They stared at it for a blank moment, and then like a returning memory, they heard the distant echo of the shot.
“Down!” cried Grey as he flattened out along Picky’s withers. A split second later a black eye seemed to open in the barrel of the big cactus. The report followed a full two second later. A bug gun, Grey guessed. Heavy caliber, fired from a long distance. Two hundred yards? Three?
Whoever was firing knew his business.
Grey kicked his horse’s flanks and held on tight as the mare sprang forward, all weariness forgotten, as she ran flat out in the opposite direction. Queenie was right there with her, like they were the only two runners racing toward a finish line. Looks Away had slid sideways on his mount, hanging down like a saddle blanket, the way Grey had seen other Indian riders do, using the horse’s body as a shield. Around them — and even ahead of them — bullets pocked the cacti or buzzed past them like angry bees.
There was a rise ahead of them and although for a split second they would be silhouetted against the sky, beyond it the land itself would offer safety. They raced for it and nose-to-nose the horses leaped over the crest and plunged down the other side. Bullets chipped the ridge and showered them with dirt.
Grey slid immediately out of the saddle, slid his Winchester from its scabbard, and crawled up the slope. Looks Away was right behind him except that he had the Kingdom rifle. The distance was too great for the shotgun to be of any use. Handguns would be equally useless.
“Who’s hunting us?” asked Looks Away. “Can you see anyone?”
Grey squinted along the barrel, but all he could see was desert, rock, and cactus.
“I can’t see a damned thing.”
The gunfire had stopped as soon as they cleared the ridge, now the vista was silent and still as the sluggish desert wind allowed.
“What do you figure,” asked Looks Away, “a Sharps fifty?”
“Or something. Big slugs from the way it hit the cactus.”
“Luckily he wasn’t a better shot.”
Grey began to nod, but stopped. There was something wrong about that statement.
Those shots had all come close. Very close. Some had missed them by inches. What were the odds of someone firing six or eight shots at ultra-long range and grouping the shots within an area no wider than twenty feet but missing two men and two horses?
There was luck, sure, though Grey didn’t think today was anyone’s idea of a lucky day for them. Even poor marksmanship had some odds in its favor.
“I don’t think he’s trying to hit us,” said Grey.
A bullet hit the dirt between them, chasing them back down the slope.
“Jesus!” gasped Looks Away as he spat dirt from his mouth. “Not trying? Not bloody trying?”
Grey shook his head. “No… he’s good, that one. He could have taken our heads off right there.”
“He seems to be giving it the old club try…”
“No,” insisted Grey. “Which makes me wonder why he’s missing.”
They considered it, then without comment they split apart and crawled up to peer over different sections of the ridge, far from where they had been.
A bullet struck the sand five inches from Looks Away’s ear.
A moment later a second one shattered a creosote bush next to Grey.
“Bloody bastard,” complained Looks Away. When there were no more shots, he wormed his way over to Grey. “I think I know why he’s doing this.”
“Yeah,” said Grey. “Me, too. He wants to keep us here.”
“Indeed. But for what?”
Neither of them really wanted an answer.
They got one anyway.
It began as a rumble, like distant thunder. Both men glanced at the sky, but the dawn was cloudless. There weren’t even birds up there.
Another rumble. This time they could feel it in their bones.
Beneath them the sand began to shiver. Grey placed his palm against the ground and heard it. A groan from within the earth. A moan of protest as the land itself began to move.
“Earthquake!” he cried.
But Looks Away shook his head and placed his ear to the ground, eyes closed, listening to the noise. The rumbling was continuous now.
And it was growing. Grey could see the plants and cacti around them trembling. Lizards flashed through the dry grass. A tarantula hurried past, then stopped and hunkered down, clearly too frightened and confused to move further. Grey could understand. He wanted to run.
But how do you outrun the earth itself?
“Look!” gasped his companion, pointing to where a crack suddenly gaped open, belching dust and gas into the air.
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” yelled Looks Away as he staggered to his feet and began backing away. Grey flinched, expecting his friend to take a bullet, but there were no new shots.
However, the land itself seemed to be assaulting them. The crack yawned wider, sending tear lines running in all directions. A Joshua tree broke from its roots with a sound like a pistol shot, and then the trunk fell over sideways. A line of saguaro cactus leaped into the air as the ground exploded beneath them. More gas shot upward in scalding jets, withering the cacti even as they flew through the air. The horses reared and screamed, but they were too frightened to know where to run.
“We have to get out of here before this whole thing—,” Looks Away’s words were cut off as something exploded upward from beneath the earth. It shot a mass of dirt, sand, and pulverized rock a hundred feet into the air, and then it emerged.
It.
That was the only way Grey’s mind could label the thing.
Massive.
Bigger than anything Grey had ever seen. A body so vast that it would have burst the walls of a barn, and as pale as dead skin. Wrinkled, segmented, impossible. It rose like some obscene finger from the hole in the ground. Yard by yard it rose above the desert floor. Glistening and featureless, like some foul intestine of one of the ancient Greek Titans.
Grey and Looks Away stood there in its shadow, showered by falling debris, mouths agape, watching with eyes unable to blink, as the monster rose and rose and rose. And then, at the apex of its rise, it trembled with an odd and disturbing delicacy, as if its massive flesh was sensitive to even the hesitant touches of the desert breeze. It wavered there, indomitable against the morning sky, taller than the mast of the tallest ship, with some foul-smelling gelatinous goo running in thick lines from pores that open and closed all along its body.
Now they knew what had burrowed those mighty holes through the bedrock. Now they knew what had left a trail of slime along the shores of that forgotten ocean. Now they knew, without doubt, that the earth held within its bowels greater horrors than man, even in the depths of opium dreams, had ever conjured. Here was Leviathan. Here was the finger of Satan.
It was a worm.
Towering a hundred feet into the desert air, with God only knew how much of its foul length still buried in the soil.
A worm.
Blind and colorless. A thousand tons of glistening flesh.
And it had come for them.
Chapter Seventy-One
There was nowhere to run, no way to escape so monstrous a thing.
Grey felt his heart sink down in his chest, falling to some low place where he could no longer feel its warmth. Several times over the last few days he had felt that he stood on the edge of life and felt himself leaning into the abyss. Each time he had been able to do something to pull himself back from that brink.
Now…?
The worm trembled and shook, and he could see its muscles twitching and contracting as it fought the pull of gravity.
And yet… it did not fall.