The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel Page 18

  Suddenly there was a crash from the front of the car. Trace wheeled to see two of the beasts knocking the glass out of the broken windows, beating the frames out of the walls, crawling through to the floor.

  “Move!” Trace bellowed, as everyone began to scream and climb toward the exit. He backed up the aisle while the two things crouched over the dead one, sniffing it. For a moment the corpse appeared to be suffused with a faint blue glow, as another figure, the transparent shade of a man, separated itself from the monster and stood up, turning to look gravely at Trace.

  A slight, neat Chinese man, with the front of his head shaved and wearing those baggy pajamas they all favored: he put his hands in his sleeves and bowed to Trace, as if in thanks, before the two living monsters brushed through his ghost and obliterated him from sight.

  The keung-si grinned at Trace and started up the aisle toward him. They looked like the cartoons in Yellow Peril articles—flat faces; grinning, toothy mouths; abnormally wide foreheads. Their skins had a wet, transparent sheen, like slugs, and Trace could see where their bellies had been cut by crawling through the glass. The wounds were white-lipped, leaking blood like a punctured waterskin but closing up even as he watched.

  It was hard to watch. There was something so human and yet so not, especially in their faces, that fought with his sense of reality and kept pulling him toward the detachment of nightmare. They had genitals, he saw with distant revulsion, like a man’s might look after he’d pulled himself out of an icy creek.

  Then one of them rushed him. Trace almost shot it, but it stopped short, grinning, taunting. He backpedaled harder, felt cold air on his neck, risked a look behind him to see the coast was clear. He boosted himself through the doorway and onto the railing, took a big step onto the roof of the first-class car.

  The wind was acrid, searing the lungs and eyes. The engine cab was still burning and it looked like there was a fire in the third-class car, as well: bright light danced in the windows and smoke poured out. People staggered out of the car and ran, wavering and ghostlike in their white nightclothes. Some of them carried torches. Shapes that were not quite men oozed under and between the cars.

  The two keung-si had climbed out after him and onto the high vantage point of the upended passenger car.

  “That’s fine,” Trace said, backing away and trying to watch in all directions at once. “You just stay there.”

  One leapt onto the roof behind him.

  He felt it more than he heard it—sensed something dark and silent looming in on him, as if death had materialized out of the night.

  He twisted on the slippery roof, wrenched his knee but managed not to go down, whipped the Colt around. The thing leapt into the air, six feet up, pushing off with its knuckles and thrusting its legs forward. It sailed right over the slugs he fired at it and hit him feet-first in the chest. They skewed off the roof in a tangle and plummeted to the gravel.

  Trace landed on the bottom, winded and brains clubbed half to mush. He raised the Colt groggily, but the beast slapped it from his hand. Its mouth was red and grinning, full of little sharp teeth like a pig’s. He could hear the croaking of his own lungs as it bent over him, its breath hot and foul like rotting meat, like the kill pits at the slaughter yard, like a sunken road choked with the bloated bodies of comrades—

  Trace’s hand fell to his own throat, scrabbling for the fine chain under his shirt. O Lord, not like this—He closed his fist around his crucifix. Bite on this, you bastard—

  He shoved the crucifix at its face and it reared back, snarling. Suddenly a stream of fire shot out of the darkness and struck it between the shoulder blades.

  Its growl of anger turned to a howl of agony. It hurtled away, wallowing in the shale and shrubbery, but the flames would not be smothered: they rose and consumed, and in seconds the thing had collapsed into a pile of bone and ash.

  “Trace!” Boz ran toward him, carrying a torch, followed closely by Ferris and two of the colored men. “Shit, Trace, I leave you alone two minutes and you’re gettin yourself dead.”

  Trace sat up, holding the back of his skull with one hand, looking past him to Ferris. “Did you just spit fire at that thing?”

  Ferris gave him a sardonic look, and a mock toast from the flask in his hand. “None of us is what we seem, Mr. Tracy.”

  “Come on.” Boz wedged a hand under his armpit. “Get up, we gotta move fore they come back around—”

  “This your gun?” One of the colored men was holding it out to him.

  “Yeah.” Trace looked down at his gun hand, saw the crucifix and its broken chain still wrapped around his fingers. He shoved it in a pocket and took the Colt. “They’re eatin my Baptists,” he growled.

  They made for the first-class car, only to find the passengers had mostly escaped and made a run for the stock cars farther back. Every few yards, one of the monsters had caught a straggler, and three or four people had stopped to fight it, beating it off with cudgels or rocks. Trace descended on the nearest of these small battles, put two slugs in the thing’s head and let someone else bash it aside. They picked up the victims that were still breathing and carried them along, collecting survivors as they went.

  Trace could feel the black things gathering behind them. His power was wide awake and tracking them, like drafts in a warm room, as they converged on his retreating party.

  “Get down!” he shouted, and shoved the two colored men to the ground. A black shadow hurtled off the top of the third-class car, right over their heads. That one missed, but the tumble delayed them long enough to let the three behind them catch up.

  Trace and the two Negroes were hit at once. Trace shot his through the head, but the Negro’s shotgun was spent and the thing plunged its fist into his chest, scything through bone and gristle with a sound like a gourd splitting open.

  Ferris loomed up beside the other man, torchlight glinting off the amber bottle in his hand. He took a sharp pull from it and then spat. Fire streamed from his lips, engulfing the third monster and propelling it off the colored fellow. Boz helped the man up and they pelted after the last fleeing passengers, running up short against a blockade of cows—cows?—milling about beside the track, sleepy and bawling and jostling each other.

  “Hee-yaw!” Boz screamed, and fired into the air. The cattle shifted and lurched, and Trace saw the yawning mouth of the first stock car, side door open, the conductor leaning down from the bed and helping to hoist up the last few refugees. Boz went next, then the colored man, then Ferris, and Trace last, while the men leaned on the sliding door from inside, propelling it closed.

  A clawed hand closed around Trace’s knee. He yelled, and Boz yelled, and grabbed him by the gun arm, which saved him falling but the Colt clattered to the floor and somebody kicked it into the dark corners of the car. The claws sank into Trace’s thigh, hot as any branding iron, and another of the things leapt at the door, landed with one foot in the opening and the other on Trace’s chest.

  “Shoot it, goddamn it!” Trace hollered, but a shapely pale form thrust between the men, Miss Eliza coming with her arm extended, face drawn and serious as she pressed the cross in her hand against the brow of the demon in the doorway.

  It shrieked, a high-pitched wail of mortal agony straight out of hell. The cross sank into its flesh. The yellow lamp of one eye winked out, and it pinwheeled out of the car, landed on the one that had Trace.

  It let go. Boz heaved. The door slammed shut with an echoing thud, blotting out the night and boxing in the frightened cries of the passengers—emigrants, railroad employees, second class, first class, white, colored, Baptist, and ex-Catholic—packed into a stinking filthy stock car like so much meat for slaughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It had fallen quiet, except for the moaning of the injured. The few remaining children had lapsed into sleep, and some of the traumatized adults were sunk into fugues. Brother Clark was preaching to them—or rather at them—out of Revelation, with assorted Beasts and Plagues. Trac
e thought uncharitably that he would have sooner seen Clark with his chest ripped open, instead of Martin Kingsley, but he doubted Brother Clark had made any effort to put himself between the monster and its intended prey.

  “How many did we leave Ogden with?” Trace asked, low.

  “Seventy-three souls, plus twelve hands,” the conductor said, rubbing Willie’s dried blood off his face. He’d lost his spectacles during the massacre.

  Trace did a quick head count; the combination of hay and cow manure they’d lit in one of the troughs gave a little light, but it made breathing a chore. The stock car was one of the modern ones—it was solid walls except for the top three feet or so, which were slatted. The breeze took some of the smoke out the top but swirled the rest of it around. From time to time Trace heard one of the creatures slither across the roof, and saw a black silhouette peer in through the slats, but it couldn’t reach the people inside.

  There were about forty of them in the stock car. More than half lost, then, unless some others were holed up elsewhere. At least they had water in this car: feed and water troughs kept the beef from shrinking on its way to sale.

  “How long before they call us missin?” Boz asked.

  “Few more hours,” the conductor said. “We’re not due in Eagle Rock until five A.M. They’ll send an engine back after us. But it’ll be sunup before they get here.”

  “After sunup, it won’t matter,” said Ferris, coming to join them. “If we can hold our position til then, we’ll be all right.”

  “How d’you know that?” said Charles, the last of the colored men.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Ferris. “They’re vampires. They don’t like the daylight.”

  Miss Eliza, who was bandaging the wound in Trace’s side, stopped what she was doing and stared at Ferris. So did everyone else.

  “What makes you think these things are vampires?” Trace asked. He didn’t need convincing, himself, but he could see the others did—except for Boz, who had his head down and was shaking it ominously.

  “They were men,” the conductor all but snarled. “Chinese, I should say, gone savage from living in the mountains.”

  “Never saw a man could jump like that,” Boz murmured. “Not even a Chinese.”

  “I know it sounds incredible,” said Ferris. “But in circus life you come to accept the incredible. Three-headed calves, pigs with two tails and no heads, men with women’s parts and the other way round—”

  “Anybody works on the range’s seen cows with extra parts,” Charles said.

  “But have you ever seen a man with the teeth of a wolf, and a thirst for blood?” Ferris said. “A man, even a heathen Oriental, who recoiled in pain from the simple touch of a Christian cross? A man who burnt to ash as soon as he was touched by cleansing flame?” He looked at Trace. “A man who could not be slain by a bullet? Whose unnatural nature made him colder and blacker than an Idaho night?”

  Trace stared at him, thinking if he survived this night he was going to shake some answers out of the Fire-Master.

  Boz broke in. “I don’t care what they are—they’re hard to kill and they’re hungry. They’re still out there, in case you can’t hear ’em.”

  They hushed for a moment, casting wary glances at the roof. Trace could have sworn he heard something chuckle. Brother Clark’s sermon rose in volume slightly; he had moved on to the Whore of Babylon.

  “How many are there?” Trace asked. “How many did we kill? I hacked the head off one in the emigrant car, and Ferris there burned at least two, that I saw.”

  “I reduced no less than three to ash, if I may be so boastful,” Ferris said.

  “That’s four. Any others we know didn’t get up?”

  “The one I smote with the cross,” Miss Eliza said. “Not the one you saw—one of them attacked me as I ran from the passenger car. I struck it in the mouth and it … melted.”

  There was a short silence. Trace remembered how her cross had sunk into the face of the beast; how the one that attacked him had shied from his crucifix. He fished it out of his pocket, found the broken ends of the chain and twisted them together, back around his neck.

  “I blew the head off one,” the conductor said.

  “We burned up a couple with the torches,” Boz said, nodding at Charles.

  “Eight, then?” Trace looked around at them. “How many are left?”

  “At least that many more,” Boz guessed, “since they took half our numbers. They ain’t dumb animals, either. They flushed the passengers out—shoved one of their own into the car, caught the ones who ran out.”

  “I saw that, too,” Trace said. “And they built the blockade on the tracks.”

  “And they laugh,” said Miss Eliza. “That one laughed when it … killed Martin.”

  “Then they’re human,” the conductor said.

  “That is a fatal mistake to make, my friend,” Ferris said.

  “I’m not your friend, friend, I’m the conductor of this god-damned train and I’ll not hear any more of this foolishness. Now we are gonna sit here until daybreak or until—”

  The conductor was drowned out by the sudden bawling of cattle. It was frantic and loud, punctuated by the skidding and thrashing of hooves on the gravel. Everyone inside the stock car went still and stiff, listening to the sounds of butchery outside. Even Brother Clark’s sermon faltered.

  “Never heard a steer make that noise,” Charles muttered.

  It sounded like the cow was screaming. Then strangling. Then there was a long, agonized moan, and the sing-song gibbering of the beasts.

  Miss Eliza was wide-eyed. “What on earth are they—”

  “They’re killin the cattle,” Boz said, and then something huge struck the side of the car.

  The stock car trembled on its rails. The passengers screamed and clutched at each other.

  “What the devil—” the conductor said.

  The impact came again, closer to the ceiling this time, and for an instant a large, dark shadow blotted the stars outside the ventilation slats. The slats cracked under the impact, buckling inward.

  Boz leaped to his feet. “They’re throwin that carcass at the—”

  The third blow crashed through. The narrow slats, not built to withstand a half ton of beef, splintered to admit the front half of a steer. The passengers screamed and scattered from the spot, packing into the ends of the car, but the body stuck there and hung, head lolling, one horn broken off. One of its front legs cocked through at a grotesque angle. Blood and froth dripped from its mouth.

  Then it began to saw back and forth in the opening. The things outside fluttered around it, climbing over the slats, trying to pull it out. The limp head rolled and bobbed.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Miss Eliza said sickly, and put her hand over her mouth.

  But the beef was well and truly stuck. One of the keung-si shrieked in rage and drove a fist into the steer’s side, then began to squeal and thrash when its hand became stuck. One of the others came to its assistance. The first one swatted it away, but the jerk freed its arm and they both toppled off. There was a thud and a yelp as they hit the gravel.

  Somebody laughed, screamingly. It was an awful sound, choked and hysterical, and others in the car took it up, wailing mad laughter until it dissolved into crying. Brother Clark’s voice rose shrill over the chorus.

  “Brethren! Be not afraid! Though the hour of death may be upon you, trust in the Lord and you will be redeemed!”

  “Hour of death, my ass,” Boz said. “I don’t mean to die in some box-car like a damn steer.”

  “Nor do I,” said the conductor, hefting up his rifle.

  “Though this darkness may surround us, and the minions of Satan try to tempt us to the path of unrighteousness—”

  “I say we go out there and give those bastards a taste of lead,” said Charles, brandishing his shotgun in one hand, a torch in the other.

  “Don’t go near that door,” Trace snapped. “You open that and all these people are
dead. We’re not fightin them off a second time.”

  “You wanna wait here til they break in?” Charles demanded.

  “Lead don’t stop them, remember?” Boz said. “I didn’t mean we should go rushin out there.”

  “Yet we must not falter! For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age—”

  “They won’t break in, and if they do we’ll make our stand here,” the conductor said. “Better to take one at a time than open up our flank to their numbers.”

  “Mr. Tracy?” Ferris said quietly. “Did you not have some insights on how to defeat these demons?”

  Boz turned and gave Trace a long, hard look. “Yeah, partner—you have any insights?”

  “I told you everything I knew for sure,” Trace said.

  “So what do you not know, for sure?” Boz demanded. “What else she tell you that you think I didn’t need to know?”

  “It ain’t like that, Boz, I told you she didn’t know much about it, she only gave me a half-assed list of ideas—”

  “Which you never bothered to read to me—”

  “What in blue blazes are you two carrying on about?” the conductor demanded. “Who is she and what do you know about these critters?”

  Trace broke off, noticed the others staring at them. Ferris looked thoughtful; Miss Eliza’s eyes were lowered, her lips pursed in disapproval. And in the sudden quiet, Trace heard something else.

  “Listen,” he said.

  There was a soft, slithery sound under their feet, something sliding under the floor of the car. A series of gentle thumps, and something rattling.

  “What’s under us?” Trace asked.

  “Feed boxes,” the conductor said.

  “Full o’ hay and corn,” Charles added.

  “And the wheels and undercarriage, of course, the journal boxes.”

  “No doors?” Trace asked. “No access in here?”