Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  The defenders panicked and scattered as more and more of the pterosaurs struck them. A few huddled down behind the sandbags, firing as quickly as they could. Grey fired shot after shot, and the Lazarus bullets detonated in balls of blue fire that burst flesh and vaporized bone. The pterosaurs flew apart into ragged chunks.

  Seven of his people were down, leaving twenty to fight a remaining dozen of the flying reptiles. Panic was in full fury, though, and most of the people were unable to cope with the terror of what they were facing. Grey pushed off from the sandbag wall and waded among the melee. He fired and fired and fired. The blue explosions rocked the street, knocking the fighters onto their backs, bursting the sandbags, but doing worse damage to the monsters.

  One pteranodon landed atop the makeshift barrier and stabbed at him with its beak, and when Grey twisted away, it grabbed his gun arm with the bony fingers that sprouted from its leathery wing. The grip was extraordinary and Grey cried out. The Lazarus pistol fell from his hand. With a cry of pain and anger, Grey used his left hand to tear his Bowie knife from its sheath and he slashed with the heavy blade, cutting through tendon and bone. Then he was free, the alien hand still locked around his wrist but no longer attached to the beast. The pterosaur screeched in pain as blood pumped from the wound. Grey slashed at it again, but it leaped into the air to evade the blade. However the leap turned into a tumble as the mangled wing buckled. The monster thumped down onto the dirt. Grey dove atop it, smashed the beak aside with a powerful blow with the side of his right fist, and slashed the thing across the throat with the knife. It gurgled as its scream of pain was drowned in a tide of blood.

  Grey shook the dead hand from his wrist and then dove to the ground as another pterosaur swooped low to try to decapitate him. He flattened out in the mud as the thing passed only inches above him. His Lazarus pistol was five feet away, lying on the wet ground as rain pounded on it. He wormed his way toward it, snatched it up, rolled over onto his back, and brought it up, all the time praying that water and mud would not do to it what they would to an ordinary pistol. The pterosaur swung around and dove at him again, and Grey fired, praying he wouldn’t blow his own hand off.

  Little red lights made the garnets pulse with light as the pistol bucked in his hand.

  The pteranodon exploded above him, showering him with bloody debris.

  He rolled sideways and got to his knees, spitting gore from his mouth.

  Around him the fight was going badly. Only a dozen of his people were still fighting, and the last five of the pterosaurs were swirling and swooping. The animals were learning from the deaths of their fellows; they watched for the raise of barrels, then they wheeled in the air to avoid the shots.

  “Defensive circle!” cried Grey, rising and firing at one of them. He missed as the monster tilted to let the storm wind shove it out of the way of the shot.

  The people were too mad with fear to listen. Grey slammed the Bowie knife into its sheath and got to his feet, firing again and clipping a wing. Then he was among the survivors, yelling at them and shoving them toward the barricade.

  “Huddle up! Guns out. Don’t let them get behind you. Protect the man to your right. No, damn it, your other right. That’s it. Fire. Fire.”

  Two of the pterosaurs fell as the men, now in a circle, fired at Grey’s direction. The animals still darted out of the way, but Grey saw a way to use that. He waited for the volley to fire and then aimed his shot to the natural escape angle and as a pteranodon veered to avoid the bullets Grey destroyed it with the Lazarus handgun.

  Again.

  And again.

  As each monster fell, the people at the barricade became more confident. Their aim improved, although some still shot wild and too soon. The next monster fell to a hail of bullets, and the last one, realizing that it was alone, attempted to fly between two buildings, but that was a mistake. Everyone fired.

  Every bullet hit it and tore it to rags.

  The men burst into cheers.

  But Grey looked around. There had been twenty-seven fighters with him at the barricade, and now there were eleven.

  Sixteen dead.

  The cheers of the survivors died away as this truth sank like poison into their stomachs.

  This was not a victory. It was a slaughter.

  And all they had so far fought were Deray’s monster pets. The army, the machines, the metal giant, and the undead still waited.

  As Grey stared over the wall and across the Icarus Bridge he felt his heart sink.

  We’re all going to die here, he thought. And he believed it, too.

  A voice—screaming his name—tore through the air, and he whirled and ran.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  The cry had come from Jenny. Terror and desperation mixed in equal parts.

  Grey raced down the street toward the far end of town; back to the place where he had first met her. The well.

  He saw her there. She was backing away from the well. Two of the townspeople lay sprawled and bloody in the rain, their bodies strangely swollen and discolored. Both corpses had deep punctures on their faces. Jenny had the Lazarus pistol in her hand, held out straight as she fired at something that came crawling over the edge. The thing was long and low, and as it moved the lightning flashed on each of its black, chitinous segments. A thousand hairy legs carried it up and over the lip of the well. Antennae whipped back and forth and a hundred tiny eyes gleamed like specks of polished coal. It was a centipede. Thirty feet long if it was an inch, and it flowed out of the depths and moved toward Jenny.

  On the ground between it and Jenny were two more of its kind, their bodies blasted to fragments, steam rising as rain struck the exposed guts. Their pincers glistened with a purple venom. Another giant insect emerged from the well. And another.

  “Grey!” screamed Jenny as she fired. Instead of a deafening blast, there was a hollow click. She cursed and squeezed the trigger again and again; each time yielded nothing but that empty and impotent noise. Then on her fourth pull the weapon fired. But it was already too late. The centipede was nearly upon her. Grey fired as he ran. Not a perfect shot, but it scored, and the insect was buffeted sideways as a yard-long section of its side erupted in flame. The blast threw Jenny backward, and Grey caught her with his free arm, steadying her.

  “The damn gun doesn’t work!” she snapped, squeezing the trigger again and getting only the empty click.

  “Stay back,” he warned, and pulled her clear as the injured centipede lashed at her. There was a barb on its tail as long and sharp as a pirate’s cutlass. Grey crouched and steadied his gun for a careful shot and blew the monster’s head off. It flopped backward, but immediately the other two crawled over it. Grey fired again and this time Jenny’s gun fired, too. One of the creatures was killed outright, its head and first ten segments bursting into balls of blue fire. The second was mortally wounded and staggered off, half its legs crippled and many of its segments ruptured. Grey holstered his pistol, grabbed the heavy wooden bucket from beside the well, and swung it up and over and down onto the monster’s head. The bucket shattered, but the impact smashed the centipede’s head to bits of shell and green blood.

  He turned to Jenny. “Are you okay?”

  She looked past him and shuddered. “God, are those things bugs?”

  “Looks and I saw their little brothers yesterday,” said Grey, nodding. “These are even bigger.”

  “Are they undead, like the dinosaurs?”

  “No. I think Deray used some hocus-pocus to drive them up here.”

  She shuddered. “This is what’s living down in those caves?”

  “This and worse,” he answered, but was immediately sorry he said it. Her face, already pale, fell into sickness.

  “We can’t fight this,” she said in a hushed whisper. “We can’t win.”

  It was too close to what Grey had thought after the fight with the pterosaurs. It was probably true, but focusing on that would almost certainly guarantee their defeat. Believing
in the possibility of victory, however unlikely, was the only way to keep despair from overwhelming them all.

  “They’re ugly bastards and they’re scary,” he said, “but they’re alive and that means they can die like anything else.”

  “They die when your gun shoots,” she snapped. “Mine keeps jamming.”

  “Take my Colt,” he said, reaching for the gunbelt that was crossed under the Lazarus pistol belt. However Jenny shook her head.

  “Maybe Doctor Saint can fix mine. In the meantime I’ll get my shotgun. I trust that.”

  She ran off before he could say another word. Once again she seemed to have shifted inside her skin. The dreamy-eyed woman he’d made love to last night was not evident. This morning she had been thoughtful and enigmatic, now she was the fiery farm woman again.

  Grey peered over the edge of the well and saw nothing but shadows down there. No other monsters came climbing out of the water, but that was hardly reassuring. Who knew how many more of them Deray had to send. A party of armed men was hurrying down the street, drawn to the commotion but too late to be of immediate use. When they saw the dead insects they slowed and then stopped to gape.

  “You two,” said Grey, gesturing to two men with big fowling pieces, “watch this damn well. If anything tries to crawl up you send it back to hell. Got it?”

  They were scared, but they nodded and took up stations on either side of the well, barrels laid on the edge and angled down.

  A burst of thunder made Grey spin around and he saw bright blue fire swirling amid the storm winds. Not thunder, after all. No—it was one of Saint’s balloon bombs. His little disasters. His bad stars filled with ghost rock smoke and his own version of Greek fire.

  One of them had exploded above the sandbag barrier on the east side of town.

  Grey took a breath, checked the rounds in his guns, and ran off that way.

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  As he approached the eastern barrier, he saw that there was a real fight in progress, so he poured it on. The men along the sandbag wall were firing as flaming debris drifted down from the sky and dark shapes flitted and dodged all around. At first Grey thought that a swarm of birds, driven wild by the storm, had flocked in panic toward the waiting men. But that wasn’t it at all.

  Instead he saw that there were dozens of small things—not true birds but some kind of clockwork devices made to look like birds—swarming down from a dark cloud. Then he realized that it wasn’t a cloud at all. With a sudden surge the great sky frigate smashed through the wall of clouds. Men lined the rails of the airship now, and they trained rifles down at the town and fired, fired, fired. The plunging fire was deadly and defender after defender went spinning backward from the wall, trailing lines of bright blood.

  Grey expected to see gun ports open and cannons roll out, but either great guns were too heavy for the lighter-than-air craft, or Deray was saving them for later. Either way, it was rifle fire for now, and that was deadly enough.

  More of the small mechanical birds swarmed over the rails and flew toward the defenders. Grey couldn’t understand what their purpose was. They were too small to carry any useful amounts of explosive. Then, as the first wave of them approached, he saw something that chilled him to the bone. The birds darted high, then snapped down into steep diving attacks and as they fell their wings folded back, their tiny mouths gaped wide and slender steel needles thrust outward. Some dark chemical was smeared on each needle.

  “Ware!” cried Saint. “Ware the birds. Don’t let them—.”

  The birds slammed into the sandbags and into the men behind them. The needles stabbed through jackets and shirts and deep into muscle tissue. Men swatted at them, and one man even laughed as he plucked the tiny needle from the bulk of his massive shoulder.

  A split second later the man cried out and staggered, his eyes going wide, mouth open, skin turning bright red. He took three clumsy steps backward and then fell onto his knees as blood erupted from eyes, ears, nose, and his open mouth. He flopped onto his face, his entire body shuddering.

  Five others went down the same way, bleeding and convulsing.

  Doctor Saint sent another of the little disasters up into the path of the second wave of birds and pressed the button. The explosion threw everyone flat and painted the sky and the landscape in azure light that was so bright it seemed to stab all the way into the mind. Grey flung an arm across his face to protect his eyes from the flaming debris. When he risked a look he saw that the sky was empty of the needle-birds. However, Deray’s sharpshooters were preparing a fresh volley. Before Grey could shout a warning they fired, and bullets punched into many of the dazed survivors.

  Grey drew his Lazarus pistol and returned fire, but the range was too long for a handgun to be of any use.

  “Don’t waste your ammunition,” said Saint, waving him off.

  “Then you do something, God damn it!”

  “I am, dear boy,” rasped the scientist, fiddling with the controls on his little metal box. Two more of the little disasters came hurrying out of the rain and soared upward. The gunfire above changed as Deray ordered his men to target the balloons. The doctor’s bombs were forty feet away when the first one popped as bullets pierced it. The mechanism and its explosives dropped harmlessly down into a puddle of rainwater. The second was nicked and gas began hissing out of it, but the impellor motor kept pushing it upward.

  “Do it now!” cried Grey, and Saint pressed the button.

  The little disaster was still twenty feet from the side of the frigate, but the blast swept the rail with brilliant blue fire. Men screamed and fell back, some of them ablaze, others beating at flames on their coats. How the chemicals Saint devised were able to burn in the wind and rain was beyond Grey, but it worked. The only thing that mattered was that it worked.

  Deray, unharmed but furious, roared to his pilot and pointed wildly toward the south. Clearly he did not want to face those bombs.

  “He’s running,” said one of the wounded men at the barrier.

  “I think his balloon is filled with hydrogen,” said Saint. “Mmm. Stupid choice. Highly flammable.”

  “Hit ’em again,” Grey pleaded. “See if you can blow that bastard out of the sky. Maybe his troops will give it up if he’s dead.”

  “Worth a try, my boy, worth a try.” He sent two more of the balloons after the ship. The frigate was turning, though, moving quickly away to try and find shelter within the darkness of the storm clouds. Grey heard Saint muttering, “Come on … come on…”

  The frigate slipped into the cloud bank seconds ahead of the little disaster.

  “I can’t see it,” complained Saint. “Damn it.”

  “Blow it anyway,” snapped Grey. “Don’t let it get away.”

  The scientist pressed the button and the entire cloud bank seemed to transform into a burning sapphire. Incandescent blue light lit the clouds from within, and Grey watched in awe as ghostly lightning throbbed like veins across the flesh of the storm. Then it was gone and the clouds roiled with black fury. The wind intensified and rain fell in sheets, hammering the town. The survivors of the barrier gasped for air in the downpour. Some sat and wept, holding their dead friends in their arms, or clutching wounds whose redness seemed to be the only color left in the world.

  A smiling Saint slapped Grey on the shoulder. “I think we got him.”

  But Grey was far less certain about that and said as much to Saint. He watched the smile drain away from the man’s dark face.

  “At least we’ve hurt him,” he said.

  “Hurt him maybe,” said Grey grudgingly, “but mostly I think we’ve helped him get a good damn idea of how tough we aren’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. He’s hit us three times now with half-assed attacks,” he said, and briefly explained about the other two attempts: the pterosaurs and the centipedes.

  “None of these are full-bore.”

  “You think he’s testing our defenses?” a
sked the scientist.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Sadly, I do,” agreed the scientist. “Which begs the question of where and when he will launch his full assault.”

  “It almost doesn’t matter. If he’s been paying attention, he’s got to see that even though we have some muscle—thanks to your gadgets—we don’t have the numbers to play this out. He can either keep chipping away at us, or he can hit us with a tidal wave and just wipe us all the hell off the board.”

  “At the bridge, you mean?”

  “Of course. It’s the only way to move big enough numbers into the town.”

  Brother Joe and his assistants came running to help with the wounded. Grey and Saint ran off to check the various barriers. They found Jenny at the southern barrier closest to the Icarus Bridge. Beyond the bridge the tanks were rumbling slowly forward, though none of them had yet rolled onto the bridge itself. Above them, the sky frigate hung like a promise.

  “Ah … damn the man,” muttered Saint. “I thought I had him.”

  “You hurt him, though,” said Grey, pointing.

  It was true. Although the frigate still floated above the army, the airship had clearly failed to escape the little disaster Saint had sent into the clouds. It had a visible list to port, and all along the starboard side the rail and decking had been blasted away. The gaping damage exposed the gears of complex machinery inside. Oily black smoke drifted from the ports and mingled with the dark clouds, and there were long streaks of red running down the sides of the shattered wood. Even though Deray had escaped destruction, he had paid with the blood of his men.