The Madders’ gun was charging, but its gears worked slower than last time.
The house wouldn’t stand long. No, if she was to get the child to a doctor, to his family, she’d have to run now, before the roof came down and buried them both.
Mae rushed to Elbert, who was still as death, his eyes glossy red and staring at the rafters. Gone out of his head with fear.
Something slammed onto the roof and rolled like a boulder down the shingles. The windows rattled, and claws scraped against glass and pane.
“We need to go, Elbert.” She wrapped him up in the blanket, tucking it tight around him as if he were a babe instead of a small boy. “I’m going to take you home to your mama and pa now.”
He stirred to that, blinked, and started crying again.
“There, now, bear up just a bit longer.” Mae gathered useful things into her satchel and pockets. Her tatting shuttle, an extra blanket, water, flint and steel. Around her waist she strapped one of Jeb’s work belts, buckled with pockets of leather that held tools. She slid her skinning knife onto that, then fastened her bonnet tight under her chin. She took a kerchief and folded it over the child’s head, trying to stanch the bleeding.
His head wound was grim. Over the kerchief, she tied a woolen hat she had knit. It was too big for the boy, but it would help absorb the blood and keep his head warm from the night.
The wind and the Strange pushed, rested, then shoved at the house so hard, she threw her arms out to the side as the foundation shifted.
Mae scooped up the boy, and, thank the heavens, he wrapped his arms around her neck and held on. The shotgun was ready, no longer humming, the needle on the gauge cocked hard to the right. Mae opened the back door, quiet as could be. The Strange was still out front, rattling the shutters. Mae ran to where Prudence was sheltered beneath the eave of the shed, her eyes rolling with fear.
Mae set the boy on the shed floor, took up the saddle, and geared Prudence as quickly as her shaking hands could manage. She ran back to the boy, Prudence in tow, and hoisted Elbert up onto the mule, swinging up behind him. She tucked him tight against her, one arm over his chest to hold him close, and still let her reach rein and stirrup. Mae rested the rifle across the saddle horn.
She pressed her heels to old Prudence’s side. “Get up now.”
Prudence didn’t need urging. From round the back of the shed, Mae set her off at a gallop toward town, up the rise in the hill, then down the drop of the tree-filled gully. Once through that edge of forest, she’d go straightway to Hallelujah.
She didn’t want to enter that forest again, but the boy didn’t have any time to spare. He was fever hot, as if coals lay beneath his skin.
Prudence shied at the edge of the forest.
“Go on, get,” Mae said, putting her heels to her again.
Prudence locked her legs and refused to take even a step forward into the shifting shadows.
The boy whimpered, squirmed with pain.
Mae turned Prudence in a circle, and the mule, thinking she was headed back to the shed, finally lifted her feet. Then Mae dug her heels in again, spurring Prudence into a trot, straight into the forest.
The wind howled, wailed. She heard the crack of a treetop breaking high above her. Old Prudence ran as if ghosts and goblins were on her heels. It was all that Mae could do to keep her on the trail to the town.
Trees flew by as Prudence galloped. Mae held tight to the boy, sparing a glance down at him just once.
He smiled, his small white teeth sharp and feral, his eyes too wide, too dark, too hungry in a face that was no longer sweet.
Then he attacked.
Mae screamed as he sprang up and bit her shoulder. She shoved at him, but he clung tight, fingers digging at her eyes, tearing her hair. He kicked the gun off the saddle and laughed. Even with all her strength, Mae Lindson could not hold him off as he sank his teeth deep into her neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jeb Lindson knew how to fight. He had lived by wits first and fists second for most all his life. He knew how to tamp his temper too, when a fight weren’t never going to go his way. And he knew when the odds were against a man, sometimes that was when the mettle of a man was made.
Jeb wasn’t the sort of man to give up easily. Jeb wasn’t the sort of man to give up at all.
But even an undead man with inhuman strength could see when he was outnumbered.
The tickers had surrounded him. Instead of attacking all at once like he thought they’d do, they’d taken their turn, deciding which monstrous metal beast would strike him. The small, fast matics had done him the most damage.
Matics, tickers, did not have the brains or reasoning of a man. But these tickers, these devil toys, carried vials of glim in their heads. Glim gave things power and unholy strength. And Jeb was sure it was that which made these matics clever.
They wanted him dead—he knew the truth of that. But they seemed to have put some consideration into how to kill him. Near as Jeb could figure, they wanted to kill him slowly, wear him down, then chop him up for good.
He still had the boulder at his back. The ground round in front of him was littered with scrap metal.
Jeb swung the scythelike arm of the first matic he’d taken down. The blade was strong and sharp. Strong enough and sharp enough to cleave through six metal torsos of six metal monsters. Strong enough and sharp enough to smash through skull casings and pop rivets, so Jeb could suck out the sweet glim in their brains.
But they had done damage to him; that was plain sure. Jeb didn’t so much hurt, even though he had cuts and gouges and hunks of missing flesh. He was wearing down, picked apart, broke apart. Soon he wouldn’t be much left but a bag of bones.
A new ticker faced off in front of him. It was near the size of a man, body and head made of mahogany casing over brass and iron. Water filled what looked like a wooden keg on its back, and brass pipes fitted around from that pack into its belly. From the smell of it, it was powered by wood, not coal. Its four legs were all piston and spring. When it bent, it launched up and bounced from boulder top to boulder top, grappling hold with two retractable clamps at the ends of arms.
Jeb watched it bounce back and forth between the rocks, puzzling out how it might be strung so he’d know how to unstring it. It finally landed in front of him with the strangled-siren sound of pistons thunking and pumping.
Every ticker that had come at him had a way to be unmade, a weakness. There was a pile of twisted, dead matics behind him. He’d figured the jugular of every one of them. Cut through pipes, torn off valves, jammed vents, and ripped appendages and torsos apart. Didn’t matter to him how to take one apart, just so much as he got it done.
This one, with the springs where legs and joints should be, was the hardest yet. Quick and wicked, it was near enough height to Jeb, but when it landed on its feet, rocks crushed to dust.
Heavy, then. Like a steam hammer.
Jeb watched it squat, the cow-sized head swiveling up to pour green light in his face. He didn’t know how many more tickers waited to attack back in the scrub. Maybe two. Maybe two dozen. There was still steam in the night, rising in wisps of clouds like thin lines of campfires, stovepipes, chimneys, rising in a wide half circle in front of him. Were there less tickers now? Were there less glowing green eyes, burning orange furnaces, glints of copper, silver, and steel in the night?
Hard to tell. Made no never mind. One at a time, by and by, he’d break them down, drink their glim, and leave nothing but metal bones and cold ash to show for it.
Spring feet clattered, like a chain somewhere inside it was pulling gears, winding tighter, tighter.
Jeb shifted his grip on the ticker arm he kept tight by his side, the length of which tucked between his arm and rib. He’d lost the other matic’s arm he had also used as a weapon. But he still had the hanging rope, and held it by the end, letting the weighted noose dangle from his fingertips.