by S. A. Hunt
Red gore hung from the tool’s head like hot cheese. Santi threw it aside and rolled over, struggling to his feet. Blood ran down his warped muzzle.
As she walked past, circling him on her way to get her hands on the Osdathregar, he seemed to be growing larger. His chest deepened, arms lengthened and swelled. Wriggling black tentacles sprouted from his jaw, pushing teeth out into the dirt. Streaks of dark color marbled his shoulders and forehead: patches of wolf hair and pebbled lizard hide. He was becoming something more than just a man-tiger: some kind of Lovecraftian animal-god, a taxidermy nightmare, a walking evolutionary chimera.
A new eye pushed its way through the gory eye socket, this one a greasy marble orb with a crocodile’s slim pupil.
“I spy, with my little eye,” laughed the multibeast.
Holy shit. Robin dove for the spear and Santiago rushed her at the same time, thundering across the ground with that tripartite William Tell thump-thump-thump. She combat-rolled
(This time she was ready.)
and the Osdathregar’s freezing spear point met Santiago’s cobbly flesh and fur,
(The dog jumped on the knife.)
penetrating skin and muscle, driving deep into his throat. Supernatural frost chilled the blood as it erupted from the wound, splashing Robin’s face, crystallizing in midair like a jackpot of cough drops. With a scream, Santiago flinched away, rolling in the dirt, clutching his wound.
Ice formed around the gash in his neck. Santi charged at her and she prepared to stab him again, but he bulled past and slammed into the Royal Enfield. He dragged it out into the street as if it were a dead antelope, where he worked his claws into the engine and pried it apart. Metal squealed deep inside. La Reina’s gas tank broke off, spraying gasoline all over the pavement.
Wait, he’s destroying the bike himself?
The jumbled shoggoth lifted it up—when had he grown a third arm?—and galloped down the street, fleeing west.
So, that’s where the teratoma was. Gas tank.
Robin stood there in the front yard, head aching, dripping with blood and shaking in fear and shock and pain, suddenly grateful that nearly every homeowner in sight was gone to work. She climbed into Santiago’s trailer, pulling herself up through the colossal hole and into a blood-smeared kitchen. She stood the spear on end and looked around.
Fridge. Inside was a half-jug of iced tea. Milo’s. She gulped some of it and set it down, panting, leaning on the counter. Bloody handprints marked everything she touched. Carnage and offal were strewn all over the carpet. Robin recognized Marina’s shoes and she retched, her stomach lurched, threatened to disgorge all the tea she’d just drank.
“Oh, my God,” she murmured. “He was eating her body.”
No, not lurched, she realized in disgust. Growled. She and Santi were more alike than she wanted to admit. The rage-hunger came in waves, like birthing contractions. One minute, she was a dark, cold void, empty and desolate, and the next, a bonfire surged inside of her, starving for something to burn.
In the window-reflection over the kitchen sink, a very human Robin grinned demonically, green eyes alight.
They were right, said the warhawk.
“No,” said Robin, wrenching the curtain over the other-Robin’s face. “I’m in control. I’ve got this.”
“Go away!” Carly screamed from the back bedroom.
“It’s me, kid, it’s me.” Robin went down the hallway and spoke through the door, clutching her side. She leaned against the wall, gritting her teeth, her eyes shut tight against the twisting of the hot screw in her guts. “Don’t come out. Keep hiding, okay? If my friends show up, go with them. But otherwise, stay hidden.”
The teenager said something, but she was crying and whatever it was, it was too hoarse to make out.
“What?”
“Daddy’s crazy,” said Carly. “He turned into something.”
“I know.”
“What is he?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t know if he’s going to be able to make it out of this alive.” Robin sighed. “Gonna be him or me. He killed my boyfriend and almost killed me.” Her voice shook. The hand she was leaning against the wall with curled into a fist against the cheap wood paneling. “I can’t let that go.”
Carly said nothing.
“I told you I was going to take care of you when this is over. And when I say I’m going to do something, I mean it.” Her other fist tightened around the spear. “Your aunt Elisa wants you. She’s gonna—”
“Just go,” said Carly, her tone flat, dead.
Robin hesitated, her heart sinking. “I told you this would be a bad idea. It always ends badly.”
Because I’m a bad person. I fucking suck.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I don’t want your sorries,” Carly said through the door. “I’m tired of sorries. That’s all I’ve ever heard from everybody, especially my dad. Sorry about this, sorry about that. Sorry I broke your phone. Sorry I hurt your mother. Sorry I hurt you. Sorry I couldn’t stand up to your father. Well, I’m done hearing it.”
“Okay—Okay, well, I have to go end this. Somebody other than you is going to stand up to him today.”
Robin paused awkwardly, then walked away, and paused again at the edge of the hole in the trailer wall. “You knew I was going to have to kill him from the minute you asked me for help. You both knew what I do.” She sighed. “He ain’t gonna let me destroy the relic in his motorcycle. Gonna have to go through him to get to it.”
“Do what you have to do, lady,” Carly said forlornly. “Just stop apologizing for it.”
* * *
Gasoline made a splattery trail all the way down the street. Ah, good. Tracking him would be easy. Robin hopped astride the Harley and kickstarted it with one jump, roaring away with the spear tucked under her arm and braced between the handlebars as if she were on her way to a jousting tournament.
Following the trail of spilled fuel, she followed Santiago’s path of destruction across the back end of Keyhole Hills, the “cheap seats” part of the town’s slope. Back there, the streets weren’t paved worth a damn, with great scribbly tar-patches and gaping potholes. She slalomed slowly between the holes, passing through neighborhoods of mimosa trees and jacarandas, stirring up devils of yellow leaves and petals. Warehouses and run-down shacks, shabby apartments and mobile homes accompanied her as she made her way deep into the town’s twilight zone. How many of these people were Santi’s wolf-boys? she thought, scrutinizing the empty-looking apartments. Only saw a handful of cars and occupied houses since she rode into town not even twenty minutes before, and those were all out on the surface streets and the highway.
A spindly man in a giant white shirt came out of a house as she ambled past, carrying his baby daughter. Squinting in the sun, they watched Robin pass. The little girl was crying, and her father looked like he’d seen a ghost.
Did he have his claws sunk into that many of these folks?
The gasoline trail petered out, becoming little more than a series of increasingly spaced-out dots. Drying up, too, fading almost before she could find the next spot. Eventually, she came to a stop sign and lost the trail.
“Where did you go?” she asked the wind.
Two fenced lawns flanked her on either side, as dry and dirty as any other property in the Hole, and another faced her across the street. To her right, two houses down, divots had been carved up out of the alkali, like the rut marks of tires, except the ruts had claw marks in them.
What looked like a stampede’s worth of feet had churned up the homeowner’s patchy lawn, kicking up deep whorls and crescents. She eased out into the next street and turned the corner, driving across the oncoming lane and up onto the sidewalk to get a better look. Their roof was damaged, shingles raked off onto the ground, a hole punched in the boards.
Dismounting the motorcycle, Robin moved onto the property and into the narrow space between the houses.
On the other side, a wooden
fence had once separated the backyard from one of the many scrubby, rocky foothills leading into the mountains. Santiago had busted right through it, leaving a tumble of sticks. She marched through the gap and over the hill.
At the bottom ran a one-lane access road, unkempt and buckling. Thirsty, rough-looking pine trees made a scabby fence, following the road into the distance. “Give it up,” she whispered, jogging along the lonely road with the spear in one hand. She felt like a bushman on the hunt, or like Hector of Troy heading out to fight Achilles. “Give it up, man. Make this easy.”
Rounding a curve, she found a tollbooth. “What the hell?”
It stood on a median, forging through the asphalt river of the road with a triangle of dead landscaping. The tollbooth gate had been smashed and lay in shards all over the road. A sign was mounted to the top of the tollhouse that read EAST GATE, and another one below that revealed what lay beyond: the decommissioned Air Force base, Fort Bostock.
As she passed into the old fort, the hardy little desert trees stopped growing, replaced by weeds that burst through the road in brown tufts. None of the Hole’s few indigenous birds sang out there, though she saw a few crows that coughed and gobbled. Legions of ramshackle buildings still stood here, mostly long single-story clapboard barracks that looked like turn-of-the-century train depots, some of them gutted by fire.
A coyote trotted past some hundred yards distant, watching her warily, and disappeared into the brush.
“Abandon all hope,” she said to herself.
“—Ye who enter here,” said Annie.
Robin’s luminous eyes cut over to the ghost. “Hey, Mama.”
Annie smiled. “Hey, baby.”
“Where have you been?”
“Saving up for another ticket to come visit you.”
Sunlight faded as white cloud cover filtered in from the east. The two of them strode purposefully into the depths of the abandoned base, following a runway that seemed to go on forever. Huge flat concrete rectangles stretched across the desert in branching patterns, the former floors of disassembled Quonset huts.
“Mama,” Robin said quietly, “are you a figment of my imagination?”
Annie said nothing for a long moment.
“What makes you ask such a thing, hon?”
“Sometimes, I wonder if I really am crazy.” Robin sighed and swung her arms, stretching her shoulders. The black armor clung to her musculature as tightly as her old skin had. She wondered if it was her skin now, and if she would ever be—or at least look—human again. “Maybe this is all just a fever dream. Werewolves burned me alive. Now I’m a demon again, walking around in the sunlight, talking to my dead mother, fighting the urge to kill and eat everybody I see. None of this makes a bit of fucking sense. Maybe I had a psychotic break. Maybe I’m still cooped up in that psych ward, doped up on Thorazine or whatever they were giving me, and—”
“I don’t think so—”
“—maybe I’ve just dreamt the last several years. Only rational explanation I can come up with.”
“Surely not.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I can’t speak for the rest of it all … The time you spent with that fella in Texas. All them witches you fought.” Annie’s smile was bright enough to make up for the cloud-hidden sun. “Kenway … oh, I love Kenway so much, baby. I really do. Good man, and I’m glad he’s with you. But me? Does it really matter if I’m a delusion?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which is better, a hallucination of a good thing that makes you happy, or nothing at all?”
“Even if she’s just around to tell me what I want to hear?”
A wry smirk flickered across Annie’s translucent face. “I tell you what you need to hear.”
Behind her mother’s spirit stood a village of decrepit office buildings, two-story structures made to look like old Spanish mission houses. Dozens of them, tall and slender, the windows busted out. Looked a lot like Hammertown—so much so that she almost expected to see painted wooden silhouettes popping up in the windows.
The buildings were decorated with scrawls of graffiti. She was relieved to not see any witch runes. “Don’t remember you being this cheesy when you were alive, Mama.”
“When you’re dead, you have a lot of free time to think up cheesy stuff. You should hear my material. If there are any comedy clubs in Heaven, they may kick me out.”
“Well, wait up for me,” said Robin, kicking through sagebrush. “This guy may tear me to pieces. I might be coming with you.”
“Doubt it. My daughter is a grade-A badass.”
“Love you, Mama.”
“Love you too, tough-stuff.”
By now, Annie had almost completely disappeared. The only thing left that Robin could see was her face, like a kindly Cheshire Cat.
“Oh!” cried Robin.
“Yes, baby.”
“Forgot to ask you—is Marina with you? Is she okay?”
“Yes,” said Annie’s disembodied voice. “She’s here, somewhere. The others, they’re hard to see, hard to find. She made it here in one piece, so to speak. Let little Carlita know she’s okay, spiritually speaking.”
“Tell her I’m sorry about what happened.”
“She understands,” said the wind, pushing a leaf across the road. “She doesn’t blame you.”
“Good. I don’t need another ghost up my ass. One’s enough.”
The wind chuckled, tumbling the leaf into the dry culvert. Robin continued walking, heading into the maze of buildings. “You never really answered my question,” she said, glancing at the now-overcast sky. “Are you real or not?”
Sunlight glimmered briefly through a gap in the clouds, and her shadow leapt from her feet, disappearing as quietly as it came.
Track 34
“Are you real or not?” Her voice carried to him from the other end of the building. Santiago sat in the corner of a dark room. Sunlight fell across his legs from a nearby window and it was not warm—indeed, the colorless quality lent it a singular, desperate, cold look, like something out of one of those World War II movies he used to watch with Guillermo in the days before Marina, before he was road captain.
Am I real? he thought, staring at the walls-ceiling-floor-sky, clutching the wound in his side and trying not to vomit. His vision was all over the place, split between half a hundred eyeballs, like watching an entire panel of surveillance cameras all looking at the same room from different angles, some of them monochrome gray, some of them in vivid blue-and-orange thermal, some so gritty with motion blur that it made him nauseous. He wasn’t hungry but he knew he had to kill, every one of him had to kill because someone wanted him, a hunter bent on ending his life, and he had to keep on going. He had to keep going for Carrie—or was it Charlie?—and he had to keep going for Mother Mary.
La Reina. His hotline to the divine. He would put her back together. The gas tank … he could reattach it. Make her good as new. But first, he had to get to safety. Had to be safe. Then he could fix her.
Santi.
Somehow, the gas tank seemed to have migrated into his body as his other selves emerged, sitting in the middle of him like a giant chrome liver. The shapes made him less solid, more fluid, and the big metal tank had passed through him and into him like a sperm forces its way into an egg.
Santiago.
Crouching there in this cramped room, he managed to keep himself silent, though it seemed a thousand mouths all wanted to bleat-roar-scream at once. Keeping himself together and quiet was like trying to talk flies into a jar.
SANTIAGO!
The voice made him twitch. Santiago looked out the window, but no one was there. “What,” he tried to say, but his mouths wouldn’t cooperate.
She’s out there. She’s here for you. No time to rest. You need to fight.
Fight who? The wound the girl had given him throbbed in agony. Wasn’t deep, or even that serious, but goddamn, did it ever hurt. Like being shanked with a knife that’
d been heated over a fire until it was orange-hot, brand-hot, hot as the sun. Creeping frostbite spread outward from the gash.
Why are you hurting me? Isn’t this your power? Didn’t this come from you, the same place this power I have came from?
No, this is something different. This is not mine.
Whose?
Them.
Who is “them”?
Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you fight, Santiago. You fight for your life. Our life. You fight for both of us today. Don’t let her kill me, Santiago. Don’t let her kill me again.
Who is she?
Robin, said Mother Mary, the one who burned me in the trenches and the one you burned in the house in the desert. The one with the blade of the purifying light, the blade that was broken from its spear so long ago, the spear that killed—
The girl I burned? The one they call Robin? She survived?
Yes.
What the hell is wrong with her? The black skin, the horns …
She’s one of them, those creatures from the void where I remain. The Dökkálfar, the Se’irim, the Rabisu. I float in their world of black nothingness, their desert of anguish, always seeking safety. They surround me, scenting me like sharks. They chase me with insolent eyes and audacious teeth, seeking to eat me alive, drain me of life. I have hidden from them for so long. Who hunts a queen? Who hunts a goddess? And now they even hunt me in the world of the living. No realm is safe.
How did she survive?
When they die protecting innocent people, offering their own life in place of another, these vermin are given free rein in the sanctified world and the chance to serve the White. She is the first Rabisu in two thousand years to ascend. The last to ascend was the Christ himself, that clever cambion, who sacrificed himself in the name of all of humanity to establish the Sanctification and forever close the door on us. He gave his life to diminish the bond between your world and mine and, in doing so, made himself part of the White.
Our plans are fucked now, ain’t they?
Yes, I’m afraid so. My resurrection must somehow continue without your protection. They will find me, I’m sure; they’ll find me and cut me out of your daughter and crush me unless you can end them. Kill them, Santiago. Kill the half-darkling Robin and then kill them all, all those thieving magicians, before they find me and rip me out like they’ve ripped me out so many other times out of so many other innocent women.