Unquiet Dreams (29 page)

“We have to find where it's coming from,” Jim said, as if a law had been declared.

I wasn't aware of any such thing happening and with a little food in my gut, I was inclined to get back to griping. “I think the best thing we could do would be to burn this town to the ground and hightail it out of here. If it's diseased, we end it.”

“What if it isn't only here?” Yun pointed out like it was the most reasonable assumption in the world. “What if it's all over the place?”

“Well, let's not assume the worst.”

“It's the first time we run into it,” I added. “I say we burn it and go.”

“We have to find out why it's happening.”

“Why don't we go find the nearest Rangers or cavalry and let them deal with it? We ain't getting paid to do this, you know.” Damned if I wasn't heating up a good pot of resentment. “Unless you got a big bag of gold you're just itching to hand over to us,” I said to Yun who was regarding our bickering with some amusement.

“You don't make a lot of money in this line of work unless you own the house,” she said more than a tad sharpish.

I couldn't help my look of surprise as I figured out just then what she meant. Give me two and two and a few hours or even days, and eventually I can come up with four. “You don't mean to say you're a whore?”

Jim shot me a glance of silencing scorn that bounced off my flabbergasted face. Yun crossed her arms and looked at me with all the friendliness of a granite cliff.

But I couldn't help it. “A little thing like you? Just nineteen?”

“Cherry was sixteen.”

The way she said it made me feel like I was both stupid and hateful. It was not a pleasant feeling. “I'm sorry, miss. I just didn't…well, I just…I'm sorry.”

“He's an idiot,” Jim said softly, stating the obvious.

Yun shrugged. “My mother was a housekeeper for a fancy school in San Francisco. My daddy worked for the railroad. Then he got blown up. My mother could not afford our apartment. She sold me to some men who said they would put me to work, said I would be able to send money home to her and my brothers. They bring me here, maybe a year ago.”

Shit. “Must have been awful.”

She shrugged. “At least I am not dead. And now I don't have to be a whore anymore.”

Jim and I digested that news for a few minutes, sipping our beer and swallowing a few more bites of bread. It had been weeks since I had some good baked bread: Made me think of my mama' kitchen. If only I had some of her good beef stew, I could have been quite happy. Instead I was sitting in a blood-covered saloon with my heathen friend and a Chinese strumpet wondering why dead folks was getting up and going all bitey.

Damn pity, too, as she was just cute as a button once you got used to her being all different. She had that long shiny black hair, a pretty little nose and, if she weren't too busy looking scornful like at me, beautiful eyes the color of a golden eagle's wing. Or maybe I had just been on the trails too long. Must have been if I could be feeling amorous in the midst of all that death.

“Maybe we should have a look around,” Jim said at last. He already knew I would have been happy to pull foot right out of here, but I shrugged. Once again I end up with the short end of the horn. I had a feeling even then that whatever we found wasn't going to be all that sweet. I couldn't really imagine a way for this story to end with puppies and kittens.

“You ride, Miss Yun?” Wasn't that all polite and gentlemanly?

She shook her head. “I rode on the stagecoach to get here. Walk everywhere I need to go.”

“You'll have to ride behind one of us, then. Unless you want to stay here.”

I don't blame her for looking pale at that thought. She told us to wait a minute and went back upstairs. In a few minutes she came back in some dungarees and a bright red shirt of some shiny fabric I never seen before. Never saw a girl in trousers before either. It didn't look half bad. “It took a while to find some boots that fit me.”

We didn't ask where she found them.

She and Jim got on the paint and I swung myself up on Beau. We went carefully through the little town, which Yun told us bore the unlikely name of Paradise Valley, looking for other folks or for more walking corpses. We found a few stray body parts, swarming with flies and smelling like hell, but we didn't find anyone alive. Which seemed mighty strange, we had to admit. Even if they were chomping on one another, there had to be more left.

“Maybe they run away,” Yun said, trying to brush some of the horsehair off her dungarees while we stood around after searching the last house on the eastward side of town. The hot afternoon sun beat down on us without mercy. Beau was sucking down some water from a washtub outside the back of the house, but the paint was looking off in another direction. I looked that way, too. Some wagon tracks led up that way. They looked fresh. I pointed them out to Jim and Yun.

“What's up that way?” Jim asked Yun, but she said she didn't know of anything being up that way. There were more hills in that direction, but they weren't much more than gopher hills down here. “Suppose we ought to take a look,” Jim said finally and we got back on the horses to do just that.

We hadn't ridden very far when the paint began to snuffle loudly, which got Beau to shying nervously as he always did when his pal sensed danger. Something wasn't right. Jim and I exchanged glances and rode the horses over to some brush. It wasn't much of a hiding place, but it would have to do. Yun must have been a pretty sharp cookie because she picked up on our concern and kept quiet and watchful. We moved real careful like toward the top of the next rise, crouching down as we got near the top. Jim threw himself down flat to look over the crest, and I crept up behind him. I was awful glad there was some stunted sage to peek through and make me feel like we were hid.

Down below there was a wagon with nothing but a few gunny sacks laying in it. A pair of mules were hitched to the front, swatting flies quietly as they stood in front of what looked like a small crevasse in the next hill. As we watched, a man came out from the darkness of the cave with a big pole in one hand and a rope in the other, which stretched back into the hole behind him. I barely had time to exchange puzzled glances with my two friends before we saw a bunch of them Lazarus folks come stumbling out behind him, all strung together. They were moaning as they lurched along, each one carrying a full sack. The man in the lead shouted at them, swearing copiously and poking them with the stick. I figured he would have been in grave danger of being bit by one of those cranky corpses, but anytime one of them lunged toward him, he reached up to his neck and flashed this big locket thing at it, and it would cringe and back away. With some effort he got them to start dropping those bags in the back of the wagon.

What the hell was going on here? I looked over to Jim but he and Yun both were still staring at the scene below, brows furrowed, which I took to mean they were just as puzzled as I was. It was a nice feeling, but I didn't have much time to savor it. The Lazarus folk finished dumping the bags on the back of the wagon, even though the two mules were shifting around trying to keep as far away from those rank corpses as they could. When all the work was done, the man tied the rope to the back of the wagon, hopped up on the seat and rattled off down the track back toward town, those shambling dead folk stumbling along as best they could behind him. I crossed my fingers right then that he wouldn't see Beau and the paint in the stand of scrub and decide to investigate. Looked like it worked because we could see the plume of dust continue to rise as he headed into town.

“What the hell?” I said as soon as it felt safe.

Jim shushed me. “Might be more down there.”

“Well, hell, they're probably dead folks, so I doubt it'll matter much,” but I went back to whispering anyway. “You know that guy?” I asked Yun.

She nodded. “Mister Dauphine. He came a few months ago. A prospector, he say.”

“Prospecting, all right. Looks like he found himself some cheap labor, too.”

“We should go down there.”

I stared at Jim. “Down there? Where the dead folks are?”

“Were.”

“What if there's more? That group he took, they can't be all the bodies we ain't accounted for.”

Yun glanced over her shoulder. “What if he comes back?”

Jim was impassive. He had that way of looking stubborn that never seemed mulish like it would have done on me. No, he always seemed right, not just obstinate The damn thing was that, most often, he was—right, that is. I had a notion this was one of those times.

“What are we going to do anyway?” I said as I made sure my guns were loaded.

“Put those people out of their misery.”

I never thought about it until just then, but he was right. I had only been considering how much I didn't want to get bit by one of them. It was even worse to think about what it must be like to become one of them. Dead, but not laying down dead, and hungry, too. It made me feel like a cold wind was blowing across my neck even though the day was hot enough to melt cheese. “What do you suppose that thing around his neck was?”

“It had some power over them,” Yun said quickly. “He must have done this to them. Changed them that way.” I could see her hating him already, and I couldn't really blame her. That Dauphine wasn't high on my list of friendly folk.

“Let's go,” Jim said, and with that we went down. Yun looked funny with that big shotgun slung in her arms—it was just about half her size—but I had no doubt that she could use it, that was for sure. We took a last gander around the entrance. There was a water barrel, some sticks of dynamite in a crate, and a couple of shovels and picks leaning against the hillside. Hearing nothing from below, we slipped inside the opening. Dauphine must be planning on heading back in the near future, because he had left torches burning throughout the dark. We sidled through the tunnel carefully, each of us a tad jumpy and ready for trouble, which didn't make for too swift a passage through that darkened walkway It was a relief to finally have the path open up a bit wider, though it was just as gloomy as before.

Turning a corner, we stepped out into a kind of room, almost, with a higher ceiling, just before the path whipped around sharply to the right and went further down into the increasingly damp rock. There was a bit of a stink in here that wasn't the musty smell of the stone walls, and I finally saw a chicken carcass lying on the floor of the cave. Those Lazarus folk must have been having themselves a little snack. But I bet it wasn't them who had drunk the rum and smoked the cigars. He could have left some of that behind just to be friendly, although I didn't think I would be fancying any chicken for a good while.

Jim wasn't looking down at the chicken, though, but up higher on the walls. I squinted, too, but couldn't quite make out what it was I saw. He got the bright idea of grabbing one of the torches and moving it closer to the wall, waving the flames back and forth.

“What the hell do you suppose that is?” I asked him since I certainly had no idea. It was a drawing, probably charcoal, and it looked like a kind of crazy cross on a kind of coffin or altar, and a couple more tiny coffins for good measure. There were all kinds of little curlicues and hatch marks to give it a bit of detail, but it didn't look like any kind of portrait I ever seen. Down below, it looked like someone had smeared some of that chicken blood. Those Lazarus folk weren't exactly the white tablecloth kind of folks.

Jim's face looked kind of grim in the flickering lights, so I knew I was not looking forward to hearing his pronouncement when it finally came. “Strong magic.”

“Well, hell.” I really didn't like hearing that.

“Blood magic—powerful stuff. Bringing people back from the borderlands is dangerous. Keeping them here, more so.”

“Borderlands?” What the hell did that mean? Oh; those borders.

“We have to break the bond.”

“Bond?” I was still struggling with the thought that people other than the good Lord might be able to zip people back and forth from far reaches of death whenever they damned well pleased, if they knew the right words to write or pictures to draw and had enough chicken blood to seal the deal. “You mean that rope he's got them tied with? That shouldn't be that hard to break.”

Jim didn't have time to conceal his impatience. “The bond between the summoner and the dead.”

“Oh, the necklace thing,” I said finally, feeling a flush of satisfaction at having figured something out and not at all of embarrassment.

“He has gone to a great deal of trouble for some reason,” Jim said sounding almost sad. I could kind of see what he meant. There was a whole lot of power in what he did—pity it wasn't directed toward something for the good of his fellow men. He obviously wasn't raised by my mama and her good teachings.

“I think I know why he did it,” Yun said, suddenly appearing at my elbow and making me jump a little. “Look.” She held out her hand and in the middle of her tiny palm there was a little nugget.

It was gold.

There was no doubt in my mind, anyway. Of course, I had never seen any real gold except that it was already made into my pop's pocket-watch or my mama's wedding band, but it sure looked like gold to me. Jim lifted her palm toward the light and took a good long look as well, then turned even grimmer. He muttered something under his breath that probably reflected poorly on me and my lesser kin of the pale skins, but as was his habit, Jim quickly turned back to usefulness and purpose. “He will be back soon, we need to plan.”

“I say we kill him and put all those good people to rest,” I said, congratulating myself on a real good idea.

“They weren't all good people,” Yun said kind of quiet like.

“Still, you don't want to leave them walking around like that, it's just not natural.”