by Chris Miller
“Dee and the black fella!” Quentin began shouting absurdly, glancing once back down the now empty alley.
Bonham didn’t even spare him a glance. What was he supposed to say, anyway? That they were ghosts? Specters who slipped through walls? And if that were the case, just how in hell were they supposed to put lead into something like that?
Quentin scrambled over the lip of the roof and onto the awning above the store he’d been perched on. His foot slipped and he slid off the end of the awning, managing to land face first in the mud. A second later, his head snapped up and he began spitting muck and dirty water from his mouth.
Avery was still firing into the Sheriff’s office as Quentin saw Bonham mount the two steps up to the porch from the street, leveling the shotgun at the door from his waist.
It exploded inward in pieces no larger than a fist.
22
Denarius felt as though his stomach was going to come out of his mouth.
Not its contents. Nothing so normal as that. It wasn’t like being sick after eating some undercooked pork or chicken, like the time Marlena had made him his favorite pot pie but hadn’t let the meat cook quite long enough—likely due to the lack of firewood they’d had at the time—and he’d spent the evening in the outhouse expecting to see his toenails swimming at the top of the festering refuse beneath the hole their business was deposited. He actually felt his entire stomach sack would come up his throat, press its way over his tongue, and ooze out like a quivering, gray tumor onto the ground.
He’d seen Mr. Dee’s power at work in the woods the other night. When he’d snatched the knife from his hand from more than ten feet away. When he’d opened a hole in the air itself and Denarius had seen into an alien world much like their own, though the trees and plant life had seemed foreign. But now, with blistering speed, Mr. James Dee had snatched him through not one, but two of those holes in the air, the first from the cell bars, the second through the wall itself a moment after snatching up their guns when the shooting had started.
Now they were splashing into the mud of the alley outside the Sheriff’s office, Denarius coughing up mud now rather than his insides—small mercies—and they were scrambling down the alley, Mr. James dragging him along for the ride. His head was spinning, his stomach rolling, and there were so many damned shots being fired. He thought of the man in the office whose head had blown apart in stringy, chunky slops right as Mr. James had been conjuring whatever magic he possessed. He’d hardly been aware of any of them until just a moment before it all happened, his mind reeling with thoughts of Marlena and Martin trapped in this godforsaken town and he unable to get to them. But they were moving now, and fast. He could hear shattering glass and wood behind him, could hear screams coming from inside the office.
My dear God! he thought in a panicked rush as they neared the building behind the Sheriff’s office. Oh, my dear God!
Then Mr. James threw his hand up before them as he veered them toward the outer wall of this new building. There was a shimmering effect Denarius recognized from what he’d been shown in the woods and the blurs of memory only seconds before when they’d scrambled from the office behind them.
And that strange sound.
They were through the wall and inside of what Denarius thought must have been a bank at one time in two blinks of the eye. He lost his footing in his disorientation and sent them both tumbling to the floor. Somewhere outside he heard the distant shout of man. It was a confused and bewildered string of words, as though the man were completely flabbergasted.
“That Dee fella and the black fella!” he heard the voice say.
But there was no more. Only the booms of gunfire and the screams of horror and death. He realized the shouting man had been referring to himself and Mr. James. Someone must have seen them. One of the shooters? Most likely. But who were they? Were they part of the Dreary gang Mr. James had told him about? He’d said he’d been tracking them, trying to beat them to this place, but they hadn’t seen them at all and Mr. James had seemed confident they had safely made it and there was no way they could have found them here. No one could have found this place, except by sheer accident or precise knowledge of how to get to the path. Mr. James had been sure of that, and Denarius believed the man was absolutely correct. Had the men been following them? For how long?
Mr. James was shoving the Magnum from another generation into his hands and Denarius dismissed the thoughts as irrelevant. There were more pressing issues at hand than how the Dreary gang—if indeed that’s who the shooters were—had found this place. They needed to get back to the church. Denarius had a family to rescue and Mr. James had a god to kill and a world to save.
“You alright, Denarius?” Mr. James asked him, bringing him out of his panicked fog.
Denarius blinked several times and gulped, his throat clicking dryly despite being soaked by the pelting rain outside.
“I-I think so, Mr. James, suh,” he said, trying to focus his eyes. “Is them the Dreary boys out there? I heard one of ‘em say—”
“That Dee fella, yeah,” James cut in, nodding. “I think so, Denarius. Fuck if I know how they got here, must have been tailing me. I’m a damn fool. I should have guessed he’d do something like this.”
Mr. James shook his head, a look of self-contempt smearing his features.
“Doesn’t matter now,” he said. “They’re here. We gotta deal with it. If we have an ounce of luck on our side, which I doubt, maybe the Sheriff and his deputy will get one or two of them for us. But I ain’t holding my breath. I say we make for the church now, while we can make use of the distraction. The Proprietor is sure to have heard the commotion. Hell, the whole goddamn town probably heard it. Might give us just the time we need to get your family and stop N’yea’thuul.”
Denarius was nodding absently again, savoring the reassuring feel the Magnum in his hand provided.
“I know I said I owed you, Mr. James,” Denarius said in a shaky voice, “but I gots to get my family. They’s all that matter now.”
James met his eyes and placed a hand on his shoulder, gripping it firmly.
“You don’t owe me a damned thing, Denarius,” he said. “We’ll get your family.”
A thundering boom issued beyond the wall to the rear of the old bank, the sound of tinkering shards of wood following on the heels of its roar. There was a shrill scream, something Denarius might have expected from a young woman, even a little girl, but it carried in its tone the abject terror of a man who could see his end, was looking it right in the eye, and dignity was wholly absent.
Another thundering boom silenced the scream, and Denarius fancied he could actually hear the smattering slaps of blood and gore suddenly adorning the walls in the Sheriff’s office, even from this distance.
“My dear, sweet Jesus,” he muttered.
Then James was pulling him to his feet and dragging him to the front of the bank. He shoved Denarius to one side of the window near the front door and took up a position on the other. He peered out, his revolvers in hand, his steely eyes sharp and watchful. Denarius looked out as well and saw several people moving through the street. They were heading toward the sound of the gunfire, but slowly, as though moving against their will toward some unknown horror.
That was when he saw three abominations skitter into the streets as fast as scolded cats, spidery legs piercing the mud and limp, human appendages dangling freely beneath red eyes, two of the things with gaping wounds through their midsections, gnashing with bone teeth. One of the three, however, seemed to still have a living host. While the arms dangled, they were not quite so limp as the others. The figure inside the nest of horrifying legs and tentacles was that of a woman, naked as the day she was born, her face a rictus of agony. She wailed as the thing inside her carried them both toward the sounds of violence and death, her haunting voice carrying with it the chills of a soul trapped in a frozen hell.
“My, God, what are those things?” Denarius asked out loud, but not real
ly directing the question to Mr. James.
He answered anyway. “Soldiers of N’yea’thuul,” he said through gritted teeth. “They come through the marker from the depths of the universe, from other universes, and take over a human body. They eventually kill the person, but first they feed on their suffering and agony. Fear is food to them, and pain is a delicacy.”
He looked Denarius in the eye. The look caused Denarius’s breath to catch.
“That’s what will become of the whole world if I fail here today. Pain, suffering, agony, death. The world over. Do you understand?”
Denarius gulped dryly again as he nodded, eyes wide. James returned his nod.
“Now, let’s go get your family.”
Another glance out the window showed the street had cleared of people and abominations. James gripped the door and swung it open and they stepped into the chilled, raining day. Gunfire continued behind them as they crossed through alleys and behind buildings, heading for the church. The sounds grew fainter as they moved.
Then a shrill, high-pitched roar that was neither human nor terrestrial punctuated all other sound and brought it to a stop.
Then, somewhere near the Sheriff’s office, men began screaming.
23
Dreary stalked slowly up the street, savoring the mingled scents of rain and cordite filling the air. It was an intoxicating mixture, made all the more so as the tang of copper whispered to his sense of smell as he neared the Sheriff’s office. Avery was clambering to the street as Mr. Bonham stalked across, pulling free his shotgun. Above and to his right, Quentin was shouting something about Dee and the black man. Dreary had little use for the word used by damn near everyone in these parts in reference to their dark-skinned brethren. He didn’t see them as mongrels or sub-humans like most of his pale-skinned compatriots. No, they were men just like he and everyone else. Their lot in this still new land had been a sour one, no doubt, about as poor a hand as had been dealt to any group throughout history. But neither did he see them as his equal.
Dreary saw no man as his equal. His intellect and knowledge of the cosmos and what sights it held hidden within were rivaled by no one. If he were being completely honest with himself—something he fancied himself to be rather astute at—all of humanity were subhuman when placed against the standard he posed. With their menial lives, working and toiling to put a mere pittance on the table for their families and themselves, most never seeing the world beyond a ten-mile radius of their homes, how could any of them compare with Mr. Gear Dreary?
Answer: they couldn’t.
Dreary knew of gods and monsters, of fiends and ghouls, yet he was above them all. And soon, once he found the marker, he would make even the great Elders tremble before him.
Though he’d nearly dismissed Quentin’s uncultured exclamation about Dee and the black man, his mind seized upon it now. Dee was here. He knew he’d made it to the town, and while he’d never heard the expected—and what would have been satisfying—gunshot marking the end of the gunslinger’s troublesome life, he’d allowed himself to believe in his nemesis’s demise.
Such a foolish assumption, he thought bitterly to himself as he glanced up the empty alley next to the Sheriff’s office.
No sooner had he done this, than a muffled curse issued from Quentin above and he watched as the man comically splatted in the mud to his right. He allowed himself a small laugh as the man pushed up from the muck, spitting brown filth and water from his mouth while the rain patted on the man’s hat, which had miraculously stayed atop his head in the fall.
The boom of the shotgun brought his attention back to the moment and he turned to see the door to the jail implode before Mr. Bonham into things which would serve well to pick food from betwixt sullied teeth. There was screaming from inside the jail, and Dreary watched with rapt attention as his steadfast companion, the insatiable Mr. Bonham, stalked through the gaping wound that used to be a door, leveling his gun before him.
Avery was coming up at his left, revolver in hand, and Quentin, covered in muck, had joined him at his right. Inside the jail, Dreary heard the muffled pleas of the fat man this town called a Sheriff as he held a hand out before him, begging for mercy. Dreary laughed again silently at this, the idea of a man begging Mr. Bonham for mercy. Mercy was an alien thing to Mr. Bonham. More alien than the rapturous creature that had left this building only moments before they’d opened fire on it. The man had a bloodlust in him that, had he not been one of Dreary’s most trusted companions, might have chilled his very heart. But as it was, the man was his greatest weapon.
Dreary abhorred violence. He really did. It was not something he savored or relished. He did not wish it upon others the way some men did, the vindictive and the vile. But it did have its place, there was no doubt of that. While ugly, it served a purpose. It brought balance to an otherwise wildly uneven world. And most importantly, it cleared paths which might otherwise be impassable.
The fat Sheriff’s hand vaporized a split-second before his jaw was torn free from above his jiggling throat. Only the smallest remnants of what had been the man’s nose remained below wide and terrified eyes, one of which had been burst with one of the blast’s pellets. Viscous blood and eye-pus oozed from the quivering man as his body tried to remain upright, not yet aware it had died. Then there was a fantastic spurt of blood from the man’s mangled chest and his body fell over limp.
Mr. Bonham had not spared a moment in the exchange. As soon as the shotgun had released its final charge, he had broken it open, tossing the empty shells aside like refuse, and dropped a pair of fresh ones in its place. The metal snicked and chinked as he latched the action back in place and swung the weapon toward the other man in the jail. This man had gotten to his knees, his right hand clamped just below the elbow of his left arm, which hung askew at an unnatural angle, a red and angry wound dripping crimson.
“Just hold on a min—” the man began bellowing before a fresh explosion from the shotgun tore a hole the size of a cannon ball through the man’s guts, sending yards of ropey intestines and shredded sacks of organs spilling to the floor behind him through the area where his obliterated spine used to reside.
The deputy’s body had no pretense of holding itself up after it was dead like the Sheriff’s had, and it folded up and crumpled to the floor before Mr. Bonham without ceremony.
Bonham turned, his gaze cold and emotionless, and strode back into the rainy street.
Quentin coughed beside Dreary, then spoke in haste.
“I-I seen that Dee fella, Gear!” he said, pointing down the alley next to the jail. “Him and that black guy! Went right through the goddamn wall!”
This didn’t have the effect on Dreary that Quentin seemed to have expected as Dreary merely nodded to his less than bright companion.
“I expect you did, Quentin,” Dreary said flatly. “Went into the building behind the jail here, did they?”
Quentin smacked his lips a couple of times, his eyes wet and wild, darting around aimlessly.
Finally, he said, “Y-yeah, Gear. Right through the damn wall!”
Dreary nodded and turned to Avery as Bonham approached them.
“Avery, you head around the other side of the jail here, Mr. Bonham and I will go this way. We’ll catch them on the other side. We were fools for letting them pass on the ridge. We shan’t make the same mistake twice. Once they’re dead, we find the marker.”
Nods issued all around, even from Quentin before the man realized he had no marching orders of his own.
“W-what about me, Gear?” he asked, the look of a stupid child his only feature.
Dreary turned to him and started to speak, even as Avery was making his way to the alley up the street from them, when a hissing shriek filled the air. They all turned and saw the abomination which had left the jail only minutes before come scrambling around the corner, followed closely by a similar nightmare. Gnashing bones of teeth clacked and snarled through the open wound of its mouth on the chest and the razor
-tipped feet of its eight—no, it was ten—tentacle-like legs ripped through the muck, racing toward them with alarming speed.
Dreary ducked and ran for the alley Quentin had seen his nemesis escape down and took cover behind the corner. Quentin was close on his heels, pulling up behind Dreary. His face was a rictus of confusion and terror, the hairy flesh of his jowls quivering in the rain.
Only Bonham had stayed in place. The shotgun in his hand was cracked open once more, and he was tossing the spent shell aside and dropping another in its place as casually as a man picking at his food with a spoon. There was no alarm on his face, nor did he seem to be rushing against time. And time was certainly not on his side as the creatures scrambled toward them.
Dreary peered around, his Bull Dog in hand, and aimed at one of the creatures. The lead one with the mouth on its chest was nearest to Bonham, having passed a stupefied Avery a second before. But Dreary saw the second thing, the one with the mouth split down the ribcage, a moment before Avery did. He started to call out to him, but saw it would be a wasted effort.
Avery turned toward the thing only a half-second before the front two spiny legs—one protruding from the stump of the neck, the other from the anus of the host—thrust forward and through him with loud and revolting plunging sounds. Dreary could see the dripping tips of the thing’s legs sticking out the back of Avery, one between his shoulder blades, the other directly above where the split of the man’s buttocks was concealed beneath his britches. A wheezing scream issued from Avery, much louder than Dreary would have thought possible, as the thing lifted him into the air a full six feet.