The woman inside did not look like a woman. She did not look human. Caleb and his mob had hacked away her features and skinned her, so there was nothing left of her former beauty. Membranes covering her stomach had broken open, and a strand of intestine poked out like a shy snake.
Matt, who was loading a Winchester, found his eyes locked on the creature in the box, and he knew immediately who it was, though he had not witnessed her torture.
He looked at Caleb. "You bastard!"
"That's what my old Ma called me too," Caleb said.
The Indian went away from the window.
There was a loud thump at the door.
The wooden bar cracked.
The thump turned to a boom and it was repeated.
One of the Indian's big fists broke through the wood, grappled for the doorbrace.
Caleb leveled his revolver and fired three times into the arm. The bullets struck, went through, plopped into the thick wooden door. The arm still weaved about like a tentacle.
"Toss me that Winchester!" Caleb yelled.
Matt, almost in a daze, did so.
Caleb stuck the revolver in his belt, caught the rifle, cocked it, and fired three quick shots through the door.
The arm stopped.
Momentarily. Now it clasped its palm against the door and pulled. The hinges creaked, groaned, screamed.
The door came off and the Indian tossed it into the street. For a moment he stood framed in the doorway, his dead servants crowding around him for a peek.
Matt loaded a shotgun (after spilling half the box of shells on the floor) and he began to back up toward the open cell.
Caleb had not moved. He fired the Winchester three times. All three shots dusted harmlessly against the Indian's chest.
The Indian smiled.
Caleb fired again. The shot hit the Indian in the left cheek and made a small neat hole but had no effect.
"You shiteater," Caleb said. "Come and get me." Caleb grabbed the barrel of the rifle, swung it over his shoulder, and the Indian—fast as a bullet—moved.
The Winchester came around, and the Indian's big hand grabbed it by the stock and jerked it free of Caleb's grasp. With a wrench of both hands, the Indian twisted the rifle in two.
Caleb went for his revolver.
The Indian caught his hand.
"Not nice" the Indian said." Not nice at all." The Indian squeezed.
Caleb screamed as his hand and the butt of the revolver became one, human flesh and bone welding with iron and ivory.
With a backhand slap, the Indian knocked Caleb down.
Dazed, Caleb looked up. The Indian reached down, took hold of the strand with the ears on it, snapped it free of Caleb's neck.
Turning his head, the Indian looked at his servants waiting impatiently in the doorway.
He smiled. "Feed," he said, and the dead rushed in.
Caleb screamed as they descended on him. Teeth snapping at his clothes, throat, and stomach.
He tried to back crawl, but they held him down. He bellowed as an old man's jagged handful of teeth snapped into his arm.
A woman's head struck at the soft part of his stomach, ripped through his shirt, and tore his flesh—deep. An intestine jumped out of the wound in a short gray coil, and then it was in the woman's teeth, and she rose, stretching it, trying to rip it free. Another woman dove at the extended gut, and it snapped in half—the two of them tumbling over the desk in their frenzy to pull it from one another—like two ravenous blue jays squawking over a large, juicy worm.
Hands dipped into the wound, more guts were uncoiled, faces met Caleb's face, and chunks came out of his face and neck. After a moment, bathed in gore, his innards stretched all over the sheriffs office, Caleb finally ceased to scream.
Frozen with fear, Matt had backed into the cell and pulled the door shut. The Indian tied the strand with the ears on it around his neck, walked over, and put his face against the bars.
Matt let go with both barrels of the shotgun. The Indian's head jerked back a foot, then returned to stare through the bars. The shotgun pellets hit him just beneath the nose and down his chest. The little balls of lead dripped out of his flesh and rang on the floor. The Indian's laugh wasn't quite as loud as the slurping and sucking and chewing that was going on behind him.
The Indian took hold of the bars, and slowly, with a smile on his face, he began to bend the bars apart. He put his head through the space he had made and grinned at Matt.
Matt dropped the shotgun, pulled his revolver, and put the gun to his own head. He cocked back the hammer. Closed his eyes. And hesitated.
But just for a moment, then he pulled the trigger.
Matt's hand was snatched away, and the bullet slammed harmlessly into the back wall of the cell, and Matt, his eyes wide open, saw that the Indian was in the cell—holding the revolver's barrel—smiling at him.
The Indian snatched the revolver away. It clattered across the floor. The Indian opened his mouth. His teeth winked silver-white in the dim light made by the moon's beams struggling against the clouds and the rain, and the flickering lamp light.
The Indian's jaws opened wider, and wider. There was a snapping sound as they came unhinged like a snake's. A loud hissing sound came up from the Indian's throat, and the head snapped forward, engulfing Matt from chin to nose.
Matt screamed, and inside the great mouth it made the faintest of echoes as it rushed down the Indian's throat. There was a nauseating crunch as gouts of blood sprayed from either side of Matt's face.
The Indian, who had been leaning slightly forward, straightened his head, and as he did, he lifted Matt— kicking—off the floor. The Indian shook his head like a dog worrying a bone, and Matt flopped like a wet rag.
A last shake of the Indian's head, and Matt's face came off, and Matt splattered to the floor and slid until his head hit the far wall He was lying face up, and there was no face.
His forehead had collapsed, and his ears seemed perched on the edge of a precarious cliff, like inept climbers about to tumble in.
A ragged hunk of flesh poked out from beneath the Indian's big, sharp teeth, and with a quick gulping motion, it disappeared into the maw that was the man-thing's mouth. An instant later the Indian spat out a stream of Matt's teeth, like a sick man disgorging too many after-dinner mints.
The Indian turned his bloody face toward his followers and smiled to see that Caleb was standing up, guts dripping from his belly, the wound showing backbone in its wet depths as well as a gnawed rib.
Lifting his head to the ceiling, the Indian let forth a demonic howl that sent bloody spittle clear to the ceiling.
The defenders inside the church heard the howl, and for a brief time they stopped ripping up the pews, hammering them over the windows and doors, and listened.
Outside the zombies turned their heads in the direction of the howl as if it were a symphony, and this was the tune that they most wanted to hear.
The howl went on for a long time, and it seemed to the Reverend (paused with hammer in hand, a nail between his teeth, the other hand holding a fragment of pew bottom over a barred window) that it was both a cry of mourning and triumph.
This is how the defenders in the church prepared for the siege to come: They moved shotguns, rifles, and revolvers from the storage room, loaded them all, armed themselves with some, and placed the others down the pew rows, leaning them against or on the seats, ready to be grabbed up and used in an instant. The trick was to hold ground as long as possible, and if you had to back, you backed down that long aisle toward the storage room—the last stand—and there were weapons on either side of you as you went.