“Heart maybe,” said Grey. “But not soul.”
With that he moved faster than he had ever moved in his life. He slapped the pistol aside with his left hand, and in the same instant, reached across his body and drew his Colt. It all happened inside of a fragmenting moment. Lucky Bob’s gun fired. Grey felt the burn in his side as the bullet ripped a trench in his flesh. Then he jammed his own gun barrel against the chunk of ghost rock over Lucky Bob’s heart and fired.
Lucky Bob Pearl staggered backward two awkward steps. His gun fell from his grip, struck the bridge and bounced over the edge. For some reason nearly everyone watched it fall. Even the living dead. As if the fall of that gun meant something. Lucky Bob, though, did not watch his pistol fall into the thrashing water below. Instead he stared down at the black hole in the center of his chest. Smoke curled up from it, and fragments of the shattered ghost rock still clung to the ravaged flesh. His mouth opened and closed several times as if he wanted to speak, or wanted to scream, and could not determine which. If he felt pain there was none of it on his face. His expression was not one of fear or anger. It was one of wonder. Of awe. His face wore the half-smiling mask of someone who had heard the whisper of some great mystery and wanted to hear more. To know the secret.
Lightning flashed and thunder erupted like a full broadside from a warship. The shock sent everyone staggering, and then a voice boomed like the voice of some dark god.
“Kill them all!” roared Aleksander Deray.
The horde of the living dead surged forward like a tide.
Chapter Eighty-Four
Grey whirled and raised his Lazarus pistol toward the sinister figure leering out over the rail of his sky ship. The craft was just beyond pistol shot, but it was close enough to see the madman’s face. There was such bottomless contempt there that it made Grey feel like an inconsequential bug. This man, hovering safely above the battlefield below, looked down on them all — the townsfolk and even his own people — with a comprehensive and uniform contempt. They were all nothing to him. A means to an end or a nuisance to be crushed underfoot.
Behind Grey, on the bridge, he heard the sound of a body falling to the wooden boards. Lucky Bob. Dying. Free from the ghost rock, but with a bullet punched through his heart. From behind the barriers, Grey heard a voice rise in a banshee wail of horror and grief.
Jenny.
“Jenny,” her father said in a whisper of grief. “I’m so sorry…”
“Kill them or burn!” bellowed Deray. Grey could hear the deaders behind him begin to move. The seconds of the hourglass had all run out now.
With a snarl of inarticulate rage he fired at Deray.
The walking dead on the bridge fired their guns. Some fired bullets. Others had the necromancer’s version of Kingdom rifles, but instead of ghost rock bullets they fired red flame in long, sizzling bursts.
Everyone on the barricade fired. Everybody was firing, firing, firing. The world seemed to explode in burning gunpowder and hot lead.
“Looks!” screamed Grey. “Now!”
Chapter Eighty-Five
It all went wrong.
It all went to hell.
In the seconds before Looks Away’s blast detonated the ghost rock explosives, the undead swarmed toward the mouth of the bridge. Scores of them thundered over the creaking boards and flooded through the gates of Paradise Falls. Grey landed hard on the edge of the drop-off as the killers swept past and over him. He curled into a fetal ball as booted feet trampled him. His Colt went spinning from his hand and he saw feet step on it and push it down into the mud.
Through the protective cage of his arms, Grey saw the destruction of the bridge. The middle of the span changed in the blink of an eye from wood and rope to a new sun that was born into searing brightness in the middle of the storm. Except instead of yellow, this sun burned with sizzling blue light that roared and crackled and vaporized everything it touched. Grey saw undead bodies light up like candles and then fly apart like piñatas. He saw bodies and parts of bodies fly high into the storm, burning despite the rain, then fall like dying embers into the chasm.
He saw the bridge itself burst apart. Torn ropes twisted like snakes of fire. Boards tumbled upward, spinning even as they became wreathed in flame. Then the whole mass of it plunged downward toward the spikes of rocks, and the unforgiving alien river that flowed outward from the depths of hell.
Hundreds of the undead vanished inside a sheet of flame. Their bodies fell twisting and burning into the chasm. Hundreds of the uniformed human soldiers fell with them. They screamed despite the fire in their mouths, their lungs. They tried to hold on to the bridge, on to life, but there was no hope for any of them. The force of the explosion flashed outward with titanic force, slamming into the cliffs on either side of the chasm like the fists of the god of fire. The sandstone rocks of the cliff walls, already weakened, collapsed at once, dragging down four of the tanks and hundreds more of the waiting army of the mad necromancer. Screaming men and screaming manitou tumbled toward their doom with half a million tons of rock and the weight of those machines pushing them to destruction.
The ground beneath Grey began to crumble, too, and he began to crawl, then to claw at the mud as it tried to fall away and send him to his death as well. He got to his hands and knees and crawled like a beaten dog, and then there was a hand under his armpit, pulling him up.
Looks Away.
They staggered together away from the collapsing cliff, and when they felt solid ground beneath their feet they ran.
God did they run.
“Jesus Christ…,” gasped Grey as they reached completely solid ground. Grey dropped to his knees again, gasping. He could feel blood running down his face and his whole body screamed in pain from all the feet that had kicked and stepped on him.
“I know,” said Looks Away grimly. “How are you? Can you walk? Can you fight?”
In the turbulent air, the necromancer’s frigate sailed toward Paradise Falls. Undead crouched behind the remnants of the shattered rails and fired rifles that shot streaks of red fire. Explosions rocked the town. Buildings went up in pillars of fire.
Directly ahead of Grey and Looks Away, the undead swarmed over the sandbag wall. Through the sounds of shouting and gunfire they heard a woman’s scream. Jenny or someone else. A young voice filled with terror.
Grey hauled himself back to his feet and spat mud and blood into the wind. He tore the Lazarus pistol from its holster. He saw movement and turned to see people standing in the shadows beneath a withered cottonwood tree. Men whose faces he knew. And a woman whose face he had dreamed about every night since he’d left her to die.
“Annabelle…” he murmured.
They were right here. His ghosts had caught up to him at last.
“I tried,” he told her. “I tried to save him. I tried.”
Annabelle said nothing. Her face shone as if she stood in bright moonlight.
“Let me try to save the people here in town. Give me that. Let me do that much before you take me.”
The ghosts of his men and the ghost of his lover said nothing. The rain slanted through the empty branches of the trees. It passed through the specters and struck the ground at their feet.
“Grey—?” asked Looks Away. He stood beside Grey and followed the line of his friend’s gaze.
“Please,” begged Grey. “Give me that much, and then you can drag me down to hell.”