Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  Arch outpaced Hendricks again, and as he passed him, Hendricks said, “You think you can outrun a bear?” between puffing breaths.

  Arch didn’t laugh, but he did feel a faint smile pop up in spite of everything going on now, and everything that was weighing on his mind. It was the setup to a joke that he actually did know, because it was clean. “I don’t have to outrun the bear,” he said. “I just have to outrun you.”

  “Bravo,” Hendricks said as they reached the tree line and Duncan grabbed them both, yanking them behind a bush and to the ground.

  “Shhhhh,” the demon said, applying his weight to the backs of both.

  Arch wasn’t out of breath, but Hendricks was puffing a little. He got it under control fast, like he was holding it in fear of being heard. They all sat there, Duncan on top of both of them, staring back the way they’d come. The house they’d just escaped was already puffing smoke, the fire sloth having done his thing. The snapping of wood carried to them loud on the wind. The fire sloth was fighting his way through a house that was collapsing under his weight, the rear studs already buckled and fallen. The sound of the lumber breaking under its weight was quite fearsome, and Arch listened as though his very life depended upon it.

  The fire sloth poked its head out of the timbers of the fallen house, writhing to get its shoulders free. It screamed, burning up the splintered beams trapping it and provoking more to fall. It was like watching a hairy, angry, demon baby being born from the rear of a fallen house.

  “And now,” Duncan whispered, “we wait.” He lay upon them as though trying to protect them from outward attack.

  “Uh huh,” Hendricks muttered. “While I got you here, Duncan … is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just happy to be lying on top of us?” Arch stifled a giggle, and it felt … strange. He couldn’t see the cowboy’s face, but he knew that son of a gun was grinning. What a time to try and make them cut up laughing. But it almost worked, because Arch had to bury his face in the dirt in order to keep from chuckling out loud.

  The screams of the fire sloth extracting himself from the fallen house grew louder and more frantic as they waited to see if he would pick up their trail.

  *

  “You don’t look so good, Nick,” Mary pronounced as they rattled along behind Erin’s cruiser. Reeve’s foot was glued to the pedal, partly because he needed, needed, needed to get out to Whistling Pines fast to deal with this situation and—based on Reeve’s prior experience—save Hendricks’s and Arch’s asses. The other reason was so he didn’t take his foot off, lift it over the center console, and give that annoying old bitch Mary Wrightson a good kick out the door while the car was in motion.

  “Oh, yeah?” Reeve ground out.

  “You’re looking haggard,” she said.

  “Like Merle, I hope,” Reeve said. “I always liked him.”

  “You’re looking like something the cat dragged in,” Mary said. “On his ass. Through a briar patch. And some nettles too, maybe—”

  “Thank you.”

  “I just can’t believe Donna let you get to this state,” Mary said, shaking her head sadly. “If my Larry walked out the door in this state, I would whop him upside the head for disgracing our family.”

  “You don’t think he looked like hell that time you creased his damned skull?” Reeve asked. He felt agitated and combative, and not really in the sort of mood required to admit that his wife was dead. He’d rather argue with Mary Wrightson than, God forbid, receive her pity.

  Mary seemed to think that over. “You know, you got a point there, but … he was needing it.”

  “Don’t we all, sooner or later,” Reeve said, intending to clam up and let her sit in silence. Instead, somehow, the words sprang out of his lips: “Donna’s dead, Mary. Died two weeks ago.” When Mary didn’t say anything, he felt compelled to add, “Demons got her,” for some reason.

  “Well, Jesus, Nick,” Mary said. “You got every reason to look like hell then, I guess—if you want to be one of them goddamned millennial children that wear their emotions on their sleeves.” He looked over at her. “You and I come from a different generation. These kids nowadays may go ejaculating their emotions everywhere like in those movies my Larry used to watch when he thought I wasn’t around, but we don’t do that shit. We were the types that lived through ’Nam and Korea and World War II, and you could take a bullet to the leg, and you’d just grin and say, ‘Nope, I’m fine.’”

  Reeve wasn’t sure how to take that, but after a moment he chortled. “You got a point there, Mary,” he said. “And I ain’t gonna tell you about my feelings—”

  “Good, cuz I didn’t fucking ask.”

  “—but I will say, while you were—off on your property doing whatever the hell it is you do to fill your days—”

  “Well, I got a garden, Nick.”

  “It’s fall.”

  “And I got my programs.”

  “Soap operas?”

  “And my boy Gary stops out every once in a blue moon. You know him, right? He’s the one in the wheelchair?”

  Oh, Reeve knew Gary Wrightson. Everyone did. “I do indeed. Anyway, my point is, while you’re checked out from town life—”

  “Politics around here are always the same bullshit, and the same bullshit people. I bet Keith Drumlin is bitching about something somebody did to his house, just like his daddy used to do—”

  “Yeah, I think Nate McMinn took a shit on his front porch or something, but—I dunno, they ain’t complaining much lately. They’re both in the Watch.” Reeve quieted for a moment. “Keith lost his family here recently.”

  “Well, shit.” Mary only waited a beat. “‘In the watch’ what?”

  It took Reeve a second to get what she was asking. “The Watch. It’s what we call the group that deals with these demon problems.”

  Mary wrinkled her nose. “That’s a dumbass name. What dumbass came up with it?”

  “That cowboy, I think?” Reeve racked his brain. He really didn’t know; they’d called it that since he’d been onboard.

  Mary nodded. “There’s a motherfucker who’s got a finely apportioned sense of the dramatic. Look at that coat. You ever seen anyone in a getup like that outside of Montana?”

  “Reckon I haven’t.”

  “Hmph.” A few moments of silence proceeded. “Well, I won’t ask you how you’re feeling, Nick, because that ain’t my bailiwick. But I will ask—how are you doing?”

  “I won’t tell you how I’m feeling then, Mary,” he said, “but I will say I got a goddamned headache, and I feel like that thing the cat dragged in through the briars and the nettles. Except I’m too tired to want to scratch the itches. It ain’t the kind of sleepy tired, either.” He felt it now, keeping the car around seventy on this road, barreling along behind Erin. “It’s the soul-deep kind, the kind that you fall into bed at night and wonder how you’ll ever sleep. But sleep comes for you, sooner or later, in that … that morass of thoughts—”

  “You’re getting dangerously close to talking about feelings, here. I might have to pop this door and jump on out if you do.”

  “That ain’t much of a threat to me, to be real honest.”

  “Oh fuck you. I’m a delight.”

  “I got a task,” Reeve said, hunching his shoulders. They felt tighter than hell. “Got a job to do. It keeps me going.”

  “That’s good,” Mary said, a little quieter. “Men who don’t have work to do, well—they tend to die real quick.”

  Reeve let out a laugh, and he felt that all the way to his toes too, over that soul-weariness. “I reckon I’ll hold on for another hundred years, then—or at least ’til this demon business is over.” His face tightened. “Unless one of them eats me first. And I don’t rule that out.”

  “Eat you? I reckon it’d find you so ornery it’d spit your ass right out,” Mary said definitely, like that settled the subject. Reeve chortled, because what else was there to say on the matter? He didn’t have anything, and his head w
as already shifting out of this short interruption—back to what was waiting for them at Whistling Pines.

  *

  The smoke whirled faintly up out of the joint as Brian held it in his fingers, keeping in the hard hit he’d just taken. His lungs felt like they were going to explode, he’d held his breath so long, trying to get the alveoli to take as much of the sweet THC into his bloodstream as possible. When he couldn’t hold it any longer he let out his breath and coughed slightly. Like a fucking rookie.

  He hated to be picky, especially since this was the first weed he’d had in weeks, but goddamn. “Where did you get this ditchweed, Casey?” he asked, looking over at the taxidermist as he proffered the joint. They were sitting on Casey’s tailgate in the middle of the quarry, not a fucking soul in sight.

  “I ain’t exactly a connoisseur of marijuana, you know,” Casey said, picking it out of his fingertips gingerly, eyeing it like it was going to explode in his hand, and finally pressing it to his lips. He took a half-hearted hit, coughed, and then handed it back. “Pussy, ass, mouth—those are my drug of choice. Everybody knows it. You can keep this inhalable shit; I feel like I’m going to die every time I try it.” Casey puckered his lips, rubbing his tongue in and out of his mouth, like he could scrub the taste out. He fell silent for a beat, then asked, “Brian … why ain’t you smoked lately?”

  “I gave it up for Lent.”

  “It’s November.”

  “Been a long time then.”

  Casey snickered. “I doubt you been going that long.”

  “No, you’re right.” Brian took another hit, enjoying the natural conversational pause it offered. Casey didn’t interrupt his moment of bliss. He let it out and enjoyed the sensation of his head feeling a little floaty. “It hasn’t been that long. Since … whenever that destroyer thing came ripping through town. That was probably the last time, that night.”

  “A few weeks then,” Casey said, then let out a low whistle. “I don’t know if I could do celibacy that long, to tell you the truth. I like to get my dick wet two, three times a day.”

  Brian stared at him through the drifting smoke. “That’s gotta be an expensive habit, if you’re always going to Miss Cherry.”

  “I don’t always go to Miss Cherry,” he said, lowering his voice. “There’s places around town—women, you know—”

  “And Gus Terkel, apparently.”

  “Oh, there’s more than Gus Terkel,” Casey said with a gleam in his eye. “It’s out there to be had, is the point. People wanting to be … intimate with people. Miss Cherry, she’s a treat though. Most people are amateurs. Some gifted, some not so much. A few I think—well, I know it might be pity, but I’m okay with that. Pity ass is better than no ass.”

  “I think one of the great philosophers said something similar.”

  A goofy grin spread across Casey’s face. “Really?”

  “No, probably not.”

  “Bummer.” He deflated a little. “But you know … sex is life. People want it. Even the people you wouldn’t expect. Maybe mostly the people you wouldn’t expect … it’s such a buttoned-up affair—”

  “Not literally, I assume.”

  Casey ignored him. “—we get so hung up about it, you know? Dudes, on average, got a drive to get fucked or get to releasing their seed at least once a day, most of us. It’s a biological imperative. Women? Ehhh, on average, less so. Don’t get me wrong—there are some women who will match the horniest sailor fuck for fuck, and lick for lick—but on average, I’m saying, most women—they just ain’t got the carnal urge like the average man. We’re different. We used to realize that. Hell, a thousand billion jokes sprung out of it. We don’t talk about that much anymore, probably because of this ‘equality’ push.”

  Brian raised an eyebrow. “You think people being equal is a bad thing?”

  Casey flushed. “No. No, I’m just saying that equal in law and life and whatever else, that’s fine, but we still ain’t built the same. Equal is one thing—someone can have the same chance as me to do whatever, and that’s cool; same is another thing entirely. Men ain’t all packing the same size cock, you know. Women ain’t all receiving an equal distribution of bosoms from birth—though doctors are doing some fine work in this area, the field of tit equality.”

  Brian snorted, flubbing just as he was about to take a hit. “‘The field of tit equality.’ That’s good.” He coughed. “I mean, uh … that’s … really inappropriate and objectifies women.”

  Casey just shrugged it off. “I don’t mean to. I see women as women, and I ain’t never been with a woman who didn’t want to be with me. I don’t like to go where I’m unwanted, personally. I want someone who’s into it, or at least acting like it.” He went quiet for a second. “My point is … I need it more than most, and I know that. Because it’s my—my thang. My solace.” He looked right at Brian. “I wish everybody felt that way. I wish every woman needed it as much as I do. Or maybe that I found just one who really did. My point is … you got a lot of … stuff in your head. In your heart. Lots happened. So … why not just smoke out before now?”

  Brian coughed lightly on his exhale. “Because my dad never approved, you know.” He stared at the floor of the quarry beneath their dangling feet. “He didn’t say much about it. Snide remark every now and again when I was blazing up in the basement every day. But since I started doing this, well …” Brian sniffed, the rich marijuana smoke wafting into his nostrils. It stank, he knew it, but it still felt like … home, strangely. Sweet, even though it wasn’t at all. “I don’t want to say he was proud of me, because for all I know, he wasn’t. But to start this up again … it feels …” He stared forlornly at the joint. “Well, a little like I’m betraying him.”

  Casey just stared at him for a second, and then reached up and slapped Brian across the back of the head so fast that he didn’t even have a chance to react. He dropped the joint against the hard stone quarry floor and blanched. It didn’t hurt too bad, but it stung, and Brian’s jaw fell open as he reacted to the sudden stimulus of a whack to the back of the skull. “What the fuck?”

  “Sorry,” Casey said, nonchalant, like he hadn’t just physically assaulted Brian. “I heard dumbassery and I had to deal with the dumbassery. My bad.”

  Brian held his hand over the back of his head like it could protect him from the slap that had already been delivered. “How is that dealing with it?”

  “So you admit it was dumbassery?”

  “I was telling you how I feel,” Brian said, nursing the sting from the slap. It smarted. “You can’t just—whack it out of me.”

  “I whack out bad feelings all the time,” Casey said, making a motion like he was stroking an invisible dick from his lap. “Literally. You know when you cum, it sends a shot of endorphins in your brain. Changes your mood, because mood is just a chemical thing, you know?”

  “Yeah, I guess I knew that,” Brian said, finally starting to withdraw his hand from the back of his head.

  “Slapping you in the back of the head changed your mood, am I right?” Casey chuckled. “You get hit, that releases chemicals too. Pain receptors fire up. Mood, feelings—they’re all just chemistry in your brain.”

  “What the fuck does this have to do with slapping me?”

  “Getting high changes your brain chemistry too,” Casey said. “Lightens your mood. And right now, under the influence of grief and all the shit feelings that brings—you need to lighten your brain chemistry. You think your dad would be mad about that? That you’re soldiering on over his lamed body? Shit. If he was really your daddy, he’d want you to be happy as you could be given what’s happened. And he’d want you to keep going. And if that meant changing your brain chemistry through a little pot, you think he’d give a shit? If he didn’t stop you from doing it when you were just sitting on your ass in the basement doing jack shit, you really thing he’d be pissed if you elevate your mood out of the dumps while you’re going through this crap pile? Hell, I bet he wouldn’t even gi
ve a damn if you took a beej from a dude like me right now.” Casey arched his eyebrows.

  “Maybe,” Brian said, then quickly added, “Let’s not test that assumption though.” He felt compelled to add further explanation. “You’re kinda … awesome and all, Casey, but you just slapped me and it stung, and I don’t want you to take that sting away by—uhhh, whatever means you’re considering.”

  “It’s called a blowjob, stupid ass,” Casey said, “and that’s fine if you’re too homophobic to accept one from me.”

  “Hey, I’m not h—”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine, I get it,” Casey said, his feathers all ruffled. “You can take the small-town boy off to a fancy college, but you can’t erase the small-town thinking—”

  “What? I am so open-minded—I have no—I mean, I have supported—”

  “These are all just pretty words from your pretty mouth. Get right down to it and you feel the same as—”

  “Jesus! I’m not gay, Casey! I’m not homophobic; I’m just not into … dicks … in my orifices.”

  “Uh huh, sure. I can see the hate of me in your eyes.” Casey snorted laughter. “Hehehehe. That was fun. Seriously, though, I’d blow you. We could talk reciprocity later, maybe after two, three times, once you got a little more comfortable—”

  “Please,” Brian said, holding up a hand and stooping to retrieve the joint. “I’m not—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m just yanking your crank cuz you won’t let me yank your cock,” Casey said. “I get it. You ain’t feeling it. And this ain’t exactly my first time being told no, I expect you realize. But back to the topic at hand—you think your daddy would be mad at you for taking a break and doing whatever it took to get over the shit in your head, in your heart—and get back to work? We ain’t machines, man. And that brain chemistry I was talking about? It’s hard to make things happen when it’s stacked against you. You end up with real problems,” he said, soberly, “serious ones. Like the inability to maintain an erection.”