Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (27 page)

He was almost there when he tripped over a discarded wrench, lost his balance and nearly fell into the gaping circular mouth of one of the eighty-eight bins. An inch or two and he’d have plunged through seventy feet of darkness onto a conical floor that would have ensured his shattered pulp flowed into the chute at its base. He lost enough skin off one shin to make it hard not to add his voice to the din, but shifted his balance in mid air so that he fell with more of his weight outside the hole than in it. He lost his radio, though, and never heard it hit bottom. This fresh and unexpected brush with mortality was enough to raise a non-existent ruff of hair along the sheriff’s spine, but there was still a damsel in distress here, his daughter. Limping instead of running, watching the floor more carefully than he had, he worked his way nearer.

He was close. He could hear their voices, make out words. “You can bet your life on it,” she was saying. Just a few more feet and….

The world ended in a flash of white-hot brilliance and a roar that tore the air from the sheriff’s chest and knocked him off his feet. She’d pulled the trigger and the dust had ignited and they were all dead…only that couldn’t be, he realized, not if he had the time to think it. Blinded, deafened, stunned, the sheriff knelt on the dusty floor among piles of spilled grain and tried to comprehend that it had been a lightning strike that dropped him, not death. Victory still might be salvaged if he could only make himself see and think and move again. He found an angled support beam and used it to pull himself back to his feet. He blinked his eyes in an effort to clear away the after images of that blinding flash, gradually discovering that he could distinguish the outlines of the distant windows again, strobing just as furiously as before. The grain distribution belt was only a few feet away. He stumbled toward it, avoided the mouth to yet another bottomless pit and found the belt’s frayed canvas edge. The crumpled shape of his daughter lay on it only a few feet away, but there were other crumpled shapes as well and one of them still held a pistol, still pointed it at the other, and the sheriff knew there wasn’t time to do anything but try to stop that shot. He grabbed the belt, took hold of its edge, and launched himself across it as the world ended yet again.

It ended differently this time, with less light, but every bit as much confusion. There was a distant crash, the whine of far off electric motors, and suddenly the sheriff was blinded by wind and dust, knocked off balance as the belt began to move beneath him. He tumbled to the floor, collided with a support column he hadn’t seen, saw stars instead, and felt blood begin to flow down his temple again. He wiped the blood and dust and dirt from his eyes. It was the same place he’d occupied moments before, but different. Those endless rows of windows that had allowed only a blurry glare to pierce them were open now, all of them, driven out into the storm at a 45 degree angle that kept out most of the rain but admitted a howling gale that cleansed the air of explosive dust at the expense of sandblasting his eyes. The wind raised plumes of debris and pelted him with a shotgun-like rain of grain kernels. She could shoot now. It wouldn’t matter. She was very close, blinking her own eyes clear. She must be as confused as he was because she seemed to have lost track of her husband who was lying just to the sheriff’s west. The gun was centered on the sheriff. He felt the wad from the blank bounce off his stomach when she fired. She looked surprised when he didn’t fall down, and then she looked elsewhere.

Maybe it was because of the otherworldly apparition that suddenly burst from the door to the stair leading to the head house. It was tall and skeletal, little more than a ribbed stick figure supporting a grinning skull and grasping talons, glowing an unnatural hue. It looked like something from a fever dream, or a secret warehouse in Roswell, or a dead-teenager movie. It howled and moaned and it came straight for Ellen Lane, who watched it, frozen, the gun still pointed at the sheriff as the wind and the nightmare reached for her.

***

The man who should have been most shocked (in every sense of the word) by the arrival of the lightning bolt, was the one who was most expecting it, or, if not lightning, some other manifestation of the evil forces he intended to face or the benevolent ones whose help he was soliciting. The blast could have interfered with every electrical impulse inside Mad Dog’s body, but it didn’t. Instead, it sent him somersaulting backwards through the door that led down into the head house. That could have killed him too, only he didn’t fight it. He was waiting for something big to happen. When it did he left his body out of the equation and tried to grapple with it only mentally. He went down the metal rungs loose limbed, rolling like a drunk. At the base, he bounced off a wall, slamming against a row of switches, two of which were activated by his passing, before he went windmilling down the second set of stairs toward the delivery floor still relatively uninjured—bumped, scratched, and bruised, but functional. He arrived at the top of that second stairway feet first and decided something wanted him to stay that way. He still wasn’t sure whether the lightning had been an assault or an assist, but he suddenly felt certain that the evil he must banish waited for him just beyond the door at the bottom of those stairs. He hit it like he’d hit those linemen when he was a football hero for the Buffalo Springs Bisons, bellowing like a mad bull, forearms extended, with all the speed and weight and strength that was in him.

The door didn’t stop him any better than opposing players had. He exploded into a whirlwind of confusion, dust and grain and bodies everywhere. One of them had a gun. He saw it, knew somehow that the person behind it intended to do harm with it, and so he charged. He didn’t know it was a woman until later. All he saw was a thing, a destructive force, an ancient evil he had loosed and helped to find physical form. It watched him come, frozen, unwilling to believe that he was here in all his power and in the company of the spirit keepers on
Maheo’s
business. At the last instant it tried to bring the gun around but not before he was on it. He knocked the weapon out of its hand and kicked it toward the windows, then tossed the evil thing off into the darkness too. That was when he realized the thing hadn’t come alone. There were two of them, not allies except perhaps against him and the prison to which he intended to condemn them once again. He found one, bent and lifted it struggling from the floor. It was a creature of the underworld. It drew its strength out of the earth and already, at this elevation, it was weakened. Out of contact with the floor, it was nearly powerless. The second one wasn’t though, not yet.

The second one came at him cautiously, confused by his appearance, confused, perhaps, by his presence on both physical and metaphysical planes. Mad Dog still couldn’t see very well, but it didn’t matter. Their physical forms weren’t important. This was a battle of spirits. The thing circled him for a moment, assessing him and then it pounced. It danced at him, feinted, reached out and slapped him with something bright and cold and sharp.

“One,” a voice seemed to whisper in Mad Dog’s ear. He couldn’t have actually heard it over the wind and the thunder and his own mad howl.

He felt it, though, a sudden sharp afterimage of agony along his ribs, and as something warm and wet that trickled down his side and dripped onto the floor. He was right. This would be more than a spiritual contest. They would fight him on the physical plane as well. The battle, Mad Dog decided, was going to be just as challenging as he’d expected.

***

The sheriff didn’t have time to stay and watch. Somewhere, a motor had come on to open the windows. At the same time, a second motor had started the grain belt moving. His daughter was on it and the sheriff didn’t have a clue what other machinery might lie along its path to crush or mangle or chew her. In fact, there was nothing but the belt, and an occasional delivery tube she would simply brush aside. When she reached the end it would just have dumped her on the concrete floor and done her no harm. The sheriff didn’t know that. This had been a day with too many frying pans and too many fires. Where Heather was concerned, he was beyond the ability to take even the tiniest chance.

The sheriff threw himself aboard the belt. No one, not even the spectral being that was almost certainly his brother, tried to stop him.

If there hadn’t been all those support beams and feeder tubes and those frightening holes into empty darkness, the sheriff could have made better time off the belt than on it. Instead, he crawled along the rolling, bouncing surface, like a kid caught on a nightmare carnival ride. They were nearly to the end before the sheriff grabbed her and yanked her off and onto a relatively open spot between a stack of disassembled tubes and a cross hatching of pillars supporting the roof. He found his pocket knife and freed her hands and ankles, crushed her to him in an ecstasy of love and relief.

“Oh, Dad, not so hard,” she said, and he released her almost instantly, terrified of the awful injuries his touch must have nudged from painful to agonizing.

“Heather, what is it? Where are you hurt?”

“I’m OK, Dad. Just don’t squeeze me. I’ve really, really gotta pee.”

***

“Two,” the voice whispered again. This time it was the figure he held over his head. It had managed to reach down behind him and run something sharp across his left shoulder blade. The cut wasn’t deep enough to sever anything vital because his muscles were still working well enough to keep it up there, but it was harder now and the other one was still out there circling, looking for an opening. He didn’t know how many more times he could afford to be tagged.

Mad Dog turned and located that second shadowy tormenter. It gamboled among the machinery and pillars, watching him, waiting for the right moment to strike. It would be so easy to surrender to the demands of the physical world and counterattack, but Mad Dog reminded himself that he was fighting on two planes. He shifted the one above his head and ducked a swipe from its steel talon while he watched the other dance, but he made his mind watch for the rhythm of it too. As one demon came for him again out of the darkness, he pivoted and dropped and interposed the other between himself and the place he knew the blade would be.

“That’s three,” he heard faintly echo through his head, but it wasn’t. The one he held dropped its talon and let out a shriek as it began to writhe and fight him even harder than before.

A new noise competed for his attention. The sound was something Mad Dog sensed both as a rumbling in his ear and a tugging at his essence. Above the maelstrom he thought he heard a run-away train bearing down on Buffalo Springs. Mad Dog had lived in Kansas long enough to know what it was. He was also learning to understand another world view, one that let him see it as a weapon he might wield.

Mad Dog felt that the one still with a blade was behind him, ducking under beams and looking for a clear avenue from which to come slashing once more. Mad Dog didn’t have to look to know it. Their relative positions were clear to him. He looked, instead, toward the windows where the wind and rain had slackened but a primal roaring indicated that yet another monster stalked the world. A jagged bolt of lustrous blue, matching Mad Dog’s body paint where it wasn’t covered with his blood or that of the flailing figure he still pressed toward the ceiling, lit the flatlands to the southwest and revealed a twisting rope of unsuppressed violence snaking across the fields of ripening wheat toward their battlefield. Mad Dog understood this wasn’t just any tornado. It was a spirit wind. It had come to claim the loser.

Mad Dog knew what to do with the demon he already held. He sidestepped a pillar to block the blade wielder’s slash at his back and began to jog toward the windows. He cut left, then right, weaving among a forest of metal braces and feeder tubes. The windows weren’t far, but the demon with the razor’s touch wasn’t far either. It wasn’t easy, not with the burden he carried and not with the frenzied thrashing and wailing it made as it realized where Mad Dog was taking it.

Lightning flashed again. The funnel was nearly on them. Mad Dog looked for a place to plant his feet for the throw. His feet were invisible, hidden by the blizzard of dust and grain being sucked across the delivery room floor and out the windows into the whirling maw that waited to carry him, or them, to another dimension. To join Dorothy in Oz maybe? Random thoughts suddenly reeled through his mind. It was the wrong moment to lose concentration, trapped as he was between forces equally willing to steal his life. He tried not to doubt.

Mad Dog steeled himself, adjusted his load, took two more steps, and hopped to the spot from which he would plant his feet and use every bit of the strength in his arms and legs to throw the first of these evils through a window open on infinity. There wasn’t any floor where Mad Dog landed. His feet came down squarely in the middle of an opening onto seventy feet of empty grain bin. He had just enough time to realize what was happening to him as he began to fall. Just enough time to understand that a momentary lapse was about to cost him his life, and, worse, let the demons go free.

***

The sheriff knew trains only came to Buffalo Springs to collect the bounty of Benteen County’s harvest. Regular freights hadn’t passed through in decades. The moment he heard what sounded like an approaching locomotive, he knew what it was.

“Heather,” he said, “we’ve got to get out of here.”

Heather was around behind the nearest support pillar relieving her bladder. If there were proper facilities available up here, they were likely (and appropriately) in the head house. She was too desperate to care.