"The Cannibal?" Stu asked. "What are you talking about?"

  "It's a mutate," the teenager said. "It lives in a cave a couple of miles from here. You all right, Davis?"

  The man who had attacked Stu with the pipe, Davis, climbed slowly to his feet. "Yeah, I think so," he said, rubbing his head. He looked Stu up and down. "You're tougher than you look."

  "I get that a lot."

  "Who are you people?" Luna demanded. "Do you live here?"

  "We live here," the older woman affirmed. "This is our home." She helped the younger woman to her feet. "Go check on Tremlo," she told her.

  The younger woman went behind the counter to check on the man whom Stu had kicked in the face -- Tremlo, apparently. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth, but his injuries didn't look too serious. He climbed to his feet, with the younger woman's help, and sat himself down behind the counter, a little unsteadily. The younger woman, who had also received a blow to the head, sat next to him; she looked a little unsteady herself.

  The situation was still tense -- Stu and Luna were on high alert, watching these strangers carefully, for any sign they might attack again. Millie, meanwhile, was tending to Lucky, who was still wincing from the hit he had taken. Stu felt sorry for him -- the kid seemed to have a knack for acquiring injuries; he had been shot in the arm, back in Heart's Glow, and just now he had been hit in the knee with a claw hammer. Millie felt his knee through his trousers and nodded. "I think you'll be all right," she told him. "It doesn't seem broken."

  "We were just looking for a place to spend the night," Luna reiterated. "We didn't know anyone was living here."

  "Infected?" the older woman asked.

  "We're clean," Luna answered.

  "What about that one?" the younger woman asked, pointing at Millie. The cyborg-girl looked back at her with her glowing eye.

  "She's part machine," Luna said. "She has a false eye and a prosthetic hand. She's not a zombie."

  "We don't like to take chances," Tremlo said. He was dabbing at his bloody nose with a napkin.

  "Is that why you tried to kill us?" Stu asked.

  He spat out a glob of blood on the counter, but said nothing. The teenager spoke instead: "It was Tremlo's idea. We saw you come into town, and we figured you might come into the store, so..."

  "So you set up an ambush."

  "You're outsiders," the teenager said. "People like you always bring trouble. And with the Cannibal having just woken up, we figured..." He trailed off, sounding a little ashamed.

  "What's all this talk about the Cannibal?" Luna asked. "You called it a mutate, but..."

  "Like I said, it lives in a cave a few miles from here," the teenager said. "It wakes up every four or five months, and when it does..." He shuddered. "It's hungry when it wakes up. It's usually satisfied with a single person, but sometimes it wants more."

  "You've been feeding it?"

  "It leave us alone if we give it what it wants," the younger woman said. "It goes back to sleep."

  "Why do you call it the Cannibal?"

  "There used to be two of them. One of them ate the other."

  "So you were planning to capture us, or kill us, and feed us to this mutate?" Stu asked, incredulous.

  "Better you than us," the older woman said.

  The words hung in the air for several seconds. Stu looked at each of these people in turn; their expressions were desperate, and their eyes were haunted. They were clearly terrified of this thing. "What happens if you don't feed it?" he asked.

  "It'll come into town," Tremlo said. "The last time it did, it killed three of us." He spat out more blood. "Including my wife."

  "How many people live up here?" Luna asked.

  "Fourteen," the older woman said. "The five of us, some of our parents, some of our children."

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Stu sympathized with their plight -- eking out a meager existence in these mountains while living in fear of this Cannibal creature -- but only up to a point. These people had, after all, just tried to kill him, and that was hard to forget. He wondered, too, how many other travelers they might have ambushed and fed to this thing, to protect themselves.

  "What does it look like?" Luna asked. "This Cannibal?"

  They all looked to Tremlo -- the only one of them, apparently, who had actually seen the monster. "Like a big gorilla," he said. "Eight, nine feet tall, when it stands up on its hind legs. Big head, big mouth, lots of teeth. White fur."

  "You've never organized a hunting party, to try to kill it?" Millie asked.

  "We did, once," Tremlo said. "There were five of us, and we were armed to the teeth, but I was the only one to make it out alive. The damn thing soaked up rifle rounds like they were nothin'."

  "So you started feeding it instead?" Luna said accusingly.

  "What would you have done?" the old woman barked back at her. "The Cannibal's a monster. It's already killed a dozen of us."

  "You could have just left town," Stu suggested.

  "We don't have any working transportation here," the younger woman said. "And my mother and father are too old to make it out of the mountains on foot. We've been stuck here since the outbreak."

  "Besides, where would we go?" Davis muttered. "The whole world's gone to shit. We're better off taking our chances with the Cannibal than getting sold into slavery in Meriweather, or getting captured by the Desert King in Talife."

  Stu could hardly disagree with that (though he had never heard of this Desert King). "So you've been capturing travelers and sacrificing them to this monster, like it's some kind of angry god."

  "It goes back into its cave after it feeds," the older woman said defensively, as if that justified their actions.

  Stu glanced at Lucky. "How's the knee?"

  "Hurts," he said, grimacing. "But I think Millie's right. I don't think it's broken."

  "Can you walk?"

  "It hurts," he repeated.

  Luna sidled up to Stu and spoke to him in a low whisper. "What should we do?"

  He frowned, thinking about it. Probably the safest thing to do would be to simply get in the glider and leave this town and its hostile locals behind, but the storm was still raging outside -- he could hear the wind howling through this building's thin walls -- and he wasn't sure they were up to facing it. They could try taking shelter in some other part of town, but if Tremlo and these others decided to regroup and attack them again...

  No, the best way to deal with this, he decided, was to try to make peace with these folks. "We need a place to spend the night," he whispered back to Luna.

  "I'm not spending the night here," she said flatly. "These people will kill us."

  An idea suddenly occurred to him. "Do you have any dynamo fluid here?" he asked the older woman.

  "We have a few canisters," she replied. "They're not much good to us, though. Our dynamo engines are dead."

  "Would you be willing to give us one?"

  "In exchange for what?"

  He glanced at Luna; he wanted to see her reaction to this proposal. "I'll kill the Cannibal for you."

  As expected, Luna looked at him like he had gone insane. She wasn't the only one, though; everyone was scoffing. "Five of us couldn't kill it," Tremlo said dismissively. "You think you can do it all by yourself?"

  "It's like he said. I'm tougher than I look." And to emphasize the point, he picked up the two-by-four the teenager had swung at him, which was perfectly solid, and broke it over his knee as though it were a twig.

  They all stared at him, in silent awe. "What are you?" the teenager asked. "Are you part machine, too, like her?" He gestured to Millie.

  "It's not important," he said, discarding the broken pieces of wood. "Do we have an agreement?"

  "If you think you can break the Cannibal like you broke that block of wood, you've got another thing coming," Tremlo said. "It's strong, and fast, and practically invisible in the snow. It's smart, too. If you go into its cave, you won't come out again."

  He shrugged. "You've got nothing to lose by letting me try," he said. "It's win-win for you. If I kill it, it won't bother you anymore, and you won't have to set up any more ambushes like this. If it kills me, and eats me, well, it'll go back to sleep and leave you alone for another four or five months, right?"

  Tremlo thought that over, as did the older woman. The woman finally nodded. "If you're fool enough to think you can kill the beast, I won't try to stop you," she said.

  "Do we have a deal?" Stu pressed.

  "All right. Kill the Cannibal, and return with some proof that it's dead, and we'll hand over a can of dynamo fluid."

  Luna was not pleased. "This is idiotic," she whispered in his ear. "We don't need dynamo fluid that badly."

  "I want to make sure you have enough to return to Meku City after you drop me off in Lon Halos," he told her. He let out a breath. "Besides, there's children living here, and helpless old people. If this Cannibal isn't dealt with, sooner or later they'll have to start sacrificing their own."

  "That's not our problem."

  "Are you really so heartless?"

  "I feel sorry for them," she conceded. "But we have to look out for ourselves, first of all, and this Cannibal-thing sounds dangerous. It's a mutate, Stu."

  "I've killed mutates before."

  "You're not invincible."

  "People are going to die if this thing isn't stopped. Either these people ambush another group of travelers like us, or they resort to sacrificing themselves and their kids. If I can kill this thing..." He trailed off. He was actually a little surprised at himself, volunteering to risk his life in this way. He had done it before, when he had battled the Living Hell, but that had been an immediate threat, and he had done it almost without thinking. This was different -- these people had tried to kill him only a few moments ago, and now he was offering to save them from this monster, like some kind of selfless superhero. What had gotten into him? The old Stu, the Stu who had spent most of his adult life shirking responsibility and hiding out from the world, would never have put himself out there like this. Maybe it was something to do with the special powers he now possessed; maybe the power was going to his head. Maybe he was growing overconfident.

  Killing this Cannibal-monster seemed like the right thing to do, though.

  Luna was pinching the bridge of her nose. "I think you're losing it."

  "Well, I'm not going to argue with that."