Playground Brawl Who: Rhiannon/Tasha What: Hunting Ridealong Where: Las Vegas When: Present Ratings/Warnings: Violence, Some Language
Tasha had arranged to meet her new hunter friend on the corner of S Eastern and E Sahara avenues in Vegas. It was off the usual beaten path, home to a 7-11, Sonic Drive-in, El Pollo Loco, and a decidedly unfabulous drinking hole titled simply ‘Jake’s Bar’, its biggest draw being video poker and round-the-clock operating hours.
It was outside the brightly-lit convenience store that Tasha waited, holding a plastic cup filled with fizzy Coca-Cola, dark liquid filling the bright pink straw as she sipped idly. She tried to pretend like this wasn’t a thing, only a casual outing in which she might have to fight and kill some creatures of the night. No big deal. It was probably like riding a bicycle, if said bicycle had caused someone years of physical and emotional therapy.
In any case, she certainly felt more prepared than usual, having on her person a wooden stake and two knives, one with a blade made of silver. Her firearms registration had lapsed in her years of retirement, but she figured that Rhiannon would be packing.
A woman in a pair of worn boots approached the corner of the convenience store, her steps taking her across the parking lot and between a set of narrowly-parked cars, one of which was idling. Rhiannon couldn’t make out the song, but the bass tickled her eardrums. Her uniform for the hunting excursion was simple: a pair of torn black jeans with some give, a soft red tee with a hem that obscured the handgun, knife, and stake at her hips, and her hair woven into a tight braid. The silver jewelry that she took off around her boyfriend was back on her fingers and neck, along with a cross.
The hunter saw Tasha had beaten her to the other side of the building. She stopped near the ice box to fish a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her hip pocket, shake one loose, and place it in her mouth. Rhiannon lit it and held it away from her body, letting a light wind carry the tail of smoke in the other direction. She gave herself four puffs before she extinguished it on the brick wall of the building and discarded the rest in a trash can.
“Hey you.” She waited for a customer to exit with a six-pack of beer and then made her way to Tasha.
She looked up at the sound of Rhiannon’s voice, and was internally relieved to see that she was dressed similarly to the hunter. However, her braids hung loose around her shoulders. “Shit, I forgot about putting your hair back. I really am rusty.” She set the cup on top of a trash can and began to search her person for a hair tie. If that was the one thing she forgot, Tasha was going to have to admit some hard truths about herself.
“I know I’ve said this probably, like, twenty times now? But I might be pinning too much hope on this helping me get my shit together. No pressure or anything,” she told Rhiannon, finally locating an elastic band and using it to gather her hair.
“As long as you walk away with your head and limbs attached, no harm, no foul, yeah?” Rhiannon smiled as she watched Tasha sweep her hair into a closer hold. How long had it been since she fought alongside a female hunter? Years, at minimum. A car blared its horn as it flew down Eastern Avenue and she followed it with her eyes, then narrowed them into the distance. A faintly familiar business had a vinyl banner hanging out front: ‘letting the cat out of the bag is a lot easier than putting it back in.’
“Jesus Christ,” Rhiannon mumbled. “I was once taken there on a date.” She pointed out Jake’s Bar. “It had been a while. My standards were flexible.”
Tasha wisely decided to toss the Big Gulp in the trash. She didn’t want to be that person who had to pause in the middle of fighting to take a pee break. She glanced at the bar that Rhiannon had gestured to and smiled. “Hey, at least flexible standards imply that you had some? Which is more than I can say for myself. Ol’ Jake’s is definitely a step up from, say, a Chevy in a strip mall parking lot.”
She shifted her weight from foot to foot, stretching her neck and attempting to appear nonchalant. “So, where to? I figure you’d know better than me where the hot spots are. Although...maybe let’s start with a warm spot, yeah?”
“Aw, c’mon,” Rhiannon teased, taking a backward step off the curb. “It’s not any fun if we don’t break a sweat.” She brought her hands up and hooked both index fingers toward her in an alternating rhythm as she walked, nails painted a dark plum. “At the gym, I have to pull punches all day long. It’s soul-crushing.”
The direction of her feet took them north on Eastern Avenue, where the choices were a park, a less than stellar residential neighborhood, and a cluster of interstate overpasses where people hunkered down at night and made themselves easy prey. All had potential. “You know how they say it’s just like riding a bike? This is easier. Nobody was born to ride a bike.”
Tasha couldn’t help but grin, especially at Rhiannon basically echoing her earlier internal monologue. “Okay, I’m game,” she relented. “No pulling punches tonight.” She walked alongside Rhiannon, sweeping her gaze over their surroundings, quickly falling into a comfortable rhythm that surprised her.
“Speaking of soul-crushing,” she spoke up after a few moments of silence, “the other night I played this fundraising gala. It made me really question myself, and I realized that I was bored. And I actually wanted to kill something.”
“Just the word gala makes me want to kill myself.” For whatever reason, Rhiannon always pictured the women at those things in shiny dresses and a shit-ton of hairspray. “All that self-congratulatory bullshit. ‘I’m rich. I’d be happy to give you zero-point-five percent of my annual income, and I will, right after the foie gras and a photo op with a local celebrity’.” She gave Tasha a sidelong look. “What was it for? Tell me it was hunger.”
“Impoverished children in…” Tasha trailed off, frowning. “Shit, I can’t remember the country? Does that make me horrible?” After a moment of silent contemplation, she shook her head firmly. “Nah, they’re the horrible ones.” She closed her eyes, realizing how that sounded before turning her neck to look at Rhiannon.
“The rich people are horrible, not the impoverished children.” Loud peals of laughter coming from the direction of the park morphed into a horrified scream that got cut off midway through.
Rhiannon had been mid-laugh when the noise reached them. “That was easy…” She frowned. Either their timing was impeccable, or the situation in the Showboat neighborhood was worse than she thought. As much as she wanted to mess up a couple of vampires, Rhiannon half-hoped it was a mugging.
She tapped Tasha’s arm and took off running towards Jaycee Park, a city-managed lot with a green space, shelters, a playground, a skate park, and a dog run. At some point in decades past, it was probably a nice place to take your kids. Some of the benches on the sidewalk that ran along the fence were already occupied for the night. The people on them stirred at the sound of rushing feet. Rhiannon vaulted the low fence. In the dark interior of the park, barely lit by street lamps that were supposed to act as a deterrent to crime, there was a huddle of moving shapes at a picnic shelter.
Tasha followed Rhiannon, a surge of adrenaline urging her along as she hopped the fence after the hunter. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but she had to remind herself that she wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t a trap. One shoe got briefly tangled up in a plastic grocery bag filled with food wrappers, and she shook it off awkwardly but never stopped moving.
As the picnic shelter came further into view, Tasha could see a group of what looked like teenagers. The smell of alcohol wafted toward her, and as she got closer, she noticed they were all huddled around something. Hand ready to grab a weapon and fight...a broken vodka bottle?
Rhiannon came to a slow stop outside the picnic shelter. When she saw the wet pavement and the shards of glass, her shoulders drooped. It was just a group of teenagers being melodramatic about a container of Smirnoff, based on the red label. The picnic table was crowded with plastic cups, a party-size container of cheese balls, and a cheap mixer. Her lips puffed out on an exhale and she gave Tasha an exasperated look. “So much for that,” she muttered, touching her temple and looking across the grass at where they’d come from.
The park bench that had been occupied before was empty. Rhiannon paused. That was odd. People who sheltered on the street weren’t usually chased off by a little bit of noise.
There was a subtle movement under a blanket on the other side of the park.
After the initial anticlimactic reaction, Tasha realized she was actually disappointed that there wasn’t an attack. It was a strange surge of encouragement that she hadn’t been aware she needed. She gave the gathered group a ’sucks to be you’ look before turning to Rhiannon. She followed the hunter’s gaze to the benches.
“What do you think?” Tasha whispered, hand still poised close to a weapon.
There was number one. Rhiannon turned on the heel of her boot, searching the perimeter of the park for number two, the missing bench occupant. A hunter didn’t have to see fangs to get that feeling in the spine and hers was buzzing now. “I think these kids are dinner,” she muttered to Tasha. A shifting shadow by the slides and swings caught her eye.. “You want the one faking a nap or the weirdo on the playground?”
“Ooh, tough call.” A split second of hesitation, and then, “Fake napper. You take playground weirdo.” Tasha turned on her heel and headed at a fast walking pace, not a run, toward the benches. The blanket twitched slightly, but whoever or whatever was under it seemed convinced that staying still was the best option.
Tasha was almost within spitting distance of the bench when, without warning, the vampire under it threw the blanket in her face and began to dash off. She slapped the material away impatiently and charged forward, aiming a solid kick at the back of the vampire’s knee.
He began to fall but caught himself, turning around to face Tasha furiously. A vampire she could handle.
Tasha heard a metallic click and the flash of something silver in the vampire’s hand as he advanced, his stance wide as he began to circle her. “A knife fight? Really?” She sighed and produced her own weapon, choosing the wooden stake.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” the vampire intoned as he swiped toward her midsection. She jumped backward easily with a sneer.
“Why, is this your turf? Are we having a Sharks versus Jets moment?” Tasha knew talking was a distraction, but she couldn’t help it. Mentally buckling down, she caught the vampire glancing toward the fight going on at Rhiannon’s side of the park and took advantage, lunging toward him. At the moment of impact, he twisted, and the tip dug into his shoulder a good inch or two, but missed the heart completely. In return, he used his free hand to belt out a good, solid punch, the tang of blood filling her mouth as Tasha stumbled backward.
Rhiannon elbowed the nearest teen. “You need to leave,” she said, lifting the hem of her shirt to flash the gun in its holster when the kid made to argue with her. “Keep it down, but go.” The hunter gave a pointed shove in the direction of the better-lit street and started an approach to the playground. She would’ve preferred to circle around the back in the dark, but it would have left a clear path to the group of teenagers.
The ground gave way from pavement to the soft, rubbery material that protected knees and elbows. It made her approach quieter, but she knew the vampire was aware of her. She couldn’t see anything moving, just the twisting and straight chutes of slides descending from a large set, spans of monkey bars between clubhouse structures, a wobbling bridge, and a couple of swings. Rhiannon ducked into the shadows under the set and dug the lighter out of her pocket. She turned it in her fingers and tossed it at the far side of the set. The plastic pinged off a metal post. The vampire took the bait and hopped off a platform onto the ground.
The traffic on the street helped mute Rhiannon’s footsteps. She covered the short distance between herself and the female vampire, jumped to catch the long side of the monkey bars, and swung out. The vampire heard the high-pitched squeak of Rhiannon’s hands on the metal. She spun around to defend herself and caught a steel-toe boot to the mouth.
Rhiannon heard the sound of enamel breaking.
The vampire pinwheeled backwards from where the hunter landed. She spit fragments of an incisor and a fang into her palm.
“Sucks to be you.” Rhiannon smiled. She put up her hands as the vampire tried to mow her down. Rhiannon waited for the charge. She tried to evade and throw the vampire’s weight to the side, but their feet got caught up. Both of them went down in a tangle of arms and legs. The hunter started crawling out of the pile when her leg was grabbed. Sharp fingernails dug into denim as she was dragged backwards.
There was nothing to catch hold of to stop the momentum. The hunter’s t-shirt rode up, little pieces of eraser-colored rubber sticking to her ribs as she was dragged towards the swing set. As soon as Rhiannon caught sight of the seats dangling from metal chains, she knew where this was heading. Mid-slide, she pulled her knife out and jammed it through the thick turf of the playground and into the dirt underneath. That little bit of resistance was enough to pop the vampire’s hold loose and sit her ass down.
Tasha grabbed the stake and tugged it out of the vampire’s shoulder as he grunted in pain. The blade connected, luckily only tearing the front of her shirt. She brought her elbow up, and it connected with the bridge of the bloodsucker’s nose, a sickening cracking sound ringing out.
She managed to grab his wildly swinging arm, twisting until he released the grip on the knife. In return, another blow landed, this one to her abdomen. The wind was momentarily knocked out of her as the vampire began to scramble away.
Tasha feinted a lunge toward the vampire, and when he jumped back to avoid it, he made contact with one of the benches, losing his footing and falling awkwardly backward against the wooden structure. She used this to her advantage, and was able to bring the stake down with full strength. It made contact with the heart, and he went completely still and rigid, slipping face down off of the bench.
Rhiannon got off the ground as fast as she could and dove for the vampire while she was on her back. The hunter landed on top, trying to pin the undead woman in place. Knuckles and elbows flew as they traded and blocked punches. The vampire’s nose bled with the slow trickle of a weak pulse. Rhiannon’s left eye throbbed. The vampire gave up hitting and tried to choke her. The angle was wrong for staking, so Rhiannon went for her gun. A bullet wouldn’t kill the undead, but it was harder to fight with a massive hole in your brain.
The safety was off, her finger on the trigger. She aimed...
Poof. Nothing but mist.
Breathing hard, Rhiannon looked around for the vaporized vampire. “Oh fuck you!” Sitting still would be a bad move; the vampire would pop up behind her. She got up and started running towards Tasha.
Tasha heard Rhiannon’s footfalls and turned around to face the other hunter. “Where’s the other one?”
A swirl of grayish-white mist appeared low to the ground, a few feet to the right of Tasha. Rhiannon stuck her gun back in its holster. “Nine o'clock! Grab her!” The vampire’s shape began to form up in roughly the same position it had been on the ground, flat on her back. Rhiannon pulled her stake and got ready.
Without thinking through it much, Tasha threw herself on top of the supine, increasingly solid form. The female vampire howled as the hunter buried the silver-bladed knife directly into her solar plexus.
Tasha shifted so that she was pinning the vampire down, one hand planted on the knife handle, so that Rhiannon had a clear shot for the staking.
Rhiannon’s stake descended. The point of the weapon broke through the vampire’s clothes and layers of tissue. It was harder to get past the rib cage than it looked. Bone splintered under the combined force of the blow and weight of Rhiannon leaning down on it, the tip piercing the vampire’s heart. The hunter gave it a wiggle and shove, and it went all the way through the torso to touch the ground.
Rhiannon straightened beside Tasha and noticed the other vampire slumping nearby. She gestured at his corpse. “Nice.” A car rolled by, not close enough to see exactly what was going on, but close enough to make her notice. “Guess we should drag them somewhere before we cut their heads off.” On that note, where was her knife? She remembered it was sticking out of the rubber by the swingset and went to collect it.
Tasha got to her feet, pulling her knife out of the vampire. She looked around the park quickly, then nodded toward an unoccupied picnic shelter. She was glad to see that the teenagers from earlier had scattered. “We can drag them over there. It’s dark enough.” Blood and adrenaline was still coursing through her from the fight.
She went over by the bench, grabbed the male vampire by the ankles, and began hauling him. The side of her mouth throbbed angrily, and Tasha could still taste blood.
Rhiannon grabbed the female under her armpits and dragged her, as well. The two bodies were placed side by side. She rolled her vamp facing away and let the woman’s head and neck hang a bit past the pavement onto the short, stubby grass. The ground would soak up some of the blood and it always seemed less splattery when they weren’t on their backs.
The hunter shot a text to the group she knew who picked up bodies, an outfit that fronted as a biological and hazardous material removal company, but dealt with supernatural waste on the side: the wealthy owner had an unhealthy fascination with all things occult. Rhiannon didn’t care what he did with the bodies, as long as a fourth grader wasn’t finding a headless one in the morning.
“So how’d it feel?” Stowing the phone away, she knelt over the vampire with her knife, as casual as a hunter with a deer. Rhiannon’s left eye was watering from the punch. She wiped a smear of eyeliner on her shirt, gripped the vampire by the hair, and began to cut.
Tasha switched to her normal knife for the task ahead, rolling her shoulders and kneeling down. “Not bad,” she answered with a shrug, pressing the blade into the vampire’s throat. “Could have done without the slug to the face, but what can you do?” It took a lot of strength to manually behead something, and she hadn’t done so in a very long time.
“If we’re not too trashed-looking after this, maybe we can get a drink at Jake’s,” Tasha remarked. A drink sounded good.
“I’m down.” The knife hit a bone so she gave it a nudge. “Hey! I bet they keep baggies for ice.” Rhiannon gestured at her own eye, which was on its way to being purple. “It’s that kind of place. If they ask, we can say we beat each other’s ass.” The head popped off and rolled on the grass and the brunette pointed at the vampire’s face. “Look, I broke her fang. You think those grow back or do they have to get dentures?”
Tasha snorted. Rhiannon was right, the patrons of Jake’s probably wouldn’t blink an eye at them. “Huh, good question,” she mused, looking at the other vampire. “Got any vamp friends you could ask?” she joked, before continuing her own work. It was strange how easy it was to get back into the rhythm. She knew, though, that dealing with one vampire was a lot different than…Tasha shut that mental train down immediately. Not tonight. She would just take the win.
Rhiannon smiled at Tasha as she cleaned most of the blood off her knife and stood up. “You know? I do.” With the weapon put away, she settled her shirt into place and started texting Katherine immediately as she wandered out of the gazebo toward the swings.
“Wait, what?” Tasha’s eyebrows shot up. “How does that happen?” She wiped her knife off on the vampire’s shirt and put it away with its silver cousin. “Not judging, I mean, just…” She trailed off, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. A smear of blood remained on the fabric, and she shrugged.
“I’d say because they’re not all evil, which is true,” Rhiannon said, walking and talking with her eyes on the screen. “But in this case? Yeah, she’s a little bit evil.”
The text read: ‘Do fangs regenerate? Just wondering.’
Rhiannon pressed send. “I don’t think I told you this, but I take money for hunting jobs. Not as much as I used to,” she amended, seeking eye contact with Tasha, “But that’s how I got into this truce with a vampire. We used to fight on the regular, then we ended up having to work together on this...” She drew a deep breath and shook her head. “Complicated thing. So now, we just don’t fuck with each other anymore. I mean, don’t get me wrong, if I saw her sucking someone dry I’d intervene.”
Tasha nodded. She didn’t begrudge Rhiannon’s source of income. Being broke sucked. “I get it. Like I said, no judgement.” She let her hair down from the elastic tie and slipped it over her wrist. It helped draw attention away from what was surely bruising on her face.
Something was threatening to spill past her lips; she wasn’t sure why she would bring it up. But there was a sense that Rhiannon would understand. “I got lured into a trap by a group of demons pissed off with the damage me and my people were causing them. I thought I was going up against one. It was about...god, seven years ago?”
Rhiannon took a quick look at Tasha, but didn’t stare. Any disclosure had the potential to feel vulnerable, especially if a mistake was involved, or injury. In her bloodline, those were the things you said aloud one time, only one time, just to get the truth out and fix what needed repairing, and then you didn’t speak of them again. She passed her phone between her hands, taking the time to wipe her thumb down the screen in a methodical way. “How bad was it?”
“They left me alive, and my family saw that as a win. They’re all hunters. Mom, dad, brother. They couldn’t understand why I’d want to quit, but they also weren’t laid up in a hospital for months.” Tasha’s tone was bitter and sharp, and she didn’t bother to hide it. It wasn’t as if she were talking about the people she loved and cherished. She talked about them like they were no different than the creatures who put her in that state. A dark, jagged crevice opened up if she let it.
“It was very much expected that I keep going once I was 'rehabilitated’. I said fuck that, and I left. All of it.” Tasha exhaled slowly. Her hands had balled into tight fists and she shook them loose.
“How dare you prioritize living,” Rhiannon said, a mild smile softening any sadness that might have leaked onto her face. The hunter in her couldn’t imagine walking away, but it was a deeply personal choice, one that only Tasha was qualified to make, and the sort of thing that probably hinged on whether a person had other viable options. In Tasha’s case -- what little she knew of it -- there was music, another passion to pursue that didn’t end in mangled limbs and bleeding organs. “If you hated it,” Rhiannon began quietly, “Or went back scared, only worse things would come of it.”
Tasha smiled, which felt good in the moment. She could feel some of the tension ease. “I don’t know if I’m scared anymore. I mean, a little, but logically I know things like this, with the vamps? I can do that. And I can’t help it, it feels good. What I’m built to do.” She fell silent, trying to find the crux of the issue, how she could put it into words.
“I spent a long time feeling shaken because I thought what happened was proof that I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was.” Tasha shook her head, rolling her eyes at herself. “That was way too long of a sentence.”
“It wasn’t.” Rhiannon watched the cracks in the sidewalk passing under her feet. The hunter next to her spoke about that shaken feeling in the past tense, but even old feelings had a way of creeping back up in moments of doubt. “Tasha… We’re all mortal and fallible. The fact that you’re alive after that means something. Rule number one is survive, right? But even if you hadn’t… Shit happens!” Rhiannon laughed and raised her hands in the air. “You blink at the wrong time, your foot slips, physics screws you over. I knew a hunter who died because the same old punch she’d taken to her head a hundred times ruptured a blood vessel in her brain. She was no less a hunter for it. I’d kill anyone who argued with me about that.”
Tasha nodded slowly. She could spot the neon lights from the bar up ahead. “I just feel like a huge cliche. You know, I might have been surviving, but I’m not 'thriving’?” She grinned sarcastically.
“What is it about beheading the undead and then shooting the shit about it afterward that makes you feel so much better?” she asked Rhiannon.
“I dunno.” Rhiannon noticed a smear of blood on her palm and made a face. Oops. She should keep disposable gloves in her pocket on a hunt. They weren’t doing her much good in the trunk of the car. “I’ve been trying to convince myself I could do without having anybody to shoot the shit with, for a year now. I’m on the outs with my family. Permanently.” Rhiannon stepped into the parking lot of Jake’s. “I mean, Cian… He’s amazing, but he’s not a hunter, so there’s some things I can’t tell him without it being uncomfortable. Sometimes we have to kill Weres if they’re hurting people, and that’s a sensitive spot. So it’d be cool if I could run things past you.”
“Hey, I understand. I’m pretty much in the same boat. You think I can go tell the sound tech at some club, ’Hey, you know what sucks? Dry cleaning bills after taking care of some vamps in a park’. He would totally be in a position to do a real life record scratch, and I think I’d have to kill him.” Tasha took a deep breath after that weighty little monologue.
“That’s my way of saying yes. I’ll be your hunter buddy.”
Rhiannon smiled, keeping this one to herself with a duck of her head. She needed this, yes, but it also indicated that Tasha was coming out of her self-imposed retirement, and that was music to another hunter’s ears. “Great. We can start by doing the thing that all hunters do third best…” She caught the door that someone offered to them. “Drink.”