"That all?" The woman behind the counter sounded impatient, and her fingers were now drumming the hard plastic side of the register. He could see that her fourth finger had a tan in the shape of a ring, but he didn't mention it. Probably pawned with the economy around here.
"Cash, please," he said in response instead, reaching into his back pocket with two fingers to draw out the thin wallet. Never credit cards, those left traces. Working for himself, odd jobs here and there - it left what had once been a chubby length of leather almost pitifully bare. A man who had once been in one of the most feared organisations now had to wander, faceless, in shadow, but it wasn't something that particularly bothered him.
"Have a good day," he said politely as he gathered the plastic handles into callused hands, but she grunted and started swiping toilet paper for the frazzled mother and her snot-nosed kid behind him. Though there were only about 800 people in town, Wes hadn't bothered to make the most of his almost two week tenure, not that there was much to party up in with the single strip of a "main street". A liquor and grocery, a one-screened movie theatre that showed things that came out a decade ago, a dentist office, a handful of "mom and pop" shops that desperately fought to keep the WalMart from encroaching on the big empty lot near the football field...one would hardly expect that, in a town like this, monsters would make their home.
His apartment was above one of those shoddy mom and pop places, which was, unsurprisingly, devoid of life. There wasn't much in the way of tourism around here, just farms and alcoholics. The owner, Ms. Needles, an ancient widow, was probably napping in the back, so he didn't bother waking her. After her surgery, the one she loved to tell him about, she needed all the rest she could get.
He needed it too, for tonight, but he put his groceries in his smelly mini-fridge. He was lucky she had not tried to clean his room again while he was out, or she may have found the rifle hidden lazily behind the curtain, and who knew what he would have to do then.
---
Every place, even a small town, changes at night. Tonight was no different - the local Wildcats were playing the Panthers, and the bright field lights could probably be seen from the space station. Even with the clouds hanging moodily overhead, obscuring the moon and stars, he felt uncomfortable, but could not stay any longer. He had dragged out his time here as much as he could, observing, figuring out the niche places to hide, and there was nothing. Whatever his source had told him, it was a lie. The only Talent there was around here to find was a young man, high school age, who didn't even seem to be aware of he could do fully, and so Wes left him wholly alone - that wasn't his department and he didn't particularly care. Sure, he had checked him out, just in case somehow this bemused C-average meathead was some Prince of Darkness, and in some sick we he had
hoped he was to justify all the time he spent learning this shithole back to front, but it was all for naught.
His bag was pretty much packed, yet he still kept pacing around the room, looking out that window and taking sips from the bottle of water he had bought earlier, picking through some "salad" his hostess had so graciously brought him that was more ranch dressing with a side of lettuce and tomato. He had told her he was an author working on a small-town murder mystery, the only way he could justify hanging around without getting a job; he had promised that yes, he would somehow write her into his book. Tomorrow morning he'd have to take out whatever little he had at the bank to get the bus to a Greyhound station to...wherever next. He'd e-mailed his source with more than a little profanity at this waste of his time, but there was no response, and now he was at the mercy of having to wait until they found something for him. On his limited resources, there wasn't much he could do alone.
There was a knock on his door, and he paused, the nerves in his body screaming like millions of tiny live wires. Ms. Needles had made it extremely clear that she would be going to the game to watch her grandson, and certainly no one would rob a dying business that paid out more than it brought in. Those few seconds of distraction were enough for a bullet to fly through the flimsy wood of the door and lodge itself into the wall.
Instantly on the ground, Wes was about to go for his own rifle when the door burst open and two formless people stepped inside. Two Disciples, it was worth noting, and Wes couldn't help but almost laugh at his own mistake. A trap? He had been working with that damn source for almost two years and they hadn't led him astray, unless somehow they had been found out or hacked. No wonder the responses lately had been so short, vague, or non-existent. And what an elaborate trap, too,
"Wesley Lan," one of them said in a dead voice, a female one. He didn't recognise it, but then again, half the Disciples sounded the same to him; maybe it was that hive-minded sense of purpose he could never stand. It was fair enough, anyways, the possibility that sending one of his old "friends" would end up with them being too emotionally attached to kill him (which was a joke, they had all hated one another), but Wes suspected that this was some kind of test.
He stood up, backed up, forgetting about his rifle as he back up towards the bed.
"You caught me," he said, doing his best to sound convincingly worried, but like most times, there was still some kind of laughing smile in his voice. "So what do you want to
do to me?" As he said it, he sat on the bed, raising his eyebrows suggestively alongside the question. Though he could not see her face, he suspected that neither she nor her companion were impressed.
"You will come with us," said the other figure, a male, much taller than Wesley. "You will answer for your crimes."
Wesley put down his hands, sighed; from their vantage, they could not fully see his hand slipping under the cheap mattress for his khukuri. It had to be a test - that was a rookie mistake.
"And what makes you think I want to come? You always served terrible food," he said admonishingly, the heft of the blade in his hand reassuring.
"Do not show resistance and we will not harm you. We are armed." She was approaching him, arm outstretched with some small gun lodged firmly between her fingers.
He got up (quickly,
too quickly) and brought down the blade with full force into the softer flesh of her elbow. There was an awful noise before her forearm hit the ground, and she screamed in pain as Wes ducked as the man fired his own gun. Grabbing the one in the hand of the severed forearm, he quickly brought his head up and shot it out of his fingers. The man howled and held his damaged hand.
"
Armed? Are you sure?" he asked the girl, unable to resist; she had sat down on the edge of the bed in shock, trying to stem the flow of blood. She wouldn't last long with a wound like that, so he kept his focus on the man, still pointing the gun. "You, buddy, are going to get the hell out of here unless you want to end up like her. Then you're going to back to where you came from and tell that asshole Snyder to leave me alone."
The man, breathing heavily, let out a yell at that and charged forwards; Wes neatly scampered up the wall and allowed him to almost crash into the wall before he swung his legs down heavily and kicked him in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious.
Dropping from his perch, he sighed and put his hands on his hips, deliberating what to do next. He wasn't sure if anyone else was out there now, but considering that there was a Talent besides him in the area, he had to suspect so - obviously they had been hiding themselves quite well, or he hadn't been looking hard enough. Still, wouldn't it be worth it to stay a few more days, just in case? He found himself smiling despite the situation.
But first, how would he explain this mess to poor Ms. Needles?