Snake Handlin' Man (11 page)

The blood that poured from her many wounds and trickled onto Eddie was as hot as his own. The snake heads of Miriam’s hair hissed at him gently. It sounded like voices shushing a baby. Eddie listened to their voices and almost slipped into oblivion.

But then he felt the burning and the weariness and the trembling of his limbs fall away. He didn’t feel refreshed or rejuvenated—he felt exhausted and beat up, but the effects of the venom were gone. He didn’t feel like he was on the brink of dying anymore.

He dug into his pocket for the cup. It felt strangely intimate and invasive to lie beside the lamia and milk her, but it would have felt even more wrong to kneel and treat her like an animal. She had made terrible decisions, but she had paid for them, and in the end, she was as much a person as Eddie was. Eddie’s heart roiled with all sorts of feelings, and he found to his surprise that one of the strongest was gratitude. As respectfully as he could, he filled the bottom of the jacks cup with the warm bluish milk of the lamia Miriam. When he had what he thought was probably enough, he put the cap back on the cup and stood.

He met her gaze one last time through lidded eyes.

“I forgot,” she hissed simply.

Eddie nodded solemnly. “I know,” he said. “I won’t forget.”

Then her last breath rattled in her throat and the lamia was gone. Eddie didn’t feel bad for her—she’d killed way too many people, and done worse, to arouse his compassion. But he didn’t hate her. In the end, he didn’t even really find her monstrous.

He took a deep breath and stepped back. When he was sure he could face the others without tears in his eyes, he surveyed the damage.

It was total. There were bodies all over the room, snake, lizard, and human, and mutant combinations of all stripes. Eddie saw mongoose corpses, too—none of the preacher’s furry allies had survived. The dog was smashed to pieces, the headless priest bled out, the preacher smashed into sanctified marmalade, the totem poles knocked over. The Nehushtan was either pulverized or hidden in the wreckage. Still, there was something about the room that nagged at his perception, something positive, something that made him feel almost happy.

Mike handed him his guns. Eddie checked to see that both weapons were loaded, snapped the Glock into its holster and reattached the Remington 870 to its shoulder strap while he thought about what it could be. It felt good to be armed again.

On the other hand, the junk in his pockets had been surprisingly useful.

“You okay?” Mike asked.

Eddie snorted and cut away the tourniquet with his pocketknife. “All things considered,” he said, “not too bad.”

Then it hit him.

The legs were gone.

He looked up and saw an ordinary concrete ceiling, undergirded with pipes and fluorescent lights, spattered with blood, but with no sign of the field of ice and the dangling legs of the damned that had previously haunted his vision.

Eddie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I feel good.”

Twitch looked around at the mess. “No amount of bleach is going to clean this up,” the fairy chuckled.

Jim shook his head and bent to pick up the charcoal grill of smoldering incense coals by its struts. Eddie watched as the singer walked slowly around the carnage, shaking coals out onto fallen totem poles and into puddles of cleaning fluids, throwing the last of them indiscriminately into the janitorial closet. By the time he was done, the basement was on fire.

Eddie started towards the stairs. In front of him a rusty iron chain ground slowly from right to left at his chest level. Severed human arms, legs and heads hung pinned to the chain like so much laundry on a clothesline. The mouths of the severed heads opened and closed and their eyes bulged in Eddie’s direction like they were calling to him.

Eddie shook his head and walked right through the chain. He ached and he was exhausted, but he was alive and free.

Did that mean, he wondered, that his vision of death in a burning palace was a true one?

Or had he been inspired to fight on by a false vision, thereby making the vision true? Or at least, preserving the possibility of its truth?

He shook the thoughts out of his head as he crossed the ground floor towards the glass doors. Really, he knew, he wouldn’t know the answer to anything until it was all over.

“I hope Adrian made it,” Mike muttered.

Eddie checked his watch. “We still got fifteen minutes,” he said. “We’ll get there in time. How are your fingers?”

“Fingers?” Mike opened and closed his hands experimentally. “Fine. Why?”

“We got a gig,” Eddie reminded him. “Unless you got cash you ain’t told me about, we gotta play or we don’t have enough money to get out of Oklahoma.”

“
Cagado.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Eddie agreed. He pushed open the doors and he and Mike walked out into the cooling air of the early evening.

***

About the Author

D.J. Butler (Dave) is a novelist living in the Rocky Mountain northwest. His training is in law, and he worked as a securities lawyer at a major international firm and inhouse at two multinational semiconductor manufacturers before taking up writing fiction. He is a lover of language and languages, a guitarist and self-recorder, and a serious reader. He is married to a powerful and clever woman and together they have three devious children.

Dave writes fantasy, science fiction, space opera, steampunk, cyberpunk, superhero, alternate history, dystopian fiction, horror and related genres for all audiences. His novels
Crecheling
and
City of the Saints
are available from WordFire Press, and his middle reader steampunk adventure series, The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie, launches soon with the novel
The Kidnap Plot
(Knopf, 2016).

Read about all of Dave’s fiction projects at
http://davidjohnbutler.com
.

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