Half-Made Girls

by Sam Witt

  Joe dug the antler-handled knife out of his belt and used it to slice his left sleeve off at the shoulder. His foggy head made him clumsy, but Joe managed to get his cuts wrapped up without killing the circulation in his arm. The lips of his wounds rubbed against the shirt, but the bleeding slowed. He’d worry about stitches if he ever got out of this hole.

  When he got out of this hole, he corrected himself.

  The tunnel narrowed, and its roof sank down until he was scooting along in a crouch that made his back ache and his thighs burn.

  He crept along like that for what felt like hours, leaning against the wall to take some of the pressure off his legs, crawling when he couldn’t stand the pain any longer. The cave was cool when his cheek brushed against the limestone. His shirt was damp with smashed mushrooms that left him smeared with wavering purple light.

  Joe heard the next problem before he saw it. Raised voices and a metallic clatter. He crawled forward until the tunnel’s left wall dropped away and the path became a foot-wide ledge that spiraled down into a wide bowl of a cavern.

  A mob of naked men and women were scattered across the cavern’s floor. Most of them were sprawled out along the walls, meth pipes glowing cherry red over wavering flames as they breathed in self-destructive escape. Others hunched in the middle of the floor, burning crystal shards the size of a man’s hand in sputtering sassafras fires and crowding around to soak up the clouds of meth. Those that weren’t busy getting high were fighting or fucking or both, voices hoarse from screaming.

  Even at this distance, Joe could see the changes working on the people of Pitchfork. Pointed ears sloped back from balding heads, convoluted nostrils sniffed the air. In the shadows he saw something flicker past with long flaps of skin stretched between half-seen ankles and wrists. The bad thing was in their blood. Joe wondered if it had always been there.

  He sat down on the rim of the bowl, staring down at the mob of townspeople he’d thought he was saving. He felt sick and weak, the strength of his convictions leaking out as he watched the idiots chasing oblivion. They weren’t villains. Hell, they weren’t even very good cultists. They were just poor people whose luck had run so dry they were willing to do anything, try anything, to escape the cold glare of reality.

  Down here, they didn’t have to worry about tomorrow. They were all equal down here, all spinning out their days through a haze of meth. This is where all of Pitchfork was headed, if he didn’t put a stop to this.

  Joe’s eyes were drawn from the squalor to a handful of men and women gathered around an enormous shrine of antlers and sharpened steel blades that loomed at the far end of the cavern. Their naked flesh was stained black with soot and filth, but even at this distance Joe could see the streams of blood running down their shoulders and arms. They shouted and shoved one another, jostling back and forth until one of the women was ejected from the scrum and thrust at the statue.

  She fell forward, arms outstretched to keep herself from slamming into the jagged statue. Her hands plunged through gaps in the statue, and ribbons of flesh curled up her forearms as blades and horns bit into her. The shrine shifted, jagged bone spears and wide steel blades rising up like great wings on either side of it.

  The woman screamed, but kept jamming her arm deeper into the tangled mass of steel and horn. Her voice rose in an ululating spiral, scratching at Joe’s ears and throbbing in his skull like a whining drill. She bent at the waist, curled her legs, then sprang forward. The shrine’s wings scythed around her, whistling through the air.

  “I got it,” she wailed. “Pull me.”

  But the others shied away from her and shook their heads, afraid to approach the slicing wings.

  “You fuckers,” she screamed. “I’m keeping it all.”

  The others raised their voices in protest, yelling obscenities at the trapped woman.

  She leaned back until her ass was almost on the floor, putting all her weight on her trapped arms. The shrine released her by inches, scraping away more skin as she sagged away from its bulk.

  She groaned, and the sound built to a raw-throated shriek as her arms were dragged free of the statue at last. She raised her bloody hands over her head, streamers of tattered skin dangling from her elbows. She clutched a baseball-sized chunk of cloudy crystal in her fists, stained with her blood.

  One of the men darted forward, and she smashed his face with the chunk of bloody meth.

  Joe scrubbed his hand over his face. His head ached, and his muscles felt too loose on his bones. Old reflexes flared up. He wanted to stand at the lip of the cavern and rain hell down on these people who’d given up on their humanity. He wanted to punch bullets through their skulls and hearts. He’d done his best to save these ungrateful fucks from their own terrible decisions for years, and this is what they did. They’d given up on their lives and called up some mad deity who gave them an altar of pain and meth and a deep goddamned hole to wallow in while they pulverized their brains.

  Joe’s rage spread through his skull, soaking into his brain like spilled blood.

  There was something else in his skull, too. A trespasser who’d set up shop days before, when Joe’d woken up inside a pig. This close to it, watching its followers grovel before the shrine of blood and blades, he recognized it and knew he was utterly fucked. He was no longer sure which thoughts were his own, and which were crammed into the dark spaces of his mind by the dark god watching him.

  The monster the half-made girls were meant to summon had been lurking inside Joe for days now. It had hidden in his anger and booze, lurking in the darkness of the Long Man’s shadow, watching and listening.

  With the last of the whiskey burnt out of his system, Joe could feel the fucker’s hooks. It knew his plan. It knew everything he’d said or done for the past days, peeked through a window it’d opened right inside his head.

  But you could look through both sides of that window.

  Joe could feel the eye watching him. And if he concentrated on it, even a little, he could sense the eye’s owner. It wasn’t here yet; it was still somewhere out past the bloodstained horizon, but it was coming closer.

  The shadow in his head spread its wings before the heat of his rage. It loved it, soaked up the hate and confusion, basked in Joe’s visions of fire and lead. He felt its approval, and the haze started to lift from his brain, his wounds buzzed with the familiar crawling sensation of healing too fast for flesh.

  His forehead burned. The three-lobed eye was coming closer. He could feel it somewhere beyond the cavern below him.

  He understood its plan now. It needed a host to bridge the gap between the world it called home and this one. It needed someone with the gift to house a spirit of such magnitude.

  It needed Elsa. And it needed a bad man to guard her while it spread its control far and wide.

  Joe’s grip tightened on his pistol, and the darkness inside him flowed into his arms, poured like black ice down his spine. He felt stronger, younger. He was tired of being weak. He could be strong forever, all he had to do was what came natural. Go down there, put bullets into the freaks, show them the face of the new boss.

  He’d enforced the Long Man’s will on Pitchfork for years. Maybe it was time to let someone else call the shots for a while. Give these assholes what they thought they wanted. He would rule Pitchfork. All it would cost him was everything he’d ever loved or believed in.

  “No,” he croaked.

  Joe threw off the shadow’s touch and heard it laugh as it flashed away, leaving him weak and wounded once more.

  The woman with the chunk of crystal meth howled from the floor of the cavern. She held the burning chunk under her nose and breathed in scalding smoke. Her eyes bulged in their sockets and shifted upward. She nodded as if listening to a voice no one else could hear.

  She thrust a bloody hand in Joe’s direction.

  “Bring him,” she shrieked, “bring him to the Haunter.”

  The meth freaks stirred along the walls, rose from their blazin
g crystalline fires on stiff legs. They jittered and hopped as the drugs burned in their veins and bound their nerves into sparking knots.

  Joe kept the feeling of Elsa in his head, the memory of her location sharp and hot in the middle of his brain even now that the shadow was gone.

  “I’m comin’, baby. Hang on.”

  The mob roared.

  Joe ran.

  CHAPTER 60

  DAN WAS SICK. There was something wrong in his head, or something wrong had started turning right, he couldn't tell which. His thoughts were cloudy and scattered; there were too many different things in his head all fighting for attention.

  He never should have let that girl in his car.

  The little girl in the cell watched Dan with big eyes staring out of a pale, pale face. She was so small, so hurt. But there was something about her, something that scared Dan more than the half-made girls, more than the madness that had taken root in the back of his head.

  All he’d wanted to do was what was right. But somewhere along the way, that had taken a wrong turn, and now he was so far from the righteous path he didn’t know if he’d ever set foot on it again.

  “Sheriff,” the little girl croaked through cracked lips. “I need your help.”

  Dan tried to ignore the girl. He didn’t want to do help her. He wanted to follow the command he’d been given. Just stand outside the cell, watch the girl, make sure she didn’t go anywhere until the monsters came back. It was an easy job. That was what he should do if he didn’t want the monstrous girls to flay him alive.

  “Save me,” she pleaded

  Dan found himself moving toward the cell on stiff legs, arms sticking out in front of him like a horror show zombie. His hands gripped the bars of the cell, knuckles white and jutting against the skin. “Please,” he whispered, “I can’t do this.”

  The poor girl couldn’t even move. She lay there on a cot stained with her own blood and stared at Dan. Strange, carved spikes pierced her body at every joint, and one stuck up from the left side of her chest. “They’re gonna do somethin’ terrible to me, Sheriff. Please.”

  Dan pressed his forehead to the bars. He couldn’t think. He was afraid of the half-made girls, afraid of the Night Marshal, afraid of what would happen if he helped this poor little girl, afraid of what would happen if he didn’t. Conflicting thoughts spun in his head like a swarm of bats rising out of the cavern of madness opening in his brain.

  He drew his head back, slammed it into the bars so hard all the noise in his skull went quiet. Just for a moment.

  In that split second, he was back in the cruiser, back with the half-made girl whispering to him, telling him terrible stories about what would happen to her, what the Night Marshal would do to her. The memory curdled in his belly like a quart of sour milk. He felt weak. Sick.

  “It’s okay, Sheriff.” The girl smiled at him. “Everybody gets scared sometimes. I’m scared, too.”

  Dan reared back, slammed his head into the bars again.

  The grip on his thoughts loosened, slimy fingers peeling back from the curves and whorls of his brain. Dan knew he wasn’t a hero. He was just a sheriff in a shitty little county, scared of the choices he’d made, scared of the people who pushed him around and made him do stupid things. Scared that his life was going to end with him as the villain of his own story.

  Dan was tired of being scared.

  “Mistakes,” he whispered. “I never should have listened to that girl.”

  She’d done something to him in the car, planted a seed that had grown into madness. She hadn’t made him brave, she’d just made him scared of something different.

  Dan looked at the little girl. Helping her was the right thing to do. He’d get her out of the cell. Get her out of this fucking cave. That was the right thing to do.

  He found the key to the cell on the wall on the far side of the cavern. Dan lifted it off the hook and carried it back over to bars. His hands shook so hard the key fell through his fingers before he could slot it into the lock. It was the first time in days he’d done something of his own volition, and he was having a hard time remembering how to tell his body to act. He knelt down to pick up the key and caught the girl’s eye. He thought he might be too scared of the half-made girls to do this.

  “You can do it,” the little girl said through a weak smile. “Just pick it up.”

  Dan’s hand closed around the key. It was so much easier when someone else told him what to do.

  “Good. Stand up.”

  The hand on the gears in his brain wasn’t his, but that was all right. She was soft, gentle. He could just let her do the driving. He stood up, key clenched in his right fist.

  “Go on,” she smiled. “You know what to do.”

  And he did. Dan felt the thoughts lining up neat as dominoes. Put the key in the lock. Turn the key. Open the cell door.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and tears fell from her big eyes. “Thank you so much.”

  Dan didn’t have the emotion left in him to smile back. He was doing what was right, even if he was still doing what he was told. It was going to be all right.

  He lifted the little girl from the cell and cradled her in his arms. The carved spikes embedded in her flesh flared with light as he carried her away. She whimpered, but curled into him and hugged him tight.

  This was the right thing to do. He would take this girl out of this hole.

  It would kill him, he knew that. The bad girls would never let him do this without making him pay for his disobedience.

  But that was okay. He could do this one right thing. It would be good to end his life doing something that wasn’t rotten and broken.

  He would take this girl back to the surface, back to the light.

  And God help anyone who tried to stop him.

  CHAPTER 61

  A THIN CARPET of smoke drifted across the cavern floor, flowing around the stirring mob. The screeching woman kept her finger aimed at Joe, blood dripping from her shredded forearms as she pivoted on the spot to follow his progress.

  Joe had no illusions about his chances in a straight-up fight against a mob of drug-addled cultists. There were a hundred or more angry folks with knives down at the bottom of the cavern’s bowl, wired out of their minds on meth they’d claimed from the razor-edged belly of their god. If they caught him, Joe knew they’d slice him to pieces and eat him screaming.

  But he didn’t plan on getting caught. He dug deep for the last of his strength, putting it all into a run he prayed would get him past the mob before it had a chance to rouse itself and get in his way.

  Joe ran, leaning into the wall as the path shrank and descended into the cavern. His legs were wobbly, his balance shaky, but he couldn’t stop. Giving up meant death, not just for Joe, but for his entire family. He had no illusions about what would happen to Elsa or about what the cultists would do to Stevie and Al when the smoke cleared. He was the only chance his people had.

  The mob was still gathering when Joe hit the cavern floor. The screaming woman kept her finger locked on Joe’s trajectory, but the other cultists were slow and sloppy. They tripped over and shoved into each other, moving toward Joe in a disorganized mob that was as much a danger to itself as to him. Tweaked out on meth and driven by burning fury, they lashed out without thought or concern for who they were cutting. Blood flashed in the air, splashing from curved blades, dripping from grimy skin.

  A young guy with rotten teeth and yellow eyes burst from the pack and threw himself at Joe with a quavering cry. He carved his knife through the air, a clumsy swipe that missed Joe by a yard and sent the man into an off-balance stumble.

  Joe didn’t break stride, just pointed his drawn pistol at his attacker and squeezed the trigger. The bullet blasted across the back of the man’s neck, blowing away bone and muscle so the cultist’s chin collapsed forward onto his chest and the air behind him turned red.

  Joe was yards away from the cavern’s sole exit, moving as fast as his weary legs would carry
him.

  A girl with a pair of knives and a bad case of meth mouth screeched toward Joe. The pistol roared, and the girl spun back, the left side of her face flopping off her skull, a swelling mound of brain oozing out in search of fresh air. Her deformed, scalloped nose gushed blood, and her eyes snapped shut.

  Another yard, and Joe could hear the cultists gaining on him. He turned on one heel and fired a shot into the crowd. The silver bullet plowed into an old man’s hip, blasting it out of the socket and sending him tumbling back into the crowd. A second shot punched through a skinny man’s chest, driving through his heart and exiting from his back with enough force to drop the woman behind him. She fell into the onrushing mob, holding the space where her jaw used to be as her tongue flopped between her fingers and her throat ran red.

  That gave the crowd pause. Those in the front stumbled in their haste to avoid a bullet in the face. Those in the back didn’t get the message and stampeded into the rest of the posse. A moment later, and they were falling all over each other, legs tangled, knives slicing.

  Joe didn’t wait to see how they’d get themselves apart. He ran for the cave exit, guns clenched in his pumping fists.

  The tunnel out of the cave was narrow and winding. Joe raced along the treacherous limestone, shoulders brushing against the walls. For once he was glad he had no hat, the stubby stalactites spearing down from the ceiling would have snatched it off his head in no time.

  He could feel Elsa and, at the first branch, he followed that feeling. The crowd was in the tunnel now, but the narrow opening would slow them, keep them from coming at him all at once. Joe fired blind behind him. The bullet whined off the stone walls, and cultists screamed and cursed. Joe grinned despite the throbbing pain and numbing exhaustion at war in his body. “Think twice, assholes.”