“She is yours, my brothers. Devour her, body and soul!”
“No… Pa… no!” Jenny gasped.
The swarm of walking dead howled and surged forward toward Jenny, and she was too terrified and heartbroken to move. She stood there, gaping at her father’s corpse while death came to take her.
Grey instantly broke from cover and ran faster than he had ever done in his life. He hooked an arm around Jenny’s waist and plucked her from the ground. Even as he did so, he pivoted and fired.
He had three bullets left but he’d be damned if he would waste them.
The closest of the fiends seemed to leap backward, his face disintegrating.
A second tried too late to dodge away and instead ducked into Grey’s next round. His head snapped back so hard that the sound of his spine snapping was almost as loud as the shot that killed him.
Jenny fought against Grey, reaching backward toward her father, who was striding forward, bellowing at his followers to kill them both. Grey struggled with her as he raised his gun and aimed at the head of the man whose clothes he wore.
“Take them!” ordered the Harrowed.
The swarm of walking corpses passed him like river water around a rock, racing to obey their master’s orders. They boiled forward, all of them laughing. All of them hungry.
Jenny bit Grey’s shoulder, and when he flinched back, she broke away and ran toward her father.
“Pa!” she screamed.
Lucky Bob saw her and laughed with mad glee. Then he raised his gun and snapped off a single shot. Jenny cried out and staggered, her hands pressed to her chest.
“No!” bellowed Grey as he threw himself at the Harrowed, firing his last round in the same moment that Lucky Bob aimed his gun at him. Both pistols banged in the same instant. Lucky Bob was spun halfway around as red burst from his shoulder, and Grey felt his entire midsection explode into a fireball. The pain was impossible and he caved forward and dropped to his knees. The empty gun tumbled from his fingers and fell into the mud. Grey couldn’t breathe and he waited for the blackness to take him. His eyes bulged from his head as he saw Jenny lying there, her body completely still, rain beating on her slack features.
Grey looked beyond her and he thought he saw the faces of all his ghosts watching, waiting for him to die. Waiting for him to be theirs.
He looked down at his hands, expecting to see blood pouring out, expecting to see his guts slide out into the rain.
But even though his hands were wet there was no blood.
The pain, though, it was unbearable.
He could not understand any of it.
He toppled sideways and lay helpless before the laughing corpses, and they came forward to take him.
And then a figure seemed to step out of the dark wind and blowing rain. At first alien and misshapen, then illuminated in eerie detail as lightning forked through the sky.
A man wearing a harness on his back fashioned in some strange design. All gleaming copper and steel, with glowing tubes of glass thrust out in all directions. Coils of wires trailed from the center of the burning tubes to the butt of the strangest pistol Grey had ever seen. It was oversized, with a glass wrapped entirely around the barrel. Blue gas swirled within the bowl, and it seemed to Grey that inside the gas tiny bolts of lightning flashed and popped. From the center of the globe thrust the black mouth of a barrel made from brass and wrapped with turn upon turn of silver wire. The man wearing this bizarre contraption wore a pair of goggles with lenses of blood-red quartz.
“Damn you all,” said Thomas Looks Away as he raised his impossible gun.
There was a sound like a thousand snakes hissing at once.
Grey’s eyes drifted shut as a terrible light filled the world. It stabbed at him even through his tightly shut eyelids.
Grey heard the screams.
Terrible screams.
Awful. High-pitched.
Begging for mercy.
Crying out to whatever gods or devils there were to save them.
Not the screams of the people of Paradise Falls.
He lay there and listened to the death screams of the walking dead.
Somewhere, impossibly, Grey heard Jenny calling her father’s name.
And he heard another voice. An impossible voice from long ago whispering softly in his ear.
“Go to sleep,” she said. “It’s over now. Go to sleep.”
He tried to say her name, but it came out as a whisper.
“Annabelle…”
Above him, defiant in the path of the storm, Looks Away stood there with his strange gun and fired and fired and fired.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The storm winds blew long and black.
They howled like the dying and the damned. Grey lay in the mud with his eyes shut.
And then a great silence fell like a blanket of snow.
Was this death? He did not know. He feared it, though. The ghosts would be waiting for him. Waiting to exact the revenge they had earned with their blood.
Grey waited and waited.
The downpour dwindled to a drizzle, then a few desultory drops. Then nothing.
If death was hovering nearby, it did not touch him with its cold fingers.
It took courage for Grey to open his eyes. He expected to see Looks Away dead and the gibbering dead standing in a leering ring around them, ready to play a deadly joke. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Yet the surprise was different.
Grey was not dead.
He touched his stomach, searching for the ragged bullet hole.
Finding none.
Finding…
His heavy belt buckle was bent nearly in half, the crease digging into him like a knife. The bullet — Lucky Bob’s bullet had — against all odds, against all sanity, hit the buckle and had not passed through.
Grey wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.
“God,” he breathed.
He raised his head and looked at the sky.
And beheld a sight that nearly drove the last shreds of sanity from his mind.
There, far above the troubled town, half obscured by the fading storm clouds, was a ship.
A ship unlike anything Grey had ever seen. Stranger than anything he had even imagined.
There were no sails, no sweeps, but it floated on the wind like something out of an opium dream. Vast and silver-gray, with massive wings that were unfurled from its side. The wings were black, the wings of some obscene bat. Thin and veined with red. As Grey watched they rose, rose, rose, then snapped down with a thunder crack, propelling the steel body of the ship deeper into the clouds. Another crack, another sound like thunder.
And then it was gone, vanishing into the darkness and distance, as if it had never existed at all. A fading fantasy of a troubled mind. A delusion of shock.
That’s what Grey tried to tell himself.
A fantasy. Nothing more.
But the horrors of this night bared the lie even to his reluctant mind.
It was real, as all of this was real. Dead men walking. A fall of snakes and frogs. Storms that screamed.
All of it.
Real.
He heard a soft moan, and he turned to see Jenny Pearl sitting up, her hands pressed to her breast. Her face was slack and eyes dull. She did what he had done, looking down at the place where a bullet should have killed her. The front of her dress was torn and there was the darkness of blood, but it did not pump from her. It did not rush from her. She touched the whalebone of her bodice.
“No,” she said, her voice thick and strange in her shock.