Last Train from Perdition

by Robert McCammon

  “I’ll refresh your memory. Sixty Confederate bodies thrown down a well in the aftermath of Fox’s Gap. Thrown down there like garbage. Did you piss on them afterward?”

  “Trevor,” said Ann. “Don’t.”

  Lawson realized that the vampire Indian had moved slightly to one side and nearer him, the better to get a clear line-of-fire with the loaded shotgun.

  “I call him Smoke, because he moves so quickly and quietly,” said Achilles Godfrey, in a soft and beguiling voice. “He doesn’t speak. I saved his life many years ago from a pack of them. His own kind, turned. He has repeated the favor many times. We are all brothers here, and there are several more out there who came with us to dispatch as many as possible. We have a small community a few miles away, in the mountains. We felt them gathering. We sent out scouts. Smoke is not the only Sioux in our happy little town. Imagine our amazement…that instead of humans being trapped as food for them, aboard this train is one of us. We saw you talking to that…boy, and what happened afterward. It was quite a shock to me personally, but then again…there had to be others like us out there. Had to be.”

  “Like you? How?”

  Godfrey was slow in answering. He walked over to a puddle of burning oil and stared into it, and by that light Lawson caught the red glare in the eyes of his battle-scarred face. “Ex-Captain Lawson,” he said, “that war you refer to with understandable bitterness is over. Yet there is another war that has been going on for years…centuries…that shows no signs of abatement. You are either on one side or another, and I will term those the dark and the light. May I call you Trevor?”

  Lawson nodded. He realized he owed his continuation of existence and the life of the others to this man, to Wilder and to Smoke, but…Achilles Godfrey? One of the most malicious and hate-filled officers to ever wear the Union blue? The story of the sixty bodies and the well had been verified, but what of the other tales? The quick execution of prisoners both by firing squad and hanging? The burning-to-the-ground of Southern villages removed from any military purpose? The placement of severed heads atop fenceposts as markers to show where the troops of Major Godless had passed through? And the skinning of the two camp followers who were proven to be Confederate spies…

  All those things Lawson had read about in newspapers in the aftermath of the conflict, as more witnesses had come forward and facts revealed. But who knew where Major Godless had disappeared to? He was one of the many hundreds missing from the battlefield, yet his legacy was still a matter of heated discussion in the papers of the day. Lawson recalled sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Sanctuaire not a year ago and reading that a new common grave of Confederate dead had been found on farmland west of Fox’s Gap. Of the thirty or so soldiers most were headless, yet it appeared a few had been buried alive with their arms severed at the shoulders. This was reported to be the work of Achilles Godfrey and his troops from a drummer boy who had escaped the carnage.

  “Trevor,” said the major, “this war is one we cannot lose. We have decided to fight the inhumanity that is attempting to consume us. We drink animal blood, not human…except for the occasional freshly-dead body we must dig up from graveyards. We portion that out in shares. The body is returned to the coffin and the earth, and no one is the wiser. We can hold out for a few months between feedings. As I say, we subsist mostly on animal blood.” His gaze sharpened as he looked upon Lawson. “I suspect your so-called life is the same?”

  “I haven’t sunken to grave-robbing.”

  “You mean…you haven’t sunken to grave-robbing yet.”

  “You’ve started drinking the ichor? That sustains you?” Lawson recalled his own brief and bitter taste of LaRouge’s ichor at the mansion in Nocturne.

  “We have been victorious in a few small skirmishes and have learned to drink from our enemies when possible,” Godfrey said. “It’s a particularly vile liquid but we’ve found that it does give strength…though not anything like the power of human blood. You’ve never tasted it?”

  “Only once.”

  “Listen…please…maybe I shouldn’t oughta be hearin’ this?” Rooster asked.

  “I don’t think I ought to be, either,” Mathias added. “It doesn’t sound too healthy for a regular man to know.”

  “We need to get this girl to the hospital in Helena,” Lawson told the major. “Rooster, can you drive this train?”

  “I can drive, but can you shovel coal?”

  “I can try,” said Eric. He had wrapped cloth torn from his coat around his wounded shoulder. “I’m not hurt bad enough to want to just sit here and wait.”

  “The track’s still blocked,” Mathias said. “What about that?”

  “It’s nothing we can’t move,” the major answered. “As I say, we’ve brought others. They’re standing guard around the train…what’s left of it.” He looked back and forth along the car. “I expect we should remove these bodies before you get to Helena. There’s going to be enough to have to explain to the sheriff and the railroad company as it is.”

  “Holy Lord!” said Rooster, with renewed alarm. “And me the only one left of the crew! They’ll split me in four pieces and hang every one of ’em!”

  “We’ll figure something out,” Lawson said. “Ann and I will stay in Helena as witnesses to a bandit raid.”

  “What…bitin’ bandits? They’ll laugh me right into the prison hole!”

  “I’ll have a talk with the sheriff. I can be very convincing when it’s necessary.” One benefit of his condition was that the Eye could be used to sap a victim’s strength of will and turn his or her mind into clay that could be shaped to suit the purpose. Even so, it seemed he and Ann would have a lot of claywork to do in Helena.

  “I’ll verify whatever Lawson says,” said Easterly. “We are not going to let anyone suffer any further.”

  “We?” Lawson lifted his eyebrows. “We?”

  Easterly came toward him and stopped only a couple of feet away. He cast his gaze upon Wilder, Smoke and Godfrey before it came back to Lawson.

  “I am everything you already know,” he said. “I have lived in the blackest of shadows. I have done terrible things, in my own name and in the name of God. I have lost…the most precious gift that was given to me: my family.” He lowered his head, and it was a moment before he could speak again. “I have nothing now,” he said, his voice strained by emotion. “I have been a thief, a charlatan, a wife-beater, a drunk, a joke of a father, a false prophet, and a back-shooting bounty hunter.

  “But, Mr. Lawson,” he said, and he lifted his eyes to the vampire’s, “I have never been a soldier. Would you allow me that honor?”

  “A dubious honor,” Lawson replied. “One that may kill you…or present you with something worse than death.”

  “I am already beyond that point,” said the reverend. “I am dead now…and I would like to return to something that might be called life.”

  Easterly meant it. Lawson didn’t have to throw his Eye to see that.

  “We’ll talk in Helena,” he said.

  “Shall we start removing this trash?” Godfrey asked. “Then we’ll get to work on the rocks.”

  Lawson was still in no shape to be moving bodies, as his broken right arm had not yet mended. He sat down on a bullet-nicked seat as Godfrey, Smoke, Wilder, and Easterly began to haul the dead vampires out of the car and throw them into the woods below. Ann sat on a seat facing him. Tears had rolled down her cheeks, but her expression was still eerily composed. She had to break sometime, Lawson thought. It might be tomorrow or the next few days, but sooner or later she would break.

  Then he would help Ann put herself back together again, and they would go on.

  “Trevor?” Her voice seemed distant. “Trevor?” she repeated.

  “Yes?”

  “Did I kill my father?”

  He looked her square in the eyes, trying to give her as much of his strength that he could spare. “You know the answer to that.”

  She nodded, but even as she did tw
o fresh tears spilled.

  He reached out with his good arm and took her hand. There was nothing more he could say, and nothing more she could ask. She shivered from the cold, and the snow blew into her hair and the puddles of lamp fuel flickered, and the bodies of the vampires were thrown into the woods and at one point Ann removed the pistol from her holster, put it on the seat beside her and stared at it as if it were the most hateful enemy she had ever faced. Then after awhile she put it back into its holster, where it belonged.

  When the bodies were cleared out, the vampires along with Eli Easterly began the removal of the rocks. Eric and Rooster went out to watch, and Rooster wanted to go over the process of bringing the locomotive up to steam. Ann informed Lawson that Blue was waking up, and he went back to kneel beside her.

  She was still very pale and obviously in great need of the surgery, but her voice was stronger when she spoke. Her eyes, at first unfocused, found Lawson. “Am I…guh…guh…gonna die?”

  “No. We’ll be getting you to the hospital in Helena very soon. Just hang on a little longer.”

  She gave a small laugh that must have hurt, because she winced. Then she said, “If there’s…anything Ca…Ca…Cassie Fredricks can d…do…it’s h…h…hang on.”

  “Cassie,” Lawson said quietly, and he put a hand on her forehead. “That’s my daughter’s name.”

  With an effort, she moved her head away. “Ohhhh,” she whispered, “your h…hand’s so c…cold.”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. He had forgotten for a moment what he was. He waited until she slept again, and then he stood up. He saw Deuce Mathias sitting on the remnant of a seat toward the front, bent over with his hands to his face, and he crunched across the debris of timbers and glass to the man, who looked up when he heard someone coming.

  Lawson leaned down close, and he saw Mathias’s face tighten with fear.

  “When we reach Helena,” Lawson said, “you are going to start walking. Go in any direction you please, but never look back.” He held up a finger when Mathias started to speak. “Don’t question. Consider your life from this point on to be a second chance. I think you’ve earned it. Shut,” he said when again Mathias opened his mouth, and then Lawson turned away before good sense and a reward for a common killer changed his mind.

  It didn’t take much longer before Achilles Godfrey and Easterly returned to the car. Steam had begun to billow along the tracks. Some of it would be coming into the car, along with the wind and the snow and coalsparks, but Lawson doubted that anyone would complain too much about their open-air condition as long as the car held together. Easterly went back to again stand watch over Cassie Fredricks. Ann sat alone with her thoughts. Deuce Mathias sat alone with a new future ahead of him and a past night that he knew no one on earth would believe. The bodies of Keene Presco, Johnny Rebinaux, Glorious George Gantt and the skin of Jack Tabberson had joined the dead vampires in the wooded embankment below the tracks, and this was an area where the predators were always hungry.

  “I have questions,” Godfrey said to Lawson. “Do you have any idea why this filth gathered in such numbers here, and why they went to such effort? I doubt they were after only the humans.”

  “They want me, and my friend Ann.”

  “Decidedly so. And why might that be? Do you pose a particular threat to them?”

  “Resistance is a threat,” said Lawson.

  “Yes, but…is there anything more I should know? Evidently they hold you and your friend in dangerous regard. The bullets you were using…what of those?”

  “Silver bullets blessed with holy water by a priest.”

  “Ah. So you’ve discovered a better way to kill them than with shotgun blast and axeblade?”

  Lawson was a little late in answering, so the major went on. “I believe we should meet again. In fact, I insist upon it. I’d like to hear your story. Where might I find you?”

  Lawson retrieved his wallet and gave him one of the plain white cards. Beneath Lawson’s name and the address of the Hotel Sanctuaire was the line All Matters Handled. And below that…

  “I travel by night,” Godfrey read. “Were you trying to be humorous?”

  “No. Realistic.”

  “Well…New Orleans is a distance and I too would be forced to travel by night. But I think it would be a journey worth taking. There are not many of us who fight against this, Trevor. We need to form our own army, and we need a plan of battle.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’ll visit you there. When, I’m not sure. But soon.” Godfrey put the card away in a pocket of his jacket. Was he smiling, or was this just the wound of his face? “I do recall Antietam,” he said. “The night I was taken. And the one who turned me. Oh yes, I do remember her.”

  “Her?”

  “A woman who calls herself LaRouge. A very beautiful monster, Trevor. This is who I search for, and you can believe I’ll never give up. Do you know the myth?”

  Lawson was unable to speak.

  “The myth…that consuming the ichor of the one who has turned you will turn you back to being fully human again? Is it a myth, or is it truth? I don’t know, but I do know that I want to die as a human, and nothing on God’s Heaven or in Satan’s Hell will stop me from finding that monster and draining every drop of ichor from her body. She is mine to kill.” Godfrey put a hand on Lawson’s shoulder. “That keeps me going, Trevor. It keeps me wanting to live. But as you must know, I was always inflamed by the idea of revenge.”

  “Yes,” said Lawson, and it was the only word he could think to say.

  “I will see you in New Orleans. You may count on that. And then I shall be ready to lead our army into a war we must win.” Did the eyes spark, or was it a shine of madness?

  “Goodbye for now, Captain,” said Major Godless, who gave the soldier from Alabama a brief salute before he went out the door beyond which the silent Smoke was waiting. They drifted off together, along with the other figures that moved through the snow.

  The train gave a lurch. The iron wheels turned. The damaged car squealed and cried out, but it held together as the locomotive rolled onward through where a pile of boulders had been, with a little boy perched on the biggest one.

  Lawson had to sit down, before he fell.

  The last train from Perdition was going home.