Except their boots aren’t touching the ground.
“It’s them,” Vernon Ray said, his voice flat.
They were 50 yards away. Vernon Ray had told Bobby about the inaccuracy of Civil War-era weaponry. Still, the image of the bulldozer man’s shattering skull was vivid, and Bobby wasn’t willing to bet his life that these dudes’ rifles followed rules of any sort.
“Come on,” Bobby said, grabbing Vernon Ray and jerking him toward the woods.
One of the soldiers shouted—except Bobby couldn’t be sure if the noise was audible or just in his head—and the nearest soldier was slowing enough to raise his rifle butt to his shoulder.
And though Bobby stood near Vernon Ray, it was clear the soldier was targeting Bobby alone.
He either thinks I’m the “leader,” or—
The pock of the powder charge echoed up the forested alley of the tracks. The shot nicked off the gravel in front of Bobby, kicking up a rock and skittering it against his shoe. If not for the canvas Nikes he wore, the stone would have cut into his flesh.
“Move it, or your disco days are done,” Vernon Ray said, pushing Bobby toward cover. Bobby reached the edge of the gravel railroad bed and slipped on the loose stone, flopping onto his butt and sliding into the brown bristle of briars and locust. A second shot zipped overhead, and Bobby rolled to his hands and feet, crawling deeper into the scrub brush. Damp leaves soaked his pants and thorns bit into his palms, but he scurried forward toward the gurgling creek, wrestling doghobble and honeysuckle vines.
The tracks were now out of sight, along with Vernon Ray. Bobby was afraid to call out lest he attract unwanted attention, but if he reached the creek he’d be exposed.
Great, I’ve thrown my best friend to the wolves again.
Except that didn’t quite jibe, either. Vernon Ray had not only survived his encounter with Col. Creep, he’d come out of it with his chin up and a little strut. And the troops on the tracks had not aimed at Vernon Ray at all. Maybe they’d picked Bobby because he was a moving target and the most likely to escape, but if the dead really were at war with the living, then any victim should have done the job.
Before Bobby could dwell on the puzzle, other shouts erupted from the woods. He recognized his dad’s voice among them: “They’re on the tracks!”
Bobby wanted to warn them that their quarry wasn’t real, but he didn’t know how many ghosts were around. About a dozen had surrounded him on the mountain just before killing the bulldozer guy, and who knew whether the dead could summon reinforcements? For all he knew, they could have dug up a Confederate graveyard somewhere and raised an entire army.
He held his breath, but his heartbeat pounded in his ears, muffling the creek that splashed between cold stones. The sulfur smell of ghost gunpowder hung in the air. Branches snapped as men plowed through the woods.
Ghosts shouldn’t make noise, right? But they can shoot real bullets. Why can’t these bastards play fair?
Vernon Ray’s dad yelled something Bobby couldn’t make out. No shots had been fired in the last minute or so, but Bobby’s heart had probably drummed a thousand beats in that time. The Living History soldiers were moving up the tracks, which meant the ghost soldiers must have moseyed the hell back up the mountain.
But where was Vernon Ray?
Bobby crawled out of concealment, accompanied by the pungent tang of broken milkweed. Briars tugged at his clothes but he fought through, afraid he’d be left behind.
As he crawled out of the woods, several of the re-enactors ran along the tracks. He recognized Stony Hampton and Whizzer Buchanan, two well-diggers who sometimes worked with his dad. They were out of breath, legs pumping, gravel flying from beneath their boots. Whizzer’s dented tin canteen bounced against his bony ass, making a pinging sound.
Ahead on the tracks, Vernon Ray’s dad was leading the way, his revolver pointed at the sky. The ghost soldiers had either vanished or had kicked into some sort of supernatural gear and choo-chooed away.
And Vernon Ray had vanished with them.
“What the hell you doing here?”
Bobby turned to see his dad limping up the track, a bloody handkerchief wrapped around his bowling hand, a red wound blooming in his shoulder. “Me and Vernon Ray—”
“I told you not to hang around with that little faggot.”
“The ghosts took him.”
“The enemy, you mean.”
“Dad?” Bobby sniffed the air, wondering if his old man was drunk. A hint of bourbon, nothing more, and Dad could always hold his booze. His eyes were not bloodshot, but they were glazed, the pupils engorged.
“Your dad’s up yonder,” Dad said, nodding up the tracks.
“Huh?”
Dad’s face scrunched into a sneer. “Captain Jeffie Davis. The man who planted your seed.”
Dad brushed past him, tottering up the tracks. The rest of the Home Guard had rounded the curve and were lost among the trees. Bobby took two steps after them then realized he was heading toward the mountain and the ghost soldiers instead of away, to the sane safety of town.
“Are you okay, Dad?” Bobby was almost afraid to ask, because it was the sort of question that answered itself.
“Gone around the bend,” Dad said, gripping his musket so tightly his knuckles were white. A thick drop of blood welled at the end of his ragged bandage and his other wound looked like raw hamburger.
Dad took off, heading toward the shouts of his fellow soldiers. A shot fired somewhere on the slope above, then came an answering report from behind. Bobby debated crawling back into the obscurity of the weeds, pondering sitting out the war. But Vernon Ray was his best friend.
Who cares if he has Bambi eyelashes and a little extra wiggle in his walk? He’s the closest thing to normal I’ve known in this life.
And Dad had suggested an even tighter kinship between Vernon Ray and Bobby, but Bobby didn’t have time to figure that one out at the moment. His forehead hurt as if a wire were stretched around his skull. Dad was nearly to the curve in the tracks. In a moment, Bobby would be alone.
He glanced around for some kind of weapon, but the nearby branches were flimsy. He stuffed some rocks in his pocket, the way he did when they passed the mean dogs at the Stillwell house. Rocks didn’t intimidate the dogs one little bit, and Bobby didn’t expect they’d scare the ghosts, either, but the gesture made him feel better.
Th’ow it, doof.
If he’d stayed away from the Hole in the first place, all this never would have happened. But maybe the Hole was bigger than all of them, the inside-out darkness that was barely hidden by the thin painted illusion of life that lay over it.
He dashed after Dad, expecting to round the bend and find the entire Home Guard gone, Dad included, and the rest of the world giving way to a blank netherworld, the tracks dangling into the vast white void of space like a comic book page that had been partially erased.
Instead, he saw the battle lines drawn as if the stakes were not merely life and death, but past and future as well.
The ghost patrol stood in a loose formation behind Col. Creep, their weapons glinting dully as if they’d been salvaged from an underground cache. One of the men had a slanted face, his left eye frozen open, a jagged scar over one eyebrow. The colonel stood with his shoulders square, eyes blazing from beneath the brim of his cavalier’s hat. Kirk’s gloved hands were folded across his chest as if he’d been laid to rest that way, but Bobby didn’t think the colonel had gotten much sleep in the 150 years he’d been dead.
Behind the colonel was Vernon Ray, standing among the ghost soldiers as if he’d been recruited into their ranks. He was a little pale but appeared unhurt. A ragged, stained kepi was tucked down on his head.
Cindy’s words came back to Bobby: Or they’ll take a replacement . . . .
Jeff Davis and his men stood spread across the tracks, weapons at ready. The rounded tip of Jeff’s saber was pointed at the heavens, the polished edge gilded by the sun. Stony and Whizzer knelt in
the gravel, muskets leveled. Five Home Guard troops stood behind them, Dad among them.
Dad aimed his gun and his cheek was pressed against the butt of his rifle as if he were sighting down the barrel. The battle cries had died away, along with the gun smoke, and leaves flapped in the hushed wind. The air carried the funereal taste of October, clouds brushing their slow shadows across the mountainsides and tinting the trees gray.
The two sides faced off, awaiting orders from above or below. Bobby couldn’t be sure because of the woolly beard, but Kirk appeared to be smiling, though the eyes were as black as rotted sin.
They’re making their stand. Which doesn’t make a bit of sense, because even a dummy like me knows they’d be better off defending higher ground.
But maybe they already occupy the high ground, because I sure can’t tell good from evil anymore.
“Looks like you’re done running, Kirk,” Capt. Davis said, as calm as if he were playing a video game. “I’d give you a chance to surrender, but I don’t think we make garrisons that can hold such as you.”
Bobby crouched behind Whizzer and Dad, peering through the gap in the firing line. The copper stink of Dad’s wound blended with the mustiness of the old uniforms and the acrid tang of gunpowder
Capt. Davis raised his saber toward the sky and leveled his pistol. “Ready!” he shouted.
The boys of the Home Guard tensed, though across the way their undead adversaries were blank faced and as stoic as Spartans.
“Aim . . . .”
“Damn, Jeff, your boy’s in there,” Stony Hampton said. “He might get hit.”
“There’s no such thing as innocent blood,” the captain said.
Col. Creep stepped protectively–floated, Bobby thought, still not used to the unnatural, liquid motion–in front of Vernon Ray, as if his amorphous flesh could shield the boy from real bullets. Bobby’s and Vernon Ray’s eyes met and Vernon Ray gave a small nod and silently moved his lips.
Bobby couldn’t be sure, because he’d rarely seen the words formed, but he thought they might have shaped “I love you.”
“Fire!” the crazed captain bellowed, and all hell broke loose in a cannonade of thunder, smoke, and screams.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Littlefield arrived on the scene just as the smoke cleared.
Jeff Davis was poking around on the gravel bed with his saber, chinking up rocks and tapping as if checking for escape hatches. The Home Guard looked as if the soldiers were fighting off a long hangover instead of a renegade pack of ghosts. Where Littlefield had expected carnage, bloodshed, and the moans of the dying, he found only the weekend warriors collapsed about the railroad tracks, wiping sweaty hair with their caps and rising unsteadily to their feet.
“What happened?” Cindy asked Whizzer Buchanan, who in civilian life had been busted for selling weed the year before. Littlefield wished this was a hallucination from the bottom of a bong instead of the reality of a world turned upside down.
“Dunno,” Whizzer said. “We was on a maneuver and that’s about all I remember.”
“How’d we get up here, anyway?” said Elmer Eldreth, and Littlefield saw that though his hand was still bandaged, the wound on his shoulder was closed and the flesh undamaged, though his uniform had a small hole in it.
“Great,” Cindy said. “The story of the century and my eyewitnesses are blind.”
“Just be glad nobody else was killed,” Littlefield said. “As far as I can tell.”
A boy approached from the edge of the woods. He wore neither a uniform nor a period outfit of the civilian attachment. His gray eyes were wide, cheeks pale, hands shaking.
Looks like he’s still got his wits about him. At least he has enough sense to be scared.
“Hey, Bobby,” Cindy said, and the sheriff saw a glance of recognition and secret agreement pass between them. “You okay?”
Before Bobby could answer, Littlefield asked, “Did you see what happened?”
The boy shook his head. “Nothing but smoke.”
“They overloaded their battery,” Cindy said. “Went ‘poof’ like a magician’s sleight of hand.”
“Vernon Ray’s gone,” Bobby said.
“Gone?” Littlefield said.
“They took him.”
Littlefield was about to ask who had done the taking, but then realized there was only one “they.” Kirk’s Raiders might have beaten a retreat from the battlefield, but the war was far from over.
“Where did they go?” Cindy asked, but Littlefield already knew the answer. He’d known it all along, just as Cindy had accused, but he’d avoided the truth because it was troublesome and painful.
It always goes back to the Hole and the darkness under the world.
If ignoring it didn’t make it go away, maybe he could solve the problem the old-fashioned way: kill it quick and bury it clean. He’d had a bead on the colonel back at the park, had aimed true at an imaginary bull’s-eye on the tunic-covered chest, but his mistake had been shooting the dead man in the heart.
Because it turned out the colonel didn’t have one.
Capt. Davis hustled up, his saber pointed toward the ground. “The Tennessee boys didn’t follow the script,” he said.
“They ain’t supposed to be in until tomorrow,” Stony Hampton said, swatting at a sweat bee that hovered in the fading gun smoke.
“That’s what I mean,” Davis said.
“Let me check that pistol again,” Littlefield said to him.
The captain frowned and gazed down the tracks as if a steam locomotive had hauled off half his brains. He passed the gun to Littlefield, who checked the chamber and saw that all the cartridges were intact.
“He fired it,” Cindy said. “And I doubt he had time to reload.”
“Invisible bullets,” Bobby said. “Everybody’s shooting blanks.”
“At blank targets,” the sheriff said.
Littlefield passed the gun back to Davis, who holstered it and began rallying the troops for the march back to camp. They grumbled a little, as if content in their drowsiness, but they gathered their gear. Elmer Eldreth collected his hat and musket, tipping his canteen and taking a generous gulp.
Capt. Davis led the desultory soldiers down the track. Bobby ran after his dad, said something to him, and received a lazy nod in response. Bobby jogged back to where the sheriff and Cindy stood on the tracks, reconnoitering the woods.
“Like nothing ever happened,” Cindy said.
Littlefield couldn’t resist. “There goes your Pulitzer and your book deal.”
“I’ve still got my camera.”
“If there’s anything on it. I have a feeling when they get back to the park, they’ll find Chalky Watkins strutting around fresh as a rooster, wondering where the hell everybody went. And that woman in the civilian camp will be flexing mugs of fresh coffee like some backwoods Martha Stewart.”
“That horseman got killed, remember?”
“Sure, but I’ll bet there’s not a scratch on him now, and Perry Hoyle will write it down as a heart attack or stroke. It’s almost like nothing’s changed, a return to balance.”
“Except Vernon Ray’s gone,” Bobby said, and he turned to Cindy. “Your ‘replacement’ theory. To balance things out.”
“That means one got away,” Cindy said.
“What are you two talking about?” Littlefield said. Capt. Davis and his Home Guard had gone around the curve and were no longer visible, though Davis’s tired commands were audible as he herded the troops back to Aldridge Park.
“It ain’t over,” Bobby said. “That was the calm before the storm.”
“The anticlimax,” Cindy said. “To trick these macho clowns into letting loose with a bunch of testosterone and rage so Kirk’s Raiders could sponge up the energy. Like a haunted battlefield where the ghosts linger long after the screams have died away and the blood has soaked deep in the dirt, feeding on the long memory of pain.”
“We’ve covered all this before,” Littl
efield said. “So does this mean they got what they wanted?”
“Only if you’re willing to give them the boy,” Cindy said.
Littlefield gazed through the trees that were rooted and fed by the black skin of the mountain, the shadows under the kaleidoscopic canopy seeming to eddy and swirl like obscene molasses. He thought of his dead deputy, Sheila Story, and his little brother, other sacrificial lambs thrown on the altar of his ego and failure.
You feed the monsters and they go away and leave you alone.
Even if the outcome carries a little collateral damage.
At least you walk away.
You walk away.
“I guess there’s nothing else for it,” Littlefield said, then asked Bobby. “How do we get to the Hole from here?”
Bobby pointed to a slight part in the scrub, where jackvine and poison oak strangled a stand of leafless saplings. The path was barely wide enough to allow passage to a rabbit or raccoon, much less a grown man. But the gate was strait and the way was narrow. Or so said a book Littlefield had burned six years ago along with a certain contaminated church over in Whispering Pines.
“I don’t suppose I could talk you into staying out of it?” Littlefield asked Cindy.
“No,” she said, adjusting the camera on her shoulder as if preparing for a hike. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll keep it off the record.”
“You could never translate all this into English.”
“Enough talking,” Bobby said, heading for the animal path. “My best friend’s up there in the Jangling Hole with a bunch of dead guys.”
He slipped into the tangled brush and was swallowed by the woods of Mulatto Mountain.
Littlefield stared at Cindy as if fully seeing her for the first time, as a colleague, a partner in crime, and a woman, and he wondered if he’d always looked at people in his life as ghosts just waiting to happen. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, flecked with gold that might have been borrowed from the autumn poplar or the sun. She blinked first.
“History is written by the winners,” she said, sneakers crunching the gravel as she hurried after Bobby.
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 56