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

by Robert J. Crane

  “It’s not that bad,” Duncan said. Only someone who hadn’t known him for a century could fail to catch all the subtle nuance in the way it was said. “It’s not the—”

  “End of the world?” Lerner asked. He felt his lips push hard against one another, puckering with emotion he didn’t normally feel. It was a sense of anger, sure—and that he felt all the time. But there was something else there, too, something deeper. “You remember that one time, in Oklahoma …?” He didn’t even bother to finish the thought.

  “With the shopping mall,” Duncan said, picking it up with their easy shorthand.

  “And the lady with those massive clogs!” Lerner said, feeling himself chuckle, just a little, his shell’s natural reaction to that levity. “Her feet were the size of hams, all shoved into those things—”

  “Was she a dancer, you think?” Duncan asked.

  “Maybe in her youth,” Lerner said, “about two hundred extra pounds before we met her. The heels on those things must have been industrial grade to keep from breaking until they did.” They both lapsed into silence. “You remember that sound she made? When she died? When that … chis’thago tore her throat out?” He spoke soberly, the levity all faded. “I think about that sound sometimes.” He stared at the ceiling. “She was trying to say something, you know, staring up at us, the only ‘living’ witnesses to her death, that clog busted on her fat foot, twitching as she lay there dying.”

  “It was a gruesome thing,” Duncan said.

  “We’ve seen worse,” Lerner said, a little huskily. “But that noise! That noise she made. It was like …” He played it back in his head, that wail. “It was like pleading, but without the words.” He pressed his puckered lips together and found them dry. He didn’t really need water, but for some reason just now the fact that his lips were parched bothered the hell out of him. “I think about that sound. That pleading sound. Like it was her way of saying, ‘I only want a few more minutes, please, please, just a few more minutes.’ Bargaining. Hoping for just a little more.”

  Duncan was quiet for a moment. “That was a long time ago.”

  “I know,” Lerner said. He felt the stir. “I know.” He shifted his head just long enough to look at Duncan. “I just want a few more minutes.” He could feel the hint of a plea as it formed on his lips.

  “You’ve got time—” Duncan said, not looking at him.

  “I really don’t,” Lerner said, and Duncan turned his head so quickly Lerner thought it might snap off. He was off the bed in a roll and next to Lerner in a hot second. Demon speed. It almost wasn’t fast enough.

  “The epoxy—” Duncan said, and he tore his eyes from Lerner’s face down to where the wound was. Lerner couldn’t see it, but he could feel it, sucking away like it was a sinkhole, dragging in the skin around it— “Oh, shit,” was all that Duncan said.

  “I just wanted a few more minutes,” Lerner said, and he felt that sinking feeling run all the way through him. A hundred years—the best hundred years he could have imagined, out of the pits, out of the fires, out of the—

  He watched Duncan’s wordless face as black flames filled his vision in all directions, dragging him back to the waiting hell. Duncan’s eyes were the last thing he saw before he left—wide, weary, and infected with that human sentimentality that Lerner had spent the last century resisting with everything he had. As the flames ate him up, he wished—oh, how he wished!—that he had just let go as Duncan had, because the place that he would be going now would have been just the same, but at least he would have felt—

  12.

  They met out on MacGruder’s farm like usual, Arch kicking the dirt while he waited. Hendricks looked calm, his cowboy hat retrieved from Arch’s car, his face a twisted knot of thoughts that had yet to bleed. He squeezed the banana bag of IV solution in his hand, not too hard, cupped it like it was a softball or a soft fruit, aware it was there and fiddling nervously but not harshly with it.

  Arch, for his part, was sick of kicking the dirt. He had taken to studying Alison’s staid face in glimpses here and there. She had a little something hanging on the corner of her mouth, and she hadn’t made to kiss him. He knew they were on a strange road, a rough path maybe, but that wasn’t like her. He could catch a whiff here and there, though, when the wind shifted, and had a suspicion kissing was not something he would have wanted to do even if she’d been amenable.

  A dog howled in the distance, a couple plots of land down the road. He’d stirred the dust as he’d shot down it to the meet-up, hammering his way out of town as soon as he’d gotten Alison’s call. It sounded urgent; he’d hurried up and now he was waiting, waiting with the other two. Three of the six they’d had the other day when they’d been here, just waiting to see when Lerner and Duncan would show up.

  Arch’s uniform clung to him like it was midday and the sun was hanging overhead instead of a half-moon with a vague crescent casting silver light on the clouds that had it surrounded.

  “Did you get ahold of Lerner?” Hendricks asked, finally, breaking that awful nervous silence. Arch didn’t care for it, for once. He had a feeling—just a hint—that he was going to get some of that from the sheriff for a while. He was supposed to be on shift right now, but he’d heard not a word directed toward him on the radio all night. That was the sheriff’s wife on dispatch, after all, and maybe a suggestion of her husband’s current sentiment filtering through.

  Or maybe he was reading too much into it. “Got Duncan,” Arch said. “Said he’s on his way.”

  Hendricks nodded. “How’d he sound?”

  Arch pondered that; it didn’t quite compute. “Like Duncan, I reckon.”

  “Huh,” Hendricks said. “I wonder how Lerner is doing.”

  “Not good when we left him,” Alison said.

  “He had a crack in him?” Arch asked. It had sounded a most peculiar thing to have, something positively bizarre—but no good at all.

  “Don’t we all?” Hendricks said with a smirk.

  “If he’s cracked, does that mean he’ll break open?” Alison asked. She said it a kind of wandering voice that he recognized as fatigued.

  “If he does, he’ll burn like the rest of them,” Hendricks said, but Arch caught the ring of uncertainty in the way he said it.

  “You sure?” Arch asked.

  “Think I heard ’em say it before,” Hendricks said with a shrug. “They’re demons, right? Break ’em open like a piñata and that black fire swallows ’em back to hell. Rules of the game.”

  “Yeah,” Arch said a little sourly, “and the others rules of the game include the idea that guns don’t kill demons, right?”

  Arch could see the cowboy’s jaw tighten in advance of his answer. “Just because I’ve been in this game for longer than the rest of you, don’t assume I know everything.” Hendricks folded his arms in front of him, gingerly moving to avoid damage to the banana bag. “Though I have to admit, the learning curve had leveled out considerably until I got here. Things are happening in this town I hadn’t even heard of before.”

  “What’s the new deal?” Arch asked, figuring he might as well pry while they waited. Who knew how punctual a demon was? They could be here until the dawn.

  “Starling paid us a visit,” Hendricks said, moving his hands to expose the IV pouch again. “While we were picking this up for Erin.”

  Arch felt his face twist involuntarily. “What did she have to say?”

  “Nothing good, as per usual,” Hendricks said. “Promised us the end of the town is in the offing. Suggested it would lead to the end of the world if Midian goes down.”

  “That’s a new wrinkle,” Arch said, but he could see by a flicker on Hendricks’s face that it might not have been all that new. “She give any hints on how it’s gonna happen?”

  “Name of a town,” Hendricks said, glancing over at Alison. “Hobbs Green, Alabama. Ring any bells?”

  Arch felt the frown crease his forehead. “Not for me. Why?”

  “Because—�
� Hendricks started to say, but he was cut off by the sound of something laboring along the road. A thin, ticking sound, repetitive, like spokes on a wheel— “Holy shit, is that a bicycle?”

  Arch had his gun pulled, low rest, facing down the driveway before he saw the figure on the bike in the half-light. He took aim, and saw Alison out of the corner of his eye already going for the town car’s trunk while Hendricks matched his aim with his own .45.

  “Cool your boots, gents,” the figure on the bike said, emerging into the moonlit night, his lime-colored suit bleached of its color in the placid light.

  “Duncan, what the fuck?” Hendricks asked, not lowering the barrel of his 1911. He didn’t look too happy in Arch’s view; then again, when Arch sifted the jumble in his chest, somewhere below that hammering heart was a flash of anger of his own at the demon. “A bike? Now? Of all times?”

  “You have my car,” Duncan said, bringing the bicycle to a stop with a skid on the dirt driveway. “Walking would have taken longer, and stealing a car would have drawn more attention, so …” He shrugged, near-emotionless, though Arch saw a flash in his eyes. “You call, and I appear.”

  “You could have asked for a ride, man,” Hendricks said, still not holstering his gun. Arch dropped the barrel of his, and watched Alison slam the trunk of the town car, the sound reverberating over them. The cowboy was fixated on the shiny metal frame of the bicycle, his eyes anchored on it like they’d caught on a hook.

  It was an old bike, not exactly modern standard. Duncan stood there, astride the thing. “Where’s Lerner?” Arch asked. “He on bed rest?”

  “He’s gone,” Duncan said, a pronouncement with no more enthusiasm or note than if he’d declared the night dark. True, and boring.

  “Gone where?” Hendricks said, still a little sizzle in his reply.

  Duncan just shrugged a lime-suited shoulder. “Fires of hell. Stygian depths. Home office. Whatever you want to call it.”

  Alison spoke first. “Jesus.” He didn’t even give her a hard look for taking the Lord’s name in vain on that one.

  “Quite the opposite, toots,” Duncan said in a reasonable approximation of Lerner’s accent.

  “Is he gone for good?” Hendricks asked. “I mean, can you come back from that?”

  Duncan did not blanch, just stared flatly ahead. “No. No, they don’t let you come back from that. Being an OOC is like parole; you get broken here, you get dropped back to the … well, let’s just say you don’t want to go back.” His lips turned into a thin line. “Lerner didn’t want to go back.”

  “Fuck,” Hendricks said, shaking his head as the brim of his hat hid his face in shadow. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Eloquent and accurate,” Duncan said.

  “We’re down another ally,” Arch said, dully, not quite sure what else to say.

  “We need to get this to Erin,” Hendricks said, holding up the banana bag. “Need to get it to her now.”

  Arch stared at it, glinting in the moonlight, and thought he saw something else in the liquid, something he couldn’t see when he squinted closer at it.

  “Where did you get that?” Duncan asked, with the closest thing to feeling he’d exhibited since he’d arrived.

  Hendricks waited a full five seconds before answering. “You know where I got it.”

  Duncan let a pregnant pause hang before he replied. “You’re looking fit compared to when last I saw you.”

  “I’m a real physical specimen,” Hendricks said, and Arch caught the interplay between the two of them, not a clue of what any of it meant.

  “Don’t drink any more of that stuff,” Duncan said, and he turned his head away from the cowboy, like he was done. Just done. “But you should get that to Harris right away.”

  Arch blinked. “I can probably do it, I guess.” He reached out for the bag and Hendricks handed it off to him. It was a little cool to the touch, springy plastic wrapped around liquid, and it sloshed as he took it in hand. “What’s this other thing you’re into? Nob Green or whatever it is?”

  “Heh,” Hendricks said. “Hobbs Green. And you should ask your woman about that, because I get the sense she knows more than she’s saying.”

  Arch dragged his eyes around to Alison, who was staring into space like she hadn’t heard. “You know something about this place Starling mentioned?”

  “Starling?” Duncan asked. “That redhead? She show up again?”

  “Cryptic warning and all,” Hendricks said. “Town’s gonna be destroyed, world’s gonna end.”

  “Is that all?” Duncan asked with a shrug. “I thought it was serious since you called me in the middle of the night.”

  “The world we’re currently resting our shoes on coming to an end doesn’t strike you as serious?” Arch asked.

  “I was joking,” Duncan said, still inscrutable. “It’s probably important to keep it spinning. How is it ending, and what does that have to do with the town?”

  “That’s the ‘cryptic’ part of the warning,” Hendricks said. “She gave us that Hobbs Green thing as a bonus, like it was some sort of blueprint for how things are going to go.”

  “What did you do to this bitch to make her hate you so bad?” Duncan said, and his voice scratched as he said it, dragging Arch’s head back around from the uncharacteristic nature of what was said. Duncan was mild. Duncan was polite. Now Duncan was swearing and tossing in something like that?

  “Hell if I know,” Hendricks said, raising his shoulders up in a shrug, like he could just drop all the weight off them.

  “She said you had to go through trials.” Alison spoke up at last, a thin thread of a voice in a chorus of louder, deeper ones. Everyone heard her, though.

  “Trials?” Duncan’s eyes narrowed. He was thinking something, that much was obvious, but exactly what was going through his head was as much a mystery to Arch as it was … probably at any other time. “It’s never simple,” the demon muttered.

  “What’s never simple?” Hendricks asked, the cowboy tilting his head toward Duncan like he was waiting for collected wisdom to spray out and hit him in the face. Arch had a sense that he was about to be disappointed.

  “Nothing. Nothing is ever simple,” Duncan said, shaking his head. “We got a flock of vembra’nonn tearing through town on bikes and now something about to end the world. I long for the days of an ychoraba dispute.”

  “What’s an ychoraba dispute?” Alison asked.

  “Family quarrel,” Duncan answered. “But they’re all sex partners in addition to being related.”

  “How the fuck is that simple?” Hendricks asked.

  “They’re partially human, and they’re inbred, so their intelligence is low,” Duncan said, almost sighing. “Ergo, they’re …” He just laid it out there and waited for them to stumble into it like a landmine.

  “Simple,” Arch said. “Classy joke.” Duncan nodded his head but didn’t smile. “So what do we do about these bikers and the end of the world?”

  “I want the bikers,” Duncan said tightly.

  “That’s what she said,” Alison tossed in.

  “You want the world to end?” Hendricks asked, ignoring her and directing his inquiry to the demon.

  “No,” Duncan said. Not quite as tightly.

  “We need to make like the doctors and do triage,” Hendricks said, sweeping his gaze over all of them. “I don’t like these bloody messes that the Tour de Midian is leaving, but I like the thought of the whole town being flattened or destroyed even less, especially if it triggers the end of the world somehow.” He glanced at everyone but Arch, and for just a second Arch got the sense the cowboy really was holding something back. “I want to beat their bicycle-pants-wearing-asses too, but I’ve done the whole vengeance thing, and I’m over it.” Arch sensed he was not over it. At all. “We have priorities here.”

  “You may be over it, but I’m not,” Duncan said simply. “Set your own priorities, and I’ll set mine.” He started to shift his weight to ride off.

>   “Hold up a second, Duncan,” Arch said, stalling for time, hoping a brilliant idea would descend from heaven just before the demon rode off with a quarter of their remaining strength. Probably more. “I don’t think you’re gonna get your revenge on the bikers if the world comes to an end.” It sounded lame even to his ears, though it had that ring of truth to it.

  Duncan halted, the front handlebars angled up the driveway toward the road. “Go on.”

  “Well,” Arch said, trying to spin the wheels a little faster, “do you think these things are gonna leave town?”

  Duncan stared at him evenly. “Unlikely. They don’t have much reason to.”

  “Even with everything we did to them?” Arch asked. The mess up on Mount Horeb would have scared away any criminal with even a tenth of a functioning intelligence. Only a real fool liked to do their odious deeds in the presence of those who would catch them.

  “Where else would they go?” Duncan asked, like it was an answer in and of itself.

  “I dunno,” Hendricks said, droll, “any one of the other eighteen hotspots currently running?”

  “Something is going on here,” Duncan said. “Something home office either doesn’t know or isn’t telling me. This place is getting the draw. Eighteen hotspots, there should be a more even distribution of chaos. But things are gravitating here for some reason.” He chewed his lip like it was invincible, tearing into it with a savagery that made Arch want to take a step back from him, in case he started crackling with black flames. “No, they’re not going to leave. Find a new place to hide, probably. Leave … I don’t think so. You’ll be scraping up their victims for a while yet, deputy.” He placed a peculiar, needling emphasis on that last word, looking at Arch as he said it.

  Arch didn’t care for it, but he didn’t want to lose sight of his objective, either. Keeping a player from storming out of the locker room when they were already behind on the scoreboard was more important than replying to the cheap goad. “So they can wait just a bit for us to deal with them.”