Skinwalkers (21 page)

“S
hut it
,“
Dewayne said. Little Joe forced the mission door closed. Dewayne turned to Wilson. “We’ll give them a minute to pass and then head out.“ The group dropped into silence as the howls and roars began to sound outside the door.

“This is insane,“ the reverend whispered. “We shouldn’t have let him go.“

“He knew the risks,“ Wilson whispered. “After all his whining, I’ve got to give the son of a bitch credit. At least he’ll die on his feet.“

“Pray we do better,“ Dewayne whispered. “We won’t have long to get to wherever it is we’re going.“

“We’ll start back at the saloon,“ Wilson said. “If Pablo got away from that thing, he probably went somewhere familiar.“

Outside, the howls now issued from the backside of the church. The
skinwalkers
appeared to have taken the bait.

This is it
, Dewayne thought. “Now!“

Little Joe grimaced and moaned as he tugged the church door open far enough for the men to slip through. Dewayne exited first, his pistols drawn. Wilson followed. The men surveyed their immediate
vicinity
. They were relieved to find no rabid
skinwalkers
jumping out at them from the fog.

Wilson shot off into the mist. Dewayne sprinted after him, praying they were heading in the right direction. As Dewayne ran through the dense green fog, it seemed to him things were moving in slow motion. It was like being in a dream
where
you had to reach the end of a long corridor, but the hallway just kept stretching farther and farther ahead. His body felt sluggish and impotent. It was as though the fog had congealed
,
approaching
a
molasses
-like consistency
impossible to move through.

In truth, the creeping of time as he ran reminded Dewayne of none of these things. Though he was loath to admit it, reality was moving exactly like it had on the day those three men had tried to steal his hog
—
his entire livelihood. He’d shot them dead. And his pregnant wife
,
Sonny
,
too, though by mistake. Dewayne might as well have turned his gun on himself right then and there, for, in that one moment, he had ceased to live in any true sense of the word. Dewayne had died. The bounty hunter had been born. And his existence had been a living hell
—
a hell he desperately wanted to end, one way or another.

The saloon’s rear entrance appeared out of the fog before them. Wilson took a position to the left of the door. Dewayne slowed his advance to keep from slamming into the saloon’s outer wall. He took up a position opposite Wilson on the door’s right side.

“Cover our flank,“ Dewayne said. Wilson nodded and turned to peer out into the fog, his guns held at ready. The door was ajar. Dewayne gulped. Although he knew it had been left this way in haste, Dewayne wondered if there was anything scarier to a person than
finding a door cracked open when it should be closed.

Dewayne snaked the back of his left hand—still armed—into the gap and pressed the door open, moving slowly so as not to make any noise.

He poked his head inside. The dead, mutilated bodies of the soldiers littered the hallway. Half-gnawed arms, legs, and torsos lay akimbo
on
the floor. The walls were now black with splatters
of
gore. So much blood had been spilled the wooden planks
hadn’t
been
able
to soak it all in.

Dewayne felt his chest tighten. Looking at the piles of corpses, all he could think about was how he’d lain beneath the dead, bloated cow as a boy and then, as a soldier, how he’d been trapped for hours at the bottom of a mound of his dead friends. It was as though he was doomed to relive this fate again and again. It seemed that no matter how hard he tried, death always came crashing down
on
him.

Dewayne felt something touch him and he whirled, his pistols held high and ready to blast away. Wilson jerked his hand away from Dewayne’s shoulder. “Jesus!“ Wilson said, his voice low
. “
What’s gotten into you?’“

Dewayne sighed and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of an armed fist. “Nothing.“ A pause, then, “I’m all right. It’s clear.“

“Come on, then,“ Wilson whispered. “I don’t want to be out in the open whenever those fucking dogs decide to come sniffing back around here.“

Dewayne nodded and then followed Wilson as he crept inside the door. Dewayne watched the color drain from Wilson’s face as he saw the hallway of death.

You’d think after everything we’ve been through, we couldn’t be spooked by anything
.
But every time, just when you
believe
you’ve reached your limit, some new evil is there to teach you different, and you’re scared and disgusted just like the first time all over again
.

The saloon itself was no better. Dismembered and decapitated bodies covered the floor, both soldier and reverted Navajo. And they had brought the rats. And the bugs. The corpses were crawling with them. The flies weren’t blanketing the bodies yet, but they soon would be. And it was all Dewayne could do not to fire his pistols as he watched several fat, black rodents chew on slimy pink loops of exposed intestine.

Wilson stepped forward and slammed his heel down on the head of an especially large rat. There was a small, clipped shriek as its skull collapsed beneath of the weight of
his
boot. Dewayne thought about telling him not to do that again, but opted simply to nod in approval. There had been rats on the beach at Wagner, too, of course. They were opportunistic creatures, and sand had proved little of a deterrent. Even under their current circumstances
—
hell, especially because of them
—
one less rat in the world was a good and fine thing as far as Dewayne was concerned.

“Let’s check upstairs,“
he
said. “If nothing else, we need to make sure there are no surprises up there waiting on us.“ The men made their way up the stairs, treading gently so that no creaking boards gave them away.

They reached the top and moved along the promenade
. They reached the first of four doors and
repeated the sequence of actions they’d performed when entering the saloon, Dewayne opening the door while Wilson
covered
. They found nothing but a few pairs of soiled undergarments belonging to the late Gertrude, judging by the abundant size of them.

They made their way to the second door and ran through their routine once more. Here was where Dewayne had enjoyed Maxine’s company. But there was nothing warm or vibrant about the room now. The bed and the curling
, yellowed
paper adorning
the
walls surrounding it were now mocking and lifeless. Silence and darkness were king and queen here now.

The third bedroom was also empty of either monster or child. When they reached Garrett’s office, both men could smell the stench of burned flesh wafting from the door and they had to cover their noses before entering. They found the charred corpse of the
skinwalker
Farnsworth had vanquished, now reverted to its true Navajo self
—
or at least, what remained of it
—
slumped against the wall, blackened jaws locked into a silent wail of anguish for all eternity.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,“ Dewayne said.

“Amen,“ Wilson agreed.

The men
exited
Garrett’s office
and
descended the staircase
. They
were just about to move on to the next building when a soft but very inhuman moan uttered from behind the bar. Both men froze
. A heartbeat later, they
took aim at the bar. They waited
—
each man a coiled spring
—
for several tense moments of silence, but nothing appeared.

Another soft moan, this one sounding full of pain and misery, rose from behind the bar. It was accompanied by a whispered chorus of strange sounds: popping, cracking, and a noise like a boot being repeatedly extracted from wet mud.

Dewayne gestured for Wilson to move to the
closed
end of the bar, the unspoken assurance that
the bounty hunter
would move to the bar’s open end passing between them. Wilson nodded
. Both
men began to creep into position.

Wilson reached his station first. Dewayne saw his partner’s eyes grow large with horror at whatever he saw on the other side of the bar. Dewayne tightened his fingers around his guns’ triggers and slowly walked the remainder of the way to the bar’s open end.

Dewayne’s mind rebelled at the sight which met his eyes. A soldier
missing
his lower body lay writhing on the floor. Somehow, despite his guts being sprawled out on the floor like bloody, pink hosing, he was still alive. Dewayne saw the soldier’s severed spinal column jutting out into empty space where he should have had an ass and legs. But that was not the worst of it. The soldier
—
barely old enough to shave
—
was changing. Dewayne realized the alien chorus of sounds they’d heard was that
of
bones breaking and reforming inside the solider
—
internal organs transforming, rearranging. Dewayne saw tuffs of fur sprouting on the
solider’s
face and exposed wrists. The soldier’s fingernails were hardening and lengthening into black claws. His face was trying to elongate, his nose and mouth becoming a fanged muzzle.
 

The soldier’s yellow eyes rolled forward and recognition sparked within them.

“Kill
…
me,“ the soldier said, his voice
inhuman
.

Dewayne stood silent and motionless as the
reluctant
skinwalker
transformed before him.

“
Kill
…
me
…
please
.“

Dewayne tore his gaze away from the thing to see Wilson wrenching a leg off one of the overturned card tables. Wilson strode over to Dewayne’s side of the bar and tried to pass by him.

“No.“
Dewayne holstered his pistols. “I’ll do it.“

Wilson looked down at the no
-
longer
-
human thing writhing on the floor and then back up at Dewayne. He handed over the table leg without protest.

Dewayne tightened his grip on the makeshift club and took a step toward the soldier. The soldier exhaled and closed his eyes, making what was about to transpire easier for both of them.

Dewayne raised the club and then brought it crashing down on the soldier’s skull. The soldier’s head made a sound like a pumpkin being busted open as it caved inward. For a moment, the soldier
seized. But
a second hard blow from the table leg stilled him into silence.

One less rat
, Dewayne thought, his subconscious mind tormenting him. He wretched as bile rose into his throat. Dewayne dropped the table leg and staggered backward.
His eyes cut from
his wounded shoulder
to
Wilson. “If
—“
Dewayne said, his words coming hard, “if I start to change into one of them, you do the same for me
.“

Wilson stared at Dewayne in silence for several seconds, his face expressionless. “We’ve got to get back to the mission.“

Dewayne nodded. “Sanchez.“ He remembered how the private had seemed to have made a miraculous recovery and then how, as the night had drawn on, his condition had worsened again. “He’s one of them.“

“Without a doubt,“ Wilson said.

Dewayne turned and stepped over the dead bodies lining the floor as he made his way to the saloon’s rear exit. “You know what we’ve got to do, Wilson.“ Dewayne reached the
back door
and peered outside. “It will be best if we just go in and take care of him first thing. Hard and fast. Easier on everybody, including Sanchez. We’ll explain it to the others afterward. You’ll have to back me up, Wilson. You’ll have tell them what we saw here. Okay? Wilson
—?“

Dewayne turned to see Wilson staring at him, his eyes bulging from
their
sockets as a stream of blood ran from his mouth down his chin. Dewayne noticed something was sticking out of Wilson’s chest
—
the bloody tip of a sword. The sword sank back inside Wilson’s torso
,
and he dropped to the ground. Behind him, an insane smile on his blood-splattered face, Captain Arrington stood aiming a pistol at Dewayne’s heart.

From the journal of supernatural investigator Nathan Morrison…

14 May 85, 3 P.M.

We
arrived
at the site alleged to be the lost town of Perdition, New Mexico
,
at midday. The place definitely has an eerie quality about it that I’ve only encountered maybe once or twice elsewhere in my years of investigation. The well
known black earth stretches for several hundred yards in diameter. It
isn’t
the fertile black soil it’s rumored to be, but rather a dust bowl of pitch. Like volcanic rock ground to dust. But that’s impossible, of course. Upon arrival, we immediately
noticed
a substantial drop in temperature
. We took readings with
the thermocouple to confirm what our fogged breath already
told
us.
A that
time, Steve
called
our attention to his digital watch
—
it
was
running at a highly accelerated rate, and
seemed
to be forming odd symbols rather than numbers. We
unpacked
our gear
in full
and
took
further readings. The EMF meter and my compass
were
haywire, their readings gibberish
(still are).
We
were
both excited and mystified to find these
malfunctions
cease if we leave the blackened earth. Are the legends true? Could this mesa of dark sand actually be where the lost town of Perdition once stood
—
where all those deaths supposedly took place? It would certainly explain
what
our instruments are registering.