Ghostwalkers Read Online Free PDF Page B

crapload of it in the Black Hills. Why aren’t you looking for it there?”
    â€œWould that I could,” said Looks Away glumly. “But for reasons I’ve already explained I am persona non grata there. There is a considerable price on my head.”
    â€œReally? Exactly how badly ‘dented’ was this Big Water fellow?”
    â€œMmmm … let’s just say that he won’t be fathering any children.”
    Grey winced. “Ouch.”
    â€œIn my own defense, he did start that fight.”
    â€œUh huh.” Grey sipped some whiskey. “You can’t get Sioux ghost rock. And…?”
    â€œAnd it doesn’t entirely matter,” said Looks Away. “As it turns out it isn’t necessarily how much ghost rock one has … but how you use it.”
    â€œDoes this get us around to a big blue explosion?”
    â€œIt does.”
    â€œWill I like the explanation once we get there?”
    â€œProbably not.”
    â€œAre you going to tell me anyway?”
    â€œIt seems likely.” Looks Away poured the last of the whiskey into their cups.
    â€œGuess I’d better hear it.”
    Looks Away nodded and took a breath to tell the rest of his tale.
    But suddenly he jerked erect, stared past Grey with huge, terrified eyes, and uttered a scream that split the desert darkness into a thousand jagged pieces.
    A moment later pale, blood-streaked hands reached out of the shadows and grabbed Grey Torrance and jerked him backward into the night.

 
    Chapter Seven
    Grey was dragged down and pulled across the rough ground by hands that were as cold as ice. He bellowed in rage and fear and punched upward over his head, trying to hit whoever had him. He felt his knuckles strike home, felt flesh and bone yield to his blows, heard the thud of each punch, but there was no cry of pain, no release from those hands.
    His hand flashed toward the handle of his pistol but his fingers only brushed the wood grips as the Colt fell into the dirt.
    Grey could hear Looks Away shrieking in terror behind him. Awful growls filled the air.
    Desperate and frightened, Grey flung himself backward from the hands that held him, trying to use force and dead weight to stop the pull, and for a moment he saw two figures bent over him. They were silhouetted against the stars but the firelight glowed on the edges of their features. Men. Two of them, dressed in torn clothes, hatless, their hair stringy, their faces dead pale in the bad light.
    Their eyes …
    Empty.
    Totally empty.
    Not like the hollowed sockets of skulls, but empty of all human light, all knowing, all intelligence. Looking into those eyes was like looking into polished glass.
    Their skin was ruined. Slashed and torn. Blood was caked on their cheeks and jaws.
    But the wounds did not bleed.
    The blood looked old. Dried.
    Their flesh hung in streamers and it should have bled.
    Should have.
    Should have.
    Fear stabbed itself through the front of Grey’s chest and clamped icy fingers around his heart.
    He knew these men.
    For one terrible, fractured moment Grey was somewhere else entirely. For a stalled heartbeat of time he was not in the Nevada desert at all, but on the muddy banks of Sunder’s Ford, deep in the heart of the Confederacy. In that moment the faces leaning over him were those of Corporal James and Sergeant Howell.
    They were the faces of dead men.
    Of men Grey had failed long ago and left behind.
    The ghostly faces of the spirits who dogged his backtrail. The accusing faces of the specters he saw in dreams every night of his life. The ones a fortune teller in Abilene warned him were following and who would haunt him until they caught up with him and dragged him down to Hell.
    That’s what he saw in one dreadful moment.
    And then the moment passed.
    He was instantly back in the desert and these were different men. Not James and Howell. Not old friends whose blood was on Grey’s soul.
    No.
    This