Jeffries’ voice was choked off wetly, but Quincannon took up his scream, scrambling to disengage himself from the shuddering man. But his shrieks were muffled, as if the green resin that covered his face was solidifying. He gave up trying to break away and began to claw at the slime on his lips. Jeffries’ hands were locked onto his sleeves, and every motion made the scouts’ corpse gesticulate like a shaken doll. Quincannon fell on his back, eyes rolling wildly, seeking help.
Weeks procured a hip knife from the nearest man and advanced to help his comrade.
They heard a series of loud cracks then, and Weeks jumped away, startled. Jeffries’ head began to swell and bulge, as if his skull were suddenly malleable, or had broken apart. His face sagged, features stretching like some kind of bizarre mask. Blood poured from his ears and nose and bubbled from his grotesquely distorted mouth.
The Rider backed away from the unreal scene, pulling the dumbstruck Belden with him.
Kabede turned and looked at them, his lips parted, face screwed up in an expression of incomprehension.
“Get back!” the Rider yelled.
Kabede moved.
All the soldiers began to move away, stumbling against each other.
Jeffries’ elastic face, stretched now to the breaking point, split in two with a wet, audible tearing, and a pair of jagged saber like protrusions erupted from the space, opening and closing with a loud click clack. The man’s ruined visage fell away, and a bulky black object from which the waving feelers, and what looked to be great serrated pincers, emerged, shining with gore in the sun. In the middle of the domelike thing the Rider saw three gaping wet slashes in a pyramidal arrangement smacking hungrily. On either side, two glossy black insect eyes, like highly polished stones. The thing hissed in chorus from its three maws.
Jeffries’ corpse inflated and sharp angles appeared beneath his clothes as the thing within him began to burst out as if he were an unneeded chrysalis.
The pincers closed around the struggling Quincannon’s neck. His face was turning deep purple. He was suffocating. In a moment it didn’t matter. The mandibles closed, neatly slicing off his head like a huge pair of shears. Behind the mandibles a set of spindly joints emerged and tipped Quincannon’s bleeding stump toward its mouths. Three wormy labia uncoiled and began to flit and lap noisily at the blood.
Weeks turned and fell. Manx vomited and stumbled away.
Dozens broke into panicked runs.
Four soldiers drew their sidearms or angled their Spencer rifles downward and began to systematically destroy the thing that had sprung from Jeffries.
After the first volley however, the bulbous insectoid emerging from the ruins of the scout emitted a piercing shriek and burst like a gorged tic, splattering the same dark green slime that had nearly suffocated Quincannon in a ten foot radius, with such force that the men surrounding the thing were knocked flat.
Those running found themselves plastered to the ground on their bellies by the sticky slime. The less fortunate took the stuff right in the face, and the Rider heard their muffled oaths as he picked himself off the ground, surrendering one of his shoes to the noxious muck.
Belden and Kabede were just outside the explosion, and helped him up.
Cord came running over, and Weeks picked himself up, having been shielded from the burst by the body of another man.
“My God!” Manx exclaimed, eyes bugging, yellowish, blood-mixed bile dripping from his lips. “My God.” He shook his head over and over.
There was groaning all about them. A dozen or so soldiers lay trapped in the slime, struggling to rise. The strange resin was extremely viscous and smelled horrible, like compost and belly wounds. Their comrades who gingerly attempted to extricate them from the muck found themselves trapped too, either by their helping hands, or by their boots.
“What happened?” Cord stammered, looking at the wide circle of slime in the dust and the men writhing in it like bugs on flypaper. The remains of the dog-sized insect thing in the middle and Jeffries and Quincannon were almost identifiable at the point of origin, mixed together as they were and coated in dark ooze.
The incident had proved fatal to at least one man, who lay face up but dead, a fragment of one large mandible protruding from his throat.
It may prove fatal to others, the Rider realized, as the men who were face down in it or had received a portion of it in the face seemed unable to breathe.
“Don’t touch it!” he warned, as Cord stooped to grab a man who was reaching out to him. “We have to find some other way of removing it. It’s too sticky. Tell the other men not to touch it.”
Cord nodded, and he and Weeks both began ordering the untouched men back from the coated area.
“What the hell is this?” Belden said to him. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No,” the Rider said. “Nothing ever like this.”
What was that thing? Jeffries had said they had done something to him. Was it a spell? Had he somehow been physically implanted with the thing? Whatever it was, he had no doubt it was some spawn of the Great Old Ones and their ilk. This was something in the nature of the invisible thing in the cave on Elk Mountain, or the reptilian Yiggians he had fought near Red House, saurian yet somehow able to breed hybrids with men. These things were not of the world he knew.
“Look!” Kabede called, and pointed with the staff.
Across the parade ground, where Doctor Milton had spilled his instruments and he and the two orderlies had paused to retrieve them, a similar scene was playing out. Milton was laying face down in the dirt, curled up into a ball, trembling. The two orderlies were trying to help him to his feet.
Of the men who had run from Jeffries, half were standing near Milton.
“Get those men away!” the Rider yelled.
They saw the orderlies recoil. Milton, small in the distance, burst apart before their eyes, the bug thing within spilling out, seeming to sigh like a fat man released from a pair of too small trousers. It was beetle-like, black with brilliant red-brown coloring on its bulky, pulsing abdomen.
One of the orderlies scooted back on his rear, jerking his pistol free.
“Don’t shoot it!” Kabede and several others screamed. The men nearest Milton turned to run.
The Rider yelled, “Down!”
They crouched as they heard the report of the orderly’s pistol. There was another shrill hissing shriek, and a boom as the thing blew apart in the midst of the troopers standing nearby.
Two dozen fell this time, once again coated in the slime.
“Shit!” Weeks cursed.
Panic was dancing through the other soldiers now. Still some stooped to help their immobilized fellows and were caught up like B’rer Rabbit in the tar baby.
“Get away from it! Get away!” the Rider yelled, waving his arms for emphasis. Cord, Kabede, and Weeks joined in.
Belden grabbed the Rider’s arm.
The Rider turned, and Belden pointed to Manx, who was standing off by himself.
Manx was stooped over, his hands on his knees, having just completed a particularly harsh fit of coughing and vomiting. A mass of dark blood and bile lay in a pool between his boots. Some of it, the Rider noticed, was dark green, the color of cooked spinach.
“Well, what are you looking at?” Manx rasped. His hair was in his face, his Van Dyke dark with blood and green bile.
Belden and the Rider slowly approached Manx. Kabede saw too, and he moved toward the middle, his staff raised.
Manx backed away, his blue eyes flitting between them.
“Well, confound it! What the hell are you doing?”
His whole body shuddered then, and he shrugged it off, shaking his head violently.
“Easy, Colonel,” Belden said. “You’re sick.”
“Goddammit, I know that. Where’s Milton?”
“He’ll be along,” Belden said. “Let’s have you lay down though.”
Manx stared at them and grimaced, wincing with pain.
“What?”
“Are you in pain?”
“N-no!” he shook his head violently. “No!”
Then he doubled over, falling to his knees.
“Grab him!” the Rider hissed.
He and Belden rushed forward, each slipping their arms into his elbows.
“The guardhouse!” Kabede suggested.
The Rider and Belden dragged the colonel between them like a wounded man away from a fight. His spurs dug a shallow trail in the dust.
Manx began to struggle, and it was like trying to hold onto a raging lion.
“No! No! Weeks! Weeks!” he screamed.
Weeks heard his name and came over at a run, pistol out.
Kabede turned to face him, brandishing the Rod of Aaron.
Manx spied Weeks and craned his neck.
“Don’t let them! Sergeant!”
He started to say something further, but a mass of the dark green bile blew out of his mouth and he gurgled and bucked.
“Watch it!” Belden warned.
“Get him into the cell!”
Weeks stopped in his tracks and put his gun away.
Kabede nodded approvingly and lowered his staff, then ran to catch up with the others.
They dragged the frothing, convulsing Manx into the guardhouse, startling Trooper Bigelow to his feet. The man’s face was red. He had been weeping.
“I didn’t mean to kill him!” Bigelow whined.
Belden and the Rider ignored him and fumbled to heave the trembling Manx into the neighboring open cell.
Bigelow pressed against the bars to watch.
“You got to believe me! I wouldn’t shoot Jaffray in the head like that. I couldn’t have! I ain’t no traitor! Jesus, you can’t shoot me!”
He ceased his railing when he saw what they were doing, and narrowed his eyes.
“Hey…is that the Colonel?”
“Shut up, Bigelow!” Belden snapped, pulling Manx’s flailing hands out of his face.
They flung him tumbling into the cell and threw themselves against the bars, slamming it shut.
As Manx scrabbled about in the dirt, moaning and coughing, they caught their breath.
“Shit!” Belden said after a moment.
“What?” the Rider asked, alarmed.
“Awww, the goddamned keys are on his belt!”
They peered into the cell, where Manx was laying in a pool of blood and slime, kicking and heaving, his face toward the wall.
“I’ll get it,” the Rider sighed.
“No, I’ll get it,” Belden groaned.
He opened the cell and stepped gingerly inside.
Manx was in his death throes, feebly twitching now. The thing was killing him from the inside.
Kabede entered the guardhouse and the Rider warned him back with an outstretched hand.
“Watch where you step,” the Rider warned. All they needed was for Belden to stick a foot in the puddle of green jelly and be trapped as the thing emerged.
Belden nodded and came to stand over his commanding officer.
Manx turned to look up at him and spat a gob the size of a baseball right up at him. Belden flinched his head to the right instinctively and the slime ball hit the ceiling with a wet smack.
Belden saw what he was looking for and stooped down, swiftly plucking the keys from Manx’s pocket.
Manx let out a clear human scream and his eyes blew across the room as the twitching antennae sprung from his sockets.
Belden high tailed it out of the cell, hitting the far wall as Manx’s scream turned into an insect hiss and his skull began to crackle and break apart.
The Rider slammed the cell door shut and Belden rebounded, plunging the key into the lock and twisting it. He extracted the key and they backed away to the guardhouse door where Kabede stood, thankfully sparing themselves the sight of Manx’s demise.
They stood panting and listening to the wet sounds coming from the cell, the clicking of the creature’s mandibles, the skittering if its six legs on the floor.
“Uh…” said Bigelow from his own cell, “can somebody let me outta here?”
The thing that had been inside Manx chattered and threw itself against the bars as they freed Bigelow. It aimed a jet of the noxious dark green adhesive at them three times through the bars before they got out of its arc of fire. It was the size of a hog, something like a cross between a stag beetle and a cockroach. The Rider was no expert on insects, but the arrangement of its head wasn’t like that of any bug he’d ever seen. There was scant possibility that this was some kind of freak insect.
“What the hell are they?” Belden asked when they had Bigelow safely at the guardhouse door as the thing strained against the bars, twitching its obscenely long feelers about.
“I don’t know,” the Rider said. “But didn’t you say Jacobi and Le Bouclier spent time with Manx and Milton?”
Belden nodded, unable to keep his eyes off the squat thing clicking about the floor.
“They must have put those things inside them somehow, like they did Jeffries.”
“But Jeffries was gone only a day and the thing hatched from him,” Kabede observed. “They stopped by here a week ago, by the Colonel’s admission.”
“Yes that’s right,” the Rider said. “Why did Manx’s and Milton’s take so long to gestate?”
“Maybe they got some way of speeding up the process. Somethin’…I dunno, magical?” Belden offered.
“Who can say?” the Rider said. “Maybe something in Milton and Manx slowed their growth somehow. Did they share any habits? Did they eat the same thing?”
“Nothing Jeffries didn’t eat too,” Belden mused.
“Maybe they weren’t gestating at all,” the Rider suggested. “Maybe they were just…waiting.”
“You mean they’re smart?” Belden whined.
“Who else did they come in contact with?” Kabede asked. “If LeBouclier was with Doctor Milton and Jacobi was with Manx while they were here, where was DeKorte?”
“DeKorte was in the graveyard most of the time. He buried their comrade himself. Said prayers over him.”
“Prayers?” the Rider repeated. That wasn’t good. “What kind of prayers?”
“I don’t think anybody hung around to listen. Like I said, DeKorte insisted on doin’ it himself.”
“Then how do you know he said prayers?” Kabede asked.
“We could hear him from up the hill,” Belden said. “Couldn’t make out the words. Didn’t figure they were English anyway.”
“Perhaps we had better visit this graveyard,” Kabede suggested.
“First we’ve got to figure out how to get all these men loose…” the Rider said. “And I want to try something. Lend me the staff, Kabede?”
Kabede handed it over without question.
Out of range of the thing’s spitting attack, the Rider extended the sharp end of the staff and began to trace a symbol in the dust in front of the thing’s cell.
When he had finished, it chittered and recoiled from the bars, backing away to a dark corner of the cell, under the cot.
“That symbol…” Kabede said, as the Rider straightened and returned the staff to him. “It’s the same one you showed the Adversary.”
“Yes,” the Rider nodded. The same symbol etched on the Star Stone of Mnar he’d taken from the cave in New Mexico. The star and eye design Spates had called The Elder Sign.
He turned to the open doorway.
“Maybe we can lay a few of these about…”
Then he stopped in his tracks.
“What’s that sound?”
They all listened. There was a rumbling like thunder, but they could feel it beneath their feet.
“Storm?” Bigelow suggested.
“It ain’t thunder,” said Belden. “An earthquake?” he suggested hopefully.
“No,” said the Rider.
Out on the parade ground, those soldiers not stuck to
the ground by the slime were beginning to wheel about about in confusion.
The sound increased, and they saw a cloud of rolling dust appear on the ridge above, rapidly descending on the post from the pass.
“Now what?” Belden groaned. “A rock slide?”
Kabede went to the threshold. He had out his telescope and whipped it open, putting it to his eye.
“It’s cattle,” he said.
“It’s a stampede!” the Rider shouted, as the earth began to jar beneath their feet and the unlit lanterns swung and clinked and the flagpole in the center of the parade ground started to sway. Then he saw DeKorte’s plan. He jogged out a few feet and screamed at the men through his shelled hands;
“Stampede! Leave them! Leave them! Get out of here!”
Then he turned himself, eyed the stone guardhouse, and took a running jump. Gripping the eaves of the structure, he struggled to pull himself up onto the roof.
Belden, Kabede, and the corporal, Bigelow, followed suit, scrambling up the sides as hundreds of maddened cattle came bellowing and crashing into the perimeter like a destructive tide of muscle, horn, and bone.
Those soldiers that understood or had come not to question the stranger’s orders did their best to imitate him. They clambered up on top of outhouses, sheds, and barracks, pulled themselves up on the roof of the open stable.
The rest, including those luckless enough to be inextricably mired on the ground and those who stubbornly continued to help them, met their ends beneath the driving hooves of hundreds of thousands of collective pounds of furious bulls and cows.
They went down soundless for the most part, though they heard a few scattered shouts and screams, pitiful, short sounds beneath the all-encompassing clamor of the stampede as it poured onto the parade ground.
Men were gored by ramming horns, dragged down and trampled flat over and over. The cattle hesitated when they reached the two areas coated with slime, as their hooves stuck in the muck, but the downhill force of the steers behind as they collided with the stumbling forefront, in some cases flipping over the ends of the fellows, piling into them until they fell face first, was irresistible. The lead bulls lowed in fear and agony as their hooves or forelegs were broken and ripped free and they were pounded down by their followers in the mad rush. The unheeded pleas of the cattle combined with the screams of the men and the tremendous collision of beef to form a hellish cacophony the likes of which the Rider had never imagined he would hear this side of Hell.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 8
