Bloodstained Oz (9 page)

      “Let him go!” she screamed, and she
began to back up against the wagon, trying to pull her baby in with her.

      The monkey stared at her with red eyes
and snarled. It dug its claws into the baby’s arms and beat its wings, pulling
at him. The skin of his arms tore and blood began to run like tears down over
his body. Jeremiah shook, wracked with pain and gasping for air, but so
overwhelmed he was unable to cry or shriek.

      The monkey laughed.

      “No!” Elisa cried, and she pulled,
beyond all reason now.

      The thing hissed, fangs bared, and beat
its wings harder, tugging at Jeremiah again. The baby’s left leg twisted in
Elisa’s hand and she heard the bone snap like dry wood.

      Horrified at what she had done, she
loosened her grip, just for a moment. The monkey pulled him from her and then
it was flying up, up into the darkness, cloaked in blackest night, only the
pale skin of her baby visible for a moment, until Jeremiah, too, was lost in
the dark sky.

      Numb, she stared after him –

      – until that terrible, devil
laugh, that chittering, came once more, all too close. Elisa looked up and saw
three of them moving toward her now, all splashed with blood from the horses
and from her husband. A fourth remained on Stefan’s corpse, nuzzling his
throat, face painted with his gore. Slowly, the others moved toward her.

      Elisa had nowhere else to go. She
climbed into the wagon and sat on the bed, realizing only when she glanced at
her hands that her hands and face and clothes were sprinkled with her baby’s
blood.

      She waited.

      Wings fluttered. Things thumped on the
roof. Red eyes gleamed as they watched her from the openings at the front and
back of the wagon.

      But they would not enter.

      For long, long minutes she thought they
were only tormenting her. Then the wind blew and Stefan’s rosary swung in the
breeze and her eyes focused on all of the crucifixes inside the wagon. Her
mind went back to the legends of the old country, and she understood.

      Elisa had no faith. She had never
believed in God, or the Devil.

      It was Stefan’s faith that had saved
her.

      If she could wait, they would give up and
leave her in time, or morning would come and they would retreat from the sun.
If madness did not claim her first.

      Shaking, she reached out and took the
nearest crucifix from the wall, a tiny thing carved of ivory. Her fingers
traced the Christ figure, imbued with her husband’s belief, his certainty.
Stefan had bought this cross for her when Jeremiah had been born, so that God
could watch over her baby.

     
God
,
she thought, jaw tight. Tears slid down her cheeks and sobs wracked her body.
The sound of her baby’s bone snapping was still in her ears, the feeling of him
still warm against her, the smell of his blood all over her.

      He existed, after all, the Lord did.
But He was a demon in His own right.

      She held the cross in her hands and she
rocked on the bed, refusing to look at the red eyes glowing in the darkness
outside. Elisa hummed softly to herself, and waited for morning.

      “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got
that swing.”

      The need to pee got the best of Gayle.
Despite her desire to hide away in the closet forever; she left the safety of
the darkness and dared her bedroom. The room was empty, devoid of dolls and
whatever it was that had scratched at her door. Her bed was a mess and her
clothes were scattered all over the floor. For a second she thought how upset
her mother would be and then she closed her eyes and swallowed hard,
remembering the sound of her mother’s scream and the sudden impact that had
shook the floor beneath her.

      Gayle closed her closet door and looked
more closely at the wood in the moonlight. Whatever had been whispering to her
had scraped thick gouges into the door. She stepped back and gasped when she
saw that her name had been carved there.

      She left her bedroom, walking as softly
as she could, her heart beating far too fast. A few small signs of her flight
from the porcelain monsters remained in the hall, fragments of colored dust and
a small piece that clearly showed an ear.

      Gayle managed to make it down the stairs
without falling, but her body trembled with every step. Her parents were down
there. She’d seen them and had thought for sure they were dead when she came
across their bodies. But she had heard their voices after that, when she was
hiding in the closet, and so now she wondered.

      She had to know.

Gayle walked into the room where she had last seen her parents and
found no sign of their bodies. Instead she saw the sofa upended and cast to
the far wall. A deep red splotch soaked slowly into the floorboards.
That’s where Daddy was…
Her heart slowed
down, seemed to almost freeze in her chest, and she sighed out a breath from
numb lips.

      Her mother had been on that sofa
earlier. There was no sign of her now, but the simple floral pattern of the
fabric was black and wet with blood.

      Gayle ran through the house, eyes wide
as she searched every room. Frantic, she called for her parents, but there
came no answer. When she at last allowed herself to admit that she was
utterly, completely alone, she crumbled to the ground, rocking back and forth,
a soft whine escaping her throat. Tears fell from her eyes, and she tasted the
salt on her lips.

      It was the sound of the horses that
brought her back to herself. They were agitated, and their ruckus was enough
to reach her in her despair. A spark of hope ignited. The horses would carry
her away from the farm, let her find help, someone to search for her folks.

      Gayle shook her head to clear it and
stood up, swaying slightly as she headed for the back door. She stepped out
into the darkness, the moonlight pale and ghostly. The barn was a hulking
shape, little more than a black silhouette in the night. She looked around,
afraid that little figures might scurry from hiding, that the porcelain people
would return. Then she took a deep breath to steel herself and ran for the
barn.

      The wind picked up and kicked grit into
her eyes and mouth. She squinted and ran faster.

A voice on the wind stopped her cold.

      “
This
is Kansas? What happened
here? Where are the fields of grain? What happened to the rivers?”

It was the same voice that she had heard outside the closet, that
knowing, insinuating, commanding voice. After those words the voice paused and
Gayle listened until she realized that other, weaker voices answered.

The monster was here, yes, and so were all of the porcelain dolls.

Gayle craned her head and tried to hear the man’s words. Whatever the
doll people said was lost to the wind, only the low chatter of their voices
reached her ears.

“No, of course I don’t care,” their master said. “Everyone here is
going to die. It’s just strange to find it changed so much.”

The man’s laugh was ugly and frightening and more than a bit crazy.
“Then again, after all I’ve been through, becoming
this
, and then being spirited off to your world, who am I to say
what’s strange? Monsters and witches and talking tin men . . . people from
around here, well, their minds would just snap if they’d seen what I’ve seen.
Ah, but I do miss the Emerald City.”

Then there was silence as the wind shifted, blowing from behind Gayle
now and toward the barn, from which the voices issued. In the near darkness
she saw him for the first time, a pale, lean man with wild hair and eyes that
glittered in the darkness. He was still far away, but not so distant that she
couldn’t see him tilt his head back and sniff the air like a hound before
turning to look directly at her.

“Well, we have company.”

Gayle froze, breath caught in her throat.

He took two steps toward her and stopped, facing her in the moonlight.
She could see his clothes, plain and outdated, but functional. She could see
his face, with the broad nose and the cruel, thin lips.

“It is so nice to finally meet you, child.”

The man’s face twisted into an ugly smile and his impossibly sharp
teeth glinted in the night.

“What have you done to my folks?”

Gayle barely even recognized her own voice.

“They’re here. Resting. Soon they will be back, but I can take you to
them now if you’d like.”

His words dripped with false sincerity, like that awful man who’d come
by in the spring promising salvation from all the evils of the world if only
her father would give him money. Gayle shook her head and blinked her eyes
against the sting of grit and unshed tears. He was lying. The worst part was
that she wanted so very much to believe him.

“What did we ever do to you? Why did you hurt my folks?” Gayle
screamed, her voice cracked and dry, even as fresh tears came and washed the
dust away.

His eyes narrowed into angry slashes against the chalky backdrop of his
flesh and he took another step toward her. She stepped back to compensate, to
keep him away, and with a flick of his wrist he gestured toward the porcelain
dolls, a silent command that set them in motion.

They rushed to attack her.

“I need them, child. The smell of their blood was maddening. You’d
understand if all you’d had to feast on was the vile broth from the veins of
monkeys and dwarves.”

The dolls ran across the rough ground, their feet silent in the dirt,
faces gleaming in the moonlight. Gayle fled, running away from the barn, her
home, and everything she knew.

“Bring her to me! Bring her alive and still warm!”

Gayle ran for her life, small legs pumping beneath her, her vision
blurred and her breath hitching in her chest. The smaller dolls fell behind
quickly, but several of the larger ones kept pace and began to gain on her.
And far behind them all, moving with the casual grace of a natural born
predator, the pale man followed.

She had almost made it to the road when one of the dolls managed to
snag her foot. Her arms flew out as she fell. Her cry of fear was cut short
when she hit the ground, and the wind was knocked out of her.

They came at her in a wave, tiny delicate figures and larger, stronger
dolls that grabbed with cold fingers. Gayle caught her breath and screamed
again, a wail of disgust and terror, as they started moving in, the impossibly
animated faces grinning gleefully.

From a dozen yards away the pale man watched, nodding his satisfaction,
his red eyes burning brightly against the backdrop of the moon.

Hank stumbled along, winded and parched, as the thick dusty air moved
around him like a shroud. He gripped the scythe he had taken from the prison
so tightly that his knuckles hurt. Hawley was just ahead, around the next
bend. There would be help there, a little bit of sanity. He could rest, find
shelter. And if anyone doubted his word and wanted to go out to the prison to
check things out, well, that was up to them. But he wasn’t going back there.
Not ever.

He’d been moving as quickly as he could and running almost completely
on instinct as he traveled. But now as he got closer to Hawley he heard the
sounds—screams in the distance, both human and otherwise—and
realized that his hopes were wasted.

Nothing to do now but keep going, and pray that the next town was still
untouched. Still, he had to go into Hawley. If he wanted to get out of here,
he was going to need transport of some kind. So he moved toward the sounds of
people screaming and dying, but he did so with great caution and a tight grip
on his scythe.

He was expecting the worst, and he got it in spades. Careful, sneaking
around corners and hesitating at every shadow, he moved through the town.
Several times things ran past him in the night, and he knew that if they got
close enough, they would be able to smell him. These were not the monsters
with the emerald eyes, but other things, just as bloodthirsty, but smaller.
Like children.

There were dead people everywhere he went, and most of them had not
died easily. He passed the body of a woman who might once have been young and
pretty. Her clothes were half torn from her body and she was covered in bite
wounds, most of them small enough to have come from children. Worse still, he
could see that she’d been with child and something had taken the time to tear
the unborn baby from her belly. What little remained of the newly forming
infant had been discarded like so much trash and left a trail of wet black dirt
that ran all the way back to the expectant mother’s corpse.

Not far away from the dead woman another body lay face down. The wind
hadn’t yet obscured the remains of the struggle, and Hank could see the signs
on the dirt that showed the man on the ground had fought hard against what must
have been an army of children.