The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Screams stole the Skeleton’s attention away from the horror’s anatomy. To his left, past Poe’s bar, where Gallows opened to the town’s center, people were wading through their new lake of blood; some to rescue stragglers, others to escape. They carried weapons, but only because it seemed the right thing to do, not because they thought they might get the chance to use them. The Red Worm could’ve killed those trudging beneath it, but the thing seemed to be enjoying itself. Instead, it stirred the steaming pool with the hundreds of arms that hung off it. By doing so, the Worm began to create a tidal pool that even the strongest struggled to escape.

  Quickly, the Skeleton moved onto Poe’s porch. He looked through the doors for the fat man, didn’t find him, and then said to Hex and Elizabeth, “I know what to do.”

  Hex and Elizabeth moved onto the porch, to temporarily get out of the blood pool’s pull.

  “We don’t have hours to wait for you,” Hex said. Her eyes hadn’t stopped glowing bright blue since this all began. Whatever had halted her telepathy before, it was gone now. “We have minutes, at best.”

  “That’s all I need.” The Skeleton reached into his cloak, closed his hand around the Black Hour’s heart. “Stay here, by me. If the Red Worm sees us, hit me as hard as you can.”

  Elizabeth gave a weak nod. She was listening, but only barely. The Skeleton was one thing, but the Red Worm was another matter entirely. For once, since Ghostgrave, he’d be one-upped by something worse looking than him.

  “Do it,” Hex said. She took out her sword. “If we can’t snap you out of it, you’re on your own.”

  He took out the heart with his gloved hand and said, “That’s fine. Worm can’t do no worse to me than what I’ve been through already.”

  As he transferred the Black Hour’s heart to his bare hand, he noticed a young girl creeping alongside the edge of Poe’s bar. He knew everyone in Gallows, but he didn’t know her. She was a teenager by his guess, tanned, with a mess of hair that was having a hard time hiding the scar that ran from neck to ear. Strange, talon-like daggers were fastened to her side, and in her hand, she carried an ax that looked better suited for battle than chopping wood. After a moment, she took her eyes off the Worm and noticed him, too. She went pale. Her mouth dropped open, as though she recognized him. Carefully, with her Corruption running like mascara down her arm, she backed away, and took off.

  The Skeleton didn’t have time to make sense of the situation, so he let the Black Hour’s heart touch his bones and went to work.

  Blood moon rising over a howling fjord. Horned doctors dissecting a stillborn. Canopies billowing. Sewer pipes clogged with wiring. Family of five having a dinner that could only feed two. The poor standing outside a bank, checks in hand, waiting for the guard to let them in. Rain clouds.

  “Atticus, hurry it up,” Hex said, smacking his skull.

  “How long?” he blabbered.

  “Forty seconds.”

  He had to focus. He needed something large. The Black Hour wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he realized that now. He’d lost a year and a half because he thought it would. He had to make do with the sights it showed him, and go where they would let him.

  “I need the skyscrapers again,” he said. He clutched the heart. “I need what’s inside them. Can’t destroy Gallows.”

  Kids in a coffee shop. Snakes in tangled sheets on a motel room floor. Strobe lights blinking across bleeding tattoos. Sanitarium blues. City on the horizon, brake lights in its smog.

  That’s what I need. The Skeleton focused harder on the recollection, pushing further into it.

  Pedestrians on the crosswalk. Children skipping intestinal rope. Summer camp social by the waterfront. Yellow-hatted workers digging up the road.

  Hex shook him again, but he ignored her. The ground rumbled—the Red Worm had to be moving—but he ignored that, too. He focused on the worker in the image, the truck they kept going back to.

  Construction yard. Barbed wire fences. Junkies hocking copper for coin. Black dogs having the run of the place. Tools. Windstorm. Tools.

  “Atticus,” Elizabeth shouted.

  Trucks idling in a garage. Foreman screwing around with his secretary. Supply depot. Protests in the streets. Supply depot. A Molotov celebration at a daycare. Supply depot.

  Hex shook him by his shoulders. “Atticus, it’s looking right at us!”

  Supply depot. Construction workers. Yellow hats, blood inside. Wrenches. Nails. A sign that says rebar. Steel bars, as long as a building—a whole mess of them.

  Hex gouged out his eye with her thumb.

  The Skeleton broke out of the trance. His eye reformed in a matter of seconds, to confirm what the other saw: the Red Worm looking down on them, drooling its fetid body water on the roof of Poe’s Bar.

  “Oh god,” Elizabeth said, repeating herself over and over.

  “Atticus.” Hex held onto him from behind, as though he were a shield. “You have to do—”

  The Skeleton closed his eyes, grasped the image of the piles of rebar he held there, and willed them into being.

  Like javelins from hell, thirty-five, sixty-foot steel bars shot out of the earth. One-by-one, they tore through the Red Worm’s body, puncturing each segment and seam. Gallons of gore and disease-infested filth fell from its ruptured carapace, raising the blood level of Gallows’ lake. Once the steel bars broke through the creature’s back, rather than blow through completely, they stopped instead. By staying fixed inside the earth, they kept the Red Worm impaled there, to bleed it out and kill it for good.

  “Holy shit,” Hex said.

  The Red Worm’s patchwork of appendages worked at the rebar, but they wouldn’t budge. Its ten thousand faces wailed in agony. It writhed in deafening desperation.

  Elizabeth started to cry. “You did it.”

  Blood rained down upon Gallows in choking sheets. The Red Worm gripped each bar, tried to hoist itself off them, but couldn’t. Great, steaming mounds of meat clumped together in the center of Gallows, sucking in those people who were caught in their wake.

  “You think that’s enough?” The Skeleton held onto the heart, to keep the rebar in place.

  Hex nodded and came out from behind him. A geyser of blood squirted out of the Red Worm’s side and blasted the front of Poe’s bar. The Skeleton, Hex, and Elizabeth flew backward, crashing into the building.

  “It’s dying,” Hex said, spitting up the blood that had gotten in her mouth. “Just give it a minute.”

  So they did. They sat where they were, crumpled on Poe’s porch, watching as the Red Worm made matters worse for itself. Like an animal caught in a trap, it twisted and turned, doing more harm than good. Whole bodies began to fall from its segments now. With them, a dam of soggy, pale corpses formed in the lake of blood, stemming the rising tide.

  From where the Skeleton had spotted the strange, young girl, he heard James say, “Was that you?”

  He turned. James and Miranda were standing beside the porch, arms full of things from his farmhouse. The blood was up to their waists now, and was lapping at the edge of the porch itself. Holding their findings to their chests, they had brought pictures, letters, toys, clothes, blankets, and surely other things cramped in between the aforementioned.

  “I can’t believe….” Miranda smiled and dumped her haul onto the porch of Poe’s. “You did it.”

  The Skeleton wished he could smile back at her, but instead he gave her that skeletal grin and went to help her and James onto the porch.

  James dropped what he carried as well. And as the Skeleton offered him a hand, he said, “Wait,” and told him there was something else.

  “This is enough,” the Skeleton said, the Red Worm in his periphery, slowing down.

  James shook his head. He crouched, chin to the blood, and reared up, producing the Skeleton’s scythe from out of the crimson water. Handing the weapon to him, James said, “Saw it. Thought you should have it.”

  The Skeleton took the scythe, and then he took J
ames up onto the porch. They stared at each other a moment, each seeing past what the other had become. He had wanted to kill the Red Worm, in part, to prove he still had some humanity inside him. And as James’ gaze went soft and looked at the Skeleton the way he used to years ago, when he was young and proud to be a part of his family, he knew he had succeeded.

  “Thanks, James,” the Skeleton said. He rested the scythe against the front of Poe’s bar. “But I think we all need a break from killing.”

  At that moment, the Red Worm bore down on the steel bars and ripped itself apart. Massive chunks of the gore-beast flew through the air in opposite directions, spinning wildly. They crashed into buildings, landed like boulders in the lake. Huge waves of red built across Gallows, before breaking on the homes in their way, or the outskirts further off.

  The Skeleton finally put the Black Hour’s heart back into his cloak. As he did so, the thirty-five pieces of rebar returned to the nightmare they’d been called from. Pieces of the Red Worm still attached to them fell as the steel bars disappeared, because it seemed not even the Black Hour wanted anything to do with the creature.

  Hex stumbled across the porch. She started to say something like, “It’s dead,” but stopped herself, because the Red Worm wasn’t.

  It wasn’t dead at all.

  About a stone’s throw away, six large, bear-sized pieces of the Red Worm rose out of the blood, until they were floating in it. Rows of teeth, human and animal alike, comprised the entirety of the vestiges’ fronts, making most of the gory, gem-hard hunks of meat nothing more than mouths. With their tens of arms and dangling legs, they lifted themselves up, until they were standing on the blood itself. All six of them, fixed on the Skeleton and his friends beside him, swarmed.

  “Find Mr. Haemo,” the Skeleton shouted. He grabbed the scythe and started down the porch steps to greet the abominations. “All of you.”

  Hex and Elizabeth didn’t need to be told twice. With James and Miranda, they gathered up all the personal belongings and dropped off the side of Poe’s, disappearing around the back.

  The Skeleton dropped into the lake, the blood going up to his waist. The abominations were bolting towards him, killing any survivors that weren’t quick enough to get out of their way. He wanted to use the heart, but he didn’t have time. They’d be tearing him apart before he could even process the first image.

  “Atticus! What the hell you doing?”

  The Skeleton’s gaze shot across Gallows, where he spotted Gary, Warren, and the new recruits emerging from in between several destroyed houses. Bruna was limping, and Allister had a little girl on his shoulders whose hair was half torn out. Maya, Kristin, and Sean were lagging behind. They looked so absolutely worn-down by their surroundings it seemed they were trying to go slow enough to be forgotten by the Cabal.

  He waved them off, said “Gary, turn around,” and then knew he’d fucked up. Immediately, the closest rotted vestige of the Red Worm identified them as his friends and changed its course. It barreled towards them, mouths within mouths chomping in anticipation.

  “Nmw’gla fhtha xu… ufv’la ufv’la axtu.”

  The Skeleton spun around, looked clear across town where, atop the general store, Mr. Haemo stood, cloaked in human skin. His thousands of tiny children were going back and forth, between him and the lake, feeding him the blood they carried. He spotted James, Hex, Elizabeth, and Miranda, working their way up to the general store’s roof, with the last of Atticus’ family’s most cherished items.

  “Oh god!”

  The Red Worm’s vestige slammed into Gary and Warren’s group. With a ceaseless hunger, it grabbed the little girl Allister was shouldering and crammed her down its toothy gullet. Bruna screamed, ran her sword through the vestige’s side. It batted her back, breaking her nose as it did. Gary got brave and drove his sword in deep—

  The Skeleton sank beneath the blood as the first of the five vestiges bashed into him. In his concern, he’d lost track of their whereabouts. Tens of hands held him down in the muck, to drown him. Because the beast didn’t know better, he stopped flailing after a while to make it think it had.

  The Skeleton, scythe in the hand, broke free and rose up out of the blood. He swung the scythe and slashed through the vestige’s mouth. Its flabby, quivering jaw split apart and handfuls of teeth rolled out into the lake.

  “Nmw’gla fhtha xu… ufv’la ufv’la axtu.”

  He drove the scythe’s blade through the top of the vestige, until it went all the way in. He ripped outward, sloppily bisecting the lump of a monster. As death deflated it, the four other vestiges trampled over it and piled onto the Skeleton.

  “Nmw’gla fhtha xu … ufv’la ufv’la axtu.”

  The Skeleton struggled to stay above the blood as the vestiges weighed him down. Several fleshy and boney hands clamped onto his face and pulled his head back until his neck broke. Momentarily paralyzed, he watched as the other two vestiges started disassembling him. With their rubbery appendages, the solidified pieces of gore tore out his bones and tossed them to the last vestige, who scarfed them down greedily.

  “Nmw’gla fhtha xu… ufv’la ufv’la axtu.”

  The Skeleton died and descended into the Membrane. He fell, as he always fell, through the organic tunnel that, now that he was looking at it, bore some resemblance to the Red Worm itself. But as he realized this, he realized another thing as well: he could still hear Mr. Haemo chanting out the ritual.

  It’s working, he thought. His soul rebounded, started hauling him out of that limbo. The ritual is taking hold.

  It wasn’t a good thing for the Red Worm’s vestige to have eaten him, because when he reformed, he reformed inside the creature. Like an oversized infant cramped in its womb, the Skeleton started kicking and clawing at the vestige’s interior. He ripped through layers of fat and cartilage, stomped on the organs and bones it had no use for, but had assimilated all the same.

  The vestige must’ve felt the attack. All of sudden, the Skeleton flew forward as the creature dunked itself into the lake and guzzled it. Heavy, coppery mouthfuls of blood flooded the vestige’s chambers, but it wouldn’t be enough to stop him. Laughing wildly, the Skeleton started biting and ripping at the creature’s side. The vestige’s flesh tore, its meaty exterior pulling apart, one sinewy stitch at a time. With not a hint of white left on his bones, the crimson Skeleton burst through the vestige’s torso, killing it immediately.

  “Nmw’gla fhtha xu… ufv’la ufv’la axtu.”

  Standing there in the vestige’s carcass, he saw its three other brethren had fled. Two were gallivanting across the lake, dead-set to knock dead Mr. Haemo mid-ritual.

  “Help them,” James cried out from the roof where the rites were being completed.

  The Skeleton looked back towards Warren, Gary, and the others. They weren’t in the lake, but scrambling across the piles of pale carcasses that had dropped out of the Red Worm. The first vestige was wounded, yet still it limped speedily across the bulwark of bodies. The third of the four that had swarmed the Skeleton was in the lake, swiping at their legs, biting at their toes.

  He grabbed his scythe out of the blood and ran as fast he could across the lake. His strides were huge, his hypothetical heart beating fast. People he’d known all his life floated past him on their broken backs, their faces fixed in disbelief. He saw Mary Beth here, Johnny and his boy Jimmy there; Katie, whom he’d crushed hard on before Clementine, and old man Carruthers, somehow looking younger than before. He even caught a glimpse of Poe, the fat pimp popped open like a pimple. It was good he died, the Skeleton thought, because he could only imagine what business opportunities the man would pursue in the wake of this hell.

  “Fuck,” Gary cried out, the vestige in the lake sinking a few claws into his thigh.

  The Skeleton hurried faster. “Hold on,” he said. “I’m almost there.”

  Gary yanked himself free of the vestige. Stumbling backward across the slippery corpses, he knocked Maya into the water.
<
br />   “Maya!” Kristin went down on her knee, but as she extended her hand, the vestige took Maya by the arms and bit her in half.

  The lake of blood started to churn. Smoke began to rise off the surface. Below the waters, a light grew from some otherworldly place.

  “Nmw’gla fhtha xu… ufv’la ufv’la axtu.”

  The Skeleton looked over his shoulder and saw the other two vestiges climbing the general store.

  “Holy Child,” Gary screamed again.

  The Skeleton snapped back to the scene atop the corpses. The vestige had Gary pinned, but the ghoul had plunged his sword through the beast’s gut.

  “Get off him,” Warren bellowed. He, Allister, Sean, and Kristin attacked the vestige from all angles. They stabbed at it repeatedly, turning its skin into pulpy, paper mache, but the beast would not relent. Every time Warren went in to drag Gary out from under it, it would snap forward, nearly taking off his arms.

  Gary screamed, driving his legs into the vestige’s stomach. He fixed his hands under the beast’s mouth, to hold it back. But his arms were weak, rotted, so when the vestige threw its weight forward, the ghoul’s arms gave.

  After that, there was a moment where time seemed to slow, where it seemed as though the Skeleton could do something other than watch what was about to happen. It was a moment of hope, where the anti-villain had one last chance at heroism. Time was slowing, but the Skeleton wasn’t; maybe it was the Black Hour doing its one good deed for the millennium.