Grey fumbled at his belt for fresh cartridges, knowing that there was no time left. This was it. All of his roads had led here and this was where he was going to die. Consumed and forgotten.
“God damn you all to—!”
That was as far as he got and the world seemed to explode.
The four closest pteranodons flew apart as if they were straw dolls in a tornado wind. Blood and leather flew everywhere, slapping the other creatures in the faces, painting the mushroom caps with red, and filling the air with the smell of strange blood. A boom, like the echo of a great thunderclap rolled outward toward the sunless sea, and once more the frightened bats fled their refuge and fled like a dark cloud toward the fungi-covered columns.
The force of the explosion drove Grey to his knees and knocked the gun from his hand. He clapped his hands to his ears and wheeled around, staring at the figure that stood behind him.
Thomas Looks Away, covered in bat guano and lichen, blood streaming from his nose, teeth bared, eyes wild, stood wide-legged with the Kingdom rifle in his hands. Then he whirled around, raised the weapon again, and fired at the pteranodons atop the mushroom caps that had formed their refuge. The round hit the closest of the beasts, and there was another shocking boom of thunder, and a shockwave picked both men up and flung them against another of the towering mushrooms.
The pterosaur that had been hit and both of the other monsters were shredded as the compressed ghost-gas bullets detonated into a blinding series of miniature explosions. The bursts followed one another almost too fast to hear — first the explosion of the rifle shells and then the howling scream as the ghost rocks embedded in the dead flesh of each animal burst apart. That, and the screams of the undead things, shook the entire cavern. Chunks of sandstone cracked off and plummeted from the ceiling, smashing down on the pteranodons, crippling some, killing many. Grey grabbed Looks Away by the arm and they scrambled under the hood of another giant mushroom. The massive cap quivered and a jagged crack appeared in the stem above their heads. They cried out and rolled over against the base just as the stem cracked like a tree in a hurricane wind and a ton of mottled fungus canted over and crashed down inches from where they lay.
The ground shook again and bloody rain fell all around them.
They dared not move.
The whole world shook and trembled around them. The pterosaurs screamed.
And then there was a new sound, that of many leathery wings flapping as all of the surviving creatures flung themselves into the air in a colliding, wild attempt to flee.
Silence settled very, very slowly.
The two men lay there, half buried under the shattered mushroom cap, half deafened by the thunder of the Kingdom rifle, half mad with terror.
Then, finally, Grey began to crawl out. After a moment Looks Away followed. They climbed to their feet and stood there, swaying and drunk with fatigue. Around them lay the shredded remains of a half dozen of the pteranodons. A few crippled ones were dragging themselves away from what had been their intended dinner. These monsters had been torn by flying shrapnel from the mushrooms, from rocks, and from flying bits of bone, but they hadn’t been caught in the blast radius of the exploded ghost rock and so they had not exploded, too. Even so, they were torn to rags.
Looks Away wiped a nervous hand across his mouth as he watched them shudder along and tried to make a joke. “A clear case of the biter bit, what?”
The quip came out crooked and landed flat.
Grey picked up the Kingdom rifle from where it had fallen when they’d been thrown backward. The little lights were still glowing bright even though it was covered with drops of blood. He held it up and thought about the cannon-sized one at Doctor Saint’s lab.
“God Almighty,” he whispered.
Chapter Sixty
They picked up their other weapons: the ordinary Colt and shotgun that now seemed both childish and somehow more wholesome than the gleaming Kingdom M1.
“Do you think that gun destroyed the demons in those flying lizards?”
“Reptiles,” corrected Looks Away, “and I don’t know. Actually, old chap, we don’t even know if they were the same kind of undead as Lucky Bob’s crew or simply bodies he raised using alchemy. Add that to our list of mysteries.”
“It would be nice,” groused Grey, “to get to the point where the answers outnumber the dad-blasted questions.”
“I don’t know that any results we get on prehistoric monsters are going to be reliable in terms of what the Kingdom rifle might or might not do to undead gunslingers. Or to a Harrowed like Lucky Bob. We have to be careful there, old boy. I think it’s fair to say that Jenny would prefer we did not destroy her father’s eternal soul.”
“Yeah, well, there’s that…”
They reloaded and did an ammunition check.
“I have fourteen shells left,” said Looks Away, closing the shotgun breech with a snap. “You?”
Grey had removed all of the rounds from his belt and put them in his one remaining trouser pocket. They were much easier to grab. “Thirty-one rounds.”
In any normal circumstance it was a lot of ammunition. This was a million miles from normal.
Above them the roof of the cavern was free of any undead flying reptiles, while the bats had once more gone back to hide in the mushroom forest. Even the insects, large and small, seemed to shun them. Grey could almost understand it. Even though they had done what was necessary to survive an impossible attack, using that gun made him feel strangely unclean. Like it was emblematic of a line in the sand that they should not have crossed.
Grey said none of this to Looks Away. After all, it was his mentor, Doctor Saint, who had created the gun, and the cannon. It was Looks Away who had used that other strange weapon to stop the reanimated army from slaughtering the town. In both cases those weapons had been the deciding factor in keeping them alive.
So why did it feel wrong? Why did Grey feel dirty?
He shook his head, unable to sort it through.
Looks Away took a sip from his canteen and handed it over. Grey sipped and gave it back.
“You know, I grew up way back east in Philadelphia,” said Grey. “I wanted to be a lawyer or someone like that. I was good in school, always read, got top grades.”
“So—?”
“So what the fuck am I doing in this hellhole?”
They both laughed. The sound echoed badly and it hushed them again.
With infinite care they left the scene of carnage and searched for a path through the cavern. Even though neither of them possessed certain knowledge that this cavern actually led to the necromancer’s residence, each of them felt it in their guts. If Veronica was right and Chesterfield had betrayed Deray, inviting dire retaliation, then the tunnel that brought the attackers — however it was made — had to come from somewhere.
But where? And how far was it? Grey had no way of knowing.
Just as he had no way of knowing what new horrors stood between them and the answers.
Looks Away carried the lantern and walked bent over, frowning at the ground, making soft grunting noises to himself to confirm or reject possible trails. Then he found it. On the far side of a cracked ridge of lichen-covered rock there was a distinctive line of glistening slime. They both agreed it was the same as the trail of whatever had bored through the tunnel into the basement of Chesterfield’s mansion. Moving as quickly as caution allowed, they followed the trail down the slope and along the night-dark sea.
The sand crunched softly under their feet, and in places felt dangerously soft, as if some trap or pocket might open up beneath them. Tendrils of colorless seaweed lay rotting on the shores, moved now and again by desultory waves. The bioluminescence in the seawater made the waves glimmer, but not in any way Grey thought was attractive. The water itself seemed to be rank with the odor of decay.