***
“This is not gonna be good,” Alison’s daddy muttered as they both lay, prone, about fifty feet from each other. She could hear him because he was talking loud enough to be heard that far away.
She had her cheek against the rifle, eye a little back from the scope with the butt against her shoulder. The pad was already in place, but she had it safetied against possible discharge. “Can’t imagine what you mean,” she said back, conveying by tone that she knew very damned well what he meant. “Limited backstop, huge crowd … what could possibly go wrong?” She said it with sarcasm, but the idea of what would happen if she fired the big Barrett, even at her slightly downward angle, into the fair was the stuff of nightmares. She could easily kill half a dozen people with a poorly placed shot. More if she had to fire multiple times. People she knew, people who shopped in her store, people she’d grown up with, been to church with.
Plus, there was still absolutely no obvious sign indicating two teenagers were having carnal knowledge on the premises. The likelihood they’d do it out in the wide open seemed low, though, especially since she’d seen Nicholas Reeve wandering around in her scan of the crowd. She hovered her sights over the line of seafoam green porta potties, looking for any of them to be rocking subtly. That’d be a sign. True romance.
“What do you reckon?” she asked her father.
“Reckon if I were a betting man, I’d like to place some money on the long odds against us.” He sighed. “But since I’m not, I reckon I’ll just put my eye back to this scope and see if I can find a couple young adults rubbing up against each other like a flea-ridden dog against a fencepost.”
***
They got off the roller coaster breathless, Molly flushed with that red-cheeked excitement that couldn’t be faked. Mick didn’t know if it was the night, the lights, the feeling of the place—music was playing, in the background, some old Springsteen song that was the kind of thing he could still get behind. The first fireworks started to go off overhead and the night was lit up like it was the Fourth of July. The air carried just the littlest hint of briskness, the first breath of fall, and it was a perfect, signature end to summer. Mick took a big breath in through the nose and smelled that whiff of cotton candy mingled with the suggestion of cool air coming. He looked over at Molly’s cheeks, those happy, rose-red cheeks, and couldn’t keep from smiling himself. He often thought humanity was a contagious condition, and in moments like this he felt like it was catching, just a little. “Wanna ride the Ferris wheel?” he asked with a grin. She nodded with a placid smile of her own, and their fingers met to interlace once more as he led her off to the night’s capstone.
***
“You don’t seem impressed,” Duncan said as he and Hendricks charged through the crowd at a brisk walk. Brisk was the word for it, all right, Hendricks thought as they paced through the crowd. They passed a funnel cake booth and Hendricks nearly did a double take at the smell.
“My hometown did something similar,” Hendricks said, catching his thousandth funny look of the night for the drover coat and hat. He had the coat all buttoned up and considered himself lucky the ticket taker hadn’t asked him to undo it. He actually considered it lucky, too, that the night was just a little chilly for the locals. Not anything to write home about in Wisconsin, but for Tennessee it was something. He saw a few others wearing windbreakers.
“Oh, yeah?” Duncan didn’t sound too impressed, either.
“Amery—the town I’m from—had this thing called the Fall Festival,” Hendricks said. “Of course, in western Wisconsin, every town had its own little fair or carnival or whatever. I mostly went to the Fall Festival in Amery, but there was New Richmond Days, Good Neighbor Days down in Roberts, the St. Croix County Fair down in Glenwood City, the—”
“I stand in awe of your boring story,” Duncan cut him off. He hadn’t been quite this abrupt a few days ago, had he? Hendricks wondered if it was Lerner’s loss or some sort of fatigue that was pinching the OOC’s personality. “This is fucking pointless.”
Hendricks didn’t remember the demon swearing as much a few days earlier, either. “It’s not looking too good for the home team, I’ll be the first to admit.” He glanced at a couple in their early twenties walking along. The guy had his hand around her shoulder, firmly cupping the girl’s tit. It looked like a pretty decent handful, Hendricks had to concede, but they weren’t really showing much sign of anything other than that, at least not yet. “Half this town’s teenagers could be heading off to fuck right after this and we wouldn’t know it.” He paused. “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“We’re not looking for a guy from this town,” Hendricks said, shaking his head at the stupidity. He leaned in to Duncan and lifted the strand of black headphone wire off the OOC’s shirt and spoke into the little lump of plastic. “We’re looking for a total stranger, team. Keep your eyes peeled for a guy you’ve never seen before.”
***
“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” Arch said, making his way slowly through the crowd next to a ball toss game. He was watching a guy in full bib overalls trying to knock over a series of bottles at ten paces. Arch hadn’t watched for more than five seconds before he came to the conclusion the game was rigged. “The guy’s a carnie, right? What do they dress like?” He stared at the booth worker, hard pressed to tell much difference between him and any of the other people he’d seen that night.
***
“Looking.” Alison trained her eye through the scope again. She focused on a knot of school-aged kids and was a little shocked to find how young they looked. She tried to put it out of her mind that they were almost a decade younger than her, and when she’d figured out that she knew every single one of them, she moved the scope onward, taking only a moment to ponder that she’d violated a rule of gun safety by having her weapon continually pointed in a very, very unsafe direction.
***
Mick felt the thrill of upcoming victory as they passed Troy at the ticket-taker stand for the Ferris wheel. He got the nod and the arched eyebrows from Troy, which was like a compliment to his skills before the job was done. That was fine with Mick, though, because he could just about smell her cooch from here, and she hadn’t even lifted her skirt or slid down her panties yet.
He took her hand as they made their way across the little platform to get on the wheel. He’d picked a carnival that had enclosed buckets—for privacy. This was always the place. He could have gone somewhere else, he supposed, but the truth was that the Ferris wheel was his favorite ride, too, and ever since he’d rode his first one in Chicago over a century earlier, he had never gotten over the idea of being lifted to breathtaking heights in the sky.
The bucket rocked as they stepped inside. He closed the door and watched Troy come by and lock it before pulling the lever and sending them up. He’d talked with Troy about this moment beforehand, and here in the heavily used, sweaty compartment, he stopped to stare at the weave of fiberglass that made up the inside of the bucket. It looked like little roots, connecting to each other, to him, like things of life that joined people and time and events together. His head always filled with these heavy thoughts just before time, like his mind was expanding in advance of the event itself. Soon he’d be tasting every woman in the entire carnival, smelling their sweat and perfume as he released himself into them. He could already feel himself stiffening with anticipation as he looked in Molly’s eyes. He felt a gleam as he kept his hand on hers and willed the Ferris wheel into motion. It started on its slow path to the stop between the seven and eight o’clock positions, and he found he could barely wait a second more.
***
“I’ve got something,” Alison heard her father say. “Young man I’ve never seen before, hand in hand with Molly Darlington. About to get on the Ferris wheel.”
Alison pulled her eye off her scope for a second. She’d been trolling near the gates, scoping out the pretzel stand. She swiveled her weapon to the Ferris wheel an
d looked back through the scope, centering on the ticket taker. She saw a blur of motion, a couple moving to get in the bucket. “Got eyes on him,” she said, watching as they stepped inside. “I don’t know who he is, either.”
***
“Heading that way,” Duncan said in response to what Hendricks presumed was a voice in his headphone. He cuffed Hendricks on the shoulder and pointed toward the Ferris wheel that towered above everything. Hendricks shrugged and fell in beside the demon. They weren’t far away, and it wasn’t like Hendricks had anything else to do but follow the OOC.
***
“This has been a real special night,” Mick said, looking over at Molly. He could smell that sweet aroma of sweat in the air, feel the hard bench beneath his ass, the wind creeping in through the slit of a window that overlooked the ten thousand lights of the fair below. The bucket bobbed from the motion, but gently, rocking them both with a Rolling Stones song faintly audible from the loudspeakers below as their lullaby. Or mood music, Mick thought. That was probably closer to right.
“It has,” Molly said, and she was just a little sphinx-like, as if she were holding something back. Girls always did, though, in Mick’s experience. Probably nerves.
The bucket started to move again, this time toward the nine o’clock, and Mick knew he only had about ten minutes left. He leaned in and kissed her, again, full and deep, parting her lips with his tongue, feeling hers press back gently. She broke from him unexpectedly, pulling away sooner than he would have thought. She looked out the slatted window on her side, out on the brightly lit parking lot below.
“What is it?” Mick asked.
She looked back at him and smiled. “Nothing. I just want to enjoy the ride.”
So she was a little reticent. He’d run across this a couple times before, and it was easy enough to solve. He’d forgotten what it felt like to have a girl resist, he’d gotten so good at picking the ones that would put out. He hadn’t even had to put his mouth on the wet snatches of the last two, something he didn’t really enjoy save for what it got him. He sniffed audibly, could almost imagine his tongue dancing on her—
“What?” Innocent. She was looking at him, wondering what he was thinking. It was obvious, written on her face.
“I was just thinking how beautiful you look tonight,” Mick said. He rested a hand gently on her thigh, and it wasn’t there for more than a second before she jerked away from his touch like he’d burned her. Now it was his turn to frown. “What?”
“Umm …” She swallowed heavily. “Let me just stop you there … I’m okay with making out a little, but … that’s about it. That’s the line.” She had some strength in that voice, and it raised Mick’s eyebrow.
He smiled. Things that were easy were never as worth it as the things that were hard. “It’s okay.” He turned on the charm. “I understand if you’re, y’know, inexperienced. It’s not a big deal.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him, and something in the way she did it looked far, far different from anything he’d ever seen in this situation before. “What do you think is going to happen here?”
Mick felt a hot flush creep up his neck and settle in his cheeks. “I figured we’d, uh … you know.” He arched his eyebrows once.
Her expression got hard just as the lump in his pants showed the first sign of softening. “Listen … I like you,” she said gently, “but … I’m sixteen.”
“You’re a woman,” he said, a little flustered. “Baby, you’re old enough to—”
“To make my own decisions?” She was sounding patronizing now, and that heat in Mick’s cheeks belied just a little, tiny grain of anger. “I agree, which is why I’m saying that we’re not going any farther than first base. Like I said, I like you. Which is why I’d like to enjoy our time together without feeling, like … pressure and stuff.”
“But … but … I took you all over this place,” Mick said, lamely even to his ears.
“It was a good date,” Molly said, still looking cool but with just a speck of pity mixed in, “but that doesn’t entitle you to carte blanche.” She smiled at him, but all he could see was this building rage in him that reflected back. “Can we just … have fun?”
He could feel his hands shaking, and he grabbed one of the lap bars to stabilize himself as he watched her pale slightly from his reaction. “Oh, we’re gonna have fun. You bet your sweet little snatch we’re gonna have fun.”
***
The scream cracked through the air as Hendricks and Duncan were loitering just outside the ticket taker’s line. Hendricks didn’t hesitate; he pulled up on the guardrail, mounted the platform and ran straight for the Ferris wheel. When he got to the box that was on the bottom, he paused just long enough to hear the next scream from the car that was climbing up to the space between the ten and eleven o’clock positions on the wheel. He gripped hard on the metal frame and started to climb.
***
“A frozen corn dog?” Reeve was chuckling at the end of her story. “Corn dog in the corn hole? Shiiit.”
“That’s what he eventually had to do to get the rest out,” Lauren said with a smirk of her own, “though it wasn’t at all frozen by that time.”
“I bet you see some crazy damned stuff,” Reeve said. “You know, other than corpses strewn randomly around your hometown.”
Lauren blew air out through her lips and could feel the weariness settle over her. “Honestly, what I’ve seen these last few days trumps most of the stuff that comes through the ER.”
There was a scream in the distance, echoing through the night as the crowd silenced abruptly. Lauren turned her head; it had come from the Ferris wheel and it was a thick, fearful one. A second one followed, and suddenly from below the lowest metal spoke of the wheel, she could see a man clad all in black, climbing the frame.
A man with a black cowboy hat on his head.
“What … the … fuck?” Reeve asked, staring up at the Ferris wheel from beside her. “I bet this shit doesn’t happen at the Renaissance Festival.” The way he said it reminded her of a plea for grace of the sort one heard in church. Minus the profanity. She started to respond, but the sheriff had already disappeared into the crowd, pushing his way toward the disturbance.
Another shriek sounded, and Lauren realized she could place it as female … and young. It took only one leap of logic before she, too, was pushing her way through the crowd toward the wheel and whatever the hell was going on within it.
***
“Hendricks is climbing the Ferris wheel,” Alison reported tensely, her rifle centered on the cowboy. She was trying to get some idea of what was going on, but the entire ride was closed off, each box providing only a thin viewing window a foot or so wide that stretched around the front of the cars. There wasn’t even a window in the side doors, which totally cockblocked her efforts to figure out if something was going on. One of the boxes was rocking pretty heavy, though, the one heading toward the midnight position. She couldn’t tell if Hendricks was heading that way yet, though, because he was just reaching the center of the wheel.
“I’ve got carnies everywhere!” Duncan’s voice exploded in her ear. He sounded strained, and she lowered her scope to take in what was going on below. He did indeed have carnies everywhere: there were three surrounding him on the platform, anchored to each of his arms and one dragging him down by grabbing his legs. They appeared to be punching, kicking, and trying to tackle him.
Alison frowned; she had little doubt Duncan was fully capable of dispatching all three of them with minimal difficulty. She doubted he could do it without causing serious injury, though, and that sounded like something that would be better off being avoided.
“You’re assaulting a federal agent!” Duncan’s voice blasted through the microphone again, and she watched him shake one of them off with that. The other two clung stubbornly to him, however, leading Alison to believe they might not be the sorts that always complied with lawful commands. Or laws.
“On my way,” Arch sa
id tightly through the open channel, “but it’s a bit of a fight to get through this crowd now that y’all have everyone’s curiosity drawn.”
A quick scan of the crowd, and Alison had to agree with her husband; there was a growing cluster around the base of the Ferris wheel, a swelling crowd of people watching the skirmish on the platform and Hendricks’s climb. It was growing all the time as people gravitated toward the ruckus, filling the tight channels around the wheel with an ever-expanding mass of humanity.
***
“You led me on, you little slut!” Mick got out in a yell. He’d been struggling with her for a few minutes, lightly at first, but with ever-increasing force. She was resisting, and it was pissing him off more by the second.
“Because I said I’d come here with you?” She grunted it out as she put a hand against his cheek and forced his face away from her. “What, that means I automatically have to have sex with you? FUCK YOU!” She finished it and trailed into another scream that lit his ears. He hadn’t hit her yet, just pushed and shoved a little. He was getting to the point he was about ready to backhand her into unconsciousness and just be on about his business.
She raked fingernails across his cheek, and he felt the sting as she ripped through the first layer of flesh on his shell. His essence boiled within him, and he slapped her down, hard. Her head hit the side of the car, and she slumped against the door.
“Finally,” he said, and knelt down, dragging her to the floor of the car. She fell in the confined space, her head thumping against the floor as she dropped. He wondered how this would work, with her unconscious, if it would be the same? This had been easier before, hadn’t it?
Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted Page 36