Skull Moon (26 page)

Two of them ran at Skullhead and he slashed them into ribbons with a single swipe of his nails. A third and forth were torn asunder by a sweep of his bony, jagged tail. No more came. There was screaming now, crying. People were running about, gathering up children and retreating into the forest. Skullhead let them go. He went from one lodge to the other, tearing them down and stomping them into the snow with childish glee. A few of the tribal elders weren't quick enough to escape their lodges and Skullhead grinned as their fragile bones crunched beneath him.

There was shooting suddenly and Skullhead grimaced in pain as bullets swept over his back. He turned and chased down the defiant ones. He killed the first by merely tearing out his throat, the second by detaching his limbs, and the third by crushing him in a hug that forced his viscera to exit from any available opening. There was another and Skullhead beat him into submission with ragged, bleeding parts of the others, then opened his skull with a blow from his own rifle.

But this was merely for amusement.

His real interest was the sweat lodge. It was set away from the others at the fringe of the forest. It was in here that would be the men who summoned him, the Skull Society members. They knew their debts and would not run. Skullhead forced his way in, the tanned flap of buffalo skin that served as a door coming apart in his fingers. The men in here squatted on the earthen floor, their naked bodies painted up with streaks of white, black, and red. They chanted and mumbled meaningless prayers.

They did not attempt to hide or flee.

These were the ones that had called him. It seemed so silly to think that these weak, cowering creatures had summoned him from his grave. Of all the absurdities. Skullhead emasculated them one by one, laughing with a dry roaring sound as he did so. He watched them bleed and cry and moan and writhe on the ground. Bored with this display, he crushed their heads to jelly and brought the lodge down on top of them. It was how sacrifice was offered and received.

Outside, he smelled meat cooking on the fire. Strips of it smoking and sizzling on wooden racks. The stench was sickening...yet Skullhead was curious. He snatched a strip and chewed the vile substance, forcing it down the cavern of his throat. When it hit his stomach, the reaction was instantaneous: he went to his knees and vomited. This done, he pulled himself up dizzily, remembering now the ancient taboos concerning cooked flesh.

He would do well not to forget again.

Skullhead decided now that these dark-skinned people were not worthy of worshipping him. As he devoured a woman and her child he decided they could only be of use as meat. The white men and their kin...they would be his new flock. They were the ones with power, with imagination. They reared cities like the ancients. A brutal and savage people. Skullhead liked them. They would do.

Moving into the forest, he found small packs of the dark-skins hiding under the cover of trees and rock. He took his time in claiming them. When he'd filled his belly to the point of bursting, he staggered back into camp and doused the fire with a stream of piss. Remembering that this was an old way of marking territory, he emptied his bladder throughout the camp. All who came here would know now that this place belonged to a king.

A Lord of the High Wood.

As the posse ran in circles outside town, Wynona Spence returned to the body of Mike Ryan. It had been very fortuitous of Ryan to order his elaborate headstone some days earlier. There were various stories circulating about how he had known of his approaching demise--everything from death threats to second sight--but Wynona was of the school that some men just knew when their time was coming. It hadn't been the first time a man had ordered a stone only to be placed beneath it a few short days afterward.

Such was life...and death.

Wynona had spent most of the morning at Sheriff Lauters' farm, sorting through the rain of flesh and bone, separating human from animal. The remains of Lauters' family had already been buried in the cemetery outside town in one mass grave. A headstone would be placed tomorrow. It took a team of five men, volunteers all, several hours to dig through the snow and frozen ground and hollow out the grave. Nasty business that. But Wynona was used to death and dying and nothing surprised her anymore. The money was good, but her heart was heavy. This town was cursed.

She covered Ryan's body with a sheet and settled into her chair, her head aching. She'd always considered herself something of an optimist. Her father had said that both optimists and pessimists were in truth fantasists; that a realist was someone tucked safely between. And maybe he was right. Her optimism told her,
assured her,
that this beast, this monster would be caught and killed. Pessimism told her it would never happen: the beast would kill everyone and then move on. And realism told her it would be killed but not before it slaughtered a great many others.

Realism was safe; it avoided the extremes.

Sitting there, thinking of Marion and her love for her, Wynona decided she would be a realist now. Under the circumstances, it was a safe thing to be. A cloak of pragmatism that could be donned and would safeguard against all circumstances.

But she forgot about fatalism.

Until she heard the door to the back room crash in, that was. And suddenly she knew some things were unavoidable. As she peered into the back room, her eyes trembling with awe on the blood-encrusted giant standing there, its massive head brushing the roof beams, she knew it was all at an end. She was dead. No weapons or locked doors would change that. The beast was here and the beast had business with her.

She'd flirted with death for years and now here it was, huge and pissed-off and smelling.

"My God," she muttered.

And the beast advanced, teeth gnashing.

Lauters was awake when Longtree walked into Dr. Perry's surgery.

Longtree wasn't surprised; he expected this very thing. Perry had said he'd given the sheriff enough drugs to keep him unconscious most of the day, but somehow, Longtree figured, given the state of the sheriff's mind, he wouldn't be out for long.

"Sheriff," Longtree said, staring down the barrel of his gun, "there's no need for that."

Lauters was a big man. Huge, really, bloated from alcoholism, but still a very large man in his own right. His eyes were red and puffy, presumably from crying, his face damp with perspiration.

"I've taken as much as I'm going to from you, Longtree," he hissed, "you've pushed me around for the last time. My family...oh, Jesus..."

Longtree felt pity for the man. But he also felt the gun on him.

"Put it away, Sheriff. Please."

Lauters gaped at him through tear-filled eyes. His bandaged nose making him look all the more pathetic, pitiful.

Longtree swallowed. The sheriff had his Colt on him. Even if he drew and drew fast, Lauters would still shoot him and probably in the chest. Such a wound had a high mortality rate.

Longtree held his hands out before him, innocently. "If you're gonna kill me, Sheriff, least you can do is hear me out first. That ain't asking too much, is it?"

Lauters stared at him. "I'm listening."

Longtree eased himself slowly in a chair. "You killed that Carpenter girl, didn't you?"

"Yes." Atrocity had brought honesty at last.

Longtree nodded. "You were part of that ring, the Gang of Ten. You boys set up Red Elk with that murder because he knew about you, then the other gang members lynched him and you stepped aside. Am I right?"

"You are."

"And now you're the only one left, the last of the gang."

Lauters nodded. "You're very good, Marshal. I always knew you were and that's why I didn't want you here. The beast is coming for me now...even the law can't change that. Your badge is useless, boy."

Longtree licked his lips. "What you did was wrong, Sheriff, and I think you know that more than any man could. But you've been punished beyond the limits of the law...I'm not going to arrest you."

Lauters lowered his gun. "Then why are you here?"

"Because I wanted to have this little talk with you." Longtree slipped a cigar from his pocket and lit it up. "You lost your family to this monster, Sheriff. You've suffered enough. Putting you on trial would be pointless, particularly given the fact that the witnesses and co-conspirators are all dead now." Longtree let that sink in. "What happened a year ago happened and we'd just better forget about it. The people in this town have a lot of respect for you and I've got no interest in dragging your name through the mud. Let 'em think you're a good lawman...because down deep, you probably are."

Lauters said nothing to any of this. A single tear slid down his cheek.

"We've got us a real problem here, Sheriff. We've got a monster that's killed a lot of people and it'll keep on killing until it's stopped. I think it's up to you and me to stop it."

"How?" Lauters asked.

"I don't rightly know," Longtree admitted. "But I do know that it'll be coming for you and I'm going to be there when it does."

"All that'll do is get yourself killed."

Longtree stood up. "It's my job to die fighting this thing same as it's yours. So get dressed. It's time we go hunting."

"You want me to help you?"

"Damn right. We're lawmen. Let's kill this thing or die trying."

It was about this time they heard shooting in the distance.

The posse led by Deputy Bowes was made up of eight men. Bowes had gathered the best and bravest shooters from the mining camps and the various ranches outside Wolf Creek. They were tough men, Bowes decided, but more than that they were angry men. They were sick of the killings, sick of being able to do nothing. They lived hard, frustrating lives. They had a lot of aggression to spend and they had been given a target to spend it on.

"There!" someone cried. "The undertaking parlor!"

Bowes turned his head and saw. It seemed impossible in that first second of realization that something this hideous could possibly walk, let alone in full daylight. It moved hunched-over, knees bent, arms crooked, hands dangling limply. Its great tail swung from side to side and when it stooped over (as it did coming through the door of the undertaker's), the tail rose up as if it were part of some fulcrum that balanced the beast. The beast staggered out into the streets, taking the door to Spence's place off its hinges in the process. It waltzed out and stood up to its full height.

The men dismounted their horses. The horses had to be immediately tethered: some vague racial memory had stirred in them and they remembered this thing, its kin, and what they were capable of. The horses whinnied and bucked, some throwing riders before they could hop off. Others ran off down the streets.

And Skullhead, Lord of the High Wood, advanced on his flock.

"All right, you men," Bowes cried out, "hold your fire! Spread out, goddammit! Spread out!"

The men, most of them pale and trembling like babes now, fanned out in a skirmish line as the beast approached. There was a stink of feces and Bowes knew someone had shit their pants. He did not blame them.

Bowes watched the creature. It gave off a sickening, acrid stink. It was tall, bulging with muscularity. Its huge and deformed head bobbed, blood freezing on its lips.

Some brave woman had circled behind it and slipped into the undertaker's. She stormed out now, falling into the street, vomiting. "Wynona!" she gagged. "It got Wynona...she's...all over the place..."

Bowes motioned for someone to get her inside. A man, presumably her husband, did just this.

"Let's shoot the bastard!" someone yelled.

"Take aim," Bowes told them, knowing if he didn't let them shoot and soon, they'd do it anyway or just run off. "Steady, steady, hold it..."

Skullhead was ignorant to what was happening here. He could remember in the old days, the forgotten days, how the dark-skins would gather around like this and await the blessing of his claws and teeth.

"Fire!" Bowes screamed.

The beast roared.

The first barrage hit the beast and he stumbled back, blood oozing from a dozen holes in his chest. The pain was intense. Pain was something he was used to, but having these white-skins bestow it upon him with no regard for ceremony or sacrifice angered him. They were to be his chosen children. This was unforgivable. He was an animal at heart, a night-stalker, an eater of flesh, a devourer of bones and babes, but he was an intelligent killer with a love of ceremony, a pagan's love of pageantry. He did now what instinct told him he must do.

He charged.

The next barrage of bullets brought him to his knees, the agony intense and irresistible. It had been a mistake doing this, he knew, their weapons hurtful. And although his kind didn't die very easy--it was this stubborn survivability that had kept his race alive eons after it should have went extinct with other such species--he was afraid. Afraid that the white-skins he'd underestimated would surround him and fill him with bullets so that even he would have to concede death. But no, he wouldn't let this happen. He would lie still, feign death until they got close. It was an ancient way. Many thousands of years before, when his race was thinning and dying out, and the dark-skins first came, they had waged war on the Lords of the High Wood. Only by killing hundreds of them, had the Lords survived, beating the dark-skins at their own game of supremacy, enslaving the newcomers. But before this...there were strategies, ways to draw in the dark-skins, methods to fool their superior numbers.

Skullhead did this now.

And these whites, oh they were easy prey. They waltzed right into the jaws of death. The beast was wise with the ages as a score of victims could attest to. Century upon endless century of hunting and stalking had taught him much.

"You men!" Bowes shouted. "Get away from it!"

Five men were circled around the dying beast, prodding it with their rifles.

"It can't hurt anyone now," one of them said.