The men from camp grabbed their weapons and raced to defend themselves. Meriwether saw that there were indeed frightening-looking natives running toward them, but with an odd, jerky gait. At first, he thought the attackers numbered only a dozen or so, but more and more emerged from the shadowy trees…at least fifty or more. If Floyd had not alerted them, the silent, undead attackers would have swarmed in upon them, catching them unawares.
If these had been normal natives, Meriwether would have tried to talk to them, to negotiate a peaceful encounter, offer them some kind of gift to make peace. But they had already killed three of his men, even if they were thieves. This would be no peaceful encounter.
The ominously silent attackers stumbled and lurched toward camp. They did not move like living men, but like people in delirium, or even sleepwalkers. In a flash, he spotted something else. The other natives he had seen, both here in the west as well as those back in Virginia and the other colonies, had a similar type of clothes and ornaments to show the tribe they represented, showing they were a cohesive band. But these were men of all sorts, their clothing so varied as to be a hodgepodge. Some of them were naked, some wore loincloths, some wore skin capes or feather-studded cloaks all dirty and tattered.
And then the smell hit Meriwether: the rank, rotting smell of a corpse had been unburied a good while. It caught in his throat and gagged him. “To arms!” he called. “Man your stations. Get your weapons. Defend the camp.”
From the rocky rise where Floyd had led them, Meriwether could see the revenants before they could attack, some even before they came within range of the expedition’s rifles. As the first revenant approached, Bill Bratton let loose a shot, which struck the creature in the shoulder, but the native kept advancing, impervious to pain.
Floyd had got hold of a rifle and started shooting as the revenants approached, though like the others his bullets had no noticeable effect. Meriwether remembered the man had said one of the undead had a hole in the center of its chest. Therefore, even shooting them through the heart would only waste ammunition. Taking his own rifle, Meriwether aimed for the head.
His shot was true, and the revenant’s head exploded in a shower of gore. The lurching body fell. He immediately yelled to the rest of the men, “Shoot at the head! It’s the only way to put them down.”
As the men aimed at the heads of revenants who came within range and Clark shouted further encouragement, Meriwether climbed higher up the rock, where he could see the entire undead army. They came out from behind trees and around the rocks, with the front group acting as scouts. As those came under fire and dropped, the latter ranks hesitated and clustered just outside the range of the rifles.
Meriwether realized, though, that if they got closer and rushed the camp, even the guns of the expedition would not be able to put them all down. Just as he thought that, the assembled revenants did precisely that, gathered in a group that suddenly charged toward the defenders in a single mass, their smell and their wordless cry preceding them.
Meriwether’s men, to their great credit, stood their ground, shooting and swiftly felling a great many of the undead attackers, but from his clear vantage, he could see that it would not be enough. “Fall back! Captain Clark, get them to higher ground!”
The terrified men obeyed, scrambling up among the rocks and setting shooting stations in the higher promontory near Meriwether, while Clark brought up the rear. The relentless revenants were so close that their miasma was like a physical force, an insult in the mouth.
As Meriwether scrambled up the rock, a hand grabbed his leg—a skeletal hand. His rifle was loaded and slung over his arm but he had no way to take aim. He needed both hands to climb.
A rotting head with bits of skin and hair clinging in irregular patches to the skull grinned up at him, while milky-white, unseeing eyes fixed on him. He let go of the rock with his right hand and reached for his belt knife, remembering the salutary effect it had had back in Tavern Rock.
Before he could yank the knife free, the deathly hand pulled harder, and he had to scrabble for hold with his right hand again. The revenant’s teeth clacked together, ready perhaps to rip his flesh off his bones.
A shot echoed close by, and a bullet whistled past him. The revenant’s head exploded, splattering brown blood and ooze all over Meriwether’s legs. The smell was so overpowering he choked. The revenant tumbled away. Floyd and Clark reached down to grasp him, pulling him to safety.
He had no time to take a deep breath, even with the stench in the air, before he had to turn and take position and start shooting back.
The revenants were hampered by the cliff face, not nimble enough to climb it properly. Many of the undead creatures simply hurled themselves at the base of the rock, as if it would give way to a concerted onslaught. From above, the expedition men picked off many of them, but a few of the revenants—by accident, rather than through cleverness—stumbled upon the less sheer part of the cliff, and they began to scramble up.
Meriwether moved to concentrate on shooting those, as did his companion. He was glad to see that Captain Clark had not lost his marksmanship any more than Meriwether had. Each shot brought down a revenant, and more men joined in to maintain the barrage of fire.
The last undead creature managed to climb high enough to reach for Floyd as he reloaded his rifle, but he reacted immediately, like a man seeing a poisonous snake. With a great cry, he swung the rifle around and smashed the revenant’s skull with the stock, using all his might, until its head was battered in. The thing stopped moving, and slid down the rocks. And that was the last of them.
In the camp, strewn with the wreckage of half-rotted corpses, Meriwether surveyed the aftermath. He took a deep breath of the tainted air. “This is—I can’t believe what…what obscene magic would kill and then use the corpses in such an awful way.”
“One good thing,” Floyd said. “None of those revenants wore the clothing that Collins, Hall, and Willard wore. They must have stayed dead.”
“That is intriguing,” Clark said, coming up behind Meriwether. “And disquieting.”
Outside the camp, the men set about digging a mass grave to bury the rotting body parts. Meriwether and Clark helped with the initial digging and collecting of revenant parts, but while the other men finished the unsavory job, the two captains washed in the river to avoid being tracked by their smell, then they hurried in the increasing dawn light along to where Floyd had said the whiskey thieves were attacked. Meriwether felt sick. The three men would have been punished for their crime, but nothing so horrible as being torn apart by undead warriors. He still felt the grasping claws of the bony hand of the undead around his ankle, and he shuddered to think of what would have happened to him if he had slipped…
He and Clark did indeed find a whiskey barrel, which had been tapped. Two tin cups lay strewn on the ground, and they still smelled of whiskey. The ground was trampled and bloodied. “They were killed, that’s for sure,” Clark said.
But they found no trace of the three whiskey thieves, or their animated bodies. They explored, widening their search, but they found neither their own men nor any more undead warriors.
“Someone sent them against us,” Meriwether said, feeling the chill in his veins. “Maybe the same person or force that first sent the ravens to attack me.” He could not shake the feeling that like a marksman aiming shots to get the range, the evil force was perfecting a way to attack the expedition. “And I can’t help thinking the force wants to harm us because it senses that we have the capacity to destroy it.”
Clark gave him a half-surprised look. “I never considered it that way, but I hope you’re right—about us having the capacity to destroy it.”
They tramped deep into the trees that grew near the river, but they found no sign of the three missing men, nor any more undead natives.
At one point, Meriwether thought he heard someone singing, not distinct words, but an eerie tune. “Clark, do you hear? Is that ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’?”