Legion (Southern Watch Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Why did you ever think you could help?” Brian said to himself again, whispering. There were the rocks and shoals of self-pity that he’d been smashing himself up on all day. What fun.

  Maybe he’d been a dilettante coming into this, just looking for something to cut the boredom while he was in Midian.

  Maybe it had been better than trying to convince himself that he was an unseen diamond, glittering in the quiet dark here.

  Maybe it had just been a convenient distraction to take his eyes off his own flaws. Whatever the case …

  “Nowhere to run,” Brian said, into the quiet hospital room, the sound of machines beeping out in the corridor, the hum of the lights. “Nowhere to hide from …” He didn’t say it out loud, but he was thinking it: From what a worthless shit you are.

  He hadn’t been able to do one damned thing to help this watch. Not one. The ad thing? Probably wasn’t even him. Even if it was, he’d shot his own father when possessed by a demon, which subtracted his gain back to zero sum. He was lower than low; he was a skidmark on the underpants of humanity. He couldn’t wield a sword, and he’d never shot a gun effectively until demons had seized his body and put it under their command. Now he was just sitting here, waiting for demons to come and do God-knew-what to—

  Brian frowned, his scalp tingling. This Legion … there was something wrong with the planning. They were a bunch of souls stacked into a body like a colony ship. They’d lost one of their own … like a second ship getting blown up, and now the ones that were left were spreading all over the watch like a virus, and his own people were just trying to weather the storm.

  Except this virus … this storm … it was a collective intelligence. Like Midian itself poured into a human body. Something about that got in Brian’s head and spun a couple times. A collective … a group … an angry, angry group … making war on the watch, specifically …

  “No, they’re not,” Brian said, still tingling. “They hit Dr. Darlington and she …” Well, she was part of the watch, but not part of the watch that fucked with this Legion, at least not at first. So … she was collateral damage? A message?

  No … she was part of the community of the watch, made war upon by the community of Legion … and they weren’t like the other demons that he’d seen, heard about, fought. They were on a suicide mission, a lot of them. They didn’t even fucking care, did they?

  But … if they were willing to widen their war once, what if …

  “Oh, my God,” Brian said, and his scalped stopped tingling and his whole body went cold as a frightening possibility came full bore into his mind, and he gave it chilling voice. “Halloween.”

  10.

  Brian had no phone on him, his broken in the struggle after his father had been shot, and so he tried to leave his bed. He rested almost no weight on his leg and it folded underneath him, drawing screams of pain out of him as his voice echoed in the private room. The door was open, but he heard nothing outside, and after a few minutes of trying to get himself under control, he started crawling.

  Searing agony came from the area behind his kneecap, pain beyond pain, wrapped in anguish. Brian gritted his teeth like he’d never done before. He was usually a creampuff in the face of pain, but there was something about the terror-inducing nature of his revelation that had him in a cold sweat before he’d even tried to get out of bed.

  “You don’t … go after … fucking kids,” he said under his breath as he slow-crawled, using his good leg to push himself along.

  His chest ached from the exertion after only a few feet, his pectorals burning. He was taking hard breaths, and realized that his cardio fitness was awful, especially as related to his upper body. He had his wounded knee crooked at an angle to try and keep it from getting hurt while he dragged himself along the smooth, white speckled tile floor. It smelled of disinfectant and rubber soles, or maybe that was just the rubberized trim.

  He made it to the door on determination alone, and then stopped, gasping, his head peeking out into an empty hallway. Why couldn’t he have had this revelation while Hendricks was with him? He could have told the cowboy, the cowboy could have spread the word, and they could have launched an immediate defense that would save the day.

  Because in this case … they had to save the day. That was what heroes did.

  He took deep, sucking breaths, and looked in either direction. He needed help, dammit, but the hallway was empty. What was happening here? A brief spell of panic shook him and he held his breath. Was the Legion attacking the hospital now?

  Brian tuned his ears, listening hard, and the normal, ordinary sounds of a quiet hospital reached him instantly. Somewhere in the distance a respirator was making that mechanical sucking sound as it breathed for some poor soul. The soft hum of the overhead lights was quietly buzzing, and in the distance he could hear a couple hushed voices talking in one of the rooms.

  He was a half-second away from bellowing out loud when he spotted his salvation just ten feet from his very own door. It was like a gleaming, shiny, personal savior, or at least the closest thing to it Brian had ever believed in. Taking a last breath, he started his crawl again, heading right for it, knowing that this was going to be the thing that would help them win the day … because losing simply wasn’t an option.

  *

  Braeden’s day at work had gotten a little better after Pike’s news. Abi had calmed down and even fallen asleep for a little while in a supply closet where they’d made her a little bed with blankets. She’d gone in crabby and come out two hours later all buzzing with new energy and a considerably better attitude. Braeden never ceased to be amazed at that transformation, because it was sincerely one of the coolest miracles a parent could hope for. Peace and quiet for a couple hours, and then, afterward, a happier, slightly more obedient kid. Because Abi still didn’t exactly listen to every command.

  Now she was buzzing around the house, because it was almost time to leave for the Halloween on the square. The longer he thought about it, the more Braeden had come around to the idea. Going out was perfect, especially since he only had designs on doing it for an hour or so and then they’d be on their way home.

  “I want to eat all my candy tonight,” Abi informed him, dancing around in her blue and purplish princess dress. Braeden couldn’t remember if she was supposed to be Elsa from Frozen or Cinderella, he’d just picked the costume she wanted at Wal-Mart and rolled with it. It was a lot better option than the goddamned sexy nurse or witch costumes that seemed to be the only options for the older girls. While he might have embraced the results that lack of choice produced in his youth, now he looked at it with a wary eye and no small amount of concern.

  “Two pieces,” Braeden said, calling out as he headed back into his closet. He heard Abi bump around out in the living room and listened. She was jumping on the sofa cushions. Normally, he did not care for that, but he wasn’t gonna call her out on it right now because he could hear her and knew she wasn’t anywhere near him—which was what he needed.

  “Ten pieces!” she shouted back, and he heard another couple bounces on the cushion. It always seemed to turn into a negotiation with her lately, and as much as he was bent around her little finger, these were the moments where they had friction.

  “I said two,” he called back, snaking a hand up into the top of his closet. He lifted an old comforter and moved it aside, feeling around carefully. He bumped his rifle and then his shotgun before he laid his hand on an old Lemon Squeezer .38 revolver. His daddy had given it to him before he’d moved to Montana, and he’d kept it in the top of his closet, unloaded. He felt around a little more and grabbed up the box of shells. “And I mean two.”

  The bouncing didn’t cease, but it slowed for a second. “Five?” Abi countered.

  “Still two,” Braeden said, opening the cylinder and hurriedly starting to load it. He didn’t keep the pistol loaded, but he did have rounds in the shotgun. He figured that was his best bet if someone broke in.

  He almost had i
t done when she called out, more tentatively. “Three?”

  “And we’re still on two, but I’m leaning toward one,” Braeden said as he clicked the cylinder shut. He looked over at the shelving to his side and opened one of the drawers. He had an old holster on top and put the .38 in it, then it stuck right behind his kidney on his belt. He pulled an old flannel off a hanger and put it on as he slid the comforter back down in the top of the closet.

  “Okay, two,” Abi said, scaring the shit out of him as she appeared at the door of his closet. He hadn’t even noticed the couch had stopped squeaking, and he spun around to see her standing there, in her princess dress, hands nervously behind her. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Dressing warmly,” Braeden said, finishing up the last few buttons. “You have to wear your thick coat tonight in case it gets cold.”

  She made the pouty face, and it was adorable. “But Daddy, my princess dress.” She made a sweeping gesture, up and down her, like that explained everything. “No one will be able to see it under my jacket.”

  Braeden gave her a wary eye. “Well, we’re gonna bring it, then, in case you get cold. You carry your pumpkin for candy and I’ll carry the coat, all right?”

  She beamed. “Okay!” And then she flounced out of the room, apparently glad to have won something this round.

  Braeden just sighed, and started toward the door to grab his coat. And they said these years were the easiest with girls. He was not looking forward to the teenage ones.

  *

  Alison felt like her eyelids were in a perpetual war with her, her tugging them up and gravity fighting to bring them back down, down to their natural state. Coffee hadn’t helped, going to the bathroom and splashing water on her face hadn’t helped, though it had left her with a wet sleeve and smeared makeup that she’d just cleaned off in resignation. Even pinching herself hadn’t helped, and so she was just starting to settle into the idea that a nap could be in order when she got the bright idea to take a walk.

  She and Arch and her mother were all arrayed around her daddy’s room, the breathing machine hissing softly every few seconds, the beeping of his heartbeat monitor making a strange composition when those two doodads were combined together in concert. She found it strangely soothing, but then, in her current state of fatigue, she might have found a heavy metal symphony at full volume in her ear to be soothing.

  Alison got up on unsteady feet. The soles of her feet ached like she’d just worked a double at Rogerson’s. She would have given just about anything to have a soak in a warm bath, maybe drift off and drag herself to bed when she snapped awake again, but instead she started for the door and Arch sat up, looking a little dazed himself.

  “Where you going?” he asked, brusque from fatigue, all his normal politeness sapped.

  “Walk,” she said, not even bothering to put the word into motion by adding the “—ing,” to it.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said and got up, much slower than usual. He stretched, soaring up nearly to the ceiling with those long arms of his. He adjusted himself left and right, doing a quick twist of his hips, then he followed her out.

  Alison wasn’t sure she would have noticed him there if she wasn’t finding herself bumping into him every few steps. Whether it was her that was dazed and tired and unable to walk straight or him or some combo of both of them, it was happening, and as she shot him a faint smile, she got one in return that was just about as weak.

  They made it down the hall and into the waiting area before they stopped, Alison’s attention dropping on a painting of a beach, with its tall green grass and beach sand looking mighty inviting. She could just about see herself there with Arch, laying out a blanket and sitting down for a picnic lunch. She could hear the sound of children playing in the distance, and waves lapping at the seaside.

  The reality sure did suck balls compared to the fantasy, she conceded as Hendricks unfolded himself from the waiting area chair and gave a good stretch of his own.

  “What’s going on?” Arch asked, drawling.

  “Nothing much,” Hendricks said. He breathed a little at Alison and she caught a whiff of halitosis like the cowboy had chowed down on an onion before speaking, or maybe just eaten straight out of the trash. She snorted as an incredibly inappropriate thought occurred to her, something about asking him if he’d just gone down on a demon, but her brain caught up with her mouth just in time to remind her that, yes, that actually had happened and it wasn’t fucking funny, stupid brain, so she clamped her jaws shut as her cheeks burned with embarrassment at her near-idiotic lapse. “How are y’all doing?” Hendricks asked, dropping into that slight Southern accent he seemed to have picked up.

  “Still waiting,” Arch answered after probably waiting five seconds to see if she was going to answer. She wasn’t; she was still trying to keep the lid on that other thought, the one that had almost resulted in her swallowing her foot well up to her knee. “Any word from back home?”

  “Not a lot going on,” Hendricks said, blinking a couple times. “The church is still safe, and I guess Pike’s answer to the town’s problems is to throw a party, so …” He shrugged. “Clearly this man is a leadership guru. I would say demon, but obviously Alison proved that wasn’t the case.”

  “Obviously,” Alison said, finally feeling in control of herself, her giggles and her embarrassment enough to speak. “I assume by the lack of screams and dying around us that the Legion isn’t assaulting the hospital right now.”

  “I guess not,” Hendricks said with a long yawn. “Unless they’re doing it vewy, vewy quietwy.”

  “It’s not even wabbit season,” Alison said. “And—”

  There was a clamor from near the elevator bank around the corner, and a slight shriek, followed by a woman saying, “Sir, you’re bleeding!”

  “Get out of my way!” That was Brian’s voice, and then she heard the squeak of something against the tile floors, and grunting, and a few seconds later Brian came around the corner in a wheelchair, red in the face and—sure enough—leaving a little trail of blood behind him from his knee, which looked like it had been reopened. “Jesus, thank God I found you.”

  “Doubt he had much to do with it, since you knew where we were,” Hendricks said wryly. Arch frowned at him, and Hendricks turned around explicitly for the purpose of seeing his reaction, Alison could tell. The cowboy was always doing that shit to get Arch’s goat. It mostly worked, that was why he kept doing it.

  Brian went on, ignoring the hell out of both of them. “You have to get back—back to—” He had to stop and take a breath, panting from exertion. “The Halloween thing, the party, it’s—”

  “Dude,” Hendricks said, looking a little distant, “I told you, it’ll be fine.”

  “It’s not fucking fine!” Brian shouted, and Alison noticed that the lady who’d seen him bleeding at the elevators was a nurse, and she was lingering at the corner, watching them all with concern bordering on alarm. “The Legion—they’re gonna go for it.” He took a panting breath and stopped for a minute.

  “That’s suicide,” Hendricks said calmly. “There’s gonna be—hell, a ton of adults there, probably. No demon would walk into—”

  “No normal, petty, random-ass demon would,” Brian interrupted, fighting for every breath. “And that’s the point. It’s motive—it’s motive and ca—” He took a heaving breath. “These things, the Legion—they’re not like other demons—”

  “I’m calling psych,” the nurse at the corner said, starting to move.

  “He’s fine,” Alison said, trying to sound reassuring, though she wasn’t sure the nurse was wrong.

  “—they’re not like anyone else,” Brian went on, babbling, trying to get ten feet of thoughts out a one inch hole. “They don’t care if they live or die, they’ve proven that. And they don’t want the same things that other demons want, they just want—they want to hurt us.”

  “Okay,” Arch said, clearly skeptical. “That’s great and all, but they already did that.�
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  “Yeah,” Hendricks said, “they proved they can hurt us with your dad and Mrs. Reeve and—”

  “And Dr. Darlington’s mom,” Brian said, huffing. “Which should strike you all as odd, because Darlington had nothing to do with the attack on Legion. She wasn’t there, she didn’t—”

  “Yeah, but,” Hendricks said, now dropping to a small smirk, clearly enjoying that he had to explain the fact of things to the overexcited college boy, “she’s with us, and they saw that. They know that, so—”

  “No.” Brian shook his head so fast Alison wondered if he’d keel over from rattling his brain too hard. “She’s part of our community, don’t you see?” He looked at all three of them, and Alison got a sick feeling. Arch and Hendricks were looking at him blankly; they didn’t get it. “It’s all about community to them, because they’re a town or a city or a nation in a single body. And they think we hurt them, except they’re seeing this as us versus them in terms of a whole community instead of mano a mano, the way we would—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Alison muttered, her skin prickling all up and down her.

  “They’re going for the Halloween event,” Brian finished, sagging back in his chair. “That’s why they haven’t attacked us at the hospital. Because they think they’re attacking us at Halloween, except their definition of us is a hell of lot broader than we’ve been considering because we’re thinking of it our way, not theirs.”

  “Holy shit.” Hendricks’s face went ashen, sick as shit. He’d got there, finally, and Alison could feel it because she was right there, too.

  “Mother of Mercy,” Arch said, milder but just as sick. “We gotta get back to Midian now—”

  “I gotta call Reeve—” Hendricks said, talking at the same time.

  “Duncan and Lerner Two—” Alison started, lunging forward.

  She almost made it around the corner to the elevator, charging past the nurse, but stopped before colliding with the lady, who had panic in her eyes. “He needs that knee taken care of,” Alison said, getting all up in that nurse’s face, her eyes wide like a semi’s hubcaps. “And so help me, if you Nurse Ratched him before I get back, I will tear your ass to pieces.” She shot a look back at Brian. “Thanks, little brother.”