smile, dammit

Slayer


We fight in pairs.

One of us -- we flip a coin, to decide who -- goes in to attack the thing head on, while our partner holds on to everything.

You don't need much, to banish a demon. Armor, a weapon. Any sword will do. Bullets don't do much, so a bladed weapon is best. The stories about holy water, special incantations -- those aren't true.

You need armor, for protection. All demons have claws, and some of them spit acid, or fire, or both. Better not to chance injury.

If you're a good fighter, you join a Guild, and they'll pay for everything you need. It's an investment: if you make it back in one piece, you can get rid of more demons, and good armor helps you come back unscathed.

You need a sword. You need determination. You need armor, for protection.

Everything else gets in the way.


We fight in pairs.

One of us goes in head on, while our partner stays behind and holds onto everything that's not needed, anything the demon can use against us.

Your pack, for example. More than just food and water and gear -- personal stuff, too. Your own clothes to wear, once you've killed the thing, something that doesn't smell of brimstone and smoke and the acrid scent of their black blood. Boots, maybe, too, because what the Guild gives you is heavy and ill-fitting, good for protecting your feet, but useless for anything else.

Some of us pack books, or other small things to help us distract ourselves from what we've just faced. The more sentimental among us bring pictures of their families, what they're fighting for.

I don't bring anything in my kit besides a change of clothes.

"Practical," my partner Bennett called me the first time we went out together, not without a hint of derision. He's the sentimental sort. His bag is absolutely full of shit -- photos of family, of his friends from school and his pets. Reminders of what he's protecting.

He's the new kid. I've been doing this for six years -- one more and I'm out -- while he's only been with the Guild eighteen months.

"You'll learn," I told him, as he started in about how I'm cold-blooded. "Give it time."

We hadn't fought anything big at that point. He still thought it was easy; that the worst experience we'd have was with one of the minor demons the retirees call "jumpers", the ones that can leap pretty high and sort-of fly by desperately flapping their tiny leathery wings.

He didn't understand why I wouldn't talk about the fights I'd been in.


"Be patient," said Joaquin, when I tried to complain to him about Bennett. "He'll learn eventually."

Joaquin was the only one of the guildies I considered a real friend, not a work-friend. We went out for drinks sometimes, in the off-season. If he was in a good mood, he brought along his husband, Phil, and we swapped stories about the civilian world. He hated talking about work as much as I did, and that's why I liked him.

"I don't know if he's going to get a chance to learn," I said pointedly. "At this rate, I might kill him before one of them does."

"All the old guildies said the same thing about you when you showed up, Miri," he pointed out, patient. "And now look at you."

I scuffed the ground with my boot. We were hanging out together outside, after a Guild meeting. Joaquin was smoking and I was...avoiding the indoors, where they were talking about one of the Big Names. I'm not superstitious, but using their names is a good way to invoke them, and I didn't want to be there if shit went sideways.

"Now look at me," I said. "Five years in, I lost a coin flip. Now I'm alive and my partner is dead."

Joaquin shrugged. "If it wasn't that fight, it would have been the next big one. Landry was an idiot and you know it."

I sucked in a breath. We have a superstition, in the Guild, about speaking ill of the dead, and besides...

"I always liked him," I reminded Joaquin. "Even if he didn't make the best choices. If it had been me, I wouldn't have gone in with everything. He got...overconfident."

"Stupid." He stubbed out his cigarette. "But I see your point. He was an idiot; doesn't mean I didn't like him."

"The new kid isn't an idiot," I said. "As far as liking him, though..."

Joaquin grimaced. "Be patient," he repeated. "He hasn't fought anything huge yet."


To banish a demon, you need determination and a sword, nothing else.

Armor helps, if you're going to banish it and live to see another day.

Everything else gets in the way.

When you're fighting a named demons -- things do more than get in the way.

The named ones, those can get into your head. It's what they do; it's how they get what they need.

They look into your mind, and they use what they find against you.

The little guys, they want to wreak havoc, maybe eat some livestock, terrorize the community. They're basically animals; it's what they do. They slip through the veil between dimensions and come eat a few goats, and then we run them through with a sword and send them right back to where they came from, banishing them by destroying their physical forms.

The big guys, they can open their own rifts. They're subtle. They can pass for human.

That's what makes them dangerous.

It's easy to believe that the thing flying at you with a bunch of teeth and claws and cloven hooves is going to kill you if you don't kill it first. We don't lose a lot of guildies to them, and when we do, it's career-ending injuries, not death. Can't banish demons if you've only got one good arm.

The Big Bads, they slip into your mind. They make you an offer, something you don’t want to refuse. They're what we fear.


We fight in pairs. We flip a coin to figure out who has to do the dirty work -- who has to take the sword and go run the damned thing through.

We wear armor and carry a sword. We leave everything else with our partner.

Your hopes and dreams and aspirations, your fears and desires, your memories -- anything that can be turned and used against you -- you leave with your partner.

Your essence, who you are, gets offloaded into a vessel: your partner. We hang onto everything and keep you from becoming prey, protect you in the most direct way we can. We hold onto your memories, yours becoming ours, until you've killed it or died trying. You don't need anything personal when you go fight them. Your training, that's all muscle memory. You don't need anything else.

It's easier that way, safer. As the saying goes, what you don't know can't hurt you.

That's not what it means, but it may as well.


Landry wasn't stupid.

Joaquin tells himself that he was, because it helps him sleep at night. He's less than a year out from retirement and praying that he's not the one on call when the next Big Bad shows up, same as Landry was. I can't blame him for being afraid.

Joaquin's different, though. He has everything he wants at home, and if he's afraid of anything, it's that one of the Big Bads will get him. He's smart enough to offload every time, and he doesn't hop into a fight he doesn't think he can win. Joaquin doesn't want glory, he wants to live to fight again, and so he calls for backup when he and his partner aren't sure they can handle it alone.

Landry wasn't afraid of dying. He wasn't afraid of the demons and what they represent. You showed him something with more teeth than you could count, reeking of brimstone and hissing in a language that sounded like someone choking a yodeling Doberman, and he'd laugh and run it through with a sword, no questions asked, while the rest of us tried not to piss ourselves.

When one of the named lesser demons he'd banished returned to our plane and hissed at him like a bad horror movie villain -- Landry, I have come for my vengeance -- what deep-down most of us fear, because when they come back they are pissed off -- well, he'd laughed then, too, and run it through without thinking.

Both things happened -- I saw them. I was there.


Landry and I were partners, and we respected each other.

Because I respected him, I deferred to his judgment in all things, including whether he needed to offload before a fight.

"C'mon," I teased him, every time. "I'll hold on to everything, and I promise I won't go rifling through your memories -- I don't want to know what you jerk off to!"

He just laughed, said there was no need. Maybe there wasn't, most of the time. I almost never saw him hesitate, never saw him do anything other than lop off heads or run them through with the broadsword he carried -- heavier than anything I could swing, and I was no slouch.

The last time, we were fighting one of the named ones. One of the big named ones.

Landry did the coinflip. I'd figure out later, that he rigged it.

"Call it," he said, spinning it in the air.

"Heads," I said.

He caught it and showed it to me. "Tails. And here I was hoping to rifle through your memories while you fought Bubba. Shame."

"Fine," I said. "Hand me your gear."

He stripped off his pack, put on his armor and gripped his sword, took two steps forward.

"Landry," I touched his shoulder. "Keith. Look, I -- this is a big one. C'mon, offload before you go."

He turned and smiled at me. "Nah," he said.

He ran in before I could stop him.


We found out, later -- his wife had cancer. Glioblastoma, always fast-moving, always terminal. He thought, I don't know, that he could save her. Strike a deal, maybe. His life for hers. That was how he saw it.

I saw him run to it. I saw him talk to it. It said something back.

He grinned at it, offered it his hand to shake -- and was dead in an instant, torn apart by something that moved faster than our eyes could see.

I watched as it happened. Before Landry even hit the ground, I snapped the seal on the emergency distress signal, dropped everything, and ran the thing through with my sword.

Such a pity, it said, its voice in my mind, not my ears, as its body crumbled to ash.

When backup arrived, I was sitting on the ground next to what remained of Landry.

"He got overconfident," I told them. "He didn't offload before he went in. He engaged before I could make him."

They took me back to the Guild, let me sleep.


There was an official investigation. I was cleared of all wrongdoing.

"Landry chose not to offload," said the Guildmaster, handing down his verdict. "Ultimately, it was this choice that led to his demise."

He didn't say anything about bargaining with demons.

Landry's wife died two weeks after he did.

"That's what you get for dealing with demons," said one of the guildies, after we got the news. He thought I was out of earshot, or that I wouldn't react -- I don't know.

I was on him in seconds. I broke his jaw in two places before the senior guild members pulled me off of him -- responding slowly to his yell for help.

The Guildmaster suspended me for two weeks, but only because it was required.


The Guild assigned me a new partner after I returned from my suspension. Bennett, one of the new recruits. He'd finished Guild training the year before, but had never been assigned a permanent place, floating instead from fighter to fighter while they waited for a vacancy.

They keep more of us on hand than they really need. Someone's always getting injured -- there's a need for substitutes.

Bennett had the most seniority among the new guildies, so after Landry died, he became my partner.

We started butting heads right away. He resented that I wasn't willing to open up to him, the way the other guildies he'd worked with had done. I didn't want to talk to him about my hopes and dreams, what I wanted to do post-Guild-life, if I was going to stay on and become one of the trainers and try to work my way up to Guildmaster, or I was going to do something else.

He tried to get me to open up. When I didn't, he gave up. That's when he started resenting me.

The fact that the Guild only sent me on basic missions probably didn't help anything. They thought they were helping -- giving me assignments where I didn't have to bother with the coinflip, I could just tell Bennett to go take care of it while I sat back and watched our stuff, helping him get more hours in, more practice before we had to fight anything terrible. He'd worked his way up the ranks and was finally starting to fight lesser named demons, and now here he was, banishing the goat-eaters without names, right back where he'd started when he joined our Guild.

I heard him ask Joaquin, at one point, why I hadn't been invalided out. "Since she obviously can't do it anymore."

"Because," said Joaquin, his voice rough. "Someone has to train your ass, and she's the only one that's patient enough to do it. Aren't you happy that she makes you do the fight every time, instead of insisting that she has seniority and doing all the exciting shit?"

I didn't hear what Bennett said in reply, but I did notice that he didn't whine at Joaquin anymore.

I put in a request afterward with the Guild. Send us the next named demon, big or small. He needs practice.

I thought they'd say no, if it was anything really big.

I was wrong.


When the Big Bad came over, we were still top of the list.

The Guildmaster called me into his office.

"Are you ready?" he asked me, his voice mild.

"Where is it?" I was prepared to say yes, if it wasn’t where Landry had died.

"Riverside," said the Guildmaster.

Landry had died in Fairview. "I’m ready," I said.

"Take Bennett. Don't do a flip -- he doesn't have the training. Have him act as the vessel, banish it, and return here in one piece."

"You make it sound so easy.”

He sighed heavily. "You sound like Landry when you say that."

I blanched.

"Go," he said. "Come back in one piece."

I went.


I told Bennett where we were going, what it was that we had to do.

"Okay," he said. "So." He tried to put on a brave face, but I could tell: he was scared shitless.

"It's not you," I told him. "Guildmaster said, 'Don't even flip a coin, Goldmund, you've got to be the one to do it.'"

Bennett had the good sense to look relieved. "Okay," he repeated. "So what do we do?"

"Get in my car, we'll drive to the GPS coordinates he gave us, and then..."

"Yeah."

I sighed. "Just don't be weird, okay? Fucksake, that's the last thing I need today."

"Okay," he said again.


We drove to the site, Bennett navigating, and geared up.

I handed him my pack, after we hiked in.

"You know what to do," I said.

He nodded.

"Stay safe," he said, before we started the ritual.

I faked a smile I didn't feel. "That's what you're here for."

I said the words, began the process, before he could say anything in response.

I gave him everything. I couldn't chance it. All of me, every memory. More than I'd normal give, in an offload, but there was no other way to be sure.

"Um," said Bennett.

I smiled at him -- "I'll be back soon!" -- and ran in.


Under the ritual, nothing feels real. You don't feel vulnerable, but you don't feel like you. You're disconnected from everything, unnaturally calm.

When the Big Bad hissed at me, made me an offer -- I sent Landry away and I can bring him back, Miriam -- I laughed.

"Who's Landry?" I said, and I lopped its head off, watched as its body turned to ash and blew away.


Bennett walked over to me, a few minutes later. He had to -- with how much I'd given him, there was no chance I'd recognize him and make it back.

He grasped my hands, said the words that would give me my memories back.

"Miriam," he started, once I was myself again. "I..."

"Ian," I said. "No."

I knew he'd looked.

I wondered how much he'd seen, whether any of that pain had leaked over to him.

"Landry," Bennett continued. "Keith. Um. That was the same..."

"I know."

"You didn't hesitate, at all."

"No," I agreed. "That's why we offload everything non-essential."

"You loved him," said Bennett. "Landry."

"He was family," I said, my voice easy. "Closer than, even, for what we do. Are we done, Bennett?"

He shook his head. "How in the fuck...?"

I smiled, remembering what Landry had said, after the first time we'd fought together, before he started refusing to offload.

"Because of you," I said, his words echoing in my memory. "Because you keep me safe."


We fight in pairs.

One of us goes in with nothing more than a sword and determination, some armor.

We're flimsy, but we feel invincible.

We know: our partner is holding on to all the important things, keeping us safe, and because of this, we are able to slay demons.