Last of the Ravagers, page 21
This time his fist connected with the tip of her chin. He let go of her wrist and her hand came away from the knife’s handle as she went flying backward. The knife was still lodged inside him as she crashed against the bed and immediately bounced back up again. Crashing against the bed had the effect of popping her head forward again, as he saw when she came rushing at him with a crazed look in her demoness eyes. The head, however, did not look stable in its perch atop her shoulders, wobbling about as she ran forward with her arms outstretched.
Before she could reach him, he plucked the blade from his flesh and jabbed it into one of her eyes. She made a sound like a partially muffled screech, its volume apparently inhibited by damage inside her throat. She grabbed onto him and he held onto the knife in her eye as they violently danced about the room in a mad parody of a ballroom dance. This continued until he managed to slam her against one of the walls and drive the knife deeper into her eyeball, eliciting another guttural screech punctuated by a series of strange clicking sounds. She clawed at him, scratching his face and drawing blood as he worked to extricate the large, serrated blade from her ocular tissue. A chunk of the eyeball adhered to the blade when he finally managed to twist it free.
He immediately tried to stab her again—this time in the throat, as that was clearly an even more vulnerable area than it would normally be—but she managed to get her hands braced against his chest and shoved him away. The maneuver sent him hurtling across the room, causing him to collide with the little side table next to the bed. Evidently not an especially sturdy piece of furniture, the table crumpled beneath him and he dropped with it to the floor. He slid off the pile of debris and rolled onto his back in time to see Charlotte coming at him again, launching herself at him like a woman leaping off a cliff into a lake. There was no time to roll out of the way, but he was able to get the blade turned upward in time for her to fall upon it, impaling herself. She screeched gutturally again and tried to bite his throat. Her teeth pierced his flesh, but he wrenched his head away before she could tear open his jugular vein.
She laughed in a croaky graveyard way. “Give up and die, Russ.”
He sneered. “Never.”
This was only outward bravado, defiant reflex. In truth, he feared he was close to defeat. She possessed an unnatural level of strength for a woman of her size and build. It was like wrestling with a bear with nice tits. He still didn’t quite comprehend exactly what was happening, except that there was definitely something extra-normal about it. At a loss for what else to do, he gave the knife stuck in her guts a savage twist. Her body convulsed as she screeched in pain, allowing him the leverage he needed to shove her off of him.
He scrambled away from her and took a frantic look around before spying his bedroll. Grabbing it, he lurched to his feet and dropped it on the bed. Once he had it spread open, he was quickly able to locate the item he wanted. His hand closed around the handle of the hatchet just as he heard Charlotte get to her feet again.
“You hurt me,” that guttural voice said, sounding more enraged and venomous than ever. “You’re going to pay for that.”
He turned around and swung the hatchet. The timing was perfect as the heavy blade chopped through her neck a fraction of a second before she could reach him. Decapitating her only took the one hack thanks to the already damaged condition of her neck. Her head tumbled away from her body and he fully expected that to be the end of it, but this was quickly revealed as an erroneous assumption.
The headless body kept coming at him and soon had its hands wrapped tightly around his throat. He gurgled in surprise as he frantically started swinging the hatchet again. Within seconds, he’d separated one of her arms from her body, but the hand remained clamped to his throat, fingers pressing tighter and tighter. He wasn’t able to start prying it loose until he’d also hacked off the other arm, at which point he dropped the hatchet and staggered about the room. Clamping his hands around the wrists of Charlotte’s dismembered arms, he flung himself about and bounced off the walls multiple times before he was finally able to tear the hands free.
After tossing the arms away, he paused for a moment to suck in several deep, ragged breaths. Standing with his hands braced on his legs, he happened to notice the blood leaking from the wound in his abdomen.
Gonna have to do something about that.
Then he glanced up and saw the headless, armless torso coming at him.
He groaned.
Goddammit.
He dodged a kick as he dashed past what was left of Charlotte and scooped the hatchet off the floor. It was time to stop messing around and eliminate this threat once and for all. He went into a frenzied state, hacking and hacking away at the saloon girl turned monster until her body was in a lot of pieces on the floor and finally incapable of assaulting him in any manner. The weird thing was how the many pieces of her were all still animated, twitching and writhing about ineffectually. There was no way any living person or creature could take that much damage and survive. He could only conclude she wasn’t alive but instead was in a state of undeath. Or perhaps she’d died earlier and had somehow been reanimated. The latter possibility made him think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which had long been one of his favorite novels.
In the aftermath of the struggle, he found himself feeling fatigued almost to the point of passing out. His eyelids drooped and his head felt heavy. Realizing unconsciousness was looming whether he liked it or not, he hauled the bed across the room and jammed it against the door. His hope was this would prevent anyone from walking in and seeing the mess he’d made of Charlotte while he was passed out. Once this was accomplished, he fell upon the bed, positioning a pillow beneath his abdominal wound in the last seconds before the world went black.
Hours had passed by the time he awakened. A glimpse of the dark sky visible through the window in his room made that obvious. It wasn’t full dark yet, but it was getting close. The pillow was stuck to his abdomen as he pushed himself up from the bed. Grimacing as he peeled it away, he was grateful to see he was no longer bleeding freely from the knife wound. The pillow was soaked with blood. Looking at it, he realized how fortunate he was to have gotten it pressed up against the wound before drifting away. Also fortunate was how the blade seemed somehow not to have nicked anything vital, which he figured was pretty goddamn miraculous.
Until, that is, Doyle started speaking in his head, filling him in on some things, such as how he was dead now, having bled out from the abdominal wound. The first intrusion of the voice was a shock, as was the revelation of his death. Also shocking was learning he now existed helplessly in thrall to Doyle, the Lord of the Dead.
Doyle gave Russ a mission.
One he best not fail if he didn’t wish to spend eternity in hellish torment.
Russ retrieved the knife that’d been used to kill him. He then pulled the bed away from the door and stepped out into the hallway, one end of which was embroiled in chaos. A knot of onlookers stood outside a room a few doors down to his right, jostling for a better look at what was happening inside. He heard the distressed whinnying of a horse in pain, a sound that brought with it a pang of sorrow. Hearing any animal in pain was a terrible thing. Seconds after exiting his room, he heard multiple booms from a shotgun. The whinnying became even more distressed after the first boom but ceased thereafter. He could make no sense of what was happening down there, but it was none of his concern.
He had a mission to fulfill.
He turned away from the scene of chaos and hurried down the shorter hallway branch, descending the staircase there to the brothel’s back door. Some heavy pieces of furniture were jammed up against it, presumably as a hurriedly assembled barricade. Two men with rifles stood near the pile of furniture, serving as defense backup should the barrier be breached. The guards made the crucial error of assuming he was on their side since he’d come to them from within the saloon. That changed when he got close enough that they could see the blood all over him, but by then it was too late. He launched himself at them before they could bring their weapons to bear, stabbing both men numerous times with only a single errant shot being fired.
The dead men reanimated minutes later, awakening to find themselves controlled by Doyle. Working together, Russ and the ex-guards hauled the heavy furniture pieces away from the back door.. Then Russ opened the door and let in a stream of Doyle’s little blue friends.
THIRTY-FOUR
The gunshot was fired from only a few feet away, so overwhelming loud at that range it made Ned feel as if he’d been hit square in the back with a sledgehammer. He lurched forward and fell into Raven’s arms. She grabbed hold of him to keep him upright and just for an instant he felt like he was back in that cell with her. He looked into her breathtakingly beautiful blue eyes and felt a powerful echo of that same passion. Then he flinched again as a second close-range shot rang out, followed immediately by yet another, that big sound hammering painfully at his ears.
Raven gripped him tighter each time the gun roared and for a few strangely disconnected moments it was almost possible to forget she’d just confessed to orchestrating slaughter on a mass scale. Another part of him spent those same moments waiting to feel pain from the gunshots. He was certain he’d been hit, but the expected lash of searing agony never came. A brief moment of physical self-assessment followed. As best he could tell, no bullets had perforated his flesh. In another few seconds, he became aware of other sounds beyond the ringing in his ears.
Sounds of frantic struggle.
Ned disengaged himself from Raven and turned around to see Billy Conway and Steve Dickinson wrestling with Doc Richardson. A knife was gripped in one of the doctor’s hands. Its blade was stained bright red with blood. Dickinson had a slash wound across one of his cheeks and Billy had a shallower cut along his jawline. These wounds, however, were insignificant and superficial in comparison to Richardson, who appeared to have been shot multiple times, including once in the jaw. Currently the bloody blade was pointed straight up in the air as both men struggled to get the manic doctor under control and pry the weapon loose. Billy’s pistol—with the “Big Boomer” scrollwork along the barrel—was on the floor, either having been knocked loose or dropped in favor of an attempt at physical containment. The younger men were having a much harder time subduing the middle-aged physician than Ned would’ve expected. Richardson, in fact, looked on the verge of shaking himself loose.
The doctor’s violent outburst left Ned dumbfounded. It seemed to have come out of nowhere. Not only that, but a man who’d been through the type of severe physical trauma he’d endured today shouldn’t be capable of putting up this much of a fight. He sure as hell shouldn’t still be on his feet after being shot so many times. Ned just couldn’t figure it out.
Until it all abruptly snapped together in his head.
He groaned.
Aw, shit. Goddammit, Doc.
Ned felt a hand on his shoulder. He was about to glance backward when Raven roughly moved him out of her way and aimed the big barrel of her gun at Albert Richardson’s face. Fire leapt from the big muzzle of the strange gun as it sent one of those oversized rounds hurtling right at Doc’s forehead. The bullet punched through his brow at dead center and blew out the back of his head. A handful of people standing several feet away gasped in shock and disgust as they were hit by a wave of blood and brain matter.
Doc dropped to the floor and didn’t move.
Everybody stood around in silent shock for a moment. Outside, the wind continued to roar and batter the building, which was vibrating so hard now it felt in imminent danger of flying apart, despite what Raven had said about the indestructibility of the underlying structure.
Billy stared at Raven in a look of open-mouthed amazement. Then he shook his head and said, “Where do I get me some of them magic goddamn bullets? Mine didn’t work worth a lick.”
Before she could respond, the door at the top of the staircase burst open, instantly drawing everyone’s attention in that direction. Screams rang out as a few men bearing firearms and other weapons came thundering down the stairs accompanied by a parade of the little blue creatures with the stout bodies and weird heads. Many of the creatures didn’t wait to reach the bottom of the stairs before attacking the people in the saloon, instead flinging themselves over the bannister into the crowd. More screams filled the air as the creatures opened their mouths wide, revealing the many rings of rotating, whirring, gnashing fangs.
Those fangs tore into vulnerable human flesh with brutal, unstoppable efficiency, that awful grinding sound becoming almost as loud as the accompanying screams. Flesh was shredded. Limbs torn loose and tossed across the room. Numerous instantaneous disembowelments happened, with strands of guts soon draped over seemingly everything like gory Christmas decorations. Gunfire rang out as the armed men in the saloon fought back with everything they had, wounding and perhaps even killing a few of the blue bastards before it became clear the situation was hopeless.
There were just too many of them.
As the melee unfolded, Raven dragged Ned in the direction of the bar, with Billy following along behind them. He tried resisting at first, believing he should stand and fight with the few surviving men and women of Snakebite, but he soon saw it was pointless. There’d be no saving any of these people, a realization as bitter as any he’d ever experienced, but denying it was impossible. They slipped behind the bar, where they found Quentin Brown hunkered down on the floor. In one hand, he held a pistol that was an exact duplicate of the one owned by Raven. Gripped in his other hand was the iron ring for opening the cellar door. One of the blue creatures was lying still under the bar, with the back of its head blown open. Wisps of smoke were still wafting from the muzzle of Quentin’s gun.
Ned frowned when he saw it. “Where’d you get that?”
“Never mind where he got it,” Raven said, scooting closer to the cellar door while keeping her head below the level of the bar. “I’ll explain in a few minutes, if we’re still alive by then.”
A liquor bottle came sailing over the top of the bar and shattered against the wall behind them, raining glass shards and foul-smelling cheap liquor down upon them. This set off a chain reaction of more exploding bottles and soon the inside of the saloon began to smell like a distillery in addition to smelling like an abattoir. Those few remaining citizens of Snakebite still alive were either out of bullets or couldn’t take the time to reload without getting devoured, thus they resorted to grabbing and fighting with whatever was in reach.
Quentin pulled on the iron ring and the cellar door creaked as he lifted it up. Raven was the first to drop through the rectangular opening in the floor, her boots thumping down the wooden stairs in the darkness below. Billy was the first to follow when Ned hesitated, disappearing into the darkness within seconds.
Ned looked Quentin in the eye. “Who are you, really?”
The barkeep’s expression was grim but tinged with sympathy. “I’m who I’ve always been. Your friend. I’m also the Overseer.”
“The what?”
Quentin shook his head. “No time. Down you go.”
Bracing the door open with a shoulder, he grabbed Ned and shoved him through the opening. Once through it, he hit the staircase without first gaining proper footing and tumbled painfully downward. At the same time, Quentin raised his gun and fired at two of the blue things as they came over the top of the bar. One bullet found its mark and the creature’s head exploded like a bag of blue paint. The other hissed and flashed its front row of fangs as it leapt at him.
Quentin Brown dropped into the floor opening, allowing the door to flap shut overhead.
***
The last of the Ravagers stood at the far end of Main Street. He wore a long duster over his clothes and had a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes. Dust and debris swirled around him as the hurricane-force winds ripped the town apart. A wagon wheel came flying straight at his head, but it struck the invisible protective bubble he’d woven around himself and went sailing off in another direction. The bubble would move with him whenever he was ready to start walking down the street toward the Last Chance Saloon. It would, unfortunately, cease to exist once he was inside the saloon itself, his magic weakened by being so close to the core of the Infinity Engine. By then, at least, the bubble would’ve served its purpose of sheltering him from the maelstrom.
There was still a chance he might choose not to approach the saloon at all and instead hop into some other reality, thereby delaying the inevitable moment of reckoning with Raven Decker a while longer. For a year or a hundred years, perhaps. He could put it off for a thousand years or longer if he wished, though that would require great diligence on his part, because Raven would never cease tracking him across the realms.
She was an infamous figure in certain obscure circles, a relentless and tenacious hunter of Ravagers. She’d personally ended the lives of so many powerful necromancers, taking that power for herself when she consumed their souls. In the interest of staying roughly on the same level as Raven, he embarked on a quest to kill as many of his own kind as he could. The society of dark wizards soon caught on to his game and started hunting him as well. This went on for countless centuries, until he was the only remaining Ravager. He hated Raven for the way she’d forced him into aiding in the destruction of his people, but he feared her as well. She was the only living creature who might feasibly kill him under the right conditions, and he had no interest in a direct confrontation with her unless he felt absolutely certain of emerging victorious.
Thus far that had not happened.
Nor did he feel any such certainty now. Jumping out of this world would undoubtedly be the prudent thing to do.. What stayed his hand was knowing this might be the best shot he’d ever get at eliminating her. The thing that made this moment of near confrontation so different from all the others was the presence of the Infinity Engine.
