Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  Arch wiped his mouth again, feeling a thin line of perspiration on the stubble of his upper lip. Maybe that was the caffeine. Or maybe that was the oddly placed, strangely rampant desire for Alison that he couldn’t explain as anything other than grossly inappropriate. For a long time he’d felt out of sorts in his life, bizarrely longing for something else. It was a call he’d heard and ignored in favor of just doing his job, and now that he was in the middle of a mess outside his control …

  His hand didn’t shake. Not at all.

  For a man whose boss had turned on him, he felt strangely calm. Even stranger considering that whole pot of coffee he’d downed.

  He stared at the wall for about another minute before he found himself standing again, stalking back to the map in the kitchen as he paced once more around the table, seeking perspective on a problem he knew he needed to solve. And the one he was considering didn’t even involve Nicholas Reeve, not even tangentially. It was the beasts on the bikes that were all he could think of, them and them alone. He would find them, he would crush them, break them, send them back to Satan with relish and gusto—

  Then he’d see his wife again, and maybe that inappropriate thirst he wanted to sate wouldn’t feel quite so inappropriate with this problem out of the way.

  ***

  Hendricks had to concede that things were becoming more and more … unnatural as they progressed further. Once-fresh shoots of trees gave way to gnarled and ragged trunks that twisted unpredictably in ways that nature never intended. The skies darkened, the wispy grey clouds turning darker, until finally he could ignore it no more. “What the hell are we walking into?” he asked Duncan and Alison. “Mordor?”

  Alison stared at him blankly, her breath ragged and heavy. “What? Where?” She sounded about ready to keel over, which did not bode well for any running they might have to do.

  “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” Duncan said, eliciting a grin from Hendricks and a shake of the head from Alison. “I love catching those movies whenever they’re on cable.”

  “I have no idea what you people are talking about,” Alison said.

  “Come on.” Hendricks waved his arm, beckoning them onward. Any sign of a road had long since disappeared, and Hendricks wondered who might be responsible for that particular bit of ominous work. Could some agency have come in here and plowed it up to discourage visitors? If so, what did they do to keep the supposed demons that were lurking at bay while they did it?

  “Not far, now,” Alison said, and Hendricks saw her bearing change. Her breathing went much shallower, like she had overcome her difficulty with it. He watched for a second then caught Duncan doing the same. The demon didn’t betray much with his look, but it was enough to make Hendricks think he was on the same track. Alison’s gait straightened, losing the lopsided limp she’d been harboring a minute earlier as though she had a stitch in her side.

  Hendricks eased toward Duncan and whispered, “What the hell was that?” She had changed in seconds, no longer the weak, winded little princess.

  Duncan just shrugged, not taking his eyes off of her. “Seems like we’re being played with.”

  “But for a good reason,” Alison said, and Hendricks stopped just in time to avoid plowing into her. She was right there, halted in the middle of their forward path. She was stiff, slightly hunched, her hand hovering at her side. She was tense, that much was obvious just from looking at the back of her jeans.

  Hendricks dropped his hand to his side as well, opening the drover coat. He waited, hand near his belt, trying to decide which weapon to pull. The air was hot and humid, and he felt drenched and sticky, everything clinging to his skin.

  “Son of a bitch,” Duncan said, and the night started to close in around them—even though it was midday.

  Hendricks listened. The chirp of crickets was strangely absent. So too was any other ambient noise. Gone was the familiar hum of the woods—the rustle of the leaves, the sound of silence or of distant cars. All that was missing, vanquished by the falling dark. He could no longer even hear Alison’s breathing, save for the occasional low breath. Duncan made no sound at all.

  There was almost a sound of buzzing in the distance, and Hendricks’s first thought ran to the bicyclists. He drew his sword, a sound of metal on leather as it cleared the scabbard. The noise passed, though, and left him clenching his blade. Duncan had his hand filled with the baton, and now Alison had a subcompact pistol in hers—a Glock, he thought.

  They stood arranged in a rough triangle, facing the perimeter of the woods. The clouds had become complete, and the sun’s last rays had disappeared. There was only a hint of illumination—like red moonlight—shining down from above. It cast Alison’s face in a strange pallor, her blond hair turned strawberry like someone had hit their brake lights right in front of her. It gave Duncan’s suit an even more exotic look. Hendricks was left to wonder what he looked like by the fading, demonic light.

  “My kingdom for a flashlight,” Hendricks muttered, and he heard a click as one turned on.

  Alison held one in her left hand, crossed under and supporting the pistol in her right. “Guess you Marines don’t prepare for everything, huh?”

  “That’s the Boy Scouts,” Hendricks said a little bitterly. “And I have a flashlight, but no one told me I’d need it.”

  There was another click, and suddenly a white beam streamed from where Duncan had stood moments earlier. “A gun and a sword on your belt, but you don’t have room to carry a micro flashlight? They weigh ounces.”

  “I didn’t know I’d need it.” Hendricks repeated, more irritable the second time through.

  “You’re a demon hunter,” Duncan said, and the beam started to move ahead, with a rustle in the leaves that echoed through the air around them. “Don’t you have to go into dark places sometimes?”

  “I try to travel light.” Hendricks could feel the aggravation, like a heavy stone being dragged through his chest. It was painful, this galling little lesson. He followed behind the two of them, watched their silhouettes in the light of the beams as they danced along; Alison’s swayed considerably as she walked, while Duncan’s was as steady as though it were mounted on some moving frame. “But thanks for the reminder,” Hendricks muttered under his breath.

  The lack of noise was disquieting, and with every step forward, Hendricks became more aware of even the red light through the clouds fading away. He could hear his companions, could smell Alison’s sweat, that scent of outdoor briskness and activity when he got close to her. He followed just behind her, wary of bumping her but even warier of getting too far away from the only people that kept him out of total darkness.

  “Do you hear them?” Duncan asked. Hendricks stopped to listen closer, breath stuck in his throat. Give him a thousand demons head-on rather than one lurking in the darkness, that was his take. The overwhelming evil he could see versus the tiny little one he couldn’t. It resonated in his head, in his heart, that feeling, and he chafed under it, wanting to throw caution aside and charge into the underbrush blindly to stab whatever was out there. Foolish but cathartic, he thought, with an emphasis on the foolish part. His superiors from his Marine Corps days would not have approved. Understood, but not approved.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Alison said. “But I can feel them.”

  “They’re watching,” Duncan said. “Growing in numbers. Feels like they’re working in a pack. Surrounding us, maybe, before they come in.” He sniffed, and Hendricks wondered if he was actually breathing. “Or leading us.”

  “Where are we going?” Hendricks asked, absolutely rhetorical.

  “Deeper,” Alison said. Better than any answer he could conjure. Because really, no matter how you sliced it, that was true.

  ***

  The day dragged like a dog wiping its butt on the carpet, and Arch gave up on the pacing after three hours. Looking at the map was a steady descent into madness, staring at gridpoints and coordinates until he went blind in both eyes. He felt the i
tch get progressively worse as time passed and his phone stayed silent. He wanted to call Alison, check in, but even if she’d been in a place to answer a phone, he knew what that could prompt. They were heading into the heart of trouble, into a place where a sudden noise could be a real detriment to your continued well-being. So he kept his hands off his phone, kept his eyes on the maps, and kept his feet moving until he could bear the weight of his uselessness no longer.

  It was a simple craziness that came on, that cabin fever feeling. He’d ignored it for an hour, then another. By now, the utterly insane was sounding more and more intelligent. There was a cave on Mount Horeb. This much he knew. An old mine. Probably had contained the bicycling demons only a day earlier. Were they there now? Unlikely.

  But his brain buzzed in circles around the hope that there was some sign of their flight still hidden in that darkness.

  Of course all the reasonable reasons to not undertake this path were perfectly present and cogent in his mind. They could actually still be there. He could be walking into a trap laid by demons. He could be outnumbered and devoured, drawn and quartered or worse by soulless beasts from the very depths of the biblical hell that he had feared since childhood.

  But every hour he stared at the four walls of his apartment was another hour where taking the initiative to go deep into the mine seemed like a better and better idea, even without a whit of backup.

  His rational, logical mind argued again, then again, that was dumb beyond dumb. That this was the height of arrogance, it was Samson not listening to the warnings and seeing his strength ripped away with his hair. The forces of the Morning Star—and he fully believed with every bit of his heart that was who was at work here—would exult in every champion’s fall, and his would surely be no exception.

  But that part of his mind became quieter as the hours passed, and as he grabbed his keys and walked out the door, it lost to the part that suggested that even one more night going by without a read on where these things were hiding would result in yet more death. More chaos in the name of the one who reveled in these things. The thoughts were still there as he revved the engine and took the damaged Explorer onto the road, heading toward Mount Horeb once again, but he let himself think that self-sacrifice for the greater good was the one that was driving the car, and ignored that little part of him that said he was just losing his good sense and giving in to wrath.

  ***

  Hendricks was way too close to Alison for his own good. He was practically up on her back now, in boner-stabbing distance, he might have called it in the Corps, nuts to butts, but he was a little too aware of the worsening situation to feel much like bonering right now. He was young, though, and sex was always—ALWAYS—in the back of his mind if it wasn’t in the front, and even in a forest that was dark as hell’s pits during midday, standing close enough to poke the wife of his friend, with his own recent lover lying in the hospital, yep, it was still there, even with a demon watching on, and it would have been to Hendricks’s shame if he hadn’t had those other worries to keep him from exploring it much. There’d be time for guilt later, he figured, maybe after the running and screaming and all hell had broken loose. He figured that was moments away based on the way his internal tension was ratcheting up, the heat just building under his coat like a furnace inside him had gotten stoked with fresh wood.

  Wood. Heh. He wasn’t too wary to appreciate that one, either. Wood.

  “Gettin’ hot,” Duncan said, a clear statement that made Hendricks come out of his own head for a minute. He was sure that the feeling of warmth was from the coat, from the fact it was Alabama in summertime and the fact there was a pretty girl just in front of him. Sweaty, but pretty.

  “Thought it was just me,” Hendricks said.

  “You ain’t that good lookin’, sweetheart,” Alison said flatly, like she could read his mind and wanted to pour some cold water on him. Southern drawl, too.

  “I meant—” He felt the frown rise. He kept the sword in one hand and grabbed the lapel of his coat with the other, flapping it like it was a valve he could turn to let some steam off. Jesus, it was getting hotter. “Never mind.” There was no way to say it without coming off like a sour sonofabitch, anyway. “How’s it getting hotter if the sun’s behind the clouds?”

  “Good question,” Duncan replied, his gait completely unchanged from when they’d first started. For Hendricks, the chafing had started. He’d heard it called being galded, where the thighs start to stick together as you walk. It made him want to sashay sideways for a bit, but he knew he’d look ridiculous and have a bitch of a time keeping up, so he didn’t. “I don’t know,” the demon conceded after a brief intermission, maybe to think it over. Hendricks didn’t think that boded too well. It was like having the native guide on an expedition telling you that you were off the fucking map, in hostile territory. Like you wandered into North Korea or something. Oops. Bad luck. Sayonara—or however you said it in Korean.

  Even his fucking feet hurt by this point, and his boots had been broken in long ago to the point where he could hump it for miles in them. Hendricks had had e-fucking-nough of this town, and they weren’t even there yet. He bypassed the coat and went straight to his t-shirt collar, finding it completely drenched with sweat. He peeled it off his chest, making way for the heat to come rushing out. It didn’t seem to help. God, if he could only take off his coat …

  He felt the trail of the drover touching the ground before he even realized it was. He looked down and saw his legs were buckling, and his first thought was that he was being such a damned pussy. This wasn’t that far of a walk, and he wasn’t in that bad a shape. Then his eyes flicked up, and saw Alison hobbling a little, too. Not like she’d been earlier, with the wheezing, but like the gravity had turned up. Her Naked Prozac t-shirt (what the hell was that band, anyway?) was completely soaked through now, looked black even in the beam light, and he saw her knees slightly folded.

  “Shit,” Duncan announced, and Hendricks just stopped.

  Sweet fucking son of a fuck, it was stifling, the air growing hotter and hotter, like he’d stuck his whole body up next to a barbecue grill someone had opened on the hottest day of summer. The sun he couldn’t see was shining down on him, the black coat absorbing every bit of it, and he felt the sweat just coursing from under his sleeves, making trails that tickled their way through every hair on his arm. His palm gripped his sword tighter and he felt the grip slip, the leather wanting to slide out of his grasp.

  “Not a good … sign,” Hendricks said, barely getting it out. He wanted to open his mouth and pant like a fucking dog in hopes the heat building inside would just Please Just Get The Fuck Out Already. It was like a rubber suit had gotten wrapped around his whole body and he was sweating into it. He could barely take a breath without smelling that stifling sweat smell, that faint hint of fucking charcoal or ozone or something, Sweet Jesus, something that made his head tingle from the beads of water dripping down under the hat. He wanted to tear it aside and mop his brow with a canvas-hard sleeve, but he knew that wouldn’t do it and—

  “Holy fuck,” Hendricks said as Alison hit a knee. She was breathing heavy again now, her hair completely and totally turned from straight and dry to a soaked, streaked mess of tangled blond turned dark with perspiration. He watched her fold and knew—just knew—that this wasn’t the heat, even though FOR FUCK’S SAKE WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE TURN DOWN THE GODDAMNED THERMOSTAT ON THE WORLD BECAUSE I WANT TO—

  His free hand came up and ran across his face, smearing stinging salty liquid into his eyes, and he bumped his hat clean off even though he knew—HE KNEW—that it would not help at all. Shaking off the coat would similarly have no effect, but that was another thing that the distant corner of his brain whispered while his body told him to strip it all the fuck off and be rid of it, to jump naked in the nearest body of water, to drag Alison with him and get the poor girl some help because it was just out of control, this feeling that—

  Ice cream on a summer’s day, s
herbet melting down the side of his face as he licked his way to the cone. That thought popped into Hendricks’s head and it helped. That sweet, tangy tartness hidden in the first feel of chill that the lick brought.

  He imagined his skin the time he’d done the polar plunge that time for charity in high school. Frigid cold water that sprang over his flesh as he jumped into the lake and felt his balls make a rapid and strategic retreat as his skin felt like it froze fucking over—

  The air conditioner in that shithole base in Iraq working double overtime after they’d come off a five-day mission. It was like a cool bath standing in front of it, trying not to get into a shoving match with the dipshit next to you, all thought of you being brothers in arms forgotten while you were trying to just get a little more cold soaked up, like it was the only thing in the damned world, with that mechanical smell filtering out the desert outside—

  Hendricks felt the will to crumble leave his legs. He was still sweating like a motherfucker but it was like the wool sweater he’d had pulled over him had been ripped off in one move. He could feel something pressing on him, like a wave of heat hanging out at arm’s length, kept at a distance by his mind.

  “You figure it out?” Duncan asked, not looking at him. The OOC was facing into the darkness, his flashlight beam dancing over the gnarled and twisted tree branches, illuminating blackened husks of things that might have born leaves and shoots once upon a time, but that was a long time ago, galaxy far away, all that jazz.

  “Heat demon of some kind,” Hendricks replied, and his sleeve drifted over his soaked upper lip. The salty taste dribbled onto his tongue. “It’s pushing thoughts on us. Feelings.”

  “On you, yeah,” Duncan said.