The old platitude says if you set out on a path of revenge, best dig two graves.

Lemme tell you, if you set out to be a hero, dig a fucking graveyard.

I’d long since given up on being a meaningful part of this world.

A lucrative career was traded in for the joys of freedom and isolation. Friendships and potential connections abandoned by the wayside to avoid the continual pain and disappointment. The realization that there really isn’t much purpose, and that’s okay.

I’d gone from a three-piece suit and a view of downtown to making money in between the lines. Selling edibles. Homemade beef jerky. Endless weeks of all night poker sessions. Small scams. Petty theft. Whatever hustle was lucrative then and there.

It was a Friday night, and I was doing doing gig food delivery on one of the apps. It only paid if you really understood the system. I could make it work just enough to make it worth it, and the dozen holes in their business model provided an endless opportunity to scam food. Yes, I am…was…that guy.

I know, fuck me.

I certainly didn’t care about others, not really. I wasn’t hatefully stewing a la’ Taxi Driver, just completely disconnected. Indifferent.

But I suppose there was some old part of me, some light that still lingered. And that part probably damned so many.

I was cruising along the medical center by the extremely prominent university I graduated from, once upon a time. The campus was encircled by a massive gravel public track, situated near one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. A place for the intelligentsia and the trophy wives of oil millionaires to endlessly burn lactic acid in the rugged pursuit of…something. Greed. Purpose. Who knows?

It was about 1 a.m. I was just cruising past where the trail kinked north when I saw it.

When we watch films, little phases us. An explosion of gory violence. A demonic jump scare. James Woods’ face. These horrifying images are pretty normative, so our central nervous system stays pretty well in flow.

But in real life, when you see something profoundly horrific, the CPU starts crashing as it tries to reconcile the black swan event with how reality is supposed to go.

I remember, somewhere subconsciously, wondering if that hesitation was going to cost this poor college girl her life.

Only part of her was visible to me, but she had backed up against one of the magnificent oaks that lined the paths.

A man twice her size, adorned in a black hoodie, black jeans, and white gloves was barreling toward her with a knife in his hand.

She didn’t move. I guess I thought at the time she was paralyzed with fear. It happens, right?

My shitty Toyota jumped the curb, and I was out the door without even putting it in park, sprinting with everything I had.

Fifteen years of baseball and four years of rugby had taught me how to explode and cover a short distance quickly.

But that was a far away time in a long-gone place. I was run down and ragged these days.

Apparently I still had a step in me.

The incidental benefit of adrenaline is it doesn’t leave lot of room for second-guessing. Instinct snaps up the controls. We’d probably all be better if that were the case most of the time.

Not much thought went into spearing him right in the side and slamming him onto the gravel path.

I could hear what I thought was sobbing behind me. It felt like blood was pulsating in my ears, denying me my hearing. The whole world sounded like if Charlie Brown’s parents had done a few whippits. His screams were inaudible “wah-wah’s.”

The attacker certainly had size on me. But I’d spent a good chunk of my life getting into fistfights. Even won a few, too.

Heaven hates an Irish temper.

The element of surprise and my ruthlessness really saved the day.

He tried to use his superior size to flip me over as my knees dug into his chest. I drove down, using my stocky frame and low center of gravity to hold tight, and slammed a fist into his exposed neck.

I ignored his gasps and flailing. A punch to the nose. Now the eyes.

Spasming like a salted slug, he finally managed to fling me off him.

He was off like a rocket, tearing into the night. Tough piece of shit, I remember thinking. My gut said chase him down. The hunter following the bloodened tracks of a deer leaking from a body shot.

But when I looked back in saw her, I knew I couldn’t.

She looked…off. There was fear, so much fear, but it felt like a mask. Sobs that felt like a recording. Professions of thanks that seemed overly enthused. A pantomime.

She flung her arms around me. I called the police. They came and took her statement. Sally Rigby was her name. A senior, doubling majoring in computer science and Chinese language.

Sally Rigby was the future, and I, a shell of a person, a glorified worm, an unplugged toaster, had saved her.

We told the police everything we knew.

He was black, and given Sally’s adorably white disposition, meant the police would actually pursue this with vigor. They found his knife in a bush a few feet from where we tussled. I didn’t get a great look, but it appeared weirdly ornate. Like a dagger in a cornball movie trying to convince the audience the weapon is ancient and ambiguously ethnic.

Sally never left my side. Beaming up at me. Holding my arm. Thanking me in that weird Stepford Wives meets Tom Cruise’s empty eyes sort of way for saving her from inevitable rape and death.

The police took our information, and Sally asked for my number before they took her to get checked out at the hospital. I figured that was the end of it, unless they caught the creep, and I had to testify.

Apparently, four girls had gone missing on campus in the last two months. The always loathsome police slapped me hard on the back, saying I might’ve just beaten down a serial killer. They dug under my nails for DNA.

I wish that had been the end of it. God. Be grateful for all the things you don't know.

The next day Sally began texting me. She oscillated between discussing her trauma and endlessly thanking me. I felt obliged to muster real responses. She had suffered something truly horrible. I might not have a kernel of faith in humanity, but I wasn’t a monster.

I wasn’t.

By the second day, the texts her turned flirtatious. Compliments I would never expect. Questions about my life, my past, my hobbies, my beliefs.

I called her. I was worried one of two things was happening; either she felt she owed me something, to make me feel good, or she was becoming attached to me as a sort of trauma response.

Neither was a good path, so I wanted to nip it in the bud as gently as possible.

This had nothing to do with delusional narcissism on my part. I took this line of thinking, dear reader, in large part because, well, in no possible other scenario would Sally be interested in me.

And who could possibly blame her? She was twenty-three, more than ten years my junior. Blonde, fit, brilliant, witty, gorgeous, vivacious. I was a broke down car that somebody threw a shitty paint job on. Nihilism, whisky, and a degenerate lifestyle do not a pretty visage make. And surly to boot.

The plan derailed quickly. Sally insisted we go out, that night. A vibrant restaurant and bar I sometimes picked up orders at. A sea of humans bolstering plastic smiles with the false hope only ethanol can provide.

Every time I tried to break through to explain, she talked over me with greater exuberance.

Finally, I snapped.

“Sally. I’m like, forty pounds overweight, rundown, not particularly pleasant, way too old for you. You don’t owe me anything. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing. I don’t want someone to go out with me out of obligation.”

There was a long pause. It felt angry, pregnant with rage.

“I genuinely like you, Pappy.”

I’ll spare you the masturbatory recounting, but she heaped an avalanche of compliments, putting up a fierce argument oozing with sweetness.

I gave in and met her two hours later.

I never imagined the date from Hell being taken in the literal sense.

We never even made it inside.

While we waited for a table, our conversation took one wild turn after another. So many common interest and hobbies. Similar perspectives, though hers a significantly softer version. An uncomfortable amount of similarities coming out of left field. That should have been a red flag, but the Venus flytrap doesn’t go hunting, now, does it?

Pappy the fly, they call me.

A few whisky sours while we waited and pretty soon, we were slammed up against a wall in the alley. While I was kissing her neck and running my hand slowly up her leg, she whispered in my ear. I expected a sensual moan, maybe a little dirty talk.

Nope. NOPE.

I jumped about four feet back.

What she said didn’t make much sense then, but it was her voice.

Imagine the screech of an angry goat mixed with the hoarse gasp of lifelong smoker battling emphysema. Now throw in the squeal of a slaughtered pig and a demonic baritone that would have bested Johnny Cash. THAT is what I heard in my ear, and THAT is why I jumped back.

“They’re here. And I want you to watch what you wrought, you empty thing.”

I stared at her as she transformed.

It wasn’t like the movies. Bones didn’t stretch and squeal. Skin didn’t inflate and shift. It didn’t have the feel of slow animation.

One minute a solid ten in a slinky black dress was there, and the next, Hell's special little abortion stood in her stead.

My first thought was, I just made out with a fucking gorilla.

And that I’d be the first person to say that in retrospect literally.

A seven-foot ape completely covered in crisscrossing black and white hair glared me down. But this wasn’t George of the Jungle. This was an acid trip gone horribly awry.

Four eyes, each a different color. Red, sapphire blue, a deep purple, yellow, in a perfect line across the forehead. An impossibly large mouth with a single tooth descending nearly six inches out of the creature’s mouth clicked against it’s twin that shot up from its lower gums. A single horizontal slit for a nose, and with every fresh breath, black smoke came pouring from it. Where ambidextrous paws should be were massive, humanoid hands, almost comically large. The creature rested on the outer palm of each one. Protruding out were at least twenty five fingers, each ending with a bone jutting out, sharpened to an infinitely fine shank tip.

I just stood and stared. You can’t outrun the Tsunami. You can just sit back and enjoy the last moments in the sun.

They came in screaming, each clutching the same odd knife. A sea of men in black hoodies, black pants, and white gloves.

Every swing was batted away as the creature moved with impossible dexterity. It ripped a man’s head off and ate it with a single crunch. A swipe of one hand disemboweled another. Two hands smashed a chest, turned the man's body gelatinous. One by one, the small army was eviscerated in ever escalating displays of grotesque violence.

I was frozen. The…thing began what I suppose was a laugh midway through the maelstrom.

With that voice that felt like a kidney stone zig zagging through my body echoing, “YOU DID THIS YOU DID THIS YOU DID THIS” gleefully as it turned burly men into viscera with ease.

No knife came even close to striking what was Sally, and the ground was littered with them, along with every organ imaginable.

I picked a dagger up. Not to test my abilities against whatever the fuck this nightmare was but to just cut my throat.

I felt a hand, strong but human, stop me and pull me away, and we were running, the sounds of ghoulish laughter and human skin being ripped off not far behind us.

After what felt like miles, we hid in an alley.

The man took off his hoodie and I finally got a glimpse of him.

It was the attacker, the one I stopped.

His eyes looked badly damaged; his nose was still askew. I had done a number on him.

It dawned on me then that might have only been because he didn’t want to hurt me.

“What have I done?”

My whisper held more emotion than I’d expressed in the better part of a year.

“You couldn’t know.”

His accent was African, though in my ignorance, I could not place it.

“What…what the fuck is she?”

The man steeled his gaze.

“That is no ‘she.’ That is not even an ‘it.’ We have a word for them, but there’s no real translation to English. The closest thing is “Decayed Whore.”

“D…decayed whore?”

“Before white men, before Christ, there was a small village in what is today Uganda. What the villagers thought was simply a man, a traveler, passed through the village.

When he asked for water, he was given water. When he asked for food, he was given food.

When he asked for souls, the villagers chased him far off, into the night. All he did is laugh as he ran.

Then came the decay.

The rains never came. Crops withered away and died. Any trace of game to hunt disappeared entirely. Sickness never seen before stole the life from children. Every night, booming laughter could be heard echoing in the sky. The minds of the villagers began to twist and knot.

Finally, the man who was not a man passed back through when the remaining villagers were summoning their strength to try and migrate somewhere where life persisted, where hope still lay.

He said would never let them leave. But they had a choice.

Die horrible deaths or give him the souls he asked for.

Many villagers, women and children among them, died trying to kill him. This man that was not a man. This wandering demon of the ancient world. Those who refused him, he let live to rot away.

They and the others died heroes.

Eleven villagers did not.

They agreed. Gave up. Surrendered their souls.

He chained their bodies together, dragged them into the mountains. No one knows what he did with them. But by the time he finished his dark works, they had turned into monsters.

The demon added insult to injury, bastardizing the sacred, peaceful form of the gorilla into something only pure evil could imagine, let alone wrought.

Those amongst us that hunt the eleven are the descendants of those who found the villagers who lived before they died horrible, agonizing, and slow deaths.

When our ancestors went to dig graves for these pour souls, they found buried in each hole the same dagger. Put there by some spirit of the earth or heavens, we assume. A chance to rid the world of what should never have been.

It’s our duty to destroy these abominations. We have hunted them for thousands of years. We’ve learned subtle clues that help us track them.

I am called Adroa. You, I believe, are Pappy.”

Tears streamed down my eyes.

“Can’t we…can’t we find her when she turns back into Sally? Kill her then?”

Adroa sighed wearily.

“There is no Sally. The Decayed Whores can take on the form of anyone. It changed into that form just to mock me as I missed swipe and after swipe. It was just playing with its food. I thought I had surprised it, just this once, in time to kill it.

The real problem is, they like to take up roost. Unadulterated violence and stark terror have become boring to them. They like to establish a hunting ground, pick through a population, drive up panic. It’s a game to them. Subtlety that creates fear they can smell, laugh about, marinade in. Then they corner their prey and quench their bloodlust.

But it will eat up all the organs and lick up all the blood of tonight and tomorrow, it will move out of its form and walk among those students, playing its sick game. More will go missing. Ripped apart. Eaten.”

Adroa looked completely defeated, but a single glance in his eyes told me he’d never give up. He’d die upon his sword. Or, dagger, as it may be.

“Adroa. You said there were eleven Decayed Whores in the beginning that came down from the mountains. How…how many have your people killed?”

His head dropped in his hands, a dagger listlessly hanging at his side.

“None.”