The bullet struck the rippling flesh and exploded, bursting outward with each tiny fragment of processed ghost road. When exposed to the air, the pellets detonated, tearing great masses of the alien flesh apart and sending it flying through the air in clouds of bloody mist. The blast tore a gaping hole in the monster and tons of gore and shredded flesh flopped out onto the ground. The monster let loose another of its dreadful shrieks and the sky itself seemed ready to rip itself apart.
Grey and Looks Away stood transfixed, watching as the monster thrashed and twisted in agony. They braced themselves for the earthquake that would surely follow as it fell.
They waited, too shocked to move. Needing this abomination to die, willing it to die.
The tremors went on and on…
And then gradually subsided.
The godlike worm writhed before them, its pale flesh pulsing with pain, oozing with red ichor. But it did not fall. It did not die, confirming that it had not been one of Deray’s undead slaves. There was no ghost rock in it to maximize the effect of the Kingdom rifle, and despite the damage that single round had inflicted, it was not going to be enough. As they watched, the wound filled with the clear lime that ran from its pores; and though this substance seemed able to burn through the very bones of the earth, it filled the wound and sealed it as surely as a bandage. The blood stopped flowing. The wound was now plugged.
The worm lived.
And it was furious.
It shuddered with rage that rippled up through the ground as if emanating from the mind of Deray himself. As he thought that, Grey realized that it was probably the truth. Grey knew that Looks Away had been right — the monster was connected to the necromancer by some dark sorcery, and it came hunting for them, herding them, working with the Harrowed to trap them. Now it was wounded. Now it had felt the power of the Kingdom rifle — a weapon that could possibly rival the infernal devices of Deray himself. That knowledge, that dread of opposition, was probably echoing down into the caverns. Deray had sent this thing, commanded it, and now it shared terrible and dangerous knowledge with him.
Grey knew this as surely as if it had been written in the sky by a flaming hand.
Using the Kingdom rifle had been a mistake. Very likely the last mistake they would ever make.
On the ground, wounded and possibly dying, Lucky Bob Pearl was laughing. Blood flecked his lips and misted the air, but he was laughing. “Now you boys have gone and done it,” he wheezed. “Now you’ve pissed in your own graves.”
The worm burst the ground apart as it rose and rose. Grey felt his mind tumbling, fracturing, disassembling. He was unable to process the size of this thing. It was taller than any building he had ever seen. Taller than the redwoods up north. Grey backed away from it, but with each step he could feel his sanity fragment. The worm seemed to draw back, to tense as if ready to smash itself down and shatter the world. There, inside its shadow once more, the two men stopped trying to run away from something that could not be escaped. The monster blotted out the sun and darkened the sky. All they could hear was the lunatic laughter of Lucky Bob Pearl as the worm from the heart of the earth… exploded.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Grey felt himself falling.
Except that he was falling the wrong way. His body was in the air, moving fast, propelled by a force like a hurricane wind. However the landscape was not rushing up to meet him. It blew past him. At the same moment that his dazed brain was able to grasp that he was flying sideways, hurled by the explosion of the giant worm, gravity played her card. His lateral flight turned into an arc. And then he was falling. The ground seemed too far away for anything but a crippling impact.
He closed his eyes.
He hit the ground. But there was still so much force pushing him sideways that he hit at an angle and went slipping across the desert floor like a skipping stone. When his body finally came to rest, he was half buried in a nest of loose sand and dirt, twigs, pinecones, cactus, and sagebrush. The tumble had twisted him around so that he was looking back the way he’d come. He saw the worm.
What was left of the worm. Forty feet of it still protruded rudely from the ground. The rest, though, had been torn apart. Massive chunks of it were scattered across the landscape. Smaller red pieces continued to fall for a long time, and a thin red rain fell across everything as the last of the monster’s blood fell down to paint the place where it had died.
Grey could not understand what had just happened. The shot Looks Away fired had done damage, but not enough. What, then, could have done this? It made no sense to his shocked and battered brain.
Then he saw someone. A man. A stranger. A black man of about sixty, with a grizzled white goatee and sideburns. He was short, round but not fat, dressed in brown tweed despite the heat, wearing a tan top hat and leather gloves. Instead of spectacles, the man wore a leather band set with wide, flat lenses that were tinted the same eerie blue as the lightning Grey had seen when he first met Looks Away. The man approached him in a series of quick, nervous steps. When he was ten feet away, he asked the very same question Looks Away had asked him back in Nevada.
“Have I killed you, white man?”
Grey tried to say something. Anything. He felt the moment needed some kind of commentary, something to anchor it to common sense and ordinary understanding.
What he said was, “Uhhh.”
Then he felt himself falling again. Into darkness this time.
He never felt himself land.
Chapter Seventy-Four
He was awake before he opened his eyes.
Grey accepted that he had been unconscious. Not just asleep, but totally out of it. Why, and for how long, were mysteries. Where he currently was provided another mystery.
In a bed, though. He could feel a mattress under him. A pillow supporting his aching head. A sheet over him.
He couldn’t feel his clothes.
I’m naked, he thought, and even though he knew that this was an accurate assessment, it felt strange to think it. Then he realized that he was focusing on that more than on the fact that he was alive.
Alive.
He didn’t want to move until he was sure he was somewhere safe. Once, when he had been briefly captured by Confederate soldiers in the last days of the war, he had feigned being unconscious while he assessed his situation. He did that now.
If he was naked then he did not have his weapons.
On the other hand he was in a bed rather than in shackles.
He focused his senses on his chest, searching for any ache or strangeness that might indicate that he had been taken by Deray and turned into a mindless walking corpse. Or one of the more conscious but no less dead Harrowed. But there was nothing that hinted at the presence of a ghost rock implant.
Which meant that he was alive and he was himself. So where was he?
There were no sounds. But there were… smells. He realized with a start that he was smelling coffee. Biscuits. And bacon.
Grey opened his eyes just a fraction and immediately knew that he was not alone at all.
She sat there.
Lovely. Her blond hair pinned up, a smoke-colored shawl around her shoulders, her eyes filled with questions and concern. And in the slanting light of late afternoon, she looked so much like that other woman. The lost one. The one he’d failed.
Like Annabelle.
She even sat like her, the same posture and angle. The same depth of thought in those beautiful blue eyes. The impression was so powerful, so intense that Grey began to doubt whether it was her. Had everything else been a dream? The years on the road, the battles, the endless lonely nights? Was meeting Looks Away part of that dream? Was Paradise Falls and Deray and all of this madness nothing more than the product of some fevered dream? Grey had been helpless once in Annabelle’s house. Recovering from a bullet wound to the chest, he had lingered in a fevered haze for weeks while she tended him. He remembered that morning, waking up after the fever broke, seeing her sitting there, exactly as she was now.