Hot Blooded

by D V Wolfe

  9

  I was almost back to Stacks’ neighborhood when I remembered the napkin with the addresses. I pulled it out and turned around. Royson had lived on Clarence Street, Ellie had lived on Birch, and Barbara had lived on Cypress. Cypress and Birch were parallel streets that ran down either side of the lot New Covenant sat on. And Clarence connected them. Shit. They’d all lived across the street from the church.

  I drove through neighborhoods rather than taking the shortest route back to New Covenant. Just in case the Elder that had watched me leave, was still watching and would now recognize me and Lucy. I needed to investigate, but it would be really nice if I could do that without making a big scene with a demon in the middle of the street. I doubted anyone would want to talk to me after they saw me run a church Elder through with the sword, in front of their houses. Maybe they would though. If these three spoke up about the preacher to the paper, maybe there were others that wanted to but were too afraid to speak out publicly. Maybe they could be persuaded to talk to me.

  This was the positive thought I held onto when I parked Lucy four blocks back from Clarence Street. I got out and hiked down to the alley that ran behind the row of houses on Clarence. There were six-foot-tall privacy fences around every backyard on either side of the alley. They each seemed to have gates that opened inward to their backyards from the alley and each house had a neat row of trash cans lined up along their fence. I counted off houses and I paused behind the back gate to Royson’s old house. I pushed on the gate and it swung open. The post where the gate would have locked had been damaged and I could see someone had broken the catch off. The gate had been forced. The cops probably didn’t even look out here when they found Royson on his kitchen floor. I looked in at the backyard.

  Everything was dead. The grass, the tree, the flower beds, all of it. I looked around the alley to make sure I wasn’t being watched and then I moved inside the gate and looked around. There was a raised garden bed filled with the dead remains of tomato plants with a few black tomatoes, rotting in the dirt.

  “Excuse me!” a voice called behind me. I spun on my heel to see an older woman glaring at me from the open gate, hands-on-hips. “What on earth are you doing in Royson’s backyard?”

  I should have worn my FBI suit. I gave her my best innocent smile. “Hi,” I said. “I’m…” I didn’t want to say a relative in case this woman actually knew every member of Royson’s family. “I’m helping out with the Special Olympics and I was told to come to this address to pick up a bunch of race bibs. I’m from Indianapolis. I would never have tried the back gate but we have an event coming up in a few days and... I tried to call ahead, but there wasn’t an answer and I tried knocking on the front door…”

  The woman’s face changed from suspicion to on the verge of tears. “Oh, I suppose someone forgot to call you all. I thought you would have seen it in the papers, but, I guess things that happen in Messina probably don’t often make it into an Indianapolis paper.”

  I did my best to arrange my face into confused concern. “What would they have needed to call about?”

  “Royson,” the woman said, her voice beginning to warble as she swiped at her eyes. “Mr. Gibbs...he’s dead.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking at the house. “I’m so sorry.” The woman nodded and I looked around the backyard. “I suppose his family hasn’t had time to keep up his yard after his passing.”

  The woman shook her head. “No, I came over here the day after... they found him and it was all dead like this. I guess it all became too overwhelming for Royson.” She swiped at her face with a tissue she pulled out of her pants pocket. “I wish he’d have called. I’d have taken care of it for him.”

  “You obviously knew him well,” I said.

  She nodded and pointed at the house directly across the alley from Royson’s. “That’s mine. We were neighbors for seventeen years.” She shook her head and sniffed. “Sorry. It’s just, he was a God-fearing man. I would have never thought he could do that…”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” I asked, mentally crossing my fingers and hoping this old gal was so interested in her story she wouldn’t pause to think too hard about who she was telling it to.

  “Memorial Day. He was in the parade and I saw him just after breakfast when he was putting the trash out before he left. I should have gone over to check on him that night, but a raccoon or something was thrashing around back here and I was on the phone with the police and animal control. Took them three hours to get over here.” Now her tone had turned from regret to annoyance. “If they’d gotten off their asses with a little more gusto, I could have had that thing taken care of and still had time to go see Royson. Maybe I could have stopped him…”

  Something occurred to me. “Did you actually see the raccoon back here?”

  The woman narrowed her eyes at me. “I wasn’t about to sign myself up to get rabies. I heard the damn thing and I called the police and animal control. Let them deal with it. That’s why we pay taxes. But, by the time they wandered over to take a look, it had gone.” Her face crumbled again. “And so had Royson…” I needed to move this along.

  “Was Royson close to anyone else in the neighborhood? Did he have any other family in town? Maybe, someone, he would have trusted…” I paused when she looked up and I saw the confusion on her face. “Someone he would have trusted to hold onto the race bibs?” I finished quickly.

  The woman shook her head. “Royson was well-liked by everyone, but in the seventeen years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen anyone but his wife in that house with him. Even after she died five years ago. Not even folks stopping by for a beer on the back porch with him. But Royson wasn’t the only one that liked to keep to himself. Lately, the whole neighborhood around here has started to clam up. I think it has a lot to do with people being mad about the division in the churches.”

  “Oh?” I asked, playing dumb.

  “Yeah,” the woman said. “A lot of us that went to the Church of the Nazarene have lost lifelong friends because they went over to New Covenant. Now, it’s like they don’t know us from Adam.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. I wasn’t sure how much more useful information I was going to get out of this woman. She hadn’t moved from blocking me into Royson’s backyard and she was still talking. Great.

  “Why Belinda Sue Cartwright and I used to be thick as thieves over at Nazarene, now when I see her at Kroger she acts like I’m a stranger on the street. Can you believe that?” I shook my head, trying to placate her, but I was really trying to think of a way to get past her without having her call the cops on me for being in Royson’s backyard. “And our kids went all through middle school togeth-,” she paused, looking down the alley. “Oh no, they’re back.”

  “Who is?” I asked.

  “The outreach aliens,” the woman hissed.

  I paused. Had she just had a stroke? The woman didn’t even say good-bye. She hustled across the alley and opened her back gate. She slipped inside, pulled it shut and I heard a bolt slide home, locking it behind her. I peeked out and I saw a pair of teenagers walk by the end of the alley. It was a boy and a girl. They were about the same height with pale skin and sandy blond hair. They wore matching yellow polo shirts and khakis, and they each had a Bible with a stack of pink fliers in their arms. As if they could sense me watching them, I saw them turn their heads in unison to look down the alley towards me and I pulled my head back into Royson’s backyard and eased the gate shut. If they were just innocents working to spread the New Covenant’s...whatever, then I didn’t have the time to waste. If they were actually Suzy and Billy Demon wearing teenage meat suits, I didn’t have a weapon on me at the moment to give them a Bible story of my own. I cursed myself for stashing the .45 in the truck before I came snooping. My thought had been that friends and neighbors might see the bulge under my shirt and get the wrong idea.

  I held my breath and listened for the sound of footsteps coming down the alley. Silence. I waited for
about five minutes and then I eased the gate open again. I peeked out. It was deserted. I crept back down the alley and kept an eye out for the teens in yellow polo shirts. I caught a glimpse of a pair of them working their way through Royson’s neighborhood, five minutes later, but I was in a moving vehicle and I guessed they hadn’t been taught how to do door-to-door missions as a drive-through.

  I moved over to Ellie’s neighborhood and parked as far back from the church as I could while still being able to get back to Lucy in under ten minutes if I ran. I repeated the process I’d started at Royson’s but I had taken a second to change into my FBI outfit and I had a story ready. I was posing as the daughter of a woman Ellie’s Meals on Wheels program had taken care of and I had driven into Messina to see her and tell her thank you. It was too bad that I didn’t actually get a chance to use the story. Ellie’s house had no back fence and I couldn’t find a nearby neighbor that was home. What I did find was that, like Royson’s, Ellie’s backyard was brown and dead. I knew demons could do something like this. The question was, why would they want to?

  I had just moved Lucy to a new spot, six blocks back from Cypress and I was about to go check out Barbara’s neighbors when I saw the yellow polo shirt squad re-emerge. The pair I’d seen earlier, started walking down the sidewalk towards me. I started thinking of the best way to avoid them. On the off chance that they were just brain-washed teens, I could ignore them. If they weren’t, I had the .45 at my back and two clips in my pockets, but that was it. Both the sword and the sawed-off weren’t good stealth weapons. I heard footsteps on the sidewalk behind me and I turned my head to see another pair of yellow polo shirts. Two guys this time, mid-teens. I picked up my pace and out of the corner of my eye, I saw another pair of polo shirts come off of a side street and start towards me. All six of them had their eyes glued to me when I turned to look. I turned on the sidewalk and started down Cypress, away from all three pairs of them. Up ahead, a fourth pair turned the corner and came onto the sidewalk. I was surrounded.

  “Welcome, sister,” one of the teens behind me said. “You seem a bit lost. Maybe we can help with that.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m fine. Why don’t you skip along back to your mothership.”

  “Welcome, sister,” one of the girls in front of me said, taking a few steps closer to me. “Let us give you the peace and joy of a new covenant.”

  “Not interested in the hash you’re slinging,” I said, trying to push my way past them. They closed ranks around me. The Empty House I was currently wearing was only five foot, six inches tall. I wasn’t sure what the teens in Messina were eating these days, but I was guessing it was something like Miracle-Gro because there wasn’t one amongst the eight surrounding me that was under five foot eight. Fan-freaking-tastic.

  “Lay your burdens down and join the new covenant,” another one of the teens said. There was a wheeze to the inhale in his voice and I heard it. The skittering sound, like a bunch of mice trapped in a shoebox. It was coming from all of them. And it was getting louder. It was the sound that imps made... when they were excited. Great. I had always wanted to blow heads off of a bunch of imps impersonating teenagers in the middle of the day, right next to a church. Since the .45 was all I had on me, I wasn’t armed well enough to deal with any demons that might come running out of the church next to us. I needed to get back to Lucy.

  “I’m just going to leave now,” I said. “Before I lay you all down on the pavement, capiche? Being imps, I’m sure you don’t understand what I’m saying so I’m just going to go.” I swung around and punched one of the teens in the gut. He doubled up and I leap-frogged over him to get out of the tight circle. Then, I started hauling ass. I needed to get back to Lucy and get the sword. At least that would be a heck of a lot quieter than the .45 or the sawed-off. I could hear them coming down the sidewalk behind me. In seconds, hands were on the back of my jacket. I pulled my arms out of it, letting them take it, hoping it would slow them down. No such luck. Seconds later I could feel hands snatching at my back, trying to grab my shirt. My gun was exposed now. I reached back and drew the .45. I rounded the corner of Cypress and one had lunged for my leg and latched on. I stumbled. If I went down, they’d tear me to pieces. I pulled as hard as I could and I managed to drag myself and the imp hanging onto me, into the alley behind the row of houses facing Cypress. I flipped the safety off on the .45.

  “Didn’t really want to do this,” I said to the imp. “So this is really on you.” I fired a shot straight down through the imp’s head and winced as it blew apart and the grip on my leg let up. Of course, now the other seven imps were coming down the alley at me. I aimed at the nearest one and it lunged just as I fired. I managed to hit her in the shoulder but she got back up and started towards me again. Great. Now, I only had six shots left to put down the last seven. They started coming at me in pairs. I managed to shoot two more in the head and bits of brain and skull rained down on the alley in a shower of blood spray, staining their perfectly-pressed polo shirts. I hit another one in the neck and two in the chest.

  The ones that had been hit were stunned and stumbled sideways, their teenage skins starting to ripple as the imps inside lost control of their ability to hold the illusion in place. I had a clean shot of the last one running at me and I drilled him through the eye socket. I saw the dumpster behind him absorb the blow out from his skull like a Jackson Pollock painting. My momentary lapse in thinking while I admired the piece of impromptu art, cost me dearly. The four imps I’d shot but not completely put down had gotten behind me and there was now a veiny, clawed hand at my throat from behind. Two of the imps were fighting my arms and legs, trying to get my gun away from me. I flailed out with it, smacking one of them upside the head. It snarled and hit me with such force that it knocked me and the imp holding me by the throat back against a privacy fence.

  The remaining imps had let their teenage good-looks fade away and they were back to being the red-skinned, vein-throbbing, drooling monsters I’d seen before. When we hit the ground, one of the imps had lunged forward and grabbed at the .45, bending my fingers backward until they could pull it out of my grip. I looked at the imp who held it. He was studying it, holding it by the barrel with the grip pointed at me. It was too bad I’d emptied the clip. The way the imp was holding it, there was a good chance he would have shot himself if there were any live rounds left. It didn’t stop the imp from bringing the gun down on my head like a hammer. I threw my arms up to protect my head and I felt my fist make contact with the drooling mouth of the imp that had been knocked down with me. It gave a hiss and strangled cry of pain and I rolled to the side to avoid its arm as it swung out to grab me. There was another, louder cry of pain when I turned to see the one with my gun had just kept on swinging and hit the other imp in the head with the .45.

  I scrambled to all fours and started searching the alley, looking for a weapon. There was a piece of metal pipe sticking out of a garbage can one house down from where I was. I took off for it and I heard the imps coming behind me. I got to the can and I’d just pulled the pipe out when the back gate next to the trash can opened and Nigel stuck his head out.

  “What in the hell?” he yelled.

  “Go back inside,” I wheezed, pulling the pipe out and swinging it at the oncoming imps. I caught one on the side of the head and knocked it down.

  “Hang on!” Nigel yelled. The gate closed and I swung again, knocking the imp that was holding my gun to the ground. The pipe wasn’t enough. Their heads were still intact, so they kept getting back to their feet and coming back for more. I was doing ok keeping them off me when they charged one or two at a time, but if they got organized and all four came at once, I was toast. The sound of a chainsaw caught my attention and Nigel kicked his back gate open. He was carrying one of the mini-chainsaws on a pole for trimming trees and he wasn’t shy about using it. He hit the nearest imp in the neck and I almost puked when he made it halfway through the neck and the blades quit spinning.

  “S
hit,” Nigel muttered. “The box says it can’t handle branches thicker than seven inches.” The imp was stumbling around in agony with the chainsaw stuck in its neck. Blood was gushing and spraying everywhere and the other three imps were knocking into each other and the wounded imp, trying to keep away from my pipe and help their sister imp. I saw my .45 in the dirt and I lunged for it, ejected the clip, and had it loaded before the three imps with heads still attached, noticed. I didn’t think, I just fired. Four exploded skulls later, I stuffed the .45 into the back of my pants and moved over to where Nigel was leaning against his back fence, all the color drained from his face. He was picking at his shirt pocket where his pack of cigarettes were but he couldn’t seem to get a hold on them.