Chapter 9 – Engulfed by the Dark...
“They won't be able to hide in that cabin for much longer.” Jeb Perry drooled in the saddle as he squinted down the barrel of the new rifle Randolph Harlington purchased for his hand. “The flames will be kissing them soon enough if the smoke doesn't flush them out.”
Jess Plinkton laughed and fired his pistol through the flames. Randolph Harlington failed to find horses for all of his posse following the swarm that swept through his ranch. Thus many in that posse were forced to the ground without a mount. But Harlington placed fine guns into the hands of those without horses, and Jess Plinkton's heart exalted for the feel of his new pistol's handle against his palm.
“I can't wait to see some Turners to feed to my new gun!” Jess bellowed into the night. He raised his new pistol with a flourish in his right hand and unleashed roaring rounds of gunfire through the flames. “I aim to make them pay for killing all the horses and making me walk to this desolate cabin. It's a shame old Randolph's not out here himself to witness it. It's a shame the old man's drinking over hands of poker rather than riding with his posse.”
Gabe Henderson scowled at the blasts of wasted ammunition. “You've not hit the cabin yet, so I don't know what makes you think you're ready to shoot at moving targets.”
Gabe did not share in the confidence the rest of the Harlington posse exhibited as they waited behind the line of flames that approached the Turner cabin. Ranchers seldom made for good gunmen. Each blind shot of pistol or rifle into the dark reminded Gabe of the fact. Gabe suspected that such ready trigger fingers attempted to hide the fear likely swelling in the men. Shouting at the cabin would do nothing to chase away that dread. The posse wasted bullets in such vain attempts for courage, while a gunfighter such as Gabe Henderson cherished each bullet that came into his possession.
Gabe felt anxious as he sat upon his saddle and squinted through the orange fire towards the Turner's dark cabin. He kept his hands close to those pistols holstered upon his hips. Randolph Harlington failed to afford Gabe that spirited bronco the gunfighter craved before that awful swarm descended upon the ranch. Instead, Harlington filled Gabe's appetite with gold dollar coins, which jingled in the gunfighter's pockets whenever his horse stomped nervously. Though he felt well payed, Gabe wished the gold would keep silent, but the coins refused to stop shaking and jingling. So many gold dollars would provide him with a good many of a gunfighter's desires, but Gabe still wished the coins would rest more easily in the saddle.
“I doubt you even get a shot, Jess.” Jeb leered from his saddle. “Gabe Henderson there has shot plenty of moving targets. We'll all be lucky if we even see a living Turner before Gabe's bullets plant them in the ground.”
Jeb's horse anxiously twirled. Jeb grunted and pulled at the reigns to force the animal into a calmer canter.
Jess laughed. “Maybe Harlington should've put me on top of a horse, seeing how much trouble you're having with him, Jeb.”
Jeb grunted from his effort. “Harlington sure found a nervous bunch of horses for us.”
Jess emptied another one of his pistol's rounds into the air as he laughed at Jeb's efforts to calm his horse.
“Watch it!” Gabe shouted as the gun's rapport frightened Jeb's horse beyond control.
In a flash, the discontent suffered by all of the posse's horses exploded into panic. Riders wrestled in their saddles. Horses reared against their masters. Gabe pulled at his reigns to direct a flurry of hooves away from Jeb Perry's face. Gabe's horse bucked as the gunfighter's hands clenched to keep hold. His legs tightened as the horse jumped and kicked against him. His horse brayed and twirled. The coins of golden dollars jingled in his pockets as Gabe fought to stay in his saddle.
All of the horses in the Harlington posse fought savagely against their riders. The men without horses scattered as the horses kicked at them. Riders fell from their saddles, striking the ground hard and losing their breath. Freed from their mounted masters, the horses sprinted away from the Turner cabin and the fires surrounding it, while those horses still struggling against their riders kicked at the men thrown to the ground. Someone moved to grab the reigns of Gabe's spinning horse, and the man screamed as the animal bit upon his forearm and tore at the flesh.
Gabe's stamina to fight the horse broke. Closing his eyes, the gunfighter grimaced in preparation for the ground's shock sure to follow his imminent fall. His legs flew from the horse, but his body failed to clear from the raging animal. His right hand twisted and caught in the reigns, pinning him to his horse's side. Before he could take a breath, the horse twisted and kicked. A searing, sudden bolt of pain shocked numb his right arm. The horse jumped, and Gabe cried out against the agony that thundered from his fingertips through his shoulder and into his spine as the horse kicked at him. The horse twirled, and the reigns mercifully released his hand. Gabe Henderson slumped to the ground and grunted as his momentum turned him upon his throbbing right side. He saw a flash of mane before his horse bounded away from the Turner cabin.
Gabe's reflexes flashed. His left hand flew to the gun at his hip. He thought of that ugly, albino Turner girl cradling her dead brother's broken face in the dust. He recalled that ugly, albino Turner girl's visit to the Harlington ranch before the swarm arrived and devoured livestock, horses and a man. An enemy like none he had ever before faced confronted Gabe in the form of that Maggie Turner, and Gabe's instinct flashed to the fury contained in his guns.
“Step away!” Gabe growled.
Jess Plinkton stammered. “I was only going to offer a hand.”
“Step away!” Gabe's eyes flashed.
Gabe stood with his pistol leveled upon Jess Plinkton. He couldn't remember the effort to rise to his feet. His instincts moved him into that dangerous posture. Gabe's right arm dangled from his side. He could twitch his right hand's fingers with shooting pains, but his elbow couldn't raise his grip to the gun that remained holstered on his right hip. Though pain clenched his teeth, Gabe's raised left hand remained steady as it leveled the gun upon Jess Plinkton, whose body trembled before the gunfighter's attention.
“We all suffered a fall,” Jess whispered as his knees knocked. “We only want to help with that busted arm.”
Gabe's mind unlocked. His deadly left arm lowered. “Time enough for that later. I'm going to shoot the next man who fires his gun without seeing a Turner for a target. No one fires until I say so.”
The pistol in Gabe's left hand glistened in reflected firelight. None of the posse breathed.
“And I don't want to hear another fool's boast,” Gabe added. “I won't stomach one braggart more. Any of you who think horses naturally spook the way they did can start walking back to Dry Acre. Anyone who still thinks shooting Turners is going to be easy is a fool idiot. I don't want to hear another noise while we wait for these flames to either flush or eat those Turners.”
Gabe squinted through the flames at the Turner cabin while the posse formed behind him. His eyes struggled to adjust. His keen sight could not see anything past the fires. Darkness choked the Turner cabin. Gabe could not distinguish a window or a wall. He could not see the roof nor the front step. Gabe squinted and wondered how so much dark could so shroud the home no matter that the fires burned so close. Gabe squinted as he thought he saw a black snake, a cord of utter darkness, coil about the cabin. He worried that a gun was not the proper weapon to bring to that fight, no matter that a gun was the only weapon he knew.
The darkness surrounding the Turner home prevented Gabe from seeing the cabin's door open. Light flashed from no window to betray any sign of escape. Rather, the darkness expanded from the cabin, rolling towards the posse like black smoke tumbling across the ground. Gabe's left hand felt heavy as stone as he watched shadows expand from the cabin.
None in the Harlington posse made a noise as the black rolled towards them. Darkness blanketed the flames so that, strangely, no hint of light wavered through the shadows. The posse still felt the fire's heat. The men still h
eard the fires crackle towards the Turner home. Yet not a soul gathered to claim revenge from the Turners saw a trace of flame as shadows blanketed the fires. Though his left hand felt so heavy, Gabe lifted his pistol and aimed at the center of that darkness, however he doubted his gun's power against what might lurk in such shadow.
The darkness engulfed them.
Gabe heard the men behind him gasp as the black fell upon Harlington's men. His hardened spirit unexpectedly pleaded with his mind that time remained to flee, unexpectedly pleaded with his feet that time remained to run away from the Turner cabin no matter that the darkness thickening around them erased any sense of direction. Only, fear weighed too heavily upon Gabe Henderson's shoulders and pinned the gunfighter in his stance. Gabe's mind fumbled through the confusion of such an uncanny collection of shadows surrounding him. Behind him, Gabe heard the posse fumble with their guns. Gabe Henderson remained a gunfighter no matter the dark, and so his left hand aimed his pistol at the invading shadow.
Gabe heard broken, shuffling footfalls as the hairs on his skin stood upright. Gabe felt something move in the dark behind him as it brushed against his throbbing right side. The sound of scuttling upon the ground turned Gabe to his left, but the darkness remained too thick for him to see any shape moving through the shadows. He wrestled to maintain his wits. He grunted to keep his shaking, left hand raised against the black as his courage wavered.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Gabe's heart froze at the strange words screamed in the dark. The babble of syllables sounded like a growl. The incomprehensible words hissed like sands ground across rock.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Gabe aimed his gun into the black towards the sound of the second enunciation. His heart pounded. He had no idea of what such harsh words meant when shouted in the shadows. Yet he could not deny the frustration, the hatred, that boomed upon those syllables hissing through the black.
“Sweet Jesus!” Gabe heard Jesse whine through the shadow. “Sweet Jesus! Something's standing right in front of me! I can't even see it! It's breathing on me! Sweet Jesus!”
A new voice sounded through the shadow, a wet voice that choked the utterance of those cryptic syllables in phlegm.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
A rifle shot screamed through the dark. Gabe flinched. Bullets shot in such utter darkness would not know clear targets. A pistol thundered. Gabe heard the impact of a bullet strike flesh and bone before he heard the sound of a body thudding upon the ground behind him.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Things bellowed in the dark. Screams of raging creatures Gabe could not understand filled the thick shadows. Guns roared above the shouts and the growls. Bullets whined through the dark. Gabe felt the heat of the fires as fear revolted against his mind and sent his feet stumbling through the black. Yet he could see no indication of the slightest glow from such flames. There was only darkness and terrible noise.
Gabe felt a rush of wind close to his head before he heard the thump of an impact that broke bone. Somewhere in the dark, a man gurgled for breath before a second thud silenced his anguish. He heard men cry and curse in the shadows. He heard them fumbling with the mechanisms of their guns. Gabe heard bullets striking flesh, but the black prevented him from knowing if those shots struck those of the Harlington posse or that which shambled in the dark. He heard the crack of breaking limbs. Things bellowed in the blackness. Men wept and went silent. Violence erupted, raged and silenced as Gabe stood in the darkness, turning his pistol towards the noises he heard in the black while the sound of chiming coins jingled from his pockets.
Gabe shook as he listened to a last dying man's groan. His pistol trembled.
“Phly'em nhist R'yla beisk'a'lem!” A wet voice groaned.
An instinct older than a gunfighter's reflex to draw his gun coursed through Gabe Henderson's heart. Gabe let his left arm fall and allowed his pistol's barrel to aim only at the ground as the shadows started to dissipate around him. The glow of the fires again offered illumination to his surroundings. Flames consumed the Turner cabin. The roof that spanned the Turner's great room collapsed in a sea of floating embers. The fires he had set with that posse of men found the fuel they craved. But Gabe Henderson wished he had had nothing to do with lighting the first match as the shadows continued to disperse to cruelly allow his eyes to see what had lurked within the dark.
Three forms shuffled in front of him as the burning Turner cabin back-lit their limbs. Gabe gasped at the condition of the men crawling and shambling from one body to the next, tearing out pockets to grab golden dollar coins which they flung into the fire behind them. Their clothes were only tatters caked with soil. Their stiff limbs doomed their movements to be clumsy. Gabe shuddered as he saw where the pale, splotchy skin peeled away to reveal the ivory of bone. The pistol rattled in Gabe's left hand as he watched one of the haggard men bite at the fingers of a fallen Jeb Perry, whose dead eyes considered Gabe from the contorted angle of a broken neck.
A last coil of shadow emptied into the night, and Gabe Henderson swooned as he realized who those forms were who savaged the Harlington posse in the dark.
Gabe could not doubt that the three corpses of the dead Turner brothers shuffled in front of him. The risen bodies of Harry, Bart and Thomas fell upon the posse's dead. Various degrees of decay consumed each brother's flesh. Harry and Bart's bodies displayed the worst effects of decomposition. Much of the skin had fallen from their faces so that their smiles exposed jawbone and skull. Gabe's knees turned to water as he watched Bart's corpse twist and tear at the bones protruding from a severed arm scavenged from one of the posse's men. With a grunt, Bart pulled that bone away from its limb, and Gabe's stomach rolled as the gunfighter watched the ghoul Bart had become slip his withered arm into the flesh so that the scavenged limb fit upon him like a long glove. Thomas's risen corpse leaned over dead Jesse Plinkton's face and dug out a staring, brown eye, which Thomas shoved into the empty socket on his skull so that the orb mismatched the other green eye Thomas had claimed from the body of another posse member.
Gabe Henderson was a gunfighter, whose mind knew the power of black powder and lead. His mind staggered at the sight of the Turner brothers scavenging upon the posse's remains. He had no way to fathom the dark magics that summoned the dead from their graves. Gabe's mind darkened before the sight his eyes gave him, as if a thick, heavy blanket of shadow fell upon him and suffocated his thoughts.
The flames shifted their firelight and small embers took flight as the fourth of the dead Turner brothers stomped through the fires eating the Turner cabin. The walking corpse paid no attention to the orange flame that danced from his scalp or burned upon his shoulders. The singed and smoking corpse of Samuel Turner walked with a slow limp to Gabe Henderson and smiled with burned and blackened lips. In the dancing firelight, Gabe saw where the posse's bullets had screamed through the walking dead man's flesh. None of the rounds succeeded to put any of the risen Turners back into the earth. Gunpowder could not stand against the craft that reanimated the dead. With smoke rising from the ruins of his scalp, with his arms still feeding flames, Samuel Turner stomped before Gabe Henderson and peered upon the gunfighter through eyes that had been glazed by death.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Gabe trembled as he felt the breath of the dead man's words. His shattered right hand dangled at his side. His will could not raise the pistol clutched in his left hand. Samuel's face was terrible. Gabe could not turn away from the gaping wound his bullet had torn through that head when he first placed Samuel onto the ground. The dead were not meant to rise. Gabe possessed no weapon with which to combat those his pistols had already harvested.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Samuel Turner's incomprehensible words raged u
pon Gabe Henderson. Samuel's dry eyes burned in the firelight. Gabe shuddered as the dead's empty breath assailed him.
An instinct buried deep in Gabe Henderson's fear raised that heavy left hand as all of the risen Turner brothers joined their brother Samuel in that mantra the living could not understand.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Gabe Henderson had yet to fire a single shot as a member of that posse who came to the Turner cabin seeking revenge. He had not fired a shot into the black shadows that had surrounded him when the rest of the posse had emptied their rounds in panic. The first shot Gabe Henderson would take that night as the Turner brothers surrounded him would also be his last, and Gabe Henderson, though he had never considered himself a religious man, prayed that his bones would not stir from his grave and bellow so terribly after he planted himself into the ground.
Gabe's heavy left hand lifted a pistol a final time, and before Samuel Turner's broken face could again scream at him, the gunfighter squeezed his trigger and sent one of his own bullets shredding through his brain.
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