by Kenny Soward
She had other friends, too, not just the witches. These were strong entities who’d passed over to Earth centuries ago and were good, faithful powers who shook the Ley Lines of the world whenever they moved. One such person was an old vagabond named Gruff who lived up near Cincinnati in the Under River, a place Torri had only visited once but remembered it being a beautiful place. Gruff was a friend, and she could count on his reverberations to calm her whenever she was rattled or sad.
Torri listened for him, hoping to take reassurance in his footsteps, but something was wrong. His reverberations shook and wavered, sputtered and flared, causing Torri’s own heart to skip a beat.
Her eyes opened wide as she strained to listen.
There was a heavy crash, like an elephant felled by distant thunder, and Gruff’s reverberations died.
The sudden emptiness tore a cry from her lips, a toast of sorrow to her most ancient and respected father. Her fists clenched in anger and confusion. What had happened? Had he been killed? Had he simply gone away? She didn’t know, might never know.
She instantly regretted not going to see him sooner. Always sooner than later, they’d say to one another, but it was never soon enough.
Torri put her cheek to the tire and wept as the grasses stretched up from the ground in a fibrous rasping to stroke her feet and knees with a lover’s touch. A bough from the oak tree she swung beneath wrapped around her shoulders with a rough bark hug.
Torrie shook from head to toe and squeezed her eyes shut along with her fists as tears chased themselves down her cheeks.
“Oh, Gruff,” she said, quietly sobbing. “What happened you old fool?”
Chapter 3
Four Months Later, in late February…
The old Grace Baptist Church van trundled east down I-70 somewhere between Columbus, OH and Pittsburgh, PA. Rain pelted the roof and wind rocked it back and forth as they battled the near gale force storm. Oil fumes and fresh rain scent came through the vents as the defroster struggled to keep the van’s windows clear. The eight cylinder engine roared as they accelerated, seemingly at will.
Lonnie just hoped they didn’t have to stop fast because the brakes were shit.
Leaving one hand on the top of the wheel, he cracked the window. Jedi, sitting directly behind him, instantly cursed as water flowed down the ridges of the opening and pelted him with big fat drops.
“Lonnie, you’re a dick.”
“Just be thankful I’m even cracking the window for you.”
Lonnie took out a cigarette from his jacket pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it with his dragon lighter. He’d been smoking so much lately that he’d had to refill the lighter countless times.
“Yeah, thanks. You’ve done a lot to lower my risk of cancer.”
Truth was, if it wasn’t cancer that got Jedi, it would be his diet. The little guy had ballooned up over the last few months. A steady diet of McDoc’s and gas station food had left him looking chunky.
Lonnie grinned, thinking Bess would get a kick out of that. But the grin died. She probably wouldn’t get a big kick out of that. In fact, she’d probably wonder why Lonnie had kept Jedi and his sister prisoner and hadn’t been returning her calls. The truth was he still didn’t know what to do with them. He didn’t know what to do at all.
He blew a billow of smoke at the crack, and the wind promptly carried it right back into the van, smoking everyone out. The gang was used to it by now, and not even Makare complained anymore, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it since her tether back to Hell had been cut.
Crash was in the passenger seat, looking glum. He gazed at Lonnie through half lidded eyes. “Where we headed now?”
Lonnie shook his head slowly, eyes focused on a road he could barely see through the water-splashed windshield. The wipers were failing miserably at their job. “I was thinking we’d head south down to Charlston. There’s that warehouse we couldn’t get to last time, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember that place.”
They’d tried to rob it once before but had accidentally set off the alarm, forcing them to make a fast getaway. Lonnie had an idea about the alarm though. About how to disable it. It was a general storage facility next to a flea market, where all the dealers put their stuff between shows. There was sure to be a lot of good shit there. Guns, electronics, and anything else they could take. They’d sell the stuff or trade it for drugs, which allowed the Eighth Street Gang to continue to draw their powers from Hell. It was just one way for more powerful classes of fade rippers (class-3 entities, the ECC would call them) could do it. All except for Makare, of course. She’d not been allowed to test her own powers because the drugs were strictly off limits to her. Under penalty of death. Everyone knew that.
Lonnie didn’t know how other monsters did it. Demons were just demons, all-powerful once summoned, and he knew other lesser monsters like zombies, lycanthropes, and ghouls existed purely from Earth magic or the tinkering of mad scientists. It was the damn Wild West out there, and all Lonnie knew was that his particular monsters couldn’t achieve full power without drugs coursing through their veins. Heroin was the best although weed did the trick sometimes, too. Sometimes even alcohol. They’d become immune to the dopey affects for the most part, although they were particularly vulnerable immediately after shooting up.
After Selix’s death, they’d robbed the first five or six dealers to stay high, but even Lonnie in his fucked up state of mind knew that wouldn’t last forever. Eventually, the weird gang in the church van would be hunted far and wide by every drug boss in the Midwest, if they weren’t already being hunted.
This storage facility would be a huge haul if they could pull it off. Would get a lot of people off their backs.
“But don’t you think they’re gonna be ready for us this time? I mean, we’re not exactly being conspicuous about anything. Just driving around in this big ol’ church van. Still to this day.”
Lonnie shrugged.
Ingrid sat in the next seat back between Jedi and Makare. Her turn to watch the kids, although no one took the job too seriously anymore.
She leaned forward, still smelling like old blood. That kind of rotten smell that came with a whorchal. Well, her T-shirt still had a few blood stains from her last kill, and her breath was saturated with it. Lonnie wasn’t exactly encouraging proper hygiene. They could only clean up when Lonnie let them, and usually that wasn’t until they came across a fairly inconspicuous gas station where the bathroom doors could lock. And that was if Lonnie felt like stopping. Mostly, he drove straight through until the tank was completely empty, stopping only when he absolutely had to.
They’d get cleaned up after this warehouse job, or maybe when they got back to the trailer in Kentucky.
“Lonnie, can we stop doing this?” Ingrid said.
“Doing what?” Lonnie knew exactly what she meant.
“I don’t know. How do you explain…driving all day and night? Robbing, stealing, and taking chances with our meals instead of being safe and careful? Maybe a good name for it is…insanity.”
“I can’t help it you bitches are always hungry.”
Ingrid slapped the back of the passenger seat in frustration.
Lonnie glanced up at her in the rear view mirror, expecting to see her glaring at him in anger, a look he had seen a lot lately. Instead, he only saw sadness and frustration. “Selix would have never done this to us. She would have had a plan. Would have kept us safe.”
The van went silent then.
Lonnie gripped the wheel hard. His eyes burned through the front windshield, through the pelting rain, and into the road. It took everything he had not to lash out. Who the fuck was she? Who the fuck were they to suggest Lonnie had somehow forgotten about Selix and what she’d done for the gang? That she’d been their leader for a few hundred years while Lonnie had been relatively protected from the worst of things. At least until it had all come down on their heads last year.
He saw her eyes in the
windshield, blue as the sky and running wet with the weather. Those damn eyes of hers ripping through is chest and tearing his heart out. He missed every godamn thing about her and all these assholes could do was give him grief.
“Just give me a little more time.”
“Time, Lons. That’s all we’ve had. We need to ditch this ride and move across the country. Maybe to Florida or even California.”
“We’re not getting rid of the van.”
“Look,” Crash implored, “This piece of shit ain’t making it nowhere. So, you’re condemning us to death in here. You hear me?”
Lonnie’s teeth grated together, tears stinging his eyes.
“I gained fifty more Twitter friends today!” Makare exclaimed from the next seat back where her face was buried in an iPhone. Lonnie had let them all pick up the devices as something to keep them pacified while he figured things out. Namely, where to move the gang and what to do about their captives. Ingrid had pilfered them some wireless accounts and those phones had become their life inside the van.
Still, Ingrid and Crash had gotten sick of the grind after the first month, but Makare had become quite fond of the internet and all its wonders. Lonnie didn’t know much about cyber space, figuring there could be no harm in letting her do it. But right now he wanted to take her phone away and toss it out the window.
“Look. We’re going to keep on doing what we’re doing until I tell us to do something different.”
Ingrid opened a big, fluttering road map and waved it between the seats. She pointed at spots all over the map.
Lonnie didn’t have to look.
“Pittsburgh, Charlston, Wheeling, Huntington, Nashville, Knoxville, Lexington, and Cincinnati. And all the places in between. Lonnie, we’ve been going in one big circle for four months.”
He ground his teeth. “So.”
“Lonnie, we want to find a home. A real home. Here, or maybe even back in Hell.”
“No.”
“Can’t we at least talk about it?”
Lonnie shot back. “Aren’t you afraid of what my sister will do if she regains her power in Hell? She’d hunt you down. All of us. Are you people stupid?”
Crash shook his head. His eyes were wide now that the conversation was heating up, and he always took Ingrid’s side whenever they talked about this. Lonnie was losing the fight a little more each time. “Look, brother. Your sister can’t do any harm here on Earth. She’s tried to kill herself twice already. She’s broken. I ain’t worried about her. We leave her here and go back home.”
“Yes, please leave me alone here on Earth,” Makare practically sung. “I’m an internet sensation. I hardly need to regain my position as a Princess of how. My xestyG0th account now has over a hundred thousand Twitter followers. I get donations from fan boys and girls every day.”
“Yeah, I see you rolling in money.”
Makare held up her phone, a flash of light in her eyes. “I have a PayPal account with over seventy thousand dollars in it. What could I buy with that?”
“I follow her, Lons.” Elsa said, nodding from the very last seat. “She amuses me.”
Lonnie was confounded. “But you’re in this van all day and night together, sitting right next to her most of the time. Why don’t you look amused with her?”
Elsa shrugged. “It’s my job in the van. But on the internet, I’m a fan. We took selfies yesterday. xestyG0th and fangGrrl.”
Crash laughed. “See what I mean?”
“That’s right,” Makare said. “I might never leave Earth. Although my only real experience in this world has been from the back seat of this accursed van, I can’t help but feel there’s more this world has to offer me.”
“I follow you, too,” Jedi said, turning to flash Makare a smile.
Lonnie wasn’t amused. He shook his head slowly, jaw locked. The fact that she was having fun when she was supposed to be suffering couldn’t have been more disappointing.
It was almost like everyone had forgotten Selix except for him.
Ingrid pressed on. “Call Bess. She’ll know someone who can get us back home. And if you won’t, we will. Give us the phone.”
Lonnie felt the lump in his pocket. Ingrid was talking about the phone Bess had given him to call her if they needed any help. Lonnie had almost used it once or twice. “No. We keep going.”
Ingrid let out an exasperated sound. “But why?”
“The phone doesn’t even work anymore. He dug it out of his pocket, held it up, and showed them a black screen. Besides, I thought we hated the ECC.”
“Mostly, yes. But Bess said we’d get a reprieve. She said they wouldn’t harm us.”
“She said that, sure. But who even knows if she’s still in charge?”
Ingrid flopped back in the seat. “We’d know if you just called.”
Crash was no longer amused. His massive form tensed, as always happened when Lonnie was about to abandon the argument. “Lonnie, if the phone don’t work, we can go to Lexington. Back to the Citadel.”
“Right. The place where they have anti-fade ripper ammo, as well as grenade launchers and helicopters—”
“Better than livin’ in this van.”
“Oh, I don’t know. This is a luxury van. Comfortable seating for six. Lots of sleeper space and a heater that comes on for no apparent reason.”
It was the gang’s turn to be unimpressed. They knew how Lonnie got when the argument was over. They slouched back in their seats and grew glum again. The only brightness emanated from their cell phone screens, the white light casting weird shadows all over the roof of the van.
The argument was over. Stalemate.
But Lonnie was losing his gang. Bit by bit, day by day.
“I have to pee,” Makare said.
“Me too,” said Crash. “Unless these deluxe accommodations have a toilet I don’t know about. Or maybe I just whip it out and piss right here on the floor.
Lonnie just shook his head, showing his annoyance. But as he leaned back to put the phone away, he clicked a button and saw the fifty seven unplayed messages on the screen.
Two more since the last time he’d checked.
Chapter 4
They got to the end of I-77, passed through Charleston where the interstate changed to I-64, and crossed the Kanawha River. It was 2:45AM and they’d only passed one cop car hanging around at a turnabout between the north and southbound lanes.
The cop car freaked Lonnie out. It was their tenth time through Charleston after trying to rob the storage facility the first time, and the authorities were no doubt looking for their van.
He was relieved when no blue and red flashing lights chased them across the river.
Maybe this cop was on break.
They drove west a little longer until the interstate turned north and crossed over the Kanawha once again. The storage facility was located just off the exit in Dunbar, and Lonnie made sure to be careful braking the huge van as they entered a spiraling turn getting off the expressway.
At the end of the ramp, Lonnie took a right on Highway 25 and looked for the road that would get them around the back of the facility. They took another right on Goff Mountain Road and continued along that until they passed the storage facility and flea market grounds on the right. The Dunbar Flea Market was one of the biggest trade shows around, open Friday through Sunday every weekend.
It was early Wednesday morning. Midweek. Lonnie hoped the security would be about as lax as possible.
He turned the van into an old dirt road that skirted the grounds and parked it in a little turnabout next to a fence.
“Elsa, you’ve got kiddie duty.”
“Yes, dearie.”
He glanced back to see Makare and Elsa sitting side-by-side as chummy as could be, the light from their phones illuminating their faces.
Some guarding.
Lonnie opened his door with a wretched squeal, got out, and went around to the back of the van. Ingrid and Crash followed him. Lonnie threw open the back
doors to reveal all the weapons and tools they’d brought with them on this excursion.
“Just take a handgun each. We’ll need the bolt cutters more than anything.”
Crash grabbed the bolt cutters and handed them each a couple large army duffels they’d use to carry the stolen goods. The big man turned to Lonnie. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Do you want to go back to robbing dealers? You know what that’s going to get us.”
“Yeah, same as robbin’ legitimate business folk right out in the open.”
“It’s not in the open.”
“Man, they’re sure to have cameras after the last time. Probably another guard, too. We can’t be killing no people, man. That’s going to get a hundred cops on our asses.”
“Ain’t going to be no cameras. Ain’t going to be no cops.”
The big man just shook his head. “All right, Prince Mardokh of the Van. Let’s get this over with. I’m tired of arguing with you.”
Crash used Lonnie’s real name, Mardokh, whenever he really wanted to bust his balls.
“You can’t argue with him. He’s too pig-headed.” Ingrid’s German accent was thick.
“Shut up, you two. Let’s go.”
They didn’t bother with any kind of pep talk from Crash. That ritual had died with Selix.
They went to the fence and Crash hefted the cutters.
While Crash and Lonnie wore the same attire as always—jeans, T-shirts, boots, and Lonnie’s jacket with the inverted crosses on the sleeves—Ingrid and Elsa had been forced to adapt to the road. Still gothic in black and purples and reds, they’d ditched the tall shoes, skirts, and billowy sleeves for a more punk-goth look. Flat-soled boots and black jean shorts topped with black mesh or T-shirts were the flavor now.
Makare wore whatever she could find, and he supposed that had become part of her charm. He’d sneaked a peak at her Twitter account once and saw she liked to dress in a fashion called zef, some South African trend, which encouraged wearing whatever you damn well could find.