He almost laughed. Some John Wayne! He was glad none of the ’Gades were around to see this, or his reputation would be lower than ant pee.
He was about to put the .38 away when he heard a slow, scraping noise.
He tensed, stood rigid and stock-still. The sound repeated—metal across concrete, he thought it was—but where it was coming from he wasn’t sure. Was it ahead, on Third Street, or behind him on Second? He bellied down in the dust and crawled back into the space between the houses, and he lay there trying to pinpoint the sound’s direction. The haze was playing tricks with him. The scraping noise was first ahead, then behind him. Was it moving toward him, or away: he couldn’t be sure, and not knowing made his guts twist. Whatever it was, it sounded like something that was just learning how to walk and dragging its feet—or claws. The good part was that it was moving slowly and clumsily; the bad part was that it sounded heavy.
He caught movement through the murk: a shape on Second Street, lumbering past Cody’s hiding place. No damned washing machine this time. The sonofabitch was big and alive and it passed with a noise like razor blades scraping a chalkboard. The haze swirled around it and spun in its wake, and then whatever it was had gone on, striding inexorably toward the church.
Cody gave it about ten more seconds, and then he scrambled up, got on the motorcycle, and started the engine; it roared like hellfire in the narrow space, and Cody gunned it toward Third Street, saw clothes flagging from a line, and ducked just in time to keep his head. He turned left on Third with a shriek of tires and rocketed east all the way to Republica Road. Then straight to the intersection of First Street again, where cars were turning toward the bridge. He took another left, deftly dodged a pickup truck full of people, and wound his way through the refugees to the steps of the church.
Inside, Mendoza was helping Paloma Jurado along the aisle. Over a hundred people had already gone, and the cars had been leaving as fast as they could get packed. But only two cars and Mendoza’s pickup truck were left, and it was clear a lot of people were going to have to make it on foot.
“Take my grandmother with you,” Rick told him. He looked around, saw twenty more elderly people who couldn’t make it over without a ride. His Camaro was still parked in front of his house on Second Street, and there wasn’t time to go after it. “You go with them,” he said to Miranda, and motioned toward Mendoza.
She’d already grasped the situation. “There’s not enough room left for me.”
“You can make room! Go!”
“What about you?”
“I’ll find a way. Go on, take care of Paloma!”
She was about to follow Mendoza and her grandmother to the door when Cody Lockett came along the aisle. He glanced quickly at her, his face gray with dust except for the area around his eyes where the goggles had rested, then directed his attention to Rick. She saw that his swagger and cockiness had dissolved. “It’s headed this way,” he said. “I saw it on Second Street. I couldn’t tell much about it, but the thing’s huge.”
Rick saw Mendoza guiding Paloma out the door, with a few other old people in tow. It wouldn’t take but a couple of minutes for Mendoza’s truck to fill up. “I said go!” he snapped at Miranda.
“I’m staying with you,” she said.
“The hell you are! Come on!” He grasped her arm, and she just as stubbornly pulled away.
“There you go, spoutin’ out orders again,” Cody said.
“You shut up!” Rick looked around, trying to find a Rattler to help him, but the rest of them had already gone; Father LaPrado was herding the remaining thirty or so people out. A car horn began blaring in the distance, getting louder, and Rick knew what that meant: Diego and Pequin had seen something and were racing back. He pushed his way through the door and out to the steps, with Cody and Miranda following.
The Impala had pulled up to the curb, and already people were jamming into it. Others had decided to run, and they were heading north toward the riverbank. Pequin got out of the car just as Rick reached the street. “We saw somethin’, man!” Pequin pointed west, and his hand trembled. “Out there, maybe thirty or forty yards!”
“What’d it look like?” Cody asked him.
Pequin shook his head. “I don’t know, man. We just saw somethin’ movin’ out there, and we hauled ass back! It’s comin’ this way!”
“Rick, I’m ready to go!” Mendoza was behind the wheel of his pickup, with Paloma and his wife in the cab beside him. Eight others were loaded into the truck bed. “Bring your sister!”
“When you go, I go,” she told Rick before he could speak. He glanced into the haze to the west, then back to Mendoza. Time was ticking past, and the creature was getting closer. “Take off!” he said. “I’ll bring Miranda over myself!” Mendoza nodded, waved a hand, and drove toward the bridge. Diego’s car was jammed so full it was dragging the pavement, and the last car was loaded down too. More than eighty people were going north on foot. Diego put the Impala into reverse and it shot backward, throwing sparks off its hanging tailpipe. “Wait for me, you bastard!” Pequin shouted, running after him.
“Hey, Jurado,” Cody said quietly, “I think we’ve got company.”
The haze swirled before the thing’s approach. They could hear the scrape of metal on concrete. The last car, carrying seven or eight people and a couple hanging to the doors, backfired and sped away.
The shape came out of the smoke and lurched into the candlelight that streamed from the church’s windows.
49
Stinger’s New Toy
RICK LAUGHED. HE COULDN’T help it. All that hurrying to get people evacuated, and what had emerged from the murk was a horse. A palomino, broad-shouldered and muscular, but just a damned horse. It took another clumsy step forward and stopped, tottering as if it had been sipping from a trough laced with whiskey.
“It’s a drunk horse!” Rick said. “We were scared shitless of a drunk horse!” The thing must’ve gotten away from somebody’s farm or ranch, he figured. Surely this wasn’t what had come out of that hole in the street. At least now he and Miranda had a ride across the bridge. The horse was just standing there, staring at them, and Rick thought it might be in shock or something. He started toward it, his hand offered. “Easy, boy, Take it ea—”
“Don’t!” Cody gripped his arm. Rick stopped, less than ten feet from the horse.
The animal’s nostrils flared. Its head strained backward, showing the cords of muscle in its throat, and from the mouth came a noise that mingled a horse’s shrill whinny and the hiss of a steam engine.
Rick saw what Cody had seen: the horse had silver talons—the claws of a lizard—instead of hooves.
His legs were locked. The creature’s deep-socketed eyes ticked from Cody to Rick and back again—and then its mouth stretched open, the rows of needles sparkling in the low light, and its spine began to lengthen with the cracking sounds of bones breaking and re-forming.
Cody stepped back and bumped into Miranda. She clutched at his shoulder, and behind her the last dozen people to emerge from the church saw the thing in the street and scattered. But the final person to come out stood in the doorway, his backbone straight as an iron bar; he drew a deep breath and started purposefully down the steps.
The creature’s body continued to lengthen, muscles thickening into brutal knots under the rippling flesh. Dark pigment threaded through the golden skin, and the bones of its skull popped like gunshots and began to change shape.
Rick retreated to the curb. His heart was beating wildly, but he couldn’t run. Not yet. What was being born in front of him held him like a hallucination, a fascinating fever dream. The head was flattening, the lower jaw unhinging and sliding forward as gray drool dripped from the corners of the mouth. The spine bowed upward, the entire body hunched, and with a sound of splitting flesh, a thick, segmented black tail uncoiled from the base of the vertebrae. A wicked cluster of metallic spikes, each one almost six inches long, pushed out of the black wrecking ball at th
e end of the tail.
The monster had doubled its length, the legs splaying out like those of a crab. And now spinier legs, each with three silver talons, were bursting through the skin of its sides. The body settled, its belly grazing the pavement. The flesh was splitting open, revealing a hide of interlocked black scales like the surface of the pyramid, and the thing thrashed as if trying to escape a cocoon. Flakes of golden skin flew like dead leaves.
Cody had the .38 in his hand. His motorcycle was just beside him, and he knew he should get on and go like a bat out of hell, but the spectacle of transformation held him fast. The creature’s elongated, knotty skull was now somewhere between that of a horse’s and an insect’s, the neck squat and powerful, muscles bunching and writhing as the body threw off pieces of dead flesh. It hit him that this was unlike anything he’d ever seen in any sci-fi or Mexican horror flick for one simple and terrible reason: this thing seethed with life. As the old skin ripped away, the creature’s movements were no longer clumsy but quick and precise, like those of a scorpion scuttling from the wet dark under a rock. The flesh of its head burst open like a strange fruit and dangled in tatters. Beneath it was a nightmare visage of bone ridges and black scales. The convex eyes of a horse had been sucked inward, and now amber eyes with vertical black pupils gleamed in the armored overhang of the brow. Two more alien eyes emerged from the holes where the horse’s nostrils had been, and diamond-shaped vents along the sides of its body gasped and exhaled with a bellows’ whoosh.
The monster shrugged off the last scraps of horseflesh. Its narrow body was now almost fifteen feet long, each of its eight legs six feet in length and the ball of spikes quivering another twenty feet in the air. The two sets of eyes moved independently of each other; and as the thing’s head turned to follow the flight of a Bordertown resident across First Street toward the river, Rick saw a third set of eye sockets just above the base of the skull.
“Get back,” Cody said to Miranda. Said it calmly, as if he saw creatures like this every day of his life. He felt icy inside, and he knew that either he was about to die or he was not. A simple dare of fate. He lifted the .38 and started to squeeze off the four bullets.
But someone walked into the pistol’s path. Someone wearing black, and holding up with both hands a staff with a gilt crucifix atop it. Father LaPrado walked past Rick. Rick was too stunned to stop the priest but he’d gotten a look at LaPrado’s ashen face and he knew the Great Fried Empty had just swallowed him.
Father LaPrado began shouting in Spanish: “Almighty God casts you out! Almighty God and the Holy Spirit sends you back to the pit of hell!” He kept going, and Rick took two steps after him, but the quadruple eyes on the creature’s skull locked on LaPrado and it rustled forward like a black, breathing locomotive. LaPrado lifted the staff in demented defiance. “I command you in the name of God to return to the pit!” he shouted. Rick reached for him, about to snag his coat. “I command you! I command—”
There was a banshee shriek. Something whipped past only inches in front of Rick, and the wind of its passage whistled around his ears. His hand had blood all over it, and suddenly Father LaPrado was gone. Just gone.
Blood on my shirt, Rick realized. The unreality of a dream cloaked him. He smelled musty copper.
Drops of crimson began to shower down on him. And other things and parts of things. A shoe hit the pavement to his left. An arm plopped down on the right, six or seven feet away. The remains of Father LaPrado’s body, hurled high and torn to shreds by the ball of spikes, fell to the earth around him. The last thing down was the staff, snapped in two.
The monster’s tail, dripping with blood and bits of flesh, lifted up into the air again. Cody saw the thing quiver, about to strike. Rick just stood there, paralyzed. There was no time to weigh the past against the present: Cody started running toward him, got off two shots, and saw a pair of the amber eyes fix on him. The fail hesitated for a vital three seconds, the creature choosing between double targets, then whipped in a vicious sideswipe, the air shrieking around the bony spikes.
Cody hit Rick with a bodyblock and knocked him sprawling over the curb, heard the ball of spikes coming, and flattened himself against the bloody pavement.
It passed less than a foot over him, came back again in a savage blur, but Cody was already twisting away like a worm on a hot plate and the tail struck sparks off the street. The tail was retracted for another slash, and Cody saw Rick sit up, the boy’s face splattered with LaPrado’s blood. “Run!” Cody shouted. “I’ll get Miranda across!” Still Rick didn’t respond, but Cody couldn’t help him anymore. Miranda was crouched down on the church steps, calling for her brother. Cody got up, took aim at one of the thing’s eyes, and fired the last two bullets. The second shot gouted gray fluid from the top of the skull, and the creature made a sharp hissing noise and scuttled backward.
Cody sprinted back across the street, zigzagging to throw off the thing’s aim. He dropped the pistol, leapt onto the motorcycle’s seat. The key was already in the ignition, and Cody yelled “Get on!” to Miranda as he stomped on the starter. The engine racketed, popped, would not catch. The creature started striding forward again, getting within striking range. Cody came down on the starter a second time; the engine backfired, caught and faded, fired up again with a throaty growl. The back of his neck prickled. He sensed the tail curling up into the air. Cody looked over his shoulder, saw the monster’s black head with its underslung jaws full of needles thrusting toward him. And then a figure ran from the right, shouting and waving its arms, and one set of eyes darted at Rick. A foreleg lifted, the silver claws slashing so fast Rick hardly saw it coming. He flung himself backward, the talons streaking past his face.
But Miranda was on the motorcycle, clinging tight to Cody’s waist. She screamed “Run!” to Rick, and Cody throttled up. The machine shot away from the curb and sped toward Republica Road.
Rick scrambled on his hands and knees up over the curb. He heard the slithering of the thing coming after him, the scrape of the talons on the concrete. He got to his feet and ran north, across a yard and in between two houses. And in that narrow space he stepped on a loose stone and his left foot slid, the ankle twisting with a pain that jabbed all the way to his hipbone. He cried out and fell on his face in the sand and weeds, clutching at his ankle.
The houses on either side of him shuddered and moaned. Boards cracked, plaster dust puffing from the walls. Rick looked back, and saw the dark shape trying to squeeze its body into the space after him, its strength breaking the houses off their foundations.
Eighty yards away, Cody and Miranda were almost across the bridge when something—a human figure—rose up from the smoke directly in front of them. Cody instinctively hit the brakes, started to swerve the machine aside, but there wasn’t enough time. The motorcycle smacked into whoever it was, skidded out of control, and flung both of them off. It crashed into the side of the bridge, the frame bending with a low moan like guitar strings breaking and the front tire flying up into the air. Cody landed on his right side and slid in a fury of friction burns.
He lay curled up and gasping for breath. Fate bit my ass this time, he thought. No, no; must’ve been the Mumbler, he decided. Old fuckin’ Mumbler just crawled up on the bridge and gave us a whack.
Miranda. What had happened to Miranda?
He tried to sit up. Not enough strength yet. There was an awful pain in his left arm, and he thought it might be broken. But he could move the fingers, so that was a good sign. His ribs felt like splintered razors; one or two of them were snapped, for damn sure. He wanted to sleep, just close his eyes and let it all go, but Miranda was somewhere nearby—and so was whatever they’d crashed into. Some protector I turned out to be, he thought. Not worth a damn. Maybe the old man was right after all.
He smelled gasoline. Motor’s tank ruptured. And about two seconds later there was a whump! of fire and orange light flickered. Pieces of the Honda clattered down around him and into the Snake River’s gulley. He g
ot up on his knees, his lungs hitching. Miranda lay on her back about six feet away, her arms and legs splayed like those of a broken doll. He crawled to her. Saw blood on her mouth from a split lower lip and a blue bruise on the side of her face. But she was breathing, and when he spoke her name her eyelids fluttered. He tried to cradle her head, but his fingers found a lump on her skull and he thought he’d better not move her.
Cody heard footsteps—two boots: one clacking, one sliding.
He saw someone lurching toward them from the Bordertown side. Rivulets of gasoline had run from the smashed motorcycle, and the figure kept coming through the fire. It was hunchbacked, with a spiked tail, and as it got nearer Cody could see a grin of needles.
Half of Sonny Crowfield’s head had caved in. Something that shone like gray pus had leaked through the empty left eye socket, and the imprint of a motorcycle tire lay across the cheek like a crimson tattoo. The body jittered, one leg dragging.
It came on across the streams of flame, the cuffs of its jeans smoking and catching fire. The grin never faltered.
Cody crouched over Miranda. He looked for the nail-studded baseball bat but it was gone. The clacking boot and dragging boot closed in, the hunchbacked body and tail of spikes silhouetted by fire. Cody started to rise; he was dead-meat now, and he knew it, but maybe he could get his fingers in that remaining eye and jerk it off its strings. Pain shot through his ribs, stole his breath, and hobbled him. He fell back to his side, wheezing for air.