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

by Robert J. Crane

  Even his fucking feet hurt by this point, and his boots had been broken in long ago to the point where he could hump it for miles in them. Hendricks had had e-fucking-nough of this town, and they weren’t even there yet. He bypassed the coat and went straight to his t-shirt collar, finding it completely drenched with sweat. He peeled it off his chest, making way for the heat to come rushing out. It didn’t seem to help. God, if he could only take off his coat …

  He felt the trail of the drover touching the ground before he even realized it was. He looked down and saw his legs were buckling, and his first thought was that he was being such a damned pussy. This wasn’t that far of a walk, and he wasn’t in that bad a shape. Then his eyes flicked up, and saw Alison hobbling a little, too. Not like she’d been earlier, with the wheezing, but like the gravity had turned up. Her Naked Prozac t-shirt (what the hell was that band, anyway?) was completely soaked through now, looked black even in the beam light, and he saw her knees slightly folded.

  “Shit,” Duncan announced, and Hendricks just stopped.

  Sweet fucking son of a fuck, it was stifling, the air growing hotter and hotter, like he’d stuck his whole body up next to a barbecue grill someone had opened on the hottest day of summer. The sun he couldn’t see was shining down on him, the black coat absorbing every bit of it, and he felt the sweat just coursing from under his sleeves, making trails that tickled their way through every hair on his arm. His palm gripped his sword tighter and he felt the grip slip, the leather wanting to slide out of his grasp.

  “Not a good … sign,” Hendricks said, barely getting it out. He wanted to open his mouth and pant like a fucking dog in hopes the heat building inside would just Please Just Get The Fuck Out Already. It was like a rubber suit had gotten wrapped around his whole body and he was sweating into it. He could barely take a breath without smelling that stifling sweat smell, that faint hint of fucking charcoal or ozone or something, Sweet Jesus, something that made his head tingle from the beads of water dripping down under the hat. He wanted to tear it aside and mop his brow with a canvas-hard sleeve, but he knew that wouldn’t do it and—

  “Holy fuck,” Hendricks said as Alison hit a knee. She was breathing heavy again now, her hair completely and totally turned from straight and dry to a soaked, streaked mess of tangled blond turned dark with perspiration. He watched her fold and knew—just knew—that this wasn’t the heat, even though FOR FUCK’S SAKE WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE TURN DOWN THE GODDAMNED THERMOSTAT ON THE WORLD BECAUSE I WANT TO—

  His free hand came up and ran across his face, smearing stinging salty liquid into his eyes, and he bumped his hat clean off even though he knew—HE KNEW—that it would not help at all. Shaking off the coat would similarly have no effect, but that was another thing that the distant corner of his brain whispered while his body told him to strip it all the fuck off and be rid of it, to jump naked in the nearest body of water, to drag Alison with him and get the poor girl some help because it was just out of control, this feeling that—

  Ice cream on a summer’s day, sherbet melting down the side of his face as he licked his way to the cone. That thought popped into Hendricks’s head and it helped. That sweet, tangy tartness hidden in the first feel of chill that the lick brought.

  He imagined his skin the time he’d done the polar plunge that time for charity in high school. Frigid cold water that sprang over his flesh as he jumped into the lake and felt his balls make a rapid and strategic retreat as his skin felt like it froze fucking over—

  The air conditioner in that shithole base in Iraq working double overtime after they’d come off a five-day mission. It was like a cool bath standing in front of it, trying not to get into a shoving match with the dipshit next to you, all thought of you being brothers in arms forgotten while you were trying to just get a little more cold soaked up, like it was the only thing in the damned world, with that mechanical smell filtering out the desert outside—

  Hendricks felt the will to crumble leave his legs. He was still sweating like a motherfucker but it was like the wool sweater he’d had pulled over him had been ripped off in one move. He could feel something pressing on him, like a wave of heat hanging out at arm’s length, kept at a distance by his mind.

  “You figure it out?” Duncan asked, not looking at him. The OOC was facing into the darkness, his flashlight beam dancing over the gnarled and twisted tree branches, illuminating blackened husks of things that might have born leaves and shoots once upon a time, but that was a long time ago, galaxy far away, all that jazz.

  “Heat demon of some kind,” Hendricks replied, and his sleeve drifted over his soaked upper lip. The salty taste dribbled onto his tongue. “It’s pushing thoughts on us. Feelings.”

  “On you, yeah,” Duncan said.

  “You don’t feel it?” Alison asked, and Hendricks thought that this time—for sure—she was truly breathless.

  “I feel it, but it doesn’t matter,” Duncan replied, like a freezer of cool compared to their surroundings. “They ramped it up pretty fast, and that was dumb because then it was obvious to me. Still wouldn’t have affected me like it hits you, but I’d have been less likely to notice if they hadn’t trumpeted it like an invading army.”

  “The Mongol hordes of heat,” Hendricks joked weakly, still feeling the heavy toll the flaming beasts had been trying to exact from him. “Think cold thoughts, Alison. Think of the times you were freezing your ass off.”

  “Can’t,” she said, and her head was slumped to the side.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Hendricks said, and stepped in closer to her. She pushed at his leg, trying to force him away because of the heat or because she had nothing else to do. “When was the last time you remember being cold?”

  “Hunting season,” she said after a minute. “In the woods. With Daddy. Years ago.”

  “Think about it,” Hendricks said, not taking his eyes off the trees around them. Where were these fuckers? Wouldn’t now be the time to strike? “What did it feel like?”

  She let another heat-laden breath out as she answered, and it came up at Hendricks like someone had opened the barbecue again. “Felt … like a blanket of chill settled over me. Like it wrapped me in a fall day, with a first snowfall a month still off, but the freezing feel on its way. Like I could see my breath frosting in front of me on the air, not steam and smoke. Like my lungs hurt from the cold when I walked home through the woods too fast and took a breath too deep. Like I could stick my tongue out and catch the air as it turned to ice on the tip.”

  She shuddered once, and he saw the tension leave her. She worked back to her feet at her own pace, and it took a minute. “I don’t remember it being like this last time,” she said once she was upright again. “Not like this.”

  “Likely whatever is here is getting stronger.” Duncan had pulled closer to them now, making their triangle tight, his purple-tinted jacket just a finger’s distance from Hendricks, who wanted to touch it, see if there was sweat beneath it at the small of the demon’s back. He knew there wasn’t, but after the assault on his senses he’d just weathered, he was curious. “Some of our kind can develop an affinity for a certain place; makes them more powerful the longer they’re homesteaded there.”

  “Must be nice to have a place to hang your hat,” Hendricks said as he picked his hat up off the ground. He brushed the dirt off the brim and settled it back on his head. It was still gawdawfully warm but not unmanageable. “How much farther—?”

  He barely got it out before Alison’s beam hit on something that didn’t look like woods. It was too smoothly rounded, though it was still a little like a tree trunk, wood scorched and reaching skyward. She started moving first, a little more sure now, but less than she’d been before the warmth had tried to melt them down. The object came into clearer focus as they went, Hendricks fighting to get one foot in front of another, the world swaying around him like he’d crossed the whole damned desert on his faltering legs.

  The scorched trunk of the thing became obvious when
he got close. Little nails jutted out from it, blackened by time and heat, he supposed, but not unrecognizable. Alison’s beam shot skyward and his gaze followed with it to the top, where the crossbeam was still attached, though the wires that had once been strung across it were long missing.

  “Telephone pole,” Hendricks said for all of them. He wanted to wipe his face again but held off. He pictured that ice cream cone again instead, and it helped some.

  “Another one up ahead,” Duncan observed. They were moving now, a train sprung to motion, Hendricks’s steps coming erratically but coming, following Alison’s lead, all thoughts of boner distance forgotten. Her smooth beam caught a straight line and Hendricks followed it, blackened edges emerging out of the dark.

  “Building,” Duncan pronounced, now leading the way. They were in line, and Hendricks did not dare look back for fear of a misstep while his head was turned, for fear of taking a tumble he could not recover from while lollygagging.

  He followed them, feeling his consciousness on a lower level than usual. It was almost surreal. Then suddenly there was orange light again that had nothing to do with a sun in the sky that he could no longer see or believe in. His steps were staggering, one leg locked permanently to keep it from betraying him from the fatigue or the mind-fuck or whatever that was working on him.

  “This way,” Duncan said, threading them into a gap beside the scorched wall. There was another a few feet away, Hendricks realized, and as they drew between them he could see the fire marks staining the walls where heat had burned its way through the alley they walked. He could see the orange light at the end and knew that it was not a train. Trains didn’t have orange lights, did they?

  They stepped out of the end of the alley, Hendricks playing caboose (fucking trains again, why was that? He felt like he’d been run over by one, maybe). The orange light drowned out Alison’s flashlight. Duncan’s was already off, and Hendricks hadn’t even noticed until now.

  He stood there, and it took him a minute to realize he was leaning on Alison for support. She was leaning right back, and he could feel her softness pressed against him on the side. She moved, and he watched her leave a trail of sweat on his coat as she slid an inch back and he caught her, his sword hand wrapped around her shoulders. He transferred the weapon to his left hand and barely avoided dropping it from the slick, sweat-drenched hilt.

  “Well, here we are,” Duncan said as they stared out on what Hendricks figured had once been a town square not that dissimilar from what Midian had. There might even have been a statue on that pedestal in front of them at one point, that stone block base that just stood there in the middle of a black-dirt field, with a bonfire burning right in the middle of it.

  The bonfire was a mile tall to Hendricks’s eyes, and black smoke piped off it and mingled with the clouds, like they were coming down to take it up and blow it evenly around the four corners of the sky. He didn’t see any wood in the bonfire, though, like it was burning without fuel, fire without source.

  The first shape broke out of it without so much as a waver in the flames. The second followed, then a third. Low to the ground, walking on four legs, each step sending up a hiss that was audible even over the crackling of the flames, and Hendricks saw one of the paw prints turned to glass in the dirt, catching the refracted light of the fire as flaming devil dogs emerged from within one after another.

  They had a sick, hungry look in their eyes that reminded Hendricks of a stray he’d gotten a little too close to one time, some element of desperation in those red pupils that he could see from halfway across the square. “Here it comes,” he muttered, and waited, sword in hand, afraid to take another step.

  But it didn’t come, and the dogs formed a little path, a little chain on either side of the bonfire as they stacked up in a line, that black earth laid out like a red carpet between them. They turned and faced each other like a salute, and Hendricks didn’t know whether to be impressed or just say fuck it and run. “Looks like someone tunneled a little too deep into the Mines of Moria,” he said.

  “Not big enough to be a Balrog,” Duncan replied. “Though they’ve got the look, the fire and darkness thing going on.”

  “You people are nerds,” was Alison’s only comment on the matter.

  The bonfire rippled again but taller this time. It belched a human shape out of the flames, a figure that looked impressively tall next to the four-legged flame beasts but not so big for a human. He could tell by the slightness that it was a woman, or a girl, and her steps were even more lopsided than his had been, like she’d been worn the fuck out and never replenished.

  She made it all the way out to the street that ringed the square before she stopped, bare blackened feet perched on the edge of the curb, a river of broken asphalt between her and them. He looked in her eyes out of curiosity more than anything, and he didn’t see the red fire there that the dogs had.

  He saw a screaming fucking horror that stretched all the way from the top of the girl’s bald head to the pit of her near-empty soul.

  She just stood there and stared at them, the dogs flanking her on either side, a hearty dozen of them, presumably with a shit ton more in the fire if need be. Hendricks didn’t love those odds, but he called out anyway.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. His voice sounded like he’d swallowed the bonfire all the way down, and it’d left nothing but scorched cracks from the back of his tongue to somewhere in his belly, where the fire had gone out completely and left nothing behind in its wake.

  When she spoke, it was a crackling whisper, something that demanded attention, and every one of the demon dogs seemed to hush to make way for her speech. It was an awful quiet too, split by the voice of the thing—the girl? The woman?—they paid some sort of homage to, here in the wreckage of lives, of homes, of a whole town.

  “My name is Mandy,” she said, and it was not anything approaching human, the way she said it. Like she’d almost forgotten. “My name is Mandy.” Like that meant anything to anyone.

  15.

  Lauren rode up Mount Horeb in silence, her mother driving and her in the passenger seat, again. It was tiresome, this co-op thing, but she hadn’t had time to get her car before morning shift, and so she’d had to impose on her mom again. It was probably the least of the impositions she’d put on her in the last few years, though, so she didn’t feel too fussed about it.

  Besides, her head was a little too busy swirling with the tandem craziness of Molly and her carnie boyfriend and what Arch Stan had maybe done this morning. The former was personally important and of special interest, while the latter had been good for making her late for her shift and would possibly bear fruit in delivering a comeuppance to one righteous sonofabitch, smacking him down off his high fucking horse. And, she dared to hope, with all the trampling underfoot that might follow such an occurrence.

  Lauren was so wrapped up in this fascinating yin/yang of karma—the Molly situation because of the parallels she could draw with her own teenage years, and the Arch Stan one because … well … because karma was a stinging, mean-spirited slut when crossed, apparently—that she barely noticed when her mother nudged the car to the side of the road behind her own, which sat waiting on the overlook, nothing but a thin layer of brown dust to indicate she’d left it there some twenty-four hours before.

  “You’re not going for another run, are you?” her mother asked, jolting Lauren back to the world.

  “I’m in my scrubs,” she said, indicating the blue garments in answer.

  “So, that’s a no?” her mother asked. “Because it seems to me I’ve seen you go out in what looked like a bra, and this is quite some improvement over that—”

  “Ughhhhh,” she let out in frustration and forced the door open. “It’s called a sports bra, Mom—”

  “—with your belly out there for the world to see like you were in a whorish bathing suit, and your bosoms all flopping around—”

  “I’m a B cup, there’s really not that much flopping,
thanks.”

  “I just wanted to know if you’d be home for dinner,” her mother said as Lauren stood there, one hand on the door and the other on the roof of the car, leaning over to look in at the grey-haired pronouncer of judgment on everything. “That’s all.”

  “And maybe take a little zip or two at my wardrobe choices in the process,” Lauren said, “because really, there’s never a moment when you should waste an opportunity to point out the things I do that you disagree with.”

  “Oh, get over yourself,” her mother said, putting the car back into gear. “I ain’t got time in my day to point out all the things you do wrong.” Lauren barely slammed the door in time to let her mother drive off, pulling around into a U-turn and lurching off down the mountain.

  Lauren could feel her internal teakettle boiling and sighed to let off the steam. It was pointless to hold onto it, because even if she did just bottle it up all the way home, unleashing it like a factory whistle, blowing as she came in the door, her mother would just look up at her with that faintly amused smile—Are you still on about that? But that was ages ago! There was a statute of limitations on every unpleasant conversation, and it was always as short as her mother wanted it to be.

  Fuck it, she said to herself. She got in her car and started the engine. She stared off the overlook, willing her irritation to be pushed off, because it would do her no good alive. One time, she goes jogging in a sports bra, gets reminded forever. All because that fucking biddy Genevieve Lane mentions to her mother than Albert Daniel—the old horn dog—was gawking at her. Not her fault that Albert Daniel hadn’t gotten laid since protesters were chanting about how many babies LBJ had killed that day. Not her fault that the shithead would probably stroke off until he stroked out, the pudgy fuck. Her legs were all right, she guessed—guys had mentioned them before in bed as being good—but nothing else was worth writing home about, certainly not her sports bra. But Albert Daniel—aww, fuck it.