Dreadful Skin (18 page)

A new dog-shout barked and whined, and another picked up the call.

I was counting. Trying to sort them out. How many? Two. One, two, three more. Four. Five. Seven altogether? More?

My heart was pounding, and it was not all from fear. I wouldn’t have admitted it to any of my company, but I was excited, too. I’d seen the moon before it’d been obscured. I heard the pack hounds calling outside, and the monster inside my own breast was aching to answer.

But no, not yet.

Not a call and response. They knew where we were, or if they did not, they’d find us soon. They could smell us, as surely as I could smell the fire and powder and charred wood blowing through the cracks where the windows let the night air in.

I prayed for the town, and everyone who might be left in it. After all, only God could help them now. I prayed for this church, and for everyone in it. After all, only God could help us now.

But God had done this, hadn’t he? God had sent Leonard to Melissa. God had sent me to Leonard. And, when I was sure I could not save them alone, He’d sent McKenzie to me.

God had done His job. The rest was up to us.

***

Padding footsteps slapped heavily up to the wooden stairs, and climbed them—one foot, two feet. Three. Four. The wood of the porch groaned under the weight.

The ranger lifted his biggest gun and aimed it at the sound, even though the doors stood between us and it. Leonard lifted his scythe, and wrapped both hands around the handle. Melissa picked up the biggest, ugliest blade that remained—one of the
navaja
blades with a curved tip that was sharpened almost all the way around.

I checked the chambers in the Colt’s barrel, and they were all occupied.

“There,” Melissa whispered, and the word sounded fierce to me.

I pointed the gun where she indicated, and yes, I heard it there too—more feet. More rustling steps shuffling through the dirt. And the sniffing, snorting of a hound on the trail of its quarry.

“Everywhere,” I argued. My ears strained and heard too much, from too many directions. The fire in the background distorted the noise, but not so much that I couldn’t tell we were surrounded. Some were holding back. Two were coming in close. I could guess which two.

I knew the scent of the one, and Melissa’s black, angry eyes told me the other.

The two nearest monsters circled the church once and retreated to confer with the others. “They’re leaving?” Leonard asked nervously, crazily. He knew better. I don’t know why he bothered to say it.

“They’re discussing,” McKenzie replied. “They’ve found something they didn’t quite expect.”

“You can hear them?” I asked.

“Well enough. Not as well as you, I reckon.” He stared at me, and through me. Who was this man, who deduced the meat of things so quickly? What else had he seen, and what else had he encountered in his work as a ranger that the prospect of human wolves did not shake him?

“They didn’t count on
you
, did they, ma’am?”

“Eileen,” I offered. I didn’t think I’d ever told him my name. “But no, I don’t think they did. And they won’t be deterred by me. There’s one of them—Jack. We’ve fought before.”

“You must’ve won.”

“No. Why would you say that?”

“Because you’re still alive.”

I moved the Colt, using it to track the things I heard beyond the walls even as I carried on the conversation with the ranger. “The first time I lost. I lost everything, including my humanity. The second time, I lost an opportunity to end him. I’d hardly count myself among the fortunate or successful.”

“Eileen?” Leonard said.

“As if you didn’t know.” I was concentrating more on the night outside than the confusion in the church. “Why did you write me, if you didn’t? I killed your preacher, you knew that.”

Melissa gasped, a puff of surprised air.

I swiveled, and the ranger did too. We were aiming at nothing, at everything. Slowly, with fingers on triggers. Ready to aim for faces, for eyes, for throats. “He asked me to do it. He was one of them. One of us. He wanted out. You didn’t tell her. I don’t blame you.”

“I didn’t know, not…for certain.”

“Of course you did. I told you in the letter, and I’m reminding you now. I’m a danger to you all.”

“What are you?” Leonard asked, and for the first time I thought he really
did
want to know.

An expression like a smile, but not a smile, bloomed on Melissa’s face. “I know what she is.”

The ranger answered. “She’s like
them
.”

“No,” Melissa insisted. “She’s not. She’s what they wanted to make me. And that’s why they are afraid of her. They
are
afraid of you, aren’t they?”

I wished she’d stop asking questions. It was hard enough to hear their movements without the distraction.

“She’s the mother and goddess Jack wanted to make. Not a pack, but a hive. Not a wife, but a queen.” She was speaking faster and faster, her words tumbling close together. “And terrifying, because she is beyond their control, because she answers to none of them and she is stronger than all of them.”

Leonard moved to put an arm around her, but she pushed him away. “No, don’t. Stupid men. All of them, stupid men. But not so stupid as that. Not so stupid as to come in here, when we are not alone.”

“Melissa.”
I threw it with as much authority as I could muster.

She turned to me and with that same killing face that wasn’t smiling, but showed all her teeth—she growled more cat than wolf.
“Our Lady, full of grace.”

On the other side of her face there was a window with a pew’s raised end holding the moonlight out. But there was a crack, too—between the church and the night. And in that crack peered an eye the color of sunrise over smoke.

I fired.

Melissa squawked. The bullet grazed her ear but fully hit its mark and a screaming whine shrieked into the sanctuary, but the invading eye retreated.

And that was the end of our preparation, and our peace. The pack came fast, without patience and without any more caution. McKenzie shot again and again. When his rifle was dry he went to his hip holsters.

“Their faces!” I shouted. “Blind them, make them bleed. Take off their heads if you think you can do it in a shot or two.”

He heard me, I know he did. But he was too busy to respond. I didn’t hold it against him.

“Their hearts, their lungs, they heal too fast. Don’t waste any bullets that way!”

Leonard had another idea. He had it beside a window down front, where a hair-covered hand was pushing at the fragmented glass. The hand writhed and reached, groping and grasping for any flesh it could clutch.

“Leonard!” I shouted.

He lifted his blade and brought it down in a heaving, hacking motion. The edge didn’t sever the hand but it lodged itself deeply and when the hand tried to retreat, it was barred by the steel. It beat itself against the frame and the pew while howling, spraying blood.

Melissa brought her knife to the scene and attacked the pinned hand savagely, until the last of the holding bones broke and the skin tore and the appendage flopped, twitching, to the floor.

The sound outside was unbearable to me.

It was awfulness in my ears, and it was calling me in a most hideous way. I didn’t know if they knew it or not, or if they even meant it—but they were calling me, or calling to the thing inside me; and the thing inside was begging to answer.

“No,” I told it. “No,” I said as I watched the blood-smeared hand spasm and disappear beneath a pew.

Teeth and a muzzle too high to belong to a dog slathered and stuffed themselves through a window’s wreckage and I fired. The teeth shattered, and saliva mixed with urpley-black slime spurted across what was left of the glass. A piece of something’s leathery nose slipped stickily down the pane.

They were all around us. Above us, even. Up the side of the porch, onto the tower with the ratty steeple, and with a clang of a bell—clapped by a foot—one was above us and stomping with leaden feet upon the shingles.

McKenzie was reloading. I had two shots left before I needed to do the same.

I held the gun above my head and tracked the thing with my ears. Even if I didn’t hit anything vital, the force of the bullet might send the beast back to the ground.

Two cracks sent dust fluttering down onto my head, along with a rain of splinters. An angry but undeterred yowl answered, and was triumphant. McKenzie’s rifle echoed my own gunfire, and then the thing yelped and fell.

On the way down it jammed a knee or an elbow into the roof, and the night spilled in from there, too. I stood beneath it, in the spot where the moon looked down and encouraged me—the moon was calling too, ally and ene- y both. I couldn’t fight it, I couldn’t move. I could only stand there and feel my bones struggling beneath my skin, itching and aching to rearrange themselves into a more fitting shape.

I could only keep it down for so long. I could only hold it at arm’s length for…for not long enough. They were coming for me, the moon and the dogs outside, and the force of nature that reared up from the pit of my stomach—from the base of my neck, and from the depths of my lungs.

Out, then. Let it
out
.

I dropped the Colt. I couldn’t hold it anymore, my hands would not accommodate it. They were coming out. Everything was coming
out
.

And the things outside were coming
in
.

Leonard and Melissa were back to back, in a corner by the window fighting with their feet and with their flickering, flashing blades that I’d all but stolen from a farmer’s store. Better than nothing. Not as good as
me
.

McKenzie was hurt. I smelled the blood reeking from his body before I saw the injury, and the injury was not so bad that it stopped him from shooting. I reached for my Bowie knife, but it was gone, it was on the floor. My body was stretching and outgrowing these weapons, made for human hands, to strap against human thighs. I bent down to pick it up and it felt like a toy to me.

The front door was losing its battle to remain closed. The pew-back buttress was failing, and an arm, a shoulder, a neck and a face were pushing, forcing, shoving inside. McKenzie’s aim was slipping as he continued to bleed, and his next two shots only struck the thing’s forearm.

But I had my toy. I had my tiny little knife, wide enough for a paddle, heavy enough for a hatchet. I threw it with all my might and it disappeared into the creature’s throat.

The beast froze with astonishment or pain. The knife handle jutted out like a knob on a door.

The Texas ranger redeemed himself with a bullet to the thing’s forehead, and it fell backwards, if not dead, then at least out of the way. But it was replaced immediately by another creature, and Melissa was screaming with rage—screaming battle screams, an Amazon warrior woman covered in blood, some of it her own.

Leonard was—I didn’t see Leonard.

Everything looked different, the color (what little there was) drained and the shape of my eyes, it contracted and opened again and the dog’s eyes were all I had.

I lunged at the door and I reached for whatever thing was behind it, and I pulled Jack’s disgusting face up into my own.

All around me the world was in flames, and heaven had left us altogether. McKenzie was still shooting, though he must be nearly out of ammunition. It didn’t matter. McKenzie would go on shooting even after he was dead, probably, and Melissa was swearing and grunting, but none of it sounded like pain—it sounded like the anger still, muted with contempt, and she had more of it stored inside. We’d run out of bullets long before she’d run out of anger.

Jack jerked his body backwards and I was hanging on tight, and I would not let go. He wanted to draw me out, to pull me onto his territory and wrestle me there, but I did not intend to leave the church. I caught us both with one hand on the porch pillar. It broke with our weight, but it slowed our retreat, and there he was—his body rigid and taut beneath mine, stinking of sweat and blood and…yes. And fear.

“No more,” I told him, and my jaw was distorted beyond human speech, but he understood and was afraid.

He grabbed for my throat, and he got a good grip there—a grip filled with puncturing claws, and itching with the wire-rough hair he worked into the wounds with his fingertips.

But I had my teeth in his throat. I bit, and a gushing torrent of salt and bile and green-copper flavor gushed into my mouth. I swallowed, and my jaw was almost unhinged with the grip of my bite. I cranked my mouth shut, jamming my teeth deeper into his flesh. My tongue brushed against something smooth and bumpy, and he wheezed hot air across it—I gnawed harder, with every drop of strength I had.

He was not taking this quietly, no. He was kicking at me—jerking his feet against my chest and my abdomen, trying to tear at the skin he found there. I felt something rip, and the pain was shocking and bright, but I had my mouth on his throat, almost through his throat, and I was not going to let go.

The harder I held, the weaker he grew.

My teeth met, somewhere beneath his chin, under his skull. The tips of my teeth found one another and I grasped, wrenched, slashed the muscles and tendons and bits of bone I found in my mouth.

I gagged on him, but still I pulled. The tatters of his neck split loose, dangling from my chin. I flung them away and dove down again, and again. Into that soft, wriggling tissue that shuddered when it was bitten.

And then there was nothing but bone.

I sat up, pulled myself up and together, and I yelled at the sky. When I looked back down at the pulpy thing beneath me, its face was slack and the metallic eyes were dark.

***

The noise behind me was crackling still. Mescalero was burning into an amazing, ashy skeletal thing, and there was running. There was retreat, and flight, and Jack was beneath me, his heart still and his throat gone—gone down to the bones that held his head upright.

I rose, and I staggered.

McKenzie was standing with his rifle hanging down at his side. One arm was ruined. One ear was gone. Even as he fell to the ground, too weak to stand any longer and maybe dying—maybe changing—his attention was locked on Melissa, who was still hacking, hacking, at a body that looked, at a glance, like the corpse of a deformed coyote. She’d taken it to bits.