Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  This was so much worse. By leaps and bounds. No contest.

  “You don’t have any hope,” Addie said, sounding mildly surprised.

  Brian made a snort of derision from deep in his throat. “Well, no shit. My dad’s lost all higher brain function and—well, you know the rest that’s going on. Hope’s a pipe dream right now, Mom.” He snorted again. “Actually, a pipe dream right now would be a full pipe of green that I could smoke.”

  “As satisfying as I’m sure that would be,” she said, a ragged edge of anger in her voice, “it doesn’t solve the problem.”

  “A fucking team of top-class neurosurgeons can’t solve this problem, Mom. Remember? We talked to—”

  “Hope doesn’t just come from doctors, son,” Addie said. “And if you wait for your circumstances to improve before having hope, your life is going to be a terrible waste.” She turned away from him, fiddling with the curtains she’d just closed, parting them slightly to look out on the Chattanooga streets. “Hope doesn’t come from the events. There’s always something going wrong in the world. You don’t have to do anything other than flip on the news or pick up a paper to know that.”

  “I get my news from Twitter, thanks.”

  “Then you’re just as ill-informed as anyone else, I reckon,” Addie said with a shrug. “But you’re missing my point. Your father and I went round and round about this when you first came home. ‘He needs a job, Addie,’ he’d say, like that’d make a grown-up, responsible man out of you.”

  Brian’s lips puckered in irritation. “Gee, thanks. I thought I was grown-up.”

  “If you’ve got to run to marijuana or beer or drugs anytime things go hard for you, son,” Addie said, looking over her shoulder at him, “you’ve got a problem that just getting a job isn’t going to fix.”

  “Nope, the reefer madness doesn’t solve any problems,” he said dryly. “Unless there’s a Cheetos invasion, or we’re drowning in Visine. Then it’s a perfect cure for what ails us.”

  “You had no hope,” she went on, ignoring him. “You didn’t know your place in the world, what you were here for. Coasting along like you had no engine—”

  “Well, I’m a human, so technically I don’t have an engine.”

  “—no reason to move,” she said. “No hope for finding the thing you were meant to do in this world, in this place. And I think you’re still there, struggling with your role in this watch.”

  “Well, right now I’m mourning a dead sister and brain-dead father, but … sure. Let’s talk about my lack of direction.”

  “It’s not about a career,” Addie said, sighing. “And that’s what you never got.”

  “I suppose I need to find my passion, huh? Like the career counselor said?”

  “You need to find something that gets you moving in the morning,” she said, “something that gives you a little fire in the belly. But I don’t think it’s just an issue of motivation. You’ve got no h—”

  “Hope. Yeah. Heard that.” He put the Entertainment Weekly down as he stood, the sound of pages whiffling in the chair as they slid back toward the seam. “So, why don’t you tell me … what gives you hope at a moment like this? When everything’s—I’m sorry, but … fucked. Everything’s fucked!” He said it with such violence it surprised him. “Irredeemably, irretrievably fucked.” He paused. “Do you know the difference between optimism and insanity?”

  His mother stared at him warily. “No. What’s the difference between optimism and insanity?”

  “I’m sincerely asking,” Brian said. “That’s not a line from a joke. I’m trying to figure it out right now, because it seems to me this hope, this optimism, whatever you’re trying to suggest—it’s a complete denial of reality. Like you expect Dad to just spontaneously heal, hop out of bed tomorrow and be fine and dandy, shake our hands, go back to … puttering around in his study or handling guns or something. And that’s not going to happen. Not that. Not the other thing—”

  “What other thing?”

  “Alison,” he said tautly. “She’s not coming b—”

  “I damned well know my daughter’s dead, son!” Addie said, losing her patience at last in a bout of breathless anger. “And I’m not blind or ignorant of the prognosis your father has received. But what you’re missing is that optimism isn’t denying reality, or failing to understand that bad things will happen, or preparing for one in case it does. Optimism is trying to find the bright spot in the darkness, trying to see how things might get better, having a belief that they will get better—”

  “Demons have invaded our town, Mom,” Brian said with bleak amusement. “Literal demons. They killed Alison. They did this to Dad. He’s not going to get out of that bed ever again. He’ll be lucky if he can string together two words. You think things are going to get better?” He let out another bark of terrible laughter. “How?”

  Addison Longholt drew herself up to her full height, which was not considerable, even compared to Brian, who was on the short side. “I don’t know yet. That’s sort of the point of life. You don’t get to see what’s around every corner.”

  “I hate to say it, Mom, but—spoilers! It’s only going to get worse from here.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He sank back into the chair, picking up the Entertainment Weekly. “Yeah. I kinda do.” And he went back to trying to read, but he had no more luck than he’d had before.

  *

  “Mack!” Reeve called out, shining his light into the woods. He was being real careful, had more than a few of the others backing him up—Hendricks, Starling, the OOCs, the Guthrie half of whom was eyeing Starling with something just this side of lust, it looked like. It would have been vaguely interesting to watch her continue to size the redhead up, maybe, if this had been a dirty movie.

  But for now, his focus was on Mack Wellstone and his whereabouts.

  “I dunno,” Hendricks said, sword glinting in the light of a dozen flashlights scanning the woods, exposing thin pines, twisted and dead-looking in the artificial white light of the headlamps. “If I was that kid … dad dying like that, mom apparently getting … well, whatever happened to her … and then this shit? Pffft. I don’t think my feet would touch the ground between here and the next county.”

  “He’s just running scared,” Guthrie said, still looking at Starling appraisingly. “Any one of you meat suits would be after what he’s seen today.”

  “‘Meat suit’? You’re calling us ‘meat suits’?” Keith Drumlin was giving a wary eye of his own to Guthrie. “So … does that make you a something else?”

  “On a form, I’d have to check a box that said, ‘Something Other Than Human,’ yeah,” Guthrie said. “That is, if you meat suits weren’t busy being blind, ignorant, and discriminatory against your non-kind and steadfastly refusing to notice us.”

  Drumlin edged a step away. “So … you’re a demon, then.”

  Guthrie seemed to find amusement in this line of inquiry. “Yeah … and if you get too close, I’m gonna eat your eyeballs too.”

  “Because … you’re a demon, and that’s what demons do?”

  “No, idiot,” Guthrie said, “because I’m a black lady, and that’s what black ladies do.”

  Drumlin let out a small snort of amusement. “Hmph. I’ve known black ladies, intimately in one case. Ain’t never seen one of them eat an eyeball. So I think that’s the demon in you talking.”

  Guthrie rolled her eyes. “Ain’t nothing in here but demon, idiot.”

  “How long are we going to blunder around looking for this kid?” This one came from Hendricks.

  “You scared, cowboy?” Erin stepped into the conversation.

  Hendricks just smiled, hat down and shadowing his eyes. “A little, yeah. Not that I don’t enjoy your company in the dark woods, Erin, but I get the feeling if we went for a moonlit stroll right now, we wouldn’t be alone for long, if you know what I mean.” Her face tightened up, but she didn’t interrupt him. “There are an awful lot o
f these things out here, lurking in the dark. Now I know everyone’s instinct here is to go charging in after this kid, and hey, I get that. First into danger, been there, done that. But given what this kid has run into … if we go out there and try to execute a normal search pattern, it means we’ve got to split up, or at least form a line with a gap of twenty to fifty feet between us, right? Then march in?”

  Reeve chewed the skin inside his cheek. “That’s usually how it’s done.”

  “Well, let me tell you a little something you already know about that sort of formation, in these woods, tonight—it’s a real good way to get a whole lot of us dead.” Hendricks’s voice was low, and dead earnest at last.

  “That cowboy’s not wrong,” Casey Meacham said.

  “Kind of a chickenshit,” Erin said tightly, “but … no. Probably not wrong.”

  “Hey, if you guys want to go marching in, I am right there with you,” Hendricks said, chucking a thumb over his shoulder. “I will be like—maybe five steps behind Erin, because like two guys and the bear, I only really need to outrun her, not those things, but—still, I’m with you.”

  “You cock face,” Erin said.

  “Sheriff?” Nate McMinn asked, stepping up next to him. “What should we do?”

  Reeve let out a low sigh. Hell if he hadn’t seen more of his damned constituents wiped out in the last couple weeks than any time in all his years in law enforcement—combined. But this kid … this Mack Wellstone …

  “First we lost his daddy,” Reeve said, “then, somehow, we lost his mom … and now …” He put a hand on his forehead and wiped at the thin sheen of sweat there. “Hell, I think these things done wiped out the whole family in one day.”

  “Not the first time that’s happened in this town lately,” Hendricks said, and he sounded a little huskier than usual.

  “Won’t be the last either,” Guthrie said, almost cheerfully.

  “Now you’re being a cock face,” Duncan said.

  “Unlike the cowboy, I haven’t had any cock in this face,” Guthrie said. “Trust me, I’d remember.”

  “We could rectify that real quick, if’n you got an interest,” Casey Meacham said, sidling up.

  Guthrie gave him a sour look. “You should stick to hookers, guy.”

  How had it come to this? Reeve wondered. Now he wasn’t just dealing with losing people here and there, piecemeal. That shit on the square had kicked off a whole new level of wrong in Midian.

  The apocalypse seemed to be getting closer all the time, but now it was taking more than baby steps forward.

  “Should we try again tomorrow?” Keith Drumlin asked. “Maybe in the daylight—”

  Reeve just shook his head. “I’m gonna issue an advisory: everyone needs to stay out of the woods until such time as we can clean these things out.” He started to bury his face in his hand again, then stopped when he realized showing despair wasn’t a real smart way to lead. “And we do need to sort them out, quick.”

  “Yeah, it’s hunting season, and my business is at stake,” Casey said. “If I don’t stuff some deer, I ain’t gonna be able to stuff Ms. Cherry, if you know what I mean.”

  “What a terrible tragedy,” Guthrie said with mock sympathy.

  “Hey, man, I don’t think you know how much money that injects into the local economy,” Casey said.

  “Please don’t tell us about your stimulus package,” Duncan said.

  “Heh,” Hendricks said, “he ‘injects’ it with his ‘package.’”

  “Yeah, that’s the joke, cowboy,” Duncan said. “Way to ruin it by shaking all the subtle out of it.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Drumlin said. “Yeah, that’s pretty funny.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Reeve said quietly. Somehow, everyone heard him, and they started to turn back toward the edge of the woods. Reeve stayed, staring into the darkness between the trees, listening for a hint of something—some sign that Mack Wellstone was still alive out there, hiding, maybe. “Mack!” he called one last time, and listened to the sound echo through the woods. But the only response he got was the sound of his compatriots shuffling through the dead leaves, and after a minute he turned and followed along behind them, feeling like he’d left a lot more than just that boy in the woods tonight.

  *

  Arch was looking over the abandoned car real carefully, wondering if a clue was sitting in plain sight, something he wasn’t noticing with just his usual police observation skills. He knew a few things, after all—that a man tugging at his pocket or his pants meant they could be holding a weapon in there, that if someone’s eyes were darting around furtively, they could well be lying. There were always little tells, things about human behavior that gave you away.

  But what could you deduce from a car sitting on the side of the road, airbags deployed and popped, and a little spot of blood on the steering wheel?

  Heck if he knew.

  “They hit the trap back there,” Arch said, trying to work it out in his head. Why was this so important to him? This particular thing, this part of the incident? They’d just been attacked by a solid several hundred cats from Hades. A kid was missing.

  Why was he fixating on this abandoned car?

  He looked around; even Barney and Tarley were off in the middle of the road, manning the defense, waiting to hear if someone shouted from the search party that was up in the woods. It had seemed too foolish to send everyone in, given what they knew was lurking out there.

  Why was he focusing on this?

  Because he was the only one who was paying attention to it. It was calling out to him, and him alone.

  “You say something, Arch?” Nate McMinn wandered over, hands on his hips, looking at the woods past him like they were going to burst open and deliver another herd of psychotic shadowcats any second. And in fairness, they just might do that very thing.

  “Working through something out loud,” Arch said, putting his head in through the car window. “She hit the trap back there—”

  “Wait, there’s a trap back there?” Nate asked.

  “Piece of plywood filled with roofing nails,” Arch said. “Can you think of any reason it’d be sitting in the middle of Faulkner Road?”

  “Piece of roof blew off a truck, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” Arch said. “You see much construction going on around here?”

  “Well, they’re building that new subdivision out on the south end of town,” Nate said. “But … I don’t reckon they’d be anywhere near here. Someone could be doing a new roof, hauling the junk to the dump … but that’s in the other direction … unless it’s one of the folks lives down here …”

  “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?” Arch asked.

  “There’s some … improbabilities, I guess,” Nate said.

  “A trap makes more sense,” Arch said, “but let’s assume you’re right for a second. One of the people down this road lost a piece of roof with a mess of nails in it. Either way, Ms. Wellstone and her boy hit it, right over there.” He gestured around the curve behind them. “They slide around the corner, come to a stop here.” He stood back up, careful not to bump his head on the car as he extricated himself. “Something happens. The son says she was attacked. Ms. Wellstone’s head got rammed into the wheel.”

  “You’re thinking demon,” Nate said. “A demon did it.”

  “Could be a human, I guess, but it hardly seems likely a human’s going to start stalking and killing people when we’re in the middle of a demon invasion,” Arch said. “Yeah, I’m thinking demon. And then they carted Ms. Wellstone away while her boy ran off in fright.”

  “Well, hopefully they find him—” Nate started to say, then turned his head to where the would-be rescuers were coming back out of the woods. “Oh. Well, that don’t look good.” He raised his voice. “Hey, Keith! What are y’all doing?”

  Keith Drumlin shook his head at McMinn. “We’re not going after him tonight. Too many of those things in the woods, we’d have to string out and make
ourselves tempting snacks for those hellcats.”

  “Well, damn,” Nate said. “That’s a shame. You reckon that boy will make it through the night out there?”

  Arch took a hard breath. Mack Wellstone had run right into those woods in the midst of that fight, and there were hundreds of those shadowcats out there, maybe thousands. They ran faster than a human, way, way faster, and Mack Wellstone probably wasn’t taking time to be quiet. It was an ugly conclusion, and it turned Arch’s stomach to come to it, but he reckoned that one was going to turn out to be a “like father, like son” sort of ending. “I don’t expect he’s still drawing breath even now, but if he is … he won’t be for long if he stays in those woods.”

  “Shit,” McMinn said. “Man, I knew things were bad after what happened on the square, but I didn’t see this demon cat thing coming. I mean, people we know being possessed and tearing shit up is crazy, right? But this is like a whole different level, you know? You can kinda … imagine something bad happening with people. People do terrible shit all the time, all over the world. But these things …? They defy explanation. Like every stray cat in the county got dipped in darkness and got big, and started killing shit.” McMinn shook his head. “A plague of them damned things just descended on us.”

  “Yeah,” Arch said idly, looking back down at the steering wheel with the spot of blood. How was it that McMinn was laying out a terrible scenario, a herd of those things, rampaging through the woods … and here he was, the only one wondering about this other mystery? A disappearing woman—why was that the thing that sparked his interest in all this?

  Well … he had just had a woman of his own vanish from his life …

  Arch shook that thought off. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said to McMinn, putting a hand on the car door. Everyone else was going to be focused on this other threat, these cats, and he’d be involved in the solution on that, whenever it came up. But this … he looked down at the blood spot again … Ms. Wellstone’s disappearance was all set to be one of the things that slipped through the cracks of Midian County’s justice system right now, and something about that he just couldn’t abide. I’m going to find who did this to you, he said to himself, not wanting to say it out loud and have McMinn question him about it. It was a faint thought so far, a little flicker of a flame, this desire to see justice done—on this, at least.