by Chris Miller
He got to his feet shakily, wincing at the pain in his arm, and shuddered. He felt weak, lightheaded. But if there were any shred of decency left in him, any glowing ember of goodness remaining, he knew now it was imperative that he not let it be quenched. It had to be protected, fostered, and allowed to bloom into flame once more. Not only did his soul depend upon it, but also the lives of the good people in this damnable place with him.
He rose to his full height, the Dreary-thing leering at him with its repulsive red eye. James grimaced, taking a single, uneven step toward the thing.
“It’s over, Dreary,” he said, addressing the thing by its host’s name, though he knew he wasn’t really speaking to Dreary. “The town isn’t yours anymore. It isn’t N’yea’thuul’s anymore. You’re beaten.”
The angry wound on the Dreary-thing’s chest began to gnash open and shut with gurgling laughter. Dreary’s eyes focused again for a moment, a look of absolute horror in them, then they fluttered again and rolled up, exposing the whites.
The red eye blinked with malice.
“You’re wrong, god-hunter,” the thing said through the dripping chest of its host. “N’yea’thuul is awakened, and he comes. His army will be rebuilt, in numbers you cannot even fathom in your pitiful human mind. Soon, this world will be his playground, and when he has finished wiping every last shred of life from this puny planet, well . . . ”
The Dreary-thing trailed off with a chuckle of laughter.
“Well, then . . . there’s a whole universe of worlds to devour.”
James’s face was set hard, his lips a flat line.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Dreary,” he said, shaking his head. “You only thought you were joining the divine. Instead it has devoured you. And if N’yea’thuul wants this world, he’s going to have to come through me to get it.”
The Dreary-thing cackled a repugnant belch of laughter.
“You, god-hunter?” it asked, amused. “You may have been lucky with the other gods, but you are no match for N’yea’thuul!”
Two of the thing’s stalks rose into the air, the black, spiked tips pointing down at him, razor sharp. Then they were lashing out, coming for him, meaning to impale him. The Dreary-thing’s angry red eye was wide, alight with hunger. Dreary’s own eyes fluttered wide again, focusing for just a moment as his mouth opened and groaned in torment.
The spiked stalks stopped in mid-air, a foot from James’s outstretched hand. He was smiling slightly now, his own eyes alight with power and purpose.
“Wrong again, Dreary, or whoever the fuck you are,” James said and spat at the thing. “I’m not a god-hunter. I’m a god-killer!”
The red eye’s malice turned to alarm as it grew into a circular orb of surprise. James flicked his wrist up and the abomination flew into the air, crashing through the roof of the sanctuary, shards of wood and splintered rafters showering down with the rain as it came through. James curled his fingers into a fist and he waved his arm in an arc over his head. The roof above shredded into kindling and soared off into the rainy day. Droplets of water deluged the interior of the building as gray light filled the place with its pale glow. Above, something wailed and screamed.
“I didn’t come to hunt N’yea’thuul down!” James howled into the stormy sky. “I came to destroy him!”
He brought his fist down to the floor as he dropped to a knee, and the Dreary-thing came down hard from the sky, smashing into the floor with a thunderous thud, its ten stalky tentacles scrambling in all directions and clicking across the floor as it gasped. The red eye’s appearance had evolved from one of alarm to something bordering on terror. The angry mouth on its chest gnashed and bit at the air, growling and snarling and bubbling.
Behind James, he could hear the gasps of Denarius’s wife and son, and the weaker, but still determined voice of his new friend speaking to him over the pelting patter of rain and the panicked sounds of the abomination that had been Gear Dreary.
“You got magic in you, suh,” his friend gasped. “And there’s goodness in you yet! God ain’t forgotten you, Mr. James! You send it back to Hell, you hear me? Send it back to Hell!”
James spared a glance back at his friend and met the man’s eyes. They were tired and drooping, but there was a fire still left in them. His stomach was torn open and blood pooled in a lake around him, though the rain was dissipating it rapidly. Marlena and Martin huddled against him, and his weak arms were curled about both their necks. He noticed the hand Marlena held over her stomach and his eyes met hers for a moment. He knew then there were more Kings yet to come, and this family could not be allowed to die. Not here. Not like this.
Not on his watch.
“To Hell, then,” James said as he turned back to the Dreary-thing.
As he came around, a sharp stalk struck him across the chest, and he was soaring over Denarius and Marlena and Martin, their heads ducking and their mouths open in screams. Then he was splashing in the mud in front of the church, the wind whooshing out of him. He kicked and struggled to get to his feet, gasping for breath. Marlena and Martin were trying to pull Denarius to them, away from the doorway. Half of the front wall of the church collapsed then, smacking into the muck all around it with a thunderous crash.
The Dreary-thing was snarling and skittering forward. White-hot pain was demanding James’s attention on his chest, but he ignored it, keeping his eyes focused through the rain on the monster stalking slowly toward him. Its red eye was an evil thing, shooting hate from its center like a projectile. Its bone-toothed mouth clacked open and shut. Dreary’s mouth moaned as his eyes fluttered back into horrible, agonized focus.
James threw his overcoat back, exposing the revolver in the holster on his right hip.
“Come on, then!” he roared at the Dreary-thing. “Let’s finish it!”
The abomination stopped then, at the edge of the structure, leering at him. Its eye blinked away the rain, but never wavered from James. Its focus was locked upon him, held in place with hunger and malevolence. The mouth on Dreary’s chest almost seemed to smile then, a strange shape for the angry wound, but unmistakable nonetheless.
“The god-hunter wants a showdown,” the thing snickered in a wet laugh. “Then you shall have it!”
Something glinted in the gray light, flashing only a moment before returning to obscurity, but it was enough for James to see. The small revolver in Dreary’s hand, still gripped beneath white-knuckles and dripping with blood. Dreary moaned again from his own mouth, the eyes blinking, horribly awash in anguish.
“Your move, god-hunter,” the thing spoke from the cavity in Dreary’s chest, oozing bloody ichor.
James’s fingers fluttered in the air above the grip of his revolver. His eyes narrowed, focused on his nemesis. The rain droned on, splashing mud and water in miniature explosions all about the muddy yard of the church. The spire collapsed above the thing then, the coiling spiral crashing through the remaining front wall and into the street to the side of the church.
Neither James nor the Dreary-thing flinched.
The mouth on the thing’s chest seemed to smile again, the eye seeming to burn with anticipation. James took a deep breath, blowing it out through droplets of rain running down his face. Another glint of dim light reflected on the Bull Dog in Dreary’s clutch.
Dreary’s eyes fluttered open again, and James met them with his own. The cube within the dilapidated structure continued to glow with a faint blue light behind the monster, casting the figure into something just shy of a silhouette. But the eyes of his nemesis were focused now, and not only the red one on his forehead. They were wide, pained, and James noticed they had a pleading quality.
James saw something in those eyes, and he felt something within him that bordered on pity. Dreary was still alive in there, in a torment James could only imagine, and poorly at that. The anguish there was a palpable thing, and James thought of an old saying from his own time.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
; The corner of James’s mouth twitched up in a half smile and he nodded.
“Farewell, my dear Mr. James,” Dreary spoke in a gurgle from his own, oozing mouth.
The red eye had just a second to twitch in confusion before Dreary raised the Bull Dog in a lightning fast motion, jabbing the barrel into the wet, red eye. There was a pop as the revolver went off and the Dreary-thing’s head snapped back, the red eye bursting in a shower of crimson gel. The mouth in its chest opened wide then, a blood-chilling shriek erupting from within it. The organs writhed and slurped, but still the thing screamed, a horrifying din that almost drowned out the sound of the pummeling rain.
Another gunshot rang out, this one much sharper and louder, and the left side of Dreary’s face exploded a second after James saw the man’s eyes softening in the bliss and peace of death. Then brain and gristle were flying through the air as the stalks stamped wildly around in a half-circle.
James saw the smoking barrel of his Magnum in Denarius’s hand as his friend’s arm shook and dropped the weapon, his head falling back into his wife’s bosom.
The revolver beneath James’s fingers lifted from the holster and slapped into his hand. He was running then, the gun up before him, his weak hand fanning the hammer back again and again as the revolver boomed over repeatedly, the bullets finding their targets and splashing blood and meat into the soaking air. The body of the Dreary-thing jerked and spasmed with each new blast of the weapon. James winced in pain as his hurt shoulder howled in protest of its use. But he ignored it, rushing and firing away until he reached the third dry click on empty chambers.
The gun flipped twice over his finger before reseating in his holster, then James was raising both hands before him as the Dreary-thing’s mouth coughed gallons of blood, wheezing and shrieking in terror, coming around to face him once more. James fell to his knees in the mud, his fingers curling into fists as he twisted his hands before him.
He screamed and wrenched his hands violently to either side.
The Dreary-thing’s screams silenced then, replaced by a spine-freezing ripping of flesh and sinew as it came apart in pieces, the organs and intestines of the thing’s host spilling to the mud below in a steaming heap, a mighty river of blood roiling in angry currents all around it.
Then its parts splatted to the mud, twitched for several moments, and went still.
For a full minute, perhaps longer, James remained on his knees, his fists outstretched to either side of him, breathing hard. His shoulder was pulsing with pain and he could feel the warmth of blood as it snaked down his side. His body trembled, and his gasps hitched loudly. Denarius and his family lay just inside the church, their faces running with rain, their eyes wide and astonished.
Finally, James lowered his hands.
It took him another minute to get to his feet and stumble toward the building. One side of the structure, which had to now still stood precariously, collapsed away to the ground with a loud crash. But no one seemed to take notice of this. James’s eyes were zeroed in on the glowing cube, which now seemed to have grown. As he stepped onto the planks of the remains of the temple, he realized the cube hadn’t grown in stature, but instead was now floating. He glanced up to the dark sky above and saw a swirling formation of clouds and streaks of lightning. He might have thought it was the onset of a tornado had he not known better. And even if he had not known better, the flittering whips of tentacles reaching out from the center of the swirling, black clouds, from the inky abyss at its center, told him the whole story.
N’yea’thuul.
“End it, Mr. James!” Marlena screamed behind him. There was real terror in her voice. James turned to her, blinking away rain, and saw her there, a hand still covering her belly in a protective manner.
He smiled at her, and nodded, rain sluicing over the brim of his hat. Then he turned back to the glowing cube beneath the swirling sky and the nightmare appendages reaching from beyond it.
“To Hell, then.”
His hands came up, reaching toward the glowing cube.
37
A dreadful tone erupted from the sky over them, a sort of shriek or roar, but a sound unlike anything James could associate it with. It seemed almost mechanical in a sense, a deep, droning horn, but beneath it were octaves of growling, snarling, clicking horror that were wholly sentient. His arms trembled and quivered with gooseflesh as he felt his power struggle with that of the floating, glowing marker and the god it was drawing forth from the cosmos.
James looked to the sky, raising his right hand toward it while keeping his left outstretched toward the marker. The power pushing back against his own was strong, focused. It reminded him of the first being he’d used his power against, so many years ago now. He hadn’t been strong enough on his own to hold the beast off, not then. Even now, with years and years of honing his skill, of focusing his power with expert preciseness, it was a great struggle.
“It’s still coming!” someone screamed behind him. He thought it was the woman, but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t devote enough attention to the words to be sure as the power of N’yea’thuul pressed back against him, breaking into the world to unleash its utter and total destruction.
The marker itself seemed to be pushing back as well. Its bluish glow was intensifying and focusing in on a central point along its face. The pressure pushing back against James intensified as a beam of blue light started protruding from its surface like a spear, coming straight at him.
No, James thought as he fell to his knees beneath the pressure from before and above him, his trembling evolving to shivers now. Not this world. Not on my watch.
Something warm began tickling his upper lip and the skin beneath his ears. He knew he was bleeding from the strain, so much stronger than anything he’d faced before in his life. He became aware that he’d begun screaming at some point. He wasn’t sure when, but from the strain in his throat he thought it must have been for some time now. He didn’t fight it. It was a release. A resolve. A way to focus his energy, his will, against this god of death.
The swirling clouds above began to shimmer, and the droning cry of the beast grew in volume and depth. The marker began to shimmer as well, as the blue spear inched closer and closer to James, now less than a foot from the palm of his outstretched hand. Tendrils of blue light began to stretch out from the tip of the spear of light, reaching toward him like probing fingers. A voice filled his head, though he knew it was audible only to himself. The droning shriek continued to rise and encompass everything. He was screaming louder now and could sense more than actually hear the screams of Denarius and his family behind him as they witnessed the spectacle.
Elder N’yea’thuul awaked is HERE! the voice in his mind roared at him in an alien tongue he nonetheless understood. Accept this fate. Accept N’yea’thuul!
His vision tinted red all at once and he began blinking away a coppery warmth as the rain cleared his vision. He was nearing the end of his rope, the end of his strength. He was very weak now, wanting nothing more than to relinquish his power and collapse beneath the weight of the Elder and its will.
A vision conjured in his mind then, part of a memory from many years before. It was a graveyard from his own time and place. Three people he loved more than anyone in all the world, walking away, their backs to him. A fourth person, a baby in the arms of the woman, his little eyes blinking with awe as they focused on him. Eyes that bore a striking resemblance to his own, though he wasn’t sure why he thought so. It had been merely an instant, nothing more. They hadn’t known he was there, his family and the one he’d left to watch over them, and that was for the best. He’d still had worlds to travel and gods to kill. But he’d peeked in on them, saw them happy, and that had been enough.
Then he saw the woman and the man, his best friends, with his daughter Joanna and the baby boy the woman had been holding, screaming in the midst of destruction as fire fell from the sky, melting their skin and turning their cries to smoky gasps.
Ja
mes bared his teeth.
The blue tendrils from the spear of light inched closer still, the voice of N’yea’thuul taunting him in his mind, and his scream rose in decibel and pitch as he focused every ounce of his gift at the sky and the marker and what they brought with them.
“NOOOOOO!” he cried in a thunderous, booming voice.
There was a burst of energy then, the shimmering sky and the shimmering marker suddenly awash in wavering light. The drone of the god in the sky sharpened then, a sound of something like alarm, and then a shuh-whump of sound, as of all sound and air being sucked into a vacuum all at once, whipped out from him in a cloud of shimmering energy.
The abyss at the center of the swirling sky imploded in on itself, and gone were the flailing tentacles and the cry of the elder god. The clouds ceased their swirling and the rain filled its absence.