by Peter Nealen
That scream had come from Sister Emilia. She'd taken the goblin with her, as it was still lying on top of her body, its teeth embedded in her throat, gaping exit wounds still oozing black ichor in its back, but she was dead. She wasn't the only one, either.
Tyrese was lying a few feet away, his neck at an unnatural angle. The shredded remains of the goblin that had gotten him lay a yard beyond him, where Ian had blasted it away. Ian was standing over Tyrese's still form, reloading, his face a mask.
I hastily shoved rounds into my rifle's loading port, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. “We've still got a long way to go,” I said thickly. “Don't let them get to you yet.” I wasn't sure if I was talking to Eryn, the others, or myself. Maybe all three.
Three more goblins were now visible, crouched a dozen yards in front of us. I wasn't fooled; they wouldn't be the main attack. They were letting us see them, so that we'd be blindsided when their pack-mates hit us from behind or on the flanks. We had to do something about these things. To have come this far and suffer the losses we had, only to be stopped by a goblin ambush while The Walker watched and laughed? No way.
Unfortunately, goblins aren't easily stampeded. But being of the Otherworld, they are almost as susceptible to spiritual warfare as they are to bullets. They don't like to come too close to holy things, though they don't have the apocalyptic aversion that demonic spirits do. They'll still try to kill a man with a crucifix, but they'll try to avoid touching it.
Could we use that, though? I wasn't sure. It was going to be difficult, at best. I found myself wishing for grenades and machine guns.
“Keep pressing forward,” I said loudly. “We can come back for the dead later. We've still got a job to do.” We could sure use some help down here, I thought, quickly flicking my gaze up at the sky. It wasn't the most eloquent prayer, but it would have to do for the moment. The Good Lord had seen fit to answer it before.
As we pressed forward, the goblins in front of us fell back, which just confirmed to me that they were a distraction, there to keep our attention. Tall Bear cranked off a couple of shots from his Auto 5 to my right, and was rewarded with a gurgling snarl. A sudden burst of higher-pitched cracks from behind would be the surviving Sisters hammering another goblin or two with AR fire.
Two more steps. Three. The goblins were getting more agitated. If I didn't know better, I'd almost think we were backing them up against a wall. They were starting to act like cornered animals. That meant…
As one, they came at us, snarling and hooting. I shot the closest one in the face, but the shot must have been off center because it's head jerked to one side and it kept coming. I worked the lever as Eryn slammed buckshot into them as fast as she could work the shotgun's pump, and shot it again. That one went home, and it flopped. Then another one was right on top of me and I had to use the rifle as a club, hitting it as hard as I could, trying to break that iron-hard neck. Its head snapped to one side, but its spine stayed intact, and it hit me, knocking me back into Brother Ezekiel, who caught me. I could hear him praying as he pushed me back up on my feet, though it pretty much put me in range for the goblin to wrap its long, hard fingers around my throat.
You don't bring a knife to a gunfight, though, and you don't try to choke somebody who still has a free hand and a pistol. The rifle was a bit too long, but I let go with my shooting hand, palmed my .45, put it between the goblin's eyes, and pulled the trigger. There was a disgusting splash of black slime, and it spasmed, its knees buckling. It didn't let go, though; it might not have been squeezing anymore, but its fingers were still locked around my neck. I had to holster the pistol and pry them off, one by one, frantic to get it off before the rest of them killed us all.
Even as I extricated myself, gasping for air, from the dead or disabled goblin, Charlie blasted the last one in the face. There were still more out there, but none of them were in front of us, so we kept pushing forward.
It was as if we had crossed a line. I don't know if there had been a street there before; it kind of looked like there might have been. A halfway-intact building with a false front that might have once been a store was a few yards ahead on the right, and a jumbled mound of gray timbers was across from it on the left. But whatever had been there before, as we moved forward, it became evident that the goblins didn't want to follow us.
“This is ominous,” Charlie said.
“While I might not know enough to say exactly why,” Tall Bear put in, “I'm inclined to agree. There's no way they backed off just because they're afraid of us.”
“No, there isn't,” I replied. “Goblins ain't afraid of much, and at this stage in the game, I think we can pretty well assume that they just don't want to interfere in whatever new nasty surprise The Walker has waiting for us.”
No sooner had I said that than two figures stepped out into the street ahead. They were draped in animal skins; one had a coyote's head draped over its own, while the other looked at us from underneath a cougar's. They looked, at first glance, entirely human, if filthy, with long, matted hair.
But their faces were painted black and white, the upper half black, the lower white, and their eyes glowed yellow in the black. They grinned, their mouths splitting far too wide, displaying hedges of sharp, yellow teeth.
Oh, crap.
I immediately looked down. “Don't look them in the eyes!” I barked. “And if you're not already praying like mad, now would be a really good time to start.”
“Are those what I think they are?” Eryn asked, a quaver of fear in her voice.
“Pretty sure,” I replied. I was having to hold off the shakes. I'd never tried to kill a skinwalker before, much less two of them, but I'd sure heard the stories. I could feel the evil coming off of them like a skunk's stench, a steadily growing sense of oppression and fear. These things had been human, once. Only doing some seriously depraved stuff had turned them into what was now walking down the street toward us.
“Well, that explains why the goblins backed off,” Tall Bear said. “Even they don't want to be around skinwalkers.”
“I thought skinwalkers were a Navajo thing,” Charlie said, refusing to let even the presence of horrors like them repress his mouth. “Aren't you Nez Perce or something?”
“They are, and I am,” Tall Bear replied evenly. “Doesn't mean I never heard of skinwalkers before. Or does white man think Injun can't read?” Sarcasm dripped from his voice, successfully masking his terror. His knuckles were white around the Auto 5, though.
Charlie just grinned. “You're all right, big man,” he said. “So, have you by any chance read how to kill them?”
“I'm hoping lots of bullets and buckshot can do the trick,” he answered.
“Guns alone aren't going to do enough here,” Father Ignacio said. “They aren't human anymore, and they're close enough to the Abyss that they can soak up more physical punishment than you can dish out. They're a step below The Huntsman.” He pushed past me, his big silver crucifix held up. “Prayer and the Cross will keep their witchcraft off, but you've got to take their heads off to finish them. And I doubt that they're going to stand still for that.”
As if prompted by his words, the two skinwalkers suddenly blurred into motion. And I mean blurred. They moved so fast that the eye couldn't quite track them. Tall Bear ducked, just in time, as a taloned hand whipped past his head, so fast that it actually made a whirring sound as it passed. Then the thing was beyond us, actually perched on a beam in the ruined house just behind the ring of goblin bodies. The goblins were no longer anywhere to be seen.
Father was already advancing on it, his crucifix held high, chanting in Latin at the top of his lungs. Behind me, I could hear Brother Ezekiel bellowing a similar chant, if not the same one. A glance showed him similarly closing in on the other skinwalker, his own crucifix that hung around his neck held up in the same way.
The skinwalker recoiled from Father's advance, then leaned forward, opened its mouth far too wide, and screamed. It was so loud it s
hook the ground and blasted a gale into our faces. I gripped my rifle and squinted against the wall of grit that slammed into us, pushing forward. If I could shoot it enough times in the head, maybe that would work. But I'd need to get close.
The scream went on for far longer than any human set of lungs could have managed. Of course, no human lungs could have conjured up that windstorm, either. Squinting against the sandblasting, I got my rifle up and shot it in the mouth.
To my surprise, that actually had an effect, probably only because it was weakened by Father's litany. In any case, it stopped screaming, its mouth shutting with a clap as it rocked back, then it jumped off the beam, leaping a good fifty feet through the air to alight on the roof of the abandoned store. Father's crucifix and three gun barrels swiveled to follow it. We advanced on it again, pointedly avoiding looking in those creepy, luminous yellow eyes.
It darted off that perch, bounding down and dashing into the bushes at what looked like about ninety miles an hour. It was trying to get around behind us, trying to use its speed to get away from the baleful sight of that silver crucifix, gleaming in the weak beams of the sun that were making it through the clouds. Father wasn't having it. Eryn, Tall Bear, and I stayed close to him on either side, guns up and ready.
More gunfire off to the right. Another tooth-rattling scream. Brother Ezekiel, Charlie, Kolya, and the two Sisters were stalking the other one. Maybe we stood a chance.
Or maybe not. A figure was suddenly standing there in the street, looking like some evil, spectral, Old West gunfighter. It was there for a second, and then it was gone.
So were the skinwalkers. I had no idea where they'd gone, and I wasn't confident that they weren't going to be back to jump us from behind, but they had vanished. Apparently, The Walker had decided to quit playing around.
It said something about The Walker's power—not that we needed any more reminders—that two skinwalkers had been in its entourage. Usually, they are pretty solitary monsters; they don't care about anyone or anything but themselves and their sick appetites. But here they'd been, acting as mooks for something even older, stranger, and more evil than they.
I suddenly had the nasty feeling that The Walker hadn't called the goblins there at all. Goblins are pretty low on the Otherworldly totem pole; not as low as skinnies, which I called “the white trash of monsters,” but only by a rung or two. They were to The Walker what jackals are to a lion.
Which meant that it hadn't sent the skinwalkers out for us. It had sent them out to chase off the riffraff. It wanted to deal with us itself.
The figure of The Walker, green fire glimmering out of the otherwise impenetrable shadow under its slouch hat, appeared again, this time at the far end of the street, just outside the ore elevator. After I'd blinked, it was gone again.
“Come into my parlor...” Charlie muttered. I couldn't disagree. It was baiting us in, inviting us to follow it. There couldn't be anything good inside there.
There was no sound but the whisper of the wind. The scrabbling of the goblins was long gone. The skinwalkers hadn't made any sound but those unholy screams. The Walker was apparently finished talking.
The oppressive sense of malice emanating from that open, broken door a couple hundred yards ahead was palpable, like a weight on the soul. Death and worse waited in there. And we had no choice but to go in after it.
“I don't suppose you can start the litany now, can you?” Charlie asked Brother Ezekiel. “Nail it down from out here?”
Brother Ezekiel shook his head. “Prayer might not require anything but faith, but it will help to be close enough to come to grips with it. It's like an exorcism. You don't pray an exorcism down the hall from the possessed, you go right in the room and confront the Devil with the power of God. Imprisoning an Otherworlder like this is the same thing.”
Kolya huffed a deep breath, flexing his hands on his rifle, and grimaced as he stared at the blackness of the open door. “Great.” He looked around at the rest of us. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let's get it over with.”
Reluctantly, our little group stepped forward. Our numbers had been cut in half since we'd started on this hunt. We were beaten down, battered, and barely holding back the weight of our horror and grief at the people we'd lost. But the work doesn't need you to feel good about doing it. It just has to be done. We had to have faith that the Lord would watch over us, and that if we fell, it wouldn't be for nothing. Every day could be our last. May as well make it count for something.
The dusty, sandy ground crunched under our boots as we advanced on the ore elevator. We were still in something of a wedge, but it had spread out as we walked down the street. Eyes flicked to every opening, every shadow, watching for the next ambush. I doubted there would be one, though. The Walker had shown itself, and even its nastiest servants had vanished as soon as it had. This was endgame. One way or another, the final confrontation was at hand.
The clouds seemed to get even darker as we got closer to the ore elevator. The shadows under the eaves of the abandoned buildings were now a deep, impenetrable black, the stark, gray wooden buildings looking like skulls in the weak light that was getting through, watching us as we walked forward. It occurred to me that it was entirely possible that The Walker would slip around behind us in the dark as we walked toward where it had wanted us to see it.
But we got to the ore elevator without further incident. It was dark as night inside, though outside wasn't much better; a gray twilight occasionally lit by a weirdly-colored flicker of lighting from above. “You'd best get to it as soon as we get in there, Brother,” I hissed to Brother Ezekiel. “We'll fight, but I doubt we're going to be able to do much to hold it off, at least not for very long.”
“Have a little faith, Jed,” he said, his face composed. He nodded at the door. “Ready when you are.”
Tall Bear, Kolya, Ian, and I stormed through the door, rifles up, clearing the corners. It wasn't quite as dark as we'd expected once we got inside, and Charlie came after, along with Father Ignacio, carrying flashlights. They didn't seem to shed enough light to see everything, though, despite the fact that they were 1000 lumen high-intensity jobs. The circles of light they cast were dim and yellow, like an old Mag Lite with low batteries.
The interior was a wreck, even though any heavy machinery from the later stages of the mine's life had been stripped out a long time ago. The scaffold of the elevator was still going up to the roof, with cables hanging down, reaching into the abyss of the mine shaft, though several were hanging slack. One was swinging slightly, though there was no air moving in there. A couple of big, concrete slabs with the bolts from machinery mounts still loomed on the floor, and half the roof had fallen in, leaving a jumble of timbers and shingles on one side. Eerie, strangely-colored light flickered through the hole in the roof with each lightning bolt up above.
Brother Ezekiel went to the largest clear portion of the floor and knelt down, his crucifix held in both hands in front of him. He didn't start chanting, but just knelt there, his head bowed. The rest of us formed a rough circle around him, guns out, searching the darkness for the telltale flickers of fiery green eyes.
At first, the noise was almost below the range of hearing, like an itch you can't quite identify. As it built to where it could be heard, it still wasn't clear. It was like the scratching of a damaged vinyl record one moment, a faint, unintelligible whispering the next, then the same sort of maddening piping that had been heard in Bartram. The next moment, it was somehow all three at once and none at all. It was horrifying in its sheer unintelligibility. My headache started to come back, starting right behind my left eye.
Eryn was shaking next to me. I took a hand off my rifle to squeeze her shoulder, and she reached up to squeeze my hand in return. “I'm all right,” she whispered.
Brother Ezekiel began to chant, the Latin syllables rising to challenge the eerie, sepulchral music. Father Ignacio was now kneeling next to him, praying silently. I gripped my rifle, peering into the darkness
for any movement. The Walker wasn't going to let this go on unchallenged.
The weird, discordant music suddenly tripled in volume, becoming a blast of noise that sent a spike of pain through all our heads. Several cried out; I couldn't tell who. For all I could tell in that moment of agony, one of the voices might have been mine.
But somehow Brother Ezekiel's voice never faltered, his own volume rising to challenge even the horrific noise that had risen out of the mine shaft.
And then The Walker came.
It hauled itself up out of the mine shaft on what looked like smoky tendrils of solid darkness. Its eyes were searingly bright points of green flame, its fury palpable. It seemed to have grown, and loomed nearly to the roof, its shoulders spreading to overshadow us all.
Two of those tendrils of blackness stabbed forward and swatted Tall Bear and me out of its way.
I went flying into the pile of wreckage from the roof. I think I might have clipped Eryn on the way; when I overcame the pain enough to look up she was lying on the floor. I'd lost my grip on my rifle, and it was too dark to see where it had gone.
Tall Bear was out of sight, lost in the gloom. Charlie got a shot off, the .300 WinMag's report painfully loud in the enclosed space, only to be snatched up by another tendril. The rifle fell from nerveless fingers as he was hoisted three feet off the floor, his eyes rolled back in his head and blood flowing from his eyes, nose, and mouth.
The Walker loomed over Brother Ezekiel and Father Ignacio, another shadowy limb, this one seeming to end in a grasping, taloned hand, reaching for Brother Ezekiel. The Friar started to slump down, as if an enormous weight was being pressed down onto his shoulders. His voice turned hoarse, the volume of the chanted litany faltering. The Walker was trying to stop him, to shut him up.
Father Ignacio thrust himself in front of Brother Ezekiel, holding up his own crucifix and calling on God and all the Powers of Heaven to preserve us against the evil facing us. The silver crucifix seemed to flare brightly in the dim light from the flashlights, and the Walker reared back a little, its flaming green eyes seeming to flicker, as if in pain. The shadowy hand was snatched back as if it had been burned.
