Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (12 page)

They peered into the cell, where
Manx was laying in a pool of blood and slime, kicking and heaving, his face
toward the wall.

“I’ll get it,” the Rider sighed.

“No, I’ll get it,” Belden groaned.

He opened the cell and stepped
gingerly inside.

Manx was in his death throes, feebly
twitching now. The thing was killing him from the inside.

Kabede entered the guardhouse and
the Rider warned him back with an outstretched hand.

“Watch where you step,” the Rider
warned. All they needed was for Belden to stick a foot in the puddle of green
jelly and be trapped as the thing emerged.

Belden nodded and came to stand over
his commanding officer.

Manx turned to look up at him and
spat a gob the size of a baseball right up at him. Belden flinched his head to
the right instinctively and the slime ball hit the ceiling with a wet smack.

Belden saw what he was looking for
and stooped down, swiftly plucking the keys from Manx’s pocket.

Manx let out a clear human scream
and his eyes blew across the room as the twitching antennae sprung from his
sockets.

Belden high tailed it out of the
cell, hitting the far wall as Manx’s scream turned into an insect hiss and his
skull began to crackle and break apart.

The Rider slammed the cell door shut
and Belden rebounded, plunging the key into the lock and twisting it. He
extracted the key and they backed away to the guardhouse door where Kabede
stood, thankfully sparing themselves the sight of Manx’s demise.

They stood panting and listening to
the wet sounds coming from the cell, the clicking of the creature’s mandibles,
the skittering if its six legs on the floor.

“Uh…” said Bigelow from his own
cell, “can somebody let me outta here?”

The thing that had been inside Manx
chattered and threw itself against the bars as they freed Bigelow. It aimed a
jet of the noxious dark green adhesive at them three times through the bars
before they got out of its arc of fire. It was the size of a hog, something
like a cross between a stag beetle and a cockroach. The Rider was no expert on
insects, but the arrangement of its head wasn’t like that of any bug he’d ever
seen. There was scant possibility that this was some kind of freak insect.

“What the hell are they?” Belden
asked when they had Bigelow safely at the guardhouse door as the thing strained
against the bars, twitching its obscenely long feelers about.

“I don’t know,” the Rider said. “But
didn’t you say Jacobi and Le Bouclier spent time with Manx and Milton?”

Belden nodded, unable to keep his
eyes off the squat thing clicking about the floor.

“They must have put those things
inside them somehow, like they did Jeffries.”

“But Jeffries was gone only a day
and the thing hatched from him,” Kabede observed. “They stopped by here a week
ago, by the Colonel’s admission.”

“Yes that’s right,” the Rider said. “Why
did Manx’s and Milton’s take so long to gestate?”

“Maybe they got some way of speeding
up the process. Somethin’…I dunno, magical?” Belden offered.

“Who can say?” the Rider said. “Maybe
something in Milton and Manx slowed their growth somehow. Did they share any
habits? Did they eat the same thing?”

“Nothing Jeffries didn’t eat too,”
Belden mused.

“Maybe they weren’t gestating at
all,” the Rider suggested. “Maybe they were just…waiting.”

“You mean they’re smart?” Belden
whined.

“Who else did they come in contact
with?” Kabede asked. “If LeBouclier was with Doctor Milton and Jacobi was with
Manx while they were here, where was DeKorte?”

“DeKorte was in the graveyard most
of the time. He buried their comrade himself. Said prayers over him.”

“Prayers?” the Rider repeated. That
wasn’t good. “What kind of prayers?”

“I don’t think anybody hung around
to listen. Like I said, DeKorte insisted on doin’ it himself.”

“Then how do you know he said
prayers?” Kabede asked.

“We could hear him from up the hill,”
Belden said. “Couldn’t make out the words. Didn’t figure they were English
anyway.”

“Perhaps we had better visit this
graveyard,” Kabede suggested.

“First we’ve got to figure out how
to get all these men loose…” the Rider said. “And I want to try something. Lend
me the staff, Kabede?”

Kabede handed it over without
question.

Out of range of the thing’s spitting
attack, the Rider extended the sharp end of the staff and began to trace a
symbol in the dust in front of the thing’s cell.

When he had finished, it chittered
and recoiled from the bars, backing away to a dark corner of the cell, under
the cot.

“That symbol…” Kabede said, as the
Rider straightened and returned the staff to him. “It’s the same one you showed
the Adversary.”

“Yes,” the Rider nodded. The same
symbol etched on the Star Stone of Mnar he’d taken from the cave in New Mexico.
The star and eye design Spates had called The Elder Sign.

He turned to the open doorway.

“Maybe we can lay a few of these about…”

Then he stopped in his tracks.

“What’s that sound?”

They all listened. There was a
rumbling like thunder, but they could feel it beneath their feet.

“Storm?” Bigelow suggested.

“It ain’t thunder,” said Belden. “An
earthquake?” he suggested hopefully.

“No,” said the Rider.

Out on the parade ground, those
soldiers not stuck to the ground by the slime were beginning to wheel about
about in confusion.

The sound increased, and they saw a
cloud of rolling dust appear on the ridge above, rapidly descending on the post
from the pass.

“Now what?” Belden groaned. “A rock
slide?”

Kabede went to the threshold. He had
out his telescope and whipped it open, putting it to his eye.

“It’s cattle,” he said.

“It’s a stampede!” the Rider
shouted, as the earth began to jar beneath their feet and the unlit lanterns
swung and clinked and the flagpole in the center of the parade ground started
to sway. Then he saw DeKorte’s plan. He jogged out a few feet and screamed at
the men through his shelled hands;

“Stampede! Leave them! Leave them!
Get out of here!”

Then he turned himself, eyed the
stone guardhouse, and took a running jump. Gripping the eaves of the structure,
he struggled to pull himself up onto the roof.

Belden, Kabede, and the corporal,
Bigelow, followed suit, scrambling up the sides as hundreds of maddened cattle
came bellowing and crashing into the perimeter like a destructive tide of
muscle, horn, and bone.

Those soldiers that understood or
had come not to question the stranger’s orders did their best to imitate him.
They clambered up on top of outhouses, sheds, and barracks, pulled themselves
up on the roof of the open stable.

The rest, including those luckless
enough to be inextricably mired on the ground and those who stubbornly
continued to help them, met their ends beneath the driving hooves of hundreds
of thousands of collective pounds of furious bulls and cows.

They went down soundless for the
most part, though they heard a few scattered shouts and screams, pitiful, short
sounds beneath the all-encompassing clamor of the stampede as it poured onto
the parade ground.

Men were gored by ramming horns,
dragged down and trampled flat over and over. The cattle hesitated when they
reached the two areas coated with slime, as their hooves stuck in the muck, but
the downhill force of the steers behind as they collided with the stumbling
forefront, in some cases flipping over the ends of the fellows, piling into
them until they fell face first, was irresistible. The lead bulls lowed in fear
and agony as their hooves or forelegs were broken and ripped free and they were
pounded down by their followers in the mad rush. The unheeded pleas of the
cattle combined with the screams of the men and the tremendous collision of
beef to form a hellish cacophony the likes of which the Rider had never
imagined he would hear this side of Hell.

The men on the ground simply
disappeared.

Those on the roofs of the scattered
structures fired bootlessly down into the stampede, trying to scatter or head
the herd, but the raging animals could no more turn aside for their efforts
then could a roaring white river for a single trout. Some fell beneath the
soldiers’ bullets causing miniature pile-ups here and there, shoals of dead
animals around which the rest flowed in undulating brown currents.

The men who stood on the roofs
looked to be standing surreally on clouds of choking dust. Then suddenly some
ill-chosen structure would begin to sway, there would be groaning wood or a
crackling as nails were torn from splintering boards, and all the men atop
would scream and flail as they plunged into the river of cattle in a clatter of
boards. Some tried to leap to neighboring roofs only to bring those rickety
structures down too. Some grasped the edges of rooftops for dear life, endangering
all, only to have their hands mashed by the butts of their comrades’ rifles in
between shrill apologies. These fell cursing.

The Rider saw one such man slip into
the river of cattle, and watched the progression of his blue kerchief as it was
swept down the hillside like an autumn leaf dropped in a swift moving brook.

“They have destroyed the seal,”
Kabede said.

That was true. The giant seal Kabede
and the cavalrymen had managed to inscribe in the dust had been wiped away. Now
DeKorte and LeBouclier would be able to attack the men in the
Yenne Velt
again, drive them to suicide
as Jacobi had.

The Rider fished once more for his
spectacles.

Then he noticed those cattle that
had not poured into the narrow trail leading down into the valley were tumbling
down the mountainside to their deaths. What had driven them to such rashness?
He knew cattle were naturally spooky, but these animals were utterly terrified.
They had heard no preceding gunshots or calls to initiate the stampede.

It was amazing enough that DeKorte
and Bouclier managed to move these animals up the back of the ridge in the
night without drawing their attention. How had they induced them to run hell
bent down the steep mountainside this way?

Then, as the tail end of the
stampede came in sight and began to dwindle and the clouds of dust to settle,
the Rider had his answer.

The dead came walking behind.

Closer now, the Rider could see the
progression of decomposition upon those of Escopeta that had crossed the desert
at their heels, their exposed wounds rotting in the hot sun. Included in that
initial group, the Rider saw the family of Mexicans DeKorte had rode in and
killed a few days ago, and some in the white cotton dress of the local Indians.
There were smaller walkers among the rest too. Shuffling in and out of vision.
Children.

Only this morning the Army had
outnumbered them. Now the Rider quickly scanned the rooftops. All that remained
of the garrison was scattered and clustered on top of five buildings. No more
than twenty-five men against the oncoming horde, which looked to be at least
twice that number. Less than half of the soldiers had kept their rifles in
their desperate flight from the stampede.

Weeks was on his knees on top of the
blacksmith. Cord was with him.

The Rider looked past them, to a
knot of six men gathered on the dangerously sagging roof over the open stables,
where the overexcited horses were shaking their heads and crowhopping in their
stalls. His was there, but more importantly, all those terrified cavalry ponies
too.

“God,” said Belden, watching the
slow but sure advance of the crowd further up the pass. “Are those what I think
they are?”

“If we can get the survivors to the
horses, we can probably escape altogether,” the Rider said. “Only DeKorte and
LeBouclier could keep up with us.”

“Good plan,” said Kabede, watching
the last of the cattle pass beneath them, uncovering a dark field of mashed
corpses half-buried, broken beef, and animal shit.

“Lieutenant!” called one of the men
on the stable roof. “Lieutenant Cord! What do we do?”

“Cord!” Belden shouted.

Cord looked over at Belden.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!
Boots and saddles!”

“Those people…” Cord called back. “They
don’t appear to be armed!”

“Never mind! They’ll still kill you
if they can, and there’s too many!” Belden yelled.

The walkers came on, close enough to
see their messy wounds without the need of glasses.

The Rider looked about. There was no
sign of DeKorte or LeBouclier. He had thought they would come at the head of
their army, but they didn’t even seem to be behind it. Nor were they anywhere
he could see in the
Yenne Velt
. He
wondered…was this too easy? Not that it would be easy to get the survivors down
and on horses. There would be no time for saddle or harness. There would be
scant seconds to spare at the rate of the mob’s advance.