Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  “I was very taken with you myself, when you were here last.” The old woman wouldn’t quite meet my eye. “I’d just lost my husband the year before, and I thought you quite handsome and mysterious.”

  “That’s very flattering, Mrs. Denslow.”

  Her smile was sad. “But you’re not for the likes of me or even my granddaughter, are you?”

  “No, Ma’am. That’s not why I’m here in this world.”

  “I didn’t think so.” She stood on her tiptoes, shy as a little girl, and kissed me on my cheek. “What cool skin you have!” she said. “Are you the Lost Angel, Custos? Are you the angel that our mesa was named for? Is that why you don’t change?”

  “I’m no angel, Marie.” I don’t know why I called her by her Christian name, the name I had known her by first, but I did. “I promise you that’s true.”

  I bid goodbye to Catherine after supper, then asked Edward Billinger to come with me while I gathered my things.

  “Here’s a list of items I need,” I told him, handing him the list I had drawn up on brown paper, then I took a bag of gold Liberty dollars from the crate and gave that to him as well. “Use this to pay for it all.”

  “But this is a fortune!” he said. “There must be two or three thousand dollars here!”

  “Buy those things for me, then keep the rest to start your life with Catherine.”

  He stuttered his thanks, then said, “But what do I do with all these items after I purchase them? And what on Earth would you want with a Gatling gun? Are you going to come back for them?”

  “Eventually. But you don’t need to worry about that. When you have collected them all, bring them to the cemetery.”

  “The… cemetery?”

  “Don’t be frightened—it’s a place I know they’ll be safe. There is a grave not far from Noah Lyman’s—a stone crypt above the ground. The marker reads ‘C. Denslow’ with no date. It’s empty. Open the crypt and store the weapons and other supplies there.”

  “C. Denslow…” He stared. “Is that you, Custos? Catherine’s grandmother told me she met you before, long ago. Are you some member of the Denslow family, then, returned from beyond the grave to protect them from the professor’s ungodly experiment?”

  “I swear I am no ghost,” I told him. “Good luck, Edward… Ned. Take good care of Catherine and her grandmother.”

  I left him there, shaking his head, the bag of gold and the piece of brown paper clutched in his hands like holy relics.

  I walked out of town and made my way along the riverbank, looking out over the dry lands that only a few short days ago had briefly but memorably been an inland sea. When the darkness began to fall across the valley and I felt sure nobody could see me, I struck out across the open grassland toward the jut of Lost Angel Mesa. When I reached the crumbling, rocky butte I began to climb, by ways only I now knew, until I reached a place high on the side of the mesa, sheltered from view of the town that had grown so distant below. A row of caves looked out over the valley as they had for thousands of years—not quite back to the days of the reptiles which we had so recently visited, but since long before white men had first walked here. Now the caves were empty, or nearly so, the aboriginal men and women who had lived there long gone.

  In the third cave from the left lay the passage that led deep into the Earth. I climbed down the difficult slope in darkness. I needed no lantern to find my way—I was home now—but when I reached the bottom, I lit a candle. The machinery was delicate and I wanted to make certain all was left as it should be when I returned to sleep.

  If the high cavern with its odd, nearly silent machines seemed a little strange even to me, how much stranger would it have seemed to Ed Billinger, Marie, or Catherine, despite the fact that all the devices had been built by Noah Lyman, the Denslows’ ancestor? I sometimes wondered if Doctor Lyman, who had taught me all I knew and made me what I am, might himself have wandered to England and then to Medicine Dance from some farther future—certainly I knew that nothing like his machinery existed anywhere else, either the device that had originally loosed Medicine Dance from the normal strictures of space and time or the machinery that enlivened and supported me. But that was something I doubted I would ever discover. All the information Noah Lyman had given me was, of course, still with me and always would be, even though the doctor himself was long dead. But Noah Lyman’s great mistake would never go away, and that was why I would always be here, too, protecting Medicine Dance and Lyman’s descendants.

  I was tired. I could feel the magnets inside me, which ordinarily spun so fast that I did not even notice their existence, beginning to slow and take on the tiniest bit of wobble, indistinguishable to anyone but me. It was time.

  I opened the vault door in the concrete floor and lowered myself into the coffin-shaped space there, then stripped off my coat and tie and set them carefully into a cedar box resting at my feet before taking off my shirt as well. Then I lay back until I felt the gears in the bottom of the mechanism engage smoothly with the flywheel in my back. Once in contact, the gears began their slow, delicate winding motion. A few months would have all my springs back to proper tension again, and then I would lie waiting, sleepless but not awake, until the time came again for me to rise and do what Noah Lyman built me to do.

  The lid slowly closed above me, leaving me alone in darkness with the sound of my own slow workings. I had done my job to the best of my abilities, but I would have time now to consider what I could have done better—what I would do better next time, because I knew that no matter what happened in the milder Midsummers to come, I would be awakened when the thirty-nine year cycle came around again. There would likely be an entirely new generation of Lymans to protect by then, and perhaps more. It was not such a long time to wait in the quiet dark, not for something like me.

  I was content.

  RED DREAMS

  JONATHAN MABERRY

  Wyoming Territory, 1875

  McCall saw the star fall.

  Like a match struck against the hard dome of the sky and then dropped, trailing sparks, burning out.

  It fell slowly, though. Not like other falling stars that were there and gone, mostly caught out of the corner of the eye. This one wanted to be seen.

  For a moment McCall thought it was an angel, but then he blinked his eyes clear and shook cobwebs from his head.

  An angel, maybe, he thought bitterly, but if so, then it’s sure damn coming for me with a flaming sword.

  He wanted to tell himself that he didn’t deserve fiery justice or burning retribution, but McCall wasn’t much good at lying to himself. Besides, the light from the falling star was dropping toward the east—the way he’d come—and by its bright light it wouldn’t require divine perception to see the truth.

  So many bodies. Animal and man. Red and white.

  The stink of gunpowder still burned in McCall’s nose. That smell and the death smells. The copper of blood, the outhouse odor of shit and piss. And, just as the sun set an hour ago, the first sick-sweet stink of rot. Bodies out here in the Wyoming heat didn’t wait long before they turned foul.

  So many dead.

  And at the end of that crooked trail, one last survivor. A guilty man and his blood-streaked horse, both of them alive by chance or miracle. Alive when they should have been as dead as everyone else. The last survivors of a massacre, now required to sit and witness the death of this piece of cosmic rock.

  The comet moved slowly across the sky, so big and so bright. Going down in a blaze of glory, firing its last as it died, declaring itself bold and powerful even while the world was poised to snuff its fire out.

  “Now ain’t that a sight?” McCall asked his horse, a big paint named Bob.

  His voice sounded thin even to his own ears. It sounded sick and old.

  Old before my time, he mused, but that wasn’t true, either. A preacher once told him that a man aged according to what he did, not by how many years he lived. A good man lived forever.

  A ba
d man?

  McCall was a short footstep over forty years and felt like he was ninety. Before the fight—before the massacre—he’d felt younger, but that was a relative thing. He couldn’t remember ever feeling young. Maybe back in Philadelphia when he was a boy. Before he signed on to guard wagons heading west. Before he went to work killing red men. Before he began chipping days or maybe weeks off of his life every time he pulled a trigger.

  Weeks or maybe years.

  Far above, pieces began breaking off of the comet. Like people jumping out of a burning building. McCall had seen that once. Way back in Philadelphia when a hotel burned right down to the ground. People from the top floors jumped out of the windows. They weren’t trying to escape the flames. Not really. Most of them were already on fire. They just wanted it to end. They wanted the hard pavement below to punch the suffering out of them, to get it all over fast so they didn’t have to live through their own deaths. That was how McCall saw it. People who didn’t have the guts to go all the way down to the end.

  McCall couldn’t understand that. He could never have jumped out of that building. Death wasn’t a destination he wanted to get to a second or a step sooner than he had to. No, sir. When his time came to go into the big dark, then he was going to fight every step of the way. It wouldn’t be cowardly kicking and screaming, either. Jonah McCall was going to make death come for him. He’d make death work for it, earn it, sweat over it.

  More and more debris fell from the comet, but the heart of it was still intact when it suddenly vanished behind the eastern wall of red rock mountains. There was a huge flash of white and green, and for a moment McCall fancied that he could see the bodies sprawled on the plain. The Cheyenne dog soldiers with their breech clouts and war bonnets, the rest of McCall’s team of riders, and the horses from both sides, all torn and broken and splashed with light. But that was crazy. The battlefield was miles to the west and all that light really showed was the lumpy terrain.

  McCall waited for the sound of the impact to come rolling across the hardpan toward him. He’d seen a lot of stars fall; you couldn’t help see them out here. Only twice had they been this big, though, and each time they hit hard and hit loud.

  He waited, his tin coffee cup an inch from his mouth, holding still to keep his own sounds from hiding any that were trying to find him.

  Nothing.

  He cocked his head and listened harder.

  Nothing at all.

  “Must have burned itself all up,” he told Bob.

  McCall felt vaguely disappointed. He was kind of looking forward to that sound, to the rolling echo of it. It would have been like hearing thunder. It’d been a long time since he’d heard thunder. It had been a long, hot summer, fraught with drought and dust storms. Even on days when the clouds stacked up all the way to God’s front porch and they turned black as shoe polish, it never rained. The hot wind always pushed those storm clouds into someone else’s sky. They went west, like fleets of ships, but none of them landed on the shores of the Wyoming desert. McCall and his boys had been riding this land for sixteen weeks and hadn’t felt a drop of rain on their faces. Not one.

  He was a thin man. The last time he’d looked at himself in a mirror he saw a scarecrow wearing his old cavalry trousers and a Pinkerton duster he’d bought secondhand after its owner had been killed. The woman at the general store mended the bullet holes in the back, but even with the fine stitching the fingers of the wind wriggled through each hole.

  He sipped his coffee and cradled the cup in his palms, taking its warmth.

  Movement in the corner of his eye made him turn, but it was only the wind pushing a piece of bloodstained rag along the ground. A sleeve, thought McCall. Torn, frayed, slick with wetness that was as black as blood in this light. Most of the cloth was dry and that part whipped and popped in the breeze; but the wet parts were heavier and they kept slapping the ground. In the variable wind, the effect was like some grotesque inchworm lumbering awkwardly across the landscape. Whip, pop, slap. Over and over again as it crawled toward the shadows and out of his line of sight.

  “Damn,” he said, and the sound fled away to chase the tattered sleeve into forever.

  McCall shivered.

  The open range was always so damn cold at night. Hotter than Satan’s balls during the day, though.

  Something scuttled past him in the dark, a quick scratchety-scratch sound. Probably a lizard chasing down a bug, or running from something bigger. Night was a lie out here. During the day, under all that heat, it was easy to think about dying because everything you saw looked like it was dying. Plants and trees dried to brown sticks; bones bleaching themselves white. And all those endless miles of empty nothing. Under the sun’s brutal gaze you expect things to die.

  He thought of the fallen star as he sipped his coffee.

  Out there behind the hills it had died. Died in its own way.

  Died, as sixteen of his men had died.

  Died, as thirty-four of the Cheyenne had died.

  As this star now died.

  McCall poured some hot into his cup and tried to chastise himself for that fanciful notion, but it was hard to hang scorn on yourself for any strange thought when you’re in the vast, cold night all alone. And it was easy to think of things dying, even chunks of rock from outer space. Who knows how long it had been out there, flying free in the big empty of the endless black. Then it took a wrong turn and came to the desert sky, and that desert sky killed it as sure as McCall had killed Walking Bear, the war chief of the Cheyenne dog soldiers.

  It had come down to the two of them. Walking Bear on a chestnut gelding, a Winchester ’73 in his hands; McCall on his paint with a Colt he’d just reloaded.

  McCall suddenly shivered.

  It was so abrupt and so deep that it rattled his teeth and caused some coffee to slop onto the ground. His whole body shuddered worse than when he’d had the ague down in Louisiana after the war. The shiver was so violent that it felt like cold hands had grabbed him and were actually shaking him back and forth.

  Then just as suddenly it was gone. McCall stared at the night as if there should be something at hand to explain what just happened.

  “The hell was that?”

  But his voice came out all wrong. It startled him because…

  He listened to the night.

  And heard absolutely nothing.

  No insect sounds.

  No scuttle of animals or lizards across the ground.

  Not a single cry from a night bird.

  There was nothing.

  Nothing.

  And there was never nothing.

  McCall shifted the coffee cup to one hand and with the other he touched the handle of his Colt. He could actually hear the rasp of his callused palm against the hardwood grips. Like sandpaper.

  He closed his hand around the gun, as much to stop the sound as to seek comfort from the weapon’s deadly potential. That gun had killed at least nine of the Indians today. Nine, including that big son of a bitch Walking Bear. It had taken five rounds to put the Indian down, and the bastard fought all the way, working the lever of his Winchester. The rifle rounds burned the air around McCall, and one hit the big steel buckle of his belt and knocked him right out of the saddle. McCall had landed hard and for a wild few moments the world spun around him in a kaleidoscope of red and black. Then the world went away.

  It was Bob who woke him up. The big paint stood over him, legs trembling, sides splashed with blood, licking the beard stubble on McCall’s face.

  The pain in his belly was white hot, and when McCall examined the buckle he saw that it had been folded nearly in half by the impact. He rolled over and slowly, painfully climbed to his feet.

  Everything and everyone was still and silent. Walking Bear lay there, five red holes in his chest, eyes wide, mouth open. The big Cheyenne did not move. Could not move. The Indian was dead and so was everyone else. McCall’s men and the dog soldiers and all of their horses.

  Only McCall and Bob w
ere left.

  That moment had been as still and silent as the darkened desert was now, hours later, with the night holding its breath all around him. His stomach still hurt from where the bullet had struck the belt buckle. The skin felt pulped and there was a burning feeling deep inside, like maybe the impact had busted something. Sitting there, listening to the silence, he felt that bruise throb and throb.

  McCall snugged his hand down around the handle of the Colt, but the gun withheld its comfort. Even so, McCall clutched at it and tried not to be afraid of the dark even though he knew for certain that there was no living soul anywhere around here.

  Gradually, gradually… the night sounds returned.

  The tension in McCall’s body faded into occasional shivers that were inspired by nothing more sinister than the chilly wind.

  McCall sipped his coffee and thought about Walking Bear. He was a strange man. A full-blood Cheyenne who’d been taught his letters by Quaker missionaries. The Indian could read and write better than half the white men McCall knew, and that book-learning had helped him rise to power within the Cheyenne community. Walking Bear had even once gone all the way to Washington D.C., along with a dozen other chiefs, to talk to President Grant. Not that it did much good, because treaties weren’t worth the paper they were printed on and everybody knew it. A treaty was another tactic. Not of war, but of business. A treaty was honored only as long—and until—the land the Indians lived on was needed by someone with white skin. Ranch land, gold mines, whatever. Protected Indian land was as much a myth as a man telling a woman that he won’t never go no farther than touching her knee. It all amounted to the same.

  McCall figured that Walking Bear knew all this, and he had to give the big Indian credit for trying to make the white man stick to his word. Then Walking Bear had apparently decided that guns and scalping knives were more useful than writs and lawsuits.