Snake Handlin' Man (2 page)

Another snake popped out from under the waitress’s skirt, another flyer that launched itself into the air. She shrieked, a high-pitched, wordless sound of pain that was more like the squeal of a deflating balloon than a noise a human would ever normally make.

Eddie scissor-kicked his boots together, thumping them into the lizard’s head behind its jaw, where he hoped the tissues would be soft. His boots were steel-toed and he kicked as hard as he could, but the kick only freed one of his feet, and then the Komodo dragon snapped its mouth at him in rage.

He managed to yank free his pistol as a third flyer popped from underneath Sami’s skirt. He felt sick, guessing what was going on under there. She squealed and shuddered like an epileptic. Poor kid.

“Adrian!” he yelled, and pointed the Glock—

bang!
—

and shot Sami right between the eyes. Her head snapped back in a flower of bright red blood and then she collapsed, still.

Then the Komodo dragon was on top of him, and Eddie struggled to get an elbow up in front of his face. The thick cloth of his old green jacket saved him from a scratch of the beast’s teeth, and then he forced the open mouth away from his face, pinning the jaws between his forearm and the counter’s support column under the cash register.

He could still smell the reek of the thing’s breath. It stank of sewage.

Eddie heard gunshots as the rest of the band, out of his vision, got into the fight.

“Chingón!” That would be Mike.

The lizard’s hind claws scratched at Eddie’s hips and pelvis, and again his jacket protected him. Eddie jammed a hand down decisively and grabbed one of the creature’s knees. He rolled himself backward, yanking the thing with him—

and hurling it down along the space behind the counter—

crash!
—

to where it slammed home against a stack of soda syrup canisters. Like bowling pins, they tumbled around the reptile and rolled in all directions.

Eddie jumped to his feet and thumbed the Glock’s selective fire switch to
automatic
. The old ladies screamed and slapped at a snake with handbags. The truck driver clutched at his throat, staining his blond beard with the sauces on his fingers. A snake had bitten him, and the man’s face was already turning purple.

Eddie had no time for the dead trucker, but the sight strengthened his resolve not to get bitten himself. He stepped towards the lizard, ducking as he realized that the swarm of winged snakes was thicker than he’d thought, and opened fire.

B-rapp-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p!

He squeezed off the entire clip into the canisters and the thrashing body of the lizard. Whatever it was, if bullets could kill it, it was now dead.

The air was full of flying snakes. Adrian chanted something and struggled not to swoon; Jim slammed a pitcher down onto a Formica table top, trapping a serpent under it; Mike swung his M1911 pistol, the one he’d taken off the dead bouncer in New Mexico, looking for a target that would hold still; Owen, the club manager, blasted away at flying snakes with his hand cannon, wearing an expression on his face that might have been
contentment
; Eddie didn’t see Twitch. Another winged viper darted at Eddie’s head, and he batted it aside with the Glock.

“Oil!” he shouted. The cook peeped out through the order window, wide-eyed and open-mouth. Eddie pointed at him, careful to point with his empty hand and not his pistol. “Oil!” he yelled again. “Now!”

Hissss!
he heard behind him, and turned to see more snakes slipping from Sami’s skirt. He caught a glimpse of what was behind, and shuddered in sympathetic pain—there was a writhing mass of snakes, and a river of blood.

Eddie heard the pounding of feet and the slamming open of a door. He looked into the kitchen and saw a back door swinging slowly shut, the cook gone.

“Damn!” Eddie raced for the kitchen, slamming the second clip into his Glock and thumbing the fire switch back to
semi-automatic
. As he passed the big lizard on the floor, the one he’d filled with lead, it stirred, slightly. Eddie cursed through his teeth.

A winged serpent whipped out of the kitchen heading for Mike’s neck, too fast for him, and he knew he was a goner—

but then a silver wing flashed in his vision and a falcon torpedoed past him—

snatching the serpent from the air with both its claws and crushing its skull with its powerful beak. A long silvery horse’s tail snapped behind the falcon like a pennant.

Twitch.

Another serpent hummed in through the order window as Eddie stepped into the kitchen and spotted what he needed—the frying vat, and, under it, a spare jug of oil, like a gas can. The snake attacked, but Eddie saw this one coming, and was ready for it.

He stepped aside, grabbed the snake by the tail and flung it into the hot oil.

Sizzle!
A frying meat smell filled the air. Eddie grabbed the handle of a fry basket and jammed it down on top of the winged snake, forcing it deeper into the fry oil in its writhing protest.

“Six piece Quetzalcoatl nuggets,” he muttered, “coming right up.” He grabbed the handle of the jug, a white plastic five-gallon container, in his left hand, and turned Glock-first back to the fray.

The lizard crouched in the kitchen door, staring at Eddie with beady black eyes. It bled from multiple bullet wounds in its body, but it was moving and it looked pissed.

Beyond, in the chaos of the diner, he saw Adrian drop to the ground. And then the wizard’s fallen body was swarmed by flying serpents.

***

Chapter Two

Eddie threw the oil jug.

He overestimated his own strength, by quite a lot. The jug thudded to a dull halt halfway between him and the lizard, and then the lizard rushed him.

He got the Glock up and into play, squeezing off several rounds and putting at least one of them into the thing before it reached him in an avalanche of claws and teeth. He hurled himself sideways, grabbing for a big squeegee on a pole and jamming it between his own body and the reptile, fending the beast off like a caveman with a sharpened stick. Stab, retreat, stab, retreat, catching the creature on the end of the pole and trying to push it further away. The squeegee’s rubber strip tore into shreds under the lizard’s assault, leaving a dull tip at the end of the hard pole.

Eddie jumped back to avoid a snap of the jaws that got past his stick. He felt a sudden burning sensation on his own backside, and realized the lizard had forced him so far in reverse that he was sitting on the edge of the grill.

“Damn it!” he shouted, and shoved back on his stick. He got his shoulder into it, scooped the lizard backwards several feet, and then he switched into a staff-fighting stance. He spun the hard wood in an arc that lodged one end of it firmly in the crook of his elbow, and with the other end he battered the lizard in the face with a quick succession of blows.

The creature pulled back, spitting with rage.

Having bought himself a little space, Eddie raised his pistol, aiming the Glock a little higher—

bang!
—

and shot a hole in the jug of oil.

Glug, glug, glug
, the contents slurped out, filling the kitchen even more with the cloying, dull smell of vegetable oil.

The lizard pushed forward and Eddie jammed the squeegee pole into its face. The beast kept pushing, Eddie shoved back with a fierce snarl, and the makeshift spear snapped in two. Eddie staggered forward and so did the monster and suddenly the big lizard was in his lap, clawing at him and snapping with a mouth like a blender set to
liquefy
.

Eddie jumped back. He fell onto the grill, smelling the scorch-stink of his jacket and feeling the heat intensely, especially on his already burned and stinging buttocks. Above him, gray-white feet hung flaccidly dripping blood, a dozen corpses dangling, each with its neck drilled through by a saber-like tooth in the mouth of a grinning scab-faced fiend. Eddie heard the gunshots and shouting and the zipping of winged serpents through the air behind him like a soundtrack to the infernal carnage he saw overhead. The stink of winged serpent flesh frying past the point of edibility filled his mouth and nose.

He shuddered and kicked.

He caught the lizard square in the center of its face with both his boots and threw it back into the puddle of oil. It hit hard and slipped back, sliding across cracked and mildewed tile in a puddle of canola. Eddie rolled back on his feet, backside and elbows burned and the back of his neck too warm for comfort, but he still held his pistol in his hand and reptilian death in his heart.

The lizard thrashed to regain its footing and scrabbled to try to launch itself at Eddie, jaws gaping. Its maw opened and closed loudly, teeth champing against each other and groping for Eddie’s flesh with visible hunger. Eddie didn’t waste time shooting it again.

He shot a hole in the fryer, and as the hot oil sloshed out and into the mess on the floor, he kept firing at the metal of the vat.

Bang, bang, bang
—

and on the third shot, he got a spark and the hot oil ignited. A sheet of flame like a grassfire sprang into being, rushing across the floor in all directions, and heat and light exploded up at the ceiling in the fryer. The lizard squealed and paddled backward as the fire overtook it, hissing with pain and rage.

Eddie jumped out of the way too, planting one hand in a tub of shredded iceberg lettuce and vaulting up onto his feet on the grill. He could feel the heat of the cooking surface, but the vulcanized rubber soles of his boots kept him from being burned. For the moment.

Eddie had never owned a decent car, but he’d never let himself be without a good jacket and boots. If only he had had a sheet of vulcanized rubber in the seat of his pants, he thought, he wouldn’t be feeling the sting of the grill now. He knew Chuck Norris sold rubber-crotch jeans for karate enthusiasts; maybe he sold fireproof-seat pants, too. Really, everyone in the band could probably use a pair.

His speculation was interrupted by a flying serpent whizzing in through the order window. Eddie grabbed it with his left hand, feeling scratchy, shuddering wings inside his clenched fist as he swung the thing around—

and brought it down hard, impaling its head on the order spike. It wasn’t much in the way of justice, but it cheered him up a bit to see one of the serpents twitching out its last snake breaths over Mike’s double order of coconut cream pie.

Across the kitchen, the burning lizard flailed into a tall set of shelves. They swung forward and crashed to the floor like a hammer, dropping paper-wrapped stacks of paper towels and stacks of toilet paper and cardboard boxes full of paper napkins hurtling through the oil-fire and across the room into its corners. A pile of rags under a big metal double sink burst into flames. Jugs of cleaning chemicals bubbled and tipped over, and thick smoke started to fill the top half of the room.

Heat seared Eddie’s lungs. He crouched and jumped, throwing himself headfirst through the order window, tumbling down full-length onto a narrow table behind the counter. He hit the diner’s two coffee machines and bounced, all the breath knocked out of him and his body hurting. He struck the floor at the same moment as one of the coffee pots and it shattered, spraying him with hot black coffee.

With his luck, he thought, the one that hadn’t shattered was probably the decaf.

Eddie groaned and dragged himself up onto his elbows, patting the puddle of hot coffee to find his pistol again. When he managed to get his eyes opened, he found himself looking at the ruined body of the poor waitress, Sami.

Flying serpents whizzed and hummed about her in a cloud, gnawing the flesh off her body. He fought back a vomit reflex. Probably nothing in his stomach but coffee grounds, anyway.

“Damn snakes!” Eddie jumped to his feet, feeling the heat of the blazing kitchen on his head as he did. He realized that he had shards of coffeepot in his hands and face, but he had no time for that. He grabbed the surviving pot—it was the regular, after all—and tossed its hot contents on the feeding monsters.

They hissed in anger and rose from their interrupted meal, spinning like hummingbirds to face Eddie. And then he heard the teeth-clacking hiss of the bigger reptile behind him, and smelled the stink of oil-charred serpent.

“Ah, nuts,” he muttered. “I thought you were dead.”

Before and behind him, the waitress’s deadly reptilian brood lunged at Eddie.

He dove over the counter, shattering the glass bell full of donuts and cookies with his boots and heading for the floor shoulder-first, trying to come up in a roll.

He hit the tiles next to jeans and boots that he recognized as Jim’s. The big man jumped over Eddie as Eddie rolled, and looking up, Eddie saw Jim swinging one of the diner’s trays like a club, smacking aside two of the winged snakes with a lunge right, slamming a third onto the countertop with his backswing, and then spinning like a gymnast on a pommel horse to squash another with the back of his boot.

Jim was a swordsman, really. And of course he didn’t wear his sword into small town diners, any more than Eddie carried his shotgun. But he was a crazy Cyrano de Bergerac sort of swordsman, as much an athlete and an acrobat as a guy that stabbed with a pointy stick, and he took the battle to the snakes with gusto.

Eddie bumped into Adrian on the floor and stopped his roll. Adrian was turning purple in the face, the livid purple bordered with streaks of yellow that marked an ugly bruise in the height of its flowering. He gasped for air, and he locked his bloodshot, bulging eyes on Eddie’s own and choked out a few words.

“Three hours,” Adrian managed, and then, “
per Hypnum dormito.
” His body went limp and his head fell back, cracking on the tile.

“Adrian!” Eddie shouted, and pressed his finger against the wizard’s neck. Adrian, who was also the band’s organ player, often fell asleep in the middle of trying to cast a spell—he was cursed—but he didn’t usually look like he was at death’s door when he did so.

He shot his eyes around the room as he checked Adrian’s vitals. The Komodo dragon scrambled to try to get out from behind the counter, but Twitch wouldn’t let it. The shape-changing fairy was in his big pony form and stood with his hindquarters to the lizard, kicking it over and over again. It squealed and tried to get around Twitch, but there was no room and the fairy was quick as lightning, and then he kicked the lizard back into the inferno of the diner’s kitchen. The lizard shrieked and disappeared.

Mike fired his M1911 and plugged a flying serpent right through the cross of its wings, breaking the beastie in half and dropping it to the floor. Next to him, Owen the accountant held another snake pinned to the table with his meaty fist. It squirmed as he sawed off its head with a steak knife. Jim smashed a snake to the wall with his tray, the last that Eddie could see, and then he threw his shoulder against the tray and squashed the reptile into paste.

Adrian had a pulse. He was breathing, too.

But his breath was ragged and shallow, his heartbeat was intermittent, and he didn’t look very good.

Eddie took a deep breath and let it out. His own heart raced like a train and he felt adrenalin surge through him. He held still and tried to let himself calm down.

“That was hilarious,” Twitch offered.

“Jeez,” Mike said, and he laughed a shaky laugh. “You guys ever go anywhere that you don’t burn to the ground?”

“What?” Owen was astonished. “You mean this kind of thing happens to you a lot?”

“It isn’t on purpose,” Eddie growled. He sat up, trembling. “And I wouldn’t say that it happens
a lot
.” Through the order window, in the burning kitchen, he saw a row of men wearing helmets, hanging from the neck by nooses and dancing in the fire. “But it has happened once or twice
lately
.”

The horse disappeared and Twitch was there, head to toe in his usual spiked leathers, with his ever-present horse’s tail dangling behind. “How’s Adrian?” he asked.

Eddie shrugged. “I think he put himself into a coma,” he said. “Anyway, you can see he looks like death warmed over, and then he cast some sort of spell and passed out.”

“So, business as usual?” Mike joked.

“Maybe.” Eddie shrugged again. “But he said something that might have been
Hypnos
in his incantation. Isn’t that the god of sleep? I think maybe he knocked himself out before the poison could kill him.”

“Spell?” Owen said. He held his big fifty caliber Desert Eagle again, carefully pointed away from everyone, like an experienced and safety-trained shooter. “Incantation? God of sleep?”

“Owen,” Eddie said, feeling stiff and sore, and his scorched butt hurting him, “I just watched you saw a flying serpent in half like so much ribeye. You gonna quibble about incantations now?”

“Nope,” Owen chuckled. “I guess not. But if this kind of thing happens a lot, maybe there’s a market opportunity here. Have you thought about making a business out of it? I mean, monster pest removal, or something?”

“Sounds like a winner of an idea to me,” Eddie agreed. “It’s all yours.”

“So, what?” Mike asked. “We find a cure for the poison before Adrian wakes up?”

“Or his wards of sleeping wear off. Or he just dies,” Twitch agreed. “Humans are so fragile.”

“Humans?” Owen asked, and then he shook his head. “Never mind.”

“Adrian told me three hours,” Eddie shared. “That doesn’t sound like very much time to me.”

“That’d just about get you to show time,” the big club manager observed.

“Perfect,” Eddie grunted. “Our sound really depends on those big organ chords. You got cops in this town?”

“No, but it ain’t that big a county,” Owen said. “Sheriff could be here sooner than you’d think.”

Eddie nodded and climbed to his feet. Standing, he saw the dead trucker, and beside the trucker, the corpses of the two old ladies. They were all swollen and purple in the face. The heat scorched him, making his burned cheeks throb sympathetically, but he dragged himself around behind the counter and looked down at the corpse. At Samantha’s body, he forced himself to say.

Poor girl.

At least the gnawing fangs of her unholy serpent children had hidden the mark of Eddie’s bullet hole. He sighed and dug around in her pockets. Sometimes this could be the world’s worst gig.

“Car keys,” he announced as he found them. “Nothing else.”

“We gotta get Adrian’s body,” Mike said, “I mean, we gotta get
Adrian
out of here.”

Owen stooped to one knee and picked up the wizard in a quick, practiced fireman’s carry. Eddie liked the club manager—he was a practical, can-do sort of guy. “I’ll carry him across the street to the club,” Owen offered. “At least until the ambulance gets here.”

“No hospital is going to be able to help our organist, poor boy,” Twitch observed. “Unless you mean a nunnery…? There are orders of sisters still passing down the old healing arts, though I didn’t know there were any in Oklahoma.”

“No, I … what?” the accountant looked puzzled.

“Never mind,” Eddie told him. “If you can take him to the club, that would be great. Don’t tell anybody he’s there, and don’t let the EMTs get him, if you can help it. With Adrian’s luck, they’d just undo his wards and kill him. We’re going to have to look into this poison ourselves, and find a cure.” He looked pointedly at the flames licking up along the ceiling and headed for the door.

The burly club manager pushed out the door first, not even breathing hard from his burden—Adrian was a solidly-built guy, but he was short. Mike followed, then Twitch, then Eddie, holding the car keys. Jim exited last, looking around the diner as the flames charged out of the kitchen and into the rest of the building, as if daring more snakes to show their scaly heads.