by Tim Curran
Cobb fished out a key and unlocked it.
Graybrow found himself looking into an abattoir. He heard the clink of chains and smelled spoiled meat and festering carcasses.
Cobb kicked him in there. “I’d like you to meet my mother,” he said and slammed the door shut behind him.
***
Deputy Pete Slade, Elijah Clay, and a trio of miners were going from house to house, killing anything that moved. They heard the shooting and the dying, but Slade held fast that they had a job to do and the others would have to watch out for themselves.
They learned quick enough that the only way you could put the Hide-Hunters down was by blowing their heads apart. After no less than four run-ins with the beasts now, they didn’t aim anywhere else.
But now they were trapped in the streets and things were getting ugly.
The beasts were up on the roofs, watching them and diving down at them when they thought they stood a chance. Green, shining eyes watched from the dark depths of barns and from behind shuttered windows.
“We gotta link up with them others,” Clay said, not frightened really, but surely not at ease. “Ye think, Slade? They’s just too many of them and too few of us.”
Slade knew it was true.
But there was no time for that, not now. For the double-doors of a stable flew open behind them and the townspeople began to flood out en masse. They were a slat-boned, pasty group with sunless faces and gleaming green eyes. But what was probably the most disturbing thing was that they were not dressed in clothing, but hides. Human hides. Hides that included flapping limbs and skinned faces, blowing locks of hair.
It was an appalling thing to see.
To watch them vaulting forward like a vicious pack of wolves, green-eyed and merciless, those spiked jaws snapping and great gouts of drool hanging from those lips. Dressed-out in human skins to boot.
“Kill ‘em!” Slade shouted. “Kill ‘em all!”
They came on in a flurry of sprouting claw and tooth, making yelping and barking sounds like hunting dogs and Slade and his boys began to unload on them with everything they had.
They dropped half a dozen, scattered a dozen more, but the others went right over the top of them, howling and snapping. Two of the miners went down. A third was just gone. Slade sank beneath a throng of four or five biting, chomping children.
Clay knocked them away from him with the butt of his shotgun, gunned down two others, felt claws open up his face and tear into his back, and fought free through his sheer size and bulk. And as he did so, he watched in amazement as the townsfolk rent the bodies of the posse, children stealing away with limbs in their mouths and going straight up the sides of buildings like spiders.
He got out while the getting was good.
***
One of the miners from Slade’s group ran when the attack came. He saw the sheer numbers and knew a fight was out of the question. His name was Rafe Gerard and he was not a coward. The fact that he had come with Dirker to clean this mess up said that he was anything but.
But he had been through both the Mexican War and the War Between the States, and he was surely a man who knew how to stay alive.
And alive he planned on staying.
He kicked through the door of a little house and slid the bolt in place after he was in. A powdering of snow like spilled flour dusted the floor. There was some blood mixed in with it. A set of tracks led right to the hearth and disappeared, as if one of them had escaped up the chimney.
Something Rafe Gerard decided was entirely possible.
He sat with his back against the wall, tried to think this out. Clay was right: They had to link up with the others. So it was pretty much a matter of finding them or waiting for them to find him.
So Gerard sat there, watching the hearth and the front door, the partially-boarded window, the doorway leading into another room. He rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it calmly. Waiting.
That’s when he heard the crying.
A pathetic, pitiful whimpering is what he was thinking. The sort of sound that was designed to yank at the heartstrings of anyone with warm blood in their veins. It worked its melancholy magic on Gerard. For once he’d had a boy, a tawny-haired wonderful little boy who’d perished of influenza one long hard winter. And although he knew that Deliverance was filled with monsters, he could not help but be moved by that sound.
He stepped through the kitchen and into a plain little bedroom at the rear of the house. A bureau. A frame bed. A wash basin. There were droplets of blood spattered up one wall. Above was an attic hatch, more blood smeared on it.
From up there, came the sobbing.
Gerard stood there, not wanting to look, but the human being in him demanding it. He dragged the bed over, stood up on it. The sad little voice was calling for its mother, its mother.
Something cold unfolding in his chest, Gerard slid the hatch aside.
What light spilled in showed him a little boy that was dark with blood. And before Gerard could pull the trigger, memories of his own lost son washing through him, the boy was on him, his teeth in his throat.
And Gerard died as he had lived: violently.
***
Beaten, bruised, and blood-soaked, Sir Tom Ian and Henry Wilcox were all that was left of their little group. The others had been slaughtered by the beasts. And Graybrow had just vanished. As it was, Deputy Wilcox had been badly gashed in the belly and ribs and had lost a lot of blood.
But he would not give in.
Not while there was strength left in him.
Ian and he were investigating a freight office, having followed a blood trail through the snow before it was covered over. Inside, it was pretty much empty. All the furnishings and office utilities long gone. But there was blood on the floor. The bloody prints of children and something wet they had dragged along with them.
There was a door at the back of the office.
It was closed.
“You up to this, mate?” Ian said.
“As up as I’m ever gonna be,” Wilcox admitted, his large frame seeming to sag now as the blood continued to soak through the makeshift bandages wrapped around his torso.
Ian took hold of the tarnished knob, turned it.
Heard commotion, wet tearing sounds.
He threw the door open and saw a cluster of children kneeling on the floor. Their eyes were green, but their bodies naked and hairless. They grinned up at the two men and their teeth were like icicles jutting from those blackened gums. They were clustered around the body of a Danite…maybe Fitch…though it was really hard to tell, such was the degree of mutilation.
The children were all nude and tattooed-up, their faces smeared with blood.
“Dear Christ,” Wilcox said and kept saying it.
The children rose from their kill quite slowly, advancing on the men. Wilcox began to sob…kids, just goddamn kids. He couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
But Sir Tom Ian had no such compunction.
He pulled his. 44 Bisley and it had barely cleared leather before the first round jacked into a little girl and another erased the face of a little boy. Making a wild, moaning sound, Wilcox finally followed suit.
For they were not children.
They were more beast than human, those eyes filled with a flat, relentless appetite. They would stalk their kill and take it down without remorse.
And that’s how he was able to kill the children with Ian.
The guns saved their lives, but they also made a hell of a racket in the enclosed room. Like thunder echoing and echoing until each man’s hearing was dulled, numbed.
And that was why they didn’t hear the others coming through the doorway at them.
Didn’t know it until they felt claws and teeth and smelled rancid, hot breath at their necks.
***
Cabe said, “After you, Sheriff.”
Dirker nodded and pushed through the door of the old hotel. Cabe followed in behind him, a Greener shotgun in his a
rms. His Evans was slung across his back. The stink hit them right away. Thick, hot, nauseating. It had no place in an abandoned hotel on a freezing day where the wind was driving snow into drifts and licking everything down with ice. Yet, the smell was there…like some breathing, consuming, living thing. A malignant sentience. Both men stood, breathless, waiting for whatever inspired that stink to come slinking down the stairs at them.
But there was nothing but silence.
“If what Harmony said is correct,” Dirker began, carefully re-loading both his. 45 Colt Peacemakers, “then Cobb and his crew were living upstairs here.”
“Jesus, that stink,” Cabe said.
“Let’s go,” Dirker said.
There was a pair of oil lamps hanging from a hook near the stairwell. Both were nearly full. Cabe took one, lit it up. A dirty yellow light sprang from it, revealing the ravages of nature-the animal bones and bird’s bests tucked into holes in the walls, the leaves and sticks and pine needles.
They went up the stairway side by side and paused at the top.
Paused, noticing that the atmosphere now was positively mephitic and pestilent like that of a malarial jungle death camp. The air was heavy, moist, and viscous with that putrid, flyblown stench of wormy meat. And hot, dear God, hot and wet and oppressive. It trembled thickly like gelatin, laying on their faces in a rank, slimy humidity.
They moved up the corridor towards that door at the end. The door with the furrows cut into it and the abnormal bloody handprints. Or something like handprints.
“Lookit the floor,” Cabe said.
Dirker did.
Just outside the door, for maybe four feet down the floor…a weird, creeping fungal mass of decay. As they stepped on it, it squished like wet leaves, some reeking black juice oozing from it.
Dirker prodded something with the tip of his boot. “A shotgun,” he said. “Recognize it?”
Cabe nodded slowly, wearily. “A Whitney. That’s Charlie Graybrow’s.”
Outside the door then, Dirker tried the filthy knob and it was locked.
Cabe stood there next to him, a wild and phobic terror threading through him. Whatever was in there…whatever gave off that noxious, eldritch stink…Jesus, it just could not be good, could not be.
Dirker handed his shotgun to Cabe and picked up the Whitney. He placed the barrel against the lock and pulled the trigger. The knob and its housing were blown into the room, leaving a smoking black hole.
Dirker kicked the door open.
And they stepped into hell itself.
As they passed through the doorway, Cabe’s lantern casting bobbing, phantasmal shadows, a black wave of fetid heat actually pushed them back a step or two. And the smell…a nauseous effluvium that was more than just organic decay and dissolution, but a noisome, contaminated stench that made their knees weak and sent their stomachs bubbling into their throats. It reminded Cabe instantly of a field hospital he’d been in during the war. A reconverted barn in Tennessee that stank of putrid battle dressings, amputated limbs, and gangrenous flesh. This was like that, a huge and polluted stink of pain, disease, and vomit.
Steeling themselves, they stepped in farther.
There was no furniture. The flowery cream wallpaper was spattered and stained with whorls and dripping patches of old blood. Even the ceiling was splashed with it…like some insane butcher had been casting buckets of the stuff around. The floor was wet and seething with more of that crawling gray fungus, but here it was matted and webby and seeping with black ichor and bloody mucilage. A gelatinous stew of rot and bones and gnawed limbs, several inches deep. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere, all covered with flies and beetles and creeping worms. A few soiled, peeled and jawless skulls stared up at them.
“Dear Christ in Heaven,” Dirker managed and his voice would barely come.
Because they saw what brooded here, what Cobb had brought back from Missouri.
It might have been a woman once, but now it was a chained ghoul with wet, leprous flesh, flesh that was pitted with gaping holes and hung from the bones beneath like a windblown shroud. That flesh seemed to move and wriggle with pulsing currents, but that was just the action of parasites and vermin nesting within. The skullish head was capped by long, greasy hair latticed with cobwebs and the deathmask face was shriveled and withered, jellied green eyes bleeding tears of slime.
It made a low, bleating sound, holding out hands that were more skeleton that flesh, the skin hanging from them in strips and loops. The fingers were sticks ending in long, curled nails that seemed to coil and convolute in the air. It began to slither in their direction, sending ripples through that pestilential sea of organic profusion. The skin had long ago melted away from the pulsating face, the nose just a hollow and those mottled gums on full display, gums set with gnarled, discolored teeth.
It came forward with a slinking, creeping motion, mewling now like a drowning kitten, a pustulant, writhing worm.
Cabe and Dirker started shooting.
Shells were flying and the air was suddenly filled with smoke and the bitter smell of gunpowder. They fired and fired, reloaded and fired again. And did not stop until that squirming human jellyfish was blown into fragments.
Then they left the room.
They shut the door.
Down the corridor, both trembling, Cabe tossed the lantern against the wall and it shattered, flames licking up over the walls.
Outside, both men fell in the snow, gasping and gagging.
***
It was ten minutes later when they stood before the church.
The bell had stopped ringing now.
They stood near the high wrought-iron gate that surrounded the church, came right up to the steps. The uprights were rusted and tall and lethally sharp. They rose up like spears.
“Well,” Dirker said, “ I guess no one else if left, Tyler. Just you and me.”
Cabe said, “Let’s show these fucks what a pissed-off Yankee and a Johnny Reb lunatic are capable of.”
Dirker laughed. Couldn’t help himself. It just came rolling out of him and soon enough tears were rolling down his face and Cabe was laughing, too, and how damn good it felt to laugh.
“I didn’t even know you could laugh,” Cabe said.
Dirker’s laughing became a coughing and a rasping. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sure I can,” he managed, “it’s just that I’m usually alone and laughing at myself.”
That got them going again and they reeled like drunken men, slapping each other on the backs until it finally died out and was replaced by a somber silence. The silence of the wind and snow and eternity.
“Sounds like I missed the party,” a voice said. “Next time, ye all invite me, hear?”
Elijah Clay came waltzing out of the storm, a pistol in each hand. “And here I thought I was the last one.”
“I never thought I’d be glad to see you, you goddamn hillbilly,” Cabe said.
Clay grinned. “Now mind yer manners, boy. I’m a-hear to save yer bacon.”
“The others?” Dirker asked.
But Clay just shook his head.
Together then, they went up the steps. The double-doors were locked, but Clay hit them with his massive shoulder and they flew wide open. Then the three of them charged right in, moving low, with shotguns in their hands.
Pews.
They saw the rows of pews, many of which had been busted into kindling. The altar was occupied by an immense scalp rack. There had to be fifty or sixty scalps on display. Scattered around them in carefully arranged piles, skulls and bones. On the cross there was no Jesus, but a mummified body nailed up instead. Dirker recognized it as Caleb Callister…at least he thought so.
But there was no time to find out, for James Lee Cobb and four of his Hide-Hunters stepped out from behind the altar. They carried rifles and wore gray dusters and were caught somewhere between animals and men.
“Looks like a stand-off,” Cobb said, laughing then, his laughter boomed an
d cackled and echoed.
Cabe got a good look at him, at the architect of this nightmare. The skin on the left side of his face was simply missing; muscle and bone exposed. It was as if some surgeon had slit a line of demarcation down the center of his face with a scalpel, leaving the right side relatively unscathed and peeling the left right to the basal anatomy. He was like some anatomical demonstration that was allowed to walk.
Clay said, “Uglier’n a trail-dead squirrel in a fat fryer.”
And then the lead started flying.
Cabe and the others dropped their shotguns and pulled their repeating rifles-Cabe’s Evans, Dirker’s Winchester, and Clay’s Henry. Bullets zipped around them like angry wasps, biting into pews and sending wood splinters spraying everywhere.
The trio returned fire.
But the Hide-Hunters were possessed of a deranged, primeval rage. They came running off the altar right into a flurry of bullets. The two leading the charge danced momentarily like marionettes as slugs ripped into them, punching holes through them and scattering blood and meat in every which direction. But Cobb was still shooting and one of his slugs caught Clay in the shoulder and another ripped a gash along the side of his head, taking his earlobe with it.
He went down, bleeding and moaning, but sitting back up and shooting a Hide-Hunter at point-blank range right in the face. The bullet cored his nose and the skull behind it came apart as the round bounced through his head like a drill bit, shredding everything in its path. Another Hide-Hunter, one with no less than a dozen holes in him, almost broached their position but Cabe put one through his throat that spun him around and finished him with a slug in his temple.
Dirker rose up and dropped the third Hide-Hunter in a mist of blood and brains and then clutched his chest, and fell over.
And then the final Hide-Hunter leaped.
Cabe put a round in him, but it didn’t even slow him down. He crashed into the bounty hunter and they went rolling in a heap. He was incredibly strong and Cabe fought and cursed and thrashed, trying to keep those teeth away from his throat.