Skull Moon (28 page)

Marshal Joseph Longtree watched Wolf Creek burn.

It had started for mysterious reasons in the undertaking parlor. But once started, it had found the chemicals therein and exploded into life.

It turned into a major blaze within minutes.

Whether the fire was unleashed by accident or on purpose, it didn't matter--the town was burning. Longtree had arrived with Lauters moments after the slaughter had occurred. By then, the beast was long gone. But the evidence it left was all-too apparent. The beast had broken through the rear wall of the mortuary.

The fire was spreading fast. Almost effortlessly, cheered on by the winds that screamed out of the north. The buildings and houses in Wolf Creek were all packed together very closely and the flames jumped from roof to roof.

Longtree and Lauters were stalking the beast.

There was no posse to be had. All available men (and women) were busy fighting the blaze and this included Bowes. Even the sixty men Ryan had assembled to exterminate the Blackfeet, were helping out.

The trail of the beast was easy to follow, though somewhat erratic. It was only a matter of following the path of wreckage and death. Wherever it went, people were killed, homes or buildings destroyed. It had charged through the wall of a saloon, murdering six people and maiming a dozen others. Then it kicked down the door of a miner's little home and decapitated his family. Next, the trail led to a dry goods store. The proprietor was crushed like a bundle of old sticks and stuffed into a coal furnace. One valiant, though suicidal, man had attempted to stop the fiend as it left the store. They found his shotgun bent into a V and his body driven headfirst like a fencing post through the snow and into the frozen earth. Only his wrenched legs were visible. Wherever the lawmen went, the tale was the same: atrocity upon atrocity.

"It's taking back its lands," Longtree commented as they slipped through the caved-in wall of a dance hall.

Lauters studied the stomped furniture and shattered fixtures. "Its lands?"

"Yes," Longtree said. "Once there were many like it. They ruled this land, the Blackfeet and other tribes worshipped them. Now it's come back and it's taking back its property."

Lauters looked at him like he was crazy. "It's a monster."

"But not a mindless one.''

"You're giving it a lot of credit, aren't you? Maybe it can reason a bit, but it's still a monster."

There was no arguing with that.

Longtree was wondering if the beast was on the run or merely hiding out in one of these ruined structures, awaiting the man he needed to kill. Or had he forgotten now, in the inebriation of massacre, why he'd been called back? What his reason for being was. Anything was possible with this creature, anything at all.

"I take it," Lauters said, scanning the debris for bodies, "that you've been talking with Crazytail and his bunch."

"I have."

"And you believe those tales they tell?" the sheriff said incredulously.

Longtree sighed, realizing he still disliked this man. And why not? He was a rapist, a murderer, a vigilante, a cattle rustler, would-be assassin (and God knew what else) parading as a lawman. "If you have a better explanation about the origin of this beast, Sheriff, I'm all ears," Longtree said patiently. "It came from somewhere."

Lauters spat. "Hell. That's where it came from."

"Regardless," Longtree sighed, "that's where it's going."

They moved along, Lauters in the lead. There was blood in the beast's tracks now. Fresh blood.

"If it bleeds," Lauters said happily, "it can die."

The trail suddenly ended. The only possible place the beast could have gone was the building leaning before them. The church. Together they circled around it. No tracks led away.

"We've got it." Lauters was jubilant. "We've got the sonofabitch."

"We'll need help."

"Stay here," Lauters ordered. "I'll get some men."

Longtree watched him vault away, moving quickly through the drifts. Longtree studied the church. Why had the beast come here? Was it for the obvious reason that it simply needed shelter, a place to mend its wounds? Or was it something else entirely? Did it know a house of worship when it saw one? Did it think in its unflappable egotism that it belonged here, a god to be kneeled before? Regardless, Claussen had been right--he was its priest now.

Longtree waited. If the beast tried to escape now, he would have to try and stop it...and no doubt perish in the attempt. There was nothing to do but wait for reinforcements. He toyed with the idea of wiring Fort Ellis for Army troops, but getting them when they were needed was like getting a child to open its mouth so you could pull a tooth. Besides, it would take them a day or so to reach Wolf Creek...and the beast surely wouldn't sit still that long.

So the marshal waited, smelling the smoke of the burning town. Like Nero, he fiddled while Rome burned.

Dr. Perry was alive.

Despite the abuse put to him by the fiend, he still lived. The spark that burned in his body for seventy odd years refused to be snuffed. Bones were broken, limbs twisted and crippled, blood spilling from a dozen wounds, yet he lived and in living, was awake. He looked down on the fiend below him with a consuming hatred that would smolder, he was certain, long after death had claimed him and the fiend was so many ashes in God's palm.

Lauters knew more pain than the doctor could ever dream of in his most anguished moments. He'd lost friends, he'd lost his family, he'd lost his way of life. Much of it was due to the beast, but Longtree was hardly innocent. When that ravaging monster was put to rest finally, he'd have a word or two to say to the marshal. He was beyond caring whether or not Longtree wanted to arrest him. He planned on dying at the beast's hands or with Longtree's bullets in him. Either way, he was going to die. And if he slew the beast and Longtree and lived, then he'd put his gun to his head and end it. Having no reason to live, Lauters took satisfaction in his own coming death.

A third of the town was ablaze now. The conflagration had eaten its way through most of the businesses and was busy blackening homes, hungry for new conquests.

"I need men," Lauters told Bowes when he found him in the mulling confusion. "We found it. I need men to kill it."

Bowes, black with soot, coughed. "The town's burning," he said dryly. "Burning."

"I don't give a fuck about this town," Lauters snapped. "I found the monster and we have to kill it. Get some men."

Bowes efficiently went about the task of rounding up what men could be spared, even though, technically, there were none. He came back with four smoke-blackened men.

"These are the only ones who'll come," the deputy said.

"Shit. All right."

Grimacing as he took one final pull from a bottle of rye in his desk drawer, Lauters handed out rifles and ammunition. His eyes blazing with revenge, he led the posse to their deaths.

Skullhead, grinder of flesh and render of souls, lay sleeping on the altar as the dogs of war inched closer. He snoozed and dreamed of the old days of slaughter and barbarity. He was sure these days would come again.

His arrogance would allow him to accept nothing less.

But what he failed to realize in the blood-misted corridors of his brain was that this was a new age and men had little use for the old gods. In these times, men wanted gods that were quiet, that didn't interfere with their own plans and conquests. Advisors, not active participants. The days when men offered up their sons and daughters to primeval monsters were long gone. In the collective psychology of the masses, this was unthinkable.

But none of this would have made any sense to Skullhead.

His was a reptilian brain--a mass of nervous tissue devoted to need, want, and desire. He was hungry, so he ate; thirsty, so he drank. His loins ached, so he raped; his territory was threatened, so he killed. Simplicity itself. The perfect hunter, the ultimate predator. There was logic and reasoning in that brain, too, but it was generally only applied to methods of the hunt, to slaughter, to self-indulgence. The little men existed only to feed, clothe, and worship him. And they should do these things, his brain decided, because he wished it.

So the beast lay on the altar, beneath ravaged symbols of Christianity, a god in his own thinking, sainted by atrocity, immortal through his own appetites. In God's house he waited, bloated with sin and suffering, his belly fat with human meat. A Christian demon, as it were, in the flesh.

Longtree grew tired of waiting.

When the posse was but five minutes away, he entered the church. He was carrying his usual armaments--Winchester rifle, Colt pistols, and Bowie knife. There was death in his eyes as he entered through the main door. It was hanging from one hinge as if it had taken a tremendous blow and from the claw marks drawn into the wood, the marshal knew what had struck it. He paused just inside, lighting a cigarette and listening. He could hear movement, but the movement of a man, a sort of limping gait.

He moved up the nave, sighting the man just ahead. It was Claussen or a beaten, bleeding, and bedraggled version of the same. There was a fire going in the aisle, a small one fed by prayer books and shards of wood.

"The marshal," Claussen said lifelessly. "I wondered when you'd show."

Longtree looked at his arm. There was no hand, just a stump burnt black. "What happened, Reverend?" he asked calmly.

"I was bleeding. The master...he took my hand...sacrifice," Claussen mumbled. "I cauterized it." He grinned madly at the idea.

No sane man could thrust his arm in a fire even if it meant saving his own life. The pain would be unthinkable. "Where is it?" Longtree inquired. "The beast."

"The master?" Claussen looked suddenly sheepish, but his eyes blazed with the embers of lunacy. "Have you come to serve? To worship?"

"I've come to kill it."

"Get out of here," Claussen demanded.

Longtree scanned the dimness, eyes bright. "Where?"

"You can't kill him, Marshal. No man can. If you've not come as a brother to him, then run before he discovers you."

There was a glint of humanity left in the reverend, but little more. "You're ill, Reverend. You'd best leave now, I've got business--"

"You've no business here. Not anymore."

Longtree moved up the aisle. Claussen blocked his path.

"Step aside, Reverend, or I'll shoot you," he said, spitting out his cigarette.

Claussen launched himself forward and Longtree easily sidestepped him. He slammed the butt of the Winchester into the man's belly and snapped it up aside his head. Claussen fell, whimpering.

"Where is it?" Longtree demanded.

Then a sound: a single grumbling moan.

Longtree looked up to the altar. In the shadows...the beast.

And in the time it took him to see the horror, its wretched form, Claussen was on him. The icy fingers of his remaining hand were cutting into Longtree's throat, the stump beating him around the face, eliciting cries of pain from its owner each time it struck. It was as much the insanity of the situation as the attack that made the marshal drop his rifle and stagger back, shielding his eyes. Claussen was on him, kicking, striking, clawing, trying to bite. Longtree shoved him away, kicked him fiercely in his lamed leg and struck him in the face with a series of quick jabs. Claussen, old cuts on his face opening, fell to his knees.

Longtree, picking up his rifle, walked slowly to the altar.

A ghostly, smoky light rained in through the stained glass windows. They had been defaced with perverse drawings now. The pulpit loomed ahead, the defiled altar, and the beast, bleeding and asleep.

Dr. Perry had been added to the fiend's roll call of victims. He had been crucified on the great wooden cross, spikes stolen from the shattered altar driven through his hands and ankles. He hung above the beast, an aged and depraved Christ, rivers of red wine staining the altar cloth below.

Longtree looked down on the beast.

He wondered if it was dead. For just one hopeful, fleeting moment, he thought it might be. Dead or dying. But he knew it was neither. In his mind he saw the butchered faces of its victims, the dead children. Had it visited the Blackfeet camp yet? Were Laughing Moonwind and her folk dead now?

No time to think.

The beast was sprawled on the altar. A blood-streaked, stinking mass of foul intent. It was tight with throbbing muscle and jutting bone. Its shoulders broad, its head huge. Its cavernous mouth open, black spiny tongue stuck to its lower lip. Its eyes were wide and staring, but it did not have lids as such.

It was a horror.

Longtree thought it seemed to be composed of many things. It had bits of fur like a mammal. The thorny, exaggerated flesh of a lizard. The ridged, armored torso of insect. The hooked, yellowed claws of a bird of prey. The spiked and skeletal tail of a saurian. Yet, it resembled a man, in form only, but it did all the same. Some bastard, perverse uncle of humanity.

Longtree took aim at its head.

There was a bustle of commotion from the vestibule. Lauters, Bowes, and a few others stomped in, shoving Claussen aside.

"Longtree!" Lauters shouted.

The beast stirred.

Christ, Longtree thought, so close, so close...

The men were charging up the altar now, talking excitedly amongst themselves at how the marshal had slain the monster. Longtree backed away into the chancel.

"It's alive," he muttered.

And it was.

One sheer membranous eyelid opened crustily, then another. Slitted pupils stirred in seas of glowing red. They expanded to take in light. The mouth dropped open, lips thinned and drew away from swollen, black gums, teeth sliding forth like arrows from a quiver. The beast was awake.

It stood up before Longtree, easily eight feet in height. It was, Longtree decided, his finger tickling the trigger of his rifle, an amazing exercise in lethal anatomy.