Ghostwalkers (18 page)

“Again—so what?”

“So, Doctor Saint was able to process enough of it to power some of his weapons.”

“Ah,” said Grey, nodding.

“Ah, indeed. When he returns here, Doctor Saint will continue his extraction process, and that will give us something more than fisticuffs, harsh language, and the odd bullet or two to help us in our campaign.”

“
Campaign
?” asked Jenny, Brother Joe, and Grey, all at the same time.

Looks Away's lips curled into a thoroughly devious smile. Very nearly malicious.

“Oh yes, my friends,” he said. “Between Nolan Chesterfield and Aleksander Deray this little town is being squeezed dry and crushed flat. They are clearly willing to brutalize men of the cloth and innocent women to protect their property, and the property in question is water necessary for basic human survival. Is it really a debatable point that they've crossed a line in the sand? This is no longer about property. These men are trying to either drive us all out, or insure that everyone here dies. As a Sioux, I believe I understand that kind of thinking better than anyone else at this table. Before we formed our own nation my people were being driven to the edge of extinction. We fought back. We made a stand. Not because we think we're better—though, I have my own thoughts on that subject—but because we believe that being born comes with certain rights. Your Declaration of Independence has, I believe, some verbiage to that effect. Inalienable rights. Life is notable among them. Chesterfield and Deray want to take that away from us. I do not believe
they
have that right. So, I think it is high time we stop bending our collective necks to the chopping block and make our own stand.”

There was a heavy, thoughtful silence following his speech. Brother Joe was the first to break it.

“I can't agree to anything that involves killing. My vows—.”

“—are all very admirable, Brother,” said Looks Away. “We're not asking you to do any actual fighting. You are skilled in medicine, I believe?”

“I'm not a doctor, but I know something about herbs and healing draughts.”

“Good enough. You can fix us if we get dented.”

“I'll damn well fight,” declared Jenny Pearl, her eyes blazing. “Those bastards took everything I have, including my pa.”

They all looked at Grey.

“You already know where I stand,” he said. “But before we—.”

Whatever else he was going to say was cut off by a terrible high-pitched scream. It was not the spectral howl of the demon storm.

This was the scream of a child.

Human.

Close.

Screaming in fear and in pain.

Outside in the rain.

 

Chapter Thirty

Grey and Looks Away launched themselves from their chairs and ran through the house to the front door. Grey whipped it open but stinging rain struck his face, driving him back. Even though the storm had slackened, the raindrops still felt like acid.

“You can't go out there!” cried Brother Joe, pushing past him to close the door.

“The Hell I can't,” snapped Grey.

“The rain will kill you.”

That almost stopped Grey and in the space of one heartbeat the fear that was always simmering inside his chest nearly drowned the dented honor that used to define who he was. Maybe if it had been only Looks Away there with him he might have stayed, but Jenny looked too much like Annabelle, and he could not allow himself to be a coward in her eyes.

You're a damn fool, he told himself.

And he mentally told that part of himself to go to hell.

“Here!” yelled Jenny as she dug an oilskin poncho from the closet and threw it to Grey. He snatched it out of the air and quickly pulled it on. It must have belonged to her father because it was too big for Grey, but that was fine. Larger meant more protection.

“Do you have another?” demanded Looks Away.

“Upstairs in the trunk,” said Jenny, starting for the stairs, but Looks Away dashed past her and took the steps two at a time.

A second scream tore the night. Higher and more terrible.

Without waiting for the Sioux, Grey opened the door and flung himself into the storm.

The wind was intensifying even though there was less rain. Great gusts swept up the street toward him, seeming to attack, to try and drive him away. Riding the wind came the howls of damned things. Grey bulled his way into it. Hitting the wind was like pushing against a wall, and the muddy ground tried to catch and hold his booted feet. Even with the poncho the rain found openings at wrist and ankle and below the brim of his hat and stung like a swarm of bees.

He tried to hear through the wailing wind to orient himself, but almost at once there was no need for that. A figure came racing up the street toward him. Small. A little girl of no more than seven or eight. Red hair streamed behind her like a horse's mane and her face was as pale as a corpse.

Except where it was streaked with blood.

In the flashes of ghost lightning the blood looked as black as oil, but Grey knew what it was. The girl ran as hard as she could, but she was slowing, staggering, nearly gone. She would have stopped to rest if she could except for the
thing
that followed her.

It came more slowly than she ran, loping along like some great, pale ape.

Only it wasn't an ape.

It was Deputy Jed Perkins.

He was nearly naked, his body covered only in torn streamers of what had been his clothes. His skin was white except for sunburned forearms and face. His hair hung in dripping rattails. His mouth was open, smiling. Laughing.

Laughing in all the wrong ways.

And his chest.

His chest.

The flesh of breast had been slashed to ribbons, the meat and muscle pulled back to expose his rib cage. And there, driven by some insane force into the very center of his sternum was a piece of polished stone. It was as black as the night except for a tracery of white lines that seemed to wriggle through it. The stone glowed from within but it was neither fire nor electric light. This was something far worse, something far stranger. Deep inside the chunk of ghost rock a cold, intensely bright blue light glowed with hellish ferocity. The deputy's eyes glowed with the same weird light. Too bright, as if lit from within.

Grey nearly lost himself in that moment.

He had already seen the dead walk and encountered witches and monstrous storms, but this was something else. This was sorcery. This was the kind of dark magic he'd read about in old books, the kind they sing of in songs when they are not trying to lull you to sleep. This was what evil looked like.

This was something that broke the laws of nature. Perkins had to be dead and yet he ran howling after a child, his eyes filled with starlight, his hands reaching to tear and rend.

Scared as he was, Grey's hand moved with practiced speed. The Colt seemed to appear in his hand, he saw and felt his thumb cock the hammer, felt his index finger squeeze the trigger. Heard the report. All of it happening as if he were witnessing someone else perform the familiar actions.

The
bang
jolted him.

The bullet drilled a hole through the night air, sizzled past the rain, and punched into the hard, flat muscle of Perkins's left pectoral. Just off-center of the black stone. The impact knocked a single cough from the man's lips.

Just that.

And nothing else.

It barely slowed the man.

Perkins's eyes shifted from the girl he was chasing and stared at Grey with a bottomless hatred that sent a thrill of terror through him. His teeth peeled back from his lips and he growled like a mountain cat.

He bent low and raced forward with maniac speed. Straight at Grey.

This was black magic.

He fished for the word, the right word. It was down there in the bottom of his mind where he kept the things he didn't ever want to think about. Ugly things. Wrong things.

Bad things.

The word awoke in his thoughts. Like a serpent stirred to wakeful rage it hissed in his mind.

The word for what this was.

Necromancy.

The magic of the dead.

“God damn you to hell!” bellowed Grey as he fired again. And again. The bullets took Perkins in the right chest and in the stomach. They made him twitch.

But they did not stop him.

With a howl like the demon wind itself, Jed Perkins flung himself at Grey and bore him down into the mud and the burning rain.

 

Chapter Thirty-One

As Grey fell onto his back he brought one foot up, jammed his boot against the deputy's chest, and let the force of the roll turn them both like a wheel. With his leg as the spoke, Perkins rolled over and then backward and Grey gave him an extra kick to send the man flying. Grey had fallen so hard that he had enough momentum to roll his own body all the way over onto his knees, with one hand snapping out to steady himself.

Somehow he'd managed to keep his pistol in his other hand, and to keep the mechanism out of the mud. He pivoted on his knee and snapped off two more shots at Perkins, who had splatted down into the mud and was struggling to get up. The first bullet took Perkins in the shoulder and Grey could see a lump of meat and a chunk of bone fly into the air.

But all that did was make Perkins laugh.

Laugh.

It was a laugh as wrong as all the damage in the world. A high, cackling bray that carried no trace of the deputy's own voice. Instead this was shrill and alien. A nightmare laugh that revealed a horrible secret to Grey—that there was something
else
hiding within the man's body. And, again, Grey remembered the stories he'd read as a boy, of demons that could inhabit human flesh and wear it like armor.

The laughter was both an anticipation of its triumph over a mortal foolish enough to do battle with something that could not be whipped, and an exultation in its freedom to wander the world of the living.

The laughter tore through the night and stuck knives in Grey's mind. The injured little girl screamed, knowing that there was no hope left.

So Grey put his next bullet into that laughing mouth. The heavy slug shattered the rows of white teeth and then blew out the back of the deputy's skull, right at the base where it attaches to the top of the spine.

There was a moment—just a flicker of time—where the demon thing still smiled, even with a mouth of shattered teeth. Then Deputy Perkins's head tilted forward, no longer supported by vertebra and the weight of it jerked the body down.

Even then the thing did not die.

It flopped in the mud and began thrashing wildly, arms and legs whipping around, feet kicking, mouth trying to bite in Grey's direction.

“God damn, why don't you die, you ugly son of a whore?” bellowed Grey and he fired the last bullet in his gun. This time he aimed for the flat plane of the deputy's forehead. The slug punched in at a bad angle and instead of bursting through the other side, it ricocheted off some angle of bone inside, and then bounced around. The deputy's head shuddered from the inner impacts.

Then all at once the blue light winked out from its eyes and Perkins fell face forward into the mud and did not move.

Grey did not believe that even now this was over. He broke open his pistol, dumped the spent brass, and hastily shoved six fresh rounds into the cylinder. As he did so he edged over to stand between the little girl—who, against all sense, had stopped running to watch the fight—and the monster. Grey snapped the cylinder into place and pointed the gun at Perkins.

The body lay still. It looked different now. Empty, somehow.

Empty of life, if life was a word that fit.

Dead.

Dead for good and all.

Dead, like the members of the posse—Riley and the others—after he'd managed to end them.

End them.

That thought stuck like an arrow in Grey's mind. How exactly
had
he ended them?

Perkins had been shot over and over again. None of those rounds had even slowed him.

Only that last bullet.

In the head.

No. In the brain.

The brain?

Why there? Why not the heart? Why not the damn spine? Either of those would have dropped even a mountain bear.

The brain.

Kill the brain and kill the …

The what?

As if in answer to his troubled, tumbling thoughts, a voice spoke a word that Grey did not know, not in this context.

“
Undead!
”

He turned to see Brother Joe standing ten feet away, panting, draped in curtains to fend off the rain, eyes wide with horror.

“W-what?” asked Grey numbly.

“That thing is an abomination against God. It is one of the
undead
. Dear Jesus and Mary protect us.”

“What
is
it?”

“It is a corpse given a dark semblance of life—unlife,” said Brother Joe, crossing himself. “It has been inhabited by a demon spirit so that it can do Satan's will on Earth.”

Grey wanted to tell him that this was pure unfiltered bullshit.

Wanted to. Could not.

Jed Perkins lay at his feet and all of this had happened. Had truly happened.

Two figures came running through the dwindling rain. One wore a set of gray oilskins and the other a cloak with the hood pulled tight around a lovely face. Looks Away and Jenny. He had a pistol in his hand and she carried a single-barrel twenty-gauge shotgun. They saw Perkins and slowed, standing shocked and puzzled.

“What happened?” asked Jenny as she realized the child was there. She hurried over to the girl, shifted the shotgun to one hand and used the other to wrap her cloak around the child. “Grey—what happened here?”

Grey holstered his gun, squatted, and turned Perkins over so that the man's ruined chest was exposed. The rain gradually washed away the mud, revealing the terrible wounds. And the thing embedded in the deputy's breastbone. It no longer glowed with blue fire, but the lines of white were like threadworms in gangrenous flesh.