Chapter Text
Wile E. crouches down behind a boulder and carefully peeks around it, observing his target.
Said target is a brown-skinned man with dyed blue locs. The target's blue tennis shoes (with bright yellow laces) smack against the asphalt of the road as he runs. A tight tank top drenched with sweat clings to his torso, accentuating his musculature, and beads of sweat roll down his skin, gliding over the curves of the muscles of his biceps and down his elbows, making his skin shine under the glaring sun. There is a bright grin on his face.
He's not even trying. Wile E. knows exactly how fast this man can go at a jog, and this is nowhere near that amount. He scowls to himself and lowers his binoculars, doing a quick inventory check and going over his plan once more in his head.
The target is approaching a curve that will steer him close to the cliff that Wile E. is currently on. In front of him is a boulder that, if he has correctly calculated its trajectory, will squash him as soon as the target gets within range. Hopefully he doesn't notice it, but for whatever reason, the target has always been incredibly unobservant.
Finding a boulder with so much raw silver in it had been nothing short of arduous. Wile E. had had to sit through several awkward calls explaining that he needed a boulder with raw silver in it tomorrow morning, no I don't want just the silver, I need the whole thing and yes, it needs to be that big, and also that he does live in the desert, I checked the website and it said you can deliver anywhere, so my location shouldn't be a problem and also that he wasn't a lunatic, although he sometimes was forced to question that; and answering all of those questions using a text-to-speech function was just as irritating when the person on the other end was too impatient to let him finish typing out what he wanted said. Regardless, Wile E. has acquired the boulder (and taken a few nuggets of silver, so he can melt them down for later use) and is positioned perfectly. He has calculated the air resistance, the friction, factored in the weight of the boulder and the steepness of the cliff, and everything lines up. The road has several marks painted onto it and Wile E. now focuses all of his attention on them.
Any second now...
He braces himself against the boulder and forces himself to wait. If he acts prematurely, then his plan is ruined, and he'll have to go back to the drawing board. This is his last plan of the day; the target has blown through all of them much quicker than he usually does. Wile E. will need to prepare more than usual tomorrow to accommodate this.
There.
The target's shoes cross over the first mark he'd painted the night before.
Wile E. starts to push. He grunts, his jaw clenched, and puts his shoulder into it, feeling the boulder start to roll forwards. The target passes the second mark and he pushes even harder until the boulder has finally been dislodged and starts to roll down.
He quickly trails after it, reaching for the sharpened wooden stake at his hip. This will have to be done fast. Wile E. will only have a slim window if this manages to work, and the target is notorious for a good reaction time and recovery, so if he isn't at the target's side as soon as the boulder hits, then this will all be for nothing. Luckily, he's planned for this as well: there is a shortcut on this cliff that he utilises, managing to reach the bottom a few seconds before the boulder.
His legs burn from the exertion and his lungs ache. It hardly matters when every fibre of his being sings with excitement. The world has condensed down to him, the target, and the boulder steadily approaching its destination. Wile E. watches the target pause on the final mark, glancing down and scuffing the paint with his shoe. The smile on his face hasn't changed. Up close, or rather as close as Wile E. has ever really managed to get to the target, he can see the reddish hue in those bottomless brown eyes and the lack of light inside of them. The target's eyes are crinkled with delight as he keeps toeing the mark.
Why hasn't he moved yet? He knows the mark is there; he must know something's up.
Wile E. doesn't have time to hold onto that line of thought as the boulder barrels down towards its intended target. He can feel his face shifting into what has been referred to, affectionately (he assumes), as his 'murderous glee' face. His lips stretch into a wide smile that bares his teeth, and his hands shake around the wooden stake, anticipation setting his body on fire.
The target finally looks up from the mark on the road and starts to turn to face the direction of the boulder-
It rolls past.
...
It rolls past.
How? How has that happened? He calculated everything perfectly! That boulder should have hit the target, he knows it. There wasn't a flaw in his reasoning; he had checked, double-checked, and triple-checked it, even had it peer-reviewed by Kevin at what was, he can admit, an unreasonable hour in the morning, but he had to be sure! How could he go to sleep knowing that there may have been an error in his working that could have led to catastrophic failure?
But there had to have been a mistake that both he and Kevin had missed, because the boulder completely misses the target and starts rolling towards him instead.
Wile E. only just manages to dodge out of its path, nearly getting his foot crushed in the process. He whips around with his stake half-raised, poised to strike, only to find a dust trail kicked up, and the target nowhere to be seen.
Defeat settles on his shoulders, a familiar weight, causing his body to sag as he trudges over to the exact spot where the target had stood.
Placed on the road is a vibrant indigo feather, impressive in its length and the brightness of its hue. Beneath it is a small note.
That one was cute. Better luck next time! :3
Wile E. snatches up the note and the feather, and angrily stomps back to his cave to put them with the other mementos that the target has left for him after each failed attempt.
Beware the Road Runner, the people whisper, for you will never see it coming; before you can blink it will have drained you dry!
At first, Wile E. had assumed that the rumours were exaggerations. Everywhere he's gone, there has been a vampire with some outlandish rumour attached to its name, and almost every time Wile E. has faced up against them, he has concluded that the details were simply embellished. Not exactly the fault of the locals. Still, he can admit that each time he had gone up against a vampire rumoured to have unusual strength or charm, he has been sorely disappointed every time.
When he arrived in Albuquerque, he assumed that the same would be the case. New rumours had begun to circulate through the networks he was part of, stories of a vampire that nobody could catch, one that was untouchable, and more importantly, impossible to kill. Each attempt to eradicate it not only failed, but ended in disaster: the remains of vampire hunters, professionals and wannabes alike, were constantly being found around the desert. It got to the point where nobody dared venture out beyond where it could be certain that they'd be safe.
Wile E. had asked around, hoping to dig up some useful information, but he'd gotten basically nothing of actual substance.
Faster than lightning, that thing is.
It'll drain you dry and you won't even realise until you're already good as dead.
Nobody has been able to see it. It's too fast to photograph.
The beast always leaves a sign in the area around its victims.
It's toying with us!
He acknowledged each statement, and as he jotted down the claims, he tempered his expectations. People thought that every vampire in existence was able to kill a person in a second or less, which was just plain untrue. He shouldn't get his hopes up. This was probably going to be an ordinary vampire and a routine kill. Wile E. would be out of here before the week was even over.
The night after he first arrived, Wile E. took his motorcycle out to the desert and began to lay a trap.
Other vampire hunters tended to rely on brute strength in a fight against a vampire, dousing their bodies in holy water or covering themselves in garlic, and all sorts of similarly unsavoury things. That was the way that Wile E. had been taught to deal with them when he first got into the business.
Those vampire hunters were stupid, feckless barbarians who didn't understand their own craft. The first time Wile E. used a trap on a vampire was by complete accident, but it had been so effective that he simply never went back to the old method. Instead he perfected the use of traps in capturing and killing vampires, fine-tuning the technique into an art. He very quickly became renowned for his unorthodox methods of hunting vampires and soon enough Wile E. became one of, if not the most, efficient vampire hunters in modern society.
Most jobs grew boring after that. Vampires became embarrassingly easy to kill. Something that once brought a rush of exhilaration and excitement had dulled, grown completely and utterly boring. There was nothing fun about the chase anymore.
Wile E. expected the infamous Road Runner to be just like every other vampire so far. The trap he set up was a simple one, but effective, able to capture pretty much any kind of vampire. Really, he just needed it to serve as a distraction so he could get in close enough to stake it in the heart.
He settled inside a bush, pulled out his binoculars, and waited patiently.
And waited, and waited, and waited...
Then, suddenly, he had been awoken by the sound of an amused chuckle. Wile E. fumbled with his binoculars and looked up, his mouth dropping open.
His trap had been dismantled. No, not dismantled. It had malfunctioned.
That had never happened before. Wile E.'s traps never malfunctioned. He would never use a faulty trap for this kind of work, so how...?
Actually, screw the trap. The figure standing over it was considerably more interesting.
They looked startlingly like an average person you'd see on the street: dyed blue hair, white athletic shorts, and an indigo hoodie. Blue shoes with sunny yellow laces nudged the ruined trap. The figure tilted their head in a birdlike fashion, the most unusual thing they had done so far. Then, they began to laugh.
Wile E. could only stare. The figure tilted their head back and giggled, an effervescent and infectious sound, and then they were gone. Dust was kicked up into the air, and he coughed violently into his elbow, scrunching his eyes shut. By the time the dust cloud had settled, there wasn't a hint that anyone had been there in the first place.
Half-numb, he had stumbled forward and knelt down by the trap, staring at it intently. Wile E. reached out for it and, just as it was meant to, it sprang shut around his hand. He hadn't managed to stifle the alarmed yelp he'd made and it had been a pain to extract his hand from the trap's teeth.
He packed up the trap and hopped on his motorcycle, driving it back to the motel where he was staying for the time being.
Over the course of that month, Wile E. had not only tried various new ways of trapping the elusive road Runner, but he also observed it from a distance, studying it and what it could do.
And as it turned out, the Road Runner was a freak of nature.
First off, it wasn't harmed by daylight. On its own, that was a relatively rare trait for a vampire to have, but nothing too outlandish. He had faced off against vampires like that in the past. Even though the Road Runner wasn't remotely nocturnal (now that was strange; most vampires that could walk in the daylight tended to still stay awake at night, but the Road Runner stuck to a traditional circadian rhythm!) it didn't seem unlike anything he'd seen before.
Next, the Road Runner was able to reach speeds that, by all means, should be impossible. At a light jog, the Road Runner could match the speed of a car speeding down a highway considerably above the speed limit. At its average speed, the Road Runner was a blur of blue as they traversed the desert at a speed that Wile E. had never seen a vampire move at before. Wile E. had never seen the Road Runner sprint at full speed, and for that he was somewhat grateful. The information would likely fry his brain and destroy what little sanity he had left.
The Road Runner couldn't just have the ability to roam during the day and incredible agility, however, because of course not. They also had to be insanely lucky, too. Every trap that Wile E. used conveniently either broke or malfunctioned so badly that it turned on him.
By the end of the month, Wile E. had made a cave in the desert his new home. He had consecrated it, turning it to hallowed ground, and lined the perimeter with salt for good measure. After half a year, his list of knowledge on the Road Runner was so extensive he could publish it as a formal case study.
Wile E. had, for the first time in years, set down roots, and in the middle of the desert, no less. He had gone from a prodigy of vampire hunting to an isolated recluse that nobody had heard from ever since he set off to Allbuquerque.
And weirdly enough, he liked it that way.
Wile E. crosses the threshold of the cave and collapses onto his couch. It's old, stains so deep in the fabric that they could no longer be removed, and one of the legs is slightly wobbly, but it holds his weight just fine. His bed isn't too far away, but he simply doesn't have the energy to reach it.
The boulder plan was a waste of time, unsurprisingly. He crosses it off the list of techniques that haven't worked, and finds that he's starting to come short of ideas. He needs coffee. Well, he needs sleep, but he's damn unlikely to get it. Wile E. has spent years tossing and turning in every bed that he's slept in, unable to rest unless he passes out from exertion at his workbench, and by now he has come to terms with it.
After a couple of minutes spent groaning into one of the cushions, he pulls himself onto his feet and shuffles to the table, grabbing a packet of cigarettes and lighting one.
The pain of failure has alleviated, leaving only determination in its place. He grabs the nearest piece of paper and starts to scribble... something before he takes a drag and presses his forehead against the table.
Years of trying to capture the Road Runner have forced him to get acquainted with disappointment. Wile E. has adjusted to his schemes constantly blowing up in his face, and while he's yet to successfully capture the Road Runner, he's gotten close on occasion.
One time, he got close enough that he managed to tear a chunk of the Road Runner's shirt. Wile E. keeps the scrap of fabric pinned to the ceiling above his bed so he can stare at it when he tries (and often fails) to fall asleep. He has shelves dedicated to the trinkets that the Road Runner leaves behind for him to collect, and even more shelves for the few trophies that he has managed to seize.
To an outsider, the cave must look like it belongs to a maniac. His bed is messy and unmade, the walls are covered with elaborate blueprints, frantic scribbles, and an eclectic collection of paraphernalia, and there's a pot of food on the kitchen stove that has been there for an unknown amount of time.
He should probably check on that, actually. Make sure it hasn't gotten mouldy. That's an activity for the morning, though, when he's considerably less tired. Wile E. takes another drag and when he exhales, he tries to make a ring of smoke. It takes about three or four tries before he pulls it off.
Wile E. drags himself over to his bed, intending to just lie on is back and stare at the ceiling all night, as he usually does, when he notices an innocuous envelope laid out on the pillow.
He pauses, hovering over it, and narrows his eyes.
The likelihood that the envelope is trapped somehow is pretty damn slim... but never zero, he supposes. Wile E. hesitantly sniffs it (smells normal, not like there's been any chemicals applied to the paper), and grabs a pair of gloves and a knife to open it with. Best to not take any chances. He pulls his shirt over his nose, just in case.
Dear Mr. Coyote,
I hear you are an incredible vampire hunter. Your praises have often been sung among the hunting community, claiming that you are something of a prodigy of your craft. I have a problem that requires someone of your calibre to fix.
To put it plainly, we have a vampire problem. A persistent one, at that. He has been terrorising us for several months now, demanding all sorts from my local community in exchange for not eating us, but last week he ate my neighbour, who had always been diligent on paying her tithe to him. Suffice to say, I've had enough! We will not be living in fear any longer because of him.
I must warn you: he is not a normal vampire. You are not the first vampire hunter I have contacted to help with this. He has killed and maimed several others already. In their words: "if Wile E. can't kill him, nobody can." He is stubborn, and no matter how much holy water is splashed on him, or how often he is burned by the daylight, he never dies. A new, ingenious approach to this problem is required. An approach that only you are able to provide.
You will be rewarded handsomely by the neighbourhood if you are able to kill him.
His name is Bugs Bunny.
There's no signed name at the bottom, but the neighbourhood is named, so at least he knows where to go. Wile E. scans through the letter's contents a few times to make sure he's read it correctly.
People still remember him, even after all these years? Huh. He'd thought... well, what he'd thought doesn't matter. They think highly enough of him to think he'd be capable of dealing with this Bugs Bunny fellow.
He isn't busy. He can be off in the morning. It'll take roughly a day to get where he needs to go - thankfully the neighbourhood isn't all the way on the other side of the country - and if he leaves early, he'll arrive in the evening.
But...
Wile E. glances around the cave. He's preoccupied. Who knows what the Road Runner will do while he's gone? It'll take at least a week to get rid of Bugs Bunny, if he's truly as persistent as the letter makes him out to be, and Wile E. sure hopes that that's not the case.
(Selfishly, he also just doesn't want to leave. Chasing the Road Runner is fun. It's the kind of thrill that no other vampire has ever given him before. What if someone manages to kill the Road Runner while he's gone? What if the Road Runner leaves Albuquerque and he has no way of tracking him down? What if he gets back, and the Road Runner has grown bored of their chase and just kills him? Wile E. has never known a vampire quite like him. He doubts there'll ever be a vampire like him ever again. The Road Runner is an anomaly, an awe-inspiring, incredible abnormality, and Wile E. would rather die than lose him to something as fickle as boredom or chance. If the Road Runner is going to be killed, it will be by his hand or no one's at all.)
He can't stay, he just can't. Wile E. has a small bit of responsibility left, and how can he turn down such a plea for help? His skills are needed. Turning someone down and putting so many lives in danger just because he wants to play games in the desert all day is irrational and childish.
He tosses the letter to the floor and climbs into bed. He'll set out in the morning. For now, he should try and get some sleep.