Neither spoke for several long minutes, each woman peering suspiciously into shattered doorways. Serena led the way, moving toward the animal noises. The only sign of life in the broken township. Dr. Peel stooped once to pick up a crowbar, only to drop it in disgust when she noticed the clump of gristle and hair clinging to its end. The hair was too long and too blonde to be animal.
“Serena..”
“I know Haley, I saw it. And the smell is getting worse. I think you should go back to the car.” Her words came out calm, but infinitely serious. She looked ahead, rather than at her companion. Serena focused outward.
Abruptly, the bestial cries halted. Something about the way sound was bit off gave both women pause. They stood together in the middle of an abandoned street and stared west, not sure what they were looking for. The smell was stronger still, almost palpable.
“Haley, go get the car.” Serena pointed ahead, toward a farming supply store where the doors yawned open. “I’m going in there to see what is making all the stink. Seems like it’s coming from inside.”
Haley looked back the way they came, to where their car was just visible in the distance. It would only take her a minute to pull back around.
“I think we should stay together.”
“Just go get the car. Hurry. I’ll be fine.”
Serena didn’t wait for Haley to comply.
Without looking back, she strode forward and disappeared into the dark mouth of the door.
Alone in the street, Haley turned back toward the car. It was so far away.
She decided to jog back.
As she went the wind kicked up again and that thickness in the air made her skin crawl. She quickened her pace and looked back over her shoulder to where Serena had gone. The black doorway yawned silently, reluctant to offer explanation or comfort. Haley turned back again and ran the rest of the way to the car as fast as her legs would carry her.
Inside the darkened building, the reek was oppressive. Serena gagged at it. Goosebumps rose and she shivered. Not from cold, but from the heavy foulness in the air of the warehouse.
All around, products sat stacked on high steel shelves with industrious practicality. Shovels and bridles and dog dishes shared company with heavy bags of animal feed. The configuration made it impossible for her to see anything past the first row.
Mysteriously, these shelves had not been raided by desperate shoppers or looters.
Her super-acute hearing picked up something from the far side of the store, an alternating raspy puffing. Serena identified it quickly, with more than a little dread.
It was the sound of labored breathing.
Worse, the stench that radiated in waves seemed to originate from that same direction.
Steeling herself, Serena headed for the sound. Straining her enhanced senses, she looked and listened for something, for clues or indicators that might explain the absence of people. If anything, this farm supply store should be bustling with folks stocking up on essentials for themselves and their animals.
Where were the grizzled old men hitching up belts and telling everyone just to ride it out? Where were the mothers chomping their fingernails over what to do with toddlers as their paranoid husbands crowded around the gun counters and bickered over boxes of ammunition? That was the scene that Serena imagined.
Instead she was greeted here in the dank building by stillness and a mingling of bad air and heat.
Rounding the last row of shelves, she froze. . .
Shock drove the air from her lungs and she failed even to gasp.
For the second time in as many days, Serena Dayne wretched at the sight before her.
Along this far wall, crammed into shelf spaces and hung on high racks, were bodies.
The missing townspeople. Along with, at second glance, many of their pets.
Some of them were naked, with odd symbols and wound-patterns marking their flesh. Others were folded and broken bodily into odd shapes. Arms and legs bent at impossible angles to create human starfish. Through her watery eyes, Serena saw blackened tracings of something like language on the cement floor. If they were words, she didn’t know what they read. It was hard for her to even think about what the blackish paste used as ink might be. It smelled like flaming hair.
There were burns everywhere.
On the floor next to the body of a very fat elderly man Serena saw a pile of iron brands, the kind used to mark livestock. All over the corpse were alphabets of blood and burnt flesh. Beyond the body and up the walls -floor to ceiling- bits of viscera clung to every flat surface. Spatters overlapped in a forensic nightmare testifying to a variance of brutality.
Serena had never seen anything so disgusting.
She tried to ignore the piles of entrails and glistening stains spreading beneath some of the victims as she moved down the aisle toward the raspy wet sound of breath. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks. The tears came before she even thought about them, an acknowledgement of loss. No sobs or sinking feeling, only a simple sadness born of regret. She somehow knew that this could have been prevented. That she herself could have helped, if only they had rolled into town sooner.
Thoughts danced momentarily out the door and wondered for the safety of her friend.
Maybe she should not have insisted that they split up. Whatever sick gang of thugs had murdered everybody and left them like this might still be around, prowling for more victims. Something had cut short the animal cries that she had originally heard. Given the evidence before her, she doubted it was any natural cause.
The good doctor was on her own for now, because Serena had finally reached the source of her weak beacon.
It was a man in a postal service uniform, or at least what was left of him. He hung twisted on one of the store’s forklifts, one tong impaled through his shoulder. Glistening meat and wet bone peeked through. His free arm looped over the opposite lift in a futile effort to relieve the pressure created by his own body weight.
Soupy sounds bubbled sickly with each inhalation. Serena wondered whether the fork had penetrated his lung as well. His head lolled back in an attitude of sleep, then rolled forward limply until bloodshot eyes met her own. Something like terror flashed momentarily before the heavy lids settled back to half-mast. He sighed something out, trying to speak to her. Whatever he tried to say was too jumbled by the swelling of his face and lips.
Where his legs should have been was a blackened mess of torn muscle and exposed bone. Serena marveled that he was still alive.
When he spoke again, it came with the weight of supreme effort.
“Can’t…. stay here.”
She could hardly believe he was trying to warn her away, considering the state he was in. It seemed more reasonable that he would ask her for something. That came next.
“You have to get out… hurry… Finish… Kill me first… Please.”
To her own horror, Serena looked around for something heavy or sharp. He must be in so much pain. Would it be wrong to end that pain?
She couldn’t.
“Who did this to you? Where did they go?”
Thick spittle dripped and his head lolled in another circle. She leaned in closer to his bloody breath to hear.
“Not… Not they.. It was her.” His volume increased at this.
“What do you mean her? A woman started this? Who is she? Why would anyone do this?” Serena worried that she was asking too many questions of a dying man.
“Listen… Listen. Just one woman…. She’s done this kind of thing before…. She’s worse now. So much more…” A sob stole the rest of his sentence. His cries were so weak now that even Serena could barely hear him. For what seemed like minutes, she counted his breaths, sure that each one would be the last.
He mustered whatever it was that the dying muster and continued.
“Go now. Don’t…. come back. She has the devil in her… She…. cursed this place. Every one of us… She’s damned us all… Look what she did to them!! I’m…. the last on
e. I’m the last.” Staring now into Serena’s face and shaking violently, he willed hard truth into his words.
“Has the Devil in her now. Been asking…. for it since she was a just a girl..” more tears tracked down his cheeks. “Horses… she’s got them outside now. I tried…I tried. Guess this….is what I get….”
He babbled on some more about a place called Angel’s Landing and the end of the world and a girl from the desert who killed his cousin and snatched a neighbor’s baby. Serena tried to pick out the bits that she thought might be important. There was an address, here in town. And a name, or maybe a title that the dying man repeated over and over. “Bruja”
Eventually, the narrative grew weaker, words running together, until the whisper became less than that. Became a susurration Serena was sure she could only pick up because of the change in her senses. Somewhere along the way, he disconnected from her, talking only to himself.
Then the postman stopped speaking.
He expelled a last bit of foul breath and the caked-saliva bubbles at his lips stopped quivering.
Dead.
Serena stayed for a moment and stared at him.
She had never witnessed someone’s last breath before.
She half expected that he would stir again. Maybe all he needed was a quick rest before he woke up and continued his story. There was no more stirring, only a sort of waxen stillness to his ravaged features.
Morbidly, the blood still trickled from the ruin of his abdomen onto the cement floor. Serena wished that it would stop, thinking it wrong that the dripping continued despite the stillness of his heart. She whispered a few words, hoping they meant something, though it was doubtful that anything could be said to assuage the horror of what had unfolded here.
The macabre scene sunk into utter silence.
Absent of all sound, the room was even harder to bear, being somehow alone and surrounded by people at the same time.
The dead stared at her and grimaced, or ignored her completely with backs turned. Their bastard repose was a mockery to humanity, and it enraged her. A breeze from some open doorway stirred the stink yet again, carrying coppery bitterness through the maze of shelves.
Something echoed toward her from beyond the labyrinth.
A new noise. One that shouldn’t be there.
Chills spread from toes to scalp, standing up the hairs on Serena’s neck and setting her eyes wide.
She wheeled around, turning her back on the cooling bodies to stare into the darkened building. The echo came again, closer now, and without the element of surprise.
Serena bristled.
Something about the childish laugh that haunted its way through the emptiness told her she was about to meet those responsible for the massacre at her back.
The chortle was light and feminine, but still full of wrongness. Hearing it made her skin crawl and somehow caused the oppressive smell to be that much worse. Through the dirty shafts of light Serena saw someone coming her way.
A woman.
The smallish figure flashed in and out of alternating light and dark as she passed under the rays that struggled their way in through open doorways and dusty skylights. Her approach made hardly any noise as she padded barefoot across the top of a long row of shelves. Ill-fitting clothes -pilfered no doubt from some of the silent dead- hung off of her and gave an air of nonchalance to her gait. She smiled at Serena, teeth glinting with ugly intent.
The woman spoke, in a voice unfit for one covered in the blood and gore of those murdered. Her tone was all childish puzzlement and innocent curiosity. It irked Serena.
“Who are you?” the strange woman asked. Dark eyes were nearly invisible in the pooling shadows, but the way her brow knitted gave an air of genuine puzzlement. The way she presented the question was maddeningly conversational.
Serena didn’t answer. No words would properly express what this woman gave rise to. Everything about her stood in contradiction to goodness. The darkness of the warehouse seemed to embrace her, while the light reflected in ugly dismissal off of her bloody and glistening skin. Tracings of word-scars spoke of awful worship and occult fetishism.
Serena Dayne, all straw-blonde hair and beautiful smiles most of the time, felt murderous rage for the first time in her life.
The inquisition from the woman –Bruja, the dying man had called her- continued, but her questions fell on deaf ears. All Serena could hear was the pounding of her own heart and the slow drip drip of the mailman’s blood as gravity drained him.
The Bruja, agitated at being ignored, dropped the questioning and peeled her lips back in an ugly smile. Very quietly, she offered a threat from her high perch on the row of shelves.
“You do not belong here, bitch. You should not have come.” A child’s voice, calm and slow.
Flexing her fingers and embracing the wave of righteous anger that washed away whatever fear she should have felt, Serena responded for the first time as she stepped forward to meet the witch.
“And you should have left when you had the chance.”
Hurricane, Utah
The stillness of the ghost town tickled the back of Haley’s neck until she shut the car door.
Keys jingled abrasively as she fired up the ignition and made her jump. The air inside the vehicle stank a bit less, allowing her to collect her thoughts. Many times on her jog to the car she had looked back at the dark doorway her friend had disappeared into. She hoped Serena would emerge and shrug off the source of the stench as burning fertilizer.
Even that half-hope was a weak one.
After only a few minutes, she grew uneasy being alone in this creepy town with its empty windows and two swinging stoplights. Pulling away from the curb in a U turn that would send her back toward the silent and looming doorway, she bit her lip and worried for her friend.
The radio chirped more emergency broadcast information over static.
Haley turned it down and reluctantly rolled the windows open so she could listen to the town. All that reached her ears was a wheezy breath of stinking, diseased wind.
------------------------------
I‘ve never been in a fight in my life.
Serena reflected on that simple notion as she chased the strange woman through row upon row of high shelves.
Not even one. Not an elementary school scuffle, no high school locker room catfights. No history of violence.
Yet she ran, desperate to catch up with this witch woman. Grimly intent on inflicting violence when she finally caught up. It was an entirely novel thought, but it occupied her mind with incredible completeness.
Sick peals of laughter and creative expletives bounced off of the prismic surfaces of grain bins and animal cages. Whole shelving units rocked at their passing. Containers that should have been far too heavy for either woman to move tumbled in the wake of their chase.
They ran faster than Serena had ever run through the expansive store.
Feet slapped loudly between breaths, skidding and sliding over trails of gore, and other messes she didn’t care to know the details of. The Bruja yelled back at her, taunting and stringing together oaths to punctuate her gleeful giggles. Blood bubbled hotly under skin. Periodically, Serena would reach mid-run for a hammer or spade or tilling claw that hung from the display racks and fling it toward the darting back of the strange witch that she pursued. None of the makeshift projectiles found their mark.
Ahead, open doors let in the light of the clear morning. Brightness streamed into Serena’s eyes and left her opponent in stark silhouette. For a moment she couldn’t see the ugly symbols burnt and carved into her skin.
Something about those markings bothered Serena, as if looking too hard at them drained her, made her sick and dizzy.
No doubt some sinister meaning organized their sporadic lines. Some of the icons were all too recognizable, like a deep red brand on one shoulder in the shape of a goat’s-head pentacle.
The dying postman had told Serena it was a woman responsible for the m
ass grave.
Her initial doubt gave way to reluctant belief, and then a sort of dread certainty as their chase progressed.
The way this woman moved -the way they both moved- told Serena that the normal rules did not apply.
A few strides ahead, the Bruja burst through the door and out into the open air of the rear shipping lot. After the dimness of the store’s interior, the stark light gave focus to every line, scab, and sweat streak. Dark stains on this woman’s clothes, black in the dimness, now shone deep crimson and wet as Serena chased her past rows of Tuff sheds and giant water troughs stacked ten high. Tractors and utility vehicles parked in long rows, watching their pursuit with mechanical indifference.
Up ahead, the room to run ran out. The back lot adjourned in a high cinderblock wall that marked the exterior boundary of a neighboring storage facility. Stacked feed bags and chain link fence topped with barbed wire completed the enclosure.
Dead end
To her left, Serena saw a gate. If she could head that off, the other woman would have nowhere to go.
She went for it, darting between a forklift and a stack of giant irrigation pipes to cut off the angle. Reaching the gate, she slammed it shut and turned back. The witch woman skidded to a stop on the parking lot. Her feet were bare, but the grinding gravel seemed to have no effect.
Why is she smiling?
The witch was smiling.
The Bruja stalked back and forth like a caged cat. Grinning that maniacal grin and whispering to herself. Laughing at her own private jokes again. Their hard, heaving breaths rose and fell almost in unison.
Over the other woman’s shoulder, Serena caught sight of a pile of corpses, not human, but equine. A heap of horses. Gallons and gallons of blood stained the ground beneath them a purplish red.
The witch spoke.
“Do you really think it is wise, chasing me like this? You saw what I did to those people didn’t you?”
To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1) Page 26