“Anything new?” I asked.
Remi gusted a laugh. “Oh yeah. There’s a rodeo in town, and one of the bulls staged an escape. Guess they are chasin’ him all to hell and gone out in the sticks. But he’s a smart old boy, and he’s using the terrain to his advantage.”
“Can’t be that hard to catch a bull. I mean, they’re cows.”
Remi’s drawl was pronounced. “Uhhh-huh. Your vast knowledge of All Things Rodeo teach you that?”
“Seriously! I’ve seen cows at the state fair.”
“Seriously. Some are mean suckers, and particularly good at figurin’ ways to get around humans.” He rose, bent over to finish the shutdown sequence on the computer. “At any rate, no angel stuff. But I did read up on the arson fires. No leads yet beyond knowing the accelerants. No claims of responsibility. But this is the second batch of places of worship burned down, and we have to assume this will continue. Because it is all about the surrogates getting rid of holy ground.” He straightened as the computer shut off, popped me on the shoulder as he walked past me. “Let’s hope Mary Jane can give us some insight into this asshole, whether he’s playing at being Jack the Ripper, or he is Jack the Ripper.”
I followed. “Isn’t it past visiting hours?”
“They said we could see her. And anyway, we need to ask her some questions.” Remi put his hat on. “She may not be up to it quite yet, but doesn’t have to be tonight. Just sooner, I hope, than later. Let’s vamoose.”
The stairs were wooden and a little slippery and dogs can’t generally reach bannisters, so Remi and I nearly got bowled over when the pittie came scramble-sliding down the stairs behind us. He splatted on the floor as we watched and winced, but bounced right back up again, grinning and wagging as he accompanied us to the back door.
“Uhh,” I said. “I think he thinks he’s coming.”
Remi considered. “We leave him here, he might eat the tables. We take him with, he might eat my truck.”
“He didn’t eat the toilet last night. Or my bed. When he applied teeth to anything, he just nibbled on my chin.”
“I thought you were going to take him into a shelter to get him scanned for a chip.”
“Hello? I was in the throes of the red death and red rum and red everything last night, remember? I’ll get it done tomorrow morning.”
Remi opened the door. “Uh-huh .”
“I will. He’s too nice a dog to be a stray. Someone’s missing him.”
The dog was allowed all of the back seat, and not once during the entirety of the drive to the hospital did he attempt to eat Remi’s truck. He just stood with his front legs braced on the console between the front seats, panted a lot, and dripped saliva everywhere. Including down our arms.
“Sliming is not eating,” I pointed out, wiping at my jacket sleeve.
Remi shot me side-eye. “And dog smears on windows is nose art.”
“Yes.”
* * *
—
Remi was required to show ID at the nurse’s station in order to get clearance to see Mary Jane. He did inquire as to whether she had family already there or coming, and was told family lived across the country and it would be another day before their arrival. Boss and co-workers planned to come the next day, but until then, he and I were it.
The nurse would not address Kelly’s injuries with us, which made sense; that was a family matter. Stable condition, lightly sedated, monitored. Sleeping, mostly. That was all the intel we were allowed.
So as we walked into the two-patient room, we found the first bed empty and Kelly in the other, next to a large window. The view of the Peaks at night was mostly black silhouettes against stars, but I knew the daytime panorama of brilliant blue skies, bright sun, rich green-and-gold slopes. Unfortunately what I mostly associated with the mountains was a demon-possessed mountain lion, a broken Grigori angel, African volcano god, park ranger, two guys still fumbling their way around the End of Days. And Jack the Ripper.
Typical hospital room: bedside hosted a couple of rolling machines featuring blinking, bouncing lights, with leads running to Kelly under the top sheet; orders written on a whiteboard; IV cath and tubing. Her head was bandaged, all wrapped up in white gauze. She slept. Dark patches discolored the fragile flesh below her eyelids and lashes, and her bottom lip was swollen. But otherwise her face, though pale and hollowed with fine bones more in evidence, showed no injury. She did have bruises on her wrists and forearms from being harnessed. But if the Ripper had used his knife anywhere besides shearing her hair away, the sheet and thin blanket hid the results.
Having seen the photo of what Jack had done to the prior victim, I counted this a win. Kelly was damn lucky.
Remi moved close to her bedside. He removed his hat, held the brim in both hands at belt-level. “Hey,” he said quietly.
I let Remi take precedence and stayed back from the bed. I couldn’t help but think that Mary Jane Kelly might actually blame us for allowing her to be abducted. Supposedly she was in our care, but first Shemyazaz dragged her out of the Zoo to a mountain cave, and then Jack grabbed her on the way down while she was in our company.
I found I much preferred it when the only ones at risk, the only true targets, were Remi and me.
“Hey,” he repeated.
She moved her head slightly, made a small sound. After a moment her eyes blinked open, slowly focused. She swallowed, licked her lips, swallowed again.
In that moment, seeing a woman I actually knew on the receiving end of a demon’s demented appetites, in the battered flesh and not in imagination, I realized the enormity of the burden laid upon us. Not to resent it, to deny the concept, but to understand it, to grasp the deeper implications. Remi and I running from demons, ghosts, and beasts? Not what we ever imagined, certainly not what we wanted to do, but according to Grandaddy we were literally made to do this. Spark, glob, fart, a celestial Petri dish of heavenly cells, whatever. We were bred for it, born for it, raised for it, trained for it. But Mary Jane Kelly wasn’t. And she and all the other ordinary humans were exactly what Ambriel warned they would be: collateral damage.
We were not ordinary humans. We were of the heavenly host, and expected to do our duty, whether we liked it or not.
Lucifer wanted the planet for himself. The angels wanted the planet for humans. The devil didn’t care who or how many he killed. The angels did—but people would die anyway.
Whether Jack the Ripper from the 1880s was a sleeper demon in human drag, or a human born an ordinary but evil man, he’d carved up people then, and he carved up people now.
‘Call me Legion,’ he’d told me that first night outside the Zoo while wearing a woman’s form, ‘for we are many.’
‘Call me Iñigo Montoya.’
Maybe Ambriel was right. Maybe Remi and I really weren’t ready. Maybe Grandaddy should have waited to deploy us, should have trained us longer. Made us better.
But the world had cracked open and hell belched demons. You field whatever army you can in such circumstances. Maybe all of the newbies like Remi and me were, in military parlance, the ‘forlorn hope,’ the band of soldiers undertaking a suicide mission for the good of the army. But someone had to be. And sometimes that forlorn hope made the battle winnable against seemingly insurmountable odds.
Kelly’s eyes were clearing. She saw me, but vaguely, I thought; true focus came when she looked at Remi.
She swallowed heavily. Her lips parted. Her voice was weak, but the words were decipherable. “He wants you,” she said, “and he’s going to have you.”
I moved close to the bed. “Why us? Why us specifically?”
“He said . . .” She was clearly fading, blinking long and slow. “He said he picked you in the fantasy draft.”
* * *
—
Remi and I were quiet on the drive back to the Zoo. The dog, who had not eaten a
ny part of the truck but had created much imaginative nose art on the insides of all the glass, took advantage of the half-lowered window behind me to catch scent upon the breeze as we drove. Eyes slitted, tongue hanging, the loose skin of his mouth and cheeks flapped. He looked ridiculous—and ridiculously happy.
It was about 10:00 p.m. when we rolled in. The parking lot was emptying, as the kitchen closed at 9 p.m. Ganji had promised to cook me a steak, but I wasn’t really in the mood for a big slab of meat. Remi took the truck around back, pulled it close to the sodium light hanging on the old telephone pole, shut off the engine.
The dog went berserk. The dog went absolutely batshit crazy with growling, snarling, and frantic, eardrum-imploding barking. Since he did this from directly behind us, Remi and I both about went through the roof.
I twisted in my seat. “Hey! Whoa whoa whoa! Easy! Knock it off! You just took ten years off my life!”
The dog did none of those things. The dog was an explosion of bone, muscle, skin, and teeth, scratching and digging at the window. The noise he made was horrendous.
And then Cerberus paced out of the shadows into yellow light.
This time the snake tail was obvious as it writhed and coiled, mouth opening to display fangs and forked tongue. The three canine heads worked independently of one another, but in this case all were lowered. He was shoulder-heavy, bulked up like a body-builder because the three heads tied into his body there. Massive muscle across the withers was defined as hackles rose. Hair stood up in a stiff line along the spine from neck to tail root. Pointed ears were pinned to his heads. Three sets of lips drew back from three monstrous dental arcades. The canines were massive fangs. Cerberus licked his lips repeatedly, muzzles accordioned into folds from noses to lower eyelids. The eyes themselves were bright red against black, mottled hair. Overall his body mass, not including the heads, was the size of a Great Dane on steroids.
One head went up to make the horrific screeching noise, but we couldn’t hear it. We could see the other heads rise, tip back, see the monster assume a splay-legged, balanced posture and we knew all three throats were screaming, but the pittie was so loud in the seat immediately behind us that we couldn’t hear anything else.
“Got the machete?” I shouted over the frantic dog.
Remi shook his head. That left us with guns and knives, which had already proven useless despite being blessed by holy oil and our breath.
We were not getting past Cerberus to reach the building.
Remi looked over his shoulder beyond the furious pittie. His gunrack carried a Winchester ’73 rifle, a shotgun, and a coiled rope similar to the one ghost cowboy Burton Mossman had used to haul my bike out of the ravine. I’d learned, thanks to Remi’s instruction, that these were not soft ropes, not flexible ropes, but somewhat stiff and rough, intentionally shaped into loops at their manufacture. If you dropped one of these, the coils would loosen, enlarge, but the general shape remained, so that it was easy for a cowboy to coil his rope back into something akin to a wreath to tie onto his saddle.
I was astonished. “You want to lasso it?”
“No. I want to rope it.” He was deadly serious. “If I could get a big enough loop around two of those heads, or even all three, we’d have him. Or I can heel him like a calf, stretch him. Try, leastaways. Tie ’im off while you grab me the machete and then I’ll have at those heads one by one.”
I gave it another go. “You want to rope a three-headed, snake-tailed, hell-born monster dog?”
“Not sayin’ it would be easy. But—”
He never got to finish. The frantic pit bull in the seat behind us finally broke out the half-dropped window and piled himself like a guided missile right into Cerberus.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Remi and I had the F-bombs drop right out of our mouths at the same time, and then we dropped out of the truck. I had my gun in hand, Remi had his in hand, and I suspect he knew as well as I that we could do nothing. It was now between the pittie and the monster, no humans wanted. Primal instinct, predator and prey, two male dogs hopped up on testosterone blind to anything but the desire to kill one another.
We kept shifting position, trying for a new angle just in case the dogs tied themselves up so tightly that, like Greco-Roman wrestlers, no one could move, and we’d have clear shots. But there also existed the possibility that Remi and I might shoot one another.
It was horrific. That we didn’t have onlookers piling out from the Zoo was due to the hour, the noise level inside of jukebox, pool balls clacking, people talking loudly. And because now that the dogs had fully engaged, their mouths were full of hair, skin, and muscle. They growled. They did not bark.
Tommy, my mentor in bike rebuilding and, basically, life in general, had owned a pit bull. Peter was a good old dog, broad as a barn, massive of head, giant of heart. He loved greatly. And he was literally a weapon.
Hell, even a Chihuahua can be a weapon. Anything alive with teeth, courage, and dedication can be a weapon. A full grown pit bull, one of the strongest breeds in the world, brought to battle a mix of mass, muscle, and momentum, and sheer determination to dominate its rival.
But a pit bull does not have a snake for a tail nor three heads.
And then I realized the dog—our dog—was drawing away. And I realized also, to my shock, that he had selected not Cerberus’s throat, of which there were three, along with three sets of teeth, but the single abdominal cavity.
I knew Cerberus was dead, with his belly torn apart. Also, the pittie would not have walked away otherwise.
So much for heaven-born men with guns and knives. Just leave it to the dog.
He was done in, poor guy. Bleeding, limping, head hanging, licking repeatedly at his lips. But he was on his feet. He wobbled his way to us, then sat down. And waited.
But only for a moment. As Remi and I both surged toward him, his front legs slid apart and he went down.
“Truck box!” Remi said urgently. He tossed the key-fob to me. “I need the tarp, the incontinence pads, and there’s a green toolbox, big. Bring it all.”
Incontinence pads? But I clambered up into the truck bed, unlocked the hinged metal box that ran from one side of the truck to the other just behind the cab, started pulling out what Remi had directed me to bring. I scrambled back down, took four long strides to the dog. Knelt down.
“Alive?” I asked.
Remi’s hands were moving over the dog swiftly and with competence. “So far.”
“What else do you need?”
“I need you to spread the tarp. Then, get into that tool box and you’ll see a spray bottle marked ALCOHOL. Spray down the tarp. Put the incontinence pads down; they’ll keep the field sterile, more or less. We’re going to lay him on ’em, doctor the one side, then do the other. I don’t see any gaping wounds, but we gotta get everything flushed, cleaned out, treated with antibiotic ointment. Dirt’s bad enough, but we don’t know what kind of saliva Cerberus had.”
I did as instructed with the tarp, sprayed it with alcohol, then spread the plastic-backed incontinence pads and told Remi all was ready. He picked up the dog just enough to get him off the ground, shifted him to the makeshift ‘exam room.’
“What next?”
“There’re a couple of bottles of saline eyewash in there, like for contact lenses. Also large syringes, no needles. Pull those out, start filling them with the saline wash. He’s mostly lacerations and punctures. We are going to start flushing everything, try to lift out the dirt and debris. This side, other side, butt, legs, and chest.”
The two of us spent some time doing the flushing routine carefully on the one side. The dog whined, scrabbled at the tarp in an effort to rise, and I pressed him back, stroked him, talked to him. Soothed as best I could.
“Okay,” Remi said. “Look for boxes of Triple Antibiotic Ointment. We’re going to pack each laceration with the ointment, b
ut the punctures need to stay open for now. Then I need you to get on your phone and see if there’s an emergency vet in town. If not, what regular vet opens earliest in the morning?”
We tended the dog with the antibiotic ointment. Then we lifted him as best we could, turned him, lay him down again. As Remi began the flushing and packing routine all over again, I got on my phone and checked Google.
I shook my head. “No emergency clinic. Got a vet opening at 6 a.m.”
“Okay. I need you to go get me a t-shirt. Otherwise he’ll goober up whatever he sleeps on tonight.”
I started to say I had no t-shirts left, but did not. I just went inside and right to Ganji, asked for one of his. He had an extra in the office and gave it willingly, came outside with me.
Remi saw him. “Ganji—can you go cut up a chunk of cheese, bring it back out?” To me, he said, “There’s a box of Benadryl in there. I need you to get me . . . oh, say, three of the 25 mg tabs. This bad boy’s probably 70-80 pounds, I’m guessin’.”
When Ganji returned, Remi tucked all three tabs inside the cheese, then let the pittie sit up. He fed him the cheese and tablets, scritched him around the ears, spoke to him calmly in a low voice.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now we put the t-shirt on him, take him up to your room. Benadryl’s used for anxiety as well as allergies and insect stings. He’ll sleep. Vet first thing tomorrow morning. You go on with him; I’ll clean up here.” He cast a glance at the body of Cerberus, a misshapen heap beneath the sodium light. “I’ll wrap that up in the tarp, drop you off at the vet’s tomorrow, then take it out and bury it. We don’t need anyone coming across a three-headed, snake-tailed corpse.”
I leaned down, told the pittie he got to sleep on my bed again. Watching him walking slowly in a human t-shirt was mildly amusing. He did need help getting up the stairs, but amazingly had enough oomph left to get himself up on my bed, the malingerer. This time he curled himself up right in the center. I resolved that I could bend my limbs around him one way or another.
Sinners and Saints Page 24
