Snake Handlin' Man

by D. J. Butler

  Phineas fired three quick shots, brass shells spinning out of his bolt-action rifle like rolling dice between each bang. “Only other door’s the back!” the preacher shouted. His face was slick with sweat and his voice quavered a little. “Through the tent, past the Nehushtan and on down the hill!”

  “Chingones might be on that side, too!” Mike pointed out. The bass player emptied his clip into a bearded man whose lower body was a hissing knot of snakes—the inversion of Lady Legs—and knocked him back into the sand. Gray-brown mongooses jumped onto Snake Legged Man and bit at his snapping serpentine lower body.

  “Have faith!” Eddie bellowed back, and shoved more shells into the magazine. “Jim! Out the back!” he yelled at the singer, and then he jumped into the kitchenette, grabbed Phineas Irving by the shoulder, and spun the preacher around to head him in the other direction. “Lead the way!”

  Overalls rammed his snake head in through the kitchenette window; Eddie pointed the Remington at the flickering tongue, as long as Eddie’s forearm, and squeezed the trigger.

  Boom!

  Then Eddie stumbled back through the trailer, on the heels of Irving and Mike, with Jim close behind them.

  A tiny hall ended in a scratched dark brown door with a flaking plastic knob. Irving pulled at the handle and the door didn’t budge. “It sticks!” he exclaimed.

  The trailer shook and its wood groaned.

  “No time!” Eddie shouldered Mike aside, pointed the shotgun at the doorknob and boom! blew it to pieces. He muscled past Mike and Irving both, pushing himself first through the door.

  He hopped down a cinderblock step and into the tent, leading with his weapon. There were a few benches, rough-cut and dirty. The tent was propped up on four poles and some cross-beams that connected them; one side of the white canvas sagged to the ground, but there were no snakes. An iron tube sunk into a poured puddle of concrete served like a flag stand, and stuck into it was a wooden pole. The wood looked so ancient it was almost petrified, and nailed to the top of the pole, coiled around a stubby crosspiece, was the desiccated body of a snake, six feet long and a brilliant red that managed to gleam through layers of sand and dust. Eddie could smell the antiquity.

  He blinked and tried not to focus on the infernal feast he saw at the back of the tent, haggard women ladling soup from a huge cauldron into bowls that they handed to a line of equally haggard men. The soup, Eddie saw, was thick with tiny fingers and toes.

  “Clear!” he shouted, and stepped forward.

  The trailer shifted again, and the other three men stumbled in behind Eddie. Twitch must be outside still, Eddie thought. He hoped the fairy was okay. He’d hate to have to find a new drummer; your choices were limited when you only let damned men join.

  “Get the Nehushtan!” he barked to Irving.

  “I … I can’t,” the preacher fumbled. “I … you’re a man of faith. You carry it!”

  “It won’t work if I hold it,” Eddie growled, “trust me.”

  Irving turned to Mike.

  “It won’t work for any of us!” Eddie snapped. “You said you could make it flicker, that’s better than nothing! Pick it up and let’s go!”

  The trailer shook again, and Eddie heard a loud CRASH! inside it. He imagined the porch torn to toothpicks, and Overalls and Lady Legs trampling the shag carpet.

  Phineas Irving flinched, gulped, and slung the Enfield over his shoulder. He bent to pick up the Nehushtan. “I’ve never tried this against … against things like those,” he said. “Just the little rattlers. Just keeping them out of the tent so I could preach a little.”

  Eddie shrugged and stepped to the tent flap. The sagebrush and sand beyond wiggled and danced with a sea of snakes, but they stopped a few feet from the canvas. Eddie locked eyes with a particularly angry-looking diamondback and hissed right back at him. “Apep can crap ’em out big,” he guessed, “and he can crap ’em out small. It’s still all the same shit.” He hoped he was right.

  “Carry the tent,” Irving pleaded, and he stood up with the Nehushtan on his shoulder.

  “What?”

  Twitch touched ground and shifted from his falcon to his humanoid forms, looking very feminine. “They’re coming around this way!” the fairy gasped, and slipped his fighting batons into his hands. His long silver hair and matching horse’s tail bounced with his own edgy footwork.

  “I don’t know if I can do it without the tent,” Irving explained. “I think I can make it work with the tent.”

  “Jeez,” Mike said, but he jumped over to one angle of the tent and picked up the pole supporting that corner.

  Eddie was tempted to shoot the preacher. “What do you mean, like it’s a force field made out of tent canvas?”

  Irving shrugged, trembling. “I know I can keep snakes out of the tent,” he muttered. “I don’t know what happens if I leave the tent.”

  Jim nodded to Eddie, arched his eyebrows, and positioned himself at a second tentpole.

  Faith, Eddie grumbled in his head. If creation had been up to him, he’d have chosen an instrument that was less finicky. “Fine!” he snapped, and grabbed one of the sagging poles. He hoisted it up onto his left shoulder, ripping a couple of tent pegs out of the ground as he did so. Twitch grabbed the fourth, and they began to shuffle forward. “I know you can do it, Reverend Irving,” he said, trying his hardest to sound encouraging. Warm and supportive was not Eddie’s strong suit.

  The corner of the tent flapped around Eddie, sometimes obscuring his vision and sometimes not. He was at the front of the tent, with Mike, and they walked forward towards a trembling jumble of serpents.

  Idiot, he thought, this is not going to work. He tightened his grip on the Remington, made sure the shoulder strap was in place so that when he’d emptied the magazine he could drop it and pull out the Glock instead. He only had one hand to work with, now.

  But the snakes hissed and pulled back. Only scant feet in front of Eddie and Mike, and drawing back in parallel to the tent’s advance. They weren’t afraid, Eddie realized. They weren’t fleeing. They were being forced back.

  It was working.

  He heard the crunch of Phineas Irving’s feet on the sand behind him, and then the preacher began to sing.

  “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus, going on before.”

  “I’d take the cross of Jesus going on before,” Mike said. The bass player grunted and sweated and looked nervous. He held the pole against his shoulder with both hands, and his M1911 in one fist. “I don’t really like being in front, and I’m not crazy about having a snake at my back, either.”

  “Don’t shoot yourself,” Eddie warned the other man, and then he looked back at Phineas Irving.

  Irving looked like he was praying, like he was concentrating so hard he might be in a trance. And above him, nailed to the high cross, Eddie would have sworn that the serpent was moving.

  Eddie blinked, trying to be sure he wasn’t seeing a vision of some damned soul.

  The snake moved. Its red scales flashed like rubies; dust and sand shook off its flanks as it coiled around and around in a spiral on the tall pole. Eddie met Jim’s gaze, bringing up the rear with a tent pole on his shoulder, and saw that the big singer had noticed it, too. They both raised their eyebrows.

  “Huevos,” Mike said, and Eddie whipped his head back around.

  Ahead of him, blinking in and out of his vision as the edges of the tent waved up and down in the desert breeze, he saw a slope down to the van, parked on the track where they’d left it. To his left were Mike and, beyond the bass player, the edge of the trailer as they slowly coasted around it. Between the van and the trailer in Eddie’s intermittent field of vision came a horde of snake-men, shambling around the trailer’s shoulder and hissing in rage. Eddie raised his shotgun.

  Irving sang louder:

  “Christ, the royal master, leads against the foe,

  Forward into battle see his banners go.”

>   “They’re back here, too!” Twitch shouted.

  Eddie heard the clash of Jim’s sword on something hard, and then the dull thump of Twitch’s batons coming into play. He wanted to risk a look back, but he couldn’t. Overalls was charging straight at him, enormous head goggling in the air like a living antenna with jaws the size of a tire clamp.

  The Nehushtan wasn’t keeping the monster back. Or at least, it wasn’t keeping it back enough. It would be no comfort if the artifact stopped the creature from entering the tent, if it could rip Eddie to pieces while standing outside.

  Boom! Eddie shot the snake-man. Overalls staggered sideways, and Lady Legs rushed up behind to fill the gap.

  Bang! Bang! To his left, he heard Mike taking pot-shots, too. The tent swerved and sagged as Mike adjusted his grip, but the big guy managed to still hold his end up.

  They were past the trailer now and headed down the slope. Cutting across the desert in the straightest line, Eddie’s combat boots tromped down on crackling sagebrush and crunching pebbles. Mercifully, he didn’t step on any snakes; the little ones, rattlers and whatever else they were, continued to wiggle back from the advancing tent.

  But the big mutant buggers rushed at the men holding up the four corners.

  Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus, going on before.

  Boom! Eddie fired again. A handful of the pinwheel-spinning snakeheads erupting from the gabardine skirt exploded into pulp and gore, but the others kept coming. He fired again, and again, and then Lady Legs was on top of him—

  whoosh!—

  something sprang past Eddie.

  He slipped back and rocked on his heels, his vision flashing sideways like he was on some Six Flags Chicago rollercoaster. He saw Mike swinging his pistol like a club, hammering Many Arms in the face over and over while the hands grabbed at Mike and tried to rip away the pole. Mike was taller and kept the pole out of the monster’s reach, but he was being inexorably dragged down.

  Then Eddie’s toes hit Overalls, who rolled on the ground, and Eddie fell. He squeezed his trigger as he fell—click.

  He hit the sand shoulders-first, hard, and lost all his wind. Vision spinning, he tried to keep his grip on the tent pole. He could see that the white canvas overhead was sagging quickly towards him, but he pushed up, hoping against hope that Overalls wouldn’t bite his head off in the meantime, and kept the tent from collapsing.

  And Overalls didn’t bite him. Overalls rolled out of the way, squirming to get out of the tent.

  Eddie lurched to his knees, climbing the pole like a ladder. He let the shotgun down to his hip and whipped out the Glock. The tent was down and blocking his view, but he knew his friends were all behind him or to the side because the tent was still up, so he pointed the pistol at the canvas, thumbed the selective fire switch to automatic mode and squeezed off two short bursts.

  The gun bucked pleasantly in his hand and punched two streaks into the white cloth. When the tent opened again in the breeze, Eddie saw what had sprung past him—

  the Nehushtan, the red serpent on the cross, had joined the fray. It slithered ahead of the lurching tent, throwing wide jaws that were impossibly elastic. A huge snake, thick around as a tree trunk and with a gaping mouth at each end of its body, rose hissing to contest its right of way.

  The ruby Nehushtan swallowed the human-sized snake monster in a single bite.

  “Holy Moses,” Eddie muttered, but he saw the path to the van opening ahead of them. “Run!” he barked, and then he remembered the tent: “I mean, jog!”

  They hustled down the hill. The van was two hundred feet away, and Eddie emptied out the Glock’s clip at a thing with two heads. One hundred feet, and Mike tripped over a hole in the ground, like the entrance to a prairie dog’s warren. He slipped and fell to one knee, and Jim dragged him to his feet.

  Fifty feet and the tent fell away. It just slipped right off the crossbeams and bounced to the ground behind them like a bride’s thrown veil.

  Irving stopped singing and shrieked. Eddie looked over his shoulder, afraid he’d see the preacher lying on the ground. To his relief, and prodded by Jim, the man was still running, and he still held the cross on his shoulder.

  But the Nehushtan wasn’t eating snakes anymore. It was slithering towards Phineas Irving like it wanted to get back on its pole. Despite all it had eaten, it was the same size as it had always been and moved quick as thinking.

  Behind it, in a wall, the mutant snake-people and the rattlers rolled down the hill towards them.

  “Start the car!” Eddie yelled. “Reverse!”

  Mike was surprisingly fleet of foot with an army of snakes on his tail, and the big man beat Eddie to the Dodge, throwing himself into the driver’s seat and gunning the engine to life. Jim grabbed the preacher by the scruff of his neck just as the rubescent serpent slithered back onto its perch and hurled the man and the artifact both into the back seat of the van. Twitch didn’t waste time or risk a bottleneck, simply changing shape into his falcon self and bursting into flight over the crappy brown van.

  “In!” Mike yelled. The mongooses scrambled into the van as if taking his orders.

  Eddie stepped into the back seat of the van and grabbed the hand strap behind the shotgun seat. “Go!” he roared, and jammed his second clip into the Glock. Still set to automatic fire, he squeezed the trigger into the wave of descending serpent flesh, letting the snakes have it as Mike threw the Dodge into reverse and slammed backwards down the road towards town.

  Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

  Eddie dropped Many Arms in his tracks, if only for a moment, and sent Snake Legged Man lurching sideways behind brush for cover. As he ran out of ammo, Jim joined him from the back seat, firing with one of the pistols lying on the floor of the van. Phineas Irving’s Enfield stayed silent, though. Eddie spared him a glance and saw that the man was shaking. He was conscious, and looked lucid, but he looked scared half to death. His mongoose guard dogs slunk around his feet in the trash that cluttered the van’s floor.

  They retreated from the rise, the preacher’s trailer disappearing with the mob of snakes. When Mike swung the van around in a quick turn where the road was a little wider, Twitch flashed in through the open door, hitting the grease-stained seat beside Eddie in his leather-clad drummer shape.

  “That was amusing,” the fairy said.

  “It was unexpected, that’s for sure,” Eddie muttered. “Hey, Irving, what happened back there?”

  Irving shook his bristly blond head and shrugged. “You mean with the Nehushtan?”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, feeling irritated, “I mean when the Nehushtan turned into a live snake and went and ate all the other snakes.”

  “That’s in the Bible, too,” Irving said. “I think.”

  “Yeah, but not the Nehushtan. That was Moses’s staff when he fought the magicians of Pharaoh—unless maybe those are the same thing.” Eddie looked back to be sure the pursuit was out of range, and then slammed shut the side door of the van. “Hey, what do I know? But what I mean is, did you know the Nehushtan was going to get down off its cross and start taking names?”

  Irving laughed, nervous. “No. I only knew that it kept snakes out of the tent, better than my hexes.”

  “Maybe the big red snake will heal Adrian after all,” Mike suggested, looking at Eddie in the rear view mirror. “Maybe we should go pick him up and heal him and get outta this town.”

  Eddie looked at Irving and saw the fear in the man’s eyes. “Nah,” he said. “Faith don’t work that way. We gotta go get the lamia. Still, the Nehushtan will probably come in very handy.” The snake was dormant again, dimly red under its furred coat of dust.

  “I’m going to guess Mike will volunteer for the milking job,” Twitch sparkled.

  “Hey,” Mike objected.

  Jim reached past Eddie and pointed forward.

  Eddie had been resolutely not looking ahead, afraid of what he’d see, but he looked now. Th
ere again was the frozen field of ice and the wind-gnawed heads protruded from it, groaning soundlessly and staring at Eddie.

  “What?” Eddie mumbled.

  “I think he means the cars,” Mike said. “Look how full the lot is. It was totally empty before.”

  “Maybe there’s a sale,” Twitch chirped.

  Eddie grunted. He tried to shake away the vision of ice, failed, and then tried to squint past it. The parking lot around the three-story building was full of cars. Also, ahead of them, the sun inched into late afternoon.

  “I would have preferred an emptier house,” Eddie said. He felt tired. His burns hurt. There were two hours left on his watch’s timer. “You up for this, preacher?”

  Phineas Irving shook, but he gripped the Nehushtan with both hands and nodded. “I want to help your friend,” he agreed. “And I want to stop Apep.”

  “Load up,” Eddie told them all. He reached over the shotgun seat for the ammo boxes he kept in the glove compartment.

  ***

  Chapter Six

  Eddie knew that to everyone else, he looked like he was walking drunk. But the others couldn’t see the frozen heads, and he couldn’t bring himself to just walk through them. In his rational mind, he knew that the sun, dropping towards the horizon now, was still fierce, but the cool desert breeze bit into his flesh like a piranha. He shuddered under the black-eyed stares of the damned and tried to stay focused on the crumbling brick cube ahead of them, even as he stumbled from side to side through the obstacle course of frozen heads.

  Jim put a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and Eddie looked up, catching a quizzical look from the titan of a singer.

  “Same old bullshit,” Eddie lied, shaking himself. “A little worse than usual, maybe, but nothing new.”

  “What do you mean worse?” Mike asked.