Last Train from Perdition

Nine.

“How many did you take?” Ann was leaning over him. The firing had stopped and for the moment there was just the high sharp cry of the wind.

“A couple.” Lawson winced and touched his hurt side with his left hand. The ichor had turned that part of his shirt ebony, as well as his right sleeve. “Damn it,” he said. The pain was more nagging than severe. His damage would heal in a few hours, though he’d be slowed down until everything had knitted together again. That was part of their aim in shooting him; not to kill, because that was impossible with the plain lead slugs, but to steal his speed and resolve. “I won’t be able to use my right hand for awhile. My arm’s broken.” He reached back and put his fingers against the hot line a bullet had grazed across the nape of his neck. “Lucky there. I wouldn’t like to know what a broken neck feels like.”

“Trevor.” She had spoken his name in nearly a whisper, and though her face was still composed it was a mask, because Lawson saw in her eyes that she was fighting the same fear that had hit him up on the car’s roof. “What are we going to do?”

“We won’t give up,” he said, in answer to what she was really asking.

“Those things have got us trapped!” It was Gantt’s voice from further up front. He sounded at his breaking point. “Lawson! This is your fight, not ours! Listen…listen…all of you…do we deserve to be slaughtered? What have we done to get into this?”

“Steady up, Mister Gantt,” said Rooster.

“Steady up? Do you want to die?”

“No…ain’t what none of us want.”

“It’s his fight, Rooster! We don’t have no damned part in this!”

“Sir…that’s where you’re wrong.”

The voice that had spoken those five words surprised Lawson; it belonged to Eli Easterly. The reverend had remained near Blue. The girl was semi-conscious. Easterly had been at her side to console her and also to keep her calm if she came more fully awake. Snow had blown in and whitened the man’s hair and eyebrows, which along with his gray-toned flesh and gaunt features made him appear more vampiric than even Lawson.

“Whatsay?” Gantt fired back.

“You are wrong,” Easterly repeated. “It is our fight, too.”

“Hell it is!” Rebinaux squawked. “I ain’t done nothin’ to them things!”

“You don’t have to,” said the reverend, as he placed a hand on Blue’s forehead; her eyes had opened, and she was whispering that she was cold. He adjusted her blanket as best he could. “It seems to me that whatever Mr. Lawson is, he is by far not the worst of them. Before getting on this train I never would’ve thought such a thing possible…that I would feel I should help him survive in whatever way I can, instead of calling upon the Lord to destroy him and the rest of his tribe.”

“Think again, preacher!” said Presco. “Your Lord ain’t listenin’!”

“The Lord does listen, but He depends on the human hand to do the work. Or the hand of whatever is available. In this case, Mr. Lawson.” He gave Blue as much of a smile as he could muster. “Shhhhh,” he said. “Just rest…close your eyes…rest…”

“You’re crazy! We cain’t fight ’em! I ain’t stayin’ here waitin’ to die, I’m gettin’ out!” Presco stood up, his bloodied right hand pressed to the wound near his collarbone. “Somebody come with me!” he said, his eyes wild. “Johnny, let’s you and me—”

The bullet came from the right side of the train, down amid the trees. It took off a chunk of Presco’s jaw. As he turned toward the gunfire with an expression of righteous indignation, like a man who has brushed against a hornet’s nest, the second bullet hit him in the upper chest and the third one, fired from the left side of the train, got him in the brainpan. He pitched forward with a small grunt, really a soft exhalation of breath, probably the softest sound the man had ever made in his life.

He slithered down amid the seats, twitched a few times and then was still.

There was a long moment of silence.

“Bloodsuckers with guns,” said Mathias. He gave a hard, hollow laugh. “Kick my ass and call me Fannie.”

“More than guns.” Eric had dared to lift his head to peer out the window to the left, then he ducked down again. “Riders coming.”

Both Lawson and Ann took a chance to look. Two riders were approaching on horses. Lawson recalled the spur he’d seen on the shapechanger’s boot. He didn’t like this; it smelled of something he’d never experienced before. The vampires riding on the horses had already transformed themselves into the winged creatures, but their wings were folded back along their sides. One looked to be wearing a cavalry’s officer’s cap. The horses showed no signs of being skittish with those things on their backs, and this is what made Lawson ask himself: Could an animal be turned?

The question was hanging there when the two riders spread their wings into the wind and left their saddles. The horses continued on through the snow, and as they neared the passenger car they began to change into beasts from a madman’s nightmare.

Their flesh, leathery at the beginning, rippled and hardened like overlapping scales of thorny armor plate. Their heads lengthened and malformed into what Lawson thought might have resembled the ancient descriptions of dragons roaming the haunted forests of old Europe. One of the creatures began to grow two more legs from its sides that pushed it along more like a spider than a horse.

They were not slowing, but coming at full gallop and slither.

“Brace yourselves!” Lawson shouted.

The first smashed into the left side of the passenger car. The other hit a heartbeat after. The car’s wall burst inward in a shower of broken planks, splinters and the rest of the glass from the windowframes. The entire car shuddered and nearly was torn off the rails and its couplings to the coal car ahead and the freight car behind. In the chaos of destruction Lawson saw that Easterly had thrown himself over Blue as protection and Ann had put an arm up to shield her own face from the flying debris.

Then the pair of shapechanged creatures began to thrash their way in, their flesh and heads more reptilian than equine. Below the red centers of their eyes their massive jaws opened to reveal the sliding forth of curved fangs the size of butcher knives.

Rooster had fallen back against the opposite side of the car. He had lost his rifle in the impact. Lawson heard Gantt gibbering with terror. Rebinaux had broken and was sobbing like a child, and he was trying desperately to crawl away from the monster whose head weaved back and forth above him, the jaws opened and the fangs glinting with light from burning pools of lamp fuel.

Lawson lifted his Colt to fire, but so stunned was he by these Hellish visions that his left trigger finger was too slow. Before he could get his shot off the creature’s head darted down and the jaws engulfed Rebinaux’s skull up to the throat. The thing’s bite squeezed off the man’s swelling scream; with a twist of its head it all but decapitated Johnny Rebinaux and then lifted the body off the planks as a man might lift a bottle to drink after its cork has been bitten out.

It was then that Lawson got his senses back and sent a bullet into the monster’s head, but even as it twisted and writhed and began to break into burning pieces it backed out of the shattered car with Rebinaux’s neck still clamped in its fangs, determined to feast on its final meal of human blood.

The second beast, the one that had become a nightmare combination of horse, spider and dragon, continued to push its way in. The fangs snapped at Rooster’s legs. Ann got off a shot and hit the thing at the base of the neck. It gave a high shriek of pain and its head turned toward her, but then it was hit by three shots in quick succession in the meat of the body. The creature’s head swivelled to go after Deuce Mathias, who stood amid the broken seats with the smoke of Rooster’s Winchester swirling around him.

Lawson’s and Ann’s pistols fired nearly together. The two silvers pierced the thing’s skull about three inches apart, and thus quickened its demise. As the thing cracked apart and its flesh sizzled like bacon in a skillet, it still focused on Mathias with its single remaining eyeball. When it lunged at him he held his ground and struck out, using the rifle as a club because the magazine was empty; the eyeball withered and sank in, the head began to collapse, and the wind whipped the body into a storm of ebony ashes.

A portion of the car’s roof caved in. The two winged vampires that had ridden the horses in had hammered their way through. Ann shot the first one just below its cavalry cap as it dropped down into the car. In its deaththroes it became a maddened whirlwind of fangs and claws. It ripped bloody wounds across Gantt’s chest and then spun toward Eric, who shot the thing twice more at pointblank range just as the body collapsed like a punctured cyst and burned out of the dirty rags of its uniform.

The second vampire thought better of entering the car and took to the air. There came a few seconds during which the noise of the wind was nearly louder than Gantt’s cursing as he lay with his back against a splintered wall, his hands pressed to his wounds.

Lawson saw them coming first, and then Ann. “Load up!” he told everyone who had a gun. “Here they come!”

The vampiric army of Henry Styles Junior was on the advance. They were not at full speed yet, but that was only a matter of seconds. There were maybe thirty of them on the left: men, women and what might be mistaken as children, some in blood-daubed rags but others well-dressed, as if they had come from the same world of humans that Lawson masqueraded in. Some had become nothing more than blood-hungry wild animals and those were the ones that rushed forward most greedily, while others with more decorum and restraint stayed at the rear. Or, Lawson figured, those were the vampires who had a steady supply of food and walked most freely among humans. He noted that those were also the ones who held the firearms. A few of the winged shapechangers perched on the rocks, crouched down as if settling in to enjoy the coming spectacle.

A check to the right showed fifteen or so more of Junior’s army coming up the embankment through the snowy woods. They were in all manner of dress, again some ragged and bloodstained, others more freshly-procured: buckskins, fancy gowns, banker’s suits, the patched clothing of dirt-poor farmers and their wives, little dresses and knickers for the things that had been turned as children.

Lawson had a thought that took hold of him as firmly as a vampire’s claw.

They have come from all points of the Dark Society’s compass. Directed and drawn here by LaRouge, because she wants me.

Me.

I could learn to be a god, he thought.

Of what use is the human world to me anymore? I am beyond it. I am strong and fast and if I pleased I could live forever. My wife and daughter…gone…a painful memory. I have been betrayed by the human kind, led to slaughter and abandonment at Shiloh. What do I owe them? Why should I hold onto that life…and…really…I am tired…so very tired…I cannot hold on.

If I give myself up, they may let Ann and the rest of them go. If I stop trying, they may yet live…

If…if…

A dangerous word.

“Do you want me to take this side or the other?”

He looked into Ann’s eyes and he thought she flinched just a little, because perhaps after their months of working together she could see what he was thinking and she didn’t like the picture.

“This side of the car or the other?” she asked. She cocked her pistol.

They didn’t have very much time left. There was none remaining for introspection, hatred, regret or bitterness. There was only time enough to go down fighting.

With an effort that he hoped wasn’t obvious to her, Lawson said, “Let’s stay on the same side.”

She nodded. “Good enough.”

In silence, Junior’s army charged the broken passenger car.