Snake Handlin' Man Read Online Free Page A

asked. “We find a cure for the poison before Adrian wakes up?”
    “Or his wards of sleeping wear off. Or he just dies,” Twitch agreed. “Humans are so fragile.”
    “Humans?” Owen asked, and then he shook his head. “Never mind.”
    “Adrian told me three hours,” Eddie shared. “That doesn’t sound like very much time to me.”
    “That’d just about get you to show time,” the big club manager observed.
    “Perfect,” Eddie grunted. “Our sound really depends on those big organ chords. You got cops in this town?”
    “No, but it ain’t that big a county,” Owen said. “Sheriff could be here sooner than you’d think.”
    Eddie nodded and climbed to his feet. Standing, he saw the dead trucker, and beside the trucker, the corpses of the two old ladies. They were all swollen and purple in the face. The heat scorched him, making his burned cheeks throb sympathetically, but he dragged himself around behind the counter and looked down at the corpse. At Samantha’s body, he forced himself to say.
    Poor girl.
    At least the gnawing fangs of her unholy serpent children had hidden the mark of Eddie’s bullet hole. He sighed and dug around in her pockets. Sometimes this could be the world’s worst gig.
    “Car keys,” he announced as he found them. “Nothing else.”
    “We gotta get Adrian’s body,” Mike said, “I mean, we gotta get Adrian out of here.”
    Owen stooped to one knee and picked up the wizard in a quick, practiced fireman’s carry. Eddie liked the club manager—he was a practical, can-do sort of guy. “I’ll carry him across the street to the club,” Owen offered. “At least until the ambulance gets here.”
    “No hospital is going to be able to help our organist, poor boy,” Twitch observed. “Unless you mean a nunnery…? There are orders of sisters still passing down the old healing arts, though I didn’t know there were any in Oklahoma.”
    “No, I … what?” the accountant looked puzzled.
    “Never mind,” Eddie told him. “If you can take him to the club, that would be great. Don’t tell anybody he’s there, and don’t let the EMTs get him, if you can help it. With Adrian’s luck, they’d just undo his wards and kill him. We’re going to have to look into this poison ourselves, and find a cure.” He looked pointedly at the flames licking up along the ceiling and headed for the door.
    The burly club manager pushed out the door first, not even breathing hard from his burden—Adrian was a solidly-built guy, but he was short. Mike followed, then Twitch, then Eddie, holding the car keys. Jim exited last, looking around the diner as the flames charged out of the kitchen and into the rest of the building, as if daring more snakes to show their scaly heads.
    Jim was no paladin, but the guy really hated evil, and had a jones for whupping its backside whenever he could.
    Speaking of backsides, Eddie’s hurt. He limped into the gravel parking lot next to the diner, looking for a car in the pale afternoon sun. Pale, but really hot. Eddie would have been pathetically grateful for just two minutes of Chicago winter.
    “I’ll have him when you’re ready,” Owen grunted, and headed across the street for his club.
    The town wasn’t much more than a crossroads, Highway 56 and some nameless county road that cut out at right angles through the fields of dryland wheat. Everything out in this part of the world was right angles, it seemed to Eddie. Showed a lack of imagination. There wasn’t a rise of land higher than six feet in sight, and the enormous watery-blue sky was broken at the margins only by about a dozen buildings. The diner was nameless, a third-rate imitation of a Denny’s built entirely of plywood and now burning. Correia’s across the street looked like it might once have been a barn, built of corrugated steel and windows covered in iron bars and chicken wire. The two neon signs in its windows read BEER and GIRLS . Past the bar was a combination gas station /