Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  “Get any sense of how much farther we’re going to have to run?” Lerner asked. It wasn’t like he was winded, though he could hear his body and it sure sounded like he was. “I only ask because this shell of mine gets wheezier the farther we go.”

  “You can control that if you put your mind to it,” Duncan said, not even breaking a sweat. Not that he broke a real sweat, ever. He wasn’t wheezing, either.

  “Yeah, but that’d require me to actually put my mind to it,” Lerner said, hiding his irritation with Duncan and his total lack of exertion, “and I have other things on it at the moment.”

  “Such as?” Duncan asked coolly. Lerner was a little surprised; Duncan wasn’t the type to ask.

  “Such as what’s doing this shit for one,” Lerner said. “Such as what we’re going to do when we catch it. Such as how sweet it would be to find the essence behind that fucking screen Spellman and crack them open slow, after forcing them to drink some marstap solution—” He couldn’t stop himself from smiling at that. Marstap solution burned the shit out of an essence. No demon wanted to go anywhere near it, but he’d gladly procure a few dozen bottles if he could turn some loose on the bastard that was making his life a hell of its own lately.

  “Not exactly your deepest thoughts,” Duncan said.

  “But some damned fun ones,” Lerner said. Especially the last one.

  The moon was hanging high overhead, and the steady sound of their feet along the asphalt path was starting to grate on Lerner. Running was not fun, not for him, and he had a hard time imagining any human could enjoy it either, what with their muscles and joints and all the other stuff that got to experience the jarring pain of the up and down leg motions. Why did humans enjoy exerting themselves? he wondered. Was it all down to those curious endorphins they got afterward? He’d read they got those after sex, too, which sounded a lot more interesting than running to him.

  “You’ve got that look on your face again,” Duncan warned him.

  “I’m keeping my thoughts to myself,” Lerner said. Duncan just griped about everything fun. “You’re what the humans call a mother hen about this shit. Or a wet rag.”

  If Duncan had a reply, he kept it to himself. “I’m still not sensing anything.”

  “So they’re just gone? Or it is. I guess it could be an it.”

  “Seems like.” Duncan slowed and Lerner adjusted his speed along with his partner. The breeze shifted the trees above, making a rattling noise that Lerner did not care for. Not in this situation, anyway. “The path forks up ahead, too.”

  Lerner looked and found it did, indeed, fork. One way looked like it was a dirt path, the other the continuation of the asphalt one, winding right to follow the path of the river. What did they call it? The Caledonia, that’s right. Like Scotland. Lerner had been to Scotland before, a long time ago. Which probably meant it was due for a hotspot at some point in the next twenty years or so. That’d be nice. He’d kind of liked the taste of haggis last time he’d been there.

  “Look at this,” Duncan said, and Lerner finally came to a stop just where the path forked. He smiled. Something was forked, all right. He wandered up to Duncan, feeling the quiet singing of his essence inside his shell. A run like that would have put some humans in the hospital. Lerner had done some study on body types, and it was always interesting to him—

  “Focus,” Duncan said, interrupting his thought.

  “What am I looking for?” Lerner gazed into the dark but didn’t see anything save for a trail.

  “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “We don’t even know if the—the whatever—if it came this way.”

  Lerner sighed. This town was such a bust for him. Where was an easier assignment when he needed one? There were eighteen hotspots, and almost certainly every single one of them was in less peril than this town. Why couldn’t the office have sent him to one of those? Somewhere pleasant, maybe. Like Ecuador. Or barren, like the one in the Atacama Desert in Chile. That one was probably a nice, easy ride, just keeping an eye on some chu’tuaka to make sure they didn’t burrow too deep into the earth and cause quakes. “I don’t see anything but tire tracks. Little ones.” He snorted. “So unless you think our demons were riding on bicycles …”

  Duncan stared into the darkness, and he did it for long enough that Lerner took notice. “No, I don’t think they’re bicyclists,” Duncan finally said, and then lapsed into another uncomfortable silence. When he spoke again, Lerner could almost hear the misery. “This town’s really going to fall, isn’t it?”

  “It’s just a few isolated incidents,” Lerner said, brushing it off. He realized on some level he was really just telling Duncan what he needed to hear, but still, he did it. “Nothing big enough and bad enough to wipe it off the map has shown up yet. Just a bunch of small-timers with big damned ambitions. Bugs with plans to take over the world can’t be taken too seriously.”

  Duncan glanced back at him. “That last one got pretty close.”

  “To taking over the world, nah,” Lerner said, brushing him off. “A Sygraath gone crazy is not exactly the doom of mankind, and it’s not the herald of anything other than a town experiencing a hotspot. Demons do crazy things at hotspots. It’s a law of nature, like coeds taking their tops off at spring break.” He paused and stared straight at Duncan, concentrated on speaking to the essence within the shell. “It’ll be all right.” He said it. He tried to send exactly that feeling, in exactly that way, directly to Duncan—the real Duncan, inside the shell.

  Then he spent a long time wondering if Duncan knew he was lying.

  ***

  Mick slept in a trailer with a couple other guys from the carnival. They were human, but that didn’t bother him. He’d lived among humans for longer than he could remember, after all, and that was fine. The food was good—if a little greasy—and they had a kind of tight-knit companionship. Mick didn’t feel any concern he’d be found out, because he could blend better than most kinds of demons. He never reverted to his true form, could eat human food and excrete human waste. In fact, the only time he was ever exposed—really exposed—was when he needed to get laid. And really, not until a few weeks afterward, when the pregnancy tests started coming up positive. That, he supposed, was going to be a little different this time, what with technological and communication advances. It was a brave new world. And now he would be open to exposure, unless somehow the whole thing stayed underground.

  Fortunately, this was rare. Rare, and filled with joy.

  He could always feel it coming on. It had been building for months, the sense of urgent need. He’d thought maybe he could keep it bottled through the last few cities that they were in, and he had. He was looking for a really isolated place to dump his load, because doing it in a major city was just too exposed. He tried to play by the rules as best he could, keep things under wraps so the Office of Occultic Concordance didn’t come shit on him.

  But it wasn’t like you could hide a whole town going down in flames.

  Ideally he’d have preferred to keep going a little longer. Somewhere even more isolated than this place would be a lot better, but in the modern world it was hard to find isolated anymore. He’d watched the world change, watched the web that tied the country together get tighter and tighter, and he’d worried. In the 1980s, Hobbs Green had been small enough that it could be cordoned off and just vanish.

  Now, though, it was a different story, wasn’t it? Back then, he’d watched the news reports every chance he’d gotten, hoping not to see a broadcast centering on how a whole small town had gotten pregnant after a carnival came to town. And he hadn’t seen it, which was a beautiful thing. With only three networks and a bunch of newspapers that didn’t want to cover news of the weird, he had been safe. Not even the scandal rags had reported on Hobbs Green.

  Now, though, it was twenty-four-hour news, and more networks than he could count. If that wasn’t enough, there were blogs and internet sites, Twitter feeds and other shit he’d only heard talked about. Lots more ch
ances of word getting out. Which would only be a concern if it got latched onto and spread far and wide.

  Maybe it’d just fade away, though. Most people still didn’t want news of the weird. They wanted to live their lives on an even keel, sure of their place in the world and in the order of things. Which worked for Mick, because his place in the world was a different one than everyone else’s, and his view of the order of things was far afield from most others.

  Every once in a while he wondered if in keeping things under wraps, in burying his secrets of the years, he’d been the lucky beneficiary of some help. It didn’t seem too farfetched to him that there was someone pulling the strings at those networks back in the olden days, someone whose job it was to keep things like Hobbs Green from disrupting the ordinary view of the world.

  He didn’t like to dwell on that too much, though. Mostly he just liked to get his job done, enjoy the company of the humans around him, and sit back to wait for the build of his essence to start pushing at him.

  He could feel it coming on, too. He’d already latched onto that Molly girl he’d seen earlier. He could tell she was going to be the one for him. She had just the right mix of rebellion and anger and curiosity. It was a perfect fit.

  Of course he’d probably have to leave this carnival behind after this time. Maybe get a job somewhere steady for once. He’d have thirty years to settle himself somewhere before he’d need to start moving again. That was enough time to live a life. A human life, anyway.

  Mick thought back to that Molly again. Yeah, she wasn’t bad. He liked knees. That would have made him weird, he guessed, based on his conversations with the guys in the trailer. They always talked about girls. He’d been around enough guys talking about girls that he knew what to say—tits, ass, oh, yeah, she was a smooth one when I got up in there—but he knew what he liked. Knees.

  He didn’t labor under any illusions of trying to blend in when he didn’t have to. He was different. His view of the world was different. The other guys, they might have left babies behind, changed a life or two along the way at most. Mick left behind destruction in his wake. And he was as okay with that being the price of getting off as the guys in the trailer were with their cost.

  In fact, he couldn’t wait to do it again. Soon.

  5.

  Arch yawned a big fat yawn as he stood in the crusted, muddy ruts of Old Man MacGruder’s driveway. Dawn was breaking overhead, and the sky was already a gentle blue. The last few days of dry, hot weather had completely eliminated any trace of the torrential rains. Arch hadn’t never really seen anything like that before, at least not that quick—but then, he hadn’t seen a rain like had come recently, either, and wondered if all this was the product of the hotspot.

  He pushed at the ridge of the giant tire tread that his shoe rested on. It flaked and crumbled with a little effort, like a segment of wall falling down into the middle of the track. It didn’t do much to entertain him, but he didn’t need much at this point. He’d been standing around in the park all night, and it’d worn him to the point where he was about ready to be cursing.

  Well, maybe not that much.

  Alison was standing across from him and so was Erin, with Hendricks off to the side. All of them but Alison had jumbo cups of coffee in front of them. Hendricks and Erin were just exchanging glances, furtive—and a little cooler than yesterday, if Arch wasn’t mistaken.

  “What was up with Lauren Darlington, Arch?” Erin’s question cut over the quiet hum of the crickets just over in the meadow. Some bird was chirping nearby, too, and they shut up as she asked the question.

  “No idea,” Arch said. The good Dr. Darlington had given him the stink-eye when he walked up to the crime scene, then said something about how she had to go home and sleep—which, even probably being true, had sounded like an excuse to everyone, including Reeve—and took off like she was about to go for a run in the opposite direction. “She’s always been a mite cold to me.”

  “She seemed fine until you showed up,” Erin said, and he could tell she was musing on it. “Then she clammed up fast and took off. Sounded a lot ruder to you than she did talking to me, too.”

  Arch just shrugged. “She seems to have a problem with me, but I’ll be dogged if I know what it is.”

  “Maybe she’s a racist,” Hendricks said, sounding utterly unconcerned. “Do we need to wait for the demon brothers, or should we get this show on the road?”

  “You tell me,” Arch said, eyeing the cowboy coolly. He switched his gaze over to Alison, who was still operating a few degrees south of normal. This was not usual for her, but then again, neither were demons and all manner of other trouble.

  “They do seem awfully interested in Starling,” Hendricks said, and he looked like he was chewing it over. “Maybe a little too interested.”

  “They might be able to give us some insight,” Alison said, still sedate. “They know this world better than we do.”

  “And it might just be that they’ll take whatever we tell them and run somewhere bad with it,” Arch said. He still didn’t trust Lerner and Duncan, not really. They may have been handy up on Tallakeet Dam, but that didn’t mean they were anything other than self-serving. Or demonkind-serving. One of those.

  “Do what?” Hendricks’s face was crumpled in confusion. “You think they’ll take the basics of this—which is, by the way, not much—Lucia turned into Starling when we confronted her—and do what with it? Kill her?”

  “Maybe,” Arch said. “We don’t know what Starling is. Seems to me like she’s on the other side.”

  Hendricks rolled his eyes. “Like an angel or something?”

  Arch had a little trouble digesting that. “Maybe. I don’t know. Hollywood told me they don’t get involved anymore. Not that he was a sterling source of information, but I’m not sure why he would lie.”

  “Because he was a piece of shit?” Hendricks suggested. “I have a hard time buying Starling as an angel.”

  “Do you even believe in angels?” Arch asked, still eyeing him.

  “I believe there could be creatures that call themselves angels,” Hendricks said. “But if they exist, they’re like demons to me—just some other, different form of life. Might as well be aliens for all I care. There’s nothing mystical about them, and the idea they would serve some all-mighty protector and master and creator of human life is such bullshit I can’t even find the words to say—”

  “Got it,” Arch said, more than a little sour. He was used to the cowboy’s sour attitude toward the Almighty, but he still didn’t love to listen to the man sermonize about it. Probably any more than Hendricks would have enjoyed hearing him sermonize about his beliefs.

  Hendricks just rolled his eyes. “So, now you know. Starling and Lucia are one and the same, at least as a matter of physical form. The hooker seems to disappear when Starling is on the premises, though, and acted like she didn’t know what happened when she came back.”

  “That’s just weird,” Erin said.

  “Weirder than demons rampaging through your town?” Hendricks grinned at her as he said it. Arch wondered if she found it charming.

  “No,” Erin said. By the way that she said it, he knew she did not.

  “There was another thing,” Alison said, and for the first time in a while, she looked a little more animated. “Starling gave us a warning …”

  Arch listened. Listened to every word. Even in the early morning summer heat, it gave him a chill.

  ***

  Lerner pulled into the driveway of the farm that the humans used as a meeting place, sighing as he turned in. Duncan hadn’t spoken to him since the fork in the path, and they’d had a long walk back to the car after that, so that had been a lot of silence. He wasn’t mad, Lerner could tell, just had his mind on other things. Normally, that would have been fine, but Lerner was running short on things he was willing to keep to himself. Still, he kept his quiet. Painful as it was.

  The town car bumped in the ruts as he took her down the
driveway to the farm. He could see the two cop cars ahead, and another car—probably Deputy Stan’s wife’s car, since he doubted the cowboy had a vehicle to his name—and eased up behind them. It looked like the humans had all fallen silent. Lerner was a little bit of an observer of human nature, and nobody in this group looked remotely happy. At least, that was his professional opinion.

  “Don’t everybody get all excited and greet us at once,” Lerner said as he stepped out of the car. Duncan was as subdued as the rest of this group, which was annoying in its own right.

  “Did you find anything?” Deputy Harris spoke first. She looked the least down of all these people. For fuck’s sake, were they all that depressed about a couple people getting splattered? Humans were weird. He glanced at Duncan and saw a long face there too. Maybe not just humans.

  “Not really,” Duncan answered, breaking his several-hour silence. Lerner just raised an eyebrow at him. “Path came to a split, and all we saw were bicycle tracks.”

  “Which makes sense, since it’s a bicycle path as well as a walking path,” Deputy Stan said. “Hard to believe some demon thing that made as much noise as Erin described didn’t leave a trail.”

  “Unless it was flying off the ground,” Hendricks said. Lerner thought the cowboy looked like he was thinking deeply.

  “You run into a lot of flying demons, cowboy?” Lerner asked with a grin. He was just messing with the cowboy; of course there were demons that could fly. But that close to the ground? That would just be a weird choice. Especially given the noise the thing had made.

  “A couple, yeah,” Hendricks said, staring him down. The cowboy had found his spine. Lerner liked that, too. When they’d first met, he’d just sort of folded on a few things Lerner had tweaked him about, and that kind of shit got old fast. A mark who doesn’t know he’s a mark was not as much fun as pulling something over on someone who was aware it was coming. That was a challenge.