Skin Medicine (40 page)

Cabe stood there next to him, a wild and phobic terror threading through him. Whatever was in there…whatever gave off that noxious, eldritch stink…Jesus, it just could not be good, could not be.

Dirker handed his shotgun to Cabe and picked up the Whitney. He placed the barrel against the lock and pulled the trigger. The knob and its housing were blown into the room, leaving a smoking black hole.

Dirker kicked the door open.

And they stepped into hell itself.

As they passed through the doorway, Cabe’s lantern casting bobbing, phantasmal shadows, a black wave of fetid heat actually pushed them back a step or two. And the smell…a nauseous effluvium that was more than just organic decay and dissolution, but a noisome, contaminated stench that made their knees weak and sent their stomachs bubbling into their throats. It reminded Cabe instantly of a field hospital he’d been in during the war. A reconverted barn in Tennessee that stank of putrid battle dressings, amputated limbs, and gangrenous flesh. This was like that, a huge and polluted stink of pain, disease, and vomit.

Steeling themselves, they stepped in farther.

There was no furniture. The flowery cream wallpaper was spattered and stained with whorls and dripping patches of old blood. Even the ceiling was splashed with it…like some insane butcher had been casting buckets of the stuff around. The floor was wet and seething with more of that crawling gray fungus, but here it was matted and webby and seeping with black ichor and bloody mucilage. A gelatinous stew of rot and bones and gnawed limbs, several inches deep. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere, all covered with flies and beetles and creeping worms. A few soiled, peeled and jawless skulls stared up at them.

“Dear Christ in Heaven,” Dirker managed and his voice would barely come.

Because they saw what brooded here, what Cobb had brought back from Missouri.

It might have been a woman once, but now it was a chained ghoul with wet, leprous flesh, flesh that was pitted with gaping holes and hung from the bones beneath like a windblown shroud. That flesh seemed to move and wriggle with pulsing currents, but that was just the action of parasites and vermin nesting within. The skullish head was capped by long, greasy hair latticed with cobwebs and the deathmask face was shriveled and withered, jellied green eyes bleeding tears of slime.

It made a low, bleating sound, holding out hands that were more skeleton that flesh, the skin hanging from them in strips and loops. The fingers were sticks ending in long, curled nails that seemed to coil and convolute in the air. It began to slither in their direction, sending ripples through that pestilential sea of organic profusion. The skin had long ago melted away from the pulsating face, the nose just a hollow and those mottled gums on full display, gums set with gnarled, discolored teeth.

It came forward with a slinking, creeping motion, mewling now like a drowning kitten, a pustulant, writhing worm.

Cabe and Dirker started shooting.

Shells were flying and the air was suddenly filled with smoke and the bitter smell of gunpowder. They fired and fired, reloaded and fired again. And did not stop until that squirming human jellyfish was blown into fragments.

Then they left the room.

They shut the door.

Down the corridor, both trembling, Cabe tossed the lantern against the wall and it shattered, flames licking up over the walls.

Outside, both men fell in the snow, gasping and gagging.

***

It was ten minutes later when they stood before the church.

The bell had stopped ringing now.

They stood near the high wrought-iron gate that surrounded the church, came right up to the steps. The uprights were rusted and tall and lethally sharp. They rose up like spears.

“Well,” Dirker said, “ I guess no one else if left, Tyler. Just you and me.”

Cabe said, “Let’s show these fucks what a pissed-off Yankee and a Johnny Reb lunatic are capable of.”

Dirker laughed. Couldn’t help himself. It just came rolling out of him and soon enough tears were rolling down his face and Cabe was laughing, too, and how damn good it felt to laugh.

“I didn’t even know you
could
laugh,” Cabe said.

Dirker’s laughing became a coughing and a rasping. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sure I can,” he managed, “it’s just that I’m usually alone and laughing at myself.”

That got them going again and they reeled like drunken men, slapping each other on the backs until it finally died out and was replaced by a somber silence. The silence of the wind and snow and eternity.

“Sounds like I missed the party,” a voice said. “Next time, ye all invite me, hear?”

Elijah Clay came waltzing out of the storm, a pistol in each hand. “And here I thought I was the last one.”

“I never thought I’d be glad to see you, you goddamn hillbilly,” Cabe said.

Clay grinned. “Now mind yer manners, boy. I’m a-hear to save yer bacon.”

“The others?” Dirker asked.

But Clay just shook his head.

Together then, they went up the steps. The double-doors were locked, but Clay hit them with his massive shoulder and they flew wide open. Then the three of them charged right in, moving low, with shotguns in their hands.

Pews.

They saw the rows of pews, many of which had been busted into kindling. The altar was occupied by an immense scalp rack. There had to be fifty or sixty scalps on display. Scattered around them in carefully arranged piles, skulls and bones. On the cross there was no Jesus, but a mummified body nailed up instead. Dirker recognized it as Caleb Callister…at least he thought so.

But there was no time to find out, for James Lee Cobb and four of his Hide-Hunters stepped out from behind the altar. They carried rifles and wore gray dusters and were caught somewhere between animals and men.

“Looks like a stand-off,” Cobb said, laughing then, his laughter boomed and cackled and echoed.

Cabe got a good look at him, at the architect of this nightmare. The skin on the left side of his face was simply missing; muscle and bone exposed. It was as if some surgeon had slit a line of demarcation down the center of his face with a scalpel, leaving the right side relatively unscathed and peeling the left right to the basal anatomy. He was like some anatomical demonstration that was allowed to walk.

Clay said, “Uglier’n a trail-dead squirrel in a fat fryer.”

And then the lead started flying.

Cabe and the others dropped their shotguns and pulled their repeating rifles—Cabe’s Evans, Dirker’s Winchester, and Clay’s Henry. Bullets zipped around them like angry wasps, biting into pews and sending wood splinters spraying everywhere.

The trio returned fire.

But the Hide-Hunters were possessed of a deranged, primeval rage. They came running off the altar right into a flurry of bullets. The two leading the charge danced momentarily like marionettes as slugs ripped into them, punching holes through them and scattering blood and meat in every which direction. But Cobb was still shooting and one of his slugs caught Clay in the shoulder and another ripped a gash along the side of his head, taking his earlobe with it.

He went down, bleeding and moaning, but sitting back up and shooting a Hide-Hunter at point-blank range right in the face. The bullet cored his nose and the skull behind it came apart as the round bounced through his head like a drill bit, shredding everything in its path. Another Hide-Hunter, one with no less than a dozen holes in him, almost broached their position but Cabe put one through his throat that spun him around and finished him with a slug in his temple.

Dirker rose up and dropped the third Hide-Hunter in a mist of blood and brains and then clutched his chest, and fell over.

And then the final Hide-Hunter leaped.

Cabe put a round in him, but it didn’t even slow him down. He crashed into the bounty hunter and they went rolling in a heap. He was incredibly strong and Cabe fought and cursed and thrashed, trying to keep those teeth away from his throat.

And then Dirker, the entire front of his overcoat wet with blood, was on the beast’s back. Another slug ripped through him from Cobb, but he would not relent. His face drawn in a mask of agony, he yanked the creature’s head back as it made a lunge for Cabe’s throat. Yanked it back and pressed the muzzle of a .45 Peacemaker to its skull. He jerked the trigger of the double-action pistol and blew the beast’s head to ribbons.

The beast fell over dead.

And Dirker with it, his hands clutching his chest, dark blood bubbling forth between his fingers.

Clay fired off two more shots at Cobb who took advantage of the confusion and ran along the far wall, firing his pistols and disappearing through a low doorway not twenty feet from the men.

But Cabe was only concerned with Dirker.

He cradled his head in his lap. “Oh, Christ, Jackson, Jesus Christ, look at you…” He felt tears coming down his face and he realized that Dirker had saved his life, but at the price of his own. “Why’d you go and do that, why’d you do that?”

Dirker reached out and found his hand. “Tyler,” he said, blood running from the corners of his lips. He coughed and choked and tried to swallow something back down. “Tyler, I’m…I’m done in, just done in—”

“No, you ain’t, I ain’t lettin’ you get away like that—”

“I am,” he insisted. “Back in town…you…you take care of my wife, take care…of Janice. Swear to me you will…”

Cabe was sobbing now, overcome with just too many damn emotions. “I will, I swear I will. But Jackson, you can’t go and die on me, not now, not now, we’re friends, we’re goddamn friends finally…”

Dirker found a smile and put it on, but it faded soon enough. He stared up into space, breathing real hard. “Pea Ridge…I can see it, Tyler, it’s right before me…the woods…the hills…oh, Tyler, you remember how cold it was…so very cold and snow…in Arkansas yet…in Arkansas yet…you boys, you boys, pull back now, dear God pull back the rebs the rebs is overrunning us…no, no, no…I’m dreaming, Tyler…”

Cabe was holding his hand tight. “I’m gonna get you on a horse and get you back to town. That’s what I’m gonna do…”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Clay’s.

“He’s gone, boy,” Clay said softly. “He’s gone.”

His face wet with tears, Cabe lowered Dirker to the floor. He stroked his cheek and sniffed, tried to get a hold of himself. He saw his shotgun and picked it up. “Where,” he said, “where did that fucking prick Cobb go?”

Clay, trying to patch his wounds, said, “Through that door yonder…give ‘em hell, boy…”

Cabe, just pumped hard with iron and hate, went through the door like an artillery shell. If Cobb had been waiting there, he would’ve slit him right in half like a sword through cheese.

But he wasn’t there.

Cabe was in a very narrow passage that went straight up to the belfry. A set of cramped, spiral stairs climbed up its throat like a spiral worm. There was blood on them. And blood smeared on the railing.

Cabe thought:
He was hit then, that cocksucker was hit…

Sucking in a sharp breath, Cabe went up those steps as quiet as quiet could be, the shotgun in his hands. He crept and inched like a stalking cat. At the very top there was a hatchway.

Steeling himself then, Cabe crouched and threw himself up through it.

He rolled across the plank floor.

Eddies of wind-driven snow lashed at the bell. The bell-room was about ten feet square, open on all four sides with a waist high ledge. The floor was drifted with snow, old leaves…and drops of blood.

James Lee Cobb, his face sculpted into that of a human wolf stepped around the bell. The left side of his face was more skull than flesh and that skull was of some ravenous beast.

“I ate all the souls in Deliverance,” he said, “and now I’m gonna eat yours…”

A hatchet flipped end over end past Cabe’s face and went flying out into the white, whipping streets below.

Cabe let the demon have first one barrel of his Greener right in the belly and then Cobb jumped at him, jumped with an amazing speed and balance for a gut-shot man. In mid-air, Cabe gave him the other barrel which threw him back against the bell. The bell began to swing and gong with a resounding, thundering peal. Cobb left a 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.