The bang jolted him.
The bullet drilled a hole through the night air, sizzled past the rain, and punched into the hard, flat muscle of Perkins’s left pectoral. Just off-center of the black stone. The impact knocked a single cough from the man’s lips.
Just that.
And nothing else.
It barely slowed the man.
Perkins’s eyes shifted from the girl he was chasing and stared at Grey with a bottomless hatred that sent a thrill of terror through him. His teeth peeled back from his lips and he growled like a mountain cat.
He bent low and raced forward with maniac speed. Straight at Grey.
This was black magic.
He fished for the word, the right word. It was down there in the bottom of his mind where he kept the things he didn’t ever want to think about. Ugly things. Wrong things.
Bad things.
The word awoke in his thoughts. Like a serpent stirred to wakeful rage it hissed in his mind.
The word for what this was.
Necromancy.
The magic of the dead.
“God damn you to hell!” bellowed Grey as he fired again. And again. The bullets took Perkins in the right chest and in the stomach. They made him twitch.
But they did not stop him.
With a howl like the demon wind itself, Jed Perkins flung himself at Grey and bore him down into the mud and the burning rain.
Chapter Thirty-One
As Grey fell onto his back he brought one foot up, jammed his boot against the deputy’s chest, and let the force of the roll turn them both like a wheel. With his leg as the spoke, Perkins rolled over and then backward and Grey gave him an extra kick to send the man flying. Grey had fallen so hard that he had enough momentum to roll his own body all the way over onto his knees, with one hand snapping out to steady himself.
Somehow he’d managed to keep his pistol in his other hand, and to keep the mechanism out of the mud. He pivoted on his knee and snapped off two more shots at Perkins, who had splatted down into the mud and was struggling to get up. The first bullet took Perkins in the shoulder and Grey could see a lump of meat and a chunk of bone fly into the air.
But all that did was make Perkins laugh.
Laugh.
It was a laugh as wrong as all the damage in the world. A high, cackling bray that carried no trace of the deputy’s own voice. Instead this was shrill and alien. A nightmare laugh that revealed a horrible secret to Grey — that there was something else hiding within the man’s body. And, again, Grey remembered the stories he’d read as a boy, of demons that could inhabit human flesh and wear it like armor.
The laughter was both an anticipation of its triumph over a mortal foolish enough to do battle with something that could not be whipped, and an exultation in its freedom to wander the world of the living.
The laughter tore through the night and stuck knives in Grey’s mind. The injured little girl screamed, knowing that there was no hope left.
So Grey put his next bullet into that laughing mouth. The heavy slug shattered the rows of white teeth and then blew out the back of the deputy’s skull, right at the base where it attaches to the top of the spine.
There was a moment — just a flicker of time — where the demon thing still smiled, even with a mouth of shattered teeth. Then Deputy Perkins’s head tilted forward, no longer supported by vertebra and the weight of it jerked the body down.
Even then the thing did not die.
It flopped in the mud and began thrashing wildly, arms and legs whipping around, feet kicking, mouth trying to bite in Grey’s direction.
“God damn, why don’t you die, you ugly son of a whore?” bellowed Grey and he fired the last bullet in his gun. This time he aimed for the flat plane of the deputy’s forehead. The slug punched in at a bad angle and instead of bursting through the other side, it ricocheted off some angle of bone inside, and then bounced around. The deputy’s head shuddered from the inner impacts.
Then all at once the blue light winked out from its eyes and Perkins fell face forward into the mud and did not move.
Grey did not believe that even now this was over. He broke open his pistol, dumped the spent brass, and hastily shoved six fresh rounds into the cylinder. As he did so he edged over to stand between the little girl — who, against all sense, had stopped running to watch the fight — and the monster. Grey snapped the cylinder into place and pointed the gun at Perkins.
The body lay still. It looked different now. Empty, somehow.
Empty of life, if life was a word that fit.
Dead.
Dead for good and all.
Dead, like the members of the posse — Riley and the others — after he’d managed to end them.
End them.
That thought stuck like an arrow in Grey’s mind. How exactly had he ended them?
Perkins had been shot over and over again. None of those rounds had even slowed him.
Only that last bullet.
In the head.
No. In the brain.
The brain?
Why there? Why not the heart? Why not the damn spine? Either of those would have dropped even a mountain bear.
The brain.
Kill the brain and kill the…
The what?
As if in answer to his troubled, tumbling thoughts, a voice spoke a word that Grey did not know, not in this context.
“Undead!”
He turned to see Brother Joe standing ten feet away, panting, draped in curtains to fend off the rain, eyes wide with horror.
“W-what?” asked Grey numbly.
“That thing is an abomination against God. It is one of the undead. Dear Jesus and Mary protect us.”
“What is it?”
“It is a corpse given a dark semblance of life — unlife,” said Brother Joe, crossing himself. “It has been inhabited by a demon spirit so that it can do Satan’s will on Earth.”
Grey wanted to tell him that this was pure unfiltered bullshit.
Wanted to. Could not.
Jed Perkins lay at his feet and all of this had happened. Had truly happened.
Two figures came running through the dwindling rain. One wore a set of gray oilskins and the other a cloak with the hood pulled tight around a lovely face. Looks Away and Jenny. He had a pistol in his hand and she carried a single-barrel twenty-gauge shotgun. They saw Perkins and slowed, standing shocked and puzzled.
“What happened?” asked Jenny as she realized the child was there. She hurried over to the girl, shifted the shotgun to one hand and used the other to wrap her cloak around the child. “Grey — what happened here?”
Grey holstered his gun, squatted, and turned Perkins over so that the man’s ruined chest was exposed. The rain gradually washed away the mud, revealing the terrible wounds. And the thing embedded in the deputy’s breastbone. It no longer glowed with blue fire, but the lines of white were like threadworms in gangrenous flesh.
Brother Joe cried out. “Blasphemy! This is black magic.”
“Necromancy,” said Grey. “I… think that’s what they call it. Necromancy.”
Looks Away knelt next to him and very carefully touched the edges of bloodless skin around the stone. He did not touch the stone itself.
“Ghost rock,” he said. “Not very pure, but definitely ghost rock.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jenny. “What happened?”
It was the little girl who answered. “The monsters came in through the window.”
Every eye turned toward her.
“Monsters?” echoed Jenny. “God… are there more than one?”
The night, as if listening with dark humor, once more held the answer. There was another scream. A man’s this time. It rose higher and higher, losing gender and identity until it was nothing more than a shriek of unbearable agony. Then it suddenly stopped with wet finality.
The little girl screamed into the ensuing silence and broke from the shelter of Jenny Pearl.
“Dad!”
She ran toward the sound of certain death.
And Grey, Looks Away, and Brother Joe ran after.