Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (59 page)

Lepsy reached the table and scooped
up his whiskey bottle. He took a grand swig and went back through the crowd,
past the jakes, towards the digging. For good measure, the bottle left his lips
and a jet of fire erupted across the yard, catching a clothesline behind a
laundry and dancing along all the linens.

The Rider glanced at Belden, saw him
raise the head of the dead or unconscious teamster, spit once in his bloody
face, and drop him contemptuously. They saw each other and the Rider nodded and
went after Lepsy.

Through the back lot he ran, toward
the Fire King shaft. The canvas there was already ablaze, and the skinny
laborer they had seen clumsily carrying barrels was wheeling about on fire,
screaming.

The Rider tried to reach him, but he
fell back into the collapsing pavilion and by the dwindling of his echoing
yell, he had fallen into the hole, taking the remains of the burning canvas
trailing the whipping lines and stakes with him.

The Rider saw Lepsy climbing into
the driver’s seat of the wagon.

“Lepsy!” he hollered.

Lepsy looked over his shoulder and
laughed.

“Xaphan’s the name, Rider. Xaphan.
No time to chat. This town’s about to go to Hell and whalp, I already been
there.”

Xaphan. He had heard the name at
least. The Fallen angel who had set fire to Paradise when he had seen Lucifer’s
Rebellion was about to fail.

Lepsy/Xaphan turned then and snapped
the reins. The already terrified horses bolted down the alley and he lifted a
hand in a parting salute and sent another jet of fire belching into the night
sky. It came down like a rain on another building and torched the roof almost
instantly.

Somewhere close by a fire bell began
to clang.

The Rider was about to give chase
when Belden caught him by the coat.

“Not that way,” he shouted. “This
way.”

They ran down an adjoining alley
which emptied out onto Fifth and south to the corner.

They spied Lepsy and the wagon about
to cross Fifth when he nearly collided with the fire wagon galloping
desperately down from the fire house at the opposite end of the street.

“Get that goddamn rig out of the way
you damn fool,” screamed a bug eyed volunteer.

Lepsy cursed and jumped down from
the wagon, leaving the irate firefighters to sort out the tangled horses as he
ran back down the alley, the Rider and Belden on his heels.

He threw plumes of fire back in
their direction, but they flung themselves to the ground and renewed their
chase when the flaming clouds had passed.

They found themselves back at the
Fire King shaft, now smoking and eliciting a strange, pervading hiss.

“Iron…” the Rider said, looking
frantically around.

“What?” said Belden.

“Iron! Iron. Find me some iron.” It
was possible he could draw Xaphan out and trap him for a time in iron. He had
done it once before, to Lix Tetrax.

But what could he use?

Belden scooped up something from the
dirt and tossed it to the Rider.

He caught it. A pick axe. Was the
head iron? Probably…

“Shit,” Lepsy yelled, when he saw
where he was. He spun and leered at them. “Ah hell, you go on and take this
body, Rider. I’ll find another…”

He opened his arms and grinned. His
eyes began to roll up. He was leaving Lepsy behind.

“Hold on, Xaphan!” the Rider yelled.
“By the treachery of Ornias and by the Pentalpha Seal granted unto…”

Just then something arced down from
the smoky sky and transfixed Lepsy from behind the right collarbone to just
above his left hip. He wheeled drunkenly in shock and tried to scream, but
instead vomited blood.

“That’ll work, too,” Belden
remarked.

The red lanterns had exploded when
the fire crept up the fence and sign, so the Rider wrenched out his spectacles
and put them over his eyes.

In the body of Lepsy, the Rod of
Aaron had spitted the demonic child too. It wailed terribly as blue-white light
spilled from its terrible wound. It dissipated, and when it was gone, Lepsy
fell, his mortal soul departed already.

The Rider took off the spectacles
and saw Kabede come running with the Elder Sign Henry rifle in his hand and his
own Volcanic in his pants pocket. His hat was gone and he was blinking at the
ash in the air.

Belden took the Henry and the Rider
took his pistol.

“Nice toss, partner,” Belden said
admiringly.

Kabede went to Lepsy’s corpse and
put his boot to the side of his head, wrenching the Rod of Aaron free in
increments.

“Where’s the old man?” Belden
called, as somewhere on Fourth Street a tremendous explosion sent a shudder
through the ground beneath their feet and pieces of flaming wood blew a hundred
feet into the air.

The explosion was quickly followed
by a rapid series of erratic shots of every caliber. The powder in the gun
store had exploded and the fire was setting off cartridges. It was like the
Fourth of July and the Battle of Glorieta Pass rolled into one.

“The whole city’s burning,” Kabede
shouted above the din. “The Chinese quarter’s burning too. He’s driving the
wagon north out of town.”

“I thought he said no force on Earth
could hurt that rig?”

“Not so the animals,” Kabede shouted
back, freeing the Rod of Aaron at last and wrinkling his nose at the blood and
gore that dripped down its length.

“Well, let’s get the hell out of
here, too.”

“Wait,” said the Rider. “The
barrels.”

They rushed back down the alley to
where Lepsy had abandoned the wagon. It was still there, but the fire brigade
had cut the horses loose in their rush to disentangle their engine.

The fire was blazing in the heart of
Tombstone, and though Russ House was in flames, the miner’s shanties on the
south side of Toughnut were untouched, so they were relatively safe.

The Rider went cautiously to the
tailgate and pulled it down.

“What are they?” Kabede asked.

“Don’t know,” the Rider answered.

“We knocked on one, and somethin’
knocked back,” said Belden.

Hundun
,
China Mary had said. What did the word mean?

He reached in and gingerly touched
the barrel. It seemed normal. This was the one that had popped a rivet when the
skinny laborer had plunked it down. One of the iron bands was loose.

“Hey,” shouted an angry voice from
behind them.

They all turned to see a suited
deputy sheriff come marching toward them, his revolver in his hand. The man was
soot streaked and at his wit’s end, his smudged paper collar half sprung from
his neck.

“Looks like I got some looters,” he
said when he was within a few feet. He cocked his revolver and pointed. “Armed
too. You boys rob the gunsmith before it went?”

“You got it wrong, deputy,” Belden
said.

“Just you throw that rifle down,
mister,” the deputy commanded.

Belden did as he was told.

“And you boy,” he said to Kabede. “Drop
that stick.”

Kabede did.

The deputy, young for the job, hiding
it with a prodigious mustache and beard, came close and kicked the rifle away.
Too close.

The Rider lunged to grab his
revolver.

The younger man was quicker and
retained it, saw the glitter of the Volcanic at his waist and tried to grab
that too.

In the scuffle the Rider fell
against the wagon, and the barrel in back tipped back.

“Watch it,” Belden yelled.

Both men leapt away from each other,
and the heavy barrel fell between them, smashing to planks in the street.

Something tumbled, or rather splattered
out.

It was entirely black, and viscous
like jelly. The flickering fire from Russ House reflected crazily in the stuff.
There was enough of it to fill the barrel. It was thick, and before their eyes,
it seemed to thicken, coalescing into a bulky shape.

“What the hell?” the deputy managed,
and then it was on him.

Tendrils sprang from the shapeless
mass, forming and lashing out at the speed of thought. Dozens of them. They
enveloped the deputy, pulling him in, no, pulling its greater bulk over him,
mummifying him as it came, burning his flesh with every touch.

The Rider scrambled backwards on his
hands and Belden ran to retrieve his rifle as the muffled screams of the deputy
were drowned out by a vicious crackling noise as the thing physically subsumed
him.

The Rider reached the curb as the
black thing flowed off of the mangled, smoking deputy and began to slide
towards him. Even as it did, it took on a new shape, vaguely humanoid, the size
of a child. It grew a faceless head with ear buds, but the head was the wrong
way around. It rose up on hands and feet, thin arms and legs, but it was
without orifice or detail, and its locomotion was strange, scuttling, like a
monkey or a spider. The Rider realized it was aping his clumsy backwards crawl.

The thing loped towards him, gaining
speed as it grew surer of the new means of movement.

Belden began to lever and fire the
Henry into the thing. At first the bullets rocked it and flung it aside, but
then it began to anticipate the shots, and wherever the bullets sought to
penetrate, a perfect hole would open, allowing the projectiles to pass
harmlessly through its body and ricochet off the street.

Kabede had retrieved the Rod of
Aaron, and he lunged at it with the pointed end, skewering it through the head,
driving it, and pinning it to the hub of the wagon wheel. Instantly it was
changing again, the limbs bending backwards to remove the offending staff, but
wherever it touched, it bubbled and hissed. The point where the Rod had gone in
changed to a greenish color, and the green bubbled and spread swiftly down the
length of the thing, as its limbs became tentacles and whipped madly out,
reaching for Kabede, finding the staff, recoiling from its touch. The legs
flowed across the ground and a mass of bulges appeared, which then bloomed into
dozens of black toad-like eyes that bulged and looked all about, settled on
Kabede.

A mouth opened lengthwise in what
had been the torso. A mouth of black teeth and tongue that screamed in a
perfect replication of the dead deputy, and as the scream rose in pitch,
several smaller mouths split open all around the first and took up the cry, in
effect creating a chorus of death screams.

Knee joints, bones, elongated
fingers, toes, genitalia, all began to form in rapid succession and strove to
touch Kabede. Then the green glow reached the end of the thing and the
screaming died out. The improvised features lost their shape and fell back into
the sizzling protoplasmic mass. Soon, what was left dripped off the staff and
pooled on the ground, then quickly dried into a smoking, noxious smelling
stain.

Belden stood over the black stain
with his Henry aimed down at it.

Kabede and the Rider rose slowly and
joined him, panting.

“What was that thing?” Kabede asked.

“
Hundun
,”
the Rider murmured. He crouched and prodded at the shattered barrel that had
contained it. He picked up the iron barrel hoop and showed it to them. In the
light of the fire, they saw that the inner surface was etched with the Elder
Sign, over and over again. “Something to do with the Old Ones.”

They all looked at the wagon in
unison. There were eleven such barrels in the bed.

It took the efforts of all three and
the better part of thirty minutes to drag the wagon back down the alley between
the burning, crumbling buildings to the lip of the Fire King mineshaft, and
another twenty to dump the barrels in.

They heard the barrels shatter with
tremendous noise at the dark bottom, followed by a cacophony of hissing and
strange sounds. The sounds were almost like speech, but the words made no
sense.

“
Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!”

They waited with the Rod of Aaron,
but nothing came up. Whatever method Lepsy/Xaphan had employed to keep the
things from rising out of the shaft was holding.

“Now what?” Belden asked.

They were all of them exhausted and
blackened, coughing from the smoke of the burning town around them.

Somewhere on the north side of the
city they began to hear explosions.

“They’re dynamiting the untouched
buildings,” Belden observed. “To stop the fire.”

Tombstone was doomed.

The bullets were still popping off
now and again.

“Sounds like a war,” the Rider
observed.

“It is not the sound of victory,”
said Kabede, staring at the staff. “Nor the sound of defeat.”

The words Moses had used, coming
down from Sinai with the stone tablets bearing the Law.

They stared at him, as with sudden
purpose, he lifted the staff over his head and brought the point down hard on
the lip of the shaft with both hands.