Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (17 page)

“Tim Connor got run over here,” Alison said, pointing to the little map square for Berg Street. The map she had was a small, local one. The interstate neatly bisected it, and the whole thing looked like it had been torn out of a bigger atlas for the entire state. “And then last night’s kill happened … here …” she pointed to Rafton Park, the big, blue snaking curve of the Caledonia River running right next to where her finger landed. “If this thing needed to get back to where it was going before sunup—”

Arch frowned and leaned over, clutching the phone close to his ear. It took a second for him to realize there wasn’t even the sound of breathing on the other side. “You still there?”

“Yeah,” Lerner said. “Just listening to your clever lady spell it out.”

“You can hear that?” Arch asked.

“Whatever it was, it was going in this direction when it hit Tim Connor,” Alison said, pointing northwest. “Berg Street runs nearly out of town in that direction …”

“It was going roughly the same direction when it made its attack last night,” Arch said, running his finger along the Caledonia’s line where the path remained unmarked on the map. “Trail splits about here …” He fell silent in contemplation. “Either way, it goes north or northwest.”

Alison looked up at him, a knowing look in her eyes. “Whatever this thing is, it’s up there during the day.”

“Up where?” Lerner asked on the other end of the line.

“Only one thing of interest to the northwest,” Arch said, clutching the phone tight to his face. That wasn’t exactly true, but there was only one thing that dominated the landscape in that direction, one central thing to which all else was subject thanks to basic topography.

“Ohhhh,” Lerner said, getting it at last. “You mean that big damned mountain.”

“Mount Horeb,” Arch said, nodding, though he knew the demon couldn’t see it over the phone. “Whatever this thing is, it’s hiding somewhere up in the wilderness around the mountain.”

Erin was caught up in that sweet, sweet feeling of afterglow. That’s what she’d heard it called, and she tended to agree with it because her whole skin felt flushed and wonderful, in a state of total relaxation. She was still getting control of her breathing, though, but in a good way, like she’d just gotten done with a run or something.

Hendricks was already nodding off next to her, his cowboy hat hanging off the edge of the nightstand. The sun was shining outside, it was the middle of the day now, and she didn’t have to be anywhere until later tonight. It was a good feeling, the cheap cotton sheets she’d bought at Wal-Mart pressed tight to her skin, laying just across her belly. She felt sweaty and sticky but those were problems for later, not now.

A thought occurred to her, and she voiced it out loud. “How long do you think this is gonna last?” She didn’t really mean it to be a downer question, but she knew the moment she said it, it sure as hell was.

“The hotspot?” Hendricks murmured sleepily. “Weeks. Months, maybe. Less than a year.”

“I didn’t mean the hotspot,” Erin said. She’d felt the rush of insecurity and just asked the question. Now she realized she’d just burned an opportunity to back out of putting it out there. Oops.

Hendricks stirred slightly, and she wondered how much of the afterglow he was feeling. She’d heard guys were sleepier afterward, and that was born out by her experience. Especially after a day and night like they’d had, there was no reason to expect he’d want to be awake afterward. “Well …” Hendricks said, and she could just hear the hesitation drip off.

“Once this is over with, you’ll be on your way, right?” She reached down and pulled the sheet up to cover her chest. Why was she even asking this? They’d known each other for like a week. She’d just been looking at him as a fresh, fun lay, to break the monotony when they’d hopped into bed together. This was a serious topic, even for her.

“I guess,” Hendricks said, and the tension filled his voice. “I mean, I don’t know. You might end up on your way, too, if all this grimdark crap about the end coming to Midian turns out to be true.”

She felt a trickle of fear run down into her belly, and she gripped the sheet tighter, rubbing the low-threadcount sheets between her fingers. “I don’t know. What happens when a town … goes down like that?”

Hendricks was silent, and she tried not to look at him, as though that would make it all go away. “Different every time, I’ve heard. Depends on what kind of demon does the job, really. Sometimes it’s like rival gangs come in and just drive the residents out. Other times … they get eaten.” He rolled over to her. “It’s not like it happens a lot, okay?” His voice still carried that hint of tiredness, though she could tell he was trying to be reassuring. “It’s rare, even for hotspots.”

“But Lerner says we’re heading that way.” Her voice sounded empty, even to her. It was a big deal, wasn’t it? Losing an entire town? How could some place, with people, with families, with homes and businesses and life just vanish? Just disappear without a word, without a trace? “How come no one ever notices these places are missing?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Hendricks said, subdued, and she could tell he was awake now, fully. “It’s a mystery to me. Government cover-up, maybe? I’m not really sure. The one time I saw it coming, there just wasn’t a word breathed about it anywhere except in the dark corners of the ’net most people don’t take seriously.” He shifted in the bed. “Or so I’ve heard. I don’t exactly spend a lot of time online myself, you know.”

He seemed like he’d be more at home navigating a giant spider web than the world wide one, she realized. His face was scratchy with a day’s worth of stubble, but she kissed him anyway, just rolled over and kissed him. She felt his chest hair against her bare skin, and it felt good. The warmth was reassuring, the touch was sweaty and sticky and just as sweet as what they’d done a few minutes ago. She felt the compulsion for reassurance but kicked herself for feeling it at the same time. Like every nineteen-year-old should just face up to the idea their entire hometown could get wiped off the planet. Totally normal.

He was running delicate fingers over her cheekbones and tracing the lines left by the salty tears she didn’t even know she was crying when the phone started to buzz on the nightstand. She looked at him for just a moment, frozen in that pause in time where she knew she was going to have to move, to leave his embrace behind, but didn’t want to.

Then she answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Arch,” came the deep voice on the other end of the line.

“Hey,” she said, restraining a sniffle. “What’s up?”

Lauren had gotten done with work early, thankfully, and drove home down the blistering interstate under a sweltering sun. Her car’s AC had gone out yesterday sometime, and she hadn’t noticed it until this morning. It was another item on her “To Do” list that she really didn’t have time for, but Tennessee summer wasn’t near to done, unfortunately, even though it was almost September. Too much shit to do, too little time to cram it all in there.

She pulled into the driveway and threw the car into park with a little more aggression than she normally would have. It had been a crap day, a busy day, with a steady influx of patients. Some of them died, most of them lived, and because of her bleary-eyed state, all of them were running together in her mind at this point.

She slammed the door and started up the walk to the white house. She never parked in the garage because her mother’s car took up most of it and the rest was junk still left over from when they’d cleaned out the house after her daddy died. Hell, there were probably still baby clothes in there from when Molly was a newborn, stacked in with the transistor radios and other shit her father had collected.

She could hear the violin going upstairs through the window as her key hit the lock. Molly was practicing, practicing like she did every day. Lauren felt a spike of frustration. Molly was a good student, a good kid overall. Seeing her do her math homework this morning was strange because usually there was no need to ride her about getting schoolwork done. She was on that shit, serious about it. Way more serious than other kids. She acted more like an adult than her peers, that was for certain.

But finishing her math homework first thing in the morning? That wasn’t just a departure from the norm; it was a full on jump from the train tracks when the train wasn’t even heading toward its normal destination. It was bizarre, that’s what it was, and to have it come along with a bullshit excuse of “I fell asleep,” gave it all the more urgency to Lauren. Something was happening there.

Nothing good.

She opened the door and closed it swiftly behind her, as though there were some way she could keep a fly from following her in. She couldn’t, and she knew that, but she tried anyway. She could practically hear one of them buzzing faintly in her ear even now.

“You’re home early,” her mother remarked as she entered the kitchen. It opened up on the family room, and
Let’s Make a Deal!
was playing on the TV in front of Vera.

“Really?” Lauren asked as she set her purse on the counter. “Because it feels like I was gone for about a year.”

“One of those days, huh?”

“You said it,” Lauren agreed. She paused, holding onto the strap of her bag. “Have you talked to Molly about—”

“No,” her mother said, not taking her eyes off the TV. Wayne Brady was about to offer someone a deal, Lauren was sure. Clearly more important than worrying about your granddaughter. “That’s your responsibility, dear.”

“Yeah,” Lauren said under her breath. “You know, I work—”

“No doubt,” her mother said with that little slathering of false sympathy she did so well, “and so hard, too, going to college and medical school and doing your residency. All that after being a teenage mother.” She tilted her head around. “I been holding the bag here for you for sixteen years, and I believe I am done now. You’re an attending physician, what you always wanted, and now it’s time, before your daughter leaves for college, for you to do the last mile of the parenting.”

Lauren just stood there with her mouth slightly open as her mother turned back to the TV. She was somewhere between shock and outrage, but she wasn’t quite sure where she landed on the scale. “I’ve been here, okay? It’s not like I left you with her and disappeared, I was here for birthdays and Christmases, and in the evenings wherever I could—”

They false sympathy came out again. It probably sounded real to people who hadn’t lived with her mother for thirty-two years. “Oh, I know, dear, every chance you could. But you didn’t get that many chances with your school and work and residency demands. Now it’s on you.” She still didn’t even turn around, watching Wayne Brady count out hundred dollar bills.

Lauren could feel the seething set in. But what was she going to say? Medical school wasn’t easy—or cheap. College hadn’t been, either, not to get her pre-med reqs out of the way. It was time intensive, becoming a doctor, and the oddball shifts and all the demands had been leading up to this moment. She could look back and see the trade-offs now, but at the time they’d been just as natural as could be. You didn’t pour this many years into achieving a goal to get into the middle of it and seriously considering walking away. That would be a ton of sunk time and effort that had no payoff.

A waste.

She thought back now, about Molly, the sixteen years. It was time she’d enjoyed, but it had been tiring. It was the little moments that she remembered, not the daily stuff. That kiss before bedtime that had caught her in the eye, the birthday party where she’d spun her around in front of the piñata a few times before she missed and started to cry.

Lauren sighed, and it was a sigh of weariness and one of desperation. “This parenting thing ain’t easy,” she said as she headed toward the stairs.

“You said it, darling, not me,” her mother replied as someone made a deal.

Lerner didn’t mind cutting down on the rest period. It was pretty unnecessary for them anyway, and he always felt like it was time wasted. Sure, they skipped it regularly when they had something brewing, but when they were rudderless, it was a regular thing. They spent a lot of time rudderless, though. Home office was like that; pointed you in the general direction and then let you walk a ways. He was used to it, so it didn’t frustrate him anymore. New arrivals into the Office tended to be pretty ecstatic about getting out of the confines of the underworld, so the heavy hand of all the attention landed on them.

Lerner wondered how many newbies the office was handling right now? He guessed a lot. Would have bet on it, actually, though he hadn’t been to the home office in quite some time.

“A whole mountain is a lot of ground to cover,” Duncan said from beside him. Didn’t even have his eyes closed; Lerner could tell he was getting out of the habit of even bothering to look around with his essence anymore. This Spellman had really fucked the whole system up.

“Less than we had this morning,” Lerner said, feeling a little more chipper. Progress was progress, even on this dinky shit case. Without it to focus on, they might as well go door-to-door looking for trouble, or sit by a police scanner and wait for trouble to crackle over the radio. The damned runes made them blind in this town, since everyone with half a brain or a connection to a connection had them. Gossipy fucks. Demons really were just one giant social circle, the stupid underworld. They’d be lucky to catch a meth dealer at this point.

“Where would it hide on the mountain?” Lerner could tell Duncan was just thinking out loud.

“Supposed to be abandoned mines up there,” Lerner said. “Coal and shit. Or some of the deeper pockets of woods, maybe. Hunting cabins. Could be anywhere, really.” Duncan nodded along; Lerner knew he knew all this. But then again, Lerner didn’t mind speaking it aloud because it was better than being told to shut up for pontificating some obscure point of human behavior.

They were heading up a back road toward the mountain. It was visible in the distance, just a low slope on the horizon. It wasn’t anything like the Rockies, that was for damned sure, or Alaska—which was the Rockies too, wasn’t it? Lerner didn’t know, all he knew was he’d been both places, and to Canada, and even seen some of the Himalayas once on a flyover. Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains were nothing so dramatic as that. They were practically foothills by comparison—but they were still mountains.