Skin Medicine

Brand was trembling badly now, wheezing, pained sounds coming from his throat. Though it was bitterly cold and his face just as stiff as leather, he was sweating profusely. Trails of perspiration ran down his spine. He had lost his shotgun and the Colt Army pistols in his gloved hands felt oily like they might jump from his fists at any moment.

He was moving down a street, but he had no true idea where he was.

The town was not that big. Though he had never been to Deliverance before, he remembered Dirker saying it was cut by a central road and that four or five other roads intersected it. So if he just kept walking, he was bound to make his way out sooner or later.

But he thought: Oh Jesus, oh Christ, what, what if I’m the last one left alive?

But he knew that couldn’t be, for now and again he could hear gunfire. So he had to keep his head. He moved forward slowly, the snow wild and flying all around him. It sculpted weird shapes and shadows. The buildings rose up like headstones, leaning out at him. He kept seeing forms moving past him, but he didn’t dare shoot. Not just yet. For there was death everywhere now, screaming white death and what it hid in that whipping white cloak was far, far worse.

He moved past a row of warehouses, then a barn, a boarded-up dry goods store. Then directly ahead he could hear a low, guttural growling sound. And then many. As if a pack of wild dogs were bearing down on him.

Quickly, he darted down an alley that twisted and turned, spilling him into a little courtyard pressed between the hulks of buildings. There was no way out. He would have to break into one of them and take his chances.

Right then, he froze up.

The wind was making a shrill, howling sound and he wasn’t entirely sure that it actually was the wind. He looked up quickly…thought, thought for a moment he saw something up on a roof. Something that faded away into the belly of the storm. He wasn’t sure he had even seen it.

There was a rapping noise off to his left.

A door was swinging open and closed in the wind. It thudded hollowly against the weathered gray wall of a feed mill. Pulling up what strength he had left by that point, Brand moved over there, the door banging and banging.

He went to the door.

It had slammed close again. His throat full of cinders, Brand hooked the barrel of one Colt Army around the latch and threw it open. And saw…saw a figure come drifting out of the darkness like a wraith. A woman. A woman in a white soiled dress. Her hair was long and fire-red, blowing around like meadow grasses in a high, angry wind.

“You,” Brand managed as she neared the doorway, “you…you gotta help me get out of here…I’m lost…I’m…”

But he saw that she was grinning like something from a dark wood that snatched away wayward children, something that gnawed on bones and sucked blood. Her eyes were huge and wet and lustrous like wet jade. They found him and held him, that mouth set with long needle-like teeth.

Brand screamed and then those long fingers speared him and that slobbering, savage mouth thrust forward. And it ended for him there in the snow, in a red-stained heap. And as he died, he could hear the sound of her chewing on him.

***

In the lobby of the hotel, Graybrow paused.

He listened.

He knew from years spent stalking that he was not alone, but where the others were, he could not say.

Though he had sung his death song before coming on the raid, Graybrow did not want to die. He would never see seventy again, but there was a vitality about him, a spunk, a gleam in his eye that age could not hope to wither.

He did not want to die…yet, he was willing.

It was an honor among the Utes to die in battle. And it would be honor for Graybrow as well. And if he had to die, at least he would die knowing grand secrets, horrible secrets and malign truths, but his soul would be stronger for it. Nourished.

Graybrow had been with Henry Wilcox and Sir Tom Ian, but had abandoned them long ago. He preferred to hunt on his own. And be hunted if that was the case. Because, honestly, he did trust whites with guns. They had a nasty habit of shooting at anything that moved and if he was going to die, it would not be with his guts shot out by some crazy white.

The hotel, he knew, had been called the Shawkesville Arms once upon a time when Deliverance went by its original name and was a lead-mining town.

Since those days, it had been abandoned to the weather, to nature, to whatever chose to call it home. And if what Harmony had said was true, Cobb and his henchmen had called it home for a time.

Slowly then, Graybrow moved towards the old stairway that was covered in filth and curled brown leaves that had drifted in from the innumerable holes in the walls and roof. The handrail was wreathed in cobwebs. The stair carpet was mildewed and black. Though it was dim, it was not dark. Scant illumination-and snow-drifted in.