Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  Chauncey pushed the door open all the way, and she just about took a step back from habit. The man was standing there in nothing but his boxers, tanned, sunken chest and skinny body distracting only slightly from those 40x magnification glasses he wore on his head. They really were magnification lenses, too, not real glasses, because no one’s damned eyes were that fucking big normally, were they?

  “Whatchoo doing up here on Mount Horeb, Erin?” His voice was high and meandering. He glanced at her clothing. “Oh, I s’pose it’s Deputy Harris now. I always thought you’d have been a good mechanical engineer, you know, but—”

  “Chauncey,” she said, interrupting him gently, “I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but I got a question.”

  “Oh?” He stood there, his sunken chest heaving up and down with the effort of keeping him breathing. The man didn’t look like he ate even one meal a day, and his expression was what she’d called gentle befuddlement. “What can I do for you?”

  She started to say something then stopped, trying to decide if she should mention his state of undress. She decided it was better to skip it. “Did I catch you in the middle of something?”

  “I was just painting a miniature army,” he said, still staring at her through magnifying glasses. “They’re gonna be my fourth army this month, getting ready for a tournament up in Knoxville next weekend. Those dadgummed boys from Johnson City—last year’s champs—they ain’t gonna know what hit ‘em.” He laughed, a loud, high sound, then blinked, and fumbled for the magnifying glasses on his head, tearing them off self-consciously. “Sorry,” he said. “I forget they’re on, sometimes. I wear ’em so much in the evenings, you know, cuz I’m working on my armies. Damn, that’s embarrassing.”

  She glanced downward at his skinny, hairy legs, exposed from the crotch on down. “Yep.” She looked back up at him and he watched her earnestly, without a trace of self-consciousness. “I can see how that might be a little … uncomfortable. Listen, I’m investigating a noise disturbance up here—”

  “Oh, you talking about that eerie-ass noise that comes rumbling down the mountain in the early evening and early morning?” Chauncey leaned forward, mouth slightly agape. He was definitely interested in what she was saying.

  “You’ve heard it?” Erin asked, feeling a chill. The last two houses hadn’t.

  “Shoor ’nuff,” he said. “Every night for the last three. Rolls through just as dusk is coming on—we get dusk a little earlier here than y’all do, being in the shadow on this side of the mountain and whatnot. Noise comes rumbling in, then passes back up just ’afore daybreak.”

  She listened to him with increasing interest. “Chauncey … did you happen to see what it was that made the noise?”

  “You know, I actually did not,” Chauncey said with mild disappointment, as though he’d forgotten a can of tuna he’d paid for at the grocery store. “Last two times I tried I was too slow, only saw a little of it as it went ’round the curve over yonder.” He gestured toward the downward slope where the road wended just past the trees at the perimeter of his property. “I’m just not as light on my feet as I used to be. Anyway, looked like a black cloud moving down the mountain, all different parts going at once.”

  “Was it big?” she asked, taking a breath.

  “Fair big, I s’pose,” he said. “Wide, more like. Flat, not high off the road, from what I could see. Hell, it was all shadows but looked like a mass just sweeping on down. Coulda been anything. I was running through my brain trying to figure it out, but coming up dry. Saw some … something like a reflection from it, but uh … I don’t know. Figured maybe it was one of them big ol’ groups of running people going from coast to coast like they did in that one movie with that feller had the slow mind—”

  “Forrest Gump?” Erin stared at him in mild disbelief.

  “Course that don’t account for the noise …” Chauncey was now in a world of his own, not even looking at her. “I believe it sounded like a buzzing, like bees or something, but different. You know, I really don’t have the first idea what that is. I should set up on the road tonight and maybe take some pictures—”

  “Chauncey,” she cut him off. “You really shouldn’t. Whatever this is, it’s killed two people so far.”

  “Killed ’em?” Chauncey’s jaw dropped open, his skinny mouth falling open to reveal perfect, shining teeth. “Holy shit. You know, nobody ever tells me nothing, all alone up here on the mountain. Oughta include that sort of stuff in that Emergency Broadcast System, cuz that is news you need to know! What if I’d gone out there tonight and got myself killed, too?” He leaned in toward her, eyes wild. “How’d they die, you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Looks like they got run over by something,” Erin said, and she shot a furtive look back to Lerner, still in the car, before turning back to Chauncey.

  “Well, now that don’t make no kind of sense at all,” he said, and she could tell his engineer’s mind was brainstorming out loud. “Whatever that was, it was moving way too low to be a car of any kind. In fact, it was kinda like … oh.” Chauncey straightened, and his mouth formed a perfect O with his last word. “That’s what it was.”

  “What?” Erin stared at him. His eyes were far away, looking past her to the road. “What was it, Chauncey?” She waited, but his mind was still adrift. “What the hell was it?”

  ***

  Arch opened the car door and got back in, feeling the cool air conditioning hit him in the face as he sunk down in the seat. It was danged warm, way too danged warm, and he’d had just about enough of summer by now. The rains that had come a few days earlier, as ugly as they’d gotten, sure had been a nice cooldown for the town. If it weren’t for the whole flooding problem, he’d gladly have had them back right about now. He glanced at the dry dust in the driveway he was parked in. Looked like the ground might be grateful, too.

  “Any luck?” Hendricks asked. The cowboy was still wearing his full-length drover coat, that black nightmare that made him look like some sort of cross between Batman and the Lone Ranger. Arch had seen a couple kids in town laugh at Hendricks’s getup behind his back, but he didn’t feel compelled to share this with the man.

  “Not as such, no,” Arch said. “People have heard a noise, but they got no clue what it came from. Some don’t even rightly know when it came through. Sounded a little like a train to this last couple.” He’d been viewed with a little surprise, maybe a little suspicion, at the first house. Things like that happened sometimes when the police came to call unexpectedly on a door out here. But at the second house he’d been invited in for crumb cake and coffee, which he’d had to decline. Being a football hero in Midian had its perks, that was certain.

  This house had about been a bust. Older couple, didn’t even seem to realize that their house was across the valley from train tracks. They’d been nice enough, though, in spite of not inviting him in for crumb cake.

  “Damn,” Hendricks said as Arch put the car into gear. He backed into a turnaround in the driveway and aimed the car down the rutted gravel driveway back toward the road. “I suppose it might make some sense, though; this house is set back awfully far from the road.”

  “Land’s a little flatter here, closer to the bottom of the mountain,” Arch said. “Got themselves a nice parcel where they could build back a ways.”

  “More than those last couple houses, anyway,” Hendricks said. “Maybe we should leapfrog to the next house over, or the one after. There’s a spur up the way, I noticed—”

  “Old mining road,” Arch said, nodding. “I hadn’t ruled out that this thing could be coming from up there. Not sure we want to go poking down that way until we’re sure.” The thing was gated, actually, and as they’d passed he’d looked carefully; it didn’t seem to have been disturbed in a half century, though it was hard to tell, he supposed. “Might be some exposed shafts out there.”

  “You make it sound like a bathhouse,” Hendricks said with a grin.

  Arch felt the frown come au
tomatically. “Is everything a dirty joke to you?”

  Hendricks just kept grinning infuriatingly. “I got a dirty enough mind to find something naughty in just about anything, yeah. It’s a talent.”

  Arch turned away before rolling his eyes. “It’s an unsavory habit. Like swearing.”

  “What is the problem with swearing for you, anyway?” Hendricks asked. Arch gave him enough of a look to see he was being genuine, not mocking. “I mean, I can understand goddamn—”

  “The Third Commandment would be my problem with that one, yes,” Arch said, a little irritated. Did he have to do that in front of him, always?

  “But what about the rest of it?” Hendricks said, leaning back in his seat and tipping his hat. “Where in the Bible does it say you can’t let loose with a ‘fucking shit’ or a ‘son of a whore’ every now and again?”

  “Philippians 4:8,” Arch said, giving him an annoyed look.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” Hendricks said, looking unimpressed. “My knowledge of the Bible is a few years out of date. And also fairly unimportant to me in the scheme of things.”

  Arch stifled a sigh of frustration. “It’s a letter from the Apostle Paul to the Philippians, in which he tells them to dwell on that which is pure and good.” Arch drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “The idea being that if you’re constantly dwelling on the impure, your mind is not where it is supposed to be in order to be a good servant of the Lord.”

  Hendricks had his mouth slightly open, and Arch just waited for the jibe. It never came. “Okay, then,” Hendricks said, but he didn’t sneer. He just waited. “So … where does it talk about getting blow jobs?”

  Arch did roll his eyes at that one, after slamming the brakes so he could turn to Hendricks and give him the full attention for this. “She’s my wife, and she and I can do anything—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Hendricks said. The car was halted just a few yards from the road. The end of the driveway was nestled between two big trees, and the entire property line was shielded from view of the road by a line of woods no more than twenty or thirty feet deep. Just enough to obstruct the mountain road from the house.

  Arch paused, still ready to unload on Hendricks for his disrespect. “What?” he asked, not bothering to conceal the anger in his voice.

  “Do you hear that?” Hendricks asked, holding a single finger aloft, pointing to the ceiling, as though something was coming from above.

  “Hear what?” Arch said with purest irritation. But as he sat there in the silence, he realized he could hear it too. A faint, buzzing sound, growing louder as it came down the mountain road ahead.

  ***

  Lauren was making good time down the mountain, but she could tell she was feeling the first strains of fatigue. This was the easy part, she told herself. The downhill run. Turning back, that was bound to be a cast-iron bitch.

  The sun was setting, and the orange glow didn’t quite reach her over the peak of Mount Horeb. It was over there somewhere, to be sure, but she couldn’t see it from here, not on this side of the mountain, and that meant she was going to be running in the dark in an hour or two.

  Reluctantly, she slowed, pulling to a stop in front of an old mailbox that said “Cooper” on the side in faded white letters. She was sweating prodigiously, feeling the burn in her legs from not doing this for a few days and now pulling this shit on her body on a damned mountain. She’d feel it tomorrow, but if she could just get a little further along, it’d be all good because at least she’d get the endorphin rush. Runner’s high. She loved that feeling; it kept her doing this even though the amount of time she had for it was nearly nil.

  She was just hooking around when she realized there was a noise over the sound of her heavy breathing. Something … buzzing. Something loud. She looked back up the mountain but saw nothing. The road made a sharp turn around a bend to the left just a hundred yards ahead, and everything past that was well out of her sight. A steep cliff’s edge to her left blocked the one side of the road, and the shoulder only extended a few feet to her right. The yard of the Cooper house—she didn’t know who that was, some out-of-towner’s cabin in all likelihood—came to an end just ahead. She followed along the road, listening to the sound.

  Whatever it was—probably a semi with engine trouble—it sounded bad. A little ominous, too, but … bad. Like someone’s car was not having a good day. Like it had smashed into a train and was clacking as it rolled down the mountain.

  She shrugged it off and started back up, and watched the shoulder narrow to her right, then fall off into a sheer cliff face. Something about that unnerved her, too, but she didn’t pay it much heed because it was the mountain, and she still had a few feet of shoulder to dive to if someone hugged the lane a little too hard.

  The noise grew louder. More persistent. Now it was hissing, descending from above, the mountain road’s S-curve wending up to her left to ride a sheer cliff face a hundred feet high. She could hear it up there, that awful sound, that unearthly buzzing, with just a little screech mixed in. She thought she heard something else, too, like tires squealing on pavement.

  What the hell made that kind of noise?

  She scuffed her shoe a little and mentally kicked herself. Paying attention to the road was important, lest she stumble and find herself with a bloodied knee. Or worse.

  The noise was louder now, starting to drown out the sound of the birds on the mountain, the crickets in the grass. She realized a little late that she hadn’t actually heard any birds or crickets in quite some time and tried to remember if she’d heard them at all on her run.

  It had been quiet the whole time, eerily so, save for a couple cars that passed her by.

  What the hell was going on here? What was that sound?

  The buzzing grew to a crescendo, and she knew whatever it was, it was just around the next bend in the road. Her pace slowed automatically, as though her head was telling her to back off, to keep away from the corner.

  Then she saw it. And only one thing came to mind.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  7.

  They moved down the mountain like shadows at high speed, catching Hendricks’s eye through the windshield. He was peering through the trees at the end of the driveway, standing like upright posts on a football field, like he was staring through about to kick a field goal.

  This wasn’t a goddamned field goal, though. This wasn’t a football game. This was—

  It was—

  “What the fuck?” he whispered under his breath.

  They moved through that gap between the trees like dark clouds rolling past on the road. They were fast, damned fast, but the wheels were visible, just barely, in the dusky twilight.

  “Is that …?” Arch just let his voice trail off.

  “You have got to be fucking shitting me,” Hendricks said, just staring at the things swirling across. The buzzing was hell on his ears. “It really is, isn’t it?”

  Arch didn’t sound surprised when he finally spoke up. “I always hated those sons of guns, but I never thought of them as real demons.”

  Hendricks just stared straight ahead as the last of them passed the driveway and rolled down the hill. When he spoke it was in complete and utter disgust. “Bicyclists.

  “Demon fucking bicyclists.”

  ***

  Alison had half considered hanging out the window as Duncan steered the car down the mountain behind the demons. On bikes. Demons on bikes. She thought about it, and dismissed the idea as stupid, because trying to fire a .50 out a window while the vehicle was in motion sounded like a recipe for 1) deafness as the crack of the rifle echoed in the town car like God’s own thunder sent down from heaven and 2) a really sore shoulder coupled with some poor shooting. For all those reasons and more, she was just watching instead, watching the swarm of bicyclists move down the mountain at a speed that wasn’t possible for human beings.

  She turned her head as tires squealed behind her and saw Arch’s Explorer burst out
onto the road. The sirens weren’t wailing, but he had his lights on. Duncan took barely any note of it; he just kept his cool and took the town car into a sharp curve at over sixty miles per hour. Alison just held on and mentally added on another reason why she didn’t want to chance shooting out the window. “What now?” she asked and waited for the expert’s answer.

  ***

  “What the hell are we gonna do now?” Hendricks asked.

  Arch ignored him for a minute because he had no idea at all other than chasing the demons down. “I thought you were the expert demon hunter.”

  Hendricks just sat there for a second. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but I can promise you I’ve never dealt with a pack of demon bicyclists before. I’m still just trying to get a handle on this situation. I mean, they killed two people just by hitting them with a bike?”

  Arch had to concede it sounded funny, but those demons were moving awfully fast down the mountain. “They’re stronger and faster, makes sense they could pedal a bike faster. Look at ’em get on down the road.”

  “I wouldn’t want to get hit by them, I guess,” Hendricks conceded. “But … there’s gotta be like fifty of them, how are we supposed to—” The sound of a ringing phone filled the air.

  “Hello?” Arch said, terse, holding the phone with one hand to his ear while he followed Duncan’s town car into a tight turn with the other.

  “It’s demons on bicycles!” Erin shouted at him from the other end of the line.

  “Figured that out for ourselves,” Arch said, and he heard the tires squeal underneath him.

  “How?” Erin asked.

  “Cuz I’m looking at them right now, like a big ol’ swarm of people who are serious about their physical fitness and enjoying nature. We’re not far below the overlook—get down here. We’re in pursuit.” He hung up without waiting for an answer. “So … how do you kill a swarm of bothersome flies?” He glanced over at Hendricks, waiting to see if the cowboy knew the answer.