Cowboys and Aliens

by Joan D. Vinge

  “All right,” Dolarhyde said, his expression like a clenched fist. “You don’t wanna tell me? That’s your business.”

  She went on staring at him, into him, unblinking, expecting him to say something, anything, that would explain why he’d made the choices he had. The way he lived his life now was so different from the path she had chosen that she could barely even relate to him. . . .

  She stopped seeing him at all, as she suddenly realized why Jake had reacted the way he had: Because his response to exactly the kind of loss and horror she’d once known had been completely different, when she’d expected it to be the same. . . . Why had she even imagined—

  Movement in the distance caught her eye, giving her an excuse to ignore Dolarhyde completely. Her mouth fell open as she recognized the man riding toward them.

  Jake Lonergan had come back.

  Dolarhyde saw the change that came over her, and turned his head to follow her gaze. “Well . . .” he muttered, more grateful for the distraction—for this distraction—than he sounded. “Look who grew a pair.”

  He turned his horse and rode off to intersect Jake, as if something about the other man drew him like iron to a lodestone.

  JAKE DIDN’T EVEN glance at Ella, his eyes on Dolarhyde from the moment he found the posse of demon hunters. He watched Dolarhyde ride toward him, and then rein in his horse as he neared. Jake’s face got a little more expressionless as he prepared himself for whatever reception he was going to get.

  Dolarhyde gave an unpleasant laugh as Jake got close enough so each could see the other’s eyes. Jake thought Dolarhyde looked a little relieved to be back in familiar territory, after riding next to Ella; back to reading something he understood in someone else’s eyes . . . something about death.

  “I see you—” Dolarhyde grinned, more like he was baring his teeth, “but I don’t see my gold.”

  Something flickered behind Jake’s stare. “What say we find those people, first,” he said, and he didn’t smile at all. “Then you can take your best shot at collecting.”

  Dolarhyde smirked, his eyes still poisonous. “Right now the reward on your head might be a more attractive proposition. Or I can put a bullet in your chest, and cut that thing off your arm.”

  Demons had kidnapped the man’s son, but gold was still the first thing on his mind. It occurred to Jake that Dolarhyde might just be the Wrong Passenger he’d wakened up, when he’d robbed that bullion coach—the one who’d convinced the territorial government to put a thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

  Spiteful bastard. Jake grinned back at him this time, his stare equally baleful. He nodded toward the waiting group of riders. “You know where to find me.”

  Doc gave out a pained sigh. “Can’t we just be glad the guy with the big gun’s back?”

  For a moment longer the two men held each other’s gaze. And then Jake slapped his reins across his horse’s withers and rode past Dolarhyde to join the others, as if somehow, overnight, he’d outgrown staring contests. He rode on ahead; Ella and the townsfolk moved on with him, leaving Dolarhyde to maintain his own position, like God, an outsider looking in.

  Acting Sheriff Lyle looked toward Jake with a frown that couldn’t quite convince his face he wasn’t glad to see Jake Lonergan again, after last night. The boy Emmett just stared, until Jake looked at him, and then he glanced away.

  Preacher Meacham offered Jake a grin that looked completely heartfelt. “Welcome back.”

  Jake looked at him for a long moment. “Lord works in mysterious ways,” he said at last. His own mouth turned up as he looked at Meacham, whose smile somehow made him feel like he’d just been reunited with an old friend.

  But he slowed his horse, letting Meacham and the others ride on ahead. Only Ella stayed by his side, with a faint grin on her face, as if she thought he was somebody else. Any kind of smile was the last thing he’d expected to get from her.

  But her glance welcomed him, as sincerely as the preacher’s had. “Much obliged to you, Mr. Loner-gan,” she said, as if their encounter just after dawn had never happened. She touched the brim of her hat.

  Jake nodded politely, his smile turning wry. “Well, I ain’t done nothin’ yet.”

  Her own smile only warmed as she said,“I appreciate it, all the same.”

  They rode on in silence, side by side, toward the coming storm.

  9

  Dusk came early as the midsummer storm closed over their heads, lidding off the sky. Inside the purple, bruised fist of the clouds, lightning flickered, and thunder rolled—far away at first, but approaching fast. The horses grew restless, anticipating the rain that the humans saw like a deep blue fog blurring their view of the distance.

  The demon’s trail had woven through arroyos and stayed close to the base of cliffs when it could, as if it preferred the darkness and shadows to the sun.

  So had the demon-hunters, until now. . . . But the stretch of broken lands that had offered them all some small relief from the afternoon’s heat had finally come to an end. Up ahead the land opened out into a flat plain filled mostly with cactus and sparse clumps of dry grass—a place that looked to offer no shelter from the storm.

  Jake could see it clearly from where he rode now, a self-exiled scout on the crest of a ridge, while the others followed Nat Colorado’s tracking. He figured it was just as well: The storm looked to be a real toad-strangler; they were going to half drown, wherever they were. But if they didn’t get out of these twisting canyons, they’d all end up drowned, period.

  Jake stopped his horse, and pulled loose the jacket the horse’s former owner had tied on behind the saddle.

  Just as he shrugged it on, pulling up the collar, sheet lightning lit up the entire sky. Pitchfork bolts struck peaks and mesas all around them, the crack of thunder following almost instantaneously. As if the clouds had been ripped open, rain poured down like Heaven’s waterfall: The storm had found them, and within seconds everyone was drenched to the skin in water that felt as cold as the day had been hot.

  The desert never did anything halfway. It would kill a man with thirst, or sweep him away in a flash flood, horse and all. The kind of rain that fell during a chubasco like this ran off the rocks and over the bone-hard crust of the earth in torrents that could flood an arroyo or narrow canyon in a matter of minutes. A few minutes more, and a ten-foot wall of water roaring down the dry wash would catch an unwary traveler with no warning at all.

  High on the ridge, Jake smelled the reek of ozone and felt his skin prickle with static. Soothing his nervous horse, he counted himself lucky simply to be only half drowning.

  He should have been more careful . . . even the high ground was treacherous, here. But riding too long in the middle of a posse, especially one that included Dolarhyde and Ella, had gotten on his nerves.

  In less than five minutes Nat turned to Dolarhyde down below with a fatalistic shrug. Water sluiced from his hat brim as he shook his head, “Rain’s too heavy. Gonna wash the tracks away.”

  Dolarhyde’s face turned grim; even knowing it was bound to happen, he glared at the sky as if he took the news as a personal affront.

  All the riders began to head up the steep slope as runoff water poured down it, following Jake’s silhouette to higher ground.

  Jake watched them make their way up the hill toward him, and understood the rest without explanation. He rode on to the end of the bluff to look for any place at all that might offer them refuge from the storm and the oncoming night.

  He shielded his eyes from the rain pouring off his hat and searched the distance. All he could see was the vast swath of blue-gray blurring to green-black that the plain below had become as the rain began to fall. He moved his horse to the very limit of the outcrop, dropping his gaze inward to scan the land closer to the foot of the ridge, not really expecting to find anything better.

  But there was something . . . something—? He stood in his stirrups for a better look. It couldn’t be . . . but it was. He raised one hand, both a
signal and a warning to the others. As they gathered around him, he pointed, waiting for their reactions. He heard sudden gasps; he heard curses and murmurs of disbelief. So he hadn’t completely lost his mind, after all.

  There was a paddlewheel steamboat from the Mississippi River lying in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Upside down.

  Like it’d been dropped from the sky . . .

  Jake didn’t say anything, wondering why the hell he’d felt so surprised, after everything he’d seen and been through the last couple of days. Nobody else said anything either, just sat staring, as the rain endlessly poured down on them.

  Finally Doc said, “Don’t know much about boats, but I’d say that ship’s upside down.”

  “And it’s five hundred miles from the nearest river that can hold it,” Dolarhyde observed, as if they were discussing the weather. Or maybe he was— “C’mon, let’s get out of the rain.”

  “I ain’t goin’ anywhere near it,” Doc said.

  Dolarhyde shrugged. “Suit yourself. Sleep in the rain.”

  Charlie Lyle nodded, and Dolarhyde led the way down the treacherous slope into the valley below, although even his own men again traded dubious looks as they followed him.

  The others headed down the slope after them, one by one. Doc was the last to leave the bluff, but he came, just the same.

  The inside of the riverboat was mostly dry; but that was about all anybody could say for it. Ella was the only one carrying matches that would still strike a light. The others groped in the lightning-lit near darkness until they found some splintered furniture, and began to turn chair legs into torches. They moved as a group, cautiously, through an obstacle course of broken wood, upended furniture, and shards of glass, until they arrived in what once must have been the Grand Ballroom.

  Its chandelier lay in a glittering pyramid of crystal pendants, in what had been the middle of the hall. A large rattlesnake lay coiled on top of it, having found refuge here before they had.

  One of Dolarhyde’s men drew his pistol, and made short work of it. He grinned: fresh meat for dinner.

  Jake glanced at the dead rattler, suddenly hungry enough to enjoy eating snake. There hadn’t been any food in the saddlebags on his horse. But he’d starve before he’d beg a crumb from Dolarhyde, or anybody who worked for him. He looked at the rest of Dolar-hyde’s crew, watching their mixed reactions. Maybe the preacher’d be decent enough to break bread with an outlaw.

  The people from town were trying to ignore the prospect of snake for dinner altogether. They busied themselves prying loose any candles left in the chandelier. Ella passed around lit candles, smiling as she handed one to Emmett and leaned down to pat the wet dog beside him. That dog. . . .

  More light revealed more broken furniture, including upside-down gambling tables and the remains of a long buffet that had been laid out with a feast of elegantly prepared food. The ship hadn’t been here long—although it had been here long enough for the food to turn rotten in the desert heat. Jake was surprised that the smell wasn’t worse. Rats, never picky eaters, frantically scrabbled away from the light, as people began to explore further.

  Jake glanced across the room, just as pitchfork lightning erased every inch of shadow. The far wall was all windows—and every single one of them had been smashed in. That explained the fresh air.

  He suddenly realized what else it meant: They hadn’t found any people on this ship, alive or dead. Everyone had been taken . . . by the demons.

  His mouth pulled back in a tight line. He didn’t bother to mention the obvious to the others. Either they’d figured it out for themselves, or they hadn’t; but none of them seemed to feel like talking about it any more than he did.

  The others began to move on in small groups, searching for places that were more private, where they could dry out and bed down for the night.

  Jake prowled the corridors alone, like a cat, unable to settle anywhere in spite of the fact that his body felt like it had been through more in the last two days than it had in his entire missing lifetime . . . though under the circumstances, he had no idea if that was true or not.

  His mind had been through as much . . . at least as much . . . more. So much that he couldn’t rest—afraid of thinking too long if he stopped moving, afraid of dreaming if he slept. No rest for the wicked. . . . At least not while his wide-awake life was enough to make him question his sanity, over and over.

  He was aware that Ella had begun following him as he explored, carrying a candle and keeping her distance. She hadn’t seemed like she wanted to talk to him, and he didn’t think she was afraid he’d bolt again if he got the chance, now that he was back of his own free will.

  If she’d wanted a bedmate, she had her pick of them: it wasn’t like that, either. What the hell, then? Was she lonely, afraid, feeling in need of protection . . . or did she think he was the one who needed watching over, like that orphaned boy or that fool dog? Maybe she was trying to figure him out. He wished her luck.

  Whatever it was, if she wasn’t talking, he wasn’t about to ask. Let her follow him if she wanted to—at least then he could be sure of what one person here besides him was doing, all the time. . . .

  Navigating by lightning-light, he passed dark halls like tunnels and more empty rooms full of breakage and spillage, until he paused as he reached the end of the main hall. It opened on a larger area, where he saw Doc, actually wearing a gun belt, and trying to fast-draw a revolver—starting the process backwards, which figured.

  First you learned to hit your target, every time it counted. Then you worked on a fast draw, or any other move you had the skill for. He watched Doc fumble another draw; watched him try it again, with the same results. Doc took hold of the pistol and attempted to twirl it around his finger; it fell on his foot. Jake winced, not in empathy, and hoped the goddamned thing wasn’t loaded.

  He wondered why Doc was even trying to handle a revolver, when it was obvious that he was terrified of guns.

  And then he saw Meacham watching Doc’s futile practice session, with Charlie Lyle observing beside him. Lyle’s expression barely hid his dismay.

  But Meacham flashed his good-natured grin at Doc, and said, “Occurred to me—you might do better with two hands. . . .” He held out his rifle.

  The frustration and self-disgust on Doc’s face eased. He holstered the pistol and gratefully took the rifle from Meacham.

  Jake backed further into the shadows before he let the faintest trace of smile show on his face. Meacham was a good man, and a sharp one, when it came to figuring out what people needed. But it was clear he hadn’t been a preacher forever, or even most of his life. Good or evil . . . it’s up to you, from now on. Maybe that was the truth he’d found, when he found his vision of the Lord. Jake would’ve liked to swap stories with the man, if he’d had any stories that he could remember.

  Ella had stopped when he did, and followed him down the next darkened corridor he chose. Up ahead he could see flame-shadows on the walls; somebody had built a small fire out of broken furniture.

  He stopped at a point just before the firelight reached into the hallway, to see who it was. Dolarhyde and Nat were sitting across the fire from each other, both of them as silent as if they were all alone. The two men weren’t camped out with the rest of Dolarhyde’s crew; Dolarhyde sat, lost inside his own thoughts, as if even Nat wasn’t present.

  Dolarhyde was peeling an apple with his Bowie knife as he stared into the fire. He peeled the whole apple with one perfect spiral motion; his hands were so skillful he could’ve cut a man’s heart out blindfolded.

  Jake watched, equally silent, completely fascinated.

  At last he turned around and headed back down the corridor. He nodded to Ella as he passed her, as if they were two restless spirits passing in the halls of a haunted house, and kept on walking. She said nothing, only turned to follow him again, still keeping her distance.

  DOLARHYDE GLANCED UP as he felt something disturb his concentration. He watched N
at feed another stick of broken wood to the fire, studying his expression. “You fixin’ to say something?”

  Nat hesitated, glancing away into the shadows, before he was able to look back again and meet Dolarhyde’s eyes. “I dunno, boss. What do you think—is there enough of us here?”

  It was Dolarhyde’s turn to hesitate, knowing the truth—knowing that Nat recognized it too, or he wouldn’t have asked the question. He said quietly, “What else am I gonna do?”

  Nat took a deep breath. “Maybe we should . . . notify the army. Get the cavalry involved.”

  Dolarhyde looked up as if he’d been spat on. “We’re not turning this over to some West Pointer—” he said, his voice as bitter as alkali, “wait for ‘em to get on the telegraph and ask Washington which hand to wipe with. I waited around for ‘em at Antietam to tell me what to do. . . .”

  He looked into the darkness that lay inside the flames, seeing the past that would never die . . . not like his men had died. They’d died, and died, in meaningless sacrifice, in the bloodiest attack on the bloodiest day of the bloodiest battle in all the history of the United States. They’d keep on dying, forever, in his memory. . . . “Lost four hundred and twenty-eight men. Over a goddamn cornfield.”

  He stared at the fire. It had been nearly thirteen years . . . but nothing, no amount of time, would ever burn away the memory of that terrible day, deafen him to the screams of the dying . . . ease the agony of the wounded, or the agony in his own soul, as his grief and self-loathing forced him to live through it again and again.

  The law, the orders, the chains of command that had held him prisoner . . . his inability to disobey them, then, had forced him to commit the sin of cowardice: moral cowardice, in the face of all that was wrong; the worst sin he could imagine. He had let over four hundred good men die, men who had trusted him, who would have followed him into Hell itself. Who had.

  “Might sound foolish . . .” Nat murmured, so softly Dolarhyde could barely make out the words. Looking back into his own memories, he smiled. “I always liked it when you used to tell those stories.”