Ghostwalkers

Chapter Sixty-Nine

They met no resistance in the house.

No gunmen, no foreign soldiers. No ghosts. No dinosaurs.

Nothing.

Everyone and everything was dead.

They climbed the stairs and paused briefly at the place where Veronica had died. Her blood was still there, pooled, drying but not dry. Looks Away bent and touched two fingers into the center of the pool, then used them to draw parallel lines on his cheeks.

“War paint?” asked Grey.

The Sioux straightened and wiped his fingers on his trousers. “Call it a promise.”

Grey didn’t ask what that meant. He knew.

They shared a nod and moved on.

Before they left the house they paused in the treasure room. They exchanged a brief, wordless look as they began stuffing their pockets.

While they were loading it, Looks Away said, “I wonder why they left all this here. I mean, they took the time to wipe Chesterfield out, why not plunder his treasure trove?”

Grey shrugged. “Why hurry? As far as Deray knows this is all here safe and sound, ready for when he needs it. Or maybe he’s going to have his troops haul it out of here after his foreign guests have left. Might not be the sort of thing he wants to let them see. Either way, I don’t think Deray frets all that much about anyone from Paradise Falls taking it.”

Looks Away sucked a tooth as he weighed a bar of gold in his hand. “I wish we could scarper with all of it and leave something clever and obscene written on the wall.”

“Yeah, well I forgot to pack an entire wagon train in my saddlebag.”

“Pity.”

They stole as much as they could carry.

When they finally stepped out into the fresh air they were shocked to see that it was nighttime. The sun was down and the moon rode naked across the sky.

“Must be nearly three in the morning,” said Grey. “Can you find our way back in the dark?”

Looks Away snorted and they went to find their horses. They had to feed and water them first, and both animals stamped in irritation at having been abandoned for so long.

“Stop complaining,” Grey said to Picky. “Let’s all be happy we came back at all.”

They mounted and rode off.

Dawn found them with miles still to go. While Looks Away could find the path, navigating it in the dark was another matter. Very often they had to walk single file, leading the nervous horses through the landscape torn by the Great Quake. Finally, as the red eye of morning began peering suspiciously at them over the eastern mountains, they saw the road that led through the last of the town’s working farms. Paradise Falls was a tiny smudge in the heat shimmer on the horizon.

They mounted and began riding again.

As they did, Looks Away kept glancing at Grey.

“What?” Grey asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing, old chap,” said Looks Away. “For the last two miles you’ve done nothing but frown, nod to yourself, and grunt. If you’re having so thorough a conversation with yourself, then please invite me in.”

“Oh… yeah… I’ve been thinking about our boy Deray. I guess there are a few things that sort of bother me.”

“A few things about Deray that bother you,” echoed Looks Away. “Imagine that. And, pray tell me what in particular?”

“Well… for one thing, I’m not sure if I buy that whole business about helping those generals start wars.”

“Why not? Deray has a reputation as a weapons merchant.”

“Right, I get that part, but he’s going about it in a strange way,” said Grey. “It’s a little too…” He fished for the word. “Obvious.”

“Obvious? How so?”

“Looking at him, at the way he acts, it’s like he sees himself as something more than a guy who peddles guns.”

“He is.”

“No, you’re missing my point. You saw how he was treating those generals? They weren’t just customers. You don’t put on shows like that for people you’ve already sold your wares to.” Grey fished for some beef jerky from his saddlebag and shared it with Looks Away. “Deray held himself above them. Like he was something bigger and more important than any general. Like it was expected of those generals to hang on his every word. Like it was expected that they would cheer him. I never met one, but I imagine that’s how a king would act.”

“A king? Interesting.”

“You don’t see it?”

“Yes,” said Looks Away slowly, “I think I’m beginning to. But what of it? Deray is a famous megalomaniac.”

“A what?”

“Someone who thinks too bloody highly of himself.”

Grey grunted. “Tell you the truth, friend, I’m not so sure this is a matter of someone putting on airs. I think he is setting himself up as an actual king.”

“What? Because he has a kingdom of dinosaurs and undead soldiers? That’s hardly—.”

“No, because I think he’s planning on doing a lot more than helping to start a bunch of wars. Those hopper cars filled with bodies gave me a very bad idea. He’s building an army of the living dead and—.”

“We already know that.”

But Grey shook his head. “Let me finish. His army is going to be made up of the dead. Of people who were killed in wars. Right now it’s the wars here in America. But what happens when he starts raising everybody’s dead?”

The Sioux stared at him in shocked silence.

Grey nodded. “Yeah. So he sells the kinds of weapons that will allow those generals to wage wholesale slaughter. Those tanks and such? They’ll kill hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.”

“And then Aleksander Deray will come along and raise all those dead…” Looks Away’s voice was hollow.

“He’ll have the biggest army anyone’s ever seen,” said Grey. “And with those metal giants like Samson as backup — or maybe to keep his own troops in line… he’ll be able to conquer the whole damn world.”

“Dear God in heaven I hope you’re wrong about this.”

Grey nodded. He hoped he was wrong, too. But he was one hundred percent certain that he was right.

Chapter Seventy

Neither of them knew they were in danger until one of the arms of a nearby saguaro cactus suddenly tore off and went spinning into the dust.

They stared at it for a blank moment, and then like a returning memory, they heard the distant echo of the shot.

“Down!” cried Grey as he flattened out along Picky’s withers. A split second later a black eye seemed to open in the barrel of the big cactus. The report followed a full two second later. A bug gun, Grey guessed. Heavy caliber, fired from a long distance. Two hundred yards? Three?

Whoever was firing knew his business.

Grey kicked his horse’s flanks and held on tight as the mare sprang forward, all weariness forgotten, as she ran flat out in the opposite direction. Queenie was right there with her, like they were the only two runners racing toward a finish line. Looks Away had slid sideways on his mount, hanging down like a saddle blanket, the way Grey had seen other Indian riders do, using the horse’s body as a shield. Around them — and even ahead of them — bullets pocked the cacti or buzzed past them like angry bees.

There was a rise ahead of them and although for a split second they would be silhouetted against the sky, beyond it the land itself would offer safety. They raced for it and nose-to-nose the horses leaped over the crest and plunged down the other side. Bullets chipped the ridge and showered them with dirt.

Grey slid immediately out of the saddle, slid his Winchester from its scabbard, and crawled up the slope. Looks Away was right behind him except that he had the Kingdom rifle. The distance was too great for the shotgun to be of any use. Handguns would be equally useless.

“Who’s hunting us?” asked Looks Away. “Can you see anyone?”

Grey squinted along the barrel, but all he could see was desert, rock, and cactus.

“I can’t see a damned thing.”

The gunfire had stopped as soon as they cleared the ridge, now the vista was silent and still as the sluggish desert wind allowed.

“What do you figure,” asked Looks Away, “a Sharps fifty?”

“Or something. Big slugs from the way it hit the cactus.”

“Luckily he wasn’t a better shot.”

Grey began to nod, but stopped. There was something wrong about that statement.

Those shots had all come close. Very close. Some had missed them by inches. What were the odds of someone firing six or eight shots at ultra-long range and grouping the shots within an area no wider than twenty feet but missing two men and two horses?

There was luck, sure, though Grey didn’t think today was anyone’s idea of a lucky day for them. Even poor marksmanship had some odds in its favor.

“I don’t think he’s trying to hit us,” said Grey.

A bullet hit the dirt between them, chasing them back down the slope.

“Jesus!” gasped Looks Away as he spat dirt from his mouth. “Not trying? Not bloody trying?”

Grey shook his head. “No… he’s good, that one. He could have taken our heads off right there.”

“He seems to be giving it the old club try…”

“No,” insisted Grey. “Which makes me wonder why he’s missing.”

They considered it, then without comment they split apart and crawled up to peer over different sections of the ridge, far from where they had been.

A bullet struck the sand five inches from Looks Away’s ear.

A moment later a second one shattered a creosote bush next to Grey.

“Bloody bastard,” complained Looks Away. When there were no more shots, he wormed his way over to Grey. “I think I know why he’s doing this.”

“Yeah,” said Grey. “Me, too. He wants to keep us here.”

“Indeed. But for what?”

Neither of them really wanted an answer.

They got one anyway.

It began as a rumble, like distant thunder. Both men glanced at the sky, but the dawn was cloudless. There weren’t even birds up there.

Another rumble. This time they could feel it in their bones.

Beneath them the sand began to shiver. Grey placed his palm against the ground and heard it. A groan from within the earth. A moan of protest as the land itself began to move.

“Earthquake!” he cried.

But Looks Away shook his head and placed his ear to the ground, eyes closed, listening to the noise. The rumbling was continuous now.

And it was growing. Grey could see the plants and cacti around them trembling. Lizards flashed through the dry grass. A tarantula hurried past, then stopped and hunkered down, clearly too frightened and confused to move further. Grey could understand. He wanted to run.

But how do you outrun the earth itself?

“Look!” gasped his companion, pointing to where a crack suddenly gaped open, belching dust and gas into the air.

“What the hell is that?”

“I don’t know,” yelled Looks Away as he staggered to his feet and began backing away. Grey flinched, expecting his friend to take a bullet, but there were no new shots.

However, the land itself seemed to be assaulting them. The crack yawned wider, sending tear lines running in all directions. A Joshua tree broke from its roots with a sound like a pistol shot, and then the trunk fell over sideways. A line of saguaro cactus leaped into the air as the ground exploded beneath them. More gas shot upward in scalding jets, withering the cacti even as they flew through the air. The horses reared and screamed, but they were too frightened to know where to run.

“We have to get out of here before this whole thing—,” Looks Away’s words were cut off as something exploded upward from beneath the earth. It shot a mass of dirt, sand, and pulverized rock a hundred feet into the air, and then it emerged.

It.

That was the only way Grey’s mind could label the thing.

Massive.

Bigger than anything Grey had ever seen. A body so vast that it would have burst the walls of a barn, and as pale as dead skin. Wrinkled, segmented, impossible. It rose like some obscene finger from the hole in the ground. Yard by yard it rose above the desert floor. Glistening and featureless, like some foul intestine of one of the ancient Greek Titans.

Grey and Looks Away stood there in its shadow, showered by falling debris, mouths agape, watching with eyes unable to blink, as the monster rose and rose and rose. And then, at the apex of its rise, it trembled with an odd and disturbing delicacy, as if its massive flesh was sensitive to even the hesitant touches of the desert breeze. It wavered there, indomitable against the morning sky, taller than the mast of the tallest ship, with some foul-smelling gelatinous goo running in thick lines from pores that open and closed all along its body.

Now they knew what had burrowed those mighty holes through the bedrock. Now they knew what had left a trail of slime along the shores of that forgotten ocean. Now they knew, without doubt, that the earth held within its bowels greater horrors than man, even in the depths of opium dreams, had ever conjured. Here was Leviathan. Here was the finger of Satan.

It was a worm.

Towering a hundred feet into the desert air, with God only knew how much of its foul length still buried in the soil.

A worm.

Blind and colorless. A thousand tons of glistening flesh.

And it had come for them.

Chapter Seventy-One

There was nowhere to run, no way to escape so monstrous a thing.

Grey felt his heart sink down in his chest, falling to some low place where he could no longer feel its warmth. Several times over the last few days he had felt that he stood on the edge of life and felt himself leaning into the abyss. Each time he had been able to do something to pull himself back from that brink.

Now…?

The worm trembled and shook, and he could see its muscles twitching and contracting as it fought the pull of gravity.

And yet… it did not fall.

It could have crushed them more easily and thoroughly than Samson had smashed Deray’s prisoners. It could have wiped them off the face of the world and never felt their deaths. They were fleas, it was a giant.

And yet it still did not fall.

“What is this?” demanded Grey. “Is this another of your prehistoric animals?”

The Sioux shook his head. “I… don’t know what this is. I’ve never even heard of a monster like this. Maybe it’s something Deray conjured with his black magic.”

“I don’t see a ghost rock implant…”

“No. Perhaps he controls it through sorcery. This is beyond me, Grey.”

“The rifle,” hissed Grey, whispering as if the thing could hear and understand. “The Kingdom rifle!..”

The Sioux nodded numbly and brought the weapon up. They had one round left, but he hesitated, apparently mesmerized by the brute. Or, worried Grey, simply overwhelmed by it. They had seen so much today. Perhaps for Looks Away it was too much.

“It’s too…,” murmured Looks Away, “… it’s too… too…”

Despite the clear hopelessness on his face, Looks Away raised the rifle. There was no clear target. No chest in which a heart might beat. No torso where lungs or liver might fall to a blast from the Kingdom rifle. There was only flesh. Acres of it, it seemed.

“Shoot and then we’ll run,” murmured Grey, beginning to edge backward. Sweat ran down his face and gathered inside his clothes. “Shoot and…”

“And nothing, son,” said a voice.

Both men whirled to see a figure standing on the crest of the ridge. He was tall, with narrow hips and broad shoulders, and he held a Sharps .50 in his pale hands, the barrel pointed at Grey’s chest. He smiled at them, and though the morning light twinkled in his eyes, there was nothing at all comforting in that grin.

“You boys are going to drop the hardware,” he said. “Nice and slow. And then we’re all going to go back downstairs to have ourselves a nice chat with my master, Lord Deray.”

Looks Away licked his lips. “You don’t have to do this…”

The morning light sparkled on the ghost rock embedded in the man’s sternum.

“Yeah,” said Lucky Bob Pearl as he shifted the rifle to point at the Sioux’s face, “I kind of think I do.”

Chapter Seventy-Two

Lucky Bob’s smile was as false as an alligator’s, and there was the Devil himself laughing in his eyes. Grey wondered how that worked. If Jenny’s dad was the kind of man everyone said he was, then did this mean that the manitou inside of him had complete control? That seemed at odds with the facts, because Lucky Bob clearly knew Looks Away, just as he had known his daughter even though he’d tried to kill her. How could the demon speak and even to a degree act like the man who had once owned that flesh, and still be able to perpetrate such evil?

“Listen to me, Bob,” said Looks Away desperately, “you don’t have to do anything.”

“I always figured you for a smart fellow, Looksie,” said Lucky Bob. “But I reckon you plum don’t understand the way the world works.”

“I know more than you think.”

“Why? ‘Cause you were down in the dark and you think you saw something?”

“For a start, yes,” said Looks Away. “You’re working with Deray and—.”

“Hey now, you’ll show some respect or I’ll blow a hole in you big enough to stand in. It’s Lord Deray, you red heathen bastard.”

“A racial invective? From you?” Looks Away seemed almost amused. “My, you have changed.”

“More than you can understand.”

“Oh? You think I don’t know what you are? Or what’s inside of you? Or has the manitou made you stupid?”

The smile on Lucky Bob’s face flickered. Clearly he did not expect that kind of response. He adjusted his hands on his rifle and there was a nervous flush on his pale face.

Interesting, thought Grey. If Lucky Bob could blush then he still had blood in his veins. That squared with what Brother Joe had told them. He wasn’t just a walking corpse after all. An idea, perhaps the seed of a plan, began to take root in his mind.

Grey still had his Winchester in his hand and he knew he was a good shot. He was more than half sure he could dodge left and fire from the hip with a reasonable chance of killing this monster with a head shot. And if all he did was wound him with a body shot, the skill Grey had learned on a dozen battlefields insured that he could work the lever and put a second round through the Harrowed’s dead face.

Could he do it, though, without getting Looks Away shot?

Maybe.

Could he do it, knowing that it would break Jenny’s heart?

Not a chance in hell.

Behind him globs of slime dropped from the giant worm and splashed heavily onto the torn desert floor.

“Enough jibber-jabber,” said Lucky Bob. “You boys drop your guns and then we’ll all go down to the Lord of the Dark.”

“Whoa,” said Looks Away, raising one hand, palm outward, “let’s pause on that for a moment. ‘Lord of the Dark’? Seriously? We’re going to call your master the Lord of the effing Dark? Isn’t that a bit, oh I don’t know…”

“Theatrical?” supplied Grey.

“Silly,” decided Looks Away. “I mean… come on, Bob. I worked in the shallowest possible end of the theater when I was with the Wild West Show, and even we couldn’t have come up with something as downright absurd as—.”

Lucky Bob fired a shot and put a bullet into the dirt exactly between Looks Away’s feet. The Sioux jumped a foot in the air and nearly dropped the Kingdom rifle.

And that’s when Grey made his move. He dropped into a low squat, pivoted, buried the stock against his hip, and fired. He aimed with all of his skill and he aimed with his heart. The bullet took Lucky Bob in the stomach. Not the head. From that distance the shot was like getting hit by a mule. The Harrowed staggered backward, and he reflexively threw up his hands. The Sharps spun upward, pinwheeled, and then struck the ground barrel-first, burying itself six inches into the torn sand. Lucky Bob tried to stagger sideways to catch his balance, but instead he collapsed backward.

Above them, the worm roared.

Roared.

Grey had not seen a mouth on it. He had never imagined that a worm had the capacity for sound. But this was a monster from somewhere deep in the earth where nothing natural lives. It had a mouth high, high up on its head, and as the Harrowed fell it let loose with a howl so loud that blood burst from Grey’s ears and nose. Lightning crackled along its trembling length. The whole landscape shuddered.

Grey was already running.

Running.

Looks Away was already outpacing him, and they were both chasing their panic-stricken horses.

Great fissures split on the desert floor as more and more of the monstrous worm smashed upward from below. The echo of that terrible scream seemed to chase them like a storm wind. They ran beyond the confines of its shadow, but immediately the shadows seemed to flow after them. Grey knew that the thing was coming.

“Picky — goddamn it wait!” he bellowed. If he could get onto the damn horse then maybe he could outrun the creature.

Ripples of force whipped along beneath the ground, lifting both men, throwing them like unimportant debris. They landed hard. Grey’s rifle was jerked from his hands on impact, but Looks Away somehow kept hold of the Kingdom rifle.

“Shoot the fucking thing!” bellowed Grey, and the Sioux glanced down at the weapon he carried as though he was surprised to see it. He scrambled to his feet, turned, raised the rifle, and fired.

There was no need to aim. The worm was everywhere. It was so vast that it seemed to blot out the rising sun. The gun bucked in Looks Away’s hand as the compressed gas fired the deadly round. Their last round.

The bullet struck the rippling flesh and exploded, bursting outward with each tiny fragment of processed ghost road. When exposed to the air, the pellets detonated, tearing great masses of the alien flesh apart and sending it flying through the air in clouds of bloody mist. The blast tore a gaping hole in the monster and tons of gore and shredded flesh flopped out onto the ground. The monster let loose another of its dreadful shrieks and the sky itself seemed ready to rip itself apart.

Grey and Looks Away stood transfixed, watching as the monster thrashed and twisted in agony. They braced themselves for the earthquake that would surely follow as it fell.

They waited, too shocked to move. Needing this abomination to die, willing it to die.

The tremors went on and on…

And then gradually subsided.

The godlike worm writhed before them, its pale flesh pulsing with pain, oozing with red ichor. But it did not fall. It did not die, confirming that it had not been one of Deray’s undead slaves. There was no ghost rock in it to maximize the effect of the Kingdom rifle, and despite the damage that single round had inflicted, it was not going to be enough. As they watched, the wound filled with the clear lime that ran from its pores; and though this substance seemed able to burn through the very bones of the earth, it filled the wound and sealed it as surely as a bandage. The blood stopped flowing. The wound was now plugged.

The worm lived.

And it was furious.

It shuddered with rage that rippled up through the ground as if emanating from the mind of Deray himself. As he thought that, Grey realized that it was probably the truth. Grey knew that Looks Away had been right — the monster was connected to the necromancer by some dark sorcery, and it came hunting for them, herding them, working with the Harrowed to trap them. Now it was wounded. Now it had felt the power of the Kingdom rifle — a weapon that could possibly rival the infernal devices of Deray himself. That knowledge, that dread of opposition, was probably echoing down into the caverns. Deray had sent this thing, commanded it, and now it shared terrible and dangerous knowledge with him.

Grey knew this as surely as if it had been written in the sky by a flaming hand.

Using the Kingdom rifle had been a mistake. Very likely the last mistake they would ever make.

On the ground, wounded and possibly dying, Lucky Bob Pearl was laughing. Blood flecked his lips and misted the air, but he was laughing. “Now you boys have gone and done it,” he wheezed. “Now you’ve pissed in your own graves.”

The worm burst the ground apart as it rose and rose. Grey felt his mind tumbling, fracturing, disassembling. He was unable to process the size of this thing. It was taller than any building he had ever seen. Taller than the redwoods up north. Grey backed away from it, but with each step he could feel his sanity fragment. The worm seemed to draw back, to tense as if ready to smash itself down and shatter the world. There, inside its shadow once more, the two men stopped trying to run away from something that could not be escaped. The monster blotted out the sun and darkened the sky. All they could hear was the lunatic laughter of Lucky Bob Pearl as the worm from the heart of the earth… exploded.

Chapter Seventy-Three

Grey felt himself falling.

Except that he was falling the wrong way. His body was in the air, moving fast, propelled by a force like a hurricane wind. However the landscape was not rushing up to meet him. It blew past him. At the same moment that his dazed brain was able to grasp that he was flying sideways, hurled by the explosion of the giant worm, gravity played her card. His lateral flight turned into an arc. And then he was falling. The ground seemed too far away for anything but a crippling impact.

He closed his eyes.

He hit the ground. But there was still so much force pushing him sideways that he hit at an angle and went slipping across the desert floor like a skipping stone. When his body finally came to rest, he was half buried in a nest of loose sand and dirt, twigs, pinecones, cactus, and sagebrush. The tumble had twisted him around so that he was looking back the way he’d come. He saw the worm.

What was left of the worm. Forty feet of it still protruded rudely from the ground. The rest, though, had been torn apart. Massive chunks of it were scattered across the landscape. Smaller red pieces continued to fall for a long time, and a thin red rain fell across everything as the last of the monster’s blood fell down to paint the place where it had died.

Grey could not understand what had just happened. The shot Looks Away fired had done damage, but not enough. What, then, could have done this? It made no sense to his shocked and battered brain.

Then he saw someone. A man. A stranger. A black man of about sixty, with a grizzled white goatee and sideburns. He was short, round but not fat, dressed in brown tweed despite the heat, wearing a tan top hat and leather gloves. Instead of spectacles, the man wore a leather band set with wide, flat lenses that were tinted the same eerie blue as the lightning Grey had seen when he first met Looks Away. The man approached him in a series of quick, nervous steps. When he was ten feet away, he asked the very same question Looks Away had asked him back in Nevada.

“Have I killed you, white man?”

Grey tried to say something. Anything. He felt the moment needed some kind of commentary, something to anchor it to common sense and ordinary understanding.

What he said was, “Uhhh.”

Then he felt himself falling again. Into darkness this time.

He never felt himself land.

Chapter Seventy-Four

He was awake before he opened his eyes.

Grey accepted that he had been unconscious. Not just asleep, but totally out of it. Why, and for how long, were mysteries. Where he currently was provided another mystery.

In a bed, though. He could feel a mattress under him. A pillow supporting his aching head. A sheet over him.

He couldn’t feel his clothes.

I’m naked, he thought, and even though he knew that this was an accurate assessment, it felt strange to think it. Then he realized that he was focusing on that more than on the fact that he was alive.

Alive.

He didn’t want to move until he was sure he was somewhere safe. Once, when he had been briefly captured by Confederate soldiers in the last days of the war, he had feigned being unconscious while he assessed his situation. He did that now.

If he was naked then he did not have his weapons.

On the other hand he was in a bed rather than in shackles.

He focused his senses on his chest, searching for any ache or strangeness that might indicate that he had been taken by Deray and turned into a mindless walking corpse. Or one of the more conscious but no less dead Harrowed. But there was nothing that hinted at the presence of a ghost rock implant.

Which meant that he was alive and he was himself. So where was he?

There were no sounds. But there were… smells. He realized with a start that he was smelling coffee. Biscuits. And bacon.

Grey opened his eyes just a fraction and immediately knew that he was not alone at all.

She sat there.

Lovely. Her blond hair pinned up, a smoke-colored shawl around her shoulders, her eyes filled with questions and concern. And in the slanting light of late afternoon, she looked so much like that other woman. The lost one. The one he’d failed.

Like Annabelle.

She even sat like her, the same posture and angle. The same depth of thought in those beautiful blue eyes. The impression was so powerful, so intense that Grey began to doubt whether it was her. Had everything else been a dream? The years on the road, the battles, the endless lonely nights? Was meeting Looks Away part of that dream? Was Paradise Falls and Deray and all of this madness nothing more than the product of some fevered dream? Grey had been helpless once in Annabelle’s house. Recovering from a bullet wound to the chest, he had lingered in a fevered haze for weeks while she tended him. He remembered that morning, waking up after the fever broke, seeing her sitting there, exactly as she was now.

As Jenny Pearl was.

If it was Jenny at all.

If anything was real at all.

He tried to pull himself back from the edge of dreams, of fantasies. He made himself say the right name.

He said, “Jenny…?”

But her face clouded with doubt, and like an after-echo Grey realized that, despite all of his determination, he’d spoken the wrong name.

He’d said, “Annabelle…”

He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Then he felt soft lips kiss his closed eyelids. Then his forehead. Then his lips. “No,” she breathed, “don’t be sorry.”

“I—.”

“Did you love her?” asked Jenny.

Grey was not a man much given to tears but he felt them burn his eyes beneath his lids. He wanted to turn away from Jenny, to push her back, to flee this moment. He could feel her breath on his skin. It was strangely hot.

“Tell me,” she asked, her voice soft but insistent. “Did you love your Annabelle?”

He winced. “Yes,” he whispered. “I loved her and… I…”

There was a sharp knock on the door, and Jenny jerked backward. Grey opened his eyes and turned as Looks Away and the black man entered without invitation. Looks Away had a bandage wrapped around his forehead and another around his right arm. He was dressed in clean clothes, though. More of Lucky Bob’s castoffs.

“Ah,” he said brightly, “you’re alive. Jolly good.”

He hooked a wooden chair with his foot and dragged it over, sat down and waved the older man to a rocker in the corner. Grey nearly whipped the sheet away and stood up, but remembered that he was naked. Instead he pushed himself to a sitting position as Jenny stood up and went over to stand by the foot of the bed. The Sioux seemed to be excited to the point of enthusiasm. He leaned his forearms on his knees and grinned. “Now we have a real chance at this, eh, old boy?”

“Chance at what? What are you talking about?” demanded Grey.

The smile flickered. “Why, at fighting Deray, what else?”

“What are you talking about? We barely got out of there with our heads attached. If you hadn’t shot that worm we’d be dead.”

“Me? Ha! You saw what happened when I shot the beast. It barely twitched.”

“Then…?”

“The victory,” said Looks Away, “belongs to the good doctor.”

He gestured to the older man. Which is when Grey’s bruised brain put two and two together. He pointed at the stranger in the tweed suit.

“You’re Doctor Saint!”

The man smiled and bowed his head. “I am indeed. Percival Saint at your service, sir.”

Saint had a deep, cultured voice that still carried soft undertones of the deep South of his youth. He leaned forward and offered his hand, which Grey shook.

“I hear you’ve had quite the series of adventures, Mr. Torrance,” said Saint. “Looks has told me the whole story, and anything he might have overlooked was filled in by Brother Joe and Miss Pearl. I’m sorry that you’ve become embroiled in our little war out here in what’s left of California. That said, I’m sure we’re all glad to have a capable gunhand on our side.”

“Thanks, and I’m glad they filled you in,” said Grey, “but how about you folks filling me in on what the hell’s going on? The last thing I remember is that worm exploding. If Looks didn’t kill it, who did? Was that you? If so, how?”

Saint nodded and leaned back. He fished a pipe from his jacket pocket and filled the bowl with tobacco, then leaned forward as Looks Away struck a match and held it out for him. The scientist puffed for a few moments, taking his time before launching into his tale.

“Looks Away told you that I have been doing some consulting for the Confederate States of America.”

“Yes.”

“You look surprised.”

Grey shrugged. “You escaped from the South.”

“It was a different South back then,” said Saint. “And I was a child. The world, as has been noted by philosophers, has moved on since then. America is no longer the emerging, young nation it was when I was a lad. Now it is a fractured and troubled place. There are grave threats to this great land. Some from without — because there are many countries who would love to conquer the New World, England among them. Germany is on the rise. Russia would like to build a new global Empire. And we need to be cautious of Spain ever since they began building their new Conquistador Fleet with ghost rock engines.” He shook his head. “The Great Quake may have changed America, but as a result ghost rock is changing the world. We are poised on the brink of the greatest industrial revolution since the invention of steel. Maybe even since the invention of the wheel.” He shook his head. “You look skeptical…”

“Actually I’m not. I saw enough down in those caverns to make a believer out of me,” said Grey. “What bothers me is what we can do about it. Deray has an army. We don’t.”

Saint’s reply was a smile. He had heavily lidded eyes and they were useful, it seemed to Grey, for the scientist to keep his thoughts to himself. He was a hard man to read.

Grey turned to Looks Away. “Tell me about—,” he began, then snapped his mouth shut. He had almost asked what had happened to Lucky Bob Pearl. But, Jenny was right there. Instead, Grey said, “Tell me about the worm.”

“That was all Doctor Saint,” said Looks Away. “Look, I have to back up a little. After we left town yesterday morning, we missed Doctor Saint’s return by less than two hours.”

“Unfortunate timing,” said Saint, nodding.

“I wanted to ride after you,” said Jenny. “But—.”

“But I convinced her to stay here in town,” said Saint. “Once she explained what was happening I realized that we needed to step up our preparations for what was inevitably going to happen. She told me about the undead attacking the town.”

“Did she tell you about the flying machine?” asked Grey.

Jenny blinked. “Flying…?”

Grey explained what he’d seen, though his description was sparse. Looks Away nodded, and added, “I think it might have had a gas-envelope and motors to drive it. I only saw it for a few moments, but that was my impression. The body was like a frigate, but it had a balloon instead of sails.”

“A frigate of the clouds,” mused Saint. “How elegant.”

“It scared the hell out of me,” said Grey. “It’s unnatural.”

“Unnatural? No. Only primitive minds regard science as something to be feared. Surely, Mr. Torrance, you are not so dim as that. This is an age of invention. What you saw was a lighter-than-airship. There’s no magic to it. There are several already in use around the world. Lovely things. Like whales in the air.”

“Not sure ‘lovely’ is a word I’d paint on the side of what I saw,” said Grey.

“I expect not,” agreed Saint. “If I were to encounter one over a battlefield, I suppose I would use a completely different set of adjectives. However my comment stands. The designs for such machines are elegant. It’s something that has been in trial-and-error stages for centuries. Da Vinci, bless his heart, designed one, although it was unworkable. Nice thought, though. I have my own sketches somewhere…”

“Doctor,” said Looks Away gently.

“Ah, yes, yes, my boy,” said Saint with a grandfatherly chuckle. “The airship you saw was very likely the command vessel used by Deray. From what I’ve been told, the storm seemed to accompany the attack, correct?”

Grey nodded. “It was a weird storm. Like the undead were using it as some kind of camouflage.”

“Very likely they were. There have been a number of very interesting papers on using the properties of ghost rock to seed the clouds, and there is sufficient energetic discharge to initiate lightning.” He stopped and smiled self-consciously. “I do go on, don’t I?”

“Short version of that,” said Grey, “is that Deray can control storms, raise the dead, and fly through the air.”

“Well… that’s oversimplified, but…”

“But yes,” said Jenny.

“Yes,” agreed Looks Away.

“And he has those mechanical carriages. Tanks, he calls them,” said Grey. “And rifles a lot like your Kingdom guns.”

“That’s very disturbing,” murmured Doctor Saint. “Making the weapons is not complicated, not for a scientist. Mass-producing the ammunition for it… well, that’s the thing. Either Deray has found a limitless supply of ghost rock, or his research is driving his designs in the same direction as what I came up with.”

The room fell into silence.

Then Jenny said, “And that metal man? Samson?”

“Yes,” said Saint, “please tell me about that again. Describe it in as much detail as possible.”

They did, with Grey and Looks Away taking turns to fill in what little they knew. Saint did not look happy.

“That is most troubling. A mechanical soldier powered by the rock would be a formidable thing.”

“You don’t say,” murmured Grey.

“No, what I mean is that building such a thing is difficult enough. Many engineers and scientists have tried. The Wasatch Railroad has been using mechanical workers for years so they can keep pace with the vertical expansion of cities like New York and Chicago. With land acreage at a premium, everyone knows that we have to build up in order to grow. Steelworkers who are themselves made of steel would be invaluable. Metal men make for a new kind of slave labor force that never complain and no one will ever go to war to free them. Why should they? They’re steam and iron and gears. But, Grey, those machines are crude and even clumsy in comparison to this. Samson is beyond anything I’ve ever even heard about. Something like that could not possibly have been built simply for labor.”

“No argument. I don’t think Deray is trying to build affordable office space,” said Grey sourly. “Samson is a killer.”

“I agree,” said Saint, “and that’s what is so troubling. One of the problems we’ve faced when considering either mechanical armor or independently operating machine men is the speed. They are simply not fast enough to be of use in combat because a field piece — a howitzer, say — could take them down.”

“Samson was faster than goddamn lightning,” said Grey.

“Right. That is the key. Deray has discovered a way to make his machines move at great speed. That is a truly, truly frightening thought.” Saint puffed his pipe and for a moment he did nothing more than stare at the smoke.

Grey said, “You still haven’t told me about the worm.”

“Ah,” said Looks Away with a grin. “Remember that Kingdom cannon I showed you at the doctor’s shop?”

“Oh,” said Grey. “How’d you—?”

“It took twenty men and a lot of sweat to put that son of a whore on the back of my best wagon,” said Jenny. “And then it took us all damn night to drive out there. We got halfway to Chesterfield’s spread by dawn.”

“What made you risk it?” asked Grey, alarmed. “That road is treacherous.”

“This young lady,” said Saint, “has eyes like a cat. She can see better in the dark than I ever could. She found paths that a goat wouldn’t take. I must admit that I was sweating lead ingots all the way.”

Jenny gave him a small enigmatic smile and glanced down at her hand for a moment. “I’m a lot like my pa,” she said. “He was always a good night hunter, too.”

“You brought the Kingdom cannon out there, and you shot the worm?”

“Yes,” said Saint, “and yes.”

“And not before time, either,” said Looks Away. “I thought we’d bloody well had it.”

“We should have had it,” said Grey. “We’ve been coasting on borrowed luck since the attack on the town.”

Again Jenny looked down at her hands. Again there was that small half-smile. Grey wondered what it meant.

“If we have the Kingdom cannon,” said Grey after giving it all some thought, “doesn’t that mean we stand a chance? Even against Samson?”

“A chance?” mused Doctor Saint slowly, tasting that concept. “A small chance, perhaps. The Kingdom cannon is a prototype. I have enough ghost rock for maybe five rounds — and even then it’s likely the internal works will overheat after the second or third shot. It’s also an unwieldy thing. We would need to direct Samson into its direct line of fire.”

“Damn. What about the Kingdom rifle? That thing was pretty handy.”

“Yes, and the fact that it did not overheat is encouraging,” said Saint. “It’s never been fired that many times before.”

“Not to bring us all down,” said Looks Away, “but there was a considerable span of time between most of its uses. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d fired shot upon shot.”

“Damn,” repeated Grey. “How many of those guns do you have?”

“Including the one you ‘borrowed’?” asked Saint.

“Yes.”

“Two. The other needs some work, but I think I can get it operational in under an hour.”

“Good, that’s better than—.

“That is not the issue,” said Saint. “I have a number of other weapons in various stages of assembly and function. Even a handgun that you might find quite comfortable.”

“Still sounds good to me.”

“However we don’t have enough ammunition,” said Saint. “More precisely, I don’t have enough ghost rock to make the guns work.”

For the first time since he’d awakened, Grey smiled. “Tell me, Doc,” he said quietly, “have you looked in my saddlebag?”

Chapter Seventy-Five

Jenny took Saint outside to where Picky and Queenie were being groomed. Grey said he’d join them as soon as he was dressed. He asked Looks Away to stay behind for a moment.

“There are some big gaps in my memory,” Grey admitted as he pulled on the clothes Jenny had laid out for him. “And there’s also some gaps in your side of the story.”

“Ah,” said Looks Away, nodding. “You’re wondering why I didn’t mention Lucky Bob.”

“No, I pretty much get why you didn’t mention him. What I want to know is what happened to him?”

But the Sioux shook his head. “You were knocked out,” he said. “I wasn’t. After Doctor Saint killed the worm, I went looking for Lucky Bob. I was hoping to find him alive but injured. I thought it might be useful for us to interrogate one of the more powerful undead. Or, maybe drag him back to see if Brother Joe could work some kind of white man religious mojo on him. Exorcise his demons, so to speak.”

“And—?”

“And he was gone. I found blood but no body.”

Grey began buttoning his shirt. “Shit.”

“I know. If Brother Joe is correct, then Lucky Bob’s body was possessed at the point of death. The body is apparently able to heal itself.”

Grey shook his head. “This is all so damn complicated. A week ago dead was dead, now there’s all kinds of different death? Corpses that try to eat you. Demons stealing bodies. Why can’t the world be the world again?”

The Sioux’s face was sad. “Believe me, old chap, I dearly wish we could roll back the clock to the way things were. You’d like to roll it back a week. My people would like to roll it back four hundred years.”

“Ouch,” said Grey, wincing as if actually punched. Looks Away spread his hands.

“However the world is the world, old fellow,” he said. “If it’s moved on, then surely we need to dig in with our spurs and ride to catch up.”

“A cowboy metaphor,” said Grey. “Nice.”

“Apt, though.”

“I guess.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his boots. They had been brushed, but there were lingering stains on them. The blood of monsters. He paused, holding the second boot between his fingers and letting it dangle. “I should tell Jenny about her dad.”

“It’ll hurt her. He seems to have embraced his new nature. Maybe all that was Lucky Bob is gone now and only the manitou remains. Either way…”

“I know, but it doesn’t feel right to lie to her. Even lying by omission.”

Looks Away cocked his head and appraised Grey. “You’re a strange man, my friend.”

Grey said nothing.

“Down in the cavern, Veronica said some things…”

“I know,” said Grey as he pulled on the second boot. He stood up. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

But Looks Away shifted to stand in front of the door. “I rather think the time is past to be coy. If we have to accept that we’re in a world where demons and monsters are a fact of life, then I suppose we need to be open to other possibilities. Prophecies come to mind. Mircalla and then Veronica. What is it exactly that they are talking about?”

Grey sighed and turned away. “It’s nothing. Ghost stories and bullshit. Let it go.”

“Really?” Looks Away said, stretching the word out. “A vampire-witch and a ghost take the time to make cryptic pronouncements about you and I’m supposed to dismiss it out of hand? Sorry, old chap, but we’ve come too far together for that to be possible anymore. The woman I loved was killed. The woman you seem to be falling for was very nearly killed. We’re preparing to go into battle against a necromancer who can raise the dead and arm them with the world’s most advanced weaponry. You — or perhaps your ‘destiny’—seems to be tied to all this. So, no, I will not let it go. Bollocks to that. There’s not one chance in ten trillion that I am going to let it go.”

“We don’t have time for—.”

The Sioux scientist leaned back against the closed door. “Make time.”

Grey sighed and sat back down. For nearly a full minute he said nothing, but instead stared mutely at his callused hands, watching his fingers knot and unknot. Finally he sighed out the ball of tension that had formed in his chest.

“It was the Battle of Ballard Creek. No, don’t worry, you won’t have heard of it. No one has. It wasn’t what historians would call an ‘important’ battle. It wasn’t even an important massacre.” Grey shook his head. “Except to me. It’s real damn important to me. You see I was leading a platoon of Union soldiers on a reconnaissance mission in Mississippi. We’d had intelligence reports that Confederate troops were building some kind of super cannon. It was supposed to be able to fire shells twice as far as anything we had in the north. The brass in Washington were afraid that it was something that could change the course of the war. My platoon was one of a dozen that were sent to find the testing ground.”

“Ah. I heard those rumors, too. It was a lie, as I understand.”

“Sure. It was a deliberate leak. The CSA intelligence division leaked a dozen different versions of the story and then monitored who reacted and how. It was all a pretty sophisticated plan to identify double-agents in their own network and to ferret out our spies. They put a lot of scalps on the walls with it, too.”

“So, what was Ballard Creek?”

“We were following one of the leads, but because of some local flooding we took a different route than the one I’d been ordered to take. That meant that we slipped past the ambush that was waiting for us without ever knowing we were stepping out of the trap.”

“Lucky break,” said Looks Away.

Grey gave a sour grunt. “That’s what we all thought. The Rebs knew they’d missed one of the teams — my team — and they put a lot of men in the field looking for us. My commanding officer managed to get word to me and told me to get my platoon the hell out of there. Easier said than done, though. The wood and swamps were alive with search parties. So, I decided it was safer to go to ground. By that point in the war there were a lot of abandoned and burned out farms. We found one way back in the bayous and we moved in. We were very careful to hide all traces. Wiped out our footprints with leafy branches, ate everything cold so there was no cooking smoke. We did it all the right way. We hunkered down and waited. And waited. I sent scouts out every couple of days. Two came back, two didn’t. When our supplies started getting low, I decided to see if I could finagle something. We were all in civilian clothes, and I can do as good a New Orleans’ accent as you’d want to hear. So I went riding to a local town to buy some supplies. My men had enough food for two weeks, and I hoped to be back with a wagonload of supplies in ten days at the most. I wore an eye patch and kept one arm in a sling, and I was able to spin a good story about being with one of the CSA divisions that had been nearly wiped out a few years back. It was convincing enough because there are a lot of wounded soldiers around and I fit right in.” He paused and sighed. “And that’s when things started going too well. I met a widow woman, a beautiful young lady who was running the general store in a small town near Ballard Creek. I had to play my role, so I acted the part of a battle-weary officer. All courtly manners. Understand, I needed to win her confidence because I wanted to buy supplies in bulk, and I couldn’t risk too many questions. She was such a lovely person. Gentle and beautiful and sad. Her father and two brothers had been killed in battle. Her husband had died at Manassas, and their only child, a little girl, had died of a fever. She was all alone in the world. Her name was Annabelle Sampson.”

“Ah. What happened?”

“Ah, what do you think happened? We became close. We, um…”

“You fell in love with her?”

Grey sighed. “I don’t think I realized until then how lonely I was. There had been girls here and there, but there was never time for anything that mattered. Nothing deep. And she’d lost so much…”

“I’m not judging you, Grey. I can’t think of a more perfect formula for love. Loss and hurt, loneliness and an uncertain future. That’s fertile ground for passion.”

“It went deeper than passion, Looks. I loved her. Really. Like they talk about in books. You can mock but it was real.”

Looks Away’s eyes were filled with ghosts. “I will never mock love, my friend. I may be many things, but a fool is not one of them.”

“Thanks for that,” said Grey.

“How did you lose her?”

“I lost her because I’m a goddamn fool,” admitted Grey. “I stayed in town for every one of the ten days that I told my men it would take me to get the supplies and get back. On the eighth night with Annabelle I told her the truth. By then we were already living together. It was like that. Fast for both of us, but right for both of us.”

Looks Away nodded.

“I expected her to be shocked, but she confessed that she knew it almost from the start. She said that there were little things. That was pretty damned disturbing, as you might expect, but Annabelle said that she was sure no one else knew or even suspected. Even so, it brought me to my senses. I realized that I was wasting time in that town when I had hungry soldiers waiting on me to get back. So that night we packed up her wagon and I set out at first light. I promised to come back for her as soon as I’d gotten my men out of the area. I swore to her that I’d be back.”

Out in the yard he heard a dog barking. It was so normal a sound for a day and a place that would never be normal again.

“It all went wrong from there,” said Grey. “I was still two miles from the abandoned farmhouse when I saw the smoke and heard the gunshots.”

“God.”

“I had my own horse trailing the wagon, and I left the supplies and rode hard for the farm. When I got there, though, the place was on fire and there had to be two hundred Confederate soldiers in the woods. My men were putting up a fight, but they had no chance. They even had a white flag hung out of the front window. A sheet tied to a musket. They were trying to surrender.”

“Were they taken?”

“No,” said Grey, “they were slaughtered. The soldiers kept firing and firing. I wanted to help them, but there were so many of them. I could hear my men screaming inside the house. Screaming and begging and praying to God. I heard them calling my name, too. Shouting it out and damning me. If I’d gotten back sooner I might have saved them. We might have gotten out and gotten away. Instead, I watched them die. I watched from some coward’s hole in the ground and saw those soldiers drag the last of my men out and cut them to pieces. They heaped the bodies in the yard and some of the soldiers pissed on them. They didn’t even bury the dead. They left them all to rot. And it’s all my fault, because I didn’t get back in time.”

“No,” said Looks Away. “If you’d gotten back sooner you’d have died with them.”

“You don’t know that. They were my men, damn it. They counted on me, relied on me. Instead of bringing them back the supplies they needed, I was dallying with a woman. I let what I wanted be more important than what they needed. That makes me a disgrace as an officer and a failure as a man. Don’t try to tell me I’m wrong.”

Silence washed back and forth between them.

“What about the woman?” asked Looks Away after a time. “What about Annabelle?”

Grey had a hard time answering that. “I… I… ah… God.”

Looks Away came over and sat down on the bed next to him. He placed his hand on Grey’s back. “She died?”

Grey nodded. “The people in town… they figured it out. With Union soldiers hiding out in the bayou and a stranger in town to buy supplies… they figured it out. I thought I was being so clever, but I was just a clumsy, arrogant fool.”

“What happened?”

“They came for her the next day. They dragged her out of her house. A dozen men.” He wiped at his eyes. “You know what they did. You know what men do.”

They sat together as the sunlight burned through the windows and threw their shadows on the wall.

“I found her after. After…” Grey sniffed and hung his head. “Since then I’ve felt them. Following me. Hunting me.”

“Who? The soldiers?”

“No — my soldiers. My men. And… Annabelle.”

“Following you?”

“Haunting me. That’s why I left. That’s why I keep moving. They’re always there on my backtrail. At first I thought it was just me being crazy, that I’d lost my mind when I found her that day. But then we met Mircalla.”

“And Veronica.”

“And Veronica.”

“I read enough books about spirits and hauntings since then,” said Grey. “I’m being followed by what they call ‘vengeance ghosts.’ They want revenge for what I did to them.”

“Dear lord,” breathed Looks Away. “But, wait, that’s not all Veronica’s spirit said to you, old chap. She said that ‘not all who walk in shadows are evil.’ That ‘not all of the lonely spirits of the dead wish you harm.’”

“Don’t ask me what she meant by that,” said Grey bitterly. “I know that I’m doomed and probably damned. If I wasn’t such a coward I’ve had stopped and let them catch up to me.”

“You’re no coward, Grey.”

“Really? Tell that to Annabelle and my men.”

“You could be wrong about why they’re following you.”

“I’m not.” Grey stood up. “Come on, Jenny and Doctor Saint are waiting for us. We have a war to fight.”

“You don’t have to fight,” said Looks Away, glancing up at him. “You’ve done your part. You saved lives here in town. You saved Jenny a couple of times. Let that be enough.”

“Meaning what?”

“If you’re afraid of ghosts, old boy, then bugger off. Ride away. Put half a world between you and the dead. Go.”

Grey picked up his gunbelt and strapped it on. “No,” he said heavily. “I’m done running.”

“But—.”

“A man can only be afraid for so long,” said Grey. “A man can only be ashamed so much and then he hits a point. I’m there. If it’s my destiny to die and let my ghosts drag me down to hell, then so be it. If it helps them, if that’s what will give them rest, then okay. I want them to rest. I can’t be the cause of their pain anymore.”

He crossed to the door and stood with his hand on the knob, then turned to Looks Away.

“We probably can’t win this fight,” he said quietly. “You know that, right?”

Looks Away sighed and nodded.

“But I promise you this… I won’t die easy and I won’t die alone. If we’re all going to hell, then let’s take as many of these bastards with us as possible.”

The Sioux stood up. “Just remember that Deray is mine.”

Grey smiled. “No promises.”

“As long as he dies,” said Looks Away.

“As long as he dies,” agreed Grey.

They shook hands and went out to prepare for war.

Chapter Seventy-Six

They all met in the barn Percival Saint used for a lab.

Grey was surprised to find that Brother Joe had joined Jenny and Saint, but not surprised to find that the monk was haranguing them about the possibility of violence.

“We need to find another way,” implored the monk.

Doctor Saint wore a kindly smile and he patted Brother Joe’s shoulder in a tolerant way. “I appreciate and even respect your compassion, my friend. I admire you for it, and believe me when I tell you that if there was any other way to resolve this, I would be the first to volunteer to lead a peace delegation. But Lord Deray is not a reasonable person. He is not offering or asking for terms. He is a conqueror. He is very possibly a madman. And he is, by any practical definition of the word, evil.”

“Even so, we must practice tolerance and—.”

“And what, padre?” asked Grey as he and Looks Away walked over to where the others stood around a big table. “And martyrdom? Sorry, but as noble as that seems when saints do it, none of us here are saints. And I don’t recall a single case, even in the Bible, where martyrdom stopped a war from happening. Can’t recall when it saved innocent lives.”

“Jesus Christ gave his life for—.”

“Let me stop you right there, padre,” said Grey. “You can preach about turning the other cheek until you’re blue in the face, but in this instance you are not preaching to the choir. We’re going to war. We’re here in this room to talk about going to war. We are going to talk about how we’re going to try our absolute damndest to kill Aleksander Deray. That’s what we’re going to do. If you don’t want to hear that conversation, there’s the door. If you want to help us, then by all means go and pray. We could use the help, although at the risk of getting another black mark on my soul, I got to tell you that I haven’t seen much of what you’d call divine protection. Not feeling the love of God right now. So, either help us or hush up.”

If Grey had slapped the monk he could not have shut him up more completely or put a deeper hurt into the man’s eyes. Brother Joe backed away from Grey as if he was a leper, but the monk lingered at the doorway and drew the sign of the cross in the air between them. Whether it was a blessing or if he was warding off the darkness inside Grey was up for interpretation. The monk turned and banged the door shut behind him.

Grey turned to the others. “Anyone want to fry my grits for being too hard on him?”

“He’s a good man,” said Jenny, “but I was about a half step away from punching his lights out.”

Saint nodded. “I quite like the fellow. Always have. But…” He shrugged and spread his hands. “We don’t share the same views on what you might call a cosmological level.”

“And I’m a red heathen,” said Looks Away dryly. “He’s been trying in vain to save my soul for years.”

Grey stepped up to the table. It was covered with several machines, some of which he recognized as guns. Two Kingdom rifles and parts that looked like they might be assembled into a third. Near them was a pair of devices that were about the same weight and general shape as his Colt, but like the Kingdom guns, these weapons were made from a blend of metals — steel and silver, copper and bronze. The grips were the same smoky quartz they’d seen in quantity down in the cavern. The cylinder was encased in a metal shell that was studded with tiny garnets.

“Those look interesting,” said Grey. “What are they?”

“Those,” said Looks Away, “are Lazarus pistols.”

“Ah,” said Grey, bending over to peer at them. The weapons were beautifully made, with golden tracery along the sides and barrel.

“Pick one up,” suggested Saint. “Feel the weight.”

Grey did and immediately grunted in surprise. “It’s light. I expected it to be heavier than a regular gun.”

“The frame is made from a special alloy I developed with Mr. Nobel. Forty percent lighter than steel but eighty-two percent stronger. Dreadfully expensive, though, which makes it impractical as a building material. Ah well.”

Grey moved the gun from hand to hand, then rolled the trigger guard around his finger. He generally did not do tricks with handguns, but he wanted to get a feel for the balance. The gun was a marvel. He removed his Colt and placed it on the table, then tried the Lazarus pistol in its place. It fit very well. It flowed as he moved it between his hands and then in and out of his holster. With the reduced weight he found he could draw much faster. He nodded, reversed the gun in his hand, and offered it handle first to Saint, but the scientist shook his head.

“You’re the gunhand, Mr. Torrance. For now I think we’re better served with it in your possession. Just a loan, mind you, I’ll want it back.”

Grey almost made a joke about Saint having to pry it from his cold, dead fingers, but that was too close to a prophecy. He merely nodded.

“Ammunition?”

“Ah,” said Saint, “that’s where I think Brother Joe’s providence may actually have smiled on us. The ghost rock you brought back from Mr. Chesterfield’s house was of excellent quality. It’s already been processed, which makes it far more pure than anything I’ve dug up myself. Given time, I can make several hundred rounds for the Lazarus pistols and perhaps two dozen for the Kingdom rifles.”

“That’s not a lot if we’re about to have a war,” said Jenny.

“It’s what we have,” said Saint. “And it uses about one-eighth of the ghost rock these gentlemen brought back. Would that they had left the gold and platinum behind and brought only the rock… but, oh well.”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” said Looks Away. “We wanted to have something to use to convince the townsfolk that it was time to pull up stakes.”

Saint shrugged that away. “Too late now anyway,” he said.

“What about the rest of the ghost rock?” asked Grey. “Can’t you make more bullets out of that?”

“I could, of course, but I have other plans for it,” said the scientist. “I’ll need a considerable amount of it for the Kingdom cannon. And if there’s any left, I want to see about getting some of my other little toys ready for our guests.”

“What other toys?” asked Jenny.

“Well,” said Saint, “I have prototypes of plasma mines, seismic webs, the Celestial Choirbox, a few rattlesnake bombs and—.”

“Stop,” said Grey. “None of that makes sense.”

“What are all those things?” asked Jenny.

“Oh, I’m sure it wouldn’t make sense to you, my dear. It’s all very technical.” The little scientist chuckled. He seemed amused by how confused he was making them, and was clearly content to be the smartest man in the room. Even Looks Away seemed mildly at sea. Grey found that he did not entirely like Doctor Saint. Not that he thought the man was corrupt or untrustworthy — just a bit of a pompous ass.

Jenny reached for the second Lazarus pistol but Saint moved to block her hand. “Oh, don’t touch that. It’s not really a woman’s weapon.”

Grey expected Jenny to fry him for that comment, but instead she pushed his hand aside and picked up the pistol. She weighed it in her hand. “I’ll bet I could do pretty well with this.”

Saint looked alarmed, but Looks Away was amused. “I have no doubts at all.”

Jenny held it with two hands and at arm’s length, sighting along the barrel, then turned slowly, aiming at various targets in the room. When the barrel swung toward the scientist, Saint uttered a small cry and scuttled sideways. “Question is what should I shoot?”

“Miss Pearl, please,” insisted Saint. “That’s too much gun for a—.”

“For a woman?” Jenny finished, then she repeated, almost move for move, the tricky gun handling Grey had done a minute ago. The weapon seemed to melt into liquid metal as it moved through her hands. Saint stared in frank astonishment. Jenny stopped the gun on a dime, the handle pointed toward the scientist. “You’re right, Doc, maybe it’s way too much gun for a woman.”

“Okay, Jenny,” said Grey mildly, taking the pistol from her and laying it on the table, “he gets the point.”

“Dear lord,” said Saint as he plucked a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. “I had no idea. How did you…? I mean, where did you…?”

“My father taught me,” Jenny said darkly. “He believed that a woman should know how to defend herself.”

“You don’t say,” murmured Looks Away dryly. He had clearly enjoyed the demonstration. He cleared his throat and turned to Grey. “You were closer than me when the worm blew up. You were unconscious almost the whole day. Are you sure you’re up for a fight?”

“Yes, I damn well am,” said Grey. “But there are four of us. Fancy weapons or not, that’s not a lot to throw at Deray.”

“We have more than that,” said Looks Away. He removed a piece of paper from his pocket and spread it out on the table. “While you were, um, recovering, I asked dear Mrs. O’Malley to make some useful lists. We have sixty-two people able and willing to fight. That includes everyone we could pull in from the farms. Just about everyone has a gun and ammunition.”

“I’ve seen some of those guns. Squirrel rifles and muzzle loaders.”

“My pa had a bunch of guns from back when we had a real farm,” said Jenny. “Seven good rifles and a dozen handguns.”

“And the weapons we took from the undead,” said Looks Away. “Another twenty-six guns — handguns and long-arms. A few of the farmers have shotguns.”

“Doc,” said Grey, “will your gadgets be enough to make up the difference?”

Saint pursed his lips. “I don’t know. If I had another week, maybe two… I could do better.”

“We may not have that time,” said Grey.

“We don’t,” said Jenny with certainty. When Grey glanced up he saw that her expression had changed again. The cocksure smile was gone and in its place was a far more serious expression. It was not the first time he’d seen that shift. Something about it worried him. It made him wonder if these events were pushing her over some kind of mental edge. When she spoke, even her voice was slightly different. Softer. “Deray is coming,” she said. “Make no mistake. He is coming for us all.”

All three men looked at her, and from the expressions on their faces it was clear they were as startled as he was by her change of mood.

“What… makes you so sure, Jenny?” asked Looks Away.

Her response was delayed as if she didn’t hear at first. Then she walked over to the window and looked out into the empty barnyard. “He’s coming,” she repeated.

Then as if a shadow that had been blocking the sun moved off to another part of her internal sky, she straightened and turned, and her devilish smile was back. “And let the bastard come, too.”

No one spoke for a moment. Looks Away cleared his throat.

Grey nodded and walked over to study the big map on the wall. Every detail of the landscape was carefully marked in Saint’s careful hand.

“We are substantially short on manpower, firepower, and resources,” said Doctor Saint. “If we are going to survive this, we need a plan.”

“All right,” said Grey without turning. “Let’s make one.”

“You have something in mind, old boy?” asked Looks Away.

Grey turned. “Yeah, I do. It’s risky, it’s crazy it’ll probably get us all killed, and I can guarantee you’re not going to like it.”

“Now there’s a sales pitch for you,” said the Sioux.

“Tell us,” said Jenny.

He did.

It was risky and crazy. And they didn’t like it.

But they all agreed that it was their best — and perhaps only—chance.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

They worked all through the last hours of that day and into the night. Jenny got the blacksmith and a tinker to act as apprentices to Doctor Saint, while Looks Away and Grey oversaw the building of barriers and defenses.

At one point, well after midnight, as Grey was directing men to stack flour sacks filled with sand along the road into town, Looks Away asked, “You’re sure this Deray will come to us?”

“Yeah,” said Grey. “We killed his worm.”

“That’s hardly enough. It’s unlikely he’s all that sentimental about his pets.”

“Of course not, but think about it. You think it was just coincidence that Lucky Bob and that worm were waiting for us? Deray had to have found out that we were down there. Hell, we left enough corpses behind. Those big lizard birds—.”

“Pteranodons.”

“Whatever. That cat with the big fangs.”

“Smilodon.”

“And those chicken lizards.”

“Velociraptors.”

“Looks — I swear to God you are the most pedantic son of a bitch I ever met.”

“Benefits of a classical education,” said the Sioux.

They grinned at each other.

Grey hefted another sandbag and thumped it down chest high on the barrier. “Besides, Lucky Bob may not be as dead as we’d like him to be. I kind of think he picked himself back up and scampered off to tell his master about Doctor Saint’s big ol’ cannon. So — do I think they’re coming? Sure. I’m just surprised they’re not here already.”

Everyone worked until they were ready to drop.

Grey finally staggered back to Jenny’s place in the black hour before dawn. He washed in the kitchen washtub and shambled off to find the couch. However there was no blanket or pillow. Instead there was a folded piece of paper lying on the center of the cushion. He picked it up, opened it, and read the single word written in a flowing feminine hand.

Upstairs

Grey smiled and put the note into his shirt pocket.

Then, still smiling, he climbed the stairs.

Her door was ajar and the soft yellow glow of a single candle showed him the way. He went inside very quietly.

Jenny stood with her back to him, looking out at the last of the night’s stars. The pale silver light shone through her nightgown, revealing curves and planes and ripeness.

“Jenny—?” he said quietly, but she shook her head.

“The night is almost over,” she murmured. Her voice was so soft, so distant. Cold and sad and filled with pain.

Unsure of what to do, Grey stood there, not fully inside the room.

“Grey—?” she murmured. “If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?”

“Yes,” he said immediately, and he found that he meant it even though there were things he never wanted to talk about.

“Annabelle,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you still love her?”

He closed his eyes and swallowed. “Yes.”

She nodded and turned slightly so that her profile was etched in silver fire. “You’re a good man for admitting that,” she said. “She was lucky to have you.”

“She died because I wasn’t good enough as a man.”

He thought he saw her mouth curl softly. A ghost of a ghost of a smile. Then she reached up and unfastened her gown and let it fall. It drifted like snow around her ankles.

“Jenny,” he began, “you should—.”

“No,” she said in a whisper. “No more words. I’m so cold. Make me warm.”

And he came to her and carried her to the bed. Around them the night was vast and tomorrow was a threat. But he held her close and for a while — just a while — the night and all its terrors went away.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Morning dawned cold and bright, but there were storm clouds on the horizon. To Grey it looked like the gods of war were sending a message that lacked all subtlety. The distant thunderheads were thick and bruise-colored and far above them dark birds drifted in slow circles. They might have been vultures but Grey had his doubts. They could have been pterosaurs, which meant Deray was definitely coming.

Grey stood on Jenny’s porch, watching the birds and the clouds and trying not to be afraid of what was coming. He wore two gun belts strapped low across his lean hips. His Colt was on his left side with the handle reversed so he could snatch it with a fast cross-draw; and on his right hip was the Lazarus pistol. It was fully loaded with a ten-shot barrel magazine, and extra magazines were clipped to the belt. Grey felt awkward carrying the thing because it neither looked nor felt like a real gun, but if it was anything like the Kingdom rifle, then looks were truly deceiving.

The door opened and Looks Away came out holding two steaming cups of coffee. He handed one to Grey and they stood for a moment looking out at the clouds. It was going to turn dark soon and Grey hoped they’d all live to see the bright sunshine again.

“An east wind is coming,” observed Looks Away, intruding into Grey’s morose thoughts as the Sioux nodded toward the storm. “Poetic, if a trifle obvious.”

Grey answered with a sour grunt.

“You’re certainly cheerful,” said Looks Away. “Not enough sleep?”

“We should have packed all these people up and gotten the hell out of here while we had the chance.”

“If you want to play that game, old chap, then I should have stayed in London. There’s far less ghost rock over there and, last time I checked, no living-dead dinosaurs or metal giants and only one quite foul necromancer that I know of. But, alas, I’m not in sodding England and we didn’t sodding well leave town, so…”

“Just saying,” muttered Grey.

They sipped their coffee.

“How do you think they’ll come at us?” asked Looks Away.

“He’ll have to bring his main forces across the bridge. But he has that airship, and those flying reptiles and maybe more of those worms, so he could come at us from a lot of different directions.” Grey sucked a tooth. “I’m betting it’ll be the bridge, though.”

“Betting or hoping?”

Grey shrugged.

Inside the house they heard a sound that made them both turn. It was a lovely voice lifted in song. Jenny Pearl, singing a sad old ballad.

“‘She Moved through the Fair,’” murmured the Sioux.

“Don’t know it.”

“It’s about a man whose love is murdered before their wedding, then comes to him as a ghost on what would have been their wedding night. It’s as morose a tune as any I’ve heard. You’re a sourpuss this morning, so it should suit you.”

Grey sipped the coffee and didn’t comment. Last night had been so strange. Jenny had been so passionate, so intense, but after their brief exchange of words she hadn’t spoken at all. Not even in the heat of climax, and not at all this morning. Now she sang tragic songs as the drums of war rumbled behind storm clouds.

“Hello the house!” called a voice and they turned to see Doctor Saint come hurrying up the side street. He wore another tweed suit — this one charcoal, perhaps in keeping with the mood of the day — and a top hat that looked freshly waxed and polished. Beneath his coat he had a gun belt strapped to his thick waist and the weapon in the holster was another of his odd copper-and-silver handguns, though this was a design Grey hadn’t seen the night before. Behind him was a pair of strong young lads pushing a wooden cart with a canvas tarp tied down over its bulging contents. Another pair of boys pushed a second cart, equally laden. Doctor Saint directed them to position the carts in front of the porch steps.

Grey looked past the scientist to see that most of the townsfolk were heading their way. They were grim-faced and stern, though there was as much fear in their eyes as determination. Scared as they were, they wanted to make a fight of it. This was their town and Deray had already hurt them badly. Each of them carried a weapon of some kind — firearms and axes and a variety of farm tools.

Not enough, thought Grey. It’s not going to be nearly enough.

Brother Joe was with them, his Bible clutched to his chest, eyes filled with anticipated pain. Grey set his cup on the rail and extended his hand as Saint joined him on the porch. The inventor nodded at the Lazarus pistol on Grey’s hip.

“Are you sure you’re comfortable using that, son?” he asked.

Grey shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”

“Oh dear me, yes,” agreed Looks Away, “we will certainly find that out. Deray is not coming for tea and scones.”

“Fine day for it, though,” said the scientist with unexpected cheerfulness. A cold, damp wind was blowing through the town, sweeping up dried leaves and pieces of old newspaper.

“Is it?” asked Looks Away.

“It is indeed,” said Saint. He moistened a finger and held it up, then nodded to himself. “The storm is in the east but the wind is coming in from the ocean. That’s good, my boys, that’s very good.”

“In what way, exactly?” asked Grey.

“I’m delighted that you asked.” The scientist chuckled as if this was all great fun. He turned and jogged back to the steps, crossed to one of the two carts and began untying the ropes that held the tarp in place. Grey leaned close to Looks Away.

“Does he actually have a plan, or is he just crazy as a barn owl?”

The Sioux frowned. “I’ll give you even odds either way.”

Saint called out to them as he held the corner of the tarp in one small, brown hand. When he spoke, he pitched his voice loud enough for the crowd to hear.

“You all know what’s coming,” he said. “You’ve been told about Aleksander Deray and his machines. You’ve seen the walking dead. You know that we are facing an army of considerable size and power.”

The crowd stared at him in silent anticipation. The fear was now etched far more heavily on their faces than a moment ago.

Grey murmured, “Jesus. Some opener to a rousing call to arms.”

Looks Away said, “I suppose it’s better than ‘we who are about to die salute you.’”

“Not much.”

The scientist did not hear this quiet exchange. Still smiling, he pointed to the sky above them all. “This is the modern age. We are already taking the first steps out of the darkness of the nineteenth century and into the world of wonder that is the twentieth.” He paused for effect, though Grey was certain that no one in the crowd was enthused by the march of scientific progress. “Thousands of years ago wars were fought hand to hand. Then the sword was invented, and those who wielded them triumphed over those who used clubs or fists. Then came the bow and arrow, then the crossbow, the cannon, the rifle. With each advancement in the science of warfare we see that the wise, the evolved triumph over the brutish. Not even the strongest and most skilled swordsman in the world can stand against a bullet, even if that bullet is fired from a gun in the hands of a weak man, a woman, or even a child.”

The crowd was listening now, and their eyes flicked now and again to whatever was under the tarps. Even Grey found himself interested.

“Aleksander Deray has his weapons,” continued Saint, “and I will grant you that they are formidable. In any ordinary battle he would sweep through a town like ours with impunity, with arrogance, and with certain knowledge of his superiority.”

“Wait for it,” said Looks Away, leaning forward over the rail, eyes alight.

“But what he does not know, my friends,” said Saint, “is that Paradise Falls is not his for the taking. We are not debris to be swept aside. We are not inconveniences to be disposed of. Oh no, that is not the case. I submit to you that we are not to be dismissed so readily. When Deray’s minions bring their war to us, it is war they will find. We will not fall. I tell you now that when the storm breaks upon us, Deray will find that Paradise rises!”

With that he whipped back the tarp to reveal a cargo of hundreds of brightly colored rubber balloons. Each was filled with gas, and as the tarp fell away, they stirred and lifted and rose quickly into the air. Reds and blues, greens and yellows, oranges and purples and a few that were as white as snow. They drifted upward and were caught by the freshening breeze, then scattered and blown high above the town.

The crowd gasped at first, and here and there were small cheers. But these faded as the people understood what they were seeing. The big reveal, the scientist’s secret weapon, were mere balloons.

One by one the looks of wonder changed to confusion and then to doubt. Finally they lowered their heads and glared at the scientist.

“That’s it?” cried Mrs. O’Malley. “That’s our secret weapon? Land’s sakes, Doctor Saint, you’re as mad as the moon. I do believe you’ve killed us all.”

The crowd became angry and hard words filled the air.

“Oh boy,” said Grey, and when he glanced at his friend he saw only confusion and embarrassment on the Sioux’s face.

“No! No, wait,” yelled Saint, holding his hands up, “you don’t understand…”

“We’re all gonna die,” said one of the farmers, throwing down his pitch fork. “Lord a’mighty we’re gonna die.”

The crowd surged around Saint, yelling at him, cursing him to hell, calling him names. Mothers pulled their children to them and wept openly. And all the time the doctor tried to calm them, tried to explain.

“I’d better do something,” said Looks Away as he leaped from the porch and waded through the crowd. He grabbed Saint by the shoulder and half pulled, half carried him through the press and pushed him roughly up onto the porch. Some of the people swung at the scientist, needing to hit something in order to vent their frustration.

“No!” pleaded Saint. “You must listen. You must!”

“Get him inside,” warned Grey as he shifted to block the stairs. He pushed a few people back, and though they were angry, he was bigger and stronger.

Finally Saint tore free of Looks Away, shoved the Sioux away from him, whipped the strange pistol from its holster, and wheeled on the crowd. “Shut up!” he roared.

Grey had his hand on his Colt in an instant. “Whoa! Whoa now, Doc.”

“No,” snapped Saint, “I want you and everyone to listen to me.”

The crowd fell into an uneasy silence, everyone casting glances at the gun clutched in Doctor Saint’s hand.

“Now you people listen to me,” he growled. “I bring you hope and you turn on me? You ungrateful—.”

“Careful now, Doc,” warned Grey. “If you have something to say, then say it.”

Doctor Saint gave him a withering stare, but then nodded. Holding the gun in his right hand, he dug something out of one of the voluminous pockets of his topcoat. He held out his hand to show a small metal box not much larger than a pack of playing cards. It was gold and had a black dial mounted on the top and several buttons along the side. He turned the dial with his thumb and then pressed a button. Nothing appeared to happen, but then a shadow moved across his face and everyone looked up to see one of the balloons — a bright blue one — come drifting back down. It stopped ten feet above the scientist and despite the wind it did not blow away. That’s when Grey saw that there was a tiny box attached to its base, and on the box were two sets of little blades that spun like windmills during a hurricane.

“Do you fools think I came out here to play with children’s toys?” said Saint, and the scolding tone in his voice was reflected in the looks of doubt that now clouded the faces of the crowd. “I’m not a toymaker… I am a maker of weapons, and these are something I designed for warfare. Modern warfare. Behold the Little Disaster. Do you even know what that word means? Disaster? It’s a Greek word that means ‘bad star.’ A pejorative, I’ll admit, but in this case the ill fortune it carries is meant for our enemies. Watch and learn what I have made for you, for this fight.”

With another turn of the dial, Saint made the balloon move away. It rose to the very top of the house and then wafted over toward an old cottonwood tree that had died from lack of water. The Disaster entered the network of withered branches and then stopped again. Grey could not guess what the little maniac was up to with all this.

Then Doctor Saint raised the control box and pushed a different button.

Bang!

The balloon exploded into a fireball of painfully intense blue-white light. Electricity writhed like snakes in the air. The tree flew apart, showering the crowd and the street and everything around it with splinters that burned to ash before they landed. The shock wave knocked fifty people flat on their faces and broke the windows of every house for half a block.

Grey and Looks Away were plucked off their feet and slammed against the side of the house, and even Saint was sent sprawling. The echo of that blast knocked all other sound out of the world and left the entire crowd dazed.

It took a long time for Grey to make sense of who he was and what had happened. The blast had been that intense. He sat down hard with his back to the wall, legs splayed, mouth opening and closing, eyes blinking, ears ringing.

He watched Doctor Saint get back to his feet. The little scientist was chuckling even though he had a small cut over his eye that ran with blood. Beyond him, fixed hard against the storm clouds, the other balloons seemed frozen into the moment.

Disasters, waiting to happen.

One by one the townspeople climbed back to their feet. Shocked and wide-eyed, they picked up their weapons and stared with a mix of shock and wonder at Doctor Saint.

“Lord a’mighty,” repeated the farmer who had been complaining a minute before.

The scientist held the control box out. “I have spent many years attempting to rediscover the secret of Greek fire — that most elusive of the weapons of war. The incendiary that struck terror into the hearts of anyone who dared attack the Byzantine Empire. I have long suspected that the ancient Greeks found some substance similar to ghost rock and employed it as a weapon of war. I have done the same. Each of my little disasters is filled with ghost rock fumes and balanced with other chemical combinations of my own devising. I made fifty of them,” he said, then with asperity added, “It is unfortunate that you made me waste one to prove that you should trust what I say. Let’s all hope we won’t have needed that last one.”

As if in response to those words, thunder boomed on the edge of town. Lightning forked the sky, silhouetting the ugly shapes of flying creatures that were larger and more terrible than any birds. Legions of them were coming. And behind them, a ship rose in the east, seeming to come from nowhere, rising up between the peaks of two broken mountains. It was like a frigate from a painting of old pirates, with a deep keel and a fanlike rudder. Instead of sails, a vast envelope of silk and canvas, distended with gas and painted with the hideous face of Medusa the Gorgon. A thousand serpents writhed around her image.

On the plains below the ship, a line of machines rolled on clanking metal treads. And lines of armed men marched in squadrons, each of them carrying a strange rifle. Grey could not tell if Deray was supported by the foreign generals or if these were his own men. Not that it mattered — there were hundreds of them. Scores of living men, and hundreds upon hundreds of the walking dead. All of the corpses they’d seen heaped in the train cars. Soldiers from all over the divided country, including dead Sioux. Behind the column of tanks strode the metal giant, Samson, legs sweeping, arms swinging, lightning striking fire from its chest.

Grey got to his feet and turned to see the looks on the faces of the people of Paradise Falls. Even with the remaining Little Disasters hanging in the sky, even with the promise of the Lazarus pistols and Kingdom guns. Even with their own determination, they were few and marching toward them was an army the likes of which had never before been seen on Mother Earth. An army of science and magic, an army of flesh and steel, an army of the living and the dead.

“By the Queen’s…,” began Looks Away, but words failed him and he simply stared.

“Good God,” whispered Grey. He glanced around at his friends, at the town, and then at the approaching army. This was going to be a slaughter. Everyone knew it. Jenny Pearl came out onto the porch and stood next to Grey. She slipped her cool hand into his and interlaced their fingers.

“Don’t worry,” she said softly. So softly that only he could hear her. “Death isn’t the end.”

The storm growled and the winds howled with the voices of the damned.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Grey forced himself to shake off his shock and despair. He let go of Jenny’s hand and slapped his hand hard on the rail. It sounded like a gunshot and people jumped.

“They’re coming,” he barked. “You see it, I see it, we all do. They’re coming. This is happening. You wanted to stay here and make a fight of it. Then by God that’s what we’re going to do. As of now, you’ve all seen what we’re facing. You’re shocked. Okay.” He paused and in a harsh, cold voice said, “Now get over it.”

The crowd stared at him.

“We know what they have to throw against us,” he continued. “They don’t know what we have. Doctor Saint’s gadgets. Our unity. The fortifications. And… something else I have cooked up. We’re done being helpless. This is a war, God damn it, so let’s stop gaping and go fight it.”

It wasn’t a great speech, Grey knew that, but it broke the spell. He saw eyes harden and jaws grow firm. He would like to have seen heroic resolve and confidence, but that was too much to ask. Too much. People began moving away. First walking and then running to take up their positions. Finally the whole crowd scattered like leaves. Some few were even laughing with some strange kind of mad battle glee as they ran off.

Jenny and Looks Away came down to stand with Grey; and after a moment, so did Doctor Saint.

“Well,” said Looks Away, “that wasn’t Henry at Agincourt, but it got them moving.”

“Going to be a long day,” said Doctor Saint. He cut a look at the others. “Should be fun, though.”

“Fun?” echoed Jenny.

“Sure. This is how history is made. A bold few standing against many.”

“We happy few,” said Looks Away. “We band of brothers. Let’s just hope its closer to Henry V than the Leonidas at the Hot Gates.”

He tipped an imaginary hat to Jenny, punched Grey lightly on the arm, nodded to Saint, then walked off to take up his post.

“Once more into the breach,” said Saint, still smiling. He nodded to the waiting boys to bring his second wagon. They headed off toward one of the sandbag barriers. The cloud of brightly colored Little Disasters followed in their wake.

That left Jenny and Grey standing alone for a moment. He wanted to say something to her. The atmosphere of the day seemed to require it, but no poetic words occurred to him. Not even lines from Shakespeare. Instead he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a long, slow, sweet kiss.

“Jenny, I—,” he began, but she stopped his words with a second kiss.

“Whatever you have to say,” she murmured, “tell me after this is all over.”

“What if there’s no chance to tell you? What if—?”

“No,” she said. “Find me and tell me. No matter what happens, I’ll be waiting for you.”

She released him, picked up the gun belt that lay on the porch rocker, examined the Lazarus pistol, snugged it back into its holster, nodded to herself, and strapped it on. She paused for a moment, looking back at him with those blue eyes.

Thunder rumbled again and a cold rain began to fall.

“Be careful,” he said.

Jenny nodded slowly. The rain looked like tears on her cheeks.

“It’s been a long, strange road since Ballard Creek,” she said, and her words stabbed him.

“How did you—? Oh… you talked to Looks Away, didn’t you?”

“War is a hungry, hungry monster, Grey. It feeds on life and love.”

With that she turned away and walked into the swirling rain, leaving Grey standing there. He was more profoundly confused than he had ever been.

“This is all a goddamn nightmare,” he told the storm. The cry of a pteranodon far above him seemed to agree.

“Madness,” said Grey as he drew his gun and went to find someone or something to kill.

Chapter Eighty

Grey took up position at the main barrier on the desert side of town. He had forty of the town’s hardiest fighters with him, and a solid wall of sandbags. Less able townsfolk huddled behind the row of shooters, ready with ammunition, water, and bandages. The women among them also carried knives hidden in their skirts. It would be up to them to cut the throats of any enemy wounded. Taking prisoners was not part of the plan.

Brother Joe and a few of his most devoted followers — those whose beliefs would not permit them to fight — were ready to tend the town’s wounded.

Deray halted his advance a quarter mile beyond the edge of town. His troops stood in ordered lines, indifferent to the rain. The tanks formed in a half circle on the far side of Icarus Bridge. and Grey could see two small figures creeping along the structure, bent close to study it. Engineers, he judged, deciding if the bridge would bear the weight of the war machines.

Grey fetched his field glasses from Picky’s saddlebag and studied the opposition. A closer look did nothing to increase his confidence. Grey searched the sky for Deray’s sky frigate, and saw it fading like a ghost ship into the storm clouds. He caught one brief glimpse of the necromancer, standing at the forward rail of the airship with a heavy cloak pulled around him and a wide-brimmed hat to shield his eyes from the rain. Deray raised a cup of coffee to his smiling mouth, then paused and raised his cup in mock salute. Although the distance was too great for Deray to see him, Grey swore that the man had directed that gesture directly to him.

And for some reason he could never thereafter explain to himself, Grey nodded and touched a finger to the brim of his hat.

Perhaps it was some kind of salute between enemies. Maybe it was two of the damned acknowledging each other from opposite sides of the Pit. Grey didn’t know and suddenly there was no time to think about it.

With howls of predatory glee, the swarm of pteranodons came hurtling down from the clouds.

“Guns up!” bellowed Grey, and a line of rifles, muskets and shotguns rose toward the oncoming flock of monsters. “Kill the bastards!”

They fired, throwing their own thunder against the storm.

The pterosaurs were in full dive, spiking downward at full speed and there was no chance to avoid the volley. Three of them suddenly twisted in midair, blood bursting from chests and heads. They twisted artlessly into screaming deadfalls, slamming into others of their kind, bringing two more down.

The rest kept coming.

“Fire!” yelled Grey. He squeezed off a shot with the Lazarus pistol and the round struck one of the monsters and exploded with enough force to tear the wings from three others. The men at the barricade fired again, and those with repeating rifles got off a third round before the flying monsters crashed into them. The lead pteranodon opened its beak and with a snap took the head off of the man at the end of the barricade. It swept past his corpse as a jet of blood shot upward from a severed neck. Five others hit the line of fighters even as the guns fired, and there was a confusion of screams and blood and falling bodies.

The defenders panicked and scattered as more and more of the pterosaurs struck them. A few huddled down behind the sandbags, firing as quickly as they could. Grey fired shot after shot, and the Lazarus bullets detonated in balls of blue fire that burst flesh and vaporized bone. The pterosaurs flew apart into ragged chunks.

Seven of his people were down, leaving twenty to fight a remaining dozen of the flying reptiles. Panic was in full fury, though, and most of the people were unable to cope with the terror of what they were facing. Grey pushed off from the sandbag wall and waded among the melee. He fired and fired and fired. The blue explosions rocked the street, knocking the fighters onto their backs, bursting the sandbags, but doing worse damage to the monsters.

One pteranodon landed atop the makeshift barrier and stabbed at him with its beak, and when Grey twisted away, it grabbed his gun arm with the bony fingers that sprouted from its leathery wing. The grip was extraordinary and Grey cried out. The Lazarus pistol fell from his hand. With a cry of pain and anger, Grey used his left hand to tear his Bowie knife from its sheath and he slashed with the heavy blade, cutting through tendon and bone. Then he was free, the alien hand still locked around his wrist but no longer attached to the beast. The pterosaur screeched in pain as blood pumped from the wound. Grey slashed at it again, but it leaped into the air to evade the blade. However the leap turned into a tumble as the mangled wing buckled. The monster thumped down onto the dirt. Grey dove atop it, smashed the beak aside with a powerful blow with the side of his right fist, and slashed the thing across the throat with the knife. It gurgled as its scream of pain was drowned in a tide of blood.

Grey shook the dead hand from his wrist and then dove to the ground as another pterosaur swooped low to try to decapitate him. He flattened out in the mud as the thing passed only inches above him. His Lazarus pistol was five feet away, lying on the wet ground as rain pounded on it. He wormed his way toward it, snatched it up, rolled over onto his back, and brought it up, all the time praying that water and mud would not do to it what they would to an ordinary pistol. The pterosaur swung around and dove at him again, and Grey fired, praying he wouldn’t blow his own hand off.

Little red lights made the garnets pulse with light as the pistol bucked in his hand.

The pteranodon exploded above him, showering him with bloody debris.

He rolled sideways and got to his knees, spitting gore from his mouth.

Around him the fight was going badly. Only a dozen of his people were still fighting, and the last five of the pterosaurs were swirling and swooping. The animals were learning from the deaths of their fellows; they watched for the raise of barrels, then they wheeled in the air to avoid the shots.

“Defensive circle!” cried Grey, rising and firing at one of them. He missed as the monster tilted to let the storm wind shove it out of the way of the shot.

The people were too mad with fear to listen. Grey slammed the Bowie knife into its sheath and got to his feet, firing again and clipping a wing. Then he was among the survivors, yelling at them and shoving them toward the barricade.

“Huddle up! Guns out. Don’t let them get behind you. Protect the man to your right. No, damn it, your other right. That’s it. Fire. Fire.”

Two of the pterosaurs fell as the men, now in a circle, fired at Grey’s direction. The animals still darted out of the way, but Grey saw a way to use that. He waited for the volley to fire and then aimed his shot to the natural escape angle and as a pteranodon veered to avoid the bullets Grey destroyed it with the Lazarus handgun.

Again.

And again.

As each monster fell, the people at the barricade became more confident. Their aim improved, although some still shot wild and too soon. The next monster fell to a hail of bullets, and the last one, realizing that it was alone, attempted to fly between two buildings, but that was a mistake. Everyone fired.

Every bullet hit it and tore it to rags.

The men burst into cheers.

But Grey looked around. There had been twenty-seven fighters with him at the barricade, and now there were eleven.

Sixteen dead.

The cheers of the survivors died away as this truth sank like poison into their stomachs.

This was not a victory. It was a slaughter.

And all they had so far fought were Deray’s monster pets. The army, the machines, the metal giant, and the undead still waited.

As Grey stared over the wall and across the Icarus Bridge he felt his heart sink.

We’re all going to die here, he thought. And he believed it, too.

A voice — screaming his name — tore through the air, and he whirled and ran.

Chapter Eighty-One

The cry had come from Jenny. Terror and desperation mixed in equal parts.

Grey raced down the street toward the far end of town; back to the place where he had first met her. The well.

He saw her there. She was backing away from the well. Two of the townspeople lay sprawled and bloody in the rain, their bodies strangely swollen and discolored. Both corpses had deep punctures on their faces. Jenny had the Lazarus pistol in her hand, held out straight as she fired at something that came crawling over the edge. The thing was long and low, and as it moved the lightning flashed on each of its black, chitinous segments. A thousand hairy legs carried it up and over the lip of the well. Antennae whipped back and forth and a hundred tiny eyes gleamed like specks of polished coal. It was a centipede. Thirty feet long if it was an inch, and it flowed out of the depths and moved toward Jenny.

On the ground between it and Jenny were two more of its kind, their bodies blasted to fragments, steam rising as rain struck the exposed guts. Their pincers glistened with a purple venom. Another giant insect emerged from the well. And another.

“Grey!” screamed Jenny as she fired. Instead of a deafening blast, there was a hollow click. She cursed and squeezed the trigger again and again; each time yielded nothing but that empty and impotent noise. Then on her fourth pull the weapon fired. But it was already too late. The centipede was nearly upon her. Grey fired as he ran. Not a perfect shot, but it scored, and the insect was buffeted sideways as a yard-long section of its side erupted in flame. The blast threw Jenny backward, and Grey caught her with his free arm, steadying her.

“The damn gun doesn’t work!” she snapped, squeezing the trigger again and getting only the empty click.

“Stay back,” he warned, and pulled her clear as the injured centipede lashed at her. There was a barb on its tail as long and sharp as a pirate’s cutlass. Grey crouched and steadied his gun for a careful shot and blew the monster’s head off. It flopped backward, but immediately the other two crawled over it. Grey fired again and this time Jenny’s gun fired, too. One of the creatures was killed outright, its head and first ten segments bursting into balls of blue fire. The second was mortally wounded and staggered off, half its legs crippled and many of its segments ruptured. Grey holstered his pistol, grabbed the heavy wooden bucket from beside the well, and swung it up and over and down onto the monster’s head. The bucket shattered, but the impact smashed the centipede’s head to bits of shell and green blood.

He turned to Jenny. “Are you okay?”

She looked past him and shuddered. “God, are those things bugs?”

“Looks and I saw their little brothers yesterday,” said Grey, nodding. “These are even bigger.”

“Are they undead, like the dinosaurs?”

“No. I think Deray used some hocus-pocus to drive them up here.”

She shuddered. “This is what’s living down in those caves?”

“This and worse,” he answered, but was immediately sorry he said it. Her face, already pale, fell into sickness.

“We can’t fight this,” she said in a hushed whisper. “We can’t win.”

It was too close to what Grey had thought after the fight with the pterosaurs. It was probably true, but focusing on that would almost certainly guarantee their defeat. Believing in the possibility of victory, however unlikely, was the only way to keep despair from overwhelming them all.

“They’re ugly bastards and they’re scary,” he said, “but they’re alive and that means they can die like anything else.”

“They die when your gun shoots,” she snapped. “Mine keeps jamming.”

“Take my Colt,” he said, reaching for the gunbelt that was crossed under the Lazarus pistol belt. However Jenny shook her head.

“Maybe Doctor Saint can fix mine. In the meantime I’ll get my shotgun. I trust that.”

She ran off before he could say another word. Once again she seemed to have shifted inside her skin. The dreamy-eyed woman he’d made love to last night was not evident. This morning she had been thoughtful and enigmatic, now she was the fiery farm woman again.

Grey peered over the edge of the well and saw nothing but shadows down there. No other monsters came climbing out of the water, but that was hardly reassuring. Who knew how many more of them Deray had to send. A party of armed men was hurrying down the street, drawn to the commotion but too late to be of immediate use. When they saw the dead insects they slowed and then stopped to gape.

“You two,” said Grey, gesturing to two men with big fowling pieces, “watch this damn well. If anything tries to crawl up you send it back to hell. Got it?”

They were scared, but they nodded and took up stations on either side of the well, barrels laid on the edge and angled down.

A burst of thunder made Grey spin around and he saw bright blue fire swirling amid the storm winds. Not thunder, after all. No — it was one of Saint’s balloon bombs. His little disasters. His bad stars filled with ghost rock smoke and his own version of Greek fire.

One of them had exploded above the sandbag barrier on the east side of town.

Grey took a breath, checked the rounds in his guns, and ran off that way.

Chapter Eighty-Two

As he approached the eastern barrier, he saw that there was a real fight in progress, so he poured it on. The men along the sandbag wall were firing as flaming debris drifted down from the sky and dark shapes flitted and dodged all around. At first Grey thought that a swarm of birds, driven wild by the storm, had flocked in panic toward the waiting men. But that wasn’t it at all.

Instead he saw that there were dozens of small things — not true birds but some kind of clockwork devices made to look like birds — swarming down from a dark cloud. Then he realized that it wasn’t a cloud at all. With a sudden surge the great sky frigate smashed through the wall of clouds. Men lined the rails of the airship now, and they trained rifles down at the town and fired, fired, fired. The plunging fire was deadly and defender after defender went spinning backward from the wall, trailing lines of bright blood.

Grey expected to see gun ports open and cannons roll out, but either great guns were too heavy for the lighter-than-air craft, or Deray was saving them for later. Either way, it was rifle fire for now, and that was deadly enough.

More of the small mechanical birds swarmed over the rails and flew toward the defenders. Grey couldn’t understand what their purpose was. They were too small to carry any useful amounts of explosive. Then, as the first wave of them approached, he saw something that chilled him to the bone. The birds darted high, then snapped down into steep diving attacks and as they fell their wings folded back, their tiny mouths gaped wide and slender steel needles thrust outward. Some dark chemical was smeared on each needle.

“Ware!” cried Saint. “Ware the birds. Don’t let them—.”

The birds slammed into the sandbags and into the men behind them. The needles stabbed through jackets and shirts and deep into muscle tissue. Men swatted at them, and one man even laughed as he plucked the tiny needle from the bulk of his massive shoulder.

A split second later the man cried out and staggered, his eyes going wide, mouth open, skin turning bright red. He took three clumsy steps backward and then fell onto his knees as blood erupted from eyes, ears, nose, and his open mouth. He flopped onto his face, his entire body shuddering.

Five others went down the same way, bleeding and convulsing.

Doctor Saint sent another of the little disasters up into the path of the second wave of birds and pressed the button. The explosion threw everyone flat and painted the sky and the landscape in azure light that was so bright it seemed to stab all the way into the mind. Grey flung an arm across his face to protect his eyes from the flaming debris. When he risked a look he saw that the sky was empty of the needle-birds. However, Deray’s sharpshooters were preparing a fresh volley. Before Grey could shout a warning they fired, and bullets punched into many of the dazed survivors.

Grey drew his Lazarus pistol and returned fire, but the range was too long for a handgun to be of any use.

“Don’t waste your ammunition,” said Saint, waving him off.

“Then you do something, God damn it!”

“I am, dear boy,” rasped the scientist, fiddling with the controls on his little metal box. Two more of the little disasters came hurrying out of the rain and soared upward. The gunfire above changed as Deray ordered his men to target the balloons. The doctor’s bombs were forty feet away when the first one popped as bullets pierced it. The mechanism and its explosives dropped harmlessly down into a puddle of rainwater. The second was nicked and gas began hissing out of it, but the impellor motor kept pushing it upward.

“Do it now!” cried Grey, and Saint pressed the button.

The little disaster was still twenty feet from the side of the frigate, but the blast swept the rail with brilliant blue fire. Men screamed and fell back, some of them ablaze, others beating at flames on their coats. How the chemicals Saint devised were able to burn in the wind and rain was beyond Grey, but it worked. The only thing that mattered was that it worked.

Deray, unharmed but furious, roared to his pilot and pointed wildly toward the south. Clearly he did not want to face those bombs.

“He’s running,” said one of the wounded men at the barrier.

“I think his balloon is filled with hydrogen,” said Saint. “Mmm. Stupid choice. Highly flammable.”

“Hit ’em again,” Grey pleaded. “See if you can blow that bastard out of the sky. Maybe his troops will give it up if he’s dead.”

“Worth a try, my boy, worth a try.” He sent two more of the balloons after the ship. The frigate was turning, though, moving quickly away to try and find shelter within the darkness of the storm clouds. Grey heard Saint muttering, “Come on… come on…”

The frigate slipped into the cloud bank seconds ahead of the little disaster.

“I can’t see it,” complained Saint. “Damn it.”

“Blow it anyway,” snapped Grey. “Don’t let it get away.”

The scientist pressed the button and the entire cloud bank seemed to transform into a burning sapphire. Incandescent blue light lit the clouds from within, and Grey watched in awe as ghostly lightning throbbed like veins across the flesh of the storm. Then it was gone and the clouds roiled with black fury. The wind intensified and rain fell in sheets, hammering the town. The survivors of the barrier gasped for air in the downpour. Some sat and wept, holding their dead friends in their arms, or clutching wounds whose redness seemed to be the only color left in the world.

A smiling Saint slapped Grey on the shoulder. “I think we got him.”

But Grey was far less certain about that and said as much to Saint. He watched the smile drain away from the man’s dark face.

“At least we’ve hurt him,” he said.

“Hurt him maybe,” said Grey grudgingly, “but mostly I think we’ve helped him get a good damn idea of how tough we aren’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. He’s hit us three times now with half-assed attacks,” he said, and briefly explained about the other two attempts: the pterosaurs and the centipedes.

“None of these are full-bore.”

“You think he’s testing our defenses?” asked the scientist.

“Don’t you?”

“Sadly, I do,” agreed the scientist. “Which begs the question of where and when he will launch his full assault.”

“It almost doesn’t matter. If he’s been paying attention, he’s got to see that even though we have some muscle — thanks to your gadgets — we don’t have the numbers to play this out. He can either keep chipping away at us, or he can hit us with a tidal wave and just wipe us all the hell off the board.”

“At the bridge, you mean?”

“Of course. It’s the only way to move big enough numbers into the town.”

Brother Joe and his assistants came running to help with the wounded. Grey and Saint ran off to check the various barriers. They found Jenny at the southern barrier closest to the Icarus Bridge. Beyond the bridge the tanks were rumbling slowly forward, though none of them had yet rolled onto the bridge itself. Above them, the sky frigate hung like a promise.

“Ah… damn the man,” muttered Saint. “I thought I had him.”

“You hurt him, though,” said Grey, pointing.

It was true. Although the frigate still floated above the army, the airship had clearly failed to escape the little disaster Saint had sent into the clouds. It had a visible list to port, and all along the starboard side the rail and decking had been blasted away. The gaping damage exposed the gears of complex machinery inside. Oily black smoke drifted from the ports and mingled with the dark clouds, and there were long streaks of red running down the sides of the shattered wood. Even though Deray had escaped destruction, he had paid with the blood of his men.

He wondered if the necromancer even counted that cost or if the lives of his own people meant as little to him as the lives of the people here in Paradise Falls.

Probably.

He wished he could get up close to the man and look him in the eye. He had met killers, criminals, and bad men before, but he had never looked into the eyes of someone who was willing to spill an ocean of blood to achieve his own goals. He had never faced down a would-be conqueror. And he dearly wanted to have that confrontation with Deray. He wanted to ask him by what right he made war on his fellow men. By what right did he cultivate war on a global scale. By what right did he set himself above all laws and all codes of ethics and morality.

He wanted those answers and then he wanted to put a hot bullet into that cold heart.

Chapter Eighty-Three

“They’re coming!”

The cry went up from the barrier and blazed like wildfire through the town.

Grey and Saint ran to the sandbag wall and stared at the line of undead troops that had begun to pass between the gates of the Icarus Bridge. The first undead soldier to step onto the bridge did so tentatively. He tugged on the ropes, jerking hard to see if they’d part before he put his weight on the boards.

The ropes held.

“Come on you bastard,” murmured Grey. “Come on.”

The corpse turned and waved to his companions and Grey saw him give a thumbs up. Then the soldier turned back and put a foot on the first of the boards. It was too far away for Grey to hear the wood creak, but he remembered the sound and could imagine it now. Old wood that complained under any burden. The undead held onto the ropes as he eased his weight onto one foot and then both. Above him, Aleksander Deray leaned over the damaged rail of his ship and growled at the dead men. Grey couldn’t hear the words but it did not appear as if the necromancer was offering compassion and support. His face seemed as filled with storms as the sky above him.

The dead man took another step. And another. The bridge swayed but the boards held. The ropes held. The bridge held. When he was halfway across the gorge, the undead stopped and actually jumped up and down on the bridge, testing its integrity and strength.

Can they feel fear, Grey wondered. If so, why? It couldn’t be anything to do with physical pain, their bodies were stolen. And it certainly couldn’t be concerns about their mortality because they were demons. If their bodies died they’d simply go back to hell.

Was it a fear of torment in the Pit? Grey doubted it. More likely, he mused, it was a red delight in all of the terrible things they could do with those stolen bodies. If they were as evil as Brother Joe said, then they would crave pain and slaughter the way an opium eater craved the pipe. An addiction of malice. His gut told him that he’d hit on it.

But that meant that he could not bargain with them. Could not really threaten them. It would be like trying to reason with a swarm of locusts or a raging forest fire.

The corpse turned and waved. First to Deray and then to the other undead. He yelled so loud that his words drifted all the way through the wind and rain to Grey.

“It’s safe! The fools have cut their own throats. Come, my brothers! Come!”

And they came.

With a howl like a pack of hellish jackals, the grinning horde drew their guns and raced forward onto the bridge. Hundreds of them. Staggering corpses whose gray and rotted flesh were a horror to behold, and they sent up a continuous moan of unbearable hunger as they stumbled forward, hands reaching toward the promise of warm human flesh. Behind the legions of the dead were the living soldiers in the employ of the mad conqueror. Deray’s men wore uniforms of gray and black and purple, and each carried a rifle made from copper and steel and set with burning jewels. Across the Icarus Bridge came the armies of the underworld. Across the chasm, far above the thrashing water, came the exterminators who would slaughter and consume.

Behind the sandbag barrier, the defenders of Paradise Falls crouched with wild eyes and sweating hands gripping their meager weapons.

“God,” cried one of the men at the barrier. “Look how many there are.”

Grey heard weeping among the gathered fighters behind the sandbags.

“They’re almost across!” shouted someone else. And it was true, the army of the damned were three quarters of the way across the creaking bridge. With every step they moved faster as their careful walk gave way to a fast walk and finally, with a howl that shook the skies, a full-out run.

The chasm was two hundred and seven feet wide. That’s what Jenny and Looks Away told Grey. The bridge was made of wooden slats and miles of rope. It swayed under the weight of hundreds of running feet.

“Guess it’s time,” said Grey. “Be ready.”

He placed two hands on the sandbag wall and swung his body over, landed with a thump on the hard-packed dirt, and then jogged down the slope to the mouth of the ridge, reaching it while the undead were still a dozen yards away. He stood between the bridge posts and raised both his hands. The racing dead suddenly slowed, and as the leading edge of the charge stopped, the others collided with them. In the air the sky frigate turned hard aport to give Deray a better look as Grey stood in a posture of obvious surrender.

The oncoming tide of killers stopped, but three hundred gun barrels swung toward him, and then — as Grey had hoped — a tall figure pushed through the crowd, shoving the other walking dead aside as he moved to the front of the army. Grey felt his heart sink. He knew the clothes, that hat, the guns, that face. Lucky Bob Pearl came smiling to within twenty feet of where Grey waited.

“You are one persistent fellow,” said the Harrowed.

“Been called that,” admitted Grey.

“And you’re a right pain in my ass.”

“Been called that, too. And worse.”

“I have no doubt.”

“You’re a bit persistent your ownself,” said Grey. “Every time people think you’re dead you pop right back up like a prairie dog.”

“More like a bad penny, wouldn’t you say?” suggested Lucky Bob.

“Fair enough.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Grey Torrance, and I’m the sheriff ’round these parts.”

“Really? Since when?”

Grey laughed. “I’m lying. I read that line in so many dime novels I just had to say it. Sounds just as stupid out loud, doesn’t it?”

A smile flickered on the Harrowed’s face. Behind him some of the others were smiling, too. Grey doubted they appreciated the little joke. No, their grins were in anticipation of slaughter and feasting.

“Kill ’im, brother,” said one of them, but Lucky Bob shook his head.

“No,” he said loud enough for them all to hear, “let’s have the niceties. After all, these people used to be my friends. It’s only neighborly to have a chat before we commence with the butchery.”

Grey kept his smile on his face, but it felt like it was hammered there with rusty nails.

“So,” said Lucky Bob as he took a casual step forward, “what’s a couple of bad pennies like us doing here, Mr. Torrance?”

“Call me Grey.”

“Fine. What’s the game, Grey? You have your hands up like you want to surrender.”

Grey lowered his arms slowly. “Not really. More of an attention-getter. Actually I wanted to have a chat.”

“A chat, is it? You want to beg Lord Deray for mercy? Do you want to offer terms for your surrender? Do you want to lay at his feet and—.”

“Actually, sport,” said Grey, “I don’t really have much to say to your lord and master that don’t involve four-letter words. I got no use for him. I wouldn’t buy water from him if I was on fire. I wouldn’t waste water to spit on him.”

Now no one on the bridge was smiling. A cold and dangerous light ignited in Lucky Bob’s dark eyes. “You want to watch that mouth of yours, boy.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me? I kind of think you’re already playing that card faceup on the table.”

“There are worse things than death.”

“Yeah,” said Grey. “I know. I’m looking at that right now.”

“I think I’ll let the dead eat you last,” said Lucky Bob. “After you’ve watched us kill every last person in town.”

“Maybe that’s how it’ll work out,” said Grey. “But before we get to that, I want to speak to you. To the manitou and to the human soul of Bob Pearl that I know is still in there. I want you both to hear what I say. Just you two. As for the rest…? Well, you’d know better than me, but I’m pretty sure they’re not the reasonable type.”

“Not much, no.” Lucky Bob cocked his head to one side. “But before you waste your last breath on an impassioned plea, son, understand that there’s nothing you can say to make this easier on you. There’s only one way this is going to end and we both know it.”

“Maybe,” said Grey. “And then again maybe not.”

“Don’t die a fool, boy. And don’t embarrass yourself by begging for mercy.”

“Nope, not about that. This isn’t about you sparing me or the people here. You’re going to try to kill us and maybe you will. Before you do, though, you need to know what you’re going to risk. Not your troops, but you. The manitou inside and the man. You both need to hear this.”

Above them a voice bellowed. “No!”

They looked up to see Deray grasping the shattered rail of the frigate. It descended through the rain and then stopped forty feet above the bridge. Close enough for a rifle shot, thought Grey. Tough height and angle for a pistol shot, especially in this weather. Might be worth trying, though. If he thought he could kill the man with absolute certainty, he might have gone for it. Even with all those guns pointed at him. It might end the war right here.

As if reading his mind, Deray barked an order. “Pearl — kill him now. He is nothing. His words are nothing but lies.”

“My, my, my,” said Grey. “He almost sounds scared. Makes me wonder if he’s afraid of what I’m going to say.”

Lucky Bob narrowed his eyes. For a moment the evil intensity of his expression wavered. He glanced up at Deray. “My lord,” he said, placing his free hand over the ghost rock chunk buried in his chest, “give me a minute or two with this fool. He felt it was important to come out here like this, maybe he has something worth hearing.”

Deray clearly did not like it, but he also clearly did not want to appear weak or nervous in front of his troops. He gave a terse wave of his hand. “Make it quick, then, and afterward bring me his head.”

“That’s the plan, my lord,” said Lucky Bob. He turned, thumbed the hammer back on his big pistol, and nodded to Grey. “Speak your piece.”

“Okay, then here it is,” said Grey, pitching his voice loud enough for them all to hear. “We know who and what you are, Bob. We know about the manitou inside you. We know that the manitou and the human being are wrestling each other for control. Right now it looks like the manitou has been winning hands down, but we both know that’s not set in stone. It never will be. I never met Lucky Bob, but from what everybody’s been telling me he was one tough son of a bitch. Brave, forthright, strong-willed, maybe even noble. He died trying to save this town. We know this.”

Grey saw how his words hit the Harrowed. He licked his withered lips and said nothing.

Behind him the undead were growing impatient and kept looking past Lucky Bob to their prey hiding behind the sandbag barrier.

“And just as we know about you, Bob,” continued Grey, “we know what will happen if you die.”

“So what?” asked Lucky Bob. “You killed me already yesterday and here I stand, right as this rain.” With his free hand he snatched a few raindrops out of the air and then flung the water at Grey.

“Yeah, well,” said Grey, “that’s because I didn’t kill you the right way, did I?”

Lucky Bob said nothing.

“That’s because I didn’t put a bullet in your brain,” said Grey. “Yeah, that’s got your attention. If your brain is destroyed, it won’t send you back to Hell. It’ll destroy you for good and all. For all time. Forever.” He pointed to the row of rifles that pointed from atop the sandbags. “Every man and woman in Paradise Falls knows that they can kill your immortal soul.”

The silence was immense. Even Deray’s yells had dwindled down to nothing.

“Now listen to me and listen to me good,” said Grey. “We don’t want to do that to you. Not even to you. Far as we’re all concerned, you’re a victim a couple of times over. First you were murdered. I suspect that Chesterfield’s men gunned you down, didn’t they, Lucky Bob?

The Harrowed said nothing.

“Then Aleksander Deray put that ghost rock in your chest and he made you his slave. Maybe he invoked the manitou and sent it to take you over, or maybe he grabbed you once that happened. Don’t know and don’t really care. I’ll bet the manitou inside of you isn’t happy about being a slave to Deray. I know Lucky Bob Pearl isn’t. That chunk of ghost rock in your chest is the same as having an iron collar around your neck. Magic or chains, it all comes out the same. As long as it’s there, you’ll never be free of Deray. You’ll never be really alive. That means you traded one hell for another.”

“His words are meaningless,” yelled Deray. “Don’t listen to him. Kill him. I command you!”

“You’re talking a lot, boy,” said Lucky Bob, “but are you getting anywhere with this?”

“I am. I’m here to give you a chance, Lucky Bob.”

“A chance at what?”

“At being free.”

They stared at him. Waiting. Waiting.

“Stand with us,” said Grey, lowering his tone so that only Lucky Bob could hear him, “and you get to live. Doctor Saint will even find some way of removing that damn rock. Stand with us, with your daughter, and save the town you love. The town you died trying to protect.”

Lucky Bob seemed to waver, and Grey prayed that he had reached the man — that good man — inside.

“I…,” began the Harrowed, but he stopped and shook his head.

“Defy me and I will burn you,” said Deray.

Something caught Grey’s eye and it very nearly made him falter. Forty feet away from where he stood, gathered together beneath the leafless boughs of a dead cottonwood, he saw a dozen figures. All men except for one young woman. Every face was familiar. Every face was as pale as death. Dark eyes, hard mouths.

The ghosts. His ghosts.

They had caught up to him at last. They were here.

Grey knew that this was all going to end in darkness. In pain.

In damnation.

But he still wanted to save Lucky Bob if he could. For Jenny. For the sake of the people they were. For his own soul.

“Please,” he said, though he spoke as much to the waiting ghosts as to the undead here on the bridge.

“I can’t do that,” said Lucky Bob softly and with his free hand he lightly touched the ghost rock buried in his chest. “Lord Deray’s cast a spell over the rock. Dark, dark magic. So… powerful. You can’t imagine. If I tried to take it out, I’d burn. Do you understand? I’d burn to ashes, flesh and bone… and brain. I’d be every bit as dead. What you’re offering me is nothing, boy. I’ve already lost. I’ve got no hope at all.”

“Listen to me,” Grey said urgently, talking now directly to Lucky Bob. “Your daughter is in this town. If you cross this bridge she’ll die. Think about what Deray will do to her.”

Lucky Bob shook his head and despite everything there were tears in his eyes. “No… Jenny’s already dead. I killed her myself the other night. Shot her through the heart.”

“You’re wrong,” Grey insisted. “The bullet ricocheted off the whalebone in her corset. It saved her the same as my silver belt buckle saved me. She’s alive. Jenny is alive.”

The Harrowed kept shaking his head. “You’re a hopeful fool, boy. Whalebone can’t deflect a bullet.”

“You’re wrong,” repeated Grey. “Jenny is alive and you didn’t murder her. You can still come back from the edge of this, man. But she’s here in town and she’s going to fight whoever crosses this bridge. You know how that fight will end. You know that she’ll die and that she’ll become a slave to Deray. Is that what you want? Is that what you — Lucky Bob Pearl, the man who saved this town — want for her and everything she stands for? Isn’t there anything left of the good man who everyone in Paradise Falls loved? Listen to me, man. This is the truth.”

“Don’t believe his lies, Pearl,” shouted Deray. “He is trying to sow seeds of doubt.”

Lucky Bob walked forward until he stood face to face with Grey. Tears burned silver lines down his face. “My daughter is dead and I am in hell,” he said. “There is no escape. Lord Deray will conquer this world and it will become an abode of demons who are his slaves. That is the truth. This town will fall and it’s going to light a fire that will burn down the whole world. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing that anyone can do. You want to threaten me? You want to shoot me in the head? Go on and do it. It would be a mercy because I am a monster, and I am already in hell.”

Once more Deray’s mad laughter filled the skies.

He’s enjoying this, Grey realized. He’s letting us have this conversation because he wants to prove me wrong in front of all of his men.

“Goddamn it, I don’t want to kill you,” Grey said to Pearl, then he spoke to the other leering dead. “I don’t want to kill anyone except that prick up in that ship. He’s the monster. I want to help you. I want you to help us. Stand with us. Fight Deray. Be free.”

“He’ll burn us.”

Grey sighed. “So will I. If I have to.”

Lucky Bob blinked. “What?”

Grey growled, “You have one chance, Bob. Get off this bridge right now…”

“Or what?” demanded the Harrowed.

“Or I’ll kill you. Right here. Right now.”

“Ha!” cried Deray. “Bold words but an empty threat. These people are sheep to be herded. They are nothing. They can do nothing. They—.”

Thomas Looks Away stepped out from the old bridge-keepers’ shack. He had his Kingdom Rifle raised, but the barrel was pointed not at the undead horde or even at Deray, but at the bridge on which they stood.

Exactly as planned.

They’d discussed this very moment back in Saint’s barn. What to do. How to fight. Killing Deray was a priority, but Looks Away, Jenny and Saint all feared that taking out the necromancer would not stop the slaughter and sack of the town. No, the fight had to be won at the bridge.

Grey pointed down at the boards beneath his feet. “We have it rigged to blow. And before you think that we’ve planted ordinary dynamite, think again. Every inch of this bridge is mined with ghost rock powder and canisters of compressed gas from the smelting factories in Salt Lake. When it blows it will vaporize everything. Every bit of wood and rope and flesh. That gun fires a special round that reacts with ghost rock.” He tapped the stone in Lucky Bob’s chest. “All ghost rock. One shot and poof! You’ll all die. Now and forever. Me, too, but my soul, at least, won’t die with me. Maybe I’ll go to heaven. Maybe I’ll go to hell.” He winked at them. “It’s an even bet either way and I’m willing to take my chances, Bob.” He paused. “Are you?”

Above them, Deray’s frigate was abruptly rising, moving away from the bridge. Grey saw it. So did all the walking dead.

“Your lord and master believes me,” said Grey. “And look at him… running to save his own ass while his slaves burn.” He shook his head. “So tell me, friend, what’s it going to be, Bob? Do you stand with us, or do we all go down together?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” said Lucky Bob. “You know what will happen if you destroy this bridge. You won’t just kill us, you doom everyone in town. You’d be trapped here. You’d all starve.”

“Yup, I reckon so. Actually, I figure we’re dead no matter what happens. Either you kill us and maybe turn us into monsters, or we starve to death. You’re not giving us any cards to play but this.”

“Who knows?” called Looks Away. “We might not starve. We might get rescued. The telegraph still works and we sent a pretty emphatic series of messages. Oh… and we told them about Deray’s plans, too. And about the foreign powers. All of it. Took forever and I fancy the telegrapher’s hand is rather worn out.”

“Nobody will come,” called Deray. His sky ship was probably beyond the reach of fire and debris should the bridge explode, but he was well within earshot from his safe distance. He bellowed down at them in a mocking voice. “Nobody will believe you.”

“Maybe not,” said Grey. “Or maybe they won’t have a choice. Maybe they’re going to have to send someone out to check. Just in case. I expect the Sioux will. They’ll want to know about all those dead red men. And the Rail Barons. The governments of the United States and the CSA. They’ll have to check because, again, you’re not leaving them a choice. And that, you incredible freak, is your problem. You think people will just bend over and take it. You must think everyone is as weak as Chesterfield. You have no faith in people. You don’t understand people at all. And that’s why we’re going to take you down.”

“If I fall,” mocked Deray, “it will be long after you are dead and gone.”

“Maybe. I don’t expect to make it out of this alive. No sir, I expect I’ve just about played my last good card. But I can guarantee, Deray, that you won’t find this country easy to conquer. People will stand up to you. They’ll fight.”

“People are sheep.”

“Think so? Look at this, look at us here in Paradise Falls. We’re ready to blow up our bridge and die to stop you. That’s just a handful of people. Good luck trying to conquer a world.”

Deray’s answer was a mocking laugh that twisted inside the screech of the wind and seemed to shake the pillars of heaven.

In a quiet voice Grey said, “You didn’t kill Jenny. She’s alive. I love her and she’s alive. Let her live, Bob. Be her father one more time.”

Lucky Bob met his eyes, and for a long moment, as Deray’s laughter shook the world, they just stood there. “You don’t understand. He’s… too powerful. He owns us. We belong to him… heart and soul.”

“Heart maybe,” said Grey. “But not soul.”

With that he moved faster than he had ever moved in his life. He slapped the pistol aside with his left hand, and in the same instant, reached across his body and drew his Colt. It all happened inside of a fragmenting moment. Lucky Bob’s gun fired. Grey felt the burn in his side as the bullet ripped a trench in his flesh. Then he jammed his own gun barrel against the chunk of ghost rock over Lucky Bob’s heart and fired.

Lucky Bob Pearl staggered backward two awkward steps. His gun fell from his grip, struck the bridge and bounced over the edge. For some reason nearly everyone watched it fall. Even the living dead. As if the fall of that gun meant something. Lucky Bob, though, did not watch his pistol fall into the thrashing water below. Instead he stared down at the black hole in the center of his chest. Smoke curled up from it, and fragments of the shattered ghost rock still clung to the ravaged flesh. His mouth opened and closed several times as if he wanted to speak, or wanted to scream, and could not determine which. If he felt pain there was none of it on his face. His expression was not one of fear or anger. It was one of wonder. Of awe. His face wore the half-smiling mask of someone who had heard the whisper of some great mystery and wanted to hear more. To know the secret.

Lightning flashed and thunder erupted like a full broadside from a warship. The shock sent everyone staggering, and then a voice boomed like the voice of some dark god.

“Kill them all!” roared Aleksander Deray.

The horde of the living dead surged forward like a tide.

Chapter Eighty-Four

Grey whirled and raised his Lazarus pistol toward the sinister figure leering out over the rail of his sky ship. The craft was just beyond pistol shot, but it was close enough to see the madman’s face. There was such bottomless contempt there that it made Grey feel like an inconsequential bug. This man, hovering safely above the battlefield below, looked down on them all — the townsfolk and even his own people — with a comprehensive and uniform contempt. They were all nothing to him. A means to an end or a nuisance to be crushed underfoot.

Behind Grey, on the bridge, he heard the sound of a body falling to the wooden boards. Lucky Bob. Dying. Free from the ghost rock, but with a bullet punched through his heart. From behind the barriers, Grey heard a voice rise in a banshee wail of horror and grief.

Jenny.

“Jenny,” her father said in a whisper of grief. “I’m so sorry…”

“Kill them or burn!” bellowed Deray. Grey could hear the deaders behind him begin to move. The seconds of the hourglass had all run out now.

With a snarl of inarticulate rage he fired at Deray.

The walking dead on the bridge fired their guns. Some fired bullets. Others had the necromancer’s version of Kingdom rifles, but instead of ghost rock bullets they fired red flame in long, sizzling bursts.

Everyone on the barricade fired. Everybody was firing, firing, firing. The world seemed to explode in burning gunpowder and hot lead.

“Looks!” screamed Grey. “Now!”

Chapter Eighty-Five

It all went wrong.

It all went to hell.

In the seconds before Looks Away’s blast detonated the ghost rock explosives, the undead swarmed toward the mouth of the bridge. Scores of them thundered over the creaking boards and flooded through the gates of Paradise Falls. Grey landed hard on the edge of the drop-off as the killers swept past and over him. He curled into a fetal ball as booted feet trampled him. His Colt went spinning from his hand and he saw feet step on it and push it down into the mud.

Through the protective cage of his arms, Grey saw the destruction of the bridge. The middle of the span changed in the blink of an eye from wood and rope to a new sun that was born into searing brightness in the middle of the storm. Except instead of yellow, this sun burned with sizzling blue light that roared and crackled and vaporized everything it touched. Grey saw undead bodies light up like candles and then fly apart like piñatas. He saw bodies and parts of bodies fly high into the storm, burning despite the rain, then fall like dying embers into the chasm.

He saw the bridge itself burst apart. Torn ropes twisted like snakes of fire. Boards tumbled upward, spinning even as they became wreathed in flame. Then the whole mass of it plunged downward toward the spikes of rocks, and the unforgiving alien river that flowed outward from the depths of hell.

Hundreds of the undead vanished inside a sheet of flame. Their bodies fell twisting and burning into the chasm. Hundreds of the uniformed human soldiers fell with them. They screamed despite the fire in their mouths, their lungs. They tried to hold on to the bridge, on to life, but there was no hope for any of them. The force of the explosion flashed outward with titanic force, slamming into the cliffs on either side of the chasm like the fists of the god of fire. The sandstone rocks of the cliff walls, already weakened, collapsed at once, dragging down four of the tanks and hundreds more of the waiting army of the mad necromancer. Screaming men and screaming manitou tumbled toward their doom with half a million tons of rock and the weight of those machines pushing them to destruction.

The ground beneath Grey began to crumble, too, and he began to crawl, then to claw at the mud as it tried to fall away and send him to his death as well. He got to his hands and knees and crawled like a beaten dog, and then there was a hand under his armpit, pulling him up.

Looks Away.

They staggered together away from the collapsing cliff, and when they felt solid ground beneath their feet they ran.

God did they run.

“Jesus Christ…,” gasped Grey as they reached completely solid ground. Grey dropped to his knees again, gasping. He could feel blood running down his face and his whole body screamed in pain from all the feet that had kicked and stepped on him.

“I know,” said Looks Away grimly. “How are you? Can you walk? Can you fight?”

In the turbulent air, the necromancer’s frigate sailed toward Paradise Falls. Undead crouched behind the remnants of the shattered rails and fired rifles that shot streaks of red fire. Explosions rocked the town. Buildings went up in pillars of fire.

Directly ahead of Grey and Looks Away, the undead swarmed over the sandbag wall. Through the sounds of shouting and gunfire they heard a woman’s scream. Jenny or someone else. A young voice filled with terror.

Grey hauled himself back to his feet and spat mud and blood into the wind. He tore the Lazarus pistol from its holster. He saw movement and turned to see people standing in the shadows beneath a withered cottonwood tree. Men whose faces he knew. And a woman whose face he had dreamed about every night since he’d left her to die.

“Annabelle…” he murmured.

They were right here. His ghosts had caught up to him at last.

“I tried,” he told her. “I tried to save him. I tried.”

Annabelle said nothing. Her face shone as if she stood in bright moonlight.

“Let me try to save the people here in town. Give me that. Let me do that much before you take me.”

The ghosts of his men and the ghost of his lover said nothing. The rain slanted through the empty branches of the trees. It passed through the specters and struck the ground at their feet.

“Grey—?” asked Looks Away. He stood beside Grey and followed the line of his friend’s gaze.

“Please,” begged Grey. “Give me that much, and then you can drag me down to hell.”

“Grey,” repeated Looks Away. “Who are they?”

The question jolted Grey. “You can see them?”

“Yes… but I don’t…”

Then Looks Away stiffened and it was clear that he understood. “Oh… my God… your men. And… and… dear god in heaven.”

The ghosts held their ground. The two men held theirs. Screams and gunfire filled the air.

“Please…,” whispered Grey once more.

Then Annabelle nodded. Once. A small thing. Despite the rain and clouds, the day seemed strangely bright. He could feel a snarl etch itself onto his mouth. He raised his gun and touched the barrel to the brim of his hat. A salute. An acceptance. He said nothing. There was nothing more that needed to be said. Together, brothers in arms, they ran toward the fight. Both of them knowing, deep in their hearts, that they were going to die. Neither of them cared. All that mattered was taking as many of their enemies with them as they could. This fight was no longer about winning.

Now it was all about slaughter.

Chapter Eighty-Six

The fight was brutal.

Nearly two hundred of the undead had made it off the bridge before it blew. They ran howling at the barricade, straight into a hail of bullets. They fell by the dozen, some with wounds that their demons’ spirits would heal given time; others dropped back with head wounds that doomed them to nothingness.

Grey saw Jenny Pearl standing with a foot braced on the pile of sandbags, her face set into a mask of mingled hatred and acceptance as she fired her Lazarus pistol into the heart of the swarm. The gun seemed to be functioning perfectly now, and one after another of the dead men exploded as the compressed gas inside the ghost rock bullets blew them to red pieces.

Looks Away and Grey opened up as they caught up to the invading horde. The Lazarus bullets killed every undead they struck, no matter where they hit. Even a wound to a leg or arm set off a chain reaction with the fragment of ghost rock in their chests. Undead died screaming.

The Kingdom rifle did far more damage, though. When one of its rounds struck, the resulting blast consumed everything inside a twenty-foot radius. Souls flickered to the wind and then were torn to emptiness as brains exploded from the monstrous pressure. It took the walking dead in the middle of the swarm only moments to realize that death chased them even as they sought to overwhelm the barricade. They laughed in the face of it, though. The red madness of slaughter was all they cared about.

Other townsfolk deserted the other barriers and dashed through the ever-thickening rain to join the melee. Grey saw Mrs. O’Malley holding a musket by the barrel and laying about her like a warrior queen from some ancient legend. Old though she was, she put real power into her swings, and a heap of undead with shattered skulls attested to her ferocity.

Grey fired his gun dry and paused to reload. He had already used half of his ammunition. One of the living dead rushed him before he could finish slapping the new cylinder in place. Grey pivoted and stamped hard on its knee with the flat of his boot. Bones snapped like dry sticks and the monster fell flat on its face, and even as it landed Grey stomped down with his heel, catching the thing behind the ear. The skull shattered and the neck canted inward. The creature stopped moving. Grey slapped the new cylinder into place and ran over the corpse to rejoin the fight.

A series of explosions tore through the air and Grey wheeled around to see several of the little disasters — blue, yellow, pink, and purple — explode in the thick of the enemy.

A split second later, a cry went up, and to his horror, Grey saw Doctor Saint fall as a line of red energy pulses punched downward from the railing of the sky frigate. Whether the scientist was dead or crippled was impossible to determine as the tide of battle swept over him, and he was lost to Grey’s sight.

Grey fought his way to the outer edge of the barricade and launched himself into the thick of a battle between two youngsters — a boy and a girl of about seventeen who looked like twins — and five of the undead. The boy was on his knees, hands pressed to a savage wound in his stomach while the girl stood her ground and fired a Winchester, working the lever with fevered determination, hitting the enemy because at that distance there was no room to miss. One of the walking dead grabbed the smoking barrel of her gun and tore it from her hands and the creature behind him flung himself atop the girl, bearing her to the ground.

Grey shot the dead man who had taken the Winchester, but he dared not shoot the one atop the girl. Instead he kicked it in the ribs with all of his strength, flipping it off of her and onto its back. The girl whipped a knife from her belt, rolled onto her knees and drove the point of the blade into the monster’s eye socket. The creature twitched once and then collapsed back, dead.

Grey flashed her a wild grin. If life was kinder and if he had any chance at a future — which he knew he did not — he would want a girl like this as his daughter.

The other three undead rushed forward, but Grey pivoted in the mud and killed them with three fast shots from the Lazarus gun. They exploded in blue fire and red blood.

“Get him to safety,” Grey said, pointing to the girl’s wounded twin.

But she shook her head and foraged among the dead for a new gun. “Safety?” she barked, then followed it with a mad laugh. “Where’s that?”

“Grey!”

He turned at the sound of his name and saw Jenny there. Right there.

She was streaked with mud, blood, and rainwater, her hair was in rattails and her dress was torn, but she was more beautiful in that moment than ever before. She had her Lazarus pistol in one hand and a big Remington army pistol. The barrel of the Lazarus gun was pointed down, but the big, black mouth of the Remington was pointed at his heart.

“You killed him,” she said.

“Jenny—?”

“You killed my pa.”

“I… I tried to save him,” said Grey. “I begged him to stand down. I wanted him to tear the rock from his chest so that he didn’t have to die.”

There were tears in her eyes. “You shot him in the chest.”

“I—.”

“Not the head,” said Jenny. “You didn’t shoot him in the head.”

“Jenny, please…”

“You killed him,” she repeated. Then she said, “You saved him.”

Grey held his breath, frozen into the moment.

“You saved his soul,” said Jenny in a voice that was strange and distant.

“This wasn’t his fault,” he said simply. “He didn’t deserve this.”

She looked down at the dead men whose bodies lay in pieces. “But you killed him.”

“What choice did I have?”

Jenny shook her head, then stared up at the frigate. “Deray is a monster,” she said. “He is the Beast of the Apocalypse made flesh. He turns flesh against flesh and hearts against hearts. He is the defiler.”

Her voice was so strange now. Not like Jenny’s voice.

“Jenny—?”

She lowered the pistol and began to turn away. Then she paused and turned her head, looking over her shoulder at him.

“We love you, Grey,” she said. “We both love you.”

Then she raised both guns and rushed back into the fight.

We both love you.

A sick wave of horror washed through Grey’s soul.

“No…,” he said aloud.

No, he screamed in the empty halls of his breaking heart. He heard a chorus of despairing cries rise up from the defenders and he turned to look. What he saw nearly crushed him. The sky frigate had moved back across the chasm, past the blackened ruin of the bridge, to the far side. The undead aboard the frigate had cast down a dozen ropes, and the remaining soldiers on the far side of the gorge were lashing them to the arms of the metal giant. Then the ship rose again and bore Samson into the air.

Across the chasm.

Toward Paradise Falls.

Samson. An invulnerable engine of destruction. Coming. Not to join the fight, but to end it. To exterminate. To prove that the beast that was Deray was truly the conqueror that would crush the world under foot.

If there had been any part of Grey that was still sane, still undamaged by all that had happened over the last few days, then it broke in that moment. Understanding is a fist, a hammer, a bullet, and it smashed through him.

We both love you.

We.

With a scream so loud it tore blood from his throat, Grey followed her into the fight.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

If war is hell, and if wars are fought on Earth, then Earth itself is hell. At least it is when the flames of war burn hottest. Grey felt his humanity drain away as he fought. Fatigue and pain went with it, leaving behind something else. A construct as cold and inhuman as Samson, who now hung suspended from the airship. Grey saw Deray at the rail, a sword in his hand and a demonic smile on his face.

“Do it, you bastard,” whispered Grey. As if he could hear those words, Deray turned and slashed at the ropes that held Samson. The giant seemed to hang for a moment longer than he should, like a fist poised to deliver a death blow.

Then it fell.

Fell.

Like a comet.

Like the hammer of some ancient god.

Like the footfall of the antichrist.

It fell.

Tons of gleaming metal dropped through the swirling rain directly down toward the barricade. Undead and humans screamed and scattered, falling back as the colossus streaked downward.

Only Grey stood his ground, his Lazarus pistol raised. He had one shot left. One.

He pointed it at the giant and fired.

Knowing that it could do no good, but needing to try anyway. Needing to. The ghost rock bullet struck the bottom of the giant’s foot.

And then…

There was a sound, like a hammer striking a great gong. A ringing, crushing noise that sent Grey flying through the air once more. Flung again like debris.

The sound was accompanied by a flash of blue.

Massive.

Incredible. Greater than anything Grey had ever seen. Bigger than the blast out in Nevada that had torn apart the hills. Bigger than the thunderbolt that had destroyed the great worm in the desert.

Brighter than the sun. The blue fireball seemed to open like a mouth and then clamp its jaws around the giant in the instant before it would have crushed the sandbag barrier. Then, like the fist of God, it punched Samson away. Far away. Away from the barrier. Out toward the chasm in an arc that trailed azure flames. Samson, a crumpled, blackened, twisted parody of the invincible giant it had been, fell into the cleft and vanished from sight. Everyone stood or sprawled in stunned silence. In this moment the world made no sense at all. Not to the living or the dead.

Above them, the sky frigate tilted into the wind, its great balloon ruptured, the hull cracked and splintered. It slid lower in the sky, trailing smoke and gas as it dropped down, yard by yard until its keel bumped against the roof of big barn that stood on the edge of town. The barn that held the late Doctor Saint’s laboratory.

Grey Torrance climbed to his feet, unaware of the blood that ran from a dozen cuts, some of them deep, crisscrossing his frame. He had no weapon now, and his clothes hung in rags.

Everyone else got slowly to their feet. Undead and townsfolk. One by one they turned toward the town, staring at the thing that loomed there in the middle of the rainswept main street.

A wagon.

Ordinary in most ways. Two mules stood trembling in the traces, their ears back and teeth bared in terror.

On the wagon, looking like something from a nightmare invention from the mind of some fevered tinkerer, sat the massive shape of the Kingdom cannon. Blue smoke leaked from its barrel. Leaning against it, small, round, dripping blood, was Percival Saint.

He smiled weakly at the sea of faces. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he pitched backward off the cart to land bonelessly in the mud. He did not even try to break his fall.

“No!” cried a voice, and Thomas Looks Away staggered from the press of the crowd and took a tentative step toward the fallen scientist. Then he stopped and hung his head. He turned slowly back to the barricade and raised his Kingdom rifle. Grey had no idea if the Sioux had any rounds left, but there was pain and murder in his friend’s eyes.

None of the undead moved. There were still nearly two hundred of them. There were fewer of the townsfolk. Maybe a hundred left. Corpses were everywhere. The rain mixed the blood with the soil and mud. Grey saw movement on the sky frigate. Aleksander Deray was still alive. He had a bag of tools slung over his shoulder and was climbing a section of netting to reach the tear in the gas envelope.

“No,” said Grey. “No goddamn way.”

He took a step toward the barn and nearly fell. There was something wrong with his leg and pain exploded upward into his back. He didn’t care. He ate the pain and let it feed his desire to reach Deray. He needed to grasp a throat in his hands, to feel its structure crumble, to hear the rattle of a last breath. He forced himself on. First in a staggering walk, then as he feasted on his own pain, he broke into a run. Behind him, the battle — stalled by shock — began again.

He heard gunfire and screams.

As he ran he saw the ghosts again. No longer under the dead cottonwood. Now they stood in the road that led up to the barn. All of his men, everyone who had died at Bailey Creek. His sergeant, the corporals. All of his friends. Everyone who had trusted him.

And Annabelle.

Of all of them, she was the least substantial. Her shade was like something painted on glass. He could see through her. Her eyes, though, they were intense. Grey braced himself, thinking that they had come to intercept him, but as he ran toward the barn they stepped back to let him pass. The dead giving license to the doomed to fight the damned. He almost laughed. It was comedy. The kind the gods would enjoy. They were perverse enough to find all of this to their liking.

The barn door was closed but Grey launched himself at it and kicked it inward. It flew backward and he landed hard and stumbled inside. The stairs were in the far corner, and Grey ran past the tables filled with strange devices designed by Doctor Saint. He had no idea what any of them were. There were no Kingdom rifles, no Lazarus pistols. Nothing that he could use. All he had left were the Bowie knife on his belt and his fists.

That would have to be enough. If not, then he really would use his bare hands. Or his teeth, if it came to that.

He heard a dull thump as the frigate bumped once more against the roof. Still there, he thought. Good.

“I’m coming,” he said as he climbed the stairs.

At the top of the second flight there was a ladder that stretched up to a trapdoor. Grey pulled it down, took a breath, and then climbed. The trapdoor had a simple slide bolt, which he shot as quietly as he could, then he raised the door an inch. The pitched roof of the barn, with its rows of black tarpaper shingles, stretched all the way to the edge thirty feet away. The frigate bobbed in the rain just beyond it, turned stern-on to the barn. All of the windows in the stern gallery had been smashed out, and Grey could see the wreckage of what had been an elegantly furnished captain’s cabin. The oak and teak from which the ship was built was ruined now — cracked and warped, singed and fractured. He saw dead men slumped over debris. Instead of a suit of sails, the ship had its big gas envelope, and Deray clung to the nettings and used what looked like a mop to smear some glistening goo along the edges of the tear. Every few seconds he paused, held the swab in one hand, and used the other to press torn sections of the canvas envelope into place. The substance he was applying must have been some kind of glue, because the fabric stuck fast. There was very little of the rupture left, though gas poured out of the diminishing hole with great force. Grey marveled at the strength of the man as he forced the pieces into place against that pressure. Deray must be fantastically strong.

Grey raised the trapdoor all the way and climbed out. There was a single beam running the length of the barn, with the rest of the roof sloping sharply down on either side. The beam was ten inches wide. One slip and he would plummet from the barn.

“So, don’t slip,” he muttered in a voice too quiet for anyone but himself to hear.

He stood up, and despite his confident words his body swayed with fatigue and injury. Even so, he drew his Bowie knife and stepped onto the beam. It wasn’t quite like walking a tightrope, but with the wind and rain it was a foolish and dangerous thing to do. He did it anyway.

Below the barn, the fight raged. He could see Jenny and Looks Away leading the fight, but it was impossible to tell who was winning. Or if “victory” was even possible with so many people already dead.

Deray had his back to him and he was nearly finished repairing the damage from the Kingdom cannon. The necromancer had a thin saber strapped to his waist but no gun. Grey saw only a few of the undead aboard. One lay on the deck, eyes glazed as he stared at the ragged red stumps where his legs had been. A second felt his way blindly along the rail; his face was a charred mask without eyes, lips, or nose.

Only the third was whole and seemed in command of himself. He stood at the wheel of the big frigate, wrestling with it to keep the ship steady in the storm winds.

“That’s done it!” cried Deray as he flung down the mop. “Hard to starboard. Bring her up and around. We’ll land on the far side, load as many troops as we can, and then bring them over here to finish this.”

“Aye aye,” said the dead man as he threw his weight against the wheel.

Neither of the men saw Grey coming. Neither heard him until he leaped from the end of the beam, across the shattered rail and landed with a thump on the deck. Then they both whirled.

The helmsman was closest, so Grey jumped at him and buried the point of the Bowie knife deep into his chest. The point struck the chunk of ghost rock and burst it into fragments of glittering black. There was a screeching sound from the stone and a louder scream from the undead as he staggered backward. As he fell, Grey tore the knife free and faced Deray.

The necromancer stood there, remarkably calm despite this invasion.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “Who are you to come aboard my ship? Who are you to try and turn my own servant against me? Who are you to stand in the way of the natural order of things?”

“Natural?” said Grey. “Now that’s a funny damn word coming from you.”

The frigate began to move sideways, shoved by the hands of the storm winds. The sudden shift of the deck forced both men to take steps to keep their balance.

“Who are you?” repeated Deray. “Are you one of Saint’s colleagues? Are you a government agent?”

“Me?” said Grey with a smile, “I’m nobody at all.”

Rain dripped from the brim of Deray’s hat and ran down the length of his sheathed sword. The necromancer studied him with cold and calculating eyes. “Then what is any of this to you? Are you a mercenary? Is that it? Did these pathetic fools hire you? Did Saint or his pet savage hire you?”

“If you mean Thomas Looks Away, then yes. I work for him. He hired me to help protect this town from you and Nolan Chesterfield.”

Deray snorted. “You’re not very good at your job, are you?”

“No? Ask those poor sons of bitches who were on the bridge.”

Deray began pacing across the deck, his head turned so that he watched Grey out of the corner of his eyes. He was a handsome man with intelligent eyes and a smile that was almost charming. In another time and place Grey would have guessed that he was a doctor. Or maybe a stage actor. Even a politician. He had presence and charm, despite the harshness of his words.

“What is your name?” asked the necromancer.

“Grey Torrance. You won’t have heard of me.”

“No, and nor will anyone hereafter. History will not record your name either.”

Grey shrugged and turned in place so that he continued to face the man even as Deray walked in a wide circle around him. The ship shifted around now, orienting itself so that the bow pointed away from the wind. The heavy gusts pushed it toward the chasm and the rest of Deray’s army. Below the keel, the sounds of screams and gunfire continued unabated. Deray waved an arm toward the rail, indicating the battle.

“Listen to them,” he said. “Your employer, his friends, the rest of the town… it’s all going to perish. Soon this town will not even be a footnote in anyone’s register. There will be no trace of it on any map because I will redraw the maps of this world. I will wash it clean of people like this.” He spat the word “people” as if it was bile on his tongue. “This world has become chaotic and disordered. It no longer makes sense and at the rate it is going it will tear itself apart. When I look into the future I see more and greater wars. Not of conquest, not wars to build something that will last. Petty wars without purpose. Wars that do nothing but leave scars upon the earth and empower fools. This country — just look at what has happened to your America. After it broke away from England it showed such promise. It could have become a superior power, it should have become a new empire. One greater than Britain, greater even than Rome. And now it is fractured and divided and everyone here has gone mad.” Deray shook his head. “That is such a waste. I will create a new world and a new world order. Something nobler, better. Something—”

Grey held up a hand. “Listen, Mr. Deray, I’m sure you have a whole soliloquy rehearsed for moments like this. Shakespeare would be jealous, I have no doubt. But can we skip the rest? I don’t give a hairy rat’s ass about your plans. I don’t care why you want to conquer the world or why you think you’re entitled. On the way up here I thought I wanted to ask you those questions, but now that we’re up to it, I just want to slit your goddamn throat.”

The necromancer stopped pacing, and in a much less pretentious tone said, “You are no fun at all, are you? You have no sense of drama, no appreciation for the importance of a moment like this.”

“No, I don’t. As you said, I’m a nobody.” Grey raised the knife and showed it to Deray. The blade was still slick with the dark blood of the dead man he’d stabbed. “All I care about is what happens next.”

“Very well,” said Deray, and with a movement faster than the eye could see, he drew his sword. “Then let us proceed from conversation to murder.”

Chapter Eighty-Eight

The necromancer was fast.

So damned fast. He lunged forward with a thrust that drove straight toward Grey’s heart. It was a beautifully timed movement, expertly delivered, and executed with power and speed. But Grey was waiting for it. He saw the shift of weight, the telltale alignment of posture and movement. Grey believed what he’d said when he told Deray that he was a nobody, but there was a lie even in his own admission.

He was somebody. He was a soldier. A fighter.

A warrior.

He had spent a life in combat and the slanting deck of this airship was not his first battlefield. Not even his hundredth. Grey twisted nimbly away as the saber’s tip sheared through the air where his heart had been. Grey turned his left side along the blade, feeling the cold edge of it trace a burning line along his arm and back as he turned. But at the end of the turn he swung the Bowie knife around in a terrible arc and slashed the blade across Aleksander Deray’s chest.

He had aimed for Deray’s throat, but the man had grasped his own error and tried to evade the counterattack. The Bowie knife sliced through shirt and vest and cut into the man’s skin. A line of red droplets flew into the air and was whipped away by the wind.

Deray howled and lashed out with his free hand, catching Grey across the mouth with the side of a closed fist. The blow was far more powerful than Grey had any right to expect from a normal man. The force of it sent Grey skidding across the deck toward the cabin wall. With a snarl, Deray leaped after him, slashing in a long diagonal line to try and catch his enemy between blade and wall. But Grey took the impact and went with it, shoving himself even faster and harder against the wall so that he struck and rebounded. He jumped to the right and the tip of Deray’s sword scored a line through the wood.

Without pausing, both men closed in for their next attacks — Deray with another diagonal slash and Grey with a lateral cut that would have disemboweled the necromancer. However the combined speed of their attacks brought them together into a bone-jarring crash that truncated each cut. They immediately locked arms around one another to prevent a close-quarters slash, and grappling like that they went into a staggering dance across the wet deck.

It became immediately apparent that Deray’s blow had not been a freak accident of angle or chance. As Grey had surmised before, he was immensely strong. It was like being wrapped by a steel band. The air was being squeezed out of his lungs and Grey could feel his bones grind. It was rare for him to fight someone substantially stronger and he knew that this level of strength could not be accounted for in any natural way.

It was twisted science.

Or, more probably, it was sorcery.

As they struggled, Deray’s face was lit by a grin of delight. He was taking great pleasure in the surprise that must have registered on Grey’s face. The necromancer leaned close until his lips were inches from Grey’s ear.

“You are nothing, Mr. Torrance,” he said. “You are less than a nuisance. You are nothing at all.”

Grey tried to break the grip but it only tightened as they turned and stepped and fought for balance on the deck of the storm-tossed frigate.

As they turned, Grey nearly cried out when he saw that the deck — which had only been littered by the corpses of walking dead — was now filled.

A knot of figures stood by the freely spinning wheel. Pale faces in bullet-pocked clothes.

His men.

And her.

Annabelle.

The ghosts stood watching as he was slowly being crushed. There was no expression at all on their spectral faces. The two men turned and turned, and as they spun Grey heard Deray grunt in surprise. He’d seen the ghosts, too. For just a moment, the man was distracted, staring with wrinkled brow and frown of consternation at the strange figures.

Grey took the moment, seizing the last chance he had.

He head-butted Deray, catching the man on the ear and then again on the corner of his eyebrow. It was a hard blow that exploded lights in Grey’s own eyes. Deray flinched back, and that lessened the pressure by the slightest amount. Grey darted his head forward and clamped his teeth on the corded tendons on the side of Deray’s neck and simultaneously brought his knee up to smash into the muscles of the man’s thigh. Once, twice, again and again as he tore at the necromancer’s flesh with his teeth.

Deray screamed.

He thrashed like a madman, no longer trying to crush Grey but going wild to try and escape him. Deray kicked back, catching Grey in the stomach with a sideways knee. The air whooshed from Grey’s lungs and the impact knocked his teeth loose. He staggered backward, spitting blood and falling hard to the deck. Deray chased him, kicking Grey again and again, in the stomach, the chest, the face.

Grey felt his bones break. His ribs detonated like firecrackers. Bits of broken teeth clogged his throat and he collapsed sideways, dropping his knife. Deray kicked the weapon overboard and kicked Grey over and over again until Grey flopped back, bleeding and shattered.

Then Deray reeled in the opposite direction, blood boiling from a terrible wound. He dropped his sword to clamp his hands to his neck to stanch the flow of blood. From the force of the blood loss, Grey knew that he had nicked something important when he’d bitten Deray before. An artery.

Good. Let him bleed out like a stuck pig.

Even as he thought those words, Grey felt like he was drifting and for a moment he thought he’d fallen off the ship. But it was his consciousness that seemed to be tearing loose from his body.

I’m dying, he thought, and he knew it to be true.

So was Deray.

The ghosts began moving toward him. Toward both of them, their eyes filled now with a strange and awful hunger.

They’re coming for me.

But they stared past him to the necromancer. Deray used one bloody hand to dig into an inner pocket. He produced a flat disk of polished ghost rock that was set in a silver frame. Strange symbols were carved into the rock and Deray began hastily muttering something over it in a language Grey had never heard.

“Da’k gugt r’un ftaxung sha tsa’t haaft shx ta’ans shas ha nax thunghiaa’ shut latsuftansuaft ghu’ftg ang ta’a us ial un s’uftiasa,” intoned the necromancer. “Bx sha aftga’ gugt I l’ax.”

Above the ship, the storm suddenly intensified and in his delirium Gsrey thought he saw strange, vast, impossible shapes leer at him from within the depths of the clouds. Monstrous eyes glared at him from a head that was lumpy and misshapen. Instead of a mouth and chin, there were dozens of writhing tentacles that whipped within the ferocious winds. Fires, ancient and endless, ignited in those eyes, and it seemed to set fire to the whole of the sky.

“Lu’g ur ghatsat ang ’angaantha,” roared Deray, his blood gurgling in his throat, “haaft na su fta shx unts’ianans!”

Lightning, red as blood, slashed across the sky. Snakes of electricity crawled all over the envelope above the frigate. While behind the hideous face a vast pair of leathery wings seemed to reach outward, each one stretching for miles and filling the whole of the sky. Below, the fighting stopped and everyone screamed. Even the walking dead.

Grey used what little strength he had left to climb to his feet. He coughed and spat dark blood onto the deck, and inside his chest he could feel bones shifting in all the wrong ways. He stared at the great god of all monsters and spat at it, too. But the wind whipped it away, and the god did not even take notice of the dying gunslinger. Red lightning struck the ship and enveloped Deray, and for one mad moment Grey thought that the necromancer was somehow being consumed by his own dark magic. That fate had stepped in to rebuke the hubris of this madman.

But the fire did not burn Deray. It writhed over him and wherever it found a cut or a wound, it glowed like the deepest heart of a blacksmith’s forge. Grey recoiled, throwing a hand across his eyes and crying out as the light burned his eyes. Even the ghosts by the wheel recoiled, and the glow seemed ready to wash them out of all existence.

Far below Grey heard Jenny cry out his name.

“Grey!”

Why she called him now was beyond his ability to understand. The light was so bright that it beat at him like hammers. Her voice though — just the sound of it — triggered a memory. Something that the vampire witch Mircalla had said to him. Something Veronica had repeated.

Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye.

The burning light began to dim, the lightning fading.

Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.

In the clouds, the face of the monster or god or whatever it was, also began to fade.

Deray stood there, wide-legged, blood glistening on his clothes, mingling with rain water. His chest heaved as if he had finished a great labor. The lightning, though gone everywhere else now, still burned in his eyes.

He raised his hand to touch his throat; he touched his chest with the other. The flesh was completely healed. The knife cut was gone. The bite was gone. He threw back his head and laughed. Exultant, triumphant.

Invincible.

Not merely a necromancer, but something else. Immortal. The unconquerable conqueror.

Grey turned and looked down at the crowd around the barricade. No one was fighting. They were all looking up at him. Jenny was not there. She was not standing where she had stood.

Looks Away was there, but he was alone.

Then…

No.

Not alone.

Looks Away, bloodied and exhausted, stood over a figure who lay in the mud. A slim figure with blond hair.

Lying there.

Broken.

“No…,” he said, but that single word had to tear its way through the wreckage in his chest.

No.

He wanted to scream it. But could not. It didn’t matter, though, and he knew it. Jenny was gone. What remained was broken, ruined, half buried in mud.

Gone.

And that made him remember something else. Something Jenny had said to him not an hour ago as they prepared for this battle.

“Don’t worry,” she had said so softly that only he could hear her. “Death isn’t the end.”

Even as he remembered those words he actually heard them.

He turned his head and she was there.

Annabelle.

Standing there, her face bright as a candle. Her hair rippled in the breeze, but even though the wind was blowing her hair moved in a different direction. As if she stood in another place and was touched by some other, gentler breeze. It was so strange. Grey wondered if this was because he was dying.

“Death isn’t the end,” she said.

And as she said it he heard both voices.

Hers.

Jenny’s.

Speaking as one.

“I’m… sorry,” he said to both of them. “I’m so sorry.”

Annabelle smiled, but he could see Jenny there, too. Like two images painted on glass, overlaid and then brought to life by magic. A shadow fell across her face and Grey turned, wheezing, gasping, coughing wetly, to see Aleksander Deray standing there, his clothes torn but his body whole. His power restored, immense, terrible.

“Now you understand,” said the necromancer as he stepped close to Grey. As he spoke his breath blew against Grey like the draft from an open furnace. “Now you see why not even death itself can bar me from taking this world for my own. Now you understand why I can never be stopped. Now you grasp the full scope of your own failure.”

“Yeah,” said Grey. “I know.”

Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye.

The words echoed in his dying brain.

Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.

Grey forced himself to stand straight. Despite the grinding pain in his chest, despite the liquid heat in his stomach, he stood tall one last time. He managed to smile. With split lips and broken teeth, Grey Torrance smiled at the man who had killed him.

“See you in hell, you son of a bitch.”

He winked at Deray.

Then he wrapped his arms around the man and with the very last of his strength he threw himself over the rail, dragging Deray with him.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

They seemed to fall for a long time.

Deray screamed in terror. Real terror.

Below them the people of Paradise Falls screamed.

As Deray screamed red fire erupted from his mouth and nose. It enveloped Grey, it wrapped searing tendrils around them both as they dropped from the frigate down, down, down.

Grey had one last glimpse of the pale face of Annabelle looking over the rail at him as he fell. Annabelle looking at him with Jenny’s eyes.

I’m so sorry, he thought.

And then the ground was there.

Even with all that rain and mud it was so hard.

So hard.

It crushed them both. Pulped them both.

But it did not kill them. The night and the storm and all of its dark magic were not done with them yet. With either of them. Grey heard them hit the ground. Heard the sound of bones snapped, of meat bursting. He felt the heat of blood. His and Deray’s, mingling together. He felt the stab like a knife as one of Deray’s splintered ribs speared him in the chest.

The world closed its eyes and there was a time of darkness.

Then there was a time of floating. Of nothingness. Grey thought he felt himself still falling and he wondered how far he would have to plummet until he landed in the fiery depths of the Pit.

Would Deray be there with him? Would both of them serve out their sentences in Hell, chained together for all eternity? Was the universe that cruel? That perverse?

His eyelids fluttered open.

It was dark and the winds blew and the rain fell.

Grey saw a face come into focus as someone bent over him. He saw worry, and then saw that worry turn to horror as full understanding struck him. Looks Away closed his own eyes for a moment.

“By the Queen’s garters, old boy,” he murmured. “You’ve gone and done it now.”

Grey tried to speak. Wanted to. Needed to. But there was so little of him left.

“Did… I…?” he croaked. Hot blood choked him and he had to turn his head to spit his mouth clear. There was something wrong with his neck. The bones felt wrong. So wrong. “Did I… kill… him…?”

Looks Away looked off to Grey’s left. His expression was confused.

“This son of a whore is as hard to kill as you are, dear fellow,” he said. He sneered at Deray, who lay beyond Grey’s sight. Looks Away drew his knife and rain pinged off the bright blade. “I think I’ll have to finish this myself — if anything at this point will end him. Let me do that for you, my friend. Let me make sure he goes first and—.”

“No,” said a voice.

And then another figure stepped into view beyond Looks Away. A tall man with iron gray hair, wearing a black vest and white shirt open to the mid-chest. A man who had a deep and dreadful scar over his heart.

A scar.

Not a chunk of ghost rock.

Not a bullet hole.

A ragged pink scar.

“No,” repeated Lucky Bob Pearl, “he’s mine.” He held pistols in each hand.

Looks Away recoiled from the Harrowed, bringing his knife up, ready to fight. Lucky Bob shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said as he touched the scar. “We’re not enemies anymore, Looksie. We used to be friends. Maybe we can be that again if the world doesn’t end.”

“Bob…?” said Looks Away, stunned. “How?”

Lucky Bob knelt and placed his hand over Grey’s heart. “He did it. He destroyed the ghost rock and freed me from the necromancer.”

“But you’re… you’re…”

“Dead?” finished Lucky Bob, smiling a rueful smile. “Maybe. I don’t feel dead. Hell, son, I’ve never felt more alive in my whole dang life.”

“What about the… um… other?”

“The manitou?”

“I guess maybe we’re both in here. Don’t know how that’s going to work out, but for right now I’m calling the damn shots. Me and nobody else.” He tapped his own chest. “Heart’s still beating. Wounds heal pretty darn fast. Don’t ask how. Guess we’re alive or close enough. And I guess we’ll try and figure some way of getting along. Both of us sharing the same suit of skin and bones. Funny old world. Point is that this man — your friend here — saved us both. Me and the manitou. He could have killed us, but he didn’t. And he tried not to kill any of us. He offered us a chance.”

Lucky Bob stood up, and as he did so his smile went away as he looked around at the last of the undead. There were eleven of them, and each was covered with blood. Their eyes blazed with unbanked hatred.

“Well, come on, you yellow-bellied sons of whores,” growled Lucky Bob. “This is my goddamn town.”

The undead howled with blood fury and rushed toward him.

Grey could not believe what he saw, what he witnessed. The Harrowed Lucky Bob Pearl brought the guns up and fired.

Fired.

Fired.

His guns bucked in his hands eleven times. And eleven undead heads snapped backward from the impacts. Eleven pairs of feet lost all sense; eleven bodies crumpled to the ground. And all of it in the space of a few ragged heartbeats. The gunshots echoed like thunder and then faded to a ghastly silence.

“My goddamn town,” repeated Lucky Bob.

Then the Harrowed turned from the pile of corpses and walked over to where Aleksander Deray lay crushed and broken. Ruined, but still alive, and Grey could see that the terrible damage was already healing. Soon the necromancer would rise once more.

“Tell me, you miserable piece of cow shit,” said Lucky Bob, “how does one kill a necromancer? Hmm? ’Cause I aim to do it if I have to cut you to pieces or burn down this whole town around you. I will do it, I swear to whatever gods there may be. You made me kill my own daughter, do you know that? You made me shoot my Jenny in the heart.”

Grey wanted to tell him — to insist — that Lucky Bob had not done that. The whalebone corset had deflected his bullet. But he looked at the ragged scar on Lucky Bob’s chest. And he remembered the scar on Jenny’s chest. It had been between her breasts, and in the heat of their passion Grey had kissed that scar.

That’s when he understood. That’s when he understood so many things.

Death isn’t the end, she had said.

At the point of death a manitou could enter a body and take possession of it. Heal it. Restore it to life, and then share it with the soul of the murdered person.

A manitou could do that. He’d seen it firsthand with Lucky Bob.

Was that it? Like father like daughter? The indomitable Pearls? Both of them… Harrowed.

And Annabelle? How did she fit into the picture?

Even as he wondered about it, Grey knew. She was every bit as strong as Jenny. And she was so much like her. In personality, perhaps in spirit. Had they bonded somehow? Become one woman? If so, then no possessing manitou stood a chance.

It had to be. After all, hadn’t those lips spoken with the voice of both Jenny and Annabelle? Even as he thought that, he saw a pale shape rise from the mud behind Looks Away. Her face and hair were filthy and her clothes were torn, but her eyes were filled with a light that even death could not dim. She came to him, and Looks Away and Lucky Bob fell back in surprise. The Sioux looked close to breaking. Lucky Bob’s eyes filled with tears.

Jenny paused and touched her father’s face. “No,” she said in a voice that was equal parts Jenny and Annabelle, “we will deal with him.”

Deal with him.

“Annabelle…,” Grey said weakly. “It’s okay… I’m ready…” He coughed up a gout of blood. “Whatever you… need to… do… I deserve it.”

The Harrowed that was both Annabelle and Jenny stood there and smiled down at him. The other ghosts appeared around her. His soldiers, his men. His friends who he had failed. They were all smiling.

Those smiles were a terrible thing to see. They were without mercy. They were the smiles of beings that had walked too long in the valley of the shadow. They were the smiles of the dead.

“Take him,” said Annabelle/Jenny. “Take him. Make it hurt. Make it terrible. Make it last.”

The ghosts let loose a dreadful howl as they rushed forward. Grey wanted to close his eyes but he did not. After all the betrayal he could not deny them that. He nodded to them as they reached with cold, dead hands. The ghosts rushed past him. Aleksander Deray screamed as the ghosts fell upon him. The scream rose and rose and rose, filling the air, shattering the storm, tearing apart the clouds, rending the fabric of the world.

The ghosts did not touch Grey. But they tore the necromancer’s soul from his body and dragged it down through the mud into the earth and down to Hell itself. Deray’s scream lingered for a long time, a stain on the day.

It was done.

Done.

And Grey knew that he was done, too. Now it was his time to make that long journey down into the burning Pit. Like Deray, his time had come to pay for his crimes.

In his shattered chest, Grey’s heart beat once. Twice.

A third time. Like the ringing of a fractured bell. Slower with each beat.

Brother Joe knelt beside him and made the sign of the cross in the air. He was weeping.

So was Looks Away.

And behind him was another figure, another woman. Voluptuous, with dark hair and emerald green eyes, and an inner light that burned with blue-white purity. Veronica.

Then she came and knelt down, pushing Brother Joe out of the way. She. Annabelle. Jenny. Both of them in one. She bent down to kiss his face, his eyes, his lips.

“Death isn’t the end,” she whispered, and then she said, “I love you.”

He could only manage one more word.

“Love…”

It was enough. His heart beat again. And again.

And then no more.

Grey Torrance felt himself float free of the broken shell, and a curtain of darkness fell over him, over the world, over everything.