by Sam Witt
“What the fuck now?” Dan looked around for more casualties, but there was only one splotch of blood on the floor and no one else standing around covered in crimson.
“Bailey slipped. Dropped the girl.” The deputy shrugged. “We’ve got her over in Holding 6, for now. I just need to get cleaned up. Shift’s over.”
“Go ahead.” Dan dropped his hat on the rack next to the door and hiked his pants up a couple of inches. They were always drooping these days, pushed down by a belly that wouldn’t stop growing. Dan was starting to wonder what was going on in there, because his appetite had been shrinking even as his waist expanded. “See you tomorrow.”
“Sure.” Tracie disappeared into the women’s bathroom.
Dan took the long way to his office, walking through the bullpen rather than past the cells. There were six of them, and he couldn’t remember the last time they’d been half full. He certainly did not want to see what they held today.
His office was small and cramped, made even smaller by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves he’d installed on two walls a few years before. Dan shut the door behind him and ran his hand along the spines of his treasured possessions. They weren’t hardbound first editions or rare texts from far-off lands. They were just paperbacks from Walmart and a few cellophane-sheathed hardbacks he’d scrounged from library sales. He’d started the collection as a teen, then kept on adding to it as often as he was able. These weren’t his favorites, those he kept on the walls of his garage at home, but they were special nonetheless. Books about being a cop, books about big-city crimes, novelizations of the exploits of serial killers, anything about crime, criminals, or cops he could lay his hands on.
Dan wished his life was more like these books. Pitchfork didn’t get many criminals outside of the meth heads who tended to blow themselves to shit before he got involved in their lives and the occasional speeders he caught while tooling around the back highways. Mostly, though, his county was infested with black magic bullshit that he was powerless to stop. Dan hated the Night Marshal, not because of what Joe did or was, but because of what the position said about Dan. Joe did things Dan couldn’t. Joe had the ear of the Long Man. Dan had a bunch of shitkicker deputies who respected him even less than he did them. This wasn’t what Dan had signed up for when he got elected sheriff.
The front door banged closed. The last of his deputies were gone. He was alone with the things in the cells.
Dan went down that hall, he told himself, to make sure his deputies hadn’t fucked up and left one of them unlocked. But even as he walked down the short hall, he knew there was another reason. He wanted to talk to her, again.
She stood with her face pressed to the far wall. Silent, unmoving. She didn’t touch the floor, but dangled six inches above it as if a great hand held her aloft by the top of her head. She didn’t turn, but she did speak.
“Hello, Sheriff.”
Dan couldn’t get his mouth to work. He stared at the girl’s back, at the space below the red, ragged stumps of her legs. Her hair floated above her head like a tangle of kelp waving in the tide. She was fascinating and dreadful.
“He’s coming, Sheriff.” Her voice was soft, but it held Dan’s attention as if she’d screamed straight into his ear. “He’s coming. He’ll kill me and my sister. He’ll torture the boys, and he’ll kill them because they don’t have the information he seeks.”
“Why are you here?” Because as horrible as Joe’s temper could be, and Dan had seen it get downright terrifying, at least he was human. He made sense. These girls, on the other hand, were something else. They made Dan doubt everything he knew about the world. “Why now?”
“The Long Man isn’t the only power in Pitchfork. Another has set designs in motion.” She chuckled and sobbed and clasped her hand and stump to the sides of her head as if her skull was trying to shake itself apart. “The winds of change are blowing, Sheriff.”
She raised her hand to the barred window at the back of the cell, and a fierce wind blew against the glass. It spat a red mist onto the window, then thicker droplets, until the sky was blocked by a red smear. “The loyal will bend before the wind, but others will be stripped bare by the storm of teeth. Their bones will glisten under the moon. Their blood will feed the roots of the Red Oak and its brothers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Choose.” She laughed again, and rain splattered against the red curtain, washing it away in moments. “Before it is too late.”
“I don’t even know what I’m choosing.” Dan scrubbed his hands through his hair. He felt as if he were swimming in deep waters, struggling to keep afloat as the undertow sucked at his legs.
“Side with the Night Marshal, and you will see horrors that will follow you to the end of your days. You will see everything you hold dear torn asunder and the pieces left to rot where they fall. You may win this battle, but you will lose everything by doing so.”
“Or?”
“Open the cell doors for my sister and me. Go back to your office. Read your books.” She turned, and her brilliant green eye rolled toward him in the raw meat ruin of her face. “When we need you, we will come for you. You will be rewarded for what you do this day.”
Dan walked away from the cells. Conflicting thoughts ricocheted within his skull like a bucket of rubber balls dumped down a well. He had no doubt the girl spoke the truth about changes coming. They were already taking root in the people of Pitchfork, even in Dan himself. A week ago, he’d never have dared speak against the Night Marshal. But he didn’t think he could throw in his lot with these monsters either. He wasn’t sure which side was going to win this fight.
But he knew he couldn’t let Joe kill these girls. Whatever else they were, they were still just girls, victims of something Dan didn’t understand. He wouldn’t let the Night Marshal come into his station and shoot them dead. He also didn’t think he could stop Joe from doing just that if the girls stayed here. Their pleas wormed their way into his thoughts, and Dan couldn’t let that be on his conscience.
Dan walked to his office and unhooked the key ring from the wall inside. He came back to the cells, opened the first girl’s door, and shoved it open. “Just the two of you?”
“And the boys,” she said. “Please.”
Dan nodded and opened the second girl’s door, then walked back down the hall to set the Pryor boys loose. He shoved their door open.
“I suggest you two get the fuck out of here and be far away before the Night Marshal comes looking.”
“No need,” the girl said and squeezed past Dan, who jumped away from her as if her skin were made of fire. Her sister followed her into the cell, whipping across the floor like a snake with a broken back, the iron bar through her flesh wiggling in the air above her. It reminded Dan of that Disney movie with the mops jumping around on their own. Only this mop ran red.
The boys cowered back against the back wall of the cell as the first girl slammed the door shut behind her.
“Sheriff,” the older one said with a voice cracking from raw terror. “Get us outta here. You don’t know shit about these girls.”
“Shhh,” the first girl pressed her finger to her lips. “You should leave, Sheriff.”
Dan sagged against the wall, his arms and legs limp and weak. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from the mess he’d made. He’d thought he was being brave, he’d thought he was standing up for what was right.
The second girl whirled into one of the boys, her flailing arms latching onto his leg. She yanked him off his feet and she mounted his chest in a flurry of flailing limbs and torn flesh. He screamed, and Dan could see his arms and legs windmilling as he tried to dislodge the thing. There was a wet, crunching sound that reminded Dan of a butcher’s knife punching through the rind of a stream-cooled watermelon. He saw the iron spear rear and thrust as the second girl went about her business, and the crunching sound came again and again and again.
Streams of blood ran across the cell�
�s sloped floor and disappeared down a drain in its center. The boy’s screams sank to a weepy bubbling, and his limbs ceased their thrashing. The second girl slopped off the mess she’d made of the boy. Countless inch-wide holes had turned his abdomen into a spongy ruin. Wrinkled gray noodles of guts poked up through the mess, split and torn in places to reveal oozing globs of slimy shit.
Dan puked his breakfast onto the hallway’s floor, adding the sting of vomit to the earthy odor of blood and waste already filling the air.
“Here we are,” said the second girl. She used the iron spear to tear a long wound in the boy’s thigh. Her delicate fingers pulled aside his stained jeans and pried open the lips of his torn flesh. She gripped his femur and pulled, thrashing her damaged body to and fro as she worried it loose from its housing of flesh. Tendons and muscles tore and snapped away from the bone as she wormed it out of its hollow. She turned the bone lengthwise in her hand and rammed it into her own body, pushing it into the red interior of her side. There was a thick, swallowing sound and her breath leaked out in a long, satisfied sigh.
“So much better,” she sang and dug into the boy’s other leg.
"Get her off'n him," the other young man screamed. "Sheriff, she's killin' him. Get her off."
The first girl laughed and beat at her head with the stump of her wrist. She rose higher into the air, and static electricity arced through her hair like a crown of lightning.
The unhurt boy threw himself at her, face contorted into a desperate snarl. He jumped and closed his hands around her throat. The girl didn't even bob in the air, but remained still as a statue. He squeezed until the veins bulged on his hands, but the girl just smiled at him.
She took hold of his index finger with her good hand and snapped it to the left. Bones crunched, and tendons gave way with wet snaps. She rolled it back to the right, popping his finger loose from his hand with a soggy crunch. The boy fell away from her, screeching as blood flowed from the gaping socket where his index finger had once been.
The girl pressed the finger to the top edge of her stump, holding it still as her wound stirred and absorbed the bloody root of the severed finger. It squirmed like a worm, struggling to come to terms with its new home as part of the girl's strange flesh.
“Look,” she howled, her voice a chorus of spectral screams, “look upon the works you have made possible and rejoice. For the time of change is at hand.”
Dan sank to the floor, legs splayed out in front of him, hands loose in his lap. He wanted to look away, but his eyes would not obey. He watched as the girls took the boys in the cell apart, reducing them from young men to scraps of flesh and disarticulated bones in less time than it would have taken him to fillet a catfish. Blood ran down the drain in the center of the cell, and Dan swore he could hear something down there gulping as the thick red juice disappeared into the darkness.
The cell door clanged open when they were finished, sparks leapt from the dark shadow of the key hole and smoke rose from the bars. Dan’s eyes jumped up as the first girl floated from the cell. The raw, red stump of her wrist was gone, replaced by a blossom of fingers and toes plucked from the dead men and grafted to her flesh. They stretched toward the sheriff, opening and closing around her stump like the tendrils of an anemone.
“What the fuck are you?” Dan’s question leaked from him, a whisper, a plea. He couldn’t remember why he’d let them go, couldn’t understand what he’d been thinking. Worse, he knew his actions had thrown his lot in with theirs. He was tied to them now, bound up in their darkness. “What have you done?”
The bloody fingers closed gently around Dan’s face, touching him with tender, precise taps, like the legs of a spider exploring his head. She smiled down at him, her face beaded with blood, her hair floating in the air above her. “We were called, Sheriff.”
Her voice thrummed in the close air of the station, reminding Dan of a flight of locusts on the horizon. “Who would call you? Who would want this?”
“Oh, Sheriff.” She crossed her legs and drifted down until she was almost at Dan’s eye level. Her fingers closed around his cheeks, and she pressed her new fingers against his lips, staining them red with blood from one of the boys. “We were called by the people you serve. They wanted us here. We’ve come to set them free.”
Dan tried to shake his head loose from her grip, but there was no strength left in him. All he could do was moan and pray to be released.
“We must go for now. Our sister is coming and needs our help.” She rose into the air and dragged Dan up onto his feet by his face. “But we will return. And we shall see this through. Together.”
CHAPTER 24
JOE’S HANGOVER WAS alive, a weasel gnawing at the nerves inside his skull. He hadn’t given Stevie the time to brew up another batch of herbs, and sorely missed their healing powers. By the time he got to the sheriff’s station house, he felt raw and his temper was primed and ready to blow. The old truck slid to a growling stop in front of the station and announced Joe’s arrival with an ill-tempered backfire that rattled the small building’s windows.
He clenched his fingers on the steering wheel and swallowed down the pain. He could end this. He just had to get the girls to talk, squeeze them and the Pryor boys until someone told him what was going on and how he could stop it.
The Night Marshal came through the front door of the police station with his shotgun held high. “Where are my prisoners?”
Joe could see Dan sitting in his office, feet up on his desk, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t wait for the sheriff to come out and meet him, but stormed through the bullpen and wrenched the office door open.
“I wondered when you’d get here.” Dan didn’t move, just shifted his eyes from the ceiling to Joe. “You have shitty timing.”
“Where are they?” Joe shouldered his shotgun, but the threat in his voice was clear.
“I’ll show you where they were.” Dan struggled to his feet, wrestling with his pants and belt. “Haven’t had a chance to clean up yet. Should have. Knew you were coming.”
Joe followed the sheriff, hairs rising on the back of his neck. There was something wrong with Dan and whatever it was gave Joe a hollow feeling in his guts. The sheriff seemed like he was sleepwalking.
He smelled the mess before he saw it. The rich aroma of spilled blood and punctured entrails spiked with the acidic tang of vomit riled up the hangover weasel and it stirred Joe’s guts with its tail. Something terrible had happened in the station.
“Tell me those girls are still locked up, Dan.”
“They’re gone.” Dan gave Joe a numb shrug and leaned against the hallway’s wall. He waved his arm forward, gesturing for Joe to go ahead to the cells. “See for yourself.”
The Night Marshal didn’t want to open the door to the holding cells, but he had to get a look at what he was up against, what kind of monsters he was chasing. He also had to know what they’d done, because if there was one rule he always followed, it was certainty before meting out punishment.
All six cells were empty, their doors wide open. He walked down the hall, breathing through his mouth to keep the stink from soaking into his nose. The first five cells were clean, gray cubes that looked like they’d never been used. Dan kept a tidy house.
Joe stopped in front of the last cell. He wiped the back of his mouth with his injured right hand and tried to blink away the nightmare splattered across the inside of the cell. The gray cube was a slaughterhouse. Someone had drawn a large circle across the cell’s floor, then drawn three smaller circles inside it. Grisly pyramids of yellow fat and striated muscle rose inside the smaller circles, their tips marked by nuggets of bone, clustered together in groups of three. Heavy clouds of green-eyed flies buzzed around the mess.
“Goddammit.” Joe’s fingers squeezed the stock of his shotgun. He wanted to kill something, to make someone pay for this mess. He stomped back down the hall.
Dan saw him coming but couldn’t muster the energy to get out of the storm’s path.
Joe’s forearm slammed into the sheriff’s chest and rammed him back across the floor and up onto one of the bullpen’s desks. Joe leaned into Dan, bending the sheriff back until his feet left the floor and he was pinned to the desktop.
The Night Marshal stared down into the sheriff’s eyes. For a flickering moment, Joe thought he saw Dan’s left pupil stretch and split. He thought about how easy it would be to press a little harder, bend Dan back a little farther, and snap his neck. Joe blinked and saw the sheriff’s eye was wide and staring, terrified. Joe’s rage subsided, though there was still an ugly part of him way back in the shadows of his mind that wanted to end the sheriff. “Where are they?”
“They left.” Dan licked his lips and looked away from Joe. “They opened their cells, made that mess back there, and left.”
“You didn’t try to stop them?”
Dan cracked a tortured grin at Joe. “Isn’t that your job?”
“I told you to hold them.” Joe stood and smacked Dan across the forehead with the butt of the shotgun. “All you had to do was keep them in the fucking cell for one goddamned day.”
“Fuck you.” Dan shoved the Night Marshal back and rolled off the desk. He caught himself before he crashed to the floor and managed to stand without losing his pants. His hand dropped to his holster, and his eyes locked with Joe’s. “You weren’t here. You got no idea what it means to stand up to them girls.”
“One of those girls didn’t have any feet. The other one had every bone in her body busted nine ways to Sunday.” Joe’s eyes burned with savage rage. “What, they crawled out of your motherfucking jail on their bellies?”
“They don’t have no trouble getting around.”
“What are you talking about?”
“One of ‘em flies. Floats. Whatever. Other one flops around like a sidewinder with a broken back.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
