reminds me. If it wasn’t Daja who tried to kill me, let’s see who it was.”
“It’s Megs,” says Cherry. “Didn’t you smell him? You burned him up good, Jimmy. He looks like a s’more that fell in the fire.”
I get out of the camper and look at him. Cherry and Traven follow me.
We’re at the far edge of the camp, away from anything important. A nice place for an ambush. I look at the pile of meat on the ground.
“It’s Megs all right.”
He moans quietly, leaking blood.
The ground leading back to the main camp is a flat surface, and the desert floor is too hard to leave footprints. Nothing useful there. I kneel down and look Megs over.
“You two have been around. Does Lobster Boy look like he could get here under his own power?”
“I doubt it,” says Traven.
“Definitely not,” says Cherry. “I saw him at center camp. He was a goddamn basket case.”
I reach back in the camper and pull out the piece of Megs’s arm that came off in my hand. Toss it down next to him.
“That means someone helped him here. Carried or wheeled him over. We would have heard a vehicle.”
Cherry gives Megs a light kick.
“Making friends wherever you go, eh, Jimmy?”
“It’s Mr. Pitts,” I say. “If you want rescuing when the time comes, that is.”
Cherry drops the Malediction and crushes it under her shoe.
“Speaking of the time,” she says, and pulls the respirator up over her chin. “Time for me to get back to the peanut gallery. There’ll be rumors about you by now.”
She winks and pulls the respirator up over her face.
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone what a shy flower you were in the face, so to speak, of free pussy. A rare commodity in Hell, Jimmy, but you’d remember that if you hadn’t gone soft living the good life back home.”
“I’m bleeding and I just got murdered, Cherry. Give me a fucking break.”
“Keep an eye on him for me, Father,” she wheezes in her mask. “If anyone’s going to kill him down here, it won’t be Daja.”
“It will be you?” says Traven.
Cherry gives us a fingertip wave and heads back to camp.
Traven looks at me.
“Well. That was unexpected.”
“That’s one word for it.”
He looks down at Megs. “What are we going to do with him?”
I reach down and snap his neck. He blips out of existence a moment later.
Traven turns away.
“Please warn me the next time you’re going to do something like that.”
“Sorry.”
He looks back at where the body was a second before.
“There’s a lot of blood.”
“We’re going to need to cover it up.”
I look around.
“We’re close to the base of the mountain. I remember loose soil down there,” I say. “I’ll bring some over and cover the blood when things settle down.”
“You’ll need help.”
I look around for something else to cover the blood with, but there’s nothing.
“You’re in good with the Magistrate,” I say. “I won’t fuck that up. If things go wrong, it should be me they come after.”
“That’s not fair.”
“We’re in Hell. I just got knifed by a charcoal briquette and molested by a witch. Talk to me some more about fair.”
“At least let me be your lookout,” says Traven.
“Fine. But not now. When most of them are asleep.”
We go back into the camper. Traven settles back down on his cot and I lie on my coat on the floor with a couple of pillows. It’s not exactly comfortable, but it beats sleeping anywhere else at this crummy summer camp.
He says, “This has been an unusual day.”
“And we’re just getting started.”
“I know.”
“Good night, Father.”
“Whatever happens, it really is good to see you.”
“You too. Now shut up and let me rest awhile.”
A minute later Traven sits up.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.”
“When I broke Megs’s neck? Don’t sweat it. Think of it like someone putting a dog out of its misery. Only he really, really hated the dog.”
“Maybe I was wrong earlier,” he says. “Maybe I can get excommunicated in Hell.”
“Pull that off and I sure as shit will let you eat my sins.”
AT LEAST ONE thing goes right. We get enough dirt to cover the blood without anybody seeing us. The rest of the night, though, Traven tosses and turns.
A few hours later, I wake to the ground shaking and a roar like Mechagodzilla. I run outside, but it isn’t an earthquake or a metal Kaiju invasion. It’s just the camp waking up and getting ready to move out. Vehicles gun their engines. Trucks maneuver out of the camp to clear a path for the cars. The semis and construction equipment get chained to the double-length flatbed carrying the tarp. It looks like complete chaos at first, but the moves are smooth and practiced. The havoc is one big, well-oiled machine.
Traven comes out of the camper and stands next to me.
I say, “Is it like this every day?”
“Not every day. We’ve camped for as long as three days while scouts have gone out surveilling the territory.”
“Hell’s own alarm clock.”
“We’re not in Hell, remember?”
“Right … I’ve been wondering about that. Why search the Tenebrae?”
He sits in the camper doorway with an old book in his lap.
“We
