Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

“I like all kinds of movies,” Mick said. He really did. They took him away—not that he needed to get away because he liked his life. But it was nice to see other things, other places that he couldn’t go. “It’s a nice retreat for a while.” No need for her to think he was anything other than a noble drifter suffering his way through life. Women still liked angst, didn’t they? He’d heard that somewhere. Angst and brooding.

  “Yeah, well, this isn’t a romcom,” she said. “You’re not cute and charming, about to sweep me off my feet. I’m not lovelorn and craving a man’s attention.” She stopped and turned, letting him get a little ahead of her. “You’re only in town for a few days, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a little guarded. This was different. She was way more jaded than he would have expected. He could still feel the innocence, but it was definitely behind a wall. He hesitated, trying to figure out which track to take. “Listen, I just wanted to say hi, maybe … get to know you a little—”

  “In the biblical sense?” she asked. Holy shit, was she blunt.

  “Ah, well, look,” Mick said, trying to think fast. This had not happened before. “I’d be lying if I said you didn’t interest me in that way, because let’s face it—I’m a teenager, and I think about sex all the time.” Neither of those was true, though he was thinking about sex all the time right now. “But that doesn’t mean that I have shady ulterior motives. That I’m just following you around like a dog, trying to figure out how to hump your leg—”

  “Gross, but possibly accurate,” Molly said, her eyebrows lifted and lips pursed. “I don’t know you.”

  “Nobody knows anybody when they first meet,” Mick said and chanced the smile, but faintly this time. Too big would be sleazy. Subtlety was the key with this girl. Everything needed to be subtle, because she was a major overanalyzer. “I get that maybe you want to write me off already, save yourself some time by fitting me into some neat little box, ‘Oh, he’s a user, I’ve heard of this before—’” he watched her blanch just slightly and knew he’d hit home—she didn’t have any real experience with a user, “but you don’t know me, as you just pointed out. I could be a perfectly nice person. I could be the nicest person you’ve ever met, but you’d never know because you’re making a snap judgment based on what you think I am.” He paused, trying to give a little effect. He was really having to work for this one. “You know what they call that, when you make a decision about someone based on a snap judgment? It’s called—”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, eyes almost closed. He sighed a little within. Back in the game. And all it took was preying on this poor girl’s deep desire not to appear prejudiced against anyone at all, ever, for any reason. An open mind was a wonderful thing to lay waste to. “Fine. I don’t know where you think this will get you, but—”

  “Go out with me,” Mick said. She wasn’t going to be a one-shot, that was for sure. Not an easy conquest like the others. This might take some work, because her wide, innocent eyes had been tempered with something—some tales from some sour source poured onto the lenses to turn the rose-colored glasses into shit-colored ones. “Just a dinner at a diner, something to give us a chance to talk. Find common ground.”

  “And what do you plan to do on this common ground?” Molly asked. Now the jadedness was back—a little.

  “I want you to like me,” Mick said, adopting an aura of frankness that was as false as his purported age. “I want you to like me so you’ll hang out with me again. So I can have someone to talk to who smells nice.” He smiled. “I sleep in a trailer with five other guys who all work the carnival, and we have a portable shower that doesn’t get used that much by anyone but me…” He shrugged ruefully.

  “Oh, God, lovely,” Molly had a look of genuine disgust. “Yes, thank you for that horrifying glimpse into carnival life.”

  “I promise I use it at least once a week, whether I need it or not,” Mick said, grinning.

  Her disgust broke into a smile that wrinkled her nose. It still had a little distaste in it, but less. “That’s a sad story. You want me to bring my violin on this date you’re proposing?”

  “Just bring yourself,” Mick said. “Save the violin for some other time.” He smiled. “Whaddya say?” He made it sound like he was a Brooklyn kid with the accent. It gave him that strange and unusual sensation, like he had brought something foreign into this girl’s little world. He wondered if she felt the same about it.

  She got a look like she was rolling it around in her head. “All right,” she said after a moment, and with more than a little reluctance. “A date. Only one. And in a well-lit, supervised environment. The diner here in town, after school—in broad daylight.” She eyed him. “If you think you can get out of work for that.”

  “Hell yeah, I can get out of work for that,” Mick said with a grin. Maybe this wouldn’t be so hard after all. “What time should I meet you?”

  6.

  Lerner was lying on the bed at the hotel, staring up at the popcorn ceiling. He didn’t know why it was called that, because it didn’t look like popcorn to him. It looked like boogers in white snot, like he’d seen blown out of a guy’s nose one time after the guy had died. Those were red from the blood, but still. Boogers in snot, that was what popcorn ceilings looked like to him. Probably didn’t have a very alluring ring to human ears to call them booger-in-snot ceilings, though.

  What was it with people desiring to make things sound pretty? Life was tough and short for these humans. Why all the pleasantries? Why all the social niceties? Why not just get down to the business at hand, even if it was cold and brutal and short? Sometimes things needed to be said, and fast. Given how short their lifespans were, Lerner would have figured humans would prefer getting to the point. But, no, they talked around it, going for nice and pleasant rather than getting it over with. The whole thing was boggling to him. But it wasn’t the only thing.

  “Hiding,” Duncan murmured from the other bed. Neither of them really slept, they just would lie down for a while when they weren’t doing something. Paperwork was finished for the day, so they were both lying down and staring up. Lerner might have asked Duncan what he thought of the popcorn ceiling name but he was clearly in the middle of some thought of his own.

  “Who’s hiding?” Lerner asked, less out of any genuine interest and more out of the faint politeness that Duncan expected. He was getting soft after over a century on Earth.

  “This thing, whatever it is,” Duncan said, still staring up. “It’s only attacked at night, and it’s so loud and obvious that it’d be noticed during the day. Which means it’s hiding somewhere during daylight hours.” He reached up and tapped on the wooden frame of the bed, absently. “So where is this thing hiding?”

  “Fuck,” Lerner said. “It could be anywhere. I know they call this a small town, but it ain’t that small. Plus the hotspot seems to extend out into the county, which ain’t exactly a trivial thing to search either.”

  Duncan was quiet for a minute. “You ever wonder what governs the range of a hotspot?”

  Lerner didn’t answer at first. These were the first questions that led down a road he didn’t want to tread. “No.”

  “Okay, then.” Duncan was quiet for about an hour after that, and he spoke again as if they’d never stopped talking. “Do you think it fears daylight?”

  “Could just fear the attention daylight brings,” Lerner said. “It might be wearing its game face all the time, or it might just be shaped in a way that it could never pass for human.” There were enough of those kinds of things still out there to give the Office a fucking headache or ten. Dispatching them all was the widely suggested solution among the OOCs in the field, but the head office had yet to go for it.

  “Something big, maybe,” Duncan said, still lost in thought.

  “If the little blond deputy is to be believed, it sounded big,” Lerner said.

  “Why do you do that?” Duncan asked, and turned to look at him. “You know their names.”

  Lern
er grunted. “Of course I do.”

  “Why not call them by them?”

  “Have you been out of our world so long you don’t even think about how names carry power anymore?” Lerner asked, more than a little crabby. Duncan was in the process of going native, no doubt about it. The question of whether that was going to be a problem was an open one, though. It could be benign.

  “No,” Duncan said softly. “I guess I don’t think about it much anymore.” He fell silent for a while longer. “Where would it hide?” he asked when he broke the silence again.

  “I don’t know,” Lerner said with a sigh he felt down to his essence. “Let’s ask …” he hesitated, “… Arch and Erin. They know the area, after all.” He ignored the fuck out of Duncan’s expression.

  ***

  Arch didn’t like the silence anymore. He thought he’d have broken through it by now, gotten over how it hung in the air of their apartment like the drywall dust still hanging in the old one from when the demons had destroyed everything. He wasn’t used to it, though, not by a mile. By several miles, actually.

  After years of dating and years of marriage, Arch was coming to a difficult conclusion.

  He didn’t know his wife nearly as well as he thought he did, but she knew him up, down, forwards and backwards.

  He felt that stubbornness cling, though, that desire not to be the one to break his silence. He’d felt it dissolve after Tallakeet, at least until he’d found out she’d been the one firing the shots up there. Then it was back with a fury, back with a vengeance, even though his brain was calling him a hypocrite and worse for resenting her not saying anything to him. He’d been keeping his own secrets, after all, keeping to himself what he’d been doing with Hendricks at night. It was easier unsaid, easier to keep to himself the way that demon hunting made him feel—

  Arch glanced over at Alison. She was sitting coolly on the sofa, looking for all the world like she was just thinking things over. And she probably was, but what she was thinking over was a complete mystery to him. Every move she made to break down the wall between them was matched by some other thing she did or he did that put it right back up.

  The worst part of it was, he wasn’t sure he had it in him to work on breaking it down himself.

  He was just starting to say something, working up to it, when his phone rang. He glanced at it, thought about ignoring it, and then picked it up and answered. He knew it was Lerner before he did so. “Hello?”

  “Got a bare hint of an idea, Deputy,” Lerner said, getting right into it. Arch didn’t mind that at all, especially right now. “Where would something hide around here?”

  Arch didn’t roll his eyes, though he thought about it. Not like the demon would have caught it over the phone. “Could be anywhere. How big you thinking this thing is?”

  “Bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a corinth’al’eshan,” Lerner’s voice came back from across the phone. Arch waited for him to translate for him. “Big enough you’d notice it. Car size or bigger, probably.”

  “Any garage in town,” Arch said, “if we care to guess it’s killed a family or taken over a house somehow. We got a few unoccupied warehouses on the outskirts. Maybe some of the bigger caves in the area—”

  “Any of them run through town?” Lerner asked.

  Arch glanced over at Alison; she was watching him. “I’m not exactly a spelunker, but I’ve heard the ones under the town are small. Too small for anything car-sized.”

  “Any house in town,” Lerner said, the sound of his teeth grinding coming through the phone’s receiver. It got on Arch’s nerves. “Well, we can’t search every house.”

  No kidding, Arch didn’t say. “It’d help if we had a little more to go on.”

  “Wait ’til tonight, maybe you will,” Lerner said, and he sounded positively nasty about it. “Not sure you want to wait for the next body to show up, though.”

  Arch sure as heck didn’t. He had a thought. “This thing likes darkness, right?”

  “Seems to.”

  That had to be worth something to his mind. “So it’s hiding somewhere dark, it stands to reason.”

  “Which is why I asked you about caves,” Lerner said. He sounded a little faint and tinny on the other end of the phone.

  Arch started to say something else but stopped when Alison started to move. She went over to one of the boxes that hadn’t been unpacked yet and started to rummage around. He watched her idly for a moment, watched her bend over in those jeans, working to get something free from the box. It took her a few seconds, and Arch had just about mustered his thought back when she came out with a map. She carried it over to the table and spread it out. “Just a second,” he said to Lerner.

  “Tim Connor got run over here,” Alison said, pointing to the little map square for Berg Street. The map she had was a small, local one. The interstate neatly bisected it, and the whole thing looked like it had been torn out of a bigger atlas for the entire state. “And then last night’s kill happened … here …” she pointed to Rafton Park, the big, blue snaking curve of the Caledonia River running right next to where her finger landed. “If this thing needed to get back to where it was going before sunup—”

  Arch frowned and leaned over, clutching the phone close to his ear. It took a second for him to realize there wasn’t even the sound of breathing on the other side. “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” Lerner said. “Just listening to your clever lady spell it out.”

  “You can hear that?” Arch asked.

  “Whatever it was, it was going in this direction when it hit Tim Connor,” Alison said, pointing northwest. “Berg Street runs nearly out of town in that direction …”

  “It was going roughly the same direction when it made its attack last night,” Arch said, running his finger along the Caledonia’s line where the path remained unmarked on the map. “Trail splits about here …” He fell silent in contemplation. “Either way, it goes north or northwest.”

  Alison looked up at him, a knowing look in her eyes. “Whatever this thing is, it’s up there during the day.”

  “Up where?” Lerner asked on the other end of the line.

  “Only one thing of interest to the northwest,” Arch said, clutching the phone tight to his face. That wasn’t exactly true, but there was only one thing that dominated the landscape in that direction, one central thing to which all else was subject thanks to basic topography.

  “Ohhhh,” Lerner said, getting it at last. “You mean that big damned mountain.”

  “Mount Horeb,” Arch said, nodding, though he knew the demon couldn’t see it over the phone. “Whatever this thing is, it’s hiding somewhere up in the wilderness around the mountain.”

  ***

  Erin was caught up in that sweet, sweet feeling of afterglow. That’s what she’d heard it called, and she tended to agree with it because her whole skin felt flushed and wonderful, in a state of total relaxation. She was still getting control of her breathing, though, but in a good way, like she’d just gotten done with a run or something.

  Hendricks was already nodding off next to her, his cowboy hat hanging off the edge of the nightstand. The sun was shining outside, it was the middle of the day now, and she didn’t have to be anywhere until later tonight. It was a good feeling, the cheap cotton sheets she’d bought at Wal-Mart pressed tight to her skin, laying just across her belly. She felt sweaty and sticky but those were problems for later, not now.

  A thought occurred to her, and she voiced it out loud. “How long do you think this is gonna last?” She didn’t really mean it to be a downer question, but she knew the moment she said it, it sure as hell was.

  “The hotspot?” Hendricks murmured sleepily. “Weeks. Months, maybe. Less than a year.”

  “I didn’t mean the hotspot,” Erin said. She’d felt the rush of insecurity and just asked the question. Now she realized she’d just burned an opportunity to back out of putting it out there. Oops.

  Hendricks stirred slight
ly, and she wondered how much of the afterglow he was feeling. She’d heard guys were sleepier afterward, and that was born out by her experience. Especially after a day and night like they’d had, there was no reason to expect he’d want to be awake afterward. “Well …” Hendricks said, and she could just hear the hesitation drip off.

  “Once this is over with, you’ll be on your way, right?” She reached down and pulled the sheet up to cover her chest. Why was she even asking this? They’d known each other for like a week. She’d just been looking at him as a fresh, fun lay, to break the monotony when they’d hopped into bed together. This was a serious topic, even for her.

  “I guess,” Hendricks said, and the tension filled his voice. “I mean, I don’t know. You might end up on your way, too, if all this grimdark crap about the end coming to Midian turns out to be true.”

  She felt a trickle of fear run down into her belly, and she gripped the sheet tighter, rubbing the low-threadcount sheets between her fingers. “I don’t know. What happens when a town … goes down like that?”

  Hendricks was silent, and she tried not to look at him, as though that would make it all go away. “Different every time, I’ve heard. Depends on what kind of demon does the job, really. Sometimes it’s like rival gangs come in and just drive the residents out. Other times … they get eaten.” He rolled over to her. “It’s not like it happens a lot, okay?” His voice still carried that hint of tiredness, though she could tell he was trying to be reassuring. “It’s rare, even for hotspots.”

  “But Lerner says we’re heading that way.” Her voice sounded empty, even to her. It was a big deal, wasn’t it? Losing an entire town? How could some place, with people, with families, with homes and businesses and life just vanish? Just disappear without a word, without a trace? “How come no one ever notices these places are missing?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hendricks said, subdued, and she could tell he was awake now, fully. “It’s a mystery to me. Government cover-up, maybe? I’m not really sure. The one time I saw it coming, there just wasn’t a word breathed about it anywhere except in the dark corners of the ’net most people don’t take seriously.” He shifted in the bed. “Or so I’ve heard. I don’t exactly spend a lot of time online myself, you know.”