Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1

by Vernon, Steve

  He watched carefully for the back splash.

  It socked in, maybe a couple hundred yards closer to the booger in the cave hole. Figure halfway up the mountain’s foot, and nowhere near the kneecaps.

  Then the booger shot back.

  It was probably the same gun, but it sounded twice as loud. Or it might be Jonah’s ear holes were still ringing from his own shooting back.

  Well, hell.

  Jonah was caught between the devil and the whoremonger’s privy. What could he do? Things were too tangled to tell. It was worse than trying to unfigure a greenhorn’s friggered knot – trying to tell where one end started and the other one let go.

  That leper army got closer. They weren’t moving too fast, but that didn’t matter much. Jonah wasn’t moving at all, so every shambling step they took brought them a little bit closer.

  He could see them clearer now. They looked worse the closer they got to him. They looked like they were wearing baggy, yellowed out, pissed in long johns--except as far as Jonah could tell that was their skin. Mind you, it might have been paint. He’d seen some Indians daub wet clay on themselves when they danced, and it’d dry sort of gray yellow chunky, just like this.

  Only this wasn’t clay. This looked more like that vinegary pale color corpses grow, after they’d sat too long in the Texas sun. Some of them were going black too. Not black like Negroes, but black like flyblown meat. A deep greasy black, the color of a gassed up leg wound.

  Jonah touched his knee again.

  He tried not to think too hard about that last mental image.

  He studied on the walking bastards.

  There were bits of white, like broken china, sharding out of some of them.

  Jonah swore it was bone – only there was no way in hell that any bastard standing could keep on standing with that much bone poking out.

  He shook his head.

  Bone bits, boogers and walking bastard haunts. What the hell had he tumbled into?

  He paused a moment.

  Should he go down shooting at an army of things that looked already long past killing, or try an impossible shoot out with a holed up booger firing back at him with a rifle barrel as long as a Spanish bull’s pizzle stick?

  That’s when the rock lifted up.

  The rock in the dirt, right beside Jonah’s left foot.

  An old man poked his head up from under the rock. For a moment it looked like he was buried neck deep in the Texas grittle.

  “Hey, younker,” the old man said. “Don’t waste your bullets popping at them things. Shinny on down here if you want to keep breathing, this side of Tartarus.”

  Jonah couldn’t believe his eyes. He opened his mouth, like he was trying to eat dry air.

  That was when the eighth bullet hit - dead bang on.

  It opened Jonah’s skull like a can of peaches. A fistful of his brains splattered across the buffalo skull.

  Jonah saw a flash of red light lifting off the Heavens, singing in his brain like a burning double lasso. Flights of screaming angels, soaring like coal oil buzzards through a hot orange sky in long looping figure eights. He saw the last ebbs of coal in a tamped down campfire whispering good night.

  Then nothing. Nothing at all.

  He was dead long before he hit the ground.

  And he hadn’t heard that shot, either.

  * Not All The Tooth Powder In The World *

  Milton Leadbetter lowered his Springfield rifle with a modicum of satisfaction. He had nailed the cowboy, deader than dirtied up worm shit. He grinned. There wasn’t anything he liked better than shooting from high and far away. Come hell or hard-shell Baptists, it was a damn good shot - nearly as good as blasting that crawler’s head.

  He grinned at that too.

  He had taken that crawler’s head clear off, and the dead fucker had kept on walking.

  Some folks were just too stupid to know better.

  “Ha.”

  But that cowboy wasn’t walking. Not anywhere.

  At least not yet.

  “Ha!”

  Leadbetter grinned so hard his tooth fell out.

  Crap.

  That stole his grin, for certain sure.

  It was the third tooth of the day. His mouth was rotting like a rained out root cellar. The Moon Man had sworn he’d magic Leadbetter up a whole new set of teeth, just as soon as he got the time.

  Bullshit.

  Leadbetter poked his tongue into the brand new empty socket. He tasted a little blood, but that was just the virgin teasing the deballocked priest. Right now Leadbetter needed to soak up some real honest-to-gut-shot blood and some real living human meat before he powdered down to moth dust.

  “Hell.”

  He didn’t like losing his looks like this. He’d never been a vain man. He hadn’t ever owned a mirror brighter than a fresh scrubbed tin pot. Still, the ladies liked him. They liked his high standing ways, his dark swallow of cowlick and his big bushied-up moustache.

  They wouldn’t like him now. Not the way he was looking. No sir, he couldn’t find a blind enough whore, nor a big enough sack of gold to pay for even a half-assed poke in the hay.

  “Devil’s rancid pee-hole,” he cursed to himself. “Dripping ringworm rectum skunk.”

  Leadbetter dry swallowed the tooth, gulping over the hard part. It wasn’t meat, but it was better than nothing. That was something else the Moon Man had promised him. He had said there’d be fresh meat, but the crawlers were bound to get all of that, long before Leadbetter got to it.

  Promises.

  Shit.

  They weren’t worth a buffalo’s midnight shadow.

  “Piss in the wrong hand, shit in the other, and see which puckerhole empties out first,” he philosophized.

  He spat to seal the curse. It was dirty spit - black and rancid as runny rat shit, only worse.

  It tasted of rotten teeth.

  “Bullshit.”

  He looked up from his spit and down to the cowboy below.

  Only the cowboy was gone.

  “Bull-double-shit.”

  He could see the crawlers, already all over the dead horse carcass.

  “Shit on a Chinaman’s skillet.”

  It was supposed to be that way, but it might have been nicer some way else. It might have been nice to keep the horse and get the Moon Man to raise it on up. Leadbetter’s old horse was wearing out where his heels dug in. He’d given up on spurs a long time ago.

  Spurs were too hard on the ride.

  So he swung his leg up over the old horse. He tried to ignore the feel of the poked out rib bones rattling against the sides of his legs. He tried to ignore the tantalizing smell of rotting meat. He eyed the horse’s slow black shoulder, the decayed meat running into color like a soft rainbow of rotted trout.

  His mouth watered like it was getting set to rain teeth.

  “Never mind that rooster shit,” he told himself. “Keep your eye on the target, Leadbetter.”

  It wouldn’t do to be eating your own horse.

  Leadbetter tapped his heel lightly against the horse's ribs. The carrion stallion obediently stumbled forward and down, following his nose towards the scent of fresh killed meat. Leadbetter looked forward to getting his share of that meat before the buzzards and crawlers picked the pan dry.

  If he was lucky, he’d turn up that dead crawler’s head. There was nothing worse than crawler meat, of course. It tasted worse than pickled pig shit, but some brains were better than no brains at all.

  * A Six Legged Crunchy Noodle *

  The blasted-off crawler head, laying in the tangle of jumping chollo cactus, wasn’t thinking too much about Leadbetter’s hunger.

  It wasn’t thinking about the cactus thorns spitted through the right side of its face. The head wasn’t thinking about the dangly bits hanging from out of its neck. It wasn’t thinking about the shattered ruin of its left eye, pulped into a jelly of blood and viscous goo. It wasn’t even thinking about its cheekbone, sunk beneath the eye like a
forgotten prairie grave. Nor was it worried about its nose, a grotesque splash of flesh spread across the center of its face, with tiny white shards of bone glinting from the raspberryish mess.

  It wasn’t thinking about much at all, but hunger.

  A deep empty throatless hunger - the kind of hunger that all the fry pans in the world couldn’t fix nor fill.

  A hunger for identity.

  The blasted-off crawler head was thinking about what it really was.

  Or maybe what it used to be.

  I am not an it, the severed head thought. I am a he.

  There was blood on the chollo. His blood, but it didn’t matter to the head. He took a biteful, chewing on the chollo as the thorns tore hell out of his tongue and mouth. The bitter juices of the chollo burned and mingled with the head’s black watery blood and the runnels of torn up tongue meat. He was mostly eating himself, but he told himself it didn’t matter.

  Sometimes that was all there was left to do.

  It was strength, of sorts. Strength enough to drag himself deeper down into the chollo, using his mouth and chin to lever himself further into the tangled mess. A scorpion tagged the head on the thorn blooded lips. The head caught the scorpion by the stinger.

  He sucked the scorpion in like a six-legged, pincer-swinging, crunchy noodle.

  That was better.

  That was meat, fresh and walking.

  That was strength enough to wait and watch.

  And wonder.

  * Pickled Or Jerked *

  Zacheus stared up at the dead cowboy’s boots, wondering if the boots would fit him.

  It wasn’t much of a view from the tunnel hole where he looked from. Just a pair of skillet flat boot soles, turned up at the toes and scuffed on the sides from too many years standing in the saddle. A pair of denim jeans, rolled up at the cuffs. Zacheus guessed that the cowboy didn’t have a woman to hem them, or enough time to bother searching for one.

  Most cowboys didn’t bother.

  It was too easy to rent a woman.

  Still, why hadn’t he stitched those cuffs up? That bit of casual neglect worried at Zacheus, like a worm worrying at a root.

  Maybe the cowboy had just figured that he’d grow into the jeans, faster than they wore away.

  There was just no telling.

  “You sure ain’t growing now, are you?” Zacheus said to the dead cowboy.

  The dead cowboy sure wasn’t.

  That last rifle shot had aired out his brainworms real good.

  “Leadbetter nailed you deader than coffin thoughts. You’re sucking bitter grass from the root end down now, boy.”

  It was a damn shame. Gunpowder sure did spoil the taste of fresh killed meat. Still, he ought to be able to jerk some considerable provisions out of the carcass. Long as he got it moved before the crawlers got to it.

  He kept looking at that dead cowboy’s leg - studying on it.

  “It is a wise man that thinks long and moves slow,” Zacheus spoke aloud.

  Further up the leg was the holster, tied off at the cowboy’s knee with a thong of dirty rawhide. It looked to be about the biggest pistol Zacheus had ever seen – one of those old navy pieces. Heavy and sensible and well tended too. Cleaner than anything else the cowboy carried.

  Zacheus appreciated the cowboy’s sense of priorities. A man’s gun was next to gold out this far in the deadlands. You just couldn’t help but respect a man that kept good care of his shooting piece, dead or otherwise.

  “Careful Zacheus,” he warned himself. The last thing you needed is to get to liking a dead man.”

  There was no telling what that could lead to.

  Zacheus looked up towards the mountain. The crawlers were getting closer, but nowhere close enough to worry about. Slow as they moved, close enough to worry needed to be somewhere around the spitting distance of a gnat.

  Leadbetter was out there too.

  Zacheus spit. There was none of that tooth-rotting foulness that could be found in Leadbetter’s spit.

  Zacheus had sprung from a different kind of root.

  He watched the crawlers, moving closer. There was still time but he ought to get moving. Mind you, he was having too much fun, staring at something so close to living as that dead cowboy was.

  You just didn’t see much of that, out here in the deadlands.

  He looked up further to the cowboy’s hands. They were sun darkened and strong. Rough at the knuckles, like he’d broke more than his share of jaws in his time. Yet there was a cup to them that spoke of proficient deadliness. Like the head of a rattlesnake, lean and all business.

  Then the hands squeezed. Like the cowboy was hanging on to life, long after he’d bit the dirt. Damn. It was funny how that was, how some folks let go so easy, while others just hung on long after hanging on long stopped making sense. Zacheus touched his own neck thoughtfully. The double ring of rope chafe burned on in his memory, reminding him just how long a man could hang on.

  The cowboy’s right finger dug reflexively into the dirt, squeezing on an invisible trigger.

  Hell.

  Deader than coffin meat, and he was still kicking. Dang it. That alone made the cowboy worth saving, never mind how bad it’d twist old Leadbetter’s pizzler nuggets into one tangled up cow knot.

  There was nothing Zacheus admired more than honest persistence.

  Hell.

  The crawlers were getting closer. He could hear them now, gibbering and hooting like a pack of tricked up monkey owls. It wouldn’t pay to stick around much longer. They sure as hell couldn’t kill him, but there was a hell of a lot worse things they could do – like maybe spend all morning chewing on what wouldn’t die.

  Zacheus shook his head in disgust.

  “Some days the fishing is good, some days it’s bad, and some days it just don’t make any sense at all,” he said.

  Then he grabbed the cowboy by the heels and dragged him down into the hole. The rifle came with him, still hooked in the man’s arms. Zacheus reached up and plucked a thorn from the pizon tree. He didn’t like touching the damned things, not even now. It was way too close, way too personal.

  Still, this was the way it ought to be done.

  The old natural way of raising up dead men. Never mind that Moon Man and his scientific lightning tricks.

  To hell with all of that unnatural blue shit.

  He poked the thorn into the cowboy’s neck. Unbidden, the words flew from his mouth. The words the pizon had taught him while he’d hung there on Leadbetter’s rope. He spoke words that didn’t sound like words at all. Words that sounded like the echoes of dead coyotes howling beneath a long forgotten harvest moon. He felt the pizon juice working into the cowboy’s veins.

  Buzzing and burning like a hive full of crazy bees.

  Turning him.

  Changing him.

  Zacheus had second thoughts.

  It wasn’t too late yet.

  He could pull the thorn out.

  To hell with it. If he didn’t like the bugger, he could always eat him later. Pickled was damn near tasty as jerked.

  He dragged him down under the rock, just before Leadbetter looked up from his last spit.

  * So Who Needs Hands? *

  The shot-off head got tired of hiding. Hiding is hard work, even if you’re a severed head. He got tired of chewing on blood stained chollo, occasional scorpions and random dung beetles.

  He decided to make a break for it.

  Being nothing more than a head, he wasn’t really built for speed. He sort of had to use what was left of his teeth and jawbones to hump-crawl his way out of the chollo. The crawling didn’t do much for his looks. His flesh was softer than when he’d been alive. The rocks wore against his waxy black cheek meat. The chollo further aggravated things, tearing at what was left of his eyes and digging niblets of rotted flesh from his lips.

  He tried to swallow as much of the rotted run-off as he could catch.

  It was all meat, and all strength.

  He kept
moving and eating. He’d learned to eat on the run as a young man, more years back than his rotted-out memory cells could recollect. He’d been a Coahuiltecan Indian by birth. He had to learn to wander and roam. His tribe had many enemies and few friends. He’d watched his family wiped out by the Spanish bastards. What the Spaniards left, their diseases took. What their diseases left, the Northern Apache raiders grabbed up. What was left of that was left to the dust.

  His name had been No Ears. His father had named him that, because he’d never learned how to listen – which was funny because now he was nothing but ears. Even his mouth was nearly gone.

  He kept on crawling.

  There was nothing left but the Coahuiltecan memory. It’s hard to kill a memory.

  Much harder than a man.

  Harder even than a head.

  He remembered dying. A fever had took him. He’d always sworn he’d die in battle with the white man, who’d raped so much of his life away, but a stinking little fever had worn him down into nothing and he’d died and they’d buried him up in the mountains.

  Until the Man Who Looks Like A Moon had found him. The big rotting head God. He’d taken him up into the mountains, bathed him in the bright blue light that crackled like fire and sang like a rattlesnake.

  No Ears kept on crawling.

  It wasn’t bad, this crawling. It wasn’t much different than how he’d used to be. He’d seen the world through his eyes. He’d tasted it with his mouth and he’d heard it with his ears. He could do all those things still, just harder was all. About the only thing he couldn’t do was to grab things. You needed hands to grab things. Hands would have been nice.

  An ant crawled by. The Coahuiltecan pushed what was left of his tongue out and slather-licked the ant into the rancid cave of his mouth.

  Hey, he thought. I don’t even need hands.

  He kept crawling, lip and jaw and teeth, stubbornly dragging himself across the desert landscape, tasting the ants and the scorpions and the dirt.

  It was better than the alternative.