Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
ECHO
My head was killing me. Like, seriously. I was considering using my living room window as a guillotine to relieve me of the ruckus it was causing.
Too bad the windowsill was dull. Physics suggested that were I to try it, I’d only end up with a bruised trachea to join my aching head.
The sun was blindingly high in the sky, and I thanked all the gods that I had the day off from teaching. Otherwise, I would have been in trouble big time because it was well after one in the afternoon.
I sat up from my makeshift bed on the couch and rubbed my throat at the thought. My neck twinged, and I realized why my head was killing me.
I should have had Vale ask Gareth to bring me a bottle of coconut water with my dinner.
Wait… How did I get on my couch? Did I pass out from blood loss? Did that asshole just ditch me and bail?
Talk about dine and dash.
Um… that had been real, right? I didn’t just dream it all up out of sheer loneliness and depression? The memories did seem oddly cloudy, though it could have been from blood loss.
I jumped up and swayed dangerously, but I kept going, holding myself up on random furniture as I crashed my way to my bathroom mirror to look at my neck.
I’m a man of action. There’s no reason to sit around and wonder about shit if you don’t know if you’ll still be around tomorrow.
I slammed my shoulder into the half-open bathroom door, and it bounced off the wall, slamming back into me in retaliation.
I wasn’t paying attention because I was spellbound by what I saw in the mirror.
There was a perfect imprint of human teeth on my neck. It wasn’t all ripped up and grisly as one would assume. Instead, it was neat and precise. There wasn’t even an open wound. The spot I was vigorously poking was sore but appeared to have been healing for days.
Wild.
Must be some vampire bullshit. Awesome.
Speaking of vampire bullshit, Vale had some fucking explaining to do.
If I’d passed out from blood loss, the least he could have done was either finish me off or roll my body into the woods so I had a chance to die from exposure. It was December, for fuck’s sake. Nature herself could have taken care of the job.
Fuck you, Vale. Seriously.
I left the bathroom and tidied up the aftermath of my rampage through my apartment.
I’d knocked over a lamp, a globe, and a painted metal rooster that I hated.
However, Evan had adored it, Rob had lovingly tolerated it, and I still loved the shit out of both of them even though they were dead, so the fugly rooster held a place of honor in my home.
It was also indestructible, so hitting the floor had done more damage to the floor than it had to Mister Cluckers.
After I’d fixed everything and Mister Cluckers had been restored to his place of honor on my end table, I went to my fridge and pulled out a carton of coconut water. Then I spent a solid minute guzzling it down until all thirty-two ounces were gone.
I patted my belly when I was done and chucked the container into the garbage can.
Since I don’t know if the container for that particular brand is recyclable, and neither does the internet, I take turns chucking it into the trash bin or the recycling bin, confident that I’m getting it right fifty percent of the time.
I don’t know about you, but I think those are pretty good odds when it comes to social accountability.
Once done with my liquid breakfast, I flopped back down on the couch and poked my neck some more. The pain reminded me that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing, which allowed me to have some nice, palpable emotions about the whole situation.
Those are hard to access, so when I get them, I hang on for dear life.
So, I sat with my emotions, fiddled with them, perused them, and in general wallowed in them as much as humanly possible. They would be gone soon, and I wanted my money’s worth.
However, by the time I had my fill, they were still alive and kicking, and I was left with the inescapable conclusion that I had been wronged.
Deeply wronged, even.
I’d been a good boy and not thrown myself under a bus so many times. Last night, death had come a-knockin' at my metaphorical door, and instead of killing me, he ding-dong-ditched me. As I sat there, holding the metaphorical bag of burning doggy-doo, I came to a decision.
Vale owed me. Big time.
I didn’t know how I would find him to collect, but find him I would, and when I did, I wouldn’t be satisfied until he had the decency to finish me off like he had Lyle.
I was going to have to get started on that tomorrow, though, because I had plans that couldn’t be put off a second longer.
You see, wonderful and diverse as my town may be, it has one fatal flaw. The goddamned church bells that terrorize us every year during the Christmas holiday.
No one likes them. Like, literally no one. But they’re centuries old, and some rich, poncy person decided that we need to be inflicted with their ringing every hour on the hour throughout the month of December.
Yesterday was December 1st, which meant that it was officially open season on the bells.
For some unfathomable reason, after a few thousand complaints, the rich, poncy guy—who we call the Patron—decided to start a tradition of allowing the bells to irritate the ever-loving piss out of us for one whole day before we’re allowed to take matters into our own hands.
On December 2nd, we attack.
Not collectively, of course. No, we’re all way too stupid to do that. Instead, the town tradition is that we can’t do it together. It has to be done singularly or in pairs; otherwise, it doesn’t count, and the Patron will just have the bells up and working again within a day.
Just to be clear, the Patron didn’t come up with these rules; the town did. However, the Patron enforces them due to some twisted sense of humor.
Rich people, am I right?
The rules for this holiday tradition are as follows:
No groups larger than two.
You can’t pay someone to do it for you.
You can’t spend more than one hundred dollars on supplies.
You can’t get caught by the cops.
The bells have to be disabled in a way that the main structure isn’t compromised, or else the Patron of the bells will make sure they run all year long.
They have to be fully disabled. You can’t just stuff a bunch of material inside the bells. The mechanism itself has to be borked in such a way that it can’t be fixed easily. The local handyman must be incapable of fixing the problem and need to call a specialist for it to count as a win.
Don’t wake the pastor up, or the hunt is over for the night.
Usually, only townies get in on the fun because the colleges in the area are busy with finals and packing up to go home. But I have no life, and I’ve lived here for ages, so not only do I have plenty of time, but I count as a townie.
There’s no prize for winning our stupid game, but it comes with the title Bell-killer, and you get to rub it in everyone’s faces for an entire year. Oh, and you get to be pretentious about it for the rest of your life.
So, when I marched to my closet holding my bell hunter gear, it was with the grim determination of a man who planned to win because it might be his last chance. Vale owed me, and I was going to collect after I’d fucked those stupid bells up.
After a few days of basking in the glow of winning at Bells, that is.
I opened my closet and uncovered the floor so I could reach my secret hideaway. It was common practice to keep being a participant in the game a secret. Only after you win was it appropriate to admit it, though very few people did.
The bell hunt was a badly kept secret in our town.
Everyone talked about it, but no one admitted to being a bell hunter.
Instead, like me, everyone would hide all evidence of what they were doing.
Hunters only go by their hunter tag and enjoy their bragging rights on the Bells forum.
People generally only reveal their IRL identity after retiring from the hunt completely.
Yeah… it sounds less lame if you’re actually involved in the game, so just pretend like you are, so I can keep going, okay?
Okay, excellent.
My gear setup was pretty decent. Just because I couldn’t spend more than a hundred dollars didn’t mean I couldn’t save stuff that had worked in the past and build on it every year.
Why would I need to keep adding to my gear?
It’s simple. The biggest hurdle to disabling the bells isn’t getting past security; it’s the other players. We have from sunset to sunrise to get the job done, and we all do everything in our power to stop other bell hunters from getting there first.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten injured from going after those fucking bells, but I doubt the number would surprise you, knowing what you do about me.
The competition is brutal, and I honestly can’t believe the law hasn’t gotten involved, but I have a feeling it has to do with the staggering amount of magic that flies around during a battle. People in this town are incredibly unobservant when it comes to magic.
No one ever mentions the magic on the forums. I’m not even sure people know magic is flying around, because it’s always referred to as minmaxing or hacks.
The minmaxers almost always win, by the way.
But sometimes a lucky, humble, non-magic person will win.
Some minmaxer named Deadlynightshade won five years straight until being dethroned last year.
The winner was a simple hunter named Musicofthenight, who had gotten lucky and was pleased as punch about it, making sure everyone knew as often as they could.
Deadlynightshade had refused to comment on the matter.
And as I sat there looking at my gear, I’d decided that I was going to be one of those humble non-magic people.