smile.
—Well, then. We’ll see. We’ll see how things are, I guess. I always said I never needed you.
He crept forward in the dark, groping with his left hand, holding his weapon outstretched with his right. Stones shifted beneath him. All he knew was that he was heading uphill. He proceeded through what felt like hours of darkness.
It became obvious that the objects that rolled and snapped under his boots with a noise like gunfire were bones, and lots of them. He didn’t need to see to know that. The acid stink of the monster’s spoor grew worse and worse, and behind it, there was the smell of rotting meat.
As he proceeded uphill, a sliver of yellow moon emerged from behind the peaks, like a door cracking open. Its light picked out details, made shapes out of the empty dark. He walked on a carpet of bones: mostly animal, some human, many too misshapen to say. The bones lay in a wide circle marked out by a dozen sharp toothlike rocks. And a patch of darkness that looked at first like a huge jagged rock shrugged its shoulders, swung itself round to face Creedmoor and opened two great yellow eyes like an Engine’s fog lamps.
It snapped out a dark gray shape at him—something that might have been a clawed arm or a long snapping jaw—but he’d already leapt back, shouting.
—Shit—
And he stumbled as some poor dead bastard’s rib cage cracked beneath him and he fell sliding in the bones. Another limb, and he was pretty sure it was a limb this time, swung through the space where his head had been. He crawled. Its thick glistening tail whipped out and scattered bones all around him and slammed into his side with the force of an exploding rocket. He went flying. He lost his hat and, more important, his gun. He landed on his feet, breathing heavily.
—Shit. Shit. I’ve changed my mind.
He was in terrible pain but not dead or even crippled; so his strength had not entirely left him yet. Was it enough?
He picked up a thighbone and held it like a weapon.
The creature stood fifteen feet away from him. Its huge body blocked the moon, and so its details were impossible to make out. It reared up on a long cobralike tail, thick as a tree trunk; but there was also a suggestion of several skinny shuffling legs, many-jointed like the legs of an insect or the branches of a tree, of uncertain number, which might or might not have been functional. Its eyes were huge and yellow and empty. Its shoulders were spined. Behind them opened out what looked like wings—diaphanous, ragged, the left far larger than the right. Creedmoor considered the wings irrelevant, but tried very hard to count the bastard’s claws: he couldn’t. Its scales were not precisely gray—rather, it was no color at all, as if all the misguided energy of creation had gone into its spines and claws and teeth, and nothing had been left over for mundane considerations like what fucking color it was—it hurt the eyes even to look at it.
The whole huge contraption whirled about its axis like a nightmare calliope, and its mouth or something not entirely unlike a mouth opened, and emitted a scream like a woman in terror, which was a sound that Creedmoor had never cared for.
It rushed forward. Creedmoor ran to meet it. He leapt and jammed the thighbone into one of its eyes—the eye shattered like glass and went dim. One of the monster’s many claws slashed Creedmoor’s leg open to the bone. Its mouth descended on him, but he’d already flung himself to one side, where he rolled in bones and ended up lying on his back. He scrabbled among the bones and his hand found his gun.
—Thank you. It fired.
—Thank you thank you shit thank you.
He blew two ragged holes in the monster’s torso. The moon’s yellow light spilled through them. The monster bled nothing at all, or possibly smoke, or possibly yellow light. It kept standing. Creedmoor fired again, and the monster’s other eye went dark and its head changed shape. He pulled the trigger a fourth time, and nothing happened.
The monster surged forward, and Creedmoor slithered back, but too slowly, and it gripped his left shoulder with one clawed arm and lifted him and closed its jaws around his other shoulder and bit down. Its teeth worked like mechanical knitting needles, stripping flesh, cracking bone. Creedmoor’s shoulder was full of agony, but