Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (8 page)

There
was an audible thud as he brought his hands together with trip hammer speed and
force and caught the plummeting cannonball. He felt the impact in the heels of
his hands, even felt his feet sink a few inches into the sand. His hair blew
back, but there was no explosion.

He
stood holding the humming twelve pound ball over his head, and slowly lowered
his arms, bringing the heavy iron before his eyes.

“Madre
de Dios,” someone whispered behind him.

Gersh
looked back. It was Trib. He was on his side, bathed in sweat and staring wide
eyed.

Gersh
looked down at the woman Marina. She was peering up at him in awe, holding her
boy and crossing herself.

Then
Gersh looked up at the ridge. The figures were scrambling over the cannon.
Gersh threw the cannonball aside and lifted up Marina and her boy to their
feet.

Wilkes
poked his head out from behind the rubble he’d leapt behind.

“Get
over here and get that man out of here!” Gersh roared at him, gesturing to Trib
as Marina scooped up her son and ran back towards the saloon.

Wilkes
came over and went into the hut. Gersh saw him hoisting the groaning Trib up,
when the cannon fired again.

Gersh
turned his attention back to the ridge, and saw the ball approaching as before.
The aim had been slightly corrected. There was little arch to its path. Now it
was headed straight for him.

He
was dimly aware of Wilkes and Trib limping away, when he opened his arms and
caught the second screaming cannonball between his hands with a grunt against
his chest. It should have blown a sizable hole in him and sent his arms and
legs to the compass points, but it was like catching a medicine ball or a
tossed sack of flour. The iron was hot, but it quickly cooled between his
calloused palms.

He
looked at it disbelieving, then turned his attention towards the ridge once
more.

The
silhouettes on the hogback were mounting their horses. Two came streaming down
the front, slaloming among the boulders.

He
tucked the cannonball into his elbow and beat his feat toward the single shack
still standing in the row of demolished outbuildings. He needed Rider.

* * * *

“I’m
your teacher’s favorite pupil, Rider,” said Sheardown.

“His
favorite pupil?” the Rider said. “Are their others?”

“Oh
yes. He made an offer, well, really an ultimatum to some of your brothers, you
see. An ultimatum he intended to give you, but you ran out to fight in that
silly war. Really, what is the lot of some dumb coloreds to you? They’re not
much better off now are they? At any rate, you mustn’t think he was entirely
merciless to the Sons of the Essenes. He gave them all the same chance. Join a
new order, or be destroyed. A few joined, most didn’t. Well, he had to
replenish the ranks so to speak, so he taught your techniques to others.” He
tapped his own breast, which glinted with a multitude of talismans through his
open coat.
“Me, for instance.”

The
Rider wasn’t sure which revelation was worse; that the Sons of the Essenes were
completely eradicated, or that some of their number had actually escaped death
and joined the turncoat Adon.

“What
is this new order?”

“Nothing less than the saviors of humanity, Rider.
We’re
ushering in a glorious new age. We will break the fetters at the Hour of
Incursion, and That Which Strains
Against
Its Chains
will swing wide the doors for The Great Old Ones. We will unleash hell and The
Great Dying will come upon the Earth, and all of us who aided its coming will
become as gods ourselves.”

His
eyes glazed for a moment, as if seeing some far off day, and he spoke like
one reciting poetry
; “That thing is not dead which doth
exist eternally, and if the Strange Ones come, then death may cease to be.”

“What
does that mean?”

“You
needn’t concern yourself overly,” said Sheardown, leveling his pistol and
grinning again down the length of the barrel. “You’ll be long dead by then.”

“Wait…,”
said the Rider, hurriedly. “Tell me more. Like you said, I left before I could
hear the offer.”

“Forget
it, Rider,” Sheardown said. “Adon knows you too well to think you’d ever join
us now.”

* * *
*

Gersh thrust his head into the doorway of the shack.

There
was Dr. Sheardown, sitting in the same posture as Rider in the saloon, in a
similar circle etched in the floor.
He did not react to
Gersh’ sudden appearance in the least.

At
first, Gersh hesitated. What was going on? What did Sheardown’s name on Rider’s
flesh mean? Was it a message to help the doctor, to protect him, or to save
Rider from him? Was he with the men on the ridge somehow? Was he helping Rider
against them? He peered at Sheardown’s pristine, bright clothes. There was no
fresh blood on him anywhere. It was all the dried stuff left over from the
shelling. He wore a placid smile on his reposing face. His greatcoat was
unbuttoned, and Gersh could see pendants such as Rider wore hanging from around
his thin neck. He looked at the designs. No, these were different than the
one’s Rider wore. Some of the images carved on their faces harrowed Gersh’s
soul. He saw cavorting beasts of shapes he couldn’t place—mismatched forms culled
from every crawling thing he had heard tell of, and others he had not.

A
strange instinct had led him to catch an artillery round with his bare hands
today—to save the lives of four people. He decided to trust that same instinct
now. Gersh lifted the cannonball and with a grunt, brought it down on
Sheardown’s balding skull, mashing it flat. Blood spurted in four simultaneous
gouts from the slight man’s nose and ears. There was a crackling as his head
was driven down between his shoulders. The doctor’s little body crumpled inward
and sagged to the dirt. He was dead without any protest.

Gersh
looked down at the murder he had done, but somehow, felt no shame. Perhaps he
had no time. He heard the galloping of horses, and turned and ran from the
shack.

* * *
*

Sheardown’s pistol disappeared in his hand as his trigger finger
twitched with mortal intent. The strange amulets draping his narrow shoulders
disappeared also. His whole astral image wavered like firelight on water, and
suddenly his feet left the ground.

His
expression went from one of self satisfied deliberation, to confusion, to
terror in the span of seconds. He stumbled, and like a man suddenly bereft of
the assurance of gravity and all physical laws, the momentum carried him head
over heels. He seemed to blow every which way, like something carried on the
wind. He spun and somersaulted and twisted away.

The
Rider stood and drew his
Volcanic
pistol. Evidently
his message to Gersh had gotten through. Bereft of a body to anchor him to the
mortal plane, his etheric tether to life severed, Sheardown’s consciousness was
adrift like an unmanned skiff in the mostly unpredictable tempest of astral
‘weather.’

Sheardown
twitched and cavorted madly, trying to regain control of
himself
.
He was blubbering, in a scared panic. The supernal currents were intent on
blowing him into chaos, something only a master traveler’s willpower could even
hope to prevent. Favorite pupil or not, Sheardown was obviously no master. He
was only a ghost now, subject to the whims of more powerful forces. Adon might
call his shade back from the gulf for answers, but he was off to where there
was no returning.

“If
he asks you, tell him I’m coming! Tell them all I’m coming!” the Rider yelled
to be heard.

He
aimed at Sheardown and fired, and the blue-white blast struck Sheardown’s face.
Sheardown screamed in despairing horror as his ethereal body dispersed like a
shattered pain of glass. All that he was went swirling off in twinkling
fragments across the green desert on purple, chaotic winds that funneled into
the raging red sky. Let Adon look for his pieces in Sheol.

“Thank
you, Gershom,” he whispered, and taking out his horse talisman, he conjured his
mount once more.

In
a moment he was again galloping towards the cannon, all aglow with red-gold
fire on the crest of the uneven hogback.

* * * *

Two
riders galloped into the settlement on black horses. One was a bald man with a
tremendous curling black mustache, big arms rippling from the sleeves of a
dirty wool vest, a pair of black bullwhips bouncing on his hips like coiled
snakes. His shaven head was covered in densely packed, angry red sores, like a
wig of tumors. The other was a pale, willowy girl with great sad eyes and a
wild bush of frizzy, dead yellow hair on her head. She wore a red bandana and a
raggedy white duster, and gripped a thick cigar between her teeth.

They
slowed as they passed through the buildings, and Gersh barely got behind one of
the shacks when the girl suddenly gave her boot heels to her horse and rode
straight for the shack where he’d killed the doctor.

She
swung off her saddle before the horse had stopped, and landed nimbly in the
dust. She slipped a sawed-off Winchester from her coat and ducked inside,
reappearing a moment later.

“Kaftzefoni!” she called.

“Yeah?”
answered the big one.

“The
little doctor’s dead!”

“Looks
like the
Rider’s
got a goddamned guardian angel down
here somewhere,” Kaftzefoni said, as the girl led her horse back to him.

“Looks
like.”

“Well
let’s make some angels ourselves,” he mused, touching one of his bullwhips.
“Startin’ with this one right here!” he spun quickly. The whip hissed out to
its full length and snapped around Wilkes’ head as the shaken drover suddenly
broke from cover and made a run for the shotgun Gersh had left laying in the
alleyway.

The
whip coiled around Wilkes’ face and jerked him off his feet. He landed flat on
his back screaming, and Kaftzefoni laughed and began to reel him slowly in,
dragging him kicking across the ground.

He
stood in his saddle and said loudly;

“Alright,
I’m gonna take this one apart scrap by scrap, till I start seein’ faces!”

Gersh
stayed where he was, but he heard a rustle behind
him,
and from the wood shack next to the ruined saloon, Baines stepped out with his
shotgun.

The
girl picked him out right away and levered her stubby Winchester. She walked
towards him as if to take him prisoner.

“Where’s
the Rider?” she called.

Baines
held his shotgun over his head and came towards her. He was beat. Had seen his
friend die, had his nerves rattled. He’d had enough.

“I
have no idea,” he said in a tired voice.

The
girl shot him in the chin.

He
fell to his knees, gurgling, spitting teeth and choking on chunks of jawbone.
Then he went to his face, where he kicked a few times as he bled out.

She
walked brazenly past the spot where Gersh was crouched. She was pale as
bleached bone, and her skin was dotted all over with freckles. Her eyes were
yellow.

“Murderin’
bitch!” it was Purdee, and he appeared in the doorway of a shack directly
across, and gave her both barrels of his shotgun. The sound was like two Dutch
ovens banging together.

She
threw up her arm and staggered back, buckshot peppering the side of her coat.
But Sheardown had apparently not loaded Purdee’s shells with rock salt, and the
blast did nothing more than knock her down and rip her clothes.

Purdee
threw down the shotgun and snagged at his pistol, but the air hissed and
cracked and Kaftzefoni’s whip looped around his elbow and jerked him off his
feet.

The
girl rose shakily to her feet, retrieving her Winchester and glaring at the
black man lying in the dirt.

Kaftzefoni
still had Wilkes wrapped up in the other whip, kneeling at his horse’s feet,
and he withdrew the whip from Purdee’s arm with an expert flick that left a
thin, bloody rip in his sleeve.

Gersh
stared. There was the shotgun he’d dropped, but had Baines loaded it, or had
Sheardown? He saw one of the salt barrels lying nearby too. He could take up
that barrel and maybe use it as a weapon, but it would be the girl or the
bullwhip man. They were too fast for him to get them both.

The
girl jacked her Winchester and went to stand over Purdee. She aimed one handed
down at him.

Gersh
was about to spring at her when the Colonel slipped out of the same shack
Purdee had emerged from, and hit her point blank with both barrels of Cashion’s
shotgun, the explosion so close and loud it was like a thunderclap.

The
blast flung her slight form right out of her boots and a full eight feet back,
splattering the Colonel and Purdee with yellow slime. Baines had loaded that
one, then. She slammed hard against the wall of a stone hut and her upper body
broke apart in black and brown fragments.