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

by Robert J. Crane

  She sent the text and tossed her iPhone into the cup holder. Shit shit shit. Anna would be late to work, that was the bottom line. Fuck. She felt bad, but she didn’t have her own car, and her goddamned mom just had to make a shopping trip to the mall in Knoxville today. Why? No reason, really. It’s not like she didn’t already have plenty of clothes. It’s not like she didn’t know the weather was going to be shitty. It wasn’t like she didn’t have plenty of warning that traffic was going to suck on the way back—

  Her furious irritation with her mother was interrupted by something smashing into her windshield. It broke the glass and hit her in the arm, stunning her. The words, did that just fucking happen? ran through her head. She tried not to swear around the kids, but fuck, sometimes that was hard.

  She was still processing what the fuck was happening when she realized that there was something ahead. It took her a second to realize that both lanes were totally blocked under the overpass at the Midian exit. A semi-trailer looked like it had smashed a car on one side, and a blue van with something written on the side had neatly smashed into the bridge support between the opposing lanes of traffic on the left. The van was wedged sideways and no more than three feet of space remained between it and the accident in the right lane.

  Sarah hit the brakes but knew she was far, far too late. She slammed into the van with her mother’s Subaru. There was no windshield to shatter now. As the hood of the car crumpled before her she barely felt the impact of her face against the side of the van, smashing her skull into oblivion.

  ***

  Gideon staggered back toward the rental now. He checked to make sure no one was coming over the bridge before breaking into a run toward the driver’s side door. He reached it and threw it open, yanking his pants down around his ankles the moment he was in. He could feel them, so close—Jerry Bryan, Jack Benitez, Sarah Glass. The delivery driver was still alive, barely, but there were other cars piling up now. The ones who were too dumb to slow down, driving seventy even with the visibility as low as it was, like they were fucking invincible. They caused the mess to grow by leaps and bounds.

  Gideon’s hand was on his cock and rubbing now, the desire and heat rushing through him. He’d been hard since Jerry Bryan had died first. Now it was just a ongoing rush of arousal, his ejaculations coming one after another with an intensity from the closeness of the deaths. He felt another car slam into the pileup and a family of three died nearly instantly. He exploded and felt the hot ejaculate splatter his legs and drip onto the floor mat. He could hear the hiss, the smoky smell of the plastic and carpet filling the car.

  Another semi slid in below, a long-haul driver named Sam Worthen dying as his sternum cracked on the steering wheel. He hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt. Worthen writhed in his cab in immeasurable pain. Gideon felt himself come again, his fingers sticky with the burning ejaculate, stinging his flesh as he continued to stroke himself to the feeling of the man thrashing around in the semi below.

  Gideon was on fire now, his hand moving up and down his shaft in a symphony of pain and pleasure. There were voices crying out below him, souls leaving their bodies while screaming in agony and terror, and he was drinking it all in. The thrill was almost more than he could manage, and just when he’d catch his breath in his throat, another car would slam into the pile-up, another life would flee its earthly shackles, and he’d explode in an orgasmic burst that would send another ejaculation spitting from his tip.

  He could smell the cloth seat burning, but his eyes were closed tight as Gideon savored the sensations around him. He was feeling those souls come through him. Their cries were like the sounds of his lover, their moans of pain as near to his lover’s orgasm as he’d ever experience. They filled him up, these twenty dead and counting, and it was more powerful than anything he’d ever felt before.

  The feeling started to taper off, this most intense of pleasures, this hottest fire of arousal he’d ever felt. His hand was covered over with his own expulsion, and the car stunk of sulfur and smoke. It was thick in the back of his throat. He could barely move his hand over his cock, it was so sticky and taxed. His wrist shook with the strain of what he’d been doing, and looked down at the clock.

  Five fifty-four.

  He felt a surge of panic and hurried to wipe his hand on the passenger seat. It burned and sizzled as he did so, and then he fumbled for his keys. He looked down and his seat was burned through, a clear swath of nearly two inches seared right through the cloth, then yellow insulation burnt black in the hole. He could see a little had even burned through the floorboard of the car, though the hole was small enough that it didn’t concern him. It was maybe as wide as his pinky. Little spots of black on the steering wheel marked the places where particularly violent ejaculations had melted the pleather.

  Gideon fumbled for his keys and felt the metal bend under his touch from the remnants of his ejaculate still on his fingers. He turned the key in the ignition hurriedly then removed his hand to see his fingerprints melted into the plastic head of the key. Fuck fuck fuck.

  He looked back and could see some minor traffic on the bridge. There were lights flashing below, police and paramedics and firemen on the scene that he hadn’t even noticed in his orgasmic engrossment. He hurriedly put the car into gear, feeling the metal of the gearshift melt beneath his touch. He looked down quickly and noted his pants and underwear were mostly intact; the instrument panel had a few spots where the plastic displays had melted because of his emissions coming to rest on them.

  He put foot to pedal slowly, not wanting to arouse any suspicion. He was just a lookiloo, he told himself. Just someone watching the chaos. Or at least that’s what they’d think at first. He’d need to be gone by the time that they realized otherwise.

  Gideon steered the car over the bridge and crossed into the left turn lane. He got onto the freeway, heading south toward Chattanooga. He’d ditch the car somewhere down there, switch to a different rental company and get another one before returning to Midian.

  Why come back? he asked himself. He’d done something new here, experienced his most intense session yet, better even than that one a year ago. But if he tried to replicate it again, it probably wouldn’t go so well.

  But the excitement! The raw excitement of moving from letting things happen naturally, lying back passively and expecting death to come to you, around you, from watching at a distance to being up close, right there, and even MAKING IT HAPPEN—

  No, that was a rush he couldn’t forget. It was a new high of arousal for him. He felt his hand shake as he guided the rental down the on-ramp to the interstate below. There was no traffic, none at all.

  Gideon smiled wider as he cranked the car up to seventy. The rain hammered the windshield, but he didn’t care. He had to come back. He was going to re-experience this moment in his motel room later tonight, over and over.

  And then, after he was good and worn out, he was going to take some time to build his excitement again—and figure out a way to do it even bigger and better next time.

  8.

  This was a sick fucking day, Erin reflected as she stood in the rain, looking at the mangled pile of cars under the interstate bridge. She was still wearing her rain gear because the shit soup was still pouring down. She was the only one of the sheriff’s department presently on scene, but there were a few Tennessee state troopers there and more on the way. She’d seen the latest one pull up a few minutes ago, siren blaring over the downpour and blue lights flashing, throwing up gravel while churning up the shoulder.

  Erin was basically watching at this point, left to supervise the more prosaic of two evils that had happened in Midian today. It was a bitch of a coincidence that the largest multi-vehicular accident in Tennessee history should happen on the same damned day as the discovery of a mass murder, but she had only the barest of suspicions about that. It was something that was nagging at her as she stood there in the rain, waiting for the tow trucks to clear things out enough that they could divert traff
ic up onto the off-ramp temporarily. They’d closed the interstate an exit back and everything was flowing through Midian proper now. That’d make the downtown shop owners real happy and piss off the homeowners.

  She felt a cold that went way beyond the chill the rain had brought as she stood there on the shoulder, the gravel crunching beneath her shoes as she shifted from left to right foot and back again. She studied the remains of the accident and tried to figure out how it had happened. It was enough of a jigsaw puzzle she honestly wondered if she’d ever be able to figure it out before conceding that no, she probably wouldn’t. Maybe the brains at the Tennessee Highway Patrol or even the National Transportation Safety Board would figure it out.

  But for now, she just stood there, watching them try and manage the scene. And it was a hell of a scene to manage.

  Colonel Donald Ferris of the Tennessee Highway Patrol worked his way over to her as he had every few minutes in a more or less standard orbit. His wide-brimmed hat was state trooper standard, and he’d come from district headquarters to oversee the shit fall out from this wreck. He was an older man, grey shot through his hair, he carried a few extra pounds and seemed to be of the same stripe as Sheriff Reeve. He walked plenty upright and was doing his damnedest to be courteous, Erin could tell that much.

  Whether that was because he was just wired that way or he was treating her different because she was a young woman, Erin didn’t know. Didn’t care, either, so long as he didn’t cross any lines.

  “Ma’am,” Ferris said, doffing his hat slightly and getting himself wet in the process. Erin found a little amusement in that. Very little, but on a day like today she’d take it.

  “Colonel,” she said with a nod. She didn’t bother to doff her hat. Not that it would matter at this point; her hair was soaked anyway.

  “We found some … unusual things here,” Ferris said without much preamble.

  “How unusual?” Erin tried to keep her cool, but inwardly she could hear her heart thumping louder than the raindrops on her head.

  Ferris gave a kind of shrug. “We found some things in places they shouldn’t be. A spare car tire that we can’t match to any of the vehicles in the collision. It’s pretty mangled since we pulled it from under the semi at the head of the crash, though. A car’s jack in the cab of one of the big semi trucks; kind of out of place there. A bent-up tire iron that looks like it might match the jack.” Ferris’s hat was sluicing water off as he talked to her, and she could tell he was raising his voice to be heard over the rain.

  “So what do you think?” Erin asked, pretty sure she knew what he was going to say. It seemed obvious enough to her.

  “I hate to jump to conclusions, but it looks like this might have been intentional,” Ferris said, looking no more bothered by the news than if he’d just told her he had to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home. He pointed up to the highway bridge above them. “Someone may have thrown some things down to try and trigger an accident.”

  Erin wanted to be sickened by the thought of that, but she’d already seen much worse just today. “What do we do next?”

  Ferris shook his head. His khaki shirt and green pants lost some of their luster under the clear plastic rain gear. He was one cool customer, Erin thought. “Nothing you have to worry about,” Ferris said. “I’ve got my forensics people bagging evidence, and we’ll get ’em back to our impound for investigation.” He scratched his cheek with long fingernails yellowed by tobacco. “Department of Transportation and NTSB might get involved with something of this scale.”

  That sinking feeling in her stomach was getting worse by the minute. “You’ll keep us in the loop, right?” Erin asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ferris said, and doffed his hat again. She watched water drip down his collar and he made a face. Any other day, under any other circumstances, she might have found it amusing. Today was not that day.

  ***

  Arch felt like he was snowed under. The call about the multi-vehicular catastrophe had come in a couple hours ago, and part of him wanted to rush right out there, but dispatch—played currently by the sheriff himself, still at the Hughes house crime scene—had told him to sit in town and keep writing tickets between patrols.

  He was doing this now, stuck in place along Old Jackson Highway with about a million cars crawling along in front of him. The traffic shunted from the shut-down interstate was plugging Midian’s main thoroughfare, a string of headlights that went for miles and miles, with very little movement.

  Arch had the itch under his skin, sick of the smell of the Explorer’s heater, tired of hearing the slow hum of the engine idling and the rain tapping on the roof. He’d heard of Chinese Water Torture and was sure as he could be that it had to be employed in some manner in Hades. He wanted to drive, but he was trapped in a parking lot on the side of the road, waiting for the mess to clear.

  He wasn’t likely to be writing many tickets here, either, unless it was for parking violations.

  He considered riding the shoulder and probably would when the time came for his next patrol in a half hour or so. Until then he was stuck in place.

  It only took a short time for him to connect the dots and start thinking of that as a metaphor for his situation with Alison, with the demon hunting he was undertaking and all else. By then the itch to move had settled into a slow, painful burn, and he just ground it out for as long as he could—another five minutes—before he flipped on the siren and lights and headed down Old Jackson Highway toward the Sinbad motel.

  ***

  Hendricks was a little surprised at the knock on his door. He figured Arch would be a lot later getting there, taking at least a few more hours on patrol. That would have suited Hendricks just fine, because he was sleeping through the dulled sensation of pain racking his side and the ache around his eye. The good news was that he was able to open his eye slightly, and his vision was clear. Holding it open for long resulted in some discomfort, though, so he shut it until such time as he’d need it.

  Hendricks made his way across the chill motel room, hip still bothering him. He rubbed his face as he got up, a bleariness settling into his head. The heater wasn’t working; he’d already checked before he’d gone to sleep. Some kind of seasonal bullshit, he figured, to keep customers from cranking up something they shouldn’t and letting it run all day and night. Probably affected the motel’s narrow profit margin.

  Hendricks opened the door and said, “Weren’t you expecting you quite this early.” He reddened after he said it, because he’d spoken without seeing who it was. It didn’t occur to him—like he was some kind of moron or something—that it could be anyone but Arch. It could have been Erin, back to apologize for what she’d said, or to rip into him again.

  It wasn’t, though. It was a woman, but most definitely not Erin.

  “You were expecting me?” She had her head cocked to the side, the very picture of curiosity. Her eyes were studying him fiercely. Her hair was long and red, not a hint of moisture on it even though she wore no raincoat. In fact she didn’t seem to have much of anything on besides a tank top covering her small breasts and a pair of blue jeans that looked tight on her thin figure.

  “Ah, no,” Hendricks said, fighting for the words. “I was … uh … actually expecting someone else.” The eyes were piercing, watching him. They felt like they were boring into him, trying to drag out an explanation. “I thought you were Arch.”

  “No,” she said, almost singsong, still staring at him, a little less blankly now. “I am not Archibald Stan.”

  “Well, yeah,” Hendricks said at last, “I know that now, Starling.”

  9.

  “What’s going on here?” Arch asked as he strode up to the door of Hendricks's motel room. That red-haired woman, Starling, who’d saved his and Hendricks’s bacon a week or so earlier, was standing out front, looking at him with those eyes. Arch found them kind of intimidating; it was like they anchored on to you and didn’t let go. He looked and realized he couldn’t tell w
hat color they were even in the light.

  Hendricks stood in the door, leaning against the jamb. The cowboy looked like he was still half-asleep to Arch. “I was about to ask her when you came walking up, actually.” Hendricks was in a black t-shirt and jeans, and his face still looked like all heck, but his swollen eye was partially open, so that was an improvement at least.

  “You got any idea what’s going on out there?” Arch jerked a thumb toward the direction of the interstate, just a few hundred feet away. The rain had started to slacken, waning into a drizzle now. The parking lot of the Sinbad was under a good quarter inch of water even still, and Arch had passed more than a few drainage ditches on the way here that were full and still rising.

  Hendricks looked past him and shrugged, looking surprisingly nonchalant for a man whose face bore all the signs of being caved in only last night. “Rush hour?”

  “Murder,” Starling breathed, and it really wasn’t much more than a breath the way Arch heard it. It was low and throaty, hissed out as she narrowed those striking eyes. He watched her, and if he’d had to make a guess, he’d say she wasn’t too happy about the whole situation.

  “Murder?” Hendricks had a scowl in place now. “Not those Spiegoth again?”

  Arch waited a second to see if Starling would explain. When she didn’t he took a step closer. “What do you mean, murder? Last I heard it was a multi-vehicular accident—”

  “Open your eyes,” Starling said, and her face was back to the normal, placid expression now. “Too much death. Too much blood.”

  Arch let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and shot a glance at Hendricks. “It does appear awfully coincidental. Can you prove that something’s going on with this wreck?”