Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  She came alongside a moment later as Duncan passed him to match pace with Alison. The red-clouded sky burned overhead, casting a glare down on them like they were under a crimson light. “You are well?” the redhead asked, causing Alison’s head to jerk around. Hendricks could read the expression on her face, but when she spoke in response he didn’t quite expect what she said.

  “What kind of rough, no-lube butt-fuckery is this?” Alison stopped hard and turned on Starling. “You sent us here—”

  “She seems angered,” Starling said, like it was a matter of no consequence. Oh, the grass is green.

  “Can’t imagine why,” Hendricks said, coming to a stop himself. He put his palms on his knees this time and gave Alison a sour look for not doing the same. She looked completely unbothered by the run. Neither were Duncan or Starling, but that was different.

  Hendricks heard the crashing of brush and turned his head in time to see the man he’d met earlier that morning—lo, those many hours ago when the sun was still well below the horizon—coming at them in the darkness. Hendricks could tell it was him by the bevy of flashlights that suddenly got pointed his way. That same slightly overweight, large-framed fellow—except now he had a hunting rifle snugged across his shoulder by strap and a pistol on his belt that looked like a real, old-fashioned wheelgun.

  “Daddy!” Alison said with obvious relief and took off for him, feet crushing leaves with each step. She threw herself into his arms and sank into his chest.

  “Baby girl.” Mister—what was it he’d introduced himself as? Longcolt? Longholt, that was it. Mr. Longholt hugged his daughter tight, his greyish brown head of thinning hair bowing down to Alison’s shoulder. Hendricks couldn’t see his face, but that didn’t stop him from looking.

  “And now she is no longer angry,” Starling observed. The sky is red.

  “Even you mystical beings can’t figure women out,” Hendricks said.

  “Don’t be a pig,” Duncan said.

  “Oink oink,” Hendricks said with an unintended snort at the end. He snapped his gaze to Mr. Longholt. “I take it we don’t have to spend time doing the long explanation about what just happened back there?”

  “Demons from hell,” Mr. Longholt said, pulling his head off his daughter’s shoulder. He didn’t look old or frail, not one bit. He looked strong, maybe a little wary, like many a soldier in a war zone Hendricks had known. “That’s what’s going on in Midian right now?”

  “In a nutshell,” Hendricks said. He hadn’t been able to formulate much of an opinion about the man when they’d met the night before, being in something approaching screaming pain, but this was more than a bit impressive. “If you don’t want your town to turn out like this, we need to get back immediate-damn-ly.”

  “We need to keep moving,” Starling said.

  Hendricks turned his eyes to Duncan. “They following us?”

  “Doubtful,” Duncan said, shaking his head quickly. “But I still can’t see in there. Someone mucked this place up, bad.”

  Hendricks blinked at the OOC. “Are you talking about the fact that this place is burned to the fucking ground?”

  Duncan didn’t even show a hint of emotion. “That too. But it’s clouded over. Some kind of work like Spellman does, but maybe on a bigger scale. I thought it was cloudy before we went in, but it’s kinda like fog; you can’t see in front of you so it’s hard to tell if there’s anything going on inside.” He glanced at Starling, and a hint of distaste appeared. “Red here doesn’t seem to share my limitations, though, so if she says we should keep moving, we should keep moving.”

  “Roger that,” Hendricks said, breaking into a jog again long after Mr. Longholt had started moving his daughter forward. Just another reason for the Army man to rise in his estimation. Between that and the impressive daughter he’d raised, Hendricks was beginning to think he’d been making a mistake running solo all these years.

  ***

  Mick had some time off, so he went into town. The sun was starting to arc lower in the sky, heading toward its terminus on the western horizon. He was excited about the night’s activities, about what the evening with Molly would entail. He had trouble with her name, because some time in the itty-bitty hours of the morning he’d remembered that the last girl he’d been with, in that Alabama slice of shit town, had been Mandy. It had popped right into his mind like only something long forgotten could, ringing triumph of random memory in his ears. She’d been a sweet little piece, hadn’t she? Nice knees and everything. He wasn’t all that curious about how she was doing, but if things fell into the usual pattern, she was probably still alive—if one could call what she was doing living.

  As he looked around the town square, he felt nothing. Less than nothing, really. The urge was too strong, it was burning him up inside. Left unsated, in about another year he’d be a walking erection, a disaster area of demonic proportions. He wouldn’t be able to be near anybody, his essence would be bleeding out in flaming bursts of uncontrolled emotion. He’d tried holding it back once, when he was young and denying what he was. That had been Italy, he thought, and a few hundred years back. It had sure as shit cost him, too, made him flee the country in a hell of a hurry. Bonfire of the vanities looked quaint by comparison.

  No, this was the time, this was the place. Just another stop for the carnival, just another town. Except this one was already heading to hell anyway, so why not speed up the process a bit?

  He could smell the scent of coffee coming out of the Surrey Diner and thought about stopping in for a bit. He had that plan with Molly, knew where to meet her and when, was ready to follow through with it. He looked at his watch, the face scratched with a half a hundred nicks in the glass, and bemoaned—not for the first time—the slow passage of the hours.

  What the hell was there to do in this town?

  He came with a half an inch of voicing that thought, and then the faint crowd around the square gave him an answer.

  “Flame inside,” came a dreamy voice, far off, from behind him. “Fire burns, runs through the trees.” He turned to see a man standing there in clothes a hell of lot worse than his own, and his were not exactly new and fancy. The guy looked to be in his fifties, old navy shirt that was threadbare and worn, long-sleeved even in the heat. He wore long, stained trousers, too, some sort of heavy canvas-looking material. He was sweating, a stocking cap pulled down around his ears.

  Homeless, Mick thought. Bum. Not the sort of thing you saw a lot of in a town like this, but here one was.

  “I can see it burning like a lit match inside,” the bum said, staring at Mick. The man’s eyes were looking straight through him, and Mick felt just a little swell of panic inside as his essence rippled. “Oooh,” the man said. “Pretty, it crackles like flame.”

  “Don’t mind Jarrett,” came a rough voice from behind him, causing Mick to pinwheel around. There was a guy in the alley next to him, wearing a white apron as he came out the side door of the diner, full trash bag in his hand. Looked older than the bum, and Mick realized he’d seen him before. Pat, wasn’t it? He squinted and caught the nametag. His hair was grey brown, and he looked like he scowled more than he smiled. “Came home from Vietnam a little off, but he’s harmless.”

  Mick tore his glance from Jarrett, the bum, to Pat. He hadn’t met Pat before, but he knew who he was. He was the guy giving Mick the stinkeye from behind the counter of the diner when he’d been sitting there with Molly last night.

  “The flames are rising,” Jarrett said, like he was in some kind of fucking trance. Mick could still feel the nervousness, but at least now he had a plan. He eased away from Jarrett and toward Pat, taking odd note of the stains and marks down the apron on the old proprietor.

  “I know you,” Mick said, putting on a fake smile.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Pat replied, pausing after heaving the garbage bag into the open dumpster. He wasn’t looking at Mick with suspicion, exactly, but it wasn’t friendliness, either.

  “You were
the one giving me dirty looks when I was with Molly last night,” Mick said, throwing some affable in there. It was all pretend, of course, but he kept his pace steady, trying to stage-manage the show and hoping that the bum stayed right where he was. A glance back showed that he was doing exactly that, though he’d taken to mumbling under his breath.

  The alley was in shade with the side of the diner keeping the sun off of Mick’s head. For this he was slightly grateful. He offered a hand to Pat. “I’m Mick. Nice to meetcha.”

  Pat glanced down at it like it was a foreign object, and Mick could see him weighing the options. Out of politeness he finally out thrust his own and took it, but Mick didn’t miss that it was the hand that had been holding the garbage bag seconds earlier. Fucker. Mick didn’t even feel remorse for what he was about to do after that. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Pat said, putting the squeeze on Mick’s hand, though by his tone he clearly wasn’t.

  Mick met his eyes, shook his hand once firmly, then glanced again back at the bum. He was at a good twenty paces away, and that was good enough for Mick.

  “The fire,” Jarrett whispered.

  “What’s he talking about?” Mick asked, nonchalant. He reached inside and started to play with something he’d only used once before, squinting at Jarrett like he held the secret of life.

  “Like I told you, he ain’t right,” Pat said from Mick’s peripheral vision. Mick knew he was far enough away to make this plausible. It was just a matter of effort, really. He pictured the bum in his head, pictured him in flames, rising—

  “So hot,” Jarrett said quietly. “Sooooo hot.” The voice rose.

  “It’s a hot day all right,” Pat said toward the bum.

  Mick reached deeper, looked deeper, saw the middle of the bum. He didn’t think of him as a person anymore, not that he cared all that much. There was a switch in there, a fiery middle, and all he had to do was—

  “AIEEEEEEEEEE!” The shriek was instantaneous, and Mick found himself jumping back involuntarily just from the noise.

  “Jesus!” Pat said from next to him, startled. “Simmer down, Jarrett!”

  “Is this normal?” Mick asked, taking note of the first strains of smoke wafting from under the bum’s dark shirt.

  “He’s usually fairly docile,” Pat said. “But I have seen him get irate once or twice.” The man said ‘twice’ like ‘twiced,’ like it had a d to end it. Southerners. It was barely audible over the bum’s shrieks by this point.

  The fire burst out of the belly of the bum’s shirt like a door coming off a stove, and the next scream he let out was consumed by a belch of flame that rolled out of his mouth.

  “Holy shit!” Pat said. He did not move to help and neither did Mick; the diner owner just stood there, stunned, and Mick stood right with him, though only feigning surprise. Inside, he was a big, bubbling pot of indifference.

  The bum’s screams died with the gout of fire that came out of his mouth and his skin was replaced with flame within a second, a blackened skull appearing within them like some object partially unearthed. The fire crackled as the bum fell to his knees, arms spread wide like he was ready for a hug or salvation or something. He was completely consumed by now, and Mick wondered just how alive he was under the orange blaze. His clothes, the threadbare, shitty things, had already blackened and peeled back. Bones were appearing now, obvious, as the body—what was left of it—toppled to the ground in the mouth of the alley and stopped moving.

  Mick watched with detached interest, trying to plot his response for maximum effect. “Jesus,” he said, putting a little acting into it, like when he had to fake excitement for someone who had won a prize at a booth, “did he just spontaneously combust?”

  “I ain’t never seen nothing like that,” Pat said from beside him. “Jesus. I think he did.”

  “I know I wasn’t anywhere near him,” Mick said, trying to sound awestruck, “and neither were you.” He cemented his alibi with this little lie. “He was just standing there and—I mean, holy, it was like the flames came out of him, it wasn’t even like he was on fire on the skin or clothes or anything …”

  “Yeah,” Pat said, nodding. The proprietor had not yet moved his gaze off the charred remains, the flames finally dying down. The whole alley smelled of them, smelled of burnt meat, and Mick covered his nose involuntarily. “There wasn’t anybody anywhere near him, he just lit off like a firecracker.” His nods came one after another, and Mick wondered for a moment if the diner owner’s head wasn’t going to bob right off his shoulders.

  “We should call 911,” Mick said, finally dropping that suggestion. Now that the damage was irreversibly done and his alibi was secure.

  “Yeah,” Pat said, but it came out with the air of a man who had heard and nodded but would not move without some external prodding.

  “You should go do that,” Mick said then thought the better of it. “We should go do that.” Pat’s gaze finally shifted off the body to look him in the eyes, a sort of blinking curiosity one might find in the eyes of a child looking for explanation on some simple fact. Mick provided it, happily, acting his way through. “I don’t want to be alone with the …” He waved a hand at the smoking corpse, lying prostrate on the alley floor, the pavement scorched around it. “… With him.”

  ***

  Arch heard the “All units” call go out on the radio as he hit the outskirts of Midian. He assumed, the shudder of the car’s deceleration running through the steering wheel to his arms, that it did not apply to him. He listened anyway, the particulars causing a very different sort of shudder, one prompted by the description of Jarrett Barnes, whom everyone in Midian knew, turned to flaming ash and dust in the middle of the square. Arch kept driving, kept shaking, and found when he reached his apartment that he had some trouble walking from the Explorer to the door of his apartment, and the fumbling for his keys was even worse.

  Yes, this was Midian now, he decided. Bodies found every day, the town falling steadily into ruin. Was it the end of days? Maybe, he decided, as he finally sunk the key into the lock. The cool air of the apartment was not reassuring, though, as he closed the door and felt the lack of the apartment’s other occupant especially acutely in the shaded dark of this place that did not feel like home.

  ***

  They made it to the car faster than Hendricks had anticipated. The chatter was minimal, the breathing not as heavy as one might have expected given that there were five of them. Two of them might not have been human, but still—Mr. Longholt did not wheeze at all, and his daughter’s panting sounds were minimal. Hendricks fought against the pounding of his own heart to hear, mostly, and found it somewhat surprising that there was no sound of dogs behind him, no patter of hellhound feet searing plant and leaf and grass and dirt as they pursued. When the town car came into sight he let out a breath of relief, one which sounded much like every other breath he’d drawn in the last hour or so—somewhat gasping.

  “Why … aren’t they chasing us?” Longholt asked. Leave it to Army to try and beat the Marines to the punch. “Last time they at least dogged us on the way out. This time, nothing.”

  “Because his girlfriend killed their queen,” Duncan said, nodding at Starling, who stood next to Hendricks, but a lot more at peace than he was. So level was the OOC’s tone that it took a moment for what he’d said to settle in Hendricks’s brain.

  “Wait, she did what?” Hendricks jerked his head around to look at Starling, who was staring straight ahead. “She killed Mandy?”

  “You’re not gonna cry about it, are you?” Duncan asked with something approaching a sneer. Like he was channeling Lerner’s departed spirit. “But yeah, she chucked a wooden support from a collapsed building at her. Impaled her right in the middle of her little dog party. They all burst into black flames right off.”

  “Like a hive army in a movie,” Alison said. “Kill the queen, kill them all.”

  “Let’s not go digging too deep into that,” Mr. Longholt said, his expression
now curiously clouded.

  “It’s good to know, isn’t it?” Duncan asked. “In case we fail tonight?”

  Hendricks let that rest for a minute before cutting into it. “Yeah, it’s great to know that if we fuck up and this carnie gets laid, all we have to do is murder a girl to save the town. I’m so very ecstatic about that. Somebody pinch me.” He felt a harsh sting on his hand and looked over at Starling, who had done just as he commanded, as neutral as ever. “Didn’t mean it in a literal fashion.” Starling did not look sorry.

  “We need to move,” Mr. Longholt said. “So as to avoid having to consider that option.”

  “I guess I’ll just play devil’s advocate here—” Duncan said.

  “Seems like that would be in your job description,” Alison said.

  “—and suggest that this is a very valid option,” Duncan went on. “Maybe you lack the emotional distance to see what needs to happen here. One girl’s life does not balance well on the scales against that of a whole town.”

  “Which is maybe gonna burn anyway, if cryptic prophecy chick over here is right,” Hendricks said, nodding at Starling. He locked his eyes on her. “Well? Gotta any other helpful words of advice now that we’ve extracted ourselves from this mess I just had to feel?”

  “You are unforged steel,” she said, looking straight at him. “A sword without an edge.”

  “Oh, I think you’re about to see my edge,” Hendricks said.

  “You are not ready,” Starling said. “You must face the trials to prepare for what is to come.”

  “And you’re just gonna lead me through ’em, like a pup at a dog show?” He didn’t even like the way it sounded in his head, but it was even more bitter spilling out of his lips. “What am I to you? A pet? Like those … things … were to Mandy?” He waved his hand in the direction from whence they’d come and tried to glare at her, but she gave no hint to indicate that his anger affected her at all. “Is that what I am?”

  She stared at him coolly, like always. “You are Lafayette Jackson Hendricks.”