Vengeance

(Part One)

Sat astride her horse, on top of a hill, staring at a small wooden shack that sat at the bottom of a dead-end valley, Jane Doe pressed her forefinger and thumb to the bridge of her nose and sighed.

She hated this part.

It was partially because of the waiting. After all, they knew she was here. She’d been chasing these bastards for three solid days now, with no sleep, not allowing them a moment's respite and she finally had them cornered, so what the hell were they waiting for?

Why did it always have to be this way? The endless moments as they tried to figure out what they were going to do before the inevitable dash for freedom and the bloodbath that followed. Why didn’t they just suck it up and accept their fate?

Her mount shifted gently beneath her, its tail swishing from side to side in the midday sun, as she subconsciously moved her right hand away from her face and onto the butt of her Winchester Repeater.

She was trying to distract herself so she didn’t start thinking but, as always in this situation, her mind started to wander back to the life she’d known before all this madness had begun.

She hadn’t always been this way. A year ago she had been a devoted wife to a magnificent man and a loving mother to a beautiful baby girl. They’d answered the call to go west and had settled on a remote piece of land in the Great Plains. It was hard work, of course, but by the time the first winter had laid its icy grip on them, they’d gotten the farm up and running and had more than enough to see them through.

They didn’t think much of it when some of the cattle started to go missing. It wasn’t as if they were losing the whole herd, it was just one or two, here and there, so they chalked it up to local predators and vowed to be more diligent in the coming months.

Months that would ever come.

She lifted her hand-rolled cigarette to her lips and took a long, hard drag before casting it aside, trying to shift her focus back onto the matter at hand.

“Come on, you sons-of-bitches” she muttered under her breath. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”

She stared at the shack at the bottom of the valley, searching for any sign of movement, but there was none.

“Goddamn it” she spat “If you want something done…”

Before she had a chance to finish her sentence the door burst open and two figures broke from the house.

“And here we go” she smiled, kicking her spurs into her steed and riding hard into battle.

She had to make a decision on which of her quarry she should chase down, as they had split as they emerged from the darkness and headed in opposite directions, but Jane knew enough about them both to know that if she chose the woman, the man would give himself up willingly.

As her horse hit its full stride, she banked it left and leveled her Winchester to her shoulder. She had done this so many times now that it had become second nature. She took a deep breath, steadied her aim, and squeezed the trigger.

The Repeater bucked in her hands but the bullet flew true and smashed through the fleeing figure’s leg, sending the woman crashing to the ground in an explosion of bone fragments and high-pitched screams.

As she bore down on her, Jane could see the look of abject terror etched onto her face. She knew she was going to die and she knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Chambering another round, Jane was about to put one straight between the woman’s eyes when a voice cried out for her to stop.

As she had predicted, the man had turned back when he realized he wasn’t the one that Jane had chosen to hunt and was now approaching her, very cautiously. She kept her gun pointed at his female companion, leaving him in no doubt that she would fire if provoked.

“Damon Marsh” she began, trying her hardest to not pull her six-shooter and gun him down like the dog he was “Oh, have I been wanting to catch up with you”

Damon Marsh stopped, almost afraid to move, knowing that if he played this wrong it meant a world of hurt for both of them.

“Jane Doe” he offered timidly “Please, don’t…”

Jane looked at him, mockingly.

“Don’t? Don’t what?” she laughed “Don’t hurt the woman you love the way you hurt my husband and child?”

Jane’s eyes burned with a hatred that Damon had never seen before.

“Jane, please, we couldn’t help it, we were starving”

“Oh, then I guess that makes it alright then, no harm, no foul”

Jane pulled the trigger before Damon knew what was happening. Another bullet tore into the figure on the floor, this time tearing through her torso. The sound of her agony bounced off the valley walls.

“Oops,” Jane said with mock surprise “this thing really has a mind of its own”

The woman on the floor was bleeding heavily from two open wounds but yet she was still alive.

“Oh God, please Jane” Damon begged

Jane threw back her head and laughed like the Devil himself

“God! You talk to me of God! How fucking DARE you!”

She pulled the trigger again, this time hitting Damon’s beloved in the back as she lay face down on the floor. There were no screams this time. Just silence.

“DAMN YOU JANE DOE!” Damon cursed her to the heavens, tears rolling down his face “JUST DO IT! FUCKING KILL ME YOU BITCH!”

Jane shook her head, almost sadly.

“Oh Damon” she replied “You should know by now that that isn’t the way this is going to go down”

The way she said it filled Damon with dread and the last thing he saw was Jane raise her rifle, aim it at his head, and pull the trigger.

(Part Two)

Lost to blissful, peaceful darkness, Damon Marsh was unaware of everything that had just happened to him and the woman he loved. Unconsciousness had him in its sweet embrace and it, seemingly, had no intention of letting him go. He could’ve, happily, stayed that way forever but Jane Doe had other plans.

She needed him awake for this part.

The anguished screams that broke his silent slumber chilled him to the bone. He started to stir, groggy and unaware of where he was, and then something clicked in the recesses of his mind and his eyes snapped open.

The piercing cries of his partner almost shattered his eardrums, and did shatter his soul, but not as much as the sight before him.

His love, his Eloise, was tied to a tree and he watched, unable to move or to help her, as Jane Doe took her hunting and slowly, methodically, started to disembowel her.

“Oh God…no…” he wept pathetically, turning his head away as her intestine started to spill out of her torso and onto the floor.

Eloise’s voice became a whimper as Jane went about her bloody work and though she hated to admit it, she really liked this part.

She turned to face Damon and smiled.

“Ah, back with us I see. I’m so glad, I would’ve hated you to have missed this”

She lifted her knife towards Elosie’s face and waved it in front of her to see if there was any response.

“Hmmm,” she pondered “For all intents and purposes she seems pretty dead doesn’t she?”

Jane moved her gaze back onto Damon, her smile turning into an ice-cold stare.

“But we both know that’s not true”

Without a second thought, she pressed the tip of her knife into Eloise’s eye, bursting it like a small rotten ballon. Eloise’s other eye sprung open and she howled like a prairie dog with its leg caught in a hunter’s trap.

“At a girl” Jane laughed, pulling out a hand-rolled cigarette and lighting it with her blood-soaked hands “I knew there was some fight left in you”

Throughout all of this Damon Marsh just lay there, helpless. He’d been hogtied in such a way that he could barely move and even though he refused to watch the scene of butchery before him, he couldn’t escape the cries of pain and agony from his Eloise.

“Please Jane…” he begged “Please, end it, she doesn’t deserve this. She’s innocent”

“She’s innocent?” Jane replied “None of you are innocent. You are all guilty for what you did to me and mine, and you will all pay”

She raised her left hand and crushed the burning hot embers of her cigarette out in Eloise’s good eye, blinding her.

Damon wept openly as Jane grinned at him like a maniac. She walked over to where he was laying and knelt down beside him.

“Do you remember, Damon? Do you recall what you did?” Jane grabbed him by his hair and yanked his head back so she was staring him in the face. “Perhaps I should remind you. Your Family descended upon my home that cold December night. At first, I’d thought you lost travelers who were looking for shelter from the harsh environment, so I did what any good Christian would and answered the door. That was my mistake Yours was what followed.”

Jane was fighting hard to keep control of her emotions now, she was physically shaking but didn’t want to lose control, if she did she’d just end it here and now and that wasn’t part of her grand plan.

“You swarmed us” she continued “You forced your way into my home and you slaughtered my husband and my baby girl” Jane’s voice broke a little when she said this, remembering the horror that she was forced to endure that night. “You butchered them and you made me watch. I didn’t think creatures like you existed. Oh, I’d heard stories but just chalked them up to camp-fire tells, myth, and lore, but then I saw with my own eyes just what monsters like you were capable of”

“Jane…I’m sorry…we were…”

“DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE!” Jane screamed in his face “If you tell me you were starving one more fucking time I will make sure that Eloise’s death is the stuff of nightmares”

Jane stood up, taking a moment to compose herself, and walked over to where Eloise was slumped against a tree that was now saturated with her blood. She crouched down in front of her and continued.

“Vampires” she chuckled mirthlessly “Fucking Vampires. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. See, we’d just put the missing cattle down to coyotes and wolves. Never thought in a million years that it’d be fucking vampires.”

Jane tilted her head slightly to the side and stared at the mess that was now Eloise.

“That’s the eternal joke I suppose” she sighed “That you’re actually real and all the stories that folks tell aren’t that far off the mark.”

She pushed Elosie’s head back with the palm of her hand and reached into the inside pocket of her duster coat. The sun was starting to set now, soon it’d be time.

“Oh sure, you don’t burst into flame in daylight and garlic has fuck all effect on you, but most of the legends are true. You’re insanely strong, quick to when you need to be, and you have the ability to regenerate which, for me at least, is a bonus”

She pulled a sharpened wooden stake from her pocket.

“And if you want to kill one of you, then you really do need to pierce the heart”

She plunged her hand downwards, puncturing Eloise’s chest. Eloise arched her back, her mouth wide open in a silent scream, kicking and bucking as the implement of her end sank deep into her heart. And then she was still.

Jane turned her attention back to Damon. She was surprised to see him smiling.

“We…we have a name for you, you know”

Jane raised her eyebrows, quizzically.

“We call you Vengeance”

Jane laughed. An actual true laugh.

“Vengeance” she pondered “I like that”

She knelt down next to Damon and watched as the sun started to dip low behind the mountains.

“You should’ve killed me, you know that don’t you” Jane was looking at Damon with an intensity that he’d never seen before “You should’ve sent me off with my husband and my child, instead of leaving me to live this life”

Damon shook his head, now accepting his fate.

“I know Jane, I know.”

“And I won’t stop, ever. I will hunt down every last one of you and wipe your kind off the face of the planet, no matter how long it takes.”

“After all,” Damon smiled as the dark of night wrapped itself around them like a blanket “You have all eternity to do so, don’t you”

Jane Doe smiled and as she did Damon Marsh watched her fangs start to grow in her mouth. She was right, they should’ve killed her that night. Instead, they’d created a monster that would hunt them down through history and time until the Vampire race was no more.

As she sunk her teeth into his throat, feasting on his life’s essence, his final thought was a simple one.

She was Vengeance and she would never stop.