by Sam Witt
The light in the tunnel faded as Joe ran. The little patches of glowing mushrooms were spaced farther and farther apart. Then they shrank, and the already dim light weakened to a dull glow. The tunnel faded into a gray blur, and Joe smacked his shoulder on a stone outcropping he didn’t see in the gathering gloom.
His feet spun out from under him. For one second Joe thought he’d tripped over something, lost his footing.
Then he realized there was no footing to be had. He fell into the blackness and landed hard enough to chase the wind out of his chest.
Joe hunkered in the dark, curled in on himself, belly heaving as he struggled to coax some breath back into his lungs. He could hear the cultists coming, their angry cries rising above the humming in his ears.
Joe didn’t think he had what it took to get out of this one on his own.
He closed his eyes and fell into his own thoughts. There was a glimmer of power down there, the barest trace of the strength he’d once known. The Long Man was weak, but he wasn’t dead. Joe grabbed that power with all his concentration and pulled on it.
His breath came back in a whooping gulp. He jackknifed up and scrambled onto his knees. He could feel the Long Man’s strength, the dregs of it anyway, pulling him back from the brink. He could do this. All he had to do was get up, find his way down to Elsa. He could do this.
“Marshal,” the singsong voice drifted down to Joe. He looked up and could make out a slightly darker shadow in the gray gloom. “Took a wrong turn?”
Joe eased back until his shoulders came up against a wall. He realized, too late, he’d dropped his left-hand pistol. “Come on down and find out, motherfucker.”
A hand hooked around Joe’s throat and cinched up tight. “Already here, dumbass.”
Joe’s breath was locked up in his chest, turning to poison as his heart thundered in his ears. He couldn’t see how many there were, but he could feel rough hands on his arms and legs, knocking him off his feet and onto the ground. Kicks pummeled his ribs and guts; the hand was gone from around Joe’s neck, but he couldn’t breathe with the beating he was taking.
They were piling on, crushing him under their stinking flesh, smashing him flat against the limestone floor. Joe couldn’t get the leverage to swing a punch or kick, so he squeezed the trigger. The pistol roared, and someone shrieked, a trilling death cry that did nothing to get the others off him.
Hot, sour breath poured onto his face. It was too black to see, but Joe could feel the three-pupiled eye staring at him. “Hello hello hello, Joe.”
The Night Marshal turned his head to the side, but a pair of hands yanked his head back straight so hard he saw stars sparkle in the darkness. “You you you can end this.”
“Fuck you.” Joe snarled at his tormentor through gritted teeth. Every breath he took was tainted by a nauseating stink. The chemical tang of batshit mingled with the ripe perfume of rot.
Someone pulled Joe’s leg out straight and rested his ankle on top of a domed stalagmite. “Don’t do it.” Joe growled. “Get off me now, and I’ll think about letting some of you motherfuckers walk out of here in one piece.”
Tittering laughs mocked Joe’s threat. He heard someone grunt, and the thin bones in his calf snapped. Joe felt them rip through his skin, jutting into the cool subterranean air, a pair of exposed nerves. Before he could take another breath, jagged pain raced up from his leg and exploded behind his eyes with the force of a shotgun blast.
“You you you fight.” The voice thrummed in Joe’s ears. “But you you you can make it it it stop.”
Joe drew in a breath against the pain and shouted his denial, a wordless roar that distracted him from the blinding pain from his shattered leg.
They swung his leg out and rested his knee on a rounded lump of stone. A foot pressed down on the middle of his thigh, bowing the bone enough to hook Joe’s breath. The pain was there, two seconds away, waiting to pounce.
The bat god was back in his head, its three pupils blazing with black light in the darkness of Joe’s thoughts. Where the Long Man’s strength was dim and remote, more remembered than real, this was something else. A live wire, a shot of raw power, just waiting for Joe to grab it. All he had to do was reach out for it, embrace its primal strength. Serve a new master.
“No,” he growled. “I ain’ turnin’. Not now. Not after all I been through to stay true.”
Joe held onto the words, leaning against the strength of his convictions, bracing for the pain.
But in the back of his mind, he remembered waking inside the pig. He remembered the burning, itching mark on his forehead. That infernal, nagging pain and his blinding rages should have tipped him off. He’d been fighting this for days now, and didn’t know how much longer he could keep at it. He’d been tricked, manipulated into coming down here in the dark where he could be destroyed.
His femur cracked, the sound a physical force that crushed Joe. He puked, choking on stomach acid. The pain was beyond anything he could imagine. His tormentor lifted off Joe’s leg, then stomped down on it hard, grinding the raw, broken edges of the thick bone together. Joe tried to scream, sprayed puke, choked again.
The whisperer was still with him. “There is nothing nothing nothing but pain. Not if you you you keep on. You you you have felt my my my strength within your soul. The two of us us us could not be stopped. ”
Joe reached for the Long Man’s power, the gift of the Night Marshal’s office, but the dark thing held him back, blocked him from reaching it.
Someone had Joe’s right index finger. They torqued it right, then wrenched it back to the left, shattering it in two places and raking the splintered chunks back and forth. Joe bit his lip and tasted blood.
“This this this,” the voice hissed rancid breath into Joe’s nostrils, “is what they they they want. They will always hate you you you for your strength and authority.”
Joe’s throat ached from screaming, from the burn of vomiting. He wanted whiskey. A slug of it. A high ball glass full. A whole fucking bottle. He just wanted the pain to stop.
But he’d spent his life fighting monsters. He’d die fighting them, if it came to that. Die spitting in the motherfucker’s face.
“Just like I’ll always hate you sick fucks.” Joe panted against the pain.
A blade dug into the flesh below Joe’s eye. He could feel it splitting his cheek, then rising, biting into the fragile tissue of his eyelid. The point was sharp and cold against his eyeball. One little push, and he’d never see out of the left side of his head again.
The knife dug and sizzling fireworks danced in the darkness of Joe’s sight.
Joe’s father had died fighting for this shitty county. The love of Joe’s life had been warped out of true and used as a weapon against him, all because he’d tried to do what was right. He’d sacrificed so much; he could never turn his back on what he’d done, on what he believed was right. He couldn’t accept that his family’s struggle was all for nothing.
The knife flicked through his eyeball. There was no pain, just a sudden warmth and an emptiness in Joe’s head. His eyelid fluttered and hung up on the sticky shell of his ruined eye.
He was going to die here. They would torture him, slice him to ribbons, use him up until all that remained was a smear on the cold stone floor.
He’d die screaming. He’d die ugly. But he’d die a man. He wouldn’t turn to the Left-Hand Path.
“Such a waste waste waste,” the voice hissed. A cold hand tugged at Joe’s ruined eye, and it slithered free of his face.
Someone pulled Joe’s left arm out straight, straddled it. More hands grabbed Joe’s wrist and spun it. The bones in his forearm gave way with two wet snaps. Joe howled. The pain chewed at him, burrowed into his skull where he couldn’t get away from it.
“God of my father,” Joe croaked, gagging on the pain.
They snapped his hand back the other way, wrenching the broken bones counterclockwise until their splintered ends knifed through his muscles and split his skin. Fingers plucked
at the wounds, prying them apart, stroking the broken bones and shredded muscle.
“My my my pets,” the voice whispered.
Leather wings flapped in the darkness. Joe felt something sharp and cold touch his forearm. Then fur, wet and bristly. A bat. A gentle, insistent prodding. Heat pushing against the edges of one of his wounds, shoveling its way under his skin.
“Though darkness be all around, the sword of my Lord shall clear my path.” Joe clung to the echo of the words, looking for strength in them.
“There is no god god god before me,” the voice whispered, “no salvation save through me me me.”
Joe ground his teeth and struggled to breathe, to transcend the pain. He tried to ignore the snapshots that flared to life in the darkness of his thoughts. Walter, screaming as the bats ate him from the inside. Al begging Joe to let him loose, to not let him be eaten.
Dead breath gusted against Joe’s empty eye socket. “Take my my my hand. Walk with me me me from this torture.”
Images shuffled in the blackness behind Joe’s eyes. Meth heads hunkered in a shitty house, sneering at Joe as he tried to save their lives. Dead towns filled with shit-stupid addicts and petty criminals, praying to evil even as Joe tried to keep it from their doors.
The bat shoved its whole head into Joe’s arm. He could feel it plowing through the broken shards of bone, biting, tearing hunks out of his muscles and chewing them, sucking them down.
Another bat latched onto Joe’s arm. Another. Another. Wings flapped in the darkness, a whole colony of the fuckers come to feast.
Joe spat, hoping it would strike whoever was whispering in his face. “I’ll see you in hell.”
“Yes yes yes,” the voice was a sigh, a disgusted exhalation. “You you you will.”
A fingertip hooked inside Joe’s right nostril, digging in until his nose felt stretched and raw. Pressure built, and Joe felt the trickle of blood running out of his nose. Skin tore, his face was on fire.
The bats chewed their way into Joe.
“You won’t be alone alone alone,” the voice whispered. “I’ll bring your whore and your demon.”
A long, wet tongue slithered up Joe’s cheek, swirled its tip in the bloody crater of his empty eye socket.
“But I’m keeping the little little little one.” A throaty chuckle. “Such fun fun fun we’ll have.”
He could feel Stevie out there, rushing toward an ambush. Elsa, desperate for rescue, near death. Al, falling to a darkness he’d spent his whole life struggling against. Joe saw their deaths, vivid and more real than his own pain. The weight of his failure crushed the last of his strength from him, left him hollow and cold.
He’d fought the fight he thought was good and just. He’d done his best.
And it hadn’t been enough.
Despite all he’d done, Joe’d ended up at the bottom a hole, with all the assholes he’d tried to save tearing him apart, punishing him for trying to protect them from their own stupidity.
Joe realized the truth. In the end, none of it mattered. All he had to hold onto was the tattered remnants of his family, the ones who loved him even when he was the worst monster they’d ever met.
He couldn’t let them die.
“Stop,” he whispered.
The finger jerked out of his nose, tearing the tender flesh, smearing his lips with blood. The tittering laughter died, and he could feel the cultists backing away from him. The heat of the mob faded, leaving Joe to shiver on the cold stone floor, huddled against the pain of his aches and the weary sorrow of defeat.
He’d been so stupid, so blind. Serving a master who came up lame when push came to shove. Doing a job that no one wanted done. Trying to save something that had been rotten and dead for longer than Joe had been alive.
One leash felt much like any other. Joe wanted to be on the winning side, for once, not just the right side.
“What did you you you say?” The voice was right there, right in his face. Rich with death, promising an end to the pain, a new kind of life.
“You want these pieces of shit? I’m sick of it all. You can have them.” Joe shuddered as years of responsibility dropped away, shed like a too-small shell. “I’ll be your fucking hand. I’ll be your goddamned whip.”
The eye widened in Joe’s mind, the darkness of its three pupils spilling out like a flood of ink.
Joe screamed as the dark god filled him to overflowing. He could hear another voice screaming along with him.
The Long Man, still part of Joe, felt it all.
Joe grinned, the pain suddenly a welcome punishment for his own shortcomings and for the failure of the master who’d let Joe’s whole life come apart at the seams.
“Let it burn,” Joe croaked through cracked and bleeding lips.
After years of struggle, a lifetime of trying to live up to an ideal he’d never quite achieved, Joe closed his eyes and let himself rest.
CHAPTER 62
ZEKE’S TRICK HIP was clicking like a jammed turn signal. Each step he took reminded him of his long years and the continued pain of living. Click. Step. Click. Step. He just wanted to sit down on a comfortable stump, smoke his pipe, and wait for the end to catch up to him. God knew he’d been racing ahead of it for long enough.
But there were other folks relying on Zeke. He couldn’t let them down. He didn’t agree with all the things Joe had done over the years, but Zeke knew the Night Marshal was doing his best now to make amends for his wrongs. Zeke would do his part, no matter how much his hip ached. It was the least he could do for a man struggling to save his little corner of the world.
“Ain’ gotta go much further now, old man,” he whispered to himself as he limped up a steep hill. He leaned against the spindly pine trees as he passed them, pulling himself up the hill with his arms as much as pushing with his wobbling legs. The sun hadn’t made it over the horizon yet, but Zeke didn’t need sight to find his way through these woods. They were as much a part of him as his bad hip or his clouded eyes. He’d grown up on these hills, and the forest held no secrets for him.
But it did have some surprises.
The ground shuddered beneath Zeke’s boots, a rippling that flowed down from the top of the hill and jarred his cane out of his hand. He groped at a nearby tree for balance, but the wave of earth rolled back up the hill before the yarb doctor could steady himself. His bad hip buckled, and Zeke crashed to the ground so hard his back teeth clacked together.
Gnarled roots and moss-covered stones bit into his knees, and Zeke toppled onto his side, groaning. He struggled to get up, to crawl to safety. His hip hurt so bad it made his whole leg useless; it trailed behind him as he crawled toward a bent pine tree.
The wind moaned over the top of the hill, driving a billowing carpet of ground fog ahead of it. The cloud flowed over Zeke, blinding and chilling him to the bone. He kept crawling, dragging his bum leg, trusting his instincts to guide him to safety. He just needed to get to a tree, haul himself back up onto his feet. Zeke could smell the springs; he was close. There was something else out there, close, too. He could feel it coming for him, stirring in the earth.
His hand brushed against a fine layer of pine needles. “Gotcha,” Zeke whispered.
He shuffled forward a bit and got his hands on the tree’s trunk. He hauled himself up, raising one hand, grabbing a limb, then the other, and another. The tree wasn’t big, but it was sturdy enough for Zeke’s needs.
His hip felt like someone had poured a fistful of ground glass into the socket and lit it on fire. The pain set his teeth to chattering whenever he tried to put any weight on his left leg.
Zeke started a slow, rhythmic chant and rubbed the knuckles of his left fist into his hip. He could feel the land answering his plea, a slow infusion of strength and comfort that soothed him and got his old bones moving again. Zeke knew he’d pay later for what he’d taken from the earth, but he wasn’t even sure there was going to be a later to worry about.
He limped along, slower than if he’d had
his cane, but he reckoned he’d still get where he needed to be on time. The sun was a hint of pale pink on the horizon, little more than a suggestion of the day to come. “I’m gonna make it.”
“No,” the voice rattled from within the rippling fog, “you end here.”
Zeke turned toward the threat and almost lost his footing again. The ground rumbled, and the fog roiled, churning as something rushed through it.
The yarb doctor didn’t wait to see what was bursting up out of the ground cover. He lurched from tree to tree, making his way up the hill on his one good leg. His breath came in ragged gasps, hard and cold in his lungs. He knew he was close to the top of the hill, but he could sense the monster behind him was even closer. He needed to give himself time.
Zeke leaned against a gnarled pine and pressed his lips to its scaly bark. He whispered to it, asked one last favor for an ancient man who had spent his life trying to make things better for the people of Pitchfork. The pressure of the earth’s magic pressed hard against the yarb doctor’s chest, exacting its price for convincing the trees and earth to do their part. Zeke grunted against the pain, trading months of his life for a chance to avoid death in the next few minutes. Magic was dangerous stuff at his age; reach too far, pull too deep, and the cost would kill him on the spot.
The ground erupted behind him, and Zeke hugged the tree for support.
“Old man,” the half-made girl snarled, “that’s far enough.”
Zeke put his back to the tree and tried to stand tall. The half-made girl was a few yards away, a broken, distorted mess rising from the earth on a stalk of bloody flesh and exposed bone. She looked like walking roadkill, more exposed flesh and fractured skeleton than girl.
“Come and get me, then.” Zeke prayed the earth would answer his plea. “Let’s see what you got.”
The girl’s jaw gawped wide to pour out a scream that Zeke could feel like a dagger of ice digging into his bowels. Her body screwed itself down, compressing as her scream went on and on.
Then she unwound, and the half-made girl roared through the air, mangled arms reaching for Zeke.
