The Fallen 3 by Thomas E. Sniegoski Page B

from inside his tattered suit coat. The absurdity of the action almost made Dusty break out in laughter, until he saw the monsters’ reaction.
    The pair stopped advancing, their glistening black eyes fixed upon the sight.
    “The instrument,” one of them hissed excitedly.
    “Give it to us,” demanded the other, holding out a twisted, clawed hand.
    The old man chuckled again. “You don’t have to ask me twice,” he said. He turned his blind eyes toward Dusty, as if he could see, moving the horn up to his mouth. “You might want to cover your ears.” He smiled, then touched the horn’s mouthpiece to his ancient lips.
    If he lived to be a hundred years, Dusty would never … could never … forget the sound that came from that horn. It was every horrible sound that he could imagine rolled into one.
    He heard it again, in his mind, as he stood at the napkin dispenser. He heard it as he’d heard it every night since that bizarre encounter in the alley.
    Dusty caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and he glanced over at the table where he’d left his things. A little kid stood there now, staring with great curiosity at the harmonica.
    The harmonica that had once been a horn.
    Dusty remembered what he’d seen that horn do, and he dove across the restaurant, screaming for the kid to get away from his table, to get away from the harmonica.
    The instrument
.
    The horrible sound couldn’t have lasted for more than a second. It had been a short blast, its shrillness barely muted by Dusty’s hands as they covered his ears. But even more fantastic was the fact that Dusty could see the sound as it left the muzzle of the battered old horn. As the notes flowed down the alley, the air had shimmered like the waves of heat from a desert road.
    The monsters had tried to flee, falling over one another in an attempt to be the first to escape.
    Neither got very far.
    As the note resonated, the disturbed air seemed to expand, enveloping the horrible pair as well as the body of their fallen comrade. Then it had torn them apart. It was as if they’d exploded, their malformed, corpselike bodies disintegrating into a fine black mist that coated the walls and floor of the alley. Even their clothing had been reduced to nothing.
    As Dusty raced back to his table, he imagined that child, if he should somehow rile the instrument.…
    But he needn’t have worried. His scream had driven the little boy, crying, into the arms of his mother. “He wasn’t going to touch anything,” the woman huffed as she hugged the child and glared at Dusty from her booth.
    “That’s good,” Dusty muttered, reaching out and snatching up the harmonica. He carefully placed it inside the pocket of his jacket. “Wouldn’t have wanted him to get hurt.”
    The mother gave Dusty another disgusted look and returned her attention to consoling her wailing son, promising him an ice cream if he would only stop crying.
    Dusty sopped up the spill with a large wad of napkins, and quickly gathered his things. He threw his knapsack over his shoulder and trudged toward the door. People were staring now, and he forced himself to look at each and every one of them, just to be sure.
    To be sure they were people, and not monsters.
    Monsters that wanted the instrument.
    In the alley, the remains of his attackers had dripped from the wall while Dusty had listened intently to the old man’s tale. Of course, at that point, the blind man could have been telling him Santa Claus was coming and Dusty would have believed him.
    Tobias had explained that the Riders—he’d called them Corpse Riders—were after his horn, that they were hell-bent on getting it for a group of renegade angels called the Powers. There was a hint of relief in his voice as he told Dusty that hewas getting too old to protect it. He had stared at the horn in his hands as if he could see it. He had been traveling, he had said, searching for someone to take on the burden, for a burden it truly was.
    And