bloody smear on it and pulled himself up by the ledge, his back to the blizzard.
His torso was blasted clean open in a burning, smoking valley. Flames were licking at his poncho from contact burns and the stink was of cremated flesh and burning hair.
But what froze Cabe up was that Cobb had no internal organs. His body cavity was filled with a chittering and crawling life. Locusts. Thousands upon thousands of locusts. And then Cobb began to laugh with a high, weird cackling that rose up and joined the gonging bell in a hammering wall of noise.
Cabe let out a cry as the locusts fled from Cobb’s torso and filled the air in a buzzing, busy swarm, descending on him like he were a field to be stripped. They heaped over him, biting and scratching and droning and Cabe was half out of his mind, clawing madly at the green, piping carpet of insects. They chewed and nipped, got under his clothes, tried to press into his ears and mouth, nostrils.
They would strip him to bone.
Cabe, knowing it was now or never, threw himself at Cobb with everything he had. He struck the grinning, cackling bastard, struck him real hard. So hard Cobb lost his balance. He fell back over the ledge of the belfry with a manic, pained barking sound. His arms bicycled in the freezing, snowy air…and then he fell, spinning end over end into the blizzard.
He let out an enraged, piercing shriek.
The insects curled-up brown like dead leaves and fell from Cabe. He leaned against the ledge, looking down as the snow let up for a moment and he could see Cobb below.
He was impaled on the fence.
Three blood-slicked uprights were jutting from his chest a good fifteen inches if not more and he was stuck sure as a bug on a pin. He contorted and fought, his arms whipping and his mouth howling. But that just forced him farther down on the uprights.
Iron, Cabe found himself thinking, iron.
The uprights were iron and he had read that the Devil feared iron for it signified earth. That’s why people hung iron horseshoes over their doorways. Iron was a basic element of earth and an enemy of demons and the discarnate.
Cabe felt the entire church shaking beneath him as Cobb screamed in what seemed a dozen different voices…men, women, children.
Cabe half-climbed, half-fell down the stairs. He dragged himself through the door and Clay was still there, still waiting. Together they made it out of the church.
Cobb was no longer moving.
He had withered into something like a brown, emaciated scarecrow that was flaking into motes.
The church began to tremble and shudder, swaying this way and that as if it were trying to pull itself up from its foundation. There was a sudden groaning, crashing noise and it fell into itself in a heap of lumber. The bell came down last with a final etching gong.
Cabe and Clay were out in the streets making for their horses by then.
Cobb’s good eye flickered open, the socket filled with maggots. His blackened, blistered face peeled open in a roaring shriek. The evil blew out of him in a yellow, searching mist, erupting from dozens of holes and slits, kicking up tornados of snow and smelling of bone pits, brackish swamps, and human excrement. There was a flash as if of lightening, a rumbling, a moaning, and the ground shook and the sky went suddenly black as something like a million buzzing flies rocketed upwards…and that was it.
Cobb was done.
Cabe and Clay found their horses, cut the others free.
Then they rode out of Deliverance, neither of them speaking for a time. When they were well away and night was coming on dark and fierce, they stopped.
“Place’ll have to burned to the ground,” Clay said, “come spring. Then the ground’ll need to be salted.”
“Suspect so,” Cabe said.
They rode on.
Epilogue
Cabe didn’t wake until the next morning.
He woke in Dr. West’s surgery. Woke on a couch that was at once comfortable and comfortless. His back was sore and he was stiff and seemed to hurt just about everywhere.
Elijah Clay was sitting in a chair near a cabinet of chemicals. His head was bandaged and his arm was in some sort of sling. He stroked his long gray beard, smiled with all those bad teeth. “Looks like ye’ll live,” he said. “I suspected as much.”
“It…it really happened?” Cabe found himself saying.
“It did. Now, we’d best forget it.” He stood and pulled on his smelly old buffalo coat very carefully. “Ye done good, boy. I was proud to be at yer side. Now I gotta go. I got kin in them hills, don’t like leavin’ ‘em alone. Ye’ll see me come spring, then we’ll burn that hell-town flat.”
He left and Dr. West came in, giving him a cursory examination, but asking no questions. From the look on his face, Cabe could tell he already knew. Clay must’ve told him about it all. And that was fine.
He left and Janice Dirker came in.
She sat by Cabe and held his hand. She was dressed in a black velvet dress, very somber and understated. A dress of mourning. Her lovely brown eyes were puffy from crying.
“I’m glad you lived,” was all she could say.
Cabe squeezed her hand, not able to take his eyes off her. He wondered if he could love her and figured he already did. Knew that though he had joined Dirker out of duty and new found friendship, there had been something else that had driven him. And Janice Dirker was that something.
But looking on her, he was seized by a sudden melancholia.
He thought of the people he had met in Whisper Lake, the friends he had made. Jackson Dirker. There was a warmth and a sadness acquainted with his memory now. They had come full circle since the war. Cabe was no longer bitter and angry, always looking for a fight. He felt calm now, easy, accepting. He didn’t think he’d be able to hunt men anymore. And Charles Graybrow? Oh, that crazy smart-mouthed Indian. Damn, he was going to miss him.
Janice said, “My husband…was his death…unpleasant?”
“He died in some pain,” Cabe admitted. “But it did not last. I was with him…with him at the end.”
Janice nodded. “He spoke highly of you. He said…he said you had known each other in the war. He would not tell me anymore. Can you?”
“Yes,” Cabe said. “I think so. I think I can do just that. I’m gonna tell you all about Jackson Dirker, ma’am, the finest and bravest man it has ever been my pleasure to know…”
