“The bell,” Harmony said, “Dear God…”
Dirker was telling himself that it meant nothing really. That maybe the wind had snagged it, but he knew better. Hands were pulling that rope and he could only imagine why.
The snow was flying thick and fine like powdered glass, dusting the buildings with a sound like blown sand. It whipped and swirled and drifted, lashing at the men in the streets, doing everything it could to drive them back, back. But they refused to be driven. They came on with shotguns in their fists and a ragged, squinting resolve in their eyes.
Suddenly, Fitch stopped dead, his rifle brought to bear. “What…what was that?” he said and the fear was thick in his voice like ice clogging a well-rope. “Over there.”
Dirker looked quick, frigid wind blasting him in the face. He saw a suggestion of a form swallowed by the storm. Could have been something. Maybe.
“It had green eyes,” Fitch said weakly. “Glowing green eyes…”
But Dirker would hear none of it.
They pushed on past sagging houses and a livery barn with a three-foot drift of snow pushed up against the door like a wave. Next to it was a larger, two-story log building. It had been some kind of community house or saloon at one time.
Dirker tried the door.
It was open.
He kicked it in all the way and the five of them came through with their guns held high and ready to spit rounds. But what they saw stopped them dead. It literally froze them in their tracks.
A couple kerosene lamps were blazing away. Seven or eight people were in there, pushed up to the dusty bar or sprawled in chairs at dirty, cobwebbed tables.
“Afternoon, gents,” a fellow behind the bar said. He was a heavy, rotund man with a Quaker-style beard lacking mustache. There were glasses set up on the bar top before him. Using a rag, he was cleaning them out. “Pull up a chair.”
Dirker and Harmony looked at each other while the Danites formed a defensive ring, just ready to draw on anything that so much as breathed. Behind them, wind rattled the door, fingers of snow snaking across the floor.
Besides the bartender, there were three men at the bar, a few others at the tables. There was nothing exceptional about any of them. A little boy with flat, empty eyes was in the corner tossing what looked like a ball into the air and catching it. Except it was no ball, but a skull. A human skull.
“Wanna play?” he said, giggling.
Dirker ignored him. “Where’s Cobb?” he said. “James Lee Cobb.”
The others just looked at each other and started to laugh, as if the sheriff was asking where Jesus was, on account he wanted to buy him a beer. When the laughter died away, Dirker saw a little girl come from the back room. She was no more than seven or eight…and completely naked. She hopped up on the bar in a very childlike, carefree manner. Sat there, her legs swinging. She looked upon Dirker and there was no innocence in those eyes, just a leering, hungry depravity. But what was truly strange was the elaborate tattooing of her belly and chest. Dirker couldn’t be sure what he was looking at in the dim light, but it looked like…intertwined serpents and weird figures, configurations and distorted magical symbols.
As he looked on them, the illustrations seemed to move.
He looked away.
A man at one of the tables with a Confederate hat and an officer’s coat patched with spreading blotches of mildew, said, “Where’s your manners, barkeep? Offer these here fellas a drink…”
“Course,” the bartender said.
His other hand came up from behind the bar…except it was elongated, the fingers spidery and narrow. Where the nails should have been there were long black claws curved like potato hooks. Smiling, the bartender used one of the claws to slit his wrist. Then, most casually, he began filling a glass with his blood.
“Blasphemy,” Harmony finally said, breaking that bleak silence. “A cancer on the face of God…”
That got them laughing again.
About that time, the sound of gunfire rose up from somewhere in the town and Dirker knew the others had made contact, too. That the party was finally underway.
The man in the Confederate hat began to grin and a spidery tangle of shadows spread over his face. When he spoke his voice was low and grating. “Now, you boys don’t really think you’re getting out of here alive, do you?” he said, his teeth suddenly long and sharp.
And there was a weird electricity in the air, an odd sharp stink of something like ozone and fresh blood. There was subtle motion and a wet, sliding sound.
“Honey,” the man said to the little girl, “these men like your pictures, show ‘em how the lines meet…”
And as Dirker watched, those weird and diabolic tattoos began to move. Maybe it was the flesh beneath, but suddenly everything was in motion. There was a rending, popping sound as muscles stretched and ligaments relocated to accommodate new and feral anatomies. The girl’s chest thrust out in a cage of bones, her limbs going long and rawboned. Thousands of fine gray hairs began to erupt from her skin until you could no longer see the skin. It looked, if anything, like millions of metal filings drawn to some central magnet. Her jaw pushed out into a snout, her nose flattened and her ears did likewise, pressing against that narrow skull of whipping locks and going high and sharp. Her eyes became green and slitted, her brow heavy, the skull beneath grotesquely exaggerated.
She was suddenly more wolf than girl.
Her lips pulled back in a snarl, her teeth sharp as icepicks.
Dirker heard himself mutter, “Shit.”
All he could think of was a childhood story of how Circe the witch had changed Odysseus’s men into beasts.
And around him…they were all changing.
Flesh became smoke that was blown by secret, cabalistic winds and rivers moved by mystical currents. The girl suddenly leaped into the air, five, six feet until it seemed she would brush the rafters overhead, and then she came right down on Sellers. And this before he could even jerk a trigger or think of doing so. He and the girl-thing went down in a thrashing, writhing heap. Her mouth was wrapped around his face, those teeth sunk right to the bone. You could hear his screams echoing down the shaft of her throat.
But nobody had time to look at that.
For as the girl made her move, so did the others.
The man in the Confederate hat rose up in a flurry of teeth and claws and growling and was almost on Harmony when his shotgun went off, pitching the man backwards. Suddenly, everyone was shooting. Shooting at shapes and forms and monstrosities from some primal nightmare.
Dirker brought his Greener up and blasted the bartender. The impact blew his shoulder to a bloody mist and threw him against dusty glasses and discarded bottles. There was a crashing and shattering and he came right back up again, his face gone lupine and his teeth bared to bisect human flesh.
Dirker gave him another round that knocked him away and then that little boy was hopping in his direction. Dirker gave him the butt of the Greener in the face, driving him to the floor, broke it open and ejected shells, fed two more in, snapped it close. The bartender was up on the bar by then, his shirt split wide open from the pulsing, bestial muscularity beneath.
As he leapt, Dirker gave him both barrels.
The buckshot blew his snarling head into a spray of bone and blood. He flipped back over the bar and stayed down this time. As Dirker whirled around, the boy hit him hard and put him down, those jaws opening like the mouth of a tiger and coming in for the kill. The Greener still in his hands, he jammed the barrel lengthwise into that mouth, claws tearing great ruts through his coat and shirt and into his chest below. With a scream, he pushed the beast away from him, flipping it off him.
The man in the Confederate hat had Harmony.
His huge, clawed hands were pressed to either side of the Mormon’s head…and he was lifted an easy two feet off the floor, rivers of blood running from his ears and eyes as his skull was crushed. Then the teeth darted forward and his face was literally stripped from the bone beneath.
Dirker saw the beast standing there, Harmony’s face hanging from its jaws like a bloody scalp.
