Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  “You don’t feel it?” Alison asked, and Hendricks thought that this time—for sure—she was truly breathless.

  “I feel it, but it doesn’t matter,” Duncan replied, like a freezer of cool compared to their surroundings. “They ramped it up pretty fast, and that was dumb because then it was obvious to me. Still wouldn’t have affected me like it hits you, but I’d have been less likely to notice if they hadn’t trumpeted it like an invading army.”

  “The Mongol hordes of heat,” Hendricks joked weakly, still feeling the heavy toll the flaming beasts had been trying to exact from him. “Think cold thoughts, Alison. Think of the times you were freezing your ass off.”

  “Can’t,” she said, and her head was slumped to the side.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Hendricks said, and stepped in closer to her. She pushed at his leg, trying to force him away because of the heat or because she had nothing else to do. “When was the last time you remember being cold?”

  “Hunting season,” she said after a minute. “In the woods. With Daddy. Years ago.”

  “Think about it,” Hendricks said, not taking his eyes off the trees around them. Where were these fuckers? Wouldn’t now be the time to strike? “What did it feel like?”

  She let another heat-laden breath out as she answered, and it came up at Hendricks like someone had opened the barbecue again. “Felt … like a blanket of chill settled over me. Like it wrapped me in a fall day, with a first snowfall a month still off, but the freezing feel on its way. Like I could see my breath frosting in front of me on the air, not steam and smoke. Like my lungs hurt from the cold when I walked home through the woods too fast and took a breath too deep. Like I could stick my tongue out and catch the air as it turned to ice on the tip.”

  She shuddered once, and he saw the tension leave her. She worked back to her feet at her own pace, and it took a minute. “I don’t remember it being like this last time,” she said once she was upright again. “Not like this.”

  “Likely whatever is here is getting stronger.” Duncan had pulled closer to them now, making their triangle tight, his purple-tinted jacket just a finger’s distance from Hendricks, who wanted to touch it, see if there was sweat beneath it at the small of the demon’s back. He knew there wasn’t, but after the assault on his senses he’d just weathered, he was curious. “Some of our kind can develop an affinity for a certain place; makes them more powerful the longer they’re homesteaded there.”

  “Must be nice to have a place to hang your hat,” Hendricks said as he picked his hat up off the ground. He brushed the dirt off the brim and settled it back on his head. It was still gawdawfully warm but not unmanageable. “How much farther—?”

  He barely got it out before Alison’s beam hit on something that didn’t look like woods. It was too smoothly rounded, though it was still a little like a tree trunk, wood scorched and reaching skyward. She started moving first, a little more sure now, but less than she’d been before the warmth had tried to melt them down. The object came into clearer focus as they went, Hendricks fighting to get one foot in front of another, the world swaying around him like he’d crossed the whole damned desert on his faltering legs.

  The scorched trunk of the thing became obvious when he got close. Little nails jutted out from it, blackened by time and heat, he supposed, but not unrecognizable. Alison’s beam shot skyward and his gaze followed with it to the top, where the crossbeam was still attached, though the wires that had once been strung across it were long missing.

  “Telephone pole,” Hendricks said for all of them. He wanted to wipe his face again but held off. He pictured that ice cream cone again instead, and it helped some.

  “Another one up ahead,” Duncan observed. They were moving now, a train sprung to motion, Hendricks’s steps coming erratically but coming, following Alison’s lead, all thoughts of boner distance forgotten. Her smooth beam caught a straight line and Hendricks followed it, blackened edges emerging out of the dark.

  “Building,” Duncan pronounced, now leading the way. They were in line, and Hendricks did not dare look back for fear of a misstep while his head was turned, for fear of taking a tumble he could not recover from while lollygagging.

  He followed them, feeling his consciousness on a lower level than usual. It was almost surreal. Then suddenly there was orange light again that had nothing to do with a sun in the sky that he could no longer see or believe in. His steps were staggering, one leg locked permanently to keep it from betraying him from the fatigue or the mind-fuck or whatever that was working on him.

  “This way,” Duncan said, threading them into a gap beside the scorched wall. There was another a few feet away, Hendricks realized, and as they drew between them he could see the fire marks staining the walls where heat had burned its way through the alley they walked. He could see the orange light at the end and knew that it was not a train. Trains didn’t have orange lights, did they?

  They stepped out of the end of the alley, Hendricks playing caboose (fucking trains again, why was that? He felt like he’d been run over by one, maybe). The orange light drowned out Alison’s flashlight. Duncan’s was already off, and Hendricks hadn’t even noticed until now.

  He stood there, and it took him a minute to realize he was leaning on Alison for support. She was leaning right back, and he could feel her softness pressed against him on the side. She moved, and he watched her leave a trail of sweat on his coat as she slid an inch back and he caught her, his sword hand wrapped around her shoulders. He transferred the weapon to his left hand and barely avoided dropping it from the slick, sweat-drenched hilt.

  “Well, here we are,” Duncan said as they stared out on what Hendricks figured had once been a town square not that dissimilar from what Midian had. There might even have been a statue on that pedestal in front of them at one point, that stone block base that just stood there in the middle of a black-dirt field, with a bonfire burning right in the middle of it.

  The bonfire was a mile tall to Hendricks’s eyes, and black smoke piped off it and mingled with the clouds, like they were coming down to take it up and blow it evenly around the four corners of the sky. He didn’t see any wood in the bonfire, though, like it was burning without fuel, fire without source.

  The first shape broke out of it without so much as a waver in the flames. The second followed, then a third. Low to the ground, walking on four legs, each step sending up a hiss that was audible even over the crackling of the flames, and Hendricks saw one of the paw prints turned to glass in the dirt, catching the refracted light of the fire as flaming devil dogs emerged from within one after another.

  They had a sick, hungry look in their eyes that reminded Hendricks of a stray he’d gotten a little too close to one time, some element of desperation in those red pupils that he could see from halfway across the square. “Here it comes,” he muttered, and waited, sword in hand, afraid to take another step.

  But it didn’t come, and the dogs formed a little path, a little chain on either side of the bonfire as they stacked up in a line, that black earth laid out like a red carpet between them. They turned and faced each other like a salute, and Hendricks didn’t know whether to be impressed or just say fuck it and run. “Looks like someone tunneled a little too deep into the Mines of Moria,” he said.

  “Not big enough to be a Balrog,” Duncan replied. “Though they’ve got the look, the fire and darkness thing going on.”

  “You people are nerds,” was Alison’s only comment on the matter.

  The bonfire rippled again but taller this time. It belched a human shape out of the flames, a figure that looked impressively tall next to the four-legged flame beasts but not so big for a human. He could tell by the slightness that it was a woman, or a girl, and her steps were even more lopsided than his had been, like she’d been worn the fuck out and never replenished.

  She made it all the way out to the street that ringed the square before she stopped, bare blackened feet perched on the edge of the curb, a river of broke
n asphalt between her and them. He looked in her eyes out of curiosity more than anything, and he didn’t see the red fire there that the dogs had.

  He saw a screaming fucking horror that stretched all the way from the top of the girl’s bald head to the pit of her near-empty soul.

  She just stood there and stared at them, the dogs flanking her on either side, a hearty dozen of them, presumably with a shit ton more in the fire if need be. Hendricks didn’t love those odds, but he called out anyway.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. His voice sounded like he’d swallowed the bonfire all the way down, and it’d left nothing but scorched cracks from the back of his tongue to somewhere in his belly, where the fire had gone out completely and left nothing behind in its wake.

  When she spoke, it was a crackling whisper, something that demanded attention, and every one of the demon dogs seemed to hush to make way for her speech. It was an awful quiet too, split by the voice of the thing—the girl? The woman?—they paid some sort of homage to, here in the wreckage of lives, of homes, of a whole town.

  “My name is Mandy,” she said, and it was not anything approaching human, the way she said it. Like she’d almost forgotten. “My name is Mandy.” Like that meant anything to anyone.

  15.

  Lauren rode up Mount Horeb in silence, her mother driving and her in the passenger seat, again. It was tiresome, this co-op thing, but she hadn’t had time to get her car before morning shift, and so she’d had to impose on her mom again. It was probably the least of the impositions she’d put on her in the last few years, though, so she didn’t feel too fussed about it.

  Besides, her head was a little too busy swirling with the tandem craziness of Molly and her carnie boyfriend and what Arch Stan had maybe done this morning. The former was personally important and of special interest, while the latter had been good for making her late for her shift and would possibly bear fruit in delivering a comeuppance to one righteous sonofabitch, smacking him down off his high fucking horse. And, she dared to hope, with all the trampling underfoot that might follow such an occurrence.

  Lauren was so wrapped up in this fascinating yin/yang of karma—the Molly situation because of the parallels she could draw with her own teenage years, and the Arch Stan one because … well … because karma was a stinging, mean-spirited slut when crossed, apparently—that she barely noticed when her mother nudged the car to the side of the road behind her own, which sat waiting on the overlook, nothing but a thin layer of brown dust to indicate she’d left it there some twenty-four hours before.

  “You’re not going for another run, are you?” her mother asked, jolting Lauren back to the world.

  “I’m in my scrubs,” she said, indicating the blue garments in answer.

  “So, that’s a no?” her mother asked. “Because it seems to me I’ve seen you go out in what looked like a bra, and this is quite some improvement over that—”

  “Ughhhhh,” she let out in frustration and forced the door open. “It’s called a sports bra, Mom—”

  “—with your belly out there for the world to see like you were in a whorish bathing suit, and your bosoms all flopping around—”

  “I’m a B cup, there’s really not that much flopping, thanks.”

  “I just wanted to know if you’d be home for dinner,” her mother said as Lauren stood there, one hand on the door and the other on the roof of the car, leaning over to look in at the grey-haired pronouncer of judgment on everything. “That’s all.”

  “And maybe take a little zip or two at my wardrobe choices in the process,” Lauren said, “because really, there’s never a moment when you should waste an opportunity to point out the things I do that you disagree with.”

  “Oh, get over yourself,” her mother said, putting the car back into gear. “I ain’t got time in my day to point out all the things you do wrong.” Lauren barely slammed the door in time to let her mother drive off, pulling around into a U-turn and lurching off down the mountain.

  Lauren could feel her internal teakettle boiling and sighed to let off the steam. It was pointless to hold onto it, because even if she did just bottle it up all the way home, unleashing it like a factory whistle, blowing as she came in the door, her mother would just look up at her with that faintly amused smile—Are you still on about that? But that was ages ago! There was a statute of limitations on every unpleasant conversation, and it was always as short as her mother wanted it to be.

  Fuck it, she said to herself. She got in her car and started the engine. She stared off the overlook, willing her irritation to be pushed off, because it would do her no good alive. One time, she goes jogging in a sports bra, gets reminded forever. All because that fucking biddy Genevieve Lane mentions to her mother than Albert Daniel—the old horn dog—was gawking at her. Not her fault that Albert Daniel hadn’t gotten laid since protesters were chanting about how many babies LBJ had killed that day. Not her fault that the shithead would probably stroke off until he stroked out, the pudgy fuck. Her legs were all right, she guessed—guys had mentioned them before in bed as being good—but nothing else was worth writing home about, certainly not her sports bra. But Albert Daniel—aww, fuck it.

  She blew the hostility out again as she drove. It was a process, a slow one, dealing with her mother’s little sand spurs that she tossed with unerring accuracy. She could land ’em in the gap between the mental sock and shoe, and for the rest of the day they stung, no matter how much you dug at ’em. Lauren took another breath out, trying to steer back to something more productive. Back to the yin and yang of karma. Back to Molly …

  … and Arch Stan …

  … who was driving past her on the road up the mountain, still in his fucked-up, dented police Explorer, signaling to turn onto that abandoned road that the old mining company had left gated off.

  She frowned. Reeve was gonna arrest the man, based on what she knew. It sounded inevitable. The only thing they were waiting on was lab results from that IV bag he’d apparently hung.

  But he was driving his police cruiser up here on Mount Horeb?

  She half expected him to hang a U-turn and come back down after her, like he could read what she’d been conspiring to do to him. She watched in the rearview, though, and his car disappeared down the road. She watched—and watched another few seconds, and then she hit the brakes. There was not another car in sight, and Arch Stan was still up there, still down that road somewhere.

  She went through about three phases of thought in quick succession. The first was the extremely natural Ah, well, fuck him, too that she sensed came almost as much from her feelings about him as from the man himself—that bastard. The second was the deeper thought—the suspicion, the wondering What the hell is he doing up here?

  The third came with a fresh breath of annoyance, and ended as she spun the car in a U of her own, heading back up the slope with full intention of following the bastard to see what exactly he was doing trespassing on the mining company’s land. Maybe it’d give the sheriff even more reason to stick the karma Taser up his deputy’s self-righteous ass.

  ***

  Arch was in the dark. It had felt like the right thing to do. He’d plunged into that mine entrance at a run, slowing only as the darkness fell and he’d had to flick on his light and draw the switchblade. He wasn’t counting on conventional threats, so the knife made sense. It wasn’t like there was a high likelihood of a bear hiding up in here, after all.

  He’d found the gate to the mine ajar. Well, a little more than ajar, actually; it’d been hanging off the hinges, open wide. Tracks for more bikes than he could rightly count were all over the ground in front of the entrance. It looked like the tunnel stretched down a ways, maybe to an elevator or something else. The gate at the front of the cave was a half-butted effort to keep teenagers out, Arch figured, the product of a company that had hit the bankruptcy skids and lost everything, even the consideration for others that might have caused them to spend their last dollars on a more substantial metho
d of keeping out trespassers. But bankruptcy was bankruptcy, and you couldn’t get blood out of a turnip. He eased down the tunnel, done with the running.

  His light fell over dark rock, stone bereft of value. Supports lined the walls, designed to keep the world from falling in around him. There wasn’t much to see—yet—but his eyes kept track of it all. The smell of cave air would have been a little dank, he figured, but for the opening behind him. He very carefully did not look back, knowing that the sight of sunlight would blind him for seconds, and Arch was now fully aware that even a second’s blindness was far too long when one was dealing with demons.

  He came to a carved split in the rocky tunnel about a hundred yards in and found himself faced with a choice of which way to go. The cool air crawled up his arms, causing his skin to tingle in a way he surely wouldn’t have felt were he still standing out in the hot sun. Which way to go, that was the question. It didn’t take him long to decide, because lingering about was surely a fast way to get himself made into a ripe target for ambush. He headed right, flashlight beam bouncing its way in front of him, revealing nothing but rock walls and the detritus left behind by a mining company on its way out.

  The tunnels were wide; he couldn’t reach from wall to wall if he’d tried. They were open channels bored into the earth, and the cut tracks on the ground indicated where the mining company had transported the minerals out of the earth with steam locomotive hauling cars. Arch minded his steps as he walked into the silence.

  His footsteps echoed, but at such a low resonance that he wondered if they could be heard down the shaft. He slowed his pace, listening, but the sound of a faint dripping in the distance overcame the soft steps. He became aware of his own breathing, even though it was quiet.

  His flashlight beam caught the first hint of something foreign in the rocky tunnel, and Arch stopped short. He stood there, the pale light stretching across the dusty tunnel floor until it found a lump, something cloth-like that reminded him of a cocoon. He stood there, hesitant to even move, waiting for something else to stir, as though the mere light could awaken something in the darkness.