by Peter Nealen
That was when I noticed it. I stopped, holding up one hand.
“Listen,” I said quietly. Everyone else stopped and heads were cocked, listening for whatever I might have heard.
“I don't hear anything,” Charlie said almost immediately.
“That's just the point,” I replied. “There's nothing to hear. No cars, no voices, no music, no dogs...not even any birds.”
That got everyone's attention. “You think we're too late?” Tyrese asked. “Could they have already wiped out the town?”
“It doesn't look like it, so far,” Tall Bear said. “Everywhere else they've gone has been pretty devastated. This looks just like a quiet, sleepy little speck-on-the-map town. No craters, no piles of bodies, no burned down houses. It looks...normal. Except for the silence.”
“Maybe we can't see any bodies because they're all inside,” Kolya said ominously.
“There are people up there by city hall,” Eryn pointed out. “They don't seem to be dead.”
“Let's go see,” Father said, “but stay alert. This could still be a trap.”
We continued past the depot, moving slowly, eyes carefully searching every window, every doorway, every shadow. As we proceeded, I started to get the distinct feeling that we were being watched. Of course, if for some reason the town really was as normal and untouched as it looked, that was entirely possible; a bunch of scruffy-looking characters and nuns, all armed to the teeth, walking down the street had to be quite a sight.
The illusion of normality started to thin as we got closer to city hall. There were half a dozen people on the sidewalk and the steps. An elderly gentleman was just coming out of the doors, a woman and her two kids were down on the sidewalk, and a middle aged couple were just starting up the steps. None of them were talking. Nor were they moving. They didn't even appear to notice us. They were just standing there.
“Okay, this is creepy,” Charlie announced as we stopped just short of the tableau. “Don't get me wrong, the other stuff we've seen has been plenty weird and horrifying, but this is creepy on a whole different level.”
I couldn't say I disagreed. These people weren't just standing on the street, they appeared to be frozen in place, not moving, not even breathing. They were like wax statues, arranged in a museum version of small town America. The faint breeze moving down the street didn't even stir their hair or clothes.
“So what is this?” Tall Bear asked. “Is it some kind of spell or something? Do we get caught in it if we get too close?”
“I don't know,” Father Ignacio said quietly. “I've never even heard of anything like this before.”
“This has got to be The Walker's work,” I ventured. “It is supposed to be a bringer of madness and oblivion, after all.” I chanced a step closer to the frozen people. Eryn reached out to put a hand on my arm, but I gently shrugged her off. “We've got to see, don't we?”
I walked right up to the couple standing at the base of the steps. They were both looking up toward the doors, and the man had his mouth open as if he was saying something to the woman. He was getting fat, balding, and there was gray in his brown hair, while she was still slim, though with some matching silver in her own dark bun.
Neither of them moved as I got closer, and I didn't feel like I was getting slowed down or frozen myself. I looked back at the rest, Hunters and Sisters gathered tightly together, guns out and eyes fearfully searching the surroundings, reassuring myself that they hadn't been frozen or somehow vanished in the five or so steps I'd taken. They looked fine, for certain values of the word, half watching the town, half watching me.
I stepped in front of the balding man. His eyes didn't move, his face remained mid-word. I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, and he didn't blink. It was as if I wasn't there. The woman showed the same lack of reaction. Taking a deep breath, I risked it and reached out touch the man's lapel with a finger. He felt alive, but he didn't move. I didn't freeze, either, so there was that.
I made my way back to the rest. “Whatever is going on, it seems to be limited to the people who were already here,” I said. “It doesn't look like we can get caught in it. My money's still on The Walker. What I don't get is what the game is? In every other town it's been World War Three against the bald guy's minions. Why is this so...peaceful?”
“Something different is definitely happening,” Father Ignacio agreed. “And I can't help but think that it has something to do with The Walker taking notice of us.”
“That's comforting,” Tall Bear said sarcastically.
I looked back at the four remaining Sisters. They had been subdued ever since Bartram. Sister Emilia had, as I'd said, taken charge, though that hadn't consisted of much more than nodding whenever Father Ignacio or I said to do something. None had ventured any opinion so far about much of anything. I hadn't heard a word out of Sister Margritte since we'd found them in that garage.
“Movement, three o'clock,” Ian said suddenly. Eyes snapped in that direction, toward the tiny, 1930s drug store. One of the white curtains in the front window was moving slightly, as if someone had been peeking out. Almost immediately, guns came up and we spread out, converging on the drug store.
It was a simple, white-painted, one-story building. A single door was flanked by two windows with white curtains in them, and the painted “Sam's Drug Store” sign above the door looked like it had been there for decades. Charlie and Ian set up on the windows, while the rest of us moved in toward the door. Eryn darted in front of me, her shotgun held in one hand, muzzle up, put her hand on the doorknob, looked at me for a second, then threw the door open, a little brass bell tinkling as its armature snagged the door. I went in behind my Winchester.
The inside looked a little more modern than the outside, though not by much. The shelves were all wood or plywood, there were coolers along the back wall, and the cash register on the counter was new, with a credit card reader next to it. Other than that, and the modern brands everywhere, the place looked like it had hardly been changed at all since the '30s.
There was a man standing at the cooler, holding the door open, reaching for a six pack of beer. A couple of kids were looking at the candy in front of the counter. The cashier was leaning against the counter, looking at a smart phone. None of them were moving.
There was a back door to the store, and I moved rapidly past the shelves, taking a second to check in between each one. Tall Bear had come in right behind me, and was pacing me on the other side of the store, keeping one aisle back so that we didn't flag each other with our muzzles. He had taken Miguel's Auto 5 after Bartram, with our blessing; he only had one partial magazine left for his own AR.
Nothing had jumped out at us by the time I got to the back. There was a tiny bathroom right next to the end of the counter, which I cleared in a heartbeat before pushing out the back door.
Nothing. The alley beyond was empty and still.
I stood there for a moment on the back step, looking around at the fenced yards that lined the alleyway. What was going on? Were we being toyed with? Was this some elaborate cat-and-mouse game? Where was The Walker? For that matter, where was the sorcerer? He couldn't have given The Walker the slip since Bartram, not the way it had hounded him this far. Unless...unless The Walker had changed its focus. Were we the prey now? Had it decided, in its fathomless capriciousness, to ignore its erstwhile nemesis to deal with us?
There was a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, down the alley. I whipped my rifle up, tracking in on it, but saw nothing. There was only a fence and the branches of a tree hanging over it. But I could have sworn I'd seen something.
I almost went out after it, but stopped myself. I'd seen enough Otherworldly traps before. I backed up into the store.
“There's something out there,” I said. “I saw movement in the alley. We're not alone here.”
Tall Bear stepped forward. “Do we go after it?” he asked.
I shook my head. “If it's a trap, that's going to be just what it wants
us to do.” I took a hand off my rifle to rub my eyes. Between the pace we'd been setting and the nightmares, there hadn't been much rest lately. “We need to search the whole town. If there's something here that we're supposed to find, we'll find it. If we go chasing after every will-o-the-wisp that we think The Walker's set to spy on us, we'll end up lost, worn out, and probably cornered and eaten.”
“This makes no sense,” Charlie put in, “especially after the last few towns.”
“Maybe The Walker got bored,” Kolya suggested. “Time for new game.”
“That is a...really disquieting thought,” Eryn said. Kolya shrugged.
“Wasn't trying to be cheerful about it,” he said. “Nothing cheerful about any of this situation.” He looked over at me. “So, where to start?”
Something seemed to flicker past the front window. I ignored it. Until it attacked, whatever it was, it was just trying to distract us. We'd stay vigilant, but I wasn't going to let us get caught up in a wild goose chase all over the town.
“We may as well continue down this street, going building to building,” I said. “We can circle back and get the couple of shops we've bypassed on the far end.”
Nobody seemed to have a better idea, so Ian led the way back out onto the street. It was just as silent and still as it had been. Nothing had changed.
There was no sign of whatever had moved across the window. Whatever it was, it was quick, assuming it had an actual physical form, and wasn't more illusion and misdirection, disappearing into smoke as soon as it caught our eyes. Of course, Father O'Neal, one of my first mentors in the Order, had once referred to the Otherworld as “the world that's just out of sight, the flicker of movement at the corner of your eye.” Some of these things had uncanny abilities, and it didn't pay, particularly at that point, to underestimate what we were up against. I briefly remembered the hag back in Forth disappearing right in front of us, and reminded myself that it was definitely possible that something like that was in play.
The next two places were the hardware store and a tiny bank branch. We didn't split up to search either building. That was not a good idea, and after the walloping we'd taken in Bartram, nobody was interested in suggesting it. We went in as one and came out as one.
The hardware store was about what you'd expect. There were shelves of pipe fittings and electrical supplies, bins of nails, bolts, screws, nuts, and washers. A wall of garden tools. Another wall of power tools. There were half a dozen people in there, counting the aging woman behind the counter, and none of them were moving. There wasn't even any sign of our mysterious shadower. The store was completely still.
The bank was the same. Technically it was illegal to carry weapons into the bank, but under the circumstances, we really didn't think anyone was going to call the cops on us. There were three old-fashioned teller cages along one wall, a series of doors leading to offices along another, and velvet ropes set up to control traffic to the teller cages. Two of the tellers were at work, or at least they had been before whatever it was had frozen the town in place. There were three people in the main room, two at the cages, and one waiting.
Charlie had started muttering to himself. I think the silence was starting to get to him. I caught a bit of it as I moved from door to door, checking the offices. They were perfectly normal, aside from the motionless blond bank employee behind the desk in one of them.
“I just don't get it,” he was muttering. “Why? What does this accomplish?”
“Do you really want to understand thought process of something like The Walker?” Kolya asked.
Charlie grimaced. “Good point. I guess not.”
Whatever we were seeing moving around hadn't shown itself in the bank. Neither had anything else of interest. I just pointed to the front door and we converged on it, emerging out onto the street. The bright sunlight was still slightly unnerving. Bowesmont, Ophir, Bartram...all had been swathed in darkness and mist. It just seemed to intensify the disquiet to have a town so completely under some kind of spell while the weather was still calm and clear.
It took another six buildings, getting out of the small downtown area and into the residential houses, before we found something.
It was a tiny, one-story, green-painted house, set back in a small yard with huge, ancient sycamores looming over it. The white-painted screen door was sagging on its hinges, and the screen wasn't in the best shape, either. Tall Bear all but ripped it off its frame before kicking the door open, and Ian led the way inside.
“Okay, this is disturbing,” he said, even before I could get inside behind him.
That was putting it mildly. The living room had been cleared, all the furniture pushed roughly against the walls, which had been covered in symbols and incantations. A few of the glyphs were things I'd seen before, and they turned my stomach just as violently as they had the first time. The incantations were worse, the words themselves making my eyeballs itch and my stomach rebel.
Looking down at the floor didn't help, either. It was stacked three deep in corpses.
They were mostly wrapped in plastic, but there were a few that were left uncovered. All were in varying states of decomposition; none of them looked all that fresh. Several had already had parts removed.
“Somebody cover up that crap on the walls,” I said, trying not to breathe too deeply in the process. It smelled about like how you'd expect a house packed full of rotting corpses would smell. “It looks like our sorcerer was trying to make some more flesh golems.”
“So what interrupted him?” Tyrese asked. “The Walker doesn't seem to be here.”
“Maybe it's been and gone,” Charlie suggested. “If it got here earlier than he anticipated, maybe he decided to cut and run instead of trying to throw his usual pack of monsters at it.”
“It's possible,” I allowed. I was trying to figure out how to destroy the markings on the walls without burning the whole building down. We had neither the time nor the manpower to keep that kind of a blaze from spreading, and as dangerous as this kind of thing was—I'd seen markings just like these open up an entire town to demonic influences that nearly tore the entire place apart—I wasn't quite ready to burn down a whole town in order to deal with it. “Unfortunately, he's not our primary concern at the moment.”
“I'll admit, that kind of bothers me,” Tyrese said quietly. “I know that overreaching the objective was what got us hammered in Bartram,” he clarified as I turned to look at him, “and The Walker is some of the biggest and baddest of 'big, bad medicine.' But this guy is no joke, either. He's wielding power like I've never seen before. Whoever he is, he either has to have been around a long time, or he has a regular Prince of Hell sponsoring him.” He paused uncomfortably. “Or both. We can't afford to have this guy running around much more than we can afford to let The Walker spread its insanity.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said. “I can't say I'm happy about it, either. Just as soon as we deal with The Walker, you can rest assured we'll be after this guy. I'm starting to get a hunch about him.” I didn't care to elaborate further at that point, but I was remembering a note I'd found in Silverton, at Mayhew's little meditation center. He'd made his try at initiating the end of the world at the behest of someone else, someone he only addressed as “Master.” With the display of supernatural power this sorcerer had put on through several towns now, could he be the same one? Like Tyrese said, this guy was throwing around a lot of witchcraft. More than most.
But that was a question for another time. No matter how powerful the sorcerer was, The Walker was worse. Priorities.
Tall Bear and Ian came out of the back rooms of the house, lugging a couple of cans of paint. “It's not perfect, but it'll do for the moment,” Ian said, lifting the paint can. “There's not enough to paint the whole thing, but we can at least deface enough of the glyphs to hopefully at least deaden their effects.”
“Is there more of this filth back there?” I asked, nodding toward the back of the house.
“Oh yeah,” Ia
n said with a grimace. “Rooms full of crazy.”
“Make it quick,” Father Ignacio said. He had his small, black prayer-book open in his hand. He was already in combat on the unseen level. Without another word, in part because talking meant having to breathe in the corpse-stink of the place, we cracked open the paint cans and started splashing white and black paint on the unclean scribbles on the walls. Where possible, a few of the splashes were made in the shape of a cross.
We finally piled out onto the lawn, gagging at the stench. If we'd had more time, we could have done more. That house was going to be an unquiet place for a long time, though, no matter what we did. Father had done his best, but we were pressed for time. Something was probably going to come crawling back once we were gone.
A short way down the sidewalk and we found out why that house had been picked in the first place. There was a small local cemetery, overgrown with trees and bushes, right next door. It didn't look like even a quarter of the graves had been left undisturbed.
“He had to have help,” Kolya said. “No way he dug all those up himself.”
“Maybe the homunculi in Bowesmont weren't the only ones he had,” Tall Bear suggested. Everyone turned to look at him, somewhat surprised. So far, he hadn't engaged much in the discussions of the uncanny except to ask questions or express his unease. He shrugged. “It's been a few towns. I've started to get used to this stuff.”
Charlie and Kolya looked at me. I just shrugged. Better that than turning into a drooling vegetable, or worse, letting the evil inside your head. I had some first-hand experience with how easy it could be to get sucked into embracing this stuff instead of fighting it. Evil has its own weird fascination.
The cemetery was the last thing on the street before it turned into woods and fields. We were right at the edge of town. Without a word, I pointed to the next street. Time to move back the way we'd come, searching another set of buildings. We'd found evidence that the sorcerer had been in Yanquinia, but so far there had been no sign of The Walker, or whatever was holding the people of the town in thrall.
