mostly nonplussed. Yuri lets out a bark of laughter.
“Not that kind of headshot! Like, those stupid pictures of yourself you send to casting agents or whatever.”
“Your mom is an actress?” Somehow, Yuri has barely mentioned his mother, besides to complain a lot.
“Singer,” Yuri pauses, then adds viciously, “Well, she says. Just because she had one kind of big hit way back in the 90s, she thinks she’s some amazing country music star and she’ll make her ‘big comeback’ any day now.”
“...I’m sorry,” Otabek says after a long pause. He doesn’t know what to say, and that seems less wrong than anything else.
“Eh, it’s whatever,” says Yuri, and he forcefully stuffs a squashed croissant into his mouth so the conversation turns to silence. They sit that way comfortably for a few minutes, enjoying the lukewarm jam and the breeze playing with their hair.
“Beka,” says Yuri suddenly, an edge to his voice, “You said you wanted me to tell you if I saw Bigfoot again, right?”
“Where?” Otabek is on his feet by the time he’s finished the question.
“Down the hill to the right, towards those trees. It’s just… standing there,”
So it is. Otabek feels like he’s been hit by a sudden chilled wind.
“What the hell made you think that thing was Bigfoot?” he demands as he gropes around in his backpack without taking his eyes off it. Shin deep in the grassy field, shaded by the long shadow cast by a far-off tree, stands a fleshy shadow, tall, hunched, and pale. It has skin as sallow white as a fish that has never seen the sun, which hangs off its spindly limbs. He can’t quite make out its face from this distance and that’s probably for the best.
“I- well- I don’t know!” Yuri splutters, “It was big and mysterious and kind of human-y and… it was further away the other times, alright?!”
Otabek’s hand hits the reassuring smooth barrel of his rifle and he drags it out along with a box of bullets. Salt ones – he gets it right on the first try. There’s nothing to set the gun on to steady his aim, but he’s practiced enough that he damn well better be able to hit a large, stationary target not all that far away.
He gets a slightly more magnified look through the scope and wishes he hadn’t. Jesus fucking Christ, what have they done?
“I think Bigfoot is supposed to have eyes…” he says.
“It doesn’t have…? So, what is it, then?”
“I don’t know,” says Otabek. He doesn’t want to know either. He takes the shot.
The sharp crack echoes across the empty plains.
“Shit!” Yuri shouts, nearly falling off the dinosaur in surprise, “What the fuck?!” The thing had shattered on impact. Well, that takes care of that.
Wait. No. What?
“What is it doing?” Yuri demands apprehensively as the thing knits itself back together, an explosion in reverse. That’s a new one. Things you shoot usually stay shot, as a rule.
“I don’t…” The breath dies in Otabek’s throat as the newly-whole thing turns to meet his gaze with the wet, gaping holes down its face where features should be. Otabek doesn’t consider himself squeamish or easily scared, but there’s a difference between frightening and deeply, instinctively wrong.
The only thing worse than seeing this thing is suddenly not seeing it anymore.
“Shit! Shit, where did it go?!” Yuri scrambles to his feet as Otabek looks around wildly. Then fingers close around his ankle.
Once, on a childhood trip to the beach, Otabek had turned while knee-deep in the surf to call out to someone on the shore, and a wave had slammed into him from behind. This feels like that. The tall grass closes over his head and the world goes dark and frigid. It’s either very loud or very quiet: the wind roars in his ears, or maybe it’s just the blood rushing in his veins. His surprised, what the hell is happening gasp pulls in no air and leaves a crushing weight in his chest instead. He should definitely have hit the ground, but gravity doesn’t seem to work anymore. He can’t even tell which way is up or down.
As Otabek flails around desperately, the thing drags him towards it, the claws around his ankle tightening so sharply that he gasps in pain, and regrets it immediately as it feels like the weight of the world on his lungs. But he knows where it is now, sort of. Sort of had better be good enough. Otabek kicks with his free leg in vaguely the direction of the hand until he makes contact with something crunchy. Remembering just in time the mostly useless hunk of metal squeezed reflexively in his grasp, he slams the butt of the gun into (he hopes) the thing’s face.
The air itself shudders like TV static, and the claws around Otabek’s ankle retract. Immediately, he hits the ground hard enough to rattle his teeth together, and the world returns in a burst of sound and color. He gasps for air and can vaguely hear Yuri shouting over his own hammering heart and the menacing rustle of the grass. The blades are living up to their name: one slices a sharp paper cut across the back of his hand as they all wave towards him in unison like the tentacles of a giant sea beast, and he spots quick flashes of claws hiding between them.
Otabek launches himself out of the way, and gravity takes over –right, hill – and he stumbles-rolls-falls his way ungracefully down the hillside, trying and failing to get back on his feet and stay there. A brilliant light blinds him – the setting sun, out from behind the hill – and the shadowy grass shudders, then goes mostly still, back to waving innocently in the slight breeze. The sudden silence hits like a physical hole in the air.
“Beka!” Yuri is shouting from far away, “Beka, are you OK?!” Otabek couldn’t get words out now if he tried, so he just gives Yuri a shaky thumbs up and flops onto his back in the grass to gasp for breath.
So that just happened. What the fuck. On the positive side, they’re not dead. On the negative side, it looks increasingly likely that they will be soon. Otabek’s no impressive wizard or anything; in fact, to general disappointment, he’s always had about as much talent for that sort of thing as the average potato. He gets by handily on killing things and keeping his mouth shut, but things that can die and then… un-die? and also fuck with reality fall far out of his skillset. All they have going for them at this point is that this thing has apparently lived underground so long it hates bright light, which won’t matter much when night falls in about half an hour.
This is the part where he bites the bullet and calls for help. The tricky part will be surviving long enough to find cell service.
At the sound of fast footsteps, Otabek looks up to see Yuri sprinting down the hill to stop next to him, eyes wide in alarm.
“Are you OK?!” Yuri demands. In hindsight, getting grabbed by a monster, falling down a hill, and then lying on the ground without moving probably looked pretty bad. Otabek sits up, the entire left side of his body where he’d landed the first time aching in complaint.
“I’m fine,” he says. Yuri doesn’t look comforted.
“You’re bleeding!” he hisses, and points to the ankle the thing had grabbed. Sure enough, dark red has started to seep through the ragged edges of slashed denim. Otabek had liked those jeans. The distressed look is in style, but he suspects that doesn’t include holes in the ankles. He inspects the damage to his skin, and finds a series of clean, thin cuts running parallel in the shape of perfect claw marks.
“It’s fine,” he says, “it’s not deep. I have a first aid kit in my… fuck.” In unison, the two turn to back up the hill, where they can just barely make out the lumpy silhouette of Otabek’s backpack against the sunset, next to the dinosaur. Right on cue, a breeze sweeps across the plain and the grass rustles innocently like a dare.
Yuri shrugs off his own backpack and drops it at his feet.
“I’ve got it,” he says, “Stay here.” Otabek makes to get up and opens his mouth in protest, but Yuri shoves him back onto the ground and says,
“I said stay fucking here! You’re injured! Let me take care of it, alright?” Then he takes off. He’s fast and oddly graceful as he sprints up the hill, skids to a stop to grab the backpack and change directions, then flies back down with gravity at his back so that his shoes barely touch the dirt. Someone with more imagination could probably convince themselves the way the shadowy grass seems to shudder and turn towards him is just the wind.
“There,” Yuri says, flushed and a little out of breath, as he drops the backpack next to Otabek with a thud.
“Thank you,” Otabek says and means it. Yuri draws his hood up over his head and looks away.
“Whatever,” he says, “just hurry up already.” But out of the corner of his eye, Otabek catches Yuri intently peeking at him disinfect and bandage his ankle, and Yuri looks distinctly worried when Otabek hisses in pain at the disinfectant’s sting.
“It’s really not that bad,” he insists, but Yuri still holds out a hand to help him up, and doesn’t let go until he sees that Otabek can safely put weight on the leg. As Otabek gathers up his things, he sees Yuri reach out a hand towards his face, then hesitate and retract it. When Otabek looks at him questioningly, Yuri says,
“You have grass in your hair,” and stuffs his hands back in his pockets. Otabek ruffles a hand through his hair.
“Did I get it?”
Yuri rolls his eyes and reaches up to brush away a stray leaf. This apparently exhausts his daily quota of being genuinely nice and helpful, because then he turns back with a mocking smile and says,
“Jeez, I can’t believe how lame that was. Aren’t you supposed to be some cool demon hunter guy or something? That was pathetic. You might as well have shouted ‘as you wish’ too.”
“If I had, would you have thrown yourself down the hill after me?”
“What? No! Fuck you,” Yuri splutters. Otabek just smiles.
“Then what would be the point?”
By the time the sky has moved on from pinks and golds to a deep dusky purple, the thing has returned. Yuri spots it first, so far away it’s just a thin pale figure standing out against a dark tree in the distance. Otabek hopes that maybe hurting it, if only briefly, might have held it off, but the next sighting beneath a small rocky outcropping is a little closer. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out a trend.
The truck nearly runs them over. They’ve taken to walking down the middle of the road, as it has the most visibility and the least places where something could jump out and grab their ankles. Yuri has exhausted his conversation topics, or maybe is just plain exhausted, so they walk in companionable silence. Then suddenly, bright lights have stretched their shadows out giant in front of them, and they barely have time to look back, be blinded by headlights, register “oh shit, a truck”, and dodge into the other lane.
At least it doesn’t honk this time. It’s a farm truck, the tall, open-topped bed piled high with shiny orange orbs. It goes by too fast to read the painted lettering, but a wheel catches in a pothole and a couple orbs bounce out into the road. Yuri chases one down.
“Grapefruits,” he announces. Well, that makes about as much sense as anything else today. Yuri stares at the grapefruit in his hand as though about to deliver it a soliloquy, and Otabek can see the struggle written on his face of whether or not to eat fruit off the side of the road. After a few seconds, he apparently settles on not. Instead, he turns to where the thing stands, silent beneath a tree silhouetted against the skyline, and flings the grapefruit, shouting “fuck off!” The thing stays motionless and the grapefruit sails harmlessly off into the deepening twilight.
No one dares speak as night falls in earnest, and Otabek doesn’t have to look over his shoulder to feel the thing creeping closer. As places to die go, you could do a lot worse than a sweeping meadow beneath a glimmering night sky, but that’s little comfort. So is the guilt that he’s responsible for Yuri now, and really shouldn’t get him murdered on the side of the road.
When the second car passes, they’re paying enough attention to clear off the road and stick their thumbs out. The old blue Honda, peppered with sun-bleached bumper stickers, doesn’t even slow down. They peer inside as it whizzes past and can’t see any faces. When Yuri turns back to look for the thing, he curses under his breath and sidles a bit closer to Otabek.
“I think something is happening,” Otabek says as the glowing red dots of the Honda’s tail lights shrink into the horizon, “we haven’t seen a car in hours, and now we’ve seen two. Something has changed.”
“Is that a good thing?” Yuri asks.
“I don’t know. But I have a feeling something is going to happen soon, one way or another.”
“Fucking finally,” Yuri grumbles. Otabek wishes he could summon Yuri’s enthusiasm, but as exhausting as this trek is, he’d rather walk forever than experience whatever happens when the thing finally catches up.
The flashlights are still full of congealing battery goop and Yuri’s phone has long since died, so their only source of light comes from Otabek’s phone flashlight. The shaky circle of harsh white light and the deep shadows it throws make the world look more sinister, like something out of a found footage horror movie or JJ’s stupid ghost hunting show. But the real horror story is how fast it drains his battery life, the icon counting down the time until they’re left in complete darkness. Just as it ticks down to 29% and it starts to sink in that they may be well and truly fucked, Yuri shouts,
“Look!”
Otabek looks up from his screen and spots what Yuri, actually bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet in excitement, is looking at almost immediately. Just yards off the highway sits a lone rest stop, fluorescent lights casting a mournful glow out across the empty fields. Yuri makes eye contact, then without warning takes off sprinting, leaving Otabek scrambling to follow. He finally catches up as Yuri is panting heavily, bent over with his hands on his knees in the parking lot.
Otabek takes in the surroundings as he catches his breath. A small roof stripped bare down to its metal paneling, removing any colors or branding, covers four gas pumps, three of which sport signs reading “Out of Order”. Blinding fluorescent floodlights overlook a small parking lot with neatly delineated spaces for cars, semis, and motorcycles, none of which are occupied.
At the complete lack of cars, Otabek has a moment of panic that the place is closed, but then he spots the lit windows and the cheap beer brand neon sign flickering “OPEN”. A gust of wind blows across the fields and jostles a few pebbles, then dissipates and leaves only the faint buzzing of electric lights against a heavy silence.
“Let’s go in,” he says as Yuri straightens up.