by Peter Nealen
What looked like a vaguely humanoid warthog, with its jaws and tusks so distended that they were actually thrusting out of its mouth, was the first one into the breach. It was the first one gunned down, as Tall Bear pumped three rounds into it in a near-perfect failure drill, accompanied by a blast from Miguel's old Auto 5. Charlie already had another Molotov in hand, with his Zippo already lit in the other, though he was holding them as far apart as he could until an opening presented itself.
A monster that looked like a slug pulling itself along with gigantic spider legs started humping its way over the porcine corpse, and I shot it just above its lamprey-like mouth. It screeched loud enough that I thought my ears were going to start bleeding, until I worked the lever and put another round in the mouth itself. It fell silent and slumped, already starting to shrink like a popped balloon.
Just as Charlie lit and flung his next Molotov, hitting a spiny human porcupine in the face with it, eliciting an ear-splitting wail, something heavy hit the back wall of the shed. For a second, everybody froze, though it couldn't last long as a nearly matched pair of scaly things were trying to get through the guttering ring of fire to attack the front door, and that had to be dealt with with another storm of gunfire, heavy bullets and slugs smashing through unnaturally armored flesh and bone.
More blows shook the shed, accompanied by a bone-shaking snarl. The sheet metal started to crumple inward. Edgar slammed three .30-06 rounds through the wall, which only got us an even more enraged roar, and a renewed assault on the wall started the entire thing buckling. Whatever was out there was either a lot stronger than the rest, a lot bigger, or some freakish combination of both. Any way you looked at it, it meant trouble.
That, of course, was putting it mildly. Because when the thing breached the wall, tearing the back of the shed open like a paper bag, there was nothing there. No physical being had torn its way inside; the shed had been ripped open by invisible hands. As if Ophir wasn't already disturbing enough.
Father suddenly lurched forward with a groan of pain. Whatever it was was trying to hurt him, trying to shut him up. And it had opened another avenue for the monstrosities outside to get at us in the process.
Eryn dropped to a knee beside Father Ignacio, lifting him up and putting his arm over her shoulders. He was drenched in sweat, his hair lank and dripping. He looked utterly exhausted, his face drawn and pale, and he'd only been at the rite for about five minutes. It was going to be a long haul, provided we lived through it.
“Come on, Father,” Eryn called out to him, “I've got you. We've got to fight this.”
His reply was drowned out by another thunderous volley as a pack of scuttling, vaguely insect-like monsters tried to charge the shed. I was about to reach down to try to help Eryn and Father when something that resembled nothing aside from a random pile of pulsing, exposed organs, eyes, and gigantic, spiny talons tried to get in the hole torn in the back wall. I whipped my rifle to my shoulder, suddenly painfully aware that I didn't remember how many rounds were left in it, and pumped two big bullets into the wetly glistening thing. The throbbing bulge that covered what might have been its head and shoulder popped nauseatingly, spraying viscous fluids across the mangled wall.
Father continued to chant, his voice growing hoarse with use and fatigue.
It went on for hours, or at least it felt like it. I doubt any of us had had much of any real sense of time left even before we piled into that shed. Ophir had just gotten too weird, too far outside of the realm of what we knew as reality. Between the demonic influence that had cursed the poor meat-puppets that were throwing themselves against our redoubt and the opposing power of the antlered Fae, Ophir might as well not even have been in the same universe.
Three more waves of gibbering horrors launched themselves at the shed. Charlie ran out of Molotovs after the second. Some of the grass caught on fire, and we were briefly threatened with immolation as the flames began to lick at the sides of the shed. It would be a horrifyingly normal way to die, under the circumstances; threatened by twisted, Boschian horrors, only to die in a fire that we set fighting them.
The things had backed off again by then, though, so Tyrese and Ian stepped out of the door just long enough to stomp on the flames threatening the shed.
Father was near collapse. While we still couldn't see anything, he was definitely under attack, and not by the monsters; we were holding those off, though for how much longer remained to be seen; ammunition was dwindling fast. Unfortunately, we couldn't shoot what was trying to beat him down. We couldn't even see it.
But he wasn't giving up. Even as we caught our breath after the latest wave, seeing the scuttling abominations scrambling back from the fires and our guns, his voice suddenly rose, a harsh, gravelly croak as he called upon God and all the Powers of Heaven to break the grip of evil on Ophir's people. With a renewed strength, he bellowed, “Now, begone! Back into the pit from whence you came! Out! Out!”
That seemed to do it. There was a deafeningly loud, primal scream of hate and rage that seemed to come out of the very air around us, and a stiff wind blasted through the shed, blowing out most of the flames in front, while spreading a few into the grass that hadn't already been burned to ash.
We were still braced for a renewed attack. I think all of us, by that time including Tall Bear, had seen enough to expect treachery where demons are concerned. Sometimes they like to make you think you've won, so they can come back around once you've relaxed your vigilance to do something really nasty.
But the attack didn't come. What we saw instead was almost heartbreaking.
The creatures still standing outside, still numbering close to a couple of hundred, were shuddering, shaking, convulsing. One by one, they shrank back down into shaking, sweat-soaked, sometimes blood-soaked, human beings.
At first, most of them just stared at themselves and their surroundings, seemingly dazed, confused as to where they were and what had just happened. When realization started to dawn…well, that was when the screaming started.
It was nearly as terrible as the attacks we'd beaten off. I had never heard such cries of horror and despair from so many at once. Even as I watched, one man, dressed only in tattered boxers crusted with I didn't want to know what, ran to a car, bashed open a window, grabbed a shard of glass, and slashed his own throat. A woman promptly gouged her own eyes out, crying in great, shrieking sobs that had no rationality left behind them.
We watched about half a dozen suicides happen in the course of moments, unable to stir from our own exhaustion and horror quickly enough to try to stop them. At least as many people fell onto their knees, clasping their hands in supplication, crying out their repentance to the still darkened sky with sobs so thick as to make them unintelligible.
Father staggered to his feet. “Help me over there,” he rasped. “These people need our help.” Eryn, still under his arm, supported him as he staggered out of the shed. Tyrese and I stomped a path through the dying fire to let them through. Ian, Charlie, and the Ramirez twins took a breath, redolent of blood, burned flesh, and fear, and rushed to try to stop a man who was attempting to bash his own brains out on the sidewalk.
Tall Bear and I ran to stop a pale, obese woman who was trying to wrap a belt around her neck. She fought us, but she was weak as a kitten, apparently drained by whatever the curse had done to her. Tall Bear easily took the belt away, and I held her in a half Nelson until she stopped struggling, sobbing that she wanted to die.
A shadow rose across the road. I looked up, and Tall Bear followed my gaze to where the tall, enigmatic figure's antlers rose nearly to the roof of the nearest house.
It bowed, a sweeping, dramatic gesture, its tattered cloak swirling about it like smoke. “Hunters,” it said, its sepulchral voice now a distant rumble as if coming from deep underground, “I salute you. I hardly expected you to survive the first few moments, let alone hold out long enough to break the curse and banish its enforcer. What you have done here today should be the stuff o
f legend.
“I will uphold my end of the deal,” it said with a sweep of its hand. “You are free to go, unmolested. I shall depart. While I hardly expected this outcome, I did give my word, and so I am bound. The Great One will be displeased...I will suffer for it. Yet I would do so gladly, for the chance to witness what has happened here today. Again, I salute you. Now, I suggest you leave quickly. I am not his only agent in these parts.” With that, it turned and walked out of sight behind the house. The purple and black cloud remained above, but the walls and the illusions that had turned the town into a deadly maze were already fading into mist.
“Jed? Is that you?” I turned to see Blake standing in the door of the shed, staring at the carnage around it. He looked dazed, but not nearly as nuts as he'd been in the middle of that crowd. “What the hell happened?” He'd spent the siege standing in the corner of the shed where I'd shoved him, staring at nothing and alternately muttering and raving. Apparently, he'd been utterly unaware of what had been happening only feet away from him the whole time. Whatever that thing had done, it was potent.
“All hell broke loose, that's what happened,” I said as I walked back over to him. “We've got a lot of talking to do, but first we've got to get some of these people sorted out.”
It was going to be a tall order. Tall Bear was already looking for a phone to call the local sheriff, and the Ramirez twins were looking for anyone in town who might still be remotely sane to help. We were going to be there for a few days.
From the look on Blake's face, I hoped we had a few days.
Chapter 13
We were fifteen miles from Ophir, at a rest area just off the highway. We could still see the storm above the town, though it seemed to finally be dissipating. The vortex that had extended to the ground had disappeared shortly after the antlered creature had departed, but the ominous overcast had remained, hovering threateningly over the town while the emergency crews worked.
It had actually been two days since the curse had been lifted, but the horror hadn't ended. We'd spent almost the entire next two days, only sleeping in short, fitful, nightmare-wracked naps, helping the local sheriff and whatever EMS could be scraped up. The town was a mess, and was going to be for a long, long time. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a ghost town in months. Maybe sooner than that. There wasn't a soul left in that town that wasn't severely traumatized by what had happened. There had been twenty more suicides in the last two days, and they probably weren't going to be the last. A lot of other people were going to need a lot of psychiatric care for a long time to come.
The whole group just looked shell-shocked. Blake was asleep, having passed out shortly after we got him in my truck. Since he hadn't slept at all for the entire two days since the lifting of the curse, it was really no surprise. He also hadn't spoken since he snapped out of whatever fugue the antlered thing had put over him.
We'd loaded Father Ignacio's bike into the bed of Ian's Raptor, since Father wasn't in any shape to ride by the time we got out of Ophir, even with two days to sort of recover. The rite to break the curse had utterly drained him, and he was still asleep in the passenger seat.
Nobody else could sleep. Nobody was talking, either. There was a small shelter with several picnic tables where we were all sitting, filthy, grimy, exhausted, our clothes stiff with dried ichor. We were all just kind of staring into space, in the general direction of Ophir, with haunted, silent eyes, the horror still replaying itself in everyone's mind. The rest stop had been the first place and time we'd had to really catch our breath, and now the enormity of what had happened was really starting to catch up with us.
It was a little weird that it was Ian of all people who broke the stunned, horrified silence, but it was that kind of day.
“So, if we're pretty sure that the thing with the antlers was a Fae, do we have any idea which one?” he asked, his voice sounding loud in the near silence.
“There are a couple with antlers, if I remember correctly,” Tyrese replied. “The biggest and baddest would be The Huntsman, and just going by what we saw in there, he'd be the most likely candidate.”
“The Huntsman?” Tall Bear asked, his voice not much more than a hoarse croak.
“Some people think he's an aspect of Cernunnos, an ancient Celtic nature spirit,” Tyrese answered. He might have been a basketball player, but Tyrese was a whiz kid in addition to it; he'd gotten his college scholarship for academics, not athletics. He was a hell of an athlete anyway, but his first love was still study, and he'd gone all-in as soon as he'd joined the Order, dredging up chronicles and diaries that most of us had never known even existed. His idea of “light reading” tended to be some heavy, hundred-year-old tome that smelled of dust and was almost indecipherable to a layman. “But nobody really knows either way. The only thing that is known about The Huntsman is that he's the King of the Wild Hunt, which, for those who aren't familiar, well...think 'Ghost Riders in the Sky,' except they'll run you down and, if they're feeling generous, just kill you.”
“What if they're not feeling generous?” Tall Bear asked. The look on his face suggested that he wasn't sure if he wanted to know.
“Kidnapping, madness, torture, never being seen again, or if you are, you'll find you've pulled a Rip Van Winkle, that sort of thing,” Charlie quipped, though he didn't look up from the patch of grass he'd been staring at vacantly for the last half hour. He didn't sound like he had a lot of his former spark back yet.
“That thing seemed awfully polite for something like that,” Eryn said.
“Oh, the Fae can be courtly as all get out,” Tyrese answered, “right up to and including the point where they slowly murder you—with the greatest of grace and aesthetic charm, of course. They're amoral at best. If they were human, most of them would be classed as psychopaths. But they're not human, so classifying them gets a little hazy.”
“Are there any other possibilities besides The Huntsman?” Eryn asked, almost hopefully.
Tyrese shrugged. “There are a few other things with antlers, but none of them really fit. Some depictions of the Wendigo have antlers, but we're in the wrong part of the country for a Wendigo, and it just doesn't fit. Wendigos are hunters, sure, but they usually just chase people down in the woods and eat 'em. They're utterly savage. They're not Fae; they're mostly old medicine men or chieftains who committed some truly horrible, nigh-on unforgivable act, usually involving cannibalism. They don't generally speak, and they don't make deals. They just hunt you down and eat you.
“There's an old Kootenai legend about a monster with antlers, but it was more of a Loch Ness sort of thing.” He frowned. “I really can't think of many others, and none of them fit what we just saw back there, either.”
“So, we met The Huntsman,” I said grimly. “Which raises another question that should just about freeze everybody's blood here. That thing said that it was doing the bidding of a 'Great One.' Just who can give The Huntsman orders?”
Nobody said a word at first, but I could see the impact of the question. Granted, we had all started to get the idea that whatever Blake had gotten into was big, old, and dangerous. That had been obvious since Bowesmont. But the fact that whatever it was could boss around a King of the Fair Folk (or war leader, or whatever The Huntsman was) kind of highlighted the enormity of the situation a little. Whatever we were dealing with, it was bigger than we had imagined. It had to be.
“It's a short list,” Tyrese finally said. “A short list with a lot of very old, very powerful wickednesses on it. Satan's on it.”
“You mean we're actually going after The Devil himself?” Tall Bear blurted out.
I shook my head. “Pretty sure we're not,” I said.
Every eye turned to look at me. I grimaced. “Rules of engagement,” I explained, and everybody except Tall Bear just kind of nodded in understanding. Tall Bear just looked confused.
“I don't get it,” he said. “What are the rules of engagement, and how do they lead to you being certain that it's not the
Devil we're dealing with?”
I hemmed and hawed a little. I still didn't know Tall Bear that well, and I didn't know what he believed. “You might find this a little hard to believe at first brush,” I began.
He snorted. “Brother, after what I've seen in the last few days, my disbelief isn't just suspended, it's been hanged, cut down, and buried. You could probably tell me that there really is a Man in the Moon at this point, and I'd probably just nod and say, 'I've seen weirder lately.'”
I took a deep breath. This was never easy to talk about, because so few, even in the Order, had ever experienced it. “Everyone is assigned a guardian angel at birth. Well, I've actually interacted with mine a few times. I call him 'Sam,' because he generally appears to me as a lanky old cowboy with a handlebar mustache. I actually fought beside him a bit in Silverton last year, when some idiot tried to summon Hell's equivalent of Heinrich Himmler to kick-start Armageddon.
“The point is, he only gets directly involved when there's some kind of serious, world-shaking demonic invasion pending. He'll whisper in my ear at other times, but for the most part, he's pretty hands-off. And he's told me that this is standard procedure; the rules of engagement are very strict quite simply because the whole point of allowing a lot of this stuff to happen is for people to fight it on their own. Virtue is nothing if it's forced or easy. He hasn't even shown his face yet, which tells me that whatever we're dealing with, it's not within his bailiwick. Hence, it ain't Old Scratch.”
Tall Bear appeared to digest that for a moment. Then he just nodded. “That actually makes a fair bit of sense,” he said. “And is actually somewhat reassuring. Not only that we're not quite dealing with the absolute pinnacle of evil, but that there are in fact powers that are on our side.”
