hoarse, hopeless, keening sound mixed with coughs.
I looked around at them. There were less than a dozen of us left. Normally, any commander would surrender now, but there was no one to accept our surrender, no one to give us quarter. Surely, not the Hag. There was no mercy there, I knew, for I had looked into her shining eyes.
“John, we have to kill the Hag,” I said.
The Preacher looked at me and nodded.
Around the corner, back where the lobby would be now, the lights were wrinkling the air around us again. Looking up, I could see threads of liquid amber and rosy pink and glaring orange. They reflected in the dying smoke and steady raindrops.
At my side, Monika leaned up on her tiptoes, I bent my lips to her and we kissed. Holly came to stand behind me, as always.
The Preacher had his axe out, and he stepped down the corridor toward the lobby. The corridor was shorn in half and full of debris. It made treacherous footing in the wet and dark night. I opened my mouth to protest, to tell him I would go first, but he was already moving forward. The words died in my throat. It was very likely I would get my turn at the front, I knew. We worked our way along the ruined corridor, a cliff into a deadly pit at our feet, ready to swallow us up. His axe’s black blades shone where there was no light to reflect. My saber glimmered faintly as I took my position behind him.
Things were coming down the half corridor now, around the bend up ahead. Now that our inner doors and barricades were gone, there was nothing stopping them, these abominations the Hag was making. They were worse now, now that she had her lantern and she was in the open air of a hellish storm on All Hallows Eve. Her power, I reasoned, was at its peak.
The first thing to come around the bend was the X-ray machine. It took me a moment to recognize it. That strange, elongated arm like an ostrich’s neck with a wide unblinking eye at the tip. The handles on the side of the projector had grown into curved blades. It didn’t walk, so much as dragged itself with appendages grown from the sides of the base. Its power cord now served as a whipping black tail.
It was the first time I’d seen a machine shifted. Always before the changelings had been animal or plant, something alive, but now the rules had changed. Heat emanated from the projector, and I felt the hot kiss of the beam as it touch my cheek. Somewhere in the back of my mind I worried, briefly, about radiation and the retinas of my eyes if the beam were to shine into my head, even for a second. The Preacher cried out something, I think it was something about Joshua, and then he went in hacking with his flashing axe. I hung back, not out of fear of the machine but of his axe. One does not get too close behind a furiously wielded double-bladed axe.
The tail was the first thing to go, it whipped out and wrapped around his ankle, but only for a moment before it was severed and flopping. Then the projector itself darted forward, like the beak of a dinosaur. It smashed into his shoulder and spun him around. I smelled burning cloth. But he was ready for it, he was good. He grabbed the metal neck and hacked wildly at the joint. A normal weapon could never have cut through the aluminum skin of it, but his axe was anything but normal. He had worked his way down to the vital wires in three strokes. The head whipped violently and then the hot lashing beams stopped and the head came off. Still the heavy base of it thrashed horribly.
“Help me,” he grunted and I rushed forward and we heaved it over the edge to smash down into the basement. The oak tree reached over and groped blindly for the thrashing machine, and crushed it. Soon there was silence again down there.
The next things to come around the bend were a pack of bulbous creatures like black jellyfish. There were a lot of them, and they rolled at us like beach balls. But these beach balls had fangs and hard white eyes.
The Preacher took the brunt of it, but some got past his kicks and his swinging axe. Those that got past were left to me and Holly and Vance, we fell on them and stabbed and chopped them up. Once they were punctured, which was hard to do, as they were tough, a mix of air and vile liquid sprayed out. This process reduced them to flopping, fish-like things. It was only when I caught the smell of them, that powerful rubbery stink. I knew then what it was we were fighting.
“Tires,” said Vance in a wondering tone. “Those were tires from the cars out in the lot.”
Panting, I nodded. I dared to let my hopes grow, for we were winning, we were beating everything she could throw at us. It had to take some length of time for her to make these abominations. The Preacher was good, better than I had any right to hope. But I could tell he was getting tired, that he could not keep this pace up forever. Soon, it would be my turn at the front, after something got him. I thought of telling him to take a breather, to let me take the point for a while, but I knew without asking that he would refuse. I knew the bloodlust he had in his eye. I had felt it myself. When you wielded one of these shadowy weapons made from the very stuff of the shifting, it was hard to quit fighting while there was a fight to be had.
We followed the Preacher, but had only advanced a few more steps, perhaps we were half-way to the bend now, when the next horror came into view. This one made us all gasp and I heard a wail of despair from behind me, but wasn’t sure who made the sound. It could have been any of us.
What stood before us was Jimmy Vanton. He wasn’t quite the same anymore, however. He was dead, of course, and he had been melted together with that shotgun of his. His arm ended just past the elbow and turned into the barrel and firing mechanism of a twelve-gauge shotgun. He raised it slowly, but not slowly enough. The Preacher’s downward stroke lopped off that monstrous fused arm of his, but not before he got off a booming shot.
The sizzling lead spray reached out like a hand, past the Preacher, past me, over Holly Nelson’s ducking head, and caught Nick Hackler full in the face and chest. He fell back with the shock of it, dead before his eyes could close, dead before he hit the cheap dirty carpet of the hallway. I glanced down into his dead eyes for second and thought of those awful squirrel sausages he’d been so proud of.
Then the Preacher’s axe took off the fused arm with the shotgun and the metal barrel crashed to the floor. The bleeding stub flailed, but the Preacher kept Nick back with his left hand. I saw then he had his Bible in that hand, pressed against Nick’s chest. He lifted the axe high again.
“I pass judgment upon thee and thine and cast this thing back into the pit from whence it came!” he cried out. His voice rolled out over us all. The axe removed Nick’s lolling head with a single clean stroke.
We pushed the whole mess over the side and took five more steps forward.
The thing that got the Preacher came next. It was a steel beast, a massive thing with whipping cords and no arms, but it had two legs of round smooth metal. It rattled and clattered and farted blue smoke as it approached. Despite the strange configuration, I knew what it was right away, I had spent too many summers looking at just such creatures, repairing them, to not know one now. It was the contents of a car’s engine compartment, all assembled together into a nightmarish configuration.
It stumped forward and appeared to have no weapons, but very soon its plan of attack became very clear. It would simply push us off into the pit that was now filled with the tree and the flopping remains of a dozen other horrors. It must have weighed near a thousand pounds and the floor sagged under its weight.
The Preacher and I tackled it, grunting, but it was like children tackling a giant. Spark plug wires lashed about and sought to wrap around our necks. The battery opened up chambers and gouted acid.
“Vance, get over here! Heave all at once now!” I shouted and Vance put his shoulder against it. It took another step, ignoring us, and crushed down on Vance’s toes. Vance howled. He struggled but his foot was pinned under those round metal legs-they were exhaust pipes, I realized in a blurry moment.
We heaved together and it shifted off-balance a fraction, and then rocked back.
“That’s it,” gasped the Preacher, straining purple. “Rock it.”
We did as he said and the spark wires whipped harder. Holly cut at the wires with her knife when they wrapped around our necks or wrists.
Vance and I managed to jump back, but the Preacher went with it. The thing had managed to wrap too many wires around him, and they went over in a lover’s embrace.
“John!” I cried out. And then he crashed down into the basement. I only had time to hope he had gotten on top of it. It weighed so much more, perhaps he had ridden it down, instead of the other way around. It was his only hope for living.
