After what felt like an eternity they reached the plow barn, and remarkably, without Skye having to fire a shot. They passed plenty of the fallen dead though, either victims of the two Rangers who had come through here earlier or her own sniping. All that firing had made the passage possible. Neither pair would have been able to face these numbers on their own. Now as they arrived, Skye saw the main doors pulled open a few feet (blown open was more like it) and the snow around them was littered with the headshot dead. The enormous industrial plow parked nearby had its engine running, diesel smoke chugging from a stack. Someone had started it, but there was no one in sight.
“Cribbs?” Skye shouted. “Bracco?”
No answer.
“We’re coming in!” She hauled the toboggan up and over the bodies, pulling Sallinger through the opening and out of the wind. Empty shells casings ground under the sled and skittered away from her boots; the floor of the entrance was covered in them.
Skye smelled blood the second they entered, picked up the scent of both Cribbs and Bracco. She could tell the blood was theirs.
And she smelled Hobgoblin.
Grimy windows coated in diesel oil and dust, lining the tops of two side walls down both lengths of the high shed, lit the cavernous space not with gray storm light but a muted, smoky glow only a few shades above darkness. Two rows of plows faced one another across a cracked cement floor, a wide central aisle running between them. The cold air smelled of fuel, metal and damp sand. Dump trucks with wide blades at the front and sand spreaders mounted at their rear bore a mixture of state, county and town emblems. The plow barn was apparently a shared facility. One shadowy end was a service area with lifts, grease pits, tool cabinets and a pair of small offices.
What couldn’t be seen from the wide entrance was the single fire door at the far corner hidden behind the trucks. It had been forced open from the outside, and now snow was drifting in across the cement.
A pair of striding, bare footprints marred the drift, headed inside.
Up near the front double doors, Corporal Bracco was sitting on the cold floor, his rifle across his thighs and his medical kit beside him. Opened packaging and bloody gauze littered the floor around him, and he was pressing a thick, adhesive-edged trauma pad against a wound in his neck, the source of the worst bleeding.
The bite had been deep, and had caused major tissue damage.
There wasn’t time to tend to the bites on both hands – his gloves had been ripped away – or the wound on his wrist and the back of his left knee. The fabric of his uniform was turning crimson at all those locations, but the neck was the worst; the back of his coat was soaked red because of it. They’d found the keys to the big plow in one of the offices, then Bracco had gone out to get it started. Right after that, everything had gone to hell.
“Top!” he shouted for the half-dozenth time into the gloom. As before, there was no response.
Movement and a dragging sound came from beyond the blown double doors, making him grab the rifle, but then Skye’s voice was yelling, “Coming in!” The young woman entered a moment later, dragging the captain on a long wooden sled. She spotted Bracco at once, even in the shadows, and pulled her load to him.
Sallinger looked at his wounded man. “There’s a lot of bodies outside. You put up a hell of a fight, Corporal.”
“And I’m still in it, sir.”
Sallinger gave the man a tight grin and nodded. For a little while was the message that passed between them.
“Where’s Cribbs?” Skye asked.
The big Ranger pressed a hand to the square pad and winced. The gauze was already soaking through. “Once we got the plow running we could see it had a full tank of diesel, but Top was worried it wouldn’t be enough to get us to Reno. He ordered me to hold the doors while he went to the back. We’d found some jerry-cans full of fuel back there.” Bracco swallowed. “Then a wave of skinnies came out of the storm and hit me hard. I took ‘em all down, though.”
The price of that battle was visible at Bracco’s neck and in the blood-soaked places of his uniform.
“I haven’t seen Top, and he doesn’t respond when I yell.” The corporal started to rise. “I have to go find him.”
Skye put a hand on his shoulder. “Watch over Sallinger. I’ll go get him.”
She moved into the gloom with her .357 in hand.
Ghoul crouched in the deep shadow between two trucks, listening and scenting the air. The bloody streak of a body being dragged from the main aisle led back to where he waited, a red pool spreading around the man lying before him. Ghoul had taken the human by surprise, leaping from atop one of the trucks and hurting him badly in a violent flurry of biting teeth and pounding fists. The human hadn’t even been able to cry out or use its weapons.
Now the prey was on its back, eyelids fluttering, blood leaking from its nose, ears and the corner of one eye, as well as from the bite wounds. Its breathing was shallow and ragged, and Ghoul’s slumped head tilted even more to the side as he stared in fascination with his remaining eye at the crimson air bubble rising and falling from the man’s lips.
Ghoul caught the scent of the human female, the one the Alpha wanted so badly. The Hobgoblin’s lips peeled back in a gruesome smile. He would butcher the Skye, feast on her flesh and organs, deny the Alpha her prize. Foggy memory flashes of other females, of pain and torment and screaming caused a stirring in him, and his black tongue darted out reflexively to lick his lips.
In his limited observation of them, the humans in this pack seemed to care for one another, to be protective. These were concepts he didn’t really connect with, but which the hunter in him understood well enough to make the knowledge useful.
He needed the Skye to come to him.
Ghoul lifted the dying man’s hand and bit it hard enough to break the small bones. Master Sergeant Cribbs let out a whimpering cry that echoed through the plow barn.
Skye heard the sound and started running down the aisle between the parked trucks. Without realizing she was doing it, she scented the air, picking out the master sergeant’s unique signature as well as the fact that it was decidedly different from normal; he was mortally wounded.
And the odor mixing with his was pure Hobgoblin.
The poor light couldn’t prevent her left eye from seeing the bloody smear on the cement leading back between two trucks. Her nostrils flared, she bared her teeth and sprinted in.
After biting Cribbs, Ghoul had scrambled up into the bed of a dump truck, and he waited there now, fingers curled over the edge and watching the space below where the dying man lay. The Skye was coming in fast, just as he’d intended.
They were so easy, such simple creatures. His teeth clicked in anticipation.
There she was, rounding the front of the truck. She would drop down beside her fallen pack-mate, Ghoul would drop onto her back and then-
But she didn’t move to the dying man. Instead, in three great bounds she vaulted to the truck’s bumper, hood, and then roof. She launched through the air into the truck bed, something in her right hand coming down in a fast, deadly arc. The Hobgoblin shrieked and reached for her, springing upward.
Too late.
And too slow.
Airborne, Skye came down on the tattooed and bare-chested Hobgoblin, swinging the tomahawk in her enlarged left hand with all its alien strength. The blade split Ghoul’s head in half from crown to beneath his chin, lodging in the bones of his spine. There was an explosion of brains and black fluid, and Skye’s momentum carried both their bodies to the steel floor.
Crouched above him, Skye tore the tomahawk free and growled, butchering the corpse with a dozen more swings, rendering the creature from the chest up unrecognizable as the human monster it had been or the genetic nightmare it had become. Breathing hard, her white coat, face and hands streaked with dark gore, Skye knelt over her victim for a moment, then climbed down into the darkness to kneel beside Cribbs.
The master sergeant was almost finished. She could se
e that his facial bones had been broken, giving him a misshapen appearance, and a vertebrae bulged outward against the skin of his neck. The bites were numerous and horrific, and he was aspirating blood. One eye was closed, the other heavy-lidded, and she doubted he could even tell she was beside him.
“I’m here, Oscar,” she said anyway, gently taking his broken and bitten hand.
There was no emotional movie moment between them, where he would press his Ranger wings into her hand and say something like, “It’s up to you now, kid.” Instead, Oscar Cribbs gurgled a spill of blood from his lips, convulsed, and died without speaking.
Skye rested a palm on his chest for a moment, then snapped the dog tags off his neck. A second later, there was the boom of a single pistol shot that reverberated through the plow barn, and then Skye was running back to the others, her face wearing a mask of stone.
When Skye reached the two Rangers, both men looked at her with an unspoken question. She simply shook her head and handed the dog tags to Sallinger.
The captain was about to say something when there was a sudden, explosive squeal of metal, the huge double doors being shoved back in both directions. The sound was accompanied by an ear-splitting screech that froze the three survivors.
A nightmare stood in the opening.
Seven feet tall. Rippling muscles and talons. A quill-covered, elongated head with yawning black baboon fangs. The only way it was recognizable as female was the scattered strands of long red hair and the deflated, sagging breasts on its broad chest. A smaller creature appeared beside it, a maroon-skinned, child-monster without a face.
Both screeched at once, then raced into the plow barn.
Their fright broke and Skye and the two Rangers brought up their weapons, opening up with rifle and pistol fire, the three of them pouring lead into the sprinting creatures. The sudden, frightening appearance of the two Hobgoblins made them slow to react, and although bullets thudded into dead flesh, grazed the big one’s head and tore through the little one’s neck, neither went down. A second later the two creatures were out of sight within the maze of parked trucks.
“Why didn’t they come at us?” Bracco demanded, his voice too high and loud.
Sallinger began levering himself off the toboggan, an awkward task. “They’re smart, afraid of the guns.” He groaned, using Bracco’s big shoulder to lever himself up onto his good leg. “Fuck ‘em, let’s get to the plow.”
Skye was dumping empty brass from her revolver, feeding in a fresh speed-loader and staring into the darkness of the shed. Her parents and Crystal. Postman and Taylor. Carney. Oscar Cribbs and the fallen Rangers. All of them casualties of a world created by the drifters, and now this thing, the most dangerous creature of all. Her rage was boiling over. It had to end.
Her mind racing, Skye turned and pointed a finger at Sallinger. “This facility of yours, you said they study the dead. That they’re working on a cure, right?”
The captain shook his head. “Skye, we have to go.”
“Right?” she demanded.
“I don’t know, I guess so. They had us collecting stray skinnies, and that’s what they told us.”
Skye’s eyes darted around, locking on several items. She knew what she had to do. Leaning against a workbench along one wall was a five-foot-long bar of galvanized steel with an eye-hook at one end, the purpose for which she couldn’t guess. But she flashed on the few times her grandmother had tried teaching her how to sew. Skye seized the bar, then a length of towing chain that hung like garland along the side of the nearby plow.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sallinger shouted, now standing with one arm around the corporal.
Skye ignored him. She scanned the workbench, found a heavy bolt and nut, then ran the chain through the eye hook and secured it with the bolt. Needle and thread.
“We have to go!” the Ranger leader yelled.
Skye draped the chain in four-foot lengths over one shoulder, gripping the bar in both hands and turning to face the men. She looked at Bracco. “Get him in the plow.”
“What are you doing?” Sallinger asked again, his voice low and urgent.
“A world full of the dead has almost wiped us out,” said Skye. “A world with those things in it? We’ll be extinct in six months. I’m going to bring a live one to your facility so they can figure out how to stop this.”
“You’re fucking crazy. We can just leave, don’t throw your life away on this bullshit!” Even as he said it he could tell by the look on her scarred, gray face that she had made up her mind.
“Get him to the plow,” she ordered again, and the big corporal nodded.
Sallinger looked at her, too exhausted and hurt to argue. “You’re going to die.” He shook his head. “At least go after the little one.”
Skye’s inhuman eye blazed and she showed her teeth. “Fuck that. I’m taking out mama.”
THIRTY-THREE
“Are you ready to go now?” Death asked.
Pepper gave a firm, very deliberate shake of her head, afraid that her shuddering might be interpreted as nodding. A conventional, mercury thermometer was set in the master electrical system control panel, and it announced that the interior temperature of the tour bus was six degrees below zero. God knew what it was like outside.
No, she corrected herself, I do know. It was the wind, sounding like a maimed animal, screaming down through the open roof hatch, the holes she had blown in the bedroom ceiling, and now through a pair of new holes; one in the sheet metal low on the main door up front, another in the right side of the windshield. She’d caught a glimpse of the creature stalking her, first at the windshield and then hammering at the bus door, and tried to kill it both times with the shotgun.
The bus was shielding her from the worst of the cold, she knew; outside it would be what, twenty below? Colder? But even in here, standing in the living area watching snow blow in through the openings, the storm was turning her once-safe haven into a deep freezer. Beyond the windows was only a shifting, alabaster wall.
White out.
She’d heard the term, seen examples on TV, but her Tennessee upbringing hadn’t prepared her for the real thing. Now she saw that the term was absolutely accurate, and visibility beyond the glass was zero. Except for when a dark shape that wanted to eat her briefly flashed by close to the bus.
“How much longer can you last?” asked Death. “And why would you want to draw this out?”
Death was sitting in one of the recliners, wearing Scott’s bloody camouflage and Scott’s face, but it wasn’t her brother. Its short haircut and complexion were the color of bleached bones, and the hands gripping the armrests were skeletal, nothing but bones poking out the uniform cuffs. Scott’s striking blue eyes no longer looked out from that gaunt face; Death’s eyes were flat and black, like a doll’s.
“Y-you’re n-n-not here,” Pepper stammered. “Y-you’re an h-h-hallucin-nation.”
“Oh, I’m here,” Death said. The ragged head wound looked just like the one that had ended her brother’s life, but it didn’t make her sad as it had during earlier conversations. On Death, it looked more than appropriate, and the sight of it filled her with dread.
“N-not real.” She shook her head again. “N-n-not r-ready.”
Death’s voice was different too, a nails-on-chalkboard shriek that made her cringe and sounded an awful lot like the wind. “Freeze, shoot yourself or let it eat you.” A shrug. “It’s all the same. But make a decision and let’s end this.”
The choices were obvious to her; she didn’t need this figment to list them, but she found it difficult to find a valid argument. A large part of her longed to simply put down the gun, give up her vigil and crawl into her bed to hide beneath the covers. Maybe she could find a few moments of warmth, and if she was very lucky, fall asleep. Then she’d feel nothing when either the cold or the teeth of a monster came to claim her. Yes, that would be the best way.
“You won’t sleep, and it won’t be the cold,” said Death.<
br />
A childhood fear rushed up on her, a half-awake nightmare where she was cowering under her blanket, holding it down tightly over her head while some unseen thing that ate children leaped upon the bed and began clawing it off her, laughing at her screams. No, the gun would be better. Just end it.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Brother Death, watching her with his doll eyes.
There was another option, though, one he hadn’t mentioned and which terrified her. She knew she didn’t have the courage for that.
Death shook his head slowly. “You’re right, you don’t. And that choice is nothing but a long agony. You don’t want that.” He gestured with his slender bones back toward the bedroom. “Maybe you could fall asleep. If you don’t think you can pull the trigger, just go and try to take a nap. We’ll see how everything shakes out.”
Pepper wanted to cry, but couldn’t. Maybe her eyes were freezing; they certainly hurt enough. A metallic, wrenching squeal along the side of the bus – dead fingernails dragging across metal? – made her jump and swing the barrel of the shotgun in that direction.
“No,” Brother Death said, ignoring the sound, “just put the idea out of your head. You don’t have the guts to make that choice. That would take character, and you’re nothing but one of those pampered and spoiled little celebrities, treating people like garbage and throwing tantrums over the meaningless.” The thin white lips curled into a sneer. “No real worth, no soul, and no backbone.”
Something slammed against the windshield behind her and she spun, catching a glimpse of a pair of scarlet hands hooked around the edges of the shotgun hole, peeling back the safety glass and making the hole larger. Pepper fired from the hip, heard an enraged scream over the wind, and fired again, this time from the shoulder. The hands were gone, and in their place was a ragged hole in the glass the size of a whiskey barrel, fragments glittering on the floor and dashboard. An icy blast carried snow in through the opening.
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 31