by Sam Witt
The great bat swayed, tremors rippling up its body as the holy flame burned through its brain. The damage was tremendous, but Joe could already see the edges of the wound healing, new fangs dropping down and shoving old, broken teeth out of their sockets.
Long seconds passed, and Joe worried he’d missed his mark, that the old god might laugh last. His prayer hadn’t been answered, after all. He turned and ran back toward the dais. Time to get the hell out of there.
Blood leaked out from around the edges of Elsa’s mask, the strain of her battle with the new boss sweating blood from her pores. She stared sightless past her father, eyes rolled up to show bloodshot whites that tracked the monster’s every move.
Joe lunged, reaching for his daughter, rushing to get her away from the dark god before it was too late. He moved faster than even he’d thought possible, warring powers fueling his race for survival.
The new boss was faster. It swept one wing forward, and the barbed talon on its leading edge harpooned Joe’s shoulder, lifting him off his feet and hurling him onto the dais.
Joe slid across the milky stone and smashed into the altar, blood spraying from his wound. Something was torn up inside him. He could feel a froth of bubbles rising up the back of his throat with every breath. He tried to get up, but couldn’t rise farther than his hands and knees.
The new boss stomped forward, and a wicked grin peeled its lips back to reveal a snoutful of blackened, splintered teeth peeking out through a mass of grasping tentacles. Smoke leaked out between those teeth, Joe’s last shot still burning in the roof of its mouth.
Joe used his good arm to drag himself up onto the altar, doing his best to protect Elsa one, final time. “Time to rest, baby girl,” Joe whispered. He covered his daughter with his body and waited for the end.
The dark god opened its mouth, preparing to lunge, and Joe closed his eyes.
The last flickers of golden fire reached Joe’s backpack where it had lodged in the monster’s brain. The leather blackened and parted, and the flames licked against the three sticks of dynamite Joe had brought with him from home.
The new boss’s skull blew apart, steaming globs of burning brain and jagged hunks of ivory sailing into the cavern’s shadowed recesses. Its mammoth body swayed and fell, crashing down, smashing apart a handful of crystalline columns and crushing dozens of the cultists who were too slow or too dazed to escape.
The corpse lay smoking on the stone floor, its body coming apart, disintegrating into a foul sludge. Cyclopean serpents lashed out from the shattered columns, shrieking as they came apart, their flesh shredded by the harsh demands of the world they’d been exposed to before the stars were right for their appearance in this place.
Joe clung to the altar, covering Elsa with his body as the burning shrapnel of a dead god rained down around them.
He felt his little girl’s breath on his cheek. “Did I do good, Daddy?”
Joe’s words left him in a hoarse whisper. “Yeah, little bit. You done real good.”
CHAPTER 75
JOE WOKE WITH blood bubbling in the back of his throat. The combined power of the Long Man and the remnants of the new boss kept him from the grave despite his injuries, but Joe wasn’t sure how long that would last. He could feel the two entities at war in his soul. The parts they had lodged within Joe were too evenly matched for either to be victorious over the other. For the moment, at least, Joe had access to their combined power. His insane plan had worked.
He watched the surviving cultists crawling out of their hidey holes and shuffling out of the darkened tunnels. More than he’d thought had survived the battle and the explosion of their depraved god. Some of the bat god’s most devout followers slinked away, taking their pointed ears and shovel noses and disappearing into the deepest abyssal reaches of the caverns they called home. Joe hoped he never had to see them again, but knew his luck was never that good. Many of the less-deformed stumbled away, heading back to the surface. With their god dead, their madness receded, and they were left confused, disoriented, and afraid.
A pack of more-or-less normal meth heads walked up and stood before the dais, jittering from foot to foot, picking at their scabs, grinding their teeth. The cultists stared at Joe, then at the charred ashes that were all that was left of their god, then back to Joe. They seemed unsure if they should worship him or try to kill him, and Joe wasn’t sure anything he said or did would make them jump one way or the other. They were just followers, men and women swept up in something bigger than themselves, idiots who’d latched onto whatever dismal version of hope they could find. Joe got tired of their cow-eyed staring in short order.
“Go home,” he said, then raised his voice to make sure they all heard him. “Get the fuck out. Think on what happened here.”
One of the cultists, some kind of leader by the number of antler knives he had shoved in his belt and the string of bat skulls around his neck, approached Joe. “So, we’re good? I mean, you ain’ gonna show up on our doorsteps with that shotgun?”
Joe stared at the man and sighed. Part of him wanted to kill every one of these fuckers before they could get up to any future mischief, but another part of him wanted to help them find their way back to the path of the righteous. “You reckon you stupid fuckers can find your way out of here without calling up anymore dark gods?”
“I’ll kill ye,” a screeching voice sliced through the air. “I’ll carve out yer heart and stew it in a bowl made o’ yer skull.”
Alma Pryor, blood streaking her face, hurled herself at Joe, an antler-handled knife in each hand, murder in her eyes.
Joe didn’t have the strength to do anything but watch as death came for him. He was too tired to fight anymore. This whole shitty mess would end the way it started, with the actions of one crazy old woman.
A streak of silver flashed through the air. Alma stumbled, blades falling from her nerveless hands. She dropped to one knee, hands clasped around the knife blade sprouting from her throat. Blood bubbled out between her fingers and her mouth flapped open, closed, open, closed, like a landed catfish.
She flopped onto her face and lay still.
The cultist tossed one of his knives over in his left hand, shoved it back into his belt, shrugged. “Them Pryors,” he began, but Joe cut him off with a head shake.
“You hear of them or anyone else getting up to any stupid shit, maybe you should come talk to me.” Joe did his best to keep his tone neutral. He was trying something new here, and every word he spoke felt like a trap he could fall into. “Maybe we can figure out a better way to get what folks around here need without opening any gates to hell.”
“Maybe so,” the man said through meth-rotted teeth. He picked a scab off the side of his nose. Shrugged. “I guess … Yeah, we’ll be going.”
Joe watched them leave, too tired to head up to the surface just yet. Some of them, he knew, were going to be fine. They’d get over this round of bullshit and go back to their sad lives, maybe figure out a way to make things a little better for themselves and their neighbors.
Others would never forget the call of the darkness. Joe reckoned there’d be a high tide for suicides in Pitchfork, maybe an even higher tide for murders and assorted craziness in the coming months. And a few — well, Joe didn’t plan on putting his shotgun away. Some people always needed a little rough justice to remind them of where the line was drawn.
Joe looked down at Elsa. Her mask was gone, crumbled to dust caught in the tangles of her hair. She looked so much smaller than she’d been when he brought her down here, the bones of her face stark against her skin. The spikes stuck in her were dark now, the light washed out of them. Stevie could fix this, he was sure of that. “You’re gonna be all right, little bit.”
The power he’d stolen from the new boss burned as it tried to patch him back together. He could feel the Long Man’s confusion, as well, the uncertainty about what had happened, what was going to happen. There was something missing, too, something that had been so long a
part of him Joe hadn’t realized he’d been able to feel it was until it was gone.
Later, when he could no longer taste his own blood in the back of his throat, Joe picked Elsa up with his good arm and carried her out of the cave and into the light.
CHAPTER 76
STEVIE AND AL waited for Joe at the mouth of the well, sitting tense in the Rambler as the sun hauled itself into the morning sky. Stevie held her son’s hand, clinging to it as if she could protect the last of her family through the strength of her grip alone. She’d let go of her daughter and husband, and now, as far as she knew, they were both dead.
“He’s fine,” Alasdair said. “The dogs would know if he was dead.”
The black hounds raised their heads as if they could hear Al’s low voice, then lowered them back to their paws. They watched the well, but didn’t seem concerned about whatever was happening down there.
Stevie wanted to believe, but she couldn’t push her worries away. On their way out to the old Pryor place, following the black dogs who Al swore would find Joe no matter where he’d gone, something had changed. Stevie felt it like the drop in air pressure before a storm, but she didn’t know what it meant. The world was different now, and she wished she knew how.
So she waited, and she watched, and she hoped.
The dogs roused themselves when the first of the cultists clambered up out of the well. They growled when the meth addicts, scorched and battered and splattered with blood and gore from a dead god, staggered away from the hole in the ground. As the wounded departed, the dogs watched them go, but didn’t give chase. They went back to waiting and watching.
The cultists gave the Rambler and its canine honor guard a wide berth, and Stevie couldn’t find it in herself to approach them. She could see the pain and horror in their bulging eyes and knew there was nothing they could tell her. She’d have to wait for her answers.
The exodus went on until the sun was high overhead, a pale white disk hidden behind a flimsy veil of scattered clouds. The flood slowed to a trickle, until only a handful of shirtless, filth-streaked men stood around the well, bare feet scuffing at the ashes on the ground.
Something stirred in the well, and the men went into action. A trio grabbed the rope that ran down into the ground and pulled on it, backing away from the well, hauling its cargo into the light.
Stevie watched as the rest of the men gathered around the mouth of the well and helped someone up and out of the hole. They shied away from the man as soon as he was on his own feet, as if unsure of what he might do to them.
Stevie’s lips trembled as Joe straightened up and raised his face to the sun. He was pale and gaunt, eyes sunken back into the sockets of his skull, which pushed hard at the back of his face. He was covered in blood and streaked with soot. But he was alive, and he held Elsa in his arms.
She rolled down the Rambler’s window, letting a cool autumn breeze tug at her hair and dry the tears she shed as Joe walked to her.
Stevie reached her unbroken arm through the Rambler’s window, and Joe eased their daughter through. Stevie cried when she saw Elsa, but her little girl gave her mama a kiss and told her she was going to be fine.
“You done here?” Stevie whispered to her husband.
Joe nodded and leaned in close. Something stirred between them, but it wasn’t the hate she’d learned to fear. She brushed her lips against his, then drew back and grinned.
“It’s gone,” Stevie whispered. “It’s really gone.”
She closed her eyes as Joe brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “Yeah.”
Stevie frowned at the wistful look in Joe’s eyes.
“I know we need to talk.”
Joe waved her concerns away. “I’ve been wrong. About you. About what you do. But there’s something else. I have to go up to the Lodge.”
“Now?”
Joe nodded and patted the side of the Rambler. “I think it has to be now.”
Stevie watched as her husband left her again, left his family, and hauled himself behind the wheel of his old pickup and drove away.
The black dogs howled as Joe drove out of sight, their voices quavering and plaintive. The sound trailed down Stevie’s back like a dead man’s hand, turned the knobs of her spine into chunks of black ice under her skin.
Al shifted next to her. “We have to go after him. He’s gonna get himself killed.”
Stevie shook her head. There was something different about Joe now, something stretched and frayed. He’d changed down in that hole, become a man so different that even the curse her mama had put on him couldn’t keep hold of his soul.
“We can’t go,” Elsa murmured, half asleep. “He’s gone to his reckoning, and ain’ nobody else can follow where he’s walking.”
Stevie kissed the top of her daughter’s head, smoothed the little girls tangled hair down her back with the palm of her hand. “I know, baby. But he’ll come back.”
She blinked away tears.
“He knows how to find his way home.”
CHAPTER 77
BY THE TIME he got to the Lodge, the sun was full up, a copper ball of late autumn warmth that Joe knew would soon fade to winter’s chill. For that moment, though, it shone on him, and he was glad he didn’t have a hat, that he could feel the sun’s kiss against the top of his head.
The Lodge’s doors were still open, hanging loose on their hinges. The black dogs were back, but facing toward the house this time, as if holding something within its walls.
Joe left his guns behind, pistols crossed over the shotgun on the truck’s bench seat. He didn’t think he’d need them for this. He was mostly healed from his time underground, just an oozy scab on his back and a bone-deep exhaustion to remind him of what’d happened down in the cave. The power he’d taken, both sides of it, worked wonders.
He found the Long Man sitting in his crooked chair, hands clasped in his lap. “The prodigal returns.”
“Don’t see any cows roasting.” Joe poured himself a drink from the bar, sniffed it. He wrinkled his nose and put the glass down so hard the dark liquor splashed out over its rim. “Guess you aren’t real happy to see me up here this morning.”
“You do not look particularly agreeable, Jonah.” The Long Man looked old, all the strength poured out of him. Hollow. “I suppose you are not willing to listen to any offers I might put on the table.”
“I reckon not.” Joe stood over the Long Man, looking down at the emaciated figure who had so long held the reins of his life and ruled over Pitchfork.
“You think now is the time, do you?”
Joe looked around the room, at how sparse and empty it seemed. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“If you think I am going to sit here and explain everything to you, then you are mistaken.”
“Then let me explain it to you.” Joe moved around behind the Long Man, put his hands on the old man’s shoulders. “You didn’t come here to make things better.”
The Long Man grunted. “I suppose that depends on your definition of better.”
“People fought the darkness a long time before you got here, you old bastard. They didn’t need any Night Marshal to keep them walking on the right path.” Joe licked his lips. He’d put it all together down in the cave, watching the meth heads flay themselves alive for the fleeting pleasure of getting high. Thinking about the people who’d settled in Pitchfork, about how far they’d fallen. Thinking about how they’d sold themselves to the lowest bidder, because they didn’t know what else to do. “You didn’t come here to protect them. You came here to ruin them.”
The Long Man chuckled and coughed. Joe pinned his shoulders to the chair, keeping the old man from doubling up.
“I mean, people who get used to doing things their own way, living their own lives,” Joe spat. “That’s not much use to fuckers like yourself, is it?”
“Animals, Jonah. They are animals. They need a shepherd.”
“But you’re no shepherd. You’re the fucking coyote.” Jonah shifted h
is hands, closed his fingers around the old man’s throat. “Sitting up here in your big house, sucking the life out of those people, draining the hope and belief from one generation after another. Gobbling it up like a goddamned vampire while you tried to turn yourself into a god.”
The Long Man’s eyes bulged, swelling out of their sockets until Joe could see the pink muscles that kept them from spilling down his cheeks.
“Shh. Time for you to just listen.” Joe squeezed, and the old man’s trachea creaked in his fists like an empty water bottle. He could feel the Long Man’s fear in his head, whipping around like a decapitated snake in his thoughts. Joe let his guard down, let the remnants of the new boss gush out of his head and down through his arms. “But then a new god came along and fucked up your sweet deal.”
The old man wrenched his head around to stare at the Night Marshal, veins standing out like black worms on his face.
Joe knew the choking wasn’t killing the old fuck. It was the power he had stolen from the new boss pouring into the Long Man like lava.
“These people deserve better. They deserve someone to keep the wolves from their door and the black spirits from their shadows.”
The Long Man was near to death. A little more pressure, and Joe’s thumbs would crush the old thing’s windpipes. A little more hate, and the power of the new boss would burn the Long Man’s insides to ash.
“So that’s what you’re gonna be from here on out.” Joe took his hands off the Long Man, stepped back. “You’re going to be the kind of protector you always claimed to be.”
The Long Man watched Joe as if he were a wild animal loose in his house.
“You and me, we’re going to turn Pitchfork around. Between the two of us, I figure we can undo all the damage we’ve done the past twenty years or so.”
