Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (11 page)

“How did you get away, Jeffries?”
Manx asked. His voice was very hoarse.

“I didn’t. They…let me go.” His eyes
widened for a moment. “They did somethin’ to me.”

The Rider looked over as Cord
returned with a pair of orderlies bearing a field stretcher and Milton bringing
up the rear in his undershirt. Milton looked terrible. The dark rings under his
eyes had deepened. As he watched, Milton’s bag popped open and his instruments
spilled on the ground. He stopped to pick them up, and the two orderlies put
down their stretcher and knelt to help him.

“What are you talking about?” Manx
said, taking an uncertain step back. He looked over across the parade ground
and spotted Milton and the two orderlies fumbling with his bag. Cord stood over
them, watching.

“Cord. What the hell are you doing?
Help them!”

Cord nodded and eased to his knee,
obviously a little stiff from the beating he’d sustained.

Then Jeffries began to gag and shake
in Quincannon’s arms.

“Lay him down,” Weeks told
Quincannon. “He’s havin’ some kinda fit.”

“I can’t!” said Quincannon. And he
couldn’t, for Jeffries was holding onto his arms for dear life, his hands
clawing into the corporal’s sleeves.

“The hell,” said Weeks. He nudged
the man nearest him. “Help him.”

The trooper stooped down to help pry
the trembling scout loose.

A sound built up deep in Jeffries’
throat, and it erupted from his lips as soon as the trooper laid a hold of him.

It was a horrible, agonized scream,
such as no one thought a hard man like Jeffries capable of.

What happened then caused everyone
gathered around to freeze in place.

Jeffries’ eyes bulged almost
imperceptibly for half an instant, before they burst in their sockets,
splattering Quincannon full in the face with not only blood and eye jelly, but
a strange, dark green substance.

Quincannon fell back, gagging, but
the blind scout continued to grasp him, screaming. Each of his ragged, empty
eye sockets sprouted some sharp, black, tapered growth, spotted with quivering
quill-like bristles that twitched nervously as they extended ten or twelve
inches past Jeffries’ face, to bend at knotty joints.

Jeffries’ voice was choked off
wetly, but Quincannon took up his scream, scrambling to disengage himself from
the shuddering man. But his shrieks were muffled, as if the green resin that
covered his face was solidifying. He gave up trying to break away and began to
claw at the slime on his lips. Jeffries’ hands were locked onto his sleeves,
and every motion made the scouts’ corpse gesticulate like a shaken doll.
Quincannon fell on his back, eyes rolling wildly, seeking help.

Weeks procured a hip knife from the
nearest man and advanced to help his comrade.

They heard a series of loud cracks
then, and Weeks jumped away, startled. Jeffries’ head began to swell and bulge,
as if his skull were suddenly malleable, or had broken apart. His face sagged,
features stretching like some kind of bizarre mask. Blood poured from his ears
and nose and bubbled from his grotesquely distorted mouth.

The Rider backed away from the
unreal scene, pulling the dumbstruck Belden with him.

Kabede turned and looked at them,
his lips parted, face screwed up in an expression of incomprehension.

“Get back!” the Rider yelled.

Kabede moved.

All the soldiers began to move away,
stumbling against each other.

Jeffries’ elastic face, stretched
now to the breaking point, split in two with a wet, audible tearing, and a pair
of jagged saber like protrusions erupted from the space, opening and closing
with a loud click clack. The man’s ruined visage fell away, and a bulky black
object from which the waving feelers, and what looked to be great serrated
pincers, emerged, shining with gore in the sun. In the middle of the domelike
thing the Rider saw three gaping wet slashes in a pyramidal arrangement
smacking hungrily. On either side, two glossy black insect eyes, like highly
polished stones. The thing hissed in chorus from its three maws.

Jeffries’ corpse inflated and sharp
angles appeared beneath his clothes as the thing within him began to burst out
as if he were an unneeded chrysalis.

The pincers closed around the
struggling Quincannon’s neck. His face was turning deep purple. He was
suffocating. In a moment it didn’t matter. The mandibles closed, neatly slicing
off his head like a huge pair of shears. Behind the mandibles a set of spindly
joints emerged and tipped Quincannon’s bleeding stump toward its mouths. Three
wormy labia uncoiled and began to flit and lap noisily at the blood.

Weeks turned and fell. Manx vomited
and stumbled away.

Dozens broke into panicked runs.

Four soldiers drew their sidearms or
angled their Spencer rifles downward and began to systematically destroy the
thing that had sprung from Jeffries.

After the first volley however, the
bulbous insectoid emerging from the ruins of the scout emitted a piercing
shriek and burst like a gorged tic, splattering the same dark green slime that
had nearly suffocated Quincannon in a ten foot radius, with such force that the
men surrounding the thing were knocked flat.

Those running found themselves plastered
to the ground on their bellies by the sticky slime. The less fortunate took the
stuff right in the face, and the Rider heard their muffled oaths as he picked
himself off the ground, surrendering one of his shoes to the noxious muck.

Belden and Kabede were just outside
the explosion, and helped him up.

Cord came running over, and Weeks
picked himself up, having been shielded from the burst by the body of another
man.

“My God!” Manx exclaimed, eyes
bugging, yellowish, blood-mixed bile dripping from his lips. “My God.” He shook
his head over and over.

There was groaning all about them. A
dozen or so soldiers lay trapped in the slime, struggling to rise. The strange
resin was extremely viscous and smelled horrible, like compost and belly
wounds. Their comrades who gingerly attempted to extricate them from the muck
found themselves trapped too, either by their helping hands, or by their boots.

“What happened?” Cord stammered,
looking at the wide circle of slime in the dust and the men writhing in it like
bugs on flypaper. The remains of the dog-sized insect thing in the middle and
Jeffries and Quincannon were almost identifiable at the point of origin, mixed
together as they were and coated in dark ooze.

The incident had proved fatal to at
least one man, who lay face up but dead, a fragment of one large mandible
protruding from his throat.

It may prove fatal to others, the
Rider realized, as the men who were face down in it or had received a portion
of it in the face seemed unable to breathe.

“Don’t touch it!” he warned, as Cord
stooped to grab a man who was reaching out to him. “We have to find some other
way of removing it. It’s too sticky. Tell the other men not to touch it.”

Cord nodded, and he and Weeks both
began ordering the untouched men back from the coated area.

“What the hell is this?” Belden said
to him. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

“No,” the Rider said. “Nothing ever
like this.”

What was that thing? Jeffries had
said they had done something to him. Was it a spell? Had he somehow been
physically implanted with the thing? Whatever it was, he had no doubt it was
some spawn of the Great Old Ones and their ilk. This was something in the
nature of the invisible thing in the cave on Elk Mountain, or the reptilian
Yiggians he had fought near Red House, saurian yet somehow able to breed
hybrids with men. These things were not of the world he knew.

“Look!” Kabede called, and pointed
with the staff.

Across the parade ground, where
Doctor Milton had spilled his instruments and he and the two orderlies had
paused to retrieve them, a similar scene was playing out. Milton was laying
face down in the dirt, curled up into a ball, trembling. The two orderlies were
trying to help him to his feet.

Of the men who had run from
Jeffries, half were standing near Milton.

“Get those men away!” the Rider
yelled.

They saw the orderlies recoil.
Milton, small in the distance, burst apart before their eyes, the bug thing
within spilling out, seeming to sigh like a fat man released from a pair of too
small trousers. It was beetle-like, black with brilliant red-brown coloring on
its bulky, pulsing abdomen.

One of the orderlies scooted back on
his rear, jerking his pistol free.

“Don’t shoot it!” Kabede and several
others screamed. The men nearest Milton turned to run.

The Rider yelled, “Down!”

They crouched as they heard the
report of the orderly’s pistol. There was another shrill hissing shriek, and a
boom as the thing blew apart in the midst of the troopers standing nearby.

Two dozen fell this time, once again
coated in the slime.

“Shit!” Weeks cursed.

Panic was dancing through the other
soldiers now. Still some stooped to help their immobilized fellows and were
caught up like B’rer Rabbit in the tar baby.

“Get away from it! Get away!” the
Rider yelled, waving his arms for emphasis. Cord, Kabede, and Weeks joined in.

Belden grabbed the Rider’s arm.

The Rider turned, and Belden pointed
to Manx, who was standing off by himself.

Manx was stooped over, his hands on
his knees, having just completed a particularly harsh fit of coughing and
vomiting. A mass of dark blood and bile lay in a pool between his boots. Some
of it, the Rider noticed, was dark green, the color of cooked spinach.

“Well, what are you looking at?”
Manx rasped. His hair was in his face, his Van Dyke dark with blood and green
bile.

Belden and the Rider slowly
approached Manx. Kabede saw too, and he moved toward the middle, his staff
raised.

Manx backed away, his blue eyes
flitting between them.

“Well, confound it! What the hell
are you doing?”

His whole body shuddered then, and
he shrugged it off, shaking his head violently.

“Easy, Colonel,” Belden said. “You’re
sick.”

“Goddammit, I know that. Where’s
Milton?”

“He’ll be along,” Belden said. “Let’s
have you lay down though.”

Manx stared at them and grimaced,
wincing with pain.

“Talk to us, colonel,” Kabede said.

“What?”

“Are you in pain?”

“N-no!” he shook his head violently.
“No!”

Then he doubled over, falling to his
knees.

“Grab him!” the Rider hissed.

He and Belden rushed forward, each
slipping their arms into his elbows.

“The guardhouse!” Kabede suggested.

The Rider and Belden dragged the
colonel between them like a wounded man away from a fight. His spurs dug a
shallow trail in the dust.

Manx began to struggle, and it was
like trying to hold onto a raging lion.

“No! No! Weeks! Weeks!” he screamed.

Weeks heard his name and came over
at a run, pistol out.

Kabede turned to face him,
brandishing the Rod of Aaron.

Manx spied Weeks and craned his
neck.

“Don’t let them! Sergeant!”

He started to say something further,
but a mass of the dark green bile blew out of his mouth and he gurgled and
bucked.

“Watch it!” Belden warned.

“Get him into the cell!”

Weeks stopped in his tracks and put
his gun away.

Kabede nodded approvingly and
lowered his staff, then ran to catch up with the others.

They dragged the frothing,
convulsing Manx into the guardhouse, startling Trooper Bigelow to his feet. The
man’s face was red. He had been weeping.

“I didn’t mean to kill him!” Bigelow
whined.

Belden and the Rider ignored him and
fumbled to heave the trembling Manx into the neighboring open cell.

Bigelow pressed against the bars to
watch.

“You got to believe me! I wouldn’t
shoot Jaffray in the head like that. I couldn’t have! I ain’t no traitor!
Jesus, you can’t shoot me!”

He ceased his railing when he saw
what they were doing, and narrowed his eyes.

“Hey…is that the Colonel?”

“Shut up, Bigelow!” Belden snapped,
pulling Manx’s flailing hands out of his face.

They flung him tumbling into the
cell and threw themselves against the bars, slamming it shut.

As Manx scrabbled about in the dirt,
moaning and coughing, they caught their breath.

“Shit!” Belden said after a moment.

“What?” the Rider asked, alarmed.

“Awww, the goddamned keys are on his
belt!”