Horns

Lee honked his horn.

“Gle

“I’m in here,” Ig called in Gle

A car door opened and slammed. Footsteps approached through the grass.

“Gle

“I’m just sittin’ here, honey,” said Ig, Gle

Lee set a hand on the concrete and hoisted himself up through the door. He had put on a hundred pounds and shaved his head since the last time Ig had seen him, a transformation almost as astonishing as growing horns, and for a moment Ig couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t assimilate what he was seeing. It wasn’t Lee at all. It was Eric Ha

“Hey, lady,” Eric said softly. His eyes darted this way and that, looking around the vast, dark room. He didn’t see Ig with the pitchfork, not where he was crouching to the right, in the deepest of shadows. Eric’s eyes hadn’t adjusted yet. With the headlights pouring in through the door around him, they never would. Lee was out there somewhere. Somehow Lee knew that it wasn’t safe and had come with Eric, and how did he know that? He didn’t have the cross to protect him anymore. It didn’t make sense.

Eric took small, scuffling steps toward the figure in the overcoat, the club swinging in slow, lazy arcs from his right hand.

“Say something, bitch,” Eric said.

The coat shivered and flapped an arm weakly and shook its head. Ig didn’t move, was holding his breath. He couldn’t think what to do. It was supposed to be Lee who came through the door, not someone else. But then, that was the story of his brief life in the demon trade, Ig thought. He had done his Satanic best to come up with a nice and simple murder, and now it was all blowing away, like so much cold ash in the wind. Maybe it was always like that, though. Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what men could think up.

Eric crept forward until he was standing right behind the thing in the coat. He lifted the club with both hands and brought it down, onto its back. The coat collapsed, and snakes gushed out, a great sack splitting open and spilling everywhere. Eric made a sound, a strangled, disgusted cry, and almost tripped over his own Timberlands, stepping away.

“What?” Lee shouted from somewhere outside. “What’s happening?”

Eric brought his boot down on the head of a garter snake, wiggling between his heels. It shattered with a fragile crunch, like a lightbulb breaking. He made a pained sound of revulsion, kicked away a water snake, backing up, backing toward Ig. He was wading in them, a geyser of serpents. He was turning to get out when he stepped on one and his ankle rolled under him. He did a surprisingly graceful pirouette, spi

“I’ll be goddamned,” Eric said.

“You and me both,” Ig said.

“Go to hell, you fuck,” Eric said, and his left hand started to come up, and for the first time Ig saw the snub-nosed revolver.

Ig lunged, not giving himself time to think, rising and slamming the pitchfork into Eric’s left shoulder. It was like driving it into the trunk of a tree. A shivering impact ran up the shaft and into Ig’s hands. One of the tines shattered Eric’s clavicle; another punctured his deltoid; the middle tine got his upper chest. The gun went off, fired into the sky, a loud crack like a cherry bomb exploding, the sound of an American summer. Ig kept going, carrying Eric off balance, driving him onto his ass. Eric’s left arm flew out, and the gun sailed away into the dark and fired again when it hit the floor, and a rat snake was torn in two.

Ha

“Leave it,” Ig said. “I don’t want to kill you. You’ll hurt yourself worse trying to pull it out.”

“I’m not,” Ha

And he swung his body to the right, dragging the handle of the pitchfork and Ig with it, out of the darkness and into the brightly lit doorway. Ig didn’t know it was going to happen until it had happened, until he had been tugged off balance and gone staggering from the shadows. He recoiled, yanking at the pitchfork, and for an instant the barbed points caught on tendon and flesh, and then they sprang free and Eric screamed.

Ig had no doubt what was about to happen and tried to get out of the doorway, which framed him like a red target on black paper, but he was too slow. The boom of the shotgun was a single deafening clap, and the first casualty was Ig’s hearing. The gun spit red fire, and Ig’s stu

Lee grabbed the doorframe with one hand and pulled himself up and in, a shotgun in his other hand. He came to his feet, in no rush. Ig saw him work the slide, saw very clearly as the spent shell jumped from the open chamber and leaped in a parabolic arc away through the darkness. Ig tried to leap in an arc of his own, to break to the left, make himself a moving target, but something had him by the arm-Eric. Eric had his elbow and was hauling on him, either to use him as a crutch or to hold him in place as a human shield.

Lee fired again, and a shovel struck Ig in the legs. They folded beneath him. For one instant he was able to keep his feet: He put the shaft of the pitchfork on the floor and leaned his weight against it to stay up. But Eric still had him by the arm and had caught spray himself, not in the legs but the chest. Eric went straight back and jerked Ig over with him.

Ig caught a whirling glimpse of black sky and luminescent cloud, where once, almost a century before, there had been ceiling. Then he hit the concrete on his back with a resounding thud that rattled his bones.

He lay next to Eric, his head almost resting on Eric’s hip. He couldn’t feel his right shoulder anymore, or anything below his knees. Blood rushed from his head, the darkness of the sky deepening dangerously, and he made a thrashing, desperate effort to hang on to consciousness. If he passed out now, Lee would kill him. This was followed by another thought, that his relative consciousness didn’t make any difference, because he was going to be killed here regardless. He noted, almost as a distant afterthought, that he had held on to his pitchfork.

“You hit me, you fuckhead!” Eric cried. His voice was muffled. Ig felt as if he were hearing the world through a motorcycle helmet.

“It could be worse. You could be dead,” Lee told Eric, and then he was standing over Ig, pointing the barrel into Ig’s face.

Ig stabbed out with the pitchfork and caught the barrel of the gun between the tines. He wrenched it up and to the right, so when it went off, it exploded in Eric Ha