Deadlands: Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  Chapter Seventy

  Neither of them knew they were in danger until one of the arms of a nearby saguaro cactus suddenly tore off and went spinning into the dust.

  They stared at it for a blank moment, and then like a returning memory, they heard the distant echo of the shot.

  “Down!” cried Grey as he flattened out along Picky’s withers. A split second later a black eye seemed to open in the barrel of the big cactus. The report followed a full two second later. A bug gun, Grey guessed. Heavy caliber, fired from a long distance. Two hundred yards? Three?

  Whoever was firing knew his business.

  Grey kicked his horse’s flanks and held on tight as the mare sprang forward, all weariness forgotten, as she ran flat out in the opposite direction. Queenie was right there with her, like they were the only two runners racing toward a finish line. Looks Away had slid sideways on his mount, hanging down like a saddle blanket, the way Grey had seen other Indian riders do, using the horse’s body as a shield. Around them—and even ahead of them—bullets pocked the cacti or buzzed past them like angry bees.

  There was a rise ahead of them and although for a split second they would be silhouetted against the sky, beyond it the land itself would offer safety. They raced for it and nose-to-nose the horses leaped over the crest and plunged down the other side. Bullets chipped the ridge and showered them with dirt.

  Grey slid immediately out of the saddle, slid his Winchester from its scabbard, and crawled up the slope. Looks Away was right behind him except that he had the Kingdom rifle. The distance was too great for the shotgun to be of any use. Handguns would be equally useless.

  “Who’s hunting us?” asked Looks Away. “Can you see anyone?”

  Grey squinted along the barrel, but all he could see was desert, rock, and cactus.

  “I can’t see a damned thing.”

  The gunfire had stopped as soon as they cleared the ridge, now the vista was silent and still as the sluggish desert wind allowed.

  “What do you figure,” asked Looks Away, “a Sharps fifty?”

  “Or something. Big slugs from the way it hit the cactus.”

  “Luckily he wasn’t a better shot.”

  Grey began to nod, but stopped. There was something wrong about that statement.

  Those shots had all come close. Very close. Some had missed them by inches. What were the odds of someone firing six or eight shots at ultra-long range and grouping the shots within an area no wider than twenty feet but missing two men and two horses?

  There was luck, sure, though Grey didn’t think today was anyone’s idea of a lucky day for them. Even poor marksmanship had some odds in its favor.

  “I don’t think he’s trying to hit us,” said Grey.

  A bullet hit the dirt between them, chasing them back down the slope.

  “Jesus!” gasped Looks Away as he spat dirt from his mouth. “Not trying? Not bloody trying?”

  Grey shook his head. “No … he’s good, that one. He could have taken our heads off right there.”

  “He seems to be giving it the old club try…”

  “No,” insisted Grey. “Which makes me wonder why he’s missing.”

  They considered it, then without comment they split apart and crawled up to peer over different sections of the ridge, far from where they had been.

  A bullet struck the sand five inches from Looks Away’s ear.

  A moment later a second one shattered a creosote bush next to Grey.

  “Bloody bastard,” complained Looks Away. When there were no more shots, he wormed his way over to Grey. “I think I know why he’s doing this.”

  “Yeah,” said Grey. “Me, too. He wants to keep us here.”

  “Indeed. But for what?”

  Neither of them really wanted an answer.

  They got one anyway.

  It began as a rumble, like distant thunder. Both men glanced at the sky, but the dawn was cloudless. There weren’t even birds up there.

  Another rumble. This time they could feel it in their bones.

  Beneath them the sand began to shiver. Grey placed his palm against the ground and heard it. A groan from within the earth. A moan of protest as the land itself began to move.

  “Earthquake!” he cried.

  But Looks Away shook his head and placed his ear to the ground, eyes closed, listening to the noise. The rumbling was continuous now.

  And it was growing. Grey could see the plants and cacti around them trembling. Lizards flashed through the dry grass. A tarantula hurried past, then stopped and hunkered down, clearly too frightened and confused to move further. Grey could understand. He wanted to run.

  But how do you outrun the earth itself?

  “Look!” gasped his companion, pointing to where a crack suddenly gaped open, belching dust and gas into the air.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know,” yelled Looks Away as he staggered to his feet and began backing away. Grey flinched, expecting his friend to take a bullet, but there were no new shots.

  However, the land itself seemed to be assaulting them. The crack yawned wider, sending tear lines running in all directions. A Joshua tree broke from its roots with a sound like a pistol shot, and then the trunk fell over sideways. A line of saguaro cactus leaped into the air as the ground exploded beneath them. More gas shot upward in scalding jets, withering the cacti even as they flew through the air. The horses reared and screamed, but they were too frightened to know where to run.

  “We have to get out of here before this whole thing—,” Looks Away’s words were cut off as something exploded upward from beneath the earth. It shot a mass of dirt, sand, and pulverized rock a hundred feet into the air, and then it emerged.

  It.

  That was the only way Grey’s mind could label the thing.

  Massive.

  Bigger than anything Grey had ever seen. A body so vast that it would have burst the walls of a barn, and as pale as dead skin. Wrinkled, segmented, impossible. It rose like some obscene finger from the hole in the ground. Yard by yard it rose above the desert floor. Glistening and featureless, like some foul intestine of one of the ancient Greek Titans.

  Grey and Looks Away stood there in its shadow, showered by falling debris, mouths agape, watching with eyes unable to blink, as the monster rose and rose and rose. And then, at the apex of its rise, it trembled with an odd and disturbing delicacy, as if its massive flesh was sensitive to even the hesitant touches of the desert breeze. It wavered there, indomitable against the morning sky, taller than the mast of the tallest ship, with some foul-smelling gelatinous goo running in thick lines from pores that open and closed all along its body.

  Now they knew what had burrowed those mighty holes through the bedrock. Now they knew what had left a trail of slime along the shores of that forgotten ocean. Now they knew, without doubt, that the earth held within its bowels greater horrors than man, even in the depths of opium dreams, had ever conjured. Here was Leviathan. Here was the finger of Satan.

  It was a worm.

  Towering a hundred feet into the desert air, with God only knew how much of its foul length still buried in the soil.

  A worm.

  Blind and colorless. A thousand tons of glistening flesh.

  And it had come for them.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  There was nowhere to run, no way to escape so monstrous a thing.

  Grey felt his heart sink down in his chest, falling to some low place where he could no longer feel its warmth. Several times over the last few days he had felt that he stood on the edge of life and felt himself leaning into the abyss. Each time he had been able to do something to pull himself back from that brink.

  Now…?

  The worm trembled and shook, and he could see its muscles twitching and contracting as it fought the pull of gravity.

  And yet … it did not fall.

  It could have crushed them more easily and thoroughly than Samson had smashed Deray’s prison
ers. It could have wiped them off the face of the world and never felt their deaths. They were fleas, it was a giant.

  And yet it still did not fall.

  “What is this?” demanded Grey. “Is this another of your prehistoric animals?”

  The Sioux shook his head. “I … don’t know what this is. I’ve never even heard of a monster like this. Maybe it’s something Deray conjured with his black magic.”

  “I don’t see a ghost rock implant…”

  “No. Perhaps he controls it through sorcery. This is beyond me, Grey.”

  “The rifle,” hissed Grey, whispering as if the thing could hear and understand. “The Kingdom rifle!…”

  The Sioux nodded numbly and brought the weapon up. They had one round left, but he hesitated, apparently mesmerized by the brute. Or, worried Grey, simply overwhelmed by it. They had seen so much today. Perhaps for Looks Away it was too much.

  “It’s too…,” murmured Looks Away, “… it’s too … too…”

  Despite the clear hopelessness on his face, Looks Away raised the rifle. There was no clear target. No chest in which a heart might beat. No torso where lungs or liver might fall to a blast from the Kingdom rifle. There was only flesh. Acres of it, it seemed.

  “Shoot and then we’ll run,” murmured Grey, beginning to edge backward. Sweat ran down his face and gathered inside his clothes. “Shoot and…”

  “And nothing, son,” said a voice.

  Both men whirled to see a figure standing on the crest of the ridge. He was tall, with narrow hips and broad shoulders, and he held a Sharps .50 in his pale hands, the barrel pointed at Grey’s chest. He smiled at them, and though the morning light twinkled in his eyes, there was nothing at all comforting in that grin.

  “You boys are going to drop the hardware,” he said. “Nice and slow. And then we’re all going to go back downstairs to have ourselves a nice chat with my master, Lord Deray.”

  Looks Away licked his lips. “You don’t have to do this…”

  The morning light sparkled on the ghost rock embedded in the man’s sternum.

  “Yeah,” said Lucky Bob Pearl as he shifted the rifle to point at the Sioux’s face, “I kind of think I do.”

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Lucky Bob’s smile was as false as an alligator’s, and there was the Devil himself laughing in his eyes. Grey wondered how that worked. If Jenny’s dad was the kind of man everyone said he was, then did this mean that the manitou inside of him had complete control? That seemed at odds with the facts, because Lucky Bob clearly knew Looks Away, just as he had known his daughter even though he’d tried to kill her. How could the demon speak and even to a degree act like the man who had once owned that flesh, and still be able to perpetrate such evil?

  “Listen to me, Bob,” said Looks Away desperately, “you don’t have to do anything.”

  “I always figured you for a smart fellow, Looksie,” said Lucky Bob. “But I reckon you plum don’t understand the way the world works.”

  “I know more than you think.”

  “Why? ‘Cause you were down in the dark and you think you saw something?”

  “For a start, yes,” said Looks Away. “You’re working with Deray and—.”

  “Hey now, you’ll show some respect or I’ll blow a hole in you big enough to stand in. It’s Lord Deray, you red heathen bastard.”

  “A racial invective? From you?” Looks Away seemed almost amused. “My, you have changed.”

  “More than you can understand.”

  “Oh? You think I don’t know what you are? Or what’s inside of you? Or has the manitou made you stupid?”

  The smile on Lucky Bob’s face flickered. Clearly he did not expect that kind of response. He adjusted his hands on his rifle and there was a nervous flush on his pale face.

  Interesting, thought Grey. If Lucky Bob could blush then he still had blood in his veins. That squared with what Brother Joe had told them. He wasn’t just a walking corpse after all. An idea, perhaps the seed of a plan, began to take root in his mind.

  Grey still had his Winchester in his hand and he knew he was a good shot. He was more than half sure he could dodge left and fire from the hip with a reasonable chance of killing this monster with a head shot. And if all he did was wound him with a body shot, the skill Grey had learned on a dozen battlefields insured that he could work the lever and put a second round through the Harrowed’s dead face.

  Could he do it, though, without getting Looks Away shot?

  Maybe.

  Could he do it, knowing that it would break Jenny’s heart?

  Not a chance in hell.

  Behind him globs of slime dropped from the giant worm and splashed heavily onto the torn desert floor.

  “Enough jibber-jabber,” said Lucky Bob. “You boys drop your guns and then we’ll all go down to the Lord of the Dark.”

  “Whoa,” said Looks Away, raising one hand, palm outward, “let’s pause on that for a moment. ‘Lord of the Dark’? Seriously? We’re going to call your master the Lord of the effing Dark? Isn’t that a bit, oh I don’t know…”

  “Theatrical?” supplied Grey.

  “Silly,” decided Looks Away. “I mean … come on, Bob. I worked in the shallowest possible end of the theater when I was with the Wild West Show, and even we couldn’t have come up with something as downright absurd as—.”

  Lucky Bob fired a shot and put a bullet into the dirt exactly between Looks Away’s feet. The Sioux jumped a foot in the air and nearly dropped the Kingdom rifle.

  And that’s when Grey made his move. He dropped into a low squat, pivoted, buried the stock against his hip, and fired. He aimed with all of his skill and he aimed with his heart. The bullet took Lucky Bob in the stomach. Not the head. From that distance the shot was like getting hit by a mule. The Harrowed staggered backward, and he reflexively threw up his hands. The Sharps spun upward, pinwheeled, and then struck the ground barrel-first, burying itself six inches into the torn sand. Lucky Bob tried to stagger sideways to catch his balance, but instead he collapsed backward.

  Above them, the worm roared.

  Roared.

  Grey had not seen a mouth on it. He had never imagined that a worm had the capacity for sound. But this was a monster from somewhere deep in the earth where nothing natural lives. It had a mouth high, high up on its head, and as the Harrowed fell it let loose with a howl so loud that blood burst from Grey’s ears and nose. Lightning crackled along its trembling length. The whole landscape shuddered.

  Grey was already running.

  Running.

  Looks Away was already outpacing him, and they were both chasing their panic-stricken horses.

  Great fissures split on the desert floor as more and more of the monstrous worm smashed upward from below. The echo of that terrible scream seemed to chase them like a storm wind. They ran beyond the confines of its shadow, but immediately the shadows seemed to flow after them. Grey knew that the thing was coming.

  “Picky—goddamn it wait!” he bellowed. If he could get onto the damn horse then maybe he could outrun the creature.

  Ripples of force whipped along beneath the ground, lifting both men, throwing them like unimportant debris. They landed hard. Grey’s rifle was jerked from his hands on impact, but Looks Away somehow kept hold of the Kingdom rifle.

  “Shoot the fucking thing!” bellowed Grey, and the Sioux glanced down at the weapon he carried as though he was surprised to see it. He scrambled to his feet, turned, raised the rifle, and fired.

  There was no need to aim. The worm was everywhere. It was so vast that it seemed to blot out the rising sun. The gun bucked in Looks Away’s hand as the compressed gas fired the deadly round. Their last round.

  The bullet struck the rippling flesh and exploded, bursting outward with each tiny fragment of processed ghost road. When exposed to the air, the pellets detonated, tearing great masses of the alien flesh apart and sending it flying through the air in clouds of bloody mist. The blast tore a gaping hole
in the monster and tons of gore and shredded flesh flopped out onto the ground. The monster let loose another of its dreadful shrieks and the sky itself seemed ready to rip itself apart.

  Grey and Looks Away stood transfixed, watching as the monster thrashed and twisted in agony. They braced themselves for the earthquake that would surely follow as it fell.

  They waited, too shocked to move. Needing this abomination to die, willing it to die.

  The tremors went on and on …

  And then gradually subsided.

  The godlike worm writhed before them, its pale flesh pulsing with pain, oozing with red ichor. But it did not fall. It did not die, confirming that it had not been one of Deray’s undead slaves. There was no ghost rock in it to maximize the effect of the Kingdom rifle, and despite the damage that single round had inflicted, it was not going to be enough. As they watched, the wound filled with the clear lime that ran from its pores; and though this substance seemed able to burn through the very bones of the earth, it filled the wound and sealed it as surely as a bandage. The blood stopped flowing. The wound was now plugged.

  The worm lived.

  And it was furious.

  It shuddered with rage that rippled up through the ground as if emanating from the mind of Deray himself. As he thought that, Grey realized that it was probably the truth. Grey knew that Looks Away had been right—the monster was connected to the necromancer by some dark sorcery, and it came hunting for them, herding them, working with the Harrowed to trap them. Now it was wounded. Now it had felt the power of the Kingdom rifle—a weapon that could possibly rival the infernal devices of Deray himself. That knowledge, that dread of opposition, was probably echoing down into the caverns. Deray had sent this thing, commanded it, and now it shared terrible and dangerous knowledge with him.

  Grey knew this as surely as if it had been written in the sky by a flaming hand.

  Using the Kingdom rifle had been a mistake. Very likely the last mistake they would ever make.

  On the ground, wounded and possibly dying, Lucky Bob Pearl was laughing. Blood flecked his lips and misted the air, but he was laughing. “Now you boys have gone and done it,” he wheezed. “Now you’ve pissed in your own graves.”