Skin Medicine

by Curran, Tim

  The man in the Confederate hat had Harmony.

  His huge, clawed hands were pressed to either side of the Mormon’s head…and he was lifted an easy two feet off the floor, rivers of blood running from his ears and eyes as his skull was crushed. Then the teeth darted forward and his face was literally stripped from the bone beneath.

  Dirker saw the beast standing there, Harmony’s face hanging from its jaws like a bloody scalp.

  And then the boy came back at him, but Dirker was on his feet.

  As the boy charged in, Dirker unleathered his .45 Peacemaker in one swift, easy motion. He fired once, punching a hole in the boy’s sloping forehead and blowing skull out the back of his head. The boy shuddered momentarily on all fours, gore oozing down his face. Then he pitched straight over, trembling on the blood-slicked floor.

  Two of the beasts were on Crombley.

  Fitch dropped another by following Dirker’s lead and shooting it in the head. Dirker put three bullets into the thing that was devouring Harmony. Then the door exploded in with a roaring wall of snow and long, furry arms powdered white took hold of both Fitch and Archambeau and dragged them screaming out into the storm.

  Dirker killed one more, reloaded his Greener and ran out into the storm, the world of Deliverance a cacophony of ringing church bells, shooting, and howling.

  ***

  The storm was reaching its peak out in the streets.

  The snow rose up into a whipping, shrieking wall of white that cut visibility down even further now. Cabe and his crew of miners had to squint and lean into the wind to press forward. They could hear the screaming and gunfire, but with the gusting blizzard turning sound around and into itself, it was hard to say where any of it was coming from.

  And the miners were panicking.

  They saw shapes hobbling through the snow and were shooting randomly, even though Cabe shouted at them to stop, because they might be cutting down their own men.

  They were ready to bolt and run.

  But where to?

  To either side they could see the vague, white-shrouded forms of buildings, but it was hard to say where they were in the town now. Paranoia and confusion had turned them back on their own tracks half a dozen times. And each time, their tracks had been erased by the storm.

  “Goddammit,” Cabe cried out at them, “stop this business, we’ve got to have some order here.”

  And that’s when he noticed there were only three miners with him, the fourth missing.

  “Where’s Hychek? Where the fuck did Hychek go?”

  “They got him! Something grabbed him…something with green eyes!” one of the miners shouted. “I’m getting out of here, I’m getting out right goddamn now…”

  But before he could, a trio of riders came pounding up the street and the miners, thinking the cavalry had arrived, waltzed right out into the streets to meet them. But it was not a rescue party, but a gang of Hide-Hunters. They thundered through the storm, parting the snows like roiling mists. They wore dusters and flat-brimmed hats pulled low over wolfish, snarling faces.

  One of the miners let out a strangled screaming sound as a lasso looped over his head and was pulled tight like a noose around his throat. He was yanked from his feet and pulled away into the storm by one of the Hide-Hunters. Another miner was similarly roped.

  Cabe ducked under a lasso meant for him and, quickly levering his Evans .44-40, knocked a Hide-Hunter from leather with three well-placed shots. He hit the ground, his horse racing off.

  And Cabe got a good look at him.

  He had the rough shape of a man, but was hunched-over and moved with a jumping, hopping side-to-side gait. His eyes blazed like wet emeralds and teeth hung over his narrow black lips like those of a jungle crocodile. With a resounding roar, he came at Cabe, the three bullet holes in him seeming to make little difference.

  Cabe couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  That repulsive, shocking face and gnashing teeth, the loops of drool hanging from the crooked slash of a mouth, the furry hands with the ten-inch fingers and claws just as sharp as scalpels.

  He put another round in the beast, mainly just to keep it off him.

  But it didn’t even slow it down.

  It slammed into him, pitching the both of them into a snowdrift. Its claws were at his throat, those fingers encircling his neck. The beast stank of tainted meat and diseased blood, saliva hung from its jaws in vile ropes.

  Before it fed on him, it did something that truly sucked the wind from Cabe’s lungs: it spoke.

  “Gonna die now, friend,” it said in a slavering, raw voice that was more akin to the growl of a rabid hound than the speech of a man. “Gonna die like an animal like in the old, forgotten days…”

  But Cabe had other ideas.

  As the beast reared up, letting out a wailing, howling noise that made Cabe’s ears explode with rushing noise, Cabe pulled his bowie knife from its sheath at his hip. And when the beast came down to fill its belly, it came right down on the blade of the knife. Nearly a foot of razored steel slid right into its throat and out the other side.

  With a mewling, whining sound, it pulled away, the knife erupting out the side of its throat. Its head hung at a sickening angle, most of its neck slit clean through. It spilled blood to the fresh snow, tried to run and fell, tried to rise up and stumbled, its life’s blood running out in a torrent.

  Cabe saw his chance and jumped on its back, knocking it face-first into the snow.

  Before the beast could so much as whimper, Cabe drew its head back by handfgul of that filthy, greasy hair and sank the knife deeper in its throat, sawing and slitting. The creature came alive, twisting and fighting and it was its own misguided strength more than anything else that finally severed its head.

  Cabe tossed it into the wind.

  The body still tried to crawl, but didn’t make it very far.

  The head stared up at him with those stark, green eyes and the jaws still worked.

  But it was done and Cabe knew it.

  Drenched with the reeking blood of the Hide-Hunter, Cabe stumbled out into the storm to find survivors.

  ***

  The only survivor from Cabe’s group was Lester Brand.

  He was a shift boss at the Silver Horn Mine.

  And he was also a dead man.

  When the Hide-Hunters attacked, he ran. He fought and blundered through the streets, ducking down when he heard a sound or sensed motion. He slipped into a doorway when two more Hide-Hunters rode by, sporting heads speared on poles. He saw the heads...they were the heads of miners, men he’d worked and drank with.

  Brand was trembling badly now, wheezing, pained sounds coming from his throat. Though it was bitterly cold and his face just as stiff as leather, he was sweating profusely. Trails of perspiration ran down his spine. He had lost his shotgun and the Colt Army pistols in his gloved hands felt oily like they might jump from his fists at any moment.

  He was moving down a street, but he had no true idea where he was.

  The town was not that big. Though he had never been to Deliverance before, he remembered Dirker saying it was cut by a central road and that four or five other roads intersected it. So if he just kept walking, he was bound to make his way out sooner or later.

  But he thought: Oh Jesus, oh Christ, what, what if I’m the last one left alive?

  But he knew that couldn’t be, for now and again he could hear gunfire. So he had to keep his head. He moved forward slowly, the snow wild and flying all around him. It sculpted weird shapes and shadows. The buildings rose up like headstones, leaning out at him. He kept seeing forms moving past him, but he didn’t dare shoot. Not just yet. For there was death everywhere now, screaming white death and what it hid in that whipping white cloak was far, far worse.

  He moved past a row of warehouses, then a barn, a boarded-up dry goods store. Then directly ahead he could hear a low, guttural growling sound. And then many. As if a pack of wild dogs were bearing down on him.

&
nbsp; Quickly, he darted down an alley that twisted and turned, spilling him into a little courtyard pressed between the hulks of buildings. There was no way out. He would have to break into one of them and take his chances.

  Right then, he froze up.

  The wind was making a shrill, howling sound and he wasn’t entirely sure that it actually was the wind. He looked up quickly…thought, thought for a moment he saw something up on a roof. Something that faded away into the belly of the storm. He wasn’t sure he had even seen it.

  There was a rapping noise off to his left.

  A door was swinging open and closed in the wind. It thudded hollowly against the weathered gray wall of a feed mill. Pulling up what strength he had left by that point, Brand moved over there, the door banging and banging.

  He went to the door.

  It had slammed close again. His throat full of cinders, Brand hooked the barrel of one Colt Army around the latch and threw it open. And saw…saw a figure come drifting out of the darkness like a wraith. A woman. A woman in a white soiled dress. Her hair was long and fire-red, blowing around like meadow grasses in a high, angry wind.

  “You,” Brand managed as she neared the doorway, “you…you gotta help me get out of here…I’m lost…I’m…”

  But he saw that she was grinning like something from a dark wood that snatched away wayward children, something that gnawed on bones and sucked blood. Her eyes were huge and wet and lustrous like wet jade. They found him and held him, that mouth set with long needle-like teeth.

  Brand screamed and then those long fingers speared him and that slobbering, savage mouth thrust forward. And it ended for him there in the snow, in a red-stained heap. And as he died, he could hear the sound of her chewing on him.

  ***

  In the lobby of the hotel, Graybrow paused.

  He listened.

  He knew from years spent stalking that he was not alone, but where the others were, he could not say.

  Though he had sung his death song before coming on the raid, Graybrow did not want to die. He would never see seventy again, but there was a vitality about him, a spunk, a gleam in his eye that age could not hope to wither.

  He did not want to die…yet, he was willing.

  It was an honor among the Utes to die in battle. And it would be honor for Graybrow as well. And if he had to die, at least he would die knowing grand secrets, horrible secrets and malign truths, but his soul would be stronger for it. Nourished.

  Graybrow had been with Henry Wilcox and Sir Tom Ian, but had abandoned them long ago. He preferred to hunt on his own. And be hunted if that was the case. Because, honestly, he did trust whites with guns. They had a nasty habit of shooting at anything that moved and if he was going to die, it would not be with his guts shot out by some crazy white.

  The hotel, he knew, had been called the Shawkesville Arms once upon a time when Deliverance went by its original name and was a lead-mining town.

  Since those days, it had been abandoned to the weather, to nature, to whatever chose to call it home. And if what Harmony had said was true, Cobb and his henchmen had called it home for a time.

  Slowly then, Graybrow moved towards the old stairway that was covered in filth and curled brown leaves that had drifted in from the innumerable holes in the walls and roof. The handrail was wreathed in cobwebs. The stair carpet was mildewed and black. Though it was dim, it was not dark. Scant illumination—and snow—drifted in.

  Outside, the storm was howling like a blood-maddened beast, throwing itself at the ramshackle buildings and making them creak and groan and sway on their rotting foundations.

  There was a high, unpleasant stink that had little to do with woodrot or animal droppings. It was a sharp, violent smell that got inside Graybrow’s head and made him think of slaughterhouses and mass graves, insane asylums and death wards…places filled with death, with pain and horror and madness.

  He started up the steps, feeling now how fully alone he was.

  But you are not a white, he kept telling himself. You are not a white who feels safe in crowds or needs the presence of many. You are an Indian, a Ute, and solitary, lonely places do not frighten you.

  And that was great in theory, but it wasn’t working so good in practice today.

  For the stink was getting worse and there seemed to be something crackling in the air like some negative charge of potential energy, some static electricity that was building and building. The farther he went up the stairs, the more he felt it. It was all around him, heavy and dark and threatening. He could feel it from the top of his head right down to his balls and it was a foul, reaching hostility like hands poised to strangle him.

  Upstairs.

  More leaves, more dirt. But you could see now that there had been traffic up here. The hardwood floor of the corridor was thick with collected dust, but a trail had been beaten through it.

  Graybrow thought: Okay, old man, okay, just do it.

  So he did.

  He began going from room to room and finding little more than additional cobwebs and some old crates and moldered furnishings. The covering of dust was disturbed in some of them as if maybe Cobb’s men had tossed their bedrolls onto the floor to sleep.

  In the corridor, the garish wallpaper was spotted with fungus. It was faded and disintegrating and peppered with wormholes. In the gloom, Graybrow was beginning to see evidence of claw-marks ripped into the paneling and old, browned blood smears.

  That smell was still thick around him, but there was another smell, too. A repellent fetor of putrescent meat and spilled blood. The stink was vaporous and gagging, enough to make him—

  Suddenly, without a sound, a shape stepped from a darkened doorway. So very quick and so very silent that Graybrow could barely even register surprise before the Whitney 12-gauge was yanked from his hands and tossed down the hallway.

  Feeble light choked with dust motes and a powdery rain of snow illuminated the shape. Graybrow saw it, felt his heart give a jolt of pain. He knew what he was looking at was James Lee Cobb. He knew that, but it took him some time to acclimate himself to the horror.

  As it was, he felt faint.

  Cobb was tall and cadaverously-thin, a mummy from a sideshow. A sombrero with a short, curled brim was pushed back on his head. The crown was scarved in the skins of desert snakes and set with feathers and the talons of raptors and the teeth of wolves. He wore a poncho of pale hide that was stitched together in a crazy quilt from human pelts. Around his corded throat there were a half-dozen necklaces of human fingers, ears, and teeth. At his waist were a brace of ivory-handled pistols and hatchets. There was a sash from shoulder to gunbelt and it was sewn together from…faces. Faces tanned to death masks with the scalps intact.

  And it was all dreadful enough…but Cobb’s own face, it was the very worse thing.

  The right side was pale and the skin was tight and seamed, barely covering the skull beneath. A single unblinking green eye with a huge, dilated pupil like a translucent moon stared out at Graybrow. But the left side of his face…just gone. Red tendons and pink muscle were stretched obscenely across an exaggerated skull like starving dogs had eaten the good stuff away. There was no eye there, just a black scarified cavity.

  Graybrow managed to start breathing again before he passed dead out. “Suppose…suppose I’m in for it now, eh?” he said.

  Cobb nodded that fright mask. Lips pulled back from sharp, yellow teeth. “I reckon ye are, friend,” he said in a hissing voice. “I reckon ye are.”

  “Don’t suppose I could—”

  “Doubt it,” Cobb said. “But since ye came this far, there’s something I’d like ye to see.”

  But Graybrow just shook his head. “Don’t think I want to.”

  And when Cobb made to grab him, he brought out his hunting knife and buried it right into the devil’s belly. Not that it did him shit-good. Cobb took hold of him with a strength that was amazing. Those clawed hands—the left one was skeletal and skinless—took him by the shoulders a
nd smashed him against the wall until Graybrow went loose as a rag.

  The fight had been pounded out of him.

  The knife still hanging from his belly, Cobb took hold of Graybrow’s long, white hair and dragged him up the corridor by it. Graybrow swam in and out of consciousness. He could hear the clomp, clomp, clomp of Cobb’s Spanish boots and then he was dumped unceremoniously before a door at the end of the hall. A door covered with old, bloody handprints.

  Cobb fished out a key and unlocked it.

  Graybrow found himself looking into an abattoir. He heard the clink of chains and smelled spoiled meat and festering carcasses.

  Cobb kicked him in there. “I’d like you to meet my mother,” he said and slammed the door shut behind him.

  ***

  Deputy Pete Slade, Elijah Clay, and a trio of miners were going from house to house, killing anything that moved. They heard the shooting and the dying, but Slade held fast that they had a job to do and the others would have to watch out for themselves.

  They learned quick enough that the only way you could put the Hide-Hunters down was by blowing their heads apart. After no less than four run-ins with the beasts now, they didn’t aim anywhere else.

  But now they were trapped in the streets and things were getting ugly.

  The beasts were up on the roofs, watching them and diving down at them when they thought they stood a chance. Green, shining eyes watched from the dark depths of barns and from behind shuttered windows.

  “We gotta link up with them others,” Clay said, not frightened really, but surely not at ease. “Ye think, Slade? They’s just too many of them and too few of us.”

  Slade knew it was true.

  But there was no time for that, not now. For the double-doors of a stable flew open behind them and the townspeople began to flood out en masse. They were a slat-boned, pasty group with sunless faces and gleaming green eyes. But what was probably the most disturbing thing was that they were not dressed in clothing, but hides. Human hides. Hides that included flapping limbs and skinned faces, blowing locks of hair.