Hellhound on My Trail

by D. J. Butler

  But the flies were headed his direction, and suddenly Mike found that he didn’t want to die, not really. Siding with the band seemed like his only shot. Mike raised the pistol and started firing.

  “Come on, lad,” he heard from Twitch.

  KABOOM!

  Another grenade went off, its concussion waves staggering Jim but throwing a carpet of flies off his body.

  Mike heard a chittering and a buzzing sound behind him, and he spun, still firing. He should have counted his bullets, he thought as he plugged a fly right between its thousand-faceted eyes just as it was about to plunge steel mandibles into Twitch’s back. Oh, well.

  Adrian sat up. “Twitch?” he asked. He seemed lucid, but the way he looked only at Twitch despite the fury and chaos all around him gave Mike the impression that the organ player was stoned.

  Bang! Mike blew away another … Zvuvim?

  ROAR!

  A loud crash on the far side of Butcher’s warned Mike that the big ugly thing inside had probably smashed down the back wall and freed itself. Any moment, it would be in the parking lot and after blood.

  KABOOM!

  Another grenade exploded, followed by a series of shotgun blasts.

  “Ah, Adrian, you big handsome lunk. I’ve got you alone at last, and isn’t it sweet and quiet here in the meadow?”

  Mike would have scratched his head in puzzlement, only he was too busy shooting giant flies. He blew away a second, and then a third, and then—

  click.

  “Fundillo!”

  He jammed the empty gun into his pocket, resisting the urge to throw it away. The open side door of the Dodge van caught his eye, and he lurched over to look inside.

  “I do like a picnic,” Adrian said. He didn’t sound dazed or crazy, but his words were totally nuts. Or stoned. “Where’s everybody else?”

  The inside of the van was a mess, clothes and crumpled food cartons and maps and coffee cups, and in the back he saw the head of a bass guitar poking up behind the seat. And there were weapons.

  Lots of weapons.

  Mike grabbed the nearest thing, which was a long-barreled silver revolver, like you’d see in a Clint Eastwood film, Mike thought. He spun the cylinder once to be sure it was loaded, then turned—

  and a fly crashed into his chest.

  He fell backward, slamming into the side of the van and tumbling to the ground. He couldn’t aim, but he fired—

  Bang! Bang!

  The giant fly stank like sulfur and its flesh was dry and gnarled. Cold steel cut into Mike’s shoulder as it bit him.

  “Aaagh!” he screamed, and tried to bring the pistol to bear on the thing. The gun’s barrel was too long, and he couldn’t get it properly aimed at the fly, but he managed to jam one elbow up under the bug’s mandibles and hurl it away a couple of feet.

  It swarmed back at him and he kicked it with both feet, like a mule, knocking it further away.

  It rushed a third time and Mike rolled under the van.

  “You’ll see everyone else,” he heard Twitch tell Adrian. “They’re all here. Only it’s dark, isn’t it? Why don’t you cast a little spell, nothing hard, just a little light for us to see by, so we can continue our picnic?”

  The fly hit the gravel where Mike had been. It bounced off and for a moment he hoped it would go away, but almost immediately it landed … stayed down … turned … and looked at him. He gulped, trying to scuttle backward on his belly without dropping the pistol.

  “I can summon daylight,” Adrian said. “I’m good at that,” he frowned, “so long as nothing interferes.”

  The giant fly skittered forward. Beyond the fly, behind Twitch, Mike could see something approaching. It looked like it had feet, might even be a man, but if it was a man then he was covered in swarming flies, like bees around a hive.

  “And what could possibly interfere?” Twitch asked.

  The fly sprang for Mike’s head—

  bang!

  He shredded it, spattering the underside of the van with its withered, husk-like bits. An explosion of bitter black dust, like gunpowder, made Mike’s eyes sting and water. He coughed and slapped at his face, trying to clear his eyes, but he kept moving.

  Mike rolled out from under the van. He had a bullet or two left, he was sure, and he raised the revolver, blinking away tears as he stumbled toward the fly-covered man.

  Only it wasn’t a man. It was man-shaped, but at least eight feet tall. It stank of rotten meat, and when the curtain of flies parted Mike could see that its flesh was the dusty black of a beetle carapace, mottled with gray. Its head was three times too large for its body, with fly-like eyes and tusks like an elephant.

  It stepped toward Twitch and Adrian. Mike didn’t hesitate.

  Bang! Bang! Click.

  With each shot, the cloud of flies shifted and the monstrosity stepped back slightly, but it didn’t fall, and it didn’t bleed.

  And then it turned to look at Mike.

  “Mierda.”

  “Per Isidem lux!” Adrian called. He sounded cheerful, like he really was at a picnic, and he waved his hands, in one of which he held a bit of glass.

  The parking lot was suddenly full of light. It didn’t come from anywhere, it just was. And it was the warm and yellow light of day, which was really damn weird, since the sky above still glittered with diamond-like stars in a field of midnight black, but Mike’s shadow underneath him looked like the shadow he’d cast at high noon. The high sandstone butte above Butcher’s that had been a dark shadow before was now a wall of brilliant red.

  Raaaaraaaraarrrghhhhh! shrieked the fly-covered giant.

  “Isn’t that nice?” Twitch said to Adrian, and pulled his head to her shoulder.

  The fly-giant staggered back, swiping at the flesh of its own arms and chest with big, razor-sharp talons. Mike rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things—the swarm of little flies on the big guy’s body looked like they were melting off. He—it—whatever, lurched away, trying to find the darkness again.

  Mike stumbled around the van to the open door and looked for something else to shoot with, or more bullets for the semi-automatic or the revolver. He was interrupted by Jim and Eddie running up behind him.

  “I’m almost done here,” Twitch said, and she sounded drained and weak.

  “Load in,” Eddie said. The guitarist grabbed Adrian by one shoulder and yanked him to his feet. Mike noticed that Eddie seemed to have a drifting eye, or some kind of nervous fidget. One of his eyes, anyway, seemed to slide sideways as he manhandled Adrian, and then the guitar player shuddered.

  “Hey!” Adrian objected. “Twitch and I were having a conversation. A private and personal conversation.”

  “Idiot.” Eddie threw the organist onto the back seat of the van. “Hold on, Twitch,” he said.

  Mike looked around the gravel lot. Butcher’s burned in a yellow bubble of light. Just beyond that bubble, Mike could now see that the darkness fell, and in that darkness swarmed flies. “Jeez,” he said.

  Jim leaped into the driver’s seat of the van, shoving his rapier in beside the seat.

  “Good luck,” Eddie said, and grabbed Mike’s hand to shake it. “I’d give you your share of the night’s take, but I don’t have it. By now, it’s probably burnt to a crisp. I suggest you hide.”

  “My car,” Mike said stupidly. If they left him, he’d be sober and alone and without a loaded gun. He found that he didn’t want to die, but he really didn’t want to die nibbled to pieces by gigantic flies.

  Twitch staggered over to the van and threw herself in, flopping onto the middle seat and swaying back and forth.

  “Where we’re going, it only gets worse,” Eddie said. He said it gently, like he was breaking a hard truth to a kid, but it was still a no, and it still meant Eddie was going to leave him alone in the desert. “Keep your head down here, you might just make it.”

  “I need a ride,” Mike said. “I can’t be out here alone.”

  Jim pivoted in th
e driver’s seat and stared at Mike. His eyes, Mike now saw, were the color of ice, so blue they were almost white. He stared at Mike intensely for several long seconds, and Mike felt that that big Viking was learning something intensely private about him. He felt naked.

  ROAR!

  Jim nodded to Eddie, held up a hand palm-first and fingers splayed apart, then started the van.

  “Get in!” Eddie said, his tone one hundred percent changed, and shoved Mike with his shoulder to help make it happen. The man was all skin and bone, but he had a gift for leverage, and Mike found himself sitting in the van and the door sliding shut before he could say anything else.

  And beyond the door, blazing with blue and black fire and jetting tendrils of smoke from its cracked, dry skin, the lizard-lion beast turned the corner of the smoldering ruins, saw the van and charged.

  Eddie jumped into the shotgun seat and slammed the door. “Hellhound at three o’clock,” he said to Jim, and started cranking down the window to bring his shotgun to bear.

  “Hellhound?” Mike asked.

  Jim punched the Dodge into gear and slammed on the gas. The van lurched left onto the two-lane highway and accelerated toward the edge of the bubble of daylight. The flies swarming in the darkness massed around and in front of the van, chittering and clattering at the edge of the light and waiting for their prey.

  “Gone,” Twitch muttered, and she slumped against the window.

  “Son of a bitch!” Adrian yelled. He sat bolt upright, staring at the Hellhound charging across the gravel.

  “Keep it together!” Eddie shouted, and leaned out the window to fire his shotgun. Boom! One fly exploded, and its neighbors scattered, but the hole in the wall of demonic fly-flesh immediately sealed shut again. The fly-shrouded giant lumbered with long steps toward the asphalt. “Can you move the light?”

  “Of course I can,” Adrian said. “If nothing interferes.” He patted his pockets and muttered.

  The Hellhound was getting closer. Mike scrabbled around in the junk inside the van for a weapon and came up with a big curved Arabian Nights-style sword.

  “Good!” Eddie shouted at him with an encouraging grin. “Open the door, and when it gets close, let the thing have it right in the eye!” He turned back to shooting at flies. He looked totally calm and relaxed, which contrasted sharply with Mike’s own feeling that the world had turned completely upside down.

  Mike yanked on the door handle and pulled it back until it caught. The ground whipped past underneath him unnervingly fast. He wrapped one fist in his seatbelt, watching the Hellhound bound closer over gravel and then over sagebrush, while ahead the tusked giant moved to intercept the van on the highway—

  thump!—

  the van hit something, maybe a big rock, at the edge of the road, and careened off its wheels at an angle—

  Mike slid halfway out the door, only catching himself by the hand he’d tangled up—

  the Dodge sailed briefly through the air, and—

  thud! crashed to the asphalt again. Twitch slid down the middle seat toward the open door and Mike moved to save her, jamming his body in the way. The leather queen bumped up against Mike’s hip before she could recover herself enough to grab onto the seat. She smiled at Mike.

  She kind of smiled like a man, Mike thought.

  “Hey!” Adrian yelled, clinging with both arms to the seat in front of him. “You can’t do that to a wizard! Stay on the road, Jim!”

  Eddie blasted another fly and shrugged. “What do you expect from a guy born in the sixteenth century?” he laughed.

  Adrian’s eyes bugged out like he was about to yell something back—

  and instead, he passed out.

  Like a snuffed candle, the daylight disappeared.

  The van raced pell-mell into the seething cloud of flies, the Hellhound snapping at its rear tires.

  ***

  Chapter Three

  The Zvuvim hit the front of the Dodge van like a black hailstorm, cracking glass and ripping away the side view mirrors and the antenna. Only the forward motion of the van itself, and big, awkward swipes of Mike’s borrowed sword, kept them from swarming in through the open door. Severed antennae and mandibles and a bit of wing fell into the carpet of detritus covering the floor of the band’s vehicle.

  For a split second, Mike hoped the fly-storm would stop the Hellhound, but he hoped in vain. The Hound roared again, shook itself to clear off the first swarm of Zvuvim, and then the devil-flies learned it was there and got out of its way.

  Boom!

  Eddie leaned back almost into the driver’s seat, blowing a fly to smithereens in his own window. Two more jammed in behind it, steel mandibles clacketing and grabbing for flesh, and Eddie jammed a foot against them, kicking at them over and over again and forcing them out the window while he scrabbled in his pockets for more shells. Mike noticed Eddie’s combat boots, worn and steel-plated in the toes, and the bandolier on his shoulder, still holding a single lonely grenade. The flies looked like they might get Eddie, when suddenly a silver blade flashed into the seething wall of black—

  not from Eddie, but from Jim.

  The singer’s driving, rough already, didn’t suffer much as he wove a net of sharp steel around Eddie’s feet. He punctured fly bodies and sliced off wings, keeping his guitarist from being snatched out the window. Mike thought he kept his eyes on the road, coming to Eddie’s rescue without even looking, much less breaking a sweat.

  Then Mike had to look away to focus on the Hellhound.

  The beast lunged for the van’s open door, crocodile jaws gaping wide. This close, it struck Mike as looking like a dinosaur: teeth like daggers, hind legs a little bigger than the forelegs, tail thicker than a lion’s would really be, eyes glossy black. Only it looked like a dinosaur on fire in three colors.

  He yanked himself back into the van with his left hand and avoided a swooping bite of those deadly jaws. Cardboard and vinyl and fast food papers erupted in a small cloud around the Hellhound’s bite, the oily paper bags and napkins bursting into flame on contact.

  The unblinking eyes, big as saucers, were in reach, and Mike swung for them. His heavy saber hit the Hellhound in the face, sending up sparks as if he’d chipped the blade against a ridge of flint, but he missed the eyes. The thing had a head like a horse, or a tyrannosaurus, a bony ridge with eyes fixed on either side of it, and Mike’s saber clanged into the beast’s ridge. His blow left no mark.

  Still, the creature didn’t like it.

  The Hellhound thundered in rage. It fell back a step as it did, and inside its gaping maw Mike saw nothing but row after row of knife-long teeth, like a shark’s mouth, and sulfurous tendrils of smoke. Not even a tongue.

  Boom!

  “Brace yourselves!” Eddie shouted.

  Mike looked over his shoulder in time to see the man-shaped giant hurl itself against the front of the van.

  Crash!

  Tusks slammed against the front window in the middle of an enormous face that was part fly and part boar. The van swerved, but Jim grappled the wheel as fiercely as any professional wrestler and kept it on the road. Yellowed talons groped at the edges of Eddie’s window and he kicked at them, drawing an irritated squeal from the fly-pig-giant. Still without even looking, Jim reached past Eddie and scratched at the giant’s knuckles with his blade. The grenade bounced more wildly on the bandolier on Eddie’s shoulder as the van swerved, and Mike worried it might fall off and explode inside the vehicle.

  The Hellhound lunged again, jaws wide—

  and Mike stabbed, not for the eyes this time, but for the open mouth—

  And he jammed his scimitar down deep into the fumes and the bristling spikes, feeling it strike solid flesh and penetrate. Fire and smoke erupted from the wound, scorching his hand and forcing Mike to let go of the sword.

  The Hound bellowed in frustration and slowed, shaking its head and pawing at the saber.

  “Good one, Mikey,” Twitch said. He … she … whatever, seemed recove
red. He had his thick drumsticks out again and was clambering around Mike, swinging with them to try to help Eddie and Jim with the big gray thing that still dragged along with the van, trying to force its way into the window.

  Boom!

  Eddie’s shot struck the creature squarely in its fly-like eye, but it only flinched and bellowed, sounding more irritated than hurt. Jim stabbed between its tusks, and some kind of black liquid—aswarm with little flies—sprayed over Eddie and the shotgun seat, but the giant didn’t give in or go away.

  Twitch lurched over the back of the seat, half-climbing on Mike to swing and batter the creature further in its face with his club. It bellowed again, and grabbed for Twitch, but Jim stabbed it in the arm. The drummer pulled quickly out of reach and Eddie kicked it again. Flies—small, normal-sized flies—filled the air around Eddie and tinted Mike’s hearing with an incessant buzz.

  “What is that thing?” Mike asked. The Hellhound had somehow yanked the sword from its mouth and was circling around to attack again, so he scrabbled around in the slow waterfall of rubbish trailing out the van’s open door for another weapon, without success.

  “It’s a Baal!” Twitch shouted.

  Boom!

  The humanoid thing squealed and chittered.

  “Ball?” Mike asked. He didn’t get it. “As in, keep my eye on the ball?”

  “Baal, as in Baal Zavuv,” Twitch explained, without explaining anything. He leaned forward to crack the Baal another time in the face, and Mike was sure he felt breasts press against his shoulder. With Twitch’s blow, the rotten meat stink of the Baal got worse, like she had ripped the skin of a decaying corpse to uncover the corruption beneath.

  “Do you mean Zvuvim?”

  “One Zavuv—”

  Twitch pounded a fly-demon away from Eddie’s hip with her baton—

  “Two Zvuvim!”

  She crunched another between the eyes, its carcass falling into the rubbish on the floor.