Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  The bearded one laughed and it was a hollow, barking sound. “You hear that, Hood? Man wants to know if we’re thirsty.” He laughed again. “You thirsty, son?”

  Hood stroked that scarred jaw. “Reckon I am. But I don’t see my favorite drink distilled anywheres. Figure I’ll have to tap my own keg in my own way. You understand my meaning, Cook?”

  “ Suspect I do.”

  A miner at the bar with a Remington model 1858. 44 hanging at his hip, said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “ Here that, Hood? This one wants to know what that means.”

  That made Hood laugh. A staccato, metallic laugh like a hammer banging at a forge. It was not a human sound. “I heard him. Figure this feller just don’t understand what we’re about is all.”

  “ Maybe you should show him,” Cook said.

  “ Maybe I’ll have to.”

  Hiley, behind the bar, his hand resting on the stock of an Army carbine just out of view, licked his lips carefully. “We don’t want no trouble here, gents. All of us are just drinking and playing cards and minding our own. I suggest you do the same.”

  Hood was grinning again and it was the sort of grin a corpse might have…two months in the ground. “That some sort of threat?”

  The miner with the. 44 nodded. “Damn straight it is, boy. You can either be sociable and peaceful…or things can happen the hard way. There’s only two of you and there’s about two dozen of us, give or take. You might want to weigh that out.”

  “ I suspect I will,” Hood said, “being outgunned and all.”

  Cook wiped the back of his hand over his beard, said, “You’ll have to excuse us. Hungry is what we are. Bellies are just plain empty, growling something fierce.”

  It was Hiley’s turn to laugh now, only it was more of a nervous tittering. “Shit, boys, all you had to do was say so.”

  “ Believe we just did,” Cook reminded him.

  Hiley didn’t seem to catch that or want to. He could feel every set of eyes in the place watching him now, seeing how he was going to handle these hardcases. He knew the situation had not been pacified yet, that just about everyone in the room was armed and lead could begin flying at any moment. He did not want this. This was his place and bullets caused damage. That cost money. Bodies he could sweep out with the trash…but stock, now that wasn’t easily replaceable up here on the far left side of the Devil’s asshole.

  “ What you boys need,” he said, “is a some meat in your bellies. That’ll fix you up.”

  Hood and Cook looked at each other and laughed. Then they looked around the room, taking in all they saw. Their faces were drawn and sallow, their eyes wide, unblinking, just as dark as open graves.

  “ Meat,” Cook said. “You hear that? Feller here’s offering us meat.”

  “ I heard it and I figure that’s right neighborly of ‘em,” Hood said, wiping drool from his lips. “Because meat’s what we came for. Fresh meat. I like my meat raw. That’s what. Nice and raw. Like that taste of blood, hear? Puts iron in my pants.”

  Some eyes widened at that. Others narrowed. Bodies shifted in chairs. Fingers slid down towards holstered pistols. One whore made a face, another smiled…finding these men interesting.

  The miner with the. 44, said, “What is it you boys do?”

  Cook drummed his fingers on the bar. Hiley saw that a pelt of reddish hair covered the man’s wrist, that it flowed over the back of his hand like wild grass and furred his fingers…which were oddly long, thin enough to pick locks.

  “ We’re what you call Hide-Hunters,” Cook told him. “Thing is we don’t hunt animal hides. We hunt the other sort.”

  The miner was about to say something about that and maybe Hiley was, too? or any number of others? but there was a pounding at the door. A thudding sound and not like a fist would make, but maybe the butt of a rifle. Whatever it was, it kept banging away.

  “ You gonna answer that, Hiley?” one of the poker players said, but in such a voice like maybe he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea.

  Hiley looked at the strangers, then at the others. He swallowed hard. “I suppose I’ll have to.”

  “ It would be neighborly,” Hood said. “Wouldn’t want them out there bursting in uninvited and all.”

  All eyes on him again, Hiley went to the doors, taking the carbine with him. He stopped a few feet away, seemed to smell something or hear something that just laid on him wrong. He looked back into the bar, maybe for help, maybe for divine guidance, but got none.

  “ See who it is,” someone said, a strange edge to their voice.

  Swallowing again, Hiley threw open the doors.

  In the barroom, people saw that darkness out there just as black as bubbling pitch. Saw it shifting and swirling and oozing. Then there was motion. A blur. A wild, rending activity. Hiley shouted, maybe he screamed. But it all happened so fast no one could do anything but jump to their feet, reach for their guns.

  And by then, it was over.

  Hiley was gone.

  The doors swung shut and there was a spattering of blood on one of them.

  In a wild, shrieking voice, a miner said, “Something grabbed him! Something took him! Something dragged him out into the night…”

  Those words echoed and died in the silence.

  No one moved.

  No one spoke.

  No one did a damn thing. Maybe they were all waiting for someone else to do something. Herd instinct. They would all move…but not until they were led. That’s how things worked in tense situations and this one was so tense, apprehension hung in the air thick as fog.

  Silence.

  Blood glistening on the grubby plank door.

  Outside, there rose a shrill howling sound that went through everyone like a sharp knife.

  The miner with the. 44 started moving, then stopped. The hairs were standing up on the back of his neck and his balls had gone small and hard and cold. He turned to the strangers, unleathered his pistol. “You two! Goddammit, you two brought this!” The pistol shook in his hand. “What’s out there? What the hell sort of game you playing?”

  Cook just smiled…and it was funny, but his teeth had gone just as long and shiny as leather punches, his lips shriveling away from them. His eyes were huge, glassy, just as green as emeralds. The pupils were horribly dilated.

  “ Ain’t no game, friend,” Hood said and it seemed that shaggy beard of his had crawled up his jaw, was encroaching on his cheekbones. The bones of his face were thrusting out, stretching the skin taut as a drumhead, the nose flattening and going canine. His jaws pushed out, teeth flashing now like knifeblades.

  Somebody started screaming.

  The miner backed away. “Dear Jesus,” he uttered.

  “ Ain’t got nothing to do with him,” Cook said, his face a skullish, wolflike expanse of jutting bone and deep hollows. His teeth were long and sharp and his voice dropped two, three octaves to the growl of a rabid dog. “Nothing to do with him whatsoever…”

  Hood advanced on the miner, his eyes gone yellow as swamp gas, the pupils just pinpricks of black. The miner saw those long teeth like hooked needles…and then Hood leaped and those needles were in the miner’s face, shearing the flesh from the bone.

  And the barroom came alive with shooting and shouting and screaming. People tried to run and they ran into each other, knocked each other out of the way, went right over the top of one another. Upstairs there was the shattering of glass and thumping and thudding sounds. More screams. Guns going off. People shouting.

  Hell had come calling…and some fool had let it in.

  Just as a gang of miners made it to the doors, they exploded in and five or six men thundered in on horses just as black as midnight. Like Cook and Hood, they wore wide-brimmed hats and dusters. And like them they had wolf faces and sharp teeth. Tables went over, cards and chips raining in the air. The horses plowed bodies to the floor and their hooves crushed and stomped bone and flesh. The riders…the Hide-Hunters…dove f
rom their mounts into the mass of screeching, fighting people. Their hands were furry, the long fingers ending in claws like the talons of hunting hawks.

  The carnage began.

  ***

  Upstairs, a whore named Milly Short was trying to push her white, heaving bulk under a bed. A miner had been on top of her, pumping away like a derrick, and then the door blew in, coming apart like kindling and something like a man…but, God, not a man…had pulled him off her and dragged him out into the corridor. She heard a tearing, ripping sound and the miner tried to make it back into the room, maybe to his gun. But something had hold of him and dragged him back out there.

  His fingernails clawed ruts into the floor as he was pulled away.

  His face had been pinched gray and bloody and Milly had never in her born years seen such a grimace of absolute horror.

  And Milly, caught in some gray netherworld between shock and terror, tried to make it under the bed. But she was a large woman, fleshy and full and wide, and it was like trying to force a barrel through a bullet hole. There was a deafening roar and then the sound of spurred boots coming into the room.

  Milly looked over her shoulder, sweat beading her face.

  She saw a set of worn cavalry boots. Saw drops of blood falling onto them, splattering.

  Something grabbed her by the ankle, flipped her over…and she was staring up at a lewd face that belonged to a demonic wolf, but whose owner walked upright like a man. Lips shivered back from teeth like icicles and a low, snarling sound came from the tunnel of that dark throat.

  Milly screamed and thrashed and the thing pulled her to her feet as if she were weightless. She fought and kicked and hit, crying, screaming, saying: “Dear Christ…dear Christ in Heaven…what is this? What is this?”

  The beast pressed her to him like a long lost lover and she could smell the spicy, raw tang of its bloody pelt, felt herself being swallowed by those huge yellow-green eyes full and leering like sacrificial moons. Loops of bloody drool dangled from the gnashing teeth…and a voice…not human nor animal, but somewhere in-between said, “It’s the skin medicine, ma’am, it does things to a man…”

  And the voice became a growling and she was crushed in the beast’s arms, her bones snapping, her insides pressed to jelly and foaming from her mouth. Then the teeth sank in her throat, nearly severing her head in a single bite

  ***

  Downstairs, it was certainly no better.

  The beasts were clawing and chomping, severing limbs and opening bellies. Bones were splintering beneath powerful jaws and flesh was divorced from quivering meat. And the screams of the dying were only eclipsed by the howling of their tormentors and the firing of guns. The air was thick with smoke and mists of red.

  Everywhere there was blood and wreckage and bodies and things that could have been men but were not men, devouring and eating and tearing. It looked like some grisly scene from a medieval hell.

  A whore trying to leap away over the dead and dying was bowled over as a decapitated head struck her in the back.

  A man crying out for Jesus and Mary was battered senseless with his own dismembered limbs.

  Two of the Hide-Hunters, laughing with hideous mirth, gored a gambler to death one bite at a time.

  A miner named Danny Smith crawled on his hands and knees through a sea of blood, half out of his mind. His Colt was in his hand and he saw the beasts and saw people shooting at them and often just hitting one another. He saw a window explode inward in a shower of glass and the darkness poured in, became a clutch of clawed hands that dragged two miners out into the night. What seemed seconds later, one of them was tossed back into the barroom, tumbling across the floor in a heap. He was bloody and scratched, his clothes hanging in strips…but he was alive.

  Alive and screaming, begging for help.

  But there was a noose around his throat and a length of rope leading out into the night. Suddenly, as he tried to crab-crawl in Smith’s direction, the rope snapped tight as wire and he was yanked across the floor. Pulled by the throat up and out the window again.

  Smith saw the door standing open, the night stygian and flowing like black silk. He could make it, knew he could make it. On hands and knees, he made a wild charge for it, his mouth babbling nonsense even he could not understand.

  He got to his feet and one of the beasts stepped through the doorway, its duster crimson with blood. It held the severed hand of a man in one paw, slapped it against its leg. Smith could smell its rancid yellow breath, see graveyards and gallows reflected in those green sucking pits it had for eyes. Its wolfish face grinned with all those teeth. “Going somewhere, friend?”

  Smith let out a wild cry and pumped two bullets into the Hide-Hunter’s belly and it laughed with a cruel, mocking sound. The eyes blazed with triumph and one of its hands swiped at Smith’s belly.

  Smith felt the impact…but figured he was okay, okay, but then he saw that his abdomen was open in a bleeding gash and that his viscera was hanging out in glistening clocksprings.

  He stood there, shocked and amazed by it.

  He wasn’t standing long.

  ***

  And upstairs, there was one survivor.

  Up to three minutes before, there had been two others. One was slaughtered by the Hide-Hunters…another took his life before the claws fell on him.

  And now there was just one.

  A man. His name was Provo and he hid in a closet. He was just another hard luck miner with a bad liver and lungs crystallizing from silicosis, the much-dreaded miner’s disease. When the bloodbath began…when the beasts came leaping through windows and hammering down doors…he had been waiting for an overweight prostitute called Abilene Sue. Waiting alone in her room.

  Quickly then, he darted into a closet.

  In the cramped, close darkness he heard the sound of boots and the jingle of spurs as the beasts looked into the room, departed. He had not heard a sound of them upstairs in over ten minutes now. Even downstairs, it had gone to a grim silence. There was a finality to that sound. A cessation, he thought, of hostilities.

  His heart pounding and his breath wheezing in his lungs, Provo opened the door a sliver.

  The room appeared to be empty.

  His ears listened and heard nothing but a distant dripping, a loose board on the roof rattling in the wind.

  Quietly, he slipped out of his hole. His chest was tight and pained, he could barely draw a breath. He stepped out into the corridor…and promptly went on his ass in a pool of blood.

  And in the light of a single oil lamp, what he saw…dear Christ.

  Blood was sprayed and spilled everywhere. It was pooled on the floor and painted on the walls and even sprinkled on the ceiling. There was a smeared handprint in it just a few feet from him. There were bodies in the corridor with him, parts of them. He saw heads, limbs, a single gutted torso like something hanging in a butcher’s shop. There was tissue and flesh and the raw, metallic stink of it got down into his belly and pulled everything back up with it.

  Provo vomited and sobbed and coughed.

  It could get no worse than this, it could surely get no worse.

  But then it did.

  He heard something like a low, rasping/snarling sound and one of the beasts stepped from a doorway. It looked very much like an animal, like some wolf right down to the jutting snout and luminous green eyes and feral teeth. But it was dressed like a man, leaning there against the doorway and looking…amused. Yes, amused. It had the appetites of a blood-maddened beast, but the brain and overall form of a man. A single claw scratched at a pointed ear.

  Another beast came up the steps, walking hunched over slightly, its nostrils flaring, tasting, smelling and then… yes, finding prey. Finding Provo. A ribbon of drool fell from its lips. Its brow was exaggerated, furry and jutting, shading those jade eyes in bony hollows.

  Provo pissed himself.

  But he could not speak, not even think of begging for his life…he was simply awed by these things, these de
mons what had burst the gates of hell. A stench came off them, an ugly odor of blood and meat. The beasts seemed to nod to one another, thick lips pulling back from those anxious teeth.

  A third one came up the steps, elbowed past the others.

  The beasts grunted and snapped at one another.

  This latest one wore a duster, a wide-brimmed hat like the others. Its shirt was open to the waist, the hairy and oddly muscular chest heaving with each breath it sucked through that blood-dripping maw. It carried a Colt pistol in each clawed hand. And they were hands, Provo saw, not pads or paws, but hands. Human hands. But grotesquely long and narrow, the fingers incredibly thin and taloned.

  It spit a gob of blood on the floor. Its teeth unclenched like a spiked mantrap and it made a gargling, guttural sound in its throat that became a voice of all things. ” You make it past us, you little fuck, we let you live…”

  The others laughed…a strangled, wet laughter.

  Maybe it was instinct or terror or God-knows-what, but Provo sprang to his feet and decided to run the gauntlet. He charged right at the Hide-Hunters and such was his ferocity, they actually stepped back. And maybe he would have made it. Maybe.

  But something tripped him up.

  Something sent him crashing into that greasy stew of human remains and as he squirmed and fought on the floor to be free…he saw it was entrails. Human entrails spread over the floor like wet ropes and he had stepped into them in his mad dash and snared his foot.

  Shrieking, he tried to untangle himself. But they were oily and rubbery and moist. He only tangled himself worse. The first two beasts stepped over to him, almost nonchalantly. Taking hold of him and heaving, they pulled his limbs free, one after the other like a child pulling the wings from a fly.

  Provo tried to wriggle away, but his life’s blood pissed in an ocean around him. He gagged and coughed and his mind went with a warm wet sound that only he could hear.

  The Hide-Hunter with the Colts came over to him.

  It pulled his head up off the floor, staring at those glazed, shocked eyes. It stuck the barrel of one pistol into his mouth.