Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (38 page)

She looked at him, but there was no flare of anger. Hendricks felt a jolt in his ribs from Alison, caught the look from Duncan that chided him for being a moron. “It wasn’t always like this,” Mandy said.

“I’d imagine with a name like Hobbs Green it might have been a little … greener, at some point?” Hendricks asked. He got the elbow from Alison again, but this time he fired back a look of his own. He’d kept it diplomatic, dammit.

“It was green once,” Mandy said. “Blue skies, too, I think?” She gazed at Alison with that broken look. “The skies were blue, weren’t they?”

“Still are, elsewhere,” Alison said cautiously. That was probably the safe way to say it, Hendricks figured. “Little different here, though.”

“Yes,” Mandy said, agreeing with a sorrowful aura. “Things are different here.”

“What happened?” Duncan asked, and waited for her eyes to fall on him. “What happened to turn the skies dark and the ground black and …” The demon just let his voice drift off.

“Why, the most joyous thing in the world, of course,” Mandy said, again delivering this like it was self-evident. If nothing else, she was doing a marvelous job of convincing Hendricks that her motor would never again fire on all cylinders. And he had doubts she was ever a V8 to begin with. “I had a baby.” Her hands fell to her stomach, and Hendricks noticed for the first time that what he had thought was black clothing was soot as the covering on her belly smeared and revealed more wrinkled flesh below.

“Holy shit, she’s naked as the day she was born,” Hendricks muttered under his breath. For whatever reason, Alison spared the elbow this time.

“Have you seen my baby?” Mandy asked, her voice off-note this time, some perverse mixture of joy and sorrow.

“Can’t say I have,” Hendricks replied, beating out the other two. “Where is … they?” He switched gears mid-sentence and felt like a moron for the two seconds it took for him to remember he was in the ruins of a demon-burned Alabama town and not a grammar rodeo.

“Why, right here, of course,” Mandy said and knelt. One of the fire dogs padded over to her, leaving scorched earth with every step. Hendricks saw similar paw prints of glass all over the square and realized that everywhere it tread, it left a mark. It made a gawdawful sound that was somewhere between a scream and a mewl, then it brought out a flaming tongue and ran it quickly over Mandy’s cheek before settling lower, anchoring on her small breast. She fell backward as it did, falling on her ass with apparent glee as it suckled from her. The next closest dog came over to them then, not leaving a single glassy paw print as it did so but latching to the other side, rubbing against her with its flaming body and leaving a smear of black soot across her shoulder as it did so. The answer for how she got that fancy suit of ash clothing popped into Hendricks’s head. The other dogs maintained their guard formation as the two front runners nursed, the flames of their bodies burning brighter as they did so.

“These are my babies,” Mandy said, and Hendricks found the time to look over at Alison, her face two inches from his. The discomfort was unmistakeable, but she kept it shy of horror by a long margin. Mandy’s hand ran over the fiery back of the one on her left breast. “But this one is the one I birthed myself.”

Duncan beat Hendricks to the punch. “Who birthed the rest of them?”

“The other women of the town,” Mandy said, smiling at her suckling pups. Hendricks found the way she was looking at them really fucking disturbing, and he thought he’d just about hit the peak when the acid-cum-spurting demon had burned his way through a hooker last week.

“Okay, Khaleesi,” Hendricks said, and caught a funny look from Duncan. “Sometimes I stay in hotels that have HBO,” he explained. Turning his attention back to Mandy, he tried to keep himself level. “What happened to the other women? The other … mothers?”

“They weren’t the mothers,” Mandy said with a shake of her head as she scratched behind the ear of her favorite. “They were surrogates, wombs of convenience to hold my other babies, the ones my own womb couldn’t hold.” Now her crackling voice just sounded like some fucked up mix of innocent and sinister. Hendricks was not taking bets on which of those descriptions was leading in that race, either.

“Where did the babies come from?” Duncan asked. “Who was the father?”

Mandy’s dead eyes flared. “He was a demon from hell.”

“Yeah, I think that’s pretty obvious to all of us at this point,” Hendricks said. No elbow this time, either. “But … uh … did this demon from hell have a name?”

“His name was Mick.” Her hand slid along the neck of her dog.

“I see,” Duncan said, taking it all in. “Was he Irish?”

“Jesus,” Hendricks said, “you really were around in the eighteen hundreds, weren’t you, you racist.”

“All you skin puppets look the same to me,” Duncan replied. “Where did this … Mick … come from?”

“He came to town with the carnival,” Mandy said, her voice taking on a dreamlike quality. “He showed me things …”

“Like his cock,” Hendricks muttered under his breath.

“… things I’d never seen before …” Mandy went on. “Made me feel things … I couldn’t have imagined …”

“Like her hymen bursting, I’d guess,” Alison added. Hendricks approved.

“… and he lied to me, made me give it all to him. Then the carnival left, and he left, and I was left behind with … my baby,” Mandy finished, rubbing the flame dog again. “My babies,” she amended.

“So he worked for the carnival,” Hendricks mused. He blinked for a second. “What the hell is the moral of this story? Don’t fuck a lying carnie?”

“All men are scum who just want to get laid?” Alison suggested, looking at him with a point harder than the elbow to his ribs had been.

“You humans are all idiots,” Duncan added, playing the game.

“He made me special, you know,” Mandy said.

Hendricks let a wary eye drift over the dozen dogs of fire he could see. “Looks like he made a lot of girls ‘special’ before he left town.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He was only ever with me. The others—they—they could feel it because he was with me. Felt him with them even though they didn’t touch him, didn’t love him like I did.”

Hendricks tried to sift through that, coming up with nothing. “What the fuck is she talking about?” he asked Duncan under his breath. It was almost a stage whisper.

“Sounds like something I’ve heard rumors of but never run across,” Duncan said. “Ancient name; a species that doesn’t really walk the earth anymore. It takes a … partner,” he nodded toward Mandy, “and any women with a fertile womb within a certain distance get hit by this … I dunno, thrall? They get a dose of highly narcotic, erotic, spiritual essence hurled at them. It takes their root in their reproductive organs and, uh …” He waved at the dogs. “Nine months later …”

“He …” Alison’s voice sounded strong, then faded away before exploding out again, “he does a
MASS GROUP SEXUAL MIND ASSAULT?!
”

Duncan just stood there, like he was trying to evaluate his answer before speaking it aloud. “That’s as good a descriptor as any, but if you want to be technically accurate, you’d need to add in something about essence or soul to the rape charge.”

“This is fucked,” Hendricks pronounced. “This guy is coming to Midian?”

“Carnival,” Alison said. “The Summer Lights Festival is in town. He’s probably already there.”

“Yep,” Hendricks said. “Fucked.” He turned his attention back to Mandy. “You said he, uh … you know … did his thing with you … the night before he left town?”

“Yes,” Mandy said.

“If that’s a pattern,” Hendricks said, “and who knows if it actually is, then when does the carnival leave town?”

“Tonight’s the last night,” Alison said.

“Shit, fuck, damn,” Hendricks said. “What the hell time is it?”

“About time we left,” Duncan said, shooting a gaze at Mandy. “If we’re allowed to.” For this he raised his voice.

“I would let you leave,” Mandy said, rubbing the neck of her fire dog, patting it like a master taking care of their pet. “But my babies … they’re hungry. There hasn’t been a real meal here in a long time … and they can’t just nurse, you know? They’re getting a little old for that …”

“Yeah, most of us stopped using the nipple to nurse a long ways back,” Hendricks said.

“Kinda figured we were about to go headlong into that snag,” Duncan said. He clutched his baton and set his feet defensively. Hendricks gently detached himself from Alison, trying to stand on his own two feet. He wobbled a little. To his surprise, she took their uncoupling better than he had.

Hendricks hoisted the sword in front of him. “Just once, I want to go somewhere that doesn’t suck, where the people and demons aren’t trying to kill me.” He realized, truthfully, that this desire was surprisingly soul-deep, something he’d never before said out loud.

“This is not your day,” Duncan said.

“Tomorrow’s not looking so good for that, either,” Alison chimed in. She had her pistol drawn and was tracking the nearest flame dog, looking down her weapon’s sights at it.

“Well, here’s hoping the day after, then,” Hendricks said, as the first of the fiery beasts leapt at him, and all hell came crashing down around his ears.

John Watkins had been coming to Melina Cherry’s brothel since he was eighteen years old. He’d been a fan of the lady herself for the longest time, because not only did she know how to run the place, she knew how to run his shaft. She’d tickled his cock in more ways than he could count, finding new methods of wringing old pleasures out of his dick all the time. John was thirty-six now, and it didn’t bother him at all that Melina had gotten up there in the years. She still knew how to run his cock.

But ever since this redhead had shown up, his loyalty had wavered. “It’s all right, baby,” Melina had assured him the first time he’d gone to bed with red, just like the other times she’d passed him off to the blond-haired girl—what was her name? Colleen? Yeah, that was it. With the blond gal, it had never taken. She was young, she was decent, but she didn’t start his fire like Melina had. That woman could have suck-started a leaf-blower. She had to be pushing fifty, and he figured he’d keep on visiting her until she was seventy, at least. She knew what he liked.

Then the redhead showed up. All it took was a test drive, Melina whispering in his ear all manner of encouragement in that throaty voice she had, all the things she whispered to him when they were together. It was a kink and a half to him; John had only ever gone for one girl at a time. Having the woman he’d been banging forever telling him to fuck a new girl, and finding that he liked the new girl on her own damned merits …

Well, it was what he’d heard some city boy call an embarrassment of riches. He wanted to spend all his money at Melina Cherry’s brothel. He wished for mail-order Viagra so he could get hard more often. He even considered going to the doctor and complaining he couldn’t get it up. Sure, it’d be damned embarrassing but worth it if he got a regular supply of those little blue pills. He didn’t normally truck with drugs, but fucking was an addiction he could get behind.

And behind it he was at the moment, buried up to his pubes in the redhead. It hadn’t taken him long to remember Melina’s name, because she practically insisted he scream it aloud in their every encounter. She had confidence when he had none, pushing a teenage boy around and pressing every one of the arousal buttons in his then-fledgling, gangling body—the one no one else but him seemed to want to touch. She could still pop his cock to boner in two seconds flat, even with her looks fading.

Names weren’t his strong suit, though, and he was always and forever forgetting the redhead’s name. Lucy? Something like that.

He was thrusting and she was moaning, just a little less sincere than Melina made it sound. God, but she got into it. Just thinking about Melina made him go faster, his hands on the redhead’s hips and thrusting inside, smooth and wet satin ringing his cock all the way down. He could feel the build as he inched closer, his eyes firmly closed. He only cracked them every now and again when he was with her, still visualizing Melina Cherry, the back of her head—

He thrust with a gasp and felt the sensation on his prick disappear. It was the most damned odd thing; one minute he could feel his pubic mound against her taint, the pressure like the curve of her insides was pushing his cock up at a forty-five degree angle. Sloping up into her, like a hungry dog begging for more. More cat. Yeah. He was digging it.

The next minute, the pressure was gone, the smooth satin pussy was gone, and he went from feeling like he was fucking a sweet, tight snatch to feeling like he was fucking empty air. He blinked his eyes in confusion and sure as shit, he was fucking empty air. The redhead was gone, no sign of her pale, freckled back where it had been only a moment earlier. His hands had been lightly resting on her hips and now they hung motionless in space. He knelt there, knees creaking on the bed, dick hanging out into nothingness, already starting to lose altitude—

“What the fuck?” John asked, waiting for the joke, waiting for the girl to pop out from the closet or beneath the bed. He just waited, feeling slightly stupid now that he could see his sweaty, hairy, sunken chest, protruding belly and his deflating cock in the mirror that had been hidden by the redhead’s sweet flame-red tresses only a moment before. He looked at his eyes in the reflection, bulging, trying to figure out if this was a dream.

“Hello?” he called, a little louder. There was no answer.

Arch felt the impact on the back of his head and knew he’d been suckered. If he’d had time to think about it, he might have held a little tighter to the flashlight, but the shock of the blow knocked it clean out of his grasp, sent it rattling and rolling away, spinning in a way that made the scene seem like something out of a disco.

He knew by the throbbing in the back of his head that this wasn’t a disco, that the only dancing about to be done was him trying to dance the heck away from whatever was aiming to put a hurt on him. He tried to roll from the blow, mostly by instinct, but it was a struggle of its own to keep control of his body. The impact sent his head rattling; his shoulder hit the hard stone ground and a face full of dust was his reward for failing to land properly.