Wicked Prayer

by Norman Partridge

  “Do what Raymondo says, Johnny. And then we can get the hell out of here.”

  “Not soon enough for me,” Johnny said, relaxing a little under Kyra’s touch. Standing this close, he could feel her warmth. Her long dark hair smelled like night-blooming jasmine and something subtler, darker.

  Infinitely darker.

  Johnny sucked a deep breath. Man, when this shit was over . . . when his own personal mojo was thoroughly stoked—

  When he and Kyra were immortal—

  “Soon,” Kyra whispered, her eyes burning like green embers. “Soon. But first—why don’t you make like a good husband and take out the trash?”

  Johnny Church had, since the age of fourteen, worn the obligatory punk fashion accessory—the dog collar—around his thick neck. Black leather, chrome studs and buckle, and a leash ring that slapped against his gullet when he walked.

  Johnny untied Raymondo’s wiry black hair from the rearview mirror, threaded it through the chrome ring on his collar, and tied it in place. He wasn’t particularly enthused about doubling up with the rancid little fuck. The whole deal reminded him of some old horror movie or something.

  Johnny was heavily into the retro-horror scene. It wasn’t exactly an interest he’d stumbled on all by his lonesome. Erik Hearse, the lead singer and guitarist for The Blasphemers, was big into horror, too. Hearse was a major collector He owned a mansion stuffed with lobby cards, posters, models, videos and laserdiscs, plus props that had been used in classic fright films. To say Hearse had it all and then some was an understatement. Hell, the singer had even married a horror movie actress, some chick who did Italian vampire flicks.

  So Erik’d know just how Johnny felt—if the singer had happened to be hanging around the dump, that is. He’d understand Johnny’s cinematic frame of reference when it came to excursions of the two-headed variety.

  In this case it was simple, your basic Creature Features double bill: The Thing with Two Heads and The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. Johnny was sure that Hearse would agree—both guy- with-two-heads movies made for extreme psychotronic kicks. But of the two, it was The Thing with Two Heads that Johnny enjoyed most.

  What he didn’t enjoy was playing Rosey Grier to Raymondo’s Ray Milland.

  Raymondo seemed to know it, too. “C’mon, Johnnyboy. Time to tote that barge and lift that bail.”

  Shit, sometimes Johnny thought that the little fuck was psychic. The shrunken head even sounded like Ray Milland . . . with his voice channeled through a theremin, of course.

  Raymondo Milland.

  Church snatched his keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car, the heavy soles of his motorcycle boots squelching a soggy flap of cardboard into a puddle of decomposing muck. Man, the smell out here was enough to put the curl in anyone’s pubes.

  Johnny walked to the back of the Merc and unlocked the trunk. He raised the lid and stared down at the corpses that lay on the plastic drop cloth he’d used to protect his precious vintage baby from leaking bodily fluids.

  The Indian chick’s back faced Johnny.

  “Nice ass,” Raymondo said, dangling from Johnny’s collar. “Too bad it’s grass...”

  The corpses had shifted during the wild ride. Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin’s head was now scissored under Dan Cody’s left arm. Her long black hair fell over her face in a shiny pall, one side of it sticky with blood from Johnny’s pistol-work.

  Johnny rolled the dead woman on her back. The pretty blue eyes that had once looked straight through him had been hastily removed, courtesy of Kyra Damon’s brand-new Mountain Clan Crow knife. Leticia’s left cheek was carved to the bone, face washed in a river of blood that had seeped down a hollow cheekbone hill, filling the dead woman’s half-open mouth with a clotting reservoir deep enough to drown the loudest scream.

  Hardin’s chambray shirt—blue as her plucked eyes and embroidered with a bright, traditional Native design—was soaked with blood. The shot from Johnny’s .357 had exploded the Crow woman’s rib cage. Guts had leaked out all over the damn place.

  “Damn it,” Johnny said. “How am I supposed to get her out of there without getting blood all over my trunk?”

  “Why don’t you make like a good doggy and lick up the mess?” Raymondo suggested. “Or if you’re finicky. I’m sure we could find a straw somewhere around this place.”

  “Smart-ass.”

  “Uh-uh, Johnnyboy. There’s where you’re wrong. I don’t have an ass. Not anymore. I lost that shriveled portion of my backside on the Amazon River. That was during the 1919 expedition. Piranhas chewed their way through my hindquarters. Didn’t finish me off, though. I can thank the cannibals for that—”

  “Put a lid on it. Head. I don’t have time for your personal fuckin’ memoirs right now. I’m kinda busy.”

  Johnny reached around Leticia Hardin’s corpse, grabbing the heavy-duty flashlight that lay beside the jack. Shadows jumped eerily as he switched it on and aimed the beam at Dan Cody.

  Leticia’s cowboyfriend was a mess . . . even by Johnny Church’s standards, and that was saying something. Cody lay on his back, his head pointing toward the backseat, his face lost in darkness. The left leg of Cody’s jeans was stiff with drying blood from thigh to ankle, his knee a riot of exploded bone and crimson jelly. The leg wound was peppered with bits of grit and gravel, a result of Cody’s desperate belly crawl across the parking lot. His leather jacket was torn, the shoulder beneath it a mess of gleaming white bone and bloody meat where the slug from Kyra’s Walther PPK had ripped through solid muscle.

  Johnny stared at the cowboy’s corpse, shaking his head. Though he couldn’t see it, Johnny knew there was another hole blasted through the back of the leather jacket. After all, Johnny had put the .357 slug there himself. That was too bad. Cody’s jacket was pretty hardcore, even if it was a little beat up. Now, with all that gore on it. . . well—

  “Man,” Johnny said. “I should have shot him in the head.”

  Or maybe not. Johnny smiled. After all, the .357 bullet hole lent Cody’s jacket a sort of badass Terminator look that was pretty cool. And he could repair the tear in the shoulder with some chain link, or maybe some anarchy pins. Shake up a six-pack, hose down the coat with warm beer. Yeah. That’s what he’d do. No way he’d get rid of this coat.

  But all that could wait for later. Johnny skinned off his pricey leather jacket with the metal Blasphemers badge and set it on top of the Merc’s gleaming purple roof, well out of harm’s way.

  No way he was getting any blood on that baby.

  On his flesh, now that was something a little different. It was easy to wash bloodstains off flesh. Just one of the facts of life, like sweat or semen.

  “Here goes,” Johnny said.

  Setting the flashlight on the ground, its beam pointing up at the sky, Johnny rolled the Indian chick onto her back and lifted her out of the trunk as easily as one of the cornhusk dolls at the Spirit Song Trading Post. He tossed the corpse over his shoulder, and Pocahontas’s hair swept down his back like a black cobweb.

  “All right, Raymondo. Where to?”

  “Up there, stud.”

  "Up where?”

  “If I had hands, I’d chart our course with a sextant, even draw you a map. Since I don’t . . . well, you can just start walking, Johnnyboy.”

  “Back off, Raymondo.”

  “I’m so frightened.”

  “I’m warnin' you, dickhead—”

  "Please.'' The shrunken head laughed. “Let’s get serious, Johnny—if you even dreamed you could take me on, you’d have to wake up and apologize—”

  “Stop it, the both of you.” It was Kyra’s voice, and it came from behind. “I need it quiet. Can’t you see I’m trying to work?”

  There was a nauseating, gaseous belch as a dead rat’s swollen body popped under Johnny’s pivoting boot heel, but Johnny hardly heard it as he turned his attention in Kyra’s direction. Stark naked and lean as a panther, Kyra stood in front of the Mercury. Her skin was
bathed in a clean white headlight glow, and a junkyard cat was cradled in her arms, and she rocked the clawing animal like a baby—back and forth, back and forth—wild white light haloing her sleek curves.

  Johnny licked his lips. Kyra was a nightmare silhouette with a pulse. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She leaned over the hood of the car, her eyes trained on the pages of that big black book, the one that had brought them to this place on this night, the one that had lured a feral cat into Kyra’s unyielding embrace, the one with a tattered cover ridged and cracked with tiny fissures like scars ... or the almost imperceptible gaps between a Crow’s feathers.

  There wasn’t much in the world that scared Johnny Church, but Kyra’s book did the job and then some. It gave him the all-over creepy-crawlies, and not in a good way. He didn’t know the name of the book, couldn’t read the language it was written in. He didn’t want to know. The book was Kyra’s baby, and Johnny didn’t even like touching it. The big gearhead didn’t know exactly what kind of skin the cover was fashioned from, but he had his suspicions. All he knew for sure was that the book radiated its own strange warmth, like a dying man racked with fever, as if it hid a wild, beating heart somewhere in its pages.

  Kyra’s cold eyes scanned those fevered pages, and words spilled from her lips, words written in the blood of long-dead sinners. Then Kyra closed the book, and she turned, dancing, the cat still cradled in her arms, and she turned again, moonlight washing the sharp angles of her face.

  Kyra smiled at Johnny, her white teeth gleaming.

  Johnny shivered as she lifted the stray cat by the scruff of its neck, raising it to her black lips.

  The cat yowled . . . but not for long.

  Cartilage crunched as Kyra’s teeth closed on the cat’s windpipe.

  The feline’s hissing wail chopped to silence.

  Johnny grinned, forgetting about the book. Man, this kind of action he could understand. Forget the creepy book. This was the real deal, better than any spookshow stage-o-rama Erik Hearse could cook up. Talk about your Blood Feast for the new millennium. One look at this gorefest and Herschell Gordon Lewis himself would be thoroughly stoked—

  Kyra held the cat above her head, stood under a bright red rain.

  “I hope she’s had all her shots,” Raymondo said.

  “Which one?” Johnny asked. “Kyra or the cat?”

  Johnny Church, breathing hard, hauled Leticia Hardin’s corpse toward a cathedral of garbage.

  Yeah. That’s what the trash mountain looked like. It loomed in the darkness like a gothic dream gone bad—rotting two-by-fours formed clumsy arches while rusting road-sign spires twisted skyward to whatever God or Devil waited there. Scrap metal formed twisted pews. The congregation scuttling toward the bashed cardboard pulpit was a family of cockroaches.

  “So are we there yet?” Johnny asked. “Pocahontas here is startin’ to get heavy.”

  “Almost. Just a little farther.”

  Johnny paused a moment, the dead girl swinging half off his shoulder as he squinted into the darkness. He could make out the dim outline of something at the top of the trash heap cathedral, backlit by the bone-yellow moon.

  The thing looked like a teetering obelisk.

  “What the hell is that?” Johnny asked.

  “In the parlance of the funerary trade, that’s a sepulchre,” Raymondo said. “Head for it, my boy.”

  Johnny sucked a deep breath and kicked aside a television set with a busted screen. Then he trudged forward, slipping and sliding over squelching piles of plastic garbage bags.

  Man, walking on this shit was like walking on the distended bellies of dead bovines.

  Man, Johnny was way past tired of it.

  Almost there now. At the tips of his crud-covered boots lay a soiled piece of blue-black carpet that looked like a tongue unfurled from a dead giant’s mouth. Johnny stepped onto it, wiped his feet, then humped the last fifteen feet to the top of the trash cathedral.

  Grunting, he dumped the Indian chick’s corpse on a broken recliner. Her head fell back, and her sightless eyes seemed to stare straight at the obelisk ... or sepulchre ... or whatever you wanted to call it.

  Johnny just called the damn thing a freezer.

  It was a Westinghouse. Johnny leaned against it, trying to catch his breath.

  “This is why we came all the way up here?” he asked. “This freezer?”

  “This is it.” Raymondo’s tiny eyes scanned the rancid valley that stretched below them, and for once he was almost friendly. “You did good, Johnnyboy. Looks like you’re King of the Mountain now. You might even say the world is your oyster.”

  “Nah,” said Johnny. “It just smells like one.”

  One more trip down the trash mountain to retrieve the cowboyfriend’s corpse.

  One more trip up, and that sucker was so damn heavy that Johnny could hardly make it. He had to make several stops, skin sheeted in sweat, muscles burning, and when he did move his boots seemed to sink deeper and deeper into dump slime with every step.

  “Son of a bitch!" he yelled, voice echoing off the mounded walls of refuse. “Motherfucking son of a—”

  “Remind me to buy you a guest pass for Gold’s Gym next time your birthday rolls around,” said the shrunken head. “You could use some serious work on your cardio endurance."

  “Yeah, I’d like to see you haul two dead bodies up a skyscraper’s worth of trash.” Johnny wheezed, dumping Cody by the freezer. The body landed hard, so much dead weight, and Johnny kicked Cody’s corpse as hard as he could, thoroughly enjoying the solid, satisfying thud his boot made when it connected.

  “That’s mature, Johnny. It’s not like the man can feel.”

  “Yeah, well I sure as hell can feel. And that felt good.” Then he bent low and tore the leather jacket off the motionless body.

  Raymondo sighed. “All right, leather boy, you got your souvenir. Now put the bodies in the freezer.”

  Johnny did as he was told, his muscles aching like hell as he wedged Cody and his woman into the dented old Westinghouse. The quarters were a little cramped, but hey, Johnny didn’t think there’d be any complaints.

  “Just goes to show my mother was right,” said Raymondo. “Right about what?”

  “It’s dangerous to play in old refrigerators.”

  Somehow that hit Johnny as funny. Damn funny. He laughed. So did Raymondo. Tiny tears squeezed from his eyes.

  “Man,” Johnny said, “I didn’t know they even had refrigerators way back in nineteen-fucking-nineteen.”

  “They didn’t,” Raymondo said. “But if there’d been any around, my dear old insufferable mother would have warned me about them.”

  Now that the job was done, Johnny was starting to feel pretty good about things. The two of them had accomplished something important together, something that required a little muscle and a little brainpower. Teamwork kind of stuff Maybe they’d even bonded a little.

  Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe not. But for the moment, at least, Johnny didn’t have the urge to grind Raymondo’s skull in his sizable fist, and Raymondo didn’t want to chew a hole in Johnny’s jugular.

  “Better lock them in, Johnny. I saw a pile of chain over there by those shot-up traffic signs.”

  “Sure,” Johnny said, because it was actually a good idea. He wrapped the stout chain around the appliance. Then he tipped the white box onto its back, securing the ends of the chain under the freezer’s own weight.

  Nobody was getting into that freezer without a lot of effort.

  Nobody human, anyhow.

  Johnny wasn’t quite sure about the Crow.

  “I’m kinda worried about the bird, Raymondo. I mean ... if you’re right and the Crow’s still alive, what’s it gonna take to stop him?”

  “Take a look down below. You’ll see exactly what it takes.”

  At the base of the trash mountain, under the Merc’s bright headlights, Kyra Damon danced. Her pale face was a symbolist painting of black cat blood, and her naked body w
as a canvas for the moonlight. She whirled, and she twisted like a wild thing that had never been born of woman, and she whispered words memorized from a book bound in human skin.

  Kyra’s own personal anthem blasted through the stereo speakers, obliterating all else. Forget Erik Hearse, this truly was the Devil’s Dance—a poisonous mix of slashing violins and guitar strung with a strangler’s favorite catgut.

  Peter Warlock’s “Capriol Suite for Guitar and String Orchestra.” Johnny knew what the music meant to Kyra, understood how much pain each note contained.

  Kyra fed on the music. She writhed as the violins lashed her, and her breath caught in her throat as a cascading garrote arpeggio drew tight around her neck, and her power gave birth to darkness.

  A black maelstrom descended en masse over the dump.

  Johnny saw their wings gleaming in the darkness. He saw their eyes, black and evil and trained on Kyra Damon.

  Only on Kyra Damon, because they were hers—and hers alone—to command.

  “Son of a bitch,” Johnny said, and he grinned at this sweet little piece of irony. For what Kyra’s words had called up from the rank roosting places of the dump was a flock of carrion crows.

  A.k.a.: eaters of the dead.

  Warlock’s “Capriol Suite” gave way to “Bransle.” One by one, the birds joined in a ragged black formation, forming an ever- spinning circle around the woman. Kyra raised her arms and threw back her head, and she made strange gestures as if she were some kind of conductor and the birds her avian symphony of destruction.

  Once Kyra had told Johnny about the tribunal of the crows. How the birds would suddenly turn on one of their own for reasons beyond the realm of human understanding. A crime, a sickness, a weakness . . . Whatever the motivation, the judgment of the bewitched bird’s all-too-mortal counterparts was harsh—and final.

  Harsh and final. That was the law, the way of Kyra’s book. These junkyard birds would guard the corpses of Dan Cody and Leticia Hardin with their lives. And if their mythic counterpart came sniffing around . . . why, he’d better watch his supercharged tail feathers, Johnny figured.