Sorry this has taken so long to post. I've been really sick lately, and have been to exhausted to touch the computer.
So, here's the latest chapter. More coming soon, so remember to review it for me! And be honest!
Two weeks had passed, and Meryl was getting more and more worried about Vash. He was spending most of his time either in silence, or talking to himself and ignoring both her and Millie for the most part. This was just fine with Millie, who was dealing with her grief over the violation of her lover's grave.
Wolfwood's grave. That confused Meryl. Vash had said that Wolfwood had died, but now he was stalking them under the name Chapel the Evergreen. Could he have been brought back to life somehow? She wondered. How could he be around? And why would someone write Knives' name over the grave? Why, why, why?
An idea occurred to her while they were sitting in a café in LH. Vash was shoveling food into his mouth and looking distracted, and Millie was just staring at her still full plate. Meryl took a drink of coffee, then wetted her lips and asked her question.
"Vash? Could Chapel be a clone?"
This caught Millie's attention, and she looked at the shorter woman with tear filled eyes. Vash slowly raised his head to look at Meryl. "He has to be."
"But," Millie asked, her voice breaking, "could he have not been dead?"
Vash shook his head vehemently and dropped his fork onto his empty plate. He ran his hand over his eyes "No. I checked. He dripped a lot of blood on the street when he walked to the church, and I checked him for a pulse before I dug his grave, and again before I put him in it. There is no way he could have been brought back to life."
"So he is a clone," Millie sniffed. "How is that possible?"
Meryl shrugged. "I don't know how it could be possible. That kind of technology is just as lost as the technology for creating Plants."
A surprised look passed over Vash's face, and he started digging in the pockets of his red coat. "I just realized: for no records of Rem to have existed, there must not have been a town where she crashed the ship. That ship was the only SEEDS ship with a crew, and so it was the only ship with a fully functional medical lab."
"So?" Meryl asked, looking confused.
Vash leaned towards her, once again calm and yet somehow animated. "That lab was where Knives and I were created. If someone could repair the computers and electronics there, they would have the knowledge and equipment to clone someone." He pulled Rem's holographic generator out of his pocket. "Come on," he ordered, getting up, "we need to back to the hotel."
Meryl looked at Millie, seeing her come out of her grief somewhat. Vash lightly tapped on the café's window from outside and waved at them to urge them on. "Come on, Millie," the petite woman sighed. "He must have some idea on what we can do. And you know he won't start without us."
Millie nodded woodenly, and followed her short friend out of the building. Down the street, Vash's coattails were all they could see as he ran through the front door of the hotel they were staying in.
The two women found him in the room he shared with Meryl, sitting in a plush recliner. The hologram of Rem was just starting to appear in the middle of the room. "Hi, Vash," the tall, dark haired woman said even before the image solidified. "Meryl. And friend. What do you need?" she asked, directing her attention back to the tall gunman.
Vash gripped the arms of his chair so hard that his fingertips turned white. "I need to know where the ship is, Rem," he said. "Someone's using it's lab, and I need to find them."
Rem shook her head. "I don't know exactly where the ship is." A look of profound disappointment erased the calmness from Vash's face. "But," she continued, "I can tell you the name of a town near it."
The tall, blonde man leaned forward, eager to hear her answer. "You need to find a little town called Little Tokyo. It's just a ghost town now, nothing but buildings filled in with sand. It's been that way for about ninety years. It's about eight hundred isles north of Inepril City."
"Eight hundred isles?" Vash wondered. "I've been near there. Nothing but sand. What was a town doing up there?"
Rem shook her head. As she moved closer to Vash with Millie close behind, Meryl could see a sad look on the hologram's face. "When I woke up after the crash, it was in Little Tokyo's little med center. Apparently, some of the settlers had left the Inepril City crash site and tried to make a city of their own. I lived there for a while."
"Why did you leave?" Meryl asked.
The dead woman's gaze turned to her granddaughter. "I had gone to Inepril to buy some medical supplies. Whey I got back, everyone was dead; it was as if they had all gathered together, and then gone berserk. It looked as though they had all killed each other, the women, men and children."
Meryl turned to Vash and put her hand on his shoulder. "We've seen that before," she reminded him quietly.
Rem's sad gaze turned inquisitive. "You know who could have done this?"
Vash stood up and walked over near the room's window. "Legato . . ." he whispered, looking out at the horizon. "Knives . . ."
Quickly, so fast that it seemed that he had suddenly been reversed back to front, he turned around and picked up the projector. "One last question, Rem," he said. "How could towns have already been founded when you woke up? How long were you out?"
The image of Rem sat down on an invisible seat. "The ship orbited this planet for months after the rest of the convoy crashed," she told him. "I was able to repair some of the electronics, but Knives had rigged the cryo-freeze units. Whenever I tried to wake someone up, the unit killed them, and I couldn't break the codes. When the ship finally crashed, people had started to build buildings around the wrecks."
Vash turned off the projector without any further words and stuffed it into his pocket. He turned to look at his two companions. "We'll stay here tonight," he told them. "Tomorrow, we'll head back to Inepril City."
The three of them shared the one room that night; Meryl insisted that Millie use the bed, and slept on the floor. Vash sat awake in one of the room's recliner.
Even at midnight, he was wearing his body armor, and had both of his pistols sitting on his lap. His coat was hanging on a peg on the door, and his travel pack was hooked between Meryl's cloak and his jacket.
Though the shutter on the window was closed, he still stared at it. The quiet sound of Meryl's breathing was helping him to think, even if it was nearly drowned out by Millie's snoring.
The sound of shattering glass brought Vash out of his chair. He holstered both pistols, then walked over to the window and yanked the shutter open.
How the glass was broken, he couldn't tell. It was a shock to him that nearly all of the glass in the large window had disappeared.
A shadow running across the roof of the building across the street caught his attention, and his eyes narrowed. "Meryl?" he called her, trying to wake her up. She groaned and rolled over, so he walked over to her.
Just as soon as he kneeled next to her, the sound of a bottle breaking on the floor behind him caught his attention. Hot on it's heels, the whoosh of igniting gasoline blew a gust of air past him.
Meryl was still sound asleep, exhausted from the worry of the last two weeks. A quick glance to the other side of the room, through the flames, showed him that Millie was in a similar condition. He picked Meryl up in one arm, then dove through the flames to grab Millie. On his way out the door, he was able to grab Meryl's cloak and Millie's stun gun also, but couldn't carry any of his own gear.
When he ran through the front doors of the hotel, he laid the two women down in the street. He gave no thought to the shadows at both ends of the street, he just wanted to wake Meryl up.
"Vash the Stampede!" a voice from one end of the street called out. "I've found you again!"
Vash stood and looked at the man calling out to him. The bounty hunter was easily twelve feet tall, and nearly as wide. He held a boomerang in his artificial left hand and was shaking the ground with each step he took.
"We found him, idiot," came a second voice from the opposite end of the street. This time when Vash looked, he saw a man about six feet tall with a wide brimmed hat, a trench coat, and a custom made rifle in his hands.
The Sixty Billion Double Dollar Man backed away from Meryl and Millie, who were just starting to wake up, and dropped the women's weapons. "What's the matter?" the massive bounty hunter asked. "Still afraid of blood?"
The boomerang came hissing down the street, slicing through houses, stores, and other buildings on both sides at the perfect height to cut of Vash's head. He ducked under the whirling blade, then ran away down an alley.
Behind him, he could hear both men as they tried to follow. A crowd of people trying to see the fire interfered with their progress, allowing him a steadily increasing lead as he made his way to the edge of town.
He didn't have to wait for very long before they caught up to him. They separated, circling around him. "We've spent a long time looking for you," the man in the hat said, training his rifle on Vash.
"After humiliating me like you did," the fat bounty hunter said, "you can be sure this is going to hurt." he readied his boomerang for another throw.
"Don't do this," Vash pleaded, dropping both of his hands for a quick draw. In the distance, over the roar of the fire, he could hear Meryl calling his name.
The fat man laughed, a booming sound. "Still afraid of blood, eh?"
"Come on," the cowboy urged. "With how he beat us last time, we can't give him the time to figure out how to now." He raised his rifle and triggered a shot.
When the bullet passed through the space Vash's head had occupied, the blonde man was on his knees and diving sideways, a good two feet below the lead projectile. He could see the details around him as thought time were frozen, and yet the sounds near him were amplified. The twin whispers of his pistols clearing their holsters were roars in his ears. He had enough time to paint the looks of surprise on the two bounty hunters faces. Time was his.
Between the two men, he could see Meryl and Millie skidding to a stop. Meryl's two derringers tracked upward ever so slowly toward the fat, red mohawked man while Millie's stun gun was swinging around toward the cowboy. Even though he wasn't looking where he was aiming, he knew: his pistols were on target, and he didn't have time to wait.
Four shots and the whuff of the stun gun rang out. The explosive, meaty thwack of projectiles meeting flesh combined with the smell of gunpowder drowned out the sound of the now blazing fire and it's smoke.
Vash turned his dive into a roll and came up on his feet as both bodies slumped to the desert floor. He could see the look of surprise on Meryl's face, and the look of anger on Millie's. He holstered his pistols and walked over to Meryl, who was by that time standing next to the larger bounty hunter.
"But . . .But . . . I . . . I wasn't aiming for . . ." she stuttered.
The gunman put his hands on his shoulders and let the calm mask on his face slip for a moment. "No, you weren't," he agreed, "you shot him in the leg."
"Then . . .You?"
"They deserved it Meryl," Millie answered for Vash. "Remember when we first met Mr. Vash? Do you remember what that bounty hunter was going to do to us when we thought he was the real Vash?"
Meryl nodded woodenly.
"We need to get back to the car now," Vash told the two women. He put his other hand on Millie's shoulder and pushed them both back toward town. "Since these two found me, others wont be too far behind. We need to leave for Inepril City. Now."