by Harvey Click
“No you’re not,” Lucky said. “You’re the worst damn driver I’ve ever seen, and I don’t plan on getting killed before we get there. I strongly doubt you even have a license.”
“You’d better think about what you’re saying,” Shane said. “The driver’s the one most likely to get shot. You’ll be driving into a hail of bullets with a big hole in front of your face. I’m going to have to drive the bus while the demons are in it, so I may as well drive it into the compound too.”
“And exactly why do you have to drive it while the demons are in it?” Lucky asked.
“Because Amy’s going to be in here helping Azura control the demons. She’s already told me so, and there’s going to be enough fighting today without me trying to argue her out of it. If she’s in here, then I am too.”
“Okay, if you’re driving the demons then I’m driving the damn thing into the compound,” Lucky said.
“We better quit arguing and get this steel back inside so we can get our cars loaded up,” Joe said.
While they were removing the windshield plate somebody said, “She’s a sweet piece of work, isn’t she?”
They turned around and were surprised to see Bill standing there. He was wearing one of his three-piece gray suits and looking very pale and sick, but then he always looked that way. He was leaning heavily on his walking stick, but at least he was standing.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Shane asked.
“Hell no. I never felt better. I’m ready to kick some butt today.”
“You’re planning to come with us?” Joe asked.
“Damn straight I am. And if there’s any confusion about who’s in charge, I am.”
The others said nothing. They carried the windshield plate back into the bus and came back out to unhook the one on the side.
Azura was running up to them. “What are you doing out of bed, Daddy?” she said.
“I’m out for a little air, if it’s any of your business. And since you don’t appear to be doing anything useful, you can start packing up my books and my other stuff so these gentlemen can haul it out to my car.”
“You can pack up your own crap,” she said.
“What’s that you said?”
Shane and Lucky carried the other plate into the bus, and as they were strapping it down to the floor the bus started. They looked up and saw Bill sitting in the driver’s seat.
“Listen to her purr,” he said. “Two hundred and sixty horsepower diesel engine, fully rebuilt. You could drive this thing back and forth across the country ten times without ever needing a tune-up.”
He shut off the engine and put the keys back in his pocket.
“We need to do something about those dead Nephilim upstairs,” Joe said. “We can’t leave corpses laying around with our fingerprints all over the place.”
“Don’t worry about them,” Bill said. “I’m going to torch this dump when we leave.”
He climbed out of the bus, leaning on his stick for support, and the others followed him. Azura was still out there, standing against the nearby cottonwood tree.
“Let’s take them out and bury them,” Shane said. “Whoever owns this place isn’t going to be happy if you burn it down.”
“I’m not concerned about making landlords happy,” Bill said. “By the way, I’ve got quite a bit of stuff that needs to be hauled out to my car before three o’clock.”
“The show starts at 2:00,” Joe said. “We need to hit the road by one o’clock.”
“No we don’t,” Bill said. “The sheriff’s show starts at 2:00, but ours doesn’t. We’re going in about 3:00 or 3:30, after the sheriff and all his damn-fool deputies are dead. I’m hoping they’ll manage to kill a few of Godson’s goons before they get killed themselves, so at least they’ll be of some use. By then there’s going to be a big fucking mess of dead cops to clean up, and the very last thing Godson will be expecting is a second attack right on the heels of the first. That’s when we’ll send in our demons and catch him completely off-guard.”
“We made a promise to the sheriff and we’re sticking to it,” Joe said.
“You made a promise,” Bill said. “I didn’t make any promises, and I’m in charge of this operation.”
Azura stepped away from the tree and said, “Settle down, Daddy. Bloody Joe’s in charge now, and you need to go back to bed.”
Bill turned on her, his pale face pink with rage. “If I hear one more word out of you I’ll tan your skinny ass till you can’t sit down for a week. Who do you think you are, ordering me around? You’re a child, you’re eighteen years old.”
“Nineteen,” she said.
“I don’t care if you’re a hundred and nineteen, you’re not going to tell your father who’s in charge and who isn’t. And we’re leaving when I say we are because I happen to have the bus key in my pocket.”
Azura pulled a key from her jeans pocket and said, “And I happen to have the spare in mine.”
Shane was standing between them, and he felt the air crackling with electricity as if a thunderstorm were about to explode.
“Let’s go get our cars loaded up,” Joe said. “We’re gonna be leaving at 1:00.”
Chapter 21
Lucky had been a furniture mover for a while when he was young, and though he liked to believe his furniture moving days were over they never were. Rambling was part of being a ramblin’ gamblin’ man, and rambling meant lugging possessions from place to place and never calling any place home for long. He’d learned not to accumulate many possessions, but some others hadn’t learned the same lesson, and now his back hurt from lugging all those boxes of Bill’s books.
The job had scuffed up his clothes too, and for some reason he always wanted to be well dressed when going to a fight. He picked out a nice pair of brown wool trousers. They could stand to be dry cleaned and pressed, but they’d have to do. He slipped a tiny Derringer into one of his trouser pockets and in another pocket a small flask full of Evan Williams bourbon.
It was too hot for a jacket, but he considered a vest essential for a well-dressed gentleman, especially a fighting gentleman, and he picked a dark brown one that he liked. The vest wasn’t complete without his silver pocket watch in one of its pockets and his sliver fob in the other with a silver chain connecting them.
The watch had belonged to his grandfather who, according to Lucky’s father, had always kept it wound, and to the best of Lucky’s knowledge the watch had been running continuously for the past seventy-five years. Like many gamblers he was superstitious, and one of his superstitions was that his luck would stay good so long as the watch continued ticking.
It was ticking. The second hand was racing merrily around the face, and the other two hands told him they’d be leaving in precisely forty-five minutes because it was 12:15.
He smiled and slipped the watch into his vest pocket. There had been too much complication and confusion, and he was eager to finish this fight and move on. He knew his watch would bring him good luck, as it always had, and he believed its luck had a way of leaking over to his friends. That’s why the sheriff had shown up just at the right time with the promise of fifteen or twenty new fighters. Their odds had looked hopeless after Bill’s ops had been killed, but the watch had kept ticking out its good luck, and with fifteen or twenty new fighters the odds were looking better again—no worse at least than filling an inside straight, and Lucky had done that plenty of times.
In the next room Nyx said, “Don’t tell me you’re actually bringing a rifle.”
“I’m gonna leave my bow in the car,” Joe said. “How do you expect me to shoot arrows out of those damn little holes in the bus windows?”
“Do you really think there’s gold in there like Bill said?” Nyx asked.
“I don’t trust anything that bunghole says.”
“Well, if there really is some, let’s buy a nice big cabin somewhere really peaceful. Maybe up on a mountain.”
“That might be nice,” Joe said. “I’
ve been thinking I need a more peaceful sort of life. I think I’ve gotten to be too cold-blooded, like a lowdown snake. But I bet you’d just get bored.”
A little way down the hall Azura was looking through her drawers and closet for anything she might have missed. She had already carried her talismans out to the car and her jars of ointments, which were so difficult to prepare, and a few clothes, mostly blue jeans and T-shirts, which she supposed most young women were wearing out there in the real world.
In a small box she had packed her little jewelry case containing her few precious gemstones, which she hoped would pay her rent until she could find some sort of job. The only piece of jewelry she’d never sell was the locket her mother had given her when she turned fourteen. She put her mother’s small framed photo on top of the jewelry case, then picked up the photo of Terra and gazed at it.
“Today we’ll be together again at last, my sister, my best friend,” she whispered. “It’s been fifteen long years, but what does that matter—we have our whole lives ahead of us now. I don’t care where we live or what we do, so long as we do it together.”
She kissed the glass above the photo and laid it gently in the box above her mother’s. She looked through the drawers one last time but couldn’t find anything else worth taking. Everything else she owned reminded her too much of this life, her life with her father. This life was now over, and she wondered what her new life would be like. Or maybe there wouldn’t be a new life; maybe she’d die today and those nineteen years of her old and lonely life would prove to be all she was given.
Farther down the hall in the room where spare rifles were stored, Amy and Shane were loading stripper clips for their SKS carbines. She preferred the AR-15 she had taken from the Nephilim because it was easier to reload than the SKS, but unfortunately Bill’s gun room didn’t have the ammunition it required. She had found and loaded four extra seven-round magazines for the 1911, and they were stuffed in a fanny pack with the loaded stripper clips.
“I feel like I weigh three hundred pounds,” she said. Her own sword was hanging on her right side, the sword Bill had given her was hanging on her left side, the SKS was strapped over her shoulder, and the 1911 was stuffed in her belt.
“It’s good exercise,” Shane said.
His phone rang. “They killed the sheriff and Deputy Murdock last night,” Jim Blaine said. “We sent a couple people over to his house because he didn’t show up at the station, and there they were.”
“I’m sorry,” Shane said.
“So now most of the Irregulars have chickened out. They’re scared shitless and have decided they want to make peace instead of war. They’re writing up an email to send it out there begging for a truce.”
“Good luck with that,” Shane said.
“I’m still up for a fight if you are. I got five men who’ll come with me.”
“There’s a stand of piñon about a mile east of the church,” Shane said. “You know where it is?”
“Yep.”
“Can you meet us there at two o’clock?”
“Will do.”
Half an hour later Shane pulled the school bus up to the barn and got out so Azura could load her demons. It was an incredible sight, like something Hieronymus Bosch might have painted on LSD, the grimsnuffers grunting and snuffling, the fat listeners grinning like lunatics and licking their teeth, the hideous jabber-suckers waving their tentacles ominously, the babbleboons squealing and jabbering like demented school children.
“I guess this is what Mack Riley was talking about,” Shane said.
“What do you mean?” Amy asked.
“In my dream Mack said, ‘If you want to see your girl again, you’ll have to ride the freak bus to find her.’”
“I guess that’s a good omen,” Amy said.
“Yes. It means we’ll find her.”
Despite the noise, the demons were boarding in a reasonably orderly fashion until Bill walked up and barked a few orders at them. Then three of the babbleboons began to shriek and scuffle, and one of them poked out another one’s eye.
“Go away, Daddy,” Azura said. “My demons don’t like you. They think you’re wicked.”
He muttered something and walked away, and finally the monstrosities were all in. Azura climbed in after them and stood at the front of the bus telling them to sit down and behave and pointing her slim wand at any who disobeyed. She too had an SKS strapped over her shoulder today and a sword hanging at her side.
Amy climbed in next and stood behind her with one of her swords in hand but lowered. Her primary job was to augment Azura’s power in case of an emergency, since Azura claimed her power was always stronger when Amy was near.
Shane climbed in and started the engine. Nyx led the caravan with Shane’s Jeep because she knew the route and, unlike Joe, she knew how to program her GPS in case they somehow got turned around on these back roads. Behind the bus was Joe’s Santa Fe, followed by Lucky’s gold Explorer and Bill’s big black van. Above the bus flew harpies and hell-kites.
As they were pulling out of the driveway Amy saw black smoke beginning to leak out through the windows of the hacienda, and she thought of Sandoval’s house in flames.
Most of the demons sat placidly in their seats but the same three babbleboons were wrestling on the floor in the back. When the bus hit a bump they started shrieking and clawing at each other’s faces. Azura waved her wand and scolded them, but they didn’t stop. Two more leaped out of their seats and joined the scuffle, and it looked as if a major fight was about to break out. The snake-walker, sitting very upright in his seat, hissed with indignation and spit a stream of venom.
The bus was rocking on the rough road, and Amy was clutching the upright bar in front to keep from falling. She aimed the tip of her sword at the squabbling demons and shouted “Stop it!” but the bus rocked and her sword blade nearly hit Azura.
Shane stopped the bus, and Azura began to walk slowly down the aisle, demon teeth and jabber-sucker tentacles just inches from her bare arms, and Amy was certain in a few more seconds the young woman would be swelling up with venom.
But she looked calm and unafraid. She was speaking quietly to the demons, telling them to hush and settle, and as she slowly walked past them they did. The babbleboons stopped wrestling before she reached them, and they sat on the floor in the back staring up at her with fear.
“Teeth cut night zoo,” one of them said.
“Back in your seats,” Azura said gently, and they quietly got back in their seats.
The bus started moving again, and Azura walked slowly to the front, clutching seatbacks to keep from losing her balance and speaking softly to her friends as she went past them.
“Ah, these are my pretties,” she said. “Today you’ll have much fun, and tonight you’ll feast like kings.”
They followed Nyx to the stand of piñon and parked behind it. Two cars were parked there with Jim Blaine and five other men standing beside them. Two of them were Shane’s work friends Bo Diamond and Pete Hane, and one was Roamer’s deputy Carlos del Toro. They were all big and burly and looked ready for a fight with rifles slung over their shoulders and the swords Roamer had given them scabbarded at their sides.
Shane and Amy shook their hands and thanked them for coming, but the conversation suddenly stopped when Azura stepped out of the bus with her demons filing out behind her.
“Holy shit,” Blaine said at last, and then Bo pointed up at the sky where the harpies and hell-kites were beginning to arrive.
“We better get them plates on,” Joe said.
Blaine and his friends helped, and the shields were soon attached. Shane walked over to Azura and said, “You’re one hundred percent absolutely positive those harpies won’t hurt Emily?”
“I’m positive. I told them to break into the upper room and kill the men up there, but they’re not allowed to go down to any of the lower floors.”
“Okay then, send them out.”
She raised her arms and spread t
hem open, and the harpies and hell-kites set off flying toward the church with the others racing behind them on the ground.
“Everybody in the bus,” Joe said.
Shane took the front seat on the right so he could quickly grab the wheel if anything happened to Lucky. The others took seats by the windows on either side with their guns in their laps.
Lucky pulled onto the road, leaning forward to peer out of the small hole in the windshield plate. It was dark in there with the windows covered, and the air was hot and stank of demons.
Shane stared out of his cross-shaped shooting hole, and before long the citadel and dormitories came into view a hundred and fifty yards or more off the road. The church looked quiet and unsuspecting, with no one visible on the grounds, but then Shane saw three or four men in the upper room run to the east window to point at the harpies and hell-kites flying toward them.
A moment later the flying demons were attacking the windows up there. One of them broke, and a man standing in the upper room screamed as a harpy pulled him out and dropped him to the domed roof, where he slid to the edge and fell shrieking to the ground.
A mob of armed people or maybe Nephilim came running out of the dormitories. While they were pointing at the school bus and shouting, Azura’s land-bound demons came running up and leaped on them, biting and tearing savagely.
A harpy swooped down, but it must have been one of Godson’s because it snatched up a babbleboon in each hand, flew up high, and slung them screeching to the ground. Now more of Godson’s demons were racing out of a dormitory to join the fight.
“Get ready for some fireworks,” Lucky said. “I’m turning into the driveway now.”
A moment after the bus turned there was a rapid drumbeat of bullets pinging the front shields, and Shane hoped Bill’s ops had welded some good steel under the hood to protect the engine from bullets. He stared out of his shooting hole, but there was nothing to shoot at from the side because all of Godson’s gunmen were straight ahead.
The bus seemed to be moving maybe twenty-five miles per hour, but then it slowed and veered to the left. Shane looked forward and saw Lucky slumped over the steering wheel. There was a big bloody hole in the back of his head where the bullet had exited.