Demon Hunt (10 page)

Marge and Chuck Brown stayed an extra day in Cripple Creek to feed Marge’s compulsive need to pump quarters into slot machines while Chuck haunted the blackjack tables.

Like most military retirees from down the mountain in Colorado Springs, the couple didn’t have anything else to do. And since Marge hit a jackpot of ten thousand dollars the year before, they’d spent the ten thousand and more trying to replicate the win.

Tapped out, the Browns checked out of the venerable Independence Hotel and headed for the old powder blue Cadillac in the parking lot.

A short, squat man of sixty-something years, with an alcoholic’s red nose and weasel eyes set back in a swollen face, Chuck wasn’t happy with their losses. He also wasn’t sober, having downed a couple of shots of George Dickle bourbon over ice in the bar while waiting for his wife. Marge had been busy losing her last three dollars in the nickel slot machine closest to the door, considered a ‘hot’ machine by experienced slot players because the slot statistically witnessed the most use, and thus made the most payouts.

He glared at his bloated wife as she puffed on a cigarette, ignoring his struggle with the luggage on the way to the car. “Could you do something besides suck on that menthol? Never mind, maybe it’ll hurry up you kicking the bucket and I won’t have to see your enormous rear walking through my house in bike shorts any more.”

Marge ignored him and opened the passenger door to climb inside, leaving her husband of thirty-five years to put their bags in the trunk. Chuck’s verbal abuse ceased to register with the woman in the last few years. Like many women in her position, Marge was dead inside. She felt nothing for her husband and considered Chuck a necessary evil to get enough money to drown her disappointment in life at brightly lit slot machines.

There was always the slim chance she’d win enough money to escape him.

She checked her bright pink lipstick in the mirror and carefully powdered her face. Then she examined the red helmet of hair covering her head and adjusted one of the hairspray-lacquered curls.

Chuck snorted in disgust. “Why do you spend money on hair and makeup? Blow a few bucks on joining the gym and maybe you wouldn’t need to color yourself up like a hooker to get attention.”

“
That’s like an elephant giving diet advice to the hippo, Chuck,” Marge replied without batting an eye. “Get in the car; I want to get this drive over with tonight.”

She referred to the solitary ride down Highway Sixty-seven to Highway Twenty-four to Colorado Springs. Sixty-seven was a winding, two-lane road, edged with steep drop offs and few houses. A post New Year’s night drive down the Hill, as everyone called the thoroughfare, would be a solitary one. Inebriated gamblers leaving the mountain town regularly drove straight off a cliff and down into one of the deep ravines between mountains. If they missed knocking out one of the occasional guardrails, it was usually days or even weeks before the car was missed. The drivers would be discovered still strapped in their seats, casino smoke clinging to their clothes.

There were no other cars in sight when the Cadillac made its way around the corner at Gillette Flats. A few lights twinkled in the scattered homes along the way but the black and gray backside of Pike’s Peak loomed in front of the car like a dark leviathan topped with a dented crown of white. The gas-guzzling auto carried the couple towards their home, and not a word passed between the pair.

After a few minutes, Chuck heard the first gurgled snore rise from the direction of his wife. Relieved that he didn’t have to make conversation, he flicked on the radio and searched for the classic country station from Colorado Springs. Evergreens crowded closer to the car as he fiddled with the knobs on the radio. He glanced down for a second and a shadow darted into the road. The land yacht smashed into the figure straight on, which thumped sickeningly into the grill and rolled onto the hood. The creature raised its head and stared into Chuck’s face, smiling. A clawed hand smashed into the windshield.

“
Oh, God!”

Chuck lost control of the car and sat back in the pale blue velour of the seat to watch in helpless horror. The vehicle flew gracefully between two guardrails and over the tops of the pines to plummet into the deep cleft between the mountains surrounding Highway Sixty-Seven. He remembered to scream seconds before they hit and his unbelted body flew through the windshield to crunch into the ground.

Marge’s rotund form was still belted into the car when she awoke half-frozen, confused and hanging from her seatbelt. Blood streamed from a cut on her head into her eyes. She realized that the car somehow had planted itself, headfirst, into the deep loam and snow of the forest floor. She gazed blearily out the shattered window into the darkness of the woods. The trees moved in the wind as small shapes scurried back and forth in the night. A smell reminiscent of rancid milk poured over a wet dog hit her nose at the same moment she heard a curious sound, like her cat nibbling at a bowl of dry cat food in the middle of the night … busy little crunching sounds.

“
Chuck?” She managed to rasp. She focused on the shattered windshield in front of her. She started to struggle with the seatbelt cutting into the rolls of fat around her midsection. “Chuck? Are you alright?”

Her sight began to clear as she managed to release the latch on the belt. She lurched, face first, into the dashboard where she struggled for a moment in the cockeyed car until she managed to shove her way through the remains of the windshield. She crashed to the ground and then staggered to her feet in the slush.

The dome light and the rear lights on the car were still lit. She could make out a pool of dark liquid on the ground in front of the car that trailed off into undergrowth surrounding the clearing. Someone had dragged himself off into the bushes.

Hoping against hope that Chuck was dead, Marge painfully followed the trail. She couldn’t get lucky enough to become a widow. Chuck would live forever just to aggravate her – there was too much residual alcohol in his system. The bastard was pickled.

Behind the bushes the lights from the car lit the backs of what resembled naked, winged children and a variety of animalistic beings gathered, giggling, around a pile of something.

Marge staggered behind the group, stunned. The ghastly white skin of the tiny bald creatures was wrinkled and covered in oozing pustules. Their ears ended in sharp points and their transparent wings were threaded with bulging veins.

One raised its head and gazed at Marge as she stood nearby, too shocked to run. The thing leered, showing her the bloody, pointed yellow teeth that filled its wide mouth. For a split second a wolf stood in the place of the creature, eyes glowing red. Then the animal became a horrible little monster again, sneering at Marge in her blood-splattered
I Love Vegas
baseball jacket. The monster belched and a needle of flame leaped from its mouth, lighting up its face.

The realization of how the creature’s teeth got bloody hit Marge as it spoke.

“
Juicy one.” A horrible voice rasped through the air and the monster giggled as its fellows lifted their heads from their meal. Small lizards with wings sailed through the air towards where Marge’s thickly colored hair gleamed dully in the light of the fiery ruins of the car.

The tall figure of a man appeared from beneath the evergreens, shadowed, a long knife dangling from his hand. “I’ll give you this one, friends. She’s a bit used, but then, aren’t we all?” The shadow approached, and the soft laughter curdled Marge’s blood.

Her smoke-stressed vocal cords couldn’t work up a proper scream as the stranger approached, surrounded by the creatures. Some crept over the ground, some floated through the air on imperceptible currents, leaving behind a pile of bloody bone and clothing. Their eyes glowed with a red, unholy lust.

In despair, Marge stared down at her silver slippers and realized life had disappointed her for the last time.

Chapter Ten

Rhi obediently drove home behind Pam. Any indignant emotions she might have harbored about being ordered around were washed away by the monstrous fear the night injected into her soul as she drove. Smoke-filled shadows smelling of brimstone swooped through the sky over the two trucks as they barreled through the snowdrifts up to Horse Thief Gulch, unnoticed by the two women except for the chill in their blood and the headache that hit Rhi square between the eyes. The spirits disturbing her soul sped away as if burned when the women made the turn up their hill.

The urge to hurry was overwhelming as she approached the refuge of Horse Thief Gulch. She observed as Pam entered her own house before making her way to her A-frame. The house had once been a haven. But her comfortable home had become a gigantic bull’s-eye she was staked out in the center of. Her stomach gave a violent lurch as she pulled up to the house where the silhouette of a tall man holding a rifle in the crook of his arm stood in the pool of light provided by the deck floodlights. Rhi relaxed when she realized her visitor was Bobby Wayne, with the large gold shadow of Ellie Mae at his side.

She clambered out of the vehicle and broke through the crusty snow to approach her new acquaintance on the hill.

“
How’s my baby?” she called as she approached the deck. “Has she been a good girl?”

“
She seems a bit bothered by something,” Bobby Wayne replied, watching Rhi as she made her way up the steps. “But then -
I’m
a bit bothered by something. We’ve been out hunting in the woods. I got the feeling that we weren’t alone, until we made our way back up here.” He ruffled the giant dog’s ears fondly. “Ellie here wants to hunt something. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight up for the whole hike. So did mine. Houston called on my cell and told me to make sure you girls got home safe. I figured it must have been an emergency or he never would have called the cell. You gonna tell me why he wants me on guard duty?”

Rhi grimaced. “You’re asking me? If I told you half of what’s gone on today, you’d say I needed lithium. And of course you aren’t alone - these woods are filled with warm and fuzzy critters.”

Bobby Wayne hitched his gun up to examine an imaginary dust speck on the barrel. “You stay indoors tonight, Rhi, and lock the doors and windows up tight. I spotted some tracks I don’t know what to make of and I don’t believe that they were made by anything warm and fuzzy. I’m gonna head down to Pam’s and make sure she’s tucked in, then I’m giving Houston a call. I’ve got the feeling our government has been up to something nasty - at least, I hope it’s
our
government.”

Rhi would have snickered about the paranoia of her neighbor at one time. But after the earlier events of the evening, she felt a strange kinship with the man Pam claimed owned enough explosives to mount an offensive on Little Round Top.

After shutting herself in the house, Rhi sat in the dark with Ellie Mae at her side, gazing out at the darkness. The woods across the little valley seemed to breathe with evil. She absently massaged her neck with one hand and rubbed Ellie Mae’s satiny fur with the other. She noticed the dog sat at attention, as alert as when they first entered the house.

Whatever lurked outside, hovering on the edges of Rhi’s mind, obviously troubled Ellie Mae’s thoughts as well. Rhi’s eyes felt heavy enough to add a few pounds to her body mass and she fought the waves of sleep washing through her. The moment she surrendered to sleep, she knew she would be another person in another time.

* * * *

The pines in the yard swayed and the wind howled as Rhi tossed in her bed. She jolted awake from the beginnings of a dark dream and resolved to not sleep for the rest of the night. Instead she sat and stared down the drive, waiting for him to come.

The fact that she had gotten no sleep at all didn’t matter. Every molecule of her being called to him, some parts of her being more than others. And the sinister presence on the edge of her mind added even more darkness to the mix. Or was the presence Blackthorne himself?

At 5:00 a.m., in the dark of the morning, she gave up and crawled out of bed to make coffee. She paused to poke at Ellie Mae, sprawled on the foot of the bed.

“
Wake up, lazy animal!”

Ellie Mae rolled over, falling off the bed into the floor. With a very human sounding groan, the dog climbed to her feet and padded over to the bank of windows on the far end of the room to flatten her large nose against the window to observe the black, white and gray landscape.

After filling the morning hours with exercise, news, breakfast and a substantial amount of coffee, Rhi answered a knock on her door at 8:30 a.m.

Bobby Wayne stood on the porch, ramrod straight and dressed in a parka and hunting clothes, gun in hand.

“
Everything alright in there this morning?”

Relieved to see another human, any human, Rhi grinned wearily at her guest.

She held the door open with one hand and Ellie Mae’s collar with the other as the dog strained to get close enough to their guest to slobber on him. ““I think we pulled through okay, Bobby Wayne. Come on in, I’ll make fresh coffee.”

“
Thank you ma’am, but I just stopped by to see if you’d like me to take Miss Ellie Mae out for her morning constitutional?” He crouched to scratch Ellie Mae’s ears, making the dog quiver with happiness.