by Eric Flint
Trace took the opening and fired. The first shot hit it high in the shoulder, the second just under the ribs. The sound it made was truly awful, a scream Trace had heard only in nightmares, but it crumpled, fell back in the aisle and slid down a few feet.
He dry-fired twice more at it, advancing by slow steps, while frantic people huddled on the berths and cowered in the aisle. It didn't seem to be moving, and neither did several of the passengers—Trace saw at least six lying in pools of blood, and the little girl with her neck bent at a terrible angle; an old man with his chest torn open, as if the thing had shoved a fist in and pulled out his heart—
It was Martin Kingsley. He had the fire-ax still clenched in his hands, a surprised expression on his face. Miss Eliza huddled on the berth behind him, her arms around his chest, holding his body, looking at Trace with a blank, lost expression.
"It was so strong," she said faintly. "It tried to get me."
"Miss Eliza, you just come here," Trace said.
"Martin's dead," she said.
"I see that, darlin', you just come here to me. That's a good girl."
She blinked, slowly, and then her face tightened like a fist. She rolled her brother's body off her lap and climbed over it to the aisle, taking Trace's hand. The front of her bed jacket and petticoat were soaked with blood.
"You hurt?" he asked her.
"I—I don't think so. Are there more of those things out there?"
Trace could still hear screaming and gunfire coming from outside. "There are, but we can't stay in here. We got to get to one of the other cars, isn't so damaged."
"I'm not going out there!" another woman cried.
"Don't like the idea myself, lady, but this one ain't safe." Trace slung the Colt's chamber open and shucked the spent casings onto the floor. He pulled a fresh cartridge from his belt and thumbed it into place.
"Look out!" Miss Eliza gasped, and he heard the snarl, the scuffle from the end of the aisle, and half-turned just as something heavy and stinking hit him and knocked him to the floor.
His head struck and the weight of the thing drove the air from his lungs; between that and the stench of its breath his vision was blotted out in red, but he felt its hot exhalation on his face and jabbed his hand up blindly, wedged the heel of his hand under its chin so it couldn't bite.
It was horribly, demonically strong, and its arms seemed to be ten feet long. It punched him low under the ribs, but not with a fist—its claws punctured and penetrated, through shirt and skin and muscle, a feeling of tearing in his side and pain rushing in like an express engine.
Trace hiked up a knee and got his heel wedged in the thing's hip, sat up and shoved with everything he had. It threw it back a foot or so; Trace brought both feet together and drove them into its midsection as it pounced, threw it over his head and up the aisle.
It landed hard on its head and Trace was up before it could turn around, snatched up the fire-ax from Kingsley's stiffening fingers and lunged after it. It met him halfway, snarling, and Trace twisted aside at the last second, swung the ax down at an angle.
The blade sank into its side and it squalled, turned on that impossibly flexible spine and swiped at him with its claws. He yanked the ax free and swung again, cutting up under the armpit this time, followed through with a kick to the chest. It somersaulted backward down the aisle, with a hard grunt as if he had winded it. Trace leapt after it with a yell and a wild swipe of the ax, buried the blade deep into the join of the neck and shoulder. The thing convulsed, unable to squeal with its throat mostly severed; one more fall of the ax and the job was done.
Panting, Trace turned and marched back up the aisle. Miss Eliza held his Colt out to him and he took it, handing the ax off to one of the men. He began shoving bullets into the breech again, faster this time. "Now," he said. "We got to get out of here. Get to the third-class car, ain't so damaged. Got it?"
Suddenly there was a crash from the front of the car. Trace wheeled to see two of those things knocking the glass out of the broken windows, beating the frames out of the walls, crawling in to the floor.
"Move!" Trace shouted, as everyone began to scream and climb toward the exit. He backed up the aisle, while the two things crouched over the dead one, sniffing it. There was a third figure standing there, too, the faint blue shade of a Chinaman, looking down on the corpse until the monsters brushed through him and obliterated him from sight.
They turned on Trace, grinning and silent now, their eyes almost human in their mad glee. Their skins were smooth and hairless as slugs, with the same wet transparent sheen. Except for the bones so close to the taut skin, they looked like hog casings stuffed with blood. They rose on their legs to climb the aisle, using those long arms to grip the berths, and Trace could see where their bellies had been cut by crawling through the glass. The wounds were white like proud flesh, leaking blood like a punctured waterskin and closing up even as he watched. It was hard to watch. There was something so human and yet so not, especially in their faces, that jarred with his sense of real-or-not and kept pulling him toward the detachment of nightmare. They had genitals, he saw with distant revulsion, like a man's might look after he'd pulled himself out of an icy creek.
Then one of them rushed him. Trace almost shot it, but it stopped short, grinning, taunting. Trace backpedaled harder, felt cold air on his back, heard screams and running from outside, knew he was almost at the door. Then the last passenger jumped out and down and Trace stood up on the twisted railing, took a big step onto the roof of the colored car.
The wind was acrid, searing the lungs and eyes. The engine cab was still burning and it looked like there was a fire in the third-class car, as well: bright light danced in the windows and smoke poured out. People staggered out of the car and ran, wavering and ghostlike in their white nightclothes. Some of them carried torches. Shapes that were not quite men oozed under and between the cars.
The two things had climbed out after him and onto the high vantage point of the upended emigrant car.
"That's fine," Trace said, backing away and trying to watch in all directions at once. "You just stay there."
One leapt onto the roof behind him.
He felt it more than he heard it—sensed something dark and silent looming in on him, as if death had materialized out of the night.
He twisted and skidded on the slippery roof, wrenched his knee but managed not to go down, whipped the Colt around. The thing just leapt into the air, six feet up, pushing off with its knuckles like the bat in the cage. It sailed right over the slugs he fired at it and hit him feet-first in the chest. They skewed off the roof in a tangle and plummeted to the gravel.
Trace hit first, lungs dashed flat and brains clubbed half to mush. He raised the Colt groggily, but the beast slapped it from his hand. Its mouth was red and grinning, full of little sharp teeth like a pig's. He could hear the croaking of his own lungs as he closed his hands around its throat, but it bent over him, breath hot and foul like rotting meat, like the offal of pigs, like a sunken road choked with the bloated bodies of comrades—
Trace's hands fell to his own throat, scrabbling for the fine chain under his shirt. Oh Lord, not like this. Not yet—He closed his fist around his crucifix, the last thing he had of his Ma's. Bite on this, you bastard—
He shoved the crucifix at its face, aiming for the eye, but it reared back, snarling. Suddenly a stream of fire shot out of the darkness and struck it between the shoulder blades.
Its growl of anger turned to a howl of agony and panic. It hurtled away, rolling, wallowing in the shale and shrubbery, but the flames would not be smothered: they rose and consumed, and in seconds the thing had collapsed into a pile of bone and ash.
"Trace!" Boz was running toward him, carrying a torch and accompanied by two other coloreds, and a strange tall fellow who looked like a scarecrow let off its pole. "Shit, Trace, I leave you alone two minutes and you're gettin' yourself dead—"
Trace sat up, holding the back of his skull wi
th one hand—a goose-egg was already rising back there—and staring confusedly at the scarecrow man. "Did you just spit fire at that thing?" he wheezed.
"Yeah, he did," Boz said, wedging a hand under his armpit. "Get up, we gotta move fore they come back around—"
"This your gun?" one of the colored men was holding it out to him.
"Yeah," Trace said. He looked down at his gun hand, the crucifix and its broken chain still wrapped around his fingers. He shoved it in a pocket and took the Colt. "They're eatin' my Baptists," he said hoarsely.
They made for the third-class car, only to find the passengers had mostly escaped and made a run for the stock cars further back. Every few yards, one of the monsters had caught a straggler, and three or four people had stopped to fight it, beating it off with cudgels or rocks. Trace descended on the nearest of these small battles, put two shots in the thing's head and let someone else bash it aside. They picked up the victims that were still breathing and carried them along, collecting survivors as they went.
Trace could feel the black things gathering behind them. Something—his fear or his gift—had awakened a primitive part of his brain and it was tracking them, like drafts in a warm room, as they converged on his retreating party.
"Get down!" he shouted, and shoved the two colored men to the ground. A black shadow hurtled off the top of the third-class car, right over their heads. That one missed, but the tumble delayed them long enough to let the three behind them catch up.
Trace and the two Negroes were hit at once. Trace shot his through the head, but the Negro's shotgun was spent and the thing plunged its fist into his chest, scything through bone and gristle with a sound like a gourd splitting open.
The scarecrow loomed up beside him, torchlight glinting off the amber bottle in his hand. He took a sharp pull from it and then spit. Fire streamed from his lips, engulfing the monster and the unfortunate colored fellow. Boz helped the other man up and they pelted after the last fleeing passengers, running up short against a blockade of cows—cows?—milling about beside the track, sleepy and bawling and jostling each other.
"Hee-yaw!" Boz screamed, and fired into the air. The startled cattle shifted and lurched, and Trace saw the yawning mouth of the first stock car, side door open, the conductor leaning down from the bed and helping to hoist up the last few refugees. Boz went next, then the colored man, then the scarecrow, and Trace last, while the men leaned on the sliding door from the inside, propelling it closed.
A clawed hand closed around Trace's knee. He yelled, and Boz yelled, and grabbed him by the gun arm, which saved him falling but the Colt clattered to the floor and somebody kicked it into the dark corners of the car. The claws sank into Trace's thigh, hot as any branding iron, and another of the things leapt at the door, landed with one foot in the opening and the other on Trace's chest.
"Shoot it, goddamn it!" Trace hollered, but a slim pale form thrust between the men, Miss Eliza coming with her arm extended, face drawn and serious as she pressed the cross in her hand against the face of the demon in the doorway.
It shrieked, a high-pitched wail of mortal agony straight out of hell. The cross seemed to sink into its flesh. The yellow lamp of one eye winked out, and it pinwheeled out of the car, landed on the one that had Trace.
It let go. Boz heaved. The door slammed shut with an echoing thud, blotting out the night and boxing in the frightened cries of the passengers—emigrants, railroad employees, second class, third class, white, colored, Baptist and ex-Catholic—packed into a stinking filthy stock car like so much meat for slaughter.
* * *
It had fallen quiet, except for the moaning of the injured. The few remaining children had lapsed into sleep, and some of the traumatized parents were sunk into fugues. Brother Clark was preaching to them—or rather at them—something out of Revelation, with assorted Beasts and Plagues. Trace thought uncharitably that he would have rather seen Clark with his chest ripped open, instead of Martin Kingsley, but he doubted Brother Clark had made any effort to put himself between the monster and its intended prey.
"How many did we leave Ogden with?" Trace asked, low.
"Seventy-three souls, plus twelve hands," the conductor said, rubbing Willie's dried blood off his face. He'd lost his spectacles during the massacre.
Trace did a quick head count; the combination of hay and cow manure they'd lit in one of the troughs gave a little light, but it made breathing a chore. The stock car was one of the modern ones—it was solid walls up to the top three feet or so, which were slatted. The breeze took some of the smoke out the top but swirled the rest of it around. From time to time Trace heard one of the creatures slither across the roof, and saw a black silhouette peer in through the slats, but it couldn't reach the people inside.
There were about forty of them in the stock car. More than half lost, then, unless some others were holed up elsewhere. Least they had water in this car: feed and water troughs to keep the beef from shrinking on its way to sale.
"How long before they call us missin'?" Boz asked.
"Few more hours," the conductor said. "We're not due in Eagle Rock until five a.m. They'll send an engine back after us. But it'll be sunup before they get here."
"After sunup, it won't matter," said the scarecrow fellow, coming to join them. "If we can hold our position till then, we'll be all right."
"How d'you know that?" said Charles, the last of the colored men.
"Isn't it obvious?" said the scarecrow. "They're vampires. They don't like the daylight."
Miss Eliza, who was bandaging the wound in Trace's side, made a queer little mewing sound and looked at him. He shook his head at her, once.
Everybody else looked at the tall skinny fellow. He was remarkably ugly, even in the half-dark: gangling and concave, with ears that stuck out from his head, a nose like a lumpy potato, and skin rough as a Colorado creek bed. But he had a loose, aw-shucks smile, and a mild look in his eyes. And of course he had that bottle of booze tucked in his coat pocket, and that trick of spitting fire at demons.
"Maybe I should introduce myself," he said, when everyone just sat and stared at him. "My name is Sylvane Ferris. Ferris the Fire-Master."
They looked at him blankly. They were so exhausted, Trace thought, that this gibberish seemed to make sense.
Ferris sighed. "I don't expect you to have heard of me. I haven't performed in six years. That blasted Human Torch! I beg your pardon, ma'am."
Trace asked, gently, "What makes you think these things are vampires?" He didn't need convincing, himself, but he could see the others did—not least of all Boz.
"I didn't get a good look at them," Charles said nervously.
"They were men," the conductor all but snarled. "Chinese, I should say, gone savage from living in the mountains."
"Never saw a man could jump like that," Boz murmured. "Not even a Chinese."
"I know it sounds incredible," said Ferris. "But in circus life you come to accept the incredible. Three-headed calves, pigs with two tails and no heads, men with women's parts and the other way round—"
"Anybody works on the range's seen cows with extra parts," Charles said.
"But have you ever seen a man with the teeth of a wolf, and the appetite for blood?" Ferris said. "A man, even a heathen Oriental, who recoiled in pain from the simple touch of a Christian cross? A man who burnt to ash as soon as he was touched by cleansing flame?" He looked at Trace. "A man who couldn't be killed by a bullet? Whose soullessness made him colder and blacker than a Wyoming night?"
Trace stared at him.
Boz broke in. "I don't care what they are—they're hard to kill and they're hungry. They're still out there, 'case you can't hear 'em."
They hushed for a moment, casting wary glances at the roof. Trace could have sworn he heard something chuckle. Brother Clark's sermon rose in volume slightly; he had moved on to the Whore of Babylon.
"How many are there?" Trace asked. "How many did we kill? I hacked the head off one in the emigra
nt car, and Ferris there burned at least one, that I saw."
"I reduced no less than three to ash, if I may be so modest," Ferris said.
"That's four. Any others we know didn't get up?"
"The one I smote with the cross," Miss Eliza said. "Not the one you saw—one of them attacked me as I ran from the passenger car. I struck it in the mouth and it . . . melted."
There was a short silence. Trace remembered how her cross had sunk into the face of the beast; how the one that attacked him had shied from his crucifix. He fished it out of his pocket, found the broken ends of the chain and twisted them together, back around his neck. Miss Eliza watched him do it.
"I blew the head off one," the conductor said.
"We burned up a couple with the torches," Boz said, nodding at Charles.
"Eight, then?" Trace looked around at them. "How many are left?"
"At least that many more," Boz guessed, "since they took half our numbers. They ain't dumb animals, either. They flushed the passengers out—shoved one of their own into the car, caught the ones who run out."
"I saw that, too," Trace said. "And they built a blockade on the tracks. They knew how to stop the train."
"And they laugh," said Miss Eliza. "That one laughed when it . . . killed Martin."
"Then they're human," the conductor said.
"That is a fatal mistake to make, my friend," Ferris said.
"I'm not your friend, friend. I'm the conductor of this god-damned train and I'll not hear any more of this foolishness. Now we are gonna sit here until daybreak or until—"
The conductor was drowned out by the sudden startled bawling of cattle. It was frantic and loud, close-by, punctuated by a volley of hoof beats on the gravel, and skidding and thrashing in the brush. Everyone inside the stock car went quiet and stiff, listening to the sounds of butchery outside. Even Brother Clark's sermon faltered.