by S. A. Hunt
Striations of cottage-cheese skin sagged down her naked ass like jagged granite. A picture of a crescent moon on her shoulder had been taffy-pulled into something like a yellow scythe-blade. She turned and scooped up air with the glistening nostrils of a boar. Theresa had become a giant amalgamation of boar and old woman, an abomination of varicose veins and stretched tattoos.
Robin swore and push-upped to her feet, pulling Wayne up with a pop of shirt-stitches and shoving him through a gap in the ivy into another row.
The three-beat gallop came at them and Theresa’s tusks plowed up the trellis where they’d been hiding. The witch-hunter and the boy zigzagged across the vineyard, coursing down rows and cutting through gaps, wending and weaving back and forth. Suddenly, the trellises fell away and she found herself in an open space where a white gazebo waited in a garden. Pergolas made a cage of the arbors, grapevines hanging from their rafters in sweet, stinking curtains.
“Hide here,” she gasped to Wayne, pointing him into the gazebo.
“Robin!” shouted a man’s voice from the shadows.
Leaping the gazebo’s banister, she ducked through a scrim of ivy and found Kenway. “The hell are you doing here?” she growled at him. “Shut up before it hear—”
He grabbed her shoulders and brushed her rain-soaked Mohawk out of her face, cupping her jaw in his big, warm hands. “Heinrich went into their house looking for the fourth witch. I ran down to my truck to get my gun, but I heard you hollering out here, so I—”
“I don’t need saving!” Robin growled. “You shouldn’t be out here!”
The trellis next to them erupted in a storm of leaves and wires and squealing hog-beast, throwing them both out from under the pergola. Robin hit the ground on her shoulders and skidded backward through the grass, her feet pedaling the sky. She rocked forward to her hands and knees.
Heat lightning flashed on an image buried in the foliage: a broad, pink-brown face the size of a car. Tiny black eyes glittered in leathery flab, and darkness fell over them again.
“You want me?” Robin bellowed. Blood ran down her neck from a cut on her temple where a wire had nicked her. “Come get me!”
“No!” shouted Kenway.
His voice came from somewhere to her left, on the other side of the gazebo. The razorback’s enormous head swiveled in that direction, splintering one of the few posts still standing.
Inside Robin’s jacket was a baby-food jar full of grain alcohol. She pulled it out and clutched it like a grenade. It wouldn’t be much, but hopefully it would keep Theresa off of Kenway and Wayne long enough for her to figure out what to do. But without the Osdathregar, her options were severely limited.
“I’m over here!” She ran back into the vines and into the rain-soaked night.
Thump-thump-thump, the beast plunged through the trellis behind her and Robin hightailed it down the vineyard row, back toward the north, toward Annie’s sacred grove. Theresa was so close, she could smell the boar’s breath, feel the hot blast pushing at her hair. As she ran, Robin wrenched up the leg of her jeans, revealing a road flare pushed into the top of her combat boot. She pulled it out and turned to throw the jar, but Theresa was already on her. Something wet and hairy slammed into her belly and scooped her up; the world plummeted and then Robin was upside down some fifteen feet in the air, gazing at a dark maze.
Grass flew up and the horizon wheeled over her head, and the breath was driven out of her lungs as she hit the ground on her back.
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 curtains of rain. Water pooled in the corners of her eyes.
This is it, she thought in fragments, I’ve met my match.
“I got you, baby,” said Kenway, coming out of nowhere.
“Away,” she grunted with spasming lungs. 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!
Theresa had pulled a U-turn somewhere and came back, bearing down on them, shouldering through the vineworks. Kenway snatched up the jar, wound up like a Major League pitcher 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 chucked 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. The warthog 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 brought his pistol up, 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 then 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 in the nose.
More deafening 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 car 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. The beast rushed at her again, opening its mouth, trying to bite her. Robin thrust out her hands. She managed to catch Theresa’s nose, but her left hand skidded on mucus and slid into the boar’s hot mouth.
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.
Taste buds bubbled under Robin’s fingers at the back of the witch’s throat.
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 Volvo wallpapered with ham.
“Let go a’ her!” snarled Kenway, and then he was working Theresa’s 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 the girl into the air by her arm, and the skin and muscle ripped apart in fleshy strands of r
ed 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.
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 rain 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 swallows a fish, until one last gobbet of skin slipped through a gap in its teeth. Then it rumbled with self-satisfaction, thumping toward her.
Snot crept from the warthog’s nostrils in cheesy 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. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her body was as numb as a waxwork statue. She could hear rain falling, but she couldn’t feel it on her skin. She raised her right hand to fend off the encroaching monster, though of course she had no delusions she could prevent another catastrophe.
This is it. I have officially messed up, Mom.
Wind tugged at Robin’s hair, whistling into those cavernous nostrils. The behemoth overwhelmed her with bloody lips.
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 taste buds, still dripped from the boar’s upper lip.
Restless air churned around the two of them, tousling Robin’s Mohawk hair. This torrent wasn’t coming from Theresa’s nostrils—it came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Pins and needles swirled along her skin and deep inside, prickling up her arm in a helix of bright pain. Her right hand had fallen asleep somehow, still clutching the edge of the flabby pig-snout. No, wait, this wasn’t what it felt like, it was something else, something strange. Alien light hummed 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.
No, baby, a voice murmured faintly from the orchard.
The suggestion of a silhouette, half-obscured by vines and trellis. A spectral Annie Martine watched from the rows. You ain’t done. They ain’t beat you. You’re just takin’ after your daddy now.
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 through her, it was flowing into her, into Robin, 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 areolae dragged in the grass. She pulled and jerked, her cloven hooves shoveling humps of churned dirt, but to no avail.
Mom, I’ve lost too much blood. She looked for the spectre, but Annie was gone.
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 legs like a midwife, as naked as the day is long, heaving and porcine and dark. 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.
“What—” Robin bared her teeth with effort, on the brink of passing out, going deaf from blood loss.
“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.
As the storm raged, Robin slept.
13
Black ooze sprayed out of the entry wound, flecking his face and arms, as Kenway put a bullet into Theresa’s head. Then he fired it again, for good measure. Fuck it. He pulled the trigger until the H&K’s fresh magazine was empty and the slide stayed open. Shell casings littered the ground around him, and the night air hummed with the sharp smell of expended gunpowder.
Was it dead? He nudged the witch with the barrel of the pistol. His hands should have been shaking, but they weren’t. His heart beat smooth and slow and hard, a steady blacksmith hammer in his neck. He didn’t blink as his eyes traveled the horizon line, darting from shadow to shadow, tracking for hostiles. Something had reignited that part of him he thought gone to sleep that day in the sandbox. Kenway dropped the mag and another was in the well before the empty one hit the ground. He holstered the weapon and disengaged, and when he did, it felt like he’d dropped down out of some higher stratosphere into a vat of warm water.
And then when he turned and saw Robin sprawled out in a tangle of ivy, covered in blood, he dropped again—shot straight toward the center of the earth until he was in the deepest trench, the pressure of the ocean threatened to pulverize him, and the frigid water of panic tried to force its way into his mouth.
Her arm was ripped clean the fuck off, right below the shoulder.
Blood dribbled out of the stump, a burst of crimson pulp in a sleeve of skin, and a slender shard of bone jutted out of the meat.
He immediately spun on his heel and threw up into the broken trellis. It took everything he had, every fiber of his being, every atom of his self-control, not to teleport back to Afghanistan, back into the past, to completely and utterly lose his shit and go off the rails.
“Mister!” screamed someone behind him.
He very nearly drew down on Wayne Parkin. The vet’s hand actually went to his hip, his fingertips brushing the butt of his pistol.
The little boy was standing right behind him, his dark face lined with firelight from the flaming corpse in front of them. Kenway spat, clutched his knees, and spat again, the taste of bile corrosive in his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, coughing, “Christ almighty, we gotta get her to the hospital.” Quit feeling sorry for yourself. This woman, this woman is changing you, changing your mind and changing your spirit and unlocking the door to your cell, she’s lying there bleeding out and you feel like you “need a minute”?
Get your ass in gear, Sergeant.
Kneeling next to her, Kenway unbuckled his belt and put it around the remains of Robin’s bicep for a makeshift tourniquet, pulling it as tight as possible. Then he slipped his hands underneath her knees and back, lifting her out of the tangle of undergrowth, and he hustled toward the house. “Hey, Chicag
o boy,” he said as they ran, his voice cracking, “you ever handled a gun?”
“You askin’ me that ’cause I’m Black?” Wayne shouted at his back. “I’m a kid, man.”
“Jesus, you know anything about ’em or not?”
Wayne jogged alongside him, the moon glinting on his glasses. He was plastered in mud from crawling around. “Uhh—well, I’ve played a lot of Halo and Call of Duty. Does that count?”
“No, damn. Damn damn damn.” The hulking veteran paused to transfer Robin to his left shoulder, letting her unconscious form drape down his back. Then he drew with his right hand, moving through the dark vineyard with the pistol extended, trigger finger resting along the slide, ready to be fired in an instant. Blood soaked into his shirt. The girl was deadweight. The truck was more than five hundred meters away, at least, and he still hadn’t gotten out of the garden yet. MOVE YOUR ASS, SERGEANT, he thought, the prosthetic ankle clanking precariously underneath him. DO IT DO IT DO IT.
“Is there anybody else we need to watch out for?” he gasped, wheezing, his breath billowing white.
The Lazenbury towered over the trellis rows, some quarter of a mile out. From the back, the Mexican-style house looked like a department store in the dark. How the fuck did this vineyard get so big? It didn’t look this big from the outside.
“I don’t think so,” said Wayne. “The other two witches that were with us ran off to deal with that Heinrich guy. My dad went crazy and ran off with them. I don’t know where he is.”
The boy stopped short, shock and fear on his face.
“What?” asked Kenway, pausing only to turn, glance at him, and continue on. Robin draped over his shoulder, heavy for such a small woman. “Come on, we have to go.”
“My dad is out here. Don’t shoot him, please!”