Southern Gods (17 page)

Beyond it all, Ingram saw the Pale Man sitting. He mouthed words, and instantly Ingram knew that this man was responsible for the carnage. He glanced at Hastur, still singing onstage. Like the cadaver at KQUI, he was just a reanimated corpse, a puppet, and the puppet-master sat across the room from him.

A man lurched toward Ingram, a shard of glass in his fist, jabbing, swaying. Blood poured from his clenched fist, dripping down the bright edge of the piece of glass. Ingram shot him in the face. The back of his skull exploded, spattering the people behind him. He fell backward, slipping on the ever-darkening floor. The sound of the pistol fire was a small pop through the wax stuffing of his ears. Ingram pushed his way across the room, swinging his splinted hand like a club. A woman crouched on all fours, snarling. When she leapt, he smashed her face with the revolver and felt bones crunch.

He vaulted over the bar, putting the counter between him and the lunatics on the other side. He shoved open the door that he assumed led to the kitchen. Before he could react, one of the bartenders leapt toward him from the opening. The knife sank into Ingram’s chest, the meaty part of his pectoral muscle. He twisted away, ripping the knife from his attacker’s grip.

Ingram screamed silently, tears and blood filling his vision. He pulled the knife from his chest, threw it away. His body moved forward of its own volition, the old habits and instincts of a life of violence reasserting themselves. His senses filled with blurry impressions and sensations caught in the half-light of the bar and the overpowering desire to maim, to kill these people—
these things—
all around him. He shoved the revolver in the bartender’s face, putting the snub nosed barrel into the man’s eye socket, and pulled the trigger. He whirled and pistol-whipped a woman climbing over the bar, grinning at him with bloody teeth, knocking her to the floor behind the bar. He stomped on her neck, felt something crack and give. She didn’t get up. Another man pushed his way through the hinged door at the end of the bar, part of his cheek ripped away to expose teeth, swinging what looked like a three-foot metal rod taken from some part of the musical equipment.

He whipped the rod at Ingram’s head, and Ingram raised his arm to block it. It twanged off his splint, and bright metallic pain shot through his whole frame. He reached forward, placed his splinted hand on the man’s chest, and clubbed him with his left hand, using the revolver as a bludgeon. The first blow crushed the man’s nose, the second collapsed his face in to a bloody, burbling mess.

Then, for a moment, everything was still. Ingram panted in the low light of the club, sequestered in his own little island behind the bar, bodies strewn around him. He wanted someone else to kill. He looked to where the Pale Man had been sitting, trying to find Rabbit, but he could only see the dead and the near-dead. A fat man, grinning eerily, was struggling to rise from the floor, his legs jutting sideways from his body, nerve-dead. His eyes were vacant. As was his mouth. It appeared he’d bitten off his own tongue.

Rabbit was gone, if he survived. The floor was covered with gore and the bodies of the people who had only moments before been audience; even now the injured clawed at one another, biting and tearing. As Ingram watched, a woman missing half of her face throttled a man whose guts hung outside his body, spooling around where he sat, blue, brown, and bloody.

Ingram jumped over the bar door, slipped, and went down on one knee. His ruined right hand throbbed horribly, and he knew it would never be the same. If it had not been shattered before, surely it was now.

He looked at the stage. Hastur remained standing at the microphone, but now he looked into the smoke in the room, at the ceiling, staring abjectly, unknowing, staring with dead eyes, milky-white. Beside the stage, the Pale Man stood too, looking at Ingram, face still half in shadow, half-obscured by what looked like bruises. But now the white glints were angry, burning with a malevolence that hit Ingram like a blow, rocking him back on the heels of his feet.

Ingram realized his revolver was still in his bloody left fist. He raised it, pointed at the Pale Man, and pulled the trigger. It clicked. Empty.

The Pale Man opened his mouth, and Ingram saw the interior was black like oil. He reached his good hand to his ear, feeling. He’d lost one of his wax earplugs. The pale man’s voice was soft when he spoke.

“Turn around, human, and leave this place. You cannot hope to survive any more.”

“Human?” Ingram asked. There was no posturing with this man, this thing. There was only the truth and questions, and Ingram meant to have them answered.

Ingram raised his bloody, splinted hand and said, “I seem to be doing just fine. All these poor folk are dead, and I’m still standing.”

The Pale Man raised a bone-white hand, mirroring Ingram, and pointed it at Hastur. The movement, so still yet menacing, made Ingram shiver.

“He is coming. I prepare the way. There is nothing you can do to stop us. There will be other reckonings, human.” The Pale Man slowly turned his back to Ingram and walked down the hall away from the carnage and what was once a dance floor, down the back hall toward the pier.

The
Hellion
!

Ingram pushed forward, following.

Hastur opened his mouth again, eyes on Ingram, and sang. Ingram fell, the force of the sound pummeling him, beating at his face, his ears. The obscene harmonies were softer now, pleading, wooing. The force of the music, if it could be called music, had waned. In the war, the sirens on Ingram’s transport ships could render strong, grown men helpless, the sound waves traveling through the men’s bodies, almost liquefying bowels and “rattling the chassis,” they’d joke. But this was worse and easier all at once. While the ship’s sirens had a physical affect, this song—for it was a song, speaking of far-away dark shores—affected not so much his body, but his mind. Ingram felt as though there was some fierce raptorial bird beating at his consciousness, trying to get in, clawing and crying out in anger. He understood now the strange words coming from the revenant’s mouth.

Rise up from the sodden earth

Rise up from Death’s black hearse

That is not dead can eternal lie

And dying know even death can die

Have you seen the yellow sign?

Have you found the yellow sign?

The song from the radio station!

Ingram threw his body forward, toward the thing that once had been Early Freeman. He slipped again in blood and viscera, but scrambled to the stage and pulled himself over the lip of the platform and onto his knees. The undead thing kept singing, without breath or life, a siren of madness and despair.

Ingram rose. He stood in front of the dead man and grabbed the microphone stand. Before he’d felt rage when he had been stabbed, a berserk madness that consumed him; now he felt only sadness and exhaustion. He knew this man’s wife, his boss, his friends. Somewhere behind Ingram, Rabbit’s body lay, abandoned and faceless. Another soldier Ingram had led to his death. The infernal song had to stop now, before it was too late.

With both hands, Ingram raised the microphone stand above his head and brought it down on Hastur, the thing that had once been Early Freeman. The revenant’s skull collapsed like an over-ripe melon. The corpse fell to the stage.

Ingram fell to his knees and wept. Hot tears spilled out on his cheeks, his chest wracked with sobs. He cried for himself, for Rabbit, for Early Freeman and his orphaned son; he wept for his hand, now ruined, a living thing of blood and pain. He wept with exhaustion.

A whisper, the slap of wet flesh on floor made Ingram turn, his sobs stopping abruptly.

The dead rose.

They rose in bloody tatters, missing limbs, arms, eyes; the rich integuments of flesh that made them human were gone, but they rose. And they looked at Ingram with hateful eyes.

Ingram scrambled to his feet. He threw himself off the stage and moved into the dim hallway to the pier, following where the Pale Man had gone before. He pushed open doors as he searched for an exit, a weapon, anything to arm himself against the dead that followed. A storage room littered with cleaning agents and crates, a maintenance closet with tins and tanks and mops. A restroom.

At the end of the dark hall, arms outstretched in front of him, he found double doors, and pushed hard. He burst through to the pier, the cool night air washing over him and making him shiver.

Limbs heavy from drink and exertion, he felt like a sponge with all the moisture wrung from it. His mouth was tacky and dry, and he wished he could just fall forward into the bayou and drink, but the dark waters didn’t smell wholesome and the dead followed behind.

He looked down the pier and saw the black tug pulling away from its mooring, moving glacially away from the tarred pilings, smoke billowing from its stack.

Behind him the door opened.

A dead man, his throat open, wet and red in the low light, lurched out of the building, arms outstretched to grab Ingram, knocking the door wide as he came through. More dead shambled forward into the light.

God, I’m tired.

Ingram kicked the corpse in the chest, knocking it back into the building and toppling the nearest dead behind it. His limbs felt leaden, and looking down at himself he realized he’d lost quite a bit of blood in the last few days.

The corpse slowly rose again, arms and legs moving in an ungainly, awkward manner. A shard of glass protruded from its eye, and its hair rose away from his skull in a flap. Half-way scalped.

Glancing around, Ingram spotted the guttering light of a kerosene lantern. He lumbered toward it. Snatching it down by the wire handle, he unscrewed the cap to the fuel reservoir, then pitched the lantern through the doors, into the crowd of undead, and nearly screamed in frustration when the lantern hit the front man’s chest, shattering, but didn’t catch fire. A dead woman, the skin stripped from her lower jaw, kicked the lantern and it spun in a circle, rattling and spreading kerosene in a widening pool.

The corpses moved through the door, walking in strange, stiff gaits, and Ingram backed away, down the pier, toward the remaining boats. He couldn’t recall dropping his Morley in the fray, everything was becoming blurred. He looked over his shoulder, spotting an oar in the closest flat-bottom, and turned toward it.

For an instant, the shambling dead were backlit by a yellow light, each ghoul traced in brilliant relief, and then the yellow turned white and expanded to fill all of Ingram’s senses, blossoming and thunderous. The building exploded, expanding outward, pieces of wood and glass and tile rocketing past, pushing him forward so that he lost his feet and found himself in the air, flying away from the heat, away from the new sun that had come to life in the night.

There are tanks in there!

Something hard and silver flashed in his eyes, whanged off his skull, sending him spinning. He landed in a twisted heap on the hull of a flat-bottom.

He felt the boat rock, heard the water lap at its sides. Using the last of his strength, Ingram twisted his body to look back at the pier. The first dead man now loomed above him, silhouetted by fire, his hair a burning halo, and then another explosion rocked the night, and the dead man’s corpse pitched over as streamers and dark objects—shrapnel—whizzed by it, and suddenly the boat was loose and floating away from the burning ruin of the nightclub and the pier, its mooring severed.

Ingram struggled to rise, but his limbs felt like lead, and, giving up the fight, he slumped back to the bottom of the boat. His breath whooshed out of him, and he passed out of consciousness, borne away from the burning dead on the waters of the bayou.

To the river.

Chapter 10

“M
omma! Momma! There’s a dead man at the river!” Lenora raced up the back porch steps, panting heavily with Fisk and Franny quick behind her.

Alice and Sarah were in the middle of their morning ritual; Sarah staring lazily out the window, Alice slowly reading the paper and sipping black coffee.

In the mornings, Sarah usually revisited her translation work of the night before. The work had progressed quite nicely, at least to Sarah’s uneducated eyes, until some very strange and unknown words came up in a passage. If only she knew what the subject of the book was, she might be able to figure out some of the more pesky lines through context. Unfortunately, the little town of Gethsemane didn’t have a Catholic church, where she could drop by and quiz the priest as to the accuracy of her Latin, and she was worried she’d have to go all the way to Little Rock to the teacher’s college or seminary there to find out what
Opsculus Noctis
had to say for itself. Part of her didn’t want to find out; sheltered in the library, late at night, she felt at once alone and part of something larger, a communion with other minds, other hearts, even if through the pages of the old, dry volumes on the shelves. She felt like she’d joined some higher calling, been initiated into some select group, but she couldn’t explain this feeling; it pervaded her nights and crept into her days as well. Some of the passages were on her lips, faintly tugging at her, at the strangest of times, like now, with Lenora shouting and Franny wild-eyed with excitement.

Alice half rose from her chair and said, “What’s this, a dead man? What you talking bout, Nora?”

Lenora stood in the kitchen doorway with Franny and Fisk behind her, her breath coming heavy in her chest. She swallowed exaggeratedly.