by Sam Witt
Joe chased Al, racing toward the doorway. He couldn’t let the boy kill those men, couldn’t let him break the Night Law. Things were bad enough without having to kill his own son.
CHAPTER 16
JOE MADE IT to the front door in time to see a battered pickup fishtail down the driveway. Al raced after the truck on all fours, covering the ground with terrifying speed. Joe watched his son leap, arms stretched out in front of him, wicked claws flashing in the moonlight. The truck’s rear window shattered, and chunks of fallen glass twinkled on the pea gravel drive. Al was halfway into the cab, thrusting his long body through the broken window. “Don’t kill anyone, Al.” Joe crossed his fingers, as the truck slewed across the gravel.
The rusted pickup missed a curve and jounced sideways off the road, wheels chewing gravel, then grass, then spewing clouds of chalk-gray dust. It swerved from side to side, then spun into a tree with brutal force. The collision bent the truck into a crooked V and sent one of the passengers flying through the windshield. The addict crashed into the scrub grass and rolled, arms and legs pinwheeling with bone-snapping force before he tumbled to a stop.
Joe shouted his son’s name and headed for the smoking truck. He clomped down the crumbling porch, hardly noticing as his naked heels cracked steps and jarred planks loose. Joe stalked to the edge of the house, trying to summon the energy to run. He had to get there before Al lost control and tore the freaks to shreds. He could see the boy stirring, dragging his long, sleek body out of the truck’s cab. Streaks of blood ran down his back, dripped from his elbows and the curved tips of his foot-long talons. Despite the blood, Al didn’t look hurt; he looked pissed.
“Shit,” Joe said. “Don’t do it, Al.”
Joe pushed himself harder, half jogging toward the truck. The rough gravel bit into his naked soles with every step, but Joe ignored the pain and pressed on. He had to get to Al before the boy lost control and turned the dazed occupants of the truck into so much shredded pork. He had to get them both out of here before the whole flock of bats poured up out of the well and ate them alive. The small group brave enough to fly in the morning sun had been bad enough. Joe didn’t want to face the whole nest once the sun was down.
And the sunlight was close to gone. All that remained was a bloody glow struggling to hold on to the rounded shoulders of the St. Francois Mountains. Joe hustled toward the truck, head down, shoulders hunched around his ears, praying he’d beat the bats.
Al roared as the survivors of the truck crash pulled themselves out of the banged-up cab. They ran in opposite directions, one limping toward the rural highway that wound past the farm, the other scrambling for the scorched orchard behind the farmhouse. Al roared once more and bolted from the truck, heading for the road. The wounded man stumbled and tripped over his own feet, desperate but far outmatched by the beast on his heels.
A shadow limped out from among the trees ahead of Joe, a familiar weapon hanging loose in its hands. “Well, lookie what we got here.”
Joe skidded to a stop as the barrels of his shotgun swung up toward his face. His hands shook; he licked his lips as terror spiked his nerves. He felt weary and energized at the same time, ready to run in a random direction but frozen to the spot. In the last light of the sun he could see greased hair, and gray coveralls spotted with blood and oil. Joe had no idea how the big man was up and walking. He looked as if the busted knee Joe’d given him minutes before wasn’t slowing him down.
“Just the man I was looking for,” Joe said. “Hand over the shotgun so we can wrap this up.”
“On your knees, Marshal.” The big man kept the shotgun’s barrels pointed at Joe’s head. “You’ve had a good run, but time to git what’s comin’.”
A man screamed from the road, the lost wail of a doomed soul. Alasdair answered with a predatory howl that made Joe’s stomach clench.
“You hear that? That’s the sound a real monster makes. That’s the sound of death coming for you and yours. Give me the shotgun, and maybe some of you get out of this mess with your hides intact.” Joe sneered at the addict, doing his best to hide his horror as he listened to his son hunt.
“The Marshal fights monsters, not bring ‘em out to play.” The addict took a step closer to Joe, stepping out from between the trees. “Don’t exactly follow rules, now do ya?”
“I do my job.” Joe clenched his jaw. “I burn witches’ nests, I kill devil worshipers. I should have killed your whole fucking family back then.”
“You fuck a witch, and she whelps devils.” The addict was two yards away. His eyes glittered like dying embers in the failing light, crimson gleams from the deep shadows of his face. “The only difference twixt us is this here badge.”
Joe saw it then. The circled pentacle, pinned to the man’s ragged coveralls. The sigil of his sacred duty, stuck on this devil-lover like a trophy. The sight made Joe want to tear the man apart with his hands. He regretted the mercy he’d shown him years ago.
“How’s it feel, Joe?” The shotgun’s barrels were as big as train tunnels. Red runes glowed an angry warning around the black holes. “How’s it feel to know all that stands between life and death is one man with his finger on the trigger? A man with every reason to want you dead?”
“It’s not the badge that makes us different.” Joe forced himself to breathe, to let the jagged saw tooth burn of the adrenaline mellow, settle into his muscles and nerves where it could do him some good. This wasn’t over yet. “It’s the duty.”
“Scaring old women? Burning down farms? That duty?” The shotgun inched closer to Joe’s face. “You ruined my granny, threw down our gods, burned my family out of our fuckin’ house. Ya think this is what we wanted? Weren’t hurtin’ no one. Then you come along with yer big gun and yer shiny badge, and we lose it all.”
Joe could hear the creak of the shotgun’s stock. The man was squeezing the weapon so hard Joe was amazed he hadn’t pulled the triggers yet.
Joe stared into the man’s three-pupiled eye. “What was your granny doing down in that basement? Why do you think I came out here all those years ago?”
“She was a witch. She helped folks, birthin’ babies, makin’ sure the harvest came in clean.” The addict took another step, jabbing the gun at Joe with each word. “Your daddy wouldn’t never have done what you did.”
“My daddy died,” Joe growled the words, keeping his voice low, “because he didn’t know how to handle Left-Hand Path hillbillies like your granny.”
“What did you say?” The big man was leaning in close to hear what Joe had to say. The shotgun was a foot from Joe’s face now. He could feel the draw of the gaping barrels, the scent of death wafting from the old weapon’s throat. “You’re gonna die, like your old man.”
“Then fucking do it,” Joe shouted, and the big man jumped at the sudden sound.
Joe slapped the barrels away from his face with his right hand. He slammed his forehead into the man’s nose and grinned at the smashed-melon squish of pulped cartilage. The Night Marshal tore the shotgun from the addict’s hands and drove his knee up between the man’s legs.
The big man jackknifed, stumbling into Joe, gasping for air and spraying blood from the wet mess of his shattered nose.
The Night Marshal shoved him away, and he fell to his knees, coughing and choking on his own blood.
Joe growled and smashed the butt of the shotgun down into the back of the man’s head. The addict’s arms and legs went limp, and he slumped to his knees on the gravel, hunched over and leaking blood onto the ground. For one moment, Joe thought about putting the shotgun to the back of the cultist’s head and emptying whatever was left of his rotten brain onto the gravel. But, at least for the moment, he needed the man alive to explain what the hell he’d been planning with that half-made girl.
“Al,” Joe shouted. “It’s over. Come back.”
Night had fallen over the farmhouse. The sky overhead had become a velvet blackness lit with the silver gleam of starlight and the milky face of the m
oon. A mad beast howled in the distance, a hunter’s challenge, a throaty cry of primacy.
The cultist’s shoulders shook, and Joe thought the man was having a seizure. Maybe he’d hit him a little too hard, jangled something important loose in that rotten gourd he called a head. Then he heard the wet, rhythmic chuckling.
Rage burned hot in Joe’s guts. He kicked the man in the ribs, shoving him over onto his back. He pushed the shotgun’s barrels into the ruined smear of the man’s nose, thumbed the safety off with a satisfying, solid click. The red runes around the ends of the barrels crackled and glowed white-green like the afterglow of a summer lightning strike.
“What are you laughing at, asshole?”
“Too late,” he laughed. “You’re too fuckin’ late.”
“This isn’t over yet.”
“Ain’ got the stones to do it.” The big man lifted his head, pressing his nose against the shotgun’s barrels until blood ran free over his cheeks and down the sides of his face. “Didn’t then, don’t now.”
Joe heard Al’s voice rising over the shrieking voices of the bats, howling as he hunted in the darkness. He stared down at the asshole in front of him, the man who had risen up from Joe’s past mercies to drag him and his son to hell. He pushed the shotgun against the man’s forehead, shoving his skull back and grinding it against the gravel. Joe felt his fingers tightening. An ounce more pressure on the triggers, and he’d turn this fucker’s head into a stain on the gravel.
“Go on, then. Ya think this ends here?” The man laughed again, his breath bubbling the blood from his nose into a pink froth. “We didn’t start this, Marshal. This is your doin’.”
“Bullshit,” Joe said. “I didn’t make you call to the darkness. We all choose our own path.”
“That what yer daddy told ya afore he died? Be free to choose any path ya want, long as it’s the one that led to his fuckin’ badge?” The man laughed, choked on his own blood and sprayed red into the air. “We all choose, but sometimes the hand at your back gives ya a little shove along your path, don’t it?”
“Like you and your granny? She the one who taught you to play with half-made girls? Did she sell your useless ass to the darkness for a jug of ‘shine and a carton of Marlboros?” Joe leaned in closer. “I’ll find her, you know. When I’m done with you and your little pack, I’m going to find that old woman and finish what I started.”
“Ya don’t even know. Yer so fuckin’ blind.” Another cough, blood drooling out of his mouth. “Come closer; I’ll tell ya what’s comin’.”
The front door of the farmhouse blew open, shoved to the side by a seething, flapping mass of screeching vermin. Their voices filled the air, a multitude of piercing squeals that dug into Joe’s ears like gigging forks. More bats poured out of the empty mine shafts scattered through the hills around the farm.
The bats hit Joe like a twister filled with razor blades. Their screeching drowned out everything, filled his head with a throbbing agony that mirrored the myriad pains of his body. Fangs slashed through his shirt, sliced through his jeans, dug bleeding furrows along his scalp. The weight of their bodies pushed Joe to his knees, pressing him on top of the big man.
The bleeding man grabbed the Night Marshal. He glared at Joe, one eye swollen and bulging from its socket. His three-lobed pupil burned with a crimson fire, pulsing in time with Joe’s pounding heart.
“I I I taste you you you, Marshal,” the voice droned like a swarm of cicadas, forcing its way through the bat’s wall of sound. “You you you are so delicious.”
CHAPTER 17
THE BATS CLUNG to Joe like a cloak of fangs, scraping furrows in his scalp and shoulders. They lapped at his blood and gnawed on his scabs, sucking the life from him as he struggled to tear them from his body. For every one he snatched away and crushed in his fist, three more fell on him and crammed their greedy muzzles against his flesh.
“Feel them them them? The weakness? The draining?” The words flowed out of the man beneath Joe, pouring out of an open mouth that did not move, as if the real speaker lurked deep inside his chest. Each syllable thrummed and trembled in the air, formed from a hundred different voices, like the chorus of rasping cricket legs rising from the grass or the choir of peep frogs chirping from the creek. “This is how all things things things will end. Torn. Hollowed. Empty.”
“Fuck you,” Joe snarled.
“They they they drink,” the voice droned on, “and I I I grow more powerful. Soon, you you you will be finished.”
Joe felt the truth in the words. He was losing not just the strength to fight, but the will to do so. He had to end this before they leeched him dry. He fought against the weight of the bats and pushed himself up onto his left elbow, putting some space between himself and the freak. Joe swung the shotgun’s barrels up into the cultist’s chin, smashing the freak’s teeth together with a sharp click.
But his finger wouldn’t squeeze the trigger. His left hand was numb as a block of wood, separated from his brain by a wall of ice and pain. Joe looked down at a foot-long blade jutting from either side of his forearm, blood running down its length. The freak grinned up at Joe, ripped the knife free, and drove it into his arm again, skewering his bicep. The shotgun fell from Joe’s nerveless hand, and bats swarmed it.
“This this this body will not die so easily,” the voice droned, and the big man slid the knife out of Joe’s arm, scattering blood in a glittering arc across the gravel. His left arm flopped loose and weak from the shoulder, twitching at his side. “We we we will feast on you you you.”
Joe looked down at the cultist and saw his last chance. He curled his fingers around the Night Marshal’s badge. It filled the palm of his right hand, solid silver engraved with runes of protection and power. It fastened with a two-inch spike, sharpened to a spear point. Joe wrenched the badge loose from the big man’s coveralls and flicked it open with his thumb. He shifted it in his grasp, and the heavy needle jutted from between his first and second knuckle.
“Not today,” Joe reared up under the cloak of bats. He punched the spike through the center of the freak’s bulging eye, tore the weapon free and drove it in again. The eye sprayed like a stomped packet of jelly, squirting dark and stinking fluid in all directions.
Joe moved his attack to the man’s throat. He swung his fist in vicious arcs that carved a bloody groove across the freak’s throat, trailing arcs of blood. The man’s neck yawned open, revealing the tube of his airway, pumping blood vessels, and striated, ragged flaps of muscle. Joe kept swinging until the man’s neck was an open crater, sleek knobs of spine gleaming up through the gore. He felt the wind stir across his back as the bats lifted from his shoulders. They spiraled overhead, voices raised in a mad keening. The flock broke apart and scattered into the night.
He shook his head and thumped his fist against the dead man’s chest. Fatigue settled in his guts, leaving him weak and nauseated. He wanted to stay there, letting the cool night air dry the sweat and blood on his skin, but he knew there was too much work left to do before the sun rose.
Joe struggled to his feet. He grabbed his shotgun from the gravel and held it tight in his right hand.
A throaty growl and the crunch of heavy steps called Joe’s attention down the driveway. Al’s eyes glowed firefly green in the moonlight. Long strings of slobber dripped from his jaws and pattered onto the gravel. He swung his arms forward and dropped a pair of bodies that crumpled into boneless heaps on the driveway.
Joe looked from the bodies back to his son. Al was painted with blood, a red stain that ran down from his crimson snout and across his chest.
“Son,” Joe began and reached out for Al with his injured arm. His fingers shook, twitching as damaged nerves struggled to carry the message of his brain, trembling as his muscles cried out to be soaked in alcohol. He shifted his grip on the shotgun and raised it. “It’s over.”
Al’s muzzle rose into the wind, sniffed the air. He turned his eyes back to Joe’s, then lowered to the shotgun. H
is bestial head shook, slowly.
“You know what has to be done,” Joe said. But his guts churned at the thought of it. Al had done wrong, but he’d done it for the right reasons. He’d killed these men with his dark talents, which made what he’d done a capital offense. As Night Marshal, Joe had no more choice in carrying out his son’s execution than he did in putting an end to the black magic shenanigans of the idiots he’d just fought. That didn’t mean he had to like it. “Don’t fight me on this. Make it easy on us both.”
Al snorted and stabbed a bloody finger at the ruined body behind Joe.
Joe ignored the silent accusation and lifted the shotgun. Aimed it at Al as best he could manage with one good hand. “You know the law.”
His son grabbed the shotgun’s barrels and pulled them to his chest. Pressed their open mouths against the flesh over his heart and held them there.
Joe’s blood ran cold in his veins. “I’m sorry, Son. I never should have brought you into this. But what you did was wrong.”
“No,” Al said and pushed his weight against the shotgun. “What you believe is wrong.”
One of the bodies groaned, curled in on itself like a wounded snake. The other one cried out and clutched at the bloody wound across his face. They lay side by side, wounded, bloody. But alive.
Joe stared at his son. He flicked a glance to the injured men, and the shotgun dropped back to his side.
“Why?”
There was a sound like grinding meat, like heavy paper being crumpled. The air stung Joe’s eyes, and when his vision cleared Al stood naked before him, slight and bloody and human. Long scratches covered Al’s arms and legs, and his torso was cross-hatched by shallow cuts and scrapes.
“I had to know,” Al said.
Joe watched his son walk away and disappear into the darkness.
