Two hours later, the posse assembled outside of the Sheriff’s Office.
The freezing rain had become snow now that drifted through the frigid air like ash blown from some huge funeral pyre. And that seemed pretty fitting given where the men were going and what they were going to do.
There were some fifteen men there when Cabe rode in on his strawberry roan. Most of them were miners that Cabe did not know. But Pete Slade and Henry Wilcox were there, the office left to another deputy. Sir Tom Ian, the English-born pistol fighter was there. As was Charles Graybrow and Raymond Proud, the big Indian carpenter. The one that really surprised Cabe was Elijah Clay astride a chestnut mare.
“Afternoon, Mr. Cabe,” he said, quite cordially. “The sheriff here has let me join this huntin’ party. He says I have to behave m’self. As far as ye killin’ Virgil, well, I knowed he weren’t nothin’ but trash. So I don’t hold no grudge no more.”
Cabe relaxed a little at hearing that. He pulled his Stetson with the rattlesnake band off the saddle horn and place it on his head. “I’m ready, then,” he said.
“Okay,” Dirker said. “You know where we’re going and what we’re going to do. So let’s get it done. And we don’t come back until Cobb is put down.”
“Yessum, Sheriff,” Clay said. “I’ll tell ye boys one thing and I’ll tell ye just the once. If’n I get that peckerwood devil in m’ sights, I’ll shoot that trash just deader’n Jesus on the cross. Yes, sir.”
And that, it seemed, was a good parting remark.
They rode.
It was at the fork in the road, at that old lightening-blasted dead oak, that they found more riders waiting for them. Mormons. Eustice Harmony was there. As were four surviving Danites-Crombley, Fitch, Sellers, and Archambeau. All of whom were anxious to destroy what lived in Deliverance once and for all.
So, then, twenty men rode on that town.
Twenty men who were willing to give their lives to stop the killing and what lived in Deliverance was more than happy to take them.
One by one.
By the time they passed through those high banks of withered, dead pines outside of Deliverance, the storm had filled its lungs with ice and had become a full-blown blizzard. Visibility was down to less than thirty feet. But no one suggested turning back. What had to be done would not be easy in any weather.
As they came around the bend, everyone brought up their guns.
They saw what they thought were two men waiting for them on either side of the road. But they were not men, but scarecrows impaled on sticks. As the posse got closer, they saw they were actually corpses and ones long dead by the look of them. Their clothes were shredded rags that flapped in the wind. Hollowed, skullish faces with empty eye sockets appraised the riders as they passed.
Although Cabe had seen countless dead men, he found he could not look upon those frostbitten faces. He was afraid they might smile at him, speak to him in voices of cold dirt.
Well, he found himself thinking, you volunteered for this fucking mess. Got nobody to blame but your ownself. If things get ugly-and they will-y’all just keep that in mind, Tyler Cabe.
“Ye can feel it, cain’t ye?” Clay said.
And Cabe could only nod, wordlessly.
For he could feel it. Feel some ancient, unspeakable terror erupting in his belly, licking at his insides with a cold tongue. Something in him knew the smell of this place, the malefic feel of it, and not from yesterday but from days long gone. It could smell those that haunted Deliverance and it frantically warned him away, filling him with an immense, unreasonable fear that made him physically ill. It settled into every cell and fiber in a black, wasting totality.
And then, as they rode in guarded silence, the town began to appear. It swam up out of the blizzard like a decaying ghost ship out of ocean fog: the masts and prows, decks and rigging. Yes, the ruined buildings and sharp-peaked roofs, false-front stores and boarded high houses all described by churning tempests of snow that shrieked through the streets.
Deliverance was laid-open before them like a sprung sarcophagus, daring, just daring them to look upon the secrets its moldering depths concealed.
Cabe saw it, really saw it, and felt like a little boy lost in a graveyard full of whispering voices and ghastly screams. And he heard these things, too, but only in his head. For that was the sound of the town-a humming, dead neutrality composed of agony and tormented screeching reduced to a single low and morbid thrum.
It made his mouth go dry and his heart pound like a hammer at a forge. His skin was tight and cold, his internals pulling into themselves. Adrenalin rushed through him, making his hands tremble on the reigns and his eyes go wide and unblinking. For everywhere around them, shadows seemed to dip and scamper in the blowing wall of snow.
In the street then, in the very black heart of the town, they dismounted and tethered there horses to a hitch rail.
Harmony stood there in a flapping black coat, a shotgun in his arms and the Book of Mormon in his hip pocket. “What you will see here will look like people,” he said to the posse, the wind turning his voice into a weird, wailing sound. “But they are not people. Not anymore. Not any more than a cadaver in a grave is a person. They may try to talk to you, to get you off alone. But don’t let them, by God. Don’t let them…”
Maybe not everyone in the posse knew what was in Deliverance. But maybe they’d heard stories, chimney-corner whispers, the sort of crazy tales kids tell late at night and around fires…things, of course, they’d dismissed at the time. But now? They did not dismiss them. They remembered them, locked those tales down deep within themselves where they would not be able to feel the teeth. And maybe that was why they did not question what Harmony said. They just accepted.
“It’ll be dark in about three hours,” Dirker said to them, his face pale and wind-pinched, but very determined, “and we want this wrapped up by then. So we’re gonna break into groups and…”
But Cabe was not listening. Not really.
He was watching those shuttered windows and high, sloping roofs, the narrow spaces cut between buildings. The tenebrous shadows that oozed from them. He was watching and noticing how everything seemed to lean out over the men in the street, wishing to crush them or get them close enough to pull them into dark places where business could be handled in private, away from the light. And what he was feeling was the blood of the town-a toxic, miasmic venom seeping into himself.
“Let’s do it,” Dirker said.
And they started off.
As Dirker led Harmony and the Danites through that howling white death, the church bell began to gong. It echoed out through the storm with a hollow, booming sound.
“The bell,” Harmony said, “Dear God…”
Dirker was telling himself that it meant nothing really. That maybe the wind had snagged it, but he knew better. Hands were pulling that rope and he could only imagine why.
The snow was flying thick and fine like powdered glass, dusting the buildings with a sound like blown sand. It whipped and swirled and drifted, lashing at the men in the streets, doing everything it could to drive them back, back. But they refused to be driven. They came on with shotguns in their fists and a ragged, squinting resolve in their eyes.
Suddenly, Fitch stopped dead, his rifle brought to bear. “What…what was that?” he said and the fear was thick in his voice like ice clogging a well-rope. “Over there.”
Dirker looked quick, frigid wind blasting him in the face. He saw a suggestion of a form swallowed by the storm. Could have been something. Maybe.
“It had green eyes,” Fitch said weakly. “Glowing green eyes…”
But Dirker would hear none of it.
They pushed on past sagging houses and a livery barn with a three-foot drift of snow pushed up against the door like a wave. Next to it was a larger, two-story log building. It had been some kind of community house or saloon at one time.
Dirker tried the door.
It was open.
He kicked it in all the way and the five of them came through with their guns held high and ready to spit rounds. But what they saw stopped them dead. It literally froze them in their tracks.
A couple kerosene lamps were blazing away. Seven or eight people were in there, pushed up to the dusty bar or sprawled in chairs at dirty, cobwebbed tables.
“Afternoon, gents,” a fellow behind the bar said. He was a heavy, rotund man with a Quaker-style beard lacking mustache. There were glasses set up on the bar top before him. Using a rag, he was cleaning them out. “Pull up a chair.”
Dirker and Harmony looked at each other while the Danites formed a defensive ring, just ready to draw on anything that so much as breathed. Behind them, wind rattled the door, fingers of snow snaking across the floor.
Besides the bartender, there were three men at the bar, a few others at the tables. There was nothing exceptional about any of them. A little boy with flat, empty eyes was in the corner tossing what looked like a ball into the air and catching it. Except it was no ball, but a skull. A human skull.
“Wanna play?” he said, giggling.
Dirker ignored him. “Where’s Cobb?” he said. “James Lee Cobb.”
The others just looked at each other and started to laugh, as if the sheriff was asking where Jesus was, on account he wanted to buy him a beer. When the laughter died away, Dirker saw a little girl come from the back room. She was no more than seven or eight…and completely naked. She hopped up on the bar in a very childlike, carefree manner. Sat there, her legs swinging. She looked upon Dirker and there was no innocence in those eyes, just a leering, hungry depravity. But what was truly strange was the elaborate tattooing of her belly and chest. Dirker couldn’t be sure what he was looking at in the dim light, but it looked like…intertwined serpents and weird figures, configurations and distorted magical symbols.
As he looked on them, the illustrations seemed to move.
He looked away.
A man at one of the tables with a Confederate hat and an officer’s coat patched with spreading blotches of mildew, said, “Where’s your manners, barkeep? Offer these here fellas a drink…”
“Course,” the bartender said.
His other hand came up from behind the bar…except it was elongated, the fingers spidery and narrow. Where the nails should have been there were long black claws curved like potato hooks. Smiling, the bartender used one of the claws to slit his wrist. Then, most casually, he began filling a glass with his blood.
“Blasphemy,” Harmony finally said, breaking that bleak silence. “A cancer on the face of God…”
That got them laughing again.
About that time, the sound of gunfire rose up from somewhere in the town and Dirker knew the others had made contact, too. That the party was finally underway.
The man in the Confederate hat began to grin and a spidery tangle of shadows spread over his face. When he spoke his voice was low and grating. “Now, you boys don’t really think you’re getting out of here alive, do you?” he said, his teeth suddenly long and sharp.
And there was a weird electricity in the air, an odd sharp stink of something like ozone and fresh blood. There was subtle motion and a wet, sliding sound.
“Honey,” the man said to the little girl, “these men like your pictures, show ‘em how the lines meet…”
And as Dirker watched, those weird and diabolic tattoos began to move. Maybe it was the flesh beneath, but suddenly everything was in motion. There was a rending, popping sound as muscles stretched and ligaments relocated to accommodate new and feral anatomies. The girl’s chest thrust out in a cage of bones, her limbs going long and rawboned. Thousands of fine gray hairs began to erupt from her skin until you could no longer see the skin. It looked, if anything, like millions of metal filings drawn to some central magnet. Her jaw pushed out into a snout, her nose flattened and her ears did likewise, pressing against that narrow skull of whipping locks and going high and sharp. Her eyes became green and slitted, her brow heavy, the skull beneath grotesquely exaggerated.
She was suddenly more wolf than girl.
Her lips pulled back in a snarl, her teeth sharp as icepicks.
Dirker heard himself mutter, “Shit.”
All he could think of was a childhood story of how Circe the witch had changed Odysseus’s men into beasts.
And around him…they were all changing.
Flesh became smoke that was blown by secret, cabalistic winds and rivers moved by mystical currents. The girl suddenly leaped into the air, five, six feet until it seemed she would brush the rafters overhead, and then she came right down on Sellers. And this before he could even jerk a trigger or think of doing so. He and the girl-thing went down in a thrashing, writhing heap. Her mouth was wrapped around his face, those teeth sunk right to the bone. You could hear his screams echoing down the shaft of her throat.
But nobody had time to look at that.
For as the girl made her move, so did the others.
The man in the Confederate hat rose up in a flurry of teeth and claws and growling and was almost on Harmony when his shotgun went off, pitching the man backwards. Suddenly, everyone was shooting. Shooting at shapes and forms and monstrosities from some primal nightmare.
Dirker brought his Greener up and blasted the bartender. The impact blew his shoulder to a bloody mist and threw him against dusty glasses and discarded bottles. There was a crashing and shattering and he came right back up again, his face gone lupine and his teeth bared to bisect human flesh.
Dirker gave him another round that knocked him away and then that little boy was hopping in his direction. Dirker gave him the butt of the Greener in the face, driving him to the floor, broke it open and ejected shells, fed two more in, snapped it close. The bartender was up on the bar by then, his shirt split wide open from the pulsing, bestial muscularity beneath.
As he leapt, Dirker gave him both barrels.
The buckshot blew his snarling head into a spray of bone and blood. He flipped back over the bar and stayed down this time. As Dirker whirled around, the boy hit him hard and put him down, those jaws opening like the mouth of a tiger and coming in for the kill. The Greener still in his hands, he jammed the barrel lengthwise into that mouth, claws tearing great ruts through his coat and shirt and into his chest below. With a scream, he pushed the beast away from him, flipping it off him.
The man in the Confederate hat had Harmony.
His huge, clawed hands were pressed to either side of the Mormon’s head…and he was lifted an easy two feet off the floor, rivers of blood running from his ears and eyes as his skull was crushed. Then the teeth darted forward and his face was literally stripped from the bone beneath.
Dirker saw the beast standing there, Harmony’s face hanging from its jaws like a bloody scalp.
And then the boy came back at him, but Dirker was on his feet.
As the boy charged in, Dirker unleathered his. 45 Peacemaker in one swift, easy motion. He fired once, punching a hole in the boy’s sloping forehead and blowing skull out the back of his head. The boy shuddered momentarily on all fours, gore oozing down his face. Then he pitched straight over, trembling on the blood-slicked floor.
Two of the beasts were on Crombley.
Fitch dropped another by following Dirker’s lead and shooting it in the head. Dirker put three bullets into the thing that was devouring Harmony. Then the door exploded in with a roaring wall of snow and long, furry arms powdered white took hold of both Fitch and Archambeau and dragged them screaming out into the storm.
Dirker killed one more, reloaded his Greener and ran out into the storm, the world of Deliverance a cacophony of ringing church bells, shooting, and howling.
The storm was reaching its peak out in the streets.
The snow rose up into a whipping, shrieking wall of white that cut visibility down even further now. Cabe and his crew of miners had to squint and lean into the wind to press forward. They could hear the screaming and gunfire, but with the gusting blizzard turning sound around and into itself, it was hard to say where any of it was coming from.
And the miners were panicking.
They saw shapes hobbling through the snow and were shooting randomly, even though Cabe shouted at them to stop, because they might be cutting down their own men.
They were ready to bolt and run.
But where to?
To either side they could see the vague, white-shrouded forms of buildings, but it was hard to say where they were in the town now. Paranoia and confusion had turned them back on their own tracks half a dozen times. And each time, their tracks had been erased by the storm.
“Goddammit,” Cabe cried out at them, “stop this business, we’ve got to have some order here.”
And that’s when he noticed there were only three miners with him, the fourth missing.
“Where’s Hychek? Where the fuck did Hychek go?”
“They got him! Something grabbed him…something with green eyes!” one of the miners shouted. “I’m getting out of here, I’m getting out right goddamn now…”
But before he could, a trio of riders came pounding up the street and the miners, thinking the cavalry had arrived, waltzed right out into the streets to meet them. But it was not a rescue party, but a gang of Hide-Hunters. They thundered through the storm, parting the snows like roiling mists. They wore dusters and flat-brimmed hats pulled low over wolfish, snarling faces.
One of the miners let out a strangled screaming sound as a lasso looped over his head and was pulled tight like a noose around his throat. He was yanked from his feet and pulled away into the storm by one of the Hide-Hunters. Another miner was similarly roped.
Cabe ducked under a lasso meant for him and, quickly levering his Evans. 44-40, knocked a Hide-Hunter from leather with three well-placed shots. He hit the ground, his horse racing off.
And Cabe got a good look at him.
He had the rough shape of a man, but was hunched-over and moved with a jumping, hopping side-to-side gait. His eyes blazed like wet emeralds and teeth hung over his narrow black lips like those of a jungle crocodile. With a resounding roar, he came at Cabe, the three bullet holes in him seeming to make little difference.
Cabe couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
That repulsive, shocking face and gnashing teeth, the loops of drool hanging from the crooked slash of a mouth, the furry hands with the ten-inch fingers and claws just as sharp as scalpels.
He put another round in the beast, mainly just to keep it off him.
But it didn’t even slow it down.
It slammed into him, pitching the both of them into a snowdrift. Its claws were at his throat, those fingers encircling his neck. The beast stank of tainted meat and diseased blood, saliva hung from its jaws in vile ropes.
Before it fed on him, it did something that truly sucked the wind from Cabe’s lungs: it spoke.
“Gonna die now, friend,” it said in a slavering, raw voice that was more akin to the growl of a rabid hound than the speech of a man. “Gonna die like an animal like in the old, forgotten days…”
But Cabe had other ideas.
As the beast reared up, letting out a wailing, howling noise that made Cabe’s ears explode with rushing noise, Cabe pulled his bowie knife from its sheath at his hip. And when the beast came down to fill its belly, it came right down on the blade of the knife. Nearly a foot of razored steel slid right into its throat and out the other side.
With a mewling, whining sound, it pulled away, the knife erupting out the side of its throat. Its head hung at a sickening angle, most of its neck slit clean through. It spilled blood to the fresh snow, tried to run and fell, tried to rise up and stumbled, its life’s blood running out in a torrent.
Cabe saw his chance and jumped on its back, knocking it face-first into the snow.
Before the beast could so much as whimper, Cabe drew its head back by handfgul of that filthy, greasy hair and sank the knife deeper in its throat, sawing and slitting. The creature came alive, twisting and fighting and it was its own misguided strength more than anything else that finally severed its head.
Cabe tossed it into the wind.
The body still tried to crawl, but didn’t make it very far.
The head stared up at him with those stark, green eyes and the jaws still worked.
But it was done and Cabe knew it.
Drenched with the reeking blood of the Hide-Hunter, Cabe stumbled out into the storm to find survivors.
The only survivor from Cabe’s group was Lester Brand.
He was a shift boss at the Silver Horn Mine.
And he was also a dead man.
When the Hide-Hunters attacked, he ran. He fought and blundered through the streets, ducking down when he heard a sound or sensed motion. He slipped into a doorway when two more Hide-Hunters rode by, sporting heads speared on poles. He saw the heads…they were the heads of miners, men he’d worked and drank with.
Brand was trembling badly now, wheezing, pained sounds coming from his throat. Though it was bitterly cold and his face just as stiff as leather, he was sweating profusely. Trails of perspiration ran down his spine. He had lost his shotgun and the Colt Army pistols in his gloved hands felt oily like they might jump from his fists at any moment.
He was moving down a street, but he had no true idea where he was.
The town was not that big. Though he had never been to Deliverance before, he remembered Dirker saying it was cut by a central road and that four or five other roads intersected it. So if he just kept walking, he was bound to make his way out sooner or later.
But he thought: Oh Jesus, oh Christ, what, what if I’m the last one left alive?
But he knew that couldn’t be, for now and again he could hear gunfire. So he had to keep his head. He moved forward slowly, the snow wild and flying all around him. It sculpted weird shapes and shadows. The buildings rose up like headstones, leaning out at him. He kept seeing forms moving past him, but he didn’t dare shoot. Not just yet. For there was death everywhere now, screaming white death and what it hid in that whipping white cloak was far, far worse.
He moved past a row of warehouses, then a barn, a boarded-up dry goods store. Then directly ahead he could hear a low, guttural growling sound. And then many. As if a pack of wild dogs were bearing down on him.
Quickly, he darted down an alley that twisted and turned, spilling him into a little courtyard pressed between the hulks of buildings. There was no way out. He would have to break into one of them and take his chances.
Right then, he froze up.
The wind was making a shrill, howling sound and he wasn’t entirely sure that it actually was the wind. He looked up quickly…thought, thought for a moment he saw something up on a roof. Something that faded away into the belly of the storm. He wasn’t sure he had even seen it.
There was a rapping noise off to his left.
A door was swinging open and closed in the wind. It thudded hollowly against the weathered gray wall of a feed mill. Pulling up what strength he had left by that point, Brand moved over there, the door banging and banging.
He went to the door.
It had slammed close again. His throat full of cinders, Brand hooked the barrel of one Colt Army around the latch and threw it open. And saw…saw a figure come drifting out of the darkness like a wraith. A woman. A woman in a white soiled dress. Her hair was long and fire-red, blowing around like meadow grasses in a high, angry wind.
“You,” Brand managed as she neared the doorway, “you…you gotta help me get out of here…I’m lost…I’m…”
But he saw that she was grinning like something from a dark wood that snatched away wayward children, something that gnawed on bones and sucked blood. Her eyes were huge and wet and lustrous like wet jade. They found him and held him, that mouth set with long needle-like teeth.
Brand screamed and then those long fingers speared him and that slobbering, savage mouth thrust forward. And it ended for him there in the snow, in a red-stained heap. And as he died, he could hear the sound of her chewing on him.
In the lobby of the hotel, Graybrow paused.
He listened.
He knew from years spent stalking that he was not alone, but where the others were, he could not say.
Though he had sung his death song before coming on the raid, Graybrow did not want to die. He would never see seventy again, but there was a vitality about him, a spunk, a gleam in his eye that age could not hope to wither.
He did not want to die…yet, he was willing.
It was an honor among the Utes to die in battle. And it would be honor for Graybrow as well. And if he had to die, at least he would die knowing grand secrets, horrible secrets and malign truths, but his soul would be stronger for it. Nourished.
Graybrow had been with Henry Wilcox and Sir Tom Ian, but had abandoned them long ago. He preferred to hunt on his own. And be hunted if that was the case. Because, honestly, he did trust whites with guns. They had a nasty habit of shooting at anything that moved and if he was going to die, it would not be with his guts shot out by some crazy white.
The hotel, he knew, had been called the Shawkesville Arms once upon a time when Deliverance went by its original name and was a lead-mining town.
Since those days, it had been abandoned to the weather, to nature, to whatever chose to call it home. And if what Harmony had said was true, Cobb and his henchmen had called it home for a time.
Slowly then, Graybrow moved towards the old stairway that was covered in filth and curled brown leaves that had drifted in from the innumerable holes in the walls and roof. The handrail was wreathed in cobwebs. The stair carpet was mildewed and black. Though it was dim, it was not dark. Scant illumination-and snow-drifted in.
Outside, the storm was howling like a blood-maddened beast, throwing itself at the ramshackle buildings and making them creak and groan and sway on their rotting foundations.
There was a high, unpleasant stink that had little to do with woodrot or animal droppings. It was a sharp, violent smell that got inside Graybrow’s head and made him think of slaughterhouses and mass graves, insane asylums and death wards…places filled with death, with pain and horror and madness.
He started up the steps, feeling now how fully alone he was.
But you are not a white, he kept telling himself. You are not a white who feels safe in crowds or needs the presence of many. You are an Indian, a Ute, and solitary, lonely places do not frighten you.
And that was great in theory, but it wasn’t working so good in practice today.
For the stink was getting worse and there seemed to be something crackling in the air like some negative charge of potential energy, some static electricity that was building and building. The farther he went up the stairs, the more he felt it. It was all around him, heavy and dark and threatening. He could feel it from the top of his head right down to his balls and it was a foul, reaching hostility like hands poised to strangle him.
Upstairs.
More leaves, more dirt. But you could see now that there had been traffic up here. The hardwood floor of the corridor was thick with collected dust, but a trail had been beaten through it.
Graybrow thought: Okay, old man, okay, just do it.
So he did.
He began going from room to room and finding little more than additional cobwebs and some old crates and moldered furnishings. The covering of dust was disturbed in some of them as if maybe Cobb’s men had tossed their bedrolls onto the floor to sleep.
In the corridor, the garish wallpaper was spotted with fungus. It was faded and disintegrating and peppered with wormholes. In the gloom, Graybrow was beginning to see evidence of claw-marks ripped into the paneling and old, browned blood smears.
That smell was still thick around him, but there was another smell, too. A repellent fetor of putrescent meat and spilled blood. The stink was vaporous and gagging, enough to make him-
Suddenly, without a sound, a shape stepped from a darkened doorway. So very quick and so very silent that Graybrow could barely even register surprise before the Whitney 12-gauge was yanked from his hands and tossed down the hallway.
Feeble light choked with dust motes and a powdery rain of snow illuminated the shape. Graybrow saw it, felt his heart give a jolt of pain. He knew what he was looking at was James Lee Cobb. He knew that, but it took him some time to acclimate himself to the horror.
As it was, he felt faint.
Cobb was tall and cadaverously-thin, a mummy from a sideshow. A sombrero with a short, curled brim was pushed back on his head. The crown was scarved in the skins of desert snakes and set with feathers and the talons of raptors and the teeth of wolves. He wore a poncho of pale hide that was stitched together in a crazy quilt from human pelts. Around his corded throat there were a half-dozen necklaces of human fingers, ears, and teeth. At his waist were a brace of ivory-handled pistols and hatchets. There was a sash from shoulder to gunbelt and it was sewn together from… faces. Faces tanned to death masks with the scalps intact.
And it was all dreadful enough…but Cobb’s own face, it was the very worse thing.
The right side was pale and the skin was tight and seamed, barely covering the skull beneath. A single unblinking green eye with a huge, dilated pupil like a translucent moon stared out at Graybrow. But the left side of his face…just gone. Red tendons and pink muscle were stretched obscenely across an exaggerated skull like starving dogs had eaten the good stuff away. There was no eye there, just a black scarified cavity.
Graybrow managed to start breathing again before he passed dead out. “Suppose…suppose I’m in for it now, eh?” he said.
Cobb nodded that fright mask. Lips pulled back from sharp, yellow teeth. “I reckon ye are, friend,” he said in a hissing voice. “I reckon ye are.”
“Don’t suppose I could-”
“Doubt it,” Cobb said. “But since ye came this far, there’s something I’d like ye to see.”
But Graybrow just shook his head. “Don’t think I want to.”
And when Cobb made to grab him, he brought out his hunting knife and buried it right into the devil’s belly. Not that it did him shit-good. Cobb took hold of him with a strength that was amazing. Those clawed hands-the left one was skeletal and skinless-took him by the shoulders and smashed him against the wall until Graybrow went loose as a rag.
The fight had been pounded out of him.
The knife still hanging from his belly, Cobb took hold of Graybrow’s long, white hair and dragged him up the corridor by it. Graybrow swam in and out of consciousness. He could hear the clomp, clomp, clomp of Cobb’s Spanish boots and then he was dumped unceremoniously before a door at the end of the hall. A door covered with old, bloody handprints.
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 arms. 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 and 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.
And then Dirker, the entire front of his overcoat wet with blood, was on the beast’s back. Another slug ripped through him from Cobb, but he would not relent. His face drawn in a mask of agony, he yanked the creature’s head back as it made a lunge for Cabe’s throat. Yanked it back and pressed the muzzle of a. 45 Peacemaker to its skull. He jerked the trigger of the double-action pistol and blew the beast’s head to ribbons.
The beast fell over dead.
And Dirker with it, his hands clutching his chest, dark blood bubbling forth between his fingers.
Clay fired off two more shots at Cobb who took advantage of the confusion and ran along the far wall, firing his pistols and disappearing through a low doorway not twenty feet from the men.
But Cabe was only concerned with Dirker.
He cradled his head in his lap. “Oh, Christ, Jackson, Jesus Christ, look at you…” He felt tears coming down his face and he realized that Dirker had saved his life, but at the price of his own. “Why’d you go and do that, why’d you do that?”
Dirker reached out and found his hand. “Tyler,” he said, blood running from the corners of his lips. He coughed and choked and tried to swallow something back down. “Tyler, I’m…I’m done in, just done in-”
“No, you ain’t, I ain’t lettin’ you get away like that-”
“I am,” he insisted. “Back in town…you…you take care of my wife, take care…of Janice. Swear to me you will…”
Cabe was sobbing now, overcome with just too many damn emotions. “I will, I swear I will. But Jackson, you can’t go and die on me, not now, not now, we’re friends, we’re goddamn friends finally…”
Dirker found a smile and put it on, but it faded soon enough. He stared up into space, breathing real hard. “Pea Ridge…I can see it, Tyler, it’s right before me…the woods…the hills…oh, Tyler, you remember how cold it was…so very cold and snow…in Arkansas yet…in Arkansas yet…you boys, you boys, pull back now, dear God pull back the rebs the rebs is overrunning us…no, no, no…I’m dreaming, Tyler…”
Cabe was holding his hand tight. “I’m gonna get you on a horse and get you back to town. That’s what I’m gonna do…”
He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Clay’s.
“He’s gone, boy,” Clay said softly. “He’s gone.”
His face wet with tears, Cabe lowered Dirker to the floor. He stroked his cheek and sniffed, tried to get a hold of himself. He saw his shotgun and picked it up. “Where,” he said, “where did that fucking prick Cobb go?”
Clay, trying to patch his wounds, said, “Through that door yonder…give ‘em hell, boy…”
Cabe, just pumped hard with iron and hate, went through the door like an artillery shell. If Cobb had been waiting there, he would’ve slit him right in half like a sword through cheese.
But he wasn’t there.
Cabe was in a very narrow passage that went straight up to the belfry. A set of cramped, spiral stairs climbed up its throat like a spiral worm. There was blood on them. And blood smeared on the railing.
Cabe thought: He was hit then, that cocksucker was hit…
Sucking in a sharp breath, Cabe went up those steps as quiet as quiet could be, the shotgun in his hands. He crept and inched like a stalking cat. At the very top there was a hatchway.
Steeling himself then, Cabe crouched and threw himself up through it.
He rolled across the plank floor.
Eddies of wind-driven snow lashed at the bell. The bell-room was about ten feet square, open on all four sides with a waist high ledge. The floor was drifted with snow, old leaves…and drops of blood.
James Lee Cobb, his face sculpted into that of a human wolf stepped around the bell. The left side of his face was more skull than flesh and that skull was of some ravenous beast.
“I ate all the souls in Deliverance,” he said, “and now I’m gonna eat yours…”
A hatchet flipped end over end past Cabe’s face and went flying out into the white, whipping streets below.
Cabe let the demon have first one barrel of his Greener right in the belly and then Cobb jumped at him, jumped with an amazing speed and balance for a gut-shot man. In mid-air, Cabe gave him the other barrel which threw him back against the bell. The bell began to swing and gong with a resounding, thundering peal. Cobb left a bloody smear on it and pulled himself up by the ledge, his back to the blizzard.
His torso was blasted clean open in a burning, smoking valley. Flames were licking at his poncho from contact burns and the stink was of cremated flesh and burning hair.
But what froze Cabe up was that Cobb had no internal organs. His body cavity was filled with a chittering and crawling life. Locusts. Thousands upon thousands of locusts. And then Cobb began to laugh with a high, weird cackling that rose up and joined the gonging bell in a hammering wall of noise.
Cabe let out a cry as the locusts fled from Cobb’s torso and filled the air in a buzzing, busy swarm, descending on him like he were a field to be stripped. They heaped over him, biting and scratching and droning and Cabe was half out of his mind, clawing madly at the green, piping carpet of insects. They chewed and nipped, got under his clothes, tried to press into his ears and mouth, nostrils.
They would strip him to bone.
Cabe, knowing it was now or never, threw himself at Cobb with everything he had. He struck the grinning, cackling bastard, struck him real hard. So hard Cobb lost his balance. He fell back over the ledge of the belfry with a manic, pained barking sound. His arms bicycled in the freezing, snowy air…and then he fell, spinning end over end into the blizzard.
He let out an enraged, piercing shriek.
The insects curled-up brown like dead leaves and fell from Cabe. He leaned against the ledge, looking down as the snow let up for a moment and he could see Cobb below.
He was impaled on the fence.
Three blood-slicked uprights were jutting from his chest a good fifteen inches if not more and he was stuck sure as a bug on a pin. He contorted and fought, his arms whipping and his mouth howling. But that just forced him farther down on the uprights.
Iron, Cabe found himself thinking, iron.
The uprights were iron and he had read that the Devil feared iron for it signified earth. That’s why people hung iron horseshoes over their doorways. Iron was a basic element of earth and an enemy of demons and the discarnate.
Cabe felt the entire church shaking beneath him as Cobb screamed in what seemed a dozen different voices…men, women, children.
Cabe half-climbed, half-fell down the stairs. He dragged himself through the door and Clay was still there, still waiting. Together they made it out of the church.
Cobb was no longer moving.
He had withered into something like a brown, emaciated scarecrow that was flaking into motes.
The church began to tremble and shudder, swaying this way and that as if it were trying to pull itself up from its foundation. There was a sudden groaning, crashing noise and it fell into itself in a heap of lumber. The bell came down last with a final etching gong.
Cabe and Clay were out in the streets making for their horses by then.
Cobb’s good eye flickered open, the socket filled with maggots. His blackened, blistered face peeled open in a roaring shriek. The evil blew out of him in a yellow, searching mist, erupting from dozens of holes and slits, kicking up tornados of snow and smelling of bone pits, brackish swamps, and human excrement. There was a flash as if of lightening, a rumbling, a moaning, and the ground shook and the sky went suddenly black as something like a million buzzing flies rocketed upwards…and that was it.
Cobb was done.
Cabe and Clay found their horses, cut the others free.
Then they rode out of Deliverance, neither of them speaking for a time. When they were well away and night was coming on dark and fierce, they stopped.
“Place’ll have to burned to the ground,” Clay said, “come spring. Then the ground’ll need to be salted.”
“Suspect so,” Cabe said.
They rode on.