Dirty Deeds

by D V Wolfe

  “They will have to ingest the powerful flesh, just before the ritual to gain the benefit,” Hilda said.

  “A Festus communion plate,” I said to Noah. “That’s why they’ve been saving him. We have to get him out of there.”

  Hilda nodded. “Your friend is a demon.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” I said, waiting for her to challenge the idea of a demon friend. Hilda folded her hands.

  “Then we must plan,” Hilda said. I leaned back. She hadn’t batted an eye at the thought of rescuing a demon from cannibals. I shook my head.

  “It’s very nice of you to want to help us,” I said. “But it’s going to be pretty dangerous, even for...us.”

  “I’d say it’s more dangerous for the two of you,” Hilda said. “I know what I’m doing. You two...” She looked at my arm and then at Noah and shook her head. “Are amateurs at best. You’re lucky I have the time to go with you.”

  “The ground out there is very...uneven,” I started. “And the cannibals are fast, like a pack of wolves.”

  Hilda was nodding. “I think it’s best if we strike during daylight. Tomorrow. I have a few customers coming later today that I need to see. Come with me.” She pulled herself up by her cane and slowly moved around the table, back to the door.

  “We’re not actually going to take her with us, are we?” Noah asked quietly. “They’ll pulverize her.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe they’ll leave her alone, thinking her meat is too stringy.”

  Noah rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean. It would be suicide. Or...homicide for us to let her come with us.”

  Hilda poked her head back into the room. “You know I can hear you, right?”

  Noah and I followed her into the kitchen. “Sorry. We’re just worried about what the trip would do to...your health.” I said, trying to be as gentle as possible. I’d learned through talking with Rosetta that pointing out their age to someone is never acceptable, and when you’re forced to do it, you have to do it gently. Hilda stood to the side of the doorway, letting us proceed her into the kitchen. She swung her cane out as I passed and I felt it catch around an ankle and yank my foot out from under me. I bashed my head on her kitchen table and hit the floor. The dead bat flapped up to hit me in the mouth as I went down and I lay on the floor holding my head and swearing.

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” Hilda said. “Now sit down and I’ll get some materials for planning.” I crawled into the nearest chair and tried to spit the dust and microscopic bat fur out of my mouth. Noah was doing his best not to laugh and he looked like he was going to give himself a hernia. I turned my head to listen to her going down the hall, her windbreaker tracksuit swishing with every old lady step. Great. Now we get to take a granny to a gunfight. I doubted very much that the cannibals would just line up to get tripped by her cane.

  A minute later she was back, a handful of pens, pencils, and markers clutched in her free fist and a stack of spiral-bound notebooks tucked under her arm. She tossed them on the table. “My first appointment isn’t for another hour. Let’s get to work.”

  It was obvious that Hilda had been a hunter in her day, and like Rosetta, she’d found a way to turn what she knew from the job, into something she could use to help others. We set to work and Hilda would get up to go help a customer here and a customer there, while we drew diagrams of the trailer park and the roads leading to and from it. Noah input everything he’d seen when he’d been snatched and I filled in the details I knew from running around like a scared rabbit behind the trailers.

  “It’s a tall order for three people,” Hilda finally said, mid-afternoon. She pushed back from the table and rubbed her knee. “You don’t have more hunters you could call in to help?” she asked, looking at me. I felt a weight drop in my gut. Apparently not. A voice called from the front of the house and Hilda got to her feet. “That’s my last one for the day. His wife is banging a lifeguard at the pool. He thinks it’s because he doesn’t have enough hair. Hair tonics day in and day out. He’s starting to look like Bigfoot, but does he listen to me when I tell him to just dump the tramp? No.” She continued to mutter darkly as she left the room.

  “Can you try calling them all again?” Noah asked quietly. “Maybe there was something with the storm cutting off the calls?”

  I didn’t know how to tell him that they weren’t going to answer. I didn’t want to shatter his perceptions of Rosetta, Tags, and Stacks. I’d known them long enough to see when they had thrown the towel in on something, and not answering their phones meant that they were done with me. I wished, for the thousandth time that morning that I’d left Noah at Rosetta’s where he wouldn’t be collateral damage to them giving up on me. Just to appease him, I picked up my phone and ran through all my contacts again. Nothing.

  “Still nothing?” Noah asked, his face going pale again. I nodded. “What about Gabe?”

  “I tried him, no answer,” I said.

  “Do you think he’s…” Noah started. I held up a hand to stop Noah from finishing that thought. I couldn’t go there in my head right now.

  I was about to put my phone back on the table when it started vibrating and ringing in my hand. On instinct, I dropped it on the table’s surface.

  “Answer it!” Noah shouted.

  I snatched it up and flipped it open. “Bane!” It was Joel and I’d never been so happy to hear his surfer voice. “I got your message! I’m on my way to Sicily and I’m bringing back up. Just hang in there.”

  “Joel,” I sputtered, trying not to cry in relief. “We’re actually in Stevensville.” I gave him the address for The Night Phage. “How far out are you?”

  “Oh man, we’re booking but it’ll probably be early morning before we make it. That ok?”

  I nodded and then remembered he couldn’t see me. “That’s perfect. We’re planning to strike tomorrow morning.”

  “Radical,” Joel said. “I’ve got two more hunters in tow so put us down for a party of three, joining you all.”

  “Drive safe, the winds start getting really bad as soon as you cross the eastern Oklahoma border.”

  “Good to know. Hang in there buckaroo, help is on the way.”

  21

  I leaned forward and put my elbows on my knees. I was almost limp with relief. They were coming. Help was coming.

  “Good news?” Noah asked.

  I nodded. “Joel and two others are headed this way. They’re going to be here early tomorrow morning.”

  “So,” Noah picked up a pencil off the tabletop and started tapping it against the scarred wood. “Three more. That makes this ambush thing a little easier.”

  Hilda caned and swished her way back into the room. “Weather’s getting bad out there. That leader of theirs is casting some powerful protection around them.”

  “So it is some kind of protection,” I said.

  Hilda nodded. “Oh definitely. Of course, the universe demands a trade, in-kind, for this kind of atmospheric help. Somewhere, the tribe leader has stashed a powerful individual that he can control with the right spell. They’re trading blood and life force for this storm.”

  Noah looked at me. “Do you think it could be Sister Smile?”

  I was doubtful. “He beat her up and stuffed her in the trunk of a car. And she’s really old. How would she be able to manage something like…” I paused, seeing Hilda’s raised eyebrow. I cleared my throat. “We have some backup coming. Three more hunters. They’ll be here early in the morning.”

  Hilda nodded. “Couldn’t hurt. Now, I believe you two have some supplies to buy for this little plan of ours. Better figure in the back up before you go shopping though. Nothing worse than a couple of grown hunters fighting over a flamethrower.” She paused and grinned at me. “Make sure there’s enough to go around because I, sure as hell, ain’t sharing.”

  With the addition of Joel and two more hunters, we figured out we could change the plan to a pincher attack, sending three of us in from one direction and thr
ee from the other to corral and meet in the middle. Since we were striking in daylight, after two nights of reveling and before the ritual, I was pretty confident that there was a good chance a lot of the tribe would be passed out around the dying bonfire. The plan was for both teams to look for Festus on the way in and if they find him, free him, give him a weapon and keep closing in. Festus was the first priority, but once he was freed and we could protect him, we had to take down the tribe. And Mastick.

  “And Mastick is mine,” I said. A cold rage rolled over me, thinking of those three women, tied to boards, mercifully dead after being terrorized, raped, tortured, and killed.

  Noah shrugged. “I can’t guarantee in the heat of the moment that when I shoot him, I’ll be able to make myself a worse shot so I don’t put him down.” I gave myself a little shake and turned to look at Noah.

  “Well, you’ve got the ‘not being able to make yourself a worse shot’ part down,” I muttered. Noah glared at me, but I ignored him and stared at the hand-drawn maps we’d made. We’d drawn rectangles and colored them black to represent where the Town Cars and RVs had been parked, noting the modes of escape the cannibals would have. I stared down at the five cars that Noah had been sure of and the line of seven more behind them that were fuzzier on the page and in Noah’s memory. I wished Stacks was with us. He was a master when it came to disabling cars. I felt a sharp pain in my chest again. He wasn’t here. None of them were. I glanced at Noah who was bent over the page, making notes. Noah was here. He’d defied the other three, which couldn’t have been easy for him. He cared about them and he cared how they felt about him, but he came anyway. I took a deep breath. The fact was, Noah was here. And now Joel was coming and bringing help of his own. Joel’s voice came back to me, ‘hang in there buckaroo, help is on the way’. I closed my eyes and thanked whatever force was out there, for sending me Joel and his buddies. I hoped my karma wasn’t so bad that we all ended up getting ourselves killed.

  Noah and I hit the hardware store to get what we needed. We got some strange looks, but all the store workers were more preoccupied with the weather outside than the customers coming in and out of their doors. On our way out of the store, Noah was almost taken out by a runaway garbage can that was rolling across the parking lot. The winds were so bad that there was a constant red haze hanging in the air, darkening the day a lot faster than normal, as it blocked out the sun. The hail started again, just as we got back to Hilda’s. We’d hit KFC on the way back and the three of us spent the evening at her kitchen table going over the plan and eating fried chicken. Noah helped me assemble the flamethrowers and we did our best to test them in Hilda’s backyard. The storm was so strong now that as soon as we saw a burst of flame from each one of the flamethrowers, we packed it in.

  It wasn’t until I bent down to line the flamethrowers up near her front door that I remembered I had a dead bat around my neck. I had gone nose-deaf to the smell and I knew it looked ridiculous, but I hadn’t seen the Ashley townsfolk all day.

  “Hey,” I said to Hilda. “This thing must really be working.”

  Hilda smiled and patted my cheek. “Sometimes you hunters have your heads so far up your asses, it’s a marvel of science that you can still hold your guns.”

  “Well,” I said. “Some of us are more talented than others. What do I owe you for the…” I motioned down at the bat. What did you call a dead bat on a lanyard?

  Hilda shook her head. “Nothing you’re in a position to give. You can’t guarantee everyone’s safety tomorrow. At least now, you’ll only be fighting against what’s actually in front of you.” Hilda turned to look out the window at the dark sky outside. “Now, the sun is down, the day is going to be early tomorrow and we all need some shut-eye.”

  I stood up. “We should be heading back to the motel.”

  Hilda shook her head. “There’s no way I’ll hear you knocking that early in the morning. I take my hearing aids out when I bed down for the night. You two are staying here so you can wake me up when it’s time. I’m not going to miss out on the action.”

  I’d been afraid of this. Speaking of keeping everyone safe, keeping Hilda safe was going to be the hardest part. “Are you sure you want to…” I started.

  Hilda lifted her cane off the floor and held it in both hands like a baseball bat. “You don’t want to finish that sentence.”

  I held up my hands. “Ok, I yield.”

  Hilda set her cane back down and pointed to the front room. “Lock the front door. There are blankets and pillows under the window seat. Sleep good.” And she turned on her heel and headed back down the hall. Noah and I fought over who got the long couch. In the end, I let him have it and threw a pillow and blanket on the floor rather than try to squeeze onto Hilda’s Victorian loveseat.

  I waited until I could hear Noah’s soft snoring and then I picked up my cell phone and tried Gabe again. I tried not to cry in frustration when it went to voicemail and the same was repeated for Stacks, Tags, and Rosetta. “Please Rosetta,” I said to her voicemail. I could hear my voice warbling but I didn’t care. “I’m sorry. Just...please come. We need help. I don’t know if you need me to tell you that you were right, but I’m afraid we won’t make it out of this one without your help. And I don’t want to prove Walter’s vision was right.” I gave the details about the Blue Ridge trailer park in Sicily. The message beeped, letting me know I was out of time and I closed my phone, staring up at Hilda’s cob-web-covered ceiling. The winds outside howled and made the house shift on its eaves. Laying down, the dead bat inched its way up my chest to rest against my neck. I didn’t want to take it off and add seeing the burning citizens of Ashley to my current pity party. I moved it so the bat was hanging down my back, and I rolled over onto my side. I fell into an uneasy sleep, clutching my cell phone, and hoping that I didn’t get us all killed in the morning.

  There was a tapping on glass somewhere near my head that interrupted the howling winds enough to wake me. I peered up at the dark figure silhouetted in the window and I got to my feet, turning on a nearby lamp.

  Joel’s face was framed in the window, his blonde hair being whipped around in the gale outside. He was grinning, like always, his sunglasses barely managing to stay on his head. I unlocked the door and he hustled in. “It’s a lot breezier than I remember Oklahoma being. Though I guess I should have known better what with that musical talking about the ‘wind sweeping down the plains’.” Joel looked almost exactly as he had when we parted way in Sparta, just a few days ago. I’d forgotten little things about Joel since we had stopped being involved. For one thing, Joel was always clean and he always smelled clean as if he hopped into the washing machine every day, right along with his clothes. I didn’t know why this annoyed me but as I stood in front of him in my ripped up and stained jeans and a-shirt, with a dead bat hanging around my neck, watching him smile and do his surfer strut around the front room, the pieces started to fall into place. He paused and looked me up and down, his gaze finding the bat around my neck. “Nice...uh accessory.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “When are the other two hunters you were bringing, getting here?”

  “Oh,” Joel said, hurrying back to the window. "They're right behind me. They should be pulling up any moment.”

  I felt the abruptness in my question and I knew I’d been rude. Embarrassment rose in me and I could feel it like a phantom spatula-beating from Rosetta. “Joel, I can’t thank you enough for coming.”

  Joel nodded and grinned at me. “Anything for you, buckaroo. When a fellow hunter needs a hand, you lend it. It’s our way, isn’t it? Especially after the help you gave me in Sparta.”

  A flash of color moving under the flickering street lamp outside caught my eye and I turned to look out the front window. Joel followed my line of sight. “There they are.” It was a very familiar, yellow Jeep with monster truck tires. Vince and Mick. I sat down on the edge of the couch where Noah was still snoring away, dead to the world. Joel let them in and they almost ran him
over, coming in out of the storm.

  “Typical Bane,” Mick spat. “Of course, you never need help on a hunt in sunny Hawaii, where we can get a tan and cold drinks and stare at girls in bikinis all day. No, when you need help it’s always somewhere like eastern Oklahoma where you freeze your dingleberries off and then they blow away in a storm made of winds strong enough to tear the skin off your ass.”