Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (13 page)

But since the torreón they had been
driven. Always driven, like cattle themselves. Driven across the desert, driven
apparently, to this post. Driven to the parade ground by Jacobi’s murders, and
then trapped there by the exploding insect things they had implanted in Manx,
Jeffries and Milton, so that the cattle had nearly wiped them all out.

He watched the advance of the
zombies, so like a line of pawns. Where were they driving them now? Down the
mountain? To the edge of the precipice over which some of the cattle had
fallen?

If they gained the horses, what
then? Ride hell bent down the mountain, away from their advance. Into the arms
of…what?

What if they just stayed here? These
things might not have the strength or motor skills to climb. But then, there
were so many, they might crawl over each others’ shoulders like army ants to
ascend, mindless in their doggedness.

“Lieutenant?” called the man on the
stable roof again, desperate for any order.

Then the top of his head popped high
into the air, riding a tall gout of blood and brain. His skeleton seemed to
waver and liquefy, limbs jellifying as he slackened and slid off the roof.

For an instant the Rider thought it
was some new diabolism, but they all heard the big report of the rifle, the
sound bouncing off the rocks, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint.
Somewhere up on the ridge? Yes. The sharpshooter had to be up there somewhere.

The men on every rooftop took
perhaps five seconds before understanding, and by that time a second soldier on
the stable roof caught a big bore bullet in the neck that sent his head
swinging sickly on his shoulders as if by a busted hinge. The rest of the men
were diving off their respective platforms before his corpse tumbled.

Driven from the rooftops to the
ground where the horde could reach them.

Again, their hands were being
forced, but the Rider found himself rolling off the roof anyway. They put the
guardhouse between themselves and the ridge.

They could feel the tramp of the mob
coming down the trail, and some of the soldiers began to scream and blubber.
Then came the snapping of shots. Pistols and rifles. Whether the soldiers were
firing up at the ridge to discourage the sharpshooter, or into the crowd of
advancing zombies, he didn’t know.

“Horses?” Belden wanted to know.

Bigelow, his face a sheen of sweat,
his breath coming in scared, rapid puffs, broke away from the guardhouse of his
own accord and sprinted for the stables, where the men who had been atop it were
wrenching open the stalls. Kabede made a grab for him, but missed.

Bigelow ran halfway there, then the
shot came. He leapt sideways in the air and fell, one arm lazily bent over his
ear, the other behind his back. Blood began to spread on the sand.

The sharpshooter again.

The Rider watched a trooper who had
swung down from the stable roof jerk one of the bucking horses free of its
stall by its hackamore bridle. Struggling to pull himself up on its back,
suddenly the horse reared up, a bullet passing through its head, actually
piercing its left eye and emerging from its right. It fell on the rider, and as
the soldier struggled to free himself, another bullet from the sharpshooter
caused a red wound to blossom on his chest, ending him.

“They don’t want us getting to the
horses,” Belden observed.

“All the more reason to do it then,”
the Rider said.

Cord and Weeks were down, looking
warily around the corner of the shack they’d been atop. Cord had his saber out,
anticipating a close fight.

“We’ll be shot down,” said Kabede. “It’s
a killing field out there.”

“No,” said the Rider. “Not all of
us. Not if we all go at once.”

“He’s right,” Belden agreed. “That
don’t sound like a repeater. It’s too big. Got to be single shot.” He flashed a
smile at the Rider. “Just like old times.”

“Well, not just,” the Rider grinned.

“Cord!” Belden yelled. “Get ‘em all
to the horses! On the count!”

Cord nodded.

“Rally on the stables at the three
count!” Cord bellowed in a surprisingly loud voice, trying to space his orders
between the volleys of gunfire. He held his saber up and whirled it over his
head impressively. The gunfire died down, replaced by shouts of assent as the
troopers passed the order to each other.

“Rally on the stables! At the count!
Keep your heads down! Listen for it!”

“On my mark!” Cord called, lowering
his saber and cocking his pistol. “One! Two! Three! Fall back!”

All around men broke cover and
converged on the stables. The Rider, Belden, and Kabede ran too.

Passing from the cover of the
guardhouse, they saw the front of the undead horde had reached the opposite
side of the building. A hasty bunch of the things spilled out from around the
corner of the blacksmith’s too, and pulled down a man who stopped to aim his
rifle at them. Cord hacked wildly with his saber to try and free the man,
chopping off grasping hands and fingers, but it was no use. He broke away and
led the charge to the stable.

The undead groaned, baring teeth,
pale eyes rolling, as they lurched at them with renewed vigor.

Kabede jabbed one in the chest with
the Rod of Aaron and it crumpled to the ground and did not move. Yet Belden
shot another in the head, blowing a quarter of its skull away. Still it
advanced, as if it had merely taken a punch to the face.

The Rider took note as he ran of the
reactions of the walkers to the attempts of the other soldiers to stop their
pursuit. After the first man, most didn’t stop and aim. Those that insisted on
doing so were almost always swarmed and overpowered. The Rider didn’t see just
what the things did to their victims, but he heard their screams.

The majority of the troopers fired
randomly as they fled, blowing holes in torsos, shooting off limbs. The things
appeared to feel no pain and beyond the momentary force of the impact, these
shots had no visible effect. Even those that fell over after sustaining
crippling damage to their legs simply crawled or staggered on the ragged
stumps.

Twelve men reached the stables
altogether. Weeks and Cord were among them, and the Rider noticed, the bad drummer,
Hutch. But for the four who had dropped down from the stable roof, the zombies
and the occasional boom of the sharpshooter on the ridge accounted for all the
rest.

After the disaster of the first
would-be escapee, the four from the rooftop were huddled on the floor of the
stable, in the stalls with the animals, and these made room for the newcomers
without protest. But this was the warm weather stable and there was only one
wall. The rest was open but for the fence rails, and soon the things would be
reaching in at them.

“Get on those horses, men!” Cord
hollered when he ducked under the roof and saw the wide-eyed troopers hugging
their knees.

“No offense, lieutenant, but fuck
that!” one of the troopers chuckled.

“Yeah, that sniper’ll clip us like
turkeys!”

“And what the hell are them things
out there?” whimpered a third. “You shoot ‘em and they just keep comin’! I seen
‘em pull Flaherty’s arms out of his shoulders!”

Trooper Hutch suddenly slapped his
hands to his eye and started shrieking, and fell to the hay covered floor.

“Shut him up or them horses’ll
trample us!” Weeks ordered.

But the other soldiers fought each
other for the furthest spot from the afflicted trooper, fearing he might
explode or deliver some clicking monstrosity any moment.

Kabede pushed past and gripped Hutch
by his shoulders.

“Help me!” he yelled.

The Rider slid to his knees next to
Kabede and held the bucking trooper against his better judgment.

Freed of restraining Hutch, Kabede
pulled the man’s grasping hands away from his own face and nearly recoiled at
what he saw.

Sticking out of Hutch’s eye was a
wriggling, disembodied finger. An index finger, torn off just beneath the
second joint, where the broken bone protruded. It was hooking its way between
the man’s eyeball and socket bone nearest the nasal cavity, trying to push
behind.

The soldiers gasped as one.

“See!” said the soldier who had
demanded to know the nature of the multitude descending on them. “Even the
pieces come at you!”

The Rider was dumbstruck. Every part
of these things was animate, independent of the whole.

“Lieutenant! Get them mounted!”

Cord nodded to himself, forcing his
gaze away from what was transpiring in the corner.

“Alright you men, form two firing
lines across that rail.”

“They don’t care if you shoot ‘em!”
one of the soldiers whined.

“They still get knocked back,” Cord
reasoned. “Keep ‘em outta here. I want you one by one to leave the line, find a
horse and mount up—starting with you, Hale. Go! You men, fire at will.”

As the soldiers lined up shoulder to
shoulder and began firing in lines (five crouched in the front, five standing
behind) out at the slowly advancing dead, Kabede forced Hutch’s arm under his
knee and picked up the Rod of Aaron.

“What’re you going to do?”

Kabede pinched the bone of the
wriggling finger like a man grabbing the tail of an escaping rat. It fought his
grip, struggling to burrow into Hutch’s head. How had it gotten there? Had it
crawled along the ground after being shot off, or had it been stuck to his clothes
somehow? The Rider watched as with his other hand, Kabede touched the head of
the staff to the finger.

Immediately it slackened and with a
jerk, Kabede plucked it out, eliciting a new scream from Hutch and a fresh gush
of blood.

Kabede wrinkled his lips and flung
the finger outside.

Weeks had seen everything, and he
yelled to them, “Hell! Get out there and put that stick to the rest of ‘em!”

“He’d be shot down!” the Rider said.
“Besides, he’d never be able to take them all. There’s too many.”

“Not on foot, I couldn’t,” Kabede
said.

The Rider looked at him.

“Forget it. That sniper would kill
you as soon as you got out there.”

“They want us all to ride down that
hill,” Kabede argued. “We can’t.”

The farrier, Hale, first man on the
horse, wheeled about, trying to keep the mount from bucking as beside him,
another trooper pulled himself on a roan’s back.

“Lieutenant, where are we going?”

Cord was preoccupied, listening to
Kabede and the Rider.

“You’re right,” he said. “They are
driving us down there. What do you think?”

“I don’t know as we have much
choice,” the Rider said.

“There’s one other choice,” Belden
said. “Up and at ‘em.”

“You want to
charge
his position?” Cord asked.

“We don’t even know where he is,”
said Weeks.

“He can’t kill us all,” Belden said.

“If we run up there and then we can’t
find him, he damn sure could pick us off.”

“Maybe you’d rather ride off the
edge of the mountain, Weeks,” Belden snapped, exasperated.

“Orders, sir?” Hale shouted again,
his voice cracking now, the eyes of his horse bugging and screwing.

The front line had mounted, leaving
the dwindling second line to fire into the pressing crowd, which was at the
fence now, reaching for them, groaning. Soon they would run dry. There would be
no time to reload.

“I will ride up the ridge,” Kabede
said. “You go down the mountain. They are driving you there for some purpose.
You must fight them there.”

“You’re sure?” the Rider said,
clasping Kabede’s arm.

Kabede nodded and ran for a horse.

“Up the ridge!” Cord bellowed.

Hale and the other five mounted men
burst from the stable, pistols blazing, and forced their shrieking mounts
through the grasping, clawing crowd.

“You men fall back and mount up.We’re
taking the ridge.” Cord ordered, jumping in front of them and swinging
viciously with his saber, swiping off limbs and heads, doing all he could to
keep them outside, to just keep them back for a few moments more.

Nobody had to tell the firing line
twice. They dropped their empty rifles and leapt onto the waiting horses.
Drawing pistols, they streamed out after Hale’s charge.

The Rider ran for the south end of
the stable, to hop the fence there. An arm caught his elbow. It was Belden.

“I’m comin’ with you.”

Cord was screaming. One of the
things hand caught his sword arm and bit into the pit of his elbow. Blood
gushed up its nose and forehead as its teeth tore into his artery. He dropped
his sword, and instantly six pairs of hands grabbed him and he was pulled
kicking over the fence and out into the mob.

“Cord!” Belden yelled, moving to
help.

This time it was the Rider who
caught him.