A Time for Vultures (9 page)

As Private Proud dreamed of a hundred years of whiskey and whores, Clem Jardine led Sam Flintlock to a large tent at the edge of the encampment. The flap lifted and two men carried out an unconscious elderly white man, his face ashen.

A voice from inside the tent said, “Max, see he gets plenty of red wine.”

“I reckon he'll be a goner soon, King,” said the man called Max.

Disinterested, the voice from inside said, “Hell, try it anyway.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Max said.

As the old man was carried past him, Flintlock said to Jardine, “What's ailing him?”

“He's old and I guess he doesn't have enough blood in him,” Jardine said. “It happens to old-timers, or so I've been told.”

Flintlock hesitated and watched the two men carrying the comatose oldster. “Here, ain't that Max Eades and Jasper Aston, guns for hire from down Laredo way? I recollect Max killed Dan Polk in Beaumont that time, and for a spell Jasper was top gun in the Colfax County War up New Mexico way. Come to think of it, I believe there are dead-or-alive dodgers on both them boys.”

“Flintlock, forget it,” Jardine said. “Max and Jasper work for Mr. Fisher, and he sets store by them. He'd take it hard if a bounty hunter tried to collect on them.”

“I have other things on my mind,” Flintlock said. “I have no interest in those boys. For the time being, anyway.”

From inside the tent came the call. “Git the hell in here, Sam Flintlock. You're not so damned tough.”

Clem Jardine grinned as he opened the flap and Flintlock stooped and stepped inside. After the brightness of the morning, the tent was gloomy and shadowed, but it was the smell, not the dim light that caught his attention. It was not a bad odor, but strange, like how the air smells before a thunderstorm. That and a vague tang of gun oil.

The smell was a little unsettling, but then Flintlock saw King Fisher . . . or what was left of him . . . and thought he was losing his mind. This was not the robust Fisher he'd known. The man was painfully thin, his face ashen, like someone recovering from a long and serious illness. Unlike Clem Jardine, there was no metal on Fisher's face, but his right eye was peculiar. As though made of colored glass, it glowed with the same green light Flintlock had seen in the cabin of the Helrun.

King Fisher held a small, bloodstained towel to the inside of his left arm as he turned to Flintlock. “Been a while, Sam. Hell, man, you look like you've seen a ghost.”

Flintlock's words came slowly, choking as thought he was coughing up walnuts. “I heard you was dead, King. All shot to pieces along o' Ben Thompson in San Antone.”

“Ben is dead,” Fisher said. “A couple balls to the head destroyed his brain and he couldn't be saved. I was luckier, if you can call it that. More dead than alive, I was carried to the Holy Redeemer church and Dr. le Strange found me there.” His right hand had been covered with the towel and now he showed it . . . a hand and wrist of flesh and blood but overlaid by a delicate tracery of thin steel and brass rods and wires of the same materials that vanished into scar tissue.

“He saved my gun hand, Sam,” Fisher said. “It's better—stronger and faster than it ever was before.”

“Did I just hear my name?”

The tent flap opened and a tall, slender man stepped inside. He wore a hooded black cape, the cowl pulled over his head, and a floppy, wide-brimmed hat of the same color. His face was not visible, covered by a mask made to look like the beak and round eyes of a large crow. About a foot long, the beak gave off an odor of sweet herbs and spices. Behind the mask, the doctor's breath hissed.

King Fisher, his face strangely immobile as though it was frozen into its bland, neutral expression, said, “Obadiah, I think you're scaring our guest.”

“He's right, boogeyman,” Flintlock said. “And when I'm scared, I get nervous and when I get nervous, bad things tend to happen.”

“No need for violence, Mr. Flintlock,” le Strange said. He removed his hat, pushed back his hood, and removed the mask, revealing the smiling, handsome face of a man in his mid-forties.

“You had me worried there for a spell, Obadiah,” Fisher said. “A narrow tent is a bad place for a gunfight on account of how all the parties involved usually end up dead.” His stiff face showed no emotion, but there was a smile in his voice. He turned his attention to Flintlock. “Dr. le Strange is testing a plague mask that he says was first used during the Black Death back in the olden days. The place I'm planning to, ah . . . farm . . . is stricken by smallpox, or so we believe.”

“You mean Happyville,” Flintlock said. “I just came from there and it's a ghost town. Them as didn't die of the smallpox have all lit a shuck.”

“Where are they?” King Fisher said, his voice registering alarm.

“I don't know,” Flintlock said, wary of giving the location of the townspeople's encampment to this man. “They're still around, somewhere.”

Fisher looked at le Strange. “Obadiah, we must find them.”

“We'll find them, King,” the doctor said. “I didn't save your life only to have you die on me.”

“How did you save his life?” Flintlock said. “You turned King Fisher into some kind of tin man. Who has a mitt like that? Hell, I talked to a woman who has a mechanical heart and I saw another with silver hands. How did you do that, huh? It don't seem right to me.”

“It seems right to King, I assure you,” le Strange said.

“Obadiah says Sarah Castle will live to be ninety with her repaired heart and I'll live just as long with my artificial eye and mechanical hand,” King Fisher said. “A word of warning, Sam. I'm still considering what to do with you, so don't make my decision too easy.”

Flintlock could be pushed, but not far. He would not be railroaded now. “King, I wasn't scared of you when you were alive. I'm sure as hell not scared of you now.”

“Ah, Mr. Flintlock, be not so hasty,” le Strange said. “You should be afraid. I engineered King Fisher to be the deadliest human fighting machine that ever lived. The Spartan hoplite, the Roman legionary, the medieval knight pale in comparison, and in our own time so do the likes of Hickok and Wes Hardin. There is not a man alive today who can draw faster or shoot straighter than Mr. Fisher.” He laid a hand on Fisher's shoulder and his voice rose. “And should his fast new gun hand be damaged, it can be repaired.”

“My God . . .” Flintlock said.

“God has nothing to do with it,” le Strange said. “Modern engineering, the forge, the furnace, the steam engine and electricity . . . those are the new gods that will soon replace the old and give mankind what their impotent god could not—power. And perhaps eventually, immortality.”

“Hell, man, what kind of sawbones are you?” Flintlock said.

Le Strange smiled. “My doctorate is in engineering, Mr. Flintlock.”

“But how . . . I mean Sarah Castle's heart, the woman with the silver hands—”

“And many more,” le Strange said. “But the woman you mention and King Fisher are my masterpieces. A good engineer can be as delicate as a surgeon when he has to be.”

“Damn right,” Fisher said. Worked up as he was, his mechanical forearm vibrated.

Le Strange made an adjustment to a tiny valve near the elbow and the barely perceptible oscillation stopped.

“As you can see, Mr. Flintlock, I still have to perfect my creations, but I will in time. Like King's arm and Dr. Castle's constant palpitations, they are inconvenient but not permanently damaging.”

“Sarah Castle says you worked with a murderer in London called Jack the Ripper,” Flintlock said. “Is what she says true?”

Le Strange winced. “That is coarse and vulgar, the sort of boorish question I had not expected from any gentleman with the slightest claim to refinement.”

“Mind your manners, Sam,” Fisher said. “Remember that I set store by Dr. le Strange.”

“It's quite all right, King.” Le Strange looked directly at Flintlock. “We were once colleagues, the man you call the Ripper, Professor Christian Prescott Tynan. He worked on steam turbine engines for the Royal Navy but dabbled in anatomy on the side. Chris taught me much about the workings of the female body, the reason I was so successful with Dr. Castle.”

As the sun rose higher and heated up the tent, Flintlock felt the canvas walls close in. It began to dawn on him that he was trapped in an asylum where everyone was stark, raving mad. “Tynan murdered women, slashed them to pieces. Damn you. He was Jack the Ripper!”

“Easy, Sam,” King Fisher said. “Mind your deportment. I won't warn you again.” He was on his feet and his automated hand with its beautifully articulated metal fingers was close to his gun.

“No harm done. Mr. Flintlock speaks the same sentimental ignorance of the great unwashed,” le Strange said. “Allow me to enlighten him. Mr. Flintlock, Professor Tynan contributed vastly to the sum of man's knowledge in steam engineering and the advancement of anatomy and surgery. If it were not for him, Dr. Castle, a fine physician, would not be alive today. And at what cost? The lives of a few whores who sold their diseased bodies for a couple pennies. They were hardly a great loss to humanity. Those worthless women redeemed themselves in the end by dying for science.”

“I know some women back in Happyville who would disagree with that,” Flintlock said.

“Whores?”

“Of a sort.”

La Strange turned to King Fisher. “Good news.”

Fisher nodded. “It's a start.”

Le Strange nodded in Flintlock's direction. “What about him?”

King Fisher said. “I have a decision to make. Do I spare this man for old times' sake or am I being a sentimental fool? We'll see.”

“See what?” Flintlock said.

“You'll find out, Sam. Maybe later, if I decide I can trust you, I will let you in on my plans.” Fisher nodded. “Big plans, Sam. The foundation of an empire.”

Flintlock was on edge. The thought occurred to him that in King Fisher he faced an abomination. The creature in the tent with the artificial eye and mechanical shooting hand was barely human, a far cry from the tall Texan he'd known, the bronco buster, cowboy, rancher, rustler, saloon owner, sometime law officer and above all, a shootist of considerable skill, daring, and courage.

Fisher's uncanny skill as a gunman was revealed in all its hell-firing glory back in the spring of 1874 on his Pendencia ranch near Eagle Pass. Four Mexican vaqueros had mocked King's usual gaudy duds, a fringed buckskin shirt, scarlet sash, pearl-handle Colts, and jinglebob spurs. King was always on a short fuse. An exchange of words led to King's fast draw and when the smoke cleared all four Mexicans lay dead on the ground, among them Juan Santos, the Nogales Wildcat, who some said had killed eleven white men in gunfights.

That was then, and the dashing King Fisher of 1874 no longer existed, replaced by this . . . madman who spoke of building empires.

Le Strange was talking again. “You don't like me much, do you, Mr. Flintlock?”

“No, not much,” Flintlock said.

“Pity. I'm a good person to know. A man in your line of work needs a friend like me, someone who can repair him if he gets shot trying to apprehend a fugitive.”

“How come you were in San Antone the night Ben and King were . . . killed?” Flintlock said, hesitating over the final word.

Le Strange smiled as though the question pleased him. “I was attending a lecture at Trinity University on the writer and visionary Jules Verne. His vision of a world turned into a utopia by steam power and engineering thrilled me, especially since the lecturer had actually met and talked with the great man. When the lecture ended and I left the university, I heard that two notorious gunman had been shot to death at the Vaudeville Variety Theater, a place frequented by persons of the lowest sort.”

“That's what I was, Obadiah? A person of the lowest sort?” Fisher said, savoring the words.

“You were, my dear, until I exalted you and raised you up to the heights of perfection where now you stand like a warrior god.”

“He's sitting,” Flintlock said. “So you headed for the theater and grabbed King's body, huh? Or what was left of it.”

“That is an approximation but close enough,” le Strange said. “On my return from London, being of independent means due to a generous legacy left me by my late father, I had taken a suite of rooms in the Brackenridge Park district of San Antonio and had set up a modest machine shop and laboratory.”

“But you'd already given Dr. Castle her heart valve,” Fisher said.

“Yes, in London, assisted by Professor Tynan, a most caring colleague and friend . . . and a meticulous engineer. You seem surprised, Mr. Flintlock, but what is the heart but a simple electrical pump? Professor Tynan had studied the beating heart, though fleetingly, of several woman, and its mysteries no longer baffled him. Between us, we made the doctor's heart valve out of scrap metal and electrical wire and by the Lord Harry, sir, it works. Mr. Flintlock, there is no limit to what the engineer can do. Given enough time and money, I could build a steam-powered vessel that would take us to the moon and back. That is, if I can convince those dolts back in Washington that it can be done. It seems nowadays all they talk about is ironclads and dreadnoughts and building more of them than the combined fleets of Europe and Japan. Fools. One day I can give them immortality.”

Morning thunder growled hollow in the distance and from close by a woman sang “O'er the Sea” in a sweet soprano voice. King Fisher's right arm made a soft, ticking noise.

“As for King, I made what emergency repairs to his limbs and chest as I could and stabilized him,” le Strange said. “I brought him back from the brink.”

“From the brink of hell,” Fisher said.

Flintlock felt a shiver run down his back. He'd thought King Fisher half-human. Was he in fact half-demon? The man's strange green eyes might explain much.

Le Strange said, “You were still alive, King, I assure you. Perhaps you flickered between life and death, but at no point were you all the way gone. Mind you, it took me the best part of a year to reengineer you and restore your eye and hand. The human body is not an efficient machine, and I had much to improve on, had I not?”

“I saw hell,” Fisher said. His face showed no emotion. “And I heard how the damned scream.”

Le Strange smiled. “Stuff and nonsense, King. Gammon and spinach, as Professor Tynan was wont to say in his jollier moods. In our modern machine age, there is no room for medieval superstition. Steam is our new god, and if there is indeed a hell, well, it's in the foundries where our steel is made, the scarlet and black infernos where the ignorant, sweating masses toil.”

“Who lies in King's grave in Uvalde?” Flintlock said.

“Not who, what,” le Strange said. “Just rocks in a three-dollar coffin.”

Horrified, Flintlock said, “Then, what about the rest of the people around here? The woman with the doll face, the one with the silver hands?”

“And there are others, mostly charity cases,” le Strange said. “Burn victims, some of them. Others suffered gunshot wounds and one poor fellow was hanged. Along with Dr. Castle, who understands the finer points of anatomy, we made all of them functional again.”