“I realize it’s not a deeply thought-out code name like COWBOY,” Brian muttered, breaking off from Hendricks as two of the broc’aminn came at him, their arms blurring with speed, their wide mouths hissing as they spit, “but I feel like it fits!”
“Yeah, you’re a real deep thinker,” Hendricks said, the aching crawl of weariness running across his muscles from the hard exertion of the last few minutes and the half-dozen glancing demon attacks he’d taken. He lashed out hard at one of Brian’s attackers, taking his eye off his own targets for a beat as he vaped one of the fuckers. The damned kid wouldn’t stand a chance against two of them. Hell, he probably wouldn’t stand a chance against one, but Hendricks figured he had about a second to help the sonofabitch before he’d be forced to deal with his own problems again …
When he came around, Hendricks realized that his second estimate had been a little too generous. Lead Guitar was about an inch from his face, his mouth opened wide, arms spread, closing in like he was all set to give Hendricks a big hug. Hendricks had no doubt about his intentions, though, and he knew a hug was not in the offing. Not that he’d want one anyway; the smell was even worse up close.
As if in answer to the prayers he never bothered with, little droplets of water splashed all over Hendricks’s face like spittle from the open mouth of the demon. It was not spittle, though. It was refracted off the demon’s cheeks and nose by the sheer power of the stream of water being shot. The sound of an electric motor ran under the noise of battle, and Lead Guitar halted in his tracks.
Hendricks just took a stumbling step back in reaction, free hand coming up to wipe the liquid off his cheek and eyebrow. He stared at the clear liquid there, like sweat on his fingertips, and broke into a smile as Lead Guitar burst into black hellfire under the assault of the holy-water-filled squirt gun.
“DOCTOR is on the field,” Alison announced in his ear. Like he didn’t already fucking know that.
“Nice to see you, Dr. Darlington,” Hendricks said as Lauren Darlington, MD, came jogging up with her mechanized squirt gun clenched in her hands. She looked like one of the new Ghostbusters, actually, dark hair shining in the fading light.
“Looked like you needed an assist,” Darlington said with a smile of her own, turning loose a hard stream of water over Duncan’s opponents and setting the four of them to dancing in pain like they’d just had acid run over their backs.
“I see what you did there,” Hendricks said and wheeled off to help Brian Longholt with his demon.
“Ayup,” Dr. Darlington said and advanced with her squirt gun’s engine running full blast. Hendricks had rolled his eyes when she’d first brought it out, but after he’d seen it work the first time, he’d kinda kicked himself for not thinking of it first. Its effectiveness was undeniable, like a flamethrower for these hell beasts, but without the danger of explosion those things brought.
“Is that everyone?” Hendricks asked, as Brian’s demon started to fall back, caught between the two of them and Bill, who was moving to cut off the damned broc’aminn’s retreat. “Are we all on the field?”
“Everyone that was available for the fight,” Alison called. “Everyone else is—well, you know.” Her voice carried a certain solemnity. “They’ve got their own fight tonight.”
Hendricks blanched at that. This right here was his sort of fight. The one that Arch and the others were involved in? It wasn’t a fight he wanted any part of, he reflected as Bill plunged his cavalry saber into the broc’aminn’s exposed shoulder. It cracked the shell and after a subtle hiss of what sounded like escaping air, the demon burst into black, shadowy flames and disappeared back to hell. “How do you reckon they’re doing?” he asked. It might not have been his fight, but it was damned sure gonna have big fucking consequences for all of them.
“If I had to guess?” Bill Longholt let out a sigh, his large frame slumping slightly as his broad shoulders came down. “Not well,” the big man said, and Hendricks caught the apprehension on his face. “Not well at all.”
*
“This is bad,” Arch Stan said, looking out on what they faced with barely concealed panic. The atmosphere in the room was tense, and the tension stretched down into his own chest, where it felt like every muscle in his body had contracted at once. Pucker time, that was how his high school football coach had described it, though he was referring rather inartfully to a different muscle. From Arch’s point of view, though, it made sense, his knuckles clenched, his skin crawling with the urge to be somewhere, anywhere other than this.
“You’re wishing you’d gone with the others when they bailed out to go fight that demon, aren’t you?” Erin Harris whispered in his ear. Her voice was low and soft, and it was plain that she didn’t mean for anyone else to hear her.
It wouldn’t have mattered. There was far too much commotion around them for anyone to have picked up on what they were saying anyway.
“Please,” Sheriff Nicholas Reeve said from the podium at the front of the Community Meeting room in the municipal building near the town square. “Please, if I could just get a minute to say what I came here to—”
There was a dull roar in the meeting room, loud enough it felt like someone had switched on one of those white noise machines in Arch’s ears. He could barely hear Sheriff Reeve over all the voices. Someone was shouting from the front row, loud enough to drown out any other conversation. “You’re so full of shit, Reeve! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” It took Arch a minute to figure out that was Eric Gronhoy doing the shouting.
“I’m trying to—” Sheriff Reeve bristled, clearly not deaf to what Gronhoy had just shouted at him over the din. It made Arch itch a little to hear what the man had said. He and Erin were sitting on the dais, after all, decked out in their khaki uniforms, trying to present an image of strength, but Reeve’s bombshell revelation that demons had been behind Midian’s recent troubles had seemed to let all the reason out of the room. “For fuck’s sake,” Reeve said, a little lower but not nearly low enough for it to go unheard by the majority of the crowd, amplified as it was by the microphone sticking out of the podium.
“Let the man speak!” A voice like the crack of thunder in the heavens snapped in the middle of the room and hushed them all. It was a voice of authority, a voice that was used to being listened to, and it made Arch smile to hear it laid down in such a way. “I said let him speak!” Barnabas Jones shouted, hushing the hubbub further. Arch caught the eye of Jones; they’d known each other for nearly forever. Barnabas Jones—Barney as everyone called him—was a tall black man with an easy smile and a word of kindness for everyone. He was also the pastor at the Methodist Church. Arch’s church. Arch had known Barney Jones since the man baptized him, and he was looking up at Arch, Erin, and Reeve, staring at them over the crowd with a knowing smile as the mob lost its enthusiasm and started to sit, casting fearful glances at Jones. Jones wasn’t a man Arch would have cared to cross, even if he hadn’t been one of the man’s parishioners. “All right, then, Sheriff,” Jones said. “You may continue.”
“Thank you, Barney,” Reeve said, nodding sincerely at the pastor. “I know this … is a lot to handle.”
“It smells like bullshit!” Nathan McMinn shouted from the back of the room, and a grumble of discontent rippled through the room, threatening to toss the whole meeting into upheaval again. “You’re covering up for your department’s fuck-ups, Nick!”
“Well, thank you for the vote of confidence, Nate,” Reeve said dryly. “I assure you, I’ll be glad to accept your condemnations at the end of the meeting, but I got something to say, first.” He paused only a second for effect before plunging ahead; Arch might have given it a second more, but then someone else might have interrupted. “Demons are real, they’re here in Midian right now, and they’re killing people—our people, dammit. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true—”
The cacophony rose once more, and this time a sharp whistle screeched, causing almost everyone in the
packed meeting to blanch at the high noise. “Excuse me, darlings,” Melina Cherry said in her European accent, standing up in the third row. The madam of the local brothel was decked out, wearing a very nice suit that looked like it wouldn’t have been out of place on a catwalk in Milan, in Arch’s opinion. It was black, which matched her raven hair, and though it was a little low cut for his taste, he couldn’t deny that she looked classy. He could have sworn he could smell her perfume if she hadn’t been a few rows back. “I believe the sheriff, and if you had seen what happened to Colleen Hudson in my own house, you would, too. Her murder—no human did this.”
That provided a moment of quiet. “Yes, that was done by a demon,” Reeve said, giving Melina Cherry a nod. Arch tried to quell his surprise; the local madam standing up and supporting the sheriff in a moment of need was not something he’d ever anticipated.
“I had some boys come bust up my bar,” Michael McInness stood up, taking off his old baseball cap to reveal hair that was desperately thinning. “I know not many of you come up my way and visit the Charnel House, but lemme tell you something—my patrons may be rough as cobs, but they ain’t the sort to back down from or lose a fight. Well, we got these three city slickers up in there one night, and they started some shit that—I’m telling you right now—it wasn’t human what they did. Ain’t no way some skinny hipster shitbird in girl’s jeans can knock out one of my boys like that—”
“Oh, come on!” Keith Drumlin called out from somewhere near the back.
“He’s telling the truth!” Molly Darlington stood up in the first row. Arch locked his gaze on her, a little surprised. He hadn’t even noticed she’d come to the meeting; she was sixteen or so, after all. Weren’t all the kids that age supposed to be out drinking milkshakes or painting graffiti or something? “I know y’all heard about what happened to me at the Summer Lights Festival. Well, that guy that … that tried what he tried …” Her face flushed at the attention. “He was a demon. And when he got stabbed, he just … swirled away in a black storm of hellfire—”
“I believe it!” Chauncey Watson cried out, coming to his feet, his skinny body hidden underneath polyester pants and short-sleeved dress shirt that looked like he’d been wearing it for twenty years. Arch could almost smell the mothballs on the man from here. “There was some demons holed up on Mount Horeb, too, and we heard ’em. They came down and killed Tim Connor and—”
“All right, I get it,” Gina Carras stood up, drawing every eye in the room to her. She was the head of the PTA at the local elementary school, Greenbriar, and had a red face to match her dark hair. “All these people are standing up and saying you’re right, it’s demons, Nick,” she nodded at Reeve. “Then we got all these other folk,” a rumble went through the crowd, “gonna shout at the top of their lungs that it’s all malarkey, that you’re making this up.” She held up a hand to keep that contingent from breaking loose with their disgruntlement. “I think we see how the room is divided up, right?” She turned her attention to Reeve. “What I want to know is—assuming things are as you say they are, and I know that’s a mighty big ‘if’—what are you suggesting we do, Nick?” There was a light chorus of nods and agreement across the whole room. “I mean, do you have a solution? Or is this just gonna get worse?”
Reeve stood in the middle of the stage. “I know this ain’t what y’all want to hear … but we have a start to a solution … but all the experts we’ve talked to seem to suggest … yeah, it’s going to get worse.”
That threatened to send the room into chaos again, but Gina Carras held up her hand. “All right, all right, just wait, y’all. How much worse are we talking here? Because a lot people have already died … I mean, you’ve already lost one of your deputies and—”
“Look, there’s not a scale for demonic destruction,” Reeve said, sounding a little calm and a lot exasperated.
“If you want us to buy this bullshit, you better square with us!” Eric Gronhoy called out. “How bad do you think it’s gonna get? Are we talking, like, Smokey and the Bandit 2, here?”
Reeve thought about it for a second. “More like Smokey and the Bandit 3.”
A mutter ran through the crowd, and Nate McMinn spoke loudest of all. “That movie sucked. It just killed the whole franchise.”
“Yeah,” Mike McInness said, “Burt Reynolds saw that meteor coming and dodged it.”
“He blew it later, though,” Chauncey Watson piped up, “in that one movie he was in, the one with Demi Moore naked—”
“It was called Striptease,” Casey Meacham, the local taxidermist answered. Arch was unsurprised that Meacham would have known this; the man was a pervert by any standard, proving it less than a second after he had this thought. “She looked mighty damned good dancing naked, too.”
Reeve sighed at the podium, dipping his head low. Arch had worked with the man for years, and could practically see the quiet desperation was radiating off of him. He hadn’t wanted to do this meeting, none of them had. But the sheriff knew it was necessary, and Arch could see he was paying for it now. Yeah, Arch had a sense the sheriff was strained, that the man was just about nearing the explosion point. And having seen him go off before, he didn’t much fancy the thought of what would happen if he blew up right here in the middle of any meeting, let alone this very important one.
*
Nicholas Reeve had been working in law enforcement long enough to feel like he’d run across damned near every scenario. Only a week or so before, if asked, he would have confidently answered that while things were always changing in the world, especially in the realm of new and different drugs gaining popularity, he’d seen just about everything under the sun.
Then Erin and Arch had gone and blown his mind with the revelation that demons were real and that they were invading the town because it had become something of a hotspot for their activities. Midian, Tennessee, hadn’t had a murder in years, and now they had more files open than he could count. It wasn’t the sort of stuff you’d see in a normal crime blotter, either—not gang-related killings, domestic gone wrong to murder, child abuse—no, this was a grotesque clump of crime stories, the kind even the most depraved serial-killer writer wouldn’t have dreamed of.
“Can we focus on the problem at hand?” Reeve asked, trying to draw his clearly wandering audience back from discussions of Smokey and the Bandit movies and where Burt Reynolds’ career had gone wrong. He looked right at Gina Carras, since she seemed to be a pretty good focus for his attention. She had asked some pretty good questions so far, after all, and she seemed to be keeping some of the less responsible parties in line, holding them off from disrupting the damned meeting.
“Maybe you can give us a little insight on how you came to this … uh … conclusion, Nick?” Gina asked, folding her arms over her broad chest. She was not a small lady, Gina Carras. She had a perfect build for a linebacker, but she was a little short.
“That’s a good idea,” Reeve said, nodding along. He tried to ignore that desperate sense that was burgeoning inside of him; he hadn’t exactly wanted things to go this way, after all. He’d kind of planned for them to, but he had hoped the townspeople would see reason. “So … most of you know Arch Stan—”
“Best player our town ever produced!” Keith Drumlin called out.
“No doubt about that,” Mike McInness agreed, adjusting his old SM Lines hat. It was from one of the local trucking concerns.
“Well, Arch actually stumbled across this stuff himself when Old Man MacGruder went missing,” Reeve said, feeling a little catch inside as he spoke about it. He hadn’t quite forgiven Arch yet for keeping him in the dark for so long. “He crossed paths with a demon hunter that showed him what was what—”
“You getting high on the taxpayer’s dollar, Arch?” Eric Gronhoy asked, his big face showing plain hostility.
“Oh, get your head out of your hindparts, Gronhoy,” Barney Jones said, standing up at his place on the aisle. The big black preacher looked more than a little perturb
ed. “If you knew Arch, you’d know the man barely touches a drink, let alone anything illicit.”
Arch, for his part, shot Gronhoy a steely look that Reeve caught out of the corner of his eye. Gronhoy nodded a grudging acknowledgment of that point, and Reeve went on. “Since the day the MacGruders disappeared, we’ve had quite a few incidents. Some of them were small—a meteoric rise in assaults and some robberies, break-ins.” He let out a slow breath. “Others, like the massacre on Crosser Street and Colleen Hudson’s murder at Ms. Cherry’s, uh … place of …” He struggled, trying to find the right word, “… residence …” he got a nod from the madam at that, “… as well as the incident at the Summer Lights Festival,” he caught Molly Darlington reddening in the front row at that, her grandmother sitting next to her, peering intently at Reeve, “and finally what happened when a full-sized demon got unleashed and tore through town—”
“I thought that was a bear?” Scott Karshman asked, staring up at Reeve in undisguised curiosity. Karshman never was sleekest car in the show.
“You heard of a lot of bears ripping right through the middle of houses and blowing up propane tanks?” Mike McInness asked with undisguised scorn. “Because me, I ain’t ever even heard of people doing that, let alone animals. That oughta be a clue to any one of y’all skeptics that things ain’t right here and that Reeve’s got the explanation that makes sense.”
“You telling me all this crap is connected?” Nathan McMinn asked, looking out through his glasses. McMinn was a skinny fella and had been unemployed for as long as Reeve could remember. “Like … the freeway accident, even?”
“That wasn’t an accident,” Reeve said, “and yes, it’s all connected, from start to finish.”
“What about the turds I been finding on my doorstep?” Keith Drumlin shouted out. “They’re all smoky and long and unnatural—”
Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Page 4
