“Are you shitting me?” McInness bellowed.
“No, people are shitting him,” Chauncey Watson said with a low chortle.
“Hey, uhm, Keith,” Nathan McMinn said, “that … that was me. I was just fucking with you, dropping deuces on your doorstep …”
“You asshole!” Keith shouted. “You cost me three doormats, and I want—I want satisfaction! I demand it!”
“And I can’t get any,” Reeve said, shaking his head. “Demons, people. We’re besieged, all right? Is anyone—?” It felt like the meeting was spinning out of his control, on stranger and stranger axes. “Does anyone really think that what’s going on here is a natural phenomenon?”
“I don’t think it’s a natural phenomenon,” came a voice from the back of the room. Reeve looked and saw a tall, lanky figure in a suit standing there in the doorway, arms folded confidently, his sandy blond hair perfectly coiffed. “I think we’re dealing with something truly strange, in fact,” the man went on, stepping into the aisle and walking slowly to the front of the room. He looked up, and his eyes sparkled, as if he were sharing a joke with everyone in the room. “But that doesn’t mean I automatically jump to the assumption that demons are behind all the troubles we’ve been experiencing in this town—and this county.”
Reeve just stood there standing at the podium, feeling all the air rush out of the room with the man’s entry. He’d been hoping to avoid this by making it a town meeting, but apparently that little gambit had failed, and failed royally. “Hello there, County Administrator Pike.” He tried not to sigh, but failed. “Nice of you to show up.”
*
Watching County Administrator Pike stride up the aisle of the meeting room like the second coming felt a little blasphemous to Arch. He’d tried to reserve his judgment on the man, but it was difficult; every time he’d met him, Pike had set Arch’s teeth on edge. He was a consummate political operator, the sort who ought to have been a senator somewhere, gladhanding constituents and kissing babies. He certainly did all that, but he did it here in Calhoun County and on a local level rather than at the state or national one that Arch felt his skills deserved. He gave Arch the willies, but in Arch’s capacity as deputy sheriff, newly reinstated, it was his job to sit down and shut up, and he did his dangdest to do just that.
“Throwing around words like ‘demons from hell’ seems a little extreme,” Pike said with a smirk as he worked his way up the aisle toward the podium, where Reeve was standing stiff as a post, gripping the edges of the wood with white knuckles. Arch couldn’t see his face, but he had to guess the sheriff was biting his lip pretty hard. “In tough times, cool heads prevail, and giving in to panic doesn’t reward anyone but … well, there ain’t no easy way to say this … but an extreme statement like this would tend to benefit only the speaker.”
“You calling me a liar?” Reeve asked, at least twice as cool as Arch would have been were their positions reversed.
“I’m just saying that an unprovable explanation like ‘demons’ would seem to be quite the life preserver for a department sinking under your leadership,” Pike said with that same insufferable smirk.
“Jesus,” Melina Cherry said, drawing to her feet. “And they call me a whore, but we sit here silently and watch this man,” she pointed at Pike, “trying to sell the sheriff downriver to make himself look good.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Pike said, holding up hands. “Using the phrase ‘sell downriver’ in this context is … well, it’s racist.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Melina Cherry said, snorting at him.
“Well, I think we know where she stands,” Pike said, swiveling away to look back at Reeve. “But there’s an awful lot of people in this room, and a great many of them seem to be holding their tongues presently. Now, if I had to calculate, it’s because they think you’re out of your damned tree, Reeve, but as good southerners, they’re too polite to say so—”
A new voice came from the back row. “The fact that you’d come here from across the county and level those accusations when you don’t have a blessed clue what you’re talking about just shows that like with every other bit of trouble we’ve had lately, outside help ain’t no help at all.”
The whole room turned, and Arch craned his neck to try and get a look at the speaker. He knew that voice, and he was almost positive who was doing the talking by the whiplash, commonsense tone that he’d heard maybe a little too often, especially of late.
Addison Rutherford Longholt—Addy to those who knew her, and woe to those who didn’t but called her that—stood up in the back of the meeting hall, removing any last doubt of Arch’s that she was the speaker. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t heard his mother-in-law speak a million times before, not to mention that her daughter had adopted many of the same characteristics and demonstrated them to Arch every day of their married life. He stared with the others as Addy rose, her purse clenched in her hands. She was white-knuckling the black handbag like Reeve was holding on to the podium, less like a lifeline and more like a squeezable outlet for the rage she wasn’t entirely managing to keep out of her voice.
“County Administrator Pike,” she said, putting hard emphasis on the title, “have you been to any of the crime scenes where these people have died?”
There was an unpleasant hum from the crowd during the pause. “Why, no, I haven’t,” Pike said, still smirking, though it relaxed a little, more in the territory of a gentle smile now that he was focused on her rather than Reeve. “But I have been to countless funerals over the last few weeks—”
“That’s nice,” Addy cut him off. “So have we. Some of us have maybe even seen an open casket or two, but that’s beside the point.” She was like hardened steel, and she went right back after him. “Have you seen the crime scenes? The places where these people died?”
Pike’s smile didn’t lose its luster. “Of course not. But that doesn’t I mean don’t know—”
“Let me tell you what I know, County Administrator,” Addy said, “because my son, my husband, my daughter, and my son-in-law have all been fighting these things over the last few weeks. Some of y’all maybe want to tune me out right now, and you’re free to do so, even though I’ve known most of you either your whole life or mine.” She gestured to Reeve with the bag she still clutched in her hand. “We’ve all known Nick for years, just the same. We’ve all known each other for years, those of us who have been here our whole lives. We trusted him,” she pointed the finger at Reeve, “before this all happened, but now we’ve got this fancy county administrator here—”
“Who is a whore,” Melina Cherry snarled.
“—coming in and telling us who to trust when things have gone wrong,” Addy went on, ignoring her. “We’ve got people we’ve trusted for years telling us something incredible is happening when we know—we know—something incredible is happening, and we just reject the explanation of these people we’ve trusted for years out of hand? Like we don’t know them at all? Like some jackass from Nashville that just blew into town last week?”
“I think we should trust the evidence of our reason,” Pike started.
“I think reason’d work a lot better if we were in reasonable times,” Addy said. “If we had a reasonable explanation for people being eaten and torn apart and burnt up and all else. If we weren’t being presented with an explanation by people we trusted before all this came down, people who we knew, that would have given us the shirts off their backs in a crisis. Yes, it’s a wild story, I’ll grant you.” There was another uncomfortable hum across the crowd, but Pike watched in silence, still smiling, but the smile seemed to be frozen on his face. “But if anyone else has a better one … I’m all ears. I think we all are. Because this ain’t nothing we asked for to come to Midian. It’s just something we’re stuck with trying muddle through, and all I hear so far from you and yours, Mr. Pike, is shouting down what’s being said, no alternative presented, no solution—”
“Oh, I have a solution,” Pike said with a faint glimm
er in his eyes, and he looked straight at Reeve as Arch felt like he was in a spiral, a lurching feeling striking him a moment before the shotgun blast of Pike’s pronouncement hit and silenced the room in its wake. “A recall election for the position of sheriff of Calhoun County.”
*
Alison had come off the roof when she knew things were pretty well mopped up, lugging the big Barrett rifle on her shoulder. It wasn’t light, but if she carried it right it wasn’t the world’s biggest imposition, either, just hella-awkward. The damned thing was thirty pounds, though, so it was like carrying a good-sized toddler around, which she didn’t have a ton of experience with.
She’d wanted to, though.
Alison had a vague recollection of the way things had been before the demons came to town, before the shit exploded all over, before she’d had her own home’s door busted in and dark-faced demons had swarmed all over her and ripped her back to a time when she’d been older than a child but scared like one as she and her daddy had run from demon dogs in Alabama. Before all this, she and Arch had been planning to have a baby. They’d been trying, practicing real hard, as Arch would have said. That was a while ago, though, and they hadn’t had much in the way of luck before that door came crashing in.
Ever since, Alison hadn’t given babies much thought. When your whole world was collapsing around you like Midian was, it didn’t seem a time to give much thought to baby-making. Or at least it wasn’t on her mind, that was for sure. She and Arch were still doing a fair amount of practicing, but to her, that’s all it was now, practice. Before all this, having a baby and being a momma had consumed her waking hours like nothing else.
Now she was consumed with making sure the Barrett was ready, that she was ready, in case a call like this one came in and she had to scoot. They were coming fast and furious, too, though typically not from Duncan. The OOC was trying his damnedest to put down the last broc’aminn, who was flaming, waving his hands around somewhere between rage and panic, until Duncan got past one of the burning limbs and stuffed his baton right in the demon’s face. It just halted, all motion stopped, and the black fire crawled out from its face and sucked it back to hell with a pop and a faint whiff of sulfur that caused Alison to upturn her nose even yards away.
“Yay, team,” Lauren Darlington said, letting the squirt gun nozzle point toward the earth, weariness showing through on the doctor’s face, which looked a little flushed.
“How’d you get the sense of these, Duncan?” Hendricks asked, still gripping his sword.
“No runes,” the OOC said, pushing his baton closed. When it wasn’t deployed, it was just a cylinder of metal that he could slide into his belt, looking a little like a bomb detonator from an old movie, except surrounded in black rubber for traction. Duncan pushed up his t-shirt and stuck the baton back where it belonged, revealing a pale, hairless belly in the process. “I guess they didn’t get the memo. Or at least they didn’t see any ads for Spellman before they started preying.”
“Yes,” Brian muttered under his breath, pumping his hand once in victory. “Maybe it worked.”
“Maybe,” Alison’s daddy said, wandering up to stand in the loosely formed circle with the rest of them. His pickup was still sitting on the park’s grass, looking damned out of place. “But don’t let one isolated incident lead you down the path of thinking we’ve won this.”
“What the fuck are you people talking about?” Hendricks asked, sheathing the sword finally. It glinted in the orange glow of sunset as he put it away.
“We’ve been doing some ad-buys for Rogerson’s lately on the web, seeing if I could displace some of those targeted ads Spellman’s been using to drum up business for those runes,” Brian said. “Not the easiest thing to crack, I must say, trying to determine the demographic criteria he was picking.”
“This all sounds like foreign language stuff,” Dr. Darlington said, brushing her dark hair back behind her with her free hand.
“Wren Spellman,” Duncan said patiently, trying to clue the doctor in. “He’s a demon doing business in these parts. He’s selling these runes that make demons untraceable to my abilities. Almost every demon in town has been picking them up, and it’s making our job harder. The demons have been finding out about him through—”
“Web ads,” Darlington said with a nod. “Okay, got it now.” She was sharp, Alison would give her that. The doctor frowned. “How do you target a demon with a web ad?”
“We don’t know,” Brian said with a little smug glee, like he used to have when he’d just rubbed Alison’s face in being wrong. He used to do that shit all the time just to annoy her. “So we’ve been trying to just blanket the area with internet ads, figuring maybe we can push him out a little bit.” He smiled. “I think maybe we can chalk this one up to the plan.”
“Or we could chalk it up to luck and demons being too stupid to check their email or whatever when they got to town,” Hendricks said, plainly unimpressed, arms folded.
“Doesn’t work like that,” Brian said, bristling a little. “It’d be in the ad bars, not direct mailings to—”
“Hey,” Alison said, passing by him and thrusting the rifle into his arms. Her brother oof’d at the weight as she held it for a second longer to make sure he had it. He fumbled it a little but didn’t drop it or his weapon, so she moved on, heading toward her goal, approaching real slow so as not to scare him. “Jacob,” Alison said, talking to the scared kid still hiding behind the jungle gym on the playground, quivering with fear, his pants wet, plainly trying to hide it by clutching tight to the bars. Jacob Arnold was still standing there, his shoulders so tight he almost looked like a hunchback. “How you doing over there?” she asked, stopping at the sandy playground’s edge. He didn’t answer, and the conversation behind her had ground to a halt as everyone finally remembered that the kid they’d just come to save was still there, and still scared shitless. “Hey, Jacob?”
Jacob finally blinked, big tears in the corners of his eyes, wet as the front of his pants that he was trying to hide from her, from them. He didn’t speak, just nodded in frightened acknowledgment of her presence.
“Jacob, how are you doing?” Alison asked, lowering her voice, taking another step toward him. “You all right?”
Jacob didn’t seem to know how to answer that. He looked around, dazed, then his eyes crawled back to her. “I’m …” he croaked when spoke, like he had a big old frog in his throat. “… I’m okay, I think.” He was shaking.
“That’s good,” she said, taking a few more steps onto the playground. The sand warred against her sense of balance. She could smell the pee in the wind now, strong, like he’d been holding it for a while before this happened and scared it out of him. Clearly he hadn’t meant for it to come out, and by the way he was holding himself he was just as aware and ashamed of it as she would have expected a nine-year-old to be even if he hadn’t had damned good reason for it. “It’s going to be okay, Jacob. You want to come out to me, so we can get you home?” She squatted down, trying to come more to his level, be as non-threatening as possible.
He looked around, and the tears in his eyes sparkled as the light caught them. He looked absolutely stricken, his freckled complexion disturbed by the tracks of already fallen tears that had made their way silently down his cheeks. If he’d made noise during the fight, she hadn’t heard it, and it would have been whimpers, not screams.
With slow effort, Jacob Arnold pried himself loose of the jungle gym and took halting steps toward her, looking sick all the time. He put one hand over his crotch like he could hide what he’d done in fear, and self-consciously wiped at his eyes with the back of the other.
“It’s all right,” she said quietly, looking him in the eyes, trying to communicate with him over the ten feet between them. She knew Jacob, knew his mom and dad, talked to his momma every time she came into Rogerson’s. They lived not three minutes’ walk from the park, and she was of a mind to make sure he got home safely. He was taking steps like a wind
-up toy, like he was gonna miss one and come tumbling down, his balance all shot to shit by fear.
She caught him when he got close and he pressed up against her and wrapped his arms tight around her neck. She felt the cool wetness against her skin and knew he weighed more than the Barrett. She picked him up anyway, like a child, like a baby. Even though he was heavy, it wasn’t that much of a strain. The wetness on her neck and seeping through her shirt at her belly didn’t bother her one whit, not one, and she lifted with her back and got to her feet. “I’m gonna take Jacob home to his momma and daddy,” she said and started walking away. “Y’all keep a watch, will you?” She said it lightly, knowing they’d take her meaning: Make sure we get there safely. And she heard them all following behind, even with Jacob whimpering in her ear the whole way, and her whispering, reassuring him the entire time that it was gonna be okay.
*
Braeden Tarley hadn’t really wanted to come to the meeting that Sheriff Reeve had called. Braeden Tarley was a diesel mechanic by trade, a father by the grace of God, and single father by shit-ass misfortune. Between work and parenthood, he had plenty enough on his mind and on his plate without involving himself in local governance. But it would have taken a man with a lot more on his mind, and maybe a head buried not just in sand but solid concrete to fail to notice the shit going on around him in Midian, and so he’d come to this meet figuring maybe there’d be an answer or two. But the answer he’d gotten had not been much to his satisfaction, and now the whole damned thing had become some sort of fucked-up shitshow from Tijuana, like watching a donkey burst out of its enclosure and start fucking everyone in the audience. He hadn’t been to one of those shows, but he’d heard about them.
After Administrator Pike—who, no matter what words were coming out of his mouth, Braeden thought was a pencilneck prick—had dropped that little bomb about Reeve and a recall election, it seemed to snuff the air out of the room for what felt like a full minute. The administrator was just sitting there with a prickish smile on his face, and Braeden didn’t really know how to feel. He’d had run-ins with Reeve and wasn’t a fan of the man, kind of a dictator son of a bitch as an officer, and his pitch about demons being responsible for their current dismal state didn’t ring true with Braeden at all. Braeden sat watching the thing unfold coolly, not really sure where his allegiance, if he had any, lay.
Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Page 5