“Go!” Griffin yelled as he lunged into the gap left by the panicking pale ones. He bulled his way toward the altar, shouldering aside any Moon-Eyes that got close. Not all of the pale folks had been sent running however and as he and Carl closed on the altar, several misshapen white forms came lurching their way.
Griffin aimed and fired, aimed and fired, just as he had done in military operations in half the third world countries on the globe. He had a speed-loader ready and as soon as his shots were fired, he snapped the cylinder open and jammed six more bullets in, letting the rubber grommet which had held them fall away. A large, and not remotely human othersider came rushing toward Griffin, bellowing as it came. It seemed to be mostly muscle, bone and teeth and it probably weighed four hundred pounds. But it had recognizable legs and Griffin put a bullet through each knee. As the thing fell he shot it in the face.
A pulpy white tentacle wrapped around his left hand. Griffin spun toward the attacker. The thing was mostly humanoid but it had tentacles where its arms should have been and its face was a mass of writhing feelers. Griffin fired into the center of the face and the thing toppled away. Something slammed into the back of Griffin’s head and he staggered, but he turned, firing as he did and seeing the bullets shear through the torso of something that looked like an oversized fetus with fangs.
The Moon-Eyes were getting over their shock and were starting to close in. Griffin glanced around but couldn’t see Carl. He fired two more shots, then snatched his second and last speed-loader and popped it in. He made each shot count, dropping a foe with each bullet. The altar was tantalizingly close. Should he go for the frag grenade? No, still not close enough to the gate.
Griffin switched the empty .357 to his left hand. It was a big heavy gun and would do well as a bludgeon. He reached over his shoulder and drew Decamp’s sword. He sliced the head from the closest pale one and smashed the face of another with the gun. The sword, edged with silver as it was, seemed to have better than normal cutting properties. Though the blade was reasonably thin, it sliced easily through bone and muscle. Maybe it really was magic.
More and more attackers were closing around him. He stabbed a Blackbourne he thought he remembered from fifth grade through an eye, and whipped the sword back and around, trying to clear some room. Something wrapped around one leg and Griffin lost his balance and fell, still swinging sword and gun, knocking out teeth and slicing through flesh as he fell. Blows rained down and Griffin did his best to protect his vitals. Sword and gun were pulled away.
“Don’t kill him!” A husky female voice said. “Bring him here to the altar.”
Griffin was jerked to his feet and strong hands and other appendages pinned his arms as he was pushed the last few feet toward the altar. He felt his gear bag, and thus his grenade, being jerked from his shoulder.
* * *
Carl caught a last image of Wade moving through the enemy like a tornado through a field of wheat and then he was too busy to do anything but move forward. There was no time, no chance to do anything but focus on surviving long enough to get close to Siobhan Blackbourne. She was as beautiful as ever, as enchanting, but at the moment her sexual magnetism was the farthest thing from his mind. Even if he had been feeling amorous, the image of her punching nails through a man’s eye sockets with her bare hands would have removed any possible desire.
Something came sailing through the air at him. All he could guess was that the long-legged thing had decided to leap in order to get to him all the sooner. It was female, at least he assumed it was by the breasts and the lack of obvious genitalia, but beyond that he didn’t want or need to get any closer.
One more shell. One more pull of the trigger. The shotgun boomed and the thing went flipping to the left, spun by the impact. Thing about leaping through the air like that is you don’t really have any noticeable weight when you’re up in the air. He’d caught a few idiots who thought they were street fighters that way in the past.
To the left another thing was coming. He didn’t take the time to aim so much as he pointed the pistol and fired. Of course, he was rapidly running out of bullets.
He didn’t dare let go of the shotgun. He still needed that. So he dropped the pistol when he felt the empty click. The shotgun got shoved into his belt, and he winced at the heat coming from the barrel as he reached for the machete strapped to his leg. Thing about a good blade is it never runs out of ammo as long as you have a functioning arm.
Something bit him in the side and Carl screamed. The teeth felt like they belonged on a sabre-tooth and he brought his elbow down and back and punched into a gelid mass that he guessed was an eye by the way the thing let go and howled. While it was pulling back, he followed through with the blade and took off the front of the thing’s face. It might heal, but it was going to feel that shit almost as much as he was feeling the wound in his side.
There were too damned many of them. They were everywhere and he needed to not have that many between him and his target. That left only one option as far as he was concerned. Wade had been on his left and so he pulled the pin, tossed to the right and prayed he wasn’t about to kill himself and one of his best friends.
Another thing—this one looked closer to human—came at him and he dropped low as it charged. The white flesh was hot, muscular and covered with coarse fur. It worked beautifully to shield him from the worst of the fragmentation grenade.
It’s one thing to know that an explosion is going to occur and another entirely to be there when it happens. The sound blew the hell out of Carl’s hearing and the vibrations bowled him backward. Had the Moon-Eye not been on top of him, he had little doubt he’d be dead. The thing rolled with him and most of the bones in its body felt like they’d been broken several times: the solid, muscular form felt like a hot bag of pudding as it rolled with him and the thing’s face was malformed by the impact.
No time to gag and puke and retch. Carl stood back up and was stunned by the damage that had been caused. Though he wasn’t close to the sacrificial altar a lot of what had been between him and his destination was now prone and either bleeding or dead. Some of the things might get back up, but it would take a few minutes.
That would have to be enough.
Carl moved forward and stumbled, his left leg refusing to carry him properly. That was okay. He’d hop if he had to. He maneuvered around the things on the ground, which were motionless or twitching and steaming around him.
He couldn’t hear a damned thing except the ringing in his ears.
As he moved, he reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out his special package, a hand made shotgun shell. Any decent hunter can pack a shell, and though he’d given up hunting years ago, his daddy used to take him when he was a boy. Long as he remembered the basics he didn’t figure he was going to blow himself to Hell—Already there, thanks kids!—when he pulled the trigger.
The shotgun was still in place, but pulling it free felt like he was uprooting it from his side. He didn’t look down, he didn’t dare. His luck he’d have done something significant to his internal organs.
Ahead of him Siobhan Blackbourne and the people and things around her were looking his way. He couldn’t be surprised by that; he had, after all just blown a quarter acre of their kin into shreds. And on the altar in front of her was another body that was dead or dying. And next to her, ready to go on the altar and still struggling mightily was Wade.
Not good, but at least he hadn’t killed the man.
Carl charged forward as best he could and slipped his special shell into the shotgun. He’d maybe have had doubts about this earlier, even when he was putting the damned thing together, but watching the woman with blood all over her hands and front and the wild-eyed expression on her perfect face tended to put things into perspective. He hopped across the body of one of the things on the ground—he didn’t even want to know what it had looked like before the explosion—and stumbled forward.
And as he looked back up, fully expecting the Moon-E
yes and the Blackbournes alike to be charging toward him, he saw a very large number of both recoiling, looking around for some way to escape.
On his worst day he knew they weren’t looking at him. And seeing as they were monsters, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was that had caught their attention, but now and then, you just have to know.
And once he looked, he wished desperately that he could have taken it back.
* * *
Siobhan felt the sky opening above her. The explosion the sheriff had caused was trivial, really. It hurt a few, killed some more, but in the end they were not significant. She had so many children and she could always have more, would have more with the One.
The burning circle expanded, and her hair whipped into a frenzy in the sudden change of pressure. Around her the Muhneyht fairly vibrated in ecstasy, their god finally returned to them. Siobhan looked up, her eyes taking in the dark magnificence of Shub Niggurath returned at last. The One was coming home to her, as she and it would be united, joined in their need to breed, to procreate, to multiply. The Black Goat with a Thousand Young, the Black Ram with a Thousand Young—the titles meant nothing, could not begin to express the power of the god that was coming for her. She could feel the god’s desire and in response, her body shifted, became more real, finally began to reveal itself for all to see.
While she was busy viewing the sire of her future children, the man she’d planned to offer up next took advantage of the moment and broke free of his guards. His face was a bloodied mask of rage. To most it might have meant something, but to Siobhan, it was little more than a flea trying to bite at her flesh.
The Muhneyht holding him were struck down, broken by the blows he used to free himself. One of his elbows shot backwards, crushing the nose and skull of the closest of her children. The man bent forward at the waist and another pale figure went flying over his shoulder to fall into the crowd below. This one was a warrior. She could almost have admired him when she was something close to human.
And then as he prepared to attack her, the transformations she was going through became visible to him for the first time.
* * *
Frank felt a sense of urgency, and moved forward, drawn to the sacrifices, to the power that they offered, and while some small part of him wondered if there was danger up ahead, the Other voice inside of him was growing louder, more excited by the second. The walls were too narrow, and so he smashed them down, breaking through the hallway with all the finesse of a bowling ball hammering its way down the fluted cup of a champagne glass. Some of the Moon-Eyes—His Other called them “Muhneyht” and was now speaking in the language that Meemaw used to sing to him in, he understood enough to know that the Other was repulsed by the white shapes—tried to stop him, but his arms lashed out, and grabbed them, tore at them, broke them into bloodied pulps. And all the while his Other screamed, drooled, demanded satisfaction.
The double doors before him would have accommodated him only an hour earlier, but now he was too big, too swollen with power and desire. Auntie lay ahead of him. Part of him wanted to kill her. Most of him had other desires.
And Shub was somewhere ahead of him, too. He could hear the voice of Shub Niggurath, a deep tone that vibrated his bones through the swollen meat of his form. He only understood a few of the desires of his Other, but knew that the thing that was taking him over wanted Auntie Siobhan and also lusted after the thing coming down to join with her. Perhaps his Other understood the odd anatomies of the thing, but the very notion hurt Frank’s head.
Frank charged forward, roaring and destroying everything that stood between him and his targets. He was dimly aware of the sheriff limping along in front of him, but not even that man meant anything to him now. He had his Auntie in his sites and he needed to hurt her. The Other disagreed. It had other plans. Two legs didn’t seem capable of moving him fast enough, and so he grew another, and then two more, the better to cross the distances to his prize.
* * *
Carl’s hearing must have been starting to come back, because he heard a thunderous roar of obscene noises coming from behind him even as he turned to look. Worse, he could feel the ground shuddering at the same time.
Deep in the pit of his stomach he knew what he would see: he could have told anyone who was there to ask him at that moment, because the last thing he wanted to see was exactly what came up to ride his ass.
The area behind him was no longer a ballroom, nor did it look remotely like any place he’d ever seen in person before. The sky was the wrong color, and the ground was a vast field of jagged rocks and mossy spots that wriggled and squirmed and tried to get out the way of the thing coming toward him, stomping on rocks, moss-stuff and bodies alike with complete abandon.
Frank Blackbourne charged, bulldozing his way past the abominations that tried to get out of his way. Carl did not recognize him easily, because he had grown like a cancer being fed steroids. The freakish thing was easily eight hundred pounds, and each time one of the massive feet slammed into the ground the world seemed to shake. There were a lot of feet. Way too many.
Carl didn’t even try to count them, he just stared, too shocked to do anything else for a moment. The part of the thing that was recognizable as Frank was smaller than he’d expected. He could make out the face, part of the torso, but they were insignificant. The gaping, babbling mouth of the thing below the chest was larger, and drooled as it bellowed vile, offensive gibberish.
Had you asked Carl what his plans were, he would have probably considered prayer, or just possibly even shooting the goddamned thing. What he would not have said, what he would have expressed as a sure fire guarantee of a painful death and maybe a good way to lose his remaining shreds of sanity, would have been to hitch a ride on the freakish thing.
And yet, he did it. Without any conscious thought his left hand lashed out and grabbed at the remaining shreds of cloth that had twisted into the cauldron of flesh that poured past him at high speed.
He was pretty sure he was screaming as he was hauled off the ground. It was hard to tell past the massive thing’s shrieking tirade.
There was a certain rhythm to the way the thing moved. That helped.
Carl held on tight and looked at the approaching altar, the growing image of Wade fighting for his life, the nightmarish thing that Siobhan was becoming—and his mind did not want to even consider that—and worst of all, the shape that was pushing at the blazing rift in the sky.
He had no idea what was trying to be born, but he was terrified to find out.
One shot.
One shell.
One target.
Carl held his breath for a moment and then sighted on Siobhan Blackbourne’s hellish shape as she expanded, grew larger and more malformed even than Frank, and prepared to pull the trigger.
* * *
The world had gone stark raving, bugfuck mad. Griffin had managed to free himself but before he could get his hands on the Blackbourne bitch she had begun to grow. No, that was wrong. She wasn’t so much changing as becoming fully visible. Phantom limbs, human, insect, and animal shimmered in the air about her and behind her was a gigantic pulsing mass like the venom sack of some great bloated spider. How could he hope to stop anything like that?
And then another mad image. A huge, misshapen thing that also seemed to be growing in more than one dimension, and riding it like a cowboy gone berserk was Carl goddamn Price. Griffin saw two things at once. He saw Carl level a shotgun and fire, and he saw something silver and glittering out of the corner of one eye. Decamp’s sword, fallen to the ground, perhaps too full of the wrong kind of magic for any of the pale abominations to hang onto.
Griffin dived from the platform as the female horror recoiled from the shot. The shotgun couldn’t hurt her, but perhaps it had surprised her. Griffin hit the ground, rolled and came to his feet, lashing out with the sword to cut through a Moon-Eye who was trying to grab him with hands like lobster claws with eyes. Griffin glanced back. Carl had fallen
from his lunatic mount and was limping slowly toward the altar. To Griffin’s surprise, the Blackbourne woman was clutching her midsection and she suddenly looked far more human than she had a moment before. Her fingers were clasped tightly over her abdomen but a great quantity of brackish blood was streaming from the wound. The semblance of other limbs and greater mass was a ghost image around her more human shape.
Above them great arcs of purple flame and coruscating white light spun across the gate. The dark shape trying to coalesce in the center of the gate flickered and a voice unlike any heard on the planet in countless ages shrieked in frustration and rage. Then the giant form that had carried Carl to the stage slammed into the Blackbourne woman and both figures crashed to the strange grassy plain that had appeared out of nowhere.
Griffin made his way to Carl, who was leaning against the altar. He said, “I think the gate is collapsing. What the hell did you shoot that freaking bitch with and do you have any more?”
Carl shook his head and immediately looked as if he regretted it. “One per customer. I’ll tell you about it later. Right now we’d better get the hell out of here.”
Griffin heard a sound like thunder and felt a concussive force shake the ground. He looked past the blazing gate to the rock strewn plain beyond and as he watched, slowly, impossibly, the horizon began to tilt.
“What the hell?” Carl said.
“I think the dimensions are shifting again. We have got to get out of here. I can’t see the door to the ballroom but maybe it’s still there.”
“Go,” Carl said. “My leg’s twisted and I think something’s broken inside.”
Griffin said, “No way. No freaking way.” He slipped one of Carl’s arms over a shoulder and half lifted the sheriff. “Now run!”
Blind Shadows Page 31