Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1

by Vernon, Steve

  It was strange. The strangest thing he'd ever seen.

  Maybe he ought to be careful thinking that sort of thought. Here he was, shot dead and raised up, following the carcass of a mountain man deep into a set of unknown tunnels somewhere down beneath the Texas deadlands.

  Strange didn’t begin to describe it.

  The tunnel twisted like a vein in an old man’s arm. There were marks of careful scraping tiny cuts and scratches that looked like they’d been nibbled clean. It looked like a thousand years of steady beating had polished them out smooth, yet Jonah could still see the facets, like a thousand careful cuts.

  Tentacles, he thought. Some kind of giant multi-millipede, crawling through here, each one of its beating string feet, rooting another skid of sandstone off the face of the rock, polishing it smooth from thousands of journeys to God knew where.

  Shit.

  He couldn’t escape the feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn’t see what it might be.

  Then it hit him, damn near hard as that last bullet.

  He could see. That was what was wrong. He could still see. Deep as they were, without torch or lantern, Jonah could see, clear as day.

  Maybe not day. It was more sort of crackly - like looking through a soft fire. Things had a funny sort of sheen to them, like he was dreaming them out loud.

  “How come I can see in the dark?”

  “How come you can walk after you been shot?” Zacheus fired back. “How come your lungs have stopped pumping, yet your legs are still moving? It’s the pizon juice. It comes from deep in the heart of the tree. I stuck a thorn in you, and it’s keeping you moving.”

  “How’s it work?”

  “How’s the damned sun shine? How’s the rain fall? How the hell should I know?”

  “How the hell did you find out?”

  “The hard way.”

  Jonah considered that.

  He let it lie.

  “How long was I dead?” he asked.

  “Long enough to kill the taste, but not long enough to cool nor stiffen nor stink. What’s it matter, anyway? You’re alive, or close enough. Watch your feet.”

  Jonah looked down just in time to step over a twisted gray root that looked like it was moving like a snake.

  That started worrying him.

  “There’s no snakes down here, are there?”

  He hated snakes. He’d been bitten once by a massasauga rattler. Hadn’t even heard it. He’d stepped onto its nest, caught it by surprise, and the damn thing had seized on to his anklebone like it had wanted to swallow him whole. He’d damn near died.

  Hell.

  Given what had happened so far, it might have been better for him if he’d died back then. At least he would’ve stayed down.

  “What’s it matter to you? You’re deader than a beaver hat. Ain’t no snakes down here. Besides, no ordinary snakebite can hurt you now. You been pizon-ated. Ain’t you been listening? Watch your head.”

  Jonah ducked. They moved deeper into the tunnel, following the assbone of a knee crawling bactrian camel.

  “Where are we going?” Jonah asked.

  “You sure do a hell of a lot of talking for somebody who just came back from the dead,” Zachaeus said.

  “That’s because I’m from Arkansas. You’re just from Texas,” Jonah explained. “You probably heard about the famous talking fight, between that Arkansas politician and the Texas cowhand. Those two decided on fighting a duel with words. Only problem was, they talked so long they starved themselves under. The town had to bury them both together, on account of they couldn’t pull that Arkansas corpse away from out of the Texan’s ear hole. Was still hanging, grimmer than a deathgrip, burrowed deeper than a chigger tick, whispering into the hollow of that dead Texan’s ear.”

  Zachaeus snorted, like he'd heard the story before.

  “So where are we going?” Jonah repeated.

  “You got more questions than a barrel full of wonder. We’re heading for home. I already told you and that’s all you have to know. You’ll know it when we get there. Or would you rather go back and face them crawlers?”

  “You win,” Jonah said.

  The tunnel started to open up. We’re too deep down to be hitting surface, Jonah thought. I wonder just how far these tunnels go?

  And that’s just when those two and three quarter crawlers come straggling up behind them.

  * Talking To The Moon *

  Leadbetter felt the give and take of his leg muscles, moving beneath his worn out denim trousers. He couldn’t tell which was worn thinner--his skin or the faded blue fabric. The denim was rotting off his skin, worn away by sweat and sand.

  For an idle instant he wondered if the Moon Man could raise dungarees from the dead.

  He kept on climbing, the crawlers obediently scuttling behind him. The whole thing had him feel a little like a big old daddy ant. Only ants climbed down, not up. Maybe he was Moses, leading his people upwards into the mountains.

  Yeah, that was it. Moses.

  He was Moses, going up to talk to the King anthill God.

  Going up to talk to the Moon Man.

  “Shit.”

  The truth was, he wasn’t looking forward to seeing the Moon Man, much less talking to him.

  The Moon Man lived high up on the Devil’s Anvil. High up near the mountain top. Up where the lightning struck. High enough up that it got hard to breathe. That made talking hard enough.

  So it was a good thing Leadbetter had stopped needing to breath some years back.

  Thank the Moon Man for that.

  No. Give credit where it was due. It was the mountain man’s fault that Leadbetter had stopped breathing.

  Zachaeus.

  Or maybe it’d been his own damn fault.

  Shit. All of this puzzling was wearing him out.

  He leaned against a rock, catching his strength. He felt the cold thin soup of the mountain air - like breathing lung full's of nothing - only the way he was now he didn’t really need to breathe. Of course he still moved his chest in and out, now and again, but that wasn’t breathing. Not really. That was just habit talking. Habit and old tissue dreams. He didn’t remember anything else but sucking it in and pushing it back out.

  Life was sure funny after you died. So many things a man stopped needing. Air. Water. Hell, even fire. The cold didn’t really bother him, much as he pissed on about it. In fact, when it came right down to it, dead was like living, only quieter. You just stood there like an old grave tree, leaning on death and aloneness, roots aching for a feast of stink and rot.

  And not needing.

  That was the trouble. Not needing. A man without needs gets to wanting strange things.

  Dark things.

  He kept on walking.

  It was a hard enough to get there. He had to clamber up a tunnel that looked to have been dug by an ambitious mountain goat crossed with agopher. It was enough to give Leadbetter a nosebleed, if he’d any blood left to leak. The crawlers didn’t seem to mind the altitude. They’d fed and were happy as maggots in moldering meat. They’d follow him anywhere. Hell, or worse.

  This was worse.

  He kept climbing.

  He climbed past the packs of crawlers, rooting in the mountainside; digging like a bunch of crazy ants, looking for whatever was buried, whatever the Moon Man wanted. Looking for whatever could be raised back up.

  Leadbetter climbed higher.

  High up into the Devil’s Anvil, up to where the Moon Man lived.

  If you could call it a life.

  Leadbetter didn’t like it up here. He didn’t like the mountain at all. It felt too big. Like it was alive, and watching every move he made.

  Like the Moon Man.

  The Moon Man’s cave was lit, like always. Blue and shiny, the color of oil poured over swamp slime. Lights dancing all about, tubes of glass and wire yanked thinner than any smith could hope to pull. Balls of tiny fire burning in glass bubbles, like the Moon Man had caged the bones of the su
n. It gave Leadbetter a case of the creeping chills every time he came up here.

  Hell.

  It chilled him out, even just thinking about having to make the trip up.

  And when that Moon Man spoke, Leadbetter jumped same as every time.

  “They fed yet?” the Moon Man asked.

  There he was. Or rather, there he wasn’t. Just a ball of big blue light, looked sort of like a face. Sort of what you might think God would look like, on a sea sick kind of day. Floating in midair, like the ghost of a dying mirage.

  “They got fed.” Leadbetter answered.

  He knew the face wasn’t real. It was just a picture the lightning machine shone in the air.

  The real face was worse than this.

  Leadbetter knew.

  He’d seen it.

  He didn’t care to ever see it again.

  “All of them?”

  The voice was nearly the worst of it. As bad as everything Leadbetter had ever seen, as bad as the crawlers and all the death piled high on Devil’s Anvil, this was nearly worse. Hearing the Moon Man talk was kind of like listening to a rattlesnake sing. A voice, soft and phlegmy wet, with the dragging of rusted iron and decaying flesh. A damp voice, that kind of made Leadbetter feel like his ears needed cleaning and burning, every time he had to listen to it.

  “They ate,” Leadbetter answered.

  The crawlers knew what to do. They weren’t scared of the face or the voice. They weren’t scared of anything. They just hooked themselves to the lightning machine, and waited for the buzzing blue light to bring them sleep.

  “Good,” the Moon Man said.

  Why don’t you ask me if I ate, Leadbetter wondered. Why don’t you ask me how I feel? I’m the one you ought to be counting on. I’m your foreman. Your straw boss.

  The crawlers stood in their tubes as docile as lambs waiting for the knife’s slick caress. They were painted up like a pack of circus clowns with horse blood cracked and smeared across their twisted, sluglike lips. Quivering in tight eager spasms, like a pack of shaking snake-oil drummers. The blue light wrapped and licked about their quivering bones, their mouths moved like red painted slugs, across the melting wax of their faces.

  It made Leadbetter sick to the bottom of his belly gut to think he was damn near one of them.

  “You bring them all back?” The Moon Man asked.

  Damn it. How’d he know to ask that? How’d he know to ask the one question Leadbetter didn’t want to answer?

  “I can count, you know,” Leadbetter retorted.

  “So can I,” The Moon Man answered.

  “Well if you can count, why ask me?”

  “Did you bring them all back?” The Moon Man repeated.

  He couldn’t deny it. There was no use in hiding it.

  The Moon Man had just wanted to hear it from Leadbetter’s lips.

  “Most of them,” Leadbetter answered.

  “What did you mean most of them?”

  “Three of them didn’t make it. They got shot.”

  “Shot? How can you shoot a crawler, so that it stays shot? Was it that mountain man? Was he carrying that antique seven-barreled cannon of his?”

  “They got shot,” Leadbetter repeated.

  There was no way was he going to let on to the Moon Man that he’d blown the head off of one of his prized disciples. Leadbetter might have been dead, but he wasn’t suicidal.

  “Go get them,” the Moon Man commanded. “The crawlers, the mountain man, anybody that’s with him. Bring that camel, if you can. I want it all.”

  I know what you want, Leadbetter thought. You want what Zachaeus has got buried underneath his cave. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve heard you dream about it. You dream loud, when you’re dreaming MoonMan. You dream out loud and paint pictures on the midnight sky. I don’t know how you do it, but I’ve seen it. And I know what you want. There’s something big down there. There’s something down there that’s been buried a whole long time.

  The Moon Man kept talking.

  “Go get them. Take the crawlers and bring them back. We’ll take turns.”

  Now how the hell was he going to do that? Root Zachaeus out of his hidey-hole? He’d only tried a half a hundred times before.

  He nodded, because dead or not, he wanted to live to see a few more moons.

  “We’ll take turns,” the Moon Man repeated. “You bring them back, and then I’ll bring them back. I’ll bring them all back.”

  The Moon Man thought that was pretty funny. He started to laugh, and that was the worst of all. His laugh was like listening to a bunch of tiny bones rattling around the bottom of a wet coffin.

  Leadbetter started his long trudge back down, wondering just why he felt like he was climbing his way back up out of a deep dark mouth.

  Or maybe down into one.

  He felt the soft blue glow of the Moon Man’s gaze, bathing against his backbone like the warm lone eye of a patient gun sight.

  He kept on moving. Not wanting, not daring, to turn around and look back.

  * The Knee, The Knuckles, Or The Teeth *

  There were three crawlers, standing in the far gullet of the tunnel, or two and three quarters if you counted the one without a head.

  Jonah dragged his Navy Colt out and emptied it. Since he had only two bullets left that didn’t take too long. The first hit was a bullet with ambition. It poked a thumb-sized hole in the forehead of the crawler to the left, and a fist sized hollow coming out back

  They were softer than real meat. He’d figured that out now. Bullets tore into them easier than they did into live folk. Only they didn’t seem to have much effect. The crawler with half a head rocked back like it might fall over and then kept on moving.

  Jonah caught the other in the knee. Took its leg clean off.

  Then his gun hit empty.

  The crawler with half a head took one more step. Then it hit the ground and shook like it was dreaming of terrified earthquakes. Jonah figured the bullet must have broken some sort of telegraph line in the crawler’s skull. But then it started moving again. Swinging its arms up over its head and dragging it self forward. Like it was trying to learn how to swim on dry land, and maybe drowning in the attempt.

  The kneeless crawler stumped itself closer towards him. The headless one that the cave booger had shot just kept coming straight ahead, aiming itself towards whatever smelled best. Worst of all was the leg Jonah had shot off, jig-jag-jerking itself along like a stick that had learned how to jump.

  It was the kind of nightmare nightmares dream about.

  Jonah kept squeezing the trigger.

  Click, click, click.

  Which was a stupid damn fool virgin of a thing to do.

  Shit.

  He’d sworn he’d had four shots left. Now all that was left was the five-dollar bill he kept rolled in the empty chamber. Money for a decent burial, in case he came out second in a gunfight. And what the hell did he need that for, being dead and all? He’d be better off with five dollars worth of extra ammo.

  “Shoot ‘em, damn it!” Zachaeus swore.

  “I’m out of ammo.”

  “Then duck!” Zachaeus shouted, bracing himself against the side of the tunnel and hoisting that half a cannon up to his shoulder.

  Jonah dropped like a flattened-out flapjack.

  Zachaeus opened up with the volley gun. It shook the tunnel like a small earthquake, all seven barrels going off at once. The blast brought down all three of the crawlers in a big wet heap.

  Jonah couldn’t really tell where they’d been hit. There were just too damn many pieces.

  “Keep moving,” Zachaeus shouted. “They ain’t done yet.”

  And they weren’t. The damned things kept coming. A foot, arching and humping along like an oversized dirty pink slug. What looked like an elbow, wobbling and rocking and slowly moving closer. Three teeth tied together with a stringlet of gum tissue inched over the dirty tunnel floor. A long rambling tuber of intestine oozed towards Jonah and Lead
better like a stretched out pinkish gray leech.

  Two Bump made a sound like he was calling on the God of panicked jackass camels. Jonah knew just what the big beast felt like. He was screaming too, at the top of his empty lungs, loud and long like a scalded baby.

  A pair of legs led the charge. A powder charred torso humped beside the legs. There were other things, smaller, that swarmed behind the torso and legs. Jonah didn’t know just exactly what they could do to him. They were just parts, is all.

  What the hell could they do?

  He was already dead.

  He sure as hell didn’t want to stick around and find out.

  “Come on,” Zachaeus bellowed. “Bullets ain’t gonna kill them. Just piss them off, is all. We got to get moving.”

  “Can we outrun them?”

  “Don’t have to. Just a little further is all we got to get. Come on Two Bump.”

  The old mountain man yanked at the camel’s neck fur, and the camel rose up, banged its head on the top of the tunnel, and crapped in stark terror. Dropped back to its knees, plunk in the freshly laid dung, and commenced to hump bump its way along the tunnel, following Zachaeus.

  “Try and keep up,” the old man yelled.

  Jonah wasn’t certain if Zachaeus was hollering at him or the camel.

  It didn’t really matter. Scared as Jonah was, he could have out run the wind.

  They headed down deeper into the tunnels. So tight and narrow, Jonah was certain the camel was going to get stuck for good. He had a sudden terrified vision of himself, trapped between the anatomic menagerie of dead crawling meat, and that great hairy humpbacked bastard’s butt hole.

  “Throw the two humped bastard to them,” Jonah shouted.

  “To hell with that,” Zachaeus shouted back. “We just got to get a little further.”

  The tunnel widened into a cave, and then a cavern.

  It felt to Jonah like he was running head long into a freshly opened mouth.

  And then, in front of them, a great green fire rose up in thin air, screaming like the grandmother of banshees.

  Now what?

  “Come on. This is where we’re supposed to be.”

  Zachaeus dragged the squawling camel straight into the burning gullet of the great green fire.