The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  “Tell her you were in a bar fight.”

  Hendricks had to concede that would probably work, though it wouldn’t make him sound too good. There was another problem though. “I don’t …” he felt his voice get involuntarily lower, “I don’t actually know where she lives.”

  Arch whipped around again for this. “Haven’t you been sleeping with her?”

  “At my motel, yes,” Hendricks agreed. “A few times, anyway.”

  “But you don’t know where she lives?” Arch was staring at him, eyebrow cocked. It would have been an are-you-fucking-kidding-me? look, except Arch didn’t swear.

  “I don’t know how familiar you are with the act of coitus,” Hendricks said, “but it doesn’t require you to know the person’s address before you do it. Or even their name, really.”

  Arch made a sound like, “Gaaaah,” a noise crossed with exasperation and possibly disgust.

  “Don’t get judgy,” Hendricks said, putting his face back against the cool glass. “People don’t like judgy Christians.”

  “Sorry if I’m reacting poorly to your revelation that you know very little about the woman you’re sleeping with,” Arch said. “I don’t tend to hang around with people who have a lot of one-night stands. Or any at all, really.”

  “You don’t have any friends your own age, huh?” Hendricks was just being snotty now, and he knew it.

  “Not any like you,” Arch said. “At least not until now.”

  “That’s all right,” Hendricks said, and he shut himself up before he could say, I never knew any guys that were going to end the world until I started to hang out with you.

  ***

  Erin Harris wasn’t at the bar tonight. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to be. It was because her rent check had just cleared and she was about fifty bucks short of broke with three days to go until her next paycheck. That wasn't a margin she was comfortable with, so she stayed in.

  Some show was going on the TV, something she’d kind of stumbled onto by accident. It was a movie, maybe, something with a couple guys out after dark, walking a city street looking for trouble. It wasn’t really that interesting, and she half expected a monster to jump out at them. She was sipping half-heartedly on a light beer, the last drink she could find in her fridge, but she wasn’t really into it. The pungent smell of the weak ale was kind of turning her stomach, if she was honest about it. When she took a sip, she made a face. She took another sip anyway.

  The TV was blaring, and she was on the verge of turning it off when there was a knock at the door. She got up and grabbed her pistol before she went to answer it, folding her hand around the Glock 19. The plastic checkering on the grip bit into her palm as she walked toward the door. Her career experience told her people who tended to knock on the door at eleven at night didn’t always have pure intentions, even in little ol’ Midian. Better safe than sorry.

  Her apartment was small, a one bedroom with shabby carpeting that probably had been there since the nineties. She had minimal furniture in the main room, just a couch and a TV. The walls had a few pictures, and the whole place smelled of the Spaghetti-O’s which she'd eaten earlier. It was the last thing in the pantry. Honestly, though, even if it had been the first thing in the pantry, she’d still have eaten it. She liked Spaghetti-O’s.

  She eased up to the door as another knock sounded. She looked out through the peephole, keeping the gun low at hand. She could smell the gun oil off the Glock, even at this range. She kept it pretty well maintained.

  As she looked through the peephole, she breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the cowboy hat. Hendricks.

  She pulled back from the peephole and frowned. What was Hendricks doing here?

  She opened the door cautiously, peeking her head out. He looked up, raising the wide brim of the hat, and her caution was forgotten. “Jesus Christ!”

  “No, I’m an atheist, remember?” Hendricks said, and he had a little hint of a smile on his beat-up face.

  “What happened to you?” Erin felt herself sputtered, almost screaming.

  “Oh, this?” He gestured to his lips, which were split. One of his eyes was blacked and swollen. “Apparently I got into a bar fight.”

  “Well, what the hell did you go and do that for?” She wanted to reach out to him, but she could almost feel her breath catching in her chest. He looked worse than that drunk that had smashed his car into a down by the square tree a couple months ago. Guy lost three teeth on his steering wheel, and his eye had popped out of the socket. By the time they brought him in to booking, the hospital had fixed some of it, but he still looked like a shit sandwich on crap bread. Hendricks maybe looked worse, she decided. His jaw line was bruised up, and he looked like he’d done some half-assed collagen injections, too.

  “Can I come in?” Hendricks asked, slurring a little. “Arch was worried I might have a concussion, so he dropped me off here—”

  “Why didn’t he take you to a hospital?” In her horror it took her a moment to fully interpret what he’d said. “Wait, Arch saw you like this?”

  “Well, yeah,” Hendricks said.

  “And he left you in this condition without taking you to the hospital?” She felt a mad-on building.

  “I told him no,” Hendricks said, shaking his head. “I’m fine, I just need a day or so to recover. I wanted to do it at the motel, but he said—”

  She held out her free hand for him to stop, then put it on her head, which was now swirling with about a thousand thoughts. Her first instinct was to drive him to the hospital herself, but he’d already apparently put the kibosh on that. It took her a moment to realize he’d never actually been to her place, that this was something new, and a moment later that gave her a funny feeling of alarm. Which she would have thought would have taken a backseat to her concern for this human being all beaten to hell, standing on her doorstep.

  Oddly, it didn’t.

  “I … cannot believe this,” she said finally, and it was all she could do to get that out. “You got in a bar fight.”

  “They started it,” Hendricks said, almost plaintive. “Otherwise, Arch would have arrested me, you know that.”

  Well, that much was true. She put her hand over her face and peered at him through the split in the fingers. It didn’t make him look any better, but at least one of her eyes was covered, so it made him look a little less worse. If that was a thing. He was a pretty handsome guy most of the time, and in good shape. Walked with a little swagger in his step.

  Now he was hunched over, looking like an old man the way he was standing, and his face was swollen like he’d just gotten out of the ring with Manny Pacquiáo. “Jesus,” she whispered.

  “Can I come in?” Hendricks asked again. She felt sorry for him now; he looked like hell.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said, and stepped aside. The crescendo in her stomach grew, though, more than just nerves, and she let him in.

  ***

  Gideon had felt the Tul’rore start on their meal. He’d felt the ones before that, too, and they’d been sweet. He’d savored every moment. He could taste the flesh and the terror as the Tul’rore went to work, could hear the screams echo in his ears as the victims began to die. He’d felt the last few that the Tul’rore had devoured, all of them since he’d gotten into town just a couple days ago, and they had been sustaining. A slow trickle of treats to keep him going.

  Gideon slipped out of bed, the hotel sheets spotted through with burns like a thin slice of Swiss cheese. He knew others of his kind; death was a call for them. A yearning to be around the end of life, to feed on the misery of the souls leaving it. His kind gravitated toward wars, battlefields, and hotspots like carrion birds to the dead. He was the only one here, though. So far, anyway.

  It had been tough to leave Chicago, especially with things going so well in the city. He’d had a steady diet there, enough for his needs. Some of the meals had been truly beautiful, moments of passion he would treasure for all time.

  Gideon opened the
curtains and left the sheer panel hanging over the window in place. He stared out across the dark parking lot of the Sinbad motel at the street. Rain was coming down, lit by the lampposts lining the roads. He could see the dark ripples hitting the puddles throughout the lot.

  He wondered, with the Tul’rore dead, how long he’d have to wait for his next meal. He could sense it when demons got burned, but it was a blissless feeling. It didn’t tantalize and thrill him the way it did when a human went. Demons simply passed through the veil and went back to the nethers; humans could be stopped, could linger and be savored. They had flavor, texture, misery.

  He sighed and stared out at the motel parking lot, letting his hand drift lower. He could feel the pressure building inside, but there was nothing to do for it. Not yet. Not without death.

  He sighed and went back to sit on the bed, cool sheets against his naked body, the smell of the singed cloth still hanging in the air. Somewhere in the distance, he heard a rumble of thunder and hoped it was a good omen.

  ***

  The whole heavens had started to pour down on Arch just as he was pulling into the parking lot of his apartment building. The night was liquid and splattering across the windshield of the Explorer in thick drops, drenching everything around him as he stepped out of the car and slammed the door behind him. He took off at a run for the stairs. Then he cursed himself for a fool and altered his course, toward the ground-level unit on the opposite side of the building. His shoes splashed on the wet ground as runoff started to accumulate in shallow puddles.

  He fumbled with his key as he reached the ground-level apartment. It was one of eight in the building, and not the one he’d been living in two weeks ago. Two weeks ago he’d been upstairs, in number six. But that had been before a bunch of meth-head demons had broken down his door and smashed the place to pieces. There were holes in the wall, a sink and countertop shattered. Basically an entire bathroom remodel already underway.

  He’d been surprised at the grace with which the landlord, Gunther Sweeney, had taken the whole thing. Sweeney was an older man in his fifties, German, with a thick mustache turned grey. He’d looked around with Arch at his side, pronounced the whole thing durcheinander, and submitted the claim to insurance. When Arch had pressed, Sweeney let him move into the unoccupied unit without complaint. It worked.

  Arch’s key hit the lock and he turned the handle with gentle pressure. The door swung open and Arch stepped into a mirror image of his own apartment, everything a perfect opposite save for the missing wall hangings and the countless boxes that were still unpacked since the move. He shut the door behind him as quietly as he could, wondering if Alison was about. The lights were on, but that meant nothing; lately she kept the lights on when she slept.

  He stood paused in the entry alcove, listening, to see if he could hear her. Nothing. After a moment he laid his keys on the small table in front of him and turned to look into the living room/kitchen area. He caught a glimpse of long blond hair on the couch, and realized she was just sitting there. The sound of the rain tapping at the windows was just background noise, and a peal of thunder crackled in the distance. The place smelled faintly of her perfume, but it was lingering and not fresh, a ghostly reminder of her getting-ready-for-work routine.

  “Hey,” he said as he entered the room. His khaki uniform was spotted with water and was starting to chill him in the cooler indoor air. The air conditioner, a small wall-mounted unit hung high on the wall, was humming faintly in the background,.

  “Hey,” she returned, but the word was as lifeless and motionless as the woman herself. Alison’s blond hair hung limp and wet, and he noticed she wore a bathrobe as he came into the room. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and got not even a trace of a smile in return.

  “How was work?” He laid a hand on the side of her neck, running his dark fingers down her tanned skin. He could see little goosebumps as he did it, pulling back the edge of the robe.

  She adjusted herself on the sofa, pulling the neck of the white terrycloth robe tight. “Fine.” She didn’t sound angry or resentful, just flat.

  He pulled his hand back to rest on the back of the sofa. She didn’t turn to face him, just kept staring ahead. This was how it had been since the attack, since the demons had smashed into their apartment. She still had the barest discoloration on her neck where one of them had held her by the throat. He wanted to touch it, to touch her, but she always seemed to shift away.

  “Going to bed?” Arch asked. He could feel the pull of the bed, the barely conscious realization that he had an early shift tomorrow. It was probably not going to be a very busy day, if tradition held. He hadn’t really had a busy day yet, save for the ones where he was fighting demons after work.

  And he and Hendricks had just killed the ones they’d gotten a lead on. It was all listening to rumors about strange out-of-towners so far, but it’d paid off a couple times. Arch enjoyed the scrapes, really, though he didn’t necessarily want to admit it to anyone, least of all himself. He could feel it, though, the glow that came from knowing he’d punched the ticket of something really bad earlier in the night.

  He stared down at his wife’s exposed neck, wanting to let his fingers drift lower. The terrycloth robe was closed tight, though. He shrugged, though she didn’t see him, and turned away to undress in the bathroom so he could hang his uniform up to dry.

  Alison remained behind and made not a sound as he left. He felt the chill as he undressed and wondered if it was just the air conditioning unit fighting against the humid Tennessee summer, or if it was the wife who hadn’t said more than a few words to him in a week that was causing him to shiver.

  4.

  If it was possible, Hendricks awoke feeling even shittier than he had when he went to sleep. His right eye was swollen shut, his ribs hurt like someone had kicked him while he was down, and his lips felt like they’d been transformed into Polish sausages filled with flaming, screaming nerve endings. He moaned and rolled over, forgetting that someone was in the bed with him.

  His one good eye caught sight of Erin lying there next to him, her short-cropped blond hair more than a little tousled from the night of sleep. She was looking at him kind of pityingly, like she was uncomfortable with him being there or with the way he looked, or maybe even both.

  “Good morning,” he mumbled through his swollen lips. It came out more than a little twisted, and he wondered for a beat if it was even comprehensible.

  “You look like holy hell, Hendricks,” she said. She reached a tentative hand across the white sheets, and Hendricks caught a whiff of the flowery scent she wore on her wrist as she touched his forehead. Her thumb traced a delicate path around his eye, causing the pain to flare even so. “What were you thinking?”

  “I’m asking myself that very same question this morning,” Hendricks said and rolled to the side of the bed. His hip cried out in pain as he did, and he wondered what he’d done to offend it so. The bedroom was flooded with light, the carpeted floors and grey walls dimly illuminated in the light of the early morning sun. He placed a hand gently upon his eye and felt the pain radiate outward in waves.

  “So you just walked into the bar and the fight started?” Erin asked over his shoulder as she got up, bed creaking beneath her. Hendricks ran a hand over his chest, feeling the curly hairs that sprang out of his skin and the bruises beneath.

  “Kinda,” Hendricks said. “Well, not really. I was there for a while, and this guy started some shit with McInness, the owner—”

  “Oh, God!” Erin cut him off. “You were at the Charnel House? Why?”

  “I dunno,” Hendricks said. “I just was. It’s where the road took me.”

  She closed her eyes tightly at this. She was standing at an angle, leaning heavily on one leg, face in her palm like she was trying to think of a way to ask what was on her mind but couldn’t find a way to do it. She was wearing a thin wife beater shirt over her tiny frame, pink panties underneath it. If Hendricks hadn’t been feeling like shit sc
raped onto toast, he knew he’d be trying to get her hair even more tousled than it already was.

  As it was, she probably wouldn’t have any of it. He was aching too much, anyway, and not in any of the right places.

  “People do not just wander into random establishments in the backwoods and get into bar fights,” Erin said finally, opening her eyes. “It’s not normal.”

  Hendricks just stood there. “I wear a black cowboy hat and a drover coat everywhere I go. Where would you get the idea I’m normal in any way?”

  She opened her mouth to respond but probably couldn’t figure out what to say to that, so she shut it a moment later.

  “Look,” he said, “I didn’t go looking for a fight.” A blatant lie, but hopefully he carried it off well. “Some out-of-towners jumped McInness and the regulars, and I stepped in to help them when it went wrong. McInness got the shit kicked out of him, too, had to go to the hospital and everything—”

  “Jesus,” Erin said.

  “Yeah, he didn’t look too good,” Hendricks said. “But Arch helped, and we ran the guys off. You can’t expect me to just sit back while people are getting the holy hell hammered out of them. It’s not who I am.”

  Erin had positioned her hands over her mouth while waiting for him to finish. She watched him through skeptical eyes, or at least that was how he would describe them. “And who are you, exactly?”

  Hendricks stood there for a second. Wasn’t it obvious? “I’m Lafayette Hendricks—”

  “I know your fucking name, jackass.” Erin wasn’t too harsh with it, Hendricks reflected, but she also could have been gentler. “I’m asking who you are. Some cowboy drifter that blows into town, doesn’t seem to work at all—at least not that I can see—just kind of hangs out, apparently jumps into bar fights from time to time.” She ran a hand through her tangled hair. “I don’t really know anything about you.”

  “Well … I mean, you know a little bit about me,” Hendricks said, and he felt heat on his cheeks. “We’ve been sleeping together for a couple weeks.”