Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (22 page)

Erin roared past Duncan’s black town car like it was out for a Sunday drive. She didn’t know if he was going slow because they were afraid to get in there and mix it up or if it was because Alison was a better shot at a distance, but she didn’t care. She cut them off like a Nascar pro and slipped in behind Arch’s Explorer like she was about to start drafting.

“Take the wheel!” she said to Lerner. He didn’t need to be told twice.

She hit the window control and had her pistol drawn as she leaned out. This was going to be a motherfucker of a shot, and she was still leaning hard on the accelerator. She had always hated math, but she figured just by judgment she had about five seconds to pull this off before she was going to have to hit the brakes for the next corner, and the curve would screw up what she had in mind.

She drew down, staring over the white sights of her Glock, holding it out one-handed. She didn’t get to the range as much as she would have liked, which would have worried her if she had more time to think about it. She didn’t, though, and so instead she pushed hard on the accelerator to bring her closer. Less distance made it harder to miss.

She drew a bead on the demon holding Hendricks. She aimed for middle back, because he had Hendricks good above the waist, and looked like he was sinking his teeth into—

She fired, the obnoxiously loud burst of the gun muted amid the squeal of tires and roar of engines. It was like the time she’d gotten tickets to sit in the sixth row at Talladega, the roar of the race loud enough to drown out the end of the world if it came.

She watched the demon fall, dissolving in black flame as he disappeared under her front end. The bump of the body under the Crown Vic was horrendous, like she’d run over a cinder block. She would have sworn the entire suspension went with him as he blew out under the right rear tire, and the shock knocked her pistol out of her hand. The impact jarred her, and she hit her armpit on the door, then bounced back and caught her left shoulder against the back of the window’s frame.

It hurt; like fire, like hell. It took her a second to recover from it to realize that Lerner was screaming at her, but by then it was too late. They were going eighty when she stomped the brakes, but there was a hairpin turn up ahead.

The tires were still screaming when they went into the flip off the side of the road.

Alison saw the sheriff’s car squeal into the turn. Duncan had already backed them off and slowed them down for the curve. Arch had done the same but pulled hard right to take the Explorer into a near ninety-degree turn. He’d made it, just barely, and the smell of burned rubber and clouds of black smoke from tires were everywhere in the air. Alison couldn’t see very well, but she knew the trajectory that the sheriff’s car had been on, and knew that things had gone very, very wrong when it didn’t emerge from the cloud of tire smoke on the other side.

Lerner had a bird’s-eye view for the car going over the edge of the cliff. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d been looking forward to when the day began, but it was the sort of shit one had to deal with when engaged in the high-stakes thrill ride that was demon hunting. He was holding that oh-so-helpfully-named oh-shit bar as the car rolled the first time. He kept his grip as they went into the second, and third, and fourth.

Not having bones to break or skin to lacerate certainly helped. The lack of nerves to send screaming signals to the brain he didn’t have was also a plus. The airbag managed to hit him squarely in the nose, but it was fairly useless at stopping his movement because it deployed forward and they were not moving forward at all.

He watched the whole thing with a sense of interest that he normally reserved for PBS documentaries. The windshield shattered on the second roll, breaking into tiny pebbles of glass. Lerner had seen glass break before, and it came out in long, sharp shards that would make a fine weapon to cut a human being if need be. Not that he’d thought about it.

These were pebbles, though, safety glass broken into tiny pieces that wouldn’t do much of anything unless they hit you full in the eyes. There was some bouncing around in the cabin, but most of it fell out on the third roll. He realized—a little surprised—that the passenger window next to him had exploded at some point, and he hadn’t even noticed it.

The roof caved on the fifth roll, sinking down a good three inches and turning the cloth-lined ceiling of the cabin into a crinkled mess. He could see the bare metal peeking through next to the shattered windshield, and the sun visors had completely broken free of their harnesses and were whipping about.

After the sixth roll there was a moment of peace. If he’d been human, Lerner would have take a breath. Actually, if he’d been human, he’d probably have been properly fucked, being good and dead from the impacts of the damned car rolling down the hill.

The moment of peace didn’t last, though. There was a feeling of weightlessness that accompanied it as the car turned once more in the air. Slowly. Painfully slowly.

He saw movement out of his window and turned his head to look. He could see the ground just below, racing up toward him. For a moment he had a perfect view of it—another road, little pebbles ground up in once-black asphalt that had turned grey with the ministrations of time.

Ah, yes, time. One of Lerner’s favorite things to ponder.

He wanted to think deep thoughts about it, but the sight of the ground racing at him replaced all the possibilities with one and only one.

Is my time up?

Lauren Darlington had seen the bicyclists coming around the steep S curve, all in black and not looking like any group of bicyclists she’d ever seen. The helmets, the bike outfits, everything was black.
This cycling team is brought to you by the color ebony, dark as the night itself.

What was missing what the sense that they were in any way human beneath all that surface shit.

She saw red eyes—red eyes, glowing ones, looking at her. She had a long run across empty pavement to a sheer cliff face on her left and nothing but a long-ass drop to her right, and those things were bearing down on her a hundred yards ahead.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

She caught the sense of malice even as far back as she was. What the hell were these things? They were pedaling fast, too, faster than she’d ever seen a bicyclist go. Was it just the mountain, aiding in their downward motion?

What the fuck was going on here?

Her gut was telling her to jump, to chance the face of the cliff and the drop below, telling her to go for it. That wasn’t normal, was it? Rational, analytical thought was intruding in. It was a weird dichotomy, but she was used to it. It was like the part of her that came out in an emergency room situation was watching her now, running down what was happening in slow motion and telling her non-rational mind to shut the fuck up, sit down, and ride this out.

And she was all ready to jump over the edge of the cliff when the car came crashing down the hill.

Hendricks knew a fuck lot was wrong as he gradually reeled himself back in to Arch’s cruiser. He was hurting up and down, could feel the blood running down his neck. He’d felt that fucking demon bite him and knew nothing good would come of it. His right arm had gotten wrenched and trapped first thing, pulled clear out of the fucking socket so he couldn’t do a goddamned thing with it. It was right there, screaming at him along with his ribs.

His left arm was more or less okay, though; that was a plus. Or it had been until he’d heard the squeal of tires behind him. He’d known something had happened with the demon to make it let go, but he was in a little too much pain to figure it out until he was back in the seat. Arch was screaming at him about as loud as the pain in his own head, and it took a minute for him to decode what the fuck was going on.

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” Duncan said. Alison had the muffs off by now, but every word that the demon was saying was still low enough that she had to check to make sure they were off. They were in a hard turn now, the S-curve that Erin had missed, and the demons were threading around right down the hill toward where the Crown Vic had run off. Alison just held her breath.

“Oh, Lerner, you bastard,” Duncan said, and Alison glanced over at him. The only thing she felt at the moment was a sense of wicked gratitude that Arch hadn’t been in the car that went over.

The car hit the road and it was like an explosion of metal and glass. Lauren covered her face and looked away, felt something sting her on her bare legs. After a half-second she turned back to look, unable to keep down for long, and she saw the car settled on its roof. It was sitting in the middle of the road.

Holy fucking shit, holy fucking God!
her mind screamed at her.
What the fuck what the fuck?!

Then the analytical took over again. The bicyclists were still coming, like a black sea surging down the hill. Like a cloud descending to cover her.

She knew what they were. Could feel it. Could feel death coming.

Her legs stung as she came up off the ground—when had she fallen? She ran—that was what she was here to do, wasn’t it? Why the hell did it hurt so much? She ran for the car and squatted down behind the hood where it had come to land, facing down the mountain road like it was going to slide the rest of the way to the bottom.

It didn’t slide, though. It just sat there, like a rock in the middle of the crashing tides, and she sheltered under it as a horrific buzzing noise rose around her and the bicyclists in black swarmed down the hill on both sides of her like hell was riding behind them.

Lerner never lost consciousness, because he didn’t do that sort of thing. He could hear the buzzing start just after he got his bearings upon landing. There was a sense that something was wrong, a sort of veiled sensation that his equilibrium was off, but he attributed that to having gone over a cliff in a car.

The air was filled with the smell of oil, and a ticka-ticka-ticka noise came from the engine, like it was cooling off after a long car trip instead of being one hundred and eighty degrees from its correct positioning on the horizontal plane. Lerner was hanging by his seat belt, suit crumpled and ripped in places.

The buzzing came and he recognized it. He knew it was coming down the hill, and he felt a rush of anger over that peculiar sense of something being terribly wrong.

And yet he did not give a fuck.

He pressed the release on his seatbelt and caught himself on the shoulder as he landed. He saw feet crouching under the place where the front of the hood rested only an inch or two from the pavement. He wondered who they were, but did not give much of a fuck about that, either.

Lerner emerged, pulling himself out of the window as the first bicycles were going by on his side of the car. They did not bother to steer around him because they did not see him, pushing his way out through the crumpled, misshapen passenger window. The damned thing was like a fucked-up rhombus from all the impacts, and it made it more difficult to get his slightly saggy shell through. He realized, quite absurdly, that it was as though the wreckage of the car were giving birth to him, letting him slide and wriggle out into the world like one of those miniature humans.

He was halfway out when he realized that they’d start to run him over soon. He would have thought of it sooner, but he attributed his scatterbrained-ness to the fall, putting aside for a moment that impacts like that wouldn’t have any real effect on his thought process unless his shell was cracked.

He jerked the baton free of his shredded jacket and deployed it into the front spokes of the next bike that passed him. He felt himself smile automatically as the flimsy spokes tore against the hell-forged metal and sent the rider flying through the air. He saw the landing, a burst of black flame disappearing around a figure who had just lawn-darted head first into the fading asphalt of the mountain road.

Lerner saw another bike swerve to miss him after seeing what their compatriot had just been through. He thought it was a bad move on their part, avoiding the body of the one inflicting the harm to their little collective in order to swerve around. He proved it was a bad move to the unthinking demon who had done it, too, by using his legs to propel himself off the side of the car and wedging the deployed baton in the front wheel of that bike. There was a scream before that one hit the ground and evaporated.

Lerner pulled himself to his feet, glancing down to see his suit completely ripped across the front. His bland chest was partially displayed from below the right nipple down to his slightly protruding belly. He ignored this and slammed the baton into the face of a passing biker who burst into dark flame in the air before leaving a brimstone stink lingering around Lerner.

He heard the shouts, the cries of “OOC!” and watched the bikers that remained in the peloton scramble to go the other way around the car. Seeking safety.

He lit up three more that cruised his way. Each tried to make small moves to stop him—hitting him with a hand as they passed, clipping him with the bike, and the last even tried to hit him dead on. Every one ended in a black cloud of flames, but the last did manage to knock him over as the bastard burned up.

Lerner lay there on his back, the sound of the buzzing bicyclists receding in his ears. That feeling of something wrong—something fucked up—was still hanging on. He didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to move, just wanted to lie there and wait for Duncan. He felt a cringe come on involuntarily and knew that was bad news. That meant the shell was telling him something.

Something bad.

He let his hand fall to the place where his shirt had been ripped and ran a finger down the length of his body. He found it just above where the pelvis would have been on a human, a little ridge so insignificant that a human wouldn’t even have called it a scratch.

But he wasn’t human. And he knew it for what it was.