Wicked Prayer (11 page)

Man, walking on this shit was like walking on the distended bellies of dead bovines.

Man, Johnny was way past tired of it.

Almost there now. At the tips of his crud-covered boots lay a soiled piece of blue-black carpet that looked like a tongue unfurled from a dead giant’s mouth. Johnny stepped onto it, wiped his feet, then humped the last fifteen feet to the top of the trash cathedral.

Grunting, he dumped the Indian chick’s corpse on a broken recliner. Her head fell back, and her sightless eyes seemed to stare straight at the obelisk ... or sepulchre ... or whatever you wanted to call it.

Johnny just called the damn thing a freezer.

It was a Westinghouse. Johnny leaned against it, trying to catch his breath.

“This is why we came all the way up here?” he asked. “This
freezer?”

“This is it.” Raymondo’s tiny eyes scanned the rancid valley that stretched below them, and for once he was almost friendly. “You did good, Johnnyboy. Looks like you’re King of the Mountain now. You might even say
the world is your oyster.”

“Nah,” said Johnny. “It just smells like one.”

One more trip down the trash mountain to retrieve the cowboyfriend’s corpse.

One more trip up, and that sucker was so damn heavy that Johnny could hardly make it. He had to make several stops, skin sheeted in sweat, muscles burning, and when he did move his boots seemed to sink deeper and deeper into dump slime with every step.

“Son of a
bitch!"
he yelled, voice echoing off the mounded walls of refuse. “Motherfucking son of a—”

“Remind me to buy you a guest pass for Gold’s Gym next time your birthday rolls around,” said the shrunken head. “You could use some serious work on your
cardio endurance."

“Yeah, I’d like to
see you
haul two dead bodies up a skyscraper’s worth of trash.” Johnny wheezed, dumping Cody by the freezer. The body landed hard, so much dead weight, and Johnny kicked Cody’s corpse as hard as he could, thoroughly enjoying the solid, satisfying thud his boot made when it connected.

“That’s mature, Johnny. It’s not like the man can
feel.”

“Yeah, well
I
sure as hell can
feel.
And that felt
good.”
Then he bent low and tore the leather jacket off the motionless body.

Raymondo sighed. “All right, leather boy, you got your souvenir. Now put the bodies in the freezer.”

Johnny did as he was told, his muscles aching like hell as he wedged Cody and his woman into the dented old Westinghouse. The quarters were a little cramped, but hey, Johnny didn’t think there’d be any complaints.

“Just goes to show my mother was right,” said Raymondo. “Right about what?”

“It’s dangerous to play in old refrigerators.”

Somehow that hit Johnny as funny. Damn funny. He laughed. So did Raymondo. Tiny tears squeezed from his eyes.

“Man,” Johnny said, “I didn’t know they even
had
refrigerators way back in nineteen-fucking-nineteen.”

“They didn’t,” Raymondo said. “But if there’d been any around, my dear old insufferable mother would have warned me about them.”

Now that the job was done, Johnny was starting to feel pretty good about things. The two of them had accomplished something important together, something that required a little muscle and a little brainpower. Teamwork kind of stuff Maybe they’d even bonded a little.

Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe
not.
But for the moment, at least, Johnny didn’t have the urge to grind Raymondo’s skull in his sizable
fist, and Raymondo didn’t want to chew a hole in Johnny’s jugular.

“Better lock them in, Johnny. I saw a pile of chain over there by those shot-up traffic signs.”

“Sure,” Johnny said, because it was actually a good idea. He wrapped the stout chain around the appliance. Then he tipped the white box onto its back, securing the ends of the chain under the freezer’s own weight.

Nobody was getting into that freezer without a lot of effort.

Nobody human, anyhow.

Johnny wasn’t quite sure about the Crow.

“I’m kinda worried about the bird, Raymondo. I mean ... if you’re right and the Crow’s still alive, what’s it gonna take to stop him?”

“Take a look down below. You’ll see exactly what it takes.”

At the base of the trash mountain, under the Merc’s bright headlights, Kyra Damon danced. Her pale face was a symbolist painting of black cat blood, and her naked body was a canvas for the moonlight. She whirled, and she twisted like a wild thing that had never been born of woman, and she whispered words memorized from a book bound in human skin.

Kyra’s own personal anthem blasted through the stereo speakers, obliterating all else. Forget Erik Hearse, this truly was the Devil’s Dance—a poisonous mix of slashing violins and guitar strung with a strangler’s favorite catgut.

Peter Warlock’s “Capriol Suite for Guitar and String Orchestra.” Johnny knew what the music meant to Kyra, understood how much pain each note contained.

Kyra fed on the music. She writhed as the violins lashed her, and her breath caught in her throat as a cascading garrote arpeggio drew tight around her neck, and her power gave birth to darkness.

A black maelstrom descended en masse over the dump.

Johnny saw their wings gleaming in the darkness.
He saw their eyes, black and evil and trained on Kyra Damon.

Only on Kyra Damon, because they were hers—and hers alone—to command.

“Son of a bitch,” Johnny said, and he grinned at this sweet little piece of irony. For what Kyra’s words had called up from the rank roosting places of the dump was a flock of
carrion crows.

A.k.a.: eaters of the dead.

Warlock’s “Capriol Suite” gave way to “Bransle.” One by one, the birds joined in a ragged black formation, forming an ever- spinning circle around the woman. Kyra raised her arms and threw back her head, and she made strange gestures as if she were some kind of conductor and the birds her avian symphony of destruction.

Once Kyra had told Johnny about the tribunal of the crows. How the birds would suddenly turn on one of their own for reasons beyond the realm of human understanding. A crime, a sickness, a weakness . . . Whatever the motivation, the judgment of the bewitched bird’s all-too-mortal counterparts was harsh—and final.

Harsh and final. That was the law, the way of Kyra’s book. These junkyard birds would guard the corpses of Dan Cody and Leticia Hardin with their lives. And if their mythic counterpart came sniffing around . . . why, he’d better watch his supercharged tail feathers, Johnny figured.

All at once the carrion crows began to caw, the harsh cacophony of their screams obliterating the classical music that spilled from the Merc.

“That’s some sweet song, eh, Johnnyboy?” Raymondo asked.

“Oh, yeah.” A smile twisted across Johnny’s lips. “It’s sweet, all right.”

The full moon hung behind him, the color of an aged scar. It cast Johnny’s long black shadow over the bloated corpse of suburbia . . . and his shadow stretched all the way to Kyra Damon’s live, electric flesh.

Johnny couldn’t help himself He screamed into the night, screamed as if his throat were full of violins, matching the cries of the gathering crows. He screamed long and loud and hard, until his voice was ruined and his throat was raw.

When he was done, the shrunken head said, “You’re a real piece of work, Johnnyboy.”

“Yeah," Johnny croaked. “Yeah, I am.”

He grinned, raised his fist to the night.

He screamed again, raw and ruined, like he was at a dark concert in hell.

And the crows rose up as one.

Eight miles north of Scorpion Flats

Sixty-seven miles southeast of Tucson

Bones welded by righteous hatred ...

Heart mended by unwavering faith in everlasting love…

Nascent connective tissue joining muscle and bone, fresh feathers blossoming like silky black flowers from wounds that seemed too deep to heal. . .

. . . the Crow rose once more.

The black bird was stronger now. Rejuvenated. Wings unfurled, it rode the cresting night wind over the dump, searching for the mortal remains of the man called Dan Cody.

The lamb’s blood-colored ’49 Merc was long gone, along with its three outlaw passengers. But the Crow scented the stink of brimstone exhaust, and it followed the tread-prints of whitewall tires, and it traced the footprints of Johnny Church and Kyra Damon as easily as cloven hoof tracks left by Satan himself

The air was ripe with the odor of dark enchantment and animal blood. The Crow had no doubt that evil rooted in the fertile soil of this land of broken dreams.

And though it was cautious, the Crow was not afraid.

The bird dipped low in the night, circling a twisted cathedral made of trash.

And suddenly there it was . . . the thing the bird sought. There . . . at the very top of the cathedral, penned by rusting road-sign spires and leaning plywood arches and twisted scrap-metal pews.

A battered Westinghouse sepulchre, where two wronged lovers lay locked in death’s bloody embrace.

Kyra Damon’s carrion army watched the intruder from a hundred hidden perches, waiting to strike with one will.

The white obelisk towered above them like an object of worship. What lay within, the birds did not know. They knew only that the obelisk’s contents had drawn the Crow like so much bait. The bait would trigger the ancient deathtrap found in the pages of Kyra Damon’s grimoire, and the carrion crow would destroy their enchanted brother. If they failed in this mission, the force of their mistress’s anger would rip their beating hearts from their chests and tear their wings from their sockets and scatter their bones to the four corners of the earth, where the beasts of the field would devour their flesh. . . .

If
 
they failed in their mission.

But they would not fail. They were many against one. Large, strong, carrion birds who drew sustenance from the dead, who drank blood from cooling bodies even as the scarlet fluid steamed in the chill night air. Their beaks were sharp and their talons long. The brighteyed intruder was smaller by far, almost delicate by comparison.

But the Crow was not weak. This the carrion tribe knew. The spirit bird possessed an unnatural strength. The Crow had come here to share that strength with another. When it did that, the Crow would be weak . . . and vulnerable.

And that was when the carrion tribe would strike.

Feathers rustled against the wind as the Crow began its descent, dark body cleaving the night like a hatchet.

There was danger below. The Crow knew it the same way it knew that lightning followed thunder.

The black bird cawed a long, loud warning, breaking the silence.

Danger be damned.

The Crow did not have time for fear.

It landed on the battered Westinghouse freezer.

Nothing inside the box but death and pain. Tools of the dark bird’s trade.

And then the sensation came again, a subtle spark of avian senses, a jolt transmitted to the Crow’s brain over a prescient tangle of nerves. Danger. The bird raised its head, trained black eyes upon the dark landscape below. All was quiet. Still, the Crow sensed the blight of evil like the presence of disease, and it waited for that evil with the patience of a predator.

But patience was not always a virtue. The Crow knew this to be true. Races often went to the swift.

And the Crow was swift. It raised its beak to the heavens, turned its eyes to the stars.

And then its beak fell as swiftly as a guillotine blade.

Once, twice, clacking against the hard white shell of the freezer.

Something moved within. Something stirred . . .

The Crow thought of an egg, ready to hatch.

Inside his tomb, Dan Cody’s eyes flicked open.

Dead or alive, Dan couldn’t tell. Both forces surged within his body, fighting like a wild riptide in his blood.