Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  The pterosaur that had been hit and both of the other monsters were shredded as the compressed ghost-gas bullets detonated into a blinding series of miniature explosions. The bursts followed one another almost too fast to hear—first the explosion of the rifle shells and then the howling scream as the ghost rocks embedded in the dead flesh of each animal burst apart. That, and the screams of the undead things, shook the entire cavern. Chunks of sandstone cracked off and plummeted from the ceiling, smashing down on the pteranodons, crippling some, killing many. Grey grabbed Looks Away by the arm and they scrambled under the hood of another giant mushroom. The massive cap quivered and a jagged crack appeared in the stem above their heads. They cried out and rolled over against the base just as the stem cracked like a tree in a hurricane wind and a ton of mottled fungus canted over and crashed down inches from where they lay.

  The ground shook again and bloody rain fell all around them.

  They dared not move.

  The whole world shook and trembled around them. The pterosaurs screamed.

  And then there was a new sound, that of many leathery wings flapping as all of the surviving creatures flung themselves into the air in a colliding, wild attempt to flee.

  Silence settled very, very slowly.

  The two men lay there, half buried under the shattered mushroom cap, half deafened by the thunder of the Kingdom rifle, half mad with terror.

  Then, finally, Grey began to crawl out. After a moment Looks Away followed. They climbed to their feet and stood there, swaying and drunk with fatigue. Around them lay the shredded remains of a half dozen of the pteranodons. A few crippled ones were dragging themselves away from what had been their intended dinner. These monsters had been torn by flying shrapnel from the mushrooms, from rocks, and from flying bits of bone, but they hadn’t been caught in the blast radius of the exploded ghost rock and so they had not exploded, too. Even so, they were torn to rags.

  Looks Away wiped a nervous hand across his mouth as he watched them shudder along and tried to make a joke. “A clear case of the biter bit, what?”

  The quip came out crooked and landed flat.

  Grey picked up the Kingdom rifle from where it had fallen when they’d been thrown backward. The little lights were still glowing bright even though it was covered with drops of blood. He held it up and thought about the cannon-sized one at Doctor Saint’s lab.

  “God Almighty,” he whispered.

  Chapter Sixty

  They picked up their other weapons: the ordinary Colt and shotgun that now seemed both childish and somehow more wholesome than the gleaming Kingdom M1.

  “Do you think that gun destroyed the demons in those flying lizards?”

  “Reptiles,” corrected Looks Away, “and I don’t know. Actually, old chap, we don’t even know if they were the same kind of undead as Lucky Bob’s crew or simply bodies he raised using alchemy. Add that to our list of mysteries.”

  “It would be nice,” groused Grey, “to get to the point where the answers outnumber the dad-blasted questions.”

  “I don’t know that any results we get on prehistoric monsters are going to be reliable in terms of what the Kingdom rifle might or might not do to undead gunslingers. Or to a Harrowed like Lucky Bob. We have to be careful there, old boy. I think it’s fair to say that Jenny would prefer we did not destroy her father’s eternal soul.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s that…”

  They reloaded and did an ammunition check.

  “I have fourteen shells left,” said Looks Away, closing the shotgun breech with a snap. “You?”

  Grey had removed all of the rounds from his belt and put them in his one remaining trouser pocket. They were much easier to grab. “Thirty-one rounds.”

  In any normal circumstance it was a lot of ammunition. This was a million miles from normal.

  Above them the roof of the cavern was free of any undead flying reptiles, while the bats had once more gone back to hide in the mushroom forest. Even the insects, large and small, seemed to shun them. Grey could almost understand it. Even though they had done what was necessary to survive an impossible attack, using that gun made him feel strangely unclean. Like it was emblematic of a line in the sand that they should not have crossed.

  Grey said none of this to Looks Away. After all, it was his mentor, Doctor Saint, who had created the gun, and the cannon. It was Looks Away who had used that other strange weapon to stop the reanimated army from slaughtering the town. In both cases those weapons had been the deciding factor in keeping them alive.

  So why did it feel wrong? Why did Grey feel dirty?

  He shook his head, unable to sort it through.

  Looks Away took a sip from his canteen and handed it over. Grey sipped and gave it back.

  “You know, I grew up way back east in Philadelphia,” said Grey. “I wanted to be a lawyer or someone like that. I was good in school, always read, got top grades.”

  “So—?”

  “So what the fuck am I doing in this hellhole?”

  They both laughed. The sound echoed badly and it hushed them again.

  With infinite care they left the scene of carnage and searched for a path through the cavern. Even though neither of them possessed certain knowledge that this cavern actually led to the necromancer’s residence, each of them felt it in their guts. If Veronica was right and Chesterfield had betrayed Deray, inviting dire retaliation, then the tunnel that brought the attackers—however it was made—had to come from somewhere.

  But where? And how far was it? Grey had no way of knowing.

  Just as he had no way of knowing what new horrors stood between them and the answers.

  Looks Away carried the lantern and walked bent over, frowning at the ground, making soft grunting noises to himself to confirm or reject possible trails. Then he found it. On the far side of a cracked ridge of lichen-covered rock there was a distinctive line of glistening slime. They both agreed it was the same as the trail of whatever had bored through the tunnel into the basement of Chesterfield’s mansion. Moving as quickly as caution allowed, they followed the trail down the slope and along the night-dark sea.

  The sand crunched softly under their feet, and in places felt dangerously soft, as if some trap or pocket might open up beneath them. Tendrils of colorless seaweed lay rotting on the shores, moved now and again by desultory waves. The bioluminescence in the seawater made the waves glimmer, but not in any way Grey thought was attractive. The water itself seemed to be rank with the odor of decay.

  The light from their lantern and the glow from the fungi allowed them to see much more of the underground waters than they wanted to. Dark shapes moved in the waves, crashing through the rollers, pale and unnatural. Misshapen bodies that did not look like fish rolled to show mottled gray-white bellies. Fins as tall as the sails of fishing boats sliced along and once they saw a huge mouth rise up and swallow a foundering creature that was as large as a circus elephant. Then a moment later a tentacle thicker than a maple tree rose dripping from the water, wrapped around the monstrous shark, and dragged it thrashing down into the depths. Blood as black as oil bubbled up.

  “This must be what Hell looks like,” gasped Grey, recoiling from the chunks of half-eaten meat that washed up onto the sand.

  “I’ve heard Hell is much pleasanter,” quipped Looks Away, though there was no humor in his expression.

  Their words sounded too loud, even with the thunder of the surf, and they fell into a desperate hush as they hurried along.

  The beach stretched on and on, and the slimy trail ran along it, smearing the sand to a glistening paste. It occurred to Grey that anything massive and powerful enough to have gnawed a tunnel from this cavern all the way into the cellars of Chesterfield’s house would be far beyond their skill to defeat. Maybe even beyond the soul-destroying power of the Kingdom rifle. Following the creature was one thing, encountering it would be something to avoid at all costs.

  A cry made them stop and look up and there, circling
at the very edge of the upsweep of light was a pterosaur. Another joined it. Then another.

  “They’re getting over their fear,” said Grey, laying his hand on the butt of his pistol.

  “I’m bloody well not,” Looks Away assured him.

  The pteranodons continued to circle but did not, at least for the moment, draw closer. Grey wanted to take that as a hopeful sign, but he found that nothing down here reassured him.

  The trail abruptly swerved away from the midnight sea and they followed it through an archway of smoky quartz spears, some of which were as massive as redwoods. The spears were interlaced like the steepled fingers of some sleeping giant and they crept beneath them. Grey nudged Looks Away to direct his attention to the deep cracks and fissures in some of the overhead shafts, and from the look of sick fear on his friend’s face, he wished he hadn’t. They quickened their pace.

  Then they came to a break in the ground. A chasm a dozen feet across that dropped down into inky blackness far beyond the reach of their lantern. The cleft seemed to run on for miles in either direction, and yet the slimy trail continued on the other side as if the thing they pursued was so massive that it could thrust itself across the divide without tumbling into it.

  “That’s done it then,” said Looks Away. “We should have brought a coil of rope.”

  “We should have brought an army and some dynamite, too,” said Grey. “But we didn’t. We either solve it or go back.”

  The cry of a hungry pteranodon behind them seemed to cancel out the latter suggestion.

  The alternative was daunting. There was a broken crystal shaft above them that leaned out over the chasm. The jagged point reached almost to the other side, but fell short by six feet. It was not a tremendous jump in regular circumstances, but to manage it here they would have to climb onto the shaft and run along it to get up enough momentum to carry them over.

  When Grey explained this to Looks Away, the Sioux stared at him with frank astonishment. “You have clearly gone ’round the bend, haven’t? You’re barking mad.”

  “It’s not the ideal plan…,” Grey admitted.

  “It’s suicide.”

  “Then we go back and deal with those birds.”

  “Pteranodons are not birds.”

  “Who cares? Pick a card here.”

  The choice, however, was made for them.

  A scraping sound made them spin and look back the way they’d come, and there, filling the mouth of the tunnel of quartz spears, was a gigantic cat. It had massive shoulders and huge paws from which claws like baling hooks dug into the ground. Massive oversized fangs dropped like daggers from its upper jaw, and embedded in its chest was a large black stone laced with white. And everywhere were signs of advanced decay. Rotting flesh, open sores, bloated pustules, and masses of wriggling maggots. It reeked of its own decay.

  The saber-toothed cat wrinkled its face in a silent snarl of pure animal hate, and yet its eyes held a darker and more complex expression than should be evident in a simple beast. A cruel, calculating intelligence glimmered in those eyes.

  They were trapped with a bottomless pit behind them and a monster before them.

  Looks Away whipped the Kingdom rifle around, staring with wild eyes that were filled with the dangerous lights of panic. He uttered a cry of sick fear and began raising it to his shoulder, but Grey leaped at him and pushed it down.

  “Stop, you damn fool!” he snapped. “You’ll bring the whole ceiling down on us.”

  Above and around them the crystal spears—clear or blue or smoky gray—were shot through with cracks.

  The wild look in Looks Away’s eyes turned to panic. “We have to do something.”

  “Yes we damn well do,” Grey said, “but I don’t want to die trying. Give me your shotgun.”

  The undead saber-toothed cat took another step forward. Its eyes narrowed as it read the scene. It crept forward, one deliberate step at a time.

  “Give me the damn shotgun,” said Grey in a fierce whisper.

  Looks Away clutched the Kingdom rifle and sought to raise it against the downward force of Grey’s restraining hand. “Let me go, damn your eyes, I can kill it—.”

  “Sure, and kill us both at the same time,” said Grey. “Snap out of it, man. We need a bang—just not the voice of goddamn thunder.”

  With a dubious nod, Looks Away drew the weapon and extended it stock-first to Grey. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Me, too,” said Grey quietly.

  The big cat kept coming. It was now only forty feet away, but as it approached one section of the tunnel, it paused. There were two crystal spikes laid like crossed swords above the narrow walkway. Grey and Looks Away had needed to crouch to pass beneath them, but the cat was so massive that it would have to crawl on its belly to pass beneath. The narrow bottleneck was the only reason it hadn’t charged them, and Grey knew it even if his companion was too frightened to grasp it.

  Even with the shotgun Grey doubted he could drop so monstrous a creature with a couple of shots. And driving it mad with the pain of buckshot did not seem like the smartest of plans in so tight a spot.

  “Looks,” snapped Grey, “see that arch? You’re the rock expert, tell me the best place to hit it.”

  Looks Away began to argue, but then he abruptly seemed to come back to himself. He studied the fragile crystalline structure and nodded.

  The living-dead cat flattened out and began crawling through the arch. Grey could swear there was a dark humor interwoven with the hunger and hatred on its face. It knew it was going to win. The very fact of its obvious confidence made Grey tremble.

  “Talk to me,” he said in a quiet voice that was at odds with every screaming nerve in his body and mind.

  “There,” said Looks Away, pointing, only to immediately change his mind and point to a different spot. “No—there!”

  “Make up your damn mind…”

  “That spot. See that dark smudge inside? It’s a fracture point…”

  The cat was more than halfway through. Already the muscles in its haunches were bunching in anticipation of slaughter.

  God, the thing was huge. It was as massive as a full-grown bull and infinitely more dangerous.

  “There,” insisted Looks Away, stabbing the air with his finger. “Shoot—shoot!”

  With a scream louder than thunder, the saber-toothed cat began its killing leap. And Grey took three fast steps forward and fired. One barrel. Then the other.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  The concentrated buckshot hit the flaw in the smoky quartz pillar.

  Chunks of crystal exploded outward, scything through the air. The whole structure of the arch groaned and shook. The cat screeched in fury and fear. A shudder rippled along the corridor of spears. The echo of the shots made stalactites shiver on the ceiling and snap off to drop down like falling daggers. They struck the archway, cracking every single spike of crystal so that the whole world seemed to splinter and shatter. The crossed-sword arch trembled.

  Trembled.

  The cat squirmed forward to free itself before the crushing weight of a hundred tons smashed it to pulp. Deep cracks spider-webbed out from the impact points, and smaller patterns of lace spread from where the pellets on the edges of the spray had struck. The air was filled with a sound like breaking ice.

  The huge cat froze, its massive muscles quivering with tension.

  Looks Away and Grey stood stock-still. Smoke curled from the barrels of the shotgun. They all looked up at the archway. The cracks ran on and on, deepening, widening, and the predatory gleam in the saber-toothed monster’s eyes quickly changed to a fatalistic dread. Even the animal knew what was happening.

  Snapping sounds filled the air all around them.

  Grey felt a triumphant smile begin to take shape on his mouth.

  “Kiss my ass, you overgrown house cat,” mocked Looks Away as a massive chunk of the crystal leaned out and fell. It smashed down onto the causeway and shattered into te
n thousand glittering pieces.

  But that was it.

  The rumble stopped.

  Just like that.

  The cracks seemed to freeze as if they had always been there. The crystal arch did not fall.

  The last trembles shivered through the crystal tunnel and then there was a deep silence that was heavy with all of the wrong implications. The saber-toothed cat looked up at the archway, then down at the broken chunks, then up at the two men who still crouched, hiding behind the now empty shotgun. The fatalistic gloom on the cat’s face vanished and triumph blossomed on its hideous face as the grins drained from Looks Away and Grey like blood from a corpse.

  Looks Away said, “Oh…”

  And Grey said, “… shit.”

  The monster cat bared its teeth and sprang.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  They both wanted to scream.

  They did not have the time for it.

  Looks Away flung the lantern at the monster as it broke free of the tight crossed-swords arch. It struck hard and burning oil splashed the thing. Instead of stopping the beast, the fire and pain galvanized it. The monstrous cat threw its massive weight against the structure and they could see its muscles rolling and bunching as it simply tore itself from the narrow passageway.

  Grey thrust the shotgun back to Looks Away and drew his Colt and snapped off three quick shots. The fire hit the impact points, but that did not seem to matter. The creature was not even slowed. It was what Grey feared. A handgun was not an elephant rifle and this brute had to have bones as thick as marble slabs.

  For a fraction of a second he thought about the Kingdom rifle but he was still convinced that it would bring down the whole ceiling. Grey did not want to die down here, buried under ten billion tons of rock.

  However there were few choices left and none of them good. All of them were insane. Most were suicidal. Only one offered a chance. A slim, knife edge of a chance. It was something only a complete madman would consider.

  So he spun, grabbed Looks Away’s shoulder, and shoved him toward one of the broken spears of rock that leaned out over the chasm.