by Peter Nealen
The white-eyed zombies just stared at us, neither retreating nor advancing. The noise of violence, along with a vague roiling of the fog that was the only visible indication of the horrific clash at the other side of the crowd indicated that The Walker still wasn't paying us much mind. It was a small comfort, made less comfortable by the fact that we had to change that.
What made it worse was the fact that I could clearly see Edgar, just as slack-jawed and blank-eyed as the rest, front and center, staring unseeingly at us. He wasn't the only one, either. I'd thought I might have seen her earlier, but now, closer to the mob, I could recognize none other than Chrystal Meek. Her hair was bedraggled and filthy, and her rolled-back eyes seemed to be weeping blood. Whatever “Lucy” had been, it had taken her and bound her to The Walker. Given how much time had passed since Bowesmont, I doubted there was going to be much rational thought left in her head if and when we ever managed to break her loose.
Great. In the middle of the hellish nightmare that Bartram had become, I got a reminder of another one we couldn't save. Just to make things a little bit worse.
The Friars were setting out their trap. It was a simple circle of salt, silver coins, and a sprinkle of holy water. Actually a bit more than a sprinkle; they were using gallon jugs. One part of the circle was open, presumably to let The Walker step into it. Of course, it would have to be pretty mad to walk into that, which meant that we had to do a little more than just get its attention. Joy.
“One problem,” Tall Bear pointed out, his voice raised to be heard over the unholy noise drifting through the fog. “We can't even see the thing right now. How are we going to shoot it to get it to come back to the circle?”
He was right. This really wasn't going well. All we could see was the wall of mindless meat shields between us and our target, and we didn't have anything close to enough ammo to cut our way through it, even if we'd wanted to.
There wasn't much choice, though. Maybe this was suicide, maybe it was foolhardy, but it had to be done.
I stepped forward and advanced on the mob.
For the first dozen yards or so, there was no reaction. As I got closer, the mob itself didn't change its behavior, but that didn't mean I'd gone unnoticed. The piping got louder, more intrusive. My headache redoubled its ferocity, and I started to think I was hearing voices in the bizarre music. It was as if taloned fingers were poking at my brain, trying to sink themselves into my very being. Apparently, The Walker didn't figure one human being was worth much more than subordination.
I took another step, my rifle in my shoulder. I was loaded with both silver and steel jacketed rounds; we had no idea if The Walker was sensitive to either, so we'd loaded with both, though our stocks of ammunition were noticeably dwindling. We still had enough to fight a small war, but we had gone through quite a lot, even so. Tall Bear was almost out, and none of us were all that confident that his .223 peashooter was going to have much effect against anything even a fraction as old and powerful as The Walker in the first place.
The pain in my head spiked with the next step, and I nearly went to my knees. I got the sudden impression that it was getting a little annoyed that I didn't just roll my eyes back in my head and join the throng. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, fighting off the agony and the accompanying nausea. Lord, I prayed, I need every bit of strength you can give me right now. Even if this thing kills me, please don't let it turn me. Don't let it. I'm begging You.
I struggled back upright, forcing my eyes open. The pain hadn't lessened, exactly, but I could fight through it. I took another step.
It was really getting annoyed. The air seemed to thicken, and it was suddenly hard to move my feet. When I looked down, there were tendrils of mist curled around my ankles. It was just fog, but it felt like wait-a-minute vines. With effort, I could wrench my foot clear, but another tendril reached out as soon as I did.
Every blank, sightless white eye was now focused on me. I could feel the threat of the inimical intelligence steering the mob like a physical weight bearing down on me. If I went much further, I was going to have that tide of mindless humanity on me in a heartbeat.
A hand fumbled for the radio at my belt. I jerked in surprise; I'd been so focused, so intent on struggling through The Walker's mental attack, that I hadn't noticed anyone else advancing with me.
It was Eryn. She looked deathly pale, and I knew she was feeling the same pressure, possibly worse, but she got the radio up and keyed it. “Sister, you need to draw this crowd off. Now.”
There was only static in reply.
“Sister Margritte!” she called again. “Can you read me? We can't get to The Walker with this mob in the way. We need a diversion, right now.” There was still no answer.
I took another laborious step. The mob made its first move in response, taking a jerky, unsteady step toward me, like some kind of drunken battle line advancing. I lifted my rifle.
“Jed, we can't,” Eryn said, pain filling her voice. “It's suicide, and it won't accomplish anything if we can't get to The Walker itself.”
“We can't just let it go,” I replied, surprised to hear how slurred my own words were. I took another step, again mirrored by the line of zombies. They weren't charging, but it was only a matter of time. I still couldn't see The Walker. Could I fight through deeply enough to get a shot at it and try to fall back? It seemed unlikely, but I had to try.
Eryn was crying. The pressure in my skull was getting worse and worse. I had to make the shot before I passed out.
Then it was there, the mist drifting aside enough to reveal The Walker, standing head and shoulders above the crowd of people it had enthralled. Squinting past the pain, I brought my rifle up, took a breath to steady the gold bead on its shadowed, smoky head, and began to squeeze the trigger.
It turned, and I got a glimpse of eyes of green fire. A white-hot sheet of agony slammed through my head, and I jerked the shot, though not enough to miss entirely. Its head snapped to one side as the bullet passed through the slouch hat, or whatever facsimile it had magicked up. I fell to my knees under the weight of the pain and the sheer malevolence of that gaze.
It wasn't like the kind of malice you saw in a demon. This was different. This was the outrage of something incredibly ancient and powerful that had just been bitten by an ant. I hadn't so much hurt it as I had insulted it. And whatever The Walker was, the old ones of the Otherworld do not like to be insulted.
Unfortunately, it still wasn't insulted enough to decide to take matters into its own hands.
Without a sound, the mob surged forward, arms reaching, grasping, clawing. Fog swirled, blotting out the sight of The Walker's terrible eyes. Eryn dragged me back, and more hands joined in. Looking up, I saw that Tyrese, Ian, Tall Bear, and Charlie had followed us, and Tall Bear was now helping Eryn haul me back from the crowd, while the rest held security.
No one was shooting yet. I think by then we'd seen so much carnage, inflicted so much of it on people who had no control over their actions but had presented a tangible threat, that everyone was reluctant to kill a single one more than we had to.
It wasn't going to last, though. The mob was now advancing on us steadily, their speed starting to increase, in enough numbers to tear us to pieces.
We fell back toward the circle, the mist letting us move without resistance as we put distance between us and The Walker. Apparently we had annoyed it, but it was happy enough to just drive us off for the moment. Sooner or later, though, its pet mob was going to start trying to rend us limb from limb. They weren't slowing down.
Suddenly we were at the circle, to find only Father Ignacio, Kolya, and Brother Ezekiel there. “Where's everyone else?” I croaked.
“They went after the Sisters,” Father said grimly, “hoping that if they could get around on the flank and link up with them, with the mob coming after us, they might still get a crack at The Walker.”
“Let's hope,” I said, straightening and raising my rifle, “because we're about to b
ecome the diversion, whether we like it or not.” I laid the gold bead on one of the advancing shamblers, just to the right of Edgar. I didn't want to shoot Edgar. Hell, I didn't want to shoot any of these people. If The Walker could get through Edgar Ramirez' defenses and turn him, it could get through anybody's, which meant that there were probably a lot of innocents in that mob. But that wouldn't change anything if they overwhelmed us.
“Fight it!” I shouted, my throat raw. “Snap out of it! This isn't you, it isn't any of you!” It didn't even register. They just kept coming. A little part of me died as my finger tightened on the trigger.
Rifles and shotguns roared out a ragged volley down the street, and half a dozen blank-faced people dropped. The ones behind them just walked over them. They didn't notice anything. They had no will, no senses of their own anymore. They were nothing but The Walker's appendages now.
Numbly, I worked the lever, shifted targets, and fired again. Another one dropped. I didn't register anything but the shape. I didn't want to. I just knew that it wasn't Edgar, and it wasn't Chrystal. Shots continued to ring out as the mob got closer and closer. It didn't seem to get any thinner, and no one who was a part of it had any ability to break and run.
We were going to die right there. All the slaughter, all the carnage that had come before, had availed nothing to stop this ancient evil from tearing the country apart as it passed. We were going to die, crushed just like we might smash an ant or a particularly annoying fly, and The Walker would move on, spreading madness and death wherever it stepped.
“Watch your fire!” It was Brother Ezekiel. He ran out in front of the rest of us, spreading something on the ground. With a start, as I lifted my rifle muzzle to avoid blasting him, I saw that he was finishing the circle. Salt, silver, and holy water was hastily spread in an arc in front of us.
We waited, fingers hovering near triggers, as the mob continued its rush toward us. Only a few yards were left, but we were all hoping that Brother Ezekiel's little brain-wave bore fruit. None of us wanted any more blood on our hands if we could help it.
The mob came right up to the circle and stopped dead. Brother Ezekiel was on his knees on the viciously rough surface of the street in front of the arc he'd just put out, chanting a Latin litany as loudly as he could. Father was murmuring one of his own, though it didn't sound like the same one. The Friars must have their own prayer-book.
The press of shambling, puppet-ized humanity spread out around the circle, pressing close to it but never quite crossing it. In effect, Brother Ezekiel had sanctified the ground we were standing on, and The Walker's will had no effect on the inside of the circle.
A flash of green fire flickered through the haze, as if The Walker had suddenly looked back at us. I suddenly, instinctively, knew that it was reevaluating us. We could stop its minions, or rather, we could call upon the Powers that could stop its minions.
It was cold comfort. We couldn't touch it from there. We could only hope that Brother Barnabas had better luck with the Sisters' help.
Green and purple lighting sheeted across the sky, visible even through the mist. Something was happening. We just couldn't see what. The mob still surrounded us, swaying and twitching, not making a sound.
It seemed to go on forever. Chilling, wild, and sepulchral sounds echoed through the fog as the light show intensified. Then, almost instantly, it stopped. Everything went quiet.
The fog slowly lifted. The scree on the street crumbled to sand, then to dust, then vanished like smoke. The tangles of thorny vines and shrubs that shrouded every house and tree withered into dust that blew away on the faint breeze. The mob, as one, crumpled to the street, unconscious or dead.
At first, none of us moved. We just huddled there inside the circle that had been meant as a cage for The Walker, our guns pointed out, and shook. It seemed as if we still hadn't hit maximum saturation of horror. Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, we just knew that it would. We trusted no respite.
We must have stayed put for ten minutes after everything, aside from the bodies, had faded away. The sun was shining through broken clouds, illuminating an only partially wrecked town. Two buildings further downtown were cheerily ablaze, and at least one tree that I could see was down, felled across the street. There were bodies everywhere, some obviously dead, others...maybe dead, maybe alive, maybe something worse than either.
The Walker was gone. Whatever had happened out there in the mist, we'd failed.
Chapter 17
Edgar was the first to come to, at least for certain values of the term.
He started thrashing around, his back arching, every muscle clenched as if he was having a seizure. Tyrese and I held him down, while Charlie, Ian, and Tall Bear kept their weapons ready, watching the rest of the fallen crowd. If this was simply a ruse to get us out of the circle, things could get very unpleasant in a moment.
Edgar stopped convulsing, but he was breathing fast, his skin felt ice cold, and his eyes were moving so fast under the lids that they seemed to be vibrating. We had to do something or he was going to have a heart attack.
“Edgar!” I shouted, shaking him. “Come on, Eddie, I need you to snap out of it!”
He twitched, gasped, then went very, very still. I thought he was dead for a second. Then he breathed again, and his eyes flickered open. They were bloodshot and streaming tears. He looked around him for a second, then started whimpering. He shrugged us off, rolled over, and started trying to crawl away. When that just brought him up against another motionless body, he started, then rolled onto his side, curled up in the fetal position, and began to weep. Great, wracking sobs shook his entire body.
Tyrese and I shared a look. While our sense of time had gone a little weird, between the adrenaline and the mind-warping power of The Walker being nearby, Edgar still hadn't been under the influence for all that long. If this was the aftermath of only an hour or so at most, then the rest of these people were going to be in a bad, bad way.
“We've got to get some emergency services heading this way,” Tall Bear said, voicing what we were all thinking. “This is going to be bad. Leaving aside the whole sanity-shredding ancient evil angle, these people are going to be in bad shape, and we do not have the hands to take care of all of them.”
There wasn't any argument. It was becoming standard procedure. We'd even gotten a throwaway cell phone for just that purpose.
“Jed?” It was Edgar's voice, though it was little more than a whisper. He was still curled up on the ground, his hands over his head, and he was still shaking, but he was awake enough to talk. “What happened?”
“You don't remember anything?” Maybe that was a blessing.
He struggled to sit up. Tyrese and I helped him. He shook his head. “I remember, but none of it makes sense. It's distorted, fragmented...it's like remembering a bad dream.” He shuddered violently. “That's putting it mildly, really. Think the worst nightmare of your life, turned up to eleven.” He looked around. “Did it work? Or did I...” he gulped, looking sick and as pale as I've ever seen a Mexican get. “Did I mess it up?”
“It went pear-shaped, but it wasn't your fault,” I told him, gripping his shoulder hard. “You need to understand that. It was not your fault.”
He groaned, burying his face in his hands, then looked up and took another bleary look around. “Where's Miguel?” He started to get frantic. “Where's my brother?”
“Easy,” I told him, trying to hold him steady.
“Miguel went with Blake, Brother Barnabas, and Brother Milo to try to hit The Walker from a different angle,” Tyrese explained. “We don't know what happened yet. We haven't seen them.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “I'm sure they're fine.” He didn't sound like he quite believed it. I know I didn't. We should have heard from them already.
Edgar started to struggle to his feet. “I've got to find him.” Not being in a real position, or of the inclination, to stop him, I helped him up. I wanted to know what had happened, too.
“I'd tend to agree,” Father said, “as much as it would have made our job harder. This is certainly taking on the dimensions of a natural disaster.”
“A big one,” I agreed, though I wasn't all that interested in the conversation. Neither was Edgar; he was looking more and more impatient to go looking for his twin. Ian and Eryn hadn't said anything, though Eryn was already moving to one of the stricken people thrashing on the ground to try to help. “Let's try to find out what happened here before the next one strikes.”
We found them three blocks away. It was bad.
Neither Brother Barnabas nor Brother Milo had been armed with anything but their faith and the tools of their order. Useful perhaps in imprisoning certain flavors of ancient evil, but not so much for self defense against physical violence. Miguel and Blake had been the only ones packing guns.
There were a lot of bodies strewn on the ground, all shot to pieces. Miguel's Auto 5 might not have been the greatest shakes at range, but it was murderous up close. Blake had only had Kolya's .44 Magnum, since his guns were lost somewhere in Ophir. They'd put up quite a fight, that was obvious. There was a small mountain of bodies, splashed with blood, stacked up against the side of a house.
Edgar had spotted Miguel's shotgun sticking out of the pile of bodies before the rest of us. Until then, we hadn't seen anything to indicate that any of our people were in that heap. With a wordless cry, he rushed forward and started levering dead or unconscious bodies out of his way.
