Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

  “Think I might,” said Audie.

  “Meanwhile, Elmer and Bill are going to be at the guards’ barracks. They are going to do that one fast, in the second after Jack and Audie go into action. When he finishes his job, old Charlie will join them. I will come over from the Whipping House, which is my special place. We will hit them, and hit them hard, and burn them out. Most of the guards will be in the barracks, which is where the armory and the kennels are, and we want to hit them before they can release them goddamned dogs. If they don’t give it up, they will go down hard. We may have to burn ’em out.

  “Now Charlie, here’s your play. You will be in the woods, ’bout a mile out. That’s where the sheriff’s deputies are quartered. You’re going to light that place up and shoot any men that don’t surrender. Then you join up with Elmer, Bill and I and work on the guards’ barracks. Then the four of us join Jack and Audie, take over the compound and let the prisoners go. Then y’all head for the river, where you will deal with any remaining guards, but by that time, with the Negroes free and the place burning, most will have gone. You head for the levee. Audie, you got military demolitions skills?”

  “I had to destroy some bridges, Earl. I learned how to blow things up right nice.”

  “I worked on engineering projects in my youth,” said Jack. “I can blow up anything.”

  “Well, that’s something I didn’t know,” said Earl. “It sure comes in handy. It ain’t a bridge you’re blowing. It’s just dirt. You blow the levee and head back onto the river. While you’re doing that, I will head down the road to the Screaming House. There is some business there I have to take care of. I will meet you all in the morning by the river.

  “Now let me tell you who to watch for special. They got one man there I will honestly tell you I fear. Kill him, and the job is ninety-five percent over, for he is the guts and strength of Thebes. His name is Bigboy; he runs the place. Guard sergeant. Big white boy, so white he glows. He’s an albino, but that doesn’t make him weak and scared. It makes him tough as hell and twice as determined. He will rally his men, he will bring fire, he will fight a hard fight. So I am warning you, he is not to be trusted. See a big white man glowing in the dark, strong as a bull, he’s the one you drop first, you hear?”

  “If I bring his head, Earl,” said Charlie, “will you give me a nickel and a piece of bubble gum?”

  “Mr. Earl?”

  It was Sally, sitting next to the old man.

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “Grandpap wants to know his job.”

  “Grandpap will be in the town. I will get grandpap in the town and he will set up at a little bar they have there. That will draw a bunch of deputies, I know. He will deal with them. In fact, that’ll be the start of the whole thing. When the deputies come to arrest Mr. Ed, Mr. Ed will take care of them.”

  Mr. Ed listened politely. Then he whispered something to Sally.

  “How many?” she repeated, louder.

  “Five, I’d say.”

  Agitated, the old man whispered something again to Sally.

  “Grandpap says that since he’ll have six bullets, what’s he supposed to do with the extra?”

  After the laughter died down, Jack had a question.

  “Earl, if everything goes to plan—”

  “It won’t.”

  “I know. And I know that all evidence we leave behind us goes under the river, so there’s nothing to trace anybody by.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But my question is, we’re supposed to burn all these buildings down. Are we supposed to carry torches? Can’t see running through the dark with torches while hillbillies are shooting at me.”

  “That’s a very good question. My answer is: Who wants to watch a cowboy picture?”

  There was silence.

  “I have Hoppy, lots of Hoppy. I have Sandy the singing cowboy, and Buck and Hoot and even some William S.? Who’s interested?”

  Again there was no answer.

  “Well, look here,” he said, and pulled out an Italian canteen.

  “Know what this could be? A World War I canteen. But it ain’t full of water. No sir, it’s full of chopped-up cowboy picture.”

  Stupefaction reigned.

  “Come out on the porch with me.”

  They followed him out.

  “Old-time movies were made on a kind of celluloid coated with a chemical called silver nitrate. The nitrate’s fine; the celluloid is unstable, particularly as it grows older. Hell, it’s explosively incendiary, which is why if you look, most projection booths are more like bank vaults than rooms. I got each canteen loaded up with bits and pieces of chopped-up movie film, and I rigged a kind of primitive match fuse.”

  He unscrewed the lid and unfolded a cord wedged in the spout.

  “You just pull on this thing, and toss it fast. Don’t be holding it.”

  He pulled the cord and deep inside the canteen, a match pulled against a striker board, lit, began to burn excelsior packed loosely about it, and in two seconds, by which time Earl had lobbed it, burned through a cardboard tube.

  “Jesus Christ!” somebody said.

  The canteen burst not into flames so much as into hell; the incineration spurted outward not in an explosion but in a kind of blossom, burning so white-hot and fierce it hurt the eyes of those who looked at it and they had to twist away.

  “Burn through anything. Melts the canteen in a tenth of a second. Burns for a solid five minutes, white-hot like that, and spreads and oozes all about, blazing like a blowtorch, setting the world aflame. Burns under water, burns in the wind, just burns and burns until it’s gone.”

  “I always say,” said Charlie, “nothing like a good cowboy picture.”

  54

  SAM sat in the medical library at the University of Texas at Austin, just a few miles up the road from New Braunfels, and watched a life swim into existence. The first spottings were tentative, in obscure journals.

  “Certain predispositions toward distribution in an Asian strain of Treponema pallidum” by D. Goodwin, M.D., was the first, from a 1936 issue of the Journal of Canadian General Medicine. Then, quickly, a second: “Treponema pallidum: some Malaysian adaptations.” This was from Lancet, the British medical journal.

  In both cases, the identity of the contributor was a minimal amount of information. “D. Goodwin is a medical researcher” was all it said.

  But D. Goodwin, M.D., flourished, if David Stone, M.D., disappeared. D. Goodwin, M.D., was like some kind of mounted knight in combat immemorial against Treponema pallidum, whatever that was, the world over. Where it appeared, he appeared to rush off and study it.

  “Burma: A new strain of Treponema pallidum.”

  “Treponema pallidum: variations on the lower Indian subcontinent.”

  “Influence of temporal variation on distribution patterns of Treponema pallidum in sub-Saharan Africa.”

  D. Goodwin, M.D., wouldn’t stop working, wouldn’t stop writing. He had given his life over to this illusive spray of germs or whatever they were, which seemed to cast such a long shadow through the world, and which seemed to exist everywhere.

  By 1941, he had published thirty-one papers; then the war came.

  But D. Goodwin, M.D., was intractable.

  He even found time to publish while running the 2809th Tropical Disease Research Unit.

  “Prevalence of Treponema pallidum among southern rural Negroes, Mississippi, 1943” appeared in the Harvard Medical Journal, though now the ID of the author simply read “is a serving officer of the Army Medical Corps.”

  Then “Similarities between varieties of southern rural Treponema pallidum and certain strains in Borneo”; this in the Journal of Medicine of the University of Chicago.

  Sam sat in a great room. He scanned the articles, but it was mostly Greek to him. He was at a large table outside the stacks, and the place was crowded with students, all working intently, their eyes firmly fixed on the future. Outside, the famous tower of the Univer
sity of Texas stood guard.

  Then the documents ran out. There were none after 1946.

  He looked around. He felt he was in a sacred place.

  He turned, and two seats away from him a young woman pored intently through something called Aspects of Brain Chemistry with almost desperate intensity.

  Yet there was something vaguely approachable about her.

  “Miss,” he whispered, “are you a medical student?”

  She looked up, fixed him with a pretty American smile. She had freckles.

  “Sir,” she said, sweetly, “actually, I’m a nursing student. Second year.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, possibly you could help me just a second.”

  He slid his card over, and she looked at it.

  “I am in way deep over my head. I am researching the career of a doctor involved in some litigation, and I came down here to take some depositions.”

  “A Texas doctor?”

  “No, ma’am. Actually, I guess a Baltimore doctor.”

  That seemed to relieve the young lady considerably. She did not want to get into anything involving a Texas doctor.

  “He’s published a lot in medical journals, public health journals, you know, and it’s mostly gibberish to me. Can’t make out heads nor tails.”

  “I see.”

  “See, there’s this one thing, don’t know if it’s a disease, or what, that appears in all his work. And there might be some connection with nuclear medicine. Atomic rays, that sort of thing? Are you familiar with that?”

  “Well, sir, experiments are underway to use atomic power to cause genes to mutate to specific purpose. I don’t know much about it, but it’s evidently one of the great benefits of the atomic bomb research.”

  “Hmmm,” said Sam. “I wonder how that would apply to our subject. Are you familiar with the term? It’s called, ah, Treponema pallidum. Would you know what—?”

  But the horror rose on her pretty young face, and she started to scream, and campus security got there within seconds, and they dragged Sam off before he could do any real damage, and held him until the Austin vice detectives got there.

  55

  ALL the talk is done now. The old enmities have run out of steam, the gossip on the misfortune of others has lost its lure, the fascinations of the technical have been discussed until they’ve been drained of all meaning. Bourbon has been drunk. Gunfights, famous and obscure, valorous and pathetic, have been gone over again and again; great pistoleros have been analyzed, respected or dismissed. Heroes have been saluted, cowards shunned.

  There is nothing left.

  Even Earl feels it.

  Men about to go into battle acquire a certain pallor. They may be salty old dogs, such as these boys, or innocent kids, such as his Marines, but they know death is very close at hand and that there’s no guessing what lies in the immediate straight-ahead. It settles them, it drains them, it stills them.

  Still, they must turn to something.

  And you can learn a lot about a man in what he turns to. The very good turn to the Bible. The very carnal turn to images of the flesh, in the thousands of sepia-toned male magazines of the war, with their starlets cupping ice-cream scoop breasts, or their skirts a-fling, showing luscious, stocking-kissed gams with fancy undergarment riggings. The prosaic turn to facts, memorizing the operational orders, studying maps and weather reports and even current charts. The physical turn to action: they must unleash themselves in basketball or wrestling or just plain horsing around.

  The warriors turn to guns.

  WE are in the revolver kingdom. Those brilliantly crafted devices, the hallmark of unnamed genius engineers of Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, dominate both the law enforcement and the civilian imagination.

  So there sits Elmer Kaye, the dean of the revolver boys. Elmer has cleaned his guns before and will again, but tonight he cleans them with a new cold knowledge. Meanwhile, outside on a calm night, a silvery moon edges toward extinction and battle.

  Elmer will fight with his guns, and has decided to ignore Earl’s injunction to use guns that can be abandoned easily and lead authorities nowhere. Better to love and trust what you fight with, and worry about the consequences later, than to go into the fight with a gun you don’t trust, which lets you down and gets you killed.

  So he’s running a rod through the four inches of his big-framed Smith & Wesson .44 1950 model, a plug-ugly thing made grotesque by the thickness of the barrel combined with a hood for the hand-ejector rod, which gives it the look of a cartoon gun, as Donald Duck would carry, not a real one, that Elmer Kaye would carry. It wears ivory stocks from the Gun Re-Blue Company with the visage of an eagle on both sides, and the thickness of that grip will cushion Elmer’s hand from the heavy recoil of his specially loaded “improved” .44 cartridges, with a dose of new powder and his own design of semiwadcutter bullet. The gun will buck hard when fired, but whatever that bullet hits, it will knock down and keep down. Elmer’s already cleaned the others he’ll carry, a Colt Police Positive as a hideout gun in a shoulder holster (it’s delicate and ladylike, and he doesn’t want Jack O’Brian to see it and tease him) and a Colt Single Action, that is, an old cowboy-style revolver, also in .44 Special, with a specially hand-honed action, so that cocking and shooting it is like squashing your fingers around a stick of butter.

  Old Ed McGriffin is also a Smith & Wesson man. Been one his whole damned life. Set all his records, did all his exhibitions, trained many a policeman and Boy Scout, all with Smiths. Ed has two hand-honed mid-framed .38s with graceful six-inch barrels. He’s fired each at least ten thousand times, and he knows them as well as any man can know a gun. His pretty niece, Sally, cleans them for him, but he watches, and once again his eyes are sharp and focused, as if he’s willed himself back from the place of content and memories, for what she is doing is important. She scrubs out each cylinder, she ramrods the barrel, she uses a piece of screen to peel the impacted lead out of the barrels. She knows the guns, too; she’s been cleaning them for grandpap since she was eight.

  Jack O’Brian isn’t a handgunner, not really. His weapon of choice will of course be a Winchester Model 70 in his beloved .270, which is accurate as hell, especially with the loads he’s prepared for it. But he knows he has to have a handgun, and the one he chooses he can’t let Elmer see, for Elmer will tease him, because it represents exactly the opposite of his public position on these matters. He doesn’t mind being a hypocrite if it’ll keep him alive. So he cleans it furtively, up in his room.

  It’s a Colt New Service, in .45 Long Colt. It’s a giant’s gun, the biggest Colt ever made, its frame spreading the hand wide on it, its trigger-pull taut, even its hammer-pull a little tense. It’s ugly, humpbacked, with its checkered wood grips, a Pachmayr grip adapter to swell out the gap between grip and trigger guard. But it’s the preeminent man-stopper; in fact, many knowledgeable New York detectives carry such a piece, but with its barrel cut down to two inches. They know that if they have to put a man down, they have to put him down fast and solid, and Jack has done his research.

  It shoots gigantic shells that seem like ostrich eggs in their heaviness and density. Jack deposits each into the gaping chambers in the cylinder, then gently locks the cylinder shut. The gun trembles when he does so and, loaded, the whole weapon feels charged with electricity, with stored energy. Immense and sagacious, it waits to speak.

  Bill, taciturn and controlled in all things, is the same in this. He does not have relationships with his guns and they do not speak to his imagination, nor is his ego expressed through them. They are totally and completely tools to him. He has three, all Smiths, all .357 Magnums, which he’ll load with the .38–44 super-high-velocity 158-grainers that Earl has provided. His actions have been honed, but what’s odd about his revolvers that marks them as different from the others are the grips. He can’t use the standard Smith magna grip, not even with a Pachmayr or a Tyler adapter to fill out the curve behind the trigger. Bill’s hands are si
mply too big. Bill has huge hands, long arms loaded with fast twitch muscles, and at six feet four inches enough lanky body to make sleeping in a normal bed or walking through a normal door an exercise in patience. But the hands are the secret to his gun work, because in them, the guns can be manipulated with extraordinary effect, if he can get a good grip. Thus his Smiths wear a somewhat magnified set of stocks, swollen, though polished smooth, seemingly without art to them at all. They simply look like the noses of bowling pins or some such, but they are big enough to extend his fingers and make contact with his palm all the way around, and place the pad of his forefinger against the curve of the trigger, so that his strong forearms can provide the muscle for that steady, straight-back pull that is the core of all great revolver work.

  Equally odd is his holster. Unlike the others, who’ll wear Lawrence or El Paso Saddlery gear with a Western flavor to it, in basket-weave or floral carving, and fancy leather rigs for undershoulder carry for their backup pieces, Bill’s holster is a simple pocket of leather, smooth and black, his trigger guard exposed. With the big grip, the smooth, small holster, his incredible hand size and reflexes, Bill can draw and fire faster than most people can see. He has even been on the TV, where he held a Ping-Pong ball on the back of his gun hand, drew and fired (a blank) so fast that his muzzle blast sent the plastic ball flying across the studio, setting an audience alight with glee.

  Charlie goes the Colt way. Charlie uses a Police Positive Special with a King’s sighting rib along the top of the four-inch barrel. It’s got a slim, now yellowed ivory stock, with his initials “CH” carved vividly into it, and the gun has been honed and tweaked. But he’s a devotee, it turns out, of the famous Colt shooter John J. “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, who believed that trigger guards slowed up draws. So Charlie has followed his mentor’s mandates and had the front two-thirds of the trigger guard removed so that, under duress, he may seize the gun and his finger will fly directly to its trigger without having to curve, then straighten, to engage that part’s sweep. Of course, if you don’t know what you’re doing with this outfit, you’ll blow off your foot. Charlie knows what he’s doing.