The children were all nude and tattooed-up, their faces smeared with blood.
“Dear Christ,” Wilcox said and kept saying it.
The children rose from their kill quite slowly, advancing on the men. Wilcox began to sob…kids, just goddamn kids. He couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
But Sir Tom Ian had no such compunction.
He pulled his. 44 Bisley and it had barely cleared leather before the first round jacked into a little girl and another erased the face of a little boy. Making a wild, moaning sound, Wilcox finally followed suit.
For they were not children.
They were more beast than human, those eyes filled with a flat, relentless appetite. They would stalk their kill and take it down without remorse.
And that’s how he was able to kill the children with Ian.
The guns saved their lives, but they also made a hell of a racket in the enclosed room. Like thunder echoing and echoing until each man’s hearing was dulled, numbed.
And that was why they didn’t hear the others coming through the doorway at them.
Didn’t know it until they felt claws and teeth and smelled rancid, hot breath at their necks.
Cabe said, “After you, Sheriff.”
Dirker nodded and pushed through the door of the old hotel. Cabe followed in behind him, a Greener shotgun in his arms. His Evans was slung across his back. The stink hit them right away. Thick, hot, nauseating. It had no place in an abandoned hotel on a freezing day where the wind was driving snow into drifts and licking everything down with ice. Yet, the smell was there…like some breathing, consuming, living thing. A malignant sentience. Both men stood, breathless, waiting for whatever inspired that stink to come slinking down the stairs at them.
But there was nothing but silence.
“If what Harmony said is correct,” Dirker began, carefully re-loading both his. 45 Colt Peacemakers, “then Cobb and his crew were living upstairs here.”
“Jesus, that stink,” Cabe said.
“Let’s go,” Dirker said.
There was a pair of oil lamps hanging from a hook near the stairwell. Both were nearly full. Cabe took one, lit it up. A dirty yellow light sprang from it, revealing the ravages of nature-the animal bones and bird’s bests tucked into holes in the walls, the leaves and sticks and pine needles.
They went up the stairway side by side and paused at the top.
Paused, noticing that the atmosphere now was positively mephitic and pestilent like that of a malarial jungle death camp. The air was heavy, moist, and viscous with that putrid, flyblown stench of wormy meat. And hot, dear God, hot and wet and oppressive. It trembled thickly like gelatin, laying on their faces in a rank, slimy humidity.
They moved up the corridor towards that door at the end. The door with the furrows cut into it and the abnormal bloody handprints. Or something like handprints.
“Lookit the floor,” Cabe said.
Dirker did.
Just outside the door, for maybe four feet down the floor…a weird, creeping fungal mass of decay. As they stepped on it, it squished like wet leaves, some reeking black juice oozing from it.
Dirker prodded something with the tip of his boot. “A shotgun,” he said. “Recognize it?”
Cabe nodded slowly, wearily. “A Whitney. That’s Charlie Graybrow’s.”
Outside the door then, Dirker tried the filthy knob and it was locked.
Cabe stood there next to him, a wild and phobic terror threading through him. Whatever was in there… whatever gave off that noxious, eldritch stink…Jesus, it just could not be good, could not be.
Dirker handed his shotgun to Cabe and picked up the Whitney. He placed the barrel against the lock and pulled the trigger. The knob and its housing were blown into the room, leaving a smoking black hole.
Dirker kicked the door open.
And they stepped into hell itself.
As they passed through the doorway, Cabe’s lantern casting bobbing, phantasmal shadows, a black wave of fetid heat actually pushed them back a step or two. And the smell…a nauseous effluvium that was more than just organic decay and dissolution, but a noisome, contaminated stench that made their knees weak and sent their stomachs bubbling into their throats. It reminded Cabe instantly of a field hospital he’d been in during the war. A reconverted barn in Tennessee that stank of putrid battle dressings, amputated limbs, and gangrenous flesh. This was like that, a huge and polluted stink of pain, disease, and vomit.
Steeling themselves, they stepped in farther.
There was no furniture. The flowery cream wallpaper was spattered and stained with whorls and dripping patches of old blood. Even the ceiling was splashed with it…like some insane butcher had been casting buckets of the stuff around. The floor was wet and seething with more of that crawling gray fungus, but here it was matted and webby and seeping with black ichor and bloody mucilage. A gelatinous stew of rot and bones and gnawed limbs, several inches deep. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere, all covered with flies and beetles and creeping worms. A few soiled, peeled and jawless skulls stared up at them.
“Dear Christ in Heaven,” Dirker managed and his voice would barely come.
Because they saw what brooded here, what Cobb had brought back from Missouri.
It might have been a woman once, but now it was a chained ghoul with wet, leprous flesh, flesh that was pitted with gaping holes and hung from the bones beneath like a windblown shroud. That flesh seemed to move and wriggle with pulsing currents, but that was just the action of parasites and vermin nesting within. The skullish head was capped by long, greasy hair latticed with cobwebs and the deathmask face was shriveled and withered, jellied green eyes bleeding tears of slime.
It made a low, bleating sound, holding out hands that were more skeleton that flesh, the skin hanging from them in strips and loops. The fingers were sticks ending in long, curled nails that seemed to coil and convolute in the air. It began to slither in their direction, sending ripples through that pestilential sea of organic profusion. The skin had long ago melted away from the pulsating face, the nose just a hollow and those mottled gums on full display, gums set with gnarled, discolored teeth.
It came forward with a slinking, creeping motion, mewling now like a drowning kitten, a pustulant, writhing worm.
Cabe and Dirker started shooting.
Shells were flying and the air was suddenly filled with smoke and the bitter smell of gunpowder. They fired and fired, reloaded and fired again. And did not stop until that squirming human jellyfish was blown into fragments.
Then they left the room.
They shut the door.
Down the corridor, both trembling, Cabe tossed the lantern against the wall and it shattered, flames licking up over the walls.
Outside, both men fell in the snow, gasping and gagging.
It was ten minutes later when they stood before the church.
The bell had stopped ringing now.
They stood near the high wrought-iron gate that surrounded the church, came right up to the steps. The uprights were rusted and tall and lethally sharp. They rose up like spears.
“Well,” Dirker said, “ I guess no one else if left, Tyler. Just you and me.”
Cabe said, “Let’s show these fucks what a pissed-off Yankee and a Johnny Reb lunatic are capable of.”
Dirker laughed. Couldn’t help himself. It just came rolling out of him and soon enough tears were rolling down his face and Cabe was laughing, too, and how damn good it felt to laugh.
