Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Read online

  Starling

  Southern Watch, Book 6

  Robert J. Crane

  Starling

  Southern Watch, Book 6

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2017 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Day One

  Interlude

  Day Two

  Interlude, Too

  Day Three

  Interlude, the Last

  Day Four

  Coda

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  Prologue

  Before

  Lucia Fiore was used to taking a punch.

  She knew the taste of blood in her mouth, knew that hard sting of shame mingled with the fear of what was going to come next. Knew the pain that radiated out from her eye when she got hit, the sting that had left scars in her red eyebrows.

  “You needed to straighten up,” her father, Jim, would say afterward. “You needed some discipline, put you back on the straight and narrow. You deserved it. Right?”

  “Yes,” she would always say, cradling the spot where he’d hit her, trying to protect herself. Every time.

  *

  The 2003 Ford Explorer rattled as it left the dirt road south of Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Lucia’s father was in the driver’s seat, head down, neck straining as he craned it to look down the road. He was squinting too, forgot his sunglasses again. He did that about half the time, and always griped about it.

  “We could go back and get ’em,” Lucia’s mother said in that quiet, plaintive way she had. She didn’t speak up often. Like Lucia, she’d been conditioned to stay quiet.

  “I ain’t wanting to do that,” her father said, continuing his squint. “It’s forty minutes to Chattanooga, and I just want to get this over with.”

  Everyone settled into silence. It was the safest course, Lucia knew.

  The sun was shining outside, bright and cheerful. Lucia could almost imagine birds singing in the trees as they passed, heading toward Battlefield Parkway. The rear shocks on the Explorer had gone to shit a while ago, so Lucia rattled in the back seat, feeling like a pebble in a coffee can that someone was shaking hard.

  That was okay though. She’d been shook a lot worse.

  “Goddamned sun is killing me,” her dad said, fiddling with the sun visor. It wasn’t having any effect, because the sun was too low in the sky and the visor couldn’t cover it. They were still heading east, yet to make the turn north, and her dad looked like he was flinching.

  “You want me to try mine?” Lucia’s mother asked, already hopping to reach for her visor.

  “What’s the fucking point of that?” Her dad gestured. “The sun’s straight ahead on my side. What fucking good is it gonna do for you to dick around with your visor? You fucking stupid?”

  Her mother seemed to recede, as though trying to melt into the window and door on her side, subtly inch away from Lucia’s father. Lucia watched from the back seat, taking it all in but trying not to be too obvious about it. It wasn’t like her dad would turn on the radio or give her anything else to entertain herself—like a cell phone. Her friends all had them.

  “Fucking stupid all around me,” her dad muttered, and blinked away from the sun in his eyes, casting a glance back at her. “And you. Did you go out last night?”

  Lucia felt like she’d been tagged in the middle of the forehead by a rogue softball. Not too hard, but enough to stun her and make her stammer when she answered. “J-just for a little while.”

  Her father gave her a hard look before turning his attention back to the road. “I suppose you went out with that goddamned devil worshipper, Lara, again?”

  Her mother turned around and sent her a scalding look. Lucia felt it burn, set fire to her cheeks. “She’s—not a devil worshipper.”

  “So you were out with her last night?” Her mother adopted a tone of stern disapproval, jarred out of her torpor by something to pick at. Lucia knew that feeling, the relief that came when the crosshairs shifted off of her.

  “I was back before ten,” Lucia said, almost begging. It was a plea, in her mind, one for them to leave her the fuck alone, or better still, give their blessing for her to get out of the house and draw a free breath every now and again, one not supervised and under their roof.

  “Sixteen years old and you’re hanging out with a devil worshipper all the time.” Her dad just shook his head. E

  ven petrified, waiting for the inevitable assault, verbal or otherwise, a thought crossed Lucia’s mind that she wouldn’t have shared even if he’d threatened to bust her in the jaw: We don’t even go to church.

  “Ain’t right,” her mother said, shaking her head. “That girl’s momma—Brenda Black—I knew her when we was coming up together. She wasn’t right as a girl, and she ain’t right as a woman, and it’s rubbed off on her daughter, sure as hell. Apple didn’t fall far from that tree.” Her mother sat up straight now, no need to seek shelter from the door or window next to her now that her father was nodding along.

  “I thought I told you to stay away from that girl and her fucked-up family,” her dad said. He didn’t deign to look back at her until after he got no reply the first time. His eyes were flaring, and not just from the bright sun. “You hear me?”

  “Yeah,” Lucia said softly.

  “But you went out with her last night anyway?”

  “We just went and saw a movie,” Lucia said.

  “What movie?” her mother asked.

  “It Follows,” Lucia said.

  “What?”

  “It’s … it’s a horror movie.”

  “You’re polluting your mind with that stupid shit,” her father said, pushing down the dashboard cigarette lighter until it clicked. “Fucking monsters and shit. Ain’t real. What a waste of time.”

  “Well, I don’t have anything else to do,” Lucia said, lowering her face to stare at the aged upholstery.

  “Oh, I’ll give you more to do,” her mother said. “There’s always more laundry could be folded. Vacuuming.”

  “I already do all that,” Lucia said, and instantly wished she could reach out, seize the words from the air and shove them back down her throat, even if they choked her.

  “Did you just sass your mother?” her father asked, head whipping around in a frenzy. He beat her—but sass? No, that was not okay, Lucia thought, keeping her eyes on her ragged shoes. “After everything we do for you? I work my fingers to the fucking bone putting food on the table, putting clothes on your back—hey, you look at me when I’m fucking talking to y—”

  She looked up just in time to see the flash. She thought maybe it was the glint of his wristwatch as he moved to smack her, but she didn’t get a chance to tell for sure because the world rocked around Lucia, everything spun, and suddenly she was upside down. She’d been
knocked around by punches before, but this wasn’t like that.

  First she thought maybe she was dead, then for one heart-stopping moment she realized, This isn’t death …

  This is …

  It’s …

  A big semi trailer smacked into her side window and sent shattered glass raining into Lucia’s hair. It had already run over the front of the car, grinding it beneath massive wheels, her parents disappearing beneath those enormous, relentless tires as she watched it happen in less than a second. One moment her father had been there, yelling, escalating, finger pointed, about to smack her—

  The next, he was just gone, the body of a tractor trailer and its running board sitting where her parents had been a moment earlier.

  Lucia just sat there, blinking. The roof had been sheared open, silence flooding in from outside of the vehicle, a ticka-ticka-ticka mechanical noise repeating in the ears deafened by Armageddon a moment earlier. It was as though the big semi had just decided to park itself in the front seat of their vehicle, miraculously appeared right there, after only a second of wrenching and tearing and squealing of metal, replacing her parents with this new, superior, mechanical god for her to pay her homage to—and fear.

  She took a breath, then another, and somewhere outside the car, now open to the sunny day, she heard someone scream, “Jesus!” She didn’t see Jesus though; all she saw were her knees, a little bloody, her shoes, still scuffed and dirty, and a missing front half of the old Ford Explorer.

  Lucia extended a hand experimentally, feeling for the door. Her palm landed on the plastic surface, and she brushed off the broken, pebbled glass and then went for the handle. She tried it, and it squeaked but failed to open. She pushed, and it yielded, making a rough grinding sound, metal against metal. It squealed and then fell with a clatter, the hinges missing.

  She tried to shove across the seat and get out, but something resisted. It was the seatbelt, clutching tight against her neck like a noose. Lucia blinked, reached down, and hit the button. It snapped free easily, zipping back to the seat and hanging there. She shoved along and out of the car, legs failing to hold her. She hit the ground and a sharp pain came from her knee; a little cry of, “Ouch!” escaped her lips.

  It was a little like when she’d hit the floor after a punch from her dad, but nowhere near as bad.

  “Holy living fuck,” a guy said, waddling up to her. His pants were held on by a belt around his waist that sat just above a wide, exercise-ball-sized storage area of a gut. “Are you okay?”

  Lucia stared at him for a second as she wobbled to her feet. She stared at her canvas shoes. “Yeah,” she said. The world sounded muffled, still, around her. She looked up and blinked at the big man. “I think so.”

  “Jesus,” he said, and looked past her.

  Lucia looked with him, knowing what she’d see but also knowing that it’d be so much worse for seeing the whole picture.

  The Ford Explorer looked like it had been cut in half, but it really hadn’t. The tractor trailer had just run over the front, mashing it down to a foot or so of height, somehow shearing it and crushing in the roof just in front of where she was sitting so that it had broken cleanly and simply hung there, like an awning, instead of mashing her to paste when it crushed the car.

  “I swear God must be looking out for you.” The big man touched her, put a hand on her shoulder, and she could feel the sweat on his palm as he brushed down her arm, like he was trying to convince himself she was really there. “I wouldn’t have believed anyone could survive that.”

  Lucia just stared at the wreck, strangely numb. Her parents … they had to be dead—there was no way a human being could fit into the inches of space that were left under the big tractor trailer’s treads. Little drips of blood or oil, dark liquid ran out of the metal beneath the truck, and she dimly knew that it was probably what remained of her only family.

  “Yeah,” she muttered, staring at the dark liquid as it dribbled out like blood across her chin after she’d taken a punch. “I guess so.” Already she could hear the sirens in the distance, like church bells, ringing out as they approached. “Maybe He is.”

  Day One

  “… see, when you use the Prep Scrub, then the Pre-Shave Oil, then put on the Shave Butter, and use an Executive razor—that’s the $9 option—”

  “I thought these razors were a dollar? Wasn’t that supposed to be the whole point of this club?” Keith Drumlin said, letting the hose he was using to wash off the pavement hang limply as he focused on what Nate McMinn was saying. This was how it went with Nate and his talking, which slowed down Keith’s progress by a good half or so. He wanted to be mad, but he did enjoy a good chat with Nate. It kept his mind off … other things.

  “Well, the cheapest option is a dollar a month,” Nate said, doing his own part to scrub some of the gore off the street of Midian’s town square. The whole place smelled like blood and turds, vomit and God only knew what else. “But the really good one—I mean, really good—is like $9, but trust me, you want it. You use the Scrub, the Oil, the Shave Butter, and then the Executive Razor, and I’m telling you …” Nate made a sweet sighing sound that was at odds with the fact that he was wearing a jumpsuit coated with human excretions all down the knees and legs. “It’s like the finger of Jesus rubbing across your face. It’s so smooth, so sweet. It’s like not even shaving at all. Smoother than a Vince Gill ballad.”

  “Shit, that is smooth,” Keith said, trying to wash a pile of—what the fuck was that, anyway?—down the nearby drain. There was a lot of stuff in the square that needed to be washed down the drain. The streets still ran with blood all around the perimeter, and the grass had an unhealthy crimson tinge to it, made it look funny in the early morning light.

  “They got a lot of other stuff too,” Nate said. “Expanded products lines and the like. Shampoos and soaps without sulfates.”

  Keith stared into space. That was a new one for him. He almost didn’t ask, for fear of sounding ignorant, but curiosity overcame embarrassment. “What the hell is a sulfate?”

  “Probably some shit they only care about in Cali-forn-i-a,” Nate said. “Anyway, it’s awesome. You should join the club.”

  “Huh,” Keith said, directing the hose toward a spot of bile and trying to wash it down the nearest storm drain. It was stubborn, refusing to bow to his sprayer’s water pressure, steadily applied to it. “Reckon that’s a lot better than what my daddy taught me to do to save money on razors.”

  “What’s that?” Nate asked, looking up. The bristles of the scrub brush in his hand were red. They hadn’t started that way. They’d been white as a wedding dress when the two of them began their labors this morning.

  “Well,” Keith said, “my daddy … he heard on Clark Howard that your razors last longer if you towel ’em off after you shave. Keeps ’em from rusting. He could use one blade for six months, because he would take his hair dryer and dry it after every time.”

  “Wow,” Nate said. “That seems extreme.”

  “You ain’t kidding,” Keith said, sniffing. Man, it just stunk around here. Lots of little pieces of people were spread all over the place, parts the demons had cut off or ripped off, parts that couldn’t be identified. There just wasn’t time enough to deal with all this. The funeral homes in Calhoun County were already filled to capacity. Keith had gotten notice of at least fifty he needed to go to himself … including his dad’s.

  Including …

  This was why he was here now, washing off the square. Talking about razors and close shaves was a hell of a lot better than sitting around his mother’s dark house, eating casserole and fried chicken and talking in quiet voices to friends and relations and well-meaning folks who wanted to tell him how sorry they were. Any distraction at all was better than sifting the ashes of whatever feelings were tickling him inside, in those idle moments when he had a chance to think about it all.

  He wondered how many people had even stopped by. There were an awful lot of dead people in
Calhoun County right now, and specifically in Midian. The folks around here had a support system. Whenever someone died, folks stopped by with food—casseroles, store-bought meat and cheese trays, cakes and pies. When you lost someone, you ought not to have to worry about cooking. Keith remembered going to a hundred houses where folks would just stop in, all day after someone died in the family. They had tables full of food. That was the Midian way, the Southern way. “We take care of our neighbors,” Keith muttered under his breath, “and ourselves.”

  He hadn’t seen a full table yet in his momma’s house. It wasn’t just this one incident, where a Halloween event on the square had gone hellishly wrong, some sort of crazy demons busting out and taking over people. He’d heard the tally on how many people had died, but it kept going up as they identified the pieces of folks.

  And there were a whole hell of a lot to identify.

  “Jesus,” Nate said, holding up a severed finger. “Should I even save this?”

  “I expected more,” Keith said, shaking his head.

  Nate frowned at him, then the finger. “More what? More knuckles? Cuz this one got severed right at the—”

  “Naw, not that … more of everything,” Keith said, shaking his head. “I expected more people to care how many of us got killed. I mean … kids and women and old folks … we lost a lot of people at Halloween. You watch the news, right?”

  Nate looked gobsmacked. “Uh … not really.”

  “Well, you know that things happen out there in the world, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” Nate said, looking quite abashed. A bird chirped from a tree in the middle of the square. That was surprising, Keith figured; unless it was a carrion bird, in which case, boy, had he picked the right place.

  “Lots of bad stuff happens, right?” Keith asked. “And the news shows up and they report on it, all, ‘You wouldn’t believe the shit that happened today in’ … I don’t know … ‘Dubuque, Iowa. There are twelve people dead after a bronco escaped from the rodeo and gored a bunch of people standing in line for a Porta-Potty.’ You know, they thrive on shit like that. News of the weird.”