by Rob Rogers
“Let’s settle down, fellas,” Poteete said in his gentle Southern accent. He laid his hand on the Behemoth’s arm, just above the tattoo of the screaming eagle.
The Behemoth let go of Stecker, who gasped at the release.
Poteete smiled at Stecker. “Clayton,” he said, “we’re just taking a piss break. Why don’t you head back to the truck? We’ll all be back on the road in a few minutes.”
Stecker rubbed at his chest, fingers splayed wide. “Maybe I have to take a piss break, too,” he said petulantly.
The Behemoth gnashed his teeth. All they needed was about a minute of peace and quiet to do what they needed to do. One goddamn minute without Horodenski asking a bunch of questions or Stecker acting like a spoiled child or some other damned thing cropping up. And they weren’t getting their minute. It was enough to make him sick. In his mind’s eye, he could see the tarp he and Poteete had stowed in the luggage compartment of the truck he was driving, the tarp and the contents rolled inside. He wanted it gone. It was weighing on him. They just needed one minute.
Poteete stepped closer to Stecker. He looked up at the tall rubber man and his smile faltered, his eyes empty. “I have a shy bladder,” he said. “Head back to the truck and wait your turn.”
Stecker’s fingers dropped away from his chest and he put his hands on his hips, spreading his legs out wide. A standing strut. He smiled back. “I don’t know what you two are up to, Hector, but I’m not skedaddling on your say-so.” He jerked his head at the Behemoth. “Or his.” He puffed his narrow chest out. “You’ve got some kind of scam running and I want a cut. You dragged us out to this godforsaken stretch of swamp, off of Ma’s route, and you must have had an awfully good reason.”
The tarp and its contents were a pretty damned good reason, the Behemoth thought. He wondered what it would take to break Stecker’s neck, if the fact that he was double-jointed meant he’d need to break the neck twice.
The remains of Poteete’s smile dropped from his face. He raised a hand and pulled at his beard. In his other hand, he held one of the torches he used in his act. It was shaped like a tree branch, but in truth it was made of cast iron, the top wrapped in fire-proof rope. A brackish, moist breeze rolled in from the swamp. “Get back into the truck right now, Chester,” he said softly.
“Chester” wasn’t Stecker’s name. “Chester” was carnival slang for child molester. Whether Poteete was using it because he knew something that the Behemoth didn’t or because he was threatening Stecker with a reputation that could spread easily, it was effective. The thin man seemed to wilt, his shoulders slumping. He turned quietly and began to slump away.
Poteete grinned at the Behemoth, who grinned back. They waited until Stecker had climbed back into the cab of his truck. Then Poteete nodded. He slid the metal torch through a belt loop at his side. “Let’s get this done before some other damn thing happens,” he said.
The Behemoth walked back to his truck and popped open the luggage compartment, wincing at the squeak of the metal door as it opened. Then he reached inside and scooped up the tarp with both hands. It was wet.
The Behemoth grunted, holding the tarp away from his body. “He’s leaking,” he said. He could smell blood. It wasn’t very different than what he smelled when he ripped chickens’ throats out with his teeth. But there weren’t any chickens in that tarp.
“Hell,” Poteete said, stepping forward for a look. “He shouldn’t be. The bleeding had stopped a long time before I helped them wrap it up.” He ran a finger along the bottom of the tarp, then held it up into the beam of one of the truck headlights. His finger was red and slick with blood. “Hell,” he said again, pulling out a rag he used to clean his torches and wiping his hand off on it. “He shouldn’t be leaking blood anymore,” he said. “There’s no reason to, unless—” he broke off.
“Unless his heart was still beating,” the Behemoth said.
They were standing there looking at each other, drops of blood falling off of the tarp and landing in the dirt road, when they heard the door of the rear truck crash open. Stecker came sprinting out, legs splayed, feet turned sideways, and two smaller figures jumped out of the cab and ran after him—Errando the Wolf-Boy and Sasha Crozier, the youngest of a family of aerialists.
The Behemoth was sucking in a lungful of air to bellow at the three of them to get the hell back in the truck when Stecker shouted, “Hey, Rube!”
Any anger at Stecker dropped away as the Behemoth spun around, peering into the darkness beyond the blinding beams of the trucks’ headlights, trying to see what Stecker had seen. In a carnival or circus, “Hey, Rube” was a warning that outsiders were present. It was a rallying cry that a fight was imminent and that the carnival family had to work together. It was a call to war.
The Behemoth managed to blind himself by looking right into a headlight, so he heard the intruders before he saw them. And the sound he heard first—penetrating over the noise of the running feet on the gravel and dirt, over the sound of Frank Horodenski opening his own door to see what was going on, over Sasha Crozier’s soft cries of “What is it? What is it?”—was the distinct chu-chuck sound of a round being chambered in a shotgun.
Everyone stopped then. Stecker and the kids behind him ground to a halt. Horodenski stopped halfway out of the truck. Poteete started wheezing. And the Behemoth slowly turned, the tarp in his arms, to see who was holding a shotgun on him.
His eyes focused on two figures, a man and a woman. They wore khaki pants and lighter tan shirts, with patches on the sleeves. The man was holding the shotgun. The woman had her arms crossed in front of her. She was the one in charge.
“We’re from U.S. Fish and Wildlife,” she said. “I’m going to need you to bend down real slowly and put that parcel on the ground.” She had a Yankee accent. Maine, maybe. “Parcel” came out “pah-sell.”
U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Mother of God. Where the hell had they come from? He looked past them. No sign of a car. A boat, maybe? He looked over at Poteete. What were they supposed to do now? But Poteete was just standing there looking like he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him.
“Don’t look at him,” she said. “You look at me. Or you can look at Agent Mathews and his weapon if you prefer.” She was tall and muscular, with mid-length black hair tied back and weathered skin. Her gaze was steady on the Behemoth’s face. If his size or tattoos intimidated her, she gave no sign of it. “Put that parcel on the ground,” she repeated.
The Behemoth shrugged. “It’s just some of our gear,” he said. He knelt and gently placed the tarp on the road. He kept his voice casual, like he was really curious, like he was really doing nothing wrong at all. “What difference does it make to you?”
Agent Mathews, a broad-chested man with long sideburns and a bald patch at the crown of his head, gestured with the shotgun for the Behemoth to step away from the tarp, which he did. The Behemoth wondered just when U.S. Fish and Wildlife had started packing heat. Had they always done that? Or was the shotgun really there to use on gators and water moccasins? The agent’s eyes were darting from one member of the sideshow to the next. He blinked when he got to Errando the Wolf-Boy, the kid’s face covered with long black fur. Blinked again at Stecker, who was doubtless twisted into some uncomfortable-looking position. But most of his attention was on the Behemoth. It wasn’t time to make a move. Not yet.
The female agent moved one hand to her belt, and the Behemoth wondered if she had a gun there, in the small of her back. “A lot of people have been poaching alligators in this region,” she said. “Now we come across you with that parcel, it makes us curious.”
The Behemoth almost laughed. They thought he was poaching alligators. But what could he say? You’ve got it all wrong, ma’am. We’re not taking anything out of the swamp. We’re just disposing of a body, that’s all. Not your department at all. Have a nice day.
What he said was, “No, ma’am. This isn’t any gator. This is some of our gear, like I said. I just took it out
of my truck.” He looked at the tarp. The bottom of it was obviously stained dark and dripping. “I think some paint spilled,” he said. “I was just going to clean it up.” Off to one side, he could see Poteete nodding confidently. But the Behemoth knew they were screwed.
“What’s going on out there?” a voice shouted from the second truck. Bernice Hutchins, billed as “Fat Bertha, the Biggest Woman in the World,” was lowering the ramp at the rear of her trailer so that she could walk down and see what all the commotion was about.
“Federal agents, ma’am,” answered Agent Mathews loudly. “Please stay inside your trailer.”
“My word,” Hutchins said, continuing to lower her ramp. “It sure is getting hot in here.” The other freaks and carnival workers began to move forward, too. Frank Horodenski finally finished stepped all the way out of the truck. Errando stepped up quietly, scratching at his furry face. Sasha Crozier came up beside him, the shiny sequins of her acrobat uniform glistening in the headlights, and the Behemoth wondered fleetingly just what she and Errando had been doing in the cab of the third truck with Stecker. Stecker walked forward on the sides of his feet, head rocking back and forth. The Behemoth could hear Bitzie the Pinhead and Lorana the Mule-Faced Girl coming out of their part of the third truck. None of them were advancing fast and none of them were acting in a threatening way, but it was becoming clearer and clearer just how badly the agents were outnumbered.
“Federal agents!” Agent Mathews barked again, raising his shotgun in the air. “No one step any closer.” The air was hot and muggy. Sweat was dripping into Mathews’s eyes, but he was blinking it away instead of raising a hand to his face and letting down his guard.
“Everything’s all right, y’all,” Hector Poteete drawled. He raised a hand to the others, who for the most part stopped their advance. “Nothing but a misunderstanding. Nothing to see here.” He made eye contact with the Behemoth.
The Behemoth nodded. He knew what Poteete was thinking. One way or the other, the Fish and Wildlife agents had to go. If too many people got close, it was going to be that much worse. Chaos.
The shotgun was the problem. The agent was too on his guard and too far away.
Poteete turned toward Mathews. “You don’t need to look at that tarp,” he said. “Like my friend said, it’s just some gear and some leaking paint.”
For a second, the Behemoth ground his teeth in anger. Telling them not to look in the tarp was just sealing the deal. There was no way they wouldn’t look now. But then he realized what Poteete was doing. The agents were going to look in the tarp anyway, that was a given. Poteete was making a subtle push. By telling Mathews not to look, he was choosing which agent he wanted to be the one to lift the tarp.
It worked. Mathews glanced at the female agent, who nodded back. “I apologize if that’s the case,” she said to Poteete, without a hint of apology in her voice. “But we need to see for ourselves.”
Mathews dropped to one knee beside the tarp. He kept the shotgun in his right hand, but rested the butt against the ground, taking his finger off of the trigger and closing his hand around the stock. Then he reached over with his left hand to roll back the tarp.
He would be expecting an alligator. He wouldn’t get one. The Behemoth breathed in, tensing his muscles, waiting for the moment of greatest surprise in which to strike.
Mathews swept back the tarp with a clean jerk of his arm, the cloth rustling and snapping. It took him a second to process what he was seeing, and the Behemoth couldn’t help but look, too.
Instead of an alligator, the agent was confronted by the broken body of the Omega, the superhero from Chicago who had come to Devil’s Cape, made threats against the establishment and the Robber Baron, and then gone missing. The Omega’s blue, red, and gray uniform was soaked with blood. His face, once movie star handsome, was a swollen, pulpy mass, and a shadowy hole gaped where his left eye had been. His black hair was matted with dried blood and there were flakes of white there that might have been bits of plaster or might have been shards of bone or teeth. There was another hole just under his jaw, and that was where most of the blood seemed to have come from, as a thick wash of it descended onto the navy blue on his shoulders and chest, over the red omega symbol, and down onto the gray on his belly and below. His left arm was bent backward at the elbow and again at the wrist.
Neither the Behemoth nor Poteete had seen the Omega’s assassination. Poteete had just been hired to dispose of the corpse—a test, perhaps, for future assignments. But Poteete had heard a little about the death and had passed the story on to the Behemoth. The Omega had been shot from absolute surprise with a high-caliber rifle. He’d then been attacked by half a dozen well-trained men armed with sledgehammers. He’d knocked three of them unconscious before another shot from the rifle stunned him long enough for the sledgehammers to finish the job.
Agent Mathews turned away from the body with a gasp. He looked at his partner, gesturing her over. “K.L.,” he said, “you have to—”
The Behemoth didn’t give him a chance to finish his sentence. He sprang forward, tearing the shotgun away from the agent with one hand while closing the other around the man’s throat. They both fell across the Omega’s body, but the Behemoth was able to put the bulk of his weight on the agent’s midsection. He dropped the shotgun to the ground and proceeded to strangle him with both hands.
If the female agent—“K.L.”—had a gun at the small of her back as the Behemoth had suspected, she never got a chance to draw it. While she moved forward to try to pull the Behemoth off of her partner, Poteete stepped up, pulled the iron flame-eater torch out of his belt loop, and swung it in a wide arc into her temple. She collapsed, legs twitching, and the Behemoth heard Poteete hit her again.
Even being strangled, Mathews was a fighter. He kicked at the Behemoth, then clawed at the backs of the huge man’s hands. The Behemoth swore at the pain and at the damage the scratches were probably doing to his tattoos. He shifted his weight and his grip, took hold of the agent’s head, and turned it fast, breaking it just like a chicken’s. Mathews sighed, then collapsed lifeless on top of the Omega’s body.
The world grew quieter for a few seconds. Rolling off of the Omega, but still on his knees, the Behemoth closed his eyes, panting with stress and exertion. He could hear Poteete wheezing, and the chirps of the crickets, and something splashing nearby in the swamp.
Then Stecker said, “You sure kicked up a shitstorm here.” He chuckled to himself.
Someone—maybe Sasha Crozier—began to sob.
The Behemoth opened his eyes to look at Stecker. His hands ached. The Omega’s blood smelled sharp and ripe. It made his nose itch.
Stecker held Agent Mathews’s shotgun in both hands. “I bet you’ve got a good story to share with us,” he said to the Behemoth. “And a good take to cut us in on.”
The Behemoth sighed. He wouldn’t have minded killing Stecker, but there were too many other people there. They’d have to make some kind of arrangement. He nodded his head and prepared to get up. Then he stopped. Something groaned on the ground beside him, a low, guttural noise that chilled his gut. Agent Mathews, head tilted over to one side at a god-awful angle, rolled over on one side. But Mathews was dead, eyes vacant. He wasn’t moving on his own—he was being pushed.
The Omega sat up.
“Jesus,” Stecker said.
Blood oozed from the hole in the Omega’s throat. Something oozed from his eye socket. He bent, began to push himself up with his broken arm, started to topple, righted himself, and pushed himself up with the good arm.
Stecker started to raise the shotgun. “Hey,” he said. “Hey!”
The Omega backhanded him with his bad arm. There was a popping noise, and the Behemoth couldn’t tell whether it was one of Stecker’s bones snapping or the Omega’s arm breaking even worse. The shotgun flew one way and Stecker tumbled the other, rolling end over end like a tumbleweed half a dozen times before he crashed into the side of the truck he’d been drivi
ng. Bitzie the Pinhead and Lorana the Mule-Faced Girl knelt over him, the excitable Bitzie beginning to hop up and down and sob at the same time.
Poteete had the iron torch in his hand again, but was backing away, mouth open.
Errando had reached a hairy arm up to shield Sasha Crozier, but she had stopped sobbing and was staring at the Omega, eyes intent and bright. The shotgun had fallen next to Frank Horodenski, who stared at it like it was a water moccasin.
“Kill you,” the Omega said, his voice low and ragged. His remaining eye was so swollen and coated with gore that the Behemoth wondered if he could see at all.
“He’s dead,” Poteete said. “He was already dead.”
“Kill you all,” the Omega said.
The Behemoth stood. He looked past the Omega at Horodenski. “Pick up the shotgun, Frank,” he said.
Horodenski looked startled, but bent and picked up the weapon. “He’s bulletproof,” he said. “I read it in the paper.”
“Yeah,” the Behemoth said. “Don’t shoot him just yet.”
Errando the Wolf-Boy trotted forward, his hairy bare feet clomping through dirt wet with the Omega’s blood. He put his hand on the Behemoth’s arm. “He’s a superhero,” he said. “You can’t just kill him.”
The Omega grunted, moving toward the conversation he heard. He lashed out again with the broken arm, missing Errando by only a few inches.
The Behemoth could feel the air coming off of the blow, like a hot wind. “Didn’t you hear what Hector said?” he asked Errando. “He’s already dead.” He leaped behind the Omega then. “Get ready, Frank,” he said. He whipped his massive arms up and around the Omega’s arms, grabbing Omega behind the neck in a full nelson. “Under his chin,” he said. “In the hole. Quick.”