Stepping over heaps of bodies, they descended the stairs. Men hiding behind the upturned tables shouting “Get that Yankee!” and started firing.
But the Carpetbagger was a mystery. He walked through the hail of bullets and he extended this ability to the naked harlot accompanying him.
He aimed at the tops of heads peeking up over the tables, firing both guns simultaneously, exploding them into sprays of blood and bone. The drunk miners and belligerent soldiers realized then that they were up against something inhuman—and, in a mad exodus of terror, the survivors fled the double doors.
The place now empty, he reached over the bar top and with a smash of his fist popped the cash register open. He withdrew the stacks of bills, folding them into his leather bag. The harlot smiled at him. “For us?”
“That depends. You up for a ride?”
She smirked. “You’d better believe it.”
“Then I suppose it is.”
He led her out of the saloon and over to his horse. The terrified drunk patrons were in the middle of scattering across the dusty street like roaches. They were hollering the devil had come to Jonesboro and a bunch of other nonsense. Already candles were being lit in the high windows of the surrounding buildings.
He un-tethered his horse, stuck a foot into the stirrup, swinging himself up. He then helped the harlot to ride pillion. Suddenly a blast of fire and glass shot out the overhead window. There was a scream, and someone began to holler, “Fire! Fire!”
He took a moment to reload his revolvers, sticking one of them in a holster by the saddle horn. “We gotta go, little lady,” he said. He felt her arms close around him. With a piercing shriek of Yahh, and a quick back-kick of his boots, they tore into full gallop.
They were ready for him. Shapes appeared in the upper windows, in the doorways, in the shadows. All men, all dressed in deep gray uniforms, all having sad eyes, some with full beards, some clean-shaven, desperate. Christ, the Carpetbagger thought, Jonesboro is a rebel hideout.
Tossing the reins to the harlot, he said, “Hold these,” and drew the other revolver and got to his feet, standing upright in the saddle, turned around.
“Jesus of Mary!” she shouted.
“Just keep it steady!”
From one of the windows, a voice yelled, “Get that Yankee swine!” Gunfire started. The rebels were more, but the Carpetbagger was faster—supernaturally fast, his revolvers discharging in rapid succession, seeming to reload themselves. He fired a bullet into every dark alley, spilling its occupants out into the street.
Men tumbled forward out of doorways and windows. Blood flowed in the dirt. The ones on the rooftops got it worst, spilled to the ground, bodies shattering on impact.
When they reached the end of the main street, the Carpetbagger spun around and dropped into the saddle. “Whoa,” he told the horse, taking the reins from the harlot. For a moment all was silent, the trees and hills growing dark into the distance, the moon a bony eye overhead. Looking back, he spotted a band of horses approaching out of the gloom.
“What you waitin’ for?” the harlot said. “Shoot them.”
He patiently reloaded his guns. When the horses arrived, it wasn’t rebels or miners in the saddles; it was harlots. They were dressed in fine clothes, faces painted, long hair billowing out.
The Carpetbagger grinned as he surveyed the group. “Look what we have here.”
“We want to join you,” one of them said, a voluptuous blonde in a ruffled red dress. “We can fight, ride, loot. This town is dust. Sherman and his boys will be here by sunup.”
“That he will,” the Carpetbagger said.
“Please,” she begged. “Get us out of here.”
He looked at them all, then chuckled. He hauled up the leather bag, opened it, and began doling out the revolvers.
“We’re tight on bullets,” he said, passing around the last few rounds, “so make every shot count. More importantly, aim for the head.”
“But almost everyone in town is dead,” said a brunette woman perching on a white mare. She spun the chamber of her revolver almost ruefully before slapping it into place. “Pity. I would have liked to put a hole in some a those fellas.”
“You’ll get your chance.”
She peered at him, brows knit. “What’d you mean?”
He grinned mischievously. “The real darkness of this world lies on the flip side of things. In a place that most folks can’t see and aren’t even aware of. But it’s there, right under their noses. In order to truly vanquish evil, both sides of the equation must be dealt with. In olden times, this was referred to as lifting the veil.”
He piloted his horse to the front, the other harlot still riding pillion at his rear, and said, “Remember: headshots only.” He then let out a wild cry of “Yahh,” followed by the word “Flip,” and all at once the horses jumped into a gallop.
He drew his revolvers as the world spun upside down.
Now the buildings were up above, along with the dirt, the streets, the trees, even the earth itself. And below, like an ocean of stars, lay the sky, deep and endless, perforated by the glowing white moon.
They rode behind the Carpetbagger, all of them upside down and yet sticking, hooves and horses sticking, harlots sticking, everything sticking. Always strange flipping through dimensions and such, he thought. Not an easy transition, don’t think I’ll ever get used to it and can’t imagine how the girls feel.
But they seemed to be doing all right. Their faces remained determinate and stony. Even the girl riding pillion had managed to keep her revolver raised, despite the murmurous whimpering coming from her.
They reentered town just as the bodies littering the main street began to rise. Up from the dirt they struggled, slinking through the growing shadows. The dead miners and boys in gray… yes, they were getting to their feet, bodies and limbs twisted, blood still gushing out of the bullet wounds the Carpetbagger had given them. Slowly, but nonetheless determinately, they retrieved their guns and started firing.
“Holy Christ!” shouted one of the harlots. “They’re spooks!”
“Let ’em have it!” cried the Carpetbagger. “Headshots—headshots!”
Gunfire ripped through the town like a swarm of killer bees. The undead miners and rebel soldiers aimed sluggishly toward them, firing, though always drawing nil. Half the time, the shots were so belated that they wound up striking other undeads on the other side of the road.
The Carpetbagger leveled his revolvers toward the left, the right, up, down, sending shots into many twisted forms, decapitating them. Heads leaking grayish fluid tumbled into the dirt one after the other. Slumped bodies, misshapen and dense, plummeted from the rooftops, and fell into an endless star-speckled sky.
The harlots played their part, though collectively they tagged a smaller headcount than the Carpetbagger. But they sent their share of abominations crumbling into the dark.
The more they tagged, the more their confidence rose, and the better they got. They began shrieking—wild, mad shrieks—as they fired and reloaded.
Once they came upon a group of undeads standing in the street. Two of the girls encircled them and kicked at their heads with pointed boots, decapitating them. The heads dropped into the sky, a thick stream of blood following after.
More crawled out of windows and doors, moaning, and some launched themselves out of lower windows, trying to land on top of them. Those that missed sailed down into oblivion, their arms pinwheeling. Others hoisted the guns of their fallen comrades and began to fire in a drunken manner, but they were no match for the Carpetbagger and his crew.
When they passed a building with the words Federal Bank written over the door, he took the magic bag and tossed it to the nearest harlot. She looked at him, eyes ablaze. He pointed, and she nodded, veering off toward the bank, and he whistled for another girl to go with her.
Meanwhile, they had their hands full with undeads firing at them from every possible and perceivable location. There were three
on the roof, which he eliminated with a straight line of his revolvers. There were a couple shambling out of the darkness between two buildings. One of the harlots got them, painting the walls with brains and blood. Another undead firing foolishly from the window caught a bullet right between the eyes, its head splitting cleanly in half like a melon.
The harlots emerged from the bank moments later. One of them held up the bag fattened with plunder. The Carpetbagger grinned.
When they passed the saloon, which was almost entirely engulfed in flames, they shot the heads off a number of burning undeads who were running around like giant candles. They picked the last few from the rooftops and windows, giving them permanent dirt-naps, just as they reached the other end of town.
They rode into the starry distance, hooves kicking up dust. The Carpetbagger glanced over his shoulder, shouting “Flip!” at the top of his lungs, and the world was set right again.
The man lying on the stone bench opened his eyes. The bowler hat tipped down over his face hid the sad smile adorning his lips. Yessir, he thought, those were the good old days.
He sat up just as the city transit bus pulled alongside the bench. As the bus depressurized, he got to his feet and straightened his blue Armani suit. Tall buildings with bright glass windows towered above him. Cars rushed past on the street.
The doors opened and he stepped onto the bus. The driver, a large black man with a beard and a bald head, took one look at him…and gasped. He leaned forward and, in a whisper, said, “You a…a Carpetbagger?”
The Carpetbagger said nothing. But he smiled. Long, wide, and full of pearly white teeth. He let that be his answer.
“I’ll be damned,” the driver said, sitting back in his chair. He waited a moment, then: “Go on. You know you ride for free.”
The Carpetbagger moved past him down the aisle, scanning the blank, unhappy faces, and finally he took a seat in the back. But the bus didn’t move. It stayed right where it was, the engine idling.
The bus driver’s eyes flicked up in the large rectangular mirror above his head. He looked over all the bus’s occupants, at last settling on the Carpetbagger. “Well?” he said. “You gonna do this?”
The other passengers looked at each other confusedly, as the man in the blue Armani suit stood up in the back aisle, drawing a massive black pistol from his waistline. He grinned, a smile of pure unadulterated delight, and shouted a single word into the cabin:
“Flip!”
Antler and Eye
K.C. Shaw
My name’s Jo, but my fellow hunters call me Catseye behind my back. We’ve got a rough and bloody job, clearing out nests of vampires or werewolf packs so that normal people are safe.
Most of us hunters are a little out of true, unwelcome hints of a harsh past before humans started hunting back: Jayden with his mouthful of wolfish fangs, Sam who hides his vestigial fairy wings under heavy shirts. In my case, it’s my eyes. I can’t hide them.
Tonight we had wind of something big. Even the soccer moms and company car bigshots seemed to sense it, so that by nightfall the streets were quiet and nearly empty. My squad and I suited up with a little more care than normal. On July nights like this one I was always tempted to leave off a layer of body armor or swap my steel-and-silver lined boots for something cooler. Tonight I wore the whole kit, even the helmet that made me feel like a dork and the night vision goggles that actually made my unnaturally keen eyesight a little dimmer.
We gathered in the ops room. Our commander, Dirk, looked perfectly normal except for being fish-belly pale. Rumor had it that his dad had been a vampire. He glared at us until we quieted down, then said, “We’ve got a long night ahead of us. The full moon has the local werewolves all riled up, and the vampires spooked. If we’re lucky, they’ll just fight each other—try to herd them into a safe zone—and we can silver-and-stake the wounded. But I’ve had a couple of weird reports about the fairies being agitated too, something about a surge of magic. That may be related. Oh, and the Necromancer’s up to something new.” We all groaned. “Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s your baby this time, Jo.”
“Aw, hell, Dirk,” I said, letting a whine creep into my voice. “Can’t the PD keep him under control? He’s human.”
“And don’t you forget it. No accidental staking.” Dirk gave me a mirthless grin. “No matter how much he deserves it.”
It’s not that I’d been looking forward to wading into a werewolf-vampire rumble—although okay, I was a little. I just didn’t want to be reading the Necromancer his rights while my squad popped his zombies, not when the other hunters were out in the middle of the real action. I wanted to accuse Dirk of sexism, since I’m the only woman hunter left since Ayla quit, but it really was my squad’s turn to deal with the Necromancer.
“Hopefully this won’t take long,” I said on the drive across town.
Jayden snorted in the seat next to me. In the back seat, Barry said, “You know we’ll be popping zombies for hours, Jo. And Steve’s squad said they had a poltergeist last time too.”
I didn’t bother to deny it. I’d heard about the poltergeist too. “Just deal with whatever we find. The sooner we dump the Necromancer off at the PD, the sooner we can have some real fun.”
Animating corpses and summoning demons is illegal, but the Necromancer was rich. He never got more than a slap on the wrist and a fine. Someone somewhere was getting his palm greased, probably more than one someone. I wished he’d cut me in on the pay.
The Necromancer lived on the west side of town in a big brick house that didn’t look more than ten years old. Anyone might have lived there—a banker with a realtor wife and a couple of kids, a dog, matching SUVs, and a trampoline out back. Instead, it was home to an old man whose hobby was dealing in things man was not meant to know. I sighed and parked the van in the circular driveway.
I heard thunder as I jumped out of the van, and by the time I crossed the porch with my squad close behind me, thunder rumbled again. No wonder the weres were stirred up, with a full moon and a storm moving in. I banged on the door, then went in. The house was always unlocked.
The foyer was big and empty of furniture, probably because it had all been broken the first time the Necromancer had filled the room with zombies. There were about a dozen milling around aimlessly now. They noticed us and started shambling our way. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of rot and drew my knife.
I hate zombies. They stink, they’re revolting to look at—grayish and moldy—and worst of all, they tend to explode when killed. All those gases inside them, I guess. I decided to keep my helmet on. I don’t like getting decaying intestines in my hair.
We hacked at the zombies for a few minutes. I’d left the front door open, but pretty soon the smell was indescribable. Zombies aren’t really that dangerous, not if you know what you’re doing; I decided we didn’t need all five of us to take care of a dozen.
“Jayden and Sam, finish up down here and do a sweep of the main floor,” I said. “Join us upstairs when it’s clear.”
Jayden grunted in answer. I felt a little guilty about leaving him and Sam behind as I charged up the stairs and into blessedly cleaner air, but someone had to finish the zombies. I just didn’t want it to be me.
I knew the Necromancer’s house pretty well after all the visits I’d made there over the years. His workshop was upstairs in a nice big room that looked like it should be the master bedroom. The floors were polished hardwood and the walls painted an attractive shade of cream, almost pale yellow.
Of course, that was where the resemblance to a normal person’s room ended. I kicked the door in and grimaced. The Necromancer was at work.
The only furniture in the room was a big stone table that looked a lot like an altar, cluttered with skulls and other bones, grimoires, vials of various-colored fluids, chunks of rock. It smelled like a chemistry lab, with a dash of slaughterhouse mixed in. I thought the slaughterhouse stink came from the zombies we’d left downstairs, until I saw that the Necromancer h
ad nailed a fairy upside-down to the wall.
The Necromancer was tall and gray-haired, dressed in a long black robe. He was intoning a spell when I burst in. He glanced up at me, frowned, and started talking faster.
I thought the fairy was unconscious, maybe dead, but he whimpered. My stomach gave an unhappy lurch at that. Fairies aren’t like werewolves and vampires; they have certain rights and we’re not supposed to kill them unless we have to. Truth to tell, I’ve always kind of liked the little buggers. This one was about three feet tall, skinny as the curved bone knife the Necromancer was waving around. Blood trickled from his wounds and dripped down the wall.
I was glad that Sam was still downstairs, popping zombies. He’d freak out if he saw the fairy.
“Don’t move,” I shouted, pulling my gun. It was fitted with a clip of silver-jacketed slugs, but bullets are bullets. “You’re under arrest. Drop the knife and put your hands up.”
The Necromancer finished up his spell in a quick gabble, made a last mystic pass with both his hands, and stabbed the fairy in the stomach.
I unloaded four or five rounds into the Necromancer with a calm sense of justice. I’d undoubtedly face an inquiry, but probably nothing really serious. I had two coworkers as witnesses, and if the fairy lived he’d be a witness too.
The Necromancer fell into an ungainly heap. “Barry, Coby, get the fairy down. I’ll call for an ambulance.” I kept my weapon trained on the Necromancer, even though he wasn’t moving, and pulled out my phone with my other hand.
The call didn’t take long; I didn’t give much information. By the time I closed the phone, Barry and Coby had the fairy lying on the floor. “He’s still breathing,” Barry said.
He reached for the knife hilt, but I said quickly, “Don’t touch it. Let the paramedics take care of him.”
“But the Necromancer’s spell is still active on it,” Barry said.
I couldn’t see that the knife was doing anything except sticking out of the fairy’s skinny stomach, but Barry could see things even I couldn’t. I didn’t question him. “Wait until the paramedics get here, at least,” I said.
Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1) Page 53