“What the hell is going on?”
Men came through the gate—MPs, led by Hopkins. Another Hopkins. He stopped just behind the other and stared incredulously at his double.
Loring scrambled to Gilman. “It’s the djinn!” she shouted. The machine gunner locked his weapon on Gilman, blasting at his midriff. Gilman stepped forward.
“What is this?” the second Hopkins bellowed.
Gilman moved right up against the muzzle of the gun. It fired harmlessly at his legs. He felt nothing. He looked into the eyes of the thing that was posing as Hopkins—
Abruptly, the entire illusion—Hopkins, the machine gun, and both gunners—turned to oily black smoke and billowed up around Gilman, skimmed over the Germans and back up into the cloud overhead, which quickly began to collect in on itself and rush back into the camp.
Hopkins—the real Hopkins—was immobilized at the gate, staring at the ground, looking for shells, for some proof that he had seen something real.
Gilman angrily erupted at the spot where the illusion had been, kicking up great feathery drifts of snow and swearing at the unseen enemy.
Loring grabbed his arm. “Now, while we have some control back—get everyone out of here!” He stared at her. “It pulled this stunt just now to keep everyone inside. It’s not enough for it to kill. I’m telling you, it needs a new host. Without a host, it’s trapped in here alone.”
Gilman looked for Steuben. “Major!” he called. “Collect your men and get them out of here. And from now on, ignore what happens on this side of the fence!”
Steuben hesitated, slipping the knife back into his belt, not wholly willing to trust his eyes and ears anymore, but recognizing his duty as a commanding officer. He turned and barked orders to the men with him. They lost no time hustling through the gate.
Grim-faced, Hopkins came down and deployed his guards to help Steuben round up the rest of the Germans. At this point, even Hopkins saw the sense of Gilman’s order.
They came hurrying through the snow, shielding their faces against the storm, intent on one thing—getting past the gate. Steuben moved along with them, repeating Gilman’s warning to ignore anything that got in their way.
Loring stayed close to Gilman, watching the POWs run a gauntlet of armed guards through the gate and up the hill into the mess hall. She looked down into the camp. The blackness had completely vanished under cover of the storm. The djinn could be anywhere now. She wondered why it didn’t continue its attack. Maybe it needed time to recover from the massive effort of the last fifteen minutes. Or maybe it had already found a new host, and it was leaving the camp right before her eyes, inside one of the Germans. She watched them carefully.
Hopkins stood at the gate, shaken and fighting hard not to show it. Snow swirled into his face and he batted the flakes away with a gloved hand. Suddenly it was no longer important to bully the prisoners or worry about what they were plotting. There was a real enemy to fight. Hopkins decided he would kill it himself and leave Gilman flatfooted.
The last of the Germans came through without incident, accompanied by the remaining MPs. Steuben stopped to comment to Gilman, “There are quite a few dead men down there, Major—some of yours, some of mine.”
Gilman nodded. As the last man went out, he turned to Loring. “Couldn’t we just clear out and let the djinn have the camp? If it can’t find a new host or any more victims, my guess is it’ll die, or at least become manageable.”
Loring indicated the men going up the hill. “It may already be out,” she said. “In a new host. We’ve got to go down there and be sure.”
“It’s going to be desperate, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” “And careless?”
“We’re not dealing with something that operates by the rules of human behavior, Major. We can’t outwit it. We have to find it and kill it. If we wait for reinforcements—for the general’s detachment—we’ll have to go through all of this again, trying to convince other people. They may not be as open-minded as you,” she added wryly.
“Thanks.”
“And worse—fresh troops determined to show you what a bunch of cowards you are will be easy pickings for the djinn and simply add more possibilities, more ways for it to escape and get out into the world. And if it gets loose-—if it leaves these mountains—”
“It’ll what?”
“It will grow and consume and kill and grow larger and more powerful and, eventually, there won’t be any way to stop it.” She shielded her eyes from the snow. “We’ve got to do it now, right here.”
Hopkins stood apart, staring into the camp, almost positive he could see a shadow moving against one of the huts. He drew his .45. “There’s still someone down there,” he called to Gilman, then took off at a run, broad- jumping the drifts.
“Hopkins!” Gilman shouted.
In a moment, Hopkins was a shadow himself, swallowed up in the storm. Gilman swore and looked back. There were MPs gathered at the fence, watching, waiting for his next move.
“I guess it’s me and Hopkins,” Gilman said.
“I’m going with you.”
“No!”
Loring flared. “I brought the damned thing here!”
Steuben joined them. “If there really is a straggler down there, Major, it’s one of my men. I’m going, too.”
Gilman thought of calling the MPs down to remove both Loring and Steuben, but they were already trudging down the slope toward the huts, and he knew they were not after any straggler. They were after the djinn.
He turned to the MP nearest the gate, “dose it,” he said. “And no matter what you see, don’t open it again. Not to let anyone in or out.”
The MP swung the gate shut and snapped the padlock.
Hopkins rounded the Krankenhaus and peered through the open door. It was dark inside. He .called softly. No one answered. Leveling the .45, he went up the steps and called again. Silence. He backed out and shut the door.
Where the hell is that straggler?
He crunched through the snow, the .45 extended in front of him as he swept the huts with a steady gaze, alert for shadows. Moving searchlights helped a little, but he saw nothing. The huts were deserted. Somewhere, an open door banged against a wall repeatedly.
Between Huts 4 and 5, Hopkins stopped and tried a shameless ploy. “I see you,” he called. “Come on out.”
No one came.
Something moved beneath Hut 6. Hopkins bounded to the wall and tripped over a body in the snow. He picked himself up and looked at the crumpled form half buried in a drift. He brushed snow from where the head would be and stared at Blish’s cold dead face with half his head blown away.
Hopkins scrambled away from it, stared at it a moment, then grimly turned back to Hut 6, moved to the wall, and crouched. Peering beneath the hut, he saw the glint of a pair of eyes. He stuck the .45 under the foundation, his finger tightened on the trigger. “All right, asshole—out! Now!”
The eyes vanished. A shadow moved. Hopkins fired. The blast was a deadened prang beneath the hut.
The thing scurried out of sight. An animal, Hopkins realized. Maybe Bruckner’s dog.
Shit, I hope I hit it.
Hopkins hauled himself up and looked around again.
A man ducked into the rec room.
Hopkins stood still, trying to decide if it was a man or just a trick of the eye. “Hey,” he called. “You in the rec room!”
Kraut. Probably heard the shot and figures we’re shooting prisoners.
Hopkins plunged toward the rec room. He heard Gilman calling his name and stopped. Three figures were coming down from the gate. At this distance, obscured by the storm, he couldn’t see them clearly. Just as well: that meant they couldn’t see him. He ignored Gilman’s call.
The rec-room door was open. Hopkins slipped in, flattened himself out of the dim light at the doorway, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He swung his .45 around slowly.
“Okay,” he said. “I know you’re in her
e. Come on out.”
Nothing moved.
He groped for the light switch, found it, and flicked it on. Nothing happened. He moved back to the doorway, where he would be silhouetted, and the German could see him holster his weapon. He slid it down snugly into the leather and removed his hand from it.
“See? I’m not going to hurt you. Come on.”
Nothing moved, yet Hopkins sensed a presence. Something in this room didn’t belong. He sniffed the air. It was cold and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and sweat. And blood. Hopkins’ eyes darted about. Blood. A metallic sweetness that had burned itself into his sense memory over the last few days.
Moving forward, he stumbled against something. It scraped loudly across the floor. A card table. Both his hands shot out—one to his .45, the other to the table for balance. His hand touched something soft. Rough wool. A blanket. There was something beneath it. He jerked his hand away, backed up, and looked at the table. Dimly he could make out a long object concealed beneath the blanket.
His other hand tightened on the .45. His heart beat faster and his mind raced. He was sure the straggler was hidden beneath the blanket with a gun or a knife—
Then he realized what it was.
Kirst’s body, put there by the MPs and draped with a blanket. That’s why he smelled blood. And on the next table under another blanket was Bauhopf.
Hopkins choked on a laugh. There was no one in this hut. No one living, anyway. The figure he had seen dart through the door?—only in his mind. There was no one. Only Kirst.
“And you ain’t going nowhere,” he said to the corpse.
He laughed again and turned to leave.
The blanket moved.
Hopkins froze.
Maybe it wasn’t Kirst. Maybe it was a goddamned straggler.
Shit.
He turned back.
“Maybe we ought to split up,” Gilman suggested. They were walking along the outer line of huts, he and Loring and Steuben, calling Hopkins and getting no answer.
“No!” Loring shouted over the storm. “You saw what the djinn was able to do at the gate. It had enough power to make us believe that whole tableau. If we separate, it could disguise itself as any one of us to get near the others. We have to stay together and find something to use against it. Protection. Then we’ll think of a way to let Hopkins know where we are.”
Gilman nodded. “All right—protection. Name something.”
“The one thing we haven’t tried—salt.”
Gilman grunted. “The one thing we haven’t tried, eh? Very reassuring. Well, anybody got a shaker?”
Steuben pointed between the huts. “There’s a supply of salt in the mess hall. Bags of it.”
“Let’s go,” said Loring.
“Okay.... Everything is going to be just fine.... You’ve got nothing to be scared of.... Daddy Hopkins is here to haul your precious German ass up to our own good old American mess hall, where you’ll get some really fine chow.... You hear me, kraut? I’m talking to you.”
Hopkins cautiously reached for a corner of the blanket. His other hand rested on the .45.
“I’m standing right beside you, and there’s no one else with me, and my gun is holstered, and you don’t have one fucking thing to be afraid of, okay, Mac? Okay, here we go. I’ve got the blanket now. You just stay calm and—”
He whipped off the blanket. A gust of wind from the open door blew it into his face. He clawed it off and flung it aside and looked down.
On the table was a body. Not a straggler, not Kirst, not Bauhopf. Hopkins was certain that he could see the two silver bars of a captain. U.S. Army. An American. Moving closer, Hopkins thought he recognized the face. The hairline, rumpled and greasy with matted blood, looked familiar. He came around the table for a better view and discovered dark, mottled stains along the shirtfront—dead, staring eyes and a ripped-out throat with torn arteries protruding—
This is Kirst, isn’t it? No, it’s not.
Hopkins trembled as he stared at the face, knowing who it was but wanting not to know it because it was someone he knew, someone he saw every day. It was Hopkins’ own dead face lying there on the card table—with no throat and the body stretched limp from the slaughter and blood all over—
A maddened howl echoed through the rec room. Hopkins’ hand shook on the butt of his .45 when he realized it was his own terrified scream reverberating in his ears—
The door slammed shut.
Alone in the dark with the thing on the table, Hopkins blinked to dilate his pupils. He leaned closer to the table to prove to himself he had made a mistake, hoping that even in this pitch-black darkness he would see what was really there. Kirst—it had to be Kirst. But then the body was in motion, and there was only time enough for him to glimpse arms rising from either side of the table before huge clawed hands seized him around the throat.
Hopkins flailed at the hands. Their grip tightened. He backed and stumbled and tried to get away, but the claws held him and, as fear dilated his pupils and let him see in the gloom, he discovered that these were disembodied hands, vanishing at the elbows, not connected to the body on the table at all. They forced him down.
His knees buckled and he was slammed into the floor, one leg bent almost double beneath him, but that pain lasted only an instant and was wiped away by a numbness spreading downward from his neck.
The djinn materialized out of the dark above, and now he saw what the arms were connected to. It towered over him, leering, its jaws opening wide, and its forked tongue flicking at him.
Then the claws punctured his neck and ripped out his throat.
The djinn’s immense hand rose, offering Hopkins’ gory flesh to an unseen god. Then Hopkins’s head dropped to his chest, and gratefully he saw at last that there was no body on the table after all. There never had been. It had all been in his mind. Only the djinn was real.
And in his glazing eyes, even the djinn became darkness.
Chapter 28
Rummaging in the pantry, Steuben found several large bags of salt, which Gilman helped him drag out to the mess hall. Each grabbing a bag, they began salting the hut. Loring poured a line of it across the doorway. Steuben scattered it on the floorboards. Gilman covered the windowsills. Loring brushed some under the back door then returned to watch Steuben stoke a fire in the potbellied stove.
When it was going strong and they could feel the warmth, they sat down in front of it and tried to relax, figuring that the smoke from the roof stack would eventually draw Hopkins. No one spoke. They all knew they had set themselves up as bait. The djinn would come for them sooner or later.
After a while, Gilman opened the door. The storm had died down. Snow was still falling, but it was no longer whipped about on raging winds. Gilman watched a breeze stir the grains of salt at his feet. The white line remained in place.
Looking up, he spotted a figure stumbling out from between the huts, coming toward him. As it got closer, he recognized Hopkins. Gilman signaled him. “Over here!”
Loring and Steuben joined him at the door. Loring studied the approaching figure intently.
Within a yard of the door, he stopped. Salt stirred on the threshold. Gilman urged him on impatiently. Hopkins stayed where he was, his gazing moving slowly from one to the other of them. All at once, his eyes rolled back into his head, he swayed, and toppled into the snow.
Gilman made a move to help him. Loring grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute,” she said.
“He’s hurt.”
“Let’s just wait.”
Hopkins didn’t move. Gilman shrugged off Loring’s restraining hand and descended the steps. He stopped, beginning to think about why she wanted him to wait. He stared at Hopkins’ body sprawled in the snow and wondered what was wrong with him. Why had he collapsed? Had there been a fight? Had the straggler attacked him? Hopkins’ .45 was still in its holster. Something about this struck Gilman as not being right.
Loring’s hand was on his arm again, pulling him back. He w
ent back up the steps and watched her hold up the silver talisman and angle it to catch Hopkins’ vague reflection. She looked into it and gasped.
Gilman and Steuben looked. In place of Hopkins’ body lying in the snow was the reflection of something half-man, half-beast, crouched and watching them with the hungry look of a starved dinosaur.
Loring dropped the talisman. It dangled on the end of the chain as she stooped and grabbed a handful of salt from the doorstep. She flung it at Hopkins.
There was an unearthly howl of pain and rage as Hopkins’ body erupted out of the snow, twisted into impossible shapes then collected into what resembled the blistering stump of a tree made of smoldering flesh. In its place then rose a thick column of oily black smoke that coiled backward then hurled itself at the mess hall.
The smoke clove into two bands of cloudy blackness that encircled the space beneath the eaves. It seized the mess hall and began to shake it.
Gilman, Loring, and Steuben sprang back into the room. The salt jumped and flew about the doorway. The floor banged and cracked beneath their feet. The walls heaved. Clouds of black boiled against the windows and exploded the glass inward. Shards tore past them and ripped their clothing. Salt blew from the exposed windowsills and whipped about their bodies in a white swirl.
Gilman shoved Loring to the floor and held her down as the boards bumped and heaved beneath them. Steuben dove under a table.
Blackness seeped upward between the cracks, forcing the floorboards apart in an attempt to get through. Salt dropped through the openings and the howl rose again. The floor stopped moving, but the entire building began to shake. Then, beneath the potbellied stove, the floorboards finally buckled. They snapped and, on a roiling black cloud, the stove was hoisted into the air and tipped over. Hot coals spilled from the open grate. The dry floor ignited.
Behind them, boards splintered and one whole wall opened up. An impossible wind blew in, fanning the fire and carrying sparks to the opposite wall.
Blackbone Page 28