Dead-Eyed God: A Pitchfork County Novel

by Sam Witt

  She had two friends with her, and Joe didn’t like those odds at all. They were cultists of the Haunter in Darkness, survivors who’d decided not to turn away from the darkness after Joe drove their god away. “I knew I should’ve killed all you assholes when I had the chance.”

  The girl grinned and whirled the steel pipe like a demented cheerleader. “Ain’t you glad we came back to give you another chance?”

  Then the cultists howled, and Joe hoped he had enough juice left to survive this fight.

  27

  The girl whipped the pipe up over her head and through a sweeping circle before slashing it down at Joe’s face. He lunged to the side, and the pipe plowed a dent into the Ranchero’s roof with an echoing clang. Joe’s right arm was still numb, but he managed a left-handed roundhouse that caught the girl below the ribs and rocked her back onto her heels.

  Before he could follow through with another attack, Joe had to back away and defend himself from the second cultist. This one had accentuated his bat-like features with shaded tattoos that transformed his face into a permanent bestial scowl. The tattooed freak launched a series of fast jabs that drove Joe away from the car and forced him onto the defensive. Joe didn’t know what had changed, but the Haunter’s followers had seriously upgraded their fighting skills since last they’d tangled.

  The third fighter came in on Joe’s blind side and drove a vicious kick into Joe’s lower back. The attack blew the strength out of Joe’s legs, and he crumpled to his knees.

  The woman reentered the fray and slammed the pipe into Joe’s right shoulder. Joe fell forward and stopped his fall with his left hand. He needed to switch things up before the cultists overwhelmed him and Frank got away yet again.

  The tattooed man stepped forward to kick Joe in the face, but the Night Marshal didn’t wait for the attack. He threw himself forward and crashed into the man’s knees, knocking them both to the ground.

  Joe scrambled up his opponent’s body and straddled his torso, knees pinning the man’s arms to his side. He reared back and drove a punch straight into the middle of the freak’s deformed snout, further flattening it and spraying blood over both of them. Joe raised his fist for another punch but heard someone coming up on his left and had to roll away to avoid that attack.

  He got back to his feet and faced the two cultists still in the fight. The woman kept the pipe weaving in front of her, twirling it around her hand. The second man had a knife out, and it looked like he knew how to use it. They advanced toward Joe, moving in tandem, spreading out so he couldn’t keep his eyes on both of them at once.

  His right arm was still too numb to wield the shotgun, but Joe had to give it a try. He fumbled with the weapon, trying to get his hand around the grip, but his fingers were nerveless and couldn’t handle the job.

  The knife man darted forward and swept the blade in a broad arc aimed at Joe’s gut. The Night Marshal hopped back, and the blade narrowly missed him. What didn’t miss him was the woman’s pipe, which crashed into his right arm just above the elbow. Joe couldn’t feel pain from the blow, just the force of its impact. He couldn’t tell if his arm was broken or just badly bruised, but he knew he couldn’t take many more hits from that pipe.

  Rather than back away from the woman, he circled in close to her, trying to keep her between himself and the knife man. He couldn’t afford to let them flank him again; he had to stay in tight to keep them from both attacking him at once.

  Up close, the woman couldn’t get the room she needed to swing her pipe. She reared back to attack, but her swing was too short, and Joe grabbed her wrist with his left hand. He turned with the attack and twisted her arm, wrenching it around as she stumbled past him. She tripped over her own feet and started to fall, but Joe didn’t let go. He stomped down hard on her shoulder and twisted her arm against his foot. Her shoulder came apart with a sickening crunch, and she lost her grip on the pipe.

  The knife man swooped in for another slice, and Joe stepped over the fallen woman to avoid it. The knife man reversed his strike with a wicked backhand slice. Joe blocked that attack with the woman’s arm. Blood sprayed from her savaged forearm, and she screamed a litany of black curses that Joe couldn’t help but find impressive.

  Frank finally got the Ranchero started. Its engine coughed to life, and thick black clouds of burning oil plumed from its exhaust. “Dammit, Frank,” Joe shouted, “don’t you fucking run!”

  The knife wielder rushed past the fallen woman, driving his knife down at Joe in a vicious overhand strike. The blade slashed through Joe’s shirt and opened a shallow gash down the left side of his chest.

  Joe lost his grip on the woman’s wrecked arm and staggered away from this new attack. He sucked in a gasp at the cold pain of the open wound. He felt nauseated and dizzy, and now his left arm felt weak. He was running out of ways to fight back.

  The knife man kept up his attack, swiping the blade in a flurry of slashes that kept Joe backing away. The Night Marshal knew if he stumbled or hesitated the knife would find his flesh again. If he went down, he knew he wouldn’t be getting back up.

  The Ranchero’s engine roared again, and Joe heard its wheels chewing up the gravel behind him. He cursed Frank and vowed that if he ever caught up with him, he was going to blow his head clean off his shoulders. He was trying to save the guy, couldn’t he see that? Fucking asshole.

  But the engine noise wasn’t getting fainter, as Joe would have expected if Frank was trying to flee the scene. It was getting closer.

  The knife man paused his attack, and Joe suddenly understood what was happening. Without thought, he lunged forward and to the side then hurled his weight into an awkward shoulder block that caught his opponent off guard. The knife man stumbled to the side, off balance.

  The Ranchero, which had been barreling across the yard at Joe’s back, slammed into the cultist. His body rag dolled up over the hood and bounced off the windshield, leaving behind a spider web of bloody cracks. The man slithered across the roof of the car and off its side.

  Frank slammed on his brakes in a panic, and the Ranchero’s engine died. He hunkered over the wheel and cranked the ignition again and again, but the car’s only response was a weak grinding noise.

  Joe stormed up to the car and landed a left-handed punch across Frank’s jaw. He wrenched the door open and dragged Frank out of the car by his shirt. “I guess were doing this the hard way,” Joe said.

  Frank opened his mouth to protest, but Joe silenced him with a vicious headbutt. Frank slumped against the side of the Ranchero, bloody drool leaking from the corner of his mouth. Joe reckoned he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He turned his attention back to the cultists.

  The knife man was down and most likely dead. His body was twisted at an unnatural angle in the tall weeds, motionless. The woman was still screeching, lying on the ground, clutching her shoulder with her good hand. She was pissed as hell, but Joe didn’t think she had any real fight left in her. The tattooed man, on the other hand, was recovering from Joe’s beating and had enough guts to get back on his feet.

  The feeling was returning to Joe’s right arm, at least enough for him to lift his shotgun on its strap and aim it at the tattooed man. He kept both barrels centered on the man’s chest as he approached him. “How’d you dickweeds know I was going to be here?”

  The man spat at Joe’s feet. “Ain’t telling you nothing.”

  Joe frowned. “Then I guess I’ll splatter your brains across the grass and see if your girlfriend is feeling more talkative.”

  He thumbed the shotgun’s hammers back.

  The cultist gulped and thought better of his bravado. “It was foretold. The Haunter in Darkness guided us to this place.”

  The news troubled Joe. If the Haunter’s cult was coming back for round two, things were about to get a lot messier than he’d planned. “How many others are coming?”

  The tattooed man grinned, revealing rows of bloody needle teeth. “Enough.”

  “Let me gi
ve you assholes a little advice. I fucked up your god, and if you come back around here, I’m going to finish the job. If I were you, I’d pack my shit and get out of town. You leave Pitchfork, and you’re not my problem anymore. That means I’m not your problem, either. But if you want to fight,” Joe said, nudging the cultist with the shotgun, “then me and mine are more than ready to give it to you.”

  The cultists sneered. “The Haunter will—”

  Joe had heard enough. He drove the shotgun’s barrels into the side of the man’s head and let him fall unconscious back into the grass.

  He stalked over to the screaming woman and nudged her wounded shoulder with his boot. She shrieked and glared at him with blood-red eyes.

  Joe closed his eyes and shifted his vision into the supernatural spectrum. He squinted, trying to remember how it felt when he reached out to touch the sheriff’s connection to the Long Man. The world blurred around the wounded woman, even as she sprang into sharper focus. A fiery three-lobed eye blazed to life on her forehead, and Joe could see a burning thread leading into the air from its center. But this thread didn’t spiral off out of sight; it hung in the air between Joe and the woman. He knew if he had a mirror he’d be able to see that thread burrowing into his head, linking the last surviving piece of the Haunter in Darkness to its cultist. Now that he was tuned to the Haunter’s frequency, he could see dozens of other threads pouring out of his head and floating off in every direction.

  While Joe had believed the Haunter was safely trapped within the confines of his skull, the crafty old god had been busy reaching out and getting its people ready for another attack on Pitchfork. It was time for that to stop.

  “Your god can’t do shit for you now, lady.” Joe rested the shotgun’s gaping barrels on the girl’s stomach. “I’ll give it credit for being a sneaky motherfucker, but now that I know what it’s up to, you won’t be hearing from it again. Believe that.”

  The woman scowled at Joe but didn’t seem to care about the shotgun digging into her gut. “Our god is everywhere. It sees all. It knows all. It is eternal.”

  Joe leaned on the shotgun, and its barrels pressed into the cultist’s gut. Her mouth opened, a red O of surprise and pain, and Joe saw the first flicker of doubt in her eyes. “All that’s left of your god is inside me. Is that the kind of god you really want to be hitching your wagon to?”

  The cultist sneered at Joe and bared a mouthful of spiky teeth. “We will free him, and he will make you suf—”

  “Enough of the bullshit. I’m going to give you a chance to get out of here alive. An opportunity to go tell all your little buddies to get the hell out of Pitchfork and never come back. But if you want to live, then there’s something I need from you.”

  The girl glared at Joe but didn’t spit any more epithets at him. She was listening, her survival instinct overriding her devotion to a god that didn’t seem ready to rescue her.

  Joe glanced over his shoulder. Frank still looked like he was out of commission, but he was a sneaky motherfucker, and Joe didn’t want to take any chances he’d get wind of the plan and throw a wrench into the works.

  The Night Marshal knelt next to the cultist and kept his voice low as he explained what he wanted. The cultist’s eyes widened, rage burning in them, but Joe could see the defeat there, too. For a moment, she said nothing. She nodded, and Joe pressed his badge tight to her forehead.

  She closed her eyes and let out a long, shuddering sigh. When she opened them again, her brown eyes were soft and almost human again. She said the words Joe had asked and finished with an addition of her own, “I so swear it, by my blood and bond.”

  The air around them grew chill, and the small noises of the rural night gave way to silence. For a moment, Joe couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. An electric shock pulsed through Joe’s badge, and it took everything he had to keep it from jumping loose of his grasp. A rush of alien sensations rushed through the badge and into Joe, leaving him stunned.

  The girl’s sob broke the spell around them. “What did we do? What did you do to me?”

  Joe didn’t have the words to explain it. He felt sick to his stomach, and the shrieking of the Haunter in his head made it hard to think. He staggered away from the cultist, leaving her alone to ponder the ramifications of her choice.

  Joe wished the woman luck and wished the same for himself. He hadn’t really believed his plan was going to work. He’d almost hoped it wouldn’t. Now that he had proof his theory was right, he felt cold and afraid. He headed back to the Ranchero. The woman’s pain and sorrow stuck with him, and her words echoed in his head. Something was happening to him, but he didn’t have time to deal with it. He shoved his misgivings down deep and did his best to ignore them.

  Frank was starting to come around by the time Joe returned to him. “Get in,” Joe snapped. This had all taken a lot longer than he’d expected, and he hoped they’d get back to the house before all hell broke loose there.

  He had a feeling that what he’d just done was making waves that would spur his enemies to action. He’d kicked the hornets’ nest; now it was time to see who’d get stung.

  28

  Joe’s head was ground zero in a three-way war between the Long Man, the Haunter in Darkness, and himself. The stunt he’d pulled with the cultist had proved his theory correct, but it had also shown his skull’s other residents that he had some new tricks up his sleeve. They were none too pleased with this development, especially the Haunter in Darkness. Joe had nipped that bat-faced fucker’s connection to its cultists, leaving it all alone inside his head. He felt stronger than before, but most of that strength now had to be used to keep his head’s alien occupants under control.

  Joe clenched his fists around the wheel and tried to keep his vision focused on the white lines in the center of the road. With the two assholes in his head pushing and pulling at his mind, it took everything he had to keep the Ranchero from plowing off the road and into a tree. He’d expected the monsters to be upset, but he hadn’t expected them to completely lose their shit. If he’d trusted Frank at all, which he most certainly did not, he’d have let him drive. Too bad that was out of the question.

  The white-knuckle ride took most of half an hour, but it seemed much longer. Since Joe’s trick with the cultist, he felt out of sorts. His senses were operating on a whole new level. Time moved in fits and spurts, seconds sometimes stretching out for what seemed like hours, minutes racing by a single breath. Joe was relieved to pull the Ranchero up underneath the oak tree in his ,front yard. He killed the engine and yanked the keys out of the ignition. He threw the door open and jerked a thumb toward Frank. “Out of the car. Don’t try anything stupid.”

  Joe retrieved his shotgun from between the Ranchero’s front seats and slung it over his shoulder.

  Frank watched him with wet, wide eyes, licking his lips every time Joe’s hand touched the shotgun. “You’re not going to shoot me with that right?”

  It was amazing that some of these people he had to deal with got through a day without killing themselves through their own stupidity. “Frank, do you think I’d drive you all the way to my house just to shoot you on my front porch?”

  Frank stammered and shuffled his feet before he was able to finally spit out, “I don’t think—I mean I don’t—no?”

  Joe’s head throbbed, and the pain ate up any patience for Frank. “Get in the fucking house, or I will shoot you.”

  Frank scrambled up the front porch and didn’t wait for Joe to open the door for him. He ripped the screen wide and shoved his way through the big oak door into Joe’s living room. When every eye in the house turned on them, he froze and Joe had to give him a shove to get him to take another step.

  As soon as he crossed his threshold, Joe felt the pain leak out of his head and the weight fall from his shoulders. Stevie’s wards kept out most hostile energy, which he was glad to see included the hate pouring out of the two bastards he had trapped in his head. “Everybody, this is Frank Blackbriar. He’
s an untrustworthy asshole. Frank, this is everybody. Most of ’em will try and kill you if you do anything stupid.”

  Frank started to speak to the rest of the house, but Joe grabbed him by the collar and steered him toward Elsa’s bedroom. Frank squawked, but Joe wasn’t taking any chances. He shoved the man into his daughter’s bedroom and slammed the door behind them. Frank opened his mouth in protest, and Joe slammed his open palm into the man’s chest. Frank flopped back onto Elsa’s bed then sat up and stared at Joe, mouth closed, eyes open.

  Without a word, Joe yanked the blankets off Elsa’s bed, nearly dumping Frank onto her floor. The Night Marshal grabbed the sheet and twisted it into a taut cord and used it the bind Frank’s wrists together then looped it down around his ankles and knotted them together as well. “I reckon you could get out of these if you tried,” Joe explained, “but if you come out of that door before I come in here and get you, I’m going to pull your head off your shoulders and stuff it up your ass. Stay put.”

  Joe left Frank, speechless, on his daughter’s bed. He retrieved one of the chairs from around the kitchen table and wedged it under the knob of Frank’s makeshift prison. He slapped his palm against the wood. “I’m not going to tell you twice, Frank. Do not leave that room.”

  Joe returned to the living room, where everyone suddenly found their attention drawn to their shoes. Stevie cleared her throat. No one else made a move, but Joe could feel their judgment on him. “What? You think I should’ve brought Frank in, fed him dinner, made him some ice tea? Fuck that. We’ve got work to do, and while I don’t want our mutual adversary killing that guy, I don’t see any reason to treat him nice while I’m keeping him alive. He tried to kill me tonight. Twice.”