The stink had grown omnipotent now.
It dried the words on Perry’s tongue, put a frost on his bones. And then, behind him, as his senses reeled with nausea, movement. Perry turned, his back wrenching and crying out. He ignored it for the Lord of the High Wood had arrived. The doctor looked on the beast with no reverence, no respect, only a sort of numbing awe at this mistake of evolution. It was huge, its shoulders twice the breadth of any man’s, its head mammoth. A giant. Its gray flesh was stained with dried blood and those eyes…good God, those eyes…bleeding balls that ran with discolored tears.
Tears?
Yes.
Jesus wept.
The beast came closer, moving with a slow grace that was frightening for something its size. Its arms hung limp at its sides, matted with patchy fur, bulging with obscene muscularity, the fingers-impossibly long-ending in hooked claws. Rapiers. Its sex swung with pendulum strokes between the massive thighs proudly. Its skin was ruptured, torn, splitting open with a vile sap in a hundred places. But its eyes, these are what held Perry. And the mouth, the sneering, hateful mouth that opened with a wet smack exposing teeth that glimmered like sacrificial daggers.
“Jesus,” Perry managed.
“Not Jesus,” Claussen said, stepping between them. “The Lord has chased Jesus from this place on the cowering tails of the saints.”
Claussen looked up at his god and made a quick benediction. The beast roared and with a single slap of its bleeding fist sent the reverend sailing over a row of pews.
Perry pulled his gun. “We’ll see what kind of god you are.”
The beast began to drool.
21
Skullhead stood on the altar, having finished with the old man and his little gun. He didn’t bother snacking on this one-he was far too old, far too tough and meatless. No, the old ones served only one purpose and had for ages and that was to be broken by the will of the Lords, killed for amusement. This was all. Murdering the old was tradition amongst the Lords. The dark-skins held the aged in such reverence that these were the first the Lords had killed when they waged war on the little men. After that, the men. Women and children were a different matter.
Skullhead sat down on the altar, fatigued with all the excitement and bloodshed. He was hurting. Pain rolled through his great torso in sharp waves. Bullets. Too many bullets in him. But the agony was good. Often, in the old days, the Lords would cut and slash themselves to bring on pain before a battle. It made them fiercer, more savage fighters. But this pain…though it made him angry, a sadistic conqueror…was not good. There was simply too much of it. It clouded the mind and made the senses reel.
It had to be alleviated.
When the Lords fought the wars against the advancing dark-skins in those ancient, forgotten times, the dark-skins used arrows and spears. Both of these were far more painful than mere bullets-they opened great gaping wounds in the body. Once they were removed, the healing began and went quickly as was the way with the Lords’ biology. But sometimes arrowheads broke off inside the flesh and had to be dug out by claws or teeth. If they weren’t, the body would fester and rot and death would follow. Skullhead knew the tales of those old days, they boiled in his cells. He knew the bullets had to be removed.
But it was no easy task.
His flesh, usually as tough as a beetle’s carapace, was sensitive and hurting from all the abuse it had taken. Still, it had to be done. Groaning, the last of the Lords of the High Wood began to dig the slugs free. Bloody, mangled and mushroomed bullets dropped to his feet. Many were near the surface, others were deeper. He worked his long bony fingers into his belly, searching and sorting through his internals. One by one, the slugs were removed. With a surgeon’s finesse, he groped and probed and stroked the secrets of his anatomy.
It was some time before he’d finished.
He removed nearly twenty bullets and there were still four or five left. He didn’t think they’d do any harm. There were other foreign bodies lodged in him, tokens of battles centuries gone, and they caused him no harm.
Lying back on the altar, he rested.
His flesh was resilient and in a short time, his wounds would scar over. He’d laid in that grave for some four centuries before the dark-skins had dug him back out. And though there was no consciousness, only vague dream, a spark of life remained in him. It was the way of his kind. If they weren’t dismembered, they could not really die, not totally. A rugged sort of half-life would remain. His kin, with the exception of one or two whose graves were the closely-guarded secrets of the dark-skins, had all been pulled apart after they’d sickened and fell. The dark-skins saw to that. Though they’d worshipped the Lords for thousands of years in one form or another, in the final days when the Lords had fallen ill with unknown infections, they’d risen up and hacked their masters to bits. Skullhead knew those were the Dark Days, the end of his race. A few of his kind, no more than three or four, had proved immune to these new contagions. But the dark-skins, natural born traitors, had rebelled and attacked the remaining Lords. Bound with rope, leather, and twine, the surviving Lords were buried alive. Their graves, a secret to all but a few in the passing centuries.
Skullhead closed his eyes.
Gone were the old days when the children were offered in sacrifice, when virgins were staked out for breeding. The system of service had vanished. It was up to Skullhead now, as the last of his race, to set things right. He would be worshipped again. Meat would be offered. The old and the weak would once again be set free and naked and unarmed in the forest for sport. And women would be offered. This last thing was the most important. The race would not survive until women were impregnated with his seed.
Once the white-skins were beat into submission, this task would be the first order of business.
22
Marshal Joseph Longtree watched Wolf Creek burn.
It had started for mysterious reasons in the undertaking parlor. But once started, it had found the chemicals therein and exploded into life.
It turned into a major blaze within minutes.
Whether the fire was unleashed by accident or on purpose, it didn’t matter-the town was burning. Longtree had arrived with Lauters moments after the slaughter had occurred. By then, the beast was long gone. But the evidence it left was all-too apparent. The beast had broken through the rear wall of the mortuary.
The fire was spreading fast. Almost effortlessly, cheered on by the winds that screamed out of the north. The buildings and houses in Wolf Creek were all packed together very closely and the flames jumped from roof to roof.
Longtree and Lauters were stalking the beast.
There was no posse to be had. All available men (and women) were busy fighting the blaze and this included Bowes. Even the sixty men Ryan had assembled to exterminate the Blackfeet, were helping out.
The trail of the beast was easy to follow, though somewhat erratic. It was only a matter of following the path of wreckage and death. Wherever it went, people were killed, homes or buildings destroyed. It had charged through the wall of a saloon, murdering six people and maiming a dozen others. Then it kicked down the door of a miner’s little home and decapitated his family. Next, the trail led to a dry goods store. The proprietor was crushed like a bundle of old sticks and stuffed into a coal furnace. One valiant, though suicidal, man had attempted to stop the fiend as it left the store. They found his shotgun bent into a V and his body driven headfirst like a fencing post through the snow and into the frozen earth. Only his wrenched legs were visible. Wherever the lawmen went, the tale was the same: atrocity upon atrocity.