Unearthed (54 page)

Of course, that probably wasn’t how it worked, but … a man could dream.

Brian dodged around a semi parked on the street in front of—shit, what was his name? His dad had introduced them before he went to trucker school. Vaughan Something. His house.

Brian’s search for Vaughan’s last name was cut short when he saw the police Explorer that used to be Arch’s shoot past in front of him, heading for the same T intersection he’d gone through a minute earlier. It didn’t take a genius to see his dad’s plan; lure the damned creature to a showdown in the least populated spot in town—Crosser Street, where you had three houses in a row completely abandoned. It was probably a better idea than trying to get it to follow them out of town, because that thing had looked like it might be able to do close to fifty.

Brian made the turn and followed the police cruiser, which was, in turn following and followed by two other cars. He didn’t recognize the sedan behind him or the SUV in front of the Explorer, but he didn’t need to. He just followed the damned leader back to where he started from and tried to steel himself for the inevitable clash and chaos that was coming.

Arch hit the curb with the SUV’s wheels as he rolled up, stepping out almost before the car was at a stop. It wasn’t hard to tell which house the Rog’tausch had gone into: right in the dang middle, a house with low eaves over the front porch and two windows up top. Classic Americana, but the big gaping hole in the front and the noises coming from within chilling Arch maybe even more than the last time he’d been here, when he’d found bones and mess inside from some demon’s feeding frenzy.

“How do we stop this thing?” Reeve asked, popping up next to him.

“I guess you’re probably ready to believe me now,” Arch said, pulling his sword and giving it a shake. Hendricks and Duncan were already parked, staring at the empty house as it rattled on its foundation. The cowboy and the OOC eased over toward them, not taking their eyes off the place.

“You know what the hell of it is?” Reeve said, sounding like he was a really old man, wrung out of almost all life. “If you’d told me it was demons back when this first started, I would have believed you. Been skeptical, sure. But I would have believed you.”

Arch stood there, maybe more than a little flummoxed. “Well, I’ll be,” was all he could think to say.

Lauren didn’t have much luck, at least not of the good variety. The Rog’tausch was clearly a beast of massive destruction, and what it left behind was either dazed survivors or shattered corpses, and not much in between. She’d seen a few lacerations, bumped into more than a few people she knew on the street, bustling about after the fact, wondering what the hell was going on—but actual injured? Few and far between.

She’d reached the edge of town and was a little out of breath. She looked out over a field, figuring that this was about where the demon had entered Midian. She knew there were other dwellings out there, but they were spread out over miles. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in helping those people; it was more an issue of what she could do. And without a car, she couldn’t do much of anything.

She moved past an ambulance that was parked in the middle of the street, grabbing a quick bag of medical supplies and slinging it over her shoulder. She counted six more in the back, so she didn’t feel too guilty about taking it. The paramedics were off in the crowd, dealing with a scalp lac or something, and she had a feeling that where she was going, she was going to need this more than they would.

She turned her eyes east, the direction she’d seen Bill’s truck racing, Rog’tausch in hot pursuit. It hadn’t been a place she’d necessarily wanted to be, but then, this whole demon-hunting business hadn’t been something she’d wanted any part of, not really.

But this was her home.

And these were her people.

She could have left years ago, and right now if she’d seen Midian on the news, she would have made that “Ohhhh” sympathy noise and maybe been done with it. But she hadn’t left; she’d stayed. Stayed after her father died. Stayed after she finished med school. Stayed after she knew she wanted to work in Chattanooga, in spite of the commute and the reasons she should have considered leaving.

This was home, like Molly had said.

She looked over the street and caught a glimpse of Wayne Thurston, an older black man, wearing his rugged blue jeans and flannel shirt, looking like he was lost amid the chaos. She marched right up to him and said, “Wayne, I need to borrow your car.”

Wayne Thurston just blinked at her, shook his head, and reached for his keys. “She’s over there,” he said, nodding to a carport. “Bring her back in one piece, Doc?”

“No promises,” she said and gave him a moment to withdraw his hand. He didn’t, so she gently took the keys and started toward the carport, waiting to hear some shouted objection from Wayne. It never came, naturally.

She really was home.

Hendricks stood outside the house on Crosser Street, waiting for someone to take the lead. He’d more or less learned his lesson about rushing in head first, and in spite of his ire toward Duncan over Kitty Elizabeth, the OOC probably wasn’t wrong about this, he had to concede. Not with what he’d seen of the giant scar left across Midian at the moment. He imagined it’d be even more impressive from the air.

“Alison,” Arch called, “find a vantage point. Hendricks, Duncan—get ready to engage with holy weapons. I’m with you on this.”

“What do you want me to do?” Sheriff Reeve asked. Hendricks looked past the man to see Erin standing in his shadow, her eyes fixed on him. He looked away abruptly, not wanting to stare, not wanting to get distracted.

“My dad’s in there!” Brian Longholt came running up, nearly out of breath, looking like he was ready to pee himself. Hendricks had seen a truck stop in the distance, somewhere past the reporter’s car. He squinted and looked for Belzer in the distance. He saw a shape in the man’s car, stubbornly—or smartly—refusing to get out of the vehicle.

“Lordy,” Alison said, under her breath. She turned tail and hauled ass across the street. Hendricks watched her go, heading for a low-to-the ground house built into the side of a hill. He figured she meant to climb up onto the roof and rain some hell.

A roar broke over them and drew Hendricks’s attention back to the house in front of him. Shattered glass came from a second story window as he watched the butt of a gun smash through, then run along the edges to clear it. Bill Longholt came squeezing out a moment later, standing up on the sloped section of roof above the porch, on the side opposite where the damned beast had entered the house. Bill made his way carefully to the edge of the roof, then halted right there, and Hendricks cringed, wondering when the damned thing was going to come wandering out.

It didn’t take long. He saw its breath in the air first, not because of the chill, but because it seemed to smoke, wafting out of nostrils as it came out of the darkness at a saunter. “You seek to distract me.” It talked in a low volume, surprisingly calmly.

“What do we do now?” Sheriff Reeve asked.

“This is the part where we talk it half to death,” Hendricks said. “Traditional demon battle technique.”

“Really?”

“Hell no,” Hendricks said, at the end of his patience. “I’ve had enough of talking to these things.” He drew his pistol and shot it right in that antler-crowned face.

A flurry of gunfire followed from all quarters; Arch, Reeve, Erin, even the big boomer from Alison echoed through the night over his shoulder. He watched the Rog’tausch wavered under the impacts, but only slightly. They might have been giving him a massage for all Hendricks could tell.

The Rog’tausch roared and the air flamed lightly around him.

“So that’s where those explosions came from,” Reeve mused as the beast tore up the lawn with a well-placed stomp of rage.

“Uh huh,” Hendricks said and holstered his pistol. He already had the sword out anyway, and it was always going to come down to this. He looked over at Duncan, who had his baton deployed, and Arch, who drew his steel after holstering his Glock. “The rest of you might want to stand back. This next part … is going to a little ugly.”

The Rog’tausch tore straight at him, and Hendricks, for his part, leaped like a motherfucker to get out of the way.

Lauren floored it, running the accelerator to the floor and skidding onto Crosser Street. It was pretty obvious where the action was, no surprises here. Hard to miss the enormous, jackhammering noise of some kind of battle going on.

She turned onto the street and saw a lineup of cars that told her she was dead-on in her guess; this was where the party was. She slammed the car into park and grabbed the bag off the passenger seat, hurrying out just as the Rog’tausch charged toward the crowd of—people? Defenders? She didn’t even have a name for them, but she rushed to join them as the massive demon stomped straight into them.

Reeve had his gun up, ready, when the big thing that had torn up his town bull-charged toward the cowboy, Hendricks. Reeve was already seeing red, had it in his mind to put some hurt on this thing. If Arch had been fighting these things for weeks, then Reeve was already way behind the eight ball. These were the things that were ripping up his fucking life. This was like an emblem, a perfect symbol dropped into his lap, a sacrificial pit bull just standing in front of him with its teeth bared.

Reeve fired until the gun went click, about four shots, tops, as the thing tore across the ground toward Hendricks, shredding the lawn and throwing dirt through the air. Reeve could smell brimstone and fresh dirt, the world seemed to slow down around him.

And then a redhead dropped out of the sky and punched the damned thing in the jaw, knocking it ten feet back and flat on its ass.

“Holy shit,” Brian Longholt said from somewhere behind him. “That is one badass goddamned hooker.”

Arch just stared. He’d felt like he was about two seconds from being flattened by the Rog’tausch when it came at Hendricks, so the appearance of Starling really was like a miracle right from above. “Well, heck fire,” he said.

Brian saw the hit, that hooker dropping out of the sky to hit the demon with a punch like a Mack truck—and his brain suddenly made a connection it should have made minutes ago. He started to tear off in the other direction and passed Lauren Darlington heading toward him.

“Where the hell are you going?” she called as he passed. She slowed as he came at her.

“Had an idea!” he shouted, rushing to the truck. He tore open the door and scrambled for the bottles in the cup holders. “Here!” He tossed one at her and she caught it. “Holy water. Might give big bad a bellyache.”

She followed him up to his window as he climbed into the truck and started it. “Okay, holy water. What am I supposed to do with this? Throw it at him and hope for the best?”

“I don’t know,” Brian said. “You’re the doctor.” He handed it over to her. “But if I were a betting man, with that thing shrugging off bullets like it’s got the hull of the Battleship Potemkin around it, I might figure out a way to get him to take his medicine orally for best results.”

Darlington just held up a bottle. “Oh, yeah?” A roar filled the air, and a stomp shook the truck. “Why don’t you try and forcefeed it to him, then?”

“Because I’ve got to do something else!” Brian shouted as he floored the car in reverse. “Back in five!” He spun the car around in the street and swung it around, dropping it into drive as he headed for the intersection.

Lauren just stood there, medical bag in one hand, two bottles of water under the other arm. “Orally? Shit, while I’m at it, why don’t I just pull the cap and shove it up his ass, let him butt chug the damned thing like a heavenly enema?” Another roar broke through the air just then, and Lauren flinched, afraid for just a moment that the bastard might just have heard her.

“I am not sorry to see you,” Hendricks said as Starling stood between him and the Rog’tausch, the fucking thing knocked back on its haunches by her punch. It roared almost ineffectually at her, scared, like it had just gotten hit for the first time.

“That seems a very backhanded compliment,” Starling said, always in that same flat manner.

“Especially considering she just saved your life,” Arch said. “Again.”

“Gentlemen,” Reeve said, “maybe we should focus on the task at hand.” The Rog’tausch was getting to its feet, unsteady. “How do we take this thing out?”

“Just like that giant, flaming cow,” Hendricks said, looking at Arch. “Remember?”

“Hard to forget,” Arch said.

“Oh, shit,” Reeve said, “that actually happened? I was damned sure the Blenkmans were dropping acid or something when they told me about that.”

“It’s all starting to come together now, ain’t it?” Erin asked.

“It’s weak against holy weapons?” Hendricks asked, watching the thing rise to its feet to tower over him.

“I am not weak,” the Rog’tausch said.

“It is not invincible,” Starling said. “But its essence is contained in a hardened structure akin to your bones, with the flesh serving as a sort of armor. The bones will be impenetrable to your weapons, the outer flesh merely resistant to it.”

“You weren’t kidding about the talking to death,” Reeve muttered.

“It’s always a thing,” Erin said, “like we all have to stare death in the eye before we charge stupidly into it.”

Hendricks took a long breath, and the Rog’tausch roared again. “Good news. I think the talk is over.”

“That’s not that good a news—” Reeve started, but the Rog’tausch was already moving.

Arch was ready when the Rog’tausch attacked. It came for Starling first, and she whirled out of its path and countered with a hard fist that hit it right in the bicep. She moved awfully fast, faster than he could have on his best day of conditioning training, but he managed to exploit her strike by hacking his sword into the demon’s skin right at the wrist. It cut loosely through like he’d chopped into a cabbage with a dull knife, nothing oozed out at the site of the attack, which should have comforted him since he wouldn’t have to clean his blade later.