Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  “The Hell I can’t,” snapped Grey.

  “The rain will kill you.”

  That almost stopped Grey and in the space of one heartbeat the fear that was always simmering inside his chest nearly drowned the dented honor that used to define who he was. Maybe if it had been only Looks Away there with him he might have stayed, but Jenny looked too much like Annabelle, and he could not allow himself to be a coward in her eyes.

  You’re a damn fool, he told himself.

  And he mentally told that part of himself to go to hell.

  “Here!” yelled Jenny as she dug an oilskin poncho from the closet and threw it to Grey. He snatched it out of the air and quickly pulled it on. It must have belonged to her father because it was too big for Grey, but that was fine. Larger meant more protection.

  “Do you have another?” demanded Looks Away.

  “Upstairs in the trunk,” said Jenny, starting for the stairs, but Looks Away dashed past her and took the steps two at a time.

  A second scream tore the night. Higher and more terrible.

  Without waiting for the Sioux, Grey opened the door and flung himself into the storm.

  The wind was intensifying even though there was less rain. Great gusts swept up the street toward him, seeming to attack, to try and drive him away. Riding the wind came the howls of damned things. Grey bulled his way into it. Hitting the wind was like pushing against a wall, and the muddy ground tried to catch and hold his booted feet. Even with the poncho the rain found openings at wrist and ankle and below the brim of his hat and stung like a swarm of bees.

  He tried to hear through the wailing wind to orient himself, but almost at once there was no need for that. A figure came racing up the street toward him. Small. A little girl of no more than seven or eight. Red hair streamed behind her like a horse’s mane and her face was as pale as a corpse.

  Except where it was streaked with blood.

  In the flashes of ghost lightning the blood looked as black as oil, but Grey knew what it was. The girl ran as hard as she could, but she was slowing, staggering, nearly gone. She would have stopped to rest if she could except for the thing that followed her.

  It came more slowly than she ran, loping along like some great, pale ape.

  Only it wasn’t an ape.

  It was Deputy Jed Perkins.

  He was nearly naked, his body covered only in torn streamers of what had been his clothes. His skin was white except for sunburned forearms and face. His hair hung in dripping rattails. His mouth was open, smiling. Laughing.

  Laughing in all the wrong ways.

  And his chest.

  His chest.

  The flesh of breast had been slashed to ribbons, the meat and muscle pulled back to expose his rib cage. And there, driven by some insane force into the very center of his sternum was a piece of polished stone. It was as black as the night except for a tracery of white lines that seemed to wriggle through it. The stone glowed from within but it was neither fire nor electric light. This was something far worse, something far stranger. Deep inside the chunk of ghost rock a cold, intensely bright blue light glowed with hellish ferocity. The deputy’s eyes glowed with the same weird light. Too bright, as if lit from within.

  Grey nearly lost himself in that moment.

  He had already seen the dead walk and encountered witches and monstrous storms, but this was something else. This was sorcery. This was the kind of dark magic he’d read about in old books, the kind they sing of in songs when they are not trying to lull you to sleep. This was what evil looked like.

  This was something that broke the laws of nature. Perkins had to be dead and yet he ran howling after a child, his eyes filled with starlight, his hands reaching to tear and rend.

  Scared as he was, Grey’s hand moved with practiced speed. The Colt seemed to appear in his hand, he saw and felt his thumb cock the hammer, felt his index finger squeeze the trigger. Heard the report. All of it happening as if he were witnessing someone else perform the familiar actions.

  The bang jolted him.

  The bullet drilled a hole through the night air, sizzled past the rain, and punched into the hard, flat muscle of Perkins’s left pectoral. Just off-center of the black stone. The impact knocked a single cough from the man’s lips.

  Just that.

  And nothing else.

  It barely slowed the man.

  Perkins’s eyes shifted from the girl he was chasing and stared at Grey with a bottomless hatred that sent a thrill of terror through him. His teeth peeled back from his lips and he growled like a mountain cat.

  He bent low and raced forward with maniac speed. Straight at Grey.

  This was black magic.

  He fished for the word, the right word. It was down there in the bottom of his mind where he kept the things he didn’t ever want to think about. Ugly things. Wrong things.

  Bad things.

  The word awoke in his thoughts. Like a serpent stirred to wakeful rage it hissed in his mind.

  The word for what this was.

  Necromancy.

  The magic of the dead.

  “God damn you to hell!” bellowed Grey as he fired again. And again. The bullets took Perkins in the right chest and in the stomach. They made him twitch.

  But they did not stop him.

  With a howl like the demon wind itself, Jed Perkins flung himself at Grey and bore him down into the mud and the burning rain.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  As Grey fell onto his back he brought one foot up, jammed his boot against the deputy’s chest, and let the force of the roll turn them both like a wheel. With his leg as the spoke, Perkins rolled over and then backward and Grey gave him an extra kick to send the man flying. Grey had fallen so hard that he had enough momentum to roll his own body all the way over onto his knees, with one hand snapping out to steady himself.

  Somehow he’d managed to keep his pistol in his other hand, and to keep the mechanism out of the mud. He pivoted on his knee and snapped off two more shots at Perkins, who had splatted down into the mud and was struggling to get up. The first bullet took Perkins in the shoulder and Grey could see a lump of meat and a chunk of bone fly into the air.

  But all that did was make Perkins laugh.

  Laugh.

  It was a laugh as wrong as all the damage in the world. A high, cackling bray that carried no trace of the deputy’s own voice. Instead this was shrill and alien. A nightmare laugh that revealed a horrible secret to Grey—that there was something else hiding within the man’s body. And, again, Grey remembered the stories he’d read as a boy, of demons that could inhabit human flesh and wear it like armor.

  The laughter was both an anticipation of its triumph over a mortal foolish enough to do battle with something that could not be whipped, and an exultation in its freedom to wander the world of the living.

  The laughter tore through the night and stuck knives in Grey’s mind. The injured little girl screamed, knowing that there was no hope left.

  So Grey put his next bullet into that laughing mouth. The heavy slug shattered the rows of white teeth and then blew out the back of the deputy’s skull, right at the base where it attaches to the top of the spine.

  There was a moment—just a flicker of time—where the demon thing still smiled, even with a mouth of shattered teeth. Then Deputy Perkins’s head tilted forward, no longer supported by vertebra and the weight of it jerked the body down.

  Even then the thing did not die.

  It flopped in the mud and began thrashing wildly, arms and legs whipping around, feet kicking, mouth trying to bite in Grey’s direction.

  “God damn, why don’t you die, you ugly son of a whore?” bellowed Grey and he fired the last bullet in his gun. This time he aimed for the flat plane of the deputy’s forehead. The slug punched in at a bad angle and instead of bursting through the other side, it ricocheted off some angle of bone inside, and then bounced around. The deputy’s head shuddered from the inner impacts.

  Then
all at once the blue light winked out from its eyes and Perkins fell face forward into the mud and did not move.

  Grey did not believe that even now this was over. He broke open his pistol, dumped the spent brass, and hastily shoved six fresh rounds into the cylinder. As he did so he edged over to stand between the little girl—who, against all sense, had stopped running to watch the fight—and the monster. Grey snapped the cylinder into place and pointed the gun at Perkins.

  The body lay still. It looked different now. Empty, somehow.

  Empty of life, if life was a word that fit.

  Dead.

  Dead for good and all.

  Dead, like the members of the posse—Riley and the others—after he’d managed to end them.

  End them.

  That thought stuck like an arrow in Grey’s mind. How exactly had he ended them?

  Perkins had been shot over and over again. None of those rounds had even slowed him.

  Only that last bullet.

  In the head.

  No. In the brain.

  The brain?

  Why there? Why not the heart? Why not the damn spine? Either of those would have dropped even a mountain bear.

  The brain.

  Kill the brain and kill the …

  The what?

  As if in answer to his troubled, tumbling thoughts, a voice spoke a word that Grey did not know, not in this context.

  “Undead!”

  He turned to see Brother Joe standing ten feet away, panting, draped in curtains to fend off the rain, eyes wide with horror.

  “W-what?” asked Grey numbly.

  “That thing is an abomination against God. It is one of the undead. Dear Jesus and Mary protect us.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is a corpse given a dark semblance of life—unlife,” said Brother Joe, crossing himself. “It has been inhabited by a demon spirit so that it can do Satan’s will on Earth.”

  Grey wanted to tell him that this was pure unfiltered bullshit.

  Wanted to. Could not.

  Jed Perkins lay at his feet and all of this had happened. Had truly happened.

  Two figures came running through the dwindling rain. One wore a set of gray oilskins and the other a cloak with the hood pulled tight around a lovely face. Looks Away and Jenny. He had a pistol in his hand and she carried a single-barrel twenty-gauge shotgun. They saw Perkins and slowed, standing shocked and puzzled.

  “What happened?” asked Jenny as she realized the child was there. She hurried over to the girl, shifted the shotgun to one hand and used the other to wrap her cloak around the child. “Grey—what happened here?”

  Grey holstered his gun, squatted, and turned Perkins over so that the man’s ruined chest was exposed. The rain gradually washed away the mud, revealing the terrible wounds. And the thing embedded in the deputy’s breastbone. It no longer glowed with blue fire, but the lines of white were like threadworms in gangrenous flesh.

  Brother Joe cried out. “Blasphemy! This is black magic.”

  “Necromancy,” said Grey. “I … think that’s what they call it. Necromancy.”

  Looks Away knelt next to him and very carefully touched the edges of bloodless skin around the stone. He did not touch the stone itself.

  “Ghost rock,” he said. “Not very pure, but definitely ghost rock.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jenny. “What happened?”

  It was the little girl who answered. “The monsters came in through the window.”

  Every eye turned toward her.

  “Monsters?” echoed Jenny. “God … are there more than one?”

  The night, as if listening with dark humor, once more held the answer. There was another scream. A man’s this time. It rose higher and higher, losing gender and identity until it was nothing more than a shriek of unbearable agony. Then it suddenly stopped with wet finality.

  The little girl screamed into the ensuing silence and broke from the shelter of Jenny Pearl.

  “Dad!”

  She ran toward the sound of certain death.

  And Grey, Looks Away, and Brother Joe ran after.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It was immediately apparent that it was not merely a single home that had been invaded.

  The town of Paradise Falls was under siege.

  Figures moved in the gloom. People, heedless of the rain, ran into the street, screaming, pleading. Some of them had weapons. A shovel, a broken table leg. One woman held a frying pan. Fewer still had guns. Mostly shotguns, fowling pieces, and one old-time muzzleloader.

  However there were other shapes moving through the rain.

  The other deputies.

  And several men Grey had never seen.

  They were all dead men. Each of them had a ruined chest in which a black stone was fixed. Blue light sparkled in the hearts of each stone. Blue had always been a good color to Grey. Lucky. Happy. Summer skies and deep water. Cornflowers and a woman’s eyes.

  Now blue was the color of hate and hurt, of harm and horror.

  Grey knew that these men were all dead. Risen dead. Torn from the earth. They laughed as they chased the fleeing townsfolk.

  “No…,” whispered Looks Away.

  There were so many of them.

  Of them.

  The word rose like bile to Grey’s mouth.

  “Undead.”

  Looks Away opened fire at the closest of them and Grey saw black holes appear in bloodless flesh. However the creatures kept advancing. Their wild laughter tore the air.

  Grey reached out and pushed Looks Away’s gun arm down, forcing the Sioux to turn his wild eyes away from the walking dead.

  “What the bloody hell are you playing at?” cried Looks Away.

  “The head—aim for the head. Nothing else stops them. Remember the posse? That’s how we stopped them. Aim for the brain.”

  The memory of that terrible night was too clear to make it a chore to convince Looks Away.

  “The whole sodding world is mad,” the Sioux muttered as he reloaded. “Stark staring mad.”

  Brother Joe edged around the crowd and gathered the little girl into his arms. Then he retreated, watching the monsters as they watched him.

  While Looks Away finished reloading, Grey raised his pistol in a steady two-handed grip and stepped into the path of the running corpse. They saw his gun and laughed.

  Maybe they don’t know, he mused, and prayed that it was true.

  The closest of them was thirty feet away. It was one of the other deputies.

  “Go back to Hell,” said Grey Torrance as he pulled the trigger.

  The bullet hit the dead deputy right above the left eyebrow and exploded the back of his head. The undead’s legs kept running for three more steps before the dead, slack weight of the dying body dragged it down.

  The other grinning corpse ran past.

  But the ones out front were no longer laughing, and their smiles seemed frozen onto their dead faces.

  They didn’t know, thought Grey. But they sure as God know now.

  The undead all froze for a moment, and a dozen pairs of burning blue eyes turned toward Grey and his friends. Grey could not tell if they hesitated because one of their own had been killed and it gave them pause, or because all of their murderous rage was suddenly now focused on the two men and one woman with the guns.

  In either case Grey knew this could only end one way.

  In death.

  Knowing that he was being watched, he used his thumb to draw the hammer back to full cock, and narrowed his eyes to sight down the barrel at the face of the closest monster.

  “Come on, you ass-ugly sons of bitches,” he said. “Come and take us.”

  They came.

  Howling with red delight, they came.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Grey, Looks Away, and Jenny all fired. The bangs of their guns were simultaneous—two pistol cracks and the boom of the shotgun.

  The front line of abominations tried to d
odge out of the way. Grey’s shot blew the jawbone off of one, but he spun away and kept upright. Still running. Looks Away put his round through the temple of a second, but the round must not have hit the right part of the brain. The creature staggered and began wandering off, as if confused.

  However it was immediately clear that Jenny Pearl’s shotgun wasn’t packing birdshot. A big deer slug fired from the small-bore weapon smashed through the bridge of the third undead’s nose and its head seemed to fly apart. The creature collapsed and two other monsters behind it tripped over it and fell.

  Grey stepped forward and fired shots at both of the fallen things. Looks Away snapped off three shots and dropped two more.

  Six down.

  The rest of the monsters scattered. Like cockroaches fleeing the light, they fled from the firestorm of hot lead. Some raced up onto porches and hurled themselves through glass windows or kicked in doors. Screams burst from within each house. Other undead ran for any cover they could find—a side alley, behind a parked wagon, or into a darkened store.

  Grey fired at them until his gun was empty, but he only killed two more. Looks Away fared less well, killing one. By the time Jenny reloaded her single barrel shotgun, there were no targets left on the streets. Nothing left to kill.

  Inside the houses, though, the slaughter had begun.

  “We have to do something,” cried Jenny. “They’ll kill everyone.”

  “I know, damn it,” said Grey as he broke into a run. He jumped onto the closest porch, shouldered through the door and saw a walking corpse struggling with a one-legged old man. Grey kicked the monster in the ribs as hard as he could. He knew the blow wouldn’t do the thing any harm, but the force of it sent the creature crashing into the wall.

  Grey swung his pistol down and was a hairsbreadth from pulling the trigger when the creature spoke.

  “Don’t!” it begged. “Please. For the love of God, don’t kill me.”

  The mocking smile was gone and in its place was the terrified face of a man. Still dead pale, but now there was no trace of the demonic presence that had owned this flesh seconds ago.

  The old man whimpered and began crawling toward the hall, his face battered and bloody. His face was stricken as if the presence of these monsters had cracked something in his mind. Grey couldn’t blame him. His own mind felt like it was hanging from one broken hinge.