Southern Ouroboros Read online

  © 2019 Matt Kilby. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Justin Doring.

  For everyone still walking the stone’s road to see where it leads

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  I. Migration

  II. The Ballad of John Valance

  III. A Kind of Suicide

  Epilogue

  Thanks…

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Joe Richards drove north towards home on a cloudless January night and thought he left his past behind him.

  Six months ago, he returned to his childhood hometown in Pine Haven, North Carolina to meet an inmate named Grady Perlson, who believed he was possessed throughout his life by immortal, time-traveling spirits. Through a week of psychiatric sessions, Grady told Joe about Sagin and Wolgiss, fighting each other for a powerful stone and leaving many dead behind them. Wolgiss wanted the stone’s power to avert some past tragedy, though Sagin believed the past necessary to ensure an unborn future. Their feud cost Grady his family and Army unit, burning a small African village to ashes before threatening the same for Pine Haven. Seduced by the promise of a better life, Warden George Carmicheal and his corrupted guards released the prison’s population into the town. In the chaos, a guard named Jim Stucker murdered Joe’s wife, Elaine. Desperate to save her, Joe touched the brick and became something he still didn’t understand—a man who cannot die. The brick gave him chances to save Elaine, but her survival meant allowing Pine Haven’s survivors to die, so he let her go to save them. Though he managed to stop Grady by focusing the stone’s energy, George Carmichael, Jim Stucker, and many of the inmates were never captured. When another of Pine Haven’s heroes, a sheriff’s deputy named Vick Hafferty, asked for his help finding a missing friend, Joe gave him the stone and wished him luck. One summer had been enough, had taken enough, to know he didn’t want anything more to do with Sagin, Wolgiss, or their magic stone. Time and distance would heal him and one day his family, if only him and Brad avoiding the pang of what might have been. They could manage that as long as the stone went the other direction, carrying Vick to his own fate.

  The first inkling he was wrong came when he realized the same headlights had been in his rearview since he left Vick at the diner. He called himself paranoid—the original car exited long ago and this was the third or fourth replacement. That didn’t explain why the dark-colored van kept a steady separation, even when he pushed his gas pedal to the floor. It didn’t come any closer until he approached his exit and then came quick.

  As it caught up to him, Joe saw the blacked-out windows, but the driver slowed in his blind spot, annoying enough with no better reason than being a jackass, but they planned this. They knew him, but not what he could do. He guessed they would find out together.

  He found the van in his side mirror as it drifted into his lane, the first tap a warning before the driver rammed his Cherokee’s back tire.

  Joe fought the steering wheel, but the Cherokee spun to give the van a clear shot at the driver’s side door. The wheels left the ground with the impact, Joe’s seatbelt catching his chest as it landed. Even invincible, his neck still bruised and air wouldn’t fill his lungs. Maybe one was punctured or both. He let the power repair his insides before crawling up to the passenger door and putting his weight against it, though it wouldn’t budge. The van destroyed the lock and busted the window, so he knocked out what remained of the glass before climbing through.

  Seven soldiers stood next to the van, each with a matching assault rifle raised to their shoulder. He didn’t have the heart to tell them bullets wouldn’t do any good but had plenty to show them. He decided to start with the one who walked from behind the van with a pistol holstered on his hip, guessing him the one in charge and the best example to scatter the rest.

  He stood on the overturned car with their guns trained on him and jumped off. Their barrels followed him to the ground, and the one with empty hands stepped ahead of the line.

  “Are you Joe Richards?” His voice came crisp enough to assume him military, though his black tactical gear didn’t quite qualify as a uniform. If ramming a civilian’s car off the road came from any official orders, Joe bet they also required security clearance and were delivered by the same people who redacted Grady Perlson’s military records.

  “If I’m not?”

  “I’ll give you my insurance information and be on my way.”

  Joe scanned the other men, each face blank as they waited for their order.

  “Shoot him,” the man in charge said, and they did, but instead of the loud bursts Joe expected, each rifle spit hollow breaths. The ache didn’t ramp up as his life sapped out but came in sharp pricks and dulled warmth after. Green plastic buds embedded in his torso, each the size of a tick. He looked up with a question.

  “Again,” the man said, but none of the others fired.

  “Again,” he repeated and looked back at them.

  “Sir,” the nearest one spoke up. “Another round might kill him.”

  Joe fought a smile as he worked to keep his feet under him. They didn’t know who or what they were messing with, but if they refused to kill him, they didn’t have much chance of doing more than dying themselves. But whatever filled those green capsules had him stoned enough for a breeze to take him down. Clenching his teeth against the drowsiness, he focused on the man giving orders. He could reach him and make him regret this. He just needed his legs to move.

  “Kill him?” the man shook his head, but if he understood the joke, it didn’t show in his cold stare. He drew his sidearm and fired three times into Joe’s chest.

  The more familiar pain sat him hard on the asphalt. He blinked, but his eyes wouldn’t open all the way. Drool gathered in the corner of his lips, but he couldn’t keep it there. As it leaked in the same slow trickle as his blood, the man came with the handgun ready. As he approached, Joe tried to lunge for him. One hand would do the job, but he couldn’t move. He stared at the man with all the hate he could muster, understanding he wouldn’t make it home to sit on the couch with Prescott at his feet. He wouldn’t pick Brad up tomorrow morning from his friend’s house or see him at all for what he imagined would be a long time. He was going wherever this man took him, somewhere along the road that damned stone paved. It couldn’t mean anything but more torture to come.

  “Look,” the man grabbed the front of Joe’s blood-soaked shirt, yanking hard enough to pop the buttons. The bullet wounds puckered and closed, sending a murmur through the line of soldiers, but this man appeared unimpressed. He understood a lot more than Joe expected.

  “You see?” he addressed his men, and as he turned, Joe put everything into one desperate attempt to grab his skull. He could force a finger through his temple or snap his neck. Clean up the rest once he woke from his tranquilizer-induced nap. As clueless as the rest seemed, he thought it would be easy, but neither hand moved.

  “Don’t worry about killing him,” the man said. “Worry about him waking in transit.”

  “Yes sir,” the hesitant one called out.

  “Does everyone understand what we have here? This isn’t a drill or a training exercise. The man in front of you cannot die and is more than capable of killing all of us with little effort, but his blood pumps the same as yours. Put enough of that green shit in him and he will go down. You got that?”

  “Yes sir,” they all answered.

  “Then shoot him again,” he said, moving
aside to let them. From his pants pocket, he took out a dark cloth and waited for seven more darts to hit Joe before he walked forward. He unfolded the hood, but before he covered Joe’s head, he looked into his eyes. The lids drew so narrow, Joe couldn’t see more than shadows.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the man said. “We’ll get you where you’re supposed to be.”

  I. migration

  1

  Carly Snead sat so deep in her beige, pillow-top armchair it swallowed her, a cigarette burning towards her fingers. Her empty gaze drifted from contraband on the coffee table—a lighter, burnt spoon, and used hypodermic—to her husband, standing in front of their television with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. He ranted with remnants of crystal meth in his nose hairs. She dreaded when he got like that, eyes so glassy but with pupils as narrow as a laser. He claimed he saw the future in those moments—every paranoia a prophecy in disguise. Today’s said a small army was coming to kill them both and running would only get them shot in the back. He stood determined to face them all when they kicked down their front door. She hated the way he stared at this side of it but couldn’t blame him. After all, he was right.

  People called him Snead for as long as she knew him, his first name Orel after some baseball player his dad adored. He said he earned so many ass whuppings growing up because of that name, it started his life’s ruin. Granted, he only talked like that when on a mellower high than pacing their duplex apartment in Bishopville, South Carolina. She met him at eighteen, him twenty-three, and her parents couldn’t say a damn thing about his spiked hair or earrings down both earlobes. She went her own way well before him, but he did something no other boy had before, and not just planting his baby in her their first year together. No matter how wasted he got, he always looked at her in a way that said the world could go up in flames and he wouldn’t care as long as she looked back at him. The thought gave her a warmth almost as strong as the heroin now radiating waves through her, making everything okay, even when he told her their life was too free to be anchored by a baby. Even when she planned to go home to be a mother and he dragged her to a mirror, telling her their daughter would be better off without knowing her. As she wept and wanted to die, he kissed her neck and told her he would always be better. So she stayed until this round of emptiness filled with too many drugs to track.

  Then he convinced her to let him deal instead of looking for work not guaranteed to send him to prison or the grave by thirty. If he worked his way up to distributor between Mr. Ciasto and his other dealers, they’d be richer than either of them dreamed. They could be out of that run-down apartment in a month or buy the one next door for another, more legit source of income. According to his simple plan, whatever they got could be recut and the extra sold. They could skim eight balls out of a kilo and split larger rocks and crystals enough no one noticed. As long as they kept their heads, they would be far away before anyone caught on.

  But neither imagined others might be doing the same thing. They diluted the coke so much they basically sold baggies of near-pure baby laxatives. They didn’t expect Mr. Ciasto to send his closer associates to break into their house when they weren’t there to find out if they had anything to do with his weaker product. At first, they thought some crackhead came looking for money or Snead’s stash, but that was in the bedroom safe, which Snead forgot to close before they left. So someone broke the deadbolt on their back door but didn’t take anything, with money and inventory in full view of anyone who walked into the other room. Snead stood for a full ten minutes, shaking his head and muttering the word “fuck” before he grabbed some meth to take into the living room.

  He thought being high gave him a fighting chance, but she wanted to drift so far into the clouds she wouldn’t know what they did to her. Her life would simply end, and no one would be better or worse. Not her parents, who probably thought her dead, or little Lita, who hadn’t seen her face since she was a gurgling lump in her crib. Snead was all she had, and she was all he did, but they were all each other needed. She thought there might be beauty in that but couldn’t hold the idea. In its place, Snead held that shotgun so tight his fingers were white, so focused on the door he didn’t notice the cowboy behind him.

  “Snead,” she slurred, but he didn’t look at her more than a second.

  She forced her eyes wider before the lids drooped back into their drowse, but the brief lucidity was enough to see the man better. His leather hat and coat were covered in thick stitches that might unravel it all into a strip of jerky if she pulled one. His sharp features made him handsome, dark eyes as intense as Snead’s but with a slight smile, like this was somehow funny. Those eyes fixed on her, his shoulder leaning on the wall into the kitchen.

  “Snead,” she said again.

  “Shut up,” he snorted a breath. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

  But the cowboy paid her plenty of attention, coming with the slow swagger his outfit implied. He was John Wayne or Clint Eastwood by the angle of his jaw. She’d never seen a man like him. Not her father, who she swore ran for sheriff because he thought it’d earn him that macho ideal of hip-holstered guns and a wide-brimmed Stetson. Not Snead, who once suggested she try having sex for money to see if she could, calling it kidding when she threatened to leave him. This one was to his purpose and strode across the room like he might pick her up and carry her somewhere better. A few hundred years ago, it would have made a girl swoon, but in her stupor, she only melted further into the cushion.

  “He wouldn’t have seen me anyway,” he said as he knelt beside her chair.

  “He’s not that high.” The corner of her lip shifted into a smile she didn’t control.

  “Maybe not,” he shrugged, “but I can see inside his head, and there’s not much there.”

  She wrinkled her forehead as if hearing a joke she didn’t understand. Snead glanced over again and, instead of aiming at the uninvited guest, stared at the door as if he didn’t see him.

  “Don’t go to sleep on me,” he grunted. “We get a chance to run, we’ll have to take it.”

  “He can’t see you,” she told the cowboy, understanding as she said the words. Snead told her not to sleep, but she was already there or most of the way. She was far enough for the dreams to start and old Texas Pete to appear out of thin air. She tried to remember the last Western she watched and wondered how long something like that stuck with a person. It might have just been her reaction to all Snead got them into, inventing a better man to get her out of it. The distraction beat waiting to be murdered.

  “Like I said,” the cowboy smiled in that lazy way they all seemed to have, lending more evidence to her theory he was a dream. “I have control of him, like a puppet. Want to watch him dance? Wet himself? I’ll prove it.”

  “The only thing you’ll prove is I need to try rehab again,” she shook her head. “You’re a heroin dream. Not a bad one, but not impressive either. I’ve flown in some. Punched a car off the road. That’s a bit beyond controlling some junkie’s mind.”

  “Who you talking to?” Snead asked, but his attention didn’t linger.

  “Fair enough,” the cowboy continued, “but it looks like the real thing I need to prove is this is all happening. That’ll be tougher, especially with that junk in your blood. How long will it last?”

  “A few hours,” she said. “Maybe all night. If you are real, you’re welcome to stick around. If not, I’m guessing you’ll leave around the time the buzz does. Of course, none of it matters if a drug dealer’s thugs are coming to erase us off the Earth. You might want to hedge your bets and leave for a while. Come back later to check if we’re still breathing. If so, we can continue this incredibly weird conversation.”

  “Are you talking in your sleep?” Snead rolled his eyes and shook his head, “or did you lose your fucking mind? Either way, your timing is shit, Carly.”

  “Will you just look over here?” her words slurred. She barely understood them as the chair claimed more of her, something rolling un
derneath the leather like ocean water lapping her sides.

  Snead did, a new panic forming in his eyes.

  “Oh no, no, no,” he said and stepped toward the coffee table. “How much did you use?”

  At the same time, the world outside grew louder. Engines approached with the ground-swelling bass of car stereos. Doors opened and slammed. Snead squinted through the window and almost fell backward as he retreated.

  “Fuck,” he shouted at the door and turned the shotgun’s barrel to aim.

  “Fuck,” he yelled again as the first boot buckled the wood.

  “Fuck,” he screamed one last time as he pulled the trigger and tore a chunk out of the door, doubling over when the butt socked him in the stomach.

  The chaos that followed didn’t leave room for words. The world became percussion and bullets that pocked the wood and Snead’s shirt. The cowboy rose so fast, her eyes couldn’t follow, taking her by the waist to drag her up. It didn’t take him much effort, but her feet wouldn’t stay on the floor. He tried to make her stand and, failing, held her close with his coat around her. Thumps of gunfire hit his back as he carried her into the kitchen, but he didn’t stumble. She wanted to warn him those same assholes broke the back door, but when she took a breath to speak, she got lost in the scent of him—old leather and wood like an antique shop. There was something else too, something she couldn’t identify until a flash of light through the coat showed her the large revolver on his hip, the handle the shape of a horse’s head. The smell was gun oil, and he drew it, its boom more substantial than the surrounding pops. He fired twice before his back took more bullets and then three more times. By her count, he had one bullet left, but before he needed it, tires screeched away.

  He walked out into the back yard and lowered Carly to the ground.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, eyes drifting again. She didn’t think she was dreaming anymore, but that meant something horrible just happened.