Half-Made Girls

by Sam Witt

  Every step disturbed layers of crusted filth, cracked open pockets of dust or spores that gushed into the air with murmured sighs.

  The place looked like no one had lived here in years, as if the Blackbriars had walked out of this house one day and never returned. He almost wished that were true, but he could feel it wasn’t. His badge throbbed against his chest, and the oozing taint of profane power caressed his skin. There was a darkness here, something he’d let fester too long that now needed lancing.

  Joe stepped from the mudroom and into a long, crowded pantry. The walls were lined with once-sturdy shelves that now bowed in the middle, worn down by the weight of countless murky Mason jars and swollen canned goods. The labels from the cans had faded to yellow-brown and shed into drifts on the floor like dying leaves. There was enough food in the pantry to feed dozens of people for weeks, if it hadn’t been left to go bad.

  The smell was stronger in the kitchen, an almost physical presence that pushed back against Joe. His stomach roiled, and his eyes watered; his legs wanted to carry him from the house and back down the hill. There was something wrong here, something infectious, something that wanted to spread.

  Something that moved. Heavy footfalls came from beyond the doorway to Joe’s left. The Night Marshal moved next to the doorway, sliding his feet to avoid giving away his position with thudding steps. He tucked tight against the peeling wallpaper and held his breath as the steps drew nearer.

  The man who stepped into the kitchen wore old, stained overalls that strained to hold in his drooping bulk. He walked with his head back, nose in the air, slurping breaths bubbled in and out of his lungs in thick, slimy snorts. Joe waited for the man to walk past him before moving off the wall. He shoved the shotgun’s barrels against the rolls of fat on the back of the man’s neck.

  “Hey,” Joe said. “Nice place you’ve got here. Mind showing me around?”

  Joe’s pulse thundered in his ears. His breaths came sharp and shallow as a jolt of adrenaline shot down his spine. This was it, the kickoff. He just had to keep the ball rolling, stay on top of the situation.

  The enormous man nodded his big head, and Joe felt rolls of neck fat scrape against the shotgun’s barrels. When he spoke, Joe felt the words rumble in the air like thunder. “Anything you say, boss.”

  “Who else is home?” Beads of sweat ran down Joe’s forehead and into his eyes. “How many?”

  It took Joe a moment to realize the grinding noise he heard was the fat man’s laugh. “Lots.”

  Joe licked his lips. He didn’t want to turn this into a shooting war with a whole house full of lardass lunatics. “Show me.”

  The big man raised his hands to shoulder height and shuffle-stepped around in a slow circle, with Joe mirroring his steps. “You oughta leave. Better for everybody that way.”

  Joe nudged him in the back of the head with the shotgun. “Show me.”

  They walked through the house together, the big man making little shushing noises as he walked through the gloom-filled rooms. Squat lanterns shed dirty yellow light, showing Joe the lumpen outlines of old furniture and shadowed humps of garbage piles scattered around. They passed through a ramshackle sitting room and into a long hall with doors on either side. “Gramma gonna be real pissed if you interrupt. Last chance.”

  The big man stopped walking, and in the sudden quiet, Joe heard a new sound. Voices scratched at the Night Marshal’s ears with high-pitched squeals that suggested words he couldn’t quite understand. The air felt thick in his lungs, a sticky, choking miasma. His forehead burned, like an ember pressed into the space above and between his eyes. Vertigo stole Joe’s legs out from under him, and he reached a hand out to the wall to keep from falling. His fingers pushed through crumbling drywall and into something moist and gritty that stung his skin.

  Joe’s shotgun crashed into his chest, shoved by the big man. The blow knocked Joe off his feet and sent the shotgun swinging wild on its sling. The Night Marshal couldn’t get his bearings, the screeching words were unraveling his senses.

  A heavy boot caught Joe in the thigh with enough force to knock him a yard back down the hallway. Pain radiated from his leg, throbbing in time with the flickering pulse of his badge over his heart. As bad as it was, the agony drove the alien words from Joe’s head and cleared his thoughts.

  The big man let loose another wet gravel chuckle and kicked Joe in the shoulder, flipping the Night Marshal over onto his stomach. Joe crawled away from his attacker, fumbling with his shotgun. His left arm and right leg were wooden, blasted numb by the powerful kicks.

  “Gramma’s songs aren’t for you,” the giant grumbled. “Never shoulda come here. Shoulda left us be.”

  Joe didn’t think he could take another kick. He scrambled down the hall on his hands and knees, struggling to keep ahead of the behemoth. The pain was fading, but the voices were crawling back through his ears to pluck at his thoughts.

  “I’ll go,” Joe gasped and raised his shaking left hand to ward off another attack. He shifted onto his knees and leaned back against the kitchen doorway, bracing himself upright.

  The big man paused and scratched the side of his head. Weak light fell across his face, revealing chubby cheeks, narrow pig’s eyes, and the flaring spade of a bat’s nose that dominated the center of his face. Snot drooled from his gaping nostrils and ran down into his slack-jawed mouth. “You’ll go?”

  Joe raised his shotgun and squeezed both triggers. Silver fire and green smoke roared from the weapon’s twin barrels, and the big man lost fifty pounds of flab and bone as the shot tore through his gut. The cultist’s hands struggled to hold in the unspooling tangle of organs that spilled from the crater in his stomach, but couldn’t stop the gushing curtain of blood from pouring out of the smoking hole. His knees gave out, and he flopped to the side, mouth gawping open, eyes fluttering.

  Joe’s ears rang from the shotgun’s thunder, but the dark voices were banished from his head. “Changed my mind,” Joe said and stepped around the smoking corpse.

  He knew he didn’t have much time. The noise would attract the rest of the cultists, and he wouldn’t stay deaf and numb to their enchantments forever. He needed to hit them now, hard and fast, before they could react. He ran down the hall, looking into each of the open doorways he passed.

  He paused at the first room on the left, some sort of ritual chamber that had been used for years, maybe decades. The floor was inscribed with a rough collection of concentric circles that radiated out from a triangle of points. A blackened, gnarled bonsai tree crouched at the tip of the triangle. The two base points were occupied by a pail of crystal-blue water and a hole hacked through the floorboards and into the earth beneath.

  The room made Joe’s eyes water, and the burning spot on his forehead flared with an intense new level of pain.

  The Night Marshal staggered back from the room, scrubbing the back of his right hand against his forehead. There was power here, the kind of power that could destroy the whole county if he didn’t do something about.

  Joe continued his search for the cultists and walked to the end of the hall before he found what he was looking for.

  The room beyond the doorway was gone, just a narrow ledge of the floor remained around its perimeter. The ceiling was missing as well, and Joe could see attic rafters three stories overhead. The smell here was beyond anything Joe had ever experienced, an overpowering fog of ammonia and rot and swamp gas that almost kept him from pushing ahead.

  Joe peered over the floor’s crumbling edge. Sick green flames flickered at the bottom of a deep pit, illuminating the distant, scrawny figure of a naked old woman with flowing silver hair. Her head was thrown back, swollen black eyes staring at something no one else could see as her mouth chewed on depraved words that split her lips and left blood drooling from the corners of her mouth.

  Seeing her again after all these years rocked Joe back on his heels like a hammer blow to the forehead. Alma Pryor, alive and raising hell today because he’d be
en too weak, too forgiving to put a bullet through her brain all those years ago.

  Filth-smeared bodies writhed on the floor around her, a living carpet of intertwined limbs and flopping meat. What drew Joe ahead was what else he saw down there: a pig’s carcass bobbing in a vat of blood, two half-made girls bathing with it, pouring blood from their cupped hands over the pig’s snout.

  They were all so intent on their work, so invested in their actions, that none of them seemed to have noticed the shotgun blast. Joe could feel the old hag’s screeching at the edges of his deafness, it must have blotted out everything else for those in the pit.

  Joe found a rickety stairway around the edge of the room and took the stairs three at a time, throwing himself forward despite the throbbing agony in his leg. Every time he landed, pain dug its knives into the muscles in his thigh, threatening to spill him onto his face, but Joe kept on. He racked another pair of shells into the shotgun as he went. This was his shot. He could end it all. Right here, right now. He just had to get down the stairs and pull the triggers.

  The old woman’s high-pitched, droning chant filled the air. Even deafened by the shotgun’s blast, Joe could feel the pressure in his ears. He didn’t know what she was up to, but he knew he had to stop it. He followed the staircase as it spiraled down into the earth, orbiting the perimeter of the room, watching as the darkness unfolded before him.

  The rest of the cultists wriggled on the floor, slathering themselves with greasy, black filth, licking one another’s faces and bodies. They were blind to the world around them, bound up in whatever spell the old woman was spinning, feeding the energy of their religious fervor to her.

  Meth pipes, flaring with blue butane flames, dotted the black floor like a constellation in hell. Joe watched the cultists take deep, lung-scouring drags as they worshiped their dark and bloody god.

  The first half-made girl noticed Joe at last and raised her stump to him, wriggling the wreath of fingers that now surrounded it. Her lips moved, but Joe couldn’t hear the words. He had a feeling it was some variation of, “You’re too late,” and hoped she was wrong.

  He hit the dirt floor, running, and leveled his shotgun at Alma. Her body was rigid with the power she channeled, but she was blind to the world around her. Blood ran from her mouth and drooled from the tip of her pointy chin, smeared across the leathery flaps of her breasts. Joe rushed across the space between them, aware of the half-made girls slopping their way out of the vat to cut him off. The blood clung to them like a living thing, slowing them, giving Joe the edge he needed. Six feet away, he pulled the triggers and sprayed death and fire at the old woman.

  The shot tore into the second half-made girl, instead. A last-second lunge had carried her into the line of fire and into the hail of lead pellets that chewed bloody chunks out of her deformed body. Joe roared and let the shotgun fall from his hands, trusting the sling to keep it nearby. He shoved his right hand into his satchel and prayed he could find what he was looking for before it was too late.

  The first half-made girl slammed a punch into his shoulder, knocking him off balance. He stumbled into a knot of cultists, and their groping and writhing tipped him off his feet. His head smacked into the moist, muddy floor.

  The half-made girl he’d shot landed on his chest, splattering him with blood from the injuries he’d caused. Joe shoved at her with his left hand, still desperately digging in his satchel with his right, but she was too strong for him. She slapped his hand away and ripped his shirt open. She pushed her bony fingertips into his ribs, grinding them against the bones, digging into him. Joe felt his skin part, opening to embrace the monster on his chest. Her nails scraped against his ribs, and she began to pull.

  His right hand found what he needed, and his fingers slipped around and through the cold metal. Joe stabbed the half-made girl’s arm, driving a broad push knife into her malleable flesh again and again. Blood splattered between them, Joe’s mingling with the girl’s as they struggled to kill one another. Flesh parted and bones snapped, and then she was gone, swirling away from him, clutching her ruined arm against the malformed flesh of her chest as she withdrew into the shadows bordering the pit.

  Joe struggled to his feet, crawling over the cultists until he could find clear ground. The first half-made girl stood behind the old woman, whispering words into her that the old woman repeated. The air writhed with their combined power, and Joe could feel it pressing down against him. Whatever they were doing down here, the ritual was almost complete.

  The Night Marshal limped toward the blood-filled vat, ignoring the half-made girl and the old woman. He didn’t think he’d survive another tangle with one of those freaks. But maybe he wouldn’t have to, maybe he could ruin whatever they were trying to do with a little something of his own.

  The half-made girl’s face contorted as she spat something Joe couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears. He pulled the flask from his satchel and popped the top with his thumb. The hard perfume of whiskey cut through shit and the blood around him, as comforting in that moment as a ray of sunshine. Joe took a swig of whiskey then shot his hand out over the vat and upended the flask. This was his holy water, the sacrament that kept him moving when every other blessing had lost its edge. Maybe dumping it into their witches’ broth would derail the fun and games. Spells were finicky like that.

  The half-made girl struck like lightning, darting from the old woman’s side to knock the flask out of Joe’s hand. Joe took advantage of the moment and sprinted away from the vat. The half-made girl caught up to him as he ran and locked her hand on the back of Joe’s neck, but not before he reached his goal.

  He threw his left arm around the old woman’s throat and lifted her off her feet and into his chest. Joe held her close and pressed the tip of the punch dagger’s blade to her throat. “Let me go,” Joe growled and felt the half-made girl’s hand lift from his neck.

  Alma Pryor didn’t weigh anything, she was as light as Elsa as Joe turned to face the half-made girls. He jiggled the knife, and a blood-red bead burst from his hostage’s brittle skin. The old woman never stopped chanting, even as her skin split and blood spilled. “Back the fuck up,” Joe said and stepped back.

  Joe eyeballed the half-made girls and the cultists, who were starting to figure out something had gone wrong. They scratched at their bloated bellies and rubbed muck from their eyes as they disentangled their sweaty bodies. Joe grimaced at the sight of the tainted flesh before him, the bat noses, vestigial flaps of translucent skin between elbows and waists, wide, bulging eyes, and elongated ears tufted with fur. Whatever they were doing, they’d been at it for years, maybe longer. There twenty or thirty of them, too many for Joe to deal with on his own.

  He moved toward the steps, keeping his human shield in front of him. Joe was willing to sacrifice himself, but if survival was an option he’d take it. He’d use the old woman as a shield to get him upstairs, then slice her throat and run for the truck. The cult would be stopped, and he’d be alive to round up the rest of them when he was better prepared.

  The half-made girls watched him go, hate burning in their eyes, but they seemed reluctant to follow him and remained next to the vat as he made his way toward the steps.

  The old woman didn’t struggle, but she kept right on chanting until Joe squeezed her throat hard enough to stop the words. He was exhaust from the awkwardness of holding the old woman, but he was almost home free. He topped the stairs and retraced his route through the house, heading down the hall, through the kitchen and the pantry, and at last stumbled through the mudroom and kicked open the back door.

  He stood on the porch and steeled himself for what had to be done. He drew his arm back and leaned in close to Alma’s ear. “You lose, bitch.”

  Lights stabbed from the darkness, blinding the Night Marshal. He blinked against the glare, and by the time he could see what was happening it was too late. A stinging pain rifled through his head, punching straight through from the base of his spine to his forehead.
He felt a cold metal circle press against the side of his head and heard a familiar voice say, “Let her go, Joe.”

  Rough hands locked around his wrists. He held tight to the crone, strained to swing the knife and finish the job. He couldn’t let her walk away again. They bent his arms away from her, though, and she slipped from his grasp.

  His captors wrenched Joe’s arms back behind him, forcing him up onto his tip toes, leaning forward.

  “Don’t do this, Dan.” The lights were still blazing in his eyes, car lights, truck lights. Dozens of them encircled the house. “Something bad is going down here. It needs to be stopped.”

  “Something bad went down earlier today, didn’t it?” Dan kept the gun pressed against Joe’s head. “Bunch of people burned alive, bunch of dead kids with them? A whole fucking farm blown straight to shit. Ringing any bells?”

  “I didn’t —”

  “You did, though.” Dan leaned in close and whispered. “You did today, and yesterday, and the day before that, and how many other goddamned days did you decide what had to be done no matter what it cost or who it hurt?”

  “It’s my job. No one has to like it.”

  “They don’t.” Dan’s voice stank of fear and whiskey, scents all too familiar to Joe. “They fucking hate it.”

  “Tough shit. Why don’t you put that pea shooter down and let me get back to work.”

  “There’s no more work for you here,” Dan said, grinding the barrel into the side of Joe’s head to emphasize his point. “You’re done.”

  Dan kicked Joe’s legs out from under him. The Night Marshal fell onto his knees, arms wrenched in their sockets.

  “Last chance, Sheriff. Do what you know is right.”

  Dan sighed, and Joe felt the barrel of the pistol mashed tight against the back of his skull. “This is what they want. The whole goddamned county is full of people who are more afraid of you than whatever the hell this old bitch is doing down in her cellar. They had a choice of monsters, and they didn’t pick you.”