Last Train from Perdition

Eight.

Keene Presco began to laugh.

It began almost as a low stutter, then it went high and wild, and the bearded bear of a man staggered and almost fell and suddenly in his laugh there was a choking sound that might have been the birth of a cry of terror.

“Hold on to yourself!” To Lawson’s surprise, it was the reverend who’d spoken the command. Easterly’s voice rang out so forcefully that it stopped Presco’s cry in mid-choke. “There’s no use in that!” Easterly continued. All eyes were upon him. “Whatever this…man is,” he said, motioning toward Lawson, “we’ve got to trust him.” His face betrayed the disgust he felt at saying that. “Before God I never imagined such a company as this, but here we are.”

“I’ve got this rifle!” Rooster said. He had turned his back on the bloody window. “I’ll take ’em down bullet by bullet!”

“Like I told you, lead can hurt them but it can’t kill,” said Lawson. “Ann, how many silvers do you have?”

She checked her holster, counting with her fingers. She had one silver to every three leads. “Five in the cylinder, eight in the holster. Twenty more in my bag.” She took the opportunity to slide a sixth silver into the pistol.

“Good. I’ve got thirty, plus the four in my gun and two in the derringer.”

“How many would you say are out there?”

“I couldn’t tell.” Lawson balked at saying Very many, because the truth would only further fray raw nerves. He didn’t want anyone panicking and trying to run for their lives through the snow…they’d end up like Tabberson, if the vampires were in a mood to be merciful. He saw in her face that she wanted to ask another question… My father, among them? He looked away, and on this subject Ann did not pursue him.

“This ain’t happenin’!” Rebinaux’s voice was as choked as Presco’s had been. “Man alive, I’m sittin’ in the Palace drunker’n eight skunks! This just ain’t—”

There came the sound of someone walking on the front platform.

The door’s glass inset was dirty with coal smoke, but through it could be seen the top of a small boy’s head, the wind-touselled hair, and the blurred upper portion of the pallid face. A hand rose up, became a fist, and knocked at the glass.

“That’s the boy?” Mathias asked. He had gotten himself under control and was eerily calm, as if at the bottom of his barrel had been a courage that he’d not expected to find.

“He calls himself Junior,” Lawson answered. “And remember, he’s not a boy.”

“Boy, warbuck or blood-sucker,” said Rooster, “I’ll put a slug right ’twixt his eyes!”

“Steady.” Lawson took two strides toward him, reached out and grasped the rifle’s barrel. He pushed it toward the ceiling. “All you’re going to do is make him mad.” The fist knocked again on the glass, with insistence. With no effort Junior could shatter that glass and let the wind in to gnaw at everyone whose veins carried human blood. “Let’s find out a little more about him and our situation.”

“Our situation? We’re at the damned gates of Hell, ain’t we?” Gantt asked.

“Everyone be easy,” Lawson cautioned. He approached the door. “Rooster, take your finger off that trigger. Eric, put your gun down.” The young Cavanaugh failed to respond. “Eric!” Lawson said, in a sharper tone, and this time he was obeyed.

Lawson opened the door. The wind and snow blew in past Henry Styles Junior, who smiled up at his opponent with boy-sized teeth that had a space between the front two.

“Are you free to talk?” Junior asked.

“I am.”

“A fine assortment here.” The creature had quickly taken appraisal of the passengers, as if he’d just opened a box of candies. His gaze snagged on the wounded girl. His chin lifted and his nostrils flared. “Oh,” he said, “she smells delicious. But she’s dying, isn’t she?”

“I’ve heard what you want. Is there anything else?”

“Yes indeed.” He came in and closed the door behind him, but he ventured no further into the car. He locked eyes for a few seconds with Eli Easterly before he returned his full attention to Lawson. “We don’t want these blood-puppets. We want you and Miss Kingsley. They’ll be free to go, as soon as you disarm yourselves and we have you. You know, her father wishes to see her. Would you like that?” He offered Ann a ghastly smile, but she made no reply.

“And your sister too,” Junior went on. “Eva’s here. Yes, that’s right. This will be a family reunion.” When Ann still gave no response, Junior’s gaze shifted to Lawson. “What point is there to resist, Trevor? You’re searching for LaRouge; she wants to see you. All will be taken care of, all will be as it should be. But…Trevor, let these humans go on their way, won’t you? And that girl there…shouldn’t she be getting to a doctor?”

“We both know that you won’t let this train pass,” said Lawson. “Granting life is not in your nature. I know, Henry…because part of me is what you are. Didn’t you ever want to fight it? Didn’t you—”

“It is a losing battle,” came the answer, in the voice of a little boy grown cold over the span of decades. “A foolish endeavor, leading to extermination. Miss Kingsley?” he called. “Would you like to see your father and sister now?”

“My father and sister,” she managed to say, “are dead.”

“You have that wrong…Ann, if I may. What they have found—and all of us have found—is true life. A life of abundance and power beyond the dreams of blood puppets and their faulty beliefs.” He fired a quick scornful glance at Easterly. “What you think of as life is death, Ann. Look at your friend Lawson here. He knows it’s true, because part of him wants to take hold of this life, to revel in it, to experience the fullness of our rapture, to never perish. Don’t let him lie to you and say he does not. And here he is now, making his stand.” Junior grinned; it was not a pretty sight. His eyes glinted red and his lower jaw appeared misshapen, as if near jumping out of joint. Lawson figured the blood smell of Tabberson had fired them all up into a frenzy, and now this aroma of Blue’s blood was working on him in the close confines of the car.

“Making his pointless stand,” Junior said, “and dooming all of you fine people to a tortured fate.” The child-vampire swept his arm across in a motion that seemed to be pulling his audience into his chest. “Well, he’s just plain selfish! What your engineer got was a quick release. Yours will be a long experience.” His smile, like a jagged razor slash, centered upon Lawson. “Ten minutes, sir. That is your…shall we say…deadline.”

“Here’s your damn deadline,” said Rooster, and fired his rifle from the hip.

The blast made an explosive sound within the car. A bullet hole appeared in the wall behind Junior, along with a splatter of thick black ichor. The Winchester slug had passed through his body on the left side.

Junior rocked back on his heels, then righted himself. His smile had faded only a fraction. He touched his shirt where the black stain was spreading. Lawson knew that the ichor would stop flowing within a few seconds, sealing the wound at both entrance and exit. Already the ichor would be healing any damage to the mysterious dead-in-life internals of the vampire. Lawson knew; he himself felt as if he were withering from the inside out.

“I think that broke a rib or two,” Junior said. “Ohhhhh…you will so regret—”

Ann’s gun had come up. Her face was a study of cold fury. She pulled the trigger.

Henry Styles Junior for all of his one hundred and five years was the quickest vampire Lawson had ever seen. Even as Ann’s pistol cracked and the silver angel blasted from its barrel, Junior had hurled himself headlong at the window to his right. He was smashing through the glass as the consecrated slug passed his blurred shape and smacked into the wall. Then he was gone, leaving the wind to blow snow through the broken window and small bits of glass to fall with the sound of tinkling chimes.

At once Lawson was at the window with his vampire-killing Colt drawn. He scanned the night, seeing rocks and wind-twisted trees but no trace of movement from the Dark Society.

“That was not very smart,” he said to Rooster, and he did not fail to note that the rifle was now aimed at his own midsection. “Please, let’s not be really foolish.”

“Hell, what do you expect?” Rebinaux’s voice had gone as high as a flute. “We just gonna sit and wait here to get killed? I’m for runnin’ for it! Get my ass outta here while I can! Deuce…Keene…you with me?”

“Yeah,” said Presco. “I’m with you. I ain’t stayin’ here and waitin’ to be et!” He gave a brief glance at Ann’s pistol. “You can shoot me if you please, but I’m gettin’! Deuce, how about it?”

Mathias was a few seconds in answering. “You won’t make it fifty feet from this train. Look what they did to that engineer.” He shivered. “Can somebody draw the curtain on that window? It’s going to get real cold in here, real—”

Quick, he was about to say, but it came more quickly than he’d thought.

A shot rang out. The bullet broke through the next window and knocked a chunk from the seatback in front of Eric. A second and third bullets finished the job on that window. More gunfire erupted from the other side of the train. “Get down!” Lawson shouted, as the glass began to be shattered from every window along the car. A slug shrieked past Lawson’s head and broke the glass behind him. One of the oil lamps was hit and spilled its burning fuel upon the floorboards. As Ann dove for the floor to cover Blue, a bullet ricocheting off the edge of a window clipped the brim of her cap and knocked it off her head. Gantt cried out in pain as wood splinters pierced the side of his face. Mathias felt a bullet pass so close to his skull he thought it might have left a part in his hair. Rooster was firing back, standing in the aisle shooting from one side to another and seemingly oblivious to being hit though the slugs were zipping by him to the left and the right. “Get down!” Lawson hollered at him, and at last the fireman seemed to realize the danger he was in. One last shot into the night and he threw himself down between two seats just as a couple of hornets passed through where he’d been standing.

The barrage of bullets went on for maybe fifteen more seconds. When it ended every window had been opened to the bitter cold and the walls of the passenger car had been pierced by at least twenty slugs.

In the aftermath of the gunshots there was the noise of the wind shrieking through the splintered frames and the crackling of the fire gnawing at the floorboards. Lawson crawled to the puddle of burning oil, took his coat off and mashed the flames down. It occurred to him that in short order the freezing temperatures would make the humans long for the warmth of a fire, but for now they couldn’t be forced out into the open any more than they already were.

“Jesus! Jesus!” Rebinaux was saying, from his huddled position on the floor.

Lawson could smell fresh blood; someone had taken a slug. “Who’s hit?”

“Took a faceful of splinters,” Gantt croaked. “Damn close.”

“I’m all right,” Ann said. “Lost my cap.”

“The girl?”

“She wasn’t hit.”

“Anyone else? Eric?”

“I’m okay.”

“Easterly?”

“Untouched,” he answered.

“I’m good,” said Rooster.

“Mathias?” Lawson prodded.

“All right…for the moment.”

“Lord…God…I’m hit,” said the rusty sawblade voice of Keene Presco. “Busted my damn collarbone…left side.”

“How bad?”

“Hurts somethin’ awful…bleedin’…but I don’t think I’m dyin’.” Another shot was fired into the passenger car, followed by a second and a third, but there were no cries of pain or panic. Lawson figured the bullets had come in one glassless window and out one opposite. Wanting us to keep our heads down, he thought. Particularly my head and Ann’s. He took a moment to dump the lead from his second Colt and arm it with the silvers.

“Alabama?” Rooster called from further along the car. “You got any ideas?”

“Keeping from being shot is the first one.”

“If you’re like that thing,” said Mathias, “you don’t have much to worry about.”

“It would be an inconvenience I’d rather not endure.”

“You gotta get us outta this!” Rebinaux piped up. “You and me, we’re brothers from Dixie, ain’t we? You can’t let me die!”

Lawson didn’t know how to answer that, so he remained silent.

“Gettin’ mighty cold in here,” Gantt said.

And then, from outside, a voice called that at first seemed to be part of the wind.

“Annie?” it said. “Annie, come to a window!”

Lawson heard her make a choking sound that wrenched at his heart.

“Annie? Eva’s here with me! Eva’s here!”

“You know one of those monsters?” Easterly asked.

“Her father and sister,” Lawson said, so Ann wouldn’t have to. “Both taken and turned.”

“Annie? Baby? Look out here at us!”

“You know what they mean to do,” said the vampire.

“Shoot me in the head as soon as I raise up. They’ve likely got a rifle already aimed.”

“Ann? Sssspeak to me, ssssister!”

That voice was the worst; it was at once both a fierce demand and a pitiful entreaty, and Lawson knew it must be repulsing Ann and pulling at her in equal measures. She had not seen her father or sister in months; did she dare now to lift her head over the bullet-riddled sill to lay eyes upon what her family had become?

“I love you, Ann! I sssstill love you!”

“I’ve got the direction fixed,” Ann said quietly, but enough to reach Lawson. “Standing about eight feet apart, maybe twenty…twenty-five feet from the window next to me.”

“Come to us, Annie! We can all be together again!”

“Lawson?” Ann called.

“Yes?”

“I can do it.”

“I know you can,” he said. “Do you want me to—”

“No.”

He heard the hammer of her pistol being cocked, even though she was muffling the noise under her coat.

From where he crouched on the floor he couldn’t see her toward the rear of the car, but he knew she was readying herself for what she needed to do. He started to say Careful but he did not, for he knew she would be…and this she had to do alone.

“We’re waiting for you, Ann,” Eva called. “Come join ussss…join ussss.” The eerie voice was whipped away by the wind.

Ann had to strike while she could still locate them by sound.

She lifted her head.

Through the falling snow she saw their shapes, standing about eight feet apart but maybe thirty feet away instead of twenty; the wind had done that trickery. She had the impression of ragged figures, like a pair of impoverished beggars. She could make out no facial features and she didn’t want to. All she could tell was that one was taller than the other though they both were sickeningly thin. She brought her gun up and took a fraction of a second to eyeball where she wanted the silver slug to go.

Her finger was on the trigger. Already the creature who had once been Eva Kingsley was whirling away, long dark hair flying in the wind, but the shade of David Kingsley had stepped forward, both arms outstretched toward her.

“My Annie,” he said, and he sounded to be in terrible pain.

She caught a glimpse of the gore that covered the front of his shirt and his suit coat. She dared not look into his face. She heard the high report of a rifle being fired from amid the rocks to her left. Without flinching she fired her revolver at the same instant as the bullet hit the windowframe beside her.

She didn’t have to wait to know that the bullet had struck the center of his forehead. When the second rifle bullet passed through where her own head had been, Ann was crouched down on the floorboards with the smoking gun pressed to her bosom and her eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Lawson lifted his head and saw the figure burning, breaking apart in red-rimmed fissures, turning to ashes that would be scattered upon the rocks and through the trees of this wild country, a long way from the boardrooms and banks of Louisiana.

The creature that had been David Kingsley perished in silence, but just before his head imploded he looked up into the snowfall though by then he had no eyes.

As he crumbled and the empty clothes fell, there came from the distance a feminine scream that started off as a cry of despair and became a shriek of rage. Lawson at the moment was thankful he couldn’t see Ann’s face.

Something hit the top of the car. Then came the sound of another weight, following seconds after.

“What’s that?” Gantt directed the question to Lawson, but in truth he knew what it must be. And he answered it himself: “One of ’em’s up there!”

“Two,” said Lawson. He was already bracing for what had to be coming next.

A tremendous blow was struck to the roof of the car; the entire car trembled and the boards whined in protest. Another blow was struck…a third, and a fourth, two of the winged shapechangers at work, tearing off the lid of this box to get at the sweetmeats within. The things sounded as if they were using iron hammers, but Lawson figured they only needed their fists and claws.

Rooster dug into his coat, brought out more shells for his rifle and reloaded. He started to stand up. Lawson said, “They’re waiting for that,” and Rooster settled to the floor again.

A third weight landed atop the car. They were near breaking through. The roof was cracking, the boards bending inward. Rooster fired upward…two shots, but the creatures didn’t slow their assault.

“All right,” Lawson said, mostly to himself, because he figured he had about twenty seconds before the things got in. He was up and out the door at the back of the car before Ann or any of the others had fully registered that he’d moved, and so fast that even the vampires hiding amid the rocks with guns were unable to mark him as a target. Outside, he swung upon the metal ladder that gave access to the roof and jumped the rest of the way.

The three winged horrors that were beating the roof to pieces turned toward him as one when his boots hit the surface. There were two males and a female, all of them gray-fleshed and sinewy, dressed in rags, the female with long silver hair and one of the males missing his left arm at the elbow. Lawson had time to think that this male might have been stolen from a battlefield just as he had been, and then he shot the creature between the eyes and the thing screamed as it burned. It fell away, its skull crisscrossed with red fissures, its wings beating holes in the flurry of snow.

Then the other two were upon him.

The female was the faster of the two. She was leaping at him before he could get his Colt trained on her. At the same time, gunshots rang out from the rocks to his left and from the woods to his right. Bullets zipped past as Lawson fought the female’s claws from getting at his eyes. The male swooped at him. Lawson shoved the female away. She went off the top of the car but her claws took most of his waistcoat with her. Along with it went his derringer in its inner pocket. A bullet tore into his right arm just above the elbow, paralyzing his gunhand. He drew his second Colt with his left hand, dodged a claw aimed at his face, felt the stinging pain of a second bullet grazing the back of his neck, and fired into the male creature’s skull.

As the vampire convulsed and burned before him, Lawson was struck in the right side by another bullet. He knew fear. It came to him that this could be the end of the line for both himself and Ann. For all his quickness and power there were too many of them. He could see more of the winged shapechangers coming at him from the woods and the rocks. How they achieved this ability he didn’t know, but at the moment he was sure he didn’t have it.

More shots were fired. Ann, Rooster and Eric were firing from the car. The female vampire came at him once more, with renewed determination. Her claws grasped his shoulders and her fangs yearned toward his throat. She had nearly snapped shut on him when he put the Colt’s barrel under her chin and fired a shot that sent the bullet through the top of her head. Still she held onto him as she began to break apart, and even as her eyeballs sank in and her gaping mouth became a hole in which the fangs melted like candle wax her claws dug deep and her wings were beating, trying to lift him off the roof. She got him up about six feet in the air before her skull sizzled away, her arms fell from the rags of her body and the wings collapsed like burning black paper.

Lawson got off a shot at the creature coming at him from the right but the thing dodged aside in midair and the bullet streaked on over the trees. The female vampire’s hands, both aflame, were still clenched to his shoulders and when he shook them off they flew away in ashes.

There were too many, and too many bullets being fired at him. He holstered his gun and as he scrabbled down the ladder a slug ricocheted off the metal. He got back into the car, slammed the door shut and threw himself onto his belly, where he crawled like a wounded animal between two seats and lay there leaking ichor that smelled of a sulphur pit in Hell.