The Rider took off his spectacles and put them away. He lowered his arms slowly, and hooked his rekel coat behind the butt of his Volcanic pistol. He had eight salt core bullets loaded, and eight more .41 caliber rounds on his person. The onager had the rest of his salt ammunition. He had his cold iron Bowie knife with its talismans, and the Volcanic’s seals had damaged demons in the past when he’d used it as a club, but he doubted he would ever get that close.
“Get back in the house, Harry,” he called.
“Rider? Where’s Robert? Where’s Nemmy?”
“They’ll be alright. Get back in the house.”
Rifles slid from saddle rings, and hissed out from scabbards. He heard hammers clicking back in the night.
The woman in the buggy stood, a mass of black silk ruffles, her disfigured face and head of weedy, sparse hairs obscured beneath a long black mantilla that hung to her toes like a great spider web.
“Rider,” she croaked.
Lilith the Demon Queen, still bearing the wounds of their unfortunate first meeting, in which she had been badly burned.
“Lilith,” the Rider acknowledged.
“I didn’t think you would really be so stupid.”
“But you hoped.”
“I wouldn’t have spent the last six months in this shithole otherwise.”
“What the hell do you people want?” Haddox demanded.
Lilith turned to her line of subordinates, and singled one of them out.
“Tentennino.”
The hunchback with the bandolier around his head raised and fired his revolver faster than the Rider could think.
Harry Haddox let out a surprised scream and spun as the bullet blew his wooden leg out from underneath him and sent him crashing to the porch, the shotgun falling across the threshold.
“Daddy!” Emory screeched, and ran out of the house to throw herself over her father.
A ripple of laughter worked its way up and down the line of shedim.
Robert burst out of the woodyard and echoed his sister’s cry. He would have run across the yard if the Rider hadn’t caught him up in a clumsy bear hug and stopped him.
“When I let you go, run back through the wood,” the Rider whispered in his ear. “Don’t let them see you. Get help. Get anybody. The marshal, the Army—do you understand?”
Robert swallowed all thought of further protest when he saw the gathered riders, and he nodded.
“Put up a fight,” the Rider murmured.
Immediately Robert tried to push away.
“My pa…”
“He’s alive,” the Rider said loudly. “Stop fighting.”
The Rider turned over his shoulder.
“Let this family go, Lilith.”
“Human lives are a dime a dozen,” said Lilith. “What do you know of shedim, Rider?”
“I know how to kill them.”
“Yes of course. But do you know what it takes to bring one into the world?”
“I’m familiar with the process,” the Rider said wryly. Unlike their insubstantial bretheren the ruhin, shedim were conceived naturally, although they emerged from the rectum.
“For ten months a lili carries a shed in their womb. It is a great inconvenience. My daughters and I must ply our trade with our bodies, so it means effectively retiring for the duration. It’s not often undertaken. The birth is excruciating. After the shed is born, they mature rapidly. They are for all intents and purposes immortal, unless they are killed. They do not breed with humans or each other.”
“The mules of the mazzikim,” the Rider said.
“They are precious to us, Rider,” said Lilith. “These are all that remain.”
“I never killed one of your children that didn’t come to kill me first,” he said, struggling to keep the boy from bolting.
“Junior,” said Lilith.
“Johnny Shada,” said Mazzamauriello.
“Ormzud,” said the monstrous faced one with the tomahawk.
“Kaftzefoni,” said Tentennino.
“Onoskelis,” said another, an albino black woman with no hair to speak of.
He recognized the names.
“We mourn our dead, Rider,” said Mazzamauriello. “And we avenge our brothers and sister.”
“Farmakh dos moyl,” the Rider cursed, releasing Robert and shoving him back into the woodyard with anger that was only partially pretended. He spun to face them with an outstretched arm and an accusing finger. “I’ve got a name for you, Mazzamauriello,” the Rider, snarled. “And it trumps all of yours. Gershom Turiel! Just an innocent boy. Just a boy and you tore out his throat with your nasty little dog teeth, you beheima. You killed him, and you gave his body over to that moser DeKorte to desecrate. Well, those shedim weren’t the first I killed. In the war I killed a lot more. Anybody you’re missing I probably accounted for, in fact. You want names? I’ll give you a long list of names and you can gai kukken afen yam!”
The shedim grumbled all throughout this tirade, eager to kill.
“Your name’ll be on our list too, Jew,” hissed the bald woman.
“I have no name!” the Rider roared in answer.
He brought out his pistol and levered a shot, as quick as Tentennino had done. Though he didn’t dare to hope he’d hit anything, he heard one of them give out a scream and saw him tumble from the back of his horse. Then he was running into the woodyard, praying Haddox took the opportunity to drag himself and Emory back into the house. Bullets smacked the wood all around, and then the horses were galloping.
But they couldn’t ride more than one at a time down the narrow, twisting paths he took. The first horseman that tried, the Rider blew him off his mount and left him fizzing and screaming in the dirt, the salt from the bullet eating him away from the inside.
Six shots left.
Another came behind him, screeching a raucous rebel yell as he came. The next minute he was spitting teeth and gurgling and sliding from his saddle, rebounding off the walls of wood before crumpling to the ground where his terrified horse stomped on him in its effort to back out of the narrow space.
Five shots.
The Rider rushed further back into the maze of lumber, pistol pointed behind, but not firing. Every shot had to count.
The albino woman thought she was sly. She dismounted and crept in the shadows, using the panicked horses of her dead brothers for cover. The Rider risked the wasted bullet and brought one of the mounts down on top of her, then blasted her dead where she lay.
Only three shots now.
“Stop,” Mazzamauriello’s enraged voice called. “Tentennino! Splitfoot! Get back here!”
“Who did we lose?” called another.
“Berlicche, Ticchi-Tacchi, and Piznal.”
“What about Satanasso’s wound?”
“He’s dying,” called another, farther away.
“Malacosa! Fistolo,” called Mazzamauriello. “Get on top of the pile. Stay low. Iscaaron! Cifero! Follow me. We will tear this place to matchsticks and drag him out.”
“No,” Lilith called out, in a flat, calm voice. “Iscaaron, Cifero, and Puzzolente.”
There was a pause as all the shedim ceased their doings to hear their matriarch’s command.
“Bring me fire.”
They were going to burn the yard, smoke him out. He turned to run. He had to find a path through this. The path Robert had taken. He crouched and squinted through the ricks to try and find the river, but it was pitch black. Then he heard a sound from deep in the back piles, and made for it, hoping it wasn’t some raccoon.
Left he turned. Right. Left again, like a scared fox navigating a thicket, listening for the barking of the hounds. Was he going in circles? If he emerged into the house yard again, what a crock that would be. He stopped to listen over the pounding of his own heart. What about Haddox and Emory and the house? He couldn’t run. They would kill them if he left. Fire the house as well.
How far had Robert gotten by now? It didn’t much matter. Once the fi
re started it would bring men from Yuma, wouldn’t it? They would have to kill him quick before help arrived. Or would they gun down whoever came? He had to kill them before more innocents died.
As he thought that, he took a step and nearly tripped over Robert’s body in the dark. The boy lay face down, but his toes pointed up. Someone had turned his head completely around.
He closed his eyes and murmured a brief prayer, as much for his own piece of mind as the boy’s soul. Another innocent dead because the Rider had stopped by.
He drew his knife. Who was in the woodyard already? Had one of them snuck around? Was Lilith’s talk of fire just a diversion?
No, he smelled the coal oil then, and saw the light over the tops of the ricks as it flared up. There was an arc of light high in the night sky, and then a crash. The edge of the woodyard where he’d stood was burning, the old timber quickly catching.
He glanced at the murdered boy and moved on. Not one more, he thought.
He spied the rear of the woodyard emptying out to the riverbank, where Robert had been heading, and ran for it.
His peripheries freed of the woodpiles, a horseman came into view. They saw each other at the same moment. The man in the saddle had on a rumpled top hat and no nose. A revolver gleamed in his fist, but he had no time to bring it to bear.
“Make sure he don’t try and sneak out one of the—” the man was saying, and the Rider was running towards him. A bullet cut out his next words, busting into the horseman’s breast.
He gagged, wheezed, and sagged in the saddle, blackish slime spilling from the wound and gushing down the neck of the horse.
The Rider caught the animal’s reins, jerked the dying shed down and vaulted into the saddle, nearly slipping off on the slime the dead man left behind.
He leaned over its neck and dug in his heels, spurring it around the edge of the woodyard, away from town, toward the rear of the house.
Angry shouts erupted behind him, punctuated with snapping gunfire and the beating of hooves.
Two shots. Only two. He couldn’t waste them firing at nothing. He leaned low.
Then the wood piles fell away to his right and there was the house. He steered the horse right and made for it, swinging as far to the left of the animal as he could, nearly hanging off the side like a Comanche in a dime novel. He could feel it shudder as bullets smacked against its right flank. The legs gave and it crashed nose first into the dirt, flipping over, nearly taking the Rider underneath, but he let go, letting himself be flung.
His shoulder struck the ground and he rolled twice.
He shook his senses back and got to his feet. That was when the noose dropped down and slipped under his chin. He managed to get his fingers between the rope and his throat as it drew taut and hoisted him off his feet, snapping his pinky and ring finger and driving his hand into his own Adam’s apple.
He hung suspended and dangling. His pistol fell to the ground. He felt his eyes bulge, his face flush red.
He managed to look up, and saw Mazzamauriello on the roof, gripping the rope in his dark little hands and grinning.
“Swing, Rider! Swing and dance!” he cackled, and turning, he put the rope to his shoulder and began to race up the slope of the roof.
The Rider’s free hand found the handle of his Bowie knife and he pulled it out. Gasping, the trapped air burning his pinched throat, he brought the point deliberately up, praying he would not cut his own throat. He did manage to nick his finger, but the keen iron blade parted the noose and he fell in a heap, dashing his head on the bottom of the porch stairs.
He heard Mazzamauriello give a surprised cry and go tumbling off the other side of the house, the frayed end of the rope trailing behind him.
Four horses were bearing down at him. Coughing, he dropped his knife in its sheath and picked up his pistol. He pulled himself onto the porch and made for the back door, taking aim, even as wild shots struck the porch rails and the wall behind him: thudded into the door, blew out the glass in the window, tore through the hem of his coat, skimmed his sleeve, bit away the tip of his left ear. His left eye filled with stinging blood suddenly and he feared he’d been shot, but it was the gash the edge of the porch had opened in his scalp.
He brushed it away quickly, aimed, and fired his last two bullets.
One shed fell screaming off the rump of his animal, clawing at his bubbling face.
The other bullet struck a horse in the breast. The rider was the man with the gigantic face. He had wild black hair too, and a beaded headband that could have fit around a fat man’s waist. He leapt nimbly from the dying horse onto the porch right at the Rider’s feet, and a chilling war cry issued from his mangled lips. The dark eyes deep set in his malformed face were wild and he brought the tomahawk down to cleave the Rider’s face in two.
The Rider rolled, and the blade sank deep into the door.
The Rider slipped out from under the big shed’s arms and pulled himself up and through the broken window, slashing up his elbows and side as he tumbled to the floor inside.
He was in a short rear hall leading to the kitchen, and Haddox was leaning in the kitchen doorway, using the terrified Emory’s head to support him.
“Get back,” the Rider warned.
Haddox drew the little girl back into the kitchen as the rear door blew open in a haze of splinters and the wild shed burst through, bellowing. His father might’ve been some kind of Indian, for he wore a fringed buckskin vest stretched tight over a powerful chest that was riddled with distorted muscles and other indescribable deformities. The fleshy, flipper-like arm that did not hold the whistling tomahawk was mostly useless, disproportionate, and overgrown with bunched tumors and lesions, but he swung it like a sack of potatoes and battered the Rider against the wall, smashing a table with a china tea set to pieces.
The huge Indian shed filled the hallway, and the Rider could see his three of his brothers and sisters behind him clamoring for him to get down or move aside so they could fill the hall with lead. One had a stick of dynamite in his hand, the coil of fuse whipping about as he madly gesticulated for his brother to get the hell out of the way.
For whatever reason, this one wanted the Rider for his own, and he chopped with the tomahawk again. The Rider dropped his pistol and yanked his Bowie knife out of its scabbard, barely knocking aside the hatchet head.
Stumbling backwards, he felt for and found Piishi’s knife, the one with the antler handle the Apache had given him. He had tucked it in the small of his back behind the belt, and he pulled it now and surprised his opponent, jabbing it to the hilt in his hard belly.
The shed gurgled something like a laugh through his snaggle teeth and brought his meaty arm down, snapping off the blade like it was made of ice.
In answer, the Rider kicked out with both feet, hearing the Indian’s knee pop. The shed went down on one leg and the Rider leaned forward and whipped the sharp edge of the engraved Bowie under his bulky chin. The cold iron or the sigils did their trick. A mess of putrescent sewage-like blood gushed from the wound as the flesh parted, splattering the floor and the Rider. The shed blinked and fell to the other knee, then tipped forward lifelessly.
The Rider caught him under the armpits and heaved his bulk, dragging the ungainly corpse back to keep between himself and the shedim in the doorway.
“Get down,” Haddox called from behind him.
The Rider glanced back, struggling with the dead body.
Haddox had the shotgun and was pointing it down the hall, waiting for the Rider to drop. He knew it wouldn’t do any good, but he did anyway, letting the heavy corpse fall on top of him, spilling more of its foul life fluid.
Haddox let go with the double barrels, and the hall flashed white. The three shedim in the doorway reared back screaming, their faces smoking and oozing.
The Rider scrambled out from underneath the dead shed, slipping in the ichors that poured from his neck, and tumbled into the kitchen.
Haddox helped him to his feet and watch
ed confused as the shedim writhed on the back porch, clawing at their faces.
The Rider lurched to his feet and mopped the blood from his eye again. He too stared at the three on the porch. They were in agony, smoking and bubbling.
“It’s just rock salt,” Harry Haddox mumbled, glancing down at the smoking barrels of his shotgun.
“Any more around?” the Rider asked hopefully.
But there would be no time for that. Haddox and Emory had shoved the kitchen table against the front door, barricading it, and the windows were the old fashioned kind that shuttered and locked from the inside in case of Indian attack, but the front door began to buck on its hinges. The Rider knew it wouldn’t hold long.
He wheeled about, looking for anything, patting his pockets. The amulets clinked there. He tore open his pocket and flung them to the floor, got down on his knees, hastily sifting through them. Which would be any good here? The tenth? The fourteenth? He found them, while Haddox and Emory leaned against the wall, terrified, staring at him.
“What’re you doing?” Haddox stammered.
Before he could answer, the Rider looked up and saw another figure rush into the kitchen from the back hall. One of the shedim from the back porch, who had taken a glancing blast from the rock salt. He was a Mexican with a Winchester in his hands. Half his face had been eaten away by the salt, and the flesh dripped and ran like melted wax over his exposed skull, the bones of which were black, the eye rolling white like an egg in the socket.
The Rider stared down the barrel of the rifle as the shed brought it up to kill him.
Haddox still had the double barreled shotgun, and standing against the wall beside the doorway, the intruder had failed to see him. He brought it up and smashed him in the face with the barrel.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 28