Jesse was gasping like an angry animal as he hunted through the tunnel for his next victims. There had been a world full of promise, and now there was nothing. The only thing his fevered mind could grasp upon, as a talisman against the emptiness, was this strange thing Billy had tracked across the length and breadth of the territories. Something with the power to pull Jesse so far, to make him go through so much, would have the strength and power to rise him up again. He would bring it to the Rebellion himself. Wielding that much power, he could begin to pursue the only vengeance that would satisfy him now.
And so, towards that end, no one in the tunnel could be allowed to stand in his way.
Jesse readied his hyper-velocity pistols, one held high, one held low. No matter where a threat emerged, it would be met with brutal force. But no attacks came. Instead he heard, echoing from ahead in the thick, reeking air, voices arguing petulantly. He growled under his heaving breath and inched his way forward. He had taken down Ringo and the Apache Kid, but he knew there were several more men with Billy still, and he had not seen Smiley since that first survey of the canyon.
Jesse’s mind was slowly returning, but none of the anger, despair, or determination was draining away with the madness. Somewhere up ahead was Billy. If Billy had been honest from the beginning, Jesse would never have been forced into this situation. Whatever else was about to happen, Billy would answer for his part in Jesse’s troubles.
Jesse eased his way along the flank of the driller, gingerly picking his way past each insectile leg. The voices echoing from up ahead became clearer with each step, and he paused to listen, in case any tactical advantage could be gained.
“I told you I heard something!” The voice was high pitched and peevish. No one Jesse recognized.
“You never said anything like this! Digging? You didn’t hear digging?” It was another voice that he did not know. “How about gagging? Do you hear me gagging now?”
Jesse shook his head. It had to be the Diablo Canyon men. Something had gone wrong, and under Billy’s cold eyes they were arguing over whose fault it was. Jesse smiled at the thought. Usually it took Frank to come up with conclusions like that, while Jesse was far more the man of action in the family. The thought of Frank swept the smile from his face, and the rage threatened once again to boil up. It did not matter what was going on ahead of him. It was time for someone to answer for Jesse’s current predicament.
He moved forward again and came around the front of the driller, looking past the enormous array of blades and bits mounted on the armatures at the front. They were hot, releasing wisps of smoke or steam up into the fetid air. The rough, churned walls and uneven floor ended abruptly in a concave area. A soft, reddish light was pouring through a hole in the stone, about waist-high, just wide enough for a man to crawl through. The voices, still grumbling and muttering, were coming from that hole. Jesse moved towards the gap, pistols at the ready.
“I tol’ ‘em you’d be comin’.” The thick, heavy voice emerged from the shadows. “Billy, he said nope, said you were out’a the pichure. But I said yup. An’ here you are.” Deeper in the darkness something stirred, moving towards him, and Jesse cursed under his breath as Jake Williamson sauntered forward, the weak light glinting off his greasy, bald head.
“Smiley.” Jesse nodded to him. “This ain’t between you an’ me. I’m just after Billy. You can walk away.”
Smiley’s grin widened beneath its thick mustache. “You an’ Billy, always thinkin’ everythin’ came down ta you two.” The grin disappeared, collapsing into a vicious glower. “You an’ Billy ain’t no more special than anyone else, Jesse James. An’ I’ll be proud ta prove it to ya. Cuz today, you’re story’s gonna end. Time to make room for some new stories now.”
Jesse tried not to react. He knew the worst thing he could do at that moment was to provoke Smiley even further. Unfortunately, he could not keep the grin from sweeping across his face. It had been too much, and Smiley was just another laugh line in a dancehall show.
Jesse snickered. “You couldn’t lead a pack o’ cowboys fresh off the trail to a whorehouse on nickel night, Smiley. You just ain’t got the smarts.” Jesse moved to turn away. “Also, you don’t smell so good.”
Smiley charged at Jesse, as the outlaw boss knew he would. The bigger man could not get up much speed in the confining spaces of the cave. Jesse had no trouble stepping back behind the drill to avoid his ungainly rush. The hyper-velocity pistols in Jesse’s hands spun around, barrels slapping into his palms. Before Smiley could turn around, Jesse brought both weapons down, like clubs, on the back of his broad bald head. Two heavy cracking sounds echoed through the tight space, and the giant man collapsed without a sound.
Jesse watched the body for a moment. Aside from the rapid rise and fall of labored breathing, however, there was no other sign of life. With a wide grin, Jesse moved to the small, broken hole and dove through.
Jesse figured that, warned by the sound of the tussle in the tunnel, the men on the other side would be waiting for him, weapons raised. Not only were they not waiting for him, they were not even looking at him as he rolled up out of his lunge with both pistols raised and ready to fire. As Jesse took in a breath to shout an order, he fell back against smooth stonework, gasping at the smell. The scene in front of him disappeared behind a curtain of blurring tears.
Jesse quickly holstered one of his guns and pulled out a handkerchief with the freed hand, wiping at his eyes with the rough fabric.
“What in the hell is that stench!” Jesse barked, pushing himself back up to his feet and looking around owlishly as he tried to clear his eyes.
The room slowly swam back into focus. Billy stood across a large stone chamber from him, two RJ-1027 lanterns resting at his feet. Four men were standing nearby, their argument cut short by Jesse’s sudden appearance. All of them were holding handkerchiefs over their mouths. None of them looked like they had any intention of drawing a weapon. Even Billy, eyes haunted and empty, was only staring at him in mild surprise.
Seeing that he was not in immediate danger, Jesse took a moment to look at the room. It was dressed stone, with designs or sculptures that looked eerily familiar carved into every wall. Angular, unnatural animals walked among strange, abstract, curlicue designs. Everything in the room seemed to focus in on a central plinth that rose out of the mosaic floor. A plinth that was completely empty, although the patterns of dust atop it suggested that, until very recently, something about the size of a small beer keg had rested there.
There were no doors in the chamber, as if it had been built to hold the plinth, and its occupant, and nothing else. The hole Jesse had leapt through had been knocked in by the driller, but it was not the only hole. In about the same place on the opposite wall was another hole, a black, empty eye staring at them from across the room. And it was from this hole that the stench came pouring.
With another quick look at Billy and the engineers, Jesse moved slowly towards this second hole, his kerchief still held to his face. It was not doing any good, however, as the reek just kept building with each step he took. Looking sideways through the hole, avoiding approaching it from the front, Jesse could not see anything but the fitful shadows thrown by Billy’s lanterns.
“Get me a damned light.” Jesse snapped, holding out the hand with the useless cloth. One of the engineers looked at Billy, who nodded, and then scuttled to get Jesse one of the lanterns. Jesse took it carefully, turned back towards the hole, and eased his mechanical arm through it and into the darkness.
The smell was like a wall pushing back at him as he moved his head in after the lantern. He was almost certain now what he would see, but he needed to check for himself. Sure enough, the rough cavern on the other side was strewn with desiccated, ravaged bodies. They were encased in metal and wire frameworks, built specifically to hold up dead bodies incapable of providing their own balance and support.
Some of the bodies had had mining tools surgically implanted where their hands had been,
but most of them had arms ending in nothing but shattered stubs of bone sheathed in tatters of rancid flesh. They had been worked quite literally until their tools and hands were worn away, and then they had been discarded. Jesse could see the cranial battery sockets, where the cylinders would be inserted to animate the ghoulish creations. Each body completely dead, the RJ-1027 machinery dark and silent, and each socket empty, their batteries removed.
Jesse tried to get a quick count of the bodies in the tunnel, but his eyes were tearing up again and he could not keep his head through the hole any longer. He withdrew, pulling the lantern with him, and the shadows of the caves swallowed the sad remnants of the abandoned animations.
“Damned foreign bastard.” Jesse spit on the mosaic floor over and over again, ignoring Billy and his three companions as they stared at him in dull confusion.
“You damned daffy European bastard. “ He spat again. He knew exactly what had happened. He remembered Carpathian’s welcome back in Payson with a bitter laugh. Offering to help Jesse take on another Heavy Rail. The blatant attempt to distract him seemed clear now, looking back. But at the time, Jesse had been so sure of his own superiority. And the old man had been a step ahead the whole time.
Jesse shook his head, the anger now aimed inwardly as much as at the rest of the world. He glared at Billy for a moment. The hyper-velocity pistol wavered in his hand and slowly rose. The other outlaw’s eyes went round as his hands rose up in a warding gesture. Jesse shook his head again, muttered a dismissive curse under his breath and moved towards the hole in the chamber wall.
“Hey, wait!” Billy snapped out of his fugue. “You’re alive!”
Jesse stopped, and spat an answer over his shoulder. “Guess it wasn’t my day to die, Billy.”
The younger man’s hand drifted towards his pistol. “Where you think you’re goin’?”
Jesse spun around so quick the three Diablo Canyon men flinched away, their empty hands raised in placating gestures. The older outlaw boss rushed across the dusty old chamber, his sleek custom pistol leading the way. The barrel jammed up beneath Billy’s jaw and slammed him up against the crumbling wall. Billy’s face contorted in pain as the sculptures in the wall behind him dug into his back.
“Whoa!” Billy’s hands were raised high, his voice contorted by the barrel pressing into the soft flesh under his jaw. “Jesse, ease up!”
Jesse’s face pressed in close to Billy’s, his brows drawn down in barely-contained rage, his eyes wild. “I got a couple quick questions for ya, Billy, before I light out’a here on my way.”
Billy tried to nod, but choked as the barrel pressed harder against his skin. “Ya,” he gasped, minimizing the movement of his head.
Jesse nodded once, his face a mask half way between confused and furious. “Okay. First, where’s Frank?”
Billy looked down at the barrel with an exaggerated roll of his eyes, and Jesse relaxed the tension in his metal arm, drawing the weapon down slightly.
Billy rubbed at the spot left behind by the muzzle, an exaggerated look of hurt innocence in his eyes. “Jeez, Jesse, you feel alright? You din’t have to bury the damned muzzle in my craw, you know!”
Jesse’s flat eyes grew harder and his pistol rose slightly. “Frank.”
Billy’s hands rose quickly again. “Whoa, Jesse! Pull in yer horns, fer Pete’s sake!” He swallowed, and it looked painful enough to spark a pang of sympathetic pain in Jesse’s own torn throat. “Honest, Jesse, before I talk, you gotta put the shootin’ iron down, okay? I’ll be straight, I promise, but it’s a might hard to think with that fancy blaster warmin’ my jaw.”
Jesse blinked, then lowered the weapon further. “Where’s my brother?”
Billy lowered his own hands a bit, sure to keep them wide, far from the butts of his own pistols. “Well, see, an’ this here’s the Gospel truth, Jesse.” He swallowed again. “I don’t know.”
The hyper-velocity pistol jammed back up under Billy’s jaw as Jesse’s eyes burned with frustrated anger. The younger man scrambled against the wall to avoid the gun. “I swear! I swear! We lit out of there as soon as the blue-bellies showed up! You all were tearin’ it up like the Kilkenny cats out there, an’ we just ran! I din’t see nothin’!”
Jesse lowered the gun, his shoulders sagging. “You din’t come back fer ‘im?”
Billy’s head shook back and forth with furious, nervous energy. “No, we din’t. We grabbed the driller machine with these galoots, looped through town up onto the tracks, and headed back down after the dust had settled. Wasn’t none of you movin’, an’ we figured you’d all either run with the others ‘r you was all up the flume.” Billy’s eyes were clear, his voice as even as he could make it. “Honest, Jesse. I thought you was dead or fled. I was hopin’ you’d run oft.”
Jesse turned away, his unseeing eyes scanning across the ancient carvings on the walls. “You really ain’t got ‘im.”
Billy shook his head furiously. “If I’d’a grabbed ‘im, Jesse, I’d tell ya.”
Jesse started walking towards the shattered hole in the wall again, but his steps were hesitant, his eyes seeing nothing, his mind a swirling darkness circling a black, empty hole. “Then they got ‘im. Alive ‘r dead, they got ‘im.”
Billy started to cautiously follow Jesse as he crossed the room. “Who got ‘im, Jesse? Those Union bastards? You think they grabbed ‘im.” Billy hesitated before continuing in a softer voice. “You sure he ain’t beefed, Jesse? I saw that thing ridin’ up on ‘im. That thing was a beast, packin’ more hardware than I seen on anythin’ short of those wagons that’re poppin’ up all over.”
The older outlaw’s head shook in vague negation. “Naw, I picked over the bodies but good. He weren’t there.”
“But maybe he’s okay, then!” Billy tried to sound hopeful. “If he’s alive, maybe we can go get ‘im!”
A light flickered deep in Jesse’s eyes for the first time since he had drawn on Billy. He turned back to look at the younger man, and Billy shied away from the growing heat there. “Go get ‘im from the Union?”
Billy shrugged. “Sure! We put a nice gang together, like that first train job, an’ there ain’t no place they can stash ‘im that we can’t get ‘im out!” More and more energy seemed to bubble into Billy’s voice. “An’ you know, there ain’t no outlaw in the territories, wouldn’t come if you put out the call!”
Jesse tilted his head as if processing Billy’s words, then shook it again. “Naw. If they took ‘im, they’d mean to keep ‘im. An’ if they mean to keep ‘im, they’ll stash ‘im someplace, you’d need an army to get ‘im out.”
A glum silence settled over the ancient room again. Jesse’s eyes snapped up after a moment, looking back at the second hole breaking into the room. “An’ I know some folks that got an’ army they ain’t doin’ much with.”
“Jesse,” Billy inched his way around into the other man’s line of vision. “You got an idea on how to make this right?” He jerked a thumb at the empty plinth.
The older outlaw was not paying attention, but he muttered aloud as he thought, and Billy nodded with the words. “Carpathian can’t be far away, those animations ain’t been dead again long. Should be able to catch up with ‘em without too much trouble.”
Billy nodded vigorously. “Yeah, Jesse, that’s it! We’ll catch up with the old bastard, an’ take back what’s ours!”
Jesse turned to take notice of the younger man again. Looking at him as if he had forgotten he was not alone in the chamber. He spoke as if he had not understood the words. “We?”
Billy gave Jesse a hard look. “Yeah, we, Jesse. This plunder’s mine by rights. I found the Injuns, I got the info, I tracked it down an’ dug it up. It’s mine more’n it’s anyone else’s. So yeah, if anyone’s ridin’ out after it, it ain’t you, it’s we.”
A smile tugged at Jesse’s lips, the first since he had leapt into the stench-filled room. “We.”
Billy nodded. “Yeah, we! Jesse, you can’t take him o
n alone, an’ you know it! He sure as Hades ain’t gonna be alone, you know that! You need me!”
For a moment Jesse stood completely still, staring at the younger outlaw boss with a blank expression. Then he started to laugh, and Billy’s expression snapped from eager to angry without a pause. “What’s so all-fired funny, Jesse? I got out here without you, din’t I? I got into this here buried room without you, din’t I? You don’t think you’ll need me when you catch up to the old man?”
The laughter continued, bouncing off the surrounding yellow stone, absurd in the foul atmosphere. Billy’s face hardened further, his right hand floating towards his gun belt.
“We made a deal, Jesse!” The hand slid over the butt of the modified six-shooter. “We were gonna ride together on this!”
The laughter cranked up another notch, but rather than fanning Billy’s anger, the young outlaw backed up a pace. A manic edge had entered Jesse’s mirth, a frantic energy that had not been there before. The fire was back in his eyes.
“We made a deal, Billy, you’re right.” Jesse nodded and took a step towards the retreating boss. “We were gonna ride this trail together, right as rain.” He took another step.
Billy nodded, but there was a hesitant doubt in his eyes. “We were, Jesse. We were gonna work together, like the old days.”
Jesse stopped advancing and looked down at his clenched fists, the metalwork of his arms gleaming redly in the RJ-1027 lantern light. He forced the fingers to relax, watching as the mechanisms beneath the armor moved smoothly and flawlessly. When he looked back up at Billy, the grin was back, but it was feral, and Billy tried to back up again only to find himself up against the rough wall once more.
“We were gonna ride together, Billy, ‘till you let my boys die takin’ down the damned robot for your gear.” The broad shoulders flexed, the arms wide, and Billy’s eyes flicked down to the hands and back up to Jesse’s frenetic eyes.
The Jessie James Archives Page 33