by Peter Nealen
Tall Bear just spread his hands. “I'm still lost,” he said. “Jed's filled me in on a few things, but I honestly have no idea what's going on.”
Eryn and I both shook our heads. “It has something to do with whatever Blake was investigating,” I said, “and we have no idea what that was. He wasn't terribly forthcoming to anyone, either in his note, or what he told Chrystal over there.” I motioned back toward where the girl was sitting by the fire, Lucy still absently patting her back.
Father Ignacio scowled again, sincerely this time. “And, knowing Blake as I do, that means he's gotten in over his head. Again.”
I started to open my mouth to defend Blake, but Father Ignacio beat me to the punch. “I know he's your friend, Jed, but I've seen it over and over with him. He rushes in where angels fear to tread and people get hurt.” He glared at me, though his ire obviously wasn't directed at me. “How many dead in Coldwell?” he demanded. “How many dead here?”
“Blake may have waited too long to call for help,” I admitted, unwilling at the moment to speculate on the body counts, “but that doesn't make the deaths here or there his fault. There's something else going on, and he's just the first one who picked up on it.”
“And, as you said, waited too long to call for backup,” Father grumbled. “Now it's going to be that much harder to stop this, whatever it is.”
Under the circumstances, it was probably better not to get into an argument about it. We had more pressing issues at hand. “I got in touch with Tyrese and Kolya,” I told him. “They're on their way.”
With a look that told me the subject was only tabled, not dropped, Father Ignacio nodded. “I've got another five on the way, too,” he said. “They should be here within the day.”
That was going to bring our little team to close to the entire roster of the Western states. “You got a plan for when they get here?” I asked.
“We've got to take the demon down,” he said. “We might still have to deal with the rest of the golems afterward, but a demon possessing a physical form is the priority target.”
“And if we have to hack our way through all of the golems to get to the demon?” Tall Bear asked. Now that we were talking tactics, he seemed to be a lot more at ease.
“Then the Hunters form a wedge to drive me and Jed to the demon,” Father said bluntly. “Like I said, that's the most serious threat. The rest will essentially be meat shields. Speaking of which; what have you got to deal with those?”
I grimaced. “Not as much as I'd like. I've got my Bowie, Tall Bear has my ax, and Eryn's got her shotgun. I told Tyrese and Kolya about the golems, so they might have something more by the time they get here. Kolya was muttering about hardware stores.”
His eyebrows went up a little. “Knowing Kolya, this could get interesting,” he said.
Tyrese and Kolya had met up before coming in, which was why they got there together, and about half an hour after the first three of Father's crew started coming in.
Alistair had gotten there first, pulling in in his ancient boat of a Buick. He barely seemed to fit in the front seat, as roomy as the old car was. When he levered his nearly three hundred pounds out, he towered over everyone else by almost a full head, and that head was a huge, shaggy mass of unruly hair and beard that made him look like some kind of savage, homeless ax murderer. He was big and scary, which was kind of a shame, because while he had a real talent for violence against the forces of evil, when it came to anyone else, he was truly a “gentle giant.” He didn't look wild because he enjoyed scaring people; he looked wild because he was a bit absent-minded about his appearance. He was a great Hunter, don't get me wrong, but he would get so intent on what he was doing that he'd forget to comb his hair, get a haircut, take a shower, or even eat. I worried about him, sometimes, working on his own. I'm always afraid I'm going to hear that he's starved to death while tracking down a shapeshifter or something.
A deep rumble had announced Ian's arrival before his big Ford Raptor hove into view. He'd bought the thing while he was still contracting for the State Department about eight years before, and while a few of the bells and whistles didn't work anymore, he still kept it running. Fortunately for him, he'd managed to get it paid off before he'd tangled with a ghoul in Basra and left the lucrative world of security contracting for the much less lucrative world of the Order. For all the ostentation of his truck, Ian was a quiet man. You might know him for a year and hear about five full sentences out of him in all that time. He preferred to work alone, and while he could work with a team, he'd do his part and then leave.
I'd heard that Ian had been a much more outgoing, even rowdy character back in the old days, before the ghoul. The first encounter with the uncanny has a tendency to change you, and there's never any telling how it's going to happen. What exactly had led to Ian's withdrawal is something that nobody has ever managed to pry out of him. True to form, he stayed in his truck for a while after parking, then got out and silently started setting up his own tent. I left him to his solitude.
Charlie arrived just ahead of Tyrese and Kolya, jumping out of his old Scout with a yell of, “Oh, yeah!” Charlie was pretty much the opposite of Ian. He took great pride in being the most outlandish Hunter in the West, if not the entire country. He'd probably claim the world, but the world's a big place. With his brown hair cut in a short mohawk, enormous mutton chops, and wearing a hodgepodge of biker leathers, cowboy jeans, and Chuck Taylors, he looked like he'd stepped out of an '80s cartoon. “This is gonna be a big one!” he bellowed. “The gang's all here! Can't wait!”
I just looked over at Father Ignacio and shook my head, even as Tyrese and Kolya arrived, Kolya's beat-up '90s Ram right behind Tyrese's '77 Monaco.
Kolya got out, looked around until he spotted me, and waved me over. A short, wiry man, with a flat face that always looked a little angry and a buzzed head, Kolya was a Russian expat who still talked with a bit of an accent even after fifteen years living in the US. He waved at the bed of his truck with a grin as I walked over. “Well, they almost broke the bank, but now we are prepared for flesh golems,” he said.
I peered into the bed. There were five chainsaws back there, along with a couple of gas cans.
“Buy, or rent?” I asked.
“Buy,” he replied. “I did not think that a rental place would want them back after what we're going to do with them.”
“Good point,” I said, waving to Tyrese as he got out of his car. The lanky former basketball player waved back.
Kolya looked around. “I haven't seen this many Hunters in one place since Conclave,” he said.
I shook my head. “Neither have I. But with at least two towns gone bad, well, this is pretty big.”
“I'm going to have some words with Blake about leaving this kind of situation behind for the rest of us to clean up,” Kolya muttered.
“You and a lot of other people,” I answered. Myself included.
It took a few more hours before the last two, the Ramirez twins, arrived. I didn't know them well; they were usually down in the Southwest, mostly in New Mexico. This was pretty far north for them. There were a few more Hunters scattered across the Western states, but we didn't dare wait for them. The sun was already going down, and we'd have to wait until morning to go in. Night would offer too much of an advantage to the evil things in town.
“I'm really not sure I want to go in there,” Tall Bear said quietly, as we stood at the edge of town. The yellowish mist had thinned where we were standing, but it got thicker quickly. It reminded me of stories of mustard gas in the trenches during World War One. I wanted a gas mask, in spite of the fact that I knew it wouldn't do any good. The mist wasn't just fog, and a simple gas mask wasn't going to keep it out.
“I don't think any of us do,” I told him in the same low tone, “except for Charlie, and Charlie's nuts. So don't feel like you're alone.”
I'd taken the opportunity to arm myself with one of the chainsaws, as had Tall Bear, Tyrese, Kolya, and Alistair
. Everybody else was packing a combination of shotguns, axes, machetes, and a few rifles, just in case. My own Winchester was once again slung across my back. The chainsaw puttered and rumbled in my hands. Edgar Ramirez was the only one not with us; he was back at the campsite, guarding Chrystal and Lucy.
For another few moments, the entire group just stood there, looking into the eerie, unnatural fog. There was no sign of the flesh golems, homunculi, or any other monsters or creepy-crawlies. That didn't alleviate the unease that I was pretty sure we were all feeling.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Charlie finally said, too loudly. “Let's get this done!”
It had to be Charlie. His voice seemed to echo strangely down the street. I almost cringed, imagining the boiling tide of monstrosities coming out of the fog, attracted by his noise.
But of course it couldn't be that easy. They couldn't just come out and fight and get it over with. No, that demon and its puppets were going to hide in the putrid mist and wait for us to come to them. Demons are jerks like that.
With little more than a series of shared looks and nods, we started forward.
Almost immediately, the fog enveloped us. Visibility instantly dropped to a couple dozen feet. It smelled like death. The whole group instinctively got closer together, though we still tried to keep enough space between us to avoid carving each other up with the chainsaws when it got messy.
It was deathly quiet. Whatever was going on, there were no sounds but our own footfalls, the chugging of the chainsaws, and our breathing. We advanced up the main drag.
You caught me by surprise last time, Witch Hunter. The deep, raspy voice seemed to come out of midair. It will not happen again. Come ahead. I am ready for you.
“Don't listen,” Father Ignacio said, unnecessarily. All of us, even Eryn, had been doing this long enough to know better than to listen too closely to a demon of any stripe. They are liars and deceivers; everything they might have to say to you is calculated by a vastly superior intellect to cause as much doubt, temptation, despair, and psychological damage as possible.
A deep, disturbing chuckle reverberated through the air around us. Of course, don't listen. Stop up your ears and hum to yourselves to keep the terrible words away. But you should wonder, as I do, just what was it you took out of here with you last time? Am I really the one you should be concerned about? What manner of creature are you working with, you oh so righteous members of a cursed Order? Do you now traffic with the Otherworld? I imagine my Eternal Enemy would frown upon such...arrangements.
“In the Name of God, I bid you to shut up!” Father Ignacio bellowed, his voice still seeming curiously flat and deadened. With another sepulchral chuckle, the demonic voice subsided. But the seed of doubt had been sown. All of a sudden, I was thinking of all the little oddities about Lucy. I'd put them down to old age, approaching senility, and trauma, but she'd kept up easily on the run out of the town, without even breathing hard. Was the demon, for all its malice, actually right? Was Lucy inhuman?
I shook my head. Not the time. We'd deal with that particular nightmare later. Right at the moment, we needed to focus on this one.
Eryn, though, was looking back toward the campsite. She'd taken Chrystal under her wing since Coldwell, and I knew she felt responsible and protective toward the girl. Right then she was thinking the same thing I was—had we left Chrystal at the mercy of another Otherworldly predator? One that had successfully hoodwinked us into escorting it out of Bowesmont?
I leaned over to her. “Even if it's telling a tiny part of the truth,” I murmured, “anything that's fighting a demon can't necessarily be that bad, can it?” I half believed it myself. Sure, there were power struggles in the Otherworld, and some of the predators were purely anarchic, hating everything from Heaven to the Abyss, but the word of a demonic interloper was hardly a sterling testimony as to who or what we were dealing with. Not everything in the Otherworld is truly evil, after all. A lot of it is, but not all of it. “Stay focused; it's just trying to distract us so it can jump us.”
Almost as soon as I'd said it, half a dozen flesh golems came running out of the fog, their rotting mouths wide with their sickly, creaking, almost-roars. They ran right into four roaring chainsaws.
It wasn't quite as simple as carving up a side of beef. They were fast, even if their movements were a little jerky; there weren't really minds or spirits guiding these things. They were puppets, just like the homunculi, though slightly better articulated ones. And they had big fists, that they were trying to pound us into paste with. So cutting them down was a combination of defense and offense. Fortunately, chainsaws can combine the two.
A lopsided pile of parts, with the head of an adolescent and the arms of two very differently-sized bodybuilders, took a swing at my head. It was a wide, flailing haymaker, and it was pretty easy to get the chainsaw blade inside it. The saw roared, easily shearing through the limb in a splatter of dead, shredded meat. The limb dropped to the ground, but the thing didn't even notice, and tried to hit me with its other fist. I ducked under the wild swing, and brought the chainsaw blade up from below, bisecting the thing through its mismatched torso, starting at the ribs under the still connected arm and coming out through the opposite collarbone. Fetid, rotting bits of meat and bone sprayed everywhere as the construct fell in two pieces, no longer coherent enough for the distant consciousness to control it.
I almost got killed a second later, as another one jumped at me out of the fog. Eryn got a shotgun blast into it but it wasn't enough to disable it before it slammed into me, almost impaling me on my own chainsaw. Fortunately, I'd taken my hand off the trigger, so the chain wasn't moving when I fell down under the thing's weight.
Flesh golems, being made up of dead parts, aren't quite as heavy as a living body. They ain't light, either, mind you. It had me pinned to the ground, its putrid, rotting mouth just above my face, staring unseeing at me with glazed, vacant, dead eyes. It smelled like formaldehyde and rot. It was also as off balance as I was. It kept trying to punch me, but we were too close, and it kept either hitting the ground or missing completely. It wasn't sophisticated enough to pick itself up into the mount and do the ground-and-pound. Fortunately, whoever or whatever was controlling it wasn't inventive enough to start it biting. That would be bad, considering that its broken teeth were about three inches from my throat.
I let go of the chainsaw, got an arm up between me and the animated dead weight on top of me, and started elbowing the thing in the head. It had precisely no effect; you can't give a dead brain a concussion. But I was just trying to throw it off enough to lever it off of me, at which point I could start carving it up. Instinct might have led me to try to shoot it, but my pistol was between my hip and the ground, and I couldn't get at it.
Alistair beat me to it, though. His big, beefy hands closed around the thing's neck, and heaved it completely off the ground. He held it for a half a second, took a breath, and heaved it as hard as he could against a nearby car. It shattered windows and bent the side panel in. Have I mentioned that for all his absent-minded-professor personality, Alistair is incredibly strong?
Of course, being smacked into a Prius hard enough to wreck it had about the same effect on the golem that elbow strikes to the head had. It came right back out of the crumpled mess of shattered glass and plastic, and came straight for me again. Of course, I had scrambled most of the way back to my feet by then, and had the chainsaw buzzing, ready for it. My first swipe took its head and half of one arm off, the second and third reduced it to a torso and a pair of legs.
That was the last one. The rest of the mob had been reduced to sliced, shredded, and pulverized bits of still-twitching meat on the pavement. Not that we got much of a breather.
With an ear-shattering scream, the demon-possessed golem came out of the swirling, unholy fog, all four arms spread, its talons now even longer, its maw spreading from ear to ear in a misshapen head that had sprouted three new eyes, the body turned into a scaly mass of harden
ed muscle. This was going to be quite a bit harder than its little puppet counterparts.
It took five rounds of buckshot without slowing down. “Stand together!” I bellowed. The five of us with chainsaws scrambled to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and braced ourselves.
It was lightning quick. It smacked Tyrese off his feet. Fortunately, it was a backhanded blow, so its talons didn't tear his head off, but they still drew blood as he went spinning to the pavement. It was apparently not terribly keen on impaling itself on four or five buzzing chainsaws, so it didn't just plow into us, but we had our hands full keeping those long, razor-sharp talons at bay. I'd barely fend off a strike from one arm, my chainsaw biting but not managing to get all the way to the bone, or whatever equivalent that thing now had, and I'd have to quickly move to block the next strike from another arm. A few got through, and I had several burning slashes seeping blood on my arms. It seemed like it was growing new arms, too, but that might just have been my imagination, fueled by the frantic struggle to avoid being disemboweled or decapitated.
Alistair suddenly surged forward, letting go of his chainsaw with one hand, using it to grab hold of the iron-hard limb that was trying to hit him. As he held on with a death grip, he swung the chainsaw one-handed, trying to force it through the bony, scaled shoulder. I darted around behind him, attacking the other arm on that side, trying to keep it from ripping Alistair's guts out, but I was a fraction of a second too slow. Alistair grunted as the thing sank its talons into his side, but held on and kept sawing away at the arm. My saw bit into the lower arm and I pushed down, willing the whirring chain to chew its bloody way through the hardened tissue.
Both arms came off at almost the same time, and Alistair sank to his knees, bleeding badly. Tall Bear and Kolya had taken advantage of its attempts to get Alistair off, and were carving up its other two arms. It tried to shake itself loose and run, but I swung my saw at the back of one knee, forcing the rapidly dulling teeth through scales, cartilage, and bone. Foul fluids were spraying everywhere as I hewed the leg off, and it collapsed on the street, still screeching and screaming obscenities and blasphemies. Tall Bear attacked the remaining leg, taking it off just below the knee and severing the final talons.
