Zachaeus could feel the thorns that had raised so many men before him. That had raised even Him from his wooden cross, Him who so many civilized men now worshipped and feared.
He heard the tree calling, but it was too far away on this shot up leg.
He’d never make it.
Leadbetter had won.
That and the barn size behemoth that was threatening to shake the Goddamn mountain down on their heads.
What could he do, but die?
Then he saw it.
He saw Jonah’s knife, glintering through the air, end over end like a racer’s baton.
He crawled for it.
He grabbed it.
He knew just exactly what he had to do.
He leaned the blade against his wrist and grimly started to hack.
“Good bye hand,” he said. “I only need the one of you.”
* Great Green Ghost Fading *
The Great Green Ghost, staring through the eyes of the Moon Man, staring through the eyes of the resurrected mammoth, grimly fought for the control of the ancient beast.
The mammoth is a natural being, the Great Green Ghost thought – a natural being possessed by the unnatural scientific urgings of the Moon Man.
Surely, a mountain spirit such as myself ought to be able to seize hold of this great wooly long nose.
I cannot lose, the Great Green Ghost thought to himself.
All I need is to keep on believing.
All I need to beat this science is a little pure and honest faith.
I am water and I am air and I am everything that is green and growing. I have slept with men and women and buried them in the dirt. I have returned entire tribes back into the soil from which they sprung from.
I am the Great Green spirit, and I have eaten worlds.
That’s what he kept on thinking.
That’s what he kept on trying to tell himself.
Faith will move a mountain.
Only the Moon Man was winning.
* Best Western Etiquette *
Jonah stood there, staring at the big horn.
Fuck it.
This was no fucking way to die.
“Come on, you big, wooly, bastardized cockleburr. I’m hungry, and you look like the biggest steak in town.”
Jonah reached up.
He grabbed hold of the big horn’s left ear and swung up.
As he was doing so he felt the finger-strings of the Moon Man’s ectoplasmic mammoth reins banjo-tickling his finger bones.
He tore them free.
The Moon Man kicked back through the ectoplasm, sending a jolt of hard blue electricity that curled old Jonah’s zombified pubic hairs.
“God damn,” Jonah swore.
Another shock.
“God and golly damn.”
Another shock.
Jonah stopped swearing and started in to cursing.
“You rotten eyed prick with ears,” Jonah cursed. “I fucked your mother with a cactus cock! I will chew on your hairy nit-ridden carcass and crap your fuzzy bones.”
There is a great power inherent in every well-delivered curse and Jonah was inadvertently tapping into that universal flow of power.
“You shit-diddling, momma-rassling, truck-fungus-wonder!” Jonah went on. “I am going to cloud up and rain all over your muddy bones.”
With each mad random curse word Jonah was fomenting a deep-down inside kind of power that allowed him to accomplish something heretofore thought of as strictly unthinkable.
“You knock-kneed virgin-assed dry-cunted nun-jumper,” Jonah ranted. “If you think you are going to fuck with me than you had better recrank that cock-blocked-rectum of a cow-hole that you call a thinker.”
The words, ranted and run and strung together, fulminating into a single burning fuse of power as Jonah eased and elbowed and tore his way into the great mammoth’s open ear hole..
“By the last flying fuck of a ten-peckered Himalayan hoot owl,” Jonah howled. “I am going to fuck you in the ear you fucked-up, fucked-out, fuckety-fucking-fuck of a furry-fucked fuck-in-the-dust!”
Jonah could see the Moon Man deep inside the mammoth and he swore that if it was the very last dying death-after-life act he performed beneath this God-blasted earth that he was going to give that blue-assed back-from-the-dead mad scientist and earful of irritation.
He crawled in deeper, cursing and chewing as he went.
And then he stopped cursing, because his momma taught him never to talk when his mouth was full of mammoth earwax.
* Waste Not, Want Not *
After he had finished completely severing his left hand, Zachaeus squeezed the stump of his wrist, force spraying the last of his pizon-steeped blood on to Two Bump’s shot up carcass.
The camel kicked out blindly and started to shake.
The pizon did its work.
Zachaeus spattered the buffalo bones with the rest of the blood and then sucked at what was left of his stump.
He sucked and chewed, eating on himself.
Meat, he thought.
Yeah, meat.
That’s what I need to get me the strength to raise myself back on up.
It was pretty poor eating, but sometimes that’s all a man could do.
He gnawed and chewed on himself, stealing a little more life from under death’s big nose.
The buffalo bones, baptized in a back-from-the-dead mountain man’s dying eternal blood, were already starting to flex and knit together.
* As Futile As A Toothless Gopher *
The Moon Man didn’t know which way to turn.
Here he was, driving the zombified carcass of the wooly mammoth. Inside, in the spirit world, he had the Great Green Ghost at his throat. The Moon Man was barely holding the Great Green Ghost off. It was taking his entire strength of focus to hold the Indian mountain spirit at bay.
And then rooting and chewing and blaspheming inside him like a skullbound gopher with a really bad attitude, the cowboy was grimly burrowing into the Moon Man’s reanimated meat puppet’s ear.
He shouldn’t have even been able to squeeze into the mammoth’s ear canal but the softness of the revitalized meat made both penetration and consumption a fairly easy feet. The back-from-the-dead cowboy was worming into the ear canal – teeth first.
And what the hell was this coming ahead of him?
It looked like a rolling white avalanche.
And it was coming this way.
* The Running Of The Buffalo *
The white buffalo were running.
Bones and the memory of meat sewed together into an extinction engine of pure trampling destruction. There were anywhere from six to a baker’s dozen back from the dead, big shaggy buffalo. Zachaeus’s creations, sewn up and mortared together to pass the time, now raised by his dying blood to throw themselves against the big horn.
And in the middle of them rode Zachaeus, bound in the saddle by the rope of Two Bump’s blown-out intestines. Lodged between the humps of his back from the dead Bactrian and howling like a madman.
“Brazos!” Zachaeus shouted. “Ride Texas. Texicana Brazos!”
Some of the buffalo were whole, but most were in pieces. Some of them had grown themselves together, joined in the ultimate amalgamation of death’s inevitable decay.
“Brazos!”
`They rolled like a great white wave, crashing into the feet of the big hairy big horn. Barely rocking it, but it was enough to get the big bastard’s attention. It was enough to let the Moon Man Mammoth know that a mountain man was riding hellward bent for big horned leather.
He jammed his big Nock Volley gun square against the side of the beast and let fly. The seven-balled blast tore a hole and an armload of flesh from the big beast’s ribs. Just as quick he dropped the volley gun, yanked his big .50 pistols and cracked off two roaring shots, chunk into the undead meat.
But that still wasn’t enough.
The big horn reared and scooped him up and slammed him down and stomped him flat. The soft
black meat of revivified mountain man and mammoth feet splattered into the cold and stony Texas dirt.
Then the mammoth reared up and stomped again.
And again.
* Giving Death An Earful *
Jonah didn’t see any of this. He was far too busy, chewing and eating his way into the big horn’s ear.
The hay-eating peanut-reeking fucker-with-ears had a hold of Jonah’s legs with its trunk.
It felt as if an anaconda was trying to deleg the cowboy, boots and all.
And Jonah hated snakes.
“Little hissing bucktoothed tongue-bitten bastards,” he swore.
Only he wasn’t going to let fear stop him now.
Jonah fought on digging and chewing, thinking chigger thoughts.
You can’t shake me. Death couldn’t shake me. Leadbetter couldn’t shake me. You sure as fuck ain’t going to shake me.
The big horn yanked his legs off.
They kicked blindly in the big bastard’s grip.
Jonah kept rooting.
Digging.
Crawling.
The brain was a mass of gray stringy gelatin. All moving and swinging and twisting and churning like a fat witch’s broth.
He dug into the gray grue. Ate it and sucked it and grabbed it up with both steaming hands.
“Gimme, gimme, gimme.”
Like a mad baby fetus, all teeth and hunger, he churned and chewed deeper into the wooly big horn’s skull cave. The brain stuff oozed like gray smelly mud, coating his body like permanent snot.
“Gimme, gimme, gimme.”
Deeper into the skull Jonah saw the second brain, riding high above the big horn’s cold gray zombified brain. A fist sized lump of shiny blue jelly.
The Moon Man.
Jonah took hold of the bright blue brain. He chewed and swallowed, feeling his teeth rioting in his own mouth, like they were trying to eat himself as the Moon Man tried to take control of his body.
And still he kept chanting, as much in his head as in his mouth--“Gimme, gimme, gimme.”
The eternal human war cry.
We need.
We feed.
When his teeth touched the green boogerly nugget of Great Green Ghost brain, tucked like a soggy green pearl in the root cellar of the Moon Man’s brain, things blasted out in all directions. Jonah felt himself falling, flying, floating, deep into a deep green sea of endless sleeping goodbyes.
* Great Green Ghost Goodbye *
Jonah looked up from the cavern floor.
For a moment all he saw was green.
Then vision cleared. He saw the sea of buffalo bones, still twitching and rattling like dice in a blind gambler’s cup.
And in the middle of it, Two Bump.
He dragged himself over.
There, beside the great two-humped beast, was Zachaeus.
He could barely recognize the face. The whole of the man had been stomped into the cavern dirt. Only the softness of the soil had prevented him from being pulverized.
Zachaeus tried to speak.
"I thought," His voice sounded like a mile of sand dragged across an acre of broken bottle glass.
“Quiet,” Jonah croaked in a voice not much better.
Zachaeus ignored him.
"I thought I'd last longer," he said.
"You're fine," Jonah lied. "Stay quiet. Let the pizon do its work."
“I won’t,” Zachaeus said. “Damn it. I won’t go quiet. I don't have any more pizon left. I gave it to the buffalo and Two Bump."
"You're fine."
"Would you be quiet? This is the second or third time I’ve died in my life, and it don’t seem any easier than the first.”
He laid his head back.
His lips parted slightly, almost as if he were letting one last breath slip free.
And then, he was gone.
Jonah looked down at all that was left of the old man. He’d never known his own father. The bastard had run before Jonah could crawl.
But wherever the old bastard was, he hoped he died a lot easier than Zachaeus.
He closed his eyes.
I’ll just lie here, he thought.
Maybe someday I’ll die.
Then he heard a soft hum.
He opened his eyes and the cavern was glowing a bright Summer green.
“I will send them all home,” said a voice from far above his head.
It was the Great Green Ghost. He had won out in his battle with the Moon Man Mammoth.
Then the soft green fire burned the crawlers and the big horn and the buffalo bones, and even Zachaeus, down to dust that blew in the sudden tunnel wind.
“Save me a ride,” Jonah said, before sinking into a deeper unconsciousness.
The Great Green Ghost smiled, as another voice spoke up.
* The Biggest Dead Indian The World Never Saw *
You could get used to anything.
Even this rolling rocking-chair gait that this camel seemed to be permanently born with.
Jonah rode across the deadlands perched uncomfortably atop a makeshift saddle on a resurrected Two Bump, the undead carrion stallion in tow.
We’re a trio, he thought. Back from the dead cowboy and camel and a cayuse caboose.
Slung to the saddle by a braided mammoth hair rope was the volley gun and Leadbetter’s Springfield. Jonah didn’t know that it used to belong to Zachaeus. He just didn’t want to leave it back there in Devil’s Anvil.
It just seemed like too good a gun to leave lying in the belly of a haunted mountain.
And haunted it was. By the ghosts of the Indians, the buffalo hunters, Leadbetter, the Moon Man.
Even Zachaeus.
Still, the Great Green Ghost saved two rides for the two lone survivors of the Devil’s Anvil undead massacre.
One of the survivors, Jonah, now rode atop of Two Bump the reanimated Bactrian camel.
The other survivor, No Ears, his head now mounted on the end of the long horn’s trunk, rode atop the resurrected carcass of the great green wooly mammoth, the chewed off stump of Leadbetter’s trigger finger still clenched defiantly in the undead Indian’s three good teeth.
They rode hard across the desert, their shadows stretching like long tall ghosts across the hard pan of the unending deathlands, bound for Texas and whatever waited beyond.
Afterword
Seven is a good number.
It’s got a fine slashing movement to it when you write it down, like the “Z” in Zorro. It’s a good number to roll on the dice and will get you to Boardwalk if you roll it just right. It’s just enough to count to if you need to get from your right hand to your left.
It’s lucky, or so some folks say.
It has been seven years since I wrote the original draft of Long Horn, Big Shaggy.
The book did well for me as a paperback from Black Death Books, but after a few years I decided to pull it off of the market. My writing had improved a bit and I felt that there was an innate clumsiness about some of the writing.
I have always wanted to revisit this yarn. It has proven to be one of my most popular of small press releases. Readers just seemed to take to its back-to-the-wilderness vernacular and the raw storytelling energy that I managed to touch on with the telling of this tale.
It is a rough wild yarn and I guarantee a wild rough ride for those who see their way through. I wanted to push the boundaries of mixed genre fiction, specifically the weird western that I have always loved. I wanted to go over the top of whatever was over the top of whatever was up there in the first place.
You say that fast and it will almost make sense.
The thing to remember is that I grew up on westerns and horror. So I gravitated to the weird western field a long time ago. There is something that is primordial about one man standing at the end of a long dusty street, facing down another man with a pistol in his hand.
Draw on that, would you?
I cannot tell you just how deeply excited I am to get this opportunity to clean u
p this old beast and roll him out for one more rodeo. I have had several publishers contact me over the years, asking me if I would consider re-releasing this old tale but I had to wait for the right company to come along.
When I first spoke with David Niall Wilson about re-releasing some of my earlier out-of-print novellas and stories and novels as e-books, this is one of the very first tales that came to my mind. So I have cleaned it up considerably. Smoothed out the rough edges. Polished it just a little bit.
And now I bring it to you.
I hope that you enjoy this yarn.
I had an awful lot of fun writing it.
Perhaps if it sells well enough I will come back around one more time and finally get to work on figuring out just what I am supposed to do with that last image on the last page of the book.
ROADSIDE GHOSTS
Dedication
You've got to have it
if you're a writer
I would like to thank the good folks at Crossroad
for making this collection possible.
I'd also like to thank Richard Chizmar and Michael Knost
who both helped with the editing of several of these stories.
I'd also like to thank the folks at
Nimbus Publishing
for first starting me on down
the long ghost road
And thanks as always
to my wife Belinda
who keeps my smile always turned up right
Table of Contents
Catcall
Old Spice Love Knot
Where You Gonna Run To?
A Sky Full of Stars and a Big Green Forever
Lost Sole
Memory Stains
Traveling Salesman Story
Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1 Page 9