Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (26 page)

“We’re not much for drinking, you know,” Arch said, rubbing his hand over his stubbled head. He kept it pretty close to buzzed, as much for the convenience as for the regulation way it looked. Most people could tell he was a lawman just by looking at him, even when he was off duty—and that was even if the entire county hadn’t already known him. He worked hard to cultivate that image, though, to try to take away that familiarity that everyone presumed because he had been a local legend on the football field. “I doubt the missus is going to be much in the mood to go out after a long day on her feet at Rogerson’s.” Rogerson’s was the grocery store where she worked as an assistant manager. And hated it. And complained about it, every day, at length, to Arch. It was, however, a family business, and certain things were simply expected.

“All right, then,” Erin said, slipping into her car seat and giving him a last wave. “If you change your mind, you know where to find us.”

“I won’t,” Arch said tightly, “but thanks.” He got in and shut his door, turned the key and listened to the rumble of the engine. The Explorer was a damned sight better than anything he would have been able to afford on his own, that was certain. He shifted it into reverse and slid out of the spot before Erin had a chance to even start her car. It was better this way; as wild as the girl surely was at the bar—and he had heard the tales from his co-workers—she was grandma-slow as a driver.

Arch guided the car out of the parking lot, keeping to the lot limit even though almost no one else did, and turned right on the Old Jackson Highway, County Road 57. It was the main street that ran right through the middle of Midian, and it wasn’t but five or so minutes’ drive to his apartment. He took a deep breath as he waited for a semi to pass. He rubbed his eyes, let his fingers massage down his face as the big tractor trailer blew past on the rain-slicked street, the new-car smell thick in his nose as he thought for just a second about cutting his lights on and going after it. It was at least seven mph over, and he wrote tickets for less. But he was clocked out, Alison was expecting him, and he’d written tickets all day. It was all he did, write tickets and cite for broken taillights.

“Is that all there is?” he asked the empty car, the turn signal clicking over and over again, tapping gently into his skull. The same boring day, over and over again, every day from now to retirement in some thirty or forty years.

When there was no answer, he went ahead and turned, leaving Erin’s lights behind him as she made the right to Fast Freddie’s. He, on the other hand, took the left, toward home, the unanswered question still hanging in the air.

+ + +

Hendricks had met a man in the town square who wasn’t a man at all. He’d gone to ask a guy wearing a John Deere hat for directions to a cheap hotel, figuring he’d find a place to crash for the night before trying to get the lay of the town tomorrow, and it became real obvious, real fast—at least to his practiced eye—that he was looking at a demon. It had taken some practice, but he could recognize a fair number of them by the signs, and when he saw the little flare of light in the man’s eyes, he knew. Worse than that was that the demon seemed to know he’d been spotted because instead of answering with polite directions to the nearest hotel, he instead let show his teeth—the real ones, the demon ones, hiding beneath the veneer of human flesh and skin that the demon wore like Hendricks wore his drover coat.

“Well, shit,” Hendricks said as he took a step back. The demon’s eyes were positively glowing now, his anger at being found out rising quickly. Green hat, glowing red eyes, well, hell, what else would you find in Midian, Tennessee on a Tuesday night? He didn’t wait to have the man-who-was-not-a-man set upon him; he recognized the signs for what they were—the demon, straight from the nether realms, was about to make a meal out of him. No, that wasn’t what Hendricks had planned for his Tuesday night in Midian, hell no it wasn't. And like any reasonable demon-hunting individual would, he had a response.

He threw the duffel off his shoulders, drew the sword that was hiding under his drover coat, and braced himself for the literal hell that was about to come his way.

+ + +

Arch had to blink as he passed the square in front of the county courthouse. It was a simple enough square, just like you’d find in any small town, with businesses closed down at this time of night. The whole town rolled up the sidewalks, as he’d heard it said, round about eight o’clock, except for the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart down by the interstate. Downtown got quiet after eight, and it stayed quiet until the next morning. Kids didn’t play there because there was nothing to do. There’d been some vandalism a year ago at the hardware store, a dilapidated old building that had lost a front window, in all probability to some bored high school kid. That sort of thing was big news in Midian. Mostly the square was quiet at night.

So it was with some surprise that when Arch drove through on his way home he saw the man in the black cowboy hat and long black drover coat who he’d passed out by the interstate waving a sword at one of the local boys who worked down at the paper mill. Arch couldn’t rightly recollect the ol’ boy’s name, not off the top of his head, but he knew him, a fellow who had come to town a few years earlier from Athens or Sweetwater or somewhere closer to Knoxville. He was wearing the same John Deere hat he wore most of the time, and he looked like he was telling the cowboy to step off, fire in his eyes.

Arch didn’t even think about it, just jerked the Explorer into a parking space at an angle by the square, and was out of his car in a heartbeat, drawing his Glock 22 as he went. “Hands above your head!” he called to the cowboy as he made his way across the pavement toward the middle of the square, which was bisected with an X of concrete walkways that met at a statue of General Stonewall Jackson. “Drop the sword!”

“That’d be a real bad idea right now,” the cowboy said, but he froze, the sword high above his head, not like he’d been holding it a minute ago, ready to strike. “This is a Chu’ala—” Arch squinted at the cowboy as the man said some nonsense word, and the next part of the statement jumped clear off the track, “—and its blood lust is about to kick in.”

“Drop the sword, sir,” Arch said again, commanding.

“I will gladly put this sword down,” the cowboy replied, “in about ten seconds.”

“NOW.” Arch put a little extra mustard into his command. If the cowboy made so much as a move toward the fellow in the John Deere hat whose name Arch wasn’t honestly sure he’d ever caught, he was going to be making a quick trip to Calhoun County Hospital, maybe take a flight from there to Chattanooga to have some bullets extracted.

“Okay,” the cowboy said, voice laced with strain. “I’m going to start putting it down, very slowly. You know, just so you don’t mistake my behavior for something … untoward.” He started to slowly bend, lowering his sword and his body like he was very gradually moving toward a squat.

“You could speed it up a little,” Arch said, annoyed. He’d been looking for action but would have preferred it stayed restricted to duty hours. Sheriff Reeve was going to be irritated if he had to pay overtime for this. Especially if it dragged on.

“No,” the cowboy said, moving at the rate of about a half-inch per second, “I really can’t.”

Arch’s gaze was drawn to the good ol’ boy, the paper mill worker. His eyes were funny, lit up with a glow like someone was shining a light in them. Arch looked, just for a second, turning his head to see if there was something behind him, a light source or reflection that’d be causing it. “You okay?” Arch asked the fellow. He’d seen him before, knew the guy from when he’d worked security at one of the paper mill’s company picnics down by the river, keeping the drinkers in line. They’d talked, a group of other guys and him, about college football, about UT’s chances this year. They weren’t great.

The man in the John Deere hat didn’t respond, not in words. He let out a low growl, something that didn’t even sound human, more like a dog crossed with a cat that’d caught its tail in a clamp, and he shook his head hard enough to break something. Nothing broke, though, not anything physical anyhow, but the man’s face seemed to change, to loosen, like the flesh was sloshing around, draining toward his mouth the way the water went out of a toilet boil. What was replacing it was shadow, darkness, a bug’s exoskeleton made out of shades of blackest night. Arch blinked once, then twice. He slapped a hand on his face, rubbed one eyelid, then the other, never closing them both. He had to be hallucinating. It wasn’t any form of mind-altering substance, because Arch didn’t truck with that stuff, but heck if what he was seeing wasn’t something of that sort.

“You might want to step back,” the cowboy said, and Arch wanted to say something to reply to him, but he couldn’t find the words. The good ol’ boy had turned into some shadowed thing, a monster with glowing red eyes, like they were the windows into the old furnace Arch’s parents had in the house when he was a kid.

“What the—?” was all Arch had time to mutter before the thing in the John Deere hat came flying at the cowboy, fast as anything that ever crawled or skittered. The cowboy looked to be ready for it, though, and dodged back, taking a clumsy swipe with his sword as the John Deere hat went past. There was a squealing noise and something that sounded like clicking as the thing came back around for another pass, righting itself after missing the cowboy.

Arch considered shooting the cowboy, as he’d threatened, but frankly, the situation was all fouled up and that didn’t seem the thing to do. Clearly something had happened to the good ol’ boy. He was on PCP or something. There was really no other way to explain it.

The cowboy took another dodge back, almost whirling out of the way as the thing came at him again, and he tried to stop the good ol’ boy with the sword—a pretty, one-handed thing—but he hit him with it and the good ol’ boy kept coming, forcing him back further. There was enough of a gap between them that Arch could shoot without worrying about hitting something he wasn’t supposed to, and he didn’t even bother to call out. The good ol’ boy in the John Deere hat had made his moves on the cowboy after a uniformed police officer was on the scene, and unless Arch missed his guess, pepper spray and a Taser weren’t gonna do a damned thing to settle this down. The cowboy was actually defending himself against John Deere. And losing, even though he had a sword.

Arch fired the Glock three times. Double tapped John Deere in the head and put one in the body as an afterthought. The .40 bucked in his hands, the plastic pistol grip kicking with every pull of the trigger. The shots were good; Arch was proficient, having put in far more range time than was technically required with his weapon. He saw every one of the shots hit, but they didn’t seem to do much of anything, barely staggering the thing in the John Deere hat. Instead of dropping like he should have, the thing seemed to almost shrug them off like they were nothing of serious concern, just walking right through them, heading for the cowboy.

The cowboy was ready this time, though, and before Arch got a chance to fire again the cowboy thrust out with the sword. Taking advantage of the moment’s hesitation by the good ol’ boy/thing, he thrust the blade where the throat should have been on the shadowed creature. Critter, Arch liked to think of it after seeing what it could do. A critter, a thing, like a mongrel dog that attacked anything that came at it. The cowboy hadn’t even really come at it, but it damned sure wasn’t a man. Not anymore, if it ever really had been.

There should have been a gurgling noise from where the cowboy had stabbed it, but there wasn’t. It was more like a steady dripping, sped up, a tapping or clicking like something was slapping against something else. The darkness swirled around the thing, like a black hole had opened up and was devouring it. Crackles of orange like the outline of a flame ran through the dark that surrounded the thing, washing over it in slow motion. Tendrils of the dark flame consumed it one lick at a time until the feet disappeared last of all, dissolving to leave nothing on the sidewalk to show that the good ol’ boy in the John Deere hat that Arch had met at a picnic once and talked UT football with had ever even existed.

“Well,” the cowboy said, and let his sword clatter to the ground, “how was that for some action to break up the monotony of small-town life?”

Arch just stared at him for a few seconds then lowered the gun, letting it rest in a low safe position while he kept an eye on the cowboy’s hands. “That … thing. He attacked you?”

“Was about to,” the cowboy agreed, “when I drew my sword. Couldn’t help himself, see. The Chu’ala, they have an aggressor response like no animal on earth. The minute he knew that I knew what he was, it was game on, and nothing was gonna stop it but the last buzzer. No time outs for them, they’re straight-up killers.”

Arch tried not to stare blankly, but then he cast another gaze at the spot where the good ol’ boy had literally disappeared. That sort of thing just didn’t happen, did it? “You called it a Chu’ala.” Sounded like koala, but with a choo like choo-choo in front of it. “What is that?”

The cowboy stared back at him, half-smiling, hands on his knees like he was winded. “You probably don’t wanna know, honestly. I mean, what you just saw? That sort of thing tends to be career-ending if you were to write a report about it, you know. They’ll ship you off to the local Bellevue.”

Arch hadn’t even thought of that. “What was it?” Dogged, like he had to know. He did have to know, but he couldn’t put a finger on why. This was the sort of crazed stuff he wouldn’t have ever thought he’d encounter, and he’d had a teacher at the academy who was an Atlanta cop, told him stories about things he didn’t think he’d ever see in Calhoun County. Definitely not something crazier than all that, even. A man turning into a devil-insect and then disappearing into shadows and night like he was being swallowed whole by it? That was far out of consideration.

“I told you,” the cowboy said with an easy, not entirely sincere grin, “it was a Chu’ala.”