Rob Thurman: Moonshine

"The client said there's at least two more, maybe four. Check back in fifteen." He didn't bother to look at a watch. Niko claimed an innate understanding of the inner workings of time, space, and the universe in general. A result of all that meditation and martial arts training, a natural talent, or simply a desire to show up his little brother—whatever the process behind it, Niko lived as an example to us lesser beings. Pointedly, I checked the watch I'd fished out of last week's cereal box. "If I see one balloon animal, I'm waiting in the car." With that, I turned and jogged farther into the small maze of sagging tents.

I'd never been a fan of carnivals. My brother and I had spent a few years off and on in them throughout our childhood. Sophia, our mother—or, to be more precise, our whiskey-swilling egg donor—had plied her trade in some of the more run-down ones in the business. She was a fortune-teller; I didn't know the Latin term for money-grubbing con artist or if it was in any official medical journal, but Sophia hadn't met the nickel she didn't like or the person she wouldn't gleefully rip off.

Boys living in a carnival—it should've been exciting for us, fun. Carnies' kids got the free rides, the night's leftover hot dogs and cotton candy, the freedom to run wild from morning to midnight, when the place closed down. Heaven for anyone under thirteen, right? Heaven for about two and a half days and then the thrill palled quickly enough. It even put me off hot dogs for a few years, and I loved those damn tubes of mystery meat. But try eating them all day, every day for weeks on end with the only veggie of choice being fries or greasy popcorn, and it won't be long before you're trying to shoplift fresh fruit at the nearest store. Incipient scurvy aside, the summers had been miserable stretches of endless heat and humidity. Niko and I spent most nights outside of our tiny trailer with sweat-soaked pillows and a sheet to sleep on. Just Niko and me under a sweltering soup of stars. Sophia liked her private time. She made money that way too. Infinitely practical, Niko had called her. Nothing like a bunch of fancy words when one of five letters would've done just fine.

Eventually Sophia outstayed her welcome and we moved on. Haven't gone to a carnival since. I also have a love of air-conditioning that will never die. Luckily, it was spring now. The only sweat on me was a cold one, prickling the nape of my neck. Damn clowns. Leaving footprints in the damp dirt, I padded along in socked feet trying to follow the bodach scent. It was so strong now your average human could've picked up on it, no creature-feature DNA needed at all. At the base of the Ferris wheel I circled once, then looked up with pessimistic expectation. Sure enough, the son of a bitch was waving at me. Waving, threatening to eviscerate—it was one of the two. Exhaling, I holstered my gun and checked out the controls. The wiring was torn out in massive chunks, making the ride as dead and petrified as it had appeared from the beginning. Adding insult to injury, my final poke in the innards of the control box had the wheel's white lights flickering and dying.

Wonderful. Goddamn wonderful.

My socks went the way of my shoes and I began to climb. I wasn't afraid of heights. A nice, normal fear like that? Where would be the amusement factor there? But as I pulled myself up by metal handholds covered in soot and grease and felt the slide of oil under my grasping toes all in near-total darkness, I wouldn't have minded saying I'd had better days. Within seconds the ground below disappeared, swallowed up by blackness. If you fell, you would have no idea when you would hit… until you did. Some would consider that a blessing. Not me—I liked to see the bad news before it took me down. Continuing upward with a grunted exhalation, I felt a quick bite to the heel of my hand and the warm flow of blood. From the dull twinge it wasn't too bad and I kept on. Far above, one car rocked rhythmically… back and forth, back and forth. It was almost hypnotic, the motion.

"Cradle will rock," the voice crooned from above. Barbwire and ice, acid-etched glass, not exactly made for singing. Like an ice pick through the ear, it went on and on. "Rockabye. Baby. Rockabye."

Nursery rhymes and the smiling face of a child's supposed best friend. Bodachs might not be the most powerful of the monsters out there, but they seemed to be smart… in their own predatory way. Whether they were smart enough remained to be seen. With four of them in a place like this, it amazed me the place wasn't swarming with cops. They couldn't have been here long or children would've gone missing by now. Lots and lots of children. Up until now I hadn't heard of bodachs. No big surprise. There were lots of boogetys that hadn't pinged on my radar. If it hadn't tried to eat me in the past and wasn't currently gnawing on me in the present, I wasn't going to worry about it. Let Niko memorize the mythology section of the public library; he loved that stuff. Or get the scoop from our new business partner. She had contacts in the after-sundown crowd. If that failed, hit up our friend by default Goodfellow. He'd been around since the dawn of time, our own Avatar of Annoyance; if he didn't know about it, it didn't exist. One way or the other somebody—somebody besides me, that is—could get the info and fill me in. And if Niko wanted to photocopy the picture and blurb about our current baddie and pin it to my jacket, I actually might read it on the ride over. Or I might finish the latest naughty women-in-prison paperback instead. You just never knew.

I kept climbing and the bodach kept serenading. That alone would've been enough for me to kill it. When I had nearly reached the apex of the metal framework, the car continued to rock about two feet above my head. Bracing myself, I balanced as best as I could, then snagged the rising and falling lip of the metal bucket with both hands and surged over it. A red-and-green-clad back was turned to me, the colors appearing as pastel shadows of themselves as the clouds parted overhead to reveal a pale sliver of moon. Wig gone, white paint smeared to show patches of the wrinkled brown skin of its hairless head, the bodach continued to rock, shaking the metal beneath my feet.

"Rockabye, baby," came its singsong. "Rockabye."

It was enough. More than enough. If my ears weren't bleeding already, they soon would be. "Bozo," I growled. "You need to shut the hell up." Reluctantly, I left the gun in its holster. I couldn't be sure of the result of firing an explosive round up here, but catapulting headfirst to the ground was a possibility that would end my bodach-hunting days but quick.

It ignored me. I wasn't offended. My brother did it all the time. No, being ignored didn't offend me, but neither did it stop me from puncturing its spinal column with ten inches of Teflon-coated steel. I didn't give it a second chance to turn around. I wouldn't have given it a first if the caterwauling hadn't driven me to the edge. It was a predator, a child-eating monster. I was going to kill it regardless. Why the hell would I wait for it to turn around? As the knife slid home with a crunch of bone and a spurt of moon-silvered blood, the bodach folded quietly forward. There was no twitching, no thrashing, and no more goddamn singing, just blessed silence. Notch one on the Cal side of the board. Still grasping the handle of the knife, I placed a foot on the bodach's back and gave a hard yank without results. Those suckers didn't come cheap, and I liked this one. I wasn't leaving it. I tried again. Trapped in bone, the blade still wouldn't budge. Swearing, I added my other hand to the grip and gave one last yank. With the harsh sound of metal against stone, the knife finally pulled free. I held it aloft and gave it a flip to free it of excess blood. "Long live the king," I muttered under my breath.