Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (40 page)

“When I let you go, run back through
the wood,” the Rider whispered in his ear. “Don’t let them see you. Get help.
Get anybody. The marshal, the Army—do you understand?”

Robert swallowed all thought of
further protest when he saw the gathered riders, and he nodded.

“Put up a fight,” the Rider
murmured.

Immediately Robert tried to push
away.

“My pa…”

“He’s alive,” the Rider said loudly.
“Stop fighting.”

The Rider turned over his shoulder.

“Let this family go, Lilith.”

“Human lives are a dime a dozen,”
said Lilith. “What do you know of
shedim
,
Rider?”

“I know how to kill them.”

“Yes of course. But do you know what
it takes to bring one into the world?”

“I’m familiar with the process,” the
Rider said wryly. Unlike their insubstantial bretheren the
ruhin
,
shedim
were
conceived naturally, although they emerged from the rectum.

“For ten months a
lili
carries a
shed
in their womb. It is a great inconvenience. My daughters and I
must ply our trade with our bodies, so it means effectively retiring for the
duration. It’s not often undertaken. The birth is excruciating. After the
shed
is born, they mature rapidly. They
are for all intents and purposes immortal, unless they are killed. They do not
breed with humans or each other.”

“The mules of the
mazzikim
,” the Rider said.

“They are precious to us, Rider,”
said Lilith. “These are all that remain.”

“I never killed one of your children
that didn’t come to kill me first,” he said, struggling to keep the boy from
bolting.

“Junior,” said Lilith.

“Johnny Shada,” said Mazzamauriello.

“Ormzud,” said the monstrous faced
one with the tomahawk.

“Kaftzefoni,” said Tentennino.

“Onoskelis,” said another, an albino
black woman with no hair to speak of.

He recognized the names.

“We mourn our dead, Rider,” said
Mazzamauriello. “And we avenge our brothers and sister.”

“
Farmakh
dos moyl
,” the Rider cursed, releasing Robert and shoving him back into the
woodyard with anger that was only partially pretended. He spun to face them
with an outstretched arm and an accusing finger. “I’ve got a name for you,
Mazzamauriello,” the Rider, snarled. “And it trumps all of yours. Gershom
Turiel! Just an innocent boy. Just a boy and you tore out his throat with your
nasty little dog teeth, you
beheima
.
You killed him, and you gave his body over to that
moser
DeKorte to desecrate. Well, those
shedim
weren’t the first I killed. In the war I killed a lot more.
Anybody you’re missing I probably accounted for, in fact. You want names? I’ll
give you a long list of names and you can
gai
kukken afen yam!”

The
shedim
grumbled all throughout this tirade, eager to kill.

“Your name’ll be on our list too,
Jew,” hissed the bald woman.

“I have no name!” the Rider roared
in answer.

He brought out his pistol and
levered a shot, as quick as Tentennino had done. Though he didn’t dare to hope
he’d hit anything, he heard one of them give out a scream and saw him tumble
from the back of his horse. Then he was running into the woodyard, praying
Haddox took the opportunity to drag himself and Emory back into the house.
Bullets smacked the wood all around, and then the horses were galloping.

But they couldn’t ride more than one
at a time down the narrow, twisting paths he took. The first horseman that
tried, the Rider blew him off his mount and left him fizzing and screaming in
the dirt, the salt from the bullet eating him away from the inside.

Six shots left.

Another came behind him, screeching
a raucous rebel yell as he came. The next minute he was spitting teeth and
gurgling and sliding from his saddle, rebounding off the walls of wood before
crumpling to the ground where his terrified horse stomped on him in its effort
to back out of the narrow space.

Five shots.

The Rider rushed further back into
the maze of lumber, pistol pointed behind, but not firing. Every shot had to
count.

The albino woman thought she was
sly. She dismounted and crept in the shadows, using the panicked horses of her
dead brothers for cover. The Rider risked the wasted bullet and brought one of
the mounts down on top of her, then blasted her dead where she lay.

Only three shots now.

“Stop,” Mazzamauriello’s enraged
voice called. “Tentennino! Splitfoot! Get back here!”

“Who did we lose?” called another.

“Berlicche, Ticchi-Tacchi, and
Piznal.”

“What about Satanasso’s wound?”

“He’s dying,” called another,
farther away.

“Malacosa! Fistolo,” called
Mazzamauriello. “Get on top of the pile. Stay low. Iscaaron! Cifero! Follow me.
We will tear this place to matchsticks and drag him out.”

“No,” Lilith called out, in a flat,
calm voice. “Iscaaron, Cifero, and Puzzolente.”

There was a pause as all the
shedim
ceased their doings to hear their
matriarch’s command.

“Bring me fire.”

They were going to burn the yard,
smoke him out. He turned to run. He had to find a path through this. The path
Robert had taken. He crouched and squinted through the ricks to try and find
the river, but it was pitch black. Then he heard a sound from deep in the back
piles, and made for it, hoping it wasn’t some raccoon.

Left he turned. Right. Left again,
like a scared fox navigating a thicket, listening for the barking of the
hounds. Was he going in circles? If he emerged into the house yard again, what
a crock that would be. He stopped to listen over the pounding of his own heart.
What about Haddox and Emory and the house? He couldn’t run. They would kill
them if he left. Fire the house as well.

How far had Robert gotten by now? It
didn’t much matter. Once the fire started it would bring men from Yuma, wouldn’t
it? They would have to kill him quick before help arrived. Or would they gun
down whoever came? He had to kill them before more innocents died.

As he thought that, he took a step
and nearly tripped over Robert’s body in the dark. The boy lay face down, but
his toes pointed up. Someone had turned his head completely around.

He closed his eyes and murmured a
brief prayer, as much for his own piece of mind as the boy’s soul. Another
innocent dead because the Rider had stopped by.

He drew his knife. Who was in the
woodyard already? Had one of them snuck around? Was Lilith’s talk of fire just
a diversion?

No, he smelled the coal oil then,
and saw the light over the tops of the ricks as it flared up. There was an arc
of light high in the night sky, and then a crash. The edge of the woodyard
where he’d stood was burning, the old timber quickly catching.

He glanced at the murdered boy and
moved on.
Not one more
, he thought.

He spied the rear of the woodyard emptying
out to the riverbank, where Robert had been heading, and ran for it.

His peripheries freed of the
woodpiles, a horseman came into view. They saw each other at the same moment.
The man in the saddle had on a rumpled top hat and no nose. A revolver gleamed
in his fist, but he had no time to bring it to bear.

“Make sure he don’t try and sneak
out one of the—” the man was saying, and the Rider was running towards him. A
bullet cut out his next words, busting into the horseman’s breast.

He gagged, wheezed, and sagged in
the saddle, blackish slime spilling from the wound and gushing down the neck of
the horse.

The Rider caught the animal’s reins,
jerked the dying
shed
down and
vaulted into the saddle, nearly slipping off on the slime the dead man left behind.

He leaned over its neck and dug in
his heels, spurring it around the edge of the woodyard, away from town, toward
the rear of the house.

Angry shouts erupted behind him,
punctuated with snapping gunfire and the beating of hooves.

Two shots. Only two. He couldn’t
waste them firing at nothing. He leaned low.

Then the wood piles fell away to his
right and there was the house. He steered the horse right and made for it,
swinging as far to the left of the animal as he could, nearly hanging off the
side like a Comanche in a dime novel. He could feel it shudder as bullets
smacked against its right flank. The legs gave and it crashed nose first into
the dirt, flipping over, nearly taking the Rider underneath, but he let go,
letting himself be flung.

His shoulder struck the ground and
he rolled twice.

He shook his senses back and got to
his feet. That was when the noose dropped down and slipped under his chin. He
managed to get his fingers between the rope and his throat as it drew taut and
hoisted him off his feet, snapping his pinky and ring finger and driving his
hand into his own Adam’s apple.

He hung suspended and dangling. His
pistol fell to the ground. He felt his eyes bulge, his face flush red.

He managed to look up, and saw
Mazzamauriello on the roof, gripping the rope in his dark little hands and
grinning.

“Swing, Rider! Swing and dance!” he
cackled, and turning, he put the rope to his shoulder and began to race up the
slope of the roof.

The Rider’s free hand found the
handle of his Bowie knife and he pulled it out. Gasping, the trapped air
burning his pinched throat, he brought the point deliberately up, praying he
would not cut his own throat. He did manage to nick his finger, but the keen
iron blade parted the noose and he fell in a heap, dashing his head on the
bottom of the porch stairs.

He heard Mazzamauriello give a
surprised cry and go tumbling off the other side of the house, the frayed end
of the rope trailing behind him.

Four horses were bearing down at
him. Coughing, he dropped his knife in its sheath and picked up his pistol. He
pulled himself onto the porch and made for the back door, taking aim, even as
wild shots struck the porch rails and the wall behind him: thudded into the
door, blew out the glass in the window, tore through the hem of his coat,
skimmed his sleeve, bit away the tip of his left ear. His left eye filled with
stinging blood suddenly and he feared he’d been shot, but it was the gash the
edge of the porch had opened in his scalp.

He brushed it away quickly, aimed,
and fired his last two bullets.

One
shed
fell screaming off the rump of his animal, clawing at his
bubbling face.

The other bullet struck a horse in
the breast. The rider was the man with the gigantic face. He had wild black
hair too, and a beaded headband that could have fit around a fat man’s waist.
He leapt nimbly from the dying horse onto the porch right at the Rider’s feet,
and a chilling war cry issued from his mangled lips. The dark eyes deep set in
his malformed face were wild and he brought the tomahawk down to cleave the
Rider’s face in two.

The Rider rolled, and the blade sank
deep into the door.

The Rider slipped out from under the
big
shed’s
arms and pulled himself up
and through the broken window, slashing up his elbows and side as he tumbled to
the floor inside.

He was in a short rear hall leading
to the kitchen, and Haddox was leaning in the kitchen doorway, using the
terrified Emory’s head to support him.

“Get back,” the Rider warned.

Haddox drew the little girl back
into the kitchen as the rear door blew open in a haze of splinters and the wild
shed
burst through, bellowing. His
father might’ve been some kind of Indian, for he wore a fringed buckskin vest
stretched tight over a powerful chest that was riddled with distorted muscles and
other indescribable deformities. The fleshy, flipper-like arm that did not hold
the whistling tomahawk was mostly useless, disproportionate, and overgrown with
bunched tumors and lesions, but he swung it like a sack of potatoes and
battered the Rider against the wall, smashing a table with a china tea set to
pieces.

The huge Indian
shed
filled the hallway, and the Rider could see his three of his
brothers and sisters behind him clamoring for him to get down or move aside so
they could fill the hall with lead. One had a stick of dynamite in his hand,
the coil of fuse whipping about as he madly gesticulated for his brother to get
the hell out of the way.

For whatever reason, this one wanted
the Rider for his own, and he chopped with the tomahawk again. The Rider
dropped his pistol and yanked his Bowie knife out of its scabbard, barely
knocking aside the hatchet head.

Stumbling backwards, he felt for and
found Piishi’s knife, the one with the antler handle the Apache had given him.
He had tucked it in the small of his back behind the belt, and he pulled it now
and surprised his opponent, jabbing it to the hilt in his hard belly.