Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  *

  “Goddammit!” Hendricks shouted, slamming a hand into the steering wheel as he hung up the cell phone Lonsdale had handed him. He’d memorized Arch’s number in case of emergency, but otherwise he just used 911 if he needed to get hold of anyone lately. It had worked pretty well, except for that time he’d had to go through the damned call center Reeve had hired to take the emergency calls at night.

  “They got murder on their hive minds,” Lonsdale said from the back seat. “These things. The demons.”

  “I fucking knew who you were talking about, Lonsdale,” Hendricks said. He was already driving close to ninety, and even Starling was holding on at this point. “Sonofabitch.” He was racking his brain. “Who all were they after?”

  Lonsdale’s answer was way too damned slow in arriving, and even when it did, it wasn’t anywhere close to what Hendricks wanted to hear. “Everyone,” the Brit said simply. “They’re mad as hell at you lot.”

  “Sonofa …” Hendricks took a corner, slowing to sixty to do it and busting the mirror off someone’s pickup as he cut it a little too close. He was still at zero fucks given though, since the rental wasn’t his and he had better things to worry about than the cherry state of someone’s superdiesel dually. Without directory assistance to get him to so much as Duncan’s hotel room, without any other numbers committed to memory—

  Wait.

  Hendricks did know one other number by heart, but it wasn’t one he’d called lately. It was one he’d put in his mind early in his stay here and it just stuck, kinda like terrible commercial jingles, way past their use. He glanced at the phone for a second and took out someone’s mailbox, then just decided to go for it and dialed the number in a hell of a hurry. He thrust it against his ear as he ran off onto the shoulder at sixty and waited, the ringing sound like a fucking countdown of doom.

  “Hello?” Erin Harris answered, kinda curious, like she was wondering who the hell was calling her from a strange number.

  “Erin, it’s Hendricks,” he said, it all coming out in a rush. “This Legion motherfucker—he’s going after everyone. He just sent two people to kick down my hotel room and one of them was Lonsdale and he’s after—”

  “What the fuck, Hendricks?” Erin asked, and he could practically see her squinching her face up at him even over the phone. “What the hell—”

  “The possession demon, Erin!” Hendricks shouted. “He’s in play! He’s coming after us. Arch isn’t answering and I don’t know anyone else’s number.”

  There was a pause that felt like forever but was probably only two seconds. When she spoke again, her voice was small. “What do we do?”

  “You gotta get to somebody,” Hendricks said, just off the top of his head. “We gotta—gotta fight these fuckers off. They tried to just bust down my door, but, I mean, if they came at everybody else the same way—”

  “They didn’t,” Lonsdale said, the dreadful voice of knowledge from the back seat. Ever since the bastard had started to come out of his post-possession delirium, he’d just been one fucking helpful nugget after another. “They were—they were going to come at them through people they knew, people they knew and loved. Your whole—what is it, a watch or somefing—?”

  “Oh, fuck,” Hendricks said. “Did you hear—?”

  “I heard,” Erin said. “I’ll call Reeve and start—I’ll get my car and see what I can—fuck, Jesus—” She hung up on him without any further word on the matter.

  “Son of a motherfucking fuck,” Hendricks said, because he couldn’t come up with something that fit any better than that.

  “This does seem dire,” Starling said.

  “Dire?” Hendricks jerked his head around. “‘Dire’? Are you fucking—?”

  He blinked; she was gone, the passenger seat empty beside him, her red hair that had been glinting in the glow of the sunset only a moment earlier completely gone, and the blinding light of sundown was now staring him right in the face … just like the fact that the entire watch had just gotten bushwhacked, and Hendricks had no fucking idea how everyone could possibly survive this one.

  *

  “Daddy!” Alison dropped to her knees, shoving Brian away. She heard him squeal in pain and didn’t care, her empathy for her brother gone like a cloud on a windy day even though she knew he’d been possessed by a demon when he’d done what he’d done. She’d seen it in his eyes in the second after Arch jabbed him through the leg, had known it by what he’d done. Brian was a shit, a fucking asshole, a know-it-all, but a guy who would grab a gun off her daddy’s belt and cap him with it? Entirely ruefully, she had to admit a nasty truth—Brian couldn’t have shot that straight even at point blank range.

  She pushed him away and let her left hand hang there for a second, not really sure what to do. The right hand was holding her up, palm hard against the tile floor, imprinted in a puddle of sticky blood. She stared down at her father, whose face was—it just looked—wrong. There was a gaping wound pumping blood slower and slower out the bottom of his jaw, and the puddle of red spreading above his head looked a little like a halo radiating out from his skull, like he was joining the angels in one of those religious icons of old.

  Alison just froze that left hand there, thinking maybe it’d be smart not to shake the man. He’d been damaged, maybe fatally, by that shot, and trying to jar him out of the state he was in seemed like a feat of dumbfuckery right up there with lighting firecrackers out of your ass. Her hand wavered, just a second as she tried to figure out what to do, and then her fingers just shot right over to that hole in his jaw. She stuck her fingers inside and tried to staunch that flow of blood. It washed out around her, though, at a little slower rate.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said solidly as she sat there, like a little girl with her finger in a dam. She’d taken first aid classes once, hadn’t she? Had there been some part she’d forgotten where they dealt with someone bleeding out like a dying animal in a slaughterhouse? Because she couldn’t recall that at all, if it had been in there. It had mostly been shit like “disinfect the wound before you apply the Band Aid,” and “fourteen compressions, two breaths,” when it came to CPR.

  The CPR thing jolted her, and she realized that if her daddy kept bleeding like he was, he was liable to need CPR, and soon, to keep his heart beating or else he’d …

  “Addy,” Arch said from behind her, “call 911. Tell the lady in the call center we need an ambulance.” The words bounced around until they stuck to Alison’s momma, and she took off to do as ordered with a feeble nod of her head that Alison saw in her peripheral vision as she watched blood continue to wash around her fingers out of her daddy’s neck. Arch had never called her mother “Addy” before that she could recall.

  “Brian,” Arch said, and she only turned her head slightly to see the conversation between the two of them. Arch had his sword at his side, at the ready, ready for anything, maybe, and Brian just looked dazed and in pain. “Who did this to you?”

  Brian was grimacing hard, but he blinked and looked at Arch. “The doorbell,” he said, voice a scratchy whisper. “When I answered it, it was …”

  Arch tore off around the corner and Alison heard him fling the door open in the distance. She was staring at her own completely ineffectual handiwork but she was listening hard for him, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do here. Fourteen compressions, two breaths. That came back again. Her daddy was bleeding out his skull and neck, and she was going to have to do this soon, this nasty thing, this pushing on the chest and breathing into lips like angel kisses.

  A gunshot cracked out and Alison flinched. Another rang out, then another, and the sound of something spanging against metal and brick made her want to hug the floor out of survival instinct. She wavered for a second, wanting to go grab her rifle, do something she was good at for a spell, but she hung where she was, trying to put pressure on her daddy’s wound. “Brian,” she snapped in lieu of going off to look for Arch, hoping he was still fine since she hadn’t
heard him cry out, “get over here!”

  Brian winced and half-crawled over to her, dragging his injured leg behind him. Arch hadn’t been unmerciful in how he’d done the job wounding her brother, but he hadn’t been kind, either. He’d caught Brian right behind the kneecap on a hard charge, and there was a decent amount of blood seeping out of there, enough that he’d need some stitches and more, maybe. He dragged along and Alison grabbed his hand as he came close, taking him by the finger and pushing it in where she’d just pulled hers out of her daddy’s jaw. “Stay there,” she ordered.

  She crawled along to the top of her daddy’s head and looked in where the bullet had come out. It wasn’t as big as she would have thought it’d be; she’d been firing a fifty cal for so long she was starting to dream about the massive holes she was leaving in targets and in demons, but the handgun her brother had used to do the job had been a nine millimeter, and it didn’t even have hollow points in it; they’d switched to full metal jacket rounds a week ago because they just did a little better punching a demon in the face.

  “Hello? 911?” Her mother spoke behind her, tentative, frightened. “My husband has been shot. I need—I need an ambulance. Y-yes, that’s our—that’s our address …”

  Blood was dribbling out of the dark wound, but it wasn’t coming out wildly in spurts like she would have feared it. It was a steady flow, a dribble, and it was covering the tile.

  Her father’s breathing started to get shallow, and now Alison knew he had to be running kind of low on oxygen. This was where she came in, where she was going to have to do the only thing she knew how.

  She ignored the fact that Arch hadn’t come back yet, just waited until her father stopped breathing, and then she started doing CPR, just like she remembered, while Brian watched along in pain and her mother talked into the phone somewhere behind her.

  *

  When they were done with the fight, Duncan was left staring at Amanda over what was practically a mountain of human bodies. The resentment was festering between them as if the corpses had already started to putrefy. They hadn’t, of course, but they might as well have by the way they smelled. She’d even left some of them alive, for fuck’s sake.

  “I can’t believe you just did that,” Duncan said, as he vaped the last demons right out of a middle-aged man.

  “I can’t believe I held off as long as I did before I started,” Amanda replied, securing her baton and ignoring the slick of red gleaming on the point. “This is stupid. These people … if we don’t do what I just did, how long do you think they’re going to survive after they kill us and move on? Because I haven’t been dealing with this particular Legion like you have been, apparently, but to me it’s looking like a kamikaze mission all the way.” She folded her arms in front of her and hit Duncan with a hard look. The Amanda Guthrie shell had an amazing Resting Bitch Face. The Lerner shell had been a little smirky, comparatively. Resting asshole face, she supposed.

  “That doesn’t matter.” Duncan’s voice rose, his essence swelling inside him. “They could have lived if we had just taken the cautious approach and dispensed with the demons one at a time, and—”

  “Oh, blah blah,” Amanda said, rolling her eyes and walking away, mostly for effect. “You’re sitting here whining so loud you can’t even connect the dots on what this was.” She paused and looked back over her shoulder, waiting for Duncan to pick up what she was laying down. “Can you?”

  If Duncan hadn’t been in a shell, if he’d had actual cheeks with actual blood in him, the poor bastard would have paled. “Ambush,” he said weakly.

  “Yep,” Amanda said, flashing him a smile that was probably only fifty percent as smug as the old one. “So … what are you going to do about it?”

  *

  Arch wasn’t fond of getting shot at, and he couldn’t rightly recall ever having a demon do it to him, at least not until now. But he’d just been fired on by a demon, sure enough, not that he’d seen the eyes to be certain of it. He’d thrown himself down just inside the hallway and listened to the bullets hit the front of the house, hoping everyone inside was far enough toward the back of the dwelling to avoid what was coming at the front.

  When he raised back up to peer out the front door, Arch saw the street. It looked empty enough, the tall-ways mail-slot part of it he could see, but then, he hadn’t but barely seen the demon’s car before they’d opened up on him. He wondered how they knew he was trouble, how they were sure he wasn’t possessed, but he answered that one for himself pretty quick. If he’d been possessed, they could have shot him all day long without worry.

  He belly-crawled a little at a time back to the front door, trying to catch a glimpse of the car that had opened fire on him. He stopped when he saw the front bumper and tire, because it had taken him a good ten or twenty seconds just to get in this position. There were sounds behind him, people talking, Addison maybe, on the phone. Arch tried to direct his listening skills out the front door, though, attempting to concentrate for footsteps.

  He didn’t hear them.

  What he did hear was the sound of something like squealing tires in the distance. An engine revved, pretty far off, but then got steadily closer, rumbling like it was coming toward them. He stared out the front door, holding still, just listening to that car get closer and closer, until finally he heard another squeal of tires—

  The bumper he’d been watching lurched forward as someone slammed into the back of the car and sent it smashing forward. It spun out from the force of the impact as the brakes tried to hold and failed to gain any traction as the back end of the car was ripped from the ground and twirled like someone had pulled the e-brake on a hard turn. Arch watched the sedan come to rest, ninety degrees off the axis of where it had started, and he was on his feet and out the door before it had come to a full stop.

  He saw Mrs. Lester sitting behind the wheel, staggered, bobbing around in the front seat like one of those punching bags that dropped to the floor after a hard hit and sprang right back up. She was shaking her head, wave of grey hair half in her eyes, as Arch came straight down and up to the driver’s side window, sword in hand. He poked down hard through the shattered window, stepping in the little pebbles of safety glass as he caught her right in the shoulder.

  The effect was immediate, the expulsion of the demon obvious in Mrs. Lester’s eyes, the yellow glare returned back to normal steely blue, even a little dull, just a second later. She had an old rifle lying next to her on the seat, but she kept her hands well away from it as they came up to her wrinkled face and covered her eyes. “Unghhh …” she said, and then she looked up and blinked at Arch, staring up at him like she was looking directly at the sun.

  The sun was going down, and it was off to his side, and all there was where he was standing was him, him and a whole sick feeling in his stomach as he came to a few realizations about what had just happened inside the house.

  What was still happening inside the house.

  “Arch!” Hendricks came out of the shattered SUV that had caused the crash, shirtless and bleeding in a few places. The cowboy wasn’t even wearing his hat, and to say he looked distressed was like saying Arch looked like he was a little disturbed. “We’re getting fucking bushwhacked, man.”

  Arch didn’t know how he could fit what he was feeling into words without bleeding out some emotion all over Hendricks. He’d seen the damage to his father-in-law, and he knew it was bad. You didn’t gush blood out of a brain injury and have it turn out all kittens and rainbows. “I know,” was all he said, and Hendricks, no prize to start with, suddenly looked a whole lot worse. Arch figured it might have been something he said.

  *

  “Please don’t,” was all that Lauren could get out of herself. It was like she’d been run under one of those steamrollers, smashed flat of emotion and feeling and hope, and looking at her daughter grinning at her with a knife poised under her sternum was just barely enough to try and squeeze another drop of blood out of her. There just wasn’t
much left to give when you’d been all wrung out.

  “Do you know what your people have done to us?” Molly asked in that hateful voice. “You’ve declared war.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren said. She had nothing else for it. She had nothing else, period. Her naked body was lying exposed in the chill air of autumn on her own front lawn. Her house, the only place she felt secure, had just been violated in the most disgusting, terrible way, and her mother’s throat had been slit in front of her. She knew that no matter how much she begged for Molly’s life, this was not going to have a happy resolution.

  Demons were evil, heartless, soulless things. She’d seen them treat people like meals, like bumps in the road, like impediments and animals … but she’d never seen anything like this.

  “Sorry doesn’t fix the damage you’ve done,” Molly said.

  “I … I didn’t do anything,” Lauren said feebly. It would have sounded feeble even if it hadn’t been a clumsy denial of guilt. “I wasn’t there when anything happened, I never even met you before—”

  “This is all your community’s doing,” Molly said.

  “We don’t … have much of a community right now,” Lauren said.

  “Your watch, then, as you call it.” Molly leered down at her. “You all share the guilt. The blame.”

  “Blame me all you want,” Lauren said, trying to muster up courage, feeling, anything. She came up onto her knees, and clasped her dirt-covered hands together, the individual grains of sand and grit covering her like she’d been frolicking on a beach. “But … please … my daughter had nothing to do with—”

  “Your little community needs to pay,” Molly said, and her eyes were bright yellow, like a cat’s, and full of just as much disdain as the most calculating one she’d ever seen. “Where one must suffer, all must suffer. Your crime … was considerable. More than murder. And so the punishment must be correspondingly larger. Pain in measures beyond those you might consider reasonable.” Her eyes narrowed harshly, the glee gone. “And now you will—”