Ghostwalkers (49 page)

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.