Skin Medicine by Tim Curran Page A

this?”
    The beast pressed her to him like a long lost lover and she could smell the spicy, raw tang of its bloody pelt, felt herself being swallowed by those huge yellow-green eyes full and leering like sacrificial moons. Loops of bloody drool dangled from the gnashing teeth…and a voice…not human nor animal, but somewhere in-between said, “It’s the skin medicine, ma’am, it does things to a man…”
    And the voice became a growling and she was crushed in the beast’s arms, her bones snapping, her insides pressed to jelly and foaming from her mouth. Then the teeth sank in her throat, nearly severing her head in a single bite
     
    ***
    Downstairs, it was certainly no better.
    The beasts were clawing and chomping, severing limbs and opening bellies. Bones were splintering beneath powerful jaws and flesh was divorced from quivering meat. And the screams of the dying were only eclipsed by the howling of their tormentors and the firing of guns. The air was thick with smoke and mists of red.
    Everywhere there was blood and wreckage and bodies and things that could have been men but were not men, devouring and eating and tearing. It looked like some grisly scene from a medieval hell.
    A whore trying to leap away over the dead and dying was bowled over as a decapitated head struck her in the back.
    A man crying out for Jesus and Mary was battered senseless with his own dismembered limbs.
    Two of the Hide-Hunters, laughing with hideous mirth, gored a gambler to death one bite at a time.

A miner named Danny Smith crawled on his hands and knees through a sea of blood, half out of his mind. His Colt was in his hand and he saw the beasts and saw people shooting at them and often just hitting one another. He saw a window explode inward in a shower of glass and the darkness poured in, became a clutch of clawed hands that dragged two miners out into the night. What seemed seconds later, one of them was tossed back into the barroom, tumbling across the floor in a heap. He was bloody and scratched, his clothes hanging in strips…but he was alive.
    Alive and screaming, begging for help.
    But there was a noose around his throat and a length of rope leading out into the night. Suddenly, as he tried to crab-crawl in Smith’s direction, the rope snapped tight as wire and he was yanked across the floor. Pulled by the throat up and out the window again.
    Smith saw the door standing open, the night stygian and flowing like black silk. He could make it, knew he could make it. On hands and knees, he made a wild charge for it, his mouth babbling nonsense even he could not understand.
    He got to his feet and one of the beasts stepped through the doorway, its duster crimson with blood. It held the severed hand of a man in one paw, slapped it against its leg. Smith could smell its rancid yellow breath, see graveyards and gallows reflected in those green sucking pits it had for eyes. Its wolfish face grinned with all those teeth. “Going somewhere, friend?”
    Smith let out a wild cry and pumped two bullets into the Hide-Hunter’s belly and it laughed with a cruel, mocking sound. The eyes blazed with triumph and one of its hands swiped at Smith’s belly.
    Smith felt the impact…but figured he was okay, okay, but then he saw that his abdomen was open in a bleeding gash and that his viscera was hanging out in glistening clocksprings.
    He stood there, shocked and amazed by it.
    He wasn’t standing long.
     
    ***
    And upstairs, there was one survivor.
    Up to three minutes before, there had been two others. One was slaughtered by the Hide-Hunters…another took his life before the claws fell on him.
    And now there was just one.
    A man. His name was Provo and he hid in a closet. He was just another hard luck miner with a bad liver and lungs crystallizing from silicosis, the much-dreaded miner’s disease. When the bloodbath began…when the beasts came leaping through windows and hammering down doors…he had been waiting for an overweight