by Larry Hoy
“Do as he says,” Witherbot said.
Reluctantly they all lowered their pistols.
“One of you slide your weapon to my fellow Shooter, here.”
“No!” Mickey yelled, “I’ll kill her, I swear.”
“Here’s the deal, Mickey, when I shoot, I never miss—never. If you let go of the assistant director to reach for that detonator then I’ll have no choice but to put a bullet in your head. If you shoot her, you’ll be dead before she is. And if she bleeds out standing there…well, you get the idea. The only way you leave this hallway breathing is by surrendering before any of that happens. Now slide that weapon over.”
One of them did as Steed asked. Sweetwater didn’t release pressure on Warden’s wound to pick it up, but eyed it like a gambling addict eyed a stack of chips traded for their paycheck.
“Now there’s a wild card, Mickey. Mister Sweetwater here is a lot younger than you or me. He’s impetuous and does things without thinking. He’s also a Marine and graduated from Scout Sniper School. That means he doesn’t miss either. I’ve told him not to shoot you, but he has a crush on my daughter, and you shot her, too.”
Sweetwater heard the words even over the powerful underground blowers, but he didn’t react. Warden heard them too, and squinted despite her pain.
“She’s losing a lot of blood,” he finally said. “We’ve gotta get her to the OR, fast.”
“Hear that, Mickey? Time’s running out for both of them. So what’s it gonna be?” Steed said.
“Stop rushing me! Lemme think!”
“Hey, Luther,” Warden whispered with a tiny smile, “please tell me I can still wear a bikini.”
Blood covered his hands, but the words drove into Sweetwater’s brain like hot nails. Mickey was standing directly to Sweetwater’s right, with his and Witherbot’s body’ turned at a right angle, putting him at the extreme edge of Mickey’s peripheral vision. Dangerous or not, Sweetwater forgot everything else, snatched up the pistol, steadied it with both hands and fired.
Sensing movement, Mickey started to turn when the bullet struck. Sweetwater had aimed for his ear canal, but the slight twist brought Mickey’s Sig into the line of fire. The round vaporized most of his trigger finger and hit the trigger, driving it forward with such force that it jammed. Half a second behind Sweetwater, Steed fired twice. Both shots hit the Sig, and it flew out of Mickey’s hand.
Screaming, Mickey released Witherbot and reached for the detonator, but Sweetwater got there too quickly. Tackling the computer tech, he was able to drive four punches into the man’s nose before Steed and some of the guards dragged him away.
Gurneys and medical personnel swarmed the two injured women. LEI’s bomb squad rushed in to disarm the suicide vest. Once it was off, one of them held it up so Steed and Sweetwater could see it.
“Fake,” he said.
In the corner of the ICU room, Sweetwater lay in a wheeled recliner, snoring. Teri Warden blinked awake and focused on the room’s second bed, where her mother was focused on a tablet computer.
“How are you feeling?” she asked in a low voice without looking up.
“Terrible, you?”
“Irritated.”
“Mmmm…” Sweetwater said, rousing. “Hey, look who’s back. Are you all right? Did it hurt?”
Witherbot closed her eyes and shook her head but said nothing.
“Of course, it hurts, dumbass. I was gut shot.” In contrast to her words, Warden gave him a weak smile. “Plus, you ripped my shirt up to get a look at my bra.”
“What?” he asked, sitting up. “That had nothing to do with it.”
“Do you have a preferred method of dying, Mister Sweetwater?” Witherbot said. “I can write that into the contract.”
“Hey—what? What did I do?”
“Aside from sleeping with my daughter, you developed a romantic relationship with a fellow employee, which is strictly against company policy.”
“I did not! Tell her, Teri! Tell her we never did anything. I never even kissed her.”
“Mister Sweetwater, I am not deaf. On the plane, I heard what I heard. It gives me no pleasure, but rules are rules. And her father insisted.”
Leaning on the door jamb, Steed joined in. “That’s true, kid, sorry. Diddle my daughter, you gotta die.”
That’s when Sweetwater’s brain finally woke up enough to notice Steed and Warden were suppressing laughs.
“Yeah, yeah, okay, make fun of the new guy. Now I get it.”
“I hope the doctors did a better job on me than what they did on you,” Warden said. “You look like a chopping block.”
“I was shot in the chest, there’s important stuff in there. You were shot in the belly. It hurts, sure, but everything there is squishy.” He paused. “Wait, how do you know what my chest looks like?”
Witherbot looked up from computer and did something she rarely did; she smiled.
“Busted.”
“What about you, ma’am?” Sweetwater said. “He shot you, too.”
“Mine was a through and through. They said the bullet went through my intestines. There was a bit of surgery, but I’m fine.”
“And Mickey?”
“Mickey has agreed to fully cooperate, so he will be fine…until he isn’t.”
Chapter 38
Five Weeks Later
Somewhere in the West Texas Desert
After a five-hour drive, the stifling heat made Adrian Erebus gasp shallow breaths of the hot air. He reached to wipe the sweat from his forehead. For the fifth time, his hands were stopped by the chains. He was secured in handcuffs and leg cuffs, joined by a length of chain.
“It’s hot in here!” he yelled and kept yelling.
There was no response.
The trucked rocked a bit as if they had turned off the road and eventually came to a stop.
Erebus looked up at the sound of a key turning in the door lock. Multiple shotguns were pointed at him, but an explosion of sunlight blinded him. Unable to shield his eyes, he could only close them and turn away. Hands grabbed him and dragged him outside, where he fell to the dirt.
“I can’t see,” he whined. “Take these fuckin’ chains off. I can’t see!”
The guard holding Adrian by the armpit gave him a sharp hook punch to the gut. He tried to curl up, but a second guard grabbed him and hauled him up straight.
“Boo-fucking-who,” said a familiar voice. It took a minute to place it—the man who killed Grace Allen. Now it all came back.
Erebus tried to say something, but the dust hung in air so hot that it hurt to breathe, so he only wheezed. It felt like the moisture was being leached from his eyes, and his lungs were blistering. He stopped resisting and went limp, and the two men dragged him into the desert.
Four guards surrounded him in addition to the two holding his arms. Alongside Sweetwater walked a man in his late 30s or early 40s…Steed—that was his name—with a younger female holding a scoped rifle on the other side. He knew her, too. Teri Warden.
The dryness of his mouth made it hard to form words. Staring at Sweetwater, all he could eke out was, “You…Grace…not right.”
Sweetwater ignored him. He accepted a bottle of water so cold that condensation dripped like a melting icicle. Erebus’ hated enemy drank deeply, smacked his lips, and cupped hands his around his mouth.
“I’m calling for the entity known as Herbert,” he said, the words swept up by winds and thrown over the desert. High overhead, a prairie falcon circled on the thermals. “We intend to kill this man as many times as it takes for him to stay dead. I know that reviving him reduces you, but our fight is only with him, so it’s up to you whether to keep existing or not.”
“My boy…won’t abandon me,” Erebus managed to say.
Someone set a bench in the dirt and a guard pushed him down until he lay flat on the wood. Rough hands pinned him while someone else used thick straps to secure him tightly to the boards. Last, they wedged a hard plastic bookend on either si
de of his head. All he could do was stare straight up as the sun burned through his eyelids.
The entire bench was lifted upright, bringing him back to his feet. Now that the sun wasn’t right in his face, he could see vague images. Fifty yards away, a distant umbrella had seats arrayed as if folks were tailgating at a football game. Erebus watched one of the men put a long stick with a “Y” at the top into the ground. The Warden woman lifted her rifle into the notch and pointed it at him.
“Hello, Father,” said a voice from below.
Sweetwater stood, holding binoculars up to his sunglasses.
“He’s here.”
Erebus could only move his eyes to look down, but it was enough. Playing in the dirt at his feet was Herbert.
“Son, what are you doing here?” He tried to twist his body, but the straps held him tight. “We’ve got to get you out of here; it’s dangerous.”
Herbert stood up. “Yeah, about that.” He brushed dust from his knees. “I think it’s time I went my own way, Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“See, it’s like this. When Mom died…well, not my mom, my mom is your mom. But when your wife died, you created me from this reservoir of your—language doesn’t really do this justice—this reservoir of your all-consuming hatred. You summoned me from hell to become part of you, to get revenge on those you believed harmed you. I helped. When I stabbed you, I knew it was the only way to get you close enough to your enemy to kill him. You opened this world to me, and I was grateful. It was our…let us call it our bargain.”
A green laser dot appeared on Erebus, right over his heart. Slowly the dot climbed up his body to stop between his eyes.
“But now you’re a liability. As long as you’re alive, I’m bound to restore you, to heal you using the energy that makes my existence possible. And things aren’t looking too good right now, you know? You’re tied to a bench in the middle of the desert, and even I can’t keep reviving you forever. But this isn’t goodbye, Father. Rather, it’s more like a welcome, because, now, instead of me being part of you, you will be part of me.”
Then his face began to change. Herbert’s pale blue eyes turned into flames. His face lengthened and widened into something resembling a bull, with a mouth stretched into a wide slash filled with sharks’ teeth. Standing on his toes, he reached up and touched the green dot.
“Aaaaiiiiieeee!” Erebus screamed. As if an embalmer was sucking out his bodily fluids, he could feel his life force flowing into the thing called Herbert.
“You’re cleared to shoot,” Sweetwater said, watching in horror as the black thing doubled in size.
Warden couldn’t see the entity, only the green dot, and squeezed off a single round. The 50mm bullet passed through Herbert and struck dead center in the laser mark. Blood, bone, and brain matter splattered against the bench, which toppled over with a softball-sized hole blown through the wood.
Herbert nudged the partially decapitated body of Adrian Erebus, turned to lock stares with Sweetwater, snorted fire, and vanished.
Epilogue
Four Months Later
Luther Sweetwater’s Trailer, Southeast Fayette County, TN
The Wolf River, as it passed south of La Grange, TN, expanded into something less like a river and more like a shallow lake, then narrowed again and flowed west-northwest to bisect Memphis before its eventual confluence with the Mississippi River. Pre-dawn light allowed Luther Sweetwater to load his new Toyota pickup with everything he’d need for a half day of fishing. He’d missed the spawning season, but catching fish was beside the point; it was the first day he’d been cleared for a return to normal activities, and just the act of going fishing signaled life getting back to normal.
Whatever that meant.
Two texts already received from LEI had gone unanswered. A mysterious death in Dallas coincided with Sweetwater’s release from the hospital, and Witherbot wanted to know if he knew anything about it. She also warned him that with Shields and Bonney gone, that left a shortage of Shooters in the region, and he’d get all the work he wanted. Sweetwater almost, but not quite, told her that he didn’t want any work. His boss lifted an eyebrow at his stammered “great” but let it drop.
Returning to the trailer for a cooler of water and sodas, the last thing to load, he’d lifted it and turned back to the front door when a figure standing there startled him so much that he dropped the cooler. Ice, soda cans, and bottles slid across the linoleum floor. One soda burst open and spewed sugary brown liquid all over his furniture.
“Goddamn it!” he said, pissed that his warning sense hadn’t alerted him. “Grace Allen?”
Outlined against the pale dawn and having already turned out the interior lights, Sweetwater couldn’t see many details of the ghastly spectre in the tattered dress and was glad he couldn’t. It took a moment for him to realize that the flashes of white were bone. Few strips of flesh still clung to her skull.
“Who else would it be?” she said, the jaws clacking when she spoke. Any traces of a human voice were gone, her vocal cords and larynx having rotted away, leaving her with only a hissing growl.
“Sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Well…yeah.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“A lot of things, Grace Allen, starting with causing your death.”
He tried to keep his face neutral and not show revulsion at her appearance, but failed.
“You did do that, Luther, you know that don’t you? I’m a moldy corpse because of you. Maybe if you’d turned down the job, somebody else would have killed me, or maybe Dennis Roy would have done it himself…or maybe I might still be alive. We’ll never know.”
“No, we won’t.”
Sweetwater sat on the red naugahyde couch opposite the flat screen TV and stared at the big rip in the floor. For all he’d done to try and move past his guilt, there was the rotting manifestation of it standing in the doorway.
“I’d make it up to you, if I could,” he said.
“You mean that?”
“I do.”
“You sure? My whole life, men told me anything I’d wanna hear ‘til they got what they wanted, then I never saw ‘em again.”
“That’s not me.”
“Not now it ain’t. But you saw what I looked like…before.”
“You were gorgeous.”
“But not smart. I believed in men of poor character.”
“Like me.”
“I don’t know about that…I think you are genuinely sorry for the part you played in my death, and one day you’re gonna have to explain it, but not to me.” The apparition of Grace Allen Tarbeau paused until he glanced up to see if she was still there. “What would you do for redemption, Luther, for me to forgive you?”
“Anything in my power, except kill another innocent person.”
“Is it within you to kill?”
It was the question he feared more than any other, the one he’d been thinking about for months. To his surprise, Sweetwater found that he had an answer.
“Yeah, it’s within me. If they deserve it.”
“Who decides if it’s worth it?”
“Me. I’m the one who’s gotta answer for it.”
“Then get revenge for me,” she said. “Adrian is in hell now, where he belongs. And you may not know it, but my second husband Dennis Roy Tarbeau, the man who did kill me, well he’s dead now too. They found him on the sidewalk outside the Renaissance Building not a week ago now and ruled it a suicide. The detectives figured he just couldn’t live without his wife.”
“Do tell,” Sweetwater said.
“He tells a different story.”
It took Sweetwater a few seconds to understand what she meant by that.
“He’s with you?”
“Let’s just say he can’t ever get away from me again. But there’s still one man left who needs killing, the man who raped me the night my Herbert died. You do that for me, and I’ll put in a good word for you when
the time comes.”
“You’re a fine woman, Grace Allen. I wished I’d known you in life.”
“I was a little old for you, Luther.”
“Not that much older.”
Maybe it was his imagination, but Sweetwater thought he saw a softening in the empty eye sockets. The jaws parted in what might once have been a smile. Grace Allen Tarbeau then dissipated like smoke in a breeze, never to reappear, but her final words echoed through his trailer.
“Thank you for Dennis Roy.”
The three-hundred pound bulk of John Cleve Stuart huddled over the emaciated deer, dressing the animal even as it bleated in agony. He’d come across it on the long dirt trail that acted as a driveway into the deep woods, where his makeshift dog-fighting arena sprawled on the private property of an absentee owner. A whole carload of fresh bait dogs guaranteed a big crowd that night, with lots of cash, and he’d have Marcus grind the deer meat into burgers and sell them for ten bucks apiece. Even as his knife cut through the tendons of the animal’s left hind leg, it craned its neck to scream for mercy. A slit carotid artery would bring death in seconds, but the truth was that John Cleve Stuart liked seeing things suffer.
A single gunshot from close behind his left shoulder made him jump to one side. The bullet struck the suffering deer between the eyes and ended its misery. Stuart struggled to his feet holding the dressing knife in his right fist, but squinted at the two men standing ten feet away, one with folded arms and the other holding a smoking pistol. The taller of the two was both lean and heavily muscled, but short; Stuart knew him from around Semple but couldn’t remember his name. He wore the usual camo and held the pistol with wisps of smoke leaking from the downward pointing barrel. The other man was the Sheriff of Fayette County.
“Sheriff Knickermeyer,” he said, using the sheriff’s proper name instead of substituting the highly offensive n-word in place of ‘Knicker,’ as he did among his friends. The black man’s grim expression didn’t change, nor did he unfold his arms. He and Stuart had a long, long history together. “What’s the problem, there’s no hunting season on deer in this county.”