Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  Like what was going to happen tomorrow. So much to do. She stared at the ceiling for the rest of the night, just thinking about it all, and smiling just a little bit.

  *

  When they reached Midian, Tennessee, it was a surprisingly simple matter for Chester and William to agree on the next course of action. Night was hanging overhead, after all, countless stars in the sky, which was not a sight they were familiar with from their time in New York.

  “Quite impressive,” Chester said, looking out the windshield. They craned their neck together to lean forward and see as the van coasted down the road at twenty miles an hour.

  “I forget what it looks like sometimes after we’ve been in a city for a while,” William said. He had his hand gripped firmly on the steering wheel. They pressed the brake together.

  “Shall we find a quiet road, a nice place to park for the evening?” Chester asked, still blinking up at the sight of all those stars. Without as much light out here, it was an impressive spectacle, pinpricks of light across the black veil of the sky. So numerous, like the souls contained within their body.

  “Indubitably,” William agreed, and they took the panel van down a side road. They chanced a quick look back; the two back windows had curtains that could be shut over them, and there were no windows along the side. A bedroll lay in the rear in lieu of seats, because it wasn’t as though they ever had guests or passengers.

  The van’s engine rumbled in the quiet night. Finding a suitable street was an easy matter. They came across a public park in a neighborhood not ten minutes off the exit ramp, a half dozen cars parked all along the avenues adjacent, and settled the van in for the night.

  Chester pulled the keys out of the ignition and pocketed them as they stretched, rising out of the seat, the light still on overhead, timing its way until it shut off. “Shall we lie for a bit?” he asked.

  “So that we can indulge in the rich inner life of a demon colony?” William asked with amusement. “I think we can accommodate you and yours in this, Chester.”

  “I do thank you,” Chester said stiffly as they lay down, the hard rubber floor of the van’s back padded by the roll of foam they’d laid down with a sheet over it. They fought with the pillow until it was positioned just so for the maximum comfort of all involved in the decision—not an easy matter—and then lay there, still.

  “I wish it could be like this all the time,” Chester said, and a chorus of quiet agreement rose from within them, his side speaking their feelings.

  “And you know we don’t,” William said, and this time it was his turn to be stiff. A cacophony began, voices shouting each other down inside.

  “Let us discuss it for a time,” Chester said.

  “Because you wish to end the evening in acrimony?” William asked with a half-sigh. “On this matter I’m not certain we are so accommodating.” He paused. “Do you not ever grow … tired of argument?”

  “No,” Chester said quietly. “Of course not. Argument is a necessary part of any debate—”

  “Perhaps I grow weary of having a debate,” William said. “Perhaps some things we see should just be done—”

  “Without discussion?” Chester asked. “Just—just do them? Without asking, consulting, deciding—”

  “Yes,” William said. “Yes, exactly.”

  “That sounds rather like … a dictatorship, William,” Chester said.

  “You always default to that,” William said. “And I’ve asked you to call me Bill.” The voices inside them were raging at one another again, as they always did. Those who spoke in reasoned tones were drowned out in the noise of argument. Those who spoke the loudest were barely even heard. “Every moment of our lives, every piece of progress we try to make can’t simply dissolve into argumentative committee meetings or a poll to see what needs to happen next. Sometimes, things need to be done—”

  “And if they are done without any of that consultation,” Chester said, and his staid voice broke into the closest thing he ever showed to compassion, “if they are merely decided on by us, by philosopher kings with their hands on the levers of power … what makes us wise enough, righteous enough to claim that mantle?” He paused, and his voice grew brittle. “What makes us right?”

  “We are right because we are right,” Bill said. “Because we know right when we see it.”

  “Every man thinks he is right in his heart,” Chester said. “And he would argue it to his dying breath—”

  “Well, you’re the one who wants to argue, not I.”

  “I do,” Chester said. “I want to argue. I want to discuss, to poll, to have us talk about the things we do. I do not want to lurch blindly in the direction of whatever desire crosses my face, to lunge toward the next ‘right thing’ without even considering first what makes it right for now and for all the moments after now—”

  “I said I don’t wish to argue it anymore,” William said and shut his eye. The cacophony did not die within, not nearly, but William—Bill—simply diminished.

  “I do not wish this to become the making of an Ambrose Bierce quote,” Chester said into the silence at the fore. He could still hear the rumbling, angry argument roiling within, but he barely listened to that anymore. He wanted to hear William’s voice, but nothing but silence came to him. “William?”

  No more argument came to him that night, and so Chester spent the dark hours staring through his open eye at the shadowy lines of the roof of the van, counting the hours until morning, when he hoped all would be well again.

  3.

  Hendricks pulled up to the sheriff’s station off Old Jackson Highway in his purloined SUV, dropped it into park, and let go of the wheel, staring out at the highway rolling along in front of him. It was just after sunrise and the traffic was minimal. A couple cars in a row came past, making a little noise that was mostly dissipated over the ditch between the lot and the road, leaving Hendricks to just stare out at them as they went.

  Part of him wished he could be in a car getting the hell away from here, but they had a meeting, and so here he was. He hadn’t had the greatest night of sleep, but neither had it been the worst in recent memory, so he just sort of yawned and rubbed at his eyes for a minute before shutting off the car and getting out.

  Meetings were not a usual thing for the demon-hunting crowd. It was kinda like being back in the Corps again, except worse somehow. Civilian oversight had never been a real joy for him or any other Marine he’d known, and this was all civilians, all the time. It hadn’t been too bad when it was just him and Arch, but with every addition it felt more and more like they were having circle time in kindergarten rather than getting to the shit that needed to be done with a cold and efficient eye to fucking up demons with maximum impact.

  He pulled on the handle to the door, staring in through the clear Plexiglas to see an already full room waiting for him. No joy there. He’d hoped maybe the action last night would cause some people to skip this one, but it didn’t look like his hopes and dreams had been answered any better this time than they ever had in the past.

  “Same shit, different day,” he muttered on his way through the open counter into the back bullpen area. It was nothing but open air dividing the waiting space from where the entirety of the watch was waiting for him.

  “So you do say that.” Duncan greeted him with a smirk, sitting on a desk at the far side of the room. Today’s t-shirt had the words “Naked Prozac” written in lush, multicolored letters. Hendricks frowned. He’d seen that somewhere before, but couldn’t recall where.

  “Morning,” Arch said, standing near the front of the room with Sheriff Reeve, who was looking a little more tired than he had when Hendricks had seen him yesterday. Hendricks’s impression of the sheriff was that he was a ball buster but probably a decent guy, just way out of his depth.

  “You’re late,” Alison ragged him as he went past. She was sitting at the back of the class, eye fixed on the door, her momma and daddy arranged around her, her hair all wavy and wet li
ke she’d just got out of the shower. He’d lived with her and Arch for a month or so, and given what he knew about how they fucked every night, he figured she had probably needed to shower this morning.

  “Jesus, it’s like you’re trying to be his personal assistant,” Brian Longholt said, standing uncomfortably a dozen paces from his parents and sister, his arms folded, because he had to be cool and distance himself from his uncool family. Nope, Hendricks did not care for the stoner smart boy at all.

  “At least he showed up,” Erin Harris said a little stiffly, kinda toward the front of the room, sitting next to that pervy taxidermist, Casey Meacham. Him, Hendricks kinda liked, in spite of him seeming dumb enough to try catching a bullet with his forehead. Hendricks had him pegged as first man down if he ever stepped up to the combat side of the watch. He was support corps all the way, if anyone with half a brainpan was running things here.

  Hendricks felt about the same about the sheriff’s wife, who was sitting up front like the favorite pupil, a little notepad in hand. They were gonna have minutes for their meeting and everything, it looked like. Hendricks buried a sigh so deep it would have taken the entire Army Corps of Engineers to find it, but of course only one Marine to do the work of digging it out. “Sorry,” he said, not really meaning it. “Overslept.”

  “It’s all right, you’re not the last one here,” Sheriff Reeve said with a surprising magnanimity that Hendricks wondered about until he realized who was missing. There were actually two people who hadn’t showed yet, but then one of them appeared at the door and Hendricks felt like he’d wriggled loose of the hook.

  “Father Nguyen,” Sheriff Reeve said as the priest came in the door. Nguyen wasn’t a very tall guy, and he greeted all the crew waiting with a thin smile.

  Nguyen came inside the counter, but only just, leaning himself against it and placing his palms on its edge. “Did I miss anything?” he asked with a vague hint of an accent.

  “You missed the cowboy showing up late, too,” Brian Longholt said with his customary smartassery. That guy was a pain in the dick, and he didn’t even have the social grace to do it playfully, like Alison.

  “So we gonna get started now?” Casey Meacham asked, looking around. “That’s everybody, right?”

  “Not exactly,” Reeve said, a little tightly. There was a sound of tires squealing in the parking lot and silence fell for a second. “That’s probably the last of us, right there.”

  They all waited in the quiet and a second later the door swung open and Dr. Darlington came in, out of breath and carrying a cup of coffee big enough to caffeinate one MEF. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, a big fucking donut with a few bites out of it in the other hand. “I am so sorry.”

  “Now that we’re all here,” Reeve said, clearly not gonna call the doctor out on her tardiness, “we can start.” That burned Hendricks’s ass like a ghost pepper sandwich with jalapeno dressing on cayenne-peppered bread. If he’d been the last to arrive, the old bastard probably would have ripped a good chunk out of his rectum. Nothing like a Marine drill sergeant would have in the same position, but enough to raise his eyebrow, at least.

  Duncan caught Hendricks’s gaze from across the bullpen and nodded once. The demon was probably reading his mind again, or his essence, or whatever. That was an annoying damned thing, but at this point just another on an endless pile.

  “Gonna deal with the urgent and sudden first,” Reeve said, looking at his one page of notes for the meeting. “We got an emergency call last night just after the meeting—three guys attacking a third out near the freeway.”

  “And we’re just hearing about this now why?” Hendricks asked, hands sweating on the sleeves of his coat, arms folded in front of him. “I live like two seconds from there. I coulda checked it out.”

  “Ed Fries took the call,” Reeve said, meeting his gaze steadily, which annoyed Hendricks further. Stare downs were a fun game, but the sheriff was plainly old enough that an uncomfortable gaze didn’t bother him at all. Hendricks would have bet that little bitch Brian Longholt would have melted under it, though. “He went out for a look, didn’t see any sign of anything—”

  “Where was he coming from?” Hendricks asked.

  “I think what my colleague means,” Arch said, stepping in between Hendricks and the sheriff to gentle things up, “is that if he was that close and Ed was across town, it might have made more sense to have Hendricks take a peek first.”

  “Yeah, it would have,” Reeve agreed, pretty brusquely, “but unfortunately, I don’t have a contact number for Mr. Hendricks.”

  “Just Hendricks is fine,” Hendricks said for the umpteen billionth time.

  “I don’t have a contact number for Just Hendricks,” the sheriff went on, the prick. “So Fries took the call. If things had gone wrong, I’m sure we would have gotten in touch somehow.”

  “Yeah, why do you not have a cellphone again?” Brian Longholt, of course, asked this question.

  “My motel room has a phone.” Hendricks felt his jaw tighten. “And power, and running water, before you ask.” He gave a sidelong look at Brian again, whose face fell as Hendricks ripped the obvious follow-ups right out of him before he could set absolutely nobody to laughing with his butter-knife sharp wit. “HBO, too.”

  “This brings up a point,” Reeve said, still all serious and shit. “Our current method of communication is pretty inadequate to the task before us.”

  “Group text messaging and the conference calls have carried us this far,” Bill Longholt said from the back of the room. “You looking to change?”

  “It is a pain in the ass to try and do group conference calls,” Duncan said, looking once more at Hendricks. “Especially since I’m carrying the burner that stupid over there uses.” He nodded at Hendricks.

  Hendricks made a kissy face. “Is that why you’re not with stupid anymore? You tired of holding my purse?”

  “Yeah,” Duncan said, “I can’t figure out for the life of me why you can’t carry your own phone in that big coat of yours.” He held up the little burner phone that Hendricks used to wire himself with a mic for some of the battles they’d done lately.

  “I don’t like those things,” Hendricks said, shrugging. “It beeps off at the wrong time, maybe a demon eats your ass.”

  “Ain’t a demon out there wants to eat your filthy ass, Marine,” Bill piped up from the back of the room.

  “Yeah, they’re all interested in my—” Hendricks started, before a sudden, violent sense of unease rolled over him.

  “Ain’t a soul interested in that, either,” Brian said, once again taking a pretty decent gag and dragging it dead over the line. Maybe it was just Hendricks, but every time that shit spoke it was like roofing nails on a chalkboard.

  “What were you thinking in terms of changing up our communication?” Bill Longholt said, dragging ’em back on track.

  “Some kind of radio system,” Reeve said. “Cell phones don’t work in some of the hollers in Calhoun County, and I’d like something that doesn’t necessarily beep loud, to Mr. Just Hendricks’s point. We’ve had to go some places lately where quiet is needed, and having something blaring out with a ringtone isn’t a great option.”

  “We could just treat it like the theater and put our cell phones on vibrate,” Dr. Darlington suggested.

  “That sounds like fun,” Casey Meacham said, and Hendricks thanked a God he didn’t even believe in that nobody asked him why that sounded like fun.

  “Anyone want to look into some options for us?” Reeve asked. “Maybe figure things out?”

  “I can do that,” Brian Longholt leapt into the fray. Sadly, he didn’t strike Hendricks as the sort who’d ever catch a bullet with his forehead. He was more the sort that would get friendly fire right into his back. Accidentally, of course. “I can read Amazon reviews with the best of them. I’ll see if I can find us something that’ll work, that’s got some range to it.”

  “Make sure it can take a headset,” Alison said. “And
it’s gotta be small. I’ve got enough shit to carry as it is.” She made a face and her hand went to her stomach, like something she’d eaten was disagreeing with her.

  “Okay, that’s two things out of the way, then,” Reeve said, eyes moving down his list.

  “Speaking of your other deputy,” Hendricks said, inserting himself right into the gap in the conversation like he was punching a hole in the enemy lines, “where is that guy?”

  Reeve exchanged a look with Arch then with Erin. “Ed’s sleeping. He had a long patrol last night.”

  Hendricks enjoyed that look enough that he decided to go back for more, just to see what happened. “I noticed he’s never been to any of our meetings.”

  Reeve went back to stare-down mode and Hendricks knew he’d found a bullet hole. “Well, let’s just say that Ed might not be philosophically predisposed to join up with our plans.”

  “You mean his sympathies are with the people who didn’t raise their hands at the meeting last night?” Addison Longholt asked. Hendricks hadn’t seen much of Brian and Alison’s mom, but what he had seen, he liked. He also felt like he now knew where Alison got her “take no shit” attitude.

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far, but Ed’s having a hard time wrapping his head around the idea of demons in Midian,” Reeve said, voice fraught with tension. Apparently shit-talking his underling in this meeting was not his idea of fun. Hendricks could respect that, but at the same time, it tickled him a little to watch the man squirm.

  “So how did that meeting go?” Hendricks asked, pretty damned sure he knew but keen to toss another grenade to liven things up. The last meeting had been damned dull; he’d thought about gouging his ears out with his own sword to end it.

  “Swimmingly,” Reeve answered with just the appropriate amount of pissed off to tell Hendricks he’d not only hit the mark, he might have punched well past it.