Long Horn, Big Shaggy by Steve Vernon

Author:Steve Vernon [Steve, Vernon,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Crossroad Press

* What The Moon Man Dreamed *

The Moon Man sat and dreamed, eyes rolled back into his skull, like he was trying to track the trail of his memories.

He was sitting in what used to be a graveyard. His cushion of choice was an ancient Indian woman’s torso. He’d given her just enough of the rejuvenating blue ray to make her breasts soft for him. Occasionally, she moaned slightly. She wasn’t alive enough to be hungry, but she felt his weight upon her.

Not that he weighed that much. The radiation had eaten him down to nothing more than a scarecrow of skin and bones. Not all the rejuvenation in the universe would help him. He was dying on his feet. It was only his force of will that held his face together. Charred and running red with puss oozing from the fissures of cracked scar tissue.

No wonder they called him MoonMan.

He looked comfortable amidst the heaps of bodies strewn about him. Bones worn black with age, fetid meat, the cloying reek of decay. There was nothing as fine as the stink of the long dead to make a man feel truly alive.

Some of them were still moving, where he had touched and played with them; where he had coaxed them with the rejuvenating blue ray. He could bring them all back, if he wanted to, but this was better.

It comforted him.

This Goddamn age was so empty. There were so few people and so few bodies. It was worse than an emptied out tomb.

Yes, this was better - these bodies, ancient with stink and wisdom and dreams. They whispered their dark secrets to him. Secrets nobody else could ever dream of knowing.

Nobody knew anything any more.

Maybe they never did. How could they? The country was so big. The sky was so damn big. It was everything he wanted, but it terrified him. The emptiness. The vastness. It would be better when he owned it.

When he ruled it.

When he buried it and raised it back up.

He lay there on his heap of rotting meat and bone, listening to the sounds of his crawlers digging through the mountain. They’d level it, given time. They’d eat it right down. They’d unearth all the treasures buried here, given time.

Time.

He had lots of that. So did they.

Still, it would be nice to raise up some more diggers to hurry things along.

He’d tried that before. He had tried to raise as many crawlers as he could find. But it hadn’t worked. They’d dug until they got hungry, and then they’d started in on eating each other. It had been fun to watch. First there was a chain reaction. One bit the other and passed it on, and soon the tunnels had been clogged with thousands of crawlers, frantically eating each other.

And then some of them had grown back together. Their pieces, chunks, stitching together.

That had been fun for awhile.

Then he started again. He had Learned from his mistakes. He had learned to keep his army small and manageable.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.