Unearthed (50 page)

“In this case, you might have a winner, trying to figure me out that way,” Hendricks said. He scratched at his bushy cheeks. “My life changed that night. In so many ways. I left the Corps after that, started my new mission, cut all ties to everyone I’d known before, not that there were many. Been on it ever since, trying to … make a difference.”

“You feel any better now than you did then?”

“I got broken ribs and lost half my damned foot,” Hendricks said ruefully. “Hell, no, I do not feel better now than then. I felt … strangely alive that night. Not in a good way, just … surreal. Elevated senses, but dulled perception at the same time. Like when I woke up and looked her in the eyes, spewing water out of my mouth with the upchuck, the CPR did something to breathe life into me in a way I hadn’t felt before.” His eyes got guarded, and he stopped.

“If your life isn’t improving,” she said, “why keep doing it?”

“Well, it damned sure ain’t for my health.”

“You got that thing,” she waved toward the vial in his hand. “You’ve taken it before?”

“Twice,” Hendricks said, staring at the glowing blue.

“It worry you at all?”

Hendricks did not blink. “I’d be dead if it didn’t.”

“Didn’t worry you?” Lauren asked. “Or didn’t work?”

“Both.” He thumbed the cork out. “But I don’t have a lot of options left.”

“You could let it go,” Lauren said, watching him with a strange indifference. If he swigged it, she was going to watch, make some notes, maybe figure out how that mixture worked. She didn’t buy into magic. Then again, she hadn’t bought into demons until recently.

“I really can’t,” Hendricks said. “The night my wife died, when those demons came at us …” He bowed his head. “Last thing I heard them say before they dumped me in the water? ‘Like Duchess Kitty says …’ Didn’t catch the rest. Figured I’d made it up in my head until Duncan explained royalty.”

“And then you died?” Lauren asked, calm as if she were in the ER.

“And then I died,” Hendricks agreed. He tipped up the vial and took it down in seconds. “But not for long,” he said as he finished swallowing, making a face. “Not nearly long enough.”

“You’re going out to fight with a death wish,” Lauren said, strangely resigned. She was a clinical observer. Couldn’t decide if she should be horrified or just diagnose this for what it was.

“I’m going out to fight with a hankering for revenge,” Hendricks said and grunted, holding his side close to him. He jerked as something moved inside. She heard bones crackling but kept her distance rather than squat down. The pain passed over his face in a few seconds anyway, and he sat up straight for the first time since she’d seen him come in. All the bruising on his flanks was gone. He yanked the sheet back and his toes were there, skin a little crusted with dried blood. “And at a hundred percent, fortunately.”

He stood as she watched, his chest exposed and muscled. In another time, in another place, she might have been impressed. Now she just stared clinically, looking at the faint tufts of chest hair that covered his sternum and pectorals. He pulled a damaged shirt over and slid out from behind the curtain. He paused as he was almost out and glanced back. “Thanks, Doc.” And then he was gone.

She just stood there, tired beyond belief, wondering how long it would be before he was fucked up beyond repair again. She hoped that somehow this time she wouldn’t see it, that it would happen fast … because fast was far, far better than this slow, inevitable death he was currently dragging out.

Reeve could hear the special switchboard ring out in the bullpen area. He heard his wife answer, heard the shift in tone. He was staring at another cup of cold coffee, musing that the day had actually been damned near silent. He’d allowed himself the luxury of hoping that this might just be a sign of things to come. Maybe the shit was sputtered out of the fan. Maybe life was ready to return to usual.

And maybe pigs were taking wing over Midian right now.

He listened intently, heard his wife’s hushed tones, urgency followed by silence as she listened, and he stood, grabbing the coffee mug. He missed the fragrant aroma that the coffee gave off when it was fresh. He thought about stopping off by the microwave, making a little excuse trip out of it, but he and Donna had been married way too long for him to even bother bullshitting her.

He came and leaned on his office door, shoulder to the wood, brought the coffee cup just below his nose. Now he could smell the rich aroma, but he could also sense the cold, like it was a black hole right in front of him, radiating a chill.

“And where is it?” Donna asked. He lost the next bit as the bell on the door rang and Erin stepped in, looking weary from her hours in a patrol car. “… How big?” Donna’s voice came back to him.

“We might have something,” Reeve said softly as Erin brushed past the counter.

“Oh, God,” Erin said, blinking. She looked tired, short hair hanging in ringlets that threatened to break loose from her tight bun. “I was starting to get used to writing tickets, too.”

“Okay, we’ll send someone out right now,” Donna said and disconnected the call with the flick of a switch. She pulled off her headset and cast her eyes toward Reeve. “That was Barnabas over at the Methodist church.”

“Lordy,” Reeve said. He knew Barney Jones. The man had been Arch’s pastor before … well, before. Hell of an upright citizen, too. “What happened?”

“Says he was at the parsonage and heard something like thunder in the distance,” Donna said, glancing back at Erin and giving her an encouraging smile that was pure cover. “Drove out to take a look and found the Watts house on County 115 looked like it got hit by—his words—‘the dadgummed wrath of God.’ Said he could hear something ripping through the woods on the way to town, felling trees as it went.”

Reeve held his coffee mug in front of his mouth, using it as a shield while he formulated a response. “Like there’s a … logging machine moving through or something?”

“Or something,” Donna said. The trilling tone came again and she adjusted her headset back on. “911, what’s your emergency?” She listened, then her eyes widened. “Church Street? What’s the address? Hold, pl—” She looked up and took her headset off. “They hung up. Said something just ripped through the Yates house on Church Street. Like a tornado or something.”

Reeve turned his head around to look out the window. The skies were dark, but it didn’t look like a storm. “Church Street is across town,” he said. “Take us five minutes to get there, I reckon.” He set the coffee on the desk as he passed his wife. “Let me know if anything else—” He was interrupted by the ringing tone.

“What the hell?” Erin asked as Donna answered the call.

“Something’s up,” Reeve said. “And there goes our quiet night.” He couldn’t keep the longing out of his voice as he made for the door, that little dream of peace he’d started to harbor fading by the minute.

Brian was tuckered out, in the homespun words of his father. He felt like he could lean his head against the headrest and just sleep, just nod right the hell off sitting upright in the truck. That was unusual for him. He remembered the last time they’d done a family camping trip, and he hadn’t been able to sleep even in a $400 sleeping bag as plush as a featherbed.

Sleep wouldn’t be a problem this time, but he now he fought to stay awake. He turned his eyes toward his father, who was steering the truck toward town. They were on their way home but had to cross right through the middle of Midian to do it most expediently. Not that he could think of a compelling reason to steer all the way around the town just to avoid a few stop signs. Brian yawned, visibly.

His father looked over at him. “Sleep if you want to. I’ll wake you up when we get home.”

“I’ll wait,” Brian said, cracking his back. “I’m gonna collapse into bed tonight.”

“Been a long day,” his father agreed.

“Made all the longer by the fact we just watched nine hours of a priest chanting shit in Latin that made almost no sense.”

“I feel worse for him,” Bill said. “He’s still got hours to go.”

“Yeah, well,” Brian said, and turned his attention to two water bottles sitting in the cup holders. He picked one up and twisted the top. It was already cracked open but was filled to the brim? “What the hell?” he muttered.

“Quite the opposite, actually,” Bill said, flashing his son a look. “It’s holy water.”

“You raided the baptismal font?” Brian asked, looking at the water suspiciously, like it was gonna jump out and start preaching to him. “Why?”

“Father Nguyen said I could.”

“But why?” Brian asked. “Holy water does something to your demons?”

“Maybe,” Bill said with a shrug. “Won’t know ’til I try.”

Brian just shook his head wearily. He was thirsty enough to be tempted to drink it anyway, but who knew how long that stuff had been sitting in the pool. The railings looked like they were meant to be swung open so that people could walk right on through, so for all he knew it’d had seen hundreds of feet and who-knew-what else run through that very water. The font could have been crotch-deep for all he knew. God’s own hot tub. He had a vision of Father Nguyen chilling out, playing solitaire at the side of the pool and screwed the lid back on and set it in the cup holder. “Gross,” he said, mostly to himself.

“I think—” his father started, and then stopped as a BOOM! rocked the night, shaking the truck. “What the …?”

A light blossomed on the horizon just beyond the trees ahead. The road wound and curved, and it shifted left, putting the explosion on Brian’s right. He stared out, knowing Midian was mostly in that direction. “Like a propane tank went up or something?”

“Or something,” Bill agreed as the road curved back around the trees, following the contour of the hillside they were on. As they came around the corner, Bill brought the car to a slow stop, letting it coast until its momentum finished out. He shifted it into park violently and opened the door without bothering to pull the keys out of the ignition.

Brian followed, getting out and standing on the running board as he looked out on Midian’s outskirts below. There was a fire burning where they’d seen the explosion, a steady, constant source of illumination beyond the normal street lamps. The flames were licking out of a house, the place burning like a bomb had gone off. He couldn’t see the finer details of the fire from here, but he could see the flames billowing out of the windows, and could see a—

—a …

… what the hell was that?

There was a shape, a shadow, moving away from the burning house. Sirens flared in another part of town, their scream echoing as he saw flashes of blue and red light passing behind houses and buildings on their way toward the flames that lit the night. But near the burning house, beyond the moving shadow that looked like a tree that had uprooted and was walking around, there was a barely lit swatch of destruction. It stretched back past the burning house: a path of felled trees, fallen telephone poles, and a fence that had been ripped open. Brian squinted to see it, wondering exactly what he was looking at.

“What … the hell?” he whispered into the not-so-still night.

“That,” his father answered solemnly, like a guest lecturer the whole class was waiting to hear from, “if I’m not much mistaken, is the Rog’tausch we’ve been waiting for.”

Kitty let Rousseau take their SUV off-road through the last mile of countryside because it looked flat and because she was sick of bumping down old country roads while going miles out of their way. They had an SUV for a reason, for fuck’s sake, and it was time to start using the four-wheel-drive action to avoid the miles of wasted highway time.

They crested a rise and saw another house, a trailer home, broken neatly in two right down the middle. She’d say this for the Rog’tausch: he stubbornly followed his path, and now that he was getting to more occupied areas, he wasn’t deviating or flinching back from the idea of civilian casualties, that was for sure. The trailer home looked like it had been simply shredded in the middle, knocked off its concrete block foundations and left strewn, one side upended as if the Rog’tausch had decided it was more expedient to leave it like that than to finish the destruction.

He was in his own sort of hurry, that guy, but was a little too deliberate about it for her taste.

The night was alight ahead, and not just from the light pollution thrown off by the dinky-shit town of Midian. No, there was a fire burning, and since it was squarely in the Rog’tausch’s wake of destruction, she suspected he was to blame. It looked to be less than a half-mile ahead, and she’d heard a rumble when they were crawling their way up that last hill that suggested something might have blown up. Good times. She was sorry she’d missed it. Barbecues were one of Kitty’s favorite activities, at least when they had good meat to roast.

“It draws closer,” Bardsley said, a little too melodramatically for her taste. He really was aiming for the title of viscount, wasn’t he?

“Sure, sure,” Kitty said, brushing him off. “Rousseau … can you speed this up? The only way I’m not going to die of boredom during this little road trip is if I can actually see some of the waste that the Rog’tausch is laying to this place.” She clapped her hands. “Chop chop. Pedal to the metal.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rousseau said and gunned it across a meadow. With every bump, Kitty cursed the stupid Rog’tausch for not sticking to the roads. But at least now things were getting a little bit interesting.

Not for the town, though. That place was about to get wrecked all to shit. And Kitty would be there to watch, and maybe grab a few survivors for her own entertainments. Who would even notice in the midst of all this chaos, after all?

Arch sat at the kitchen table, devouring the meal that the reporter had put in front of him. Whatever Duncan’s issue was with the man, he made a mean can of beans, and Arch couldn’t decide if it was great because he hadn’t had anything in a day and a half or simply because it was cooked really danged well compared to what he was used to suffering through. Could be either way at this point, he supposed.