“Jenny—?” he croaked and began crawling through the mud toward her. “Jenny?”
She reached out a hand to take his. Her fingers were icy with rainwater. He pulled her to him and they clung together in a stricture of shared pain that went all the way to the bone. To the heart. To the soul.
Jenny Pearl writhed against him, in agony. Body and soul.
Ten yards from where they lay, Looks Away sat in the middle of the street, his goggles pushed up on his head, face haggard, lips slack and rubbery with exhaustion. All of the tubes on the machine he wore were dark, the glass of each cracked and smoking. The strange gun was on the ground, thin lines of steam rising from it, the metal melted.
Grey craned his neck to look for Lucky Bob and the other monsters.
Many of them lay in the mud.
Dead and still.
Dead for good and all.
Their heads were gone. Just… gone.
Nothing above their shoulders was there anymore. Instead the ground and even some of the faces of the buildings on either side of the street were splashed with red, with some viscous black substance that Grey figured must be the blood from their decaying veins, and gray lumps of brain tissue. In each of them the black chunk of ghost rock was shattered and smoke rose from each of them.
Grey looked and looked, but he did not see a figure dressed all in black. He did not see the torn and burned remains of a flat-brimmed hat, nor a pair of matched pistols.
“By the Queen’s lacy garters,” said Looks Away in a soft and distant voice. “Did you see?”
“I saw too much.”
“Did you see the ship?”
“I…,” began Grey, then he shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw.”
“Ah,” said the Sioux. “I fear the world is broken. Or I am. Hard to say at this particular juncture.” His precise word choices were totally at odds with the moment, and Grey feared for the man’s sanity. But then Looks Away shook his head as if coming awake out of a dream. He looked at Grey as if surprised to see him.
“You’re alive,” he said. “God rot me, but I thought I saw Lucky Bob gun you both down.”
Grey showed him the dented belt buckle.
Looks Away actually laughed. “You are the luckiest man alive.”
“I feel like I’ve been cut in half.”
“At least you can feel.”
They both turned to Jenny. She shook her head. “Don’t you dare call me lucky.”
“How—?” asked Looks Away, then he blinked. “Dear God, are you going to stand there and tell me that your corset deflected a bullet?”
Jenny kept one hand pressed to her chest. “It grazed me. Don’t make anything out of it.”
“Let me see,” insisted Looks Away.
“No,” she said. “Leave me alone.” Her eyes were puffed red, tears had cut lines through the mud on her cheeks. “Pa—?”
The Sioux scientist raised his head and looked past the pile of corpses that littered the street. “He’s gone.”
She shuddered with relief. “Thank God.”
“No,” said Looks Away. “I don’t think so.”
Feet slapped through the mud and Grey turned to see Brother Joe hurrying over. The monk helped Jenny to her feet and then offered a hand to Grey, who took it gratefully.
Grey touched Jenny’s arm with tentative fingertips. She stepped away, shrugging off his touch. Grey sighed and slogged over to Looks Away. He offered his hand, but the Sioux knelt where he was.
“Give me a moment.”
“Sure,” agreed Grey, but he nodded to the machine. “What in tarnation is that contraption?”
Looks Away picked up the melted handgun, considered it, and let it fall back into a puddle.
“Long or short answer?”
“Short. One I’ll understand.”
“Gas expansion pistol.”
Grey thought about it. “Medium answer.”
A faint smile flitted over Looks Away’s mouth. “A weapon, powered by chalcanthite and ghost rock waste gasses. Designed to focus a beam of superheated plasma that radically expands the gasses trapped within solid ghost rock resulting in an explosive chemical reaction.”
“Um…”
“Did you get any of that?”
Grey nudged the gun with a booted toe. “That thing blew the heads off the undead?”
“It did.”
“By doing something to the ghost rock inside them?”
“An oversimplification, but yes.”
Looks Away sighed. “If you’re still offering a hand up, my friend, I’ll take it.”
Grey gripped his arm and pulled him to his feet. The effort hurt both of them and they spent a good long time cursing and wheezing. Looks Away stood wide-legged and wobbly. He unbuckled the straps and let the device crash to the ground.
“Hey!” said Grey. “We might need that—.”
“We probably will, but that unit is buggered.” Looks Away turned around to show that the back of his shirt was singed and the skin beneath blistered. “It’s a prototype. Doctor Saint scrapped it because we couldn’t keep the coils from overheating.”
“Ouch.”
“Ouch indeed.”
“Jesus. Can you fix it? Or, um, reload it?”
“I study rocks, old son. I’m not a mechanical engineer. Doctor Saint built it, and as far as I know, only he can repair it.”
“Balls,” said Grey. “You got it from his lab, right? Is there anything else we can use if the things come back?”
“I’m… not sure. I didn’t have time to look.”
“Then we’d better have that look.” He went over to the nearest of the formerly walking dead, knelt, and began removing bullets from the man’s gunbelt. He put the first six into his Colt and then slotted the rest into the loops on his own belt. Then he went to two others and took their ammunition as well. Once all the slots on his belt were filled, he dumped the rest into his pockets. The weight was comforting.
Jenny came over. She still had one hand pressed to the damaged front of her dress. She looked angry and sheepish at the same time, and she wouldn’t meet Grey’s eyes. But she stood foursquare in front of Looks Away.
“You tell me the truth,” she demanded. “No lies. Did you try to kill my pa?”
Looks Away took a breath, and then nodded. “He ran away and took the last dozen of them with him. But, Jenny, listen to me — I do not believe that was your father.”
“Of course it was.”
“Of course it was not. Come on, woman,” said Looks Away, “you saw him. He was a corpse. Withered. He’s been dead for weeks. Probably ever since he went missing. Whatever that thing was, I daresay it was not Lucky Bob Pearl. It was some kind of construct, a galvanized mockery brought back to a pretense of life by the qualities of ghost rock. Ask Grey. We’ve both seen the dead walk. We fought them. They are not the people they were when they were alive.”
“That was my pa,” she insisted. “He spoke to me.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It was, damn it. You think I don’t know my own father?”
Brother Joe joined them. “Miss Pearl. That was a demon straight from Hell wearing your father’s body like a suit of clothes.”
“You’re not helping,” said Grey quietly, but Looks Away shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I rather think he is correct.”
“Demons now?” Grey sighed. “We have the walking dead and screaming storms, and now you want to add demons to this stew?”
Jenny punched Grey in the chest. “My father is not a demon.”
“Ow! Why’d you hit me? I didn’t say he was a demon. I’m on your side.”
“You tried to shoot him.”
“Yeah, well, okay, fair enough,” said Grey quickly, “but let’s count the cards on the table. He was shooting at me. And at you.”