Dead Legends (Book 1): R.I.P. Van Winkle (6 page)

After another hour or so, Rip stumbled outside to the front porch area of the bar. Gripping a bottle of cheap whiskey in one hand, he strolled over to the edge of the porch and flopped down. He wasn’t usually an emotional drunk, preferring to just have a good time with the boys, but as he sat, he felt an overwhelming urge to cry. He buried the feeling down deep, as he did with most everything. There was a time and a place for him to break down, and it wasn’t now, and it wasn’t here. There was no mistaking it, though.

Geoffrey Irving was losing it.

His wife, however she felt about him, was one of the few people who had taken care of him when he fell into his current state. When he was drunk, he was more unbearable than usual, often taking out his inadequacies on her as well as Geoffrey Jr. She would fight with him, sure, but she would always make sure he made it to the bed, however overbearing he became. He loved her and Geoffrey Jr., but had a wall that he had built inside of him that kept him from showing it. The constant firefights and lack of time spent with them made him as numb as he felt now. The chance to turn his life around had come and gone, and he had no one to blame but himself.

His wife was dead.

His son hated him.

Fuck it,
he thought, and upended the bottle again.

“Hello, Rip. I see it didn’t take you long to find your favorite watering hole.”

Bleary eyed and drunk, he looked up at the familiar voice. Even through the haze of booze, it was easy to see who was speaking to him.

It was Crayon.

Rip grinned devilishly. “You son of a bitch. You knew about Geoffrey Junior. You knew about my wife and Crane. You knew about all of it, didn’t you?” Rip pointed to Crayon with the bottle of whiskey. “You’re turning out to be a really shitty friend, you know that?”

Crayon knelt down. “I’m sorry, Rip. I was going to tell you when we got back from Afghanistan, but well, we know how that went. I never made it back, so it was lost, until now.”

“You shoulda told me anyway, asshole!” Rip said, enraged. “You shoulda told me about Crane while we were over there! I could have ended that shithead and no one would have known about it, goddamnit! I would have buried that worthless fuck out in the desert!”

Crayon placed a reassuring hand on his longtime friend. Keeping his usual calm demeanor, Crayon tried to ease his friend. “It doesn’t matter now, Rip. I’m here to tell you exactly what you need to do.”

Rip’s brow furrowed. “Well, it’s about damn time. Remind me what the fuck I’m doing here, Crayon.”

Crayon sighed deeply. Explaining everything wasn’t going to work, so it was best to take it one step at a time. One
very small
step at a time. It was time to hit him with some bad news. Well, maybe hit him with some arguably
worse
news. Crayon looked his drunken friend in the eyes.

“Rip, I’m the Horseman.”

CHAPTER 7

Rip laughed his ass off. He threw his head back, knocking it hard against the wooden façade of the bar's makeshift porch. He guffawed as he rubbed the back of his head, not because he was in pain, just out of habit. He was three sheets to the wind and feeling no pain.

Crayon was still there, nonplussed.

"You're the Horseman? Goddamn, Crayon, I thought I was the crazy one! You mind explaining how that makes any fucking sense?"

Crayon kicked Rip on the side of the knee, aggravated that the man wasn’t taking him seriously. The man who he had chosen to save humanity was having a good ol' time just laughing like an idiot. He kicked Rip again, harder. This time it got his attention.

Rip looked at his leg in a drunken haze. Shitfaced or not, he was certain that his dead ghost of a friend wasn’t capable of actually hitting him. The pain in his knee said otherwise. Of course, Crayon had given him the shimmering flask of magical shit that put him in his current state, so maybe he did need to expand his possibilities.

“Look, goddamnit, it ain’t my fault you’re dead, and it damn sure ain’t my fault that you’re a horse-fucking goddamn zombie, either!”

Crayon knelt down in front of him. He grabbed Rip by the shoulders and held firmly. “No, Rip, it's not your fault, but you’re the only one who can do anything about this.”

“I'm not doing shit until you explain what the fuck you’re talking about,” Rip said, moving the leg that Crayon had kicked repeatedly. “And how the fuck are you kicking me?” He leaned forward, meeting Crayon eye-to-eye. “You’re a goddamn ghost, Crayon, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.”

I might be a ghost, but zombies have taken over the earth, Rip. Don’t you think you ought to expand your mind a little?

Rip let the bottle of cheap whiskey slide out of his hand. It rolled along the wooden floor and off the porch. “So it
is
you putting all those thoughts in my head. You should be a little more careful who you talk to like that, Crayon.” Rip attempted to stagger up, sliding his back against the wall and wriggling with his shoulders in a desperate attempt to stand. He slowly slid back down, too drunk to get up. “If you’re the Horseman and you can put those thoughts in my head, then who the fuck is the other asshole giving me directions, and why can’t you tell me something worth a shit.”

“I can’t do it all the time, and it's really random when I do. I have a hard time talking specifically to you. It’s like this; imagine you’re at a party with the music really loud and you’re trying to hear one conversation out of all the people that are there. You hear bits and pieces of everyone’s conversation, but not all of it, and not enough to make sense. I do much better when I can talk to you in person, so to speak. As for the other voice—that one is mine, too; or I should say, the Horseman's. When I died, my body and soul split. As you see me now is my soul, the Horseman is my body.”

Rip snorted. “So I’m hearing some kinda bipolar, split-personality shit from you. How can you be the Horseman? Start making some sense, son, or I’m going back inside and getting another drink.”

Crayon sat beside his belligerent friend. “Do you remember what happened to me in Afghanistan?”

Rip felt a lump rise in his throat. Gritting his teeth, he answered, “Yeah, I remember. I remember tagging along with SEAL Team 8, kicking in the door of some mud-hut shithole, and killing three insurgents, only to find your body without your fucking head attached. So yeah, I remember, and thank you for bringing up a sore subject, asshole.”

“Hey, you weren’t the one who got captured and tortured for sixteen days, Rip. Those sons of bitches did shit to me that I wouldn’t do to my worst enemy… and let’s face it
they
were my worst enemy. I was beaten, burned, had my fingernails removed, my teeth pulled, water boarded, and the whole time, I didn’t tell them shit. They weren’t trying to get any useful information out of me; they just wanted to torture me. I was just a pawn in their little game. There was nothing I could say or do to stop them. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was there for one reason and one reason only—to be cursed.”

Rip raised his bottle. “Cursed? Well, congratu-fucking-lations, Crayon. They didn’t break you, and you saved the fucking day by not giving up the rest of us. I’d say being cursed is the least of your worries.”

“I didn’t say they didn’t break me, Rip.” Crayon looked down solemnly.

“What the hell do you mean, Crayon?”

“After two weeks of having them beat the shit out of me, there was a woman who came in to try and bandage me up a little bit. She was there to keep me alive and make sure I didn’t pass out between beatings. She was the closest thing that I had to a friend in that shithole.” Crayon lowered his voice. “After they left one night, she came in to fix me up. When she did, she told me that they were going to kill me if I didn’t tell them something. I told her that I didn’t care. She said, ‘You don’t have to die; you can live forever as a martyr.’ I really didn’t give a shit about being a martyr, but at the time, I didn’t want to die. She told me they were going to curse me as part of the zombie plague. They needed a soldier, and they needed someone to lead the undead, so they cursed me. That is where you come in, Rip.”

“Well, I’m not cursed, Crayon. At least not by you.”

“Yes, you are.”

Rip quickly stumbled to his feet, enraged. “What the fuck are you talking about? I know you’re the reason that I slept for ten years, but I am
not
cursed. You understand me?”

“Yes, you are, Rip. I didn’t have a choice; I had to make sure that I had someone to defeat the Horseman.”

Rip went to shove his friend in the chest, but forgetting Crayon was a ghost, he whiffed straight through his dead friend, falling face first on the ground behind him. Rip slowly rolled over on his back, dazed. He grabbed the whiskey bottle that had rolled off the porch. After taking another swig, he pointed to Crayon with the bottle.

“That’s a little unfair. You can kick me, but I can’t hit you. Fucking figures.”

Crayon grabbed Rip by the collar, hefting him up. A lesser man would have been knocked down by the smell of booze on Rip’s breath. As it were, Crayon thankfully could not smell it.

“See, not fucking fair.”

“Listen to me, Rip. When those Hadjis cut my head off, they cursed me. They cursed my soul to forever roam the earth until Armageddon. When that time came, my body would rise again like the undead and take out unholy vengeance on whoever was left. I was cursed as the leader of the zombies. They started the zombies to speed up Armageddon. There was so much more going on in those caves in Afghanistan than we ever knew, Rip. Those little bastards started the end of the world just to get revenge on the infidels. The zombie plague will
never
have a cure—it is pure mysticism, magic, whatever you want to call it. There are things that go way beyond your understanding, so just come to terms with it. We never even had a chance to contain it. The three insurgents you killed were meant to die; they had to make sure that my body would be found and sent to the United States so I could take over the undead when the time came. There was a reason why those three fuckers didn’t fight back; they were meant to die.

“Little did they know I already had a plan. The woman that cleaned me up snuck in a Shaman to help me out; to this day I’m not sure why. The Shaman couldn’t do anything about them killing me, but he knew what they were going to do. He did give me an option to have someone live through Armageddon that could defeat my cursed body, someone that I had to choose to defend humanity. So, in my weakened state, I agreed to something that I really didn’t understand. I agreed to give them someone to kill the Horseman. I gave them the strongest person that I knew, someone that had nothing to lose. That person is
you,
Rip.”

“So you want me to kill the Horseman? To kill
you
? Well, what the fuck am I waiting for? I’ll get right on that tomorrow morning; until then, I’m gonna get fucked up. And by the way, I have quite a bit to lose.”

“No you don’t, Rip. You are a worthless human being, but you have a chance to be so much more… if you’ll stop being such a dick.”

Crayon nonchalantly tossed his friend back on the ground. Maybe he had made a mistake in picking Rip for the hero; maybe the sergeant was just too far-gone, too damaged to make a difference. The drunk man that lay in front of him didn’t look like he could help himself, let alone the entire human race.

“Rip, let me explain something to you…”

Rip laughed again—the laugh of a man too drunk to care. “You’ve done plenty of explaining, brother, and none of it makes any sense!”

“Before they cursed me, I made the deal with the Shaman. He made a potion; a potion that would make you invisible to the Horseman until you woke up. The only catch was that I had to get you to willingly drink the potion. I had to give you that elixir to make sure that you would sleep, Rip. Without it, you would have died of starvation, or the Horseman would have killed you in your sleep.”

“Hell, that don’t sound so bad, Crayon,” Rip said. Ever the badass, he could handle saving humanity; he would kill the Horseman and let Crayon’s soul rest.

Crayon looked away solemnly. “The only catch is that the person that kills the Horseman will die themselves, completing the curse. If you kill the Horseman, you put my body and soul to rest, and you will end the zombie plague… but you will die in the process.”

Rip slowly gazed up at his longtime friend. The haze of booze made it a little more difficult to concentrate, but the unmistakable words that Crayon spoke hit home through the cloud of inebriation. Many things in his life had given him a reason to reevaluate, but the cold, hard fact of death was something he was familiar with and didn’t shy away from.
Certain
death, however, put a completely different spin on things. Faced with the unimaginable, he could shut off the outside world and do terrible things to others in order to protect the ones he loved and cared for, but dying—well, Geoffrey Irving wasn’t ready to die. Dying was something for cowards.

“What are you talking about, Crayon? I can kill the Horseman, but in turn, I die? Is that what I’m hearing?”

Crayon lowered his voice. “It is for the greater good, Rip. You have to end the plague and give humanity a chance. It’s the only way to save everyone. You have to be a hell of a lot less stubborn than you are now, that’s for damn sure.”

“Go fuck yourself!”

Crayon stood. He was beginning to regret his choice for the savior of humanity. The man was most certainly capable of handling the rigors of survival and the protection of those who were unable to protect themselves, but the intangibles were not looking good. The fact that he was sitting in front of him drunk, belligerent, and incapable of normal conversation was a good indicator of how he was going to act. Rip was far too hardheaded to wrap his mind around giving up his own life in exchange for the safety of others, despite his loyalty to the Army. The oath of a soldier was to keep safe those who were unable to keep themselves safe against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Or maybe living and undead.

“Fine, Rip. I might not be able to convince you how serious this is, but rest assured, you will see something that will change your mind. Life has a way of taking things away from you when you least want or expect it. I’m done preaching to you. Either you are going to help, or you can just sit back and watch the world destroy itself. I’m dead, anyway; what do I care?”

“Yeah, you are, Crayon. So why don’t you just fuck off for a while and let me be; I got nothing else to say to you, anyway.”

Crayon took a few steps back and turned around. He hated turning his back on Rip, quite literally, but there was no talking to him right now. He gave his friend some parting words—words that were not meant to hurt him, but meant to get him in the right frame of mind. As the words floated along, Rip could hear them echo and vanish slowly, as Crayon did.

Just remember, Rip. No matter what you do, you can’t save yourself.

And with that, he was gone again.

Rip sat back, the whiskey bottle still in his hand. Once again, too much to try to absorb, and once more, he was alone with no idea what he was doing. He threw the bottle out into the street. It shattered into a thousand pieces as it hit, mimicking Rip’s emotional state—broken and useless.