The Threshold (46 page)

Wells began whirling as if the horse under him were a trick horse at a rodeo. It nearly climbed the bank onto Cree’s side. Before Cree could find snow to hold his weight, Wells had disappeared. At first Cree couldn’t understand who the uniformed soldiers were fighting. He began to suspect they were two armies in the same uniform fighting each other until he realized they were fighting their horses and the infantry pushing forward too soon, attempting to stay behind the business end of a vintage Gatling gun partially stuck in the snow. The gun’s keepers tried to move it forward and aim it in preparation for firing down the street at the same time. The whole business looked staged for a TV sitcom.

Wells appeared on the snowbank without his horse. Cree wished he could get this guy on the right side of time just once. It would be intriguing to share a few thoughts over a few Michelobs. But when he followed Wells’s glance down the street he saw what the Gatling was trying to aim for. Cree could even pick out Bram O’Connell. He should have known.

Cree’s job was to get Sheriff Rickard and himself back to Aletha, not to mess in Bram’s life or Wells’s either. He turned back to the car, determined but gut-sick. It was not his war. He could do nothing but harm. He still couldn’t see the sheriff but he did see Bram’s sister, Callie, headed for the street with a paper bag. And Aletha was right behind her.

Clyde Duffer saw her too. He and Maynard had been ordered off the streets when they’d walked up to Colorado Avenue to visit one of the more classy gambling joints for a drink and to get Maynard in on the games. They’d decided to develop some more natural talents. When the soldiers ordered them off the street, they obeyed until they were hidden by snowbanks and then angled back toward the edge of town where all the noise was coming from.

They slipped unnoticed back onto Colorado Avenue, toward the west end and around into a shoveled pathway to somebody’s house, which gave them a ringside view of the dumb machine gun on wheels these jerks seemed to think was a howitzer. They saw the O’Connell girl dart from the shoveled path across from them, and behind her, Aletha Kingman. When Duffer recognized Cree Mackelwain’s head above the snow he touched his broken nose. He decided that if he never got home, neither would Mackelwain. Either way, that man was going to die.

Bob Meldrum hadn’t heard Captain Wells’s command to arrest the queer man with the badge and green glasses. Hearing a particular command amidst the mayhem was impossible, even though for him the mayhem was muted. Whenever he was in a crowd, a flood of sound came jumbled to his disabled hearing.

He was only partially aware of how his disability affected his actions. It had come upon him gradually and he’d adapted in ways he hadn’t realized. Sheriff Cal Rutan had sent him back to question Wells or the general about what the deputies should do, seeing as the Gatling was unhorsed and had become hard to handle on ice and snow. At least that’s what Meldrum had interpreted from Rutan’s sounds, lips, and gestures.

Now he was without a horse, had lost interest in the fake sheriff of San Miguel County, and was trying to make his way back to the real one when the Gatling finally steadied all its barrels at the enemy and fired.

Even to Bob Meldrum the sound was deafening.

53

Aletha was covered in blood.

The Gatling gun had roared when she was within inches of grabbing onto Callie’s coat. Horses reared, trying to avoid her. One stared at her in terror before its sharp hooves struck her down. Men and horses screamed in pain and confusion. Blood, snow, and ice mixed to a surface so slippery her hands slid out from under her when she tried to rise.

She’d thought the blood to be all her own. Down here she realized the carnage was general. Chaos reigned above her. She made it to her knees. Before she was knocked down again she saw Clyde Duffer leap over a fallen man. No expressionless, mechanical look on his face now, but the killer was still there and he was enraged. Aletha slithered around to see Cree making his way toward her, but Duffer landed on him and both went down out of sight. She could feel no bullets in her flesh, didn’t know if she should feel much yet through the shock. But she could feel the numbing cold of the street beneath her, the heated rush of fear in her veins, a soreness in one shoulder where flaying hooves had struck her down. She wiggled past a man with blood spurting from his legs, his arms grabbing at air. She’d never realized blood had such an odd metallic smell to it. Another man, this one in uniform, lifted her to her feet and yelled in her ear, “Ladies shouldn’t be out here.”

And then he went down too. Whether he was shot or had slipped on the goo, she didn’t know, but she dropped back to her knees when a bullet snapped by her nose. Aletha had known war only from films, but Armageddon, instinct told her, was as simple as one death—her own.

Bram O’Connell had blood on his clothes too, but his face was clean of it and the snarl that pulled back his lips. He leapt up to yank Bulkeley Wells from his horse. They struggled silently in the gory sludge. Fury locked Bram’s curses inside him as surely as the exertion locked his jaws. He’d surprised Wells and had that advantage and two more: he was clearly the stronger, and Bram alone knew someone must pay for what had happened to Pa. When first he’d caught sight of Wells, he’d known who that someone would be. Throwing down his borrowed rifle, useless in the tight mix of bodies, he’d gone for the man with his hands. Even in the heat of it all a part of Bram reasoned odds. Wells had a couple of advantages too. A pistol—better for close combat, and an officer’s uniform to command instant aid from the first soldier to spot his predicament. The captain’s advantage was one of time.

Bram determined Wells would not have that time, knowing his own to be limited no matter the outcome. Bram had faced death before, but poorly. This time would be different.

One hand came down on his enemy’s throat while the other grabbed the man’s wrist to thwart the rise of the pistol. The huge eyes beneath him bulged.

Suddenly Bram was jerked off Wells. He was tumbled and pinned to the street. He stared up at the gunman, Bob Meldrum. The killer’s knee came down on his chest and his boot tip in tight to Bram’s crotch. The empty eyes lowered so close to Bram’s face he could smell the chewing tobacco on the man’s breath over the gore and gunsmoke that drenched the air. “She was a virgin, wasn’t she, boy?”

“She” and “virgin” had no context in this man’s war. But Bram’s brain offered up an answer before his emotions could clear. There was but one woman he could answer to for that. Why should anyone care at a time like this? “Miss Heisinger?”

Meldrum read Bram’s lips and then shook him. “There was blood on the sheets, wasn’t there?”

The kid thought. He looked at Meldrum like he thought he was barmy. Then he shook his head. The kid shook his head no. “No blood.”

Bob could feel considerable strength rising in the body beneath him as the kid began thinking of more important things demanding his attention, and he slipped off him before it was too late. Bram O’Connell might not be bright but he looked to be honest. You didn’t find many like that in this modern age. Let somebody else kill him. Meldrum had more important things to do too. He walked off and left them all to it. He had a debt to call in.

Captain Bulkeley Wells watched Meldrum walk away unscathed. The battle seemed to open a path before him as the Red Sea had for Moses.

Wells had barely regained his hold on his pistol before the O’Connell boy faced him again. How could a common laborer have produced such a son? And if all Wells had heard about the mind inside was true as well … the trouble with enemies was involvement.

Bulkeley raised his pistol and looked into the face of the man-boy he was about to kill and knew that the military life was not for Bulkeley Wells. He pulled the trigger anyway. There was, after all, such a thing as duty. But the moment Bram O’Connell fell, Wells was on his knees beside him. An enemy is always best unknown.

Cree had wanted to kill Clyde Duffer in the 1904 depot. When Aletha and Renata had dragged him back to sanity and luxury and hot tubs he’d been glad that desire had gone unconsummated. Now he wanted only to drag Aletha back to the sheriff’s car, hoping time would switch them to the modern medical attention she obviously needed. Instead he once again faced the nose he’d broken not so long ago. The man had him down so fast Cree didn’t feel the fall, only Duffer’s weight on his body and hands at his throat. Cree thought about killing again. He also thought about giving it all up. But as his lungs fought for the air Duffer tried to choke off, the rest of Cree bucked and plunged like an animal gone mad at a branding party.

He’d thrown Duffer off before he realized it. The false colors flashing before his eyes gave way to the reality that clashed around them. He’d rolled over to grab his attacker by the shoulders when silence fell on Colorado Avenue. Cree thought he had died. But he could blink. And so could Clyde Duffer.

“Are we going home?” Duffer asked, childlike. He pushed Cree away and struggled to his feet, eyes wandering toward the sky, head turning slowly one way and then the other as one does to listen.

Cree stood warily, ready to pounce on his enemy at the first provocation. He listened too, but all he heard was the labor of their breathing. It was still winter in Telluride, blood still stained the snow, they were still surrounded by men at war. The antique Gatling gun aimed uselessly at a snowbank. Sheriff Cal Rutan, for once without his cigar, sat about an inch above the saddle of a horse swiveling into an unfinished turn. Captain Bulkeley Wells knelt over a prostrate Bram O’Connell, his hand reaching toward the wound at the boy’s temple.

All these men, horses, and weapons, the dying, and the unsuspecting with death coming at their backs—all waited. No wind, almost no air. Cree could move, Duffer could move, but their gasps for breath intensified and everyone else, man and beast, seemed stilled to concrete.

Bram’s eyes were open, their expression one of arrested surprise. The head wound appeared to be hardly more than a graze, the bleeding slight. Cree knelt opposite Bulkeley Wells and felt Bram’s neck for a pulse. The heat of life was there but no movement of blood. There was no pulse in Wells’s neck either. Cree couldn’t read the captain’s expression, but he removed the pistol sagging from the man’s hand.

“Hey, Maynard?” Duffer called tentatively into the vacuum.

Maynard Bellamy could move too and he turned to them with a slow-motion smile. Then he stuck his hand into the pocket of the stilled horseman next to him. The horseman had enough braid and metals on his coat to sink the
Titanic
.

Time for once really did stand still. Aletha was on her knees clutching Callie across the body of a fallen man. He had nasty burn scars on the side of his head. His blood was stopped in mid-spurt but it had already stained part of what looked a lot like Sheriff Tom Rickard’s hunk of highgrade ore. It stained Callie’s hands where she held the highgrade as if she was just setting it down there. It stained one of Aletha’s hands where she clasped Callie. Callie wore a chain around her neck and as she was hunched forward it seemed to meld into the rock on her father’s chest, as if the highgrade was a giant bauble on the end of the thin chain.

“Is this Renata’s connection?” Cree asked the bloody tableau. It was more likely that he was in a dream. If time was really frozen, why wouldn’t the fury of sound that had commanded here be drawn out in the unending notes of what had sounded at the second that time stopped? Why the silence? Cree reached for a bullet suspended about four inches from the back of Callie O’Connell’s neck and threw it to the snow. If this wasn’t a dream, then he was the one messing with history now.

Finger by finger, Cree pried loose Aletha’s hold on Callie and gently pushed the girl over. She might be in danger from yet another bullet headed past Aletha. A patch of mist from Callie’s breath stayed in the air where her face had been like a cloud or phantom in the forming. Callie’s anguish stuck rigidly to her face, her body stayed in the same kneeling posture. She reminded Cree of the frozen burro at the end of Spruce Street in 1901, the night he’d walked the railroad tracks with her brother. But a piece of the highgrade had pulled away with the chain Callie wore and now resembled that quartz pendant of Aletha’s. John O’Connell’s blood surrounded the hole left in the rock, hovered at its edges, ready to fill it in in red.

The breathable air grew ever thinner. The silence was horrible. Duffer helped Maynard pick pockets now and their soft scurrying, their breathing, was all he could hear. If they and Cree could move, why was Aletha stuck? She felt warm to the touch. Did she have a wound that would be fatal when time resumed? Was that what made her different? Cree picked her up. Her stiffened kneeling position made it awkward, her deadweight strained his airstarved muscles, but he weaved them through hanging bullets, through puffs of white smoke suspended in balloon-billows at the ends of weapons, and through fighting statues. He felt like the only moving piece on a chessboard.

Cree headed for the sheriff’s car. He knew Duffer would be right behind him, but he was locked into a nightmare and just had to keep functioning until he woke up.

Cree deposited Aletha on the front seat and turned to face Duffer and Maynard. Duffer, his hands full of loot, was just leaving the snow passage and Maynard just entering it from the street.

One of the investigators crawled out of the back as the screams and shouts and small-arms fire exploded into the vacuum and a dispatcher’s voice spurted static on the radio. A man Cree recognized as the Pinkerton agent slipped out of the car and took off toward Duffer. But Clyde Duffer and the snowbank faded into autumn on Colorado Avenue and Simon Doud narrowly missed being hit by a pickup full of split logs and Siberian huskies. The driver honked and yelled suggestions but Doud kept running.

The fed had started after him but stopped now to stare around, nervously jingle the change in his pocket. The sheriff’s car sat in front of the same house but on a paved street that passed much closer to it than it had in 1904. As Cree bent inside to see to Aletha, who was trying to sit up, the fed asked, “Where’s the sheriff?”