The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  “Good,” Erin said. “He’s in management up near Cleveland—Ohio, not Tennessee. Helps run a factory up there.”

  “Made it out, huh?” Lauren idly mused, leaning over the body. “Good for him. So few of our class did.”

  “Made it out of where?” The deputy—Erin—asked her. Lauren didn’t even look up or bother to answer, because the blond girl clearly got it a second later. “Oh.” Yeah. Out of Midian. So few of their class got out of Midian. It was like the world’s largest flytrap, and once it got you caught, you never got out.

  Like this poor bastard, whoever he was. She stared at the body, and it took her a second to realize it might—maybe—have been female. There was a lot of stuff wrong with it, but she could see the long hair now. It was hard to tell, what with swaths of the scalp torn loose and folded over themselves.

  “Well?” Sheriff Reeve asked. “What do you think?”

  Lauren didn’t even bother to stop herself, assuming she even would have had the willpower to if she wasn’t half-asleep. “This man is dead, Jim.” She paused. “Or … this woman is. Hard to say.”

  “If they’re dead?” Deputy Harris asked.

  “No, that’s for sure. I was talking about the victim’s gender, though I suppose it’d be easy to tell if I were motivated to disturb the body enough to try and remove the pants,” Lauren said. “I assume you probably don’t want to know badly enough to do that, though.”

  “I suppose not,” Reeve said. “Good Lord, though, identifying this poor bastard—”

  “I’m not sorry I don’t have to deal with it,” Lauren said, a little more bluntly than she might have if this were taking place at midday. She sighed and realized that she should probably throttle back a little on the bitchiness. It’s not like Reeve wanted to be here, either. She glanced at him. Hell, he didn’t even look like he fully realized where he was.

  It wasn’t that warm, yet Reeve had sweat running down his forehead that glinted in the moonlight. She might have assumed it was tears if it had been below the eyes, but it wasn’t. If she had his job, with the body count piling up lately, she would almost certainly have shed a few tears, even absent the fact that she knew indirectly or directly every person who’d died in the shitty events of the last week. She’d already had to take time off work to go to Kim Hauser’s funeral.

  “Any idea—any clue—what might have done this?” Lauren heard Erin Harris ask her, but she wasn’t turned where she could see the female deputy. Still, there was something about the way she asked, a tremor of something in her voice, that was different than the sheriff’s state of shock. It wasn’t something Lauren could quite put her finger on, but she’d dealt with enough fake smiles and feigned “Oh, bless your hearts” over the years to be able to detect a little bullshit when it was being applied directly.

  This wasn’t quite that, but it had the faint ring of it. She glanced at Reeve, but he was far beyond noticing. Hell, maybe she really was just a little put off by the whole thing. She was … what? Nineteen? Probably hadn’t seen a whole lot of dead bodies.

  “I don’t know,” Lauren said, a little guarded. “This isn’t exactly my specialty. My gut says trauma did it. Blood loss or cardiac arrest in the aftermath of being smashed. As for what hit them? Not a clue.” She stood, putting her hands by her side. She hadn’t brought any gloves, which didn’t matter because she didn’t want to disturb the corpse in any case.

  Lauren stared down at the body and then shook her head. Stuff like this happened at her work, not her home, and she’d been very careful to keep a bubble separating those two things. It was for Molly, she’d always said, and having the added benefit of the drive meant she could work farther away. But really, it was for Molly in the sense that things like she saw in the ER in Chattanooga didn’t happen here in Midian. Murders, rapes, hit-and-runs … they didn’t happen here. Minor mischief, sure. Some assholes that beat their wives or girlfriends, yes. Drug use, for certain, and tons of it lately.

  But this? This happened in her other world. Not in Midian. Not until now.

  Lauren turned away from the body, feeling a certain rush to her head from the thoughts surrounding it. She turned and caught movement coming up the path. It took her only a moment to see the shadow emerging from the dark.

  Archibald Stan.

  “Looks like I didn’t miss much yet,” Stan said as he came up the path, looking smug and irritating in his deputy uniform. He always looked smug and irritating to her, though. Always had. Even before the uniform. “Miss Darlington,” he said, and she could tell how much effort he was putting into making it sound polite.

  “Doctor,” she said. “Doctor Darlington, thanks.”

  You bastard, she didn’t say.

  ***

  Lerner was chugging down the trail, Duncan behind him. They couldn’t hear it anymore, the sound of the thing—whatever the hell it was—somewhere far ahead. This wasn’t all that surprising to Lerner, because they’d given the killer a hell of a head start, and demons weren’t renowned for standing still when they’d murdered a human. Unless they were planning to make a stand, or planning to eat it, or just generally be a complete and total nuisance.

  No, that didn’t happen all that often. Flagrant violations like that would tend to bring the Office of Occultic Concordance down pretty hard, and no demon stood still for that. None.

  “Get any sense of how much farther we’re going to have to run?” Lerner asked. It wasn’t like he was winded, though he could hear his body and it sure sounded like he was. “I only ask because this shell of mine gets wheezier the farther we go.”

  “You can control that if you put your mind to it,” Duncan said, not even breaking a sweat. Not that he broke a real sweat, ever. He wasn’t wheezing, either.

  “Yeah, but that’d require me to actually put my mind to it,” Lerner said, hiding his irritation with Duncan and his total lack of exertion, “and I have other things on it at the moment.”

  “Such as?” Duncan asked coolly. Lerner was a little surprised; Duncan wasn’t the type to ask.

  “Such as what’s doing this shit for one,” Lerner said. “Such as what we’re going to do when we catch it. Such as how sweet it would be to find the essence behind that fucking screen Spellman and crack them open slow, after forcing them to drink some marstap solution—” He couldn’t stop himself from smiling at that. Marstap solution burned the shit out of an essence. No demon wanted to go anywhere near it, but he’d gladly procure a few dozen bottles if he could turn some loose on the bastard that was making his life a hell of its own lately.

  “Not exactly your deepest thoughts,” Duncan said.

  “But some damned fun ones,” Lerner said. Especially the last one.

  The moon was hanging high overhead, and the steady sound of their feet along the asphalt path was starting to grate on Lerner. Running was not fun, not for him, and he had a hard time imagining any human could enjoy it either, what with their muscles and joints and all the other stuff that got to experience the jarring pain of the up and down leg motions. Why did humans enjoy exerting themselves? he wondered. Was it all down to those curious endorphins they got afterward? He’d read they got those after sex, too, which sounded a lot more interesting than running to him.

  “You’ve got that look on your face again,” Duncan warned him.

  “I’m keeping my thoughts to myself,” Lerner said. Duncan just griped about everything fun. “You’re what the humans call a mother hen about this shit. Or a wet rag.”

  If Duncan had a reply, he kept it to himself. “I’m still not sensing anything.”

  “So they’re just gone? Or it is. I guess it could be an it.”

  “Seems like.” Duncan slowed and Lerner adjusted his speed along with his partner. The breeze shifted the trees above, making a rattling noise that Lerner did not care for. Not in this situation, anyway. “The path forks up ahead, too.”

  Lerner looked and found it did, indeed, fork. One way looked like it was a dirt path, the ot
her the continuation of the asphalt one, winding right to follow the path of the river. What did they call it? The Caledonia, that’s right. Like Scotland. Lerner had been to Scotland before, a long time ago. Which probably meant it was due for a hotspot at some point in the next twenty years or so. That’d be nice. He’d kind of liked the taste of haggis last time he’d been there.

  “Look at this,” Duncan said, and Lerner finally came to a stop just where the path forked. He smiled. Something was forked, all right. He wandered up to Duncan, feeling the quiet singing of his essence inside his shell. A run like that would have put some humans in the hospital. Lerner had done some study on body types, and it was always interesting to him—

  “Focus,” Duncan said, interrupting his thought.

  “What am I looking for?” Lerner gazed into the dark but didn’t see anything save for a trail.

  “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “We don’t even know if the—the whatever—if it came this way.”

  Lerner sighed. This town was such a bust for him. Where was an easier assignment when he needed one? There were eighteen hotspots, and almost certainly every single one of them was in less peril than this town. Why couldn’t the office have sent him to one of those? Somewhere pleasant, maybe. Like Ecuador. Or barren, like the one in the Atacama Desert in Chile. That one was probably a nice, easy ride, just keeping an eye on some chu’tuaka to make sure they didn’t burrow too deep into the earth and cause quakes. “I don’t see anything but tire tracks. Little ones.” He snorted. “So unless you think our demons were riding on bicycles …”

  Duncan stared into the darkness, and he did it for long enough that Lerner took notice. “No, I don’t think they’re bicyclists,” Duncan finally said, and then lapsed into another uncomfortable silence. When he spoke again, Lerner could almost hear the misery. “This town’s really going to fall, isn’t it?”

  “It’s just a few isolated incidents,” Lerner said, brushing it off. He realized on some level he was really just telling Duncan what he needed to hear, but still, he did it. “Nothing big enough and bad enough to wipe it off the map has shown up yet. Just a bunch of small-timers with big damned ambitions. Bugs with plans to take over the world can’t be taken too seriously.”

  Duncan glanced back at him. “That last one got pretty close.”

  “To taking over the world, nah,” Lerner said, brushing him off. “A Sygraath gone crazy is not exactly the doom of mankind, and it’s not the herald of anything other than a town experiencing a hotspot. Demons do crazy things at hotspots. It’s a law of nature, like coeds taking their tops off at spring break.” He paused and stared straight at Duncan, concentrated on speaking to the essence within the shell. “It’ll be all right.” He said it. He tried to send exactly that feeling, in exactly that way, directly to Duncan—the real Duncan, inside the shell.

  Then he spent a long time wondering if Duncan knew he was lying.

  ***

  Mick slept in a trailer with a couple other guys from the carnival. They were human, but that didn’t bother him. He’d lived among humans for longer than he could remember, after all, and that was fine. The food was good—if a little greasy—and they had a kind of tight-knit companionship. Mick didn’t feel any concern he’d be found out, because he could blend better than most kinds of demons. He never reverted to his true form, could eat human food and excrete human waste. In fact, the only time he was ever exposed—really exposed—was when he needed to get laid. And really, not until a few weeks afterward, when the pregnancy tests started coming up positive. That, he supposed, was going to be a little different this time, what with technological and communication advances. It was a brave new world. And now he would be open to exposure, unless somehow the whole thing stayed underground.

  Fortunately, this was rare. Rare, and filled with joy.

  He could always feel it coming on. It had been building for months, the sense of urgent need. He’d thought maybe he could keep it bottled through the last few cities that they were in, and he had. He was looking for a really isolated place to dump his load, because doing it in a major city was just too exposed. He tried to play by the rules as best he could, keep things under wraps so the Office of Occultic Concordance didn’t come shit on him.

  But it wasn’t like you could hide a whole town going down in flames.

  Ideally he’d have preferred to keep going a little longer. Somewhere even more isolated than this place would be a lot better, but in the modern world it was hard to find isolated anymore. He’d watched the world change, watched the web that tied the country together get tighter and tighter, and he’d worried. In the 1980s, Hobbs Green had been small enough that it could be cordoned off and just vanish.

  Now, though, it was a different story, wasn’t it? Back then, he’d watched the news reports every chance he’d gotten, hoping not to see a broadcast centering on how a whole small town had gotten pregnant after a carnival came to town. And he hadn’t seen it, which was a beautiful thing. With only three networks and a bunch of newspapers that didn’t want to cover news of the weird, he had been safe. Not even the scandal rags had reported on Hobbs Green.

  Now, though, it was twenty-four-hour news, and more networks than he could count. If that wasn’t enough, there were blogs and internet sites, Twitter feeds and other shit he’d only heard talked about. Lots more chances of word getting out. Which would only be a concern if it got latched onto and spread far and wide.

  Maybe it’d just fade away, though. Most people still didn’t want news of the weird. They wanted to live their lives on an even keel, sure of their place in the world and in the order of things. Which worked for Mick, because his place in the world was a different one than everyone else’s, and his view of the order of things was far afield from most others.

  Every once in a while he wondered if in keeping things under wraps, in burying his secrets of the years, he’d been the lucky beneficiary of some help. It didn’t seem too farfetched to him that there was someone pulling the strings at those networks back in the olden days, someone whose job it was to keep things like Hobbs Green from disrupting the ordinary view of the world.

  He didn’t like to dwell on that too much, though. Mostly he just liked to get his job done, enjoy the company of the humans around him, and sit back to wait for the build of his essence to start pushing at him.

  He could feel it coming on, too. He’d already latched onto that Molly girl he’d seen earlier. He could tell she was going to be the one for him. She had just the right mix of rebellion and anger and curiosity. It was a perfect fit.

  Of course he’d probably have to leave this carnival behind after this time. Maybe get a job somewhere steady for once. He’d have thirty years to settle himself somewhere before he’d need to start moving again. That was enough time to live a life. A human life, anyway.

  Mick thought back to that Molly again. Yeah, she wasn’t bad. He liked knees. That would have made him weird, he guessed, based on his conversations with the guys in the trailer. They always talked about girls. He’d been around enough guys talking about girls that he knew what to say—tits, ass, oh, yeah, she was a smooth one when I got up in there—but he knew what he liked. Knees.

  He didn’t labor under any illusions of trying to blend in when he didn’t have to. He was different. His view of the world was different. The other guys, they might have left babies behind, changed a life or two along the way at most. Mick left behind destruction in his wake. And he was as okay with that being the price of getting off as the guys in the trailer were with their cost.

  In fact, he couldn’t wait to do it again. Soon.

  5.

  Arch yawned a big fat yawn as he stood in the crusted, muddy ruts of Old Man MacGruder’s driveway. Dawn was breaking overhead, and the sky was already a gentle blue. The last few days of dry, hot weather had completely eliminated any trace of the torrential rains. Arch hadn’t never really seen anything like that before, at least not that quick—but then, he hadn’t seen a ra
in like had come recently, either, and wondered if all this was the product of the hotspot.

  He pushed at the ridge of the giant tire tread that his shoe rested on. It flaked and crumbled with a little effort, like a segment of wall falling down into the middle of the track. It didn’t do much to entertain him, but he didn’t need much at this point. He’d been standing around in the park all night, and it’d worn him to the point where he was about ready to be cursing.

  Well, maybe not that much.

  Alison was standing across from him and so was Erin, with Hendricks off to the side. All of them but Alison had jumbo cups of coffee in front of them. Hendricks and Erin were just exchanging glances, furtive—and a little cooler than yesterday, if Arch wasn’t mistaken.

  “What was up with Lauren Darlington, Arch?” Erin’s question cut over the quiet hum of the crickets just over in the meadow. Some bird was chirping nearby, too, and they shut up as she asked the question.

  “No idea,” Arch said. The good Dr. Darlington had given him the stink-eye when he walked up to the crime scene, then said something about how she had to go home and sleep—which, even probably being true, had sounded like an excuse to everyone, including Reeve—and took off like she was about to go for a run in the opposite direction. “She’s always been a mite cold to me.”

  “She seemed fine until you showed up,” Erin said, and he could tell she was musing on it. “Then she clammed up fast and took off. Sounded a lot ruder to you than she did talking to me, too.”

  Arch just shrugged. “She seems to have a problem with me, but I’ll be dogged if I know what it is.”

  “Maybe she’s a racist,” Hendricks said, sounding utterly unconcerned. “Do we need to wait for the demon brothers, or should we get this show on the road?”

  “You tell me,” Arch said, eyeing the cowboy coolly. He switched his gaze over to Alison, who was still operating a few degrees south of normal. This was not usual for her, but then again, neither were demons and all manner of other trouble.