Skin Medicine

Gerard stood there, not wanting to look, but the human being in him demanding it. He dragged the bed over, stood up on it. The sad little voice was calling for its mother, its mother.

Something cold unfolding in his chest, Gerard slid the hatch aside.

What light spilled in showed him a little boy that was dark with blood. And before Gerard could pull the trigger, memories of his own lost son washing through him, the boy was on him, his teeth in his throat.

And Gerard died as he had lived: violently.

***

Beaten, bruised, and blood-soaked, Sir Tom Ian and Henry Wilcox were all that was left of their little group. The others had been slaughtered by the beasts. And Graybrow had just vanished. As it was, Deputy Wilcox had been badly gashed in the belly and ribs and had lost a lot of blood.

But he would not give in.

Not while there was strength left in him.

Ian and he were investigating a freight office, having followed a blood trail through the snow before it was covered over. Inside, it was pretty much empty. All the furnishings and office utilities long gone. But there was blood on the floor. The bloody prints of children and something wet they had dragged along with them.

There was a door at the back of the office.

It was closed.

“You up to this, mate?” Ian said.

“As up as I’m ever gonna be,” Wilcox admitted, his large frame seeming to sag now as the blood continued to soak through the makeshift bandages wrapped around his torso.

Ian took hold of the tarnished knob, turned it.

Heard commotion, wet tearing sounds.

He threw the door open and saw a cluster of children kneeling on the floor. Their eyes were green, but their bodies naked and hairless. They grinned up at the two men and their teeth were like icicles jutting from those blackened gums. They were clustered around the body of a Danite…maybe Fitch…though it was really hard to tell, such was the degree of mutilation.

The children were all nude and tattooed-up, their faces smeared with blood.

“Dear Christ,” Wilcox said and kept saying it.

The children rose from their kill quite slowly, advancing on the men. Wilcox began to sob…kids, just goddamn kids. He couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.

But Sir Tom Ian had no such compunction.

He pulled his. 44 Bisley and it had barely cleared leather before the first round jacked into a little girl and another erased the face of a little boy. Making a wild, moaning sound, Wilcox finally followed suit.

For they were not children.

They were more beast than human, those eyes filled with a flat, relentless appetite. They would stalk their kill and take it down without remorse.

And that’s how he was able to kill the children with Ian.

The guns saved their lives, but they also made a hell of a racket in the enclosed room. Like thunder echoing and echoing until each man’s hearing was dulled, numbed.

And that was why they didn’t hear the others coming through the doorway at them.

Didn’t know it until they felt claws and teeth and smelled rancid, hot breath at their necks.

***

Cabe said, “After you, Sheriff.”

Dirker nodded and pushed through the door of the old hotel. Cabe followed in behind him, a Greener shotgun in his arms. His Evans was slung across his back. The stink hit them right away. Thick, hot, nauseating. It had no place in an abandoned hotel on a freezing day where the wind was driving snow into drifts and licking everything down with ice. Yet, the smell was there…like some breathing, consuming, living thing. A malignant sentience. Both men stood, breathless, waiting for whatever inspired that stink to come slinking down the stairs at them.

But there was nothing but silence.

“If what Harmony said is correct,” Dirker began, carefully re-loading both his. 45 Colt Peacemakers, “then Cobb and his crew were living upstairs here.”

“Jesus, that stink,” Cabe said.

“Let’s go,” Dirker said.

There was a pair of oil lamps hanging from a hook near the stairwell. Both were nearly full. Cabe took one, lit it up. A dirty yellow light sprang from it, revealing the ravages of nature-the animal bones and bird’s bests tucked into holes in the walls, the leaves and sticks and pine needles.

They went up the stairway side by side and paused at the top.

Paused, noticing that the atmosphere now was positively mephitic and pestilent like that of a malarial jungle death camp. The air was heavy, moist, and viscous with that putrid, flyblown stench of wormy meat. And hot, dear God, hot and wet and oppressive. It trembled thickly like gelatin, laying on their faces in a rank, slimy humidity.

They moved up the corridor towards that door at the end. The door with the furrows cut into it and the abnormal bloody handprints. Or something like handprints.

“Lookit the floor,” Cabe said.

Dirker did.

Just outside the door, for maybe four feet down the floor…a weird, creeping fungal mass of decay. As they stepped on it, it squished like wet leaves, some reeking black juice oozing from it.

Dirker prodded something with the tip of his boot. “A shotgun,” he said. “Recognize it?”