Snake Handlin' Man (7 page)

“This time you won’t choke,” Eddie reassured him, and then he pumped the Remington. “Besides, we’re here with you, and we’re armed to the teeth.”

“I’d still rather it was you holding the pole.”

“Believe me,” Eddie laughed harshly, “I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat.”

“What are we going to milk the lamia into?” Mike asked. “I mean, Adrian’s not here, so he can’t … you know …”

“Breastfeed?” Eddie asked, grateful for the change of subject. Too much thinking wasn’t going to help Phineas Irving at all. He stepped over to a display of kitchen furniture and took a green pebbled plastic pitcher off the top of a finger-smudged black table. “That’ll do,” he judged. “We get that much milk, we can donate the extra to Johns Hopkins or the VA.”

He heard a clicking sound and looked up. Standing at the top of the stairs, dim light washing his face from the story below, Jim snapped his fingers and hissed in Eddie’s direction.

“Uh-oh.” Eddie rushed to join the singer of the band.

Jim pointed.

The floor of the story below was awash in snakes. They were the normal-sized ones, rattlesnakes and whatever else, but there were hundreds of them. They hissed and slithered over each other and tied themselves in knots like living pretzels, batting the inflated clowns every which way and knocking showers of woodscrews to the floor.

Eddie felt tired.

“Dammit,” he sighed. “All I want to do is keep us alive until we can get to Chicago, get a little help from the hoodoo woman, and save our souls. Why’s it have to be so hard?”

The snakes began to climb the stairs. No sign of the big freaky mutant ones, though. Jim braced himself and Mike came around to join them, pistol ready.

“Irving,” Eddie hissed, “get over here!”

Phineas Irving stumbled around to the top of the stairs. He looked like he was in shock, and the Nehushtan on his shoulder shook. “Maybe we should shoot the snakes,” he suggested.

“Maybe they ain’t heard us yet,” Eddie countered, “so we should try something a little more quiet.”

“Even Peter sank into the water,” Irving pointed out.

“Just once, though,” Eddie said optimistically. “The second time out, he was gangbusters. Should we sing a hymn? It’s gonna have to be soft if we do. Plus,” he pointed at Jim, who stood resolutely pointing his sword at the advancing snakes, “it’ll mean Jim gets to join us, and it’ll make him feel included.”

“I …”

“
Onward, Christian soldiers
,” Eddie started in a whisper, “
marching as to war.
…”

Irving closed his eyes and moved his lips along with the music.

Come on, Eddie thought, you can do this.

The Nehushtan began to loop and slither on its pole. Eddie crossed his fingers.

“I’m taking the safety off,” Mike said. “They’re close.”

“You’ve still got the safety on?” Eddie snapped, incredulous.

The Nehushtan shook off a veil of sand and coiled like a spring. It stared at Eddie, and its black, beady eyes glittered.

“You’re doing great, Reverend Irving,” he told the preacher. “
Christ, the royal master, leads against the foe.
…”

“
Forward into battle see his banners go!
” Jim joined in. The boom of his voice filled the Furniture section, even whispering as he was.

Eddie heard the
whoosh
of wings, the angry
hiss
of a snake and a tiny
crunch
as a serpentine skull was cracked open. Twitch the horse-tailed falcon tossed a bloodied scrap of former snake to the floor and then landed in his human shape, batons in hand.

“They’re getting ready for a party down there,” the fairy said. He turned and joined Jim, both of them swiping with their weapons at the slow flood of snakes. “An orgiastic one.”

“Where’s down there?” Mike asked. Jim and Eddie continued to sing softly, as the song reached its chorus. Eddie kept his eyes locked on the preacher’s face, communicating all the faith and confidence and trust he could. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the twinkling red of the Nehushtan’s scales as it shifted about, and he tried not to let himself get distracted.

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus, going on before.

“The basement,” Twitch answered. He and Jim were hard pressed by the snakes, slapping them aside and skewering them and stomping them flat. “Kitchenware. Apparently, Apep’s a domestic goddess.”

Ding!

“What’s that sound?” Eddie asked, and stopped singing to listen. He looked into the depths of the floor where he thought the sound had come from and saw a light appear, sliding into visibility as the door concealing it opened.

The elevator door.

“Uh oh,” he muttered. Over a cluster of bookshelves and a wardrobe he saw the waving, jaw-snapping head of the mutant snake-man Overalls. He couldn’t see the other monsters yet, but from the sound of many feet that Eddie heard, he knew that Overalls wasn’t alone.

Then Overalls turned his head in the direction of Eddie and their eyes met, man to snake.

“Hell.”

“What?” Phineas Irving gulped.

The Nehushtan froze.

***

Chapter Seven

Eddie hurled the pitcher at the mutants. It was a pointless gesture, except that it freed his hands for the shotgun.

Jim leaped into combat in his crazy Zorro way. In two steps he was stomping on the springy center of a little kid’s bed set, grinding his heel into the eye of Fuzzikins the Slumber Bear, and then he hurtled himself upwards.

Eddie didn’t wait for Jim to come down. He took three steps to the side to get a clear look at the elevator and raised the Remington.

“Believe!” he shouted, and squeezed the trigger.

Boom!
He missed Overalls and shattered all the glass in the windows of an ornately scrolled but gaudy china cabinet. Shards flew in all directions.

Jim skipped like a flat rock over water across the top of a high wardrobe, coming down through the air, boot heels first, on the other side.

Bang! Bang!
Eddie heard Mike start unloading behind him. He didn’t see what happened with the bullets, so either Mike was missing big-time, or he was shooting at the snakes on the stairs.

Jim kicked down into the grinning human head of Many Arms, flattening the mutant’s ear in a spray of blood and knocking them both sideways in opposite directions. Eddie saw that all the snake-man thugs from the Church of the Redeemer Nehushtan were here—no, not quite, since the ones the Nehushtan had actually eaten hadn’t reappeared, but in the meantime, the survivors had picked up a few new friends. He also saw they looked fresh and uninjured; the limb he had seen chopped off of Many Arms was now small and stubby, but it was visibly growing back.

At least with this many of them coming, he couldn’t really miss. Eddie pumped the shotgun and fired.

Jim hit the ground on his shoulders and slid on the smooth floor, like a human toboggan skidding backwards and head-first. When he rolled to his feet, he came up swinging a blue lava lamp by its cord. The singer jumped back into the fray alternating swooping strokes of the lamp and sharp, quick thrusts with his saber.

Overalls lurched at Eddie, jaws gaping open and down at Eddie’s head. Eddie found the creature’s persistence irritating, more than anything else. He jammed the shotgun into Overalls’s maw with his left hand, muzzle against the back of its throat. The mouth clamped shut, and Eddie narrowly missed losing his arm—the monster’s teeth sunk into the thick fabric of his jacket sleeve. The mutant snake-man’s beady black eyes glittered and he hissed. Having his fist inside the creature’s mouth made Eddie feel like one of those TV veterinarians on some PBS show, sticking his arm inside a cow to deliver its calf. He felt wet snake-slobber on his fist and a bad stink clogged his nostrils.

Eddie squeezed the trigger.

The back of Overalls’s big serpentine head blew out in a shower of red blood, white bone fragments and black and yellow scales. The velocity of the slug carried the monster back with it but didn’t open its jaws and, with a sharp tearing sound, Eddie’s sleeve ripped right off at the shoulder.

Eddie had no time to mourn for his jacket. Snake Legged Man rushed at him, his snakes for feet hissing in protest as they were thumped against the floor. At his side came a barechested guy in a John Deere cap and corduroy pants who had a mass of snakes sprouting from his back and shoulders like wings. Eddie grabbed his Glock with his free hand, whipped it out, and started entertaining the company.

Meanwhile, Jim whirled his lava lamp like a bola, tangling it around the neck of Many Arms and jerking the snaky son of a bitch sideways and off balance. Bob the repairman grabbed for Jim, trying to drag the singer and pin him against the nest of snakes writhing on Bob’s chest. Jim sidestepped and lopped off the entire bush of serpents in a single swipe—

they dropped to the floor and kept swarming.

The Nehushtan, Eddie thought. He needed the snake-on-a-stick to push some of these things back.

“Why do I not hear singing?” he barked. “
Onward, Christian soldiers!
”

“Cagado!” Mike shouted back, like that was some kind of answer.

Eddie threw a look over his shoulder in between shots and saw that the Nehushtan leaned against the railing around the stairwell, and Phineas Irving worked his Enfield rifle, slamming .30-06 bullets alternately down the stairs at the snakes or past Eddie at the mutants. Mike had stuck his M1911 back in his pants and swung a club that might have been a table leg originally. He and Twitch swiped at the snakes that raged hissing up the steps, not making any progress. They might have already been overwhelmed but for the preacher’s mongooses, which bit through snakes’ heads with terrible efficiency and kept a frightened circle of serpent flesh milling away from them.

“Twitch!” Eddie yelled. “Get us a way down!”

“I already have one!” the fairy howled back as Eddie turned away to pay attention to the horde that rushed him. “It involves you turning into a bird!”

Lady Legs charged, a hurricane of snakes. Eddie didn’t let himself get distracted by the biting mouths, and calmly aimed for one of her knees instead.
Boom!
The 870 chewed a coconut-sized hole right through the gabardine and punched the knee out backwards. Lady Legs toppled to the ground writhing and kicking, her half-disconnected leg spinning red out like a centrifuge.

A white horse flashed in the corner of Eddie’s eye.

And then John Deere piled into Eddie like a freight train.

His fists were cinder blocks, and they both connected to Eddie’s jaw before Eddie really even saw them coming. Snakes bit at him and he shoved the Glock into John Deere’s belly—

bang!

John Deere slipped and fell in the gore, and as he dropped, one of the snakes on his back grazed Eddie’s bare arm with a fang. Cold terror lanced through Eddie’s heart and he leaned into his pistol, pushing it like a knife into the mutant’s belly and squeezing off several more muffled shots. John Deere flailed and shrieked, the sounds coming out of his mouth sounding more animal than human.

Jim appeared, a television in his hands. The device dragged an extension cord behind it and its screen was jagged with rolling horizontal lines of static. Eddie looked up and saw that Jim had cleared a space the length of several wounded and shuddering mutants’ bodies. John Deere howled and clawed at Jim’s legs, and his snakes bit harmlessly at Jim’s boots as Jim raised the TV—

smash!
—

and brought it down in a final hammer blow that threw sparks in all directions and obliterated John Deere’s head. The barechested mutant kicked his feet in one final moment of agony then was still.

And then the silvery horse flashed past Eddie again, headed for the stairs.

It pushed a bed, its chest pressing against the high headboard.

“Go!” Eddie yelled. He switched the Glock’s selective fire mechanism to
automatic
and strafed the surging crowd of mutants with everything left in his clip. It didn’t last long. “Go!” he yelled again, then holstered the pistol, grabbed the Nehushtan where the preacher had laid it down and jumped onto the bed.

Mike and the not-quite-Reverend Irving stumbled in with him. Jim threw his shoulder against the headboard and then vaulted over it as the bed tipped over the stairs—

and began rattling down like a big sled.

“Five little monkeys!” Mike hollered, his teeth rattling.

It occurred to Eddie too late to wonder how high the bed’s legs were—if they were too tall, he thought, they might hit a step and tip over forward. He heard and felt the squishes of snakes being run over as the bed ba-ba-ba-ba-bumped down the stairs at a trot.

Twitch whizzed over the bed and ahead of it in falcon form, wings spread wide.

“Four little monkeys!” Mike laughed.

Eddie turned to look behind them and saw Lady Legs and Many Arms and a swarm of their friends lumbering after them. Including Overalls, dammit! How many times did these things have to be killed? He raised the Remington to add a few to the score before remembering that both his guns were empty.

And the second story was coming fast.

He shoved the Nehushtan into the hands of Phineas Irving and started singing. Jim joined in:

“Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war!”

Eddie switched clips on his Glock and shoved shells into the Remington as fast as he could without dropping them, watching the floor rise up to meet them and praying, though he had no right to pray, that Phineas Irving would just
believe
. Clowns with fixed maniacal grins bobbed back and forth, and Eddie felt like they were mocking him. He twisted around as the stairs were coming to an end and let off three quick slugs into the ravening crowd on their heels.

“
With the cross of Jesus 
…” Irving’s voice rose to join his and Jim’s in a warble.

CRASH!

The wood of the bed splintered on impact, throwing splinters in all directions and hurling Irving out of the bed. The lanky man rolled forward into a hissing wall of snakes, clutching the Nehushtan on its pole—

and the snakes parted.

“Three little monkeys!” Mike laughed, short of breath. A bobbing clown with two buck teeth in his yawning mouth bowed low and touched foreheads with the bass player. “Mierda!”

Eddie jumped off the bed and staggered to drag Irving to his feet. “
Mierda
is right!” he yelled. “Run!”

Sheets of blood ran down the walls and Eddie’s combat boots stepped on a floor of heads. Damned souls stood beneath his feet, stacked shoulder to shoulder like sardines, so tightly that they made a solid floor. The flesh on their heads was worn from treading feet all the way down, exposing cracked and oozing skulls under the tatters of hair and skin that remained.

Eddie ignored them. He jammed the muzzle of his 870 up the stairwell and squeezed off a couple of rounds, and then he half-dragged, half-kicked Phineas Irving into the Toys Department.

Mike was right on their heels. Jim jumped from the demolished bed to the banister of the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie saw the big dark-haired man slash three times at the pell-mell mutants before leaping over a shelf of sagging plush giraffes to join them, landing on his feet light as a cat.

Twitch touched down in man-shape as they raced through a depressing junkyard of dusty fire trucks and no-name action figures, but immediately took to the air again as a falcon. Eddie saw why and pumped the shotgun. “They’re bad enough when they stick to the ground,” he muttered, and pulled the trigger.

Two flying snakes in the way of the Remington’s slug exploded into shuddering meat. Two out of a thousand.

Phineas Irving sang louder and he sweated rivulets of salt, but he was still singing.

The wall of flying snakes hit the Nehushtan’s bubble of faith—

and bounced back.

“Yee ha!” Eddie shouted. “Onward, Christian soldiers!”

They rounded out the back of Toys at the top of the next flight down in a no man’s land between shrink-wrapped wire crates of fake plastic food labeled to look like off-brands on one side and a pallet of two-by-fours on the other.

“Down!” Eddie barked, and pushed Irving and Mike forward, after the flashing horse’s tail of the falcon Twitch.

He joined Jim at the back. The singer ducked under and wove around a hedge of snakes that snapped and hissed at him from the floor as well as from the bodies of the mutants—Lady Legs charged at him, along with Bob the repairman and others Eddie hadn’t yet bothered to recognize.

Eddie squeezed the trigger of the 870, letting off several rounds into the horde and setting them back a few paces.

“Don’t mind us back here!” he yelled to Irving, retreating from the serpents in a quick skipping shuffle down the stairs. “Everything’s under control!”

“
Forward into battle 
…” came the indirect reply.

They hit the ground floor, and it was ice. Heads protruding from the ice surrounded Eddie, and he was close enough now that he could see the words they were mouthing.

Save us
, they said, and
I’m sorry
, and
Soon you too will join us
.

Eddie turned with Jim to see the late afternoon sun through the glass doors. He saw more heads out in the parking lot, but he saw cars, too, and with half his heart, he wanted to ditch Adrian and run like the devil.

Then the snakebite he’d got from John Deere’s wing-snake itched, fiercely. It stung. Eddie scratched at it, and saw that Mike and Irving were hesitating, too. “Go on!” Eddie bellowed, channeling his Inner Sergeant. “The basement, Twitch said!”

They ran through racks of brassieres and panties. Mike’s choice, Eddie thought. Guy can’t stop thinking about tail, even when he’s getting shot at. He could hear the sound that Twitch had been talking about now. It was a chanting, with a drumming mixed in, the shaking of metal rattles. If it counted as music, he thought idly, it did so only barely. It sounded like the crap he’d played for Sharon back when she was in college and he was just back from Iraq, and he wanted to impress her with his sophisticated interest in things African.

Bullshit, he snorted now. Gimme a fuzzed-out, wailing guitar solo any day. That’s the music of my people.

He forced himself to ignore the freezing heads, and charged straight through them. They flinched as he struck them, but of course he didn’t feel anything. They were ghosts, figments in a vision. Still, it was strange that they seemed to see him back. By a rack of underpants printed with fading images of Space Ghost and Quick Draw McGraw they turned again, and charged down towards the basement. Eddie wasn’t sure what to expect, and whatever it was he might have imagined, it wasn’t what he saw.

He stopped, several steps from the bottom, and stared. The basement was thronged with people. It might have been a Kitchenwares Department once, but the shelves and tables of merchandise had all been shoved to the walls to make a great empty space in the center of the floor. In the center of the floor lay a dog on a low-end kitchen table, a charcoal barbecue grill full of smoldering incense, and two figures.

The mongooses stood beside Eddie on the steps, rearing up and hissing.

Miriam was unmistakable.