Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (8 page)

“Good, good,” said Major Mondrick, the warden of Hellsgarde
Penitentiary. He slipped the stem of his pipe between his lips and puffed as he approached the jail wagon. “Maybe I shall pit them next Sunday against a couple of the feistier ghouls in our boxing league.”

“Maybe oughta feed one o’ ’em to the blood-swillers tonight. Or…” Murphy grinned at the warden. “Maybe you oughta throw him in ole Charlie Hondo’s cage.”

“Why?” The warden bunched his wiry brows and loosed a couple more smoke puffs as he gave a condescending gaze to the jail wagon driver. “So you and your lowly ilk can watch the bloodletting, hear the screaming, bet on how long it takes Charlie to clean up his mess?”

“Well, hell, Warden,” said Schwartz, his features creasing indignantly. “Ain’t that what we’ll all be doin’ come Sunday?”

Mondrick stretched his lips back in a faintly abashed smile. “Touché.” He looked into the wagon, where Curly Joe, Lucky, and One-Eye slouched as before, returning the warden’s glare. “Oh, well, I suppose I could let you boys have one for this evening. But save the other two for Sunday. You know how Mrs. Mondrick and I and the Considines from the Chain Link Ranch enjoy our Sunday festivities.”

“Warden Mondrick!” an English-accented voice called from high above. “Come on up here, Warden. I wish to speak to you about your bathing facilities! Not quite up to the Freeman-Johnson Regulatory Agreement Regarding the Incarceration of Non-Humans, are they?”

Mondrick lifted his head to one of the casement windows in a tower high overhead, in the main part of the castle.

“Shut up, Hannibal. You just got here two weeks ago, and you’re already getting on my nerves!”

“Send up one of your big-breasted peasant bitches, will you?” Poking his head out the one-foot‑by‑one-foot window casement, the swiller named Hannibal James jerked his round, pale face toward where the washerwomen were boiling clothes. “I’m thirsty—and
horny
!”

He snapped his fangs, snarling.

Several of the washerwomen looked up at the castle wall with expressions of great revulsion.

Warden Mondrick glanced at one of the men crouched behind a Gatling gun in the tower to the right of the closed drawbridge. He jerked his chin toward the swiller, and the Gatling gun belched, spitting smoke and flames from the end of its six-barreled canister. The bullets hammered the stone wall around the swiller’s window a quarter second after the immortal beast had pulled his head inside. The rocketing lead blew up rock slivers and dust.

The Gatling’s swivel squawked as the gun was again aimed down at the jail wagon. Warden Mondrick turned his attention back to the new prisoners then, too, and the pipe fell out of his hands to bounce off his right boot, gray tobacco ash smoking.

“Holy shit!” cried Murphy and Schwartz at nearly the same time, widening their eyes at the jail wagon in which all three prisoners continued to slouch as before.

But, unlike before, they were no longer men slouching with their hands cuffed and ankles shackled.

They were wolves.

The blazing wolf-red eyes and the fangs curving down like sharp, miniature sabers from their upper jaws set the warden’s heart to pounding so hard he thought it would literally explode from his chest.

All three sets of pulsating red eyes and grinning teeth were focused on him.

Murphy was slapping the covered holster on his right hip, trying to get his gun out, and screaming, “Holy Christ, they’re
spooks
! They’re spooks, Schwartz—
shoot ’em!
”

As the warden stumbled backward, swinging his gaze toward the Gatling guns in the guard towers and trying to find the words to the orders he was trying to shout, Schwartz fumbled his Henry rifle up.

Wolves?
he was thinking beneath the thundering of the blood in his ears.
It ain’t even dark yet!

Levering a shell into the chamber, he pressed the butt to his shoulder and took aim at the wolf you could still recognize as Curly even if you didn’t know where he’d been riding in the wagon—something about the facial features and eyes.

Schwartz fired too quickly, and the first slug ricocheted off one of the iron straps on the door and hammered Murphy’s right shoulder, tearing his coat and squirting blood from the driver’s back. As Murphy stumbled backward, grabbing his shoulder and grunting, Schwartz fired two more shots into Curly Joe, merely puffing dust from the outlaw werewolf’s shirt and pin-striped vest but not appearing to penetrate the tough, hairy hide.

In fact, the lead bullets merely seemed to tickle Curly Joe, for the outlaw tipped his wolf head back and loosed a near-deafening howl, kicking his wolf legs and hammering his paws against the wagon’s wooden floor in jubilation.

The others were howling and doing the same, kicking up a tornado in the warden’s head. Mondrick finally found the words he’d been searching for and shouted at the Gatling gunners, “Shoot! For Christ’s sakes, shoo—”

The air was sucked out of his throat as a weirdly shaped shadow swept over him. A half second later there was a roar like that of a hundred steam valves being released at once.

Varoooooosssshhhhhhhh!

The tower right of the drawbridge, and the man and the Gatling gun on top of it, were suddenly consumed by a great ball of black-stitched, red-orange flames. As the gunner in the other tower turned his head toward the conflagration, he disappeared, too, in a second ball of fire that licked down over the sides of the tower, leaving charred rock in its wake.

The burning gunners’ horrific screams were barely audible above the fire’s roar and the great creaking of enormous, flapping wings.

Mondrick, who had fallen on his butt at the base of the steps rising to the guard tower, now lifted his eyes to the sky. As it had been threatening to do for the past twenty or so seconds, his heart exploded like dynamite in his chest, not killing him but paralyzing him and filling him with as much hammering pain as the increased horror he felt when he saw the shiny-scaled, locomotive-sized, winged creature sweeping over the castle and favoring him with one large, copper-colored eye, like a small, leering sun.

“Oh, no,” he rasped. “Don’t tell me there’s dragons now, too!”

Chapter 8
    

THE HOBGOBBIE TRAIL

The silhouettes of mesquite branches shone like witches’ fingers on the rocky slope in the light of the full moon rising over the West Elk Mountains near Sapinero, just north of the San Juans in Colorado Territory.

It shone like a giant, sun-bleached skull—so clear and vivid in the lens-like desert air that Angel Coffin could have surveyed the lunar plains and mountains if she’d lifted her head. But the deputy United States marshal out of Denver had no time to marvel at the night sky.

She kept her head down, eyes forward, as she scrambled up the side of the rocky knoll in a shallow, cedar-rimmed canyon, hearing the drunken, jubilant singing of the Mexican hobgobbies down the other side of the rise. Several were singing badly while another strummed a mandolin. Other sounds rose on Angel’s left—strange grunting noises.

Angel stopped suddenly and crouched down behind a boulder, holding her Winchester carbine straight up and down in hands clad in black gloves from which she’d cut out the fingers. She was dressed nearly all in black leather excepting a sleeveless, low-cut doeskin tunic that was drawn tightly across her full breasts, her deep cleavage exposed behind rawhide drawstrings. She didn’t wear the revealing attire out of vanity, but only because it was comfortable in most climes and gave her nearly six-foot but willowy and graceful frame ample ease of movement.

Over the tunic she wore a Spanish-style deerskin charro jacket stitched in red. Tall, black, lace‑up boots rose nearly to her knees. Her skintight leather breeches were shoved down into the tops of the low-heeled boots.

Doffing her black Stetson, shaking her rose-red hair out, and setting the hat down beside her, she peered over a jumble of black volcanic rocks humping up on her right, and narrowed her jade-green eyes. On her smooth, tapering cheek, beneath her right eye, lay the sickle-shaped scar she’d incurred several years ago from a wolf’s decisive swipe a half second before she’d blown the beast to hell.

Angel studied the two human-shaped shadows moving among a few mesquites and desert willows.

About fifty yards away from Angel’s position, she realized they had to be part of Rafael Ortiz’s band, who’d been robbing banks and raiding ranches throughout Colorado Territory for months. The living demons, who could occasionally pass themselves off as humans despite their long noses and close-set eyes and the fact that they were no more human than a rattlesnake, which made them particularly hard to run down, had left clear signs south of Leadville. Some said the hobgobbies were the
offspring of the Devil himself, and Angel, who’d had plenty of experience with the wretched vermin, had found no reason to contradict the theory.

There they’d robbed the second bank in their monthlong raid, after enjoying a show at the opera house, oddly enough. Judging by their southward bearing, they were probably intending on returning to Mexico, where the devils were welcome if they had pocket jingle, and if they limited their desecrations to the Apaches and relatively defenseless peons, both a bane to the current Mexican government. Also, the Mexicans were more tolerant of hobgobbies because they were natural enemies of the werebeasts that were as nettling south of the border as north of it, and they were more effective than Mexican bounty hunters at thinning the renegade packs.

Angel had tracked them along with her partner, Deputy Dwight Curry, who had been gunned down six days ago. Angel and Curry had been so intent on the hobgobbies’ trail that they’d made the mistake of not keeping a close eye on their own backtrails, and several of the band had swung back and flanked them, killing Curry but not before he’d taken out one of the devils and wounded one other. Angel had dispatched the other two before burying Curry and getting back after the main band comprised of the remaining five riders, heading as due south as possible in this demon’s playground of towering ridges, slanting mesas, and the maze-like, rocky, snake-infested slashes of canyons.

Angel Coffin had been a deputy U.S. marshal for six years and was as respected as any of the men in a profession that, since the War, did not discriminate against women because, due to the depredations of the ghouls, women outnumbered men on
the frontier nearly two to one. There simply weren’t enough men any longer to fill all the traditional male occupations, which gave women the opportunity to fill them. Angel had honed her skills and was confident, though not overly so, that she could handle the Ortiz bunch well enough solo.

Still, she didn’t like that moon coming up. Not only was it too damn bright, but she should have known better than to night hunt during a full moon when anyone with any sense was holed up in a werewolf-proof cabin. She’d been so eager to run Ortiz’s bunch down, however, that she’d lost track of the lunar calendar—an embarrassing, tinhorn mistake that was too damned dangerous to make twice.

Ortiz was out here, though. Maybe he knew something about the hunting habits of the wolf packs in this area. Maybe the werewolves were sticking close to their home country again and dining mostly on Indians, wild horses, and ranch cattle.

Just thinking about one of those spooks getting on her scent out here made Angel shudder—something she took pride in rarely doing. The deputy marshal was no hothouse flower, but even a man like the notorious Uriah Zane, her sometime lover and trail partner—a moody loner who hunted the devils for a living—shied from the thought of a pack of the howling hordes cutting his trail. Werewolves were hardly ever outrun or dissuaded. In fact, Angel had never heard of anyone surviving a werewolf attack unless they were somehow able to make it to a stout-walled shelter with a wolf-proof, iron-banded door.

The deputy marshal pressed her tongue to her lower lip as she peered over the rocks to her left, trying to get a fix on whoever was over there. Finally, wanting to keep track of all members of Ortiz’s gang, so she could corral them all later, she pushed
out from behind her covering boulder and made her way slowly, weaving among the rocks, toward where the two were grunting and groaning together and making belt buckles and spurs jingle. And then, when she found a nook in the rocks with a good view of the pair, she quirked her mouth corners knowingly.

The demons were fucking like back-alley curs. Not surprising. Male hobgobbies were even more randy than human men, but they were seldom not outshone by the females of their species.

One of the two shadows among the moon-silvered mesquites was bent forward over a flat-topped boulder while the other shadow rammed his pelvis against her round, naked bottom. The bell-bottomed charro slacks of Ortiz’s hobgobbie sister, Leonora, were bunched around the young female’s ankles while one of the males from the gang rammed her from behind so hard that he had to hold her hips taut in his gloved hands to keep her from sprawling to the ground.

Leonora cackled nastily, wildly.

“Damn fools,” Angel muttered, staying low among the rocks and tufts of Spanish bayonet. “Liable to call the wolves down out of the hills, put us all in one helluva bind.”