Damn it, he thought.
The rescue was for nothing.
The Tatterdemon scooped and planted her just that quickly.
She began to grow into another scarecrow.
“I can make as many as I want,” the Tatterdemon cried out. “I don’t even need to be close to the field, now. I’m getting stronger. I have the power. I’m goddamn God.”
For a moment Wilfred felt despair washing over him. He fought it back. He reminded himself that he was dead already.
How worse could things get?
To hell with fear.
“You’re a hollow god, Tatterdemon,” Fell shouted through Wilfred’s mouth. “You seek to ride the broom but the broom rides you. You have no power. No more power than a horse in harness. The witch is your master. She takes no orders from anyone but herself.”
“Pishh!” Wilfred added, making a whip cracking gesture with his hand. “Pussy-whipped is what you are Vic. Pussy-whipped for sure. You got yourself killed by your wife and you’re taking orders from a witch-woman. Ought to call you Little Vickie. How’s that gall your ass?”
“Bastard!” the Tatterdemon yelled.
“Straw for brains,” Wilfred returned.
He was coming for Wilfred but Wilfred didn’t wait.
He ran at Vic throwing a huge right hook, but he might as well have been taking a swing at a standing oak tree. The Tatterdemon caught Wilfred by his arm and damn near tore it off. He shook Wilfred like he was a child. Wilfred hung on as best he could, but it was worse than wrestling a full-grown hurricane. The bastard was just too big. Wilfred wondered if he might die again.
Would it hurt?
The Tatterdemon was about to find that out when he stopped, like he had heard something in the distance. He tilted his head, listening.
“Damn that bitch,” he growled.
He looked up.
“Everybody back to the farm,” he called out, as if the entire army of scarecrows could hear him.
And for a wonder, they did.
The entire battalion of scarecrows turned and began to leave the town.
The Tatterdemon strode away from Wilfred’s fallen body, giving him no more heed than a fallen leaf. Wilfred pulled himself to his feet and staggered across the parking lot, towards his chosen weapon.
“Yeah,” Wilfred muttered. “Everybody back to the farm.”
He used his key to unlock the pumper truck.
He unreeled the hose, stuck it down a sewer drain and started to work.
CHAPTER 49
From Straw to Flesh
* 1 *
Maddy never dreamed gardening could be this much fun.
She was digging and rooting like a kid in a mud pile, turning it all over with the backhoe and ripping at random, unearthing bodies and dead horses and other bio-geological finds.
She understood why Vic loved this big machine. It made you feel like a freaking colossus, being able to rip and tear great chunks of landscape. Finally she found what she was hunting for.
The broom.
It seemed so tiny, so small.
How could so much evil be locked within such an insignificant object?
She nudged at it, trying to pick it up or crush it with the shovel mouth.
The damn thing seemed to dodge her, every time. She just wasn’t that practiced with the machine.
Maybe Vic could have managed the trick, but Maddy was no Vic.
She tried again.
Impossible.
She was just about to climb down and grab it herself when the witch appeared -- part shadow, part root, part hatred.
There was a body, and there wasn’t, just a blue, tattery haze of light, like heat lightning on a summer day.
In the heart of that flash stood the witch.
Her memory.
Her living will.
Thessaly flashed towards the backhoe. Her haste sounded like scissor blades slicing through fingertips. It sounded dangerous, scary but definitely afraid.
The old bitch was afraid of Maddy.
“Forget about it, Broomhilda! You’re a hell of a long way from Kansas, and I’m bitchier than Dorothy ever dreamed of being.”
The witch touched the side of the backhoe. Maddy felt her touch passing through the metal and into her straw. It was a little like receiving a sudden electrical shock. Great arcs of flame and power danced up the side of the machine, running haywire cartwheels about the cab like St. Elmo’s fire on steroids.
Then, with a gentle lift of her hand, the witch tipped the backhoe over on its side. She sent one final charge of power through the machine. Everything shook and fell to pieces like the backhoe was being blenderized.
Maddy pushed her way clear of the wreckage.
She was pissed.
“You broke my toy,” she shouted.
Maddy felt straw strong, ready to rip witch and broom into splinters.
“You want to play, bitch? Do you want to fucking play?”
She grabbed the backhoe’s bucket, tore it off the arm and flung it at the witch.
The witch laughed and easily avoided the projectile.
“Your power is straw, woman. You are nothing but straw.”
Maddy grabbed another piece to throw.
This was nearly as good as the backhoe. She felt like the Hulk, like Superman, like Wonder Woman.
She hoisted the chunk of metal over her head and threw it.
“Look out, witch. Here comes Hurricane Maddy, strong enough to drive straw through a barn door.”
While Thessaly was dodging, Maddy lunged.
She damn near made it.
Thessaly waved her hand in a short, reaping motion.
The effect was instantaneous. The straw that had been holding Maddy together twisted and yanked through Maddy’s flesh. It felt like someone had dragged a screen door straight through her bones.
And just that quickly, Maddy was human again and lying there -- shot in the chest with Earl’s random bullet. All of Vic’s healing magic had been undone. Maddy toppled to the ground like a shaft of cut straw, bleeding to death and unable to save herself.
In the back of her mind she heard an air horn blaring.
It must be quitting time, she thought.
It’s time to lie down and quit.
* 2 *
Preacher Wilfred rolled down the highway in a tanker truck full of hellfire and brimstone, singing at the top of his badly punctured lungs.
“Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves.”
He honked the air horn.
God, he’d wanted to do this ever since he was a kid, ever since that fireman pulled him out of the flames.
“Retribution’s coming, witch,” Fell called out. “It’s time to reap the whirlwind.”
“Give her hell, Fell!” Wilfred added.
It had taken ten minutes to drain the water from the fire truck and another fifteen to fill it back up with gasoline. Wilfred wasn’t worried by the delay. He figured time was on his side. The delay just guaranteed that straw boss bastard would be back in the fields by the time Wilfred was ready, and by fuck, Wilfred was surely ready.
“For behold, the Lord will come with fire. And with his chariots like a whirlwind to render his anger with fury and his rebuke with flames of fire -- Isaiah, sixty sixth chapter, fifteenth verse.”
Flames of fire. Wilfred liked that. It had a real old style ring to it.
“Flames of fire, you son of a bitch,” Wilfred shouted. “Flames of goddamn fire! That straw man wants a firefight, and we’re going to give him one.”
* 3 *
Momma Clavis kept on stitching and Wendy Joe kept on shooting but they were running out of time, needles and ammunition.
Suddenly the scarecrows began to retreat.
“We’ve beaten them,” shouted Wendy Joe.
Momma Clavis shook her head.
“It wasn’t us. It’s somebody else’s fight now. You got to help me sew this all around. Knot it tight and then we got to burn it
or else the evil ain’t ever going to truly die.”
* 4 *
The Tatterdemon heard the truck’s approach long before he saw it.
He heard the air horn sounding in the distance like a trumpet of judgment.
“The bastard is coming back,” he shouted. “Everybody get ready.”
He knew the witch could take care of Maddy. It was up to him to take care of Wilfred.
“If that bitch hadn’t interrupted me in town, I’d have finished him already.”
She’d called out to him in the heart of battle like she’d been terrified. What could have scared that old bitch so? It sure couldn’t have been his little Maddy.
He looked about, afraid the witch would hear his thoughts. The truck drew closer. A few of the scarecrows tried to charge it but there was nothing they could do. The damn thing was just too big and fast. It roared into the field, skidding into the dirt and heeling over on its side, plowing a wound into the dirt, spilling fuel and wreckage all about.
Wilfred clambered out of the wreckage, grabbed the hose nozzle and worked it free, spraying the remainder of his cargo in all directions.
“It’s payday, you hay-stacked sons of Satan, payday has come at last.”
Everything broke loose all at once. It was like watching an army of ants spilling out of a rotted log on a bonfire. Vic stared lost in the chains of panic and abject surrender. Scarecrows ran wildly about, flapping their arms like great stick planes trying to take off in flight.
Marvin the centaur was the only one who kept his head, maybe because he had two of them now or maybe because he’d burned before and didn’t want to burn again. Or maybe he just didn’t give a shit.
He cavalry charged up over the wreckage, toppling Wilfred to the ground.
The nozzle whipped free, lashing about and spraying its dangerous venom like a beheaded serpent. And then it lay still, spitting out the last bit of high-test gasoline into the parched earth.
For a moment everything froze.
The air reeked of gasoline.
Nothing dared breathe.
Wilfred lay in the dirt, nearly dead again. Marvin had torn him nearly open. Shit, he thought, all this way for nothing or maybe not. He fumbled in his pockets searching for his lighter.
“This ain’t over yet,” he growled. “I’m ready for a rematch.”
Only he didn’t have a light.
“Shit.”
He was finished.
Until Maddy -- bleeding, torn, and damn near dead -- dug into the pocket of her jeans, slid out the pilfered Zippo and flicked it alight.
“Remember, friends,” she muttered into the dirt, “only you can prevent forest fires.”
She lobbed the lighter towards the wreckage.
“So shall you reap.”
Payday had come at last.
CHAPTER 50
Down It Came
* 1 *
The lighter soared like a tiny Kahouetek comet.
It caught the fumes before striking the dirt, the flames leaping up to greet its approach. The blue aura of heat ran ahead of the flames, eating at the dead grass and scarecrows like a plague on legs.
Flames roared like Judgment Day, catching everything alight in one massive birthday candle of retribution. Figures ran screaming through the inferno, their screams rising above the roar of the flames. Maddy felt the heat and grinned like a drunken maniac. She’d die, but what the hell, she was dying anyway. It’d be worth it to take the old witch down with her.
“Top that, you old broom-frigging witch.”
The witch raised her broom high over her head. The clouds darkened above her, the sky swirled like a madly whirling brew. She summoned a whirlwind, blowing out the flames like a birthday candle.
A sudden deluge drowned the fire.
Retribution was over before it even got started.
* 2 *
The witch was wild with anger.
“Preacher? Are you out there? I can feel you close, you old, withered prick. I can smell you out there you quivering, rancid worm.”
Wilfred dragged himself from the wreckage of the fire truck.
He looked like something dragged out of a fire sale. Pieces of charred meat were dangling from his body. Three ribs arced out from his abdomen like the tines of a white, bony pitchfork. He hit the ground like a scalded panther, flinging scarecrows like so many jack straws, aiming himself like a human torpedo straight for the waiting witch.
The witch raised the broomstick higher.
Chain lightning sheeted down around Wilfred’s body, caging him in a magical electrical fence. He felt like something out of a cartoon, his teeth shivering like broken glass, his hair standing out, the stink of ozone rafting over him.
Maddy tried to move.
The witch extended her reach and snared her as well.
“You’d show me fire, Preacher? I’ll show you what fire really is. I’ll snuff the two of you out like a pair of moths in candle flame.”
A gunshot rang out like a single hammer swing on a blacksmith’s anvil.
It was Earl.
He’d dragged himself free from the wreckage of Maddy’s tumbled house. In his twig-bone hands, huge and looming like a cannon of fate, dangled Helliard’s big old Ruger revolver, Big Fuck.
In the confusion of battle he’d found the gun and used it.
It was a hell of a peg, coming from a damn near antique gun. The bullet neatly severed the head of the broom from its shaft.
“Glock, my hairy ass,” Wilfred snarled. “Now let’s see you work your hoojoo.”
The witch had enough strength to turn the lightning on Earl.
The lightning died with the last of her magic, dancing about Earl Toad’s broken tatterframe in a waltz of vengeance that fried him down to his wooden bones.
Wilfred stood, petrified in astonishment. He figured he had one chance. If he moved fast enough he could catch her and tear her apart before she could turn her magic back on him. Only the Tatterdemon charged out of the shadows, pushed past Earl’s electrified corpse and knocked Wilfred flat before he could do anything more.
But Earl wasn’t finished. He stumbled over to where Maddy lay. He was charbroiled from the witch’s lightning. Damn near dead the second time around. Only Nova Scotia stubbornness kept him moving.
“You can’t kill a toad,” he croaked. “We’re lightning proof.”
Time stood still.
Earl staggered the last half step and toppled to the ground. As he fell he touched Maddy, as lightly as a butterfly on her pumped out wound. There was a tiny flicker of sunflower yellow. Earl made the magic happen. How’d he do it? Maybe it was the lightning.
Or maybe they just didn’t come any gamer than Earl Toad.
“Go,” he whispered. “Run.”
And then there was nothing but straw.
Maddy ran like a frightened deer, bolting blindly for the shelter of the barn.
CHAPTER 51
Musical Carcasses
* 1 *
The witch stalked over the broken field towards Wilfred’s body, raising the broken shaft of her broom over her head and shoulders like a whaler’s harpoon.
“You die now, Preacher. I will make you one of my own and then I’ll stake you out and burn you myself.”
Wilfred tried to rise.
The Tatterdemon pole-axed him from behind; the impact breaking the big man’s spinal column. Wilfred lay there, helpless and twitching like a swatted fly, waiting for the witch’s death blow.
“Push over,” Fell whispered. “I’ll drive.”
A cold, black wind rushed from the sheriff’s dying body. The air about him rippled like a sheet of black cellophane. The spirit of Fell, released into the night, searched and found a suitable host.
That host was Earl’s charred body.
It happened fast.
A dead body, possessed by a dead man, killed twice over, rattled into life. Head down and bound for glory, the Earl puppet rammed all of his weight against the Tatt
erdemon’s towering form.
The Tatterdemon lurched backwards, tipping towards the witch.
Thessaly Cross stepped back warily, ready with her broomstick.
Preacher Earl kept on coming towards her in the short, ugly armor of Earl’s borrowed body.
Chunks of Earl fell to the ground with every step.
“Suffer not a witch to live,” Fell called out triumphantly, only the words fell out of Earl’s mangled mouth and sounded a little something like summanuttawishalift. “Exodus, twenty second chapter, eighteenth verse.”
It was a stopgap. Earl’s blasted body just wasn’t strong enough to last. The preacher knew that. He couldn’t stay here all that long.
He didn’t plan to.
And then, like a demented game of musical chairs, the preacher leaped free from Earl’s worn-out husk and tried to ride the witch.
* 2 *
Maddy rummaged through the barn, as busy as a housewife in pickling season.
Preserving jars? I ain’t going to need these. I get through with this, I’m done with saving anything.
She filled three empty Mason jars full of nails and gasoline. Then she grabbed a twisted fistful of her very own straw for the fuse and jammed the lids on as tightly as she could.
She laid the hatchet and hammer handy where she could reach them.
Then she toppled a tin full of screwdrivers as well. Anything that might serve as a weapon, Maddy wanted close at hand.
She hauled the big welding torch out.
The chainsaw?
Fuck that for a bad idea.
She’d been there and done that and she wasn’t about to risk losing to a too-short extension cord.
Sometimes length does matter.
She looked about herself, satisfied with her preparations.
She was ready for war.
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