Riders on the Storm

by Rob Blackwell

  Jules reached the end of the tunnel while the first creature was still at least ten feet away. Glaring at the thing, she tossed the empty reserve can away and lowered the lantern toward the floor.

  The Viper in front of her shrieked again as it prepared to leap at her.

  “Die, you sons of bitches,” Jules said, and smashed the lamp into the ground at her feet.

  The flame immediately lit the line of oil reserves she’d left in the tunnel, running beneath the lead Viper and all of those behind it. Jules turned and ran through Dy’s storeroom to the ladder and trap door.

  The line of flame ran all the way back into the crypt where it spread throughout the room—and then ignited the barrels of whiskey and other liquor that had been placed nearby.

  The crypt—packed with Vipers fighting each other to get into the tunnel—exploded in a massive ball of fire, engulfing the stone church and all the creatures inside.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Alice Ivers earned her nickname Poker Alice through a lifetime of gambling. Born in England, her family moved to Colorado when she was young, where she soon discovered she had a knack for playing cards. She met her first husband at the poker table, marrying Frank Duffield, a former rival whom she had regularly bested. She played cards all her life, earning herself a spot in Deadwood’s ‘Days of ‘76’ parade.”

  — Jessie Berry, “Overlooked Women of History,” 2016

  Jules had barely made it up the ladder before the church exploded.

  It was louder than the thunder, a boom that echoed across the town like a massive blast of artillery.

  A moment later there were heavy thuds on the rooftop of the saloon. Jules worried at first that it was more Vipers and then realized the church’s explosion was raining stone debris all over town.

  Jules smiled savagely, thinking of all the Vipers that had been crowded inside. She raced out into the main saloon, finding the entire town seemingly present and accounted for. When they saw her, there was a cheer that was taken up and spread around the room, but she quieted them down immediately.

  There was no telling if their plan had worked. The men were loading their weapons with the extra store of silver bullets she’d left here, but if there were still a significant number of Vipers left, they didn’t stand a chance. Her bet—a big one—was that most of them had been wiped out in the explosion.

  Will stood by the two swinging doors in front, peering out into the darkness. He was clearly struggling to see anything. After a few seconds, she realized why. The lightning flashes were fewer and far between. The thunder, too. It was still loud, but it was starting to fade. The tempest was moving off.

  Somehow they’d done it. They’d actually done it. She almost didn’t want to believe it. She pushed through the crowd, many of whom were patting her on the back, looking for her sister.

  She spotted her with Pete and Luke near one of the windows. They all seemed safe. She breathed a sigh of relief, unaware until now that she’d been holding her breath.

  She reached Will, touching him at the elbow. He kept his attention focused out front.

  “Any more of them?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said in a hushed tone. “I saw the explosion, Jules. That was… that was incredible work. And I think the storm is passing.”

  Passing, but not passed. Jules still felt nervous. Her stomach clenched and she hurriedly crouched down before the bag of ammunition and reloaded her revolvers. Something didn’t feel right. She tried to tell herself it was just the aftermath of a tough battle, but that line wouldn’t stick.

  There was sudden movement outside, and Jules hurriedly brought her guns up.

  “Everyone back now!” she shouted.

  It was too late. A rush of Vipers came in through Dy’s windows at the same time that several others burst through the front door.

  Jules was knocked over by the first Viper. She shot him as she fell, so that he landed dead on top of her. There was screaming and shouting as people began to try and push back the way they’d come. But there were too many of them in such a small space.

  Jules pushed the creature off of her and fired from the floor in the dim light, catching two of the first intruders, but several more launched themselves into the crowd.

  A woman nearby was raked by a claw across the chest and a man fell underneath two Vipers that had broken through. Their screams mixed with shrieks from the creatures.

  Jules pulled herself off the floor and began firing at any creature she could spot. Some she dropped in the act of feeding on the townspeople, so she put bullets into the brains of the victims too.

  “Fire at will!” Luke shouted, but he barely needed to.

  There were periodic gunshots going off in the too confined space, making sounds louder than the thunder outside, which was steadily receding.

  Jules looked desperately toward her sister, and found her stabbing a Viper on the ground with the silver knife she kept strapped to her ankle. Pete was nearby, holding out his cross and looking at the creatures with disgust, apparently unhurt.

  Jules stopped to reload and tried to get a handle on the situation. There had been only a dozen or so Vipers in the initial assault. But they were creating more. Already, she saw two villagers joining their numbers. One man leaped into the air at Dy, who shot him in the chest before he could reach him.

  There were also too many people, all of them in a crush together. For every Viper they shot, another was rapidly being created to take its place. If that wasn’t bad enough, a few villagers had accidentally shot each other instead of the monsters that were attacking.

  Luke pushed his way through, rifle raised, and began picking off any Viper or villager who lunged forward. Jules followed suit.

  Within moments, the attacks started to die down. She shot the last of the original Vipers, winging it in the shoulder and causing it to collapse just outside the saloon door.

  Luke took out three other newly-made creatures, two women and a young man who couldn’t have been older than twenty. All had red eyes.

  When they died, Jules swept the crowd. There weren’t any more monsters attacking. She looked for signs of movement on the bodies on the floor. Any moment, one of the fallen members of the village could become a problem, infecting others.

  “Has anyone been bit?” Jules yelled.

  “Him!” Dy yelled. “Him on the ground. I saw him get bit on the wrist.”

  Jules ran forward to the body on the floor—and her heart caught in her throat. Lying by the door was Will Starling. Blood was seeping from his wrist.

  Dy jumped forward with his gun, aiming it at Will. Jules raised her own and pointed at the bartender.

  “You even try it and I’ll kill you where you stand,” Jules said.

  “But he’s bit!” Dy said, his eyes wide.

  “Lower the weapon, Dy. Right now. I won’t ask again.”

  Dy did as he was told, and Jules holstered her gun as Dy and the other men stepped back. Jules stared at Will on the floor, who looked back at her with his sky-blue eyes. He was still awake and aware, but breathing hard.

  For a moment, she dared to hope that Dy was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t been bit, just hurt. But the wound on his arm looked red and angry, the skin blistering around it. There was no doubt it was made by a Viper.

  “Jules,” he said, sounding as if he had been running uphill. “Somabitch got me.”

  Jules hurriedly kneeled by him. “Shhh,” she said. “It’ll be okay, Will. It’s okay.”

  Will shook his head. “No, Sally,” Will said. “Jules, sorry. Hard to think now. I can hear them. I can hear them in my mind.”

  “You need to shoot him, Jules!” Dy said.

  “You open your mouth again and it’ll be the last thing you ever say,” she replied without even glancing in his direction.

  “You gotta do it, Jules,” Will said. “You gotta shoot me. I’m trying to move my arm, but I can’t.”

  Will appeared paralyzed. Some part of h
er—the one that never stopped thinking—wondered why it was taking so long with Will, whereas some others had been near instantaneous. Maybe it was where the bite had come. If they got hit in the neck, the change seemed far faster. But Will had been caught in the wrist.

  It didn’t matter. She could see Will changing before her eyes. The skin around the wound had become black, changing from flesh to scales. The whites of his eyes had now turned a sickening yellow. Will was fighting it with all he had, but it wasn’t enough.

  “I’ll do it, Will,” she said. “You have my word.”

  “Good,” he managed, his voice coming out in gasps. “Don’t want to hurt anyone. Don’t let me.”

  “I swear,” Jules said.

  She felt the tears in her eyes as she said it. Her father’s voice cursed at her in her head, but she ignored it. Her father could go to hell right now.

  “I love you, Sally,” Will said. “Sorry I couldn’t help you go further.”

  She touched his leg, which was still human flesh. But she could feel it changing, like bugs crawling beneath his skin.

  “You did enough,” Jules said. “Will? You asked me earlier if I loved you? I said it didn’t matter. But I did love you, Will Starling. I’ve never loved any other man but you.”

  He heard those words. She could see it in his expression. For a moment, he looked overjoyed. He even managed to smile at her.

  “Knew it. I kn—”

  His expression began to turn. The eyes changed to red, and the black scales spread across his face. Jules couldn’t wait any longer. Through the tears in her eyes, she pulled the trigger.

  Black blood sprayed across the back wall, and Will slumped to the ground, dead.

  Jules felt the tears running freely down her cheeks, but did nothing to stop them. She was dimly aware that the storm had truly passed now. The thunder was a distant rumble—and there was no more lightning. They’d won.

  From nearby, she heard a strange sound. It was like someone else gasping for air. She scanned for it, wondering if another villager had been bit. But it was coming from the Viper she wounded earlier, the one who’d fallen by the door.

  She opened the door and looked down at it. Even in her current state, she was shocked to realize she recognized the creature. She didn’t think that was possible, but the wounded Viper below her was what once remained of Rezzor. She could still see the scar that had dominated his face.

  The storm had claimed him and used him to attack the town. And if she had to guess, she’d say he was the one who had bit Will. A last infliction of damage from beyond the grave.

  The creature that had been Rezzor stared at her and she received her second unpleasant surprise. The noise he was making wasn’t gurgling or gasping for air—it was harsh, guttural laughter.

  “We’re waiting for you,” Rezzor said in a raspy voice. “We’re waiting for—”

  “I’m coming,” Jules said. “You can count on that. But you tell whoever’s running the show they won’t be happy when I get there. I’m going to murder every goddamned one of you.”

  She didn’t wait for a response. She aimed her revolver at the creature’s head and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “She will be tested. The storm, the dead, the fire.”

  — Attributed to the Lady of Shadows, 1861, excerpted by Terry Jacobsen, “A History of the Supernatural,” 2013

  In the morning, they buried the dead.

  The day dawned bright and clear, as if to apologize for the weather the night before.

  The entire town turned up to pay their last respects. As these things went, Stanton had gotten off lucky.

  Only two dozen had died. A couple townsfolk who had elected to stay at home had disappeared, presumed dead. A relative handful had died in the church, and far more had perished in that final attack in Dy’s saloon. Jules had a sickening feeling about why that was, a reason that would never have occurred to her until she saw the Viper laughing at her.

  When she laid Will to rest, she wore a proper black dress, something she borrowed from the stock of clothes she’d had in Chicago. She hadn’t worn it there, but Will would have approved. It made her look like a proper lady.

  When they lowered his body into the ground, Jules stepped up to say a few words. She hadn’t intended to, but then again, she hadn’t intended a lot of things.

  “You all saw what kind of man Will Starling was,” she said. “In his final hours, he didn’t hesitate to sacrifice his life to save those whom he did not know. That was his way. He was honorable and kind.

  “He wasn’t a perfect man. There’s no such thing. But he was as close as we’re liable to find in this world. You know me as Jules Castle. Will knew me as Sally Hawkins and later, Sally Starling. We had only a brief time together, but what I could never admit to him, and I now freely admit to all of you, is that those were some of the best days of my life.”

  Jules was unsurprised to find tears on her cheeks again. She let them fall, unashamed. She was through letting her father determine what she could do.

  “If life were fair, Will would have a statue,” she said. “He saved this town. If not for him, none of us would be standing here today. But he wouldn’t want a statue. All he would want is for us to acknowledge what I say now, ‘Will Starling did his duty.’”

  She stepped up to the grave and deposited a purple pasque flower she’d found in someone’s garden on the outskirts of town. The flower was weathered and bent but had somehow survived the storm. She touched her fingers to her lips and then to the dirt. There was no tombstone yet. For right now, there was just a bare wooden cross. Pete had given her one from his collection.

  But she planned to order a proper marker later. She knew what it would say, “Here lies Will Starling. Beloved son, beloved brother, beloved husband.” She would put the name of Sally Starling beside him. For in that moment when she shot Will, the girl who had been Sally Starling—if she had ever existed at all—had died too.

  She stood up from the grave and walked away. She felt the eyes on her as she went. Luke and Miranda hurried to catch up behind her.

  “That was well-said, Jules,” Miranda said. “Will deserved every bit of it.”

  “Will deserved to die in bed decades from now, surrounded by a loving wife and a dozen grandchildren. But he didn’t get that fate because of me. I stole that from him and dragged him out here to his doom.”

  Miranda rushed forward, catching Jules’ arm and stopping her.

  “This is not your fault,” she said.

  Jules met her eyes and didn’t blink. “Yes, it is,” she said. “And you know it. But if you’re worried I’m going to collapse in guilt and anguish over it, don’t be. I’m going to survive. I’m going to finish the job. Because that’s what our father raised us to do.”

  She broke free of her grasp and kept walking. She had been determined to save her father before. Now she also wanted something else—revenge. She thought of Rezzor’s awful laugh, his final taunt. “We’re waiting for you.” Far be it for her to keep them waiting any longer.

  It was Luke who caught up to her next. To his credit, he didn’t try to physically hold her back, but walked in lockstep with her.

  “We need to postpone for a few days,” he said. “We need more bullets, for one, and we still haven’t found the horses.”

  Jules stopped in her tracks. She put two fingers into her mouth and whistled loudly. A black horse came galloping around the corner a few moments later, running right toward her.

  “You were saying?” she said.

  “The bullets,” Luke persisted.

  “You believe I’m not thinking straight,” Jules said. “You think I’m going to throw myself into the maw of whatever monster is out there and let it bite off my head. But I’m doing no such thing. My grief hasn’t clouded my vision, it’s clarified it.

  “We can’t afford to wait. For one, if we do, the Maelstrom is likely to send another storm after us. That’s a risk not ju
st to us but to these fine people here.”

  “That storm wasn’t after us,” Miranda said.

  Jules rounded on her. “Oh yes, it was,” she said. “It’s not hard to put two and two together, sister. You know it too. I was willing to accept that it was a coincidence that a storm hit us when we robbed that train and later when we robbed that bank. But when it chased us into a river, it began to feel a might bit personal. And here? That didn’t happen by chance. It hit here because of us, because of me.”

  “Why?” Luke asked.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” she replied. “All I know is this—whatever directs those creatures is after me. And if I stay here, I’m putting these people at risk. I won’t do that. They’ve lost too much already.”

  She didn’t point out that a day ago, she’d pointedly said she didn’t care if these folk lived or died. She’d been wrong about that. She had cared, she just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

  “The other reason to go now is Duggett and the others,” she said. “They’ve got the map and the keys. With Pete in tow, we may not need the map, so that’s good. But we need to get back those keys.”

  “To steal a vase?” Miranda asked. “Why does that matter anymore?”

  “To get Father back,” Jules said. “But yes, I’ll take the vase. I have no intention of selling it, however. There’s a bigger game being played here. I’ll be damned if I’ve figured it all out, but the vase is a big part of it.”

  “Duggett may already be dead,” Luke said.

  “Perhaps. Maybe that tempest rolled right over him. In which case, this’ll be the shortest cavalry charge in history. So be it. If we wait any longer, we lose any chance of catching up. And that is not acceptable.

  “There’s another reason too, before you question me again. You want to know why Will’s dead? Because I didn’t think hard enough about what happened to people who are caught by Vipers. I knew Rezzor was one of them. I should have seen it coming.”

  “Seen what coming?” Miranda asked.

  “Rezzor was one of the few people in this world that knew there was a tunnel between the church and the saloon,” Jules replied. “He was waiting outside that saloon for when we were all inside.”