Chapter Five
6 April 2018
I waited a day to raid Farmall Supply. We’d need a way to hold the pumps once they’d been dipped in fuel—I wasn’t going to chance a fire in the vehicles because some daemon got lucky with a hunk of fuel-soaked carpet. Been there, done that in Iraq, got the t-shirt and nightmares to prove it, thank you very much. Plus there was the fact that the ball for the Tahoe’s trailer hitch was buried under all of Padgett’s gear and about fifty pounds of fish.
So, on an electric gray Thursday morning—so far they’d all been electric gray, but who was counting—we started out on an all-hands evolution to raid Farmall Supply.
Everyone was kitted out, except Holt, who refused a weapon other than his bat. We decided he was the designated hitter. Baseball jokes aside, he was humping a huge pack of medical gear for Dalma, who, in addition to her talents with a rifle, was a third-year nursing student at Texas State.
While we were getting ready, I’d gone ahead and pulled the last bit of kit out of my cases—my mace.
“Wait a minute, Father,” Holt said, eyeing the footman’s mace I tossed in the back of the Tahoe. “Why a mace? You’ve already got the honking great knife,” he said, gesturing. “Besides, I thought you guys couldn’t carry blade weapons.”
“Ah, D&D rules again, right?” I said.
I handed him the mace.
“There are a couple things Gygax got wrong. This weighs about the same as your bat,” I said. “More than my bolo here, and it’ll do more damage than most swords. You take one of these to the knee, and your walking days are probably over without a good doctor, let alone your adventuring days.”
“So you should be using this instead of the blade,” he said.
“Have you ever tried to behead a staked vampire with a sledge hammer?”
“No. Besides, that doesn’t sound like it’d work,” he replied.
“It won’t, trust me,” I said. “But a mace to the face will slow down most rampaging monsters. Ruins their whole day. It’s also less likely to stick. The bolo is for after we’ve got the monsters manageable.”
“I see, I think,” Holt said.
“You guys ready to roll?” Dalma asked. She was carrying a UMP, but had insisted on tossing one of the cased Barrett’s and a box of fifty cal in the back.
She drove the Tahoe so I could man the Golf, again. I really needed to find a better vehicle to bless for travelling around town. I’d pulled the windows out last night in hopes of getting rid of the fish smell. It hadn’t worked. It’d air out eventually, like the Humvee the terp had puked in back in Iraq, but for now, there was a lingering pong of fish.
We’d lead; Father Miller, along with Diindiisi and Padgett, would follow in the van. If things went to hell, they were to run while we slowed the monsters down. It wasn’t my best plan, by far, but it was the closest we’d get to perfect for now.
I slammed the tailgate shut. We hadn’t seen any showers of ectoplasm this morning—so far, so good. I put a set of noise-cancelling earplugs in—I’d shown everyone how to work the built-in radios last night and decided to leave them all on ‘open.’ It meant a lot of noise, but it was better than someone forgetting to key the mike at the wrong moment, which happens even with the best-trained troops.
“Go,” I said.
We rolled, crossing the line of protection, then stopped, far enough out that the van could clear the ward. Miller jumped down and re-did the wards. Admittedly, his gestures were cleaner than mine, but I was used to using—to misquote George Carlin—the version of the wards you did ‘as you were going under the bus.’ Miller waved before he jumped back in the van. I nudged the front seat and off we went, signaling every turn. After all, even though we hadn’t seen them, my coworkers might be driving around.
It should have been a simple trip. The short route, which we were taking due to fuel status, cut through the square. Every time we’d been through the square, though, something had found us. I wasn’t sure that either Dalma or Padgett were up to combat driving. All the way to the Farmall Supply, I was nervous. Nothing. We pulled up in the parking lot, dodging the cars there, and finally stopped in front of the trailers lining the fence.
They were chained, of course.
We dismounted, and Miller sprinkled holy water around the vehicles while I looked things over.
“You have a plan?” Miller asked when he was done.
“We need two pumps—manual ones if they have them—and at least one trailer. I’d be ecstatic if they had a couple of fuel tanks we could put on the trailer, but at this point, I’m not going to hold out hope. A couple of sprayers would be nice, too,” I said.
“Sprayers?”
“Yes, sprayers. Delivering holy water at a distance since the early days.” I grinned. “Oh, and a universal key or three.”
“What’s a universal key?” Dalma asked.
“A set of bolt cutters or a cutting torch,” Miller replied. “Marine humor.”
I’d explained it to him last night.
“Hey, now, gear adrift is a gift,” I said. “If I can cut it loose or pry it up, it’s adrift.”
Miller sighed.
“It’s for a good cause,” I said.
“What good cause is that?” Miller asked.
“Me not getting eaten by a slavering grue. I’ve got to admit, that’s probably my favorite cause,” I said.
“You’re incorrigible,” Miller replied before walking toward the door.
“My bishop says the same thing,” I said. “And, nothing personal, but let me go first.”
“After you,” he said holding the door.
Tools first. We had a list, so we grabbed a couple of bags.
There was noise from the back.
I held up a fist and realized that probably no one could read the hand signals. We’d need training on tactical hand signals right after training on firearms.
“Y’all wait here,” I said, slipping down the aisle toward the back.
There was something hulking at the back of the store. It was making slurping noises as it fed, probably on another person who’d fallen into the Shadow Realm. It stopped feeding, one arm raised, and snuffled the air around it.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
The pong from the daemon couldn’t have been helping its attempts to locate us by smell—I could smell it from where I crouched next to an end cap. I dropped to one knee, and something on my load-bearing equipment tapped the shelf lightly.
It spun, searching the room. It stood about eight feet tall, covered in lank, red fur. Its head was ball shaped, with an orange nose and a mouth that took up the remainder its head. In one of its arms, it held a human leg, torn loose from the hip socket. The other arm hung loosely at its side. It sniffed again.
“Is that…?” Dalma whispered from behind me.
“No. It’s his low budget, daemon-possessed cousin. I thought I told you to stay up front,” I hissed back.
“Diindiisi thought you might need help. I won the toss,” Dalma replied.
The monster sniffed one last time and roared, shaking dust from the suspended ceiling.
Something outside answered.
“Hells bells,” I said.
Dalma pulled the trigger. I’ll give her this—her aim was good. However, she had the selector on “Full,” so her point of impact climbed from the red thing’s chest up over its shoulder and into the wall and ceiling beyond, before her bolt clattered, locking back.
“Bursts,” I shouted, swinging my UMP up and firing short, controlled, three-round bursts. “Fire three-round bursts!”
I started with the things knees, being a follower of Shepherd Book. It crashed to the ground as Dalma fumbled the reload. It was by no means dead, and it squirmed as it tried to reconstruct itself. It was also seriously pissed off at this point.
I dumped the rest of the magazine into its maw, dropped the gun, and pulled out the bolo on my left hip.
Three hard chops, and the head rolled free. Dalma got the magazine seated and ran the bolt home.
“You ok?” Diindiisi asked over the radio.
“We’re fine,” I replied as something crashed through the front of the building.
I looked at Dalma.
“Pull the trigger, count to three, release, repeat, until the mag runs dry, and reload. Got it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
On-the-job combat training sucks, officially.
Diindiisi’s shotgun boomed, followed by the pistols carried by Padgett and Miller.
“Follow me,” I said, praying she’d keep the muzzle elevated, and her booger flinger off the bullet switch.
I watched a cash register, counter still attached, go flying. Diindiisi’s shotgun boomed again, and something spun off and squelched into a wall. There was a pause, and a screech.
“Coming through!” I shouted before joining the scrum up front.
The thing was covered in greasy green fur and stank of a cacophony of rotten garbage.
“I do not want to kill characters from my childhood,” Dalma shouted.
“Get to work!” I shouted back. “Remember, short bursts!”
We joined the party, and we finally put enough silver into the thing that it stayed down long enough for me to remove its head.
“Anyone hurt?” I asked.
No one was. But the front of the store was a mess, festooned with stinking, greasy green hunks of fur and bits everywhere.
“Catch your breath, count your ammo, and take five. We’ve still got to load the van and trailer,” I said.
The green monster started to deliquesce.
“Oh my God!” Miller said, dashing down an aisle marked ‘Farm Clothes.’
“Aim out and try not to puke on one of the aisles we’ve got to go down,” I said.
“That was somewhat cold,” Diindiisi said.
“Yup. I’ll be nice later,” I said, listening as Miller was noisily sick.
“Are we going to see a lot of that?” Padgett asked Diindiisi.
“A lot of what?” she replied.
“Monsters shaped like characters from fucking cartoons?”
“I don’t know what cartoons are,” she replied. “But if it is popular or was popular at some time, then yes. With a few caveats. We’ll probably see a lot of things that take on a twisted form of something popular in your time. I watched a pair of Billikens take out a Kewpie shortly after I arrived here.”
“Ma’am?” Holt asked. “What’s a Billiken?”
She reached into a pocket and pulled out a pouch. From the pouch, she shook out a one-inch, ivory-colored figure and handed it to Holt. He looked at it and passed it around. The figure was a seated baby, with a pointed head. The face was minimal—slanted slashes for eyes with a bump of a nose over a toothless grin.
“That’s kinda frightening, all by itself,” Dalma said, handing the figure back to Diindiisi. “Why do you carry it?”
“It’s lucky,” Diindiisi said. “Sam Clemons gave it to me when I met him in 1909.”
“Wait, you met Mark Twain?” Holt asked.
“Yes,” Diindiisi replied. “He’d gone a bit far afield when his daughters died, so Henry and I visited him to help him get over it.”
“Not to change the subject, but things are going to get weird,” I said.
“Yes. Very,” Diindiisi replied.
“So, a QMG Tuesday,” I said, sighing.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Miller said, coming back from where he’d been painting the tiles.
I tossed him a bottle of water from a cooler that had survived the destruction in the front of the store.
“Good. You hear the discussion?”
“I knew that things like this could happen, I just wasn’t prepared for the…the reality,” he replied before cracking the bottle to rinse his mouth out. “I think I am now.”
“Right. We’ve got work to do,” I said.
I grabbed a set of bolt cutters and went out the front door. It wasn’t raining ectoplasm, but I could see an area where it was. We needed to get things done so we could get the hell out of here. I chuckled at the thought of getting the hell out of a kind of limbo, then cut the lock holding the largest trailer to a bollard. Cutting the chain would have taken a stronger pair of bolt cutters and someone muscled like Hercules.
“Hey, Jesse, you know how to operate a forklift?” Holt asked, coming over where I was coiling the chain before tossing it onto the trailer.
“No, why?”
“There’s a couple of thousand gallon fuel cubes in there, but we need a forklift to load them on the trailer.”
“We’d need a forklift to unload them on the other end,” I said.
“Hadn’t thought about that. Good news is there’s a forklift in there,” he said.
“Just the things we talked about for now, Holt, okay?” I asked, walking over to the Tahoe.
I backed it into place and hooked on the trailer as they started bringing the first loads out—bags of tools and bins of various items. The bags and bins went into the van until it was loaded, then we started on the trailer. I went back inside to find some cargo straps to tie everything down.
“Father Salazar?” Dalma called from farther inside the store.
“What’s up?” I asked, walking toward the sound of her voice.
“Would this help?” she asked, when I finally got to where she was.
She’d found the ‘Hunting Equipment’ section of the store. There was a pallet of twelve gauge bird shot in the middle of the floor, separating it from the rest of the area.
“Man, if Diindiisi’s right, there’s going to be some very pissed people on the other side,” I said, “cause we’re clearing this section out, best we can.”
“There’s a couple of reloading sets, too,” Dalma said. “I found setups for everything except the fifty cal.”
“Bless you my child,” I said before heading back to the front of the store so we could change plans to work this bounty into our loadout.
* * * * *