Flesh, fur and red mist erupted from the side of the monster’s face as the silver fragments tore through.
The Hobie wolf howled in pain as it flew backwards, landing with an impact that would pulverize any man’s bones. The thing popped up and dashed into the woods, beholding its dead partner one last time.
Hudson pumped another shell home and did a quick visual, as the gunshot echoes faded, leaving only the ragged breathing of drained men.
Dennis fell to his butt, then eased himself to his back. He squeezed his bleeding arm, rolled to all fours and vomited like a bursting dam.
Pedro tried to stand but collapsed. “My leg is wrecked.” He was just close enough to kick the dead tawny wolf with his good leg. “Rot in hell, ass-wolf.”
Bravo rose with a groggy groan.
Dennis laughed with relief. “Bravo. You’re the man.”
“I’ll be damned,” Hudson said. “We survived.”
“This round,” said Dennis.
“Should we go after the other one?” asked Yoshida.
“Hell no. It’ll come to us, don’t you worry.”
Yoshida fetched the medical kit. He and Hudson tended to the boys and the dog, as all kept constant watch.
Five minutes later, they were moving again, vehicle and occupants all groaning at their injuries.
* * * *
As he drove to Saint Saturn’s, Bernard’s hands shook so badly Stuart almost offered to take the wheel, though he’d only had a little driving experience under Dennis’s tutelage.
He caught Bernard up on the details: he and DeShaun had found a subterranean level under the church and then something like a mushroom man had abducted DeShaun. Then; what he believed to have happened—that McGlazer had changed somehow, for the worse, and taken Stella.
Bernard might not have entirely believed there was a fungus creature, but there could be no doubt something seriously strange was afoot.
At the church gates, what should have been a comedy of errors transpired when Bernard climbed the fence. He might have broken his fool neck if not for Stuart helping ease him to the ground, watching out for his gut and crotch as he struggled over like a fat fish trying to flop its way out of a bucket.
Even getting him to a stand became a feat of planning and discussion like the most bloated of military projects. But they succeeded, and then Bernard sat on a tombstone for a minute, blowing out heavy breaths like some sedentary ringsider pulled from the audience to replace a no-show at a boxing card.
“You gonna make it, Mr. Riesling?”
Bernard put a hand on Stuart’s shoulder. “I took her for granted,” he reiterated, as if on his deathbed. “I didn’t take good care of her!”
Stuart had a brief image of being married to Candace, yet still living with Ma, and still watching out for his goddamn drunk-ass brother.
Bernard was ready to tear up again, so Stuart gently tugged his arm and got him standing. “We need to get moving Mr. Riesling.”
They made it up the hill, Stuart’s patience with Bernard’s slow progress drawn taut.
Bernard’s expression went from discomfort to dread when Stuart showed him the recessed stone stairway.
“We need to get in there and find out what’s going on before Reverend McGlazer comes back,” Stuart stressed.
Bernard drew two sturdy flashlights from his backpack. Stuart took one and started down the stone stairs for the second time.
The sun was down. Their descent was into a blackness that could have been an ancient tar pit.
Wheezing, Bernard pointed his flashlight on the old door’s rust-covered latch. “Should I call out to her?”
“I’d vote no,” said Stuart, electing not to mention the knocking from before.
Bernard took a camping canteen from his backpack and offered it to Stuart before taking a deep gulp himself. He reached for the door latch, finding that it operated like new.
Chapter 25
A Blade in the Dark
Jiggy wasn’t generally fazed by corpses. He’d seen plenty. But this one, in its…condition, robbed him of composure.
The witch’s cadaver lay on the floor in only her underwear. Face up—in a manner of speaking.
The front of her head was gone—sawed off, by the messy looks of it. Someone had made themselves an honest-to-God death mask. “God…daaaaamn,” Jiggy muttered, drawing his .38.
Footsteps; someone was approaching—and it wasn’t Nico.
Jiggy spun with the weapon in time to catch a glimpse; a corner of the figure’s flowing clothes whisking around the corner of the shelving behind him.
It had been decades since Jiggy had felt true, pure terror; the kind that left him immobilized and fighting to draw a breath through clenched throat. But here he was, trembling in his size-thirteens, certain he was in the presence of Death itself.
Did he really want to push his luck?
“Pussy-ass!” he grumbled, slapping himself. He extended the .38 and stepped to the corner, where Everett met him with his new toy—a set of hedge clippers.
“Peek-a…” came Everett’s ragged whisper from behind the flesh and bone of Matilda’s face, as he stabbed. “…Boo!” as he closed the blades together on Jiggy’s guts.
* * * *
Bernard and Stuart cast their beams in. They had to focus their sight beyond the heavy dust languishing in the air to see the puzzle of flat stone blocks that made the floor. Faint footprints, too many, all haphazard, darkened the dusty surface of these stones. “There’s been a lot of activity in here lately.”
Stuart focused his beam on the blackened lantern sconce near the door, the wraith-like fragments of thick webbing hanging from it, recently torn away. Once more, he chose to stay quiet about it.
The floor was about fifteen-by-fifteen, empty except for clusters of mushrooms, some as big as a foot across. Stuart took a quick step back.
The traveling light beams made the fungus’s shadows appear to grow and shrink, lean and sway. “Could the mushroom being you saw be a trick of light?” Bernard asked, waving his beam around to experiment with the effect.
“DeShaun and I didn’t have any light, sir.”
Stuart inspected the patches of white-specked brown fungi while Bernard moved his beam around the chamber. The beam jumped in time with his cry of fright. There was a black figure standing at the far wall. He and Stuart braced each other, then realized it was a vaguely man-shaped water stain seeping from cracks between stones.
“Crap on a Chrysler!” Bernard exclaimed. “I am not cut out for this!”
“Mister,” Stuart said. “You are in the wrong tow—”
The water stain spread bat wings as it opened sinister solid-white eyes.
They screamed and mashed together again as they backed against the door.
The shape became a mere water stain again.
“Did…?”
“Yeah.” Stuart kept the beam trained on the stain, trying to ignore how shaky his hands made it. “Tr…Trick of the light.” He examined it. “But it’s not what grabbed DeShaun, Mr. Riesling. I swear!”
“Okay!” answered Bernard in a high pitch. “Maybe we should call for them now.”
“Wait.” Stuart’s beam came to an arched door about six feet high, located in the center of the wall to their right. They went to it, walking four or so steps.
“…What the Sam Hill?” Bernard said.
They glanced up and up. The doorway and ceiling had expanded.
The arching entrance now loomed high and wide before them; at least twelve feet at the top. They peered behind them, toward the door, the ceiling, the water stain. All were as they should be. It made no sense, spatially or otherwise.
They whipped their lights back to the archway again and found it as they had first seen it; around six-and-a-half feet high.
* * * *
“Does this mean Petey and I are gonna turn into goddamn German Shepherds now?” Dennis asked, cradling his bandaged arm.
“You better not,” Hudson answered. “I doubt either of you is housebroken as is.”
Pedro’s heavily-bandaged leg lay elevated and straightened between the front seats.
Bravo was as determined as ever, if not as physically insistent. Yoshida had felt around the canine’s thick torso and found no broken ribs, but they had to be bruised. The dog didn’t hold his tail up anymore, but he still gazed ahead in the road, perking his ears at even the slightest sound.
“Definitely something going on up ahead,” said Yoshida, peering through the forest ahead at some dim light. “Maybe a mile.”
Hudson gunned it, battering the vehicle’s undercarriage on the rutted road. No sense in playing pussy-foot now.
* * * *
“Did you say something, Jig?” At the opposite end of the barn, Nico listened, holding the lighter high.
Jiggy didn’t answer but there was no cause for worry. He was the most vigilant and observant of the Fireheads.
Nico returned his attention to the chipped old wardrobe he had just discovered, set against the wall. He lifted the padlock that secured the double latch. It was identical to the one from the entrance, though less weathered. “I need that key,” he muttered.
“Naaah.” He kicked the latches, once, twice, shattering the whole works with the third. Nico opened the wardrobe, startled to find several more animal skins inside, hanging like winter clothes. Bear, coyote, another wolf, and…something.
The skin was scaled, not furred, with a thick snake-like tail so long it was coiled up on itself and tied off.
“Komodo dragon!” Nico exclaimed. “That bitch was holding out on us, Jig!”
He pivoted to go find Jiggy, and found his path blocked.
His lighter flame revealed the witch, just three feet away. He had caught her sneaking up on him.
“Oh ho ho, shit on me!” Nico laughed, shaking away his startled convulsion. “Still kicking are ya, ol’ girl?”
It didn’t take long for the biker to realize that though the figure wore her dress, hair, even her face, this was not Matilda.
“Trick or treat!” The blood-spattered impostor’s raspy voice was soaked to the core with madness.
Nico stood still, knowing he had a good chance of out drawing whoever this—
“Oooh!” The eyes behind the witch’s sockets widened when their gaze fell upon Nico’s tattooed chest, the ragdoll on the cross.
The crazy eyes narrowed, as if remembering something. But after whatever oblivion had held him for the past year, images that once struck him as terrifying were now just “Very very bad!”
Nico saw the demon take Matilda’s ritual knife from her sweater and knew it was time to draw. He reached behind him.
Fast as he was, Everett was faster with the athame.
In a swift arc, Everett unzipped Nico from groin to gullet.
With a wheeze, Nico dropped his Luger and lighter to catch his falling innards. The lighter’s flame blinked out for eternity, just before Nico’s own life.
* * * *
“Holy Stromboli,” Stuart murmured. “You seeing this, Mr. Riesling?”
The low ceiling of the long-hidden basement had expanded to cathedral proportions, then shrunk again in a blink.
“I’m not sure what I’m seeing,” Bernard wheezed. His respiratory system had zero sense of rhythm.
He directed his flashlight through the archway into a stone-walled tunnel.
“It’s just a few yards to the end.” Bernard stepped back, clearly waiting for Stuart to go first.
Stuart gulped as he stepped into a passage with walls of smooth polished stone. Clusters of the weird fungus grew where it met the dirt floor. He took two steps, closing his eyes briefly to focus on shutting out Bernard’s Darth Vader-like breathing.
At the end of the tunnel, his beam was halted in the egress by a wall of swirling dust so thick it seemed to blend with the dirt floor. He stepped in—and down, down…
He was falling.
He cried out, hearing the emptiness of his own voice echoing in the vast chamber.
Chapter 26
The Last Coffin
Pipsqeak tossed an antique spice cabinet onto the fire, not bothering to dump out the spices, then returned to gazing out towards the barn. “They musta found something good,” he said. “Ain’t like Nico to waste time.”
Aura discreetly offered Jill a puff of her joint. She refused.
“I’ll try to get him to let the little one go,” Aura whispered. “That’s the best I can do.”
“And what if he refuses?”
Aura searched for an answer.
“What the hell you gals talking about over here?” Pipsqueak ambled toward them, his right thumb hooked in his pocket, from which the grip of his .25 jutted.
“Let me cut the little girl loose,” Aura said.
With a surprised expression, Pipsqueak reared his shoulders back. “You goin’ soft, girl?”
“We don’t need to kill her.”
“Her brother killed the Chief’s woman,” Pipsqueak reminded. “Blood for blood.”
“I’ll take responsibility.”
Pipsqueak threw his head back but didn’t laugh.
“Oh!” Candace exclaimed; the first sound she had made in nearly an hour. “You guys…you gotta run! Now!”
Pipsqueak caught movement from the field in his peripheral vision. He took a few steps out from the fire’s glare and saw a figure walking toward them with an odd gait.
Nah. One of his brothers, carrying a bag or sack in his right hand, and maybe a rag in the left. Nico or Jiggy was wearing her sweater and dress and—what, her… hair? Pipsqueak laughed. “Oh no, you guys didn’t!”
“Run!” Candace squealed.
Aura came to Pipsqueak’s side. “I don’t think that’s Jiggy or Nico.”
“Right,” Pipsqueak scoffed. “Then who…?”
“Tricks!” Everett raised his left hand. In it were the fresh masks he had made—taken, rather—from the bikers.
“What the—”
“Run nooowww!” Candace screamed.
“Shoot it,” Aura whispered.
Pipsqueak shook his head, trying to comprehend. Aura reached into his pants for his handgun, snapping him out of it. “Hands off, bitch!” He took it from her and aimed. “Stop right there, creep!”
Everett dropped the sack and the faces, his grin growing wider. “Cowboys for Halloween!?” He clasped his hands together. “Yee haaaw!”
Everett reached into Matilda’s sweater pockets and drew Nico’s Luger and Jiggy’s .38. He swung them around dramatically like a character from a John Woo film.
Pipsqueak got off one ineffective shot just as Everett fired. Bullets riddled Pipsqueak, knocking him down.
Blood splashed on Aura. She screamed and spun toward the house.
Pipsqueak pressed a hand against the worst of his wounds as he tried to aim his little gun.
Everett was close enough now that Pipsqueak saw the deranged gaze behind the skull-and-flesh mask. His aim went to hell.
Candace was hyperventilating. Aura forgot escape long enough to cut the little girl loose.
Everett stood astraddle Pipsqueak and emptied the guns into his chest. The mortifying death mask was Pipsqueak’s last sight—made all the worse in the gunpowder flashes and spatters of blood hitting it.
Aura tried to drag Candace away. “Jill too!” insisted the child.
Aura saw that Jill was at last showing fear. Tears of terror flowed like Pipsqueak’s pumping gouts of blood.
Humming, Everett dropped his empty guns and went back to get his sack.
Taking the bonesaw from it, he
strode back to Pipsqueak’s corpse. “Swappies!”
“Hurry!” Candace shouted,
“Hmm!?” Everett popped his head up. “Canniss?”
Aura sliced through Jill’s ropes, gashing her wrist in the process.
The trio dashed into the house. Hands shaking like mad, Aura and Jill worked together to get the deadbolt and chain lock connected. “Run upstairs honey!” ordered Jill.
* * * *
Stuart landed lightly on his feet.
He spun to look above—make that behind him, and saw Bernard, at the exit a foot away. “What? You see a spider?”
Stuart aimed his flashlight at his own feet on the new room’s earthen floor, about six inches lower than the tunnel he had just exited. “Something’s messing with our heads.”
He aimed his beam at a cluster of mushrooms growing where the wall met the floor. He touched one with the toe of his shoe, raising a shimmery brown cloud from it.
“Don’t breathe it!” Bernard shouted.
Throwing his arm across his mouth, Stuart backed further into the dark chamber, until he stumbled into something solid at hip level.
Stuart spun, training his flashlights on the object—an oblong box.
“Is that a…?” Bernard took a hesitant step into the chamber.
Stuart examined it. The thing lay atop a stone stand that resembled a scaled-down Stonehenge monument. Something like an inverted cone protruded from the top of the box.
“It’s a”—given the implications, Stuart chose not to say either of the two-syllable C words that came to mind—“box. It’s some kind of big box.”
Despite Stuart’s tact, Bernard rasped with despair.
It was impossible to see what the box was made of through the layers of mushrooms and black moss that covered it. Stuart’s impact had raised another puff that swirled in his beam with a subtle glitter.
“Oh god, oh god!” Bernard crowded so close to Stuart, the latter could feel him trembling. “Is she…in it? Oh god!”
“Can’t be,” Stuart said. “It’s way too old. Hasn’t been open in…” He could not imagine.
Stuart moved the flashlight around the room, finding it to be roughly thirty-by-thirty, housing about a dozen more of the coffin-like structures aligned in three rows, all fitted with open-ended cones.
Grim Harvest Page 18
