Bulls Rush In (3 page)

“No, I can’t,” Reedy said pointedly. “And even if these aatxe things were real, you’re basin’ all this family stuff on a feelin’?”

I shrugged. “I could be wrong. It could be that the Blancos came from some cult that summoned Samuel’s daddy here on purpose, for all I know. Or maybe the Blanco family were criminals, and Samuel was their muscle until the world changed around them. But I’m pretty sure Luis was the last human member of Samuel’s
family
, no matter what Samuel meant by the word. That’s how Samuel got stuck in Vista Verde. He was out of keepers.”

I walked home from the Comida Unida. “Home” was a pickup truck and a tent that I’d been staying in while working the pumpkin fields. There wasn’t anywhere in Vista Verde that was more than a half-hour walk to the surrounding mountains, and I was used to living in the woods. It’s one of the ways I stay off the grid.

Samuel had gotten increasingly agitated at the mention of Luis, and I could tell that he was seconds away from becoming violent and to hell with who saw what, so I’d backed off, finished my fajitas while he repeated his demands that I leave town, and wished him luck when I stood up. “I don’t have anything against you, Samuel,” I’d told him truthfully enough.

He didn’t immediately follow me. Of course, with Samuel’s senses, he could afford to sit and brood and drink for a while before tracking me, even with the rainfall. The question was, would he? I hadn’t just sat around all those days while I was waiting for it to rain.

I had prepared a killing ground.

“Breakin’ into the man’s home and plannin’ to kill him.” Jim Reedy shook his head. “Do you know what else is agin’ the law in Vista Verde?”

“It was a Tuesday,” I explained. “On Wednesdays I kidnap people, and on Thursdays I set things on fire.”

He leaned forward and peered into my eyes intently. “Is there anybody home in there, smartass? Do you have any ideer what kinda trouble you’re in?”

His accent and dialect were becoming thicker. If we were playing poker, it would have been a serious tell. “How am I going to get in trouble? You keep interrupting my confession.”

He rubbed a hand against his mouth. Maybe Deputy Reedy was recalling that I hadn’t actually gotten to the part that would involve a life sentence yet. Finally, he opened his hand and held it up in a gesture of appeasement. “You’re right. I apologize.”

“It’s no big deal,” I lied.

The most important step had been making a poor man’s version of liquid nitrogen. It had turned out to be surprisingly easy. All I’d needed was two big plastic bottles—one smaller than the other—a sharp pair of scissors, 99% isopropyl alcohol, and some dry ice. Making a bucket of the stuff hadn’t taken long, but I’d had to be very careful about not making physical contact with the liquid. The guy who made the how-to video on YouTube, a Wbeatty, described the stuff as cryogenic napalm.

I had placed the bucket behind a tree at the edge of a small clearing. The area around the tree was filled with punji traps, small pits with sharp wooden stakes at their base. They wouldn’t stop Samuel, but they would slow him down. About thirty feet in the woods beyond the tree was a deep grave, maybe six feet wide by nine feet long. The grave was filling with rain.

I looted through my truck cab and removed a Japanese long sword, a Japanese short sword, and a Ruger Blackhawk, respectively. The fourteen-inch silver steel knife was already sheathed on my hip. Then I stripped down to my jeans and sneakers. I needed to be elusive, a dancer, and if the rain was cold, it was better than having loose clothing that huge hands could grab or horns could snag. I fixed my sheathed swords crosswise over my shoulders and the smaller weapons at my hips.

Then I waited. Would Samuel come? I thought he would. I knew his secret. He was angry and scared and out of his depth, and if the beer bottles in his house were any indication, he had started drinking to self-medicate. The alcohol might numb his anxiety, but it wouldn’t help Samuel with all of those predatory instincts that he had no idea what to do with. He hadn’t even waited for rainfall or night to find Ben and Colton, and all the old stories agreed that this was when fire elementals should hunt.

It took four hours for Samuel to appear, but I didn’t mind. I’m patient when I have to be.

Samuel had stopped by his house, and maybe picking up my scent there was what finally set him off. He was carrying Luis’s shotgun in any case, and he leveled the weapon at me. His face was contorted with rage, and he hadn’t bothered to put on a raincoat or bring an umbrella. His cheap green T-shirt was suctioned to his skin, his long black hair plastered to the side of his skull. Little red lights flared in his nostrils at the sight of me.

I started moving when the muscles in Samuel’s left shoulder tensed, but it wasn’t necessary. His finger pulled the trigger, but there was no gunpowder in the shotgun shells.

“No powder in the shells?” Jim asked skeptically.

“Only black pepper,” I clarified. “I told you. I prepared.”

I reached the tree that the bucket of liquid nitrogen was behind. They say that a person’s life flashes before their eyes right before they die, but I’ve come close to death many times and never experienced that. What did unfold in my mind’s eye was the next six seconds. I saw Samuel stumble as he ran into a punji pit. I saw myself dousing him with the bucket of liquid nitrogen. I saw Samuel screaming as the solution sank into his skin and slowed down his molecular rate, kept him from heating up or changing shape. I saw myself targeting his heart and his brain with my swords as I took him apart like he was cattle and I was a butcher.

And I did something I rarely do once a fight has started.

I hesitated.

“Say what?!?” Jim Reedy demanded. He seemed angrier than he should have been.

“I’m not saying it was smart,” I admitted.

Jim adjusted his weight back into his chair. “I thought you were supposed to be some badass monster hunter.”

I sighed. “Have you ever killed someone, Jim?”

It was as if someone had wiped all expression off of his face with a rag. “Once.”

I didn’t tell him how many beings I’d ended. “Whatever else I am, I’m human. I screw up. I get tired. I have doubts.”

“But you did kill him,” Jim said carefully. That statement was what he was waiting for, the reason he had endured so much nonsense that he thought was bullshit, and it was, only not the way he imagined.

“My life is a lot like Samuel’s in some ways,” I said. “I try not to feel things, or at least some kinds of things, but that sad, empty house got to me. And the idea of a family that tried hard to take care of Samuel. And maybe the fact that he was a little off had something to do with it too. I’m a hunter, not a butcher.”

“But you did kill him,” Jim tried to keep his voice neutral.

I ignored him again. It was important that the deputy hear the whole story. “Samuel felt a little too much like a victim to me—like a murder or a sacrifice.”

Maybe I needed to tell the story as much as Deputy Reedy needed to hear it. They say confession is good for the soul.

“Samuel, stop!” I yelled, and stepped back away from the tree.

Of course, he didn’t stop. He charged forward and plunged into a punji pit. The stakes pierced his foot and his tendons, but they began to heal the moment Samuel pulled his leg out of the hole with a frustrated yell.

“You’re going to die here if you don’t stop,” I said sadly. “This is what I do.”

“THOSE KIDS WERE WORTHLESS!!” Samuel screamed. Rain began to hiss and pop when it hit his skin. Even damp, his clothes were steaming, and Samuel didn’t seem to notice when the fabric dried and began to burn around his body. “Destroying stuff for no reason! Making people feel bad! Just mean little bastards! People like that don’t change.” The nubs of horns emerged from Samuel’s head. Thick black pads began to develop on the palms of his hands. His body hair thickened and coarsened.

“Say that’s true,” I said. “Say those kids did deserve to die. What about the cop you killed?”

“Whoa!” Jim shot up out of his chair. “Cop? What cop?!?”

“You, Jim,” I said sadly. “Samuel killed you.”

Jim’s face had already been unnaturally pale. There was no blood to drain out of it. But somehow, he gave that impression anyhow. He tried to laugh, but it didn’t sound like any laugh I’d ever heard. “You really are crazy.”

To be fair, I had admitted that there were a lot of things I wasn’t telling him. “Look around,” I indicated the room we were in. “Does this look like a police station?”

Jim took in Samuel Blanco’s kitchenette as if seeing it for the first time. I had heard about the missing cop while I was knocking around Vista Verde, but I hadn’t put it together with the presence I’d sensed when I first entered Samuel Blanco’s house until I found the police badge that Samuel was keeping in a shoebox for some reason.

“Do you remember how we met?” I asked. “It was when I came back here to remove any trace of myself from Samuel’s home, with Samuel’s blood—the blood of your killer—fresh on my jeans. That’s when you manifested and started acting like you were going to arrest me.”

“This isn’t…No…You aren’t….” Jim stammered. His reaction didn’t surprise me. Ghosts are naturally inclined toward denial; they are the ultimate manifestation of it. But I could tell the realizations Jim didn’t want to face were starting to catch up with him.

I lifted my hand up and made a whistling tricorder noise, pretending I was moving one of those scanning devices from the original
Star Trek
series over him. “You’re dead, Jim.”

The kitchen table suddenly tilted upward and flew at me, but I’m stronger and faster than I should be, and I tucked my head while I put my arm and shoulder into the wooden surface and slid the table over me. Beer bottles shattered all around me like icicles falling from the rain gutters of a house, but I was more concerned with the fact that Jim’s visible form was gone.

“I can leave if you want me to, Jim.” I kept my voice calm but loud. “But don’t you want to find out what happened to the man who killed you? You do remember Samuel, don’t you? Isn’t that why you’re still here?”

It was why I had told my story piece by piece, hoping Jim’s memories would come back to him gradually.

Nothing else happened for a while. I didn’t move. The coffee was all over the floor, but Samuel’s coffee had been dirt cheap and stale anyhow, so I didn’t bother to get any more. There was a painting on the wall in front of me, one of the few in Samuel’s house. It showed a beautiful Latina-woman in a gossamer-looking bright orange gown, lying on the shore of a beach as if she’d just washed up on it, her long black hair spread around her in a nimbus that was wreathed with seaweed and shells. I didn’t recognize the artist, but I did recognize Jim Reedy’s reflection when it appeared in the transparent film covering the picture.

Jim—or some fragment of the man—spoke from behind me. “Tell me.”

“Jimbo knew Luis,” Samuel’s voice was deeper, and it didn’t sound uncertain anymore. “He stayed at the house sometimes. He kept coming round after Luis died. He wanted to put me in some home.” Samuel’s feet emerged from the burning fragments of his shoes, only they weren’t feet any longer. They were large, thick hooves. Samuel stamped his right hoof, and the grass coverings I’d made for the punji pits dislodged as the earth around us shook violently.

“Did he suspect something?” I asked. “When he saw the spray-painted word on your driveway, then saw the spray paint cans all around Ben and Colton’s bodies? Or was he just afraid you’d tell someone about him and Luis?”

Vista Verde  was a small, conservative West Virginia town. Would a macho deputy sheriff have been able to be openly gay there? How in touch or at peace was this Jimbo with his relationship with Luis?

“NO!” I didn’t know if Samuel was answering me or refusing to answer me. His horns, half formed, elongated into curving, sharp points. Muscles began to ripple and twine beneath Samuel’s slack skin, especially around his chest and shoulders and neck. His bodily hair continued to thicken into a black hide, and a tough, black, callused material began to form around the ridges of his hands. His nose became a snout, his mouth stretched wide, and small jets of flame shot out from his nostrils.

I stepped back toward the tree, but it was too late for that. Samuel charged. I wasn’t in a ready stance, but I wasn’t exactly unready either. My right foot was in front, my left foot back with the heel slightly up, and I was holding my palms up in a placating gesture that put them close to the hilts of my blades. I surged into a fast draw, slipping my left thumb against the wakizashi’s hand guard and twisting the short sword and the sheath, positioning the cutting edge of the blade even while I drew it one-handed.

The wakizashi deflected a strike from something that was half hand and half hoof and had a long reach either way, sparks and blood and bits of rock hard callus flying. My feet were slightly diagonal to him, and I moved into a sloppy hiraki-ashi sidestep. I almost slipped on the wet grass as I swiveled onto my back foot, but I still pivoted so that the angry mass that was Samuel surged past me. Both of my hands were on the hilt of my sword now, the bottom hand guiding as I went with the whirling motion and plunged the blade into Samuel’s back, between his left shoulder muscle and his neck.

Samuel screamed and stumbled, his weight and momentum tearing the hilt out of my hands. He blundered forward into a kneeling position, squarely between me and the bucket of homemade liquid nitrogen.

“It’s still not too late to stop this,” I told him. I didn’t sound particularly convincing, and I was no longer quite as conflicted now that my blood was up and the danger Samuel represented was undeniable.

Samuel tried to reach backward where the hilt of the wakizashi was sticking from his back, but his shoulders and neck had become too wide to be flexible, and the blade had severed muscles. He lifted his head up to the sky and bellowed, began to change again, his body twisting and expanding in front of me. Flames licked over his frame, making the black fur look reddish.