by Sam Witt
An ammoniac stink wafted to Joe from the junkie’s wound. There was a familiar scratching sound, claws on flesh. Joe took his eyes off the road to get a look at Walter.
“They sent me over to Springfield, to that place out on 44.” Walter coughed, took a deep, gasping breath. His words tangled in his throat.
Joe saw the lump on Walter’s neck, a plum-sized knot that squirmed when the junkie spoke.
“Hurts,” Walter said and scraped at his throat. His eyes were wide. “I can’t —”
“Just say it.” Joe brought the truck to a skidding halt on the side of the gravel road. “Tell me before it’s too late.”
“Don’t let it —” Walter started, then gagged. His mouth hung open, and drool ran from his chin in thick, bloody strings. The lump shivered under the skin and moved up his neck, following the line of his jaw.
Walter dug at his pick spot, scraping away ribbons of flesh that clung to his ragged nails in tangled coils.
“Out!” Walter screamed, blood spraying from his lips. “Get it out.”
Joe drew the knife from his belt and jammed its tip into the back corner of Walter’s pick spot. He needed what Walter had to tell him, but he’d never hear it if the addict died. Joe didn’t know if digging that nasty lump out of Walter would help, but he didn’t reckon it could hurt.
Blood welled around the knife’s tip as Joe worked it back along Walter’s jaw toward the twitching lump. Thin skin parted to reveal blood-stained bone and knotted muscle. Joe sliced along the jaw until he hit the lump.
A spade-like snout thrust through the slit, followed by a furry head. Walter screamed and hooked his fingers into the flap of loose skin dangling from his jaw. He tore it back toward his ear, and a bat flopped out of the gaping wound. It shook blood from its wings and stretched them wide, rearing its head back to unleash a piercing squeal of rage.
“Fuck you,” Joe snarled and flicked the knife down through the thing’s neck. The bat’s head rolled free and tumbled down Walter’s leg onto the floor of the cab.
Walter’s hands fumbled at his wound. Blood poured between his clumsy fingers, running down his throat to soak his filthy T-shirt.
Joe dug under his seat for one of the spare flannel shirts he kept in the truck. He smacked Walter’s hands aside and shoved the shirt against the wound. “Hold that.”
Walter nodded and pressed both hands to the makeshift bandage. “Hospital,” he croaked.
“Sure,” Joe said. “Soon as you tell me what you were doing.”
“Okay, okay.” Walter coughed. Gagged.
Joe could see another lump rising under Walter’s skin, just above his ear. Then another on his forearm. A bulge stretched out from his chin. Something moved under Walter’s bloody shirt.
Joe lifted the knife.
Walter screamed.
CHAPTER 28
JOE STARTED WITH the twitching bulges closest to the surface of Walter’s skin. He pinned the writhing addict’s head to the back of the seat with his wounded left arm and used his right hand for the cutting.
“You’re killin’ me,” Walter gasped, but he didn’t fight. The feeling of violation was so strong he’d tolerate anything to get the fuckers out. “Just get it done.”
“Tell me who was buying that shit.” Joe drew the sharp edge of the curved blade across the center of the swelling. It parted with a sound like tearing paper, and blood spritzed into his eyes. He jammed the knife into the back of the truck’s seat and dug in the wound with his fingers. He blinked away the blood and squeezed the bedraggled bat out of Walter’s scalp.
“Fuck me,” the junkie screamed and beat his hands against his thighs. The bat screeched and tried to bite Joe, but the Marshal was faster. He squeezed its wiry torso in his fist until blood gouted from its snout and the hellish light went out of its eyes. “There’s too many. Too fuckin’ many.”
Walter focused on a lump in his thigh and turned his fists against it. He pounded his leg with rhythmic punches, one after another, crushing the moving lump until it stopped twitching. There were tiny cracking noises coming from his leg as he kept on smashing the dead thing.
Joe grabbed the smurf by the chin and turned him so their eyes met. “We don’t have much time. Tell me who bought this shit.”
“Gotta get ‘em out.” Walter found another lump on the inside of his left arm and scraped the fingernails of his right hand over it. “Makin’ me crazier’n goddamned crank bugs.”
The junkie panted and kept scraping at his flesh until red weals appeared and the blood began to flow. Another lump throbbed with an irregular rhythm, swelling as the creature within tried to thrust its way into the world. “C’mere, you little fucker.”
Joe slapped Walter. “We’ll get them out, but you have to tell me who did this.”
“There’s a list,” Walter started, then went back to digging at his arm. The flesh tore open like a sack of wet tissue, and the addict screeched a cry of victory. He hooked his fingers inside his arm and yanked the bat out with such force he tore a six-inch wide swath of his own flesh off at the same time.
Walter mashed the bat against the passenger-side window, smearing it against the glass until its guts spilled out of its screeching mouth, choking it on its own innards.
“Where’s the list?” Joe pinned Walter again and sliced his t-shirt open with a long swipe of the knife. There were three lumps moving under the smurf’s pale skin, stretching it so tight Joe could see the bats’ furry heads through it. He stabbed the bats, one, two, three, skewering them through Walter’s flesh.
Joe felt sick and helpless. The sheriff had lied to him, all the rest of the Pryors were dead, and his last lead was just about to kick off. He needed this list. Without it, he had no idea who to chase after. He’d never stop this mess before it spiraled out of control. He had to get Walter to talk.
Walter was panting, his eyes little more than puffy slits. He was soaked with blood that ran out of him like water from a leaky balloon.
“The list. Where’s the list?” Joe slapped the junkie, trying to bring him back around. He thought of applying a tourniquet, but there was too much blood, too many holes to plug.
Walter lifted his eyelids. Gave Joe a slow blink. “Hid that shit. They’d fuckin’ kill me if they found out I kept the list. Guess it don’t matter much now.”
“Help me put a stop to this.” Joe squeezed the junkie’s hand. “Give me the list.”
“Don’t let ‘em take me. I was scared, that’s all. Didn’t know no better.” Walter’s eyes widened as if he saw something far beyond the horizon, something dark and hungry and drawing near. “We all was, I guess.”
“Who?” The Night Marshal resisted the urge to shake the junkie. “I can’t help you, if you don’t help me.”
“Reckon I’m gone, anyhow.”
“It’s the right thing. You know that.”
“It true what they say?” Walter’s words came out slurred and dripping with blood that ran over his lower lip and stained the gray stubble on his chin. “That you got the big man’s ear?”
“Yeah,” Joe said, trying to hide his frustration. He didn’t have time to explain his job and the complicated connections that bound him to the powers that be. The big man listened to Joe, but often he didn’t seem to give much of a shit what the Marshal had to say.
“Can you forgive me?” Walter’s eyes were wet with unshed tears. “For what I helped ‘em do?”
“I can say the words,” Joe started, but Walter kept on pressing his point.
“I done bad, Joe. I done real bad.” Walter coughed, and blood slopped from his wounds. The lump on his forearm split, red leaking over its edges. Walter hissed in pain as a shrieking bat shoved its head through the slit. “Goddamn. That burns.”
Walter dug inside his own arm and ripped the bat out, crushing it in his shaking fist.
“Walter, I forgive you.” Joe didn’t know what else to say. “You can still help make it right.”
“We were just tryin
’ to make it.” Walter grimaced, and the bulge on his chin juddered up toward his lower lip. He spat a mouthful of blood into his hand. “The world left Pitchfork behind, Joe. Whole damned place was dying. All we had was the old ways, and we was scared you’d take that from us, too. Remember that, all right?”
“The list. You don’t have much longer to make this right.”
“Yeah.” Walter took a deep breath and screamed. Blood sprayed in the cab, and three of his teeth spilled out of his mouth, stuck to his chin. His tongue jutted from between cracked lips and whipped back and forth as if pulled by an unseen string. Walter pulled away from Joe and slammed his bloody hand against the window. His fingers spasmed against the glass, tapping an erratic tattoo on the window.
“Walter, please.” Joe tried to pull the man back around, to see if he could least try to read the dying man’s lips. But the junkie was having none of it. He shrugged Joe off and spat strange words that scorched the air in the cab and smelled of shit. His back bubbled with huge blisters that swelled and burst, soaking his shirt with dark, sticky blood. Writhing figures pushed against the cotton T-shirt; white fangs shredded it to reveal hungry, furred faces and glaring eyes with too many pupils.
“Fuck,” Joe shouted and threw his door open. The cab was filling with bats, their hungry mouths tearing Walter apart. He turned back to Joe, his face stripped down to the bone in places, one eye dangling from its socket with a bat clutching it.
“Forgive me,” he mouthed, and a wordless scream poured out of him on a tide of blood.
Joe ran around the truck and tore the passenger door open. Walter splashed onto the wet ground, his blood running into the mud as his scream went on and on. Joe watched as his last lead shrieked toward the grave. He didn’t know what to do now, where to look, who to interrogate. The darkness was coming, and he had no idea how to stop it.
“God keep your soul, Walter. May he shelter it in his furious fist and hide it from the evil that haunted you in life.”
Joe eased the barrels of the shotgun down onto Walter’s forehead. The red ran out of the rain, as if in answer to Joe’s simple prayer. The Night Marshal closed his eyes, tilted his face to the sky, and let the rain wash the blood from his face. Joe let out a long, shuddering sigh and pulled the shotgun’s triggers.
CHAPTER 29
SPURRED BY HIS mother’s words, Al scooped Elsa into his arms and hit the stairs to the second floor at a dead run. He bounded up the steps three at a time and rushed for the big bedroom at the end of the hall. He hit the door with his shoulder, and it flew open, bouncing off the wall to slam shut behind them.
Elsa wormed out of Al’s arms and dropped to the floor with an irritated hiss. She adjusted her mask and turned back toward the door.
Al shot the deadbolt and laid a heavy hand on his sister’s shoulder. Elsa tried to brush him away, but he held her firm.
“She needs us,” Elsa growled. “You left her alone out there.”
Al tightened his grip on her shoulders to keep her from bolting for the door again.
“If you promise to stay here, I’ll go see what’s happening.” Al knelt before his sister and looked into her mask’s black eyeholes. There were tiny sparks of sapphire glittering in the deep shadows, but he couldn’t see Elsa’s eyes at all. The spirits were gathering within her, responding to her rage and fear. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” she said through gritted teeth. “Be quick.”
Al nodded. “I’ll be fast.”
He shot the deadbolt open and pointed to a chair at the small desk in the corner. “Use that. Lock the door behind me.”
Elsa wrestled the chair over to the door.
Al waited in the hall until he heard the door lock behind him, then headed for the stairs. He leapt down the stairwell, landing on all fours in the living room. He could feel a presence gathering outside the house, something old and foul. He tilted his nose into the air and took a deep breath. Rot and char came to him from the back of the house. He crept into the kitchen, tracking the source of the stench.
A gray shape lumbered past one of the windows, and Al ducked low to the floor to avoid its attention. The thing moved fast for its size, flowing forward with a predator’s gait. Al lunged, racing toward the window, roaring a challenge at the intruder. He leapt for the window, jaws spread wide. He closed his eyes and crossed his arms in front of his face to shield himself from the worst of the breaking glass. He imagined himself coming through the window, wrapping his arms and legs around the big man, and tearing him to the ground.
He never saw the shadow coming at him. The window shattered, and whirling glass shrapnel exploded into the house. The shards bit into his forearms and chest, slicing ribbons of flesh from his bones and burying themselves in his muscle. He crashed to the kitchen floor, something heavy and smelling of death on top of him. Pain crawled up his sides, lanced his stomach, slashed at his head. Fangs gored chunks from his flesh, leaving him gasping and breathless from the pain.
Something hit the side of the building and rattled the windows in their frames. Al heard his sister scream from the room above him, calling for her mother. The sound was a jolt of energy to his system. He had to get up; he had to protect Elsa.
Alasdair roared and threw his weight to the left. He rolled onto his attacker, shifting their positions to give himself the leverage to rip it apart. Blood ran into his eyes, but he could see the dark shape beneath him, a swirling mass of fur and fangs that seemed to be all talons and teeth. Wherever it touched him he bled, and the myriad thin cuts were starting to take their toll.
He slashed his hands through the swarm, tearing chunks of it free. They were and were not bats, clumps of fur studded with gnashing fangs, wings of smoke. Al kept shredding it, and the enemy beneath him grew weaker. Its fangs tore smaller and smaller pieces from him, leaving behind pinpricks of blood that were little more than tick bites.
Then it was gone, leaving Al on his knees, blood running from a hundred shallow wounds. He hooked his claws into the kitchen table next to him and hauled himself up onto his feet. The little cuts were healing, a side benefit of his bestial curse, but he needed meat to restore his energy. His knees were weak and wobbly, Much more of this and he’d be out cold.
Al’s head jerked up as Elsa screamed again. He hadn’t beaten it, the swarm had just gone after easier prey. He forced himself to move. He put one weak, stiff leg ahead of the other and made his way up the stairs one bloody handhold at a time.
The black shadow flattened itself against the door, smudging it with charcoal-gray wing prints and splattering fine sprays of blood across the pale wood. Al took a trio of lumbering steps and laid into it again. He smashed chunks of it flat against the door, tore other pieces of it loose and sent them fluttering down the hall behind him. He tore and bit and crushed, but its mass did not diminish, and Al continued to bleed.
His legs gave way, and he sagged onto his knees, arms buried in the swarm up to the elbows. “Elsa,” he croaked. “Hide.”
“Al?” she whispered, her voice thick with fear. “Don’t leave me.”
“Hide,” he gasped. “You have to hide.”
He separated more squirming chunks from the monstrosity, but he knew he was losing the fight. He couldn’t cut or bite the swarm to death, but it had no trouble doing the same to him.
“Al?” Elsa whispered through the keyhole.
“Hide,” he gasped, but his voice was too weak to be heard. The bolt clicked.
Elsa opened the door.
CHAPTER 30
JOE SAT ON the pickup’s tailgate, sucking deep breaths through his mouth. Walter’s body lay behind him, wrapped in layers of blue nylon tarp and duct tape. Either the smurf was heavier than he looked, or Joe was older than he’d imagined. At this rate, he was going to need a bottle of oxygen to get through the day. He hated to think how he’d feel without the supernatural strength that came with the Night Marshal’s job.
The rain had dwindled to little more than a thick mist, a
n annoying dampness that chilled the air and made Joe want to sneeze. He forced himself up onto his feet and walked down to Walter’s Jeep, watching the sky for bats. The little fuckers had dispersed when Walter died, but Joe didn’t trust them to stay gone.
The Jeep’s interior was as much of a disaster as its rusted shell. Taco Bell wrappers and empty cans of Busch littered the floor, filling the vehicle with a greasy, yeasty stench. The ash tray was an overflowing mound of butts and gray ash, runnels of which trickled down onto the floorboards. There was a fistful of little glass pipes as well, cracked and stained and thrown around like broken ornaments the day after Christmas. Joe dug around in the garbage with the barrels of his shotgun, looking for something, anything he could use to find Walter’s buyers.
Light flashed from under the seat. Joe reached into the darkness and found a sleek glass-and-metal rectangle. He pulled Walter’s cell phone out and allowed himself a sigh of relief.
Joe didn’t have a mobile phone himself, nor did most of Pitchfork’s residents. There were no cellular towers in the central section of the county, and the signal from the perimeter was often blocked by the hilly terrain. But Walter had spent much of his time smurfing pills in Springfield or Rolla or St. Louis, urban areas where a cell phone was more than just an expensive status symbol.
The screen was black with four white rectangles across its center and a keypad below them. The phone vibrated in his hand and Joe tapped 1, 2, 3, 4, hoping Walter was too stupid to bother with a real password. A red bar flashed over the blank rectangles. Joe punched in four 1s, and the bar flashed again. Whoever was calling Walter gave up, and Joe wanted to smash the phone onto the ground. He needed the numbers out of the phone, along with whatever else he could find in its encrypted innards. But first he had to get the code.
Joe shoved the phone into his shirt pocket and hiked back up to his truck. He stared at the mess inside the cab and groaned. There was blood everywhere, clotted on the seats, smeared across every glass surface as if a pack of maniacs had gone berserk with their finger paints. He rooted around under the seat for the rags and alcohol he kept on hand just in case things got messy and started cleaning the windshield.