Ghostwalkers (35 page)

The rifle lay ten feet outside of their niche.

“Oh …

Above them the two mushroom caps that formed their ceiling were falling to pieces beneath the renewed assault of the pteranodons.

“They're going to get us,” cried Looks Away, fumbling for his shotgun. His hands were shaking badly, and Grey could not blame him. His own trembled with the palsy of genuine terror.

“We need that gun,” he growled.

As if in conscious defiance of their needs, one of the pteranodons placed a foot over the weapon. Grey knew that it couldn't be more than happenstance, but it felt like a statement to them.

You are our meat.

It terrified him.

It infuriated him.

As he reloaded he thought about what Mircalla had said about his life. He thought about what Veronica had said. The martyr.

Martyr.

The gun lay there, ten feet away. He could reach it. If he could get it away from the monster then maybe he could throw it to Looks Away before the pteranodons killed them both. They would kill him, of that there was no doubt.

No doubt.

Was this it? Was this the moment predicted by the witch and the manitou? Was he destined to sacrifice himself and to die here in the fetid darkness, the meal of monsters? Was that a tragedy or would it redeem him in the eyes of the universe? And what then? Would he join the band of wandering vengeance ghosts and drift along the fringes of the living world until the sun burned itself out and time ran down to its last few ticks?

Those thoughts flashed through his mind even as he felt his body moving.

Moving.

Rushing toward the cleft, toward the gun.

This is a better death than I deserve
, he thought.

And then he was falling sideways.

Something buffeted him and sent him crashing against the tree-like stem of a giant mushroom. He fell hard and saw Looks Away throw him a madman's grin as he dove through the cleft.

 

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“No!” cried Grey as he struggled back to his feet.

When Looks Away had shoved him out of the way, Grey had dropped his gun. He scooped it up now and prayed that the barrel was not clogged.

It all happened fast.

So fast.

Looks Away had his shotgun in his hands and as he dove he fired both barrels into the face of the towering pterosaur. The creature towered ten feet above him, but the spray from the sawed-off barrels spread wide, and the entire flight of pellets struck beak and eyes and throat and head, and all of it exploded into a cloud of pink mist. The recoil from the poorly braced weapon hit Looks Away in the center of the chest and sent him into an awkward, crashing fall. He landed hard and his head banged against the ground as the headless pteranodon toppled the other way, slamming into two others and dragging them down.

There was one single moment of absolute stillness.

The Kingdom rifle was five feet from where Looks Away lay, but he lay there, shaking his head, dazed, hovering on the edge of blacking out.

“Looks!” shouted Grey as he flung himself out the niche just as three huge beaks stabbed down. He opened up with the Colt and fired at the pteranodons who were recovering from their shock to realize that fresh and helpless meat lay there for the taking.

Grey scooped up the rifle and thrust it at Looks Away, who had managed to prop himself up on one elbow. His nose was bleeding and he was wheezing like a dying trout.

“Here, damn it!”

Grey fired his six rounds, unable to miss at that range.

Beyond the closest pteranodons there were more.

So many more.

At least fifty of the living dead things were crawling through the forest or perched atop the mushroom caps. More circled in the humid air, jealous of their brothers who were close enough to join the impending feast. The stench of their rotting flesh was stifling, overwhelming.

Grey fumbled at his belt for fresh cartridges, knowing that there was no time left. This was it. All of his roads had led here and this was where he was going to die. Consumed and forgotten.

“God damn you all to—!”

That was as far as he got and the world seemed to explode.

The four closest pteranodons flew apart as if they were straw dolls in a tornado wind. Blood and leather flew everywhere, slapping the other creatures in the faces, painting the mushroom caps with red, and filling the air with the smell of strange blood. A boom, like the echo of a great thunderclap rolled outward toward the sunless sea, and once more the frightened bats fled their refuge and fled like a dark cloud toward the fungi-covered columns.

The force of the explosion drove Grey to his knees and knocked the gun from his hand. He clapped his hands to his ears and wheeled around, staring at the figure that stood behind him.

Thomas Looks Away, covered in bat guano and lichen, blood streaming from his nose, teeth bared, eyes wild, stood wide-legged with the Kingdom rifle in his hands. Then he whirled around, raised the weapon again, and fired at the pteranodons atop the mushroom caps that had formed their refuge. The round hit the closest of the beasts, and there was another shocking boom of thunder, and a shockwave picked both men up and flung them against another of the towering mushrooms.

The pterosaur that had been hit and both of the other monsters were shredded as the compressed ghost-gas bullets detonated into a blinding series of miniature explosions. The bursts followed one another almost too fast to hear—first the explosion of the rifle shells and then the howling scream as the ghost rocks embedded in the dead flesh of each animal burst apart. That, and the screams of the undead things, shook the entire cavern. Chunks of sandstone cracked off and plummeted from the ceiling, smashing down on the pteranodons, crippling some, killing many. Grey grabbed Looks Away by the arm and they scrambled under the hood of another giant mushroom. The massive cap quivered and a jagged crack appeared in the stem above their heads. They cried out and rolled over against the base just as the stem cracked like a tree in a hurricane wind and a ton of mottled fungus canted over and crashed down inches from where they lay.

The ground shook again and bloody rain fell all around them.

They dared not move.

The whole world shook and trembled around them. The pterosaurs screamed.

And then there was a new sound, that of many leathery wings flapping as all of the surviving creatures flung themselves into the air in a colliding, wild attempt to flee.

Silence settled very, very slowly.

The two men lay there, half buried under the shattered mushroom cap, half deafened by the thunder of the Kingdom rifle, half mad with terror.

Then, finally, Grey began to crawl out. After a moment Looks Away followed. They climbed to their feet and stood there, swaying and drunk with fatigue. Around them lay the shredded remains of a half dozen of the pteranodons. A few crippled ones were dragging themselves away from what had been their intended dinner. These monsters had been torn by flying shrapnel from the mushrooms, from rocks, and from flying bits of bone, but they hadn't been caught in the blast radius of the exploded ghost rock and so they had not exploded, too. Even so, they were torn to rags.

Looks Away wiped a nervous hand across his mouth as he watched them shudder along and tried to make a joke. “A clear case of the biter bit, what?”

The quip came out crooked and landed flat.

Grey picked up the Kingdom rifle from where it had fallen when they'd been thrown backward. The little lights were still glowing bright even though it was covered with drops of blood. He held it up and thought about the cannon-sized one at Doctor Saint's lab.

“God Almighty,” he whispered.

 

Chapter Sixty

They picked up their other weapons: the ordinary Colt and shotgun that now seemed both childish and somehow more wholesome than the gleaming Kingdom M1.

“Do you think that gun destroyed the demons in those flying lizards?”

“Reptiles,” corrected Looks Away, “and I don't know. Actually, old chap, we don't even know if they were the same kind of undead as Lucky Bob's crew or simply bodies he raised using alchemy. Add that to our list of mysteries.”

“It would be nice,” groused Grey, “to get to the point where the answers outnumber the dad-blasted questions.”

“I don't know that any results we get on prehistoric monsters are going to be reliable in terms of what the Kingdom rifle might or might not do to undead gunslingers. Or to a Harrowed like Lucky Bob. We have to be careful there, old boy. I think it's fair to say that Jenny would prefer we did not destroy her father's eternal soul.”

“Yeah, well, there's that…”

They reloaded and did an ammunition check.

“I have fourteen shells left,” said Looks Away, closing the shotgun breech with a snap. “You?”

Grey had removed all of the rounds from his belt and put them in his one remaining trouser pocket. They were much easier to grab. “Thirty-one rounds.”

In any normal circumstance it was a lot of ammunition. This was a million miles from normal.

Above them the roof of the cavern was free of any undead flying reptiles, while the bats had once more gone back to hide in the mushroom forest. Even the insects, large and small, seemed to shun them. Grey could almost understand it. Even though they had done what was necessary to survive an impossible attack, using that gun made him feel strangely unclean. Like it was emblematic of a line in the sand that they should not have crossed.

Grey said none of this to Looks Away. After all, it was his mentor, Doctor Saint, who had created the gun, and the cannon. It was Looks Away who had used that other strange weapon to stop the reanimated army from slaughtering the town. In both cases those weapons had been the deciding factor in keeping them alive.

So why did it feel wrong? Why did Grey feel dirty?

He shook his head, unable to sort it through.

Looks Away took a sip from his canteen and handed it over. Grey sipped and gave it back.

“You know, I grew up way back east in Philadelphia,” said Grey. “I wanted to be a lawyer or someone like that. I was good in school, always read, got top grades.”

“So—?”

“So what the fuck am I doing in this hellhole?”

They both laughed. The sound echoed badly and it hushed them again.

With infinite care they left the scene of carnage and searched for a path through the cavern. Even though neither of them possessed certain knowledge that this cavern actually led to the necromancer's residence, each of them felt it in their guts. If Veronica was right and Chesterfield had betrayed Deray, inviting dire retaliation, then the tunnel that brought the attackers—however it was made—had to come from somewhere.

But where? And how far was it? Grey had no way of knowing.

Just as he had no way of knowing what new horrors stood between them and the answers.

Looks Away carried the lantern and walked bent over, frowning at the ground, making soft grunting noises to himself to confirm or reject possible trails. Then he found it. On the far side of a cracked ridge of lichen-covered rock there was a distinctive line of glistening slime. They both agreed it was the same as the trail of whatever had bored through the tunnel into the basement of Chesterfield's mansion. Moving as quickly as caution allowed, they followed the trail down the slope and along the night-dark sea.

The sand crunched softly under their feet, and in places felt dangerously soft, as if some trap or pocket might open up beneath them. Tendrils of colorless seaweed lay rotting on the shores, moved now and again by desultory waves. The bioluminescence in the seawater made the waves glimmer, but not in any way Grey thought was attractive. The water itself seemed to be rank with the odor of decay.

The light from their lantern and the glow from the fungi allowed them to see much more of the underground waters than they wanted to. Dark shapes moved in the waves, crashing through the rollers, pale and unnatural. Misshapen bodies that did not look like fish rolled to show mottled gray-white bellies. Fins as tall as the sails of fishing boats sliced along and once they saw a huge mouth rise up and swallow a foundering creature that was as large as a circus elephant. Then a moment later a tentacle thicker than a maple tree rose dripping from the water, wrapped around the monstrous shark, and dragged it thrashing down into the depths. Blood as black as oil bubbled up.

“This must be what Hell looks like,” gasped Grey, recoiling from the chunks of half-eaten meat that washed up onto the sand.

“I've heard Hell is much pleasanter,” quipped Looks Away, though there was no humor in his expression.

Their words sounded too loud, even with the thunder of the surf, and they fell into a desperate hush as they hurried along.

The beach stretched on and on, and the slimy trail ran along it, smearing the sand to a glistening paste. It occurred to Grey that anything massive and powerful enough to have gnawed a tunnel from this cavern all the way into the cellars of Chesterfield's house would be far beyond their skill to defeat. Maybe even beyond the soul-destroying power of the Kingdom rifle. Following the creature was one thing, encountering it would be something to avoid at all costs.

A cry made them stop and look up and there, circling at the very edge of the upsweep of light was a pterosaur. Another joined it. Then another.

“They're getting over their fear,” said Grey, laying his hand on the butt of his pistol.

“I'm bloody well not,” Looks Away assured him.

The pteranodons continued to circle but did not, at least for the moment, draw closer. Grey wanted to take that as a hopeful sign, but he found that nothing down here reassured him.

The trail abruptly swerved away from the midnight sea and they followed it through an archway of smoky quartz spears, some of which were as massive as redwoods. The spears were interlaced like the steepled fingers of some sleeping giant and they crept beneath them. Grey nudged Looks Away to direct his attention to the deep cracks and fissures in some of the overhead shafts, and from the look of sick fear on his friend's face, he wished he hadn't. They quickened their pace.