Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (7 page)

“You’ve
played us all fair so far, ‘cept….,” he shrugged, “for attracting these
bloodthirsty sonsofbitches here in the first place. Let’s hear it.”

“I
might be able to knock out
that
cannon. Stay put and
don’t show yourselves.”

“You
can’t get across that open space,” Purdee said.

“Just
let me worry about that,” the Rider said. “I’m going to take Gersh with me.”

“Good
luck,” said the Colonel.

The
Rider and Gersh ducked back outside as the cannon thumped on the ridge and
dropped a shrill round onto the saloon. Most of the structure was blown to
fluttering, burning paper and sticks. The roof collapsed as one wall
disappeared. The place was a lean-to now.

The
Rider stared. Maybe lightning wouldn’t strike twice. He led Gersh into the
smoking wreckage.

The
back wall and the bar were gone, as was half the right wall. The ceiling sagged
so low that one of the cable spool tables was all that supported it, but the
wall with the broken piano and the entrance remained. It was just enough
shelter to be secluded from the sun.

The
Rider kicked aside the crates and cleared a spot in the darkest corner of the
room.

“What’re
we doing here?” Gersh asked, bewildered.

“This
is going to be hard for you to understand, Gersh” the Rider said. “I can stop
the cannon, but in order to do it, I can’t be disturbed.”

“What?”

The
Rider got out his engraved iron Bowie knife and knelt down. He began to scratch
a circle in the dirt floor.

“I
need you to try to listen for that gun. If it looks like it’s going to hit here
again, I need you to pull my body out. I won’t be able to react.”

“What
do you mean?”

“I
won’t be here, Gershom,” the Rider explained, continuing to scratch at the
floor, etching out a protective seal, for all the good it would do him. “My
body will be here, but I won’t. Look, you can accept that the men who we’re
fighting aren’t human? Now you’ve got to just accept this.”

It
occurred to him that if any of Lilith’s demonic minions had followed him, they
might tear his soul to pieces as soon as he set foot in the Yenne Velt. He had
not attempted to leave his body since Tip Top. He had to trust that Nehema’s
rosette token would protect him there too.

Ketev
Meriri spoke on the ridge again, and in a few moments one of the picket shacks
on the edge of Varruga Tanks ceased to be, the impact shuddering underneath
them. It would be a test of concentration for him to be able to travel in these
conditions, but he was a master. Part of his training had involved leaving his
body on a rocky top during a tremendous lightning storm. This would be somewhat
similar.

The
Rider seated himself cross-legged in the circle and looked up at the bewildered
youth towering over him.

“Be
strong,” he said, and closed his eyes.

* * *
*

Gershom stared at the man seated on the floor. He was unlike any man
Gershom had ever known. He felt a kinship with him because he knew the man was
of his father’s people—a people he did not know except from childhood memories.
All his life he had been the Child of Calamity, alone even with Hash, the man
who had known him best.

Hash
had been a good friend, and very like a father. He had saved him as a boy from
the wrath of the Comanche, after he had wrestled down a warrior who had beaten
him and broke the grown man over his small knee. That was the same warrior who
had killed his mother and father and taken him to be a slave, and that had
given him satisfaction.

At
first Hash had viewed him as a freak to be displayed, though over the years
they had grown fond of each other. As a half breed, Hash had understood
Gershom’s sense of being apart from other people. They had skirted society
together, at least. But Hash could tell him no more about his people than
Gershom could tell Hash how to be a Comanche or a ‘Polack,’ as Hash had always
told him the other half of him was.

But
this man, this Rider, in the short time they had known each other, had
explained to Gershom one of the great mysteries of his early memory as a matter
of course. He had accepted Gershom’s great strength and even explained its
source. He had opened Gershom’s world like one who entered a dark room and lit
a lamp.

So
he knew that whatever Rider was doing, no matter how crazy it seemed
,
he would protect him as he had been asked. There was more
to know, and they both had to live through this.

Gershom
took Bill’s shotgun and crouched outside of the circle in the floor. He watched
his still and silent charge and their surroundings, and he waited.

* * *
*

The Rider stood, emerging from the top of his skull. He hesitated,
then
stepped out of the protective circle. No rush of talons
swept through his etheric form, no clutch of demons settled upon him. The
rosette symbol in his fist was potent indeed, or else Mazzamauriello had
arranged to take him alone and horde the credit. He reached into his jacket for
another token—the clay Cheyenne horse talisman given to him by the great shaman
Misquamacus. Concentrating on it, he drew it in easy circles, the innate energies
coalescing into an animal form—a fiery horse, which he mounted and steered
toward the ridge.

Atop
the
horse’s
back, he would reach the cannon in
moments. He spurred it on, passing like a ghost through the wreckage and
through the scattered hovels. He reached the open desert and went galloping
across the sand, when suddenly there was an audible crack as of a gunshot, and
the horse disincorporated between his knees. Instantly he was soaring, and his
etheric self tumbled to the ground.

It
was a stunning sensation. He wondered what had disrupted the horse’s field. He
picked himself up, and twice more heard the jarring crack sounds. Pain—actual
pain—ignited in his leg and side, or, more correctly, in the parts of his
astral form corresponding to those physical areas, and he fell once more.

He
lay on his back, staring up at the black sky and its currents of energy, and
then looked at his own body. There was a neat hole in his left leg, just above
the knee, bleeding a blazing blue and white light. It was such a hole as he had
seen appear when he attacked a person’s latent defenses on this plane with his
mystic Volcanic pistol. There was another such hole in his left forearm,
bleeding light. What could have caused it?

The
Rider sat up slowly, propping himself on one elbow. There, striding towards him
across the green desert
plain,
was a slight figure in
blinding white, smiling at him beneath a toothbrush mustache. In the real world
he was effete and unassuming. Here, with his blazing greatcoat billowing behind
him and the weird etheric light playing along the long barrel of his
outstretched forty five, he was imperious and menacing.

“Where
were you off to in such a hurry, Rider?” asked Sheardown.

The
Rider stared as Sheardown ambled over, covering him the whole time with his
pistol. It was too dangerous to snap back into one’s physical form without
returning the astral self to the body. There could be terrible psychic side
effects. Dementia, or worse, the self could be dislodged. He was trapped.

Sheardown
would shoot him if he went for his pistol. He turned slightly, slid his Bowie
knife from its sheath, unseen. He considered trying to throw it, but he’d never
been much good at throwing a knife. He thought for a second,
then
pressed the keen knife into the palm of his left hand.

“Sheardown!”
he rasped.

“Doctor
Sheardown,” said the doctor, a cross expression momentarily spreading across
his face. “I bet you’re surprised,” he said, instantly smiling again. “This is
just something I learned…from one of your teachers.”

“Adon,”
the Rider murmured.

Sheardown
nodded.

“He’s
going to be so tickled. It’s just blind luck I even ran across you, Rider. I
was only supposed to deliver a scroll. Now I’m gonna bring him your head too.”

“Where
is he?” the Rider demanded.

“I
guess you’ll never know how close you were,” Sheardown said in mock regret,
cocking his revolver. The Rider noticed it was a Frontier double-action, the
nickel surface etched with symbols, just as his own Volcanic was. They weren’t
Judaic, though.

The
Rider held up his right hand imploringly, as if to catch the bullet.

“Wait!
I don’t understand! Who are you, Sheardown?”

“Doctor
Sheardown!” the slight man spluttered.
“Doctor!”

“Doctor…,”
the Rider agreed, placating.

* * *
*

Another shell struck Varruga Tanks, another shack disintegrated, and
Gershom listened to the patter of debris on the remains of the roof over his
head. He worried that the random shelling would strike the hovel in which the
woman and her boy and the two wounded men were hiding. He wanted to go to them,
get them to some semblance of safety—but where was there to go? And then there
was his charge.

He
glanced back at the Rider, motionless in the circle.

He
was about to turn back when he noticed a splash of red on the man’s leg.

He
crept over and cautiously dabbed at the red stain on Rider’s leg. It was blood,
and it was spreading, yet Gersh couldn’t see any kind of hole in the fabric
that would account for a wound. He started at the sight of blood trickling down
the back of the man’s left hand.

More,
there were spots of blood dripping from the hand itself. He laid aside the
shotgun and turned the Rider’s hand over.

Cut
into the palm, faint enough to be read but deep enough to leak blood, were
crude letters; C-O-D.

“Cod,”
said Gersh to himself.

Before
his amazed eyes, a fourth jagged wound opened over the underside of Rider’s
knuckles, overlapping the ‘C’ like a lightning bolt. No, it was a letter ‘S.’

“Cods.’
He shook his head,
then
started. He turned the hand, looking at it from a new angle. The angle someone
writing in their own hand might see.
Docs.
Or, Doc S.

Doc Sheardown.

What
did it mean? Was Sheardown responsible for the wounds? Was he causing his own
name to appear on Rider’s flesh somehow? Gersh picked up the shotgun and
stepped out of the ruins of the saloon. He ran across the adjoining space to
the hovel where they’d left Baines and Sheardown.

He
stormed in, making Baines jump.

“Christ!”

“Where’s
Doc Sheardown?”

“Hell
if I know,” said Baines. “He slipped out not long after you did. Where’s
Rider?”

Gersh
rushed back outside without answering. A stone shack exploded. He ducked as
bits of gravel rained down.

Then
he noted the line of leveled structures. They were walking the artillery fire
along the outer edge of the settlement, leaving a row of craters scattered with
flaming wood and blackened stone—except for one wood shack still standing. Why
had they skipped that one?

Gersh
started to head for that shack when the cannon burped smoke again in the
distance. He glanced at its target, and immediately shifted course and ran for
it.

It
was the stone hut containing the woman and the boy.

“Get
out! Get out of there!” he screamed, breaking into a full tilt run.

The
whistling above intensified, and he saw Wilkes, the cowboy with the broken arm,
go racing out, head hunched down.

He
was nearly at the hut when the woman Marina stumbled out, spilling the young
boy in her arms. The two of them drew themselves into a ball and pressed their
faces into the dirt and their hands over the sides of their heads and waited
for death.

Gershom
pumped his arms, dropping the shotgun in his haste. Then he could see it. He
could actually see it—the cannonball. It was streaking through the sky in a tall
arch, and as he spied it, a tiny dot in the sky, it began its descent.

He
screamed, as he knew he was about to see the ball strike the woman and her boy.
It would annihilate them. He was already close enough to be bathed in their
blood.

He
heaved forward, not knowing just what he intended to do, only knowing he had to
prevent it. He supposed he meant to tackle the two of them, carry them as far
away from the explosion as he could with his own momentum, but something else,
some irrational, unearthly notion that flared like a light in the back of his
mind, made him skid to a stop over their prostrate forms and hold his hands up.

The
ball seemed to be traveling extremely slowly, more like a child’s balloon
floating down then twelve pounds of heavy iron. It was lunacy, but he craned
his neck and raised his hands. He couldn’t say why he did it. In that
precipitous moment at the edge of the dark chasm of death, he felt the mad
inspiration that lit in his brain course like a fuse down his body till a tiny explosion
popped off in his chest like a Chinese firecracker and spread a fiery light
through his limbs. Each of his capillaries contained a trace of gunpowder that
flared and streaked in every direction and ignited charges in his arms, his
legs.