Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (42 page)

The fire burst out of the belly of the bum’s shirt like a door coming off a stove, and the next scream he let out was consumed by a belch of flame that rolled out of his mouth.

“Holy shit!” Pat said. He did not move to help and neither did Mick; the diner owner just stood there, stunned, and Mick stood right with him, though only feigning surprise. Inside, he was a big, bubbling pot of indifference.

The bum’s screams died with the gout of fire that came out of his mouth and his skin was replaced with flame within a second, a blackened skull appearing within them like some object partially unearthed. The fire crackled as the bum fell to his knees, arms spread wide like he was ready for a hug or salvation or something. He was completely consumed by now, and Mick wondered just how alive he was under the orange blaze. His clothes, the threadbare, shitty things, had already blackened and peeled back. Bones were appearing now, obvious, as the body—what was left of it—toppled to the ground in the mouth of the alley and stopped moving.

Mick watched with detached interest, trying to plot his response for maximum effect. “Jesus,” he said, putting a little acting into it, like when he had to fake excitement for someone who had won a prize at a booth, “did he just spontaneously combust?”

“I ain’t never seen nothing like that,” Pat said from beside him. “Jesus. I think he did.”

“I know I wasn’t anywhere near him,” Mick said, trying to sound awestruck, “and neither were you.” He cemented his alibi with this little lie. “He was just standing there and—I mean, holy, it was like the flames came
out
of him, it wasn’t even like he was on fire on the skin or clothes or anything …”

“Yeah,” Pat said, nodding. The proprietor had not yet moved his gaze off the charred remains, the flames finally dying down. The whole alley smelled of them, smelled of burnt meat, and Mick covered his nose involuntarily. “There wasn’t anybody anywhere near him, he just lit off like a firecracker.” His nods came one after another, and Mick wondered for a moment if the diner owner’s head wasn’t going to bob right off his shoulders.

“We should call 911,” Mick said, finally dropping that suggestion. Now that the damage was irreversibly done and his alibi was secure.

“Yeah,” Pat said, but it came out with the air of a man who had heard and nodded but would not move without some external prodding.

“You should go do that,” Mick said then thought the better of it. “
We
should go do that.” Pat’s gaze finally shifted off the body to look him in the eyes, a sort of blinking curiosity one might find in the eyes of a child looking for explanation on some simple fact. Mick provided it, happily, acting his way through. “I don’t want to be alone with the …” He waved a hand at the smoking corpse, lying prostrate on the alley floor, the pavement scorched around it. “… With him.”

Arch heard the “All units” call go out on the radio as he hit the outskirts of Midian. He assumed, the shudder of the car’s deceleration running through the steering wheel to his arms, that it did not apply to him. He listened anyway, the particulars causing a very different sort of shudder, one prompted by the description of Jarrett Barnes, whom everyone in Midian knew, turned to flaming ash and dust in the middle of the square. Arch kept driving, kept shaking, and found when he reached his apartment that he had some trouble walking from the Explorer to the door of his apartment, and the fumbling for his keys was even worse.

Yes, this was Midian now, he decided. Bodies found every day, the town falling steadily into ruin. Was it the end of days? Maybe, he decided, as he finally sunk the key into the lock. The cool air of the apartment was not reassuring, though, as he closed the door and felt the lack of the apartment’s other occupant especially acutely in the shaded dark of this place that did not feel like home.

They made it to the car faster than Hendricks had anticipated. The chatter was minimal, the breathing not as heavy as one might have expected given that there were five of them. Two of them might not have been human, but still—Mr. Longholt did not wheeze at all, and his daughter’s panting sounds were minimal. Hendricks fought against the pounding of his own heart to hear, mostly, and found it somewhat surprising that there was no sound of dogs behind him, no patter of hellhound feet searing plant and leaf and grass and dirt as they pursued. When the town car came into sight he let out a breath of relief, one which sounded much like every other breath he’d drawn in the last hour or so—somewhat gasping.

“Why … aren’t they chasing us?” Longholt asked. Leave it to Army to try and beat the Marines to the punch. “Last time they at least dogged us on the way out. This time, nothing.”

“Because his girlfriend killed their queen,” Duncan said, nodding at Starling, who stood next to Hendricks, but a lot more at peace than he was. So level was the OOC’s tone that it took a moment for what he’d said to settle in Hendricks’s brain.

“Wait, she did what?” Hendricks jerked his head around to look at Starling, who was staring straight ahead. “She killed Mandy?”

“You’re not gonna cry about it, are you?” Duncan asked with something approaching a sneer. Like he was channeling Lerner’s departed spirit. “But yeah, she chucked a wooden support from a collapsed building at her. Impaled her right in the middle of her little dog party. They all burst into black flames right off.”

“Like a hive army in a movie,” Alison said. “Kill the queen, kill them all.”

“Let’s not go digging too deep into that,” Mr. Longholt said, his expression now curiously clouded.

“It’s good to know, isn’t it?” Duncan asked. “In case we fail tonight?”

Hendricks let that rest for a minute before cutting into it. “Yeah, it’s great to know that if we fuck up and this carnie gets laid, all we have to do is murder a girl to save the town. I’m so very ecstatic about that. Somebody pinch me.” He felt a harsh sting on his hand and looked over at Starling, who had done just as he commanded, as neutral as ever. “Didn’t mean it in a literal fashion.” Starling did not look sorry.

“We need to move,” Mr. Longholt said. “So as to avoid having to consider that option.”

“I guess I’ll just play devil’s advocate here—” Duncan said.

“Seems like that would be in your job description,” Alison said.

“—and suggest that this is a very valid option,” Duncan went on. “Maybe you lack the emotional distance to see what needs to happen here. One girl’s life does not balance well on the scales against that of a whole town.”

“Which is maybe gonna burn anyway, if cryptic prophecy chick over here is right,” Hendricks said, nodding at Starling. He locked his eyes on her. “Well? Gotta any other helpful words of advice now that we’ve extracted ourselves from this mess I just had to
feel
?”

“You are unforged steel,” she said, looking straight at him. “A sword without an edge.”

“Oh, I think you’re about to see my edge,” Hendricks said.

“You are not ready,” Starling said. “You must face the trials to prepare for what is to come.”

“And you’re just gonna lead me through ’em, like a pup at a dog show?” He didn’t even like the way it sounded in his head, but it was even more bitter spilling out of his lips. “What am I to you? A pet? Like those … things … were to Mandy?” He waved his hand in the direction from whence they’d come and tried to glare at her, but she gave no hint to indicate that his anger affected her at all. “Is that what I am?”

She stared at him coolly, like always. “You are Lafayette Jackson Hendricks.”

He felt his mouth dry. “And?”

She did not break off from his look, did not blink. “You have a task set before you.”

He started to bark back at her about tasks he did not want nor need, but before the bile even had a chance to bubble out in hot, molten fury, it was as though he had blinked and she was no longer there. Empty space stood before him, the cloudy sky now more closely approximating a grey day than night, the smell of fire and sulfur nearly gone from the wind.

“That’s a hell of a thing,” Mr. Longholt said, staring into the space she had occupied.

“Neat trick, huh?” Duncan said, and he sounded a little pissed himself. He bumped lightly into Hendricks’s shoulder as he stepped forward, like it could give him a better view to the empty space Starling had been standing in only a moment before. “Well … you want to keep arguing about whether you ought to do as she said like a dog, or would you like to go see if we can save that town where you’ve been hanging your hat, laying your—lay?” Duncan grinned, and once again Hendricks had the sense that it was the sort of crack Lerner would have made, had he been here.

Hendricks felt like arguing, was all set for it, ready to let it fly, but the lack of Starling to rail against took all the starch out of his collar. He kept his mouth shut long enough for reason to prevail, never once looking away from the place that damned woman had stood as she spouted her matter-of-fact bullshit. “Let’s just go,” he said, and he turned away, tracing a path back to the town car one step at a time. He tossed the keys to Duncan, though, and headed for the passenger seat for himself as he watched Alison go toward her father’s pickup. He spared only a fleeting thought about how it might be marginally more fun to be a fly on the window of that vehicle than the passenger in his own, seated next to the stoic demon for a hundred and fifty miles of highway and silence.

Alison didn’t exactly revel in silence, not when her daddy was right there. He gave her the space to start the conversation, and she appreciated that, watching the fence posts on the side of the highway whipping by as they blew past at eighty. The black town car carrying Hendricks and Duncan was just ahead of them, setting the pace her father was following. The air conditioner was turned up to full and blowing cold air at her, silent accusation for what had happened a hundred miles ago and more now.

“She wasn’t the same girl,” Alison said, breaking the silence herself, a plate crashing to the floor of the kitchen on a quiet night.

“No, she wasn’t,” her daddy agreed, nodding along without much else in the way of emotion. “I could see that plain as day, even through the scope.”

“How do you reckon it’s been for her?” Alison asked, genuinely curious. “All those years there with nothin’ but those dogs for company?”

Her father just shook his head. “Girl wasn’t right, that’s for damned sure. Last time she was … distant, for certain. But not like this. Her daddy … I reckon he’d have been real disappointed to see how it all turned out for her. I find myself thinking that redheaded gal might have done Amanda a favor by putting her down.”

“Like a dog,” Alison said.

Her father held a silence for a second, guiding the old pickup truck between the lines. “Just like.”

She held her thoughts for another minute, just letting them sift. “Did you ever think when we went there all those years ago … that … what happened there … that it’d ever happen to our home?”

“Hell no.” There was a silent shame there, she realized, unspoken. “It was one of those things that I couldn’t explain at the time, not knowing about demons and whatnot. I still don’t really know much, at least not like your new friend in the cowboy hat seems to. But I don’t reckon anyone looks at the misfortunes of others like that—and I couldn’t see what happened to her, her town, in any way except through the eyes of her daddy, because I knew him well—and wonders too hard about what would happen if a freak occurrence like that came to rest on his own home. It’s a lot easier to think that something like that’d happen to someone else, anyone but you. So, no, I didn’t ever think about it coming. Not to Midian.” He swallowed hard enough that she saw his Adam’s apple waver. “Not in a million years.”

“More like thirty years.” She sat there for a second and the reached out, resting a hand on his arm. “We’ll stop it, Daddy.”

He gave her a faint smile. “Damned right we will, sweetheart.” But she could tell that in his heart of hearts, he was really not so certain.

Hendricks rapped the window, staring out. The sky was starting to show the first purple hues, and that didn’t sit well with him for some reason. Veteran of Iraq, demon hunter who’d put the sword to more of the beasts than he could rightly count, and now he was getting squeamish—nervous, he corrected himself—wondering what was about to happen. He’d left home behind a long damned time ago, walked away at eighteen with not even a look back for very good reasons. With Renee, it had felt different for a while, like he could go home, just to a different one. When he’d been fished out of Lake Ponchartrain, that feeling had gone like yesterday’s breakfast, flushed out of him. Nothing left but a hollow, hungry feeling that he’d filled by indulging in revenge. Sweet, sweet revenge against an endless, disorganized army of demons that he’d bested on every single occasion. Strong but solitary, he’d found stomping demons flat easier than knocking down doors or going on missions in Iraq.

He could hear a noise in the wheel well of the car as it rolled along the highway, and that noise was driving him half nuts. The steady thump of his knuckles against the glass didn’t cover it, didn’t nearly blot it out of his hearing. It almost seemed like it added to it, a drum beat for the music that was torturing his soul. If he’d believed in souls.

“Will you stop that?” Duncan asked him. The OOC didn’t seem terribly put off by it, such was his calm.

“Sorry,” Hendricks said, not really sorry. He did stop the drumbeat, though, letting his knuckles twitch idly in the same rhythm. He could hear the noise, that buzzing, screaming sound like he’d heard on the mountain as he hung out the window and felt the air streaking through his uncovered hair—

“Missing your girlfriend?” Duncan asked, and Hendricks could tell by the way he asked that he didn’t really care.

“Missing your boyfriend?” Hendricks lobbed back.

Duncan didn’t respond, and Hendricks sunk back into thought. That buzzing noise was a damned haunting thing. He imagined hearing it in dreams, wondered how much of it that it would take to drive him mad. He listened closer to the thrum of the tires on the highway and concluded that it probably wouldn’t take all that much. Then he thought of Erin, lying in a hospital bed somewhere he couldn’t even see her, hopefully surrounded by her family by now, and the sound became a buzzing in his head again, and before he knew it, he was drumming his fingers on the window without even being fully aware of it.