by D V Wolfe
I found the box and the last stake. It was a puny looking one, more like a fat pencil than anything. And it had a blunt tip. I’d purposely been avoiding using it because I knew it was going to be an ordeal to get it through the skin. I wanted to sharpen it but that would mean knocking the coating of Solomon’s Spice off which I knew was essential for the whole demon-killing thing. Well, the time of the inevitable blunt spike had come. I climbed back out of the truck bed and looked down at the asshole on the ground. The one that had called me a bitch. There was never a better candidate.
“That looks pretty blunt,” Noah said.
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s why it’s the last one. I’d been avoiding using it.” I looked down at the man, who was feebly trying to get away again. I looked him over, trying to figure out the best way to run him through.
“You stupid whore,” he was seething, trying to laugh through his gritted teeth and the multiple avenues of pain he was feeling. “We’re just the welcoming party. When our lord gets here, he’s going to skin you alive and make this dimid watch.”
“As good a show as that sounds like it would be,” I said, an idea striking me. “You’re not going to be around to see it.” And then I squatted down next to the guy and pried his jaws apart with one hand, shoving the stake into his mouth. He started to scream, the red in his eyes flickering like a light about to burn out. The black smoke filled the air, stinking of burning shit and sulfur, and then he began to liquify. “Watch your shoes,” I said to Noah as the man’s puddle began to expand on the pavement.
“Well that’s one way to get around the blunt stake problem,” Noah said. “And thank you, by the way, for picking that orifice.” He followed me to the passenger side of the car. The woman just watched me as I opened her mouth and repeated the procedure while the other two demons fought against the salt tape that was holding them inside the car.
“There has got to be a better way for us to do this than with these freaking stakes,” I said as I force-fed the stake to the skinny driver. He didn’t go as quickly as the others. A lot of the Solomon’s Spice had burned up and fallen off with the first two. Finally, the black smoke started to pour out of him and his body began to liquify. I closed the driver’s side door and looked at the cloth seat upholstery that was absorbing the goo. “Not much resale value on this car now,” I said. I looked at Noah as we watched the sealed up SUV rock side to side with the angry demon in the back seat.
“We could just leave him,” Noah said, looking around. “It’s not like he can get out to follow us.”
I shook my head. “Until sweet Mary Jane from the farm down the lane stops to help on the way home from school and opens the door.”
“You’re right,” Noah said.
We both looked down at the stake. There was a ring of Solomon’s Spice up towards the top of the stake, but the bottom two-thirds were coated in black demon goo with pristine cypress underneath.
“This might take a while,” I said with a sigh. I probably should have staked him first.
“You probably should have staked him first,” Noah said.
“Monday morning quarterback,” I grumbled at him. I reached for the door. He’d figured out how the lock worked already and the salted tape was the only thing keeping him contained. I looked at Noah. “When I open the door, shoot him in the face. Hopefully, that will put him down long enough for me to shove the stake down his throat.”
Noah nodded and I jerked the door handle, moving to the side to give Noah clear room to fire. He lifted the sawed-off and for half a second, time slowed down. I realized that Noah had never shot the sawed-off before at the same time that Noah seemed to remember. He was looking down at the gun as the demon launched himself out of the backseat and straight onto Noah, knocking him to the ground. Thankfully, the sawed-off fell out of his hands rather than Noah accidentally shooting himself with it. The demon’s hands were around Noah’s throat and he was starting to squeeze by the time I’d grabbed the sawed-off of the ground and fired. The demon wasn’t letting up.
“I will bring destruction on you and my lord will elevate me for my service,” The demon hissed. I fired again. If anything, he looked like he was trying to choke Noah harder. I dropped the sawed-off. I felt something snap inside of me and I grabbed the demon by the head and stuck him in the throat. Black smoke filled the air and the cloth suit and heavy body beneath my hands began to collapse as the body liquified. I had forgotten the blunt stake had been in my hand when I’d struck. I quickly looked down at the deteriorating flesh around the stab wound. Only a half-inch of wood still stuck out of his neck. The blunt point had come out the other side, tearing and stretching the skin around the hole as it reluctantly punctured through.
“Oh my god,” Noah gasped from the ground. “Get it off me. It smells like burning dog shit.”
I yanked the goo-stained suit off of Noah’s chest and threw it into the road. I held my hand out to Noah and he took it. He got to his feet and stared down at himself. His tie-dyed shirt looked rather depressed with half of it repainted in demon black. His shorts were even worse.
“Do you want to put your FBI suit back on?”
Noah shook his head. “I’ve got one more shirt and a pair of shorts.”
I closed the doors on the SUV and pulled the tape off along with some of the paint job.
“We should probably torch it. I think at this point we’d be doing the SUV a favor,” I said.
“Seriously, one act of arson isn’t enough for today?” Noah asked.
I shrugged. “If we just leave it, the people who find it are going to ask the same questions about the suits full of black goo as they would about that ghoul’s bashed-in skull.”
Noah sighed. “Fine.” Noah and I stuffed the two goo-covered suits from outside the SUV into the back seat and closed the door. Noah emptied half the gas can onto the backseat of the SUV and I picked up the blunt stake from the ground. No Solomon’s Spice left to speak of. This worried me. If more demons were coming for us, like the ‘C’ team had promised, we were sitting ducks. Sure, we could rock salt them and give them a holy water shower, but we didn’t have anything to punch their tickets. I put the stake in the cab on the seat. I wasn’t sure why. I guess it gave me the tiniest bit of security. I grabbed the ten-gauge off the tailgate and Noah opened the passenger side door, dressed in a clean, well cleaner shirt and shorts. He pulled the seat forward and I handed the ten-gauge to him.
“I have to say,” I said. “It was damn convenient that you had this thing fully loaded.”
Noah smirked. “So, after all the lectures you gave me about us hitting a pothole and getting shot in the ass because of there being no safety.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “I feel fully vindicated.”
I shook my head. “Remind me when we have some time off, that you need to practice with the sawed-off.”
Noah snorted. “Yeah, time off. There’s a pipe dream.”
I balled up a crumpled food sack, lit the edge on fire, and threw it into the backseat of the SUV. There was a whoosh as the seat ignited and I slammed the door shut. I was hurrying back to Lucy when the sound of a car coming up from behind us made us both pause. I glanced back down the road and saw a van coming around the bend.
“I don’t really want to wait around to find out if that’s the ‘B’ team coming to check on their buddies’ progress,” I said.
“Me either,” Noah said. “Let’s haul ass.”
4
Surprise, surprise, now that the demons were past tense, Lucy started right up. As soon as I’d found the sulfuric residue on her engine, I knew there was demon foul play involved. Then the SUV of insistent Samaritans showed up, making it a sure thing. We headed down the road at a good clip, keeping one eye on the van that had slowed down when it passed the burning SUV and then sped up to the seventy mile per hour range. It was coming up behind us, but not speeding, as if it was going to try to force us off the road.
“We could just be going the same way,” I said.
>
“In a normal circumstance,” Noah said. “I’d buy that. Minutes after we just killed a luxury SUV full of demons and then set it on fire? Not a chance.”
“Not really luxury,” I said. “I mean, it had cloth seats.”
Noah narrowed his eyes at me. “Not really the point, Bane.”
I sighed and glanced at the rearview mirror. I could see the rising black smoke of the SUV marking the fire behind the van’s hulking outline. “It probably doesn’t make us look all that innocent when we ‘shank, gank, burn, and run’, huh? You think it’s the demon ‘B’ team?”
Noah shrugged. “Unless they’re being really obvious and going as the ‘A’ Team in that van. That does seem a little too on the nose.”
“Yeah,” I said, moving my gaze back to the road as we took a curve. “Usually pop culture references elude them. I can understand. If it hadn’t been for my re-education in the modern world when I came back topside, I’d probably be standing somewhere having a stare-off with a microwave.”
We hit the turn off for 44 East and Noah and I both let out a deep breath when the van took the on-ramp for 44 West.
“Well now that we don’t have to change our drawers,” I said, picking up my cell phone. “I think I’m going to yell at Stacks for a couple of minutes about him hoarding demon stakes just to get the blood moving again.”
“Be my guest,” Noah said with a grin as he leaned back in his seat. “You should put it on speakerphone so that I can hear it too. There’s nothing really exciting about this scenery.” Noah motioned at the pastures and flat horizon out the window. Noah was lucky he didn’t grow up in Kansas. The midwest has its own beauty. My dad used to say it was the perfect place for claustrophobics to live; lots of open space in every direction. Of course, if you had a fear of rattlesnakes, it was best if you moved along.
I flipped my phone open and hit the three on speed dial then the speakerphone button and set the phone on the seat between Noah and I. Stacks answered on the fourth ring. “What in the ninth circle of Rosetta’s canning cellar do you want?!”
Oh good. He was in a friendly mood. “She doesn’t store her canning in the cellar,” I said. “She uses the downstairs bedroom. And what has put you in such a fantastic mood?”
“Nothing,” Stacks muttered. “I’m still staying with Tessa and Marge until my new trailer gets fully installed. The damn landlord is being a jerk about the lot it’s on. Apparently, they found some of the used blasting caps I had buried on one corner and now they’re worried about ‘public safety’ or something.”
“Imagine that,” I said and Noah put a hand over his face.
“No offense,” Stacks snapped. “But I don’t remember ordering a wake-up call from the pain-in-my-ass fairy.”
“Stacks, it’s afternoon,” I said. “Were you still sleeping?”
“Yeah,” Stacks said. “I’m staying on Marge and Tessa’s couch and they had their floating craps game last night. I had to wait until Big Mikey passed out on one end of the couch before I could lay down at the other end to get some sleep. Of course, sometime during the night, he shifted and we ended up spooning and it made waking up at six-thirty this morning, really awkward.”
“Geez,” Noah said. “Bane, maybe you should take him off speakerphone.”
“What?” Stacks asked. “I’ve been on speakerphone this whole time?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, we’re driving through Oklahoma. Not much to entertain ourselves so we thought we’d give you a call. Catch an episode of ‘How I Spooned a Card Shark’. Anyway, I thought you were staying in their guest bedroom.”
“Tessa’s mom is visiting, so she’s staying there and I’m on the couch,” Stacks said.
“Them’s the breaks,” I said, trying to choke back a laugh.
“I’m so glad my life is amusing to you,” Stacks grumbled. “I’m going back to sleep now.”
“Wait,” I said. “We just ran into a black SUV full of demons.”
“Like ran into them, ran into them?” Stacks asked.
“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’d hardly waste a phone call telling you about that.”
“What, were they just randomly joy-riding and happened to trip over you?” Stacks asked. “How did the demons find you? With all the hex bags and protections you haul around in that truck, you should be the fricking invisible plane to every demon besides Festus.”
I paused. How had they found us? On a two-lane blacktop in Oklahoma. Maybe Nya was right. Maybe there had been demons amongst the cannibals. Of course, there was also the soul stone I had in my pocket. Festus said demons could hone in on them, but I thought he just meant the big demons could, not the pissants. I wasn’t ready to air this theory about the soul stone yet because I didn’t need Stacks freaking out and telling me to throw it in a river or bury it in Oklahoma or something.
“Bane,” Stacks said, pulling me back. “Walk me through what happened.”
I sighed. “Lucy started acting up so we pulled over. Then, this SUV with four demons dressed like Secret Service agents rolled up, got out, ignored our polite but firm,” I caught Noah’s gaze and grinned, “assurances that we didn’t need help and proceeded to open fire.” I just remembered my foot. It stung a little but it had gone numb for the most part. My sneaker was red and starting to turn brown as the blood dried, so I took that as a good sign that I wasn’t going to bleed out through my foot.
“Well, maybe it was the way you said it,” Stacks said on a yawn. “You can be incredibly blunt.”
“Speaking of blunt,” I said. “We used the last Solomon’s Spice stake we had and someone must have cut some corners when they were sharpening it because Noah’s elbows would have been a more effective shiv.”
“Shit,” Stacks said, and he sounded more awake now. “You only have one stake left?”
“Had,” I said. “Someone hoarded a bunch of the stakes for ‘research purposes’, remember?”
“So you don’t have any stakes left at this moment?” Stacks asked, completely skipping over the accusation in my voice.
“No,” I said. “We still have the stake, but there’s no coating on it anymore. I had to stuff the stake down the throat of three of them. The last one, well, there was some adrenaline pumping, there was some choking involved and I think I just snapped.”
“And you staked someone with a blunt stake?” Stacks asked.
“In the neck,” Noah said. “And it went all the way through.”
“Ewww,” Stacks said. “Thank you for the image, Noah. I’m sure that will be resurfacing when I go back to sleep. Just like bad Thai food after a drinking bender.”
“Anyway,” I said, giving the phone and then Noah a stern look. “We need more ‘Demon Away’ stakes. Are you done poking and prodding them for research purposes?”
“Not really,” Stacks said. “I’m trying to break down the exact ratios needed for the most effective kill. When we made them in St. Louis, we just coated the things. I want to come up with something more effective. Like hollowing the cypress stakes out and making a paste of Solomon’s Spice and the elixir that can be injected through the stake, right into the bastards.”
I groaned. “As excellent as that would be, we’re currently ‘butt cheeks flapping in the wind’ if a demon happens upon us.”
“Well, just don’t pull over anymore,” Stacks said. “Or go hunt something that isn’t a demon. Do you have any leads on Sister Smile and Joel?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe Walter will have something but it’s been goose eggs all around this week. We just can’t seem to get a bead on her. We thought we were hunting her earlier today, but it turned out to be a ghoul that liked wearing old ladies’ undergarments.”
“Takes all kinds,” Stacks said. “Man, I just hope Joel’s ok.”
Joel hadn’t been ok when Sister Smile had taken off with him. He had been beaten bloody. I gripped the steering wheel tighter. Damn it. If I’d just been a little quicker…
“Hey Bane,” Stacks was
saying. “I’ll front-burner the stakes and get on a solution asap. Hopefully, I’ll have some for you, ready to roll, in the next day or two.”
“I appreciate it,” I said to Stacks.
“Please let me know if you get any leads on Joel and Sister Smile,” Stacks said.
“Will do.” I flipped the phone closed and Noah turned on the radio. I was silently willing Walter to have seen something, anything that could lead us to Sister Smile and Joel. I was going to tear Sister Smile limb from limb when I found her. I didn’t care if she had been imprisoned herself by Mastick. He was dead and now it was her turn.
The radio was playing a Queen song and Noah started singing along. I watched him out of my peripheral vision and smiled as he banged his head and started to really get into it. In the last few days, I’d started to see Noah feel a little more comfortable in his skin and it reminded me of how I’d felt after a few months with Jo. Happy, even just in the moment, with who I was and where I was going.
The song ended and Walter’s old man voice coughed into the microphone before clearing his throat and reading. “A heavy fog is rolling into southwestern Iowa today and is expected to cause commuting problems, delays, and an upset in the migration of wild animals so motorists, be careful out there.” Noah met my gaze.
“That doesn’t sound like cannibal activity, does it?” Noah asked.
I shook my head. We listened for more but Walter introduced a Who song coming up next and faded out.
“Well, while we’re waiting for divine intervention to point us in the right direction to find Sister Smile, do you feel like doing a little hunting?” I asked Noah.
Noah pretended to think about it. “I don’t know. I mean the pay is crap, the risk is high and the companionship…” he looked at me, a dissatisfied smirk on his face. I gave him the finger and picked up the phone.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something. Your sass is starting to cause us some reductions in our gas mileage efficiency,” I said, hitting the six on speed dial. “It’s just too much. I’m afraid we might have to dump it.”