Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (16 page)

“
Gut
Shabbes
,” the Rider said, shrugging.

“Kill him,” said DeKorte.

The Rider dropped to his belly as
Gershom’s massive hands came together with a resounding clap where his head had
only just been.

Belden, now on his feet, whipped up
his fist and sent a stone hurtling at DeKorte. This was the man who had hunted
the Blue Ridge Mountains for rabbit and fox as a boy with only a pocketful of
such stones. When it left his hand there was no doubt it would find its mark.
It struck DeKorte in the eye and he threw up his hands, cursing.

Just as he did so, something bounced
to the ground beside the Rider. It was oblong and thin, and sparking like a
dying star on one end. He smelled the burning, heard the hiss.

Quickly he dove between Gershom’s
legs and stumbled to his feet. Rushing straight ahead, he tackled Belden,
carrying him for a few feet in the direction of DeKorte, who, with one hand
clapped to his eye and leaking blood, opened fire.

DeKorte was half-blind. He squeezed
the trigger as fast as he could, and bullets struck the ground, punched holes
in the grave markers, and snapped in the air near the Rider’s ear. One did clip
Belden’s left shoulder, and he groaned as the Rider’s momentum carried them
both into Gershom’s open grave.

As the Rider landed on top of him,
Belden was squashed between the jutting broken boards of the empty coffin and
his friend’s weight. His groan turned into a wheezing hiss as all the air was
forced out of his lungs.

Then the stick of dynamite which had
landed at Gershom’s feet exploded.

From the depths of the grave, the
Rider felt the earth tremor from the concussion, and saw the flash of light
overhead. DeKorte uttered a Dutch curse and the Rider heard him fall.

“Here’s another one for you, you
sonsabitches!”

It was Sergeant Weeks. Shortly after
they heard his voice, another explosion knocked loose the grave dirt and
covered them both.

The walk from the ridge through the
marauding undead and to the guardhouse was arduous. Every step was a passion,
as the souls of Gans and Kabede warred within the Frenchman’s body for control.
This was not a relatable contention of astral bodies in the
Yenne Velt,
but an abstract battle of
intent, with Kabede struggling like a man astraddle a thrashing crocodile to
keep the consciousness of Gans from pulling itself up and aright.

Gans saw his plan right away. The
nègre
intended to force him from cover
so the soldiers could kill him. But to his evident chagrin when he broke from
the safety of the rocks and walked haltingly down the ridge, there were no
soldiers to be found. They were either dead or had holed themselves up
somewhere from the assault of the horde. Gans laughed and the
nègre
spitefully let his body stumble
and fall for the last ten feet down the ridge, where he rolled to a stop,
battered and bleeding.

Gans felt the African working his
body like an unfamiliar operator, and inwardly laughed again when he saw
himself walk toward the zombies.

They would not attack him of course.
He had wards prepared personally by Het Bot to keep the undead from molesting
his person.

Gans contented himself to let the
African control him for a bit, as he obviously had no further plan, and would
not dare try and turn his rifle on himself in the manner Jacobi had done.

“
What
now
, nègre
?” he taunted.

Then he was walking toward the
guardhouse. Here Gans would have outright guffawed had he the means. The door
was shut to the structure. Obviously the
nègre
had holed inside to safely leave his body and enter the
Yenne Velt
. The black fool was leading him straight to his own
helpless body.

Gans affected to resist, and
projected feelings of outrage and a need to fight, but secretly reserved his
efforts, gathering strength for a final push that would regain control of his
physical form.

Let the fool think he was winning.
His plan was so unsubtle and stupid. It was only a matter of assuming control
of his own body before the black could regain his—and his enemy had to release
Gans first. In that moment Gans would kill him as he sat reposed. Let him think
his victory assured for now.

He watched his own hands reach out
and fumble with the guardhouse door. The black had very little aptitude for the
finer points of possession. Gans almost shoved his faltering will aside just to
get it over with. But no, he thought. Savor what is to come. He only hoped the
black would open his own eyes to see his death.

The door swung open and his body
nearly fell in sprawling, but caught itself on the frame.

Careful,
savage!
He thought. He didn’t want to return to the pain of a broken wrist.

The guardhouse was a bank of three
cells on the right hand side, a plain earth and stone floor. Seated against the
far wall was the black’s body, in the middle of a scrawled pentacle with his
eyes closed.

See
if your Solomonic seals protect you against my bullets,
nègre
,
he thought.

His body moved forward, falling
first against the stone wall and then against the bars of the cells.

Carefully,
you idiot!

It was exasperating to watch this
ape handle his body. He couldn’t even walk straight.

He passed the first cell.

Now,
monkey. Release me.

He lurched against the wall, then he
swayed and fell against the cell bars, rattling them.

Then, as if someone had been sitting
on his chest and had suddenly stood up, the presence of the
nègre
was gone.

With a silent mental cry of triumph
Gans’ conscious soared from the dark limbo of imprisonment straight toward the
growing light of his own perception.

In a matter of an instant he was
back, drawing breath and correcting the unfamiliar posture he had affected
under the black’s control.

He raised his rifle. Stupid of the
black not to have thrown it away.

Then something struck him
simultaneously at two points on the right side of his face. Something had leapt
from the shadows of the cell and clung to the bars. It had reached through the
bars and latched onto him. He screamed and struggled to get a look at what it
was. It hissed and chittered close in his ear.

Kabede’s eyes snapped open and he
blinked them into focus. Fighting the needles of numbness in his arm, he
brought up Hale’s pistol, cocked, took aim, and fired in one motion.

The bullet struck the insect thing
that had emerged from Colonel Manx’s body. Without the Elder Sign to keep it at
bay, it had lashed out at the first person to pass close to it. And Kabede had
made sure that was Gans.

It had been difficult to hide his
plan from Gans. The Frenchman had possessed an incredible sense of self, even
in the face of possession. Kabede had played the fool, telegraphing his surface
plans, feigning frustration when they didn’t work (as he had known they wouldn’t),
even mimicking a lack of finesse in his control of Gans’s body (and secretly
relishing every knock he purposefully inflicted on the man).

The bullet that struck the creature
caused it to explode, as he had known it would. Gans was thrown up into the
corner of the far wall and ceiling by the concussion, and actually hung there,
plastered in place by the thick, noxious green stuff that had trapped the
soldiers earlier. He was entirely coated, only his twitching hands and the tips
of his boots visible in the dripping muck.

Kabede supposed he would suffocate
if the smashing into the ceiling had not killed him already. He thought to try
and use his dagger to cut a hole for him to breathe, but it was a passing
thought. The sound of the dynamite explosion from down the path, down in the
direction of the cemetery, drove it from his mind.

Then there was a second.

He gathered his robes to him and the
staff, being careful not to get caught in the slime that now coated the hall as
he leapt over the most sizable patch.

Hale was at the bars of his cell.

“Holy shit,” he said admiringly.

Kabede whipped open the cell door
and tossed him back his pistol.

“Come with me.”

Weeks laughed crazily in his deep,
barking voice, and punctuated the laughter with a third explosion.

In the grave, Belden groaned as the
Rider shifted off of him, brushing the loose dirt from his shoulders.

“Weeks!” Belden exclaimed. “The
stupid sonofabitch must’ve snuck off and got into the dynamite.”

The Rider drew his Volcanic and put
his back to the cold wall of the grave, giving them both room enough to crouch.

Belden fished for his Schofield and
found it.

“You alright?” the Rider asked,
seeing the shimmer of blood running down his arm.

“I’ll be alright. Just shaved me.
Let’s go get that bastard before Weeks lobs a stick in this hole.”

“On three,” the Rider nodded.

They counted together, and sprang
from the grave, training the muzzles of their pistols at the spot DeKorte had
been standing on before the first explosion had blown him off his feet.

But he was gone.

All that was left of him was the
empty scroll case, the Rider’s spice box and candle, and the bit of root he’d
been chewing on, pale enough to see in the dark.

They flinched as a fourth stick of
dynamite went off in the midst of the four undead walkers that remained
standing around the outer edge of the graveyard. The explosion kicked them high
into the air and brought them down in wet pieces.

Weeks was standing at the edge of
the cemetery, a rifle in the crook of his arm, a pistol in his belt. As they
watched, he stooped and lit a cigar on the flame flickering in Gershom’s
cooking remains.

“Thought that bald bastard was gonna
be a lot of trouble,” Weeks remarked casually, leering in the light of the end
of his fat cigar. “Guess he wasn’t as much trouble as me.”

He took a step towards them, boots
squishing in bloody bits littering the ground. Mercifully they were nothing
more than a muddy glistening in the night, though there was an aroma of cooked
meat and the acrid gunpowder smell of the dynamite hanging over everything.

The Rider glanced about. The twelve
zombies and Gershom had all been blown to bits. Many bits. Enough to coat the
ground.

Then Weeks went down flat on his
face, as if he’d tripped over something.

The ground began to move beneath
their feet. The Rider felt warm and wet somethings wriggling between his toes
like slugs. They curled and slithered up his pant leg.

Weeks bellowed in terror and then
gurgled, as something rope-like lashed around his neck. It was a length of
burned intestines belonging to the headless body of Gershom, which got up on
its one stump of a leg and pulled him toward its exposed cavity with one intact
arm. Its guts shared the work, drawing him closer, springing into his gaping
mouth, wriggling down his throat, cutting off his screams and choking him from
within. One strong hand reached around and grabbed hold of the sergeant’s
belly, squeezing blood through the fabric, and the things’ rib cage began to
creak open and closed around the body, as if it were trying to chew him.

“Oh shit!” Belden exclaimed, as the
top half of a woman trailing a blackened lower rib cage and spinal column
lunged out of the dark and wrapped its arms around his ankle

The Rider shook his leg to dislodge
the nameless bits of animate matter that were assailing him. He put the barrel
of his Volcanic against the half-woman’s face and fired, blowing her lower jaw
away. It slackened, and Belden whimpered and kicked its arms away.

“Let’s get the hell outta here.”
Belden stammered.

But the Rider tarried. What had
caused the woman to drop dead finally? He looked closer, and saw in the
scattered ruins of her lower jaw, a white piece of parchment half burned away
that had been lodged in her mouth.

He reached down and picked it up,
holding it close to see.

“Now what are you doing?” Belden
hollered, turning in a circle. “Let’s go!”

It was a glyph. Not something he
knew the meaning of, but something he had seen before somewhere. In the scroll,
maybe.

He backtracked toward the grave.

Belden came behind.

“If you ain’t gonna use that gun,
give it to me.”

“It won’t work for you,” the Rider
said, peering at the dark ground, kicking aside the empty scroll case, seeing
the candle, the spice box…where was it?

Belden tore a wooden cross out of
the ground and hefted it like a club.

“Get back you goddamned spawns of
hell!
Our father who art in heaven,
hallowed be they name…
” he gibbered, swinging at the dark, smoking shapes
crawling across the ground at them.

The Rider saw it. The thing DeKorte
had been sucking on constantly, talking around. Or talking through. Not a root,
a bone. Maybe a human finger.