Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (4 page)

GHOUL HUNTER’S LAMENT

Zane and Junius Webb spent the night in the canyon, on the other side of the river from the cave, drinking coffee liberally laced with busthead from the bottle in the ghoul hunter’s saddlebags, and roasting a jackrabbit buck that Junius had shot earlier in the day, near the start of their excursion.

Junius had no liking for bivouacking this close to the swillers’ cave, and Zane had to admit, if only to himself, to a buzzing along his own nerve endings. He’d never encountered so many swillers shacked up in the same place before. He and Junius had come close to being torn to shreds, the blood sucked out of their bones, in the cave over yonder.

Worse yet, they might have been transformed, though he couldn’t imagine himself and Junius fitting in among that crew of fancy swillers.

Good to know the blessed silver bullets worked so efficiently,
however. Next time he ran into a sky pilot, he’d be sure to have him bless a few more boxes of.44s for his Colts and LeMat and his Henry repeating rifle.

Zane and Junius took turns throughout the night keeping watch, though it wasn’t really necessary. Neither slept except in short spurts, awakened by every owl hoot and falling pinecone, expecting to see a flour-faced demon glaring down at them, saber fangs flashing in the firelight.

They rose early the next morning and returned to the cave, where Zane set to work with a hand ax, cutting the heads off as many dead swillers as he could find. As each head dropped away from the ragged neck, Junius gathered it up by its hair and dropped it into a croaker sack, muttering sour lamentations under his breath. When he’d filled four sacks, and Zane had accounted for twenty-three heads, they tied the tops tight, making sure no sunlight could get in and spoil their work.

“Nasty damn business,” Junius complained once more as he and Zane draped the four croaker sacks across the wheeled casket in which the trusty Gatling gun nestled.

“Yeah, well, someone’s gotta do it,” Zane said for the seventh time that morning, doffing his hat and running a big hand through his thick mane of tangled black hair. “You’re glad to have them swillers gone, ain’t ya? Might have turned you into one of ’em.”

“I doubt a swiller’d care for the white lightnin’ I got runnin’ through these old veins, but I’m damned tired of ’em feedin’ on my cows. The neighbors’ cows, too. And I been wonderin’ why all the game disappeared from this neck of the Sawatch.”

They had a last cup of coffee, then broke camp, and, Zane straddling General Lee and Junius Webb in the saddle of his
burro, they headed back to the main trail and began following it west along Taylor Canyon, the wheeled coffin rattling along behind, the croaker sacks swaying to and fro down both sides. It was a nice day in the high country this late in the year, the sun a warm caress, the leaves of the aspens well on their way to turning their vibrant yellows and golds.

They stopped to rest and water their horses in a horseshoe of Taylor River, and Zane stepped into the trees to evacuate his bladder. He took a deep breath, leaned back a little on his hips, and glanced at the sky. He glanced away, then lifted his eyes once more to the rim of the granite and sandstone ridge rising on the opposite side of the river.

A bird was winging around up there, likely hunting the ridge crest for jackrabbits or cottontails. Zane squinted. One hell of a big bird.

As he watched the raptor, or whatever it was, wing out over the canyon from the ridge crest, he vaguely detected a slight tightening in his shoulder blades and a thinning of his piss stream. He lifted a gloved hand to shade his eyes and scrutinized the winged beast just now flying over him, about two thousand feet in the air and beginning to bank as it gradually headed back toward the ridge. Massive lime and gold wings, like giant bat wings, swatted against the air while a long tail, spiked on its top side, curled like a ship’s tiller. The head owned the shape of the alligators Zane had once seen on a tobacco-selling journey to southern Georgia, only this head had large triangular ears, like a dog’s ears.

Green and gold scales along the winged beast’s reptilian body flashed in the sunlight as the beast careened back over the top of the ridge and disappeared behind it.

Zane stood staring, incredulous. He blinked his eyes as if to clear them, wondering if what he had spied was really only a large hawk or eagle but a trick of the light had given it the shape of a dragon.

He stared at the sky over the ridge, hoping the beast would appear once more. After a time, Junius called from behind him, “Uriah, if you’re havin’ trouble in the peein’ department, I know a fella in Gunnison. Sells an elixir that’ll have you streamin’ like a Belgian plow horse!”

“Did you see that?” Zane said, buttoning his pants and striding back toward the prospector.

Junius was holding the burro’s halter and waving blackflies away from his own long, wart-stippled nose. “See what?”

“That bird up yonder?”

The prospector lifted his gaze. “What bird?”

“Ain’t sure it was a bird.” Zane brushed past the man and grabbed General Lee’s reins. “Do me a favor. The rest of the way to Gunnison, keep an eye on the sky for me, will you? Don’t laugh or spread it around the saloons till I know for sure, but I think I seen a dragon.”

Junius had turned, wincing a little on his twisted ankle, to follow Zane with his gaze. He arched a skeptical brow. “A what?”

The ghoul hunter swung into the leather and felt his bearded cheeks warm with chagrin. Was he going mad? “Just keep an eye skinned upward and let me know if you see anything you ain’t used to seein’. Now, come on, goddamnit. We don’t have all day to burn out here. I wanna turn these heads in before we start attracting mountain lions!”

He neck-reined General Lee around and, the casket wheeling along behind him and the croaker sacks swishing like grisly
ornaments down its sides, headed back up the western trail. They wound around through the canyon until the steep walls gradually lowered and they were on a broad open flat, the river to their left now, distant mountains jutting like storm clouds in all directions, several peaks already snow mantled.

They crossed the river, wide and shallow here on the sage flats, and entered the cow and mining town of Gunnison. The rough little prairie oasis was so high in altitude that the sun literally appeared to be raining gold out of a vast cerulean sky upon the log shacks and shanties and tent saloons and corrals and leaning privies and stock pens.

Gunnison had a broad main street, its crown jewel a turreted sandstone opera house at a hitch in the road. The log and frame false-fronted businesses around it were more than humbled by its gaudy opulence, though there was a three-story brothel painted red and deep purple, with balconies on the upper two stories, that tried its damndest to compete.

Gunnison was bustling, as it always was this time of the year, with drovers driving beeves to be shipped out on the railroad to Denver or Salt Lake City and prospectors making their gradual way out of the extreme high country around Crested Butte and Tincup to lower altitudes for the winter. And since Gunnison was sandwiched between two known ghoul hideouts—one of hobgobbies, the other of werebeasts, of which there were several known varieties including bobcats and pumas—there was the ever-present and generally unheeled bounty-hunting crowd as well.

A couple of pianos were being hammered in saloons up and down the street. Cutting through the patter as well as the rumble of conversations rising from
clumps of waddies and frontiersmen of all shapes and sizes all over the street, a man’s angry voice shouted, “Goddamn your vermin hide, McCreedy! I want you outta here
now
!”

Boots clomped. A man yelled. Spurs rang. The batwings of the Wolf’s Howl Saloon on the street’s left side belched out a burly gent in a short bearskin coat, duck trousers, and brown bowler hat. He stumbled across the gallery, arms akimbo, and continued on down the three steps to the street where he fell and rolled, kicking up a sand-colored dust cloud, and lost his hat.

A dapper-dressed, mustached gent wearing a five-pointed copper star and a ten-gallon Stetson stomped out the batwings, descended the gallery steps, and drove the point of his right, black, hand-tooled boot into the ass of the man in the street. His victim yowled and leapfrogged forward, cursing bitterly and holding one hand against his ass. The badge toter kicked the pilgrim’s ass again, through his hand, and again his victim leapfrogged forward and twisted around, red-faced, blond hair hanging in his pain- and fury-pinched eyes. One hand flew to the six-shooter on his right hip.

The mustached badge toter laughed and stood with his boots spread, both hands on his hips shoving back the tails of his charcoal-colored frock coat. “Go ahead, McCreedy. Jerk that toad, if you’ve a mind. Never know; you just might be as fast as you
think
you are!”

McCreedy stayed his hand but kept it on his pistol butt, glaring up at the tall gent with the badge who dared him with his mocking blue eyes. Men had come out of the saloon behind the town marshal, holding beer mugs or shot glasses, some smoking, eyes glittering their appreciation of the show before them. McCreedy cut his wounded gaze to the onlookers, then
shuttled them back to the town marshal, veins bulging in his forehead as he jerked his Schofield out of its holster.

The lawman slapped leather, his hand a blur as the steel-blue Colt came up in a flash, and roared, smoke and flames stabbing from the barrel. McCreedy’s head jerked back as the. 44 round drilled through his temple and plunked into the dust about two feet behind him, spraying blood, brains, and bone into the grit.

McCreedy’s quivering hand opened. His six-shooter tumbled into the street by his right knee, and he sagged back in the dirt, shivering as though he’d been struck by lightning.

The crowd fell silent.

Zane and Junius Webb had stopped in the street about thirty feet before the saloon from which the ruckus had erupted. Zane clucked as the lawman, whose name was Wayne Lomax, strode toward the still-shaking carcass.

“That’s a mighty fast draw you got there, Marshal,” the ghoul hunter said.

Lomax stood over McCreedy but turned his head toward Zane and Junius and grimaced. “Oh, Christ. Not you, Uriah. As if I don’t have enough trouble.” He picked up McCreedy’s gun and turned to Zane once more. “This son of a sow been leadin’ up a gang sellin’ busthead to the hobgobbies out on Eagle River. You ever confront a drunken hobgobbie, Uriah?”

“A time or two. Like takin’ down a bear with a slingshot. I see now why you were so contrary, Wayne.”

Lomax beckoned toward the saloon veranda, and three men came down and started to pick up the dead McCreedy and haul him off to the undertaker’s. The lawman shoved the dead man’s pistol behind his black cartridge belt and sauntered over to Zane
and Junius, canting a skeptical eye to appraise the wheeled casket behind the bounty man.

“That’s some outfit you got there, Uriah.”

“Thanks.”

“What’s in the sacks?”

“Swiller heads. Ran into a cave teemin’ with the vermin, like bedbugs in a Mexican brothel, about ten miles up canyon.” Zane arched an admonishing brow. “Ain’t that your jurisdiction, Marshal Lomax?”

Lomax’s nostrils flared, and he hardened his jaws. “Sundown.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s your deadline for hauling your crazy ass, your crazy friend, and your ghastly casket the hell out of my town, Zane. Sundown!”

Zane’s broad, bearded face darkened. His voice was pitched low with an almost affable menace. Darkly, he smiled. “Now, you know better than to tell
me
what to do, Wayne.” He splayed his right hand across his thigh, near the Colt Navy jutting on his right hip.

Chapter 4
    

U.S. BOUNTY OFFICE

Town Marshal Wayne Lomax looked pained and frustrated.

He cut his eyes from side to side to see who, if anyone, was witnessing his confrontation with the notorious ghoul hunter Uriah Zane. Since most of the onlookers had drifted off after Lomax had killed McCreedy, Lomax looked vaguely relieved.

But he kept his voice low as he said in defeat, “Goddamnit, Uriah. You bust up any more saloons in my town, I’m liable to get voted out of office. Now, will you”—he paused to look around once more, then stepped up so close to General Lee that the horse nickered nervously, and through gritted teeth Lomax said quietly—“kindly finish whatever business you have here, stock up on the supplies you need, and all the firewater you can hold, and move on out? Plenty of ghouls up in them mountains yonder. You have a way, Uriah, every time you’re here, of makin’
me look bad. Weak. And it ain’t a good thing for a lawman to look weak in the eyes of those he serves.”

“Ah, shit, Wayne—you’re fast enough. Why don’t you just go ahead and shoot me? You been wantin’ to since we was six years old.”

Lomax ran a frustrated hand across his mouth and rattled a sigh. “You know I can’t shoot my own blood. ’Specially since there’s so few of us Lomaxes and Zanes left in the world. But believe me, if we weren’t kin, they’d be hauling you off to where they’re taking Lyle McCreedy even as we speak.”