by Tim Marquitz
Nina frowned. “It ain’t something I wanted.” She looked away before Mathias could see the guilt in her eyes. “To be honest, I asked the boha gande to take me with him. I wanted to stay in the spirit world. I would have abandoned my father...James too. Truth be told, Father, I’m a coward.”
Mathias pursed his lips, then took a breath, but before he could speak a deep cough drew their attention. Cato had turned to face them, the whites of his eyes standing out in the moonlight. “You sayin' there's someone behind all this?”
“Unfortunately, there is. Someone bent on turning the world we know into a hellish place of bedlam and turmoil, where the dead rise and do his bidding.”
Cato nodded, gulped so dry Nina could hear it from where she sat. “The end of the world?”
“I fear so, yes.”
Rachel raised her head. “My mom got tore in half,” she said, informing the big man, saying it as if she were relating what happened in school that day. Nina wondered how much she’d heard of the exchange with Father Mathias.
Cato winced; the man wore others’ pain well. “Your mama? Teared in two?”
“Yep. Back at the fort.”
“Where we holed up before,” Nina explained.
“This man is some kinda monster?”
“Of a sort,” Mathias said. “But you're on the right side. Or, the side of right, I should say. Are you feeling up to the Lord's task?”
Cato’s posture went stiff and uncertain. “Don't seem like I have much choice.”
Mathias nodded. “The Lord has a way of putting us in impossible situations to put us to the test.” He pulled out his Bible and began thumbing through the pages.
Suddenly George Daggett pushed aside the wagon flap. “Any of that beer in those supplies?”
The wagon swayed a moment, then Greta, who was leaning against Cato’s bare back, spoke up. “No beer. No whiskey.” Her voice was a forlorn sounding croak, obviously dried up from having shed a barrelful of tears.
“Fuckin' figures.” The flap dropped with a ruffle.
Nina shifted, trying to be easy; Manning's unconscious weight had numbed her legs some time ago. She found a more comfortable position and let the creaking, rocking motion of the wagon send her into a bit of a fog. She trusted they were going somewhere, and put it out of her head that Strobridge could be taking them to Liao Xu. The railroad boss was a bastard and a half, but it just plumb didn’t make much sense.
She leaned back and reflected. They'd gotten out of another mess, but not without injury. Nina flexed her right hand. Stiff, swollen, blistered. Not much of her wasn't. She took the canteen from Rachel's lap, poured a little water on her hands, and wiped them uselessly, on her shirt.
They hadn’t even gotten more than an hour’s rest, and what had they cost Liao? Nothing. He seemed to have a ready supply of rotting flesh at his beckoning. Nina had no ideas about how they should proceed. She reckoned she should feel lucky—her pa and Manning were alive, at least for now, but James might not stay that way unless proper care could be found. She didn’t know a durn thing about this Carson City, either. In any case, Nina wasn’t getting nowhere just going round and round in her head. “You know,” she said in low whisper, then cleared her dry throat. “When Jasmine wakes up, we’ll have to see if she feels like singing. You should hear her,” she said that last bit to Cato.
The big man smiled and looked over at the sleeping woman. “I bet she has a beautiful singing voice.”
Rachel looked at her, too. “Should I wake her?”
“No,” Nina hissed, a bit harsh. Seeing Rachel's hurt expression, she said, “Sorry, I'm just feelin’ sour.”
Rachel's face brightened. “I can sing.”
“I’d love to hear it,” Cato said. “If you don’t mind.”
Rachel cleared her throat and drummed a little pattern on her knees.
Nina prepared to be assaulted by a warbling, off-key portrayal of notes, or some simple nursery rhyme the girl had learned in school. Rachel hummed a small refrain, and then what came out of her was unexpected: a womanly voice that had either seen considerable practice or was guided by pure, natural ability. In any case, it was a sweet and bitter melody that captured Nina's dark feelings:
Hangman, hangman, slack up your rope,
Oh, slack it for a while.
I looked down yonder, and I seen Pa comin’,
He's walked for a many long mile.
Rachel Buell’s voice was downright lovely. Unlike Jasmine’s rich, earthy tones, Rachel’s timbre was like clear crystal, lilting and lively. Like cool, running water on a gentle spring morning.
Oh, Pa. Say, Pa, have you brought me any gold,
Any gold to pay my fee?
Or have you walked these many long miles
To see me on the hangin’ tree?
No, son. No, son, I ain't brung you no gold,
No gold for to pay your fee.
But I just walked these many long miles
To see you on the hangin’ tree
There was more to the song, but the words couldn't compare to the sweet sound of Rachel's voice. Even as the tears flowed down the girl's face, and her voice cracked at times, she never stopped, and Nina noticed Greta and Cato both watched with tears in their eyes, as well. Everyone else had their eyes shut, and Nina followed suit, wrapped herself around the melody, and closed her eyes against the cruel, brutal world.
Let Rachel cast the shadows away, as unfair a burden as it was for a young girl to bear. Nina was just plain tuckered out. She let herself sink into the lilt and the sway, and swam down into a singsong, dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE MOTIONLESS SILENCE WOKE HER. The swaying of the wagon, the endless creaks and groans and jarring bumps that could loosen your teeth were gone. The canvas cover was awash in daylight. The smells of stale sweat and old blood lingered. And dust. But they were stopped.
Nina noticed small sounds, then. Snores. Several snores. Lot better than moans.
She rubbed her eyes and sat up. Cato and Greta slept back to back, while Pa rumbled steadily in the corner—she'd know that snore anywhere. Buck and Red remained against the front wall, leaning against one another like two blood-stained blood brothers. Rachel lay against Jasmine, Mathias was asleep sitting up in the same position she'd last seen him, and Manning was curled up on his right side beside her.
She blinked to clear more of the sleep from her caked eyes. Jesus.
Everyone was covered in blood; hands and arms, fingernails dipped in red, shirts and dresses stained a deep brown, necks and cheeks smeared with the stuff. All their sins exposed in the light of day. They had the appearance of a pack of murderous bandits fresh off a violent raid, or perhaps a band of gypsies hell-bent on terrorizing the countryside.
If only it were that simple.
She put her fingers on James’ neck. Strong pulse. She felt a little better about that. Thank you, Father.
Nina held his arm, feeding off his warmth for a moment, basking in the memory of last night before all hell broke loose. His arms around her, his kisses on her, him inside her...She'd give anything if this morning would stay quiet, filled with peace, in the company of her unhinged, hopeless, slumbering bunch.
Nina smiled and stretched—holy hell!—before moving as quiet as she could over the sleeping bodies. Her shoulders and arms were raw and sore, her back full of protest as she stepped down onto the dirt road. She squinted into an overbearing layer of gray clouds, the kind of clouds that were still bright enough to hurt. She waited for her eyes to adjust, looking back up the road and wondering just where in blazes they were.
Nina took off her hat and let her hair play in the breeze that blew across the road, then scratched her crusted scalp. That was a week's worth of itch, seven days of scum caked on so thick she'd probably never get it off. She lifted her arm and whiffed at her armpit. Smelled like blood. Everything did. Guess she'd become immune to her own stench. She remembered a few nights ago in Truckee when Pa, his
ass sticking out of that overturned wagon, had asked if she wanted a dress. She'd kill for a bath and a durned dress right now—as long as she could get her gun belt over it, of course.
She sighed and glanced about. Where in Tarnation were they?
Nina went to see what was happening up front. The horses were still tethered; they snorted and stamped at the sight of her, probably indignant at their poor treatment. George Daggett leaned over in the driver's chair, sleeping sitting up, blood crusted in his hair and over half his face, breathing so deeply you'd have thought the man had never slept before. Same with Mason on the other side—minus the bloody head. Strobridge lay stretched out in the seat, muddy boots hanging over the foot rest, softly snoring, head tossed back, neck exposed to the sky. Nina shuddered. Lucky nothing had come to tear it out. She pictured deadun teeth ripping into that hairy Adam’s apple. These assholes hadn’t even set a watch, all of ‘em easy pickings. Yup, damn lucky.
She thought about smacking ‘em awake and giving ‘em hell, but there was the wind ruffling the grass and the horses making a susurrus with their tails…things felt too peaceable to have to bicker with folks. Instead, she looked down the rutted road, simply wheel-made furrows in the earth that stretched southward for miles, and tracked as the land rose to her right, became scrub-covered hillsides and slim valleys with twisty grooves etched into them. Beyond that, several massive, snow-capped peaks ran away to the west, mountains she'd need Pa’s help to name, if they had names at all.
Were those hills filled with deaduns? Working their way over stone and through briar, some of ‘em trapped in gullies or ditches, doing their dumb, dead walk until Liao Xu's influence over them waned or they fell to pieces in the oven-dry air.
Nina shook her head. Not something to dwell on when they were sitting in the open, vulnerable. She put her hat back on and glanced the other way, east. More nothing. A scenery of low hills as far as she could see. They'd have to pass Lake Washoe on the way to Carson City. Maybe they hadn't reached it yet. Maybe it was buried somewhere behind those low hills. Or maybe they'd already passed it. Who the hell knew?
A sense of being watched nagged her. Nina scanned the sky, searching the gray for specks of birds or shadowy flying devils—anything that might indicate Liao Xu was on their trail. You're just waking up, she thought. Understandably paranoid. But what happened to feeling safer in the daytime?
It's all an illusion. They could think what they wanted, but Liao Xu was coming.
She'd need to visit her boha gande soon to learn more about her power—and her limitations. Nina needed to know how to fight Liao Xu. She needed to figure out who and what she was. But how exactly?
She headed on back to the rear of the wagon, but fetched up, fell against the wheel, petrified at the thing watching her from across the road atop a large, curved stone. She hadn't seen it before, had looked right past it. Or maybe she'd not been willing to see it and blamed the bleak iron-gray sky.
In any case, there it was.
A cyclopean eye, edged with puffy flesh, bulging at her, worming around in its socket as if studying her from assorted angles with a fidgeting, ravenous interest. The whole of its featherless frame, easily more than half her size, was the color of coal, mere skin stretched over bone; only its folded wings sprouted wild, rumpled plumes. Its head swiveled on a thin, flexible neck. A long beak curved downwards, ending in a fine point. The thing's fat, scaled legs were tipped with talons that clicked on the rock whenever it moved. She took note of a festering wound on the left side of its breast near the wing.
Nina was suddenly struck with the image of the unlucky sawmill worker named Christopher, his head plucked off, arcing through the air. Whatever this infernal thing was, she knew it was also Liao Xu. She knew it as surely as she'd ever known anything. Nina straightened, unwilling to let it feed on her fear. “I was wonderin' where you'd got to.”
“Were you?” Its voice was every squeaky door she'd ever heard opened at once. Every wagon wheel starved for grease. “We’ve found each other again, Nina Weaver.”
“You're determined, I'll give you that.”
“And you are very serendipitous.”
“Don’t know the meaning of that word, but you ever thought maybe we wanted you to find us. Ever think about that, you evil fuck?”
The foul critter tilted its dark head. “I do not think so, Ninataku, Fire Eater. You are terrified of me, even now. As well you should be. Your priest is worn thin, his frail mind unable to understand that I have outgrown him. He is a broken man, waving around his pathetic crucifix and his book of lies, filled with empty words never uttered by his pretend god. What will you do when you are the only one left? When your father can no longer protect you and your lover is a broken sack of flesh?”
Nina pulled her Colt. Probably not worth a damn against this devil, but the weight was reassuring. “Even brave people get scared, but that doesn't keep them from standing up to assholes like you. Hell, I been scared shitless for days, but still managed to carve up a few score of your deaduns and choked up your demon train, too.”
The sickly thing shifted on the rock, claws scratching its perch. “I would offer you a place by my side, if I did not dream of skinning you alive, Nina Weaver. But you will have a place in my kingdom, one way or another.”
Nina took a step forward. “I don't think so.”
“I am coming,” it croaked, twisted its head to the north where a gathering of red-hued clouds rolled south across the sky.
“Right now you're going.” Nina raised her Colt, cocked it, and sighted the squawking thing. She poured her will into the steel, into every grain of black powder that was probably too wet to fire, every hard-packed ball of lead. She imagined doing with one bullet what thirty rounds couldn't do to Rachels’ possessed father back at Fort Bluff.
She tried to think of something to say to invoke her boha gande and the spirit of the People. Some kind of prayer, something Father Mathias might say to his god, but Nina was no preacher and, truth be told, she didn't have an eloquent bone in her body.
Just let me kill him. Please, just let me do this one blessed thing…
Nina pulled the trigger. A .36 caliber ball flew from the barrel, true to its target. A fine spray of black mist exited the other side of the Liao-thing along with Nina's lead. The beast jerked into the sky, shrieking and caterwauling, shedding plumage as it flew on a wild, wounded course. With a yelp of victory, Nina squeezed the trigger again, this time striking the beast in mid-flight where it plunged to the ground. A quiet rumble of distant thunder, then all was still.
THE DAGGETTS AND STROBRIDGE WERE CUSSING and springing up, while the rest of the folks inside the wagon started up like a nest of jackrabbits dogged from the burrow. Nina sensed Liao Xu's spirit exiting the mutilated, deflating corpse of the foul creature. She hadn't killed him, but it felt good all the same.
“He's gone,” Nina said.
“Who?” George Daggett truly looked hell-fired. His forehead was swollen and leaking from somewhere beneath his hair line, a dark seepage that looked more like crude than blood.
“Liao paid a visit, and I shot his ass.”
“What the hell you talking about?” Strobridge’s cold stare stabbed at her, and he looked highly agitated.
Nina pointed off toward where the thing fell. “Have a look.”
So Mason, George, Strobridge, Red, Buck, and Cato all headed that way, the latter giving her a wide-eyed look before hurrying after the other men. They strode past the rock and all stared down at the ground, and to abate her curiosity Nina headed that way, as well.
Pa was just now crawling out of the wagon, asking “What now?” as he got down and stood next to Rachel. Nina could see it from a distance away, and the thing was a black lump of bone and tar and really nothing much to look at.
“God in Heaven!” It was Jasmine, and she stood next to Pa and Rachel, her arm raised, pointing at the sky. Those faint crimson clouds from before had turned an angry red, and they were rolling q
uickly toward them.
“What the hell is it?” Mason asked.
“It's Liao. He’s sending a storm.” Nina headed back toward the wagon. She needed to see James. And she noticed Mathias was sitting at the wagon’s edge, looking gaunt and empty.
“Right,” Strobridge said, walking back toward the wagon, as well. “Time to go.”
There were a few more questions but Nina just hurried everyone back inside the wagon and was the last to climb in as it started to roll. Everyone crowded around the back port and watched the crimson cloudbank approach. It roiled, one wave of frothy red reaching over another like an ocean of blood in the sky.
Jasmine gazed hard at the approaching menace. Nina gasped. Jasmine's eyes were sunken, dark circles beneath them. Her skin held an ashen pallor. There was no hint of the dark beauty her skin normally radiated.
Nina felt a knot tighten in her guts. “Can I take a look at your neck?”
Jasmine shook her head. Tried a good-natured smile. “No need, I'm fine. Just slept like shit. Woulda been better off staying awake.”
Cato pulled his eyes away from the crimson torrent, that unnatural motion in the sky. “I think I might be ill,” he murmured, turning back inside.
Nina went to check Manning, concerned he hadn’t woken up with all this commotion. His pulse was steady, though his skin was clammy. She tried to pour a little water in his mouth, but most of it spilled on the floorboards.
Rachel squeezed in beside her and stared at Manning for a long moment until Nina met her gaze. “He’s going to be okay,” she told Rachel, though in truth it was more for her own benefit. “We just need to get to Carson City and he’ll be okay.”
“I heard you talking outside, heard you shoot at…” the girl spoke in barely a whisper, “…him.”
Nina wasn’t sure what to say back to that, so she didn’t say anything.
