American Gothic (7 page)

11

The Killing Field

T
HE LONELY COUNTRY road crossed the Pennsylvania countryside, rising and falling with the landscape, dividing silent fields of shoulder-high corn, running past farmhouses dark in the first hour after midnight on a July night. The sound of an approaching horseman could be heard from a great distance on the still night, hooves pounding the road, the dirt baked hard by the summer sun. The rider’s speed seemed to increase as he drew nearer, a clatter exploding when the horse took the covered bridge at full gallop, the pounding reverberating across the sleeping countryside like a sudden volley of rifle shots.

Nathaniel Peregrine leaned forward in his saddle, his cape streaming behind as if with dark wings partly unfurled. The road passed through a grove of cottonwoods on the far side of the stream, then up an incline, an undulating rise that followed the bend in the watercourse, formed by years of spring floods carrying away earth from the bank. At the top, the rider pulled sharply back on the sweat-flecked beast’s reins. The stallion cried in protest and rose up on its hind legs, but the rider remained firmly seated in the saddle.

In the far distance, he saw a flickering line of lights from well-spaced fires. This was the rear guard—the train, the hospital tents, the nether end of the immense community an army drags behind as it hauls itself ponderously over the earth, depleting the countryside of forage, leaving in its wake smoldering foundations of houses and barns, ruined towns, poisoned wells, and the dead. Peregrine had ridden around the flanks of two entire armies to come up on the rebel force from its rear. The underbelly that the army dragged with it across the land was its weakest spot, especially to a lone rider, approaching the assembled Confederate host from where it least expected attack.

Peregrine tied the horse to a cottonwood sapling and headed toward the nearest bonfire with preternatural speed, moving impossibly fast in a low, wolfish crouch, cutting with fierce purpose through the growing corn rows.

The picket stood leaning against his rifle, eyes closed. The firelight illuminated his figure so that Peregrine could see the soldier perfectly. The private’s youthfulness was partly disguised beneath a misshapen slouch hat and an untrimmed brown beard. He had a smallish nose, thin lips, his sunburned skin pulled taut over the cheekbones from forced marches on short rations over great stretches of terrain as the rebel army moved north. The picket’s uniform was homespun cloth, his boots gone beyond hope of repair. The only thing of value the soldier seemed to possess was his weapon. The picket must have brought his Kentucky squirrel rifle with him when he joined the rebellion.

Peregrine noted all of this from a distance that rapidly diminished as he approached unseen. The picket sensed something at the last, but Peregrine was already upon him, dragging his head back by the long, dirty hair. He sank his teeth into the soldier’s neck with a single, swift, savage motion. The man’s neck tasted of dried sweat and dust from long months of marching without anything more than a splash in a creek to serve for bathing. The vileness made Peregine want to retch, but instead he bit down harder, ripping muscles and tendons with his razor teeth before the natural sweetness of living blood began to carry him away on its hot tide of delirium.

He had not fed the Hunger in a long while, so he stayed with the man longer than he had intended. He greedily swallowed gulps of blood until he began to feel drunk. Blood did that to a vampire: the first explosion of pleasure deepened into intoxication. The more one drank, the more lost one became to the boundless abandon and sense of power. It was so great that Peregrine sometimes thought he could use the force of his mind to drive the moon backward through the sky.

Footsteps approached. He sensed the other man’s alarm. The powerful smell of fear mingling with murderous rage came to Peregrine in the next instant, but still he drank, not releasing the corpse until it had been drained of its last drop of blood, drained like a spider sucks the vital juices from a fly.

Peregrine turned toward the intruder in time to watch the bayonet plunge into his stomach up to the tip of the barrel of the rifle holding it. He felt no pain. The rebel holding the weapon was breathing hard, panting from the run, and the terrible thrill of standing eye to eye with someone he had just stricken with a mortal wound.

“You’ve killed me,” Peregrine said.

“Yankee bastard,” the rebel said. There was spittle in the corners of his mouth. He was trembling. Peregrine could tell he had never killed a man up close. Like the rebel Peregrine had just killed, this one was skinny from short rations, his face sunken, with eyes and cheeks hollow, and a ratty goatee.

“You needn’t worry,” Peregrine said. “You can become accustomed to anything, even killing, given the chance.”

Peregrine put his hands around the rifle barrel and held it as he pushed himself backward off the bayonet. His enemy stared at him, too astonished to pull the trigger. A slug in his stomach wouldn’t have mattered more than the blade, Peregrine thought, though a gunshot would have brought more rebels running. Once he’d pushed himself off the bayonet, he jerked the rifle from the soldier’s hands, then reversed the direction of his swing and smashed the butt into the soldier’s jaw. A streak of blood and teeth made a slow parabola in the firelight before splattering on the dusty ground, the sound quickly followed by the muffled crumple of a body collapsing.

Peregrine straddled the prostrate rebel. The man looked up at him and blinked, as if trying to clear his mind enough to comprehend the impossible thing that had just happened. A flicker of horror replaced confusion as Peregrine flipped the gun over in the air, the blade pointing downward.

The soldier’s lips moved soundlessly, though the words were obvious enough: “No, please, no…”

Peregrine thrust the bayonet completely through the man’s body, pinning him to the ground.

Peregrine removed his jacket and hung it over a tree branch. His shirt was torn where the blade had gone in and wet with blood. He unfastened the buttons and ran his hand over the welt where the skin had already closed over the wound. Soon, even that would disappear. Though the shirt was damp with blood, he buttoned it back up, stuffing the tails into his trousers.

He stripped the butternut jacket off the first dead picket, making a face when he smelled how it reeked of sweat, cheap tobacco, and wood smoke. There were blood splatters on the collar, but they were hardly noticeable on the stained and much-patched jacket.

The other man was dead when Peregrine went back to him, bled out through the stab wound. He picked up the man’s hat and looked at it before putting it on. The straw planter’s hat was in relatively good condition and fit his large head almost perfectly.

He probably didn’t need a disguise, but now he had one. He could go wherever he wanted among the sleeping army, unnoticed as he moved toward the front line and the generals making plans for the battle that would be rejoined with first light.

A line of officers’ tents was pitched in the yard of a house that had been damaged by artillery fire. The canvas flaps on the tents were folded up to let in the air of the warm summer night. There was a single cot in the tent at the end of the row, and on it a man on his back, asleep.

Peregrine looked about. Except for the watch, the encampment was asleep after another exhausting day of battle.

Peregrine stepped into the last tent and stood looking down on the sleeping man. Beside the cot, before a portable writing desk, the man’s jacket was draped over the back of a camp chair, a colonel’s insignia on the epaulets. Peregrine made a close study of the man’s face, observing his features down to the slightest detail. He had a high, intelligent forehead that met brown hair brushed back straight and neat even in sleep. The nose was slightly rounded at the tip, as was the chin. The faint line of an old scar could be seen on the left upper lip, the mark repeated in a slight gap in the left eyebrow, an old saber wound perhaps.

Peregrine opened his hands and held them over the colonel’s face, lowering them until he nearly touched the sleeping man. He closed his own eyes to better
see
the contours of the man’s face so that he could re-create the man’s image perfectly within his own mind, and then in the minds of others.

Even asleep, the man sensed danger. He stirred and opened his eyes. Peregrine lightly touched his fingertips to the man’s temples and the rebel closed his eyes again.

Next, the vampire drank in Colonel John Reeve’s memories in great gulps, swallowing them like cool springwater on a hot day. The recollections of a lifetime poured out of the man and into the vampire.

After only a few minutes, Peregrine knew everything he needed to accomplish his purpose.

“Colonel Reeve, you’re up late, sir.”

The captain was leaning against a tree, holding a thin silver flask. Peregrine searched his recently acquired memory and was not disappointed. Colonel Jack Wiley, a lawyer from Mobile, Alabama. Mad Jack, they called him, because of his reputation for foolish courage. The men were of two minds about Mad Jack. Half thought he was certain to be the next of Lee’s staff officers to be killed. Others—Reeve was in this camp—thought the man led a charmed existence and was sure to go home at the end of the war.

“Jack,” Peregrine said, and held out his hand for the flask. The initials engraved in the silver in elegant script—L.R.S.—belonged to a fellow officer. The flask had been Leonard Stacey’s, until he made a gift of it to the luckier Mad Jack as Stacey lie dying. The brandy tasted good to Peregrine, though the Change had taken him to a state of being beyond the consolation of liquor or even opium. The only thing that still had the power to intoxicate him now was blood.

“Tomorrow ought to tell the tale, John, though I can’t say I like slugging it out with the Yankees with us both in fixed positions.”

“Those people,” Peregrine said, and spat, playing his part with perverse enjoyment. “If the Yankees will turn tail and run on an open battlefield, I don’t reckon they’ll do any different if we attack them in their trenches.”

“I suppose not,” Mad Jack said gamely, though the hint of a frown made Peregrine wonder if Mad Jack was as mad as his compatriots imagined. He raised his flask to Peregrine in salute. “I trust tomorrow will prove to be an excellent day to see the enemy die.”

“I have no doubt of it,” Peregrine said, and moved off toward the next encampment. A ring of tents circled a low-burning fire. Just beyond, revealed only when the dying blaze gave off a brief flicker, stood a battery of cannon aimed at the Union lines. Between the lines was nearly a mile of empty ground, the land rising gently as it approached the Union Army. The terrain was a strategic strength for General George Gordon Meade’s blue-clad forces sleeping on the opposite side of the broad, open killing field.

There was only one person still sitting out by the fire, a bearded officer formally dressed in boots and jacket, a major general’s golden epaulets on the shoulder. The familiar leonine features were instantly recognizable. It was Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Though outnumbered and outweaponed, Lee had beaten the Union Army time and again, yet this was his boldest move ever, invading the North in an audacious—not to say desperate—bid to force the United States to sue for peace.

Massah
Lee, Peregrine thought, studying the Confederate general’s profile in the firelight. Lee looked tired but not the soft kind of tired that sleep could remedy. He had been offered command of the United States forces, but chose to side with the South. Three short years had turned him into an old man. The skin around his eyes was deeply lined, and his beard was turning white. There was no way short of a miracle that the South could win the war, but in a way that played to its advantage. Desperate men fight harder. They win because they
have
to win.

Lee glanced up, regarding the campfires burning on the opposite ridge, assessing the enemy’s number.

It would have been a simple matter to kill Lee. Peregrine could have done it quickly and silently, without anyone noticing their commanding general’s lifeless body until Peregrine was safely gone. But that was not what he had in mind. It hardly would be logical to kill one rebel—even one as important as Lee—when he could just as easily send many thousands of them to hell.

Peregrine closed his eyes and reached out with his mind…

The air was filled with voices, the aimless thoughts of sleepless men and their slumbering compatriots, all dreaming of home and the battle to come, a fight that would send many of them down into the earth as food for worms. Peregrine had to focus hard to direct his attention through the gibbering echoes and anxious cries until he found Lee. The interior of the Confederate commander’s mind was exactly as Peregrine had expected: clean, clear, well ordered, austere, like a library, like a Greek temple.

Peregrine hid there in the midst of Lee’s thoughts for many minutes, choosing not to act until he was familiar with the tone and flow of the commander’s thoughts. The thing Peregrine hoped to achieve required great delicacy and subtlety. If he forced the matter, the sober-thinking tactician could become too uncomfortable with the idea to accept it as his own.

The vampire lurked in the trees, watching the methodical logic of Lee’s mind as he turned the problem of the coming battle over and over again, like a chess player studying a difficult problem. The solution seemed to present itself spontaneously, as if it had come to Lee as one of those sudden insights, when the answer, so elusive, suddenly makes itself plain.

Lee had doubts about the resolve of the Union soldiers. He questioned the mettle of the Yankee officers. He was contemptuous of Meade, a sentiment Peregrine shared. Lee wondered if the center of the Union line was as strong as it appeared. Maybe if he sent one of his best divisions crashing headlong into the blue-belly center, the line would break, and the resulting split between the army’s wings would lead Meade to panic and draw back, opening the way for Lee to drive deeper into Pennsylvania and despoil the countryside until the Northern politicians cried uncle. In his mind’s eye, Lee could see General Pickett leading a vast host of the Confederacy across the open plain and smashing the Union line.