by Sam Witt
The biter did not take kindly to his shenanigans. It scrambled up higher on his side and chomped down hard on the tender center of his armpit. Joe shouted in surprise at the intensity of the pain.
Al answered his father with a wordless howl of his own. The desperate sound spurred Joe to action. He had to get them out of here.
Joe pushed with his right leg and heard something tear apart along his back. He had a little more room. Enough to slip his right hand away from his chest.
He felt along the floor, digging his hand through the old medicine boxes and garbage, trying to find something he could use as a tool, or a weapon. He hadn’t heard anyone else moving about, but he didn’t want to be unarmed if the freaks who’d captured them came home.
The biter sank its jaws into Joe again, tearing loose another nugget of flesh. Joe could feel it chewing, swallowing. It was burrowing, trying to get inside him.
Joe forced his right arm up, cramming his fist through the gap under his chin. He wriggled and thrust with his arm, screwing it up and out. Both of his arms were up, pressed tight against his cheeks, pushing his head back and choking him.
He imagined himself dying like that, suffocating while his son screamed. He imagined the nightmare from the bluff coming home and tearing them apart.
The beast in his armpit bit again, and Joe was sure he could feel its snout snuffling against his ribs. He tried to howl in pain, but his arms pressed against his throat choked the sound down to a thick gurgle.
Joe’s vision blurred, pulsed in black-and-white strobes. He had to get out.
With the last of his strength, he levered both his arms down. The motion was slow, and it pressed the biting thing deeper into his side. He ground his teeth against the pain and forced his arms down, dragging his torso up and out of his bonds like a cork from a bottle.
The biter at his side snapped its teeth through his flesh again, and Joe could feel its claws digging into him, as if it could sense his impending escape and was desperate to finish what it had started before he could get away.
Joe grabbed the wriggling fiend with his right hand. It was slick and bony and wrapped in a film that bulged between his grasping fingers. He tore it loose with a roar of pain and flung it away. The thing screeched and thumped against the floor. Joe heard it skittering through the trash, coming for him.
Joe cleaned the goo off his eyes with the backs of his hands, saw that it was thick, clotted blood. He rolled onto his back to get a look at what had him trapped.
He was up to his waist in a pig’s carcass. The swine’s head lolled back against his hip, and it had thick, crude stitches running up its belly. Its pale skin was covered with a series of interlocking spirals and primitive glyphs, an occult graffito that made Joe’s eyes itch and his brain throb.
He kicked and shoved at the carcass, desperate to get free. He lay on his back and scraped his fingers down his chest and abdomen to sluice away a thick, curdled layer of old blood. There were symbols scrawled across his flesh, dark marks that made his vision throb and his heart lurch in his chest. What had these assholes done to him?
The trash off to his left exploded up from the floor, and the biter flew through the air. Its body was long and lean and bone white. It spread thin wings, and its wrinkled snout peeled back to reveal twin rows of scythe-like teeth as it came at him.
Joe punched the little monster away, knocking it across the garbage-strewn room. The feel of its skin against his knuckles warped his thoughts into knotted tangles of revulsion. The biter hit the far wall with a brittle crunch and slid down into a bloody heap on the floor.
That wasn’t good enough for Joe. He could imagine it crawling through the garbage, clawing its way toward him, teeth slashing the air. He had to find it, kill it, before it had a chance to come at him again.
It squealed when it saw him coming and tried to dart away, but one of its wings was contorted out of true and hung limp by its side as it lurched through the trash.
Joe stomped its legs flat, grinding his heel down until he felt the bones crack and blood run out from under his toes. The biter squealed and slapped at the floor with its one good wing until Joe lifted his foot and brought it down hard in the middle of the creature’s back. Its mouth burst open to vomit blood and viscera onto the scorched floor.
Al screamed from below, his voice raw and frantic.
Joe got to his feet and took a step back. Streams of chill sweat carved their way down his chest and back, sluicing through the thick blood. Dread took root in his gut. This was more than he’d bargained for when he’d answered the black phone that morning.
He fell to his knees and puked up a gout of foul-smelling, nearly black blood. His ears rang, and he could almost make out voices thrumming through his head. They were insectile and rasping, alien sounds that he couldn’t escape or understand.
They’d done something to him, but Joe wasn’t sure what that something was. He felt weakened, as if the power gifted to him as the Night Marshal was remote, diffused. His skull felt too full, his mind crowded by some other, unseen presence. He had to get out of here, get his boy and get gone, get some space to figure out what was wrong with him and how he could put it back to right.
Joe stumbled to his feet and headed for the room’s only door on unsteady legs. He stopped at a scarred table where he found his clothes in a tangled pile. He shrugged his arms through the sleeves of his flannel shirt, managed to cram his bloody legs into the stiff legs of his jeans. He couldn’t find his boots or his duster. He couldn’t find his badge, either. He kicked his bare feet through the garbage, hoping it had just fallen from his shirt, but he couldn’t find the heavy silver symbol.
Al’s voice vibrated through the house, a raw, primal denial of an animal with its leg in a trap, a man facing his doom.
A boy about to die.
CHAPTER 9
CUT LOOSE FROM the cross, the girl crumpled to the floor with her ragged stumps curled under her, sobbing.
“Just,” Dan said, unsure of what to do next, “stay there.”
He opened the heavy door at the front of the church. His deputies were clustered together in patches of morning sunlight, drinking bad coffee from their thermos bottles and shooting the shit. They didn’t even pretend to be doing anything productive when they saw him frowning in the doorway.
“Go on,” Dan barked. “Do something useful. Roust some meth dealers or shake down the working girls at the Flying J. No point in hanging around here playing with each other’s peters while I do all the work.”
The deputies didn’t wait to be told twice. They loaded into their motley collection of patrol cars and fled the church’s meager parking lot in short order. Dan wished he had some real deputies, men he could trust and depend on, but all he had were those too lazy or too stupid to secure other jobs. He watched the pack of morons disappear down the gravel road, then went back into the church. The less they saw of the poor girl, the fewer rumors they could spread around the county. Dan had enough problems without a bunch of looky-loos coming down to stare at the freak in his jail.
Sitting on her stumps, her good hand covering the jagged point of her naked arm bone, the girl looked like any other skinny teenager. Then she turned to Dan and brushed her hair back with blood-flecked fingers. His guts roiled at the sight of the raw meat where her face should be. She blinked and those eyelids, pale and pink, and somehow whole, made the mess so much worse.
Dan gulped down his revulsion like a cup of drain cleaner. He couldn’t leave her here. “Let’s get you out of this place.”
He knelt down next to her. She smelled like old flowers, wilted and thrown out with the garbage. He hooked one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulders, scooped her off the bloodstained floor. She was too light in his arms, like a sack of autumn leaves. He could feel a tingling buzz where she pressed against his chest. It reminded him of roaches, scuttling through the dark.
Dan crossed the sanctuary as fast as he dared, careful not to drop the gir
l or stumble, but hurrying just the same. As he crossed the threshold he felt a cold draft against his back, a dreadful sigh of relief. The church door slammed behind him, startling a cawing murder of crows. The birds rained shit onto the sheriff as they launched themselves into the sky.
“Fucking birds,” he growled. He sat the girl on the cruiser’s hood and fumbled with the key chain on his belt. He found the right key and popped the cruiser’s door open.
“Where we going?” The half-made girl’s voice belonged to a girl many years younger than she appeared. That and the other voice, deep and dark, rustling beneath her words, made Dan’s skin crawl.
He scooped her off the hood and eased her into the passenger seat. She was limp as a doll, letting him arrange her arms and legs as needed to get her situated and buckled into the car. She watched him through the veil of hair hanging over her face until he answered.
“Back to the station.”
“You scared?” The girl tilted the raw mess of her face up and peered into his eyes. He tried to suppress a shudder and failed.
Dan could see the memory of a face in the bloody mask. It felt familiar, like a word on the tip of his tongue. He looked away before he could recognize it. “Aren’t you?”
The ride back to the station was long and rough on roads that were more gravel than asphalt. The girl sat next to Dan, hunched forward with her good arm folded over the bad, long hair hiding her face, glittering eyes peering through the lank strands. Dan watched the treacherous road, both hands on the wheel, grateful for the distraction. The silence hung between them like a curtain for half the ride.
“You gonna let him do me in?”
Dan wanted to lie to her, but her deep, black eyes boring into him made him an honest man. “That remains to be seen. We’re going to have ourselves a talk.”
“He never talks.” The girl’s voice sank. “That’s not his way.”
Smoky images rose from the ashes of Dan’s memory. A burnt-out barn. An old woman kneeling in the dirt. A malformed boy with a goat’s head crawling across dew-dappled grass with his guts trailing behind. A shotgun that spoke with the voice of an angry god.
“He walks a hard road,” Dan swallowed. “Pitchfork needs a man like him to keep an eye on the darkness.”
“That what he told you?” The girl pushed her hair out of her face.
“That’s what I know.” Dan didn’t like Joe, but he’d seen what was out there. He knew sometimes the darkness could only be fought back with blood and fire. It wasn’t a job for men like him. That kind of work did something to those who picked up the burden. He didn’t think he was strong enough to survive that kind of change.
“He’ll burn me,” she said with a voice as small and lost as anything Dan had ever heard. “Why can’t you just let me go?”
Dan thought it over. He could stop the car here, let her loose in the woods. No one would ever know what he’d done. He’d say she escaped, or that someone came and took her. He’d tell lies; maybe someone would believe them. He might even get lucky and she’d just crawl off into a hole somewhere and die.
Her eyes were fever bright in the red mask of her face. Dan could hear the buzzing beneath her skin. The insectile hum scraped across his nerves.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Here.” Her teeth flashed white in the raw gash of her mouth. She made a vague gesture with her stump.
“Who did this to you?”
She shrugged and drew a lazy spiral around the jagged bone jutting from the stump of her forearm with her index finger. “We was all scared.”
“Of?”
“Him.” She smoothed her blood-stained dress across her thighs with her remaining hand. “What he’s done. What he’s gonna do.”
They drove in silence for miles more. Dan tried not to look at the girl, but his eyes were drawn back again and again. She sat still and silent, hand folded over her stump, elbows on her knees. Watching. Waiting.
The fly-wing buzzing crawled through Dan’s ears, plucked at his courage with spider fingers. He wished he’d left the girl up on the cross. He wished she’d been just another dead girl. He didn’t have the guts for this.
Dan pulled the cruiser around behind the station house. There were no cars; all his deputies had been with him at Red Oak and were now out looking for trouble or hiding in quiet places where they could smoke their pot or drink their booze in peace. There should have been a dispatcher to take calls and route the law, but Dan had let Alice go last year. There wasn’t enough money for anything anymore. Pitchfork was drying up, the whole county so deep in the red he didn’t know how it’d ever get back to black.
He reached over to unbuckle the girl.
Her breath whispered against the side of his neck. “Don’t let him burn me. You know it ain’t right.”
She looped her arms around Dan’s shoulders. He could feel the slick flesh of her ragged stump pressed against the back of his neck. It throbbed there, cool and buzzing against his skin.
Dan carried her out of the car and into the station house.
“You’re gonna lock me up?”
Dan didn’t answer, but shoved the unlocked holding cell’s door open with his foot. The girl’s arms tightened around his throat.
“What hold’s he got on you, Sheriff?” The girl pressed the cool, moistness of her face against Dan’s cheek. He could feel the ragged slit of her mouth moving against his ear. “What makes him right?”
Dan froze on the cell’s threshold. He’d asked himself that question again and again. The answer shamed him. Dan was the law here, the protector of the people. But the sheriff knew there were things he could never do, things he could never face. Pitchfork needed Joe, even if it didn’t always understand why.
“He does the hard things. Things we can’t.” Dan whispered. “He kills our monsters.”
Flies crawled over the edge of the cell’s toilet bowl. Their eyes were red beads set in glittering green heads. They left crimson trails on the white porcelain.
“What happens when he runs out of monsters, Sheriff?”
CHAPTER 10
JOE ZIPPED HIS pants and buttoned his shirt with trembling fingers as he headed for the door. Al’s screams were like a tangle of fish hooks in his heart, tugging at him. His hands shook with growing tremors, and his head throbbed with the pangs of an impending headache. He needed a drink.
The pictures nailed around the door hauled him up short. What he saw raised the hair on his arms and the back of his neck.
There were shots of him. Black-and-white photos cut from the county’s weekly paper, bigger prints taken with a shitty camera, all yellowed and faded with age. A dozen pictures of him, a dozen more of an old woman with white hair and close-set, black eyes. For the moment, fear and caution outweighed the need to rush out of the room. He needed to know what he was up against.
Joe limped over to the room’s solitary window and spat on the flyspecked glass. He rubbed a clean spot big enough to peer through, and his heart sank at what he saw. He recognized what was left of an old barn, blackened beams jutting from the ground like a dead giant’s rib cage. He recognized the apple tree burnt down to a gnarled stump beside the road.
Alasdair screamed, his voice ragged and lost. The sound spooked a crow, which flapped past the window with a rough caw.
This was Alma Pryor’s place years ago, an old farm tucked up tight in the Francois Foothills. Joe recognized it, because he’d burned the hellhole down. Or thought he had.
He left the room and stepped onto a fire-scored landing. Chunks of wood were missing, chewed away by the fire he’d set years before. The whole place smelled of ash and decay, a clinging stench that made Joe pull the collar of his shirt over his nose and mouth. He listened for sounds of movement, for the telltale creaks and groans of an inhabited old house. There was nothing but the rattle of chains from somewhere below and the saw-edged sigh of the wind through the house’s warped walls.
His heart ached with the knowledge
that all of this might be part of some sick bastard’s revenge against him. Had someone hung that girl in the church just to draw Joe into an ambush? He tried not to think of Elsa and Stevie, alone down in the valley. If the people who’d done this were out for revenge, and weren’t here with him in the house, then where were they?
Alasdair’s voice came again, a wordless pleading, begging for rescue. It tore at Joe’s heart, but the Night Marshal knew if he rushed down to rescue Alasdair, he might miss someone, something, that would spell disaster for them both. He really needed a drink, just a sip, to steady his nerves and clear the fog from his mind.
There were three rooms off the landing, the doorways empty holes in the walls. Joe could see where fire had melted their hinges into useless clumps and heat had warped the frames. He poked his head into the first room and yanked it back out twice as fast.
All of the room’s walls were covered in thick, squirming lines and eccentric spirals. Strange symbols marked their intersections and scrawled pictograms occupied the empty spaces. The arcane scrawls burned bright in his mind’s eye, and arcs of fire flared across Joe’s vision. He stumbled away from the door until his back bumped into the landing’s creaking railing.
Just a glimpse was enough to imprint vivid images into the empty spaces of his mind. He took a deep, cleansing breath and blinked again and again to dispel the burning afterimages before their dark magic could take root in his skull.
“What are you idiots up to?” Joe reached for his badge before he remembered he didn’t have it, and instead muttered a prayer to a deity he’d lost faith in long ago. He’d learned that the prayers were like mathematical formulas - whether you believed in them was irrelevant as long as you knew how to string their pieces together. Gods didn’t care about men, but they would listen if you were willing to pay their price and knew which words would reach their distant ears. He’d take whatever edge he could wrangle. Something dark and strange had found a home in this place.
