Then the pair of shapechanged creatures began to thrash their way in, their flesh and heads more reptilian than equine. Below the red centers of their eyes their massive jaws opened to reveal the sliding forth of curved fangs the size of butcher knives.
Rooster had fallen back against the opposite side of the car. He had lost his rifle in the impact. Lawson heard Gantt gibbering with terror. Rebinaux had broken and was sobbing like a child, and he was trying desperately to crawl away from the monster whose head weaved back and forth above him, the jaws opened and the fangs glinting with light from burning pools of lamp fuel.
Lawson lifted his Colt to fire, but so stunned was he by these Hellish visions that his left trigger finger was too slow. Before he could get his shot off the creature’s head darted down and the jaws engulfed Rebinaux’s skull up to the throat. The thing’s bite squeezed off the man’s swelling scream; with a twist of its head it all but decapitated Johnny Rebinaux and then lifted the body off the planks as a man might lift a bottle to drink after its cork has been bitten out.
It was then that Lawson got his senses back and sent a bullet into the monster’s head, but even as it twisted and writhed and began to break into burning pieces it backed out of the shattered car with Rebinaux’s neck still clamped in its fangs, determined to feast on its final meal of human blood.
The second beast, the one that had become a nightmare combination of horse, spider and dragon, continued to push its way in. The fangs snapped at Rooster’s legs. Ann got off a shot and hit the thing at the base of the neck. It gave a high shriek of pain and its head turned toward her, but then it was hit by three shots in quick succession in the meat of the body. The creature’s head swivelled to go after Deuce Mathias, who stood amid the broken seats with the smoke of Rooster’s Winchester swirling around him.
Lawson’s and Ann’s pistols fired nearly together. The two silvers pierced the thing’s skull about three inches apart, and thus quickened its demise. As the thing cracked apart and its flesh sizzled like bacon in a skillet, it still focused on Mathias with its single remaining eyeball. When it lunged at him he held his ground and struck out, using the rifle as a club because the magazine was empty; the eyeball withered and sank in, the head began to collapse, and the wind whipped the body into a storm of ebony ashes.
A portion of the car’s roof caved in. The two winged vampires that had ridden the horses in had hammered their way through. Ann shot the first one just below its cavalry cap as it dropped down into the car. In its deaththroes it became a maddened whirlwind of fangs and claws. It ripped bloody wounds across Gantt’s chest and then spun toward Eric, who shot the thing twice more at pointblank range just as the body collapsed like a punctured cyst and burned out of the dirty rags of its uniform.
The second vampire thought better of entering the car and took to the air. There came a few seconds during which the noise of the wind was nearly louder than Gantt’s cursing as he lay with his back against a splintered wall, his hands pressed to his wounds.
Lawson saw them coming first, and then Ann. “Load up!” he told everyone who had a gun. “Here they come!”
The vampiric army of Henry Styles Junior was on the advance. They were not at full speed yet, but that was only a matter of seconds. There were maybe thirty of them on the left: men, women and what might be mistaken as children, some in blood-daubed rags but others well-dressed, as if they had come from the same world of humans that Lawson masqueraded in. Some had become nothing more than blood-hungry wild animals and those were the ones that rushed forward most greedily, while others with more decorum and restraint stayed at the rear. Or, Lawson figured, those were the vampires who had a steady supply of food and walked most freely among humans. He noted that those were also the ones who held the firearms. A few of the winged shapechangers perched on the rocks, crouched down as if settling in to enjoy the coming spectacle.
A check to the right showed fifteen or so more of Junior’s army coming up the embankment through the snowy woods. They were in all manner of dress, again some ragged and bloodstained, others more freshly-procured: buckskins, fancy gowns, banker’s suits, the patched clothing of dirt-poor farmers and their wives, little dresses and knickers for the things that had been turned as children.
Lawson had a thought that took hold of him as firmly as a vampire’s claw.
They have come from all points of the Dark Society’s compass. Directed and drawn here by LaRouge, because she wants me.
Me.
I could learn to be a god, he thought.
Of what use is the human world to me anymore? I am beyond it. I am strong and fast and if I pleased I could live forever. My wife and daughter…gone…a painful memory. I have been betrayed by the human kind, led to slaughter and abandonment at Shiloh. What do I owe them? Why should I hold onto that life…and…really…I am tired…so very tired…I cannot hold on.
If I give myself up, they may let Ann and the rest of them go. If I stop trying, they may yet live…
If…if…
A dangerous word.
“Do you want me to take this side or the other?”
He looked into Ann’s eyes and he thought she flinched just a little, because perhaps after their months of working together she could see what he was thinking and she didn’t like the picture.
“This side of the car or the other?” she asked. She cocked her pistol.
They didn’t have very much time left. There was none remaining for introspection, hatred, regret or bitterness. There was only time enough to go down fighting.
With an effort that he hoped wasn’t obvious to her, Lawson said, “Let’s stay on the same side.”
She nodded. “Good enough.”
In silence, Junior’s army charged the broken passenger car.
Ten.
They came fast. Some were faster than others. The most nimble hurtled through the windowframes and the gaping hole the horse-creatures had torn open. Lawson and Ann barely had an instant to take aim. Some moved like the wind, nearly invisible until they were right there, lower jaw unhinging, mouth straining wide, fangs sliding out for the feeding under the crimson glare of the eyes.
The first one Ann shot in the head wore the flesh of a little blond girl about ten years old, but there was caked blood all down the front of her lavender-colored dress and she shrieked like a storm of ravens as she burned. Lawson killed a young male vampire who had a deep jagged scar across his forehead, the testament of a hard human life. The fangs of a red-haired woman in the sackcloth dress of a farmer’s wife came at Lawson before he shot her between the eyes and she fell back hissing like a snake and cracking like old plaster. Ann missed with her next shot at a gaunt male vampire in a filthy mud-colored suit, but Lawson got him in the left temple as he scrabbled toward Eli Easterly.
A female vampire with long dark hair and a nearly-skeletal body had leaped upon Gantt, who tried to fight her off but was no match for her strength. Lawson saw two vampires, a male and female, bearing Rooster down to the floorboards. Eric was firing his pistol, hitting nothing but at least keeping them back. Mathias was fighting a pair of vampires using the Winchester as a club. Lawson suddenly had the grinning rictus of an old white-haired man right in his face, and he shot the thing just below the left eye as it opened its mouth to bite. Ann killed another young female vampire, a golden-haired girl in a yellow dress who was still beautiful and who might have been in another life a stage actress or some celebrated but ultimately doomed soul.
Both Ann and Lawson were running out of bullets and had no time to reload. Then a blurred form fell upon him and a tremendous strength bore him down, and he looked up into the gap-toothed face of Henry Styles Junior, the one-hundred-and-five-year-old vampire boy. Ann was pushed down by a wiry vampire with a thatch of black hair wild with cowlicks. Her gunhand was knocked aside just as her last silver bullet was fired.
“Ssssuch a sssstubborn fool,” Junior said, as delicately as if already tasting him. His mouth opened and the fangs sli
d out. One hand was on Lawson’s throat. A knee pinned the gunfighter’s Colt. “We win, Trevor,” he said in a whisper. “You ssssee? Firssst we win the battle, and then we win the—”
He blinked.
There had been a disturbance, a movement of something unseen, a something that should not be. Lawson felt it, just as Junior had.
Junior’s head twisted around.
In the splintered mass of the car’s side there appeared a figure, standing over Junior and Lawson.
It was an Indian with a single eagle feather in his braided hair. He was barechested but wore an open cowhide waistcoat decorated with patterns of red, blue and green beads. He held a sawed-off shotgun, the double barrels of which he pressed against Junior’s forehead.
Lawson said to Junior, and afterward never knew why he spoke it: “Merry Christmas.”
The Indian pulled both triggers.
There was no sacred work of the silver bullet in this. There was no butcher knife to cleave off the vampire boy’s head. There was only a double load of buckshot, delivered at flesh-kissing range from a fearsome weapon held by a determined killer.
In the next instant Henry Styles Junior had no head. From the ragged mess of where it had been the black ichor streamed out, and the Indian grasped the neck of the writhing body and drank from it.
Lawson, in a kind of shocked stupor, realized he was seeing something he had never expected to witness: a vampire Indian, probably a Sioux by the look of him. He roused himself and used his last silver bullet to shoot in the midst of its cowlicks the creature who was bearing down on Ann. As that thing convulsed and burned, the Indian had already reloaded two shells and had strode forward to blow the head off one of the vampires who drank from Rooster. Then he grabbed by the hair a female who was gnawing into Deuce Mathias’s back and he threw her through one of the windowframes as if she were made of straw. As the Indian was reloading for another vampire scalp, a second half-seen figure that had been moving with the quickness of the Dead Society slowed enough to come into view: a broad-shouldered, white-bearded mountain man in fringed buckskins and a coonskin cap. With a howl of rage he went to work with the axe he was carrying, causing heads with fanged mouths to fly and ichor to pour thickly from the neckstumps.
The appearance of a third figure, immediately following, was enough to send the remnants of Junior’s army scrabbling from the car. This one was another male, slim of build, dressed in patched but relatively clean clothing and a dark blue jacket, and the axe he wielded did the same quick and violent work as the burly mountain man’s. The bodies of the decapitated vampires continued to thrash, the arms flailing as if seeking the heads they’d lost, but the wound was too severe for the ichor or the lifeforce of the creatures to heal and their motions were slowing. A female vampire in blood-crusted rags showed either extreme hunger, courage or stupidity as she leaped upon the mountain man’s back. Her fangs sank into his shoulder but her head was blown apart by the Indian’s shotgun and all that was left were the curved teeth. The mountain man plucked them out with disdain and flung them away, then he grasped the twitching body to take his own drink.
They were on the run. A couple more dared to attack the new trio and were dispatched by the axes. After that, the passenger car emptied of the last of them. Lawson caught sight of the remaining troops, a paltry number, fleeing through the snow down the embankment into the woods. The winged shapechangers took to the air. A few half-hearted shots were fired from the rocks on the left, and then there was no more gunfire. The arms of Junior’s headless body reached out as if trying to grasp hold of a purchase enough to stand. The hands with their dirty clawlike nails closed on empty air. Then the arms fell back, as from the stump of the neck the last of his ichor oozed out like ebony mud.
Lawson stood up. As he warily watched the new arrivals, he reloaded his Colt with silvers by holding the gun as best he could in his right hand; the broken arm was an impediment but at least he had a little strength in his fingers now. Ann was standing too, her face and hair splattered with vampire gore. Her expression was eerily calm, but her hands were shaking as she fed her pistol.
The Indian pushed two more shells in the shotgun. The mountain man swung his axe back and rested it on his shoulder. The vampire in the blue jacket leaned on his axe and looked around at the carnage.
“Travel this way often?” he asked. It was the voice of a refined and educated man.
“Once will be enough,” Trevor said.
The man’s eyes were light brown. There was a combination in them of both terrible sadness and terrible ferocity. Though his mouth was stained with the ichor his fangs had sucked from the bodies that still convulsed on the floorboards, he might have given the merest hint of a smile. It was hard to tell, because the light came only from flickering pools of lamp oil.
“You’re one of us,” he said.
“I’m one,” Trevor answered. “Who are us?”
The man grunted softly. He was nearly Lawson’s height, had thick black hair with streaks of gray on the sides and a gray lock that fell across his forehead above the right eye. On the left side of his face was the puckered round hole where a bullet had made its entry, and on the right side the same where it had made its exit. Another scar was scrawled from the corner of his left eye to the left corner of his mouth, and the disfigurement of the upper lip made him appear to wear the faint and rather mocking smile.
Minie ball hole and saber scar, Lawson thought. “The War For Southern Independence?” he asked.
“The War of the Rebellion,” said the man.
“I was taken at Shiloh.”
“You mean Pittsburg Landing? I was taken at Antietam.”
“You mean, of course, Sharpsburg,” said Lawson. “I was a captain.”
“I was a major…captain.”
“Ah,” Lawson said, and returned the smile in same faint and mocking fashion. “Well…we are greatly thankful for your arrival here, major. All of us.”
“Figure you’d best see to your people,” rumbled the mountain man. “Smellin’ their blood.”
Except for Ann, the others had become a frozen tableau…and almost literally because the air was far below freezing, the snowfall heavier, and the car looked to have been busted and crushed by the fist and boot of a disagreeable giant who hated trains. It was time to count the costs.
Blue was all right, drifting in and out with no knowledge of any of this. Easterly had taken some splinters and glass cuts, but he’d had the presence of mind in the battle to draw his crucifix and use it to burn the creatures who’d tried to swarm both himself and the girl. Eric had suffered the rake of a claw from the top of his left shoulder down to the elbow and been bitten on the throat but the vampire’s thirst had been interrupted by the noise of the Indian’s shotgun. With the decapitation of Junior the creature had decided a few cupfuls of human blood was enough soup for the nightly meal and had fled the car through a window.
Mathias had fought them off as well, though he’d taken several bites to both arms, his hands and one more frenzied bite on his back. He was weak and dazed but he was alive.
“I’m all right,” said Rooster as he struggled to his feet. What had saved him was the fact that the male and female vampires who’d attacked him had started fighting each other for his blood. The female had gotten to his neck while the male’s fangs had pierced his right hand, but just after the male had been destroyed by the shotgun the female had pulled out and turned away in time to give her head to an axeblade. “I’m all right,” Rooster repeated, though he had lost a goodly amount of blood and was near falling down again. “I’m ready for the nuthouse, but I’m all right.”
“Gantt?” Lawson called. There was no answer.
The mountain man had already walked back to the strongest smell of human blood.
“This one’s gone,” he said. “Throat open…chest too. Heart’s tore out.” He glanced at Lawson with a pair of narrow pale blue eyes in the rugged and wrinkled face. “Took it and skedaddled. Blo
od trail goes out the window.”
Lawson had to see for himself. He hated the sight, for Gantt’s eyes were open and blood had run from both corners of his mouth. It seemed a terrible violation, worse than having your throat pierced by a pair of fangs, to have your heart torn out and stolen as one might snatch a gravy-soaked biscuit from a dinner plate. He recalled seeing a very thin female vampire with long dark hair bearing down on Gantt. He wondered if it might have been Eva, and if so…LaRouge was teaching her well.
He had no doubt LaRouge was somewhere near. Maybe not in the Montana territory, but near enough to have planned all this, and near enough to soon know that Lawson had escaped.
But he and the other survivors had not gotten out of it yet. Helena still seemed a world away…and there were these three to be considered.
“Josephus Wilder,” said the mountain man. “Your handle?”
“Trevor Lawson. Your name?” he asked the major.
The man was standing over Reverend Easterly and Blue, and the Indian was walking back and forth among the dying vampire bodies.
“Achilles Godfrey,” said the man.
That name. That name, Lawson thought. Where had he—?
Oh yes.
“Major Godfrey,” said Lawson. “Also known as ‘Godless’.”
“By some,” the major said. “Those who failed to grasp realities.”
“I read in the newspaper…somewhere…about you and your men at the battle of Boonsboro.”
“You mean the battle of South Mountain.”
“The Yankee name for it. Specifically, what happened at Fox’s Gap. September 14th, 1862…three days before Sharpsburg. Does that bring back a memory?”
“Dim,” came the answer. “All of that, except for that night on the Antietam battlefield, among the screaming wounded, when they found me under my dead horse…very dim.”
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