by Hunt, S. A.
Jar and flare both were knocked out of her hands and she lay there, stunned, gasping for air. A callous moon laughed down at her through the curtains of the sky. This is it, she thought in broken fragments, I’ve met my match.
“I got you, baby,” said Kenway, coming out of nowhere.
“Way,” she grunted. Go away! Not your fight, stupid! This is my battle, goddammit! This is what I was born and bred for, don’t you see? This is what I’m here for, don’t take this away from me!
Theresa had pulled a U-turn somewhere out in the sticks and came back, bearing down on them, shouldering through the vineworks. Kenway snatched up the jar, wound up like a Major League pitcher (his fake leg kicked up, say it ain’t so kipper), and fastballed it at the hog-witch’s face.
Glass shattered across Theresa’s snout, splashing her with alcohol. Robin smacked the end of the flare on the ground and it ignited with a flash, SKSSSSSH!, and a shower of red sparks.
She didn’t have anything clever to say, so she just threw it. The flare bounced off Theresa’s monstrous face and the alcohol went up in an arc of dim blue light, sweeping up the bridge of her nose and into her hairline. She shook her great face and tried to back away from the flames like a cat with a bag on its head.
Lifting her tusked snout to the sky, Theresa gave a trumpeting scream and galloped toward them.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Kenway had brought his pistol, he was firing at the flaming thing as it charged like a shrieking meat meteorite, it’s not working, Robin thought, nothing is working oh God, and she crabbed away, still on her ass, but she couldn’t get away in time. The meaty snout came down on top of her and drove her into the dirt, and now she was flattened against a seething-working mouth full of teeth, foul carrion breath washing over her.
Robin’s hands pushed at snot-slimed lips. “Get off me!” she cried, punching the Theresa-thing’s cheeks.
More gunshots. Click click click.
Wind gusted from nostrils big enough to jam her hands into, so she did. Reaching up Theresa’s nose with both hands, Robin grabbed fistfuls of greasy hair and yanked it out by the roots.
“AAAAAWK” howled the witch, recoiling in pain. It moved back enough to relieve Robin and she took a deep breath.
Kenway grasped the rims of the boar’s nostrils and pushed, throwing all of his weight like a man pushing a minecart up a hill, trying to keep it off of her, but Theresa was too strong. She shrugged, shaking her boar-head, and he slipped loose, falling over the hoop of a tusk and stumbling by the wayside.
Robin thrust out her hands as the beast dove at her again, opening its mouth, trying to bite her.
She managed to catch Theresa’s nose, but her left hand skidded on mucus and slid into the boar’s cold mouth. Theresa bit down and grinding-chopping incisors pierced Robin’s forearm, tweezing the two ulna and radius bones together.
Pain unlike anything she’d ever known whipped through her system, ten thousand amps of agony along her elbow and up her arm, and she screamed in wordless horror. Hot blood squirted between those jagged yellow teeth as they rasped through the vessels in her wrist. Theresa let go, but only to gulp forward for higher purchase, biting down on Robin’s upper arm, right below her shoulder.
She’s eating me.
Tastebuds bubbled under Robin’s fingers at the back of the witch’s throat.
She’s eating me. She’s eating me. She’s eating me.
Reaching toward the witch’s beady black marble of an eye with her free right hand, she tried to claw at it, but it was too far away, three feet at least. She punched and punched and punched at the nose pressed against her chest, but it was like boxing a mattress.
“Let go a’ her!” snarled Kenway, and then he was working Theresa’s fat warty cheek with both fists like Rocky Balboa, whump-whump, whump-whump. It simply snorted and stepped back, dragging Robin helplessly through the grass. The joint of her shoulder was a knot of torture, but it was nothing compared to her bicep. Muscle shredded and a vessel ripped open, pumping into Theresa’s mouth.
When the witch laughed, she misted Robin with her own blood.
The behemoth warthog tossed its flaming head, lifting her to her feet, and the humerus bone in her upper arm broke with a hollow, singular, drumstick SNAP! over the fulcrum of its teeth. There was no pain at this point; her system was amped to hell and back by adrenaline, just a dull sense of cutting, dividing.
Again the thing that had been Theresa raised its head, rooting her into the air by her arm, and the skin and muscle ripped apart in fleshy strands of red and yellow curds. Cartwheeling over two trellises, Robin landed upside-down in a third as if she were a fly in a web. The arbor collapsed and she sank to the ground in a net of wire and grapevines.
As soon as she settled, she reached out to pull herself back up, but she couldn’t get a grip on the wire. The instant she managed to struggle to a sitting position, her head swimming, it became abundantly clear why she couldn’t grab anything.
Her left arm was completely gone.
She stared in disbelief at the ragged stump of her shoulder. Blood trickled out of the pulped gore.
There were no words she could call to mind, looking at this lie of reality, so her mind was simply a whirlpool of abstract perceptions. The remains of her left arm were something out of a horror movie, like a rubber special-effects prosthetic, leaking red-dyed Karo syrup, but it was all too real.
The blood soaked her shirt. Her stomach heaved, on the brink of vomiting. Her face felt ice-cold. This was real, it was really happening.
Firelight flickered through the trellis in front of her, and the gigantic witch-hog stepped into view. Theresa’s mouth hung open, and Robin could see her arm lying inside on a yellow-purple tongue. A dagger of bone protruded from the sloppy stump. The hog tossed its head several times, swallowing the arm inch by inch like a crocodile will swallow a fish, until one last gobbet of skin slipped through a gap in its teeth. Then it rumbled with surety and self-satisfaction, thumping toward her on stout, rippling legs.
Snot crept from the warthog’s nostrils in cheesy black strands. A few alcohol flames still licked around her eye sockets and the crown of her sweaty black mane.
Dark pulsed at the edges of Robin’s eyes, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her body was as numb as a waxwork statue. She raised her right hand to fend off the encroaching monster, though of course she had no delusions that she could prevent another catastrophe.
This is it. I have officially messed up, Mom.
The behemoth overwhelmed her with bloody lips. Wind tugged at Robin’s hair, whistling into those cavernous nostrils.
She reached out and grasped the rim of Theresa’s snout as its mouth came open, revealing that bilious tongue and those disgusting teeth. Her own blood still stained the pebbled tastebuds, still dripped from the boar’s upper lip.
The wind that tousled her mohawk hair wasn’t coming from Theresa’s nostrils—it came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Restless air churned around the two of them. Her right hand had fallen asleep somehow, still clutching the edge of the flabby pig-snout. Pins and needles swirled along her skin and deep inside, prickling up her arm in a helix of bright pain.
No—wait—this wasn’t what it felt like, it was something else, something strange. Swamp-light radiated from her fingers, tracing green radiation along her wrist, following the veins along the back of her hand toward her elbow. The bones were visible inside as murky shadows.
Something was coming out of Theresa and coursing up Robin’s right arm, some kind of essence.
Care Bear Stare, she thought drunkenly.
The boar’s flanks quivered and the beast trembled, trying to pull away, but Robin’s fingers held it fast. She was a live wire, grounding the witch, but instead of electricity flowing out of her, it was flowing into her, draining the Stygian source where the witch’s heart used to be. She could feel something withering inside of Theresa, healing over, closing up.
The libbu-harrani, Theresa�
�s heart-road to Ereshkigal.
The beast shook like a dog with a rope in its mouth, trying to break free, but Robin’s right arm was an iron chain.
I’m sucking it out of her. I’m closing the door. She’s diminishing.
The hulking Grendel-hog was not so hulking anymore, now only as big as a horse. Heavy sheets of collagen drooped from Theresa’s sides and thighs like raw dough, and her brown areola dragged in the grass. She pulled and jerked, her cloven hooves shoveling humps of churned dirt, but to no avail.
I’ve lost too much blood.
Her fingers were locked, a perfectly relentless clamp. The pergolas behind the boar were on fire, orange flames licking at a night sky, but she could feel unconsciousness lurking behind her temples.
Whatever this is, I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.
An old woman knelt on her hands and knees between the witch-hunter’s feet, as naked as the day is long, heaving and porcine and dark. She slavered like a winded horse. The tip of Robin’s thumb was still up Theresa’s nose, as she still had the witch’s nostril pinched in her fingers.
“My God,” breathed the witch, her voice muffled. It was probably an epithet she hadn’t uttered in a very, very long time. “You’re his daughter.”
Robin bared her teeth with effort, on the brink of passing out, going deaf from blood loss.
“What—”
“You’re the demon’s daughter,” said Theresa, and then Kenway was by her side. He pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the witch’s skull and pulled the trigger, barking silent fire.
Robin slept.
we got to hurry
fifty cc, stat
come on come on
i need that hemostat
we’re losing her
34
SHE OPENED HER EYES and found a hospital room. The windows were dark, but a soft fluorescent light above her head picked out the foot of the bed, a chair to her left, a flatscreen TV hanging from the ceiling.
Even though Robin felt like a mashed insect, the bed and duvet were astonishingly comfortable—other than the post-seizure snooze on Leon Parkin’s bed, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept on something that wasn’t a couch or the floor of her van, and she’d forgotten how nice it was. The mattress felt like something she could sink into, warm and deep. Her legs were more or less pain-free except for a dull ache in her right knee, but she was sensitive, and the rough linen felt pleasurably like burlap.
Rain tappled restlessly on the window.
It told her the world outside was still going, it had moved on without her for the evening. From time to time, the wind would rake a gust of water against the glass, like a pearl necklace with a cut string.
A blond head was buried in a pair of folded arms, nestled into the duvet. She reached over and stroked his hair, and her abdomen howled in tormented chorus with the stump of her left arm.
Kenway sat up and took her hand. “You’re awake.”
“I’m awake.”
“How do you feel?”
“You know how they say hot dogs are made out of ground-up lips, foreheads, and assholes?”
“Yeah?”
“I feel like a hot dog.”
Kenway smiled in sympathy.
Robin sat back, her head flouncing into the pillow. The angry burn in her abs faded. “Take me out to the pasture and shoot me. I’m no good to you anymore. I’m glue.” Her stomach gave a gnarly growl. “I’m also starving.”
“I’ll get you something.” He stood up and dug in his pocket for change. “I’ll have to get you something from the vending machine. It’s too late for dinner. Is that okay?”
A lap tray on a floor-stand stood next to the bed, on the other side from Kenway, and there was a cafeteria tray on it, covered with a lid. She didn’t have to open it to know that the food inside would be cold.
“Yeah. That’s fine. What time is it?” She thought. “What day is it?”
“Monday night, about nine.”
“I slept all Sunday night and all Monday?” She frowned and glanced at the ceiling. “Where’s Wayne? Did he make it out okay?”
“He’s fine. We put down that hog-monster and he called 911 for me while I carried you out to the road. The ambulance was taking forever so I drove you here myself.”
“What about his dad?”
“I haven’t seen him. Wayne came to the hospital with me last night. He hasn’t been to school—he’s afraid to go home. He couldn’t sleep in these chairs, so he’s in the waiting room down the hall.”
“Leon will be fine. He’s been familiared and there’s no reason to kill him, so they’ll let him stick around. We can un-familiar him with an algiz.”
“That’s good. I’ve been worried about that. So has Wayne.”
“What about Heinrich? Have you seen him?”
Kenway shook his head. “Not since he went into their hacienda.”
She sighed. Whatever mess he’d gotten himself into, she decided he deserved it. “He messed everything up. This is his fault. If he hadn’t gone in there like that, Marilyn would have let us walk out of there and I’d still—” Robin looked down at where her left arm had been, at a thick bandaging and gauze, and saw that there wasn’t even a stump; everything was gone right up to the shoulder.
Peeling back the adhesive gauze and padding, she could just see it out of the corner of her eye: a swollen hump, bristling with hairy black stitches, stained with orange Betadine. A hot bomb of loss and dismay dropped into her chest and tears sprang to her eyes.
She pressed the padding back down, less out of a desire to protect it than to hide it.
“What happened?”
“The bone was too damaged,” he told her. “Lots of splinters. They had to take everything up to the joint.”
It couldn’t be helped. She cried, big wet pitiful boo-hoo sobs, salt-water streaming down her face. Kenway came over and bent to kiss her forehead, which only broke her heart and made it worse, and squeezed her remaining hand.
“What am I going to do?” she asked. “What kind of a witch-hunter am I going to be with one hand?”
Kenway bit back a sad smile. “I do okay with one leg.”
Shame burned her face.
“I don’t know how I’m going to keep doing this with one hand. This is all I know. It’s all I’ve ever done. I can’t even open jars now.”
“We’ll figure something out.” His smile became earnest and she reached up to feel his face, combing her slender fingers through his gingery beard. “I can be your camera-man,” he said, his mustache brushing the pad of her thumb. “We’ll figure out the rest as we go.”
Giving her hand one last squeeze, he stepped away and left the room. Robin stared at the dark television. It was still raining. She listened to the rain clatter softly against the window-pane.
Her cellphone lay on the bedside table. She picked it up and logged into Facebook, and then YouTube, and finally her Gmail account. All three were full of posts, emails, and comments from strangers emotionally hooked into her video series:
“Where are you?”
“What’s going on?”
“Are you okay?”
“You haven’t posted any new videos. What’s happening?”
“Did you kill the witches?”
It was true that she marketed and produced the video series as if it were a fictional affair: scripted, staged, cinematic. Where the public-facing front of her ‘business’ was concerned, it was common knowledge that the videos were fake. Seriously, witches that turn into monsters and people possessed by cats don’t exist, right? (Right about now, she wished they didn’t.)
But the people that watched her videos treated them as if they were real, they commented on each upload with words of encouragement and asked after her well-being, remarked on how attractive she was (even though she didn’t believe that, not for a second), begged her for a chance to fight alongside her. Ex-military, male and female both, asked to join her personal crusade
, sometimes dozens a week. Cops offered their protection on the downlow and insinuated that they’d turn a blind eye to the legal vagaries of her adventures. A national spectrum of neckbeards professed their love for her.
Searching the nooks and crannies of her mind, she couldn’t think of anything to tell them. Seemed like all those four million or so people that’d followed her shenanigans thus far deserved a well-thought-out, optimistic, detailed answer, and right now she didn’t know if she had one in her.
Besides, it was damn hard to type with one hand.
She tested the voice-to-text function on her phone, but the pain meds had slurred her speech and the results were less than satisfactory. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” The brain in Spain follows mainly on the plane. “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” The rain in Spain hauls manly only praying.
“Come on, you asshole. I know how to speak English.”
Come on your asshole, uno how do speakeasy?
Kenway came back a little while later with cheese crackers, candy bars, chips, M&Ms. It looked like he’d bought half the machine. She cried again at the sight of it all.
“Okay, okay,” he said, piling red bags into her lap, “you can have the Cheez-Its.”
Her sobs broke up into pained giggles.
Since it was October, there were several cable channels showing marathons of horror movies. They sat up for several hours, eating vending-machine snacks, drinking vending-machine coffee, and watching masked maniacs slay their way through half a thousand promiscuous teenagers.
At some point Robin slithered out of the bed and took a shower, but she had to do it with the lights off, going through her ablutions by the night-light over the sink. Every time she caught a glimpse of that stitch-haired vacancy on her left side, it was everything she could do not to burst into tears again. The effort it took to avoid this, and the constant pain and itching, felt as if it were slowly driving her mad.