Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (19 page)

“This is called canvassing,” Arch said as Hendricks considered tuning the man out. He was already bleary-eyed, and the intro to basics of police work was about as boring as any of the ten thousand procedural shows he saw on the rare occasions he’d turn on the TV in his hotel rooms.

“Yeah, thanks for that basic instruction,” Hendricks said, noting the quick flash of annoyance on Arch’s face. “Think I’ve heard that somewhere before. Seems like the thing to do is for you to knock and me to sit in the car with the window open, since—hopefully—we’re not going to accidentally stumble onto the actual demon we’re looking for in the course of this canvassing thing.”

“You never know what you’re gonna find when you knock on doors,” Arch said, and Hendricks could see the tension in the man. “Could be anything.”

Hendricks could feel the annoyance building. “Tell me about it.”

“Mountain folk get a bit peculiar at times,” Arch said. Hendricks was already bored of the lecture. “Most of them are normal enough, but every once and a while you get a real weird one. Anti-social types. Maybe even a little angry at the authorities, if you catch my meaning.”

“Yeah, sure, hostile,” Hendricks said with a yawn.“I realize that’s probably a foreign concept to you,” Arch said, giving Hendricks a little angry side-eye.

“You ever hear of Ramadi?” Hendricks waited, but there wasn’t even a hint of recognition in Arch’s face when he looked over. “It was a town in Iraq where there were insurgents hiding. We—the Marines—had to go busting down the doors to houses. It was fucking shitstorm, too, a real Charlie Foxtrot.” Hendricks looked out the window.

He could hear the gears grinding for Arch, and when the policeman spoke, it was a lot quieter, a lot less irritable and with a mountain of humility. “What happened?”

Hendricks shrugged. He was too drained to put much into it; not that he had much to put into it anyway. “I was nineteen. We go busting down doors, sometimes I’m on point. Thing is, the guy who’s on point? Something like two out of three of them go home in a coffin, family gets the American flag to display on their mantle. We didn’t even get to use our fancy scopes and shit. We just short-stocked the rifle, lined our pointer fingers up with the barrel and BANG. Point and shoot. Pink mist splashing the walls. It was a goddamned clusterfuck. So, yeah, I’ve knocked on a few hostile doors in my time, even before I started finding demons on the other side.” He sniffed, irritation causing his face to twitch. “Hell, I prefer the demons to some fifteen-year-old fuckstick with an AK-47 that thinks he’s doing God’s own work. At least I don’t have to feel guilty about what I do to the demons.”

Arch was hesitating, and Hendricks could hear it. “You feel guilty about what you did over there?”

“Hell, no,” Hendricks said, staring at the greenery passing by out his window as they wended their way down the mountain road. “It was us versus them. I don’t care what you’ve heard, we didn’t fight over there because of orders or CO’s or for some fucking butterbars—that’s a junior lieutenant that doesn’t know his ass from an M203—trying to get a goddamned medal.” He turned to look at Arch. “We fought for the guys in our squad. If I’m blowing through the fatal front—that’s the three feet around a door, which you gotta clear in a goddamned big hurry—I’m doing it because of the guys with me. My buddies. It’s us versus them, and anyone who ain’t with us gets a bullet in them if they raise so much as a finger that looks like a pistol barrel.” He turned back toward the window. “That’s why it doesn’t bother me, having Lerner and Duncan with us. Because they’re with us, not them.”

“For now,” Arch said.

“For now,” Hendricks agreed. “But be honest. Those guys are working on the side of order against chaos. You think they’re gonna go switching sides when all we’re getting promised is chaos in the forecast?”

“I don’t know,” Arch said, guiding the Explorer into a slow turn. “I don’t have any idea what they’re about—really—and we ain’t got a lot of time to dig into it right now.” He made a face. “Help is help in this situation. I guess we need all of that we can get.”

“We do indeed,” Hendricks said and came within about a millimeter of asking Arch if he thought his wife was going to be a help or not. He didn’t, though, because he could’ve felt the tension between the two of them even if he hadn’t known Arch for a little while now.

“So what do you think this is?” Erin asked, waiting to see what Lerner said. She figured now that she had him alone, maybe she’d get the straight dope, the rumors and shit he didn’t feel compelled to share with a larger group.

“Fuck if I know,” Lerner said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen a few bodies get the shit beaten out of them, flung for a distance like these two have been, but it never quite looked like this. I mean, this shit isn’t like a beating. This is the sort of thing you’d swear was vehicular homicide if you didn’t already smell demons slinking about in the streets.”

“You said ‘slinking,’” Erin said, glancing over at him. He was cool as a cucumber, just sitting back like he didn’t care. “You don’t like your own kind?”

“I don’t like trouble,” Lerner said, not looking at her. She didn’t mind; she didn’t like his grin anyway. “Every one of the ones that’s drawn to a hotspot is trouble, lots of them with a capital T. It’s the nature of my job to deal with trouble, but much like a prison guard, I don’t have a lot of love for the inmates.”

“You run across a lot of the same shit?”

“There’s a lot of variety in the demon world,” Lerner said, still pretty close to neutral—and not like a douche. “Hell, you should remember, you grabbed your boyfriend’s demon guide. Thick book, right?”

“Like a Bible or an encyclopedia,” she said.

“It probably doesn’t even cover close to everything,” Lerner said, putting his hands up behind his head and leaning back into the seat rest. She worried his slick hair would get grease on the upholstery, but she didn’t say anything, just ticked another box against him. “There’s a lot of different kinds of demons out there. We number as many as the stars in the skies.”

She thought that sounded vaguely familiar but didn’t know from where exactly. “So how do you tell what you’re dealing with?”

“The thing you gotta understand,” Lerner said, and he finally turned his head to face her, lecturing like he was some professor and she was some fresh-faced student just out of high school, who didn’t know the world was going to fuck her for all it was worth, “is that most of the kinds in that book your boyfriend has are extinct or nearly extinct. They may have been prolific back in the day, but there was a war between man and demon, and demonkind got its collective ass kicked real hearty. Lots of species died off or came near enough to it as not to matter. The ones that survived learned to adapt and go underground. Stay out of human sight, keep things quiet, let them forget about our kind. Those are the ones that are still walking, still feeding and living their lives. Maybe they were fruitful and multiplied, who knows—”

“Don’t you know?” she asked. “Weren’t you there?”

“Hah!” He barked a laugh. “Good one, kid, but I’ve only been on earth for about a century. This was thousands of years ago. Point is, the demons you see today are mostly integrated into human society. The troublemakers are the ones that travel around, look for the places of upheaval—hotspots—and thrive on the chaos there. They come to a town like this, where you probably had more than a few demons living already, all peaceful and normal, and they stir the pot. They come and whatever they touch gets tainted. Corrupted, I guess you could say.” Lerner’s expression turned dark. “Just like a good man might live his whole life decent and gentle in a place where he’s safe and secure. But you put that same man in a lawless waste where he’s gotta steal and kill to survive, and you get a whole different animal. See, these wanderers, these agents of chaos—they come to a hotspot when it flares, and they start breaking down society. Dead bodies in the streets. Some family gets turned into dinner. Worse things happen. Point is—that lawful demon who’s just been living his life, suddenly he’s wondering why he’s bothering. He’s strong—stronger than a human. Maybe he’s got a taste for flesh, wants something his neighbor has—so he takes it. Because he saw someone else do it. Because he can. Because all the things that told him how normal it was to just be one of the people, they start to evaporate.” Lerner tapped the window with his fingertips, and Erin saw him leave oily residue on them. “See, the process of corruption leaves marks behind. Leaves spots. Dirt. The things that were once clean and pretty get ugly fast.” He held up his hand, then used his sleeve to wipe the fingerprints, leaving a smudge behind. “But just like this, it doesn’t come off so easily.” His smile was gone. “Sometimes it never goes away.”

Alison watched Duncan steer the car around the slope. They were set to tackle the middle of the road, between the overlook and the bottom of Mount Horeb. It had been quiet in the cab so far; she could tell the demon liked silence. So did she. But there were some questions that just needed to be answered.

“So,” she started, “what’s it like being a demon?”

When Duncan looked over at her, she just smiled. She could tell he didn’t know what the hell to say.

Lauren stood at the overlook up the side of Mount Horeb looking out on the town. It always made her feel tiny, like she was a nothing and a nobody being here. Midian looked pretty small itself, but not as small as she felt staring down at it. She stretched her hamstrings, felt the pull and the pressure as she did so, leaning against her car.

Molly. Molly was on her mind now. She’d left work behind, and now all she could think about was Molly and whatever she was getting into. Probably nothing good.

But maybe not. She was pretty responsible, wasn’t she? She wasn’t the kind to just get crazy—

Oh, wait. Neither was Lauren herself, but that had changed when Molly’s dad came into the picture. Charming son of a bitch. Lying, charming son of a bitch. Lying, charming, deadbeat son of a bitch. Not that she was still irritated at him or anything. A little help might have been nice, though.

She shuffled back and forth, preparing herself mentally. She’d run down the side of the mountain road before, and fortunately it had a lot more shoulder than the average road. She’d need to be safe on the tight turns, maybe move a little closer to the edge, but she should be fine. It was a pretty safe place to run, after all, low traffic, and fortunately a decent distance from Midian, what with all that had happened down there of late.

She grabbed her water bottle and took a last squirt for hydration before she headed down the mountain. She’d need to turn back before she got very tired, because the trip back up was going to be the real killer.

Erin knocked on the door of Chauncey Watson’s house with the back of her hand. It was a solid wood door in a solid wood house, an A-frame monstrosity that looked out over the valley. Hell of a view, probably go for a hell of a cost nowadays, but Chauncey Watson had been living here forever. Or at least since she’d been a girl.

Erin could hear the motion inside the house and glanced back to the car. Lerner was just waiting in the passenger seat, watching the whole process with a measure of disinterest. This was the third door she’d knocked on, and Lerner hadn’t showed any more interest in house number one or number two.

Erin stood there, baking in the damned heat, feeling the sweat pour down from her scalp. It was tracking lines down the back of her neck and across her forehead. She would swear to it that noon was nothing compared to the late part of the day, when the heat settled in on the valley before sundown and shit just got sweltering. It made her back itch, and she longed for the cool air conditioning in the car.

The door cracked open and a magnified eye peeked out at her through a glass thick enough it could have been cut off the bottom of a Mason jar. Chauncey Watson stared out at her, the half of his face that was exposed telling her that he was looking at her like she was a specimen for dissection or something. “Erin?” he asked. “Erin Harris?”

“Hey, Chauncey,” Erin said. She’d known him a little here and there, just like she knew a lot of the town folk. Chauncey Watson worked at a big engineering concern near to Cleveland just down the interstate, doing something with numbers or schematics or some such shit that she didn’t pretend to understand. She’d known him from his work volunteering for the engineering club when she was in high school. As far as she knew, it might have been his only human contact with people other than when he’d shop for groceries once a week. He’d always been sweet to her, at least for the year she was in the club. Always said hello to her when he’d run into her in town, too.

Chauncey pushed the door open all the way, and she just about took a step back from habit. The man was standing there in nothing but his boxers, tanned, sunken chest and skinny body distracting only slightly from those 40x magnification glasses he wore on his head. They really were magnification lenses, too, not real glasses, because no one’s damned eyes were that fucking big normally, were they?

“Whatchoo doing up here on Mount Horeb, Erin?” His voice was high and meandering. He glanced at her clothing. “Oh, I s’pose it’s Deputy Harris now. I always thought you’d have been a good mechanical engineer, you know, but—”

“Chauncey,” she said, interrupting him gently, “I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but I got a question.”

“Oh?” He stood there, his sunken chest heaving up and down with the effort of keeping him breathing. The man didn’t look like he ate even one meal a day, and his expression was what she’d called gentle befuddlement. “What can I do for you?”

She started to say something then stopped, trying to decide if she should mention his state of undress. She decided it was better to skip it. “Did I catch you in the middle of something?”

“I was just painting a miniature army,” he said, still staring at her through magnifying glasses. “They’re gonna be my fourth army this month, getting ready for a tournament up in Knoxville next weekend. Those dadgummed boys from Johnson City—last year’s champs—they ain’t gonna know what hit ‘em.” He laughed, a loud, high sound, then blinked, and fumbled for the magnifying glasses on his head, tearing them off self-consciously. “Sorry,” he said. “I forget they’re on, sometimes. I wear ’em so much in the evenings, you know, cuz I’m working on my armies. Damn, that’s embarrassing.”