A Haunting in the SWATS (The Savannah Swan Files Book 1) Page 5

  Her vision blurred, pulsing in black-and-white strobes. She had to get out.

  With the last of her strength, she levered both her arms down. The motion was slow, and it pressed the biting thing deeper into her side. She ground her teeth against the pain as she forced her arms down, dragging her torso up and out of her bonds.

  The biter at Van’s side snapped its teeth through her flesh again. She could feel its claws digging into her, as if it could sense her impending escape and was desperate to finish what it had started before she could get away.

  Savannah grabbed the wriggling fiend. It was slick and bony and wrapped in a film that bulged between her grasping fingers. She tore it loose with a roar of pain then flung it away. The thing screeched as it thumped against the floor. Savannah heard it skitter through the trash, coming for her.

  She cleaned the goo off her eyes with the backs of her hands. She saw that the goo was thick, clotted blood. She rolled onto her back to get a look at what had her trapped.

  She was up to her waist in a pig’s carcass. The swine’s head lolled back against her hip, and it had thick, crude stitches running up its belly. Its pale skin was covered with a series of interlocking spirals and primitive glyphs.

  Van kicked and shoved at the carcass, desperate to get free. She lay on her back then scraped her fingers down her chest and abdomen to sluice away a thick, curdled layer of old blood. There were symbols scrawled across her flesh. What had these bastards done to her?

  The trash off to her left exploded up from the floor. The creature soared through the air. Its body was long, lean and bone white. Its flesh was wrinkled like fingers after a long bout of washing dishes, and its elongated snout peeled back to reveal twin knifelike teeth protruding from its upper jaw and a lower set of teeth like needles.

  An African mole rat? Savannah pondered.

  The mole rat hissed in reply, as if reading her mind, as it came at her.

  Savannah punched the little creature away, knocking it across the garbage-strewn room. The mole rat hit the far wall with a brittle crunch then slid down into a bloody heap on the floor.

  It squealed when it saw her coming and tried to dart away, but Savannah stomped its back flat, grinding her heel down until she felt the bones crack and blood run out from under her toes. The mole rat vomited blood and viscera onto the scorched floor.

  Carter screamed from below, his voice raw and frantic.

  Savannah got to her feet then took a step back. Streams of sweat wormed their way down her chest and back. Dread took root in her gut. This was more than she had bargained for when she had answered the black phone that morning.

  She fell to her knees then puked up a gout of foul-smelling, nearly black blood. Her ears rang, and she could almost make out voices thrumming through her head. They were rasping, alien sounds that she could not escape or understand.

  They had done something to her, but Savannah was not sure what that something was. She felt weakened, as if the power gifted to her as the Root Woman was somehow diffused. Her head felt too full, her mind crowded by some other, unseen presence. She had to get out of there, get her son and get gone. She needed space to figure out what was wrong with her and how she could put it back to right.

  Savannah stumbled to her feet then, on unsteady legs, headed for the room’s only door. She stopped at a scarred table where she found her clothes in a tangled pile. She shrugged her arms through the sleeves of her blouse, then managed to cram her bloody legs into the stiff legs of her jeans. She could not find her boots or her leather jacket. She could not find her identification, either. She kicked her bare feet through the garbage, hoping it had just fallen from her blouse, but she could not find it.

  Carter’s voice vibrated through the building – a raw, primal denial of an animal with its leg in a trap; a man facing his doom… a boy about to die.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Cut loose from the altar, the girl crumpled to the floor with her ragged stumps curled under her, sobbing.

  “Just,” Phil said, unsure of what to do next, “stay there.”

  He opened the heavy door at the front of the restaurant. His officers were clustered together in patches of morning sunlight, drinking bad coffee from their thermos bottles and shooting the shit. They did not even pretend to be doing anything productive when they saw him frowning in the doorway.

  “Go on,” Phil barked. “Do something useful. Hit some trap houses or shake down the hoes at Queen City. No point in hanging around here, telling lies and swatting flies, while I do all the work.”

  The cops did not wait to be told twice. They loaded into their cars then fled the restaurant’s meager parking lot in short order. Phil wished he had some real officers – men and women he could trust and depend on, but all he had were those lazy, dumb bastards. He watched the pack of morons disappear down the road, then went back into the restaurant. The less they saw of the poor girl, the fewer rumors they could spread around town. Phil had enough problems without a bunch of fools coming down to stare at the freak in his jail.

  Sitting on her stumps, her good hand covering the jagged point of her naked arm bone, the girl looked like any other skinny teenager. Then she turned to Phil, brushing her hair back with blood-flecked fingers. His guts roiled at the sight of the raw meat where her face should be.

  Phil gulped down his revulsion. He could not leave her there. “Let’s get you out of this place.”

  He knelt down next to her. She smelled like old flowers. He hooked one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulders, then scooped her off the bloodstained floor. She was too light in his arms, like a sack of autumn leaves. He could feel a tingling buzz where she pressed against his chest.

  Phil crossed the restaurant as fast as he dared, careful not to drop the girl or stumble, but hurrying just the same. As he crossed the threshold he felt a cold draft against his back. The restaurant door slammed behind him, startling a cawing murder of crows. The birds rained feces onto the detective as they launched themselves into the sky.

  “Dumb ass birds!” he growled. He sat the girl on the cruiser’s hood then fumbled with the key chain on his belt. He found the right key and popped the car’s door open.

  “Where we going?” The conjured girl’s voice belonged to a girl many years younger than she appeared. That and the other voice, deep and dark, rustling beneath her words, made Phil’s skin crawl.

  He scooped her off the hood and eased her into the passenger seat. She was as limp as a doll. He let her arrange her arms and legs as needed to get her situated and buckled into the car. She watched him through the veil of hair hanging over her face until he answered.

  “Back to the station.”

  “You scared?” The girl tilted the raw mess of her face up then peered into his eyes. He tried to suppress a shudder and failed.

  Phil could see the memory of a face in the bloody mask. It felt familiar, like a word on the tip of his tongue. He looked away before he could recognize it. “Aren’t you?”

  The ride back to the station was long and rough on roads that were more pothole than asphalt. The girl sat next to Phil, hunched forward with her good arm folded over the bad; her long hair hid her face, glittering eyes peering through the thick strands. Phil watched the treacherous road, both hands on the wheel, grateful for the distraction. The silence hung between them like a curtain for half the ride.

  “You gonna let her do me in?”

  “That remains to be seen. We’re going to have ourselves a talk.”

  “She never talks.” The girl’s voice sank. “That’s not her way.”

  Smoky images rose from the ashes of Phil’s memory: A burnt-out hotel. An old man kneeling in the dirt. Malformed conjoined twins, with the heads of a goat and a Doberman, crawling across dew-dappled grass with their guts trailing behind them. A revolver that spoke with the voice of an angry god.

  “She walks a hard road,” Phil croaked. “The SWATS needs somebody like her to keep an eye on the darkness.”
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  “That what she told you?” The girl pushed her hair out of her face.

  “That’s what I know.” Phil did not like Savannah, but he had seen what was out there. He knew sometimes the darkness could only be fought back with steel, hot lead and fire. It was not a job for men like him. That kind of work did something to those who picked up the burden. He did not think he was strong enough to survive that kind of change.

  “She’ll burn me,” she said with a voice as small and lost as anything Phil had ever heard. “Why can’t you just let me go?”

  Phil thought it over. He could stop the car and let her loose in the woods. No one would ever know what he had done. He could say she escaped, or that someone came and took her. He could tell lies; maybe someone would believe them. He might even get lucky and she would just crawl off into a hole somewhere and die.

  Her eyes were fever bright in the red mask of her face. Phil could hear the buzzing beneath her skin. The insectoid hum scraped across his nerves.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Here.” Her teeth flashed white in the raw gash of her mouth. She made a vague gesture with her stump.

  “Who did this to you?”

  She shrugged then drew a lazy spiral around the jagged bone jutting from the stump of her forearm with her index finger. “We was all scared.”

  “Of?”

  “Her.” She smoothed her blood-stained dress across her thighs with her remaining hand. “What she’s done. What she’s gonna do.”

  They drove in silence for miles more. Phil tried not to look at the girl, but his eyes were drawn back again and again. She sat still and silent, hand folded over her stump, elbows on her knees. Watching. Waiting.

  The buzzing crawled through Phil’s ears, nipping at his courage. He wished he had left the girl up on the altar. He wished she had been just another dead girl. He did not have the guts for this.

  Phil pulled the cruiser around behind the station house. There were no cars; all the officers under his command had been with him at Hotlanta Wings and were now out looking for trouble or hiding in quiet places where they could smoke their weed or drink their booze in peace.

  He reached over to unbuckle the girl.

  Her breath was cold against the side of his neck. “Don’t let her burn me. You know it ain’t right.”

  She looped her arms around Phil’s shoulders. He could feel the slick flesh of her ragged stump pressed against the back of his neck. It throbbed there, cool and buzzing against his skin.

  Phil carried her out of the car and into the station house.

  “You’re gonna lock me up?”

  Phil did not answer, but shoved the unlocked holding cell’s door open with his foot. The girl’s arms tightened around his throat.

  “What hold do she got on you, Detective?” The girl pressed the cool, moistness of her face against Phil’s cheek. He could feel the ragged slit of her mouth moving against his ear. “What makes her right?”

  Phil froze on the cell’s threshold. He had asked himself that question again and again. The answer shamed him. Phil was the law here, the protector of the people. But the detective knew there were things he could never do; things he could never face. The SWATS needed Savannah, even if it did not always understand why.

  “She does the hard things. Things we can’t.” Phil whispered. “She kills our monsters.”

  Flies crawled over the edge of the cell’s toilet bowl. Their eyes were red beads set in glittering green heads. They left crimson trails on the white porcelain.

  “What happens when she runs out of monsters, Detective?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Savannah zipped her pants then buttoned her blouse with trembling fingers as she headed for the door. Carter’s screams were like a tangle of fish hooks in her gut, tugging at her womb. Her hands shook with growing tremors, and her head throbbed with the pangs of an impending headache. She needed a smoke – just a pull from a one-hitter would do the trick.

  The pictures nailed around the door gave her pause. What she saw raised the hair on her arms and the back of her neck.

  There were shots of her – prints taken with a crappy camera, all yellowed and faded with age. A dozen pictures of her, a dozen more of an old man with charcoal skin, white hair and close-set, black eyes. For the moment, fear and caution outweighed the need to rush out of the room. She needed to know what she was up against.

  Savannah limped over to the room’s solitary window then spat on the flyspecked glass. She rubbed a clean spot big enough to peer through, and her heart sank at what she saw. She recognized what was left of an old hotel, blackened beams jutting from the ground like a dead giant’s rib cage. She recognized the pear tree burnt down to a gnarled stump beside the road.

  Carter screamed, his voice ragged and lost. The sound spooked a crow, which flapped past the window with a rough caw.

  This was the old bluesman Pigmeat Porter’s place years ago, the Tuxedo Hotel off Foster Place and Lawton Street. Savannah recognized it, because she had burned the hellhole down. Or thought she had.

  She left the room, stepping onto a fire-scored landing. Chunks of wood were missing, chewed away by the fire she had set years before. The whole place smelled of ash and decay, a clinging stench that made Savannah pull the collar of her blouse over her nose and mouth. She listened for sounds of movement; for the telltale creaks and groans of an inhabited old building. There was nothing but the rattle of chains from somewhere below and the saw-edged sigh of the wind through the hotel’s warped walls.

  Her heart ached with the knowledge that all of this might be part of some sick bastard’s revenge against her. Had someone hung that boy on the street and bound that girl in the restaurant just to draw Savannah into an ambush? She tried not to think of Lashey and Rashad, alone at the house. If the people who had done this were out for revenge, and were not there with her in the hotel, then where were they?

  Carter’s voice came again, a wordless pleading, begging for rescue. It tore at Savannah’s heart, but the Root Woman knew if she rushed down to rescue Carter, she might miss someone, something, that would spell disaster for them both. She really needed a smoke, just a puff, to steady her nerves and clear the fog from her mind.

  There were three rooms on each floor; the doorways empty holes in the walls. Savannah could see where fire had melted their hinges into useless clumps and heat had warped the frames. She poked her head into the first room then yanked it back out twice as fast.

  All of the room’s walls were covered in thick, squirming lines and eccentric spirals. Strange symbols marked their intersections and scrawled pictograms occupied the empty spaces. The arcane scrawls burned bright in her mind; arcs of fire flared across her vision. She stumbled away from the door.

  She took a deep, cleansing breath then blinked again and again to dispel the burning images before their wicked magic could take root in her skull.

  “What are you idiots up to?” Savannah muttered a prayer to a deity she had lost faith in long ago. She had learned that prayers were like mathematical formulas – whether you believed in them was irrelevant as long as you knew how to string their pieces together. Gods would listen if you were willing to pay their price and knew which words would reach their ears. She would take whatever edge she could wrangle. Something dark and strange had found a home in this place.

  A heavy footfall shook the floor. Savannah whirled around. Another foot crashed onto the floor to the side of her. She flicked her eyes around, searching for the source of the sound. Thick, black tar oozed up between the charred floorboards, sticking to the soles of her feet.

  Carter shouted, his voice engulfed in a strange, pig-like squealing that mimicked his words. “They’re coming,” the voices screamed together.

  Another heavy footstep crashed against the floor. Tar splashed into the air. Savannah ran for the stairs, her feet trailing sticky tar with every step.

  At the top of the steps, the Root Woman felt her head turn against her w
ill. A bubble rose from the thick tar, a great mass heaving its way up out of the floor.

  The bubble stretched into the air, dripping foulness. It split open, malformed eyelids parting to reveal a three-lobed eye. The pupils bulged with a spider-web of furious red veins, hatred boiling out of them.

  Savannah’s feet tangled as she ran down the steps. Whatever was back there, whatever she had seen, whatever had seen her, was not something she could fight. She had to get her son and get the hell out of there. Then she would come back with enough flares and gasoline to turn this place, and everything within its walls, into a bad memory.

  On the next floor down, she passed doorways gaping open on two more rooms. One was being used as makeshift chemical storage, filled with enough open canisters and spilled fluids to get half the nation poppin’ mollies. The other bedroom looked like a wild animal’s den. The bedding was shredded and stained, broad strokes of filth scarring the walls with indecipherable scrawls. Savannah wasted no time investigating these rooms. She had to get Carter and get the hell out of there. There would be time to figure out how to deal with that godforsaken mess later.

  Savannah took the stairs three at a time, praying she would not plunge through a chunk of rotted floor or stumble into some hole she could not see in the dim light. Whoever had brought her there wanted her and all she had destroyed. They were willing to traffic with old things – creatures from days best forgotten – and they were willing to create blasphemy to get their revenge.