Are you freaking kidding me?
Eric met the cowboy’s puffy, bloodshot eyes over the glinting metal of the gun barrel. Black, angry bruises had spread around them and down one cheek. His nose was entirely hidden beneath a thick pile of blood-soaked gauze and tape. A large, purple lump stood prominently out on his forehead. His remaining hair was still wild and uncombed. It blew about his shining, bald scalp in the breeze, revealing the painful abrasion where he and Aiden dropped him down the tavern’s hidden stairwell. His western shirt was soaked with blood.
He looked terrible.
Eric found without much surprise that he didn’t feel remotely sympathetic.
He turned and looked behind him. The open doorway remained empty. And yet the strange, blue shard of glass had revealed a horrible figure lurking within.
“Give it to me,” growled the cowboy, his voice thick from his blood-clogged nasal passages.
Eric faced him again. “Give what to you?”
The cowboy shoved the gun at him. He stepped back to avoid being struck with the barrel. And he stepped sideways to avoid being pushed closer to the ruined house.
“Don’t, boy. Just don’t.”
“Fine. I won’t.” He stood with both hands clenched at his sides. He could feel the sharp edges of the glass shard digging into his palm.
Again, the cowboy jabbed the gun at him. Again, Eric stepped back and to the side. “I’ve had it with your bullshit, boy. I’ve had it as much as I’m going to have it.”
Eric wasn’t sure he’d ever seen someone look so mad. And yet, he didn’t fail to notice that he was neither shooting him nor beating the snot out of him with the butt of the weapon. Clearly, he had a purpose for being here.
And it was no mystery what that purpose was.
He was here for the glass shard.
“Where’s Aiden? What did you do with him?”
The cowboy squinted at him in an ugly combination of puzzlement and snarling rage. “What are you talking about?”
Great. Now they were both being evasive. This was promising to be a long conversation and he was sure they didn’t have time for it.
He glanced back at the shadowy remains of the doorway again. It was so close. Too close. At any moment the old woman could emerge with those awful claws drawn, ready to spill the blood of anyone foolish enough to remain here for too long.
It was a miracle she hadn’t appeared already. He couldn’t help but wonder what she was waiting for.
“What’re you looking at?”
“Nothing.”
The gun came at Eric again. This time he dared to take two steps to the side. He wanted to keep that doorway in sight. Right now, at this exact moment in time, what mattered most was the shotgun. But if Granny stepped out onto the porch, he wasn’t entirely sure that weapon was going to be big enough to keep him from running.
The cowboy glared at him. But now his eyes also twitched toward the ruins. He was taking it all in, judging the situation. “What were you doing in there?”
“Looking for a place to go pee. Small bladder. It’s really embarrassing.”
For the third time, the gun was thrust at him. For the third time, he lurched backward and to the side.
The cowboy swore at him. He spit the words like venom, the hatred in his voice crystal clear. It was a colorfully constructed profanity, as well. In a single, vulgar sentence, he managed to suggest that Eric was cursed by a higher power, participated in specific homosexual activities, was a prostitute and that he was sexually active with somebody’s mother, although it wasn’t clear whose.
“That was beautiful, sir. Truly inspiring.”
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” With each word, he jabbed Eric firmly in the chest with the barrel of the shotgun, forcing him back a couple more steps.
Eric decided it was time to do as he was told.
“I should just shoot you right now.”
Eric shook his head. He didn’t care for that idea.
“Not in the head. Not in the heart. No. That’s not good enough.” He lowered the gun and pressed it against Eric’s belly. “Right there. Tear your filthy guts to ribbons inside you, let you die slow and screaming.”
Eric swallowed hard. This guy had the psycho turned way up.
“How does that sound?”
“Like it would really ruin my day.”
“I’m thinking it would, yeah.” Now some of the rage in the cowboy’s swollen eyes was replaced by a strangely unsettling gleam. “Do you have any idea how many hours it’ll take for you to die like that?”
Jesus! He’s really enjoying this! Eric felt sick. He recalled his first meeting with this lunatic in the empty restaurant and how he’d bragged about frightening people into committing suicide at the sight of his monstrous projections.
How many people had this man murdered over the years? How many of them had he tortured mercilessly?
“Now,” said the cowboy as he pressed the gun more firmly into Eric’s too-soft gut. “Why don’t you just give it to me?”
“Give you what? I still don’t know what you want.”
Eric wasn’t sure how far he could push this guy before he pulled the trigger. If he was telling the truth about how long it would take to die from a round in the belly, there was nothing to keep him from doing just that. But the fact that he hadn’t shot him already suggested that the cowboy still needed him for something.
The cowboy glared at him. The hatred in those bloodshot eyes was still clear, but there was also a smugness there. “Let’s start with whatever you’re holding in your hand.”
Eric’s eyes flittered down toward his right hand, still clenched at his side. “I don’t have anything in my hand.”
“Sure you don’t.”
He stared back at the man, not speaking.
“Now.”
Eric lifted his fists and held them up for the cowboy to see.
“Drop it.”
Eric hesitated. Then he opened his hands.
They were empty.
The cowboy looked from one empty hand to the other.
“Told you.”
While he was threatening to shoot him in the belly and doom him to a slow, agonizing death, Eric had taken advantage of the lunatic’s obvious and perverse enjoyment and slipped the shard of glass into his pocket unnoticed.
“Where is it?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The cowboy stepped forward, shoving the gun deeper into Eric’s belly and forcing him back another step. “Don’t fucking lie to me!”
Eric didn’t say anything.
“I saw you run out of there! I know you found something!”
“It was scary in there. I just had to get out.”
With a growl, the cowboy withdrew the gun from Eric’s belly and then thrust it forward hard, jabbing him in the gut and knocking the wind from him.
He staggered backward, gasping for breath, and fell to the ground. The back of his already aching head struck the trunk of a dead maple tree.
“Tell me!”
Eric rolled onto his side and coughed. “There’s nothing in there,” he managed. “It’s empty. Go see for yourself.”
The cowboy spat more vulgarities and kicked him hard in the back.
Eric cried out in pain.
This guy was seriously an asshole. Eric was definitely not adding him to his Christmas card list.
With even more creatively obscene curses, the cowboy seized a handful of Eric’s hair and hauled him painfully to his knees. He was then knocked back to the ground by a swift punch to the side of the head that left him sprawled face-down in the dirt.
“Obviously, this is getting us nowhere,” panted the overweight cowboy as he mopped the sweat from his vast forehead. “So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to start shooting holes in you, starting at your feet. And you can decide when you’re ready to tell me how to find that goddamn schoolhouse. What do you say to that?”
Eric said the only thing that came into his dazed mind: “Oh crap…”
A heavy foot crushed down on the back of his knee, forcing a grunt of pain from him. “Now hold still. This is going to hurt like a bitch.”
Eric struggled, his heart thundering. He couldn’t wrench his leg from under the fat cowboy’s boot. And any second now he was going to experience a new threshold of agony.
But the shotgun didn’t go off. Instead, he heard the cowboy shout, “Who the fuck are you?”
Eric’s eyes, squeezed shut in anticipation of the pain he expected, flashed open and darted to the remains of the house. There, standing in the doorway, just as he saw her the first time, was the old woman in her ragged housecoat and scarf. Like before, her face was hidden in unnatural darkness.
Oh crap.
“What is this?” bellowed the cowboy. “What’s going on?”
But the woman did not answer.
Still standing on the back of Eric’s knee, he lifted the shotgun and pointed it at the woman, threatening her. “Answer me, you bitch!”
The woman lifted her hands. Like the first time, long, gleaming blades protruded from her fingers.
The cowboy released Eric and took two steps toward the woman. He pulled the trigger. The gun boomed. And yet the woman did not even flinch.
Eric had seen enough. He lifted himself onto his hands and knees and began to crawl away.
The cowboy discharged the empty shell and reloaded a fresh one from his pocket with impressive speed. And yet his second shot was just as pointless as the first. A puff of dust kicked up behind the woman, yet she remained standing where she was, as if the shot had passed right through her.
Having withdrawn several yards from the confrontation, Eric rose to his feet and began to back away.
The cowboy ejected the second shell, but as soon as he reached for a third, the woman dashed toward him, her claws raised.
He cursed bitterly and began to stumble backward, away from the horrible phantom.
Eric continued to back away, determined not to let them out of his sight, convinced that razor claws or buckshot would pierce his skin the moment he turned his back.
But neither seemed to notice him.
The cowboy dropped the shotgun and thrust his hand forward, as if throwing something at the woman. At the same instant, one of those large, pale monsters leapt out of thin air and darted toward the woman.
Without hesitation, she slashed the pathetic creature and reduced it to a splash of black goo.
The cowboy threw out a second creature, then a third. Both met the same fate and the woman drew ever closer.
Desperately, he hurled a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. To Eric, it looked as if these last three were deformed, as if in his panic, he was losing his concentration, unable to keep them whole. The seventh one lurched from his hand as if injured, grotesquely twisted and barely able to stand.
The woman dispatched it as easily as the rest and then she was upon him. Her claws moved almost too fast for Eric to see, slashing at the cowboy’s flabby belly.
Although he’d struck terror into him multiple times today, this man now let loose the most undignified scream Eric had ever heard uttered by a grown man in his life.
The woman carved him up like a machine, shredding his flesh and clothes alike, spraying blood high into the air. As Eric watched, horrified, he saw a terrible face emerge from the darkness beneath her scarf. Aiden had referred to this thing as a vengeful spirit, but if that was true, it had turned far from whatever old woman it may have once been. Screaming eyes, wide and hollow, bulged from the shadowy plane of her concealed skull and a wide, gaping mouth began to open, stretching impossibly wide and revealing row after row of gray and crooked teeth.
He took one more step back and tripped over a thorny thicket of brush, falling backward to the ground. He scrambled quickly back to his feet and looked back at the terrible scene before him just in time to see the cowboy’s lifeless body fall to the ground, leaving his bald, bandaged head in the woman’s taloned hands.
Then she turned her grotesque face on Eric.