Skull Moon (29 page)

It looked to be armored for battle like a knight of old. Like a fleshy, living skeleton. Its arms fed into sockets just beneath the shoulders which were shielded by jutting plates. The legs, the same, plates concealing their origin. Its torso was gleaming with ribbed mounds, knitted with a black oily skin that bled into gray, riddled with numerous lacerations and punctures. It had no neck, the head firmly mounted on the sloping shoulders, jaw protruding in a quasi-snout, nostrils flattened and bulging with each rasping breath. There seemed to be barely enough flesh to cover the protruding architecture of the massive skull. It was drawn tight, scarred and thinning. Silver and gray tufts of fur sprouted here and there like weeds through cracks in rock.

A thing engineered to stalk and kill and take any amount of abuse thrown at it. The ultimate hunter. Built to survive in a savage world of half-humans and monsters that no longer existed.

The beast took one step forward.

One of the men--the one who'd lost his brother to this horror--charged forth, screaming out a battle cry. The beast took his knife in the abdomen and then took the man himself. Before the cowering, helpless eyes of the posse, the man was pulled apart, his viscera decorating the altar. There was nothing to do but watch.

The body was dropped. The beast crushed the head with a grinding of a bony heel, wetting the remains down with a gush of viscous, steaming piss.

Longtree and the others fell back, shooting.

Skullhead felt more bullets pierce his hide. He took them and roared, still standing. He'd been deceived into thinking these white-skins had brought offerings of themselves. But it was not so; they refused to obey the ancient laws. So, great instructor in all things bloody and agonizing, Skullhead would teach them.

Longtree watched the beast move. It had just absorbed no less than a dozen bullets, and here it leaped like an angry child, that great tail thrashing. It knocked Lauters aside and grabbed the first available man. With a grinding, an awful wet snapping, it separated the first man at the hip, tossing legs one way and body the other. The man screamed and flopped, legless, blood coming out in a flood.

As more shots were fired, Longtree ran to the small fire Claussen had built and removed a chair leg, the end of which was a flaming red coal. As the monster turned on him, he jumped up and jammed the torch in its face, falling back before he was swatted away. Its left eye and much of the flesh around it was incinerated into a sap of blackened fluid. The beast roared, swinging out madly in all directions, claws whistling through the air seeking life to take.

Bowes got behind it and opened up its muscled back with blasts from his shotgun. It turned on him and Lauters and another assailed it from the front with bullets. The beast howled with rage, pounding dust from the rafters overhead. Its back was ripped wide, glistening vertebrae exposed.

"Its eye!" Longtree shouted. "Shoot out its eye!"

As the men attempted to do this, Longtree turned and saw Laughing Moonwind and Herbert Crazytail coming up the aisle. The old man was dressed out in his finest. He wore a shirt of antelope skin, matching leggings. Both ornamented with colored beads, feathers, and dyed porcupine quills. He wore a skull mask over his face and carried a medicine club decorated with wolf fur, weasel skin pendants, and topped by the foot of a wolf, claws extended. He pushed past Longtree and the others, facing the beast.

At the sight of him, Skullhead stopped dead.

Crazytail took items from his medicine bag--bits of herb, pinches of colored powder, feathered talismans--and threw them at the beast. He chanted and sang, circling the beast now, forming a circle of powder around it.

"What's that crazy injun doing?" Lauters asked.

No one answered. The beast had paused now, whether held by magic or by curiosity, it was held all the same.

"It killed everyone in the village," Moonwind said sternly. "Only a few of us escaped..."

"What is your father doing?" Longtree asked.

"Binding him."

"Will it work?"

She shook her head. "No, but he feels responsible. He and the others brought it back. It should never have seen the light of day again."

The beast suddenly grew bored with the ceremony. Teeth went in motion, burying in the old man's head, his skull pulped under the jaws. He fell dead at the monster's feet.

Laughing Moonwind screamed.

Lauters walked right up to it, emptying his rifle into its hide. "No more! Goddammit, this ends now!"

The beast put hands to either side of Lauters' head, lifting him into the air and crushing his skull slowly into mush. Longtree dashed away to get another stick from the fire and saw salvation: pushed beneath a pew was a can of kerosene.

The beast charged him and he uncapped the metal jug, letting its contents wash it down. Skullhead ignored this benediction and slammed into him, sending the marshal sailing through open air. In the process, the beast stumbled into the fire. In the time it took him to feel the pain of the embers beneath his feet, flames had licked up and over him. He spun and danced, trying to shake the kiss of fire.

No good.

Skullhead had never known such pain. He and his kind had no use for fire; it was something the little men used. Cooked meat was repulsive. In the old days when a finger of lightning set a dry forest ablaze, the Lords fled, migrating to safer environs. Fire destroyed. Fire hurt. Fire consumed. He slapped at himself and threw his body on the floor, rolling and rolling. It was no good. The fire ate at his flesh, incinerating his being, cremating his will. When all the hair was gone from his skin, the flames died out. He pulled himself weakly to his feet, singed, blackened, blind, his face a distorted running mess.

"Now," Longtree said, directing his remaining troops, "kill it."

Keeping well away from the clawing fingers of the beast, they began to shoot and shoot. Reloading when chambers were empty. Finally the fiend fell to its knees. Its crisped flesh was open in dozens of places, mangled and bleeding viscera bulging forth.

Claussen dragged himself forth now. He had an ax. With a single vicious swing, he buried it in the monster's spine. It went down face first, jerking with convulsions, a sickly mewing deep in its throat. It was beaten now and all knew this.

"Hack into pieces," Moonwind directed. "It can only die if its pulled apart."

Bowes, Longtree, Moonwind, and the two survivors from the posse went to work on the primal monster that would be a god. As Claussen looked on at his fallen idol, they each took the ax and chopped at the beast. Its hide was incredibly tough, but its assassins worked with an almost superhuman diligence. Soon its torso split. Its arms were severed free, it legs divorced from their thorny housings. Longtree cleaved the head free himself, kicking it away to the altar. To his amazement, the jaws still chattered, the legs still trembled. With a few more blows the skull collapsed, brains emptying at his feet.

"Not a god," Claussen mumbled. "Jesus help me."

Longtree looked down at the wreck of Skullhead with Moonwind by his side. It was a great butchered slab of meat now, bleeding black blood and yellow fluid. Its guts steamed with a foul odor. The altar was stained with bits of it and would have to be destroyed.

But Skullhead was dead.

Two days later, it was over.

The fire had been contained the same day the beast died. A heavy snowfall drowned the flames. Half of the town had been destroyed. The survivors quickly began rebuilding. Reverend Claussen died from his injuries that night and was given a Christian burial along with Perry, Lauters, and the other members of the posse. Herbert Crazytail was buried in the Blackfeet cemetery. Only Longtree, Moonwind, and a few others were present. The remains of the beast were assembled in sacks, tied shut, and buried in another part of the burial ground--the same grave they'd been originally interred in centuries before.

The church was burned to ashes.

"I don't know what I'm going to do about all this," Bowes said to Longtree as they sat and sipped coffee at the jailhouse. "How I'm going to explain this."

"There's nothing to explain. The beast is dead."

"But all the deaths..."

"People know what happened. Let it go. In a year, it'll be forgotten."

Bowes looked at him. "Do you really believe that?"

Longtree didn't answer. He stood and pulled on his coat and gloves. "I guess I'm done here," he said.

"Thanks for your...help," Bowes said.

Longtree nodded and walked out into the cool air, listening to the sounds of sawing and hammering as the town was put to right. People wouldn't forget what happened, he knew, but they probably wouldn't talk much about it. In time, the entire experience would take on the connotations of legend. A twice-told tale. A myth. Something to frighten children with on stormy nights. Nothing more. A dark bit of collective memory that would seem all the more unreal as the coming days of normalcy blotted out its darker elements into the stuff of nightmares.

Longtree rode out of town, hoping he'd never have to return. He would ride to Fort Ellis and put in his report. Tom Rivers wasn't going to like the truth about this matter, but the truth was the truth. On the way, he would meet Laughing Moonwind. They were bonded now, he knew, from these horrors. Parts of them were linked. He couldn't imagine being without her.

A cigar in his mouth, the wind at his back, Joseph Longtree rode away from Wolf Creek.

A full-time factory worker and part-time author, Tim Curran has been fascinated by story-telling since a young age. He spent his formative years listening to his father and uncles tell stories of their depression-era childhoods and experiences in World War II. His neighborhood was filled with interesting, unusual characters who spun tales with great abandon. It wasn't long before he was telling tall tales himself. And when a scary or adventurous tale was in the offing, his ears were always open.

Now a Teamster and father of three, not much has changed. Imagination and good story-telling are still the primary focus of his life. He's done everything from groundskeeping to construction, hanging signs to digging ditches. His influences range from H.P. Lovecraft to Elmore Leonard, Jack London to Ray Bradbury, E.C. horror comics to film noir. His short stories have appeared in
City Slab
,
Flesh and Blood
,
Space and Time
,
Black October
,
Blue Murder
,
Hardboiled
,
Whispers from the Shattered Forum
, etc. Other work has appeared in anthologies such as
Sideshow
,
Weird Trails
,
Darkness Rising
,
Crime Spree
, and
WarFear
. He has also written a crime novel,
Street Rats
, which is available through Amazon.com.

Tim writes in variety of genres--crime, horror, western, mystery and suspense as well as science fiction. He feels to be at his strongest mixing genres and is forever on the lookout for the perfect fictional form that will combine the best elements of them all.

You can find him on the web at:

http://www.darkanimus.com/curran.html