What? It was a good memory. Worth a smile.
“And then I dumped your piece of shit dead body down a hole in that hellacious smelly dog food factory.” It had been a recessed tank in the floor with a rusty but movable container lid that could be pushed back in place. Now you see him, now you don’t, and a better grave than he deserved. No one would find him. No one would risk the stench to step foot in that place. “I spit on you first, though. For Mels. Then I went home, ate leftover pizza. It was pretty good. Meat-lovers’. And I didn’t think about you again, not once.”
The hand approached closer. I shook my head. “But you didn’t learn your lesson.”
And I’d forgotten mine. Imagine everything. Be prepared for anything. Cover your bases. But I was only human…okay, not only human. No claws, no red eyes, no silver needle teeth, but not human enough either to let this son of a bitch get away with what he’d done. And he…he was a monster who didn’t know the same when he was face-to-face with it.
“But you came back for more.” I studied his hand curiously as it inched closer. “Hell, I don’t think you could touch me, no matter how much you wanted to, much less kill me, or you would’ve already. But I’m just guessing. I don’t know anything about ghosts. My bad.” I rocked on my heels. “I take that back. I didn’t know anything. I now know two things. I know my brother doesn’t believe they exist. And I know that if he was wrong and they did exist, salt would purify and destroy them. Hopefully painfully.
“Seems stupid to me, that something I could swipe from the table of any restaurant could obliterate a monster,” I added. The hand stopped moving and a wary, uncertain, fearful shadow passed over Mr. Not-So-Invisible-Now’s face. Fear is plain to see. If he was alive, I would be able to smell it on him. Fear made him one of the herd he preyed on and easy to see from a mile away.
“But you never know what will happen until you try,” I said with the darkest of verbal warnings, the vicious cheerfulness of the last attempts to send him on his own way, and a belly full of voracious hope that he wouldn’t listen.
What fun would that be?
Hope, today, turned out to be my favorite emotion, and proved steadfast and true when the invisible man ignored the others. That was fine by me. If he didn’t want to move on to nothingness or Hell or whatever punishment waited for him, I had no problem giving him a push. If he didn’t want to pay, then he’d have to play. I loved to play because it wasn’t play at all, not the kind anyone else would know. It was winning. Surviving. I was a lion and that’s what lions did. It was a fact. And fact was fact as truth was truth.
“So, hey, asshole,” I told him with all the menace and predatory nature I had in me, which was more than he would have possessed in all the years of his whole fucking pathetic life, “let’s see what I can do to you.” He was backing away, but I’d already pulled two handfuls of salt out of my sweatshirt’s pocket and flung it at him.
He burned.
Every cell flamed a peculiar almost black-red, but it wasn’t raging. It was slow and, from the flailing of his arms, the horror in his sizzling eyes, and the voice he finally found in ragged scream after scream, nice and agonizing. He careened from wall to wall, but didn’t stop, drop, and roll. Basic fire safety, and he ignored it. Then again, he wasn’t leaving singe marks on the warped paneling of the walls he slammed against. Dropping and rolling wouldn’t have helped. After almost a full minute, he staggered to a halt in front of me, a burning shape of a man, and said the only word I’d heard him say. I’d seen him talking to Mels but had been too far away to hear. I hadn’t given him time to talk to me after he’d “lured” me behind the bushes with beer. This was his first and last chance. With a tongue blackened but still burning, he said it.
“Monster.”
I grinned. “Recognize.”
For once, I didn’t care about the label. For once, I was a little proud.
He then exploded. I winced and closed my eyes, throwing up an arm, but I felt no heat. Opening my eyes, I blinked and there was nothing. No glare. No afterimage. There was simply empty space where a way-too-motivated killer and molester’s stubbornly evil asshole of a shade wouldn’t give up. Not that it mattered. He lost anyway.