Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  “Well, hello, Starling,” Hendricks said with as much aplomb as he could gather to him on the short notice afforded by her appearance. “Is it the end of the world again already?”

  “You mock, but it comes nonetheless,” Starling said, and Hendricks would have sworn the shadows around her eyes moved in a way that the light shining on her face couldn’t have supported. “And soon—only a day away.”

  11.

  Alison stood there, under the porch light, staring at the redhead. She felt it build inside, that pressure, the need, and then she could hold it back no longer. She let out a long, cackling laugh that split the night, echoing over the flat grass surrounding the farmhouse, corralled by the trees that edged the horizon, barely visible as sentries against the surrounding night. It was a good laugh, a hearty one, and when it drew the frown from Hendricks and the cool look of surprise from Starling, she found she still couldn’t quite get it under control, the wracking hilarity bubbling up from within like its origin was somewhere in her toes.

  She was doubled over, feeling the pull and tug of muscles warring over her direction. Consciously, she wanted to be upright again, but the humor—God, the sheer humor of it!—pulled her earthward. Why was it so funny to her? Even as she laughed, she knew it wasn’t really that funny.

  “Care to share the joke with the rest of the class?” Hendricks asked. He looked odd without his cowboy hat, his brown hair pointing in every direction, matted down in front where the Stetson had pushed it flat and spiked in back where his stint on his back at her parents’ house had given him a wicked case of bed head. This, too, gave her an inescapable bout of giggles, adding right to what was already a losing battle with mirth.

  “It’s funny because she’s a redhead, and she said—” Alison felt her lips stretch, her belly feeling that slow ache from the hilarity of it all. “Like Little Orphan Annie, because she’s a redhead and ‘only a day away’… Never mind.” She drew herself upright again. “It was probably one of those things you can only appreciate in the moment.”

  “I do not understand,” Starling said, staring coldly at her.

  “I figured the meaning behind that one might go sailing over your head,” Alison replied. Why would a super-powered hooker know the words? “It was just …” She sniffled a little, her nose running in the night from the laughter of the moment. She could look back on it now with the appropriate perspective; it wasn’t that funny, but everything else was just too crazy for it not to have made a strange, hilarious diversion.

  “There is a threat at hand,” Starling said.

  “Is this the one that’s gonna cause me to lose all hope?” Hendricks asked. He didn’t sound too impressed to Alison. “Because I can’t keep track of all these scary things anymore.”

  Starling just kept those dark eyes nailed on him. Alison didn’t like that look, it was just a little too appraising for her taste. “This is the next of your trials.”

  “I don’t really go in for trials,” Hendricks said with a low sigh. He was walking upright now, like a real boy and everything. Already a far cry from the shattered mess that had required her help just to get into the house a few minutes earlier. “I’m just a demon hunter. Trials mean someone’s putting me through something I don’t care to go through. I just fight.”

  “You will experience trials,” Starling said, like that was the last word on the matter. “You will be tested.”

  “This conversation is doing a mighty fine job of that,” Hendricks said.

  “The town is in danger,” Starling said, like it was some kind of conclusion. Alison just watched her, feeling a little like a kid while her parents were arguing, talking adult stuff in serious tones.

  “This town is always in trouble,” Hendricks said with a sigh. He was recovered enough to drop that wall of anger that had cropped up when Spellman had been telling him how it was. Alison had watched that, too, wondering if the cowboy was going to push the man. (Was Spellman a man? The OOCs kept calling him a screen, whatever that was.) She hadn’t cared for the odds, but she also had a contingency plan in case things had snaked in a downward direction on that one. She eased her hand onto it now, a slapjack she had ready to hammer Hendricks on the head if he got stupid again. She was not signed up to die if the cowboy got a sudden case of the moronic.

  “And it is in trouble again,” Starling said.

  “I saw this episode last week,” Alison said, “and the week before.”

  “The threat is new,” Starling said.

  “Please tell me it’s the bicyclists,” Hendricks said.

  “It is not the Night Riders,” Starling said. “Their threat is isolated, restricted only to those who cross their path.”

  “The … ‘Night Riders’?” Hendricks asked, dully. “Do they call themselves that or is that your name for them?”

  “It is their own designation,” Starling said. Alison realized she sounded a little like a robot from science fiction movie.

  Hendricks let loose a long cackle. Not quite the belly laugh she’d experienced, but a fair guffaw that had him bending at the knees a little. “Man. The ‘Night Riders’. What’s their leader’s name? KITT?”

  “His name is unpronounceable with your tongue,” Starling continued, as if she hadn’t just been laughed at, “but he likes to call himself Michael.”

  Alison felt herself snicker a little at that one, and she was joined by Hendricks, who shot her a look, the bridge of his nose crinkled with laughter. “Fan of the ’Hoff, huh?”

  “Probably from Germany,” Alison cracked.

  “They are most recently from Germany, yes,” Starling said flatly, sending Alison into a deeper laugh. Hendricks, alongside her, howled with laughter. “How did you know?” The redhead had her face cocked to one side, analyzing the situation. Still robotic.

  “Lucky guess,” Hendricks said, shaking his head as he straightened. “All right, so these Night Riders are pulping people all over Midian, but they’re not the world-ending threat that will shake my belief in everything. Fine, then. What is?”

  “I cannot give you the answer,” she said.

  “Of course not, because that would be far, far too easy,” Hendricks said, throwing up his hands. His black coat sleeves fell to mid-wrist, revealing dried blood in the dark hairs of his arms. Alison wondered where that had come from. “What can you tell me, lady of mystery—and the night?”

  “The fate of Midian is tied to another town, long buried in the past,” Starling said, the words flowing like they weren’t coming from a human voice and throat, but from somewhere deep inside the creature that was Lucia on her off days. “This place is a nexus, a summoning ground for all the darkness that calls forth the true believers.”

  “Believers in what?” Alison ventured to ask. She did not get an answer. She got ignored.

  “Some come by what appears to be chance,” Starling said. “But there is no chance. It is calculation. Forces move in the shadows that conspire to bring ruin to Midian, to hasten its fall, its demise, knowing what that will bring.”

  “God, let it bring pizza,” Hendricks said, shaking his head. When Alison gave him a questioning look, he just shrugged and said, “I’m hungry.” Turning back to Starling, he asked, “Any chance you can tell us what will happen if Midian falls?”

  “The world will end,” Starling said simply, like it was nothing. Like a natural consequence, like a math problem. A plus B equals the end of the world. No big.

  “Midian falls, the world dies,” Hendricks said, and by now he was so jaded, so worn, possibly disbelieving—Alison couldn’t quite get the read on him—that he got matter-of-fact about it, too. “Got it. And you’re some sort of benevolent hooker angel, sent to help us even the score.”

  “I am Starling,” she said, like that answered that.

  “Cool,” Hendricks said in a tone that suggested it was anything but. “All right, well, I get the sense you’ve just about reached the limit of what you’re going to share, so … spit it out.” He w
aited, and the redhead said nothing. “Well, go on, give us the last little bit of the puzzle we need to start stumbling around in the dark to solve your little mystery game.”

  Starling just stared at him. “You will need to go to Hobbs Green, Alabama, in order to understand what comes to Midian.”

  Hendricks blinked. Alison noted it like she’d note a butterfly floating by as a catastrophic storm destroyed everything she cared about. “Hobbs Green,” she breathed.

  “Well, that’s a little more than we usually get from the mystery box,” Hendricks said.

  She heard him at a distance, ten thousand miles away from the vision of carnage that was flashing through her mind. She could see the smoke and fire, all lit up in her head, black ash in clouds and fallen on the ground in every direction in her mind. She could taste it, see the black specks falling on her suntanned skin, see it smear when she touched it to brush it away. It was memory, it was real, it was bile rushing up from her stomach and doubling her over again in a way that was nothing like what she’d felt moments earlier—

  She fell to her knees and exploded in a gush of vomit, her stomach hurling everything out in a wave of sudden and uncontrolled nausea. The yellow liquid splattered on the white porch and splashed like a bucket poured everywhere. The acidic smell washed over her, the awful taste of that stringy, empty, viscous liquid that was heaving out of the back of her throat overcame her.

  “Holy shit!” Hendricks said, and she watched his boots dance backward, thumping on the porch floorboards as she made her mess.

  A few more heaves and she was empty; she hadn’t had much to begin with, but she finished as abruptly as she began, trying to hold in the last little bit of fluid and keep herself from dumping her entire stomach out there in the half-light of the porch. She sat there for a brief second before the self-consciousness came rushing in, and she become keenly aware of Hendricks staring down at her, his messy hair framing his rough, unshaven face. His lips were slightly parted, both eyebrows keening skyward as he asked his question with his expression rather than his mouth. What the hell?

  “Sorry,” she said, brushing the dot-like splatters on her hand away on her worn blouse. She never liked this one anyway, and it had blood on it now. “We gotta go.”

  “What?” Hendricks asked, and his head whiplashed around, searching for something that wasn’t there. “Where the hell did Starling go?”

  “Back to the whorehouse, probably,” Alison said, shaking her head as she fought to her feet. She fumbled in her pocket, brushing past the slapjack, and came up with her cell phone. She had it dialed before she even got to the car and was speaking as she was climbing into the dinged-up mess of the Lincoln. “Arch? We need to meet,” she said, putting the key in the ignition and starting the thing before Hendricks was even in. He was a step or two slow, and she was tempted to throw it in reverse before he was even in the car. He took a second too long to gather his drover coat around him and she hit the gas, sending the car backward down the drive and whipping around in an empty space in the yard, closing the door on Hendricks’s side handlessly, prompting a yelp from him. He fumbled for his seatbelt as he watched her with cautious, wide eyes. “Call Lerner and Duncan,” she said and then just hung up on her husband as she gunned the town car’s engine, sending a cloud of dust billowing behind them as she raced down the farmhouse’s driveway.

  ***

  Lerner was just staring up at the ceiling. He was still trying to figure out the popcorn thing, but only because he wasn’t in a mood to watch TV. Something about the peril hanging around his immortal essence didn’t entice him to want to laugh with nerdy humans on that Big Bang show or get overly involved in the drama surrounding a cooking contest.

  Duncan was in the next bed over, freshly returned. The epoxy had been applied, and now it was a waiting game. Waiting to see if it held, if it would do any good. His money was still on “maybe.”

  “Want to talk?” Duncan asked. None of the lights were on; they were sitting there in the dark, the only illumination the occasional set of headlamps from passing cars that would drag slowly from one side of the room to the other, shifting the shadows as they passed.

  “You never want to talk,” Lerner said, more offhand than he meant. That was bad. If Duncan was willing to talk, and he’d seen the crack while he was applying the epoxy …

  “But we could,” Duncan said. It had the air of an easy suggestion, something put out without effort or care. No problem, let’s just chitchat while we wait for you to do the demon equivalent of spontaneous combustion.

  “Anything to break the sense of misery, huh?” Lerner said. He cracked a smile then frowned, not wanting to do anything associated with the word “crack.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Duncan said. Only someone who hadn’t known him for a century could fail to catch all the subtle nuance in the way it was said. “It’s not the—”

  “End of the world?” Lerner asked. He felt his lips push hard against one another, puckering with emotion he didn’t normally feel. It was a sense of anger, sure—and that he felt all the time. But there was something else there, too, something deeper. “You remember that one time, in Oklahoma …?” He didn’t even bother to finish the thought.

  “With the shopping mall,” Duncan said, picking it up with their easy shorthand.

  “And the lady with those massive clogs!” Lerner said, feeling himself chuckle, just a little, his shell’s natural reaction to that levity. “Her feet were the size of hams, all shoved into those things—”

  “Was she a dancer, you think?” Duncan asked.

  “Maybe in her youth,” Lerner said, “about two hundred extra pounds before we met her. The heels on those things must have been industrial grade to keep from breaking until they did.” They both lapsed into silence. “You remember that sound she made? When she died? When that … chis’thago tore her throat out?” He spoke soberly, the levity all faded. “I think about that sound sometimes.” He stared at the ceiling. “She was trying to say something, you know, staring up at us, the only ‘living’ witnesses to her death, that clog busted on her fat foot, twitching as she lay there dying.”

  “It was a gruesome thing,” Duncan said.

  “We’ve seen worse,” Lerner said, a little huskily. “But that noise! That noise she made. It was like …” He played it back in his head, that wail. “It was like pleading, but without the words.” He pressed his puckered lips together and found them dry. He didn’t really need water, but for some reason just now the fact that his lips were parched bothered the hell out of him. “I think about that sound. That pleading sound. Like it was her way of saying, ‘I only want a few more minutes, please, please, just a few more minutes.’ Bargaining. Hoping for just a little more.”

  Duncan was quiet for a moment. “That was a long time ago.”

  “I know,” Lerner said. He felt the stir. “I know.” He shifted his head just long enough to look at Duncan. “I just want a few more minutes.” He could feel the hint of a plea as it formed on his lips.

  “You’ve got time—” Duncan said, not looking at him.

  “I really don’t,” Lerner said, and Duncan turned his head so quickly Lerner thought it might snap off. He was off the bed in a roll and next to Lerner in a hot second. Demon speed. It almost wasn’t fast enough.

  “The epoxy—” Duncan said, and he tore his eyes from Lerner’s face down to where the wound was. Lerner couldn’t see it, but he could feel it, sucking away like it was a sinkhole, dragging in the skin around it— “Oh, shit,” was all that Duncan said.

  “I just wanted a few more minutes,” Lerner said, and he felt that sinking feeling run all the way through him. A hundred years—the best hundred years he could have imagined, out of the pits, out of the fires, out of the—

  He watched Duncan’s wordless face as black flames filled his vision in all directions, dragging him back to the waiting hell. Duncan’s eyes were the last thing he saw before he left—wide, weary, and infected with that
human sentimentality that Lerner had spent the last century resisting with everything he had. As the flames ate him up, he wished—oh, how he wished!—that he had just let go as Duncan had, because the place that he would be going now would have been just the same, but at least he would have felt—

  12.

  They met out on MacGruder’s farm like usual, Arch kicking the dirt while he waited. Hendricks looked calm, his cowboy hat retrieved from Arch’s car, his face a twisted knot of thoughts that had yet to bleed. He squeezed the banana bag of IV solution in his hand, not too hard, cupped it like it was a softball or a soft fruit, aware it was there and fiddling nervously but not harshly with it.

  Arch, for his part, was sick of kicking the dirt. He had taken to studying Alison’s staid face in glimpses here and there. She had a little something hanging on the corner of her mouth, and she hadn’t made to kiss him. He knew they were on a strange road, a rough path maybe, but that wasn’t like her. He could catch a whiff here and there, though, when the wind shifted, and had a suspicion kissing was not something he would have wanted to do even if she’d been amenable.

  A dog howled in the distance, a couple plots of land down the road. He’d stirred the dust as he’d shot down it to the meet-up, hammering his way out of town as soon as he’d gotten Alison’s call. It sounded urgent; he’d hurried up and now he was waiting, waiting with the other two. Three of the six they’d had the other day when they’d been here, just waiting to see when Lerner and Duncan would show up.

  Arch’s uniform clung to him like it was midday and the sun was hanging overhead instead of a half-moon with a vague crescent casting silver light on the clouds that had it surrounded.

  “Did you get ahold of Lerner?” Hendricks asked, finally, breaking that awful nervous silence. Arch didn’t care for it, for once. He had a feeling—just a hint—that he was going to get some of that from the sheriff for a while. He was supposed to be on shift right now, but he’d heard not a word directed toward him on the radio all night. That was the sheriff’s wife on dispatch, after all, and maybe a suggestion of her husband’s current sentiment filtering through.