The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  “What am I?” Santiago asked, reeling around the cellar. He found a tall red tool chest and jerked drawers open, rummaging through tools. The third drawer had a pair of pliers in it. Santi used it to grip one of his demonic-looking fingernail-hooks and pulled.

  Pain shot up his finger. He cried out.

  “That goddamn Enfield.” Urine made a dark stain on the front of Gil’s Wranglers. “It’s doin’ something to you, kid. Got the damn devil in it, maybe. Got its claws in you.”

  “Got the devil in it?” said Santi, throwing the pliers at him.

  Gil flinched; the pliers went wide.

  “Do you know how stupid that sounds?” Santi paced. His own voice sounded exhausted, bewitched.

  “Yeah, yeah, it sounds stupid, yeah.”

  Scrrrrratch. Santi pulled open a drawer and found a pair of scissors. “It’s that bitch,” he grumbled, cutting off the strange hair growing out of his arms in a horrified frenzy. Locks of Creamsicle-colored hair littered the floor. “She’s doing this to me, you know? My nerves. She’s got me so stressed out, I’m losing my mind, Gil. I’m seeing shit.” Tears spilled down his cheeks, mingling with the blood to make red tracks. The words were almost sobs. “Got laid off, man. Laid off. I’m fuckin’ broke. My daughter hates me. She turned my little girl against me. What am I gonna do?”

  “We’ll figure s-something out.” Gil was in full-on negotiator mode, hands up, speaking in an ingratiating tone. “I know you don’t like it, and I don’t either, but, hey, maybe we can get Bobby back out here and we can push again. Move some product east, for a little while. Just to get you back on your feet—”

  Santiago rounded on him with the scissors. “Told you I wasn’t goin’ back to that shit. I don’t want my daughter anywhere near it. Heroin, cocaine, meth, I don’t—I don’t want her near that. I’m done. I told you.” Then, as he paced around the basement, he seemed to come out of a trance. “My daughter.” His beastly face darkened. “What are they driving?”

  “Driving?” asked Gil.

  “The people that took my family,” Santiago snarled, and went at him. Gil yelped and stumbled back; Santi caught him by the throat and pinned him to the wall again. He held the scissors against Gil’s cheek, pointed at his eye. “What are they driving?”

  “A-a-a wuh, a Winnebago,” stuttered Gil. “Shitty old brown Winnebago. Looks like an ice cream truck.”

  Standing there holding the scissors to Gil’s face, Santiago just breathed. He finally spoke again. The first several words were muddled because his lips were dry and stuck together. “How d’you like being president, Guillermo? Noticed you don’t wear the rank patch on your vest anymore. You ashamed of being president of Los Cambiantes?”

  Gil glanced down at where his PRESIDENT tab used to be and shook his head. The scissors poked a dot of blood out of his cheek. “No, not at all. It’s just a, a security th—”

  Hooking Gil’s glasses off with the scissors, Santiago tossed them aside. “High time you retired, grandpa. Been thinking I’d make a pretty good president. What you think? I’ll give road captain to Maximo. Max’ll make a great rocap.”

  Do you remember, El Tigre? Do you remember the night?

  “Sounds g-good to me,” Gil smiled nervously. Tears rolled down his face. “M-maybe I’ll even move out to the beach. Get out of you guys’ way. Yeah, I think I like that.” The soon-to-be-former president of the Los Cambiantes still had his hands up in surrender. Santiago braced Gil’s wrist against the pegboard and slammed the blades into the palm of his hand, nailing him to the wall with a scissor stigmata.

  I remember.

  * * *

  Noises came out of that cellar like Maximo had never heard outside of a horror movie. Screaming, growling, crushing, rending, tearing, splattering. The Mexican Mountain winced, his eyes cutting over to Tuco. Slimy bastard stood there with a placid, lizard-like expression on his face, eyes inscrutable behind his Kadeem Hardison flip-shades.

  Five or six men stared at the doorway with cold anxiety. “What the hell is going on in there?” one of them asked.

  He was answered by the sight of Santiago Valenzuela coming out of the cellar. Their road captain was plastered in gore, his hair stringy and lank. Gobbets of flesh speckled his shirt, and his teeth—normal, chisel-edged human teeth instead of the pointy goblin teeth he’d had a few minutes ago—were stained red. He looked like a pot of marinara had exploded in his face.

  “Congratulations,” said Santi, clapping Maximo on the shoulder. “You just got a promotion.” He ripped the Velcro ROAD CAPTAIN tab off of his vest and affixed it to Maximo’s. “Enough of this goat-rope. Let’s roll out.”

  Maximo looked down at his new rank tab (noticing the bloody handprint Santiago left on his shirt) and then up at Tuco’s easy reptilian grin.

  “Congrats, big guy,” said Tuco, and he followed after their new president.

  Maximo watched them all funnel out of the foreclosed property in a loose crowd of dazed, fearful expressions. Faces of men who had been dragged into a strange but not wholly unwelcome darkness.

  On legs that didn’t feel like his own, Max wandered into the cellar and into the green stink of deep shit.

  Hanging from a scissor plunged through one hand was a mauled corpse. The marionette that used to be Gil was unrecognizable. His face—and hell, the front of his skull—was gone, leaving nothing but the bottom rim of teeth and a pulped cavity. His sinuses were a pink pit under the white cauliflower of his ripped brain. His throat was torn out and so were his guts, intestines draping over his lap in wet gray loops.

  Max stared at the dead man, his hands trembling. Nothing ever made this behemoth shake.

  He wasn’t disturbed so much by the fact that he was looking at a mangled dead guy. Wasn’t the first time he’d seen one. Neither was it that one of his closest and oldest friends apparently ate the parts that weren’t here. Yeah, that’s messed up, he admitted, but when he looked at the corpse, it felt as if his brain was packed in a box of Styrofoam peanuts, insulated from the enormity of the tableau in front of him. He could feel the terror and disgust, but it was outside of him, like looking out at a burning-hot sun from inside an air-conditioned house. Something had put down a wall between him and reality, it seemed like—something wanted him divorced from what he saw, what he did.

  An invisible thought-finger dragged a jagged nail down the inside of his skull.

  Ay, Boo-Boo! I see a pic-a-nic basket!

  One eye twitched.

  No. Max tracked bloody boot-prints back into the sunshine. Part that disturbs me, he thought, as he stumbled across the crunchy grass, is that it’s makin me fuckin’ hungry.

  SIDE B

  I Am the Fire

  Track 14

  From time to time, a faint Tibetan-singing-bowl drone emanated from the bedroom: Gendreau’s magic fingers, dutifully sealing Kenway’s gunshot wound. Doc G had gotten the big vet stabilized a little while back; Robin wasn’t sure when. Could have been ten minutes before; it could have been half an hour. When you’re on pins and needles like this, every minute feels like a day.

  All she could do was sit still and wait for the all-clear, trying not to glare at the kid. Robin and Carly sat in the breakfast nook, the sawed-off shotgun on the table between them like Spin the Bottle. The RV’s radio belted out some scratchy classic rock. Bad Company. Six-gun sound is our claim to fame.

  “Sorry I dragged you into this.” Carly touched the shotgun with tentative fingertips. “It was my idea to hide in here.”

  Robin grunted.

  “So, is it true?” she asked. “You really kill witches, for real?”

  “Yes.”

  More uncomfortable silence.

  “How many?”

  “Too many. Not enough.” She was covered in scars, but it didn’t seem like the time to tell stories.

  Prying herself out of the nook, Robin finally realized that her hands were bloody and so was her shirt. She pulled it off and deposited it into the garbage,
then washed her hands in the kitchen sink. Her bra smelled like hot-dog water. She changed into a fresh one and a black My Favorite Murder T-shirt.

  When she sat back down, Carly said, “You throwing that bloody shirt away made me think of something.”

  Robin stared expectantly.

  “Couple of months ago,” Carly continued, “a mountain lion got into Keyhole Hills for a while and it was, like, tearing peoples’ garbage open until Animal Control came out from Lockwood. Took it out east or something. Anyway, I was heading to school one morning and it, like, tore open our garbage and pulled it all over the yard. That really pissed Dad off, but Mom and me picked it all up before he got home, so it wasn’t that bad. But I found something in the garbage when we were picking it up that I put in my bag before Mom could see it.”

  “A bloody shirt?”

  “Yeah. And bloody jeans.”

  “Well, your dad is an outlaw biker.” Robin stared out the window at the evening. The sun was a giant doubloon in a dusky indigo swell, chewed at the bottom by a sawband of black desert hills. Stars dusted a glittering arc overhead. “I would imagine he comes home with blood on his clothes once in a while.”

  Evident by the quietly stricken expression on her face, Carly hated to think about that. “Yeah, but … not like this.” She mimed pulling something apart. “Those clothes were, like, ripped to pieces. Like the Incredible Hulk tore ’em up. The butt was blown out, the legs were split, the button was gone, the fly was broken. The shirt was completely messed up. They were, like, just rags, you know?”

  Robin’s nail polish stood at the back end of the table with a dirty coffee mug, a newspaper’s comics section, and a bottle of ketchup. She picked it up. Vampire Red, a deep bloody mahogany. Wasn’t black, but it might as well have been. She went back to painting her nails, as she’d been doing when Marina so unceremoniously surprised her by falling out of the shower.

  “So, where did you learn those moves?” asked Carly. “Like, when you punched Wacky in the face.”

  Wacky Joaquin. Robin scoffed.

  “My old boss, Heinrich, taught me. Said it would come in handy, fighting familiars.”

  “Familiars?”

  “Witches can sacrifice housecats and ‘send’ their souls into people, turning them into feral maniacs. Basically, they turn into the zombies from that movie 28 Days Later, except if you leave them alone for a while, they’ll start licking their nuts.”

  “Wow,” said Carly. “All this time, I thought your videos were fake.”

  “Nope. But that’s the point.”

  Bad Company became Kansas. Carry on, my wayward son. Robin finished repainting her left hand’s nails and held it up to assess them. “I imagine those bloody clothes you saw have something to do with what Gil said about seeing your father in the woods.”

  “The animal masks?”

  “I don’t think they were wearing masks.”

  Strained horror cast a shadow over Carly’s face. “You mean … their heads changed? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “More than that changed.” Robin blew on her nails. “Seen a witch turn into a one-ton hog monster with her tits hanging on the ground. Saw another one climb across a ceiling and through a hole the size of a baseball.”

  “Like werewolves?” Carly asked, incredulous. “Are you saying my dad and his friends are werewolves?”

  “Werewolves don’t exist.”

  “Then what the hell is happening?”

  “I think it’s a relic of Ereshkigal turning them into something else with the Gift of Transfiguration.”

  Carly gave her a dumbfounded look.

  “Witches derive their powers from a tumor inside their bodies called a ‘teratoma.’ When a witch-hunter kills a witch, a specialist called an Origo is able to extract this teratoma from the witch’s body and use it to craft a magical weapon.” As she continued on to explain relics, she quietly offered Carly the nail brush. Perhaps if she could occupy her mind with something as mundane as painting someone’s nails, she might calm down. With practiced strokes that looked better than Robin’s splotchy mess, the teenager took her right hand and proceeded to do just that. “Witches were created by an ancient death-goddess named Ereshkigal. Ever since she was banished to the afterlife, she’s been trying to resurrect herself here on Earth through our bodies. Teratomas are usually made of hair, or bone, and sometimes you’ll find a whole body part in there like a finger or an eyeball. That’s a part of Ereshkigal’s body. We’re all doorways that she’s continuously trying to come through.”

  “My dad has one of these, these … relics?”

  “I believe so.” Robin blew on her nails again. “Does your dad have any family heirlooms? Anything around the house he’s really attached to?”

  The girl swallowed. The polish brush trembled in the air just above Robin’s finger. “He does, actually. He bought a bike a couple of years ago at a police auction. Calls it La Reina.”

  “Lorena?”

  “No, La Reina—the Queen.” She started painting again, and Robin could feel her gathering up more words. “Sometimes, he looks at it funny, like when I make a weird noise at Mr. Delgado’s dog and it turns its head sideways.”

  Got to be it, Robin thought, blowing on her fingers. She let Carly finish painting her nails. A soothing, meditative task, and it went a long way toward calming them both down. Never seen a relic that big. Wonder where the teratoma is?

  While her nails dried, she stepped into the bedroom to check on Kenway and talk to Gendreau.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Just in time, Miss Martine.” The curandero brushed sweat away from his forehead with his arm, leaving a smear of blood. “Help me roll him over so I can get to the bullet in his back.” The gunshot wound looked like it had been cauterized with fire-heated steel wool; whorls of angry red flesh marked the place where the quarter-sized entry hole had been.

  “Shit on me! Goddamn!” cried Kenway. “Can’t we just leave it in? Pretty please?”

  “Could get infected. Or travel into a vital organ. Pretty close to one of your kidneys as it is, and as far away from a hospital as we are, we could do without renal failure, friendo. That’s something I can’t necessarily treat.”

  The vet sighed. “All right, all right.”

  He raised himself up onto his elbows with a wince. Gendreau grabbed the leg of Kenway’s shorts and hooked a hand under his arm. “You take his hand and pull him, and I’ll push. One, two, three,” Gendreau chanted, and they flipped him over.

  “Aaarrrggh,” Kenway groaned into one of the rare patches of duvet not soaked in blood.

  “There it is.” A smudge halfway up Kenway’s back, so faint it could have been a trick of the light. Gendreau’s eyes slipped closed, and his head tipped back. “Right there, about three inches deep. Carried a chip of bone from his pelvis along with it.” Massaging the area with light, graceful movements, the magician muttered under his breath. The skin underneath his hands grew paler and took on a waxy cast.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Closing off blood to the area so I can cut into it and take out the bullet.” Gendreau pointed at his satchel. “Nurse, could you get me a scalpel out of my bag and sterilize it for me with that bottle of alcohol? And those forceps, too?” Robin dug out a scalpel and wiped the tools down. The magician took the scalpel in one hand as one would hold an ink pen and braced his other hand against the skin. As the blade pressed in, the skin split cleanly open like a sausage casing. No blood spilled out, but the tissue inside was a dainty salmon-pink.

  “Ah, ssssssshhhit,” Kenway complained into the duvet.

  “Be even worse if I hadn’t deadened your nerves when I closed off the blood vessels. Quit wiggling, man.” Picking up the forceps, Gendreau held the incision open with his fingers, inserting the tiny cupped tips.

  “Figured out why Gil saw that shitlord Santiago and his buddies out in the woods wearing wolf masks,” said Robin. “One of them has a Transfiguration relic. I
’d say it’s his motorcycle. But I’ve never heard of a relic that big before.”

  “Rare, but they do happen,” said Gendreau, glancing at her. “There was a car relic in California in 1938—a Wolseley Hornet, I think—that caused the owner to hallucinate the future whenever he drove it. When my dad was a teenager, a 1958 Plymouth Fury was used in a bunch of murders up around Maine. People said the car itself was possessed, but it was demolished in a car-crusher before the Dogs could study it.”

  He paused, staring into space.

  “What is it?” asked Robin.

  “Do you hear that?”

  She strained to listen.

  Under the constant rumble of tires on asphalt and the throaty hiss of the ancient air conditioner, she heard it.

  Motorcycle engines.

  Track 15

  Out of the darkness they roared, dragging a long convoy down the highway in a spear formation. Robin watched them through a narrow gap in the back curtain. Their bikes bristled with weapons. The Royal Enfield she’d heard so much about led the procession, and sitting on it, as ramrod-straight and dark-eyed as Genghis Khan on his war horse, was Santiago Valenzuela.

  “Just keep driving,” she shouted to Marina. She urged Carly out of the breakfast nook and opened the bench seat to reveal a foam bed arrayed with gun parts. She took out a black plastic stock, an upper receiver, another part that looked like a vacuum cleaner attachment, and a box of smaller parts, and laid them out on the table. Also a box of what looked like cartoon bullets as big as salt shakers.

  Hanging on the wall was a vinyl scabbard and webbing harness. She put it on. Taking a short sword off the wall, she slipped it into the scabbard. Finally, she pointed a remote control at each of the cameras mounted on the walls. Tiny red on-air lights winked on.

  “If this is going down,” she told Carly, “might as well get some footage.”

  Santiago blasted around them, passing on the left. “Hey!” he shouted at his wife. “Hey!” He shouted again. “Fuckin’ talkin’ to you! Roll that window down!”