The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (8 page)

It was a shame, in a way, though, because if Stevie Ray had believed in a god—or at least the right god—he might have worried less about the family of vampires living in town. As it was, in the absence of a god to pray to, he’d decided he had to go and talk to Edsel.

Father Edsel wasn’t a tall man, but he was a big man, with a big personality, a big bushy beard, and wild eyes, like a biker gang boss who’d decided to take holy orders. He’d been a priest down in Texas or someplace, but he’d done something bad and got sent up here to Lake Woebegotten. Not the kind of something bad where he’d molested little boys or anything, though the church wasn’t above sending priests to tiny little middle-of-nowhere parishes for
those
offenses, either, or so Stevie Ray had gathered. More the kind of bad where he’d performed an exorcism on a little kid who turned out to have a neurological disorder, and gotten a lot of bad publicity for the church. Edsel was loud, formidable, pigheaded, bombastic, and other such adjectives, but he had a quality that Stevie Ray needed, mainly: he believed in evil, and in demons, and in abominations before the Lord, and such things as that, which had made it easy for Stevie Ray to convince him the Scullens and the Scales were actually vampires. It had been harder to convince him
not
to sharpen up a bunch of wooden stakes and round up some of the dumber parishioners and arm them with pitchforks and torches, though. But Edsel wasn’t
stupid
, and he’d seen reason eventually, and agreed to just keep a watchful eye. But now, Stevie Ray was worried, so he sat down with the priest in his office and sipped a cup of bad coffee and talked for some time while Edsel scowled at him from under those hirsute caterpillar eyebrows.

“So you think a war is brewing, then,” Edsel said finally, leaning forward across his great oak slab of a desk.

Stevie Ray sighed and shifted on his uncomfortable chair. The furniture in here was really terrible, the seating equivalent of hair shirts. “I’m not sure it counts as a ‘war’ when it’s five or six fellas on one side and six on the other, maybe it’s better to call it a feud or something, but yeah, I think the tribal elders and the Scullens—and the Scales—could come to blows over this thing. I don’t think the boy, Edwin, meant to stray onto the reservation, he was probably just tracking a deer and didn’t realize he’d hit their territory—it’s not like there are signposts out there in the woods. But technically it’s a breach of their treaty, so…” Stevie Ray shrugged. “I’m just concerned, is all. I’m trying to make things peaceful, you know, but—”

“I’m not opposed to the devil-worshipping heathens from Pres du Lac killing the bloodsucking undead fiends, and vice versa,” Edsel said thoughtfully. “In fact, if we could manipulate this into a full-on war of evil vs. evil…”

Stevie Ray pressed the heels of his hands to his eyeballs. Talking to Edsel gave him a headache. “Father, please, the elders aren’t devil worshippers. They hate vampires—or wendigos, as they say—worse than anybody. All right, all right, worse than anybody except
you
. But what I worry about is collateral damage. The Scullens haven’t bothered anybody in the years they’ve been here, and in a year or two they’ll have to move on anyway, because people will start to notice they aren’t aging and wonder why the ‘kids’ haven’t gone off to college. I was really hoping to keep things nice and quiet until they left, knowing they won’t be back for at least a few generations, long after it’ll cease to be my problem. But if they start trying to kill each other over a breached treaty, the town could get caught up in the mess.”

“I am a man of action, Stevie Ray. What action would you like me to take?”

“Just be ready. Get your… people ready. So if something
does
happen, we can step in, at least to protect the townsfolk. Vampires are tough, I know that, but the tribal elders tell me guns will slow them down and blades will cut off their heads and fire will burn them.”

“And fragmentation grenades will fragment them, I’m sure,” Edsel said. “So the Interfaith Vampire Slayers may finally see action, then? How wonderful.”

Stevie Ray nodded. Edsel had access to truly startling quantities of weaponry, mostly because of his crazy friend Cyrus Bell, who was widely believed to be the single most insane person in town, outranking even Gothic Jim the Satanist and that odd fella on the outskirts who talked to himself all the time, called The Narrator by those locals who called him anything at all. Cyrus ran Cy’s Rustic Comfort Cabins and Bait Shop, which had been pretty popular before the internet came along and allowed past guests to provide warnings for potential future guests, who mostly chose to give the place a pass after hearing about Cy’s warm and outgoing personality and the way he liked to stand in your doorway for three or four hours telling you about how the moon was a hollow spaceship full of alien biologists studying Earthlings like ants under a microscope and how he’d stopped wearing underwear entirely because underpants were an Illuminati conspiracy designed to lower the sperm counts of working-class men. Because of Cy’s assumption that some kind of attack—from space, or the government, or the depths of the earth on account of all the lava men down there—was imminent, he’d spent a lot of years going to gun shows, writing to fellas who put ads in the back of survivalist magazines, and acquiring various sorts of ordnance, which he kept in an old bomb shelter underneath one of the cabins which was eternally closed for renovation. Stevie Ray didn’t like knowing about that little treasure trove—his boss Harry would have been troubled, to say the least, at the quantities of explosives and such just inside the town limits—but it was sort of a comfort, what with the vampires and werewolves. Sure, silver bullets and wooden stakes were traditional, but a Saiga 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun with a ten-round magazine would take your head clean off whether you were man, beast, or some kind of beast-man. And then there were the rocket-propelled grenade launchers Cyrus had bought off a white supremacist militia who’d gone out of business recently. They’d get the job done, too, assuming the job was “utter obliteration.”

“We could strike pre-emptively,” Edsel said. “Burst in on the Scullens en masse.”

“Right,” Stevie Ray said. “And when Harry investigates, and traces it back to you and Cy and your buddies, you’d be okay spending the rest of your life in prison? Nobody
believes
in vampires, Edsel. And these ones haven’t even committed any crimes.”

“Their existence is a crime against God and humanity.”

“I thought you believed in redemption?” Stevie Ray said. “Isn’t that the difference between Catholics and Lutherans? Lutherans believe in predestination, and you don’t?”

“That’s one of the differences,” Edsel said. “But there can be no redemption for the undead. You have to confess and repent and be absolved before you die—and they’re already dead. The fact that they’re still walking around… it’s a walking desecration. Besides, even if Argyle Scullen is telling the truth about subsisting on animals alone, he wasn’t
always
so scrupulous.”

“He says he hasn’t killed a human being since the 1500s, Edsel,” Stevie Ray said. “And I know for sure he’s saved a whole lot of lives in the time since then. You’ve seen it yourself.”

“There is no statute of limitations on murder,” Edsel said sternly. “In the eyes of man’s law,
or
God’s.”

I wish I could have more reasonable people as allies,
Stevie Ray thought, but he was limited to the sort of people who’d believe in vampire doctors and high schoolers and werewolf Ojibwe, which didn’t leave him with a whole lot of choices. “I’ll be in touch, okay?” Stevie Ray said. “Don’t do anything until you hear from me?”

“I will wait,” Edsel said, in his implacable prophet-on-a-mountaintop voice. “God’s judgment is long, and God’s will is undeterred by the passage of time.”

After Stevie Ray left, Edsel got on the phone. “Cy? Listen: The Omega Scenario is almost upon us. Be ready.” He listened for a while, made a face, and said, “Yes, that’s right. The aliens will be here soon. They’ve been experimenting on people, as we’ve discussed, making wolf-human hybrids and bat-human hybrids and—of course, we shouldn’t talk on the phone. Yes, that’s right, there’s no telling who’s listening. Yes, Cy. I know. I agree. Cy. Take yes for an answer.”

Edsel hung up and sighed. It would be nice to find allies who weren’t insane, he thought. But Cy had the guns, and he was righteous, even if he was misguided. Still—aliens! Ridiculous.

Everyone sensible knew demons were the problem. And Edsel’s crack team of Interfaith Demon Hunters were the solution.

Once he actually recruited them, anyway.

ACCIDENT PRONE

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

S
o the next day I nearly killed Ike with my truck.

I was driving Marmon to school, pulling into the parking lot. There’s a bit of hill right at the entrance of the parking lot, and the driveway slopes down to where the parking spots are—it’s really just an unlined field of oil-stained gravel. The slope isn’t huge (not even enough to sled down in winter, really), but it’s there, and the incline was enough to almost doom Ike.

Marmon wasn’t complaining any more than usual, and I never felt remotely unsafe in him, since he could crumple any other car on the road like a beer can crushed against a frat boy’s forehead. Which turned out to be the problem.

I pulled into the entrance to the parking lot, and there were just a few other cars there, including Edwin’s Subaru, parked about fifty yards away, right near the school buildings. Edwin was leaning on the hood, talking to his sorta-sister Pleasance.

Ike was parked a lot closer to me, and he was just getting out of his little Volvo. He waved at me, grinning like an idiot, and gestured to the empty space next to his. Anything for a moment’s proximity to me. It would have been sweet if I could have thought of a way for him to be remotely useful to me. He stepped into my path and started making big exaggerated air traffic controller gestures, as if guiding Marmon in for a landing. For the school’s “funny kid,” Ike wasn’t all that funny, but it was park where he wanted or run him over, so I hit the brakes to slow down.

But the brakes didn’t respond. I pushed harder, and the pedal sank mushily into the floor.
Oh, fuck
, I thought. Vehicular manslaughter, here we come.

Adrenaline does things to your subjective time sense, and kicks your attentiveness up a few notches. I didn’t panic: I pumped the brakes, but that didn’t achieve anything, so I stomped down on the emergency brake. Not much help there, either. Marmon was rolling downhill, and locking the back wheels with the emergency brake didn’t really stop my momentum—it just made my back end start to drift a little to the left. I tried downshifting, but Marmon’s got touchy gears, and I mostly just made horrible grinding noises. “Move!” I shouted, but Ike just looked at me, his stupid grin gradually melting into a quizzical expression. It occurred to me that I could swerve Marmon into one of the other cars and stop
that
way, but apart from the fact that such action would be terminally embarrassing, it probably wouldn’t save Ike’s life: If my front end struck something, it would probably just slew my back end around, and I’d end up killing Ike via sideswipe rather than head-on collision. There just wasn’t
time
to do much of anything except mow the stupid kid down, and that would lead to all sorts of unpleasantness. I’m not overly concerned with the sanctity of human life, but something so public, against someone who’d never wronged me, was hardly my idea of a good time.

Ike realized I was going to hit him, and started to dive out of the way, but Marmon’s a big truck, and if he was lucky, he’d end up with just his legs crushed instead of his whole body—it wasn’t going to get much better than that.

Suddenly, I saw Edwin’s face at my window, even though moments ago he’d been at the far end of the parking lot. He streaked in from the side and body-checked Marmon like a football player making a tackle. The truck swung hard to the right, much more sharply than I could have turned it. I bounced in my seat hard enough that the top of my head hit Marmon’s ceiling. Son of a
bitch
. Marmon, pushed hard off course, crunched into the rear of Ike’s Volvo. Ike, meanwhile, was standing up unharmed and dusting himself off, gaping.

Edwin eased open my door and clutched my hand: those icy fingers again. “Bonnie, are you all right? Did you hit your head?”

“Um, a little.” I rubbed the top of my head and stared at him. “Edwin, how did you
do
that?”

He frowned. “Do what?”

“Push Marmon—my
truck
. He weighs three thousand pounds, and you moved him like a tackling dummy.”

Edwin frowned. “You must have hit your head pretty hard—I just ran over a second ago to check on you, I didn’t push your truck.”

Okay. Play it that way, then. Edwin was even more extraordinary than I’d realized. Was it just some temporary Hulk-out moment, like those women who lift burning cars to save their kittens or kids or whatever? But, no, it couldn’t be that, he’d been at the end of the parking lot, and he’d flown over here in a
second
, faster than anything living could move. Was he… what? A kid superhero? I’m what you’d call a realist, and a skeptic, but I also absolutely trust my own senses and my mind, and they were telling me: Edwin moved as fast as lightning and shoved a ton-and-a-half truck aside like I’d push a chair out of my way. “Better check on Ike,” I said, easing myself out of the truck, and he looked momentarily annoyed.

“Ike, are you all right?” he said brusquely.

“I, uh, yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, making a great show of clutching my not-really-all-that-wounded head. “I don’t know what happened, the brakes just didn’t work.”

“Good driving, though,” Ike said, rubbing his elbow, which I guess he’d scraped diving for the gravel. “I mean, it’s gotta be hard to control a truck that big, and I’d rather you dent my fender than crush my head.”

I glanced at Edwin, who was looking conspicuously at nothing, and realized Ike hadn’t seen his intervention—too busy leaping for his life, I guess. I looked over at the Scullens and Scales, who were clustered around Edwin’s car, and they were mostly glaring at me, except Pleasance, who looked almost concerned. Pretty soon people were pouring out of the school, and more students were arriving, and before I knew it, there was an ambulance and EMTs, and Edwin told them I’d hit my head and probably had a
concussion
. Not very nice at all. I insisted I was fine, but who listens to a girl with a head injury? No one. They loaded me onto a stretcher, which struck me as funny, because
I
wasn’t the one who’d been nearly run down, and all Ike got was a band-aid for his scraped elbow and an EMT shining a light in his eyes.