The Walker on the Hills (Jed Horn Supernatural Thrillers Book 3)

by Peter Nealen

  Now, under any other circumstances, we might have done the same thing we'd done at Lone Hill, and pushed on for the next town that fit the target profile. And every instinct was nagging at me that we were wasting time poking around here, that The Walker was wreaking some new havoc somewhere else while we were distracted by a town having been turned into a wax museum. But this was different enough, bizarre enough, that I strongly suspected that Charlie and Kolya were right, and that something about the game had changed. I wasn't ready to keep pushing on until I knew just what, and apparently, even without discussing it, everyone else was thinking the same thing.

  There was another flicker of movement ahead as we moved across the block to the next street. This time everybody saw it, as every gun muzzle tracked toward it, but whatever it was was gone as quickly as it had appeared. The side street was empty, just houses on one side and the open field on the other.

  “Did anyone see what it was?” Father Ignacio asked.

  There was a chorus of negatives. Some of us had been looking right at it, and still hadn't seen what it was. This was not good. Not that anything we'd seen yet had been anything but horrifying.

  Cautiously, ever wary for a trap, we advanced to the next street. The Hunters were in a sort of wedge, while the Sisters were still clumped up behind us. They were still doing their silent act. The shell-shock probably went deeper than I'd suspected, which raised questions about just how active the Sisters really had been in the fight against the Otherworldly that were going to have to wait for another time. I was starting to think that their reputation might be a bit inflated.

  As we came around the corner, there was a man standing in the middle of the street. At first, I just glanced at him and continued to scan, looking for the source of the movement. He was maybe early middle age, clean-shaven, wearing a shirt and tie.

  My eyes snapped back to him as another detail registered. His eyes were rolled back in his head, so that only the whites were showing. He was facing us, his hands held out at his sides.

  There was another flicker of movement on the right. Weapons swiveled toward it, but there was nothing there. Then the middle-aged man's mouth dropped open and a voice came out.

  It was hard to describe the sound. It somehow wasn't deep or resonant, though it still managed to sound like it was coming up from the very depths of the Earth. It was hollow, its inflection flat and utterly without emotion.

  “It is they.” It was a weird way to start off, but The Walker was a weird creature anyway, so I don't know why we might have expected anything else. “The insects that have sought to strike at me. How small, and how pitiful they are. Such tiny sparks futilely trying to shine in the darkness. The void will consume you.” So now it was talking to us, apparently. “You have dared to attack me, to try to shackle me as those far greater than you once did. This cannot be borne. The one I have pursued was insolent, but I shall deal with him in time. Your crime is even greater than his. You have allied yourselves with forces inimical to my reign. They might have granted you victory. For this you must die.

  “Can I really touch them, though, with The Enemy's grace upon them?” Now it was talking to itself again. This was going to get disorienting. Which was probably the point. “Of course. They are still but mortals. See what happened to your companions when you first dared to try to strike at me, with only a small part of my thought bent upon you. You are not untouchable.”

  “So why dilly-dally like this?” Tyrese asked, more talking to the rest of us than the thing that was speaking through the man on the street. “Why not just come in here and squash us if it's so sure of itself?”

  “Because it's worried?” Charlie suggested. “Brother Ezekiel did manage to stop its zombies cold in Bartram.”

  “So why not throw the whole town here at us, since its nemesis isn't on the scene?” Tall Bear asked.

  “Maybe because it's got something worse in mind,” I suggested.

  “Hunters,” it said, “You wish to protect these other morsels of insignificant life? You wish them to live?”

  None of us answered. Getting involved in a conversation with a Power of the Otherworld is usually a bad idea. Madness is probably the least kind of unpleasantness that can result.

  “Should you desire them to be spared, come to the place called Storr's Hole. Should you refuse, I shall strike you down wherever you are, and all around you will also die. It matters little to me.” Somehow I suspected that was a lie. There was some reason why it wanted us at Storr's Hole instead of Yanquinia, and I didn't think it was going to be good for us. “Should you try to free these people in this place, know that the imp I have left there is one that you cannot catch, and it will kill them all, one at a time, before your very eyes.”

  Oh, crap. So that was what was making those flickers of movement we thought we kept seeing.

  “Okay, I'm going to be that guy one more time,” Tall Bear said. “What's an imp? Is it like the fantasy thing? Sort of a demon or goblin?”

  “More like a goblin, just a lot more elusive,” Tyrese answered. “These things can make themselves invisible right in front of your face. They're usually pretty ungovernable by anything, but somehow it doesn't surprise me that The Walker can order one around.”

  “You have one day, Hunters,” the impassive, sepulchral voice said. “Then my wrath will flow out across this land, and you will perish along with countless others, in terrible agony. You will beg for death before the end.”

  “Boy, they just can't leave it at, 'I'm going to kill you,' can they?” I muttered. “Always got to get over-dramatic.”

  “The Otherworld doesn't exactly think the same way we do,” Tyrese said unnecessarily.

  The Walker was apparently done with the man in the shirt and tie. He gasped suddenly, and fell to the street. Eryn and Tyrese ran to him, but it was too late. He was dead. Another demonstration of The Walker's power, as if we needed it.

  As he looked down at the body, Father Ignacio sighed. “I guess we're going to Storr's Hole. God preserve us.”

  Chapter 19

  It took a while to find Storr's Hole. It wasn't on any maps. Some dedicated searching finally turned it up after a couple of hours. It was an old, abandoned mining town about six hours away. The Walker had picked a ghost town for our little reckoning. It seemed fitting, somehow. We still had no idea why it preferred Storr's Hole to anywhere else, but if that was where it was, that was where we were going. Hopefully it wasn't just misdirection.

  The country turned barren and rocky as we got closer. Bunchgrass and sagebrush were broken by rocky outcroppings, the only trees we could see grew along the rare river and stream beds in the low ground. It was overcast for most of the drive, the sky growing darker as we got closer to Storr's Hole.

  There wasn't any rain, but when the plain suddenly dropped away into the hollow filled with rock, tailings, scrub bushes, and the crumbling remains of the town and its mine, there was green, purple, and blue lighting flickering in the cloud cover overhead. The clouds were almost black, a wan light leaking in from the horizon. There was bad medicine down there, as if we needed any further indication.

  As was becoming standard procedure, we parked the vehicles on the bluff above the town and got ready to go down. The Sisters were still keeping to themselves, though Father Ignacio went over to them anyway, laying hands on each of them and praying over them. They were going into the same nightmare we were, and they needed the same graces.

  “I don't know if the circle plan is going to work this time,” Brother Ezekiel was saying. “At the very least, it'll be looking for it. Not to mention the fact that I don't have as much to work with this time.”

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked. “We're not exactly well-versed in your Brotherhood's rites. If there's anything in particular that you need us to do, let us know now.”

  He looked a little uncomfortable. “There is a litany. It is rarely used anymore; the use of sacramentals is easier. While they require faith, certainl
y, the litany requires faith and utter dedication on an even higher level. It's a little easier to summon up that kind of focus when you have a blessed, physical object to aid your concentration. This will be especially hard because whenever The Walker hears what I'm doing, it's going to focus all its fury on me. It's going to do whatever it can to silence me, probably preferably by killing me.” He took a deep breath. “You're going to have to keep it and whatever assistance it's summoned off of me until I can complete the litany, and, by the grace of God, compel it into captivity.”

  Charlie whistled. “That don't sound like any kind of small task.”

  “It won't be,” the Friar replied. “It's probably going to be the hardest fight of your lives. I wish there was some way to make it easier; if things hadn't gone south in Bartram, maybe it would be. On the other hand, I don't think we were quite ready for what was going down in Bartram even if the Sisters hadn't gone off the reservation.”

  Nobody said anything at that. In retrospect, he was probably right. Even if we'd been properly coordinated, driving through that horde of mindless puppets would not have gone well. All shooting The Walker had done had brought the zombies after us.

  But was Storr's Hole going to be any different? Had we hacked it off to the point that it would actually try to deal with us personally, or had it lured us here through that message in Yanquinia only to swamp us under a tide of bodies while it stood back, watched, and laughed? Sure, Storr's Hole was a ghost town, without a population it could enthrall, but Chrystal hadn't been from Bartram. Who knows how many people it had following it around, their minds lost in its weird, discordant piping?

  It wasn't the most reassuring way to mentally prepare for a fight.

  Father Ignacio, finished with the Sisters, came back over to us. He stepped in front of me, making the Sign of the Cross on my forehead in holy water and praying quietly. “Remember,” he said, looking me in the eye, “we're not going to do this alone. We are instruments of His Will, and if we forget that in our pride, we will fail.” I joined him in the words of St. Patrick's Breastplate once more, as I slung my bandolier over my head.

  One by one, he went around and repeated the prayer and remonstration with each one of us. Eryn came and stood next to me, slipping under my arm. We didn't say anything, but just held each other close, looking down at the wreck of a town below us. If this was the last time we got to hold one another, we were going to savor it.

  Finally, there was nothing left to say, no more preparations to make. The battle awaited. We stepped off and headed down the road toward Storr's Hole and The Walker.

  While it had looked pretty empty from up on the bluff, once we got down to ground level, Storr's Hole was riddled with hiding places. While only a handful of the buildings were still standing, and some of them only barely, there were little thickets of junipers and scrub, piles of weathered timbers, and holes in the ground everywhere. The ground was also anything but flat. We quickly found that aside from the big, multi-story ore elevator, we couldn't see much.

  We definitely weren't alone, though. We hadn't gotten fifty yards into town before we started to hear pattering footsteps and scrabbling sounds. Whatever was making them didn't show itself, but I could have sworn I heard a chuckle in the bushes. It was a raspy, grating sound, that didn't sound like it came from anything human. It wasn't a pleasant noise.

  There was also more than one of them, whatever they were. No sooner had that chuckle rattled across the empty street than another scratching sound came from the other side. Running footsteps pattered past behind us.

  The whole group, Hunters and Sisters alike, was now bunched together tightly, guns pointed in all directions. It appeared that The Walker had some more unpleasant surprises in store for us, after all.

  More laughter, a harsh cackle that sounded like it was right next to my ear. “One might almost feel sorry for them, might one?” a voice croaked. It was impossible to tell where it had come from; it sounded like it was only a few feet away, within an arm's distance at least. While there were bushes close, as well as the crumbled remains of a store or cabin—it was impossible to tell which—there was no place that close for anything to hide.

  “Indeed, indeed,” squawked a different voice. “A mercy, really, to kill them ourselves, right here and now. It'll be quick, compared to what the Great One will do to them.”

  “Yes, yes, let us finish them! End their suffering, the poor things!” The third voice was definitely from behind us, and if it was trying to sound sympathetic, it was failing miserably. The words sounded like nails on a chalkboard, a dissonant screeching more than a voice.

  “What are they?” Tall Bear hissed.

  “Unfriendly,” I replied. “Just keep your eyes out and be ready to shoot 'em when they come.”

  That didn't take long. A warbling screech went up to the right, and for a second every muzzle tracked toward it. So naturally the attack came from the left.

  I hadn't turned all the way, and so I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye. Something that looked like it was mostly arms and legs sprang six feet into the air, descending on Charlie, who had caught himself looking toward the noise and started turning back at the same instant. I whipped my rifle around, but it dropped onto Charlie and I didn't have a shot. He'd just barely gotten his own Benelli R1's muzzle up under the thing as it fell on him, and he fell beneath it. A moment later, the .300 WinMag boomed twice, barely muffled by the body it was tearing big, bloody chunks out of. The thing screeched, flopping off of him, and he shot it once more before struggling to his feet.

  There was no time to get a good look at it, because its brother, or cousin, or whatever was coming, leaping out of the brush at us from the other direction. That one caught a blast of steel buckshot from Eryn's shotgun, before I put a silver-jacketed .45 caliber bullet in its head. It somersaulted backwards and sprawled on the ground, trying to crawl away. That's no mean trick, after taking a bullet to the brain-case.

  “Goblins,” Tyrese snarled. “It had to be goblins...”

  Two more exploded out of the bushes and a third burst out of the very ground itself behind us, only to be met with more gunfire from the Sisters. One managed to get its claws on Sister Margritte and slashed her arm pretty good before she dumped six rounds into its abdomen and made it let go. It scrabbled away into the weeds. A low growl reverberated all around us. Their little patter might have been relatively light-hearted and jolly, if slightly psychotic, before the shooting started, but now they'd been stung, and they were mad. Goblins are tough creatures, pack hunters, and very, very dangerous.

  “I don't think they appreciate the favor we're trying to do them, my dear,” another voice hissed. “If they get past us, oh, then terrible things will happen to them, yes, terrible, terrible things.”

  “The madness? The pain?” a different voice muttered.

  “Oh, no, my dear,” the hissing voice replied. “The madness comes last. It will want them to be present for the suffering. It will take them to its own place and there it will take an age or two to tear them apart.”

  “Little over-dramatic, don't you think?” Tall Bear said wryly.

  “Goblins aren't that good at psychological warfare,” Tyrese said, scanning the brush and the weathered timbers lying haphazardly in the dust, his rifle barrel following his eyes. “Subtlety ain't their strong suit.”

  “Do not make the mistake of underestimating them, though,” I cautioned. “They're far more dangerous than they are intimidating.”

  “Flattering, isn't it?” another voice croaked. “It won't get it any mercy that we're not already offering by killing it, but it is nice to hear.”

  “Oh, shut up,” I growled. “Come get some if you're going to.”

  The goblins apparently didn't need any more of an invitation than that. Howling, screeching, screaming, and laughing, they sprang out of the weeds, out of the wreckage of nearby buildings, and out of hollows in the ground. Some seemed to have even tunneled underground, and spran
g up from nearly underfoot in fountains of dust and grit.

  We were ready for them, at least as ready as we were going to be. They leaped straight into a storm of fire, thunder, and flying metal. I cranked three shots into the one in front of me as fast as I could work the Winchester's lever, barely noticing the heavy rifle's kick. The goblin dropped on its face, thrashing and snarling, and I shot it twice in its twisted face as it looked up at me from the ground. It's features were a leathery caricature of a human face, its mouth too wide, its nose too long, its chin a bony point. It's yellow eyes were recessed beneath deep ridges of bone, and its skin was pebbly, the color of motor oil. My fifth shot smashed its beak of a nose in, finally hitting the one spot that can actually disable one of them: the spine.

  A scream rose behind me, nearly drowned out by the hammering of gunshots, then faded to a gurgle. I couldn't turn to look, as another goblin was coming at me, low to the ground, its long arms whipping out for my throat. I blocked the blow with the barrel of my rifle, at which point Eryn put the muzzle of her shotgun against the thing's neck and pulled the trigger. Black blood and greenish meat blew out and the goblin fell, flopping like a fish out of water. Another goblin tried to jump on her from behind, and I shot it dead center, the big, heavy bullet smashing through its tough flesh and bones to break its back. It still hit her, but by then it was just twitching, and she shoved it off with a shrug. They weren't that heavy, just fast, tough, and mean.

  As suddenly as the rush had come, it ended. I realized I was breathing hard, and was soaked with sweat. That had been close. It wasn't over yet, either; there were still goblins circling us like wolves circling a herd of bison.

  “Oh, no,” Eryn breathed. I chanced a look behind me.