by S. A. Hunt
Gasoline splattered all over her as Robin rolled through a puddle. If I can just get my hands on the sword, she thought, reaching for it as the beast hunkered over her. Teeth closed on her arm, piercing skin and muscle, and he yanked her up off the floor, throwing her ass-over-teakettle into the fire.
This time, there was no escape. The gasoline all over her instantly ignited. Robin went up like a witch, her arm hair and head hair evaporating in one crackling whoosh!
“Burrrn, baby, burn!” snarled Santiago, laughing.
Light enveloped her in excruciating pain, a gigantic despair that reduced her to a singular, primitive, panicking instinct—get out of the house. Find water. Robin crawled out of the burning debris, a figure of billowing flame, and tried to stand. Get out of the house. Undulations of fire rolled up and up her arms and legs in waves of stinging hornets. Her jeans were shrouds of flame. Find water.
“Gotta go back in. I like my murdering whores well done.” Santiago shoved her into the fire, still laughing.
Ashes roiled around her in a cloud of red stars. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get out of here. He is going to kill me, if I’m not dead already. She tried to scream and inhaled only torment. The insides of her lungs crisped, frying like bacon in her chest. Her tongue was jerky, shriveled in her mouth. Find water. Find water.
All the strength went out of her legs and she collapsed.
Crawling after Santiago, she put her hand in a puddle. A blue aurora burped across the gasoline’s surface as it ignited.
“You look busy,” he said, coughing as he pulled the katana out of his back and threw it away, clang-clang, flinging an arc of blood. “Think I’m gonna leave you to it.” The warped tiger-creature went to the crawlspace and ripped the door away, pulling out a filthy Rook and dragging her up the stairs by her throat.
Glowing ashes rushed out of her mouth as Robin tried to rasp, “No,” and with them went the pain.
Nothing left to hurt. The burns went too deep, the skin destroyed, no nerves to feel anymore. Summoning everything she had left, Robin began her agonized via dolorosa up the stairs, following Santiago, crawling on burning hands and knees. The last scrap of her clothes fell off.
“Come on, baby, you can do it.”
Her mother’s ghost stood at the top of the stairs, waving her on, begging, sobbing, swearing. Embers floated unimpeded through Annie Martine’s translucent body. She wore the pristine sundress she’d died in. “You can do it,” screamed the ghost from her perch at the top of that tunnel of flame. “Get out of there. Come on.”
Closing her blistered eyes, Robin focused on climbing, the steps peeling away her palms. The soles of her feet came off in gluey strands like hot cheese. Annie continued to encourage and chide her, shrieking like a madwoman.
Blood boiled and smoked on the stairs as wolves howled triumphantly in the distance.
Track 22
Then
“Stop Me” by Natalia Kills pounded the Top Dollar Gentlemen’s Club with a driving beat. Lights strobed through a bead curtain, glittering across Robin’s face as her heart fluttered in her chest. This was not the kind of place where they do a background check, then blow a bunch of money on training you to pole-dance. This was the kind of place where they put a Girls Wanted ad in the town trading-post magazine, and if you have all your front teeth, they put you to work next week and pay you under the table.
She was beginning to regret answering that ad.
One of the other girls came dancing over with a shot glass. “Here, newbie, you’re gonna need one of these,” said the girl, handing it over. She was dressed like Tinkerbell, which clashed nicely with her almost-skeletal face and the sores on her arms. “You got that deer-in-the-headlights look, and Bobby ain’t gonna like it if you puke on his stage.”
Sniff, sniff. Smelled like pancake syrup. “What is it?”
“Good shit. Just drink it. You’re on in ten.”
“Ten minutes—?”
“Ten seconds.”
“Well, hell,” said Robin, throwing back the shot. The whiskey went down like a sweet cannonball. She coughed, covering her mouth with her wrist, and handed the glass back to the girl. “What was your name again?”
“June.”
“Oh, right. Thanks, June.”
“Knock ’em dead.” The girl pushed her through the bead curtain.
“Stop Me” was still rolling at top volume, vibrating the floor under her feet as Robin shuffled out onto the stage. A twenty-foot catwalk led to a large round dais, where a brass pole ran up to the ceiling, all of it illuminated by red footlights, and the audience—what there was of it on a Thursday evening—exploded with noise. Between the bar and the tables, she estimated there were about thirty people.
(the exits)
They’d given her the gunslinger routine: assless chaps, a leather bikini with fringe, and a pink cowboy hat. Strapped to her hips was a pair of holsters, each of which contained a realistic cap-gun revolver. Her cowboy boots clip-clopped across the mirrored platform, and every muscle in her frame locked up in stage fright.
(look for the exits)
“Damn, baby!” shouted someone in the darkness.
Alcohol made her panic rise to the surface as a strained giggle. Robin put on her best hip-rolling strut and made her way toward the pole. Slow down. This ain’t the hundred-meter dash. She’d done this a hundred times in rehearsal, but as soon as her own face gazed up at her from the mirrored floor with that shell-shocked stare, all of it flew out the window. For a brief adrenalized instant, she thought she saw it flicker into cold fury, a dark micro-expression, revolving from the face of someone running from a serial killer, into the killer, and back again. Watching her mother die, Heinrich’s brutal training, the years spent in the mental hospital eating creamed corn in handcuffs and explaining her delusions to bored men in neckties: it was all trying to surface.
Do it, said the warhawk inside as the fear returned to her reflection’s features, just fucking do it.
Getting down on her hands and knees, she stretched luxuriantly, arching her ass in the air, and crawled the rest of the way, pistols waggling. The toes of her cowboy boots felt as if they were about to smash through the mirror floor. She sort of hoped they would. Goddamn, it would be satisfying, wouldn’t it? She reached the pole after what felt like a humiliating six-hour crawl and pulled herself to her feet. Individual faces gazed up at her. This didn’t help the anxiety at all. Robin closed her eyes and tried to focus on the pole in her hands, tried to pretend she was there by herself, all alone. “Dance like nobody’s watchin’,” Darlene had told her yesterday, and that was easier said than done.
An insect fluttered against her thigh. Her eyes snapped open and saw a crumpled-up dollar bill.
She went back to dancing, looking up at the ceiling, at the back wall, at her own reflection below her boots, the pole, anywhere but the faces of the men watching her. She threw her best moves into the mix, bending over to peer between her knees (luckily, her hat was pinned to her hair), sashaying in a circle around the pole, bending over backward to flash her scant cleavage.
“Take your top off!” someone shouted from the bar.
She pressed one hand against her chest and reached behind her back with the other, untying it. The strings fell through her armpits, but she held the top on.
“You heard the man,” said a familiar voice from her left.
Eyes darting in that direction, she saw her erstwhile mentor sitting at a table, nursing a beer. Heinrich Hammer’s eyes sparkled in the red footlights. “Give him what he wants!”
What is he doing here?!
“Go blow a goat,” she said, shouting to be heard over the music, strutting back up the catwalk. “I’m trying to work.”
All he did was light a coconut cigar and sit there in the red shadows, smoking it.
She ripped the bikini top off with a leathery whipcrack and twirled it over her head like a lasso. Her nipples were tiny and dark, hard from embarrassment and ai
r-conditioning. She flung the top into the tables in one motion. A man in a business suit caught it. He loosened his tie, pulling it out of his collar, and hung the bikini top around his neck like a towel.
The businessman threw his tie onstage. Robin picked it up, lasciviously flossed her ass with it, and threw it back, eliciting a wild cheer from the club patrons and a sprinkling of currency. Something about gaining control dissolved her tension. If she kept this up, she’d be running the room. Hell, she could even get them to drag Heinrich out and throw him into the parking lot.
Pulling the six-shooters out of her gun belt, she went through a series of sinuous action poses, shooting at the men in the audience. Some dark splinter in her relished this part of the routine; she could feel her face darkening, her brow tightening as she put imaginary bullets in perverts’ heads. She bared her teeth at them, aimed with her eye, and killed them with her heart, and they loved every minute of it. They’d be whistling a different tune if these guns were real. She blew imaginary smoke out of the guns’ barrels and shoved them back in their holsters, then lunged for the pole and swung herself around it, throwing her legs wide.
Never ceased to amaze her that these poles weren’t fixed in place; they rotated on ball bearings. A year of this, Robin mused, and I’ll have leather palms. Hand jobs will be like masturbating with catchers’ mitts. She thrust her pelvis at the audience and crawled toward the nearest man.
“Damn,” said a red-faced bald man in a Steelers T-shirt. His breath was rank with liquor. “You are totally amazing.”
She pulled a pistol and shot him in the temple. “Powww.”
“You blow my mind, baby.”
“I can blow more than that, you know,” she said, sitting up. Her initial anxiety was beginning to drain away, and when she turned around and threw her feet over the edge of the stage, rhythmically flexing her ass for Baldy, she realized why. This whole display was making Heinrich uncomfortable. That fact made all the shimmy-shimmy-shake worth it. I can get you to do anything in the world, climb any mountain, swim any sea, he’d said that day in Hammertown, just before she’d thrown the knife at his face. All I gotta do is piss you off.
Well, now she was pissed off.
The gnarly witch-hunter glared at her from under his hat brim, twirling a bottle of Corona. His cigar smoldered in an ashtray.
Rumpled dollar bills danced across her bare back. A mean smile spread across her face. She got up and pinched one of the strings hanging out of the knot holding up one side of her bikini bottom, showing it to Heinrich. Check it out, old man. She grinned at him, biting her bottom lip suggestively. It was Go Time, take it or leave it, last train to Omaha, buddy. You better say something if you don’t want me flashing my barely legal pussy at these howler monkeys.
Wait, did she really want to do that? Did she really want to go back to Hammertown? Back to that dusty shithole of a—
“Look, I’m sorry,” growled Heinrich.
“Sorry about what?” Robin asked, letting go of the knot string. Pulling out a pistol, she put it between her legs as if it were a penis, then pantomimed jerking off, leaning back in feigned ecstasy. She pulled the trigger and it shot off a cap with a loud bang, startling her. The bar went insane with laughter.
“About Lucky Luke.” Heinrich got up and knelt by the stage, looking up at her. “I’m just—well, I just wanted—I’m tryin’ to train the hesitation outta you, kid,” he said, taking off his black gambler hat.
“Hesitation?” She pulled the trigger, moaning, giving it her best Sleepless in Seattle orgasm, firing caps as if she were blowing a load over the audience’s heads. Pow! “Ohh!” Pow! “Ohhhh!” Pow! Pow! Pow! “OHHHH GOD YES!” She scowled at him, trading the pistol for the other, holstering the empty one. “You trainin’ the hesitation outta me, or the heart?”
“You got enough heart for both of us.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I been lookin’ for you for days, Robin Hood,” said Heinrich, grinding his teeth. “This ain’t you. You’re better than this. Come back home.”
“Don’t start that, you old bastard.”
“Hey,” Heinrich protested, as Robin turned the pistol around, “who you callin’ old?”
“You, you dried-up old bastard.” She proceeded to slowly saw the cold gun barrel in and out of her crotch like a credit card that just wouldn’t take. “I bet you can’t even get it up at your advanced age.”
Hurt and anger battled on his face. Heinrich sat back down at his table and puffed on his cigar, his eyes going dead. Maybe I went a little too far, maybe got a little weird with that one. She gave a mental shrug. So what? He deserves to be uncomfortable. Deserves more than that. Deserves a good ass-kicking.
“Hey,” said someone behind her. Baldy.
“Yeah?” asked Robin, crawling toward him. He had a twenty in his hand, but he wasn’t holding it out to her.
“Are those scars on your legs?”
Old hashmarks shared space with fresh scabs, a dozen of them across the tops of her thighs. She’d tried to cover them with makeup, but the harsh stage lights made them stand out—along with her goose bumps—like Braille. “So what if they are?”
“Well, like,” said the man, wincing sheepishly, “I just wanted to know if you were okay. Looks like you’ve been, I dunno, cutting yourself or something.”
She turned the pistol around and pushed it into his hands. “You too? I’m showing you my tits, and you want to psychoanalyze me?”
He looked down at the pistol in his hands like she’d handed him a picture of his dead grandma.
“Thanks, Dad, but I’m fine,” Robin said, climbing up the pole.
“I just care, man, you know? I give a fuck.”
“Good, I could use a few.” She grinned coldly. “I’m all out of those.”
“Bitch,” he muttered.
In lieu of another thanks, she took another jaunt around the pole, untying the bikini bottom, and laid it gently over the top of another man’s head. Her pubic bush glossed in the footlights.
Laughing, she looked over at Heinrich to satisfy herself with the expression on his face, but his table was empty, his cigar stubbed out in the ashtray.
* * *
The western horizon was a slash of purple and orange by the time Robin came out of the club, a little wobbly from the liquor, counting a wad of cash. Or at least she was trying to, because the minute she stepped out of the employee entrance, her mind decompressed, her frame unlocked, and her eyes fogged up with tears.
When she looked up again, she stood at the edge of an infinite expanse of hardpan, furred with dry sagebrush and overpowered by the full majesty of the Texas sunset. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
“Did you get it out of your system?”
Her Obi-Wan Kenobi sat on the hood of his ancient Ford Fairlane, a devil-red land yacht of a car. In his hands glittered a long, thin dagger, and his hat lay open by his right leg, as if waiting for donations.
“What are you still doing here?” she asked in a low, miserable voice.
“Thought you might like a ride back to wherever you’re staying.” He stared at his feet, wagging the dagger in his hands as if it were a diving board and the pavement below his feet was a swimming pool. “Where are you staying, if I may be so bold?”
“Nowhere right now,” she replied. “I mean, I guess I have my van, but I have some money, though; I can stay in a motel room if I want.”
“You bought a van with the money you stole out of my cookie jar?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it down by the river?”
“If that’s a joke, I don’t get it.”
A few moments passed as they lingered, sizing each other up, perhaps. Robin squinted at the silver dagger, gesturing at it with a handful of ones. “You told me that’ll help me kill Marilyn Cutty and her coven.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thought it was high time you saw it, got a look at it for yourself. Held it in your hand. No more wooden swor
ds, no more rubber Ka-Bars.”
Her feet carried her over to him. She wore the bikini again, her jacket over her shoulders like a cape, and the algiz tattoo stood out on her white chest like a cattle brand. She held out her hands and Heinrich put the dagger into them. Might have been her imagination, but Robin thought she felt a peculiar heat in the handle, a subliminal static charge. Or perhaps it was just the heat of Heinrich’s hand.
“You sure this can kill a witch?”
“It can pin one down like a butterfly in a case, so you can burn ’em good, just like Tilda. You jab a witch with this and push it all the way through into the floor, and they’ll be there until the end of days.”
Hair blew across her face. She tucked it behind her ear.
“I have a headache,” she said, and Heinrich said, “I’m sorry,” both of them speaking at the same time.
“Got some Tylenol”—he tipped a thumb back at his car—“rolling around in there somewhere.”
She stared into his weather-beaten brown face.
All I gotta do is piss you off.
“No more Lucky Lukes. No more of that shit. You can PT me until I shit my kidneys out, I’ll even let you beat me up with the pugil sticks some more, but if you do that to me again—”
“Cross my heart—”
“Never again,” she said a little more forcefully. “You—”
“—hope to die.”
“You do that to me again and you’ll be lucky if I leave again. I might just catch you asleep and use this on you.” She offered him back the silver dagger, but he didn’t reach for it. She thrust it out a little more. His hands went up in mild surrender. “You want me to keep it?”
“Yeah. Keep an eye on it for me, will you?”
Wispy, starry clouds glided across the flat of the blade. She nodded solemnly.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Back in the day, the Persians called it the Osdathregar. Folks I ran with called it the Godsdagger. Whatever you wanna call it, you take care of it, and it’ll take care of you.”