Chapter Text
The West was an unforgiving beast. Too hot in the morning. Too cold at night. Too dry for anything substantial to grow in the rare patch of soil in the endless desert.
That was why it took a beast just as plucky to make a living out there. Someone who was willing to take a gander at all of that adversity and say, “Y’ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
Jill Valentine prided herself on her resolve. It kept her on her feet in times of difficulty, like when Mr. Rosso’s cattle got loose and she had to help herd them back up before a dust storm overtook them, breathing a sigh of relief when she got the last cow in and locked the door of Mr. Rosso’s ranch house behind her.
When you were the Raccoon County Sheriff, crazy stuff like that was bound to fall under your jurisdiction; that was something Jill learned in the early days of her job.
It took a long time, longer than she would have liked, to gain the trust of the locals. More than a few times some of the men in the saloon had looked upon her with a sneer and made some rather unsavory remarks. “You’re just a whore with a fancy hat,” they’d say. Jill knew better than to take it to heart.
However, after more than a few run-ins with fellows who thought they were too slick to get caught makin’ away with all of the money in the bank, Jill had proven herself, showcasing her impressive marksmanship and refusal to give up.
So, now, the people came to her for concerns both big and small, no matter if they fell under her responsibilities as sheriff or not, and she always helped them with a warm smile and no-nonsense attitude. If you asked for Jill’s help on anything, you could blink and she’d have already fixed your problem. She was smart, fast and sure of herself, a force to be reckoned with.
It was a regular ol’ Tuesday morning when Kendo came to her office, the batwing doors creaking as he swung them open and entered with a heavy step. He was dressed in his usual getup; a black vest over a yellow shirt, blue jeans, brown boots, concerned look in his eye, and a black hat to top it all off.
“Hey, Sheriff,” he called as he removed his hat, revealing a bald head. His voice had gone softer recently. He’d lost his wife a few months prior, to the consumption; a terrible thing, really. Roslyn had been a bright woman, always with a smile and a rambunctious laugh to offer at someone’s jokes. She and Jill had gotten along well; in fact, that was how she had gotten to know Kendo. He liked staying on his farm with their (at the time) newborn daughter, taking care of the farm animals and his beloved horse. It had taken some significant prodding from Roslyn to get him to come inside one afternoon and introduce himself to Jill. (“I’m Robert,” he’d said, with a small wave, “but you can call me Kendo, Sheriff.”) He was a quiet, humble man, with a heart full of nothing but love.
Jill lifted her boots from the top of her desk and settled them on the wooden floor. She smiled and said, “Hello, my friend. What brings you here on this fine day?”
“Somethin’s up on the farm,” Kendo replied, approaching her desk. “I need you to come, quick.” Noting his worried tone of voice, Jill stood quickly, rocketing up from her chair. Now that Kendo had come closer, she could see the lines between his eyes, how they creased further with the downturn of his brow. Whatever it was, it was not to be taken lightly.
“I’m right behind you, Kendo,” she said, lunging for the holster and hat that hung on the rack behind her.
After a ride of a few short minutes, they arrived at Kendo’s farm. Jill surveyed the land as they rode up to the main house; nothing seemed out of place. The building was intact, the cows and sheep were in their discrete pastures, grazing happily, and the sun was beating down, like every other day in Raccoon.
Jill dismounted as Kendo did, tying her horse’s (Lightning, she had taken to calling him) lead to a post next to the one where he did the same. She placed her hands on her hips when she was finished, looking at Kendo. He wouldn’t meet her eye, instead idly stroking his horse’s mane.
“Kendo,” she half-barked. He jumped, eyes blowing wide in surprise. “You’re drivin’ me crazy with all this silence. Tell me what’s goin’ on.”
Kendo’s hand fell from its position on the white horse’s neck, and his jaw set. “Follow me,” he said.
Jill rolled her eyes when Kendo turned around. She hated being kept in the dark. Many a problem had been solved with a quick talking-to or a set of instructions, knowledge she had picked up in her short tenure as the sheriff, but now the man was making it hard to put a finger on what exactly was the matter.
She followed him around the far wall of the house, toward the pasture. There was complete silence in the land around them as they strode across the dry, crunchy grass, feeling the unrelenting shine of the sun soaking into their skin. It was an eerie silence, one that Jill felt the need to fill with a wisecrack or a question, but when she finally matched pace with Kendo and started walking alongside him, she could see in the corner of her eye that there was an uncharacteristic severity in his features. Now was not the time for levity.
Finally, Kendo spoke again, as they started to close in upon the fence of the sheep’s pasture. “After I woke up this mornin’, I was walkin’ out to tend to the sheep.”
“Uh huh,” Jill prompted as they started to skirt the outside of the fence, headed for the corner where the shed stood; a short but long wooden structure that looked rickety from the outside but was undoubtedly sturdy, standing firm as a blessedly cool wind washed over them from the north.
“But when I was startin’ to shear one, I looked out at the plains, by those two rocks over there,” Kendo said, pointing to the spot he referred to. Jill followed his finger, seeing nothing there but the two rocks, large, brown, and nearly adjacent to each other, with a mere few feet of space between them.
Wait a minute. Jill almost stopped in mid-step when she spotted it between the rocks, barely noticeable until she had looked closer. It was a small mound of white fluff, with the unmistakable, slender black shape of a leg poking out.
“The hell is that?” Jill asked, cursing her own voice as it trembled.
Kendo suddenly broke out into a jog. “Come on,” he urged, and Jill was not slow to follow suit, catching up with him in a matter of seconds as they approached the rocks.
A few seconds of running later, and they had come upon the “mound of fluff,” which Jill now realized was a sheep. But it was so small, it looked like a poor man’s taxidermy. Its tongue was sticking out, eyes wide open, but clearly dead, for there was no visible rise and fall of the animal’s stomach.
“What happened to it?” Jill asked, glancing at Kendo. He was looking down at it with a mournful expression; he loved every last one of his animals, and rarely killed a cow for meat. He somehow ate well despite that fact, with a significant gut to sport alongside his massive revolver.
“It got all the blood sucked out of it, poor thing,” Kendo explained, pointing to a spot on its neck. Jill leaned down next to the carcass, inspecting it closer. Now that she looked at the spot Kendo had indicated, she noticed that there were four little puncture marks just below its jaw. With a chill, she realized that that was why it was so small: it had shriveled up like a damned raisin when it had been completely drained of blood.
“It got all the blood sucked out from that one spot?” Jill asked skeptically from her squatting position, prodding the wound gently with her finger. She was giving off the air of someone who knew what they were doing, but things were quickly slipping beyond her well-established comfort zone, the borders of which would now have to accommodate for shriveled up sheep carcasses. Wonderful start to this morning.
“No, there are more on its legs,” Kendo said. Jill flipped the animal over and held up each of its legs as she investigated them, seeing that indeed, there was one on each leg.
“The hell?” Jill said again, muttering under her breath. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this before,” she admitted, standing up and meeting Kendo’s eye. “Think it was a snake?”
The man shook his head. “Nah, snake would’ve eaten it. Those things have huge jaws, you know.”
“I’m aware,” Jill said, thinking back to an unpleasant experience that had involved an unbelievably huge cobra and her rarely-utilized shotgun. Shivering at the memory, Jill chewed on her bottom lip. “But what else could it have been?”
“I dunno,” Kendo said, scratching the inside of his wrist. “But I don’t want it killin’ any more of my sheep. Barely got enough as it is.”
“‘Course not,” Jill agreed. “Tell ya what, I’ll ask around, see if anyone else has had this problem.”
Kendo’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Thanks, Sheriff,” he said. “I know you’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Say hello to little Emma for me, will ya?” Jill said with a smile as she finally dusted herself off.
Kendo smiled too, for the first time that morning. “Oh, she’ll be delighted to hear,” he replied with a twinkle in his eye. He always had that look when talking about his daughter. “Little one’s just learned to walk.”
“My, they grow up fast, don’t they?”
“Indeed they do, ma’am. Indeed they do.”
“All right,” Jill said, pushing the brim of her hat further down to protect from the sun that had risen higher in the sky in the time between Kendo’s arrival and their discovery. “If you see or hear anythin’ else, just come a-runnin’.”
“You got it.”
On the ride back to town, Jill took the few minutes to process all of the new information that had flooded her mind, along with the conclusions she kept drawing up and throwing out.
- It wasn’t a snake that had killed the sheep, but it had the telltale four puncture points in its bite.
- It came in the night.
- It had sucked out every last drop of blood that the little sheep had to offer.
Jill didn’t like this one bit. She was more used to dealing with humans and the problems that came with them, not animals, and especially not ruthless ones like the one that had attacked Kendo’s sheep. But when she had to buckle down, she would do so, no matter the circumstances. Even if the burden was great, she would do whatever she could to protect the people of Raccoon.
Soon enough, Jill arrived at the edge of the town’s main street, where the general store and the sheriff’s building stood on one side and the bank and inn-saloon (affectionately referred to as The Lean-To by the locals) on the other. It was a small settlement, but most of the residents lived on the outskirts anyway, where there was arable land and a sense of privacy.
She directed Lightning to the porch of the sheriff’s department and dismounted, making quick work of the lead this time. When she gave him a quick stroke on the back of his neck, he whinnied, content. “I’ll get to feedin’ you soon,” Jill promised, turning toward the saloon and striding purposefully in its direction.
“Hey, Sheriff!” a man’s voice shouted. Jill stopped in her tracks, turning to search for the voice. Her eyes landed on a tall, muscular man, and she was ready to give him a swift kick where the sun don’t shine until she realized that the man was Barry Burton. He had a wife and two daughters at home, all three of whom he loved dearly.
The tension in Jill’s shoulders settled and she smiled as a greeting. “How goes it, Mr. Burton?”
“Bad news,” Burton said as he approached, walking fast on his way toward her, with a breathless quality to his voice. “One of my cows was slaughtered in the middle of the night. Got all the blood sucked out of him. Can you believe it?”
Jill’s smile fell and she froze. “Oh, no,” she said.
Burton stopped a few feet away, frowning in concern. The expression reminded her of her father. “Y’alright, kid?”
From any other man she would have slapped him in the face for referring to her as such, but from Barry, Jill supposed it was all right. “You ain’t the first one to tell me about somethin’ like this,” she said.
“What, someone else had somethin’ similar?”
“Kendo,” Jill explained. “One o’ his sheep was drawn out of its enclosure and got the same treatment as your cow.”
Burton sighed, placing his hands on his hips. “What d’you reckon, Jill?” he asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest, Barry.”
He nodded gravely. “You gonna spread the news?”
“Indeed. I’m headed to the saloon right now.”
“All right, then. You need something, just call for me.”
Jill smirked. Leave it to Barry Burton to tell her what she’d just told Kendo.
“See ya,” she said, tipping her hat and starting to walk toward the saloon again.
The Lean-To was where most of the town’s men hung out, whether good or bad, friendly or mean. Jill could handle the worst of the patrons just fine, though, no matter how many of the “good” ones rushed to her aid in a piss-poor attempt at chivalry. Before she was taken seriously as sheriff, she could expect someone in there to buy her a night’s worth of drinks and a few propositions to be made before she returned to her little apartment above the sheriff’s office — alone, mind you. She hardly had the patience, let alone the heart, for romance. Her one true love was her job.
Which she couldn’t seem to get through the thick skulls of some of these assholes at the saloon. As she entered, the doors swinging back and forth behind her, the heads of everyone at the bar swiveled in her direction.
“Howdy, Sheriff,” greeted the barkeep, Mr. Vickers (he insisted that people call him Bradley). “What brings you here?”
Jill swept her gaze over the patrons that sat at the bar and at the various tables. “I have an announcement to make,” she said, loud enough so that she could be heard even from the back of the room.
“You finally on the market, Sheriff?” a man joked, causing the laughter of a few men seated near him.
“Make another remark like that and it’ll be your head on the market, mister,” Jill retorted. Even as she looked away, she could see the man visibly gulp. She’d perfected the craft of making men mess their drawers a long time ago. Nobody seemed to take the hint, anyhow. “What I was gonna say is, a few fellers have come to me about somethin’ that happened last night. One of Kendo’s sheep and Mr. Burton’s cows were slaughtered.”
“Sounds pretty reg’lar to me,” someone said. A few nods and murmurs of agreement followed.
“They weren’t killed in the usual way, though,” Jill argued. “Got the blood sucked out of ‘em, lookin’ all deflated.”
“I’ll show you somethin’ that ain’t deflated,” said another man, with a grin on his face and deviance in his voice. It took every fibre of Jill’s being to not walk up to him and whip him with her revolver.
“Somethin’ killed these livestock, fellas,” Jill said instead, with a note of desperation. “I’m tellin’ y’all to keep an eye out. Hell, maybe even both of ‘em.”
She sighed.
“There’s your fair warnin’, folks.” Jill placed her hand on her gun in its holster for good measure, to show she meant business. Nobody protested when they noticed that. “Come back tomorrow n’ see how reg’lar it is.”
With that, she turned on her heel and walked out of the saloon, back to the sheriff’s department, where she threw the doors open in an expression of pent-up anger and flopped back into her chair, squeezing the bridge of her nose in agitation.
It would be a while before she once more felt as relaxed as she had earlier that morning, when she was in the same position: at her desk, but with a lazy smile on her face and a cozy sensation rooting her to the spot, instead of this dread that was beginning to creep in on her, teasing at the hairs on the back of her neck and whispering in her ear:
Bad things are coming.