Depths: Southern Watch #2

by Crane, Robert J.

  Hendricks took a step forward and the floor creaked like he’d put a thousand-pound weight on it. Arch wanted to shoot him a dirty look, but that really wasn’t his fault.

  The cowboy walked on, heading toward the narrow corridor that led along the right side of the trailer. It was dark back there, threatening to swallow the man in the black coat whole. Arch tried to follow a step or two behind, waiting to see if something leapt out at them.

  Hendricks had to get all the way to the bedroom before something actually did.

  Something hit the cowboy in the black coat just as he was coming through the door, slamming him into the wall with shattering force. Hendricks’s sword was held high, and Arch knew he couldn’t get it down to thrust it into the figure that had hit him.

  The thing that hit him was a guy in denim shirt, as near as Arch could tell in the darkness. He hurried into the room to follow and something hit him in the ribs as he came through the door. He instinctively jerked the switchblade around and buried it into the flesh of the figure that had run into him.

  A low stink of brimstone filled the room. A hiss of air and a dark flash illuminated a small bedroom, no more than eight feet squared. Black shadows lit around the edges by fire crawled over the shape that had hit Arch as the demon was ripped back into hell.

  Arch started to fight his way forward to stab the demon that Hendricks was struggling with, sword still aloft, but another demon hit him in the side with a shoulder charge.

  He knew it was a demon by the eyes. Even in the dark it was obvious, the glow. Like a red iris inlaid over blackness.

  The demon had a shoulder buried in his ribs, and Arch could feel the ache from where it had hit him—same place as the last one had. He dropped his elbow on its head, landing it on a scruffy bearded jaw. He had a vague impression of long, raven hair that was curled. The smell of pot was thicker here than it had been out in the main room.

  He could hear Hendricks fighting behind him now. Arch had fully turned to deal with his threat and tried to throw the demon off of him, but to no avail. He dropped another elbow and heard a grunt, but his arm with the switchblade in it was trapped low, beneath him. A strong demon arm had pinned his arm to his side, unable to move.

  Arch drilled the demon with another elbow to the head, wondering if it was having any effect. He remembered the last time he’d wrestled a demon in close proximity. It hadn’t been the most fun thing in the world, and he was doubtless overmatched.

  The memory of his last time fighting one of these things triggered a thought. Arch sunk lower, dropping into a football stance. The demon still had a shoulder in his ribs and resisted.

  Arch pushed down, hammering with his elbow, all he had available to fight with. Had it been a human, he would broken its jaw by now. The demon only grunted. Arch pushed down harder, buckling the demon into a ninety-degree angle. It tried to shove back, but its leverage was limited.

  Arch hit it with a knee that caused it to make a grunt of pain. He could feel the balance shift and pushed forward like he was up against a practice dummy back in his football days.

  The demon’s footing was lost, and Arch came crashing down on him. He buried his knife in its ribs, over and over again until the black fire crawled over it and it disappeared with only a hissing sound.

  Arch fell to the floor, the demon no longer holding him up. His hand reached out to touch a sliding closet door, and he struggled to his feet and turned around.

  Hendricks was still grappling with the demon on one side of the bed. Grunts of exertion came from both of them, and the thump and bump of them against the walls of the trailer rattled the whole place.

  Arch grimaced, catching his breath, and then sprang off the closet door and entered the fray.

  * * *

  Lerner and Duncan were watching the trailer shake on its foundation. “Looks like somebody’s getting fucked in there,” Lerner said. “Hard.”

  Duncan just shook his head. “It’s a fight. Those two demon hunters up against two Acuspidas.” He paused, and Lerner watched him think. “Make that one Acuspida.”

  “Sounds like our boys are making progress,” Lerner said and turned back to the wheel. “How shall we handle this? Clearly the woman is not with them.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Someone who shows up as a dead zone to you sounds like it’s within our area of interest, yes?” Lerner asked.

  “It is,” Duncan said, a little reserved.

  “You don’t seem concerned,” Lerner said. He kept his hands pressed tight to the wheel.

  Duncan shrugged just a little. “If we’re trying to find out about the woman, we might have to ask them some pointed questions. Not sure we want to raise the stink messing with a local lawman would cause.”

  Lerner nodded. He had a point. “What if we could just get the cowboy alone for a while? Ask him some questions independently of the police officer?” Lerner thought about it for a minute. “You don’t think the entire department is in on the hunt, do you?” Duncan just shook his head. “Of course not,” Lerner said, and relief flowed through him. “That sort of shit doesn’t happen, a whole department hunting demons.” He laughed, but it was weak.

  That sort of scenario was exactly what they were here to prevent. Humans turning en masse against their kind was bad for the status quo, bad for those who were living peacefully—or relatively so—on the earth. Big disruptions, huge body counts, these were the sorts of things that tended to attract attention.

  And attention, for a demon, was a big no-no.

  “What do you think they know about the Sygraath that’s jerking off to traffic accidents?” Lerner asked, frowning.

  Duncan shrugged again. His jacket looked black in the dark. “Probably less than us.”

  Lerner nodded, pondering it. “Have you ever seen a Sygraath jump the tracks like this? You know, start slaughtering people instead of waiting out their deaths?”

  “Yeah,” Duncan said. “Sometimes when they get desperate or blood drunk, they do crazy things.” Lerner heard him sniff lightly. “After World War I, a bunch of them went mad and started doing things like this. They went through a kind of withdrawal after some of the major battles and couldn’t handle coming down from the high. Tough to go from an orgy of slaughter to a few deaths per day.”

  “Huh.” Lerner fixed his eyes on the trailer. The shaking had stopped. “If we’re going to have a conversation with one of these boys—”

  “Just the cowboy,” Duncan said.

  “If we’re going to have a conversation with this cowboy, we probably ought to set ourselves up for it,” Lerner said. “Get in the shadows, if you know what I mean.” He waited to see what Duncan would say to that. Turned out he didn’t say anything, but he gave Lerner a hell of a nasty look.

  * * *

  They had him overmatched. With Arch’s help, Hendricks had overwhelmed the last surviving demon, and they had him on the ground, a sword at his throat. The stink of the weed that had been smoked in the trailer was nearly overwhelming, enough to take Hendricks’s breath away, and he kept pushing the sleeve of his coat up to his nose to stifle it. Problem was, the drover was starting to pick up the smell.

  “You got a problem?” Arch asked him, not taking his eyes off the demon.

  “Stinks in here,” Hendricks said. “Let’s kill this guy and get out.”

  The demon’s dark eyes widened, but the blade was at his throat and Arch had one of his hands pinned down with the switchblade at the wrist. All it would take would be a little poke …

  “Wait, wait,” Arch said, and Hendricks could feel him picking up the hint. They exchanged a look, but it was almost unnecessary. He’d play good cop by default. “We’re not going to just kill this guy.” Arch stared down. “Let’s burn him a little first.”

  Oh. So he wanted to be worse cop. Hendricks could play with that. “You want to torture him first?”

  “Yeah, see what he knows,” Arch said. “How do we do that?”

  Hendricks pr
etended to think about it. “Well, fire doesn’t rupture their skin on its own but hurts like hell, I’m told. Probably a lighter around here somewhere, based on the smell. Cook a little of his shell, I bet he’ll be singing up a storm as his essence starts to get all hot and bothered.” Hendricks paused. “Not THAT kind of hot and bothered, you understand—”

  “I got it.”

  “Waaaaiiiit!” the demon said, eyes starting to return to human from the slitted, snake-like glowing ones he’d shown while fighting. “If you let me go, I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

  Hendricks poked him in the neck with the sword, just a little. “And you end up breaking down my friend’s door like your buddies did last week?”

  “Oh …” the demon’s voice was subdued, kind of scratchy. “Was that you? I heard about that. Awfully sorry. I didn’t have anything to do with that, really. I mean, I’m not into assault and murder type stuff—”

  “No, you’re into petty larceny and possession,” Arch said, glancing back toward the living room. Hendricks caught his meaning; there had to be some paraphernalia out there, probably some pot as well. Maybe it was all used up, though. “I don’t think our criminal justice system is quite designed for demons. It’s supposed to be for people, not things.”

  “I’m … I’m a people,” the demon said, and his human-looking eyes were wide. “A person.”

  “Really?” Arch said. “Prick you, do you not bleed?” He made a move like he was going to stab the switchblade into the demon. “Let’s find out.”

  “No, no, no,” the demon said, shaking his head. “Look, I’ll talk. Please, just let me walk away afterward. I won’t be any trouble.”

  Arch and Hendricks exchanged a look. Hendricks could see the conflict in the cop’s eyes and made a note to ask him about it later. “All right,” Hendricks said, like he was resigned to it. “You talk, we let you go. Fair’s fair. What do you know about these slaughters that happened in town?”

  “Oh, yeah, righteous feast, huh?” The demon cracked a little bit of a smile that fast disappeared. “You know, if you’re into that sort of thing. He rested his head on the dark, brown shag carpeting as they sat in the half-light of the trailer bedroom. “Uhm, yeah, it was a bunch of Tul’rore.”

  Hendricks nodded. “Not Spiegoth?”

  “No,” the demon said, looking blank. “They were eating and feasting. Moving from one house to the next, all in a row.”

  “Where are they now?” Arch asked, and Hendricks could see him tense as he asked the demon the question. The words came out pretty low and harsh considering the guy was cooperating.

  “Dead, I think,” the demon said. “Word was they got toasted in a raid by two OOCs.” Sounded like moooo-k to Hendricks. Without the M.

  Arch gave Hendricks the sidelong. “What’s an … OOC?”

  “Office of Occultic Concordance. They ride herd on demons,” Hendricks replied, mind racing. “Keep ’em from making too big of a splash. I’ve heard it’s to keep things from getting out of hand, so humans don’t get wise to the threat in their midst and start killing them off.”

  “Ever run across them?” Arch asked.

  “No,” Hendricks replied. “I’ve talked to other hunters who have. As far as I know, they tend to give us a wide berth.”

  “So if the things that killed all those people are dead,” Arch said, focusing back on the demon lying upon the shag carpeting, “who caused that accident outside Midian earlier?”

  The demon’s eyes were blank, still wide. “That … I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything about that.”

  Arch nodded. “I believe you.”

  He poked the demon in the arm with the switchblade, and the black fire crawled over the demon. He was gone within seconds.

  “Why didn’t you lie to him from the outset?” Hendricks said, sliding his sword back into his scabbard. “You start threatening them with being tortured to death, it makes them desperate. Might get us in a world of hurt.”

  “I don’t like to lie,” Arch said, pushing the blade back into the handle of the switchblade. “There’s this whole commandment that tells you that you shouldn’t.”

  “I don’t think your God had talking to demons in mind when he scrawled that in the stone,” Hendricks said, trying to be nice.

  “It was on the tablet,” Arch said, and to Hendricks’s ears he sounded a little testy about it, “and I think if the good Lord had had a caveat in mind saying it was okay to lie to the servants of evil, he would have added it.”

  Hendricks chuckled. “I don’t think these guys are serving much evil. More like serving themselves.”

  “Serving none but yourself could be considered a very great evil,” Arch said, and Hendricks felt the buzz of annoyance at the sanctimony.

  “Whatever,” Hendricks said and kept just this side of rolling his eyes. He turned and headed back toward the living room.

  “Where are you going?” Arch asked as Hendricks hit the door leading outside and opened it.

  “I gotta take a piss,” Hendricks replied with a tight smile.

  “They’ve got a perfectly good bathroom in here.” Hendricks could hear Arch say it even with the door standing between them, blocking the passage to the bedroom where the police officers still stood.

  “I’ve seen the rest of the house, I doubt it’s anything approaching ‘perfectly good,’” Hendricks said as he let the door slam shut behind him.

  He wasn’t even off the steps when he felt something hit him solidly in the back of the head. He was dimly aware of his hat tumbling off, of strong arms taking hold of him, but he never saw his attacker.

  Which, he had just enough time to think, was strange, since the area around the front door of the trailer was awfully well lit.

  Hendricks passed into unconsciousness, feeling the weight lift. His head throbbed in pain, not for the first time this day, as he faded away.

  Chapter 11

  “Heavy bastard,” was Duncan’s only comment as they loaded the cowboy in the back seat.

  “Probably the sword,” Lerner said, pulling the blade off the cowboy as he reached in. “Or maybe the gun.” He pulled a black-steel pistol with wooded grips out of a holster on the man’s belt. It looked vaguely familiar, like something he would have seen before in a movie, but Lerner didn’t know guns. They were nearly useless in his line of work.

  “Or it could be he’s a solidly built guy,” Duncan replied. Lerner heard him click a pair of cuffs around the cowboy’s ankles. “Swords and guns don’t weigh all that much.” Their voices were hushed, and the rain had once more quit. Lerner was trying to keep quiet so as not to tip off the police officer in the trailer that there was something going on out here.

  Lerner didn’t respond to Duncan’s observation. Instead he walked up to the left rear tire of the police cruiser SUV and jabbed the sword in delicately until he heard a hiss. Then he withdrew it, gently, and watched the black rubber deflate slowly to the ground. “Hope you got a spare, Officer.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Duncan said from behind him. He didn’t have to say it twice. Lerner got in the car, started the engine, then put it in gear, all very slowly, as though the cop could hear him from the trailer. He didn’t switch on the lights, either, keeping them off and the engine low until after they were over the flooded tracks and back onto the main road.

  * * *

  Arch got outside just as a sedan disappeared onto the trail. He would have cursed, but he didn’t allow himself to say anything strong enough to count in a situation like this. He’d wondered what was taking Hendricks so long, but he got a little caught up looking around the trailer. He’d forgotten how bad it smelled until he stepped out into the fresh air of the rain-cooled night. The chill, from the air and from what he’d just seen, ran over his skin, and he bolted for the Explorer.

  He was just about to yank open the door when his conscious mind realized what was wrong with the scene before him. The left rear tire was flat, and the Explorer was sagging in
that direction.

  Hendricks was gone; somebody had probably grabbed him. Though he couldn’t rule out the possibility it was someone like Starling, giving him a lift. No, that didn’t fit.

  His first instinct was to pick up his mike and call it in. Then he thought about the sweep pattern that was going on, the traffic diversion of the interstate, and hesitated. This would throw a wet clump of dirt right in the middle of the sheriff’s plans, and he’d have some manner of explaining to do. Explaining that he couldn’t do. And that’d be in addition to pitting unwitting sheriff’s deputies against something they were absolutely unready for.

  He sighed and hurried to the hatchback of the Explorer. It’d take him a while to change the tire and get in pursuit. Two questions bounced along on infinite loop in his head as he went.

  Who had taken Hendricks? And why?

  * * *

  Erin was still up at midnight, pulling into the sheriff’s station in the sheriff’s own patrol car. She could see the lights burning within. Normally this would have been an all-hands-on-deck kind of meeting, but there wasn’t really time for that. Not with everyone on patrol and Arch gone to God knew where.

  She parked the car and walked stiffly across the parking lot, her head still reeling from everything she’d found in Hendricks’s hotel room. There’d been one last thing that’d absolutely knocked her back, and she rubbed her hand over her hair, pushing it off her forehead.

  She was glad the rain had stopped but was not loving the chill it brought with it. When she opened the station door, it only got worse.

  She got hit with a blast of cold air that told her the ancient air conditioner wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. That was no great shock; it only worked when it wasn’t needed. There was a scent of stale coffee lingering in the air as she passed through the waiting area. All was quiet. As it should be.

  Reeve was waiting in his office. His wife, Donna, gave Erin a faint smile as she passed through the area behind the counter where all the desks were lined up. The place was always quiet at this time of night, but something about the events of the day made it seem even grimmer than usual. Donna was a well made-up Southern belle, her hair steel grey and short cropped. She had the lines that Reeve wasn’t showing yet but still had a stately look. She didn’t wear any sort of sheriff’s deputy uniform, because she wasn’t deputized. She was admin when they needed the extra help.