Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  “What are you?” demanded Grey as he pressed the barrel of the Colt against the dead flesh.

  The creature tried to shrink back, and it was impossible for Grey to tell whether this was some kind of ploy or not. He had far too little to go on.

  Behind him he heard gunshots and more screams.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t send you straight to hell,” he said to the thing.

  A tear broke from the corner of the man’s eye. Grey would not have thought that a dead thing could weep. The blue light from its eyes turned the tear into liquid sapphire.

  “I am in hell,” said the monster in a hoarse voice. “I—I died. I mean, I think I died. I remember falling. I remember seeing my own blood. And then … and then…”

  His voice disintegrated into sobs.

  Grey adjusted his hand on his pistol grip and had no idea what to do.

  “Why are you attacking these people?”

  The undead looked surprised. “Attacking? I didn’t … I mean … I … I…”

  “You ran in here and tried to kill that old man.”

  The thing cut a look sideways at the old man crawling along the hall toward the kitchen. A deep frown of confusion grooved his brow.

  “Mr. Chalmers? Is that you? It’s me. It’s Bobby Sandoval. You know me. I used to work at the sawmill with Tommy. You know me. I … I … I swear it’s me.”

  Grey glanced over at the old man to see how he was reacting.

  It was the wrong thing to do.

  With the speed of a snake, the monster’s left hand flashed out and slapped the pistol from Grey’s grip. The expression on its face changed from confusion and horror to malice in a heartbeat.

  But it was a long heartbeat, and even as everything became crazy, Grey’s mind pulled apart what he had just seen. The hand moved, and the thing attacked, but the face registered what looked like genuine surprise at what its body was doing. It was like a horseman who was reacting to a mount suddenly stumbling. The expression did not match. Not at once. Only after the creature reached for Grey did the confusion melt away to be replaced by that malicious leer. The undead kicked up with both feet, catching Grey in the thigh and chest and sending him staggering backward. Then the dead man—Sandoval—arched backward and reverse-jackknifed forward so that he flipped onto his feet like a circus tumbler. The azure fires in his eyes flared as he rushed Grey.

  Grey hit the edge of the sofa and sat down hard, but as Sandoval threw himself at him, Grey flung himself sideways. Sandoval hit the backrest and the whole sofa rocked onto its back legs and crashed over. By the time it hit, Grey and Sandoval were already locked in a deadly struggle.

  Unlike Riley Jones and the dead members of the posse, this monster was a skilled and tricky fighter. There was none of the vacuous blankness in Sandoval’s eyes. There was hate, there was malice, but there was also sly cunning. And the son of a bitch could fight.

  Sandoval tried to knee Grey in the crotch, head-butt him, box his ears, and bite. He fought like someone who had been in more than his fair share of big-ticket scuffles. It was like fighting three people at once. The man attacked with total commitment and ferocity.

  But Grey Torrance knew a few tricks of his own.

  He turned his hip inward to take the knee thrust on his thigh instead. It hurt, but not nearly as much. Grey ducked his head to take the head-butt on the forehead instead of the nose. That hurt, too, but he caught Sandoval exactly as he didn’t want to be caught, and the lights momentarily flickered in the killer’s eyes. That spoiled the creature’s attempts to box his ears, too, and as Sandoval tried to recover and bite, Grey hit him across the chin with the heel of his palm. He put a lot of heart into the hit. A lot of muscle and fear, too. And he twisted his hip as he connected.

  He got it just right and he followed through with a scream and all his rage.

  Sandoval’s jaw slewed sideways amid an audible crunch of cartilage and bone. Grey pulled his hand back six inches and hit him again. Same place. Twice as hard.

  The jaw lost all shape and nearly tore loose from the tendon and muscle that held it to his face. It sagged down, flopping against Sandoval’s chest. Fear ignited in those strange eyes.

  Grey liked to see it there.

  He wanted to see more.

  With a grunt, he hip-bucked and turned, throwing the man off of him. As Sandoval fell flat on his back, Grey rolled over and knelt on him, pinning one knee into the undead’s crotch and bracing his other foot against the floor for stability. From that vantage point he schooled Sandoval—and the demon inside of him—about the niceties of gutter-fighting done right.

  He short-punched the man in the nose, the throat, both eyes. Grey knew how to punch with snaps instead of powerhouse thrusts so that he didn’t bust up his own knuckles. He grabbed the dead man’s lank hair, picked his head up, and slammed it against the floorboards again and again. That knocked all of the fight out of the thing and it lay there, twitching and terrified. Grey did not understand that fear but now wasn’t the moment to try and sort it out. Instead he reached into his boot, removed a short knife, held the monster’s head down with a flat palm against his forehead, and drove the point of the blade deep into the thing’s eye socket.

  The blue light in its other eye—and the glow deep in the heart of the stone lodged in its breast—flared and then went out.

  Grey sagged back, gasping.

  No blood welled from the punctured eye socket, and Grey wasn’t sure if he was relieved or even more disgusted. It was proof of how unnatural this truly was.

  He turned to the old man. What was his name? Chalmers?

  “Chalmers,” he barked and the sound of his voice made the man’s head snap up, “are there any more of them in here?”

  “M-more—?”

  “Is anyone else here?”

  “No.”

  Grey got to his feet and picked up his gun. He immediately began reloading. “Lock yourself in a closet and don’t come out until you know it’s safe.”

  “H-how will I know?”

  Grey left without answering because he had no answer to give.

  He dashed outside and saw Jenny Pearl standing guard over a small knot of townsfolk. Brother Joe crouched over the huddling mass of old folks, women, and children. Jenny stood wide legged, shotgun raised, as three of the walking dead circled her. The monsters faked right and left, trying to make her spoil her next shot. If she did, they would all fall on her and the people she was trying to protect. Looks Away was nowhere in sight.

  “Jenny!” he cried as he ran into the street. “On your left. Now!”

  She whirled and fired at a corpse who was running in, sneaky and low, on her blindside, a pitchfork clutched in its dead hands. The thing was so close that she almost died right there. The pitchfork stabbed in at the moment she fired. The deer slug punched between the tines and caught the undead on the right cheek and blew half his face off.

  Grey began firing from twenty feet away. He put three slugs each into the other two creatures. His first shot hit the chest of the closest one, which effectively jolted the creature in place. That steadied his target so he could put the next two into its brainpan. Then he whirled and repeated it with the final fiend, who had already abandoned the attack and was trying to run. The bodies crumpled to the ground and Grey turned to see Jenny use the stock of her shotgun to crush what was left of the first corpse’s shattered skull.

  “Reload,” he ordered, and they both did. Grey realized with horror that he only had four bullets left in his belt. Four rounds and there were screams coming from everywhere in town. His heart turned to ice in his chest.

  “Where’s Looks Away?”

  “I don’t know. I think he went over to Doctor Saint’s place.”

  “Now? What the hell good is that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said tightly. “Wasn’t really the time to chat about it, was it?”

  Blue lightning flashed overhead. The storm seemed to be building again.

  “J
enny—get everyone into the Chalmers place. Bar the windows and block the doors.”

  “What are you—?” she began, then snapped her mouth shut, gave him a terse nod, and ran to herd the people to safety.

  Grey lingered for one moment, watching her. She hadn’t panicked, hadn’t fallen apart, and hadn’t wasted time with useless questions. Lucky Bob Pearl had raised himself one hell of a daughter.

  She caught his eye and damn if there wasn’t a flicker of a smile on her lips.

  Yeah, he thought, this Jenny Pearl is one hell of a woman.

  Grinning despite everything, he turned and ran toward the sound of screams.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  He ran down the center of the muddy street as the rain, which had dwindled to a thin drizzle, strengthened to a steady downpour that hissed and burned like acid. It seemed to do him no real harm, though, but it hurt like the blazes. Grinding his teeth together, Grey endured it as he went hunting for monsters.

  They were there. Waiting for him.

  And they had grown wiser in this fight.

  He felt something whip past him like an angry bee, and almost as an afterthought, heard the dull bang of a gun.

  Grey flung himself down, rolled through the mud, and came up to his feet on the sheltered side of a wagon filled with empty barrels. Three more gunshots rang out. Two from the same direction and one from across the street. Two guns.

  He crouched and peered around the corner of the wagon, watching for the next shot. Bang! And he saw the muzzle flash. An undead gunman stood with a Winchester snugged against his hip, firing as he came. Aiming too high, though. Hitting where a standing man’s head would be. So, at least the monster wasn’t a genius. Grey braced his gun hand against the curve of the wagon wheel, took careful aim, and fired.

  The bullet hit the thing under the edge of his jaw and from the flip of hair on the far side of his upper scalp, it was clear that it went all the way through. The man fell like a sack of potatoes. Grey watched the Winchester spin through the air toward him and for a moment he thought the Fates would deal him a better hand of cards than the one he was playing. But the Fates, as Grey had long come to realize, were a bunch of vindictive bitches. The rifle landed barrel downward and buried itself six inches into the mud.

  “Shit,” he growled, then he ducked back as a hail of bullets began tearing apart the barrels and a good part of the wagon itself. Splinters filled the air and ricocheting rounds whined off into the storm. Grey tried to curl into a ball too small to be hit, but fingernails of flying wood jabbed him.

  Grey flattened down under the wagon, making sure to keep his face and his gun out of the mud. He saw six of the undead walking out into the street. All of them had guns. One, though, held two big pistols and the others flanked him as if he was in charge of this mad invasion. This one was different from the others. His face was less weathered, less eroded. He was as pale as a ghost but he did not look like a rotting corpse. Instead he seemed to glow with an unnatural and savage vitality. He wore a flat-brimmed black hat, black clothes, and a white shirt that were streaked with mud. The shirt and vest were unbuttoned to reveal a ghost rock burning in his chest. It was a bigger stone than the others wore, and the light it emitted was like a beacon whose glow sparkled on the falling rain and underlit his ghostly face. He strode forward with the absolute confidence of a predator who knew that anything he encountered was his for the taking. Tall, broad-shouldered, powerful. All of the other undead, fearsome as they were, looked like pale shadows of this towering figure.

  Grey’s breath caught in his chest. Not because of the fearsome nature of this new threat, but because he recognized him. A man who everyone believed was dead.

  A man who, despite his ferocious vitality, was probably dead.

  The name was on his tongue, but he dared not speak it.

  Then he heard an anguished voice cry out.

  “Dad!”

  Grey and the corpse turned to see Jenny Pearl standing in the middle of the street, her shotgun in her slack hands, eyes wide with a terror so great that it seemed to even quiet the raging storm. Her mouth, having shouted that word, now repeated it in soundless horror.

  “Dad.”

  The monster that had been Lucky Bob Pearl, turned toward his daughter.

  And he smiled.

  He smiled as he held up a hand and the gunfire died away. Even the storm seemed to withdraw its power at his gesture, as if everything in this night bowed to a creature of such inarguable power.

  Jenny Pearl sank slowly to her knees. The shotgun fell to the mud. And her proud back bent as she hunched forward over the impossible agony in her heart.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” the monster said in a voice that was gravel and dust and wrongness.

  Then he raised both pistols toward Jenny.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “No!” cried Grey as he wriggled like a snake out from under the wagon. “No, goddamn it.”

  The faces of the undead creatures all turned toward him. Lucky Bob turned more slowly, less concerned, less impressed. His smile did not waver. He was something more. The name came unbidden to Grey’s mind … he was dragged forth from the earth and possessed by a far greater spirit. He was Harrowed.

  “And what are you?” he asked in his dead voice. “My daughter’s suitor? Sweetheart? Her young man of favor? Or are you another hound dog come sniffing after the goods?”

  Grey answered with a bullet.

  But just as he fired, one of the other undead threw himself between Lucky Bob and Grey and took the round in the face. It blew out his teeth and exploded from behind his left cheekbone, but the angle was wrong for a kill shot. Even so the monster tottered backward, arms spread, using his body to protect what was clearly his master.

  Lucky Bob bashed the interfering corpse aside and opened up with both guns.

  Grey spun away and rolled back to shelter under the wagon as a swarm of lead tore into the place where he’d lain a moment before.

  “Hide, little rabbit,” mocked Lucky Bob. But to his followers he said, “Drag that worthless piece of man flesh out here. I want to see him bleed.”

  “No,” begged Jenny. “Pa—what are you doing?”

  “Doing?” echoed the Harrowed. “Why I’ve come to bring peace to our little town. Isn’t that what everyone really wants, my girl? Peace and quiet? The peace of eternity and the quiet of the grave.”

  The monsters laughed like a chorus of jackals.

  Three of them began crawling under the wagon, reaching for Grey with worm-white fingers. Grey kicked at them and wriggled away, fighting the urge to use his last three bullets on them.

  “What … what happened to you?” begged Jenny, struggling to her feet. Her dress dripped with mud and rainwater. The wind plucked her hood back from her head and the stinging rain stung her face. “Why are you doing this?”

  Grey slithered out from under the far side of the wagon as Jenny asked this question and it gave him a moment’s respite in which he saw the expression on the Harrowed’s face. The look of evil confidence flickered for but a moment. Like a candle flame at the very edge of a draft, it trembled, and for the second time that night Grey saw a different kind of expression on the monster’s face. Not the gloating monster, but an expression far more human. One that called to mind the face of the man in the photograph in Jenny’s house. Jenny must have seen it, too, for she gasped as if struck.

  “Pa…?”

  The Harrowed’s mouth moved and for a moment the sounds he made were garbled, as if two people were trying to speak at once using the same tongue and lips.

  “Oh … Jenny…,” whispered that mouth. “Oh, my girl. Run!”

  But even as he finished saying those few words his trembling lips broadened once more into that pernicious grin.

  “Run,” he repeated, but this time with an entirely different meaning. “Run so that my boys here can have some sport.”

  Lucky Bob raised his arms. Lightning glittered on the silvery filigree
along the barrels of his matched Colts. He spread his arms, threw back his head, and laughed in a voice that came from no human throat. It was huge and it stole the sky from the thunder itself.

  “She is yours, my brothers. Devour her, body and soul!”

  “No … Pa … no!” Jenny gasped.

  The swarm of walking dead howled and surged forward toward Jenny, and she was too terrified and heartbroken to move. She stood there, gaping at her father’s corpse while death came to take her.

  Grey instantly broke from cover and ran faster than he had ever done in his life. He hooked an arm around Jenny’s waist and plucked her from the ground. Even as he did so, he pivoted and fired.

  He had three bullets left but he’d be damned if he would waste them.

  The closest of the fiends seemed to leap backward, his face disintegrating.

  A second tried too late to dodge away and instead ducked into Grey’s next round. His head snapped back so hard that the sound of his spine snapping was almost as loud as the shot that killed him.

  Jenny fought against Grey, reaching backward toward her father, who was striding forward, bellowing at his followers to kill them both. Grey struggled with her as he raised his gun and aimed at the head of the man whose clothes he wore.

  “Take them!” ordered the Harrowed.

  The swarm of walking corpses passed him like river water around a rock, racing to obey their master’s orders. They boiled forward, all of them laughing. All of them hungry.

  Jenny bit Grey’s shoulder, and when he flinched back, she broke away and ran toward her father.

  “Pa!” she screamed.

  Lucky Bob saw her and laughed with mad glee. Then he raised his gun and snapped off a single shot. Jenny cried out and staggered, her hands pressed to her chest.

  “No!” bellowed Grey as he threw himself at the Harrowed, firing his last round in the same moment that Lucky Bob aimed his gun at him. Both pistols banged in the same instant. Lucky Bob was spun halfway around as red burst from his shoulder, and Grey felt his entire midsection explode into a fireball. The pain was impossible and he caved forward and dropped to his knees. The empty gun tumbled from his fingers and fell into the mud. Grey couldn’t breathe and he waited for the blackness to take him. His eyes bulged from his head as he saw Jenny lying there, her body completely still, rain beating on her slack features.