The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  Black holes appeared in their faces and chests. Click. The slide stayed back. Empty. She dropped the magazine, putting the Beretta on safe, and gently placed the pistol and mag on a little end table.

  “I’m out.” A knife lay on the table today, a wicked-looking Ka-Bar combat knife like something a Marine would have carried into Vietnam. “Mind telling me what all this crap I’m wearing today is? Gonna come out here and beat me with a stick? You leave me a knife and you’re gonna get stabbed again.”

  Several seconds of silence passed as she waited for an answer.

  “You there, old man?”

  Squeaky-squeaky-squeak, pulleys in the walls labored to open the plywood door again, revealing the dark hallway inside. Something clapped open in the shadows, a brittle metallic sound like that of a birdcage. Tick-tick-ticka-tick-tick. Sounded like water dripping on plaster. Heavy breathing.

  “Pick up the knife, kid,” said Heinrich.

  Something moved in the darkness beyond.

  German Shepherd. Absolutely huge—eighty or ninety pounds by the looks of it. White fuzz rimmed his eye sockets and lips. The dog growled, sending a thrill of fear through her.

  As the growl deepened, the dog’s head lowered, his ears folding back. He stared up at her from under his eyebrows.

  “Pick up the knife,” said Heinrich.

  “I’m not stabbing a dog, asshole.”

  “Name’s Luke. Lucky Luke, but his previous coworkers called him LT. Retired police dog. Ten years old and can’t see out of one eye. Got a bit of a waddle ’cause some tweaker stuck him in the shoulder with a screwdriver. Bought him off a dogfighter that stole him out of a cop’s backyard.”

  “You what?”

  The dog charged at her. Robin turned and ran. Lucky Luke gave chase.

  The hallway ended in a door. She shoulder-checked through without pausing, stumbling down the stairs on the other side. She found herself in a sort of plaza surrounded by building façades. Didn’t make it twenty feet before she got ahead of her feet, overbalanced, and went down, skinning the heels of both hands. The dog was immediately on her, clamping sharp teeth on her padded left wrist.

  “Get him off me!” Robin shrieked, pounding on Lucky Luke’s face with her free hand. “Get him!” He was immovable, inexorable, invincible, jerking fiercely at her arm. Didn’t even flinch at her blows. Each jerk was accompanied by a hideous growl like a violin being played with a hacksaw.

  “Get up, stupid!” yelled Heinrich, coming outside.

  Dimly thankful Luke had grabbed her wrist and not her fingers, Robin wallowed around until she could get a leg underneath her. As she got to her knees, the dog pulled and jerked and yanked on her padded glove. She braced herself with her other hand and rose to her feet.

  “Punch him!” shouted Heinrich. “Punch him in the face!”

  “I AM!” she screamed at him. Like a nightmare, even her hardest of blows couldn’t fend off the growling dog, as if she were underwater and her fist just wouldn’t move fast enough. “Call it OFF!”

  Something clattered across the concrete and bounced off her foot. Combat knife.

  “Gonna have to do something,” said Heinrich. Luke gave a hard jerk and pulled her down to one knee. “Won’t stop until you’re dead or he is.”

  “Why won’t you call him off?” Robin cried in a rising panic.

  “Won’t be anybody to call that witch off when she latches on and starts eating you. They gone drag you down like a dog in the street and tear you limb from limb, and then they’re going to fucking eat you! Witches eat people, Robin! They’re cannibals! That’s what they do! Kidnap kids, put ’em in cages and boil the meat off their bones!”

  The knife was behind her at this point. Luke had succeeded in pulling her away from it. Robin pulled back, starting a deadly game of tug-of-war. Only way she was going to be able to save herself. It was going to have to be the knife.

  “If I have to walk over there and put the knife in your hand myself, I’m gonna take you to Killeen and put your ass out by the side of the road!” Heinrich ranted from the top of the steps. “You can hook for your dinner for all I give a shit! I bet that’s about all you’re good for anyway!”

  Heat rushed into Robin’s face and she envisioned herself snatching up the knife. But instead of sticking the dog with it, she wanted to rush Heinrich. She gave a good hard jerk and gained some ground. His gums left bloodstains on the glove. The dog growled venomously, planting his feet, and Robin pounded him in the ear as hard as she could.

  “Do it!” Heinrich yelled, applauding slowly. “Prove you can win, little girl!”

  To her surprise, the dog let go. She dove for the knife, frantically trying to pick it up with her thick, mittened hands. Got it. She rolled over and the dog bit into the hockey mask.

  Teeth jabbed through the eyehole and holes, jagging her across the nose and scratching her lip. She screamed, almost forgetting the knife in fear. Luke ripped the mask off her face. The nylon straps popped like gunfire, whipping her ears, and he backed away in what seemed like confusion.

  Spitting the mask out, he lunged at her again.

  This time she held out the knife.

  The tip of the blade went in directly underneath his collar, sliding through the hard muscle of his chest all the way to the hilt.

  Didn’t stop him, though. Luke continued to snap at her face, slavering and growling, throwing cold ropes of saliva, absolutely apeshit, trying to bite every available appendage and surface she gave him access to. Her arms were extended out straight, elbows locked, muscles trembling. One mistake and she’d have teeth in her throat. She turtled, tucking her chin under the catcher’s vest.

  Abandoning her face, he latched on to her arm and growled, flexed like a dying snake, coiling, stiffening. Angry growls became higher-and higher-pitched until they were more like squeals.

  He coughed through his teeth, spraying her glove with blood.

  No, no, no.…

  Tears filled Robin’s eyes as the dog started losing spirit.

  Heaving and panting in pain, Luke’s legs buckled and he knelt next to her. Finally, he lay down in the dust and blood, and looked up at her with dark honey eyes.

  Robin got up onto her knees and pried her fingers free of the knife. The Ka-Bar’s handle throbbed with the beat of the dog’s heart, blood streaming out from under it into a puddle.

  She toppled forward onto her hands.

  She cried her eyes out. Tears plopped into the dust between her bloody gloves.

  She sobbed until she retched, and then she retched until she threw up acidic yellow bile. Heinrich didn’t say anything, he just lit one of those coconut cigars and sat down on the stairs, smoking and watching her cry.

  Stab that son of a bitch, said the lamp-eyed warhawk.

  Robin wheeled on the dog and wrenched the knife out of his chest. Blood ripped out of the wound, pattering across the ground. She strode toward her cigar-smoking mentor with every intention of gutting him.

  “He limps ’cause he’s got osteosarcoma,” said Heinrich.

  Robin hesitated.

  “Bone cancer. Extensive, all up in his spine and hips. He was gonna die anyway, Robin Hood. Only had a couple months, half a year at the most.” Heinrich spoke out of the corner of his mouth, the cigar hanging from his lips. “You don’t know it, but you did him a favor.”

  Sick, impotent rage built inside of her. Robin glared at him. “What the hell kind of favor was that?” she growled through gritted teeth. Wanted to jump on him, claw him like a monkey or a fucking chupacabra or something, bite him, bite his face, bite his nose off, bite his neck open. The rage was all-consuming. Of all the things he’d made her do in the name of her revenge, this was the worst. It was one thing to shoot at cardboard targets and let him knock her around, but.…

  Every fiber of her being wanted to rush at him. She knew he could put her down without breaking a sweat. Probably wouldn’t even have to toss his cigar. Goddamn coconuts.

  “You
gave him a warrior’s death,” said the bastard.

  Robin stared in incredulity.

  “FUCK YOU!” she bellowed, throwing the knife at him. Heinrich ducked and the blade went whirling over his head, clanging across the steps. “Fuck you and your manipulative bullshit—” She charged him, meaning to hit him in the face, but he caught her hands and twirled her in an awkward pirouette, then shoved her back the way she came. She went down face-first, stumbling to her hands and knees next to the dog.

  “I can get you to do anything in the world,” Heinrich said quietly, in that desolate, commanding tone of voice that told her he was done joking. “Climb any mountain, swim any sea. All I gotta do is piss you off.”

  “FUCK! YOU!” Robin shrieked one last epithet and stormed away.

  When he’d smoked as much of the cigar as he was going to smoke, Heinrich reached up and took one last draw off the cigar, stubbing it out.

  Standing up, he loped down the stairs and over to Luke, where he pulled a revolver out of his cross-draw rig. Robin was in her makeshift bedroom packing her stuff when the gunshot came rolling out to her.

  Track 20

  Now

  Boredom finally got the better of her, and she crept out of the basement closet to explore the house. Ended up in a filthy upstairs bathroom, where she found a dusty wood-cabinet television, of all things, standing like an altar where the tub should have been, amidst thirty or forty VHS tapes.

  When she plugged the TV in, Robin was amazed to realize the house still had power. She pushed a stiff button and the screen blazed to life with snowy static.

  Selecting a tape, she pushed it into the VCR. The image resolved into a scene of a birthday party, distorted by bad tracking. She turned the volume up just high enough to hear it, but instead of a family singing “Happy Birthday,” it sounded like a chorus of demons howling a garbled hymn. She watched it as long as she could stand it, then tried another one. The next tape was of a children’s ball game, jerking and stuttering, the stands full of more howling banshees. Baseball? Tee-ball? She couldn’t tell. The camera panned to the right and the screen filled with the face of the woman in the stairwell photographs. The wife. Markedly younger in the video … late thirties, maybe.

  Robin tried to read the label on one of the tapes by the glow of the TV. WEDDING, scrawled in blue ink pen. Several others were labeled in the same manner: PARTY, FUN AT THE PARK, JOHN’S GRADUATION, one cryptically labeled “11/02/97,” and one that simply said LILY’S SERVICE. As soon as she touched the one labeled LILY’S SERVICE, Robin was pierced with a sudden, sharp sensation of loss and heartache. Smelled ointment, heard the grinding swell of an electric organ. Cheap fake flowers ghosted across her fingertips.

  11/02/97. This tape was the cleanest so far, with only the occasional tracking issue. The woman from the stairwell photographs gave the camera operator—most likely her husband—a tour of the motel down the hill. Very happy, spry for her age, even giving a little shimmy as he followed her down the suite sidewalk into the office. She lifted the counter leaf, her eyes sparkling—no bifocals yet—and took her position behind the ledger. Must have been the owner-operators of the motel.

  Robin suddenly remembered she was wearing the GoPro. She leaned the shotgun against the bathroom wall, detached the camera from the chest harness, and held it in front of her face.

  “If you’re watching this,” she told her YouTube audience in a voice just above a whisper, “I’m probably still alive. Hopefully, I live long enough to upload it.” She pointed the camera at the TV. “We’re currently hiding from werewolves in an abandoned house out in the Texas scrubland.” Her face twisted in a wry way. “I know, right? Werewolves? As if the witches and cat-people and magicians weren’t crazy enough. And Heinie himself even said there were no such thing as werewolves.” She turned the camera back toward her face, feeling giddy and strung out. “Hope I got footage of that fight in the Winnebago and the part with the grenade launcher. Gnarly fucking action, right? Car chase. Exploding motorcycles. Jesus! Hope the camera in the bedroom was on.”

  For a few more minutes, she sat and watched the videotape until it abruptly cut off and the screen went blue. Robin replaced it with the videotape that said LILY’S SERVICE on the label.

  Soon as the tape started, she regretted it. This one seemed professionally produced. Standing in front of an open casket was a young man, and surrounding him were people of a multitude of ages: cousins, siblings, grandchildren. He began a heartfelt eulogy.

  She turned the volume down before he could really get going.

  * * *

  In the living room. She stood catty-cornered to the front window, peering around the edge of the window frame, and saw that the biker had dragged José’s corpse out of the empty pool, through the back gate, and into a stand of rocks and bushes at the farthest corner of the property.

  Does he think Santiago isn’t going to notice that dude being gone? Robin thought, shaking her head.

  Flashlights glittered in the dark distance, faraway stars in the ocean of night. Some of them had turned back, lights twinkling toward the motel. She went back through the kitchen and into a dining room, looking for a more advantageous window.

  A large table had been overturned, two of the legs broken off. Chairs were smashed and strewn all over the already-filthy room.

  Through a door on the other side she could see the outline of a desk in the moonlight, the blotter swept clean. A little office. Maybe something she could use in there. A small window overlooked a ten- or twelve-foot drop to the steep front yard, and would make a good vantage point for unloading some buckshot across the porch.

  One of the wolf-men had overturned a china hutch in front of the door so that it lay on its side. She thought about turning it facedown so she could walk across the back of it, but decided it would make too much noise. Laying the shotgun down, she climbed on top of the hutch and sat down, swinging her legs into the little office. She took the shotgun, ducked under the lintel, and slid off into the room.

  Her right foot came down on something hard and angular, KER-CHUNK.

  White-hot silver bolts of pain as a bear trap clamped down on her shin. Undoubtedly the missing item from the Cracker Barrel bullshit nailed up in the living room. The Los Cambiantes had set up a snare—they’d funneled her right into a trap. She was no cleverer than a goddamn jackrabbit. “Ahh! Fuck!” Robin shouted into the silence of the abandoned house, gushing a deluge of four-letter words, and fell over. “Motherfucker! Jesus Christ trapezoid! Fuck me and fuck my life!”

  She wedged her fingertips underneath the lips of the trap and pulled as hard as she could, but there just wasn’t enough strength in her arms to pull them far enough apart. Helpless, she let the trap ease shut again, the teeth grinding into the bone and muscle.

  “Fuuuuuuck!”

  Footsteps came barreling up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, cutting through the dining room. As soon as he saw the overturned hutch, Kenway wrenched it to the side, out of the way. “What the shit!”

  In the distance, a wolf cried a long, mournful note.

  Every movement elicited another stab of intense pain. “Fuckin’ bear trap.” It was everything she could do not to sob.

  He slipped his fingers between the trap’s teeth and pulled the iron jaws apart, shaking with exertion. Pulling her foot out, Robin rolled away, and the pain didn’t diminish—it only grew stronger and stronger as she lay there, her hands over her eyes. She drummed fists on the floor, throwing a tantrum of agony and rage.

  Three incredible gashes encircled her shin, like she’d tried to saw off her foot. Robin swore as he helped her up. Blood ran black and thick in the darkness, soaking into her sock. “Somebody heard you.” Kenway got up and thumped over to the window. Flashlights in the desert. Just a few hundred feet from the motel parking lot. “They’re coming back.”

  “Come on, we gotta get into the basement.” Tears swam in her eyes. Grabbing the shotgun, she hobbled into the kitchen behind
him and Kenway opened the cellar door, ushering her in.

  “No,” she told him. “You first, in case I fall.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He went in. She slammed the door behind him. Near the top of the door was a deadbolt; she slid it home and he immediately hammered on the door from the inside. “Have you lost your mind? Open this damn door.”

  “Can’t let you guys get hurt again.” Robin rested her forehead on the door, wincing at the pain in her leg. “You and Doc have almost died because of me. You forget about the knife in your back last year? I almost lost you.”

  “Let me out of here. Now.” The veteran’s old sergeant-voice came through the door like a growling Doberman. “That’s—”

  “—An order?” Robin straightened, holding the shotgun at low-ready. Her bowels were an acid hurricane. Blood and adrenaline surged through her. “I’m not one of your soldiers, babe. Now, get your ass down there and—”

  Bang! She jumped as the door slammed loudly. He was kicking it. Bang! Bang!

  “Open this damn door!”

  A wolf howled again. Sounded like it was in the front yard, coming up the steps from the motel.

  That was followed by the most terrifying, earth-shaking roar she’d ever heard and felt in her life, so heavy the texture of the sound seemed to swarm across the ceiling. Robin actually ducked. If she didn’t know any better, the ground had opened up and the devil himself had come galloping out.

  Maybe that’d be better. At least she was on a first-name basis with the devil.

  She shook so bad, she thought she would drop the shotgun. Robin limped into the living room, looking for a place she could hide and ambush them guerilla-style. “Robin!” Kenway kicked the door again, BANG!, jangling the deadbolt, BANG! “Let me the hell outta here!”