Red Engine
The buzzing sound began to distinguish itself into a thousand insect voices. In the same gentle monotone, Grief answered, “But what about when we met? You had woken the Starving Men and I got the other Hallowjacks to help you. That’s how people survive, by helping each other.”
The buzzing was loud, almost maddening, but Spur was caught in Grief’s imploring gaze and didn’t look away. His words were thick and hard to understand when he said, “I’m sorry but I can’t. I’m scared. I’m bad. Can’t let you in.”
The awful smell of rancid meat wafted over them and the rising hairs on the back of his neck and arms told Grief that he had seconds. H said simply, “Then we’ll both die. You took a step outside the circle, Spur.”
“What?” Spur started and jerked his head frantically, looking to his feet, then to the markers on either side of him, and he didn’t even have time to register that it wasn’t true before Grief had slammed into him, driving his knee up into Spur’s groin.
A motorcycle built of steel and bone and gristle, trailing a comet tail of flies, came skidding to a stop mere feet away from the struggling men. An massive figure clad in a long stitched coat of pale leather that had to be the flesh of men, dismounted and roared, its voice sounding like a lion’s from the bottom of a well.
Grief gave Spur a savage crack across the head with the butt of the shotgun and dove into the circle. Spur had just enough time to realize that the struggle had landed him on the wrong side of the border when a hand made of dull gray metal and bare red muscle landed on his shoulder.
“You lied to me!” shrieked Spur as the Red Engine pressed him down and began to dismantle him. Again and again, punctuated and interrupted by cries of agony, he screamed, “You lied to me!”
But Grief wasn’t listening. He had an oath to keep. He ran to the center of Steelhenge and found a small mound of dirt with a protective circle drawn around it. A few swipes of his hand cleared the grit away from the little glistening fragment of the Red Engine. Grief pulled a pen-knife from his pocket, pricked his finger, and traced the ovoid symbol onto the fragment in blood.
Grief looked back to see that the beast had paused in its work on Spur’s corpse and was peering into the circle, perhaps intrigued by this barrier to its senses. But it wouldn’t cross, couldn’t cross. There were rules that even beings like the Red Engine were bound by. It parted its mismatched jaws, the lower might have come from some kind of dog, and hissed.
Grief spoke the word and then howled in pain, clutching his finger. The Red Engine howled too when it felt itself suddenly jerked forward into the outer boundary of the steel circle.
Grief spoke the word again and the agony spread to his other fingers. The Red Engine struggled mightily but slid a couple more feet into the circle. Its flesh components began to run and sizzle like cooking fat.
Grief spoke the word a third time and felt as if his entire left hand licked by the unfathomable cold beyond death. The Red Engine, its talons dug into the dry dead ground, inched past the inner circle of markers. Its final hateful snarl echoed across the desert as its body erupted, flinging fragments of bone and metal and spraying liquid meat across the impassive faces of the markers.
Grief tumbled into unconsciousness.
The rude insistence of the morning sun’s heat woke him. Sun glinted painfully from the gleaming markers. Buzzing flies explored the remains of Spur and the creature that killed him. Dust and dirt caked his leathers and rained from his hair when he sat up.
He got himself a beer and some jerky from Spur’s Winnebago. He had to open them both using only his right hand. His left was numb and limp. He worked with it for half an hour, trying to get some feeling, some movement. He knew it was pointless but he had to try.
After his breakfast, such as it was, he took stock of his options. His own motorcycle was still in one piece, standing right where he left it, but riding it with one hand wasn’t a smart idea. There was the Winnebago but he didn’t intend on using any vehicle that Spur had a hand in ever again. As long as his right hand still worked, there was always traveling by thumb. He decided to hike the long miles on that unmarked dirt road all the way back to I10 where he’d hitch a ride.
He found a duffel bag in the Winnebago and packed it with some beer and food. He slung the bag across his back, took one last look around old Steelhenge and hit the road.