Read Online Deadman's Crossing by Joe R. Lansdale - Free Book Online Page B

bit into his head, started slurping at the brain. Well, I’ll tell you, I was up then and running. I heard one of my buddies scream up there on the hill, then after that I was running so fast through the trees, getting hit in the face by limbs and such, I didn’t hear nor notice nothing. It come to me that I might have been better to have grabbed up my horse, but I don’t remember if it was even around no more. Good as it was about being trained to stand, I had either forgotten it, or it had run off at first sight of that thing comin’ out of the ground.
    “I ran and I ran, thought I was making pretty good time and doing well, then I seen a shadow moving through the woods, and pretty soon it was everywhere. It made me feel sick and weak, like I’d walked into a cloud of poison. Then there was these other shadows that come out of the darker shadow, and they moved, and they changed, took shape. It was them hairy things, kind of wolf-like they were. I got my brains back for a moment, started firing my six gun, but it wasn’t doing no good. I’d have done about as much good to try and stop them by peeing on them. But I didn’t even have that kind of ammunition, having already peed all over myself from being so scared. And I guess, since I’ve gone this far, got to say I messed myself too. I was so scared my goosebumps had goosebumps.
    “I ran and ran, then come to a break in the woods, climbed to the top of a hill, and then I heard them growl, and they was on me. It happened faster than you can skin your foreskin back for a soapin’.
    “But they didn’t kill me. Not right off. They slapped me around, bit on me some. Finally one of them threw me over his shoulder like I was a sack of taters, carried me off. I tell you, I was one scared cowpoke. Didn’t know if they was gonna eat me or stick their peckers in my asshole. What they did was carry me to the woods and they brought me back to where we had been, up the top of the graveyard. As they carried me I tried to take note of things, see where I was goin’, thinking maybe I stayed alert I had a chance. But there wasn’t no chance. They got to the graveyard, they threw me down and one of them stood there with his big paw on my chest, the claws cutting into me like knives, and the others took to digging. Down on their knees, digging like dogs, or wolves, or whatever they was, and soon they had a big hole dug out and they pulled this big run of bones out of the ground, and yanked a long, carved stick out of between its forehead, which wasn’t nothin’ but a skull, and while I’m lookin’, I seen the moonlight come down on that head and I seen that hole in the head seal up, then I seen flesh start to run over them bones, and then I seen it get pink with blood and the chest start to breathe, and then hair started to grow, in patches at first, then finally all over, and when it was thick as wild prairie grass, the thing sat up, and finally stood up. It was a male, that was obvious. Male like all the others, cause the thing that let me know they was all male was hanging out for all to see, long as a razor strap, thick as my ankle. And then it looked right at me.
    “Well now, this is the ugly part, and I start to almost feel humanly sick when I think about it, even though I’m deader than Custer and his whole outfit. Still feel the fear, dead or not, thinking back on it. This thing, it come at me slow and easy, pulled its lips back on that long old snout and showed me all them teeth, and I went to screamin’, just like a little girl who’s seen a spider. And boy, that thing liked that. It pulled those lips back even more and spit started dripping off its teeth, and then it crouched like, and finally I realized I was screamin’, cause at first I was just doin’ it, not knowing I was, you know, and I heard the quality of it, and I thought, well, ‘You go to hell,’ I ain’t screamin’ another sound. And I shut my mouth and went quiet and made to go like a