Dust of the Damned (9781101554005)

by Brandvold, Peter

  Zane dismounted and quickly unharnessed the casket from General Lee. “I’m gonna make a quick run, leave this here. Don’t need a busted wheel.”

  Grunting, he pushed the casket off into the dense brush and rocks along the trail.

  “You sure you don’t want us to go with you?” Angel asked.

  Zane shook his head. “You two push on, find a spot to camp. If all goes well, I’ll find you before sundown.”

  Zane remounted General Lee and galloped onto the forking trail, over the rise, and into a canyon between steep-walled tabletop mesas.

  Chapter 20

  A VISIT TO THE SILVER-BULLET PADRE

  Zane lay atop a rise, focusing his field glasses on the lower canyon before him. The cut was abutted in the north and the south by steep cliffs leaning inward.

  Up a brushy slope on the canyon’s north side sat an old Spanish church flanked by a cemetery of tilting wooden crosses and engraved tombstones. A little ways down the hill from the church, and nearer Zane, lay a small mud-brick, brush-roofed shack from which a curl of smoke lifted. The sun’s dying rays burnished the sandstone church above the shack so that it glowed like a new penny.

  A thin stream flashed at the bottom of the canyon. On both sides of the stream were wood-frame shacks, seven in all. Sun-silvered and dilapidated, with brush growing up through the boardwalks fronting them, they were all that remained of a town built here by gold prospectors before the War and abandoned soon after. The stone ruins of an old Spanish pueblo could be seen around the newer buildings, only a few of them still sporting roofs.

  There wasn’t much gold in the stream, but the padre had found a healthy silver vein in a hidden canyon cut into the northern ridge behind the church. The Franciscan priests from Spain had been the first to exploit the vein, and they’d even processed the ore, a tradition that Padre Alejandro had been continuing for nearly thirty years with the help of his half-breed assistant, Tico Palomar. Few besides Zane knew of the silver cache, and he’d stumbled on it years ago when he’d holed up here to recover from an arrow drilled into his leg by a Coyotero Apache.

  Despite Zane’s lack of a spiritual bent, he and the padre had become fast friends. It was then that the padre had begun selling silver bullets to the ghoul hunter, as he did for a select few fighting the hard war against El Diablo, who would surely take over the world if not for the brave men who stood against him.

  Spying no sign of danger below—he’d learned long ago to never ride into a place without scoping it out carefully beforehand—Zane returned his field glasses to his saddlebags, mounted General Lee, and galloped on down the hill and into the canyon. He cut away from the stream, mounted the northern slope, and drew rein before the humble shack.

  “Padre?”

  No answer but the breeze rustling the dead brush roofing the shack. An ojo hanging from the ceiling of the narrow front gallery twisted slightly in the breeze, its rope creaking faintly. The striped Indian blankets hanging over the windows from the inside fluttered.

  “Padre Alejandro?” Zane called, louder. “It’s Uriah Zane.”

  Still no reply from the shack. The door was closed. The padre was not in his garden to the shack’s right, which the old Catholic watered each day from the stream, chanting and praying, as was his practice.

  Zane gigged General Lee around the shack and up the well-worn trail to the church that stood like a hulking sandstone barrack. A cracked and tarnished bell crouched in an eroded belfry mounted high above the arched, wooden front door. Pigeons gurgled and fluttered. As Zane swung down from the saddle, they swooped into flight.

  Zane dropped the palomino’s reins, tripped the heavy oak door’s latch, and shoved the door wide. His big frame filled the opening as the panel tapped the wall to the left, and he stared into the church’s bowels that smelled of stone, wood, and candles.

  “Padre?” His deep voice echoed.

  The benches inside the place had long since rotted and crumbled and been hauled away. Now if any worshippers appeared—and there were damn few left in these hills—they simply knelt on the cracked flagstone floor. Beyond a dilapidated wooden rail and a rack of unlit candles lay the altar and a wooden cross.

  Zane walked into the church, leaving the door open wide behind him, and followed his long shadow down the center aisle and around the altar to a small back door. He pushed the door open and peered into the cemetery.

  Again, he called for the padre. Except for the breeze ruffling the brown, wiry weeds that had nearly overgrown the boneyard and the gurgling of the pigeons perched on the red-slate roof above him, there was no response. He raked his eyes across the cemetery. They caught on the large oak cross standing at the rear of the yard, and held there, his heart skipping beats.

  Zane lunged into a run, leaping stones and small crosses until he stood in front of the large cross at the rear of the cemetery and stared up in horror at Padre Alejandro, who lay naked and spread-eagled and bloody, nailed to the cross just like his beloved Jesus.

  Zane reached out and touched the man’s thin, pale, blue-veined right ankle. Cold as stone. He looked at the gaunt face framed by long, grizzled, silver hair. The skin sagging against the concave cheeks was as dry as parchment. The man’s brown eyes were half-open and staring almost tenderly down at Zane, his head canted to one side. The blood that had oozed down from the spikes driven through his hands and feet was dry. He’d been dead a day or two, his flat belly starting to pooch out away from his ribs from the putrefaction within.

  Oddly, it appeared no buzzards had yet found him.

  Zane backed away from his dead friend, the horror in his eyes hardening now to a keen rage as he lowered his right hand to the cross-draw holster on his left hip, and slipped the Colt Navy from its holster. He remembered the smoke lifting from the stovepipe jutting from the roof of Alejandro’s shack.

  Maybe whoever had done this was still here. Or was that too much to hope for?

  He walked back through the church and out the front, swung up onto General Lee’s back, and booted the horse down the hill. When he was fifty feet from the padre’s shack, he slid down from the saddle while the palomino was still moving. He hit the ground jogging, and pressed his back against the shack’s rear wall, near the closed back door.

  He reached over and tried the metal latch lever. It clicked, and the door whined open a few inches. Zane gave a shove and stepped into the cabin. He was in the padre’s kitchen, simply furnished with a small cookstove, eating table, and several plank shelves crowded with airtight tins and burlap food pouches.

  Beyond lay the sleeping area with one rocking chair built of elk horns and hide and over which an afghan was draped that Alejandro used to wrap around his shoulders of a chilly night at this altitude and sip his home-brewed ale and stare into the hot fire provided by the small, mud-brick hearth in the left wall. The windows were covered by Indian blankets through which a dingy, washed-out light shone, casting the cabin in misty gray shadows.

  The padre’s cot lay before the hearth, in which a small fire smoldered. On the cot lay a man in threadbare long handles. He had long, obsidian-black hair and a long, sharp, upturned nose. The way he lay bespoke a hump on his back, neck bent at an angle. An empty whiskey bottle and a shot glass sat on the hearth on the far side of the sleeping beast. A cigarette stub lay on the floor a few inches below his sagging, knobby hand with fingernails shaped like arrow points.

  On the room’s other side, two more figures lay on a straw pallet—a naked male and a naked female only partly covered by a green wool Army blanket. Lice flecked the hair of each. Two whiskey bottles, one empty, one half-full, and several of the padre’s beer bottles lay or stood around them. The male was spooned against the female, cupping one of her small, pert breasts in his pale, gnarled hand. His face was buried between her shoulder and her neck, and he was snoring loudly.

  The female opened her eyes and stared at Zane through sleep fog. She blinked, recognition flashing in her pale blue eyes as she realized that she
was not dreaming the big man in the room. She lifted her head with a start, stretching her lips back from yellow fangs.

  A snakelike hiss rose from deep in her throat, and her eyes slanted devilishly. Zane’s Colt roared, spitting smoke and flames into the dimness. The female tipped her head back and clutched her throat with both hands, making strangling sounds and staring wide-eyed at the herringbone pattern on the ceiling, quivering.

  The male behind her lifted his head up, coming awake instantly, snarling, and reaching under the pillow they both shared. Zane’s Colt roared twice more, blowing the male back off the cot, both slugs exiting his back with a spray of snot-colored blood and viscera, and painting the whitewashed wall behind him.

  The female had fallen onto her back atop the cot, and was flopping around like a landed fish. Zane shot her again, through the heart, then turned toward the other side of the room where the other ghoul was reaching under his own cot for a sawed-off, double-barreled ten-gauge.

  As the ghoul brought up the coach gun, Zane drilled him through his left shoulder. The man loosed a shrill falsetto squeal that felt like a slap to the ghoul hunter’s ears, rattling his eardrums painfully. The black-haired hobgobbie dove forward off the bed, turning a complete somersault as he hit the floor, rolling toward the door. As he came to a standing position in his threadbare, filthy white balbriggans, he tried to bring the shotgun up once more, shouting in his bizarre old woman’s voice, “Fuck you, you red-blooded coyote!”

  Zane’s Colt belched twice more, punching one slug through the top of the man’s center chest, another through his other shoulder. The man squealed louder, and Zane threw himself hard to his left as the double-barreled barn blaster roared like a cannon in the close confines, spraying a pumpkin-sized load of buckshot across the kitchen and into the table and wall and through the open back door.

  Zane rolled off his left shoulder and hip, dropping his empty pistol and shucking the one holstered on his right side, thumbing the hammer back, narrowing an eye as he planted the bead at the end of the barrel into the V over the cylinder, and fired.

  The slug hammered through the ghoul’s forehead, just below his hairline. As he flew back against the door with a high wail, he triggered his gut shredder’s second barrel into the ceiling. He lolled against the door, which wobbled in its frame on weak hinges until it gave way with a crunching splintering sound, and both the door and the ghoul went sailing into the padre’s front yard.

  The ghoul piled up atop the door. He sighed heavily and lay still. Greenish-yellow blood oozed from the silver dollar–sized hole in his forehead.

  Zane looked around the room, in which powder smoke billowed in blue webs, smelling like rotten eggs. The other two were down and still, oozing their putrid fluids onto the padre’s hard-packed earthen floor.

  “Sons o’ bitches,” Zane bit out, wincing at the pain his impact with the floor had caused in his left shoulder.

  Slowly, breathing heavily, he gained his knees. He retrieved his empty Colt, then heaved himself to his feet, holstering the right-side gun, flipping open the loading gate on the left-side gun, spinning the wheel and letting the empty casings tumble onto the floor around his moccasins.

  As he plucked fresh shells from his cartridge belt and punched them into the Colt’s cylinder, turning it slowly, hearing each click, he walked through the open door and stepped over the dead ghoul. He looked around, expecting more ghouls from any quarter. They usually ran in packs, and it was odd to find only a few at a time.

  He glanced up at the church, then toward a knob of rock looming on his left, then at the garden and clumps of brush and cedars all around the place. He heard a murmur of voices from the direction of the canyon, and stepped farther out away from the padre’s shack to peer the hundred yards down the gradual slope into the deep arroyo.

  Three figures were just now crossing the ghost town’s single street and angling toward the base of the slope, looking up at Zane from beneath the brims of their battered hats. They were three ragged-looking hombres in worn trail garb. One wore a duster. He also walked with a limp and had a prominent hump on his back, giving him a twisted look. Zane inspected the other two more closely, saw that they, too, had humps lifting the backs of their shirts.

  The one who wore a funnel-brimmed hat, red-and-black-checked shirt, and green neckerchief dropped suddenly to one knee and raised a pistol, aiming up the slope at Zane. The ghoul hunter wasn’t worried about the hogleg. He was pretty much out of range of the short gun, unless the shooter was the best shot Zane had ever known. But ghouls were notoriously lazy and undisciplined, and it was hard to find a good shooter among them.

  What had gained the brunt of his attention were the clumps of other ghouls just now spilling out of two of the other rickety, false-fronted buildings on the far side of the ghost town’s narrow main street. They were all slouched and still pulling on shirts or denim jackets and checking pistols as they came on toward the slope. More movement caught Zane’s eye, and he saw three more men filing out of the old Palace Hotel, and then three more men stepped out behind them.

  And four more…

  A pistol popped. Zane looked straight down below his position and saw smoke puffing in front of the hobgobbie in the checked shirt. The other two men were running up the slope now, taking long strides and casting savage looks up at Zane.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the ghoul hunter muttered, swinging around and running over to where General Lee stood about fifty feet in front of the padre’s shack, swinging his brown tail back and forth sideways and twitching his ears as he stared down the slope at the crowd headed toward him and his master.

  “Easy, fella,” Zane said, quickly shucking his Henry repeater from the saddle sheath.

  He ran back to the brow of the hill and quickly, resolutely, dispatched the two ghouls running up toward him and laid out the pistol-wielding ghoul in the checked shirt. That didn’t waylay the others a bit. In fact, it seemed to lure them on.

  All twenty or so loosed a low roar and surged forward, filtering out between the dilapidated buildings and running up the slope. For all their sloth and the cumbersome humps on their backs, hobgobbies could run. It was almost as though they had springs in their ankles.

  The group was coming on fast, triggering lead.

  Zane lowered the Henry and ran back to General Lee.

  “Hate to tell ya this, General,” he said, catching up the reins and swinging into the saddle. “But I do believe we’ve done wore out our welcome here in old Dry Wash.”

  General Lee replied with a shrill whinny and lunged into a gallop, kicking up great gouts of clay-colored dust behind him.

  Chapter 21

  A SNARLING HORDE

  As Zane, atop General Lee, angled down the slope toward the creek threading the canyon’s bottom, he looked to his right. Now the horde of hobgobbies in the grimy garb of thirty‑a‑month-and-found cowpunchers was running along the road paralleling the creek, on an interception course with Zane.

  Holding the General’s reins in his teeth and giving the horse his head, Zane shouldered the Henry repeater and snapped off three quick shots. The slugs puffed dust along the road and the slope and skipped away, screaming. That didn’t stop or even slow the hobgobbie horde, as the ghoul hunter had known it prob-

  ably wouldn’t.

  Once a hobgobbie had you in his sights, there was little stopping him except a slug or an arrow. They could be snivelingly nonaggressive when they weren’t excited, but whipped up by the bloodlust, they’d chase you barefoot across a smoking lava field and gut you with the short, razor-edged knives they favored, or shoot you with a pistol or hogleg. They lacked coordination, and their eyes were bad, but they could shoot within ten feet as well as your average greenhorn who’d been practicing only a week or two.

  The really bad thing about them was how fast on their feet they were. Zane had less ground to cover to the canyon bottom than they did running out of the ghost town, but as fast as they were all moving, as one
yipping, snarling, cursing horde along the trail, he judged they were running nearly as fast as General Lee, and the palomino had been cut and gentled out of a bronco mustang herd in the rough country around Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains.

  As he approached the canyon-bottom trail, Zane cursed and snapped off two more shots. One hobgobbie, within fifty yards and coming hard, running abreast of three others, yelped, grabbed his knee, hit the ground, and rolled, nearly tripping one of the others.

  They all kept coming.

  The front of the snarling, long-striding pack was only thirty feet from the intersection of the two trails when Zane hit the canyon bottom. General Lee gave an indignant whinny at the closing horde and swung hard left, faltering slightly before grinding his rear hooves into the turf and lunging forward until he was in full gallop once more.

  Behind Zane, pistols and rifles popped above the hum and buzz of the frenzied ghoul pack. He heard the fast patter of running feet and glanced over his right shoulder just as the lead ghoul pistoned off his heels and made a mad dive forward, scissoring his arms as though to grab one of General Lee’s hammering rear legs.

  The ghoul missed by inches. He hit the ground with a shrill, enraged cry, and rolled off to the side of the trail, the one behind him wildly leaping over him, the others hammering on past him and after Zane.

  Two of the front-runners were sporadically triggering shots, and several times the ghoul hunter felt the air beside his head curl warmly, saw the bullets plunk into the dust ahead of him. As he approached the rise atop which he’d glassed the canyon an hour ago, one bullet tore through his flapping wolf vest to kiss his right side, about a foot below his armpit. He felt little except the slight dampness of trickling blood.

  He glanced behind once more. A few hobgobbies were slowing for the grade, but General Lee was, too, so the horde was continuing to gain on Zane in small increments. He could probably outrun them in time, because General Lee had more staying power than the hobgobbies, who could run like grizzlies for only short stretches, but this group was especially determined. He was beginning to feel the stony chill of the doomed in his bowels when, as he closed the gap between him and the crest of the hill, a familiar sight appeared between a boulder and a gnarled cedar right of the trail.