Ghostwalkers

by Jonathan Maberry

  It became immediately apparent that Deray’s blow had not been a freak accident of angle or chance. As Grey had surmised before, he was immensely strong. It was like being wrapped by a steel band. The air was being squeezed out of his lungs and Grey could feel his bones grind. It was rare for him to fight someone substantially stronger and he knew that this level of strength could not be accounted for in any natural way.

  It was twisted science.

  Or, more probably, it was sorcery.

  As they struggled, Deray’s face was lit by a grin of delight. He was taking great pleasure in the surprise that must have registered on Grey’s face. The necromancer leaned close until his lips were inches from Grey’s ear.

  “You are nothing, Mr. Torrance,” he said. “You are less than a nuisance. You are nothing at all.”

  Grey tried to break the grip but it only tightened as they turned and stepped and fought for balance on the deck of the storm-tossed frigate.

  As they turned, Grey nearly cried out when he saw that the deck—which had only been littered by the corpses of walking dead—was now filled.

  A knot of figures stood by the freely spinning wheel. Pale faces in bullet-pocked clothes.

  His men.

  And her.

  Annabelle.

  The ghosts stood watching as he was slowly being crushed. There was no expression at all on their spectral faces. The two men turned and turned, and as they spun Grey heard Deray grunt in surprise. He’d seen the ghosts, too. For just a moment, the man was distracted, staring with wrinkled brow and frown of consternation at the strange figures.

  Grey took the moment, seizing the last chance he had.

  He head-butted Deray, catching the man on the ear and then again on the corner of his eyebrow. It was a hard blow that exploded lights in Grey’s own eyes. Deray flinched back, and that lessened the pressure by the slightest amount. Grey darted his head forward and clamped his teeth on the corded tendons on the side of Deray’s neck and simultaneously brought his knee up to smash into the muscles of the man’s thigh. Once, twice, again and again as he tore at the necromancer’s flesh with his teeth.

  Deray screamed.

  He thrashed like a madman, no longer trying to crush Grey but going wild to try and escape him. Deray kicked back, catching Grey in the stomach with a sideways knee. The air whooshed from Grey’s lungs and the impact knocked his teeth loose. He staggered backward, spitting blood and falling hard to the deck. Deray chased him, kicking Grey again and again, in the stomach, the chest, the face.

  Grey felt his bones break. His ribs detonated like firecrackers. Bits of broken teeth clogged his throat and he collapsed sideways, dropping his knife. Deray kicked the weapon overboard and kicked Grey over and over again until Grey flopped back, bleeding and shattered.

  Then Deray reeled in the opposite direction, blood boiling from a terrible wound. He dropped his sword to clamp his hands to his neck to stanch the flow of blood. From the force of the blood loss, Grey knew that he had nicked something important when he’d bitten Deray before. An artery.

  Good. Let him bleed out like a stuck pig.

  Even as he thought those words, Grey felt like he was drifting and for a moment he thought he’d fallen off the ship. But it was his consciousness that seemed to be tearing loose from his body.

  I’m dying, he thought, and he knew it to be true.

  So was Deray.

  The ghosts began moving toward him. Toward both of them, their eyes filled now with a strange and awful hunger.

  They’re coming for me.

  But they stared past him to the necromancer. Deray used one bloody hand to dig into an inner pocket. He produced a flat disk of polished ghost rock that was set in a silver frame. Strange symbols were carved into the rock and Deray began hastily muttering something over it in a language Grey had never heard.

  “Da’k gugt r’un ftaxung sha tsa’t haaft shx ta’ans shas ha nax thunghiaa’ shut latsuftansuaft ghu’ftg ang ta’a us ial un s’uftiasa,” intoned the necromancer. “Bx sha aftga’ gugt I l’ax.”

  Above the ship, the storm suddenly intensified and in his delirium Gsrey thought he saw strange, vast, impossible shapes leer at him from within the depths of the clouds. Monstrous eyes glared at him from a head that was lumpy and misshapen. Instead of a mouth and chin, there were dozens of writhing tentacles that whipped within the ferocious winds. Fires, ancient and endless, ignited in those eyes, and it seemed to set fire to the whole of the sky.

  “Lu’g ur ghatsat ang ’angaantha,” roared Deray, his blood gurgling in his throat, “haaft na su fta shx unts’ianans!”

  Lightning, red as blood, slashed across the sky. Snakes of electricity crawled all over the envelope above the frigate. While behind the hideous face a vast pair of leathery wings seemed to reach outward, each one stretching for miles and filling the whole of the sky. Below, the fighting stopped and everyone screamed. Even the walking dead.

  Grey used what little strength he had left to climb to his feet. He coughed and spat dark blood onto the deck, and inside his chest he could feel bones shifting in all the wrong ways. He stared at the great god of all monsters and spat at it, too. But the wind whipped it away, and the god did not even take notice of the dying gunslinger. Red lightning struck the ship and enveloped Deray, and for one mad moment Grey thought that the necromancer was somehow being consumed by his own dark magic. That fate had stepped in to rebuke the hubris of this madman.

  But the fire did not burn Deray. It writhed over him and wherever it found a cut or a wound, it glowed like the deepest heart of a blacksmith’s forge. Grey recoiled, throwing a hand across his eyes and crying out as the light burned his eyes. Even the ghosts by the wheel recoiled, and the glow seemed ready to wash them out of all existence.

  Far below Grey heard Jenny cry out his name.

  “Grey!”

  Why she called him now was beyond his ability to understand. The light was so bright that it beat at him like hammers. Her voice though—just the sound of it—triggered a memory. Something that the vampire witch Mircalla had said to him. Something Veronica had repeated.

  Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye.

  The burning light began to dim, the lightning fading.

  Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.

  In the clouds, the face of the monster or god or whatever it was, also began to fade.

  Deray stood there, wide-legged, blood glistening on his clothes, mingling with rain water. His chest heaved as if he had finished a great labor. The lightning, though gone everywhere else now, still burned in his eyes.

  He raised his hand to touch his throat; he touched his chest with the other. The flesh was completely healed. The knife cut was gone. The bite was gone. He threw back his head and laughed. Exultant, triumphant.

  Invincible.

  Not merely a necromancer, but something else. Immortal. The unconquerable conqueror.

  Grey turned and looked down at the crowd around the barricade. No one was fighting. They were all looking up at him. Jenny was not there. She was not standing where she had stood.

  Looks Away was there, but he was alone.

  Then …

  No.

  Not alone.

  Looks Away, bloodied and exhausted, stood over a figure who lay in the mud. A slim figure with blond hair.

  Lying there.

  Broken.

  “No…,” he said, but that single word had to tear its way through the wreckage in his chest.

  No.

  He wanted to scream it. But could not. It didn’t matter, though, and he knew it. Jenny was gone. What remained was broken, ruined, half buried in mud.

  Gone.

  And that made him remember something else. Something Jenny had said to him not an hour ago as they prepared for this battle.

  “Don’t worry,” she had said so softly that only he could hear her. “Death isn’t the end.”

  Even as he remembered those words he actually heard them.
r />   He turned his head and she was there.

  Annabelle.

  Standing there, her face bright as a candle. Her hair rippled in the breeze, but even though the wind was blowing her hair moved in a different direction. As if she stood in another place and was touched by some other, gentler breeze. It was so strange. Grey wondered if this was because he was dying.

  “Death isn’t the end,” she said.

  And as she said it he heard both voices.

  Hers.

  Jenny’s.

  Speaking as one.

  “I’m … sorry,” he said to both of them. “I’m so sorry.”

  Annabelle smiled, but he could see Jenny there, too. Like two images painted on glass, overlaid and then brought to life by magic. A shadow fell across her face and Grey turned, wheezing, gasping, coughing wetly, to see Aleksander Deray standing there, his clothes torn but his body whole. His power restored, immense, terrible.

  “Now you understand,” said the necromancer as he stepped close to Grey. As he spoke his breath blew against Grey like the draft from an open furnace. “Now you see why not even death itself can bar me from taking this world for my own. Now you understand why I can never be stopped. Now you grasp the full scope of your own failure.”

  “Yeah,” said Grey. “I know.”

  Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye.

  The words echoed in his dying brain.

  Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.

  Grey forced himself to stand straight. Despite the grinding pain in his chest, despite the liquid heat in his stomach, he stood tall one last time. He managed to smile. With split lips and broken teeth, Grey Torrance smiled at the man who had killed him.

  “See you in hell, you son of a bitch.”

  He winked at Deray.

  Then he wrapped his arms around the man and with the very last of his strength he threw himself over the rail, dragging Deray with him.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  They seemed to fall for a long time.

  Deray screamed in terror. Real terror.

  Below them the people of Paradise Falls screamed.

  As Deray screamed red fire erupted from his mouth and nose. It enveloped Grey, it wrapped searing tendrils around them both as they dropped from the frigate down, down, down.

  Grey had one last glimpse of the pale face of Annabelle looking over the rail at him as he fell. Annabelle looking at him with Jenny’s eyes.

  I’m so sorry, he thought.

  And then the ground was there.

  Even with all that rain and mud it was so hard.

  So hard.

  It crushed them both. Pulped them both.

  But it did not kill them. The night and the storm and all of its dark magic were not done with them yet. With either of them. Grey heard them hit the ground. Heard the sound of bones snapped, of meat bursting. He felt the heat of blood. His and Deray’s, mingling together. He felt the stab like a knife as one of Deray’s splintered ribs speared him in the chest.

  The world closed its eyes and there was a time of darkness.

  Then there was a time of floating. Of nothingness. Grey thought he felt himself still falling and he wondered how far he would have to plummet until he landed in the fiery depths of the Pit.

  Would Deray be there with him? Would both of them serve out their sentences in Hell, chained together for all eternity? Was the universe that cruel? That perverse?

  His eyelids fluttered open.

  It was dark and the winds blew and the rain fell.

  Grey saw a face come into focus as someone bent over him. He saw worry, and then saw that worry turn to horror as full understanding struck him. Looks Away closed his own eyes for a moment.

  “By the Queen’s garters, old boy,” he murmured. “You’ve gone and done it now.”

  Grey tried to speak. Wanted to. Needed to. But there was so little of him left.

  “Did … I…?” he croaked. Hot blood choked him and he had to turn his head to spit his mouth clear. There was something wrong with his neck. The bones felt wrong. So wrong. “Did I … kill … him…?”

  Looks Away looked off to Grey’s left. His expression was confused.

  “This son of a whore is as hard to kill as you are, dear fellow,” he said. He sneered at Deray, who lay beyond Grey’s sight. Looks Away drew his knife and rain pinged off the bright blade. “I think I’ll have to finish this myself—if anything at this point will end him. Let me do that for you, my friend. Let me make sure he goes first and—.”

  “No,” said a voice.

  And then another figure stepped into view beyond Looks Away. A tall man with iron gray hair, wearing a black vest and white shirt open to the mid-chest. A man who had a deep and dreadful scar over his heart.

  A scar.

  Not a chunk of ghost rock.

  Not a bullet hole.

  A ragged pink scar.

  “No,” repeated Lucky Bob Pearl, “he’s mine.” He held pistols in each hand.

  Looks Away recoiled from the Harrowed, bringing his knife up, ready to fight. Lucky Bob shook his head.

  “Don’t,” he said as he touched the scar. “We’re not enemies anymore, Looksie. We used to be friends. Maybe we can be that again if the world doesn’t end.”

  “Bob…?” said Looks Away, stunned. “How?”

  Lucky Bob knelt and placed his hand over Grey’s heart. “He did it. He destroyed the ghost rock and freed me from the necromancer.”

  “But you’re … you’re…”

  “Dead?” finished Lucky Bob, smiling a rueful smile. “Maybe. I don’t feel dead. Hell, son, I’ve never felt more alive in my whole dang life.”

  “What about the … um … other?”

  “The manitou?”

  “I guess maybe we’re both in here. Don’t know how that’s going to work out, but for right now I’m calling the damn shots. Me and nobody else.” He tapped his own chest. “Heart’s still beating. Wounds heal pretty darn fast. Don’t ask how. Guess we’re alive or close enough. And I guess we’ll try and figure some way of getting along. Both of us sharing the same suit of skin and bones. Funny old world. Point is that this man—your friend here—saved us both. Me and the manitou. He could have killed us, but he didn’t. And he tried not to kill any of us. He offered us a chance.”

  Lucky Bob stood up, and as he did so his smile went away as he looked around at the last of the undead. There were eleven of them, and each was covered with blood. Their eyes blazed with unbanked hatred.

  “Well, come on, you yellow-bellied sons of whores,” growled Lucky Bob. “This is my goddamn town.”

  The undead howled with blood fury and rushed toward him.

  Grey could not believe what he saw, what he witnessed. The Harrowed Lucky Bob Pearl brought the guns up and fired.

  Fired.

  Fired.

  His guns bucked in his hands eleven times. And eleven undead heads snapped backward from the impacts. Eleven pairs of feet lost all sense; eleven bodies crumpled to the ground. And all of it in the space of a few ragged heartbeats. The gunshots echoed like thunder and then faded to a ghastly silence.

  “My goddamn town,” repeated Lucky Bob.

  Then the Harrowed turned from the pile of corpses and walked over to where Aleksander Deray lay crushed and broken. Ruined, but still alive, and Grey could see that the terrible damage was already healing. Soon the necromancer would rise once more.

  “Tell me, you miserable piece of cow shit,” said Lucky Bob, “how does one kill a necromancer? Hmm? ’Cause I aim to do it if I have to cut you to pieces or burn down this whole town around you. I will do it, I swear to whatever gods there may be. You made me kill my own daughter, do you know that? You made me shoot my Jenny in the heart.”

  Grey wanted to tell him—to insist—that Lucky Bob had not done that. The whalebone corset had deflected his bullet. But he looked at the ragged scar on Lucky Bob’s chest. And he remembered the scar on Jenny’s chest. It had been between her bre
asts, and in the heat of their passion Grey had kissed that scar.

  That’s when he understood. That’s when he understood so many things.

  Death isn’t the end, she had said.

  At the point of death a manitou could enter a body and take possession of it. Heal it. Restore it to life, and then share it with the soul of the murdered person.

  A manitou could do that. He’d seen it firsthand with Lucky Bob.

  Was that it? Like father like daughter? The indomitable Pearls? Both of them … Harrowed.

  And Annabelle? How did she fit into the picture?

  Even as he wondered about it, Grey knew. She was every bit as strong as Jenny. And she was so much like her. In personality, perhaps in spirit. Had they bonded somehow? Become one woman? If so, then no possessing manitou stood a chance.

  It had to be. After all, hadn’t those lips spoken with the voice of both Jenny and Annabelle? Even as he thought that, he saw a pale shape rise from the mud behind Looks Away. Her face and hair were filthy and her clothes were torn, but her eyes were filled with a light that even death could not dim. She came to him, and Looks Away and Lucky Bob fell back in surprise. The Sioux looked close to breaking. Lucky Bob’s eyes filled with tears.

  Jenny paused and touched her father’s face. “No,” she said in a voice that was equal parts Jenny and Annabelle, “we will deal with him.”

  Deal with him.

  “Annabelle…,” Grey said weakly. “It’s okay … I’m ready…” He coughed up a gout of blood. “Whatever you … need to … do … I deserve it.”

  The Harrowed that was both Annabelle and Jenny stood there and smiled down at him. The other ghosts appeared around her. His soldiers, his men. His friends who he had failed. They were all smiling.

  Those smiles were a terrible thing to see. They were without mercy. They were the smiles of beings that had walked too long in the valley of the shadow. They were the smiles of the dead.

  “Take him,” said Annabelle/Jenny. “Take him. Make it hurt. Make it terrible. Make it last.”

  The ghosts let loose a dreadful howl as they rushed forward. Grey wanted to close his eyes but he did not. After all the betrayal he could not deny them that. He nodded to them as they reached with cold, dead hands. The ghosts rushed past him. Aleksander Deray screamed as the ghosts fell upon him. The scream rose and rose and rose, filling the air, shattering the storm, tearing apart the clouds, rending the fabric of the world.