Hellhound on My Trail (3 page)

Mike stumbled around the van to the open door and looked for something else to shoot with, or more bullets for the semi-automatic or the revolver. He was interrupted by Jim and Eddie running up behind him.

“I’m almost done here,” Twitch said, and she sounded drained and weak.

“Load in,” Eddie said. The guitarist grabbed Adrian by one shoulder and yanked him to his feet. Mike noticed that Eddie seemed to have a drifting eye, or some kind of nervous fidget. One of his eyes, anyway, seemed to slide sideways as he manhandled Adrian, and then the guitar player shuddered.

“Hey!” Adrian objected. “Twitch and I were having a conversation. A
private
and
personal
conversation.”

“Idiot.” Eddie threw the organist onto the back seat of the van. “Hold on, Twitch,” he said.

Mike looked around the gravel lot. Butcher’s burned in a yellow bubble of light. Just beyond that bubble, Mike could now see that the darkness fell, and in that darkness swarmed flies. “Jeez,” he said.

Jim leaped into the driver’s seat of the van, shoving his rapier in beside the seat.

“Good luck,” Eddie said, and grabbed Mike’s hand to shake it. “I’d give you your share of the night’s take, but I don’t have it. By now, it’s probably burnt to a crisp. I suggest you hide.”

“My car,” Mike said stupidly. If they left him, he’d be sober and alone and without a loaded gun. He found that he didn’t want to die, but he
really
didn’t want to die nibbled to pieces by gigantic flies.

Twitch staggered over to the van and threw herself in, flopping onto the middle seat and swaying back and forth.

“Where we’re going, it only gets worse,” Eddie said. He said it gently, like he was breaking a hard truth to a kid, but it was still a no, and it still meant Eddie was going to leave him alone in the desert. “Keep your head down here, you might just make it.”

“I need a ride,” Mike said. “I can’t be out here alone.”

Jim pivoted in the driver’s seat and stared at Mike. His eyes, Mike now saw, were the color of ice, so blue they were almost white. He stared at Mike intensely for several long seconds, and Mike felt that that big Viking was learning something intensely private about him. He felt naked.

ROAR!

Jim nodded to Eddie, held up a hand palm-first and fingers splayed apart, then started the van.

“Get in!” Eddie said, his tone one hundred percent changed, and shoved Mike with his shoulder to help make it happen. The man was all skin and bone, but he had a gift for leverage, and Mike found himself sitting in the van and the door sliding shut before he could say anything else.

And beyond the door, blazing with blue and black fire and jetting tendrils of smoke from its cracked, dry skin, the lizard-lion beast turned the corner of the smoldering ruins, saw the van and charged.

Eddie jumped into the shotgun seat and slammed the door. “Hellhound at three o’clock,” he said to Jim, and started cranking down the window to bring his shotgun to bear.

“Hellhound?” Mike asked.

Jim punched the Dodge into gear and slammed on the gas. The van lurched left onto the two-lane highway and accelerated toward the edge of the bubble of daylight. The flies swarming in the darkness massed around and in front of the van,
chittering
and
clattering
at the edge of the light and waiting for their prey.

“Gone,” Twitch muttered, and she slumped against the window.

“Son of a bitch!” Adrian yelled. He sat bolt upright, staring at the Hellhound charging across the gravel.

“Keep it together!” Eddie shouted, and leaned out the window to fire his shotgun.
Boom!
One fly exploded, and its neighbors scattered, but the hole in the wall of demonic fly-flesh immediately sealed shut again. The fly-shrouded giant lumbered with long steps toward the asphalt. “Can you move the light?”

“Of course I can,” Adrian said. “If nothing interferes.” He patted his pockets and muttered.

The Hellhound was getting closer. Mike scrabbled around in the junk inside the van for a weapon and came up with a big curved Arabian Nights-style sword.

“Good!” Eddie shouted at him with an encouraging grin. “Open the door, and when it gets close, let the thing have it right in the eye!” He turned back to shooting at flies. He looked totally calm and relaxed, which contrasted sharply with Mike’s own feeling that the world had turned completely upside down.

Mike yanked on the door handle and pulled it back until it caught. The ground whipped past underneath him unnervingly fast. He wrapped one fist in his seatbelt, watching the Hellhound bound closer over gravel and then over sagebrush, while ahead the tusked giant moved to intercept the van on the highway—

thump!—

the van hit something, maybe a big rock, at the edge of the road, and careened off its wheels at an angle—

Mike slid halfway out the door, only catching himself by the hand he’d tangled up—

the Dodge sailed briefly through the air, and—

thud!
crashed to the asphalt again. Twitch slid down the middle seat toward the open door and Mike moved to save her, jamming his body in the way. The leather queen bumped up against Mike’s hip before she could recover herself enough to grab onto the seat. She smiled at Mike.

She kind of smiled like a man, Mike thought.

“Hey!” Adrian yelled, clinging with both arms to the seat in front of him. “You can’t do that to a wizard! Stay on the road, Jim!”

Eddie blasted another fly and shrugged. “What do you expect from a guy born in the sixteenth century?” he laughed.

Adrian’s eyes bugged out like he was about to yell something back—

and instead, he passed out.

Like a snuffed candle, the daylight disappeared.

The van raced pell-mell into the seething cloud of flies, the Hellhound snapping at its rear tires.

***

Chapter Three

The Zvuvim hit the front of the Dodge van like a black hailstorm, cracking glass and ripping away the side view mirrors and the antenna. Only the forward motion of the van itself, and big, awkward swipes of Mike’s borrowed sword, kept them from swarming in through the open door. Severed antennae and mandibles and a bit of wing fell into the carpet of detritus covering the floor of the band’s vehicle.

For a split second, Mike hoped the fly-storm would stop the Hellhound, but he hoped in vain. The Hound roared again, shook itself to clear off the first swarm of Zvuvim, and then the devil-flies learned it was there and got out of its way.

Boom!

Eddie leaned back almost into the driver’s seat, blowing a fly to smithereens in his own window. Two more jammed in behind it, steel mandibles clacketing and grabbing for flesh, and Eddie jammed a foot against them, kicking at them over and over again and forcing them out the window while he scrabbled in his pockets for more shells. Mike noticed Eddie’s combat boots, worn and steel-plated in the toes, and the bandolier on his shoulder, still holding a single lonely grenade. The flies looked like they might get Eddie, when suddenly a silver blade flashed into the seething wall of black—

not from Eddie, but from Jim.

The singer’s driving, rough already, didn’t suffer much as he wove a net of sharp steel around Eddie’s feet. He punctured fly bodies and sliced off wings, keeping his guitarist from being snatched out the window. Mike thought he kept his eyes on the road, coming to Eddie’s rescue without even looking, much less breaking a sweat.

Then Mike had to look away to focus on the Hellhound.

The beast lunged for the van’s open door, crocodile jaws gaping wide. This close, it struck Mike as looking like a dinosaur: teeth like daggers, hind legs a little bigger than the forelegs, tail thicker than a lion’s would really be, eyes glossy black. Only it looked like a dinosaur on fire in three colors.

He yanked himself back into the van with his left hand and avoided a swooping bite of those deadly jaws. Cardboard and vinyl and fast food papers erupted in a small cloud around the Hellhound’s bite, the oily paper bags and napkins bursting into flame on contact.

The unblinking eyes, big as saucers, were in reach, and Mike swung for them. His heavy saber hit the Hellhound in the face, sending up sparks as if he’d chipped the blade against a ridge of flint, but he missed the eyes. The thing had a head like a horse, or a tyrannosaurus, a bony ridge with eyes fixed on either side of it, and Mike’s saber clanged into the beast’s ridge. His blow left no mark.

Still, the creature didn’t like it.

The Hellhound thundered in rage. It fell back a step as it did, and inside its gaping maw Mike saw nothing but row after row of knife-long teeth, like a shark’s mouth, and sulfurous tendrils of smoke. Not even a tongue.

Boom!

“Brace yourselves!” Eddie shouted.

Mike looked over his shoulder in time to see the man-shaped giant hurl itself against the front of the van.

Crash!

Tusks slammed against the front window in the middle of an enormous face that was part fly and part boar. The van swerved, but Jim grappled the wheel as fiercely as any professional wrestler and kept it on the road. Yellowed talons groped at the edges of Eddie’s window and he kicked at them, drawing an irritated squeal from the fly-pig-giant. Still without even looking, Jim reached past Eddie and scratched at the giant’s knuckles with his blade. The grenade bounced more wildly on the bandolier on Eddie’s shoulder as the van swerved, and Mike worried it might fall off and explode inside the vehicle.

The Hellhound lunged again, jaws wide—

and Mike stabbed, not for the eyes this time, but for the open mouth—

And he jammed his scimitar down deep into the fumes and the bristling spikes, feeling it strike solid flesh and penetrate. Fire and smoke erupted from the wound, scorching his hand and forcing Mike to let go of the sword.

The Hound bellowed in frustration and slowed, shaking its head and pawing at the saber.

“Good one, Mikey,” Twitch said. He … she … whatever, seemed recovered. He had his thick drumsticks out again and was clambering around Mike, swinging with them to try to help Eddie and Jim with the big gray thing that still dragged along with the van, trying to force its way into the window.

Boom!

Eddie’s shot struck the creature squarely in its fly-like eye, but it only flinched and bellowed, sounding more irritated than hurt. Jim stabbed between its tusks, and some kind of black liquid—aswarm with little flies—sprayed over Eddie and the shotgun seat, but the giant didn’t give in or go away.

Twitch lurched over the back of the seat, half-climbing on Mike to swing and batter the creature further in its face with his club. It bellowed again, and grabbed for Twitch, but Jim stabbed it in the arm. The drummer pulled quickly out of reach and Eddie kicked it again. Flies—small, normal-sized flies—filled the air around Eddie and tinted Mike’s hearing with an incessant buzz.

“What is that thing?” Mike asked. The Hellhound had somehow yanked the sword from its mouth and was circling around to attack again, so he scrabbled around in the slow waterfall of rubbish trailing out the van’s open door for another weapon, without success.

“It’s a Baal!” Twitch shouted.

Boom!

The humanoid thing squealed and chittered.

“Ball?” Mike asked. He didn’t get it. “As in,
keep my eye on the ball?”

“Baal, as in Baal Zavuv,” Twitch explained, without explaining anything. He leaned forward to crack the Baal another time in the face, and Mike was sure he felt breasts press against his shoulder. With Twitch’s blow, the rotten meat stink of the Baal got worse, like she had ripped the skin of a decaying corpse to uncover the corruption beneath.

“Do you mean Zvuvim?”

“One Zavuv—”

Twitch pounded a fly-demon away from Eddie’s hip with her baton—

“Two Zvuvim!”

She crunched another between the eyes, its carcass falling into the rubbish on the floor.

“Oh.” Mike kicked the dead fly out of the van. He wished it were bigger, so its corpse might actually slow the Hellhound down.

Twitch smacked the Baal again, and the firm decisiveness of her attack, and the resulting pleasant jiggles, made Mike very conscious of her femininity. “And their master is a Baal Zavuv.”

The Baal swiped at Twitch, and Jim stabbed its wrist with his sword, the blade darting in like a cobra to sting and pull back.

Graaaaraaaaaaaagh!
the Baal objected to being stabbed, and Eddie kicked it in the face. Still it hung on, and the van lurched back and forth as it barreled down the highway.

“Baal … you mean
Beelzebub?”

“Now he gets it,” Eddie muttered. Only the speed of the van kept the Baal outside, by forcing it to use its hands mostly to hang on. Still, its tusks snapped at Eddie through the cloud of flies, and Eddie kicked for the center of its face and pumped the twelve-gauge again.

“The
Beelzebub?” Mike felt sick. He grabbed what looked like a gun, but turned out to be a blow dryer. He looked up to see Jim’s blade reaching behind Eddie’s seatback and skewering a Zavuv, pinning it to the wall of the van. The singer snapped his wrist and tossed the fly-demon off his blade and out the door.

“You’re not listening,” Twitch said. “It’s
a
Baal Zavuv.”

“You mean there are others?”

“Oh, lots.” Twitch grinned.

Mike looked back out the open door and saw the Hellhound, racing closer and opening its enormous smoking jaw. Desperately, he grabbed for the only weapon he could think of—

Snatching the last grenade off Eddie’s bandolier—

With a faint
snick,
the pin decided to stay behind—

And hurling it into the Hellhound’s razor-pit maw.

“Duck!” Twitch yelled, and dropped into the pile of junk.

Mike grabbed for the door handle and slammed the door forward, as the Hellhound yakked and fussed at the thing in its jaws, like a cat with a hairball.

KABOOM!

Somehow, maybe because it was inside the Hellhound’s mouth, the explosion was bigger than the others had been. The van rocked with the impact, tilting up onto its driver’s side wheels, and every window on the passenger side of the vehicle cracked. Fire washed up against the Dodge like a tide.

The Baal, caught by surprise in the moment of trying to slap at Eddie with one of its fists, lost its grip. The explosion threw it up and over the van as the van tilted, jerked it free and hurled it into the sagebrush and shadow on the other side. The headlights just caught a flash of it, gray-black and swarming with flies, tumbling down the side of the road, and then the van’s passenger-side wheels touched down with a heavy
thump
and the van burst out of the cloud of Zvuvim and into clear night air.

Mike bounced against the back of the shotgun seat and then collapsed. He was sweating and cold, his heart pounded like a jackhammer in his chest, but the stink of the Baal was gone and cold clean air rushed into the van and he felt like he could breathe for the first time in hours. He looked back and saw jets of multicolored flame inside a dark knot of tangled, twisting air that marked where the evening’s strange attackers were.

Twitch got back into her seat and Eddie swiveled again into a normal sitting position, winding his shoulder like he was stretching for a pitch.

“Jeez,” Mike said. “Who
are
you guys?”

“Like I told you this morning,” Eddie chuckled. “We’re a rock band.”

“On the phone this morning you forgot to mention the Hellhound.”

Eddie shrugged. “We’re a rock band that fights evil.”

Fights evil? “What, like knights of the round table?”

In the dim light inside the van, Mike saw Eddie’s bad eye drift sideways again, and Eddie hesitated before answering. “Not like knights,” he said. “More like rival gangsters. We’re out to get Satan.”

“Before he gets us.” Twitch laughed.

“Carajo.”

“We’re your family now,” Twitch added. “Jim took you in.”

“You’ve got the Hand on you,” Eddie explained.

Mike met Jim’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They were shockingly pale, even in the darkness. “The hand?” Mike asked.

“The Left Hand,” Twitch said. “It’s a bad thing that Jim agreed to let you in.”

“No it isn’t,” Eddie snorted, and began thumbing shells into the shotgun. “The bad thing would have been getting left behind and eaten.”

“And going to Hell, poor boy,” Twitch continued.

“I’m going to Hell?” Of course Mike knew he was going to Hell. How did Twitch know it?

“No,” Eddie finished, “Jim taking you in is not a bad thing. Look, it’s like … it’s like getting admitted to the hospital for cancer surgery. It’s bad that you have cancer, and getting operated on is no fun, but getting admitted to the hospital is a
good
thing.”

“Unless you get an infection,” Twitch pointed out.

Mike looked around at the rumpled and torn interior of the Dodge and laughed. He felt shaky. “I haven’t been in too many hospitals, but none of them looked like this.”

“No,” Twitch agreed, “I have it on good authority that this is a nineteen seventy-something Dodge something-or-other.”

“You want to get anywhere in this world,” Eddie said, “you need a good car.”

“You saying this is a good car?”

“Nope.” Eddie guffawed. “This is a nineteen seventy-something Dodge something-or-other, and a total piece of crap.”

“You got anything to drink in this piece of crap?” Mike asked. He rummaged through the junk at his feet. “Other than cold coffee?”

“You got something against cold coffee,” Eddie said, “and we might not be able to be friends.”

A sign flared on the side of the road in the Dodge’s headlights. Jim swerved toward the sign as if to read it better and nearly ran it over before correcting course and getting the van back into the center of the asphalt, over the dashed yellow line.

DUDAEL, N.M.
, the sign read.

There was no population indicated.

Twitch handed Mike a small bottle. He smelled spirits, and took a sip without investigating further. He tasted cheap whisky, suffered the burn in his throat and stomach and instantly felt much better. “What’s the Left Hand, then?” he asked. He met Jim’s eyes again in the mirror. “What did you see, Jim?”

“Jim won’t talk,” Twitch said. “Don’t take it personal.”

“It ain’t you,” Eddie tried to soften the blow. “It’s because of Isaiah six.”

Mike took another sip, trying to puzzle out the reference. He thought of Eddie’s combat boots and grenades. “Is that a military thing?” he asked. “Like a code? Are you guys special forces?”

“No, it’s in the Bible.” Eddie arched an eyebrow at him. “You know what the Bible is, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Mike agreed, “but go easy, I haven’t actually read it, I was raised Catholic and we had a priest to do the reading for us. But I know …” he took a swig and considered, “I know it’s got two halves. And Moses and the Israelites are in one half, and Jesus and the saints are in the other.”

“This is the Moses half,” Eddie said. Mike offered him the bottle, but Eddie shook his head.

“What does Moses say about Jim not talking, then?”

“‘In a the year that king Uzziah died,’” Eddie said in a voice that sounded a little bit like a chant, “‘I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.’”

“Heavy.” Mike took a sip, glad he didn’t have to drive. “I didn’t hear Jim mentioned, though.”

“No, Isaiah’s talking about the angels in Heaven,” Eddie agreed.

“Jim’s not an angel.”

Mike caught Jim’s eye in the rearview mirror and the singer winked.

Eddie and Twitch looked at each other. “No,” Eddie agreed, “Jim’s not an angel. Here’s the thing. The angels in Heaven, what do they do?”