Fungi Read online

  Legs had ridden his plasm north — out of sight — intending to double back on the L&W 445 as soon as the last car had passed. It was a cloudy night, at least, and there’d be no moon to betray their ambush until at least midnight. Duke hoped the clouds would stick around until well past the Witching Hour. The full moon might give Legs a brisk up, but Duke would rather skedaddle in the friendly dark once they’d grabbed Karlowe. He’d stopped thinking about this as a rescue, too. If Legs was right and the Professor had arranged his escape, then he was certain to raise some hell to keep from going back.

  Duke patted the scales of Shiloh’s neck and the nightmare picked up speed on the flat ground, angling towards the train. Shiloh’s fiery hooves raised a cloud and Duke pulled his charmed bandanna tight against the possibility of infectious puffballs.

  As he neared the train, a tongue of fire lanced from the reinforced window of a crew car behind the locomotive.

  Saints’ Balls! That was close!

  Another blast of sulfurous brimstone hurtled past and the L&W bellowed like a sea-leviathan, a challenge to Duke and a warning to the rest of them that rode the train. His blood surged through him like molten copper. Relic or not, Duke knew he was born to rob trains. Beneath the bandana, he smiled as an inky patch of dark glimmered near the caboose.

  “All right, Legs,” he said, knowing the beyonder would hear his thoughts even at this distance, “let her rip!”

  Maribel saw the flashes of hellfire arc out from the front of the train across the desolate fungal plain. The worms in her lungs churned to the deep call of the locomotive’s whistle. Bushwhacked, then. Nothing less than she’d expected.

  She opened the view-slit. The glare from the carriage’s discharge and the damned clouds made a murk of the Colorado night. But there, just past a stand of anchorite toadstool, she saw him — a lone rider, an inkblot against the velvet hills. Dim flames shot from his horse’s hooves, the tell-tale sign of a nightmare. Maribel’s breath caught. Whoever was aiming to bushwhack the L&W 445 Express was no ordinary rip. Nightmares were mighty difficult to break; most who tried got eaten. Maribel knew only one to have done it and she hoped to hell it wasn’t him out there now.

  Marsh nudged her in the kidneys with the butt of his rifle.

  “Road agents?” The earthy stink of his mold-ridden flesh filled her nostrils and desire shuddered through her. Marsh was an unwelcome distraction, idiot or no. But Maribel hadn’t survived the Awakened West by giving in every time any old fungus-veined chucklehead leered at her sidewise.

  “A lone rider. I expect he’s aiming to draw our attention elswh—”

  There was a sound like waves crashing over the train and even the Van Schijn car rocked from the impact.

  “Shit and brimstone!” Maribel cursed as the air fouled with the stink of polecat.

  “Close the fucking portholes!” she screamed at Marsh and the rest of the Deadbeats. Dread throbbed through her; the very air reverberated with an abyssal despair. Marsh felt it, too.

  “A beyonder!”

  Maribel nodded, steeling herself against the alien will that probed the armoured car. Thank the Goddess for Van Schijn’s weave, or they’d all be gibbering corpse-suckers already. Beyonders didn’t usually truck much with road agents, but there were a few powerful deuces that took to the outlaw life. Maribel thumbed through the possibilities like a poker hand. The Taos Lightning? Shoggoth Jr.? Legs McGraw? Oh, shit, not Legs. He was supposed to be up in Wichita.

  She shoved Marsh out of the way and headed for the ladder that led up to the car’s cupola. Maribel pointed to the heavy door at the fore of the car, all levers and knobs like some grotesque bank vault.

  “Watch that door. Don’t open it for nobody ’less I tell you to.”

  Marsh nodded, gripping his rifle until the green veins in his hands turned white. Maribel climbed the ladder into the cupola platform. There was a Van Schijn Gatling there. Its eldritch bullets could chew up anything you aimed it at, even a beyonder.

  She heard muffled yelling and thunderbolt discharges outside. The shouts quickly turned to screams. Maribel ignored the thumping rain of zombi parts against the cupola and jerked open the porthole.

  Deepest night engulfed the car behind her, with a swirl of stars like the rainbow at the bottom of a glass of laudanum. Her eyes ached from the sight and the slaughterhouse stink of the beyonder crept into the cupola, soothed her mind, willing her surrender before it tore her apart.

  Maribel jammed the barrel of the Van Schijn gun through its special hatch. She shut her eyes against the unearthly vertigo.

  Maribel?

  The alien mind brushed against her own and as quickly recoiled — but she’d already squeezed the trigger.

  “Madre de noche,” she shouted. Legs!

  She swung the gun wide and green fire stuttered behind her eyelids, the air ripping like wet carpet. A thousand vultures clawed at her brain and the stink of the beyonder vanished. Maribel wondered if she’d scored a hit.

  Another violent jolt shook the car. The swivel-mounted gun tore free from her hands and flung her from the cupola. She tumbled into one of the Deadbeats and the pair of them crashed onto the velvet-draped jar. The floor quaked beneath her and she rolled. Her heel crunched something and the scent of old things, musty and virulent, filled her nostrils, smothering her until the world was dark.

  The train had been easier to stop than Duke had reckoned. The engineer was not much more than a pile of human-shaped mold, grown fast to the boiler with thick, ropy tendrils blossoming with purple buds. It had only quivered silently when Duke blasted it out of space-time.

  Legs had taken care of the rest of the zombi guards. Now Duke banged the underside of the Van Schijn car with the butt of his pistol. It made for a good show. He’d also wedged a single stick of implosive dynamite between two stanchions on the wheel carriage and another against the armoured door. Not enough to destroy the car, but it would scare the hell out of whoever was inside.

  What are you doing?

  “Just gonna get ’em good and streaky,” he thought back to Legs. There was a smell of rotten eggs and compost as Legs approached.

  I see you stopped the train. Nice job. The beyonder had a hitch in his wiggle and his voice was faint.

  “And I see you got shot. Nice job.”

  Gatling gun with Van Schijn cartridges. Guess who?

  “Someone we know?”

  Maribel. She’s guarding Karlowe.

  “Aw, shit.” Duke avoided thinking about Maribel de Miedo every chance he got. It only led to whiskey and long one-sided conversations with Shiloh.

  “Isn’t ‘Bel supposed to be in Wichita?”

  Legs turned away and didn’t answer for several moments.

  Remember that fandango down in Mexico, Duke?

  The first symptoms of her fog-lung had just come on and ‘Bel and Duke had fought like Kilkenney cats the whole time. Their last evening started with a dance, but it ended in a drunken shootout where nothing died but their mutual affection. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked her to wear that Spanish dress. Still, something in Legs’ tone gnawed at him.

  “Wait. You … and ‘Bel?”

  Yes. You left her. I was trying to treat her infection.

  “I bet you were,” Duke muttered, feeling around and finding the old wound still raw. “And I didn’t leave her. I just got pretty roostered up on all that cerveza.”

  After Maribel told him she was dying, Duke had sequestered himself in a cantina for three days. The world was Awakening, sure, but why it had to get so personal and take Maribel from him, he didn’t understand. After Mexico, he just kept going through the motions, just until he could scrape enough together for a little place in one of the sealed cities back east. But he’d started working for the Professors and somehow just never quit.

  He climbed out from under the bulbous panels of the Van Schijn car, trailing the fuse. He glared at Legs as he squirmed in the darkness, a deeper nightmare against the horrors of the Awake
ned prairie. Duke admitted to himself why he hadn’t gone back east. He didn’t want to leave Legs behind.

  I suspected she might be on this train, Legs admitted, expelling a musk of dirt and iron. I saw her with an L&W zombi at the Cosmic Eye Saloon in Zohar City.

  “You should’ve told me, Legs.”

  I didn’t know for sure.

  “Well, what the hell are we going to do now?” Duke replied, wiping dust and gravel from his backside. Karlowe, they wanted dead or alive, but Maribel? Maribel was always a complication.

  Karlowe will fight us, too. I can feel his mind straining to escape.

  “I could always blow the whole damn Van Schijn car, then.”

  Not with Maribel inside.

  Duke rubbed his face in his hands and sighed.

  “Then we’ll just have to ask her to come out.”

  Maribel woke to Marsh’s toothy grin, a blur of stupid and spite.

  “You got him, Calico,” he cackled.

  She staggered to her feet, relieved to see the drape was still safely secured around Karlowe. The zombi she’d fallen into wasn’t so lucky. His face was stoved in, a mess of puffballs and oily slime. The lamps flickered like dying stars; the glyphs on Karlowe’s drape glimmered. The Van Schijn car was still.

  “The road agents.”

  Marsh frowned. “Yup. What next?”

  Maribel was streaked, the fluid darkness of the beyonder still swirling in her thoughts. Would she have shot if she’d known it was Legs? The pain of memory swelled until it became indistinguishable from the ache in her lungs. The worms churned and a fit of coughing gripped her. She turned away from Marsh so the zombi wouldn’t see the blood dripping from her shaking hands.

  Stars burst in her eyes and Maribel thought about Mexico — and Legs. And Duke. Shit. Duke was out there, too.

  “All we got to do is wait ’em out,” she muttered, half to herself. “L&W’s mediums have to know already we’ve stopped. They’ll send someone.”

  Maribel sat down on one of the velvet-cushioned benches and pulled a flask from her boot. A little tequila, a little laudanum. The pain in her chest dulled to an ache.

  “Wait?” Marsh gave her a doubtful look and made a show of checking the cords that kept the drape secured to the floor. Three sharp clangs sounded from the door.

  “Evenin’, folks,” a muffled voice called from the other side. “Reckon I could come in and set a spell?”

  Maribel slid the flask back into her boot. It was Duke, all right.

  “Best back away from the door, Duke,” she replied. “It’s wired.”

  “Don’t think so, ‘Bel,” Duke called. “No demons left in your boiler.”

  He was right, the lamps were almost out and the battery wouldn’t last much longer.

  “You try to come through that door, Duke, we got enough lead and lightning to cut all of you down,” she warned, but her heart wasn’t in the threat.

  “Sounds like a standoff, then. It’s just the two of us, ‘Bel. Come on out and dance with me.”

  “We all know how that ended last time,” she replied, trying to hide the smile that tugged at her lips.

  “Dance with Legs, then. You clipped him mighty good, but I bet he forgives you. Hell, I’ll even forgive you if you just come on out.”

  Francis “Duke” Winchester and Legs McGraw. Notorious bounty hunters, almost as expensive as she was. Had they been any other road agents she’d have ordered the Deadbeats out in a full charge, standoff or no. But of course it was old friends that came hunting Karlowe. Crack shots, hard to kill, even if she’d wanted to. And both pretty damn good for a roll in the hay.

  “I forgive you, too, Duke,” she called.

  Marsh leveled his rifle at her. “Sorry to interrupt the love affair, Calico, but there’s no way we’re opening that door.”

  Maribel stared down the barrel of Marsh’s gun as the arc lamps failed. Marsh stared back. The growths in his eyes and the rest of his body shone with a soft blue luminescence. Was that to be her fate, as well? Would Karlowe’s cure for the worms in her lungs turn her into a fungus-ridden ghost?

  She shook her head. “We gotta make a deal, Marsh. He’d rather kill Karlowe than wait for the L&W troops to get here.”

  “You’re a fool and he’s a liar. He’ll shoot you as soon as you open that door.”

  Maribel looked past the barrel of the long rifle at the door. It wasn’t that far away, but neither was Marsh.

  “Hell, I’ll shoot you if you try,” Marsh said.

  L&W wouldn’t take betrayal lightly, but they damn sure wouldn’t be offering up any sort of cure after this fiasco. Her lungs itched and she knew the cough would return soon. She was almost out of tequila.

  The remaining two Deadbeats brandished their rifles, taking aim at Maribel, their splotchy, rotting faces hard with fear. They were too stupid to know their rifles were next to useless in the confines of the warded car.

  Maribel dropped and drew the Bowie from her boot. A quick slash laid Marsh’s shins open. The zombi howled, spraying lightning into the sidewall. The car seemed for a moment like one of Ft. Derleth’s laboratories; arcs of electricity like sizzling blue worms crawled across the warded stanchions.

  She threw her shoulder against Marsh’s wounded legs and sent him toppling to the floor. Ducking his rifle, she blasted the other two zombis with brimstone from her Hellfire gun. They collapsed, shrieking, chest cavities seared out by the burning coals.

  She knelt on Marsh, pressing her knife under the zombi’s chin.

  “L&W will kill you for this!” he snarled.

  “Sorry, Marsh. I’m already dead.” She leaned in on the knife until she heard the crunch of the blade against his neck bone. Severing the spinal cord wasn’t the only way to stop a zombi, but it was the quickest. She sat back on her haunches, wiping the blade on his pants, leaving trails of sluggish blood and oily fungal ichor.

  The Van Schijn car was dark again except for the eerie, green glow of the sigils on Karlowe’s orichalcum drape. The reek of burning zombi filled her lungs and brought on another coughing spell. The worms churned in displeasure; their gnawing seared out all other thought.

  She didn’t notice the zombi with the smashed face rising up behind her until he was already at Karlowe’s drape. Black worms crawled from her mouth as she turned in time to see him sawing furiously with his knife at the cords of India rubber. He tugged the warding cloth aside.

  A deep voice boomed in her mind.

  I WILL NOT GO BACK!

  Duke waited before the armoured door, sheltered in the vestibule from the sour wind that blew fitfully off the plain. Green clouds, swollen with spores, rolled in from the mountaintops. More rain. There never used to be so much out here. Legs pulsed silently in the dark. The gunfire had stopped five minutes ago, though the air still smelled burnt. In the quiet, a deep foreboding came over Duke.

  Something’s wrong.

  Duke checked the dynamite wedged in the door and twisted the fuse to a detonator.

  “Of course there is. It’s Maribel.”

  She still loved you, even then.

  Duke glared at Legs. Lightning flashed overhead.

  “We’re out of time, Maribel. You comin’ or not?”

  Clangs resounded from the other side of the armoured door and it swung open, belching smoke and the stink of prairie lightning. The dynamite, dislodged, rolled to a stop at a pair of worn black boots tooled with Mayan glyphs.

  Maribel de Miedo emerged from the charred dimness of the Van Schijn car, painted black with zombi guts. Her sunken eyes were lambent with cloud light and shone with a lunatic glare. The entity that peered out of those baleful eyes was not Maribel.

  Duke tried to shout a warning to his partner, but the beyonder, already sensing danger, staggered up on tendrils of slime. Dark things flew like ravens from his inkblot form, only to vanish in puffs of smoke as they reached the possessed Maribel.

  I HAVE IMPROVED MY MIND PAST EVEN YOUR ABILITIES, BEYONDER.


  Duke drew his Hexmakers and pointed them at his old beloved.

  “I don’t want to shoot you, ‘Bel!”

  SHOOT. YOU CANNOT HURT ME, Karlowe gloated, flexing his power.

  Duke’s fingers squeezed the triggers of their own accord, but the cursed bullets swirled in the air like brilliant horseflies before Maribel’s outstretched hands. They exploded into tiny motes, each burst punctuating Karlowe’s mind-words.

  I WILL NOT GO BACK TO THEIR PRISON IN ZOHAR CITY.

  The pronouncement resounded in Duke’s skull, driving him to his knees and the revolvers from his hands. The beyonder swooped, battering Maribel/Karlowe with his own psychical energies. Even so, several slugs of brimstone burned into Legs’ roiling mass. As he tumbled to the floor, Maribel collapsed, too, worms dripping from her nose. Karlowe’s black mind searched for more fertile soil than the sickly fog-lunger.

  Darkness rippled across Duke’s mind and he lost sight of Legs. In the last light of consciousness, he saw a dim, rosy pulsing from inside the Van Schijn car. Karlowe’s brain sloshed in its jar of oil as Legs McGraw wrestled with Karlowe’s loosed psychic force. If the Professor got a hold of the beyonder’s mind, they were all doomed.

  The detonator lay a mere foot from where his partner struggled. Duke dragged himself along the floor of the vestibule, fingernails cracking as they bit into the rough wood. His fingers closed around the plunger. Maribel, still half-mad with the sinister influence of Karlowe’s brain, scooped the dynamite up before Duke could reach it.

  “‘Bel!”

  The unearthly glow faded from her eyes, replaced by a different sort of light. Pain. The half-grin, even with the worms on her lips, was all Maribel, though.

  “Dance with me?” she wheezed.

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Duke laughed.

  Maribel hurled the dynamite into the Van Schijn car and tumbled off the vestibule.