Dust of the Damned (9781101554005)

by Brandvold, Peter

  Closing his eyes against the magnified vision, clamping his hands over his ears to quell the night sounds of predators and prey—the tearing and frantic screaming and the salty smell of blood—he wheeled and began striding back toward Tucson. He opened his eyes. The dim lights spilling out of the cantinas and saloons beckoned him. His heart beat faster but more hopefully now.

  He’d get a drink and try to distract himself from the keenness of his savage senses, the barely contained will to unleash them, to follow them, and turn himself loose upon the night.

  He dropped his hands to his sides, ground his teeth against the sounds that began slithering into his brain once more, making him feel dizzy and overloaded and causing his knees to grow spongy, his heart to beat faster and faster, his breath to grow shallow and weak.

  His hands sweated in the chill air. His feet burned in his moccasins.

  For a moment, he thought he’d pass out.

  He kept walking.

  As he passed the church, the padding of many canine feet sounded. He glanced down the side street between the church and the Rincon Beer Parlor that was dark now in the wake of the massacre.

  Up the hill on which the cemetery sprawled, he heard frantic panting and scratching and saw the silhouettes of several shaggy wolves scrambling around the boneyard while one hunkered forward and dug, tearing at the soil with its front paws. It stopped digging, ran around, mewled and whined in frustration, then resumed digging once more.

  Zane’s nostrils filled with the sweet, wild scent of the carrion-stalking pack. The fetor struck his belly like pig slop, and his stomach turned, nearly heaving up its contents.

  If a full moon had been rising, would he have been able to keep his wolf in its cellar?

  No, somehow he had to kill it. He had to find a way to kill the beast or surely it would free itself, and it would be Uriah Zane forever chained and locked in that cellar while a madman ran loose upon the frontier.

  He quickened his pace, stopped at the first cantina he came to, no more than a long, low adobe box with PULQUERIA scrawled in black paint over its deep casement door, above which a bead curtain hung, clicking and clacking in a slight breeze that had risen, bringing even more scents—so many it was hard to identify a single one—to the ghoul hunter’s nostrils.

  He bulled through the curtain, the beads clattering back into place behind him, loud as the thudding of shod hooves in his ears. His knees and hands shaking, he moved forward, sagged into an empty chair that sat back against the cracked adobe wall. A small, square table of half-cut cottonwood logs sat to the left of the chair. He rested an elbow on the table and entwined his hands together, mashing their heels against each other to steady himself.

  He’d thought he’d been through all this months ago, during the first several full moons after he’d first been bit. It was happening again with nearly as much force as it had happened then.

  He knew why.

  It was happening because he’d become keenly conscious of the wolf inside him—maybe partly because of the savagery he’d seen in the Hell’s Angels, maybe partly because of what they’d done here in Tucson day before yesterday—and he was steeling himself against it.

  What he needed to do—and he did not know where the realization suddenly came from—was to ignore it. To ride it out. To not fight the sensations. He hadn’t been fighting them before. He’d merely used the heightened senses to his best advantage. Now he was fighting them again in the same way he’d first fought them until he’d learned the key: to let go and distract himself, to have enough confidence in his own humanness to keep the wolf under lock and key without an overwhelming effort.

  Without dwelling on the temptation he felt to turn the wolf loose…

  The strains of the mandolin flooded Zane’s senses. He welcomed the distracting music and looked around until he saw the player—a plump Mexican girl in an ornate Mexican basque. She was round-faced and sleepy-eyed, and she sat in a chair beside the bar made of crude cottonwood planks and resting on beer kegs. Two large crock jugs stood atop the bar, and Zane could smell the pulque inside one—a milky liquor made from the fermented juice of the century plant. In the other was bacanora, brewed from the agave plant, and a form of mezcal.

  “Bacanora,” he told the big-eared, thin-haired barman staring over the plank board at him, while the girl continued strumming the mandolin. While the barman was old and craggy, Zane could see the hint of his features in the girl, probably his daughter.

  The barman, dressed in a white shirt, filthy apron, baggy green slacks, and rope-soled sandals, reached for the dipper handle poking up from the bacanora crock. Zane looked around the room, which spun and tilted slightly, and saw a milky-eyed man with close-cropped gray hair sitting at a table just beyond Zane’s, staring blindly toward Zane and grinning toothlessly. His small brown hands with nails thick as seashells were wrapped around a wooden cup.

  Three men played craps on the floor toward the back of the cantina, and two other, younger men dressed in the gaudy attire of vaqueros sprawled in chairs near a smoky charcoal brazier. They smiled shiny-eyed at the opposite wall, one waving a hand lazily to the strains of the mandolin.

  Beneath the girl’s hide-bottom chair, only partly visible behind the pleats and folds of her black, gold-embroidered crinoline dress, the cur that had stolen Cole Younger’s boot lay curled, nose to tail, sound asleep.

  The barman limped out from behind the bar and set a stone mug on the table before Zane. With a shaky right hand, the ghoul hunter lifted the cup to his lips and drank the glass down in four deep swallows, the powerful hooch that tasted a little like skimmed milk and grapefruit juice searing his tonsils and lighting a welcome fire in his chest and belly.

  The heat rose from his gut and flooded into his face, and he felt suddenly as though he were ensconced in warm wool during a raging blizzard.

  “Another.”

  The barman turned from the bar, arching one thin, dark brow dubiously. The man lifted a shoulder, retrieved Zane’s mug, and refilled it from the same crock as before. He set it on Zane’s table and watched while the ghoul hunter took a sip. Zane put the cup down and smiled up at the man.

  “Nectar of the fucking gods, eh, amigo?”

  He fished some coins out of his shirt pocket, placed them one by one in the man’s open palm, and waved him away.

  He sat back in his chair and welcomed the warmth that washed through him—up and down and sideways, reaching as far up as his hair ends, as far down as his toes.

  The girl began to sing an old Spanish ballad, “Había hace tiempo un muchacho para mí en Chihihuaha,” and the ghoul hunter sagged farther back in his chair, setting his hat on the table and letting his head rest against the wall.

  He sighed.

  A warm, relieved smile stretched his mouth. Bittersweet tears filled his eyes as he listened to the lonesome song of unrequited love in Mexico, of a girl who drowned herself in a well because the boy she loved had eyes only for her more beautiful sister, and he indulged himself without feeling foolish.

  He probably looked foolish, lounging there, teary-eyed, but he didn’t feel anything but sorrow for the poor girl who’d drowned herself.

  He listened to the ballad and then to two more, his soul dangling from every note. He’d never felt more alone—even during those long nights he’d first started fighting the wolf inside him—but the strong Mexican liquor filed off the edges of the loneliness. He finished the pungent but deadening brew, then heaved himself unsteadily to his feet. He shambled over to the girl with the mandolin and dropped a copper dollar into the coffee tin sitting beside her atop the bar.

  She gave him a cordial nod as she strummed and sang.

  He bowed lavishly, doffing his hat and sweeping it down before him. “Muchas gracias, senorita. Para uno tan joven, usted canta maravillosamente sobre angustia.” For one so young, you sing beautifully of heartbreak.

  He set his hat on his head, turned, and staggered out of the cantina, retracing his steps b
ack to the second floor of the Santa Catalina Inn. He glanced at Angel’s door directly across from his own.

  No sounds in there. At least, none that he could hear. She was likely asleep. His heart started to tighten, and he floated away from it. Vaguely, behind the curtain of drunkenness that had dropped down over his senses, numbing them, he made a mental note to remind the marshal that if they were still riding together during the next full moon, she’d need to keep her guns filled with silver, and a watchful eye on her partner.

  He chuckled. Angel wouldn’t need reminding.

  He went into his own room and was finally drifting off into a welcome slumber when someone rapped loudly on his door.

  “Zane! Zane! You in there, Zane?”

  The ghoul hunter jerked his head up from his pillow and reached for the LeMat. He flicked the hammer over the shotgun shell and aimed the piece at the door. “Holy Christ! Who the fuck is it?”

  “It’s Jesse. Open up! We gotta talk, Zane!”

  Chapter 27

  JESSE’S DREAM

  In his balbriggans and still holding his heavy, cocked LeMat, Zane threw the door open and stood barefoot, staring down at the wheelchair-bound, wiry little creature in the too-big hat, pale blue eyes still sparkling crazily, as they had been earlier in the day.

  The outlaw/ghoul hunter was no longer drinking or smoking, but he hadn’t quit long ago. He reeked of both alcohol and marijuana. He was dressed in a long, gray duster, and pistols jutted up from holsters on his hips. He held a Spencer repeater across his bony knees with his good hand, the left one still in a sling.

  “We done talked at the boneyard, Jesse,” Zane said, voice raspy from the sleep he’d been drifting into.

  “Hear me, damn you,” Jesse said, narrowing his eyes menacingly, his delicate face flushing, veins bulging in his temples. “You’re gonna need me when you go after them ghouls.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I know where they’re headed, Uriah.” Jesse’s lips shaped a slow smile. He let that sink in, and then he added, “Seen the place in a dream last night. And it’s still right here.”

  He lifted his right hand from the carbine’s breech and set a long, slender index finger against his right temple. “You don’t got time to track ’em, ’cause they’re racin’ the full moon, four nights away. And now they’ll be coverin’ their trail. Won’t take no chances.”

  He lifted his chin to glance out the window behind Zane, where the milky wash of a three-quarter moon was brushing Tucson’s rooftops. “You need me to lead you to where they’re goin’.”

  “Bullshit.” Zane started to close the door.

  Jesse wheeled himself forward and stuck a boot out to stop it. “Don’t you do me that way. I know where they’re headed, goddamnit, and you need me to show you. My men are dead, and I need you, Uriah, though I’ll likely rue this night for sayin’ it. But you need me, too.”

  “I won’t ride with you, Jesse.”

  Zane had been invited to join the James-Younger gang years ago, just after the War, when they’d all found themselves together in Kansas. Zane had declined then, because the gang was a pack of angry killers led by a demented, kill-crazy hillbilly in Jesse James. The War had given him a good excuse to kill and rob banks, but even without the War, his severe visage would be adorning wanted dodgers throughout the West. That was just who Jesse was. It was also Cole Younger and even Jesse’s late brother, Frank, to some extent, though Frank might not have been as het up without the War and the Hell’s Angels giving him a cause.

  “Don’t be a fool, Uriah. You an’ me fought on the same side. We’re still fightin’ on the same side.” Jesse made his red-rimmed eyes bulge crazily. “And I got the gift. Handed down by my grandmammy. Second sight.” His eyes danced as though there were lights behind them. “And I seen where them killers o’ Frank and our Confederate brethren are headed, Uriah.”

  He cackled like an old woman, sitting there shaking in his chair. Just then Zane smelled cigar smoke and saw one of the men who’d been digging Frank’s grave standing in the shadows near the end of the hall, near the stairs. He stood with one hand against the wall behind him, smoking desultorily, waiting to take his crazy benefactor back down the stairs.

  Across the hall, Angel’s door opened. The marshal stepped out in a striped nightshirt that hung to her bare knees. She had a pistol in her hand, and as she moved out into the hall, she aimed it at the back of Jesse’s head, loudly ratcheting the hammer back.

  The Missourian had heard the door latch click and the hinges squawk, and now he turned to see the redhead bearing down on him, and he grinned. “Well, if it ain’t the lovely Marshal Coffin.”

  “Sorry for your losses, Jesse, but I reckon I’ll be lockin’ you up in the local hoosegow. Pick you up on my way back to Denver. Several rail lines will be very happy to see you hanged.”

  Zane sighed in frustration. “Forget it, Angel.”

  She furled a skeptical brow. “How’s that?”

  “The crazy bastard’s pullin’ out with us tomorrow.”

  Zane stepped back into his room and closed the door.

  The next day, at high noon, the hunting party, including Jesse James, riding his black-socked buckskin, was angling southwest of Tucson, the direction in which the outlaw from Missouri said they were heading. The tracks made by both the Hell’s Angels and the posse that had followed them out from town bore this out.

  It was a cool, sunny day, though high, thin clouds moving in from California threatened rain later. Al Hathaway, who was riding ahead, checked his mule down suddenly and rose in his stirrups to inspect the trail, swinging his head slowly from left to right and back again.

  “What is it?” Zane asked.

  Hathaway said nothing. He swung heavily down from the mule’s back, dropped the reins, and walked ahead a ways, where the trail narrowed between two piles of cracked and sun-bleached granite heaved up from the earth’s volcanic bowels eons ago. Chin dipped, he swerved off the trail’s left side where a thin corridor in the rocks rose up a low shoulder along an outcropping. He walked forty yards to the top of the shoulder, then turned to stare back down where Zane, Angel, and Jesse James waited astride their horses.

  “They came this way, swingin’ back east. The posse from town was still followin’ ’em.”

  “Nope.” Jesse shook his head.

  He no longer wore the sling but kept his left arm sort of hanging gingerly at his side, gloved hand resting on his thigh. He’d changed the bandage on his right thigh that morning before they’d left, and so far no blood spotted it. A tough little Missouri devil, Zane silently opined.

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?” Hathaway asked, indignant. “I got eyes; I can see their trail.”

  “They mighta gone that way for a time, but they would have swung back west. They were just tryin’ to shake the posse and anyone else trailin’ ’em—includin’ us. I told you fellas… and ladies… I know where they’re goin’. There’s no need to waste time scourin’ for sign!”

  He booted his buckskin ahead between the scarps and disappeared behind a bend in the trail, his dust sifting behind him.

  Sitting to Zane’s right, hands crossed on her saddle horn, Angel gave the ghoul hunter a pointed look. “How can you be so sure he really does know where the Angels are heading? He’s crazier’n a tree full of owls, Uriah.”

  “That’s sorta how I know.” More to the point, the wolf in Zane sensed the medium in Jesse. Saw it in his eyes. He’d seen it before in the Southern hill folk, many of whom practiced the art of clairvoyance and witch doctoring and all manner of magic, black and otherwise. Besides, Jesse hadn’t been studying the trail at all, but he seemed very confident about the path he’d chosen south of Tucson.

  When Hathaway had stepped into his saddle, he gave Zane a skeptical glance before shuttling it to Angel, who shrugged. With a grunt, Hathaway touched heels to his mule’s flanks, and Zane and Angel followed the scout on up the trail a half mile before they spotted Jesse squatting
atop a hill to the right side of the trail. His buckskin lazily foraged short, green grass spiking among the black rocks.

  Jesse looked at the trio below him and jerked his head, beckoning. “Take a look, friends.”

  Zane dismounted, dropped his reins, and started up the hill. Angel and Hathaway glanced at each other dubiously once more, then stepped down out of their saddles. They followed Zane up the hill to where Jesse knelt, staring off toward the southwest. He pointed toward a series of rocky, sun-blasted sierras rearing up against the western horizon—long, toothy-tipped ranges that appeared as dark and foreboding as the mountains on the moon.

  “See that second range there, a little higher than the first with that high peak in the middle?”

  Zane tipped his hat brim down a notch and squinted, following Jesse’s finger. “I see it.”

  “That’s the Lobo Negros. From a different angle—from the angle I saw in my dream of two nights ago—that high peak there looks like the head of a giant, snarling wolf, both ears sticking straight up in the air.”

  “And that’s where you think the Angels are headed?” Angel said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “Since you know so much about where they’re headed from this dream of yourn,” Hathaway said, “you must have some idea why they’re headed thataway.”

  “Nope, can’t help you there, Mr. Hathaway. I got the powers of seein’. Not readin’ what’s in a man’s—or, most ’specially, a wolf’s—heart. But that’s where they’re headed, and if they keep movin’ as fast as they was through here, they’ll be in the heart of them mountains in three nights.”

  “The night of the full moon,” Angel said, staring pensively off at the dark, volcanic range dappled in sunlight and shadows cast by the high clouds. She glanced quickly at Zane and away again.

  A hunting hawk screeched in the far distance, though in Zane’s ears it sounded no farther away than their horses.

  “Let’s shake a leg,” he said, and walked back down the rise.

  The others followed, approaching their mounts.