Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (14 page)

“He’s gone.”

They saw the last of the horsemen
clatter out into the melee, heard pistols and yells and screams, and above all,
the unspeakably fast boom boom boom of a rifle, different from the first. It
was smaller, but not like any repeating rifle either of them had ever heard.
The shots were so close together that the sound became a constant roar, and the
Rider lost track of their number.

“Jesus,” said Belden. “What’s that?”

The Rider silently prayed Kabede
would find the shooter, though it sounded as if they had ridden out into a
storm of gunfire.

Something grabbed the Rider’s
shoeless foot and he glanced down to see one of the severed hands closing and
opening on the top of his foot, trying to grip the cuff of his pants. With an
involuntary shiver he swiftly kicked, and sent the spidery thing off into the
crowd, still gripping his stocking.

There was a cracking sound as the
weight of the pressing undead mob broke the top fence rail and the zombies
tumbled into the stable and began to crawl at them, only to be stomped down by
their fellows behind. It was like the stampede all over again.

“Come on!” he shouted, and continued
toward the far end of the stable.

There were still dozens of horses
there, and Belden paused long enough to throw open a few stall gates, freeing
the excited animals, putting them between themselves and their pursuers.

As they reached the end of the row,
the Rider found his onager. He stopped and swung open its gate, rushing into
the pen and rifling through its pack.

“What the hell are you doing?”
Belden nearly shrieked, watching the panicked horses rearing, kicking down the
zombies and being pulled down and overpowered themselves. One zombie clung to a
horse’s powerful neck only to be thrashed through the wooden wall.

The roof groaned and shifted
dangerously.

Between the stomping hooves of the
horses, a bare, detached leg came toward them, knee bending, foot slapping the
earth, like some blind caterpillar inching along a branch. Belden took aim and
blasted it back into the tangle of horses and zombies.

The Rider took the scroll case off
the onager’s cantle and opened a parfleche hanging from its side. He worked
swiftly, then tied the parfleche shut, shrugged through the carrying loop of
the scroll case and patted the animal’s neck.

“Good luck, old friend,” he murmured
in its scarred ear. Then he went to the fence.

He and Belden leapt over the top
rail and hit the ground running, the downward slope of the trail granting them
momentum.

Behind them, one of the support
struts snapped and the stable roof partly collapsed with a tremendous sound.
That would detain their pursuers a bit, but not for long.

The Rider gripped Belden’s arm,
slowing him.

“Wait, Dick. I want you to tell me
about the nightmare you had.”

Belden answered in a low, breathless
whisper, “Is this the right time for that?”

“You said it was about bugs, and
then those things came. We can’t ignore anything and we might not get another
chance. Tell me. Quick.”

“Uh…well, that Polack that died. I
saw his grave. It was open and full of fire, and he was layin’ all burned up in
his coffin. There were bugs spilling out. Running from the fire I guess. And
there was…a lady.”

“What kind of a lady?”

“Pale. Real pale, and young. She had
eyes almost like a bird’s. She was…there was a light in her. This is gonna
sound strange but, she wasn’t the kind of woman you’d try to…well, she was like
a mother, or a sister. No…”

The Rider had seen a woman very much
like this. One of the angels of the Lord. He had spoken to her in a hotel in
Delirium Tremens, when the Lord had been poised to destroy the Molech
worshipers there. He had seen her even before that, when he’d attempted to
ascend into the Seventh Heaven and been cast out.

“What did the lady in the dream do?”

“Nothing. She stood over the Polack’s
grave, and the bugs went around her, like they wouldn’t come near her. Then she
pointed.”

“At what?”

“At the grave, or…”

“Or?”

“At the Polack’s mouth.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then the Polack opened his mouth
and the blade of a saber shot straight up out of it, like somebody below had
stuck it in the back of his head. That’s when I woke up.”

They cleared the boundaries of the
post and slipped down the curving path to the post cemetery, a small collection
of plank markers squared off by a low border of stacked stones.

A single figure, all in black, was
there, apparently digging.

What did Belden’s dream mean? No
doubt the angel had been trying to tell him something, but what?

The Rider dared a look over his
shoulder, and saw a mass of zombies, twelve or more shambling after them. The
rest were either freeing themselves from the stable or converging on the
horsemen.

Belden raised his pistol to fire
back at them, but the Rider pushed his arm down.

“Don’t waste it. Come on.”

They ran down the rest of the steep
path, distancing themselves from the mob, and fell against the plank markers
panting.

The figure in the graveyard turned
towards them. He was dressed in an embroidered black vest, a wine red shirt and
black pants, high black boots and a black hat. A double breasted frock coat lay
draped over one of the grave markers. He wore a pair of black leather
gauntlets, fanciful beaded Mexican-style
calaveras
with sparkling eyes adorning the cuffs. A silver pistol glinted across his
stomach, and there were silvery medallions adorning his neck. Like Jacobi, he
was bald, without eyebrows, and very pale. He planted the spade he’d been
toiling with into the earth and leaned on it. He smiled tightly at them. His
eyes appeared as black as his clothes. There was something protruding from the
corner of his mouth, small and white, a stick, like a cigarette, or a root.

From the looks of it, he had been
unearthing one of the graves. He stood beside it. It yawned, a black mouth.
Something pale lay within, the early evening shadows obscuring it.

“Hello there,” he said around the
stick, in a clipped Dutch accent. “I hoped you at least would come this far. I’ve
been drawing your bath, Rider,” he said, gesturing to the open grave with a
grin.

“DeKorte,” said the Rider, standing.
“Known as Het Bot. Betrayer of the Amsterdam Enclave.”

DeKorte frowned slightly.

“Have we met, Rider?”

“No. But I know your name,
moser.”

“How did you learn that, I wonder?”
His expression darkened. “The bones of the dead of all the enclaves said
nothing of you knowing our names. But you know mine.”

“As I knew Jacobi of Berlin. As I
know Gans of Owernah, up on the ridge back there.”

DeKorte cocked his head,
animal-like. “Who is that
zwarte
you
picked up in Escopeta?”

“Never mind,” said the Rider
quickly. “Why’d you want me here so badly?”

DeKorte regained his earlier
superior smile.

A driving hail of bullets had met
their desperate horse charge, breaking it almost before the last man got five
feet from the stable. The first four men in the advance fell in the initial
stunning volley. The sniper had evidently switched rifles. He fired with less
precision, but made up for it in volume. Zombies, horses, and men alike stopped
the shooter’s bullets.

The planned assault on the ridge
proved impossible. The undead swarmed tightly together, and of the thirteen
riders who burst from the stable, very swiftly only six remained.

Six men on bleeding, screaming
horses, fighting to keep from being thrown by their animals as the crowd all
around them reached out and bit or tore their hides away beneath them, bit
their legs, tried to pull them from the saddle.

The shooter paused, either reloading
his incredible rifle or simply admiring the chaos from his hidden vantage
point.

Kabede watched as one man fought
with a severed woman’s arm that curled around his neck, choking him.

Hale, the first man out of the
stable hadn’t gone more than a few yards when the sharpshooter on the ridge
shot his mount out from under him. He’d run into the guardhouse to take cover.

Kabede had it easiest. Wherever the
Rod of Aaron touched a zombie, they fell inert. But there were too many, and he’d
already suffered cuts and bites to his legs, bloodying his white robes. His
horse was shuddering beneath him. Finally he slid from the saddle and spinning
the staff in his hands before him, much as his brother had taught him as a boy,
he lashed his way through the creatures until a clear path lay to the
guardhouse. He made for it, a black Moses parting the lunging undead like a
torrid sea.

A downpour of bullets came at him,
kicking up the dirt all around so that he had to shield his eyes with his hand
as he ran.

He ducked into the guardhouse just
as one of the bullets tore off the heel of his boot.

Hale lay on his elbows, bleeding,
firing out the door.

“Watch out!” he yelled as Kabede
pushed himself up.

Hale’s gun barked and the head of a
leering, bearded old man which had been clinging to Kabede’s robes by its teeth
blew back out the door, trailing its red and ragged vertebrae like a tail. They
pushed the door shut and heard it beating itself against the wood.

“They’re killin’ us,” Hale panted. “We
can’t get up that ridge.”

“No,” Kabede agreed.

He looked about furtively, and saw
the back wall where the Rider had sat earlier, the drops of his blood still in
the dirt.

“Lend me your pistol, and lock
yourself in that empty cell there.”

Hale stared at him.

“You’re serious?”

“Yes. Trust me,” he said.

Hale shrugged and handed over his
Remington.

“Whatever happens,” said Kabede,
checking the loads, “don’t come out. Don’t try anything.”

Hale nodded and rushed into the
first cell. Kabede kicked the door closed with a clang and stalked to the back
of the guardhouse. He passed the cell where Manx had died, where the thing that
had burst from him crouched beneath the cot. He dragged his foot across the
Elder Sign the Rider had drawn in the dusty floor and putting his back to the
wall, he sat down.

He drew his dagger and held it up to
the directions, intoning the names of the archangels, then drove the tip into
the floor and began to hastily describe a Solomonic seal.

“Joe,” Belden whispered anxiously.

The Rider looked to his friend. He’d
almost forgotten he was here. Belden was looking back at the steadily
approaching figures behind them.

The Rider turned back to DeKorte and
raised his eyebrows.

“Are they going to be a problem?”

“Not at all,” DeKorte said. “Stop.”

He gestured at them, offhandedly, and
the twelve undead marchers ceased moving. “Let’s keep it interesting for them.
Come my friends, gather around.”

He waved his fingers in a way that
the Rider saw was meant to look casual. What was he using to control them? The
Rider couldn’t tell. He looked for rings on DeKorte’s fingers, a ward or fetish
clutched in his hand— anything.

The twelve creatures that had been
men, women, and children spread out in perfect unison and stepped around the
perimeter of the little graveyard until they surrounded it, evenly spaced. Then
they simply stood staring, close-mouthed, milky eyes staring impassively.

The sun was sinking and the
graveyard was washed in blood.

Belden still had his pistol in his
hand, and he raised it, cocked it, and aimed at DeKorte.

“If you’re responsible for these
things, you’d best put a stop to it right now, mister.”

“Kill me and they will tear you both
to pieces,” DeKorte said, unconcerned, even grinning around the root in his
mouth in the face of Belden’s gun.

Belden slowly lowered the pistol.

“Good choice, Dick,” the Rider said.
“I think he meant it.”

DeKorte nodded.

“You were going to tell me how the
zwarte
knows all our names, Rider.”

The Rider said nothing, but clenched
his eyes when DeKorte’s smile widened.

“So he does know our names. Who is
he, Rider? How did a black savage come to know about us?”

The Rider glared, but said nothing
still.

“It doesn’t really matter,” DeKorte
sighed. “Soon he’ll be dead.”

“So what if you know their names?”
Belden whispered to the Rider.

“Names have power,” DeKorte answered
for him. “Power over life and death. Name a thing, and you control that thing.
That’s why the members of our Order took on
nom
de plumes
, you see.”