She was suddenly more wolf than girl.
Her lips pulled back in a snarl, her teeth sharp as icepicks.
Dirker heard himself mutter, “Shit.”
All he could think of was a childhood story of how Circe the witch had changed Odysseus’s men into beasts.
And around him… they were all changing.
Flesh became smoke that was blown by secret, cabalistic winds and rivers moved by mystical currents. The girl suddenly leaped into the air, five, six feet until it seemed she would brush the rafters overhead, and then she came right down on Sellers. And this before he could even jerk a trigger or think of doing so. He and the girl-thing went down in a thrashing, writhing heap. Her mouth was wrapped around his face, those teeth sunk right to the bone. You could hear his screams echoing down the shaft of her throat.
But nobody had time to look at that.
For as the girl made her move, so did the others.
The man in the Confederate hat rose up in a flurry of teeth and claws and growling and was almost on Harmony when his shotgun went off, pitching the man backwards. Suddenly, everyone was shooting. Shooting at shapes and forms and monstrosities from some primal nightmare.
Dirker brought his Greener up and blasted the bartender. The impact blew his shoulder to a bloody mist and threw him against dusty glasses and discarded bottles. There was a crashing and shattering and he came right back up again, his face gone lupine and his teeth bared to bisect human flesh.
Dirker gave him another round that knocked him away and then that little boy was hopping in his direction. Dirker gave him the butt of the Greener in the face, driving him to the floor, broke it open and ejected shells, fed two more in, snapped it close. The bartender was up on the bar by then, his shirt split wide open from the pulsing, bestial muscularity beneath.
As he leapt, Dirker gave him both barrels.
The buckshot blew his snarling head into a spray of bone and blood. He flipped back over the bar and stayed down this time. As Dirker whirled around, the boy hit him hard and put him down, those jaws opening like the mouth of a tiger and coming in for the kill. The Greener still in his hands, he jammed the barrel lengthwise into that mouth, claws tearing great ruts through his coat and shirt and into his chest below. With a scream, he pushed the beast away from him, flipping it off him.
The man in the Confederate hat had Harmony.
His huge, clawed hands were pressed to either side of the Mormon’s head… and he was lifted an easy two feet off the floor, rivers of blood running from his ears and eyes as his skull was crushed. Then the teeth darted forward and his face was literally stripped from the bone beneath.
Dirker saw the beast standing there, Harmony’s face hanging from its jaws like a bloody scalp.
And then the boy came back at him, but Dirker was on his feet.
As the boy charged in, Dirker unleathered his .45 Peacemaker in one swift, easy motion. He fired once, punching a hole in the boy’s sloping forehead and blowing skull out the back of his head. The boy shuddered momentarily on all fours, gore oozing down his face. Then he pitched straight over, trembling on the blood-slicked floor.
Two of the beasts were on Crombley.
Fitch dropped another by following Dirker’s lead and shooting it in the head. Dirker put three bullets into the thing that was devouring Harmony. Then the door exploded in with a roaring wall of snow and long, furry arms powdered white took hold of both Fitch and Archambeau and dragged them screaming out into the storm.
Dirker killed one more, reloaded his Greener and ran out into the storm, the world of Deliverance a cacophony of ringing church bells, shooting, and howling.
The storm was reaching its peak out in the streets.
The snow rose up into a whipping, shrieking wall of white that cut visibility down even further now. Cabe and his crew of miners had to squint and lean into the wind to press forward. They could hear the screaming and gunfire, but with the gusting blizzard turning sound around and into itself, it was hard to say where any of it was coming from.
And the miners were panicking.
They saw shapes hobbling through the snow and were shooting randomly, even though Cabe shouted at them to stop, because they might be cutting down their own men.
They were ready to bolt and run.
But where to?
To either side they could see the vague, white-shrouded forms of buildings, but it was hard to say where they were in the town now. Paranoia and confusion had turned them back on their own tracks half a dozen times. And each time, their tracks had been erased by the storm.
“Goddammit,” Cabe cried out at them, “stop this business, we’ve got to have some order here.”
And that’s when he noticed there were only three miners with him, the fourth missing.
“Where’s Hychek? Where the fuck did Hychek go?”
“They got him! Something grabbed him… something with green eyes!” one of the miners shouted. “I’m getting out of here, I’m getting out right goddamn now…”
But before he could, a trio of riders came pounding up the street and the miners, thinking the cavalry had arrived, waltzed right out into the streets to meet them. But it was not a rescue party, but a gang of Hide-Hunters. They thundered through the storm, parting the snows like roiling mists. They wore dusters and flat-brimmed hats pulled low over wolfish, snarling faces.
One of the miners let out a strangled screaming sound as a lasso looped over his head and was pulled tight like a noose around his throat. He was yanked from his feet and pulled away into the storm by one of the Hide-Hunters. Another miner was similarly roped.
Cabe ducked under a lasso meant for him and, quickly levering his Evans .44-40, knocked a Hide-Hunter from leather with three well-placed shots. He hit the ground, his horse racing off.
And Cabe got a good look at him.
He had the rough shape of a man, but was hunched-over and moved with a jumping, hopping side-to-side gait. His eyes blazed like wet emeralds and teeth hung over his narrow black lips like those of a jungle crocodile. With a resounding roar, he came at Cabe, the three bullet holes in him seeming to make little difference.
Cabe couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
That repulsive, shocking face and gnashing teeth, the loops of drool hanging from the crooked slash of a mouth, the furry hands with the ten-inch fingers and claws just as sharp as scalpels.
He put another round in the beast, mainly just to keep it off him.
But it didn’t even slow it down.
It slammed into him, pitching the both of them into a snowdrift. Its claws were at his throat, those fingers encircling his neck. The beast stank of tainted meat and diseased blood, saliva hung from its jaws in vile ropes.
Before it fed on him, it did something that truly sucked the wind from Cabe’s lungs: it spoke.
“Gonna die now, friend,” it said in a slavering, raw voice that was more akin to the growl of a rabid hound than the speech of a man. “Gonna die like an animal like in the old, forgotten days…”
But Cabe had other ideas.
As the beast reared up, letting out a wailing, howling noise that made Cabe’s ears explode with rushing noise, Cabe pulled his bowie knife from its sheath at his hip. And when the beast came down to fill its belly, it came right down on the blade of the knife. Nearly a foot of razored steel slid right into its throat and out the other side.
With a mewling, whining sound, it pulled away, the knife erupting out the side of its throat. Its head hung at a sickening angle, most of its neck slit clean through. It spilled blood to the fresh snow, tried to run and fell, tried to rise up and stumbled, its life’s blood running out in a torrent.