Skin Medicine (39 page)

That smell was still thick around him, but there was another smell, too. A repellent fetor of putrescent meat and spilled blood. The stink was vaporous and gagging, enough to make him—

Suddenly, without a sound, a shape stepped from a darkened doorway. So very quick and so very silent that Graybrow could barely even register surprise before the Whitney 12-gauge was yanked from his hands and tossed down the hallway.

Feeble light choked with dust motes and a powdery rain of snow illuminated the shape. Graybrow saw it, felt his heart give a jolt of pain. He knew what he was looking at was James Lee Cobb. He knew that, but it took him some time to acclimate himself to the horror.

As it was, he felt faint.

Cobb was tall and cadaverously-thin, a mummy from a sideshow. A sombrero with a short, curled brim was pushed back on his head. The crown was scarved in the skins of desert snakes and set with feathers and the talons of raptors and the teeth of wolves. He wore a poncho of pale hide that was stitched together in a crazy quilt from human pelts. Around his corded throat there were a half-dozen necklaces of human fingers, ears, and teeth. At his waist were a brace of ivory-handled pistols and hatchets. There was a sash from shoulder to gunbelt and it was sewn together from…
faces.
Faces tanned to death masks with the scalps intact.

And it was all dreadful enough…but Cobb’s own face, it was the very worse thing.

The right side was pale and the skin was tight and seamed, barely covering the skull beneath. A single unblinking green eye with a huge, dilated pupil like a translucent moon stared out at Graybrow. But the left side of his face…just gone. Red tendons and pink muscle were stretched obscenely across an exaggerated skull like starving dogs had eaten the good stuff away. There was no eye there, just a black scarified cavity.

Graybrow managed to start breathing again before he passed dead out. “Suppose…suppose I’m in for it now, eh?” he said.

Cobb nodded that fright mask. Lips pulled back from sharp, yellow teeth. “I reckon ye are, friend,” he said in a hissing voice. “I reckon ye are.”

“Don’t suppose I could—”

“Doubt it,” Cobb said. “But since ye came this far, there’s something I’d like ye to see.”

But Graybrow just shook his head. “Don’t think I want to.”

And when Cobb made to grab him, he brought out his hunting knife and buried it right into the devil’s belly. Not that it did him shit-good. Cobb took hold of him with a strength that was amazing. Those clawed hands—the left one was skeletal and skinless—took him by the shoulders and smashed him against the wall until Graybrow went loose as a rag.

The fight had been pounded out of him.

The knife still hanging from his belly, Cobb took hold of Graybrow’s long, white hair and dragged him up the corridor by it. Graybrow swam in and out of consciousness. He could hear the clomp, clomp, clomp of Cobb’s Spanish boots and then he was dumped unceremoniously before a door at the end of the hall. A door covered with old, bloody handprints.

Cobb fished out a key and unlocked it.

Graybrow found himself looking into an abattoir. He heard the clink of chains and smelled spoiled meat and festering carcasses.

Cobb kicked him in there. “I’d like you to meet my mother,” he said and slammed the door shut behind him.

***

Deputy Pete Slade, Elijah Clay, and a trio of miners were going from house to house, killing anything that moved. They heard the shooting and the dying, but Slade held fast that they had a job to do and the others would have to watch out for themselves.

They learned quick enough that the only way you could put the Hide-Hunters down was by blowing their heads apart. After no less than four run-ins with the beasts now, they didn’t aim anywhere else.

But now they were trapped in the streets and things were getting ugly.

The beasts were up on the roofs, watching them and diving down at them when they thought they stood a chance. Green, shining eyes watched from the dark depths of barns and from behind shuttered windows.

“We gotta link up with them others,” Clay said, not frightened really, but surely not at ease. “Ye think, Slade? They’s just too many of them and too few of us.”

Slade knew it was true.

But there was no time for that, not now. For the double-doors of a stable flew open behind them and the townspeople began to flood out en masse. They were a slat-boned, pasty group with sunless faces and gleaming green eyes. But what was probably the most disturbing thing was that they were not dressed in clothing, but hides. Human hides. Hides that included flapping limbs and skinned faces, blowing locks of hair.

It was an appalling thing to see.

To watch them vaulting forward like a vicious pack of wolves, green-eyed and merciless, those spiked jaws snapping and great gouts of drool hanging from those lips. Dressed-out in human skins to boot.

“Kill ‘em!” Slade shouted. “Kill ‘em all!”

They came on in a flurry of sprouting claw and tooth, making yelping and barking sounds like hunting dogs and Slade and his boys began to unload on them with everything they had.

They dropped half a dozen, scattered a dozen more, but the others went right over the top of them, howling and snapping. Two of the miners went down. A third was just gone. Slade sank beneath a throng of four or five biting, chomping children.

Clay knocked them away from him with the butt of his shotgun, gunned down two others, felt claws open up his face and tear into his back, and fought free through his sheer size and bulk. And as he did so, he watched in amazement as the townsfolk rent the bodies of the posse, children stealing away with limbs in their mouths and going straight up the sides of buildings like spiders.

He got out while the getting was good.

***

One of the miners from Slade’s group ran when the attack came. He saw the sheer numbers and knew a fight was out of the question. His name was Rafe Gerard and he was not a coward. The fact that he had come with Dirker to clean this mess up said that he was anything but.

But he had been through both the Mexican War and the War Between the States, and he was surely a man who knew how to stay alive.

And alive he planned on staying.

He kicked through the door of a little house and slid the bolt in place after he was in. A powdering of snow like spilled flour dusted the floor. There was some blood mixed in with it. A set of tracks led right to the hearth and disappeared, as if one of them had escaped up the chimney.

Something Rafe Gerard decided was entirely possible.

He sat with his back against the wall, tried to think this out. Clay was right: They had to link up with the others. So it was pretty much a matter of finding them or waiting for them to find him.

So Gerard sat there, watching the hearth and the front door, the partially-boarded window, the doorway leading into another room. He rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it calmly. Waiting.

That’s when he heard the crying.

A pathetic, pitiful whimpering is what he was thinking. The sort of sound that was designed to yank at the heartstrings of anyone with warm blood in their veins. It worked its melancholy magic on Gerard. For once he’d had a boy, a tawny-haired wonderful little boy who’d perished of influenza one long hard winter. And although he knew that Deliverance was filled with monsters, he could not help but be moved by that sound.

He stepped through the kitchen and into a plain little bedroom at the rear of the house. A bureau. A frame bed. A wash basin. There were droplets of blood spattered up one wall. Above was an attic hatch, more blood smeared on it.

From up there, came the sobbing.

Gerard stood there, not wanting to look, but the human being in him demanding it. He dragged the bed over, stood up on it. The sad little voice was calling for its mother, its mother.

Something cold unfolding in his chest, Gerard slid the hatch aside.

What light spilled in showed him a little boy that was dark with blood. And before Gerard could pull the trigger, memories of his own lost son washing through him, the boy was on him, his teeth in his throat.

And Gerard died as he had lived: violently.

***

Beaten, bruised, and blood-soaked, Sir Tom Ian and Henry Wilcox were all that was left of their little group. The others had been slaughtered by the beasts. And Graybrow had just vanished. As it was, Deputy Wilcox had been badly gashed in the belly and ribs and had lost a lot of blood.

But he would not give in.

Not while there was strength left in him.

Ian and he were investigating a freight office, having followed a blood trail through the snow before it was covered over. Inside, it was pretty much empty. All the furnishings and office utilities long gone. But there was blood on the floor. The bloody prints of children and something wet they had dragged along with them.

There was a door at the back of the office.

It was closed.

“You up to this, mate?” Ian said.

“As up as I’m ever gonna be,” Wilcox admitted, his large frame seeming to sag now as the blood continued to soak through the makeshift bandages wrapped around his torso.

Ian took hold of the tarnished knob, turned it.

Heard commotion, wet tearing sounds.

He threw the door open and saw a cluster of children kneeling on the floor. Their eyes were green, but their bodies naked and hairless. They grinned up at the two men and their teeth were like icicles jutting from those blackened gums. They were clustered around the body of a Danite…maybe Fitch…though it was really hard to tell, such was the degree of mutilation.

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.