The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted, Page 3

  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 he
ad 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.”

  “Like a chihuahua?” Arch raised a don’t-give-me-no-bull cop face. He hadn’t learned that at the academy. “Didn’t look like no little yappy dog to me. It didn’t even look human.”

  The cowboy gave a grudging nod of his head. “Well, you got that much, at least. Most people don’t make that leap straightaway. You’re right, it wasn’t human.” He gave a look left, then right, as though he half expected another of those things to come leaping out at him. “You mind if I pick up my sword?” Arch shook his head. “No?” The cowboy’s disappointment seemed mild. “Well,” there came a kind of exhausted, long sigh, “in that case … it’s a demon. A Chu’ala is a demon of the old school, and when I stabbed it in the neck with my sword,” he gestured at the blade that lay upon the grass, shining in the lamplight, “the rupture loosed his essence, sending him right back to whatever hell he came from.” The cowboy said it all plain, matter-of-fact, like he was giving directions to Rogerson’s just down the highway. He waited a second, watching Arch, watching the gears spin.

  “A demon?” Arch’s logical mind butted up against the problem once, then twice, then once again. He had no suspect, no body, no evidence of an assault, no victim—or attacker, as the case might have been—nothing but a cowboy with a sword, strolling through the town center of Midian just before midnight, getting into a fight with a man Arch thought he’d known, who had turned into something improbable, then promptly dissolved into shadow and disappeared, maybe back to hell, if indeed that’s where he came from.

  “Yeah,” the cowboy agreed. “Sounds pretty fucked up, doesn’t it? Like I said, you might wanna just stroll on away from this one and pretend you didn’t see anything. It’d probably simplify your life.” There was just a touch of apprehension under ‘don’t-give-a-damn’ in the cowboy’s tone. “I know it’d simplify mine if you did.”

  Arch pondered that for a moment as he slipped his Glock back in his holster. He was running it through his brain, trying to figure out how to explain it to the sheriff in a report—explain a man who didn’t run away, didn’t disappear by hiding behind something, but a guy who vanished, evaporated into the air itself. Trying to imagine explaining to Reeve that he’d been off duty and seen something staggering, absolutely amazing and impossible. Imagine having to file a report on it—which would technically mean he’d have to punch in, or be in violation of regulations. And that would go over … not so well.

  He looked around the square. No lights were on, no sounds were made. His gunshots were loud, but not that uncommon in a rural area like Calhoun County. People shot in one of the fields behind the square from time to time, and firecrackers during July weren’t exactly the most unusual of sounds. No cars, no lights, nothing. A quiet night in Midian. Not a soul about. He eyed the sword, and the cowboy took a step back from it. Arch took a couple steps forward, stooped and picked it up, looked at the fancy swirls of runes that made the blade look particularly intricate. “You think I should just let you go, I expect?”

  “Well, of course,” the cowboy said. “Doesn’t everyone you catch hope that you’ll just let them go?”

  “Not all of them come at me with stories of demons and hell as alibis for what they’ve done, though. Almost none of them are strangers, in town for just an hour before they start waving a sword around and killing some poor bastard that works at the local paper mill by making them disappear like something out of a Criss Angel performance.”

  The cowboy inclined his head slightly. “I can see why this might be a little disturbing to you. It took me a little getting used to myself when my eyes first got opened to this sort of stuff. Might I suggest a little something to ease the passage …?”

  The cowboy was ever so mild in his suggestion, and it made Arch just a little curious what he thought might make this easier in the slightest. This idea of demons and disappearing people that didn’t really fit into Arch’s world, not at all. “What’s that?” Arch asked.

  “We should go get a beer.”

  ***

  The cop hadn’t let him have his sword back, but Hendricks wasn’t all that worried about it, not yet. He’d gotten in the back of the patrol car, and the cop had put the sword up front with him after searching him for weapons. That had caused a tense moment, but he’d been up front with the officer. “I have a 1911 pistol in my belt,” Hendricks had said. “My ID’s in my back pocket, along with a permit to carry it.”

  The cop had taken the gun out of Hendricks’s belt. The guy was
big, broad, muscular, a black man who, if Hendricks had still been a gambler of any sort, he would have laid money on having been a football player at some point in his academic career. He didn’t just have the build for it; he had the power. The cop was at least six foot two, and even with his Marine training, Hendricks wouldn’t have wanted to get in a scrape with the fellow. No chance. Demons were easier, because you could just kill them. Fighting humans sucked.

  After the cop had taken Hendricks’s gun and sword, and asked him to remove his coat, Hendricks got in the back of the cop car, a new model Ford Explorer that rode real nice. He was tempted to ask which he was headed for, a bar or jail, but they buzzed right on past the sheriff’s office without turning, though Hendricks caught a backwards look in the rear-view at him as they neared, as though the cop expected him to crack or something at the prospect of going to jail. It wouldn’t exactly be the highlight of Hendricks’s night, that was for sure, but a jail cell still beat the hell out of being devoured, guts-first, by a raging Chu’ala in the town square.

  Besides, he at least got to keep his cowboy hat. That was something.

  There was a glaring patch of neon up ahead, and Hendricks recognized the same stretch of strip malls he’d seen when he’d come into town from the interstate. The Wal-Mart was up there and a few other stores, a fireworks outlet, and a bar with a red neon sign blaring the name “Fast Freddie’s.” It sounded like a pretty jerkoff place, but Hendricks wasn’t too picky, being both hungry and parched and not having had anything to eat nor drink nor even had a chance to piss since being picked up at the Cracker Barrel outside Nashville hours earlier by the trucker. The last concern was still mild; the first two were growing in importance rapidly. He was parched and hungry enough to skin a coyote and eat it ass-first.

  Fast Freddie’s was a shitty looking place, all wooden eaves and paneling outside, like it was supposed to be an authentic Texas roadhouse. Old Father Time had clearly had his way with the joint, though, and it was faded enough that even the red neon sign looked worn. Hendricks would have bet that it looked like hell during the daytime, probably like it had been damned near forgotten by the owners, needing all manner of improvements. Still, Midian was a one-horse town, or possibly less, maybe a one-mule town, or even lower, a one-cat town or something. It was damned small; a micropolis, he’d heard this type of place called before. It only looked as big as it did because it served the rest of Calhoun County, drawing in people from the rural reaches of the county to the surprisingly wide array of commerce it offered.