by S. A. Hunt
“I try to take care of it.”
They got in and he started the engine. It roared and rampaged, just waiting to break free and tear shit up.
The man, concern in his eyes: “You good?”
He watched her as if he were waiting for her to start screaming about witches again, his hands resting on the steering wheel. Robin took a deep breath and let it out in a shaky sigh.
“Yeah,” she said, pulling on her seatbelt. “Yeah, I think I am.”
Pulling out of the parking lot, Heinrich eased them down the long, winding driveway that would take them away from Medina Psychiatric forever. Twenty thousand pine trees buffeted the windshield with shadows from the setting sun. She rolled the window down and let the wind ruffle her greasy hair.
Man, I look rough, she thought, grimacing as she caught a glimpse of her own face in the side mirror. She looked homeless and destitute—Sasquatch hair, grody teeth, dark circles around her eyes, chapped lips from the constant licking caused by the anti-psychotic meds.
The car seemed sturdy. The door felt strong, heavy, solid.
“What if—” she murmured out the window.
“Hmm?” asked Heinrich.
“What if this is a new start? What if this is my life startin’ over?”
“We’ll call it a mulligan,” said Heinrich, turning on the radio. Low, barely a susurration of static and music. “Take two, like they say in the movies. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She reached over and turned the radio up, trawling through the stations until she found something other than country. Shinedown’s “The Crow and the Butterfly” filled the car with music.
“Not what I would have gone for,” said the man. “But I can dig it.”
“What you into, then?”
“Rock. Oldies. Creedence, Cash, AC/DC, Skynyrd, Hendrix.” He twisted the station dial until something with a little more vintage came in: Aerosmith. Dream on, dream on, dream on, dream on. “There we go. Can’t go wrong with KZ106 Tennessee.”
“My mom likes this station,” said the teenager.
A smile spread across the man’s face, and he turned it up until she could feel Steven Tyler’s voice through the seat. “Rock on, then, baby, rock on then.”
* * *
Thirteen-hour drive between Georgia and Texas. Almost nine hundred miles. They drove until it was past midnight, then stopped in Jackson, Mississippi, for the night and got a two-bed room at a rundown motel in the middle of nowhere. The next morning Heinrich changed out of the navy two-piece and into something definitely more his style: black jeans, white old-fashioned pioneer shirt, black vest. Over that went a black trench coat and a black gambler hat. The shirt’s collar was open a little bit, and she could see the pendant swinging around down in there.
“Like black much?” Robin asked, sitting cross-legged on the bed, eating an IHOP omelet. Best thing she’d ever eaten in her life.
The man tied an avocado-green paisley handkerchief around his neck and stuffed it into his shirt collar for a cravat. “If it’s good enough for Johnny Cash,” he said, checking himself in the mirror, “it’s good enough for me.”
“You look like you were born about a hundred years too late.”
“Got me fair and square. Felt that way all my life.”
She couldn’t shake the feeling she was in the wrong place, going the wrong way with the wrong man. She’d spent her whole life to date in Blackfield, and now she had that eerie, queasy sensation you get when you wake up on the bus and you realize you’d missed your stop.
She voiced her concerns to Heinrich, who chuckled. By then they were on the road again. At a nearby Target, Robin picked out a bunch of black clothes herself: T-shirt, ripped jeans, military jacket. “It’s called a ‘leap of faith,’ Robin Hood,” he told her. “You’re moving forward into the unknown. Shit is scary, I’ll give you that. I been there. But you’re in good hands now. You been knocked down, kiddo, but old Hammer is gonna pick you up and dust you off.”
The landscape slowly transformed from green forest to swampy delta to grassy plains, and slowly they were swallowed up by arid scrublands, which gave way to the open desert of Texas. Gave them a lot of time to talk, and Heinrich did most of the talking. He took the opportunity to continue his history lesson.
“There have always been witches. According to my research, the first witch’s name was Yidhra. She was a priestess of Ereshkigal, the Mesopotamian goddess of the land of the dead, Irkalla. Yidhra became a witch by sacrificing her own heart in exchange for a piece of Ereshkigal’s power.
“The goddess replaced Yidhra’s heart with what they called a libbu-harrani, Sumerian for ‘heart-road,’ to Irkalla, or more specifically, perhaps a sort of conduit—sort of like how a power outlet in a house pulls its electricity from the electric company. Her heart had been exchanged for a direct line to the afterlife. From this conduit, Yidhra derived her powers: divination, sorcery, necromancy, speaking with the dead, the familiarization of animals, that kind of shit.
“Over time, Yidhra became the Biblical ‘Witch of Endor,’ a minor celebrity in ancient Mesopotamia, a notorious sorcerer, oracle, and cult figure who drew in acolytes, followers who also sacrificed their hearts to Ereshkigal.
“By the time she was living out her twilight years in the village of Endor, she had convinced hundreds of women to give up their hearts to the goddess of the dead.”
Around lunchtime the Fairlane wound through Killeen, passing the desolate reaches of the army base of Fort Hood, where Heinrich stopped for gas and got Robin a Vanilla Coke, and they continued on.
On the other side of town, the environment got real sparse, real fast, looking like something out of the old Western movies she used to watch with her dad. Robin watched it pass by them, imagining John Wayne hurtling across the stony sand on his horse, cycling his lever-action Mare’s Leg rifle with one hand. Heinrich drove them onto a two-lane meandering almost all the way to Mexico, through stands of tall, scratchy bur oak and red cedar. He diverged from this down a rocky dirt road and came around a particularly large oak, parking in front of what looked like an old Mexican village. Or, at least, it would have if not for the weird script painted on signs nailed to the façades and the half-assed graffiti Kryloned all over the walls.
“Welcome to Hammertown,” said Heinrich. “It’s a facsimile of a Middle Eastern village. Those signs are in Arabic. It’s a ‘MOUT’ course—Movement Over Urban Terrain. Army built it for training purposes when Desert Storm kicked up, then built a new one on the fort and gave this one to the Killeen police. They eventually opened up the one on the fort to civilians, and abandoned this one.”
“You live here?”
“I sure do.”
“Nobody gives a shit?”
“They haven’t so far.” Heinrich opened the trunk and pulled out Robin’s gym bag, carrying it through the front gate. “Come on, I’ll show you where you’re gonna be sleeping.”
Her arrangements turned out to be at the top of a rather barren four-story cinder-block structure that, according to her new guardian, was used to train firefighters. She had a cot curtained off from a large, open room with a dusty Oriental rug in the middle of it. Place looked like the studio apartment of some small-time drugrunner, with enormous windows looking out over the Texas desert and posters of seventies blaxploitation movies and kung-fu flicks on the walls. A sectional couch that looked like it had been through the bombing of Hiroshima, a glass-top coffee table with a crack running diagonally across it, shelves upon shelves of military novels and Louis L’Amour adventures and gunsmithing books. The windows had mosquito netting instead of glass, so as the wind blew through they made weird soft thrumming noises.
A turntable sat on a beat-up nightstand. The man put on a record and Earth Wind & Fire began to tell them what would happen if they wished upon a star. “Make yourself at home, Robin Hood,” he said, pausing in the makeshift kitchenette to chug water out of a jug in the fridge. “I’m gonna go pick up some fo
od and some other stuff. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
With that, Heinrich trotted back down the stairs again, disappearing into the darkness.
A few minutes later, she heard the distant sound of the Fairlane starting up, and then there was just her and the music. She sat on the couch, trying to will herself, to center herself, to find her Zen and take stock of what kind of situation she’d gotten herself into.
After a while the song ended, and then the record ended. Robin took it off and found another one. Needle scratch, pop, crackle.
“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine,” sang Johnny Cash.
Robin stood at the window for a long time, the Texas breeze showering her in dry, odorless air through the black mesh. Crickets sang softly in the chaparral outside.
Plastic chests lay on the floor around Heinrich’s bed—a foam mattress on steel milk crates—and Robin went to them, started picking through them. One was full of military fatigues, or at least that’s what she thought they were. One was full of his underwear and socks. She opened another and found a rifle encased in gray foam.
Big. Tactical. Wicked-looking. This thing looked like it belonged in the hands of a revolutionary, or an insurgent. Her heart thumped. The situation hit her like a ton of cold, hard bricks—she had jumped in a car with a man she’d never met before, on the flimsiest and most fantastical of promises, and driven hundreds of miles to the middle of the desert to this burnt-out fortress of papier-mâché and plywood and cinder blocks, where now she knelt in the dust, looking down at a unmistakable tool of incredibly violent death.
Lying on the nightstand next to a dirty ashtray was an enamel lapel pin: green, with gold accents. It depicted a dog’s face, or perhaps a wolf, in profile, on top of a golden circle inscribed with a long sentence in an unreadable language. Looked paramilitary, or maybe one of those secret societies, like the Freemasons, or the Illuminati. Around the dog’s neck was a bow—not a cutie-pie bow, but the kind that fired arrows.
Whoa. Her hands went cold. She didn’t know this man at all.
“These things shall pass so don’t you worry,” sang Cash. “The darkest time is just one hour before dawn.”
She closed the trunk on the weapon and opened another one.
This one contained bundles of blankets and what she discovered to be electric clippers in a heavy plastic bag, along with a small collection of different-sized trimmer heads. She took it out and scanned the walls for a power outlet. One by the sink in the kitchenette. She plugged in the clippers and turned them on. The sound was startling in the solitude of the tower, a loud, venomous, live-wire hum.
Putting the blade to her temple, Robin began to shave her matted hair into the sink.
She was almost done when Heinrich returned just after lunch. He had armloads of grocery bags. He deposited them on the counter and watched her buzz her scalp as he put them away.
Soon, all that was left was a stripe of hair on top of her skull, a slightly crooked Mohawk of wavy locks. With little more than a meaningful glance, the man took the clippers from her and touched up the edges of the Mohawk, then washed the shorn-off hair into the garbage disposal and ground it up.
“Looks good. Welcome to the new you.” He pulled a pint of Ben & Jerry’s out of a plastic sack and slid it across the kitchen island like a wild-west bartender. “Hope you like ice cream.” He took out another pint, tore off the lid, and plunged a spoon into it. “I have two vices in this world: ice cream and not dressing like shit. And my car. Three vices. I bought you a carton of this because if you touch my ice cream I will kill you and leave your body for the coyotes to pick clean.”
They locked eyes for an interminable moment in which Robin thought she might scream and fling herself through the window and mosquito netting. Heinrich’s face was so incredibly intense it was horrible—soulless, cold, all full of unfeeling steel and veiled evil. In that instant she considered the fact she might have had a serious lapse in judgment in coming here.
Then his eyes fell from hers and the man laughed into his ice cream, a low, throaty belly laugh communicating more warmth and humor than she thought she had ever heard from a grown man.
“The look on your face,” he said, still laughing.
And that got her to grinning like an idiot, and when she looked for a spoon the first drawer she pulled open was full of silverware as if she’d lived here for years, and as she dug out a spoonful of Chubby Hubby and stuck it in her mouth she decided being a guerrilla witch-hunter had the potential to be a pretty sweet gig after all.
* * *
“And that’s when I started training with Heinrich,” said Robin. By the time she’d finished the tale, they had migrated to the kitchen. She sat on a stool at the island while Kenway cooked burgers on a griddle set in the island next to the stove. Her camera stood on a bendy-legged tripod at the end of the counter, next to a splat of postal envelopes.
“Was it like in the movies?” he asked, flipping a burger. Kssssss. “You know, like a montage with a music backing, and you’re beating up a kick-bag and throwing wooden stakes at a dummy?”
“That’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Robin gave him a dark eye. Noticing a glass vase full of coffee beans, she slid it over and took a sniff. “And … well, there were things like that I guess. It was mainly porin’ over esoteric texts. Library books, microfiche, photocopied newspapers, stolen documents.…”
“Stolen?”
“Heinrich was the type, he didn’t let a little thing like the law stop him from doin’ what he needed to do. Most of them he stole from the cult he used to belong to before he escaped. Never told me much about it, just that they’re nasty pieces of work.”
“I see.” He flipped another patty. Kssssss. “I assume you haven’t had to do anything like that, since you don’t seem to be hiding from the law.” Unwrapping a piece of cheese, he added, “You aren’t running from the law, are you? Living in the van would make a lot more sense if you were.”
“Heinrich had already gotten all the stuff he’d needed by the time I met him,” said Robin. “Of course there’s probably a couple dozen unsolved cases of arson out there.” As well as assault cases, vandalism, manslaughter, and God knows what else. Need-to-know info. She put a finger to her lips. “But I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Kenway sighed thoughtfully and put the cheese on the meat as it sizzled. “You’re really something, lady. I don’t know what to do with you.”
You could kiss me, she thought, but didn’t say. “Thanks for giving me a place to hang out for the evening that ain’t my van or the pizzeria. And for the Internet.”
He smirked up at her. “And the burger.”
“And the burger. I love pizza, but I think I’m overdosing.”
“So how did the YouTube thing start?” Kenway asked, putting some buns on plates and scooping up the burgers onto them.
“You know how in football, the team keeps the game recordings and goes over them later? Heinrich used to do that so we could watch them and fine-tune our techniques. I was the one who suggested we could put the tapes on the Internet and make money on ’em.” Her stomach growled at the smell rising off the griddle. “At first, he was dead set against it, but after I showed him how much like some of the other YouTube series it was, and how much money we could make on it, he warmed up to the idea. As long as I made sure he didn’t appear in any of them, and if he did, his face was censored out.”
A noise came from Robin’s jeans, startling both of them. She dug in her pocket and took out her phone. Alarm set to go off at six. She put it away and slid down off the stool, opening a cabinet. “Where’s your glasses?”
“I don’t wear glasses.”
She grinned awkwardly. “Drinking glasses, you dingus.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Kenway opened one of the other doors. Robin took down a glass and filled it at the sink, then went to her laptop on the coffee table and dug a prescription bottle out of her messenger bag. She tipped out a tablet and swallowed it wit
h a gulp of water.
He watched her with curiosity, but didn’t say anything.
Putting the bottle away, Robin went back to the island to sit down and drink the rest of the glass. Kenway gave her a curious eye.
“The pills are for, uhh … well, the shrinks say I got delusions, or something. Hallucinations. Nightmares. PTSD. I had night terrors when I was a kid, and I guess the things I been through just made them worse.” She picked at a fleck of color in the marble counter. “The medication helps. I did have Zoloft too, but I stopped taking it when I ran out of the bottle they gave me at the psych ward. I don’t like it. I mean I’m not a big fan of the Zoloft zaps, but I like being a robot even less.”
And to be honest, I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m even having hallucinations. At this point, taking the meds had become force of habit … but after the encounter at Miguel’s Pizza, her faith in the anti-psychotics had been shaken. And having her faith shaken in something she’d been relying on to maintain her sanity made her feel vulnerable.
Kenway seemed to be uncomfortable. He rolled his shoulders and tugged on his shirt as if it didn’t fit right.
“Guess that probably put you off me, didn’t it?” Robin murmured, folding her arms. “It usually does. Guys. Hell, girls, even. I’ve … tried to date before, but as soon as I break out the pill bottle, they’re out the door. Confucius say, don’t stick your dick in crazy. Even if you ain’t got one, I reckon.”
Pursing his lips, Kenway looked at her—really looked at her, a burning, assessing, ant-under-a-magnifying-glass stare—and then he put down the spatula and rolled up one of his pants legs, revealing the prosthetic foot. He unbuckled it, a laborious process with grunting and pulling and ripping of Velcro, then pulled the foot off, leaving a nub wrapped in a bandage.
As big as Kenway was, the false leg looked as if it were three feet tall, with an articulated ankle and a silicone cup. Had a shoe on it, of course, the match to his other Doc Marten.
