It had made the noise deliberately. The man was armed and alert; ambush would not have been certain. But men always froze in fear when they spied it. That made them easy meat.
Shrieking in hunger and fury, it leaped at the intruder.
The creature was on Peet before he had time to do much thinking. The Dirtman by the creek had been right—it did run on two legs, like a man. Past that, to Peet it was only a brownish blur.
He set himself, swung the mace at the top of the blur, felt it thud against flesh and bone. The thing’s scream took on a sudden new note of shock and pain. He hit it again. Claws scored his arm. Then he rammed his knife home, twisted it, felt hot blood splash his left hand.
Now the once-fierce shriek was a bubbling wail. Peet swung his mace once more, screwing up his face at the stench that filled his nostrils. The creature toppled. He hit it several more times to make sure it was dead.
When it moved no more, he took a deep breath and bent close to see what he had killed. He rose still unsure. It had more hair than a man, less than an animal. His blows had pulped and bloodied its face past recognition.
“I doubt it was beautiful to begin with, though,” he said aloud. He pulled up his tunic sleeve to see how badly his arm was hurt. The thick suede had absorbed some of the damage. His cuts bled freely, but none was deep.
Feeling a full man for the first time since his glasses had been broken, he stirred the thing’s corpse with his boot. “You won’t try that again,” he told it.
He walked on to the next store. Most of the big black letters over it were still intact. He squinted up at them. “Sun and Wind,” he whispered. The sign said H. P. LENSCRAFT.
He had no idea what the H and P stood for, and did not care. He rushed into the shop. Only overturned chairs and couches were in the outer room. He stumbled over a chair, almost fell.
The door inward screamed on its hinges as he forced it open. He paused at the threshold as his eyes adjusted to the gloom within. He saw another couple of overturned chairs—these two large and heavy—as well as some smashed gadgets he would not have understood even if they were whole. He did not see anything that had anything to do with lenses.
His feet scuffed old dust as he walked into the room. He waved his arms, knocked aside thick cobwebs. He was not the first to have come here; some drawers in the cabinets along the walls were open, others missing altogether. If those had once held lenses . . . Frustration threatened to consume him.
He fought for calm. If those drawers had once held lenses, he couldn’t do anything about it now. He repeated that to himself several times. At last he began to accept it.
Another door stood at the far end of that second room. He kicked it and slammed it with his shoulder. It finally opened wide enough to let him through. Cautiously, he stuck his head in. If the last room had been gloomy, this one was black as tar inside.
He had to find out what was in there. He went back outside the shop, crushed dry leaves to make a little pile of tinder on the floor of the dead mall. Then he began the slow, patience-testing process of starting a fire with flint and steel.
The blaze caught at last. Peet crawled on hands and knees, his nose to the ground like a tooth-hound on a scent, until he found a stout piece of wood a couple of feet long. He stuck one end of it in the fire.
He went back into H. P. LENSCRAFT. He reminded himself to carry the torch carefully; if fire got loose, the whole ruin—and he with it—would go up in flames.
When he looked into the third room, he gasped and almost dropped the burning stick in spite of his best intentions. Tray on tray of lenses glittered dustily in the flickering firelight, hundreds more than he had seen in his whole life before. Other trays had been tipped onto the floor, the lenses in them smashed to smithereens.
Peet rushed in, snatched up a tray, carried it out of the store under one arm. He went back for two more before he noticed that one wall of the third room held a great rack of frames. Many had been stolen, but the ones that were left were better than any he could hope to make for himself. He piled several handfuls of them onto another tray, carried out his loot. By then his torch was nearly burning his fingers.
He sat down by the lenses, blew one more or less clean, and held it close to his eye. The world grew sharper, but not enough. He set the lens down, reached for another.
Outside, Snowdrop screamed, aloud and in his mind.
Peet sprang to his feet, dashed for the entrance through which he’d come. He fell once, scrambled to his feet, and ran on. Two of the creatures that gave ruined Uvalde such a dread name were attacking his horse. One was on Snowdrop’s back, the other kept trying to dart in and tear at the horse’s throat with teeth and claws. Snowdrop bucked and plunged as much as the tether would allow, and flailed hard hooves at the monster in front of it.
That one was so intent on its prey that it did not pay any attention to Peet until too late. It turned just as his mace slammed into the side of its head. The shock traveled up his arm. The creature swayed, stunned and hurt. He hit it again. It went down.
The other monster shrieked. It leaped off Snowdrop. The horse, lashed out with its hind feet. One caught the creature a glancing blow. It reeled away. Peet sprang after it.
It turned to glare at him, just as the one inside the dead mall had. Its mouth gaped wider than a mouth had any business doing; it was a great black hole in the monster’s blurry face. That made as good a target as any for the next swing of his mace.
At the last possible instant, the thing ducked. All the fight was gone from it, though. Instead of closing with Peet, it turned and ran. He chased it for a few steps, then gave up. It was faster than he, even if he could have seen where he was going. It vanished into a ruin on the far side of the parking lot.
Could have seen . . . Peet looked down at his left hand, which was clenched into a fist around something that should have been, but was not, the hilt of his dagger. He opened his fingers and proceeded to call himself eighteen different kinds of damn fooclass="underline" he was still holding the lens he’d picked up just before the monsters jumped Snowdrop.
He walked back to the horse, gentled it with mind and hands. Then, when Snowdrop was approaching calm again, he put the lens up to his eye and took his first at least half-focused look at the creature he had slain.
He’d held that stupid lens all through the fight. He almost dropped it now. “Monster” was too kind a word for the hideous thing on the ground before him. And those grotesque features could only have been more terrifying when animated with life.
He put the lens down, shook his head. The sight of the horrid creature and reaction from the fight were both making him shaky. “Sun and Wind,” he muttered under his breath. “If I’d seen what I was fighting, I’d’ve been too damn scared to fight it.”
He looked toward the wrecked building where the other monster had fled, wondered how many more lurked in Uvalde. Alone, he did not care to find out.
He climbed onto Snowdrop. The horse shuddered but bore his weight. The monsters’ claws had gashed it in several places, but none of the wounds was disabling. “Come on,” Peet beamed soothingly, and rode the horse into the mall.
He used leather straps to convert the trays of lenses to makeshift panniers hanging from either side of Snowdrop’s saddle, then stuffed every saddlebag full of frames. That done, he urged Snowdrop into a trot— out of the ancient mall, out of the parking lot, and out of Uvalde. Not until the ruined town was well behind him did he begin to breathe easily again.
The creature hiding in the wrecked building across from the dead mall thought about pursuing the rider as he headed north toward the edge of town. It hated to see so much meat escape, and in addition the horseman had slain its comrades. Those killings cried for revenge.
But doubt and fear clouded the creature’s mind. Always the barest sight of it and its kind had frozen a man with fear, and frightened men made easy prey. Going after one who not only defended himself but ferociously attacked was a different—and daunting— prospect.