Dust Devils

by Janz, Jonathan

  White Bonnet drew back from Horton, aghast. “What are you talking about, young man? And where are your clothes?”

  “Don’t know,” Horton said amiably. “Don’t ordinarily wear ’em when I fuck.”

  “Why you…” The old woman’s mouth worked, her lips twisting in affronted disbelief. “Why you disgusting, detestable young man.”

  Horton brayed laughter, smacked Penders on the chest. “You hear that, Stevie? ‘You disgusting, detestable young man,’” Horton mimicked in a querulous falsetto. “Oh man, lady. If you only knew.”

  A rustle went through the crowd, several sets of eyes turning toward Marguerite’s again. With Penders’s hand still perched paternally on his shoulder, Cody turned to see Grizzly’s brother walk out of the saloon. But walk wasn’t the right word for it. Drifted was more like it. The big man drifted out, his wraithlike movements a fitting counterpart to his now colorless face. His chin was slicked with either slobber or vomit, it didn’t matter which. He’d glimpsed the carnage inside. Perhaps he’d even seen what was left of his dead brother.

  “What’s happened, Richard?” the short, plump woman asked.

  At that moment Cody noticed a face at the rear of the crowd, just behind a blond-haired lady.

  Mrs. Black.

  He’d forgotten all about Willet’s mother, and from the way everyone had their backs to her, the townspeople had too. But Cody saw her all right. Saw her unhinged jaw and her mad orange eyes—one of them injured but already mending itself—and before he could even scream for the blond-haired lady to for God’s sakes run away, the creature that had once been Willet Black’s mom tilted her head sideways and clamped down on the woman’s neck like a bear trap. A breathless little yelp was all the woman mustered before Mrs. Black whipped her back and forth three or four times like a fox snapping a chicken’s spine.

  The terrible sight of it had the unfortunate effect of diverting everyone’s attention from the rest of the vampires, whose opening mouths were only marked by Cody and Grizzly’s brother, the one the plump woman had called Richard.

  Maybe this explained why Richard died next. In one moment the big man was watching Price loom toward him with a kind of spellbound uncertainty. The next, Price embraced Richard like an old friend.

  But the manner in which Price pulled away, jammed his thumbs into the man’s eyes and proceeded to peel his face open like a boiled egg was decidedly unfriendly.

  Cody bucked to loose himself from Penders’s grasp, but the vampire’s steely grip only tightened on his shoulder, made Cody wonder how long it would be before the squeezing talons lanced his flesh and attracted the vampire’s sanguinary desires.

  When Price began to lap at the torrents of blood gushing from Richard’s eyes, Angela leaped onto Bushy Mustache and began carving up his face with her razorlike fingernails. With his free hand, Penders punched through a young man’s chest, ripped a clump of lung from his lifeless body, and began gnawing on it the way one might a particularly choice morsel of steak. A good deal of blood splattered on Cody, but in his terror, he hardly noticed the crimson dots stippling his cheeks.

  Horton took off after White Bonnet, who shrieked, “Stay away from me! You stay away from me, you horrid boy!” But in the next moment he’d dragged her down and ripped her bonnet off her head. She batted frantically at Horton’s clawed fingers, but her resistance only brought on a spate of maniacal laughter.

  “Aw, come on, Grandma!” Horton chuckled. “Don’t tell me you don’t want me to show you a good time.” He seized a handful of her flowing white hair, began dragging her back toward where Cody stood straining against Penders.

  Penders muttered to Price, “Here, your turn to hold this pussy.” And with one hand still jammed into Richard’s eye, Price took custodianship of Cody by seizing a handful of his collar.

  The onlookers were emerging from their horrorstruck fog. A few pelted away into the night. Three or four made futile attempts to save their victimized friends and neighbors. The rest simply stood there in mute disbelief while the vampires finished off the first wave of kills and turned their attentions to their second courses.

  The blood from Richard’s mutilated face spewed over Cody like a baptismal font, and in avoiding the hot crimson flow of the man’s lifeblood, Cody’s gaze happened upon the man’s belt. There was no holster there, but Cody did spot the handle of what looked like a large hunting knife. It wasn’t quite as huge or wicked as the Bowie knife with which he’d stabbed Slim Keeley earlier, but it looked more than capable of dealing some serious damage. Doing his best to ignore the spray of Richard’s blood, Cody unsheathed the knife, reared back and swung the wide silver blade at Price’s throat.

  It almost worked.

  At the last possible millisecond, so quickly that Cody hadn’t seen the man twitch, Price blocked the knife stroke with an open hand. The mean blade plunged all the way through Price’s palm, the tip actually nicking Price’s cheek before the vampire jerked the hand and the knife away and raised Cody’s face to Price’s bloody one. Price hissed, the blood of his most recent victim frothing over his stretched bottom lip, and nose to nose as they were, Cody was assailed by the stench of maggoty death, the ancient carrion cloud of a thousand flyblown corpses.

  “I thought you weren’t gonna kill me yet,” Cody said into the monstrous white face.

  “We ain’t,” a voice said, and Price jolted, ripped for a moment out of his bloodlusting reverie.

  They both turned and saw Penders striding toward Marguerite’s. From behind Cody a new barrage of screams erupted, Angela and Mrs. Black no doubt riveting onto a new pair of victims.

  His vampire’s face abruptly donning a strangely human expression of good humor, Penders reached into the pocket of his pants and extracted a pint bottle of some kind of alcohol. “We ain’t gonna kill you until we take everything from you. Mr. Price told you that.”

  “You’ve already taken everything,” Cody said.

  Penders chuckled, unscrewed the cap of the glass bottle. “You know that ain’t true, Wilson. There’s your pa, first of all. We’re gonna pay him and his wife a visit.” Penders chucked the cap into the street and upended the bottle, splashing alcohol over the weathered boards of the porch and the doorframe. “Shame we can’t kill your mama again, Wilson, but I guess the tuberculosis already done that.”

  Cody clenched his jaw, his lips itching to say something equally hurtful to Penders.

  But the big man went on, hurling the empty bottle through the empty doorframe. “We’ll just have to settle for what we got though. Course, before we leave town we gotta attend to your girlfriend.”

  Penders brought out a book of matches.

  “Please,” Cody said.

  “That root cellar of hers is awful handy,” Penders said, tearing off a match. “But I doubt it’s fireproof.”

  “You can’t do that,” the old woman said.

  They all turned to regard her. It was the first time she’d spoken since Horton had towed her back into the main group. Without her bonnet, she looked somehow younger, almost girlish. She was on her knees now, her veiny fingers cinched over Horton’s hand, which still gripped a goodly skein of her flowing white hair.

  “You can’t burn that place,” she repeated. “Our dry-goods store’s been next door going on twenty years now. It abuts the saloon and will go up too if you burn it.”

  “You old bitch, why the hell do you care?” Horton said, kneeling beside her. “You ain’t gonna live long enough to see the sunrise anyhow.”

  “It’s all we have,” the old woman persisted. “You can’t just destroy it. You burn one building, the whole row will burn. That’s a quarter of the town’s commerce.”

  “It ain’t enough,” Penders said, striking a match. “But it’ll have to do.”

  Cody watched the match flare into life, saw Penders pivot toward the alcohol-soaked doorframe.

  “No!” Cody screamed.

  “Don’t worry,” Penders said, tipping Cody a wink.
“We’ll hang around long enough to hear your little senorita burn.”

  He tossed the lighted match onto the porch. Flames puffed up around the matchstick and spread in a steady blue lick over the porch, up the doorjambs.

  The bar began to blaze.

  “You can’t!” the old woman screamed.

  The plump woman, widow of the now-deceased man with the bushy mustache, lurched over to wrestle with Horton’s arm in a vain attempt to disengage his hand from the old woman’s white hair.

  “Let…her…go!” the plump woman demanded, punctuating each word with slaps at Horton’s delighted face. Horton crowed, easily dodging the plump woman’s attempts. Still cackling, he took hold of the woman’s black hair and pushed her down to face the wailing old woman whose dry-goods store was about to go up like dried tinder.

  “You care so much about this old hag,” Horton said, mashing the women’s faces together, “why don’t you kiss her? Give ’er a big ole smooch on those wrinkled lips so she knows how sorry you are for her.”

  “You bastard,” Cody muttered.

  Horton looked up, his countenance twisted into a hideous parody of defiance. “You got somethin’ to say, little sister? You gonna stop me?”

  “Tell your boss to let me go,” Cody said, throwing a sideways nod at Price, “and you and me will have it out.”

  Horton’s gaze went steely. “I ain’t got no boss.”

  Something began to build inside Cody. “Then why’s he order you around like you’re some kind of slave?”

  Horton’s hands, buried as they were in the two women’s hair, must’ve balled into fists, because both the plump woman and White Bonnet let loose with wails of pain. “I ain’t no slave.”

  White Bonnet’s scream rose higher, and though Cody exulted in the rage he’d kindled in Horton, he didn’t want to cause either lady more pain.

  One side of Horton’s upper lip curled in a snarl. “You mouthy little shit.”

  Cody held his tongue. Store it away for later, he told himself. You might be able to use it at some point, but if you don’t shut up now, you’re going to get these ladies killed.

  “Don’t mind him,” Penders counseled. “He’s just grievin’ his senorita.” Despite the sensible tone in which he spoke, a moment later Penders pivoted toward a skinny old man and walloped him so hard in the jaw that before the old codger fell, his head lolled on his neck like a flower with a broken stalk.

  Horton regarded Cody as if nothing had happened. His orange eyes blazed in the inky night. After a long moment, he turned and began dragging the women toward Marguerite’s. The empty windows now flickered with tongues of flame, the heat from the conflagration shimmering the night air.

  Cody had thought he’d salvaged the situation by shutting up, but the closer Horton got to the flames, the more he realized the horror was far from ended. Before Cody could say anything, Horton deposited the plump woman on the porch and reached down to grab hold of White Bonnet by one chalky ankle and one liver-spotted wrist.

  “I don’t want to die!” White Bonnet cried out.

  “Shut your damned gob,” Horton answered.

  Grasping her by the ankle and wrist, he swung her back toward the crowd, then tossed her bodily through the fiery doorway.

  Cody was too sickened to scream.

  “This isn’t happening,” a young woman in a pink nightgown moaned. She was on her knees near Cody, weeping. A second or two later, she was sprawled on her back, Willet’s mom having pinned her and latched on to her throat like a leech.

  The plump woman had scuttled off the porch, but no sooner had she gained her feet than Horton leaped onto her back like a panther. He began dragging her by one leg back toward the bar, which was now spitting white-hot bolts of fire into the night.

  Unmindful of the blistering heat, Horton strode up the steps and into the doorway. “Jesus, lady, you ain’t been skipping any meals, have you?”

  As the smoke surrounded her, the woman’s gibbering screams devolved into violent coughs.

  “In…ya…go!” Horton shouted, hurling the plump woman into the inferno.

  “No,” Cody whispered. He shook his head, struggling to block out the braying shrieks of the plump woman. Mercifully, she fell silent.

  Cody looked up at Horton with bleary eyes. “You’re a coward.”

  “I don’t hear nothin’,” Horton said, ignoring him. Horton glanced at Penders. “You sure that Mexican bitch is still down there?”

  “There’d be lots of smoke,” Penders said, moving toward the waiting black wagon. “She breathes just a little of it, it’d be just about impossible for her to do aught but choke.”

  Horton nodded, but he didn’t seem convinced. Cody had an image of Marguerite coughing on smoke down there in that lightless cellar and did his best to shove it away. Perhaps the smoke would all rise, and she’d remain safe from it. But the heat would be unbearable. Marguerite would be broiled alive by the inferno raging over her.

  Cody gritted his teeth. He had to do something, but what could he realistically do? He supposed he could try to break away from the devils, but what would that prove? They’d stop him before he got to the door, and if he did make it to the bar, he’d die before saving Marguerite. And say he did reach her in the cellar—what then? They’d perish down there like rats, or they’d miraculously elude the flames and the smoke only to be slaughtered out here on the street like the rest of Mesquite’s people.

  No. The only thing to do now was to go with them. He doubted he could save his father or Willet, but these pursuits were where he had to focus his thinking.

  “Time we push on,” Penders said, looking at Price. Price wore a bemused expression, his slowly transforming face halfway between vampire and human. Penders caught the indecision in Price’s orange eyes. “We have to go now, Adam.”

  Cody had never heard anyone speak to Price in such an authoritative way, yet rather than bellowing at Penders in rage, Price surrendered his grip on Cody and moved toward the waiting red coach. Penders gripped Cody roughly by the scruff of the neck, shoved him toward the black coach. Cody stumbled, regained his balance and for a fleeting second debated fleeing down one of the nearby side streets.

  Then he thought of Willet and made his way toward the coach.

  “Back door, right side,” Penders commanded.

  Cody moved in that direction. Someone bumped into him from the left, nearly pitching him headlong into the street. It was Horton, of course. Horton who’d just cast two innocent women into the flames of a burning building the same way a smoker would flick a spent cigarette butt into a campfire.

  “Howdy, princess,” Horton said. “You remember how your little buddy shot me in the face?”

  “I remember seeing you bleed,” Cody said.

  “You do, huh? Get your ass in the coach.” Horton shoved Cody hard in the back. Cody was just able to catch himself before smashing face-first into the coach. He opened the black door and hoisted himself inside. Mrs. Black climbed into the coach with him, the front of her powder-blue dress now scrimmed with the congealing blood of half a dozen of Mesquite’s citizens.

  Mrs. Black pulled the door closed and regarded him in the near darkness. The shade covering the window to his left, Cody noticed, hadn’t been drawn all the way down, so that a bar of light washed through. He couldn’t see Mrs. Black too clearly, but what he could see was more than enough. Her face was changing back into a woman’s again, but even when the hellish orange glow had left her eyes and the distorted jaws and teeth had ceased their resemblance to a bear trap, there would still be the blood smeared all over her dress, the beard of viscera caked around her mouth. In her lap she held the head of Eliza, the one she’d been sewing up earlier.

  Upside down, Eliza’s lifeless eyes stared at him.

  Cody had to look away.

  “You weren’t to see him yet,” Mrs. Black said.

  Cody blocked her out. From his left came the roar and crackle of the still-growing blaze. The flames con
suming Marguerite’s saloon sent lemon-colored flickers through the slit beneath the blind. Cody wanted to draw it all the way down so he wouldn’t have to be reminded of Marguerite’s death, but that would leave him alone in the dark with Willet’s mother.

  He glanced bleakly around the coach, noted the finery, the black velvet lining the ceiling. The bench on which Cody sat was cushioned and reminded him very much of a bed. Chances were good that he was sitting on the very spot where Horton or one of the other devils had taken Angela. An unmistakable undercurrent of old blood tinged his nostrils. Like a slaughterhouse that had never been properly cleaned.

  “You weren’t supposed to see him until later,” Mrs. Black persisted.

  Cody frowned. Next to Willet’s mother there was a shapeless bundle wadded in the corner.

  His throat went dry. “Who am I not supposed to see, Mrs. Black?”

  Willet’s mother smiled, a gruesome, inhuman smile. She reached out, massaged the sable lump beside her.

  The lump stirred. Something in Cody died. He knew what he would see even before the amorphous hump rose and gained definition. A small, scrawny figure sat up, the black blanket that had covered it slithering to the floor.

  Willet looked at Cody without recognition. The boy’s eyes were orange and ravenous.

  Willet’s mouth unhinged, a deep growl trembling in his throat. Slaver dripped from his icepick teeth.

  Cody screamed.

  Part Three

  Last Stand at Escondido

  Chapter Twenty

  Willet stared at Cody as though he wanted to rip his throat out. Even after all Cody had seen, after watching his wife murder and eat innocent townsfolk, after witnessing two shrieking women heaved thoughtlessly into a burning building, after all the fathomless horrors of the past few days, he was still too stunned to do anything but gape when he saw how Willet had been changed.

  “Here,” Martha Black said to her son, offering him Eliza’s severed head. “I want you to snack on this while we ride.”