XI. Primeval Minds

Axe-Wielding Maniacs. Only This Time, It Ain't Just The Guitarists We're Talking About...

Art by Kevin John Jacob

For your old buddy-n-pal-n-evening-entertainment Nic Ridgefield, there’s a sort of blues-off me and the boys always do to get a jam session going. Not just playing your bog-standard, 12-bar boot-scooter, but hitting the grooves with thicker and thicker guitar tones until it’s all fuzz screaming out the amps. Normally Harry Garret always won, his big-bad Fender howling its scalloped heart out. Normally. It was only after roping in our new recruit Brett Tsé that the winning streak was broken. Our tan-furred brave managed to blow both our asses clear out, landing heavy blows with guitars riffs a half-step from hell itself.

“Guess we’re doom now,” chuckled Rory Armstrong. “Makes my job easier.” The white-furred devil was still kicking out of a wipe-out he had on-assignment, so spacing out on his ride cymbal was about the best he could do in rehearsals. What’s funny is that he wasn’t that far off. I, for one, started fingering my bass that night.

There, even gave ya the chance to laugh that one out your system.

But not only am I playing my bass like bass instead of an overpowered guitar, Harry starts playing with a helluva lot more vibrato than any of us was used to. And man, shit sounded heavier than all the bombs in the world, dropped at once.

Didn’t hurt that’s what Brett kept singing about.

“Anything else on your peace pipe’s mind?” Harry would always quip.

His tan-furred compadre always had the same answer. “Well SOOORRY it ain’t all kibbles and bitches, sunshine.”

Shit like that’s why we nicknamed him “The Brave.” Well that, and to keep the Navajo jokes going. Brett was always quick on the draw like that when he wanted to be.

Only thing faster than his comebacks was my hand on the ham-radio when the ol’ Commish rang up. When I slid that little black box from my hip to my cocked-back ears, the words I heard were ones I ain’t ever heard since certification.

“We got an untouchable.”

Now of course, some y’all got a fedora-clad fella with a Tommy gun in mind, but that ain’t the way we play out here in Hell Patrol. For us, an “untouchable” is what it says on the tin: a job no one wants to do. Our P.D.0. cases tend to be the ones that get those designations the most, but “untouchable” also means jobs where no one CAN do anything. That is, we’re always the ones running around on orders. Orders with names, numbers, facts, figures, the whole nine. You can hand us the culprit’s name on a silver platter, but we can’t do shit without the bastard’s business card. These file-o-facts are always whipped up by whip-smart detectives and a few private investigators, but they’re just as wolven as the rest of us, i.e. fallible.

Therefore, if laymen like us are getting served an untouchable, it means we gotta be real detectives for once. And the funny thing about Hell Patrol is that our answer to any problem is to dump more men on it until it gets solved.

The murders I was served involved decapitations the long way round. A rash of homicides in a nearby settlement, Danesville. No eyewitnesses, just some poor critter opening a door, and finding that crimson highway pouring out onto the shag floor. That, and a sort of marking drawn on the floors of each, with melted candle-wax found nearby. Same M.O. for all four mentioned.

My only options were saying “yes” or “yes, sir” to the task, and so I said, “yeah.”

Before heading out to dig through my module, we decided to kicked things around for a bit, just to see what fresh angles we could come up with. The candle wax was the odd item out, and so that’s where we started.

“Maybe they snagged something from the scene.” Harry said, brown digits noodling away, even after unplugging his Fender from his amps. “Brought a candle or nicked one from the home, stuffed the thing they stole in an envelope, and did a wax seal on-site.”

“Didn’t sound like they stole anything though.” Rory pondered. “We know for sure they didn’t snag a finger or ear. Maybe the wax was just collateral. Someone lights something for the evening, killer barges in, candle goes flying.”

“‘Not ‘round midnight though,” I fired back. “Not unless he managed four night owls in a row.”

Then from outta nowhere, in comes Brett with one word: “rites.” The three of us turned to him, and I gave him the “go ahead” nod of approval.

“Well obviously we ain’t talking ‘bout scalping,” he continued, still playing along to Harry’s neoclassical nonsense. “You’re supposed to go across the skull-top, not crack it like an egg. But markings and candle wax sound like ancient shit in modern times. Can’t find a goat’s skull? What the hell, crack Kenny-down-the-street’s open, his brains are good as anyone else’s. All sorts of crazy pagan killings like that, around the time of Samhain and shit. Though it ain’t quite October, is it?”

“Summer solstice has already been and gone.” I nodded, plucking a final note off my bass. “Guess that’s our cue to actually look at these things on the ol’ CRT. All four of us.”

Brett’s eyes shot open like a cuckoo clock at high noon. “Four?”

“Did my black-ass stutter?” I shot back. “If your hypothesis comes out king, I’m gonna need that knowledge on deck.”

“I-uh—sure thing.”

I suppose it was the shock of actually being asked on, having missed at least 20 assignments, 10 chases, five shootouts and a partridge in a pear tree. Brett, bless ‘im, never was a Hell Patrolman. It worked out swell for his chances of living, but made jam sessions like ours bitter affairs when we got our daily, undodgeable draft. Those early months were miserable at times, mainly because we all just wanted to play, and I kept leaving our latest recruit in the lurch. Fortunately, today was not that day.

We gathered round my pickup’s monitor, shotgun-side door open so everyone didn’t look like a five-year-old reaching up a toy-shop window, and went over the photos. The less said about what the inside of the wolven skull looks like, the better, especially after getting served a late-night Lizzie Borden special. What was important was the sanguinary symbols drawn. Against all logic, they weren’t pentagrams or backwards swastikas, but dots inside circles. Rather, a swatch of floor always cut through the red pool. And if it was hardwood, or some darker shade, the dude always plopped a cotton ball or something white to make the image out.

“Are them eyes or tits?” Harry pondered, stroking his chin.

“Which side of the coin?” Rory replied, balancing a classic American quarter on his thumb.

“Let Brett peep ‘em.” I said, col-cocking both upside the head. When the Navajo dynamo muscled in, he didn’t say anything at first, just kept swiping his tan hand across the clicker to survey the whole lot. When he stopped on a wide shot of Victim One, a fella about my height and color named Ted Baxter, he did about the funniest thing we’d seen all day.

“Computer, enhance 24 to—” was all poor Brett got out before we broke up in hysterics. He looked ready to blind us with a good left hook until I explained our eternal struggle to get voice-activated anything. The bitch about pirating Haven’s wares was that they almost always made it to the Force or third-party thugs, and never us. The Force was too busy tinkering with them and the thugs always wanted more credits than any of them was worth. We’d used to talk all that coordinate gobbledygook, pretend we had a full, 3D mapped image, and fell down laughing like toddlers for having done so.

“Buddy, you’re lucky you ain’t looking at an Etch-A-Sketch!” I hollered. “Pinch-er-spread your claws across the screen, that’ll zoom ya in and out.”

He did just that, after a surly scowl to silence our peanut gallery, and brought us right into a chunk of ol’ Ted’s skull. That finally got us ALL to pipe down because we realized the blood pools meant little compared to the black marks etched on the skull.

“That’s the ol’ glyph for Flying Head...but what the devil is a myth from the Northeast doing around here?”

When I pressed him on this, Brett gave me one of the tallest tales I ever heard in life. Big, disembodied heads, long locks of twisting hair, floating round the tribe they used to call Iroquois up in the joint they used to call New York. Vengeful spirits and all that jazz, coming back to haunt those who wronged ‘em.

And here it was, in damn near the furthest place it could be. None of us believed the mumbo-jumbo. Hell, Brett himself said he hadn’t even seen the Rolling Heads he was “promised,” them’s being the Old West equivalent of these Flying Heads.

However, both tales implied some pretty grisly shit regardless, and the mixed martial magic on display meant it was anyone’s guess whose denomination was the main motivating factor. All ambiguities that kept our asses on guard for the rest of the case.

And so, off we rock, barreling over to Danesville to hook up with the local sheriff, who then punts us over to a guided tour of the crimes. Danesville is a bit of a weird setup where the town has a pretty solid-built center, with a sub-suburb rack of houses outside of it. None of the houses in town had been hit yet, it was all just the outskirters we were inspecting. Wasn’t exactly a Sunday stroll either, especially when one of the joints hadn’t been fumigated. I’ll paint the picture as politely as I can so...imagine your garbage can after it rains, but before you empty it.

Yeah. That.

Fragrances aside, I ain’t ever seen a scene quite like these. I made a few outta the perps I was sic’d on way back when, but not like this, not in a room this small or a way this gruesome.

It’s funny too, the way you gotta look at it from both sides of the law. “We’re not so different, you and I,” at its best is a cheap platitude you get hit with before you rip a rapist’s arms off or torch an arsonist. But then again, you don’t have to go looking back after the job’s been done. You take ‘em out by the Maypole, you do ‘em in, you move on to the next.

But this. Strolling into a home once owned, sifting through a hound once alive, reading out observations on a little pocket-mic, saying shit like “The bodies show traces of ritualist violence. A kind of electric ceremony where the blood split isn't just for sport or play; he basks in this shit. He wears it. And I don't think he'll ever stop.”

Well Brett said that one, anyhow. I just dictated it into the recorder, but the point remains. This is why getting pulled into active investigations is a trip-and-a-half for any hound stuck running the rat race. You finally gotta look the gore in the face, and I’d seen plenty in my day. Justified, of course. It was seeing it unjustified that turned any good wolf’s stomach inside out.

That or the stench reeking from that one-story shack like stink lines on a Sunday strip. That got us all doubled over the second we opened that damn door.

Things got freaky once we started inspecting the bodies, and the rooms they were found in. There was only one fresh soul to go over, who bore the same strange etching on his brain-box, and just about every wall bore a “sparse beauty that’d make Pollock weep.”

Doth quote Harrison “Richter” Garret anyway. Kid always was cooking up the weirdest lyrics for us.

Anywhosamawhats, all throughout our investigation that day, Brett was looking more and more worried.

“Heya,” he asked the local sheriff, rubbing the scruff of that slim tan neck of his. “Do you know if any shamans are still living ‘round here?”

“Yeah,” the gray sheriff nodded. “Twofeathers a few houses back.”

“Are you cool with him cleansing the place?”

The good old boy fixed his ten-gallon hat before answering with that incredible Texan drawl...”yeah, sure thing.”

The “Twofeathers” in question was really just a nickname, for he had two quail feathers slid under his hat-band. That said, he was the real spiritual McCoy Brett wanted. He could’ve been Brett’s great-great-great grandfather the way he looked, shambling in with smudging sticks and a full pack of cigarettes. He ground the smokes out and sprinkled the tobacco on every site we were latecomers to, but kept him off the latest of the bunch. It was only after we had made our final inspections, got our little trick-or-treat bags full of evidence, that we waved the shaman on and let him hoya his last hoya all over the joint.

“You seem to have a good head on you for this kinda stuff,” Rory pondered, white hands drumming on his knee. “What kinda paperback hell you crawl outta?”

Brett smiled that sheepish smile before answering. “Well ya see, it’s just familiar that’s all. No cute sob stories, just seen plenty of Wasteland wackos killing like this. If they happen to sprinkle in something fresh like Native myth from halfway across the continent, then you got me thinking.”

“Why all the salt-sowing?” Harry added, the brown-mutt surveying the last room like a health inspector.

“Well, if someone’s able to brand a hound’s skull with a pretty intricate glyph.” Brett replied. “He believes this shit and I don’t see no reason to not play along. That, or the bastard just ain’t real. And it’s the ‘just ain’t real’ bit that gets me.”

Now, as I’m sure y’all can attest, we’re not easily spooked on Hell Patrol. And we weren’t by Brett’s little quip either. There’s always a rational explanation for these things. Some jamoke’s born with a few screws loose and no one to tighten ‘em, hauls off and kills some folks, and we get called in to put him down. And even if we weren’t the most inveterate sleuths in the game, we’d surely be able to find something.

We didn’t find shit for the next week.

The killings had stopped, full-stop. Nothing, nada, ádin. There wasn’t a whole lot in the way of “DNA evidence,” thanks to our analyzers were running on coffee grounds and orthodox prayer. Besides there being a consistent M.O. (ax to head, native graffiti on skull fragments), the suspect list in Danesville was downright impoverished. A lot of the residents were up in years, and half of ‘em couldn’t even pick up an ax, let alone bring it down on someone’s head.

Now, the one thing I always abide by was the polygraph. I’d been tinkering with a new model of one that goes right to the brain instead of just vitals. Like I said earlier, Hell Patrol was running on pocket lint at that particular juncture, so I had to cook up prototypes in private and on my own dime. Either way, we ran both a regular polygraph and my little device on damn near everyone in the town. Beyond a few folks confessing to two robberies, three batteries, and starting a bush fire two weeks before a controlled burn on accident, the folks of Danesville were just fine wolves with their own little foibles. We put in words with sheriffs of nearby towns to keep an eye on any killings with the M.O. mentioned, but still, nothing came up.

And then, one night, it all came into view.

We had gotten done with a set at Doc’s, and we were all plum-beat. Everyone’s throats all screamed out, blisters on the pads of our fingers, whole nine. We get done, pack up our gear, bid adieu to the Oasis crew and all run off to our separate abodes. ‘Cuz Brett’s bunking with me, we have a little drag-race back to my shack before hitting the hay. The Brave won (sonofabitch) and after shooting the shit over one last beer, we’re both out like a light.

I get about two-three hours of sleep before I hear a shot fired. A full-on pulse of five-alarm laser power. I’m up and at ‘em like the Alamo’s back on and book it for Brett’s room, only to stumble my ass over my own bare paws and take one in the schnoz on the hardwood floor. I pick me and my delirium back up, spin round while pulling my pants up, and find myself standing over the body.

He was a red wolf, about my height again, small fists curled around the handle of an ax. Blood pooled from his skull onto Brett’s floor, and up on the bed was the little big man himself with an automatic in hand.

“Hey Nic.” Brett asked me, his tone low.

“Yeah?”

“Check those profiles again.”

We got the body hauled away, and sure enough, the answer was right there all along: all victims were of some native extraction. Some distant tribe or a cocktail therein, didn’t matter. None of them bore it outwardly, not like Brett did with his chokers and fringed suede, and none of them were full-blood either.

To all outward appearances, so read our final debrief, it looked like it was all some strange spiritual crusade in the end. Maybe he hated “half-breeds,” maybe it was internalized what-have-you, that all went to his grave. We worked to get an ID on him, but didn’t have so much as a license on his person, or a car ten miles from my shack. When we went back to Danesville with a police sketch in hand (seeing as the crime scene photos of my house woulda cut their population in half through heart attacks alone), no one knew him. Not even the shaman.

And that was it. Who he was, where he came from, none of us knew. How that primeval mind knew who to pick and where to pick ‘em, none of us knew, not even Brett. That quartet of killings, even after we got our guy, stayed with us for ages.

So naturally, we wrote a song about. And man, was it heavy.

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