Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  Grey looked beyond her and he thought he saw the faces of all his ghosts watching, waiting for him to die. Waiting for him to be theirs.

  He looked down at his hands, expecting to see blood pouring out, expecting to see his guts slide out into the rain.

  But even though his hands were wet there was no blood.

  The pain, though, it was unbearable.

  He could not understand any of it.

  He toppled sideways and lay helpless before the laughing corpses, and they came forward to take him.

  And then a figure seemed to step out of the dark wind and blowing rain. At first alien and misshapen, then illuminated in eerie detail as lightning forked through the sky.

  A man wearing a harness on his back fashioned in some strange design. All gleaming copper and steel, with glowing tubes of glass thrust out in all directions. Coils of wires trailed from the center of the burning tubes to the butt of the strangest pistol Grey had ever seen. It was oversized, with a glass wrapped entirely around the barrel. Blue gas swirled within the bowl, and it seemed to Grey that inside the gas tiny bolts of lightning flashed and popped. From the center of the globe thrust the black mouth of a barrel made from brass and wrapped with turn upon turn of silver wire. The man wearing this bizarre contraption wore a pair of goggles with lenses of blood-red quartz.

  “Damn you all,” said Thomas Looks Away as he raised his impossible gun.

  There was a sound like a thousand snakes hissing at once.

  Grey’s eyes drifted shut as a terrible light filled the world. It stabbed at him even through his tightly shut eyelids.

  Grey heard the screams.

  Terrible screams.

  Awful. High-pitched.

  Begging for mercy.

  Crying out to whatever gods or devils there were to save them.

  Not the screams of the people of Paradise Falls.

  He lay there and listened to the death screams of the walking dead.

  Somewhere, impossibly, Grey heard Jenny calling her father’s name.

  And he heard another voice. An impossible voice from long ago whispering softly in his ear.

  “Go to sleep,” she said. “It’s over now. Go to sleep.”

  He tried to say her name, but it came out as a whisper.

  “Annabelle…”

  Above him, defiant in the path of the storm, Looks Away stood there with his strange gun and fired and fired and fired.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The storm winds blew long and black.

  They howled like the dying and the damned. Grey lay in the mud with his eyes shut.

  And then a great silence fell like a blanket of snow.

  Was this death? He did not know. He feared it, though. The ghosts would be waiting for him. Waiting to exact the revenge they had earned with their blood.

  Grey waited and waited.

  The downpour dwindled to a drizzle, then a few desultory drops. Then nothing.

  If death was hovering nearby, it did not touch him with its cold fingers.

  It took courage for Grey to open his eyes. He expected to see Looks Away dead and the gibbering dead standing in a leering ring around them, ready to play a deadly joke. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

  Yet the surprise was different.

  Grey was not dead.

  He touched his stomach, searching for the ragged bullet hole.

  Finding none.

  Finding …

  His heavy belt buckle was bent nearly in half, the crease digging into him like a knife. The bullet—Lucky Bob’s bullet had—against all odds, against all sanity, hit the buckle and had not passed through.

  Grey wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.

  “God,” he breathed.

  He raised his head and looked at the sky.

  And beheld a sight that nearly drove the last shreds of sanity from his mind.

  There, far above the troubled town, half obscured by the fading storm clouds, was a ship.

  A ship unlike anything Grey had ever seen. Stranger than anything he had even imagined.

  There were no sails, no sweeps, but it floated on the wind like something out of an opium dream. Vast and silver-gray, with massive wings that were unfurled from its side. The wings were black, the wings of some obscene bat. Thin and veined with red. As Grey watched they rose, rose, rose, then snapped down with a thunder crack, propelling the steel body of the ship deeper into the clouds. Another crack, another sound like thunder.

  And then it was gone, vanishing into the darkness and distance, as if it had never existed at all. A fading fantasy of a troubled mind. A delusion of shock.

  That’s what Grey tried to tell himself.

  A fantasy. Nothing more.

  But the horrors of this night bared the lie even to his reluctant mind.

  It was real, as all of this was real. Dead men walking. A fall of snakes and frogs. Storms that screamed.

  All of it.

  Real.

  He heard a soft moan, and he turned to see Jenny Pearl sitting up, her hands pressed to her breast. Her face was slack and eyes dull. She did what he had done, looking down at the place where a bullet should have killed her. The front of her dress was torn and there was the darkness of blood, but it did not pump from her. It did not rush from her. She touched the whalebone of her bodice.

  “No,” she said, her voice thick and strange in her shock.

  “Jenny—?” he croaked and began crawling through the mud toward her. “Jenny?”

  She reached out a hand to take his. Her fingers were icy with rainwater. He pulled her to him and they clung together in a stricture of shared pain that went all the way to the bone. To the heart. To the soul.

  Jenny Pearl writhed against him, in agony. Body and soul.

  Ten yards from where they lay, Looks Away sat in the middle of the street, his goggles pushed up on his head, face haggard, lips slack and rubbery with exhaustion. All of the tubes on the machine he wore were dark, the glass of each cracked and smoking. The strange gun was on the ground, thin lines of steam rising from it, the metal melted.

  Grey craned his neck to look for Lucky Bob and the other monsters.

  Many of them lay in the mud.

  Dead and still.

  Dead for good and all.

  Their heads were gone. Just … gone.

  Nothing above their shoulders was there anymore. Instead the ground and even some of the faces of the buildings on either side of the street were splashed with red, with some viscous black substance that Grey figured must be the blood from their decaying veins, and gray lumps of brain tissue. In each of them the black chunk of ghost rock was shattered and smoke rose from each of them.

  Grey looked and looked, but he did not see a figure dressed all in black. He did not see the torn and burned remains of a flat-brimmed hat, nor a pair of matched pistols.

  “By the Queen’s lacy garters,” said Looks Away in a soft and distant voice. “Did you see?”

  “I saw too much.”

  “Did you see the ship?”

  “I…,” began Grey, then he shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw.”

  “Ah,” said the Sioux. “I fear the world is broken. Or I am. Hard to say at this particular juncture.” His precise word choices were totally at odds with the moment, and Grey feared for the man’s sanity. But then Looks Away shook his head as if coming awake out of a dream. He looked at Grey as if surprised to see him.

  “You’re alive,” he said. “God rot me, but I thought I saw Lucky Bob gun you both down.”

  Grey showed him the dented belt buckle.

  Looks Away actually laughed. “You are the luckiest man alive.”

  “I feel like I’ve been cut in half.”

  “At least you can feel.”

  They both turned to Jenny. She shook her head. “Don’t you dare call me lucky.”

  “How—?” asked Looks Away, then he blinked. “Dear God, are you going to stand there and tell me that your corset deflected a bullet?”<
br />
  Jenny kept one hand pressed to her chest. “It grazed me. Don’t make anything out of it.”

  “Let me see,” insisted Looks Away.

  “No,” she said. “Leave me alone.” Her eyes were puffed red, tears had cut lines through the mud on her cheeks. “Pa—?”

  The Sioux scientist raised his head and looked past the pile of corpses that littered the street. “He’s gone.”

  She shuddered with relief. “Thank God.”

  “No,” said Looks Away. “I don’t think so.”

  Feet slapped through the mud and Grey turned to see Brother Joe hurrying over. The monk helped Jenny to her feet and then offered a hand to Grey, who took it gratefully.

  Grey touched Jenny’s arm with tentative fingertips. She stepped away, shrugging off his touch. Grey sighed and slogged over to Looks Away. He offered his hand, but the Sioux knelt where he was.

  “Give me a moment.”

  “Sure,” agreed Grey, but he nodded to the machine. “What in tarnation is that contraption?”

  Looks Away picked up the melted handgun, considered it, and let it fall back into a puddle.

  “Long or short answer?”

  “Short. One I’ll understand.”

  “Gas expansion pistol.”

  Grey thought about it. “Medium answer.”

  A faint smile flitted over Looks Away’s mouth. “A weapon, powered by chalcanthite and ghost rock waste gasses. Designed to focus a beam of superheated plasma that radically expands the gasses trapped within solid ghost rock resulting in an explosive chemical reaction.”

  “Um…”

  “Did you get any of that?”

  Grey nudged the gun with a booted toe. “That thing blew the heads off the undead?”

  “It did.”

  “By doing something to the ghost rock inside them?”

  “An oversimplification, but yes.”

  Looks Away sighed. “If you’re still offering a hand up, my friend, I’ll take it.”

  Grey gripped his arm and pulled him to his feet. The effort hurt both of them and they spent a good long time cursing and wheezing. Looks Away stood wide-legged and wobbly. He unbuckled the straps and let the device crash to the ground.

  “Hey!” said Grey. “We might need that—.”

  “We probably will, but that unit is buggered.” Looks Away turned around to show that the back of his shirt was singed and the skin beneath blistered. “It’s a prototype. Doctor Saint scrapped it because we couldn’t keep the coils from overheating.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Ouch indeed.”

  “Jesus. Can you fix it? Or, um, reload it?”

  “I study rocks, old son. I’m not a mechanical engineer. Doctor Saint built it, and as far as I know, only he can repair it.”

  “Balls,” said Grey. “You got it from his lab, right? Is there anything else we can use if the things come back?”

  “I’m … not sure. I didn’t have time to look.”

  “Then we’d better have that look.” He went over to the nearest of the formerly walking dead, knelt, and began removing bullets from the man’s gunbelt. He put the first six into his Colt and then slotted the rest into the loops on his own belt. Then he went to two others and took their ammunition as well. Once all the slots on his belt were filled, he dumped the rest into his pockets. The weight was comforting.

  Jenny came over. She still had one hand pressed to the damaged front of her dress. She looked angry and sheepish at the same time, and she wouldn’t meet Grey’s eyes. But she stood foursquare in front of Looks Away.

  “You tell me the truth,” she demanded. “No lies. Did you try to kill my pa?”

  Looks Away took a breath, and then nodded. “He ran away and took the last dozen of them with him. But, Jenny, listen to me—I do not believe that was your father.”

  “Of course it was.”

  “Of course it was not. Come on, woman,” said Looks Away, “you saw him. He was a corpse. Withered. He’s been dead for weeks. Probably ever since he went missing. Whatever that thing was, I daresay it was not Lucky Bob Pearl. It was some kind of construct, a galvanized mockery brought back to a pretense of life by the qualities of ghost rock. Ask Grey. We’ve both seen the dead walk. We fought them. They are not the people they were when they were alive.”

  “That was my pa,” she insisted. “He spoke to me.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “It was, damn it. You think I don’t know my own father?”

  Brother Joe joined them. “Miss Pearl. That was a demon straight from Hell wearing your father’s body like a suit of clothes.”

  “You’re not helping,” said Grey quietly, but Looks Away shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “I rather think he is correct.”

  “Demons now?” Grey sighed. “We have the walking dead and screaming storms, and now you want to add demons to this stew?”

  Jenny punched Grey in the chest. “My father is not a demon.”

  “Ow! Why’d you hit me? I didn’t say he was a demon. I’m on your side.”

  “You tried to shoot him.”

  “Yeah, well, okay, fair enough,” said Grey quickly, “but let’s count the cards on the table. He was shooting at me. And at you.”

  “My point exactly,” said Looks Away. “Does that sound like your father?”

  She glared at each of them in turn. “Then maybe he’s sick or something. People rave when they have fevers and—”

  Looks Away pointed at the corpse that had attacked them. “A fever? Really? Until now I’ve rather admired you for your practicality and clarity of vision, but you are genuinely at risk of becoming another ordinary hysterical fool.”

  “Whoa, ease up, pardner,” murmured Grey.

  Jenny balled her fist and looked ready to swing a roundhouse punch at the Sioux, but then she abruptly turned and walked a dozen paces away. Her body was ramrod stiff. She stopped and stared into the darkness at the edge of town.

  Looks Away glanced helplessly at Grey. In a hushed voice he said, “I’m merely trying to make her see reason.”

  Grey shook his head. “Reason left town a long time ago, brother. She just watched her father lead an army of corpses in an attack on everyone she knows. You want to maybe give her a minute?”

  The Sioux opened his mouth, thought better of it, and turned away. He tapped Brother Joe on the shoulder. “Come along. There are people who could probably use our help.”

  They hurried off to tend to the wounded, the shocked, and the grieving.

  Hitching up his borrowed pants and all of his courage, Grey walked over to where Jenny stood. The carnage around her was horrific. There was one final rumble of thunder, far away over the ocean. Above them, though, the moonlight was scattering the last of the storm clouds. It spilled a pure white light down on everything.

  It seemed odd to Grey. He’d always hated the night and the cold eye of the moon. Now it was the purest thing in his world.

  For a long, long time he said nothing. He did not touch her, did not speak her name.

  She stood like a statue, frozen by the impossibility of what was happening, and Grey understood that. The world was wrong. Everything was so damn wrong.

  He knew that he should find Picky and get the hell out of Paradise Falls. Out of the Maze. Out of California.

  Maybe go East. See if Philadelphia was still normal, still sane.

  Or perhaps take a ship. He’d heard about something called the Légion étrangère. The French Foreign Legion. They were supposed to be a group of misfits and outcasts, and nothing seemed better suited to him than that.

  He almost smiled at the thought. Putting ten thousand miles between him and this godforsaken little town. Putting an ocean between him and this whole broken country.

  It was a nice thought.

  The moonlight painted everything with a veneer of purity. The mud, the bloodstained buildings, the mangled dead.

  The light traced a silver line along the profile of Jenny Pe
arl.

  A pearl in pearlescent light.

  A poet could make something out of that.

  Very softly, Grey said the only thing that he could say that might matter to her.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  It broke her.

  She bent and put her face in her dirty hands and wept. It was a horrible sound. So deep. Torn from some private place.

  Jenny turned and leaned against him, and then she wrapped her arms around Grey and clung to him. He hesitated for only a heartbeat, then he took her in his arms and held her as the storm and the madness of this night went away.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  They walked through the town together. Silent, his arm around her shoulders, her hand clutching the torn front of her dress.

  The town was coming alive, but death circled like a carrion bird. People were in the street and there were torches and gas lamps lit. Three bodies lay on the back of a wagon. A young man named Huck who worked in the livery stable and an older couple—the Delgados—whose family had lived in Paradise Falls for nearly a century. More than thirty were hurt, including a twelve-year-old boy with a bad bite on his upper arm.

  Looks Away and Brother Joe were tending to the wounded. It did not surprise Grey that the Sioux was skilled in medicine. The man seemed to have a remarkable depth of knowledge, especially in scientific fields. He diagnosed injuries, cleaned and dressed wounds, and mixed compounds that he said would prevent infection or ease pain. Brother Joe, on the other hand, seemed to be more shamanistic in his approach, using herbs and prayers. In both cases, though, the people seemed to respond to the treatments. It was, Grey knew, as much from the appearance of authority and knowledge as it was from what the men did.

  They found the little red-haired girl sitting near Brother Joe. Grey learned that her parents had been badly injured but were expected to recover, and that the girl—whose name was Felicity—was herself unharmed. The blood on her face had not been hers.