The thing moaned, and this close it sounded more like a desperate plea than before. Hawthorne tore his eyes away from it long enough to glance around the darkness, wary for whatever monster had done this. He saw and heard nothing.
The thing croaked, "
Kill ... kill me ...
"
Hawthorne faced the thing, frowning. He sat on his haunches, close.
He said, "What happened to you? Who did this?"
The thing moaned, its head moving back and forth, its eyes rolling back. "
Kill me ...
" it said again.
"Tell me who did this."
"
The train ... the long black train ... please ... kill me ...
"
The thing was already dead, Hawthorne figured. Through the gristle and gore of its open chest, he could see that its heart and lungs were gone, ripped out. No one could survive that. No, this thing was dead, some sort of revenant kept animate by dark, dark forces. Animate and in agony.
Hawthorne glanced south, down the length of the train tracks.
He stood up, aimed the gun at the thing's head. He said, "I'll find who did this. They'll pay."
The thing moaned once more, and Hawthorne put a bullet between its eyes.
He rode on, following the train.
The moon was almost full, taking up a huge chunk of the black sky, casting a silvery veil over the woods. The tracks wound ever-southward, over hills and creeks. About every two miles, he would find another piece of human refuse—a foot, a hand, part of a leg—and each one quivered with tortured life. Hawthorne was an expert at killing things, but he didn't know how to put an end to that sort of life. Even the ghastly creature he'd shot in the head had continued to jerk and spasm like a living thing as he rode away from it. He did his best to push it out of his mind.
About five miles farther on, he came across a severed head lying alongside the tracks. A pack of wolves were tearing at it, and the ruined mouth cried and moaned. Hawthorne shot in the air to scare off the wolves, then put two bullets into the head. It stopped the crying, but he had no way of knowing if some sort of life still existed in it.
Alive or dead or somewhere in-between, the head would be food for the wolves the moment Hawthorne rode away.
Well
, he thought.
Wolves gotta eat, too. Nothing for it.
He felt the tracks humming. They skimmed low around some foothills and wound up into a shallow mountain pass. Hawthorne could see black smoke against the face of the moon in the distance. He was gaining.
He spurred the Morgan, ignoring the tracks and cutting through the thick woods, up the gentle incline of the hills. After half a mile of riding rough, he crossed over the tracks again on their steady climb, and kept pushing the horse up the hill. The horse sweated and huffed, but didn't complain.
By the time the horse had come to the tracks again, it was running out of steam, its neck slick with sweat. Hawthorne could feel its heart pounding hard, and he eased up. He wasn't the sort to get attached to a horse, or even give it a name, but he also wasn't the sort to run a horse to death.
He could feel the tracks vibrating under them now and hear the soft rumble of the train some two miles ahead, winding through the pass. The ribboned path had slowed the train considerably.
He guided the animal into a trot, letting it get its wind back. Then he flicked the reins and spurred it into a run. It was dangerous business, what with the tracks half-obscured by darkness, but he had to risk it.
They came into the pass with the train less than a mile ahead.
It was clearly visible now, since the pass was open on both sides and the moonlight lit it up like some strange alien world, all still and white and washed-out. There were no trees, only the exposed stone and earth of the mountain the tracks cut through, as pale as bleached bone.
The train whistle sounded, bellowing through the pass and echoing off the stone. Black smoke billowed as the train engine strained against the incline. Hawthorne dug his spurs in, pushing the Morgan faster. The horse huffed and sweated.
Something misshapen stood on the landing platform at the rear of the train. It hovered there for a moment, seeming to watch Hawthorne getting closer and closer. And then it dropped like a sack off the train and onto the tracks.
It thudded, bounced, came to rest half-on the rails. The distance between it and Hawthorne shrank, and when he saw what it was an icy shiver touched the base of his neck.
It was a woman, or at least it had been at one point. Naked and ashen, blood-streaked from head to toe.
Someone had done ... something to her, some sort of demonic surgery. She had a third leg, attached with suture wire to her left hip. At each shoulder, another arm had been sewn. With the extra limbs, she looked like a crippled spider, flopping around on the rails.
Nearly on top of her, the Morgan reared up in fright and threw Hawthorne off. He landed hard on the tracks, tried to roll with the fall as best he could. Pain jolted through his left shoulder and the breath in his lungs expelled all at once and didn't come back.
He felt the tracks rumbling under him, heard the horse's hooves clatter off into the woods. Heard the stitched-up thing moaning and pulling itself toward him.
He willed himself to move but his body wouldn't respond. He struggled to draw breath into his lungs. From very close by, the thing moaned and cried and pulled itself closer.
On his back, he managed to turn his head to look. Less than six feet away, the thing was clutching the ties with three of its four clawed hands, dragging the rest of its sallow body laboriously nearer. It gazed at him with hungry, desperate eyes. It opened its mouth. Blood dripped from broken teeth, and it wailed.
Hawthorne rolled over onto his left side. Pain shot up his shoulder and through his torso. He ignored it, started to push himself up.
One twisted hand gripped him by the leg. Another grabbed his gun belt, pulled closer. It smelled like blood and shit, a pungent death smell that Hawthorne knew all too well. He tried to kick away from it, but a third hand found purchase on his coat and the thing pulled itself on top of him.
Directly over his face, dripping blood and bile, the thing moaned, "
Help ... me ...
"
Hawthorne snarled, "Get off!" He shoved the thing from him and scrambled away. The thing grabbed at his legs. He kicked it in the mouth, rolled off the tracks and got to his feet.
It had pulled his gun belt off and now held it in one hand while the other three tried to drag its body closer to him. Hawthorne took a step toward it, kicked it viciously in the face. More of its teeth broke. He kicked again, two, three times, until the bones of its face were shattered. It dropped the gun belt but kept trying to reach him, moaning the whole time.
"Son of a bitch," Hawthorne said. He dodged in, grabbed the gun belt and pulled out the Schofield. He shot the thing four times in the face.
It stopped moaning and wailing, rolled over onto its back. Its face was nothing but a lumpy mess of blood and bone now, but the limbs continued to twitch and jerk. The third leg clawed spasmodically at the tracks.
Hawthorne put his belt back on and reloaded the revolver. He stared at the thing for a long moment, getting his breath back.
He'd lost his hat in the fall, and the pale white scar on his forehead seemed to shine in the moonlight, the shape of a cross that cut down to the bridge of his nose and from temple to temple. It ached now, and he touched it half-unconsciously and then pulled his hand away.
He glanced around for the hat, couldn't find it. He shrugged and started looking for the Morgan.
The horse was in the woods and it shied away when he approached. But after a time, he caught the reins and mounted up. The train was still visible, moving slow through the pass.
Hawthorne glanced again at the thing that had fallen off the train, the thing that used to be human. Its seven limbs still jerked like a spastic, and the horror and revulsion he'd felt before was gone now, replaced with an intense, burning rage.
He spurred the horse hard and shot off after the locomotive.
* * *
The train was just coming out of the pass and into another cluster of pines when he gained on it. The engine wasn't yet back up to full speed. The wheels chugged hard, black smoke belched, and Hawthorne pushed the horse until he was beside the caboose.
Slow for a train, but taxing for a horse. The animal was giving all it had, hooves pounding the dirt next to the rails, snorting with effort, its black hide slick. It had been a bad night for the Morgan.
But it would be a worse night for someone else.
Hawthorne drew the horse as close as he could to the caboose, about two feet to his left, switched the reins to one hand. The train was deafeningly loud. He spotted a hand-grip near where it connected to the car in front of it. He got his boots out of the stirrups and placed one foot firmly on the saddle. For three long seconds, he balanced precariously, half-standing.
He jumped.
The horse veered away and Hawthorne's fingers latched onto the hand-grip as the rails sped by inches below him. He pulled himself up and over to the connecting platform and drew the Schofield, crouched, took a moment to get his breath.
He tried the door to the caboose, but it was secured from the inside. He turned his attention to the connecting car. The door there had a beveled window, and inside the car, a single gas lamp cast twisted gold light on the glass. Hawthorne pushed the door open.
It was a passenger car, but there were no passengers. No living ones, anyway. From front to back, corpses lined the benches. Men, women, children. Most had been hacked to pieces and were missing arms or legs. Hawthorne counted twelve dead. Blood soaked the floor under his boots and splattered the walls and windows. The stench of it assailed his nostrils, like the rotting stink of Hell itself.
The one lit gas lamp was at the front of the car, and the flickering light from it made the dead faces look as if they were grimacing. Hawthorne kicked aside a man's arm on the floor and started cautiously forward.
He half-expected one of the corpses to grab at him as he passed, still showing some sign of unnatural life, the way the others on the track had done. But these dead were truly dead. He tread carefully through the car anyway, gun ready. At the far end, he pushed open the door and went through.
The next car was worse, blood so thick on the floor that his boots sloshed through it like a shallow pond. Some of the dead had been altered. And discarded. He spotted a man with a second head half-sewn onto his chest. Both mouths opened and closed like drowning fish.
Another man, a black porter, had a young white girl attached to his back. The porter crawled slowly through the blood, toward Hawthorne. The girl's arms and legs kicked uselessly, sluggishly, in the air.
Hawthorne put a bullet in each of their heads, and the porter stopped crawling.
There were others, men and women with various body parts removed and new ones added. Arms, legs, hands, attached to their heads or chests or hips. All still moving, still moaning and crying.
Hawthorne had seen many monstrous things in his life. He'd seen demons and supernatural creatures and all manner of evil. But this ... it was horrifyingly surreal. He felt as if he'd stepped into a waking nightmare.
He went through the car, kicking aside twitching corpses and random limbs.
And in the third and last passenger car, he found the monster responsible for it all.
A huge, bald man in a blood-stained suit stood at the far end of the car, knee-deep in the dead. He had a woman's corpse draped over a bench like a length of linen. He was carving off her head with a hacksaw.
He looked up when Hawthorne came in, and his little eyes lit up. He opened his mouth to speak but Hawthorne didn't give him a chance—he raised his revolver and shot the big man in the chest.
The behemoth hardly blinked. He looked down at his chest where the bullet had entered. He was already covered in so much blood that it was impossible to tell what blood was his and that of his victims. He looked back up at Hawthorne, and spoke in a thick, immature voice, "Ow. That sort of hurt."
Hawthorne shot him again, in very nearly the same place, and the big man dropped his hacksaw, took an almost dainty step backward and grunted. There was a black valise on the bench next to him. He reached into it and pulled out a razor-thin stiletto.
"Drop it," Hawthorne said.
The big man ignored him and balanced the blade on his fingertips. Before Hawthorne could react, it was flying.
He got off one shot that went wild before the stiletto cut into his forearm, stuck there. He dropped his gun, glanced briefly at the blade, and when he looked up again, the big man was barreling down on him.
The floor shook and the windows rattled as the monster's shoes pounded toward him. Hawthorne yanked the knife out of his arm, had it in his left hand when the big man slammed into him.
The impact knocked the breath out of Hawthorne's lungs. He went backward over a bench with the behemoth on top of him, fell against a woman with half her face removed. Her body slumped away but she stared at them with wide, blinking eyes.
Hawthorne was on his back, blood soaking his clothes. A pair of huge fists pummeled him in the face and neck as the big man blubbered, "You can't be here! You'll ruin everything!" Hawthorne tried to roll his head with each punch, but the fists were like sledgehammers and everything was beginning to go black around the edges.
And suddenly the big man stopped. He stared at Hawthorne and a look of bewilderment came over his round, bland face. He was transfixed by the scar on Hawthorne's forehead, the pale white shape of a cross.
In a whiny, phlegm-choked voice, he said, "The cross ... are you God? Are you Jesus?"
The momentary reprieve was all Hawthorne needed to recover. He said, "Shut up," and planted the stiletto in the side of the big man's neck.