He slung the rifle back over his shoulder and drew his sword. Close encounter time.
Colleen leveled her crossbow and nocked a bolt into it. But just then Inigo darted past her, nose in the air, sniffing. For what? she wondered, and realized it might be for a path devoid of grunters.
“This way!” Inigo yelled, diving into the bushes behind them. What the hell, Colleen thought, and dove after him, with Cal, Doc and Goldie close behind.
She abruptly found herself up to her thighs in frigid, slimy water and saw that she had plunged right into a narrow, twisting waterway. Casting about in the moonlight, she spied a group of boats with ratty awnings clumped at a dock.
“Oh great,” Colleen muttered, “the jungle cruise.”
She could hear the mob of grunters tearing through the foliage, coming after them.
“Here!” Cal cried, and led them running around the bend, keeping to the middle of the shallow river, where they would be harder to track, by smell at least. The grunters were keeping up such a racket they’d be hard pressed to find Cal and company by sound.
On the move, Cal drew alongside Goldie. “Where’s the exit? Get us back to Iowa.”
“No problema, mon capitaine.” Goldie paused, looked about uncertainly. “Only I’ve gotten the teeniest bit turned around.”
“Splendid,” Colleen said. Beyond the massive, vine-strangled face replicating Angkor Wat, she could hear the grunters hotfooting it in the distance. It sounded like they were getting closer, they must have caught the scent. “Tell me, Goldman, was it worth it?”
“I’m not sure yet. I think so.”
“Hey, it was rhetorical.”
“Those are the ones I always make it a point to answer.”
“C’mon!” Cal led them onto the opposite shore, through the dense growth onto the pavement again. “We need some high ground.”
Colleen glanced about, saw the silhouette of a craggy mountain, realized with a postcard shock of recognition that it was the Matterhorn-or a reasonable amusement-park facsimile thereof. But it was clearly too far away to reach, if the caterwauling of their pursuers was any indication.
“There,” Cal said, and she followed his gaze to stairs that led to an overhead track. Not ideal, but the best they could do…
They bounded off at full clip, the grunters right behind like a starving pack of hounds (which wasn’t that far off, if the hounds were rabid and crazy-strong and butt ugly, to boot). As Inigo bolted up the stairway like greased lightning, Cal and Doc on his heels and Goldie behind, Colleen wheeled and fired off a bolt, catching the lead little creep in the throat. He fell like a sack of wet cement and the ones behind him tumbled over him, screeching and yelling in frenzied rage.
Colleen turned and clambered up the stairs. By now, Cal had found handrails to climb onto the roof of the aluminum train that sat silent and stilled and remarkably unworn.
It was the highest point around, and it allowed them, cursing and firing and swinging their metal cutting blades, to drive the monsters back, to hurl the demonic little brutes screaming down to smash on the hard walkway below.
Not a purpose its designers had ever envisioned, but hell, all things considered, just about now it was a damn good use for a monorail.
Suddenly, a piercing whistle rent the air and the grunters fell back, vanishing into the night.
Colleen heard the shuffling odd footsteps first, before she saw their owners.
“Bozhyeh moy,” Doc whispered, and crossed himself.
It was that punk bitch, that crazy queen in her haunted mansion, who’d done this, just like she’d summoned those ghosts that throttled Goldman.
The army of the undead-or more accurately, the automaton non-living-shuffled slowly forward on metal feet. The pirates, the spooks, the smiling children of foreign lands.
And at the front, leading them on, Abraham Lincoln.
Colleen hadn’t had a night to match this one since her prom.
And like that ghastly, long-ago night-in fact, exactly like it-she knew by the end she’d be covered in mud and blood and oil.
TWENTY-THREE
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Colleen Brooks hissed when she returned limping and bloodied along with Cal Griffin and his companions to the Iowa grain silo where Krystee Cott and the other refugees waited breathlessly for their return.
Al Watt noticed Herman Goldman carrying a battered black stovepipe hat. “What’s up with that?”
“Two ears and a tail,” Goldie replied, and would say no more. He tossed it onto his bedroll and moved off from the others, back out into the night, to where he could be alone with his thoughts.
Rafe Dahlquist approached Griffin, who was just pulling some jerky from his pack, handing a bit off to the grunter boy Inigo. Jeff Arcott accompanied Dahlquist. Under his arm, Arcott carried the rolled schematics he’d brought from Atherton, the plans for his dearest, most secret project.
“It’s incredibly ambitious,” Dahlquist confided. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What exactly is it?” Cal asked.
“A communications device,” Arcott jumped in. “Let us say on rather a grand scale. I have to be rather cagey at this point, sorry about that.” He cast an eye at Dahlquist. “And I would need to require your discretion, too, Doctor.”
Cal glanced over at Dahlquist. “It’s your call.”
“I’d like to pursue this, yes. I think I can help them get it up and running.”
Cal considered, spied Inigo staring at him. The boy had led them here, had said Cal would find what he sought in Atherton….
And who was to say that this project might not be the door to the very thing he sought?
“You want him, you let them all come,” Cal insisted of Arcott, the sweep of his arm taking in the men and women dozing, mending clothes, speaking quietly about the room. “They could use a hot shower, a warm meal, clean bed.”
“Sure. Anything else?”
“I keep this,” Cal said, unslinging the rifle. He thought to add, And you give me more ammo. A lot more.
But why fan the flames of Arcott’s suspicions, tip his hand? Besides, he didn’t need Arcott’s approval.
He would get what he required, and go where he had to.
Through Atherton to the bloody heart of the Source Project, whether helped or hindered by anyone in this hellish, miraculous world.
Arcott nodded his agreement. Satisfied, Cal looked back toward Inigo.
But the boy was gone.
Herman Goldman stood in the night on the periphery of the derelict farm, the fierce wind off the prairie grasses making his teeth chatter, blowing clean through his many layers of clothes, chilling him to the bone. The freezing awareness of his own armature made him regard himself as a living skeleton, barely wrapped in gristle and flesh, as much a ghost as the phantoms that had attacked him in the haunted mansion out California way; more so.
Every part of him ached. Lord, he was tired. He longed to curl up in his bedroll and sleep for about twenty hours or so, the sleep of the dead, of the just or unjust, it didn’t matter, so long as it was without dreams-please, for pity’s sake, no dreams.
But he was here for a reason. He had to find something out, or all his adventures down this long night that seemed without end were for nothing.
Colleen had largely dropped her uppers when he’d kissed that Bitch Queen; hell, they all had, regardless of their human or inhuman status. But all of them had totally missed the point of his actions; the last thing he had in mind was romance (although now that he was safely several thousand kilometers out of her homicidal clutches, he had to admit-at least, in retrospect-that she was fairly hot).