The Killer's Life (A Jeff the Killer Story)

Rematch

"I swear to God if you make this worse I'll kill you."

"Do you even believe in God?"

"Blood."

"You bastard, that hurt!"

"Well, seeing as you've got multiple pieces of shrapnel embedded in a good amount of your back, yes, I'll say it's going to hurt."

"Lots of blood."

"Yes, thank you for that amazing observation, Karlyah." I looked over at the small girl from across the camp. "Would you mind going and grabbing some more water from the stream?"

"Not your servant."

"Don't sass me or I'll go dunk your head in when I'm done with her." She went quiet. "Good. Now, water please."

The bowl is snatched up by her small hands and she walked slowly over to the small stream, dumping the already pink water into the grass by a tree. Then, she carefully leaned over and scooped up some more. I turned back to Alicia, who was lying on her stomach beside me. Her face was slightly pink, either from exertion or from having her bare back exposed to me and Karlyah. If it was the latter, than it was entirely her fault for stepping on the trap after explicitly telling us to avoid it.

With my tweezers, I pulled out another small piece of shrapnel. Karlyah was at my side with the bowl of water and I dropped the piece in. It sunk to the bottom, leaving a trail of pink. Onto the next piece. We'd gotten into this rhythm in the past hour since Alicia hurt herself. It was hard to drag her over here while avoiding all the traps but it paid off to have the running water nearby.

"Are you almost done?" She growled, her face turned away from me.

"I think so?" I said passively, pulling a piece out more aggressively than was probably necessary.

"Bastard!"

I ignored her and dropped it into the water. "Karlyah, you have much better eyesight than me. Can you take a look and see if I got it all out?"

The young girl moved up beside me, her matted hair taking up more space than she actually did. She looked at Alicia's back and pointed out a few pieces that I missed, which I quickly pulled out and set in the water. When she was sure I'd grabbed them all, I shooed her off and grabbed a towel from another bowl of water we had, which had been sitting in water that been purified just in case. Under normal circumstances I would have just used the water-after running some tests-since running water is typically clean but we were in Zalgo's territory. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that he'd poisoned the water supply and, judging from the lack of wildlife, I would have to assume I was correct.

With the towel, I clean off Alicia's wounds and wipe off as much of the blood as I can. It would have been troublesome to wrap it if the wounds had covered all of her back but thankfully her bag suppressed a lot of the damage and kept the wounds more towards the lower back. We'd still end up wasting a lot more bandages than I'd prefer to spare but this wasn't something I could play around with. Disease and infections are the silent, persistent monsters, waiting around the corner for you to make one little mistake. Like not wrapping a wound.

I tried to go as lightly as I could with the bandages but I still ended up with a roll that was far too light considering we were only on our second day out. When I was done, she sat up carefully, reaching back and running her fingers gently over the bandages. Karlyah was awfully close to me, practically on top of me, watching Alicia very closely.

"Well, what are we sitting around waiting for?" Alicia moved to stand but I grabbed her wrist.

"It's late," I said, gesturing around. "The sun is already going down and in the dark it will be nearly impossible to navigate this trapped field. We even managed to set off one while in the day. We can't risk anything at night. Besides, we made really good progress yesterday. You said so yourself."