Chapter Two: The Next Exciting Chapter of the Scarlet Saint, Gatekeeper of the Underworld!

THE WORLD WILL DIE SCREAMING

Starring Darwin Flynn, the Scarlet Saint

by Phil Bledsoe

Chapter Two: The Mountain Goats of Madness - 2011 Pulp Ark Award Winner for "Best Short Story"

After several miles of walking through the tunnel under the Carpathian Mountains, and having whistled uncountable refrains of “The Rifles of the IRA,” Darwin Flynn, also known as the Scarlet Saint found the first traces of wan daylight beginning to intrude on his vision. Accustomed as his eyes had become to the darkness, cut but by a narrow flashlight beam, the merest hint of illumination was almost painful. As the floor of the tunnel began to ascend towards the surface, he noted the debris of past occupants. He had entered the tunnels and caves under the mountains in search of the lair of a ferocious beast that preyed on the nearby countryside, but he had yet to find it. Instead, he had stumbled across an inexplicable set of circumstances that could only be the first gangrenous fingertips of a truly cold and evil hand grasping at the throat of the world. He could not help but suspect that the monster he was hunting was somehow tied to the bizarre tableau he had witnessed in the cavern, in a way that would only be revealed through further unspeakable horrors and abominations.

The debris he now encountered had little to do with his investigations; it was evidence of the tunnel's use by Romanian freedom fighters hiding from the Axis decades earlier. A few corroded boxes of ammunition stood sentry over cigarette butts, rusted canteens, binoculars, and maps yellowed beyond usefulness. These relics looked undisturbed, as did the dust settled across them. The beast's tracks had been clear where he had entered the cave on the other side of the mountains. This place was untouched by anything living since the fall of der Fuhrer. He had marched almost ten miles underground and climbed into and out of a small pocket of Hell itself only to discover that he had lost the trail.

“Well, if anybody has any advice now would be a good time to share it,” he said, rubbing his temples with his gloved fingers. Entombed within the outer layers of his brain's frontal lobe was a finely boat-tailed and deburred bullet of finest solid silver, exactly 7.62 millimeters at its widest point. In some strange way, this deadly projectile had not only failed in its intended purpose by leaving him alive, but it had also opened up a pathway to the realm of the dead that permitted him to communicate with and channel the spirits of his deceased ancestors. Darwin's ancestry was a veritable Who's Who of history's misfits and heretics. From Greek philosopher Heraclitus the Obscure (who had passed down a piece of preserved sheepskin that became the Scarlet Saint's fleur-de-lis mask) to a controversial Belgian quantum physicist who became the last man to die in a sword duel in France during the 1920s, Darwin's progenitors lived cursed lives under the looming shadow of supernatural evil and just plain bad luck. Darwin's role was to break the cycle of the family's many curses, to close the gateways between the living and the dead, man and beast, spirit and matter, and science and magick. He was to set the world back on the course designated by nature before the greed and hatred of mankind had derailed it with selfish delving into the darker powers of the occult.

“Well, laddie,” chirped Darwin's long-dead drunkard heathen of a grandfather, Buckley Flynn, “you do seem to have veered off of one path and onto another. You could waste more shoe-leather walkin' all the way back the way ye came, or you could follow the path laid our right before yer eyes and try to do some good.”

“Good old Buckley, always following the path of least resistance, right?” Darwin said. “Hey, Buckley, have you noticed the new equipment?” In his strong right hand, Darwin hefted an ironwood walking staff stained in a deep, dark shade of red and fitted with a leather carrying strap. It had been a parting gift from his Romanian guide, Razvan, and Darwin felt that an old single-stick expert like Buckley might have some appreciation for it. Buckley's spirit circled Darwin's mind hungrily, and the craving for cheap whiskey clawed at the back of Darwin's throat. Darwin felt his hand move, almost against his accord, testing the weight and balance of the stick. He made a few lunges with it, some feints and parries along the cluttered tunnel.

“Not bad, boyo, not bad,” Buckley conceded. “It's no shillelagh, but for a piece of driftwood picked up on a foreign shore it ain't half bad.”

“Always the optimist, weren't you, gramps? Anybody have any more sage advice while I'm listening?” There was the usual cacophony of murmurs from far back in the bloodline: the ancestors so distant that Darwin could barely communicate with them. It took hours to bring their voices up to a level that he could hear, and frequently they were still incomprehensible. He wondered if the modes of human conversation had changed too much over the centuries, or if they were harder to reach because they were further removed from the world of the living.

Trusting his own gut had never been Darwin's strong suit. In the days before he gained a direct line to the talkative dead, his instincts had been unconsciously guided by their influence without his knowledge. Consequently, he had never really developed the habit of following his own feelings. Weighing his options, he decided he could do more good by leaving the tunnel and exploring the area than backtracking all the way to his point of origin and starting over. Besides, his local guide Razvan would have long since departed the area and taken the horses with him. Darwin had brought with him enough supplies to subsist for several more days, and climbing equipment that could get him down the mountains easily enough. Picturing in his mind the image of the decrepit, ramshackle castle on top of the very mountain under which he had traveled, he thought how that gear could also get him up the mountain quite handily. If his provisions ran low, he knew how to forage; he could take small game with his pistols if he had to, and there was plenty of snow on the upper faces of the mountain that could provide drinkable water in a pinch.

His mind made up, he took a couple hours to rest and eat a few bites of jerky and hardtack. Flipping open his pocket watch, he used the concave inner surface of the lid to catch sunlight from the mouth of the tunnel. Focusing the light onto some scraps of decayed paper to ignite them, and then adding fragments of wood from some of the crates, he got a small fire started and heated water in a tin cup. Adding freeze-dried coffee crystals, he made his first real cup of coffee in days and took the time to savor it. He found that a robust, strong cup of coffee effectively made his own thought processes “loud” enough to drown out the distractions of all the others clamoring to be heard inside his skull. Thus refreshed, the Scarlet Saint checked his gear and discarded anything he could do without. He had emptied a small bandolier of parachute flares while inside the great underground cavern of the slug creatures and their undead jailers, so it and the flare gun were discarded. His lantern was unlikely to be of any help above ground, and was nearly out of fuel at any rate. He had expended a few pitons along the way, an unfortunate necessity when spelunking in a full shirt of steel chain mail and an opera cloak.

Stepping out of the cave with the aid of his ironwood walking stick, the Saint drew one of his modified Mauser pistols from his belt and surveyed the area. No warning signs of hostile of evil thoughts intruded on his sensitive mind. This did not mean that he was safe, however; many a creature that walked the Earth with evil purposes had no capacity for conscious thought. Darwin checked the chamber of his weapon and tapped the buttplate of the magazine against the top of his stick to ensure that it was properly seated. He already had the safety off, and he toyed with the selector switch as he debated whether to set it to automatic fire. His pistols were of the less common “Schnellfeuer” variety that could double as a submachine gun when necessary; the drawbacks were that they were meant to be mounted to a shoulder stock for better control and fully automatic fire ate ammunition like candy. Handling the old German sidearms one-handed was easy enough (he often wondered why such an easily aimed and ergonomic weapon ever went out of production) with single shots, but he hesitated to give up accuracy in the name of spraying the air with ten or twenty rounds at a time. He had plenty of use for the feature under certain circumstances, but out here he was too limited in his supply of ammo to waste it.

“Good thinkin',” muttered Gutshot Pete from the cheap seats of Darwin's brain. Pete had been a gunfighter in the 1850s and 60s, and unlike many such men of his era was truly skilled with his pistols. It was his steady hand and eagle eye that guided Darwin's aim most of the time, and he liked to be able to put his shots just where he wanted them. He allowed some interference from some of the later veterans of the family, especially when it came to the technical aspects of modern weapons, but he felt strongly that shooting was shooting whether it was with a crossbow or a rail gun. The fact is that Pete's reflexes were fast enough to accurately place the first three or four rounds of an automatic burst exactly where he wanted, but after that things got a little iffy. Besides, he opposed it on principle.

Darwin covered the next several yards out of the cave with his gun held at the ready, muzzle tracking from side to side like a dowsing rod trying to find water. Nothing greeted him, and the way over the rocks became more difficult so he holstered the weapon. Reaching behind him, he brought out a second section of the walking stick and snapped it into place on top of the first, turning it from a four-foot cudgel into a seven-foot shepherd's crook. The added length improved his leverage and balance over the rocks, and the crook at the top was handy for reaching handholds beyond the length of his arm. The cave had been to cramped to use the full length of the staff that Razvan had given him at the start of the journey, but now Darwin couldn't help but chuckle about it: intentionally or otherwise, the “saintly” aspect of Darwin's ironic masked persona was perfectly complemented by staff that resembled a bishop's crosier. The staff was all the more practical for him for its attachment of a leather strap for the wrist or hand that prevented it being dropped, and a longer sling that permitted it to be carried rifle-style behind the shoulder when not needed.

The simple pleasure taken in a well-crafted tool and weapon was soon spoiled by a sound on the rocks above. Bracing himself, the Scarlet Saint's hand went back to his pistol. Gutshot Pete cautioned him to hold his ground and breathe slowly while his great-uncle Fermin, a veteran of My Lai, urged him to immediately fire all his rounds in order to flush the enemy into the open. Darwin silenced both of them and took his hand away from his gun, instead picking up a stone about the size of a small egg. Carefully lobbing it over the rocks in the direction of the sound, Darwin thought he heard it strike something else before it clattered against the rocks. A phlegmy snort followed, accompanied by the scrape of hooves. Mountain goats, he thought. A bleat, like air escaping some desiccated bladder in the decay-engorged, putrid entrails of a demon's carcass, echoed in the air above him.

As panic swept through the spirits of Darwin's less battle-tested ancestors, the ectoplasmic corps of soldiers, frontiersmen, crusaders, and killers formed ranks to assist him. Gutshot Pete's callused hands sleeved themselves in Darwin's nerve endings and one of the Mausers cleared leather without so much as a sound. Darwin crouched low to preserve his balance on the uneven terrain and began circling to one side to flank whatever beast he let out the hellish call. The black tip of a horn came in view, and Darwin shot it reflexively. The horn splintered, eliciting another monstrous wail and bringing the goat bounding over the edge of the higher rocks. Its eyes were rheumy red, crying mucous tears while foamy spittle rimmed its gaping mouth and flared nostrils. Unlike the sedately marching corpses he had met in the lower tunnels, this goat bore the classic features of a true zombie.

“And a vicious one at that,” chimed in K.L.R. Whatley, Professor of Esoteric Studies, who had apparently had brief, secret affairs with both Darwin's maternal great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother while each of them were students at the Northern Massachusetts Young Ladies' Academy for Religious Education twenty years apart. Darwin didn't like to think whether Whatley counted as one ancestor or two (nor what that meant about his addle-brained and short-lived grandfather), but the man knew the occult and if he counted this a dangerous zombie then that's just what it was. Pete aimed, and Darwin fired.

The goat's deft footing as it charged down the mountainside was a grotesque parody of its gracefulness in life. One hoof dangled limply from a hind leg and another left smears of clotted blood wherever it touched the ground. The first brass-jacketed nine-millimeter bullet creased the goat's forehead and skidded harmlessly off of the thick bone of its brow. A second slug followed a nearly identical path and Darwin began to realize just how dangerous a goat was as a zombie. With the thick skull plates around the base of the horns, a shot to the brain would be nearly impossible. Time to improvise, he thought.

As the goat charged, he stood his ground until the last possible instant. Spinning on the ball of his foot, he swung his body out of the path of the horns and brought his staff down on the thing's neck. Using the crook at the top of the staff, he trapped the goat's neck and pulled it against the muzzle of the gun. Flipping the automatic fire selector, the Scarlet Saint fired the remaining seventeen rounds in just over a second, severing the goat's spine just behind the head. So much for conserving ammo, thought Darwin and Gutshot Pete. As the zombie goat collapsed, motionless now that its diseased brain had ceased to control its animated dead flesh, Darwin released his walking staff to reload his pistol. He knew that such a cacophony of gunfire was sure to attract unwanted attention. As he knelt to examine the corpse, the echoing bleat of another undead goat confirmed his fears.

Looking up at the rocks above, he saw that the sound had not been an echo at all. He was looking into the maniacal eyes of four more zombie mountain goats. He knew that they could smell fresh meat and worse, fresh brains; he also knew for a fact that zombies of the traditional brain-eating variety seemed to find his scent particularly enticing. Perhaps the altered state of his brain made it a delicacy to the undead. Perhaps there was some unexplainable zombie communication network that warned them about how many of their kind he had already laid to rest. Perhaps, he preferred to think, the family jinx just gave him a really tasty smell.

“Bullets are becoming tedious,” he said to himself as the goats pawed the ground in anticipation. The pistol slid back into its holster and his gun hand opened the flap of his belt pouch to expose a deck of tarot cards. Darwin's late uncle, the Magisterial Mysteriouso, had once been the greatest card-handler in the world of stage magic; Mysteriouso's brother (and another late uncle) had been Montague “Three-Card Monty” McCallister, a deft card-handler of another stripe. A handful of past fortune-tellers also had a feel for shuffling, dealing, and occasionally palming the tarot. The larger, heavier cards of the tarot lent themselves perfectly to Mysteriouso's signature trick: card-throwing. This situation called for more than a mere slice through the windpipe, however. Zombies didn't breathe, and wouldn't bleed to death if their jugulars were severed. Their skulls had already proven too thick for head shots, which left the base of the neck and the spinal cord itself as targets.

Even through the protective leather of his fencing gauntlets, he could feel the cards as he slid them free of the pouch. He held three of them together and bent them with his fingertips, almost letting them flex back to their original shape before tossing them towards the man-eating goats. The cards spun with an eerie sound through the mountain air, sailing over the goat's heads. The bend he had imparted to their shape caused the cards to double-back on their own flight path in mid-air, just past the targets. The cards swooped in behind the goat's heads, and two struck true, wedging between vertebrae and neatly snipping the spinal cords. The third dug deep into the base of the skull, but stopped short of hitting the brain stem.

Enraged, the wounded goat charged and led his only surviving companion with him. With inhuman speed, the Scarlet Saint slapped the tarot cards back into their carrier and drew his pistol again. In desperation, he fired from the hip and blew their eyes out. Zombies could follow prey accurately with only their sense of smell, but not well enough to sense movement in mid-charge. Sidestepping their blind assault, Darwin fired at their legs as they passed. The sound of snapping bone echoed across the Carpathians and the two undead creatures were flung face-first to the ground. Darwin planted one heel on the back of each of their necks and used his shepherd's crook to wrench their heads backwards and snap their necks. With the threat passed he sat down, exhausted.

As was often the case, in a moment of need he had called on extraordinary strength. Not only could he combine the physical strength of several ancestors at once, but he had more than one circus strongman and competitive weightlifter to draw upon. The downside was that Darwin, for all his hours of dynamic tension and Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, did not have the body of a circus strongman and there was always a price to pay after the fact. His muscles throbbed and spasmed until he could barely lay his gun down beside him. He grasped his staff with both hands and dug its tip into the rocky ground, trying to still the convulsions rippling through him. The ghosts of several dead drug addicts wailed inside his head, begging for relief from the pain. Biting the cuff of his gauntlet to keep from crying out, he pushed through and weathered the storm. He was sore and stiff and would have preferred not to spend the rest of the day hiking up a mountain, but he could walk again.

Relying more on his staff than before, he climbed over the crest of rocks from which the goats had attacked him. There he found steel cylindrical canisters missing their labels, with small holes punctured in the sides. From the look of it, the goats had been chewing the labels off to get at the glue underneath when their teeth had inadvertently breached the canisters. Whatever was in them had made the goats into walking corpses with a craving for the flesh of the living. Without the labels it was impossible to know what the canisters had contained or where they had come from. The only remaining mark on the cans was a bright blue stripe around either end. Cautiously, Darwin leaned down over the cans and smelled them. Whatever was in them didn't smell like anything he had encountered before, and he didn't relish getting any closer to the substance. He proceeded uphill.

The slope of the mountain path ended at a plateau, hemmed in by boulders and outcroppings. Using the reflective inside of his pocket watch as a mirror, Darwin peered around the side of a large rock and saw buildings, and then the wing of an airplane. The plateau was large enough for a small airstrip, and he doubted there was any other way to reach it besides laboriously traveling through the caves and up the mountainside on foot as he had done. He watched for several minutes to be sure there was no sign of movement, then reached out with his mind. He was greeted by a disjointed clamor of mental screams, bloodthirsty and violent but utterly incoherent. They were a multitude, with hardly a higher brain function among them. The only reason he could sense them was that they were so indescribably loud. The edges of his awareness were also tainted with the combined flavor of paint fumes and ozone that meant there were large quantities of various metals close by. The planes would account for some of that, but there had to be something else in those buildings.

The Scarlet Saint crossed the open ground between his hiding place and the buildings quickly. As he got closer, he began to see movement past the buildings, around the planes, but momentary inspection showed that it was more of the same undead that he seen in the caves. They posed no threat, since they weren't even aware of his presence and they seemed only capable of mechanically carrying out designated tasks. Flattening himself against the back wall of one of the prefabricated structures, he looked around the corner to see the zombie-like slaves loading canisters like the ones he'd seen earlier into brackets under the wing of one plane. The cans had the same blue stripe at either end, and he noticed a matching blue stripe on the plane's wing.

Slipping stealthily between the buildings, he found an open door and stepped inside. Stacks of canisters marked with a red stripe were lined up along the walls. There were different sizes, and inspection showed that each size represented different contents according to the labels. All the information given on the labels was the chemical name, the volume in the canister, and the chemical's degree of concentration. There were anabolic steroids, hallucinogens, stimulants, and an anti-coagulant. This last was hard to identify, but Darwin's own late father had been a doctor and he was able to recognize the chemical name of a drug that had just been in the early testing stages during his career. All of these substances were diluted in such a way that they could be aerosolized in massive volumes; the thought that they were being loaded onto the wing of a waiting cargo plane filled Darwin with dread. Looking out a small window, he saw that there were three planes lines up on the airstrip. The first in line had a red stripe, the second blue, and the third green. He speculated that the color code and the different sized canisters may have been necessary in ordering the zombie servitors to load them properly. Making his way to the next building, he found the blue canisters like the ones the goats had chewed open. These blue striped cans contained either tetrodotoxin (blowfish venom) or cultures of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease) and toxoplasmosa gondii (brain parasites).

Darwin searched his equipment in vain for some form of explosives, hoping for a means to destroy the stockpile. He knew that blowfish toxin, along with disassociative drugs like datura, was considered a component in Haitian zombie potions. Mad Cow and toxoplasmosa both produced zombie-like states in animals as well. The three of them combined, and administered to a human population would mean a zombie plague on a scale unforseen by even the most far-fetched parapsychologists. He had not come equipped for this kind of threat. He had been expecting to hunt and kill a single rampaging monster in the wild, not face a nightmare that would have worldwide ramifications. Hoping to find something more useful to help destroy the facility, he moved on to the third building.

The canisters designated for the third plane were unmarked. Having lost his patience, Darwin wrenched one open and nearly heaved at the smell. It was the same viscous, gelatinous substance he had seen being harvested from slug-like monstrosities in the cavern deep under the mountain. He had seen it used to produce the mindless, non-violent zombies that now loaded the planes. Whatever diabolical mind was behind this plan, they obviously intended to produce a huge number of zombies in a short time. Standard-issue zombie traits would be imparted by the hallucinogens on the first plane mixed with the toxins and disease cultures on the second; the slug juice from the cavern seemed to impart near invincibility to the creatures it raised from the dead. The stimulants and steroids would undoubtedly produce much stronger, more violently inclined zombies, and the anti-coagulant seemed to be a particularly gruesome way to ensure the subjects died in a timely manner since it would (in such high concentrations) cause anyone exposed to it to bleed freely from every orifice.

There was more to this plot than he was seeing, but he was too disgusted to think about it clearly. He knew that aviation fuel wasn't flammable enough to use it to blow up the planes or the buildings, and he saw nothing else handy. Burning down the buildings might have an effect on some of the canisters, but it would just as likely produce a smoke cloud that drifted down the mountainside and spread the very substances he was trying to destroy. He had to stop the planes taking off until he could come back with the means to vaporize the canisters for good; he seized on the spirits of a handful of legitimate scientists in his family tree and put them to work devising plans for an improvised atomic explosive device. A planeload of thermite might do the trick, but he didn't want to take any chances.

Outside, the zombies went about the task of loading the canister into the sprayers underneath the planes' wings. He already knew that the normal shot to the brain did nothing to these creatures, and he doubted that beheading would work either. Rather than trying to stop the loading process, he simply walked to each plane and fired several shots into its engine. Heavy blows from his staff bent the rudders and wing flaps until he was sure the planes could not take off. Checking the cockpits, he saw complicated electronic instruments with which he was unfamiliar as a pilot.

“Radio controls,” a voice said in his forebrain. “These craft were to be unmanned.” A distant relation with a background in the OSS and CIA had so far remained nameless and seldom spoke, but he knew his business.

“That makes this even easier,” Darwin said, shooting the controls. He was beginning to hear voices from the far edge of the plateau, opposite the end from which he had approached. It sounded like moaning and screaming. Putting two and two together, it occurred to him why he had sensed so many tormented, violent minds when he first arrived: if this was a zombie manufacturing operation, there were bound to be a few of them around besides the mummified servants he had spotted so far. With all of the different means on hand to create the walking dead, Darwin did not relish the thought of investigating those noises but he knew that all of the damage he had inflicted was bound to attract someone's attention. He reloaded his pistols and wiped off the gunshot residue from the frames and the bolts that had already accumulated, then he checked the extra weapons concealed in the pistols' hollow stocks: spring-loaded switchblade knives, retractable wire garrotes, and single-shot rimfire derringers. Whatever genius had constructed these weapons had certainly believed in preparing for every contingency. Not unlike me, Darwin thought as he also checked his tarot cards and flexed his bullwhip. He swung the weighted edge of his opera cloak a few times to warm up for using it defensively, then polished the black iron bracers he wore that had once been manacles aboard a slave ship, then tightened the buckles on the sides of his homemade chain mail shirt of stainless steel and sterling silver alloy.

Walking cautiously towards the far side of the airfield, with his staff in one hand and a pistol in the other, the Scarlet Saint prepared for the worst. A large hangar for the three planes blocked his view as he walked towards the sound of voices. The mummified zombie slaves that had been loading the planes began to stop what they were doing as leaking fluid from the engines began to hinder their work. He wasn't worried about them; he knew from his experience in the caves that when their efforts were blocked they would simply stand motionless, presumably until their master told them otherwise. He was beginning to understand more about what he was up against: whoever was behind this had perfected a unique means of manufacturing undead that were completely obedient and nearly unstoppable, yet totally unaware of their surroundings and nonviolent. If the planes took off and sprayed the Romanian countryside in order according to how they had been lined up on the runway, then people would die horribly and rise again as drug-fueled super-zombies! They would become a hybrid of all of the worst qualities of the various zombie plagues, but made from corpses that had been pumped full of stimulants and steroids before being bled to death. It would be an undead infestation such as the world had not witnessed in centuries. Creating such a large number seemed almost counterproductive, though. If an entire population was converted, it would be that much easier for the military to intervene without fear of civilian casualties. Zombies were troublesome on an individual basis, but planes armed with napalm and miniguns would have little difficulty with them, and infantry could mop up stragglers.

Rounding the side of the hangar, the Scarlet Saint's mind raced through these possibilities as more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. He found himself facing a cattle corral, guarded by a lone man. Of course, Darwin thought. Mad Cow disease wasn't something you could just grow in a petri dish and keep on ice; you would need a steady supply of infected cows to harvest it when you were ready to suspend it in a serum and weaponize it. The agonized cries made more sense until Darwin's father, the doctor, whispered that infected cows would never sound like that. The Scarlet Saint's piercing eyes narrowed behind his leather mask as he saw what kind of cattle were stumbling around mindlessly in the corral. Dozens of human beings, their features distorted by pain and madness as their brains slowly dissolved from the infection, roamed aimlessly. Several were chewing on themselves, and many other showed signs of mutilation, self-inflicted and otherwise. The guard stepped forward.

“I see you have found us, my pets and I,” he said in a voice that carried the telltale trill of barely contained insanity. “I wondered when you would finish with the planes and come to find us.” He was attired in Romanian folk garb, with a fur hat and wool trousers against the cold mountain air and a loose white shirt under a heavily embroidered coat. A well-maintained rifle leaned against the gate of the corral behind him, but his hand was resting on the hilt of a long, curved sword at his hip, a traditional kilij.

“Why didn't you stop me?” Darwin asked.

“I care not for the master's grand schemes. He can have the world for all I care. I am only here to stand watch over my flock. The one who was to stand this post escaped, ran into the caves.”

“The beast?” Darwin said.

“Yes! One of the master's abominations! Now I stand here before you, a true and perfect man, made in the image of God.” Darwin noticed the reason why the man seemed to have abandoned his gun in favor of the sword: his left hand appeared to have been chewed off, which also explained why he was showing such clear signs of irrationality. Darwin even thought he could see one of the infected people in the corral chewing on it absentmindedly.

“I can't let this continue, you know,” Darwin said. “I won't stop with the planes. Your `children' need to be put out of their misery before they can be used to do any harm to anyone else, and your master is next.” The swordsman shrugged.

“To Hell with my master, but you will not touch my children.” In a flash, he crossed the space between them and brought the sword around in a wicked draw-cut aimed at Darwin's neck. The combination of hostile intentions and rapidly approaching steel triggered Darwin's psychic radar and his left arm came up to block the strike with his staff. The attack was followed instantly by another and Darwin found himself pushed back as he awkwardly maneuvered the seven-foot shepherd's crook with one hand. Pride and instinct won out and the Scarlet Saint holstered his gun.

“We'll do this the old-fashioned way if you like,” he said, “but you and your flock won't see tomorrow's sunrise!” The ironwood staff took several deep cuts from the whirling blade before Darwin smashed his opponent across the bridge of the nose and sent him reeling. When the sword flew next, it met one of the iron bracers and struck sparks. Darwin gripped the edge of his cloak and whipped it at the swordsman's face, blinding him. The crooked head of Darwin's staff hooked the back of the swordsman's foot and lifted, throwing the man onto his back. A bootheel to the sternum, then to the windpipe, and a steel-capped toe to the temple ended the madman's threat. A bullet to the brain ensured that no zombie resurrection would be possible. Darwin gave the same mercy to the twenty lost souls roaming the corral before taking the swordsman's blade and systematically dismembering the servitors tasked with loading the planes. The kilij and its scabbard fit nicely into one of the few vacant spots on the Scarlet Saint's gun belt, and the many duelists and backstabbers among his ancestors rejoiced.

Beyond the corral was a road, winding its way up the mountain towards the distant castle. The origin of the beast he had come here to hunt lay at the terminus of that road, as well as the twisted mind behind all of the evil he had so far encountered. Whoever this “master” was and whatever Luciferian game he was playing, he would soon have to contend with Darwin Flynn, the Scarlet Saint. The Saint's ancestors had been cursed, scapegoated, and victimized by the unholy and the supernatural for centuries and Darwin, the last of their bloodline was their tool of redemption. He was the Gatekeeper of the Underworld, walking the Earth for the sole purpose of closing those gates that had allowed evil to plague mankind.

TO BE CONTINUED...