The Influence

by Bentley Little

  “We’ll figure it out on the way,” Ross said. “We’d better get moving, or we won’t be able to drive.”

  McDaniels and Hec got in the backseat with their rifles, and Kevin sat up front with him. Ross put the car into gear and started moving out slowly. The road was indeed starting to get slippery, and the snow, as it hit the windshield in one of its colored states, melted to gelatinous goop rather than water, but the wipers kept the glass relatively clear, and he was able to see where he was going.

  He turned left at the corner where the beauty parlor used to be. A disturbing thought occurred to him. He was lucky to have escaped Magdalena the first time, especially with that mob gathering in front of the store. Did that mean that his luck had now changed and he would not be able to get out safely this time?

  Ross tried not to obsess on the thought, but it worried him.

  He’d also had no problem getting in to see the monster before, with Lita and Dave. Did that mean they would not be able to get anywhere near it today?

  Such concerns were not unreasonable. If McDaniels was right and the thing was close to hatching, it stood to reason that its powers would be getting stronger.

  Ross drove carefully, hands at ten and two on the wheel. “So how do you think we get in there? Where do we go?” The last time, he and Lita and Dave had pretended to be believers. He didn’t think that ruse would work again.

  “I say we go east,” McDaniels said, “past the driveway, to where the road dips. There’s a dry wash there, which’ll give us some cover if we keep low. I’m not sure where on his ranch it ends up, but if it goes anywhere near the back of the barn, like I think it does, we can prob’ly get close where we need to be.”

  The barn. That was a good idea. It offered them a place to hide, and if they could find a way in there—and it was unoccupied—it would also be easily defensible.

  Ross slowed the car. Ahead, through the snowflakes, he could see two very tall figures standing in the road before them. From here, they looked like scarecrows, although that didn’t make any sense. “Uh, guys?” he said. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “I seen those before,” Hec told him.

  Unsure of what to do, Ross stopped the car, hoping to gain a few minutes. He needed time to think. Did he have time? He’d assumed the figures in the road ahead were stationary, but as he looked through the windshield, he saw that they appeared to be moving closer.

  They were walking.

  It knew they were here.

  So much for the element of surprise.

  He felt amazingly calm, considering, and though Ross would not have described himself as even remotely brave, they were in this, it had started, and he was going to see it through to the end, no matter what happened. “So,” he said. “Any ideas? Should we back up and come at this thing from another angle?”

  “Let me out,” Kevin said. “I need to get a few things from the trunk.”

  “We could try shooting it,” Hec said dubiously, “but I don’t know as it’d do much good. Might just be a waste a ammo.”

  Kevin opened the passenger door and hurried outside in the snow. Reaching under the dash, Ross popped the trunk. With one eye on the slowly advancing figures up the road, he, Hec and McDaniels also got out. Kevin had opened two of his boxes and was rifling through them. “I wasn’t sure why I packed some of this stuff, but now I know.”

  He withdrew a couple of cheap wine bottles with short lengths of rag stuffed into their uncorked openings. Quickly, smoothly, he withdrew the rags, unscrewed the lid of a plastic gasoline container, pulled out a hose extension and poured gasoline into the bottles without spilling a drop. He shoved the rags back in. “Molotov cocktails. Primitive but effective.” Kevin grinned, and for the first time Ross had reason to believe that their plan might actually work. “I know what to do, Unc. I just need you to do what I say. I need everyone to do what I say.”

  “Got it.”

  His nephew’s luck had changed, and it was with a sense of relief that Ross took one of the bottles and a Bic lighter.

  But if Kevin’s luck had changed…

  Ross didn’t even want to go there.

  “We’ll wait until they’re close,” Kevin told his uncle. He motioned toward the other two men. “Why don’t you get off to the side there and pick a place where you can fire on them.”

  “I don’t think it’ll work,” Hec said. “I don’t think they can be killed.”

  “They aren’t made out of Kevlar. Even if they can’t be killed, you can probably knock the heads off their bodies or shoot out their legs. Those are some good rifles you guys have. They can definitely do damage.”

  “Good point,” McDaniels said, moving into position.

  “Here they come.”

  They were, in fact, made out of mud, Ross saw as the figures drew closer. And they were indeed scarecrows, though their lack of uniformity gave each one an alarming individuality. While he knew that mud wouldn’t burn, the clothes the scarecrows were wearing would, and he hoped that would at least distract the figures long enough for McDaniels and Hec to blast the shit out of their legs and bring them down.

  “Light your rag,” Kevin said. “Throw on the count of three, and aim for the center of the chest. One…two…three!”

  The bottles hit within a second of each other, shattering and engulfing the top half of each scarecrow in a whoosh of flame. The result was better than they could have hoped for. McDaniels and Hec need not have wasted their bullets, because even before their legs shattered in an explosion of dirt, the scarecrows were lurching about confusedly, turning blindly in different directions. Whatever sort of mud made up their forms definitely was flammable, and the mounting flames not only burned off the scarecrows’ clothing but quickly engulfed their entire bodies. The one on the left tumbled into a ditch on the side of the road as bullets tore apart its leg. The one on the right toppled over where it stood, its lumpy form burning on the hardpacked dirt.

  “Back in the car!” Ross ordered. “Let’s get out of here!”

  He was trying to think fast and on the fly, though that was not something he was good at. Kevin slammed the trunk shut and got into the front passenger seat, while Hec and McDaniels hopped back into the rear seat with their rifles. Ross drove around the downed burning scarecrow in the center of the road. The snow had stopped, he noticed, and he slowed the car. “What should we do now? It knows we’re here. Maybe we should just take the direct route and go straight up the drive.”

  “We don’t know that it knows,” McDaniels said. “Those scarecrows coulda just been patrolling randomly, making sure people stay away. If we drive past the entrance to the ranch, the angel might just think we’re passing by.”

  “Angels know everything,” Hec said simply.

  “It’s not an angel,” Ross repeated. “If anything, it’s a demon.”

  “I’m just sayin’ we should stick with the plan,” McDaniels said. “The driveway’s a lot easier for them to defend. We have more chance, I think, if we sneak through that wash. Although,” he added, “maybe we should hurry it up a bit.”

  With the snow stopped, it was easier to see, and what had remained on the ground was already starting to melt into that gloopy mess. Ross drove quickly by the head of Holt’s drive, and, though he deeply wanted to, he did not even look in that direction as they passed in a probably futile effort to pretend that the ranch was not their destination. The road dipped down soon after, and McDaniels told him to stop, this was it. Ross shut off the car, holding his breath, half-expecting to be attacked by…something. But nothing came after them, and after only a moment’s hesitation, Ross opened his door and got out, the others following suit.

  He walked immediately around to the trunk, popping it open. “What do you need?” he asked his nephew. McDaniels and his friend would be carrying their rifles and ammunition, so he and Kevin would have to take the arson supplies themselves. It seemed unfeasible to carry all of those boxes across open land for who knew how fa
r, and he was hoping not all of it was needed.

  Kevin opened each of the cartons, looked through them and made a quick determination. “You take that box there with the Coke bottles. It’s pretty light. Think you can carry it?”

  Ross lifted the carton. It was light, if slightly awkward to carry. “Sure.”

  Kevin was already rearranging items, moving things from one box to another. “I’ll take this one,” he said finally.

  “Let’s move out then.”

  There was a barbed wire fence surrounding Holt’s property, but it remained level at the top, even where it went over the wash, which meant that one post hung in the air above the dry stream bed, leaving a space beneath the bottom strand of wire. McDaniels ducked under it, and Ross passed through his box to the handyman before going under himself. Hec followed after, and Kevin crouched over, clutching his carton of materials to his chest as he made his way under the fence.

  Ross took his box back from McDaniels. “Lead the way,” he said. “But keep an open eye.”

  The wash wasn’t deep, but there was enough brush growing along the sides to keep them hidden from anyone who might be looking. Ross’ concern was that whatever was waiting for them did not need to look, but he said nothing and tried to focus on the positive.

  It was not a short walk. A half-hour later, they were still trudging through the sand, and it was ten minutes after that that McDaniels raised his hand, silently telling them to stop. The good news was that they had not been intercepted. No one or no thing had come after them. But when McDaniels poked his head above the edge of the wash and peered through the branches of a young palo verde tree, motioning for the rest of them to do the same, they saw a pen attached to Holt’s barn filled with people running about on all fours like animals. They were naked and filthy, and even from this distance, Ross thought he recognized some of them.

  McDaniels ducked back down. “The angel’s right behind the barn there. But if we try to go past that pen, someone’ll shout a warnin’. Even if they’re not part of it, even if they’re captured, they’ll call out for us to save ’em, and everyone’ll know we’re here.”

  “We go past the barn,” Hec told him, “double back around.”

  “It’s out of our way, and we don’t know what’ll be waitin’ for us at that point. Might be even worse.”

  “Well, we can’t go through this way.”

  The wash continued on, heading out and away from the house and barn, and they decided to go on a bit further and see if they couldn’t find a better way in.

  “Unc?” Kevin said quietly.

  “Yeah?” They were all whispering now.

  “I need a hose. I need some water.”

  He frowned, confused. “To drink?”

  “No. To put in those bottles.” He nodded toward the carton Ross was carrying. “That’s what makes them work.”

  He wished his nephew had said something earlier, but he only nodded and passed the word along.

  “Hopefully there is one,” was all McDaniels had to say.

  The bed of the wash had gotten rocky, slowing their progress, and, ahead, a tree stump marked a change in the direction of the dry stream. They followed the turn—

  And stopped.

  Squatting in the sand, waiting for them, was a man with the head of a jackal. He was wearing muddy jeans and a flannel shirt that looked familiar, and Ross was pretty sure that he used to be Fred Hanson, the guy who’d cleaned out Lita and Dave’s septic tank. Ross glanced over at McDaniels, whose blanched face told him that he’d recognized the man, too.

  But that didn’t stop McDaniels from raising his rifle. “Stop right there,” he said. “Don’t move, don’t say a word. I hear a peep outta you, I’m takin’ off your head.”

  The jackal man was not alone, Ross saw. Behind him, several small creatures cavorted in the wash, jumping from rock to rock. They looked like miniature rat-faced kangaroos, but it was difficult to see them clearly because they kept moving.

  Hec was counting. “…three, four, five… I see five of ’em.” His rifle, too, was raised.

  “What do we do now?” McDaniels asked Ross. “It’s kind of a Mexican standoff here.”

  Then the jackal man roared like a lion and leaped forward, the creatures behind him scurrying in his wake, squealing in high-pitched voices and showing fangs.

  This close, the report from McDaniel’s rifle was deafening. Hec’s followed instantly after, or maybe at the same time—it was hard to tell because he was firing over and over again. The jackal head exploded in a burst of blood, fur and flesh, and the little leaping monsters were blasted into nothing.

  “They know where we are now,” Kevin said, hefting his box.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound.” McDaniels pointed up the sloping side of the wash. “It’s now or never. Let’s do it.”

  That was the last word any of them spoke as they ran out of the dry stream bed, across an open area, and along the east side of the barn. In the lead now, Ross stopped and peeked around the corner of the building, looking toward the place where the smokehouse should have been. He quickly pulled back. There was an army out there. Literally dozens of men and women, seemingly all of them armed, some with farming implements, some with firearms, were stationed in front of, behind and to the sides of what looked like an enormous black egg the size of a small car, a situation so daunting as to seem nearly insurmountable.

  As of yet, they did not appear to have been spotted, and no one was coming up behind them, so Ross gestured for the others to follow him and backtracked several yards. Crouching down along the side of the barn, his box in front of him, he explained what he’d seen. “We’re outnumbered ten to one. Anybody have any ideas?”

  Kevin nodded calmly. He was already opening his box. “I’ll create a distraction. I’ll set up an explosion in the barn. Everyone will come running, and that’s when I’ll go in and take out that…angel?...demon?...whatever it is. You guys just cover me.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” Ross said. “And wouldn’t know how to shoot it if I did,” he admitted.

  Kevin smiled, pointing to the box in front of his uncle. “That’s what those are for. And that’s why we need some water.” He picked up one of the two-liter Coke bottles. “There’s Drano crystals in here. And aluminum foil. All you do is add water, shake and throw. Basically, it’ll explode and spray acid all over. It won’t start a fire, but it’ll take care of anyone in its way.”

  Ross felt uncomfortable about actually hurting anyone. Cameron Holt had always been an asshole, but that didn’t necessarily hold true for everyone here. And even assholes didn’t deserve to die. These were just people who’d gotten sucked into the monster’s orbit, maybe the people who’d been there New Year’s Eve when it had been shot down. Chances were, if they could pull this off and destroy that black monstrosity, those individuals would revert back to normal once it was all over. They couldn’t do that if they were dead. Or scarred by acid.

  That jackal man—Fred Hanson?—was already on his conscience.

  At the same time, he had no illusion that they weren’t doing the right thing. Dead, that creature had caused enough horror to justify destroying it. If it was allowed to “hatch” as McDaniels put it, to become what it was becoming, who knew what damage it would cause, what people it would kill?

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked Kevin.

  His nephew was unspooling a long length of wire. “I’ve got some det wire, here.”

  “Det wire?”

  “Detonation wire. I’m going to use it to set a fire inside the barn. If I can get in there without anyone seeing me.”

  Hec was already off, heading around the back corner of the building, presumably to check if it was empty.

  “I’m sure there’s something flammable inside there. I’ll pick a bale of hay or some old wood or a pile of newspapers, soak it with gas, spread things out so it’ll shoot simultaneously to each area of the barn, pop in the end of the det wire, spool it out here, li
ght it and haul ass. The whole place’ll go up in an instant. That’ll bring them running. We need to be in a position at that point to swoop in while they’re distracted. I’ll soak the angel demon with gas and gel, set it off, and we’re done.”

  “What’s gel?” Ross asked.

  Kevin grinned. “Good stuff.”

  Hec came running back along the side of the barn. “I think it’s clear,” he said. “At least, I got in without seeing anyone or being seen. The door’s wide open.”

  “Any hay in there?” Kevin asked.

  “Mountains of it.”

  “We’re in.”

  Ross was impressed by the fact that his nephew had suddenly become such an expert in firestarting, but he worried that the opposite might occur, too, especially in such close proximity to the monster. What if Hec’s sharpshooting skills suddenly deserted him? What if McDaniels couldn’t aim for shit?

  It didn’t matter. They had no choice. This was the only plan they had.

  “Before we do anything, we need to find water,” Kevin said, pushing the hair out of his eyes.

  “There’ll be water in the corral,” McDaniels said. “For the horses and cattle. Might be a spring or a pipe-fed barrel, but it’ll be damn near impossible to get to. You’ll have to go through the people you’re gonna use it on to do it.”

  “There must be, like, a hose near the house, right?”

  “Usually,” McDaniels said. “But I never worked on Holt’s plumbing, so I don’t know for sure.”

  “I’ll take that chance,” Ross said. He was pretty sure he had a water bottle in the car, and he wished he’d brought it, but his nephew hadn’t said anything at the time.

  “Once everyone takes off and runs to the barn, it’s your job to keep them there. Inside, outside, doesn’t matter. Just keep that angel demon free so I can set up shop. You have six of those bottles. Use them wisely. After the first explosion, it’ll probably scare them enough to keep them back. It’s pretty gnarly. But if it doesn’t work out, and you run out of bottles before I’m done…” He turned toward Hec and McDaniels. “You two keep them in line.”