Bloodstained Oz (14 page)

      Elisa and Hank didn’t seem to hear her.
Several more of the monsters came darting down out of the night sky, moonlight
gleaming on their black wings. They wouldn’t come too close, not with all the
crosses the man and woman on the wagon’s seat wore. It was as though they were
just trying to make Hank and Elisa angry.

      “What are they doing?” Elisa cried.

      Hank set the shotgun down behind him and
stood in a crouch, shovel in his hands. Gayle cried out to him, afraid he
would tumble overboard if the wagon hit a rut. But Hank slapped one of the
monsters out of the air without losing his balance. He was strong and fast.

      “They won’t attack us, so what are they
bothering for?” Elisa asked, whipping the reins upon the horses again.

      The horses surged forward, throwing Hank
back into his seat. The shovel fell from his hands and clattered over the edge
of the wagon.

      “They want to slow us down,” Hank said,
his voice a rumble. He turned to Elisa. “Why would they—”

      All three of them heard the lion’s roar.
It tore across the night sky. Gayle held her breath, terror gripping her.
The lion had no crucifixes and no weapons other then his strength and his jaws.
He had no safe wagon to ride within.

      “No!” she cried, and she scrambled to
the back of the wagon.

      Careful not to put her hands or face
outside, she pulled the flaps open so that she had a view of the road behind
them. They were moving up a hill now and the horses were slowing a bit. The
slope wasn’t much, but still there was an incline.

      The lion had fallen behind. There were
vampire monkeys swarming around him, slowing him, keeping him from catching up
with the wagon. He stood on his hind legs and began to tear at the monkeys,
claws slashing them, stomping them into the dirt.

      Then he was free, for just a moment, and
he lunged forward, barreling up the hill after them. Once more he roared, and
there was such sadness in it that Gayle felt her own grief anew.

      “Kalidah!” the lion growled. “Leave
them!”

      Gayle frowned. She was about to shout
back to him, ask him what he was talking about.

      Then there came another jungle roar,
just as loud and thunderous as the lion’s. But it was not the lion. The sound
was too close, off to the right. She threw herself to one side and pulled the
flap back to see at an angle, and there it was, running at the edge of the
road, catching up to the wagon.

      The thing was bigger than the lion. It
had the head of a tiger but its body was more like an enormous, lumbering bear.
In the moonlight she could see that its fur was streaked orange and black.
Tiger stripes.

      Kalidah. That was what the lion called
it.

      Gayle screamed, rigid with fear, unable
even to drop the curtain so that she would not have to see it anymore. The
Kalidah heard her and even as it lunged for the back of the wagon, it looked at
her with its bright red eyes and bared long, bloody fangs in a terrible grin.

      But she had distracted it. Her scream
must have made Elisa snap the reins, for the horses redoubled their efforts.
The wagon surged forward and the Kalidah faltered. For a moment it stumbled on
the road.

      Then the lion was upon it.

      All around the wagon she heard the
screaming of the flying monkeys, but now the vicious little vampire beasts left
the wagon alone, darting back to help the Kalidah. The two jungle creatures
roared and got up on their hind legs. They batted at one another with their
claws, slashing deep furrows into flesh, spilling blood on the dusty road.

      But Gayle knew that the Kalidah was a
vampire. Claws would not kill him. He could be drained of blood completely
and would only continue to seek more.

      The monkeys were attacking the lion
then. There were only a few of them left and he leaped away from the Kalidah
for a moment, snatching a monkey out of the air with his jaws, biting its head
off even as he shattered a second one with one paw.

      The Kalidah roared again, and it laughed
with a sound that seemed to come from the night itself, from all of the arid
fields and dead crops and all of the spilled blood from that long, terrible
night.

      Gayle tore herself away, staggering to
the front of the wagon. She pushed her face up to the little window to find
Elisa whipping the reins, driving the horses even harder. Hank had the shotgun
aimed at the fields off to the left—the north—where a miserable
little crop of thistle grew on a small farm.

      “You have to stop and help him!” the
girl said. “Please. He saved me. Saved all of us. It’s going to kill him.”

      Hank spun and looked down at her. “We
can’t stop. Look!”

      He gestured with the barrel of the
shotgun and she peered into the night. At first she had missed it, but now she
wondered how she could not have seen the dozens of tiny lights glowing in the
darkness of the thistle field, glowing sickly green and moving quickly across
that dead farm toward the road, moving as though to cut off the wagon up ahead.

      “Those are the things that attacked the
prison,” Hank said, glancing down at the little girl. “They’ve got emeralds
for eyes and their faces . . . their teeth . . . Jesus, I’d rather face any of
the other things we’ve seen.”

      Elisa risked a glance back.

      “Gayle, we don’t even know if the
crosses will frighten them.”

      “But the lion,” Gayle said, pleading,
staring at Elisa first and then looking to Hank. “We can’t just . . . you
can’t leave him. You can’t just
run away
.”

      Hank flinched as though she’d struck
him. He turned on her, anger flashing in his eyes, a cruelty she would not
have expected him to have.

      “Now you listen to me, little
girl—“ he began. But then he faltered, as though he had lost track of
his words. Hank looked at the emerald-eyed vampires sprinting through the
darkness toward them, so fleet over the rough terrain of the thistle field, and
then he looked down at his hands.

      There was a green glow by his right
hand. Something in his pocket had begun to shine with the same tainted green
light as the eyes of the vampires that had slaughtered everyone at his prison.

      Hank closed his eyes. He reached into
his pocket and brought out his fist, the green light glowing between his
fingers as he clutched the object in his hand.

      “Damn it,” he whispered.

      Then he opened his eyes again. He
shoved the glowing emerald back into his pocket and made sure the hatchet was
secure in his belt. His shovel was gone, but he picked up the shotgun in both
hands again and turned to Elisa.

      “Whatever happens, keep on going. We’ll
catch up.”

      “What are you talking about?” the woman
said, risking a glance at him as she spurred the horses on. “What’s going to
happen?”

      Hank tapped the glowing gem in his
pocket. “Those things, they want this. I can buy you some time.” He smiled
at Gayle. “And the lion needs my help.”

      Gayle smiled back.

      “No! What’s wrong with you? You fool,
you’re just a man. They’ll tear you apart.”

      “And if they catch up to the wagon,
maybe they’ll tear us all apart,” Hank said. He reached in through the window
and took Gayle’s hand. He squeezed it, and she saw the pain in his eyes. Then
he looked back at Elisa. “I’ve been running away my whole life. It’s time I
stopped.”

      Then he took his hand back and touched
the crucifixes against his chest, though Gayle was never certain if he was
gesturing to them, or to himself, to the courage in his own heart.

      “Have a little faith,” he said.

      The hill had slowed the horses down a
bit, but they were still going fast. Hank braced himself and then jumped from
the seat. He hit the ground and rolled with the impact, but then the wagon was
hurtling past him and Gayle couldn’t see him anymore.

      Elisa screamed at him, angry and
terrified, but she kept on driving the horses. Gayle watched her quietly for a
moment. Tears streaked Elisa’s face as she snapped the reins, driving the
horses ever harder.

      Gayle went to the back of the wagon
again. She pulled the flaps open and peered out at the dusty road behind.
Hank ran back toward where the lion and the Kalidah were tearing one another
apart, roaring as though he himself were a third jungle beast, come to join the
fray. Some of the monkeys screamed and flew at him, and Gayle heard the boom
of the shotgun.

      Off across the thistle field, the filthy
green, glowing eyes of the emerald vampires turned, following Hank . . .
pursuing whatever it was he had taken that belonged to them. They were like
ghosts in the night, drifting so swiftly across the dead farmland, haunting what
remained of Kansas in the dust bowl.

      The wagon reached the top of the rise.
The horses picked up speed as the terrain flattened out and they didn’t have to
work as hard. As they crested the hill, Gayle lost sight of Hank and the lion
and of the monsters that thirsted for their blood.

      Slowly, Gayle made her way once more to
the little window and she looked out past Elisa, now alone up on the seat. She
searched the night sky and the road ahead, but there was no sign of trouble.

      The road took them east, toward sunrise.
With every step, the horses drew them closer to morning.

      Gayle touched one of the crucifixes on
the wall and said a silent prayer for her friends. It was a careful prayer,
with a wish that they would be safe, not simply that she would see them again.
The difference was important. After all, God could be a real son of a bitch
when He wanted to.

      To Gayle, it felt like the storm that
had come through the day before had swept her up, that a tornado had ripped her
from her home and now carried her through the dust and the darkness toward some
unknown land. And after the storm, what then? She had seen rainbows, pretty
colors in the sky, when a storm had been through, but she found it hard to
imagine anything beautiful coming from this.

      Happy ending were for storybooks.

      Soon, Elisa stopped crying, and Gayle
allowed herself to think that maybe they’d make it to sunrise after all. But
there were hours of darkness still to go, and the dust was rising off the road,
so she did not dare give in to hope. Gayle put her hope away, and would not
let it out again until she could feel the warmth of the sun on her face.

      Or until she saw the rainbow.