Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  He heard something and froze, that crash of fear like a cymbal in his head. He straightened, a pang of awareness running down to his stomach. He was vaguely aware that he’d frozen at the thought of some trouble and told himself that it was natural, that he needed to listen. He needed to know where it was coming from before he could deal with it.

  Arch listened, listened hard, waiting for some subtle clue about its location. Was it a demon? A drip of water? The hand on the flashlight shook, and even the knowledge he’d fought a demon that breathed fire at him—on him—did nothing to bring him warmth as he stood there in the dark. It had been a bad idea to come here, he knew that now, not just in his mind, but his gut, which had told him just moments ago to charge into this. The beam shook on the cloth object in front of him, fooling him for just a second into thinking it was moving.

  There was a quiet scrape of something and this, he knew for sure, came from behind him. His head snapped around, and he could see no hint of the entrance and the bright sky somewhere above. He could see nothing, not really, like he’d turned off the lights around him and stood in the dark. His hand sweated on the flashlight, felt it slickly in his palm, the ridges feeling almost ineffectual against the tangible proof of his nervousness—his fear.

  He almost shouted “Hello!” but remembered himself. There was reassurance in that word, in hearing it echo, in hearing someone else repeat it back. But he kept it in, knowing that here in a mine that had so recently harbored demons, reassurance was not what he was likely to find.

  Arch’s eyes adjusted, and now he could see the faint light somewhere down the corridor. Outlines were visible, the dark of the mine broken just slightly by his flashlight’s beam and the far-off promise of daylight somewhere around a curve in the distance.

  His breath came slow, controlled as he drew it while measuring his fear with each exhalation. Nerves were a killer in a place like this. It was a mine, after all; demons weren’t the only things in a place like this that made noise. Natural things could do it as well, like water seepage and bats.

  Arch brought the flashlight around slowly, casting light over craggy walls and dark stone clefts, until it was shining back up the tunnel from whence he’d come. Coming here still seemed like a bad idea, he reflected as he turned the beam around, and as it fell on a face in the darkness he was struck from behind, a scream filling his ears as he hit the ground and the flashlight rolled out of his grasp, casting his whole world in flashes of light for a moment before it stopped.

  ***

  “Mandy?” Hendricks asked, repeating it like he hadn’t heard it. He stared at the girl, bald as Lex Luthor, her skin wrinkled like she’d been a sun worshipper her whole life, that leather handbag look to it. He was still leaning heavily on Alison and she on him, and it surprised him that they weren’t both flat out on the ground because she sure as shit didn’t look strong enough to bear his weight.

  Duncan hummed a few bars of something, and Hendricks cocked his head over to the demon. “Mandy,” Duncan said. “The Manilow song?”

  Hendricks glanced at Alison, who shrugged. “Who the fuck is Manilow?”

  “Kids these days,” Duncan said. “Mandy … what are you doing here?”

  “I live here,” came the ragged response from the fire lady.

  Hendricks raised an eyebrow and surveyed the square again. He’d seen shittier shitholes but not too many. He’d broken down doors in Ramadi that looked more livable than this place—and that was after he and his boys had plowed through. “I’m a little surprised anyone lives here,” Hendricks said, holding back the honesty—because it felt like it might firehose out, irritating that girl and her flaming devil dogs. And he didn’t feel like fighting quite yet.

  “Lots of people used to,” Mandy said. She sounded a little hollow, a little high-noted mixed with some scratch, like she hadn’t used her voice in a while.

  “What happened to them?” Alison asked, and Hendricks gave her a frown. Didn’t she already know?

  “You were here before,” Mandy said, staring at Alison with hollow eyes. They were taking it all in, those eyes, but Hendricks had a doubt that it was all making sense to the brain behind them. Mandy looked about eighty percent checked out, by his reckoning. The lights were on, maybe, and that was about it. “You came last time.”

  “I came last time,” Alison agreed. “I saw you, from a distance, before we ran. But I didn’t talk to you.”

  “No one talks to me,” Mandy said.

  “Better than hearing voices, I guess,” Hendricks said. He regretted it as those empty eyes took him in for a minute.

  “You look a little like him,” Mandy said, and her bald head went to a forty-five degree angle as she surveyed him. “I think.” She paused and put a burned finger up to her cracked lips; Hendricks could see the dried skin flaking off in a way that suggested to him that a whole fucking tube of Chap-Stick could not fix the dryness problems this lady had. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.”

  Hendricks wondered how long they should indulge the crazy cat-lady—minus the cats. He landed on, “At least a little longer,” when his eyes fell across the flaming dogs again. They were just waiting, like a command barked would send them leaping forward. Hendricks’s eyes darted to his sword, then back to the dogs. Nope, not great odds. He did not favor them. Walking out would be a lot better. “Who is he?” he asked, trying to sound interested while he worked on a backup plan. None was forthcoming.

  “He—” she snarled, “he’s the one who—” She made a guttural noise in her throat that reminded Hendricks of a dog growling. He eyed the flame dogs and decided that nope, it was coming from her. He shot a sidelong glance at Duncan and noticed the demon was still taking it all in, not making a hostile move. The baton was still in his hand, though, which was either a good sign or a damned bad one.

  Mandy made a new sound, now, a high, whining one, and it took Hendricks a second to realize what it was.

  “She’s crying,” Alison said a second after he got it.

  “You’d be crying, too, if you had what I had,” Mandy said, turning those blank eyes on Alison again. “Did you ever have a man … who took everything from you?” Her eyes fell to Hendricks. “Well? Did you?”

  “I’ve never had a man, no,” Hendricks replied, regretting his glibness as soon as he’d said it.

  It seemed to fall right off Mandy, who focused back on Alison. “Have you?” Mandy asked.

  “I have a man, yes,” Alison replied, a little carefully to Hendricks’s ears. He didn’t have to try hard to wonder why; Mandy sounded a little on edge. Well, actually, she sounded like she was on the edge of the cliff standing on her tippy-toes and leaning over, trying to give the abyss a big damned smooch.

  “Is this him?” Mandy nodded at Hendricks.

  “No,” Alison said.

  “What about him?” Now Mandy sounded tired, as she laconically gestured at Duncan.

  “Definitely not,” Alison said, and Hendricks cracked a smile at that one. “My man’s not here.”

  “I had a man once,” Mandy said, and she’d settled back into a trance-like state where her eyes were fixed on the red-black sky. “He’s gone now.”

  Hendricks’s mouth spoke again before his brain could get a grip on that slippery weasel. “Can’t imagine why; it’s such a lovely town you have here.”

  She looked at him, but there was no flare of anger. Hendricks felt a jolt in his ribs from Alison, caught the look from Duncan that chided him for being a moron. “It wasn’t always like this,” Mandy said.

  “I’d imagine with a name like Hobbs Green it might have been a little … greener, at some point?” Hendricks asked. He got the elbow from Alison again, but this time he fired back a look of his own. He’d kept it diplomatic, dammit.

  “It was green once,” Mandy said. “Blue skies, too, I think?” She gazed at Alison with that broken look. “The skies were blue, weren’t they?”

  “Still are, elsewhere,” Alison said cautiously.
That was probably the safe way to say it, Hendricks figured. “Little different here, though.”

  “Yes,” Mandy said, agreeing with a sorrowful aura. “Things are different here.”

  “What happened?” Duncan asked, and waited for her eyes to fall on him. “What happened to turn the skies dark and the ground black and …” The demon just let his voice drift off.

  “Why, the most joyous thing in the world, of course,” Mandy said, again delivering this like it was self-evident. If nothing else, she was doing a marvelous job of convincing Hendricks that her motor would never again fire on all cylinders. And he had doubts she was ever a V8 to begin with. “I had a baby.” Her hands fell to her stomach, and Hendricks noticed for the first time that what he had thought was black clothing was soot as the covering on her belly smeared and revealed more wrinkled flesh below.

  “Holy shit, she’s naked as the day she was born,” Hendricks muttered under his breath. For whatever reason, Alison spared the elbow this time.

  “Have you seen my baby?” Mandy asked, her voice off-note this time, some perverse mixture of joy and sorrow.

  “Can’t say I have,” Hendricks replied, beating out the other two. “Where is … they?” He switched gears mid-sentence and felt like a moron for the two seconds it took for him to remember he was in the ruins of a demon-burned Alabama town and not a grammar rodeo.

  “Why, right here, of course,” Mandy said and knelt. One of the fire dogs padded over to her, leaving scorched earth with every step. Hendricks saw similar paw prints of glass all over the square and realized that everywhere it tread, it left a mark. It made a gawdawful sound that was somewhere between a scream and a mewl, then it brought out a flaming tongue and ran it quickly over Mandy’s cheek before settling lower, anchoring on her small breast. She fell backward as it did, falling on her ass with apparent glee as it suckled from her. The next closest dog came over to them then, not leaving a single glassy paw print as it did so but latching to the other side, rubbing against her with its flaming body and leaving a smear of black soot across her shoulder as it did so. The answer for how she got that fancy suit of ash clothing popped into Hendricks’s head. The other dogs maintained their guard formation as the two front runners nursed, the flames of their bodies burning brighter as they did so.

  “These are my babies,” Mandy said, and Hendricks found the time to look over at Alison, her face two inches from his. The discomfort was unmistakeable, but she kept it shy of horror by a long margin. Mandy’s hand ran over the fiery back of the one on her left breast. “But this one is the one I birthed myself.”

  Duncan beat Hendricks to the punch. “Who birthed the rest of them?”

  “The other women of the town,” Mandy said, smiling at her suckling pups. Hendricks found the way she was looking at them really fucking disturbing, and he thought he’d just about hit the peak when the acid-cum-spurting demon had burned his way through a hooker last week.

  “Okay, Khaleesi,” Hendricks said, and caught a funny look from Duncan. “Sometimes I stay in hotels that have HBO,” he explained. Turning his attention back to Mandy, he tried to keep himself level. “What happened to the other women? The other … mothers?”

  “They weren’t the mothers,” Mandy said with a shake of her head as she scratched behind the ear of her favorite. “They were surrogates, wombs of convenience to hold my other babies, the ones my own womb couldn’t hold.” Now her crackling voice just sounded like some fucked up mix of innocent and sinister. Hendricks was not taking bets on which of those descriptions was leading in that race, either.

  “Where did the babies come from?” Duncan asked. “Who was the father?”

  Mandy’s dead eyes flared. “He was a demon from hell.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s pretty obvious to all of us at this point,” Hendricks said. No elbow this time, either. “But … uh … did this demon from hell have a name?”

  “His name was Mick.” Her hand slid along the neck of her dog.

  “I see,” Duncan said, taking it all in. “Was he Irish?”

  “Jesus,” Hendricks said, “you really were around in the eighteen hundreds, weren’t you, you racist.”

  “All you skin puppets look the same to me,” Duncan replied. “Where did this … Mick … come from?”

  “He came to town with the carnival,” Mandy said, her voice taking on a dreamlike quality. “He showed me things …”

  “Like his cock,” Hendricks muttered under his breath.

  “… things I’d never seen before …” Mandy went on. “Made me feel things … I couldn’t have imagined …”

  “Like her hymen bursting, I’d guess,” Alison added. Hendricks approved.

  “… and he lied to me, made me give it all to him. Then the carnival left, and he left, and I was left behind with … my baby,” Mandy finished, rubbing the flame dog again. “My babies,” she amended.

  “So he worked for the carnival,” Hendricks mused. He blinked for a second. “What the hell is the moral of this story? Don’t fuck a lying carnie?”

  “All men are scum who just want to get laid?” Alison suggested, looking at him with a point harder than the elbow to his ribs had been.

  “You humans are all idiots,” Duncan added, playing the game.

  “He made me special, you know,” Mandy said.

  Hendricks let a wary eye drift over the dozen dogs of fire he could see. “Looks like he made a lot of girls ‘special’ before he left town.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “He was only ever with me. The others—they—they could feel it because he was with me. Felt him with them even though they didn’t touch him, didn’t love him like I did.”

  Hendricks tried to sift through that, coming up with nothing. “What the fuck is she talking about?” he asked Duncan under his breath. It was almost a stage whisper.

  “Sounds like something I’ve heard rumors of but never run across,” Duncan said. “Ancient name; a species that doesn’t really walk the earth anymore. It takes a … partner,” he nodded toward Mandy, “and any women with a fertile womb within a certain distance get hit by this … I dunno, thrall? They get a dose of highly narcotic, erotic, spiritual essence hurled at them. It takes their root in their reproductive organs and, uh …” He waved at the dogs. “Nine months later …”

  “He …” Alison’s voice sounded strong, then faded away before exploding out again, “he does a MASS GROUP SEXUAL MIND ASSAULT?!”

  Duncan just stood there, like he was trying to evaluate his answer before speaking it aloud. “That’s as good a descriptor as any, but if you want to be technically accurate, you’d need to add in something about essence or soul to the rape charge.”

  “This is fucked,” Hendricks pronounced. “This guy is coming to Midian?”

  “Carnival,” Alison said. “The Summer Lights Festival is in town. He’s probably already there.”

  “Yep,” Hendricks said. “Fucked.” He turned his attention back to Mandy. “You said he, uh … you know … did his thing with you … the night before he left town?”

  “Yes,” Mandy said.

  “If that’s a pattern,” Hendricks said, “and who knows if it actually is, then when does the carnival leave town?”

  “Tonight’s the last night,” Alison said.

  “Shit, fuck, damn,” Hendricks said. “What the hell time is it?”

  “About time we left,” Duncan said, shooting a gaze at Mandy. “If we’re allowed to.” For this he raised his voice.

  “I would let you leave,” Mandy said, rubbing the neck of her fire dog, patting it like a master taking care of their pet. “But my babies … they’re hungry. There hasn’t been a real meal here in a long time … and they can’t just nurse, you know? They’re getting a little old for that …”

  “Yeah, most of us stopped using the nipple to nurse a long ways back,” Hendricks said.

  “Kinda figured we were about to go headlong into that snag,” Duncan said. He clutched his bato
n and set his feet defensively. Hendricks gently detached himself from Alison, trying to stand on his own two feet. He wobbled a little. To his surprise, she took their uncoupling better than he had.

  Hendricks hoisted the sword in front of him. “Just once, I want to go somewhere that doesn’t suck, where the people and demons aren’t trying to kill me.” He realized, truthfully, that this desire was surprisingly soul-deep, something he’d never before said out loud.

  “This is not your day,” Duncan said.

  “Tomorrow’s not looking so good for that, either,” Alison chimed in. She had her pistol drawn and was tracking the nearest flame dog, looking down her weapon’s sights at it.

  “Well, here’s hoping the day after, then,” Hendricks said, as the first of the fiery beasts leapt at him, and all hell came crashing down around his ears.

  16.

  John Watkins had been coming to Melina Cherry’s brothel since he was eighteen years old. He’d been a fan of the lady herself for the longest time, because not only did she know how to run the place, she knew how to run his shaft. She’d tickled his cock in more ways than he could count, finding new methods of wringing old pleasures out of his dick all the time. John was thirty-six now, and it didn’t bother him at all that Melina had gotten up there in the years. She still knew how to run his cock.

  But ever since this redhead had shown up, his loyalty had wavered. “It’s all right, baby,” Melina had assured him the first time he’d gone to bed with red, just like the other times she’d passed him off to the blond-haired girl—what was her name? Colleen? Yeah, that was it. With the blond gal, it had never taken. She was young, she was decent, but she didn’t start his fire like Melina had. That woman could have suck-started a leaf-blower. She had to be pushing fifty, and he figured he’d keep on visiting her until she was seventy, at least. She knew what he liked.

  Then the redhead showed up. All it took was a test drive, Melina whispering in his ear all manner of encouragement in that throaty voice she had, all the things she whispered to him when they were together. It was a kink and a half to him; John had only ever gone for one girl at a time. Having the woman he’d been banging forever telling him to fuck a new girl, and finding that he liked the new girl on her own damned merits …