Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  It was agreed that they'd recce in pairs. J.B. went along with Jak, Steps Lightly Moon dogging them at every step. Doc and Lori wandered hand in hand, like the lovers they were. Ryan and Krysty began to ex­plore the sun-bleached buildings on both sides of the main street, taking care where they stepped. Most of the timbers had either rotted or been attacked by hordes of insects.

  Sometime Never was a comparatively rare small ville in those late days of the twenty-first century. The nuking hadn't touched the remote valley, and the depredations of the weather hadn't been too severe. The Southwest of the Deathlands didn't suffer from the screaming gales of two hundred miles an hour and the pitiless acid rain that vomited down from the deeps of violent chem storms.

  Everywhere the rough-built shacks showed signs of the long-lost days before the skies burned. As Ryan and Krysty walked up the hill, preceded by the skinny cat, they kept pausing to look at some new chimera from the past.

  Triple Scoop Rocky Road Only $2.50. The sign swung off a porch from one hook. The rest of the building had slipped wearily into a narrow ravine at its back.

  Rocks, Cristalls, Candels and All Kindsa Rare Qrios. Ryan pushed the door open, the hinges creaking their protest. A small copper bell tinkled a merry greeting—before the spring broke and it fell silent.

  "Anyone home?" Krysty called, her voice dulled by the inches-thick layer of fine red dust that covered everything.

  The air in the shack was overwhelmingly hot and stuffy, with an odd lifeless quality to it. Ryan guessed that the last person who'd pushed open the door and rung the little bell had done so nearly a hundred years ago.

  The shelves that lined the walls were mainly bare, though some had empty cardboard boxes on them. Peeling labels still clung to a few of the boxes: Pinon Candles; Owl Prisms; Mica Wind Chimes; Honeydew Candles; Canyon de C Place Mats; Shot Glasses; Large Prisms.

  "What was a prism, lover?".Krysty asked, wiping sweat from her forehead.

  "No idea. Seen the word on sights for long-range blasters. Guess it must have meant something differ­ent back then."

  "Look here. The front of this closet's broken in. Some kinda store behind it." She was on her knees, rummaging around. Ryan moved closer to watch her. "No. Just a lot of old boxes and stuff… Wait. Something smooth in here. Got it. Oh, Gaia!"

  Krysty held up a round crystal ball, rubbing the dust off it. It was a little larger than the clenched fist of a grown man, shining in the shadows of the old store. Ryan whistled at what the crystal contained.

  It was the severed head of an adult prairie rattler, jaws gaping as though it were about to strike. The flat eyes stared blankly out of the clear glass.

  They took it outside where the brilliant sun danced off the polished surface. Doc and Lori were on the far side of the street, and Ryan called them over.

  The girl was fascinated by it. "Can I be having it, Doc, please? If Ryan and Krysty doesn't want it? Can I?"

  "Too heavy, child," Doc replied, taking the ball as if it were a religious totem. "By the three Kennedys! This brings back memories of such places. It's beau­tiful, is it not? When I was here back…in my first days here… there was a saloon up near Chinle. The barkeep had a large glass bell jar on the counter with a live rattler in there. Big son of a bitch, if you'll pardon my French, friends."

  "Didn't know that was French, Doc," Lori said, puzzled.

  "Figure of speech, my dear. Anyway, this man of­fered a five-dollar bet that you couldn't lay your hand on the outside of this jar and hold it there, eyes open, watching the snake. It would always strike at the hand. But you never knew when. It might be five seconds, might be five minutes. When it did, the speed and venom was so scary that you just had to take your hand off the glass. Couldn't help yourself. Guy made a lot of dough that way from greenhorn suckers. Suckers like me, if I tell the truth."

  To Lori's sadness, he pitched the crystal ball down into one of the numerous gulches running off the street.

  Krysty and Ryan continued up their side, peering through cracked windows that were smothered in spiderwebs. The planks on one of the stoops disinte­grated under the girl's weight, and her leg plunged in to the knee. An army of vicious red ants came boiling out of the darkness, and Ryan heaved Krysty clear, while she stamped her foot to shake off the insects.

  "Fall into that and you could have a hard time," she said, not quite managing to keep her voice from trembling.

  A sign painted on the glass of the front window re­vealed what the next building had once been. It read: Ole Zeke's Rock Shop. All Welcome.

  The lock on the front door had been smashed in and dangled, rust-red, from a broken iron staple. The place looked as if it had been deliberately wrecked. The tables were overturned and the glass display cases on the back wall were splintered. The floor was lit­tered with piles of ordinary rocks, but if there had ever been anything of real worth it was long stolen. Krysty pushed with the toe of her boot at a heap of rectan­gular cards. Each one had a name, neatly printed with a firm italic hand.

  "Uncle Tyas McCann knew rocks and stones and all their names," she said. "I recognize some of them. When I was a sprat I loved 'em. Uncle Tyas would re­cite them like they were the names of famous he­roes." She bent and picked up the cards, reading them and then flicking them away to float in the dusty motes that drifted lazily along the spears of sunlight.

  Ryan listened. He knew nothing of either gemstones or heroes, but he admitted to himself that the names sounded good from Krysty's lips.

  "Wolframite, dolomite, barite… that would have been a desert rose. Real pretty, pink shape. Fragile. I remember them. Chrysoprase…lovely name. Banded agate and chalcedony. Onyx, jasper, opals and carnelian. Oh, I'd love to have come to this place when it was still filled with all… Turquoise and malachite."

  A stray beam of hazy light bounced off something in the corner, near the bolted back door. Ryan's first reaction was to guess it was one of the shards of bro­ken glass. He walked across, boots crunching, and picked up a small, smooth stone.

  "Nice," he said, wiping it on his jacket. It was roughly circular, polished and gleaming black.

  "Obsidian," said Krysty.

  "Yeah."

  She took it from him, feeling the hard smoothness of the small stone. "Know what they used to call these in the old days?"

  "No."

  "Apache tears."

  NEAR THE TOP END of the main street, there was an adobe house, better preserved than any of the wooden shacks. A wrought-iron shingle swung there, as neat as when it had been hung more than a century past: Portrait Photographs. Old Style Pix.

  "Hey, come see double stupes," Jak shouted to the others.

  J.B. was there first, fedora tugged low over his eyes against the harsh sun. Ryan and Krysty were joined by Doc and Lori. The old man was looking fatigued by the extreme heat, leaning on the girl's arm for sup­port on the steep, rutted slope. The gray cat was pa­rading up and down on the windowsill, back arched, purring in a loud dissonant rasp.

  "Look in here," Jak said. "Must be craze-muties, clothes like them."

  The door to the store stood open, the entrance step piled high with driven sand. Ryan glanced inside and saw that the place had been stripped of furniture. The walls, however, were still covered with serried rows of pictures. They were all sizes, all tinted light brown, all showing stiffly posed people, wearing the kind of clothes that Ryan had only seen in vids set in the Old West days: Long dresses and parasols and stiff collars and tall hats.

  Come and pose. Fifteen minutes only. Complete satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. Show your friends how you might have looked a hundred years ago. Try on anything that takes your fancy. Mayor or gunman. Women's Purity League or whore. You got the fantasy and we got the camera.

  "Look at them." The Indian girl laughed, her face wreathed in the broadest of smiles. "So silly."

  Doc came to the front of the group, shading his eyes with his hand. He stooped to look at a large framed pony Soldiers picture tha
t held pride of place in the middle of the photographer's window.

  There was a young woman, seated in an ornate armchair with golden cherubs carved along its arms. Her hair was knotted back, and she wore a wide-brimmed hat with a trim of osprey feathers. Her dress was dark velvet and pinched at the waist. A cameo brooch clipped the blouse together at her slender white throat.

  A tall man stood behind her, one hand upon her shoulder, smiling down at her with an unaffected look of pride and love. His hair was parted down the mid­dle and pomaded back. A luxuriant mustache curled around his lips. The frock coat was light gray, with darker piping around the lapels, A heavy gold chain drooped across his stomach, carrying a seal and a Masonic emblem. A little hideaway Derringer .22 was tucked discreetly into the top of his striped pants, showing its pearl butt.

  He held a stovepipe hat in his beringed right hand.

  "Never seen nothing more triple-stupe," Jak cack­led, holding his bandaged ribs. "Nobody never looked like that."

  Doc turned away, face stricken as if he had just witnessed the moment of his own death. "God help me, friends," he whispered. "That is… could be… It is like my dearest Emily and myself."

  Tears began to flow and he walked off, back ram­rod-stiff. Lori looked at Jak as if she were going to spit in his face. Then she spun on her heel and dashed af­ter Doc, spurs tinkling in the stillness of the ghost town.

  "What was…?" Jak began, his face slack with shock. "Just joke 'bout…"

  "Those people, kid," Ryan said. "They're wearing the kind of clothes Doc and his wife wore when he was alive in the 1890s before those bastards trawled him. It just made him recall things he'd want to forget."

  "I didn't think…I'll go say sorry an' tell Doc how…"

  "Later, Jak," Krysty said. "Later."

  It took a couple of hours for Ryan, helped by the Armorer, to recce the whole of Sometime Never, con­centrating on the trails in and out. There were several places ideal for an ambush.

  "We'll send word for a peace council here. They'll look for a trap, but we'll hit 'em on the way in. I can come back and pick the best place a coupla days be­fore the meet."

  J.B. nodded his agreement. "Sounds good."

  "Reckon this General Yellowhair'll guess it's a trick?"

  "Bound to, Ryan. Sneaky sec leader like that isn't able to think straight anymore."

  Ryan looked around the scattered shacks, most of them in the last stages of decrepitude. "Must have been a good place to live. Once."

  "Most places were," J.B. said, wiping sweat from his hands on the leg of his pants.

  IT WAS GETTING TIME to head back. The cavalry didn't patrol toward Sometime Never very often, knowing the Apache kept away from the gulch. But it was as well to ride safely into Drowned Squaw Canyon be­fore dusk crept over the desert.

  From where he stood, Ryan was able to look clear down the steep valley. Jak was sitting on a porch with Steps Lightly Moon, stroking the cat. Doc and Lori were sitting together by a tumbled heap of timber that had once been called The Crazy Shack. J.B. was pitching pebbles at a metal sign, thirty yards away across the street, rattling it with nine shots out of ten.

  He couldn't see Krysty and guessed she was still ex­ploring some of the fascinating relics of the ghost ville.

  His own eye had been caught by a stone-walled shack near the adobe photo store, but on the opposite side of the street. Loops of rusting barbed wire were festooned around it, and a sign fashioned out of the bottoms of green bottles, stuck in clay, read Hillbilly Heaven.

  Ryan climbed cautiously up the slippery slope of loose stones, past a couple of handmade signs, both fallen and faded. He tried to make out the wording, but all he could read was a warning to keep out of the patch of land around the cabin.

  Far below he heard Jak's reedy, cackling laughter and Doc's booming bass. It was obvious that the fall­ing out between the old man and the teenager had been resolved.

  Unusually the door to the hut was made from sheet steel, fixed in a sturdy wooden frame. Metal shutters covered the windows.

  Ryan strolled around the curious building, puzzled at the security, more puzzled that it didn't seem to have been breached at all. Yet the state of the main bolts and hinges showed that a determined child could have pushed its way in.

  Krysty's voice made him start. "What have you found, lover?"

  "You shouldn't creep around like that. Get your­self chilled one of these days."

  "Hillbilly Heaven," she read. "What's that mean? And how come it's still shut up tight as a duck's ass?"

  "You shouldn't talk dirty." He grinned. "I figure this has to be the shack that the Apaches talked about. The lone crazy who liked some old country singer lived here at the end. The man they say haunts the ville."

  "The ghost-town ghost, you mean? Could be. If it's bolted up and locked from inside, then it looks like—"

  "The ghost's still there. Let's see."

  He braced himself, then kicked out, his combat boot shattering the main lock. The door swung open, revealing a dusty box of utter darkness, blacker than the wing feathers of a raven.

  Krysty pushed by him, pausing on the threshold and pulling a face. "Ugh. Something bad in here, lover. Long gone death."

  "I'll break off a couple of the shutters to give us some light. Don't go in. It might be boobied."

  "Yeah," she replied absently, still sniffing the arid air.

  Ryan went outside and wrenched away two of the shutters, the metal giving a loud groaning sound of protest.

  He heard a yell from Steps Lightly Moon, far be­low him down the gulch, but he took no notice, eager to follow Krysty inside.

  The girl was poised by an inner door, surrounded by swirling motes of dust, the bursts of sunlight giving her a halo, setting her hair ablaze with rich crimson. She looked staggeringly beautiful, and Ryan felt a wave of love sweep over him.

  She pushed open the door. Ryan heard the click of a contact breaking and an odd whirring noise. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the glint of metal, a huge ax with a curved edge, swinging toward Krysty's skull.

  He started to move....

  Chapter Twenty

  RYAN'S SHOULDER CAUGHT Krysty just above the knees, projecting her across the far room like a gren from a launcher. She landed on her side, coming up with her blaster in her hand, the silvered finish glow­ing with light in the dimness.

  "Why the…?" she began, voice cracking in her anger. Words failed her as she looked behind Ryan and saw the swinging pendulum of the huge ax blade, hissing through the air. It reached its apogee, hung frozen for a moment, then plunged into its lethal arc once more.

  "I guess…" She holstered the 9 mm pistol, then stood to brush herself down. She offered a hand to Ryan, who was still lying on the floor. "Thanks, lover."

  "Crazy bastard didn't want nobody creeping in on him," he said, examining the mechanism of the booby, which had a simple switch trigger, and a waxed fishing line coiled on a spring under tension. A sec­ond switch released the ax head. He touched it with his index finger, finding it still keen enough to slice through silk.

  "He's still here, Ryan," Krysty said, pointing to the dust-muffled shape on the truckle bed against the far wall of the hut.

  An antique disk player stood by the bed, and a ta­ble by the window held a dozen empty liquor bottles. A heavy Smith & Wesson automatic, loaded, was on top of some frail, curling magazines. All dated from the year 2000. Leaning against the leg of the bed was a stack of extremely old record albums, warped black vinyl. From the covers, the illustrations so faded they were almost transparent, Ryan saw that the records were all of the same artist, with several copies of the same album. The young man's name was Dwight Yoakam and his records had titles like "Hillbilly Deluxe" and "Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc."

  "Hillbilly Heaven," Krysty said. "The name of his cabin. Must have been that loner the Mescalero talked about."

  "Yeah." Ryan turned as he heard the others arriv­ing outside the shack. Despite his injuries, Ja
k was first, with the fleet-footed girl panting behind him.

  "Very bad medicine here," Steps Lightly Moon said. "Home of all the spirits who do evil in this place."

  "There's your evil spirit." Ryan pointed to the leathery corpse. "A lonely old man who lived here and died here. That's all there is."

  Dust had settled in the empty, sunken eye sockets and the mouth hung dryly open. The hands were coiled shut against the palms. The cotton dungarees had rotted away as the corpse decomposed, and the bones thrust through at knees and elbow.

  "Let's go," Ryan said. The last to leave, he pulled the outer door shut behind him, wedging it with a large stone so the remains wouldn't be disturbed by coyotes or any of the other desert scavengers.

  THE WAR COUNCIL THAT NIGHT took place in one of the wickiups, around a smoking fire. The sky had lowered around dusk, and deep purple chem clouds, streaked with chrome-yellow, brought a rising wind and pounding rain. For several minutes hailstones pounded the box canyon, bouncing off the boulders, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in two minutes.

  They all ate a fiery bean stew, helping themselves with old metal spoons, marked with the name "Holiday Inns." After they'd finished eating, Ryan and J.B. stayed behind while the others went to their own huts. Cuchillo stayed, as well as two of his most senior warriors: Many Winters and Stones in Face.

  "You think it will work, Ryan Cawdor?"

  "Fireblast, Cuchillo, how the fuck can I answer that? I've seen some of the best plans ever made fall apart just because someone chose the wrong moment to fart. How should I know?"

  "But it is a good plan," Stones in Face said, fin­gers absently tracing the runic patterns of pockmarks that seamed his cheeks.

  "Best we got."

  Many Winters was not so convinced. "If Yellowhair catches the scent of betrayal, then he will escape the trap. He will be angered and will come and burn us from our home."

  Cuchillo Oro sighed. "Old men fear life. If one never risks the danger of the hunt, then one will fi­nally starve."