Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Hey, maybe we could make a deal—” Pike started to say.

  Hendricks drew his 1911 and plugged Pike with it in the chest three times fast, three quick strokes of the trigger that caught that cunt of a County Administrator in the chest. He staggered back a couple of steps, but Hendricks didn’t let it rest like that.

  “The shit did you—” Pike wheezed.

  Hendricks caught up to him and drove the sword right into his belly where one of the rounds had already gone in, stabbing him straight through, holding the pistol to his neck as he did so. “The shit I did was kill your ass,” Hendricks said, staring him right in the eyes. It wasn’t the first time he’d killed a man up close, but it was the first time he’d done it with a sword. He pulled it out and plunged it right back in again, a little higher, right in the second bullet hole. He repeated it a third time with the last gunshot wound, covering his tracks by impaling the bastard hard, really moving the sword around in the wounds.

  Pike gagged, and blood came flooding out, running down his neatly shaven chin. The bureaucrat fell to his knees, his dress shirt completely sodden with red as Hendricks withdrew the sword and took a step back.

  “You … motherf—” Pike gasped, really trying to get it out, but the blood flowing out with the words. “Darla …” He gagged on his own bodily fluids.

  “That’s for Sheriff Reeve,” Hendricks said, and wiped his bloody sword right on the back of Pike’s shirt as he hung there, on his knees, upright for a second before he toppled over onto his face. “Oh, and just to be safe …”

  Hendricks raised a booted foot and brought it down on the back of Pike’s neck. The crunch of bone sealed it for him, but in case that wasn’t enough, he could smell it—the bastard had shit his pants.

  Hendricks circled around and checked, just to be sure.

  Pike was dead. His eyes were unfocused, staring at nothing in particular. Hendricks stooped just to look him in the eye. No breath. He touched the neck. No heartbeat.

  Yeah. That fucker was toast.

  Hendricks started to say something to Starling, but when he turned, she was already gone.

  “Figures,” he said, holstering the 1911. He made a quick sweep and picked up his shell casings, putting them in his pocket. He didn’t figure this would end up being a big deal, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of point in making this any easier if there was an investigation.

  Then he walked out, leaving Pike in a pool of his own blood.

  *

  Erin wanted to shift gears, not because she actually needed to—the Explorer was an automatic transmission—but for a FUCK YEAH! point of emphasis, because it would look cool if she did.

  Instead, she settled for planting her grill through a pack of shadowcats at sixty miles an hour. Even the recirculate feature couldn’t keep the stink of sulfur out of the car. Whew.

  “YEEEEHAWWW!” Father Nguyen shouted through the earpiece, really leaning into the redneck fun of this. She saw his truck go streaking by outside, just a massive thing, tires the size of her and replete with all these dirt-digging spikes. She thought about him prescribing penance in the confessional, something like, “Twenty Hail Marys, an Our Father, and, uh … you have to let me borrow your truck,” and was beset by a case of the giggles as about fifty shadowcats went poof! under his tires.

  “This is the shit!” McMinn shouted, zipping along beside her.

  “Don’t get too crazy,” Erin said. “Remember, if you flip your vehicle, they’ll tear your ass to pieces lickety split.”

  “If I had to go out, this is the fucking way to do it!” Casey shouted. His truck bounced over a rut to the side of her and landed on two shadowcats, turning them into nothingness.

  Erin looked out soberly as her little driving brigade—Holy-Armored Cavalry?—sped down into the hollow. “Keep an eye out for the quarry; it’s gotta be coming up soon. Ms. Cherry, get up on the right and try to steer them toward the middle—”

  “You want me to herd them?” She punched it left and spiked a couple cats, her Range Rover dirtier than she’d ever seen a shiny, pretty car like that. “Okay. I can do that.”

  “Casey, take the left,” Erin said, and she saw him cut in front of her wildly, wiping out a dozen cats with the sudden move. It was like the running of the bulls, and they were right in the middle of them. “If we miss this, they keep running free, and there has to be like … a hundred or more of them still.” She looked over the pack. They’d killed a lot of them, probably more than were left, but still … this was a sizable threat. Enough to kill another street, enough to kill the whole town.

  And damned sure enough to kill them if Erin wasn’t careful.

  They were spooked and scared, but she didn’t count on that to last. Casey was coming at them from the left, bopping one of them into making a shrieking noise when he hit it with his vehicle. It didn’t pop, which illustrated the flaw in her plan, because he’d caught it with a flat door panel, going sideways, not nearly fast enough to bust its shell.

  Now that they were running, matching speed, the only way to get them was to crush them with their holy tires or catch them with a sharp corner of the pronged ramming bar. Just hitting them with the bumper, flat and smooth as they were, wasn’t going to kill one of these fuckers.

  “Nate, Chauncey, Keith, Father Nguyen … take up position at the back of the herd. Keep ’em running,” she said, and gunned the pedal.

  “What are you going to do?” Nguyen asked.

  “Try something,” she said, surging forward as she watched the others move in behind her, creating a nice little herd box.

  She raced ahead, right up through the middle of them. She had to do it quick; couldn’t lay off the horses, because if she did, they’d just part for her.

  So she revved up to a hundred miles an hour and plowed through. Shadowcats hit the front of her car like they were a swarm of flies and she was a big swatter.

  “You look like you just wrecking balled them!” Casey shouted with glee as Erin tore through them, blasting out the front of the pack and into the lead. She didn’t slow down once she was through, either. The trees were thinned here, pretty near gone, leaving behind only the little traces of saplings, stumps and a sandy, rocky slope down into the hollow where the loggers had made a hell of a mess. The quarry had to be—

  There it was.

  They were heading into open ground, and Erin was leading the way, probably close to a quarter mile out front, and still charging ahead. She needed to be sure that there wasn’t anything blocking the quarry. The Alders weren’t the kind of people who’d waste their money putting up a fence, so far as she knew—probably embraced more of a Darwinian philosophy, even with their own kin—but the last thing she needed now was an obstacle in the way of their plan.

  She raced closer, and said, “It’s coming up. Tighten them into a formation. Get ’em herded. Once they’re in here, there’s no escape.”

  “Roger that,” Ms. Cherry said formally. Erin wondered where she’d picked that up.

  Erin shot into the quarry, which was a spiral road down into the deeper ground. It wasn’t a very big thing, not like miles across—more like a hundred yards or less. She followed the road down, down the curve, and found herself in the bottom. When she got there, sure enough, it was bone dry, rock and dust and the occasional near-dead cluster of weeds the only thing waiting.

  “Quarry’s clear to the bottom,” Erin said. “We’re good to go.” She gunned it again, spun the car around and started heading back up.

  “They’re coming in!” Casey shouted. “Watch yourself!”

  Erin would have sworn, but what was the point right now? This was what she’d wanted. Instead, she said, “Well, hot dog,” without a lot of enthusiasm.

  She revved the engine harder. She didn’t want to meet a shadowcat going twenty up this slope; if it merely hit her car without breaking its skin, it wasn’t exactly going to do a ton of damage to the damned thing. More likely the damage would be to the surface of the Ex
plorer at that speed.

  Erin pushed up the speedometer to sixty, seventy, on a tight curve, and she felt her heart jackhammer. This was what she’d done up on Mount Horeb just before she went flying over the edge. The mere thought made her hands close hard on the wheel, made her white-knuckle—

  They came flooding around her just as she drifted into the turn, the sound of the shadowcats slamming into her grill and poofing like a hard rain on the outside of the car, like the most hammering fucking storm she’d ever driven through. It was weird and intense, and she slid through it, tires catching, shadowcats catching hell, and little clouds of black appearing and disappearing in front of her grill as she killed the fucking things.

  She slid out of the curve as the last of them were clearing through. “Made it,” she muttered, almost triumphant, as she watched the last of them coming at her. All she had to do was make it through and they’d turn around, charge down and mop up—

  One of the last shadowcats leapt when it saw her steamroll their fellows. Its thin legs pinwheeled through the air as it flew toward her, slipping sideways in its comical last-minute stop and jump. It hit the windshield ass first and smashed through, showering her with beads of safety glass and sliding into the vehicle. It hit the cage at the back of the driver’s seat and burst right through, landing half its ass in the prisoner area in the back seat and the other half still sticking out at her.

  Erin couldn’t breathe for a second, staring out the wrecked windshield at the cars of her little pack ahead, at the entry to the quarry, waiting for her. She was almost there, but she’d let her foot off the Explorer’s pedal when the shadowcats came thick and heavy and she went into the turn.

  Now they all seemed impossibly far away. She was stuck out here, dim, frozen, a moment of peace before the panic hit.

  She was trapped in her car with a shadowcat.

  And then the damned thing howled, and started to struggle, the sound of the metal squealing as it fought against the only thing holding it back from tearing Erin to pieces.

  *

  Desperation practically dripped from Drake’s pores. The hunger. It ground at his essence, ate away at him. His throat was tight, his lips up against the skin of the human who’d followed him. His cutlets were steps away, just up the dark storm drain.

  Meat. Tender, delicious meat. This was what he wanted. What he strove for. Ached for. Craved.

  He was so hungry. All the time. It was beyond hunger now; it was an unquenchable voraciousness to feed. But every bite he took just made him crave more …

  More food, more flavor, more to satiate.

  He sniffed the human in police clothes, licked the skin, leaned back to take a bite—human tartare … maybe tasting it uncooked would soothe the cravings …

  *

  The shadowcat was going nuts next to Erin, wild with frenzied anger, shrieking louder than the speakers at any concert she’d ever been to, ripping through the cage in the back of the Explorer, writhing its front end trying to free its back end, black shadowy paws swiping left to right.

  “Fuck!” Erin scrambled for her seatbelt, trying to get loose. This was the shit she feared, the shit she’d had nightmares about ever since she’d gone off that cliff.

  She was going to die in a fucking car.

  The seatbelt whipped loose and Erin threw her back against the door. The shadowcat was lashing blind, trying to writhe itself free of where it was stuck in the metal cage barrier to the back seat. It looked like a meteor had struck the damned thing, a shadowcat meteor that just lodged there and sprung to life, pissed as hell about its current status. It lashed at her, and she missed getting ripped open by about a half inch.

  Where the fuck was her bat?

  Erin’s looked over the car, desperate. It clicked—passenger seat well.

  Her gaze flew to where the bat had been resting. It was gone, gone like—

  No.

  It was there, but it had fallen completely into the well, and there was a goddamned shadowcat between them. The cat was trapped ass-first, but those back claws weren’t fucking playing around, were they?

  Hell no. She caught one of them, she’d be hurting, maybe dying.

  “Erin!” someone shouted in her earpiece. It was a distant voice.

  Erin’s back was pressed against the door, the armrest punching right into the middle of her back. Her head was against the window, as far as it could go without starting to spiderweb the damned thing as she tried to force her way out. Or at least that was how it felt.

  “Get down there and finish these fucks,” she breathed into the open mic. “Don’t let ’em get away.”

  “What about y—”

  “I got this one,” she said, with a fiery confidence she damned sure didn’t feel.

  Then she ripped the earpiece out of her ear and fought to get to the door handle.

  She fell out backward when she found it, catching herself, shock running up her arms from where she landed on the dusty, rocky ground. She caught a rock in the elbow and didn’t give a fuck. The pain shot up her arm.

  She didn’t give a fuck about that, either.

  Erin kicked her legs, getting back to her feet. “I’m not fucking dying in a car,” she said, as Ms. Cherry flew by her on one side, her door missing by a neat few inches, stirring her uniform as she blew by. Erin broke into a run as soon as she was clear, hellcat shrieks and revving engines her soundtrack.

  She swept around the rear of the Explorer as the hellcat writhed within, wrenching its way free of its little prison. It’d get loose soon, that much was sure.

  Erin came around to the passenger door, hauled it open with a hard tug on the handle, and bent low, snatching up the bat—

  The cat broke loose just then in a squeal of metal as it hauled its ass out of the barrier and got the dashboard with a good swipe that ripped through plastic and metal, shattering the radio in the middle of the console.

  Its back paws landed on the seat and ripped through the cloth, shredding and tearing up pieces of white stuffing as it twisted, working its way toward her.

  Erin fell over backward, screaming pain radiating out from her tailbone as she lay there, bat in hand. The hellcat burst out of the car, getting traction at last like her coming out of a turn with the Explorer, and it leapt at her, those ebony jaws open wide and coming for her throat—

  She managed a wide swing around, like she was back in softball again. The barb-wire-wrapped bat caught the thing right in the side, and it burst in a black cloud that lasted only a second, then vanished into nothingness.

  She was left lying there on the quarry floor, rocks poking up in the back of her neck, against her back, for a second before she slapped a hand down and pushed herself up. On unsteady legs, she worked her way back to the driver’s seat, tossing the barbed wire bat right into the hole that the hellcat had made in the seat with its claws. It rested there, upright, braced against the busted dash, well enough for her purposes—which were to make sure she had a weapon handy in case she needed one again.

  Erin slipped the earpiece back in just in time to hear Casey say, “Fuck yeah!”

  “We got ’em on the run?” she asked, shifting the car back into drive. She took a slow breath. Cool fall air slid into the car from above, in through the windshield. She reached out and brushed some of the pebbled glass out of the way, dislodging the last chunk remaining on her side so she could see clearly.

  “Hell yeah, Erin,” Chauncey Watson said. “You make it through that okay?”

  “Me one, that sonofabitch zero,” she said, still breathing. She’d made it through all right—by the skin of her teeth. She never wanted to be that close to death again, but down there …

  She had a busted windshield. Another one could get wise and jump on up, and she’d be in even worse straits than before.

  She could wait here. Catch strays, maybe, if any came. It sounded like—engines roaring around the bend—they had it in hand. She could just chill, catch any that came, or—

&nb
sp; Fuck. No.

  Erin laid on the accelerator and heard the engine rev. It raced her pulse too, made her fear for a second that she was back in the old hell, flying over the cliff.

  But she wasn’t. This was something new. And her baggage—her high school years, her teenage boredom, her stupid drinking, the car crash, the guys she’d slept with, all the way up to that shithead Hendricks—none of that fucking mattered now.

  “Town before everything,” she said, under her breath, slewing the car around to face downhill. She let off just enough to let the wheels catch, and she was off, racing, down into the quarry to finish this with the rest of them.

  And she wouldn’t let up until they were done.

  *

  Arch was feeling fuzzy. Something was licking him, tasting him. It was so dark, his perception of things like a tunnel he’d slid into. He wanted to close his eyes, but something told him not to …

  Arch …

  Alison. It was like she was breathing in his ear again. Right there, close as life, his blond-locked angel. She brushed his skin, and he felt like he was on fire. Her kisses were like ice down the side of his cheek—

  Arch …

  Her voice was so soft, so sweet, and she nibbled at him. It was sharp, filled his senses, the daydream, the darkness, the pain eclipsing it all in a way that—

  Arch …!

  She wasn’t whispering anymore, she was shouting his name, in the distance, where he could just barely hear her. Something was closer—her breath was in his ear, her hands touching down his sides. Arch didn’t want to wake up, didn’t want to come out of this tunnel of darkness. She was right there with him, for the first time since—

  It all crashed in with a moment of clarity so profound it was like the Lord Himself did reach down and rip Arch’s eyes open and command him: “SEE.”

  There was a demon at his neck, foul sulfurous breath that he’d somehow mistaken for Alison in his delirium. His head ached fiercely, it was so dark, bands of light coming from the distance to either side, spare, lower than twilight, and his skin crawled like bugs were everywhere on him.