Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 24: PUNKIN'S ONCE AGAIN (SOMEONE KILL ME)

I met Willa and Ethan at the edge of Punkin's, just as planned. 

Since it was Halloween, the tired, tried-and-true seasonal workers had set everything up for the night's final burst of classic spooky fun. There were cardboard cutouts of classic monsters set up at different intervals, holding signs to tell the directions to all sorts of different places. One pointed to the bathrooms; another pointed to the stand where caramel apples, sugar-dusted funnel cakes, and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies were being sold for exorbitant prices. I didn't want to go to either of those places. What I wanted was to find Willa and Ethan by the pyramid of hay bales and get ready to enact our plan.

That was exactly where I found them: at the pyramid where I died. Willa was suiting up in some sort of sports armor that looked too bulky for her own good. (Don't ask me what it was. I don't know anything about sports and I will admit that freely.) Ethan was looking through his book, which was open on his lap; he traced the words with a steady finger and fiddled with a pocket knife. It was like a perpetual motion machine, the way he folded and unfolded the blade over and over again. I couldn't help but notice that he was still in his work t-shirt. The orange of the Punkin's logo was impossible to ignore. 

Blanche, in contrast to the preparation and nervous energy of the other two, was lounging on a layer of hay above them. Seemingly bored, she was tossing a machete up in the air and catching it again. She looked like she always did (like the greatest joy in life was cruelty, which she was being robbed of), but I caught fear in her eyes. She wasn't doing much to hide it, anyway. 

In a way, I supposed I got what she was so afraid of. She was going to be confronting someone who honestly deserved to get a bit of revenge. The end was unclear for her. Was thirty-ish years of not changing anything about herself a form of penance, or was her afterlife hanging in the balance? Did any of this have anything to do with her unfinished business at all? And, for that matter, did it have anything to do with mine? What if this wasn't the right way to go at all?

Oh, well. There was no time for me to second-guess myself. I was already entrenched in all this. I was already here with my father's gun and my family's wood-chopping axe and a brown plastic bag of ammunition. There was no turning back now. 

"Are we ready?" I asked, after a moment of standing there, watching them silently.

"Not quite. Could you help me with this?" Willa gestured to a clasp on her arm that was jammed and wouldn't quite close. 

"Uh, yeah." 

"Thanks." 

I don't know if the pyramid is the best place to do battle," I admitted. "It would be fitting, since I... died... here... But it wouldn't be all that practical, you know?" 

I tried not to look up at the top of it. Something about it made me want to scream, burst into tears, or tense up until I died. Again. And that would be a sign of weakness-- and that wasn't useful here, not in the slightest. 

"I guess. It might be easier if we had a void full of nothing, a field with no features. We don't have that, though. It's either here one of the closed-down rides, or the haunted corn maze. This is the only open space in the entirety of this place." Willa pulled away from me when the plastic clasp finally snapped into place. "We're going to have to choose one."

"I guess."

"There's no guessing. We're going to have to."

"Does it really matter?" Blanche interrupted, more snippish than she needed to be.

"I guess not," I admitted.

Ethan didn't look up from his book. "It doesn't."

"Plus," Willa pointed out, once again being the reasonable one, "if it's difficult for us to traverse the terrain, it should be just as bad for the... What was it called again?"