by J. Stone
But no matter what he wanted, he knew danger lurked ahead. Shots rang out in the distance, causing both vespari to come to a stop just before arriving in the silver mining city.
“Gunfire?” Lockhart asked, looking at his apprentice. “Is s-s-someone really t-trying to kill them?”
Wynonna just shrugged, not meeting his gaze.
“Come on,” he continued. “W-we can’t let them. It w-will only make things harder for us. I don’t w-want to fight a wraith again.”
Lockhart continued forward, entering the town with Wynonna right on his heels. Several people fled from the direction of the gunfire, but most seemed to have already hidden inside their homes. The streets were largely free of people, but that didn’t mean they were absent entirely.
They passed a general store and turned, hearing another exchange of gunfire, but Lockhart came to a sudden stop when he saw that two bodies laid in the street, bloody bullet holes in their chests. A woman kneeled over one man, weeping softly. The scene didn’t make sense. He’d expected a particularly brave but foolhardy individual had taken it upon themselves to kill the beldams. Why then were people dying to gunfire?
Everything came into focus when he approached the bodies and saw that it wasn’t simply blood leaking from these wounds. Black ooze seeped out as well. This black ooze had come from the Gentleman’s bullets. Lockhart looked at Wynonna who just stared back with still, unmoving eyes. The beldams weren’t there. His apprentice had lied to him.
“I--” she began, shifting on the spot.
“We’ll d-deal with this later,” he told her, shaking his head. “N-now we’ve got to take c-care of the revenant and his ghouls.” Lockhart pulled out his silver and pearl revolver, eyed it carefully for a moment and then handed it to Wynonna. “Here. You’ll n-need this.”
She wasted no time in taking it, but then she looked up at him in realization. “What about you?”
Lockhart retrieved his knife. “I’ll h-handle the ghouls. Y-you’re on the r-revenant.”
Wynonna nodded. “Right.”
“Remember. D-don’t kill him without burning his body. H-he’ll just jump to a ghoul’s b-body.”
“What about these two? They’ll turn, won’t they?”
“I’ll d-deal with it. Go. I’ll c-c-catch up.”
Wynonna nodded. “Cory, I--”
“Go!” he growled.
His apprentice took one last look at him, and then she turned, running toward the gunshots still echoing throughout the town. Lockhart, meanwhile, turned to the bodies that the revenant had gunned down. They would turn into ghouls any minute. He had to deal with them before that happened.
Lockhart started with the one that would be simpler to handle - the body without a woman mourning over him. He moved to the man’s bullet riddled body and kneeled down. The same black sludge that accompanied the bullet he pulled out of Wynonna was present in these wounds too. If he had any doubt as to where his apprentice had taken him, it was gone now. Without pausing to consider what he had to do, Lockhart gripped the knife and slid its blade into the man’s temple. With the brain destroyed, that would ensure the ghoul wouldn’t be able to rise.
One down, one left to go. This one had the woman mourning over it though. He already feared having to deal with such an encounter, but he had to do it. Lockhart stood up and walked the short distance to the second body. He stopped behind the woman, watching her shoulders heave up and down, but no sound came out. He didn’t even know how to begin to broach the subject.
“Ma’am,” he began.
She didn’t respond.
“Ma’am,” he repeated.
Still, the woman continued to weep in silence.
Feeling bad that he had to do this, but not so bad that he couldn’t do it, Lockhart reached out and put his hand on the woman’s heaving shoulder. Her movement stopped immediately, but still she didn’t turn around. There was something strange about her though. His pinky finger hadn’t landed on the fabric of her dress and rested instead on her skin. Her cold, dead skin.
As soon as Lockhart realized this, it was too late. The woman turned around and lunged at the vespari, knocking him onto his back. As he landed with a thud in the street, the knife slipped from his grip and slid away. The ghoulish woman followed Lockhart to the ground, her teeth chomping down toward his face. As she plummeted down at him, he managed to grab both her wrists, holding her at bay.
Luckily, as a freshly formed ghoul, the woman was not as strong as she could’ve been. He knew that the undead creatures started out weak when first transformed but that they grew in strength and speed over time. He had an advantage for the moment. The woman was so weak, in fact, that Lockhart could push her off him, but as he began to do so, the man that he had thought she was mourning over began to reanimate. The vespari pushed up on the woman, but the man rose and lunged toward him as well, preventing him from accomplishing this goal. Instead, he had to shift himself, so neither the woman or man could sink their teeth into him and tear his flesh.
His left arm pressed into the man’s neck with that hand gripping one of the ghoul’s wrists, its other limp and unmoving. His right arm had moved to the woman’s throat, holding her far enough away from him that she couldn’t claw his face with her fingers. Though he held them off, he couldn’t remain that way forever. His arms both strained against the ghouls, and his exhaustion weighed on him.
Needing to do something, Lockhart raised his knee up and into the woman’s gut, freeing his hand. She didn’t balance there well, so he didn’t have long. He reached his hand to the side, toward his knife. His fingers nearly scraped the handle, but they couldn’t grasp it. The woman was moving too much against his knee, and he had to once more grip her neck.
Above him, the ghouls continued to chomp and claw at him. He had to do something. That’s when he saw yet another of the shambling creatures from the corner of his eye. He turned toward it to see it too approaching him. Three would be too much. He had to deal with these two before it piled on him as well.
Lockhart was not able to toss either of the ghouls off him with his efforts split, and he couldn’t reach the knife without first moving them. He had one thought as to how to escape this situation, and it was terrible. Despite this, he saw no other opportunity. He released his grip on the man and exchanged his right hand with his left. He held the woman in place and allowed the man to be free.
This exchange allowed him to squirm to the right and grab the knife with his free hand. The cost was that the ghoulish man bit into the flesh of his arm. Lockhart gritted his teeth and gripped the handle of the knife. He then lowered the woman to within his reach and plunged the blade into her skull. Her body went limp, and he pushed her off him.
The other ghoul continued to tear and bite into Lockhart’s flesh, and the vespari had trouble not screaming out from the pain. He focused his mind, however, and managed to free his arm while stabbing this ghoul in the head as well. It too fell limp on him, this time, pinning him under its weight.
The new ghoul was nearly upon him, however, and he had little time to react. His arm was still free, so he pried the knife from the ghoul’s head and chucked it into the other’s. The blade landed with a sickening sound, and the monstrous creature dropped to the ground.
Lockhart allowed himself only a moment to rest. Once he’d taken a breath, he wriggled his way out from under the ghoul and stood up. The bite had mangled his arm, but he would live. Retrieving his blade from the forehead of the ghoul, the vespari looked around for a clue as to the location of any more of the creatures, the revenant, or Wynonna. He saw and heard nothing.
Looking at his gruesome arm, he knew he had to deal with that before it got worse. His tattoos would prevent the ghoul’s disease from harming him, and the vampiric regeneration the runic designs stored would take care of the damage already done in time. All the same, though, he had to wrap the wound in something to avoid any further infection from setting in.
Looking at the ghoul’s bodie
s for something to do the trick, Lockhart found a scarf on the woman. Some of the black ooze that made them into what they were had soaked into the fabric, but after he tore that chunk away, the rest of the scarf served his purpose well enough. He wrapped it around his arm tight enough to stymie further blood loss and prevent anything else from getting into the wound.
One problem dealt with, he still had the greater threat remaining. The Gentleman had gone through Columbia, and there was no telling how many ghouls he’d created so far. Not to mention, he had some before he even got there. At a bare minimum, he’d made Wynonna’s family into ghouls plus at least a handful from back in Delamar. He could still hear the occasional gunshot, meaning either Wynonna was fighting him or she hadn’t yet got to him. He wasn’t even willing to consider the very real possibility of her death at the revenant’s hands. She was strong, and he knew she could take care of herself. From what he’d seen of her skill so far, he thought the Gentleman didn’t stand a chance.
No matter how good his apprentice was, however, revenants made for particularly tricky targets. Their ability to jump into a ghoul’s body at will made them difficult to nail down and kill. Add to that the requirement that their body be burned with the revenant still inside, and Lockhart knew she was going to have a rough time. To help her, he needed to eliminate as many ghouls as possible to limit the Gentleman’s possibilities. Gripping his knife and doing everything he could to ignore the pain in his arm, Lockhart set out to do just that.
***
Wynonna’s hands trembled as she clutched Lockhart’s revolver. She had a sense of regret for lying to her master, but she needed this. She was willing to deal with whatever consequences might befall her; the Gentleman had to die. As such, she pushed the thought of what Iris had said would happen to Lockhart out of her mind and focused on the revenant. She needed this.
As she approached the center of the town, the gunshots grew louder, signaling her closing in on her target. She’d never been to Columbia before, but she could already see what she was moving toward. The silver mine. She’d been reading up on the monsters called revenants though, and asking Lockhart everything she could think of. Wynonna didn’t know what interest an undead creature such as this would have in the mine, but there had to be one.
From what she’d found out, revenants all had a purpose in returning to life. In fact, that was what brought them back. Something unfulfilled in life that drove them to return from the grave and wreak havoc until they’d accomplished all they ever set out to do. They had some strong urge that drove them to certain actions in their second chance in the world, and the Gentleman was no different. The revenants were so concerned with it that nothing else mattered. What then would the Gentleman find so appealing about a silver mine?
That’s when it clicked. She knew exactly what the undead creature was after. Wynonna had come home to find her ranch in shambles. Hoping to figure out what had happened to her home and family, she’d looked around the house, trying to piece everything together. She’d found the rifle, some bullets, and some food for the journey, but the one thing she didn’t find was any money. He’d even emptied out the hiding spots that only her family knew about.
The Gentleman had not only killed her whole family, but he’d robbed them as well. That must’ve been what he was after. Money. Greed. She determined that his death had somehow related to money, and in this undead life he’d revived into, that’s exactly what consumed him now. The mine was the biggest source of silver in the whole desert. Wynonna was not going to let him get away with any of it though. She would make certain that the mine would be his tomb.
Before she got to the mine entrance, however, she stumbled upon a group of the ghouls. She saw them through the broken window of a building, huddled around something. Her first thought was to ignore them and press on. She knew she couldn’t just let them be though. They might present a danger to her or anyone still surviving. Also, they’d be an opportunity for the revenant to come back. She had to wipe them out before she confronted him.
Wynonna gripped Lockhart’s revolver, at first intending to just shoot them. She frowned though, realizing that wouldn’t work. She only had ten runed bullets in total. She couldn’t waste them on ghouls. Thinking back to what Lockhart had told her about them, she realized that all she had to do to kill the ghouls was destroy their brains. Unlike him, she didn’t have a knife that she could just slide into their skull. She’d have to improvise and find something else.
Looking around, she spotted a blacksmith just down the road from the building with the ghouls. Thinking there had to be something in there that she could use, Wynonna crept up and looked through the window. No sign of anyone inside. She slipped to the side and pushed the door open and then stepped in and looked around. There was certainly plenty of metal within, but the majority wasn’t useful to her. She saw numerous horseshoes, a few small tools, and some larger though awkward implements, but she wanted something slightly less unwieldy. That’s when she saw a bit of metal sticking out of the still burning fire. The blacksmith must have left it in there with all the chaos the Gentleman had created.
Wynonna spotted a pair of thick leather gloves and slipped one on before picking up the hot metal pole from the fire. Holding the rod in her hand, she thought it would work, but it was too heavy for just one hand. She put the pole back into the fire for a moment, while she slid Lockhart’s revolver under her belt and put on the other glove. With both hands, she picked up the warm pole and swung it about a bit. Deciding it would prove a great bludgeoning device, Wynonna left the smithy and moved next door.
Prying open the door to what she found to be a small office of some sort, Wynonna discovered the ghouls were all huddled around a locked safe. The ridiculousness of the sight of a group of undead creatures trying to break into a safe was too much for her, and she chuckled at the sheer absurdity. The ghouls heard her and turned around. All at once, they started to shuffle toward her, some faster than others. She didn’t mind. She was ready for them.
The ghoul closest to her was the first to feel the still warm rod. The hot metal slid easily through its skin, so much so that Wynonna nearly lost her balance when the rod came out the other side of the creature’s soft, mushy head. She expected her melee weapon to work, but not so efficiently.
Recovering from her brief stagger, she turned to the next of the ghouls. Each time, the heated metal mashed the undead creatures’ heads and dropped their lifeless husks to the floor. With the ghouls’ bodies at her feet, Wynonna felt a little better. She took a couple heavy breaths and thought of how the Gentleman had made these innocent people into his slaves. Her rage toward the revenant that took her family away from her heavy in her mind, she turned and left the building in search of the monster.
Holding the still warm metal rod in her hands, Wynonna continued toward the silver mine. Walking through the town, she noticed that the gunshots had died down to almost nothing. Whether that was a good or bad sign, she didn’t know, but all the same, she kept moving.
Encountering a couple more roaming ghouls along the way, Wynonna dealt with them similarly to the first group. By the time she arrived at the entrance to the silver mine, her metal rod was covered in the brain matter, bone, and other assorted goop from the ghouls, and its temperature had dropped considerably. That didn’t make much of a difference when it came to the rotting skulls of the undead creatures though, as they continued to crack and split to her blows.
Outside of the mine, Wynonna took stock of the situation. The entrance was clear, and she saw no sign of anyone, dead or alive within. Some distance from the entrance, she found a building, which she suspected served as an office for the mine. Deciding to check and clear that first, Wynonna ignored the mine for the moment.
Gripping the cooling rod in one hand, she opened the door with the other. For whatever reason, Wynonna didn’t expect anyone inside and had relaxed because of it. She discovered that this had been a terrible mistake. The horrible creature that she hun
ted, the Gentleman himself, stood inside the office, rifling through a desk.
Caught off guard, both he and Wynonna froze for a moment, but the revenant was the first to act. He drew one of his twin revolvers and aimed at her. Despite her surprise at finding the revenant in such a place, Wynonna did not let that stop her. She gripped the pipe and swung it at the Gentleman’s gun. The weapon fired just as she hit his hand. The diseased bullet flew past her lodging in the wall at her side, the black ooze rolling down the wood.
The attack caused the revenant to drop the revolver and growl, pulling his seared hand back toward him. Given a brief moment to take advantage of the situation, Wynonna reached into her belt for Lockhart’s revolver, but her gloved hands were clumsy. She gripped the handle, but she couldn’t get her finger through the hole to fire. The revenant saw this and lunged for her. He tackled Wynonna to the ground, and she hit the floorboards hard, knocking the air out of her. With the hit, she lost grip of the metal rod as well as the revolver, which went sliding across the floor and back toward the door.
The Gentleman still had one of his guns, however. He sat upright over her and pulled it from his holster. Before he could fire, Wynonna recovered enough to grab his arm to stop him from aiming it down at her. Regardless, he fired off a couple of shots that went wide. Being near a chair, Wynonna decided to use it to her advantage. She banged the revenant’s hand against the butt of the chair, trying to force him to release the weapon. Looking at his face, however, he felt nothing. He just smiled back at her, unmoved by the pain.
Then, with his other hand, the Gentleman grabbed Wynonna by the neck. She released one of her hands from his gun arm, trying to stop him from choking her. He was too strong, and she was making no progress. He was, however, as the barrel of the gun drifted closer and closer to her head. Trying another tack, she punched the revenant in the face. Just the same as with his hand, the pain seemed not to register. The life was quickly draining from her, and she could barely keep the Gentleman’s gun from aiming down at her.
