The one in the mask looked down at him with black eyes and said a single word that Perry Cooke could not understand. No, that wasn’t true. He understood the word but not why it was being said.
Feed.
The word struck him as so peculiar that he was able to sigh with relief and find his voice again. “Did you say feed?” he asked. “You want to buy some horse feed?”
No one answered.
“Do you mean you want me to get you all some food?”
The man in the mask smiled thinly.
Cooke tilted his head to get a better look at them. He snapped his fingers. “Hey, are you folk actors? Is that it? Is that why you’re all still wearing your costumes?”
Wind rippled through their robes and made the lights on the ends of their torches dance. All of the ones seated on horseback stared at Cooke, silent and stone-faced. There were both men and women, Cooke realized. All dressed the same, wearing the same strange, misshapen haircuts.
“You doing some kind of traveling show?” Cooke asked. “What, we pay you with food and you put on a play or something? It might be a little late for Miss Rena to start cooking, but maybe if you make camp here tonight I’ll see what we can do for breakfast tomorrow. How’s that work for you?”
He became aware of something buzzing in the distance. In the glare of the torchlight, he could no longer see the gate, but it sounded like a large swarm of insects rushing toward them. They clicked and buzzed and droned nonsensical words and Cooke realized it was not insects at all, but rather a large group of people.
They were naked and filthy and so skinny he could see their ribs, but they ran so fast that he barely had time to register the thought that they were running toward him.
The closest ones latched on to Cooke before he had time to cry out. They leapt on top of him, one after another, piling on until he collapsed under their weight. Perry Cooke was a strong man, with muscles born of years of labor, but the weight of the bodies pinned him to the ground so that he could not move.
There were so many of them with their knees on his back and his sides that he could not breathe. When he did manage to grab on to one of them and try to pull them off, they were too slick with slime to get ahold of. It was like they’d rolled in pig slop before coming there. Cooke gasped for air, desperate to get even the smallest breath into his lungs. The terror of it all gave him strength. He managed to lift himself up, using every last ounce he could muster to create enough space between him and the horde to breathe. Just as the air went down his throat to fill his lungs, he felt the first set of teeth clamp down on his right bicep. Cooke screamed as the teeth ripped the skin from his arm along with a clump of the muscle beneath it.
They tore and clawed at him for minutes before he stopped struggling.
From behind his mask, John Deacon watched the Children of the Forest eat. One of them had torn the man’s stomach open and ripped out a length of intestines. They were red and coiled and stinking and the creature lowered his mouth to bite into them, when Deacon said, “Enough!”
The Children of the Forest looked up from their fresh kill in dismay.
“There is more,” Deacon said. “Much more.” He pointed at the Sinclairs’ house and said, “Bring me anyone you can find in there and after that you will feed like you never have before.”
* * *
* * *
Miss Rena stood barefoot on the living room floor in her long blue nightdress. Her hands shook as Jesse handed her the shotgun. She didn’t look strong enough even to hold it upright, much less pull the trigger.
“Do you remember what Ash told you about how to use this?” Jesse said.
Rena was too frightened to answer. “What were they doing to poor Mr. Perry out there? Why was he screaming like that?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “It weren’t nothing nice. They’ll do the same to us if we let them.”
“Did you see them?” Rena whispered. “They didn’t look human. They looked like wild creatures.”
“They’re human,” Jesse said. “Shoot one, you’ll see them bleed just like anybody else.” She yanked open a drawer and grabbed the pistol inside it. The snake engraved around the length of the black barrel was silver and shining. Its jaws were open at the mouth of the barrel where it would spit its venom at anyone who dared step foot on her porch. But only six times, she thought. Why had she left Ash Sinclair’s other snake gun in the basement?
It was too late to worry about that now. She grabbed Rena by the arm and said, “Come on.”
“Ohhh, I don’t think I can do this,” Rena moaned.
“We don’t have no other choice,” Jesse said. She positioned herself at the front door and said, “Put that shotgun on the back door. Anybody comes through it, blast them.”
“I can’t, Mrs. Jesse!”
“The hell you can’t,” Jesse said. “This is our house, you hear me? Our house! Ain’t nobody allowed to come here and mess with us. You hear me out there? Nobody!”
“Okay,” Rena panted. “Okay, I’m ready.” She leveled the shotgun at the back door and tried to steady herself. “I can do this.”
The glass window next to the front door exploded inward with an enormous crash, and both women screamed. A bare fist was sticking through the opening, blood pouring out from between its clenched fingers.
Something crashed against the front door, trying to force it open. The door was made of thick wood, but the blow shook the house to the rafters. A second crash came, harder than the first. The door was holding but the frame around it wasn’t. The wood was cracking around the locks and hinges that were keeping it shut.
“What do we do?” Rena asked.
“Keep that gun on the back door,” Jesse whispered. She cocked the snake gun’s hammer back and inched toward the broken window.
Shadows of figures spilled throughout the sitting room, silhouetted by the torchlight from the riders outside. Blood spilled in thick droplets from the window’s shattered glass onto the floor.
Jesse inched past the window’s curtain and something came thrusting through the window in front of her, headfirst, its eyes wide and its mouth open, just inches from her own face. It gnashed its teeth at her, biting and snarling like a crazed beast, and Jesse flung her hands out trying to keep away. The thing was trying to fit itself through the rest of the window, when Jesse stuck the barrel of the snake gun against its forehead and fired.
The creature’s skull exploded in a burst of red mist and hair and bone. Its lifeless body collapsed, half in and half out of the house. There were more behind it, grabbing it by the shoulders to pull it free and get through the window.
“Told you they bleed,” Jesse said. “We have to move.” She tried to grab Rena by the arm, but Rena wouldn’t budge. Her eyes were turned to the stairs, looking up toward the second floor.
“They’re upstairs,” Rena whispered. “I can hear them.”
Jesse listened and heard something shuffling across the roof. Rena was right. The bastards had climbed up onto the porch roof and come in through her bedroom window. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Go where?” Rena cried.
Jesse grabbed her by the hand and pulled her toward the kitchen. “We’ll go out the back and make a run for it.”
Rena clenched her teeth in fright and shook her head. “I don’t think I can run for it.”
“You have to,” Jesse said. Glass crashed on the second floor above them. Behind them, the dead creature’s body was being pulled out of the broken window and another one was climbing over it. Jesse raised the snake gun and fired. “Get that door open!” she shouted to Rena.
One hand trembling as she held the shotgun, Rena worked the locks on the back door with the other. Finally, she got the latch turned and she grabbed hold of the doorknob and pulled the door open.
A naked woman was standing in the door
way with her mouth open. The creature lunged, latching on to Rena’s throat so hard that her jagged nails pierced the flesh there.
Rena screamed and thrust the shotgun against the woman’s chest to beat her back, and the shotgun fired. Just before the deafening boom, Rena remembered to clench her eyes shut and turn her head. She felt the hot, wet spray of blood against her face.
Jesse reached past her and shoved the kitchen door shut again. She quickly turned the lock as Rena spat blood from her mouth and shook her head to get as much off her face as possible. “I shut my eyes in time,” Rena sputtered. “I remembered!”
There was another crash against the front door, and this time, it worked. The frame around the door split inward with a tremendous crack that was followed by a series of violent kicks against the door itself that snapped the metal locks in their housings.
Above them, creatures raced across the second floor toward the steps so fast that they crashed into the stairwell wall.
“This way,” Jesse said. She grabbed Rena by the arm and dragged her toward the only place left to go.
The first creature leapt from the bottom of the steps into the downstairs hallway, just as Jesse pushed Rena through the cellar door and pulled it quietly shut behind her. In the darkness of the stairwell, she squeezed her eyes shut and turned the basement door lock as quietly as she could, hoping it wouldn’t make a sound.
It did, but only a soft clicking one.
She and Rena crept down the basement stairs, taking their time. The floor squeaked above them with the sound of dozens of bare feet racing around, trying to find them.
Rena began to pant heavily. She clutched her throat and gasped for air and shook her head that she couldn’t take any more.
“We have to keep going and you have to be quiet,” Jesse whispered. “Come on.”
She put her hand on Rena’s back and they made their way down the rest of the steps together.
* * *
* * *
John Deacon watched the Children of the Forest swarm through the house and grew impatient. He could hear glass breaking and furniture being tossed aside, but not one single scream had rung out. A naked creature muttered to itself as it shuffled along the porch, going back and forth from the window to the door, stooping to peer in as if the people inside might suddenly appear from one point in the room to the other, and Deacon realized he’d made an error. For all of their hunger and feral ferocity, the Children of the Forest were complete idiots.
The people inside the house had escaped, he thought. Somehow they’d gotten away undetected.
“Form search parties and check this entire property,” Deacon called out to his followers. “Tear down every barn and shed if you must. I want them found.”
The acolytes rode off in different directions, leaving Deacon by himself. He looked up at the second-floor bedroom window where the Children had gained entry. He maneuvered his horse around to look into the house through the open door and windows downstairs. All he could see were the creatures, stumbling into one another. Their destruction was pointless. In their frustration at being deprived of their next meal, they pulled framed pictures off the wall and tossed them across the room. They ripped a tablecloth off the dining room table and tore the cushions on the sofa apart. None of it would help find anyone.
Deacon rode around the side of the house and saw the corpse of the creature who’d been shot at the back door. The door was closed and the creature’s body was collapsed against it.
He surveyed the rest of the ranch from behind the house. Barns and animals and storage sheds, and way in the back more storage sheds.
Just beyond those sheds was a round hill the top of which would overlook the rest of the property. The hill was groomed, with a clear path leading up to the crest, which, to anyone else, might have looked like a fine picnic area, or a place for someone to set up an easel and paint the land below.
To John Deacon, whose mind did not encompass picnics or painted landscapes, the hill was immediately identifiable for what it was. A place for the dead.
Deacon rode to the edge of the property and leapt down from his horse. He took off his mask and set it on the ground, then hiked up the hem of his robe and made his way up the trail to the top of the hill. By the time he reached it, he was sweating with anticipation. To his right was a flat patch of earth covered with grass and flowers and a wooden cross with the name Edna Sinclair engraved on it.
Next to the cross was a second one, at the head of a still-raised part of the ground. Although it had not yet been flattened by the wind and rain, grass had sprouted across the rectangle of dirt. Deacon stood atop the grave and read the name on the cross. “William Sinclair,” he muttered.
Now he looked to his left. There, set apart from the others and bearing no marker, was a third grave. The dirt was still high and relatively fresh. Less than a month old, Deacon thought. “You,” he whispered. “It must be.”
He ran a few yards down the hill and shouted, “Everyone, bring as many shovels as you can find! Now!”
The acolytes below who’d been searching the storage sheds heard his command and ran off to search for supplies. Deacon could hardly contain himself. He glanced at the house in the distance and could imagine the Children of the Forest still searching. Let them look, he thought. It no longer mattered so much if he killed Jesse Sinclair and whoever was holed up in the house with her. He would have his oldest enemy instead.
The man who had scarred him as a boy. The man who had eluded him for decades. Deacon looked back at the grave and smiled. “Did you think death would save you, old man?” he said. “Did you think my powers could not reach beyond this world into the next and tear thy soul to pieces?”
Deacon’s acolytes were running up the hill with shovels and pickaxes and whatever else they could find. Deacon pointed them at the unmarked grave and said, “Dig.”
Within seconds the entire group was slinging dirt as fast as they could while Deacon looked on. “Faster,” he commanded.
The pile of dirt around the grave grew, until three of the male followers were standing inside the grave digging, and one of them thrust his shovel downward and hit something that was neither dirt nor rock.
“Stop!” Deacon called out. “Uncover it, but be careful.”
The acolytes dropped to their knees and swept the rest of the dirt away with their hands. Soon they had uncovered a white cloth that was tied at the neck, waist, and legs of a dead body.
“Bring him out,” Deacon said.
They hoisted the body out of the grave and laid it on the ground in front of Deacon. “Unveil him,” Deacon said.
The acolytes worked at the ropes and yanked until they’d gotten the knots undone, then unwrapped the cloth to reveal the decayed body beneath. The face had been mostly eaten away by the things living in the soil. The left eye was missing and a black centipede slithered out of the empty socket.
The corpse’s hair and beard were stark white, so different than they had been all those years before, Deacon thought, but its identity was unmistakable. This was the correct body.
Deacon picked up one of the shovels and carried it toward the corpse. He raised the shovel high over his head, then slammed the blade down as hard as he could against Sinclair’s throat.
The shovel cut through most of the desiccated flesh, but the bones were more difficult. Pus and gelled blood leaked out of the throat as Deacon put his foot against the corpse’s shoulder and raised the shovel back up into the air. He grunted with effort as he slammed the shovel back down once more, even harder, and heard the satisfying snap of bone.
He grabbed the head with both hands and twisted it back and forth until he was able to tear it free from the remaining pieces of skin and muscle that held it attached to the neck.
Deacon staggered back from the corpse, holding the severed head by its hair. He held it aloft so that his
acolytes could see, then turned the head around and stared into the face of Ashford Sinclair. Deacon screamed with laughter.
* * *
* * *
Jesse and Rena were crowded together in the small closet under the basement stairs, listening. There were a few creatures walking around on the floor above them, but not as many as before. Most, it seemed, had gone upstairs to search the bedrooms.
“It won’t be long before they come down here to look too,” Rena groaned.
“I know,” Jesse said.
“What are we going to do?”
Jesse kept listening. It was now or never. “You said there’s lantern oil down here, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Rena nodded. “In a can over in the corner. Why?”
Jesse opened the door and said, “Go get it, but don’t make a single sound.”
Rena crawled out of the room and headed across the cellar floor. Jesse started to come out behind her but then she stopped and ran her hand along the closet wall until she found a hook mounted there. Hanging from the hook was a length of well-used leather.
She took it down from the hook, careful not to smack it into anything else, and slowly backed out of the room. Straightening up, she wrapped the leather around her waist and buckled it. There was an empty holster on the right side and she put the first snake gun into it. The other snake gun was already holstered on the left.
“Hand me the shotgun,” Jesse whispered. “Now grab that can and some matches.”
Rena searched the nearest shelf and found the matches. She picked up the can and Jesse said, “Follow me. Quiet as you can.”
They crept up the basement steps, doing their best not to make any noise, walking on the outer edges of the steps to keep them from squeaking. It was slow going, but by the time they reached the top of the stairs, Jesse was able to open the kitchen door safely.
To their left, they heard the sound of slobbering and openmouthed chewing coming from the pantry around the corner. An empty jar was knocked to the ground so hard its glass shattered. One creature stood over the broken glass eating handfuls of beans and sugar while another creature behind it whined in protest. They bared their teeth and shoved one another until they began to fight.
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