Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  Stickney had cowered behind a dead mule through the shooting. Now he climbed over corpses to tug Cawthorne’s sleeve. “Major, please, send the scouts back to the surface for reinforcements if you want to fight a war, but our orders are to find the Comanche.”

  Cold as an undertaker reading a bill, Cawthorne said, “Take your hand off me and get the hell out of my sight, or I’ll have you shot.”

  “Look yonder, rubes!” Tobin Roherty pointed over their shoulders at the undead armies on the terrace. “I think we finally woke these boys up, Major.”

  The y’m-bhi hordes had silently regrouped, and suddenly took hold of three troopers and summarily tore them apart. Relentless talons of naked bone shredded wailing soldiers and trampled their remains to get at the panicked survivors.

  Surrounded by walls of groping hands, the company turned their backs to each other and fired into the shambling slaves, but their bullets only punched bloodless holes in unfeeling flesh. The circle collapsed under the sheer weight of bodies piling on top of them. The switchback trail down the mountainside vanished under a black tide of silent, faceless killers.

  Tobin Roherty leapt up onto the shoulders of the fumbling dead and hopped from one to the next, firing into the mob and howling a wild rebel yell.

  Hull unsheathed his bowie knives and hacked a clearing out of the forest of dead flesh all around himself, then ran along the edge of the uppermost terrace, shoving y’m-bhi slaves off the edge or into the paddies. Oliver Stickney and a Pawnee scout followed him, leaping over the limbless grotesques Hull left flopping in his wake.

  Hull beheaded a slave, gutted another and crushed the skull of a third with the pommel of his other knife, shoving the broken bodies into the path of their fellows, sending them tumbling at his feet. Without pausing to press the advantage, Hull leapt into a harvester’s cart and drew his Navy revolver.

  “Hull, wait!” Stickney hollered. “For the love of mercy, wait—” He dove headfirst into the cart just as Hull shot the brake cable. The Pawnee scout leapt for the falling cart but it dropped out from under him so quickly that the leaden edge caught his legs and sent him spinning head over heels into the shredding claws of the y’m-bhi.

  The cart gained terrible speed as it roared down the mountainside, flying past terraces and smashing away the grasping slaves that blocked the track. Stickney was flattened against the wall of the cart, while Hull clung to the prow and braced himself to shoot crawling slaves off the tracks.

  When the cart slammed into the track’s terminus, Hull leapt clear and rolled to a safe distance in the blue sand. Stickney was flung out of the cart in a flurry of crushed vegetables and landed badly on his right arm.

  They lay on a subtly glowing desert plain on the desolate outskirts of a metropolis of onyx and obsidian, of towers, domes and pyramids to dwarf any under the sun; yet also a necropolis, unruined but seemingly uninhabited, and lit by unblinking, cold blue fires.

  “Where are we?” Stickney moaned. “Is this hell?”

  Hull grimly set the Indian agent’s broken forearm before he thought to reply. By then, Stickney was just delirious enough to accept his answer.

  “Yes. But it is also home.”

  * * *

  May 3, 1868

  Fort Fetterman, Wyoming

  The rising sun shone like a golden eye of judgment on the Platte River plains, but until this morning, the rain had beat down on the red ground around Fort Fetterman for nineteen days. It was weather only fit for redskins, but Colonel Hemphill had insisted on riding at the earliest break in the storm. His prize white mare sank into the sucking mud fifty yards out of the gates and nearly drowned the Colonel.

  Before they could dig the mare out, the dawn patrol had come galloping in with a lost girl they’d found on the trail.

  * * *

  “Now, you just take a good long look,” Barney Farquhar said to the girl, “and you speak right up if you recognize any of these bad boys.”

  Smiling eagerly, Farquhar dangled the flyblown bunch of severed redskin heads for the girl, twisting the knotted ropes of hair in his grubby fist so she could see each face up close as it swiveled past her glazed, empty eyes.

  “Leave her be, Barney,” the ruddy-faced sergeant said, shoving the bounty hunter out the door, and waving away the rest of the rabble who’d come to eyeball the girl. “She ain’t pickin’ none of your rotten fruit today. All of you vultures, make yourselves scarce!”

  The girl was starved and bloodied and scared out of her mind, with brambles and thorns woven into her hair. She belonged with the last wagon train that left the fort for Oregon, three weeks ago. She told the men who found her that their guide led them into the Rockies, and that “the mountains ate them up.” She would say no more, but the wound carved into her palm—parallel zigzag lines like a lightning bolt curling on itself, or a serpent eating its tail—was a silent scream that haunted the half-breed scout who found her.

  Corporal Hull slouched in the doorway of the fort’s telegraph office and watched Sergeant Truscott try to coax the girl out of her trance with a peppermint stick. He had never seen anyone look so lost, but he knew more than most, how she probably felt. Once, not so long ago, he had also wandered into a fort with all of his life torn away.

  He was born and raised a Comanche of the Kotsotekas, the warlike rulers of the southern plains from Kansas to Mexico. His mother died giving birth to him and he never knew his father, but every man in the tribe was his father until he was thirteen.

  When he returned from his first buffalo hunt, he found the camp hysterical with mourning. The chief had been killed and mutilated in his sleep, and the shaman lost in madness after an evil dream. The new chief, a callow brave named Walking Tree who feared and despised Hull, called him a curse sent by the devils under the earth. The Kotsotekas cast Hull out with a buckskin bag full of white papers he couldn’t read, and a bloody blue wool coat. No other tribe would accept him, so he set out east for Fort Cobb.

  The papers he carried identified him as the only son of Cadmus Hull, a Union Cavalry lieutenant and notorious deserter and renegade. He earned his keep as an interpreter and horse-breaker. No man on the post was his father, yet they taught him much until he turned sixteen, and enlisted him as a cavalry scout. Though they never quite trusted him, they gave him work and a path to manhood.

  At the bleeding edge of the settled frontier, Fort Fetterman oversaw the split of the Oregon and California Trails, and skirmished almost daily with one or another of five hostile tribes. While the Civil War raged back east, the wagon trains had flowed out of Fetterman like lemmings off a cliff into the lawless wilderness. Native scouts outnumbered the rank-and-file infantry, and the Indians raided the wagons without fear. But with the end of the war, the Union had turned its undiluted wrath upon the southern Plains Indians, and beat them into accepting a treaty that would relocate them all to the badlands between Kansas and Texas. In another year, the railroad would join the east with California, and the wagon trails would become cornfields and stockyards, enclosed in fences from sea to shining sea.

  Hull knew that, out here, your place in the world could be ripped out from under you in less than a breath. You could get right with it however it all panned out, or you could go mad looking for the hidden hand that kept tearing it apart.

  Hull stepped outside and watched the traffic passing through the fort and the trading post. He stuck close to the office, because they’d be sent out soon to find the girl’s people.

  The fair weather had set many trains to hastily setting out, despite the saturated ground. Their wheels bogged down and flung cakes of blood-red mud skyward as they passed through the open stockade gate. Greenhorns and religious fanatics on the trains might still get themselves killed, even without the natives’ help.

  A stranger surprised him. One moment Hull was alone on the creaking boardwalk outside the office door, and the next, a hand fell on his shoulder.

  Hull couldn’t say later, whether he’d heard him speak firs
t, or just felt his presence and turned around. And what he heard—or what he thought he’d heard—left him flummoxed.

  The words in his ear were a strange chain of sounds that no human tongue ought to be able to string together. And yet he thought he understood them, for he heard, in his mind, “The Road Below is open, boy. Will you come home, now?”

  Corporal Hull guardedly looked at the man, searching for some familiar sign, but he’d never seen this man before, and he was not Comanche.

  Rawboned and compact, with white hair cropped just above the collar of his fringed buckskin shirt and tucked under a black, broad-brimmed drover’s hat, the stranger looked more than half white. At first he appeared not much older than Hull, with a broad brow and sharply chiseled cheekbones, but the wrinkles around his cobalt blue eyes were spider-webs with centuries trapped in them. His teeth were long and yellow, and finely etched with geometric symbols.

  When Hull locked eyes with the stranger, he shrank inside himself as the stranger grew, until Hull was like a swaddled baby on a cradleboard, or a man buried up to his neck in the sand. The face of the stranger looked down on him was like the sun, beams radiating from his eyes seeming to shine right through his skull, and everything Hull was, everything he knew, was laid bare and stolen away.

  Suddenly, they were just two men standing together in a muddy fort. Hull’s brain somersaulted in his skull. He reached out to a post and clung to it until his knees stopped shaking.

  “What did you say to me?” Hull asked.

  The stranger’s smile turned sad, and he gave Hull a pitying shrug as he passed by, saying, “I mistook you for someone else. Good day, my son.”

  Hull stared after the stranger, until he heard the sergeant shout and the chow bell ring an alarm.

  Barging into the office, Hull nearly got run over by a bellowing Sergeant Truscott. “Murder! A girl’s been murdered in our midst! Shut that damned gate!”

  Beyond Truscott, Hull saw the girl from the wagon train splayed out across the desk. In the middle of the telegraph office, in less than a few minutes, someone had cut her open from neck to crotch and filled her hands with her heart and liver.

  Only then did Hull notice the bright red handprint on his shoulder, where the stranger had touched him.

  Hull ran out onto the quadrangle, searching the sea of faces. A crowd massed at the office door, and the men at the gates were cursing in rounds. A wagon drawn by two oxen with a Mormon elder at the reins was bogged down in the gateway, and a gang of soldiers and civilians had been pressed to push it out of the mud. Hull saw a flash of dancing buckskin fringe among the mob. He dropped to one knee to see the smiling stranger duck under the wagon and slip out through the open gates.

  “Stop that man!” Hull ran through the gates with his pistol drawn. He heard a great splash just beyond the open gate. He thought of the sea of sucking mud outside, and smiled.

  The mud trapped his boots and he slid to a stop just outside the fort. The next wagon was hundreds of yards down the washed-out road, and no man or beast was anywhere in sight, except the sinking hindquarters of the colonel’s unfortunate horse.

  A bottomless lake of red ooze stretched out to the right of the trail. Hull got up and trudged to its unstable shore, bent and plucked the black drover’s hat off the surface. A few bubbles broke through the stubborn scum, but of the stranger, he saw no other sign.

  * * *

  With the Indian relocation going full steam down south, a full company couldn’t be spared to run down the vanished wagon train. Hull and two Delaware scouts—Barking Bird and Left-Handed Jim—rode west on the Oregon Trail ahead of an expected party led by Colonel Hemphill, as soon as his new horse arrived from back east.

  They rode west for a week, stopping at trading posts and wagon camps beside every swollen stream. Nobody had seen or heard of the missing train, but everyone had a tale of someone who had dropped off the face of the earth, in these parts. The Indians and settlers blamed each other with a blind symmetry that hinted at some invisible third party in the middle, craftier and crueler than either of its neighbors.

  The old, half-blind French mother of the trading post agent at Goshen Hole set to cursing in her native tongue when she squinted at the crude sketch Hull showed around. She told him that the white-haired, blue-eyed half-breed had called himself Honest John. He came through preaching the End of Days and led a flock of scared settlers and Cheyenne Indians up onto a hilltop to be lifted to Rapture. In the morning, they were gone, every soul, including her mother, sisters and brothers. The trader told Hull she was crazy. Honest John the preacher was a local legend that, if true at all, had occurred around 1810.

  Hull and the Delawares rode out of the grasslands and into the dry steppes of the Laramie Mountains, past wind-carved castles eroded to reveal the trapped bones of petrified thunder lizards. The sun beat down so hard that if you stood still, your shadow would burn into the rocks.

  Two days into the high country, they found the mark.

  It was carved into a lightning-struck oak with its roots snarled around a boulder the size of a house. If Hull had not committed the crude symbol to memory until he saw it with his eyes closed, he might have missed it, and the hidden trail it pointed out of the jumbled, jagged rocks.

  The trail was cut with fresh wagon tracks, and took them up a sandy creek bed in the shadow of Black Mountain, where the Oregon Trail first began to climb in earnest up the eastern face of the Rockies. None of the scouts knew of any overland pass hereabouts. There were countless places to get lost, stuck or ambushed.

  Hull and the Delawares doggedly picked their way up the steep trail, then followed it into a rocky downward draw that meandered for two miles before ending in a box canyon. The walls loomed outward as they climbed nearly a hundred feet with no exit, but Hull was sure they’d come to the right place. When he dismounted, he began to see the jagged symbols chiseled in the sandstone everywhere he looked. In the lee of a boulder above the trail, he found a broken boot heel in a young lady’s size, and a shard of bloody rock that she or someone else must’ve used to cut the image in her palm.

  But the trail ended here, and no wagon train. No blood or spent bullets, so signs of a struggle. Whatever she had seen had not ended here. Hull went to the wall and ran his hands over the weathered granite, probing every natural facet and carved symbol until his numb, bloodied fingers found a seam that somehow felt like the handle of a door.

  When he tugged at it, the entire face of the wall swung like a bank vault door on hidden hinges that gave not a groan until it revealed a cylindrical shaft, thirty feet in diameter, boring down into the mountain.

  Before they even debated whether or not to enter it, the three scouts stood before the open door without speaking or looking at each other. White men might have known fear of the unknown that only fired their curiosity and crazy, perverse courage. But all of them had heard tales of what lay beneath the earth, and to the Indians, it was more frightening than Hell. The white man believed that bad souls went below the ground when they died to be punished. The Comanche believed that men had come up out of the earth at the beginning. Hell is all the more frightening, if one has escaped it once, already.

  At last, Hull spurred his buckskin stallion over the threshold. The tunnel’s unpaved floor was smoother than any white man’s road, and sloped gently downward as it delved deeper into the mountain. The Delawares followed only after Hull taunted them, but his excitement masked a creeping dread sensation that something below wanted them to come.

  The tunnel led them down for almost another mile, before they reached a massive natural cavern. The torchlit walls seemed to crawl with ornately carved snakes and stranger legless things of the earth and sea, far more complex and obscene than the crude imitations outside. Hidden among the crazed bas-reliefs were the handholds of ladders, which Hull traced up to recessed cliff-houses tucked under the dripping, vaulted ceiling. They were of the Anasazi type found all over the Southwest, but much older, and hewn out of t
he black basalt walls, rather than built out of bricks.

  Everywhere they walked, the floor was crusted with black-red blood.

  Hull led the terrified scouts around the walls of the cavern, and found a steeply descending passage. A chill wind that reeked of carrion blew away their hats and snuffed their torches.

  Hull heard a wet crunching, and felt a spray of hot wetness across his face. Jim screamed and galloped off into the dark.

  Hull fought to calm his stallion. He backed up until he hit a wall, struck a match and lit his torch. Barking Bird lurched after him, his mouth mutely flapping. Above his nose, a hole the size of a fist had been punched right through his skull, but somehow, he sat astride his palomino until another silent sharpshooter cut him down.

  Hull saw something waiting just outside of the glow of the torch. Shambling, silent shapes pulled Jim out of the saddle and abruptly silenced his terrified horse.

  Hull drew his rifle out of its scabbard. His horse reared up and whirled, poised to run, but no direction offered safety.

  Something whooshed out of the dark and smashed his horse’s head in. Hull saw a fist-sized ball of dull blue-gray metal crush the stallion’s skull like a soap bubble. Something like a cannon, but utterly silent. Hull rolled off the horse as it toppled, and lay prone behind its spasming corpse. He cocked his Winchester and fired at phantoms.

  They were men, or had been once. Naked and armed with tarnished silver cleavers or razor-beaked shears bolted to the stumps of severed limbs, they stumbled blindly towards Hull as if eager for the blessing of lead.

  He hammered them down as fast as he could aim, but he could not kill them, for they had no heads to shoot. Limbs blown away and ribcages cracked to disgorge black, unbeating hearts, yet they kept coming.