Lawless Lands

by Emily Lavin Leverett

  “Yeah, there was a little thunder boomer a ways back,” I said. “The landing wasn’t the smoothest thing I’ve ever seen, either.”

  “Well, you know what they say about landings,” the man said. I took a better look at him, now that the horizon had stopped swaying. He was a tall fella, big, rangy, John Wayne-looking dude with deep valleys around his eyes from squinting into the sun for years and years. His skin had that rough, reddish tone that comes from a lot of wind and sun, and his hands were big and looked solid. He wore a faded chambray work shirt, sleeves rolled up to show some cheap homemade, or maybe prison tattoos, and his jeans were also faded and worn thin at the knees. He wore a battered brown cowboy boot on his right foot and a blue walking cast on his left.

  “I reckon you’re Tyson,” I said, walking over and shaking hands with the injured Hunter.

  “What gave it away? My rugged good looks, devastating smile, or the footwear?”

  “Might have something to do with you being the only person anywhere around this shitheap airport not wearing coveralls and driving a fuel truck.” I swept the area with my gaze, but the little four-seater plane I’d arrived in was the only thing that looked like it had moved any time recently.

  “You okay over there, Randell?” Tyson hollered.

  “Kiss my ass, you old gimpy bastard!” the pilot yelled back.

  “He’s fine,” Tyson said. “Get your crap and let’s roll. I’ll fill you in while we drive.”

  I walked over to the side of the plane and opened the back door. I grabbed a small backpack with my clothes in it and two duffels full of weapons. I tossed the duffels in the back of the pickup, pitched my backpack on top of them, and then reached into the cockpit to grab Bertha from where she hung on the back of my seat. I slipped the shoulder rig on and fastened it to my belt, checking to make sure the Desert Eagle was snapped in and secure. I did not want any fifty-caliber surprises coming at me if I had to move fast.

  “Thanks for the ride, Randell,” I said, waving to the pilot. “Sorry about your shoes.” He looked down at the vomit on his right foot and set off into a fresh tirade. I laughed under my breath and walked over to the truck.

  I pulled out my phone and turned it on, then pressed the button to wake up the Bluetooth transmitter in my earbud. “Skeeter, you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here, Bubba. How was your flight?”

  “Shitty. Dumbass Randell drove us right through that thunderstorm you warned him about. Some crap about not wanting to add any more time onto the journey.”

  “That dipshit,” Skeeter’s shrill voiced laughed in my ear. “How many times did you throw up?”

  “None, thank you very damn much,” I replied. “I drank a bottle of Pepto in the airport before we left Atlanta. I won’t poop for a week, but I didn’t paint the inside of the plane, either.”

  “I reckon we can call that a win. You met up with Tyson yet?”

  “Yeah, just got into his truck.”

  “Put me on speaker, then.” I pulled out my phone, and Tyson pointed to a mount set into the dash. I slid my phone into it and pressed a button on the screen.

  “Alright, Skeeter, you’re on speaker.”

  “Hey, Tyson,” my technical expert and best friend since middle school said. “Pleased to kinda meet you.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine,” Tyson said.

  Skeeter continued. “I’ve got our giant friend here wired up to a satellite phone connection, and I pretty much don’t ever break it, unless I need to sleep or he feels the need to go to a strip club, which happens way more often than I like. So if you need anything researched or the big guns called in, y’all just let me know.”

  Tyson chuckled and looked over at me. “You’re saying you’ve got some bigger guns than this giant?”

  Skeeter’s shrill laugh about made my ears bleed. “No, but I’ve got a few that bring even bigger guns. Anyway, if you need anything, I’m never further away than Bubba’s Bluetooth. You need me, just holler.”

  “Will do,” Tyson said.

  “I’m gonna go back to watching Hap & Leonard on Netflix. Bubba, try not to get dead.” He beeped off, and I put the phone back in my pocket.

  “Let’s roll,” Tyson said. He clicked his seatbelt into place and put the truck in gear. We didn’t move; he just sat there staring at me. I took a minute to figure out what he wanted, then I put my own seatbelt on. Once I was properly restrained, he took his foot off the brake and started driving toward the exit of the Grant County Airport, south of Hurley, New Mexico. It was a little one-runway job that looked like it might see ten planes a week if it got real busy.

  Once we got out of the airport gate, Tyson continued. “I appreciate y’all helping me out while my foot heals. Damn Gila bastard almost took it off, but I got him good.”

  “You said it was a were-lizard?” I asked. “I ain’t never heard of such a thing.”

  “I don’t know if it was technically a lycanthrope, or maybe some variant on a skinwalker, or just some type of shapeshifter. I can’t rightly tell you since there wasn’t but the one, and he wasn’t too talkative when I was done with him. All I know is it was the biggest damn lizard I ever seen, and I’ve lived out here my whole life. No way in hell that thing was natural. I put him down, but he got one good bite in, right through my damn boot, and that venom has completely wrecked my foot. I’ve got a healer coming in from one of the reservations twice a week working with me on it, and he says it oughta be back right in another four or five treatments, but for now I can’t run, jump, or climb anything.”

  “That sounds like a good way to get dead in our line of work,” I said.

  “Don’t I know it,” Tyson agreed. “That’s why you’re here. This thing out in the flats has got to be dealt with, and I can’t do it. So I’m glad the Church had somebody they trusted enough to send.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that trust probably had very little to do with it. I wasn’t the closest Templar to Tyson’s territory, but I was the one who was usually the biggest pain in the Church’s ass. So if there was a chance somebody was gonna get killed hunting down whatever was out in the desert, it made sense to send the Knight they thought of as the most expendable. That was me in a nutshell.

  We rode along for another forty-five minutes, shooting the shit, arguing about whether Chris Stapleton was better than Jason Isbell, about whether Colt or Sig made a better .45, and about whether barbecue was supposed to be made out of a pig or out of a cow. You know, the kind of crap guys talk about. Finally, we pulled up in front of Tyson’s house, a wide old adobe-style ranch with not so much a driveway as an area of slightly flatter dirt than the dirt just off the road.

  A good-looking woman in her mid-forties came out to meet us, her dark hair blowing in the wind. “Hey there, you must be Robert,” she called as she came forward to give me a big hug.

  “Call me Bubba,” I said. “Nobody calls me Robert but the Bishop and the police when they pull me over for speeding.”

  “I’m Vanessa. I’m Ty’s wife,” she said. “Ty, you get your ass on in that house. Gerald will be here in an hour for your treatment. And no whiskey. You know how loopy you get after he works on your foot. We don’t need you trying to dance in the swimming pool again.”

  “We ain’t got a swimming pool, woman,” Tyson said with a grin. I noticed he didn’t slow down as he limped toward the house, though.

  “That’s my point, jackass. You were so stoned after Gerald’s doctorin’ and one beer you thought you were doing damn water aerobics in the middle of the desert.”

  “I woulda paid to see that,” I said.

  “Oh no, you wouldn’t, either,” Vanessa said, laughing. “He was doing it butt-naked!”

  I shook my head, wishing I’d packed some brain bleach for the trip. “Yeah, I’d like to amend my earlier statement,” I said. “Hey Tyson!” I hollered at his back. “You leave the keys in the truck?”

  “Yep,” he called back. “It’s all you, buckaroo!”

&nbs
p; “You’re not coming in?” Vanessa asked.

  “No ma’am,” I said. “As much as I appreciate the offer, I figure I oughta let you and Tyson get his foot worked on in peace. I’m gonna go ahead and drive out to where the weird things are and see what I can find.”

  “Well, give me your suitcase. I’ll put it in the guest room,” she said, looking up at me. “Try not to get dead.”

  I laughed. “That’s always the goal, ma’am. Always the goal.” I handed her the backpack with my clothes in it, grabbed my duffels full of weapons and tossed them in the cab of the truck, then slid behind the wheel. I put the old GMC in gear and pulled back onto the highway.

  I pressed a button on the Bluetooth ear thingy Skeeter made me wear all the time and said, “Where am I going, Skeet?”

  Skeeter’s voice came through the thousands of miles just like he was sitting beside me in the truck. I wasn’t entirely convinced this was a good thing. “Head east for another thirty miles, then take the next road off to the north. All of Tyson’s reports are coming from a couple of old homesteads in that area.”

  “Anything around there?”

  “Dirt and wind, as far as I can see,” Skeeter said.

  “And were-lizards,” I added.

  “Poisonous were-lizards,” Skeeter clarified.

  I pulled up to an abandoned homestead about an hour later, having made one wrong turn and stopping at one gas station for a couple of hot dogs and a Pepsi. One thing is universal—it don’t matter how far you travel, gas station hot dogs all taste like shit. The house had seen better days. I couldn’t tell you when those better days were, but they weren’t any time this century. The roof was all caved in, every window in the place was busted, and the porch only had one step left where three used to be. I barely trusted the porch, much less the steps, so I just stretched a little and hopped up there to take a peek inside.

  The roof was indeed laying in the house, obscuring anything that might have been left behind when it was abandoned, but this didn’t look like the kind of place anybody was cherishing any memories about. Frankly, I couldn’t see why anybody would be out here to even report on anything weird.

  “Skeeter, do Tyson’s notes say what these people were doing out here in the first place?” I asked.

  “One couple claimed they were stargazing and needed to get away from all the light pollution.” I looked up through the open space where the ceiling should have been, and while it was still too light out for stars, there also weren’t any street lights anywhere in view.

  “That kinda makes sense,” I said. “I can see it being darker than the inside of an elephant’s butthole in a couple hours out here.”

  “That’s poetic, Bubba,” Skeeter remarked.

  “I try. What about the other strangeness?”

  “That was a couple of high school kids. Two boys and two girls. They didn’t say what they were doing, but I reckon you can guess.”

  “Yeah, I can probably figure it out. I’m gonna poke around here for a little while, then gear up and wait for dark. Oughta only be about another two hours. Then if I’m lucky, I can see whatever they saw, shoot the shit out of it, and be on the first plane out of here tomorrow morning.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m gonna go watch Z Nation on Netflix and laugh my ass off. Call me if you need me.”

  “Will do, brother. Will do.” I clicked off the comm and continued my poking around in the rubble. I couldn’t see anything that would make me think the place was haunted, and nothing about it looked particularly demonic, either. There were a few piles of random animal poop laying around, but nothing seemed at all supernatural. Maybe I’d get lucky and the folks just got spooked by a coyote.

  Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.

  It was full dark for a couple hours before anything weird happened, and I had to admit, the stars were real pretty. I was geared up as heavy as I could be and still move, with Bertha under one arm, a Mossberg pistol-grip 12-gauge on a sling over my right shoulder, a pair of silver-edged kukris strapped to my back, my Judge revolver in a paddle holster at the small of my back, and a silvered boot knife on my right leg. If it was magical, I was ready. I had silver, cold iron, and white phosphorous rounds for Bertha and the shotgun, and enough silver blades to gut anything short of a dragon.

  I was dozing a little bit, playing Ray Wylie Hubbard low on my phone to set the mood. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the pickup with the windows down to make sure I could hear anything approaching, but I figured I was safer there than in the house, which looked like it was liable to collapse in on me at a stiff breeze.

  A howl split the night open like a machete through a watermelon, and I fumbled around to make the music stop. I held still, but no more sound came. Opening the door, I slid out down to one knee and took cover beside the truck, drawing Bertha as I did. “Skeeter,” I whispered. “You got me?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  His voice came through my earpiece at his normal volume, enough to make me cringe in the dark silence. I knew if there was anything close enough to hear Skeeter in my ear, then I was probably already dead, but that didn’t make me any less jumpy.

  “Something just howled,” I said.

  “Bubba, you’re in the desert of New Mexico. I reckon there might be a coyote within a hundred miles. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t something howling.”

  “It didn’t sound like a coyote,” I whispered back, then the howl came again. This time it did sound like a coyote, until it cut off in a sharp yelp, followed by a series of snarls and barks, then another bunch of yips, yelps, and whines. The noise trailed off, and everything around me was silent again. “That sounded like a coyote, but it sounded like a coyote having a real bad night,” I said.

  “Let me see if I can get any kind of satellite over you,” Skeeter said. A few seconds passed, then he came back. “Nothing. Sorry, Bubba. I got nothing.”

  “That’s fine, Skeet. I reckon this is as good a time as any to try your new toy.” I reached back into the cab of the truck and slipped on the heat vision goggles Skeeter insisted I pack. I kinda hated the things because they screwed up what little crappy night vision I had, but if they let me find whatever just had itself a nice coyote dinner, I was happy to have them.

  “Can you tell what direction the sound came from?” Skeeter asked.

  “I think it came from the hills over to the west,” I said, starting in that direction. The terrain was a weird range of greens and yellows, and when I looked down at my hands, they glowed bright red. I scanned the horizon as I walked, holstering Bertha and keeping the shotgun out in front of me. With my vision shot to shit, I figured I’d need the spread the Mossberg gave me.

  I walked west for a good twenty minutes, occasionally hearing some scrabbling sounds off to the left or the right of me, but whenever I looked, nothing showed up in the infrared. I came over a low hill, and down in a depression was a wide area giving off an orange glow, telling me it was warmer than the surrounding dirt. I didn’t see anything red, or moving, so I flipped up the goggles and clicked on the flashlight I had slung under the barrel of the shotgun.

  The scene that lit up in front of me was like something out of a horror movie. The sand was churned up and turned to red mud with all the blood spilled. It looked like whatever went down out here was fast, mean, and bloody as hell. I pulled a couple of chemical light sticks out of my back pocket, snapped them, and jabbed them into the dirt. The whole area lit up with a blue-white glow, making the blood look almost black in the artificial light. I stuck the butt of the shotgun into the sand, wedging the gun upright, and took the flashlight off the barrel. I walked into the depression, playing the light over everything trying to see if there were any clues I missed.

  I pulled out my phone and snapped a bunch of pictures of tufts of hair, one loose coyote leg laying half-buried in bloody sand, and some piles of blood-muddied dirt. “Skeeter?” I said.

  “Yeah, what you got?”

  “I’m sen
ding you some pictures to look at. Wait, never mind. I can’t send data out here.”

  “Bubba, the only reason you have cell service is because I put that portable repeater in your bag. What do you see?”

  “Looks like some kind of animal attack. Shitload of blood and hair. I’d guess coyote, but I’ve only got about one leg to go by.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Skeeter said.

  “Yeah, I’m a little surprised there ain’t more guts and stuff laying around, though. This is a real clean kill, like whatever did this hauled the coyote off somewhere to eat.”

  “Sounds smart,” Skeeter said.

  “I hate hunting smart monsters,” I said.

  “You hate hunting monsters that are smarter than you,” Skeeter replied.

  “Yeah, ain’t that what I said? Anyway, there’s a blood trail. I’m gonna see what I can find if I follow it.”

  “Don’t get lost. It gets cold out there at night.”

  I didn’t get lost. I also didn’t find shit, even after traipsing around half the night in the cold-ass desert. The sun was coming up, setting the horizon ablaze by the time I trudged back to my truck. I made it back to Tyson’s house right about the time Vanessa was setting the breakfast table.

  “That does not look like a hunter coming home triumphant,” she said. “Leave your boots on the porch if you’ve got anything nasty on them.”

  I didn’t think I did, but I took them off anyway. She was walking around barefoot in the kitchen, so I wasn’t sure if they were some of those folks that don’t like shoes in the house, but either way it felt good to get my poor feet out of them boots for a while.

  “What do we look like when we’re triumphant?” Tyson said, limping around the corner and sitting down at the head of the table.

  “Oh, sweetie, y’all are downright insufferable,” Vanessa said, sliding a plate piled high with eggs and bacon in front of him. She turned to me. “You want to get cleaned up before breakfast?”

  “Yeah, I oughta at least get a quick shower. Otherwise I’m liable to put you off your feed,” I said, following her finger down the hall to the spare bedroom where she stashed my clothes. I grabbed a shower and sat down at the table ten minutes later, feeling almost human. I told them about my night while I shoveled food in my mouth, finishing up with the fact that the coyote’s leg was in the back of Tyson’s pickup.