by S. A. Hunt
“Why did it explode?” screamed Robin. Her swamp-light eyes focused on Elisa. “Are you sure they were here? Your brother got it right?”
“Yes, Alfie—”
Frustration and despair fed the hunger-anger inside her, stoking hellish flames. The air stank of sulfur, a pungent brimstone, even over the high acrid smell of the natural gas fire. Robin rushed at the flames, trying to get into the building again, but the wall was an impregnable mess of bricks and fire.
Strange black frost emanated from the Osdathregar. She got an idea. “Flame off!” She thrust the spear point into the fire several times, but the supernatural chill didn’t seem to extinguish anything. “Flame off, dammit!”
She went back to Elisa. “Did he say where Santiago went?”
“Left to take Carly home.”
A maniacal scream echoed out of the fire and a burning shape came staggering out of the clubhouse.
At first, Robin thought it might have been Kenway and went running to his side, but at the last moment, she realized it was one of the bikers, wreathed in flame. The man stumbled, collapsing into the gravel, where he rolled around in a gibbering frenzy, and Robin shanked him through the flames like a spear-fisher.
Smoking blood leaked out in a puddle, filtering through the rocks, and “Wacky” Joaquin lay still.
He smelled like barbecue, sweet and thick.
Robin felt her stomach tense up. She wanted to find the biggest rock she could lift and smash him into the ground with it until he was a smear in the gravel. The demon in her also wanted to eat the man, to dig her pearly fangs into the charred meat and tear it away in strips, choke them down.
Fuck. Fuck. I have to get out of here. I’m losing control. Just like Frank Gendreau thought I would. The magicians were right.
They were right, they were right, sang the warhawk.
“Where is their house?” she growled over her shoulder.
“Single-wide trailer out in the Alderman Street subdivision in Keyhole Hills,” said Elisa. “Past the Conoco. You’ll know it by the motorcycle in the driveway.”
Speaking of a motorcycle … Robin went over to the dead Hamburger Guy and dug his keys out of his pocket. A few minutes’ search found his motorcycle and she pulled it upright, jumping on the kickstarter. The engine erupted to life. She only hoped she could drive the next several miles to town without laying the bike down—or getting attacked by a terrified state trooper. She didn’t need a warrant out for her arrest for killing and eating a cop.
“Get my niece out of there, lady,” said Elisa, eyes locked on Robin. “Bring Carly to me, and I will take care of her.”
“I will.”
“My brother’s gone too far. Running guns, selling drugs … now he’s killing people and, and … turning into a freak. It’s the motorcycle. I know it is. You don’t have to kill him if you can destroy La Reina. Destroy the Enfield. That will stop it.”
Alien rage still hummed in Robin’s bones. It’s not the bike, Marina had told them. He was always like this. The midday sun glinted on her obsidian skin like oil on asphalt, black and faintly iridescent. The bike just brought it back. Mutated it. Mutated him. She caught Gendreau’s eyes and saw terror there,
B I T E T E A R K I L L
and it was all she could do not to run away, to get as far as she could get from him. Flaming intestines dangled from her remaining antler. She ripped them down and threw them away. They were right, the warhawk said in her ear, laughing.
“I can’t promise you—”
“Not in front of Carly,” said Elisa. “I still think he can be saved, but if it has to happen, don’t do it front of her.”
“Take me with you.” Gendreau came toward the bike.
“No. You’ve been in enough danger. You stay here.” Robin pushed the spear into a shotgun scabbard between the saddlebag and the rear fender so that it stood up behind her. “I need to do this alone. I’m already going to have one liability with Carly being there.”
Wordlessly, she heeled up the kickstand before the curandero could protest and peeled out of the parking lot, spraying gravel. Annie’s remonstrations rang in her mind as she squealed into the eastbound lane: Get up, dragonfly. Get up. Walk it off. Ain’t no daughter of mine gonna get beat that easy. Wind coursed over her sleek, strange body. She thought back to all the times she’d burned herself with hot water and cigarettes, trying to psych herself back up for the Great Hunt, trying to fury away all the fear. I can get you to do anything I want, said the Heinrich in her head, climb any mountain, swim any sea. All I gotta do is piss you off.
If only she’d known back then what she was, what she was capable of doing, of becoming …
You’re gonna do it, ain’t you, said the warhawk in the mirror, said the teenager hiding in the bathroom, fighting off a panic attack with scalding water. Don’t run, coward. Are you going to run?
“No.”
She overtook a tractor-trailer and darted between two cars. Highway reeled out behind her in a long roaring ribbon.
ARE YOU GOING TO RUN?
The warhawk’s voice deepened, became demonic. In her mind, in her memories, the face in the bathroom mirror burst into flames.
Light sizzled between her teeth, and coals burned in her eyes. Robin revved the bike, ice-wind breaking over her like the tide, and she realized she was looking at her real face, her now-face, in the motorcycle’s mirror. Fire licked from the corners of her mouth.
NO, said the reflection.
Green light crackled in her eyes.
Track 32
Santiago sat in the hallway of their trailer, his back against the bedroom door. Behind him, his daughter sobbed quietly, all the rage wrung out of her. The place still stank like pepper spray, leaving a spicy funk in the air like bad takeout.
The girl had fought like a wildcat at the motel, punching, kicking, screaming, cursing, calling him every name in the book, threatening him with death and castration, blaming him and his motorcycle for everything from her mother’s fall to the fucking moon landing.
One good slap to the mouth ended that. She rode home with one of the other boys—no room on La Reina with Marina’s body, wrapped in a bedsheet from the motel, slung over the back like a bandito on the back of John Wayne’s horse. He brought his dead wife straight home from the clubhouse, taking every back road he could find to stay off the highway, and scooped everything off the coffee table onto the floor, depositing her carefully and neatly on top of it.
There she lay in state, a primitive, Viking-like sort of viewing. Santi sat on the couch and prayed over the blood-splotched cocoon, crying silently into his hands until he heard a knock at the door.
Javier Barela with his daughter, one hand locked around her upper arm.
La Reina scrawled an insidious fingerbone down the inside of Santi’s skull as he stood there trying to recognize them. Scrrrrrratch. “Put her in the bedroom.” Santi plodded back to the couch to sit down.
As soon as Carly saw her mother lying on the coffee table, shrouded in a bloody bedsheet, her legs buckled and she crumpled on the floor in a heap, covering her face with her hands. A thin, whistling cry slipped through her fingers and Barela stood over her, an exasperated man with a Mohican haircut and a red face.
“Put her in the bedroom,” Santi murmured again.
“Yeah, okay.” Barela stood Carly up and half-carried her into the master suite. She immediately balled into the fetal position on top of the covers and he respectfully backed out, shutting the door and locking it.
With a wary glance at Santi, he left.
Now the patriarch of the ruined Valenzuela family sat in the hallway, trying to ignore the sound of La Reina scratching that hideous nerve in his head that sent pulsing waves of heat and color across his eyes. A red heat-strobe, a firetruck light in his head. “I’m sorry, baby,” he said over his shoulder, hoping his rusty voice would carry through the bedroom door. “I’m real sorry this had to happen. I’m sorry it had to happen to you. And your m
other. And me. But if you hadn’t run off…”
He let the accusation linger.
Santi got up and went into the kitchen, hesitated, and passed through the kitchen to the living room, where he stood at the end of the coffee table and looked down at the shrouded corpse. Something squirmed restlessly inside of him, a giant grub-worm made of grief and rage and despair. He wanted to ask, “Why did you leave me?” but he knew the answer. It was because Marina was stupid, she was weak, she had no idea how to be a
(queen?)
good wife to a good man. She had no faith in herself and had no—what’s the word?—oomph, she had no testicular fortitude, and she at least was lucid enough to understand that, and to try to take herself out of the picture, to take the burden off of her husband. But she made a vow to him the day he put that ring on her finger, and marriage, oh boy, marriage, ’round these parts, that’s written in stone, you can’t just throw in the towel on Catholic marriage. You sign your name on the dotted line and them’s the breaks, man, you’re in it for life, for richer or poorer, for good times and in bad.
Wind hooted through the broken window in the kitchen.
Been a long time since you received the Eucharist, isn’t it? asked Mother Mary.
“Yeah. Hell, been a while since I went to church at all.”
Earlier this year.
“Yeah. February, maybe. No recuerdo por qué fuimos.”
After a fight. You broke one of Marina’s ribs.
Santiago reached out and felt for her side through the bedsheet. His knuckles brushed the swell of her left breast. “Ah, yeah.”
You asked her to go with you because you wanted her to see you suffer. You wanted her to see you grovel and beg for forgiveness. You came out of that confessional booth a free man, and you wanted her to see you absolved of your transgressions, out of … what? Guilt?
“Pity?”
Control. You wanted her to see how the worst you could do to her would be washed away as if it were nothing more than dirt on your hide. That you could do whatever you wanted to her and God would forgive you. And God’s forgiveness made you omnipotent. A moral phoenix. Like a murderer getting out of prison on a technicality. Only, the technicality was permanent and reusable.
Santi stared down at the bundle laid across the table and swallowed heavily. With shaking hands, he peeled back the sheet covering Marina’s face.
I forgive you, Santiago, said the voice. I am the only god that matters now. I am the only god that has ever mattered. I am your god and mistress now, and as I am in you, so too are you a god. I live through you, living god, and thus I do my works through you. You must seek forgiveness from no one as long as I am in you.
Most of the damage from the fall had been sustained to the skull and upper body. Broke her neck on impact, judging by the grotesque jag of vertebrae straining against the left side of her neck, and her left temple was caved in from the eyebrow to the crown of her skull. Luckily, this was all hidden under her hair, a blood-plaster of black and brown. Her eyes had rolled toward the top of her head so that she peered beatifically skyward, like people looking at God in old paintings.
Her mostly white eyes were nauseating and somehow terrifying to look at. He wanted to apologize to her like he’d apologized to Carly, but he couldn’t find a reason in his heart to do so. He’d had no hand in this—it had been solely Marina’s idea to run away, hadn’t it?
Probably bought the pepper spray, too.
“No,” he said, tears spilling out of his eyes. Droplets turned blue on the white sheets piled at his feet. “No, yo la amaba. La amo.”
She can’t run off now, huh?
He shook his head and ducked, as if the sob that came out of him was a thing that could be dodged.
Or can she?
“No, she’s dead. Esta muerta. Gracias a esa perra punk que murió en el incendio. She can’t go anywhere now.”
She’ll start to deteriorate eventually, Santiago.
“No.”
Yes. She will leave you in the end, Santiago, she will leave you, and she will take everything with her, leaving you with nothing but dust and bones. It is inevitable.
“No.”
Do you want her to stay with you forever?
“Yes.”
Then you know what you have to do.
Slowly at first, he shook his head, and then hard enough to give himself a headache. His chest felt as if it were imploding, collapsing in on itself as if he were drowning in the hot-cold darkness at the bottom of the deepest oceanic trench. “No. No, no, no, I don’t want to do that. Don’t make me do that.”
Been a long time since you received the Eucharist, isn’t it?
“Shut the fuck up,” Santiago mumbled, beating on his forehead with the heels of his fists. “You shut the fuck up.”
Communion.
Pain raked coals down the bones of his arms. As if in a dream, he turned his hands and saw that orange shag running down the edges of his forearms again.
“No, goddammit,” he said, his teeth growing out of his gums.
Drool and blood spattered where his tears had fallen. He watched in the dead television’s gray reflection as his lips stretched across yellow fangs, his nostrils gaped, and his eyes bled and bulged out of his face. White whiskers sprouted from his chin and cheeks, his jawbone widening into an awkward moon-face.
Communion.
“No,” he sobbed, the black talons sliding along underneath the skin of his thickening fingers, materializing in his palms, thin daggers gliding up and out of his fingertips, where the skin split open and the obsidian hooks came curling out from under his nails. Blood ran into his upturned palms. Breath came out of him in ragged, horselike wheezes. The giant dazzling head of a jungle phantom gazed back at him from the dark television screen.
“Dios mio, verdaderamente soy un monstruo,” he said in hoarse Spanish, feeling his face. El Tigre. El Tigre. Santiago hooked his claws into the bedsheet, drawing it away, uncovering Marina’s broken corpse. Then he leaned forward, opened his massive jaws, and closed his mouth on the corpse’s flank.
Brittle ribs cracked under his teeth. Cold blood welled over his tongue as the president of Los Cambiantes devoured his dead wife.
Track 33
Took some riding around, but Robin eventually found the Valenzuelas’ house in an obscure corner of the rearmost subdivision, at the top of Keyhole Hills’ gentle slope. Mountains loomed over her, the properties here climbing into hilly scrubland that reminded her of that old television show M*A*S*H.
Santiago’s motorcycle was parked in the driveway. Army-green Royal Enfield—admirable, almost cute. Hard to believe that this run-down-looking machine was what had caused all this mess. She parked the Harley by the side of the road next to the mailbox and dismounted, plucking the makeshift spear from the bike’s shotgun scabbard. The spear was heavier than she remembered.
Standing next to the bike, she listened for Santiago.
Wind howled lightly off the desert, a few birds out in the scrub, and the barking of some dog a block away.
If she could destroy the relic before Santiago even knew she was there, she could avoid a battle altogether. She crept toward the motorcycle and paced slowly around it, trying to guess where the teratoma was inside the bike. Did someone mix witch-blood into the paint? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. Maybe hair? Teratomatic hair? She knelt close and studied the paint-job. No, that wasn’t it, either.
Searched the saddlebags. Nothing.
Maybe hair or bones inside the engine somewhere. She went into the shed out back to look at Santiago’s tools. Wasn’t much—hammer, C-clamp, a box with a socket wrench and a bunch of mismatched attachments.
Hanging on the wall was a hacksaw. She took it.
Back in the driveway, Robin grasped La Reina’s handlebars and rested the toothy, rusty blade on the steel bar.
KA-BOOM, the side of the trailer exploded outward like a can of biscuit dough, shredding the air with aluminum chaff. Some en
ormous shape rocketed through the storm of metal and collided with her, and the two of them plowed through the fence in a tangle of limbs, knocking wood across the street. The Valenzuelas’ mailbox somersaulted into their neighbor’s yard, spilling unpaid bills on the dead lawn.
In the clear daylight, Santiago was a terrifying, confusing sight, even bigger than Robin remembered. Full-on Beast Mode, a hulking creature striped in black-and-orange shag, his head massive and asymmetrical. A thousand teeth jostled for space in a pit of gray-pink flesh, all of it swimming in blood. Too many muscles, too many joints, whipping-beating appendages that ended in maces bristling with a dozen claws. An elephantine cock dangled between his hind legs, spiky and purple like some kind of deep-sea anemone.
He was a living siege engine.
“LEAVE HER ALONE!” Santiago roared, pounding Robin’s head into the dirt.
Darkness danced in the corners of her eyes. His fists were sledgehammers wrapped in mink. She wasn’t going to be able to take much more, even in her strange state.
Reaching up, Robin caught his fists and pushed. To her surprise, she was able to stop the onslaught. Santi leaned forward, pressing his weight. Her knuckles slammed against the ground and the tiger-thing lunged at her face, his mouth cavernous and fleshy. Teeth scraped her armored cheek as antler-points jabbed his gums, and hot blood drizzled into her eyes.
Snarling in pain, he lifted Robin over his head, flinging her toward the shed in the back yard. Fragile wood shattered under the impact. The entire structure collapsed on top of her: tools, joists, dust, and dead wasp-nests.
Before she could even get her bearings, the monster was already digging her out of the wreckage, flinging wood and shingles aside.
“KILL YOU,” he snarled, uncovering her.
“You tried that already.” Robin cracked him in the eye with the back end of a claw hammer. Santi recoiled and the claw hooked in his eye socket, wrenching it out of her hand. Robin clambered out of the remains of his toolshed as he writhed on the ground, screaming.