The Influence

by Bentley Little

  His eyes still on the child, who had not moved a muscle, Ross pulled carefully up in front of the bar, pulling behind the only other vehicle he saw on the street: Jackass McDaniels’ dented red pickup truck.

  The door to the establishment was closed, and Ross honked the horn, hoping to see McDaniels come out.

  The door remained closed.

  “I don’t like this,” he muttered.

  Kevin said nothing. Whatever doubts his nephew might have had, Ross could tell that they had fled in the face of the overwhelming sense of dread that hung over the virtually abandoned town. Kevin, too, was keeping his eye on the little girl. The fact that he wasn’t suggesting that they help her, or go over and ask her what was wrong, was a pretty good indication that he thought she was as spooky as Ross did.

  Ross honked the horn again, then unbuckled his shoulder harness. “You wait here,” he told his nephew. “I’m going in to check. If you see anything weird, honk the horn and I’ll be right out.”

  “Don’t you have a gun or anything?” Kevin asked nervously.

  He had no weapons at all. The truth was that the idea hadn’t even occurred to him, although whether that was a result of his own stupidity or that demon’s influence, he would probably never know. “No,” he said. “But honk the horn and I’ll come out.”

  His hands were trembling as he got out of the car. His knees felt weak, too, but he walked around the front of the vehicle over to the closed door of the small building, took a deep breath, and opened it.

  It was dark inside, but he walked in anyway.

  The handyman was sitting alone at the bar, drinking a beer, a rifle on the countertop in front of him. “I’m assumin’ that’s you, pardner,” he said without turning around.

  “It’s me,” Ross said.

  McDaniels swiveled on his seat. “I thought you was Hec. Arrived a little early, did you?”

  “We left early.” He sat down next to McDaniels. “So your friend’s coming?”

  “Saw him last night. Said he would.” The handyman shrugged. “Hard to tell these days.” Ross couldn’t tell if he was drunk or not, but, as early as it was, he could probably use a beer, too. Or something stronger.

  Outside, the horn honked once, twice, three times.

  Without waiting to see if McDaniels was going to follow him, Ross rushed back outside.

  The farmer’s market girl was walking down the middle of the street toward them, chanting.

  “Butt fuck dick suck! Dirty pussy pie!”

  Kevin had gotten out of the car and was standing next to the open driver’s side door, his arm stretched out to the steering wheel, ready to honk the horn again. He stopped when he saw his uncle. “She just started walking and saying that.”

  “Butt fuck dick suck! Dirty pussy pie!” The girl met his eyes, thrusting her chin out belligerently.

  “Where’s your mother?” Ross asked her.

  She had nearly reached the car. He didn’t know what to do, so he moved in front of her, blocking her way. “Stop,” he said. She was only a few feet in front of him.

  “Butt fuck dick suck! Dirty pussy pie!” She leaned forward, whispering. “Stick a needle in your eye. Hope you die.”

  He jerked back at just the right minute as the filthy child tried to stab his eye with a needle that she was pinching between her thumb and forefinger. She missed, the needle scraping his cheek instead and drawing blood. Reflexively, he lashed out, hitting her in the face.

  McDaniels had come out of the bar behind him, rifle butt snug against his shoulder as he sighted down the barrel, ready to shoot. He put the weapon down when he saw who it was.

  The girl had fallen to the ground but was not crying as she stood back up. She fixed Ross with a cold stare. “Hope you fucking die.”

  He grabbed her arm and pushed her back in the direction from which she’d come. “Get out of here,” he ordered.

  He half-expected her to leap at him again, to fight back, but she wandered up the street toward the church, chanting. “Butt fuck dick suck! Dirty pussy pie! Butt fuck dick suck! Dirty pussy pie!”

  Past her, walking forlornly back and forth at the end of the street, near the front of the church, was an equally dirty man holding a handful of strings connected to dead balloons that dragged behind him on the ground.

  “Holy shit!” Kevin said. “You weren’t lying!”

  “No,” Ross admitted. “But I wish I was.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Ross glanced over at McDaniels. “Wait,” he said, and the handyman nodded. “Wait and see if anyone else is going to join us.”

  THIRTY SIX

  Today’s the day.

  The words were imprinted on his mind but Cameron Holt had no idea what they meant. Was the True Angel finally going to emerge from its cocoon? He knew the time was getting close; the cocoon had grown larger than the smokehouse that had originally held it, and the black outline of the new angel was clearly visible through the transparent sheath that covered its evolving form.

  Was today the day his troops would finally be called upon to defend their savior? Was this the day Magdalena would finally fall?

  Or was today the day he would die?

  It almost didn’t matter. He was ready for all of those eventualities, and he rolled off the cold body of the dead woman whose ass he’d been reaming, and pushed her off the side of the bed onto the floor, next to the other one. He was sore but sated, and he got out of bed, put on his underwear and dress, and walked downstairs, where he took his shotgun from its place on the kitchen table. April, the red flower that had grown out of the drain in the sink, whistled her little tune.

  He hummed the song back to her, and she smiled at him.

  Outside, he stood on the porch and fired the gun in the air to get everyone’s attention. As soon as the sound of the blast faded away, he shouted the words that he had been given: “Today’s the day!”

  The cattle came first, or what was left of them: three hungry steers with permanent smiles and bright green gnats flying around their heads, wandering up one by one. The wetbacks and the churchies were all one big group, and they emerged together in various states of undress from their new home in the barn, all of them carrying weapons of one sort or another, ready to defend the angel to the death. There weren’t as many of them as there had been the last time he’d checked, and he wondered if the missing had been killed, eaten or run off.

  It didn’t matter. They still had more than enough defenders to repel any intruders.

  After the barn dwellers came the others, creatures that might once have been human or might have sprung fully deformed from the ground at the angel’s behest. He had no control over these, they answered exclusively to the angel, communicating on a frequency he could not hear, but he spoke to them anyway. He spoke to everyone. Standing on his porch, he told them that something big was going to happen. He didn’t know what it was, but they needed to be prepared for anything. “Today’s the day!” he said again.

  Immediately, the others started running off in different directions. They weren’t running away, he knew. They were following orders other than his, taking up position in places where they would be most useful, probably intending to make sure that, if anyone was coming, they did not make it this far. Or perhaps setting up a perimeter to keep out undesirables because the True Angel was about to emerge.

  Cameron hazarded a look toward the spot where the smokehouse used to be.

  He still didn’t like to look at the angel. One reason was that he was not sure if he was allowed to gaze upon it, and he didn’t want to be punished for some stupid mistake he’d made during the interim once the angel was whole again. The other reason was, well…

  Because it scared him.

  He wanted to love the angel the way he knew everyone else did—

  the way Jorge had

  —but on a primal level he didn’t understand and couldn’t change if he wanted, the angel frightened him. No, not just frightened him. Repuls
ed him. It was akin to the feeling he’d had when he was camping and woke to see a big hairy spider bouncing up and down on its spindly legs, inches from his face, while his arms were stuck at his sides within his sleeping bag. There was something profoundly alien and unknowable about the angel, and looking at it now, all folded up in its cocoon, its open, silently screaming mouth morphed into a cruel black-toothed smile, its one visible red eye staring, staring, staring, Cameron was suffused with an unnamable fear that went far beyond the fear of death. Turning his attention back to the cattle and people in front of him, he was suddenly overcome with the conviction that today his luck was going to change again. For the last time.

  The head churchie came up on the porch to say a few words to those assembled, but Cameron still couldn’t stand the prick, even if they were temporarily on the same side, and he wasn’t about to share a stage with the man and let everyone think they were equals. Without a word, he turned and strode back into the house, heading straight for the kitchen where, in the sink, April whistled her little song.

  Cameron put his shotgun on the table, opened up the refrigerator, took out shotgun shells, a handgun and several rounds of ammunition. Just in case, he took out his Daddy’s old pistol. Humming along to the flower’s tune, he started loading.

  THIRTY SEVEN

  Lita was not herself. She was…a camera. A camera that floated over Magdalena, zooming in every so often to examine a particular area or particular person in closer detail.

  She saw the ranch, their ranch, and the red flowers were gone but their corpses littered the landscape like dog droppings, little brown clumps of squishy smelly rot. Mickey was not in his pen but was running wild, a crazed look on his face as he chased a line of bright red moths that led him deeper into the desert. Every so often, he would catch one of the bugs, eat it, and for a brief fraction of a second, his entire body would flash a different color.

  Then she was in town, where she saw JoAnn. Her friend was kneeling in front of a bonfire in her back yard, wearing a heavy coat and shivering as though she was freezing. Next to her on the ground was a pile of dead cats and dogs, neighbors’ pets that she had obviously killed, and every few minutes she would pick one up and throw it in the fire, holding her hands up, palms out, in order to absorb the extra heat generated by the burning animals.

  Next, she found herself looking at Vern Hastings and Ben Stanard. The self-anointed preacher and the grocery store owner were locked inside Ben’s store, knives in hand, preparing to sacrifice a woman Lita didn’t recognize, on the butcher table behind the refrigerated meat display cases in the back.

  Looking down on the town again, she thought she saw Ross in front of the bar across the street from the market. But then she was inside Anna Mae and Del Ford’s house. The old couple, now both suffering from something apparently far worse than Alzheimer’s, were naked and drooling, crawling like babies on their hands and knees over a floor covered with feces.

  Then…

  She was at Cameron Holt’s, standing in front of his house, staring at the spot where the smokehouse used to be. The small building was gone, only its foundation left, and on that foundation, the dead body of the monster was encased in a transparent egg-shaped shell twice as tall as a person. Within, the monster was no longer dead. Its red eye was wide awake and staring, and the coiled tension in its folded wings and scrunched-up legs made it clear that it was ready to emerge from its hibernation. She had never seen anything so awful, yet she knew that this partial look was nothing compared to the horror she would see once the creature was out in full view. She was filled with a feeling of complete and utter despair.

  But she saw Ross again, in front of the bar, and Jackass was with him, and someone else. They hadn’t given up, and they not only looked like they had a plan, they appeared convinced that the plan would work. Feeling better, Lita drifted up and away, her view pulling back above the town, above the clouds, into the darkness beyond.

  And, slowly, with a groan, she opened her eyes.

  ****

  Lita awoke, and Dave was there when it happened. He was holding her hand, and it twitched in his, and he looked into her face and saw her eyes open. He was not by nature an overly emotional person, but he burst into tears when he saw that she was once again conscious, and he realized at that moment that despite what he had told Ross, despite what he had told the hospital staff, despite what he had told himself, he had been preparing himself for Lita never recovering.

  Even as he leaned forward to kiss her, still sobbing, Dave was pushing the red button on the side of the bed to call for a nurse, pressing it over and over and over again. After what seemed like forever but might have only been minutes, a nurse arrived, and while she wasn’t in as much of a hurry as Dave would have liked, that changed instantly once she saw that Lita was awake. “Stay there,” she told him. “I’ll get a doctor.”

  Stay there? Where was he going to go?

  Moments later, the nurse returned with a young female doctor. Not one he recognized, but that didn’t mean anything. As far as he could tell, Lita hadn’t been visited by the same doctor twice in the last two days.

  He was asked to move back, and the doctor examined Lita’s eyes, shining a penlight into her pupils, before checking her reflexes as she asked a series of formalized questions that were meant to test her memory and mental acuity. Several minutes of this resulted in the doctor patting Lita’s hand and smiling in his direction. “Things are looking good,” she said. “I’m going to schedule an MRI, we’re going to run a few more tests, but I think she’s going to be fine.”

  “You don’t have to just tell him. You can talk to me,” Lita said. “I’m right here.”

  The doctor chuckled. “You’re going to be fine.”

  She left, and the nurse followed, after explaining that an orderly would be in shortly to take Lita down the hall for the MRI.

  The two of them were left alone. Dave moved forward again and took both of her hands in his.

  “I’ve been out for two days?” Lita asked incredulously. That had been one of the things the doctor revealed during questioning.

  Wiping his eyes, Dave nodded.

  “Did you tell anybody else?” She looked around as though expecting to see gifts and flowers.

  He shook his head. “I was going to, but…I never got around to it. I’ve been camped out here almost the entire time. I did call Ross when it first happened.”

  “But he’s not here. He went back to Magdalena.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded, then frowned. “How’d you know that?”

  “I saw it.”

  “I wanted to go, too, but he said I should stay and take care of you, and of course he was right.” Dave’s frown deepened. “What do you mean, you saw it?”

  “It was like a dream, I guess. But it wasn’t a dream. I saw things when I was knocked out.”

  “Did you see anything useful?”

  “Not really. I just saw things as they are. In real time, I think. But I remember them clearly, not like a dream, where, you know, it kind of gets fuzzy after you wake up and you start to forget.”

  Dave sighed. “Even if you did see something Ross could use, there’s no way we could tell him about it anyway.”

  “Cell phones don’t work in Magdalena,” they said together, and Lita laughed. His eyes filled with tears as he realized how wonderful it was to hear her laugh again.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She smiled at him, squeezed his hand. “I love you, too.”

  THIRTY EIGHT

  Hec arrived just as it started to snow. He came on foot, carrying a high-powered rifle and wearing a backpack that undoubtedly contained ammunition.

  The clouds had sped in out of nowhere, in a matter of minutes, like something out of a Godfrey Reggio movie. They were white rather than gray, but they brought cold with them, and as soon as they settled into place, the snow began.

  “Jackass told me whatcha wanna do,” Hec said without preamble. “I’m in.”
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  A burly guy with a thick lumberjack beard, he didn’t look like someone who had ever been in the military, let alone a sharpshooter, but looks could be deceiving, and Ross had no choice but to trust McDaniels on this.

  “Basically, we need you for cover,” Ross said. “We’re going to try and destroy it by setting it on fire, but I understand that there are some people protecting it. That’s where you come in. I don’t want you to actually kill anyone, but I’m hoping you can keep people away from me and Kevin over there while we do what we have to do.” He glanced at his nephew, who seemed to be watching the farmer’s market girl and the balloon man at the end of the street, wondering if Kevin’s luck as an arsonist was going to change and, if so, how long it was going to take to kick in.

  The more he thought about it, the dumber his plan seemed and the more ill-prepared he realized they were.

  “You two have been there recently,” Ross said to McDaniels and his friend. “What do you suggest we do? What’s the best way to go in? If I remember right, there’s a long drive coming off the road, and it sort of ends at a big open space between Holt’s house and barn. The smokehouse is right there between the two.”

  “Ain’t no smokehouse no more,” Hec said.

  “I know, but that’s where the monster is—”

  “The angel?”

  “It’s no angel, but yeah. And what I’m trying to figure out is how we get there. However many people they have, I assume they’ll be watching that road. We need to find some sort of back way or side way to get on to Holt’s ranch.”

  The flakes were changing color as they fell from the sky, white to green to yellow to red, but they froze when they hit the ground, and within moments, the earth had begun to be covered with a thin sheen of ugly brown-colored ice.