Lucky's Girl (40 page)

Find it! Yes!

Find it! Our God wills it.

Yes!

Will find it! Our God giveth strength!

It was the Most Faithful. It was Ellen and Abby and all the ones who had fallen for Lucky’s shuckin’ an’ jivin’. That’s what Grampa would have called it. And now they were here, they were on the roof.

***

Lucky stood amongst his flock, Blackie by his side. The bonfire was enormous, flames reaching higher than all but the white pine. But fifty feet away, it was just a faint blur and the roar of the flames couldn’t be heard at all. This was the power of Darkness and Silence. This was the veil of protection His God had laid down over Elton on his night of Reckoning and Justice.

After tonight only the Faithful would remain.

He didn’t know what came after tonight, but tonight…

Justice
.

He smiled grimly, thinking back on all that had been taken from him by the petty and small-minded. Jerry, and Kenny’s crazy Uncle Frank. Weaklings and cripples imposing their weak and crippled views on others. The very definition of Pigs.

Errol.

Their lackey.

His dad. The Rev.

Another weak and scared little man.

Sheep. Stupid fucking sheep, shitting and breathing and dying and cranking out more sheep.

He looked down at Blackie and she looked back.

Strength incarnate.

Like him.

Wolves don’t concern themselves with the opinions of sheep.

He looked down at the four Faithful which Kenny had shot. They’d been standing in a ring around the station speaking the words of Their God when Kenny had murdered them. Five of the Pack now lay dead and he heard the lament in every breath Blackie took.

A few minutes ago Kenny had run from the station carrying a bottle of whiskey. This was so disappointing, every bit as disappointing as Jake’s retreat from the path. Jenny had explained that he held some notion that Lucky would need their grandfather’s permission to take her as his wife.

He had smiled and shaken his head. From the first days of his life, people just didn’t get it.
Mason James didn’t
ask
permission
. This was because he knew, he’d always known. Even before the full revelations of His God, he’d just known.

Wolves and Sheep and Pigs.

Well, not anymore.

Justice
.

***

When Frankie lifted his left arm something stabbed him inside. It felt like he’d stepped on a nail, but inside instead. He left the Kevlar on, didn’t feel any blood, but he’d broken some ribs. He was coughing out blood, which meant he was getting stabbed on the inside with a jagged piece of bone.

But his injuries were minor in comparison. Errol’s right forearm – there was no meat left. Jerry’s chest – there was no skin left.

He did what he could do with what he had. He wrapped what was left of Errol’s arm in gauze, using medical tape as a tourniquet so he didn’t bleed to death. He’d seen hundreds of bloody bar fights, even some stabbings and shootings during his time at the bar, but never injuries like these.

There was nothing to do for Jerry but put the other Kevlar vest on him.

For a while they’d heard crazy noises on the roof. The shit-covered freaks—his former customers—were up there stomping and
scratching
. And the sounds they were making: he’d never even imagined anything like it. These people were beyond brainwashed, they were completely
gone
. In a matter of days they’d gone from either bad country music song material or holy rollers to shit-smeared psychos doing a pod people routine and making animal noises. They’d killed Sally and Wally, they’d cut the phones and the power, and now Lucky was going to marry a little girl.

And they were cooperating,
living with
,
wolves.

Jake had told a crazy story about Sally getting cut open and an eyeball opening up on the Big Tree. Now Frankie believed every word of it. It didn’t matter that no one believed in that sort of thing, because Frankie didn’t believe it either: but the trouble was, he
believed
it. He was convinced, even if his rational mind wouldn’t glue the pieces together.

The Rev had never been a hellfire and brimstone guy, and Frankie had never given a shit about church to begin with. The troubles of man were simpler than that shit. Drinking and dying and trying to get a job, staying one step ahead of the hearse and the taxman.

But now he knew the Devil was real. He’d seen him in the eyes of the Faithful.

And Frankie wondered…

The footsteps started on the roof again.

***

Yes! Yes we will!

Our god is a mighty god!

He lives! He walks the world!

This is the way!

Jerry winced as the nylon fabric covering the Kevlar scratched the surface of his skinless chest, the only thing between them being an old deputy’s uniform shirt.

He squeezed his eyes shut, so much so he saw sparks inside his eyelids. Breathing with no skin on your chest hurts. It hurts a lot. He should be in a hospital bed with IV morphine. For a second he almost laughed, but he stopped himself because he couldn’t even imagine how much
that
would hurt. The pills Doc Pete had given him were on the kitchen counter at his cabin.

How many days ago had he left the hospital thinking he was the thin blue line between Lucky and Elton? He almost laughed again, a delirious thing of pain, blood loss, sleep deprivation, and alcohol withdrawal.

He’d had no idea what Lucky was up to when he’d left the hospital, had no idea what the man was capable of. What had he thought he’d been trying to save Elton from?

A guy in a bed-sheet toga? A guy he’d kicked out of town twenty-odd years ago?

Well, impossible and perverse had nothing on the last few days. He should have stayed in that hospital bed, getting a few days of taxpayer-funded, drug-induced sleepy time. Then he thought about it. Part of his reasoning was that he was afraid of getting his state funding cut.

Which brought him back to Errol.

Despite the fact that he was in physical agony, it was Errol’s betrayal that he couldn’t let go of. He’d been through all the scenarios in his head. He should be thinking, grasping madly for an escape plan but he wasn’t. Instead he just sat that there and thought about making sense of it.

Errol would go to the Capitol once a year to secure their funding.

That made no sense. Odds were he went and bribed someone. Michigan was home to the Detroit political machine, which was one of the most corrupt places in America. The whole state lived in the shadow of that corruption.

He went there, somehow bribing someone to get the breadcrumbs keeping Jerry in a squad car handing out tickets. It had kept the most inept cop on the beat, so the Staties or cops from up the road wouldn’t come in. He was Errol and Frankie’s cover.

Errol, Frankie, Fat Sally, and
Wally Weed
.

Suddenly it all came together. It was clever, really, if you could live with the fact that your own stupidity was the lynchpin of a man’s plan – a man you had counted on as being a friend for a very long time.

His face twisted in pain as he pointed the gun at the front door.

The shit-freaks were on the roof again, croaking and yelping, growling and speaking in those crazy voices. He assessed his fellow prisoners. Errol could hold a pistol but only in his left hand. Frankie had broken ribs at minimum. Kenny’s little boy Jake was the only one worth more than his weight in shit.

He stared up at the ceiling, pacing back and forth like a third world child soldier on sentry duty, his innocence gone, and the willingness to kill stamped across his face.

Kenny had put water and coffee in a whiskey bottle, taking only a flare pistol and had run off, leaving his boy and three wounded old men to the mercy of Lucky and his death cult. Jake took up his gun like it was just another day, just another chore for a little boy in a warzone.

There was a series of long
scree-
ing noises as the Faithful went about their bizarre animal mutterings on the roof. It sounded as if they were running steel nails along the roof.

Jerry cleared his throat and spat. “What are you looking at, Jake?”

Jake didn’t take his eyes off the ceiling. “The Most Faithful.”

Errol stammered, shivering and weak from blood loss. “What makes them the
Most
Faithful?”

Jake nodded. “They gave themselves to the Great News first, body and mind. Turned their backs on the System. They are the Covenant. The words made Flesh. The Union of Man and Animal.”

Frankie groaned. “Lucky sure ain’t one for modesty.”

Errol and Jerry couldn’t help it, they laughed, bitter and short.

Jake shook his head. “They’re on the roof, and they’re gonna come through that roof and eat you.”

Frankie grimaced. He was bruised and bleeding in the real world, but yet the real world had spun off its axis. “Earlier you said that they’d eaten a man. What did you mean?”

Jake turned to him and fixed him with a look that no child should hold. “I mean the Big Tree turned them into wolf people and they ate him.”

Frankie closed his eyes, shook his head, but there was no conviction in his words. “You’re fucked in the head, kid.”

Then came the whine of steel roof panels bending followed by the sound of metal tearing.

Followed by an animal roar which sounded all too much like a human cry.

Yes!

Yes!

And a face popped down through the ceiling, swiveling back and forth, taking in the interior of the station, a gurgling growl coming from its toothsome maw. It was too fast for them to even raise their guns and fire. There was a deep lupine howl from the roof, answered by something else in the dark. And then
it
launched through the door and hit the cell with the force of a car.

Teeth and fur and the screaming growl of a thing that should not,
could
not, exist.

But they were now in the realm of Darkness and Silence.

A real God ruled here, the Wendigo, with the power to shape and mold his creations. He was the God of man’s fears of the wild, and the fear of his own wild nature. This was his vehicle. Neither man nor animal but the usurpation of both.

Arms reached through into the cell, its head pressing between the bars, one clawed finger catching Errol by the front of his Kevlar and yanking him bodily against the bars of the cell, just inches away from the jaws of the thing. It was covered in fur like a wolf but with the breasts of a woman and, despite its glowing grey eyes and distended snout and teeth, Errol recognized it.

It was Abby.

Her own love for her son had been used against her. She’d gone of her own free will, and had become an abomination.

The bullets came from mere feet away, piercing the blur of fangs, fur and glowing unearthly eyes. It twisted and shrieked, bashing Errol against the bars again, his head flopping back and forth, his forehead splitting to the bone, nose smashing flat, and teeth ejecting in a pinwheel of blood and gums. The bullets sparked and ricocheted, climbing the bars to the ceiling with most flying through the roof.

The thing that was Abby-but-not-Abby released Errol, launching backwards out the front door before limping off into the darkness.

The night was rent with a deep rumble which escalated to a high keening scream of fury. The thing which had lain dormant on Grove Island for centuries did not care for bullets, but it would not be deterred by man and his things. In the night the Faithful chanted again and again.

The metallic groaning came again. They were taking the roof off, bending and tearing and yanking the metal sheeting away. Sounds came from behind them and they felt the impact through the cinderblock walls, like someone was hitting them with sledgehammers. But they weren’t; they were the fists of the Most Faithful, cracking and shattering concrete block with every strike.

Ceiling tiles rained down on them while a furry fist raked the air from above, and another launched itself through the front door. It went right for the cage, ramming it and roaring in triumph, ducking a controlled burst of fire from Jerry, who then turned his barrel up at the thing clawing at them from above and emptied his magazine through the roof. There was a glass-breaking scream, the arm pulling up and out of sight. The one inside launched itself at the bars again, the bolts holding them in the concrete loosening in their moorings.

Jake jumped back and fell over Errol, missing his chance to fire. The thing launched itself backwards out the front door as
another
launched in against the bars, snapping the bolts holding them to the floor.

Jake pulled the trigger. This time he was ready, more than one bullet hitting its target before the barrel shot up and the rest flew through the ceiling. The thing held something in its face about Ellen, and thrashed as the line of bullets stuttered up its torso and through its face.

It crumpled to the floor, seeming so very small when not animated with fury.

The screeching of the metal roofing and the pounding on the cinder block walls continued unabated, while others launched through the front door, taking different courses, feinting left and running along the wall before crashing into the bars, completely breaking the bolts holding the bars fast. The entire front panel of the cage pushed back a foot against the concrete floor.

The entire section of metal roofing peeled back.

Yet another boom sounded, and cinder blocks fell away.

One of them landed in the cell from above, and jumped out again. Jake had
gone
. The opening in the cinder blocks widened from the back and Errol was yanked away. Jerry screamed as the thing reappeared at the bars, leaving with Frankie’s head.

CHAPTER 20