Ghostwalkers

Chapter Nineteen

They did not speak again until they crossed into California.

Looks Away grunted and pointed to a wooden sign hammered onto a post someone had driven into the dusty ground. It read:

Clustered around the base of the post and piled into a crude pyramid that reached halfway up its length were skulls.

Human skulls.

Some still had scraps of leathery skin or strands of sun-bleached hair stuck to them, but otherwise the bones were white and dry.

“By the Queen’s sacred bloomers,” said Looks Away. “That’s bloody charming.”

Grey slid from his horse and walked in a slow circle around the post.

“Over here,” he called, and Looks Away jumped down and came over to see. On the far side of the pyramid were two heads that were much fresher than the others. They both wore their skin and hair, both still had milky eyes in their sockets. Withered lips were peeled back from their teeth as if the owners of these heads had died laughing, which Grey knew was a lie. Skin contracts as the moisture is leeched away.

Looks Away cursed softly as he squatted down to peer at the heads. Both of them had long black hair. Both had prominent noses and wore red cloths around their foreheads. Their skin was a slightly ruddier shade than Looks Away’s.

“Apaches,” said Grey quietly.

“Yes,” murmured Looks Away. “And I sodding well know them.”

“You what?”

Looks Away bent forward and spat into the face of each Apache. He took his time, hocking up phlegm and firing it off with great accuracy and velocity.

“I take it you weren’t friends,” said Grey. “But since when did the Sioux and the Apaches have trouble brewing between them?”

“They don’t. Not as such. They are no more representatives of their people than I am of mine. This was entirely a personal dispute.”

“Who are they?”

“The one on the left there was known as Horse Runner. His companion was Dog That Barks. Rather an obvious name, don’t you think? All bloody dogs bark. It’s like saying Cow That Moos.” He sniffed. “They were renegades from their tribal lands and when last I saw them they were working as hired muscle.”

“For who? That Deray fellow?”

“No. They worked for a land syndicate run by a right bastard of a man named Nolan Chesterfield, a nephew of one of the rail barons.”

“Which baron?” asked Grey.

Looks Away caught something in his tone and gave him a sharp look. “Why does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“Not a chum of the barons, I gather?”

“Hardly,” said Grey bitterly. “I worked for a couple of them once upon a time. Got well paid, but somehow I always seemed to come up short on the deal. First one I signed on with was that Chinese fellow, Kang. He was my boss for six months.”

“Kang? I thought he only hired his own people.”

“His own people don’t always blend in with people outside of his own crowd,” said Grey, shrugging. “And he needed someone solid to protect his lawyers when they went to dicker with some of the other barons. That was me, for a while anyway, but we had some differences of opinion. So… then I worked for that witch Mina Devlin.”

Looks Away wore a wistful smile. “Ahhh… Mina Devlin. I’ve seen pictures, heard tales. Reliable tales, mind you. I always wanted to make her acquaintance.”

“No,” said Grey, “you don’t. She may be prettier than a full moon over the mountains, but she will gut you and leave you to bleed just for the fun of seeing it. And people say she’s, you know…” He tapped his temple.

“I believe the phrase is ‘touched by God.’”

Grey snorted. “Touched by someone,” he said sourly, “but I don’t think God was doing the groping.”

“Ah. Even so. She is supposed to be a truly passionate woman.” He cut a sly look at Grey. “You… wouldn’t know anything about that now, would you?”

Grey felt his face grow hot and he immediately changed the subject. “You said these Apaches were providing muscle. Muscle for what?”

“Oh, for whatever needed to be done. If Nolan Chesterfield wanted a tract of land so he could lay down some tracks, he had these two fellows — and a couple dozen others who worked with them — drive off anyone who lived there. Drive off or bury.”

“Ah. I’ve met the type.”

Looks Away turned to his companion. “I daresay you have. I’ve been wondering about that. When you say you’ve met the type it makes me wonder if you are, in point of fact, the same type?”

Grey smiled. He could feel how thin and cold his smile was. “That’s a strange question to ask, friend. Especially after what we’ve been through and how many miles we’ve ridden. You slept ten feet from me for twelve nights and now you wonder if I’m some kind of badman?”

“Actually, old sport, the thought has occurred to me before,” admitted the Sioux. “I’ve been trying very hard to figure you out. You have a charming demeanor when you want, but mostly you keep a distance. And your face gives nothing at all away. I’d hate to play poker with you.”

Grey shrugged. He was very much aware that he let very little of his personality show through in either word or expression. He generally played the role of a saddle-weary but competent gunhand, and that was true enough in its way. There were layers of his soul he did not want peeled back. He dreaded the thought of anyone seeing the real him. The man who had failed, who had betrayed. The man who was certain that his true road led downhill to somewhere hotter even than this desert. Nor did he want this Sioux, or anyone, to see the fear that was always vying with his courage for control of his life. So, as he had done for so many years now, he kept his face wooden and his gaze flat.

“Besides, the moment always seemed a bit wrong for bringing it all up. Manners, don’t you know.”

“And mutual protection, let’s not forget about that.”

“Let’s not. However let’s not let a shred of self-interest cloud this particular conversation.”

“Okay then. If you have a straight question, ask it.”

Looks Away sucked a tooth for a moment. Grey noted that the man’s hands hung loosely at his sides, well within range for a quick grab for the pistol butt in his stolen holster. The Sioux’s fingers twitched ever so slightly. Grey shifted his weight to be ready to dodge as well as draw if this all turned bad.

“I’ll ask three questions,” said Looks Away, surprising him.

“Shoot.”

“That’s a rather unfortunate choice of word, wouldn’t you say?”

They smiled at each other. They kept their gun hands ready.

“What’s the first question?” asked Grey.

“Have you ever been to the Maze before?”

“No,” said Grey flatly. “Second question?”

“Abrupt, aren’t we?”

Grey just looked at him.

“Very well,” said Looks Away. “Are you hunting for ghost rock?”

“No.”

“And you’re telling me the God’s honest truth?”

“Is that your third question?”

Looks Away shook his head. “No.”

“Then I’ve already answered it once. I’ve never felt the need to repeat myself.”

“Fair enough, and therefore I must take you at your word.”

“Seems so. What’s your last question?”

Looks Away took a breath. “Are you now, or have you ever been, in the employ of Aleksander Deray?”

“I never heard of the man before you told me about him the day we met. And that,” said Grey, “is the God’s honest truth.”

They stood and studied each other, and Grey felt as if something shifted between them. Looks Away had an almost comical way of speaking, which Grey figured was more than half put-on, but there was nothing funny about the keen intelligence in the man’s eyes. They were hard, cold, and sharp as knifepoints. Grey would not have wanted to stare into those eyes on a bad day if he didn’t have a well-oiled gun within grabbing distance.

“Well then,” said Looks Away.

He watched a slow smile spread across the Sioux’s face. It looked genuine, and the man appeared to be relieved. Probably not so much at what Grey had said in answer to those questions, but at whatever Looks Away had seen in Grey’s eyes.

And Grey found himself making a similar decision about the strange Sioux renegade.

The sun beat down on them and the horses blew and stamped.

“If I’ve offered offense, my friend,” he said, “then please allow me to apologize. I would take it as a kindness and a pleasure if you accompanied me on my little mission. I will, in fact, pay you for your services and would value both your protection and your company. Here’s my hand upon it.”

Grey couldn’t help but return the smile. “You don’t even know how much it costs to hire me.”

“Are you expensive?”

“I’m a little saddle-worn but I’m not bargain counter.”

“Then by all means state me a price.”

Grey did and the Sioux’s smile flickered. “Dear me, you think very highly of your skills.”

“Others have in the past. I’m giving you my last rate with only a five percent increase.”

“Ah,” said Looks Away. “Well… done and done.”

“All right then.”

Neither of them moved. Not until the moment had stretched between them. However it was Looks Away who broke the spell and held out his hand. Still smiling, Grey took his hand and shook it. Before he let it go, he asked a question.

“What would you have done if you didn’t like my answers to your questions?”

“Shot you, I suppose.”

“What makes you think you can outdraw me?” asked Grey.

“Oh, I have no doubt you’re a faster draw than me.”

“Then—?”

“I anticipated a moment like this, so I took the liberty of emptying your pistol while you were sleeping last night.”

Grey’s smile vanished and he whipped the pistol out of its holster, pivoted and fired three quick shots at the mound of skulls. The bones exploded as heavy caliber bullets smashed through them.

Thomas Looks Away shrieked. Very high and very loud.

The echoes of the gunshots rolled outward like slow thunder and faded into the desert shimmer.

“And I reloaded them this morning, you mother-humping son of a whore,” said Grey.

Looks away took several awkward steps and then sat down heavily on the sand. “By the Queen’s garters!” he gasped.

Grey opened the cylinder, dumped the three spent casings, and thumbed fresh rounds into the chambers. Then he slid the pistol into his holster.

“And that,” he said quietly, “is why you’re paying the extra five percent.”

He turned and walked back to his horse.

Chapter Twenty

They entered into the broken lands of California and rode into the hills. As they climbed away from the desert floor they left the relentless brutality of the Mojave behind and found small surcease in the shadows beneath green trees. All around them, though, were remnants of what had been and hints of the new realities. Some of the most ancient trees had cracked and fallen, their roots torn by the devastating quakes and aftershocks of the Great Quake of ‘68. There were deep, crooked cracks torn like ragged wounds through the rocks. Mountains had been split apart. Massive spears of rock thrust up through the dirt. Forest fires had swept up and down the hills, turning forests to ash. Rivers and streams had been changed by the new complexities of the landscape. And not very far across the border from Nevada lay the edge of the world. Instead of the miles upon miles that had once stretched to the bluffs and beaches west of the Camino Real pilgrims’ road, a new range of shattered mesas had risen up as most of the rest of California had cracked like dry biscuit and tumbled into the churning Pacific. Millions had died in what anyone within sound of that upheaval must have truly believed was the true apocalypse warned about in the Revelation of Saint John.

Even now, a decade and a half later, the land still looked like an open wound. Grey fancied he could feel the land moan and groan as it writhed in agony.

And yet…

And yet, the ash from those burned trees had enriched the soil and now there were new trees reaching up to find the sun. Riots of flowers bloomed in their millions, and even the desert succulents were fat and colorful.

At least that was how Grey saw it for the first day of their journey.

All of that changed the deeper they ventured into the broken lands. The lush growth waned quickly as they climbed a series of stepping-stone mesas that marched toward the shattered coastline. The soil thinned over the rocks and was more heavily mixed with salt from ocean-born storms. The flowers faded to withered ghosts and gasping succulents and austere palms replaced the leafy coniferous trees.

As the hours burned away, Grey found himself sinking into moody and troubled thoughts. His life had taken some strange, sad paths since he had gone to war. And stranger still since he’d tried to leave that war behind. No matter how far he rode the world did not seem to ever wash itself clean of hurt and harm. And everything seemed to get stranger the farther west he went.

Not that the south was any model for comfort and order. That’s where his luck had started to go bad.

That’s where he began to dream that the dead were following him. That he was a haunted man. That maybe he was something worse.

Doomed, perhaps.

Or damned.

Maybe both.

Even now, as he drowsed in the saddle he could catch glimpses of silent figures watching him from the darkness beneath trees, pale faces that turned to watch as he passed. It would be easier, he thought, if all of those faces belonged to strangers. If that was the case he could resign himself to accept that it was the land that was haunted. He’d heard enough stories — and recently had enough experiences — to accept that any definition of the word “death” he once possessed was either suspect or entirely wrong.

After all there were those things that had been raised by the explosion of Doctor Saint’s strange weapon. Surely if the hinges of the world were breaking, then the door to hell was already torn off and cast into the dust. It made him wonder about all those wild tales he’d read in dime novels about the lands of the Great Maze. Monsters and demons, angels and goblins. He’d enjoyed those books as exciting and absurd fancies.

Now he wondered.

And he feared.

If even a fraction of them were true, then dear God in Heaven why was he riding west? Why had he agreed to this job? Why was he moving toward the lands of madness and monsters?

As if in answer, the voice of that woman — that witch or vampire, whatever Mircalla was — whispered inside his memory.

You do not know what you are, man of two worlds. The man who lives between the worlds. Yes… that’s what it says about you. You do not belong to either life or death. That means that I and my sisters cannot have you, Greyson Torrance. You are exempt, pardoned. Not from your crimes but from my web.

And when he had demanded to know what she meant, Mircalla had confounded him more.

It means that the universe, for good or ill, is not done with you. I am forbidden to claim you. Your journey is not over.

But the thing that had frightened him most was what she said about the ghosts he dreamed about every night. He had never spoken of them to anyone, but she had either plucked the thought from him, or possessed a true second sight.

The dead follow you, Grey Torrance.

“No, goddamn it,” he said between clenched teeth.

Looks Away glanced at him. “What’s that, old chap?”

“Nothing,” mumbled Grey. “It’s nothing at all.”

The lie fit like thorns in his mouth. Looks Away studied him for another few moments, then shrugged and turned away.

They rode on.

Two hours later he and Looks Away stopped there and stared out at what lay beyond. The horses trembled and whinnied. Grey felt his own heart begin to hammer while his skin felt cold and greasy.

“Suffering Jesus on the cross,” breathed Grey.

Beyond the mesa was madness.

Beyond the mesa was the world gone wrong.

A world where sense and order had drowned along with mountains and fields.

There, shrouded in drifting clouds of gray mists lay the bones of the earth. Tall spikes and shattered cliffs. Great gaping holes. Monstrous caverns that gaped like the mouths of impossible beasts. And through it, swirling and churning, the ocean reached into the tortured land, slapping at the rocks, smashing down on newborn islands, sizzling into steam as it flooded into deep pits.

Grey had once read a book by a man named Dante that described the rings of Hell.

He was certain he and Looks Away stood looking at the outermost ring.

“Welcome to the Maze,” said the Sioux. “And God help us both because that is where we’re going.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“Where exactly are we heading?” asked Grey as their horses picked their way down through a series of crenellated canyons. Juniper and eucalyptus trees leaned drunkenly over them, their damaged roots clinging desperately to the shattered rocks. “Does your Doctor Saint have his workshop up in these hills?”

“Yes and no.”

“Damn, son, have you ever considered giving a straight answer?”

“Life’s not that easy,” said Looks Away.

Grey thought about it. Nodded. “So—?”

“We’re going back to where this all started.”

“You mean to the laboratory where those guards were killed?”

“Yes. Maybe there was something I missed, something that would give me a new trail to follow.”

“Worth trying. What’s the town?”

“You won’t have heard of it,” said Looks Away. “Sad little place called Paradise Falls. Way out on the edge of the Maze. Dusty little nowhere of a town.”

“Sounds charming.”

They pushed on and Looks Away brought them along a chain of trails that linked former trade routes and newer traveler’s roads. There was no longer such a thing as a straight and reliable road. Not since the quake. Many times they had to dismount and lead their horses on treacherous paths along the sheer sides of mesas, or in the darkened hollows at the feet of crumbling mountains.

“A goddamn billy goat wouldn’t take this road,” complained Grey more than once. Looks Away offered no argument.

By the afternoon of the third day they emerged from a canyon and paused on a promontory beyond which was a sight Grey Torrance had never before seen.

The land was as blasted and broken as it had been, but now, past the cathedral-sized boulders and spikes of sandstone a wide blue expanse spread itself out under the sun. The Pacific was sapphire blue and each wind-tossed wave seemed to glitter with diamond chips. White-bellied gulls wheeled and cried. Long lines of pelicans drifted on the thermals, changing direction, taking their cues from the flight leader. After the blistering desert and the heartbreak of the shattered lands, the deep blue of the rolling ocean was like a balm on the soul.

“God…,” breathed Grey.

Looks Away smiled faintly. “Looks lovely from here,” he said, “but I don’t recommend taking a swim.”

“Why not? Are there sharks?”

The Sioux shook his head. “I saw a few sharks once. Big ones. Bull sharks, I think. Or Great Whites. Washed up on the beach. Bitten in half or crushed.”

“Crushed by what?”

“What indeed?” said the Sioux mysteriously. “This is the Maze, my friend. I’m afraid there are far more things that we don’t understand than things we do.”

“What, sea serpents and cave monsters?” laughed Grey. “Those are just tales from dime novels. There’s nothing to any of that nonsense.”

The Indian turned and studied him for a long moment. There was a small, knowing smile on his lips, but no humor in his eyes. “As you say.”

Grey could not draw him into an explanation. So, in another of the moody silences that seemed to define their relationship, the two men rode down a crooked slope toward a massive cleft in the ground. A rickety bridge spanned the chasm. They stopped at the foot of the bridge and the men slid from their horses to peer over the edge.

“This gorge runs for two hundred miles north and south,” said Looks Away as he and Grey squatted down on the edge. “It opened up during the quake.”

Below them was a raw wound in the earth. Far below, nearly lost in the misty distance, were spikes of jagged rock that rose from a threshing river. Fumes, thick with sulfur and decay, rose on columns of steam.

“The water comes from some underground source,” said Looks Away. “Not salt water, which means that it comes from inland, but I wouldn’t dare call it ‘fresh.’ Anyone who drinks it gets sick and some have died. They break out in sores and go stark staring bonkers.”

“Jeez…”

Grey stood and nodded to the bridge. “Is that thing safe?”

“It hasn’t fallen yet.”

“That’s not exactly an answer.”

“I daresay not.” Looks Away shrugged and pointed to the twisted remnants of a second bridge. All that was left was a pair of tall posts and some rotting tendrils of rope. “That one, the Daedalus Bridge, used to cross a lovely little stream of crystal clear water. It was destroyed in the Quake. A man named Pearl organized the building of a second and much longer bridge to span this chasm. Not sure who chose the name, but people call it the Icarus Bridge.”

“Wasn’t Icarus the one who fell?”

“Yes,” said Looks Away, “charming thought, isn’t it?”

They remounted. Beyond the far side of the bridge was a small town, though to Grey’s eyes it looked more like a ghost town. A cluster of dreary buildings huddled together under an unrelenting sun. Everything looked faded and sunbaked.

“That’s Paradise Falls?” he asked.

“Such as it is.”

“Swell.”

They crossed the Icarus Bridge very slowly and carefully. The boards creaked and the ropes protested, but it proved to be more solid than it looked. Even so, Grey was greatly relieved when they reached the far side.

“And we didn’t plunge to our deaths,” murmured Looks Away.

“Oh… shut up,” grumbled Grey.

The road into town was littered with lizard droppings and the bones of small birds. They passed under a sign very much like the one they’d encountered in the ghost town in Nevada. The difference here is that the paintwork looked like it had been done with some sense of style. A little artistry, no less. But it was faded now and there were cracks in the wood and there had been no attempt to freshen the sign. Grey looked up at it.

Beyond the sign were a few dozen buildings along one main street and on a few, smaller side lanes. Smoke curling upward from a handful of chimneys. Bored-looking horses hung their heads over hitching posts. Withered old men and women sat on porch rockers. A few grubby children played listlessly, tossing a wooden ball through a barrel hoop. They missed more often than made the shot, but their bland expression didn’t change much no matter how the game turned out.

“Paradise Falls?” Grey mused quietly.

“I know,” said Looks Away. “The running joke is that Paradise Fell.”

“Not a very funny joke.”

“No, it isn’t.” Perched on the corner of the sign was a bird that Grey at first thought was a buzzard, but as they passed he did a double take and gaped at it. The creature had wings and feathers, but beyond that it bore little resemblance to any bird Grey had ever seen. Not outside of a nightmare at least. The body was bare in patches and instead of the pale flesh of a normal bird, this thing had the mottled and knobbly hide of something more akin to a reptile. The wings were leathery and dark, and there were claws at the end of each that gripped the sign as surely as did its taloned feet. The creature’s beak was long and tapered, and it cocked its head to stare at the two horsemen with a black and bottomless eye.

“Christ,” whispered Grey, “what the hell is that thing?”

Looks Away followed his gaze and shuddered. “Be damned if I know,” he said. “The locals claim that after the quake great flocks of them flew out of caverns that had previously been trapped in the hearts of mountains.”

“It looks like it flew up from hell itself.”

“Yes,” agreed the Sioux. Grey hadn’t meant it as a joke, and Looks Away did not appear to take it as such. They kept a wary eye on the bird as they passed beneath. The sun was in the east and it threw the misshapen bird’s shadow across their path. Both horses, unguided, stepped nervously around that shadow.

That made the flesh on the back of Grey’s neck prickle.

The Sioux nodded to the people who had come to windows or porch rails to look at them. “They’re simple people, but good ones.”

The remark surprised Grey. “You care?”

Looks Away shrugged. “I do. I’ve lived among them for months and I know most of them. Granted, few make rewarding conversational partners, but they are honest folk who have had a run of bad luck that was both unearned and unlooked for.”

“The quake?”

“That was the start of the bad luck, but it didn’t end there. When the land fell into the sea it changed the course of the water. That road we took had been a strong freshwater stream. Pure snowmelt from the mountains. The Paradise River, and it ran to the edge of a drop. That waterfall is what gave the town its name. There used to be thousands of square miles of arable land. Now there are rocks, scorpions, and ugly mesas where nothing grows that you’d care to eat.”

“How the hell do they survive?”

The Sioux gave him a rueful smile. “Who says they’re surviving, old chap?”

Grey opened his mouth to reply, but a scream suddenly tore through the air.

A woman’s scream.

And almost immediately it was punctuated by the hollow crack of a gunshot.

Chapter Twenty-Two

They wheeled in their saddles and looked off down a side street. There, at the very end of town, were several figures engaged in a furious struggle by an old stone well.

“Shite!” cried Looks Away as he instantly spurred his horse into a full gallop.

Grey hesitated for a heartbeat longer. This was not his town and not his fight.

Except…

The fight looked too uneven for his tastes. A tall, thin stick-figure of a wildly bearded Mexican man in a monk’s brown robe, and a woman with curly blond hair were struggling with six hard-looking men.

“Well… balls,” he growled, and kicked Picky into a run. Even his horse seemed outraged and barreled down the street at incredible speed.

Grey watched in astonishment as Looks Away vaulted from his saddle and flung himself at one of the biggest of the six men. They crashed against the side of the well, spun and fell out of sight. In almost the same moment, one of the men — presumably the one who’d fired the gun — slashed the monk across the face with the pistol. Another man had the woman in a fierce bear hug and held her, kicking and screaming, off the ground. The other men were closing in on her, laughing and pawing at her.

As Picky devoured the distance between Grey and the fight, the woman lashed out with a foot and caught one of the men on the point of the chin. He backpedaled and hit one of his companions. They both staggered. Then she used the same foot to kick backward and upward. The man holding her let loose with a high whistling shriek and hunched forward, his thighs slapping together about a tenth of a second too late.

Then Grey was among them.

He used Picky’s muscular shoulder to crash into the back of the sixth man and the force of that impact picked him off the ground and flung him into the side of the well. He bent double and very nearly went in, saving himself at the last second by clawing at the stone lip.

Grey leaped from the saddle, grabbed the hair of the shrieking man holding the woman, and jerked him backward with such force that the man was bent nearly in half the wrong way. His hands snapped open, sending the woman staggering forward. Grey snapped the handful of hair like a whip and the man flopped onto the ground. He immediately tried to sit up and got as far as the short, hard kick Grey fired at his face. The man flopped back, bleeding and unconscious.

Pain exploded in Grey’s kidney and he reeled, but he turned as he did so, crouching and bringing up his arms to block a second punch. It was the bruiser who’d pistol-whipped the monk. He’d rammed the barrel of his Colt into Grey’s back and was raising the gun now to point it at the intruder’s face.

Grey rushed him low and hard, ducking beneath the gun arm and hooking a muscular arm around the man’s waist. He drove forward, plucking the man off the ground and running him three steps into the rocky well. The man let out a huge “Oooomph!”

Grey let him sag down and spun just in time to see the first man the woman had kicked snake an arm around her throat. He had lost his pistol after the kick, but he plucked a skinning knife from a belt sheath and touched the edge of the blade to her cheek.

He was fast.

Grey was faster.

He caught the man’s wrist before the blade could do more than dent the woman’s skin, then he stepped back and sideways, pulling the arm with him. Grey had received some schooling in the manly arts, but he’d learned more from gutter fights and trench wars. He knew what hurt and how to make it hurt. He jerked the man’s arm straight and punched him full-fisted just above the elbow. A bent elbow, Grey knew, was as strong as a knotted tree limb. A straight elbow was as fragile as a breadstick if you knew where to hit. He did.

There was a sharp snap and the elbow suddenly bent the wrong way.

The knife fell from twitching fingers and the man let loose a howl that would have broken glass if there was any around.

The woman, clearly not content with the man having a broken arm, spun toward him, kneed him in the crotch, drove a thumb into the socket of his throat, boxed his ears and broke his nose with a very professional short punch.

He went down.

And she spat on him as he fell.

Grey liked that. He grinned.

A fragment of a second later the grin was knocked off his face by a hard punch that caught him on the point of the jaw and spun him halfway around. He staggered back, continued the turn and then stepped inside the follow-up punch. It was the man Picky had crashed into. Not tall, but far bulkier than Grey had first thought. Arms and shoulders like a circus gorilla. He swung big lefts and rights that would have darkened the world if a second one had landed fair.

Grey brought his elbows up and used his own fists to protect his ears. As he plowed forward he let the man ruin his own arms by punching elbows and shoulders; then as he got close enough he leaned in and hit the man in the face and throat, left-right, left-right, and followed it all with an overhand right that put the man down on his face.

Then Grey stepped back and drew his pistol. He thumbed the hammer to half cock and the sound was as sharp and eloquent as if he’d fired the weapon.

“Stop!” cried a voice. “For the love of Jesus and the saints, please stop this!”

Grey turned to see the bearded monk, his cheek torn and bleeding from the pistol-whipping, his nose askew, eyes filled with the tears of pain, standing between him and the thugs. He stood with palms out, pleading with him. With everyone.

The moment froze into a bloody tableau.

The group of men lay or knelt or leaned in postures of exhausted defeat, their clothes dusty, faces streaked with bright blood. Looks Away climbed to his feet on the far side of the well, and the man he’d been fighting with crawled away from him with blood dripping from his nose and slack lips. The woman stood panting, fists balled, blond curls blowing free from her pins, blue eyes blazing with cold fury.

“Please…,” begged the monk. “I beg you.”

Grey glanced at Looks Away, who gave him a small nod. The woman looked too furious to speak, but even she gave him a nod. And in that moment Grey’s heart froze in his chest.

The woman.

Dear God, he thought. She was a stranger to him, and yet there was something so intensely and deeply familiar about her and a name came to his lips.

“Annabelle,” he murmured.

The woman frowned. “My name is Jenny Pearl.”

Grey swallowed hard. It was like forcing down a chunk of broken glass.

Not her, he told himself. Annabelle’s gone and this is another world, another life, another woman.

The face was different, the body was different, but those eyes.

He wanted to turn and run out of the moment.

There was a smudge of bloody dirt on Jenny Pearl’s left cheek. And that hit him almost as hard. There had been blood on Annabelle’s cheek when he buried her.

God.

“Please,” repeated the monk, intruding into his thoughts and bringing him back from that long-ago grave on a forgotten hillside in Virginia.

Grey took a breath, then nodded, eased the hammer down, and let the gun hang at his side.

“Okay, Padre,” he said. “Okay.”

The monk exhaled a big lungful of air and nodded. “Thank you, my son. God bless and thank you.”

On the ground, one of the men groaned and staggered painfully to his feet. He stood swaying like a drunkard. With a snarl of feral hatred he peeled back the lapel of his coat to show the vest he wore beneath.

Pinned to the vest was a round disk of metal embossed with a star. The words “Sheriff’s Deputy” were etched into the silver badge.

Grey said, “Oh… shit.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Drop your weapons and raise your hands,” snarled the deputy as he laid his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “All of you sons of bitches are under arrest.”

Grey stiffened. His gun was still at his side. “On what charge?”

“Assaulting an officer,” barked the deputy. “How’s that for a start?”

“Not good enough,” said Grey. “Way I saw it six grown men were assaulting a man of the cloth and a helpless woman.”

“I’m not helpless,” snapped Jenny and again those eyes flashed at him, full of life and challenge.

Full of life.

Of life.

“Point taken. Assaulting a woman,” Grey amended, trying to study that lovely face while keeping an eye on the deputy. “Even if that wasn’t illegal in itself, six to one is hardly what I’d call fair.”

The deputy sneered. “We were in the process of making a legal arrest.”

Jenny spat at him. It didn’t reach his face, but the effort was impressive. Grey smiled. She was a very pretty woman. Slim, but with an abundance of everything he liked above and below. A face like an angel and, clearly, the temper of Satan himself. Nice. And it was relief to see those qualities, because even though Annabelle had been willful and passionate, she was a gentle flower and not this desert rose. Plus Jenny could clearly handle herself. If it had only been two men, she might have wiped the street with both of them. Grey liked her at once.

“Arrest?” he asked. “Care to tell me what the crime was?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

Grey kept the pistol down at his side, but he thumbed the hammer back to full cock. “I guess I’m making it my business.”

The deputy eyed him, clearly weighing his options. The man had his hand on his gun, and maybe he was a quickdraw artist — they seemed to be springing up all over the place these days — but on the other hand, Grey already had his gun out. And Grey knew that to anyone with wits he did not look like a man unfamiliar with gunplay.

“Please,” urged the monk. “We can be civil about this.”

“Civil?” said the woman. “How can anyone be civil with wild dogs?”

“You watch your mouth, Jenny Pearl,” warned the deputy, his fingers beginning to close around the sandalwood grips of his gun. The other deputies were getting to their feet, dazed and stupid with pain. But there was anger and bloodlust in their eyes.

Thomas Looks Away drew his pistol in a smooth, fluid motion and pointed the barrel at the side of the deputy’s head. “Jed Perkins, I believe you were born stupid and you’ve lost ground since.”

Deputy Perkins froze.

A shadow passed above them and out of the corner of his eye he saw the same ugly bird he’d spied earlier. With a whipsnap of its leathery wings, the creature came to rest on the top of the well’s crossbar. It cocked its head again, turning a dark eye on the drama here on the street. The monk touched the wooden cross that he wore on a cord around his neck.

“Now,” continued Looks Away, ignoring the bird and giving Perkins a stern and uncompromising look, “I believe I heard my friend ask you a fair question, son. What exactly were the crimes for which you were attempting to arrest Miss Pearl and Brother Joe?”

Perkins licked his lips.

“Theft,” he said.

“Theft?” cried Jenny Pearl. “So help me God I’ll nut you and feed—.”

Looks Away touched her arm and it cut her flow of threats.

“Theft it was and there’s no way you can deny it,” countered Perkins. “There’s your proof, and it’s enough to get you a full month in the mines. Hard labor, too.”

As he spoke, Perkins pointed to the base of the well, where two wooden buckets lay on their side, surrounded by a pool of water that was drying quickly in the hot afternoon sun.

“Maybe I’m missing something here,” said Grey. “Are you saying they stole the buckets?”

“No, you damn-fool,” said Perkins. “Anyone can clearly see they were stealing water.”

“Water?” echoed Grey. He looked from Perkins to Jenny Pearl, to Looks Away, to the monk named Brother Joe, and back again. “You’re arresting them for drawing water from the town well?”

“Of course,” said Perkins. “That well is the sole and complete property of—.”

“No, wait,” said Grey, holding up his free hand. “We’re talking about water? Water as in… water?”

“What are you? Stupid?”

“No, but I am deeply confused,” admitted Grey. “Or maybe appalled is the right word.”

“That’ll work,” agreed Looks Away, icily. Miss Pearl nodded.

Brother Joe tried to explain. “Mr. Deray has legal claim to all the water rights in this whole region.”

“Why? Is he grazing cattle or sheep?”

“No.”

“What’s he farm, then, that he needs so much water? Help me out here, brother, ’cause I’m having a hard time getting my hands on this.”

“Like I said,” laughed Perkins, “you’re a fool who doesn’t know shit from sheep’s wool.”

Grey’s arm was a blur. He raised his gun and fired a shot into the dirt between Perkins’s feet. The bullet ricocheted up and whined away into the distance. The deputy emitted a sharp yelp like a kicked dog and jumped two feet in the air. He landed flat-footed and froze into a hunched statue, eyes as wide as saucers.

“You want to keep a tighter rein on your mouth, son,” he said. “Call me a fool again and I’d be just as happy to put the next one through your kneecap. See if I don’t.”

Perkins’s mouth was open but he said nothing. Grey was pretty sure that the man was, at the moment, incapable of human speech. It took some effort to keep a smile off his face.

Brother Joe took a step forward as if he planned to stand between Perkins and Grey should the former incur any further wrath. The action said a lot about the monk’s devotion to the heart of scripture. It said a lot less about his awareness of the realities of this hard world. Even so, Grey lowered his gun again. He still didn’t holster it, though.

Looks Away let out an audible breath.

Jenny huffed. “You should have shot him. That’s what people do with mangy dogs.”

Grey turned to the other men. He could see that they each wore a deputy badge. His heart sank. However he said, “I see anyone’s hand twitch in the direction of their holsters I will kill each and every damn one of you. No, don’t look at me like that. I have five shots and my friend has six. If you don’t think we can put you down before you clear leather, then have at it. I’m sure there’s a coffin-maker in town.”

“There is,” Jenny assured him.

“So,” continued Grey, “you have to ask yourself if there’s anything here worth dying for. I’m thinking there isn’t.”

The deputies did not draw their guns. Brother Joe let out a deep breath of obvious relief.

“Well now,” said Grey affably, “how about someone tell me what in the actual hell is going on here? How is it that someone can claim water rights inside a damn town? Pardon my language, ma’am.”

“I don’t want your damn apologies,” she fired back. “I’d rather you had the balls to shoot these shit-heels and be done with it.”

Looks Away chuckled. “Ah, I do admire you, Jenny Pearl.”

“And you can keep your mouth shut, too, Mr. Looks Through Windows,” growled Jenny.

Looks Away affected to look like innocence offended. He said nothing, though, and Grey could see a ghost of a smile on his mouth.

“Padre,” said Grey, trying to find a voice of reason in this pack, “what’s the story with this water rights thing? Surely you’re able to tell the truth. Kind of a professional requirement, as I understand it.”

“Don’t listen to that old—,” began Perkins, but Grey shushed him. Not with a finger to his lips but with the barrel of his big Colt. That shut the deputy’s mouth.

“You were saying, Padre—?” encouraged Grey.

The monk cleared his throat. “Please, I don’t want any more trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” Grey assured him. “Just some folks standing around chatting on a sunny afternoon. So… if you please…”

“Well,” said Brother Joe, “what Deputy Perkins says may be true in the sense of the local law. This well is technically owned by Mr. Deray.”

“Tell him all of it,” said Jenny.

Brother Joe nodded. He wiped blood from his broken nose and pawed it from within the tangles of his beard. There was a lot of it. “That’s the thing… Aleksander Deray has acquired the rights to all of the water in this part of the Maze. All fresh water, that is.”

“All of it?” asked Grey, smiling at the absurdity of it.

“Every drop.”

“How’s that even possible? This well is inside the town limits. Surely it has to belong to the town.” Before he finished both Brother Joe and Jenny were shaking their heads.

“Mr. Deray bought all of the water,” said Brother Joe.

“You mean he stole it,” growled Jenny.

“More like swindled,” suggested Looks Away casually. They ignored him.

“All of it?” Grey asked. “What about on the farms? You can’t tell me there’s no water on any of the farms.”

“There’s water,” said Looks Away. “Not a lot, but it’s there.”

“Well, there you go, then—.”

“Mr. Deray owns that, too,” said Brother Joe. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s what makes this all so unfair. People are dying for want of water. The livestock and crops are already withered down to nothing. At first Mr. Deray would sell us some. A gallon a day for a family of four. Then it was a gallon every other day. Then a gallon a week.”

Grey gaped at him.

Jenny Pearl’s eyes flashed with blue fire. “Now Deray says that we can’t even buy water.”

“How does he expect you to live?”

“That, my dear chap,” said Looks Away dryly, “seems to be the question. Perhaps one of these fine constables can furnish us with an adequate answer. Shall we ask them?”

Grey took a step toward Perkins who, for all that he was afraid, held his ground. Grey had to grudge him that much. The deputy stiffened and stuck out his jaw in an attempt to look like the symbol of authority he was supposed to be.

“Talk,” said Grey.

“This ain’t your business, mister,” said Perkins. “Or the Indian’s.”

“I beg to differ,” drawled Looks Away.

Grey smiled. “I guess we’re making it our business.”

“You know you only got the better of us because you snucked up on us and bushwhacked us.”

“Snucked isn’t a word, you illiterate troll,” said Looks Away.

“You’re saying,” Grey said to the deputy, “that things would have been different if we’d made this a fair fight?”

“You’re damn right.”

“Like the fair fight that was in progress when we arrived? Six men against a woman and a parson who clearly didn’t offer any resistance. Which means that it was six men against this woman. That’s your idea of fair? Is that what you’re trying to sell here?”

Deputy Perkins turned as red as a fresh bruise and wouldn’t meet Grey’s eyes.

“They was breaking the law.”

“You call that a law?” demanded Miss Pearl. “There are children wasting away in this town. People are getting sick.”

“That’s not my concern,” insisted Perkins. “The law is the law.”

Grey used the barrel of the Colt to turn Perkins’s chin, forcing the man to look at him.

“When armed men enforce a law like that, then the law’s no law at all.”

“You need to take that up with the sheriff and the circuit judge. They say it is the law.”

“Fine. Tell me where they are and I’ll be happy to have that conversation.”

Perkins faltered. “Well… you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The, um, sheriff’s down south in the City of Lost Angels.”

“And the circuit judge?”

“Well… he won’t be back around until March.”

“That’s a long time,” said Grey. “What about Mr. Deray? Maybe I should go have a conversation with him.”

Brother Joe gasped audibly. Jenny Pearl took a step back, touching her hand to her throat. They both looked deeply afraid.

A slow and nasty smile crawled onto Perkins’s mouth. “Well, why don’t you?”

Behind Perkins, out of his line of sight, Looks Away pursed his lips and quietly blew out his cheeks.

Grey Torrance hoisted a smile onto his own face. It wasn’t the kind of smile he liked to show to people he thought well of. The smile on Perkins’s face leaked away.

“Take your men and get the hell out of my sight,” said Grey. “Do it quick and do it now.”

“And then what?” said the deputy. “Soon as we’re gone you’re going to steal some water. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Oh, you’re absolutely right. I intend to have a water party. Free water for everyone. Much as they want.”

The other deputies milled around, looking at each other, looking at the well. Looking everywhere but at Grey or Looks Away.

“C’mon, Jed,” mumbled one of the men. “This ain’t worth taking a bullet over.”

Jed Perkins slowly slapped dust from his clothes. He bent and picked up a brown hat with a band of silver conches and screwed it down on his head. The motions were deliberate and exaggerated, as if cleaning himself up after a beating was somehow able to shift him to a moral high ground or some position of tactical superiority. Grey was unimpressed. He’d seen this sort of thing before.

“Get gone,” he advised.

Perkins stepped up and for a moment stood nose to nose with Grey.

“You better watch your backtrail, mister,” he said coldly. “’Cause the next time I see you I’m going to—.”

And Grey hit him.

It was a left-handed blow. Very fast, and despite being short-range it rocked Perkins onto his heels, knocked the lights from his eyes, and then sat him down hard on his ass.

The other men cried out and started forward and Grey turned smoothly, raising his pistol, pointing it at the closest man. Looks Away stepped out from behind the well and held his gun in a rock-steady brown fist.

“Listen to me,” said Grey coldly. “Learn this for the future. If you’ve just taken a beating, that is not — I repeat not—the time to make a threat. Only a complete idiot does that. Like this sorry excuse for a human being.”

He punctuated his words with a short, sharp kick that drove the square toe of his boot under Jed Perkins’s chin. The man’s eyes rolled up white and he flopped back.

“Please!” begged the monk.

Grey patted the air toward him. “It’s okay, Padre. This is over. Deputy Perkins dealt the play. Everyone here saw that. Now you fellows pick this piece of cow dung up and cart him off before I get really mad. Be best for all concerned if no one said anything smart while you were about it. Go on, get ’er done.”

The other deputies did not say a single word as they hooked their hands under Perkins’s arms and knees, hoisted him up, and went creaking away in a puffing cluster.

Grey and Looks Away held their guns on them until the men flopped Perkins over a saddle and the six of them rode out of town.

The ugly bird suddenly cawed. It was so strange a sound. More like the plaintive cry of a lost child than any sound that could come from a bird’s throat. With a snap of its leathery wings it launched from the crossbar of the well, rose ponderously into the air and flew away to the northeast. Whether it was following the deputies or merely heading in a similar direction was unclear. The four of them watched it, and the fleeing men, until they were out of sight.

Then, with a sigh, Grey opened the cylinder, replaced the single spent cartridge, and reholstered his Colt. Looks Away did the same. They turned to face Brother Joe and Jenny Pearl.

Before Grey could say a word, the woman slapped him across the face with all of her considerable strength. It was a lightning-fast blow that rocked Grey’s head and spun him halfway around. Then the woman grabbed his shoulder, wheeled him back, grabbed his ears, pulled his head down, and planted a scalding hot kiss on his lips.

Then she shoved him back. Gasping, blinking, totally confused, Grey staggered and might have fallen if Looks Away hadn’t caught his arm.

“What,” he sputtered, “the hell was that for?”

Jenny Pearl crossed her arms under her breasts and cocked her head. Her blue eyes seemed to ignite the air around them. “The slap was because you didn’t kill that murdering son of a bitch, Jed Perkins.” She paused. “The kiss was because you damn sure beat a pound of stupid off his sorry ass.”

Brother Joe turned a suddenly scarlet face away and shook his head slowly. Grey heard Looks Away laughing softly.

He rubbed his face and stared down at the woman and had no idea what to do or say.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Looks Away made formal introductions and that broke the spell of the moment.

“Jenny Pearl,” he said, “I would like to formally introduce my new associate, Mr. Grey Torrance. Grey, this is Miss Jenny Pearl. She owns—.”

“Used to own,” corrected Jenny.

“—used to own a cattle ranch northeast of town.”

“You’re a rancher?” asked Grey, rubbing the red welt on his cheek.

“Why?” said Jenny with challenge in her tone. “Can’t a woman own a ranch?”

“Sure. But you don’t look old enough.”

A shadow passed behind the woman’s eyes. “It… it was my father’s place. I took it over when he…” She let the rest hang, then added, “I ran near three hundred head before that bastard Deray got here.”

“Miss Pearl, please…,” said the monk.

“Not talking about it isn’t the same as it not being the case,” said Jenny; but then she sighed and nodded, withdrawing her anger from the moment.

“And this,” said Looks Away, “is Brother Joe, late of the order of the Brothers of Outcasts.”

“I heard about you fellows,” said Grey, nodding.

Those monks were all, in one way or another, failed shepherds of their herds. Drunks and sinners, thieves of church offerings, men who had broken their vows of chastity, and others who had dishonored their vows. Where such disgrace would drive most clerics totally away from the church, a handful of them had come crawling back and begged for a chance to redeem themselves.

They were stripped of most of their priestly powers and allowed to serve without pay, without praise, and probably without much chance of setting things right. Grey had never met one before and didn’t give much of a damn for humility, but he admired their courage. As a man who felt the weight of his own sins and worried about the slim chance of salvation and the very real threat of celestial punishment, he hoped the Outcast Brothers would prove that even the most wretched had a fighting chance on Judgment Day.

He said, “Thought you were all down Mexico way, trying to turn the last Mayans into good little Christians. What brings you up here? You a priest of a church ’round these parts?”

“We missionaries go where the Lord sends us.”

“God sent you here? Why? You lose a bet with him?”

The joke fell flat and Grey was sorry he’d made it. The monk actually winced as if he was in physical pain.

“Are you a Christian, brother,” he asked.

Grey shrugged. “Not sure where I stand on that topic. God and me haven’t had any meaningful conversations in quite a long time.”

“But you believe?”

“That’s a complicated question,” said Grey. “The world’s big and strange. Maybe bigger and stranger than people thought it was. So… I guess I’ll keep an open mind. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to find me in a pew come Sunday morning.”

Brother Joe nodded. He was as thin as a rake-handle, nearly bald. He wore a rough brown robe with the hood folded down on his bony shoulders, and rope sandals on his feet. His only extravagance was a beard that was full and wild. His voice had only the faintest echo of the Spanish that had probably been the language of his childhood.

Brother Joe offered a thin hand and Grey shook it. The monk’s hand was like dry parchment stretched over fragile sticks.

“Although I abhor violence of any kind,” said Brother Joe, “I thank you for what you did. Those men might have hurt Miss Pearl.”

“They might have done worse than hurt her,” said Grey. “I know men like that. I know that type. Maybe I should have schooled them a bit more on how to treat decent folks.”

Jenny smiled at that.

But Brother Joe shook his head. “Judgment and punishment are for God.”

“Sure,” said Grey, “forgiveness, too. But I’d rather be judged by the Almighty for doing what I think’s right than stand aside and let bastards like that make life hell for people. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

Grey put a hand on the monk’s shoulder. “Yeah, padre, I know. Maybe carrying a gun makes me a bad man, too. I’ll talk that over with Saint Peter if I get the chance. Or maybe my answer will come from a lick from the Devil’s riding crop, but I will be damned if I stand aside and do nothing. Some men can. I can’t.”

Brother Joe met his eyes and it was clear that there was much he wanted to say, but they both knew this wasn’t the time. Instead he took Grey’s hand and kissed it.

“May God’s mercy and protection be with you always.”

“Amen to that,” said Looks Away. “Now, how about we draw some of that water and get off the street? I doubt our Deputy Perkins or his employer will let this matter stand where it is.”

“So what? I’m not afraid of them, Looksie,” said Jenny.

Looks Away winced at the nickname, but he let the bucket slide down the well. “I’m not afraid of them coming back,” he said. “But let’s make it later than sooner. I’m fair parched.”

“Looksie?” echoed Grey, grinning.

“Don’t start,” warned the Sioux as he cranked up the laden bucket. “You wouldn’t be the first white man I’ve scalped.”

There was a sudden rumble, deep and heavy, and they all turned toward the west. Far out over the ocean was a massive bank of dark clouds that Grey could have sworn were not there five minutes ago. It was a storm front, and the clouds pulsed and throbbed with thunder. Lightning flashed within and it looked like red veins in the skin of some great beast.

“Looks like the town’s in for a break,” said Grey. “Stretch some canvas and catch the rain. Nothing beats a cup of fresh rainwater.”

“Not that rain,” said Jenny softly. “God…”

Brother Joe quickly crossed himself.

A wet wind whipped off the ocean and blew past them. It smelled of rotting fish and sulfur. Jenny wrapped her arms around her body and shuddered. Even Looks Away seemed to grow pale and nervous.

The first fat raindrops pinged on the tin roof of the nearest house. Fresh thunder growled at them. Closer now.

High above they heard the shrill and haunted call of that strange bird. It seemed to be pushed toward them on the stiff wind.

Rain splatted down on the street a block away and they watched the leading wall of the storm march toward them. Grey frowned at the storm. It was strange. It was… wrong. As the belly of the storm swelled outward like an obscene pregnancy, the lightning changed in color. Where a moment ago it had been like red veins, now it changed into a tracery of blue.

Grey knew that shade of blue. He’d seen it in Nevada. He’d nearly been killed by a burst of it.

“Looks Away—,” he began, but thunder exploded like artillery fire, smashing all other sounds into nothingness.

Inside the storm, behind the veil of slanting rain, something moved. Something vast, something that writhed like a nest of serpents. And tangled up with the growl of thunder he thought he heard something else. Something that roared with a voice from nightmare.

Looks Away glanced down at the bucket he held.

He let it fall.

“Run,” he murmured. Then as the rain thickened and as the sky turned black as sackcloth, he yelled it. “Run!”

The four of them turned and ran.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Running from a storm is like running from a forest fire or the fall of night. At first it seems possible, but then with every step the realities become apparent. What man can do, nature can overmaster.

“Get the horses!” Grey bellowed to Looks Away. “You take Brother Joe and I’ll take—.”

Before he could finish the statement a gray bulk slammed into him and sent him skidding into the stone well. He rebounded and whipped around in time to see Picky race away from him in a full-out panicked gallop. Queenie was neck and neck with her.

Grey wasted no time cursing the horses. Instead he launched himself to his feet, caught Jenny Pearl’s arm, and together they ran. He heard feet slapping on the dampening mud behind him.

“Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” breathed Brother Joe with every step.

“Move your holy ass,” snapped Looks Away.

Rain pelted them, punched them, and chased them. Grey could see that the street up ahead was empty. Everyone had fled the coming storm. Two of the rocking chairs still wobbled, proof that their occupants had been there only a moment before.

The howl of the wind was a terrible thing to hear. It was the sound of souls in burning torment. It was the shriek of the tortured damned. As he ran, Grey tried to tell himself that it was the wind, only the wind. That the sound was some freakish side effect of ghost rock that was somehow caught up in this gale. That it was no more dire than the hiss of a burning fuse or the bang of gunpowder. Just a sound.

Only that.

But the rain burned as it struck his skin. It hissed and sizzled as if the storm had come howling up from Hell itself, carrying with it the screams of the dead. The cries of a thing that hated the living for what the quick had and the dead did not. It was a hungry, covetous sound that betrayed a greedy want of life. Or to see life torn down and swept away.

As Grey ran he heard human voices screaming, too. Rising to match the wind.

They came from inside houses. They came from behind closed doors and windows. And they came from the mouths of Thomas Looks Away, Jenny Pearl, Brother Joe.

And from his own mouth.

Jenny grabbed his sodden sleeve and jerked him sideways toward a rain-spattered porch. They raced up the three wooden steps and across the porch. Jenny fumbled in her skirt pocket for a key, stabbed it into the lock, turned it, shouldered the door open, and fell inward, dragging Grey with her. Brother Joe came through next, stumble-running from a push, and finally Looks Away staggered in. The Sioux slammed the door and began slapping at his skin, trying to swat away the stinging rainwater as if it were filled with biting gnats.

Jenny pushed past him and tore a curtain down. “Use this!”

They each grabbed a corner of the frilly yellow curtain and frantically dabbed and blotted themselves.

“It burns,” cried Brother Joe. “God, it burns.”

“Out of those clothes,” ordered Grey. “Now.”

Brother Joe, despite his pain, cast an appalled look toward Jenny, but the woman brusquely waved him off and began unbuttoning her blouse. Grey half tore his shirt getting it off. He yanked off his boots and shoved down his jeans. Looks away was already down to britches and Brother Joe pulled off his robe to reveal a thin and many times patched pair of what looked like woman’s cast-off bloomers.

All three of the men turned their backs on Jenny Pearl and she stepped out of her dress. Grey had a lingering afterimage of her in layers of white, and a bodice with a plunging neckline. There was another tearing sound and he half turned to see her rip down a second curtain and begin winding it around her slim body.

Thunder boomed and outside branches snapped from the oak tree on the lawn. Flying sticks hammered the front of the house.

“Stay away from the windows,” warned Grey.

“Looksie,” said Jenny, “the shutters.”

“Shite,” groaned the Sioux, but he ran to the closest window and opened it. Wincing into the spray, he snagged the pulls of the heavy wooden shutters and slammed them closed. Grey did the same with the window on the other side of the door as Brother Joe and Jenny ran to repeat this with the windows upstairs. By the time they were done, Grey and Looks Away had the rear and side windows shuttered. It darkened the house, but it felt far more secure. They grabbed the curtains and rags from the kitchen to mop up the stinging rain.

“Am I burned?” asked Looks Away, probing at his face with nervous fingers.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Grey, “but your skin’s red.”

“Hilarious. But it feels blistered.”

“It’s not. How’s mine?”

“The same. There must be something in the rain to cause this, but it doesn’t seem to be causing tissue damage.”

“Hurts like a bitch, though.”

“Yes, it damn well does,” agreed Jenny as she rejoined them. Grey became instantly and acutely aware of how transparent white undergarments could be when soaked with rainwater. He tried his level best to look anywhere but at her, and failed miserably. He felt his face burn even hotter, and that had nothing at all to do with the rain.

Outside the rain intensified. Grey bent and peered through the shutter slats. The rain fell in sheets that seemed to march like platoons of ghosts across the street.

“It’s starting to hail,” said Looks Away, then he stiffened. “Oh… bloody hell!”

“What is it?” asked Jenny, crowding beside him to peer between the slats.

When Brother Joe joined them, he immediately gasped and clutched his crucifix in a white-knuckled fist. “Dear Lord, save us from the horrors of the Pit.”

In silent fear, they stood and watched for long minutes, each of them staring in horror at what was falling with the rain.

Snakes.

And frogs.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

The snakes were strange and there were many kinds Grey had never seen. Not desert snakes like sidewinders and rattlesnakes. These were mottled and sinewy, more like sea snakes or eels. And the frogs were tiny and brightly colored. Livid greens and bright blues and shocking yellow. Some of the frogs landed in puddles and hopped away; others struck harder parts of the street that hadn’t yet softened to mud. These exploded into red that was immediately washed away. All of the falling animals steamed, though, as if plucked from boiling pots.

Overhead the lightning flashed with blue madness and it cast the entire street into an alien strangeness.

They could still hear the screams and the deeper bellows of whatever vast things they’d glimpsed inside the storm. Huge, stentorian cries rattled the glass in the frames and shook the timbers of the house.

“What’s happening?” whispered Jenny. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s the end of the world,” whispered Brother Joe. “This is the Beast come to conquer. God, bless us sinners and shelter us with your mercy.”

If Grey expected — or hoped — that Looks Away or Jenny would refute the monk’s words, he was mistaken.

Blue lightning struck a telegraph pole on the far side of the street and it exploded into a swarm of splinters. The wires broke apart and drooped in defeat to the muddy ground. Grey and the others cried out and shrank back as jagged splinters thudded into the mud and rattled against the windows like a hail of arrows. One of the panes cracked but did not break. Even so, Grey spread his arms and pushed Jenny and Brother Joe backward. Looks Away flinched away as another azure bolt hit the stump of the telegraph pole and set it alight. The blue flame burned like a torch despite the heavy rain.

“This is madness,” breathed Grey.

“Madness,” agreed Looks Away.

Outside the storm raged.

It went on and on and on as darkness closed its fingers around the town of Paradise Falls and tightened everything inside a big, black fist.

Chapter Twenty-Six

After a while the lightning and thunder began to ease, but the rain continued to hammer down. The thump of frogs and snakes had dwindled and stopped after the initial cascade. Now it was only rain.

The four of them had long since retreated to the subjective safety of Jenny’s kitchen and sat huddled around the table. As the storm eased, their focus shifted from the wrath of a perverse nature and more toward the others in the room. The men became increasingly aware of their state of undress, while Grey in particular remained distracted by Jenny Pearl’s lack of attire. With disheveled hair and a curtain for modesty she looked like some fairy princess from an old story. Even in the weird blue light of the storm she was beautiful.

It seemed to take her longer, however, to begin feeling self-conscious. She was clearly not overly concerned about modesty. Not that she flaunted herself, that was clear enough. It was just that she seemed to be a practical woman. Very grounded, and Grey admired that as much as her looks.

However she did finally turn away from the windows and pluck at the folds of cloth she’d wrapped around herself. “I’m going to get dressed,” she said. “There’s wood in the kitchen. Looksie, why don’t you make a fire in the stove and set some water to boiling. Once that’s going I’m sure you men can figure out how to dry your clothes. When I’m decent I’ll see about eggs or soup. Maybe a steak, if it hasn’t spoiled. And Brother Joe — you’d better get some hot coffee into you.”

“I–I’m o-o-o-k-k-kay,” said Brother Joe, but his teeth chattered the words into a stutter.

The hard look on Jenny’s face softened. “Don’t be silly. You’re turning blue. If you don’t get something hot into you, you’ll catch your death.”

“I’m f-f-fine,” he insisted.

“You’re not. You’ve got no meat on you to keep you warm, you skinny old thing.” Jenny chewed her lip in thought, then nodded to herself. “Look… my dad’s things are still in a trunk in his room upstairs. You boys can sort through and find something to wear. He was of a size, so his stuff will be big on everyone except Mr. Torrance.”

“Call me Grey. And, thank you kindly.”

She nodded, appraising him. “Come along then. This storm’s not going anywhere for a while and it’s getting cold in here.”

With that she turned and headed up the stairs into the shadows of the second floor.

Grey lingered, glancing at Looks Away.

“That,” he said quietly, “is some woman.”

“Indeed she is.”

“What happened to her pa?”

Brother Joe said, “The D-Devil t-t-took him.”

Grey looked to the Sioux for explanation.

“Bob Pearl was a good man. Everyone called him Lucky Bob. He was a real bull of a man, a sterling chap. Tough as leather, but fair-minded and honest as the day is long. He did a lot for the people of Paradise Falls, and after a while it seemed like he was the backbone of the whole town. He hated Nolan Chesterfield and hated Aleksander Deray even more, which is saying something because men like Lucky Bob Pearl seldom give in to hate. He had a big heart, as the poets say.”

“What happened?” Grey repeated.

“What happened is that he decided he’d had enough of what was going on, and he went out to see Aleksander Deray about setting things straight,” said Looks Away. “He wanted to appeal to him to be more fair with the water leases. However he never made it to Deray’s place. Or, at least that’s what Deray told people. Lucky Bob’s horse was found in a pit near the edge of the drop-off. It was dead, its bones nearly picked clean. I saw the body. The horse’s right front pastern was broken. The evidence suggested that Bob was riding along the edge and the horse stepped wrong, broke its leg, and fell into the pit. It was a long fall and there were plenty of rocks. Our fine Deputy Perkins concluded that when the horse fell, Bob Pearl pitched over the edge of the drop-off and went down into the salt water.”

“His body wash up?”

Brother Joe shook his head and repeated, “The Devil took h-him.”

“Devil or not,” said Looks Away, “Lucky Bob’s body never washed up.” He paused. “Around here the sea doesn’t willingly give up its dead.”

Grey thought about that, remembering the churning water and jagged rocks. And the things that moved beneath those troubled waves. He shuddered.

Then he cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Our horses are out there somewhere.”

Looks Away almost smiled. “I daresay they are. And while I value horseflesh as much as the next bloke — and maybe doubly so since I am, after all, Sioux — if you are primed to suggest that we venture out in that rain to corral them, then—.”

“Don’t!” said the monk without a trace of stutter.

“Not even a little chance of that, friend,” said Grey. “I was remarking on it is all. I was not and am not planning on putting one foot out that door until this storm stops.”

He almost added, If it stops.

“Bloody glad to hear it,” said Looks Away. “I—.”

From above came a stern call. “Are you coming or do I have to carry this son of a bitching case all by myself?”

Grey grinned. “Yeah. Quite a woman.” He started toward the stairs then paused. “Looks Away—?”

“Yes?” the Sioux asked.

“I think we both know that you haven’t been entirely straight with me about what’s going on here.”

“I haven’t lied to you.”

“That’s not the same thing and you know it.”

Looks Away said nothing, which was answer enough.

“When we get settled,” said Grey, “we are going to have a full and frank discussion about this. About all of it, you hear me? Am I getting through to you on this?”

“You are,” said the Sioux. “And… we will. I think it’s high time for that conversation.”

They exchanged a single nod, and then Grey climbed the stairs as the storm’s intensity spun up again. It raged and the house creaked and Grey’s heart hammered.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“In here,” called Jenny Pearl, and Grey followed the sound of her voice down a darkened hall. It was a two-story house with a tin roof, and the rain made an awful din above his head. There were wrought iron sconces on the walls but the candles were unlit and cold. The darkened hall conjured an old memory in his mind, and he wasn’t sure if it was real or something belonging to a dream.

In the memory, a much younger Grey — a boy still too young to shave — crept along a corridor like this but longer, with dusty wood paneling and the framed faces of dead relatives scowling at him from the walls. Unseen mice squeaked behind the wainscoting and their voices sounded like sly laughter. A dead cockroach lay on its back, one leg continuing to kick as if death’s grip on it was tenuous. Cobwebs trembled in the corners as he reached the end of the hall and turned to follow a second and longer one. There were doors on either side. Shut and bolted. Always in his dreams those doors were locked against him. And even now, walking along Jenny Pearl’s hall, he passed closed doors and felt deliberately shut out by them. Or… was something else shut in?

That was the secret of those old dreams. That was the thing that gnawed at him. At the self who walked through those halls. At the dreaming boy in his bed who sweated and writhed as his young limbs aped the movements of walking where he did not want to walk. And at the man he was now. Big, strong, experienced, armed, ruthless, tough by any standard. And all three of them, all three aspects of himself, were afraid. Even the gunslinger. Even the killer he was now.

Strength, he had learned through hard lessons, did not free you from fear. A life spent in combat and in small acts of violence, only proved to you how much hurt was there, how much danger. Bullets run out, muscles fail, stamina flees, and even the strongest warrior can find himself on his knees, weaponless and unable to raise his arms as his enemies close in around him.

And yet that sure knowledge, the understanding of his own mortality and his physical limits, were not the things that truly frightened him now. Here, in this strange town, with a storm raging outside that could never be called “natural,” with dead men who walked and ghosts who followed him, Grey Torrance feared the things he did not understand. He was not afraid of dying. No, he’d danced with Death’s cold daughter too many times to fear that. No, he was afraid of what might happen to his soul if death did not shut out all the lights and close all the doors. What then?

What then?

Grey saw a matchbox on the dresser, removed a Lucifer match, and popped it alight with his thumbnail. He forced his fingers not to tremble. He lit both candles and was relieved by the warm yellow glow. The shadows retreated to the far corners and clustered up near the high ceiling. Not gone. Waiting.

Always waiting.

The thought, as absurd as it was, sent a small chill down his spine.

Outside the thunder roared. The wind shrieked in demon voices.

The last door along the hall was ajar and light spilled out onto the floor. Grey tapped a knuckle against the frame.

“You decent?” he called.

He heard a short laugh. “I’m dressed, Mr. Torrance, but I’ll never make claims about being decent.”

Smiling, Grey opened the door.

Jenny stood on the far side of the room. The curtain and a mound of sopping frilly whites lay in a heap and she now wore a simple dress that hung straight enough to let him know there weren’t too many slips and layers of bloomers beneath. She was buttoning the front and he caught a glimpse of soft cleavage. From her small curl of a smile it was clear she both knew he’d seen it, and that it was intended.

Watch this one, he warned himself. Grey was not afraid of facing any man with gun, blades, or fists, but he had been brought low by women more times than he could count. Samson and Achilles weren’t the only men with weak spots.

Jenny nodded to the corner to Grey’s left. “That’s the trunk. I kept my pa’s clothes.”

“Can’t let them go?” Grey suggested.

She shrugged. “He went missing but I never had a body to bury. It’s stupid, but I… I suppose I keep hoping.… Well, you know.”

“I do,” he said. “And you have my condolences and my best wishes that he’s out there somewhere. I guess it’s fair to say that these days anything is possible.”

She nodded and bent to scoop up her clothes. He knew, though, that she was hiding the flecks of tears that sparkled on her lashes.

“He must have been a good man,” said Grey.

Without looking she asked, “Why do you say that?”

“Hard to imagine a bad man being loved that much.”

Jenny did not answer. She picked up the clothes and dumped them in a canvas-lined wooden washing bin. Grey busied himself with the chest. The lid was unlocked and inside the bin were five pairs of jeans, several shirts — most of them neatly mended — under drawers, socks, gloves, scarves, two light canvas jackets, and one Sunday go-to-meeting black suit. It occurred to him that if Mr. Pearl came home alive he’d need the farm clothes; if they found him dead they’d bury him in his church clothes. It was a sad thought.

He selected a pair of jeans and held them up, expected them to come up short, but after studying himself in the mirror he realized that he might have to roll the cuffs.

“How tall was your dad?”

“Six feet and four inches in his stocking feet. We used to make a joke of it and sometimes called him ‘Seventy-six.’”

Grey unfolded one of the shirts. The man must have been a bull. Narrow at the hip but broad in the shoulders, with long arms and thick wrists. Grey figured they’d fit just fine.

“Thank you for the loan of these,” he said. “I’ll take good care of them.”

She turned. “Pa was a good man. A decent man. He used be known as Lucky Bob. Survived the war down South, survived the Indian Wars and some of the Rail Wars. Lived through the Great Quake without a scratch. When things went bad out here, people looked to him. You could, you know. Look to him, I mean. He was that kind of man. Even when everything else was going all to hell, Lucky Bob kept his head and saw to others. When we lost the first of the wells, he was the one who organized the people here in town to share their water and help each other with their crops and herds. Even if he hadn’t been my father I would have loved him and trusted him.”

Jenny crossed to a small writing desk on which there were several photographs in hard-carved wooden frames. She removed one and stood looking down at it, her face softened by memories. Her breasts lifted and fell as she drew in a deep breath and exhaled it in a sigh. Then she turned and held the frame out to Grey, who took it.

“This is your pa?”

“Yes. It was taken two years ago.”

The man in the photo looked like a hero from some old tale. He stood with two other men, both of whom looked impressive and strong, but Lucky Bob Pearl towered over them. A big man with broad shoulders and a face that could have been chiseled out of granite. Firm chin, high cheekbones, a clear brow, and penetrating eyes that stared frankly out from beneath the flat brim of a black hat. He had an uncompromising gaze, but there was the smallest hint of a self-aware smile. That little smile was not a smirk; there was nothing mocking or condescending about it. This was a man aware of his power and faintly amused by it. Even though power and speed were promised by the lean body and the hard muscles that showed through the tension lines of his clothes, there was nothing of the bully about him. Merely confidence. Grey found that he liked the man in that photo and was damn sorry he wasn’t here in Paradise Falls. As he handed the picture back he took another and more appraising look at Lucky Bob’s daughter.

She had his strength. That was there in the straightness of her back, the lift of her proud chin, the clarity in her eyes. There was the same intelligence, the same confidence. And it occurred to Grey that he was probably doing a disservice to her in his mind by comparing Jenny to her father. Here was a woman who was powerful in her own way. In a way that was not — and could not be — defined by any man. They were individually powerful in a family that, for all Grey knew, could have been descended from heroes, kings, and queens. Stranger things were possibly in this world.

“He must have been quite a man,” he said as he picked up the clothes again. He gestured with them. “Thanks for these.”

Her eyes hardened. “You can put on my pa’s things but you make sure you remember the kind of man whose clothes you’re standing up in.”

Grey nodded, seeing the hurt in her eyes. And the challenge. Left to burn, that challenge could turn into an unfair but entirely understandable resentment. So he decided to head it off at the pass.

“Miss Pearl, I wish I’d known your pa. I didn’t, but I’ve known men like him. Not many, ’cause if there were more men like your dad maybe this world wouldn’t be in the state it’s in. That’s not flattery, it’s a fact. Men like me — we’re tough and we’re hard, and a lot of times we talk about how we’re meaner than a rattlesnake and tougher than rawhide. But the plain truth is that we all want to be men like you say your dad was. It’s humbling to stand here holding his clothes, and it will be an ice-cold day in Hell’s backyard before I make claims to deserve to be spoken of in the same breath. I know I’m not that kind of man. I wish I was, but I’m not. You say your dad stepped up when others were hurting. That’s what they call nobility. That’s honor. And not half an hour ago you stood up to six armed men to draw water for the people in this town. Ever heard the expression about apples and how far they fall from trees?” He took a step toward her and lowered his voice. Jenny watched him with eyes filled with blue challenge. “You don’t know the value of my word, so you can choose to accept what I say or not, but I tell you this, Jenny Pearl, that while I wear these clothes, I’ll not dishonor the man who owns them.”

Jenny’s eyes were locked on his and for a moment neither of them listened to the screaming wind or the pounding rain. Grey felt his heart hammering again, but this time it had nothing to do with fear or ghost rock or the risen dead. His throat went dry and he wanted to clear it, but he dared not break the spell.

The storm, however, had other plans.

There was a massive crack of thunder — many times louder than anything that had come before. It shook the whole house as if a giant had reared back and slammed both fists into it. Jenny cried out and staggered forward; Grey caught her and they ran to stand in the paltry shelter of the doorway, dreading that the whole place was coming down. The windowpanes rattled like chattering teeth. Blue lightning stabbed their eyes and not even when they squeezed their eyes shut could they hide from that glare. Grey and Jenny clung together as the fury of the storm raged and raged. They could hear the blast echoing away, rolling like a threat toward town.

And then past it.

And then off, over the cliffs and out into the ocean.

The trembling timbers stilled. The glasses settled uneasily into the frames.

Slowly, slowly, the terrible tension eased. Even the howl of the demon wind and the barrage of the rain seemed to abate. Not completely, but to a much lower level than before.

Still, they stood there, wrapped in each other’s arms with only her thin dress and his wet undershirt and britches between them. It wasn’t much, and it soon dawned on him that if they stood there any longer it wasn’t going to be enough.

He forced himself to step back and to push her gently away. And now he did clear his throat. The spell woven by high talk, closeness, shared experience, and the darker magic of the storm, finally snapped like a soap bubble. Jenny suddenly noticed an invisible wrinkle on her skirt and turned aside to smooth it out. Grey scooped up her father’s fallen clothes and did his very best to stand behind them in case his interest in her showed. It occurred to him that hiding an erection behind the folded clothes of a woman’s murdered father was both sick and wrong. But it was what he had.

“I’ll leave you to change,” said Jenny as she headed toward the door. She didn’t leave at a dead run, but it was close. Grey stood there and listened to her shoes on the steps. Then he closed his eyes, bent forward, and slowly, deliberately banged his forehead on the doorframe.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Grey and the other men dressed in bits and pieces of Lucky Bob Pearl’s clothes. Their own wet things were draped over the backs of kitchen chairs arranged around the fat-bellied cast-iron stove. Brother Joe — who seemed quite familiar with the inside of the Pearl home — brewed coffee and began frying eggs. Jenny joined them a few minutes later and took heavy coffee mugs from a closet and began filling them.

When Grey tasted the coffee he winced and nearly spat it out, and he was a man who enjoyed his coffee strong enough to pick a fight. But this was hot tar in a cup. When he trusted himself not to actually curse the monk for being a poisoner and a blasphemer against the sanctity of the gods of coffee, he said, “You, um, make a strong cup, Padre.”

Looks Away hid a grin behind his cup.

Brother Joe was unabashed, however. “We don’t have much water, so we brew it strong. People drink less of it that way, and still get to enjoy the flavor.”

“Is enjoy really the best word?” Looks Away wondered aloud. “Experience seems more apt.”

If Brother Joe got the joke he did not show it.

The eggs were fried in bacon fat, and they tasted good enough. Grey had eaten many worse things over a life in the saddle.

“I think we should have our talk now,” he said after swallowing a forkful of eggs.

“There’s clearly a lot of strange things happening in this town. In your town. I’m a stranger here, so exactly what in the Sam Hill is going on? Who wants to start?”

He expected it to be Looks Away, but Brother Joe surprised him by speaking first.

“I’ve been living in these parts for many years. I was born near here, but then I followed a missionary down to Mexico and spent six years in a monastery. I took holy orders and came back here to build a church. My father left me some money and it was enough to buy land and materials.”

“I didn’t see a church,” said Grey. “Not a Catholic one. Actually not any churches come to think on it.”

Brother Joe shook his head. “There was one, but it’s gone now. It was a lovely thing, too, though it’s prideful to say so. A tall steeple and a bell so clear and true that you could hear it miles away. Enough pews for four hundred people, and for two full years we filled those pews. People came from other towns for services.”

“When was this?” Grey asked, but he thought he knew the answer already.

“We opened the doors on the first day of spring 1866.”

“Ah,” said Grey. The great Quake was in 1868. “I’m sorry.”

“For the church? No,” said Brother Joe. “Lovely as it was, it was just a building. Brick and stone, nails and paint. But remember that the Great Quake happened on a Sunday.”

Grey winced.

“So many people,” said Brother Joe in a voice that was raw with pain. “And they were good people, Mr. Torrance. Fine, hard-working people. Decent people who worked the land and came to their knees on a Sunday. Maybe not every Sunday, and maybe not every one was the best Christian he or she could be, but everyone sins.”

No one commented on that.

“Everyone,” repeated the monk. “God knows.”

Grey caught a strange note, a deeper sadness in the monk’s voice. He saw unshed tears glittering in the man’s dark eyes.

Brother Joe took a pull on the bad coffee and seemed to steel himself before he continued. “As sinners must, I want to make a confession,” he began, directing his words only to Grey. “When I said that I was not a priest, I should have said that I was — but am one no longer. Because I sinned a great sin, I lost the blessings of the church. I disgraced myself and have betrayed the love of God.”

Looks Away reached across the table and patted his arm. “There, there, old chap.”

“What happened?” asked Grey.

Brother Joe closed his eyes and his fingers knotted together into trembling knots.

“When the Great Quake tore these lands apart, we were in the middle of a hymn. ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ Perhaps the timing was a joke of the Devil. A mockery. The first of many.” He shook his head, eyes still closed. “The tremors struck so quickly. We had no warning, no clue. One moment we were all there, bathed in the shared joy of worship, and then the world split apart. The church itself split apart. All in an instant there was a sound like green wood being split and the floor itself was rent from the doors along the aisle to the transept. It broke apart the church like two halves of an eggshell. The walls leaned away from each other and great masses of the roof came plunging down. Everyone… everyone…”

“Joe,” said Jenny, touching his shoulder, “you don’t need to do this.”

He opened his eyes but didn’t look at her. Instead he stared at his interlaced hands. Tears rolled down his brown cheeks.

“The people screamed. My parishioners, my flock… my friends… they screamed as our church was torn apart and the pit opened beneath us. Many were… killed… when the roof fell. More died as the steeple plunged down among them. I saw a woman — a lovely young farm wife no older than Miss Pearl — torn to pieces as the stained glass window exploded. I saw her die, still clutching her child as she tried to protect him with her own body. I witnessed people burn as smoke and fire belched up from the bowels of the earth. I saw people try to hold onto the pews, the broken timbers, the floor boards to keep from falling into the inferno. I heard them all scream. I heard them call out to God and His angels to save them. I… I prayed, too. I prayed harder than I ever had before. But, God forgive me, I did not pray for them. I did not pray for the people in my church.” Tears streamed down his face and fell onto his hands. “I prayed to God to save me. Me. I begged the Almighty to spare me. Not them. Not the men and women. Not the old. Not the children. I prayed that I would be spared. And I was.” A sob broke in his chest. “I was saved from fiery death because the great hard-carved crucifix that hung above the altar fell down across the crack in the floor. And while everyone I loved, everyone I had sworn to guide and protect died I… I… crawled across the body of our Lord to escape.”

He buried his face in his hands and wept. It was terrible to see. The sobs came from such a deep place that they shook his thin body, striking him like blows. Jenny got up and came around behind him, wrapping her arms around the monk’s frame, and he half turned and clung to her. The way a drowning person would. The way a child would.

Grey wanted to walk out of the room. He didn’t want to see this man’s shame and grief and remorse, or to share in any of it. Nor did he know how this related to the matters at hand, but he did not move. Something deep inside his chest, inside his heart, told him to stay. He glanced at Looks Away and the Sioux’s face was troubled and sad, so Grey sat there drinking the bitter coffee and thinking bitter thoughts as storms raged outside and inside the old house.

It took Brother Joe a long time to claw himself back from the edge of his personal abyss. Jenny eventually stepped back and reclaimed her chair. The monk wiped his streaming eyes with his sleeve. He took a sip of coffee and coughed his throat clear.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but no one responded to that.

Instead Grey said, “Tell me the rest. What happened after that?”

“After that? Paradise Falls was destroyed,” said Brother Joe. “Most of it, anyway. Three-quarters of the homes and buildings. Nine tenths of the people. Gone. We would learn later that this was not a judgment leveled against us but against many. Most of what had been California had been rent apart and thrown down. Like a bandage removed to reveal a terrible wound, we saw what lay beneath our land. Pits. Great caverns where the foul things of the earth long dwelt in shadows. Bottomless holes and endless caverns from which the earth exhaled a breath of brimstone and ash. Men have come to call it the Maze, but it is the landscape of Satan’s burning kingdom revealed.”

Jenny poured him more of the wretched coffee.

“Paradise Falls nearly died on that day. I do not know why any of it survived and I do not pretend to understand God’s mysteries. Like many of the survivors did, I left. I went down to Mexico and made a confession to the Cardinal.”

“What happened?” asked Grey.

Brother Joe almost smiled. A rueful, twisted little smile. The kind never associated with a happy memory. “He spat on me.”

“He spat on you?”

“And I do not blame him,” the monk said quickly. “If he’d had a knife at hand I believe he would have plunged it into my breast, and he would have been right to do so. There are some sins that go beyond any tolerance. I had broken faith with God and with my flock, and I had crawled across my Savior to—.”

“Bullshit,” said Grey, and it brought Brother Joe up short. “Far as I can tell you’re an ordinary human being. I’m no Catholic and I’m not much given to attending church, but I seem to remember from having been there once or twice that priests and parsons are no different than anyone else. You’re flesh and bone, man. You’re not an angel or God Himself.”

Brother Joe shook his head. “No, you don’t understand what it means to be a priest of the church. It was my duty to protect my flock.”

“What, like Jesus protects everyone who calls themselves a Christian? No, don’t look so shocked. You can’t sit there and tell me that faith alone is any kind of shield. It never has been. The Romans nailed Jesus to the cross, and they whipped him bloody before they did it. And I read enough of the Bible to remember that most of the apostles and saints got themselves tortured and killed. John the Baptist lost his damn head. They crucified Peter upside down, and millions of good Christians have died since then. You want to sit there and tell me that none of them—including some of the saints — weren’t afraid? That they didn’t want to bargain their way out? You think all of them went willingly to their deaths? People think that because that’s how the Bible’s written, but didn’t Jesus ask God to let that cup pass by?”

“He still went to the cross.”

“Sure. He was Jesus. You’re not. You’re only a man like the rest of us. If it had been me in that church, I’d have crawled over more than a wooden cross to get out of there.”

The monk kept shaking his head, and Grey let it go. He flapped a hand at Brother Joe.

“Whatever. Tell me how that walks us all the way to right now.”

“Very well,” said Brother Joe. “After I made my confession I was defrocked. My robes were torn, my surplice cut to pieces and my holy orders rescinded. The cardinal stopped short of excommunicating me because another priest interceded on my behalf. A good and righteous man who had been in seminary with me. He begged that I be allowed to work for my reclamation by returning as a brother of the Order of Outcasts. The order was formed after the Quake and is made up of brothers and a few priests who have each survived the destruction of their churches.”

“Like I said, you’re not the only one.”

“I am the only coward,” said Brother Joe.

“I doubt that,” said Grey unkindly. Then he amended it. “I mean, I doubt you’re the only one who did what he had to do to survive.”

Brother Joe chose not to comment on that. Instead he picked up the thread of his narrative. “When I returned to Paradise Falls, I expected to find only scattered people. Or perhaps no one at all. Instead I found that a leader had risen among them. A good man who, though not a Catholic, was clearly doing God’s work. He had gathered the survivors and organized them into work parties to search for other survivors, to gather food and water, and to begin rebuilding the town.”

“You’re talking about Jenny’s dad,” said Grey. “Lucky Bob Pearl, am I right?”

“Yes,” said Brother Joe. “Bob Pearl saved this town. He protected it the way I should have. He was a great, great man and if he is indeed dead, then I know that he sleeps in the arms of the Lord.”

Jenny smiled a sad little smile.

“Brother—?” prompted Looks Away, “at the risk of being indelicate, we are straying from the point.”

“No he’s not,” said Jenny. “This all started with the Quake, and the people here in Paradise Falls are what’s left of a good town. Brother Joe may have done wrong as he sees it, but he came back. He worked right alongside my pa to rebuild. He worked hard, day and night. Since he’s come back he’s bled for the people here.”

“Miss Pearl, please—,” began the monk, flushing with embarrassment.

“Hey,” said Grey, “you don’t need to defend this man to me. I’m not in any position to throw stones, God knows. I have enough check marks on my own soul to buy me a front seat in Hell, and that’s not a joke.”

They all looked at him. The rain rattled against the windows and lightning burned the night.

“Maybe these days there’s no one pure as a babe,” continued Grey. “So let’s not waste a lot of time on confession or absolution. Let’s talk about what the hell is going on.”

“What’s going on, old chap,” said Looks Away, “is that as soon as the dust settled from the Quake they discovered ghost rock.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Ah,” said Grey. “Now we’re getting to it.”

“You know about that,” said the Sioux. “Everyone does. And you know that the supplies of it are becoming scarce very quickly. Prospectors found several large pieces of it in the caves just over the cliffs from where we’re sitting. Enough of it to make those gentlemen enormously wealthy. They hired other men to continue mining.”

“If there was so much of the rock around then why is the town so damn poor?”

“Ah, well there’s the crux of it,” said Looks Away. “You see Lucky Bob and the good Brother Joe here weren’t the only people offering to help out the good citizens of Paradise Falls. A certain gentleman from the East came and offered to provide start-up capital and loans for rebuilding. At a modest rate of interest, of course.”

“And—?”

“And instead of being charged interest, the people here signed away their mining rights.”

“Well, that was goddamn dumb.”

“It was a timing issue, don’t you see?” said Looks Away, looking pained. “The offer was made before ghost rock was discovered. Just before, in point of fact. The ink was barely dry on the loan papers when the prospectors found the first veins.”

Grey leaned back in his chair. “How soon before?”

“One week,” said Jenny.

“Now isn’t that mighty interesting timing,” said Grey.

“Isn’t it just?” agreed Looks Away. “The people here had barely enough money or liquid capital to build the few homes and stores you see. Not enough for anything else.”

“What makes it worse,” said Jenny, “is that since the Quake the ground doesn’t grow much that you’d want to eat. More than half of the crops that we can grow are either too bitter to eat or they’re infested with worms or bugs or other critters. We’re surrounded by ten thousand farmable acres and everyone’s slowly starving to death. And forget about raising cattle. They drink from the wrong well or eat some of a strange new kind of grass that has been growing wild these last few years. The farmers try to weed it out, but it’s more ornery than crabgrass and it seems to spring up overnight. Everyone has some in their fields. Any cow or sheep that eats it either keels right over or goes mad and runs off the cliffs.”

“Christ,” said Grey.

“Which resulted in people having to borrow more and more money and to pay for food brought in by rail from other towns,” said Looks Away. “Mr. Nolan Chesterfield — of the Wasatch Railroad — controls all supplies being brought in, and he has been trying to acquire the mineral rights. Not only for the veins of gold and silver exposed by the quake, but for ghost rock. A few folks didn’t sell their rights, but they’re on land where no ghost rock has been found. So far Chesterfield has picked everyone’s pockets but hasn’t gotten much in the way of rock. Such a pity because his wife, Veronica, is quite a lovely person who has tried to help.”

“Help — how?”

Brother Joe said, “She’s donated money and some barrels of grain to my church.”

“Why would she do that if her husband was squeezing the town?”

Grey saw the monk look down and Jenny cut a sly and mildly accusing glance at Looks Away. For his part, the Sioux wore an expression of bland and entirely artificial surprise.

“Why, I suppose,” he said, “it’s because she has a — oh, how should I phrase this? — a generous nature.”

“Generous is right,” Jenny said in a sharply disapproving tone. “Humph.”

Grey grabbed the conversation and brought it back to the topic. “Chesterfield’s the son of a bitch who hired those Apaches, isn’t he?”

“Indeed. They were his muscle.”

“Were?” asked Jenny. “Did something happen to them?”

“Someone decided to — how should I put this? — cut short their term of employment.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means, Miss Pearl,” said Grey, “that someone cut their heads off and left ’em in the desert with a sign that pretty much says ‘get lost.’ Words to that effect.”

Brother Joe went pale, but Jenny snorted. “Good. Those men were sons of bitches and they’re better off as coyote meat.”

“Dear me,” said Looks Away, pretending to be shocked. Then he turned to Grey and arched his eyebrows. “Would you care to venture a guess as to the name of the other party involved in our little Shakespearean drama? Namely the philanthropist who owns the bank and holds title to every viable mine where ghost rock has been found?”

Grey Torrance felt his lip curl. “Aleksander Deray,” he said. Flat. Not a question.

“So,” said Looks Away, spreading his hands, “now you see the shape of it. The townspeople are buried to their eyeteeth in debt, which ties them to the land by legal and moral obligation. Deray and Chesterfield are like a pair of vultures.”

“They’re worse than vultures,” snapped Jenny. “They’re monsters. They won’t be happy until he owns us body and soul.”

Brother Joe nodded. “I fear that they are both in concert with the Devil.”

Grey wanted to ignore that, but the screams of the wind made it hard to easily dismiss any such comments.

“When the townsfolk had no more mining rights to sell,” said Looks Away, “Deray offered new loans in exchange for their water rights. Some of those rights, by the way, had already been sold to Chesterfield to pay for seeds, medicine, and bulk goods, like dried beans and salt beef. Before you ask, no, the terms were far from equitable, but then no one here is in a position of strength when it comes to bargaining.”

“Which is damned unfair,” declared Jenny, “since around here water’s the only thing worth as much as ghost rock.”

“And both of them worth more than gold,” agreed Looks Away. “Funny old world.”

“So,” said Grey, “while Nolan Chesterfield has been competing with Aleksander Deray to suck this town dry, Veronica Chesterfield has been trying to help? You said she gave extra food and such to the church?”

“She is a generous woman,” said Brother Joe. “I think she would be even more so if she could.”

“I take it her husband disapproves?”

“Her husband doesn’t bloody well know about it,” said Looks Away. “Veronica has to make secret arrangements to get supplies out to Brother Joe. And she risks much in doing so.”

“She’s afraid of her husband?”

“Very,” said Looks Away. “And with good cause. Nolan Chesterfield is a fat, obnoxious, short-tempered, violent, greedy parasite.”

“Don’t dress it in lace, son. Tell us what you really think.”

Looks Away sneered. “I can say without reservation that if he went the way of his Apaches, I would shed so very few tears.”

“Please, brother,” cautioned the monk. “We should not wish ill on anyone.”

“Bollocks.”

The sound of the rain changed and they all looked up.

“The storm’s passing,” said Jenny. “Thank God.”

It was true. The hammering rain had diminished to a few pings and the awful screams were only whispers on the wind.

“Still might wait a piece before we go out,” suggested Grey.

“Did you see any of us bolting for the door?” asked Looks Away.

“Need to find our horses.”

“Mm. However horses are easier to replace than one’s skin. Just a thought.”

Grey nodded and sipped his coffee. “Now, that brings us around to you and your boss, Doctor Saint. If Deray owns all the mining rights, then why’s Saint have a laboratory out here?”

“No, I said Deray has almost all the mining rights,” corrected Looks Away.

“Right, but the rights he doesn’t have are for land without ghost rock.”

“Yes and no. You see here in the Maze there are traces of ghost rock in much of the substrata and—.”

“In the what?”

“Let me back up a bit. Paradise Falls is in what was once the San Joaquin Valley. Hard to tell that anymore, but there it is. Geological explorers, like some of my teachers, believe that this whole area was once a great inland sea many, many years ago. Probably millions of years ago. Water erodes all forms of rock and mineral, and moving water tends to spread it all around, don’t you know. When the mountains were formed — probably by some ancient earthquakes every bit as powerful as the Great Quake — the sediment left traces of every rock it eroded. Are you following me?”

“I think so,” said Grey slowly. “So if ghost rock was already down there in the Maze, and if some of it eroded, then…”

“Then traces of it are everywhere,” said Looks Away, nodding his approval. “Not chunks, not pieces you could easily spot.”

“Then so what? How’s that worth anything to anyone? I never heard of anyone panning for ghost rock and making much more than beer money off of it.”

“It’s not about money,” said Looks Away, although from the expression on Jenny’s face it was clear she didn’t entirely agree. “Doctor Saint developed a process to extract trace particles of the rock from sediment. It’s a time-consuming process, though, and still very much in the experimental stages.”

“Again — so what?”

“So, Doctor Saint was able to process enough of it to power some of his weapons.”

“Ah,” said Grey, nodding.

“Ah, indeed. When he returns here, Doctor Saint will continue his extraction process, and that will give us something more than fisticuffs, harsh language, and the odd bullet or two to help us in our campaign.”

“Campaign?” asked Jenny, Brother Joe, and Grey, all at the same time.

Looks Away’s lips curled into a thoroughly devious smile. Very nearly malicious.

“Oh yes, my friends,” he said. “Between Nolan Chesterfield and Aleksander Deray this little town is being squeezed dry and crushed flat. They are clearly willing to brutalize men of the cloth and innocent women to protect their property, and the property in question is water necessary for basic human survival. Is it really a debatable point that they’ve crossed a line in the sand? This is no longer about property. These men are trying to either drive us all out, or insure that everyone here dies. As a Sioux, I believe I understand that kind of thinking better than anyone else at this table. Before we formed our own nation my people were being driven to the edge of extinction. We fought back. We made a stand. Not because we think we’re better — though, I have my own thoughts on that subject — but because we believe that being born comes with certain rights. Your Declaration of Independence has, I believe, some verbiage to that effect. Inalienable rights. Life is notable among them. Chesterfield and Deray want to take that away from us. I do not believe they have that right. So, I think it is high time we stop bending our collective necks to the chopping block and make our own stand.”

There was a heavy, thoughtful silence following his speech. Brother Joe was the first to break it.

“I can’t agree to anything that involves killing. My vows—.”

“—are all very admirable, Brother,” said Looks Away. “We’re not asking you to do any actual fighting. You are skilled in medicine, I believe?”

“I’m not a doctor, but I know something about herbs and healing draughts.”

“Good enough. You can fix us if we get dented.”

“I’ll damn well fight,” declared Jenny Pearl, her eyes blazing. “Those bastards took everything I have, including my pa.”

They all looked at Grey.

“You already know where I stand,” he said. “But before we—.”

Whatever else he was going to say was cut off by a terrible high-pitched scream. It was not the spectral howl of the demon storm.

This was the scream of a child.

Human.

Close.

Screaming in fear and in pain.

Outside in the rain.

Chapter Thirty

Grey and Looks Away launched themselves from their chairs and ran through the house to the front door. Grey whipped it open but stinging rain struck his face, driving him back. Even though the storm had slackened, the raindrops still felt like acid.

“You can’t go out there!” cried Brother Joe, pushing past him to close the door.

“The Hell I can’t,” snapped Grey.

“The rain will kill you.”

That almost stopped Grey and in the space of one heartbeat the fear that was always simmering inside his chest nearly drowned the dented honor that used to define who he was. Maybe if it had been only Looks Away there with him he might have stayed, but Jenny looked too much like Annabelle, and he could not allow himself to be a coward in her eyes.

You’re a damn fool, he told himself.

And he mentally told that part of himself to go to hell.

“Here!” yelled Jenny as she dug an oilskin poncho from the closet and threw it to Grey. He snatched it out of the air and quickly pulled it on. It must have belonged to her father because it was too big for Grey, but that was fine. Larger meant more protection.

“Do you have another?” demanded Looks Away.

“Upstairs in the trunk,” said Jenny, starting for the stairs, but Looks Away dashed past her and took the steps two at a time.

A second scream tore the night. Higher and more terrible.

Without waiting for the Sioux, Grey opened the door and flung himself into the storm.

The wind was intensifying even though there was less rain. Great gusts swept up the street toward him, seeming to attack, to try and drive him away. Riding the wind came the howls of damned things. Grey bulled his way into it. Hitting the wind was like pushing against a wall, and the muddy ground tried to catch and hold his booted feet. Even with the poncho the rain found openings at wrist and ankle and below the brim of his hat and stung like a swarm of bees.

He tried to hear through the wailing wind to orient himself, but almost at once there was no need for that. A figure came racing up the street toward him. Small. A little girl of no more than seven or eight. Red hair streamed behind her like a horse’s mane and her face was as pale as a corpse.

Except where it was streaked with blood.

In the flashes of ghost lightning the blood looked as black as oil, but Grey knew what it was. The girl ran as hard as she could, but she was slowing, staggering, nearly gone. She would have stopped to rest if she could except for the thing that followed her.

It came more slowly than she ran, loping along like some great, pale ape.

Only it wasn’t an ape.

It was Deputy Jed Perkins.

He was nearly naked, his body covered only in torn streamers of what had been his clothes. His skin was white except for sunburned forearms and face. His hair hung in dripping rattails. His mouth was open, smiling. Laughing.

Laughing in all the wrong ways.

And his chest.

His chest.

The flesh of breast had been slashed to ribbons, the meat and muscle pulled back to expose his rib cage. And there, driven by some insane force into the very center of his sternum was a piece of polished stone. It was as black as the night except for a tracery of white lines that seemed to wriggle through it. The stone glowed from within but it was neither fire nor electric light. This was something far worse, something far stranger. Deep inside the chunk of ghost rock a cold, intensely bright blue light glowed with hellish ferocity. The deputy’s eyes glowed with the same weird light. Too bright, as if lit from within.

Grey nearly lost himself in that moment.

He had already seen the dead walk and encountered witches and monstrous storms, but this was something else. This was sorcery. This was the kind of dark magic he’d read about in old books, the kind they sing of in songs when they are not trying to lull you to sleep. This was what evil looked like.

This was something that broke the laws of nature. Perkins had to be dead and yet he ran howling after a child, his eyes filled with starlight, his hands reaching to tear and rend.

Scared as he was, Grey’s hand moved with practiced speed. The Colt seemed to appear in his hand, he saw and felt his thumb cock the hammer, felt his index finger squeeze the trigger. Heard the report. All of it happening as if he were witnessing someone else perform the familiar actions.

The bang jolted him.

The bullet drilled a hole through the night air, sizzled past the rain, and punched into the hard, flat muscle of Perkins’s left pectoral. Just off-center of the black stone. The impact knocked a single cough from the man’s lips.

Just that.

And nothing else.

It barely slowed the man.

Perkins’s eyes shifted from the girl he was chasing and stared at Grey with a bottomless hatred that sent a thrill of terror through him. His teeth peeled back from his lips and he growled like a mountain cat.

He bent low and raced forward with maniac speed. Straight at Grey.

This was black magic.

He fished for the word, the right word. It was down there in the bottom of his mind where he kept the things he didn’t ever want to think about. Ugly things. Wrong things.

Bad things.

The word awoke in his thoughts. Like a serpent stirred to wakeful rage it hissed in his mind.

The word for what this was.

Necromancy.

The magic of the dead.

“God damn you to hell!” bellowed Grey as he fired again. And again. The bullets took Perkins in the right chest and in the stomach. They made him twitch.

But they did not stop him.

With a howl like the demon wind itself, Jed Perkins flung himself at Grey and bore him down into the mud and the burning rain.

Chapter Thirty-One

As Grey fell onto his back he brought one foot up, jammed his boot against the deputy’s chest, and let the force of the roll turn them both like a wheel. With his leg as the spoke, Perkins rolled over and then backward and Grey gave him an extra kick to send the man flying. Grey had fallen so hard that he had enough momentum to roll his own body all the way over onto his knees, with one hand snapping out to steady himself.

Somehow he’d managed to keep his pistol in his other hand, and to keep the mechanism out of the mud. He pivoted on his knee and snapped off two more shots at Perkins, who had splatted down into the mud and was struggling to get up. The first bullet took Perkins in the shoulder and Grey could see a lump of meat and a chunk of bone fly into the air.

But all that did was make Perkins laugh.

Laugh.

It was a laugh as wrong as all the damage in the world. A high, cackling bray that carried no trace of the deputy’s own voice. Instead this was shrill and alien. A nightmare laugh that revealed a horrible secret to Grey — that there was something else hiding within the man’s body. And, again, Grey remembered the stories he’d read as a boy, of demons that could inhabit human flesh and wear it like armor.

The laughter was both an anticipation of its triumph over a mortal foolish enough to do battle with something that could not be whipped, and an exultation in its freedom to wander the world of the living.

The laughter tore through the night and stuck knives in Grey’s mind. The injured little girl screamed, knowing that there was no hope left.

So Grey put his next bullet into that laughing mouth. The heavy slug shattered the rows of white teeth and then blew out the back of the deputy’s skull, right at the base where it attaches to the top of the spine.

There was a moment — just a flicker of time — where the demon thing still smiled, even with a mouth of shattered teeth. Then Deputy Perkins’s head tilted forward, no longer supported by vertebra and the weight of it jerked the body down.

Even then the thing did not die.

It flopped in the mud and began thrashing wildly, arms and legs whipping around, feet kicking, mouth trying to bite in Grey’s direction.

“God damn, why don’t you die, you ugly son of a whore?” bellowed Grey and he fired the last bullet in his gun. This time he aimed for the flat plane of the deputy’s forehead. The slug punched in at a bad angle and instead of bursting through the other side, it ricocheted off some angle of bone inside, and then bounced around. The deputy’s head shuddered from the inner impacts.

Then all at once the blue light winked out from its eyes and Perkins fell face forward into the mud and did not move.

Grey did not believe that even now this was over. He broke open his pistol, dumped the spent brass, and hastily shoved six fresh rounds into the cylinder. As he did so he edged over to stand between the little girl — who, against all sense, had stopped running to watch the fight — and the monster. Grey snapped the cylinder into place and pointed the gun at Perkins.

The body lay still. It looked different now. Empty, somehow.

Empty of life, if life was a word that fit.

Dead.

Dead for good and all.

Dead, like the members of the posse — Riley and the others — after he’d managed to end them.

End them.

That thought stuck like an arrow in Grey’s mind. How exactly had he ended them?

Perkins had been shot over and over again. None of those rounds had even slowed him.

Only that last bullet.

In the head.

No. In the brain.

The brain?

Why there? Why not the heart? Why not the damn spine? Either of those would have dropped even a mountain bear.

The brain.

Kill the brain and kill the…

The what?

As if in answer to his troubled, tumbling thoughts, a voice spoke a word that Grey did not know, not in this context.

“Undead!”

He turned to see Brother Joe standing ten feet away, panting, draped in curtains to fend off the rain, eyes wide with horror.

“W-what?” asked Grey numbly.

“That thing is an abomination against God. It is one of the undead. Dear Jesus and Mary protect us.”

“What is it?”

“It is a corpse given a dark semblance of life — unlife,” said Brother Joe, crossing himself. “It has been inhabited by a demon spirit so that it can do Satan’s will on Earth.”

Grey wanted to tell him that this was pure unfiltered bullshit.

Wanted to. Could not.

Jed Perkins lay at his feet and all of this had happened. Had truly happened.

Two figures came running through the dwindling rain. One wore a set of gray oilskins and the other a cloak with the hood pulled tight around a lovely face. Looks Away and Jenny. He had a pistol in his hand and she carried a single-barrel twenty-gauge shotgun. They saw Perkins and slowed, standing shocked and puzzled.

“What happened?” asked Jenny as she realized the child was there. She hurried over to the girl, shifted the shotgun to one hand and used the other to wrap her cloak around the child. “Grey — what happened here?”

Grey holstered his gun, squatted, and turned Perkins over so that the man’s ruined chest was exposed. The rain gradually washed away the mud, revealing the terrible wounds. And the thing embedded in the deputy’s breastbone. It no longer glowed with blue fire, but the lines of white were like threadworms in gangrenous flesh.

Brother Joe cried out. “Blasphemy! This is black magic.”

“Necromancy,” said Grey. “I… think that’s what they call it. Necromancy.”

Looks Away knelt next to him and very carefully touched the edges of bloodless skin around the stone. He did not touch the stone itself.

“Ghost rock,” he said. “Not very pure, but definitely ghost rock.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jenny. “What happened?”

It was the little girl who answered. “The monsters came in through the window.”

Every eye turned toward her.

“Monsters?” echoed Jenny. “God… are there more than one?”

The night, as if listening with dark humor, once more held the answer. There was another scream. A man’s this time. It rose higher and higher, losing gender and identity until it was nothing more than a shriek of unbearable agony. Then it suddenly stopped with wet finality.

The little girl screamed into the ensuing silence and broke from the shelter of Jenny Pearl.

“Dad!”

She ran toward the sound of certain death.

And Grey, Looks Away, and Brother Joe ran after.

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was immediately apparent that it was not merely a single home that had been invaded.

The town of Paradise Falls was under siege.

Figures moved in the gloom. People, heedless of the rain, ran into the street, screaming, pleading. Some of them had weapons. A shovel, a broken table leg. One woman held a frying pan. Fewer still had guns. Mostly shotguns, fowling pieces, and one old-time muzzleloader.

However there were other shapes moving through the rain.

The other deputies.

And several men Grey had never seen.

They were all dead men. Each of them had a ruined chest in which a black stone was fixed. Blue light sparkled in the hearts of each stone. Blue had always been a good color to Grey. Lucky. Happy. Summer skies and deep water. Cornflowers and a woman’s eyes.

Now blue was the color of hate and hurt, of harm and horror.

Grey knew that these men were all dead. Risen dead. Torn from the earth. They laughed as they chased the fleeing townsfolk.

“No…,” whispered Looks Away.

There were so many of them.

Of them.

The word rose like bile to Grey’s mouth.

“Undead.”

Looks Away opened fire at the closest of them and Grey saw black holes appear in bloodless flesh. However the creatures kept advancing. Their wild laughter tore the air.

Grey reached out and pushed Looks Away’s gun arm down, forcing the Sioux to turn his wild eyes away from the walking dead.

“What the bloody hell are you playing at?” cried Looks Away.

“The head — aim for the head. Nothing else stops them. Remember the posse? That’s how we stopped them. Aim for the brain.”

The memory of that terrible night was too clear to make it a chore to convince Looks Away.

“The whole sodding world is mad,” the Sioux muttered as he reloaded. “Stark staring mad.”

Brother Joe edged around the crowd and gathered the little girl into his arms. Then he retreated, watching the monsters as they watched him.

While Looks Away finished reloading, Grey raised his pistol in a steady two-handed grip and stepped into the path of the running corpse. They saw his gun and laughed.

Maybe they don’t know, he mused, and prayed that it was true.

The closest of them was thirty feet away. It was one of the other deputies.

“Go back to Hell,” said Grey Torrance as he pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit the dead deputy right above the left eyebrow and exploded the back of his head. The undead’s legs kept running for three more steps before the dead, slack weight of the dying body dragged it down.

The other grinning corpse ran past.

But the ones out front were no longer laughing, and their smiles seemed frozen onto their dead faces.

They didn’t know, thought Grey. But they sure as God know now.

The undead all froze for a moment, and a dozen pairs of burning blue eyes turned toward Grey and his friends. Grey could not tell if they hesitated because one of their own had been killed and it gave them pause, or because all of their murderous rage was suddenly now focused on the two men and one woman with the guns.

In either case Grey knew this could only end one way.

In death.

Knowing that he was being watched, he used his thumb to draw the hammer back to full cock, and narrowed his eyes to sight down the barrel at the face of the closest monster.

“Come on, you ass-ugly sons of bitches,” he said. “Come and take us.”

They came.

Howling with red delight, they came.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Grey, Looks Away, and Jenny all fired. The bangs of their guns were simultaneous — two pistol cracks and the boom of the shotgun.

The front line of abominations tried to dodge out of the way. Grey’s shot blew the jawbone off of one, but he spun away and kept upright. Still running. Looks Away put his round through the temple of a second, but the round must not have hit the right part of the brain. The creature staggered and began wandering off, as if confused.

However it was immediately clear that Jenny Pearl’s shotgun wasn’t packing birdshot. A big deer slug fired from the small-bore weapon smashed through the bridge of the third undead’s nose and its head seemed to fly apart. The creature collapsed and two other monsters behind it tripped over it and fell.

Grey stepped forward and fired shots at both of the fallen things. Looks Away snapped off three shots and dropped two more.

Six down.

The rest of the monsters scattered. Like cockroaches fleeing the light, they fled from the firestorm of hot lead. Some raced up onto porches and hurled themselves through glass windows or kicked in doors. Screams burst from within each house. Other undead ran for any cover they could find — a side alley, behind a parked wagon, or into a darkened store.

Grey fired at them until his gun was empty, but he only killed two more. Looks Away fared less well, killing one. By the time Jenny reloaded her single barrel shotgun, there were no targets left on the streets. Nothing left to kill.

Inside the houses, though, the slaughter had begun.

“We have to do something,” cried Jenny. “They’ll kill everyone.”

“I know, damn it,” said Grey as he broke into a run. He jumped onto the closest porch, shouldered through the door and saw a walking corpse struggling with a one-legged old man. Grey kicked the monster in the ribs as hard as he could. He knew the blow wouldn’t do the thing any harm, but the force of it sent the creature crashing into the wall.

Grey swung his pistol down and was a hairsbreadth from pulling the trigger when the creature spoke.

“Don’t!” it begged. “Please. For the love of God, don’t kill me.”

The mocking smile was gone and in its place was the terrified face of a man. Still dead pale, but now there was no trace of the demonic presence that had owned this flesh seconds ago.

The old man whimpered and began crawling toward the hall, his face battered and bloody. His face was stricken as if the presence of these monsters had cracked something in his mind. Grey couldn’t blame him. His own mind felt like it was hanging from one broken hinge.

“What are you?” demanded Grey as he pressed the barrel of the Colt against the dead flesh.

The creature tried to shrink back, and it was impossible for Grey to tell whether this was some kind of ploy or not. He had far too little to go on.

Behind him he heard gunshots and more screams.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t send you straight to hell,” he said to the thing.

A tear broke from the corner of the man’s eye. Grey would not have thought that a dead thing could weep. The blue light from its eyes turned the tear into liquid sapphire.

“I am in hell,” said the monster in a hoarse voice. “I–I died. I mean, I think I died. I remember falling. I remember seeing my own blood. And then… and then…”

His voice disintegrated into sobs.

Grey adjusted his hand on his pistol grip and had no idea what to do.

“Why are you attacking these people?”

The undead looked surprised. “Attacking? I didn’t… I mean… I… I…”

“You ran in here and tried to kill that old man.”

The thing cut a look sideways at the old man crawling along the hall toward the kitchen. A deep frown of confusion grooved his brow.

“Mr. Chalmers? Is that you? It’s me. It’s Bobby Sandoval. You know me. I used to work at the sawmill with Tommy. You know me. I… I… I swear it’s me.”

Grey glanced over at the old man to see how he was reacting.

It was the wrong thing to do.

With the speed of a snake, the monster’s left hand flashed out and slapped the pistol from Grey’s grip. The expression on its face changed from confusion and horror to malice in a heartbeat.

But it was a long heartbeat, and even as everything became crazy, Grey’s mind pulled apart what he had just seen. The hand moved, and the thing attacked, but the face registered what looked like genuine surprise at what its body was doing. It was like a horseman who was reacting to a mount suddenly stumbling. The expression did not match. Not at once. Only after the creature reached for Grey did the confusion melt away to be replaced by that malicious leer. The undead kicked up with both feet, catching Grey in the thigh and chest and sending him staggering backward. Then the dead man — Sandoval — arched backward and reverse-jackknifed forward so that he flipped onto his feet like a circus tumbler. The azure fires in his eyes flared as he rushed Grey.

Grey hit the edge of the sofa and sat down hard, but as Sandoval threw himself at him, Grey flung himself sideways. Sandoval hit the backrest and the whole sofa rocked onto its back legs and crashed over. By the time it hit, Grey and Sandoval were already locked in a deadly struggle.

Unlike Riley Jones and the dead members of the posse, this monster was a skilled and tricky fighter. There was none of the vacuous blankness in Sandoval’s eyes. There was hate, there was malice, but there was also sly cunning. And the son of a bitch could fight.

Sandoval tried to knee Grey in the crotch, head-butt him, box his ears, and bite. He fought like someone who had been in more than his fair share of big-ticket scuffles. It was like fighting three people at once. The man attacked with total commitment and ferocity.

But Grey Torrance knew a few tricks of his own.

He turned his hip inward to take the knee thrust on his thigh instead. It hurt, but not nearly as much. Grey ducked his head to take the head-butt on the forehead instead of the nose. That hurt, too, but he caught Sandoval exactly as he didn’t want to be caught, and the lights momentarily flickered in the killer’s eyes. That spoiled the creature’s attempts to box his ears, too, and as Sandoval tried to recover and bite, Grey hit him across the chin with the heel of his palm. He put a lot of heart into the hit. A lot of muscle and fear, too. And he twisted his hip as he connected.

He got it just right and he followed through with a scream and all his rage.

Sandoval’s jaw slewed sideways amid an audible crunch of cartilage and bone. Grey pulled his hand back six inches and hit him again. Same place. Twice as hard.

The jaw lost all shape and nearly tore loose from the tendon and muscle that held it to his face. It sagged down, flopping against Sandoval’s chest. Fear ignited in those strange eyes.

Grey liked to see it there.

He wanted to see more.

With a grunt, he hip-bucked and turned, throwing the man off of him. As Sandoval fell flat on his back, Grey rolled over and knelt on him, pinning one knee into the undead’s crotch and bracing his other foot against the floor for stability. From that vantage point he schooled Sandoval — and the demon inside of him — about the niceties of gutter-fighting done right.

He short-punched the man in the nose, the throat, both eyes. Grey knew how to punch with snaps instead of powerhouse thrusts so that he didn’t bust up his own knuckles. He grabbed the dead man’s lank hair, picked his head up, and slammed it against the floorboards again and again. That knocked all of the fight out of the thing and it lay there, twitching and terrified. Grey did not understand that fear but now wasn’t the moment to try and sort it out. Instead he reached into his boot, removed a short knife, held the monster’s head down with a flat palm against his forehead, and drove the point of the blade deep into the thing’s eye socket.

The blue light in its other eye — and the glow deep in the heart of the stone lodged in its breast — flared and then went out.

Grey sagged back, gasping.

No blood welled from the punctured eye socket, and Grey wasn’t sure if he was relieved or even more disgusted. It was proof of how unnatural this truly was.

He turned to the old man. What was his name? Chalmers?

“Chalmers,” he barked and the sound of his voice made the man’s head snap up, “are there any more of them in here?”

“M-more—?”

“Is anyone else here?”

“No.”

Grey got to his feet and picked up his gun. He immediately began reloading. “Lock yourself in a closet and don’t come out until you know it’s safe.”

“H-how will I know?”

Grey left without answering because he had no answer to give.

He dashed outside and saw Jenny Pearl standing guard over a small knot of townsfolk. Brother Joe crouched over the huddling mass of old folks, women, and children. Jenny stood wide legged, shotgun raised, as three of the walking dead circled her. The monsters faked right and left, trying to make her spoil her next shot. If she did, they would all fall on her and the people she was trying to protect. Looks Away was nowhere in sight.

“Jenny!” he cried as he ran into the street. “On your left. Now!”

She whirled and fired at a corpse who was running in, sneaky and low, on her blindside, a pitchfork clutched in its dead hands. The thing was so close that she almost died right there. The pitchfork stabbed in at the moment she fired. The deer slug punched between the tines and caught the undead on the right cheek and blew half his face off.

Grey began firing from twenty feet away. He put three slugs each into the other two creatures. His first shot hit the chest of the closest one, which effectively jolted the creature in place. That steadied his target so he could put the next two into its brainpan. Then he whirled and repeated it with the final fiend, who had already abandoned the attack and was trying to run. The bodies crumpled to the ground and Grey turned to see Jenny use the stock of her shotgun to crush what was left of the first corpse’s shattered skull.

“Reload,” he ordered, and they both did. Grey realized with horror that he only had four bullets left in his belt. Four rounds and there were screams coming from everywhere in town. His heart turned to ice in his chest.

“Where’s Looks Away?”

“I don’t know. I think he went over to Doctor Saint’s place.”

“Now? What the hell good is that?”

“I don’t know,” she said tightly. “Wasn’t really the time to chat about it, was it?”

Blue lightning flashed overhead. The storm seemed to be building again.

“Jenny — get everyone into the Chalmers place. Bar the windows and block the doors.”

“What are you—?” she began, then snapped her mouth shut, gave him a terse nod, and ran to herd the people to safety.

Grey lingered for one moment, watching her. She hadn’t panicked, hadn’t fallen apart, and hadn’t wasted time with useless questions. Lucky Bob Pearl had raised himself one hell of a daughter.

She caught his eye and damn if there wasn’t a flicker of a smile on her lips.

Yeah, he thought, this Jenny Pearl is one hell of a woman.

Grinning despite everything, he turned and ran toward the sound of screams.

Chapter Thirty-Four

He ran down the center of the muddy street as the rain, which had dwindled to a thin drizzle, strengthened to a steady downpour that hissed and burned like acid. It seemed to do him no real harm, though, but it hurt like the blazes. Grinding his teeth together, Grey endured it as he went hunting for monsters.

They were there. Waiting for him.

And they had grown wiser in this fight.

He felt something whip past him like an angry bee, and almost as an afterthought, heard the dull bang of a gun.

Grey flung himself down, rolled through the mud, and came up to his feet on the sheltered side of a wagon filled with empty barrels. Three more gunshots rang out. Two from the same direction and one from across the street. Two guns.

He crouched and peered around the corner of the wagon, watching for the next shot. Bang! And he saw the muzzle flash. An undead gunman stood with a Winchester snugged against his hip, firing as he came. Aiming too high, though. Hitting where a standing man’s head would be. So, at least the monster wasn’t a genius. Grey braced his gun hand against the curve of the wagon wheel, took careful aim, and fired.

The bullet hit the thing under the edge of his jaw and from the flip of hair on the far side of his upper scalp, it was clear that it went all the way through. The man fell like a sack of potatoes. Grey watched the Winchester spin through the air toward him and for a moment he thought the Fates would deal him a better hand of cards than the one he was playing. But the Fates, as Grey had long come to realize, were a bunch of vindictive bitches. The rifle landed barrel downward and buried itself six inches into the mud.

“Shit,” he growled, then he ducked back as a hail of bullets began tearing apart the barrels and a good part of the wagon itself. Splinters filled the air and ricocheting rounds whined off into the storm. Grey tried to curl into a ball too small to be hit, but fingernails of flying wood jabbed him.

Grey flattened down under the wagon, making sure to keep his face and his gun out of the mud. He saw six of the undead walking out into the street. All of them had guns. One, though, held two big pistols and the others flanked him as if he was in charge of this mad invasion. This one was different from the others. His face was less weathered, less eroded. He was as pale as a ghost but he did not look like a rotting corpse. Instead he seemed to glow with an unnatural and savage vitality. He wore a flat-brimmed black hat, black clothes, and a white shirt that were streaked with mud. The shirt and vest were unbuttoned to reveal a ghost rock burning in his chest. It was a bigger stone than the others wore, and the light it emitted was like a beacon whose glow sparkled on the falling rain and underlit his ghostly face. He strode forward with the absolute confidence of a predator who knew that anything he encountered was his for the taking. Tall, broad-shouldered, powerful. All of the other undead, fearsome as they were, looked like pale shadows of this towering figure.

Grey’s breath caught in his chest. Not because of the fearsome nature of this new threat, but because he recognized him. A man who everyone believed was dead.

A man who, despite his ferocious vitality, was probably dead.

The name was on his tongue, but he dared not speak it.

Then he heard an anguished voice cry out.

“Dad!”

Grey and the corpse turned to see Jenny Pearl standing in the middle of the street, her shotgun in her slack hands, eyes wide with a terror so great that it seemed to even quiet the raging storm. Her mouth, having shouted that word, now repeated it in soundless horror.

“Dad.”

The monster that had been Lucky Bob Pearl, turned toward his daughter.

And he smiled.

He smiled as he held up a hand and the gunfire died away. Even the storm seemed to withdraw its power at his gesture, as if everything in this night bowed to a creature of such inarguable power.

Jenny Pearl sank slowly to her knees. The shotgun fell to the mud. And her proud back bent as she hunched forward over the impossible agony in her heart.

“Hello, sweetheart,” the monster said in a voice that was gravel and dust and wrongness.

Then he raised both pistols toward Jenny.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“No!” cried Grey as he wriggled like a snake out from under the wagon. “No, goddamn it.”

The faces of the undead creatures all turned toward him. Lucky Bob turned more slowly, less concerned, less impressed. His smile did not waver. He was something more. The name came unbidden to Grey’s mind… he was dragged forth from the earth and possessed by a far greater spirit. He was Harrowed.

“And what are you?” he asked in his dead voice. “My daughter’s suitor? Sweetheart? Her young man of favor? Or are you another hound dog come sniffing after the goods?”

Grey answered with a bullet.

But just as he fired, one of the other undead threw himself between Lucky Bob and Grey and took the round in the face. It blew out his teeth and exploded from behind his left cheekbone, but the angle was wrong for a kill shot. Even so the monster tottered backward, arms spread, using his body to protect what was clearly his master.

Lucky Bob bashed the interfering corpse aside and opened up with both guns.

Grey spun away and rolled back to shelter under the wagon as a swarm of lead tore into the place where he’d lain a moment before.

“Hide, little rabbit,” mocked Lucky Bob. But to his followers he said, “Drag that worthless piece of man flesh out here. I want to see him bleed.”

“No,” begged Jenny. “Pa — what are you doing?”

“Doing?” echoed the Harrowed. “Why I’ve come to bring peace to our little town. Isn’t that what everyone really wants, my girl? Peace and quiet? The peace of eternity and the quiet of the grave.”

The monsters laughed like a chorus of jackals.

Three of them began crawling under the wagon, reaching for Grey with worm-white fingers. Grey kicked at them and wriggled away, fighting the urge to use his last three bullets on them.

“What… what happened to you?” begged Jenny, struggling to her feet. Her dress dripped with mud and rainwater. The wind plucked her hood back from her head and the stinging rain stung her face. “Why are you doing this?”

Grey slithered out from under the far side of the wagon as Jenny asked this question and it gave him a moment’s respite in which he saw the expression on the Harrowed’s face. The look of evil confidence flickered for but a moment. Like a candle flame at the very edge of a draft, it trembled, and for the second time that night Grey saw a different kind of expression on the monster’s face. Not the gloating monster, but an expression far more human. One that called to mind the face of the man in the photograph in Jenny’s house. Jenny must have seen it, too, for she gasped as if struck.

“Pa…?”

The Harrowed’s mouth moved and for a moment the sounds he made were garbled, as if two people were trying to speak at once using the same tongue and lips.

“Oh… Jenny…,” whispered that mouth. “Oh, my girl. Run!”

But even as he finished saying those few words his trembling lips broadened once more into that pernicious grin.

“Run,” he repeated, but this time with an entirely different meaning. “Run so that my boys here can have some sport.”

Lucky Bob raised his arms. Lightning glittered on the silvery filigree along the barrels of his matched Colts. He spread his arms, threw back his head, and laughed in a voice that came from no human throat. It was huge and it stole the sky from the thunder itself.

“She is yours, my brothers. Devour her, body and soul!”

“No… Pa… no!” Jenny gasped.

The swarm of walking dead howled and surged forward toward Jenny, and she was too terrified and heartbroken to move. She stood there, gaping at her father’s corpse while death came to take her.

Grey instantly broke from cover and ran faster than he had ever done in his life. He hooked an arm around Jenny’s waist and plucked her from the ground. Even as he did so, he pivoted and fired.

He had three bullets left but he’d be damned if he would waste them.

The closest of the fiends seemed to leap backward, his face disintegrating.

A second tried too late to dodge away and instead ducked into Grey’s next round. His head snapped back so hard that the sound of his spine snapping was almost as loud as the shot that killed him.

Jenny fought against Grey, reaching backward toward her father, who was striding forward, bellowing at his followers to kill them both. Grey struggled with her as he raised his gun and aimed at the head of the man whose clothes he wore.

“Take them!” ordered the Harrowed.

The swarm of walking corpses passed him like river water around a rock, racing to obey their master’s orders. They boiled forward, all of them laughing. All of them hungry.

Jenny bit Grey’s shoulder, and when he flinched back, she broke away and ran toward her father.

“Pa!” she screamed.

Lucky Bob saw her and laughed with mad glee. Then he raised his gun and snapped off a single shot. Jenny cried out and staggered, her hands pressed to her chest.

“No!” bellowed Grey as he threw himself at the Harrowed, firing his last round in the same moment that Lucky Bob aimed his gun at him. Both pistols banged in the same instant. Lucky Bob was spun halfway around as red burst from his shoulder, and Grey felt his entire midsection explode into a fireball. The pain was impossible and he caved forward and dropped to his knees. The empty gun tumbled from his fingers and fell into the mud. Grey couldn’t breathe and he waited for the blackness to take him. His eyes bulged from his head as he saw Jenny lying there, her body completely still, rain beating on her slack features.

Grey looked beyond her and he thought he saw the faces of all his ghosts watching, waiting for him to die. Waiting for him to be theirs.

He looked down at his hands, expecting to see blood pouring out, expecting to see his guts slide out into the rain.

But even though his hands were wet there was no blood.

The pain, though, it was unbearable.

He could not understand any of it.

He toppled sideways and lay helpless before the laughing corpses, and they came forward to take him.

And then a figure seemed to step out of the dark wind and blowing rain. At first alien and misshapen, then illuminated in eerie detail as lightning forked through the sky.

A man wearing a harness on his back fashioned in some strange design. All gleaming copper and steel, with glowing tubes of glass thrust out in all directions. Coils of wires trailed from the center of the burning tubes to the butt of the strangest pistol Grey had ever seen. It was oversized, with a glass wrapped entirely around the barrel. Blue gas swirled within the bowl, and it seemed to Grey that inside the gas tiny bolts of lightning flashed and popped. From the center of the globe thrust the black mouth of a barrel made from brass and wrapped with turn upon turn of silver wire. The man wearing this bizarre contraption wore a pair of goggles with lenses of blood-red quartz.

“Damn you all,” said Thomas Looks Away as he raised his impossible gun.

There was a sound like a thousand snakes hissing at once.

Grey’s eyes drifted shut as a terrible light filled the world. It stabbed at him even through his tightly shut eyelids.

Grey heard the screams.

Terrible screams.

Awful. High-pitched.

Begging for mercy.

Crying out to whatever gods or devils there were to save them.

Not the screams of the people of Paradise Falls.

He lay there and listened to the death screams of the walking dead.

Somewhere, impossibly, Grey heard Jenny calling her father’s name.

And he heard another voice. An impossible voice from long ago whispering softly in his ear.

“Go to sleep,” she said. “It’s over now. Go to sleep.”

He tried to say her name, but it came out as a whisper.

“Annabelle…”

Above him, defiant in the path of the storm, Looks Away stood there with his strange gun and fired and fired and fired.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The storm winds blew long and black.

They howled like the dying and the damned. Grey lay in the mud with his eyes shut.

And then a great silence fell like a blanket of snow.

Was this death? He did not know. He feared it, though. The ghosts would be waiting for him. Waiting to exact the revenge they had earned with their blood.

Grey waited and waited.

The downpour dwindled to a drizzle, then a few desultory drops. Then nothing.

If death was hovering nearby, it did not touch him with its cold fingers.

It took courage for Grey to open his eyes. He expected to see Looks Away dead and the gibbering dead standing in a leering ring around them, ready to play a deadly joke. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

Yet the surprise was different.

Grey was not dead.

He touched his stomach, searching for the ragged bullet hole.

Finding none.

Finding…

His heavy belt buckle was bent nearly in half, the crease digging into him like a knife. The bullet — Lucky Bob’s bullet had — against all odds, against all sanity, hit the buckle and had not passed through.

Grey wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.

“God,” he breathed.

He raised his head and looked at the sky.

And beheld a sight that nearly drove the last shreds of sanity from his mind.

There, far above the troubled town, half obscured by the fading storm clouds, was a ship.

A ship unlike anything Grey had ever seen. Stranger than anything he had even imagined.

There were no sails, no sweeps, but it floated on the wind like something out of an opium dream. Vast and silver-gray, with massive wings that were unfurled from its side. The wings were black, the wings of some obscene bat. Thin and veined with red. As Grey watched they rose, rose, rose, then snapped down with a thunder crack, propelling the steel body of the ship deeper into the clouds. Another crack, another sound like thunder.

And then it was gone, vanishing into the darkness and distance, as if it had never existed at all. A fading fantasy of a troubled mind. A delusion of shock.

That’s what Grey tried to tell himself.

A fantasy. Nothing more.

But the horrors of this night bared the lie even to his reluctant mind.

It was real, as all of this was real. Dead men walking. A fall of snakes and frogs. Storms that screamed.

All of it.

Real.

He heard a soft moan, and he turned to see Jenny Pearl sitting up, her hands pressed to her breast. Her face was slack and eyes dull. She did what he had done, looking down at the place where a bullet should have killed her. The front of her dress was torn and there was the darkness of blood, but it did not pump from her. It did not rush from her. She touched the whalebone of her bodice.

“No,” she said, her voice thick and strange in her shock.

“Jenny—?” he croaked and began crawling through the mud toward her. “Jenny?”

She reached out a hand to take his. Her fingers were icy with rainwater. He pulled her to him and they clung together in a stricture of shared pain that went all the way to the bone. To the heart. To the soul.

Jenny Pearl writhed against him, in agony. Body and soul.

Ten yards from where they lay, Looks Away sat in the middle of the street, his goggles pushed up on his head, face haggard, lips slack and rubbery with exhaustion. All of the tubes on the machine he wore were dark, the glass of each cracked and smoking. The strange gun was on the ground, thin lines of steam rising from it, the metal melted.

Grey craned his neck to look for Lucky Bob and the other monsters.

Many of them lay in the mud.

Dead and still.

Dead for good and all.

Their heads were gone. Just… gone.

Nothing above their shoulders was there anymore. Instead the ground and even some of the faces of the buildings on either side of the street were splashed with red, with some viscous black substance that Grey figured must be the blood from their decaying veins, and gray lumps of brain tissue. In each of them the black chunk of ghost rock was shattered and smoke rose from each of them.

Grey looked and looked, but he did not see a figure dressed all in black. He did not see the torn and burned remains of a flat-brimmed hat, nor a pair of matched pistols.

“By the Queen’s lacy garters,” said Looks Away in a soft and distant voice. “Did you see?”

“I saw too much.”

“Did you see the ship?”

“I…,” began Grey, then he shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw.”

“Ah,” said the Sioux. “I fear the world is broken. Or I am. Hard to say at this particular juncture.” His precise word choices were totally at odds with the moment, and Grey feared for the man’s sanity. But then Looks Away shook his head as if coming awake out of a dream. He looked at Grey as if surprised to see him.

“You’re alive,” he said. “God rot me, but I thought I saw Lucky Bob gun you both down.”

Grey showed him the dented belt buckle.

Looks Away actually laughed. “You are the luckiest man alive.”

“I feel like I’ve been cut in half.”

“At least you can feel.”

They both turned to Jenny. She shook her head. “Don’t you dare call me lucky.”

“How—?” asked Looks Away, then he blinked. “Dear God, are you going to stand there and tell me that your corset deflected a bullet?”

Jenny kept one hand pressed to her chest. “It grazed me. Don’t make anything out of it.”

“Let me see,” insisted Looks Away.

“No,” she said. “Leave me alone.” Her eyes were puffed red, tears had cut lines through the mud on her cheeks. “Pa—?”

The Sioux scientist raised his head and looked past the pile of corpses that littered the street. “He’s gone.”

She shuddered with relief. “Thank God.”

“No,” said Looks Away. “I don’t think so.”

Feet slapped through the mud and Grey turned to see Brother Joe hurrying over. The monk helped Jenny to her feet and then offered a hand to Grey, who took it gratefully.

Grey touched Jenny’s arm with tentative fingertips. She stepped away, shrugging off his touch. Grey sighed and slogged over to Looks Away. He offered his hand, but the Sioux knelt where he was.

“Give me a moment.”

“Sure,” agreed Grey, but he nodded to the machine. “What in tarnation is that contraption?”

Looks Away picked up the melted handgun, considered it, and let it fall back into a puddle.

“Long or short answer?”

“Short. One I’ll understand.”

“Gas expansion pistol.”

Grey thought about it. “Medium answer.”

A faint smile flitted over Looks Away’s mouth. “A weapon, powered by chalcanthite and ghost rock waste gasses. Designed to focus a beam of superheated plasma that radically expands the gasses trapped within solid ghost rock resulting in an explosive chemical reaction.”

“Um…”

“Did you get any of that?”

Grey nudged the gun with a booted toe. “That thing blew the heads off the undead?”

“It did.”

“By doing something to the ghost rock inside them?”

“An oversimplification, but yes.”

Looks Away sighed. “If you’re still offering a hand up, my friend, I’ll take it.”

Grey gripped his arm and pulled him to his feet. The effort hurt both of them and they spent a good long time cursing and wheezing. Looks Away stood wide-legged and wobbly. He unbuckled the straps and let the device crash to the ground.

“Hey!” said Grey. “We might need that—.”

“We probably will, but that unit is buggered.” Looks Away turned around to show that the back of his shirt was singed and the skin beneath blistered. “It’s a prototype. Doctor Saint scrapped it because we couldn’t keep the coils from overheating.”

“Ouch.”

“Ouch indeed.”

“Jesus. Can you fix it? Or, um, reload it?”

“I study rocks, old son. I’m not a mechanical engineer. Doctor Saint built it, and as far as I know, only he can repair it.”

“Balls,” said Grey. “You got it from his lab, right? Is there anything else we can use if the things come back?”

“I’m… not sure. I didn’t have time to look.”

“Then we’d better have that look.” He went over to the nearest of the formerly walking dead, knelt, and began removing bullets from the man’s gunbelt. He put the first six into his Colt and then slotted the rest into the loops on his own belt. Then he went to two others and took their ammunition as well. Once all the slots on his belt were filled, he dumped the rest into his pockets. The weight was comforting.

Jenny came over. She still had one hand pressed to the damaged front of her dress. She looked angry and sheepish at the same time, and she wouldn’t meet Grey’s eyes. But she stood foursquare in front of Looks Away.

“You tell me the truth,” she demanded. “No lies. Did you try to kill my pa?”

Looks Away took a breath, and then nodded. “He ran away and took the last dozen of them with him. But, Jenny, listen to me — I do not believe that was your father.”

“Of course it was.”

“Of course it was not. Come on, woman,” said Looks Away, “you saw him. He was a corpse. Withered. He’s been dead for weeks. Probably ever since he went missing. Whatever that thing was, I daresay it was not Lucky Bob Pearl. It was some kind of construct, a galvanized mockery brought back to a pretense of life by the qualities of ghost rock. Ask Grey. We’ve both seen the dead walk. We fought them. They are not the people they were when they were alive.”

“That was my pa,” she insisted. “He spoke to me.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It was, damn it. You think I don’t know my own father?”

Brother Joe joined them. “Miss Pearl. That was a demon straight from Hell wearing your father’s body like a suit of clothes.”

“You’re not helping,” said Grey quietly, but Looks Away shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I rather think he is correct.”

“Demons now?” Grey sighed. “We have the walking dead and screaming storms, and now you want to add demons to this stew?”

Jenny punched Grey in the chest. “My father is not a demon.”

“Ow! Why’d you hit me? I didn’t say he was a demon. I’m on your side.”

“You tried to shoot him.”

“Yeah, well, okay, fair enough,” said Grey quickly, “but let’s count the cards on the table. He was shooting at me. And at you.”

“My point exactly,” said Looks Away. “Does that sound like your father?”

She glared at each of them in turn. “Then maybe he’s sick or something. People rave when they have fevers and—”

Looks Away pointed at the corpse that had attacked them. “A fever? Really? Until now I’ve rather admired you for your practicality and clarity of vision, but you are genuinely at risk of becoming another ordinary hysterical fool.”

“Whoa, ease up, pardner,” murmured Grey.

Jenny balled her fist and looked ready to swing a roundhouse punch at the Sioux, but then she abruptly turned and walked a dozen paces away. Her body was ramrod stiff. She stopped and stared into the darkness at the edge of town.

Looks Away glanced helplessly at Grey. In a hushed voice he said, “I’m merely trying to make her see reason.”

Grey shook his head. “Reason left town a long time ago, brother. She just watched her father lead an army of corpses in an attack on everyone she knows. You want to maybe give her a minute?”

The Sioux opened his mouth, thought better of it, and turned away. He tapped Brother Joe on the shoulder. “Come along. There are people who could probably use our help.”

They hurried off to tend to the wounded, the shocked, and the grieving.

Hitching up his borrowed pants and all of his courage, Grey walked over to where Jenny stood. The carnage around her was horrific. There was one final rumble of thunder, far away over the ocean. Above them, though, the moonlight was scattering the last of the storm clouds. It spilled a pure white light down on everything.

It seemed odd to Grey. He’d always hated the night and the cold eye of the moon. Now it was the purest thing in his world.

For a long, long time he said nothing. He did not touch her, did not speak her name.

She stood like a statue, frozen by the impossibility of what was happening, and Grey understood that. The world was wrong. Everything was so damn wrong.

He knew that he should find Picky and get the hell out of Paradise Falls. Out of the Maze. Out of California.

Maybe go East. See if Philadelphia was still normal, still sane.

Or perhaps take a ship. He’d heard about something called the Légion étrangère. The French Foreign Legion. They were supposed to be a group of misfits and outcasts, and nothing seemed better suited to him than that.

He almost smiled at the thought. Putting ten thousand miles between him and this godforsaken little town. Putting an ocean between him and this whole broken country.

It was a nice thought.

The moonlight painted everything with a veneer of purity. The mud, the bloodstained buildings, the mangled dead.

The light traced a silver line along the profile of Jenny Pearl.

A pearl in pearlescent light.

A poet could make something out of that.

Very softly, Grey said the only thing that he could say that might matter to her.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

It broke her.

She bent and put her face in her dirty hands and wept. It was a horrible sound. So deep. Torn from some private place.

Jenny turned and leaned against him, and then she wrapped her arms around Grey and clung to him. He hesitated for only a heartbeat, then he took her in his arms and held her as the storm and the madness of this night went away.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

They walked through the town together. Silent, his arm around her shoulders, her hand clutching the torn front of her dress.

The town was coming alive, but death circled like a carrion bird. People were in the street and there were torches and gas lamps lit. Three bodies lay on the back of a wagon. A young man named Huck who worked in the livery stable and an older couple — the Delgados — whose family had lived in Paradise Falls for nearly a century. More than thirty were hurt, including a twelve-year-old boy with a bad bite on his upper arm.

Looks Away and Brother Joe were tending to the wounded. It did not surprise Grey that the Sioux was skilled in medicine. The man seemed to have a remarkable depth of knowledge, especially in scientific fields. He diagnosed injuries, cleaned and dressed wounds, and mixed compounds that he said would prevent infection or ease pain. Brother Joe, on the other hand, seemed to be more shamanistic in his approach, using herbs and prayers. In both cases, though, the people seemed to respond to the treatments. It was, Grey knew, as much from the appearance of authority and knowledge as it was from what the men did.

They found the little red-haired girl sitting near Brother Joe. Grey learned that her parents had been badly injured but were expected to recover, and that the girl — whose name was Felicity — was herself unharmed. The blood on her face had not been hers.

Saying that she was uninjured and knowing it to be true, though, were different things. When Grey looked into the girl’s eyes he saw that shadows had taken up residence and they would be hard to exorcise.

He carried his own shadows around, so it was something Grey knew all too well.

Thinking that made him glance toward the unlighted far end of town. It was a reflex; something he did when he felt like ghostly eyes were watching him.

There was no one there, though. No one — nothing — that he could see.

“What is it?” asked Jenny.

“Huh?” he said, jolted back to the moment.

“You look like you saw a ghost?”

He turned to her. She was trying to force a smile, but it was a ghastly attempt. It broke apart and fell away, and then she, too, was staring toward the darkness.

“Is it them? Are they back…?”

“No,” he said gently, making himself turn his back on the night. “It’s nothing. They’re gone. They won’t be coming back.”

“How do you know?”

“That damn contraption of Doctor Saint. The gas gun thing. Whatever it is. I think they’ve had enough,” he said, and nearly added “I hope.”

Jenny nodded.

“What I don’t understand,” she said after a few steps, “is who they were. That was Jed Perkins and his men. I mean, that’s who some of them were. What happened to them?”

“I’ll be damned if I know.”

They walked together to the well at the other end of town. There were four teenagers busy drawing bucket after bucket of water up from the shadows. The town’s school marm — a hatchet-faced old buzzard named Mrs. O’Malley — stood guard with a woodsman’s axe clenched in her hands. She had a fierce glare in her eyes and her dress was splashed with black blood.

While they were still out of earshot, Grey murmured, “There’ll be a story behind that.”

“Sure,” agreed Jenny, “but I know her. She was my teacher, too. She keeps things to herself. Farthest thing on God’s earth from a gossip. If there’s a story there, and I have no doubt there is, she won’t be the one to tell it.”

Grey nodded. “That’s how it often plays out.”

Jenny leaned her hip against a hitching post outside of the feed store. “What do you mean?”

He took a moment before answering, but he could see that she wanted to talk. Probably to distract herself from what she needed to talk about but wasn’t yet ready to face. So he lowered himself onto the edge of the feed store porch.

“History books and newspapers talk about battles as if they’re one big event. This side and that side. They talk about the land that’s being fought over, the generals or officers, maybe a hero, and they count the dead, but that’s not what makes a battle. Not really.” He leaned his forearms on his knees and watched the teens bring up the water. “Battles are people. Battles are small things. They’re big, sure, but up close it’s man against man. When it starts, okay, it’s lines of men firing rifles, but then you get into it, then it’s one guy shooting at another. Specifically at another, you understand?”

She nodded.

“It becomes very personal. You fix on someone and you try to kill him, and it hurts you because up close you see that it’s just some fellow wearing a uniform. If your folks had moved a hundred miles away and settled on the far side of some invisible line, that might be you over there. It’s kids a lot of the time. Especially if the war goes on for a while. Boys who can’t shave who are being fed into a meat grinder.” Grey paused, shook his head. “There are these moments in a battle. No one sees them because everyone else is having their own series of moments. But it’s all about you in that moment. You. A guy comes at you and you fire your gun — and you miss, or maybe your powder’s wet, or maybe it hits his buckle and wings off. Then it’s you and him, up close. Hitting each other with your guns ’cause you don’t have time to reload. Maybe bayonets or swords or knives. Sometimes it’s just hands. And teeth. Dirty fighting. Gutter fighting. And you’ll do anything to live through it. To not die.”

She nodded again.

“I remember once, back was I was sixteen — no, seventeen. It was my third battle. We were down in Culpepper County in Virginia. I was with the 46th Pennsylvania Infantry. Papers called it the Battle of Cedar Mountain, though afterward most of the fellows I know called it Slaughter Mountain. Stonewall Jackson plumb beat us to death and nearly ran us all down. The battle was important, because it was the beginning of the South’s Northern Virginia Campaign. But on my level, it was me and this other guy fighting in a streambed. He was twice my age and he looked like my Uncle Farley. A lot like him, which still bothers me. Anyway, we were on the fringes of our two lines and we emptied our guns at each other. I could feel his bullets whipping by my head but nothing hit me. Then for a while we were swinging our rifles back and forth like gladiators with swords. Whanging them off each other, trying to bash in each other’s heads. It was right about then that the slope we were on crumbled and the two of us slid down into a stream. There we were, half drowned, no guns left, beating the pure hell out of each other. He tried to bash my head in with a hickory branch. I hit him with some stones I picked up. I’m telling you, this fight went on and on. We chased each other up and down the muddy slopes. We kicked each other in the privates. We beat on each other’s faces until our hands were busted up.”

“What happened?” she asked.

Grey shook his head. “He slipped on a mossy stone and fell. Hit his head on another stone and was just lying there in the water. So I… well, I…”

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “I sat on him and pushed his head down into the water and held him there for maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Long, long after he stopped moving.”

The night was huge and now there were thousands of stars. The teenagers worked like machines. Lowering, filling, cranking, dumping, lowering again.

“I never told anyone about it,” said Grey.

“It must have been awful,” said Jenny.

“No, that’s just it,” he said, “it’s always awful. It was awful for every man on that field. It’s awful for everyone in every war, on both sides and for everyone who lives in the path of the armies.” He pointed to the town. “This was awful for every one of them. Most of them will eat their pain and their horror. Like I did. I never told anyone because it’s not something you do. Not unless you save the day and you need the applause to help you win a promotion or an election. Like generals. Like heroes. They say history is written by the winners. That’s true to a point. I think what’s really true is that history is written by the ambitious.”

Jenny glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. O’Malley. “She’s not the ambitious type.”

“No.”

“She wouldn’t brag if she won a prize hog at a county fair.”

“A lot of people are like that.”

“Is it pride?” asked Jenny. “Or fear?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that on that level, killing is personal. It’s something you own, something you have to deal with.”

“Is that how you see it, Grey?” she asked.

When he didn’t answer, Jenny came over and sat next to him. So close that her body touched his, and despite the wet clothes she wore, he could feel her heat.

They sat together in a silence that was at first awkward but which became gradually comfortable. Even comforting.

“Those men tonight,” she began slowly.

He nodded.

“I knew most of them. Not just Perkins and the deputies, but a lot of the others as well.”

Grey turned sharply toward her. “What?”

“Most of them I knew only to see. They worked for the railroad. For Nolan Chesterfield.”

“Ah.”

“But the others? They were from here.”

“Here, meaning—?”

“Paradise Falls,” she said. “They were all men from right here in town.”

“Jesus.”

“Aside from the deputies, the rest were men who worked in the mines.”

“Mining for what?”

She looked at him. “What do you think? Ghost rock’s the only thing people care about, apart from water.”

“As I understand it, the mines are owned by two men. Some by Chesterfield and most of them by Aleksander Deray.”

“Yes,” she said. “Those men… some of them worked for one, and some worked for the other. But they all died. Mine collapses. Tidal surges into the caverns. And other stuff. Men gone missing and people talking about sea serpents and cave monsters. Crazy stuff.”

“Crazy,” he said, but it didn’t sound one bit crazy to him right then. And probably not to her, from the tone of her voice.

He steeled himself to ask the next natural question.

“Jenny…,” he began, but she cut him off.

“I know that was my pa,” she said.

He said nothing.

“He knew me, too.”

Fresh tears glittered on her cheeks.

“And I know he was a monster.”

“I’m so sorry…”

Her mouth was a hard, uncompromising line. “Somebody did that to him. You saw them. Those things. You saw the stones in their chests. Somebody did that to them. Which means they did it to my pa. They turned my father into a monster and they sent him to kill me.” She shook her head. Two slow, decisive shakes. “I can’t let that go. I never will. I need to find whoever did this — Chesterfield, Deray or someone else. I need to find them and I need to kill them. No… that’s not right. I will kill them. As God is my witness — if there’s even a God left in heaven — I will kill them.”

Grey reached out and took her hand. He entwined his fingers with hers and pulled the back of her hand to his chest. He wanted her to feel the strong, steady beat of his heart.

“And I am going to help you put those evil sons of bitches in the ground.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Even the longest of nights must end, and that night passed, too.

Grey found his horse, Mrs. Pickles, shivering under a palm tree half a mile from town. Queenie was a few hundred yards away along with a dozen other horses, cows, and sheep. Why the animals had come to this spot to stay safe was something Grey never found out. His horse nickered reprovingly at him, but when Grey produced some carrots from a pocket, Picky forgave him and even pushed against his chest with her long, soft nose.

Grey, feeling a bit like Noah leading the animals to the Ark, guided the mixed herd back to town.

It was the only pleasant moment of that night. Grimmer work lay ahead.

Those with the strongest stomachs helped gather up the ruined bodies of the attackers, and they were taken by wagon out past the edge of town to where a small cemetery lay withering. Water-parched trees leaned dolefully over cheap markers and handmade crosses. Only the older graves had proper headstones, and they seemed to mock the current poverty of the town.

Four strong men took turns digging a pit, and then the dead were laid in it, stacked like cordwood. No one threw roses. No one sang hymns. Those would be saved for the burials of three people the dead had murdered.

The burial was not without ceremony, though.

As the sun curled red fingers over the serrated teeth of the broken mountains to the east, Brother Joe came and read a prayer for the bodies of the dead monsters. It was a strange ceremony. Everyone came to it, but except for the gravediggers the townsfolk stayed outside of the low slatted rail fence that bordered the graves. The men took their hats off. The women wept. It was nearly impossible to identify any of the dead except by their clothes, but some of the families laid claim to a few of them. One mother collapsed down into a sobbing pile as the dirt was shoveled into the pit.

Grey stood with Jenny and Looks Away. They were filthy and exhausted and sick at heart. The Sioux’s posture was unnaturally still because of the burns on his back, although Brother Joe had smeared a noxious mixture of chicken fat and herbs on it. He said it helped with the pain, but the rigid lines around his mouth told a different story.

Brother Joe read the burial prayer for the dead. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

Normally Grey was indifferent to the words, his own tethers to religion having worn thin after all he’d been through, but today those words hit him hard. They chilled him. Jenny Pearl took his hand and squeezed it hard enough to make his fingers hurt. On the other side of him Looks Away’s face had turned to wood.

Yeah, Grey thought, maybe that wasn’t the right choice of prayer. Not after last night.

The monk droned on, apparently oblivious to the possible interpretations of his words. Typical of a lot of preachers, mused Grey. They say the words, but he was pretty sure a lot of them didn’t study on them in the way they were supposed to.

“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For if we live, we live unto the Lord; and if we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.”

Having stalled on the first part, Grey’s mind became numb to the rest of it. Brother Joe’s words seemed to flow past him. He glanced around and saw a variety of expressions on the faces of the crowd. Some of them held bitter resentment in the hard lines around their mouths, though whether it was directed at the monk, at the undead, or at God Himself, Grey couldn’t tell. Others wore the blank masks of shock. A few looked impatient, clearly wanting to get back to the tasks of the day, even if those tasks involved burying the dead and repairing damage done by monsters. And a handful murmured the prayers, word for word, with Brother Joe.

“The Lord be with you,” intoned Brother Joe. “O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant, and grant him an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, O God, now and forever. Amen.”

Grey mouthed the word and it tasted like ashes on his tongue.

The funeral gathering broke apart. Most of the people drifted listlessly back to town; a few lingered to watch the rest of the dirt being shoveled into the pit. Grey saw Mrs. O’Malley standing with Felicity, the little red-haired girl. The teacher’s eyes were hard as bullets; the girl’s eyes were empty.

“She’ll be okay,” said Jenny, who had followed his gaze.

“Will she?” asked Grey.

Jenny, clearly unwilling to pursue the lie, squeezed his hand and led him away.

But Grey paused as they passed Brother Joe. He gestured for the monk to join them, and they all stepped aside under the shade of a juniper tree.

“Nice service,” lied Grey. “I’m sure the families were comforted.”

The monk wasn’t fooled. “There’s nothing I can say that can comfort these people.”

He leaned on the word “I,” taking the whole measure of blame and adding it to his stock of personal and spiritual favor. Grey would have liked to take the man off the hook, but he was too tired and this wasn’t the time. Instead he nodded toward the mass grave.

“Tell me about the ‘Harrowed,’” he asked, thinking of Lucky Bob. “I’ve heard of that, but I don’t know much. I don’t know enough. Tell me what you know about these Harrowed. What are they?”

“Brother Looks Away might disagree,” began the monk, “since he tends to see everything in terms of science and what can be measured or labeled.”

Looks Away shrugged. “After last night, dear chap, consider me open to alternative suggestions. Besides, I have some experience with the phenomenon. So, please, share what you know and I’ll contribute if I can.”

The monk looked around to make sure their conversation was not being overheard. “Some of this is what I have heard from others in my order. Some is from what I have learned from travelers. Do you know the word ‘manitou’?”

“Sure,” said Grey. “It’s the Algonquin word for spirit. Like Gitchee Manitou, the great spirit. Kind of their take on God, as I understand it.”

“To some, yes,” said Brother Joe. “The word — or variations of it — are present in many pagan beliefs.”

“Pagan? Careful where you tread, old son,” warned Sioux.

“Forgive me, brother,” said the monk, placing a hand over his heart. “I meant no offense. I know that among your people, the Lakota Sioux, they call the Great Spirit nagi tanka. I respect that, but the manitou of which I speak are not that. They are not of God. Not of anyone’s version of God. They are more like demons.”

“Demons?” echoed Grey.

“Yes. Devils of the Pit. More like the kagi of your faith, Brother Looks Away,” said Brother Joe, and the Sioux gave him a guarded nod. “The monks of my order believe that the manitou are the irredeemable souls of sinners who were cast into Hell. These tormented souls are always searching for a way to escape their punishment and return to the land of the living.”

“My father was not a sinner,” hissed Jenny, and Grey had to step between her and the monk to prevent violence.

“No, no, let me finish,” said Brother Joe. “I need to tell you some things in order to talk about what happened last night.”

Jenny wore a hostile scowl, but she nodded.

“Manitou are always trying to enter our world. Before the Great Quake it was much more difficult, but they have managed it. The Bible speaks of possession, and that is one way. It is very difficult, of course, for a manitou to enter a living body and conquer its rightful host. Exorcists of the church have fought against this for many centuries, and in some of these struggles the manitou were cast back down into the Pit.”

The others said nothing.

“There are rumors — horrible rumors — that some sorcerers and devil worshippers over the years have performed rituals to invite a manitou into their body. This is done in the crazed belief that the demon will grant powers and share ownership of the flesh. But… manitou do not like to share.”

“Egad,” said Looks Away tartly. “Like a party guest who will not leave.”

“Far worse than that,” said Brother Joe. “In such cases the human is driven mad and frequently commits terrible acts of violence and cruelty. There is a story from Europe about a prince, Vlad of Wallachia, who performed such a ritual and the list of his crimes is legendary. Perhaps other great mass murderers and conquerors have been similarly overcome. Maybe even the Caesars of Rome and—.”

“But you digress,” said Looks Away quietly.

“Sorry, sorry…” The monk looked momentarily flustered, then he found the thread of his tale. “The second way in which the manitou try and enter our world is by invading and reviving the bodies of the dead.”

Grey exchanged a quick, covert glance with Looks Away. Visions of the dead posse seemed to loom above them.

“What happens to these spirits when the body is destroyed?” asked Jenny. “Are the manitou killed, too?”

“I don’t think so. The abbot of my order believes they are released back into the spirit world. Into what many call the Happy Hunting Grounds.”

“‘Happy’ is a relative term,” mused Looks Away sourly.

“There is another way in which a spirit can walk in our Earth as a person,” continued the monk. “If a demon of sufficient power enters a body soon after death — and the soul inside has a strong will or something else the demon thinks makes the reward worth the risk — it can attach itself to the corpse permanently. This is what we call the ‘Harrowed,’ and they are far more powerful than ordinary undead. For the undead the possession, as dreadful as it must be, is fleeting. However with the Harrowed, the demon actually feeds off the holy light of the host’s soul. And in exchange it exists in a parody of actual life, even to the point of healing the stolen flesh when wounded. If it was not so dreadful a thing we would praise it as miraculous.”

“It sounds quite horrible,” said Looks Away quietly.

“It is,” said the monk, “for the soul and the invading spirit wrestle for constant control.”

“Wrestle is a funny word,” observed Grey. “Is there a chance the human soul can win?”

“Perhaps,” said the monk. “I’ve heard it said that a strong-willed individual might win back control of the flesh. Some say that there have been times when the human soul achieves this but then uses some of the demon’s supernatural abilities. Most often, though, it is the demon that is strongest and it takes dominion, suppressing the host and using the stolen flesh to cause as much strife and mischief as it can, delighting in the pain and suffering it inflicts.”

“Couldn’t we just put a bullet in them and end it there?” asked Grey. “Wouldn’t that end the — what’s the word? — occupation?”

“Possession,” supplied the monk. “And it’s not as simple as that.”

Grey sighed. “Of course it’s not.”

“You see, my friends, if the host is destroyed — say by a shot to the brain or burned to ashes — the demon is slain as well. Therefore it will do absolutely anything to prevent that from happening, and you cannot even imagine the lengths to which a Harrowed will go. It would burn down Heaven if it could. My abbot was uncertain as to whether this would release the soul of the possessed or cast it into greater spiritual torment. It is because of this that the Harrowed are perhaps the greatest example of the struggle we all have with sin and temptation and—.”

“Drifting, drifting…,” murmured Looks Away.

“No,” said Brother Joe, “I am not. Tell me, gentlemen, do you know why the War Between the States ended?”

“Ceasefire,” said Grey. “Everyone knows that.”

Brother Joe shook his head. “No, that is the lie that everyone believes. It’s what we have all been told. But the truth is that this world — our world — has been changed somehow. It has become an abode of evil.”

“Oh come on now,” began Looks Away, but Grey gestured for him to be quiet.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“It began at the Battle of Gettysburg,” said Brother Joe. “In that terrible, terrible place where so many died. But, God save us all, the dead did not stay dead. They rose.”

Those words hung there and no one dared speak. After what he and Looks Away had seen, Grey could not call this man a liar.

“It was a slaughter,” said Brother Joe, “with the dead killing the living and thereby swelling their own ranks. It forced the generals on both sides to withdraw. It happened again when the Union’s Potomac Army and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia clashed. Red slaughter and the dead walking abroad in defiance of the natural order of things. The war ground on for years, but the horrible truth of the living dead, my friends, is what eventually brought on the ceasefire.”

“Those were manitou?” asked Jenny, her eyes huge.

“Yes, and with the risk that every battle would further empty the halls of Hell itself, the generals and politicians quietly ended hostilities. It was not a move toward peace and sanity but a desperate act to prevent the wholesale slaughter of everyone in North America.”

“By the Queen’s silken garters,” breathed Looks Away.

“But a lot of people have died since then,” protested Grey. “Why aren’t we ass-deep in walking corpses?”

Brother Joe shook his head. “There are so many mysteries. Some believe that only those who die by violence are at risk of being resurrected in this fashion. My abbot believes that it is only those who die in war. They could both be wrong, and for my part… I do not know.

Grey grunted. “You know, I did hear some rumors like that. But it was from men who were being treated for war stress. In army hospitals and such.”

“Or,” mused Looks Away, “is that where they put the witnesses to discredit them?”

It was an ugly question.

“My point,” said Brother Joe, “is that this kind of possession is the most frightening. They are the most rare of all these undead things, but they are also the most powerful. There are some who believe that a few of these Harrowed are still abroad in our world, hiding among us. Living in our own towns. Maybe in our own families.”

“How can you hide in plain sight like that if you’re dead?” asked Grey.

“What makes you think you could look at one and know?” asked Jenny.

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes were filled with pain. “If my pa had walked up to me on the street this afternoon, I wouldn’t have known he was… different. Tonight, he sounded the same, looked the same.”

“Hey,” said Grey, “let’s not forget that he shot you. It was only a lucky break that the bullet bounced off that fancy corset you’re wearing. Shooting you doesn’t exactly sell family unity and love to me.”

“He could have shot her in the head,” suggested Looks Away.

“C’mon, that was a monster out there, and—.”

Jenny’s face flushed with anger. “I know that, but he looked like my pa. I still can’t believe it’s not him.”

“The demons that animate the Harrowed want to walk among others. That is where they can cause the most harm. Their wounds heal and I am told they don’t look like corpses. Not like some of the other risen dead, at least. Some even say that a very strong-willed person can bring himself back from death, which is both encouraging and frightening.”

“My pa had a will of iron,” declared Jenny. “Sounds like he’d be the perfect candidate for these… things.”

Grey noted that she used the past tense. Had. It was a sign that she was accepting certain realities, but it also broke his heart.

“He did,” agreed Brother Joe, “and he was a God-fearing man. If he wasn’t in church every Sunday I have no doubt he was abroad doing good in this world. He was like that. And yet the abomination we saw last night could not have been him. Not completely. The Lucky Bob I knew would never willingly do harm to innocents, nor would he consort with those who would. This is why I believe that he was murdered and that a demon has stolen his body. This is a sin against God and against the memory of a good and decent man.”

The words hit Jenny like a series of blows, and her anger crumbled beneath the pummeling. She hung her head. However Grey saw that the young woman’s fists were balled at her side. Overwhelmed by grief, to be certain, but ready to exact a terrible revenge.

He found it all extremely — and strangely — exciting. What a woman.

“Clarify something for me, old chap,” said Looks Away, “there were quite a lot of those monsters out there. How many were Harrowed and how many were simply nimble corpses?”

“I can’t say for certain,” admitted the monk, “but it is most likely that Lucky Bob was the only Harrowed. The rest were demons.”

“Are the souls of the dead still in there?” asked Jenny, her eyes wide with fear.

Brother Joe shook his head. “No. For most of them… only the demon wears their flesh. If they speak or act like the person that they were, it’s because the demon can still read the memories in their brain. Unlike the Harrowed, they are pure evil. Destroy the brain and the demon loses its hold on the flesh and they flee back to hell. The body, which was merely a disguise of flesh, merely dies.”

“Well, that’s something,” said Grey. “It simplifies things.”

“Does it?” asked Looks Away.

“No, but it felt good to say it.”

The Sioux shook his head. “White men.”

The monk said, “I myself have heard stories about some of these Harrowed working for the rail barons, fighting in the War Between the States, and even riding as agents for the Texas Rangers and the Pinkerton Agency. It is frightening to think that so many of them may be among us…”

“Hold on,” said Grey, shaking his head, “none of this explains what we saw last night. What about the pieces of ghost rock in the chests of those other things, the undead slaves. I admit I don’t know as much about possession as you do, Brother, but I never heard about that.”

“Nor have I,” admitted the monk. “I can only speculate that some dark rite was performed on this ghost rock itself. Ghost rock is the Devil’s creation so it would make a fine receptacle for some unholy spell. Some even say ghost rock itself is made of damned souls. We’ve all heard the tormented screams that issue from it when burned and—.”

Jenny swiped angrily at the fresh tears in her eyes, but she said nothing.

Looks Away pursed his lips for a moment. “I admit that after last night I’m more inclined to accept a preternatural explanation for things. For some things. However I have had some experience with ghost rock and with the reanimation of the dead. Doctor Saint and his colleague, Mr. Nobel, agreed that there was some kind of chemical reaction resulting from an explosion of the mineral that temporarily restored life to the recently dead. They reasoned that because those people had been dead for too long, with the resulting deprivation of oxygen to their brains, when they reanimated they were hysterical and mentally deranged. We did not view this as having any connection to matters of a spiritual nature.”

“That was then,” said Grey. “Where do you stand now?”

“Quite frankly? On very shaky ground, old chap. I wish we understood more about these blighters,” said Looks Away.

“We know how to kill them,” said Grey grimly. “A head shot seems to do it for the bulk of these bastards. But tell me, Joe, what about the Harrowed? How do we kill them? I mean, what happens if we shoot them in the head?” He was careful not to mention Lucky Bob by name, but Jenny still gave him an evil glare.

“That is the only thing the demons truly fear,” said the monk. “If they enter such an individual, then they are bound to the flesh. If you kill the body by destroying the brain, the Harrowed dies, too.”

“But…,” began Jenny, then she took a breath and asked the dreaded question, “what happens to the soul of that dead person?”

The monk shook his head. “I… don’t know. I wish I had an answer, I wish I could speak comfort to you, Jenny, but we do not know. And this is something the brothers of my order would dearly love to know. Because if the soul of the undead are released and allowed to fly to the arms of Jesus, then we would offer no objection at all to men like Grey and Looks Away doing whatever they had to do. Instead of breaking the commandment against murder.”

“I thought all killing was anathema to you clerical blokes?” said Looks Away.

Brother Joe smiled wanly. “Have you ever read the Old Testament? Achan was put to death by Joshua because he caused the defeat of Israel’s army by taking some of the plunder and hiding it in his tent. David had an Amalekite put to death because he claimed to have killed King Saul. And Solomon ordered the death of Joab. No, my brother, there is so much blood written into the pages of our holy book. But we are told by God not to commit murder — the wanton act of killing.”

“Wait, wait,” said Grey, “let’s stick on that point for a minute. Jenny’s right. If we killed the Harrowed, or even the lesser undead, are we doing some kind of spiritual harm to the possessed, or are we setting them free to go on to Jesus? Or whatever you want to call it.”

“As I said,” explained Brother Joe, “I simply do not know.”

That stopped them all, and for several painful moments they could do nothing but look at each other and weigh the events of last night against their fears.

“You’re sure my pa got away?” asked Jenny in a small, fragile voice.

“I am,” Looks Away assured her.

“You wouldn’t lie to me, Looksie, would you?”

“No, my dear, I would not.” He bent and kissed her on the forehead. “And I thank whatever Gods may be that Doctor Saint’s gun burned itself out before I could take that shot. Let’s call it the hand of providence for now.”

Jenny kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

They began walking again.

Looks Away trailed behind them, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, chin resting thoughtfully on his chest. Grey glanced over his shoulder at him. “You got that gun contraption from Doctor Saint’s lab?”

“Mmm? Oh, yes,” said Looks Away absently. “But as I said, it’s ruined now and—.”

“He have anything else in there?”

The Sioux stopped and sucked a tooth while he thought about it. “Quite frankly, my dear chap, I don’t really have a clue what all is in there. The good doctor has most of his equipment locked up and I don’t have all the keys. It’s his private workshop and I was only an assistant.”

“Can’t we break the locks?” asked Jenny.

Looks Away shook his head. “I wouldn’t dare. Doctor Saint is—.”

“—not here,” she interrupted. “We are.”

They stopped in the street and he half-smiled. “Doctor Saint has been very generous and supportive to the people in this town,” said Looks Away. “Some of what’s in his lab is the result of years of his work.”

Jenny pointed to the cemetery. “Then you go tell those people that we can’t help because we’re being too damned polite. Explain to them that good manners forbids us to check to see if there’s a weapon or two in Saint’s lab that might help us. Tell the parents of all those men who you killed last night — all those undead — that their sons died in vain but it’s okay, they’ll get to join them soon because you’re too bloody British for your own good.”

“Now hold on a sodding minute, Jenny,” protested Looks Away. “Don’t lay this on me because I’m trying to respect the privacy of a good and decent man. And moreover, this isn’t about me being British. I’m a Sioux—.”

“—and the Sioux took back their nation, didn’t they? Or are those the American Sioux? The ones who still have their balls?”

Grey winced.

Looks Away turned livid. “Fine! You want me to commit larceny? Absolutely. Follow me, you daft cow.”

The Sioux spun on his heel and stalked angrily toward a large shuttered barn on the edge of town.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Jenny let her stern face melt away to be replaced by a bright but devious smile. “Good. That was even easier than I thought.”

She set off in Looks Away’s wake.

Grey lingered a moment longer. Then, grinning, he followed.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Grey caught up to Jenny as she caught up to Looks Away. The Sioux was fitting a strange and elaborate key into the lock of the barn. There were signs nailed above the doors and along the signs:

Bolts of blue lightning radiated out from the letters. Eloquent, thought Grey sourly.

“Open it,” urged Jenny.

“I am opening it,” snapped Looks Away. “Give me a bleeding minute.”

The lock clicked and Jenny pushed Looks Away aside and went into the darkened building. Grey paused and leaned close to the Sioux.

“Is she always like this?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” said Looks Away, “sometimes she’s pushy and abrasive. You caught her on one of her good days.”

“Ye gods,” murmured Grey as he followed her in.

Looks Away scraped a match on the sole of his shoe and lit four oil lamps, dialing up the flames so that a great mass of yellow light filled the room.

The barn was not a barn. It had once served that purpose, but builders had been hard at work converting the interior of the big structure into something else entirely. There was a large central space in which several wagons of different size were stored and strange equipment was positioned in the beds of each. The equipment was so arcane in design that Grey could not even hazard a guess as to what purpose it might serve. Around this, a series of small rooms had been built, each of them closed and secured with heavy padlocks on steel hasps. One door stood ajar and Grey could see a simple workbench beyond, covered with dozens of finely-made tools.

Overhead, hung from the beams, were strange devices that looked like suits of armor from the days of King Arthur, but these were mostly made from woven materials unknown to Grey. Many had bulbous metal heads with wire-mesh grilles over glass faceplates. And against one wall was a mass of drilling and mining equipment. Wheelbarrows were piled high with pick-axes, shovels, sledgehammers, and coils of leather hose.

Jenny stood gaping at it all, her lips parted. She turned in a slow circle like a child at the circus.

“What is all this stuff? I thought Doctor Saint was working on weapons.”

“He’s working on quite a lot of different things,” said Looks Away, then he gave an officious sniff. “Percival Saint is a great man, you know. He is an important man. He will be remembered long after we three are dust.”

“Sure,” said Jenny. “Good for him. Where are the weapons?”

“Please understand, Doctor Saint is not primarily concerned with destroying things. Most of his work is intended for the betterment of mankind and—.”

Jenny gave him a sparkling smile that went less than a millimeter deep. “I don’t care if he can cure the common cold or turn chicken shit into gold. We need weapons.”

“How eloquently you put it.”

“Children,” said Grey mildly, “don’t make me cut a switch on both of you.”

For that joke he received identical lethal stares that he was certain burned two full years off his life. He held up his hands and retreated.

“My point,” said Looks Away with asperity, “is that not only don’t we understand the nature and dangers of most of this equipment, but we also run the risk of destroying crucial experimentation that could in very real point of fact benefit all of humanity. There is, after all, a world beyond Paradise Falls.”

Jenny jabbed him in the chest with a stiffened finger, emphasizing each word. “I. Don’t. Care.”

“Well, I bloody well do.”

The ensuing argument slid down the side of a privy slope and soon the two of them were slinging words that made even Grey flinch and flush.

He tried not to listen — though he was mildly impressed that Jenny Pearl seemed to have the greater vocabulary when it came to descriptions of disgusting liaisons with livestock and mishaps of the water closet. Looks Away was losing ground very quickly and clearly hadn’t brought the right bullets to this gunfight.

Grey wandered over to the mining equipment, bent over to examine the tools, and selected a straight-pane sledgehammer with a twelve-pound steel head. He nodded to himself, hefted it, found the balance point, walked over to the first locked door, and while the argument raged behind him, raised the sledge and brought it down with a savage grunt.

The padlock was undamaged but the hasp was torn from the wood with twin shrieks of protesting metal and timber. Splinters flew and the heavy padlock dropped, bounced once, and skidded to a stop by Looks Away’s foot.

The argument stopped as surely as if he’d backhanded them both — which, in truth, he had considered — and they turned on him like scalded snakes.

“Enough!” he barked before they could open up on him. “Enough talk. Enough bullshit. It’s been too long a night and I’m too exhausted to listen to you two squabble like cats. Looks Away, I’m sorry that we might be breaking Doctor Saint’s rules, and I’m almost sorry that we may mess with some of his inventions. But there are people dying in this town, and as far as I see it that trumps everything. And don’t even try to give me a speech about posterity or benefiting the future of humanity. It may be true but we don’t have the luxury to care about it.”

Looks Away opened his mouth, but Grey turned to Jenny.

“I don’t know you very well, ma’am, but I know you well enough to know that sometimes your mouth gets ahead of your horse sense. Whatever. Stop it. We don’t have time for that either.”

He brandished the sledgehammer.

“I’m going to knock every damn one of these locks off. That’s not an option and it’s not a discussion. It’s what is going to happen. Looks Away, I want you to go through every room and find whatever you can to help us. Jenny, you’re going to help him.”

“Who,” asked Looks Away coldly, “the bloody hell put you in charge?”

Grey raised the sledgehammer and brought it whistling down so that it smashed a hole in the floor between Looks Away and Jenny. They both cried out and jumped backward.

“I did,” said Grey into the silence. “Now let’s get to work.”

They got to work.

Grey was so deeply exhausted that every time he swung the sledge he felt ten years older. He kept at it, though, and after only a small hesitation — perhaps for good form’s sake — Looks Away began invading the rooms as they were opened.

By the time Grey had smashed all eighteen of the locks off, he was sweating and trembling. Jenny had run outside and returned with a bucket of cold well water, and she handed a full ladle to Grey.

“Thanks,” he said, and dumped it over his head. Jenny gave him a refill, and this time he drank it, and two more besides. “God, that’s better than any whiskey I ever swallowed.”

“Costs more, too,” she said. “More than the finest champagne.”

“No doubt.” As he drank a fourth mouthful, he considered Jenny. He knew that he was probably seeing her at both her best and her worst. This was a time when great courage was called for, and she certainly showed that, but it was also the kind of thing that can shake a person to their core. And Jenny was undoubtedly shaken. First the loss of so many friends when the town was nearly destroyed, then her way of life as the farm failed, then the loss of her father, and now the corruption of her father’s memory. Even though Grey had no personal stake in this town or its people, he believed that he could sympathize with her. After all, his world had been torn apart by these events, too. Not in the same way, but in a way he knew he’d never shake off.

And, he considered, maybe he was fooling himself about not having a stake in this town. Or its people.

As Jenny took the ladle back from him her fingers accidentally brushed his.

If, indeed, it was an accident.

The look she gave him was not. Nor that knowing, secret smile that was certainly not meant for Looks Away to see.

Grey ran fingers through his hair to comb it back from his face.

This woman confused the living hell out of him. Not a handful of hours ago she’d stood in the rain while her dead father tried to gun her down. Now she was flirting and casting slanting glances at him. It made no sense. Either she was mad or…

Or what? Grey didn’t know where else to go with that. What deepened his unease was how much this kind of whimsical play reminded him of his lost Annabelle. She was always playing saucy games no matter how proper she was on the streets or how dire the tension was.

Wrestling with these thoughts was difficult and painful. He was starting to genuinely like Jenny Pearl, but he had to wonder how much of that was old longing transferred unfairly to this troubled young woman.

“Jenny,” he said softly, pitching his voice for her ears alone, “I’m sorry I yelled and—.”

She touched her fingers to his lips. “You hush now. I was playing the fool and we both know it. You hadn’t spoken up when you did I’d have done a nasty to Looksie. Or him to me.”

He took her hand and held it for a moment. “Guess we have enough enemies without that.”

The blue of her eyes was the blue of summer skies and blooming cornflowers. Her lips were without rouge but they were pink and delicious and he wanted very badly to kiss her.

“Jenny,” he said, “when this is over I’d like to maybe invite you out for a carriage ride in the country.”

“Well,” she said, a bit breathlessly, “wouldn’t that be nice?”

He wanted to kiss those lips. Her lips parted and long lashes brushed her cheeks as Jenny tilted her face up toward his. Grey was actually beginning to bend down toward her when a voice shouted, “You sodding bastard!”

Looks Away.

Yelling from inside one of the rooms.

Not directed at them, but clearly yelled for them to hear.

Jenny jerked back from him, turned, and cleared her throat. Her face was flushed. “He… um, must have found something.”

“I guess so,” said Grey. “Wish to hell I’d hit him with that damn sledgehammer.”

Jenny turned and flashed the brightest smile he’d ever seen. Then she spun and dashed out to see what Looks Away had found.

Heaving a great sigh, Grey followed.

Chapter Forty

They found the Sioux scientist in a large room at the very back of the barn. Inside there was a long mission table on which lay various pieces of Doctor Saint’s bizarre machinery. Set haphazardly around the pieces were notebooks, loose papers filled with handwritten notes, larger sheets of drawing paper covered with complex diagrams, and even some pages produced by one of those newfangled typewriting machines. On the wall across from the door was a big and very detailed map of this part of California. It was an older map, clearly made in the days before the Great Quake, but Saint had meticulously overwritten it with a carefully measured tracery that showed the new coastline and much of the Great Maze. Grey, who had always loved maps, was drawn to it and stood studying the details. It was by far the most detailed map of the Maze he’d ever seen.

He found Paradise Falls on the map and spotted several notations made in Saint’s crabbed hand. One was the location of Nolan Chesterfield’s estate, situated in a green valley that had been left mostly intact by the devastation. Another was an old mining camp whose name, Dragon Wells, had been crossed out and the name DERAY written over it. The pen strokes of each letter had gouged into the thick paper. Clear evidence of Saint’s dislike for the mineral tycoon.

There were other markings, too. Lots of places notated with “GR,” and Grey figured these were places where ghost rock was discovered. There were at least a hundred of these spread out over an area that encompassed all of the farmland around Paradise Falls. There were twice as many with “GR-?”, suggesting spots where either ghost rock was reported but not found, or where mineral scouts planned to look. And there were dozens with a slash mark through the GR. They must have been bad leads that yielded none of the ore.

One notation struck Grey. In the broken hills between Chesterfield’s valley and Deray’s mine, Saint had written:

It was a strange thing for so practical a man to write. That was something they used to put on maps to indicate the perils at the end of the known world.

“Grey,” said Looks Away, “if you please—?”

Grey turned away from the map and joined Jenny and the Sioux at the table. On the table in front of them lay something that looked like a rifle but wasn’t. Or at least not any kind of rifle Grey had ever seen. Apart from having a barrel, stock, and trigger the rest was entirely alien to him.

The rifle was fashioned from highly polished steel and gleaming brass, with fittings of copper and silver. Crystals were inset into the body of the weapon and even in the bad light they seemed to glow with dark-red promise. The pistol-grip handle was wound turn and turnabout with gray silk.

“Oh, dearie-dearie me,” murmured Looks Away nervously, “I hadn’t realized Doctor Saint had built a prototype.”

Grey bent and peered at it, but did not touch the thing. “What is it?”

“This is something very special,” said Looks Away. “And something very, very dangerous.”

“It’s a gun, though, right?” asked Jenny.

“Oh yes, it is very definitely a gun. And, if it works the way the good doctor theorized, it will be a dreadfully powerful gun. Even a small platoon of men armed with weapons like this would triumph over an entire regiment, and probably without the loss of a single man.”

“How?” gasped Jenny.

“Ghost rock.”

“Oh, bullshit,” said Grey. “That’s tall tale stuff. Ever since they first found ghost rock people have been going on and on about stuff like this. The ultimate weapons of conquest. Weapons so powerful they would end all wars.”

“You don’t believe that?” asked Jenny.

“Not even a little. I mean, sure, someone will eventually create a better gun. Happens all the time. Double-action pistols trump muzzle-loaders. Flintlocks trump crossbows. Going all the way back to when someone invented the club and kicked the ass of everyone who was still using fists. The wonders of modern science. I get that,” said Grey. “What I don’t get is why anyone thinks that a weapon — any weapon — will end war. I mean, how the hell could a weapon end a war?”

“When you conquer your enemies,” said Jenny. “That’s how.”

“Really? And then what? There are always more enemies. My family lines come from England and Scotland. They conquered each other lots of times, and conquered other people. That didn’t end war. When white men landed at Plymouth Rock and started killing the red men, that didn’t end war. Soon as they cleared out the Indians, they started killing each other. And then we fought the British, and the French and the Mexicans. Look at all the ghost rock weapons out there now. Have they stopped the Rail Wars? Has either the North or South won the damn war? Uh-uh, honey, no weapon is going to end war. Can’t happen.”

Looks Away sighed. “I tend to agree with you, Grey. Doctor Saint, for all of his brains and wisdom, is of a different mind, however. It’s his belief that if someone developed what he called an ‘ultimate’ weapon, then peace could be achieved. A lasting peace, I mean.”

“How?” asked Jenny. “Grey’s right, people are plain contentious. They’ll find some way to pick a fight, no matter what.”

“Contentious, yes, but are they suicidal? What if there was a weapon so powerful that to use it would insure the utter destruction of one’s enemy? Wouldn’t knowledge of such a weapon make any rational person choose to opt out of a conflict?”

Grey and Jenny considered, then they shook their heads.

“People aren’t that smart,” she said.

“People are plumb crazy,” agreed Grey.

“Hey,” said Looks Away, “don’t get me wrong. I didn’t say that I was sold on Doctor Saint’s idea of a weapon to end all wars. I’m saying that he believes it. He is rather emphatic about it. Dare I say obsessive?”

Jenny tapped the rifle with a fingernail. “What is this and what does it do?”

“This, dear girl, is a prototype of the Kingdom Mark One air-cooled, electric reload, ten-shot infantry repeating rifle. It fires iron-core, silver-tipped forty-caliber copper-jacketed chemical bullets powered by compressed gas collected by the discharge of the process of smelting ghost rock.”

The silence following that explanation was crushing.

Grey was the one to break it. “You want to take another swing at that, son? Maybe this time in English?”

Looks Away gave them a crooked smile. “The Kingdom M1 is something entirely new. There is nothing like it anywhere in the world, of that I am quite certain. You understand, I hope, the concept of an electric motor?”

“I read about it, sure,” said Jenny. “Even before the big ghost rock invention craze. Something about coils and such holding lightning?”

“Not exactly,” said Looks Away, “but close enough for our purposes. Doctor Saint worked with a bright young naval officer named Frank Sprague from Milford, Connecticut. Mr. Sprague is part of the American Navy’s efforts to build machine-driven warships powered by ghost rock engines.”

“Everybody’s navy is working on that,” said Grey. “Airships, too. I think Deray might have one, too. I saw something during the storm.”

“As did I,” said the Sioux, “but I didn’t get a good look at it. That only reinforces the point that everyone seems to have a natural bent for armed conflict, even in an age of prosperity and discovery.” He gestured vaguely toward the town. “And by ‘prosperity’ I refer to virtually anyplace that isn’t Paradise Falls.”

Jenny made a face.

“My point,” continued Looks Away, “is that Doctor Saint was able to take some of Sprague’s designs and build a very compact version of a functional electric motor. He put that inside the Kingdom M1 and discovered a process of keeping the motor working at a perpetual rate of fire by something he calls ‘gas injection.’”

“But you’re talking about ghost rock? How’s that a gas?” asked Grey. “I thought that when they smelted it all they got was a stinky cloud that tends to scream as it comes out of the smokestacks. They got all those smelting plants in Salt Lake City and the sky’s black with that smutch. People call it the ‘City of Gloom’ for a damn good reason.”

“There are side effects, I’ll grant you. But what most people dismiss as merely gaseous discharge — waste products, if you will — Doctor Saint has discovered possess certain useful attributes. One of Doctor Saint’s… um… what’s the word I’m fishing for here? Rival? Colleague? Something like that but I can’t find the exact word. Anyway, one of the other scientists working on developing advanced military mechanics is based in Salt Lake. Dr. Darius Hellstromme. You’ve heard of him?”

Jenny shook her head.

Grey narrowed his eyes. “I have. Been some wild-ass tales coming out of Utah. I met a guy once who swore on his own mother’s grave that he saw a machine man walking down the center of Salt Lake, big as two men and clanking like fifty headaches. Of course, that fellow was a known drunk and his mother’s still alive, so who knows what he really saw.”

Looks Away shrugged. “Machine men? Really? I doubt that. Though… I might be unfair. I suppose if machines can fly, then maybe they can be made to walk. But what concerns me, or rather what concerns Doctor Saint, is the Kingdom rifle. He explained it to me, but I’ll try to put it in simpler terms for you.”

“That would be nice,” said Jenny. She gave Grey a knowing wink. “For the benefit of us lesser mortals.”

“Hilarious,” said Looks Away sourly, but he was smiling. “The whole thing involves capturing the smoky discharge from the smelting process and then compressing it into small cylinders. The more gas that can be compressed into, say, a five-inch cylinder, the better. More gas pressure creates more energy when released. You follow?”

“Like a bloodhound,” said Grey.

“There is so much raw energy, even in the ghost rock smoke, that one cylinder, properly regulated, can be used for many bursts of energy. What Doctor Saint has done is connect a replaceable cylinder to the electric motor. Each time a burst of gas is discharged, it winds the copper coils of the motor at such a high rate that a strong electrical charge is created. This charge is used for two purposes. First it is injected into the brass shell casing of each bullet through a special kind of firing pin, thus triggering a blast that has far more power than black powder. The projectile flies faster, farther, and straighter. The second thing it does is activate all of the destructive properties of tiny grains of ghost rock that have been placed inside the core of the bullet. That turns what appears to be an ordinary bullet into a round that has the approximate explosive power of an explosive artillery shell. Imagine, if you will, a twenty-four-pound field gun firing canister packed with thousands of tiny iron pellets. Grey, I’m sure you’ve seen the effect firsthand.”

“Too many times,” admitted Grey. “One round can rip a whole platoon apart. But that’s a big shell.” He picked up one of the loose rounds and examined it. The bullet was only a little larger than a rifle round. “Even if this broke up it couldn’t do that kind of damage.”

“Yes,” said Looks Away sadly, “it could. That bullet is not what it seems. Inside are grains of ghost rock. Not enough to be of much value for sale, but when charged during a compressed gas firing, each one of them explodes like a tiny grenade. There are fifty grains in each bullet. The effect is every bit as devastating as fifty small bombs going off in a tightly packed area.”

They stared at him in horror.

“So you see what would happen if an army went into the field carrying Kingdom M1s?”

“It would be a slaughter,” said Jenny, aghast. “That’s terrifying.”

“It is indeed. One effect is that any ghost rock used is utterly destroyed, as is any ghost rock it encounters. One of Doctor Saint’s intentions was to create a weapon that would obliterate any ghost rock — powered weapon of the enemy.”

“What would happen if you fired that at one of the undead?” asked Grey.

“Or a Harrowed?” added Jenny.

Looks Away shrugged. “As I said, the ghost rock is obliterated. Doctor Saint was never concerned with the spiritual aspects of his devices, but given what our friendly monk says about the manitou, I rather think they would be obliterated as well.”

Grey felt that sink in. A weapon that could actually destroy a demon was so far beyond anything that he’d ever thought about that he didn’t know how to think about it. He had to resist the temptation to glance at Jenny. If the Kingdom Rifle was used on her father, would it destroy the demon inside him as well as his own human soul?

So many ugly questions, and so many unbearably ugly answers.

“Now,” said Looks Away, warming to his topic but apparently oblivious to its emotional implications, “here is where it gets even worse.”

He led them out of the room and into the adjoining room where a dusty sheet covered what Grey took to be a lumber wagon. Looks Away took a breath, shook his head, then took a corner of the sheet and whipped it away. There, beneath the cloth, mounted on the back of a wooden delivery cart, was a huge machine.

Copper and steel and silver.

A Kingdom gun.

But this was no rifle. This gun was the size of the biggest cannon Grey had ever seen.

“Imagine what an army could do with a hundred of these,” said Looks Away. “Just imagine.”

Chapter Forty-One

Jenny approached the gun cautiously, as if it could somehow come to life and devour her. The machine was impressive, but Grey did not like the sight of it. He had seen beautiful cannons before. Old time brass ones, iron monsters, and even some whose metal skin had been engraved with filigree and a tracery of wild flowers. He had never understood that, though looking at this one, he wondered if making a weapon beautiful was somehow a way for the maker to convince himself that peace — defending it or keeping it — was truly the end result of warfare.

Personally he didn’t think so.

His life tended toward other interpretations. War was pain and suffering. War was loss and regret. War was innocent blood and stolen lives.

He walked past Jenny and ran his fingertips along the ribs of copper wire that encircled the middle of the weapon. Even though it was inert he could imagine the thrum of power contained in its dormant battery. Power waiting to come to unnatural and unholy life.

Grey stopped and studied that thought and the word choices that had flitted through his mind.

Unholy.

It was a strange word for him. Not one he used. Holy or unholy. Those concepts belonged to a broken part of his long ago childhood back in Philadelphia. Not to the stoic and cynical killer he’d become since going to war. Not since he had let war and all of its ugly trappings define him.

“Impressive, is it not?” asked Looks Away.

Jenny turned to him. “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. This is unholy.”

Grey did not comment on that.

“If one bullet from the small gun could kill a dozen men, this thing could… could…” She shuddered and hugged her arms to her body. “No, Looksie, this is wrong.”

The Sioux arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying that you wouldn’t use this against Deray, even if you found out that he was behind the murder of your father? Even if you found out for certain that he was responsible for the deaths of all these people and the attack on the town?”

Jenny did not answer. The inner conflict was clear on her face, though.

“It’s not easy to answer, is it?” asked Looks Away gently. “And, for the record, I’m with you on this. I disagreed with Doctor Saint on many points. He is a good man, don’t misunderstand me, but he actually thinks that select use of an ultimate weapon will remove from men’s heart the desire for conquest.”

“No,” said Jenny.

“No,” said Grey.

“No,” agreed Looks Away, “and more’s the pity.” He sighed deeply and patted the barrel of the deadly cannon. “Luckily this is something we do not need to concern ourselves with at the moment. As the French are so fond of saying, we have other fish to fry.”

“That’s a French expression?” asked Grey.

Looks Away shrugged. “Who cares? We don’t have sufficient ghost rock gas to power a weapon this large. There are magazines for the small rifle, but only two gas cartridges and nine bullets.”

“That would put a dent in the monsters,” observed Grey.

Jenny wheeled on him and finally spoke the thought that Grey knew had to be burning on her tongue. “Are you saying that we use it on my pa?”

He held his hands up. “Whoa, now. I’m not saying that,” he lied. “I was thinking out loud. But since we’re talking about it now, let’s look at that. I’m not saying we use this on your dad, but I wouldn’t shed too many tears if we were to thin his crowd a bit.”

“Even if it means destroying a human soul along with the demon?”

“First, we don’t know that it would do such a thing… and second… maybe. We might have no choice. I’d rather use that gun and destroy those… things… than stand unarmed and let them slaughter every living person in Paradise Falls. In an ideal world we’d never have to make that kind of decision, but let’s face it, Jenny, we’re being dealt some pretty bad cards here. We have to do what we have to do. And who knows, maybe Brother Joe can intercede with the Almighty to save those souls.”

“And what if he can’t?” demanded Jenny.

“Like I said, we do what we have to do. That rifle may be our only chance.”

“Isn’t it funny,” observed Looks Away, “that we can discuss using the rifle while we all consider the cannon to be somehow obscene. Why is that?”

No one offered an answer.

“Yes… exactly what I thought,” said the Sioux. “We’re all barking mad. All of us. Every human who ever walked on dear-old planet Earth.”

“I got no argument for that,” said Grey.

Jenny merely sighed heavily and nodded. They went back to the room and stood looking down at the rifle. “We live in such strange times,” she said. “It’s like we’re living in a dream. A nightmare. Those things that happened last night… that was wrong in so many ways. I mean… snakes and frogs? That’s so strange. It’s like something out of the Bible. Out of the Old Testament. The plagues of Egypt.”

Looks Away smiled. “You think Deray conjured that like Moses to drive us from this land?”

“Maybe.”

“I was joking.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I think everything that’s happened has been part of that kind of plan. To get us off this land.”

“But why?” asked Grey. “All he has to do is wait another few months. Without water no one can stay here. Shipping it in’s got to be more expensive than it’s worth.”

“It is,” said Jenny.

“Why not buy it from other towns?”

Jenny cut him as she crossed to the big map on the wall. “Other towns? Sure. Other water sources? Absolutely. There’s Branton.” She slapped the map over the name of that town, which was a few miles to the north. “And St. Lopez.” Slap. “And Casper’s Corners.” Slap. “Golden Springs.” Slap. “Diego Sanchez.” Slap.

“What’s your point.”

“They’re gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

“Gone. Every town for a hundred miles in any direction is gone. Dead.”

“The Quake?”

“No. They’re ghost towns. Chesterfield bought up most of the land south of here. Deray bought the rest. And any place too stubborn to sell out was either burned out or they had their water rights stole out from under them. You can call it legal purchase, but we all know what it really is.”

Grey gaped at her. “All of them? You’ve got to be wrong.”

“She’s not, you know,” said Looks Away. “If anything, Jenny’s understating the problem. You’re coming into this at the end of a very destructive and very thorough process. Deray and Chesterfield are like two fists and Paradise Falls is the flesh caught between the punches. Lucky Bob thought he could turn it around. He thought he could get one or the other to see reason and maybe find a compromise that would allow Paradise Falls to survive. I advised him against it. So, for the record, did Jenny. Lucky Bob was like that, though. Clever as he was, his weakness was always believing the best in people. He thought that if he could speak with them face to face that there could be some kind of opening of the heart, a meeting of the mind.”

“He went to see this Deray character?” asked Grey.

“Indeed.”

“And we think that Deray somehow turned him into a Harrowed? Or one of those lesser undead?”

“The man is, after all rumored to be an alchemist of some note. That certainly stands against him. And Brother Joe claims that he’s a necromancer as well,” said Looks Away.

“A what?” Jenny asked. “That some kind of wizard?”

“Yes,” said the Sioux. “One who has power over the dead.”

“That fits,” Jenny said sourly. “Deray’s army are all monsters.”

“That’s just swell,” said Grey. He grunted and sucked a tooth thoughtfully for a moment. She looked at Grey. “Does that scare you?”

“Of course it does, but if you think it’s going to chase me off, think again. What about Chesterfield? Is he a wizard, too?”

“No,” said Looks Away. “He’s an asshole.”

Jenny gave a short, hard laugh.

“He doesn’t have power over the dead or any of that?” asked Grey.

“No. Why?”

“Nothing… I’m just working it all through.”

“Working what through?” asked Jenny.

“Maybe Lucky Bob had a good idea.”

“But we know how that turned out,” said Looks Away, shaking his head.

“Right, so I’m wondering if Jenny’s pa went out to see the wrong man.” He tapped the map. “Chesterfield’s place is pretty close. Couple hours easy ride. If Deray is the kind of monster we all seem to think he is, then maybe Chesterfield’s only a corrupt asshole.”

They looked at him.

“That’s almost certainly the case,” said Looks Away. “However what possible leverage could we use on a rich man who is, as you so eloquently phrase it, a corrupt asshole?”

“You ever hear the expression, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

“Yes. But in my experience it’s almost never as simple as that.”

Jenny snorted and nodded. “Chesterfield is every bit as bad.”

Grey picked up the Kingdom M1. “Then I guess we’ll have to be worse.”

The smile that blossomed on Jenny Pearl’s face was one of the most disturbing things Grey had ever seen.

“Hold on right there,” he said quickly. “You are not coming along.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“The hell you are.”

She stepped toward him. Five foot two to his six four. But her sudden anger seemed to fill the room. He’d read so many dime novels about women with fiery tempers, but not one woman in any tale could hold a candle to the swift fury of Jenny Pearl.

“And why not? I can ride and shoot as well as any man, and better than most.”

“I do not doubt that,” he said. “But I need you to stay here in town.”

“Why?”

“Because who else is going to keep these people safe if something else happens?” he asked flatly. “Brother Joe? Mrs. O’Malley? Come on, Jenny, you’re the only one around who everyone’s afraid of, which means they’ll listen to you.”

“He’s jolly well right about that,” said Looks Away. “You’re more valuable here in town than as another gun in what is ostensibly a diplomatic venture.”

“My ass.”

Neither man dared make a comment. They let their silence do their talking for them, and Grey could see Jenny work it out. Her expressions showed on her face. Every expression did. She was lovely, but she had no poker face at all. He wondered if she’d ever wanted to play cards. He’d learned a kind of poker from a frisky lass in Louisiana. Loser had to shuck a garment.

Her answer snapped him back to the moment.

“Very well, damn you both,” she said.

Chapter Forty-Two

Looks Away argued that no such expedition could be undertaken in their present condition. They were dead for sleep, filthy, and hungry. So they did their best to lock up the workshop and they trudged back to Jenny Pearl’s.

With the deputies all dead and the town’s well free — at least for now — they were able to get enough water to take actual hot baths. Jenny heated big pots of it and corralled a couple of the town’s kids to run them out back to where Looks Away and Grey sat, naked but uncaring, in a vast metal washtub. The men scrubbed and scrubbed and finally wrapped themselves in sheets and tottered inside. Jenny gave them a choice of spare bedroom or couch. Grey let Looks Away take the bedroom and he flung himself down on the couch and slept all through the day and into the night.

He’d left orders to be awakened if absolutely anything untoward happened.

However the night passed without incident.

Though, that was not entirely true. It passed without violence. It passed without trouble.

But not without incident.

Deep in the night, the moon still riding the sky and long before the first cock crow, Jenny Pearl came down the stairs in a cotton gown and nothing else. Grey heard the creak of the stairs and opened his eyes to what he thought was a spirit in a dream. Her blond hair was unpinned and fell around her shoulders and her eyes were smoky and half closed.

For a heartbreaking moment she looked less like Jenny and more like Annabelle, but Grey felt ashamed of thinking that. Annabelle was long gone now. All except for the ghost that haunted his life. She was gone and Jenny Pearl was alive.

So alive. So real.

So beautiful.

Without saying a single word she unfastened the gown and let it puddle around her ankles. Grey’s heart beat wildly inside his chest as he saw her painted in silver moonlight. Slim but ripe. Full breasts with nipples the color of dusty roses. White blond hair on her head, a dark blond below. A flat stomach and lovely legs that were strong and graceful. On her sternum, between her breasts, was a dark scab left from the bullet that had nearly killed her. It was right over her heart.

She raised the corner of the blanket under which he lay and crawled onto the couch, on top of him. She wrapped her legs around his hips and even as she sat astride him she deftly guided him inside of her.

Grey began to speak, but she silenced him with a kiss.

“Please,” she said in a husky whisper. It was the only word she spoke.

They made love with infinite slowness. It was a gentler encounter than he would have guessed from her fiery nature. Slow and soft, unhurried and unforced. A sweeter encounter than any in Grey’s experience. And all the sweeter for that.

Neither of them rushed toward any cliffs. They discovered a rhythm that was the song of their mutual connection. And when Grey felt himself lift finally toward the inevitable, she was there with him. Even then it was not a screaming climax, but a warm release that nearly brought him to tears. It was in those moments that he realized how far his life’s trail had taken him from any true understanding of what gentleness was.

He kissed her lips, her throat, her breasts, her forehead, and then held her to him, feeling the hummingbird flutter of her heart against the walls of his chest.

They fell asleep like that. As one. Safe in the moment, safe in each other’s arms.

When he woke, though, she was gone.

Weak sunlight slanted through the shutters on the window and drew yellow lines on the floor.

Grey wondered if it had been a dream.

But the smell of her was there. Perfume and sweat and natural musk.

It was no dream.

For a long time he lay there and stared at the ceiling and thanked whoever was running the universe that the world was not so broken that it had run out of perfection.

Like Jenny Pearl.

Then he got up, washed, dressed, strapped on his guns, and braced himself to face whatever the new day offered.

Chapter Forty-Three

The morning was bright and cold. A wet wind whipped in off the ocean but there were no storm clouds anywhere to be seen. Grey stood on Jenny’s porch with a cup of coffee in his hand and a bellyful of eggs and grits. He watched a boy walk up the street leading Picky and Queenie. Looks Away walked with him, and he had a large canvas slung over his shoulder.

“Penny for your thoughts, cowboy,” said a voice and he turned with a smile to see Jenny Pearl standing in the open doorway. She wore a yellow dress that was buttoned primly to her throat, and a light wool shawl that was the exact color of her blue eyes. Her hair was tied into a loose tail by a ribbon that was the same color as her shawl. She also wore a knowing smile, but almost at once her throat and cheeks flushed a brilliant scarlet.

“What I’m thinking is worth more than a penny,” he said. “Maybe as much as a whole dollar.” He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You’re something else, Miss Pearl.”

The moment was sweet and they smiled at each other for the span of maybe three heartbeats before it suddenly changed, turned, became incredibly awkward. It was immediately clear to Grey that this kind of thing was new to Jenny. Maybe not the sex, because that was no virgin who’d swept like a ghost into his dreams, but maybe the rest of it. The tenderness after the fact. The intimacy of conversation that followed those times when the passion was right, when the connection was correct.

It had been a long time for Grey, too. He’d loved many women but had only been in love once. A sweet girl named Annabelle. She was dust and bones now. Though, sometimes at night, he feared that her ghost was part of that shambling horde that followed just beyond his line of vision. Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he caught a glimpse of her as he’d last seen her — bloody and broken — staring accusingly from the corner of his eye. One of the many people he had failed and left behind.

Now here was Jenny.

Was he in love with her?

Last night was sweet and pure in its way, but had it ignited something important in both their hearts? Could love possibly blossom that quickly? It seemed perverse that it could happen in the midst of tragedy and horror.

Or maybe that meant something. A thing that was important to know when all other knowledge fails or is proven false.

These thoughts tumbled like an avalanche down the slopes of Grey’s mind as she stood there with her, feeling a tender moment turn sour.

“I—,” he began, but she just nodded and walked past him to stand at the edge of the porch to watch Looks Away and the boy lead the horses.

He tried again. “Jenny, about last night…”

“Last night?” she echoed softly. “Last night was a dream. Don’t you know that?”

She did not look at him as she said it, and before he could assemble a response, Jenny stepped down off the porch and went to meet Looks Away.

Grey resisted the urge to bang his head on the porch column, though it seemed like a reasonable choice. Instead he thrust his hands into his back pockets, pasted on an expression that he hoped looked entirely casual, and followed Jenny.

“I think I have everything we’ll need,” said Looks Away brightly. He set down the canvas sack and knelt to open it. His mouth tightened momentarily as he did so.

“How’s the back?” asked Grey.

“Medium rare. Brother Joe was kind enough to give me more of his entirely offensive-smelling salve.”

“Does it help?”

“Hard to say, though considering the amount of animal fat in it, I will probably attract every hopeful carrion bird in this end of the state.”

“You do smell… interesting.”

“Please go and stick your head in an ant hill.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Jenny. “And don’t worry — Brother Joe’s salves and poultices do a power of good. They work like magic.”

“Magic,” said Looks Away, “is not a word I want to hear just now.”

From the bag, Looks Away produced the Kingdom M1 rifle and its ammunition, along with a spare ghost gas cylinder. “We don’t have any rounds so if we use it, we should probably keep to single shots. And… besides, I’ve never fired it so I don’t know what kind of kick it has. Quite frankly the ruddy thing scares the bejeebers out of me.”

“That’s comforting,” complained Grey.

“Then take comfort in this.” Looks Away produced a conventional Winchester .30–30 and handed this to Grey. “Courtesy of Deputy Perkins. I found his horse and this was in a saddle scabbard. I doubt he’ll need it henceforth.”

Grey took it and checked the action. It had clearly been cleaned and oiled since the rain.

“I had the guns seen to,” said Looks Away. He removed a double-barreled shotgun from the bag, too. It was a snubby little thing with both stock and barrels hewn short. It came with a modified pistol holster.

Grey smiled. “Where the hell’d you find that?”

“It was among the weapons taken from the undead. Twelve gauge with lots of shells.”

“You expect me to carry that frigging thing?”

“No,” said Looks Away, “I expect me to carry that frigging thing. You’re the crack shot of this outfit. I’m okay on a good day with a stationary target, but overall I’m an indifferent shot. Scatterguns fire in a wide spray, so I’m likely to hit something useful.”

“It doesn’t have a stock. You can’t use your body to brace for the kick. Gun like that’ll knock you on your ass.”

Looks Away sniffed. “Then I’ll reload while sitting.”

“Fair enough. What else you got in there?”

“A pair of excellent hunting knives, a compass, and lots of ammunition. Two boxes for your Colt as well.”

“Nice.”

They shared the supplies between them, stowing the extra boxes of shells and cartridges in their saddlebags. Jenny watched all of this without comment. She stood with her arms folded, head cocked to one side like someone at a gallery appraising art. Or, Grey thought, someone judging pigs at a county fair.

As they swung up into their saddles, she broke her self-imposed silence. “I still think I should be going with you.”

Grey crossed his wrists on the saddle horn and leaned forward. “And for two pins I’d take you along.”

“But…,” she said, glancing at the boy from the stable and then past him to the center of town.

“But,” he agreed. He smiled at her, but her returning smile was filled with so many emotions that Grey couldn’t catalog them all. Doubt and anger, passion and compassion. Love, too? He didn’t know if he saw it or merely wished for it.

Looks Away glanced from Grey to Jenny and then down at his fingernails as if suddenly finding them deeply fascinating.

“We’re burning daylight,” he said quietly.

“Be off with you, then,” said Jenny, stepping back. “You boys come back quick and you come back safe, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Grey, and Looks Away pretended to doff a hat that he wasn’t wearing.

“As your ladyship commands,” he said, “so shall it be.”

They tugged the reins to turn their horses toward the road that led past the Pearl farm and out toward the east. But Jenny suddenly ran up to Picky and took the bridle, stopping the animal. Then she tugged the ribbon from her hair and tied the blue length of it to the head collar.

“For luck,” she said.

Grey smiled at her. “Thank you.”

“A lady’s favor on the steed of a knight aboard on a mission of errantry,” said Looks Away, rolling his eyes. “Good Lord save me from romantic fools.”

He kicked his horse into a gallop.

Grey winked at Jenny and cantered after.

Chapter Forty-Four

They rode in silence for much of the way.

Grey pointedly ignored the occasional amused glances aimed his way by his companion. The one time Looks Away tried to open a conversation about Jenny, Grey laid his callused hand on the butt of his holstered Colt.

“Point taken,” said Looks Away.

The miles fell away beneath their horses’ hooves.

The land was clearly broken and in places it still looked raw. A game trail through a grove of trees would suddenly end at a jagged cliff to which the fractured trunks of dead trees still clung. Then they’d have to pick their way through boulders and rotting logs and between towers of splintered granite. At one point they crossed a gorge along a slat bridge that was so new the lumber was still green.

“Grey,” said Looks Away during one of the times they had to dismount and lead the horses, “I’m sure you recognized some of those walking corpses that night.”

“You mean Perkins and the deputies? Sure.”

“I can’t rough out any scenario where that makes sense. I mean… we’re going on the assumption that Deray created the undead, or controlled them, with these magic bits of ghost rock. Right?”

“Yup.”

“But Perkins worked for Deray. We saw him less than half a day before those deputies turned up dead and reanimated. What happened to them? How did they die? Why did they die? And why were they brought back?”

“All important questions,” agreed Grey. “And my considered opinion is that it beats the shit out of me.”

“Ah.”

They remounted and rode along a deep cleft at the bottom of which lay the smashed remains of a farmhouse, barn, and corn silo. The bleached bones of at least a dozen cattle were scattered among the splintered wood.

Grey was about to ask if Looks Away knew if the farmer family had survived the Quake, but then they passed a line of crudely made crosses standing in a row. The paint was faded after all these years, but Grey could see that everyone buried there had the same last name. From the birth and death dates it looked like grandparents, parents and young kids. Eleven graves in all.

He wondered why any of the survivors would stay in such a place as this. Death, the wrath of an insane planet, and the villains who mingled science with sorcery. What could make someone like Lucky Bob and his daughter think this land was worth fighting for?

The nomad in Grey’s soul was so practiced at riding away whenever troubles got too big that he no longer felt able to understand any other choice.

As if reading his thoughts, Looks Away said, “It’s hard to walk away penniless from something you’ve put your whole life into.”

“What?”

“Jenny. It’s why she stayed after her father died. It’s why most of the families here want to fight this out. If they left, where could they go? And how could they start something new without funds or resources?”

“That’s not a decision, it’s a trap.”

“It’s a choice for some,” said Looks Away. “They love this land. Their family members are buried here. That ties them to the land.”

“Is that Sioux wisdom?”

“It’s human nature, Grey. People want to put down roots.”

“Not everyone.”

Looks Away nodded, but he wore a knowing smile.

A mile later Grey said, “I take it you and Chesterfield’s wife—.”

“Veronica.”

“—Veronica, are friends?”

Their horses walked nearly a dozen paces before Looks Away answered. “There are a lot of lonely people in this world, my friend. Is it wrong to offer comfort? Is it wrong to provide a shoulder to cry upon or an ear to listen? Is that a moral crime? Is that a sin in your world?”

“You’re asking the wrong fellow. I don’t study on sin very much. Not anyone else’s. My own sins — and they are many — provide me with enough to think about.”

“So you don’t judge?”

Grey sucked a tooth. “I’m not saying I can’t or won’t form opinions. For example I’m of the opinion that Nolan Chesterfield and Aleksander Deray would do the world a power of good if they stood in front of a fast-moving train.”

“We’re of a mind in that regard.”

“Beyond that?” Grey shook his head. “It’s a cold, hard world and if someone can find a little warmth and comfort, then good on ’em.”

That seemed to satisfy Looks Away, and he said no more on the subject.

They reached the top of a series of broken foothills, and there they paused. Beyond the ridge, stretching out for miles, was a green and lovely valley. Long, broad fields of blowing grass, orderly groves of fruit trees, and a stream as blue as Jenny’s ribbon wandering through it all. Beyond the stream was a dirt road that ran in a slow curve toward a mansion that would have fit better on a Georgia peach plantation. Three stories tall, with a row of white columns along a deep porch.

“By the Queen’s sacred knickers,” said Looks Away, even though he had presumably visited the place before.

“Is that the Chesterfield place?” asked Grey.

“It is.”

“Oh shit.”

“Indeed.”

It was not the obvious wealth or the ostentatious splendor that made them both stiffen in their saddles. It was not the nearness of a potential enemy that made their hands stray toward their guns.

It was the state of the place.

The trees lining the driveway were nothing but blackened stumps. Some had fallen, their trunks split by what looked like lightning strikes. Horses and cattle lay everywhere.

Dead.

All dead.

There were long, black trenches running back and forth across the grounds. They looked like the kind of mark Grey made when he scraped a match on a doorpost. Except these were a yard wide and some of them ran for a hundred feet across the lawn, through hedges, and even through parts of the house’s big slope roof. Anything in the path of those burns had been incinerated.

The front of the house was blackened with soot and part of the shingled roof had collapsed inward. A thin curl of smoke rose into the wind and was dissipated into nothingness by a steady breeze blowing inland.

“What the hell could have done that?” demanded Grey.

Looks Away said nothing, but his face was pale and he stared with naked horror. He silently mouthed a word. A name.

Veronica.

Chapter Forty-Five

Looks Away started forward but Grey clapped a hand on his arm and held him in place.

“She’s in there,” insisted Looks Away, trying to tear his arm free.

“Okay, we’ll go in and find her,” said Grey as he drew his pistol. “But let’s do it the smart way. Not the I-want-to-be-dead-way. You understand me? We do it smart or we go back to Jenny’s place.”

Looks Away glared at him, but then he snorted air out of his nostrils and nodded. “Very well, damn you.”

“Good. Let’s go, but keep your eyes open.”

They rode down the slope into the green valley. The closer they got the worse it all was. There were huge burn spots on the grass, and most of the dead animals had been charred. Some had burst apart, or been torn asunder. Some of the trees looked like they had been torn from the ground by some force Grey could not comprehend. They lay on their sides trailing roots that snaked away into the troubled dirt.

Looks Away touched Grey’s arm and nodded to something that glinted in the trampled grass.

“Shell casings,” he said. “Lots of them.”

“Heavy caliber. Gatling gun?”

Looks Away nodded. “Or something with a heavy rate of fire. There are two or three weapons manufacturers with newer, faster models than the Gatling. Want to guess what makes them work so fast?”

Grey sighed. “Makes me long for the old days. I mean… is anyone trying to use ghost rock for something other than war?”

“Of course they are, but science tends toward warfare first and humanitarian purposes later. Airships and faster trains will carry food, goods, and people as easily as guns and cannons.”

“Mm. Nothing humanitarian about what happened here.”

They dismounted and studied the house.

“You see any bodies?” asked Grey. “People, I mean.”

“None.” And under his breath the Sioux added, “Thank god.”

“Under any other circumstances that could be a good thing,” said Grey. “It won’t be here.”

“No,” agreed Looks Away glumly. He slung the Kingdom rifle over his shoulder and slid the chunky sawed-off shotgun from its hip holster. They tied Picky and Queenie in the shade of one of the few remaining unburned trees, nodded to each other, and approached the house. Grey checked the loads in his Colt, and then held it down at his side as they moved in.

As they did so, Looks Away shifted off to the left of the main entrance and Grey went right, both of them moving without haste and making maximum use of cover. Aside from smoke and heat-withered grass, nothing moved at all.

Grey gestured to indicate that Looks Away should cover him as he approached the door. The Sioux ran low and fast to the front wall and knelt beneath one of the fire-blackened windows, holding the shotgun in both hands. Once he was in position Grey walked straight up to the door and only angled to one side as he got within twenty feet. The big oak doors were pocked with bullet holes and splashed with blood. Grey used the toe of his boot to ease the door open. It swung inward with sluggish reluctance.

Grey waited.

Nothing. No voices. No shots.

He nodded to Looks Away, steeled himself against whatever might be waiting, and then went in low and fast, the Colt held out in a firm two-handed grip. He immediately cut right and swept the room with the gun, his eyes tracking in concert with the barrel. Looks Away dashed in a heartbeat later and went right, the shotgun stock braced against his hip.

The entrance foyer had been smashed apart and was open to the hall on Grey’s side and to a drawing room on Looks Away’s left. The walls were shattered. Bricks were shattered, exposing the wooden bones of the house. The red foyer carpet was singed black by ash and a figure lay half in the hall and half in the drawing room. Perhaps it had once been human, though whether man or woman was beyond telling. It was a set of bones wreathed in crisp layers of ash. The tendons, shrunk by heat, had contracted and pulled the corpse into a fetal position. Though clearly an adult, the posture called to mind one of the cruelest aspects of death. To Grey it looked like a dead infant rather than a grown man or woman, and in his mind he imagined he saw the newborn baby, the tottering first steps, the simple joy of a toddler at play, the full potential of a life unsullied by influences, choices, or actions. Snuffed out now like a match, and discarded by whoever had done this.

Even though this was the house of a probable enemy, Grey felt a small stab of grief and another deeper one of anger.

“It’s not her,” said Looks Away, and the sound of his voice almost made Grey jump.

“What?”

“That body — I think it was a woman named Anna Maria. See the right foot? It’s clubbed. Anna Maria Ramirez had a club foot.”

“Was she another friend of yours?”

“Anna Maria was a shit,” said Looks Away. “Nolan hired her as a maid, but she was really there to spy on his wife. Veronica was a virtual prisoner in this place.”

“Are there places Veronica could have hidden during all of this?”

“God, I hope so. But, Grey, there’s something else. Anna Maria is the first body we’ve seen. Don’t you find that strange? I mean, there are forty people working for Chesterfield. House staff and hired guns. More if you count the wranglers and yard servants. But, there’s clearly been a war here, and except for livestock this is the first body we’ve found. Human body, I mean. I dare say that Chesterfield lost this particular engagement. Do you agree?”

“It’s a goddamn slaughter. But… you’re right, where are the other bodies?”

Looks Away crossed to the doorway to the connecting room. “No one here, either. Should we search the whole place?”

“I think we have to at this point.”

They were talking in hushed voices, and in the same hushed tone he added, “Shall we do this stealthily or like bravados?” His smile was small and wicked.

“Much as I’d love to kick doors and take names, friend, until we know who — or what — did all this, I think we should creep around like mice. Then we find Veronica and get the hell out of here. How’s that for a plan?”

“Jolly good, actually.”

So, they went with only as much speed as caution would allow.

They took turns entering rooms with one or the other providing cover. They found more devastation. The place was decorated in the very height of style, with imported French furniture, paintings from Italy, a library with every English classic ever written and thousands of volumes of poetry and history, Turkish rugs, and curios from China and Japan. All of this magnificence was ruined, though; stained with soot, splashed with blood, torn by some savage claw, or holed by ordinary lead bullets. In the upstairs master bedroom, Looks Away knelt at the edge of a Persian rug that Grey was sure cost more than the entire value of the town of Paradise Falls. The embroidery within the rug showed a series of episodes from the life of Sinbad.

Grey began to leave the bedroom but stopped when he realized that Looks Away wasn’t following.

“What is it?” he asked.

The Sioux nodded. “Come over here for a minute. Tell me what you see.”

He came and stood next to him and studied the carpet. It took him only a moment to catch what Looks Away had already seen.

There was considerable debris strewn across the floor as well as some ash residue that covered everything. However in the center of the carpet was an outline. It was large and probably male. But there was no body.

“They took the body?” Grey wondered. “Why would they do that?”

However Looks Away shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what happened. See…? There’s the outline of where a man fell. But what I don’t quite get is that it looks like he stood up again and walked off. See there? That’s a handprint like a man might make if he was leaning on the floor to push himself up to his feet. And there, those are his footprints.”

“So he fell down and then got up again. I’m not sure why this is so fascinating.”

“You’re not reading it the right way,” said Looks Away. “I may not have spent much of my adult life among my people, but from the time I could walk I was taught how to track, to read sign.”

Grey nodded. It had been clear from their trip from Nevada that the Sioux was far more skilled than he was at tracking. Grey could follow a horse through a forest, but Looks Away seemed able to follow a rabbit over hard rock. It was an enviable talent, and in the presence of that level of ability it wasn’t worth arguing.

“Tell me what you see,” he suggested.

“I think the man was shot over there, by the dresser. There’s some blood drops on the top and down the side of the drawers. Not much on the carpet, though, which is why I believe the shot was a fatal one.”

“A dead heart stops pumping blood. Dead men don’t bleed unless the wound is pointed toward the floor, and then it merely leaks out. It won’t pump out of a dead man.”

Grey nodded, unnerved but impressed.

“There are no marks to indicate that anyone came to help him up,” continued Looks Away. “Which begs the question of how a man with a fatal gunshot wound gets up and walks away.”

He straightened and they stood there, looking at the outline of ash and debris.

“Pretty sure we’re both thinking the same word,” said Grey.

“Does it start with a u by any chance? As in ‘undead’?”

“It does.”

“Then bloody hell.”

“Yup,” agreed Grey. He considered. “Not sure how much else you can read into this, but do you think this dead man was Nolan Chesterfield?”

Looks Away shook his head. “It’s his room, but that body shape is from someone tall and thin. Chesterfield was heavyset.”

They searched the rest of the upstairs but found no bodies. However, they looked for and found several places where bodies had fallen, and some of these were clearly not easy deaths. In one room there was a massive pool of blood, suggesting someone bled out there. In another they found long streaks of arterial droplets running up the wall to the ceiling.

No bodies, though.

They found bloody footprints, but that was all.

Even though Grey understood that this was now part of the world, that through some process the dead were able to rise again, it was still deeply unnerving. Knowing something isn’t always a pathway to accepting it. Each time they found fresh evidence of the returning dead Grey felt more frightened and less certain that they were going to figure a way out of this.

They reached the far end of the top floor and found a set of stairs that led from the servants’ quarters down to the kitchen and pantry. And it was there that they found something that changed the whole complexion and direction of their day.

It changed everything.

In the pantry there were a row of cupboards. Most of them had been shattered and they sagged from the walls, their contents spilled out onto the floor in a profusion of powders, grain, rice, beans, bottles, and cans. The air was rich with the scent of a hundred exotic spices. But stronger than the crushed herbs and seasonings was a foul and fetid stench that swirled out of the shadows between a wooden frame and a hidden door.

The door now stood ajar. The concealed handle and the jamb were smeared with bright red blood. Beyond them, revealed in the gap, was a set of stone stairs cut into the living bedrock. They circled around and vanished into shadows that were as black as the pit.

The aroma that rose from below carried with it the fresh-sheared copper smell of blood and the rotting fish stink of something alien and grotesque.

All of the footprints the two men had found led them to this pantry, this doorway, and those steps.

Thomas Looks Away pulled the door open and stared down into the darkness.

Beside him, Grey Torrance stood with his gun in a tight fist and cold sweat running in lines down his face. He cleared his throat and spoke in a hushed whisper.

“We have to go down there.”

“God help us.”

Grey shook his head. “I don’t think God lives down there.”

Chapter Forty-Six

They were both brave men, tough men, experienced men who had seen violence more times than most. However, going down those stairs took more courage than either of them believed they possessed. Going into battle was always terrifying, and Grey knew for sure that any man who said otherwise was a damn liar. He’d done it time and again since his teenage years, but in each of those cases he knew essentially what he was facing. Men with guns and knives.

Not monsters.

Not the walking dead.

Not the unknown.

Not something that might do worse than kill him. Something that could steal his flesh and wear it like a suit of clothes. Something that could possibly rend his soul. Something that could turn him into a monster.

The gun in his hand felt small and inadequate. He did not want to go down there. It was foolish and mad and probably suicidal.

He went down anyway.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Looks Away found an oil lantern in a closet by the front door and lit it. He held it out before him with one hand and clutched his shotgun with the other.

The stairs wound around and around, and as they descended, the light pushed back the shadows.

No, that was not right. That wasn’t how it looked or felt to Grey. It seemed as if the shadows crept backward from the light, always retreating to just around the turn in the spiral staircase. Not gone, not banished. Waiting. Drawing the two of them down, down, down.

They came to the bottom and stood in a wide circular stone chamber. There was another expensive rug on the floor and the walls were hung with heavy tapestries. The images on these tapestries were strange, though, and completely at odds with the ones upstairs. There, Chesterfield had tended toward scenes from myth and magic. Not only Sinbad, but King Arthur and Tam Lin and Hercules.

Down here the subjects took a darker turn.

At first glance the nearest tapestry seemed to show naked nymphs in a grove standing around a fire. But as Grey bent to study it, he saw that they weren’t nymphs at all. They were naked women bound to stakes about to be burned.

He said, “Shit…”

“Look at this one,” said Looks Away.

The second one had a scene of a woman — also naked — strapped to a chair that was being lowered backward into a stream of running water. The delicate embroidery caught every line of tension in her screaming mouth. Beside the stream a group of men in Puritan clothes stood by. Most were scowling, but the man controlling the pulley was laughing.

“Jesus,” muttered Grey.

They went from one tapestry to the next. In each a naked woman or women was being tortured, beheaded, enclosed in a spiked box, impaled, or otherwise abused. In each of the images the woman was still alive and whoever had made these tapestries seemed to want to capture that exact moment between the terror of anticipation and the moment of destruction.

“I sense a certain misogynistic theme here,” said Looks Away dryly.

“A what?”

“The man hates women.”

“Chesterfield? He’s married, isn’t he?”

“And how does that change things? Haven’t you ever met a married man who despises women?”

“Yeah, damn it.”

They looked around the chamber but there seemed to be no exit.

“Strange,” remarked Looks Away.

“Lower the light for a minute,” said Grey as he knelt. “Down here.”

The Sioux set the lantern on the floor and from that angle the shadows changed. Small lines appeared on the cold stone. Looks Away bent and studied them, then turned and slowly extended a finger to a tapestry across the chamber.

“The footprints are nearly gone, but it looks like they went that way.”

The tapestry over there was of a young and very buxom blond woman screeching as she was about to be torn apart by four horses. It sickened Grey to look at it, and for a bent copper penny he’d have torn them all down and tossed a match onto the pile.

Now wasn’t the time.

Instead he and Looks Away approached the tapestry from either side. Grey touched the center of the big fabric and it yielded as if there was nothing behind it.

With a nod to his companion, Grey took a fistful of the brocade edge of the tapestry and gave it a mighty downward jerk. The rings stretched and popped and the material fell heavily to the floor, revealing a short passage behind it. At the end of which was a door made from heavy oak timbers and banded with iron-riveted metal bands.

The door stood slightly open and the light from a lantern glimmered within.

Together, they crept down the hall and on a signal from Grey, Looks Away kicked open the door. They rushed in together, fanning right and left.

There was no one to shoot.

There was nothing alive in that room.

But they both stopped and gaped at what was there.

The room was much bigger than the chamber outside, with walls that stretched back farther than even the light of two lanterns could reach, and rows of stout pillars supporting the roof. Along all of the walls were sturdy pallets made from rough-cut oak, and on these were stacked pieces of metal. Each piece was about seven inches long, not quite four inches wide, and one-and-three-quarter inches thick. Each pallet was piled to shoulder height.

The men stood stunned, utterly unable to speak.

Looks Away finally managed to take a few steps forward, but his feet were clumsy and he staggered, falling against one stack. He set his shotgun down and picked up a single gleaming bar. It was the color of hot honey and it was improbably heavy.

“By the Queen’s lacy garters,” he breathed as he hefted it in his hand. “This is… this is…”

Words failed him and he was unable to finish the sentence.

Grey staggered over to another pile and lifted a plate whose argent sheen was like metal moonlight. “Is this silver?”

“No,” said Looks Away as he picked up a second gold bar, “that’s platinum. As are the next — what is it? Ten? A round dozen? — stacks. I believe the silver is over there.”

“Looks like,” said Grey in a hollow voice, “there has to be a couple of tons of this stuff.”

The Sioux set the heavy bars down with a dull clang and picked up the lantern. He and Grey walked along the rows. Looks Away stopped at a series of pallets of metals Grey did not recognize.

“This is palladium or I’m a Chickasaw.” He moved to another. “And this is ruthenium. They only discovered this in ’44. I met the man who wrote a paper on it. A Baltic German — Karl Ernst Claus. Doctor Saint bought some because of its usefulness in electrical conductivity. And this… God, Grey, this is an entire mound of rhodium. It’s corrosion resistant, but I’ve only ever seen it in small quantities. And there, that bluish metal? That’s osmium. Heaviest damn stuff you’ll ever find, and God save me, but that is iridium over there. A ton of it at least.”

He stepped away to the center of the room and turned in a wide circle.

“By the Queen’s several birthmarks, Grey, this is not merely a fortune — this is perhaps the greatest single fortune I’ve ever even heard of. Millions of dollars. Maybe thousands of millions. Good lord, man, just one wagonload of these bars — any of these bars — and a man could buy himself his own country.”

“So what the hell is it all doing down here?” asked Grey, astounded at what he was seeing and hearing. “I mean, first off, how the hell did Chesterfield acquire all this? What was he going to do with it? And…” He stopped and shook his head. “No, I got nothing. My brain is spinning.”

“Mine, too.” Looks Away came over and touched Grey’s arm. “Listen to me. This isn’t what we came for, but let’s face it, old chap, this is better than anything we could have hoped for. Clearly Chesterfield and his family are dead. Everyone in this damned house is dead.”

“So what?”

“So what is that we have a much simpler solution to our fight with Aleksander Deray than we thought. Look around you. All we have to do is get some of this out of here. Not all. We don’t need to be greedy, but a wagonload or two.”

“And what? I’m not interested in buying myself my own country.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. We can take this back to Paradise Falls and distribute it evenly between the remaining residents. Don’t you see, Grey? We can make them all rich. But we give it to them on the condition that they move the hell away from here. Let Deray have the damned land. It’s falling apart anyway and who wants to stay and fight someone who can raise the sodding dead? No, let’s make everyone rich on the condition that they bugger off out of here. Sound like a plan to you?”

Grey holstered his gun and rubbed a hand over his jaw. The mountains of metal gleamed in the lantern light.

“Or,” said Grey, “we could use this money to hire us a private army and go and reclaim this land from Deray. Walking dead or not, he can’t stop an entire army, and we can hire ten thousand men — and pay them well enough to guarantee their loyalty.”

The Sioux smirked at him. “And that would allow Jenny Pearl to keep her farm and earn you her undying gratitude and affection.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

They grinned at each other.

“Either way,” began Looks Away, but his words were instantly cut short by a terrible high-pitched scream of unbearable horror.

Not a child’s scream this time.

The shriek that rang through the underground treasure chamber was torn from a woman’s throat.

Chapter Forty-Eight

“Veronica!” cried Looks Away.

A second scream tore the air.

“Maybe it’s not her,” growled Grey as they snatched up their weapons and each took a lantern.

“Dear God let it not be so,” said the Sioux as he broke into a run.

Grey was right on his heels.

The path between the stacks of precious metals was narrow and long.

The scream faded to a harsh silence as they ran and thereafter all Grey could hear was the slap of shoe leather and the pants and grunts of their breathing. The rows of precious metals gave out and the walls were bare. The light from their lanterns rolled before them and it seemed as if the long dark of that place was endless. Then they saw the rear wall. It was set with a single iron door and, as before, the door stood partly open. At first Grey saw what he thought was some thick, pale snake lying across the open threshold, but as they drew near he saw that it was an arm.

A man’s arm.

They slowed to a careful walk.

The arm reached out from the other room, fingers splayed, muscles slack.

They moved cautiously now, angling to let their light spill inside while staying outside of the line of any ambush gunplay. As they shifted, Grey saw that the arm was thick and flabby, without apparent muscle and the hand bore no trace of the calluses of manual labor. There was a large emerald ring in a gold setting on the index finger.

“Is that Chesterfield?” he asked quietly.

“No. That was his foreman. I recognize the ring.”

In the lantern light the arm gleamed like a fat slug.

Grey pushed the door open the rest of the way, looking for the owner of that limb. However the arm was all there was. The other end was a ragged stump that lay in a small puddle of blood. It was immediately clear that no blade that had cut the arm from its owner. The wound was savage, raw.

“Something tore it off,” said Looks Away.

“Something like what?”

The Sioux had no answer.

They stepped inside, guns up and out, ready to fight, to kill.

The room beyond was another of the circular chambers and there was a second set of spiral stone steps. There, sitting on the third step down, was a woman.

Middle-aged, lovely in a faded way, with masses of dark hair pinned up in a bun, and a sheer dressing gown that offered very little concealment to her ample curves. However the gossamer was stained with blood and soot, and that handsome face was white with shock and blood loss.

She sat in a pool of blood.

It ran over the edge of the step and down to the next and the next. She held a broken silver letter opener in one hand, the blade stained with gore. Her other hand was clamped against a dreadful slash that had opened her from breastbone to hip. Bubbles of red expanded from between her lips, swelled and burst, misting her face with tiny dots of crimson.

“Dear god,” said Looks Away as he rushed over. “Veronica!”

The woman’s eyelids were closed but opened at the sound of her name. Her eyes were a dark green, but they were unfocused and glassy with shock and pain.

Looks Away set his lantern down and laid the shotgun on the top step. Then he knelt and very gently brushed a few wisps of dark hair from her brow.

“Oh, Veronica,” he murmured, “what have you gotten yourself into?”

His voice was soft, his tone familiar, his touch intimate. It made Grey sad because the wound the woman was trying to stanch was horrific. Muscle and bone were torn, and through the gaping slash he could see the bulge of a purple coil of intestine.

“Thomas… oh, my sweet Thomas. My sweet man…”

“My dear,” said the Sioux, “who did this to you?”

She mouthed some words and they both bent to hear. “The chickens got out.”

“The what? What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it… strange? I thought they were… chickens.”

She coughed and fresh blood leaked from the corners of her mouth.

“Grey—?” asked Looks Away, his fingers pressing over hers to try and seal what could not be mended. “Grey, we need to do something.”

Grey did not move. There was nothing either of them could do.

Veronica Chesterfield raised her eyes and looked into Looks Away’s face. “I’m sorry, Thomas…,” she said.

“No, no, no,” he said quickly and softly. “No, it’ll be fine, lass. We’ll sort this out and—.”

“Mrs. Chesterfield,” said Grey, “who did this? What happened?”

“Damn it, Grey, not now,” snapped Looks Away, but Veronica smiled at him. There was blood on her lips, but she managed a faint smile.

“I… came down here to hide,” she said in a faint voice. “Isn’t that funny? Me thinking that it was safe down here?”

“What do you mean? Who did this?”

“Aleksander was very upset with Nolan. So… upset.” Her eyes sharpened for a moment.

“He came for us, Looks. He sent them for us. From the sky… from the shadows. From everywhere.”

“Why?” begged Looks Away.

“It was because of Nolan,” she said in a faint voice. “Nolan has been naughty. He thought Aleksander would not know… but the devil always knows.”

“What happened, Mrs. Chesterfield?” asked Grey. “Help us understand exactly what happened here.”

“Don’t you know?” Her green eyes shifted toward him. “They opened the doorway to Hell and all the chickens got out…”

The words chilled Grey to the marrow.

Veronica coughed and the wound tried to gape wider. Looks Away uttered a small cry and clamped both hands over it. Tears boiled into the corners of his eyes.

“Grey,” he begged, “please…”

Grey came and sat down on the step next to his friend. He placed one hand on the Sioux’s shoulder and the other over the hands trying to hold back the inevitable. It was all he could do in an impossible situation.

“He…,” began Veronica and her voice was noticeably weaker, “Nolan made a deal with the Devil. He did. Everyone thought… they were enemies… that they were at war… with each other. Then he broke his deal… broke his word… and the Devil came for him. With a ship that sails through the sky… with soldiers and their clockwork guns… with other things…”

She shuddered and coughed and blood bubbled from between her lips.

Grey plucked a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to Looks Away, who dabbed at the blood on Veronica’s mouth.

Even then, even dying, she favored him with a smile and a courteous little nod. It was so genteel a thing that it touched Grey’s heart. He suddenly found that he liked this woman.

“When you say he made a deal with the Devil, ma’am,” he said, “do you mean with Aleksander Deray?”

“Yes,” she said. “With him. With… the Devil.”

“What was the deal?” asked Looks Away.

“They… wanted… it all…”

“All of what?” asked Grey. “The mineral rights? The water? The ghost rock?”

“No,” she said weakly. She was fading and it was a terrible thing to witness. It was almost like the soul of the woman stood behind a faded portrait of what she had looked like in life, and with each moment the soul took another step backward. Withdrawing life from the image. Going away.

The tears burned their way down Looks Away’s face.

“No,” repeated Veronica, “my husband and… that monster… they wanted it all.”

“All of what, sweetheart,” said Looks Away, and his voice cracked as he spoke.

“All…,” she said. “It’s all… down there, Thomas. Down… there… When they came for Nolan, I ran down here to hide.”

“Where’s Nolan,” asked Looks Away. “Where’s your husband? Did they kill him, too? Did they turn him into one of those things?”

It seemed to cost Veronica a lot to answer. “The Devil… took… him… down to… hell…”

That last word stretched and stretched until it became clear it was riding a long, soft, terminal exhalation.

Her body settled against the steps and the confusion and pain drained away from her face, leaving behind only her beauty, cast now in cold serenity. Looks Away bent forward and kissed her lips, and then touched his forehead to hers. He sat that way for a long time.

Grey withdrew his hand and stood, then sagged back against the far wall. He stared down into the darkness below them. He fancied that he heard a ghostly voice whisper his name. Not down there, but somewhere behind him. Was it the voice of his sergeant, Harrison? Was it Corporal Elgin? Was it the whisper of the woman he’d loved and lost so many years ago? Was it Annabelle’s voice calling him as she walked along with the others he’d failed and abandoned?

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I am so sorry.”

For a moment, for a splinter of time, he felt a shift in the world. In his world. As if that apology, given here in this blighted place, meant with a heavy heart, had caused his legion of ghosts to falter, to miss a single shambling step.

But that was absurd. Of course it was. The ghosts were nothing more than the shadows of a guilty conscience and nothing more.

Then, like a whisper inside his mind he heard the voice of the witch Mircalla.

The dead follow you everywhere you go.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. Very quietly. So quietly only a dead ear could hear him.

That was when he saw the marks on the stone steps.

They were tracks half hidden by the shadows. Small, splay-toed. There were many of them, and their paths crisscrossed in and out of the lines of blood that had run down the steps. Grey frowned and squatted to study them.

What had the poor woman said?

They opened the doorway to Hell and all the chickens got out.

Yes. That’s what she said.

The tracks on the steps were not made by a human foot. Not even the risen dead. These were much smaller and stranger.

Chicken tracks?

No.

They were a little too big and they were…

Strange was the only word that would fit into his mind.

So strange.

Little birdlike feet running through blood down into darkness.

Chickens had four toes.

These prints had two, and both toes had wicked claws.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Looks Away climbed heavily to his feet, pawing at the tears on his face.

“I didn’t realize you two were this close,” said Grey awkwardly.

The Sioux gazed down at the dead woman and then at Grey.

“The thing is… we weren’t,” he said softly. “We were lovers, but that was mostly intrigue. An escape for her and some compassion on my part. It was fun to make a fool of her husband and make fanciful plans about a future neither of us thought we’d ever share. But…”

Grey waited.

“But,” continued Looks Away sadly, “how close do two people really need to be before it’s appropriate to grieve for them? She was a good person who deserved better than this.”

“Yes,” Grey agreed.

“Her husband can rot for all of me, but Veronica… she was truly an innocent in this. Her only crime was trying to help and wanting to be free of domestic oppression.” He sniffed again, then his sharp eye caught the footprints. “What the bloody hell is that?”

“Veronica said something about chickens…”

“Those aren’t chicken tracks. A blind man could see that.”

“I know,” said Grey, “so what are they?”

“I’ll be buggered if I know. They’re as big as an ostrich, but it’s not one of those either.”

“What’s an ostrich?”

“A bloody big bird from Africa. Ugly as sin and cranky as a—. Hello! What’s that?” He jogged down five steps and bent to retrieve an object Grey hadn’t even seen. Looks Away held it out.

It was a feather. Long and stiff, colored a dark orange with a band of black.

“Do you recognize it?” asked Grey.

“No… I don’t, and that’s rather an odd thing. I’m no ornithologist, but I know my local birds, and I’ve never seen these markings. And certainly nothing similar on any bird that could have left tracks that big. Those prints look almost reptilian.”

“Can’t be. They’re in sets of two. No lizard I ever saw walks on two legs. And no bird I can think of could slash a person up like it did to your lady friend.”

Looks Away said nothing, but he let the feather drop from his hand and went back up the stairs to retrieve his shotgun.

They stood for a moment, glancing back the way they had come and then down into shadows.

“We came out here to try and talk sense to Nolan Chesterfield,” said Looks Away.

“Yup.”

“Not to go searching through catacombs.”

“Nope.”

“Our moral responsibility would be to return to town; organize a wagon train; take as much of the gold, silver, and platinum as we can carry; and brush the dust of this town off our feet.”

“That’s smart thinking,” said Grey, nodding.

“There is no sane or intelligent reason to go down these stairs.”

“None that I can think of.”

They stood there.

“Shite,” said Looks Away.

“Shit,” agreed Grey.

Guns in hand, they started down the stairs.

Chapter Fifty

It was a long way down.

The stone steps curved around and around, and soon Grey lost all track of how far they’d descended. At one point Looks Away stopped and bent with his lantern to inspect the steps.

“These are new,” he said.

“New?”

“I think they were made since the Quake.”

“How can you tell? The house might have been built over one of those old Spanish missions. Those guys used to build all kinds of cellars and sub-cellars.”

“No, that’s not what this is,” said Looks Away. “I know my geology and I’ve been to enough ruins to know one style of stonework from another. The Spanish used broader, flatter stairs. These are narrow and a bit steeper. Much more in the style of French or English castle architecture.”

“If you say so.”

“I do, and I find it rather curious. Chesterfield’s family is from England, and they were rich going back to the time of the Plantagenets. So, while I can see Chesterfield using the building style he’s familiar with, I can’t quite suss out why he cut a staircase so deep into the earth. It must have cost a fortune to do this much excavation through solid rock.”

“He could afford it.”

“Okay, fair enough,” said Looks Away, “but why spend that money on this? What the hell is down here that’s worth all of this effort to conceal it from the world?”

They had no answers.

Until they reached the bottom of the stairs.

The steps ended in another circular chamber. Once more there was a single doorway. Once more it was open.

More than open.

The door had been torn from its heavy iron hinges and smashed to kindling. Pieces of it were scattered all around. There was blood on the floor and walls, and the scuff patterns told of a battle between two men wearing ordinary boots and things that made impressions even Looks Away could not read. Much of the bloody spill was smeared as if someone had dragged something long and heavy from inside the room, through that destroyed door, and then back in again. The small three-toed prints were everywhere, but nothing with feet that small could have torn that door down. The timbers of the door had to be half a foot thick.

“I’m having some serious second thoughts about coming down here,” said Grey quietly.

“I’m having third thoughts,” said Looks Away. “And if we don’t find something useful soon I’m all for getting our bums back up those stairs.”

They approached the open doorway and held their lanterns up to reveal what was inside.

There were three metal carts of the kind miners used. They squatted on wheels, however, not rails. Two of them were piled high with chunks of rock cut unevenly from the ground. The third cart had been knocked over; its contents spilling outward like guts. Grey felt his mouth go dry. The rocks littered the floor. They were mostly crude, a mix of sandstone, volcanic rock, and variegated sedimentary stone. However each piece also contained fragments of a black stone that was streaked with wavering lines of white.

“By the Queens’ lacy…,” began Looks Away, but he couldn’t finish.

Grey estimated that each of the carts could hold a full ton of broken rock. If even after smelting the total yield of all three carts was only a hundredweight of that which was the white-veined black rock, then there was a fortune here to rival two full pallets of gold bars.

“Ghost rock,” he whispered.

And ghost rock it was.

“This is what Chesterfield was hiding,” said Looks Away. “I think he was mining ghost rock and selling it. He was making himself insanely rich.”

“Not sure that makes enough sense for me,” said Grey. “Doesn’t explain why Deray attacked this place. If it was to get the gold and the rock, then why leave it here?”

Suddenly they froze and it took Grey a moment for his mind to catch up with what his senses had recorded.

There it was again.

A sound.

A scuff of a stealthy foot.

Grey raised his lantern and held it so they could see the rest of this chamber.

“Look!” cried Looks Away in a choked voice. “Dear God what is that thing?”

Twenty feet away, caught in the spill of lamplight, stood a creature unlike anything Grey had ever seen. It was nearly as tall as a man, but it was no man. It stood on two impossibly muscular legs, and each foot had two splayed toes. The creature had a third toe, however, and this one was raised on both feet. It was longer than the others and where they had claws, the third toes curved out with a talon as long and sharp as a dagger. But the strangeness did not end there. The thing had a birdlike body, much like a condor, but larger and more massive. And instead of arms or wings it had something that was akin to both. Short, sharp-clawed arms pawed the air and these were completely covered by smoky gray feathers. The rest of the body was covered by feathers that were a rusty orange banded with black. A crest of red feathers ran backward from the center of its skull, however the face was not birdlike at all. It had a protruding muzzle like a lizard, but its mouth was large enough to bite through a grown man’s leg. As it stood there, the thing opened its mouth to display rows of curved, needle-sharp teeth. It glared at the men with eyes that were black and bottomless.

The creature was like nothing Grey had ever seen before. However Looks Away breathed a word, a name, and it rung a faint bell in Grey’s mind.

“Dinosaur…”

“What?”

“By the Queen’s garters that is a bloody dinosaur.”

“What the hell’s a—?”

“Something that can’t be here. It’s impossible.”

The thing snarled at them and took a threatening step forward into the light and in doing so became more impossible still. Now they could see that many of the feathers were bent and broken or missing entirely, and through those gaps they could see that the flesh was strange. Unnaturally pale and withered, like that of some dead thing that had lain rotting in the dark. Maggots wriggled through flaps of torn skin and from many open wounds wafted the dead meat stink of advanced rot.

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Grey. “That stench…”

Looks Away gagged. “Dear God, that thing’s… dead.”

“No,” said Grey, pointing. “It’s worse than dead.”

In the center of the creature’s chest, amid the feathers, gleamed a multi-faceted piece of black rock that was shot through with white lines.

Ghost rock. In the chest of an undead monster.

The creature threw wide its mouth and screamed at them as if defying any classification of either dead or alive. The men raised their weapons in trembling hands, ready to fight, ready to kill this monstrosity.

But far away, deeper in the large underground chamber, came the answering cry of other monsters just like this one.

They cried in rage and hate.

And those cries were coming.

Straight for Grey and Looks Away.

Chapter Fifty-One

“Christ — watch out!” bellowed Grey as he shoved Looks Away to the side as the first of the monsters rushed them. The creature raced toward them and then leaped into the air. Grey saw the third and terrible claw on its foot snap forward and he tried to twist out of the way. The claw hooked into the pocket of his jeans and tore it open as if it was tissue paper. Coins flew across the room and bounced off the metal carts.

The first of the undead dinosaurs was too close for Grey to get a clear shot at without hitting Looks Away, so instead he clubbed at the thing with the butt of his Colt. The monster shrieked in pain, but instead of shrinking back from its much bigger opponent, it hissed and leaped again, slashing this time at Grey’s groin.

He flung himself backward and the claw missed him by half an inch. He landed on his back and used the momentum to roll up onto his shoulders so he could kick out with both heels. He caught it square in the chest and sent it flying backward into the side of a metal cart. It struck with a ringing thud and fell dazed to the floor.

Grey scrambled back to his feet.

“Move — move!” shouted Looks Away as he surged forward and shouldered him out of the way. The Sioux braced the stock of the shotgun against his hip and fired. Grey twisted around to see the buckshot catch another of the dinosaurs full in the chest just as it launched itself to slash. The blast punched a huge red hole in the center of the thing’s chest, obliterating the ghost rock implant and tearing off its feathered arms and screeching head. Thick, black blood splashed the men, the cart, and the faces of half a dozen more of the monsters.

Before the echo of the blast could begin to fade, Grey whirled and shot the first creature in the head as it fought to get back to its feet. It flopped back and lay absolutely still.

“How is this even possible?” demanded Grey as he hastily reloaded.

Looks Away shook his head, but then said, “Deray is a necromancer. That means he has power over the dead. It looks like he’s discovered some alchemical process for raising the dead and suborning them to his will. Like those creatures who accompanied Lucky Bob. He was a Harrowed but the others were something else. Mindless dead.”

“Mindless?” said Grey, pointing with the barrel of his gun. “Maybe they can’t think, but that look in their eyes says that they feel something, and it’s not anything good. We need to get the hell out of here.” The death of two of the beasts had momentarily stalled the charge of the others. They stared as if in shock. Then all of the strange, feathered and rotting heads turned slowly toward Grey and Looks Away. Those faces may not have been human, but their expressions were easy to read.

Hate.

Rage.

Hunger.

“Oh… shit,” said Grey and Looks Away at the same moment.

The monsters surged forward.

Both men stumbled backward but they opened fire at the same time. Grey emptied his gun into them. The Sioux fired his last shell. The fusillade of pellets and bullets hit the attacking wave like a storm. Three of the monsters went down into red ruin. A fourth staggered sideways, one eye blown away and blood dark as ink poured from a dozen pellet wounds.

The remaining two did not pause this time. One jumped at Looks Away, slashing at his belly with its terrible claw. The other did its best to rip open the arteries on the inside of Grey’s thigh.

Grey felt a line of white-hot fire explode along his hip. He cried out in pain and swung the pistol again and again, clubbing the scything foot, battering at the bizarre creature’s head and chest. It snapped at the gun and caught the barrel between its jagged teeth. If there had been one more round Grey could have blown out the back of its head. Instead as the dinosaur gave a mighty pull on the trapped barrel, Grey released it and emphasized it with a kick to its gut. The monster staggered backward and Grey immediately whipped out his hunting knife. Now he had his own claw.

“Come on, you undead little bastard,” he growled, baring his teeth at it. He could hear Looks Away and the other monster fighting somewhere behind him, but he didn’t dare turn and look.

The dinosaur spat out the useless pistol and lowered its head as it prepared to charge. The big claws on each foot tapped downward onto the floor. The thing’s long tail stuck straight out behind it, counterbalancing its weight and twitching with pure rage.

Then it launched itself at its prey.

Grey expected it to be fast, but it was so much faster. It became a blur of feathers, scales, teeth, and claws as it leaped into the air, slashing with those claws.

It was faster than he was.

He, however, was smarter.

As soon as it launched itself into the air, Grey dodged to one side and then twisted, pulling his body out of the path of the claws. He did not stab at it. Stabbing is a fool’s way to fight with a knife. Grey whipped his arm in a tight arc that slapped the edge of the blade across the throat of the dinosaur. The combined speed of its leap and Grey’s own speed made the blade bite deep. A black spray burst from the throat, but Grey did not want to make any assumptions about how tough the monster was or if blood loss could ever kill it. He jumped at it as the thing landed, clubbing it with one balled fist and slashing again and again with the blade.

Feathers flew. Blood erupted. Tissue parted.

It fell forward onto its wing-like arms, but immediately tried to rise. With a savage howl, Grey raised his foot and began stomping on its head. Once, twice, again and again until the bones shattered and his heel mashed the shards into the creature’s brain. All at once it sagged down into death.

Grey staggered back from it, then turned as he heard a series of heavy thuds.

It was Looks Away pounding at the head of the last of the reanimated dinosaurs. Or at the pulpy mess that had been a head. But Looks Away kept hammering and his face was a mask of fear that hovered near the flame of madness.

“Looks,” said Grey. “Whoa, now… it’s done. You killed it. Ease back now.”

The Sioux froze with the bloody shotgun raised for another strike. His wild eyes looked at Grey, at the dead creatures that lay everywhere, and then down at the mess beneath him. He lowered the shotgun and sagged back onto his heels.

“God save the Queen,” he breathed. The mad light faded from his eyes, replaced by shock.

There was a squeak and they both whipped around to see the dinosaur with the gunshot wound to the eye staggering slowly away. Black ichor ran sluggishly from its nostrils. It was clearly dying and it left a trail of splay-toed prints identical to the ones that had been on the stairs.

Looks Away got up, cracked open the shotgun, and dumped the spent shells, fitted two new ones in, and walked up behind the dinosaur. It turned to look up at him with its one remaining eye. It tried to hiss. It tried to slash at him. But it was too far gone.

“No,” said Looks Away as he placed the barrel against its head.

The blast was huge and wet and it echoed off of the darkened walls.

Chapter Fifty-Two

The last of the booming echoes disintegrated into the sober silence of death. Gun smoke hovered like a chorus of phantoms in the still air.

His face turned to emotionless wood, Looks Away replaced the spent shell, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and began methodically wiping the blood of monsters from his shotgun. Grey said nothing. He limped over to retrieve his Colt, checked that it was undamaged, and reloaded it.

Then he addressed his wounds. The creatures had done their best to eviscerate him. Only the toughness of his jeans and the leather of his gun belt had saved his life. Even so, there was a bad gash on his hip and it bled freely. The pain was searing and he clamped his jaw shut as he used strips torn from his shirt to compress and bind the wound. It was a sloppy job, but it would serve. Luckily the talon had torn only skin and not the muscle beneath. He could still move easily and he set his teeth against limping. That would wear him out too quickly and besides, it was only pain. Grey had maintained a long and passionate affair with pain. He knew all her secrets.

Once he was finished he wiped his bloody fingers on his thighs and waited for Looks Away to speak.

When he did, the Sioux’s voice was filled with both stress and wonder. “These are — or, at least were—dinosaurs.”

“Yeah, you said that, but I don’t know what that means. They’re animals, right? From where? They from Africa or—?”

“They’re extinct,” said Looks Away. “All we’ve ever seen are bones and paintings done to try and reconstruct what they might have looked like. Dinosaur. It means ‘terrible lizard.’”

“Fair enough as something to call them,” muttered Grey. “Ugly sonsabitches works for me, too.”

“The term was coined by Sir Richard Owen. I met him twice — when our show played in Lancaster, and then again in London. He was a surly, contentious old git who thought Charles Darwin was completely wrong about his theories of evolution.”

“Darwin? I read about him. A lot of folks said he was trying to say God didn’t make the world.”

“That’s not precisely what he said. Darwin believed that our world is much older than suggested by the ages of the people named in the Bible, and that long before humans came along there were ages and ages of natural development. The animals and plants that we know today are there because they were the ones best able to survive those long millennia of growth. He also believed that before there were the animals we know about, there were others before them. This was about the only point he and Owen agreed upon, though Owen tended to think that Darwin simplified the process too much.”

“Did he?”

Looks Away shrugged. “I studied rocks, not animals. I’m not qualified to judge.”

He squatted down and studied one of the dead creatures. Grey joined him.

“So, what are you getting at? Were these things the ancestors of alligators and horny toads?”

“Maybe. I’ve heard arguments to that effect, and I’ve heard arguments that they evolved into birds.”

Grey ran his fingers along the feathers. “Seems pretty likely. But if they’re the ancestors of birds and such, why the hell are they here? How did Deray get his hands on them?”

“That is a very, very good question, old chap,” said Looks Away. “I have a theory, or part of one at least.”

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Well, look around,” said Looks Away. “Ever since the Great Quake all sorts of strange things have been happening. Reports of flying lizards and sea serpents. These things are strange, I’ll grant you, but surely they’re not the strangest things that have been said to come out of the Maze. Not if even a tenth of the reports are true.”

Grey grunted. “Before I came out here I was of the mind that all of those stories started at the bottom of a whiskey glass. Now… well, I mean, does something really actually need to bite you on the ass before you take it as Gospel fact?”

“For my part, my friend, I shall henceforth endeavor to keep a very open mind.”

Looks Away grabbed the shoulder of the creature and rolled it onto its back. The chunk of ghost rock embedded in its chest was small, about the size of a grape. The white lines seemed to shift and flow like restless worms, though Grey told himself that it was just the flickering lantern light or his own imagination. “I think that maybe these creatures were trapped down here. See how pale their flesh is? That suggests a life lived away from the sun. When Deray came down here he must have encountered all sorts of strange creatures. Encountered them, slaughtered them, used his sorcery to bring them back to life, and then found a way to enslave them with ghost rock.”

“I didn’t think ghost rock could do that.”

Looks Away shrugged. “It can’t, as far as I know. As I said, this is as much alchemy as it is ghost rock science. Maybe more so.” He shook his head. “And God only knows what else Deray has waiting for us. If he can command the dead… the possibilities are staggering.”

Grey rubbed his jaw and looked back the way they came. “There’s always a war going on somewhere. Countries fighting, land wars, rail wars. Lots of dead people to be had. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, then we are in deep, deep shit.”

“My friend,” said Looks Away as he reloaded, “I believe that without a doubt we are in very deep shit indeed.”

“Deray,” muttered Grey. “More and more I’m getting the feeling that I need to park a bullet in his brainpan.”

“You, my dear chap,” said Looks Away, “will have to stand in line.”

Grey knelt beside one of the monsters and plucked a feather out, sniffed it, winced, and tossed it away. Then he peered at the chunk of ghost rock. “I thought there was some kind of rules to this ghost rock business. Same with the Harrowed. The way Brother Joe put it, this was ghost rock or some demons or whatever taking over corpses. That’s what we saw in Nevada, and it’s what you told me happened when that factory blew up in Europe. If that’s the way it’s supposed to work, then how do you explain extinct dinosaurs with ghost rocks in their chests? I mean… give me a place to stand so I can think about that the right way.”

“I’m afraid I can’t offer you such a refuge, Grey,” said Looks Away. “I am in totally unknown territory here. You know as much as I do.”

“Which means we don’t know enough.”

Grey began to reach out and touch the stone, but Looks Away shook his head. “Not with your bare hand.”

“Why? Does it do something?”

“I have no idea,” admitted Looks Away, “but we can surmise that the chunks of ghost rock he’s implanted in the chests of his victims — human and animal — allow him some measure of control. They’re clearly his slaves.”

Grey drew his knife and used the point to touch the stone. It made a dull metallic tink sound. Nothing else happened. “So he took something that was already dangerous as hell and used black magic to make it worse?”

“Yes. We’ve only begun to understand the nature and properties of ghost rock. Dr. Saint is exploring new scientific directions, and now we have proof that Deray’s necromancy has taken him in even more obscure and frightening directions. It’s so much to consider, but for now we’d best leave it be. We have a job of work ahead of us.”

“Work?” asked Grey. “As in getting the hell out of here?”

Looks Away shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that, Grey. Not at this point. Not after all that we’ve seen. I think we have to gird our loins and enter the belly of the beast.”

“Meaning what?”

Looks Away stood and picked up one of the lanterns. “Didn’t you see this?”

“See what?” asked Grey as he rose.

“I saw it just as those beasties rushed us.”

The Sioux walked a couple of paces toward the back of the room and the spill of light revealed a sight Grey had not noticed before. The rear wall of the chamber was in ruins. The naked stone had been shattered, pushed outward by some titanic force, and lay in heaps of rubble. Beyond the debris was a gaping maw of a hole that yawned like the mouth of some fabled dragon.

“I think that is where our monsters came from,” said Looks Away. “And if my guess is correct that tunnel will lead us to the answers we seek.”

Grey Torrance closed his eyes for a moment, and in the brief silence he could once more hear the muffled footsteps of the ghosts who haunted him. They were behind him and darkness opened before him.

“Damn it,” he breathed. Then he opened his eyes and nodded. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Fifty-Three

Grey didn’t know exactly what “girding one’s loins” meant, but he squared his shoulders and set his jaw as they moved toward the gaping hole. Looks Away padded along beside him, his face grim and determined.

As they approached the hole it became apparent that the destruction had not been accomplished by anything like dynamite. The whole wall had been pushed into the chamber. They stopped at the entrance and held out their lanterns.

“Jesus Christ,” said Grey.

Beyond the hole was a tunnel. Roughly round and crudely made, it curled around down into the bowels of the earth. The sides of it glistened and when Looks Away reached to touch it he quickly withdrew his hand. His fingers were wet and sticky and they smelled like rotting fish.

“What the hell is that?” asked Grey.

“I have no idea,” said the Sioux as he rubbed his fingers together under his nose. “It’s disturbingly like the secretions a worm makes. But God — the smell.”

The odor wafting up from the tunnel was clearly the source of the stench they’d smelled earlier. Here, though, it hadn’t been diluted by distance. The stink was almost palpable.

Looks Away drew a breath and raised his leg to step over the fractured rim.

“You’ll die in there,” said a voice behind them.

They both whirled, bringing their guns to bear.

A figure stood at the far end of the chamber, surrounded by the corpses of the reanimated dinosaurs. It was a woman who wore the shredded remnants of a sheer dressing gown. Her hair was up in a loose bun, her eyes were filled with dark mystery. A dreadful wound had been opened in her side through which they could see purple coils of her intestines. She seemed to be bathed in the glow of a pale blue-white light, but she cast no shadow.

Beside him, Grey heard Looks Away utter a low cry of bottomless pain and endless fear.

It was Veronica Chesterfield.

And she was dead.

Chapter Fifty-Four

The dead woman spoke in a voice that was as cold and alien as a cemetery wind.

“Thomas,” she said. “My sweet man.”

Looks Away would have fallen to his knees if Grey hadn’t dropped his lantern and caught him. The lantern fell over and burning oil spilled out. The flames cast wild shadows onto the walls, though none were stranger than the dead thing that stood before them.

“What…,” began Looks Away in a strained choke, “what are you?”

She held her arms wide. The gesture pulled the bloody gossamer tight across her ample breasts, and the wisps of cloth seemed to float around her as if stirred by a wind that neither man could feel. Grey realized that the blue-white light did not fall upon her but was instead part of her, as if she were alight within. It was beautiful in its way, but in this moment and in this place there was nothing in Grey’s heart but terror.

“Don’t you know?” she asked. “Don’t you recognize me? Don’t you know your own loving Veronica?”

“God rot you,” snarled Looks Away, “you are not her. Damn you to Hell!”

“To Hell?” mused Veronica, letting her arms drop. “No, my love. That’s not where I belong. Nor do I belong among the living. I walk now between those worlds.”

“I don’t… I don’t…”

She smiled sadly. “Such a brave man. You’ve faced such horrors already. Will you shrink in fear from a helpless spirit?”

“Spirit? You’re a… a ghost?” breathed the Sioux.

“Though I’ve only been dead for a short time I feel as I’ve lived forever here in the world of spirits. Ghost? That is so impure a word, and so shallow. Call me that if it helps, but know that it does not truly tell you what I’ve become.”

“You can’t be here. It’s wrong… it’s a lie. What are you that you are so cruel?”

For a moment the she-thing before them seemed to waver, her face twisted into doubt. “I don’t mean to be cruel,” she said in a voice that was filled with sadness. “Truly I do not.”

“Then why do this?” demanded Looks Away. “You have no right to use Veronica’s body like this. It’s unholy.”

“Unholy? That’s a strange word for you to use, Thomas. I thought you didn’t believe in God. Or the Devil. Or anything. Isn’t that what you told me? Or, isn’t that what you told her? That you were a man of science, not of ancient superstitions.”

Grey saw his friend stiffen. “How could you know what I said to her?”

“Because I am her. When she died, I rose from the flesh, but all that she was I am except that flesh. Please, Thomas, try and understand.”

“Don’t call me that. Only she was allowed to call me that. You don’t have the right.”

The ghost considered, then nodded. “Then I will call you Looks Away. Great Sioux warrior. Noted scientist. May I address that man rather than the lover of the woman who died?”

“This is insane,” Grey said sharply.

Veronica turned to him. “Ah… Greyson Torrance,” she said slowly, a half-smile on her lips. “The haunted man. Oh yes, don’t look so surprised. In the worlds beyond the flesh there is much we spirits know. Much we can see. And do you want to know what I see when I look at you?”

Looks Away frowned as he studied Grey. “What is she talking about?”

“Nothing,” said Grey. “This thing just wants to mess with our heads.”

“Oh no,” said the ghost. “I can see a tarot card burning in the air above your head. The martyr’s card. It is your sigil now. You are the haunted man who walks one step ahead of the tireless dead.”

“Grey—?” murmured Looks Away.

“She’s lying.”

“Am I?” asked the ghost. “Did Carmilla not read your fortune?”

“I don’t know anyone named—.”

“Mircalla then. She spoke prophecy to you and its truth burns within you. I can see the flame. Be careful, Grey Torrance or it will consume you.”

“I don’t give a mule’s hairy balls about prophecy or card tricks or any of that guff. You want to know the future? Sure — it’s me putting a hot lead bullet through the brain of that twisted bastard Aleksander Deray.”

Veronica’s smile faded from her pale lips. “Then listen to me, both of you. And you, Looks Away most of all,” she said softly. “I will tell you now what I was too afraid to say while I lived. “Nolan was nothing but a pawn of Deray. My husband was little more than a slave. He worshipped Deray like a god. He crawled on his belly before the necromancer. They conspired together to destroy this town because the Maze here is ripe with wealth. Gold and precious metals. You’ve seen it, you know. The great Gold Rush was nothing compared to the veins of ore that were exposed after the Quake. Nolan discovered the vast riches here, and he knew how to find the ore. He knew how to smelt it and extract the purest metals. And he knew where to find ghost rock.”

“If you’re Veronica, then why didn’t you tell me this before,” demanded Looks Away.

“Because, no matter what else, Nolan was still my husband and I swore to keep his secrets. That oath perished with my vows.” She smiled again, and it was ghoulish and cold. “The vow was ’til death do us part, and we are surely parted now. I am beyond the bindings of my wedding vow and beyond the cruel force of his hand. There is nothing Nolan can do to me anymore. But I fear Deray, because he has mastery over the dead. He could raise my body as one of his undead slaves. He is worse than a murderer, worse than a monster. He is evil incarnate. Even the dead and the damned fear him.”

“So what?” asked Grey. “We already know he’s a miserable blood-sucking bastard. That’s why I want to park a bullet between his eyes. And we pretty much figured Nolan was his lackey.”

“Nolan was all that, but the presence of all that gold and ghost rock here in his basement weighed on him. It was not his — he was merely the treasurer for Deray. He coveted it, though. It ate at his mind and gnawed even at his devotion to Deray. He came to worship a different god — that of his own greed. And so he rebelled. He used the gold to buy the loyalty of many of Deray’s men. The deputies in the town, some of the hired gunmen. With enough gold you can buy any mortal man’s soul.”

Looks Away said, “You’re speaking about Chesterfield in the past-tense. Is he dead?”

“Not yet,” said the manitou. “Every man, woman, and child on this estate has either been killed, captured, or given over to the undead summoned by Deray. A few yet live. Nolan himself still lives, but his hours are numbered. As for the rest? Most of them have been raised through the black magic of Deray’s necromancy and bound to his will by the ghost rock he has fused into their flesh.”

“Good lord,” said Looks Away faintly, “that’s quite… horrible.”

Veronica nodded. “For love of you, my dear Thomas, I have come to you to tell you this. I came freely and willingly, even though I know I am abhorrent to your eyes. You look at me and you see only a wretched ghost. But hear me, I beg.”

“We’re listening,” said Grey thickly, and he did not correct her on the use of his given name.

“Deray has Harrowed in his service, and a legion of the undead. This is the army he will use to realize his mad dreams.”

“What dreams? He’s already richer than God,” snapped Grey. “What the hell else does he want?”

“He wants to conquer.”

“Conquer what?”

She shook her head. “I… do not know. His mind is closed to me as it is closed to all lesser spirits. What I know for certain is that if he is unchecked all will suffer. Your kind and perhaps even mine. Necromancy is an abomination that threatens the living and the dead in equal measures.”

Chapter Fifty-Five

“That’s impossible,” said Grey. “I admit that I’m not much for church and all that Bible stuff, but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that souls are immortal. Eternal. How can he do you any further harm?”

“Oh, my love there is so much you don’t know, so much you can’t know until death opens your eyes. Magic is not merely a tool, it is a doorway. With necromancy, Deray can enslave the souls of the dead. He could take me and use me in ways the living could never imagine — not in your wildest nightmares. I have an eternity to suffer, and Deray has the power to turn forever into Hell itself. Believe me, it does not. Haven’t you heard of banshees wailing or ghosts moaning? Suffering does not end when the heart becomes still and the flesh cools.”

“By the queen’s garters,” breathed Looks Away.

“What is it you expect us to do?” asked Grey.

“You need to stop Aleksander Deray,” said Veronica, “by any means necessary.”

“How?” demanded Looks Away. “If he’s that powerful, if he’s able to force ghosts and demons and every damned hobgoblin that goes bump in the night to his will, then what chance do we have?”

“Almost none,” she said sadly.

“Well that’s encouraging as hell,” said Grey. “Thanks so much. Maybe we should take the gold, gather everyone in town and move to — oh, I don’t know — anywhere else.”

She shook her head. “You cannot escape what is coming.”

“I can give it one hell of a try.”

“If you run all will be lost. Deray is not doing all of this just to conquer the town of Paradise Falls. He cares nothing for this place. Surely you can see that.”

Grey said nothing.

“The future is not a window but a house of mirrors reflecting ten thousand possibilities. Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye,” said Veronica, repeating what Mircalla had said. “Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.”

Grey felt his mouth go dry as dust.

“What does she mean?” asked Looks Away, frowning at him.

Grey said nothing.

“Not all who walk in shadows are evil,” continued the ghost. “Not all of the lonely spirits of the dead wish you harm.”

And with those words she turned and walked away. The firelight danced along the swirling folds of her gossamer nightgown. Then she vanished into the distance and the darkness.

Looks Away took a single, uncertain step as if to follow, then he stopped and sagged back in grief and defeat. Finally he turned to Grey.

“We are already in Hell,” he said. “So I guess we must play our parts like good puppets.”

He walked past Grey and stepped through the ragged hole in the wall. Grey lingered for a long moment, feeling an icy chill on his spine and a fiery burn in his gut. Then he, too, turned, stepped through the destroyed wall and began his journey into darkness.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Grey caught up with Looks Away, who had walked fifty feet along the slime-covered corridor. The Sioux stood without a lantern, awash in shadows. Grey carried the only remaining light and as before it cast capering shadows onto the walls.

“This is madness,” said Looks Away without preamble.

“This is not normal,” agreed Grey with a tone that was ten tons lighter than the weight on his heart.

“What are we doing? After all, we don’t even know if this tunnel will lead us to Deray.”

Grey looked at him. “Sure we do. Where else would it lead?”

“Bedlam?”

“Where?”

“Oh, never mind,” groused Looks Away. Then he cut a sharp look at Grey. “What was all that about Mircalla? You dodged me before when I asked.”

Grey did not want to tell him because it would open the door to more questions and to things he never wanted to share with anyone. However that kind of privacy no longer seemed to matter. He began walking and Looks Away fell into step beside him. Their path sloped down and curved away into unknown territory.

As they walked, Grey told him about what had happened at the brothel and his dream about that tarot card reading by Mircalla.

“The martyr card?” mused Looks Away. “Hardly what I’d call an apt description.”

“Why not? I’m down here risking my ass, aren’t I?”

“Sure but—.”

“And don’t think it’s just because you hired me. Give me a little more credit than that.”

“I do, actually,” said Looks Away, looking amused. “And I wasn’t casting aspersions on your valor, old chap. It’s just that martyrs sacrifice themselves and you’re a fighter, Grey. I believe you’d fight them all the way to the bitter end.”

Grey thought about it, and shrugged. “Guess I don’t have a whole lot of ‘give up’ in me. If I did you’d be down here alone.”

Looks Away nodded, his face serious. “I wonder if maybe I should be down here alone. After all this isn’t really your fight.”

“You’re paying me to make it my fight.”

“Oh, come now, old chap, I hardly think my offer of employment extends to fighting demons in an underground anteroom to Hell itself.”

“I still took your coin.”

“It was a token. You can give it back and no hard feelings.”

Grey dug into his pocket and realized that it was the one that had been torn by the dinosaur’s claw. “I guess I can’t.”

“But—”

“So I guess you’re stuck with me.”

The Sioux shook his head. “I don’t know which of us is more daft.”

“You’re doing this for love and I’m doing it for—.”

“Love?” asked Looks Away. “No, don’t try and look so innocent. Do you think I did not hear you two downstairs?”

Grey said nothing and he felt his face burn.

“Jenny’s a fine and decent woman,” he said.

“Yes,” Looks Away agreed, “she is. As was Veronica Chesterfield. They are the ladies of our heroic little tale and I suppose that makes us the knights errant.”

“Oh, please.”

“Who knows… maybe we’ll even get to slay a dragon.”

Grey shook his head. “You need to shut the fuck up.”

They kept going, deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

They walked for miles down there in the dark.

For the first hour the tunnel was featureless except for the dripping slime on the walls and strange footprints that fit no creature they had ever seen. Several times Grey caught Looks Away pausing to study those walls.

“You seeing something I should know about?”

The Sioux nodded, looking worried.

“There are certain kinds of worms that secrete acids through their skin that allow them to essentially burn their way through the soil. Mind you, we’re talking about tiny creatures. Two or three inches long.”

“So?” began Grey, then he stopped and reappraised the slick, unnaturally smooth walls. “Oh… shit.”

“Yes,” agreed Looks Away.

“Is that even possible? Something this big?”

Looks Away turned and gave him a withering stare. “After all that’s happened you can ask that question with a straight face?”

Grey sighed. “I guess I keep hoping we’ve seen the worst of what Deray has up his sleeve.”

“I wish,” muttered the Sioux.

They pressed on, and soon turned a sharper corner and found themselves in a vast cavern. They stood gaping in wonder at the things they saw.

The cavern stretched out in all directions and gnarled pillars of sandstone rose to support a roof that was lost in the darkness far above. They did not need the lantern to see because there was a light that seemed to come from blue fungi that clung to all the walls. The ground was broken, but there were pathways formed of natural sand runoff. Water dripped from the points of massive spears of quartz crystal that had been thrust outward from the walls by some titanic force. They looked too old to have been the result of the Great Quake, and Grey decided that this cavern, unlike the slimy tunnel they had just traversed, had been here for maybe a million years and only opened by the quake. Fantastic mushrooms sprouted from the ground to their right and rose in staggered ranks to cover one entire wall. The stems were as big around as oak trees and the caps of even the smallest would have covered an entire stagecoach. Bats clustered beneath the hoods, wriggling in their leathery thousands, and below them, insects writhed through the piles of guano. The stink of ammonia rolled at them in waves, but to their left was a different sight, and it brought with it a different and more powerful smell. The landscape sloped downward toward the rock-strewn shore of an underground sea. Waves broke upon the shore and cast broken shells and bizarre bones onto the sand. With each breaking wave a fresh stench of spoiled fish assaulted them.

The sea stretched on for miles, the wave tops glimmering with more of the eerie blue luminescence, but in the misty distance it faded into a uniform blackness.

Looks Away softly murmured some lines of poetry, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.”

Grey gave him a sharp look. “Wait, you know this place?”

“No, old boy,” said Looks Away, his eyes alight with wonder, “that is an old poem. Coleridge, and it was written about a mythical place far, far away. It’s just that it seems to fit, does it not?”

“I guess… but I wish it had stayed in a poem.”

Looks Away walked over to the closest rock pillar and bent to peer at the glowing fungi. He sniffed at it. “Grey… come here and see this.”

With great reluctance, Grey joined him. The fungi looked like tiny cabbage leaves, but it rippled like sea anemones.

“This is so strange,” said Looks Away. “This is some form of panellus stipticus—what most people call ‘bitter oyster.’ But bioluminescent fungi emit a green light. This is blue.”

“And it’s a pretty damn familiar blue,” said Grey.

“Indeed it is. The fungi must pick up trace amounts of ghost rock. Not enough to react to the flame of our lanterns, but enough to change the color of the bioluminescent glow.”

“That’s not much of a comfort. And, damn, but it’s hot as hell in here,” said Grey. “Could there be a volcano down here?”

“Anything’s possible in the Maze,” said Looks Away. “Whatever it is, there’s some form of geothermal activity. You can smell the sulfur in the air.”

“All I smell is batshit and dead fish.”

“No, there’s more. That rotten egg smell. That’s sulfur.”

Grey sniffed. “Oh, right.”

They looked around. Far off in the distance and up near the inky darkness of the roof, they could see small birds flapping or drifting on thermal currents.

“This is all so—” began Looks Away, but a sudden sound jolted them to silence. They raised their weapons as something seemed to detach itself from the stem of one of the gigantic mushrooms. At first it looked like part of the stalk was sliding off, then with a thrill of mingled terror and disgust Grey saw that it was something far worse. The thing — for thing was the only word his mind could conjure — was as long as an alligator but it was no reptile. It had a narrow body that seemed composed of hundreds of banded segments, and from the sides of each of these segments sprouted a pair of jointed legs. The shell was the same dead-white color as the mushrooms, but the legs were black; and the whole thing glistened wetly.

“Dear… God!” cried Looks Away. “Are you seeing this?”

“I wish to Christ I wasn’t.”

The creature crawled out onto the floor of the cavern and began moving toward them on a thousand feet, and it uttered a weird, high-pitched, chittering sound.

“Is that… is that a…?” Grey began but couldn’t finish.

“It’s a whacking great centipede,” said Looks Away.

Grey shoved the lantern into his hand, took his pistol in a steady two-hand grip, and fired three spaced shots into its head. The impact of the hot lead punched through the chitinous shell and exploded the first three segments. However the body kept moving forward.

“Shite!” yelped Looks Away. He quickly set the lantern down and took aim with his shotgun.

The blast was enormous and it rang through the cavern. Masses of bats broke in panic from beneath the mushrooms, and the air was filled with the thunder of ten thousand leathery wings. All around them came the cries and chirps and clicks of creatures seen and unseen, and Grey knew that they were surrounded by more things than they could possibly fight.

What was left of the centipede twisted and thrashed on the ground like a worm on a hot rock. Even with three bullets and a round of buckshot the thing was somehow still alive.

“Is that thing one of those undead sonsabitches?” demanded Grey.

“No. I don’t think so,” said Looks Away uncertainly. “There’s no ghost rock implant. I think this is something that was always down here. Maybe no one would ever have seen something like this had it not been for the Great Quake.”

“I wish I’d never seen it.”

“I tend to agree, old chap,” said Looks Away. He was sweating badly and his hands trembled with fear and disgust.

“Tell you what, Looks,” said Grey as they crouched beneath the storm of hysterical bats, “I’m having some serious second thoughts about this. Maybe we should fall back, regroup, get drunk, and talk ourselves out of this.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” muttered Looks Away. “We may need different equipment for this kind of expedition.”

“Fifty armed men as backup, a Gatling gun, and a shitload of dynamite would be at the top of my shopping list.”

They rose slowly and began edging back toward the door when they heard another sound. A sharp, piercing cry that echoed through the caverns and stabbed painfully into their eardrums. It came from above, but it was neither a bat nor a bird.

They looked up and once more terror filled Grey’s heart. Above them the small birds were swooping down, but Grey immediately realized how wrong he had been. They were not small at all. They were merely very far away.

Now they were getting closer and with each fragment of a second they grew larger, and larger.

And larger.

“What the hell are they?” cried Grey, raising his gun.

“By the queen’s garters!” whispered Looks Away. “I read a paper on these things not five years ago. They were just discovered in Kansas by Sam Wilson.”

“What are they?” growled Grey as the creatures swooped lower and lower. Just as the dinosaurs they’d fought had been covered with features, these birdlike monsters were scaled like reptiles. They had vast leathery wings that stretched twenty feet across, long spike-like beaks and sickle-shaped crests protruding from the backs of their skulls. Even at that distance Grey could smell the dead-flesh stink of them. Unlike the centipedes and bats, they were reanimated corpses. Their cries threatened to crack Grey’s head apart.

Just as the two men broke and ran, he heard Looks Away speak a word he had never heard before. “Pteranodon!”

“Terra-what?”

“Never mind… just kill the bastards.”

Grey fired three shots at the closest one, but he had no idea if he hit it. At that range there was no certainty of a head shot. He whirled, bolted, and ran toward the tunnel.

But he instantly skidded to a stop as two of the monsters swept down and cut him off. Looks Away fired his shotgun, but the distance was against him. The pellets peppered the monsters, and they screamed more in rage than pain. Maybe they couldn’t even feel pain. Grey grabbed his shoulder, spun him around, and shoved Looks Away in the opposite direction.

“Run!”

Chapter Fifty-Eight

They ran.

The living dead pteranodons flocked after them, screaming for a meal of living flesh. The beat of their wings was like thunder, and all the bats whirled away and vanished under the mushrooms once more. Grey thought that was a smart damn idea, so he dragged Looks Away toward the forest of towering fungi. A gust of wind buffeted him from behind and he staggered down to one knee just as something snapped the air where his head had been a moment ago. Grey rolled to one side to see one of the monsters sweep past, its beak empty but not for lack of trying. Grey’s gun was empty, so he shoved it into his holster, scrambled to his feet, and raced on as another of the monsters snapped at the ground on which he’d been lying.

“They’re too big to fly under the caps,” yelled Looks Away, who was now ten yards ahead, picking his way through the forest. Grey raced to catch up. They crunched ankle deep through pools of bat droppings and insects, and then squeezed between two mushrooms that had become twisted together as they’d grown between spears of crystal.

“Reload,” ordered Grey. “Reload.”

They reloaded as the pteranodons flapped over the mushrooms, shrieking in fury. The cap above them suddenly tilted and groaned and Grey realized that one of the beasts had landed atop it. He saw the rest of the flock rise and arc away into the shadowy sky, then wheel and come rushing back.

Several of them landed in the clearing beyond where the two men huddled. They looked so alien, like nothing that should ever have been allowed to trouble the world of living men. On stubby legs and clawed hands attached to their wings they crept forward, searching for a way in to get at their feast.

“They’re coming,” breathed Looks Away. “Christ!”

Four more of the pteranodons dropped to the ground and began approaching on different sides of their narrow haven. A huge one landed on the spear of quartz above them and stabbed downward through a narrow gap, trying to spear them with its beak. Grey hammered the side of the beak with his fist and then fired past it, trying to hit the monster’s eye in hopes of punching through to the brain. The angle was bad and the bullet merely scored a deep groove on the top of its skull. Even so the impact knocked the creature backward.

Grey pivoted and fired four shots at the approaching pteranodons, the rounds punching through folded wings and hitting one in the chest. The creature roared and reared up, then staggered against another monster. Wounded or dying, Grey couldn’t tell.

“What about that damn fancy rifle of yours?” he gasped. “Seems like a good goddam time for it, don’t you think?”

“Shite!” cried Looks Away. “I’m a bloody fool. I’ve been carrying it all this time and forgot about it.”

Looks Away slid the loaded shotgun into its holster and jerked the strap to swing the Kingdom M1 rifle from his back and into his hands. He began fumbling with small brass and crystal switches and dials.

“Do you even know how to work that thing?” demanded Grey.

“In theory, in theory…,” muttered Looks Away under his breath. A series of small green lights sparkled to life along the gun’s sides and Grey could hear a low hum as the rifle began to vibrate.

“Should it be doing that?”

“Probably not,” said Looks Away nervously. “But we have to try. I just hope the bloody thing doesn’t blow up in my hands.”

“Is that likely?”

Looks Away answered with a sour grunt.

“How many rounds do you have?”

“Two magazines. One full one, which has five rounds; and one with only four. Plus two gas canisters. That should be enough to fire what we have.”

One of the pteranodons began chopping at the mushroom caps in order to get at them. Two of the others watched for a moment, and then they joined it. Their sharp beaks tore at the spongy fungus.

“Will it stop them?” Grey said, backing away.

Looks Away shook his head. “I have never used it before. I’m not one hundred percent certain it will work at all.”

Pieces of the mushroom cap began to rain down on them as the monstrous pterosaurs hammered away. Grey could already see the faces of the monsters. Their eyes glittered with hunger and bloodlust.

“Come on, damn it… we’re out of time!”

Looks Away was still fiddling with the dials and controls. “I don’t know where to set the gas pressure,” he said between gritted teeth.

“Then take a wild goddamn guess and — oh, shit.”

Grey shoved Looks Away to one side as a huge beak stabbed down through the ragged gap. It speared the air a scant inch from the Sioux’s unprotected back. The gun fell and slithered halfway out of their niche. Looks Away dove for it, scrabbling with fingernails as the stock slid away. He caught the very end of the brass butt-plate, but then he snatched his hand back as a savage beak snapped at him.

Grey grabbed his collar and hauled him back to safety as the beak of one of the monsters locked its powerful jaws around the stock of the Kingdom rifle. It lifted the gun up, and with a mighty jerk of its head flipped it into its mouth and tried to eat it.

“Grey!” cried Looks Away.

“I know,” he snapped. He leaned halfway out of their niche, dug the barrel of the Colt into the throat of the pteranodon, and fired. Deathless monster or not, the bullet tore a big red hole in the leathery flesh and exited at a sharp right angle, sure evidence that it had ricocheted off of heavy bone. The pteranodon’s head suddenly canted sideways and flopped onto the creature’s upper wing, and Grey knew which bone his bullet had struck. With a broken neck and two bloody holes in its throat, the giant creature toppled slowly sideways. The other pterosaurs sent up an ululating cry of indignation and fury.

“Did you see that?” yelled Looks Away. “A head shot and trauma to the spinal cord will do for those buggers.”

“Great, we’ll throw a party later. You lost your damn gun.”

As the dying beast struck the ground the Kingdom rifle fell from the yawning beak and landed hard. The rows of little lights flickered, flickered, flickered… but then they steadied.

The rifle lay ten feet outside of their niche.

“Oh…

Above them the two mushroom caps that formed their ceiling were falling to pieces beneath the renewed assault of the pteranodons.

“They’re going to get us,” cried Looks Away, fumbling for his shotgun. His hands were shaking badly, and Grey could not blame him. His own trembled with the palsy of genuine terror.

“We need that gun,” he growled.

As if in conscious defiance of their needs, one of the pteranodons placed a foot over the weapon. Grey knew that it couldn’t be more than happenstance, but it felt like a statement to them.

You are our meat.

It terrified him.

It infuriated him.

As he reloaded he thought about what Mircalla had said about his life. He thought about what Veronica had said. The martyr.

Martyr.

The gun lay there, ten feet away. He could reach it. If he could get it away from the monster then maybe he could throw it to Looks Away before the pteranodons killed them both. They would kill him, of that there was no doubt.

No doubt.

Was this it? Was this the moment predicted by the witch and the manitou? Was he destined to sacrifice himself and to die here in the fetid darkness, the meal of monsters? Was that a tragedy or would it redeem him in the eyes of the universe? And what then? Would he join the band of wandering vengeance ghosts and drift along the fringes of the living world until the sun burned itself out and time ran down to its last few ticks?

Those thoughts flashed through his mind even as he felt his body moving.

Moving.

Rushing toward the cleft, toward the gun.

This is a better death than I deserve, he thought.

And then he was falling sideways.

Something buffeted him and sent him crashing against the tree-like stem of a giant mushroom. He fell hard and saw Looks Away throw him a madman’s grin as he dove through the cleft.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“No!” cried Grey as he struggled back to his feet.

When Looks Away had shoved him out of the way, Grey had dropped his gun. He scooped it up now and prayed that the barrel was not clogged.

It all happened fast.

So fast.

Looks Away had his shotgun in his hands and as he dove he fired both barrels into the face of the towering pterosaur. The creature towered ten feet above him, but the spray from the sawed-off barrels spread wide, and the entire flight of pellets struck beak and eyes and throat and head, and all of it exploded into a cloud of pink mist. The recoil from the poorly braced weapon hit Looks Away in the center of the chest and sent him into an awkward, crashing fall. He landed hard and his head banged against the ground as the headless pteranodon toppled the other way, slamming into two others and dragging them down.

There was one single moment of absolute stillness.

The Kingdom rifle was five feet from where Looks Away lay, but he lay there, shaking his head, dazed, hovering on the edge of blacking out.

“Looks!” shouted Grey as he flung himself out the niche just as three huge beaks stabbed down. He opened up with the Colt and fired at the pteranodons who were recovering from their shock to realize that fresh and helpless meat lay there for the taking.

Grey scooped up the rifle and thrust it at Looks Away, who had managed to prop himself up on one elbow. His nose was bleeding and he was wheezing like a dying trout.

“Here, damn it!”

Grey fired his six rounds, unable to miss at that range.

Beyond the closest pteranodons there were more.

So many more.

At least fifty of the living dead things were crawling through the forest or perched atop the mushroom caps. More circled in the humid air, jealous of their brothers who were close enough to join the impending feast. The stench of their rotting flesh was stifling, overwhelming.

Grey fumbled at his belt for fresh cartridges, knowing that there was no time left. This was it. All of his roads had led here and this was where he was going to die. Consumed and forgotten.

“God damn you all to—!”

That was as far as he got and the world seemed to explode.

The four closest pteranodons flew apart as if they were straw dolls in a tornado wind. Blood and leather flew everywhere, slapping the other creatures in the faces, painting the mushroom caps with red, and filling the air with the smell of strange blood. A boom, like the echo of a great thunderclap rolled outward toward the sunless sea, and once more the frightened bats fled their refuge and fled like a dark cloud toward the fungi-covered columns.

The force of the explosion drove Grey to his knees and knocked the gun from his hand. He clapped his hands to his ears and wheeled around, staring at the figure that stood behind him.

Thomas Looks Away, covered in bat guano and lichen, blood streaming from his nose, teeth bared, eyes wild, stood wide-legged with the Kingdom rifle in his hands. Then he whirled around, raised the weapon again, and fired at the pteranodons atop the mushroom caps that had formed their refuge. The round hit the closest of the beasts, and there was another shocking boom of thunder, and a shockwave picked both men up and flung them against another of the towering mushrooms.

The pterosaur that had been hit and both of the other monsters were shredded as the compressed ghost-gas bullets detonated into a blinding series of miniature explosions. The bursts followed one another almost too fast to hear — first the explosion of the rifle shells and then the howling scream as the ghost rocks embedded in the dead flesh of each animal burst apart. That, and the screams of the undead things, shook the entire cavern. Chunks of sandstone cracked off and plummeted from the ceiling, smashing down on the pteranodons, crippling some, killing many. Grey grabbed Looks Away by the arm and they scrambled under the hood of another giant mushroom. The massive cap quivered and a jagged crack appeared in the stem above their heads. They cried out and rolled over against the base just as the stem cracked like a tree in a hurricane wind and a ton of mottled fungus canted over and crashed down inches from where they lay.

The ground shook again and bloody rain fell all around them.

They dared not move.

The whole world shook and trembled around them. The pterosaurs screamed.

And then there was a new sound, that of many leathery wings flapping as all of the surviving creatures flung themselves into the air in a colliding, wild attempt to flee.

Silence settled very, very slowly.

The two men lay there, half buried under the shattered mushroom cap, half deafened by the thunder of the Kingdom rifle, half mad with terror.

Then, finally, Grey began to crawl out. After a moment Looks Away followed. They climbed to their feet and stood there, swaying and drunk with fatigue. Around them lay the shredded remains of a half dozen of the pteranodons. A few crippled ones were dragging themselves away from what had been their intended dinner. These monsters had been torn by flying shrapnel from the mushrooms, from rocks, and from flying bits of bone, but they hadn’t been caught in the blast radius of the exploded ghost rock and so they had not exploded, too. Even so, they were torn to rags.

Looks Away wiped a nervous hand across his mouth as he watched them shudder along and tried to make a joke. “A clear case of the biter bit, what?”

The quip came out crooked and landed flat.

Grey picked up the Kingdom rifle from where it had fallen when they’d been thrown backward. The little lights were still glowing bright even though it was covered with drops of blood. He held it up and thought about the cannon-sized one at Doctor Saint’s lab.

“God Almighty,” he whispered.

Chapter Sixty

They picked up their other weapons: the ordinary Colt and shotgun that now seemed both childish and somehow more wholesome than the gleaming Kingdom M1.

“Do you think that gun destroyed the demons in those flying lizards?”

“Reptiles,” corrected Looks Away, “and I don’t know. Actually, old chap, we don’t even know if they were the same kind of undead as Lucky Bob’s crew or simply bodies he raised using alchemy. Add that to our list of mysteries.”

“It would be nice,” groused Grey, “to get to the point where the answers outnumber the dad-blasted questions.”

“I don’t know that any results we get on prehistoric monsters are going to be reliable in terms of what the Kingdom rifle might or might not do to undead gunslingers. Or to a Harrowed like Lucky Bob. We have to be careful there, old boy. I think it’s fair to say that Jenny would prefer we did not destroy her father’s eternal soul.”

“Yeah, well, there’s that…”

They reloaded and did an ammunition check.

“I have fourteen shells left,” said Looks Away, closing the shotgun breech with a snap. “You?”

Grey had removed all of the rounds from his belt and put them in his one remaining trouser pocket. They were much easier to grab. “Thirty-one rounds.”

In any normal circumstance it was a lot of ammunition. This was a million miles from normal.

Above them the roof of the cavern was free of any undead flying reptiles, while the bats had once more gone back to hide in the mushroom forest. Even the insects, large and small, seemed to shun them. Grey could almost understand it. Even though they had done what was necessary to survive an impossible attack, using that gun made him feel strangely unclean. Like it was emblematic of a line in the sand that they should not have crossed.

Grey said none of this to Looks Away. After all, it was his mentor, Doctor Saint, who had created the gun, and the cannon. It was Looks Away who had used that other strange weapon to stop the reanimated army from slaughtering the town. In both cases those weapons had been the deciding factor in keeping them alive.

So why did it feel wrong? Why did Grey feel dirty?

He shook his head, unable to sort it through.

Looks Away took a sip from his canteen and handed it over. Grey sipped and gave it back.

“You know, I grew up way back east in Philadelphia,” said Grey. “I wanted to be a lawyer or someone like that. I was good in school, always read, got top grades.”

“So—?”

“So what the fuck am I doing in this hellhole?”

They both laughed. The sound echoed badly and it hushed them again.

With infinite care they left the scene of carnage and searched for a path through the cavern. Even though neither of them possessed certain knowledge that this cavern actually led to the necromancer’s residence, each of them felt it in their guts. If Veronica was right and Chesterfield had betrayed Deray, inviting dire retaliation, then the tunnel that brought the attackers — however it was made — had to come from somewhere.

But where? And how far was it? Grey had no way of knowing.

Just as he had no way of knowing what new horrors stood between them and the answers.

Looks Away carried the lantern and walked bent over, frowning at the ground, making soft grunting noises to himself to confirm or reject possible trails. Then he found it. On the far side of a cracked ridge of lichen-covered rock there was a distinctive line of glistening slime. They both agreed it was the same as the trail of whatever had bored through the tunnel into the basement of Chesterfield’s mansion. Moving as quickly as caution allowed, they followed the trail down the slope and along the night-dark sea.

The sand crunched softly under their feet, and in places felt dangerously soft, as if some trap or pocket might open up beneath them. Tendrils of colorless seaweed lay rotting on the shores, moved now and again by desultory waves. The bioluminescence in the seawater made the waves glimmer, but not in any way Grey thought was attractive. The water itself seemed to be rank with the odor of decay.

The light from their lantern and the glow from the fungi allowed them to see much more of the underground waters than they wanted to. Dark shapes moved in the waves, crashing through the rollers, pale and unnatural. Misshapen bodies that did not look like fish rolled to show mottled gray-white bellies. Fins as tall as the sails of fishing boats sliced along and once they saw a huge mouth rise up and swallow a foundering creature that was as large as a circus elephant. Then a moment later a tentacle thicker than a maple tree rose dripping from the water, wrapped around the monstrous shark, and dragged it thrashing down into the depths. Blood as black as oil bubbled up.

“This must be what Hell looks like,” gasped Grey, recoiling from the chunks of half-eaten meat that washed up onto the sand.

“I’ve heard Hell is much pleasanter,” quipped Looks Away, though there was no humor in his expression.

Their words sounded too loud, even with the thunder of the surf, and they fell into a desperate hush as they hurried along.

The beach stretched on and on, and the slimy trail ran along it, smearing the sand to a glistening paste. It occurred to Grey that anything massive and powerful enough to have gnawed a tunnel from this cavern all the way into the cellars of Chesterfield’s house would be far beyond their skill to defeat. Maybe even beyond the soul-destroying power of the Kingdom rifle. Following the creature was one thing, encountering it would be something to avoid at all costs.

A cry made them stop and look up and there, circling at the very edge of the upsweep of light was a pterosaur. Another joined it. Then another.

“They’re getting over their fear,” said Grey, laying his hand on the butt of his pistol.

“I’m bloody well not,” Looks Away assured him.

The pteranodons continued to circle but did not, at least for the moment, draw closer. Grey wanted to take that as a hopeful sign, but he found that nothing down here reassured him.

The trail abruptly swerved away from the midnight sea and they followed it through an archway of smoky quartz spears, some of which were as massive as redwoods. The spears were interlaced like the steepled fingers of some sleeping giant and they crept beneath them. Grey nudged Looks Away to direct his attention to the deep cracks and fissures in some of the overhead shafts, and from the look of sick fear on his friend’s face, he wished he hadn’t. They quickened their pace.

Then they came to a break in the ground. A chasm a dozen feet across that dropped down into inky blackness far beyond the reach of their lantern. The cleft seemed to run on for miles in either direction, and yet the slimy trail continued on the other side as if the thing they pursued was so massive that it could thrust itself across the divide without tumbling into it.

“That’s done it then,” said Looks Away. “We should have brought a coil of rope.”

“We should have brought an army and some dynamite, too,” said Grey. “But we didn’t. We either solve it or go back.”

The cry of a hungry pteranodon behind them seemed to cancel out the latter suggestion.

The alternative was daunting. There was a broken crystal shaft above them that leaned out over the chasm. The jagged point reached almost to the other side, but fell short by six feet. It was not a tremendous jump in regular circumstances, but to manage it here they would have to climb onto the shaft and run along it to get up enough momentum to carry them over.

When Grey explained this to Looks Away, the Sioux stared at him with frank astonishment. “You have clearly gone ’round the bend, haven’t? You’re barking mad.”

“It’s not the ideal plan…,” Grey admitted.

“It’s suicide.”

“Then we go back and deal with those birds.”

“Pteranodons are not birds.”

“Who cares? Pick a card here.”

The choice, however, was made for them.

A scraping sound made them spin and look back the way they’d come, and there, filling the mouth of the tunnel of quartz spears, was a gigantic cat. It had massive shoulders and huge paws from which claws like baling hooks dug into the ground. Massive oversized fangs dropped like daggers from its upper jaw, and embedded in its chest was a large black stone laced with white. And everywhere were signs of advanced decay. Rotting flesh, open sores, bloated pustules, and masses of wriggling maggots. It reeked of its own decay.

The saber-toothed cat wrinkled its face in a silent snarl of pure animal hate, and yet its eyes held a darker and more complex expression than should be evident in a simple beast. A cruel, calculating intelligence glimmered in those eyes.

They were trapped with a bottomless pit behind them and a monster before them.

Looks Away whipped the Kingdom rifle around, staring with wild eyes that were filled with the dangerous lights of panic. He uttered a cry of sick fear and began raising it to his shoulder, but Grey leaped at him and pushed it down.

“Stop, you damn fool!” he snapped. “You’ll bring the whole ceiling down on us.”

Above and around them the crystal spears — clear or blue or smoky gray — were shot through with cracks.

The wild look in Looks Away’s eyes turned to panic. “We have to do something.”

“Yes we damn well do,” Grey said, “but I don’t want to die trying. Give me your shotgun.”

The undead saber-toothed cat took another step forward. Its eyes narrowed as it read the scene. It crept forward, one deliberate step at a time.

“Give me the damn shotgun,” said Grey in a fierce whisper.

Looks Away clutched the Kingdom rifle and sought to raise it against the downward force of Grey’s restraining hand. “Let me go, damn your eyes, I can kill it—.”

“Sure, and kill us both at the same time,” said Grey. “Snap out of it, man. We need a bang — just not the voice of goddamn thunder.”

With a dubious nod, Looks Away drew the weapon and extended it stock-first to Grey. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Me, too,” said Grey quietly.

The big cat kept coming. It was now only forty feet away, but as it approached one section of the tunnel, it paused. There were two crystal spikes laid like crossed swords above the narrow walkway. Grey and Looks Away had needed to crouch to pass beneath them, but the cat was so massive that it would have to crawl on its belly to pass beneath. The narrow bottleneck was the only reason it hadn’t charged them, and Grey knew it even if his companion was too frightened to grasp it.

Even with the shotgun Grey doubted he could drop so monstrous a creature with a couple of shots. And driving it mad with the pain of buckshot did not seem like the smartest of plans in so tight a spot.

“Looks,” snapped Grey, “see that arch? You’re the rock expert, tell me the best place to hit it.”

Looks Away began to argue, but then he abruptly seemed to come back to himself. He studied the fragile crystalline structure and nodded.

The living-dead cat flattened out and began crawling through the arch. Grey could swear there was a dark humor interwoven with the hunger and hatred on its face. It knew it was going to win. The very fact of its obvious confidence made Grey tremble.

“Talk to me,” he said in a quiet voice that was at odds with every screaming nerve in his body and mind.

“There,” said Looks Away, pointing, only to immediately change his mind and point to a different spot. “No—there!”

“Make up your damn mind…”

“That spot. See that dark smudge inside? It’s a fracture point…”

The cat was more than halfway through. Already the muscles in its haunches were bunching in anticipation of slaughter.

God, the thing was huge. It was as massive as a full-grown bull and infinitely more dangerous.

“There,” insisted Looks Away, stabbing the air with his finger. “Shoot — shoot!”

With a scream louder than thunder, the saber-toothed cat began its killing leap. And Grey took three fast steps forward and fired. One barrel. Then the other.

Boom.

Boom.

The concentrated buckshot hit the flaw in the smoky quartz pillar.

Chunks of crystal exploded outward, scything through the air. The whole structure of the arch groaned and shook. The cat screeched in fury and fear. A shudder rippled along the corridor of spears. The echo of the shots made stalactites shiver on the ceiling and snap off to drop down like falling daggers. They struck the archway, cracking every single spike of crystal so that the whole world seemed to splinter and shatter. The crossed-sword arch trembled.

Trembled.

The cat squirmed forward to free itself before the crushing weight of a hundred tons smashed it to pulp. Deep cracks spider-webbed out from the impact points, and smaller patterns of lace spread from where the pellets on the edges of the spray had struck. The air was filled with a sound like breaking ice.

The huge cat froze, its massive muscles quivering with tension.

Looks Away and Grey stood stock-still. Smoke curled from the barrels of the shotgun. They all looked up at the archway. The cracks ran on and on, deepening, widening, and the predatory gleam in the saber-toothed monster’s eyes quickly changed to a fatalistic dread. Even the animal knew what was happening.

Snapping sounds filled the air all around them.

Grey felt a triumphant smile begin to take shape on his mouth.

“Kiss my ass, you overgrown house cat,” mocked Looks Away as a massive chunk of the crystal leaned out and fell. It smashed down onto the causeway and shattered into ten thousand glittering pieces.

But that was it.

The rumble stopped.

Just like that.

The cracks seemed to freeze as if they had always been there. The crystal arch did not fall.

The last trembles shivered through the crystal tunnel and then there was a deep silence that was heavy with all of the wrong implications. The saber-toothed cat looked up at the archway, then down at the broken chunks, then up at the two men who still crouched, hiding behind the now empty shotgun. The fatalistic gloom on the cat’s face vanished and triumph blossomed on its hideous face as the grins drained from Looks Away and Grey like blood from a corpse.

Looks Away said, “Oh…”

And Grey said, “… shit.”

The monster cat bared its teeth and sprang.

Chapter Sixty-One

They both wanted to scream.

They did not have the time for it.

Looks Away flung the lantern at the monster as it broke free of the tight crossed-swords arch. It struck hard and burning oil splashed the thing. Instead of stopping the beast, the fire and pain galvanized it. The monstrous cat threw its massive weight against the structure and they could see its muscles rolling and bunching as it simply tore itself from the narrow passageway.

Grey thrust the shotgun back to Looks Away and drew his Colt and snapped off three quick shots. The fire hit the impact points, but that did not seem to matter. The creature was not even slowed. It was what Grey feared. A handgun was not an elephant rifle and this brute had to have bones as thick as marble slabs.

For a fraction of a second he thought about the Kingdom rifle but he was still convinced that it would bring down the whole ceiling. Grey did not want to die down here, buried under ten billion tons of rock.

However there were few choices left and none of them good. All of them were insane. Most were suicidal. Only one offered a chance. A slim, knife edge of a chance. It was something only a complete madman would consider.

So he spun, grabbed Looks Away’s shoulder, and shoved him toward one of the broken spears of rock that leaned out over the chasm.

“Go!” he bellowed. “It’s our only chance.”

Looks Away staggered to the edge, then half turned. “You’re insane!”

Before Grey could answer, the cat screamed again. And they saw it break free of the tunnel. The creature’s head and shoulders were ablaze, the hairs withering to black wires, the skin retracting to pull its lips back into a permanent scream.

Perhaps the fire would ultimately kill or cripple it, but the beast was determined to take them first. It came forward, slowly at first and then, driven by rage and pain, faster and faster.

“Go — go — go!” shouted Grey as he gave Looks Away another shove.

The Sioux leaped up onto the broken shaft, staggered for a moment with flailing arms, steadied himself and ran.

The cat jumped into the air, slashing toward them with the massive claws on its front paws.

Grey flung himself sideways. As he fell, he saw Looks Away race along the length of the spear and then leap high into the air, his legs continuing to pump as if he was trying to run across the air itself. His arms reached toward the far side of the chasm, fingers clawing. He hit the edge and bounced backward.

And down.

Down, down, down.

Into darkness.

“Nooooo!” cried Grey, but then the cat swiped at him and he had to dive away to save his face from being torn away. He landed hard and rolled badly, then frog-hopped forward to evade a second slash. The whole back of his vest tore away and he felt the tips of two claws trace burning lines across the skin over his kidneys.

He flattened out and rolled sideways like a log until he was under the broken crystal shaft that leaned over the drop-off. The cat reached after him, slashing at the ground, shredding the last of Grey’s vest and tearing away most of his shirt. But Grey kept rolling until he was on the other side of the spear. Then he was up onto fingers and toes, running like a dog for ten feet until he could get to his feet again.

He looked wildly around, but there was still no other choice. The only possible way out was the same suicidal route that had claimed Looks Away. Either he got to the other side of the chasm, or he died right there and then.

The cat was still trying to find him under the spear and Grey knew that as soon as it realized that its prey was not there, the cat would simply climb over and that would be it.

Grey steeled himself and scrambled up the side of the spike. The smell of burning cat filled his nostrils. He marveled that it could still come after him even as the burning oil was consuming its flesh.

Then he remembered the chunk of ghost rock imbedded in its skin. Could that be driving it? Was that why there was such a dangerous intelligence in the monster’s eyes? Grey was certain of it.

He got to his feet and, as Looks Away had only seconds ago, he had to fight for balance. The top was not a flat walkway but rather a lumpy, cracked and distressingly rounded surface. The cat either heard or sensed that its prey was about to escape. It pulled sharply back from the spear and raised its burning head. For a moment it stared through flames right into Grey’s eyes.

That’s when he heard the sound. Not the scream of the cat, but a scream nonetheless.

It was the ghost rock.

It was burning.

And the demons within it were screaming.

Screaming.

Screaming.

The sound tore at Grey’s mind.

Then he was running along the shaft. His path to safety ended too soon. With a howl of desperation, Grey Torrance flung himself toward the far side of hope. And, like Looks Away had before him, Grey hit the edge of the cliff. And, like Looks Away, he fell.

Down.

Into darkness.

Chapter Sixty-Two

He slid down the side of the chasm.

Down and down. He scrabbled for purchase and found none. He kicked at the sheer wall and could find not the slightest toehold. Grey went down deeper and deeper, and in his panic he thought he could hear a chorus of ghostly voices crying his name. Even as he fell he knew that this was no fantasy. He knew that the ghosts who followed him saw him about to escape into an ignoble death in a forgotten hole, and they cried out in joy.

Was Annabelle’s voice among them? Would she — even she — delight at the thought of his bones lying here at the bottom of the Maze for all eternity? Could his betrayal of her have truly turned her to such cruelty? The mind is quick and ruthless at such times. Grey thought he could see her there, at the top of the chasm, leaning over to stare down at him as he fell.

And he did fall.

Down, down, down.

But…

But not…

But not faster and faster.

His gunbelt and hands scraped down the side of the cleft as he dropped, but he felt his body slowing.

Slowing.

Then the toes of his boot met a new angle of the wall and he felt his legs moving outward. Then his whole body bent backward until it was his belly and then his chest that was pressed hardest against the wall. He slowed more and more… until he stopped.

Just like that.

The world and all of its madness spun down like a windup toy that had clicked on its last cog. Grey lay facedown on a curved slope of rock. Panting, sweating. Bleeding. Nearly weeping.

Alive.

Far, far above him the screams of the living dead saber tooth were changing. He heard the hiss of frustration turn into a long wail of agony. He listened to it. He heard the demon inside the cat’s shrieks.

He heard them both die.

Or, maybe it was only the cat that died. Maybe the demon was cast back into Hell.

Grey had no idea which fate was worse. Burning to death or living to burn.

It took a long time to realize what had happened.

The chasm was not a sheer drop after all. Its sides were slopped like the inside of a bowl and the deeper he went the more the bowl curved inward.

His heart lurched as he realized that had he not leaped all the way to the edge of the bowl, then he would have plummeted straight down. Providence turned a failed escape into the only possible pathway to survival.

Grey lay there and pressed his forehead against the ground, closed his eyes, and thanked whatever gods there might be for dealing him a lucky card.

Lucky.

Looks Away.

Oh god.

“Are you dead, white man?” asked a familiar voice.

Chapter Sixty-Three

Grey rolled over. Slowly, painfully.

He saw Looks Away sitting with his back to a boulder. The bioluminescent fungi burned on the walls all around him and the eerie glow made him appear like a ghost from some ancient tale. Jagged lines of fresh blood were painted blackly against the Sioux’s skin.

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Grey.

“Not even close.”

He extended a hand and pulled Grey up as far as a hunched sitting position. It was the best they could each manage. Grey craned his neck to see if a ghost-pale face still looked down at him, but all there was at the top of the chasm was the dying flicker of fire from the burning monster. He hung his head and put his face in his palms.

“Well,” said Looks Away with weary sarcasm, “aren’t we a pair?”

“We’re alive,” said Grey.

“Oh, jolly good, then. All’s right with the world and we can skip tra-la.”

“Fuck you.”

“Well, there’s that. And a cogent argument you make.”

Grey scrubbed his face with his callused hands, and then got to his feet. His whole body trembled from exertion and injury. The slash on his hip felt like a hot poker driven all the way to the bone. His hands, toes, belly, and chest tingled with friction burns. And he doubted that, even should they escape from this hellhole, he would ever sleep soundly again.

“We have to find a way back up,” he said.

“Thank you for that shockingly obvious observation.”

Looks Away also got up, looking every bit as bad as Grey felt. They turned and studied their surroundings. The walls of the chasm rose steeply on either side, and even though there was a slope to each, it would be impossible to climb up the way they’d come down. The sides were far too smooth. No handholds, nothing to give them a chance of getting out. The bottom of the chasm was narrow but mostly flat, and it stretched away to either side of them. The left-hand path wended its way through chunks of fallen quartz and stone. The blue fungi allowed them to see everything as clearly as if a full winter moon hung over them.

“Which direction?” asked Looks Away.

“Hell if I know,” said Grey. “Pick one.”

“Well, I think we more or less came from that way,” said Looks Away, nodding to their right. “Maybe if we make our way along the bottom we’ll find a way up. Not a good plan, I grant you, but it’s—.”

“—better than no plan,” finished Grey. They took a moment to check their weapons. Grey reloaded his Colt and Looks Away slapped his pockets for more shells. And slapped and slapped.

“Oh, bugger that,” he growled as he found a ragged hole in his trousers. “I’ve lost the bleeding shells.”

They did a quick search of the debris at the bottom of the drop and only found one cartridge, but it was crushed and the buckshot spilled out as Looks Away picked it up. There were no other shells in sight. Looks Away considered the shotgun, sighed, and slid it back into its holster. “I feel like tossing this thing as far as I can, but it’s been useful and we might get lucky.”

Grey wasn’t sure what kind of luck his friend was referring to. The only other shells for the weapon were in Queenie’s saddlebags, but he made no comment. It was easier to find ammunition than it was to acquire a new gun.

“What about the doohickey?” he said, nodding to the Kingdom rifle.

After a quick examination, Looks Away nodded. “Seems sound. A trifle dented but the mechanism works and we still have a few rounds left. Let’s hope we don’t need them, what?”

“Sure,” said Grey, “let’s hope.”

“I have a bit of a concern about using it down here, though.”

“Why?”

“Well, the explosive force released when it obliterates the ghost rock in encounters is rather dramatic and we are, after all, in a cavern formed by an earthquake. I don’t know how much we can trust to the stability of the ceiling. A blast of unexpected size in the wrong part of this place could bring the roof down and bury all of us under a billion tons of rock.”

“Jesus. And now you tell me?” demanded Grey.

“Be fair, old boy. It’s not like I had any experience with this, and I’m sure Doctor Saint never tested it under these conditions.”

“So, we can’t use our best weapon, is that it?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s just that we should exercise prudence.”

Grey closed his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ, Esquire.”

With their expectations running low and their fears bubbling over, they set off along the path, but after three hundred yards of twists and turns the way became impossible. A massive tumble of granite and marble had toppled from the upper walls of the cleft and filled the entire chasm to a height of eighty or ninety feet.

“Maybe we can climb it,” said Grey, stepping back to look upward. The rocks were haphazardly stacked but there were many obvious hand- and footholds.

However Looks Away shook his head. “Not a chance, old sport. See there? And there? Those rocks are held in place by loose dirt and some quartz splinters. It’s all as fragile as a house of cards.” To emphasize his point he picked up a fist-sized rock and walked backward, guiding Grey with him by an outstretched arm. “Stand back.”

He tossed the rock to a midpoint on the pile. He didn’t throw it very hard, but the rock struck one of the crystal splinters and suddenly the whole wall began to vibrate. Chunks of broken stone ground together and a dozen boulders as big as cooking pots bounced down toward them. Both men dove for cover as the whole gully shook and grumbled. Dust belched out from between clefts in the stone. They waited until it subsided before they stood up again.

“Damn,” murmured Grey. “You’ve got a good eye.”

“For rocks, at least,” said Looks Away with a shrug. He turned away from the blocked trail and looked back the way they had come. “Well… there’s nothing for it. Come on, dear fellow, quick march.”

With that he set off down the left-hand trail. Grey followed. They reached the point where they’d fallen and Grey glanced covertly up, still looking for that pale face. Now, though, even the firelight was gone. He wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not.

The left-hand trail wormed its way through the shattered landscape for miles. Grey figured they walked two or maybe three miles down there in the fractured gully. He was exhausted and the walk seemed to be draining what little reserves he had left. There was almost nothing left in the canteen, and neither man wanted to drink from the infrequent lines of water running down through mossy cracks in the wall. The water smelled of rot and sickness.

Then, with a start, Grey realized that one of the reasons the journey seemed so tiring is that they were no longer walking along a flat bottom. The ground had begun to tilt upward. Looks Away nodded when Grey pointed this out, clearly having reached that conclusion already.

Within minutes the incline became more pronounced and within another quarter mile was rising sharply. It was slow and ponderous work to climb that hill, and they had to press their palms against the nearly smooth sides of the cliff to steady themselves and push their weary bodies upward.

Time seemed to lose all meaning.

The blue fungi grew thicker and its light intensified until it was as bright as a cloudy afternoon. Grey could have read by that glow. It made it easier to pick out their trail and to find what few handholds were available, but Grey was sure he would have preferred less light. The glow revealed one of the terrible secrets of this cavern.

The path was littered with bones. Many of them. Some were clearly ancient and had withered to dry, cracked relics; others were far too fresh for comfort and still glistened with scraps of meat and strings of tendon. Some of the bones were those of animals. Grey saw fish skeletons and the skull of a horse. They walked between the curved ribs of some vast thing that must have been as tall as a house and as long as a locomotive.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded, slapping his hand against one of the huge ribs. “I’ve seen elephants and this is ten times bigger.”

Looks Away shook his head. “I’ve seen drawings of bones like these,” he said, “but I don’t recall the name. Look, see there? That line of vertebrae? Lord above what a neck it had. And there, the skull? How delicate for so ponderous a beast.”

Grey saw where he was pointing and shook his head. “No way a brute like that had a head this small.”

But the skull lay there as if to mock him, positioned in perfect alignment to the remnants of its spine. Worse still were the marks on both skull and neck bones. Deep groves that could only have come from some savage claw. Not even the hulking saber tooth could have made cuts that deep.

Clutching their weapons, they hurried on. Then the path whipsawed through a series of switchbacks, and in the third section there were many small boulders that had tumbled down from some quake. They appeared haphazard at first, but as the men approached it became immediately obvious that this was far from the case.

“Look,” whispered Grey, “those are stairs.”

Stairs they were indeed.

Although rough-hewn and covered with moss, they were far too orderly to have been the work of anything but a deliberate hand. The steps led upward for a hundred feet and then vanished around a sharp turn.

“You’re a rock expert,” whispered Grey, bending to examine the rocks, “how old are these stairs? Is this some ancient passage, maybe cut by Spanish missionaries or—?”

“No,” said Looks Away decisively. He ran his fingers along one edge and the moss peeled off easily. “Not a bit of it. This is mostly marble and it’s cut from the living rock. See there? The chisel marks haven’t had time to completely oxidize. No, old boy, I’d say these steps are less than ten years old.”

“Ten years, eh,” mused Grey. “And how long has it been since Aleksander Deray and Nolan Chesterfield set up shop hereabouts?”

Looks Away grunted, and then grinned. “Eleven years,” he said. “Give or take.”

“Give or take.”

They straightened and Grey put a booted foot on the bottom step. “Don’t know if you’re a gambling man, Looks, but I’ll give you twenty-to-one odds that I know who lives at the top of these steps.”

“That, my friend, is what I believe they call a sucker’s bet.”

“It is.”

They smiled at each other.

“Shall we pay our respects?” asked the Sioux.

“I believe we should,” agreed Grey. “It would be the neighborly thing to do.”

Without a further word they began climbing the stairs.