Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  He saw movement out of his window and turned his head to look. He could see the ground just below, racing up toward him. For a moment he had a perfect view of it—another road, little pebbles ground up in once-black asphalt that had turned grey with the ministrations of time.

  Ah, yes, time. One of Lerner’s favorite things to ponder.

  He wanted to think deep thoughts about it, but the sight of the ground racing at him replaced all the possibilities with one and only one.

  Is my time up?

  ***

  Lauren Darlington had seen the bicyclists coming around the steep S curve, all in black and not looking like any group of bicyclists she’d ever seen. The helmets, the bike outfits, everything was black. This cycling team is brought to you by the color ebony, dark as the night itself.

  What was missing what the sense that they were in any way human beneath all that surface shit.

  She saw red eyes—red eyes, glowing ones, looking at her. She had a long run across empty pavement to a sheer cliff face on her left and nothing but a long-ass drop to her right, and those things were bearing down on her a hundred yards ahead.

  Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  She caught the sense of malice even as far back as she was. What the hell were these things? They were pedaling fast, too, faster than she’d ever seen a bicyclist go. Was it just the mountain, aiding in their downward motion?

  What the fuck was going on here?

  Her gut was telling her to jump, to chance the face of the cliff and the drop below, telling her to go for it. That wasn’t normal, was it? Rational, analytical thought was intruding in. It was a weird dichotomy, but she was used to it. It was like the part of her that came out in an emergency room situation was watching her now, running down what was happening in slow motion and telling her non-rational mind to shut the fuck up, sit down, and ride this out.

  And she was all ready to jump over the edge of the cliff when the car came crashing down the hill.

  ***

  Hendricks knew a fuck lot was wrong as he gradually reeled himself back in to Arch’s cruiser. He was hurting up and down, could feel the blood running down his neck. He’d felt that fucking demon bite him and knew nothing good would come of it. His right arm had gotten wrenched and trapped first thing, pulled clear out of the fucking socket so he couldn’t do a goddamned thing with it. It was right there, screaming at him along with his ribs.

  His left arm was more or less okay, though; that was a plus. Or it had been until he’d heard the squeal of tires behind him. He’d known something had happened with the demon to make it let go, but he was in a little too much pain to figure it out until he was back in the seat. Arch was screaming at him about as loud as the pain in his own head, and it took a minute for him to decode what the fuck was going on.

  ***

  “Shit shit shit shit shit,” Duncan said. Alison had the muffs off by now, but every word that the demon was saying was still low enough that she had to check to make sure they were off. They were in a hard turn now, the S-curve that Erin had missed, and the demons were threading around right down the hill toward where the Crown Vic had run off. Alison just held her breath.

  “Oh, Lerner, you bastard,” Duncan said, and Alison glanced over at him. The only thing she felt at the moment was a sense of wicked gratitude that Arch hadn’t been in the car that went over.

  ***

  The car hit the road and it was like an explosion of metal and glass. Lauren covered her face and looked away, felt something sting her on her bare legs. After a half-second she turned back to look, unable to keep down for long, and she saw the car settled on its roof. It was sitting in the middle of the road.

  Holy fucking shit, holy fucking God! her mind screamed at her. What the fuck what the fuck?!

  Then the analytical took over again. The bicyclists were still coming, like a black sea surging down the hill. Like a cloud descending to cover her.

  She knew what they were. Could feel it. Could feel death coming.

  Her legs stung as she came up off the ground—when had she fallen? She ran—that was what she was here to do, wasn’t it? Why the hell did it hurt so much? She ran for the car and squatted down behind the hood where it had come to land, facing down the mountain road like it was going to slide the rest of the way to the bottom.

  It didn’t slide, though. It just sat there, like a rock in the middle of the crashing tides, and she sheltered under it as a horrific buzzing noise rose around her and the bicyclists in black swarmed down the hill on both sides of her like hell was riding behind them.

  ***

  Lerner never lost consciousness, because he didn’t do that sort of thing. He could hear the buzzing start just after he got his bearings upon landing. There was a sense that something was wrong, a sort of veiled sensation that his equilibrium was off, but he attributed that to having gone over a cliff in a car.

  The air was filled with the smell of oil, and a ticka-ticka-ticka noise came from the engine, like it was cooling off after a long car trip instead of being one hundred and eighty degrees from its correct positioning on the horizontal plane. Lerner was hanging by his seat belt, suit crumpled and ripped in places.

  The buzzing came and he recognized it. He knew it was coming down the hill, and he felt a rush of anger over that peculiar sense of something being terribly wrong.

  And yet he did not give a fuck.

  He pressed the release on his seatbelt and caught himself on the shoulder as he landed. He saw feet crouching under the place where the front of the hood rested only an inch or two from the pavement. He wondered who they were, but did not give much of a fuck about that, either.

  Lerner emerged, pulling himself out of the window as the first bicycles were going by on his side of the car. They did not bother to steer around him because they did not see him, pushing his way out through the crumpled, misshapen passenger window. The damned thing was like a fucked-up rhombus from all the impacts, and it made it more difficult to get his slightly saggy shell through. He realized, quite absurdly, that it was as though the wreckage of the car were giving birth to him, letting him slide and wriggle out into the world like one of those miniature humans.

  He was halfway out when he realized that they’d start to run him over soon. He would have thought of it sooner, but he attributed his scatterbrained-ness to the fall, putting aside for a moment that impacts like that wouldn’t have any real effect on his thought process unless his shell was cracked.

  He jerked the baton free of his shredded jacket and deployed it into the front spokes of the next bike that passed him. He felt himself smile automatically as the flimsy spokes tore against the hell-forged metal and sent the rider flying through the air. He saw the landing, a burst of black flame disappearing around a figure who had just lawn-darted head first into the fading asphalt of the mountain road.

  Lerner saw another bike swerve to miss him after seeing what their compatriot had just been through. He thought it was a bad move on their part, avoiding the body of the one inflicting the harm to their little collective in order to swerve around. He proved it was a bad move to the unthinking demon who had done it, too, by using his legs to propel himself off the side of the car and wedging the deployed baton in the front wheel of that bike. There was a scream before that one hit the ground and evaporated.

  Lerner pulled himself to his feet, glancing down to see his suit completely ripped across the front. His bland chest was partially displayed from below the right nipple down to his slightly protruding belly. He ignored this and slammed the baton into the face of a passing biker who burst into dark flame in the air before leaving a brimstone stink lingering around Lerner.

  He heard the shouts, the cries of “OOC!” and watched the bikers that remained in the peloton scramble to go the other way around the car. Seeking safety.

  He lit up three more that cruised his way. Each tried to make small moves to stop him—hitting him with a hand as they passed, clipping him with the bike, a
nd the last even tried to hit him dead on. Every one ended in a black cloud of flames, but the last did manage to knock him over as the bastard burned up.

  Lerner lay there on his back, the sound of the buzzing bicyclists receding in his ears. That feeling of something wrong—something fucked up—was still hanging on. He didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to move, just wanted to lie there and wait for Duncan. He felt a cringe come on involuntarily and knew that was bad news. That meant the shell was telling him something.

  Something bad.

  He let his hand fall to the place where his shirt had been ripped and ran a finger down the length of his body. He found it just above where the pelvis would have been on a human, a little ridge so insignificant that a human wouldn’t even have called it a scratch.

  But he wasn’t human. And he knew it for what it was.

  A crack in his shell.

  ***

  Arch took them around the corner slower, the fear of all manner of badness put into him now. His concern was assuaged slightly by the fact that Alison was just behind him, he could see her as he glanced in the rearview. Still, he had a sick, swimming feeling in his stomach, like it was in the kind of free-fall Erin’s cruiser had just experienced.

  He glanced at Hendricks. He’d intended to look for just a moment before turning back to the road. Instead he ended up staring.

  The cowboy was in rough shape, with a hand held up to his neck and blood rushing between the fingers. His lip was bloodied, and he was holding his body at a peculiar angle. There was a jagged cut along his eyebrow, too, though Arch wasn’t exactly sure where that had come from. All told, the poor guy was clutching himself like he was hurt in a dozen different places. For all Arch knew, he was.

  “This is gonna be a problem,” Arch said, trying to think ahead. “I gotta call it in.”

  “Do it,” Hendricks said, his voice muffled as he seemed to try and keep his mouth clenched as tight as possible. “Erin …” His words drifted off.

  Arch paused, and stared at the mike on his car. He clenched his jaw and picked it up, wondering exactly how deep the trouble was going to run on this one.

  ***

  Lauren came out from her little pocket at the front of the cop car like she was a groundhog coming out of her hole on February 2nd. Tentative didn’t even come close to covering it. She poked her head out first, making sure there weren’t any other bikers streaming down the hill toward her.

  There weren’t.

  The sound of the engine and the burning scent that filled the air around her worked with her already fast-beating heart to give her a sense of numbness and a nausea-inducing taste in her mouth. She thought she was going to puke, to chuck hard right there staring at the broken and beaten frame of the cop car. There were torn branches lodged in the fuel lines and transmission, all speckled throughout the undercarriage like the damn thing had been feathered in them.

  Lauren took a deep breath in disbelief, then another. She could hear sirens up the hill but she didn’t look up there. Not yet. First she saw a guy in a ripped suit lying on the ground to her left, just lying there, hand moving like he was poking at his hip.

  Her training kicked in and overcame the desire to just sit there and stare, openmouthed, at the shit that had unfolded before her. She hurried over to him, still dimly aware that there was pain in her legs. She hit her knees at his side and snapped her fingers in his face. “Sir, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you just fine,” he said in a Yankee accent. Sounded like he was from Bahs-ton. “I can also see you.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked, throwing up a peace sign in his face.

  “Two,” he grunted. “I’m fine, my back just hurts a little. Check on the girl in the driver’s seat.”

  She whipped her head around to look in the window of the car. Sure enough, there was someone hanging there, limp, in front of the wheel. Thin arms dangled down lifelessly, along with longish hair that she could tell was blond in the last fading light of day. “Is that Deputy Harris?” she asked.

  “Fuck, all you people really do know each other here,” Bahs-ton said. “Yeah, that’s her. You might want to go check on her. I just barely got her seatbelt fastened around her in time.”

  Lauren started to get to her feet, ready to head around the car to do just that, but a police cruiser SUV came screeching to a halt just in front of her a second later, and out stepped Archibald Fucking Stan.

  ***

  Alison got out of the car as soon as Duncan brought it to a stop and threw it into park. They’d seen a figure in a suit lying splayed out on the ground before Arch’s Explorer had blocked their view. Even without being able to see much in the way of a reaction on Duncan’s fairly impassive face, she could sense the temperature change in the town car. And it wasn’t a favorable one.

  Duncan, for his part, bolted without even bothering to stop the ignition or pull out his keys. He was in a state, that’s how her mother would have described it. Seemed like it fit pretty well.

  Alison watched Arch as he got out of the car, watched Duncan fly past him like he was running in an all-out demon sprint, cooking down the hill like he was on a skateboard or was one of the bicyclists. She just needed to make sure Arch was all right, and then she had a job of her own to take care of.

  She knew he was all right by the way he stood there at the door, staring over it at whatever was happening past his car. Still, she watched him for a second. Looked at the wrinkles of his uniform, thought about how it needed a washing and an ironing later. Someone had to do it.

  Then she hefted her rifle and went around the front of the car to use the hood as a rest. She figured she wouldn’t have to wait but a minute or two.

  ***

  “How is she?” Hendricks asked, shuffling his way out of his seat only with great difficulty. There was a dark-haired woman with running shorts and bloody knees between him and the overturned cruiser, and he wasn’t entirely sure he could make it to her without tipping over.

  “I—” The woman had a look on her face that was none too pleased. Hendricks didn’t know her well enough to speculate whether that was because of the bloody knees, the fact that there was an upturned car sitting in the middle of the road next to her, or because that was just her personality. Something about the lines around her eyes told him it was the last one, though.

  “Lauren,” Arch said, calling her by name. Hendricks made a note of that through the fog of pain. Made of a note of it that was promptly balled up and thrown away as his ribs flared at him, pissed that he had the audacity to get out of the damned car. He fell straight to the pavement, and he couldn’t even rip a hand away from his chest to cushion his fall, which hurt like someone had dropped a semi-trailer on his side.

  ***

  Arch watched Hendricks fall and was torn about what to do next. He knew Erin was in the upside-down Crown Vic, but that car was so trashed he was having a hard time imagining her surviving. The fall was at least a hundred feet down a mountainside, and that wasn’t the sort of crash resistance that the NTSB tended to rate on, he suspected.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Lauren said, and she made a move for him. She ran for Hendricks, and he watched her struggle as she went. She was tottering on weak legs, and blood was running down from both knees like she’d taken a hit from something.

  “Hard to explain,” Arch said as something whizzed past his door, buffeting him with the breeze. It took a second for him to realize it was Duncan, and he was beside Lerner before Arch could say anything at all about it.

  ***

  Lauren dropped down to triage the guy in the black coat and was again dimly aware of pain somewhere in her knees. That was the thing about triage, though—you needed to assess what was the worst so you could work on it. This guy looked like he’d been fucked up good. Whatever had happened to her legs was minor by comparison. She still needed a little better read on the guy in the middle of the road, but Deputy Harris was in desperate need o
f some assessment.

  Even though Lauren suspected she was dead.

  “Where are you feeling pain?” she asked the guy in the coat. His hair was all mussed and flattened back, like he’d been wearing a hat. She wondered what kind of hat would even go with this getup. Then he moved, and she saw the pistol holstered at his waist. She flinched back a notch.

  “What?” he asked, shifting and then grunting in pain. He followed her eyes to the gun on his belt. “I’m riding with a sheriff’s deputy. Do the math on that.”

  “You’re law enforcement,” she said and then leaned in closer to check on him again. She still felt her body grow stiff from the unease of being near to him. Lauren had a few cardinal rules, and avoiding guns was one of them. She glanced at Arch Stan. Figured that asshole would end up carrying one for a living. It just made him easier to dislike.

  “Where does it hurt?” she asked the black-coated guy again.

  “Ribs are broken,” he said, rattling it off between cringes. “Got a superficial lac on my neck, but it’s bleeding like a fucker. Some other minor shit. What about Erin?”

  Lauren looked over at the upturned cop car. “Keep pressure on your neck wound, and try not to move. If you’ve got broken ribs, you’ve probably got other internal injuries.”

  “I’m fine,” Black Coat said. “Go.” He waved her off with a bloody hand that he removed from his neck for just a second. She got a look at the wound he was covering; the blood was already starting to crust on it.

  “Paramedics are on the way,” Arch finally said. She would have deemed him less than useless, but he was saying it from a prone position as he was wriggling his way into the passenger side of the overturned car. She could hear him, but he was muffled.

  Lauren was ready to tear a strip out of him, but he’d gone the long way around to get to Harris, really. She came around the car at a jog, dropped down at the driver’s side window and saw the blond deputy still hanging there. She gently poked for the carotid pulse and felt the thrum of it. Harris’s chest was heaving up and down in gentle time, but she was straining, probably because she was upside down. Some open wound from somewhere on her body were causing long streaks of blood to run down her face and into her hair. There was a steady drip to the crumpled roof of the car as Lauren rested her hand on the underside of the—