Free Snake Handlin' Man by D. J. Butler

white canvas overhead was sagging quickly towards him, but he pushed up, hoping against hope that Overalls wouldn’t bite his head off in the meantime, and kept the tent from collapsing.
    And Overalls didn’t bite him. Overalls rolled out of the way, squirming to get out of the tent.
    Eddie lurched to his knees, climbing the pole like a ladder. He let the shotgun down to his hip and whipped out the Glock. The tent was down and blocking his view, but he knew his friends were all behind him or to the side because the tent was still up, so he pointed the pistol at the canvas, thumbed the selective fire switch to automatic mode and squeezed off two short bursts.
    The gun bucked pleasantly in his hand and punched two streaks into the white cloth. When the tent opened again in the breeze, Eddie saw what had sprung past him—
    the Nehushtan, the red serpent on the cross, had joined the fray. It slithered ahead of the lurching tent, throwing wide jaws that were impossibly elastic. A huge snake, thick around as a tree trunk and with a gaping mouth at each end of its body, rose hissing to contest its right of way.
    The ruby Nehushtan swallowed the human-sized snake monster in a single bite.
    “Holy Moses,” Eddie muttered, but he saw the path to the van opening ahead of them. “Run!” he barked, and then he remembered the tent: “I mean, jog!”
    They hustled down the hill. The van was two hundred feet away, and Eddie emptied out the Glock’s clip at a thing with two heads. One hundred feet, and Mike tripped over a hole in the ground, like the entrance to a prairie dog’s warren. He slipped and fell to one knee, and Jim dragged him to his feet.
    Fifty feet and the tent fell away. It just slipped right off the crossbeams and bounced to the ground behind them like a bride’s thrown veil.
    Irving stopped singing and shrieked. Eddie looked over his shoulder, afraid he’d see the preacher lying on the ground. To his relief, and prodded by Jim, the man was still running, and he still held the cross on his shoulder.
    But the Nehushtan wasn’t eating snakes anymore. It was slithering towards Phineas Irving like it wanted to get back on its pole. Despite all it had eaten, it was the same size as it had always been and moved quick as thinking.
    Behind it, in a wall, the mutant snake-people and the rattlers rolled down the hill towards them.
    “Start the car!” Eddie yelled. “Reverse!”
    Mike was surprisingly fleet of foot with an army of snakes on his tail, and the big man beat Eddie to the Dodge, throwing himself into the driver’s seat and gunning the engine to life. Jim grabbed the preacher by the scruff of his neck just as the rubescent serpent slithered back onto its perch and hurled the man and the artifact both into the back seat of the van. Twitch didn’t waste time or risk a bottleneck, simply changing shape into his falcon self and bursting into flight over the crappy brown van.
    “In!” Mike yelled. The mongooses scrambled into the van as if taking his orders.
    Eddie stepped into the back seat of the van and grabbed the hand strap behind the shotgun seat. “Go!” he roared, and jammed his second clip into the Glock. Still set to automatic fire, he squeezed the trigger into the wave of descending serpent flesh, letting the snakes have it as Mike threw the Dodge into reverse and slammed backwards down the road towards town.
    Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
    Eddie dropped Many Arms in his tracks, if only for a moment, and sent Snake Legged Man lurching sideways behind brush for cover. As he ran out of ammo, Jim joined him from the back seat, firing with one of the pistols lying on the floor of the van. Phineas Irving’s Enfield stayed silent, though. Eddie spared him a glance and saw that the man was shaking. He was conscious, and looked lucid, but he looked scared half to death. His mongoose guard dogs slunk around his feet in the trash that cluttered the van’s floor.
    They retreated from the rise, the preacher’s