Read Snake Handlin' Man for Free Online

sometimes the same thing. Only I don’t know what this other thing is.” He turned the pamphlet over and read the end of it again. “Apep.”
    “Oh, that’s easy,” said Twitch. “That’s not from the Bible.”
    “I know that,” Eddie rumbled. “So what is it?” He saw a row of naked men, pinned to the road in front of the Dodge with long jagged wooden spikes like thorns through their bellies. The van rolled over them with the same bumping it made on the dirt road, and Eddie was glad for the new vision of torment—it was brief, and it almost helped him forget the frozen Hell-Sears.
    Almost.
    “Apep is one of the Egyptians,” Twitch said lightly. “He’s a snake, as it happens.”
    “Or maybe not just as it happens ,” Eddie countered. “ Snakes seem to be the order of the day.”
    “ Mierda .”
    “Right.” Twitch considered. “Well, that’s not good. He’s not thought of as one of the good ones, not even by the Egyptians, and you know how crazy they can be. Bird-headed men and dogs with aardvark snouts and all that crazy mixing up of forms.” He grinned mischievously. “Hilarious.”
    “What does he do?” Eddie asked.
    “Ah …” Twitch thought. “I don’t know. Eats people. He’s a giant snake, what do giant snakes do? Shed giant skin? Dance for giant flute players? Live under giant sheds?”
    “So we got an Egyptian snake god on a pamphlet printed by a guy who preaches under the sign of the snake, which we found in the car of a woman who gave birth to a bunch of snakes that ate her alive.” Eddie grabbed the Remington 870, checked its magazine and shoved a handful of shells into his pocket. “That about sum it up?”
    “And Adrian was bitten by a snake,” Twitch reminded him.
    Jim pointed again. At the top of a very slight rise sagged a dilapidated yellow and blue double-wide trailer. Above it, a tilted rusty weathervane rooster dawdled lazily back and forth, and to one side, half-collapsed and leaning right up against the wall of the trailer, slouched a big dirty canvas tent. At the start of the dirt track that turned off and led to the trailer, a sheet of plywood hung nailed to a lashed tripod of two-by-fours. On the plywood was painted a ragged cross, and a long snake coiled around it, meeting the viewer’s gaze with beady eyes and flickering tongue.
    “Friendly,” Mike joked.
    “Cheerful!” Twitch added.
    “Better than Sears,” Eddie shot back. “Best park the van here. We don’t want to go in guns blazing, in case we need this guy’s help.”
    Mike stopped the van and they piled out. Jim took his sword this time, buckling its belt around his waist right over his jeans. Twitch looked unarmed, but he was always able to produce those wooden batons he used both to play the drums and to pound the minions of Hell over the head. Mike had the .45 semi-auto he’d picked up in New Mexico tucked into his belt; as an afterthought, he grabbed a knife out of the driver’s side door pocket and stuck it in his pants.
    It was Eddie’s van, more or less, and he tried to keep it full of weapons. It was easy enough, when you didn’t really have to worry about questions from the cops.
    Eddie carried the Glock in its shoulder holster and the Remington hanging off a sling. His old green jacket’s pockets were stuffed full of things that could be useful, too, though most of them weren’t weapons per se—pocket knives, a compass, string, a deck of playing cards, matches, duct tape, that sort of thing. The duct tape especially came in handy when you played in the kind of band where your gear was always falling apart. He had a couple of odd knick-knacks that really just had emotional value, too, he could admit to himself, like a plastic cup full of jacks and a red bouncing ball. In a pinch, he could kill a person with any one of those things, if nothing else, by stuffing them down the poor bastard’s throat.
    Even the jacks.
    Giant snake gods, he was less sure about.
    The afternoon sun