Doc and Champ hurried as the yard dropped into moonlight again. The chopper faded. They slid into Fred’s truck, Champ went under the dash and hot wired the vehicle. The engine made a sound like glass grinding in a garbage disposal. The infected heard it, became irritated and started their way. Champ felt her fingers grow slippery with sweat. Doc watched through the windshield as the creatures closed in on them.
“Uh, Champ?”
WHAM! Someone terrified them by pounding on the window. A bloody pair of hands. More coming. Faster. Crowding in on them. Mangled, desperate faces. The truck started. Champ crawled over Doc and into the passenger seat. She fastened her seatbelt. “Haul ass, Doc,” she yelled. “Midnight. It all blows at midnight.”
Doc gunned the engine. He started forward, ran over someone with a crunch. The infected pounded on the vehicle, wandered around the area confused. They ran over someone else without looking. Finally, Champ and Doc broke free and drove out of the ER’s parking area and onto the mountain highway. Their tail lights disappeared. Silence descended on the ER. The infected seemed lost in the moonlight. No enemies left. A zombie girl scout sat down, opened a box of cookies and stared absently at the contents.
The bride who was bleeding out fumbled for her severed arm. She examined it like a chimp searching for insects on a twig. The coach with the chain saw tossed it away and sat down heavily next to the pile of guts that was Cap. The bloody saw stank of gore and gasoline.…And Doc and Champ roared down the highway.
Meanwhile, inside the ER there was a deafening silence. Dust and smoke rose from a small fire caused by an infected man, stoned out of his mind, who’d begun playing with matches. Broken windows, shards of glass, splintering boards, dead bodies, torn flesh. Boffo the clown dead, the board up his butt.
And then Riggs the giant homeless guy, still lying on the table. His eyes popped open. Riggs swallowed dryly. “Hey! Hello?”
He struggled to move and discovered that his hands and feet were tied.
“Oh, man…”
The giant summoned all his strength and popped free. He looked around the room, saw the boards on the window and the dust everywhere. Something smelled awful. Where was everybody?
Riggs called, “Guys? I’m sober.” He sat up. Winced. His headache was brutal. Where was Fred? Riggs peered around in the emergency lighting, the gloom. And then he saw what was in the room with him.
“Fred? The fuck you doing down there?”
Gore, blood and guts and body parts. The truth registered just as Riggs heard something powerful headed his way, a whooshing sound, at first far away and then closer and closer and closer…
Riggs said, “Oh, man. I have me about the shittiest luck in…”Somewhere a clock beeped as it reached 12:00 AM.
The world went white.
««—»»
…The headlights of the truck tearing down the road. The skyline behind it goes WHAM with smoke and fire. The truck keeps moving, racing away from the destruction.
Speeding down the mountain. Doc and Champ come around a sharp corner. They see the roadblock ahead, the flashing lights. A police car blocks the highway. Soldiers and cops with rifles stand just behind a wooden barrier. They all throw down on the truck.
Champ and Doc in the cab. They exchange glances. He guns the engine. She nods. Fuck it. Maybe they’ll both go out in a blaze of glory.
Doc guns the engine again. Steels himself.
The soldiers look at each other, brace themselves.
Doc looks at the kid. She’s so young. He sighs.
And then Champ shades her eyes, sees something. Someone pushing her way along, moving towards the front of the group. Blonde hair? She grabs Doc’s arm and says, “Wait. No. Let’s take our chances.”
They both slide out of the truck, arms high. Doc hollers, “We’re not sick.”
A soldier with a bullhorn addresses them. “Listen up. Face forward. Put your hands behind your head. Get down on your knees. Do it now.”
Champ and Doc obey. In unison this time, “We’re not sick!”
The soldier calls, “Go down on your face and do not move.”
Doc presses his face to the pavement, relieved to see some medical personnel in white NBC suits approaching. They are getting the benefit of the doubt. And then he tenses up. Spots two mercenaries, dressed in black like Cap and Bowden. They are aiming sniper rifles directly at Doc and Champ. One looks at the other. Nods. Orders are orders. Still, the second soldier seems nervous, uncertain. Finally nods back. It seems the boss wants these people dead. They prepare to fire.
Someone calls, “Burkhalter is dead, boys. Lower your weapons. Now.”
The two men freeze. Leanne is rightbehind them, aiming a pistol.
Colonel Sharpe is with her, his two men by his side. “Do as she says or we’ll drop you.”
Champ calls, “Leanne?”
Leanne runs to the barricade. She stays behind the striped wooden sawhorse. Looks at the group of people up the road, sitting there in the glare of the truck’s headlights, twin beams already swarming with bugs. Champ and Doc are sitting up now, talking with the folks in NBC suits. Their blood is being drawn, vital signs taken, but the medical personnel can tell there is no sign of infection, their posture is calmer already, one looks ready to remove his helmet.
Doc Roth feels tears running down his face. It really is over. And then the woman soldier waves and Champ waves back. Doc wonders how they know each other. The woman seems warm and friendly, quite pretty. He is puzzled by all this, but suddenly everything feels better, as if things will finally be all right, and that maybe, just maybe, the pain he’s lived with for so long will finally come to an end.
About the Author
Harry Shannon has been an actor, an Emmy-nominated songwriter, a recording artist, a music publisher, VP of Music at Carolco Pictures and a Music Supervisor on Basic Instinct and Universal Soldier. His novels include Night of the Beast, Night of the Werewolf, Daemon, Dead and Gone (also a Lionsgate movie) and The Pressure of Darkness, as well as the Mick Callahan suspense novels Memorial Day, Eye of the Burning Man, and One of the Wicked. His collection A Host of Shadows was released in 2010 from Dark Region Press. Shannon has won the Tombstone Award, the Black Quill, and has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Shannon is a member of the HWA and of the International Thriller Writers’ (ITW). Contact him at Facebook or via his website at:
www.harryshannon.com
The following is from the short story collectionA Host of Shadows by Harry Shannon from Dark Regions Press. Sign up for our mailing list to hear about new releases, contests, discounts and special offers at:
www.darkregions.com
— | — | —
The Name of the Wicked
How magnificent is the desert sky! The icy, scattered stars are like teardrops of crystal in a calm, dark ocean. A harsh wind is coming from the east, off the dry salt flats; wheezing down the gully and into this small canyon. It sounds like a creature in pain. Time hangs suspended. This land could effortlessly move a hundred years forward or back, but this is the night of April 16th, 1892.
Pray for me. I may not live to see the morning.
It’s getting hard to think, much less write in this journal. I can no longer feel my legs and doubtless have lost a great deal of blood. I can’t smell anything but dust, cordite, my own stink and the acrid odor of lamp oil. Ominous shadows are dancing all around me, lurking just beyond a yellow smear of light, waiting for my lantern to go out.
When the glare no longer hurts their eyes they will attack.
I have no excuse for my conduct; I certainly cannot plead ignorance. I returned to Nevada already well-schooled in the history of the region. After all, my grandfather’s ranch, several miles south of Two Trees, overlapped much of what had been the land of the Horse Humans. I had heard the legends at the knee of Nelly Tall Bear, who watched over me, this both before and after my parents died of the fever.
Old Nelly was a large woman, jol
ly yet quite imposing. She wore pale deerskin and turquoise beads that were patiently threaded onto tiny strips of leather: Oiled hair, black as newspaper ink, pulled back tight and braided. It kept her aging face youthful. In fact, Nelly still looked girlish much later, in her coffin. She told me of that savage tribe; how the Horse Humans had sacrificed their own children and young girls to a demon called Orunde. They were the only known cannibals in the region and eventually their bloodlust all but wiped them from the face of the earth.
As for me, I would tremble in awe when told of these primitive, horrible beings, my little pulse racing with boyish delight. On occasion, my mother would overhear such a recitation, grow distraught and sternly admonish Nelly to ‘stop this nonsense for the sake of the child’s immortal soul.’ Mother was a saved Christian and a stern taskmaster. I respected her, certainly, but it was Nelly who I loved as my true mother. After such a scolding, Nelly would promise to refrain from speaking of the Horse Humans again, but before too long I would charm yet another tale from her reluctant lips.
On the other hand, my father was not a religious fellow. Indeed, he was known to enjoy the occasional card game, a cigar and some brandy. Father was a bald, round and bookish man given to wearing suspenders and wire-frame glasses. I think he found Nelly and her macabre fables quite amusing. In fact, he would argue to mother, ‘would you rather he read a Grimm Brothers fairy tale of a cannibal witch baking live children in her oven?’ Father reckoned that no harm could ever come to me merely from ‘the fevered imagination of a tribe of illiterate savages.’ Hogwash, he would sputter, is hogwash.
But Nelly swore that her own great-great-grandmother had been a Horse Human named Crow Wing. And that Crow Wing’s mother, fearing for her life, had sent her to the hills to live with the Cave People, because they worshipped the sky and seldom went to war. Then Crow Wing, knowing that the night of Orunde had come, sat high up in the mountains and watched the tiny fires in the valley. Only one child was to die, but this night the sacrifice spread like a blaze in dried sage; seeping out like blood upon the sand. The Horse Humans went berserk. Three children, four. Warrior turned on warrior. They skinned one another. More killed, more died. It was blood lust.
They say Crow Wing cried when she heard the final, tortured shrieks of the last remaining men, women and children. She vowed to tell the story; to pass it down from generation to generation, so that Orunde would never again successfully deceive a people. “Nelly, stop in the name of God!” Mother would cry. “Oh, hogwash!” Father would respond. “Let the boy be.”
As previously stated, I was told these tales many times. They kept me hushed under the itchy covers, quaking but still, very long into the night; which is what I suspect old Nelly Tall Bear had intended. They also thrilled and disturbed me, thus sparking an interest in anthropology, anthropophagy and my wish to study at the finest schools in Europe after my parents passed on. Indeed, I did my Ph.D. on the legend of the Horse Humans, but Nelly would have been shocked, for I held that they had never truly existed. My thesis was that the tale of Orunde was apocryphal.
Hush!
A few pebbles zing merrily down a rock face and sprinkle a flat rock like jacks. Something is inching closer, staying just beyond the blush of yellow light. Tears spring to my eyes as I ache for opportunities lost and roads not taken.
Sweet Jesus, I am running out of time. Must hurry, write faster…
I returned to America via New York at the beginning of this year, 1892. I traveled west on the Union Pacific Railway with my degree, boundless arrogance and a financial grant from the fine Territory of Nevada. I was determined to prove my thesis and write a scholarly book before achieving tenure at a suitably posh university.
In my arrogance, I had my life all mapped out. I returned to the Two Trees area via stage coach; I hired a digger, a merrily alcoholic sociopath named Abraham Lincoln Moon; and ventured out into the desert on horseback.
My deceased grandfather’s ranch had been sold whilst I was abroad, of course; various parcels had then been divided and auctioned away to pay taxes. I had not been home in many years, although I knew that the area I wanted to visit lay a few miles south. Research had revealed that the deed was held by one Samuel Moon, the uncle of my drunken assistant, a fact which explains the necessity of his foul presence. He sang, mumbled and was exceedingly flatulent the entire trip.
We rode further into the sage-freckled emptiness of the Nevada desert, until all signs of civilization vanished. No telephone poles, railway tracks, fences; not so much as a strand of barbed wire (as a child I had called the wickedly spun metal twine ‘bob wire’). The heat was as scorching as I remembered.
The day dragged by until finally a red sunset stained the horizon. We had ridden for several miles when we spotted some cow skulls and buzzard feathers near a huge mound of earth. Abe Lincoln took a long drink of whiskey, belched and shook his head. “There,” he said. “That was the Horse Human land.”
“And your Uncle Samuel lives there?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not lives. He watches.”
“Watches what?”
Abe Lincoln Moon shrugged. “Just watches.”
We continued on. My buttocks and thighs ached mightily and it was dusk by the time we located the dilapidated wooden shack. It had splintered frame windows and a roof of dented sheet metal that arched like a rainbow in the pastel sunset. I squinted and made a note in this journal as Abe Lincoln Moon approached the house.
“Empty.”
I shivered. The night was cool; a dry breeze raised the small hairs on my neck. I took a drink of water and swatted a horse fly away from my reddened nose. “Perhaps he is sleeping,” I ventured.
Abe Lincoln scowled again. He grunted. “I doubt it.”
For some reason his stereotypical behavior annoyed me. I slid down from my mount and cringed. I was used to traveling in a buckboard or a carriage. My very testicles hurt. I had not ridden a horse in many a year. I massaged my muscles beneath my stiff new work pants.
“We’ll camp here,” I said, imperiously. “I don’t give a damn if your uncle is home or not. My buttocks are sore and I need something to eat. Build a fire.”
Abe Lincoln Moon said: “Build your own.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
He shook his head again. “I won’t,” he said. “Not on this ground. This ground is sacred.”
I squatted down and rubbed my eyes. I fear I was quite condescending. “Mr. Moon,” I said, “it’s getting late and I am weary. Now, first of all the entire Horse Human legend is just that, a legend. I have already told you that. There is nothing here that will harm us. Second, your uncle has built his home here, so quite obviously this place is safe. Third, if it is a question of money, I can…”
Moon snorted. “You think I am afraid because it is Horse Human land?” He slapped his own chest. “I have their blood in me.” I rolled my eyes, but he did not seem to notice. “But this is also where many white men are buried. That makes for too much magic.”
Moon now seemed totally sober and somewhat imposing. In fact, his doughy facial features had somehow hardened. He now reminded me of Nelly Tall Bear, my beloved childhood nanny. I swallowed and jumped to my feet. “White people?” I looked around, and my heart kicked in my chest. Even at dusk it became clear to me. I registered the scoured, white rock face and the Two Trees; the low creek bed and the gully coming in off the flats. “My God,” I said. “This was part of my grandfather’s property, Moon! I remember it from when I was a boy. Your uncle took some of the land nearest our spread.”
“Yes.”
“Members of my family were buried near here. How wonderful! In fact, I may see their graves again soon, after all this time!”
Moon was silent. I could see he was troubled, but I cared not. I twirled in circles, like a child in a circus tent for the very first time, eyeing the rock face above. “But where is the house my grandfather constructed?” I cried. “It was of a d
ecent size, and mainly built of stone.”
Then I remembered the sadness of my parent’s passing, and that all those who had lived here were now passed away and gone. My enthusiasm waned. A long moment passed. I repeated myself: “Where is that house?”
“Torn down, brick by brick,” Moon said.
“No! But why?”
Moon spat onto the parched earth. “To calm the spirits,” he said. “You may think I’m foolish, but they wished things…repaired. Back the way they were before the white men came.”
A chill ran through me. “They wanted?”
Moon smiled white and wide, but now his eyes were flat, reptilian slits. “I don’t have an Uncle Samuel,” Moon said. “Not anymore. He died five winters ago.”
“But…”
Moon looked up and around. Shadows were streaming out of the mountains like stalks from a carnivorous plant. He casually pulled a long Army Colt pistol and aimed it at my lower belly. I am ashamed to say that my bladder released.
“Step back, sir,” Moon said. “Get away from the animal.”
I did as I was ordered.
In a flash, Moon was on his horse, clicking with his tongue and leading my mount away. I watched him go, my throat tight with terror. Fortunately, I had my canteen in one hand and my own handgun tucked into the back of my leather belt. I dared not draw it. Mr. Moon would have surely cut me down had I tried.
“Where are you going?” I cried weakly. “What shall become of me?”
“Truth is, I don’t know.”
Moon looked back over his shoulder only once, and again I was struck by how different he seemed. With the palate of sunset behind him he seemed like a brave warrior from bygone days. I half expected to see feathers in his hair.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because of your family, sir. Your family desecrated this ground,” Moon said. He spoke softly, yet my belly flooded with adrenaline. “And because the Horse Humans are buried here,” he continued. “Nothing personal, but they need to stay buried.”
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