Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (21 page)

Kill?

He tightened a fist against it.

No, he told himself, staring out at the star-capped night in which the waning moon climbed, relieved it was not full and feeling the fearful anticipation, as he always did, of the next time it would be full and high.

Would he once more be able to hold the wolf inside him at bay?

He and the others got started at first light. By midmorning they slipped across the Colorado border and into Arizona. Pushing the horses as hard as they dared, in the midmorning they followed the tracks of the Angels’ five shod mounts into a small ranch headquarters.

There was a hay barn, two corrals including a breaking corral outfitted with a snubbing post, and a run-down, brush-roofed cabin.

They reined up near the windmill and stock tank, and Zane caressed the trigger of his Henry as he and the others got the lay of the place.

There wasn’t much movement except four horses in the main corral off the barn, the lazily spinning windmill’s rusty blades, and a tumbleweed bouncing off across the yard flanking the cabin from which emanated the squawls of a young child.

By the scuffed, windblown tracks in the yard—though with no sign of the dragon—the gang they were after had obviously ridden through here some time ago. Likely they’d moved on. But boot hills across the frontier were rife with men who’d banked too heavily on assumptions.

A child’s face appeared in the window right of the cabin, two little hands closing over the window’s bottom casing. A man’s long face appeared over that of the boy, then just as quickly disappeared.

The cabin’s front door opened. The man poked his head out, squinting his eyes, then drew the door wider and stepped out holding a.45/70 Springfield army carbine down low across his thighs. He was a gaunt, thin man with muttonchops and ragged pin-striped coveralls and a grimy undershirt. He wore stockmen’s undershot boots, but both toes were nearly torn away from the
soles. His shoulders were thick, his sun-browned hands on the Springfield large.

A wild horse hunter and breaker. Zane knew the breed. He eased his finger away from the Henry’s trigger.

“We’re friendly,” he said.

The man had drawn the door closed behind him and haltingly stepped down off the cabin’s dilapidated stoop and walked slowly toward the newcomers, squinting, a lock of gray-flecked hair hanging over one eye.

“Name’s Zane,” the bounty hunter said when the mustanger had stopped about twenty feet away. “The lady with the badge there is Deputy U.S. Marshal Angel Coffin, and on the other side of her is Al Hathaway, cavalry scout. We’re after the gang that pulled into your yard sometime back—I’m guessing the day before yesterday.”

The mustanger looked uncertain as he dropped his eyes to the ground as though looking for the tracks these newcomers had followed to his ranch. He looked back up at Zane, flicking his eyes across Angel and Hathaway, then said, “What’d they do?”

“Broke out of Hellsgarde,” Angel said. “Leastways, the men did. The woman gave ’em a hand.”

“When did they pull in and when did they leave?” Zane inquired.

“You had it right,” said the mustanger. “Midafternoon day before yesterday. Pulled out the next mornin’. Hellsgarde, you say?” His facial muscles stiffened, and the lids drooped halfway over his eyes. “Why on earth…?”

“Spooks,” Hathaway said with a grunt, leaning forward to run a gloved hand down his mule’s neck. “Shapeshifters. Wolves. They show you that?”

“There wasn’t no such nonsense as that. I invited ’em to go ahead and camp behind the cabin, and Angeline cooked for ’em, and before they left they bought two beef haunches from me and gave me five dollars for ’em, though it weren’t nothin’ but a scrub cow.”

Angel cast a wary eye to the sky. “The girl didn’t come packin’ a dragon, did she?”

The man’s face colored up slightly, and his eyes gained an indignant cast. He thought he was being toyed with.

“I ain’t seen no such nonsense as dragons,” he said finally. “Good Lord. I have enough trouble keepin’ a pack o’ hobgobbies away from my cattle. Whole ranch of ’em in the next watershed to the north. They love beef—any beef that ain’t their own, that is. Sometimes they even come after my hosses.”

The mustanger shook his head as he stared in silent beseeching at Angel.

“When we’ve done run our current quarry to ground,” she told the mustanger, “I’ll look into it.”

“I’d be obliged.”

“In the meantime,” Zane said, “mind if we water our horses?”

“The water’s good. You can stay for supper, if you like.”

“Thanks,” said Hathaway. “We best keep movin’, sir.”

The mustanger nodded. “I gotta go back inside. Little one’s sick, and the missus needs help with the others.” His eyes acquired a sad look. “Too bad about Charlie and his pards and that girl. They was right friendly.” He grinned bashfully. “That girl—she was an eyeful.”

“I bet she was,” Angel said.

The man turned and went back inside the cabin. Zane, Angel, and Hathaway watered their horses at the stock trough, loosening
the latigos and slipping the bits from the horses’ mouths. They fed them a couple of handfuls of grain, letting them eat it slow.

Resting in the windmill’s shade, Zane and Hathaway each rolled a quirley. Angel smoked one of her long, black cheroots she bought for a nickel each in Denver and which, at one time, had been her father’s favorite brand. Zane smoked only half of his cigarette. For some reason, the tobacco didn’t taste as good as it once did. As the sun angled westward toward the White Mountains rolling up like severe clouds above the sage-stippled plain, they mounted up and headed along the trail once more.

After another hour’s ride, they came to a right fork in the trail, the fork meandering up and over a distant rise among low buttes and mesas.

Zane halted General Lee and studied the trail with a speculative air.

“What is it?” Hathaway said.

“Gonna head up that canyon, see a man about a horse.”

“What’d we need with another hoss?” asked Hathaway.

“I don’t think he means a horse,” Angel said. “Think he means silver.”

Hathaway stretched a knowing smile. “Untaxed, I suppose?”

Zane shrugged.

Officiously, Angel said, “That’s contraband, Mr. Zane.”

“Nah, that’s just affordable silver. Ain’t much of it these days, with the increased demand since the War an’ all.”

Zane dismounted and quickly unharnessed the casket from General Lee. “I’m gonna make a quick run, leave this here. Don’t need a busted wheel.”

Grunting, he pushed the casket off into the dense brush and rocks along the trail.

“You sure you don’t want us to go with you?” Angel asked.

Zane shook his head. “You two push on, find a spot to camp. If all goes well, I’ll find you before sundown.”

Zane remounted General Lee and galloped onto the forking trail, over the rise, and into a canyon between steep-walled tabletop mesas.

Chapter 20
    

A VISIT TO THE SILVER-BULLET PADRE

Zane lay atop a rise, focusing his field glasses on the lower canyon before him. The cut was abutted in the north and the south by steep cliffs leaning inward.

Up a brushy slope on the canyon’s north side sat an old Spanish church flanked by a cemetery of tilting wooden crosses and engraved tombstones. A little ways down the hill from the church, and nearer Zane, lay a small mud-brick, brush-roofed shack from which a curl of smoke lifted. The sun’s dying rays burnished the sandstone church above the shack so that it glowed like a new penny.

A thin stream flashed at the bottom of the canyon. On both sides of the stream were wood-frame shacks, seven in all. Sun-silvered and dilapidated, with brush growing up through the boardwalks fronting them, they were all that remained of a town built here by gold prospectors before the War and abandoned
soon after. The stone ruins of an old Spanish pueblo could be seen around the newer buildings, only a few of them still sporting roofs.

There wasn’t much gold in the stream, but the padre had found a healthy silver vein in a hidden canyon cut into the northern ridge behind the church. The Franciscan priests from Spain had been the first to exploit the vein, and they’d even processed the ore, a tradition that Padre Alejandro had been continuing for nearly thirty years with the help of his half-breed assistant, Tico Palomar. Few besides Zane knew of the silver cache, and he’d stumbled on it years ago when he’d holed up here to recover from an arrow drilled into his leg by a Coyotero Apache.

Despite Zane’s lack of a spiritual bent, he and the padre had become fast friends. It was then that the padre had begun selling silver bullets to the ghoul hunter, as he did for a select few fighting the hard war against El Diablo, who would surely take over the world if not for the brave men who stood against him.

Spying no sign of danger below—he’d learned long ago to never ride into a place without scoping it out carefully beforehand—Zane returned his field glasses to his saddlebags, mounted General Lee, and galloped on down the hill and into the canyon. He cut away from the stream, mounted the northern slope, and drew rein before the humble shack.

“Padre?”

No answer but the breeze rustling the dead brush roofing the shack. An
ojo
hanging from the ceiling of the narrow front gallery twisted slightly in the breeze, its rope creaking faintly. The striped Indian blankets hanging over the windows from the inside fluttered.

“Padre Alejandro?” Zane called, louder. “It’s Uriah Zane.”

Still no reply from the shack. The door was closed. The padre was not in his garden to the shack’s right, which the old Catholic watered each day from the stream, chanting and praying, as was his practice.

Zane gigged General Lee around the shack and up the well-worn trail to the church that stood like a hulking sandstone barrack. A cracked and tarnished bell crouched in an eroded belfry mounted high above the arched, wooden front door. Pigeons gurgled and fluttered. As Zane swung down from the saddle, they swooped into flight.

Zane dropped the palomino’s reins, tripped the heavy oak door’s latch, and shoved the door wide. His big frame filled the opening as the panel tapped the wall to the left, and he stared into the church’s bowels that smelled of stone, wood, and candles.

“Padre?” His deep voice echoed.

The benches inside the place had long since rotted and crumbled and been hauled away. Now if any worshippers appeared—and there were damn few left in these hills—they simply knelt on the cracked flagstone floor. Beyond a dilapidated wooden rail and a rack of unlit candles lay the altar and a wooden cross.

Zane walked into the church, leaving the door open wide behind him, and followed his long shadow down the center aisle and around the altar to a small back door. He pushed the door open and peered into the cemetery.

Again, he called for the padre. Except for the breeze ruffling the brown, wiry weeds that had nearly overgrown the boneyard and the gurgling of the pigeons perched on the red-slate roof above him, there was no response. He raked his eyes across the
cemetery. They caught on the large oak cross standing at the rear of the yard, and held there, his heart skipping beats.

Zane lunged into a run, leaping stones and small crosses until he stood in front of the large cross at the rear of the cemetery and stared up in horror at Padre Alejandro, who lay naked and spread-eagled and bloody, nailed to the cross just like his beloved Jesus.

Zane reached out and touched the man’s thin, pale, blue-veined right ankle. Cold as stone. He looked at the gaunt face framed by long, grizzled, silver hair. The skin sagging against the concave cheeks was as dry as parchment. The man’s brown eyes were half-open and staring almost tenderly down at Zane, his head canted to one side. The blood that had oozed down from the spikes driven through his hands and feet was dry. He’d been dead a day or two, his flat belly starting to pooch out away from his ribs from the putrefaction within.

Oddly, it appeared no buzzards had yet found him.

Zane backed away from his dead friend, the horror in his eyes hardening now to a keen rage as he lowered his right hand to the cross-draw holster on his left hip, and slipped the Colt Navy from its holster. He remembered the smoke lifting from the stovepipe jutting from the roof of Alejandro’s shack.

Maybe whoever had done this was still here. Or was that too much to hope for?

He walked back through the church and out the front, swung up onto General Lee’s back, and booted the horse down the hill. When he was fifty feet from the padre’s shack, he slid down from the saddle while the palomino was still moving. He hit the ground jogging, and pressed his back against the shack’s rear wall, near the closed back door.

He reached over and tried the metal latch lever. It clicked, and the door whined open a few inches. Zane gave a shove and stepped into the cabin. He was in the padre’s kitchen, simply furnished with a small cookstove, eating table, and several plank shelves crowded with airtight tins and burlap food pouches.

Beyond lay the sleeping area with one rocking chair built of elk horns and hide and over which an afghan was draped that Alejandro used to wrap around his shoulders of a chilly night at this altitude and sip his home-brewed ale and stare into the hot fire provided by the small, mud-brick hearth in the left wall. The windows were covered by Indian blankets through which a dingy, washed-out light shone, casting the cabin in misty gray shadows.