Black Magic

by Russell James

  “The weather’s supposed to go to hell in a handbasket soon,” he said. “FPL has repair crews stationed in Sebring ready to start repairing downed lines as soon as the storm passes. I’ve pulled all the trash cans from the parks and all the vehicles are secure in the parking lot.”

  “There’s no help coming,” Flora blurted out. “No sheriff’s deputies, no FDEM, no National Guard. Stuart tells me the Food Bonanza is being picked clean down to cocktail onions and canned beets. We are going to get pounded and we are not prepared.”

  Andy sat in the chair by her desk. “Citrus Gladers are pretty resilient, used to standing on their own. The fact that the Food Bonanza is cleaned out means that they have taken their safety into their own hands.”

  “But many can’t,” she said. “Mary Wickersham out in her little trailer. Jenny Bingham here in town with no car and using a walker. Someone needs to help them. I need to help them.”

  There had to be some way for her to shelter the townspeople in need. Her eyes lit up.

  “The bomb shelter,” she said. “We could open that.”

  The bomb shelter, like all the infrastructure of Citrus Glade, was a remnant from another decade. In the 1960s, the Cuban Missile Crisis had the country on edge, but it put the fear of the Apocalypse into South Florida. Citrus Glade had gone whole hog on Civil Defense and hollowed out the basement of City Hall into a bomb shelter, complete with hermetically sealed doors, air conditioning/recirculation and a generator that was also a backup for City Hall. Those townspeople were going to survive the bomb so they could slowly starve to death in America’s radioactive remains. Access was through ground-level storm shelter doors against the building’s east side.

  “It’s ready,” Andy said. “I cleaned it up last month. MREs and water and first aid supplies are still stockpiled from when Hurricane Katrina brushed the area. I kicked on the generator and it checks out.”

  Flora sat up straighter in her chair. She could make this happen. She just needed to let everyone know the shelter would be open. She punched a button on the intercom on her desk, another technological leftover.

  “Serina?” she asked her receptionist/clerk. “Can you set up a reverse 911 call for me?”

  Serina clicked back amid some background static. “Sure. And tell Andy that Pete McNichol just called with two gator carcasses for pickup.”

  “Well,” Andy said as he stood, “looks like we both have a busy morning ahead.”

  Pete McNichol’s house was out past the town limits, north on CR 12 but south of the canal. Technically he was out of Andy’s limited jurisdiction and the county should have hauled away the gator carcasses. But Pete told Serina that the county was too busy with hurricane prep to help him out and there was a duo of dead gators there. Andy knew that at seventy-eight, the frail man wasn’t going to have someone else to turn to.

  He pulled up in front of the concrete-block bungalow and there wasn’t a carcass in sight. Well, Pete didn’t say they were in the front yard, but if they weren’t by the road, did they die of heart attacks?

  He opened the door of his truck and the front door of the house flew open in response. Pete McNichol stood there barefoot. He looked even smaller than he was in blue jeans and a baggy white shirt. He wore a pair of large, thick glasses. He waved at Andy like he was shooing gnats away.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” he shouted in a reedy little voice.

  Dead animals had a pretty flexible schedule, but Andy put a little spring in his step to accommodate the panicky man. Some people got so itchy around a carcass.

  He stepped into the house. Pete slammed the door behind him. The place smelled of mothballs, something Andy was sure the government had long ago declared toxic.

  “Thank God,” he said. Pete pulled Andy toward the sliding glass doors that faced the backyard. “They are in the back. You have to take them away. They ate my poodle Alice. They stared at me all night after that. They’ve got to go.”

  “Whoa, whoa. These aren’t dead?”

  “Not yet. See, look at them out there.”

  Pete pointed to his backyard. The yard backed up to a small lake. Two ten-foot gators lay on the grass between the house and the water. They looked asleep. A thin rope ran from a pole in the ground near the house to a spot a few feet from the sleeping reptiles. The end of the rope was freshly frayed. Adios, little Alice. Who leaves bait like that tethered outside by a lake in Florida?

  “Mr. McNichol, I don’t have anything to kill them with. You told Serina they were dead.”

  “They will be,” he said. “Wait.”

  He stepped into the living room and walked back in with an M-16 assault rifle. Andy jumped back.

  “Hey! What are you doing with that? Point that at the ground!”

  Pete frowned and lowered the muzzle.

  “I know how to handle a weapon, boy. Got this one after I got back from Nam. I’ll go out and blast ’em, then you can haul them off. That’ll keep the sons of bitches from staring at me.”

  The old man’s hands shook as he held the rifle. He squinted at Andy though his glasses. Pete couldn’t hit the pond, let alone the gators, especially being so upset about his dog.

  “I’ll take care of it, Mr. McNichol.”

  Pete looked Andy in the eye, then out the door at the gators. He handed Andy the gun. Andy hadn’t touched an assault rifle in a long time. By choice. He remembered the familiar plastic feel of the butt stock and hand grips. It did not feel good.

  Andy did have the state permits to shoot nuisance gators. He had to for the DPW. Of course he’d never done it. The county boys had too much fun with it. He really didn’t think he’d have to do it now. If he went out there and made a ruckus, the gators would shuffle off back into the pond and everyone would be happy. He checked that the rifle was on safe. He noticed a lot of rust around the trigger. He stepped out the back door.

  The gators were adults, a bit smaller than the one Andy pulled off the road a few days ago. Only folks near the top of the food chain could rest so easily in the open. Time to shoo them home.

  “Hey gators!” Andy yelled. He stomped his feet on the ground. He slapped his hand against the rifle’s butt stock.

  The gators’ eyes stayed shut.

  Alligators could move fast as a horse when they wanted to, especially short distances. Andy wasn’t going to get any closer. He did have a very expensive noisemaker in his hands. He flipped off the safety. He checked the chamber. The crazy old man had already chambered a round. Andy brought the rifle to his shoulder.

  Multiple flashbacks flipped through his mind. Basic training, qualification ranges, arms room details, dusty desert roads, ambush responses. Sweat beaded on his brow. His heart hammed out a rapid beat. He sighted down the barrel at the ground a few feet in front of the gators. He exhaled and squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle popped and he caught the familiar, unwelcome smell of burnt cordite. The round punched the ground in front of the gators and sprayed their noses with sand. Their eyes popped open. They blazed bright aquamarine.

  “Holy shit,” Andy gasped. The rifle barrel drifted downward.

  “Told ya they stared at me!” Mr. McNichol yelled from the doorway.

  The gators bellowed and charged. Their mouths opened to reveal pink tongues surrounded by rows of gleaming white teeth. They moved fast.

  Andy reacted before he could think. He brought the rifle to bear and fired. One round right, one round left, back and forth. Chunks of flesh flew from the gators as bullets hit the mark. A bullet hit one gator in the foreleg and blasted it clean away. The gator lurched downward and its momentum dug its jaw into the sand. Andy drew down on the second one and sent three rounds into its midsection. The impact rolled the gator on its back and it fell still.

  The first gator raised itself up on three feet and opened its mouth with a hiss. Andy sent a round down its throat. The bullet tumbled through the animal’s body and exited at the other end, severing the back half of its tail in an explosion of blood and fle
sh.

  Andy took a few steps back and rested against the side of the house. What in the hell was that?

  Mr. McNichol walked over to the tailless gator carcass and gave it a kick. “Serves you right for eating Alice, you son of a bitch.” Tears welled in his eyes. His hands shook.

  Andy felt sorry for the old man, living out here in the middle of nowhere, wife gone on to whatever was beyond our mortal horizon, and now his dog, their dog eaten by some leftover from the age of dinosaurs. He cleared the rifle and snapped it to safe. He handed it back to Mr. McNichol. The old man shook his head.

  “Hell, you had better keep it. I shot a hole in the wall with it last night. Why do you think I waited for you to get here to shoot the damn things?”

  Andy slung the rifle across his shoulder, a move that felt more familiar and far less foreboding doing it than he’d expected. He headed back to the truck and wondered if the two carcasses would fit in the bed.

  In the short time he had been here, the sky’s horizons had filled with dark, bellicose thunderheads.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Vicente Ferrer stared out the shop window at the worsening weather. He’d lived his whole life around the Caribbean and had never seen a storm this strong blow up so fast. His mother would have blamed a vengeful God.

  Vicente had woken up this morning fully wired. Well before coffee could take credit, his mind had hit full speed. He was amped up on something and ready to get things in order. There was something under his skin, some itch he couldn’t define that needed to be scratched.

  Vicente’s big concerns were about the damage the hurricane might bring. Not the damage to Ferrer Motors and his inventory, but to the government property he had a special interest in. The NSA tower was rated for hurricane strength winds he had been told, but that promise was a bit too vague. If something went wrong out there, the NSA would have repair crews on it before he knew, and those crews would surely find the little modifications he and Squirrelly had put into place. He didn’t want to put a kink in that new revenue stream.

  His cell phone rang and displayed a blocked number. He gritted his teeth. His unlisted cell only got calls from one blocked number.

  “Hello.”

  “Vicente, amigo.” Raoul’s voice had the usual cheery familiarity to it. Like the playful yip of a pit bull before it clamped on your arm.

  “Raoul. Good to hear from you.”

  “Our delivery had better be on time.”

  Way to cut to the chase.

  “Boss, Hurricane Rita’s beating us to death here.” A premature assessment, but Raoul was on another continent.

  “Hurricane Rita don’t mean shit,” Raoul rumbled. “You don’t need to worry about that storm. You need to worry about the storm we’ll unleash if our shipment is a minute late in Macon. And the storm will double if the shipment is light again.”

  Son of a bitch. That shit couldn’t have been light. Unless that twat Juliana made a personal withdrawal from the Bank of Colombia after hours.

  “No problems, Boss. It will be there. On time. All of it.”

  “It better be or the driver won’t come back in one piece.” Vicente was always the driver. The line went silent.

  This was ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. The Colombians needed that coke to roll to Georgia. The Ukrainians had already put a deposit down on the data that was about to flow their way. He needed a clone. Instead he had…

  “Juliana!”

  She wandered in from the shop office. She had abandoned her trailer for the relative safety of Ferrer Motors’ concrete-block construction. He marched over to her, pulled the truck keys from his pocket and shoved them in her hand.

  “You’re driving to Macon.”

  “Cente, no!” she whined. “The weather, it’s so bad. I cannot drive that truck. I don’t even know where to go.”

  “Bullshit. I taught you to drive it and you drove it fine when we went up there last time. You’ve seen the route three times. Get in the cab and go.”

  “Northbound traffic will be hell…”

  “No, our lives at the wrong end of the Colombians will be hell.” He raised his arm as if to back-hand her. “Get the fuck out of here. Now!”

  “I need some clothes,” she surrendered. “Cente, let me get a bag. I’ll be back. I swear.”

  “Pack a bag and get going,” he said. This was one of the times he wished she’d pack a bag for good.

  Juliana slunk out of the shop.

  Vicente paced the garage floor and fumed at the idiot girl. She’d stolen from the Colombians. Could she do anything stupider? We’ll if she’d skimmed a bit off the top this time, she’d be there to pay the price when the Colombians weighed it up. They’d get retribution. He’d get rid of her. He’d be square with the syndicate. South American problem solved.

  Next issue, the tower. He dialed Squirrelly’s cell phone. Voicemail picked up.

  “Dude, it’s Squirrelly. Rita’s on her way, so I’m heading north today. Leave a message.”

  Vicente pounded the end button before the annoying beep sounded. The weasel had skipped out ahead of the storm. He was the only one who could pull the skimmer off properly.

  Did everything have to be such a problem? When he finally blew out of this town, he was hiring better help.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The firmament foretold a horror story to come.

  By the afternoon, Autumn saw all the signs. Clouds raced across the sky in great counterclockwise bands like phantom cars on a tight circular track, darkened with the growing energy they absorbed. Then there would be wind and rain and darkness. Irregular gusts of wind already blasted her Everglades outpost. They would get worse before they got better.

  She had caught fuzzy pixelated snips of the Miami TV weathercasts and the weathermen were shooting straight. This storm was going to be major and it was going to be local.

  Oscar sat on the steps just inside the open RV side door. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open as he sniffed the air. He spit out a half-sneeze and settled down into a compact little hunch, fur stiffened. He took up watch over the swaying wetland grasses.

  Autumn thought her location would be okay to ride out the storm. It took a lot of rain to raise the water levels of the broad shallow swamp and the rise she was on was several feet above the waterline. There were no large trees to come crashing down on her little metal shell of a home and she could reposition it into the wind as the storm shifted. Better to ride it out here.

  As she uploaded the morning’s observations, Oscar let loose a low defensive growl.

  “Oscar?” She rose and stuck her head out the door. The cat was hunkered down on the stoop, the fur along his spine bristled like a feline Mohawk, ears back against his head and streamlined for combat. His tail snapped back and forth.

  An enormous python lay coiled at the base of the steps, head raised in striking position. Its black tongue flicked through the air to taste the range to its feline target. Autumn caught her breath when she saw its eyes. They were a piercing bright blue.

  Her maternal instinct smothered the scientist in her. She grabbed the shovel by the door and leapt over Oscar. He dove behind her into the trailer.

  The snake hissed. Autumn hit the ground and the snake rocketed forward like a brown/green comet. She flicked the shovel up just in time to shield her neck. The snake’s head hit the spade with a clang, like it had been struck with a hammer. The impact bent Autumn’s wrists. She sidestepped and lowered the shovel, expecting to see a dead snake.

  Instead it lay coiled for a second strike. Its mouth gaped open to expose needle-sharp fangs. Blood poured down from a gash between its eyes, unfazed and burning blue. It struck again.

  Autumn swung like a baseball player. The shovel rang as it struck the snake’s skull. The upswing sent the snake’s head in a wide arc. It dropped down on its back, lighter belly exposed, head cocked at an unsurvivable angle. Its eyes were dark.

  Oscar wailed and Autumn whirled in his
direction. A second snake girdled the cat’s midsection. Orange fur stuck out between the tightening coils. Oscar snapped in vain at the scaly tail that writhed out of reach. To his rear, the python’s head rose to strike, blue eyes focused on the back of the cat’s neck.

  Autumn launched the shovel like a javelin. The blade struck the snake below the head and then pinned it to the side of the RV. Its coils unraveled and the freed cat sunk its teeth into the snake’s underbelly. The python’s head, not quite severed by the blade, snapped back and forth in a futile search for revenge. Its eyes went dark and it dropped with a thump on the steel blade.

  Oscar gave the carcass a hiss and bounded through the RV door. Underbrush rustled behind her. Autumn spun around. Seven snakes slithered in her direction, fourteen blazing points of blue locked on her and closing fast.

  She yanked the shovel from the gash in the RV’s side. The severed snake head lay in the shovel. The scientist in her surfaced for a split second and she flicked the head and the shovel through the doorway. She bounded in and slammed the door behind her. A python hit the tiny door window with a crack. The glass shattered but held.

  Autumn scrambled into the driver’s seat. Through the panoramic front windows she saw that pythons surrounded the RV. If some suicidal snake did break any of the glass…

  She flicked the ignition key. The dash lights dimmed with each labored turn of the starter. The gauge said the batteries were fully charged. She pumped the accelerator and tried again. The motor turned even slower.

  Not now, she thought. C’mon, Porky! You always start first try!

  A snake pounded against the side of the RV. Out the left window, a python coiled for a puncturing strike at the RV’s front tire. Autumn’s heart raced.

  She jammed the ignition key toward the dash. The starter uttered a long loping moan with each labored turn of the engine. The cranking wound slower and slower. The dash lights went dark.

  Suddenly, the engine roared to life. A wet ripping sound splattered under her feet. Twin red sprays of python vomited from the RV’s front wheel wells as the fan blade shredded an under-hood snake. Autumn threw the shifter into drive and floored it. The RV spun a plume of sand behind it and lumbered forward. Autumn cut the wheel and the behemoth lurched sideways as it headed for the highway. The front wheels hit a python the size of a speed bump and Autumn slammed against the steering wheel with the impact. But momentum carried the day and the RV made its escape to the highway.