by Ronald Kelly
Homer Lee Peck was just starting to relax and enjoy his recent victory when the tavern door burst from its hinges and somersaulted across the barroom. It crashed into the jukebox, shattering the dome and demolishing its inner workings. Randy Travis was abruptly cut off in mid-lyric, giving way to the tinkle of broken glass and the shocked silence of the men at the bar.
"Howdy, hombres!" roared a voice like thunder.
They stared at the dark form who stepped through the open doorway. The tall man was decked out in a fancy outfit reminiscent of the "singing cowboy" era of Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and Gene Autry. He wore a high-peaked black hat, a black kerchief and Western shirt with an iron-gray sheriff's star pinned to the chest, black trousers, and dark riding boots. The lawman had two gun belts cinched around his waist. Homer recognized one of them as belonging to his unfortunate predecessor, complete with handcuff pouch and holstered Smith & Wesson. The other gun belt held a large-caliber Peacemaker with a nickel finish and polished ivory grips.
"Who the hell are you?" breathed Jimmy Whitman hoarsely.
"Why, don't ya'll recognize me?" asked the dark sheriff. "I'm your old pardner… Black Gart!"
Startled, they all stared into those ghastly gray-fleshed features and saw the lean face of Gartrell Mayo staring back at them with sparkling black eyes.
"Thought you had me bushwhacked, didn't you?" sneered Black Gart. "Well, you figured wrong, you lowdown sidewinders! Say your prayers…it's a long, hard ride to hell!" Then, with gray hands as quick as greased lightning, he drew his pistols and began blazing away.
A few of the men scrambled over the bar, while some dove behind overturned tables. Six were slow in moving, though, and they were the ones who caught the hail of lead. Bullets riddled their bodies, knocking them against the front of the bar, splattering the polished mahogany with crimson. Jimmy Whitman was one of the unfortunate ones. He took a .44 slug right between the eyes and his head erupted in an explosion of skull fragments and ruptured brain.
The fellow who had served as bait for Mayo's ambush emerged from behind a table. He heaved a heavy chair at Black Gart with all the force he could muster. It shattered into a burst of splintered wood as it hit his chest, drawing only hearty laughter from the dark gunman. The sheriff fired from the hip, nailing the guy in the heart. As he dropped, another made a run for it, heading for the rear exit. Black Gart snapped off a couple more shots, putting one into each of his kneecaps. The man screamed and dragged himself painfully behind the shelter of the alcove wall.
Emery Gooch crouched behind the bar with Big Hank and Homer Peck. He looked at the wall above the shelves of liquor bottles and shot glasses. Hank's prized collection of Civil War memorabilia hung there—a Confederate flag, bayonets, cap and ball pistols, and several genuine cavalry sabers. He reached up and drew one of the swords, then bounded over the bar.
"You lousy son of a bitch!" he shrieked. "I'm gonna slice you up good!" He expected to be shot at, but the dark sheriff merely stood there with a big grin, letting him come on. Gooch reared back and, with all his might, brought the edge of the saber down on the side of Black Gart's neck. There was enough force behind that swing to decapitate a normal man, but Gooch suddenly realized that it wasn't a normal man he was dealing with. The steel blade snapped off at the brass hilt with a metallic clang. He watched in shock as the sheriff returned the .38 to its holster, freeing his right hand. Gooch tried to get away, but gray fingers shot out and buried themselves in his gullet. He could feel them punching through the flesh and muscle of his throat, searching for the bone within. They found his upper spine, squeezing tightly and turning the vertebrae into tiny splinters of pulverized bone. Gooch grew limp like a rag doll, then was flung across the barroom. He tumbled into the game room, landing on top of a pool table.
"Hey, you stinking bastard!" yelled two voices in unison. Black Gart turned just as the Conover twins came barreling toward him from out of a side booth. Their huge hands were linked and their flabby arms extended at throat level, ready to pull a strangling clothesline. The dark sheriff merely laughed. He cocked his head back a bit, giving them a clearer shot at his gray throat.
They hit him full force, but the effect was not the one they had hoped for. Instead of knocking the sheriff off his feet, they shot past him and kept right on going. The Conovers screamed in sudden agony as they hit the saloon wall and slid heavily to the floor. Their shrieks grew louder as they stared at the bloody stumps of their shoulders. With eyes glazed with pain and horror, they stared up at Black Gart and saw their lost arms hanging around his throat like a gruesome necklace, the white-knuckled fists still joined. The sheriff cast the limbs aside and lifted the Magnum. Two slugs left the muzzle with the fury of miniature cannonballs, putting the two brothers out of their misery.
A thunderous explosion erupted from behind and a bee swarm of double-ought buckshot hit the dark sheriff between the shoulder blades. The pellets were ineffective, however. They ricocheted in all directions, punching large holes in the tavern walls. Black Gart turned and saw Big Hank shucking the spent shells from his double-barreled shotgun and replacing them with fresh loads. A single shot from the .44 knocked the twelve-gauge from the bartender's hand, taking a couple of fingers with it for good measure. Clutching his hand, Hank leaped over the bar and ran for the back door. The hellish lawman didn't make any attempt to stop him. Someone else was foremost in his mind.
"Homer Lee Peck!" growled the dark sheriff with Gart Mayo's face. "Show yourself, you fat son of a bitch! You traitorous bastard!"
Homer knew there was no place to run to. He had to fight back and hope for the chance of escape. He drew his .38 Special from its holster and powered to his feet, clutching the revolver in a two-fisted combat hold. He took aim and fired rapidly.
The slugs flattened against Black Gart's chest, then dropped to the floor with dull thuds. When Homer had run out of bullets and continued squeezing the trigger, striking empty casings, the sheriff grinned. "Reload!" he demanded, taking a classic gunfighter's stance. "Then we'll have us a rootin'-tootin' showdown!"
Numbly, Homer did as he was told. He ejected the spent casings from his revolver and replaced them with fresh cartridges. Slowly, he walked around the end of the bar and faced Black Gart. "It ain't fair," he protested lamely. "You can't be killed."
"The eyes!" bellowed the sheriff, pointing to those inky black orbs. "Shoot for the eyes!" His splayed hand hovered over the handle of the .38 like a gray spider. "Are you ready? On the count of three…one…two ... three!"
Homer drew his service revolver and fired. His aim was slightly off. It missed the sheriff's left eye by two inches, landing in the pocket of his ear. The lump of lead squealed as it traveled the curve of gray flesh and wedged there. Black Gart pried the deformed slug away with his fingers and tossed it aside, as if it were no more than a bothersome insect.
"Now it's my turn!" he laughed. The hand dipped and flashed in a fraction of a second, full of cold blue steel, belching flame, and gun smoke. The bullet hit Homer squarely in the stomach, in the exact same spot that Mayo had taken one only an hour before. The impact slammed the deputy against the edge of the bar. Before he could slump to the floor, Black Gart was there, hand wrapped around his flabby throat, lifting him up as if he was a feather pillow.
The dark incarnation of Gartrell Mayo glared at him with those pitch black eyes and grinned broadly with teeth that could literally bite nails in half. "Time to leave another message!" he rasped.
Homer Lee Peck begged and pleaded for mercy, but to no avail. Black Gart merely laughed in his pale face, then went to work.
Rowdy Hawkens woke up feeling as if a freight train had run over his head. He staggered to his feet and leaned against the fender of his jeep, feeling a knot the size of a goose egg on the back of his skull. When his vision began to clear, he checked his watch. According to it, he had been out for nearly twenty minutes.
Who had hit him? One of Homer's pals? He looked around for his gun belt, but it had
been taken by the one who'd brained him. He started toward the tavern entrance. Halfway there he saw that the door was gone. "Something's wrong here," he said out loud. Carefully, he peeked inside.
Rebel's Roost was a slaughterhouse. Blood stood in murky puddles on the barroom floor. Twisted bodies lay amid the gore, most of them sporting nasty bullet holes. He glanced to each side of the entrance and found the Conover twins sitting slumped there, each with a bloody stump at the shoulder. Their missing arms lay beneath a barroom table, holding hands like two lovers who simply wouldn't let go, even in death. Emery Gooch was stretched out on the blood-drenched felt of a pool table with his head twisted completely around on his boneless neck.
The sight of the mass bloodletting made Rowdy's head pound even more. He stumbled to the bar and steadied himself, but the view was no better there. In fact, it was much worse. He looked up at the wall over the bar and felt the dizziness and nausea hit him even harder than before.
Homer Lee Peck was pinned, spread-eagled, to the big rebel flag with bayonets and sabers. It looked as though he had been crucified by the Confederate Army. His huge belly had been ripped open and inside the hollow of his abdomen there was only glistening darkness, nothing else. Homer had been brutally disemboweled and left as a ghoulish trophy on the rear wall of Rebel's Roost.
It was at that moment that Rowdy shifted his grip on the bloody bar top and felt something wet and squishy beneath his palm. He glanced down and, with a yelp of disgust, jumped back.
Homer's intestines trailed the length of the thirty-foot bar, but they weren't stretched into a taunt line. Instead, they looped and swirled with a definite pattern. It took Rowdy a few moments, but he finally recognized the tangled viscera as being some insane jokester's duplication of human handwriting.
"Oh, God, it's another one," moaned Rowdy. "It's another message."
And it was…a very. Clear and concise one.
LAST WARNING!
Rowdy was turning to get the hell out of there when something caught his eye. On the booth table, next to his white Stetson, were a couple of gun belts. One was his, while the other belonged to his grandfather. But how did it get there? He checked the guns. Both were empty, every round in them fired. Looking around the room, Rowdy could see where the bullets had gone to.
"But who?" he asked himself. "Who did this?"
"Hopalong Cassidy from hell," sobbed a voice from the back of the saloon.
Rowdy loaded his magnum, then checked the source of the voice. He found one of Homer's gang sitting at the end of the little hallway, between the restroom doors. His legs were spread out at awkward angles. It looked as though someone had blown his kneecaps apart, most likely with the .44 he was now holding. "What did you say before?" Rowdy asked. "About the one who did all this?"
"It wasn't human," the fellow moaned, teeth clenched against the pain in his ruined legs. "It looked kinda like Sheriff Mayo, but it wasn't. It was that critter that lives up on the mountain…the one that can change into all manner of evil things."
"The Dark'Un," said Rowdy.
The man shuddered. "Yeah, that's the one. It must've saw us ambush Mayo up on the mountain, then came after us."
Abruptly, Rowdy lost control. He grabbed the guy by the collar of his shirt and lifted him. "All right, I wanna know exactly where on that mountain you left my grandpa, do you understand me?"
The man answered only with a shriek of agony. Rowdy looked down and saw that the man's lower legs had folded outward at the fractured knees, instead of inward as they normally did. The fellow collapsed in a dead faint as Rowdy let go of him. He couldn't wait around for the man to regain consciousness and tell him what he needed to know. The state police were bound to be on their way already and he didn't want to be discovered there, especially with the guns that had killed half of the men in the place in his possession.
He went back to the table, put on both the gun belts, then headed for the tavern door. He intended to drive his jeep to PaleDoveMountain and search high and low until he found out what had become of his grandfather. He just prayed to God that the old man was alive and kicking when he finally found him.
Rowdy left the blood-splattered ruins of Rebel's Roost, his eyes directed toward the black, Southern night. He avoided glancing back at the awful carnage that the Dark'Un had decorated the barroom with. Neither did he want to see the pulpy, pink-gray message spelled out on the bar. He only had to close his eyes to see that grisly final warning etched in the darkness of his inner mind.
Chapter Twenty-Five
"Anything wrong?" asked Glen. The interior of the four-wheel drive was dark, but even in the faint glow of the dashboard light Jenny could see the concern on his bearded face.
"No," she said, forcing a smile. She turned her eyes from him and looked down at Dale's sleeping form on the bench seat between them, his head resting in her lap. Jenny absently ran her fingers through his thin brown hair. He stirred a little and then was lulled back into slumber by the monotonous drone of the Ramcharger's engine.
"You've seemed preoccupied all night," he told her. He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it gently, as if assuring her that he was there to listen if she wanted to talk.
"Maybe a little," she admitted. "I've just had a lot of things going on in my life lately, that's all."
Glen smiled. "Yeah, I know how that is."
The man was observant. Her mind had been on other things all evening long, through their quick meal at Burger King and the horror double-feature at the Skyline Drive-in afterward. Freddie Kruger and Leatherface didn't seem so frightening when you had to confront the consequences of having failed at a very important mission.
And Jenny Brice had most certainly failed at her attempt to buy back Pale Dove Mountain.
Sadly, she recalled her solitary trip to Mountain View and her brief meeting with Vincent Russ at the High Peaks Motel. Despite their differences, he had been courteous to her and had invited her in. She hadn't wasted any time in getting to the point. She expressed her wish to buy back the property from Eco-Plenty giving sentimental attachment to her family heritage as her reason. Russ had been a perfect gentleman, patiently listening to every word that she had to say. But still, he had refused her request. She tried to convince him otherwise, but obviously Jackson Dellhart had instructed him to reject any offer that she or anyone else might present for PaleDoveMountain.
Then she figured it was time to show him that she meant business. She took him out to the MG, telling him that she was willing to hand over the trunk's contents for the transferred deed. He had regarded her patronizingly, beginning to grow weary of her attempts to persuade him to sell. His eyes had nearly bulged from their sockets when she popped the trunk and revealed two heaping buckets of pure, unminted gold. He had even picked up a chunk roughly seven pounds in weight, juggling it from one hand to the other. But oddly enough, he again declined her offer, even though she could see the intense interest in his eyes. Vincent Russ urged her to go back home and accept the fact that the mountain was not, and never would be, for sale again. Politely, the corporate spokesman shook her hand and left her standing in the parking lot.
Since then, Jenny could only think of the disappointment and dejection that Lance LaBlanc and the race of albino creatures would feel at the news of her failure. She had been their only hope for a peaceful solution to the danger that threatened to destroy PaleDoveMountain and all who inhabited it. They had trusted in the name of Brice and had come to her. They had asked her to do a job for them and had given her the means to accomplish it.
But even iron-willed determination and a hundred pounds of raw gold couldn't sway the momentum of Dellhart and the Eco-Plenty Corporation when a pet project was set into motion.
Jenny pulled her mind from the unpleasant thought of having to eventually break the bad news to LaBlanc and the others. For the time being, she turned her attention to the two Tuckers she had shared that Saturday night with. At certain points during the evening, Jenny had found h
erself forgetting that she was a single woman. There were moments when she had felt as though she were actually part of a family, like when they were cutting up and talking while gobbling down Whoppers and fries, or when she hid her eyes during the gory parts of the movies, drawing laughter and good-natured razzing from Glen and Dale. During those incidents, he had known how Liz Tucker had felt while being with her husband and son. It was a feeling that Jenny both enjoyed and, truthfully, was a little afraid of.
She turned her eyes to the road ahead as they crossed the Little River Bridge and traveled the final five miles to Tucker's Mill. At one point, a state patrol car came up fast from behind, blue lights flashing, but it didn't pull them over. It passed them by, speeding off toward the south.
When they finally topped the rise and headed down into the valley, they found that Tucker's Mill had been the trooper's destination. There were five or six other police cars parked in front of the town hall. As Glen pulled the 4x4 into the driveway of Compton's Boardinghouse, three of the cars raced southward out of town, their lights flashing and their sirens on.
"What's going on?" asked Dale sleepily. He sat up and grabbed his glasses off the dash to get a better look.
"I don't know," said Glen. "Looks like there's trouble going on somewhere."
As they parked the Ramcharger and got out, more sirens blared from the way they had just come. An orange and white paramedic van shrilled past, heading in the same direction as the police cars. It had been called in from the fire department in Mountain View. Thirty seconds later, another ambulance shot past.
They spotted Miss Mable and Alice McCray standing on the front porch, the elderly woman dressed in a pink nightgown, while the plump brunette wore her Broncos jersey. They stared in the direction of the commotion, but their expressions were not those of curiosity. Instead, there was worry and dread on the faces of both women.
