Ebenezer now thought of that afternoon because Virgil looked an awful lot like that usher. He wasn’t nearly as fat, but he was stalking toward Eb with the same goatish belligerence, his eyes squinted in vaporous idiocy. Ebenezer reached into the toolbox and selected a heavy wrench.
“What the fuck you think you’re doing, you uppity nig—”
Ebenezer threw it. The wrench spun end over end, tomahawk-style, and poleaxed Virgil spang between the eyes. Virgil went down on one knee, looking like Al Jolson singing the crescendo of “My Mammy,” then staggered up and tilted off in a new direction toward the trees. His forehead was split open, blood pissing out.
Eb curled his hand around an old spark plug lying in the toolbox and walked over to Virgil. He swung his fist in a tight arc, clouting Virgil on the back of his head. Virgil grunted and fell face-first into the dirt. Ebenezer turned him over and punched him in the face, hard. And again. And again. Virgil’s eyelids fluttered, and blood leaked from both sides of his mouth.
“Eb,” Micah said.
Ebenezer turned. He could feel the warmth of Virgil’s blood freckling his face.
Micah said, “Lay off.”
“Cheerfully!” Eb said. He rolled Virgil over, grabbed the man’s gun from his waistband, then walked back to the bike and tossed the spark plug into the toolbox. Virgil lay still with blood bubbling out of his mouth.
“Those things in the woods, Eb,” said Micah, taking no interest in the downed man. “They are fast.”
“I saw them before, Micah. Back at the campsite.”
“No. These ones are different.”
Eb sighed. “What choice do we have? No phone, no telegram, no carrier pigeons, no smoke signals. Someone has to get out of here. Who does it hurt if that someone is me?”
Micah said, “You coming back?”
“No,” Eb said evenly. “Why the hell would I? But I promise I’ll call the authorities. I’ll have Johnny Law dispatched here posthaste.”
“If you make it.”
“If I make it.”
Micah considered this. “Give us some time. We can help.”
Micah went away with Minerva. Ebenezer spent the good part of an hour tinkering with the bike. Doc Lewis and another man showed up meanwhile and dragged Virgil off; Virgil’s boot heels left shallow rails in the dirt.
The sun skinned above the trees. Shapes shifted in the bad light of the woods. The electric tang of dread lay heavy in Eb’s mouth. Micah returned with Ellen and two male followers. Both men carried compound bows.
“Ellen made these.”
Micah held up a globe of paper-thin glass with a hole in the top. The men filled each globe with gasoline—now a precious resource—and lashed the globes to hunting arrows with duct tape.
“We will try to hit a few,” Micah said. “At least you will see them coming.”
Ebenezer duct-taped Virgil’s gun to the motorbike’s handlebars. He kick-started the engine. The motor coughed, sputtered, then buzzed to life.
“You better make that fuckin’ phone call!” Minerva shouted over the engine.
“I’ll miss you most of all!” he shouted back to her.
The men notched arrows in their bows. Ellen lit the gasoline in the glass bowls. Micah hefted the Tarpley rifle. Minerva had Ellen’s .38 pistol.
“We’ll lay down cover,” she said grudgingly. “Race like your ass is on fire.”
Minerva and Micah jogged fifty yards ahead. The shapes in the trees were massing now. Ebenezer gunned the engine; the bike buzzed louder—those wine-swilling Frenchies made one hell of a motorcycle.
Ah, well, Eb thought. Who wants to live forever?
Two arrows arced over his head. One hit a tree, whose trunk went up in a furious cone of fire. The other arrow hit one of the creatures, which shrieked as flames burst over its body. The fire clawed all over it to showcase its enormous and baffling size.
“Go!” Micah shouted.
Eb opened the throttle. The bike took off like a scalded cat. He raced between Minerva and Micah, bike screaming, tachometer in the red. The bike bottomed out in a rut, the chassis kicking up sparks. He shot past Charlie Fairweather’s corpse—Charlie’s eyes wide open, his dust-covered intestines resembling floured sausage links. Two more arrows arced overhead; something went up fifty yards ahead of him, a lunatic combustion that threw the woods into momentary relief. Noises from all angles, a cacophony of screeches and howls.
Something charged from his left-hand side; he cranked the bars to the right. Micah’s rifle cracked; the thing skip-tumbled away, a good chunk of its anatomy obliterated by the blast—
The tires hit a rut; the bike wobbled, threatening to spill him off, but he recovered and rose up off the seat as the bike launched out of the rut on a bad line. The wheels spun, engine whining, before he slammed back down. His skull hammered the handlebars. He pulled his head up, woozy, seeing stars—he was riding straight at the trees. An abomination loomed out of the woods: the skulls of many animals smashed together, the bone humped and carbuncled like a walnut with a horrible mouth splitting its surface. Ebenezer dropped one leg down and wrenched the bars hard, spinning a tight one-eighty; he gunned the throttle, and the bike reared up as something snagged at his shirt collar, slitting the material and leaving a burning line of pain down his back. He cat-walked the bike away from the trees, shifted his weight to bring the front tire down again, and slewed onto the path. Blood was trickling down his back. He shot past the pickup truck and caught a flash of blood on its windows and a headless body slumped against the tire.
Sweat dripped into his eye; he blinked, and when his vision cleared, he saw something in the firs to his right, forty yards ahead. It kept rising and rising in a crazed mass of limbs like a living totem pole. It slumped forward, falling like a tree but much faster—more like an enormous whip being cracked. It slapped down on the path, sending up a stinking puff of dust, this terrible skinned rope studded with red-rimmed eyes and mouths full of teeth gnashing with mindless hunger—
Eb jerked the handlebars, popping the front wheel up, and hurdled the thing like a speed bump. The tires burred over its body, sending up the stink of burned rubber; for a heart-sinking moment Eb was sure the thing’s teeth or claws would puncture the tire, leaving him to flee on the shredded rim, but the rubber held, thank Christ.
The path widened and ran flat; the shapes between the trees began to thin. He sensed movement from behind, things blundering and crashing through the bush, but he was moving faster than them now.
Ha-haaaaah! he thought joyously. Run, run, just as fast as you can, you can’t catch me—I’m the bloody GINGERBREAD MAN!
A shadow fell across his shoulder. He caught the decayed smell of his pursuer. He glanced back in time to see something swooping in from above. Its plated wings were fanned out, a fearsome ten-foot span of vein-threaded blackness. He swerved to avoid its predatory strike; its wings flapped directly overhead, the air filling with rancid white dust like the powder off a moth. It latched onto his ear; its talons were blunt but incredibly powerful—it was like getting pierced with ballpoint pens. The creature flapped its enormous wings; Eb’s ass lifted a few inches off the seat. He screamed as the thing tried to muscle itself skyward; it raked his head with other claws, these much sharper, slicing his scalp open.
Eb clung desperately to the handlebars as the thing rose up, clutching his ear like an angry schoolmarm. One hand was pried off the bars, his fingers barely holding on; his screams intensified as his panic hit maximum intensity. Then, with a fibrous zippering tear, part of his ear was gone, ripped right off the side of his head. He barely felt it, on account of the adrenaline washing through his system. He dropped back onto the seat; the shocks groaned as the bike bottomed out again, spraying a fan of gravel. There came a pressurized hiss as blood sprayed from the wound, flowing around his jaw and down his neck.