“They’re massing for a charge. They’ll be easy to shoot when they come over that open ground, but they’re just too many,” Willie said. “And without a Gatling gun or something as serious, I don’t see how we kill them fast enough.”
“I just had the one,” Douglass said. “I was tracking the airship after I sent the pigeon for the cavalry. When I saw the mob, I thought I’d lend a hand.”
“Was the gun damaged? I can’t remember after the dynamite,” Willie said.
“Dirty, on the ground. And not here,” Douglass said.
The murmuring of the crowd shuffling about the loose rock downhill had been growing.
“If we climb up over the rock, the airship will see us in the daylight and shoot at us or drop dynamite. And if we go down there we’ll face these miners,” Willie said. “If we stay here, we will be overrun before noon.”
“It is a despicable position we are in,” Douglass agreed. “I can bring more rifles and ammunition up for our last stand. But I’ll understand if you want to make a run for it. I, however, will make a stand and fire off the flares before I fall. I cannot imagine what these things would do if they were to get into a city. Think of New York or Philadelphia falling to them. It makes me shudder.”
Willie leaned against the rock and thought of that for a moment, and then decided it was best to focus his imaginations on the present.
“Mr. Douglass, we should take our chances heading over the hills and staying alive,” Willie said. “If we do that, we can alert the cavalry.”
“The airship…”
“It’ll be dangerous, but I think it best we engage with it if we have to,” Willie said levelly. “I will smite these god-damned possessed men out of the sky if I must. But hopefully we can keep running long enough for the cavalry to save us.”
* * *
They crawled out of the canyon with difficulty, hauling rucksacks with ammunition and several rifles with them.
And the signal guns.
Willie stopped twice to fire back at the horde behind them. Any of them able to climb with any precision dropped off the high hill face.
The horde waited patiently for them to make their climb.
Sweat drenched their dusty, tattered clothes by the time Willie and Douglass topped the hill and began to leg down into the next canyon. For another hour they hiked it, stopped to drink water, and then climbed up the other side.
It felt pointless skirting the foothills of the mountain, but once they had a canyon between them and the horde, they sprinted downhill, back toward Duffy.
“This way,” Willie muttered after a half hour of fast walking.
Douglass said nothing. He looked focused on his breathing, and Willie eventually offered to take the man’s rucksack. Douglass refused with a snarl.
And that snarl turned into a chuckle when the older marshal suddenly realized where they were. “Hell, Mr. Kennard. You wanted an old friend back, didn’t you?”
Horse flesh littered the ground and draped off scrub. Flies buzzed. Pieces of the wagon were scattered around, and the Gatling gun was buried upside down in the dirt.
“We don’t have much time,” Willie said. “Help me drag it into the clear area.”
That horde of mining men would not be too far behind.
* * *
The gun was mounted in such a way it wouldn’t tilt up to aim into the sky. Why would it? No one had designed it with airships in mind.
But the Gatling would let Douglass hold his own.
They could hear the trampling march of feet in the distance. See some heads wavering over the low-lying scrub. The dust and desert made it easy to spot the first elements of the charge.
Willie grabbed the rucksacks and opened them up, pulling apart a knot and unrolling them. Set on the rock, their small arsenal was at the ready.
He picked up a pair of the signal guns.
Douglass glanced at his pocketwatch. “It is eleven. We still have an hour with even the most optimism.”
Willie paid the time no attention. “I’m not thinking about your cavalry,” he said.
“Then what…”
The airship swooped in from the hills with a buzz and swoosh of steam and smoke.
“Shoot at it with your rifle,” Willie said. “Let them know we’re down here.”
Douglass looked reluctant to let go of the Gatling. He picked up a Winchester and fired off at the airship. It adjusted course, bearing down on them.
It vented something from the gasbag and lowered. Willie eyed it as being some five hundred feet off the ground.
“Come lower,” he said sweetly.
And it did, responding to the crack of Douglass’s Winchester.
It passed over the masses of miners advancing on them, some of them shooting wildly in their direction. A brown whale, shifting slightly as the wind bumped at it.
“Mr. Kennard?” Douglass asked. “What do you plan to do?”
“It’s easier to shoot if you wait until you can’t miss,” Willie said, and fired the Very pistol. The flare sparked and fizzed as it arced out toward the airship.
Willie picked up the next pistol and fired. Same arc, slight adjustment based on the course of the last shot.
The first shot still hadn’t hit as he picked up and fired the third.
And then one, two, three flaming orbs of light struck the gasbag.
The first one hit the nose and bounced off. People in the metal understructure were running back and forth, and already the airship was beginning to change course. Lift.
The second ball of light hit a piece of rigging. And stuck. It began to burn merrily.
Willie sighed and picked up the fourth Very pistol. The last one. He looked at the three rifles waiting beside them. The backups for the last stand.
The third flame, the last adjustment, arced over the nose of the airship and toward the area he’d seen the venting. There was enough left over gas in the air still.
It caught.
A wild, dancing flame ran along the top of the airship, and then like a devil it lanced downward. The entire envelope began to glow like hell itself, and then flames burst out from every corner and seam.
The cigar-shaped inferno staggered out of the sky and dropped to the desert floor before them.
When the hesitant crowds of miners walked around the remains of the airship, Frederick Douglass and the Gatling gun raked them with a withering volley of gunfire, while Willie stood on a tall rock and sighted with a Winchester, picking them off one by one with shots direct to the head.
* * *
Willie walked from body to body, examining them. Douglass followed him.
The cavalry had arrived, following the smoke. They’d help flush the town out. Drag the dead bodies to the street. They’d done the same to the mining camp.
Now Willie could look for the murderer that he’d tracked here. Make sure his job was done.
“I wonder,” Willie mused as he walked down the line of carnage. “Why here?”
“What do you mean?” Douglass asked.
“Why Duffy? Why did creatures from some other world fly their airship all the way from the Alaska territories to Duffy? It was the mine, wasn’t it? Just like everyone else coming here?”
Douglass thought for a moment. “If their machine was damaged, they could have been looking for metals.”
Willie nodded. “That was what I wondered.” He stopped. And squatted. Looked into a familiar face.
Well that was that, then: He’d found the man that had come into their camp. Killed his employer. Killed the other men.
Willie stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Douglass. I’ll be on then.”
“I have a counter-proposal,” Douglass said abruptly. He waved his hand around at the uniformed cavalry stacking dead bodies. “There are still possibly other infected out there, in the countryside. You are a steady man with a gun, and with flint in his heart. We could use you, out here. And elsewhere. With… other things that pose a threat to the nation out
here in this country.”
Willie nodded. “I understand. But I was headed east, hoping to find myself a good woman.”
Douglass leaned forward. “Now, I don’t take you as the settling down sort. I asked around about you via telegraph yesterday,” Douglass said. “Learned about you and Billy McGeorge. How’d you bring him in?”
Willie scratched his chin. “Offered a reward. Met him in town when he rode up to discuss the matter with me.”
“He came to you?”
“Well, he wasn’t too happy about the reward,” Willie explained. “Everyone else was offering north of $300. I figured $50 was good enough for him. He figured that was insulting.”
“Insulting?” That smile had come back to Douglass’s lips again.
“Yep. Met his whole gang when they rode into town right in the middle of the street with my shotgun. Ended up shooting one of his men when they drew on me. Led the rest of them off to jail. Hung McGeorge from the same pine I hung Casewit on.”
“Just like that?” Douglass asked.
“Just like that.”
Douglass looked easterly, down the main street. “No room for a man like you back east, Kennard,” he said softly. He gave him a business card. “If you don’t find that woman you call on me.”
Willie nodded.
They’d gifted him a swift horse on Douglass’s orders, though they grumbled about it. Willie left, riding east, leaving Duffy as the sun began to sink toward the horizon in the west.
LA MADRE DEL ORO
JEFFREY FORD
New Mexico Territory, 1856
I was adrift in Las Cruces with no dime in my pocket and an empty stomach. I’d started west from Pennsylvania at age sixteen, four years earlier, working a little and then traveling till my money ran out and then working some more, in hopes of reaching the gold fields of California and making a killing. My Ma and Pa told me I was foolish to leave the East, and they were right, God bless them.
In any event, there I was on a July morning, having just arrived, standing by the stagecoach post in the bright sun under a clear blue sky. I squinted into the distance, trying desperately to figure how I could get a meal. Hungry and half in a daze, I looked around at The Town of Crosses, as it was called.
There was a short main street of adobe buildings, a few ranchero-style places, mostly wood, but one of stone and mortar. It looked as if the natives had built some huts out at the edge of town. I saw a tin lean-to or three out there as well. There was a hot breeze, and I could taste the dirt in the air, smell the horse shit. Flies all over. People were jawing about a killing that took place in town the night previous to my arrival. I cocked my head and heard a terrible story. Some fellow they called Bastard George had supposedly killed and ate a young woman name of Pearl Gates. The old man standing nearest me repeated, “Ate ’er like a rump roast.”
I moved away from the stage post and stumbled through town, searching as I do when I land in a new place for any signs of opportunity. I approached a few friendly-looking men and women, told them I was new in town and inquired if they had knowledge of any gainful employment to be had. Folks talked to me, me being so young-looking, and I do believe my freckles, which I always hated as a kid, made me seem like a vision of innocence they’d not seen in those parts.
The fact is I was far from innocent. In the four years I’d been traveling, I’d laid with whores, stole food and money, and carried in my satchel a brand new LeMat Revolver I swiped from a drunken soldier in an alleyway in Cleveland, Ohio. I practiced with that pistol when I could afford the bullets and got pretty good with it. It had two bores, and one of the tricky things about it was that, in addition to its six bullets, it fired a barrel of grapeshot too if you flipped a little lever. Like a shotgun in one hand. I’d learned to always keep it loaded, either stuck in my belt under my cold weather coat or handy in my bag. That gun got me out of a lot of scrapes but my sweet face got me out of more.
I was drenched with sweat, and it finally dawned on me how hot it was. Must have been a hundred degrees, no lie. That and my hunger were doing a wicked job on me. And the bustle in the street was dizzying. For a place in the middle of drop-dead nowhere, there were a fair amount of people in that town. There was a saloon big enough for a second floor of rooms. I thought I’d go in there and see if I could beg a drink, but just when I was stepping up out of the street onto the walk in front of the place, I heard a commotion off to my left. I stopped and looked, and there was a man in the street and there were a bunch of folks crowding around him. All I had to hear was that he was looking to hire some gents to do a job.
I quick made my way over there to catch the drift of what he was saying. Moving through that crowd sideways and abouts, I eventually slipped up to the front. First thing I saw was the fellow’s badge. He was a deputy sheriff, and wore two six guns in holsters. His flat-top, wide brim hat was the same black as the bandana round his neck. He looked about as old as my Pa would have been, and had his same expression between a sigh and a strain. Just when I got there, it seemed folks started drifting away. The deputy said, “Where are the courageous citizens of Las Cruces?” I heard laughter, drifting away. “Wait now,” he said, “I already said four dollars a day.”
A minute later, there was only me and another character present, waiting on the deputy to say something else. He looked us over and shook his head. “You gentlemen are signing up?”
“Yes,” said the other, and so I said, “Yes.”
“Follow me,” said the deputy. He started walking, and then he stopped, turned to me, and said, “How old are you, boy?”
“Twenty,” I told him.
“You got a gun?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A LeMat.”
“I ain’t gonna ask you where you got that from,” he said with a smile. “Can you ride?”
I told him I’d spent a year working on a farm in western Indiana and learned to ride passing fair. It was true.
“Good enough,” he said.
He went on, and we followed him to the saloon where he took us into a back room. The owner of the place, a small man with a missing left ear and long hair in the back but none on top, came in and asked the deputy what he wanted.
“Fetch me a bottle and three glasses, Billy,” he said, “and bring each of these gentlemen a plate of that fine horse turd stew you’re famous for.” The deputy laughed.
“Fuck you,” said Billy and laughed as well. He left and the deputy took to rolling a cigarette, which gave me time to look across the table at my new colleague.
“Name’s Franklin,” I said to the heavyset man. He wore a blue and white checkered suit of clothes, white shirt and spatz, a bowler that sat on his big ol’ head like a pill box on a melon. He wore a pair of wire rim specs, pushed low down the bridge of his nose. “Fat Bob,” he said. We looked to the deputy, who by then had his cigarette going and through a cloud a smoke he told us he was Deputy Stephen S. Gordon.
“I been instructed by the honorable Sheriff Fountain to deputize you gentlemen for a government posse with the mission of apprehending George Slatten, a.k.a. Bastard George, in connection with the commission of murder in the first degree and the heinous act of cannibalism. You will be given four dollars a day, to be paid in full upon the capture of the guilty party. If we return without him, you will be paid two dollars a day. Anyone who shoots him dead will receive a bonus from me personally of an extra dollar. Gentlemen, I’ll make it clear now, I aim to kill the Bastard. We’re gonna gun this dog down and get back here as soon as possible with the body. You with me?”
We nodded.
“Good, then meet me at the stable at dusk and we’ll saddle up and head out. Be prepared to be gone for about four days, I figure. Any supplies you might need, ammunition, a blanket, whatever, head on over to Malprop’s store across the street. The governor of the Territory, Mr. David Meriwether, personally wants this dog done away with, and he’s willing to pay the bill. He’s got some relation to Miss Gates, I believe I’ve heard. So s
tock up, within reason. We’ll travel tonight into the Jornada. I hope you like the heat.”
That said, the door opened and a fetching young woman, wearing a loose shirt and a pair of britches, no less, carried in plates of grub and a bottle of whiskey. We ate while the deputy drank. The plate of stew saved my life, but it very well could’ve been horse shit. When we were done chomping and slurping, the deputy poured us each a shot of whiskey and we drank to the death of Bastard George.
That afternoon, at the general store, I put a new pair of boots and socks on the governor’s tab. I didn’t need ammunition. I’d saved up enough over the past two years to kill Bastard George about twenty times over. Luckily, I’d never had to actually shoot at anyone, but I waved the thing around a lot like I might. The old fella behind the counter, Mr. Malprop, asked me if I was part of the posse that was going after Bastard George. I nodded.
“You best get a bigger hat, wide brim to cover more of your face.”
I owned only the sailor’s cap I presently wore on my head.
“You’re going out into the Jornada,” he said, squinted, and laughed.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Jornada Del Muerto,” he said. “The Trail of Death. A hundred miles of brimstone up the Camino Real.”
“It gets hotter than this?” I asked.
“Lordy, boy. After the devil’s been out there, he goes to Hell to cool off. Might be a hundred and thirty up there today. And that ain’t even mentioning the Mescaleros.”
“Mescaleros? You mean Apache?” I said.
“They’ll kill ya, if the summer sun don’t fry you first.”
“I heard they take scalps.”
“The Apache?” he said. “No. The Mexicans were taking Indian scalps to collect the bounty for a while. Not sure that’s still going on.”
So a wider-brimmed hat it was, white, as not to take in the sunlight. I stowed my cap in my bag, and, now fed and gainfully employed, I strolled over to the stable where they found me a spot to lay down on the hay in the barn till Deputy Gordon came at sunset to lead us out.
I tossed and turned and sweated through the noon-day heat so that when I was finally nudged awake by a boot, the straw was soaked. I came up out of a dream of being run down by Apache in the burning desert and thanked the deputy for saving me. He grunted. Along beside him was another man.
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