The rattling continued for a few seconds, then it was replaced by loud thumping. Something far stronger than any man was trying to break down the door. It was a heavy door and a heavy bolt, but as the thumping continued, Gibbons began to fear the door wouldn’t hold. The terror returned, and this time logic wouldn’t keep it at bay. Logic said: That door can’t hold forever. She heard a faint, distinctive click as Jett slowly eased the hammer back on her Colt.
Then all of a sudden there was silence once more. Before Gibbons could demand help to get to the window again, Jett had leaped to the bunk and was peering out.
“What is it? What do you see?” Gibbons demanded urgently.
“It’s the preacher-man,” Jett answered. “It’s Brother Shepherd.”
* * *
Brother Shepherd looked to be in fine fettle this evening. He was wearing a long frock-coat and a low-crowned hat, and he looked like a doctor—or the preacher his people claimed he was. What he certainly didn’t look was reanimated. He was standing at the back of a freight wagon, wholly unconcerned by the zombies lurching past him to deposit their plunder in it. She was about to tell Gibbons and White Fox more, when suddenly Brother Shepherd threw back his head and began caterwauling.
The sound was half Rebel yell, half lamentation. It made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. There seemed to be words mixed into it somehow, but she couldn’t make them out. “Sounds like somebody stepped on a cat,” she muttered under her breath.
“It’s no language I know,” she heard Gibbons whisper.
Jett jumped down from the bunk. Brother Shepherd kept right on yowling. “Maybe if you—” she began.
She broke off with a hiccup of indrawn breath. There was an unmistakable sound of movement from the other cell.
The one that contained Finlay Maxwell’s body.
“He isn’t dead,” White Fox said, sounding baffled.
“But I checked,” Gibbons protested.
“He was,” Jett said.
“It isn’t locked,” White Fox said.
“Who locks up a corpse?” Gibbons demanded.
Just like before, they could hear the sound of Maxwell thrashing around his cell. Only it wasn’t Maxwell now. It was a creature that meant to do Brother Shepherd’s bidding. Once it got out of its cell, it would open the jailhouse door …
“I need light!” Jett said urgently. She was already moving before either Gibbons or White Fox responded. She shoved open the cell door and launched herself into the darkness, navigating by memory. A moment later she had the jailhouse key-ring in her hands.
Someone lit one of the lamps, turning the wick down as far as possible. The faint glow was enough to let Jett see where she needed to go. The thing that had been Finlay Maxwell was in front of the door to its cell pawing blindly at the bars. The door rattled in its frame. Jett launched herself forward, shoving the key into the lock.
It didn’t turn.
The wrong one! Jett thought frantically. She fumbled for the next key on the ring. The thing in the cell reached through the bars, patting clumsily at her as if it didn’t know what she was and moaning faintly. The key-ring fell from her fingers, hitting the floor with a jangle. She bit her lip hard and snatched it up again. Which key had she already tried? She couldn’t tell. She chose one at random and jammed it into the lock.
The tumblers clicked as Jett turned it.
At the sound, the zombie’s movements quickened. It clawed at her arm, her shoulder, its mouth open in a horrible silent scream. She jerked the key from the lock and threw the key-ring as far behind her as she could. The thing in the cell clutched at her with impossible strength. Soon its hands would find her throat …
Strong arms—living arms—encircled Jett’s waist from behind. White Fox dragged her free of the zombie’s grasp. The moment they reached the far cell, Gibbons blew out the lamp in the center cell. Jett blinked back tears, grateful for the concealing darkness. She wouldn’t let them see her cry. She wouldn’t let anyone see her cry. She sat down on the bunk and tried to stop shaking.
Somewhere in those frantic minutes spent trying to lock the zombie’s cell before it could get out, Brother Maxwell’s squalling had grown fainter. Now the loudest sound was the thumping and rattling of the former Finlay Maxwell as it tried to free itself.
“You have the heart and spirit of a great warrior, Jett Gallatin,” White Fox said quietly.
“You’d’ve done the same,” she said gruffly. She knew it shouldn’t matter, but she felt strangely warmed by his praise.
“You got there first,” Gibbons said, sitting down beside her. She took Jett’s hand and pressed something small and cool into it. “Here. Brandy.”
Jett managed to unscrew the cap. She tilted the tiny flask to her lips and drained it. The liquor burned down her throat. “Thanks,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Looks like you’ve got your zombie after all.”
She heard Gibbons make a small sound of annoyance, but when she spoke, her voice shook a little. “I know he was dead. What I want to know is—how did he come back to life?”
Jett saw a flicker of shadow. White Fox had returned to the center cell, taking care to stay out of Maxwell’s reach, and was looking out the window once more. “They’re leaving,” he said when he returned to their cell. “Brother Shepherd and his … zombies.”
“Oh, good,” Jett said shakily. “I can’t stand crowds.”
* * *
Gibbons sat on the floor of her cell while the other two took turns at the window. She had seen all she could stand. And right this moment, it was all she could do to sit in one place and shake, with her knees pressed up into her chest and her arms wrapped around them.
The bottom had dropped out of her universe. In her world, the dead did not walk. There was no magic, there were no supernatural explanations. Science had a name and a cause for everything—or if it didn’t now, it would soon. Things like this did not happen.
But they had. And that meant everything she had faith in was wrong.
She wanted to cry. She wanted to run home to San Francisco and hide in her rooms forever. She wanted to drive her Auto-Tachypode to the nearest railhead, abandon it, board a train, and never, ever, leave a place that was safe again.
She put her head down on her knees and let herself cry silently. She didn’t frighten easily; she would have said she didn’t frighten at all until today. But how could anyone have looked on the faces of those … things … and not been afraid?
She couldn’t let the others know how afraid she was. If they knew, they wouldn’t trust her judgment. She had to get to the bottom of this, and find the cause—more importantly, the “cure.”
But right now …
Right now, Gibbons wished, very badly, for her Papa.
CHAPTER FIVE
By unspoken agreement all three of them stayed awake the rest of the night, even though Maxwell was safely imprisoned and Brother Shepherd and his zombie army were gone. It would have been impossible to sleep in any event: the caged zombie battered tirelessly at the door to its prison. At first, Gibbons had wanted to go straight to the reanimated corpse and examine him. But after Fox and Jett objected forcefully—and Jett threatened to knock her in the head if she tried—she finally agreed to let the zombie be. Not because she thought Jett would knock her unconscious. But because after about half an hour of watching the creature, she realized that if she got anywhere near it, it would have a very good chance of killing her. It wasn’t fast, and it was clumsy, but death seemed to have granted Finlay Maxwell an unholy strength.
So they settled as far away from the thing as possible, and mostly to try and keep Jett’s mind (and, truth to tell, her own) off the horror trying to claw its way out of the cell, she asked about the one thing she was pretty sure Jett truly cared about.
“Your stallion, he’s—well, remarkable is an understatement. Did you train him? I’ve never seen anything like him outside of Liberty Horses in a circus.”
“My brother an
d I had him and his sister from the time they were suckling foals,” Jett said slowly. “Nightingale and Lark. They were bred from a fancy stud out of Arabia as our birthday presents. I was to have the filly, of course, and my brother the colt. We’d been reading about knights—not the King Arthur sort, but the Crusader kinds, and how they’d trained their horses to fight with them, and we thought that was a champion idea. We saw the Liberty Horse acts with traveling circuses too, and our head stableman agreed to let us train ‘em as we wanted, so we pretty much started training them before they were even weaned.”
“Aha,” Gibbons said, enlightened. “Yes, the old knights, particularly the Germanic ones, made their horses into weapons. I can see now what you did. But how is it you have the stallion now?”
“When my brothers went off to fight, nobody thought we’d lose,” Jett said bleakly. “You don’t send the horse you intend to be your foundation stallion off to war. If Lark was killed, we’d lose maybe eight, ten foals at most. But if Nightingale died or was taken, we could, potentially, lose hundreds. So my brother took Lark, and I got Nightingale. He—” Jett paused, and the silence continued long enough for Gibbons to be sure there was something painful about it. “The Yankees didn’t get him. It’s about all we had they didn’t get.”
Quickly, Gibbons spoke up to turn Jett’s thoughts back to something happier. “So tell me more about how you trained them. I know very little of horses.”
As she had hoped, horses, or at least Nightingale and Lark, were Jett’s passion, and she was more than willing to wax eloquent about how she and her brother had turned their mounts into something so remarkable that foolish people might start pointing fingers and whispering about witchcraft. It was more than interesting enough to keep Gibbons from thinking too closely about the horror on the other side of the jail. Even White Fox found it interesting enough to add some tidbits about how Indians trained their horses. But at last the sky turned from black to gray to blue, and in the first moment of true daylight, Finlay Maxwell’s body dropped to the floor, lifeless once more.
“I want to take a look at him,” Gibbons said decisively. She’d managed to bottle her feelings back up and put them where they belonged—out of the way. There was no place for feelings in Science.
Jett shook her head, but made no other protest. She got to her feet and picked up Gibbons’s coach gun. “Here,” she said to White Fox as she handed it to him. “This’ll be a darned sight more use than your pistol.”
Despite that, Gibbons noticed Jett kept a hand on the butt of one of her Colts. For that matter, Gibbons wasn’t nearly as sanguine as she wished to appear as she picked up the ring of keys and advanced on Maxwell’s cell. He certainly looked dead. More dead (in fact) than he had the night before. Of course, by now he’d been dead longer, and while he didn’t have any bruises from the hours he—it!—had spent trying to batter its way out of its cell, the struggle had left the body looking a bit more … beat up.
Gibbons unlocked the door and stepped inside, then knelt down beside the body and placed the back of her hand against its cheek. It was cold. She felt for a pulse in both neck and wrist, because no matter what she’d seen outside the jail last night, Maxwell’s condition might stem from some natural cause. Datura—among other things—could cause both the frenzy she’d witnessed and the near-coma that had followed it, and Jimsonweed—or loco weed—was a common local plant.
But if the former Finlay Maxwell still possessed a pulse, it was far too weak for her to find. Gibbons thought he probably was as dead as he looked, but Science was not a venue in which to entertain guesses and suppositions. First she’d identify his condition beyond doubt. Then—if he was dead—she’d start searching for what had reanimated his corpse.
Because if corpses were being reanimated, she wanted to know how.
* * *
Jett watched approvingly as Gibbons relocked Maxwell’s cell (there was no point in taking chances). She’d been as scared as she could ever remember being last night, but with the return of daylight, Jett had other things to worry about.
“I’m going down to the livery to see if the horses are still there,” she said, picking up her Stetson. She glanced back at the provision-laden cell as she moved toward the jailhouse door.
“I suspect it will be for the best if we continue to sleep here,” White Fox said, seeing the direction of her glance.
“Didn’t do much sleeping last night,” Jett commented sourly. She lifted down the bar securing the outside door. As she swung it open there was a faint sound and a piece of metal fell free. The creatures battering at the door last night had torn the facing plate of the lockset from the doorframe. “But I don’t think they’ll be coming back, somehow,” she added, and stepped out onto the wooden sidewalk.
When Gibbons and White Fox joined her, they could see what she’d meant. Overnight, Alsop had been transformed from a deserted town into a devastated one. Most of the street-level windows were broken. Doors stood open, and some of them had been wrenched completely from their frames. There’d obviously been substantial and systematic looting.
“My Auto-Tachypode!” Gibbons gasped.
She took off at a dead run for the livery stable. Jett and White Fox were only a few paces behind her. When they got there, it was empty—both of zombies and of horses—but the Auto-Tachypode didn’t seem to have been touched. While Gibbons examined her machine for signs of damage, White Fox and Jett examined the stables.
“They carried off most of the oats,” White Fox said, gesturing toward the back of the barn. “But they left the hay, the blankets, the carriage, Gibbons’s conveyance.”
“Hay would take up too much space, I think,” Gibbons said, emerging from the inside of her wagon. She frowned in puzzlement. “And the Auto-Tachypode does not look particularly valuable—if one is not aware of the treasure of Science its form conceals! But there are no signs they even tried to break down its doors. Certainly I would have expected them to at least try to get into it.”
“Are you bragging or complaining?” Jett asked. “Just as well. Your buggy may be our only way out of here now.”
“Our horses weren’t taken,” White Fox said. “They fled. We may hope they will find their way back to us soon.”
Jett nodded without speaking. If Nightingale could, he’d come back to her. I should have stayed here with him. Or brought him into the jailhouse, she thought, even though she knew either course would have ended in disaster. The zombies had been all over Alsop last night. She couldn’t have escaped them again—and even if she had, Brother Shepherd had been here too, and probably armed. She might outrun a zombie, but she couldn’t outrun a bullet. And Nightingale would have given them away for sure if he’d been in the jailhouse when Finlay Maxwell came back from the dead. All she could do now was hope the miraculous luck that had kept the two of them alive for so long hadn’t run out.
Gibbons disappeared inside her wagon again, emerging with a bulging carpetbag. “We must make a detailed search of the town,” she announced. “But that can wait until after breakfast!”
* * *
Any drinking establishment worth its salt served food. Beans and eggs, or plates of stew—both accompanied by sourdough biscuits—were common fare. Most saloons served as tavern, restaurant, and hotel—and sometimes even as courtroom and hospital—but in Alsop there was a restaurant and rooming house next door to the saloon. A well-beaten path between their back doors proved that food went one way and beer went the other. Despite the depredations wreaked in most of the town, the rooming house’s kitchen had escaped essentially untouched; White Fox speculated that the looters were interested mainly in bulk provisions. As Gibbons stoked up the huge cast-iron stove, Jett went to inspect the general store for additional supplies. It had been looted, and much of what remained had been smashed or ruined, but she found an unbroken bag of Arbuckle’s and some cans of Eagle Brand in the wreckage. At least there’d be coffee, and milk to go in it.
Good thing Gibbons stocked u
p on bullets when she did. There sure aren’t any here now. Or firearms, either.
She no longer wondered what zombies would want with things like iron frying pans and bolts of cloth. The question was: what did Brother Shepherd want with them?
Over flapjacks, beans, and coffee, Jett got the chance to ask that question. White Fox had carried one of the tables into the kitchen area. The smoke from the chimney might be seen at a distance—or more likely smelled—but anyone riding into Alsop wouldn’t see anything but the broken window of the dining room.
“So Br’er Shepherd can make zombies—somehow,” Jett said.
Gibbons nodded reluctantly. “You were right after all, Jett. And what I need to do is—”
Jett held up her hand so she could finish. “And he took over Alsop, killed everyone here, turned them into zombies, then came back to loot the place. Why? What’s he get out of it besides the chance to lord it over less than a hundred people?”
“Perhaps that is sufficient,” White Fox said in doubtful tones.
“No. It can’t be,” Gibbons said urgently. “Think, both of you! He has discovered some method by which he can cause the dead to rise up and follow his orders. That secret could make him a rich and powerful man.”
“Except for the fact he’s crazier than a daystruck owl,” Jett said. “I don’t think the bank was touched last night, but even if it was, there can’t be more than a few hundred dollars there—and that’s figuring in the paper money, too. If Br’er Shepherd was to use his army to hold up a stagecoach, there wouldn’t be a lawman in the Territories who could stop him. Or he could hit the assay office in Denver—there isn’t a desperado alive who doesn’t dream of lifting that cashbox.”
Gibbons looked thoughtful. “A herd of cattle is worth a great deal of money—but only if one can get it to the railhead in Abilene. I don’t think zombies, from what I’ve seen, make very good cowhands. If we assume Shepherd is behind the disappearance of the trail drive, he must have taken them for a reason beyond personal enrichment.”
Novel - Dead Reckoning (with Rosemary Edghill) Page 10