by RW Krpoun
We exchanged glances. “Old stuff ties it together,” Captain admitted.
“So what is an ‘eccentric flint’?
The boy struggled for an answer. “See, mister, they barely know. They are like about so big,” he held his hands about eight inches apart. “Some are flint, some are other stone, but they’re all carved, not flat like a knife but sticking out on all sides. Brother Paul thinks they go on the end of a staff for ceremonies and stuff. They’re like a decoration or a symbol or something.”
“You know, I keep hearing ‘stone’, ‘old’, and ‘ceremony’,” I said thoughtfully, recovering the journal from Nhi, who was studying the drawings with a frown bisecting her brow. “That’s a strong pattern that ties in with Brother Andrews’ information and my salt sledge report. Nhi, you have anything to add?”
She shrugged. “That is not a fan, it is a book.”
“A book?” I looked at the picture. “That’s not a book.”
“Like a book, a scroll folded,” She flipped her palms atop one another in a folding motion. “Chinese still do that.”
“You’ve been to China, Seth. She shooting straight?” Captain asked.
“How the hell should I know? I was a Corporal when I was there, and we were more or less invading, not that I was there long. I spent my free time in whore houses, not lending libraries.” A sudden memory brought me up short. “Wait…”
“What?”
“They had scrolls on the walls of tea shops and the brothels,” I said slowly. “A couple had crease marks.” I concentrated. “Crease marks at regular intervals. And the Chinese were always yammering about the Jap troops stealing books and dinnerware. I saw them, they had carts full of small cloth-covered boxes.” I looked at the sketch again. “If you folded up a scroll flat, the paper part, you could fit them in those boxes. More than one per box.”
“Dinnerware?” Captain grinned.
“Not dinnerware, vases and stuff. It had names.”
“Names?”
“Like…from periods in history. Who knows why? There was a huge city being sacked and those idiots took vases.”
“Seems pretty dim.”
“Damn straight. I didn’t bother with anything but gold, silver, and jade.” I tapped the sketch. “But Nhi is probably right. You’ve got two pictures of old ceremonial things, and a folded scroll. Put that together and you get…hell, I don’t know, exactly.”
“Tools and instructions,” Captain suggested. “The scroll tells you what to do, and the celts and flints are how you do it.”
“Make the dead walk?” I shook my head. “Maybe. But Brother Andrew said it was like snake oil, too, mixing stuff. By the way, anyone else notice that some crazies smell like some sort of perfume?”
They had.
“I think we’re getting’ off the reservation,” Captain tapped the journal thoughtfully. “Nothing says this sawbones had the whole rope. He might be like Brother Andrew: knows what is going on, but is unclear on the how. The monk says mixing stuff, this guy says books and trinkets. Could be both are right, but they each only have a part of the whole picture.”
“Brother Andrew said it was a complex business,” I said, flipping through the journal again. “Stands to reason, otherwise this would happen more. So this sawbones is up here looking for the same thing the Church is on guard against, he’s got some ideas on what the business entails but probably not the whole picture.”
“He’s got people to answer to,” Mac pointed out. “He sent word, even had a code set up.”
“Good point. He’s official, too: he could camp out in Army quarters and could expect that his messages sent through the Army’s telegraph system would reach his friends.”
“I have a question,” Captain said abruptly. “What do they have in the wagon?”
“What wagon?”
“The wagon the crazies from Sinaloa are pulling. We saw it, remember? It’s heavily loaded to judge by the tracks.”
I shrugged. “Stuff Green Coat needs.”
“But what stuff? Brother Andrew said that wheels aren’t good for the snake oil stuff.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. Finally I shrugged. “Good point. Something from town, something that is ordinary.”
“And heavy,” Mac added.
“You know, sooner or later we’re going to come across something that makes sense on its first examination and the shock is going to kill me,” I said disgustedly. “All right, lets go see where Green Coat is, find out what he is up to, and then kill him.”
Tobias didn’t want to take the mules back to the orphanage on his own and it didn’t seem like a great idea in any case, so we took him and the extra mules along.
I was fuming as we rode, drumming my fingers on the shotgun’s butt.
“What?” Captain urged his horse alongside Pork Chop. “You look like a steam engine with the safety valves wired shut, hoss.”
“I’m getting pissed off at being the dumbest kid in the class,” I snarled. “Everyone I meet knows more about what is going on. A Noviate, a monk, a dead Mexican doctor, everybody. If Green Coat isn’t the necromancer, then we’re messing around with the workers, not the foreman. There are carriers running around, we saw that yesterday, while Green Coat and other underlings are busy going about the real game.”
“Its like a military campaign,” Captain said slowly. “We’re chasing a detachment.”
“Yeah. The necromancer has a plan and is working towards it while we are stumbling around trying to figure out what is happening. A big part of all this is smoke and mirrors, diversions to create chaos and panic, on top of what’s already happening around here. We need to start getting down to the heart of the matter.”
“You think Green Coat’s running the key operation?”
“I have no idea, but I’m sure he knows a lot more than we do.”
“How much of a lead do they have on us?” I asked as Captain remounted from examining the tracks.
“A pretty fair one,” the lean ex-lawman admitted. “I wondered about them not using horses, but I’m seeing why now: those damned crazies don’t need much rest. They’ve made two stops so far, neither much more than an a few minutes apiece is my guess. They had twelve hours on us this morning, and they used eleven of those to cover ground. I guess they probably spent an hour at that cavalry post.”
“I make it about two miles an hour,” Mac observed somberly. “They were close to twenty miles ahead of us when we rode out this morning.”
I glanced at the sun. “Five hours on the trail and we’ve covered a good twenty miles, so that makes us five hours behind them. Ten miles at most.”
“Less,” Captain lowered his binoculars and pointed. “There’s dust up ahead, look to the right of that hill.”
“How far do you make it?” I asked the others.
“Two miles, give or take a bit,” Captain said thoughtfully; Mac grunted an assent.
“So if that’s them, they arrived either about the time we left the mission, or not long after, give or take a bit.” I raised my glasses and studied the dust again, then passed them to Nhi. “That’s too much dust-they are doing something complicated in one place.”
“Yeah,” Mac nodded somberly.
“What’s two miles in that direction?” I asked Tobias, who was now wearing a Captain’s tunic and a trooper’s kepi from the cavalry post.
“Nothing much, mister. There used to be a place there, a little village, but somebody shot it up bad and burned a lot of it. The people, them still alive, they left.”
“Is that a fact.” I accepted by binoculars back from Nhi and cased them. “That reminds me-there weren’t any binoculars or spyglasses as the cavalry outpost, either.”
“What’s the country like where that village used to be?” Mac asked Tobias.
“There’s hill to the north, that one there, and then sort of a long rise to the west. They grew stuff to the south and east, and had goats on the high ground.”
“Circle
around, come in from the north?” Mac stroked his mustaches thoughtfully.
“The high ground is always good,” I nodded. “Let’s go see what they are up to.”
Chapter Seven
Artists always seem to depict Mexico as a desert, but most of what I have seen isn’t much different than the Great Plains-maybe a bit drier, but not all that much. China was much the same-the artists make it look exotic and strange, and yet the countryside wasn’t anything you couldn’t see in parts of the USA, with the exception of the way they raise rice, which some boys who hailed from Louisiana told me was all wrong. Peking was a lot different, but even it had buildings and whole streets that looked like they would not be out of place in Ohio. It makes travel for entertainment pretty pointless, in my opinion.
We left Tobias watching the mounts and climbed up the north slope of the hill, then eased around the west side to reach the military crest on the south slope, the military crest being the area just below the actual crest from which maximum observation and direct fire opportunities can be obtained. For some reason that phrase has stuck with me since I read it on a troop ship chugging towards China.
Mac moved forty feet ahead of us, as the big man was cat-quick and as stealthy as an Apache, but there were no sentries posted, which surprised me as Green Coat had to know there was armed opposition around. Nhi, carrying a leather-covered case on a shoulder strap, stayed close to me.
Lying in the dusty grass in a row we studied the scene below. “What the blazes?” Captain muttered.
“Its how this entire trip has gone,” I sighed. “We’re likely to end up in bedlam if we ever try to tell anyone.”
Down below the ruins of the village spread out, but not very far-I doubted there were more than a hundred souls there when it had been occupied, and a hundred peons do not require a great deal of town to live in. Fire and a season or two of neglect had not left much standing.
There was less standing now than there had been: the wagon we had seen outside of Sinaloa was sitting on the faint track that served the area as a road, empty, and a mob of crazies, armed with all manner of shovels, spades, pry bars, and associated tools were clumsily tearing down every building and digging up the foundations. Digging deep, as a matter of fact: in several places the holes were so deep all you could see of the digger was the earth being tossed into the air, the dirt landing back in the hole as often or not.
The zombies seemed to be working under the direction of a couple of men dressed in the white linen suits often affected by professional men in Mexico. The pair had considerable difficulty in their endeavor, for while the crazies were docile and obedient, they also appeared to be dumber than rocks.
“Anyone see Green Coat?” I muttered, although I doubted either of the overseers would have heard me if I was shouting.
No one did. “I make it three men who aren’t crazy, but none have long hair, hoss,” Captain observed thoughtfully, wetting a finger to test the breeze.
“Three? I only see the two giving orders.”
“The fella sitting in the shade there just to the left of the stones they hauled from the church. He’s reading a book.”
“Yeah, looks like an gringo.”
“So,” Captain adjusted the leaf sight on his rifle. “How do we do this?”
“How many do you count?”
“About a fifty, give or taken,” Mac pointed. “Looks like a few got put down by stuff falling on them.” He was indicating some mangled bodies dragged into a pile away from the work areas.
“That’s a lot of ammunition, but I don’t see any other way. The problem is that they don’t break-once they figure out we’re up here they’ll come at us like the tide. And I really want to grab at least one of those men alive.”
“The crazies are obeying them,” Mac objected. “They could get cute and send groups to flank us.”
“True. But if we don’t get someone to tell us what is going on, all we’re doing is killing crazies.”
“You both got it all wrong,” Captain advised as he laid out a handful of cartridges on a kerchief. “We don’t kill the crazies, and we take those birds alive. How we do it is Mac slips around to within speakin’ distance, whereupon I’ll shoot close enough to one or the other that they understand that they’re fish in a barrel. Mac pops up and explains the business to them.”
“The business?”
“Sure: have half of the crazies knee down, and the other half then bashes in the head of the first half. And repeat.”
“I’m not sure if that is brilliant or stark raving insane.”
“It’s a fine line, hoss.”
I pondered the concept. “Its just crazy enough to work. Except I’ll go down and do the talking-if it falls apart I’m a faster runner than Mac, and I don’t need the skills of a fox to creep up on two guys while a herd of crazies tear up the remains of a village.”
“Mac speaks Spanish-you don’t, not really,” Captain pointed out.
“Shit.” I turned it around in my mind, but that was a point that I could not refute. It went against my nature to send a man on a job that risky-the Army always said to lead by example, but this example required a skill I lacked. “Mac, are you game?”
The big man studied the scene below us. “Doesn’t seem too uncertain-if it goes south, kill the two jaspers givin’ orders and I’ll be fine. I can outrun the crazies if I need to.”
“All right, signal when you’re ready.” As the big man set off at a crouch, circling around to the west, I unbuckled my cartridge belt and laid it out for faster reloading. Nhi opened her case, which turned out to be a velvet-lined gun box, and extracted a Luger pistol with a considerably extended barrel that sported a short checked walnut forearm. She slotted a walnut stock onto the pistol’s butt, transforming the weapon into a carbine, and carefully adjusted the leaf sight.
“All right, Captain, you watch the fellow with the plug hat, he seems to be in charge. I’ll watch the short one, and Nhi, you keep an eye on the sitting fella-if he starts to get up put a bullet close enough to motivate him to stay still.”
“You know, Sister Celeste said she saw a greasy little rascal in Sinaloa, and I’ll wager that’s her fellow you’re laying your sights on.”
“Could be.”
Mac’s ability frequently surprised me-he was suddenly crouched behind a rock pile not twenty feet from where the two men were conferring. From their gestures I guessed they were losing interest in their project and were discussing moving on to their next task, although that might have been just wishful thinking on my part.
Plug Hat was leaning on a stub of adobe wall while Short Man made a point, or at least was talking while Plug Hat was listening, when Mac gave a careful wave. A second later a .30-06 bullet demolished the adobe brick Plug’s Hat’s hand was resting upon. Plug Hat fell to his knees, clutching his hand at the wrist as Mac popped up, his Smith & Wesson at the ready.
Short Man was as frozen to the spot as spit on iron in a Dakota blizzard as Mac made his speech, which he kept short and to the point. The fellow in the dark suit sitting by himself started to get to his feet, thought better of it, and carefully sat back down.
Mac was convincing, of that it was clear. Of course, men who stand nearly six and a half feet tall often are, especially at close quarters and pointing a revolver. The pair slowly turned and began shouting and gesturing at their clumsy charges, and with no small amazement I watched as nearly all the zombies knelt in a ragged line and two crazies armed with sledge hammers began smashing in their skulls, starting at opposite ends of the line.
No more than two or three had been put down when I realized that while the plan had started out well, it was about to jump the tracks. I kept the front sight rock steady on Short Man’s grimy jacket at center chest or back (he moved often while giving orders), awaiting the double cross.
The seconds trickled away with marrow-chilling slowness, the faint sound of hammers pulping skulls sounding with monotonous regularity. Lying on the military cres
t of a Mexican hill next to a pretty Indochina girl watching dead men crush the skulls of other dead men who patiently waited for the hammer stroke was an experience that was so surreal it was dizzying.
When it came it caught me off guard: Plug Hat suddenly turned and fired a little hold-out he had somehow gotten to, trying for Mac, but both Mac and Captain were faster. Plug Hat’s shot went wide as he was punched off his feet by a .30-06 bullet, and Mac was already moving.
Short Man started screeching until a .30-40 Krag split his sternum, but apparently he got off enough of whatever he needed to yell because that wailing cry erupted from the remaining zombies as if they were a trained chorus performing at some big-city theater house, and to a body they started lurching for Mac.
However Mac was legging it upslope in our general direction, angling slightly to the west to avoid fouling our field of fire.
The hammers had accounted for a quarter of the zombies before Plug Hat had worked up his nerve-I was shocked to see how many bodies lay inert-I had thought the wait had been shorter; but there were still enough crazies left to hold our interest. Captain dropped one with each shot, whereas I got a head shot with every second or third round. Nhi did better, although with her lighter bullets she had to hold back until the crazies began ascending the hill before opening fire. While only half as accurate as Captain she was able to fire at least twice as fast as he could, and between the two of them the zombies quickly melted away, helped along by Mac, who stopped halfway up the slope to add his rifle to the engagement.
Unlike our earlier fights there was none of the frantic pace nor sense of insanity involved, just the careful business of planting a bullet into the brain-pan of a stumbling but still-moving-yet-deceased Mexican man or woman. It was somewhat anticlimactic, but in a very good way. Like killing scorpions with a hammer.
I was glad to see that Dark Suit was standing but motionless, his hands held up in a gesture of surrender; I desperately wanted someone to talk to about what was going on, and I was confident that he knew more than I did. I was also confident that one way or another he was going to tell us everything he knew.